— John Lutkevich, AKA Soft Fangs

So goes the explanation of Fractures, the latest album from John Lutkevich’s Soft Fangs. Far from being an interesting line to fill the Bandcamp page, the idea feels pertinent to the record, as though shaping the songs into very specific shapes and textures, forcing them to become uniquely intimate and intense. As such, the record achieves a very personal feel underlined with an edge of discomfort, the sort of relationship you might develop should you be locked in the same room with someone for three days, growing to understand their smallest details while stress and boredom whittle away your patience, the dwindling resources adding a vaguely primal unease.

Indeed, the recurring theme of hunger and inadequate resources permeates the Soft Fangs sound, coupled with a wider sense of imprisonment. Scratch the surface and Fractures is near enough a protest record, even if the thing being criticised is nebulous or ubiquitous enough to escape being named. Opener ‘Elephant Girl’ paints longing and the betrayed feeling upon it not being reciprocated, while ‘Honey Colony’ allows itself to be more upfront, portraying a deep dissatisfaction with the capitalist system through a hymenopteran lens of work and self-sacrifice.

“I believe there’s more to see,
than the honey colony.

I’ve been trapped inside my hive, barely alive.
Working for a queen who I’ll never get to see.”

‘Apple Picking’ is similarity scathing (“Taking the fruit for granted, while other people starve”), while ‘Shells from a Smoking Snail’ details a more general disquiet, as though those that dare show (or even imagine) any deviation from the accepted system must do so under a suspicious, all-seeing eye. ‘No Cops’ is even more explicit, a claustrophobic song on police brutality, shot through with dread, while ‘Weed Spiders’ asks a question that could sum up the entire album in a single line. “But what do you know about struggle?” Lutkevich, his voice even and gentle and all the more pressing for it.

‘Cartoons’ can be viewed as the make-shift solution to the problem, which amounts to nothing more than high-energy entertainment taken in huge doses as a kind of anaesthetic, feeling empty even as you sit down to begin.

“Sighed, then turned on the TV.
And let the static wash your face.”

Taking us back in time to apathetic teachers, ‘Jordan // Jackson Elementary’ is something of an introduction, the entry point to the system Soft Fangs struggles with so fiercely, while ‘Mistress’ zooms us back to the present, where the cumulative pressures have eroded all belief in love and wonder into a nihilistic nub. “He said: ‘I don’t believe in love, so why should I make it?'” Lutkevich sings, “It’s built to destroy those who create it.” With this in mind, closer ‘We Don’t Live Together Anymore’ plays like the epilogue, capturing the endgame of a system where nothing matters beyond the creation of wealth, all sense of individuality, hope and love atrophied beyond use, leaving a benumbed figure, alone, warmed only by accumulated possessions.

“Home alone, with nothing left to eat,
buried in junk I always thought I’d need.
But now it owns me.”

Fractures is available now via Disposable America and you can get it on Bandcamp, including lovely cassette and vinyl editions.

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Solace is an album about pain and love, tackling the issues of mental health and racism through an emo-influenced brand of alternative folk. Some of the tracks, such as opener ‘Joseph’, play like frenetic rock songs, while others, like ‘Capacity’, are slow and dark and brooding. Walker’s lyrics are often simple and melodramatic, written without poetic flourish, like blunt and truthful diary entries.

The title track plays like laid back folk with both emo and country tinges, the vocals plain and confessional throughout the verses though building into cathartic choruses ruled by alienation, isolation and melancholy.

“Could you feel
in your empathy?
Look at their pain
and find beauty.
I can’t live like
like you want to.
I can’t live like
you want me to”

‘Heart’ emerges warmer and more hopeful, the proverbial new dawn, while ‘Cruel’ morphs across it’s length into an alt-rock anthem. Other notable songs include ‘I Hope It Ends One Day’, a powerful meditation on racism where Walker’s subtle guitar plays behind a spoken word sample from his grandmother, and the striped back ‘They Don’t Want us to Live’ with only acoustic guitar, piano and backing vocals from Olivia Price of Fossil Jane.

Single ‘It Hurts’ represents Walker at what could perhaps be his best, fierce folk which rises into rock by the very momentum of his words.

“We are the slaves of a desperate past
It’s memories like this that we’ll always look past
It’s the scars that touch our bones
That will always hit home
It’s the memories within
That’ll leave our skin

It hurts
To know the truth”

This is music from someone sick and tired, someone beat-down and furious with the things they see and experience every day, a person making a decision as to what to accept and what to fight in the ultimate hope that things can change. And forget genre, or sound, or influences, forget whether you’d prefer your songwriting less forceful and melodramatic, because this is the sort art the world needs. The sort of artist.

