Out via The Long Road Society, latest album The Light is a testament to the fact. Described as a “33 minute long, drama-noir love story,” the record is rooted in old-time country styles but not limited to them, adding elements of dream pop and indie rock as well as a binding punk spirit. The result is perhaps best described as southern gothic—country music as it exists in the world of Flannery O’Connor or Carson McCullers—where the wistful charms of the genre are backed up by something dark and fierce and strange.

Opener ‘Avondale’ serves as an introduction to this world. Equal parts heartfelt and irreverent, the song sees sweetness marble with the weird and the violent, characters on the edges of society now or then or maybe always. We meet the narrator at a Louisiana thrift store, where a chance encounter with a seeming stranger opens up a window into a history of train rides and jailhouses, the women who shared the cells. Revealed is a common history with bad situations, a sense of solidarity in the outsider life.

The poignant and impassioned ‘South Missouri’ takes us to a funeral service, a track of odd details and genuine heart, not mention an undercurrent of deadpan humour. “See you laid out in a suit you’d never wear,” Janko sings, “bet you’d have thought twice if you knew they’d comb out your hair.” ‘Demon’ offers a stark balance between dreaminess and darkness, while a version of Utah Phillips’s ‘The Telling Takes Me Home’ expands this interplay to a national level. The fantasy of the American West built on bones and haunted by ghosts.

The title track is both plaintive and celebratory, a song of hard won wisdom both railing against the ubiquitous nature of loss and finding some tenacious beauty in life’s transience. ‘Love Song’ follows suit, an ode to love in all of its forms, no matter how tender, how traditional, how true.

I’ve seen so many kinds of love
Falling out the windows or shutting out the sun
Running through the streets screaming tough
Or easy as a Sunday or sugar on your tongue
Giving up your money Having someone’s baby
Lying to a judge
Or lying to your love
Threatening you’ll die
Promising you’ll kill her
Making Christmas dinner
Or bringing home some flowers

With its near-whispered vocals and lingering melancholy, closer ‘Friend of Mine’ encapsulates The Light as a whole. The intimate sound weaving threads of fondness and regret, painting characters not surprised by loss or the passing of time but no less immune from the sting. Characters tough and lonely and ultimately human, voicing thoughts perhaps to an empty room, but no less sincere for the fact.

The Light is out now on The Long Road Society and available from the Dawn Riding Bandcamp page.

Album art by Sarah Rose Janko, photo by Gem Studio

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Debut single ‘Spider’ serves as the perfect introduction to this aesthetic. Along with Cameron Worne (drums), Alice Robbins (cello), John Thompson (bass) and Henry Scott (electric guitar), Jiminil weaves lush, layered sound shot through with a folky rhythm, achieving an enviable balance between texture and forward motion. The resulting mood is hard to place, its undeniable warmth undercut by a certain ominousness, a contradiction which extends to the themes of the track.

“Spider is a song about discovering yourself in a social or political landscape that your ignorance or tolerance has been complicit in creating,” Jiminil explains, “and the disillusionment that follows which in turn finds you further alienated from where you find yourself. Sometimes your apathy can allow the cobwebs to take up all the corners, and through a blasé indifference the spiders can take over the house.”

But within the track’s perky motion lies a sense of hope too—that there are ways in which to acknowledge and confront these creatures, and in doing so reclaim spaces for those who chased out by the arachnid threat.

You take all the gold while the rambler’s in the garden
You won’t find them there hiding shy
Wear the jester crown while we bathe our heads in silver
But the blue gown is wearing another lie

You can run, run, you can run from me
You can run, you can run, you can run

You’re the spider
You’re the spider
You’re the spider
You’re the spider
In the right of my eye

Artwork by Faye Robinson, photography by Adrian Vitelleschi Cook

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Ruby Landen’s latest single, ‘I Look Like My Mother’, displays the style perfectly. Supported by Hannah Reed (fiddle, vocals), Jerry Cronin (cello) and Liri Ronen (French horn), Landen crafts a sound rooted in the classic American style, all warmth and acoustic detail plus kind of melancholic fondness. Landen describes the track as one written in a “retrospective state,” the product of reflecting on her relationship with her father and other men. The result is a kind of duality, between specificity and diffuseness, the wide world and Landen herself. A myriad of experiences honed to a point by the common emotions that accompany them.

I look like my mother, we’re drawn with the same lines
and the burden that is hers, I see becoming mine

I’m afraid to be my father, I’m afraid to let him win
he couldn’t give a home to
the kid I should’ve been

come and take from me
the things that I lack
I’m tired of this bag that
never hits back

if I was better made,
would I know my name?

