(Indie Folk, Alternative Rock) [CD] Steve Gunn - Time Off - 2013, FLAC (tracks+.cue), lossless

01. Water Wheel 05:10
02. Lurker 07:43
03. Street Keeper 05:43
04. New Decline 05:25
05. Old Strange 07:01
06. Trailways Ramble 08:54
All songs are written by Steve Gunn

Steve Gunn is a guitarist, songwriter, and producer living and working in Brooklyn, New York. While he is best known as a go-to musician and for his membership in GHQ, Gunn has a varied recording and collaboration history that includes work with British legend Michael Cooper (with whom he recorded the duo album Cantos de Lisboa in 2014) and the late Jack Rose. The diversity of his approach embraces everything from American Primitive guitar to raucous, Neil Young & Crazy Horse-inspired psychedelic roots rock & roll. He has collaborated with Meg Baird, the Magik Markers, and Kurt Vile, and issued a handful of well-received solo albums including Time Off (2013) and Way Out Weather (2014) for Paradise of Bachelors.
Gunn began playing guitar before high school, and credits his older sister with giving him tapes to listen to. His first loves were punk rock and rap. His first real band was a hardcore covers unit that actually toured between his freshman and sophomore years of high school.
But Gunn kept expanding his musical horizons, taking in everything from psych to folk to country to funk. He eventually developed a deep interest in Indian classical music, La Monte Young, and Gnawa music as well—all of which would feature in his own work. While in college, Gunn became aware of other Philly-based musicians including Bardo Pond and Rose. He also joined GHQ, whose other members were Pete Nolan (Magik Markers, Vanishing Voice) and Marcia Bassett (Un, Double Leopards, Zaimph, Hototogisu), and the trio moved to Brooklyn, which became his home base. Gunn played with GHQ between 2005 and 2007, during which time the band issued nine full-length recordings. While still with GHQ, Gunn issued three extremely limited-edition recordings as Moongang. These releases were created using tape manipulation, field recordings, and, to a lesser extent, guitars.
In 2007 he released his first self-titled solo album on Onomato, followed almost immediately by a self-titled, self-issued CD-R. Sundowner followed in 2008 on Tulsa, Oklahoma’s Digitalis label. In 2009, Three-Lobed (also GHQ’s label) released Gunn’s Boerum Palace and the Too Early for the Hammer EP. The former—a limited-edition LP—quickly sold out. Later that year, End of the City, a split album with Shawn McMillen, appeared from Abandon Ship Records. Gunn’s next solo guitar offering was Camel Throat, released as a cassette-only album on Germany’s Meudiademorte. In 2010, Gunn and drummer John Truscinski began playing live together as the Gunn-Truscinski duo. Their debut, Sand City, was issued by Three-Lobed that year, followed by a live CD-R in 2011 and Ocean Parkway in 2012.
Gunn also kept busy as a solo artist, releasing a split album with Sun City Girls entitled Not the Spaces You Know, But Between Them in 2011. In 2012, the guitarist joined Kurt Vile & the Violators for a global tour, eventually returning to issue his next album Time Off, a trio album featuring Truscinski and bassist Justin Tripp, for Paradise of Bachelors in the late spring of 2013. In 2014, Gunn was prolific. Melodies for a Savage Fix, his collaborative date with Pelt guitarist Mike Gangloff, was issued in March, followed in June by Cantos de Lisboa, a duet session with Mike Cooper in RVNG Intl.’s Frkwys series. In early October, Way Out Weather, his second singer/songwriter offering for Paradise of Bachelors, appeared.
Gunn teamed with the Black Twig Pickers during a short break in his touring schedule to record a live-in-studio date. Seasonal Hire included four original tunes and one traditional piece, with Gunn and the Black Twig Pickers’ Mike Gangloff and Sally Anne Morgan all taking turns on lead vocals and songwriting. It was released by Thrill Jockey in early 2015. By the end of that year, he’d also taken part in a unique vinyl box set of split LPs from Three Lobed Records titled Parallelogram, with Gunn and Kurt Vile each taking a side of one of the LPs. The following summer he made his Matador Records debut with a collection of road meditations called Eyes on the Lines and a live set with Angel Olsen titled Live at Pickathon. The following year his seemingly never-ending tour produced the self-released Dusted, whose six tracks were captured from gigs in Chicago, New York and Toronto. Gunn’s singer-songwriter ambitions were predominant on 2018’s The Unseen In Between, a set of nine intimate, often autobiographical songs that flowed stylistically from Anglo-Celtic folk, Indian raga, guitar pop and Americana. Meg Baird duetted with the guitarist on the track “Vagabond.” The album also contained the song “Stonehurst Cowboy,” a tribute to his recently deceased father and the Philadelphia neighborhood Gunn grew up in. (Thom Jurek, AllMusic)

