Life Experience

It’s just past 2:00 a.m. in Olympia, Washington, and Dylan Sharp is
hanging out on a couch at Reuben Storey’s house on the city’s leafy,
residential Westside. Sharp is a guitarist/singer for a punk band
called Gun Outfit, along with fellow singer/guitarist Caroline Keith;
Storey is Gun Outfit’s drummer. The band have just unloaded their gear
back into their practice space following a show at Olympia’s Old School
Pizzeria, where all three have been employed and where Storey and Keith
still work. Three houseguests, up from Portland for the weekend, all
ladies, are interrogating Sharp in a kind of mock interview, making
good fun of my reason for being there.

One of the ladies asks, “Where do you get your ideas?”

Sharp, his voice pitched up in a parody of earnest enthusiasm, his
arms swinging in an old-timey “aw shucks” gesture, replies, “From
real life!“

Before the show, while the sunset was fading, Sharp and Keith split
a cigarette on the balcony of Keith’s downtown apartment, from which
you can see the old K Records warehouse, which now has “Olympia
Knitworks” painted on its side but which actually houses band practice
spaces, including Gun Outfit’s. Sharp joked about how he was going to
spike his hair for the show (he didn’t): “I know you’ve seen me in my
normal life, but tonight I’m playing a show!” And then, walking the few
blocks from the apartment to Old School, Keith’s guitar slung over her
back, Sharp did a little leap and self-effacingly exclaimed, “We’re
really doing it!”

Sharp has always been the best, most
amiable kind of smart-ass.
I’ve known him for years, although I only realized he had a new band
three months ago, when Stranger music critic Dave Segal wrote an
enthusiastic review of their debut album, Dim Light, which I
hadn’t yet heard (“the contrast between flat vocals and manically
expressive guitars creates a pleasing friction”), and I recognized
Sharp’s name. Eight years ago, we briefly lived together while
attending college in Olympia. Back then, he lived on the couch of a
two-bedroom apartment we shared with a third friend. From that couch,
we watched the A&E biography of Brian Wilson (afraid of the ocean),
played a season of Baseball Stars on the NES, and introduced me
to records by Lync and Bright Eyes and Men’s Recovery Project. Mostly,
though, we just reclined in the weird mix of seemingly limitless
possibility but probable hopelessness that comes with being young,
poor, and pursuing a (“worthless”) liberal-arts degree. Lots of leisure
time. Not surprisingly, the view from that couch, reflecting our slack
positions and prospects, was one of seriously self-deprecating sarcasm.
Everything was at least partly a smirk, or a sigh.

While in school, Sharp fronted a thrashy hardcore band called Homo
Eradicus, featuring members of Seattle bands Teen Cthulhu and Akimbo
(the misanthropological name reflected a distaste for all of Homo
sapiens, not homosexuals)—a technically proficient band, but
with Sharp screaming inscrutably while flailing and flopping around
like a fish thrown in a boat, microphone cord hooked to his mouth. The
whole act seemed like one loud, disaffected shrug.

Something of that posture still exists in Gun Outfit—not the
screaming or flailing, but the shrugging and smirking. Sharp sings
about dead-end drudgery (“Work Experience”), bad feelings (“Guilt and
Regret”), deprivation (“In the Dark”), and refusal (“Had Enough,” “Your
Will”), all in a tunefully deadpan baritone. When he sings, “Want to
feel good all the time/Feeling good is feeling… fine,” there’s
a sardonic, slightly sly inflection to the last syllable, as if wanting
to feel good were just so pedestrian. Keith acts as a
counterbalance with her relatively airy and earnest
vocal
presence, and it all plays out over lively drumming and surprisingly
bright, catchy guitar melodies.

Sharp and Keith formed the band in the summer of 2006, originally
performing as a duo at house shows, both playing electric guitar and
singing without a drummer or drum machine; Storey, already playing in
two metal bands, joined a few months later. Sharp describes the band’s
early, drummerless incarnation as being “very Olympia,” and indeed,
there’s as much of a shade of Beat Happening to their
shambolic-band-plays-house-parties origin story as there is to Sharp’s
flattened drawl. (If Sharp and Keith were an item, there might be
something of the Vaselines’ vibe to them as well.) But while everybody
thinks of Olympia as being all K Records, there’s a whole other scene
of punk/hardcore/metal bands happening there under the surface, to
which Gun Outfit belong, and which K really doesn’t often touch.

Dim Light was released in February by Post Present Medium,
the boutique label run by Dean Spunt of L.A. band No Age, which is also
home to releases by Mika Miko, Wavves, and others. Spunt decided to
release Gun Outfit’s album, as well as a 7-inch, after the band opened
for No Age at an Olympia house show. Whether because of Spunt’s
patronage or because of the album’s considerable strengths—it has
attracted not undeserved comparisons to SST standard bearers Dinosaur
Jr. and Meat Puppets, the latter of which Storey was listening to while
cleaning his house before the night’s show—Gun Outfit has
recently received a rash of good press, including nods from KEXP and
Rolling Stone, all without having so much as a
MySpace
page. (Of the trio, only Storey even has a cell phone.) They’ve been up
and down the West Coast but have played Seattle only once before; they
embark on their first nationwide tour this summer.

Not that this attention has gone to their heads. In Olympia, it’s
hard to get too haughty about your indie-rock band—for one thing,
everyone’s got one; for another, everyone knows that success in that
world doesn’t exactly mean making a living. (Sharp is unemployed after
a period spent teaching ESL in Turkey, but he can afford it for the
time being because rents in Olympia are ridiculously cheap—he
pays $150 a month for a room in a house.)

At the pizza place, the band played in front of the soda fountain,
chairs and tables cleared out, to a packed crowd of about three-dozen
people. Sharp strained to make his vocals heard while Keith’s came in
relatively clear over the feedback, both fingerpicking their electric
guitars; Storey roundly pounding the shit out of his drum kit in good
time. The catch-and-release guitar hook of “Troubles Like Mine,” which
breaks into a chorus of rollicking drums and Keith wordlessly crooning,
sounds especially persuasive live.

The “real” interview finally happens late the next morning. I’d been
putting it off because it’s just so awkward to switch the tape recorder
on and switch the casual, friendly conversation off. Sharp encourages
me to fabricate an interview if there aren’t any good quotes: “Just
make me sound funny.” We do it over coffee and some weird soy-lecithin
supplements that claim to fight “mind fog,” while the three houseguests
are making French toast. It proves to be about as predictable and
perfunctory as they expected.