Strange Pilgrim - Strange Pilgrim (2022)

Strange Pilgrim is the self-titled debut by the Oregon-based former Port O’Brien drummer Joshua Barnhart under his new project name, taken from Doce Cuentos Peregrinos (Strange Pilgrims), a collection of short stories by Gabriel Garcia Marquez about dislocation. A generally moody and often soulful affair, it features guitarists Adam Nash and Paul Dutton, percussionist Pat Spurgeon, bassist Sterling Schlegel, keyboard player Joel Tolbert and backing singers Kelly McFarling and Taylor Belmore.

It opens with the five-minute More Than I Did, a cascade of chiming guitar and keyboard notes giving way to dreamy, hushed vocals as he sings about not taking love for granted (“I should have said I love you more than I did”), leading into the Lennon-tinged Staring at the Sky, the narcotic strangeness of the sound as it gathers reflecting its genesis in a psychedelic mushroom experience with friends, sitting watching the sunset.

Equally sonically blissed with a rippling drums pattern and an undulating guitar wave, Brighter Horizon, with its Beach Boys-styled vocal harmonies, was written following a break-up and the contemplation of an uncertain future (“One more time, I promised the world to you/A broken dream without any follow through”) while, in contrast, the walking beat shoegaze sound of Salt and Seagulls looks to the past, a visit to his California hometown of Los Osos prompting a nostalgic sensory memory of connection to a landscape.

In another five-minute track, Embers continues the album’s cosmic otherworldly soundscape, the various Rhodes and synth parts, guitar tones and vocal arrangements designed to evoke a dreamlike feel to the lyrics based on the experience of playing West Coast festivals.

Featuring Nash on pedal steel, Blue Light, on the other hand, has a less positive perspective, the mellow melodics counterpointing a lyric questioning the bleak future of living at a time of worsening political and environmental crisis and trying to find some sanctuary in the sometimes beauty of day to day life. Which perhaps logically gives way to the percussively propulsive instrumental Survive the Summer with its simple repeated guitar notes and psychedelic West Coast electric guitar break midway as the energy builds.

Opening with the line “I must have had too much to drink last night/I started thinking about all the times we used to fight”, one of the musically poppier (and again druggy Lennon-flavoured) numbers, Dance With Me is another downbeat affair, beginning addressing his struggles with depression and anxiety and moving to a wider picture of trying to deal with societal dread, the title suggesting the best thing to do is try and have a good time while you can. The penultimate track, The Mirror, Beatles-esque psychedelic pop, finds him battling an identity crisis, looking at his reflection and not liking what he sees (“The man I thought I was ain’t the man I turned out to be”), musing on how the people around us can influence our negative self-perceptions. It ends with No Relief, a number written in the early years of the California drought (“Green hills turn to brown/The rain will not fall down… The light is gone, the day is done”), George Harrison-sounding guitars and with orchestral string arrangements by Barnhart’s father Robe (who’s done similar duty for CS&N and The Beach Boys) who also played cello, a final flourish of sun-kissed late 60s West Coast musical gold.