It’s easy to crash when making a road record. The setup of writing about life on the move can foster insularity and diminished perspectives; have you felt the need to spin Running On Empty and feel sorry for Jackson Browne lately? But the road can also offer a vantage point, one that Steve Gunn exploits to splendid effect on his Matador debut.
His writing persona is self-aware but not self-obsessed, inclined to appreciation and compassion for others, and his lyrics are ambiguous enough that you can drive them to your own destination. That combination of discipline and allusiveness is also at play in the music. Guitarists Gunn, Jim Elkington and Paul Sukeena channel their prodigious technique to fleeting textures and ingratiating hooks, and the arrangements update the templates of 1970-vintage Velvet Underground and Grateful Dead with a half-century of judiciously applied production acumen.
—Bill Meyer
