Punks gone country. They take all kinds of forms: lightning-fast thrashgrass band. Gravel-throated, neck-tattooed troubadour. Social D-indebted twang-rock hybrid. Gun Outfit are from the West, but they take a different—and unique—angle on this concept. As always, the band’s sound on Out of Range is driven by the languid voices and lysergic guitar playing of Dylan Sharp and Carrie Keith, who trade off both duties throughout. Vocally, Sharp speak-sings a la Lou Reed (or, more precisely, Silver Jews’ David Berman), while Keith’s spectral intonation gives these songs a needed leavening agent. Their guitars both seem permanently set somewhere between jangle and jam, with the distortion turned down and clean tones as far as the eye can see
Like a stone eroded by years in the arroyo, Gun Outfit’s enveloping “Western expanse” aesthetic of guitar levitations and honky-tonk hexes has become gradually smoother over time. Their fifth LP ranks as their most brutally beautiful statement yet. Drawing from mythologies both classical and postmodern, Out of Range builds a world in which Brueghel the Elder, St. Augustine, and the ancient goddess Cybele ride with John Ford, Samuel Beckett, and Wallace Stevens on a Orphic-Gnostic suicide drive towards the hallucinatory vanishing points of the Southwestern desert, debating the denouement of the decaying American dream. Dreamers wielding slide guitars. A tradition-warping band, with a punk aesthetic deep at the center and double-guitar desert-rock psychedelia at the surface. – The New York Times With its echoing grooves, drifting landscapes, and new textures—bits of bluegrass banjo, homemade electric sitars—it has the blue-sky sensibility of a soul-searching road trip. You want to get lost inside of it, to turn it up on a road trip that lasts for weeks. Expansive, arid, and dusty.
Gun Outfit’s “Out of Range” is out November. 10th, 2017 on Paradise of Bachelors.
The Fat Angel Sings 