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]

The post Year in Review: 2024 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Arlo Sun is the moniker of Canadian Erin Bolton, whose music draws on powers both astral and spiritual, as well as the deep ancient energy of the natural world. The Arlo part of the project’s name is a Gaelic word meaning “between two hills,” a reference to the valley of peace and perspective that Bolton creates with her music. Latest single ‘Forwards Motion’ is no different. An emotive song that feels at once weightless and quietly substantial, offering no empty platitudes but instead preaching a steadfast belief in the importance of hanging on through difficult times and putting one foot in front of the other no matter what. “Written while floating just above the relentless undercurrent of hope, this song is more applicable to me now than it was when I wrote it,” Bolton describes. “‘Forwards Motion’ begs you to look at yourself and the path you’ve taken, forks and all.”

‘Forwards Motion’ is out now and available from the Arlo Sun Bandcamp page.

Ellen Soffe x Aodhan – Tomb of the Prince

Ellen Soffe is a songwriter from Sydney whose work feels like the next step in the rich lineage of fellow Antipodean artists (i.e. Julia Jacklin, Aldous Harding, Tiny Ruins). A skilled guitarist, she played her first gig while still at school, and since then developed a distinctive vocal style and the knack for capturing raw emotion. Described as “a dreamy, meditative journey through lost love and the mythology of a fallen prince,” her debut single ‘Tomb of the Prince’ sees Soffe joined by young Dhawaral artist Aodhan. It’s a languid and tender folk-tinged pop song which captures the warm golden hour glow of a summer evening perfectly. Watch the video below:

‘Tomb of the Prince’ is out now and available via streaming services.

Fairy Tales In Yoghourt – Mania

Fairy Tales in Yoghourt is the solo recording project of Nantes-based Benoît Guchet. A self-confessed control freak, Guchet took his time to create Shape Mistakes, the project’s debut album which came out earlier this month. He has spent the last twelve years playing in other bands (such as Bantam Lyons, Yes Basketball, Classe Mannequin), and struggled to find the time to make his own release as perfect as he wanted. But he eventually managed it, and it’s fair to say it was worth the wait. A distinctive blend of psych folk and chilled-out indie rock, the record feels very much the product of one creative mind, unshackled by limitations or the expectations of others. Lead single ‘Mania’ kicks things off, an off-kilter folk pop song that features layers of guitars, beguiling melodies and a sense of brave forward motion.

Hannah Frances – Honey, Hear Me

Back in 2021, Chicago-based songwriter Hannah Frances released her fifth record Bedrock, an album of raw emotion and considerable storytelling. Next month, Ghost Mountain Records are re-releasing the album on cassette, giving anyone who missed it first time around another chance to put that right. Single ‘Honey, Hear Me’ is as good an introduction as any, showing off Frances’ signature guitar work and vehement songwriting. As the opening track of a record Frances describes as “a fountain of intentionality,” which “offer[s] rawness with reverence,” ‘Honey, Hear Me’ feels like something of a mission statement, a bold pledge towards directness and honesty.

learning to not be alone
to be known and sewn with a thread
other than my own
singing with the birds who know
of bravery

Madi Diaz, S.G. Goodman & Joy Oladokun – Be Careful

When Roe Vs Wade was overturned earlier this year, LA songwriter Madi Diaz found herself thinking of Patty Griffin’s song ‘Be Careful’. “It became a mantra of strength that was playing consistently in the back of my heart and mind day in and day out, gently encouraging me to keep putting one foot in front of the other,” she describes. “It became a sort of battle cry directed toward anyone that wants to take away my rights to my own body and my reproductive freedom.” Diaz got together with her friend Morgan Elizabeth Peirce and the pair wrote a new final verse, bringing the song right into the present.

For all the reasons that are ours to know
It’s my choice and I’m not alone

For every man who’s standing next to me
For queer and trans and non-binary
For everybody with their own body
I will meet you all out in the street

Diaz is joined on the track by S.G. Goodman and Joy Oladokun, who each sing a verse, and Courtney Marie Andrews and Savana Santos also provide backing vocals. You can listen to the cover below:

‘Be Careful’ is out now and available from the Madi Diaz Bandcamp page.

