ACAB Rocky / Kneedlez (split) – ACAB Rocky // Kneedlez

(RIYL: punk rock, lo fi, bedroom pop)

Ahava – Steal, Kill, Destroy EP

(RIYL: folk, acoustic, ambient, Julianna Barwick)

Alexia Avina – Kind Forest EP

(RIYL: dream pop, folk, intimate)

Ant’lrd – Biblioteca Nod Out

(RIYL: experimental, ambient, fuzz)

Arrange – Their Bodies in a Fog

(RIYL: bedroom pop, ambient, Orchid Tapes)

Art Contest – Math Major

(RIYL: math rock, punk, Cap’n Jazz, Dananananaykroyd, Abe Vigoda)

Astroskeleton – you are not alone

(RIYL: Nintendo, 8-bit, chiptune, power pop, Space Boyfriend)

Aunt Sis – 9 Tracks

(RIYL: indie, folktronica, Broken Social Scene)

Baby Mollusk – Baby Mollusk and the Big Babies

(RIYL: bedroom pop, indie rock, lo-fi)

Balacade – From Memory

(RIYL: indie pop, Cataldo, Grandaddy, Sparklehorse)

The Bank Trail / Lake Michigan – A Split EP

(RIYL: bedroom pop, lo-fi, ambient, covers)

Bellows – Blue Breath

(RIYL: bedroom pop, Small Wonder, Why?)

Blush Response – Dead Air

(RIYL: shoegaze, dream pop, indie rock, Pains Of Being Pure At Heart)

Bois – Blank (out) EP

(RIYL: dream pop, soul, Bon Iver, Praything)

Boosegumps – Leave Me Alone EP

(RIYL: bedroom pop, lo-fi, sad)

Born Standing Up – Born Standing Up

(RIYL: country, folk, The Wooden Sky, The Head and The Heart)

Boy Spit – Everyone Is Cool

(RIYL: lo-fi, garage rock, Quilt, Cloud Nothings)

Broke For Free – Petal

(RIYL: chillwave, glitch, trip hop, summertime)

Camping In Alaska – Bathe

(RIYL: punk, indie rock, post-hardcore, At the Drive In)

Captive Portal – Somethign Abbadat EP

(RIYL: electronic, experimental, collages of chopped up sounds)

Cellulist – Holocene

(RIYL: ambient, drone, experimental)

Chips Calipso – I Walked Outside and Felt the Sun 

(RIYL: dream pop, surfy vibes, pysch, Evangelicals)

Cold Foamers – All Cold Everything

(RIYL: indie rock, lo-fi, Built To Spill)

Contron – Before I Hated Things

(RIYL: lo-fi, acoustic, weird old-timey folk)

DAILON – Transitions

(RIYL: electronic, beats, “future soul”)

Dead Folk – It Won’t Take Long

(RIYL: grunge, shoegaze, the 90s)

Dear – Dear EP

(RIYL: bedroom pop, lo-fi, acoustic)

We have selected our favourite tracks and made a mix for your listening pleasure. Check out the player below and be sure to tune in tomorrow for the next installment.

Favourite Free Music of 2014 (A-D) from Wake The Deaf on 8tracks Radio.

The post Favourite Free Music of 2014 (A-D) appeared first on Various Small Flames.

As ever, please support any of the acts you like and buy their own music. There are some super-talented and prolific acts on here who release a lot of their stuff for free, and I’m sure a few dollars, or even just an email of appreciation, would be very welcome.

Tracklisting:

