Pezzettino – Somewhere North of Pescadero

Pezzetino has been the recording moniker of Oakland-based multi-instrumentalist Margaret Stutt since 2008, with the releases numbering into double figures. Indeed, Venus, the 10″ EP out this month, is the eleventh Pezzetino release. “Success to me means having the opportunity each day to witness beauty in life, big or small,” Strutt says. “I just so happen to write music along the way to help me through.”

Lead single ‘Somewhere North of Pescadero’ operates according to this sentiment. Led by a mellow piano line, the track is an encapsulation of the calmness to be found in the small details of nature—mindfulness in its pure sense, before it became co-opted by the productivity ghouls of our age. “I enjoy the flavor of fruit and the color of sunsets,” Strutt explains. “I can’t believe how many sunsets I wasted in my 20s. There is so much to be found beneath the surface of everyday, boring life.”

Check out the video below, which was edited by Christiana Charalambous, with footage by Chris Coad:

Venus is out now and you can get it from the Pezzetino Bandcamp page.

Bedtime Khal – Black Tears

Bedtime Khal is the recording moniker of Michigan-based bedroom artist Khal Malik. After releasing two EPs last year, Malik has teamed up with the good people at Devil Town Tapes for a brand new release. Described as an “introspective” EP of ” love, isolation and the feeling of nostalgia,” Fog finds Bedtime Khal at its most developed and honed, taking inspiration from the aesthetics of the late 90s/early 00s and combining post-punk, indie rock and singer-songwriter styles.

Lead single ‘Black Tears’ gives a good indication of how this turns out. Intended as a meditation “on life as a black and brown individual,” the song’s tight rhythm evokes both frustration and unease, though below this energy lies an overwhelming sadness too. The restless melancholy of post-punk has sometimes fallen victim to existential navel gazing, and Bedtime Khal is here to revitalise the sound and direct it toward more pressing concerns.

City Dress – Showing Up

City Dress is the recording moniker of Brooklyn-based songwriter Christina Skramstad. With help from Johnny Simon Jr., Skramstad draws from folk, rock-and-roll and jazz to create lush, narrative-based songs that combine emotional immediacy with a desire to evoke memories and tell stories.

New single ‘Showing Up’ serves as the perfect introduction. “‘Showing Up’ is a response to a tension that built up with my best friend as we navigated walking deeper into the wonders and hardships of adulthood,” Skramstad explains. “It speaks to the insecurities that follow us as we get older. There are still so many humbling moments when we feel small and vulnerable, just like we did when we were young.”

Check out the video by Glenn Gallagher with visual narrative and illustrations by Liana Finck:

Prudence – Heart Sways

We covered Prudence, the recording project of Australian multi-instrumentalist Tom Crandles (of COLOURS and Au.Ra), a few times last year. First the single ‘Euphoria’ introduced a smoky dream-like atmosphere before the full EP Major Tom was released on Forged Artifacts. The release explored “realms both strange and reassuring, disquieting and beautiful,” drawing on post-punk and new wave to capture an alluring blend of the joyous and sinister.

This month sees Prudence return with a brand new single, and something of a shift in the project. Enlisting the talents of pianist Aleesha Dibbs (of Divebell, Lorelei), bassist Kat Harley (The Laurels, Mezko) and drummer Steve West (Obscura Hail), Prudence has evolved into a full band, and new song ‘Heart Sways’ utilises this to weave a vivid dream pop soundscape. The warm currents evoke the themes too, with the volatile patterns of love charted in all of their fickle beauty.

You know it’s not done.
Don’t ruin all the fun,
Cos’ I’m becoming numb.

I know your mood swings with the moon.
I know your heart sways

Check out the video directed by McLean Stephenson:

Heart Sways is out now and available from the Prudence Bandcamp page.

Jess Williamson – Wind on Tin

LA-based songwriter Jess Williamson has been steadily establishing herself as a leading name in the Californian folk movement. Released in 2018, her last record Cosmic Wink introduced a subtle esoteric edge to her country-inspired sound, and Williamson’s forthcoming fourth full-length album looks sets to continue in that direction. Sorceress, to be released this month on Mexican Summer, might not be overtly psychedelic, but it carries a mysticism nonetheless.

Lead single ‘Wind on Tin’ is the perfect example. Born out of an experience during a memorial service for a friend in a remote town, the track sees Williamson lean into the spiritual dimension of the desert, where the air shimmers over the land and the wind carries its own mystique and power. “We heard an unexplainable sound in the wind that made us all pause,” she explains. “Like a flute, but more angelic. It kept going. We tried, unsuccessfully, to record it. The sound was indescribably beautiful and heavenly.”

Helpless, helpless, helpless
We all sang along
There is a braid that binds us
And his thread ain’t gone
Heard a sound so heavenly
Were the angels singing just for us?
Or is that what the wind
Out here does on tin?

I heard god

Sorceress is out via Mexican Summer on the 15th May and you can pre-order it now.

Toner – Dark Ecstasy

Oakland band Toner describe their music as ‘lovers rock’, though the tag doesn’t quite get close to the noisy amalgamation of slacker, garage rock and slowcore that constitutes their sound. Last month saw the release of their brand new record, Silk Road, on Smoking Room, an album that completes the outfit’s total transformation from solo project of lead Samuelito Cruz to no holds barred rock band.

Single ‘Dark Ecstasy’ sets the tone, Cruz’s vocals perched atop of the dense sound and weaving a carefree, nocturnal air. But beneath the buoyant energy runs another force, some desperation, as though everything is slipping away with the motion of the track, leaving Cruz to reach out as they move away. “No sleep, gin on the backstreets,” he sings. “My time is on your lease just to calm / your ease but you leave.”

Karina – Teko

Helsinki duo Karin Mäkiranta and Helmi Tikkanen record under the moniker Karina, and in 2018 won critical acclaim with their self-titled debut album. Built from a sense of intimacy that veered between warm and haunting, Karina was a record of serious emotion, blending folk sensibilities with the indie rock weight of Daughter, and maintaining a certain mysteriousness too—establishing them as one of Scandinavia’s most intriguing acts.

Ahead of their second record, the aptly titled 2 that’s out on GEMS this summer, Karina has unveiled a brand new single, ‘Teko’. Weaving a detailed soundscape populated by the pair’s ethereal vocals, the track sits at the intersection of dream pop and indie rock, pushing the Karina sound in an increasingly ambitious direction. Indeed, with the peaks and troughs, ‘Teko’ has roots in post-rock too, and the transcendent climax (which in fact kicks in around halfway through and refuses to let up) packs a punch of which Sigur Ros would be proud.

2 will be released via GEMS on 3rd July.

Eliza Edens – Garden of Sound

Raised in Massachusetts and currently residing in Philadelphia, Eliza Edens weaves a delicate, finger picked brand of folk music. Taking inspiration from the slower rhythms of geological time, her debut full-length Time Away From Time removes itself from the rush of modern life to probe and ponder at a more leisurely place, finding beauty and melancholy in both nature and the process of living.

Lead track ‘Garden of Sound’ welcomes you into this world. Carved from a wistful fondness, the song balances intuition with mystery, offering a natural ambiguity where knowing and unknowing marble into something wonderful.

I lay down
In a garden of sound
And I remembered
I remembered
Inside of you
Is a place that has never been wounded
Don’t you remember?

State Park Ranger – Mountain Kin / Anodyne

Hailing from Asheville, North Carolina, State Park Ranger are a folk rock duo with an added bluesy streak. Released last month, Days Gone is a three song EP that’s paving the way for a forthcoming full-length, and each of the tracks capture a different side to the outfit that suggest the album will be both versatile and ambitious.

There’s much to admire in the gentle acoustic strum of the title track, and the hauntingly spacious hymn ‘Bright Morning Stars’, but the slow-burning ‘Mountain Kin / Anodyne’ really stands out. Shaking into life with a lazy flow, there’s a deep-set anger at the heart of the track, one that is allowed out not in melodramatic bursts of noise but rather the flat delivery and spikes of guitar. “‘Well it never ends’ is all I’ve been thinking lately,” they explain, referencing the opening line of the song. “Being caught at the bottom of the economy never allows for a break. Even being at home now, I am spending borrowed and stolen time. I don’t own my time, I’m a thief for resting, and I’m lazy if I do not desire more than what I need. Capitalism is unsustainable.”

Renée Reed – Out Loud

Born and raised in southern Louisiana, Renée Reed makes music as a continuation of a rich cultural lineage. She is the granddaughter of Cajun accordion player Harry Trahan and both her parents are Cajun musicians too. Reed is currently studying Traditional Music and French at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette and working in the Archives of the Center for Louisiana Studies, in some ways following in the footsteps of another family member, great-uncle Revon Reed who was a folklorist from Mamou, Louisiana.

Adapting the blueprint of contemporary artists such as Cate le Bon and Jessica Pratt, Renée Reed uses her music to bring this sense of history and culture into the present moment, resulting in what she describes as “dream-fi folk from the Cajun prairies.” ‘Out Loud’, Reed’s first single on the reliably excellent Keeled Scales, is a wonderful introduction. It’s a beguiling and magnetically dreamlike folk song which Reed says is about “surviving an unhealthy relationship… by embracing and being yourself fully.” Check it out below:

‘Out Loud’ is out now on Keeled Scales. Get it from the Renée Reed Bandcamp page.

That’s all folks for Vol. 34! Be sure to check out the Reviews and Previews sections for more in-depth writing, and do let us know what you’ve been listening to on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram.

The post Bright Sparks: Vol. 34 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Cold Beat – Mother

Out via DFA Records, the latest Cold Beat album, Mother, came into existence when front person Hannah Lew was expecting a child. “I found myself trying to describe our earth to a new human who had never been here,” they explain, submerged in what is undoubtedly a pessimistic age. “It was a bleak year to be pregnant, but I was simultaneously filled with so much love and hope at the same time.”

Mother is Lew’s attempt to communicate these conflicting sensations. Shot through with a binding sense of energy, the record channels the like of Au Revoir Simone in its otherworldly beauty, synths and guitars offering sparkling yet melancholic soundscapes that are constantly shifting. That said, the songs actively work against the sense of doom of our age, unearthing light amid the darkness, and finding a sense of hope and perseverance in the cycle of life.

MAITA – A Beast

Inspired by the songwriters of 2000s indie rock, from Conor Oberst to Lesley Feist, Maria Maita-Keppeler found her own artistic vision in the amalgamation of reality and poetry. The result is songs both honest and emotionally resonant, driven by the urge to communicate more deeply. “For me, songwriting comes from a place of wanting to find the truth in life,” Maita-Keppeler explains. “Sometimes that truth is so complex and nuanced that it requires a whole song to explain.”

