Like many artists in recent years, ahem found the process of making new album Avoider a unique and challenging experience. “We were writing songs in ways we never had before,” they explain, with trio Alyse Emanuel, Courtney Berndt and Erik Anderson often working in separate basements. But rather than treat the circumstances as a limitation to be worked around, the outfit choose to embrace the frustrations to charge the songs themselves, something most apparent in single ‘Waterlogged’. As the title suggests, the song provides a sense of confinement or submergence against which it struggles. “A kind of unresolved hope that maybe we can someday break a little loose and get free in whatever ways we need too,” as the band put it. “We wanted the song to feel like you were getting free especially as it went on—like it feels like a celebration of that aspiration and hope even if you’re still just actually stuck.”

Derek Ted – BLACK WIDOW LIGHTNING

Following on from 2022’s times have changed, a record which developed the warm, earnest side of Derek Ted‘s work, the LA-based songwriter returns this year with new album, day went away. First single ‘BLACK WIDOW LIGHTNING’ offers our first glimpse of what to expect. Finding a balance between loose-limbed energy and sincere tenderness, the song is a three-and-a-half minute dose of fondness, capturing a late summer light where the shadows are stretching and temperatures holding, and where the suggestion of any end only serves to strengthen the appreciation of the moment.

Black widow lightning
The end of summer’s coming
I love you more than ever
I love you like no other

Evelyn – I’m A Dog

Described by the artist as both “a heart-swelling love song about attachment theory,” and “a Cancer Moon abandonment-wound ballad sponsored by Big Feelings,” ‘I’m a Dog’ sees Evelyn grapple with the various contradictions bound up within any relationship in search of some sweet catharsis. Especially how the security and comfort of an intimate connection seems to conjure the possibility of the very opposite, as though to experience a good thing is to summon its shadow too. “Late at night, you’re sleeping by my side / And I’m playing out ways that you could die,” as one verse plays, “I keep track of your breathing / I’ll feel better in the morning.”

Watch the video directed by Izzy Dow and shot and edited by Tim Gersten below:

‘I’m a Dog’ is out now and available via Bandcamp. Evelyn’s album Someday We Will Eat A Feast of Light which will be released later this summer.

Fake Fruit – Mucho Mistrust

“This song was a snapshot of how I got through a difficult year.” So says Ham D’Amato of Fake Fruit on the lead single and title track from the Oakland indie rock outfit’s forthcoming record on Carpark Records. Written in response the the end of a relationship and the start of a new one, an alopecia diagnosis and looming big birthday, it’s a typically vibrant and unpredictable song from a band that burn bright with volatile energy. Wry humour and cathartic noise combine to great effect to live up to the Blondie-homage title, which the band say is intended to “encapsulate both the anxieties of daily life, a bloodless music industry, and global capitalism as well as the clear-eyed scepticism needed to rebel against it.”

Holding Hour – Come Undone

Des Moines, Iowa duo Holding Hour first caught our attention back in 2022 (when they went by elison), with single ‘Hopes & Horoscopes‘ confronting vices and regrets with a sound energetic and confident enough to emerge with an affirming air. Latest single ‘Come Undone’ is no less nuanced in its tone, Marissa Kephart’s reflective, hushed vocals painting an introspective mood as the instrumentation rises into something far larger. Holding Hour again mine the rich creative seam at the intersection of dream pop and shoegaze to offer something ethereal yet sensual. “Say something sweet to me,” as one of the verses goes, “I wanna hear my name inside your mouth / Before you chew and spit it out.”

Julia-Sophie – numb

The debut solo album from Anglo-French avant-garde electronic pop artist Julia-Sophie coming soon via Ba Da Bing Records, forgive too slow is a record which charts a journey through life. There are moments of self-destruction, of romance and longing, not to mention the inevitable loss which chases everything. But such developments are not presented in palatable, linear sequence. Instead, Julia-Sophie uses her danceable electro pop sound to present something messier but more authentic. As though the album is not a straight line towards a final goal but an orbit around an elusive answer. Single ‘numb’ highlights the sensuality and cinematic depth of the sound, where the crystalline shimmer of the track makes everything feel so fragile and precious and sharp.

forgive too slow will be released via Ba Da Bing Records on 26th July. Pre-order now from the Julia-Sophie Bandcamp page.