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The song was the result of a moment of sudden inspiration. “I had a guitar riff that I was messing around with the day before this track was recorded,” Squires describes. “A good friend of mine that I hadn’t seen in years called me up and asked if I’d like to come over and jam. We just pressed record and I started playing the riff and he played drums. I went home and I played bass to it, wrote the lyrics and recorded them all that same night.”

Squires says the song is “about saying goodbye or not having a proper goodbye or closure,” and like much of his music has deep religious undertones. The lyrics are relatively minimal and opaque, shrouding the track in a sense of mystery as Squires addresses an unknown “you.” Fittingly, this is not one of Squires’s straight folk songs, but rather a slow and weighty slice of Americana, thick with a sense of consequence and regret.

The single comes complete with a video, shot and edited by Squires himself, which he says the feelings of “decay, abandonment and unanswered questions,” that permeate the song. Check it out below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8ymRx_kDsU

The second release is the self-explanatory A Collection of Covers, a mini-album of other people’s songs Squires has recorded over the past few years. He’s chosen wisely, with songs from legends such as Jason Molina, Damien Jurado, Bonnie “Prince” Billy and Pedro the Lion, all of whom have discernible influence on Squires’s music. There is also a take on Nirvana’s ‘Heart Shaped Box’, the achingly emotive ‘Rust or Gold’ by Jill Andrews, and ‘The Bluebird of Happiness’ by Lotte Kestner, the latter opening in twinkling glockenspiel before the entrance of Squires’s comparatively gruff vocals and smoothly emotive piano.

They are songs linked not by sound but a common feeling, something that can be traced back to Squires’s own work. As he puts it, “the song has to feel like I could’ve written or something I wished I had written and hit me like a ton of bricks.”

You can get ‘Diminish’ and A Collection of Covers from the Jeremy Squires Bandcamp page.

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Still, that’s not to say the record is one long dreary dirge of heartbreak. Indeed, one of its key motifs is that of juxtaposition. Clear guitars soundtrack muddied emotions as love and loss stab one another in the back, freedom and pain flashing in a constant cycle. How much value can be drawn from such an existence is up to interpretation. “Brambles are an interesting growth,” the press release describes. “They can bear flowers and fruit, but many consider them weeds due to their growth in neglected areas and sharp thorns. Whether brambles are worth eradicating or cultivating is all up to perspective.”

The continuation of a series of songs across all previous Morning River Band albums, opener ‘Drinking Blues Reprise (3,700 Brokenhearted Days)’ sounds exactly as you’d imagine, all hungover lonely cowboy blues. The wry pessimism lifts somewhat on ‘Monmouth County Blues,’ or at least shifts slightly into a different shape. The song more reflective, its narrator in a constant search, knocking on doors and interrogating the half moon in the heavens.

There’s another dose of red-eyed whiskey blues on ‘Drinking Blues, No. 3 (Bend, Fall, Break)’, while ‘Sun Alone’ finds our narrator contemplating a sunrise by himself, reflecting on wronged lovers and a lingering sense of guilt. It’s a song wrapped up in both regret and defiance, the familiar Morning River Band theme of men fated to make bad decisions and abandon those that try to love them. “I ain’t ever coming home,” goes the devastatingly simple final line, summing up the spirit of the track in a handful of words.

The first upbeat country song on the album, ‘Bury Me’ is infectious, full of bluesy guitar and carefree defiance. It begins like a story we’ve all heard before, as Field sings “The good Lord said to Noah, ‘son build yourself a boat, take two of each of everything out there that doesn’t float.’” But this Noah doesn’t want to listen, and vows to live (and die) on his own terms.

“But Noah turned away,
he said I don’t work for you.
I toil and sweat I do the things you refuse to do

so send the wind and send the rain,
I’ll die right where I stand,
bury me with my regrets”

Continuing the theme of juxtaposition, ‘(All of My Best Friends Are) Dead & Gone Blues’ bemoans the diurnal cycle, pining for the moon all day and the sun all night. Even the mourning suggested by the title is bittersweet, the loss altered by the knowledge that he too won’t be far behind them. After the playful interlude of ‘Space Boy Rag,’ ‘Ezekiel’s Wheel / Gloucester Skyline’ emerges, two songs in one separated by a void of guitar effects. However, the second half rises from quiet acoustic guitar into a rousing ballad, as though in defiance of the gaping space from which it crawled.

