Hallelujah The Hills – A Band is Something to Figure Out
(REVIEW | INTERVIEW)

“This is an album built from symbolism (one of the tags on Bandcamp is ‘hieroglyphics’, to give you an idea) but, like all the best mysteries, a sense of significance floats to the top, independent of any hidden code. Hallelujah the Hills reconstruct the human experience through sheer enthusiasm, using their joyous hooks and choruses as earnest expressions of emotion rather than ironic juxtapositions.  Walsh and Co. aren’t sitting us down to share a smirk and a wink, or to reel off some abstract philosophical theories, but rather taking us by the hand and running through their strange world, leaving it up to us to catch something meaningful in the breathless blur. And what a world this is, one which has been evolving since their first album, an ecosystem based on a strange molecule – twin strands of confusion and intuition tightly bound and swirled into a double helix – the DNA of Hallelujah the Hills.”

Camp Cope – S/T
(REVIEW)

“For those of us that want to hope that maybe everything doesn’t have to be shit forever, there’s an atmosphere of dissent that seeps into every line. Not in that horrible on-the-nose Billy Bragg/Frank Turner way, but more subtle, funny and heartbreaking, with throwaway lines that leave you a bit off-balanced. I think that’s what I like most about Camp Cope – the constant switch between personal and protest, heartache and anger, and all the while feeling completely and utterly helpless.”

Beat Radio – Take It Forever
(REVIEW | INTERVIEW)

“Beat Radio’s fifth album Take It Forever feels like a culmination of ideas, the product of some long, hard thinking… With a large dose of hope and a pervading sense of goodwill, Take It Forever plays like the manifesto of someone who doesn’t know all the answers but finds meaning in asking the questions, the words not of a revolutionary or prophet but an ordinary man striving to make life extraordinary, just as it should be.”

Talons’ – Work Stories
(REVIEW)

“Explores the pervasive disillusionment in a society that hasn’t yet lived up to what it promised, a society run for interests other than those of the people who make up its majority. A society that offers hopes and dreams of resplendent lives in exchange for your hard earned $$$s, education courses that leave people stranded with more knowledge but no money, opportunities or sympathy. These are songs for people who wonder ‘when did it become not okay to do what I want with my life?’ Work Stories is a reminder that it’s okay to occasionally feel afraid or sad, that the things which trouble you are probably not as much your fault as you think, and most of all that, despite how it might sometimes feel you are never, ever, alone.”

Mount Moriah – How To Dance
(REVIEW)

“Mount Moriah push past their troubles into something positive and mysterious, a conglomeration of symbolism, mysticism, universality and other cosmic forces which pretty much equates to Southern Gothic 2.0. How to Dance is crafted from spirit and faith, carved out of a high, wide hope capable of healing any wounds, giving us the courage not just to survive, but to live.”

The Chairman Dances – Time Without Measure
(REVIEW | INTERVIEW)

“The Chairman Dances succeed in bringing characters to life in three dimensions, though on Time Without Measure the feat is even more impressive as the roster of figures are not only numerous but also known to history in decidedly superhuman terms. Now more than ever we should remember that activists and political heroes, for all of their spirit and unimaginable resolve, are as prone to doubt and death as anyone, and not half as powerful without our support and belief. Likewise, we’d do well to remember that villains and bigots are human too, flames that, however fierce and bright, will be snuffed out without the oxygen that is our backing. This album is a reminder that belief and faith can save us. It’s just a matter of choosing the right thing in which to invest our energies.”

Karima Walker – Hands in Our Names
(REVIEW)

“Hands in Our Names sees Karima Walker reconstruct an array of varied elements into something larger and more meaningful than they could ever be alone. Field recordings from her present and found recordings from someone else’s past swirl above and beneath her own words and guitar notes, drones of every pitch filling the background and stretching the songs into worlds of their own. When atomised into separate parts, the album is impressionistic, blurry and strange and difficult to describe, though when listened to as a whole, a blanket of stitches, it becomes something vivid and intuitive. As such, Hands in Our Names is able to convey things normal songs cannot, a freedom not just born of trope-avoiding experimentalism but somehow inherent in the very combinations of sounds, as though arranged into secret patterns or codes, magic spells that trump postmodern convictions. Rather than dying in open air upon leaving her mouth, Karima Walker’s communications bubble from within, stirring that dormant empathy that lies somewhere near the centre of us all.”

