Really happy to have the opportunity to write about one of my favorite albums of the 21st Century so far: Suburban Tours by Rangers. For Pitchfork's Sunday Review series.
It was also an opportunity to get started - possibly jumping a gun a bit, since it's only 16 years since, but why not? - on feeling nostalgic about chillwave a/k/a hypnagogic pop.
The Rangers review is also a kind of an ambivalent ode to suburbia - where I grew up, where I returned to (but not forever?) - and this is something explored previously in this essay about Ernest Hood's Neighbourhoods for The Nation.
Here's an epic 13 minute-plus track from the follow-up to Suburban Tours, the double album Pan Am Stories. "Zeke's Dream" takes the stoned-on-sunshine sound of the previous album even further, especially in the last of its several segments: a controlled explosion of ecstatic noise, two minutes of blasting bliss I could happily listen to for ten times longer. Joe Knight, self-effacing guitar hero.
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I did not know there was an Olde English Spelling Bee video for "Deerfield Village"
Another beauty from Pan Am Stories - now who is he channeling in the guitar solo? (I have my own ideas)
In the Pitchfork piece, I talk about how Suburban Tours prepared me for the move to LA in some obscure way...
A slightly fanciful thought maybe but it is true that hypnagogic pop made so much more sense to me almost the minute we arrived in Southern California (as explored in the piece on the genre for Frieze).
In David Keenan's famous Wire piece on hypnagogic, James Ferraro describes KFCs as "dark energy temples"... and my reaction, as someone then living in New York, was that it was stoned hippie drivel.... But then moving here, especially in the more featureless reaches of the San Gabriel Valley, through the endless strip malls, it's true that the fast food outlets and name-brand retailers and supermarkets like Bristol Farms can start to look a bit like ecclesiastical buildings, what with their out-size frontages and spire-like constructions calling out to you from a distance.... beacons for the faithful in the church of consumerism ... At the same time, actual ecclesiastical buildings - modern-look or even outright Modernist churches and synagogues and Scientology temples - look like megastores or shopping malls. In poorer neighbourhoods, the churches look commercial in a different sense: like bodegas or repair shop shacks... Unlike in new york or london, where fast food places are bunched together with other and much more older and characterful buildings, in LA KFCs and McDonalds and In-N-Out Burgers and Jollibees are usually separated off (realty space being cheaper) and they often have bizarre ziggurat-like or pagoda-like shapes.... at night, they really do look like peculiar plastic temples glowing with too much artificial light...
"Actively passive, losing-itself-in-the-noise" - new column by Kieran Press-Reynolds steps out of his lane to explore the "dreamy malaise" of "hazy new-gen alt-rock": bar italia, untitled halo, deer park et al.
Slackerdelia part 3, only this time they don't even have the energy to capitalize their names...
Slackerdelia part 3?
Well obviously part 1 is Mercury Rev, Pavement etc.
But what would part 2 be?
Chillwave, glo-fi, hypnagogic pop, of course.
Not the sound of the groups he's writing about particularly, but some of K's evocations of them reminded me of my favorite guitar album of the past 15 years: Suburban Tours by Rangers.
Also the name of one of the bands, deer park, reminded me of the opening track "Deerfield Village".
I got into this record not long before we moved to LA and I think it somehow prepared me for suburban life in the land of perpetual summer. Drifting through, dazed by light, mood oddly suspended between anomie and bliss....
As I recall, the album is inspired by living in Texas and the newbuilt suburbs, which often have names inspired by the wilderness they've supplanted - hence track titles like "Bear Creek", "Deerfield Village," "Woodland Hills," "Glen Carin."
That integration of wilderness and built-up areas is very LA and something that continues to enchant and unsettle - just the other day heading off to an on-the-early-side dental appointment we saw a mangy looking coyote in someone's driveway. This in a neighbourhood completely built-up with suburban houses, no wilderness or even parks nearby.
An early attempt to connect hypnagogic pop and Southern California while freshly enchanted as a new arrival.
Then there's the Suburban Tours track "Out Past Curfew" - an allusion to the fact that some towns in America actually have legal curfews for teenagers. You're not allowed out after sundown.
Joe Knight has put out a bunch of excellent records since but here he tapped into something really magical-mystical - I bracket Suburban Tours with The Greatest Hit and Up On the Sun.
Supposedly he drew some sideways inspiration from this song by Rush - not musically but the mise en scene
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Another recent Rabbit Holed - K reports onSWAGGOTFEST, a 12-hour anarcho-pride parody of a music festival that transcended cringe and captured the sweetest, rawest aspects of the New York DIY scene
I had a lovely time talking with Jeremy Gilbert and Tim Lawrence for their triffic music + politics podcast Love Is the Message. Our chat covered glam and punk and postpunk, themes of suburbia and boredom and the political economy of 1970s Britain. You can listen to the deftly-condensed and music-illustrated conversation at Apple or Spotify or Patreon