The album then ends on ‘The Last Red Bank Blues’, a track which serves as both the denouement and genesis story of Brambles. Here the broken-hearted narrator parks atop of a mountain and eases his foot from the brake, the only note he leaves behind that of a lyrical tune (the song, the album). This is a man finding betrayal and divorce hollowed out into their blackest nadir, and escaping through a headlong rush toward a hard ground.

Brambles is out now via Under The Counter Tapes and you can get it from Bandcamp.

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The choice to adopt his own name for his new record is a product of the maturation and evolution that every artist, especially those that start young, naturally work through. Hip Hatchet was plucked haphazardly from a novel by a nineteen-year-old Bronchtein, and after a decade the name began to feel less and less meaningful. “As I got older and more comfortable in my own skin,” Bronchtein explains, “the moniker felt like something I was hiding behind rather than embracing. It feels more honest to continue putting out music under my own name than trying to conform to some image of what an American songwriter should be.”

Which is to say, the arbitrary Hip Hatchet began to feel like something of a folk trope, an attempt to fit within the Americana genre that became an empty facsimile. For some, a band name is just a band name, but for an artist who plies his trade with a sense of sincerity and authenticity, the false meaning of Hip Hatchet just wouldn’t do. The solution was easy—how better to reclaim a sense of authenticity than using one’s own name? “The name contains multitudes,” Bronchtein says. “My first name is from my mother’s Quebecois (French-Canadian) side. My last name is from my father’s side, of Russian Jewish Heritage.” Philippe Bronchtein is a history.

Which is to say, Me and the Moon signals not some drastic change of direction, but rather a full embrace of the styles and nuances that make Bronchtein’s music his own. The themes of travel and longing and the distance of home were always Hip Hatchet staples, and again this record is centred on the compulsion to move and the fear and loneliness that might follow. ‘It’ll Do’ and ‘Home Again’ explore the discrepancy between feelings when away and at home, Bronchtein pining for home on the road and itching to move when off it, the traditional benefits of home feeling empty, lacking their imagined importance, like wistful delusions born of too many nights driving alone.

However, there is doubt too about the value of the miles he has so far clocked, questions as to what exactly he has to show for such an endeavour. Therefore, the road he desires to get back on might be a metaphorical one, the urge to move on not necessarily a longing for the next town or tour, but a new period of life.

The entire record could be viewed as the slow realisation of this, the ubiquitous wistful tone the product of Bronchtein letting a great part of himself go, Hip Hatchet and all that came with it now separate, his identity no longer but fond memories, remembered in a dusky light. ‘Kitchen Window’ and ‘Joy of Repetition’ seem preoccupied by this, a pervasive sense of loss creeping into all things, as though the experiences are slipping through his fingers even as they are unfolding.

“I feel like a memory, one that can’t brave the fires of time and stone”

Perhaps the most upbeat track on the record, ‘Ginger Tea and Wine’ finds Bronchtein an ocean away from home and regretting those he left behind. ‘I’m a Runner’ is similarly troubled, born of the loneliness of the rootless life, where moving forward is merely the most efficient way of not looking back. The title track too finds Bronchtein in a life difficult and rarely comfortable, and the motivation behind the constant movement begins to feel like a lie he has repeated into certainty. Though, the fact that Bronchtein is still going suggests that maybe some people are just cut out for this. For journeys with no clear end. For journeys as the end.

I’m drinking for free in a new town each night”
with my sleeves both rolled up, man this is the life.

When the gasoline’s cheaper but I’m barely alive
after ten thousand miles, man this is the life.

But the trees here ain’t green and a truck’s not a home.
I keep telling myself, this is the life I chose”

Me and the Moon is out now and you can buy it from the Philippe Bronchtein webstore.

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Today we’re thrilled to share their follow-up record, Purple, Green, and Yellow, a few days before its release on the 5th October. Thematically, the band are certainly on the same course, detailing the trouble and strife of dealing with other human beings, especially those who seem hell bent on breaking your heart. However, the album sees an evolution of the Anamon sound, reaching far beyond the country and western-inspired indie rock to borrow from genres as diverse as punk, psych and a handful of rocks—hard, classic, garage, math—as well as a more traditional folk.

Which isn’t to says the western vibes are lost. Anamon are still ostensibly a country rock band, with songs such as ‘Outsider’ feeling like direct links to Stubborn Comfort. Even the more divergent tracks feel rooted in the outsider experience that marks the genre, the sensation of being somehow cut off from the regular human experience, separated by will or design or pure bad luck, and doubling down within the role as an act of resistance.

