Remembering the Rockets

For Strange Ranger, indie rock isn’t just a genre; it’s an actual lifestyle, the prism through which every aspect of adulthood can be projected and understood. The 2016 album Rot Forever, by an earlier incarnation of the band, started its 72 minutes of Up Records fanfic with the line “She played rock guitar” and peaked with “Won’t you come see Pile with me?” Going by the name Sioux Falls at the time, core members Isaac Eiger and Fred Nixon were kids in Bozeman, Montana, who were prone to let one or two ideas stretch out for six minutes because that’s what their heroes Built to Spill and Modest Mouse would do. They moved to Portland for the followup, Daymoon, and it felt like a higher education, going deeper into the Pac NW canon and local scene politics (key song: “House Show”). They’re now in Philadelphia, and Remembering the Rockets is everything one might expect from an ambitious, reverent band moving to the epicenter of American indie rock: It’s sharper and more purposeful, forged by the pressure of real expectations. The best album of their deep and underappreciated catalog, it also imagines a life after indie rock.

Eiger’s in no hurry to get there just yet. Remembering the Rockets operates from a mid-twenties contemplation stage, having enough distance from the crippling insecurities and dependencies of youth to start formulating an adult identity through jobs, relationships, and homeownership—but not to the point where the impending financial and familial obligations aren’t something to recoil from reflexively. Strange Ranger may present as a scrappy indie-rock quartet, but the emotional pitch of their songs honors this liminal stage of adulthood by operating at the excitable internal frequencies of teen pop.

Strange Ranger songs still emulate Buzz Bin bands of yore, though Remembering the Rockets tends to aim higher than the band used to, evoking the headliners of Lollapaloozas past rather than indie rock’s ragtag insurgents. More provocatively, the album often makes the case that both camps were playing the same game: Opener “Leona” sees no reason “Pictures of You,” “Semi Charmed Life,” and “Carry the Zero” couldn’t have coexisted on a Winamp playlist to commemorate a new crush or a fresh heartbreak. The most effortlessly anthemic Strange Ranger song to date, “Leona” volleys two chords and two states of being, giddy anticipation and paralyzing doubt. The lyrics are littered with the potentialities that get people up in the morning—the arrival of Friday night, a ticket for a trip abroad, a new love that leaves room for nothing else—yet Eiger sighs, “Not to say these things fix everything,” as though still distrustful of the idea that things could ever be this good forever. It ends with a symphonic burst of gratuitously overdubbed infinity guitars, a vision of endless uplift that’s at stark odds with the next song, “Sunday,” where Eiger is jobless, aimless, and washing the dishes just for a sense of purpose. “What if I just went away?/I’m alone in the world,” he sighs.

Throughout, Eiger and Fiona Woodman vacillate between blind optimism and a nihilism that feels more justified with each passing year. The fear of apocalypse is ever-present on the Woodman-led “Message to You” and “Living Free,” synths shimmering like pink mist, while Eiger ends “Beneath the Lights” melting into a puddle of Auto-Tuned isotopic waste. These are the tracks that give credence to Eiger’s Yves Tumor and Oneohtrix Point Never namedrops, even if those are clearly inspirations and not models—the loops on “Nothing Left to Think About” and “Planes in Front of the Sky” are more in line with the Eiger-endorsed “Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth With Money in My Hand,” watching time slip away, one lazy summer night after another.

But Strange Ranger still leave open the possibility for indie rock to swoop in and save the day. On the piano pounding yowler “Ranch Style Home,” Nixon yelps requests for sex and “French fried potatoes” in a caricatured cowpoke accent. But in a moment of true candor—“I need my gal holding my hand/I need my pals packed in my van”—“Ranch Style Home” makes a silent point: Is that kind of itinerant indie-rock lifestyle the only sensible one when nothing feels permanent anymore? “Awkward angels in the snow/What if I just want a family,” he wonders during “Living Free,” putting a fine point on a question hinted at throughout: Is it morally justifiable to bring children into a planet that’s going to be irreversibly worse for every successive generation? Eiger is on the verge of drifting through another morning on “Planes in Front of Sky” before everything snaps into focus: “I walk to work in fading light/Daddies with their kids/I still want that.” On Remembering the Rockets, Eiger is trying to create a legacy as a musician and a person; given the way the ice caps, indie rockers’ economic future, and maybe even human decency itself are all eroding, his hope isn’t just inspiring, it feels downright rebellious.