The release will be available via Western Vinyl both digital and on vinyl, including a limited deluxe edition which includes liner notes by 2024 National Book Award winner Jason De León (Soldiers and Kings) and poetry from National Book Critics Circle Award Winner Ross Gay (Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude). Both editions of the vinyl include photography from Pulitzer Foundation Grant Awardee Greg Constantine and cover art by Reena Saini Kallat, which is taken from the series Ruled Paper (red, blue, white) which depicts contested geographies around the world. All proceeds will be shared between two Texas-based organisations, American Gateways and Casa Marianella, who provide all manner of support for immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers, including food, shelter, access to health care, legal services and other essential things. Plus, on the 4th December, Tim Heidecker will host a live variety show and raffle/auction on his call-in show Office Hours to further support the two organisations.

In preview of the December release, the offerings of Alan Sparhawk and Benjamin Booker have been made available to stream. Both offered statements to explain the context behind the tracks. “Here is a song that came from the struggle to know what to say to someone who is having a hard time,” Sparhawk explains of his song ‘No More Darkness’. “There are real things that we can do to lift each other out of suffering—sometimes it is tangible charity, like this compilation to raise funds and awareness for the plight of immigrants and those who have been displaced. Sometimes it is words of encouragement. It can also just be time spent with someone who needs help getting through the moment. Let’s do our best to turn up the light.”

Fittingly for the compilation’s themes, Booker’s track ‘A Place for Us’ is warm, welcoming and nakedly emotive. Lucid whispered truths over gentle but stark guitar. “The human struggle is a family struggle,” he explains of its ethos. “We rise together and we suffer together. There are so many things out of our control, but we can always open our hearts to love and understanding. May you find light in the darkness.”

Passages: Artists in Solidarity with Immigrants, Refugees, and Asylum Seekers will be released on the 5th December via Western Vinyl and you can pre-order it now.

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The albums which followed offered various combinations of such styles, and were no less receptive to influences outside of music too. Janus looked to literature and history, while fires on the plain, inspired by the Kon Ichikawa film of the same name, not only drew from cinema but was structured something like a movie in its own right. A long journey conceptualised, where even guest appearances from the likes of Robin Pecknold and Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, which on other records might have stood solely as exciting coups or Easter eggs, had structural and thematic implications. A way for Kivel to introduce new narrators. Small diversions to the main narrative in a technique echoing that of Ichikawa’s film.

Then came a pair of ambient-based albums—last night in america (Pedro Y El Lobo Records + Cascine) and that day, on the beach (PYL Records)—which leaned toward almost contemporary minimalist tones. But working counter to the meditative calm the genre often entails, last night in america painted a picture of mundane life as soundtracked by anguish and violence, exploring how the bland everyday remained bland despite the terrible things unfolding all around. “Everyone seemed to process this abstract grief so quickly,” Kivel explained at the time. “I wanted to write a record about that. It feels like a very American idea to me—that short memory, or that ability to shrug and submerge terrible feelings.”

And if last night in america asked how we managed to live in peace in spite of everything, then follow-up that day, on the beach was more concerned with whether we can live peacefully at all. Because Matt Kivel no longer wanted to partake in the national (or Western?) burial of grief, held no illusions as to the persistent influence of memories and past trauma. Instead he chose to unearth periods of intense depression throughout his own life, return to them and attempt to map their shapes through music. Therefore, if last night was a quiet protest against a national mindset, then that day was a personal living of the alternative course. A decision to not bury the past but rather submerge oneself within it.

Each record felt like its own cohesive, complete thing, yet the sense of searching continued. The journey of an individual dissatisfied with their surroundings yet unable to let go of the hope that some better, more hospitable place to call his own might eventually come into view. Recorded after moving back to Austin with his wife, bend reality ~ like a wave might be the closest Kivel has got to such a home. Stripping back the expansive style of the previous records in favour of a more intimate, insular tone, the album references the tranquility found in nature, as well as the pervading unease with messier human landscapes (what the press release calls “a deep, inner pain and grotesque sense of dislocation”), refusing to sugar-coat hard realities without abandoning faith in renewal and growth.

One of the main ways Kivel achieves this sensation is again by inviting others to sing these songs with him. Will Oldham returns on several tracks, a presence Kivel said aims to make the songs “feel more human and holy,” an almost literal reminder that, when they so choose, people can come together to make something good, something beautiful. “Vocal harmony is one of humanity’s purely positive non-destructive powers and I’m glad we could tap into it on this song,” Kivel goes on to explain, concluding the thought with a sentiment that might be said to represent the record as a whole: “The world is gravely ill and this is just a small acknowledgment that we are capable of healing if we want to.”

bend reality ~ like a wave is out now via PYL Records and you can get it from the Matt Kivel Bandcamp page.

