Photo by Joanne Kim.
“And Orpheus’ ghost fled under the earth, and knew
The places he had known before.”
– Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book XI
Today the acclaimed new album by Gun Outfit, their most brutally beautiful statement yet, is available wherever you may range, above or below the earth. The incredible, alchemical 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?
The album ends with the moving “Second Decade,” an unusually autobiographical and candidly self-reflexive meditation on the experience of playing together in a decade-spanning band, and the effects of of time on art. Using the stage as metaphor, each of Gun Outfit’s singers assumes a role in a Samuel Beckett play, Carrie Keith as Winnie from Happy Days and Dylan Sharp as Estragon from Waiting for Godot: “Ten years attention/Trying to hold on/You were akin to Winnie/While I was doing Estragon.” They’re existential antiheroes, each half of an enduring partnership, who have returned underground, like Orpheus, to the out-of-range places they’ve known before, to play ballads for the dead: “Oh my/Caroline/Can you believe how hard it is to keep a love alive?/Ten years of working/And playing all our parts/We had to call it a country/Because it was bigger than a work of art.”
Order Out of Range below, and scroll down to watch the “Sally Rose” and “Landscape Painter” videos, and to check out tour dates.
ORDER OUT OF RANGE:
$9.00 – $30.00
Or support via: Bandcamp (LP/CD/digital) | Other Options (LP/CD/digital/streaming) | Local Record Stores
ACCLAIM FOR OUT OF RANGE
Cactus-chewing, smoke-signaled rock music that perpetually rolls towards sundown… a cowboy poetry swirled in honky-tonk postmodernism. “Strange Insistence” is 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. – NPR Music
I take solace by listening to Gun Outfit’s “Strange Insistence” several dozen times in a row. The band’s excellent new record, “Out of Range,” is a kind of paean to breathing in and dropping out. – The New Yorker
Warped, warm, and hollow, between a burned-out monotone and a jumpy quaver, [Dylan’s] voice bears all of this experience, suggesting a modern Merle Haggard or Terry Allen. In tandem, he and Carrie Keith fashion a web of briars with their guitars, their low-key psychedelic lines perfectly warped into complementary tangles, tapping a vein of cosmic country gold until the sun finally sets. That’s a drug that Sharp never mentions, but is written into every moment of this great little dispatch. – Pitchfork
8/10 (lead review). Excellent. There are elements of folk and country in their music, but it’s also the sound of the desert, the ocean, the prairie, and the loneliness of LA. Gun Outfit can sing from the heart as well as from the brain. – Uncut
The reliably great California band [is] behind some of the decade’s coolest classic-feeling psych folk. True to form, Out of Range finds Dylan Sharp and Carrie Keith trading lines of metaphysical poetry over hypnotic guitar runs… intoxicating. – The FADER
Expansive rock songs that have as much to do with the heartache of Lucinda Williams and Townes Van Zandt as they do with the humid sprawl of Sonic Youth… via the consistently great Paradise of Bachelors label. – SPIN
This band is luminous and mesmerizing. Out of Range is serene and difficult, trippy and literate… a zone-out record with a library card. Not many albums simultaneously slow down your pulse rate and rev up your brain, but this one does. – Dusted
4/5. Easily among the best of the Cosmic American bunch. Dylan Sharp and Carrie Keith back their deftly penned songs with the kind of delicate sonic weirdness that demands attention without distracting from the principal communicative mission of the tune and its lyrics. – Record Collector
8/10. Gun Outfit know how to sound murky and dank, but it’s their literary slant and patient delivery, along with Sharp’s baritone and Caroline Keith’s vocal style that make their latest their strongest to date. There aren’t many bands making music right now with a clearer vision than Gun Outfit. – Exclaim!
Now a five-piece also featuring Henry Barnes (Amps for Christ, Man Is the Bastard), the band’s fifth album both honors the ideals of classic country rock and rages against it with a freewheeling reflex to push at the genre’s edges. – LA Times
Five albums in and Gun Outfit are still showing us new tricks and still making albums that feel instantly classic. – Post-Trash
If you’re in Los Angeles, don’t miss Gun Outfit‘s FREE record release show at The Love Song on November 12th!
WATCH THE “SALLY ROSE” VIDEO
WATCH THE “LANDSCAPE PAINTER” VIDEO
LISTEN/WATCH THE WHOLE ALBUM ON YOUTUBE
Gun Outfit European Tour for February 2018
13.02.2018 Gent (BE), Nest *
14.02.2018 Utrecht (NL), Cafe Stathe
15.02.2018 Amsterdam (NL), OT301
16.02.2018 Lille (FR), La Gare Saint Sauveur
17.02.2018 Bristol (UK), The Louisiana
18.02.2018 Glasgow (UK), The Hug & Pint
19.02.2018 Manchester (UK), Gullivers
20.02.2018 London (UK), Moth Club
21.02.2018 Brighton (UK), The Hope & Ruin
22.02.2018 Paris (FR), Espace B
23.02.2018 Düdingen (CH), Bad Bonn
24.02.2018 Zürich (CH), Zukunft
26.02.2018 München (DE), Unter Deck
27.02.2018 Jena (DE), Glashaus
28.02.2018 Hamburg (DE), Hafenklang
01.03.2018 Aarhus (DK), Tape
02.03.2018 Copenhagen (DK), Stengade
03.03.2018 Berlin (DE), Schokoladen
* w/ Lina Tullgren
