Strange Ranger - Remembering the Rockets (2019)

On its third full-length Remembering The Rockets, Strange Ranger continues to excel attranslating the way intimacy can feel so overwhelmingly gigantic. With a dozen releasesacross its 10 years as a band, the Philly-via-Portland-via-Montana group has traversedgenres, moods and textures while maintaining one important throughline: an explorationof closeness.2016s double-LP Rot Forever was a 72-minute freakout that paired Built To Spill grandiositywith early Modest Mouse intensity. On the 2017 follow-up Daymoon (Tiny Engines), StrangeRanger hung up the distortion pedals and traded caustic yelps for Alex G-esque croons. Itwas a synth-adorned, insular bedroom-pop record that floated rather than soared, and theband opted for lyrical impressionism over the hyper-specific outbursts of the debut.Farontman Isaac Eigers writing style reads like a loose assembly of quotes from conversationshes had with others spliced with his own, private introspections. He is a modern masterof conveying the anxiety and uncertainty of growing older through a mixture of childhoodnostalgia and interpersonal tidbits. Theres plenty of that on Remembering The Rockets , butafter all of these years of singing about Eigers own coming-of-age story, the album approachesthe quandary of whether hell ever be able to impart that processthrough which hes reaped somuch artistic joy and curiosity onto someone else.For a topic as severe as ecological collapse affecting his own parental aspirationsas wellas other melancholy ruminations on loneliness, the passing of time, and the complicationsof emotional intimacyStrange Ranger still ended up making the lushest, smoothest, andmost pleasingly hypnotic album of its career.