1. Seasons (Waiting On You) (Future Islands Cover) – Slow Club
2. Don’t Let Me Get Me (P!nk Cover) – Arrange
3. Doin’ It Right (Daft Punk Cover) – Verdigrls
4. Flotus (Flying Lotus Cover) – Spazzkid
5. This Charming Man (The Smiths Cover) – SKATERS
6. Ain’t That Enough (Teenage Fanclub Cover) – Nai Harvest
7. Son Of Sam (Elliott Smith Cover) – The Provincial Archive
8. Her Sinking Sun (Coma Cinema Cover) – Julia Brown
9. Thru The Wall (Paul Baribeau Cover) – Matthew Lee Cothran & Delaney Mills
10. It Is What It Is (Blood Orange Cover) – How Sad
11.Dreams (Fleetwood Mac Cover) – Emily Reo
12. Is This Is (The Strokes Cover) – Total Warr
13. Everything Is Embarrassing (Sky Ferreira Cover) – Saturday Looks Good To Me
14. Bein’ Around (The Lemonheads Cover) – Courtney Barnett
15. Call It What You Will (Joe Pug Cover) – Vandaveer
16. Waking Hour (Vandaveer Cover) – Joe Pug
17. The Promise (When In Rome Cover) – Sturgill Simpson
18. The Mother We Share (CHVRCHES Cover) – SOAK
19. Game Of Pricks (Guided By Voices Cover) – Meursault
20. Ooh La La (Faces Cover) – Manchester Orchestra
21. Romulus (Sufjan Stevens Cover) – Donovan Woods
22. Drive All Night (Bruce Springsteen Cover) – Sharon van Etten

Covers Mix #11 from Wake The Deaf on 8tracks Radio.

The post The Covers Mix: Volume #11 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

“I’ve spent years with these songs when they were only mine, and I emptied myself into them…So if you’re going to listen, please know that this is all of me. A flawed and destructive mess of good intentions. A still life.”

The album is an emotional mixture of futuristic electronics, lo-fi bedroom pop and heart-on-his-sleeve lyrics. It’s also magnificently produced, sounding like a cinematic, widescreen version of the genre. Those of you who like Houses will love Dawn Golden, as will fans of Youth Lagoon, Arrange and the newer stuff by The Antlers. This is an album to be listened to on headphones, or on lonely nighttime drives. Tortoriello has similar ideas:

“I hope you will listen to it on your headphones and keep someone that maybe you miss a lot in your mind while you do. Maybe you will see them soon and I hope that you do.”

Lead single ‘All I Want’ (which you can hear in the player above) is a slow-burning epic, which climaxes in a chaotic, but triumphant, breakdown. The track has recently been given the remix treatment by Diplo too, which you can hear over at Soundcloud. We also featured the video (an excellent sci-fi love story directed by Tyler T. Williams) ‘All I Want’ over at Beatclash, so check that out too.

You can buy Still Life right now via Downtown Records / Mad Decent.

The post Dawn Golden – Still Life appeared first on Various Small Flames.

If you’ve missed the previous editions, then check out January and February right now.

March Mix from Wake The Deaf on 8tracks Radio.

The post March 2014 Roundup – A Mixtape appeared first on Various Small Flames.

The album opens with the brief ‘A Fog’ in which Lacey declares, “Your hearts a strong thing / That you’ve learned nothing about”. This line proves an early taste of the lyrical nature of the album, which comes across as Lacey’s latenight thoughts, vague questions and accusations, pleas and promises and confessions.

‘Home’ opens with a music-box melody and blossoms into a beautiful slice of dream pop. The beat picks up and adds an urgency to the chorus line of, “They see their father’s eyes / When the sun comes up he promises that they’ll be alright”. As I said last time, the horns during the finale seem to herald bigger things, a jump in scope and ambition, the product of an extremely talented musician hitting his stride. This is also apparent in the instrumentation elsewhere on the album, for example, the instrumental ‘Heart//What if This Were It?’ sounds cinematic, like the soundtrack to a tragic finale of a movie.

‘Stranger’ opens with these lonely, floating atmospherics before the onset of a really nice guitar melody. Yes it’s a sad song, but it’s not a typical syrupy dirge, it has a groove, the sort of hip swaying melancholy of later Bon Iver releases. Again the lyrics offer fragments of isolation and self-doubt.

Another of my favourites is ‘Time’ which opens with a simple mournful piano which repeats and repeats, becoming almost hypnotic by the time it fades out at the end. Lacey delivers the vocals.

It sounds like r&b minus the swagger, the masculine posturing. It’s more concerned with existential angst than beautiful girls and trite professions of love. But that’s not to say that Their Bodies in a Fog is simply cynical and pessimistic navel gazing. Lacey certainly wears his heart on his sleeve, this is one of the most earnest albums I’ve heard for a long time. But it never becomes too much, presumably because, as the listener, we feel that he’s telling the truth. The angst on show is real and sincere, and I think we can all relate to that.

You can get Their Bodies in a Fog as a pay-what-you-like digital download via Bandcamp, or on limited run cassette tape via Orchid Tapes.