Sioux Falls (now Stranger Ranger) – Rot Forever
(REVIEW)

“Sioux Falls’ sound reads like a melting pot of the last twenty years of rock music. Taking the indie rock of the likes of Built to Spill et al., the band add thoughtful emo (like The Hotelier) and smart pop punk vibes (think LVL UP etc.) to create something wonderfully varied and entertaining, cycling through these genres not just between songs but within them. The narrator is centred within the stories of which they sing, sounding like another confused player in violent, unfair game operating to rules outside of anyone’s understanding. In the face of bewilderment they turn to anger and sorrow and joy, feelings easy to recognise, easy to submit to, decidedly non-ambivalent chemical reactions which remind them that they’re still alive.”

John K Samson – Winter Wheat
(REVIEW)

“The Weakerthans frontman’s first release since 2012 is everything we’ve come to expect, exploring his favourite themes of contemporary loneliness and isolation in his uniquely warm manner, his characters not ready to give up hope that connection (that is, real human connection) is still possible in our digital world.”

Nap Eyes – Thought Rock Fish Scale

“Nova Scotia’s Nap Eyes return with a sophomore album of rhythmic, ear-worming slacker folk rock songs, recorded completely live with no overdubs in just four days. Nigel Chapman’s lethargic monotone vocals give the whole thing the feel of a daydream, like the wandering high-brow thoughts of a sleepy philosophy/psychology major.”

Jeremy Squires – Shadows
(REVIEW | INTERVIEW)

“Does what the very best folk music can do, an outpouring from one human being to a multitude of others. It’s a record borne out of legitimate heartbreak, the end of a marriage and the death of a loved one, a brave and honest attempt to deal with big life-changing events. Deft songwriting allows Squires to expand these specific, individual scenes into large, engaging metaphors, in which we can find shards of our own experiences. The beauty of it is that the finished work is not just healing and revelatory for the artist. It can help us too.”

Loone & Paper Bee – Now I Know You and See How Wide You Are to the World
(REVIEW)

“Now I Know You and See How Wide You Are to the World is a terrific album. It’s as rich and as complex as life itself, steeped in passion and poetry, whirring like the universe and everything in it. There’s a line at the end of ‘Ugly, I’m Sorry’ that sums up the whole release rather nicely, capturing its in a handful of words far better than I am able to in this review: ‘And I wanna hold your hand / and go explore the pulsing humming darkness’.”

Spartan Jet-Plex – Get Some
(REVIEW)

“Taken at face value, Get Some is an indistinct album, the themes and meanings wrapped in layers of abstract lyrics and varied instrumentation. However, this vagueness itself curls and contorts and creeps into your head, eluding inclinations to describe and detail and thus bypassing the whole processing machinery most music must enter. As such, Kells’s thoughts and feelings arrive whole, unaltered, meaning that you feel what’s being said, even if it’s impossible to put into words.”

Kyle Morton – What Will Destroy You
(REVIEW)

“While Typhoon’s fourth record is still in the works, Morton last month released a surprise solo album, What Will Destroy You. Again the twin themes of tragedy and pleasure are central, as is the idea of catharsis and release. However, while mortality is an intrinsic element, the album does not tread the exact same ground as previous Typhoon releases. What Will Destroy You shifts the focus onto love, more specifically what Morton describes as “the ambivalence of erotic love,” leading to an intimate, surprisingly honest album which delves into things both more wonderful and mundane than your average love songs.”

