Gun Outfit: Out of Range

$9.00$30.00

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.

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 ElderSt. Augustine, and the ancient goddess Cybele ride with John FordSamuel 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.

Highlights

  • Deluxe 140g virgin vinyl LP features heavy-duty reverse board jacket, printed inner sleeve, and high-res Bandcamp download code. CD edition features heavy-duty gatefold jacket and LP replica artwork.
  • RIYL Steve Gunn, Terry Allen, Promised Land Sound, Chance, Amps for Christ, Meat Puppets, Sonic Youth, Waylon Jennings, Lee Hazlewood, Blaze Foley, Townes Van Zandt, Kurt Vile.
  • Artist page/tour dates
  • Also check out Dream All Over (PoB-023), Gun Outfit’s previous album

Physical format music purchases from the PoB webstore and Bandcamp include digital downloads when feasible. Some, but not all, pre-2023 vinyl pressings also include a download coupon. For digital preorders and high-resolution digital downloads, please visit our Bandcamp page.

Tracklist

A1. “Ontological Intercourse” 5:02
A2. “Landscape Painter” 3:09
A3. “Cybele” 2:40
A4. “Strange Insistence” 4:13
A5. “The 101” 2:56
B1. “Slow Realization” 2:47
B2. “Sally Rose” 3:06
B3. “Three Words” 3:58
B4. “Primacy of Love” 4:56
B5. “Background Deal” 3:42
B6. “Second Decade” 5:12

Catalog Number/Release Date

PoB-036 / November 10, 2017

Purchase from PoB above or support via

Weight N/A
FORMAT

, , ,

Album Narrative

 

“And Orpheus’ ghost fled under the earth, and knew
The places he had known before.”
– Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book XI

Orpheus had a hell of a time. Of all the evocative modern retellings of the Orpheus myth—by Jean CocteauMarcel CamusPhilip K. Dick, et al.—none equals the blunt power of Ovid’s version in Metamorphoses. After losing his lover Eurydice, the great musician Orpheus swears off women and turns instead to the love of young men. He refuses to worship all gods but Apollo, inciting Dionysus’ female followers the Maenads to tear him limb from limb. Orpheus’ severed head and orphaned lyre, still singing and strumming—his bewitching songs “made the pale phantoms weep”—float down the Hebrus River to Lesbos, and his ghost revisits the underworld where he left Eurydice.

It’s this lesser known beheading-ending of the story that L.A. band Gun Outfit recount in “Ontological Intercourse,” the opening track of their fifth full-length record Out of Range, their most brutally beautiful statement yet: “Seeds/the kind that sparrows eat/becoming the willow tree/that Orpheus took beneath/To play ballads for the dead/Till they buried his singing head/Because he worshipped the sun instead/Of the god of epiphany.” Next time the chorus comes round, singer and guitarist Dylan Sharp—who shares twin vocal and guitar duties with the incomparable Carrie Keith—sings a mutant doo-wop bass line. Ballads for the dead, indeed.

Those strange, arresting juxtapositions between classicism and postmodernity—warped tales of Western civ melting into those of the American West—abound on Out of Range, a potent, highly allusive elision of mythologies and sounds that the band refers to as “Western expanse” music. Following “Ontological Intercourse,” the brooding “Landscape Painter” and “Cybele” wrestle with Dutch Renaissance artist Brueghel the Elder and the Anatolian goddess Cybele, respectively—not your average fodder for rock and roll lyrics. The album goes on to build a world in which St. Augustine rides with John Ford 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. (“I wanna lay my world on you,” Keith proclaims in “Sally Rose.”)

Meanwhile, other songs inhabit concerns more terrestrial and immediate, though no less profound: the open road (“The 101”); human love (“Three Words,”); death and the failures of faith (“Primacy of Love”); and the damages, deceits, and delights of drugs (“Strange Insistence.”) The latter quotes the Old Testament (Numbers 21:17: “Spring up/O well”) soon after reciting, ironically, the deadly seductions of narcotics: “Speed makes you a genius/Cocaine will make you rich/LSD shows you divinity/And everything’s alright on opiates.” “I tried to quit/before I quit again,” it begins with resolve, but after all, “lies can make you famous.” Throughout the album, the strange becomes familiar, and the familiar strange, a desert mirage of music and language; or, as Carrie sings in the Waylon-esque “Background Deal:” “The things she says/you never heard ’em before.”