Molly Murphy – Salt for Witches

Now based in New York, songwriter Molly Murphy evokes the Blue Ridge Mountains with her homespun folk music. Her latest single ‘Salt For Witches’ is equal parts catchy and emotive, adding lush pop details to a timeless folk skeleton. Drawing on imagery of folklore and superstition, it’s a song about coping with difficult circumstances and wishing simple actions like knocking on wood or a circle of salt could solve them. “They say a circle of salt can keep evil forces at bay,” Molly Murphy describes. “‘Salt for Witches’ is about wishing you could do just that for bad vibes and people.”

Like salt for witches
Salt for witches
It is simple and strong
Find it in the cabinet
and keep the demons gone

Morena Leraba – Morea-rea

Morena Leraba is a musician/band from Lesotho, who for the last few years has steadily become of the figureheads of a reinvention of the country’s musical heritage. The music draws heavily on Sesotho culture and aims to preserve the language which is declining due to the spread of colonial languages such as English. Morena Leraba achieves this by taking Famo, a sub-genre of traditional Sesotho music, and updating it with contemporary flourishes inspired by hip hop and electronic music. “Because we also have influences from elsewhere musically,” he describes, “I’ve always re-imagined Famo. I’ve always re-imagined Sesotho traditional music.” Latest single ‘Morea-rea’ is a great example, emphasising Sesotho phrases and idioms in a style that feels both modern and timeless.

‘Morea-rea’ is taken from a forthcoming EP called Fela sa Ha Mojela. Until then, listen to the single via streaming services.

The Veils – Undertow

It’s been six years since the release of Total Depravity, the last album from London/Auckland-based outfit The Veils, a gap largely explained by an injury suffered by lead Finn Andrews. A freak accident on stage left him with a fractured wrist, and the decision to continue the tour further aggravated the situation. “The scaphoid bone in my wrist had died,” Andrews explains, “which I didn’t know was possible. My sister said that at least it was a really ‘on brand’ injury for me.” With the process of making music now “profoundly annoying,” it seemed to be the end of his days writing albums, but as is the way of such things new songs started to bubble up regardless. What eventually emerged was …And Out Of The Void Came Love, a new double album coming via Ba Da Bing Records. A release intended to experienced in one sitting, albeit with an intermission in the middle, which throws itself headlong into themes of isolation, healing and creation itself. The latter is brought into relief by single ‘Undertow’, tracing the compulsion to write through genetics, like some cursed blessing that holds tight in spite of intention or circumstance.

Wesley – Sugar Free

This month saw Wesley, AKA Louisville, Kentucky‘s Jacob Weaver, release Glows in the Dark on Earth Libraries. An album we described in an earlier preview as “a hazy dreamworld… all pleasantly surreal imagery and twinkling atmospherics,” with the title track “folding the syrupy dream-like quality of meeting your true love into the almost paradoxical emotion of awakening.” Latest single ‘Sugar Free’ might open with a more mournful, reflective tone, but as soon as Weaver’s vocals kick in the uber smooth style returns. A mood perhaps a tad starker than the previous track but no less ethereal. Some nocturnal vision caught between reality and dreams.

Glows in the Dark is out now and available via the Earth Libraries Bandcamp page.