CHUCK – My Band is a Computer
(REVIEW | INTERVIEW)

“Playing like a collaboration between Owen Ashworth and Bret Easton Ellis, the CHUCK brand of observant and at times cringe-inducingly honest indie pop will no doubt prove divisive. But there’s far more to My Band is a Computer than drugs and self-pity and empty sex. Like the Frog release that Audio Antihero brought us last year, it crams an awful lot into its run-time, covering everything that’s terrible and everything that’s not about being a young adult in the twenty-first century, somehow managing to tap into the human kernel at the centre of our zombified lurch of nostalgia and regret.”

Monarch Mtn – Everyone is Here
(REVIEW)

“It would be wrong to consider the music of Monarch Mtn as simply a two dimensional mope-fest, with Farmer’s poetic lyrics and warm delivery hint at something beyond the misery. The palette is undoubtedly gloomy, blacks and greys and deep blues, but Farmer’s warm vocals and poetic turns of phrase flicker across this twilight like threads of gold.”

Claire Cronin – Came Down a Storm
(REVIEW)

“The real success of Down Came a Storm is how Claire Cronin and John Dieterich combine to spin stories and landscapes from their combined talents, every element given equal standing to conjure not only folk tales but the worlds in which they exist. Here you can feel the wind on your skin, hear it move in the trees, smell its scent of salt and earth and ozone. You can feel it move the characters too, propelling them into dark, poetic places where nature rules and comfort can be found in the starkest of elements.”

Adeem the Artist – Kyle Adem is Dead
(REVIEW | INTERVIEW)

“The word ‘sincere’ is often taken as synonymous for affectionate or sentimental. With Kyle Adem is Dead, Adeem the Artist strives to be sincere in every sense, finding the bravery not just to declare his love for his wife but to voice his fears, his weaknesses, his exasperation with life as we live it. With everything on the table, no lingering mysteries or secrets withheld, there is nothing left to corrupt the good things. Because, after all, Kyle Adem is dead.”

Mal Devisa – Kiid
(REVIEW)

“Kiid is a personal record and plays like condensed version of life, reaching high and falling low, crackling and bursting and simmering under the surface, at times exploding in urgent streams of consciousness as if the words and thoughts can no longer be held in. This is an album that refuses to be reduced to something easily describable, persevering in it’s complexity against the binarizing forces of anxiety or genre or gender or race. Kiid isn’t a self-doubt record or political record, nor a sad record or a happy record. It’s not jazz or gospel or indie rock. Kiid is everything. Kiid is whatever it wants to be.”

Lisa/Liza – Deserts of Youth
(REVIEW)

“Wonderfully minimal and psych-tinged songs that will doubtless appeal to fans of  soft and sad outsider folk artists such as Sarah Winchester. At times it’s gossamer thin, with Victoria’s vocals little more than hushed murmurs, though even in these quiet moments her words hold a kind of understated magnetism, a power which draws in the instrumentation and in turn becomes augmented by it. Deserts of Youth shows you don’t necessarily need to raise your voice to make a statement, that even quiet songs can be imbued with a blazing energy.”

Old Earth – Lay For June
(REVIEW | INTERVIEW)

“Trying to put Old Earth’s music into words seems futile and kind of besides the point. There’s never going to be a satisfactory way to describe art so fluid and weird and instinctive, so all we can tell you is what it sounds like to us. It’s operating on a deeper level, one not easily outlined, playing on some atavistic region of the subconscious that reacts to fear and beauty, that treats intense wonder and dread as the same emotion. It’s the same area of the brain that tells us to light candles and throw coins down wells no matter how secular our society becomes.”

What were your favourite albums of 2016? Let us know through one of the usual channels – we’re on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and Instagram.

