Gun Outfit's 'Strange Insistence' Is Cowboy Poetry Set To A Postmodern Honky-Tonk

Gun Outfit has, finally, figured out a way to describe the cactus-chewing, smoke-signaled rock music that it perpetually rolls towards sundown: "Western expanse music." Henry Barnes (of Amps For Christ, Man Is The Bastard) coined the phrase while on a recent European tour with the band, boiling down the out-of-time essence of Gun Outfit to a cowboy poetry swirled in honky-tonk postmodernism.

The latest issuance from the Outfit's expanse, Out Of Range, sees the core songwriting duo Dylan Sharp and Carrie Keith expand to a five-piece, including multi-instrumentalist (and now full-time member) Barnes, drummer and founding member Dan Swire (drums, percussion, guitar) and Adam Payne (bass, guitar). Ovid's epic poem Metamorphoses happens to inform many of the songs, but on the album's first single, "Strange Insistence," Sharp's concerns are far more temporal, though just as complicated as the divine.

"Speed makes you a genius / Cocaine will make you rich / LSD shows you divinity / And everything's alright on opiates," Dylan Sharp sings over a chooglin' trio of intertwined guitars and a precision rhythm section. It's 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.

Out Of Range comes out Nov. 10 via Paradise Of Bachelors (physical, digital).

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