B-Side Guys

Robert Kuhn has survived enough near misses that the refrain running through “Roll to G-Town” reads two ways at once. “One more little taste and I’m gone” cuts across GALVEZTON’s swaggering homecoming single like a dare, carrying both an appetite and a warning about mortality in the same seven words.

The song sets up its temptations early. Kuhn sings about honey that’s sweet, girls who are mean, competition kept well-hidden, and apples on the tree that are all forbidden, borrowing the oldest garden in Western literature to describe a hometown he clearly can’t stay away from. Kuhn has lived scattered across the globe and walked away from more than one situation that could have ended badly, which gives the pull back to G-Town the weight of compulsion. G-Town, the nickname doing double duty as both the title and the band’s own name, stays grounded in real, named places too: Winnie Street shows up by name, birds flying south to catch the heat, small details that keep the song from floating off into generic Americana myth-making.

Musically the track lands somewhere Beck fans will recognize without ever imitating him directly, splitting the difference between dusty acoustic strum and something closer to garage psych. The chorus pushes tempo and volume up together, urging the show into full ignition, and Kuhn undercuts his own danger with a completely straight-faced line about doing the robot like R2-D2. That whiplash, forbidden fruit and near-death stakes sitting next to a Star Wars joke, is the record’s actual trick. It never asks to be taken more seriously than it takes itself, and it never stops circling back to that one more taste anyway.