Wantok
The greatest dream pop album of the past 5-10 years. It feels like they stumbled on some new genre, Dream Pop, Techno, Emo, and Post Rock all fold into one. Unfortunately it seems we won’t see what could come next, but here the end result achieved is the sound of a band executing perfectly all album, it is Pure Music.
dietchet
pure ecstasy on record, the sound of a band shedding the confines of any previous expectation and reforming into something entirely New, fully formed, effortlessly poised and wickedly stylish
Favorite track: Dazed in the Shallows.
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In one of the few recorded interviews with the elusive Burial, the producer admitted to spending much of his time walking city streets alone, sometimes in pursuit of an obvious objective, other times because he had nothing else to do. “Being on your own listening to headphones is not a million miles away from being in a club surrounded by people,” he said. “Sometimes you get that feeling like a ghost touched your heart, like someone walks with you.”
It’s a disarmingly earnest sentiment, one that has stuck with Strange Ranger’s Isaac Eiger since he first read it years ago, when the band was just getting started playing house show circuits in and around the mountain West. We are taught to believe that life is made up of a series of arrivals, but it is in the liminal spaces where we most often experience the sublime. Strange Ranger’s transcendent fourth album, Pure Music, was made to be heard in private moments between where you’ve been and where you’re going. Though that Burial quote resonates, these songs have a pulse so strong they’re practically breathing; not touching your heart, but gripping it.
Recorded at a cabin in upstate New York as a blizzard raged outside, Pure Music elucidates the promise of No Light in Heaven, a mixtape that hinted the band was cocooned in a state of near total transformation. Pure Music emerged from the same sessions, and while No Light in Heaven resembles, in places, bygone iterations of Strange Ranger’s sound, Pure Music is easily their most exciting and ambitious work to date because it was made with so little concern for what anyone might expect of them, as if they were a band without history. It's an album that feels out of this time, one that lives in a dimension running parallel to ours.
credits
released July 21, 2023
Isaac Eiger: vocals, guitar, electronics
Fred Nixon: vocals, bass, electronics
Fiona Woodman: vocals, electronics
Nathan Tucker: drums, saxophone, electronics
Music by Strange Ranger, lyrics by Isaac Eiger except for track 3, by Isaac Eiger and Fiona Woodman; and tracks 5 and 8, by Fred Nixon
Additional Musicians:
Tyler Bussey: guitar, banjo
Ellie Eiger: additional vocals on track 2
Blake Ortiz-Goldberg: additional vocals on track 4, additional production of tracks 2 & 4
Produced and engineered by Strange Ranger at our apartments in NYC and Philadelphia as well as Tim’s old place in Phoenicia, NY; the Chicken Shack in Stanfordville, NY; and Livingrooms in Brooklyn, NY
Drum kit on tracks 1, 6, 7, 8, and 9 engineered by Kyle Pulley at Headroom Studios in Philadelphia, PA
Strange and angsty alternative rock from Los Angeles that hovers between haunting and pretty and sharp and driving. Bandcamp New & Notable Jul 27, 2023
Dammit every track makes me smile. How did you do that? If a friend recommends this album to you, hang on to them because they're just as fabulously messed up as you are. I'd like to thank my bank for allowing me to buy things online again. Thank you. Everyone. Thanks. duskbringer