OP8 was a joint project of members of Giant Sand and Lisa Germano, and this duet, scuttling and sighing, feels like every mysterious nocturnal Old West chance encounter you ever imagined, campfire, hauntings, tumbleweed and all (it’s actually an old Nancy and Lee number, I think). For me, the shadow-edged spag-western dynamics of “Sand” summon a swirl of images and associations which I can’t quite grasp even when they arise in my mind, never mind articulate them in words — but they have something to do with drifting, and solitude, and endless uncharted new frontiers with the horizon always before one, and the unnameable magic that seems to inhere in all of that…it’s a song that works in the space between imagination and allusion, and it’s mighty fine at that.