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Here’s a list of thirty records we didn’t get a chance to tell you about properly in 2022. Releases we think you would do well to come to know.

The A’s – Fruit

Psychic Hotline

A collection of traditional folk songs, lullabies and one original, the debut album from The A’s—AKA Alexandra Sauser-Monnig (Daughter of Swords) and Amelia Meath (Sylvan Esso)—is a mélange of the whimsical and quietly devastating. The product of over a decade of close friendship (the pair make up two-thirds of Mountain Man), and rooted in a long history of American folk eccentricity, the record features beguiling vocal harmonies, pitch-perfect yodelling and a sonic potpourri of everyday orchestral elements (the liner notes list instruments like hair, shoes, ice chunk, gravel, frog sample and shoelace). Examined individually the ten songs share little in common, but as a whole they somehow work perfectly, capturing both a sense of fun and genuine beauty. As Sauser-Monnig puts it when describing compiling the tracklist, “If it doesn’t make you cackle or cry, it doesn’t belong.”

A.O. Gerber – Meet Me at the Gloaming

Hand in Hive / Father/Daughter Records

True to its title, A.O. Gerber’s Meet Me at the Gloaming invites the listener into a world between day and night. A space in which the binaries of light and dark are muddied, complicated, ultimately dissolved into insignificance. To inhabit such a place, Gerber shows us, is to confess new feelings and relinquish old shames. To move beyond ideas of good and bad in order to exist on your own terms, and heal from the years in which this was not the case. Because if anything emerges from the nuanced folk rock of the record, it is the sense that strict boundaries are counterproductive and often imaginary, fencing off the rich confluences in which life is truly lived.

Ashenspire – Hostile Architecture

code666 / Aural Music

‘Great’ Britain might have had a strange smell about it for years now, but 2022 was the year it quit pretending and died in full view. Nothing quite managed to capture the spirit of the time like Glasgow-based outfit Ashenspire, with their LP Hostile Architecture manifesting this broken feeling as avant-garde metal. It’s a record of fury and futility that rails against not only the misery of the moment but the abject cruelty of those who have allowed it to come to pass. “Always three months to the gutter / Never three months to the top,” goes a line in the typically forthright opening track ‘The Law of Asbestos’, “another set of fucking homeless spikes outside another empty shop.” Through a series of shapeshifting, endlessly inventive tracks, the album posits hostile architecture as the contemporary British landscape. A society designed to inflict discomfort on its citizens out of nothing but fear and malice. “This is not a house of amateurs,” as the opener concludes bitterly. “This is done with full intent.”

Bartees Strange – Farm to Table

4AD

If Bartees Strange’s debut record Live Forever confronted and ultimately rejected the pigeonholing and self-censorship too often required for a Black person to exist within a traditionally white space, then follow-up Farm to Table is a dispatch from the other side. A genre-hopping and often jubilant refusal to be put into a single box, or indeed to be anyone other than Bartees Strange. “That’s why I really can’t fuck with y’all / In fact I’m feeling more grown,” as he sings on ‘Escape This Circus’. “I really can’t fuck with y’all / And I don’t wanna act no more.” But though this embrace of the self comes with a sense of empowerment, there’s another side which proves equally important. Because just as Bartees Strange wasn’t all the things the industry (and society in general) demanded he be when chasing success, he’s not suddenly some saint or superhero having found it. He’s himself, a single person, communicating something important and hoping to reach whoever might need to hear.

billy woods – Aethiopes

Backwoodz Studioz

“I think Mengistu Haile Mariam is my neighbor,” declares billy woods in the opening line of Aethiopes. “Whoever it is moved in and put an automated gate up.” For most artists, this might be using their best material too early on, leading with the ace up their sleeve. But woods is only getting started. Allusions to the drug epidemic through the Challenger disaster, colonialists on cannibal tours, quotes from Wole Soyinka’s Kongi’s Harvest… and that’s only by track four. “Conceptually, it was one of the [most] complex ideas I’ve ever tried to tackle on an album,” woods told FADER. “It’s a lot of ideas, big and small, of a significant depth. I guess, to me, there’s a lot going on about Blackness as an idea, Africa as an idea, Africa as a reality.”

Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy – Once Again In The World

Antiquated Future Records

Antiquated Future Records has been steadily and quietly releasing collections of rarities from a range of artists as part of their Selected Songs series, delighting old fans and winning new ones, but perhaps most importantly preserving work which might otherwise have been lost. After the likes of Christopher Sutton, Twig Palace and Two White Cranes, this spring saw the turn of Will Oldham with two albums: Time From Work To Go which featured songs recorded as Palace Music, and Once Again In The World with tracks from Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy. “Will Oldham’s wide-ranging influence can be felt in nearly everything in the Selected Songs series so far,” Antiquated Future’s Andrew Barton explains in the liner notes, and thus the releases feel like a milestone in the project. A key text added to the library, important not only in and of itself but also in reading what came after. “As an elementary school teacher,” Barton continues, “I look back on making it a bit like one of my students looking at a final project for a unit they got really into and cared deeply about. A view from my seat in a room full of fellow enthusiasts. The glow of the interesting subject pulses like a star in the sky, always there.”

Brian Harnetty – Words and Silences

Winesap Records

A portrait of the Cisteritan monk and writer Thomas Merton, Words and Silences sees Brian Harnetty add original musical compositions to recordings made by Merton himself during his hermitage in Kentucky in 1967. We hear him identify birdsong, listen to gunfire from Fort Knox, celebrate New Year’s Eve alone and comment on an array of topics from Sufi mysticism to Michel Foucault. But more than offering an extraordinary window into Merton’s solitude, the album elucidates the beauty and melancholy inherent within his reflections, honing the endearing doubt which permeates each monologue and furthering the strange contradictions at work. A communication to no-one, immediate in tone but of course now distant too, and very much aware of the artifice of the recording process. Brian Harnetty embraces such conflicts much as Merton did, and thus not only continues the conversation but opens it wider. Words and Silences is a meditation on curiosity, and one which understands uncertainty and inconsistency to be the very foundations of any will to learn.

The Cool Greenhouse – Sod’s Toastie

Melodic Records

British post-punks The Cool Greenhouse follow their self-titled 2020 debut with a sophomore effort that doubles down on the deadpan wit, surreal humour and thinly-disguised existential pain. Where else are you going to find references to “Jordan fucking Peterson”, talking ladybirds and the unending search for the end of the sellotape, all within the same song? But despite the weirdness, The Cool Greenhouse have polished some edges too, dialling up the accessibility with what the liner notes call “flirtations with–heaven forbid!–melody, chord progressions and arrange-ments.” ‘Get Unjaded’ is the closest thing to a pop song the band have written to date, and they even have a go at actual singing on the slo-mo jangler ‘I Lost My Head’, but regardless of any stylistic evolution, it’s that sardonic lyricism which will keep you coming back.

Craig Finn – A Legacy of Rentals

Positive Jams / Thirty Tigers

Last year, we described The Hold Steady‘s eighth album ODP as a glimpse “into the lives of imperfect figures dissatisfied or downtrodden and merely surviving.” Not so much a pivot from the self-destructive adventure of older THS releases as a natural evolution. With his fourth solo record A Legacy of Rentals, Craig Finn pushes things a step further. A move from the survivors to people who didn’t, as well as those left in their wake with nothing but imperfect memories. With vocal support from Cassandra Jenkins, Finn mines the full depth of this ground to reveal how we shape entire lives around such recollections. Stories we hold onto regardless of their veracity. The justification for toiling in a hostile world. Again we are introduced to characters on the margins—a man forced into drug dealing by financial necessity, a woman escaping life with vodka and a superhero matinee—and the detail and control of the writing is as impressive anything Finn has crafted to date, further cementing his place at the table of America’s best working writers, in music or elsewhere. Memories might not be perfect, A Legacy of Rentals tells us, but they are a way to survive after all.

Daniel McClennan – Unfurling Redemption

Cruel Nature Records

What fuels humanity’s incessant drive to conquer its surroundings? Why must we always seek to transcend? These are some of the questions explored on Unfurling Redemption, a solo album by Daniel McClennan (Warren Schoenbright, Why Patterns) which draws on a range of classical and avant-garde influences to conjure the full, dreadful weight of the subject at hand. Built from synthesised instruments and stock sound samples, the songs exist within a netherworld at once melancholic and ominous, as though having long come to understand transcendence as either an illusion or pyrrhic victory, and left to grasp blindly for redemption elsewhere in the dark.

Dear Nora – human futures

Orindal Records

In a piece for Talkhouse, Dear Nora’s Katy Davidson states confidently that human futures is the best thing they’ve ever made. “I’m just gonna come right out and say it,” they say, “this is the best one… all the previous Dear Nora recordings were practice for this moment, for this album. This is the culmination of them all.” It’s a bold statement for a project that’s been running since the late nineties, but it’s hard to disagree. human futures retains everything that has made Dear Nora a cult hit—the playful lo-fi pop vibe, the offbeat observational lyrics that have come to mark later releases—but feels somehow more complete, more cohesive. Few artists capture twenty-first century life as well as Davidson, images of natural beauty sitting next to wry humour and deadpan observations of our ruined world.