Recording under the moniker MAITA, the Oregon-based musician works with such ideas in mind, crafting emotionally resonant tracks that look to convey what might otherwise be left unsaid. New single ‘A Beast’ is a superb example, drawing the listener in with the gentle lilt of the opening before plunging you headlong into the cold rush of the chorus. However, MAITA has a firm grip of your shoulders, and pulls you out for breath before immersing you once more.

Best Wishes will be released via Kill Rock Stars on the 3rd April and you can pre-order it now from the MAITA Bandcamp page.

Orpine – Sondern

Orpine is UK duo Eleanor Rudge and Oliver Catt, self-described migratory birds “singing in harmony 300 miles removed.” The pair had spent time together in the past, lending their talents to various bands and records, yet fell out of touch for several years before Rudge eventually reached out once more. A trip to Black Hill in the Scottish Borders entailed, and a four day writing period where the collaboration truly began.

The result was Grown Ungrown, a full-length album to be released this May on Heist or Hit. Forgoing the trappings of contemporary life, the album is a celebration of the natural and organic—tapping into the great rhythms of nature so as to create a space in which their own emotions can ebb and flow. Lead single ‘Sodern’ is a great example, a song ostensibly about loss and mourning that nevertheless finds the time to cycle through various moods and states. A seasonal song that finds not only comfort in the patterns of life, but something like awe.

Cold ice water covering my head
And a long, hard winter breaking whatever’s left
And black coal burning, warming my legs
And my old, lone island, sinking for itself

Grown Ungrown is out via Heist or Hit on the 15th May and you find Orpine on Bandcamp.

Alli Millstein – Smoke in Her Eyes

Combining folk and rock sensibilities and driven by an impressive vocal range, the music of Brooklyn songwriter Alli Millstein is an evocative trip through the emotions and vulnerabilities of modern life. New EP Psychic Distance represents an authentic and idiosyncratic experience, drawing as much on classic country rock as contemporaries such as Lucy Dacus, and capable of both urgency and dreamy patience.

Latest single ‘Smoke in Her Eyes’ is firmly in the latter camp. A slow ballad of lazy saxophone and unfurling lyrics, the song brings to mind the moving conversational power of Frederick Squire, Millstein possessing the confidence to lean into the expansive half-paced style.

There is a flame burning all day
too hot to touch it
There is a name on every page
too shy to say it

she’s on the tip of my tongue
and the skin of my hands
I sleep in her waves
and live on her land

Chase Weinacht – Leap Day

Best known as the singer of Austin band Marmalakes, Chase Weinacht records solo under his own name, and has teamed up with the ever-reliable Keeled Scales to release a brand new single, ‘Leap Day’. In contrast with the slick polish of the Marmalakes sound, Weinacht’s solo work is far more individual and textured, refusing the urge to iron out every kink or answer every question.

Such a sense of uncertainty marks ‘Leap Day’. The song is “about how big and small New York feels when you’re there with the people you’ve known for years,” Weinacht explains, “but how you can feel like an imposter in that very familiar person’s very unfamiliar-to-you world, like you can’t understand how they are so in their element in a place that feels so different from the space where you made the initial connection.” Chase Weinacht is not writing perfect answers to every ambiguity but mapping their shapes, making them known so that the common humanity there might be teased to the surface.

On a rooftop in Bushwick at 5am
I couldn’t look at you
Without almost leaning in
And if we’d been alone
I’d have had no control
but if we’d never met up
How would I have ever known

V.V. Lightbody – If It’s Not Me

Back in May last year, we wrote about ‘Babe, Honestly‘, a single by Chicago’s V.V. Lightbody on Acrophase Records. The song has a “surreal, constantly-shifting atmosphere that subverts and surpasses the genre conventions,” we wrote, noting the duality between the “delicate and hospitable sound masking a colder, more vicious tone.” Again working with Acrophase, Vivian McConnell and co. are back with a brand new full-length album, Make a Shrine or Burn It, to be released this May.

Lead single ‘If It’s Not Me’ serves as our introduction to the record. Although there might be an ambiguous space between the soft, warm sound and the lyrical themes, the bite of the previous single is replaced by something altogether more conciliatory. For rather than anger or jealousy, the song attempts to make peace with an ex and their new flame, viewing the ‘other woman’ not as some poisonous figure but a fellow human being. Treating this person “with respect and dignity,” McConnell explains, is “an important step for healing and one’s sanity.”

Make A Shrine Or Burn It will be released on the 1st May via Acrophase Records.

Grizzly Coast – Forever

Writing last year about the single ‘Half-Light Boy‘, we described the music of Alannah Kavanagh’s Grizzly Coast as “vivid […] heartbroken rock,” the song “operating within the liminal space between clinging to and moving on from someone who was once important […] a cathartic detailing of the profoundly wounding experience of another’s selfishness.”

A brand new Grizzly Coast single has just been released, and the song builds upon this style. Finding harmony between thoughtful lyricism and instrumental immediacy, ‘Forever’ is dream pop in its most potent form. The haziness of the genre is present but not overpowering, Kavanagh’s vocals cutting through the velvet tones in a forthright, confrontational manner. The result is something of a subversion of the usual conventions, a fight against the false romanticism of longing and loneliness.

Grizzly Coast is releasing her debut EP this spring, so be sure to follow on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram for more news.

Foreign Fields – Rose Colored

Hailing from Wisconsin, Foreign Fields have been crafting some of the most evocative folk music of recent years, starting with their debut record in 2012. Indebted to both the natural world and the human experience, the songs of Eric Hillman and Brian Holl have always carried a quiet grandness, melancholy and wonder wound tight into soundscapes both lonely and affirming.

Brand new album The Beauty of Survival looks set to continue this style, holding up small pockets of human warmth against the cold. Latest single ‘Rose Colored’ displays this with its fittingly moving sound. A song “about contentment and the paths we take to reach it,” the song looks into the past for answers about the present. “It is probably the most autobiographical song on the record that closely follows our path and journey in making this record.”

Merpire – Heavy Feeling

Recording as Merpire, Melbourne’s Rhiannon Atkinson-Howatt released her debut EP Endless Chatter back in 2018, a record that introduced her distinctive brand of urgent pop emotion. Leading up to an as of yet unannounced debut album, a series of singles followed that saw the sound evolve and grow. As our friends over at Swell Tone put it: “Building from acoustic beginnings, [Merpire] has developed a sound that maintains her songwriting’s signature punch of familiarity but ignites it with unexpected textures and tones to create her own mystical sonic world.”

Based around experiences of anxiety and discomfort, latest single ‘Heavy Feeling’ is a good view into the world Merpire is creating. Rich, affirming and confident, a steely-eyed glare into the face of one’s demons in the hope that they might just blink. “I write music to get those thoughts out of my head so that they seem like less of a reality I’ve created and more just thoughts that will pass,” Atkinson-Howatt explains. “This song is more straight-up lyrically, melodically, production-wise than previous releases. Straight to the point of ‘anxiety is shit so I’m going to write a loud, strummy song to get it out’.”

The debut Merpire album is on the horizon, so be sure to follow on Facebook and Instagram for further updates.

Minor Powers – Wound Like Me

Minor Powers is duo Megan Lightell and Derek Greene, partners from the Appalachian foothills who combine mountain music with indie rock to produce a bittersweet sound perfectly positioned to explore the age old themes of love and loss. Album Stones We Keep is a collection of such tracks, staying true to folk influences while adding newly emotive edges. As the Minor Powers website explains, the songs are “haunted by the past while grasping at the ephemeral nature of the present […] search[ing] for the meaning of memories and second chances.”

Single ‘Wound Like Me’ is the perfect example. The song “explores what life is without the one that chose another,” the band explain, as well as “the regret that follows.” But rather than the self-pity and melodrama of many a break-up record, Minor Powers offer something far more poignant. Embedded in the organic world, loss and longing are presented as another of nature’s cycles, persistent features of being alive.

Jordana – Crunch

The recording moniker of Wichita’s Jordana Nye, Jordana put out the record Classical Notions Of Happiness last year to some pretty impressive acclaim. Teaming up with Grand Jury Music, this March sees the re-release of that record, giving those who missed it the first time around the perfect opportunity to right the mistake and fall for Jordana’s distinctive brand of indie pop.

Despite being the closing track, latest single ‘Crunch’ is as good a place to start as any. Introducing Jordana’s knack for taking relatable vignettes and twisting them into evocative, layered weirdness, the track highlights how Nye masks her clever and often cutting writing within deceptively simple scenarios. “Crunch is a feeling of an overbearing want for validation from someone and getting the cold shoulder from them,” Nye explains. “The song starts out with the confidence in knowing this person could possibly notice you, and ends in anger and frustration seeing that they ignored you, established by a distorted guitar solo.“

Laveda – Ghost

Regular readers of VSF will recognise Laveda, the Albany duo of Jake Brooks and Ali Genevich, after we covered several releases in the past, including single ‘If Only (You Said No)’ back in November. Unbeknown to us, the song was actually part of the band’s forthcoming debut record, What Happens After, set for release this spring on Color Station.

Laveda used new single ‘Ghost’ to make the announcement. “It was the song that invented our sound,” Genevich explains. “If we had never written it I don’t think the rest of the record would sound the way that it does. It felt obvious and just right to make it the first track on the LP because it laid the foundation for all our other songs.” As we’ve come to expect, the song packs a real punch, setting up What Happens After to be one of the most anticipated dream rock albums of 2020.

Thanks for stopping on by for Vol. 33! Be sure to check out the Reviews and Previews sections for more in-depth writing, and do let us know what you’ve been listening to on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram.

The post Bright Sparks: Vol. 33 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Locate S,1 – Personalia

Recording under the moniker Locate S,1, Christina Schneider stretches the boundaries of pop to create strange, beguiling songs that play light and dark off of one another. Following a successful tour with Frankie Cosmos in 2019, Locate S,1 signed with Captured Tracks and will release their second album, Personalia, this April.

The title track is the record’s first single, and represents the ideal welcome into the world of the album. Taking it’s title from a Mary Ruefle poem, ‘Personalia’ rises from a period of personal darkness toward something brighter, its clever, determined lyrics pitched somewhere between honesty and self-deprecation. It’s a potent mix, a spell which conjures life, and by the close Schneider is fired into orbit by her own energy once again.

Almost killed myself so I went home
I just cannot take these local shows
Tom T. Hall said don’t let your music kill you
But I’m no country boy
I’m just some punk

Personalia is out on the via Captured Tracks and you can pre-order it from the Locate S, 1 Bandcamp page.

Ratboys – I Go Out At Night

After the success of previous records AOID (2015) and GN (2018), Ratboys are back this month with the third album, Printer’s Devil, on Topshelf Records. Crafted around themes of instability and change, the record seeks to make peace with upheaval by defusing the fear it brings, and such a headspace proved conducive to a real development of the band’s sound. “There’s definitely a lot of uncertainty about what’s next,” explains lead Julia Steiner. “But I like to think that, in the midst of creating a lot of vulnerability for ourselves, we’re confident and becoming more self-assured.”

