Gun – Favourite Pleasures (2017) Review

Good things come to those who wait.

In Gun’s case, it took five years.

Comeback record Break The Silence had restored much of the groove that disintegrated during the band’s late-’90s collapse, but 2015’s underwhelming Frantic threatened to undo much of that good work.

Then came Favourite Pleasures.

And this time, everything clicks.

The Scottish rockers’ irresistable guitar hooks are back in full force, their towering rhythm has been fully restored to its former glory, and Dante Gizzi now carries himself like a frontman rather than the bassist who happened to inherit the microphone.

If the previous two albums were Gun figuring out how their second life should sound, Favourite Pleasures is the moment they stop searching.

They’ve found it.

Return Of The Crunch

Producer Simon Bloor returns for a second stint behind the desk, but the difference between this and Frantic is immediate.

Where its predecessor chased glossy pop textures, Favourite Pleasures finally lets Gun sound like a rock band again.

And I mean properly sound like one.

Giuliano Gizzi and Tommy Gentry are pushed towards the front of the mix, the riffs have some serious weight behind them, and — praise the rock gods — somebody has finally remembered that Jools can play a mean guitar solo.

Paul McManus benefits from the heavier approach too.

His drums sound huge throughout, giving the album the kind of physical punch that defined Gun’s best work in the first place. On Black Heart, they were so determined to capture natural ambience that McManus was sent into an empty warehouse behind the studio in temperatures around minus five degrees — eventually resorting to playing in oven mitts while the others kept disappearing inside for warmth.

Ridiculous?

Probably.

But listen to the finished track.

It worked.

Twenty Storeys Tall

She Knows wastes absolutely no time announcing the change.

Jools drops a filthy, stomping riff straight out of Gun’s early-’90s playbook, McManus thunders away underneath it, and within a few seconds any lingering memories of Frantic’s softer moments have been kicked firmly into touch.

Then comes the title track.

Favourite Pleasures feels like the song this version of Gun had been threatening to write since the comeback: thick guitars, an undeniable groove, and one of Dante Gizzi’s most confident performances to date.

Elsewhere, bouncy rocker Take Me Down contains one of the most aggressive riffs on the record, and Black Heart attempts to tap directly into the grit and swagger of the Gallus years.

Even the more expansive Tragic Heroes works. Built around a chiming, U2-inspired guitar riff, Dante later revealed that the song was actually stitched together from fragments of several abandoned ideas by co-writer Dave McCracken, which makes the fact that it sounds so cohesive even more impressive.

Over the course of its lean 37-minute runtime, Favourite Pleasures’ ability to consistently hit the target becomes its greatest strength:

It doesn’t just turn up the distortion and hope for the best — it remembers exactly what made Gun such a formidable band all those years ago, and bites down on it with all the force of a rotary drilling rig on Glasgow docks.

"The dirty secret that you tried to hide, a love affair with mister third time lucky."

HERE'S WHERE I AM

Running The Show

The other major difference is Dante Gizzi.

On Break The Silence, he proved he could front the band.

On Favourite Pleasures, he owns it.

There’s none of the lingering sense that Gun are trying to work around the absence of Mark Rankin anymore. Dante’s higher, raspier range has become part of the furniture, and the rest of the band now seem to understand exactly how to build songs around it.

More importantly, he has developed his own voice as a lyricist.

She Knows is a perfect example.

Its swaggering riff disguises a surprisingly ugly true story from a 1995 American tour, when Dante discovered that a woman he had been chatting to all evening held openly racist views. Years later, that experience became the backbone of the song and one of its sharpest lines:

"I'm colour blind, but you're caught in two."

She Knows

It’s concise, uncomfortable and says everything it needs to say without turning the song into a lecture. Dante recounted the full story in our track-by-track discussion of the album.

There’s a similar honesty running through Without You In My Life, written about his eldest daughter, and the relationship breakdown that’s covered in Here’s Where I Am.

The Boy Who Fooled The World

Favourite Pleasures saves one of its most personal moments until last.

The Boy Who Fooled The World reaches back to Dante Gizzi’s childhood, when Friday nights meant sitting beside the radio waiting for Tommy Vance and Tom Russell to introduce him to whatever new rock song would become his next obsession.

He’d eagerly record his favourites onto cassette, play them for his friends over the weekend, and secretly enjoy the small thrill of feeling like he had discovered them first.

That memory gives the song its charm.

Because the kid who once sat there taping Bryan Adams, Van Halen and Starship eventually grew up to front the very kind of band he had spent those years idolising.

It gives the album a neat closing perspective: after all the riffs and thunderous drums, Gun finish by reminding us that this isn’t just what they do — it’s who they are.

"Got my fingers on the play and record."

The Boy Who Fooled The World

Not Perfect

Despite its firepower, Favourite Pleasures isn’t flawless.

Silent Lovers is one of the album’s weaker moments, its ’70s influence clear but its impact noticeably softer than the material around it.

The helicopter-like chorus of Go To Hell also struggles to land.

This is despite the track having some of the deepest roots on the album. It’s core idea dates all the way back to 1992, and Gun have repeatedly revisited the demo to try to find a way to make it work. Unfortunately, the song’s history is more interesting than the finished result.

These minor issues become a bigger source of frustration when the Deluxe Edition reveals Come Undone and 20 Storeys — two tracks strong enough to make you wonder why they weren’t part of the original running order.

That said, these are minor blemishes on a record that gets far more right than wrong.

Gun — Favourite Pleasures

Favourite Pleasures is the point where Gun’s second life finally stops feeling like a comeback.

There’s no sense of compromise here, no awkward attempt to modernise the formula, and no lingering question around whether this version of the band can stand on its own. The Scottish veterans sound confident, the guitars have regained their famous bite, and Dante Gizzi now feels fully embedded in the role rather than measured against the man who came before him.

Commercially, the resurgence was reflected in the charts. Favourite Pleasures became their biggest chart success since 1994, reaching the heady heights of No.16 on the UK Albums Chart and No. 3 on the UK Rock & Metal Albums Chart.

The Gizzi brothers had spent years trying to regain their footing after the seismic collapse of Gun’s original line-up back in 1997.

Favourite Pleasures is the moment they finally succeeded.