Tracklisting:

Mike Pace and the Child Actors – Everyone Out of the Car
Miranda Winters – The Futuristic District
Exam Season – Strawberry Milk
Saccharine – Pumpkin Guts
Tuvaband – Wolfpack
Devon Welsh – Dreams Have Pushed You Around
Mending – Alan after the Fire
Reddening West – Even If
Valley Maker – Light on the Ground
The Washboard Abs – Return to You
Manatree – Brushfire
Miserable Chillers – Horse Opera
Saint Charles – She Don’t Wanna Know
new casino – going for a walk*
Frankie Valet – Why Blue
Goodbye Max – Old Photos
Adeline Hotel – Habits
Joe Kaplow – I Said I Was Going and I Went
Pecas – Tuesdays
Sun Kin – Neglect
Baby Cages – flowers
Crooked Spine – Skinned Knees
Lauren O’Connell – Out of Focus
Mount Goldie – Summer
Harvey Trisdale – Baby
american poetry club – the sum of your parts
Babehoven – Out of the Country
Adam Arcuragi – Low Parade Rain
Jason Bemis Lawrence – Southern Midwest
Campdogzz – Sorceress
Barfoot – A Thin Place Between Worlds

* not on Playmoss

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Miranda Winters – The Futuristic District

Usually found fronting Chicago noise-rock band Melkbelly, Miranda Winters put out a solo record this summer that shows she is equally comfortable with the energy toned down a little. Which isn’t to say Xobeci, What Grows Here? is without its own bite, just that its intensity is not quite of the eardrum-busting variety. Opener ‘The Futuristic District’ is a good example, an electrically charged blend of bedroom pop and indie rock along that fans of Hop Along and Waxahatchee will appreciate, though Winters’ vocal rhythm carves out a space all her own.

You can get Xobeci, What Grows Here? now via the Miranda Winters Bandcamp page, or on cassette via Sooper Records.

Tuvaband – Wolfpack

The Berlin-based project of Norwegian singer/songwriter/producer Tuva Hellum Marschhäuser, Tuvaband create ethereal and emotive songs that sound something like a more radio friendly take on the reverb drenched drone pop of Midwife or Allison’s Gate. The latest Tuvaband single, ‘Wolfpack’, is a wonderful example, a smoky and twilit song that borrows elements of panoramically affecting singer-songwriters like Daughter and buries them in a dreamworld of smoke and twilit. The delicate shimmering beauty is offset with a sharper edge – as the title suggests, the track has teeth.

Be sure to keep an eye on the Tuvaband website for future releases.

Valley Maker – Light On the Ground

We’ve featured Austin Crane’s Valley Maker project numerous times here at VSF, culminating in a review of the excellent record, When I Was a Child released in 2015, which we described as “an album about belief and love in a variety of guises, about the big and unknowable questions, from love and growth and family to God and everlasting life.” Crane is back with a brand new Valley Maker album, Rhododendron, that will be released this autumn, and has released a single to whet our appetites, complete with a video from Joseph Kolean. It sounds like the album will be one to look forward to.

Rhododendron is set for release on the 12nd October via Frenchkiss Records and you can pre-order it now.

new casino – going for a walk

Taking their name from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Brooklyn’s new casino began as a solo project of Morgan Kaplan though has since expanded to incorporate Carlo Pisanu on bass. New single ‘going for a walk’, released in preparation of the band’s first full-length, Oshiki 2, gives a good flavour of the new casino aesthetic, combining a minimal slacker sound with an engaging lyrical flow. Every so often this rhythm gathers itself into something of a crescendo, which appears not in an increase in volume or energy but rather in the sincerity of the vocals, the feeling breaking through the disaffected cool of the genre to offer something a little more heartfelt.

Oshiki 2 is out now and you can listen via Soundcloud or Spotify.

Joe Kaplow – I Said I Was Going And I Went

After traversing the USA for the better part of three months playing all manner of clubs and bars, Joe Kaplow began to feel a profound longing for the tiny details of life at home. The idea of tour might conjure an image of exciting adventures, though Kaplow realised he was missing the decidedly unexciting, the household chores, cooking food from scratch. New single ‘I Said I Was Going And I Went’ channels this into an emotive and homesick sound in which uncertainty reigns, where the halcyon ideal of home is known not to be entirely true, though allowed to persist to drag him through the days away.