Latest single ‘I Go Out at Night’ makes good on that sentiment, finding Ratboys building upon the style they’ve been developing across their previous records. Settling as a four-piece, with Marcus Nuccio (drums) and Sean Neumann (bass) joining founding duo Dave Sagan and Steiner, the project has fully transcended its acoustic beginnings while preserving the original spirit—delving into power pop, garage rock and alt-country to not only highlight the Ratboys range but also best chart the ever changing world in which it is created.

Printer’s Devil is out via Topshelf Records on the 28th February and you can pre-order it now.

Sea Offs – Will (You)

The collaborative project of songwriters Olivia Price and Rashmit Aror, Sea Offs make an atmospheric collision of folk and rock that manages to inject a tangible urgency without puncturing the enveloping ethereal tone. Released in 2017, album What’s the Point? displayed just how evocative a blend this can be. “Every moment on the album, from the dazzling highs to the locked-away lows,” we wrote, “is threaded not just with an unshakeable sense of isolation but the equally persistent suspicion that things need not always be this way.”

This spring sees the band return with a brand new release, and lead single ‘Will (You)’ shows that they have lost none of their impact. Let loose into a delicate miasma of ambient tones and driven by a deep drum beat, Price’s vocals move from crooned questioning to steely determination, eventually rising into a cathartic closing section. Thematically, the song “discusses body ownership in a relationship,” the band explain. “The detachment one can feel sexually when there is no emotional connection to serve as a basis.”

Greg Mendez – Bike

Philly native Greg Mendez has been making music since 2006, self-releasing CDs from home alongside his presence on Myspace and the not-yet blossoming DIY scene in the city. Years struggling with addiction, homelessness and mental health issues meant that his output was sporadic through the 2010s, but Mendez released his debut full-length ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ in 2017, and is now back with a brand new record, Cherry Hell.

A joint release between Forged Artifacts and Devil Town Tapes, the album represents another link the chain of American songwriting, taking the themes of Townes Van Zandt, Connie Converse and Elliott Smith and casting them in the bedroom pop spirit of today. Lead single ‘Bike’ is one such example, a song based around “wanting to change and longing to be someone else” that dreams against the restrictive nature of our one single life—pining for experiences wide and disparate so as to exist more fully, free from the accumulated dirt of our positions in the world.

Mount Sharp – Ordinary

Writing back in August, we describe Mount Sharp‘s ‘Apostate’ as a song “indebted to the past but shaped by present conditions, concerned with the personal and the political when exploring what it means to be pushed away from someone or something.” The track was the first single of forthcoming album That Shadow, a record that will finally be released this month.

To increasing the anticipation, the Brooklyn band have release a brand new single, ‘Ordinary’. Ramping up the energy from the half-paced ‘Apostate’, the track is one of jangling confidence, bringing to mind the way Nap Eyes juxtapose loose-limbed inquisitiveness and deadpan lyrics, though injecting a punk energy too. There’s a dark humour to the way the track ebbs and flows, the lulls shaking into intense collisions of noise, as though firing itself through its own gathering motion, all tied together by the cutting lyrics.

How many times before it starts to feel ordinary
How many (how many) before
Cause I heard I’ll start to feel things relatively
And I don’t know if that sounds good or bad anymore

Normal’s just what you’re used to
And you’re surprised
So find all the space your anger takes
And try not to make all of it about you

That Shadow is out on the 22nd February and you can pre-order it now from the Mount Sharp Bandcamp page.

Silo’s Choice – Annwn

Silo’s Choice is the moniker of Chicago resident Jon Massey, a musician interested in pushing the boundaries of rock to further its conceptual and political scope. Forthcoming album Twilight on the Trail dials back slightly on the more idiosyncratic elements of previous releases, allowing a sincere immediacy to flourish (“less Mahler and more Joni Mitchell,” in the words of the artist), yet still the art-rock foundations remain. As such, the record seems perfectly positioned to explore big themes without straying too far into the inhuman abstract.

Lead single ‘Annwn’ is a clear progression in this sense. Named after the otherworld of Welsh mythology, the track takes on theme of death and mourning from an oblique angle, focusing not on the usual sadness and suffering but rather the mystery life’s end. Annwn was a world of peace and eternal youth, death with the pain removed, and Silo’s Choice uses it as a foil to examine mortality in a new manner—melancholic perhaps, but also joyous, lost in the sublime of that which we do not know.

and how i long to see the old things
the old world written in the old words
consumed with my body in a long fire
and wake up to the sound of a new chord

do you float?
does your spirit sink into the earth?
i think you slip sideways into a new birth

Jesse Blake Rundle – Radishes and Flowers

“A story of longing arranged into a bed of radishes and flowers.” That’s how Jesse Blake Rundle described his latest single, aptly named ‘Radishes and Flowers’. Adapted from Wallace Stevens’s ‘Cy Est Pourtraicte, Madame Ste Ursule, et Les Unze Mille Vierges’, the song is the title track of an entire collection inspired by the poetry of Stevens, crafted to match the source material in both theme and shape.

Rundle is a self-taught musician who utilises unconventional tuning to form a singular style, an aesthetic that proves the perfect mode with which to capture the nuanced life of Stevens’s Florida. As the title track shows, Rundle’s arrangements are capable of both whimsical creeps along the small details of our world and grand swells of emotion, achieving a balance between macro and micro that makes for a striking and beautiful sound.

Ursula, in a garden, found
A bed of radishes.
She knelt upon the ground
And gathered round,
With flowers blue, gold, and green

Isadora Eden – Anhedonia

Hailing from Colorado, Isadora Eden is a songwriter who pairs dark, searching lyrics with a moody sound, ranging from intimate simplicity to something altogether fuller and more striking. The lead single from a forthcoming EP, ‘Anhedonia’ makes this apparent, its stark style lending the sound a haunting edge.

The track is produced by Corey Coffman of Gleemer, and there’s certainly a shared emotional depth between the projects, the sounds so rich and evocative that their undoubted melancholy takes on an affirming quality. Opening with little beyond a simple acoustic guitar and Eden’s poignant vocals, the track soon welcomes jags of guitar and a driving drum beat, swelling beyond its minimalist beginnings and taking on an elevated form.

i’m alone again
like i wanted to be
didn’t i say
that i wanted to be
i guess it’s easier now
i guess it’s easier now

there’s gotta be a break
someday
i don’t wanna be left behind

Shadwick Wilde – Rain

You might know Shadwick Wilde as the front man of Louisville band Quiet Hollers, though he is writing solo music too. Latest single ‘Rain’ was written after Wilde was asked to perform at the Climate Strike in 2019, in particular a song for Greta Thunberg who was in attendance via her solar powered yacht. Originally averse to the idea, Wilde latched onto a a song he had started months earlier, the line “clean on the inside, free as the sun” suddenly taking on a new meaning as this young person arrived on her boat.

With help from Sarah Balliet (of Murder by Death) on cello and Shelley Anderson on bass, Wilde crafts a sullen soundscape of dark tones, the plaintive strings weaving their way over backdrop and conjuring a place of perpetual rain. There’s a fatality to the track, though hope too, as though the narrator has given up their own future but retains a vague belief in the possibility the next generation might somehow succeed.

We’ll leave our home to you
our fugitive daughter
and all we’ve built for you
will be reclaimed by the water
giver of life and destroyer of worlds
red, gold and coral, mother of pearl

Wilde expects to release an album later this year so be sure to follow him on Twitter for more news.

Thanks for stopping on by! Be sure to check out the Reviews and Previews sections for more in-depth writing, and do let us know what you’ve been listening to on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram.

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Upset – S/T

The current project of former Best Coast and Vivian Girls drummer Ali Koehler, along with Patty Schemel, Nicole Snyder and Lauren Freeman, Upset formed in 2013 and released their debut record She’s Gone on Don Giovanni that same year. In 2015 the band put out a 10″ via Lauren Records and now are back with a self-titled album on the same label. The album continues to perfect the band’s pop-punk flecked crunchy indie rock, with songs like ‘Lucky Strikes Out’ exploring relationship woes with blazing energy. There’s even a Hollywood-style happy ending, so what’s not to like?

The Great Yawn – California

Based in Pretoria, South Africa, The Great Yawn are a country folk band led by singer-songwriter Danielle Bakkes. Following on from this year’s full-length album, Botanica, the band are back with a brand new single ‘California’. Offering a sultry yet tongue-in-cheek take on the the West Coast culture, the song scores its syrupy, dreamy style with a cutting satirical edge, evoking chlorined pools and toned bodies and those superficial fantasies we know to be false yet secretly pine for all the same.

The track comes complete with a video to further these ideas, directed by Susan van Tonder with cinematography by Heleen van Tonder, and you can watch it below:

Botanica is out now and you can find The Great Yawn on Spotify and Apple Music.

Point No Point – Don’t Cancel Your Plans

Point No Point is the recording project of multi-instrumentalist Jana Sotzko, a renowned figure in the Berlin music scene known for the likes of Soft Grid, Dropout Patrol and many more. The new Point No Point album, Drift, marks a return to the early experimentation of Sotzko’s career, moving away from the rigid planning and attention to detail that represented the Soft Grid style in favour of something more impulsive and impromptu. The result is a release that lives up to its name, a drifting collection of songs, unguided by anything beyond the mysterious natural rhythm of things.

‘Don’t Cancel Your Plans’ encapsulates this new mindset. With its spacious, patient sound, the track is sparse yet undeniably warm in its own peculiar way, and Sotzko’s distinctive vocals are equally captivating, sitting next to the likes of Dear Nora in their confident, idiosyncratic flow.

K. Campbell – Chords Come Easy / Static Threads

We wrote about K. Campbell back in April when he released his album Heads Up on Poison Moon Records. “Taking the DIY aesthetic of punk and hardcore and filtering it through the more refined lens of power pop,” we wrote, “Campbell […] retains the immediacy and personality of the former while gaining the polish of the latter, allowing for songs that are as affective as they are precise.”

November saw the release of a new double single, Chords Come Easy / Static Threads, which develops this aesthetic further. Belonging to the same family as the work of Beat Radio, ‘Chords Come Easy’ is a nostalgic slice of lo-fi rock that celebrates the power of creating art, while ‘Static Threads’ adds a jangling warmth to the mix, maintaining a wistful air but not dwelling on the past.

no reason to look back if you accept the fact
that our days will end with simple math
and static threads

nutrients – always in bloom

Toronto quintet Nutrients specialise in sweet and snappy songs, borrowing from slacker rock and dream pop and some psychedelic tones too to create tracks both bright and soft. After a series of self-released tapes, last month saw the band release their self-titled debut on Earth Libraries—a record that embraces the warm, relaxed style that Nutrients have made their own.

