f prolificacy can be viewed as a kind of virility, then Giant Sand’s Howe Gelb might be the alpha male to end all alpha males. In two decades of recording with his band, as a solo artist and under a few other guises (Band of Blacky Ranchette, OP8) he has wedded American roots, world musics, skronky noise and humorous free-associating lyrics across an enormous catalogue that can barely get out of its own way. I’m not even gonna pretend to be conversant with his entire career; you’d need a guy on staff strictly for that one job. What I do know is that he’s still at it, still looking for a new wrinkle. Is All Over the Map differs primarily in the absence of longtime cohorts Joey Burns and John Convertino (AKA Calexico), but despite this Giant Sand still offers plenty of rough-hewn, crusty songcraft with enough mischievous surprises to keep you on your toes.

The strangeness can take the form of sudden lashings of hyper-dirty guitar like the solos on “NYC of Time” and the oddly touching “Classico”. Sometimes it’s the wandering narratives as on the folk/bossa nova “Hood (View from a Heidelberg Hotel)” which ends with Gelb lamenting “sitting here singing like Gordon Lightfoot”. If you say so. Other times it’s the mix itself and the schizy production (by P.J. Harvey collaborator John Parish and Gelb) where instruments often sound as if they’re in the next room and nothing is immune from a grimy coat of fuzz. All told, it is music that sits at the crossroads of Neil Young and Captain Beefheart, a reverence for its rustic background balanced by a playful desire to fuck shit up.

The ease with which Gelb spins ideas out and his unfussy attitude toward recording them are partly why his records number in the tens of thousands. And that’s why a listener can’t be complacent even when the song seems to be a relatively straight-forward bluesy chugger like “Muss”. Guitars are liable to explode, or Howe is apt to pull some goofy non-sequitur out of his butt. Sometimes it sounds like things are just about to unravel, but then no, they don’t.

The few instrumental pieces here suffer from the lack of Gelb’s distinctive voice and unpredictable lyrics, but no harm is done. They do allow him to stretch out on the piano, (which sounds “prepared” in the John Cage sense, various debris lodged between the strings) working in some nods to ragtime and dissonant modernism. He even dabbles in some Cuban son (that on the non-instrumental “Napoli”). Among the guest vocalists are Gelb’s daughter Indiosa singing a charmingly sour rendition of “Anarchy in the U.K” and bird-of-a-feather Vic Chestnutt’s foppish drawl dueting with the cool, Bjork-like Henriette Sennenvalt on “A Classico Reprise”.

Howe Gelb’s long, strange trip continues, all over the map literally and figuratively. Tirelessly creative, open minded and warmly communal in spirit he remains an inspired and inspiring presence in the underbelly of Americana.