The post Weekly Listening: November 2022 #3 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Native to Texas and now based in Ojai, CA, Austin Leonard Jones has made a name braiding melancholy and wit into his country style. Described as “somewhere between a funeral and a costume party,” new album Dead Calm continues to develop this apparent juxtaposition. Though as lead single ‘Back in Black Lagoon’ shows, humour and sadness might not be such odd bedfellows. “I’m the sole survivor of the all-night show,” Jones sings, “it cost a thousand tears for every episode.” Check out the video starring Bill Wedden below:

Dead Calm is out on the 29th July via Perpetual Doom and you can pre-order it via Bandcamp.

bedbugz – bedbugz / golf jumper

Hailing from Canterbury, shoegaze outfit bedbugz is the latest addition to the roster of Tonetic Records, a new youth-led label run via the Arts Education Exchange. Their new self-titled single and b-side ‘golf jumper’ first came into being in demo form while the members were still at school, and periods spent in the studio alongside continued world-building developed them further, creating a sense of ambition and energy which mark the band (the songs even come complete with a text-based adventure game). With its upbeat rhythm and searching vocals, the title track is a bittersweet tale of young love, while the b-side sets out further into shoegaze territory, its pace slower but weightier, the feedback gathering slowly before breaking in a stormy finale.

Easy Sleeper – D.T.F.S.

Having formed in DC and now based in LA, indie rock outfit Easy Sleeper have cut their teeth across various locals scenes on both coasts. Following on from previous single ‘Access Reply’, their latest release celebrates the value in creation and community. Titled ‘D.T.F.S.’, or Drive That Fucking Stake, the song is a searing reminder of how powerful the present moment can be, blocking out yesterday and tomorrow in favour of making something worthwhile today.

Every breath that you take
is another chance
to drive that fucking stake

Editrix – Hieroglyphics

As with all the work of Wendy Eisenberg, Editrix is a project which eschews binary thinking to transcend usual labels. To describe new album Editrix II: Editrix Goes To Hell as precise or chaotic would be misleading. Likewise accessible or challenging. It is all these things simultaneously, not only furthering the marvel at Eisenberg’s invention, but also pushing the burning questions of their work. Single ‘Hieroglyphics’ descends into the hell of the title, a depth not burning miles beneath our feet but centred square in our heads. “I don’t think all hells are other people,” Eisenberg explains. “Most of the hells I’ve experienced are the effects of solitary, circular thoughts, the kind that make a person attack themselves, while claiming they’re helping them gain a kind of clarity. This song is a dispatch from that place.”

Enumclaw – Jimmy Neutron

Ahead of debut album Save the Baby on Luminelle Recordings, Tacoma’s Enumclaw have unveiled brand new single, ‘Jimmy Neutron’. Drawing equally from the Pacific Northwest’s grunge history and the working class dreams of Britpop, the song introduces a band aiming for the stars, with lead Aramis Johnson pointing to Oasis’ rise from small-time to stadiums as an arc to emulate. The single’s combination of genuine heart and rock swagger suggests Enumclaw have all the elements required to achieve these ambitions, and its themes of self-sabotage hint at an awareness behind the bravado which will keep them grounded no matter how far into the stratosphere they might shoot. Check out the video directed by John C. Peterson below:

Save the Baby releases on 14th October via Luminelle Recordings. Pre-order a copy now from the Enumclaw Bandcamp page.

headboy – Toothrot

With equal parts riot grrrl ferocity and bedroom pop charm, London‘s headboy capture the worrying absurdity of our decidedly volatile times. Out via Blitz Cat Records, new single ‘Toothrot’ attacks the theme with classic nightmare imagery. Teeth falling into palms with no explanation, the world getting smaller and you shrinking too. Between the deadpan verses and frantic chorus, the song finds both horror and wry humour in the situation, where fear is ever-present but bewildered exasperation never far behind.

You’ve got toothrot
There’s nothing we can do about it
You keep your teeth clean
But it’s still all coming out

Jasmyn – Blank Paper

After fronting Toronto‘s Weaves for a number of albums and EPs, Jasmyn Burke has now gone it alone under her first name with debut solo record, In the Wild. Single ‘Blank Paper’ seizes the sense of freedom and possibility, turning away from self-doubt with a conviction present across much of the record. Uncertainty can be frightening, but it can also be an opportunity. With In the Wild, Jasmyn has decided to make it the latter, finding joy and meaning in music once again, and urging the listener to join her for the ride.