This is made clear on single ‘Always in Bloom’, a sub-two-minute track that punches above its short run-time. Because, in contrast to its succinctness, the song is mellow and loose, not rushing toward a conclusion but ambling slowly, taking in the hazy atmosphere through which it moves.

tumble, tumble on down
down where those prickly plants
and the evergreens are always in bloom
seeing double
see twice or vice versa
exercise all the second thoughts you can’t bare to lose

Nutrients is out now on Earth Libraries and available from Bandcamp.

Winter – Nothing More

Hailing from Curitiba in Brazil, Samira Winter moved to Boston at eighteen and started recording under the moniker Winter. The project combines the gauzy dream pop of the Cocteau Twins with something a little more psychedelic, resulting in a sound that is at once immersive and surreal.

After a series of successful bilingual releases, Winter are now teaming up with Bar None Records for a brand new EP, Hazy. Taking the band in newly lo-fi direction, the EP draws influences from the bedroom aesthetic to strip back the layers of previous material, allowing for a more intimate, direct sound. Lead single ‘Nothing More’ is a good example, showing off the conversational tone of the release, and it’s nuanced take on what it means to be in love.

Cayley Thomas – Midnight Hours

Based in Edmonton, singer, guitarist and songwriter Cayley Thomas is set to release her debut record, How Else Can I Tell You?. An album that “reflect[s] upon a period of subconscious overwhelm and the subsequent shift into conscious thought and awareness,” the songs blur the line between studio richness and home charm, managing to achieve a vivid pop sound without sacrificing any of the personal wrinkles that give them their charm.

Lead single ‘Midnight Hours’ is a great example of this. A pop song with an eccentric edge, the track proves accessible but also disarmingly weird, as though below the polished surface lies a whole world, strange and deep. The video, which Thomas co-directed with Sam at Bootjack Video, furthers this sensation, leading the viewer through all of the window dressing in order to get closer to the essence of one’s thoughts.

Keep an eye on the Cayley Thomas website for more information on How Else Can I Tell You? 

Teen Idle – Dreaming

The recording project of New Jersey-based songwriter Sara Barry, Teen Idle fuses the heartsick melodrama of 60s love ballads with the downbeat and languorous tones of 90s slowcore. The result is a melancholic sound clouded by love, so richly textured that you feel you could lean back into it and never quite fall through. New single ‘Dreaming’ is the perfect example, emerging from a slow and wistful opening that sets the tone from the off, the track possessing a smooth, elegiac tone that threatens to rise into some great crescendo but instead meanders on in its restraint.

I know you want to leave these familiar streets
The city weeps
When the moon fades
There will be no light
If you’d be mine

Leggy – Not What You Need

Back in March, Cincinnati trio Leggy released their latest album, Let Me Know Your Moon, on Sheer Luck Records and cemented their place among the most exciting and interesting indie rock bands plying their trade today. “[Leggy’s] punk rock possesses an inner tension,” we wrote in a preview piece. “Both the sound and Allaer’s lyrics having a tautness that always appears on the verge of snapping, lending an atmosphere that is both engaging and slightly volatile, a provocative spirit that threatens to unravel at any moment.”

With the album receiving praise and the year seeing Leggy tour with the likes of The Ophelias, Summer Cannibals, Pile, The Spook School and Personal Best, the band are closing out 2019 with a brand new video for ‘Not What You Need’. Directed by Jo Shaffer, the film is a celebration of what Leggy does best, blending dreamy shimmers and nostalgic longing with something far more confrontational, all topped off with a playful air that adds further layers to the tone. Check it out below:

Let Me Know Your Moon is out now via Sheer Luck Records and available via the Leggy Bandcamp page.

So with Vol. 31, that’s Bright Sparks done for another year. Be sure to check out the Reviews and Previews sections for more in-depth writing, and keep you eyes peeled for our end of year lists in the coming weeks.

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Rat Tally – Feel Something

The recording project of LA’s Addy Harris, Rat Tally makes an emo-inflected brand of indie rock, exploring tortured emotion and mental health struggles in a manner at once wistful and fierce.  New single ‘Feel Something’ is a perfect example. A song about depression and self-sabotage, Harris delves into the competing horrors of feeling bad and feeling nothing at all. “When you feel depressed and numb, and you’ll stop at nothing to feel anything at all,” she explains, “even if it means emotionally hurting yourself and sometimes the people around you.” Gathering momentum as it progresses, the track becomes both an expression of regret and something of an explanation, and thus a drive to continue forwards nonetheless.

But I just want to feel something
Even if I end up spitting out blood
I told you you’d get used to it
I think I always knew you never would
But I just want to feel something
Even if you end up spitting out blood
When you’re finally done with it
I’ll tell you I always knew one day you’d run

EL LAGO – Pyramid

Existing at the intersection of shoegaze, dream pop and post-punk, EL LAGO’s Pyramid is a nocturnal record, ominous and dark and shot through with shimmering points of light. Released last month on Wallflower Records, the EP packs a genuine sense of variety, from the brusque, Patio-esque detachment of ‘Moths’ to the breathless, soaring shoegaze of the title track. However, each track is linked by a common spirit, all existing in a mysterious twilit space where threat and wonder stand side by side.

Lead single ‘Citadel’ is as good an introduction as any. Kicking into dinghy rhythm, the song holds a promise at its heart, though whether this is a promise of awe or violence is left unsaid. As such, there’s an unhinged intensity to the sound, like Bambara’s crazed preacher vibe, or something that might roll through the Roadhouse in Twin Peaks.

Pyramid is out now on Wallflower Records and you can grab it from the EL LAGO Bandcamp page.

Will Orchard – Turning Back Again

Working under the moniker LittleBoyBigHeadOnBike, Will Orchard wrote and released hundreds of songs a year, his Bandcamp featuring a vast array of experimental and colourful albums that stitched a giant patchwork of his creative influences. After much touring, Orchard decided to reinvent his practice, focusing on less tracks for a longer period of time and putting them out under his own name.

The result is Old Friends on the Mountain, an album made with engineer Jeff Prystowsky (The Low Anthem) that is concerned with loss and longing ” for lost imagination, friends long gone, and memories slipping away.” Ahead of its release next January, Orchard has unveiled the lead single, ‘Turning Back Again’, showing off his more cohesive, Americana-inspired sound. The tone is certainly nostalgic, and therefore focused on things now lost, though cast in a fond light—committed to bringing to life those moments, however mundane or ordinary, that help us become ourselves.

Katie Kuffel – Jelly Donut

Back in October of last year, we had the honour of sharing Take It Up, the debut album from Seattle-based songwriter Katie Kuffel. The record was one “of complete authenticity,” we wrote. “All pretences have been dropped, all half-truths abandoned, every wrinkle of self-doubt examined and ironed out.” In cherry picking the best bits from blues, jazz, folk and pop, Kuffel’s piano-led sound is capable of being fun as well as emotionally deep, tied together by a sense of live energy that her soulful vocal style only grows.

Kuffel is back with a brand new single, ‘Jelly Donut’, a track which develops on the sound of the record. Revolving around ideas of recovery and healing in the face of trauma, there is once again a serious weight at the core, though that is only half of the story. Replete with an energetic groove and smoky charisma, a fluid confidence permeates the sound, producing an affirming mood that’s as enlivening as it is infectious. Check out the video from Amphora Media below:

Alex Chilltown – Drown

Alex Chilltown is the recording project of Croydon’s Josh Esaw, and their debut record Eulogies is very much a product of that south London milieu—a blend of dream pop and art rock for the hyperreal present, a place of concrete and tarmac and a constant bustle toward a future that no-one can quite imagine, so is instead painted as another cycle of the past.

Lead single ‘Drown’ gives a taste as to what to expect. Threaded by a taut energy and a richly intricate sound, the song has pressing tone, unfurling in a relentless flow. “I wanted to write something that felt urgent,” Esaw explains. “It represents a lot of anxieties I was having about myself and that’s why it has that kind of tightness to it like when your brain is stuck in an anxious thought pattern and you’re crippled with indecision but also can’t stop ruminating on that.”

Eulogies will be released on the 24th January via Fear of Missing Out Records and you can pre-order it from the Alex Chilltown Bandcamp page.

French for Rabbits – Highest Hill

Led by Brooke Singer, New Zealand dream pop band French For Rabbits make an ethereal, layered brand of music. Their previous record, The Weight of Melted Snow, released on Home Alone Music and Muscle Beach Records, was translucent and melancholic and alive, the songs the musical equivalent of a sea mist that drifts in with a beguiling hush and settles upon your skin.

‘Highest Hill’, sees French for Rabbits perfect the style, the muted atmosphere showing that emotional resonance need not resort to bombast or melodrama. Working with Misma Andrews, the band set out to record a video with Lucifer the cat and dogs Pepa and Jolene, though with too much footage and/or a reluctance to cut, they ended up crafting two films for the same track—the cat version and the dog version. You can see the one for the far superior animal below:

You can find French for Rabbits on Bandcamp, and find out about the upcoming tour dates on their website.

Lazy Legs – Silkworm

We’ve written about Portland, OR’s Lazy Legs a few times in the past, from their self-titled debut in 2016 to last year’s single, ‘Nosebleed‘. The latter was taken from a new record, Moth Mother, and we’re finally getting close to release, with the album out on the 15th November.

In the preview, we suggested that the new record would see Lazy Legs “orbiting closer to their grunge and slowcore influences,” and latest single ‘Silkworm’ continues the trend. Finding a shuffling rhythm from the tape hiss intro, Laura Wagner’s vocals shimmer across the track before an almighty crunch of sound, drums and guitar and bass clattering into a reverb-drenched crescendo. From here the track ebbs and flows, settling into brief moments of peace before diving headlong into the noise once more.

The Big Easy – Nothing Comes for Free

The recording project of Stephen Berthomieux and friends, The Big Easy makes a distinctive blend of bedroom pop and garage rock that leans into the lo-fi aesthetic as a route toward authenticity. From now until February, The Big Easy will release a brand new single on the first Friday of every month, and ‘Nothing Comes for Free’ is the first entry in the series.

With fuzzed out guitar and a drum machine whirring behind, Berthomieux puts his vocals through a guitar amp to give them a distorted edge too, his voice almost becoming another instrument in weaving the rich texture of the sound. Thematically, the title does the talking, exploring ideas of uncertainty in the face of our costly society.

Two packs a day is more than just a goal of mine
cause then they find my ashes they’re be nothing left that’s mine
and every fucking time that i find i spend the night
life’s like every episode of twilight zone
something must be wrong
i never trust myself

People Person – Bound

Coming from the abrasive world of post-metal and hardcore, People Person is a project that aims to take aggression and ferocity and channel them into a more thoughtful, considered sound. The result, album Look Outside, Watch Closely, is somewhere between post-rock, bedroom pop and ambient, the sound rising from confessional whispers to something intense and soaring. If heaviness comes in a variety of forms, People Person are keyed into the nuances.