What binds the indie pop momentum of ‘No Friends’, the angry swagger of ‘Iron Bill’ and runaway energy of ‘In Three’ is a determination to fight for the privilege of being oneself, even if that self is reserved or shy or anxious in a world that views such traits with utter contempt. Indeed, Anamon challenge exactly what these features entail, banishing the notion that reserved people have nothing to say, that shy people have no spirit or belief. Therefore, what at first seems something of a contradiction in the Anamon sound—introverted discomfort communicated with sometimes sloppy, sometimes sleazy abandon—is revealed to be no contradiction at all.

Key to all of this is the direction Anamon choose to focus the beam of this revelation. The classic counterculture mode places all focus on the individual, coolness as a complete retreat into the idiosyncrasies of the self, though Monaco appears to reject such self-indulgence. Despite possessing a wry tone, Purple, Green, and Yellow wants more than hip denunciation and cynicism. It wants to help build a community of nonconformists, people intent not on burning the world down, but building a beacon around which others might gather. As Saby Reyes-Kulkarni puts it:

In a time when social civility appears to be falling into ruin, we need more from the punk-rock attitude than just individual angst expressed as a middle finger to the world. No surprise, a band of friends who live together, dine together, and have played together in various guises since their teens gets across a sense of grappling with being in the world rather than against it. Monaco certainly has her middle finger ready throughout Purple, Green & Yellow, but there’s a palpable sense of inclusion and welcoming in her refusal to flinch from uncomfortable truths.

We’re thrilled to be able to share the album a few days before its release, so be sure to take advantage and listen below:

Photo by Clay Patrick McBride

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However, the relatively simplicity of the arrangement says nothing of the detail and scope of the music, as though in this genre there is an inverse relationship between number of instruments and level of detail. Indeed, as his bio states, Atalay’s music “varies in structure and character, ranging from long-form compositions to brief impressionistic explorations of a theme,” and thus through guitar alone he is equally capable of evoking moments in time as he is entire landscapes.

Teaming up with the good folks at Dust Etc. to put out what will be the first album that he has not released himself, this month sees the release of the latest Kerem Atalay, Summer Winter. Performing something of a balancing act between the poles of long form and vignette, the album draws its atmospheric core from the equally antithetical seasons of the title. The good folks at Post-Trash featured lead single ‘Summer 1’ a few weeks ago, a track they described as “warm and vibrant, beaming down like the hot sun and entrenched in long day vibes and late nights […] creep[ing] forward with a winding arpeggiated melody, bright and beautiful, with a sense of wonder.”

We’re super pleased to be able to share ‘Winter 2’, a brand new track from the thematic flip-side of the album. But that’s not to say Kerem Atalay moves away from a sense of wonder. The duality between summer and winter is not easily partitioned into a happy/sad divide, and ‘Winter 2’ could be said to match or even trump the brightness of ‘Summer 1’. This is a track representing early January mornings where the sun stretches shadows and shimmers layers of frost, life emerging from the night before, red cheeked and speckled with an icy light.

Summer Winter will be released on the 22nd June via Dust Etc. and you can pre-order it now from Bandcamp.

Tape design and photographs by Mindy Burgess and Caleb Kong

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The story is told in semi-linear fashion, playing out as if remembered from a (not-so-safe) distance, and it becomes clear that the narrator is not just damaged by past trauma but haunted by the violence of the experiences. As such, Patricide mixes the desperate small scale deprivation of Denis Johnson (albeit with Johnson’s restraint thrown into reverse) with Knausgaard’s meticulous introspection. Outside of this self-reflection, there’s something far larger brewing at the edges, philosophical and poetic nods to concepts of not just life and family but society and power, grasping for grand meaning within the personal fragments like Melville and McCarthy.

The blurb describes the novel as a “heavy metal Huck Finn,” and it’s in the novel’s first half that this becomes apparent. Pat is isolated and sad and seething with anger, wired with a need to take control of something, anything. This leads to bursts of brutal violence, and soon the frustratingly inevitable pact with the very same demons that landed his parents in their own mess. His preoccupation with the past, wherein lies the root of his dysfunction, is intensely powerful, scenes and images from childhood concatenating into one long and painful filmstrip, a dusty reel of loneliness and violence and humiliation. And this fact never really changes throughout the story. Even as an adult Pat is nursing wounds from his past, swimming in a soup of introspective anger and shame.

