The Estok’Gna have survived hundreds of years of genocide and oppression since the arrival of Europeans, and continue to face severe threats to their culture, history and way of life. Now, three natural gas pipelines are planned on traditional Carrizo/Comecrudo Tribe territory, which would destroy scared sites and make it a felony for the Estok’Gna to occupy them. Not to mention the project’s lack of consideration to it’s non-human impacts—current plans will see it destroy over 300 acres of important habitat that is home to 21 endangered species.

As you would expect from Keeled Scales, the album contains recordings from a whole host of great artists. From indie rock heavyweights like Big Thief and Sharon Van Etten, to the countless whose releases we have written about and loved over the last few years, including (takes breath) Black Belt Eagle Scout, Erin Durant, Jess Williamson, Jo Schornikow, Karima Walker, Sun June, Will Johnson, and Tenci.

There is considerable diversity across the 31 tracks, but all are united by a common spirit. Renée Reed brings her distinctive and dreamlike Cajun folk with ‘J’ai Trouve’, while Christelle Bofale shows off her wonderful soulful vocals with a stripped-back demo titled ‘And I’ll Go’ and Aisha Burns sets the tone with the collection’s first track, the beautiful and immersive ‘Chinati’. A personal favourite is Little Mazarn’s take on the classic cowboy folk song ‘Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie,’ which sounds at once bright and mournful.

100% of donations from the album will go directly to the Estok’Gna to support their fight for their land, culture and very existence. As Keeled Scales put it: “As indigenous people continue to lead the fight against the reckless fossil fuel industry, we are honored to offer this compilation and its earnings in solidarity with everyone in the fight for racial justice and a livable future for all beings on planet earth.”

To the People of the Land is out now and available via the Keeled Scales Bandcamp page.

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Not content with her work with Big Thief (who, by the way, have a new record in the works on 4AD), Adrianne Lenker also records solo songs under her own name, a chance for her intimate lyrics to sit at the heart of quieter, more opaque ruminations. Released back in October, latest album abysskiss is further proof that Lenker is right at the forefront of the not insignificant roster of contemporary songwriters.

abysskiss was recorded quickly, intended as a diary-like snapshot of a certain period of Lenker’s life in much the same way that an Impressionist painter fills their canvas before a fleeting feeling is lost. The result is a collection of poetic shards, bruised and tender and fierce despite their hushed nature, steeped in mystery and loss and a sense of esoteric humanity.

It is in the oblique nature of the record that its true majesty lies, the uncertainty fostering a curious sense of mystery and meaning. “See my death become a trail,” Lenker sings on opener ‘terminal paradise’. “And the trail leads to a flower / I will blossom in your sail / Every dreamed and waking hour.” The song is typical of Lenker’s work on abysskiss, not confronting ideas or themes but skirting around their invisible edges, sketching an outline of something too large or important to be grasped directly.

Which sounds far more complicated that it is in practice. Take the beguiling melody in the chorus of ‘cradle’, a song that’s almost ballad-like in its unhurried romance, rising from gently intertwined guitars. The track is a great example of how Lenker uses a basic, traditional set up (i.e. her guitar and her voice) but is able to hit little pockets of rhythm, small explored places that feel fresh and new but never over-complicated or jarring.

baby you’re still too proud to come down
maybe i’m still too loud to hear

Such an effect lies behind the intentions of the album. abysskiss is about “this whole conversation we’re having right now, about death and loss, and the deaths within life that happen,” Lenker describes in a great in-depth Q&A with Gabriela Tully Claymore for Stereogum. “It’s something like this bridge between the infinite and the finite and the mystery and the abyss of complete wonder, and maybe even that spirit of witnessing something, something really powerful and not knowing what it is, and feeling small.”