The post Wake the Deaf’s Favourite Albums of 2016 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Tracklisting:

1. Your Best American Girl – Mitski
2. Shine – Solids
3. Vertebrae – Sam Moss
4. Joy Lies Down – Cloud (Bern Yr Idols comp from Audio Antihero)
5. Near You – Adeline Hotel
6. I Saw You – Outer Spaces
7. Madeline – Yoni & Geti
8. Keep it Light – ARMS
9. Figure It Out – Jake Rollins
10. We Learned to Cry – Adeem The Artist
11. ant hill paradise – Bedbug
12. I’m Young – Erin Tobey
13. coca cola purgatory – Ryder Eaton
14. Muppet Babies – Nice Legs (FRY YR BRN comp from Cereal + Sounds & Z Tapes)
15. Dawn Raid – The Second Hand Marching Band & Benni Hemm Hemm
16. President – Nice Try
17. SHIP – Fake Boyfriend
18. If You Let It – Sioux Falls
19. sorry for not answering the phone, i’m too busy trying to fly away – In Love with a Ghost
20. Clueless – Holiday Home
21. Realistic Birthday Music – Hallelujah the Hills
22. Age of Consent – Cayetana
23. Seattle – Tincho
24. Lance bangs #1 single released on 4/20 – Lance Bangs
25. Cigarettes – Daytime TV
26. Everything Costs – Radical Face
27. Tired of IPAs – talons’
28. Soak – Good Good Blood
29. Heavy as a mountain – Moin Moin

The post April 2016 Roundup – A Mixtape appeared first on Various Small Flames.

“strives to be sincere in every sense, finding the bravery not just to declare his love for his wife but to voice his fears, his weaknesses, his exasperation with life as we live it.”

As we liked the album so much, we were delighted when Adeem accepted our request to talk a little more in-depth about it, and delighted further when we read his responses. I hope, like us, you find his answers interesting and enlightening and maybe inspiring, too.

Hi Adeem, thanks for taking the time to speak with us. How’s life in Tennessee at the moment?

Life is well. Currently most of my time is spent practicing the tao of litter box maintenance and watching The Force Awakens as many times as I can before it leaves the theatre. Tennessee is full of pollen right now so we’re all crying for the same reason which isn’t usual.

First of all, I think we need to ask about the change of name. It’s clear from your piece on the matter that names and identity are very important to you, and that Adeem feels like an unburdening of mystery and/or a return to something more sincerely, capital-Y You. Was Kyle Adem a weight around your neck, or a well-worn skin now shed? Do you feel the switch of name is intrinsic to the album as it turned out?

I feel so uncomfortable to talk about my name. It must sound so trivial and elitist and irksome to most people. Kyle Adem was a proclamation in its own right as well so it’s proper to call it a well-worn skin. The first album I released as Kyle Adem was important to the change I was making. I wanted to make music that was more lighthearted and quirky. I discovered Lou Reed and Tom Waits and was really over trying to make every song I wrote into a sermon’s sister piece. So that album had strangers looking for soulmates at a funeral and a character who dies and starts offering sexual favors to other ghosts in order to make friends in the afterlife. “We are not philosophers in search of the unknown. We are kids who do not want to be alone- and we will find our own fucking way home” as a lyric from that project was kind of my creed during that time. Especially last year, it began to feel more like a barrier to the art that I wanted to create. I feel very over the idea of trying to commit to a brand. I contain multitudes. I don’t know how to package that. It also deals a lot with my relationship with my parents, religion, my inevitable death… All of that felt very linked to my decision to assume the name “Adeem” and the things that it meant for who I want to be in this life. I guess this is a sort of generic Saturn’s return sort of record so there’s birth and death and the introduction of myself as “Adeem” is important to that.

Sincerity in art is something which really interests me, particularly in terms of a reaction against something, irony or mystery or whatever you want to call it (ie. the mask to hide behind born of fear of being seen as naïve). Do you find it difficult to share the songs which are unashamedly You?