The post arrange – Their Bodies in a Fog appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Miss last month’s edition? Listen to our January round-up.

February Mix from Wake The Deaf on 8tracks Radio.

The post February 2014 Roundup – A Mixtape appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Lacey has also put together a trailer for the album, which features snippets of each track set to some pretty nifty visuals. It’s safe to say I’m super excited for the album, so keep an eye out in the next few weeks for a longer write up.

Their Bodies in a Fog is out on the 4th of March on the ever brilliant Orchid Tapes.

The post Arrange releases Home, from new album Their Bodies in a Fog appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Their latest release, J.C., is a four song EP with lyrics adpated from ‘Expecting to be Loved for Nothing’, a book of poetry by Jake Core (hence the title initials). This is slow atmospheric music that reminds me a bit of Arrange in the way the vocals unfurl over the ethereal instrumental arrangements, giving something that is otherworldly yet fundamentaly personal, a paradox comparable to daydreaming in an empty room.

You can buy the EP in various formats through Bandcamp. Check out more Why Don’t you Believe Me? artists on this sampler.

The post Hot Palms – J.C. appeared first on Various Small Flames.

As the concept suggests, the album is highly cinematic and is doused in melancholy, while neatly side-stepping the epic bombast that would have been easy to create handling such an emotive theme.The album also avoids going too far in the opposite direction. Far from a series of unlistenable dirges, it has a soothing ambience, with much of the violence that is usually associated with such post-apocalyptic scenarios left to the imagination. Think McCarthy’s The Road minus the explicit brutality, all doomed love and snatches of painful sentiments. This is all captured much better than I am able in the beautiful trailer below:

The resulting sound lands somewhere between the emotionally charged aesthetics of bedroom pop artists such as Arrange and the male-female vocals of Stars or A Weather. I have seen some criticism in reviews regarding the album’s length (around 55 minutes), but I think this is unfair. It is very hard to find an album that so successfully engages the listener in its concept and I found myself lost in this crumbling world for what was almost an entire hour. Listen to my current favourite track, the post-rock influenced ‘Beginnings’, below:

A Quiet Darkness is out now on Downtown Records and you can buy it now from most good retailers, or, if you live in North America, get a copy directly from the band during their upcoming tour. Check the dates here.

The post Houses – A Quiet Darkness appeared first on Various Small Flames.

(RIYL – “Defeatist Folk”, Nostalgia, House of Wolves)

Pop Winds – Earth To Friends

(RIYL – Psych Pop, Animal Collective, Parts & Labor, Braids)

Praything – Her Skin Caught The Glow

(RIYL – Indie Pop, Pianos, Beach House, Fleet Foxes, Youth Lagoon)

Rem’s Floating Chandelier – Think Of The Willows

(RIYL – Chillwave, Ambient, Dream Pop, Variety)

Ricky Eat Acid – Ambien Music

(RIYL – Ambient, Drone, Melancholy)

Ricky Eat Acid + Arrange – Sketches

(RIYL – Ambient, Collaborations, Ricky Eat Acid, Arrange)

Roman Ruins – Homebuilding

(RIYL – Electronic Pop, Animal Collective, Beach House)

Sean Atkins – Volume One / Volume 1.5 / Volume Two

(RIYL – Acoustic, Singer Songwriters, Bright Eyes, J. Tillman)

Selkies – Tall Grass

(RIYL – Psych Folk, Nature, Mountain Man, Joanna Newsom, Lemolo)

Seth Frightening – Don’t You Worry (Heat Death)

(RIYL:Experimental Folk, Smog, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Grouper).

Shipwrecks – Whatever

(RIYL: Bedroom Pop, Talons’, Phil Elvrum, Sufjan Stevens)

Sledding With Tigers – Being Nice is Still Cool

(RIYL: Folk Punk, Defiance Ohio, Andrew Jackson Jihad).

Snow Mantled Love – Romance 126

(RIYL: Dream Pop, Sharon Van Etten, Beach House, Twin Sister, Sigur Ros).

Spook Houses – Trying

(RIYL: Indie Rock, Pavement, Titus Andronicus).

Squanto – On Being Lumpy

(RIYL: Ambient, Folk, Nils Frahm, Talons’)

The post Favourite Free Music of 2012 (P – S) appeared first on Various Small Flames.