Drop Everything You're Doing and Listen to Strange Ranger's New Album, 'Pure Music'

The chameleonic indie band works through their biggest transformation yet, resulting in an AOTY candidate.

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Strange Ranger has never been known to make the same record twice, and for that matter, not even the same song. In fact, they spent their first six years as a band under a completely different name, Sioux Falls. While bouncing around the country from their Montana roots to Portland, Oregon, and onto Philidelphia before recording their new album, Pure Music, in upstate New York, Strange Ranger is a continuous exercise in keeping things fresh while disregarding monotonous routine. 

After starting in post-punk roots as Sioux Falls, Strange Ranger’s reverence for the Pacific Northwest was evident on their debut record, Daymoon, recorded in Portland. It’s from an early aughts time, mashing together the rawness of a pre-Transatlanticism Death Cab For Cutie with Modest Mouse - there’s no denying that Modest Mouse’s The Moon and Antarctica was also the driver for the album cover aesthetic for their Sunbeams Through Your Head EP. 

For my money, though, 2019’s Remembering the Rockets is where the band fully hit their stride - it tossed out the rawness of their earlier work for an album of warm, reverb-loaded indie rock in a most classic sense. One of my favorite records of that year, Remembering the Rockets, was an early effort for the current nineties revival, with songs like “Nothing Else to Think About” hitting a healthy vein of nostalgia for those long-gone nights of hanging around a pile of bikes (at one point singer Isaac Eiger croons, “Today’s the greatest, I know what he’s talking about” and yeah, we know what he’s talking about). 

I was baffled when the follow-up No Light in Heaven dropped a year and a half ago. Described at the time by the band as a mixtape, No Light in Heaven tore down everything Strange Ranger was working towards in its frenetic 25-minute runtime. Some moments worked like the eighties UK-inspired “Pass Me By” and the songs that allowed vocalist Fiona Woodman to take over a little more, but “In Hell” is much more of a blown-out Burial track (whom I do love as well, but it came off as such a sharp turn) than the emo found on Rockets, and the entire thing felt half-baked. Now that Pure Music is out, it’s much easier to understand why No Light in Heaven was such a challenge that I wasn’t eager to revisit many times.

Ever since Justin Vernon holed up in a cabin to deliver Bon Iver’s indie folk classic, For Emma, Forever Ago, sixteen years ago, the concept of an album recorded in the isolation of nature has become somewhat of a trope in the indie world - the pandemic only escalated this tired PR stunt (can you tell my inbox is full of these pitches?). I’m happy to report that while Strange Ranger recorded Pure Music in a cabin during a blizzard in The Catskills, there’s no evidence that the smell of pines and a bellowing fireplace influences what you hear here. 

Instead, Strange Ranger is now operating a nightclub on another planet. There’s an electronica undertone to most of the ten songs on the new record, yet Pure Music is never interested in staying sedentary, as it visits moments of the band’s preferred emo and indie rock background, yet often flirts with dream pop (“She’s On Fire”), shoegaze, Madchester’s baggy scene (“Dream”) in the early nineties. Combine these nods with the update that the mentioned earlier No Light in Heaven was recorded during the same sessions and released as an odds and sods collection before the main course, and this all makes sense. It’s such a backward move to release your b-sides and toss-offs before your audience has any narrative for your next LP that I find it downright praiseworthy. Does it work? I’m unsure, but I’ve enjoyed revisiting No Light in Heaven over the past few days with this newfound context.

Strange Ranger purposely sequences Pure Music to blend one song into the next. There are so many ideas here, with many pieces breaking up pop music's verse/chorus monotony, in favor of movements. It makes for a dense experience that will have you glancing to see if you’re still listening to the same song but spending the deserved time with the record; it’s easily one of the most exciting experiences of this year. The band gives everything throughout the album, and the results are infectious.

While the whole “cabin in a blizzard” thing doesn’t appear to have much to do with the final version of Pure Music, the ending of Isaac Eiger and Fiona Woodman’s long-term relationship unfolded during these writing and recording sessions, and the aftermath is felt in the lyrics as the two navigate keeping the band together. I’m glad Strange Ranger is still around because Eiger and Woodman’s harmonies and calls and responses are the strongest they’ve been. Woodman, especially, has more room to breathe, and songs like “Dream,” “Wide Awake,” “Ask Me About My Lovelife” (a great grower written by drummer Nathan Tucker), and “Fantasy” are that much better because of her sublime vocals. For my fellow aughts Canadian indie pop fans, their work together on Pure Music reminds me of Torq Campbell and Amy Millan of Stars - pure magic when they hit the collective peak.

If you’re new to Strange Ranger, Pure Music is the paramount moment in the band’s career. As much as I love Remembering the Rockets, this new record is in another galaxy. It’s an album that sometimes seems daunting, as I’m sure the sessions were for the band while recording it. But give it the multiple listens it deserves, and not only will you find Strange Ranger’s best, but also a record shooting straight up the year-end list.

Pure Music is available now on Fire Talk.