This upward draft is stronger than ever on Other You, owing in large part to Schnapf’s close-tracked production. Like a plane taking off, Gunn’s songs move at a rapid horizontal speed while their vertical lift feels gentle and eventual. Even the gorgeous ballad “Reflection” is streaked with a screaming handful of chords from Jerry Borgé’s synth. While Gunn sings of “Leaning on the window, feeling more alive” in “Morning River,” Ben Boye turns the ends of the lines around with his piano, as if he’s holding the words up to study them in the light. Julianna Barwick’s vocals shine like a cold sun through the dust of “Good Wind,” a perfect complement to the resolute and earthy runs Gunn pulls from his acoustic guitar alternating between a pair of notes so close she sounds like she’s flipping over a sheet of paper, her vocals are a dome under whose safety the song’s passages are able to thrive. That includes bringing in a number of guest artists who buy completely into his vision. gave him the space to try out new sounds and compositional approaches. As a result, Other You sounds unlike any previous Steve Gunn album, but it’s impossible to imagine it being made by anyone else. Where on Gunn’s earlier albums the guitar functioned as an exceptionally well-honed vessel for his personality, both the delicacy of his arrangements and the calm clarity of his band on Other You make it feel as though that same personality has been distributed across the entire ensemble even when it’s the lead instrument, Gunn’s guitar sometimes seems to melt away. It’s the most ambitious album he’s ever made, and the first one in which his guitar-playing-a singular sound that typically draws together the hand-punched tin of old-timey rag with the needle-nose scribbling of Tom Verlaine-is largely undistinguished. Like the city in which it was recorded, Other You is a sprawling and decentralized tangle of ideas, people, sounds, and, yes, vibes, all of it lit in the merlot purples and maraschino reds and Pacific Ocean blues of a Southern California sunset.
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