The idea is perhaps most conspicuous on the title track (“Wilderness / Vast abyss / Will we ever kiss?) but is present in every song, from the rhythmic lullaby ‘​blue and red horses’ to tender closer ’10 miles’—a song which closes the life/death cycle that began in the album’s opening. Even the most cryptic songs are imbued with such concepts. The lyrics on ‘symbol’ tumble together in a breathless poetic rush, a tangle of symbolism knit into a nest of finger-picked guitar that somehow straightens itself out into a clear conclusion.

The symbol of your love is time

For all of its abstraction and arcane symbols, abysskiss is an intuitive, organic record, and it is this which provides the common thread through Lenker’s oeuvre. It is “as though the meaning is summoned from the words themselves, something in the syllabic arrangement dragging stories and emotions into our world from somewhere else entirely,” we wrote of Big Thief’s Capacity, words that could just as easily be describing abysskiss. “Lenker’s gift is her ability to recognise the strange, innate forces within language, surrender to them, and present them back to us with a crystal-clear clarity.”

abysskiss is out now on Saddle Creek Records and you can get it from their website or the Adrianne Lenker Bandcamp page.

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Various Small Flames’

Songs of 2017

Anamon – Kneel Old
Android Automatic – Dark Roads*
Angie McMahon – Slow Mover
Basement Revolver – Johnny Pt. 2
Baxter Roy Long – Paribanou
Bea Troxel – Let Them Know
Big Thief – Mary
Black Belt Eagle Scout – Soft Stud
Bully – Running
Cayetana – Mesa
Charly Bliss – Percolator
Chastity Belt – Different Now
CHUCK – Happy Birthday
The County Liners – Maria
The Courtneys – Tour
Craig Finn – God in Chicago
Crumb – Locket
Crushing – Emery Board
Cut Worms – Like Going Down Sideways
David Bazan – Care
Distant Reader – First Try
Emperor X – God Save Coastal Dorset
Fits – Ice Cream on a Nice Day
German Error Message – 2017*
Gleemer – Soothe Me
Great Grandpa – Favorite Show
Haley Heynderickx – Oom Sha Lala
Hiccup – Teasin’
Horse Culture – Texaco
Illuminati Hotties – ‘(You’re Better) Than Ever’
Japandroids – No Known Drink or Drug
Jason Isbell & the 400 Unit – If We Were Vampires
Jay Som – The Bus Song
Jeremy Squires – Night Cars
Katie Ellen – Drawing Room
Lizzie No – Monuments
Lomelda – Bam Sha Klam
Mike Pace and the Child Actors – Audits & Surveys
Meursault – The Mill
Mount Eerie – Crow
Nice Legs – Mighty Three
Oceanator – Nowhere Nothing
Ohyeahsumi – Daisy
Old Earth – Pit Dynamics
PASTEL – Stammer
Peter Silberman – New York
Phoebe Bridgers – Motion Sickness
Pope – Talk Me Out of It
Protomartyr – Windsor Hum
Rainwater – Place
Ratboys – Elvis is in the Freezer
Rick Rude – Bald & Fat in Houston, TX
Roadkill Ghost Choir – Classics (Die Young)
Rose Dorn – Dirt
See Through Dresses – Lucy’s Arm
Shannen Moser – A Funeral, A Friend, My Sanity
Sinai Vessel – Died On My Birthday
Slaughter Beach, Dog – Phoenix
SOAR – Fort Funston
Soft Fangs – Jordan // Jackson Elementary
Spartan Jet-Plex – We Believe
Strange Ranger – House Show
Strawberry Runners – Garden Hose
Timid, The Brave – Alice
Us and Only Us – Bored of Black
Vagabon – Cold Apartment
Viewfinder – Instant Moonlight
The Washboard Abs – Veil
Waxahatchee – Never Been Wrong
Wild Pink – Albert Ross
William Ryan Fritch – In Our Blood
The Wooden Sky – Swimming in Strange Waters
Ylayali – Cherry Tomatoes

*Strictly released in 2016, but barely, and we covered it in Jan. 2017.

If you missed it, you can see our Favourite Albums of 2017 list here. Also, the curious can find such lists from previous years here.

