Photo by Constance Mensh.
Way Out Weather has landed! Let float the smoke signals, and pick up your copy from your finest local record shop or via one of the below links.
$9.00 – $31.00
Purchase from PoB (LP/CD/MP3): https://paradiseofbachelors.com/pob-15
Purchase from iTunes (digital only): http://smarturl.it/SteveGunn_WoW_iTunes
Purchase from Amazon (all formats): http://smarturl.it/SteveGunn_WoW_Amazon
Purchase from Bandcamp (all formats): http://bit.ly/1rMZ6Ts
Stream on Spotify
Stream on YouTube
Catch Steve and his expanded band (feat. fellow PoB artist Nathan Bowles on drums and banjo, Jason Meagher on bass, Jim Elkington on guitar, and Mary Lattimore on harp) on tour now in the US. He heads to Europe in November for full-band dates with The War on Drugs.
To celebrate the release and the tour, check out this Rolling Stone Young Guns video with Steve talking shop with fellow guitar master Matt Sweeney. Guitar Power indeed! Plus, Aquarium Drunkard and Stereogum just posted some great interviews with Steve, both definitely worth reading. And Pitchfork weighed in this morning with a glowing 8.0 review:
8.o. 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’s so many guitar tracks it it feels like in the middle of a pickup jam session with Jerry Garcia, Duane Allman, and John Fahey.
– Jeremy D. Larson, Pitchfork
5 stars. Way Out Weather motors slowly but powerfully, like some 70s muscle-car cruising lazy coast-roads, safe in the knowledge of its own killer torque. The album title may abbreviate as a guileless “WOW!”, its bright melodies flickering like autumn sunlight on evening waves, but Gunn’s rolling lyrics deal with darker aspects – the ill omens of climate change, society’s lonesome outcasts, occluded Dylan riddles of impending apocalypse – that infuse the meander and drift of these lazy beguiling songs with a manifest chill, the dark rain clouds up ahead on that perfect summer drive that says sweet times now, bad times coming. You couldn’t wish for a more fitting musical soundtrack to the rest of your 2014.
– Andrew Male, MOJO
The guitarist blends the traditional and the avant-garde, fusing the sounds of John Fahey, The Grateful Dead and Will Oldham into back-porch masterpieces. Gunn’s virtuosic guitar work is still the main attraction, but his backing band of session players gives the [album] a Rolling Stones-circa-Exile on Main Street vibe. Simultaneously earthy and epic.
– Otis Hart, NPR’s All Songs Considered
This is masterful, textured and gorgeous. The double-tracked melodic lead guitars billow in like warm sheets of rain. You can sense, as a listener, that every single player has the same overall shape in their mind, and you can feel them all pushing towards it.
– Jayson Greene, Pitchfork
Way Out Weather marks the completion of Gunn’s transformation from a master guitarist into a songwriter who can trust in his own voice and arrangements as much as his spectacular fretwork. He’s thrown open the windows and let the light in, as he embraces pristine, lush production that makes guitars sparkle and drums crack.
– Max Savage Levenson, NPR Music
Our heads are blown. How did this NY guitarist become a cosmic-psych visionary? Assured groover “Milly’s Garden” feels like it’s been around forever.
– MOJO Playlist, September 2014
Following 2013’s excellent Time Off, this is a fuller, richer-sounding album. Gunn is an incredible guitarist, [and this is] a sun-dappled, easy highway song, the gleam of guitar pressing against the tarriness of Gunn’s voice.
– Laura Barton, The Guardian
8/10. Steve Gunn is managing the transition [into a classic singer-songwriter] with uncanny elegance, fold[ing] his old jamming imperative into beautifully constructed songs. He sings plenty, with engaging huskiness, while leading his band down ever more inventive tangents… Eco-fear played out with a sun-damaged languor.
– John Mulvey, Uncut
Way Out Weather is big-hearted and expansive, its windows thrown open to the world, [its] lines and contours beautifully rendered. Perhaps the best thing he’s ever done… relentlessly inventive. Way Out Weather unquestionably accomplishes its goal: fully transforming Gunn from a guitar hero into a respected songwriter. That’s no easy feat.
– John S.W. MacDonald, The Quietus
8.5/10. Way Out Weather mixes various musical styles – folk, classic rock, psychedelia, space rock, dub hues, West African grooves, open-tuned raga drones – to arrive at a genre-defying, expansive sound that’s simultaneously tight and totally, winningly loose, sparsely uncluttered yet richly textured in a way that rewards repeated spins. The outcomes are frequently sensational… A giant leap forward.
– Janne Oinonen, Line of Best Fit
It’s a record that still shows Gunn’s incredibly wide arsenal of skills on the guitar, both acoustic and electric, but he and his band trade dust in the light for glimmering shards that shape themselves into the beautiful mosaic this album is.
– Matthew Fiander, PopMatters
This is the most elaborately arranged thing Gunn has ever done, jammed full of understated yet excellent guitar. Perfectly placed licks that reference Richard Thompson, Jerry Donohue, Robert Fripp, Sneaky Pete Kleinow, and Ali Farka Toure make it a veritable encyclopedia of guitar sounds. It moves with a blend of head-down purpose and furtive apprehension—an apt soundtrack for a world where you need to keep one eye on the street and the other on the weather.
– Bill Meyer, The Wire
It’s impossible to just talk about Steve. He’s too good! I just want to listen to him. Hearing Steve, I was completely blown away, beyond. It made me want to be a part of it myself.
– Kurt Vile
My favorite new artist.
– J Mascis, Pitchfork
Meditative and mellow, the songs float along on soft waves of intricate, hypnotic guitar lines and the Brooklyn singer/songwriter’s low, gently exhaled lyrics. Call it otherworldly country blues.
– Carla Gillis, Now Toronto
Appalachian mandalas. Cosmic folk songs that feel highly intricate and effortlessly propulsive, like Robbie Basho sitting in with the Doors.
– Chris Richards, The Washington Post
Gunn is blessed with a voice as rich and warm as Tim Buckley or a young Van Morrison.
– Nick Southgate, The Wire
After last year’s exceptional Time Off, the new guitar master continues to expand his vision.
– Uncut Playlist
Goes from ramshackle Southern-fried folk-rock to psychedelic intrumental jam and back again. It’s a gorgeous piece of work.
– Tom Breihan, Stereogum
Way Out Weather sees Gunn delving deeper into folk rock contemporization, now applying more intricate production and atmospheric arrangement, somewhat akin to early-’90s Crazy Horse playing a show in a city on the clouds.
– Mike Sugarman, Ad Hoc
With a larger ensemble in tow, Way Out Weather is more colorful than its predecessor, evoking the full band interplay of Fairport Convention or Van Morrison and band live at Montreux in 1974. The band sounds exuberant, like prime Dead.
– Jason Woodbury, Aquarium Drunkard
Steve Gunn is maybe my favorite guitarist right now. His new LP is breathtaking.
– Steven Hyden, Grantland
Though Gunn’s throaty baritone and stunning guitar work remain pillars of his earnest sound, a new sheen of blues-inspired grittiness abounds.
– Josh Terry, Consequence of Sound
Exhilarating. This is the new, ghostly classic rock.
– The Big Takeover
The premiere artist in the John Fahey inspired, post-Jack Rose realm of fingerpicked, raga-meets-American folk. With Way Out Weather, he takes an even grander step forward both in terms of arrangement and improvisation, as well as the roster of musicians he has aboard.
– Dog Gone Blog