Bright Sparks is posted once a month and offers a collection of really great songs that we’re determined not to let slip past our radar. Vol. 27 is fresh out of the oven.
Bad Flamingo – Fire
“Give a man a mask,” said Oscar Wilde, “and he will tell you the truth.” The mysterious band Bad Flamingo have taken the idea to heart, favouring a cryptic anonymity that goes right through to actual masks. Without biographical details clouding the mix, we’re left to focus on the music, with new single ‘Fire’ showing off an ethereal Western atmosphere that creeps and crawls into a sparse yet infectious rhythm. The result is something pitched halfway between cowboy swagger and soulful pop, sounding inviting yet also dangerous too, as though a sharp edge lurks beneath the croon.
The track comes complete with a suitably atmospheric Super 8 video, so be sure to check it out below:
You can find more on Bad Flamingo via their website, and follow them on Facebook and Instagram.
Garden Centre – Wide Sea
In preparation for the release of their third album, A Moon for Digging, on Specialist Subject Records and Kanine Records, Brighton’s Garden Centre has unveiled a brand new single. ‘Wide Sea’ shows off a new full-band Garden Centre line-up, with principle songwriter Max Levy joined by members of Porridge Radio for a newly collaborative sound. Not that Levy’s distinctive style is in any way ironed out, the track full of the strange curiosity and energy that has long represented the Garden Centre sound.
“‘Wide Sea’ is a song about being incredibly worried about somebody, and to devoting yourself to worry,” the band explain, though insist the track is actually positive. “Coming through a period of constant fear for a person you love can peel the glue from your eyes. The horizon can overwhelm you with an accepting vastness, and you can find a little bit of comfort again in being unable to know or control the world around you.”
A Moon For Digging is out on the 1st November via Specialist Subject Records (UK)/Kanine Records (US).
Nina Keith – In The Woods We Both Saw It, Weren’t Dreaming
Nina Keith is a Philadelphia-based composer, who is about to release her debut full-length MARANASATI 19111. Built from “textured piano arrangements laced with vocals, flute, electronics and found sounds,” the album builds on foundations of contemporary classical music to create something something uniquely haunted and human. For a record that promises to delve into a “personal history marked by community tragedy and paranormal incidents,” lead single ‘ In The Woods We Both Saw It, Weren’t Dreaming’ is the perfect introduction, if just for that title alone. The piano-led track is quietly moving and oddly reassuring, a lament and a balm rolled into one. It’s a confident and distinctive taste of an album that could be very special indeed.
Antonioni – Stutter-Step
Returning with a new EP, The Odds Were All Beating Me, Seattle’s Antonioni have evolved from the languorous jangle rock of previous release Lullablaze into something altogether heavier and darker. While their past music flirted with grunge, the new is a full-bodied embrace, the powerful vocals of Sarah Pasillas driving a newfound energy and emotional immediacy.
Single ‘Stutter-Step’ is the perfect example, weaving lines of insistent energy into a hefty whole, meaning that the sound has both an urgency and a deeper, slow-burning dimension too. The track comes complete with a video by artist Kyle Todaro, with the improv choreography of Matte Demon.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzjbyahC2G4
The Odds Were All Beating Me is out now via Den Tapes and you can grab it from the Antonioni Bandcamp page.
Side Saddle – Ink & Dirty Strings
The recording project of New York’s Ian McGuinness, Side Saddle make a reflective brand of power pop that balances joy and angst to the perfect degree. Ahead of the forthcoming EP, Waltermelon, the band have unveiled lead single ‘Ink & Dirty Strings’, a track that shows off Side Saddle’s ability to combine moods to craft their own style. Charting the choppy waters of a long distance relationship, the track is at once melancholic and energetic, as though only through missing someone can you truly appreciate what they mean to you.
Special Friend – Before
Special Friend is a Paris-based duo raised from a cocktail of 90s genres, drawing on grunge, shoegaze and pop to create something lusciously textured and hazy, Erica (drums) and Guillaume (guitar) sharing the vocals. The press release describes a “naive, honest and spontaneous DIY nature” that saw the band play their first show after four months and record an EP a year later, and something of this attitude shapes the sound of debut single ‘Before’, providing a sense of wonder that permeates the track.
Filmed by Marion Sautron and edited by Erica, the single’s video is “an existential crisis on a background of light, even joyful music,” taking inspiration from David Hockney’s pink clouds. Check it out below:
‘Before’ is out via Howlin Banana Records.