The post Favourite Songs of 2017 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Big Thief – Capacity

Saddle Creek

“[Lenker’s vocals] unfurl like a magician’s silk scarves, a perpetual unravelling shaped by a poetic, negentropic logic. [It] is as though the meaning is summoned from the words themselves, something in the syllabic arrangement dragging stories and emotions into our world from somewhere else entirely. Lenker’s gift is her ability to recognise the strange, innate forces within language, surrender to them, and present them back to us with a crystal-clear clarity.”

REVIEW / BUY

Wild Pink – S/T

Tiny Engines

“Ross feels like a narrator dropped into an ongoing narrative, not fully aware of the beginning or end, or even any coherent context, yet haunted by profound sensations of sadness, fear and guilt—an unshakeable, existential dread that suggests we’re going to pay for how this story is panning out. Wild Pink haven’t come to us amidst this chaos with magic cures or quick-fix solutions, but they’ve come to us nonetheless. Right now, that’s probably the most valuable and noble thing any of us can do.”

REVIEW / BUY

The Wooden Sky – Swimming in Strange Waters

Chelsea Records / Nevado Music

“The Wooden Sky are making music with emotion, intelligence and integrity, songs in which you can both lose and find yourself, and perhaps even connect with the plight of others. We’re all trying to survive strange waters to some degree, and the record’s intent on illuminating this fact—both appreciating your constant kicking beneath the surface, and imploring you to help those that may be tiring, or entering even rougher seas.”

REVIEW / BUY

Vagabon – Infinite Worlds

Father/Daughter Records

“This is the sort of music that makes you feel part of a something, it does reflect a big sad and confused gang spread out all over the world, and we should be connected by shared experience and a sneaky feeling that life is worth living. However, to mark Infinite Worlds as simply sad or lonely falls into to the very trap of binarism that the album spends so much time fighting. Yes, it’s mournful but joyous too. It’s bedroom pop and indie rock and experimental ambient. It’s immensely personal and broadly relatable. It’s Vagabon, though only as it sounds right now.”

REVIEW / BUY

Protomartyr – Relatives of Descent

Domino

“Casey returns to his own struggles with the irony of being an artist in such a world, where to not speak against the absurdity of the system is to become complicit, yet knowing those very absurdities render his words meaningless. Rather than give up, or persevere nobly, Casey twists his art into the shape of this double-bind, using self-deprecation to cover any hint of naivety. “I have a backlog of so-called prophets,” a character tells a Messiah-like oracle near the beginning of the [final song]. “You are of a multitude.” The preacher insists he witnesses truth, to which the first character reacts with genuine confusion and interest. “The truth?” he asks. “What is it?””

REVIEW / BUY

Julia Lucille – Chthonic

Keeled Scales

“Part folk, part dream pop, part something else entirely, her music combines equal parts delicacy and foreboding with an impressive patience and emotional intensity […] concerned with the underworld, more specifically descending into as a mode of growth and rebirth (a la Persephone), and [showing] off the interplay between shadow and light that constitutes the record’s aesthetic.”

REVIEW / BUY

Friendship – Shock Out Of Season

Orindal Records

“In many ways, Friendship are in a Bardo of their own, caught between how life has been and could be, unsure how and when, if ever, they might pass into the next part. Shock Out of Season is concerned with finding this exit, figuring out some act or combination of words that allow passage into the next life. Or maybe it’s about making peace with the current space, acknowledging that perhaps true communication is impossible, and that trying to live with this understanding might be the most sympathetic and empathetic path available to us.”

REVIEW / BUY

Real Life Buildings – Significant Weather

Lauren Records

“Real Life Buildings capture both the quiet minutiae of day to day living—the soft feeling you get in an empty room with just a ticking clock and raindrops on the window pane for company—and the exhilarating rush of joy that is still sometimes possible. It’s music that, despite its anxiety and concern, still sees that silvery sheen of magic in the mundane, a fun indie rock record and a lesson in paying attention to what’s going on both inside and outside your head.”

