The album is the latest in a long line of releases from Ben and Adam Parker. Starting as Tempertwig back in the halcyon days of noughties indie, the pair shifted through various projects including Nosferatu D2 and The Superman Revenge Squad Band before eventually settling on their current iteration. The pair won acclaim from various corners with each release, building a loyal fanbase in the way Audio Antihero artists seem to do best, but always sitting uncomfortably within a music industry which often asks too much of its would-be stars. But where some sell out and others self-destruct, the Parkers decided to operate on their own terms, appearing and disappearing as it suited them, always changing, always staying the same.

Following on from similar retrospective features on Benjamin Shaw, Fighting Kites, Broken Shoulder, Frog (parts 1 and 2) and Magana, we have again enlisted Jamie Halliday from Audio Antihero to share their memories on the Parker brothers’ career, from the early days right up to the present day. Read on below!

I’ve worked with Ben and Adam Parker on and off since the Audio Antihero record label’s inception in 2009 when I released Nosferatu D2’s We’re Gonna Walk Around This City With Our Headphones on to Block Out the Noise. In the many years that have followed, I got the opportunity to work with them again with different names and lineups on records by The Superman Revenge Squad Band and Tempertwig.

I suppose it was a bit of a coincidence that Audio Antihero came out of hiding in late 2023 for Frog’s Grog album shortly after the Parker brothers had formed My Best Unbeaten Brother with Ben Fry. This lucky timing means I am fortunate enough to once again be their label. We did kind of a soft launch with the ‘Slayer on a Sunny Day‘ single in December, and the debut record, Pessimistic Pizza, was released late last month. I hope you’ll check it out if you get a chance.

The Parkers have had a strange journey, a kind of feast or famine in terms of output and people’s interest in their work. This is actually the first release I’ve done with them where the band is still active since previous titles have been posthumous, one-offs, or retrospectives. It’s almost a novelty to work with them on something where a follow-up release is a possibility, where the band is excited to get together to record radio sessions and play live, and maybe most importantly, where the songs we’re promoting reflect the artists in the present day.

I think my label’s history with Ben and Adam Parker illustrates that I’m quite big on documenting and archiving. That’s why I wanted Nosferatu D2’s album to be on CD, and that’s why Tempertwig demos were remastered and released. Too much stuff just disappears and so much context gets lost, oftentimes this happens with things far more important than Indie Rock, but that’s what I periodically choose to make myself responsible for, so essentially I’m doing this again here.

I wanted to record some kind of a history and evolution of the work of Ben and Adam Parker from Tempertwig to My Best Unbeaten Brother. It’s all through my eyes, and I’m not really sure who it’s for, but it’s something I wanted to exist for someone. Bands break up, labels give up, blogs go dark, and music platforms shut down, but there’s always someone who remembers, and too often I’ve sought out a band or a song and found nothing. So, I like the idea that the following links, quotes, and memories are consolidated in one place should that person ever come looking for them.

TEMPERTWIG

Tempertwig was a 3 piece band from Croydon that I tried to make into a mixture of Pulp, Arab Strap, Dinosaur Jr and the Afghan Whigs. We started in 1999 and finished in 2004 I think. Along the way we recorded a bunch of songs at different places, got played by Steve Lamacq when he was on Radio 1, built up a small group of other bands that we liked playing with, then called it a day

—Ben Parker (For the Rabbits, 2019)

The chronology of Ben and Adam Parker’s musical exploits can feel a little jumbled on account of the irregular way that much of their music was released. So while the vast majority of their output didn’t receive a formal release until 2019 (their one previous commercial release was a seven-inch split single with Air Formation), Tempertwig came first.

The trio (completed by bassist Daniel Debono) went from scrappy post-punk to something that the late great Cereal & Sounds blog called “Angled hooks, mathematical elasticity, and unbridled ferocity,” before dubbing Ben and Adam Parker “the lost pioneers of the indie-emo scene.” You can believe I ran hard with that line in our press materials.

When discussing the meaning of the song ‘Bratpack Film Philosophy’,” Ben told The Alternative: “The lyrics are inspired by the Breakfast Club, awful small talk at parties and a Motown collection on record that I got from a charity shop at university that had “I’m still waiting” by Diana Ross on it.” Ben’s lyrics often mix these references to good and bad media with the very real frustrations and disappointments that come with trying to find a way to live, connect, and relate. It’s through this combination that he creates a rat king of dissatisfaction, where the dull and drab become something frantic and frightening.

I’ve seen Tempertwig described (probably on the Drowned in Sound forum?) as something like “Nosferatu D2 with a bassist / distortion pedal,” which is factually true, but doesn’t necessarily give them their due. When compared to other more streamlined outlets for Ben’s songs, the depth of the sound, and the variety of the arrangements can be quite exhilarating to listen to. The spark that made Nosferatu D2 a small cult success is always there too, that bizarre sibling chemistry between a Metal drummer and a Bonnie Prince Billy nerd.

Nosferatu D2 and Superman Revenge Squad’s songs often push us to question how, if none of this matters, we can feel how we do. If there’s no meaning to any of this, why do we fill our homes with books and records? Why do we write, think, and take ourselves out into crowded shopping centres in search of touch and meaning? For me, Tempertwig possessed that same swollen contradiction. “Why is the bedroom so cold, etc etc.”

When reflecting on their live shows in 2019, Adam mentioned: “Every song was like a race to the end – the adrenaline definitely took hold when we played gigs, which gave us an edge of barely controlled chaos.” Ben told God Is In the TV that their anthology release contained a: “younger version of me that I can barely recognise in places.”

NOSFERATU D2

This record perfectly depicts disillusionment with the place you live or the relationship you’re in, but are completely unable to bring yourself to get away from. Brothers Adam and Ben Parker– Adam whose drumming is up there with any drummer I’ve ever heard, and Ben whose lyrics are perfect in their hopelessness

—Gareth Campesinos! (Pitchfork)

Nosferatu D2 broke up in 2007 and the Audio Antihero record label was started around their unreleased debut album in 2009. It was a silly idea that panned out quite well on account of a small but enthusiastic fanbase, which included Gareth Campesinos! (who wrote a very kind piece about the album on the Los Campesinos! website), and a small fleet of music bloggers. The unexpected interest helped us get support from  Pitchfork, Drowned in Sound,  The Line of Best Fit,  DIY Mag, The Skinny, BBC 6 Music, Public Radio International’s ‘The World’ and a heap of others. If you’ve heard of the Parker brothers (or Audio Antihero, for that matter), it’s quite likely that Nosferatu D2 is the reason why.

They’ve been one of my favourite bands since I was a teenager, but I’ve always had a hard time articulating what it is exactly that I love so much. The lyrics, of course, and the urgency that’s perhaps exemplified by the immediacy of ‘Broken Tamagotchi’ or the frantic ‘Springsteen’. This quality of urgency doesn’t always mean fast and loud though, it can be found in other ways and at other tempos.

I was once practically yelled at by a music degree student about ‘Colonel Parker’, who found its jolting stop-start so miserably unmusical. There’s also ‘I Killed Burt Bacharach’, which I saw reviewed once as something like “Radiohead stuck in the mud.” Evidently, these songs are not to everyone’s taste, but there’s an urgency in their delay. Some might hear aimlessness, but to me, it sounds like a desperate attempt for the Parkers to ground themselves, to hold onto some control, which inevitably slips away before the cathartic finale.

It was always far easier to describe the feeling than the sound, and so Nosferatu D2 was always something that you just needed to try in order to know if its rough edges were a positive or a negative for you I always loved this review quote: “Some kind of alchemy, not to be repeated—a mix of tension, bitterness, and a way with lyrics that no one has, or will, match”—Drowned in Sound

A lot of the interest in Nosferatu D2, and their moderate (but what was for us huge) success occurred before their music was sold via Bandcamp and iTunes, or streamed on Spotify and Apple Music. So, I suspect a lot of those connections were lost over the years as MP3s were deleted and boxes of CDs were shoved under the bed (and then out the door). At press and radio, a lot of their supporters were hobbyists who eventually got too busy with real life to keep up with fielding premiere pitches for so little in return.

Consequently, it’s kind of hard to really illustrate to the uninitiated that this little Nosferatu D2 revival was a pretty special moment in time, I don’t think Audio Antihero could have gotten through the first few years without the goodwill Nosferatu D2 had given us.

I spoke on this about as well as I’m going to when I made a pretty sombre Christmas mixtape for Various Small Flames last year:

It’s funny because Nosferatu D2 really did so well. As a dead band on a first-timer one-person DIY label, the album kinda overachieved and found an audience, but that CD-buying fanbase never quite translated to Spotify, which in part is my fault for being a late adapter but is probably also common for inactive independent releases. In recent years however, Nosferatu D2 have been getting a bit of a boost on Spotify at this time of year. This particular song has amassed a modestly respectable 37,000+ streams thanks to playlists like ‘christmas cries‘, ‘Christmas Music for Pretentious People‘, ‘loser christmas playlist‘, and bless them: ‘It’s Christmas time for God’s sake‘.

I don’t think that myself or either Parker had particularly aimed for their lasting legacy to be having a very nominal Christmas hit but as their song ‘A Footnote‘ illustrates: you’re lucky to be a part of all this any way that you can be. If you put enough time into it all then you’ll learn that there’s far worse things to be known for in music than having a song people like listening to.

For what it’s worth, “It’s Christmas Time (For God’s Sake)” is now up to just shy of 45,000 streams on Spotify.

When the album came out, I remember one review made a point of mocking the unsustainability of my “business model” on account of launching with an inactive band. I think it might have been the same review that said it was “absolute shit posing as absolute genius,” which I bitchily quoted on a later press release as “…absolute genius” because I thought that was a pretty funny thing to do at the time.

The writer was probably right about it all being a daft idea in theory, but in some ways, Nosferatu D2 were maybe an ideal band for a micro-revival. They’d done enough in their short lifespan to have a couple of higher-profile fans, they’d been featured by NME, BBC, and XFM, but they were also quite restrained in their live schedule and promotional efforts. There was still much that could be done, and perhaps even a small air of mystery about them, I didn’t even really know what the band looked like until I saw them live for the first time.

