Gun Outfit

Overwhelmed by the rising sea of garbage seeping in through every crack in the earth and mind, Gun Outfit respond by playing human music. Their new record, HARD COMING DOWN, is the first one with bass, and it is a dark opening in a wall of artificial light. They think they are playing folk music because rock is folk music now, and anyway, they're country educated. Warm tones, heavy vibes. Although they drink the same water as the real believers of the past 40 years like Great Society, Relatively Clean Rivers, Meat Puppet and Lucinda Williams, Gun Outfit don't get too comfortable with the past, because they've got their own strange moment to capture.

PERENNIAL DEATH  ::  SOUNDCLOUD  ::  POST PRESENT MEDIA  ::  LAST.FM

Listening to Olympia, Washington’s Gun Outfit, you know that there’s going to be a little bit of nostalgia at play. These guys nail Sonic Youth’s noisy disaffectedness and Courtney Love’s flat growl, but it doesn’t feel like empty nostalgia so much as carrying on a tradition that never really died out. You can probably chalk part of that up to the fact that Olympia is a bubble where people live cheap and see out their idiosyncratic influences with sincerity. Three albums deep, Gun Outfit keep refining their craft, tightening the vocals and riffs and perfecting their sloppiness like they’re writing huge pop singles. When Carrie Keith ends the song with the lyric, "you lost me somewhere in the blue," you expect her to keep going, finish the thought; she doesn’t, and the song is better for it. [FADER]