As we’ve come to expect from the Audio Antihero cohort, the album is essentially about maintaining humanity in the face of contemporary society. That is, moving headlong through every banal custom and soul-crushing circumstance and coming out the other side with some degree of happiness, sanity or at least autonomy intact. Which sounds heavy, but Plays With Fire is anything but, the entire record suffused with a dreamy atmosphere which belies these existential themes. The majority of the tracks are pitched firmly on the upbeat side of the divide, and some, like ‘Disenchanted’, are downright playful. Furthermore, this doesn’t come off as an ironic juxtaposition. The bouncy sound is not the punchline to the cynical joke of the lyrics, but rather a facet of the sincerity with which Taormina pursues his craft, a perspective that is unafraid of honesty or even naivety in chasing its desired tone.

We’re delighted to get Taormina on board to write a track by track to Plays With Fire. This sort of feature is always interesting, but this in-depth and intimate take on the exercise makes for not only an illuminating read, but also an enhanced or altered listening experience that helps you get to the core ideas behind the record.

1. Happer’s Laugh

Comes like a meditation, or a dream in slow motion. I picture this track to be a sort of warning of what’s to come down the dark road of getting older and coming to grapple with what is called the “real world.” The lyrics, although brief explore the frustration of a seemingly impossible journey towards “true strength,” unfettered by externalities.

2. Disenchanted

I wrote and recorded this song having never heard it with my ears until the day recording began. For many moons did it exist only in my head as something I would sing along to. I loved it. I couldn’t wait for the world to hear it. It’s slightly different from what I had originally pictured, I like the recording more than the version I had imagined. Only when a friend was recording on this track did I realize the time signature wasn’t in 4/4.

3. Two Hands Bound

An anthem for hating your job and feeling oppressed to the point of atrophy. Since then I can happily say I have a job that I like a lot more! I question whether this song fits on the record but it has a nice upbeat quality to it despite the lyrics that I think is nice.

4. Me, Her & Lavender

Reminds me of my childhood friend, Greg Salwen’s old band, City Museum. They had a song called “Hands” which took a look at a string of people and how they all dealt with that time period in life when “your friends start making plans.”

5. Oh, So Juvenile

I wrote this song in the ten minutes after the event referenced in the first line happened. Someone smiled at me in a way that opened up something that hadn’t been opened in years. Something where after the Comfort Songs era I was certain was a ruse. I fell in love again, and very unromantically at first. I felt like it was juvenile!

6. Heartfluttered

This song I wanted to be a spiritual ascension of some kind—I don’t know where to or why. I just know that it ends with the nagging force, one of the formations of the begging flame explored in this record—the desire to procreate. I was still a virgin when I wrote this song.

7. Wildfire

I think the first line really sums up so much of the thesis here, “Every flame wants to be a wildfire.” I remember when Nolan from the band Infinity Girl, who also ended up mixing this record, took the train in from Brooklyn to record guitar on this. It was so fun and he Greg Salwen and I had a sleepover where we talked about how pathetic our love lives were.

8. Comet Happer

The title a reference to one of my favorite Scottish films, I won’t say which! I really like the way this came out. The ending especially is my favorite. I think that this title actually brings back an old theme of Cloud’s which is the futility and inevitability of wishing to change your circumstances.

9. Mary Goes Mad Again

So to me, the record is about struggling to keep these human incentives and motivators at balance, trying to remain pure-hearted, happy, and even sane. Well in ‘Mary Goes Mad Again,’ sanity is gone. Written very quickly in a period of time where I’d felt I’d lost my mind. The song has a contented and childlike disposition on these enormous woes that push us over the edge or very close to it. The song suggests, “oh well, I guess it happens,” and with a light smile. I wanted this to feel like a nursery rhyme and a psychedelic experience, which for better or worse seem to be a common pairing in the work I’ve been doing. The vocals were recorded by somebody who I’d met and briefly fell in love with, on the first day I met her. After hearing her speak I asked her to record and she agreed without a care in the world.

Plays With Fire is out now and you can get it from the Audio Antihero Bandcamp page, including a rather lovely vinyl edition.