Open up your eyes
Look for what you want to see

Little Mazarn – Dew Nears Yay

Austin‘s Little Mazarn formed in local dive bar The Hole in the Wall, a club famous for hosting the likes of Nancy Griffith, Lucinda Williams and Townes Van Zandt. It’s tempting to say some of the ghosts which lingered there somehow attached themselves to the project, but the experimental folk style of new single ‘Dew Nears Yay’ (from LP Texas River Song on Dear Life Records) suggests the opposite transaction occurred. As though Lindsey Verrill and Jeff Johnston instead joined the spirits there, themselves now phantoms content to haunt the Texan land around them. Scouring for details, salvaging what they find.

Check out the video directed, shot, and edited by Jordan Moser below:

Texas River Song is out via Dear Life Records on the 19th August and you can pre-order it now.

Louien – No

After last year’s No Tomorrow, Norway folk rock outfit Louien have returned with single ‘No’ ahead of new EP, Figure Me Out, coming later this year on Jansen Records. Something of a sequel to the previous release, the EP continues the style and themes established there while shaking up the formula by co-writing with Preben Sælid Andersen. The single highlights the release’s balance between vulnerability and empowerment, confronting the issue of personal boundaries to show how honesty and openness might be painful but ultimately always more affirming. Check out the video filmed, directed and cut by Marthe Amanda Vannebo below:

Figure Me Out releases in September, bundled with No Tomorrow. Order it now from the Louien Bandcamp page.

Occupants – Serpent Shine

Having formed in Portsmouth over a shared appreciate of noisy punk and Father Ted, it is fitting London’s Occupants combine ferocious energy and whip-smart wit within their sound. Forthcoming EP Serpent Shine sees the trio direct this sound toward themes of narcissism, paranoia and grief, and the title track highlights their ability to repurpose cynicism into a purging force. Naked fury scorching all before it, eradicating anything bothersome and banal.

Boring protagonist,
Recycles used plot twists,
Repeats the same catch phrase,
Dripping with tired cliches

I was sent here to destroy you

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“Strange DIY songs for strange DIY times,” is how we’ve described the work of California‘s Derek Ted in the past, though 2021’s KEEP TRYING hinted at a warmer, sentimental side. Latest single ‘someday soon’ develops this aspect of Ted’s work, finding a ray of light in otherwise dark circumstances and working to persevere if only for the sight of it. “I wanted to capture that pure magic you feel when you’re first crushing on someone special,” Ted explains. “Like a springtime daydream played out in your head.”

gotten used to having my heart wasted
but then you came around
could it be true?
there’s beauty on the horizon
i’d wait around all just if just for you

For Breakfast – Orfordness Lighthouse

Ahead of their forthcoming EP Trapped in the Big Room on Glasshouse Records, London-based art rock outfit For Breakfast have unveiled brand new single, ‘Orfordness Lighthouse’. The single is as detailed and inventive as you might expect from a seven-piece band, each member bringing their own musical sensibilities to achieve a sound incorporating everything from dream pop and noise rock to trip hop and psychedelica. The brass and flutes of ‘Orfordness Lighthouse’ weave a nuanced, playful sound, though this is anchored by a post-rock depth which rises as the song progresses and thunders into the cathartic conclusion.

Horseface – Sanakirjan Takana

Based in Umeå, Sweden, Horseface work at the intersection of dream pop and post-punk to create their immersive songs. Next month sees the release of their latest album Sanakirjan Takana on Sing a Song Fighter and they have shared the title track by way of an introduction. With rhythmic percussion and synths/mellotron from David Lundberg (of Gösta Berlings Saga), the song combines emotive atmospherics with off-kilter charm. The title, which translates as “behind the dictionary,” alludes to a short story by the mother of the lead vocalist which was sadly only found after her untimely passing, and there’s a sense of cryptic fondness running through the sound.