Lead single ‘Bound’ is a case in point. Opening with a despondent pop-rock style in the vein of Daughter of Julien Baker, the song intensifies gradually, the band displaying a real expertise in the balance between build and payoff. The result is something more intricate that the one-speed rush of hardcore while avoiding the self-indulgence of post-rock, creating a sound at once vast and immediate.

Alexander Biggs – Madeleine

Australian songwriter Alexander Biggs makes music haunted by a sense of loneliness and loss, as though something important has gone missing from our times. Through poignant arrangements and evocative folk melodies, Biggs brings such emotions to life, binding it all together with his earnest vocal style somewhere between Conor Oberst and Phoebe Bridgers.

Brand new single ‘Madaleine’ is described as an “observational piece,” collating several toxic relationships to paint something of a caricature—a person violent and volatile and suffering, lashing out as though to share some of the pain they are subjected to. Loaded with starkly beautiful lyrics and possessing a tenderness despite the bitter tone, the track is caught between two poles: the immediacy of hurt not lessened but matched by the slow sadness of understanding.

That’s all for Vol. 30 of Bright Sparks folks, but be sure to stick around the Reviews and Previews sections for more in-depth writing.

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Ganser – Buio

Chicago post-punk outfit Ganser are set to release a new EP, You Must Be New Here next week. “We keep saying this EP feels like a confectionery,” explains Nadia Garofalo, though if this has you expecting something sugary sweet and superficial then you would be very much mistaken. Because far from being throwaway, nutritionally-poor treats, “[Confectionery] can hold significant symbolism, seen as a more precious sustenance, celebratory, comforting or a show of gratitude.” Garofalo continues. “We assign moral weight to them and to ourselves for consuming them, ‘I’ve been so bad’ or ‘I shouldn’t.’”

Led by Alicia Gaines, single ‘Buio’ gives an insight into what to expect, complete with a confectionery filled video. With an angular and pervasive tempo, the track forms uncomfortable atmosphere, unease extending into the lyrics too. “I won’t pretend I know anymore,” sings Gaines, “I don’t even know what I like anymore.” The mood serves as an interesting exploration of the artist-audience relationship, as well as wider concerns related to authenticity and truth within any form of communication.

You Must Be New Here is out on the 8th November and you can pre-order it now from the Ganser Bandcamp page.

A.S. Wilson – Taken Apart

‘Taken Apart’ is the first single from Convinced Friend, the forthcoming album from Providence, RI-based songwriter A.S. Wilson. The song introduces an aesthetic that’s rooted in stark emotionally-wrought folk a la Jurado or Bazan. Wilson says the album will “deal with characters realizing that suffering doesn’t make us unique,” and so perhaps unsurprisingly it’s on the downtempo end of the spectrum. But there’s more to A.S. Wilson than mopey folk. There’s a glimmer around the edges, supple and gauzy dream pop elements illuminate the track from within, resulting in something that’s ultimately quietly uplifting. Something that, as Wilson puts it, might “open the door past solipsism into empathy.”

‘Taken Apart’ is out now and available via the A.S. Wilson Bandcamp page, and keep your eyes peeled for further news on Convinced Friend in spring 2020.

Béret – Book of Hera

Béret is the project of Seattle’s Ian Kurtis Crist, who makes Velvet Underground style minimalist post-punk. The new Béret record, Jesus White, is out later this month on Born Yesterday Records, and in the meantime we have some advanced singles to increase the anticipation.

Latest offering ‘Book of Hera’ promises to be one of the album’s “emotional peaks”, a song that Crist tells Post-Trash is intended to explore the “blurriness between the want and the need for human compassion and understanding.” It’s a good introduction to Jesus White precisely because it sounds quite unlike anything else on the record. Béret’s approach is at once careful and intuitive, the songs fitting together more like elements of an artwork than a traditional album. All of which means Jesus White is one to spend some time with once it’s released.

Joel Jerome – There’s Nothing Here To Bother You Anymore

The latest offering from Dangerbird Records‘ Microdose singles series (like the Milly release we wrote about last month), ‘There’s Nothing Here To Bother You Anymore’ shows off the psychedelic folk talents of California’s Joel Jerome at their very best. Blending a sunny energy with a western twang and a slice of psychedelic heartbreak, the single is firmly rooted in the bittersweet rhythms of life.

The song therefore has a dual spirit, on the one hand perfect for soundtracking the warmest days with its effervescent air, yet also possessing a wistful tone, as though all the while aware that the seasons pass all the same.

‘There’s Nothing Here To Bother You Anymore’ is out now via Dangerbird Records.

Hit Like A Girl – No More Dysphoria

Hit Like A Girl is the recording project of Nicolle Maroulis from Montclair, New Jersey, starting out as an acoustic solo endeavour before evolving into a full band. Maroulis also runs the non-profit No More Dysphoria, which seeks to provide emotional and financial support for people going through the transition process.

The band and charity operate according to the same aim, and latest single ‘No More Dysphoria’ is something like a title track for Maroulis’s work. Describing themselves as a “non-binary Rosie The Riveter for young adults struggling with their identity,” Maroulis uses Hit Like A Girl as a vehicle for their goals, extending the support they offer to LGBTQ+ people from the practical stuff of the non-profit to the intangible but no less important influence of music, showing that identity need not be a barrier to art, and furthermore can act as the binding force within a community.

Carpet City – Little Longer

The solo recording project of Jack Ventimiglia, Carpet City makes a downbeat and emotionally resonant brand of bedroom pop. So far we only have debut single ‘Little Longer’ to go on, though the track marks the act as one to watch for sure. With its moody, melancholic sound that nevertheless captures a distinctive empathy, the song reminds us that emotions are temporary, that “feelings are just feelings, and they will pass eventually.” The trick is therefore to ride out the storm. As Ventimiglia continues, “When it seems hopeless, you just need to wait a little longer.”

asking for a friend
how you been doin
in this crazy world
with your crazy heart
won’t it fall apart again?

it only hurts right now
just a little longer

Zachary Lucky – Didn’t Know That You’d Come Along

A songwriter in the traditional sense of the word, Saskatoon’s Zachary Lucky cut his musical teeth on the road, playing hundreds of dates a year as he blew through towns and played his songs to whoever was listening. “I never felt the need to come home” he says, “because there was never anything waiting for me there.” Fast forward a decade and things are changing, a family waiting at home in Ontario changing his whole perspective.

Forthcoming album Midwestern confronts the change, delving into the experiences of fatherhood as well as change both personal and global, wondering whether his daughters will experience the same Canadian prairies that he found himself traversing. Lead single ‘Didn’t Know That You’d Come Along’ serves as an introduction into Lucky’s new situation, balancing the joy of kinship with the allure of the road and seeing which way the scales fall.

Seen the sun rise over the mountain peaks
I drove a thousand miles to feel so free
I always thought I would die alone
I didn’t know you would come along

Midwestern is out on the 18th October and you can pre-order it now.

Maya Lucia – preteen

When Maya Lucia was in high school, she told her friends that she liked a boy, only for the guy to find out and come up with the coup de grace of any adolescent. “Isn’t she like a preteen?” he asked, perhaps aware of the insult or perhaps not. Either way, the experience forms the basis of ‘preteen’, the first single from Lucia latest EP, lashing out, where Lucia reclaims the term to describe “someone who is constantly lashing out and just upset[ing] everyone.

Where her previous releases were firmly in the love ballad camp, the song marks a change of direction, pushing into a rambunctious garage rock sound while still giving her strong vocals room to hold centre stage. The result is as sweet and stroppy as any moody child, so lean into your angsty side and let Maya Lucia take you back to the melodrama of youth.

Wintersleep – Free Fall / Fading Out

Mainstays of the Canadian indie rock canon, Wintersleep have made a habit of writing anthemic and often existential songs that run the gamut between triumphant and brooding. In the wake of full-length album In the Land Of, released this March and earning a place on the Polaris Prize longlist, the band are releasing two singles, ‘Free Fall’ and ‘Fading Out’.

Led by Paul Murphy’s distinctive vocals, the songs continue Wintersleep’s career-long exploration of the line between awe and dread, taking on issues both personal and political with a palpable weight and beauty. Following a recurring theme in Murphy’s work, ‘Fading Out’ pitches human fragility against an inorganic tide of chemicals and electronics, as well as dealing with the death of a loved one. Leaning more toward prog rock, ‘Free Fall’ instead confronts the death of a relationship, though again within a soundscape that far exceeds such personal intentions.

‘Free Fall’ comes complete with a video directed, animated and edited by Christopher Mills of Number Four Films, which you can check out below:

Free Fall / Fading Out is out now via Dine Alone Records and you can get it now.

ahem – Try Again

Minneapolis trio ahem released their debut EP Just Wanna Be back in 2016 on Forged Artifacts, blending boisterous punk and indie rock into a sweet ‘n sour mix of blown out guitars and vocal harmonies. After a follow up EP last year, the band are once again teaming up with Forged Artifacts to unveil their full-length record, Try Again.

Lead single ‘Sideways’ sees the return of ahem’s trademark energy, the guitars weaving a bright and infectious sense of momentum that sweeps up the listener and delivers them to cathartic release. The wistful lulls in the racket hint at another side to the band, and second single ‘No Kid (Gold Star)’ embraces the quiet/loud dynamic too, pitching reflective introspection into the moments of quiet, then riding the crests of the guitars to arrive at a sense of certainty.

Coral – find me wrong

Coral is the recording project of Miranda Coral Engholm, a swede who grew up a “theatre kid” Österlen but views songwriting as her favoured mode of expression. “I like the intimacy of it,” Engholm explains. “Sometimes when I listen to a song it can feel like a complete stranger is suddenly standing in my living room talking about something really personal.”

Such a connection drives all of Coral’s work. For Miranda it’s really important to stay genuine and tangible as an artist, so this feeling of connection is something she wishes to achieve with her own music. “Like someone wrote it in their diary and it just happened to rhyme.” Debut single ‘find me wrong’ certainly achieves such intimacy, spinning a tale of tender love and fear of loss. Check out the suitably affectionate video below:

find me wrong is out now via Feverish and available from the Coral Bandcamp page.

That’s all for Vol. 29 of Bright Sparks, but be sure to stick around the Reviews and Previews sections for more in-depth writing.

The post Bright Sparks: Vol. 29 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Husbands – Mexico

Husbands are a duo separated by geography, Danny Davis living in Seattle and Wil Norton in Oklahoma City. If the circumstances go some way to explaining their forthcoming album’s lengthy gestation (After the Gold Rush Party had been planned for 2016) then they are not apparent on the songs themselves. There’s something of the late 00s buzz band aesthetic at work, sun-bleached rock unafraid to dip its toe into the dreamy, tropical ends of the genre. However, as single ‘Mexico’ shows, the tracks come complete with undercurrents of something more morose—like shadows and sudden breezes, or the sunset sorrow of summer evenings.

