Gun Outfit singer-guitarist Dylan Sharp describes the sandstone butte, that archetypal desert platform as, “...the only stage on which our kind of puritanical decadence can successfully perform the irony of its existence.” On their newest work, he and co-founder Carrie Keith are willfully Out of Range—from cell service and pop culture frenzy, honoring instead the timelessness of Western expanse. Aligning your art with such iconography as a means of dismissing the digital sandstorms that sweep said art into consumer consciousness is a bold profession. It’s a mission statement at worst construed as pretentious and grandiose, and at best a bit naive.
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. Laid back as they are, the songs protest the marketing frenzy of present-day, a dismissal of social media strategies in favor of the beauty and simplicity of emptiness. It’s an invocation of unplugged-ness, and an invitation to U-turn from all the mental traffic toward the vastness of desert sunsets over horizons accessorized with saguaros, Joshua trees, and sagebrush.
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. For the anointed, it’s a communal celebration and exploration of consciousness. But for everyone else, it’s a just a bunch of longhairs puking in the desert. Recall your reaction to your friends’ Instagram transmissions from the empty confines of Joshua Tree: You either get the allure of the Integratron, or you smirk at all of the dummies who paid $30 to lie in a dome listening to a dude play crystal bowls in 102-degree temperatures. It can be hard to bring folks to your side when it comes to crunchy shit. Though they tread steadily in these waters, it’s something the band seems at least partially aware of.
”Pardon me for the hippie talk,” Sharp sings on “Slow Realization.” The apology is a disclaimer for the next lines: “I’m trying to tell you how the flow was blocked/Like a crisis in a dream/The patterns are unseen.” For a guy whose lyrical professions traverse German mathematicians, Waiting for Godot, and phrases like “psychic ghetto,” it’s a moment of unexpected self-consciousness. It’s also a track that best embodies the group’s current focus. The five-piece left their Olympia punk rock roots for the canyons of Los Angeles, and their music slowed down and lost its angular crunch in the process. But all good punks hold a torch for their past and it’s perhaps why at many junctures Out of Range recalls a coterie of great ’90s acts, like Pavement, Sonic Youth and the madman philosophies of Silver Jews. The album’s lyrics are steeped in scholarly ideas that either apply to or stand beside observations on the every-day, and it’s impossible to ignore the similarities between David Berman and Sharp’s vocal delivery.
Through their commixing of twang and affectation, Gun Outfit express the Southwestern panorama without being too on the nose about it and avoid becoming a parody of their tropes. It favors posi-vibes over cowboy clacking. Album opener “Ontological Intercourse” beams with sunny optimism, a traffic-free ride in a droptop, with Sharp as omniscient narrator splicing Greek mythology with tales of personal evolution over shiny cymbal taps, bass shimmies, and dual guitar texturing. “The 101” reads as a modern folktale as Keith recounts the trek from her home in Washington state to Los Angeles, Sharp’s banjo co-mingling sounds of past and present behind her mystic singing.
Multi-instrumentalist Henry Barnes recently joined the band full-time and his dulcimer, fiddle, lap slide and other contributions inject the tunes with an earthen appeal. His playing of traditional and homemade instruments give the songs an effortlessly timeless quality lacking in past efforts, and his presence marks another natural fit in a line of punk and folk hands in glove—Jason Molina’s long alliance with lap steel player Mike “Slo Mo” Brenner comes to mind.
The problem, though, with aligning yourself with such an immortal landscape as Monument Valley, and such an iconic sound as cosmic American music, or “western expanse music,” as Gun Outfit calls it, is that you risk falling short of its might. Despite some of the lyrical weight, overall Out of Range floats like a feather and relies too heavily on atmosphere, an intangible vibe. It doesn’t have the teeth that really gnaw into one’s consciousness, lacking the bleeding heart and pleading lyrical hooks of Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris. Instead, Out of Range dishes out good feelings and Zen calm—more East than West. These days, we all need that sort of thing, regardless of your stance on sound baths.