A 2006 interview with Ben Parker for Robots & Electronic Brains makes it pretty apparent that they weren’t terribly keen on compromise or becoming entangled in the more cynical or desperate aspects of making music. Re-reading the interview today, this quote stood out:

Adam’s got a sixteen-track that we take to the practice room, then he mixes it at home. I don’t ever want to go into a proper studio – I don’t like the kind of people you get working there. I really quite dislike the music industry and I think we aren’t part of it. I don’t really want to go back to spending loads of money and getting someone outside involved. Their influence just works its way in. I’m happy with what we’ve got, it’s immediate, and I like the fact when we’re played on the radio and stuff it’s just us two.

So, maybe in 2009, with a couple of years of distance, it was a solid option to allow in a DIY label that was helmed by an inexperienced superfan, one far too hapless to know how to try to manipulate them into something ugly or expensive. There was someone there to do the shamelessly enthusiastic (or enthusiastically shameless) promotion through channels that may have always just been waiting for something this different, someone who at that time was still too excited to really mind the indignities of a collapsing industry.

Speaking of shameless, one time I wanted to use a burner account to bump their legendary thread on the Drowned in Sound forum, but I forgot to log out of my label account first and posted something like “wow I just bought this album, so great!” on main. Mad embarrassing. When I remember who I was in the early years of this label, it makes more sense to me that Benjamin Shaw (Nosferatu D2’s only labelmate until 2011) was always making fun of me.

THE SUPERMAN REVENGE SQUAD BAND

This chronophobic dissatisfaction with how life turned out, paired with a lack of control over any of it, leads me to rehearse and remember negligible things, especially from the realm of popular culture, just so I can cling to something that allows me a pathetic sort of mastery and belonging. So much of my anxiety comes from cultural surplus, the acute unease of being always a curator, never a creator. I’m ashamed of how tragic I felt in discovering that I still know all of the words to Savage Garden’s “I Want You,” but that any other memory of my fifteen-year-old experience is virtually non-existent.

Ben Parker, formerly of Nosferatu D2, now recording solo as Superman Revenge Squad Band, has created an album that eloquently articulates these anxieties and musings with an alarming degree of accuracy. There is Nothing More Frightening Than the Passing of Time terrifies me as much as it comforts me to know that someone else is having these thoughts.

—From a High Horse

While those who discovered Tempertwig likely did so after Nosferatu D2, it was The Superman Revenge Squad’s 2013 album, There Is Nothing More Frightening Than the Passing of Time, which was the closest we’d gotten to what you could call a “follow up” to the duo’s well-received debut (until My Best Unbeaten Brother’s Pessimistic Pizza in June of 2024, of course).

Superman Revenge Squad briefly overlapped with Nosferatu D2 when Ben began uploading his solo recordings to Myspace before they called it quits shortly after supporting Los Campesinos! and Sky Larkin in March 2007 (as captured on ‘Live at The Spitz’).

Superman Revenge Squad evolved from Ben recording solo with an electric guitar to Ben recording solo on an acoustic guitar, and later he expanded the lineup to a duo (initially with Martin Webb on cello, and later with Tim Eveleigh on the accordion). If you were lucky though, you might have actually caught Adam joining him on stage to play drums for The Angriest Dog in the World, which was something I found spellbinding when I got to see it in 2009 or so (I believe at The Brixton Windmill).

Though the brothers had resumed (briefly) sharing stages, it would take a few more years before you’d hear them collaborating on new recordings. It wouldn’t be fair to refer to it as an album by Ben and Adam Parker however since the lineup for this record was expanded to The Superman Revenge Squad Band, featuring a lineup of Jon Roffey, Martin Webb, and Gavin Kinch who added saxophone, accordion, cello, and piano on top of Ben’s guitar and Adam’s drums.

As Ben had done previously with Superman Revenge Squad, he mixed new songs (‘Lately I’ve Found Myself Regressing’) with re-recordings of old songs (‘Kendo Nagasaki’), offering a more layered and immediate experience than he’d been able to offer under this moniker previously.

We wouldn’t recapture the same blitz of press support for this release, in part because so many past supporters of Nosferatu D2 and Superman Revenge Squad had moved on from music, and perhaps because just two months prior I’d burned through more favours than I realised during my unhinged press efforts for Cloud’s Comfort Songs. However the new album did well, the CDs sold out (I’ve lost my copy, and can’t even find one to buy back), we got some wonderfully thoughtful reviews, and Steve Lamacq and Gideon Coe were pretty generous with BBC airplay too.

It was a lovely experience with a lovely album. I’d wanted to work on something from Superman Revenge Squad for a long time, so to get to do so, and to find out yet again that his words and music could really move people felt good.

Here are some kind words about it:

…Practically bursts with melodic ideas thrumming off of tense accordions and wandering saxophones. In one way it sounds like Parker has gone off the deep end finally, but in another it is pure genius. You may recall we’ve done things like proclaim Parker England’s greatest contemporary lyricist, or characterize him here as “startlingly talented,” all of which still holds true

—Clicky Clicky Music

This album speaks to me on an almost embarrassingly intimate level… It’s been a long time since I was so interested in an album’s lyrical content

—The Album Wall

There’s something so special about There Is Nothing More Frightening Than the Passing of Time. It’s a record which deserves wider recognition, but will likely hold a special place only to those few fortunate enough to have come into contact with it. I for one am truly glad that I am one of those

—Gold Flake Paint

I suspect that the big band iteration of Superman Revenge Squad had always been intended to be short-lived, or sporadic at most, but the entire thing went quiet after this album. Ben continued to perform with The Jonbarr Hinge, a group he’d joined around 2010, and they released an album in 2015, but there were no more Superman Revenge Squad releases, and live shows eventually stopped too. As he’d told Clicky Clicky Music in 2008: “I’ll continue doing this until I don’t want to do it anymore.” I guess he didn’t want to do it anymore.

MY BEST UNBEATEN BROTHER

On the whole, despite often dealing with frustration and disappointment with the world, I hope the songs on the album convey a feeling of hope and some positivity. In the past, I have tended to write very much from a personal perspective, but I wanted to write stuff that is a little more universal.

—Ben Parker (MusicNGear, 2024)

Formed in 2023, My Best Unbeaten Brother began when Ben Parker happened to bump into Ben Fry, his former Jonbarr Hinge bandmate. Parker had already been experimenting with music again during lockdown and Fry’s interest in helping him flesh these songs out as bassist became the foundation of the band. Adam then joined on drums to make them a trio, a lineup that the Parkers hadn’t been a part of since Tempertwig’s split in 2004.

Their music is both familiar and strange. On one hand, they’re both very much who they always were, Ben Parker’s lyricism is still full of wit and passion, and the generally quiet and unassuming Adam is still an absolute madman behind his kit. On the other, after what we’ve heard from them before, it can be bewildering to hear Ben Parker yell “Come on! Come on!” or allow himself a bit of guitar solo.

The hopelessness found in the early work of Ben and Adam Parker verged on nihilism, stylistically, they’d usually sought to strip elements from their sound (for example, never utilising distortion pedals in Nosferatu D2). They were never self-important but there was a seriousness to them in that they knew enough about what they wanted to know what they didn’t, and so they walked away at the band’s peak, and when the posthumous release created even greater interest, they refused to reform, focusing on the projects they found more interesting.

People would tell me to “make” a Nosferatu D2 reunion happen, and my response was a politer “How the fuck do you expect me to do that?” I’d maybe talked them into some things they were unsure about, but I was never going to convince them to do something they didn’t want to, and I wouldn’t particularly wish to either.

When Ben lowered the volume as Superman Revenge Squad, it helped to highlight some of the humour that was always present in Tempertwig and Nosferatu D2, but a bit obscured by the rapid pace and yelping. But much of the lightness of his solo material was through self-deprecation (“I’m only mocking myself” he told God Is In the TV in 2013) or a cheeky warning about our own meaninglessness and impermanence through a pop culture reference to something that doesn’t exist anymore.

If Nosferatu D2 were shrugging into the abyss, then Superman Revenge Squad was shuffling into obscurity, and not even adding sax and accordion could really change that. It feels appropriate to me that the single artwork for ‘A Funny Thing You Said’ was inspired by the iconic and harrowing climax of Lucio Fulci’s The Beyond.

With My Best Unbeaten Brother though, they seem to be really having fun, and without the feeling that they should be ashamed of that. Self-described as “overly self-conscious men reborn as less self-conscious men, now too old to worry about indie credit,” there’s a looseness and a sense of freedom in their work. As Ben Parker told Marc Schuster of Abominations: “In the past, I set myself pretty strict rules when approaching music-making: no guitar pedals for one. With this new stuff, I’m just going with whatever comes and ultimately it all sounds like us somehow! I’ve even allowed myself a guitar solo on one song, which I wouldn’t have gone anywhere near previously.”

Lyrically the songs could almost be seen as a condemnation of their past selves, ‘It’s Not Embarrassing to Care About Stuff’ pushes back on fan-favourites like ‘The Kids from Fame’ and ‘Bratpack Film Philosophy’ by turning the “1980s film that no-one liked, that you quite liked” into a source of inspiration, rather than one of defeat or tedious ‘fake nostalgia’. The line “I never liked Bruce Springsteen, but I always envied that he cared” even questions the message of Nosferatu D2’s “Springsteen” (an apathetic Croydon counter to ‘My Hometown’) by willing us to find a way to find meaning and purpose–unless “we’re too old to care?”

In a Q&A some years ago, Ben Parker was asked who would play him in a film about his life, and he responded: “I’ll let the director choose and then complain at the premiere.” Just a lighthearted bit of cheek, but you could choose to see his answer as representative of where he was back then. Waiting for things to go wrong so that he can complain about them isn’t him in 2024, but for years Parker had written songs about watching the erosion of a world he didn’t much seem to care for, if he ever thought to offer a solution it rarely went much further than a trip to Wetherspoons or a doomed plan to get on Top of the Pops. His message now is much more about doing what you can and finding meaning in what you do.

Tempertwig’s This Means Everything, This Don’t Mean a Thing featured the ‘I’m not Bono’ refrain, which he later explained to mean: “I’d like to create music that would help… songs that bring people together but it probably wasn’t in me.” In 2024 though, he sings: “There’s a song / Building up inside of you that’s gonna change the world / And all your Bono fantasies are gonna take hold.”

