The Wanderer Along - A PORTRAIT OF ME

 Released: July 20

On what appears to be their first album, Indiana-based artist The Wanderer Along tells a short but engaging story about odd and terrifying happenings in the strangely-chosen town of Kingfisher, Oklahoma. The story is told through a sort of public access channel broadcast, somewhere in between a weather station and the TV guide, and opens up on a good note with “ 6:00AM (SIGNING ON)” but slowly morphs into a terrifying public emergency involving alien doppelgängers. As you might have guessed, the album borrows heavily from the analog horror genre with nods to The Mandela Tapes, Local 58, and SCP-adjacent emergency alert scenarios. The album follows a full broadcast day all the way to “3:00AM (SIGNING OFF)” by which time the community has fallen into pure terror. 

A big piece that the album really nails in this regard is the pacing as we keep getting lulled back into easy and relaxed motifs that are periodically broken by unnerving broadcasts that talk about a man murdering his family and shelter in place orders. On the other side of this is the music, which wades deep into old and faded transmissions from the 80s and 90s, complete with the rather cheesy nature of those stock music libraries licensed to every local station in the US. Most of it stays rather simple and sometimes plain. But this works quite well with the pieces of scattered soap opera dialogues and sardonic advertisements for energy pills. Without giving away too much, everything that you hear is tied together in bizzare and unnerving ways, even if it seems to be a bit tangential. But it all works really well together to make for a sense of dread, mystery, and otherworldly horrors. It’s a very interesting concept pulled off with some clever execution and worth all the 30 minutes of your time it asks for.