Strange Ranger
Pure Music
FIRE TALK
ABOVE THE CURRENT
My Bloody Valentine without Bilinda Butcher would pretty much just be an eccentric old Irishman alone on a farm with 80 guitars, losing sleep over a half-semitone discrepancy, and taking decades (more than two, that is) to produce each record. There’s an element of that approach in the genre-defying outfit Strange Ranger. Not the Irishness or tardiness or even the fastidiousness, but the mad-scientist-like experimentation one assumes comes chiefly from AutoTune-happy lead vocalist Isaac Eiger, who co-founded Sioux Falls with bassist and co-vocalist Fred Nixon before they rebranded to the less problematic moniker used today.
On Pure Music, the Portland-via-Philly-via-NYC quartet’s third proper album, Eiger’s impressionistic contemplation of the past and discomfort with the present is buried under sodden, water-logged synths and glitchy samples; his voice is contorted through shapeshifting vocal effects, the pitch artificially edited in a way that suggests someone absent-mindedly toying with the control knobs. It’s Fiona Woodman, then—Eiger’s foil, the Butcher to his Shields, and until recently his romantic partner—who breathes clarity into the songs.
On the trip-hoppy “Ask Me About My Love Life”—whose lyrics call back to the interstitial track “Tales of Romance,” a live recording from their 2021 mixtape No Light in Heaven—Woodman’s unaffected, angelic voice counterbalances Nixon’s tremulous mumbling as she delivers her titular request. It’s Woodman’s airy lilt undercutting the dense moan (Nixon’s again) that lightens the Massive Attack–esque “Blue Shade,” steering it away from claustral darkness.
And it’s Woodman’s performance that makes “Wide Awake” the most accessible song on Pure Music. Amid the album’s sputtering breakbeats and hauntingly rudimentary piano lines—the demented saxophone tremors and miscellaneous other methods by which the Rangers distort their pop songs—“Wide Awake” is refreshingly straightforward. Nixon’s unswerving, on-beat bass line allows ample room for the song’s central focus: Woodman and Eiger, who wrap their voices around one another in a close call and response. The song exemplifies just how captivating their music is when they turn toward one another without excess accompaniment.
That’s not to discredit the rest of Pure Music. “Rain So Hard” is a weightless, hypnagogic opener that sets the album’s tone: one of fluorescent lights, city streets, and rainy nights with nowhere to be (“I would have thought / The rhythm of the club might lead me somewhere,” Eiger sings on “She’s on Fire”). One line from “Rain So Hard” turns everyone who’s ever written about this band beet red: “I heard you write about culture / What’s that mean? / Is it sorta like everything?” That barb may be niche, but Eiger’s romanticization of growing up in Bozeman, Montana, which informs the Loveless-esque “Way Out” among other tracks, is universal insofar as it emphasizes feelings over specifics.
In both mood and in practice, Pure Music lives in the bardo, caught between a rosy, half-remembered past—as a breakup is wont to initiate—and a future that’s uncertain, out of reach. The band can’t settle in one city; the five-year relationship at their core has ended; their frontman gives equal runtime to the childhood years he spent playing Nintendo as he does the art forms operating within late capitalism as he does the rhythm of the club. The album lives in between days, and it’s easy to read each of its components in line with that narrative; even the field recording of footsteps and laughter that segues “Blush” into “Wide Awake” seems to emulate a fragment of memory you aren’t sure is yours.
At the same time, Pure Music is a far cry from the unwieldy, Modest Mouse–inspired guitar rock of Sioux Falls’ debut, and comfortably outshines No Light in Heaven, which had all the right ingredients but didn’t mix them as smoothly as Pure Music does. It’s trite but true: Through all of their odd, wide-ranging rage, love, and loss, Strange Ranger have made an album that’s near-enough timeless, taking a generous step forward but leaving a trail of breadcrumbs so they don’t forget where they’ve been.
