Last year saw the release of a self-titled EP which heralded something of a comeback, a patchwork of influences and inspirations that served as a reintroduction for existing fans and a Battle Ave primer for new listeners. Writing of the EP’s closing track, ‘There Can’t Be Love’, we described how Battle Ave build songs with patience and care, the song “giv[ing] itself time and space to follow its convictions, ebbing and flowing with intuitive rhythm.” A sound which swaps constraints for uncertainty in order to achieve a certain organicity. The sense it is always shifting, always willing to cede its current form in the face of progression or change. As we continued:

The effect is both reflective and very much within the present moment. An opportunity perhaps to recognise the passing periods of life. The years with devils and wizards and lovers. The fact that nothing ends within any one moment, and there will always be another.

This spring sees Battle Ave return with a brand new full-length record, I Saw the Egg. A joint release between Friend Club Records and Totally Real Records, the album not only continues the band’s embrace of uncertainty within songs, but positions the band’s career as a larger scale model of the same concept. Tracks which took sixteen years to complete sit next to those hammered out in half an hour. Some run barely two minutes and others closer to six. What emerges is a constant interplay between contemplation and forward motion. An openness to contradiction that allows vastness to sit alongside intimacy, ominousness next to sincerity, and ultimately embraces the beauty and truth of ambiguity. I Saw the Egg is the work of a band who have come to understand the value in dropping any preconceptions or images of their own future, allowing themselves to be shaped by the uncertain present instead.

Today, we’re delighted to share the first two singles in anticipation of the release.  ‘Maya’ draws on lo-fi indie folk, a warm and emotive song built on a surprisingly simple guitar loop. MIDI strings swell as if from a break in the clouds and soon the whole thing sounds big and unabashedly heartfelt, the closest thing to a ballad Battle Ave have ever written. But there’s still a weirdness too, a shimmering mirage-like quality exacerbated by the opaquely romantic lyrics. The sense that the track, despite the purity of its intentions, is not quite built on solid ground.

The second single, ‘Leo,’ is a song about everyday toil and strange, strained friendships. About hiding hurt and losing connection, and how we’re all just doing what we can to get by. Sometimes at the detriment of things we care about. “Michael is a friend of mine,” Doherty sings in a line that illuminates the underlying sentiment, “we never talk, who has the time?” The song emerges in a kind of stupefied swirl, capturing the sensation of being locked on the slo-mo conveyor of day-to-day life and sometimes losing sight of loved ones locked onto tracks of their own.

A collaboration with Laura Stevenson, ‘Leo’ arrived with unusual haste. Indeed, Doherty describes it as one of the quickest Battle Ave songs ever written. “If I remember it correctly, I got high and started playing my roommate’s piano (I don’t really play piano) and came up with the chords and melody that became the center of the track,” he explains. “The entire song came together in about 30 minutes, which runs counter to my usual writing process, since I normally take years per song.” The immediacy of the process is coded within the track itself. It feels like a swift and necessary release of feelings accumulated across many months (a period which saw Doherty face both the isolation of the pandemic and the joys and challenges of a new baby).

Stevenson proves the perfect foil, her vocals adding not just supporting melody but clarity too, guiding Doherty’s wavering voice with quiet confidence. Though very different in style, her latest record occupied a similar headspace. As we wrote back in August, the album “evok[ed] the turbulent milieu in which it was created.” Its moment of crisis not “some snap moment of terrible energy but a lingering process, a phenomenon to be endured, rooted as it is in both the past and what is still to come.” The sedated swirl of ‘Leo’ (created in part by slowing the original recording by 15bpm) is in many ways the polar opposite of the fiery catharsis of tracks like ‘State‘, but beneath the surface lies a shared spirit. The fact that its very much a product of these strange times, the sense of being within something and accepting the fact without looking for beginning or ends.

