Watch

Press / Management / Booking

You’ve fallen down the rabbit hole. Concussed from the impact you’ve awoken bewildered. Quickly you acknowledge that you’ve been transported to an unfamiliar and enchanted domain. It’s dark. The fog is thick and the heat in the air suggests a swamp. There’s a voice that pulls you forward speaking in raw truths. Mesmerized you trudge through the muck, but as you draw nearer a stage appears and then it clicks. This is no Wonderland, you’ve now entered The Bluff’s realm.

At the forefront of this 4-piece is the booming baritone and piercing falsetto of lead singer Kirk Dath. Principal songwriter, and founder, Dath is the voice that guides listeners through torrid scenes of desire, or ushers them across the River Styx with mellifluous whispers of absolution. Using a carefully-honed lead guitar, Ryan Arnold provides depth and drama to the music, employing both ferocious bone-cutting solos and rich, nuanced tapestries of sound. With the intensity and focus of a surgeon, Christian Mills controls the low-end with lyrical bass lines and heavy doses of fuzz, all while Darren Farnsworth, the well-oiled engine of the group, provides both propulsion and elegance from behind the kit.

"Kirk Dath's voice is soulful and sooty, like iron-crusted boots kicked around in the sand until they're tattered but still barely in tact, elation and agony both held in the shreds. Purist blues and squealing harmonica-mixed with slithering, vintage rock n' roll..." --SLUG Magazine

Equipped with an arsenal of songs depicting lust, love, loss, murder and malevolence, Crook & the Bluff’s music explores diverse themes and often meddles in strange curiosities. Storytellers at heart, “The Bluff” engulfs listeners in a spectrum of orchestrated vibrations with eerie ballads of torment and revenge, a sultry number lamenting a lost bird that administers the pulse to the dance floor, or the droning, hypnotic piece that buzzes through a hallucination upon licking a toad. Equal parts musicians and mad-scientists, the band has crafted a deep symbiosis with its armory of equipment, using it to manifest colourful and bizarre soundscapes that has many fans describing them as “the Pink Floyd of the American West”.

Crook & the Bluff is a band more at home on the road. Driven by an appetite for exploration, foreign encounters, and peering into the kaleidoscopic jewels of their minds, they regularly leave their hometown of Salt Lake City to tour throughout North America and Europe. The Bluff has shared the stage with international touring acts including, Murder By Death, Joshua James, Wovenhand and Sleepy Sun and headlined music festivals: MGME, Craft Lake City, Escalante Music Festival and the Utah Arts Festival. Crook & the Bluff delivers their music with passion, intensity, and precision that leaves audiences bare, feverishly aching for more.

"“Crook and the Bluff is the perfect music to hear in the desert, creating a sound that takes cues from the surreal region’s strange, but beautiful vibes.” --City Weekly