REVIEW / BUY

Distant Reader – Home Power

Lily Tapes & Discs

“Distant Reader weav[es] a dense web of not just personal reflections, but reflections on the lives of those he cares about. Home Power is a deep record, one that withstands, even requires, a lot of thought and rumination, but after repeated listens the key points of empathy and kindness begin to resonate deeply. It’s a reminder that we’re all able to help ourselves and each other, and that we will be better people for both.”

REVIEW / BUY

Alex Napping – Mise En Place

Father/Daughter Records / Sports Day Records

“Less like a chronicle of a disintegrating relationship than the beginning of a process of self-examination, of moving forward, of weighing things up day-by-day and acting accordingly […] On Mise En Place, Alex Napping somehow manage to marry the immediacy of good pop songs with a slow-burning complexity, proving that meaningful songs can still be fun, and that great pop songs need not be a simple shallow sugar rush.”

REVIEW / BUY

Craig Finn – We All Want The Same Things

Partisan Records

“There’s a danger that pushing everything through the Trumpian prism collapses some of the intricacies and nuances of art. After all, The Donald is a product of the disaffection Finn is exploring here, not the cause. The problem is deeper and more complex than any government-related trouble, and Finn is too wise to offer much in the way of an answer. Instead, he suggests we shift the focus of our questions. Because We All Want the Same Things is an album about relationships, but not in the usual sense. Not the transcendental, star-aligned love of Billboard hits and Hollywood flicks but coupling based on common needs. Not life-changing answers but life-preserving strategies. Luckily, in the hands of Craig Finn, this version of ‘romance’ feels somehow more fulfilling, the opposite of cynical, for better or for worse, genuinely human. Perhaps the revolution in the conclusion isn’t some violent revolt or epiphanic break, rather a gradual yet constant commitment to challenging our own expectations. To stop wanting too much for ourselves and to start being sympathetic to others. A comeback story, of sorts.”

REVIEW / BUY

The Courtneys – II

Flying Nun Records

“There’s something joyfully nostalgic [about II]…the aural equivalent of the era it borrows from musically. It’s wrapped up in the warm fuzzy tape hiss of the late 80s / early 90s, that period of endless possibility, where everything was colourful and exciting and came with a free toy.”

REVIEW / BUY

Pleasure Systems – Antumbra Pull

Antiquated Future Records

“Essentially a collection of love songs. Each track is pure and sincere and deceptively rich, each created within its own little world, or perhaps conjuring a snapshot of a particular time/place in our own. The positive outlook never seems like some near-forgotten memory. It’s as if Sondermann is using Pleasure Systems to focus all of the hope and love into a beam which is aimed at the shadow, a beam which might not make the problem go away, but can at least be used as a formidable weapon in the forthcoming struggle.”

REVIEW / BUY

Midwife – Like Author, Like Daughter

Whited Sepulchre

“On Like Author, Like Daughter, Midwife have made an album of dualities…both powerfully elemental and somehow intangible, the unrestrained power of nature versus the invisible waves that surround us, emotionally pure messages coded in digital distortion. This duality goes for the atmosphere too. It’s impossible to pack the album away into an explicit genre or emotion, somehow conveying the whole spectrum, swelling triumph and crushing defeat, bright white hope and oil-black despair. But, ultimately, almost unbelievably, the message is positive. Even during the moments where the music sounds like the apocalypse, a tangible, sonic manifestation of loneliness and despair, Johnston provides a thread to hold on to, a reminder that the human spirit is the one thing that can, and will, endure.”

REVIEW / BUY

Black Belt Eagle Scout – Mother Of My Children

Self-released

“For all the difficulty and heartache that clearly went into it’s creation, Mother of My Children ultimately feels like Black Belt Eagle Scout making a clarion call, a proud statement that is intended to encourage other queer people of colour to use art as a source of strength, self-knowledge and empowerment. But it’s more than just an artistic statement. The album has both focus and depth, exploring themes directly with its lyrics and more indirectly with the atmosphere it conjures.”