And this is what proves to be the lasting message of I Saw the Egg. It finds a band returning to what they do best after seven years, but returning somehow changed. Returning in a different place both personally and creatively, with dreams discarded and other dreams realised, and a newfound sense of patience and acceptance for what the future holds. As Sammy Maine’s bio puts it: “This is the sound of Doherty loosening the constraints of a preconceived future, instead embracing the uncertainty of whatever comes next.”

I Saw the Egg is out on the 1st April via Friends Club Records and Totally Real Records and you can pre-order it now from the Battle Ave Bandcamp page.

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Battle Ave feels true to this experience. Though serving as something of a reintroduction for those listeners who fell for 2015’s Year of Nod, the release is not a considered engagement with the hiatus. Rather, Jesse Doherty and co. give us five varied tracks that highlight the range of their style. Each is its own snapshot of a distinct period, focused on nothing but the work at hand. Just how Battle Ave sounded at this time or that, what they could sound like moving forward.

After the taut rhythm of ‘My Year with the Wizard’, which as we described in a preview lands “somewhere between playful and menacing [with] an oddly hypnotic air,” second single ‘Fear Of’ offers a richer, country-inflected style. A wistful flow through which Doherty’s vocals emerge hushed and cautious. The spacious instrumental ‘Kingston South Cuties’ takes this mood further, pushing towards an almost Yo La Tengo-esque nostalgia, while ‘Cell’ pivots into dense intensity. With a skittering, pattered rhythm driven by a deep momentum, the drums whip themselves up into a concentrated mass, Doherty’s vocals surfacing through the thicket as though from a tired, overwhelmed mind.

Closer ‘There Can’t Be Love’ switches things up once again, and marks the return of a Battle Ave speciality. Year of Nod displayed a talent for building long and winding tracks, with songs like ‘Lalande’ and ‘Zoa’ breaking traditional structures with both invention and patience, and the new example is a lesson in the form. Built upon ethereal ambient foundations, the song gives itself time and space to follow its convictions, ebbing and flowing with intuitive rhythm. Importantly, as with all of Battle Ave’s longer works, the length feels inherent to the sound. This is not a traditional song couched by an extended intro or self-indulgent close, but its own animal that grows and dips and drops out altogether.

The latter is the centrepiece of the track, a moment of silence that feels like an end, but just before it settles a scratched guitar draws Doherty back in. He sings tentatively, placing a word at a time and following the spirit that emerges. The effect is both reflective and very much within the present moment. An opportunity perhaps to recognise the passing periods of life. The years with devils and wizards and lovers. The fact that nothing ends within any one moment, and there will always be another.

We were lucky enough to ask Jesse a few questions, so read on below to dig a little deeper into the release.

Thanks so much for speaking with us. How does it feel to be back and releasing new music into the world?

Thanks for the interest <3 Finally releasing music again feels very weird! I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with my own music. Sometimes I just want to mix these songs eternally, tinkering and never actually showing anyone, so releasing is always a bit stressful. That being said, I was the class clown in school… the spotlight always feels nice.

It feels important the EP is self-titled, especially in light of the relatively long gap between this and Year of Nod. Do you see the EP as a reintroduction? A fresh start? A statement that you are very much still alive?

Yeah, it’s been seven years, give or take, since we released anything substantial. I think part of the eponymous title is exactly that—a new beginning, or a dusting off. But I also think of this EP as being closer to a mixtape or a compilation. These songs were not written or recorded with this release in mind, and the approaches we took for each of these songs really fall all over the spectrum of our shared influences. I guess it’s self-titled because it’s meant to be akin to a primer or a “get-to-know-us” release.

You’ve described the recording process as “like a game of Exquisite Corpse,” with an element of surprise as the various elements are passed between the members of the band. Was this a life/pandemic-induced change from your usual method, or has it always been baked into the Battle Ave style?