And therein lies the magic trick: Out of Range somehow manages to contain Gun Outfit’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. Yes, that’s the iconic Monument Valley landscape on the album cover, but in an impressionistic daylit photo by a family member, denuded of its cinematic magic-hour drama. Sharp explains the approach as “a kind of American neoclassicism, running through an enormous empty set piece of the historical frontier, the only stage on which our kind of puritanical decadence can successfully perform the irony of its existence, and thus salvage small chunks of high value scrap from the culture that now threatens the world with death.” (On the ballad “Slow Realization,” he sings, apologetically and archly, “Pardon me for the hippie talk.”)

Sonically, Gun Outfit has never sounded more confidently awash in its collective strengths and nuances, its players never more sensually attuned to each other’s playing. Like a stone eroded by years in the arroyo, the band’s enveloping aesthetic of guitar levitations and honky-tonk hexes has become gradually smoother over time. Sharp and Keith have become highly sensitive, idiosyncratic singers and guitarists—two voices that meld and ascend into a wild, honeyed helix. Drummer and founding member Dan Swire (drums, percussion, guitar) and Adam Payne (bass, guitar) comprise the rare rhythm section able to vault a song into the strata through sheer will (as on the kinetic, anthemic “Sally Rose”) or show remarkable restraint when required (“Primacy of Love.”) Henry Barnes, the legendary mastermind of Man Is the Bastard and Amps for Christ, has gone from mentoring multi-instrumentalist accomplice to official band member, scarifying these songs with his singular guitar, dulcimer, bouzouki, and fiddle parts as well as his own homemade hybrid instruments like the “sibanjar” and “springocaster lap-slide.” Engineered by Facundo Bermudez (Ty SegallNo Age) and mixed by Chris Cohen (Weyes BloodCass McCombs) in Los Angeles, the recording process spanned the 2016 presidential election. Dylan recorded the vocals for “Cybele,” a song about a religious cult, drowned antiquities, and the end of empire, ten minutes after the election results were announced.

Out of Range 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 as Winnie from Happy Days and Dylan 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.” And the pale phantoms weep.

Videos and Streaming

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Acknowledgments

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.

– Lars Gotrich, NPR Music

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.

– Grayson Haver Currin, Pitchfork

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.

– Amanda Petrusich, The New Yorker

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.

– Peter Watt, 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.

– Patrick McDermott, 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

The music Gun Outfit writes—breezy, slow-going, cosmic country tunes drenched in scholarly musings and West Coast vibes—live removed from the cultural vacuum of anxiety-inducing messaging on 24-hour blast. The songs protest the marketing frenzy of present-day, a dismissal of social media strategies in favor of the beauty and simplicity of emptiness.

– Pitchfork

‘Out of Range’ acts as a sort of sonic Ayahuasca ceremony, Sharp and Keith the shamans inviting you to purge of your toxins in the only place left largely untouched by human constructs.

– Pitchfork

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.

– Jennifer Kelly, 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

8.8./10. Its most fully realized release yet; the ideal form Gun Outfit has been evolving toward for years.

– Paste

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.

– Daniel Sylvester, 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.

– Randall Roberts, LA Times

Five albums in and Gun Outfit are still showing us new tricks and still making albums that feel instantly classic.

– Post-Trash

Even more esoteric than its predecessor, Out of Range‘s drowsy academia plays out like an abstract road trip through the Mojave in a windowless, beatnik jalopy. 

– AllMusic

Gun Outfit explore the calm expanse of cosmic Americana without a journey’s end in mind. Concise rustic ballads like “The 101” and “Landscape Painter” describe the scenic beauty of the city with streams of gleaming melodic chords. Singers Dylan Sharp and Carrie Keith carefully duet with their unusual cadences as slow-burning arrangements smolder with the vivid sparkle of an opal’s gleam. 

– No Ripcord

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.

– Pitchfork

Peyote for the ears… Expansive, arid, and dusty.

– Uncut