Strange Ranger with Husk

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.”

Pure Music feels like Strange Ranger’s most collaborative effort to date. “With a few exceptions, I can’t tell whose production ideas were whose, when I listen back to it,” he says. “We were literally trapped in this cabin, manically working at all hours, and the energy was crazy, in a fun way.” 

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.

with 
Special Guests TBA