This was definitely a new process, one that was both situational and experimental. During the early part of the lockdown, our drummer Samantha set up a remote songwriting group; her idea was that one person would contribute a musical idea and then it would go down the line, with every subsequent person adding something new to it. I definitely followed her lead and used this songwriting approach for a few of the tracks on the EP (I think the lopsided, left-field quality of this process is best heard on “Fear Of”) but this is the total opposite of how I normally write. Usually, I will have just about every part written out in my head before I ever bring a song to the band.

One thing that’s always struck me about the Battle Ave sound is its willingness to play with structure and length. You might put a two-minute track between a pair exceeding seven minutes, with neither feeling undercooked or overdone. How do you know when a song is ready, so to speak? What decides if the original idea becomes a succinct little spark or some winding behemoth?

It’s always a gut reaction for me. The song either feels incomplete and lacking or it feels like I’ve found an organic ending point. I’m a high school English teacher, and a lot of my time out of class is spent reading student essays. I feel like evaluating my own songs feels similar to evaluating someone’s writing; it’s the same feeling you get when you read a sentence that is grammatical, but still feels off. I make myself rework my songs much in the same way I ask them to clarify, rephrase, expand upon, refocus their writing when it doesn’t sit right.

Most songs usually take a few years for me to complete, often because I’ll lose steam trying to figure out what needs to happen next and won’t come back to it for a while. I’ve always gravitated towards longer forms, and it’s only recently that I’ve been really happy writing shorter songs with more traditional organization.

I was struck by a line in your bio, written by the wonderful Sammy Maine, which describes your sound as a “wizened throwback to various beloved cult catalogues,” but one which “manages to shake off any nostalgic fog and avoid anachronism by employing a detailed focus on the here and now.” Could you speak a little on your influences, and any attempts to follow and/or subvert their work?

I love that line, because wizened means ‘shrivelled and wrinkled with age’—not sure if that’s what Sammy meant to say, but I think it feels appropriate, since most of us in the band are curmudgeons who are preoccupied with getting older.

I’m pretty unabashed about how much influence I get from other musicians. Before the songs have names, I’ll sometimes label them based on who I was listening to when I started writing them—”the Alex G song,” “the Talk Talk song,” “the Judee Sill song.” When I formed the band with Samantha it was with the definitive goal of “making something that sounds like Pavement.” I never really try to subvert the artists I’m inspired by, but my musical instincts are my own, my voice is my own, the instincts of the band members are really distinctive, and so just by dint of these factors our songs never end up really sounding like the songs or artists that helped spawn them.

I wondered if we could dig a little deeper into the final words of the release. “There can’t be love in everything.” It captures something of the EP as a whole. The sense of making peace with never making peace?

I remember coming up with that line while sitting in traffic in NYC. I really love the move Bill Callahan makes in “Too Many Birds,” where he uncovers this beautiful line one word at a time (“If you could only stop your heart beat for one heart beat”). I wanted to do something similar, and I’d had this snippet of a melody sitting in my head for years, and it just fit perfectly. I ended up building the whole song around it.

When I was compiling songs for the release, I wasn’t really trying to create anything with a coherent emotional through-line; I was just using songs that didn’t really fit anywhere else. Interestingly, I do think that there are some shared themes that come out when you take the piece as a whole; there’s a focus on tenderness and being kind to yourself, and on letting things go. When I wrote that lyric, I wasn’t sure exactly what it meant, but after sitting with the song for a while, it really does feel like I’m telling myself that it’s okay to fail. Nobody’s meant to succeed at everything, and that’s fine.

Battle Ave is out now and you can get it from Bandcamp, where you can pick up the previous releases too, as well as all the usual places.

Photos by Molly Doherty, album art by Gabriel Chalfin-Piney with lettering by Mike Brown

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Battle Ave. is aptly named, as the release serves as a kind of post-hiatus reintroduction. Founding members Samantha Niss and Jesse Doherty are joined by Adam Stoutenburgh, John Burdick and Peter Naddeo. The project was built on the shared interests of Niss and Doherty, and it is a testament to their collaboration and vision that it has emerged from the period of absence sounding so familiar.