Leif Vollebekk – Moondog

This September see the return of Canadian songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Leif Vollebekk with brand new full-length Revelation on Secret City Records. Pairing his distinctively earnest vocals with almost cinematic arrangements, the album sees Vollebekk follow Jung’s Dreams, Memories, Reflections through to themes such as alchemy and the mystery of the divine, as well as the pervasive uncertainty of our existentially threatened present. What results is something which sits at the intersection between the earthly and ethereal, a style typified by lead single ‘Moondog’. Love held up in all of its magic and strangeness, where chance and predetermination move our lives with their inscrutable gravities.

Watch the video directed by Kaveh Nabatian below:

Revelation is out on the 27th September via Secret City Records.

Nick Zanca – Little Professor

Having spent a decade making electronic music under the moniker Mister Lies and working as a producer with the likes of Wendy Eisenberg, Nick Zanca has now stepped out under his own name for Hindsight—an album which forgoes electronic styles in favour of a theatrical, jazz-inflected brand of rock music. Coming soon via American Dreams Records, the album sees Zanca follow a very personal line to explore some of our society’s most pressing themes, not least the crushing omnipresence of capitalism and the ways this works to undermine anyone who might wish to devote their life to something more fulfilling. Lead single ‘Little Professor’ engages with experiences in the wake of a childhood diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome, not only castigating the harmful language and actions faced by such young people, but offering a new vision where neurodivergence is seen as something valued and respected. Watch the video directed by Hunter Adams and Carl Elsaesser below:

Hindsight will be released on 2nd August and is available via Bandcamp.

West of Roan – The Bell

West of Roan is the recording project of artists/musicians/puppeteers Annie Schermer and Channing Showalter who together draw on a rich folk tradition and centuries of myths and legends to create what they call “a deeply resonant balm for a fractured culture.” This summer, West of Roan will release their second album, Queen of Eyes, via SPINSTER and have unveiled the lead single and opening track by way of introduction. The pair say the song was inspired by “conversations about gods of loss and ancestral wounds [and] texts about the Sumerian underworld demon-goddess Ereshkigal,” all during a near-apocalyptic period of forest fires near their home and the global pandemic. But it’s more than a lament for a world gone bad. Built on the plaintive drone of harmonium and fiddle, it’s sober and aching but somehow hopeful too, finding potential for growth and healing in family, friends and the world around us.

sister find me
sister keep me fed

The post Weekly Listening: May 2024 #4 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

The project of Gothenburg-based musician, producer and visual artist Lela Amparo, Amparo is an outlet for atmospheric and cinematic music that blends electronic, ambient and folk. Taken from new album Day and Night, out now on Bikiniwax Records, latest single ‘After Ours’ is a great example. Drawing on the likes of Bonobo and The Cinematic Orchestra, the song builds from simple guitar and plaintive strings into a rich, jazz-inflected track that’s thick with a sense of late-night drama and emotion. ‘After Ours’ is “inspired by a night spent in Paris before changing the course of my life,” Amparo explains. “It’s about being in the moment and knowing nothing will ever be the same.”

 Getdown Services – Cream Of The Crop

If John Cooper Clarke’s ‘Evidently Chickentown’ conjured the end days through pictures of a tedious, ruined Britain, then ‘Cream of the Crop’ by Bristol’s Getdown Services offers a new vision of the non-future. A world polished to within an inch of its life and then polished a bit harder. A stage of capitalism so late they’ve stopped updating the time on the board. Think branded boozers and no-change-from-a-tenner street food cuisine. The milieu is brought to life by shiny disco beats, though it is the conversational snark of vocalist Josh Law the grabs the attention. A figure who finds himself in a place so soulless he’s not sure whether to self-immolate or burst out laughing. Either way, he’s stuck there and so are you. Roll up everybody, Chickentown’s had a fresh coat of paint.

