Rangers redux

release rationale:

Nearly a decade after their original assembly, two crucial early volumes of Texan ranger Joe Knight’s voyaging kaleidoscope kitchen sink-psych have been dusted off and dressed up for a new generation of suburban tourists. Europe On TV collects the entirety of both 2009 outings on freeform Pittsburgh imprint As Above So Below, totaling 110 twisted minutes of miasmic guitar heroics, sci-fi city surf, face-melt glam, no-fi jangle, art rock squall, and nebulous new wave, pocked with 4-track feedback bramble and cathode-blasted voices. 

Taken as a whole, these sides vividly remind just how omnivorous, inventive, and scrambled Knight’s sound was in its infancy, like scanning low-watt stations in a dusty car cruising the industrial outskirts of a foreign city. Mangled fragments of melody and rhythm beamed from crumbling radio towers in the distance, half-heard through static before the road turns and the signal fades. An alien and absorbing revisitation to the restless roots of Rangers.


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Weirdly just listened a few days ago - for the first time in quite a while - to Suburban Tours, by Rangers, the 2010 album by Joe Knight. 


Still sounds fantastic - he bottled some magic there - A dream-drift through the placid plotted neatness of the burbs


mind-haze


it prepared me spiritually for moving to the burbs of east Los Angeles later that same year   



this one makes me think of the soundtrack to Gregory's Girl







this one has the spirit of Meat Puppets infusing it somehow





this one i think is the one that is influenced by Rush's "Subdivisions"! a little detail from The Wire feature by Keenan that stuck in mind



elsewhere i always think of Felt for some reason


Blue Orchids even


mundane mysticism


some of the tracks on Suburban Tours have this clumpy, lurch-funk.. thick ultra-effected bass



here's Joe's most recent release



he's had a bit of a prolific spurt in recent years


need to pile it all in a playlist - the entire uuuurv - and get lost in it for a day


might spill into the next day, there's such a lot of it


whatever happened to his mate KWJAZ?


i did like this record 




nearly 10 years since Hypnagogic Pop eh?