Doherty has described the recording process as a game of Exquisite Corpse, each member crafting various elements more or less in isolation. The style leads to richly imaginative sounds unafraid of the left-field, though what is perhaps more striking is how intuitive and fluid the final result manages to be. As though for all the distance between its members, the Battle Ave. spirit emerges intact—a product not just of shared artistic sensibility but something deeper. A persistent friendship and trust.

Lead single ‘My Year With the Wizard’ introduces just what this sounds like. A brooding approach through a cloudy atmosphere, guitars spiralling away from the drums with a style somewhere between playful and menacing. Doherty’s distinctive vocals float above all of this, soon buoyed further by an unexpected brightness, lending the track an oddly hypnotic air. A sense that extends right down to the cryptic lyrics:

My year with the wizard was a long one / you act like a friend, but you’re the wrong one I call on the phone, I need an answer / why don’t you want the truth?

Check out the video by Doherty himself below:

Battle Ave. is out on the 8th October and you can pre-order it now from Bandcamp.

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A book within a book, Hystopia is actually the novel left behind by Eugene Allen, a Vietnam vet from a slightly-alternate version of the 60s where John F. Kennedy survived Oswald’s assassination attempt and is serving his third term in office. Opened and closed by various notes and testimonies from friends and family members, Allen’s work makes up the majority of the novel, a narrative imagining characters from his time in Vietnam once they return home. The kicker, though, is that while they are back in the States, they never really ‘get home’, with the war following them back to a dystopian (but far from unrecognisable) America ravaged by biker gangs and forest fires.

In an attempt to solve the crisis of PTSD and violence, the government turn to an experimental psychiatric method called ‘enfolding’, where veterans reenact traumatic scenes while dosed up on a tranquilliser, Tripizoid. While even the doctors working on the project believe the technique to be without substance, it proves paradoxically effective for many subjects and blanks memories of combat. “Confusion is undoubtedly an element of the curative process,” writes Means. “In most cases the patient does forget about it, becoming fully immersed in the reenacted trauma’s nullification of the real trauma”.

Which isn’t to say it’s a silver bullet. Indeed the novel opens with a “failed enfold,” Rake, a man filled with the sort of all-consuming rage and propensity for violence unique to men forced into the sacrifices of war only to end up on the losing side. We find him with Allen’s sister, Meg (whom he has almost certainly kidnapped, and has undergone some degree of enfolding too), as they drive across Michigan on an anarchistic rampage of murder, drugs and destruction. Eventually, they reach the home of Hank, Rake’s former sidekick who has developed a love of trees since enfolding, a man who tries to protect Meg and figure out a way in which they can save themselves from Rake.

The second strand of the story deals with another enfold Singleton and his colleague Wendy, government officials breaking protocol to meet up and fall in love, who somehow end up on the trail of Rake, as though their rule bending was in fact a conspiracy on the part of their superiors to engineer the operation. Again though, confusion reigns, with Singleton’s boss admitting that a key part of being a commander is having the “gumption to go back and revise history”, talking of writing operation plans after the operation in order to ensure they are correct.

This sense of counter-history runs throughout the novel, from Singleton and Wendy’s quest and Hank’s transformation into peaceful nature-lover, right down to Eugene Allen’s re-telling (re-imagining?) of his sister’s story. What becomes important for these troubled people is not discerning the capital-T Truth but rather finding a variation they can believe in. More often than not, this involves a sense of mission, the victim’s need for order in the face of chaos, the desire for purpose or meaning in “an age when everything else seemed to be spinning deeper and deeper into despair,” anything which enables them to form a narrative of the world in a way they would like it to exist.

