The term “cosmic Americana” has been thrown around when discussing Gun Outfit and to some extent this is true, as they’re not your typical Americana band. With the synthesizer kicking in on opening track ‘Ontological Intercourse’ it’s clear they’ve given the genre somewhat of an overhaul. Now five albums deep, Out of Range is perhaps their most lyrically impressive material, while retaining their most subtle musicianship under the backdrop of cosmic country soundscapes.

They now sound truly comfortable within themselves, with the band’s aesthetic of guitar levitations and honky-tonk charms having become gradually smoother over time. Gone are the distortion pedals and feedback, but there is still an indie-rock slant hidden within the charming 11 tracks.

Engineered by Facundo Bermudez and mixed by Chris Cohen in Los Angeles, the recording process spanned the 2016 presidential election. With Dylan Sharp recording 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.

The alternate subject matter doesn’t stop there, though, with the LP largely 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 an Orphic-Gnostic suicide drive towards the hallucinatory vanishing points of the Southwestern desert, debating the denouement of the decaying American dream,” so said the press release anyway. It is a strange juxtaposition between classicism and postmodernity, yet somehow works.

The aforementioned ‘Ontological Intercourse’ kicks proceedings off with a thrilling line: “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,” that is sung under the backdrop of a catchy bassline which arrives halfway through. The brooding ‘Landscape Painter’ and ‘Cybele’ then wrestle with the ‘standard’ subject matter of Dutch Renaissance artist Brueghel the Elder and the Anatolian goddess Cybele.

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 all that comes with recreational drugs (‘Strange Insistence’), with the latter even quoting the Old Testament. This is soon followed by album closer ‘Second Decade’- a lighter number that is autobiographical in nature and self-reflexive on the experience of playing together in a band and the effects of time.

Principal songwriters Dylan Sharp and Carrie Keith have fashioned a web of complex lyricisms under the backdrop of mellow guitars and lo-fi psychedelic soundscapes and the result is a complex album that takes a few listens to sink your teeth into, but turns out to be very rewarding.

Paul Hill

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