"say something smart, say something funny..."
I love art, love songs that surreptitiously wrap their tentacles around you. That is the case with "Magical Floating Eye" by Bozeman, Montana's (by way of Brooklyn and Los Angeles) askew indie rock outfit King Ropes. It is the kind of song that overtakes you steps in and then has you push replay repeatedly. There is something about the sadcore folk rock undertones, the utterly beautiful yet drunken sounding guitar melodies and principal songwriter and vocalist Dave Hollier's propensity to mirror a lot of the guitar melodies inherent in his progs. This duality of sound, along with quirky lyrics, with interesting societal views (and maybe visions) reminds me of Stephen Malkmus (a bit).
"Magical Floating Eye" also has a pervasive sort of 90's college radio sound and I thought (also) of Miracle Legion. There is a sense here that we are as humans intertwined in a cosmic joke as the punch line. Hollier seems to search for the meaning of life within it's oddities.
"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..."
Love this track, I mean it makes you feel high and low at the same time. King Ropes is rounded out by bassist/guitarist Ben Roth (Oberhofer/BOD) and drummer Jeff Jensen. Their 4th full length "Way Out West" was recorded during the pandemic and [is as thematically heavy as anything King Ropes has done].
I look forward to jumping into Hollier and the boys' world. I have a feeling that it will make me think and feel comforted too. It's nice to know that you are not alone. (check out the enlightening press notes below)
-Robb Donker Curtius
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For the Montana band King Ropes, Way Out West is more than just an album title. It’s a guiding principle. Dave Hollier, the band’s lead singer and primary songwriter, moved back to his native Montana in 2017, following extended stints in the Brooklyn and Los Angeles music scenes. “I’m trying to carve out a sound for us that reflects our Montana roots,” Hollier says. “I’m trying to evoke the open space. Rural, open— just where we’re from.”
Way Out West, King Ropes’ fourth album, is full of open spaces and jagged edges—from “A Loser and a Jerk,” with its brooding feedback moans, to the cathartic opener “Big Man on the TV,” with its mangled arpeggios and visions of a broke rodeo flailing amidst “the great wide open.” Guitars scrape and whine. Amps rumble. Rickety pianos rattle in and out of tune. Like the Treasure State itself, nothing is too refined. Perched uneasily between indie, desert rock, and ragged americana, it’s the band’s finest record yet. And at the center of it all is Hollier, a gifted songwriter at the top of his game, surveying a land haunted by doomed relationships and hypocrite ideologues in his odd, quivering voice.
Music is in Hollier’s blood. His parents were always singing in church choirs during his childhood. “We sang in the car all the time,” he says. As a teenager growing up in Montana, he rebelled by delving deep into outlaw country. “Nobody’s parents wanted us to be listening to Willie Nelson and Lefty Frizzell and Merle Haggard,” he reminisces. “In high school, we’d go to the cowboy bars here to dance, and try not to get beat up.”
Veering from one geographic extreme to another, Hollier moved to Brooklyn in the mid-1980s and his musical parameters exploded overnight. There was salsa and merengue music on the streets, old-school rap in the clubs; Hollier spent time in nightclubs like Danceteria and was turned on to everyone from the Beastie Boys to Sly and Robbie.
It was a personal tragedy that led Hollier to commit seriously to his own music. “My brother was a musician,” Hollier says, “and he was much more advanced musically than I was.” In 1998, Hollier’s brother died of a drug overdose, right around the time the two brothers had begun playing together. Hollier decided to carry on the musical torch. “I feel like, in some way, he passed that on to me,” Hollier says. “I felt like, ‘OK, this is something I can do.’”
Hollier had begun DJing at underground dance parties thrown in his Brooklyn cabinet shop. Later he and some friends opened their own spot, the Brooklyn Rod and Gun Club, a tiny but unforgettable joint on the Williamsburg waterfront. Hollier would block off Thursday nights for informal jam sessions. “That evolved into a band pretty quickly,” he says. The band was called Home for Wayward Drummers, and they played freewheeling three-hour sets centered around covers. Every week, Hollier would learn two or three new songs to keep the material fresh. It became a crash course in songwriting.