REVIEW / BUY

CHUCK – Franenstein Songs For the Grocery Store

Audio Antihero

“Frankenstein Songs for the Grocery Store finds CHUCK doing what he does best, making songs that are catchy and funny and unashamedly “pop” and all undoubtedly good fun. But there’s always that something else to his songs too, something that’s harder to put a finger on, a nod to the vacuum at the centre of our 21st century consumerist culture.”

REVIEW / BUY

Half Gringa – Gruñona

Self-released

“Unpick[ing] the knots and tangles that have developed through[out] life, both retracing steps and forging ahead to discover something closer to [an] authentic self […] Gruñona is a journey without a clear destination, a question without an answer. An attempt to map identity not to achieve some clear-cut conclusion but rather in the hope of better understanding how history and culture and personal beliefs shape the people we are and were, the people we will be.”

REVIEW / BUY

Meursault – I Will Kill Again

Song, By Toad Records

“This is an album full of ghosts, both literal and metaphoric, from the disembodied voices that sometimes interrupt the broadcast, to Pennycook’s characters themselves, all coalescing to create a grand sense of melancholy […] but [the final song] see a sense of advancement, a suggestion that the ghosts might finally be confined to the past, where they belong.”

REVIEW / BUY

Adult Mom – Soft Spots

Tiny Engines

“Soft Spots finds Adult Mom with a new sense of self-assurance. These songs contain genuine hurt but also genuine hope, the narrator finally in possession of the bravery necessary to open up to people. It’s hard to think of a more fitting illustration of the album than the pickled pink peaches on the cover art. Yes, the fruits may get bruised if the jar is opened, but how else would anyone know how soft and sweet they are?”

REVIEW / BUY

Bea Troxel – The Way That It Feels

Self-released

“The album is an introspective one, based around big questions of where the narrator wants to be and what kind of life they want to live. In that way, it feels like a re-evaluation, the bright and hopeful result of much thought and worry […] The Way That It Feels hits a nice balance between the weighty and the not. It’s an album as poetic and pretty as it is serious and sincere, and marks Bea Troxel as a name to watch among contemporary folk musicians.”

REVIEW / BUY

The post Favourite Albums of 2017 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Tracklisting:

Friendship – If You See My Beloved
Rainwater – Ordinary Pain
Vivian Fantasy – Florist
Anamon – Kneel Old
Human Kitten – Stuck Neverlasting
American Poetry Club – You Don’t Have To vs. Anyone
Merce Lemon – Johnny When He’s Sweet and John For All The Rest
Beverly Tender – Whose Taxidermy Horse?
Big Thief – Shark Smile
Pleasure Systems – Crumbs
CIVIC – Down & Distant

We’re winding down for the holiday season right now, so the posts will be even more sporadic through December. We plan to use the time to check off a few gems that we missed through the year. Sometime near the end of the month, we’ll be putting up the requisite Favourite Albums/Songs of the Year lists, plus our annual round-up of the best Name-Your-Price releases on Bandcamp.

The post November 2017 Roundup appeared first on Various Small Flames.

— Big Thief, ‘Mary’

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last few months (or even years), chances are you’ve come across someone swooning over Big Thief. The band, led by Adrianne Lenker, released their sophomore album, Capacity, earlier this year, and it is an utterly breathtaking. It’s music that sits at a crossroads between a whole variety of genres. Part Angel Olsen left-field folk, part honest-to-goodness country, part good ol’ indie rock, Big Thief manage to create something with grit, feeling, and above all a beguiling sense of narrative.