Fiver – Soundtrack to A More Radiant Sphere: The Joe Wallace Mixtape

You’ve Changed Records

Back in 2019, filmmaker Sara Wylie asked Fiver (AKA Simone Schmidt) if they might contribute music for her new project, A More Radiant Sphere. The hybrid documentary centres on Wylie’s great uncle Joe Wallace, a Canadian poet and political prisoner shunned in his home nation but celebrated in Eastern Europe and China, exploring how the role of Communists has been mostly excised from Canadian history. Fiver’s soundtrack furthers this examination, turning a selection of Wallace’s poems into song alongside instrumental pieces. “I have always felt a song is worth singing for what wisdom one can discover through its repetition,” Schmidt explains of the album’s style, “be that in beauty, prayer or, in time, prophecy.” Hopeful, heartfelt and unafraid of nuance, The Joe Wallace Mixtape captures a specific period of Canadian leftist nationalism in all of its passionate imperfection. A movement which threatened to forget its own colonial past in its hurry to attack American imperialism, yet nevertheless dared to imagine the possibility of a society beyond capitalism.

Friendship – Love the Stranger

Merge Records

Having established themselves as one of our favourite contemporary acts with Shock out of Season and Dreamin’, both on Orindal Records, Friendship‘s first LP for Merge is a continuation of their distinctive brand of introspective, country-tinged, slices of life. The songs again centre on lead Dan Wriggins’s plaintive vocals and everyday poetry, ably supported by the careful attention and creative flair of Michael Cormier-O’Leary, Jon Samuels, and Peter Gill. Be it distracting yourself with nature documentaries or a peek at the moon, Wriggins examines small, seemingly mundane details for their loaded meaning. Searching if not for answers then at least reasons to get up every day and keep looking. A way, in other words, to live and love when “gripped by a fear of no discernible beginning.”

Good Looks – Bummer Year

Keeled Scales

“I don’t think they’re evil, even when they’re awful / Not totally class conscious, but ultimately good.” So sings Tyler Jordan on the title track of Good Look’s Bummer Year, referring to his old high school friends in small town Texas. The line is indicative of the tension on a record where fondness and sentimentality are constantly challenged by life’s imperfect reality. A collection of songs willing to hold more than one idea in its head at a time, be it in celebrating close-knit communities while recognising their susceptibility to insular or reactionary turns, or charting the strange relationship between working pride and industrial exploitation. “Blue-collar” indie rock can sometimes comes off as inauthentic or condescending, but it is this nuance which allows Good Looks to come across as authentic, and moreover begin to imagine such communities as sites of revolutionary potential for positive change. “If we’re gonna make a comeback, we’re gonna need those people,” as Jordan concludes on the title track, “like my friends on the bottom who don’t know who to fight.”

Joy Guidry – Radical Acceptance

Whited Sepulchre

“One of the best guides to how to be self-loving is to give ourselves the love we are often dreaming about receiving from others.” So wrote bell hooks in All About Love, gracefully unmasking the cruelty which internalised trauma can bring. That Joy Guidry released Radical Acceptance in the year the world lost hooks feels like the most fitting testament to her legacy. A clear indication that her work is not only being acted upon but developed further, pushed in new directions. A personal practice brought to life in music, the album sees Guidry combine ambient, jazz and classical styles with direct and often humorous spoken word delivery to short-circuit the self-judgement of which hooks wrote. To connect with the reality of one’s identity in a way beyond labels, and learn to love it precisely for what it is.

June McDoom – S/T

Temporary Residence Ltd.

Influenced by a love for sixties and seventies folk, intricate jazz, early soul, and the reggae of her childhood home, the self-titled debut release from Florida-born, New York-based June McDoom takes relatively simple folk blueprints and weaves whole worlds of sound around them. Working with partner and collaborator Evan Wright, McDoom’s style feels like a constantly shifting collage of her influences, warm and rich and strangely dream-like. Highlighting her talents as a producer as much as a songwriter, the record is an exercise in texture and atmosphere, shifting from the earthily pastoral to something more spectral, hallucinatory echoes and psychedelic ambient flourishes moving the songs to some other strange plane.

