The Los Angeles-based, neo-psychedelic band Gun Outfit make you feel as if you’ve swallowed the sun in the canyon. Their music is the equivalent of being faced against imposing, red-hued sandstone buttes piercing a clear blue sky. Before you get the wrong impression that Gun Outfit are Millennial hippies (they could well be), imparting wisdom like New Age and Holistic practices (when you wish you were reading Emil Cioran, instead), the band can be deeply philosophical. Firstly, they fulminate against Cartesian materialism (don’t ask me what that is all about: I’m no epistemologist); secondly, their songs barely speak, let alone preach.
If Tom Petty had met the Grateful Dead in the late 1960s, he would’ve been fronting Gun Outfit, which is to say, their music is both melodic and nebulous, neither being subordinate to the other. Process and Reality, Gun Outfit’s sixth studio album, imbues a cosmic existentialism in which celestial instrumentation coils and twists, like a serpentine trail in a canyon, leading us somewhere until we’re back at the start, an eternal return of psych-rock. Yet we fall for the chimerical sound because, well, we have no choice. Beauty is illusory.
Although Gun Outfit exude a blithe disposition, hidden beneath the equanimity is a profound truth: modern society has no time for the soul. We all know that the quiddity of the soul has gone down the chain of command: TikTok is endowed with the reverential status of the holy dove. Perhaps divinity isn’t in the human visage, as William Blake wrote, but in some AI-generated post, after all? In any case, Gun Outfit’s music becomes, importantly, an antidote to the digital age.
Named after the mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead’s 1929 book of the same name, Process and Reality was recorded during the 2020 California wildfires. For context (any analytic philosophers out there can ignore the following), Whitehead thought that the only real experience of living is change, and that creativity is the apotheosis of existence (yes, I have the temerity to pretend to understand and distil Whitehead’s philosophical framework into a sentence).
Clocking in at the 80-minute mark, the double LP is sprawling and contains multitudes like the United States: bold, contradictory, and self-invented. The jaunty opener, “Unfelt Loss”, is, with its skittery guitar lines and infectious female backing vocals, a bit of an outlier, as the rest of the album is never quite as punchy and catchy.
The rest of the record is built upon an inertia, in which the music seems to be moving away from the musicians, who seem to be content to watch it drift from them as if they are under a spell, as if it is not coming from them but a divine source. For instance, “So Easy to Love” is a languid tune laden with sparse electric guitars and drums, the latter sounding like stones falling into a pond.
“Teardrops (Classic Hell on Earth)” could be the War on Drugs, especially with the singer’s drawling diction, which, to a certain extent, draws attention to the simple but profound statement that love is the only reason why we hang on. The reverb-drenched “Whiplash”, with its feedback and distant vocals, swallows you, or envelops you to the point where you feel yourself going to places which you thought were in some other place, some other life, which is to say, you are being whiplashed into being what it means to be alive, today, tomorrow, and yesterday.
The second half of the LP is atmospheric and numinous. It is as if the music is used to explore consciousness; that is to say, it leads the album, though that could mean going backwards, returning to a spiritual state, like the recorder-led “Backward Path”, as if defying linear time, or all forms of time. The ambiance which I am referring to are tracks such as “Don’t Remind Me”, with a long psychedelic guitar solo as if this was Spacemen 3, the Eastern-influenced “Lilies of the Field”, and, lastly, the hypnagogic “Lifelong Sellout”, in which the singer sings over a slow percussive beat, the music so trippy you could have been listening to the song for four hours straight and would’ve thought it had just begun.
Viewing the record as a collection of songs rather than as a single long piece feels incorrect. Perhaps not unlike Whitehead’s philosophy (from my limited understanding), Gun Outfit are in continual motion, as if changing from moment to moment, second to second—that way, life is not transcended but experienced. Above all, the record is like sand falling through your fingers but never hitting the ground. Indeed, Gun Outfit are free-fallin’. I won’t be there to catch them.