Perhaps the least overtly festive song of the supposed trilogy, ‘Movie Theater Manager’ draws on personal experience to tell the tale of an armed robbery at a movie house with characteristic nuance and pathos. A tale of lonely people getting by however they can. Working late at the cinema, counting the cash in the office upstairs before the night drop at the bank, or else walking into the same theatre with a pistol and a set of demands. Supporting vocals from Margaret McCarthy of Moontype further the emotion, the whole thing bathed in a nocturnal air, where the sad rhythms of routine are accompanied by a sense of possibility, as though the solitude of the night brings with it small dreams and a vague temptation to change your life by doing something drastic. “I wonder how far / all that money could take me / if I just kept walking,” the narrator muses as they take the evening’s profits to the bank. Though one person’s idle musings are another’s grand strategy.

“‘Movie Theater Manager’ was inspired by some of my experiences working at San Francisco movie theaters in the late 90s,” Ashworth explains, “a period of my life that remains vivid in my memory. The song came back to me a few weeks ago after watching the Clint Eastwood movie Escape From Alcatraz with my kid.” The Eastwood movie directly inspires the middle verses of the song, where the narrator shares a dream in which they come across family letters while babysitting back in Vermont. Namely notes addressed to their aunt from their uncle, who is himself serving time for a series of bank robberies.

In most of his letters
he said he was sorry &
wanted forgiveness
The last one’s a postcard
from after he broke out
it said Merry Christmas

As its title suggests, ‘Blue Christmas 2’ is more openly festive, the narrative present of the song situated on Christmas evening. The protagonist is another lonely figure moving through the night, first in a diner where they sit with their coffee and pumpkin pie, alone but for the waitress and Elvis on the radio. At least before the former changes the station (“I hate that tune” she said / “What Christmas isn’t blue? / I don’t need to hear it / from him, too”). Later, on driving to a motel, the narrator shares a memory of their own robbery, hitting a bank on Christmas Eve with an apparent significant other (if a partner in crime could be anything else?). The pair, both dressed as Santa Claus, got away with the cash, only to later part and learn something went wrong, their loneliness sealed and plans scuppered, Christmas turned blue in more ways than one.

We drove through the night to Wichita Falls
where I left you at your mama’s house
& as you pulled your bag out the back of the Buick
You said to me “Merry Christmas, bud!”

Movie Theater Manager is out now via Orindal Records and available from Bandcamp. Check out the Advance Base tour dates below and buy tickets here.

The post Advance Base – Movie Theater Manager / Blue Christmas 2 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

And it’s a pretty impressive list, what the label call “an often-stunning gestalt of generational talent paying homage to one of the most gifted but underrated American songwriters.” Some of our very favourite artists feature, including Advance Base, Friendship, Trace Mountains, Sadurn, Hand Habits and a whole host more, reimagining a selection of songs from across Molina’s oeuvre.

Only two tracks have been released so far, but if they are any indication it’s going to be a pretty special release. Opening proceedings is MJ Lenderman‘s pretty faithful take on Songs: Ohia’s ‘Just Be Simple’, before Sun June put their own spin on Magnolia Electric Co. track ‘Leave the City’, moulding it into what could sound like a new Sun June track if you are not familiar with the original. It also features what is, in a particularly crowded field, one of Molina’s best opening lines.

Broke my heart to leave the city
I mean it broke what wasn’t broken in there already

I Will Swim to You: A Tribute to Jason Molina will be released on 5th September and available to pre-order via the Run For Cover Records Bandcamp page, including the fittingly titled Coxcomb Red, Comet Dust Red or Old Hen Black vinyl editions. 10% of profits will be donated to MusiCares® Mental Health and Addiction Recovery Fund.

The post I Will Swim to You: A Tribute to Jason Molina appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Last week, Keeled Scales announced they will be releasing These Days, the excellent debut album from Nashville-based songwriter Emily Hines, later this summer—a record we have previously described “as warm and soft as a blanket to wrap around yourself in the cold winter months, but with a sharp pang of something else too, a bittersweet bite more potent than the frost at the window.” To coincide with the news, Hines has unveiled opening track ‘My Own Way’, a hushed but nonetheless defiant folk song about walking one’s own path. “This is the last song I wrote for the record,” Hines describes, “I wrote it on my porch in Nashville. I felt stuck in place and needed to sing myself out of it.” It’s the perfect introduction to a collection of songs that unfold with grace and ring with real emotion, recorded mostly live to cassette for that warm and intimate texture.

Jacquelyn Roy – Shoot Your Arrow

On May Day, Ipswich, Massachusetts artist Jacquelyn Roy released Museum of Time, an album of wonderfully restrained and finely-wrought folk songs. Built on softly tumbling acoustic guitar, unembellished vocals and opaque imagery, these are folk songs in the gothic tradition, equal parts beautiful and darkly spectral. Perhaps the best introduction is ‘Shoot Your Arrow’, the record’s midpoint and an encapsulation of everything Jacquelyn Roy does so well. Roy describes it as a song “about love and loss,” and this is true in a very direct sense. It opens in the springtime, fluttering with the sense of contentment and new beginnings, but eventually slows into doleful resignation as Roy sings “So I’m setting you free / so you can shoot your arrow away from me.”

Jess Kerber – Never Again

“Beginning as a reflective croon and slowly ramping up in emotional intensity, as though ascending through the slightly ethereal haze of the opening towards a newfound clarity.” So we wrote of Jess Kerber‘s ‘Next to You’ last month, praising the combination of traditional Americana and contemporary electronics. With full-length From Way Down Here coming this June on Felte Records, Kerber is back with ‘Never Again’, the album’s opening track which not only further introduces this style but digs into the themes of loss and belonging which it brings to life. “I miss it sometimes / But never for long,” as she sings in the chorus. “I’ll Know it forever / But never again.”

Watch the video edited by Kerber herself below:

From Way Down Here will be released on the 20th June via Felte Records and you can pre-order it now.

Johnny Falloon – Circumcision

“Takes its seriousness unseriously and its unseriousness with reverence.” So reads the bio of self-described absurdist no-wave rock and rollers Johnny Falloon, with forthcoming full-length Tell Hell I’m Not Coming seeing the Athens, Georgia outfit take on the information overload that is the twenty-first century with a suitably raw and chaotic style. Latest single ‘Circumcision’ indicates the kind of intensity you should expect from the record, racing forwards with an almost dangerous momentum, as though at any minute threatening to go veering of the tracks and end in a fiery wreck. John Edmondson’s fervid vocals only escalates the manic energy, the wry humour which often shadows the lyrics doing nothing to dispel their deliver’s rabid preacher tone. The result is furious, searing, sometimes funny, and undeniably odd, the perfect cocktail of moods to describe our current moment.

linoleumville – to see you and talk

What they describe as “a conceptual project comprising a concept album & a literary zine,” linoleumville is the new venture of Alex Blake and Ben Dodd which brings together folk songwriting with electronic compositions. What the band call a song “about the first and final days of a relationship,” lead single ‘to see you and talk’ introduces the album’s melancholy atmosphere, combining sparse electronics and gentle vocals with minimal samples and shadowy negative space. Sheffield dream pop act Prima Hera joins to provide guest vocals, and these harmonies work to smooth the edges of the otherwise downbeat atmosphere.

pearly drops – Mermaid (ft. Cub Sport)

Recording under the moniker pearly drops, Finnish duo of Sandra Tervonen and Juuso Malin make a brand of pop that occupies the full spectrum of the word otherworldly. Lush and ethereal but also strangely alien, originating somewhere other than this world, be it dreams or outer space. New single ‘Mermaid’ invites Aussie rock outfit Cub Sport to lift the song further, bringing to life a track full of shimmer and melancholy which exudes a kind of fallen splendour. “In this song, among other things, the glamorous Hollywood scenarios have already been turned upside down,” the duo explain. “The decline has begun and, for example, a persona as a mermaid in the sewers of Sunset Boulevard seems like a more attractive sidequest.”

‘Mermaid’ is out now via Music Website and available from Bandcamp.

Sid Hillman – Even Things

For going on thirty years, songwriter Sid Hillman has been releasing evocative, often melancholic Western music, both solo and as part of the Sid Hillman Quartet, and latest album Oxygen feels every inch the product of this hard won experience and expertise. Take single ‘Even Things’, a slow, almost minimalist folk rock song as wise as it is poignant, rising above the rush of the everyday to share its meditative message. “This is a song about letting go,” as Hillman explains, “not trying so hard to control things, manage things, and seeing that there’s a beauty in taking a step back to allow things to move of their own accord.” Fans of the likes of Low and Red House Painters are sure to find much to appreciate within Hillman’s work, but comparisons are not always helpful with songs like this, as you leave the track with the sense of having experienced something far more personal.

Oxygen is out now via Rare Bird Recordings and you can find more on his website.

Special World – Big Apple, 3am

Back in 2024 we introduced Special World, the personal project of Philadelphia-based songwriter and musician Andy Molholt, with a self-titled release crafting “a place often strange and always colourful,” as we put it, “where the light bends in odd shapes and everything takes on the loaded, abstract logic of dreams.” With a June US tour on the horizon, Molholt has returned with a brand new single ‘Big Apple, 3am’, available as a specialty lathe cut 7″ via PIAPTK Records, which in reality isn’t a new song at all. Rather, the track is built from a demo Molholt wrote all the way back in 2009, with Izzy True (bass guitar) and Eric Slick (drums) joining to bring it to life. The result lives up to the above description in its woozy, cryptic tones, offering all the nocturnal colour suggested by its title and possessing that off-kilter glide unique to the forbidden hours of the night.

Watch the video by Grant Bouvier below:

‘Big Apple, 3am’ is out now and available from Bandcamp. The 7″ is available from PIAPTK.

Teethe – Magic Of The Sale

Texas outfit Teethe have had plenty on their plates since the release of their celebrated self-titled debut album back in 2020, putting out a number of well-received singles and support slots alongside the likes of American Football, Ethel Cain and Horse Jumper of Love. But it is only now they are turning their attention to a new full-length. Coming via Winspear this August, Magic Of The Sale continues to develop what the band call ‘Southern slowcore’, the addition of strings and and slide guitar allowing for a newfound cinematic depth. The lead single and title track embodies the layered style, where a melancholic weight is shot through with something brighter, and small beams of hope manage to penetrate the dark.

Watch the video by Ben Turok below:

Magic Of The Sale is out on the 8th August via Winspear and you can get it via Bandcamp.

