Out with our friends at Fox Food Records, Fairytale Delirium is Yani Martinelli’s latest solo release. As the title might suggest, the album is an exploration of ethereal sounds, building from a base of bedroom pop into areas of psychedelia, dream pop and experimental folk, though it’s the authentic DIY attitude that really shines through. This is apparent from the opening title track, sparkling to life with dappled synths before the psych refrain adds a dash of New Age colour. The track swells from here, the backing instrumentation adding a depth beyond the charming simplicity of the vocals, and drawing the track away from accusations of being twee.

There’s a playful yet wistful air to ‘Spirits from Saturn’, a track that maintains a restrained bedroom pop style, while the haunting ‘Solarium’ shimmers beneath skating synths before eventually kicking into a near post-punk rhythm, though the vocals remain detached and floating, a satellite to the main body of the track.

‘Maps to the Deep Deep Ocean’ lives up to its name, blending a tropical lilt with something stranger, almost primordial, a song of teeming life and unknown expanses, though ‘Letter to the Moon’ immediately switches things from earthly depths to outer space. The here the languid style and electronic sparks pitch the listener as the person receiving the titular letters, encased within a low gravity, technological bubble, a thin layer between us and the wide arc of space.

The record closes with ‘Goin To Be’, a return to the bright and grounded pop of the opening. After the transportive styles of the previous tracks, the closer feels like snapping out of a daydream, back to quotidian life. However, in true Yani Martinelli fashion, what you find around you is not rendered dull by the experience but rather heightened, everyday life made wonderful by earnest engagement, magic lurking within the simplest of things.

Fairytale Delirium is out now via Fox Food Records and you can get it from Bandcamp.

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We have followed Max Holmquist’s career with some admiration, first as South of Lincoln and then Great American Desert (which we wrote about here). Holmquist is now in a band called Oquoa and they have made their album available for free. Their sound is somewhere between Water Liars and Hip Hatchet, a restrained folky rock which has darkness and grief lurking just beneath the surface. Check out ‘Cigarettes’ below.

You can download the album for free here.

A Singer of Songs – From Hello to Goodbye

Barcelona-based folkster A Singer of Songs is back with From Hello to Goodbye, another album chock full of lovely lo-fi tunes recorded in his home studio. Some tracks are delicate (‘Sand in my Shoes’), some are a little more rambunctious (such as opener ‘Another Way of Saying Hello’), and all seem to have the curious sensation of being between times, as small moments of the past are opening up in the present. Maybe it’s the use of violins, trumpets and pianos or the slightly European street music vibe on tracks like ‘I’ll Follow You’. Maybe it’s just the cartographic artwork.

A Singer of Songs is attached to the Son Canciones label, and you can buy the album now from the A Singer of Songs’ Bandcamp page.

Steve Palmer – Unblinking Sun

Steve Palmer is a “Fahey nut and guitar obsessive” who has taken lessons from American Primitivism legend Peter Lang. It is perhaps unsurprising then that Palmer makes guitar driven instrumental music that combines the finger-picking of traditional US folk with more modern sounds of drone and krautrock. The result is a collection of long, complex acoustic songs peppered with ambient and psychedelic flourishes that lend a whole jazzy improvisation feel to things.

Unblinking Sun is being released by Dying for Bad Music.

Ezkiel – A New Mask

Ezkiel is Louis Monroe from New Orleans. A New Mask is his debut release and presents four dark and cinematic folk songs which explore the themes of change and rebirth. The EP was developed almost by accident, as part of a music production class that Monroe was taking at university. Monroe himself was required to production on a singer-songwriter record, but the recording artist pulled out last minute. This forced Monroe himself to record something and A New Mask was the end result. The tracks were recorded at home and have that intimate bedroom pop vibe which I really like. Grab it now via the Ezkiel Bandcamp page.

Charlie Rayne – Wider Waters

Last but not least is Wider Waters, a brilliant album by Beirut-based Charlie Rayne. Rayne makes glorious Dylan-style folk songs which twist and turn with a remarkable lyrical flow. The focus is very much on Rayne’s passionate deliver and the stories held within, the bare bones guitars providing the perfect counterbalance. If Sweden were to stake a claim on Bob Dylan reincarnate with Kristian Mattson, then I think we have to say that Beirut now have themselves a real rival. Get it via Bandcamp.

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As the band name and verbose song titles suggest, Hope Only Brings Pain is an instrumental album that aims somewhere between post-rock stalwarts Mogwai and GSY!BE and chirpier electronic acts such as Animal Collective and Cut Copy. It’s either dancable post-rock or exceptionally dark and brooding dance music. The album refuses to settle into an identifiable rhythm, changing styles from track to track.  One moment it could be a popular festival hit and the next it could soundtrack some neon-drenched sci-fi dystopia, Hope Only Brings Pain is constantly morphing just when you think you have it pinned down and comparable to something else.

The album is scheduled to be released on 14th March, 2013 so keep an eye out for it.

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