Remembering The Rockets (WHITE VINYL) [Vinyl] (ONLINE ORDER ONLY)

On its third full-length Remembering The Rockets, Strange Ranger continues to excel at
translating the way intimacy can feel so overwhelmingly gigantic. With a dozen releases
across its 10 years as a band, the Philly-via-Portland-via-Montana group has traversed
genres, moods and textures while maintaining one important throughline: an exploration
of closeness.

2016’s double-LP Rot Forever was a 72-minute freakout that paired Built To Spill grandiosity
with early Modest Mouse intensity. On the 2017 follow-up Daymoon (Tiny Engines), Strange
Ranger hung up the distortion pedals and traded caustic yelps for Alex G-esque croons. It
was a synth-adorned, insular bedroom-pop record that floated rather than soared, and the
band opted for lyrical impressionism over the hyper-specific outbursts of the debut.

Farontman Isaac Eiger’s writing style reads like a loose assembly of quotes from conversations
he’s had with others spliced with his own, private introspections. He is a modern master
of conveying the anxiety and uncertainty of growing older through a mixture of childhood
nostalgia and interpersonal tidbits. There’s plenty of that on Remembering The Rockets , but
after all of these years of singing about Eiger’s own coming-of-age story, the album approaches
the quandary of whether he’ll ever be able to impart that process—through which he’s reaped so
much artistic joy and curiosity—onto someone else.

For a topic as severe as ecological collapse affecting his own parental aspirations—as well
as other melancholy ruminations on loneliness, the passing of time, and the complications
of emotional intimacy—Strange Ranger still ended up making the lushest, smoothest, and
most pleasingly hypnotic album of its career.