Steve Gunn: Way Out Weather

2014 vinyl LP pressing. While ecological unease worries at the edges of Steve Gunn's bold full-band album 'Way Out Weather'-the breathing sea of the billowing title track, the bad wind and moon over "Wildwood," the polluted pyramid and blue bins in "Shadow Bros," the desert heat sickness of "Atmosphere"-the resonance of the title is primarily metaphorical and oblique. Written largely while on tour, the record is an elliptical but seductive travelogue, more engaged with navigating foreign ("way out") emotional landscapes, and with grasping at universal threads of language and narrative, than with bemoaning rising sea levels. Despite the album-opening lyric to the contrary, "Way Out Weather" is an uncommon song in Steve Gunn's discography. Sonically and lyrically the album demonstrates a radical evolution, lighting out for lusher, more expansive, and impressionistic territories; it's his first major work as an artist for whom the studio provides a critical context. A more enigmatic and e