Jeffrey Silverstein – Cowboy Grass

Later this spring, Jeffrey Silverstein will release Western Sky Music, his second LP for Arrowhawk Records and first full-length since 2020’s You Become the Mountain. Promising an evolution of Silverstein’s cosmic brand of country, the album again features contributions from Barry Walker Jr (pedal steel) and Alex Chapman (bass), and also adds Akron/Family’s Dana Buoy on drums, as well as guest appearances from William Tyler and VSF fav Karima Walker. Lead single ‘Cowboy Grass’ is our first taste, a song with a little more dust and dirt and barroom boogie than anything Silverstein has made to date. Watch the video, directed by Austin Abbott and starring Eric DuRant, below:

Western Sky Music releases via Arrowhawk Records on 12th May. Pre-order a copy now from the Jeffrey Silverstein Bandcamp page.

Melati ESP – BAHASA BARU

With LP hipernatural coming soon on Carpark Records, Indonesian-American experimental pop artist Melati ESP has unveiled new single, ‘BAHASA BARU’. The record is notable in the way it draws on the breadth of Melati’s cultural influences to achieve its vivid sound (Javanese radio Dangdut, gamelan cassettes, Moving Shadow-era liquid jungle and Japanese chill-out are all listed as inspirations), and the new single serves as the ideal introduction to a style which exists outside of the usual categorization of genre or geography. “It’s a personal statement of intent,” Melati explains, “being comfortable in occupying the third space, and creating new ways of communicating that are tethered to intuition, empathy and understanding.” The song comes complete with a video, directed by Melati’s sister Kathleen Malay, which celebrates this embrace of otherness despite, as Melati puts it, “mostly feeling like a baby alien while growing up in Jakarta, always between two worlds.”

hipernatural is out on the 28th April via Carpark Records.

The Saxophones – Desert Flower

Released to announce their third album, coming early this summer on Full Time Hobby, ‘Desert Flower’ is the new single from The Saxophones. For the uninitiated, The Saxophones is the project of married duo Alexi Erenkov and Alison Alderdice, who make slinky Lynchian lounge music that’s dark and velvety, confronting existential concerns with a smoky sophistication. What Erenkov describes as “about avoidance and fear impeding personal growth and the deepening of relationships,” ‘Desert Flower’ is no different. Creeping and cryptic, it blends the material and the mystical, eventually swelling to emotive peaks as Erenkov’s croon gives way to radiant sax. It’s an intriguing glimpse of what promises to be a strange and sublime record.

There are symbols everywhere
signs that even I can’t deny.
Only if they aligned,
I could lift away the veil.

To Be a Cloud will be released via Full Time Hobby on 2^nd June. Pre-order it now from Bandcamp.

Strange Ranger – Rain So Hard

Strange Ranger are a band who have been defined by a sense of self-reinvention. Winning initial acclaim within the spheres of indie rock, 2019’s Remember The Rockets saw the first shoots of shoegaze and pop influences breaking the surface, and by No Light in Heaven the following year they were entirely rebranded as an experimental electronic outfit. New single ‘Rain So Hard’, out via Fire Talk Records, emerges from this electro ground, its lush and layered sound playing as some nameless immensity above the vocals, be it a looming cityscape or wide open sky. This overwhelming scale registers as a kind of melancholy, the vocals adrift within something to large for them to navigate or control. “How do I get out of this movie now?” asks the repeated refrain, hoping for nothing more than another person to cling onto for the ride. Watch the video directed by Ben Turok below:

‘Rain So Hard’ is out now via Fire Talk Records.

Women Tied to Railroad Tracks – Fake Tans

Back in 2019 we wrote about Women Tied to the Railroad Tracks, describing the sound of their album And Levitating as “indie pop that sits in a strange space between mundane reality and freaky dreams.” With their debut record on the horizon with Anxiety Blanket Records, the LA outfit have shared the brand new single, ‘Fake Tans’. A bright summertime track loosely based on Doris Lessing’s novel The Golden Notebook, where the protagonist speaks of an encounter with a man with a crack in his personality: “like a gap in a dam, and through that gap the future might pour in a different shape—terrible perhaps, or marvelous, but something new.”