Photography by Carson Lund

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‘A Great Height’ opens the release with insistent drums and sinuous baseline, with numerous types of percussion joining the simple beat as if in thumping chorus. The repetition builds into a near atavistic frenzy, carving out a depth within which you could become lost. Second track ‘Seskinore’ begins with another prominent baseline, this time backed with pretty ambient flourishes which shimmer and glitch behind vocals reminiscent of Thom Yorke. Again the instrumentation gathers in intensity, swelling outwards before being joined by more scattered drums and Tubridy’s vocals following a similar pattern, remaining even for a long while before eventually getting swept up in the energy too.

‘Christine’ is airy and slightly ominous, the ambient drone lethargic and strange like some slow-motion dream world. The vocals take centre stage, rising from the fog with unerring clarity, playing like the confessions of a man as spoken within his head. Closer ‘Johnny Brazil’ feels like several songs coalescing into one, a magic formula emerging by chance from a radio set between stations. There’s post-rock thump, dream pop drone and indie rock vocals shrouded in gauzy ambience as the track gathers around itself, the various elements complementing one another to build into a squally climax.

“Chrisine, oh Christine,
I’ve shot another one”

mk II (part 1) is set for release on the 16th of September and you can pre-order it now from the Hiva Oa Bandcamp page.

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It is perhaps unsurprising then that the band’s debut full-length Time Without Measure is an album with lofty goals. As the press releases states, the album explores “history and biography, faith and doubt, in unexpected and meaningful ways,” with Eric Krewson and Co. looking to history for inspiration. “What sets Time Without Measure apart — and what makes the album so relevant in 2016 — is its political nature. The album depicts the lives of ten (mostly) activists who demanded progress and, in return, were demonized by the powers that be.”

Opener ‘Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin’ is a snippet from the lives of the pair who created Catholic Worker Movement, a organisation which aimed to provide help for those struck by poverty, as well as protesting (nonviolently) on their behalf. The song finds Day working as a journalist, with Krewson conjuring the dualism of being a normal, humble person (“I wake up each morning in the newsroom that doubles as my bedroom, which doubles as my closet”) while also working toward huge, socially progressive ends.

“I’m up late each evening cleaning the dishes, Tamar at my knee and Peter at the table reading a book or two or three, when he gets to talking. Of leaving this city and taking the worst off, taking them all with us, just over that bending river”

‘Augustine’ finds the saint the bewildered by the names that dream of him, the music brash and confident in a way one is entitled to be when thought of so highly by Calvin and Dylan, while the verses of ‘Fannie Lou Hamer’ has the skippy energy and catchy repetition of a children’s verse. Complete with handclaps and echoed refrain, the track mimics Hamer’s habit of singing hymns with her civil rights group to maintain spirit and morale. And spirit they needed — the song is a reference to her bus trip to Indianola, Mississippi, where she travelled on the urging of Rev. James Bevel in order to register to vote. With the rhythmic chorus, the song is ready to singalong with from the off, and certainly captures the sense of carefree momentum that surely enchanted those brave enough to risk discrimination and death in order to gain what their people deserved.

‘Thérèse’ describes the beginning of the end for Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, who, after going to bed on Good Friday joyous after the Lenten fast, woke to find blood on her handkerchief, a sure sign of the death sentence that was tuberculosis. “I woke up with a pounding in my chest and a ringing in my ears,” Krewson has her say amid the cinematic swells of instrumentation, “you would have thought that I’d protest”. In reality, Thérèse was immensely touched that Christ should speak to her so clearly on the anniversary of his own death, providing the album with an example of capital-F Faith. The following track ‘Jimmy Carter’ is far less sure, finding the former president citing Flannery O’Connor (“It is much harder to believe”) and Paul Tillich (“Doubt is not the opposite of faith; it is one element”) as touchstones in his own struggles. The song is slow and wide and almost peaceful, before growing into a finale not quite transcendental but near enough, as though Carter grows into an understanding of Tillich’s words.

“I have found it’s much harder to do right. Doubt, fear and worry—and unbelief

O what sweet relief I found in Mark 9:23-4. I gave a sigh.”

‘César Chávez’ casts the civil rights activist in a light both typical and not, a man who takes out equity loans and recognises his wife’s favourite clothing who finds himself in the headlines and having visions in his sleep. ‘Kitty Ferguson’ offers progressive views of a different kind, providing yet another spin on the idea of faith by challenging the militant opinions on both sides of the religion/science divide by claiming that the two fields can coexist, striving, as she put it “[to] wrest both science and religion from the dogmatists of scientific atheism and religious fundamentalism”.