“I spent last summer housesitting with my wife in Costa Rica,” Davis explains. “I spent the summer surfing, writing music and playing poker with the locals. It was the best time of our lives, but it also wrecked us.” Because the trip was something of an eye-opener, not so much in terms of what was in Costa Rica, but rather what was waiting back home. “We came back to Seattle, disillusioned about our days spent looking at code, working in cubes working 9-5s with no end in sight.” ‘Mexico’ is the response, a single based around the type of pipe dream fantasy that we know will never happen, yet lean on nonetheless.

Kelly Hoppenjans – If I Had You

Channeling the spirit of riot grrrl while maintaining a folk sensibility, Nashville’s Kelly Hoppenjans makes music of empowerment, facing up to expectations and staring them down. Her debut full-length, OK, I Feel Better Now, is an album about breaking moulds and realising your true self, encouraging people to fill their own space in the world without apology or embarrassment.

Single ‘If I Had You (Love Letter From A Padded Cell)’ is a case in point. Exaggerating and subverting the bunny boiler ex trope, the song confronts the glorification of obsession and fixation in relationships, asking why creepy and/or violent situations are held up as romantic or honorable. “I’d do anything to keep you, if I had you,” Hoppenjans sings amid the buoyant sound, the unhinged heart of the track dressed in brightness. “The album, as a whole, deals with the experience of being a woman in the world and accessing our power as women,” she explains. “I feel there is so much power in taking control of the narrative around the so-called ‘crazy ex-girlfriend,’ and saying, ‘You think that’s crazy? Oh no, this is crazy’.”

OK, I Feel Better Now is out on the 18th October.

Leah Dunn – Oakland

Based in the Bay Area in California, Leah Dunn is a songwriter with diverse influences, from the folk majesty of Joni Mitchell to the atmosphere and noise of Sonic Youth and My Bloody Valentine. Released earlier this summer, her first EP Oakland displays how perfect such a marriage is, combining tenderness with a brooding atmosphere to create authentic and emotional songs driven by Dunn’s insistent vocals.

The title track is a perfect introduction for new listeners. Rising to life from a wistful wash of field recordings and reflective guitar, Dunn’s delivery emerges with the gentle croon of a lullaby. The lyrics themselves are concerned with something lost, an unease that works in juxtaposition to the sound, though soon a defiant refrain is found, repeating itself like mantra and growing in impact with every cycle.

I gave my soul to a lonesome mystery

Gutter Sparrow – Sheridan

Gutter Sparrow is the recording project of John Mosloskie. After previously writing and singing for Holler Wild Rose, Mosloskie set out solo, releasing his debut, The Fear of Forgotteness in 2017. The record was a lesson in patient, melancholic folk music, songs carved out of the intricacies of history and relationships and shaped into sad and striking sounds.

With the follow-up album, The Waker Dreams, set for release this autumn, Gutter Sparrow has unveiled a brand new single that continues such a style. The intimacy and warmth of ‘Sheridan’ is indicative of Moslokie’s sound, warm and fond and possessing the Kozelekian knack for sounding conversational and poetic in the same breath.

The Waker Dreams is out on the 25th October on Meadowlands Records and you can find more on the Gutter Sparrow website.

Soot Sprite – Bleed

Exeter trio Soot Sprite operate at the intersection of shoegaze and bedroom pop, crafting songs polished with an alternative sheen that lends a real intensity to the emotion. Set for release next month via Specialist Subject Records, their latest EP, Sharp Tongue, develops this aesthetic into something moody and dark but human too, balancing a simmering anger against vulnerability, a willingness to open up.

Lead single ‘Bleed’ is our first taste of the release, a track which finds an insistent rhythm yet is willing to change when needs be, breaking down into a heavy reverberation at the midpoint. Thematically, the song charts the insidious harm of friendship turned sour. ‘Bleed’ is about “toxic friendships and recognising them in your life and in others,” explains lead Elise Cook. “It’s all the niggling signs of someone acting like your friend and confidant whilst casually putting you down and chipping away at your self esteem, and the damage that leaves.”

Fime – Solo/Together

Based in Los Angeles, Beto Brakmo, Chase Cook and Maxine Garcia combine to form Fime, an alt rock band indebted to the genre’s 90s heyday. Recorded and produced by Melina Duterte (AKA Jay Som), Fime’s latest EP is set for release on the 11th October and you can hear the first single now.

‘Solo/Together’ utilises a quiet/loud dynamic to huge effect, crafting a sound that is smoky and sultry one minute then soaring the next. “How do you see without (Absolutely knowing)?” they demand in the cathartic refrain. “How do you feel without (Absolutely knowing)?” The song comes complete with an excellent video directed by Hailey Ruffner, so be sure to check that out below.

Sprawl is set for release on the 11th October and you can find Fime on Bandcamp.

Kate Teague – Sweetheart

“I’m just trying to be as real as possible,” says Oxford, Mississippi songwriter Kate Teague. “My songs are like journal entries. And I rarely filter myself.” Her self-titled debut EP is a product of such an artistic style, a rich tapestry of emotions that nevertheless maintains a near conversational tone. The balance is an interesting one, allowing Teague to delve into a kind of natural poetry, the incidental poetry of daydreams where the various strands of any given moment stitch into a beautiful whole.

The final single from the EP, ‘Sweatheart’ shows all this and more, playing subtlety and directness off against one another, both in terms of the sound and lyrical style. Because, for all of the delicate melodies and rich arrangements, there is a steely centre to the song that refuses to concede an inch to expectations. “Don’t call me sweetheart, I can frown if I want to,” Teague declares, breaking the romantic tropes of the folk genre to reclaim respect and autonomy. “Is the smile on my face that makes you feel you can put me to shame?”

Kate Teague is out on the 20th September and you can pre-order it now.

Sea Caves – Dart

Led by singer Sydney Rohrs and writer Shiloh Halsey, Sea Caves are a band interested in the rhythms of life—how circumstances, feelings and emotions can often be found to exist in recognisable patterns. These shapes might be hidden in the ground-level experience of every day living, but a slight change of vantage or remove from the usual conditions reveals them all the same. Sea Caves operate on such a level, creating music to be experienced rather than analysed, though closer looks will find a considered engagement with (or subversion of) forms and patterns.

As new single ‘Dart’ attests, the ability to recognise such patterns can be a source of optimism, allowing one to move beyond and start afresh. “You get into these rhythms,” Halsey explains, “but when those rhythms start to dissolve, you look to find them and they’re just not there. So you learn to recognize and explore new ones.” Change, however painful and uncertain, can be a force for good.

Beautiful Dudes – Shape I’m In

Led by Tom Bevitori, Nevada City’s Beautiful Dudes make what they describe as “rocking real dude music.” Set for release with the ever-reliable Mama Bird Recording Co., their self-titled debut out this autumn promises to be a return to classic punk rock, foregoing any experimentation or frivolity in favour of a high-energy commitment to the cause.

The album’s first single, ‘Shape I’m In’ explores the reality that lurks behind even our best days. A ‘pink cloud’ is the transient feeling of contentment and joy that come with early sobriety, and the song is positioned in the aftermath of such an experience, where the positivity has fallen away. “It felt so empowering to believe in the concept of freedom,” Bevitori explains, “and to be such a positive force with a mindset for change. But when the cloud went away, I was left with the weight of life, wavering health, and the emotional burdens of society. In the end, all the realness of life is still there, and when the cloud opens up, we are left living with life on life’s terms.”

Radio is to be released via Mama Bird Recording Co on the 28th October and you can pre-order it now.

That’s all for Vol. 28 of Bright Sparks, but be sure to stick around the Reviews and Previews sections for more in-depth writing.

The post Bright Sparks: Vol. 28 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Bad Flamingo – Fire

“Give a man a mask,” said Oscar Wilde, “and he will tell you the truth.” The mysterious band Bad Flamingo have taken the idea to heart, favouring a cryptic anonymity that goes right through to actual masks. Without biographical details clouding the mix, we’re left to focus on the music, with new single ‘Fire’ showing off an ethereal Western atmosphere that creeps and crawls into a sparse yet infectious rhythm. The result is something pitched halfway between cowboy swagger and soulful pop, sounding inviting yet also dangerous too, as though a sharp edge lurks beneath the croon.

The track comes complete with a suitably atmospheric Super 8 video, so be sure to check it out below:

You can find more on Bad Flamingo via their website, and follow them on Facebook and Instagram.

Garden Centre – Wide Sea

In preparation for the release of their third album, A Moon for Digging, on Specialist Subject Records and Kanine Records, Brighton’s Garden Centre has unveiled a brand new single. ‘Wide Sea’ shows off a new full-band Garden Centre line-up, with principle songwriter Max Levy joined by members of Porridge Radio for a newly collaborative sound. Not that Levy’s distinctive style is in any way ironed out, the track full of the strange curiosity and energy that has long represented the Garden Centre sound.

“‘Wide Sea’ is a song about being incredibly worried about somebody, and to devoting yourself to worry,” the band explain, though insist the track is actually positive. “Coming through a period of constant fear for a person you love can peel the glue from your eyes. The horizon can overwhelm you with an accepting vastness, and you can find a little bit of comfort again in being unable to know or control the world around you.”

A Moon For Digging is out on the 1st November via Specialist Subject Records (UK)/Kanine Records (US).

Nina Keith – In The Woods We Both Saw It, Weren’t Dreaming

Nina Keith is a Philadelphia-based composer, who is about to release her debut full-length  MARANASATI 19111. Built from “textured piano arrangements laced with vocals, flute, electronics and found sounds,” the album builds on foundations of contemporary classical music to create something something uniquely haunted and human. For a record that promises to delve into a “personal history marked by community tragedy and paranormal incidents,” lead single ‘ In The Woods We Both Saw It, Weren’t Dreaming’ is the perfect introduction, if just for that title alone. The piano-led track is quietly moving and oddly reassuring, a lament and a balm rolled into one. It’s a confident and distinctive taste of an album that could be very special indeed.

Antonioni – Stutter-Step

Returning with a new EP, The Odds Were All Beating Me, Seattle’s Antonioni have evolved from the languorous jangle rock of previous release Lullablaze into something altogether heavier and darker. While their past music flirted with grunge, the new is a full-bodied embrace, the powerful vocals of Sarah Pasillas driving a newfound energy and emotional immediacy.

Single ‘Stutter-Step’ is the perfect example, weaving lines of insistent energy into a hefty whole, meaning that the sound has both an urgency and a deeper, slow-burning dimension too. The track comes complete with a video by artist  Kyle Todaro, with the improv choreography of Matte Demon.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzjbyahC2G4

The Odds Were All Beating Me is out now via Den Tapes and you can grab it from the Antonioni Bandcamp page.

