Sometimes it’s the most unlikely thing that makes you want to hear a record. With Suburban Tours, I read an interview in The Wire magazine with Joe Knight, the one-man-band that is Rangers, in which he described the songs as “dull, numb, and vacant.” An odd way for a musician to characterize his own work, you might think. Odder still, it’s this remark that snagged my attention, got me thinking: “I’ve got to hear this album.”

To understand why a creator might say such a thing and why it might pique a consumer’s interest, we need to re-immerse ourselves in the musical climate of the late 2000s and early 2010s. The reigning sensibility on the American underground was something variously dubbed chillwave, hypnagogic pop, and glo-fi (my favorite of the three, and easily the most evocative of how the genre actually sounded, this term sadly never really caught on). Artists like James Ferraro, Oneohtrix Point Never, and Emeralds were exploring hitherto maligned genres like New Age and yacht rock. Meanwhile, over in the UK, hauntologists like the Ghost Box label were sampling, or simulating, the inconspicuous sounds of library music and radiophonics. People were suddenly paying attention to music you were never meant to pay attention to, giving serious consideration to sounds until now considered beneath serious consideration. Square was hip, soporific was exciting, background came to the foreground.

What happened then is what the philosophers call transvaluation: Conventional ideas about what is good, valid, pleasing to the ear were upended. Suddenly, you could no longer think of words like “bland” or “slick” as inherently negative properties. It wasn’t so much that hip folk were examining unexamined assumptions as they were simply turned on by the idea of thinking counterintuitively—by the sheer dare of listening to the original uncool music, or the contemporary cool music influenced by it.

This new appreciation for soft rock and sedative New Age made sense as a paradigm shift within the rock dialectic. While initially an invigorating break from late ’90s alt-rock blandness, what could be more conventional, played-out, and old hat by 2008 than the standard, White Stripesy palette of “raw,” “dirty,” “warm”? Not that those received associations have ever gone away entirely: They’ve just wound their way through to the beyond-exhaustion point of what I call “Studio Dirty,” and young bands modeled on this obsolete value system still trundle forth to play the lower rungs of festival line-ups.

Having said all that, when I finally clapped ears on Suburban Tours in spring 2010, it didn’t strike me as dull or numb or vacant. It sounded exciting, tingling with feeling, ecstatic. And in a funny way, the record does involve qualities traditionally valorized in underground rock. The sound is rough around the edges; distortion is involved. Suburban Tours is audibly a DIY record, home-made on dirt-cheap equipment, and in no way resembles something cooked up (coked up?) by the Doobie Brothers at Sunset Sound Recorders.

But I could see what Joe Knight was getting at with “dull, numb, and vacant”—there’s a serene, empty-headed glide and glisten to the sound. He was living in San Francisco when he recorded Suburban Tours, initially just as a creative outlet from a series of soul-deadening jobs. But as the songs accumulated, the vibe that emerged reminded him of Texas, the home state he’d only recently left behind. The guitar sound has the frazzled dazzle of suburban sprawl in the Sun Belt. Listening, you almost feel like shielding your eyes from light glancing off windows and car roofs and the surfaces of swimming pools.

As the record coalesced around a mood, Knight started to title the tracks after subdivisions where he’d grown up: neighborhoods with names like “Deerfield Village,” “Bear Creek,” “Woodland Hills,” and “Glencairn” that gesture towards the wilderness they’ve replaced. He titled “Golden Triangles” after a mall near Denton he used to visit as a kid when staying with his grandparents. “Out Past Curfew” references the regulations that kids love to flout in American towns, even when there’s not that much to do out there after dark.

As a title, a “set and setting” theme, Suburban Tours crystallizes the kind of sensations that the music suggests: steady and tranquil transit—driving, cycling, jogging, walking the dog—through the placid plotted neatness of the burbs. A landscape of new-built and often single-story constructions (where space is cheap, why not sprawl sideways rather than build vertically?) alternating with playing fields, public parks and all those artificially irrigated, barely used front lawns.

Rush’s 1982 single “Subdivisions” became a talisman for Knight as the album took shape: not so much for its retooled New Wave sound as for its promo video. Aerial shots traverse the characterless cookie-cutter grid of Greater Toronto’s suburbs. The camera zooms down to follow the humiliations of a lonely teenage boy, a nerdy individual trapped within soulless surroundings and high-school hierarchies—the archetypal Rush fan, in other words. “Nowhere is the dreamer or the misfit so alone… Conform or be cast out,” sings Geddy Lee. Although Alex Lifeson is one of Knight’s guitar heroes, there’s nothing on Suburban Tours that sounds like Rush, except for a dated Yamaha synth, seemingly on loan from Geddy, that here and there flickers through the reverb-haze of guitar.

Suburban Tours is my favorite guitar album of the last 15 years. And it’s very much the work of a humble guitar hero. Intricate filigrees of soloistic melody thread through the glittering smog. Knight started learning classical guitar from the age of 12. Soon he was an avid reader of guitar technical magazines. If he’d read fanzines, alternative weeklies in the Village Voice mold, or a magazine like Spin, Knight might have assimilated an alternative rock value system. Instead, his pantheon of guitar idols jumbles figures from all over the spectrum: Eddie Van Halen and Felt’s Maurice Deebank, Robert Fripp and Royal Trux’s Neil Hagerty, Adrian Belew and Johnny Marr. As a result, his head—and his playing—was from the start already in the transvaluated space that chillwave turned into a new kind of cool.

