Strange Ranger

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.

Strange Ranger now occupy a space best described as uncanny; on Pure Music, the band indulges an obsession with Loveless, but they infiltrate any comparison to shoegaze with overtures to disco, house, and experimental pop. The Talk Talk inspired pean to isolation “Way Out” features a saxophone part played by Nathan Tucker, while “She’s On Fire” is only a rock song until just after the midway point, when the drums throb, the snare skitters then snaps, and suddenly, you’re in a sweaty pit of swaying bodies dancing as Eiger and Fiona Woodman harmonize, “I would have thought the rhythm of the club might lead me somewhere.” “Music makes us transcend the feeling of being alienated from or trapped by the world,” Woodman says. “I want the experience of listening to Pure Music to be euphoric.”

It’s been four years since Strange Ranger released the spirited Remembering the Rockets, and in the interim period, the band surveyed a range of electronic production techniques, determined to integrate them on Pure Music. That effort is apparent from the outset; opening track “Rain So Hard” is scaffolded upon layers of oceanic synths, the trill of a marimba, and a mournful guitar part that mirrors the lyrical content. Written while Eiger and Woodman – who had been dating for five years – were in the process of breaking up, “Rain So Hard” captures the romantic loneliness of a late subway ride home. “Any day there will be no more stars,” Eiger sings and Woodman echoes, “How do I get out of this movie now?”

Pure Music embodies that manic state through interstitial interludes laced with YouTube samples that connect each track to the next so as to submerge the listener in its world, one that rewards catharsis.“Wide Awake” captures it best when, over a glistening guitar part, Woodman sings the rapturous chorus with an ease that defies the disquiet in Eiger’s voice: “And with the window open, you call me outside.” The alienated might gaze through panes of glass eternally, without breaching the gap between the self and the destabilizing chaos of the world beyond. Riding the train across the East River in the early morning, one witnesses thousands of individual stories, each contained within a glowing square of light, and it's a comfort to know that soon, those strangers will emerge from their solitude to rejoin the city.

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Pendant (DJ Set)

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