Side Saddle – Ink & Dirty Strings

The recording project of New York’s Ian McGuinness, Side Saddle make a reflective brand of power pop that balances joy and angst to the perfect degree. Ahead of the forthcoming EP, Waltermelon, the band have unveiled lead single ‘Ink & Dirty Strings’, a track that shows off Side Saddle’s ability to combine moods to craft their own style. Charting the choppy waters of a long distance relationship, the track is at once melancholic and energetic, as though only through missing someone can you truly appreciate what they mean to you.

Special Friend – Before

Special Friend is a Paris-based duo raised from a cocktail of 90s genres, drawing on grunge, shoegaze and pop to create something lusciously textured and hazy, Erica (drums) and Guillaume (guitar) sharing the vocals. The press release describes a “naive, honest and spontaneous DIY nature” that saw the band play their first show after four months and record an EP a year later, and something of this attitude shapes the sound of debut single ‘Before’, providing a sense of wonder that permeates the track.

Filmed by Marion Sautron and edited by Erica, the single’s video is “an existential crisis on a background of light, even joyful music,” taking inspiration from David Hockney’s pink clouds.  Check it out below:

‘Before’ is out via Howlin Banana Records.

Cartalk – Noonday Devil

Cartalk is the solo project of LA-based songwriter Chuck Moore who took the moniker from a text to a dear friend—”Love our car talks.” If such conversations are intimate and thematically fluid then Cartalk is determined to create a similar feel in the music, blending grunge and Americana into something heartfelt and full of momentum.

New single ‘Noonday Devil’ is a case in point, the guitars swelling and drums galloping as Moore rides the crest. Lyrically, the song is reflective but self-consciously so, recognising how patterns and conventions can shape the passage of time. Cartalk is here to dismantle such order, freeing one to live in the way that best suits them.

It’s a sentence break
Comma between patterns
Oh the love you gave
I’ve got a noonday devil

Justin Peter Kinkel-Schuster – Educated Guesses

You probably know Justin Peter Kinkel-Schuster’s voice if not his name. As the lead of Water Liars he proved himself a master of walking the line between folk and indie rock, combining great writing, expressive delivery and powerful instrumentation. The Arkansasan now has a burgeoning solo career, and is set to release his sophomore record Take Heart, Take Care later this month of Big Legal Mess Records.

Cut from “humid Southern nights and kudzu-encased vistas,” the album shows all of Kinkel-Schuster’s songwriting talents, representing American vignettes that are both detailed character studies and something much wider, serving as glimpses into the universal processes of hurting and healing. Single ‘Educated Guesses’ teases a newfound glimmer to Kinkel-Schuster’s tone too, the overwhelming dark of Water Liars not lost but somehow lifted, if not quite in the rear-view then at least not nailed over one’s eyes. Check out the video by Kyle Taubken below:

Take Heart, Take Care will be released on 30th August on Big Legal Mess Records.

Mount Sharp – Apostate

Formed somewhere between a Brooklyn rooftop and a boat in Maine, Mount Sharp combines the poetic songwriting of Swood (Sarah Wood) with Bryan Bruchman’s frenetically noisy sensibilities. With Ryan Zumsen and Maia Macdonald adding a rhythm section, 2014’s WEIRD FEARS EP was a lesson in uninhibited energy—be that born of excitement or anxiety.

Back with their first new music since that release, Mount Sharp have added Sal Garro and Jonathan Pilkington Kahnt on drums and bass and developed their sound into something more contemplative without loosing any of the spirit that marked them previously. Therefore, ‘Apopstate’ is an evolution, indebted to the past but shaped by present conditions, concerned with the personal and the political when exploring what it means to be pushed away from someone or something.

Surely I’m not made of bone and blood
Surely I’m something that’s never or always been
Am I still earning your love?
Do I remind you of someone you could dream of?

Pearla – Daydream

Pearla is the moniker of Brooklyn’s Nicole Rodriguez, a songwriter who knits threads of folk, pop and psychedelica into an evocative, mystical whole. New single ‘Daydream’ finds the sound perfected, the delicate minimalism belying the intricacy at work behind the vocals. “This song is about clinging onto a memory until it becomes distorted in your mind,” Rodriguez explains, “and turns into an almost absurd attempt to escape the present.”

Written after time spent rehabilitating primates in South Africa, and during an obsessive period reading Brontë novels, ‘Daydream’ offers memory and fiction as two forms of fantasy into which we can escape, spaces outside of the harsh realities of life that should be protected and celebrated.

Cataldo – Ding Dong Scrambled Eggs

“Anybody who has survived his childhood,” Flannery O’Connor once wrote, “has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.” Literally Main Street, the forthcoming record from Eric Anderson’s Cataldo, is crafted from a similar sentiment. Utilizing his trademark knack for writing songs that manage to be at once playful and emotional, the album sees Anderson take stock of life from the hinterland of middle age, an eye of a storm where longing for the future and nostalgia for the past cancel one another out.

“I tried to write songs about what it was really like growing up in a weird small town,” Andersen explains, “not a tarted up banjo-and-suspenders version of what people imagine it might be like,” and such a philosophy is clear on single ‘Ding Dong Scrambled Eggs’. This is hindsight without rose-tinted spectacles, memories shaken from the sepia-toned warmth and resurrected in all of their awkward, nervous energy. Check out the video by Dan Fromhart below:

Literally Main Street is out on the 27th September

That’s all for Vol. 27 folks. If you liked what you found, be sure to check the tag for previous editions of Bright Sparks.

The post Bright Sparks: Vol. 27 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Outer Spaces – Gazing Globe

Working under the moniker Outer Spaces, Baltimore-based Cara Beth Satalino creates off-kilter pop songs that shift and shimmer, like arcane messages from some place out of sync with our own—a distinct dimension, an outer space. Released last month on Western Vinyl, new album Gazing Globe suggests that such a place might not be a deviation from reality but a more distilled form, somewhere free of projections and expectations that can shape us beyond our control.

The record is a product of great upheaval, Satalino turning to meditation in the aftermath of a relationship. “I think I was trying to get back to myself and my identity,” she explains, “separate from my relationship.” Perhaps the Outer Space does not concern some external world but something far closer, an interior nonetheless separate from the quote-unquote ‘real’ world, a space where we can find ourselves.

Kali Malone – The Sacrificial Code

Stockholm’s Kali Malone makes expansive, organ-based ambient music that pleasures in patience and precision. Released by iDEAL Recordings, The Sacrificial Code is a double album where no minute is wasted, working within a self-imposed austerity to achieve a near-hypnotic focus. “By voluntarily giving up the freedom to do whatever momentarily comes to mind,” Steve Reich once said, “we are, as a result, free of all that momentarily comes to mind.” Malone operates according to this ideal, stripping back any sense of surroundings, organ music suspended in blank space. The result is a meditative, ascetic lesson in transcendence, where open-ended does not mean nebulous.

Big Joanie – Sistahs

Consisting of Stephanie Phillips (vocals/guitar), Estella Adeyeri (bass) and Chardine Taylor-Stone (drums), London punk trio Big Joanie draw on influences from across the spectrum to form their distinctive style. Owing as much to The Ronettes as to the Riot Grrrls, and borrowing some of the weight of the post-punk movement, the band refuse to settle in any one box. “[We wanted to be] completely ourselves as black women,” they describe, “and discover what was possible to realise in those spaces.” The result is Sistahs, a full-length album released late last year via the The Daydream Library Series of records and tapes, the independent house label of Thurston Moore and Eva Prinz’s publishing imprint Ecstatic Peace Library.

Abe Hollow – Paradise

Abe Hollow is the the recording project of Oakland-based composer, producer and multi-instrumentalist Adam Hirsch, and its songs display the full range of his talents. Born of an obsessive interest in family history and his Jewish heritage, debut album A Palace in Time is a collaborative, improvised journey through the many layers of Hirsch’s psyche—“a Yiddish gothic trip” according to one friend.

Single ‘Paradise’ gives some clue as to what such a thing might sound like, a single full of radiant shimmers and ethereal vocals where nothing is quite as it seems. With help from Ryan McGill (aka Ryan Von Gonten on guitar), Andrew Maguire (drums) Doug Stuart (bass) and June Hong (piano), Hirsch weaves a pleasantly surreal soundscape that’s at once forward-facing and reflective, proving that digging into one’s history can lead to discoveries as meaningful and rewarding as any other.

Slow Pulp – Big Day

Based in Madison, Wisconsin, Slow Pulp bring to life dreamy soundscapes with a minimalist touch, angular riffs punctuating the gauzy space. Released with our friends at Citrus City Records, Big Day goes a long way in perfecting the style, borrowing from shoegaze and post-punk but maintaining its own unique spirit. Which is fitting, seeing as the EP is concerned with ideas of development and learning, focused on the formative years where everything is strange and new and nothing is set in stone. Slow Pulp take this idea into their music, moving forward without hesitation or preconception, letting the experience speak for itself in the present moment.

Nathalie Joachim – Papa Loko (Interlude: September 24, 1918)

Nathalie Joachim is a Haitian-American composer, flutist and vocalist who draws upon hip hop, indie rock, electronic and classical music to form a sound capable of forging new directions while maintaining an awareness and respect of cultural traditions. Joachim is set to release her debut solo record later this summer via New Amsterdam Records, an album which sees her joined by the Grammy-nominated string ensemble Spektral Quartet.

Fanm d’Ayiti, or “Women of Haiti”, is something of a celebration of Haiti’s female performers and storytellers, featuring recorded interviews with these artists, including Joachim’s grandmother and the the girls choir of her family’s home farming village of Dantan. Opening track gives a view ‘Papa Loko (Interlude: September 24, 1918)’ gives a glimpse into this vivid blend of music and oral history, and hints at what promises to be a special release.

Joyer – Here

Drawing inspiration from slowcore, 90s-era slacker rock and the contemporary bedroom pop movement, New Jersey’s Joyer make richly textured songs that often barely break a murmur. The songs exist in a crepuscular lethargy, favouring a kind of slow dawning rather than any immediacy or confrontation.

The duo are interested in movies and new album Peeled is no different, with Counterzine going into the influences of Harmony Korine and Andrei Tarkovsky on the lyrics. But there is a filmic quality to the sound itself too, with single ‘Here’ showing off the image-based, atmospheric style.

Mauno – Vampire

Montreal experimental pop duo Mauno have a new record on the way. Out later this summer, Really Well sees the band delve into high weirdness in order to explore the absurdity of life under late capitalism, where everything from art, love and even the self are assaulted by the drive for productivity and growth. With its playful tone and metaphorically ripe title, single ‘Vampire’ is the perfect example of Mauno’s style, fiercely critical yet grounded in humour, as though in wit lies a truly subversive power.

The song comes complete with a video directed by Max Taeuschel which further layers the critique, Mauno made to exercise non-stop for an hour during recording as a comment on the reality of creating and promoting music today. The duo can barely sing at times, exhausted and visibly sweating upon bikes stripped of their purpose, going nowhere.

