With their latest album Idaho, King Ropes set out to make a record “soaked in The Spirit of The West,” though if you know anything about the Bozeman, MT outfit, you’ll know to expect more than the classic tropes of lassos, cowboy boots and dusty sunsets. Take 2021’s Way Out West, an album which recreated the wide-open spaces of Montana with what we described as “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.” Or follow-up Super Natural which further honed the weirdness to offer what we called “a ramshackle ode to both the grace and difficulty of our strange world.” No, if Dave Hollier and co. are taking on The Spirit of The West, you’d best expect a collection of songs attuned to the contradictions of the experience on the ground, where well-worn myths and old stereotypes rub up against everyday hardships and the outright oddness of twenty-first century living.
To bring this to life, King Ropes offer a sound to match the landscape. One where beauty and harshness sit side by side, and imperfections are just part of the rustic charm. Whether that be the bright and buoyant opener ‘Two Shoes’ or the brooding ‘Radio Jane’ which flickers with an edge of what might be sultry romance or latent violence. ‘Way Too High’ follows with a far smoother, languid flow, though beneath the lazy haze lies a simmering unease. As though, true to the title, the narrator is finding themselves overtaken by a sense of deepening unreality, peculiarities bleeding into the everyday, the sense nothing is quite what it seems.
It is this balance between the ordinary and the extraordinary that marks Idaho, just as it has the other records in the King Ropes oeuvre, and represents that elusive Spirit of The West. The upending combination of familiarity and alienation that comes with living in the middle of nowhere, where isolation is both a confine and a wide-open space. Sun-baked, unrefined, a world within a world. Something as evident in the laconic rhythm of songs like ‘Broken Cup’ and ‘Ride In Your Car’ as it is spacious wonder of ‘International Shortwave’ or the sleek mischievousness of ‘Succulent Thief’, not to mention ‘Live Like an Animal’ with its mean swagger and bite. A song in which sardonic humour meets something primal to the point where you are never quite sure what its next move might be.
Idaho is out now via Big and Just Little and available from the usual places.