They may have formed in a modest-sized college town in Indiana, but the Bloomington-quartet Murder By Death doesn’t do anything small.

The group, with Adam Turla (vocals and guitar), Sarah Balliet (cello and keyboards), Matt Armstrong (bass) and Dagan Thogerson (drums), has created a distinctive sound, blending gothic Americana and hard rock since 2000. The band’s songs are large and desolate like sand dunes and roll like tumbleweeds by an Old West saloon with a vocalist whose ominous baritone sparks comparisons to Jim Morrison or Johnny Cash.

But according to Turla, it was never part of any boundary-breaking plan.

“I don’t think there was ever a goal to do it, it’s just naturally what happened,” Turla says. “It’s more of an expression of geography than intention.”

The geographical aspect is a marriage of their own Midwest upbringing and a curiousity for what is beyond it. Even when the members were taking a full load of college courses at Indiana University in 2003, they traveled to play shows as far away as Maine and Alaska while writing and recording new material.

“There was never a minute where we went out and had fun,” Turla says. “It was just crazy. That’s why we just decided to focus (on music) full time.”

Their music may be dynamic, with a classically trained celloist coloring within the lines of hard rock rhythms and barroom riffs. But Turla’s main priority has always been the story he is telling.

A longtime poet, he cites writers like John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway and Gabriel Garcia Marquez as some major influences on his lyrics, with timeless themes of religion, justice, good and evil, life and death. And it’s these words that dictate Turla’s melodies.

“I would never write the music first and not the lyrics,’” he says. “I try to write songs as if they were stories, independent stories.”

That may have been the case on the band’s past three albums, including the underground 2006 hit “In Bocca Al Lupo,” but not on the latest release “Red Of Tooth And Claw” on Vagrant Records. It tells the story of one man’s lawless journey, with experiences of lust, love, heartache, murder and redemption over the album’s eleven tracks.

After a month-long European tour this summer, Murder By Death took a much-deserved break from the road. The group will embark on a mini-tour this August, starting with a show opening for Split Lip Rayfield Grinders in KC at 7 p.m. tonight.

But even while relaxing, like Turla was on a kayaking trip, he’s taking in scenery and mapping out terrain that could likely end up in Murder By Death’s next musical odyssey.

“You never really take a break if your job is to create things because you draw from everything,” Turla says. “That’s what we’re fortunate to scrape by doing.”