Kali Malone – Living Torch

Portraits GRM

Driven by both the conceptual and intuitional, Stockholm-based composer Kali Malone has made a name pushing the boundaries of the pipe organ. 2019’s The Sacrificial Code subverted the traditions of the instrument to prove its power was not contingent on a grand, cathedralesque setting. Staying true to her exploratory style, Living Torch sees Malone continue to excavate music for new styles and perspectives, but this time swaps the organ for an altogether more diverse ensemble of instruments, from the trombone and bass clarinet to the boîte à bourdon and Éliane Radigue’s ARP 2500 synthesizer. The result again manages to suggest both academic rigour and unburdened instinct, but ultimately transcends any focus on its intentions as the listener becomes immersed in the soundscape. Some hymn or lament, latent with the suggestion of the sublime, be it total dread or transcendence, silence or all-encompassing sound.

LINQUA FRANQA – Bellringer

Ernest Jenning Record Co.

Meaning both “a jab to the face that knocks someone out completely” and someone who raises an alarm, Bellringer is the perfect title for the sophomore album by Linqua Franqa, the project of Athens, Georgia-based rapper Mariah Parker. Balancing music with work as a linguist, activist, parent and politician, Parker makes razor sharp, socially conscious hip hop that aims to both empower and critique. In provocative, sometimes dark, but always poetic verses, Parker takes on the prison industrial complex, police brutality, exploitative capitalism and mental health issues. There’s also a stellar guest list, which includes Georgia hip hop talent (like Dope Knife and Wesdaruler) as well as indie rock heavyweights like Jeff Rosenstock, of Montreal and Kishi Bashi, and even legendary civil rights activist Angela Davis. Ultimately, Bellringer is a record that sees music as a tool toward liberation. As Parker puts it “[using] the aesthetic pleasure of hip-hop to educate people about why things are so bad and what can we do about it.”

Logan Farmer – A Mold For the Bell

Western Vinyl

“It’s gonna be hard to talk about this when it’s done / Those days of plenty come and gone.” So opens A Mold For the Bell, the latest album from Logan Farmer. The Colorado songwriter has long been marked by a willingness to stare straight into the maw of whatever calamity is approaching, as typified by his almost singularly successful depiction of climate dread on 2020’s Still No Mother. The new record might shift its focus away from explicitly environmental concerns, but roots itself in the same shades and colours. As though the promise of impending loss hangs in the air like a fog. “It’s a full time job, just staying calm / Don’t read the papers,” he sings on ‘Horsehair’, but portents of doom reveal themselves all around. Through lines of silver in hair, or the very silence itself. Yet across all of this persists a very human spirit, small hopes flickering in spite of everything. Because what sets the work of Logan Farmer apart from the plethora of other such dark and pessimistic art is the intimacy with which he approaches such themes. There’s no sublime release to this apocalypse, just people living on through it.

Lou Turner – Microcosmos

Spinster

Nashville’s Lou Turner returned with a cosmic country record that keeps both feet firmly on the ground. Rooted in a welcoming sense of domesticity, Microcosmos finds a sense of wonder in the infinite detail of our immediate surroundings, gently probing at some pretty big questions without the need for some epic quest. Musically it could be from some long-hidden seventies folksinger (think Joni Mitchell, Michael Hurley), but refuses to fall into many long established tropes. There are hints too of David Berman in the songwriting, which melds philosophical musings with observational images—a bird’s nest at a gas station, rising bread dough—and ultimately decrees that an artist is not doomed to tortured wandering.

Medicine Singers – S/T

Stone Tapes / Joyful Noise Recordings

In a year of many great albums, it’s hard to imagine one as bold and committed as the self-titled debut by Medicine Singers. Something of a groundbreaking supergroup, the band are the product of collaboration between Algonquin powwow drum outfit Eastern Medicine Singers and Israeli guitarist Yonatan Gat, and also features contributions from ambient music visionary Laraaji, Thor Harris and Christopher Pravdica of Swans, Ikue Mori of no wave icons DNA and trumpeter jaimie branch. Together the group collide traditional powwow and experimental music, resulting in a distinctive and often joyously cathartic experience. Take the colossal ‘Hawk Song’, or the first sudden burst of pure rock n’ roll guitar that comes blazing in near the beginning of ‘Sunrise (Rumble)’. “These two cultures can work together, and blend together,” Medicine Singers leader Daryl Black Eagle Jamieson explains, “to show people how we can work together and make something beautiful.” What emerges is a piece of contemporary art which serves as a map to its own history, following its roots back into a myriad of traditional styles.