Walker Rider – Free

“You took me to the RV show, listed off every engine you thought I’d know,” sings Minneapolis songwriter Walker Rider on ‘Free’. The everyman, perhaps unlikely, setting for a love song captures something of the atmosphere of Fair, Rider’s new record of rough ‘n ready heartbroken lo-fi country. The track is quiet and unpretentious and devastatingly intimate, Rider’s vocals (plus subtle accompaniment from Advance Base‘s Owen Ashworth) bleary-eyed and earnest as a 3am soul-bearing voicemail. A song tender in every sense of the word, aching with fondness yet sore to the touch, and unsure quite what to do with a love which hurts as much as it helps. “I am fine most of the time,” he sings in the refrain. “The other half, you were on my mind.”

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When news of the fires broke in January 2025, Verrill’s mind returned to this feeling. “The faces I was seeing online of people who were fleeing, who lost everything, were friends, family, and collaborators,” they continue. “The helpless darkness was creeping in. I grasped for that feeling, that feeling of being held and together and supported that threaded through the music we created on Election Day. I called up Jolie and Carolina about our comp idea.”

The resulting release features over forty tracks by an array of talent, including VSF favs like Karima Walker, Advance Base, Tobacco City, Macie Stewart, Allegra Krieger, Squirrel Flower, Claire Rousay, Lisa/Liza, Stephen Steinbrink, Tasha, Eliza Niemi, Sophia Corinne and many others. But where some compilations which take the maximalist approach end up with a disparate, scattergun feel, If I Could Only Fly maintains a clear, uniting vibe despite the diversity of its artists. A sense of cohesion and togetherness which hints at the radical potential within the collective, something we need to remember now more than ever as the suite of challenges which marks the contemporary moment only widens and deepens. As Verrill continues:

I feel like coming together an creating a Thing like a Comp not only raises cold hard cash for the people that need it now (and we could all be next) it weaves us together in song and solidarity, reminds us we have each other, adds our names to the list of those we could turn to, whether it is the artists who contribute or the dear ears who listen, share, and support. These things matter when things are hard. They matter always

‘If I could only fly’ a comp for LA Wildfire Relief is out now and available from Bandcamp.

Cover art by Lili Todd

The post If I Could Only Fly: A Comp For LA Wildfire Relief appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Adeline Hotel – Whodunnit

Ruination Record Co.

“There’s always a strange combination of continuity and change within a new album from Adeline Hotel. Each record building upon what came before it while often in some respects also turning away to chart new ground. As though the project exists as a kind of world of its own, and the function of each release is to bring us a view of a different corner. Adeline Hotel as a vast space we’re discovering album by album, song by song, with Dan Knishkowy not so much engineering the experience as leading the way. This exploratory spirit is central to Whodunnit […] an album following a tradition which lists the likes of Gillian Welch, Neil Young and Van Morrison among its practitioners. Songs as a form of stream of consciousness, not only in terms of lyrics but the very sound itself. The sense of having tapped into some wellspring of movement or momentum and choosing to lean into the flow.” [Review]

Advance Base – Horrible Occurrences

Run For Cover / Orindal Records

“For while the setting is entirely imaginary, the narratives and characters owe much to real life. Indeed the killer [of ‘The Year I Lived in Richmond’] is inspired by an analogous figure who stalked a place Advance Base‘s Own Ashworth once called home, fictionalised to create some sense of distance and decency. If Horrible Occurrences can be distilled into one reductive image, then that is perhaps the most enlightening. A receptacle into which bad memories and old stories can be poured. A small town diorama in which they can play out again, change shapes, take on lives of their own. One we might approach and watch over along with Ashworth, feeling tall from that perspective, relatively safe in the top-down view.” [Review]

Anne Malin – Strange Power!

Dear Life Records

Released in tandem book-length poem What Floods under the name AM Ringwalt, Anne Malin‘s Strange Power! is an album which explores “how nature and its inherent motion might possess the key to the process of healing in the aftermath of trauma and loss,” as we wrote earlier in the year. Something which possesses a palpable momentum yet no clear conclusion. In other hands, this lack of answers or endings might be held up as the tragic farce of existence, but here is positioned more like an opportunity. To continue asking questions both of yourself and your surroundings, as though the act of interrogation is its own strange power. A sign of a faith in something human and sublime.

Being Dead – EELS

Bayonet Records

“If you thought [previous release] When Horses Would Run was inventive, then just wait until you hear what is coming next. Because the new Being Dead full-length EELS […] takes everything that made its predecessor special and pushes it further. Travelling to Los Angeles for a fortnight of writing and recording with John Congleton, the pair pushed themselves to embrace the singular spirit of their work. The result is a record that’s more intense, more raucous and decidedly darker than anything which has come before, without sacrificing that mischievous persona.” [Review]

Ben Seretan – Allora

Tiny Engines

Described by Ben Seretan as his “insane Italy record,” Allora represents a snapshot from a very specific time and place. Or rather it would, should ‘snapshot’ come anywhere close to describing the scale, heft and sheer abundance of moving parts on show. Seretan and his band were due to play a wedding at the tail end of “a wonderful but lightly disastrous tour” of Europe during the summer of 2019, only for rain to half play and leave them in the lurch. But rather than waste the curious mix of energy and exhaustion that sets in at the end of a tour, they decided to make an album instead. A three-day stint at a farmhouse in the hills overlooking Venice with renowned mixing engineer, producer, musician Matt Bordin was arranged. A brief moment where a plethora of emotions were processed and purged through joyful noise. The result is unashamedly maximalist, entirely heartfelt, and in possession of that lightning-in-a-bottle feel that suggests it could never have materialised anywhere else. Catharsis has long been a key thread of Ben Seretan’s work, but rarely has it gone quite so hard.

The Big Easy – (It’s No Secret) The Truth As Bad As the View

Trash Casual Records

“It’s notable that The Big Easy’s latest album, (It’s No Secret) The Truth As Bad As The View, is the first to feature Berthomieux’s image on the cover. The first symbol on a record that looks to grapple with exactly how and why a person of colour might be made to feel an interloper within certain artistic circles. Berthomieux cites a James Baldwin statement as a key to realigning his perspective. ‘To be a Negro in this country,’ Baldwin wrote, ‘and to be relatively conscious is to be in a state of rage almost all of the time.’ Suddenly what had for so long seemed like a personal hang-up or imposter syndrome was revealed to be an intrinsic part of the Black experience, and to connect his own emotions with a historic struggle proved liberating. Thus the album became an exercise in owning his identity and finally voicing those things kept buried for so long. ‘It’s No Secret is kind of like a journal,’ as Berthomieux concludes, ‘a place where I can express the things that I haven’t been able to say out loud’.” [Review]

Brown Horse – Reservoir

Loose Music

“Call it distraction, call it despair / No matter what you call it you can feel it when it’s there.” These lines from the track ‘Bloodstain’ encapsulate the presiding mood of Brown Horse’s Reservoir. A sense of unease which permeates their alt-country style like something “drifted on the low tide,” as the song continues. Something that’s now “hell bent for to stay.” This disquiet is evoked not only in images of stark estuary mudflats and cold fields but also polycotton shirts and soulless expanses of megastores. In the nostalgic melancholy of opener ‘Stealing Horses’, or the Molina-esque lyricism of songs like ‘Sunfisher’ and ‘Outtakes’ with their burning houses, hummingbird hearts and singing birds. And like all the best Gothic atmosphere, it is not entirely clear whether the sensation is a haunting from some ancient thing or a dark harbinger of what is to come.

Cara Beth Satalino – Little Green

Worried Songs

“The success of Little Green is in no small part a result of the nuanced nature of Cara Beth Satalino’s approach. Early on you come to appreciate her uncanny ability to combine deep soul-searching with offhand observations and gentle humour, inventive imagery and smart turns of phrase creating something rich and full of life despite the surrounding turmoil. [A record] soft and fragile as a little green shoot but with a spark of energy too, a desire to keep on. It might be too dark to see what is in front of you, but the earth is still turning and the bright star is still burning. There is time yet to grow towards the light.” [Review]

Cassandra Jenkins – My Light, My Destroyer

Dead Oceans

Cassandra Jenkins intended to step away from music after her 2021 album An Overview on Phenomenal Nature, only for the album to resonant so deeply with audiences she found herself newly (and perhaps reluctantly) energised, pulled back towards the urge to create. My Light, My Destroyer is what emerged a few years later, a record which not so much builds upon its predecessor as explodes out in every direction. Sophistipop, jazz and New Age elements lift Jenkins’s indie rock sound to almost orchestral territory, while layers of found sounds and field recordings anchor the otherwise celestial style in the lived-in world. This duality between the grounded and the elevated is typical of the tone, where encroaching darkness is matched by a curiosity and attentiveness to wonder. The world is beautiful, the world is burning, and both of these facts are made more urgent by the other.

The Chairman Dances – Evening Song

Self-Released

“Originating as a narrative poem, The Chairman Dances‘ new album Evening Song traces the early days of a nascent relationship,” we wrote back in September. “A seminarian and a drummer mutually enamoured with one another, caught in the heady space of attraction and mystery, hungry to learn everything there is to know about the other.” Working from this point of intersection, Eric Krewson and co. bring the pair of characters to life, providing small glimpses into moments both special and seemingly mundane to achieve a strikingly intimate sense of humanity. As with much of The Chairman Dances’ catalogue, the beauty is in the detail. The hollow knock of shoes, the wail of an oven’s timer, the catch of a lock. Small confessions shared between two people daring to allow their lives to become enmeshed.

The Dead Tongues – Body of Light / I Am a Cloud

Psychic Hotline

Not content with releasing just one record this year, Ryan Gustafson’s The Dead Tongues put out two simultaneously. The albums, published as standalone digital releases but brought together in a double LP, display both aspects of the Asheville, North Carolina songwriter’s oeuvre. I Am A Cloud is an exercise is meandering cosmic Americana, what Gustafson calls “a fever dream of song and spoken-word about the toggle between identity and ephemerality,” while Body of Light sees things solidify into discrete folk rock songs. Joined by a stellar cast of collaborators and a sense of improvisational freedom, it’s the most expensive and ambitious Dead Tongues release to date.

Deerlady – Greatest Hits

Self-Released

Described as “a collection of songs about intimacy,” Greatest Hits sees Mali Obomsawin and Magdalena Abrego unite as Deerlady to conjure soundscapes simultaneously stark, tender and thunderous. Both Obomsawin and Abrego have backgrounds in jazz, and though some of the genre’s fluidity carries through, the Deerlady project exists outside of that sphere and the expectations it carries. Rather, Greatest Hits offers an indie rock style free to be more elemental and raw, one attuned to ideas of softness and hope within a hostile and violent world. As if in the face of colonial cruelty, sound might fill the gaps where words cannot suffice. “Brick and concrete / two hundred thousand years buried beneath / while the stars witnessed the unholy,” as Obomsawin, who is from the Abenaki First Nation at Odanak, sings on ‘Masterpieces’. “Well I take it in / I wrestle with the language to begin / I didn’t come to make a speech, I came to live.”

Desert Liminal – Black Ocean

Whited Sepulchre Records

“Released in 2021, Desert Liminal‘s Glass Fate found the Chicago band “settling into a higher form,” as we put it at the time, with violinist and noise artist Mallory Linehan (AKA Chelsea Bridge) joining Sarah Jane Quillin and Rob Logan to elevate their trademark dreamy aesthetic. [Black Ocean] in many ways represents a continuation of this process. With the outfit now cemented as a trio, Linehan joins Quillin as a songwriter and vocalist, grounding the nascent sense of collaboration and connection which emerged on Glass Fate as a core facet of Desert Liminal. A development which is thematically resonant too, the record exploring ways in which death can be faced communally, and grief transmuted into something affirming and meaningful. Chicago’s DIY scene carried Quillin through the worst experiences, and Black Ocean looks to distil this experience into its purest form. The resulting songs often seem like love letters to the people in these communities. Those figures who stood next to you through the best and worst of times.” [Review]

Distant Reader – Place of Words Now Gone

Lily Tapes & Discs

“No news in weeks from outside town,” announces Emmerich Anklam at the beginning of the latest Distant Reader album, Place of Words Now Gone, thrusting the listener into a world suddenly quiet along with his bewildered characters. “Who left me in the center of this desolation?” one such person asks, “Who’s hearing me talk? Does it matter at all? Is anyone still out there? And who can tell the difference between the end and the beginning?” The record took seed in Anklam’s brain during long train rides through the fabled American landscape, and although a clear work of fiction, it’s hard not to see reality in the community it describes—abandoned by those beyond it’s boundaries, succumbing to helplessness as they lose what little agency were ever afforded them. A portrait of an isolated and dislocated America where those left behind are left to struggle and mourn as a deepening silence floods the places they call home. “And everybody she knows goes quiet trying to forget about the ways they could diminish still,” as Emmerich sings on ‘From High Remove’, “the spiral closing in around all of them. Words vanish fold in on themselves, questions halved quartered eighthed. Absence of sound infects all who feel it. Tones, phrases returning to the ether.”

Emily Hines – These Days

Self-Released

“I don’t know about you, but I’m holding out hope.” So sings Emily Hines on ‘UFO’, a single which embodies the tone of her full-length These Days. As warm and soft as a blanket to wrap around yourself in the cold winter months, but with a sharp pang of something else too, a bittersweet bite more potent than the frost at the window. The entire album is an understated gem, full of quiet and wistful songs about difficult relationships, questions unanswered or unanswerable, hoping for something more. On ‘UFO’ this ranges from a desire to know the truth about the Roswell landings to wishing for the sublime reckoning of the Second Coming. But for all of its outlandish subject matter, the song, like These Days as a whole, is entirely straight with its underlying sentiment. There is still hope that wrongs can be righted, Hines insists. Things can change for the better.

Enumclaw – Home in Another Life

Run For Cover Records

Ever wondered what might happen if you were to cross the beams of don’t-give-a-shit slacker rock and confessional, emotionally intense emo? Home in Another Life, the latest album from Tacoma’s Enumclaw, is here to provide an answer. The record is unafraid of the largest themes, lead Aramis Johnson wrestles with everything from God, illness and death to self-doubt, relationships and sex, but does so with a sense of energy and swagger. As though faced with the tangle of life’s difficulties, Enumclaw make the conscious decision to charge headlong forwards, conscious of every possible branch and thorn but moving too purposefully to become ensnared in any one spot. Whether it be the denial of a difficult diagnosis in ‘Not Just Yet’ or the internalised shame of ‘I Still Feel Bad About Masturbation’, Home in Another Life takes emotions and experiences which so often feel unspeakable and shouts them aloud in an act of agency.

The Felice Brothers – Valley of Abandoned Songs

Million Stars / 15 Passenger

Since their inception in 2006, The Felice Brothers have established themselves as one of the premier acts of contemporary US folk rock, building a catalogue of urgent narratives and strange visions with enough depth to stand alongside their literary influences. “Poems and short stories packed with clever references and wry turns of phrase” as we wrote of 2021’s From Dreams to Dust. “A confrontation of the grim realities of our moment that nevertheless celebrates the fact of being alive.” As the title suggests, Valley of Abandoned Songs is a collection of tracks written throughout the project which never quite made it onto a record, but were nevertheless strong enough to convince Conor Oberst, no less, to set up a brand new label just to release them into the world. Single ‘Flowers By The Roadside’ is the perfect example of their ability to conjure entire lives and histories in the shortest of spaces.

Are you
High as Mr Albert was
When he drove the cross town bus
Straight into the sky
I’m just sitting in these flowers by the roadside
I’m not trying to flag a ride
Just happy watching the wide world go by

The Fourth Wall – Return Forever

DevilDuck Records

Kickstarted by a family story of a relative who left a child behind when emigrating to the United States, Return Forever by The Fourth Wall is “an album which,” as we put it in our review, “combs through the contradictions of the immigrant experience in order to voice feelings otherwise impossible to convey.” Delivered via a weighty brand of indie rock, the mood ranges from anger and confusion to catharsis and joy, and the result, as we continued, is “a mixture of hope, denial and genuine love which not only subverts expectations but confounds any attempt to properly reassess. As though some decisions can be so complicated, their impacts so profound, that the very physics of emotions are bent beyond their own laws.”

Gabriel Birnbaum – Patron Saint of Tireless Losers

Western Vinyl

“Gabriel Birnbaum has become increasingly interested in music’s narrative potential, and Patron Saint [of Tireless Losers] finds him at his most confident to date,” we wrote in June. An album where Birnbaum again evolves his sound and writing to present “vignettes which occupy the knife-edge between specificity and ambiguity, rewarding the return listener with layers of wry humour and naked human emotion.” Birnbaum introduces a diverse array of characters—young and old, male and female, lonely and in the throes of love—all troubled by the gap between their own views of the world and the evitable dawning reality. As though every person, be they nervous concert-goer or overeager prepper ostensibly ready for the end times, is at some point destined to realise the true, unforgiving nature of mortal existence.

h. pruz – No Glory

Mtn Laurel Recording Co.

Many albums exists within the giddy period of new beginnings, their creators emerging from a tumultuous period of suffering or drastic change with an almost epiphanic perspective. The bad thing is in the past now, life can show its light. But while h. pruz‘s latest album No Glory focuses its gaze on a variety of pivotal moments from the life of Hannah Pruzinsky—moments they withstood, survived, emerged from—and goes as far as to imagine the perfect life ahead, it refuses the temptation to bask in the transient warmth of such possibility. As though to present the experience of a newly hopeful present as something unmarked by regret or doubt is to fail to fully inhabit its complexities. “I keep seeing change,” as Pruzunsky sings on ‘I Keep Changing’. “Peel away the borders / Of things with weight like copper / Thought it was gold / Til it turned green / In the rain.”

Haley Heynderickx – Seed of a Seed

Mama Bird Recording Co.

In 2018, Haley Heynderickx released I Need To Start a Garden, an album “all about growth and the hope of new beginnings” we wrote, yet one which refused to “shy away from the necessary hard work that makes such growth possible.” Follow-up Seed of a Seed emerges from this process of emotional cultivation, Heynderickx learning how to continue and improve upon the previous album’s progress while coming to understand such things are rarely linear and never complete. Opening tracks ‘Gemini’ and ‘Foxglove’ are marked by a sense of urgency, seized by the haste of new growth, though by the second half the tempo levels out into something slower and more complex. A host of musicians support the trademark finger-picked style, creating a layered thicket, the Haley Heynderickx sound now a rich polyculture diverse and hardy enough to face whatever life might throw at it next.

Hatis Noit – Aura (Rework Series)

Erased Tapes

In 2022, Hatis Noit released Aura, a full-length album “which draws from the vast array of Noit’s influences from Japanese classical music Gagaku and operatic performers to Bulgarian and Gregorian chanting,” we wrote previously, “not to mention avant-garde experimentalists and pop vocal styles.” Aura has had a new lease of life in subsequent years, with a series of reworkings made in collaboration with an equally diverse set of artists. After the likes of William Basinski and Matthew Herbert in 2023, this year saw Noit enlist the talents of Laraaji, Preservation and Armand Hammer to push the already kaleidoscopic sound even further.

Holland Andrews – Answers

LEITER

“Back in 2021, Brooklyn-based composer, producer, vocalist, and clarinetist Holland Andrews released Wordless, the first of a series of EPs under their own name (having previously recorded as Like A Villain). Released with label LEITER, the record introduced a distinctively transportive sound. Led by voice and clarinet and processed through a variety of electronics, the compositions offered soundscapes in which the listener might lose themselves. Rich tapestries of colour and texture crafted with an almost cinematic attention to detail. Subsequent EPs Forgettings and Doubtless furthered the scope and intention of the style, exploring themes of healing and transcendence as Andrews’s genre-bending sensibilities solidified into a style of their own […] Now Holland Andrews has returned with Answers, the fourth and final EP of the series which feels like both the clearest realisation of their creative ideals and a continued, active resistance against genre conventions.” [Review]

Hour – Ease the Work

Dear Life Records

With a studio’s worth of equipment in tow, the ensemble Hour took a ferry to Peaks Island, Maine out of season, and spent a week holed up together in an old theatre to record their latest album, Ease the Work. The project boasts a diverse cast of musicians—lead Michael Cormier O’Leary (electric guitar, classical guitar, percussion) joined by Jason Calhoun (synth), Em Downing (violin), Matt Fox (viola), Elisabeth Fuchsia (violin) Peter Gill (bass), Lucas Knapp (radio effects, field recordings, piano), Evan McGonagill (cello), Peter McLaughlin (drums, percussion), Keith J. Nelson (bass clarinet, clarinet), Erika Nininger (piano, rhodes) and Abi Reimold (electric guitar)—each bringing their own instincts and sensibilities to the project’s lush instrumental arrangements. The intimacy of the recording process allowed each separate contribution to coalesce into harmony. “Challenging any clear distinction between composition and improvisation,” as we wrote earlier in the year, the resulting record “performs the same small miracle of the previous records, presenting the everyday in all its joy and melancholy, comfort and strangeness.”

I Saw the TV Glow soundtrack

A24 Music

“The danger of nostalgia is that it tends to confuse the actual home with the imaginary one,” Svetlana Boym wrote in her 2001 book, The Future of Nostalgia. “In extreme cases it can create a phantom homeland.” The warning is explored in Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow, a film with a decidedly complex relationship with nostalgia. It can be something to wrap yourself in, bond over, shelter beneath, yet with this retreat comes the risk of a detrimental stasis, where fondness for the past comes to eat up the present. The interrogation is furthered by the film’s soundtrack, where the likes of Caroline Polachek, Florist, Frances Quinlan, Sadurn and King Women tap into the unapologetically sentimental nineties aesthetic. But it is the very first track that is perhaps the most thematically resonant. Yeule‘s cover of ‘Anthems For A Seventeen Year-Old Girl’ is so distorted by glitchy imperfections it becomes something of a Baudrillardian simulacrum. A memory denatured by overhandling, unpegged from reality, a figment of the imagination which has come to replace the real.

Jahnah Camille – i tried to freeze light, but only remember a girl

Winspear

“The songs offer a picture of late adolescence in all of its bittersweet nuance, its introspective contemplation matched only by its bold confessional attitude.” That’s how we described i tried to freeze light, but only remember a girl, the debut EP of Birmingham, Alabama-based songwriter and musician  Jahnah Camille earlier this year. The release reaches for a number of genres with real confidence, be it the nineties alt-rock swagger of ‘flesh’ or the country twang of ‘roadkill’. “[But it is] the lyrics which really see the artist stand apart,” we continued. “Because Camille has a knack for combining emotion and self-awareness, offering songs entirely committed to the feelings being explored but never lacking a wry wrinkle to add that extra layer of personality.”

Jess Ribeiro – Summer of Love

Poison City Records

Written amid a period of intense instability, Summer of Love finds Jess Ribeiro negotiating the liminal space between hope and reality, confronting the past and possible futures alongside the present moment to find a way towards healing. Ribeiro chose to lean into the turmoil during the recording process, undeterred by the fact collaborators could only visit individually thanks to the pandemic restrictions, and many never made it to the studio at all. Yet together with Nick Huggins, she nonetheless enlisted the talents of Jim White (drums), Darcy McNulty (saxophone), Leah Senior (keys), James Seymour (bass), Davie Mudie (percussion) and Carrie Webster (violin and viola), guiding each musician according to the release’s spirit. The result is improvised and exploratory yet bound by the same sense of longing. That will to work through tumultuous times towards something more solid. The hope that chaos might resolve itself into a more hospitable state.

Josaleigh Pollett – In The Garden, By The Weeds

Self-Released

“An excavation of the present which inevitably tends pastward, tracing a presiding cynicism back to its roots in search of a cause.” That’s how we described Josaleigh Pollett‘s third album In The Garden, By The Weeds. At first, the imagery of the title resonates on a surface level, the Salt Lake City songwriter surveying the ecosystem of their life, assessing which parts to nurture, which to pluck or prune. But spend a minute with this collection of stark and glitchy songs and it becomes clear things are operating on a deeper level. For Pollett not only gives the weeds their due but the subterranean conditions too. Those places dark and elemental we so often pretend have no relation to us higher beings. Places perhaps inside of our lives or our selves we must reach down into if we are to make any real progress in cultivating the kind of environment we want to live in. Even if it means getting our hands dirty, scrunching our eyes and grasping blind.

Joy Guidry – AMEN

Whited Sepulchre Records

“In AMEN,” explained Joy Guidry of their most recent album, “there is a lot experimentation with different forms of Black American music. I wanted to lean heavily on my Texas, Louisiana and Creole roots in this project. There were many days spent with my ancestors during the writing of this album and I’m eternally grateful for the music they sang to me during our time together.” The record saw the basoonist and composer develop their sound with the newly prominent influence of gospel and spiritual jazz, combining the sensibilities of church music with jazz invention to create something fundamentally devotional. “The result is at once communal and singular,” as we put it in our review. “Joy Guidry as realised in their most complete form to date.”

K. Freund – Trash Can Lamb

Soda Gong

We’ve been following the work of Akron, Ohio’s Keith Freund for the better part of two decades, originally with Trouble Books, then as one half of the experimental/neoclassical duo Lejsovka & Freund, and more recently with Lemon Quartet and Aqueduct Ensemble. Following 2022’s Hunter on the Wing, Trash Can Lamb is Freund’s latest release under his own name, and offers another exercise in minimal piano, degraded samples and an array of tactile electronics. It’s the neoclassical equivalent of the folk art eccentric, spinning singular homebrew beauty from a treehouse studio filled with strange gadgets and devices, at far remove from the polish and pretension of the auditorium, yet somehow deeper for it. Trash Can Lamb walks it own path straight to the heart of things, small moments and sensations that you couldn’t describe with words if you tried.

Kali Malone – All Life Long

Ideologic Organ

“Manages to suggest both academic rigour and unburdened instinct, but ultimately transcends any focus on its intentions as the listener becomes immersed in the soundscape. Some hymn or lament, latent with the suggestion of the sublime, be it total dread or transcendence, silence or all-encompassing sound.” So we wrote of Living Torch by Kali Malone back in 2022, though the description could be extended to much of the Stockholm-based composer’s work. Written for pipe organ, choir and brass quintet, latest release All Life Long possesses all the same clarity and depth, breathing new life into classical techniques to create something at once intimate and exalted. Not holy music, per say, but music which operates according to the same ends. Aiming to evoke those sensations felt in the face of things far greater than us, more mysterious, yet surrounding us all the same.

Keanu Nelson – Wilurarrakutu

Mississippi Records

Primarily a poet in his home of Papunya, northwest of Alice Springs, Keanu Nelson was inspired to start singing his work after meeting producer Yuta Matsumura in the local arts centre. The result is Wilurarrakutu, an album first released on Altered States Tapes last year, but put out to a wider audience back in August by Mississippi Records. With Casio beats programmed by Matsumura as support, Nelson delivers deeply personal poetry on themes of loneliness and family, home and loss, in both Papunya Luritja and English. Nelson incorporates reggae and gospel influences into a sound which emerges from an electronic sonic lineage that trails back to the likes of Suicide and Francis Bebey but represents its own singular style. One which aches with a sense of longing, the relative simplicity of the arrangements allowing the emotional depth of Nelson’s poetry to sit front and centre, blurring the classic and the contemporary into something genuinely moving.

Lia Kohl – Normal Sounds

Moon Glyph

“Able to evoke existence in all of its magic and mundanity.” That’s how we described the work of Chicago-based cellist, composer and multidisciplinary artist Lia Kohl back in July, describing her album Normal Sounds as “at once normal and very much not, or else it is extraordinarily normal—with Kohl turning her attention to the acoustics of everyday living and presenting them back to the listener as something as something new.” Existing somewhere between music and sound art, the record uses synths and cello (as well as occasional flute and electronics from Ka Baird and sax from Patrick Shiroishi) to accentuate field recordings of human-made sounds, reflecting our own world back to us in a new light. Here the incidental is elevated, each song a cacophony crafted from the sounds we so often ignore or phase out. Kohl isn’t so much crafting a soundscape for us to hear as rewiring our brains so that our attention might be heightened. What we encounter in such a state is sometimes playful, sometimes strange, occasionally unnerving and melancholic in the way the slow passage of life always is. The human world in granular detail. What it sounds like to live here and now.

Lindsay Reamer – Natural Science

Dear Life Records

“[Songs which] not only represent a study of a specific time and place—capturing a snapshot of environments both natural and human and the porous border between the two—but also a report on how it feels to exist within that period. As though Lindsay Reamer serves as our guide through contemporary America as she knows it. A squeezed no-man’s land between the past and the future. A place where great beauty and banality sit side by side, where old choices drag unforeseen consequences towards us and yet the smallest details still seem to hold life in all of its inscrutable charm.” [Review]

Little Kid – A Million Easy Payments

Orindal Records

“[The] ability to vary the focal length of its perspective so gracefully is a signature of A Million Easy Payments. “The urgency in Kenny Boothby’s voice matches the stakes of his lyrics,” writes Dan Wriggins in the liner notes [of Little Kid‘s latest album], “epic ballads and reveries that come at life from all angles and exposures, driving at and a little over the limits of self-reflection.” The sense of an artist never quite satisfied with the scene they have captured, always looking to widen the lens to better represent the truth before them, or else zoom in closer in search of the missing detail which might click everything else into place. Call it a search for meaning, or even God Himself. In other hands, songs reaching for such things with the expansive style of Dylan and Welch at their most ambitious might feel like novelty or pastiche. But in this context it seems the only logical outcome for Little Kid’s specific way of working.” [Review]

Lollise – i hit the water

Switch Hit Records

“Hailing from Francistown in Botswana and now based in New York, Lollise is an artist who draws from the entirety of her musical history when crafting her songs. Hence the sound of her debut full-length I hit the water owes a debt to the styles which soundtracked her childhood and early years—including Setswana and Kalanga folk songs, South African electronic bubblegum and kwaito from the eighties and nineties, Congolese soukous and Zimbabwean sungura—as well as genres like Afrobeat, art-pop and new wave which she immersed herself in after moving to the US. What results is a sound capable of evoking the future and past simultaneously, where traditional styles are repurposed to open new directions, and the line between history and imagination blurs into something entirely new.” [Review]

Mary Ocher – Your Guide to Revolution

Underground Institute

“To say Mary Ocher’s latest album Your Guide to Revolution is ambitious in its intentions is to risk understatement. A kaleidoscopic and politically charged collection of songs which draws on Ocher’s childhood (born in Moscow to Jewish-Ukrainian parents before emigrating to Tel Aviv during the Gulf War) as a way into wider themes of resistance and civil disobedience. A huge array of styles and influences are utilised across the record, both to evoke the gamut of emotions triggered within the contemporary struggle and to ground the release within a wider history of such subversive art. A central part of the album is a series of three tracks which rework pieces by harpist Dorothy Ashby based on the Rubaiyat of Omar Khyyam, a triptych of songs which Ocher has collected into a short film which echoes The Color of Pomegranates by Sergei Parajanov.” [Review]

Merce Lemon – Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wilds

Darling Recordings

“A collection of nine songs with dirt under their fingernails, equal parts wild and vulnerable as they reckon with the changing tides of love in all its guises […] Merce Lemon’s songwriting is often gentle, careful and sincere ruminations on love and solitude, but this underlying ferality is perhaps the record’s biggest strength, and the most obvious step forward from Moonth. A reminder the soft animal can still bear its teeth, a kind of wildness that turns heartfelt, mid-tempo folk rock songs into blown-out anthems, building towards crescendos of wailing guitar and pure feeling.” [Review]

Minor Moon – The Light Up Waltz

Ruination Record Co.

Minor Moon‘s latest album The Light-Up Waltz is set within “speculative world, where civilisation has collapsed and the characters are made to exist in the aftermath,” as we wrote earlier in the year. “But far from some desolate landscape of grim suffering, this post-civilisation society is one coloured by the invention and playfulness of its inhabitants. As though steely determination can only be maintained with a suitable accompaniment of joy.” This is a collection of songs working under such a logic, finding its characters proactive in their search for meaning, and perhaps finding it through that very mindset. “To me,” as lead Sam Cantor puts it, “the antidote to fatalistic disillusionment is a kind of complicated dance with dread, hope and joy.”

MJ Lenderman – Manning Fireworks

Anti- Records

It’s fair to say MJ Lenderman has come a long way since we shared ‘Gentleman Jack’ from his 2021 album, Ghost of Your Guitar Solo. Through his what we’ve described previously as “masterful knack for combining details small and absurd into something which feels like life as it’s lived on the ground,” the last coulpe of years has seen Lenderman take the leap into the indie stratosphere, and latest album Manning Fireworks makes good on this acclaim without sacrificing the sensibilities which got him there in the first place. Often wacky yet always unabashedly earnest, these are songs of a different sort of American mythology. Colourful, chintzy, most likely temporary. A place of waterparks and McDonalds lots. Pocket Bibles, drunk drivers, Disney Pixar deleted scenes. A place inhabited by people who were once babies and now jerks. People like you and me.

Mol Sullivan – GOOSE

Self-Released

A self-described “long exposure photograph” charting growth both artistic and personal, Mol Sullivan‘s GOOSE serves as a portrait of a person within the arc of great change. With songs written in the aftermath of a relationship and during a nascent sobriety, the album opens with Sullivan “set deep in those early days of a new beginning,” as we wrote, “where everything feels possible yet tenuous and a little too vivid to bear,” but does not stay constrained to the present moment. Instead, we find an artist moving forwards and looking back, reflecting on who they were and who they want to be, reaching beyond stories of love and addiction for a more nuanced picture of life. An artist in dialogue with themselves, teasing out those fundamental things which exist beyond what happens to us within any given moment, and thus repositioning change as a positive force we might harness to become ourselves more fully.

mui zyu – nothing or something to die for / cantonese tasting menu EP

Father/Daughter Records

Last year’s Rotten Bun for an Eggless Century saw Hong Kong British artist mui zyu delve deep within themselves in search of a better understanding of their own identity. The songs mapped a vast labyrinth of history and personal experience and located the elusive truth not locked in some remote central chamber but rather via the process itself. But if the introspective survey of Rotten Bun charted the complex contours of its own small world, follow up nothing or something to die for flips its gaze outwards to take on a far bigger challenge—the chaotic, conflicted place we call home. Here human society is painted as an overwhelming and fundamentally lonely place, where an omnipresent technological connection belies the isolation at its core. Floating over this absurd space, mui zyu looks for the points where the veil between us is the thinnest, hoping a better existence might be possible while refusing to ignore evidence to the contrary. There might be nothing, there might be something to die for, or perhaps both of these things can be true at once.

Nap Eyes – The Neon Gate

Paradise of Bachelors

Through a string of ambitious, philosophical and playful albums, Halifax outfit Nap Eyes have established themselves as one of the most inventive, thematically interesting bands in contemporary indie rock. Even by their standards, The Neon Gate pushes the envelope on what songs can be and explore. Fans will recognise Nigel Chapman’s distinctively deadpan vocals, but the Nap Eyes sound has expanded in various directions, shapeshifting between tracks and unafraid of the abstract and improvised. Weird tangents are followed, eldritch stories are told, what rules there were are broken. The result is to witness something familiar transmogrify, metastasise, expand and contract before your eyes, the recognisable slowly twisted strange into a new, surreal landscape. A style inspired, at least in part, by the William Butler Yeats poem ‘I See Phantoms of Hatred and of the Heart’s Fullness and of the Coming Emptiness’. A poem which is adapted as a song near the end of the album:

I climb to the tower-top and lean upon broken stone,
A mist that is like blown snow is sweeping over all,
Valley, river, and elms, under the light of a moon
That seems unlike itself, that seems unchangeable,
A glittering sword out of the east. A puff of wind
And those white glimmering fragments of the mist sweep by.
Frenzies bewilder, reveries perturb the mind;
Monstrous familiar images swim to the mind’s eye.

Prostitute – Attempted Martyr

Self-Released

The past year has been desperate, dizzying and ferociously cruel for many, and no release captured this reality better than Attempted Martyr by Prostitute. Described as being “written and recorded under duress of a world in turmoil” and “dedicated to Lebanon, from Dearborn with love,” the album sits somewhere between noise rock, post-punk and jazz. A collection of songs twisted tight with intensity, always threatening to spin out of control, fired by the depthless fury of grief and somehow managing an air of plaintive sorrow too. Beneath the delivery’s bark and bite lies a deceptively diverse range of moods and emotions—from the mournful opening title track and spittle-flecked defiance of ‘Judge’ to poetic meditations on justice and resistance and even a certain wry humour (Prostitute one-up fellow Michigan punks Protomartyr by devoting an entire song to celebrity attorney Joumana Kayrouz). A timely reminder of the fertile relationship between anger and compassion, and a scream into the face of a world gone numb.

Rosali – Bite Down

Merge Records

“Help me, darling, I can’t seem to bite down on it / I can’t seem to feel what’s real anymore.” So opens the title track of Rosali‘s Bite Down, giving voice to a sentiment which underpins the entire album. But this is not a record of desperate pleas and drifting disconnection, rather the antidote to such things. As though having been touched by these emotions, Rosali chose to be proactive, confronting life’s ups and downs with a newfound defiance, determined to feel reality in all its forms. The title refers to “something more extreme than leaning in,” as Rosali told Mariana Timony for Bandcamp. “I’m taking a bite. I’m accepting it. I’m chewing it.” Again recorded with the David Nance Band to blur the line between solo and group effort, the resulting album effortlessly straddles folk and classic rock styles and builds upon everything which made 2021’s No Medium so special.

Roswit – Eternal Living

Mono Tapes

The debut album from self-described “olde punks” Roswit has one foot in classic Pacific Northwest indie pop and another across the ocean in a Flying Nun Records style jangle, with some wiry, stripped-back punk thrown in for good measure. From infectious opener ‘Grape’s Song’, which calls to mind fellow Vancouverites The Courtney’s, to the sleeves-rolled-up scrappiness of ‘King’s Song’, every song is packed with a sense of DIY fun. And to top it all there’s a throwback vibe, not to bygone decades but right back to the Middle Ages, a candy-coloured fantasy land of knights and dragons and damsels in distress. This is sometimes achieved with subtle lyrical nods, and others musically, such as ‘Princess’s Song’ which sounds like a lo-fi punk take on a Medieval ballad. Eternal Loving is perhaps best summed up by ‘Dreamer’s Song’, which has it all—supremely catchy hooks, galloping percussion, oohing and aahing harmonies, flutters of flute and daydreams of ye olden days.

Shovel Dance Collective – The Shovel Dance

American Dreams

“We want to play and experiment, layer and move between different spaces in recording, and extend the limits of our instruments to sing and break in new ways,” explained Shovel Dance Collective of their experimental folk sound. “Improvising, textural playing, and moving as one free organic organism are all part of the experiments we try and make in form. It’s all towards this one goal: constructing the Shovel Dance world and saying what we feel needs saying.” Latest album The Shovel Dance saw the outfit “position themselves within an exciting contemporary movement,” as we wrote in our review, “and The Shovel Dance is sure to join the likes of Lankum’s False Lankum and Shane Parish’s Liverpool in their mission to push old sounds and stories into new dimensions.”

S. Raekwon – Steven

Father/Daughter Records

A moniker can offer many things for an artist, not least a sense of separation between their ‘real’ and performing selves, but while Steven Raekwon Reynolds released his latest record Steven under the name S. Raekwon, the album’s title is suggestive of the manner in which the songs work to close this gap in search of authenticity. Because this is a personal album in the most practical sense. Reynolds did all the writing, production, engineering and mixing, not to mention played every instrument with the exception of the drums. What emerged is a collection of songs which serves to illuminate the different parts of their curator, as though the record is a prism through which he shines himself, each track a different wavelength of his personality stratified according to mood. “Maybe subliminally or unconsciously, the songs kind of grouped together in a certain way to explore different areas of myself,” he explains. “The beginning is rage and angriness in a certain way. The middle is this uncertainty of questioning yourself, who you are, and if you’re a good person. And then at the end, I think it comes to a place of resolution. I’m just examining myself and trying to come to a better understanding of who I am.”

Sinai Vessel – I SING

Keeled Scales

In October, Caleb Cordes announced that Sinai Vessel, his moniker for the past fifteen years, had come to an end. “You have taught me everything and I’m taking it all with me,” he wrote in a statement of social media, looking forward to new, healthier future without the constant striving for further success and recognition in the cockfight that is the music industry. Released back in the summer before this news broke, the fourth Sinai Vessel album I SING represents both a parting gift from a project that has meant so much to so many, and a frank examination of the factors which grind artists down to the point of submission, taking on themes so often absent from art with a sincere yet unromantic air. “I sing for a reason,” Cordes sings on the title track. “My reason’s the same // as the nurses buying rentals
/ and rides to broadway
/ who fill up big bars on buses
/ and fall off shit-faced / and the trained men who clock in / coming back from smoke breaks
/ who zoom in from satellites
/ to bomb palisades.” Because I SING is an album about the rarest of things: money, or the lack thereof. How contemporary society seems built to punish anyone who dares attempt a living through art, and the ways in which the compulsion to create persists in ways both magical and mundane. “I sing ‘cos I wake up
/ again and again,” as the title track continues. “It never stops coming
/ it doesn’t make sense.” Sinai Vessel is dead, long live Caleb Cordes.

Slippers – So You Like Slippers

Lame-O Records

“It was childhood residence Atlanta that lit Madeleine BB’s creative fire. The city is home to the headquarters of Cartoon Network, which inspired not only her interest in animation, but indie rock too. ‘Cartoon Network… was a big part of my life growing up,’ she says. ‘They always had a lot of indie bands in the fold there—I remember there was this Powerpuff Girls music compilation that had Devo and Apples in Stereo and Shonen Knife on it. My dad bought that for me and I just became obsessed with it.’ Many of the tracks on [Slippers‘] So You Like Slippers? are a product of this kind of cross pollination, either inspired by or written specifically for BB’s animations. ‘I was trying to make these jokey kid’s songs, sort of like They Might Be Giants, to go along with my animations,’ she describes, and it’s clear this visual starting point provided a sense of creative freedom. License to write quickly and without inhibition, and the ability to explore themes and feelings that could be painstakingly overwrought with charming ease.” [Review]

Tasha – All This and So Much More

Bayonet Records

“Finds an artist embracing the pace and breadth of their new life. Confronting each day with a sense of defiance rather than looking for somewhere to hide.” So we wrote of Tasha‘s All This and So Much More in a preview back in the summer, an album written amid a flurry of experiences that ran the gamut between agonising (unexpected grief, an abrupt separation) and amazing (a role in the Tony-nominated Broadway musical Illinoise). Where many might have sought some form of retreat from life’s constant barrage of change, the Chicago artist instead decided to lean into the momentum to embrace the potential of forward motion. “I’m overcome at the wonder around me,” she sings on the quasi-title track ‘So Much More’. “I fill my lungs, feel the air rush inside me / Could this be fun? Could I be happy?” The album works through the doubt of such questions with decisiveness, choosing to believe that the impossible might be true, life a joyous experience after all. “What if my hope didn’t have a ceiling? / What I want most, all I imagined / What if I chose to settle for nothing less than magic?”

Trace Mountains – Into the Burning Blue

Lame-O Records

Glance at the title of Trace Mountains‘ latest album Into the Burning Blue and you’d be forgiven for expecting a descent into something deep and dark, an assumption only strengthened by opener ‘In a Dream’. “A dispatch from whatever stage of capitalism we’re calling contemporary America as delivered from a breathless nighttime bike ride,” as we wrote of the track back in the summer. “The effect is passing through a dark passage full of eerie shadow without quite knowing if there’s an exit at the other end.” Yet rather than barrelling down towards some nadir, the track’s glittering eighties rock sensibilities manage to invert the arc, the climax instead finding Dave Benton breaching the surface into a wider world. Which isn’t to say the rest of Into the Burning Blue is bright and affirming, it is after all a record concerning the end and aftermath of a long-term relationship, rather that the shades of blue on offer are far more nuanced and diverse than you might at first expect. A picture of person moving through conflict and loss attuned to all the accompanying tones that come with it, and one delivered with all the widescreen confidence of Petty or Springsteen to boot.

villagerrr – Tear Your Heart Out

Darling Recordings

Zeroing in on life’s small, ostensibly ordinary moments to find the meaning within, villagerrr‘s latest album Tear Your Heart Out sees Mark Allen Scott embrace his Midwestern roots for a country-inflected brand of indie rock. Chillicothe, Ohio might have felt constrictive growing up, but home is home and soon a sense of fondness began to blossom, and with it came a desire to acknowledge the fact. “I want to wear where I’m from and my family on my sleeve,” Scott explains. “I’m proud of the twangy influence in my music from corny country songs I’d hear on the bus rides to school. I feel like I’m reclaiming where I come from and making it my own.” The result is a decidedly empathetic collection of songs able to zoom close to the smallest details of small town life, be it light through a sunroof, the smell of cut grass or pencil drawings made in an effort to preserve memories. Some of the tracks are tortured in their own quiet way (“Falling in and out of trust / With the ones you loved before,” as he sings on ‘Cry On’, “It’s not the way I hoped it would be / Oh, no”), some wryly funny (“I see you wearing your Carhartt jeans / Talking ’bout how you don’t got money,” is a refrain in ‘Car Heat’), but all are wrapped in a sense of understanding, as though villagerrr attempts to see through the tangle of emotions to see the fallible humans struggling underneath.

Waxahatchee – Tigers Blood

Anti- Records

When released in 2020, Waxahatchee‘s fifth full-length Saint Cloud felt like the pinnacle of the project, Katie Crutchfield pivots towards an alt-country aesthetic so seamless and fitting it appeared to be some form of completion. Only for Tigers Blood to roll around a few years later, an album which sees the Waxahatchee star rise even further. Unfazed by recent popularity, Crutchfield and co. resisted all the trappings of success and temptations to transcend into the mainstream to instead focus on the present. There are no synths on Tigers Blood. No cinematic pop flourishes. No indication of burning through a newly weighty budget. Which is to say, the album finds Crutchfield not so much dreaming of what Waxahatchee could become, but instead concentrating on exactly what it is. The result is full of heart, romance and hard-won authenticity that could only stem from a place of confidence. Waxahatchee might have found its final form, but you sense this is only its beginning.

Wendy Eisenberg – Viewfinder

American Dreams

“When Wendy Eisenberg finally got Lasik surgery after a lifelong struggle against an assortment of ocular and vision-based afflictions, the resulting impact went far deeper than they perhaps expected […] Viewfinder emerges from within this new experience of the world, reckoning with exactly what it means to see and not to see, and how beauty and meaning are inherent within both experiences […] How does our understanding of the physical world change according to our ability to visually perceive it? And what about other planes—the emotional, spiritual and metaphysical?” [Review]

West of Roan – Queen of Eyes

Spinster

“A god of doorways and portals, a god of seeing in the dark and in dreams, a saint of weeping in sorrow or in joy.” That’s how Laurel Premo, writing in the album notes, describes the titular figure of West of Roan‘s latest record Queen of Eyes. The guide which leads Annie Schermer and Channing Showalter deep into a realm of myth, archetype and imagery, some otherworld beneath our own which bears the load of all that has been before and will surely arrive in time. A place where both personal, historical and cultural trauma unwinds itself as story. When we say West of Roan is a project steeped in the folk tradition, we mean it in a fundamental sense beyond any musical style. That urge to communicate, console, explain or contextualise. To take on the largest of themes in the ways humans always have. The result isn’t so much ambiguous as multifaceted. Stark, beguiling, full of glory and grief. As mysterious as the Queen herself, demanding you submit to its forces to discover the transcendence within.

Why Bonnie – Wish On The Bone

Fire Talk

“How do we live authentically within a world which demands we perform and pretend? Is it possible to confront the true dismal nature of things and still retain a sense of hope? Such questions have weighed on [Blair] Howerton since previous Why Bonnie album 90 in November, not least because she felt she had evolved beyond the wistful country-inflected style those songs presented. “I’ve changed since that album, and I trust that I’ll probably continue to change,” as Howerton explains. Wish On The Bone looks to pinpoint who she is at this point in time without committing to any lasting identity. To possess the confidence to work beyond the expectations of preconception and present however feels right within the current moment. Hence an album which foregoes easy pigeonholing in terms of style, unified instead by the defiant new self-confidence which underpins it. “You owe it to the people who are experiencing the worst to just keep pushing,” as Howerton concludes. “These songs were written out of hope for a better future. I’m not naïve, the world is fucked up, but I think you can radically accept that while still believing it’s possible to change things.” [Review]

Wild Pink – Dulling the Horns

Fire Talk

If recent years have seen Wild Pink’s star rise, then Dulling the Horns could be said to see it begin its arc back earthward, returning not to obscurity but a gravity-saddled weight and heft, the loud rush of the atmosphere roaring in its ears. Recorded live with all the grit and raw energy of the band’s live show left intact, it feels like both a throwback to their early work and a new chapter entirely, losing the wide-screen scope and sparkling electronics in favour of something with a little less polish.  “I didn’t want to clean up anymore,” says lead John Ross. “In doing so we’ve arrived at a new place.” Thematically it leaps around, touching on everything from Dracula and Michael Jordan to the Waco siege and Lefty Ruggiero, and this willingness to reach wide and chase tangents only furthers the sense of immediacy, resulting in the most urgent Wild Pink album to date.

Wishy – Triple Seven

Winspear

Released hot on the heels of December 2023’s successful EP Paradise, Wishy‘s debut full-length Triple Seven seemed to confirm suspicions the Indiana outfit possess the magic Midas touch, a spontaneous jackpot on first pull of the lever which included an NME cover among other such acclaim. And though the journey to that recognition was far more convoluted in reality, something about this iteration, led by songwriters Kevin Krauter and Nina Pitchkites, possesses an undeniable lightning-in-a-bottle charm. A sound which “pays homage to forebears […] while fashioning the nineties-nostalgic sound into something entirely their own,” as we put it, combining dream pop, shoegaze and indie rock influences into something as polished as it is fun.

Young Jesus – The Fool

Saddle Creek

“The pressures of touring had seen the original Young Jesus band slowly disintegrate, and the mosaic pop of Shepherd Head demanded hours spent alone in front of a computer. Exhausted and disillusioned by the process, Rossiter pined for something less abstract. A way to express his creativity rooted in the real world. So he turned to gardening, studying permaculture and the slow process of nurturing it demands. Only then came a chance encounter with Shahzad Ismaily, originating in a shared interest in the work of Milford Graves, and a slow process of coaxing. Rossiter would work on music then tend Ismaily’s New York garden between sessions. At home in LA, he did the reverse, planting trees and laying paths with Alex Babbitt and Alex Lappin before gathering around the piano to play and sing. Slowly the compulsion to make music returned, though now informed by the lessons learnt whilst working on the natural world. The resulting album The Fool feels like another milestone for Young Jesus. A continuation of the searching style which has so long marked the project, but one armed with a new array of tools and techniques to perhaps arrive closer to a satisfying end.” [Review]

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Richmond. A fictional town. Generic. All-American. Perhaps belonging to the Midwest if anywhere, but could fit into essentially any state you might have in mind. Owen Ashworth cites Springfield from The Simpsons as an influence on this first fully imagined setting, plus Haddonfield from John Carpenter’s Halloween. And you don’t have to look far to find echoes of Carpenter’s slasher in ‘The Year I Lived in Richmond’, though it is the classic story inverted. For the killer sneaks into a bedroom window one night, in search of his next victim, only to fall under the kitchen knife of a woman named Deborah Lee.

Deborah Lee leaves Richmond once the coroner has taken the body, but her story remains, lingering in the town like some psychic stain. “Any child could tell you how that killer died,” the closing verse states, as though to live within the town limits is to be bathed within its ever accumulating history of ill-fortune. “Richmond is just this place where all the bad memories live,” as Ashworth puts it. One he created in part to serve that very purpose.

For while the setting is entirely imaginary, the narratives and characters owe much to real life. Indeed the killer is inspired by an analogous figure who stalked a place Ashworth once called home, fictionalised to create some sense of distance and decency. If Horrible Occurrences can be distilled into one reductive image, then that is perhaps the most enlightening. A receptacle into which bad memories and old stories can be poured. A small town diorama in which they can play out again, change shapes, take on lives of their own. One we might approach and watch over along with Ashworth, feeling tall from that perspective, relatively safe in the top-down view.

It’s unsurprising then that Horrible Occurrences is the darkest Advance Base record to date. The tale of the killer killed is followed by ‘The Tooth Fairy’, a snapshot of a father-daughter relationship that taps into the primal fears of children and parents alike. With his wife out of town, the father finds himself needing change for Tooth Fairy duties, but a quick trip out of the house sees an innocent intention unravel into pure terror. The trauma is deep and double-edged—the parent arriving home to find their child’s bed empty, the child alone on the street, hysterical in asking the gut punch question that forms the song’s denouement. “Where did you go, Dad? / I couldn’t find you.”

There’s no let up with ‘Big Chris Electric’, the album’s second murder ballad in its opening trio. The titular Big Chris falls for Yvonne after working on her house, becomes a father figure to her daughter, soon has a child of his own on the way. Only Yvonne’s jealous ex intervenes and shoots him dead, leaving Yvonne to live out her days with Big Chris’s van in her driveway, his name still stencilled on the side. Again Ashworth twists the story, bending it beyond the trope at its heart. For the song is narrated by Big Chris’s child, now at least halfway grown, living with their mother yet resenting the fact. “I know that she’s had a hard time / raising kids on her own,” as the closing verses start. “We fight all the time / I hate being at home.” The development plays as an added complication to tragedy, both a rejection of the romantic neatness which might otherwise accompany such a tale of heartbreak, yet also an extension of this very romance. Because the narrator offers another angle, another myth conjured in the wake of one taken too soon.

Someday I’ll fix up his van
I’ll keep his name on the side
I’m gonna get out of Richmond
& vanish into the night

The tension at the song’s heart is one central to Horrible Occurrences. Fearing the loneliness and mystery of disappearance while simultaneously desiring its transcendent promise of escape. A sizeable number of songs in the Advance Base catalogue deal with such ideas—close friends now strangers, familiar sights now a leering void—and much of Ashworth’s success as a writer stems from his willingness to maintain a restricted narrative frame. Rarely told more than the characters themselves, the listener is placed alongside them, left to feel the ache of unanswered questions, the latent sense of possibility, and invited to fill in the gaps with stories of their own. The single town concept of Horrible Occurrences is essentially this same device across an entire album. Richmond itself the frame of the stories, as though it were the only illuminated part of the world.

Hence the ambiguity of ‘Rene Goodnight’, where an apparently friendly companion is revealed to have a reputation of domestic abuse out of town (“Now I see you in my dreams / Sometimes sinister & mean / Sometimes sweet as hell / I don’t know what to believe”), and perhaps even the pivotal mystery of the exceptional ‘Little Sable Point Lighthouse’. Partners Elise and CJ visit Michigan for a birthday celebration, only for a sleepless CJ to wander to the nearby lighthouse and vanish into the night. To leave town and step into the world, the song suggests, is to risk getting lost in the dark.

Standing under at the tower
Watching the big light spin
Hypnotized by the silver beam
that cut right through the dim
That’s how Elise imagined him
He was never seen again

The closing track, ‘Richmond’, plays like the testimony of one such disappeared character returned. A figure stepping back into frame, now forced to reckon with everything which happened before and since, as though unable to leave old stories peter out into the dark no matter how painful it might be to dredge them up. It’s difficult not to hear Ashworth himself in this character, a reluctant homecomer persevering (sometimes against his better judgement) to share what might be his most difficult, personal collection of songs. “I drove back to Richmond / to see how you’ve been,” he sings. “To learn more about all / the life that you’ve lived / & to talk about CJ / & to talk about Chris / & all my reasons for leaving / & everything that I’ve missed/ I’ve been so sad & angry / I know you’ve been too / but I can’t take the silence.”

But to stress the melancholy and darkness of the album is to miss what has long made Advance Base so special. “[Ashworth’s] is an ever evolving body of work which stands out in its deftness and humility and empathy and care,” we wrote back in summation of his style back in 2022, “bringing to life individuals from across the spectrum of human experience while remaining unerringly attuned to the tender, fallible heart at the centre of each.” The same compassionate attention is present here too, be it in a story of serial killers, strange premonitions or solitary singers, shivering as they make their way back towards home.

“You’ll be fine,” a paramedic tells the titular character in ‘Brian’s Golden Hour’, a teen skater and would-be Days of Heaven-era Malick who plans to film himself dropping in on a homemade ramp from the roof of his parents house only to bail and shatter his spine. “You’re 15 & paralyzed / & lucky to be alive,” as the refrain goes. But Brian doesn’t actually commit to the trick. His only paralysis is a hesitation at the top of the ramp. This horrible occurrence takes place entirely in his head. Yet the paramedic’s words echo all the same. Kind, if slightly hollow. What they want to be true, or need to be true. Or rather what might as well be true inside that moment, until the opposite is confirmed. You’ll be fine. Words so brittle and tender and heartfelt. Somehow the epitome of both security and vulnerability. The essence of not only Horrible Occurrences but perhaps Ashworth’s entire body of work. Voices heard from beneath the weight of all that has happened, and all that possibly could. You might be dying. The darkness might all be in your head. You’ll be fine.

Horrible Occurrences is out now via Run For Cover Records and you can get it from the Advance Base Bandcamp page.

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Any new album from Advance Base is going to rank near the very top of our most anticipated of a given year, but the description of newly announced full-length Horrible Occurrences couldn’t be any more exciting. A record “all centered around a fictional town called Richmond and featuring an interlinked cast of characters,” as the press release explains. “You will hear stories of death and disappearance, climactic confrontations and unsolved mysteries.” Fans of the project will recognise songs like ‘Little Sable Point Lighthouse’ and ‘How You Got Your Picture on the Wall’, but new single ‘The Year I Lived in Richmond’ is what serves as an introduction to Owen Ashworth’s most conceptual release to date. A song which does more in three verses than the majority of published stories, and one which effortlessly displays Ashworth’s unrivalled ability to mine ostensibly ordinary lives for their brilliant slivers of heartbreak and strangeness.

Horrible Occurrences will be released on 6th December via Run For Cover and Orindal Records. Pre-order it now from the Advance Base Bandcamp page.

Anlaki – Escape ’til Dead

Based in Iruña-Pamplona, Spain, Anlaki is the bedroom music project of Julen Izkue which uses a classic DIY spirit to explore both the difficulties of adulthood and discomfort of modern life. Latest album Wind Call shows just how fun and inventive this lo-fi style can be, lovingly wrapping up a mix of slacker rock and power pop sensibilities in a warm blanket of fuzz. Single ‘Escape ’til Dead’ is the perfect example. The hazy tones are by no means a barrier to a sense of forward motion that propels things, the track embracing its title as a kind of motto to push itself onward with carefree brightness in spite of everything.

Constant Follower – All Is Well

Last month we introduced The Smile You Send Out Returns To You, the forthcoming album by Constant Follower via Last Night From Glasgow, with single ‘Whole Be’. A song about the contradiction inherent in the way we long for wholeness while acknowledging imperfection, the track not only introduced a newly ethereal sound for the outfit, but also furthered the visual element of their work through both cover art and video. Latest single ‘All Is Well’ is no different. Stephen McAll and co. mine the title for all of its complications, delving into the ways in which the contemporary reliance on comfort and convenience masks an ever-present dread below the surface of our society. It is notable that the band dedicate the song to Jake ‘Taurus Mortimer’, a young person killed in the care of NHS Forth Valley Psychiatric services back in 2023. Watch the video filmed and directed by Kris Boyle below:

The Smile You Send Out Returns To You will be released on the 28th February via Last Night From Glasgow.

The Convenience – Routiner

Duncan Troast and Nick Corson started The Convenience after meeting at Loyola University in New Orleans, using the project as a space in which to experiment within the wide genre of pop. Released in 2021 via Winspear, album Accelerator felt like the culmination of this practice, evolving the sound of their earlier releases towards its most vivid, far-reaching state. However, not satisfied to rest on their laurels, The Convenience are now pushing their boundaries again. New double single Routiner / Postcard sees the duo strike out towards a guitar-led art-rock which sits closer to the likes of Cate Le Bon and Parquet Courts. Take the first track, which is strung across a taut bassline but spins in various directions with a volatile twitching energy, capturing the push and pull of life, from deadening repetition to sharp alarm.

Routine / Postcard is out now via Winspear and available from Bandcamp.

Doctor Delia – What a Drag!!

“We literally had gendered uniforms,” explains Doctor Delia of growing up in suburban Tampa schools. “We were stuck in them like little toy soldiers. The whole time, or much of the whole time, I wanted to dress like a woman, or more feminine. Deep down I knew it felt good, and right for some reason, but there was so much shame around it.” New single ‘What a Drag!!’ serves as both a refutation of the strictures experienced during this time and a celebration of living as the person you truly are. “What a drag not to be yourself,” as the song goes, progressing with the kind of calm, assured rhythm that only comes with lessons learnt the hard way.

Holding Hour – Can I Leave Me Too?

‘Can I Leave Me Too?’, the latest track from Des Moines duo Holding Hour, is a lesson in juxtaposition. For while the song is set within the ostensibly celebratory, communal scene of a birthday party, the overriding mood is one of alienation and doubt. The sound itself follows a similarly contrasting style, its brooding undertones threatening to engulf the vocals as the percussion presses forward as though towards some imminent break or change. What results is a track full of conflict, between calmness and motion, darkness and light, not to mention that internal disquiet of a person coming to understand how they might be responsible for the less than perfect conditions of a relationship.

‘Can I Leave Me Too?’ is out now via streaming services.

Leoblu x World Wild Web – Utopia

Emerging from the heart of Berlin‘s underground music scene, ‘Utopia’ is a single which sees Leoblu and World Wild Web pair their styles into something at once ethereal and charged with vivid energy. We’ve written about the ambiguous and atmospheric sound of Julia Carlsson’s Leoblu several times in recent years, most recently with Blu Lucid Nightmare, and the addition of World Wide Web’s rhythms and beats pushes it into new territory—one still shadowed yet shot through with a kind of transcendent possibility. “’Utopia’ came from a deep place of questioning,” Carlsson explains, “both within myself and the world around us. It’s an emotional journey through grief, but also a declaration of hope, defiance and change.”

‘Utopia’ is out now via streaming services.

Melanie MacLaren – Laika

“The product of a period marked by experiences of grief, loss and illness, the new songs look to confront life in its truest state. To push beyond the myths we tell ourselves and look at mortality with a clear gaze.” So we wrote last month of the forthcoming release from  Nashville singer-songwriter Melanie MacLaren. New single ‘Laika’ is no less direct in its focus, using the tragic story of the titular Soviet space dog as a way into humanity’s propensity to exploit the vulnerable more generally, and how the powerful continue to disregard the rights and dignity of everyone else. The result is a lesson in restraint, though beneath the slow, soft folk style is a vast chasm of anger at everything we have done and continue to do.

‘Laika’ is out now and available from the usual places.

This Frontier Needs Heroes – Truck Driver

Writing back in July, we described Brad Lauretti of This Frontier Needs Heroes as “a folk artist in the traditional sense, wandering and entertaining audiences with equal parts playfulness, protest and heartbreak while always pining for places left in the rear view mirror.” Inspired by a period driving an RV across America for another artist’s tour, latest single ‘Truck Driver’ leans into this spirit more fully, injecting a sense of constant momentum to the folk rock style to equate the life of a touring musician with that of a long-haul driver. “I got to live the life of a truck driver for a few weeks,” as Lauretti says, “driving all night, sleeping in the cab, eating in gas stations, with all the crazy things that happened along the way.”