‘Catonsville 9 (Thomas and Marjorie)’ focuses on the Melville’s from said organisation, a Catholic couple who fought to bring attention to US involvement in Guatemala and served time after the Nine burned draft files in protest against the Vietnam war. The song finds them happy and relaxed, as though entirely convinced in their actions and beliefs, and finding the prospect of prison less of a burden than acting against their values. As ever, Krewson manages to cultivate a real sense of character, their playful intimacy possibly the biggest symbol of protest against the sanctions of bloodshed and fear peddled by their opposition.

“My wife and I drive to Catonsville, homemade napalm in our laps. Sun soaked and happy, we spill cherry cola on the map. My wife and I talk about the years, philosophy and its limits. Though we’re off to federal prison, there’ll be conjugal visits”

‘Peter Gomes and Nancy Koehn’ is based around a personal remembrance written by Koehn for the preacher and theologian Gomes, speaking of a man who saved her life and those of many others through his elegant insights into religion and life. The song plays as a suitable ode to what sounds like a great man (who Koehn called “a blazing light”, and Krewson “a sign for the living”), but also a meditation on faith, serving as a reminder that any holes in thinking and philosophising can be filled through empathy, compassion and friendship, acts which might just end up becoming your belief itself.

As if that lot was not powerful enough, The Chairman Dances close the album with ‘Dietrich Bonhoeffer’, a track about the anti-Nazi dissident who, despite being imprisoned and finally executed, lives on through his book, The Cost of Discipleship, which argues against the commodification of faith. The song finds Bonhoeffer under threat, perhaps from the Gestapo or the hangman or maybe the more general fascist danger, though amidst the violence holds onto his unshakeable trust in something bigger than himself.

“I was up smoking a cigarette when the curtains were thrown open. The night spilling in. And I thought about you, I thought I might see you bathed in light”

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

Time Without Measure is out now via Black Rd. Records and you can buy it from the Chairman Dances Bandcamp page, including a rather lovely CD edition.

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The release opens with ‘Pinesol’, an off-kilter garage pop song that falls halfway between Screaming Females and Rilo Kiley, with instrumentation that stops and starts and pushes and pulls and generally seems incapable or unwilling to settle into any clear groove. Lyrically, the song deals with lost love and the general numbness which succeeds it (“needles fall and prick my feet / but they don’t feel a thing “). The second verse pushes into deeper territory, getting past simple pining and asking why we feel the way we do, becoming as much about introspection as it is about the now missing other.

“it’s not like you’re the one i miss
it’s the principle of it
all the story lines don’t fit in single file
what would you do different
if you knew you wouldn’t get
everything they promised
if you just stay still a bit longer”

‘New Ketamine’ is tight and tense, confronting the past and the way we cling to it, asking why tradition brings comfort even if it’s unhealthy. The guitars twitch through the song in neurotic claustrophobia, though eventually work loose so that the track unravels into something messy and sprawling and free. The peppy guitar of ‘Moonshine Kingdom’ follows, though while the instrumentation sounds bright the lyrics are anything but. “Comfort was killing me before I died,” sings lead Katie Capri, “sticking your head in the mud / pretend to breath you’re not alive”. Still, there’s enough force in the track to propel it through its darker imagery, no longer stuck in the mud but flying above it, frowning and snarling and challenging anyone who thinks differently.

“In a kingdom run on
moonshine and grapevines
tell yourself what you must to get by
but

if you’re going to
you’d better be right”

Hex Signs is out now and you can grab it via the Fern Mayo Bandcamp page.

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As the name suggests, Adult Teen deals in the ways that many 20- and 30-somethings are often not as “grown up” as is expected of them, particularly in regards to love and relationships. But as you might imagine from a guitar and drum machine-wielding whirlwind, these are not soft and tender songs pining for that special someone. Label Father/Daughter Records (who are releasing the vinyl issue of the album) describe the Lisa Prank sound as “dominated by bruised romanticism, introspective longing, and a palpable sense of desire, building a sound heavily influenced by 90s pop punk and the decade’s lighthearted culture”. A VHS-grained nostalgia for the Nineties is pretty prominent, from the stylistic nods to Blink 182 et al. to the teen movie blend of sincere and heartfelt worries and simple good fun. There’s even a track named ‘I Want to Believe’ for chrissakes.

