Ransom Scenery – Ear To Ear

Ransom Scenery is the Illinois duo with a taste for avant-garde music. On their latest album ear to ear, the duo takes experimentation to a chilling new level with nine tracks of dream rock that knows no frontiers. 

Straight off the bat, Ransom Scenery delves into their very own bizarro world with opening track ‘Spinning Slowly’ - a rhapsody of haunting drones and spacey synthesizers. Beneath the dark overtones there’s quite melodic vocal work at play, making the song oddly entrancing in its eeriness. Track two ‘Driplove’ introduces plucky, left field mandolins, while ‘My Golden Shield’ drowns in throbbing bass. Bouncing off the walls with fidgety rhythms in all directions, ‘Just Tour’ opens in snappy fashion before eventually relenting into a steady but nonetheless sinister stride. Breaking the album up with a wash of what can only be described as “disturbed tranquillity” is the instrumental track ‘Unconditional’. With layer upon layer of shadowy harmonies and stretched out electric guitars, Ransom Scenery creates a rich soundscape on ‘Unconditional’, one that’s surprisingly relaxing in the face of an otherwise manic album.

‘Holozoic’ takes us on a trip down a warped, dimly lit alleyway of trance experimentation. If this record were Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, ‘Holozoic’ would be the dark tunnel scene. (On second thoughts, the whole album is the dark tunnel scene.) Earthy vibes are thrown into the mix with marimbas and glockenspiels on next track ‘Gasm of the Heart (knuckle gloves)’, while ‘All My’ is a relatively simmered down eight minutes.

Arriving at ‘Pop Scripture’, Ransom Scenery closes the album with collisions of broken record vocal samples accompanied by cello born for a thriller movie.

ear to ear is as far from easy-listening as the North Pole is from the South. But there’s hidden depth in these dark, weird experimentations – you just have to give yourself the chance to find it.

ear to ear is available from Bandcamp.