Remembering The Rockets

On it's third full-length Remembering The Rockets, Strange Ranger continues to excel attranslating the way intimacy can feel so overwhelmingly gigantic. With a dozen releasesacross it's 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.2016's 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 Eiger's writing style reads like a loose assembly of quotes from conversationshe's 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. There's plenty of that on Remembering The Rockets, butafter all of these years of singing about Eiger's own coming-of-age story, the album approachesthe quandary of whether he'll ever be able to impart that process-through which he's reaped somuch artistic joy and curiosity-onto someone else.For a topic as severe as ecological collapse affecting his own parental aspirations-as wellas other melancholy ruminations on loneliness, the passing of time, and the complicationsof emotional intimacy-Strange Ranger still ended up making the lushest, smoothest, andmost pleasingly hypnotic album of it's career.