Howe Gelb has always done things differently. He’s one of those artists who is constantly traipsing within his own boundary-less creative labyrinth — recreating songs of his past, releasing albums every year, playing with friends in side projects, changing his band names every few years.
It’d be easy to write about his 2005 project, Arizona Amp and Alternator. Their bio is a poem by Gelb that starts off with the lines: “this band has no members/ no memberships is loud anymore. It is mostly a place to get things fixed.” The poem eventually ends with the chorus from his song “Arizona Amp and Alternator,” which is performed and reworked in the album no less than four times. The band did not widely publicize the members involved. M. Ward sings. Scout Niblett has a bizarre thirty second feature. Grandaddy is on a few tracks. There’s a creepy boy-girl duet cover of “Baby It’s Cold Outside.” The band doesn’t have a website anymore and they’ve long since disappeared as Gelb moved onto his next project.
As good as Arizona Amp… is, 2006’s ’Sno Angel Like You is my favorite stop on the career path of the musical enigma that is Howe Gelb. In 2003, Gelb was at an Ottawa blues festival and found himself playing between two gospel bands at a Baptist church. They inspired him to the point that he wanted to create a gospel album that day. So he went back to the church later to catch the band again and recruited them to be an integral part of his new album.
Gelb stands out from other musicians because he definitively owns his world — with a dusty, rambling folk croon that sometimes unexpectedly finds it’s way home to washy noise freak-outs. Yet even with his omnipresent voice and style, it never feels like he has guest musicians on his collaborative records. His contributors always come off more as musical partners with whom he has a shared intimate working relationship.
The kind of soulful folk standouts you’d expect from the album are mostly collected in the first side. Setting the tone, opener “Get To Leave” was recorded as a Giant Sand song fifteen years earlier. “Hey Man” and “Love Knows (No Borders)” are some of the slower-burning highlights. “But I Did Not” and “Paradise Here Abouts” both engage with driving rhythm sections and call-and-response choir vocals. The album is full of highlights though. The songs exist within the album’s own terms.
In 2009, Gelb released a live version of the album, while his newest features Gypsy musicians and was recorded on a rooftop in Spain over the last few years. Looking through the overall career arc of Gelb, this kind of thing is no longer surprising. Rather it’s part of the naturally evolving role he has as an artist — shifting genres, defying conventions, and spinning the web of his diverse creative endeavors.
