Photo by Heather Hall.
Gun Outfit has been cruising towards the release of their PoB debut, Dream All Over, out October 16th. They’ve released three spectacular, unique singles that have demonstrated their refined songwriting chops. On “Gotta Wanna,” Dylan Sharp sings, “I wanna squirm around / I’m a wild primate / Can’t never make no art / When my clothing chafes,” and on “Only Ever Over,” he muses, “Out here on the West coast where the ocean eats the sun / We’ve known for a long time the end’s already come.” With “Legends of My Own,” Carrie Keith coolly laments, “I looked familiar in a foreign land / I couldn’t speak, but I could understand / From another life I rode / Into a desert of my own / And when I put my blanket down / I’m going to dream all over.” The band maps a dangerous California that bears little resemblance to Tinseltown fantasies.
There are many such moments on Dream All Over, deflating lyrical reversals that frame these plainspoken riddles with devastating regret and resignation, in the manner of all great country songs. “Worldly Way,” the new single they’re sharing today via Noisey, finishes with a desolate aphorism: “Oh world, what knowledge do you teach? / To grow a tail and chase it / Or sit awhile in grief.” On their most refined and ruefully elegant album, Gun Outfit has perfected their incandescent sonic signature: a dusky, canyon-cult blues fueled by melodic dual-guitar weaving and seductive male/female incantations at zero hour. It’s the nocturnal sound of desert-damaged L.A. burnout, a soured American surrealism in rock and roll creole: white line fever, paint fume flashbacks, a stranger wading out alone into the black surf.
Click here to read the Noisey interview with the band: “We’re not going to wear all wool and leather.”
A slice of bleached-out West Coast psych-folk… This expansive collection tunes plays like a post-party, pre-hangover wander under a freeway. Sounding both defiant and defeated at the same time, Sharp demands answers from an indifferent world over a groove so sexy it’s doubly devastating, especially when he hits the listener with a bitter denouement: “Oh world, what wisdom do you teach? Console yourself with sadness, befriend your misery.”
– Mariana Timony, Noisey
LISTEN TO GUN OUTFIT’S “WORLDLY WAY”:
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PRAISE FOR GUN OUTFIT:
“This band has a punk aesthetic deep at the center and, especially now, slow and drifting, double-guitar desert-rock psychedelia at the surface. ‘Dream All Over’ is the latest installment in the output of a band that’s remained open-ended, slow and steady.”
“Supported by two tessellating guitars and a rhythm section that seems stuck in an infinite, italicized shuffle, [‘Gotta Wanna’ is] a classic get-free anthem, sourced from the great, open American tradition that birthed the Grateful Dead and, more recently, Brightblack Morning Light or even Kurt Vile.”
“Dream All Over is a dusty piece of good time rock ‘n’ roll.”
“Gun Outfit songs tend to conjure up daydreams of a weirder, stonier, long-gone version of southern California. ‘Gotta Wanna,’ our first taste of the L.A.-via-Olympia outfit’s gorgeous new full-length, is a good example of that.”
“The latest outing from Gun Outfit crystallizes from nothingness like a Yo La Tengo song slowly surfacing out of primordial ooze. This is music of becoming, an indie rock cut that sounds more like the process of making a pop song than a pop song itself.”
– SPIN
“Gun Outfit’s music has always been so necessary. It exists freely, even if we can’t.”
Pre-order Dream All Over in advance of the October 16 release date:
$9.00 – $30.00
Other ways to purchase this release: iTunes | Amazon | Bandcamp