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Music

The Hills are alive with a new sound

Head for the Hills is bluegrass without boundaries
Head for the Hills will bring its innovative acoustic sounds to the Animas City Theatre on Friday. “We’re a bluegrass band for the most part, but we like to keep it eclectic and play different styles, because that’s the way our minds work,” bass player Matt Loewen said. “We listen to a bunch of different stuff ... it all works itself in there.”

Four-part Colorado string band Head for the Hills has an ongoing predicament: how to pin down its unusual blend of bluegrass styles, jazz notes, folk-pop melodies and even hip-hop flare in words.

Post-bluegrass, progressive string-music, twang and punch, Colorado mountain boogie. Whatever you call it, don’t expect it to fit nicely into the bounds of bluegrass.

“We’re a bluegrass band for the most part, but we like to keep it eclectic and play different styles, because that’s the way our minds work,” upright bass player Matt Loewen said. “We listen to a bunch of different stuff ... it all works itself in there.”

Head for the Hills is bringing its multifarious acoustic sounds to Durango for a show at the Animas City Theatre on Friday.

The band, which steadily has been growing its profile since its inception in 2003, has been keeping busy playing shows and working on tracks for the follow-up to its fourth album, “Blue Ruin.” The 12-track record, which was released in July of 2013, represented the band’s most unorthodox effort yet, weaving jazz, indie and rock-and-roll stylings into songs inspired by love and comic books. Loewen said “Blue Ruin” is the truest representation of the band’s manifold musical interests and the direction Head for the Hills is, well, heading in.

“We kind of meld, I think, more successfully and seamlessly styles and pulled different strains of music into the bluegrass thing,” he said. “I think it’s the most successful blending of styles that we’ve had on record.”

Not that the band will be abandoning its bluegrass base anytime soon, he said.

“I think we’ll always really love the danceable, up-tempo bluegrass stuff,” he said. “That’s a big part of what the band is, for sure. There will always be those songs. But there’s a lot of other ground to cover, and we look forward to continuing to do that.”

The band formed in the fall of 2003 after the musicians met on the CSU campus in Fort Collins. From the beginning, Loewen said, members brought diverse musical interests to the table, imbuing the music with a nontraditional sound.

What began with picking at house parties has grown into a repertoire of four albums, a strong Colorado following.

Loewen said the thing that has kept Head for the Hills playing together for more than a decade is pretty simple: the music.

“If the songs weren’t that good and kept getting better, I don’t think we would have stuck with it,” he said. “But the music keeps getting better, and we love doing it.”

kklingsporn@durangoherald.com

If you go

Head for the Hills will play a show at 9 p.m. Friday at the Animas City Theatre, 128 E. College Drive. Tickets for the Durango Massive show are $12 and available at www.animascitytheatre.com.



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