Last year we wrote about Go Back Where They Came From, and album by Montana‘ indie rock outfit King Ropes. Led by Dave Hollier, the band offered “a deep engagement with the preceding lineage of rock artists,” and emerged with something new, taking some of their favourites songs and reimaging them from the ground up. Adding a dose of indie rock flare to the country spirit of track’s like Tandy’s ‘Girls Like Us’, the album also hinted at the band’s own history, having left Bozeman for Brooklyn and Los Angeles, and then returning home.
If Go Back was in some way an album about returning from the city, then new album Way Out West is what comes after. To be released this June, the record takes direct inspiration from the rural landscape and mindset. A Montana record, made at home, about home. “I’m trying to carve out a sound for us that reflects our Montana roots,” he explains. “I’m trying to evoke the open space. Rural, open— just where we’re from.”
The mood is caught by lead single, ‘Magical Floating Eye’, an unsettled, creeping track that blurs the banal and the mystical. There’s something Lynchian in both the lyricism and delivery, the easy-going rhythm interrupted intermittently by odd wisdom and surreal images, all cloaked in a psych-inflected air that only accentuates the strangeness. But beneath it all, somewhere between the peculiar demands and esoteric vibes, something else stirs. Something that looks surprisingly like hope.
Say something smart, say something funny
walk backwards, speak in tongues
A magical floating eye on a blue plate hanging on a wall in a motel in Deer Lodge, Montana
might make you free
Way Out West is out on the 11th June and you can pre-order it now from the King Ropes Bandcamp page, including on CD and LP.