The album wastes no time in getting right to the pop punk goodness, opener ‘Starting Again’ a sub-three minute blast which sees Edwards struggling to forget a former beau, even if they were something of a jerk.

“you say you’re not still drinking
you just started again
I swear I don’t still miss you
I just started again”

‘Luv is Dumb’ rushes through its 1:30 run-time at breakneck speed, the tale of having all your thoughts reduced to a crush, while ‘Jumper’ has some electronic beats (from Edward’s trusty Roland MC-505 drum machine) behind restrained guitars, which eventually blossom to become warm and rich. Lyrically the song is a good illustration of the themes of the whole album, as Edwards sings “don’t wanna be in love cause it’s never enough / and I don’t wanna fall for you cause we’ll only make each other blue”. The rest of the songs exist in this same plane of self-examining melodrama, a life that’s begun to imitate all those 90s teen movies – all break-ups and make-ups and epiphanies of the ‘what-was-I-thinking?’ variety. ‘Baby Let Me Write Yr Lines’ is a hectic bounce-along track about growing to realise that you partner isn’t quite as special as you’d first thought, while ‘Drive Anywhere’ (which featured on Jon’s Toon Tunes effort for The Grey Estates) is about that confusion and loss of direction after a relationship breaks down.

“lights flashing
signs passing
I could drive anywhere
but there’s nowhere that
I really wanna go”

Closer ‘I Want to Believe’ sounds warm and happy and hopeful, as Edwards sings lines that hold a belief that this time things will be different, that the complications of past relationships won’t appear in the next one. It’s not clear if this hope should be applauded or doubted – is having faith in things working out a virtue or simple naivete? Edwards is well aware of this bind herself, as she sings:

“and maybe I’m too optimistic
I never learn much from the past”

On Adult Teen, Lisa Prank deal with all the pitfalls of being a young person in the only way they know how. It’s an album that puts equal faith in the energy of pop punk and the connective power of sharing real feelings, Edwards swerving mumbling melancholy for something bright and brief and blazingly her own.

Adult Teen is out on cassette tape and vinyl from Father Daughter Records and Miscreant Records. All orders of the record come with limited edition sticker sheet (below!), designed by Faye Orlove, who also created the album artwork.

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Luckily, 2016 has changed all that with the announcement of their debut full-length album, Kinda Like Electricity. So far we only have one song to go by, but it’s enough to suggest that the brooding blend of dream pop and indie rock remains. ‘E.V.I.L.’ emerges with a dark energy, like some bluesy shoegaze track played on half-speed, the lyrics emerging like words from a forbidden love letter or the images of a late night fever dream (e.g. “I shaped the weather for my love / ’cause I know she likes to dance out in the thunder / I shaped the weather for my love / Well I guess that she was stuck in under cover”). It seems apt then that they posted a quote from Milan Kundera alongside the song on Facebook.

“Looking out over the courtyard at the dirty walls, he realized he had no idea whether it was hysteria or love”

The song comes complete with a video. Directed by Mark Leonard, we find a suitably atmospheric dive-bar scene, complete with low lighting, smoky ambience, etc. Without wishing to spoil anything, the film develops to include a mysterious priest, a lot of hard staring, snake-handling, and an epiphanic/death-cultish conclusion. Check it out below:

Kinda Like Electricity is due out on the 15th August, but in the meantime you can grab ‘E.V.I.L.’ from the Medicine Boy Bandcamp page.

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Bowl of Plums, his latest album set for release this Friday (24th June), was written and recorded across the breadth of America, from an Alaskan island and Californian condo to a greeting card factory in Queens and a pharmaceutical factory in Brooklyn. The geographic variation translates into the music, the songs feeling like a collection of singles rather than a cohesive album, a kind of greatest hits compilation which draws from every sound, sight and second from Seretan’s recent life. As he explains in the press release: “Each track seems to me to hint at a nonexistent record that might have been made in the last two years. These are the best of them, the shiniest plums. The greatest moments.”

We’re delighted to share the title track ahead of Friday’s release, a song Seretan describes as the “guiding light for the whole album”.  And it’s not difficult to understand why. The song is constructed from a multitude of small details, dreams and snapshots and sensations, which knit together into a kind of abstract storyboard for good times. Or a vivid representation of life’s sunny side. A shiny plum indeed.

