(Indie Folk, Neo-Psychedelia, Alternative Rock) [CD] Steve Gunn - Way Out Weather - 2014, FLAC (tracks+.cue), lossless

01. Way Out Weather 06:18
02. Wildwood 05:38
03. Milly’s Garden 05:34
04. Shadow Bros 04:29
05. Fiction 05:44
06. Drifter 03:59
07. Atmosphere 05:09
08. Tommy’s Congo 06:34
All songs 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)

Steve Gunn’s Time Off was one of the great surprises of 2013. Not because it showcased his already considerable skills as a guitarist, but because he discovered his strength as a songwriter too. Way Out Weather, written during his global travels over the last year, is ambitious. Its musical architecture is more focused yet its production is more spacious. Gunn employs a larger band here—drummer John Truscinski, bassist/producer Justin Tripp, banjo player and soundscape artist Nathan Bowles, harpist Mary Lattimore, Rhyton’s Jimy SeiTang, and multi-instrumentalist/engineer Jason Meagher. Gunn has gained considerable confidence as a singer. His grainy yet airy voice sits atop this mix, fully expressive for its limited range. Songs often follow a verse-chorus-verse structure underscored by layers of repetitive, gradually shifting acoustic and electric guitar and percussion patterns, adorned by the other instrumentation selectively as well as strategically placed drones and gorgeously tailored effects that extend the songs’ margins. Way Out Weather unfolds, for all of its range, holistically. The title track emerges tentatively from skeletal lap steel and acoustic guitars with a sparse, reverbed upright piano toward a gradually revealing lyrical and musical landscape as Americana, droning blues, and psych-drenched folk (think David Crosby’s If I Could Only Remember My Name) commingle and converse. Its emergent lyric examines drive-by glimpses of ocean vistas, jagged coastlines, and bleached landscapes with the awareness that while seemingly eternal, they are always in flux. The droning organ that introduces the twinned electric guitar vamp on “Milly’s Garden” is sun-drenched, shuffling, windswept. Its musical aspect asserts a blurred terrain where roots rock, blues, and country meet. They carry a bright melody that reveals a dark, tragic lyric. As it unfolds, the music betrays traces and influences of the early-’70s Grateful Dead and the Byrds—circa Untitled. It is easily the most beautiful song Gunn’s ever written. “Shadow Bros,” the excellent back-porch waltz that follows, is framed by banjo, mandolin, acoustic guitar, harp, and old-timey vocal harmonies; its use of reverb gives more dimension to the poetic, metaphysical narrative in the lyric. The spacy psych impressionism of “Fiction” is the set’s first hard proof of an evolving direction, followed by the interlocking rhythms in the acoustic-electric rocker “Drifter” and the shimmering, hushed instrumental interlude that is “Atmosphere.” Closer “Tommy’s Congo” contains brooding, trance-like reverbed and layered percussion driving a steamy, minor-key Junior Kimbrough-esque blues groove voiced with Malian-style guitars, background bass, and synth drones. It’s a knockout six-minute jam that suggests what Robert Plant might sound like if he were backed by Lobi Traoré and Francis Bebey. Way Out Weather ends in a very different place than it began, but Gunn’s wide-angle musical vision possesses the acumen necessary to encompass it. His musical language has evolved into a sound that is not only ambitious, but instantly recognizable. (Thom Jurek, AllMusic)
Say what you will about the hyper-speed of modern life—it doesn’t matter to Steve Gunn. He plays his guitar with a traditional precision, his eyes gazing at the neck, his fingers moving limberly around the frets, a thumb pick doing the most economical work. He’s austere as someone with no need to go anywhere anytime soon. His songs stretch and loom like a dust storm. Time, it seems, bows to him.
Gunn’s career shows a similar sense of patience: zoomed out, it looks like a 9-year crescendo, whose highlights include his earliest limited-run solo guitar improvisations, his work as a duo with drummer John Truscinski, a sideman in Kurt Vile’s band, the spine of the psych-folk supergroup Black Dirt Oak, on up to last year’s Time Off. That last record was a statement, casting Gunn as not just an instrumentalist, but a damn fine songwriter, too, as ambling, cyclical guitars loped and folded among verses, choruses, bridges, and his doleful baritone. They were simple songs, produced with plenty of dust and hiss all over the tracks, and Time Off was Gunn squinting at something big on the horizon.
His latest, Way Out Weather, is the fully formed pinnacle of his career. With a full band and plenty of instrumentation behind him, the care he puts into every nook and cranny of a song is evident. It’s lush but without lacquer, detailed without being dense. These songs live in hollowed out holes of America’s past; it’s as easy to imagine him playing in front of a disused gas station off an Oklahoma highway as it is to hear his band booming out of a roadhouse on the Mississippi Delta. At times, there’re so many guitar tracks that it feels like in the middle of a pickup jam session with Jerry Garcia, Duane Allman, and John Fahey.
Among the strides Gunn has made on Way Out Weather is his singing voice. His baritone has a perfect character to it, somewhere between Lou Reed circa Loaded and a toothless barfly who occasionally breaks into song. He falls off the ends of notes as if the energy to sing them is out of reach, yet he avoids the kind of droll, wondering vocal style used so liberally and effectively by his contemporaries Adam Granduciel and Vile. Instead, Gunn hones in on every pitch, like on the the lilting waltz of “Shadow Bros,” which is the closest thing you’d call a traditional folk song here.
There’s so much space inside these songs: the opening title track is a six-minute stroll through tendrils of guitars—a lap steel in the background, a strummed acoustic just beside it, a picked acoustic just in ahead of that, and a clean Fender lead right up front. Even when these sounds aren’t washing over you, like the simple country blues riff that runs through “Wildwood,” hearing these melodies is a delight. He sings of private rivers, slowly moving light, fast nights, long days, and moving inside dreams.
It’s not all swaths of guitars and natural nostalgia, though: Gunn turns it up with “Drifter,” a balled up and electric stomper, and Way Out Weather closes with an excellent climax, “Tommy’s Congo,” a swirl of psych, krautrock, Malian folk, and a slight nod to Bob Dylan’s cadence on “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)”. Gunn may have been more experimental-leaning on Cantos de Lisboa, his collaboration with Mike Cooper, but this song gathers up all his improvisational tendencies and eclectic influences, bringing unheard textures to his music that are somehow still cut from the same cloth. He closes the album in a voice that's never sounded more certain: “Steady eyes on the crowd to see what’s going down / Never once looked down at what they’re playin'/ Never look down at what you need to do.” His eyes are trained far somewhere far in the distance, waiting for what’s next. (Jeremy D. Larson, Pitchfork)

Steve Gunn: acoustic and electric guitar, vocal
James Elkington: guitar, dobro, lap steel
Justin Tripp: bass, guitars, keyboards
John Truscinski: drums
Nathan Bowles: drums, banjo, organ, piano, percussion
Jason Meagher: bass, drones, engineering
Mary Lattimore: harp, keyboards
Jimy SeiTang: synths, electronics
Produced by Justin Tripp