| Ramp | |
| Type: | studio |
| Artist: | Giant Sand |
| Border: | yes |
| Released: | 1991 |
| Genre: | Country rock |
| Label: | Amazing Black Sand |
| Producer: | Howe Gelb |
| Prev Title: | Swerve |
| Prev Year: | 1990 |
| Next Title: | Center of the Universe |
| Next Year: | 1992 |
Ramp is an album by the American band Giant Sand, released in 1991.[1] [2] The album was released via frontman Howe Gelb's Amazing Black Sand label, before being picked up by Restless Records.[3]
The majority of the album was produced by Gelb. Victoria Williams contributed backing vocals to the album's second track, "Romance of Falling," the only track produced by Dusty Wakeman.[4] Pappy Allen also makes an appearance on Ramp.[5] The album was recorded in Los Angeles and Tucson.[4]
Robert Christgau wrote: "The first side makes something of the dissociated atmospherics that undermined the band's previous umpteen releases; the second's almost popwise. Together they're what country-rock was never really like, or wanted to be."[6] Trouser Press thought that "Gelb seems to have found a way to propel himself at will into a deconstruction zone where boogie can mutate into pre-rock vocal harmony ('Warm Storm') and Sun Ra can be construed as a lounge lizard (the slurry 'Jazzer Snipe')."[7] The Austin American-Statesman deemed it "the kind of revelatory release that makes one want to search out everything the band has previously recorded."[8] LA Weekly likened the album to "Neil Young hallucinating punk rock... But this time out, the riffs are gentler, the harmonies sweeter."[9]
The Spin Alternative Record Guide opined that the band "has mastered the art of rambling within a loose structure."