These songs don’t necessarily have answers to all of his past work, but sometimes they change the question. Superman Revenge Squad seemed to show him willing himself to find meaning in his “box of old records” or those reviews that called him “an adequate lyricist,” but now a father, it seems his purpose is having these things so that they can be left behind for his son to explore. The question of what “these stupid songs I sing for something to do” are all worth will ultimately be left for the younger Parker to answer.

In a Resonance FM interview with the two Bens, Parker told deXter Bentley some of his prior writing had been indecipherably personal, and he was now trying to write more broadly, about things that are more relatable, or of importance on a larger scale. So while he still takes shots at figures of pop culture, it’s not because he doesn’t like the later Smashing Pumpkins albums, it’s because he’s “sick and tired of punching down,” and this feeling is no longer compatible with being a fan of Morrissey, even if, as he recently told The Daily Music Report, Reel Around the Fountain was a pivotal inspiration for his beginnings as a songwriter.

On the matter of other artists though, sometimes he was right the first time. Radiohead’s bullshit around Israel, and opposition to the BDS movement in support of Palestine has finally made me connect with Ben’s old Public Enemy homage: “Thom Yorke was a hero to most, but he never meant that much to me.”

Despite all the differences, much is still the same. Ben and Adam Parker are still unmistakably themselves, and Ben Fry, who brings a wealth of creativity to both their music and their artwork, is an addition that reaffirms the Parker brothers’ individuality, rather than diluting it. When speaking to the Hello GoodBye Show, Fry mentioned how playing in My Best Unbeaten Brother was allowing him to channel his own anger at the state of this miserable world through Ben’s words, and their collective art. There’s that important feeling of doing something rather than nothing, which is now so crucial.

When reflecting on Nosferatu D2’s “A Footnote” in 2011, Ben had said: “The main concept of the song comes from the fact that we’d probably never be famous enough to have a rock biography written about us, but maybe one of the bands we’ve played with a few times will one day get massive and there might just be a quote in the book that has a footnote that, when you look it up, references me; and maybe that will be enough.”

I always found that ambition to be quite humble, and even inspiring. In 2024 though, as he told Amplify the Noise, that concept of legacy may not be really even worth engaging with: “More than ever, you have to be making music and writing songs just for the joy of making music and writing songs. You ask yourself. why are you bothering, and you just have to avoid the question and carry on.”

And he’s right. Indie credit doesn’t last forever. You could take it to the grave, but it wouldn’t do you any good.

Pessimistic Pizza is out now via Audio Antihero and available from the My Best Unbeaten Brother Bandcamp page.

Cover Photo by Tony Robertson

The post My Best Unbeaten Brothers: An Audio Antihero Retrospective on the Music of Ben and Adam Parker appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Hailing from Iran and now based in Paris, 9T Antiope has served as a vehicle for duo Nima Aghiani and Sara Bigdeli Shamloo to explore the unique difficulties of the expatriate experience. New album Horror Vacui lives up to its title to go further still. To live between two cultures is to never quite belong to either, to perpetually seek firmer roots in the present while fighting the fear of forgetting where you have come from, or even that place forgetting you. 9T Antiope address such dualities with a concept album almost cinematic in scope, and single ‘Shapeshift’ offers a compelling mix of haunting and alluring tones to welcome the listener through its doors.

Beti Masenqo – better than before

Following last summer’s debut single ‘much of anything’, which we described as a “delicate [and] often reflective folk [song] which ties together melancholy and joy with a wistful thread,” California songwriter Beti Masenqo is back with a new song, ‘better than before’. What she describes as “a nostalgic tune about loving someone who is plagued with uncertainty,” the track pairs an upbeat rhythm with another reflective tone, capturing a bittersweet mood which looks to shake free of doubt and look towards something brighter.

‘better than before’ is out now via streaming services.

Blitzen Trapper – Cosmic Backseat Education

Portland, Oregon‘s Blizten Trapper have been a significant force in indie rock for over twenty years now, and new album 100’s of 1000’s, Millions of Billions, coming this spring on Yep Roc Records, returns to the ideals which first fired the project into being to explore ideas of freedom and rebirth. With guests including Eric D. Johnson (Fruit Bats/Bonny Light Horseman) and Anna Tivel, the album melds earnest folk/psych rock with something more metaphysical. Lead single ‘Cosmic Backseat Education’ returns to the childhood experience of listening to the radio in the car, when music was nothing more than a source of joy. The video, directed by Mychal Sargent, offers a playful dimension, riffing off Mr Rogers and ultimately questioning just who is in control of the puppet/puppeteer relationship.

100’s of 1000’s, Millions of Billions is out on the 17th May via Yep Roc Records.

Crow Baby – Pity Party

Having both been raised in Johannesburg multi-instrumentalists Cherilyn MacNeil and Jean-Louise Parker formed Crow Baby upon being reunited in Berlin. Debut album Get Yourself Together will be released this spring, and if single ‘Pity Party’ is anything to go by, it’s going to be quite the ride. An ever-shifting track which never quite settles in any one shape, creating and undermining a number of moods and meanings, and ultimately leaving the listener to question the very ground beneath their feet. The result is something as clever as it is infectious, and as the triumphant chorus comes around, the self-pity is proven to be anything but.

Get Yourself Together will be released this spring via Duchess Box Records.

Grocer – Packrat

We’ve covered Philadelphia‘s Grocer several times in recent years, always appreciating the unapologetic chaos of their sound. Recent EP Scatter Plot felt like a band exploring the possible new directions such a style might take, and this spring sees Grocer return with their second full-length on Grind Select to capitalise on these gains. Evoking the sensation of “feeling stricken with the inability to make decisions and the procrastination paralysis of anxiety,” single ‘Packrat’ finds Grocer at their most collaborative, trusting in the bonds which have now developed between the members to make something far greater than the sum of its parts.

Hot Wheels – August

What do you get if you mix equal parts Brian Eno, Julee Cruise and Link Wray? LA-based painter and musician Dan Bruinooge, AKA Hot Wheels, has the answer with ‘August’, a new single on Earth Libraries. The song looks to add sixties surf and ambient sensibilities to nostalgic dream pop in order to bring to life a sonic representation of the culture and climate of California. But far from being a blissed-out image of Western sun and sea, ‘August’ sees Hot Wheels mine the landscape for all of its complexities and contradictions, where every instance of natural beauty is countered by gridlocked traffic, and apparently carefree summers are stalked by worsening wild fires.

‘August’ is out now via Earth Libraries.

Little Wings – Bubbles Go Pop

Kyle Field has recorded under the moniker Little Wings since the late nineties, pushing and pulling his folk rock sound into every shape imaginable while leaning into the joy of the ephemeral moment. A few years ago Antiquated Future tried to capture this ever-shifting style in one album with Sing Wide (Selected Songs 2002​-​2019), though true to the spirit of the project, Field has since taken the Little Wings sound onwards. New full-length High On The Glade will be released this spring on Perpetual Doom, and single ‘Bubbles Go Pop’ is every bit as idiosyncratic and inventive as you’d hope. With its ramshackle percussion and sing-song melody, it tells the story of a wild party in a zany vaudevillian procession befitting of a Pynchon novel. “The bubbles go pop,” as Field sings, “the laughter doesn’t stop / Effervescence grows into a roar.”

Night Hawk – Bedroom Waltz

Back in February we featured Night Hawk, the Brunswick, Maine-based project led by Colter Adams and Peyton Semjen. As we wrote previously, the pair work alongside “a rotating cast of band members […] to create a sound which evokes the Edward Hopper painting after which they are named.” After a slew of singles, the band are readying their debut EP, Everything Good Ends, and have just unveiled lead single ‘Bedroom Waltz’ as a taster of what to expect. It’s a picture of a relationship curdled by overdependence, depicted with both raw feeling and poetic grace. Cello and guitar weave across each other in somber patterns, while the percussion drives things forward towards the eventual cathartic climax.

In love with an addict
He works fighting fires
He gets paid in forgiveness
And he never gets tired

Trailer Dust – Sunday Morning (feat. Kelley Swindall) (The Velvet Underground Cover)

Taking inspiration from the likes of Sparklehorse and Sonic Youth and adding a country inflection, Trailer Dust is the new project of songwriter/producer, Greg Griffith. As if to highlight the success of such a marriage, Griffith has enlisted Kelley Swindall for a take on The Velvet Underground’s ‘Sunday Morning’. A version which swaps the dreamy drift of the original for something with more dirt on its boots. Griffith and Swindall’s chemistry is clear in the playful, carefree atmosphere, the song lifting towards its affirming conclusion as though gambolling in childlike wonder.

‘Sunday Morning’ is out now via streaming services.

The post Weekly Listening: February 2024 #2 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

The new solo project of Isabelle Banos, who you might know as the synth-bassist of Caveboy, Ballsy looks to the nineties for its amped up emotions—from grunge to the golden age of pop punk. As new single ‘Joe Millionaire’ highlights, such intensity and energy is central to the venture. A song about the climate emergency which typifies the way Banos uses songs to take on the biggest problems of our time with youthful defiance and optimism. “There are really positive and motivating things happening behind the scenes that the news won’t cover because it isn’t click bait,” they explain, “but we CAN save our planet if we keep fighting.”

Bnny – Good Stuff

Back in 2022 we wrote about Bnny, the recording project of Chicago-based artist Jessica Viscius. The single ‘I’m Just Fine‘ showed “what appears to be a mundane encounter is transformed into something else.” Namely, a study of heartbreak and denial presented with the most minimal of details. The title of new album, One Million Love Songs, coming this April on Fire Talk, suggests something brighter this time around and single ‘Good Stuff’ appears to deliver with one of Bnny’s most upbeat songs to date. Though beneath the surface lingers the spectre of something darker. “It’s a breakup song,” as Viscius explains, “but it’s hopeful, optimistic even. Or perhaps it’s just the denial, hoping things will be different next time, hoping that love can save you.”

[bandcamp width=100% height=42 album=2938161023 size=small bgcol=ffffff linkcol=0687f5 track=2578202037]

One Million Love Songs will be released via Fire Talk on 5th April. Pre-order from the Bnny Bandcamp page.

 Empty Heaven – End Times!