“It was crazy, he admitted, but it kept him going and like all good delusions it was fuelled by genuine hope and dedication to the truth”

And that’s what sets apart David Means’ Vietnam from that of the postmodern cannon. Yes, it is full of claims and counter-claims and impenetrable paranoia, but rather than using these to trace a descent into bewilderment, Hystopia utilises them to chart a way out. In a world where confusion and conflict constitute the resting face of the planet, maybe disinformation is needed not to obscure the truth but rather create it?

Here’s a playlist of songs that are suitable or relevant in one way or another, or maybe just capture the mood of certain characters and scenes.

Tracklisting:

1) Search and Destroy – The Stooges
2) IN EVIL HOUR – Battle Ave.
3) High & Wild – Angel Olsen
4) My War – Black Flag
5) Everything Falls Apart – Hüsker Dü
6) Saigon Shrunken Panorama – The Mountain Goats
7) Rugged Country – Japanese Breakfast
8) Meg – Hovvdy
9) Love, Come Save Me – Right Away, Great Captain!
10) I Need You To Tell Me Who I Am – John Moreland
11) Drugs To Make You Sober – Jeremiah Nelson
12) Are We Failing? – Hallelujah The Hills
13) Flaming Home – Mount Eerie with Julie Doiron and Frederick Squire
14) Lovers as Mirrors – Paper Bee
15) Forgetting is Believing – Nathaniel Rateliff
16) Redemption:1 (An Army Man And His Self-Discovery) – Justin Vernon

Hystopia is out now via Faber & Faber (UK) and Farrar, Straus and Giroux (US) and you can get it from most good bookshops. Check out the other works by David Means on his Goodreads page.

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Today we are delighted to share a piece by Shana Hartzel, one half of the excellent, Philly-based music blog Swell Tone. If you are unfamiliar with the site, Hartzel and her partner in crime Victoria surf the high seas of new music and write about the best of it, with well-written reviews, cool sessions, innovative (and often pizza-based) guest appearances and regular mixtapes full of unearthed gems. Basically, it offers everything a music blog should.

As if that wasn’t enough, Shana also writes for The Wild Honey Pie, and is the assistant director of Philadelphia’s Y-Not Radio, and hosts the show ‘Aussie Unlocked’ on 2nd Fridays, 9-10pm (or you can find them on-demand via Mixcloud).

Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park
by Shana Hartzel

Though I’ve never been the most dedicated reader, my adoration for Jane Austen hasn’t waned since my first required reading of Pride and Prejudice. The English novelist’s romantic yet satirical fiction is an ideal match for my constantly shifting mental stream of humor and enchantment. It is a rare literary love that, at its peak, led to a full day of my life being dedicated to baking scones and lemon tarts, wearing frilly dresses, and plowing through the film adaptations of her three biggest novels in the company of a large pot of tea and my equally nerdy best friend.

There is something especially intriguing about Mansfield Park. Austen’s third novel is arguably her strongest exploration into the cloudy dichotomies of the British middle class and her most controversial work. Amongst an examination of the period’s morals and privileges and a slew of amorous entanglements, the story centers around the life of Fanny Price. Fanny is relocated at age ten from her markedly poor family to live with her wealthy relatives at Mansfield Park where she becomes a tiresome burden to everyone but her cousin Edmund.

Thanks to Edmund’s kindness, Fanny survives through an upbringing of monetary privilege and emotional abuse to become the most morally centered resident of the estate. As a character, Fanny isn’t nearly as agreeable or as openly charming as Austen’s other protagonists. Her emotional fragility appropriately reflects her constant treatment as an inferior. Yet, she always manages to imperfectly persevere through matters of affairs, slavery, debauchery, and consanguineous relationships. Seemingly unaffected by normal rules of decorum, her free will and clarity of thinking are always her best defense against the surrounding negativity. In the many ways it both defines and guides her, Fanny’s sincere approach to life is what has always drawn me back to this story in particular.