Coming across records by Ariel Pink was a key moment for Knight: the messthetic of classic rock and ’80s pop hits hazily heard through a badly tuned transistor radio, but also the inspiring idea that you could make a record entirely on your own, using a Tascam Portastudio or similar 8-track home recording unit. Another catalyst was James Ferraro, particularly in his Lamborghini Crystal identity (“like some kind of weird audio graphic novel” is how Knight describes that project’s releases). The earliest Rangers recordings, like the tape Low Cut Fades and the 20-minute-plus no-fi sprawls later released as Europe on TV, are very much in the shadow of Ferraro’s flood of tape releases of the late 2000s, along with the noisescapes that Pink included on albums like Worn Copy. But with Suburban Tours, something distinctive took shape: a classic case of genius emerging out of scenius, an individual voice speaking through the common vocabulary of an era.

Recording on his own, using basic equipment, plugging his guitar straight into the multitrack rather than spilling out into the room: This constricted and claustrophobic set-up encouraged Knight to find ways to snazz up what might have otherwise sounded dead-aired and lifeless. Using a $99 Digitech multi effects processor, he piled on reverb, phaser, and other effects. His 8-track had a built-in varispeed, so he used that to slow down tracks to intensify the woozy dreaminess. He used GarageBand to have different effects going on in the separate channels of the stereo-field, to suck the treble out of the sound, and to sluice entire finished songs through another layer of distortion that glued everything together. The hypnotic lope of the rhythm section adds to the record’s makeshift charm: There’s a sort of sprained funk feel, with gluey, heavily treated bass (often played with a slap element) dovetailing with drum pads played by hand through a 1980s-redolent gated setting. The feel of a band is simulated, without fully masking the fact that this is a man grooving by himself in the absence of musical playmates.

It’s hard to pick out favorites on an album that works as a one solid block, each song a slightly differently inflected iteration of a wondrous same. The swirling radiances and plaintive synth pipings of “Deerfield Village”, the opening track, set the template for most of what follows. “Golden Triangles” enchants me because its sweetly sentimental melody recalls the slick jazz-funk on the soundtrack of Gregory’s Girl, a 1980s rom-com set in a Scottish high school. At other points during the record, the mood of gentle elation—as opposed to any musical specifics—reminds me of Vince Guaraldi’s Peanuts music and Ernest Hood’s Neighborhoods. Almost inevitably, the Texas mise en scene suggests an affinity with Richard Linklater’s films about rhapsodic meandering like Slacker and Dazed and Confused. Suburban Tours, and indeed the entire chillwave moment, feels like one more fold in the slackerdelic continuum that includes other self-effacing guitar heroes like Dinosaur Jr.’s J. Mascis and Curt Kirkwood of Meat Puppets.

Suburban Tours is so much a guitar feast of an album, I always forget that a bunch of the songs feature Knight’s voice, albeit submerged in the mix and heavily processed. Later albums like Texas Rock Bottom and Late Electrics are properly songful, featuring his small, pleasant mumblecore voice on almost every tune. In the large and varied Rangers discography, there’s the sample-strewn Spirited Discussions, a metal-oriented, all-instrumental exercise in nostalgia called Out in the Sticks, and Reconsider Lounge, a collation of song shards from the archives. All of it is well worth a listen, but Suburban Tours is where Knight bottled magic. The next closest thing is its immediate successor, 2011’s Pan Am Stories, a sprawling double album recorded using all the same settings as on Suburban Tours. “Zeke’s Dream” is a 13-minute multi-segmented beauty whose final two minutes of achingly lyrical noise I wish had been elongated to an hour. Then there’s “Sacred Cows,” featuring a gorgeous solo in which Knight channels Robby Krieger.

Does Suburban Tours, and the chillwave moment it belonged to, capture anything of the larger era in which it was made? It’s hard to reconstruct mentally what life felt like in 2010. The crash of 2008 was in the rear-view mirror, but the economy was still rough. Obama was president, which was nice, but he faced fierce resistance and obstruction both within Congress and without (from the Tea Party). In March 2010, the month that Suburban Tours came out, the Affordable Care Act passed, which was also nice, but then again, the Public Option had been strangled at birth. Overall, it was an interstitial sort of time, a phase of irresolution and centrist muddle-through, that felt frustrating at the time, but from today’s vantage seems relatively idyllic.

When I first heard Suburban Tours, I was only a few months away from moving from New York’s East Village to suburban east LA: a massive upheaval, but also a renewal, an adventure. My family and I went from bustling streets to sidewalks eerily empty even during daylight and traversed by little gangs of raccoons after dark. Suddenly records by the likes of Ferraro and his former Skaters partner Spencer Clark made a lot more sense in this terrain of palm trees, parakeets, jacaranda, and drive-thru In-and-Out Burger signs juxtaposed with the almost parodically picturesque San Gabriel mountains. In a quite accidental but real and fortuitous way, Suburban Tours spiritually prepared me for this transition—a return to a warmer and drier version of my own childhood habitat, an English commuter town, after a quarter-century of inner-city living in London and Manhattan.

Born out of Knight’s own unexpected feelings of nostalgia for his Texas youth (eventually he would leave the Bay Area and return to his home state), the album’s baked-in, bittersweet wistfulness is the kind that anybody can wrap around their own particular yearnings. Geddy Lee may have lamented that “the suburbs have no charms to soothe the restless dreams of youth.” But tapping a mood poised between anomie and reverie, Suburban Tours finds the bliss in the blandness.