MJ Lenderman – Boat Songs

Dear Life Records

“Listening to Boat Songs by MJ Lenderman is like joining your best friends out on the porch,” describes author Ashleigh Bryant Phillips in the album’s liner notes. “The neighbors might be yelling and the bugs might be biting. But y’all are shooting the shit and letting loose, telling the same old stories again and again.” There’s wrestling, basketball, sightings of Dan Marino in a South Carolina cereal aisle. Drained out swimming pools and birds pecking seeds off the ground. But most of all there’s the masterful knack for combining details small and absurd into something which feels like life as it’s lived on the ground. Lenderman, much like Phillips herself, represents the contemporary face of a certain type of storyteller. One living on the margins or else in the great rural stretches too often ignored, presenting life back to us with all its shine and sharp edges intact.

Posmic – Sun Hymns

Let’s Pretend Records

Clocking in at under twenty minutes, Posmic’s Sun Hymns feels like watching an old Super 8 home movie found at the thrift store, unknown people and scenes flashing by, wrapped in nostalgic film grain and warm colours. Comprising of members of several Baltimore and DC bands (Post Pink, Wildhoney, Ultra Beauty), the outfit make music that collides grungy nineties guitar rock and sixties psych weirdness, resulting in something that feels both fresh and strangely familiar. There are noisy alt-rock jams, incense-scented folk numbers and sunny, easy-going pop, the whole thing adding up to a brief but oh so welcome escape to some other time or place. Sun Hymns might be the sleeper hit of the year, so load it up and bask in its glow.

Réverbérations d’une crise – Une enqu​​​ê​​​te sonore sur le logement à Montr​​​é​​​al

Cuchabata Records

Described as existing “at the border of music and sound art,” and “produced during a collective process of sound inquiry,” Réverbérations d’une crise: une enquête sonore sur le logement à Montréal is a work seeking to evoke a fuller picture of Montreal‘s housing crisis, and make audible what is otherwise silent or silenced. Hubert Gendron-Blais (ce qui nous traverse, Devenir-ensemble) leads a collective featuring Aidan Girt (Gospeed You! Black Emperor), Claude Périard (Claude L’Anthrope), Christine White, Stefan Christoff (Anarchist Mountains) and others, with each track setting out to capture the multifaceted impact of the crisis through political, socio-economic, psychological and existential planes. Take one of Gendron-Blais’s own offerings ‘À la multiplicité fragile d’une ruelle de Parc-Ex’, a collection of sounds from the multicultural, working-class neighbourhood Parc-Extension which evokes both the diversity of the space and the growing precarity as gentrification closes in.

Sarah Davachi – Two Sisters

Late Music

Following the thread back from contemporary drone music through a variety of chamber and choral styles, Sarah Davachi’s Two Sisters is as influenced by medieval sacred music as it is modern minimalism. As though the two forms are not separate entities but the same thing manifest differently across the years—a perpetual attempt to communicate something near inexplicable, some great mystery known only in flashes. Because while spiritual endeavors in music have driven many toward ostentation, Davachi is far more astute. After all, if the mystery shows itself only in glimmers, then what use is show and noise? Two Sisters follows the lead of its forebears and instead turns toward quiet; a hushed, elusive collection of pieces loaded with all the hope, fear and strangeness inherent in that which we cannot fully comprehend.

Silica Gel – Wooden Shoe

Noumenal Loom

Listening to Wooden Shoe, the latest release from Providence, Rhode Island outfit, it’s difficult to ascertain what exactly is going on. Has the past slipped through a crack in the world, returned as some strange, haunting force? Or have we moved in the other direction entirely? Been transported to some unnamed future where old things have reoccurred as the great wheel turns? Having made their name with debut May Day, reinterpreting songs from the fourteenth century satirical text Roman de Fauve, Silica Gel continue the art song tradition by merging Early folk styles with contemporary (or even futuristic) noise, capturing both the ever-spinning cycles of suffering, exploitation and superstition, as well as the interminable dream that something better might lie just beyond the horizon.

Soul Glo – Diaspora Problems

Epitaph

The recipe goes something like this: Take two handfuls of post-hardcore for every one of hip hop, take equal parts punk rock and poetry. Don’t skimp on the humour, don’t forget to stir in the grief. Then preheat the oven to fucking furious and roast the whole thing until the smoke alarm goes off. With the myriad of ingredients and processes, Soul Glo’s Diaspora Problems risks biting off more than it can chew, but with every track it keeps biting, keeps chewing, lets you know there’s no way it’s going to blink before you. From the college scam and reselling economy to the false allyship of the white left, no topic is too much for this record. It bites off your head and chews.

Tenci – A Swollen River, A Well Overflowing

Keeled Scales

Tenci‘s 2020 debut My Heart Is An Open Field was a record of catharsis, with lead Jess Shoman moving beyond pain and trauma via a process of purging. The result was a certain emptiness, a blank space residing where negativity had once lived. Follow-up A Swollen River, A Well Overflowing is an attempt to repopulate this space. A conscious effort to collect the small joys and wonders of the world, and to reposition one’s relationship with things previously difficult to live with so that they might exist comfortably too. With a sound somewhere between bedroom pop introspection and folk hymn timelessness, each song serves as a spell, as Shoman puts it, to “fill my heart back up.”