While the book itself portrays music as a skill that elevates character or a means by which affections are exchanged through dance, I have aimed to take a more modern musical approach to the grandeur and societal confines of Mansfield Park. Below, you’ll find an assortment of songs that challenge structural and melodic conventions in the way that Austen’s characters grapple with the expectations of their environment and upbringing. The sonic mix paints the spirit of the novel’s colorfully quaint world in stokes of humble grace, fearsome defiance, and (of course) irrevocable declarations of love.

Tracklisting

1. 1914 – Florist
2. Looking Out for You – Joy Again
3. For You – Free Cake For Every Creature
4. Super Rat – Honeyblood
5. The Garden – Flinter
6. Don’t Feel So Alive – Gabriella Cohen
7. p r e s c r i p t i o n – Good Try
8. Hey – The Twoks
9. Your Best American Girl – Mitski
10. Don’t Go – CBMC
11. Jogalong – Rozi Plain
12. Girl! – Terror Pigeon
13. Right Now – Amber Arcades
14. Tame One – Your Friend
15. All Day and All Night – And The Kids
16. No Room For Doubt – Lianne La Havas Ft. Willy Mason
17. Running with the Wolves – Aurora
18. You and I – Margaret Glaspy
19. Geranimo – Aphra
20. The Sun – BATTLE AVE.

You should most definitely add Swell Tone to your ‘blogs to check regularly’ list, and you can also find them on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Soundcloud and Playmoss. The Quiet, Constant Friends compilation is still available on our Bandcamp page, including a rather nice limited edition tape and art print bundle. All profits go to Worldreader so why not treat yourself?

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The post Wake The Deaf’s Favourite Songs of 2015 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

As I said last time, the band, led by Jesse Alexander and Samantha Niss, describe what they make as “dark pop”, which sounds about right to me. In fact, they have a sound which defies simple description, a great twisting amalgamation of influences and approaches creating something at once grand and strange and beautiful. The band enlisted the help of some really talented and knowledgeable people too, including producers who’ve worked with Titus Andronicus, Porches and Rivergazer, and members of LVL UP, Crying and Frankie Cosmos.

The album begins with ‘Aleph’, in which swirling atmospherics give way to drums and a repeated dream pop guitar line and the cool, almost mumbled vocals. We also get our first taste of Battle Ave.’s singular lyrics, which alternate between opaque poetry and something altogether more mystical, “see my arrows on the floor/ see my sweaters keeping me warm / I’m major arcana / I wanna kiss you on the lips and that’s the whole of it”.

Next up is ‘Summer Spear’ with its early squeezebox synths and eventual blooming cacophony, a multitude of percussion and cooing vocal harmonies giving things a bright, sunny feel. ‘Lalande’ is a completely different animal – a nine minute slow-build which starts with delicate, icicle-like xylophone, before adding minimal guitar and vocals, which are joined with a female voice later on. The track eventually peaks with strings and the thumping march of a drumbeat and dual proclamations of the line “I am the empty house”. It’s almost impossible to describe, but sounds something like if Spencer Krug fronted Stars and made them raw and weird and cool. ‘In Evil Hour’ sounds quietly sad, it’s lyrics like the mythology of dreams:

“I broke my sword in two
It was always a waste of time
You are mine and the world is mine

Pitchers of fire have me dusting off my wings
I give up on the shape of things

I never loosed an arrow
Even towards the sky
They were always good friends of mine”

‘ZOA’ bursts onto the scene with it’s own tailing breeze, a seven minute slice of toe-tapping indie rock, with lyrics like inscriptions on an ancient scroll, or the messages left by some messiah in the static between the radio stations. “I am the thorn, I am orion with blue eyes forever torn, I am reason in everything.” It should also be noted that Battle Ave. are a band not afraid to bring things shuddering to a halt mid-song. Like several other tracks, ‘Zoa’ has lulls of almost silence, creating a spacious, panoramic feel. On ‘Solar Queen’ slow mumbling vocals contrast against tense and jittery instrumentation. The lyrics are wonderfully odd once more. And there’s something hopeful in the way Alexander sings “I see a light, a light, a light…” in what stands in that gap where most bands would place a chorus. Additional instruments and volume punch in around the 1:30 mark, sounding like the shifting, idiosyncratic pop of Siskiyou meets buoyant indie rock.