Yes and no. I started writing poetry when I was twelve as a way of communicating things I didn’t know how to say. As a teenager, most of my songs were about pain and sadness and I didn’t entirely understand why. I was viewing the world through such a distorted lens and so I think music became my safe space where I could say whatever I wanted and people would interpret it in ways that were personal to them. I could write a song about my questions surrounding religion and people would connect with it on a personal level. If I asked those questions aloud, it was heresy. Same with my parents, my friends, everything. If I sang it, it seemed like people heard it in a way that was palatable. It’s difficult, though. It’s true that to listen to these songs is to hear the essence of who I am as a person in a very vulnerable, honest way so it’s scary to think of being known in this way by strangers. It’s also true, however, that it’s a vague portrait of the ocean inside so there’s a dual fear that people will think they know more than they ever could.

What or who would you list as your biggest influences? Do you consider art forms other than music to have played a role in shaping your sound? Maybe literature or film or visual art?

I was born in eighty eight so my very young years were filled with all of the glory of the 90’s. Garth Brooks was probably the first artist I obsessed over. I poured through his albums and devoured his songs. After that I listened to Savage Garden’s debut album probably over a thousand times. That’s my cleaning-the-house jam. In the early 2000’s I started getting really excited about Johnny Cash and then Chris Carrabba and everything emo. mewithoutYou, David Bazan, and the mountain goats are some of my most formative influences at this stage. I had to stop listening to TMG because I was emulating his writing style too much. I also consider Charles Bukowski, Kahlil Gibran, and Fred Rogers a sort of holy trinity that I spend time praying to depending on whether or not I feel like inspiring someone’s very gentle, beautiful soul or drinking whiskey under a bridge. Film too, yeah. Chaplin’s The Great Dictator inspired the song “Sidewalk” off the new album. I have an EP that I’ll put out next year probably that’s based on an episode of Doctor Who. I also really like Duaiv, a visual artist in Florida who paints these wonderfully eccentric paintings of sailboats that I adore. I own one from my time working on ships. My wife as well is a painter who has inspired me not just with her person but with her art. I have a couple of pieces that are based on paintings she has done.

Your mini-essay reads as something organic, a gloriously natural non-PR led piece of the kind which seems to be dropping out of view in the modern music scene. Do you feel artists could do more in their use of the internet as a means of direct, intimate conversation, as opposed to the mass marketing, product-selling tool it seems to have become?

Oh, I don’t know. I think part of it probably comes from my general dissatisfaction with capitalism and consumer culture as a whole. I’ve read a lot of blogs about social media marketing strategy and branding and it’s all great stuff but it feels disingenuous to me- probably because I don’t see myself as a “professional musician.” I see my approach as a weakness more than anything. When I was younger and I still believed life was a story about me, I was much more prone to these marketing strategies. Now that I am older, I wonder how many more songs from white guys with acoustic guitars do we really need? There are people who like what I do and have a visceral reaction to it. I like to stumble organically into those people because they usually have some similar trajectory of life as I do. Anyone is capable of writing the music that I write but I was sad enough to do it. It seems weird to try and sell that reality as a commodity. I don’t aspire to be a musician. I aspire to journey- to eat fresh fruit and ride my bicycle in every state. I aspire to breathe ocean air and to taste Hannah’s mouth in the cool spring mornings. I aspire to sleep in and drink tea. Music is a thing that I do to re-center my soul and also to make new friends. I hope it supports a quality of life that enables my aspirations but little else and I can’t tell yet if there is a market for brash sincerity. I’ll get back to you.

At the end of the piece you hint at ‘lots of kickass projects’ which will be coming in the future. Can you give us any more details, or are they all Top Secret for the time being?

I’m not entirely sure what I’m going to do next. I’m probably going to take a little bit of time off in the fall and work on a definitive “next-art-thing.” I’m starting to write a lot more prose and I’ve been painting and sketching and working on some new conceptual EP’s that are literary pieces- vague storylines with interesting characters. I am leaning towards releasing this series of four EP’s named after birds. They deal with the emotional connection that songs have to specific memories in our life and the lasting impact they can have on the way we ascribe narrative to our experiences.

Finally, could you name four or five acts you think we should be listening too? They can be brand new or old classics, whatever you think will make our days a little brighter (or darker)?

