Blush Face – Libby
After the release of single ‘Had To’ last year, Richmond‘s Blush Face have returned with a new EP, Mirage Island. ‘Had To’ offered a maximalist sound to “confront the gap between expectation and reality, [looking] to find solace in the action,” and the new EP’s first single ‘Libby’ suggests the rich style continues into the new release. With the guitar, bass and percussion of four core members accentuated by violin, cello, trumpet and saxophone from a variety of guests, the song presents a lush and layered sound. One rooted in dream pop but grounded by a tangible physicality, blurring the line between reality and dreams. Fitting for a track about trying to manifest something dearly desired but never experienced through nothing but the imagination.
Bo Milli – FOMO
“Think Soccer Mommy meets The Beths, telling tales of hungover bus rides, dancing to The Strokes and a lingering unease that persists despite.” That’s how we previously described the work of Bergen‘s Bo Mili. Latest track ‘FOMO’ again taps into the zeitgeist to explore the pitfalls of love in the digital age, where everything is recorded and curated for your viewing no matter how uncomfortable it might be. “You make me feel dumb / sitting at home,” Bo Milli sings, “wondering if you’re out with someone / staring at my phone.” There’s genuine feeling to the song as it gathers momentum, but no small amount of wry humour too. This is the strange world we inhabit now, and blissful ignorance is a thing of the past.
Bobbie Lovesong – Inner Sea
Bobbie Lovesong is the recording project of Madelyn Strutz, whose debut album On the Wind is set to be released early next year via Woodsist. Written and recorded in an unfinished Earthship in Taos, New Mexico where a small group of musician rode out the lockdown, the album promises to be a surreal kaleidoscopic ode to the region, bringing together sixties pop, oddball psych and LSD-warped Americana. Lead single ‘Inner Sea’ is a great introduction, a strange warbling pop song that feels conjured from Taos’ desert landscape, the melody and ethereal vocals refracted into dreamlike unreality. Check out the video by Michael Stasiak below:
On the Wind will be released on 20th January via Woodsist. Preorder it now from the Bobbie Lovesong Bandcamp page.
Greyon Greene – Sunken Meadow Causeway
After the release of the crepuscular creeper Belong To It on Lily Tapes & Discs in 2019, Grayon Greene turned to their Low Pressure System catalogue with the release of LPS001. A series of compositions described as “Weather Channel music” which combines ambient textures and beats to conjure something at once nostalgic and unreal. The third in the catalogue, Transactional Memories furthers this style, slowly weaving a world based on our own but somehow separate too. Soundscapes drawn from charts and maps but made dreamlike with computerised graphics, digital textures and neon overlay.
Hack-Poets Guild – Daring Highwayman
A collaboration between Marry Waterson, Lisa Knapp and Nathaniel Mann, Hack-Poets Guild is a project with a forward-looking attitude to traditional folk styles. Their debut Blackletter Garland will be released next year via One Little Independent Records, a high-concept album which draws on history and folklore to dig into meaty themes of life and death with a decidedly idiosyncratic style. Lead single ‘Daring Highway’ is the introduction to this world, a breathless tale of the titular rover which crackles with danger and volatility, the rhythm conjuring a sense of lawless freedom sliding toward some climax, be it glorious or calamitous or some fickle combination of the two.
Jessica Breanne – Bad Shape
Released earlier this month via Perpetual Doom, Jessica Breanne’s Rosebud Queen is album concerning resilience in the face of difficult conditions, and how the spirit finds ways in which to survive. An attempt to find joy and beauty in the darkest situations, be it through hard perseverance or openness to change. Single ‘Bad Shape’ feels like an encapsulation of the album, a piece which began as a short story and gradually evolved into a song, morphing into what it needed to become to communicate its message most fully. Then director Kevin Doyle came along and took the concept further, adding his own ideas to create a new narrative for the video, and serving to highlight the way in which connection can create new things in unexpected ways.
Rosebud Queen is out now via Perpetual Doom and you can get it from Bandcamp.
The Bird Calls – Auditioning For The Part
The recording project of the prolific New York songwriter Sam Sodomsky, The Bird Calls has released over thirty records across the last decade or so, with the most recent Tarot on Ruination Record Co. his first with a label. Later this week Sodomsky returns to Ruination with My Life in Hollywood, a brand new record which continues the style established on Tarot—an idiosyncratic take on on classic country and folk which utilises and often subverts genre tropes to create something decidedly new. Take latest single ‘Auditioning For The Part’, a song fully aware of its place in a lineage of songwriters, or rather at the convergence of several lineages, be it George Jones and Johnny Paycheck or something more like The Mountain Goats, and thus able to play with the listener’s expectations in a way only the more learned songwriters can.
TV Room – Pretend
Back in December last year, we wrote about ‘Balcony‘, the debut single of Lucy Rushton’s TV Room released via Sad Club Records. Described as a subliminal message to someone they were unable to speak to, the song represented “an earnest if indirect attempt to communicate the nuances of emotion,” as we put it. “A human song in which no feeling is held back.” Rushton has now returned with a brand new single, ‘Pretend’, a track no less emotionally charged but something of an inversion of its predecessor. A song about being close to someone, almost too close to say what needs to be said. A love unrequited, even as the significant other goes through the motions and says all the right things.
‘Pretend’ is out now via Sad Club Records and you can get it from Bandcamp.
Will the Whale – Next to Me
The new solo project of Will Boesl, Will the Whale is gearing up to release debut album Only Things of the Heart Remain early next year, and single ‘Next to Me’ gives an indication as to what to expect. With Bennett Littlejohn (Hovvdy, Katy Kirby) joining on bass, the track is described as a “celebration of commitment and deep love.” A love letter to Boesl’s wife penned amid a myriad of personal and collective challenges, aiming to reassert what is the most important facet of any life. And furthering this compassionate style, all proceeds from the album are going to the Oceanic Preservation Society (OPS), with Boesl hoping to encourage further links between art and social action, using creative means as a positive force. You can find the video for ‘Next to Me’ below:
Only Things of the Heart Remain is out on the 24th February.