No bowing his Flying V with a Stradivarius for him. Gunn is an odd sort of guitar hero, one who definitely has the chops to shred and wail with the best of them but who seems unconcerned with showboating or self-regarding displays of virtuosity. Other You is not only his best album in some years, but also his most human. The true constant is his voice, which he pushes to the forefront of these songs, and he sounds more engaged and more vulnerable than ever. Gunn introduces a new guitar tone on every song, and the other instruments swim in and out of the mix, surfacing briefly then submerging again, lending the songs a gentle, swirling psychedelia. The result is a record that is all the more beguiling for sounding so fidgety and mercurial. It could have been unsettling, but instead it reinforces the song’s off-kilter optimism. A strange two-note theme gusts through Good Wind, played on some unidentifiable instrument or possibly by some otherworldly entity. ![]() “The Painter” makes space for a dust-up between a Spanish guitar and what sounds like a drunken mandolin making trouble at the bar. His solo in On The Way sounds heraldic, majestic in a prog-rock sort of way, upending the song’s understated sense of anticipation. Other You is full of similar moments of lovely friction and disruption. ORDER NOW: Nick Cave is on the cover of the October 2021 issue of Uncut. ![]() The solo doesn’t quite fit the mood or the sound of the song, but that’s the whole point: there can be a peculiar beauty in such stark contrasts between sounds, in the interruptions of our everyday reveries. “The night felt so quiet, listening to the silence,” he sings, then the electric guitar rampages into the song, thick and staticky and tangled, intruding on Gunn’s contemplation and lingering on the fringes of the song like a gremlin in the works. Fulton, the second song on his new album Other You, opens with stray piano notes and organ chords twined around a striding guitar strum, as Gunn muses on finding calm and stillness. ![]() Steve Gunn likes to paint a beautiful picture, then scribble all over it.
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