Cartalk – Noonday Devil
Cartalk is the solo project of LA-based songwriter Chuck Moore who took the moniker from a text to a dear friend—”Love our car talks.” If such conversations are intimate and thematically fluid then Cartalk is determined to create a similar feel in the music, blending grunge and Americana into something heartfelt and full of momentum.
New single ‘Noonday Devil’ is a case in point, the guitars swelling and drums galloping as Moore rides the crest. Lyrically, the song is reflective but self-consciously so, recognising how patterns and conventions can shape the passage of time. Cartalk is here to dismantle such order, freeing one to live in the way that best suits them.
It’s a sentence break
Comma between patterns
Oh the love you gave
I’ve got a noonday devil
Justin Peter Kinkel-Schuster – Educated Guesses
You probably know Justin Peter Kinkel-Schuster’s voice if not his name. As the lead of Water Liars he proved himself a master of walking the line between folk and indie rock, combining great writing, expressive delivery and powerful instrumentation. The Arkansasan now has a burgeoning solo career, and is set to release his sophomore record Take Heart, Take Care later this month of Big Legal Mess Records.
Cut from “humid Southern nights and kudzu-encased vistas,” the album shows all of Kinkel-Schuster’s songwriting talents, representing American vignettes that are both detailed character studies and something much wider, serving as glimpses into the universal processes of hurting and healing. Single ‘Educated Guesses’ teases a newfound glimmer to Kinkel-Schuster’s tone too, the overwhelming dark of Water Liars not lost but somehow lifted, if not quite in the rear-view then at least not nailed over one’s eyes. Check out the video by Kyle Taubken below:
Take Heart, Take Care will be released on 30th August on Big Legal Mess Records.
Mount Sharp – Apostate
Formed somewhere between a Brooklyn rooftop and a boat in Maine, Mount Sharp combines the poetic songwriting of Swood (Sarah Wood) with Bryan Bruchman’s frenetically noisy sensibilities. With Ryan Zumsen and Maia Macdonald adding a rhythm section, 2014’s WEIRD FEARS EP was a lesson in uninhibited energy—be that born of excitement or anxiety.
Back with their first new music since that release, Mount Sharp have added Sal Garro and Jonathan Pilkington Kahnt on drums and bass and developed their sound into something more contemplative without loosing any of the spirit that marked them previously. Therefore, ‘Apopstate’ is an evolution, indebted to the past but shaped by present conditions, concerned with the personal and the political when exploring what it means to be pushed away from someone or something.
Surely I’m not made of bone and blood
Surely I’m something that’s never or always been
Am I still earning your love?
Do I remind you of someone you could dream of?
Pearla – Daydream
Pearla is the moniker of Brooklyn’s Nicole Rodriguez, a songwriter who knits threads of folk, pop and psychedelica into an evocative, mystical whole. New single ‘Daydream’ finds the sound perfected, the delicate minimalism belying the intricacy at work behind the vocals. “This song is about clinging onto a memory until it becomes distorted in your mind,” Rodriguez explains, “and turns into an almost absurd attempt to escape the present.”
Written after time spent rehabilitating primates in South Africa, and during an obsessive period reading Brontë novels, ‘Daydream’ offers memory and fiction as two forms of fantasy into which we can escape, spaces outside of the harsh realities of life that should be protected and celebrated.
Cataldo – Ding Dong Scrambled Eggs
“Anybody who has survived his childhood,” Flannery O’Connor once wrote, “has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.” Literally Main Street, the forthcoming record from Eric Anderson’s Cataldo, is crafted from a similar sentiment. Utilizing his trademark knack for writing songs that manage to be at once playful and emotional, the album sees Anderson take stock of life from the hinterland of middle age, an eye of a storm where longing for the future and nostalgia for the past cancel one another out.
“I tried to write songs about what it was really like growing up in a weird small town,” Andersen explains, “not a tarted up banjo-and-suspenders version of what people imagine it might be like,” and such a philosophy is clear on single ‘Ding Dong Scrambled Eggs’. This is hindsight without rose-tinted spectacles, memories shaken from the sepia-toned warmth and resurrected in all of their awkward, nervous energy. Check out the video by Dan Fromhart below:
Literally Main Street is out on the 27th September
That’s all for Vol. 27 folks. If you liked what you found, be sure to check the tag for previous editions of Bright Sparks.