Titus Andronicus – The Will to Live

Merge Records

“It is the same misery that is all around us,” said Werner Herzog in his 1982 film Burden of Dreams. “The trees here are in misery, and the birds are in misery. I don’t think they sing, they just screech in pain.” Titus Andronicus reach an equally difficult picture of the world on their seventh album, The Will to Live, yet the New Jersey punk royals thoroughly reject nihilism in the process. Written in the wake of tragedies both personal and global, the album sees lead Patrick Stickles dare to embrace life despite the inevitable pain, coming to understand suffering not as the default form of existence but merely the shadow of life itself. Screeching in pain they might be, but Titus Andronicus are singing too, and it is as loud and heartfelt as anything else they have sung for years.

Young Jesus – Shepherd Head

Saddle Creek

Even for a band that has shapeshifted throughout its history, Shepherd Head feels like a departure for Young Jesus. After completing the mathy, jazzy epic Welcome to Conceptual Beach in 2020, the band were burnt out, and lead John Rossiter decided to take a different tack. Working primarily alone, armed with a Macbook, a microphone and a newfound patience, he began to piece together songs from found sounds, audio recordings and white noise. The result is, at least stylistically, a glimpse at Young Jesus in a different form—a stripped-back singer-songwriter approach wrapped in meditative electronic pop, more interested in the emotional, or even spiritual, than the cerebral. It’s a record which faces up to fear and grief but somehow feels suffused with hope, a personal, quasi-solo record that feels anything but lonely (with cameos from friends dotted throughout, including collaborations with Tomberlin and Arswain). As we wrote in a preview of lead single ‘Ocean’ back in the summer, Shepherd Head is “a tapestry both vulnerable and tender, where great loss and transcendence are not so different after all.”

Thanks to everyone who stopped by during 2022, your continued interest and support means the world to us.

The post Albums We Missed in 2022 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Here are some great songs from the tumultuous year that was 2003.

1) The Thermals – No Culture Icons
2) The Wrens – Ex-Girl Collection
3) Wintersleep – Orca
4) Yeah Yeah Yeahs – Maps
5) Sun Kil Moon – Carry Me Ohio
6) Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy – Hard Life
7) Califone – Million Dollar Funeral
8) Okkervil River – The War Criminal Rises and Speaks
9) Sufjan Stevens – Romulus
10) Hymie’s Basement – Lightning Bolts and Man Hands
11) The National – Lucky You
12) Malcolm Middleton – Cold Winter
13) Damien Jurado – Amateur Night
14) Cursive – Sierra
15) The Constantines – Shine a Light
16) Casiotone for the Painfully Alone – Jeanne, If You’re Ever in Portland
17) The Unicorns – I Was Born a Unicorn
18) The Decemberists – Red Right Ankle
19) Songs: Ohia – Farewell Transmission

What did we miss from 2003? Let us know via Facebook or Twitter! Be sure to check out our posts on 2000, 2001 and 2002, and pop back in a month when we’ll be turning our attention to… 2004.

The post Millennium Mix: 2003 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

“I Sleep Alone is a beautifully human, sounding simultaneously hushed and impassioned, delicate and raw. The negative space that intersperses each guitar note has an emotional heft, an almost tangible substance that snakes around like fog. The lyrics are superb, and the whole thing has a depth that requires repeated listens to even begin to appreciate.”

Obvious + Unafraid is the latest release from Psalmships, which sees Britton enlist the help of Chelsea Sue Allen and Brad Hinton. The album is comprised of Psalmships originals and a handful of cover song, all of which hit that same note of resonant melancholy, the vocals as raw and powerful as ever.

If a man is judged by his influences then Britton is pretty much impeccable, with his choice of covers pretty much matching the dream lineup for the genre. From his noirish and grand version of Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s ‘Death to Everyone’ (which we featured on our Haints Stay playlist), to a beautifully composed take on ‘Old Black Hen by Songs:Ohia. As if those two weren’t enough, there is also a Damien Jurado cover and a wonderful piano-led rendition of Phosphorescent’s ‘Cocaine Lights’.

But of course Psalmships is by no means just a covers project, with Britton’s songwriting holding its own even in such great company. From the subdued opener ‘Eulogy’, where his vocals are sometimes barely more than a strangled whisper, to the slow-burning ‘Revocation of the Elk’, each original song is suffused with a sense of pain and sorrow. Perhaps my favourite track is a song that originally appeared on I Sleep Alone, though this rendition of ‘Patience to Undo the Patience’ sounds of lot warmer and upbeat than the original. That said, the track still has shadowy and almost mystical Molina-esque imagery.