Oh, hell yes. One of my favorite EP’s right now is by a band called Blond Bones. Otherwise I’ve been listening to a lot of Jason Isbell, Childish Gambino, Joey English, and Gaslight Anthem. I think all of those will probably accomplish both brightening and darkening of days!

You can buy Kyle Adem is Dead from the Adeem the Artist Bandcamp page, or via iTunes. Don’t forget to read our review too.

Photo by Hannah Bingham

The post Interview: Adeem the Artist appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Adeem wrote an excellent piece which shone a light on the whole change, highlighting just how much weight the metamorphosis carries for him. It’s clear from the first listen to the new album that something major has taken place, the writing and delivery imbued with a sense of sincerity beyond anything on his music to date. The opening track ‘Good Evening’ serves as the introduction to this new/real Adeem, although it feels like a two-way thing, like he is as eager to meet you as you are him. As we described in the previous post:

“[Good Evening is] forged from that peculiar kind of earnestness which makes you feel comfortable, the sense that someone is willing to listen… ‘This is me,’ Adeem is saying. ‘Now who are you?'”

‘Impossible’ is a song about the beauty and strength that can be found in fragility, sounding like a cross between Small Houses and Great American Desert, while ‘Cincinnati’ channels Gregory Alan Isakov in its sad tale of Midwestern life, a world where things don’t work out as expected, as if tipping towards some larger tragedy. ‘Quiet Songs’ is a creeping heartbreaker not loud in terms of instrumentation but deafening in its words, the lyrics standing stark against an echoing silence. In much the same way as Noah Gundersen, Adeem the Artist manages to sound at once tender and enraged, seized by the words coming from his throat as if in frenzy. The song charts the progression of a person who knows they are different, starting from their birth into a conservative family where guns came before any clear sense of identity, and following them through school (“everybody knew I was a dark kind of kid”) and the rest of life. In an effort to regain (and then communicate) a sense of self, they turn to anger (“I was older when I learned that you gotta yell / and summon some hell /if you want to be heard”) before tragedy lets the façade drop enough for their true, earnest self to poke through.

“And I got scared when you were dying
it changed the melody for me
between the stones we threw to keep ourselves from crying
and the soft moments composed of unsung harmonies

I didn’t think that things would be perfect
I just thought you would listen
I just thought you would hear”

‘Good Ship Jesus’ has a mean country twang, the talk of devils and saviours foreshadowing the references to racism and discrimination by authorities which form the final verse, while ‘Waiting’ is altogether warmer and more hopeful, a bona fide love song tracing the possibilities for development and betterment within a relationship and opening up the possibility of fate or true love or some similar phenomenon. ‘Asphalt’ is a Dylan-esque folk song about falling head over heels, ‘We Learnt To Cry’ a slow, cathartic number in which suffering is the binding force of a relationship, and ‘Sidewalk’ is a frenetic folk song which borders on performance poetry or rap, the words streaming out as if from a man given three minutes to clear his heart or mind or both. From this, ‘We Belong Here’ emerges with a gentle intimacy, the couple here linked not be some grand understanding of life or love but rather a common confusion, a willingness not only to face strange, unknowable questions together but to accept this company as enough.

“We belong here inside the mystery of facing one another
here inside this endless, burning collage of color
here inside the searching, and the hurting, and the wonder.

We belong”

‘Midway Motel’ is an electrified Americana number carved out of small town nostalgia, where time passes like a desert wind or else a lightning flash, childhood dreams lost to the fierce grip of obligations and expectations, and the closing track, ‘Goodbye’, is equal parts compassionate and fierce. Part love song, part demand for answers, the song finds Adeem seized by love and fear and that all-too-human dissatisfaction, the inability to accept that life amounts to no more than growing and working and shrinking slowly towards your grave.

“Life can be hard
when you aren’t quite sure who you are
or where you’re going.

Sitting alone in my car,
I felt my heart explode into an epitaph.

