Steve Gunn
★★★★★
Daylight Daylight
NO QUARTER. CD/DL/LP
LP Number 20-something from the Pennsylvanian singer-songwriter taps into something unique.
There is a particular kind of light that arrives in early autumn; soft, imprecise, suffused with a languid melancholy. If you could process that light into sound you might arrive at Steve Gunn’s remarkable new LP. “I was born yesterday,” he sings on the rippling Another Fade and you believe him, as this album has the quality of a slow reawakening, like someone trying to bring back the elusive chimerical dreams of a long sleep. Produced and arranged by close friend James Elkington, Daylight Daylight takes Gunn’s skeletal acoustic compositions and embroiders them with diaphanous traces of strings, horns, and synthesizer. Stripped of the insistent forward rhythms that defined his last proper studio album, 2021’s Other You, Daylight Daylight remains a spare, transient, restrained thing. Yet it’s that restraint that ultimately defines its brilliance; the sound of a more confident, assured artist realising that it might be better to travel slowly than to arrive.