King Ropes – Greedy

Bozeman, Montana outfit King Ropes won our attention back in 2021 with the release of Way Out West, an album which took inspiration from the rural landscape and mindset as well as a healthy slice of weirdness. Songs marked “by odd wisdom and surreal images, all cloaked in a psych-inflected air that only accentuates the strangeness,” as we put it. With trauma, reincarnation and inexplicable ailments, this balance between natural beauty and eeriness is again a feature of new LP Super Natural, out next month on Big and Just Little, as shown by latest single ‘Greedy’. A deadpan stream of consciousness which captures the vibe of an album that is a ramshackle ode to both the grace and difficulty of our strange world.

Super Natural is out on the 26th May and you can order your copy from the King Ropes Bandcamp page.

Mal Not Bad – Oven

The recording project of Los Angeles-based visual artist and musician Mallory Hauser, Mal Not Bad makes a lush brand of indie folk which blurs the line between mundane reality and ethereal dreams. Ahead of new EP Continuous Short Feature Film and a EU/UK tour with Illuminati Hotties, Mal has released the single ‘Oven’. A slow, foggy track which captures this spirit perfectly. “Smells like something’s burning,” Hauser sings, the delivery more sluggish than panicked as dissonant tones scramble the once-pillowy sound, like a nightmare where the terrible is happening but you can hardly move.

Continuous Short Feature Film is due to be released later this year.

Sinead O’Brien – There Are Good Times Coming

Ahead of debut album Time Bend and Break The Bower, out via Chess Club Records this summer, Ireland’s Sinead O’Brien has unveiled latest single, ‘There Are Good Times Coming’. The song captures the idiosyncratic aesthetic O’Brien has developed, one reliant on words and images as much as sound, and able to be at once twitchy and fluid, alluring and menacing, forthright and mysterious. “Throw a coin in the fountain,” O’Brien sings. “A curse in your name / A praise in vein of kindness / There are good times coming / For love or for money there are good times coming.” Check out the video directed by Chloé le Drezen below:

Time Bend and Break The Bower is out via Chess Club Records on the 10th June and you can pre-order it now.

Yves Jarvis – At the Whims

We’ve followed the work on Montreal‘s Yves Jarvis since his days recording under the moniker Un Blonde, always appreciating how Jarvis maintains such a sense of detail and invention in his sound. Ahead of new album The Zug on ANTI-, Yves Jarvis is back with brand new single ‘At the Whims’. Described as depicting “the arc of civilization,” the track uses psych pop as the thread to weave a tapestry of human history, starting with creation and extending out into a time yet to be realised. A future marked by collapsing empires, as foretold in all empires past.

The Zug is out on the 13th May via ANTI- and you can pre-order it from the Yves Jarvis Bandcamp page.

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The new name follows this spirit of change. “I felt like I had found, finally, phonetically, the perfect project name with Un Blonde,” Audet says. “I thought it evoked the proper imagery for all the shit I wanted to do.” But that was then, and this is now, and Audet is one to follow intuition. “I’m at a place where I feel like when I hear it, I don’t like it because I don’t identify with it at all. I knew I needed something that I could identify with.” Rise Yves Jarvis—his middle name matched with the surname of his mother.

Yves Jarvis is intended as a blank page after Un Blonde, but one thing that is retained is the creative fluidity. Back with his first music since 2019’s The Same But By Different Mean, last month saw the release of ‘Victim’, a brand new Yves Jarvis single that once again defies clear categorization. Laid out on a bed of soft vocals, the track doesn’t so much walk the line between folk and R&B as erase it, rising above to a plane of its own.

The track’s lyrics focus on this too, ruing attempts to constrain and sustain the notion of ‘normal’, coming to represent not only the overbearing desire for neat classification in art but across a wider context too. Beneath the languid rhythms, Audet is seething, describing himself as a “vitriolic mass of dynamite / just bound to ignite,” but the juxtaposition does not come across ironic or jarring. For this is an old anger, familiar and timeworn. It sits the palm like a pebble.

I’m a victor of process
and bound to result
just plowing the field
relentlessly to no end

I’m a victim of the same old stuff
my father was

‘Victim’ is out now via ANTI- Records and available via the Yves Jarvis Bandcamp page.