“My friends call me when they’re feeling low
We talk quietly for hours and walk the room
Flowers growing in a coffee can
Our lives are wonderful and sad sometimes

I’m so happy I could cry
A bowl of plums on the table”

The post Song Premiere: Ben Seretan – Bowl of Plums appeared first on Various Small Flames.

‘Beekeeper’ is a frenetic opener, throwing us into a squall of guitars and drums upon which Tincho’s vocals float, the relentless noise juxtaposed against his even-toned, almost detached delivery. ‘Golden Car’ is more far less hurried, a languid summer number which might coalesce into something more serious if only night should fall, but instead stretches on in the amber light of dusk.

“She drives around in her golden car,
I can barely hear myself over the burn
She picks me up in her golden car
I don’t think anything could stop her
No, we don’t need anything to stop this
I don’t need anything to simmer down
Take me the long way home”

As we described in our previous post, ‘Seattle’ (and its accompanying video) has “a weirded-out 90s vibe, a time of neon-drenched puddles and mass UFO sightings within the dead limits of big cities”, following a loner protagonist moving through these scenes in a dreamy abstraction, “feeling a few notches loose from society”. The catchy ‘Underwater Eyes’ picks up with what seems to be the tale of missed opportunities with a face from televisual advertisements (“I’ve been watching your TV commercial on repeat / Seven years don’t seem too far in my dreams”), while closer ‘We Dono’ returns to the loose-limbed sloppiness of ‘Golden Car’, though here the tone is decidedly more contemplative, the verses building toward the titular expression of confusion.

“I cherish the hard times
Wear them close to my soul
You know I don’t like that
that I’m leaving alone”

Nos Vemos is out now and you can buy it from the Tincho Bandcamp page.

Album artwork by Jen Kinney

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‘Seattle’, a rowdy track of glo-fi pop, comes complete with a video from Chicago-based Ryan Ohm and Weird Life Films (Twin Peaks, Gauntlet Hair, Yawn). Shot onto 16mm film in the Weeping Willows at Elmhurst, IL, the footage has a weirded-out 90s vibe, a time of neon-drenched puddles and mass UFO sightings within the dead limits of big cities. The loner lead character passes through these scenes operating to his own logic, feeling a few notches loose from society and reality and the curious freedom that can bring. As Ohm explains: “Amidst packing bags and hitting a new coast, a boy falls deeper into alien conspiracies while drifting through his mind on his moped. Maybe the fumes are getting to him.”

Still, he manages to conjure enough lucid thinking to dream of something more satisfying, namely escape to the West Coast.

“Ima find a job in see see Seattle
Maybe I will see ya there

I’m waving bye to shit hole Chicago
Baby you don’t even care
I will find another band to take care of me
I will find another girl who never loved me
I will find another band to take care of me
Maybe I will see you there”

Nos Vemos is set for release on the 3rd June and you can pre-order it now from the Tincho Bandcamp page.

Album artwork by Jen Kinney

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Boston’s Hallelujah The Hills are a band which seem to create according to similar aims and aspirations. Ryan H. Walsh and Co. release detailed, carefully-written albums without ruining their status as a bona fide rock band, their songs resonating on an emotional level irrespective of whether or not the listener wants to delve into the more cerebral aspects. The band went a good way to nailing the complicated/fun trade-off on 2014’s Have You Ever Done Something Evil?, a record we described as “good-time rock and roll with a weird edge”, but their new release, A Band is Something to Figure Out, sees the formula refined once more. Here the dichotomy has been stapled back together, the songs no longer working on several levels but rather across wide open vistas, accessible and interesting simultaneously. Even the most abstract lyrics feel important on an subconscious level. This is an album built from symbolism (one of the tags on Bandcamp is ‘hieroglyphics’, to give you an idea) but, like all the best mysteries, a sense of significance floats to the top, independent of any hidden code.