“Hardly ever does the moon not shine for me
and, rarer still, that he sings like a priest
so what kind of dreams are the best to have?
what if I never wake up again?”

There are similar themes on ‘Yven’, the song which gives the album its name (“What if I was just a cliff side, obvious and unafraid? Would I travel through the tremors as they made the hills separate?”), while ‘Impossible’ is perfectly gloomy and morose, just soft guitar and Britton’s vocals and wide open spaces. But things aren’t entirely dark either with a thread of something bright running through (at least some of) the tracks. Let’s revisit ‘Patience to Undo the Patience’ for an example, one of my favourite lines from the album.

“If you find heartbreak don’t come undone
because there are these shadows in everyone
what kind of light should I hold onto?
There is the moon, shining off of you”

Obvious + Unafraid sees Psalmships doing what Psalmships does best. Britton’s style is sometimes referred to as “ghostfolk” and I couldn’t come up with a better tag if I tried for a hundred years. This is folk music in its most distilled form, coalescing from the shadows on a moonlit night.

You can get Obvious + Unafraid on a name your price basis from the Psalmships Bandcamp page.

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“A dark love poem about self-discovery, realizing the things you love, close friends and adventure, limitations and failures, and bouts with depression”

Van Vliet is an interesting songwriter, not afraid to ply his trade across a diverse of genres. As well as the fragile folk songs as On The Water, he also writes doom metal with his band Ulthar and theatrical post-punk for the now defunct Da Comrade. You get the impression that Van Vliet is an artist confident in his abilities, drawing from the twin wells of creativity and experience.

Chicago artist Nnamdi Ogbonnaya has created a new video for their song ‘Born in Reverse, a strange stop-motion collage that sits perfectly with the lyrical themes of death, decay and, naturally, life (a similar theme to that of Young Jesus’ Grow / Decompose). The figure in the video, made up of a mish-mash of human and animal parts, is subject to confusion and terror and joy as life lives and dies in front of his eyes. The track itself a great introduction to On The Water, highlighting Van Vliet’s intimate, impassioned vocals and delicate arrangements which place the songs somewhere between the folk songs of Keaton Henson and Bonnie “Prince” Billy:

“Autumn leaves are falling to the ground. They decay but they are becoming something else. All will be and all will be born again. Finally all will be formless. All things must go. All things must go that way”

You can buy Cordelia now via the On The Water Bandcamp page. Nnamdi Ogbonnaya also has a Bandcamp page, where you will find his wonderfully strange multi-instrumental compositions.

P.S. On The Water are currently touring the US. You can find all the dates and details here.

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Tracklisting:

1. On A Good Day (Joanna Newsom Cover) – Jordan Klassen & Brian Chan
2. Storm Windows (John Prine Cover) – Jeffrey Foucault
3. I’m Going Home (Hank Williams Cover) – Teen Suicide
4. You Are the Everything (R.E.M. Cover) – Redbird
5. You and I Are a Gang of Losers (The Dears Cover) – Admiral Fallow
6. Won’t Back Down (Tom Petty Cover) – Benjamin Francis Leftwich
7. I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine (Bob Dylan Cover) – Dirty Projectors
8. Storms (Fleetwood Mac Cover) – Matt Sweeney & Bonnie Prince Billy
9. It’s Not Happening (Be Good Tanyas Cover) – Lowpines
10. Two Headed Boy (Neutral Milk Hotel) – My Latest Novel
11. Cruel Summer (Bananarama Cover) – Superchunk
12. Southern Girls (Cheap Trick Cover) – Cold Warps
13. Tambourine Man (Bob Dylan Cover) – Cloud Cult
14. Black Cat (Donkeys Cover) – Advance Base
15. Save Yourself (Sharon Van Etten Cover) – Brendan Losch
16. Learning (Perfume Genius Cover) – The Bearcat
17. Wicked Game (Chris Isaak Cover) – Widowspeak
18. John Wayne Gacy Jr. (Sufjan Stevens Cover) – Bryan John Appleby
19. Reason To Believe (Tim Hardin Cover) – Evening Hymns
20. You Are My Sunshine (Oliver Hood Cover) – Peter Broderick

As ever, please please please support the musicians we feature if you enjoy what you hear. The artist names in the tracklisting will take you to a page for each so please explore their music catalogues.

The Covers Mix: Volume #5 from Wake The Deaf on 8tracks Radio.

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