‘Helen (This Isn’t Meant to Offend)’ holds an aura of plain melancholy, with its sparse acoustic guitar and male/female vocals and periods of pure silence. The lyrics sound sorrowful but are also reassuring, a combination I like a lot, “Remember that you aren’t the only one / who is thought of as a train wreck / who is thought of as a hopeless cause”. ‘Seaside Girls’ has a dreamy sway and rough and tumble drums and fidgety delivery and later a blaring horn section and a martial ratatat, before it glides seamlessly into the final track, ‘Say Say Oh Enemy’ which sounds like paranoid mutterings in a silent room, desperate and feverish and slickly sweaty, the far-off instrumentation like traffic passing on the street outside the window, on another world entirely.

“Something wicked this way comes
My head is a stone
Got rid of my phone
Just leave me alone
(My heart is darkness)
I haven’t seen you in days
Who knows what moves me anyways?”

This claustrophobic atmosphere is occasionally punctuated with bursts of energy, making the track an example of the album as a whole, unpredictable and wavering, but with a continuous thread of something peculiarly beautiful and strangely affecting. I have a nagging sense that none of these words do the album justice, so do yourself a favour and get a copy and experience it yourself.

Year of Nod is out now on cassette via Seagreen Records or Little L Records, and digitally via the Battle Ave. Bandcamp page.

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The May Roundup mix below contains a track from every artist we featured during the month (apart from Sharon van Etten and Noah Gundersen, sorry!), so plug your headphones in and enjoy some new music. Click the artists’ names in the tracklisting below to be taken to the post in question.

Tracklisting:

1. No More Sad Songs – Elvis Depressedly
2. Catchyalater – Frog
3. The Day Draws Near – The Washboard Abs
4. Every House is On Fire – Island Eyes
5. Forever – Boosegumps
6. Open Casket Hidden Meaning – Molly Drag
7. The Arp – Aidan Knight
8. Atheist Money – Adam Stafford
9. Lynx – The Tarantula Waltz
10. Milo – Young Jesus
11. Slow Dark Water – Furnsss
12. Aubrey – Debris Slide
13. Foreign Hands – Aisha Badru
14. I Need Never Get Old – Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats
15. Outside the Pale – Samantha Crain
16. Home – The Modern Folk
17. Staggers and Rise – Small Houses
18. Yannina – Jake Houlsby
19. To the Black Horizon – Mark Timmins
20. Heart – Bobby’s Oar
21. Bling – Bells Atlas
22. And You Meant the Sea – Ruth & Trudy
23. Party – Lake Michigan
24. Growing Leaves – Gay Angel
25. On and On – Zee Town and the Dog Boys
26. Travel Map – Hip Hatchet
27. Zoa – Batte Ave.
28. The Bird – Kathryn Joseph
29. …Until They’re Called – Old Earth

May 2015 Roundup from Wake The Deaf on 8tracks Radio.

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

Looking at the list of contributors the band got to help out with the album, it’s little wonder it’s shaping up so good. It was produced by Kevin McMahon (who has previously worked with indie rock heroes Titus Andronicus) and Hunter Davidsohn (who has worked with a variety of great bands such as Porches. and Rivergazer) and also features contributions from Greta Kline (ie. Frankie Cosmos), Nick Corbo (of LVL UP and Crying).

Year of Nod is due for release tomorrow (the 5th of May). You can pre-order the album on cassette via Seagreen Records or as a download via the Battle Ave. Bandcamp page.

P.S. You can stream the entire album over at Stereogum.

P.P.S The band have pledged to donate all digital pre-order sales to Baltimore to cover rebuilding and legal fees after recent events. All the more reason to grab a copy!

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