Yael S. Copeland – Pool

Having made a name fronting Borito, Tel Aviv’s Yael S. Copeland is setting out alone for her first solo release. If the Borito sound occupied a colourful, retro bracket of the dream pop/rock genre, then Copeland’s solo work turns more toward the intimate and lo-fi, having more in common with Alex G and Elliott Smith. With an album set for release later this month, latest single ‘Pool’ shows how this stripped back style is no less immersive or heartfelt, the lyrics playing like something between a daydream and a poem in their gentle reflection, the sound still managing to envelop the listener in its lush layers.

big sky
like a big pool
blue and clear
but I can’t see my
reflection when I look down here

The post Weekly Listening: March 2023 #2 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

San Francisco band Cindy specialise in a dreamy, slo-mo brand of pop music, centred on lead Karina Gill’s distinctive vocals and poetic vision. At the beginning of April, Cindy will release a brand new record Why Not Now? via Tough Love and have unveiled lead single ‘A Trumpet on the Hillside’ by way of introduction. Landing somewhere between Galaxie 500 style slowcore and a half-speed Au Revoir Simone track, the song is a quietly transcendent hymn to the wonder that’s threaded into even the most mundane experiences. “It’s about being in a room with people, the closeness and distance involved in that,” Gill describes. “And it’s about the vividness and grandness (sometimes) of the most ordinary experience.”

En Attendant Ana – Wonder

Back in January we wrote a little about ‘Same Old Story’ by Paris indie pop band En Attendant Ana, taken from their new LP Principia. We described it as “a blend of playful indie pop rhythms and post-punk angles… [that] pitch[es] the listener into a funhouse room of mirrors with only the smooth clarity of Margaux Bouchaudon’s vocals as a guide.” The album is out now on Trouble In Mind and the band have released an animated music video for single ‘Wonder’ to celebrate. A song that explores conflicting emotions of legitimacy, opening gentle and pensive before a motorik beat drops with a clockwork energy, building towards a cathartic close, embodying that weird blend of strength and doubt of trying to do your best but always second guessing yourself. Watch the video by Jérôme Papaphotiou below:

Principia is out now via Trouble in Mind and available from the En Attendant Ana Bandcamp page.

Eric Angelo Bessel – Secret Lake

We’ve written about Laura Mariposa Williams and Eric Angelo Bessel’s Lore City several times in the recent years, with 2021 LP Participation Mystique and last year’s Under Way highlighting the band’s evocative, esoteric style and the manner in which it blurs the physical and metaphysical so seamlessly. The pair set up Lore City Music to facilitate the release of their work, and April sees the imprint release Bessel’s debut solo album, Visitations. Single ‘Secret Lake’ invites us into the world of the record, its slack drift like some sitting bogland but soon deepening into something more. A depth alluring in its own way, beautiful and strange in the manner unique to hidden spaces, allowing the listener to descend through its column while refusing to give anything away freely.

Visitation comes out on 21st April and you can pre-order it from the Lore City Music Bandcamp page.

Foyer Red – Plumbers Unite!

Yarn The Hours Away, the debut full-length from Brooklyn‘s Foyer Red coming this spring on Carpark Records, is described as a collection of short stories—where each track aims to build a fully rendered sense of character and place. Previous single ‘Etc‘ hinted at the depth of such an intention (“exploring,” as we put it, “a mismatched relationship of indistinct philosophical musings and robotic computations.”), and new single ‘Plumbers Unite!’ is no less ambitious. A song which not only uses the relentless trials of a side-scrolling videogame as a metaphor for life’s daily grind, but then imagines the sentience of the console once the power has been cut. “When I was little I was obsessed with my Gamecube, but after entering cheat codes on my Harvest Moon game, I felt sooooooo guilty,” explains Elana Riorda. “I impulsively deleted my game data and later had recurring nightmares about my Gamecube’s anger towards me, something I knew was unrealistic but felt so creepy and real.” Watch the video filmed, edited and directed by Leif Morton below:

Yarn The Hours Away is out on the 19th May via Carpark Records.

Nicolas Krgovich – Front Stoop #2

“For years and years I guess I was lonely / but refused to call it so.” So opens ‘Front Stoop #2’, the first single from Nicolas Krgovich’s Ducks, out next month on Orindal Records. The realisation is prompted by a direct question on the titular front stoop, one the narrator answers simply. Yes, he is lonely. “
To answer a plain question with a plain reply / Feels new to me and good.” What follows is so rooted in specific details it almost feels, paradoxically, like a dream. That weird summer, the smoke, the deserted beach. Tossed pebbles and sand and shells and “things that don’t matter and things to forget.” With Ducks, Krgovich promises to explore how moments are catalogued and remembered via minutiae, and the manner in which complexity of any present is not so much reduced to images but coded in them. “I let them whirl, a little cyclone,” as he concludes at the end of the song. “Living in a world of love.”

