THE GLOBE & MAIL (Canada)

by Brad Wheeler

3 stars

If luck be a lady, what be coincidence? Coincidence be the cosmos’s jokester, the dismissible one. Consider that the phrase “I think not” was pretty much invented to answer a rhetorical question – “Coincidence?”

Howe Gelb, the scruffy Arizona puzzler and farsighted leader of the avant-dust collective Giant Sand, has just released The Coincidentalist, somewhere between his 40th and 50th album, by his own rough count.

It’s a dreamy disc of desert folk-rock and a wry, near-weird tumbleweed soundtrack. As to what or who the titular character is, Gelb quizzically explains in the press notes: “The coincidentalist is someone who can read the coincidences but who doesn’t try to figure out their meaning. For if one tries to figure out the meaning, it will be lost. The coincidences aren’t there to figure out but to point the way.”

So, lead on, or whatever, Howe Gelb.

“Welcome to the desert,” he talk-sings languorously on the album’s unassuming opener Vortexas. It is a recollection of his time at Tucson’s Congress Hotel, the place where the Dillinger Gang hid out in 1934, but didn’t do it right and were captured. The hotel still lives in the bank-robber age, historically authentic right down to the vintage radios and dial phones in each room. “The clocks are stuck in rewind,” as Gelb puts it, “living on Tucson time.”

I visited Arizona once, if only to stand on the corner in Winslow to see if a girl in a flat-bed Ford would happen by. It worked for the Eagles, who took it easy and took it often, but not for me. If I had stood there any longer, the only person who would have “slowed down to take a look at me” would have been a police officer acting on a suspicion of vagrancy.

But I digress. Gelb’s cactus cabaret is as similar to early Eagles as peyote is to pot, and there is absolutely no Don Henley or Glenn Frey involved. Instead, helping the enigmatic rhymist is the free-wheeling professional collaborator M. Ward (credited as lead guitarist, on a six-string electric bass), the curious Andrew Bird (on violin) and KT Tunstall, the Scottish singer-songwriter whose 2013 album Invisible Empire // Crescent Moon was produced by Gelb.

Tunstall duets on The 3 Deaths of Lucky, a likable minor-key piano ballad about luck, love and the loss of both. Gelb introduces it as a narrator: “In this film you’ll find …”

I adore Picacho Peak. Its dark manner resembles Nobody Home from Pink Floyd’s The Wall or something similarly sombre from Leonard Cohen, but it’s not dour. “I haven’t flown in my dreams since I was at least 11,” Gelb relates, “so now I sleep when I fly just to get even.”

On the easy-going, slightly psychedelic title track, Gelb pops the question: “Do you believe in the coincidentalist?” (He also says “all together now,” right before a violin solo.)

I believe coincidences mean you’re on the right path, and I believe Gelb knows where he is going, even when all evidence supports the opposite. I’ve listened to The Coincidentalist on a half-dozen occasions, with each listen leaving me a little less lost. Gelb will get me there, I think so.