Album reviews: Steve Gunn – The Unseen in Between, and Deerhunter – Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared?

Gunn channels Sixties folk musicians and modern contemporaries on his fourth solo record, while Deerhunter observe death with heart-wrenching detail on the band’s eighth album

Steve Gunn (Clay Benskin)

Steve Gunn, The Unseen in Between

★★★☆☆

For more than a decade, Steve Gunn was the guitarist giant on whose shoulders better-known artists stood – artists such as Kurt Vile, who recruited him to his band the Violators, as well as Mike Cooper, Michael Chapman and Hiss Golden Messenger. He was, as Rolling Stone put it, “an artist’s artist”. With his fourth solo record, though, the American musician is hoping to change that. Or, at least, expand upon it.

The Unseen in Between, an album of woozy folk-rock so laid back, it could be horizontal, tells Gunn’s own stories. The lessons he learnt from his father, who died in 2016, are distilled in “Stonehurst Cowboy”, whose finger-picked guitar is coarse and visceral. The lessons he learnt from contemporary artist Walter De Maria’s installation of 400 stainless steel poles, meanwhile, crop up in “Lightning Field”. Inspiration can strike at any time, I suppose.

The album, though, never quite manages to raise its head above the parapet. Drawing from Sixties folk musicians such as Simon and Garfunkel and Cat Stevens, and channelling contemporaries like Ultimate Painting, Gunn has created a work of quiet, understated charm. But as far as helping him break out as a distinctive artist, it’s less likely to make its listener sit up and pay attention than lean back and close their eyes. Alexandra Pollard

Deerhunter, Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared?

★★★★☆

On Deerhunter’s eighth album, frontman Bradford Cox takes on the role of war poet, documenting the things he observes with a cool matter-of-factness, and heart-wrenching detail. Death is everywhere on Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared?, as much as others may refuse to see it.

He may have abandoned the nostalgia (“I’m not as interested in the pink fog,” he said in a 2015 interview before Fading Frontier was released), but in the chirpy harpsichord of opener “Death in Midsummer”, there is an element of whimsy that softens the blow of Cox’s glum ode to the departed of the Russian Revolution. Yet, as with Ray Davies’s Our Country: Americana Act II, Cox appears to acknowledge the blue-collar workers who helped build America, and wonder if it was all worth it.

A song later, on “No One’s Sleeping”, he watches the tragedy of Jo Cox’s murder unfold from across the Atlantic. As he mourns the fading of “the village”, he realises with despair that the picturesque image of England The Kinks painted is no longer – or arguably never was – real, just as Davies acknowledged of his beloved America.

Already Disappeared, which was co-produced with Cate Le Bon in the sprawling desert expanse of Marfa, Texas, is not an easy album. It’s often bleak and experimental: Cox’s vocals burst through like distorted, burbling fragments of static, or appear muffled amid the instrumentation. This is a new side of Deerhunter that gives the listener much to contemplate. Roisin O’Connor