An album made “to be heard in private moments between where you’ve been and where you’re going.” That’s how the liner notes describe Strange Ranger‘s latest LP Pure Music, out now via Fire Talk Records. Partly inspired by a quote from Burial, who described the joys of walking through cities with no purpose or destination (“Sometimes you get that feeling like a ghost touched your heart, like someone walks with you”), the album offers a collection of songs which commits to this liminal strangeness, refusing the comfort of definite location or intention in order to mine the full potential of the in-between.
We’ve written previously about the band’s willingness to experiment and shapeshift, with 2021’s No Light in Heaven signalling a move away from the indie rock which made their name towards electronic pop. “[Strange Ranger] push and prod at their sound as if it were a lump of clay,” we wrote in our review, “moulding it into totally new shapes that feel drastic even for a band that has never stood still stylistically.” But however drastic a transformation No Light represented, the evolutionary thread could be followed back to the past releases, the old Stranger Ranger sound appearing as echoes throughout. Pure Music is less a continuation of this journey than a new beginning. Why mould your sound into new shapes when you can have the total freedom of starting from scratch?
What results is an album stylistically and thematically in concert. A conscious attempt to step outside of the usual structures, be they of geography, history and merely expectation, in search of a truly blank slate. And within this freedom comes great variety. Be it ‘Rain So Hard‘, a track we described previously as a “lush and layered sound [which plays] as some nameless immensity above the vocals, be it a looming cityscape or wide open sky,” while ‘She’s On Fire’ offers a different version of transcendence. A street-level blaze with all its intimate heat and movement and light.
With its combination of ethereality and immediacy, ‘Wide Awake’ might encapsulate the album, and indeed Strange Ranger, most fully. A sound strung out across eighties, nineties and noughties aesthetics but belonging to none, somehow sinuous and static simultaneously, both surreally dreamlike and hyper-alert. Ultimately a track which breaks new ground by foregoing any attempt mark its position on the map. “Wide awake / Still on hold,” as the lyrics go. “In line for a lifetime / And in control.”
Pure Music is out now via Fire Talk Records and available from the Strange Ranger Bandcamp page.
