Strange Ranger’s lovely new album Daymoon begins with a low, fuzzy, electrified hum, streaked with one skinny ribbon of guitar feedback. Then a pump organ fades in, wheezing back and forth between a couple of chords like a sleepy driver trying to stay awake on the road.
When the familiar plunk-plunk-plunk of an acoustic guitar enters the picture, it does so unassumingly; you might wonder if it was there the whole time. The feedback squalls, then cuts out just as spectral vocals settle in: “Everybody knows he is not at home/Where else would he go?/Who knows?/You don’t.” The voice is soft and slightly slurred, adding to the hazy feel of the song, which spends its final three minutes crescendoing into a sea of crash cymbals, sighed “oohs,” and scattered piano.
This opening track is aptly named “Glow,” and it signals a new path for Strange Ranger, the band formerly known as Sioux Falls.