‘I Said I Was Going And I Went’ is available now from the Joe Kaplow Bandcamp page, alongside his previous EP release.

Baby Cages – flowers

We featured Baby Cages twice back in 2014, calling single ‘Dark Arts‘ a “shadowy three minutes that slither under your skin” and album Indelicate as akin to “taking a thousands of weird screenshots from Twin Peaks and Blue Velvet and Eraserhead to make one giant mosaic that is super-weird. Hyper-Lynchian.” Well, the Toronto-based music collective are back with a new EP, bitter melon, a release that maintains the off-kilter vibe though this time casting it in a light altogether more bright and peppy. ‘Flowers’ serves as a good introduction, the production relatively crystal clear when compared to that of Indelicate, the instrumentation possessing a manic, restless edge that is at odd with the lyrics.

“teach me to relax
and i am reborn

flowers in the back
of a pair of patterned pants
so I pick up the past
and fall into your lap”

bitter melon is out now and you can grab it from the Baby Cages Bandcamp page.

Lauren O’Connell – Out of Focus

Hailing from Rochester, NY, songwriter Lauren O’Connell has been releasing a steady stream of albums and EPs since 2007, displaying a keen sense of storytelling within her country/folk style. Earlier this year, O’Connell put out a new record, Details, and her writing is as detailed and impressive as ever, managing to craft complex, near literary-level metaphors and imagery while losing none of the immediacy and atmosphere. Single ‘Out of Focus’ is a case in point, a piano-driven track falling somewhere between Leonard Cohen and Julien Baker, though it’s in O’Connell’s words and delivery that the real magic lies. Maintaining a conversational flow capable of accelerating and decelerating at the drop of the hat, the song sounds like thoughts and feelings unfurling straight from the brain, as though bypassing the awkwardness of phrasing and speaking entirely, emerging fully formed and disarmingly beautiful.

Details is out now and you can get it from Bandcamp, along with the rest of Lauren O’Connell’s back catalogue.

Harvey Trisdale – Baby

Based in Los Angeles, Harvey Trisdale make a restrained, languid brand of indie rock that’s perfectly suited to sunny climes. However, rather than being carefree tropicana, their songs possess an emotional depth too, resulting in a struggle between light and dark where neither side wins out. This summer saw the release of their self-titled EP, and such a to-and-fro can be seen across the record, the sunny energy of opener ‘corners’ dampened by the emo-tinged ‘Fit to be Found’. Though these conflicting moods even seem to compete within single songs, as typified in second single, ‘Baby’, with the depressed torpor of the vocal style eventually shaken by the instrumentation as the track rises into a stirring finale.

Harvey Trisdale is out now via Baby Blue Records and you can get in from Bandcamp.

Babehoven – Out Of This Country

Babehoven is the project of Portland resident Maya Bon, rounded out to a trio with the help of Skylar Pia and drummer Elias Williamson. Their latest release, a five-song EP titled SLEEP, is being released by our pals at Good Cheer Records later this summer. In preparation, they have released a single, ‘Out of This Country’, a soft and shambling bedroom pop song that swaddles real feeling in a blanket of restraint. The drums and guitar and Bon’s impressive vocals seem to grow in intensity only to recede and dissipate, a reminder that sometimes less is more, that something intangible can be captured when artists hold a little something back.

SLEEP is out via Good Cheer Records on 17th August, and you can pre-order it now from the Babehoven Bandcamp page.

Adam Arcuragi – Low Rain Parade

For a period from the mid-to-late-00s to 2012, American songwriter Adam Arcuragi was one of the most soulful and stirring songwriters plying his trade, releasing a series of albums and EPs that collected his probing writing within an evocative musical landscape. The good news is that Arcuragi is back, with a brand new full-length due sometime this year, though for now all we get by way of a taster is the single ‘Low Rain Parade’. The track falls on the restrained side of his oeuvre, the slow meandering rhythm dominating what is a contemplative and calm song, though Arcuragi does show flashes of his vocal range as the swells reach their highest points.

The as-of-yet untitled album is reportedly due to appear sometime in 2018, so keep an eye on the Adam Arcuragi website for more information.

