Featuring:

Petal – I’m Sorry
Wild Pink – The Seance On St. Augustine St
Big Thing – Spin
Bombshell Nightlight – Death Day
Mount Goldie – Summer
Elsa Lester – Pretty Bad, Man
Why Bonnie – Gold Rush
Devon Welsh – Vampires
Max García Conover – Another Travelling Man
Floating Room – Dog
Izaak Opatz – Bathing in the Ganges
Free Cake For Every Creature – Around You
Indigo De Souza – Home Team
Museum Food Court – bad song
Crisco Dreams – I Like Your Bed
You’re Sister – I Think About You
Russel the Leaf – Let ‘Em Run
Fresh – Daytime
Stevhen Peters – Phone Talk
Tender Age – Don’t Mind
Lord Youth – Do You Have Anything To Add?
Quiet Hollers – Addicted
Blue J – Hard to Know
Post Moves – The Arc of Life
Angus & Julia Stone – Nothing Else
Gia Margaret – Birthday
Sun June – Discotheque
Campdogzz – Souvenir
Field Report – Every Time

*(Due to various issues of availability and licensing, neither playlist has the complete quota of acts, but welcome to the modern age).

You can find all of the previous instalments of Bright Sparks here, and be sure to check back in a few weeks to see what makes the next edition.

The post July 2018 Roundup appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Placid Lake is an album based around themes of grief, mourning and self-doubt, adopting an earnest, vulnerable tone that aims for sincerity and honest connection. The songs serve not only as a personal process of grieving but also a communal invitation to the listener to do likewise. Through this, remembrance and longing are wrought into something altogether more joyful, memories and emotions used in a celebration of life, and those now gone but not forgotten. After first single ‘Your Eyes‘ introduced the Bombshell Nightlight sound, we’re happy to be able to share the second single, ‘Death Day’, which picks up many of these themes directly. As the label describes:

The song deals with celebrating the death day anniversary of a loved one who has passed, and the emotions of grief that come with it. Specifically, Cardiello sings about the loss of his father when he was a child and the years of processing and grief that have accompanied that loss.

The video, directed by Marshall Granger, supports this. Shot at the the location of Cardiello’s recording, the film brings to life the simplicity and natural beauty of the area, and further draws the impact of that space from the music. Furthermore, it reinforces the urgency of Cardiello’s words, railing against the accepted wisdom of death and loss through imagery both peaceful and frantic. This is something of a theme for the track as a whole, competing emotions mirroring the condition of bereavement, where intrinsic beliefs are guessed at and questioned by outsiders, conventional wisdom stretched over an unconventional state, and serving no purpose beyond the creation of tension and guilt.

“I don’t see the difference,” Cardiello sings at the crescendo of the song, “no-one’s gone forever / we’re swimming in the pool of memories.” The statement becomes something of a mantra, and forms the overriding position of the track. The message here does not appear to be one of ‘moving on’ from loss, but rather re-configuring its meaning into a more useful shape. Which is to say, a lack of reason or explanation does not equate to a lack of meaning. Bombshell Nightlight use absence not as proof of nothingness but the very opposite, as validation of life and evidence of meaning, emptiness mapped by what surrounds it.

Placid Lake is set for release on the 17th August via Anything Bagel and Reflective Tapes.

Photo by Emily Johnson

The post Song Premiere: Bombshell Nightlight – Death Day appeared first on Various Small Flames.