Rangers: Suburban Tours

"Sometimes it's the most unlikely thing that makes you want to hear a record. With Suburban Tours, I read an interview in The Wire magazine with Joe Knight, the one-man-band that is Rangers, in which he described the songs as "dull, numb, and vacant." An odd way for a musician to characterize his own work, you might think. Odder still, it's this remark that snagged my attention, got me thinking: "I've got to hear this album.""

"To understand why a creator might say such a thing and why it might pique a consumer's interest, we need to re-immerse ourselves in the musical climate of the late 2000s and early 2010s. The reigning sensibility on the American underground was something variously dubbed chillwave, hypnagogic pop, and glo-fi (my favorite of the three, and easily the most evocative of how the genre actually sounded, this term sadly never really caught on)."

Suburban Tours funneled childhood nostalgia and omnivorous taste through piles of reverb and dirt-cheap equipment to produce a defining 21st-century guitar record. Joe Knight of Rangers described the songs as "dull, numb, and vacant," a characterization that paradoxically drew attention and curiosity. The record emerged amid a late-2000s and early-2010s underground preoccupation with chillwave, hypnagogic pop, and glo-fi, where artists mined New Age, yacht rock, and library music. Hauntological sampling and an embrace of background, soporific, and square sounds revalued what was once dismissed, shifting aesthetic hierarchies and foregrounding previously overlooked sonic textures.

Read at Pitchfork