Joe Knight's Rangers project burst onto the scene in 2009 with two limited-edition cassette releases on which the music and presentation seemed to go hand-in-hand. With titles such as "Europe on TV" and "Volvo Jungle Mist" placed on j-cards featuring vintage photography of automobiles, Knight's infatuation with saturated analog was beyond question. Comparisons to Rangers' former Olde English Spelling Bee labelmates are a given, but particularly Ferraro's Grippers Nother Onesers LP is what much of his attributes recall: muffled vocal hooks, heavyset slap-bass, and the latent pop marketability if it hadn't been recorded onto overused Maxell c90's. The breakneck excitement over Rangers was transparent, as Joe Knight had uncovered a hidden realm of VHS psychedelia whose present-day documentation would have seemed dubious without prior knowledge of Ariel Pink.
His first proper album Suburban Tours displayed immense refinement in its over-two-track length and larger semblance of conventional songwriting. Its authentic late-'80s-early-'90s veneer didn't garner all of the praise, though. Peppering his looping phaser-soaked guitar backdrop was Knight's voice slathered in reverberant, mind-expanding distortion that elicited a spellbinding loss of conscious. In an anachronistic sense, the album fused groovy nostalgia with the druggy exploration shared by many on the Not Not Fun roster. Much of that compositional prowess and hypnotism has transferred to Pan Am Stories, though its twofold length and saga-like title are testament to Knight's elevated ambition, and one would need to look no further than "Zeke's Dream" to find evidence of this. No longer do the jams plateau and instead explore the entrancing capabilities of repetition as well as fluid transitions between variant phases.
As the title would suggest, Knight allows his music to soar, whether it be in a given song's expanse or the sheer mood. Just a shade away from mall muzak is "Jane's Well", where echoing guitars glide above a bubbly tempo cleansing the listener of unease while their cross-continental travel smoothly advances. That, as well as an ample number of Pan Am Stories' boisterous space-rock vignettes attain an even greater inclination toward familiar framework than that of Suburban Tours. On the second suite opener "Zombies (Night)", his lyricism is elucidated in playfully illustrating a struggle for survival, "On the full moon, onto the city streets, entertained most easily / I saw you climb the ladder, I saw you climb the tree." Considering the extent of Rangers' newly acquired dynamics, Pan Am Stories could be assessed as an eclectic pastiche of past pop culture, with channels frantically riffled through and their common bond discovered all-inclusively.
[Rangers Myspace]
[Buy Pan Am Stories from Not Not Fun]
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