Really Well is out on the 2nd August and you can pre-order it from the Mauno Bandcamp page.

Kate Tempest – Holy Elixir

If performance poetry and spoken word artists are experiencing something of a boom, then Kate Tempest can stake some claim for instigating a new urgency in the movement. While the form gets co-opted from all angles, popping up on every other advert as banks try to mimic a human face, Tempest stands resolute as an example of the true power of words. Recorded with Rick Rubin, her latest album The Book of Traps and Lessons builds on what has come before, its tracks alive with some electrical frisson, something related to both love and dread.

Lead single ‘Holy Elixir’ serves as a fine example, its force conjured from the unfurling sentences, as though within the correct sequence of syllables an energy can form. This energy lies at the heart of all things, both good and bad, though Tempest seeks to harness it, channel it in the right direction. “I hope that people feel connected,” Tempest explains. “I hope they connect with the work, and that this connection enables them to connect with themselves, and that this connection encourages a deeper connection to others. It might sound like high hopes. At this stage in the game, you have to know your motives. Otherwise, why even try?”

The Book of Traps and Lessons is out now via Fiction and you can get it from the usual places.

Daughter of Swords – Dawnbreaker

Daughter of Swords is the moniker of Alexandra Sauser-Monnig, who you might know as part of folk trio Mountain Man. Setting out solo, Sauser-Monnig uses Daughter of Swords to explore a break-up before it even happened, both pre-empting the sadness to come and dreaming of the things that couldn’t happen on her current course. As the title track highlights, the result is something elegiac and warmly hopeful, as though only through some great, earth-shaking catastrophe can the new shoots of life break through the topsoil.

Dawnbreaker is out now via Bella Union and Nonesuch, and you can get it from the Daughter of Swords website.

High Sunn – Our Perception

High Sunn is the recording project of San Francisco’s Justin Cheromiah, who makes an upbeat and glimmering brand of bedroom pop. New record Our Perception was released earlier this year, with Tristin Souvannarath joining to lend drums, as well as mixing and mastering duties, leading to the most vivid and immersive High Sunn tracks to date.

Indeed, the process of creating the record was the most involved too. “Never have I ever spent months on a release,” Cheromiah explains. “I’ve ached, cried, stressed, and felt joy writing these songs of love, real life experiences, struggles, and pure gratitude.” Lead single ‘Grateful’ shows off the care and attention that constitutes the release, a jangle pop so lush you can fall back into it and not hit the ground.

Our Perception is out now via Spirit Goth Records and you can buy it now.

Briston Maroney – Fool’s Gold

After a nomadic childhood strung between Florida and Tennessee, Briston Maroney eventually settled back in Nashville, laying down roots and cutting his teeth in the DIY music scene. Winning fans one living room at a time, Maroney built up a reputation and has now released an EP, Indiana, with Parlophone Records. Despite the big label, single ‘Fool’s Gold’ shows off Maroney’s grounded and intimate style. There’s a tenderness to the sound, a gilded nostalgia that drives a hope for the future, kicks of reverb hinting at the dissatisfaction with the present.  Check out the video directed by Joey Brodnax below:

Indiana is out now on Parlophone Records and available from all the usual places.

That’s all folks. Check the tag for previous editions of Bright Sparks.

The post Bright Sparks: Vol. 26 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Champ Major – Abbeville

Recording in her Brooklyn apartment, Madison Major writes and releases hauntingly intimate songs under the name Champ Major (the name her father had preferred for her at birth). Despite living and studying in New York, Major originally hails from Savannah, and something of the Georgian landscape worms its way into her sound—the tactile nature of the dewy air and black mud of the marshes recreated in the foggy lo-fi aesthetic.

The lead single from debut EP, Recipe For Baking Two Humans Together, ‘Abbeville’ makes this clear. A song carved out of the past, the track is a collision of childhood curiosity and anxiety, the outside world pushing into the recording even as Major’s vocals rise in feeling. The result is more of a question than an answer, but a fond one at that.

Jordan Klassen – Virtuous Circle

The prolific Vancouver songwriter Jordan Klassen first came to our attention with the 2012 Kindness EP, though has been releasing music longer than that. After a number of albums and EPs since, Klassen is preparing to release a brand new full-length later this year, and has unveiled the single ‘Virtuous Circle’ by way of introduction.

Threaded by a taut sense of forward motion, the song is a rich collision of folk and rock that utilises electronic and orchestral flourishes to fully realise its spirit. Thematically, the track is a form of prayer, a hopeful wish for change and transformation in the face of a seemingly inescapable situation. With the deft touch and light energy, the track makes such a desire seem possible, as though a vicious circle could be made virtuous with enough will and determination.

Hostxess – Time

There’s a magnetism as the heart of the music of Hostxess, some compelling force around which the dreamy instrumentation swirls. Composing, recording and mixing everything themselves, the Tuscon-based artist conjures thickly atmospheric tracks that possess a near-tangible weight, holding your hand through the misty soundscapes, drawing you toward the bright centre point.

New single ‘time’ is the form idealised, the translucent sound down-tempo to the point of stasis, the vocals close and conversational yet somehow distant too, as though the echoes of communication now passed, or else words spoken only in one’s head. The track might not culminate in a joyous crescendo, the centre might never be reached, but when the process of searching is a wondrous as this, then perhaps the journey is all that matters.

oh my darling
I want to take my

skin to skin
even these bodies
feel thick
and there’s really
no space
between us

omes – wyd

Taking inspiration from the DIY aesthetic that stretches right back to early Death Cab and Built To Spill, Omar De Col began recording lo-fi bedroom pop songs under the moniker omes. After winning a sizeable fan base through a trickle of Soundcloud singles, and appearing on the spring Z Tapes compilation, omes is now set to release a debut EP, boy, with Devil Town Records.

Lead single ‘wyd’ gives an idea of what to expect from the tape. Wrapped in a gauzy melancholy and delivered with a disarming sincerity, the track is a stellar addition to the bummed-out bedroom movement, built from layered guitars and near-whispered vocals that paint a kind of hushed loneliness.

Tied up, lost out
Found it over there
Hannah,
What are you doing?
“Nothing”

Ditty – Deathcab

An urban ecologist in the day, Goa’s Aditi Veena records under the moniker Ditty by night, crafting a delicate brand of folk that she describes as ‘earthsongs’. After debut EP Mumblings was released back in 2014, Ditty is now releasing her debut full-length album, Poetry Ceylon, via Pagal Haina Records, and the new singles display the consolidation and growth of her sound.

Inspired by ‘Transatlanticism’, ‘Deathcab’ is a great introduction for those unfamiliar with the Ditty sound. Taking the tenderness of Death Cab’s song and applying it to her own relationship, the track sees Ditty craft a subtle and snaking sense of emotion that brings to mind the languid tones of Sun June. The effect is a kind of inevitability, love painted as an organic thing, just another process of the earth’s natural rhythms.

Poetry Ceylon is out now via Pagal Haina Records.

Pancho and the Wizards – Rot

San Luis Obispo rockers Pancho and the Wizards peddle a psych-inflected brand of punk that grabs you by the ear and drags you through the other end, the breathless style only interrupted for sluggish, heavy breakdowns that club you over the head. Released earlier this spring, their latest EP Cemetery sees the formula perfected, born of a tension between the urge to race and stomp and a cocksure embrace of the resulting unpredictability.

Despite being the closing track, single ‘Rot’ is as good a place to start as any, strung along by a creeping baseline that seems to propel the rest of the instrumentation and Tristan Wildey’s fluidly conversational cadence. As such, there’s an unavoidable pull at the centre of the track that extends right to the fatalism of the lyrics, leaving you with no option but to buckle up and hold on tight.

I feel it all the time, I think I’m finally dead inside
I know, it’s starting to show
I regret everything, my visions shot and ears ring all the time
I’m on my way out

Oliver Ray – Ol’ Coyote

Having played guitar for Patti Smith since 1995, Oliver Ray has long been a man immersed in music. However, it is not until now that Ray has released music of his own, with debut record Out Passed Nowhere out via Royal Oakie on the 7th June. Not that Ray is letting his musical history go to waste, enlisting members of bands like Giant Sand, The Myrrors, Sugar Candy Mountain, Xixa and China to help craft his detailed sound, not to mention Howe Gelb and even the “high priestess and poet laureate of punk” herself.

Single ‘Ol’ Coyote’ gives a glimpse into one facet of such a collaboration. Unfurling slowly with exploratory guitar, the song is something of desert vision quest viewed through the prism of classic folk, the psychedelic hints nodding toward the more dedicated forays into the genre elsewhere on the album. With its swelling warmth and patient build, ‘Ol’ Coyote’ is a good example of a musician at the height of his ability, crafting something vast and striking from the array of experiences and influences at his disposal.

Plastic Cactus – Mystery Boy

Fronted by Brooke Metropulos and Michaela Gradstein, Portland’s Plastic Cactus make surf-rock for cowboys and desert creatures, their tropical summer vibes counter-shaded with something altogether more sunbaked and strange. After two self-released EPs in 2017 and 2018 respectively, the band are working on a brand new collection of songs to be released into the world later this year.

For now, ‘Mystery Boy’ is the only glimpse that we have of the new material, but the song provides more than enough evidence to suggest that Plastic Cactus are perfecting their sound. Starting up with a tropical sixties shimmer, the track lulls the listener into a false sense of ease before gradually twisting the dial, psych tinges heralding something eerie at the heart of the sound. After a series of slow rises, the track eventually culminates into a frantic race, making good on its promise to subvert the lazy, languorous tone.

My Father’s Son – Dust to Rust

Led by Montreal’s Mark Kulmala, My Father’s Son are an indie folk outfit who released their debut record, Heart of Wood, back in 2016. Combining the melancholic tones of the folk genre and the toe-tapping energy of country, Kulmala and co. created songs both stirring and introspective, joining the likes of Noah Gundersen and Jason Isbell in their ability to find light amid darkness and pain.

Ahead of forthcoming album The Greatest Thaw, the band are releasing a number of singles to whet our appetites. The latest, ‘Dust to Rust’, is described as both a love song and a ‘diss’ track centring on the experience of touring. Rather than being a traditional love song, the pining here is for Kulmala’s apartment during the long weeks on the road, the attack directed toward his rusty ‘02 Honda Civic. “Touring is the epitome of bitter-sweet,” Kulmala explains. “Leaving loved ones and the comfort of home behind as you drive away for weeks at a time always comes with moments of panic. The day before I leave is always the worst.”

The Greatest Thaw will be released this month, so keep an eye on My Father’s Son’s Bandcamp page.

Enjoyed Vol. 25? There’s more where that came from over on the Bright Sparks tag. If you fancy something a little more in-depth than head on over to our Reviews page.

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