Seminar Shadow – Luring (Excerpt)

Seminar Shadow, AKA duo Lucie Vítková and Teerapat Parnmongkol, are preparing to unveil their new release HEATWAVE via Dear Life Records. Recorded on a pair of baby grand pianos during the August 2022 heatwave and comprising of two improvised side-length tracks, the release probes the present for the full weight of the past, exploring how any apparently ‘live’ moment rests upon an unseen foundation of everything which preceded it. “Liveness as in a self-organization in action can’t detach or distinguish from skeleton of memory,” as they explain. “A wave of heat is rinsing out inseparably within this heat, where the liveliness is revealing itself as a part of motion and movement that lives through this instinctual response to the environment around it.” You can hear an excerpt of the opening track ‘Luring’ now:

Shit Present – Voice in Your Head

“It really did come as breaking news to me in 2016 that I am not my thoughts and I might learn to have some agency over them,” explains Shit Present’s vocalist and guitarist Iona Cairns of new single ‘Voice in Your Head’. What they describe as a ‘textbook’ I’ve-been-to-therapy song which serves as the perfect introduction for those unfamiliar with the Bristol outfit’s blend of emo and power pop. Committed to offering honest dispatches from the trials of mental health, wide open in their vulnerability but armed with the power of noisy catharsis. ‘Voice in Your Head’ is sincere in its message, wry in its tone, and ultimately empowered by the realisation that you can learn to live with your thoughts. “I could fucking destroy you or be your best friend,” sings the titular being in the chorus. “I’m here ’til you’re dead.”

talker – Don’t Want You To Love Me (Oceanator Remix)

“Indie rock with glitter all over it,” that’s how Celeste Tauchar describes the talker sound. Last year’s In Awe of Insignificance showed off the style in all its vivid glory, working to elevate Tauchar’s moody, emotionally-driven vocals. Following on from the success of the release, talker is putting out a brand new EP of remixes, with offerings from the likes of Overcoats and FRENSHIP. Latest single sees VSF fav Oceanator reimagine ‘Don’t Want You To Love Me’, adding gauzy textures over the clarity of the original without losing any of the sound’s urgent motion.

Zoon – Manitou

‘Manitou’ is the second single from Bekka Ma’iingan, the forthcoming sophomore record by Daniel Monkman’s Zoon on Paper Bag Records. Regular readers will by now be familiar with Monkman’s work, an ever-evolving sound rooted in shoegaze that explores themes of activism and Indigenous experience. The new song continues this trajectory, a lush orchestral piece that strips any notion of shoegaze back to its bare bones, emotional swells rising up amidst the atmosphere of lingering melancholy. “‘Manitou’ is about the group of friends I had growing up in Selkirk Manitoba,” Monkman explains. “We’d run a cross the red bridge and have fires and drink. Our little piece of heaven.” But far from a simple rose-tinted exercise in nostalgia, ‘Manitou’ reflects on the difficulties of that time too, acknowledging struggles and vowing never forget friends lost before their time.

And live out your youth
And all the stars shine fine
And keep this close to me
And live out your youth

Bekka Ma’iingan will be released by Paper Bag Records on 28th April and you can pre-order it now from the Zoon Bandcamp page.

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Having now signed with Carpark Records, Foyer Red have released brand new single, ‘Etc’. Every bit as playful as we’ve come to expect from the band, it’s a springy and elastic pop song straight out of the left-field, Eric Jaso’s mesmerizing bassline setting the odd but infectious tone. But beneath this exuberance lies something darker and more complex, exploring a mismatched relationship of indistinct philosophical musings and robotic computations.

“My character in ‘Etc’ finds themselves in a dysfunctional relationship in which gender informs internal struggles of power and control,” lead Elana Riordan explains. “Instead of addressing the problem they state it plainly while asking vague and broad questions about the nature of the world. Rather than seeking a new system they find ways to play into that system to ultimately get what they want in the short-term.”