Laughing, the forthcoming album from San Antonio‘s Empty Heaven, sees something of a change for the band. They describe their previous record Getting the Blues as like trying “to squeeze blood from a turnip,” with a nightmarish labyrinthine narrative brought to life in painstaking detail, with the band having to fight for every second set down. By comparison, Laughing stemmed from a period in which it felt there were too many ideas in the world, leaving Empty Heaven to mine as much of this rich seam as possible. With its frenzied narrator, lead single ‘End Times!’ very much feels like a product of such process. A manic vision of the encroaching apocalypse delivered with a zeal which leaves you wondering if you are listening to a prophet or paranoid crank.

 Lola Wild – Get Up

With debut EP coming soon via Tip Top Recordings, Lola Wild has released single ‘Get Up’, a single which shows an artist who owes as much to classics like Roy Orbison as contemporaries Sharon Van Etten and The Beths. “This track is an ode to my little youth,” Wild explains. “Like most young people, you do and say what you thought at the time was necessary to block out certain aspects of life, I guess. Eventually it just got to the point where I needed to get up, move on and sort my stuff out.” But more than a broad brushstroke picture of a past time, the song delves deeper to reveal the patchwork of concerns and anxieties which so often make up young life. A style “influenced by my obsession with the sad clown paradox,” as Wild continues, “the contradiction between outward appearance and internal emotions, hiding true feelings behind a facade of happiness.”

‘Get up’ is out now via Tip Top Records.

Malice K – Radio

Having recently signed with Jagjaguwar, Olympia-born, Brooklyn based artist Malice K has shared single ‘Radio’ as a preview of what’s coming next. Co-produced by Strange Ranger‘s Issac Eiger, the song offers a picture of a singular artist pushing themselves to a new level. Where searching emotion and detached cool co-exist without any sense of contradiction, and the strange line between agency and fate keep the narrator uncertain of how exactly to view their own sorry state. Watch the video directed by Johann Rashid below:

‘Radio’ is out now via streaming services.

Old Amica – Everyone We Know

Comprising of five songs originally written and recorded twelve years ago for their debut Debris, it’s not quite correct to refer to the forthcoming EP by Swedish duo Old Amica “new.” Titled Debris Sides, the EP takes songs the band say were “hiding on slowly disintegrating hard drives until now,” and finally unveils them to the world, resulting in a slightly uncanny blend of old and new. Built almost entirely from a melange of recorded and sampled voices, lead single ‘Everyone We Know’ is suitably strange. Old Amica describe it as “a song about being followed and the intensifying paranoia,” and the song invites the listener into this headspace as the enveloping sound builds.

Debris Sides is due for release on 16th February.

Olin Janusz – The Throat

Dark and elegant and brooding, ‘The Throat’ is the lead single from Please Leave Quietly, the debut album from London-born, Boston-based songwriter Olin Janusz. The record, a joint release from Stellar Frequencies, Araki Records and Candlepin Records, sits at an intense and individual intersection of chamber folk and slowcore. Janusz’s work often presents with a weary melancholy, something derived from both “the primordial struggle of working class upbringing and his own poor decisions,” and ‘The Throat’ disperses this emotion into its various component parts—tenderness, fatalism and patient attention. Watch Joan Sabatier’s Bergman-esque video below:

Please Leave Quietly will be released on 5th April via Stellar Frequencies, Araki Records and Candlepin Records. In the meantime you can get ‘The Throat’ as a digital single from the Stellar Frequencies Bandcamp page.

Still Corners – The Dream

The title of Dream Talk, the forthcoming album from Still Corners, speaks not only to the sound of the record but the creative process which brought it into being. “I had tapped into something new,” Tessa Murray explains of writing/recording the songs, “and the way it came out was quite hypnotic, like a transitional state between wakefulness and sleep.” Latest single ‘The Dream’ pushes into the oneiric depths of this style, taking inspiration from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer’s Night Dream to weave something rooted in narrative yet unrooted in waking reality. What the band describe as an investigation of “the Mystery of the Repeating Dream.” The song comes complete with a video filmed by Darcie Thompson and directed by Murray and Hughes themselves which sees the duo weave a whole cozy crime-style narrative around this mystery.

Dream Talk is out on the 5th April via Wrecking Light Records and you can pre-order it now.

 Surf Party, USA – Barrel

With a new self-titled album pencilled for release this spring, Surf Party, USA have shared the appropriately titled ‘Barrel’ to whet the appetite as to the approaching waves. The project sees Ben Weinman (Bones Forever, Boys Go To Jupiter) and Nate Hollander (Boots Deatherage, One Hour Photo) draw on their childhoods in California to create a sun-baked, salt-encrusted sound. One which allows them to, in their own words, “write humorously and to touch on themes they likely wouldn’t in their more “serious” endeavors—joy, friendship, peace, drinking beer, and, of course, surfing.” But don’t underestimate the scope of forthcoming record, a concept album looking to do more with the genre than anyone might expect. The epic ‘Barrel’ is convincing proof Surf Party, USA are going to ride this promise all the way to the shore.

The post Weekly Listening: January 2024 #4 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Radio Heat has this idea baked into its very bones, Desiree Cannon holding the creation of songs as a kind of alchemical process. With a country-inflected style that reaches towards everything from dark pop and surf influences, Cannon brings an assortment of pain and doubt to the table in an attempt to transform it into something different. As though a song is a kind of machine able to transmute suffering into beauty, not only for the artist but the audience too.

Lead single and album opener, the title track is a door through which the listener is invited to witness this process in action. “I wished for a brighter start for you / Picturing day’s first light / Like a tide running over your door,” as Cannon sings with something like weary fondness. “Hot water on cold veins / When a soft beat drops like a screen / I know, and I know you’ve got it too.”

I can feel radio heat on
While you walk to my back I retreat
Now everytime before like
A box of matches in the sink on fire

The post Desiree Cannon – Radio Heat appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Nosferatu D2 – ‘It’s Christmas Time (For God’s Sake)’

It makes sense to start at the beginning, doesn’t it? This song comes from Nosferatu D2’s posthumous debut final album: We’re Gonna Walk Around This City With Our Headphones On To Block Out The Noise. Audio Antihero started in 2009 to release this album since no one else was going to and I wanted it on CD. Thanks to Gareth Campesinos! and lots of other folk, the album ended up doing really well–and for a long-time it was what this label would be known for. 

Honestly, I’ve been telling that same story for fourteen years. If anyone has been paying attention I’m sure they’re bored to tears hearing it again. I don’t get tired of Nosferatu D2 though, which is key because it can otherwise feel a bit sad to still be shilling ancient back-catalogue.

That was the point of this belated release though, I wanted people to hear it and I knew that I always would. As a label, it does feel great to have something new to share but I can’t imagine releasing an album that I didn’t least hope would still be worth talking about fourteen years later.

Like everything Nosferatu D2 did, the recording sounds like it’s held together by tape, and it rattles with the beat–but it might be my favourite ever Christmas song, certainly it’s the one I most relate to. In 2014, Spencer Madsen published ‘You Can Make Anything Sad’, and that title might best describe Nosferatu D2 and my connection to their work.

I often tell people that I “hate Christmas,” but what I truly hate is that I just can’t love Christmas. It’s no-showing the office party each year, it’s looking at the “Pound Shop Santa in a plastic sleigh” and feeling nothing, and it’s sitting down for Only Fools & Horses without comfort or contentment. I’d skip the whole thing if I could, and a few times I have.

It’s funny because Nosferatu D2 really did so well. As a dead band on a first timer one-person DIY label, the album kinda overachieved and found an audience, but that CD-buying fanbase never quite translated to Spotify, which in part is my fault for being a late adapter but is probably also common for inactive independent releases. In recent years however, Nosferatu D2 have been getting a bit of a boost on Spotify at this time of year. This particular song has amassed a modestly respectable 37,000+ streams thanks to playlists like ‘christmas cries‘, ‘Christmas Music for Pretentious People‘, ‘loser christmas playlist‘, and bless them: ‘It’s Christmas time for God’s sake‘. 

Between Nosferatu D2, The Superman Revenge Squad Band, and Tempertwig (featured by Various Small Flames here), I’ve worked on a few albums from the Parker brothers. I don’t think that myself or either Parker had particularly aimed for their lasting legacy to be having a very nominal Christmas hit but as their song ‘A Footnote‘ illustrates: you’re lucky to be a part of all this any way that you can be. If you put enough time into it all then you’ll learn that there’s far worse things to be known for in music than having a song people like listening to.

If people should ever want to explore songs like ‘Springsteen’, ‘Broken Tamagotchi’, ‘The Kids From ‘Fame’, ‘The Mojo Top 100’ or ‘Colonel Parker, they’ll all still be there.

Frog – Wish Upon a Bar

If Nosferatu D2 is what Audio Antihero was “known for” (relatively speaking) in its earlier years, then Frog (interviewed by Various Small Flames here) is what Audio Antihero is best known for now (still speaking relatively). ‘Wish Upon a Bar‘ is taken from their Kind of Blah album, which was the first of five that we’ve now worked on together. 

This 2015 album is certainly one of the favourites, though they’ve become so eclectic, and seen such an increase in their audience since that I don’t think there’s any clear favourite. Count Bateman has a lot of fans now and, from within my hyperfixation bubble, November’s GROG album is feeling like a phenomenon right now.

‘Wish Upon a Bar’ is highlight of an album filled with highlights (‘Judy Garland’, ‘All Dogs Go to Heaven’, ‘Catchyalater‘, ‘Photograph’, ‘Irish Goodbye’, ‘(Kind of Blah)’) and I think it has that special quality where it’s a song set over Christmas without being a song about Christmas. 

Don’t tell me where you are
don’t send me holiday cards
I’ma drop dead drunk on the FDR
I wish upon a bar

It’s almost Christmas time
the bartender’s cutting limes
and he asks you about your kids
you respectfully decline

The pain that Bateman describes in ‘Wish Upon a Bar’ existed in November and it’ll exist in January too. If anything, Christmas exists in ‘Wish Upon a Bar’ as a threat–it’s the looming presence of what feels like state-mandated closeness, and the pressure of expectation to feel what you maybe don’t and to be who you maybe aren’t.

