D.C. Americana outfit Stranger In The Alps crafted a lovely batch of songs for its debut LP, Honey If You’re Lucky, and today the band has a new album that polishes and refines the promise of that 2013 album.
Pattern Matching comes from Mount Pleasant resident Steve Kolowich, Stranger In The Alps’ sole songwriter. He’s exceptional at capturing that young-but-weary Gram Parsons style of songcraft; yet as steeped in the 1970s as Pattern Matching sometimes sounds, producer Louis Weeks (who also contributes synthesizers, vocals, guitar and an egg shaker) brings a contemporary sheen to Kolowich’s gently twangy compositions.
Kolowich says he wrote much of Pattern Matching while flying. “For a lot of us, being in an airplane is the closest we are to dying,” he told Bandwidth in a 2014 interview.
Stranger In The Alps’ new LP is streaming today on Soundcloud and Bandcamp, and arrives later this week on iTunes and Spotify. Listen to it below.