Jim Turner vocals, guitar
Andy Hittle guitar, vocals
Mike Montgomery bass
Rick McCarty drums

Organelle Various Artists

The Official Guide To Loss 11-song CD/LP

Listen to The Official Guide To Loss

- Citybeat

Now in their third year, El Gigante continues to tweak the sound that makes them instantly distinguishable from their peers. Rick McCarty's drums, militant and stubborn, are at first bracing in their aggression, but they slowly and cleverly reveal an undercurrent of intricacy not often felt in modern music. Like McCarty, bass player Mike Montgomery is tactful in his contribution to the El Gigante design, allowing his lines to remain within the drum patterns or to scramble into swollen, distorted melodies. Nodding to combining disparate elements of the last forty years of electric music, guitar aggregate Jim Turner and Andy Hittle swap melodies, percussive figures, and experiemental swerving that unfailingly snap back to somehow accomodate curious detours and neck-jerking standstills. Somewhere within the enormity of the music, Turner's voice, throaty and imploring, surfaces and demands melodic elbowroom.

Taken separately, the listener can appreciate each element of El Gigante, but it is the songs themselves that call for acclaim. Direct and well considered, the band's songs move easily between pensive and sometimes hushed verses to resonant, memorable choruses that dutifully avoid contrivance.

That the band has a seemingly endless supply of such songs from which to choose bodes well for their future, as El Gigante is currently working on the follow up to The Official Guide to Loss.

In songwriting and playing, El Gigante balances the responsibility of sounding catchy without gimmicks, and clever without pretension. And in the end, though they are difficult, these are the efforts that matter.

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