For most of the last decade and a half, guitarist Steve Gunn has been quietly going about his business as a musician’s musician. In addition to collaborating with Meg Baird, the Magik Markers, and Kurt Vile, he has been an active recording artist as a member of GHQ, the Gunn Truscinski Duo, and in his low-key way, as a solo artist. Time Off is his first trio recording under his own name. Gunn is a guitarist of wide interests and skillful versatility, whether it be early blues traditions like Piedmont or Delta styles, American Primitive, Indian music, psych, Gnawan, etc. He seeks out what inspires him then masters it. This set was reportedly cut in the breaks he had between other projects. Its six songs (clocking in at nearly 40 minutes) ranging from five to nearly nine minutes, are performed with Truscinski on drums and bassist Justin Tripp. Those seeking the fiery interplay of GHQ will be surprised by the vibe here. Gunn employs his layered acoustic guitars primarily, with electric guitars woven in sporadically. He also sings on all but one track. This band is tight. They weave Americana, folk, blues, psych, improvisation, drone, and more into Time Off. The 12-string in “Water Wheel” opens with a gorgeous vamp that changes shapes effortlessly in spite of its repetition, and becomes an intricate through-flowing jam. The short electric guitar solo briefly carries it in another direction only to return like a shapeshifter. Check the group interplay on the darkly tinged psych folk of “Lurker,” which is simultaneously locked yet open to possibility. The guitar vamp that becomes the body of “Street Keeper” suggests the Grateful Dead’s “Cassidy,” though Gunn opens it up with jazz chord voicings and a lilting bridge; recording engineer Jason Meagher’s pulsing flute moves it further afield. “New Decline” is a slide guitar psych blues that offers an extended electric guitar break and deep choogling boogie by the rhythm section. Tom-toms and fingerpicked guitars introduce “Old Strange.” The guitar comes out of the Delta blues, but Helena Espvall’s cello turns that on its head, and it becomes a spooky, infectious dark groove that suggests Led Zeppelin’s more sinister acoustic moments. The nearly nine-minute closer, “Trailways Ramble,” is the only instrumental; it’s a sprawling, fluid, densely detailed workout with 12-string and slide guitars, cello, and that unshakeable rhythm section creating 21st-century trance music. Time Off contains great songs. It’s warm, spacious, sophisticated, and elastic. The only complaint is that Gunn’s singing isn’t more present in the mix, but even so, it adds to the album’s sense of mystery. Gunn is at a creative peak here; can’t wait for more. (Thom Jurek, AllMusic)
Over the last decade, a spate of pastiche-fiends have been mining previously dormant genres for inspiration—and as a result, dudes like Bruce Hornsby and Nile Rodgers are now serving unexpected, late-career stints as alt-touchstones. “Jam bands,” though—long the presumed terrain of white people in dreadlocks and homemade pants—stay largely unsung; maybe there’s something too dopey about the contemporary scene, or something too ambitious about the virtuosity high-caliber jams require. The Grateful Dead remain the grand exception, a band that’s somehow both an embodiment of, and an outlier within, their field. The Dead’s best live jams are emotional, melodically dizzying romps, rightly treasured for their ability to insulate a listener from whatever shitty things might be transpiring elsewhere. There’s safety in those songs. Getting close to it can feel euphoric.
Steve Gunn, a sometime-guitarist in Kurt Vile’s Violators and one half of the Gunn-Truscinski Duo, is offering the same kind of shelter on Time Off, a collection of six loose, spiraling guitar songs that give more than they ask: These are generous compositions, gently presented. Gunn’s a descendent of the Dead, but also of J.J. Cale and La Monte Young and Bert Jansch and Frank Hutchinson, and his guitar playing has a mesmeric quality, a tender circling that feels almost like being swaddled. Which is not to belittle their potency, or Gunn’s craft: he’s a nimble, expressive guitarist and a pleasantly lackadaisical vocalist, singing, as he does, about his Brooklyn neighborhood, or water bumping a waterwheel into motion, or taking a certain path through a field. There’s an unrefined, organic quality to Gunn’s work that occasionally recalls Chicago stalwarts Califone or early Red Red Meat—a reinterpretation of “Americana” that allows for plenty of ingenuity (and requires no costuming).
Gunn’s voice is rambling and soft, but he’s a welcome guide wherever and whenever he shows up—like a third of the way into “Street Keeper”, when his vocals hitch onto a sweet guitar refrain, or on “Water Wheel”, where he sounds, momentarily, like the late Shannon Hoon, mewing placidly about a river. There are bits here that feel improvised—or at least slack enough to suggest improvisation—but Gunn’s songs still rely on patterns and interactions that were clearly composed with care. It helps that his backers (John Truscinski on drums and Justin Tripp on bass) are as comfortable with a groove (see “New Decline”, especially) as they are with hoisting up Gunn’s guitar.
Like all acoustic guitarists with extensive record collections, Gunn has endured plenty of comparisons to John Fahey, but the association feels almost too facile to perpetuate: While Gunn’s produced some more explicitly cerebral work (for a time, he was into manipulating tapes of field recordings), Time Off’s biggest asset is its ease. There’s a real sense, listening to these tracks, that everything could be a little simpler if we all stopped trying so hard. It is deeply mellow in a way that the famously cantankerous Fahey would have likely found confounding.
It’s also a record that happens to make tremendous sense right now, on the precipice of summer, when we’re all anxious to uncurl a little. On “Lurker”, Gunn sings repeatedly about finding “a spot to kill time and look around,” and while it’s ostensibly an innocent observation of a neighborhood drifter, it ends up feeling more like a directive—advice to heed. Find a spot, kill some time. Look around. (Amanda Petrusich, Pitchfork)

Steve Gunn: guitar, vocal
John Truscinski : drums
Justin Tripp: bass, guitar
Helena Espvall (Espers) : cello
Jason Meagher: flute, engineering, mixing
Tyson Lewis: piano
Produced by Justin Tripp