Steep Canyon Rangers Prove Appeal Beyond Bluegrass

If you like bluegrass, you’ll like Steep Canyon Rangers. This is beyond reproach. If you don’t like bluegrass, you may still like Steep Canyon Rangers. This is their special gift; more than perhaps any other popular music genre, bluegrass is about tradition. Inevitable but minor gradations in songwriting aside, the composition of practicing outfits has barely changed in the genre’s history, so neither has the baseline sound. What you hear today is not so unlike what you might have heard in Appalachia in the 1940s or earlier, or later.

The Steep Canyon Rangers are clearly not bluegrass punks — never mind that the existence of such beings anywhere is itself questionable. With acoustic guitar, banjo, fiddle, mandolin, bass and box kit or cajón percussion, they represent the prototypical bluegrass lineup and sound. They do not seek to subvert the rules of their genre as much as continue refining their approach within them. To that particular end, there can be no question of their success with Out In the Open.

Songs like “Let Me Out of This Town,” “Roadside Anthems” and “Can’t Get Home” are invitingly spacious, capturing a sense of liberation via elemental, homegrown virtuosity and coarse, soaring harmonies. “Shenandoah Valley” endears itself with a charming whistle solo and simple, contented lyrics detailing a wish for peace but, shrewdly, crucially, withholding its realization as the narrator cheerfully reveals himself to be a soldier about to ship out.

Instances like this are where Out In the Open shines most brightly – instances in which the Rangers ever so slightly defy convention, add notes of darkness rendered brightly, skew the classic sounds of bluegrass – instances few but frequent enough to make an impression.

The aforementioned “Can’t Get Home” goes deeper in detailing the soldier’s plight with an incisive narrative about the impossibility of reacclamation to normal life after war: “I can’t unsee what I’ve been shown / My body’s bent and my mind is blown / And I never was ready for the things I know / I can find a house but I can’t get home.” (The anti-war message extends beyond originals with an inspired, inspiring cover of Bob Dylan deep cut “Let Me Die In My Footsteps” as well)

A number of the Rangers’ songs actually betray what is thought of as bluegrass form, sounding like work from other genres translated in their tongue. I’m convinced there is a disco tune buried somewhere in “Love Harder” while funky blues sneak into “Farmers and Pharaohs” and “The Speed We’re Traveling,” the latter also featuring intriguing, zen-like lines about the purity of nature and the joined futility of possession and denying time’s passage.

This is not to suggest that Steep Canyon Rangers are trying to be anything other than what they are. Out In the Open very clearly skews traditional and the boys mostly play by the rules. But throughout, they make clear that they have more to say than what pure tradition allows, affirming subtly that they want nothing to do with the insularity and exclusion that slavish adherence to any single musical form can engender. It isn’t an emergence into Oz but it is a few splashes of color in an often sepia-toned genre, which are nothing but welcome.