To make a Cinematic comparison, 1974’s Black Christmas (considered by many to be the first North American-made slasher) is a brilliant horror film set over the holidays. The season informs the mise-en-scene and influences the circumstances of the plot, but what makes that film so haunting is the sheer randomness of the violence. This could have happened in any home at any time, but it happened here and now. Compared to a film like Silent Night, Deadly Night which relies on the novelty of a psycho-Santa killer, it’s clear how special Black Christmas is–and while it is a brilliant film to gather the children together for on Christmas morning, it shouldn’t be isolated in novelty sub-genre. If you’re not a horror fan, then think Die Hard vs. Jingle All the Way.

Just as there’s plenty of tedious Festive horror films, there’s a lot of shite Christmas songs too–and “Alternative” Christmas songs are no different. Punk covers of ‘Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer’ with bonus-swears are just not for me. ‘Wish Upon a Bar’ and Black Christmas are works that can be appreciated all year round–but they do gain some unsettling powers as the weather gets colder.

Slotted onto Kind of Blah at track three, the Christmas A Go Go! blog called it a “hidden Christmas track,” and I liked that.

Papernut Cambridge – ‘93 Million and One’

People tend to know Ian Button from his work in Death in Vegas, which is funny because I knew Death in Vegas for their work with Ian Button. Ian drummed for Audio Antihero alumni Paul Hawkins & The Awkward Silences, but there’s no way to express his contribution to the group. As a producer, he helped to channel Hawkins’ raw talent and creativity into a blistering debut record for Jezus Factory Records. On stage, Ian helped to contain much of the chaos and was the foundation for increasingly ambitious arrangements.

He had been quietly releasing his own songs for a while but when Ian’s new Papernut Cambridge monicker debuted with ‘93 Million and One’ in the Darren Hayman & Fika Recordings 2011 advent calendar, I was pretty blown away.

From here, Papernut Cambridge became a fully-fledged project, and with the subsequent founding of Gare Du Nord Records, he seemed to really find the freedom to be as prolific and experimental as he truly wanted to be.

There’s lots of great Papernut Cambridge songs, clever, touching, funny, and eclectic, but this little Christmas surprise is the one I always come back to. Whether it’s leading the charge or as a helping hand for the works of others, Ian is a real gift to music and a joy to know.

Benjamin Shaw & Fighting Kites – ‘This Christmas (I Just Want to be Left Alone)’

This was Audio Antihero’s only halfway earnest attempt at a Christmas single. Fighting Kites (featured by Various Small Flames here) were a brilliant band, instrumental and experimental without being pretentious. Their songs were danceable, melodic, beautiful, and fun. I have many joyful memories from their shows.

Conversely, Benjamin Shaw (reviewed by Various Small Flames here), who has since been reborn in Australia as a progressive house DJ called Megadead, was a relentlessly pretentious singer-songwriter with a daft tiny guitar. You were not dancing at this gloomy gut’s shows, and had you even tried, he’d probably have mumbled something rude into the microphone.

Though very different, these friends and labelmates collaborated on a Christmas charity single for Shelter. In a similar vein as ‘It’s Christmas Time (For God’s Sake)’ (which Benjamin Shaw also has a version of), it’s a grudging shrug into the happiest time of the year. The song explores the gnawing feeling of knowing that the one thing you want for Christmas (a day off work without pressure and performance) would be a heartbreaking insult to all around you for reasons you’ll never understand.

It’s not really a representative introduction for either artist but there’s clear chemistry here, which it would have been great to see expanded on with more recordings. I have a great memory of seeing them performing this together live and it was great to see Ben stop moping about in his box room and have a bit of fun with his friends for a change.

Fun fact: Benjamin Shaw did briefly have a regular backing band and they sounded incredible together. When I asked him to record a session of his solo songs with this expanded line-up he said “I’m not Tom Jones, Jamie!” and refused. Too bloody right you aren’t, Ben.

pen pin – ‘Office Party’

If you’ve followed Audio Antihero or Various Small Flames, you might already know the great Jeni Magana who comprises half of the pen pin duo with Emily Moore. ‘Office Party’ is their second single, a delightful song about seeking love at the office Christmas party.

By touching on the absurdity of “celebrating” within your workplace, and seeking a romance with your colleagues (the smallest fish in the smallest pond), it casually offers a terrifying message about capitalism without dropping its gorgeous sheen of 60s pop naivete. Naturally, I prefer their Halloween song but this is stil a really good one.

If there’s a positive to the season, it’s the reminders it offers you of the friends and loved ones you don’t get to see very often. Love you, Jeni, miss you, mama. Glad you’re doing well. Jeni’s solo work is all over Various Small Flames, so when four pen pin singles just isn’t enough for you, there’s still plenty more to dig into within the VSF vault.

Frog – ‘Space Jam’

It would be daft to go on about Frog’s seasonless (but not unseasoned) seasonal offerings after discussing ‘Wish Upon a Bar’ at length–but ‘Space Jam’ from their debut (reviewed by Various Small Flames here), offers something similar:

Thursdays I met you ‘neath the Garibaldi statue
And I held my breath as you came over,
Looking like the best of Auld Lang Syne
Lip-synced Sinatra blarin’ out an idling mack truck…

There’s a bar outside my window and they’re playing My Sharona.
It’s Christmas time, I think so, and the air feels just like home…

Danny Bateman writes songs that understand that Christmas isn’t one unshiftable block of good cheer. We get scraps of time off work where we’re required to be the jolliest versions of ourselves like you can just flip a switch. All the while, loss, regret, grief, illness, exhaustion, anxiety, insecurity, and desire persist. “‘cus it hurts” indeed.

This year is as good an example as any. I’ve bought mince pies and Christmas crackers to amuse my American in-laws, the TV and radio will get shitter and shitter, decorations will go up, and thoughtful gifts will be exchanged. But nothing has stopped. The UK and US governments are supporting Israel in committing a white supremacist genocide against Palestinians this December. If God allows it, Christmas doesn’t stop it.

Broken Shoulder – ‘Stille Nacht’

Broken Shoulder (featured by Various Small Flames here) is former Fighting Kites guitarist Neil Debnam, he began working on solo material due to the physical limitations he experienced when he, as you might have guessed, broke his shoulder. I was already a big Fighting Kites fan and was lucky to release his debut solo album, Broken Shoulderrr, which was all gorgeous sprawling soundscapes, looping guitars, drones, fuzz and lovely lovely NOISE. 

It was a bit of a departure for Audio Antihero but I did a few records with him, and hopefully I didn’t do too bad a job. Sensing my limited understanding of the genre, he joked gently once about how he’d need to prepare “a riffy song for Jamie” when I asked him to contribute to one of our compilations. My mum always called his music “strangely beautiful,” which is a happy memory I have of her now.

There’s a slightly more festive ‘Stiller Nacht‘ version which I also love, but the original is perfect as it is. The composition is performed primarily with a khene, a mouth organ and Laos’ national instrument. It produces the most beautiful sound.

Though themed on a silent night, this composition gives me images of daybreak–but one reserved for cinema, a sunrise intended to express both the power of nature and the terror of pollution. My eyes burn when I hear it.

Whether Broken Shoulder offers a silent night or the dawning of a new day is pretty irrelevant. For me, he offers exactly what I spend most of Christmas day pining for: a few wordless, solitary minutes, ushering in the end of Christmas day or the beginning of a new day. However bittersweet both might be.

In my quasi-annual Christmas shilling of back-catalogue, this eight-and-a-half-minute instrumental never quite makes it on the radio–but I optimistically continue to include it. I don’t know how you do this sort of thing but part of me will always believe that it’s destined for the big screen. Love you, Neil, miss you, king. I hope you’re doing well, mate.

I’ve put all the above songs together here. Frog’s “GROG” LP is out now via Audio Antihero. It’s good to be back, lads.

The post I Just Can’t Love Christmas: A Holiday Mix by Audio Antihero’s Jamie Halliday appeared first on Various Small Flames.

We first wrote about Nashville duo Angel Saint Queen back last summer, describing single ‘Diable Lake’ as “a track which highlights the duo’s bittersweet tone, capturing a sadness for leaving and excitement for what comes next.” Latest single ‘You Were There’ is no less conflicted in its tone, evoking the strange blend of sadness and relief left in the wake of a break-up. Though sound’s raw energy embraces the emotion wholeheartedly, building from restrained beginnings into a blaze of feeling. One last conflagration at the end of a fiery relationship before the new dawn arrives.

‘You Were There’ is out now and available from the usual places.

bugcatcher – Desert

The recording project of Rochester‘s Jake Denning and a variety of friends, Bugcatcher operates within the slacker end of the alt-country spectrum, though crafts its DIY aesthetic with a precise hand. With an album coming soon, the outfit have released new single ‘Desert’, a song which both serves as an ode to the titular landscape and a search for meaning within an otherwise barren milieu. “I’m going across the desert / I’ll find the holy land myself,” Denning sings, buoyed by the understated rhythm of the sound. “I’m going across the desert / Got my soul for all my wealth.”

Running across the desert
The walls of Jordan are calling me
Going across the desert
Where dinosaur bones are buried in sleep

C.J. Red Mouth – Red Line

With EP Greenhouse on the horizon, C.J. Red Mouth (AKA Durham, North Carolina songwriter C.J. Yang) has unveiled brand new single, ‘Red Line’. The EP centres on the search from freedom within restrictive systems and relationships, and the single typifies the building catharsis which results. A reflection on an old commute, the slow creeping sound evokes the grimy dark of the Boston subway with guitar from June Isenhart (Miss Bones). The track gathers momentum as though quite literally barrelling toward the light at the end of the tunnel, culminating in an ecstatic finale complete with primal screaming.

Scream over the roaring dark
Scream until I hear myself

Daneshevskaya – Somewhere in the Middle

When Anna Daneshevskaya Beckerman took her Russian-Jewish middle name as the moniker for her songwriting project, she did so with significant intention. Daneshevskaya is also the surname of her grandmother, a poet who helped to cultivate her granddaughter’s creative sensibilities, and ultimately served as great inspiration for Beckerman’s own voice. In this way, Daneshevskaya represents a continuation of her grandmother’s vocation, though one processed through Beckerman’s own distinctive eye for detail, spinning off from poetry into vivid indie rock. Released to celebrate signing with Winspear and an imminent tour supporting Black Country, New Road, new single ‘Somewhere in the Middle’ is the ideal introduction for the uninitiated. A curious, searching song which broaches the subject of identity from an unguarded, almost child-like perspective. “My grandma had two sisters and her parents would say ‘Anita has the looks, Miriam has the books, and Gloria has the charm’,” Beckerman explains. “I used to think about which one I would want to be. I never questioned having to choose.” Watch the video by Mia Duncan below:

‘Somewhere in the Middle’ is out now via Winspear and available from Bandcamp.

