Happy 15th Anniversary to Guster’s fifth studio album Ganging Up On The Sun, originally released June 20, 2006.
[Read our interview with Guster’s Ryan Miller here.]
I have been to one concert in the past year, and it was Guster. Guster shows are always a fun time—the tunes are undeniably joyful and the stage banter is usually excellent. But that’s not why I simply had to go. It was because, while I like a lot of bands, Guster is one of the only bands that really gives me comfort. And so, in the middle of that dark and lonely year, seeing Guster felt hugely important.
But how did it come to be this way? While I’ve been listening to Guster for a long time, longevity doesn’t guarantee that you think of a band as grounding in the way that I see Guster. The answer, at least for them, is Ganging Up On The Sun, their kind of bizarre, unpredictable, and expansive fifth album.
We can tell that Ganging Up On The Sun is different from the jump. The opener “Lightning Rod” is maybe the quietest song ever featured on a Guster album and it sets an ominous tone. Vocalist Ryan Miller is coming to us from what feels like a distant rooftop, over a spacious electric backing (very different from the jangling acoustic guitars we’re used to hearing from Guster). He gets the sense that storm clouds are coming his way and there’s nothing he can do to stop them, so he’s just going to keep doing what he’s doing. What’s really plaguing Miller? It doesn’t matter. The subject of the song, the thing to care about, is that feeling: something bad is going to happen and there’s nothing we can do.
Right after “Lightning Rod,” we slam into the strummy acoustic guitar intro of “Satellite.” Even if you’ve heard the album dozens of times, it feels sudden. Ganging Up On The Sun is full of these unexpected transitions; it’s unique as a Guster album because it has no overarching aesthetic sensibility. Most other Guster albums can be easily described in a few words: Lost And Gone Forever (1999) is an acoustic apocalypse. Keep It Together (2003) is Saturday Afternoon Funtimes. Look Alive (2019) is futuristic doom ennui. Ganging Up On The Sun is…kind of a mess.
It’s a mess in the best possible way. Ganging Up On The Sun is the hardest Guster album to summarize, except in the sense that it is the most dynamic and unpredictable. It’s the Guster album that offers the most fully-formed journey. What it lacks in cohesion it gains in geography.
For my money, the lynchpin is “Ruby Falls,” the longest song Guster ever put on record. Alternating in tone between wistful and bitter, the band drives to a peak at the end of the verse/chorus section that’s as cathartic as anything else in their repertoire, and then promptly drop to almost nothing. The song’s masterstroke is the decision to play beyond the final lyric and leave space for a trumpet solo, which pushes the song beyond the realm of Guster’s universe and to somewhere else entirely. I’m still not sure what the trumpet solo means, but it does move us so far away from our usual center of gravity that the first notes of “Come On,” which in any other situation would be somewhat unremarkable pop, feel like an asteroid hitting the earth.
What makes Ganging Up On The Sun truly special is not just the journey, though – it’s how the journey is rendered meaningful by “Hang On,” the last track, which looks back on the chaos of the rest of the record and creates that feeling that Guster is helping you through this, not just describing it to you.
One of the only songs on the record to speak clearly, without obfuscation or metaphor, “Hang On” is telling you that the band knows that times are hard, and that they might be hard for a long, long time. We just saw that with all of the music we went through—we felt clouds conspiring against us on “Lightning Rod,” discovered the irretrievability of youth on “One Man Wrecking Machine,” floated in the vacuum of space on “Empire State” and became oil-filled machines on “The New Underground.” But that doesn’t mean that we can’t deal with it and find hope, and that’s what the final track wants us to know.
Ending the album in this way was a risk. It could come off as cheesy or contrived—you’re trying to tell us that there’s all this terrible stuff coming for us, but you want us to keep our heads up? OK, guys. But “Hang On” works—maybe because you can hear in Miller’s voice how much he believes what he’s saying—and makes us feel a little bit less doomed. This doesn’t mean that all of the things we’re scared of won’t happen to us, just that we’re not helpless against them.
LISTEN: