Last week, New Haven, Connecticut band All The Pretty Horses released a new album, Witches Up No Mountain Switches Down No Valley, on Candlepin Records. Led by Austin Travers, the band craft slowcore-inflected bedroom pop that is equally comfortable in an intimate hush as it is in triumphant noise. Described as a love letter to cat Franny (AKA the Frances of the title), the record’s second track is a good introduction, moving from near-whispered vocals and shambling percussion into something joyously clamorous, all smashed cymbals and rousing guitar. It’s also charmingly sincere, taking the conventions of a standard love song and framing around not another human but a beloved pet. “When Frances meets me in my backyard,” Traver sings, “this song will fill her heart, her eyes stare into mine as I reach the chorus line.”

Cali Bellow – LFG!!!! (i just died)

Ever find yourself wondering what would happen if you took some of the early 2000s’ biggest musical styles and shoved them into a blender? Say, punk rock from the likes of Rancid and commercial pop from Spice Girls, NSYNC and Aqua? Well, ponder no further, because Cali Bellow has shared ‘LFG!!!! (i just died)’, the latest single from upcoming genre-bending album Ciao Bella. The single combines all those sensibilities and more. As we wrote in August, the album is inspired by everything from Dark Souls, The Muppets, Ursula Le Guinn and Joanna Russ, and the new single shows just how idiosyncratic and infectious a sound such a wide palette can create.

Ciao Bella is out on the 25th October and you can pre-order it now from Bandcamp.

Carpet – Soft and Hidden

Carpet is the solo recording project of Rob Slater, a Leeds-based artist perhaps best known for his work as a musician and recording engineer at Greenmount Studios. Slater has played in a myriad of bands—from Thank and Mi Mye to Post War Glamour Girls and Crake, as well as noisy punk outfit The Spills—though Carpet sees him go back to the beginning to reclaim the lo-fi sensibilities which first sparked his imagination in his youth. With EP Fruit coming soon via Launchpad+, Slater has unveiled single ‘Soft and Hidden’. A song which lives up to its title with its hushed and intimate sound, and serves as the ideal introduction to a release concerned with mining life for those small, fond moments.

Fruit is out on the 1st November via Launchpad+.

Clem Snide – Free

Oh Smokey, the tenth full-length from Eef Barzelay’s Clem Snide, finds a songwriter at something of an inflection point. With break-ups putting an end to long-term relationships both personal and professional, Barzelay left his home of Nashville after twenty years and set about searching for the next step without quite knowing what that might even look like. It’s therefore unsurprising the album is preoccupied with the unknown, a collection of “slow, sad songs about God and death” as Barzelay himself puts it which reflects on life’s ups and downs with a mix of empathy, wry realism and hope that only experience can bring. Single ‘Free’ shows the record’s compassionate tone, with Josh Kaufman of Bonny Light Horseman helping elevate the Clem Snide sound into some of its warmest, richest territory to date.

Oh Smokey is out on the 27th September and you can pre-order it now.

Dorio – Drive / Last Day of Summer

Recording under the moniker Dorio, Texas-based multi-instrumentalist, producer and songwriter Chad Doriocourt makes what we’ve described previously as “vivid, inquisitive songs that balance an easy-spirited energy with an underlying empathy for the human experience.” Released via Earth Libraries, new double single The Drive Collection sees Dorio continue to experiment with the pop genre, drawing the audience in with laidback simplicity and catchy earworms. Which isn’t to say there’s no substance under the surface. ‘Drive’ juxtaposes its sunny rhythm with doubt and nostalgic yearning, while the ‘Last Day of Summer’ offers an idiosyncratic snapshot of summer romance.

The Drive Collection is out now via Earth Libraries and available from Bandcamp.

max garcía conover – sue and buz catch up during fireworks

One of the most prolific and consistently interesting songwriters working today, max garcía conover has made a name with an emotive brand of folk which pairs lyrical dexterity with an earnest immediacy. New single ‘sue and buz catch up during fireworks’ captures the style perfectly, a song which unspools like long-held thoughts suddenly released, its verses dense with words but entirely natural in flow. “I wrote [the song] after spending the Fourth of July with family and friends, watching fireworks and repeatedly having the same conversation about the calamities of this country, its role in the world and the futurelessness we felt,” Conover explains. “Lot of that has since been put into a somewhat different light and I think the song landed somewhere else too, moving beyond despair without shying away from it.”

‘sue and buz catch up during fireworks’ is out now via streaming services.

 Slark Moan – Nervous Breakdown

“Oozes calm confidence and newfound wisdom [even] as life’s many emotions threaten to burst from the seams.” So we wrote of single ‘Dollhouse Heart’ from Slark Moan‘s upcoming EP, The Return of Guitar Music. The project is the alter ego of New York-based artist Mark Sloan—someone who has worked with the likes of Torres, Margo Price, Erin Rae, and SG Goodman—and provides space to utilise an expertise in craft to explore personal uncertainties. Latest track ‘Nervous Breakdown’ is no different, effortlessly blending genres to recreate an experience of feeling anything but effortless. “When I wrote the song, I was having a hard time trusting myself, and experiencing anxiety around choices I had made and uncertainty about where I needed to go,” Sloan explains. “I felt like I was always playing catch up to where I needed to be, like I had just arrived at a party just as everyone else was mapping the train ride home.” Watch the video directed by Evan Murray below:

The Return of Guitar Music is out on the 25th October.

Steve Slagg – The Newest Soil

“I spread my father’s ashes in the winter / With my brothers and my sister.” So opens ‘The Newest Soil’, opener and lead single from Steve Slagg’s latest album, I Don’t Want to Get Adjusted to This World. The record sees Missouri–born, Chicago-based songwriter place personal human experience within the wider patterns of the natural world, not only to reposition death as just another part of the living cycle, but also interrogate the ways in which our current actions might impinge on this order of things. As the opening suggests, ‘The Newest Soil’ begins this with the most intimate of subjects, describing how Slagg and his family spread his father’s ashes upon receiving his remains after a period in which his body had been donated to science.

My daddy had a body but he freed it
He knew he wouldn’t need it
At least for the next couple thousand years
This side of the veil of tears
Content he was investing in sequoias
Letting creation enjoy us

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Radcliffe gets the A-side of the album, opening with the rather ominous line of, “Oh my God I’ve really done it this time” which rather nicely sets the tone (read: young, confused and lonely). It both sounds and feels like the outpouring of someone who has locked themselves in their room (and that isn’t a criticism). It’s raw and pure and honest, full of sincere yearning and wry self-deprecation.

But this isn’t simply the sound of some young guy moping over his acoustic guitar. Radcliffe’s music is nothing if not unpredictable, jam-packed with idiosyncratic elements; xylophone and flute recorder and periods of near-silence, schoolyard chant backing vocals, intimate wordless murmurs and weird unintelligble vocal recordings like answerphone confessions from another dimension. All this is wrapped up in a warm and cozy fuzz, giving the sense that not only are you sitting in Radcliffe’s bedroom with him, but you are sat on his bed wrapped up in a duvet.

The third track, ‘My Song’, is a little different, with an almost hip-hop spoken word delivery which brings to mind Why?. It also possesses Yoni Wolf’s millennial deadpan irony with lines like, “On the phone asking room service where the party’s at.”

‘Brown Horse’, the final of Radcliffe’s tracks, is probably the most upbeat. The lyrics are like a postmodern poetic summary of Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses:

“I wanna ride a brown horse somewhere where a horse hasn’t ridden it’s course before
Other horses running around taking in the air feeling hooves on the wet ground
Waiting for the sun to go down
All the horses run towards the big field in the sky”

R.L. Kelly’s side is perhaps more accessible, refreshingly simple after Radcliffe’s experimentation. The highlight is Rachel Levy’s characteristic sweet and bright vocal work. It’s intimate and introspective but not overly morose. In fact there are some pretty positive messages peppered throughout, not least on ‘Wake Up’, which is the sonic equivalent of spelling out ‘KEEP GOING’ in multi-coloured magnetic alphabet letters on the door of your fridge:

“They want to hurt you because they’re hurting too
Don’t let them inside your head they’ll take control”

The final track offers another comforting philosophy, a little pick-me-up for your soul, a reminder that your really little and insignificant and this is far from being a bad thing because it means that all your worries and fears are even smaller and things will carry on as normal and you can too. Or, as Levy puts it in a repeated pseudo-chorus:

“And the great big great big world keeps spinning”

So if you like your music DIY and lo-fi and you find comfort in solidarity with people you’ll never meet, Brown Horse is the album for you.

The cassette release has sold out, but you can still download the album on a name-your-price basis via the Orchid Tapes Bandcamp page.

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