Dustin Mayle – Saturn’s Last Ring

Ohio songwriter Dustin Mayle recently released latest album Dear Loretta, a collection of songs which fall into the DIY folk tradition but nevertheless achieve a tangible richness despite their lo-fi leanings. Take single ‘Saturn’s Last Ring’, its intimate acoustic style periodically coalescing into something bigger and bolder before unwinding to its former state just as quickly. Mayle’s vocals add an opaque lyricism, nodding towards the mythic undertones of Jason Molina or Adrienne Lenker, catching onto a repeated refrain as the instrumentation swells, as though having tapped into some kind of incantation.

Hannah Cameron – Smells Like Leaving

Later this year, Naarm / Melbourne singer-songwriter Hannah Cameron will release Holding Pattern, her third studio album. Recorded with producer Matt Redlich in his studio alongside longtime collaborators Luke Hodgson (bass) and Leigh Fisher (drums), the album was written largely on baritone guitar. This is immediately apparent on latest single ‘Smells Like Leaving’, a sombre slow burner that details a post-breakup road trip with wistful pedal steel and evocative lyrics that read like staccato poetry. Watch the very apt video, shot by Cameron herself, below:

The blink and dash
The petty cash
The cigarette that’s burned to ash
Smells like leaving

Holding Pattern releases on 22nd September. Pre-order a copy from the Hannah Cameron Bandcamp page.

Laura Zarougian – Cairo

Self-described as “one part Armenian cowgirl and one part indie rock,” the music of Laura Zarougian draws on everything from mystical desert rock to the wistful classics of Emmylou Harris and Neil Young in order to tell the story of her forebears. New single ‘Cairo’ applies this to the city of its title, casting Egypt as a distant, almost mythical place, one constructed from old tales and holding secrets too. “My father was born and raised in Cairo, Egypt,” Zarougian explains. “What I know of Cairo is from the stories—the ones my father told me, and the ones that were withheld.”

We don’t have the money to bring his body up the Nile
you will marry an older man, remember to smile
Cairo, you’re a gilded frame,
yeah you’ve got the man beguiled
we’re headed on an aeroplane
we won’t see you for a while

I can tell you’re hiding something,
look at you I know you’re bluffing

Nymphlord – Bougainvillea

A combination of “radio-ready pop hooks” and “a ferocious feminist punk energy,” that’s how we described the music of Nymphlord back in May, along with “an ethereal experimentalism that sees acoustic guitar become otherworldly.” With the release of EP Mothers Cry And Then We Die. fast approaching, the LA-based artist has unveiled a brand new single, ‘Bougainvillea’. A song which blurs hectic energy with a downbeat emotional state to paint a subversive picture of California, drawing equally from retro surf rock and contemporary pop to undermine the sunny stereotypes. A landscape where even the prettiest things have teeth.

Hot day
Muggy day
Same thing
Always
I still feel so cold in LA

Mothers Cry And Then We Die. is out on the 25th August and you can pre-order it now.

Wandering Summer – Show Me The Way

Wandering Summer, the new project of Geddy Laurance (Boyracer, City Yelps, Wonderswan), might be rooted in its Leeds home, but it certainly reaches far and wide to bring the sound to life. An amalgamation of bouncy energy and nostalgic fuzz which owes more to New York noise bands or Californian and Glaswegian pop than anything coming out of Yorkshire. Though as their self-titled EP shows, there’s something particular to the sound that marks its place in the world. An ability to evoke both rolling fields and endless terraced housing, simultaneously embracing its surroundings and dreaming of escape. Single ‘Show Me The Way’ sits at the popppiest end of the Wander Summer style, where wistful fondness is only matched by the sense of eager forward motion.

The post Weekly Listening: June 2023 #4 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Climbing a rung up the mainstream ladder with every new release, The National’s rise in popularity continues unabated. But regardless of your opinion of the band’s more recent output, Pembrokeshire-born, London-based artist Bryde‘s cover of ‘Brainy’ is a timely reminder of what they were before the lyrics grew increasingly literal and they become the kind of outfit which casually enlists the help of Taylor Swift. A sparse, cryptic track which seethes with an underlying intensity, as though the subtext the moment comes unspooling as the song develops. Bryde pulls this tautness ever tighter, capturing every inch of the crackling energy while making the song her own.

Griffin Moyer – Like No One Else

“If you’re going to say something, you might as well be honest.” That’s the maxim under which Nashville-based songwriter Griffin Moyer works. Having left a career in geological survey to pursue music, Moyer is about to release the LP Liar’s Disguise via Like You Mean It Records, and new single ‘Like No One Else’ invites the listener into the straight-talking emotion of his sound. A track where longing is accompanied by a nostalgic sixties warmth, lifting the ache at its centre into its own kind of romance.

Liar’s Disguise is coming soon via Like You Mean It Records.

Jess Kallen – Ink

LA-based musician Jess Kallen has been a staple of the local scene for a while, touring and recording with numerous bands, including the likes of Rosie Tucker and Alex Lahey. Next month, they will release their debut album Exotherm on New Professor Music and to celebrate they have released a brand new single. Titled ‘Ink’, it combines crunchy guitar and a springy sense of momentum. “Monday, Tuesday, Thursday / the time flies when nothing changes,” Kallen sings in what begins as a frustrated ode to everyday monotony, before the big chorus arrives to shake things up. Which is fitting, as Kallen describes ‘Ink’ as a song “about being stuck in a rut, and escaping by surrendering to an impulse.”

Exotherm will be released on 21st June via New Professor Music. Pre-order it now on Bandcamp.

John Hollywood – Leavings

Houston-born, California-based songwriter John Hollywood might draw his main inspiration from the likes of John Prine, Guy Clark and Bob Dylan, but new album Beauty Sleep shows his focus is very much on the present. Take ‘Leavings’, a song about the ever-deepening climate catastrophe delivered with the stark fervour of an old-time Bible preacher, where a father picks through the ashes a failed society for something which might outlast the oncoming violence. “What can I give to my son to help him? / What can I leave him after I’m gone?” Hollywood asks in the opening lines. “I’d leave him my land but the land is forsaken / I’d leave him my house, but the house has burned down.” The song gathers around itself with tumultuous foreboding, the sound of a society reaching its dead-end with no time to turn around.

Nathan Xander – Drive My Car

“He’s a big man, got no feeling below the knee,” opens ‘Drive My Car’, the latest single from Nathan Xander’s Three Waltzes. “When he goes down, getting back up sure ain’t easy.” The track is indicative of New York songwriter’s ability to paint such vivid portraits with so little, each song an elegant slice of life as lived within an uncertain present, be it Xander’s own quest for sobriety or the mind-bending experience of living with twenty-four hour news. As ‘Drive My Car’ highlights, this is delivered with equal parts sincerity and knowing humour, resulting in a wisdom that might not know how life is going to shake out, but is sure enough along for the ride.

Some folks drink, some folks smoke
Tonight, we’ll do a little of both
And if we die, at heaven’s door,
Please don’t tell them I let you drive my car

Nymphlord – Stinks 4 Lyfe

Raised in the forested foothills of Northern California, singer-songwriter and producer Nymphlord says her music was influenced by everything from “90’s alt rock [and] misty bush-whacked trail walks” to “Britney Spears crop tops, dog bites turned scars, and dust-covered pom poms.” This goes some way to explaining the distinctive Nymphlord style, which combines radio-ready pop hooks with a ferocious feminist punk energy and an ethereal experimentalism that sees acoustic guitar become otherwordly. Written in the aftermath of the overturning of Roe vs. Wade, ‘Stinks 4 Lyfe’ channels every ounce of fury, frustration and vulnerability into three minutes of catharsis.

Don’t tell me you want it
Don’t tell me you need it
Do you think it’s worth it
Do you think I’m worth shit, hey

‘Stinks 4 Lyfe’ is out now via Lauren Records and available from the Nymphlord Bandcamp page.

Rain Gregorio – Myrtle on Holiday

Having previously recorded under the moniker Mount Rainier, LA’s Rain Gregorio decided to revert to his own name for new EP, Myrtle on Holiday, coming soon via Anxiety Blanket Records, and the switch sees the sound push into newly personal territory too. “It gave me the confidence to excavate part of myself using the observational side of songwriting,” as Gregorio explains. “This is the first time I’ve made something that is true to myself as a songwriter.” The title track is the perfect introduction, its lush yet controlled beat ebbing and flowing as Lexi Vega (Mini Trees) lends backing vocals, all resulting in a sense of closeness which only amplifies the overall emotional resonance.

Sweetbreads – Chaos Is

Led by Brooklyn singer-songwriter Melody Stolpp, Sweetbreads make country-inflected indie pop that they say “will bend your ear, twist your pretty little heart, and get your hips swaying.” Following last year’s EP Out Of Range, Stolpp has again worked with long-time collaborator Nick Watt to write a new song, ‘Chaos Is’. “[It’s] a song about teenage life in the suburbs,” Stolpp describes, “with all the boredom, recklessness, and soul searching that come with it.” The track’s slow build captures the direction of such days, building from seemingly mundane beginnings into something with real emotional charge, and in doing so manages to recreate some of the heightened magic of those formative years.

The Tines – Collarbone

Formed in 2019 from members of acts such as Ports of Spain, Laundry Day, Quiet Giant and Ryxno, The Tines is an indie rock outfit based in New Haven, Connecticut. Back in 2022 they released their self-titled album on Funnybone Records, and latest single ‘Collarbone’ is the ideal entry point for those who let the initial release slip past their radar. A track which combines shimmering dream pop with a more pressing indie rock rhythm, the reverbed vocals drifting above it all to give the whole thing a sunny if enigmatic vibe, drawing the listener into its psych-inflected world.

The Tines is out now via Funnybone Records and is available from Bandcamp.