Opener ‘Pretty Things’ is both seductive and sad, the vocals curling around the acoustic guitar like smoke from a burning ember. It’s our first taste of Lenker’s ability to paint vivid pictures with careful and often beautiful phrases, spare lines that are loaded with tension and allusion, an intense sexuality, a sense of danger or trauma, and the crushing weight of one’s past. The track is concerned with communicating pain and violence, or else transferring it blindly, casting each person as donor and receiver, capable both of offloading their pent up emotions and swallowing them. And, despite being told through the gender-reinforcing imagery of sex, the narrator works to muddy the traditional narrative of masculine and feminine, allowing both characters to be rough and animal, vulnerable and alive. In doing so the track transcends the moment, becoming something more complex and long lasting. Indeed, the entire record could be described along similar terms, refusing to be cast as feminine delicacy or masculine intensity, instead weaving these two strands into a tightly wound double helix—the Big Thief DNA.

“Don’t take me for a fool.
There’s a woman inside of me
there’s one inside of you, too.
And she don’t always do
pretty things”

Like a great short story, ‘Shark Smile’ seems to be over too soon, despite the fact it’s almost four minutes long. Emerging from a tangle of guitar and scattered drums, the steady beat of the song proper arrives with an unassuming sense of confidence. The tale it tells is not a happy one, beginning with the thrill of two lovers’ escape in the night, “howling through the edge of south Des Moines”, and ending in a brutal collision with the guard rail. The kicker lies in the chorus, what initially seems like a vow of devotion, turns out to be final words and the survivor pleading to follow into the afterlife. “And she said woo, baby, take me,” Lenker sings. “And I said woo, baby, take me too.”

The track is deceptively simple, but holds a rare mix of catchiness and rich emotion that marks the second triumph of Big Thief’s sound. These are stories propelled by the energy within their flow, as though its characters and the very world they inhabit are born of language and not vice versa, scenes conjured through cadence as though through spell or incantation. The title track  follows such an idea, pitching Lenker as a conduit for these flows rather than a conscious writer.

The push and pull of love is again the main theme on ‘Watering’, with aggression and tenderness tangled into one messy knot, while ‘Coma’, sounds like it’s been beamed straight from For Emma era Bon Iver, glistening with a so-far unseen gentleness. Something of this delicacy follows onto ‘Great White Shark’, though beneath the hushed vocals and skittish percussion lies a dark figure that threatens to descend into frenzy.

This is followed by the wonderfully syrupy and sad, ‘Mythological Beauty’, spinning stories of Lenker’s young mother struggling to raise her children. It’s one of those songs that captures you with its melody, that works its way into your brain and lies dormant, only revealing its texture and richness after repeated listens. For this reason it’s the perfect illustration of what Big Thief do so well, and why Capacity is one of the most striking albums of the year. Again the lyrics seem to flow through rather than from Lenker, the songwriter channelling voices beyond herself to tell the story that shapes her own. At once instance, her composure threatens to break, the desperation palpable as she recounts a scene from her childhood, as though the remnants of her mother’s now possess her own body. “You held me in the backseat with a dishrag,” Lenker sings, referencing an accident with a railroad spike she suffered as a child. “Soaking up blood with your eye / I was just five and you were twenty-seven / praying, ‘Don’t let my baby die.'”

If ‘Objects’ and ‘Haley’ are more meandering, likewise closer ‘Black Diamonds’ with it’s classic folk imagery of eyes and tears and whippoorwills, then it’s only a sign of the calm circumscribing the majestic ‘Mary’. Ringing out in a cathedral-like near silence, gentle piano acts to tether the fluid cadences of Lenker’s vocals, which unfurl like a magician’s silk scarves, a perpetual unravelling shaped by a poetic, negentropic logic. Once more, it is as though the meaning is summoned from the words themselves, something in the syllabic arrangement dragging stories and emotions into our world from somewhere else entirely. Lenker’s gift is her ability to recognise the strange, innate forces within language, surrender to them, and present them back to us with a crystal-clear clarity.  “Do what you want with me,” as she sings on the title track. “Lost in your captivity. / Learning capacity.”

Capacity is out now via Saddle Creek and you can buy it from the Big Thief Bandcamp page.

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