“I was learning a lot of songs, and I was writing songs at the same time,” Hollier says. “Something just sunk its teeth in me and hasn’t let go. It’s endlessly fascinating to me: What is it that makes these things work or not work? There’s some mysterious magic stuff going on there.”
By 2015, the Brooklyn Rod and Gun Club was a casualty of Brooklyn hypergentrification, and Hollier had moved back west. In 2017—after resettling in Bozeman, tucked up close enough to the mountains that bear and moose wander through the woods around town —Hollier rechristened the band King Ropes, yearning for a tangible connection to his western roots. (King Ropes/King Saddlery is a western tack store in Sheridan, WY. They carry a wide variety of saddles, reins, halters, bits, slickers,… and ropes. “People from Montana and Wyoming know King Ropes because they’re local,” Hollier notes, “further away you get, the less people get the reference.”)
Inspiration struck, and it struck hard. Hollier recruited an inner circle of West Coast musicians to record and tour with—notably bassist/guitarist Ben Roth (Oberhofer/BOD) and drummer Jeff Jensen, both of whom play throughout the new record. Three King Ropes albums followed in quick succession: 2017’s Dirt, 2019’s Gravity and Friction, and 2020’s suitably eclectic covers album Go Back Where They Came From.
Recorded during the pandemic, Way Out West is as thematically heavy as anything King Ropes has done. Some of the songs are about accepting the chaos, others more fed up with it. “They’re all reactions or comments on or meditations on ‘What the fuck, man?’” Hollier says. Consider “Halfway Did,” with its careening groove, less-than-friendly nods at anti-vaxxers, and repeated cries of “I’m stuck inside and I can’t stop moving!”
But it’s not an isolation album. The way these songs swagger and shake has the unmistakable feel of musicians sharing energy together in a room. There’s a palpable twang in Hollier’s voice, and an irreverent glint even in the bleakest of times. The basic tracks were recorded over the summer, at Hollier’s multipurpose warehouse space in Bozeman, which he cheekily calls the “East Gallatin Yacht Club.” “We did it pretty fast and pretty live,” Hollier says.
Although Way Out West is an unrepentant rock album, with the requisite feedback squalls and tempo jolts to burn itself into your cranium, it also contains glimpses of Hollier’s vulnerability as a songwriter. On the clattering, bluesy “Needles,” the songwriter’s caustic imagery softens when he centers his gaze on a photograph of a shooting star. “It reminds me of when my kids were just little,” the singer repeats during the climactic refrain, as the song’s staccato groove dissolves into a puddle of cello moans—a cello part performed, fittingly enough, by the songwriter’s own son, Sam Hollier. (Dave’s two older children, Sam and Lucy Hollier, are both skilled musicians who have been part of the extended King Ropes universe since 2017’s Dirt.)
And speaking of children, there has never been a King Ropes track quite like “Petulant Child,” the uncommonly sensitive album closer. The song is half lullabye, half sonic collage: The singer repeats the titular phrase—“Petulant child / A petulant child”—over an elegiac piano refrain, which loops throughout the song’s six-minute entirety. But then the vocals fade out, replaced by a tapestry of mysterious voices: individuals reflecting on their year and speaking plainly about their hardships.
Those voices belong to friends of Hollier’s; their unintended monologues were taken directly from social media posts. “I started to notice some really interesting posts from friends,” Hollier says. “They were more meditative and thoughtful, taking a long view of their take on their life this year. I started collecting them together, thinking, ‘This is interesting. They’re kind of poetic and beautiful.’” Hollier asked some of those friends if they would read their posts aloud and send him a voice memo. Those recordings form the emotional climax of “Petulant Child”: a cathartic form of “found poetry.”
It’s the song that constitutes the most direct comment on the past year of pandemic and collective hardship. As for who that petulant child might be, Hollier won’t say. “I’ll let the listener decide,” he shrugs. Some mysteries must remain buried way out west.
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