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Just in time for Christmas, Swick has unveiled a cover of Advance Base‘s ‘Christmas in Nightmare City’, a song which fits the DoomFolk StarterKit style of quiet introspection perfectly. Taken from the album Animal Companionship, the song is set on a lonely late-night drive, the protagonist restless as they struggle three months into sobriety, all captured with Owen Ashworth’s distinctively quiet power. “No-one writes Christmas songs like Ashworth,” as we wrote in a review of the record. “His aesthetic and temperament are the perfect medium to capture the strange mix of sad and magical.”

None of this feeling is lost in Swick’s take, the stripped back style and hushed vocals capturing the same sense of seclusion, the balance between inner turmoil and the strange peace of quiet roads, the odd beauty of the twinkling lights of an oil refinery. The sparse arrangement accentuated with subtle touches of bass and pedal steel from Bennett Littlejohn, taking this version into folkier territory than Owen’s, and it really works.

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Earlier this Spring, Karima Walker released demos, a new album with Orindal Records and Keeled Scales which paired older versions of some of the songs from 2021’s beautiful Waking The Dreaming Body with new compositions. The release provided a glimpse into the beginnings of the eventual album. With rougher, perhaps more intimate acoustic arrangements and slight lyrical differences. The deviations from what we know as the ‘final’ versions are conspicuous in hindsight, but so to is the sense of latent possibility. The soul of something forming, even if it hasn’t yet realised its true physical body.

The result proves an inadvertent rebuttal of the fears around preserving early drafts. A lesson in the value of looking back, if only to remember the dual nature of creation. A combination of abstract magic and mundane perseverance. The easy inspiration, the mechanical work. For the final thing does not fall into complete existence but rather takes shape in the manner of a natural landscape. An uneven process of slow movement and violent change, where any divine beauty or imagination is underpinned by a long physical act, occurring day after day. The songs of demos are no less representative of the ones of Waking the Dreaming Body than a landscape a hundred years ago is of a landscape today.

demos challenges the binary between ‘demo’ and ‘final’, just as Waking the Dreaming Body challenges other such binaries. “The release is a product of both isolation and connection,” we wrote in our review. “The former fostering the latter in strange ways. In confronting the surrounding environment and considering her place within it, Walker traces lines between the self and the outside so that such boundaries might be challenged and blurred.” Songs crafted by both sound designer and singer-songwriter, deep rooted in conscious and unconscious thought, and both interior and exterior spaces. Environments which might feel complete or permanent within any given moment, but always subject to change.

As Walker prepares to head off on a UK tour with Advance Base, we took the opportunity to ask her a few questions about the new release and her work more generally. Check out the tour dates below then scroll on down for the interview, which Walker answered, fittingly, from an airport with gear and merch in tow.

Aug 28, 2022- Manchester, UK @ Gulliver’s
Aug 29, 2022- Glasgow, UK @ The Hug & Pint (w/ Raveloe)
Aug 30, 2002- Wakefield, UK @ Chantry Chapel
Aug 31, 2022- London, UK @ The Lexington (w/ Herbal Tea)
Sept 01, 2022- Brighton, UK @ The Prince Albert
Sept 03, 2022- London, UK @ St John on Bethnal Green / Daylight Music (w/ Robert Stillman)
Sept 04, 2022- Salisbury, UK @ End of the Road Festival (just Karima Walker, no Advance Base)
Sept 05, 2022- Bristol, UK @ Cube Cinema (w/ SH Davidson)
Sept 06, 2022- Oxford, UK @ Port Mahon (moved from The Library) (w/ Katie Malco)

Thanks so much for speaking with us Karima, and congratulations on demos. Does it feel different releasing a record that’s not quite new?

It does feel different, casual!

As a listener, I’m always fascinated to hear early versions of songs. How the vision for the track might have altered, what seeds would eventually blossom into the finished thing. But if I put on my writer cap, the prospect of going through my own old drafts caused a specific sense of dread. The interest might still be present, but there’s a competing trepidation too. Like you might be dispelling the mirage somehow. Does this ring true? And if so, how did you tackle the unease?

It does feel vulnerable… with “Reconstellated,” I sat with different iterations of it for well over a year. It’s almost like I owed something to the versions that brought so much to the final song, even if they weren’t present in it, in the end. In this state, the demos are still rough but feel like they have potential, so this release feels lighter.

To invert the question, what about the reverse situation? Do you feel your relationship with Waking the Dreaming Body has been altered by returning to the demos? Did you learn anything new about the songs in revisiting their early forms?

I do. On one hand there’s magic in how a song arrives but part of assembling these demos was reminding myself that they don’t always fall out of the sky. A lot of it is a much more mundane process. I’m a ways out from writing WTDB, so as I start writing again it’s helpful to hear the kind of questions I was asking for that record, how I assembled it.

The two versions of ‘Window I’ offer one of the most interesting comparisons because they foreground one of the most striking features of Waking the Dreaming Body. The porous line between a more traditional folk style and an experimental found sound/drone. Do you feel you identify more strongly with any one position along the songwriter-composer spectrum? Does your future seem to lean toward either end, or is resisting any clear binary the only certainty?

I am honestly not sure. I’m very impressionable when I’m listening to something I love, so it changes all the time… I don’t know if I could hang out on one side of those paths forever. I love that porous line, how one thing somehow becomes something else, and all the moments in between that can feel just as complete, or sometimes better than where you begin or end. I do like structure though, framing those moments around questions of perception, gender, the self-other dichotomy… On WTDB, I was wanting songs that felt complete and solid, compositions that felt whole and I wanted them to all happily co-exist together. Right now I’m writing you from an airport, surround by over a hundred pounds of my gear and merch, so sometimes I think it’s time to write folk songs.

To talk about craft more generally, what is the typical process when writing a song? Is it a case of generating a bunch of rough material and returning to hone it once halfway complete, or are you more meticulous within each track? Like, would you perfect an opening or chorus before tackling the rest of the piece? Or follow something through and polish it later?

I try to be open to whatever is coming my way… some days I’m showing up for a song even if I’m not feeling it, and that feels more like the former, documenting what happens through play, then looking back over it and doing the honing/editing work of reading what this body of parts is. But sometimes things do surface with more completeness built in, or more urgency, and I want to be available for that too. If my intuition is saying to dive deep into something then I try to leave room for that.

You wrote about the link between breathing and landscapes when announcing single ‘how it falls apart’, how words come when you’re running and form “a way of mapping or notating a place/landscape.” Could you talk a little on how this phenomenon informed the song, or indeed your work more widely?

When I’m out, moving my body, it’s like I’m shaking loose all the associations and ideas that were up there in my brain, stagnating. But then also, being outside and aware of what’s around me is an endless source of joy and inspiration, it’s hard not to connect to my creative brain when I’m feeling good and alive and awake. All that life around me starts to imprint on my internal world.

In a very physical sense, running over a trail feels like mapping or reading a score. I’m active in the former- moving through the landscape, and receptive in the latter- being shaped by the choices of trail builders, game trails, elevations. I’d noticed how my breathing rhythm would change over the course of a run, so I recorded my breath and footsteps on a trail near my house… I wanted to see if I could listen back to the recording later and remember where the uphills and downhills were. I suppose the audio isn’t technically a map, since a map presents itself visually, all at once, where as an audio recording opens up over time. But we consent to the components of a map or a score when we follow a path. It feels like collaborative performance.

Speaking of landscapes, we can’t talk about your work without touching upon the importance of the environment. There’s something about the balance between reality and unreality on WTDB which feels unique to the desert. Perhaps I’m projecting, writing from a place about as far from a desert as somewhere could be, but it seems a desert is the most real and unreal of places. Are you aware of the landscape’s influence on your work? Do you think it would sound different if you lived elsewhere?

I was just in Florida, and had really only been there once before. I’d walk around, filled with awe, with my mouth hanging open because I just could not fathom the trees and flora… they’re just so different. Huge, weblike, loud, lush worlds. I think I know what you mean by unreal… being in a landscape that is just so incredibly different from what I know, I was left to observe without a lot of language to help me. It’s a very joyful childlike frame of mind. I guess I’d suggest that those emotional, inner and dream realities, though very squishy, are still very real but that language fails in articulating that reality, maybe that’s where the unreal-ness comes from. There’s a knowledge in the body that can navigate those realities in ways my rational thinking brain just can’t. I think I’m aware of the landscapes influence on my work, and I’m pretty certain it would sound different if I was somewhere else, or with people when I wrote.

Talking of places far from deserts, you’re about to head out on a UK tour with Advance Base. It’s a difficult time for obvious reasons, but speaking more generally, what role does touring and live performance play within your work? Does it feel part of the creative process?

Touring, especially with friends, and playing live are sources of real joy for me. Then there’s the connected and slightly different kind of joy, the… maybe more fraught joy of having a creative practice. The logistics of tour give my days structure and purpose, reconnects me to the network of friends and community, that I often only see when I’m on the road, and to places I love very much.

Live performance is immensely fulfilling and at the same time a huge output of energy. I build my sets around a narrative arc and it feels like a theater-healing ritual, to transition through different places and arrive at a resolution of some kind.

demos is out now via Orindal Records and you can get it from Bandcamp.

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Released to coincide with his birthday, and organised by Dan Wriggins (of Friendship) in collaboration with Dear Life Records, You Were Alone: An Owen Ashworth Almanac is a covers compilation featuring versions of Owen’s songs from family, friends, labelmates and fans. A celebration which recognises a birthday but also so much more than that. A body of work and the burgeoning legacy it has and continues to establish, not to mention the blossoming community fostered through Owen’s label Orindal Records.

And community feels like the right word for the compilation. Both in terms of the gathered artists and the characters they bring to life. Because hearing the songs in different voices really brings home the diversity of personalities present across Owen’s work. Pedro the Lion adds a weariness to ‘My Sister’s Birthday’ with his distinctively gruff fondness. Claire Cronin is the perfect person to fully excavate the spookiness of ‘Pamela’. MJ Lenderman and Karly Hartzman raise a glass to poor old Christmas Steve. Sinai Vessel captures ‘Kitty Winn’ in all its sad affection.

Some, like Lisa/Liza‘s ‘Rabbits’ or Karima Walker‘s ‘Same Dream’, take the original versions back to the traditional folk roots, while the likes of Ylayali, Moon Racer and Bedbug lean into the electronic, harking back to earlier CFTPA days. What’s impressive is how the distinctive “Ashworthian” voice remains across the spectrum. Even the tracks with no literal voice, be it Robert Stillman‘s take on ‘Christmas in Nightmare City’ or Gordon Ashworth‘s extended guitar version of ‘Nephew in the Wild’, lose none of their ability to evoke the tales we’ve grown to hold so dear. Because while Dan might have intended to organise a birthday party, it turned out more like a reunion. A gathering of Owen’s characters, our friends. Still here, still living, still with so many stories to tell.

Cover painting by Martha Miller

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