The post Weekly Listening: May 2023 #3 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

‘Been a Long Year’, the lead single from Alex Nicol’s forthcoming EP Been a Long Year Vol. 1, offers a picture of grief as a kind of matryoshka doll. Where a wider context of loss and decay couches the personal, and sadness moves ever-inward with increasing weight. The track’s landscape is a town decimated by both the pandemic and chronic neglect (“And all the shops are empty,” as Nicol sings, “and the diners too / The miller, baker, and seamstress / Gotta find something new to do), within which personal tragedies including the loss of a job and the death of friends and family unfold. But with a compassionate, airy tone and guest vocals from Angel Deradoorian, ‘Been a Long Year’ doesn’t try to make sense of such experiences so much as admit the full implication of their difficulty. “I wanted to express my frustration at running from my feelings for so long,” Nicol explains. “It felt like the world was crumbling at the same time as I was pretending everything was fine, but I really wasn’t, and I finally expressed it. It feels like one long exhale for me.”

Been a Long Year Vol. 1 is out on the 30th June and you can pre-save it now.

Alex Gardner – Upside Down Crown

Inspired by everything from the Anthology of American folk music, rockabilly and bluegrass to fairy tales and experimental poetry, LA‘s Alex Gardner combines classic and contemporary styles in his distinctive music. A kind of outsider folk for the twenty-first century, where Gardner teases out the through line from acts like Michael Hurley to the modern indie style. With album Highly Attainable Dreams coming later this week, single ‘Upside Down Crown’ gives an example of what to expect. A tender folk number propelled by a nineties-style indie rock energy, coupled with a suitably nostalgic video by Lauren Slusser:

Highly Attainable Dreams is out on the 12th May and you can find Alex Gardner on Bandcamp.

Brittany Ann Tranbaugh – Pennsylvania

As much a snapshot of a damaged country as it is a personal narrative, Brittany Ann Tranbaugh’s latest single follows a queer couple as they move from a liberal urban setting to their home in rural Pennsylvania. “It was wonderful to live out west,” go the opening lines, “fun to kid ourselves I guess,” the drive punctuated by second thoughts, uneasy vibes and a “radio blaring about divided times,” but also an undeniable fondness for the familiar landscape too. Tranbaugh’s country style captures this mood in all of its nuance, where fear, fury and bone-weary disappointment coalesce into one dense weight, and wry humour is perhaps the only way to lighten the load.

Pennsylvania, it was never easy to explain ya
Sometimes home’s not just an easy chair
Lately home feels like a cross to bear

Greta Ruth – Holy Omen

Writing of her debut album The Fawn back in 2021, we described the music of Minneapolis artist Greta Ruth as “hum[ming] with a quiet dream-like energy,” where “each track is a composition of poetry and tone which slowly unfurls to reveal layers of depth and meaning.” Last week, Ruth released a brand new single ‘Holy Omen’ which again follows this style. Built on gentle vocals, fingerpicked guitar and Zach Waldon’s subtle piano, it’s a song about the awe and calm that comes with real love, “a love that,” as Ruth puts it, “sweetens and strengthens you while the chaos, mystery, and dissonance of life rage on.” Stark and soft and dream-like, it’s a more than worthy addition to the Greta Ruth oeuvre.

headboy – Reservoir

Next month, London post-punk trio headboy will release their debut EP, Was It What You Thought. Comprising of Mars West (guitar, bass, vocals), Jess Collins (guitar, bass, vocals) and Oli Birbeck (drums), the band make a distinctive blend of raucous punk and lo-fi indie pop which tackles themes both personal and political. “We pretty much condensed every emotion we’ve felt in the past two years into fourteen minutes,” Collins describes. “There are moments of anger, fear, and sadness, but also moments of joy, or acceptance, at least.” Latest single ‘Reservoir’ has all the sweaty, smoky allure of a late-night dive bar dancefloor, a shadowy post-punk exploration of “infatuation and unaddressed sexual tension.” Watch the video, directed by West themselves below:

Was It What You Thought will be released on 9^th June via Blitzcat Records. Order it via the headboy Bandcamp page.

Julez and the Rollerz – Wildest Fantasy

Having originated as a solo project, Julez and the Rollerz really came to life when Jules Batterman moved to LA in 2020 and the Rollerz were enlisted. Soon Rachel David (bass/vocals), Shea Carothers (synth/vocals), Hannah Hughes (guitar/vocals) and Emi Borja (drums) were as important a part of the band as any, and the quintet began honing their psych-inflected punk rock sound. With EP Is This Where The Party Is? coming later this month, the outfit have unveiled latest single ‘Wildest Fantasy’ to rope listeners in. A track which confronts the honest difficulties of negotiating the music industry, fighting to maintain enthusiasm in a space so often appearing to drain dreams from artists. But armed with equal parts playful mischief and heart-on-sleeve passion, Julez and the Rollerz power on through regardless.

Nora Kelly Band – Lay Down Girl

Having made a name as part of grunge outfit DISHPIT, Montreal‘s Nora Kelly has until know been known for her unapologetic attitude and energy. And though a pandemic-induced rebirth pushed new project Nora Kelly Band in an alt-country direction, this defiant tone remains. Album Rodeo Clown is out this summer Mint Records, and lead single ‘Lay Down Girl’ goes some way to explaining the LP’s titular image. A figure made to smile no matter the mood. “The lyrics to this song were direct advice that I was giving to myself,” Kelly explains. “To stop staying put, acting sweet and putting everyone else first. Other people’s approval had been my priority for so long that overtime my connection to what I liked and what I wanted had become weak.” Watch the video directed by Gabie Che below:

Rodeo Clown is out on the 25th August via Mint Records. Find Nora Kelly Band on Bandcamp.

The Phone Booth – Wasted

‘Happier at Home’, the previous single from Santa Barbara outfit The Phone Booth, was a slow-burning ode to living against expectations, moving through a sludgy haze of boredom and anxiety. Something of the track must have served its therapeutic purpose, because new single ‘Wasted’ is altogether more upbeat, blending sunny indie rock with slacker sensibilities to signal something of a return to past album Roman, albeit with a new sheen of polish. The song is the lead single from a forthcoming self-titled album, and gives the impression that The Phone Booth are ready to reintroduce themselves in their most confident form yet.

Sarah Coolidge – Ice Pack

Following several singles and EPs over the last few years, Bay Area musician Sarah Coolidge is set to release her debut album, Call Me When You Get There, a collection of ten songs recorded in John Vanderslice’s Tiny Telephone Studios in Oakland. Coolidge has a knack for writing deceptively simple songs that are effortlessly catchy and full of tongue-in-cheek humour, and lead single ‘Ice Pack’ is the perfect introduction. Upbeat indie pop soaked in shoegaze shimmer, it’s a song about a litany of eye injuries suffered from 3^rd grade to present, from burnt eyebrows to invasive pepper flakes. Tennessee Mowrey joins on bass and Chris Olson on drums, and together the trio make something genuinely infectious, certainly the most buoyant examination of bodily harm you’ve heard this year.

Virgin of the Birds – Moon Chariot

Following a series of EPs, Seattle‘s Virgin of the Birds caught the attention of Edinburgh label Song, By Toad, with albums Winter Seeds and Secret Kids seeing them join a roster including the likes of Meursault and Adam Stafford. The company felt fitting for a project straddling lo-fi folk and left-field art rock, where literate lyrics are met with experimental sounds, and inventiveness need not come at the expensive of emotion. The Scottish link continues with new EP Viper Summer, with members of Edinburgh folk outfit Storm the Palace joining to add a new dimension to the project, as captured by lead single ‘Moon Chariot’. A track bursting with bright energy and mythical strangeness, where any sense of opacity from the latter is rendered redundant by the conviction of the former. A song of serpents and winged horses in which you can only totally believe.

I rejoiced at seeing the giantess
And the world and its cruelties
And the serpent that sings:
“Now, for the moon, Noreen!”
“Now, for the moon, Noreen!”

The post Weekly Listening: May 2023 #2 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Bay Area songwriter Asha Wells is releasing a double single ahead of forthcoming album Water Words on Royal Oakie Records. Written during a testing period of a relationship, Water Words traces the arc of a partnership from dreamy beginnings to the new paths of the aftermath, and this pair of singles sits in the strange space at the heart of this progression. The period where nothing is decided in any one direction, the potential of both promise and regret latent within every detail. Take ‘Blue Angels’ and the way it marbles intimacy and hesitance into its tender tones, like an open palm wanting to grasp what is before it, though wary of the thorns hidden out of view.

Elisapie – Uummati Attanarsimat

Recording under her first name, Juno Award-winning Inuk musician, filmmaker and activist Elisapie Isaac makes music that reflects Canada’s complex history, singing in English, French and the Inuit language of Inuktitut as she combines contemporary pop with her ancestral culture. Her latest single ‘Uummati Attanarsimat’ is a cover of Blondie’s new wave classic ‘Heart of Glass’ translated into Inuktitut. A song that transports Elisapie to her childhood, bringing back memories of dancing to the radio with her cousins. “I remember one night when they played ‘Heart of Glass,'” she recalls. “I must have been five or six years old. They all started dancing like crazy. I observed their joy with admiration. I felt like I was free.” The cover also comes with a video, directed by Philippe Léonard, which comprises of Super 8 archival footage from Quebec’s northern reaches. Watch it below:

‘Uummati Attanarsimat’ is out now via Bonsound and available to download from the Elisapie Bandcamp page.

Her New Knife – douglasland.v1

Philadelphia outfit Her New Knife have recently released lead dreams/flayed so light, a new EP via Julia’s War Records. Through a combination of noise and shoegaze elements, the band weave a deliciously dark sound somewhere between 90s alt rock and contemporary acts like Greet Death, the controlled simmer of its brooding dark always threatening to spill over into chaos. Inspired by the band’s dog, who is said to have the regular old name of Halo 3, ‘douglasland.v1’ is the ideal intro to the aesthetic for anyone uninitiated, its palpable weight settling over the listener and gathering like a thunderhead before the searing climax.

Josie Toney – Extra

With album Extra coming soon on Like You Mean It Records, Olympia‘s Josie Toney has shared the title track to whet appetites for her distinctive blend of traditional and contemporary country styles. It’s a tale of longing dressed in a wistful brightness, inspired not so much by the heartbreak so familiar to the genre but rather the missed opportunity that comes with lonely living. “Is there anybody out there / who wants what I’ve got to give?” she sings in the opening lines. “I have so much extra / more than any one girl needs to live.” But more than that, Toney recognises that others are out there feeling the exact same way, and the song becomes a kind of ode to the possibility of a mutual love, if not yet the love itself.

