Even in a catalog that bristles with pinnacles, Strangers From the Universe remains pinnaclier than most. Somehow harnessing influences from Bali to Cinecittà to Memphis to the wobbly Sunday morning organ at Oakland’s Rose of Sharon Missionary Baptist Church without feeling contrived or showoffy, Strangers is possibly and/or indisputably the most successful shotgun marriage of the Fellers’ disparate pop sensibilities with their outlandish song structures, their acre-feet of tape snippets with their hydra-headed arrangements, and their individual compositional and instrumental skills with their congenitally peculiar joint sensorium.

Eager as always to experiment with unconventional (i.e., daft and cumbersome) approaches to writing and recording, the Fellers fine-tuned their working methods for Strangers, assigning individual members as “sheriffs” to oversee the arrangement of promising morsels into coherent compositions. Even more daringly, they decided to let Greg Freeman, their long-suffering engineer, control his own mixing board. “The result was a much more cohesive sound than we'd ever gotten with our usual approach,” says TFUL282 multi-instrumentalist and multi-vocalist Mark Davies.

The whole album sounds as wild and inventive against the heartbreaking drosscape of early 2020s independent music as it did against the soul-crushing hellscape of mid-1990s independent music.

Bulbous Monocle’s long-overdue reissue puts every single one of this millipedal LP’s best feet forward with meticulous remastering by the golden-eyed and gimlet-eared Mark Gergis, making it an essential acquisition for the diffident toe-dipper as well as the seasoned bathyscaphist.