As the title suggests, Pat’s preoccupation centres on his father. This in itself feels like something of a sidestep for this genre, the fact that it is his mother who does most of the physical tormenting (a result of her own violent childhood) reversing the stereotypical gender roles in such a situation. Here, it is the father’s sins that lay in inaction, a shirking of perhaps the fundamental tenet of parenthood—the protection of one’s offspring. And, worse, he abuses that power to project his own inadequacies onto his son, something that is made plainly clear in opposing scenes where he is first humiliated by another man at the dump and then strikes Pat in anger, channelling all of the hurt of the world onto the one person he’s supposed to protect.

My father is a man of such limitless contradictions that it doesn’t seem possible he walks this earth. And how is it possible I’ve survived this long, having been raised in this world by such a man as my father.

Perhaps the most painful emotion on show in the whole novel is Pat’s confusion about why his father doesn’t look after him better, of his inability to be the much-needed shield against the mother. Even as a child, Pat seems aware of his predicament, nailed to the cross of his circumstances and eternally asking the question: “Father, why have you forsaken me?”

If all that sounds exhausting then that’s because it sometimes is. Just like Pat’s mind/life, the novel races with a kind of internal chaos born of confusion and pain. But there is a glimmer of light. Patricide is often funny, for one thing, especially when Pat is younger. The passage on Dylan Thomas, where he describes the disappointment of discovering the face of the man who writes all those beautiful poems is hilarious (“I loved his poetry, and still do, yet not as much as before I saw his face… the face of a clown without its makeup… the slippery jowls, the ropey lips, the bulbous head overrun with knotty unkempt hair, the penetrating eyes of a man, drunken or no, could be a moron or a genius”). Foy does not write flat characters, but characters being flattened by their anger and pain. A distinction that makes the whole thing more alive, yet all the more galling.

This control of innocence and beauty, even within environments of crushing despair, is what marks Foy’s writing. Indeed, much of his prose a joy, regardless of how depressing the scenes it details. For example, there aren’t many authors who can describe a dump quite so evocatively, or who can capture the dread ingrained in a city:

The sky, monotonous and brown, heavy on the boulevards endlessly trudged by assembly-line serfs and delivery men and mechanics and butchers and dolts, by bagboys and clerks, by sick little children and sick old men, and by the endless plenty of sad-eyed tailors and black-eyed bums, and by the polyester salesmen, dishwashers, cooks, single-mother waitresses, and whisky-slurping keeps, security guards, bank tellers, cholos and cops, and helicopter men, and sheet metal men, and plexiglass cutters and ironwork men and aluminum men and the sons of cops in gangs, the endless vile dust of the walkless ways, the peeling tenements, the tumbledown shacks, the yards of toys all shattered and dogs on chains and car parts and junkies and trash.

And, despite how it sounds, there is some deeper hope too. Pat clearly loves his father, a fact that’s painfully confirmed by his obsession over his failings. Even during the moments when his anger and confusion spills over into vitriol, it’s because he wishes things were different. The dream that his father could be the person that both of them want him to be. The fantasy that he wasn’t born into the double bond that has gripped the family for generations.

The paradox of pain and love is what resides at the heart of Patricide. D. Foy doesn’t simply blur the lines between good and bad, he continually flips them, reminding us that cruelty breeds cruelty, or as he puts it, “brutal men are almost always brutalized boys.” Even in the most dedicated allegorical readings of the novel, it’s worth remembering that all fathers are also sons, that it’s possible to view many tormentors as fellow sufferers.

Patricide is out now on Stalking Horse Press. Ask about it in your local bookshop. D. Foy also put out a new novel, Absolutely Golden, in 2017.

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We’re therefore excited to hear that Jeremy has a new album on the way. Entitled Poem, the record doesn’t have a release date yet, but we’ve already had a taste with the first single ‘Somersault’, which was unveiled recently over at Adobe and Teardrops.

Now Squires has released Poem‘s second single, ‘Gift’, and an accompanying video, which premiered recently on One Chord To Another. The song retains Squires’s trademark stark and emotive writing, backing it with sombre piano and stirring strings, resulting in something that’s at once grandiose and melancholy. But despite that description, it’s actually one of the most positive songs I’ve heard Jeremy write. It’s a heartfelt and tender love song, the titular gift revealing itself to be a person the narrator is very grateful for.

“and under the blankets, i was just still
you were a dream i had
beautiful just like flowers in bloom
only i could find”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkIJ7UIXLZI&feature=youtu.be

Make sure you keep your eyes on the Jeremy Squires Bandcamp page for further information on Poem. In the meantime browse the Jeremy Squires tag to delve into his back catalogue.

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