There’s plenty to get down about, plenty to hate or fear or ignore, and the solution isn’t going to be found in hashtags or think-pieces. The answer, I think, lies in human connection, in empathy. In realising that despite it all, there are people out there feeling the exact same way, or else worse in ways you can’t begin to image. For all of its doubt and anger, and whether he is aware of it or not, A Day Without Love is some sort of attempt at this, a kind of starting point. Taking a quote from the beginning of ‘Too Fast’ as his mission statement:

“You’re still not alone in the world. You just have to believe there’s a power greater than yourself.”

Solace is out now and you can buy it on CD from Sounds and Tones Records and digitally from the A Day Without Love Bandcamp page.

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The first single from an upcoming full-length, ‘Housemouse’ is a brand of acoustic bedroom pop with emo overtones and deliciously rough alt-folk delivery. The song plays as half apology, half plea for help, both the narrator and the target of his communication clearly suffering in one way or another, while also dealing with the concerns of solipsism that come with mental pain. Caught in the double whammy of feeling bad and feeling-bad-for-feeling-bad, the track bristles with a raw-throated intensity which gives the whole thing a sincere, cathartic air, even if no conclusion or solution can be reached.

“I left you in your state
Clouding the fact that
It wasn’t too late
Wouldn’t be the first one
Your suffering I’ve chosen to ignore

Didn’t even mean to do you harm
Didn’t even mean to leave you there
Didn’t even have to go that far
Hit me so that I could just not stare

[…]

We all have burdens
We all have burdens they feel the same
But they look different”

The full-length on which ‘Housemouse’ belongs is still in progress, but be sure to keep an eye on Wyndwood’s Soundcloud and Facebook pages for updates. In the meantime, why not head to the Wyndwood Bandcamp page and explore his previous releases?

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“Anchored by steady, finger-picked guitar and graceful instrumentation, De Natale’s plaintive voice soars amidst lush, cathedral-sized reverb”

As we said in our preview, De Natale, “[Does] things the proper way… record[ing] in various living rooms and basements around the city of Seattle, using a portable studio set up and help from some of the area’s luminaries (such as Philip Kobernik of Hey Marseilles). The result promises to build on a bedrock of guitar/vocals folk music and elevate it with layered harmonies and a cinematic ambience.”

The intro, ‘Wherever We Go’, is slow and considered, threatening to unfurl in luscious instrumentation, before ‘The Well’ delivers a slice of spacious folk, with acoustic guitars and soaring vocals which will appeal to fans of fellow Seattle act, Valley Maker. ‘Waiting’ is a highly polished acoustic song in the vein of Donovan Woods, a sleeper smash hit just waiting for some director to use it in his well-made romantic drama, the lyrics telling a story of love and heartache:

“I don’t wanna wait to go back home
And it feels like I’m running out of ways to be alone
I think on it every day
But it ain’t every easy to say
I don’t know when I’ll go home”

‘Way To Die’ builds on acoustic guitars with gently galloped percussion and straining vocals, feeling at once intimate and expansive, while ‘The Cure’ feels like the gentle dawn of spring, a delicate acoustic song in the vein of Death Cab or Family of the Year’s acoustic tracks. Again it’s something of a love song, but phrased in the past as if the good times are over “You were an island hidden by the storm / I washed ashore and your beaches kept me warm,” De Natale sings, “But that was long ago and now it feels / Like being drowned beneath the churning wheel.” ‘Dear’ is another spacious and emotive track, and ‘What You Took’ a heartfelt ballad is the vein of Small Houses, sung from a lonely perspective after the end of a relationship, tense lulls and passionate bursts swapping and swaying in the current.

“I didn’t leave a letter, handwritten and hidden
in the pages of your favorite book
I didn’t leave one damn thing
And I sold my wedding ring
I’m just making up for what you took”

The next track, ‘Texas’, feels like the natural follow-on, the narrator journeying south in an attempt to fill the newly-created void in his heart. “Headed down to Texas, gonna find myself a girl / and try to make her fit into my heaven / cause there’s gotta be somebody in this God-forsaken world / who can find a way to put me back together.”It’s a traditional travelling folk song, ending in triumphant horns and a quiet, secret sense of hope for an imagined new love with which everything will be okay, as he repeats the line “maybe she will save my life”. The last track ‘Ontario’ zooms us back up north, slow and soft and considered, acoustic guitars and breathy vocals providing a hushed and gentle end. The lyrics are in some ways the opposite kind of hope to the previous track, seeing the narrator give up on miracles and attempt to move forward with what he has. But it’s just as hopeful, the sentiment in the lines, “Sometimes we try / too hard to find a way / to make tomorrow come today,” somehow comforting, a sign that things get better even if a dark-skinned Mexican beauty doesn’t sweep you off your feet immediately.

