Gun Outfit have shared their first new track since acclaimed 2017 release Out of Range. Check out the dreamy, lavender-steeped 16mm film of their live performance in LA at the Getty, directed by Mike Stoltz with sound by Chris Cohen. Catch their US tour, running April 10th through May 13th, including dates with Steve Gunn and Lavender Country.
In just under two weeks from now Gun Outfit will hit the road with Itasca and Amps for Christ for a string of shows across the midwest – culminating in their appearance at Trouble in Paradise in Chicago.
Trouble in Mind and PoB, in cooperation with the venerable Chicago venue the Empty Bottle, are proud to present Trouble in Paradise, a three-day festival (Sept. 13-15) showcasing a simpatico sampling of both record labels’ critically acclaimed and wide-ranging international rosters. The lineup, which features an array of artists including The Weather Station, Gun Outfit, Nap Eyes, Itasca, James Elkington, JX Fussell & Nathan Bowles, among many others, explores the shared terrain between the respective realms of one label named for a classic blues song and another named for a Melville story.
‘Tis the season to give records to beloved friends and family (and to yourself too.) In lieu of the madness of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, we prefer to observe Krampus Day (honoring the Central European folkloric anti-Santa critter). Shop PoB through Dec. 15 and enter coupon code KRAMPUS during checkout for a 20% discount on all catalog items.
The acclaimed new album by Gun Outfit, their most brutally beautiful statement yet, is now available where’er you may range, above or below the earth. Out of Range contains the band’s most conceptually sophisticated and lyrically ambitious material, while remaining their most musically subtle, understated, and accessible album to date, completing their gradual metamorphosis from punk aesthetics to a truly cosmic country—wherein “country” is a geography, a structure of feeling, not a genre. What other record begins with Orpheus and ends with Samuel Beckett?
Gun Outfit have shared the third single, “Sally Rose,” from their forthcoming album, Out of Range, along with another self-directed video from the band premiering via Noisey—featuring shots of Carrie Keith in the desert, a reference to First Nations songwriter Willie Dunn, fireworks, rock climbing, horse racing and more—and an interview about the American Southwest and the Meat Puppets. Gun Outfit tours the EU this winter.
In keeping with the “Western expanse” themes evident on Out of Range—warped tales of Western civ melting into those of the American West—and the “intoxicating” song’s title and lyrics (which name check Dutch Renaissance artist Brueghel the Elder), the video was shot on Super 8 film during the band’s EU tour last year in various locations, including the Bronze Age stone circle known as Long Meg and Her Daughters.
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. Preorder Out of Range, and hear “Strange Insistence” via NPR Music, who call it “a song about giving into pleasure, and discovering the joys and pains of consequence, centered around an irregular groove that squiggles like heat waves off baked asphalt.” Pitchfork compared it to Merle Haggard and Terry Allen! Also: in memoriam John Ashbery and Orpheus.
Like a stone eroded by years in the arroyo, Gun Outfit’s “Western expanse” aesthetic of guitar levitations and honky-tonk hexes has become gradually smoother. 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, St. Augustine, and the 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.
Your guide to Hopscotch and other performances this weekend by PoB artists Lavender Country, Promised Land Sound, Gun Outfit, and Nathan Bowles, including events at the Center for the Study of the American South at UNC, the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke, and Slim’s and Fletcher Theater in Raleigh.
