Brendan Ranney’s guitar went down for nearly two decades. What brought him back was a box of paper: in 2022 he came across his late father’s old poetry, and reading through it restarted something he’d assumed was finished. He picked up a guitar for the first time in nineteen years, and what came out of that stretch became “Slightly Out of Focus,” his first solo record.
Slightly Out of Focus
The album is melodic, guitar-driven rock, and its emotional territory is more or less what the backstory suggests, grief, reflection, and the strange experience of returning to something you’d already written off. Ranney has pointed to The Police, Social Distortion, R.E.M., and Midnight Oil as formative influences, and the record moves through a real range of moods because of it.
“My Existence (No Not Today)” throws the door open rather than knocking first, no real intro before the band kicks in, and Ranney’s own voice sits underneath it in a flat, worn-down register that undersells the emotion rather than performing it. There’s a clear debt to The Cure in the guitar work here, moody and layered in that specific gray-skies way. “Last Ride” changes the temperature almost immediately after. The tone shifts toward something rounder and older-sounding, more suited to a decade before the one that shaped the opener, and Ranney’s singing loosens up to match, less clenched, easier to follow melodically.
The mood swings back with “Second Son,” another guitar part that owes a debt to The Cure’s playbook, low and unsettled, with Ranney’s vocal dropping into its heaviest, saddest range of the record. Neither element outshines the other, which is part of what makes the track work as well as it does. Then “Where I’ve Been” arrives and does something none of the earlier songs attempt. It opens on acoustic, folk-rooted guitar rather than anything electric, giving the whole song a lighter footing right out of the gate, and Ranney’s vocal takes on a hazier, more far-off quality that isn’t a million miles from Alex G, while the guitar interplay has shades of Foals in its intricacy. Out of everything on the record, this is the track most likely to make a new listener stop and pay closer attention, and it’s easily the most fully realized song here.
“I Remember You” pulls back rather than pushing further, content to stay small and let two elements, guitar and voice, do the talking instead of adding more to the mix. The lyrics don’t try to be clever, and that plainness is exactly why the song works as well as it does. “I Don’t Want To Go” is the record’s high point emotionally, the one song where strings show up and change the texture of everything around them, and it’s arguably Ranney’s best vocal take on the album, sounding like every earlier song was quietly setting up for this one. Closer “Sail Away” wraps things up with the cleanest mix on the record and a vocal that, in a few spots, brushes up against Eddie Vedder’s tone without ever feeling like a copy. It’s a strong closer overall, though it cuts off sooner than it probably should, the song earns a longer goodbye than it gets.
What keeps the record from becoming a nostalgia exercise is that Ranney isn’t trying to sound like whoever he was before he stopped. This is clearly the work of someone in his forties looking backward, not someone pretending the gap didn’t happen, and that perspective is most of what gives these songs their weight. There’s vulnerability in it without any self-pity, which is a harder balance to strike than it sounds, especially with material this close to home.
Final Thoughts
“Slightly Out of Focus” is a genuinely moving debut, and the story behind it, a creative life interrupted and then restarted by a father’s words, gives the whole record a foundation most first albums don’t have.
You can find Brendan Ranney on his official website. Stay tuned to MusicOnTheRox.com for all your music news and reviews.