Redoubt will be released on the 25th of February. You can order it now via the Faint Peter Bandcamp page.

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According to their bio, JR Green use “accordion-riffed nostalgia and teenage angst acoustic guitar” to make songs which fall somewhere between traditional folk, early 00s indie and the raft of quality Scottish songwriters from the last decade or so. For example opener ‘Nigerian Princess’ channels the likes of Withered Hand and Second Hand Marching Band to produce a song at once knowing and naive, sentimental and self-aware, that millennial blend of knowing both too much and too little at the same time.

“She makes me walk across the Congo where F.G.M and hungers all the rage.
And all these nihilist with firearms trying to slay the Milky Way.

And why can’t you see there’s real need in me?

I’m sorry for my output I’m surrounded by wankers, I’m only seventeen
And I don’t have all the answers yet”

‘Do the Katie-Step’ is almost like a stripped-back song from The Libertines song is they were devoid of smarmy swagger, a tale of a romantic British youth from a wannabe likely lad (“I wanna go where the young men fight, I wanna be the type of guy the thin girls like”). ‘The Gentleman’s Apocalypse’ is a different sort of track entirely, sounding like Organ Fight-era Frightened Rabbit. This is a song about love with a physical weight, a feeling not limited to the head and the heart but to the more functional organs too – the viscera, the skin, the liver, lungs and bones. The track is desperate, hot and young, a matter of life and death too large to contain within words and chords but what else is there to do?

“This is your love song, I hope it will suffice”

‘They All Know Something’ feels more triumphant, with bright strummed acoustic guitar and harmonious vocals on the chorus of “All my problems, all my feelings / They all know something that we don’t” highlighting a sunnier side to an already diverse EP. The variation on Bring The Witch Doctor suggests the band could take numerous directions in future release, and it’ll be exciting to see where they choose to go.

‘The Gentleman’s Apocalypse’ single is out on Valentine’s Day, and you can buy Bring the Witch Doctor from Hits the Fan Records on CD, cassette or digital download.

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Human Behavior are an experimental, genre-bending band from Tucson, Arizona, led by chief songwriter Andres Parada. Following 2013′s Golgotha, Bethphage is the second album in a trilogy which combines classical folk music with drone and spoken word and Bibilical imagery to explore dark themes like death and unhappiness. In an interview with Valley Hype Parada was asked how Bethphage differs from his previous work:

Long answer: This album was written in sequence, a technique we’ve never done. It is two long tracks, split up by chapters. We tried to make this album a cinematic experience. It is also our first studio album, which allowed us to experiment in ways we haven’t before.

Short answer: It’s weirder.

Weird is a good word to describe Bethphage, with each of the various ‘Chapters’ flitting between styles and genres at will. For example ‘Chapter 2′ begins as a traditional folk song before morphing into a spoken word poem that itself gradual changes into a hymn. ‘Chapter 3′ is a western soundtrack akin to Ry Cooder which is peppered with abstract samples, from a man yelling “hey!” to a strange droney conversation between an adult and an upset child. The use of white noise over a classic folk sound is unsettling, a weird modern confusion against the comfortable nostalgia that folk music offers, changing a romantic lonliness to a sharp a threat of isolation, a seething radio silence. ‘Chapter 5′ is minimal yet expansive, bringing to mind vast empty spaces with nothing but dust, and ‘Chapter 6′ grows out of this, beginning with gentle vocals before becoming a ramshackled punk-folk song with the repeated refrain: “The end is nigh.”

Bethphage does not sit comfortably but its purpose is not to comfort, at least not explicitly. That said, the use of folk music as a medium to explore things such as depression and suicide and Catholic guilt suggests that Human Behavior are not nihilists. If they wanted to convince us all that everything is worthless and stupid and fucked then there are plently of other more suitable genres. Instead they attempt something more constructive, something that pulls no punches while criticising traditions while also acknowledging that they can form part of the solution. Bethphage is too honest to take a distinct and definite view of anything.

You can buy Bethphage from the Human Behavior Bandcamp page, grab a CD through Diet Pop Records, or a vinyl from Folktale Records.

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