Extra is out now via Like You Mean It Records.

Jude Brothers – practicing silence / looking for water!

There’s a curious mix of sorrow and whimsy on ‘practising silence / looking for water!’, the lead single from Jude Brothers’ render tender / blunder sunder coming soon on Gar Hole Records. The sense that the distance between the confusion of loss and clarity of peace isn’t all that large, with a considerable overlap between the experiences. Consisting of just Celtic lever harp and vocals, the song explores this territory with a delicate, compassionate tone, cataloguing those things lost amid living while coming to a sense of acceptance too. The track also has a video directed by Adeliza Backus-Pace which featured puppets made by Flying Wall Studios and controlled by Damon and Sabrina Griffith:

render tender / blunder sunder is out via Gar Hole Records and you can pre-order it now.

Langkamer – Hatchet

With new album The Noon and Midnight Manual coming this May on Breakfast Records,  Bristol‘s Langkamer are unveiling a steady stream of new tracks. First single ‘Sing at Dawn’ found “the sweet centre of a Venn diagram of twangy Americana and insouciant indie rock,” as we described it, though in doing so worked through heavier themes and depressive moods. New single ‘Hatchet’ again uses left-field pop energy as a Trojan horse to push into darker territory, taking inspiration from an old poet vocalist/drummer Josh Jarman knew. “He read me a poem about going to the supermarket with his wife, and how much of a struggle it was,” Jarman explains. “His words really stuck with me. How difficult such everyday things had become for them. Even just getting out of a car. It was heartbreaking, the matter-of-fact way he spoke about it.”

The Noon And Midnight Manual is out on the 8th May via Breakfast Records and you can pre-order it now from the Langkamer Bandcamp page.

Matthew Danger Lippman – And

Matthew Danger Lippman practises what has been called “stream-of-consciousness songwriting,” blending psych, pop and indie rock into an inventive and endlessly shifting style able to evoke the flights of fancy of our inner worlds. New album Once You Get Low You’ve Gotta Start Flying Baby promises to build upon this style is all of its bizarre glory, with lead single ‘And’ typifying Lippman’s ability to be earnest and absurd in the same breadth. The sort of thing which only makes sense when caught up within it, dream logic fired by its own momentum and charged by the endearing brightness of its rhythm.

And I had that dream last night
Where I pissed on the third rail
And the charge climbed up the piss trail
And it shot into my dickhole
And electrified me

And I walked around glowing
And I fried everything that I touched
And then I ran into my third grade teacher and she said
“You better watch where you piss”
And watch me now!

Palm Shadow – You Wouldn’t Have It Any Other Way

Based in southern California, Palm Shadow is a songwriter and musician who combines elements of dream pop, shoegaze and folk to create lush, diaphanous songs that shimmer and swirl in an enveloping haze. Debut single ‘You Wouldn’t Have It Any Other Way’ is the perfect introduction, taking the stark emotion of the likes of Phoebe Bridgers or Lucy Dacus and wrapping it up in ethereal ambience. Subtle arpeggiated synths add a cinematic poignancy as the song looks head-on at the tender regrets and heart-quickening inevitability of a complicated relationship, touching on what the liner notes describe as “bad timing, tabled ambitions, missed connections and procrastination guilt.”

Wayfinding – Hiro Up From The Woodshop

Wayfinding is an Edmonton-based project consisting of nêhiyawak members Marek Tyler and Matthew Cardinal alongside musician/artist Cassia Hardy (Wares) and Ryan Beattie (Himalayan Bear, Chet). The band introduced their shoegaze-inflected pomo pop back in November with ‘Bad Bloods’, which turned out to be the opening track of a self-titled EP set for release next month. It is a collection of songs which explores the full spectrum of memories both personal and cultural to Canada’s colonial history and the people shaped within it. Latest single ‘Hiro Up From the Woodshop’ moves through loneliness and humble compassion to capture the essence of a friendship, as well as the existential weight bubbling beneath even the quietest of moments.

And if you should inscribe
Iambic pentameter on my gravesite
make it a couple of lines
about the first part of my life
No empty accolades
Or poetry infantilized
Just the good times

The post Weekly Listening: March 2023 #4 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

The project of Gothenburg-based musician, producer and visual artist Lela Amparo, Amparo is an outlet for atmospheric and cinematic music that blends electronic, ambient and folk. Taken from new album Day and Night, out now on Bikiniwax Records, latest single ‘After Ours’ is a great example. Drawing on the likes of Bonobo and The Cinematic Orchestra, the song builds from simple guitar and plaintive strings into a rich, jazz-inflected track that’s thick with a sense of late-night drama and emotion. ‘After Ours’ is “inspired by a night spent in Paris before changing the course of my life,” Amparo explains. “It’s about being in the moment and knowing nothing will ever be the same.”

 Getdown Services – Cream Of The Crop

If John Cooper Clarke’s ‘Evidently Chickentown’ conjured the end days through pictures of a tedious, ruined Britain, then ‘Cream of the Crop’ by Bristol’s Getdown Services offers a new vision of the non-future. A world polished to within an inch of its life and then polished a bit harder. A stage of capitalism so late they’ve stopped updating the time on the board. Think branded boozers and no-change-from-a-tenner street food cuisine. The milieu is brought to life by shiny disco beats, though it is the conversational snark of vocalist Josh Law the grabs the attention. A figure who finds himself in a place so soulless he’s not sure whether to self-immolate or burst out laughing. Either way, he’s stuck there and so are you. Roll up everybody, Chickentown’s had a fresh coat of paint.

Jeffrey Silverstein – Cowboy Grass

Later this spring, Jeffrey Silverstein will release Western Sky Music, his second LP for Arrowhawk Records and first full-length since 2020’s You Become the Mountain. Promising an evolution of Silverstein’s cosmic brand of country, the album again features contributions from Barry Walker Jr (pedal steel) and Alex Chapman (bass), and also adds Akron/Family’s Dana Buoy on drums, as well as guest appearances from William Tyler and VSF fav Karima Walker. Lead single ‘Cowboy Grass’ is our first taste, a song with a little more dust and dirt and barroom boogie than anything Silverstein has made to date. Watch the video, directed by Austin Abbott and starring Eric DuRant, below:

Western Sky Music releases via Arrowhawk Records on 12th May. Pre-order a copy now from the Jeffrey Silverstein Bandcamp page.

Melati ESP – BAHASA BARU

With LP hipernatural coming soon on Carpark Records, Indonesian-American experimental pop artist Melati ESP has unveiled new single, ‘BAHASA BARU’. The record is notable in the way it draws on the breadth of Melati’s cultural influences to achieve its vivid sound (Javanese radio Dangdut, gamelan cassettes, Moving Shadow-era liquid jungle and Japanese chill-out are all listed as inspirations), and the new single serves as the ideal introduction to a style which exists outside of the usual categorization of genre or geography. “It’s a personal statement of intent,” Melati explains, “being comfortable in occupying the third space, and creating new ways of communicating that are tethered to intuition, empathy and understanding.” The song comes complete with a video, directed by Melati’s sister Kathleen Malay, which celebrates this embrace of otherness despite, as Melati puts it, “mostly feeling like a baby alien while growing up in Jakarta, always between two worlds.”

hipernatural is out on the 28th April via Carpark Records.

The Saxophones – Desert Flower

Released to announce their third album, coming early this summer on Full Time Hobby, ‘Desert Flower’ is the new single from The Saxophones. For the uninitiated, The Saxophones is the project of married duo Alexi Erenkov and Alison Alderdice, who make slinky Lynchian lounge music that’s dark and velvety, confronting existential concerns with a smoky sophistication. What Erenkov describes as “about avoidance and fear impeding personal growth and the deepening of relationships,” ‘Desert Flower’ is no different. Creeping and cryptic, it blends the material and the mystical, eventually swelling to emotive peaks as Erenkov’s croon gives way to radiant sax. It’s an intriguing glimpse of what promises to be a strange and sublime record.

There are symbols everywhere
signs that even I can’t deny.
Only if they aligned,
I could lift away the veil.

To Be a Cloud will be released via Full Time Hobby on 2^nd June. Pre-order it now from Bandcamp.

Strange Ranger – Rain So Hard

Strange Ranger are a band who have been defined by a sense of self-reinvention. Winning initial acclaim within the spheres of indie rock, 2019’s Remember The Rockets saw the first shoots of shoegaze and pop influences breaking the surface, and by No Light in Heaven the following year they were entirely rebranded as an experimental electronic outfit. New single ‘Rain So Hard’, out via Fire Talk Records, emerges from this electro ground, its lush and layered sound playing as some nameless immensity above the vocals, be it a looming cityscape or wide open sky. This overwhelming scale registers as a kind of melancholy, the vocals adrift within something to large for them to navigate or control. “How do I get out of this movie now?” asks the repeated refrain, hoping for nothing more than another person to cling onto for the ride. Watch the video directed by Ben Turok below:

‘Rain So Hard’ is out now via Fire Talk Records.

Women Tied to Railroad Tracks – Fake Tans

Back in 2019 we wrote about Women Tied to the Railroad Tracks, describing the sound of their album And Levitating as “indie pop that sits in a strange space between mundane reality and freaky dreams.” With their debut record on the horizon with Anxiety Blanket Records, the LA outfit have shared the brand new single, ‘Fake Tans’. A bright summertime track loosely based on Doris Lessing’s novel The Golden Notebook, where the protagonist speaks of an encounter with a man with a crack in his personality: “like a gap in a dam, and through that gap the future might pour in a different shape—terrible perhaps, or marvelous, but something new.”

Yael S. Copeland – Pool

Having made a name fronting Borito, Tel Aviv’s Yael S. Copeland is setting out alone for her first solo release. If the Borito sound occupied a colourful, retro bracket of the dream pop/rock genre, then Copeland’s solo work turns more toward the intimate and lo-fi, having more in common with Alex G and Elliott Smith. With an album set for release later this month, latest single ‘Pool’ shows how this stripped back style is no less immersive or heartfelt, the lyrics playing like something between a daydream and a poem in their gentle reflection, the sound still managing to envelop the listener in its lush layers.

big sky
like a big pool
blue and clear
but I can’t see my
reflection when I look down here

The post Weekly Listening: March 2023 #2 appeared first on Various Small Flames.