Artists like Jason Isbell and Chris Stapleton are proving that country is a deeper and more diverse genre than many give it credit for, and another act that’s breaking boundaries in a similar way is Gun Outfit. The band just announced their upcoming album Out Of Range, and on the record and lead single “Strange Insistence,” they’re not even working with the same definition of the word “country.”
Although the band’s Dylan Sharp describes the sound as “country,” he means that less in terms of genre and more in regards to geography and feeling, calling it “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.”
The album was inspired by mythological sources that can’t really be described more vividly than how it was written up in their press release:
“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.”
Out Of Range comes out on November 10th via Paradise Of Bachelors. Check out the tracklist below, and listen to “Strange Insistence” above.
1. “Ontological Intercourse”
2. “Landscape Painter”
3. “Cybele”
4. “Strange Insistence”
5. “The 101”
6. “Slow Realization”
7. “Sally Rose”
8. “Three Words”
9. “Primacy of Love”
10. “Background Deal”
11. “Second Decade”