This intuitive meaning is present from the off. The album’s opener ‘What Do The People Want’ is a rousing, strangely emotional, indie rocker which proceeds with a tone that can only be termed bewildered hope. What the people actually want is never made clear, though they experiment with a multitude of strange situations in an attempt to find out, “calling the M’s from the dictionary” and “telling jokes in the ossuary” and “waving backwards to Massachusetts / trying to win the ‘World’s Best Haunt’©” (itself reference to a song from their début, Collective Psychosis Begone). There’s a real feeling of disorientation here but it never feels isolating. Rather it seems uniting, a force of perplexment so ubiquitous it has become a source of solidarity. ‘We Have The Perimeter Surrounded’ follows in emphatic manner, a song which raises a number of questions. Such as: Does Woody Guthrie dream of punk bands? Do the FBI chase indie rock musicians? In the blur between reality and fiction, a postmodern confusion reigns, though the celebratory, earnest tone (which is positively nostalgic by the midway mark) is set it apart from the usual paranoid sort of deal.

“Woody
Guthrie
once had
a weird dream
he fronted
a punk band
called Exed Out
they were amazing
every single thing that I could think of
we have the perimeter surrounded”

Full of catchy hooks, ‘The Mountain That Wanted More’ tells of a modern dissatisfaction where even the grandest, most impressive, among us are victims to a constant desire for more, and ‘The Girl With Electronics Inside’ sounds like a 90s indie hit written by George Saunders, a man/machine love song whose Big Feeling instrumental section suggests a complete lack of irony. ‘Spin the Atoms’ is slow and slinky and cartoonish in the Pynchonian sense, the background whirring bleep sounding like some covert analysis in a deep desert bunker, before ‘I’m in the Phone Book, I’m On the Planet, I’m Dying Slowly’ provides a pretty succinct summation of what its like to be alive. The song finds its characters bumping through life yet seized by a chemically assisted pseudo-wisdom, their conclusions (the title/chorus) morbid and moving and monstrous enough for decisive action (“a ritual in a Motel 6 / to make us one, at least for a night… Let me lay my hands on top of glowing spheres of endless light!”).

‘Play it as it Loops’ is a metafictional oddity for the time of instant gratification while ‘Hassle Magnet’ is heavy and relentless, the instrumentation and vocals rattling toward distortion. The track can be heard in various ways – the neurotic interior of a blank faced citizen, a cryptographic bulletin from an enigmatic sect, the ravings of some brain-fried wacko – though those of you with energy, time and grey matter will probably find clear threads leading elsewhere within the Hallelujah the Hills labyrinth. ‘New Phone Who Dis’ emerges with surprising tenderness, a song which sounds like the lone voice in a desolate expanse of digital echoes and cyber-ghosts, a person stripped and scorched by the constant beam of information yet still trying to maintain a sense of pride and an openness to connection:

“you now know
there’s a code word for you in the files

it’s certainly been awhile
the parts of me you reviled
have all been removed
but I didn’t do it for you

new phone who dis?”

‘The Dangers Are Doubled’ sees a return to the celebratory tone, Walsh’s words riding the crest of bright instrumentation and taking pleasure in absurd details and ambiguities, while ‘Realistic Birthday Music’ is carried by a similar energy. Returning to the themes of fiction vs. truth, the track crosses the wires of image and reality to paint a mimetic scene of the 21^st century. Here the characters are trying to act with sincerity according to what they’ve seen on screen, their ideas of human connection coloured or constructed by televisual representations of those very things.

“i’ve seen this in a movie
but never without a soundtrack of folk music
to coax and guide me toward your bed

And I’m coming at you with realistic birthday music
i’m coming at you with my hands above my head
And I’m coming at you with realistic birthday music
you’ve heard this song before
you’ve heard this song before”

There’s a lot of postmodern confusion present on A Band is Something to Figure Out but Hallelujah the Hills are not a postmodern band. Rather they are post-postmodern, reconstructing the human experience through sheer enthusiasm, using their joyous hooks and choruses as earnest expressions of emotion rather than ironic juxtapositions.  Walsh and Co. aren’t sitting us down to share a smirk and a wink, or to reel off some abstract philosophical theories, but rather taking us by the hand and running through their strange world, leaving it up to us to catch something meaningful in the breathless blur. And what a world this is, one which has been evolving since their first album, an ecosystem based on a strange molecule – twin strands of confusion and intuition tightly bound and swirled into a double helix – the DNA of Hallelujah the Hills.

You can buy A Band is Something to Figure Out now from the Hallelujah The Hills Bandcamp page.

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