Rangers

Rangers

Europe On TV

Not Not Fun

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 bootleg 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 shitty car cruising the industrial outskirts of a foreign city. Fragments of mangled 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.  Remastered by Alex Nagle. Design by Britt Brown.

Rangers

Reconsider Lounge

Not Not Fun

Trans-american Joe Knight recently caravanned his custom duffel bags of woozy jukebox esoterica from the Bay to the plains of central Texas but, before and during so, crafted and released the double-volume Scrap collection for multifaceted Midwestern organization, Bezoar Formations. Reconsider Lounge distills a portion of this material into different arrangements, intercut with an assortment of unreleased curiosities and classics, comprising an essentially new album in the instrumental fantasy radio canon Rangers reigns so uniquely at. Song modalities station-switch from piece to piece, spanning lonesome new wave garage (“Lauderdale Saints”), dreadlocked psych (“Clown Prince”), monorail zoo tour DVD themes (“ETV”), tight-wired Television-lensed guitar heroics (“Safety Goggles”), out across the endless airwaves. The logic of Knight’s pack-rat electric collages culture-jam as much as flow, chasing sparks, exposing irrelevancies and connective tissues. Fissured fragments of rock mythology, obscurely realized, again and again. Reconsider. Lounge. Black vinyl in buffalo relic jackets designed by Suzanne Pfutzenreuter. Mastered by Brian Pyle. Edition of 265.

Rangers

Pan Am Stories

Not Not Fun

***“After clocking up huge plaudits from Fact Magazine, The Wire, SImon Reynolds and Altered Zones for their 'Suburban Tours' release, RANGERS arrives on Not Not Fun with his 2nd album proper, Pan Am Stories. The mind-child of one JOE KNIGHT, Rangers deal in especially evocative soft-psych charms which share a clear love of '80s MOR culture with James Ferraro and Ducktails. It's reflective of the music most Americans (we'd imagine) have absorbed by some kind of as-yet-unidentified radiopathic osmosis; the soul-absorption of thousands of criss-crossing radio transmissions beaming 24 hour soft rock and cable stations emitting unending re-runs of mood-manipulating TV theme music and vibes. But most crucially Joe's music has filtered only those most warbly, hooky parts and sifted out the cloying earnestness of so much coffee table Americana, yet retained its sun-smacked and soulful intentions. And it's the sly, wry glaze of electronics and occasional overblown noise which gets warped in transmission that does it for us, an empathic hypnagogic affect which translates to European tastes very well. If there's anything to distinguish this album from the last, there's perhaps a more blown-out grunginess, not in terms of fidelity, which is actually higher here, but just a burnt twilight tone which feels moodier and more autumnal than say the last Ducktails, and like a pop refined version of Ferraro's immense Last American Hero.”—Boomkat