On the other hand, the character played by singer & guitarist Mitch Myers takes rationality to the extreme. As Riordan explains:

“Taking a note from Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions, they are fixated on the optimal stopping problems, seeking to maximize the reward of a great parking space and minimize the cost of distance from the front doors and time spent circling around holding out for a better spot. The syllables are so stiff and stressed at unnatural points in the last verse to exemplify how mechanical the whole process has been, where the character is in their head crunching data to guarantee satisfaction with the outcome.”

‘Etc’ is out now via Carpark Records and you can get it from Bandcamp.

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Such a situation is central to Expert In A Dying Field, the latest album The Beths. “How does it feel / To be an expert in a dying field?” asks lead Elizabeth Stokes in the opener and title track, speaking from the aftermath of a relationship where years of effort and learning have lost their purpose. The beginning of a more general exploration of the idea of moving on, even when those intimate details recorded and memorised still feel so pressing. Even while the ghosts remain.

Hours of phrases I’ve memorized
Thousands of lines on the page
All of my notes in a desolate pile
I haven’t touched in an age

The rise of the Aotearoa band has been something to behold. The four-piece—Stokes (guitar, vocals), Jonathan Pearce (guitar), Benjamin Sinclair (bass), and Tristan Deck (drums)—have won hearts and minds around the world since announcing themselves with debut EP Warm Blood back in 2016. Expert In A Dying Field is The Beths third LP (following 2018’s Future Hates Me and 2020’s Jump Rope Gazers) and represents another step towards perfecting their characteristic blend of pop hooks, punk scuzz and dynamic indie rock, all tied together by Stokes’s earnest and accomplished writing.

This might be The Beths’ biggest strength. How they manage to make awkward post-relationship angst feel somehow affirming, like an intravenous shot of “things will be okay” positivity regardless of whether Stokes’s lyrics share the same optimism. It has something to do with the songs’ candid nature, leaving nothing guarded or muddied by shame, a kind of open-heartedness that keeps things on a knife edge, continues to see possibility and wonder even in the deadest of dead ends.

Such a dynamic energy marks Expert In A Dying Field. Because for all the authentic emotion and reflection, this is a record written with live performance in mind. Full of small moments that spark with inexplicable electricity, suffused with joy despite its difficult subject matter. A collection of songs that are supposed to be fun, both for the audience to listen to and, crucially, for the band to play. Resulting in a record which sounds, above all, like a group of friends doing what they love.

‘Your Side’ has the shiny unreality of a doe-eyed daydream, Stokes imagining an ex- dropping everything to rush to her (“don’t cry, I’m on the next flight, to be by your side”), when in reality she is “mixing drinks and messages” alone. ‘Knees Deep’ is an upbeat and catchy pop song about coming to terms with not being fearless. “The shame, I wish that I was brave enough to dive in,” Stokes sings during the chorus, “but I nevеr have been and never will be / I’m coming in hot then freezing completely.” Closer ‘2am’ on the other hand is the record’s sole slow-burner, sharing all the late-night quiet of its title. But no matter the changes of shade and tone, this vigour shines through.

The result is a kind of transubstantiation. Doubt and sadness offered up with such sincere passion they are somehow transformed into a form of empathy. Across the record, Stokes documents a whole host of losses and their accompanying wounds. Be it suffering the white noise of anxiety (‘Silence is Golden’), praying on her knees (‘Head in the Clouds’) or crying in the rain (‘When You Know You Know’). But the experiences are processed through the band’s irrepressible energy. The Beths magic formula. A way to transform the personal into the universal. Trauma into a reason to love and live.

Expert In A Dying Field is out now via Carpark Records. Get it in a variety of formats from the Carpark Records Bandcamp page.

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Here is a list of songs from 2020 that we liked but didn’t get around to writing about.

If you find something you like, follow the link in the embed to support the artists and labels on Bandcamp. And of course, there is a whole year’s worth of pieces on releases we did manage to write about, so have an explore through our reviews, previews and interviews from 2020.

The post Music We Missed in 2020 appeared first on Various Small Flames.