Over the last decade, a spate of pastiche-fiends have been mining previously dormant genres for inspiration-- and as a result, dudes like Bruce Hornsby and Nile Rodgers are now serving unexpected, late-career stints as alt-touchstones. “Jam bands,” though-- long the presumed terrain of white people in dreadlocks and homemade pants-- stay largely unsung; maybe there’s something too dopey about the contemporary scene, or something too ambitious about the virtuosity high-caliber jams require. The Grateful Dead remain the grand exception, a band that’s somehow both an embodiment of and an outlier within their field. The Dead’s best live jams are emotional, melodically dizzying romps, rightly treasured for their ability to insulate a listener from whatever shitty things might be transpiring elsewhere. There’s safety in those songs. Getting close to it can feel euphoric.
Steve Gunn, a sometime-guitarist in Kurt Vile’s Violators and one half of the Gunn-Truscinski Duo, is offering the same kind of shelter on Time Off, a collection of six loose, spiraling guitar songs that give more than they ask: These are generous compositions, gently presented. Gunn’s a descendent of the Dead, but also of J.J. Cale and La Monte Young and Bert Jansch and Frank Hutchinson, and his guitar playing has a mesmeric quality, a tender circling that feels almost like being swaddled. Which is not to belittle their potency, or Gunn’s craft: he’s a nimble, expressive guitarist and a pleasantly lackadaisical vocalist, singing, as he does, about his Brooklyn neighborhood, or water bumping a waterwheel into motion, or taking a certain path through a field. There’s an unrefined, organic quality to Gunn’s work that occasionally recalls Chicago stalwarts Califone or early Red Red Meat-- a reinterpretation of “Americana” that allows for plenty of ingenuity (and requires no costuming).
Gunn’s voice is rambling and soft, but he’s a welcome guide wherever and whenever he shows up-- like a third of the way into “Street Keeper”, when his vocals hitch onto a sweet guitar refrain, or on “Water Wheel”, where he sounds, momentarily, like the late Shannon Hoon, mewing placidly about a river. There are bits here that feel improvised-- or at least slack enough to suggest improvisation-- but Gunn’s songs still rely on patterns and interactions that were clearly composed with care. It helps that his backers (John Truscinski on drums and Justin Tripp on bass) are as comfortable with a groove (see “New Decline”, especially) as they are with hoisting up Gunn’s guitar.
Like all acoustic guitarists with extensive record collections, Gunn has endured plenty of comparisons to John Fahey, but the association feels almost too facile to perpetuate: While Gunn’s produced some more explicitly cerebral work (for a time, he was into manipulating tapes of field recordings), Time Off’s biggest asset is its ease. There’s a real sense, listening to these tracks, that everything could be a little simpler if we all stopped trying so hard. It is deeply mellow in a way that the famously cantankerous Fahey would have likely found confounding.
It’s also a record that happens to make tremendous sense right now, on the precipice of summer, when we’re all anxious to uncurl a little. On “Lurker”, Gunn sings repeatedly about finding “a spot to kill time and look around,” and while it’s ostensibly an innocent observation of a neighborhood drifter, it ends up feeling more like a directive-- advice to heed. Find a spot, kill some time. Look around.