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Tracklist

1. Boat – The Tallest Tree
2. Lonely – Rivergazer
3. I Think I’m Old Enough – Adult Mom
4. Thought u were better than that – Cyberbully Mom Club
5. Way Gross – Aunts
6. Fierce Resource Allocation – Emperor X
7. Dark Arts – Baby Cages
8. Stranded (On My Own) – Titus Andronicus
9. Singapore – Reid
10. Attak (ft. Danny Brown) – Rustie
11. Gold (Chet Faker re-work) – Flume
12. Duals – Bonobo
13. Ongoing Thing (ft. Oddisee) – 20syl
14. Animal – The Acid
15. Heirloom Luna – Chemists // 化学者
16. Triumvirate – Lewis & Clarke
17. Holly Would – Benjamin J Woods
18. Terrified – The Rural Alberta Advantage
19. Friday Night – The Parade Schedule
20. Falling Stars – Jacob Furr
21. Red Thread – Spark Alaska
22. Blood – Ahava
23. Stars Pt. 2 – Psalmships
24. Goodbye Letter – Adieu Caribou

You can also listen over at Minilogs.

July Mix from Wake The Deaf on 8tracks Radio.

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

Indelicate takes the unsettling tones of the single and runs with it, putting the ‘dream’ into dream pop. Opener ‘Porcelain’ sets out the stall – a strange, off-kilter song that simmers away without ever boiling over, and is back by what can only be described as understated moans. If a song could ever be described as haunted it would be this one.

The lyrics across the whole album are abstract and unsettling. Their fragmented nature means that you are constantly picking up images and storylines in brief snippets, leaving you to try and piece together something coherent. Kind of like when your brain picks out faces in cloud and wood grain, you unconsciously form a narrative thread or ‘complete picture’, or rather a collection a bizarre Lynchian scenes that slowly merge to form a complete picture. It’s like taking a thousands of weird screenshots from Twin Peaks and Blue Velvet and Eraserhead to make one giant mosaic that is super-weird. Hyper-Lynchian.

You can buy the album over at Bandcamp.

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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.

If the song wasn’t already creepy enough, Heather Rappard teamed up with Justin Lees to make a surreal art inspired video. If you’ve ever wondered what live action painting might look like, look no further.

You can get ‘Dark Arts’ on a pay-what-you-want basis on the Baby Cages Bandcamp, and the video can be seen below. The duo plan to release the LP in the near future so keep an eye out for that too.

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Adult Mom – I Fell In Love By Accident

(RIYL: bedroom pop, lo-fi, kimya dawson)

Alone – S/T

(RIYL: downbeat, morbid beats, Why?)

Andrea – #OneSampleOneDay

(RIYL: electronic, chill, samples, r&b)

Animal Teeth – Me & You

(RIYL: indie rock, lulls and crescendos, reverb)

Astro Children – Proteus

(RIYL: shoegaze, surreal, weird sounds, literary references)

Baby Cages – I’m So Sorry

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

Bashe – Open Up

(RIYL: math rock, pop, electronic)

Bearhead & Tape Sounds – S/T

(RIYL: experimental, electronic, samples)

Beat Easton – S/T

(RIYL: emo, Death Cab, Modest Mouse)

Ben Sollee – The Hollow Sessions

(RIYL: folk, covers, cello)

Birdtapes [Label] – Top 40 Compilation

(RIYL: covers, lo-fi, Top 40, tape hiss)

Boreal The Sky – S/T

(RIYL: indie rock, experimental, Said the Whale)

Cannon Beach – Concrete, People and Things

(RIYL: electronic, folk, Mount Eerie)

Casiotone For The Painfully Alone – In Sydney

(RIYL: CFTPA, Advance Base, indie pop, live recordings)

Chemists // 化学者 – Slow House Virtual

(RIYL: dream pop, ambient, chillwave, Rem’s Floating Chandelier)

Clipping – Midcity

(RIYL: hop hip, rap, harsh noise, Death Grips)

Coma Cinema – Posthumous Release

(RIYL: bedroom pop, downer, Elliott Smith)

Coyotes In The Room – Violence

(RIYL: lo-fi, garage, psych)

Crying – Get Olde

(RIYL: 8-bit, punk, indie pop, Gameboy, Rilo Kiley)

Cullan Bonilla – That’s fricked up fricked me up I’m fricked up now frick

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

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