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“Listening to its twenty minutes now, I experience a fleeting era distilled into a single day. I hear the first few miles of a long ride, hands released from handlebars’ grip, arms splayed out to the sides, coasting with abandon, rounding a blind corner without worry for what might slam into me beyond the immediately visible… These tracks have felt three summers melt away, relearning the same cruelty each year: that summer’s start initiates a countdown to its end, that the first day’s light stretches infinitely outward before shrinking back from a dilating night.”

The slow dawn drone of ‘i’ opens the release, the flutter and hum of one steady note playing like the gradual creep of sun over the land, bringing subtle changes to the tints and hues and angles of light. Following Silberman’s explanation, the track rarely changes dramatically in a short space of time yet seems to be constantly evolving, imparting the sense that what’s been has gone, and what is unfolding will surely follow.

‘ii’ sees something of a disruption, the ambient notes restless and skittish, all set against a background whoosh like that of some desert wind. This gale follows into ‘iii’, though here the instrumentation is warmer and perhaps most-recognisable as that of The Antlers main man, while ‘iv’ is more restrained, swapping out the carefree vibes for distant melancholy so it sounds less immediate, the memory of something dear weathered smooth by constant handling.

Transcendless Summer is out now on ANTI- and Transgressive Records and available on iTunes and Spotify. People Teeth are also making a run of cassettes to be released later in the year, which you can pre-order now. Also, Peter Silberman will head out on a solo tour at the end of the year to “debut new material, repurpose old Antlers songs, undertake covers, etc.”, which sounds like a pretty cool thing. He’s stopping off along the west coast of the US as well as two nights in London:

November 7 – Los Angeles, CA @ Resident
November 11 – San Francisco, CA @ Swedish American Hall
November 14 – Seattle, WA @ Triple Door
November 16 – Portland, OR @ The Old Church
December 7 – London, UK @ Forge
December 8 – London, UK @ Forge

Cover photograph by Peter Silberman

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Anyway, Saintseneca are back with a new full-length, Such Things, which is very much worth your time. Combining rock, pop, folk and punk with strong writing and clever word play, the band make catchy yet surprisingly deep songs which seem equally suited to live parties and solo headphones sessions. From the up-tempo celebration of ‘River’, which brings to mind Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, the Neutral Milk Hotel-inspired title track and the choral, almost acapella singalong of ‘House Divided’, Such Things is a nuanced collection of indie rock songs which will provoke a fair bit of existential thinking. ‘How Many Blankets Are In The World?’ provides a nice summation of the band’s philosophy and message:

“Life is long
long enough to be mean
Life is short
short enough to mean something
To those who long
those who long for longer”

Such Things is an album which confronts the mysteries of life in a celebratory and/or fulfilling way, favouring finding interest and comfort in the unknowable instead of the nihilism many turn to when thinking of, well… such things.

You can buy Such Things now from the Saintseneca Bandcamp page, or on vinyl from ANTI-.

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The new album is due out in the new year but ANTI- have released a new song to keep you occupied in the meantime. ‘Jenny Come Home’ is something of a departure from his previous records, employing warmer, more upbeat sound to produce a jaunty, 70s-flavoured blend of folk and rock. The lyrics however are at odds with the buoyant tone, a story of infidelity unearthed, told from the perspective of the guilty party.

“You got back home about a quarter to four
and when you opened the door
you saw a pair of shoes you’d never seen before.
You came upstairs and we were scrambled so
she tried to make for the door.
I swear you packed all your things and were gone before she.
Jenny come home to me”

You can pick up The Bearer of Bad News and other past releases on the Andy Shaf Bandcamp, if you missed them the first time around. Otherwise keep your ears to the ground for more news on the new record.

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“Through summers long and winters cold,
may you always have someone good to hold
and make good fortune, win on every bet
and may your winning streak, may it never end”

You can watch it below via NPR Music First Watch:

Didn’t He Ramble is to be released on the 18th Sept by Anti- Records.

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