Strange Pilgrim Finds Light ‘Through the Branches’
From Portland, Oregon, where the rain etches slow patterns on windowpanes, Strange Pilgrim returns with a song that feels unearthed rather than composed.
‘Through the Branches,’ drawn from their forthcoming album ‘Too Bright Planet’ (due September 26 via Royal Oakie Records), drifts like a recollection half-formed, lodged somewhere between winter and spring.
Led by Josh Barnhart whose voice and rhythm guitar evoke a clarity both unadorned and spectral—the group navigates a sound that is part recollection, part reverie. The track captures the peculiar hush of the early pandemic: time folding in on itself, the world held in abeyance. Yet even in that suspended state, something tender stirs…light shifting through trees, seasons glancing past.
Recorded live at Bocce Recording with Cory Gray and mastered by David Glasebrook, the song’s textures are meticulously placed. Elliott’s bass and twelve-string shimmer beneath Pat’s steady percussion, while Gray’s trumpet and melodica hover like echoes from an old film. The result recalls the faded beauty of Laurel Canyon, tinged with the delicate disorientation of dream.
It’s haunting, humane, quietly luminous.
Headline photo: Katie Oscar
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