Is this the plan of a perfect God?
Breeding and depleting and then falling apart
well, all I hear is the sound of goodbye.
Don’t say goodbye”

The word ‘sincere’ is often taken as synonymous for affectionate or sentimental. While it might be true that, deep down, us humans are often feeble, dewy-eyed creatures pretending otherwise, true sincerity involves a whole lot more than confessing love. We also hide things like depression, discontentment and fear of death, decidedly un-saccharine facets of the human condition we’d rather forget, feelings which can eat us up and void whatever love we might be holding. With Kyle Adem is Dead, Adeem the Artist strives to be sincere in every sense, finding the bravery not just to declare his love for his wife but to voice his fears, his weaknesses, his exasperation with life as we live it. With everything on the table, no lingering mysteries or secrets withheld, there is nothing left to corrupt the good things. Because, after all, Kyle Adem is dead.

Kyle Adem is Dead is out on Friday. Keep an eye on the Adeem the Artist Bandcamp page to buy it, or snag it from iTunes.

Artwork by Hannah Bingham

The post Adeem the Artist – Kyle Adem is Dead appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Tracklisting:

1. Fire – Mal Devisa
2. wild fire/flowers – Trust Fall
3. Home Alone – Max Gardener
4. Your Love – Jeremy Squires
5. Veins – Camp Howard
6. How To Dance – Mount Moriah
7. Good Evening – Adeem the Artist
8. Shallow – Candy
9. Francie Cool – Francie Cool
10. Bad Vibes – Zebrafi
11. Piece of Ivy – Jake Bellissimo
12. Snow Day – Julia Brown
13. Alive – Dear Tracks
14. Ted the Radical Westy – Ravetank
15. ft1 – naps
16. We Have The Perimeter Surrounded – Hallelujah the Hills
17. Bullet in a Broken Gun – Oscar Lush
18. Color Peels – The Wandering Lake
19. Nowhere Nothing – Oceanator
20. Suagr Skull – The Washboard Abs
21. Of Wandering – Littler
22. bicycle – Twelve Gardens
23. Ya Ya Ya – You Won’t
24. Find You – Family Video
25. Jack Campbell (Quick Jammer) – Dingus.
26. Candy – Fish Food
27. It May Very Well Do – 100 Watt Horse
28. Life – Whim
29. Meg – Hovvdy
30. Piano Player – The Hotelier
31. Calvary – Chris Bathgate
32. Postman – Sam Moss

The post March 2016 Roundup – A Mixtape appeared first on Various Small Flames.

“I’ve decided recently that what I want to do is be very sincere with my art. I always wanted to be vague and mysterious; I thought that the space was important. Now, I feel differently; I want to tell you my name, which I’ve since changed the spelling to Adeem, and you tell me your name. Then we’re friends, and we get coffee, or beer, or food together- like before when my hope was to patch together a family of strangers.

The truth is there is organically such a broad universe dividing us from one another and I just don’t think that it needs any added mystery. So hey, I’m Adeem”.

So far only one track has been unveiled from Kyle Adem is Dead, but it goes a long way in showing the direction Adeem has taken his sound. ‘Good Evening’ sees sparse guitars allowing Adeem’s voice to fill the track, expanding outwards so that it fills your chest too. His words are disarmingly sincere, not melodramatic or overly sentimental but instead forged from that peculiar kind of earnestness which makes you feel comfortable, the sense that someone is willing to listen. Even without the back-story, ‘Good Evening’ sounds like an introduction “This is me,” Adeem is saying. “Now who are you?”

“Good evening
you’re a fine looking group
and your faces make expressions
​that decide which songs I’m going to do”

In this dark inner observatory
it’s a fine night for sharing songs and stories
like this one time when I was still young
I mean- I’m still young now
but I was younger when this happened…
I sang a song that was quite similar to this one”

Kyle Adem is Dead is to be released on the 8th April, so expect a full review closer to that date.

The post Adeem the Artist announces new album, Kyle Adem is Dead appeared first on Various Small Flames.