Released to coincide with his birthday, and organised by Dan Wriggins (of Friendship) in collaboration with Dear Life Records, You Were Alone: An Owen Ashworth Almanac is a covers compilation featuring versions of Owen’s songs from family, friends, labelmates and fans. A celebration which recognises a birthday but also so much more than that. A body of work and the burgeoning legacy it has and continues to establish, not to mention the blossoming community fostered through Owen’s label Orindal Records.

And community feels like the right word for the compilation. Both in terms of the gathered artists and the characters they bring to life. Because hearing the songs in different voices really brings home the diversity of personalities present across Owen’s work. Pedro the Lion adds a weariness to ‘My Sister’s Birthday’ with his distinctively gruff fondness. Claire Cronin is the perfect person to fully excavate the spookiness of ‘Pamela’. MJ Lenderman and Karly Hartzman raise a glass to poor old Christmas Steve. Sinai Vessel captures ‘Kitty Winn’ in all its sad affection.

Some, like Lisa/Liza‘s ‘Rabbits’ or Karima Walker‘s ‘Same Dream’, take the original versions back to the traditional folk roots, while the likes of Ylayali, Moon Racer and Bedbug lean into the electronic, harking back to earlier CFTPA days. What’s impressive is how the distinctive “Ashworthian” voice remains across the spectrum. Even the tracks with no literal voice, be it Robert Stillman‘s take on ‘Christmas in Nightmare City’ or Gordon Ashworth‘s extended guitar version of ‘Nephew in the Wild’, lose none of their ability to evoke the tales we’ve grown to hold so dear. Because while Dan might have intended to organise a birthday party, it turned out more like a reunion. A gathering of Owen’s characters, our friends. Still here, still living, still with so many stories to tell.

Cover painting by Martha Miller

The post You Were Alone: An Owen Ashworth Almanac appeared first on Various Small Flames.

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

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

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

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

But somehow, amidst the drugs and fighting and perversion, Pollock managed to create characters interesting beyond black curiosity, taking up the mantle of Southern greats such as William Gay and Flannery O’Connor in his ability to induce sympathy or at least complicate the antipathy his characters will garner. This style was developed (and potentially mastered) with Devil All The Time, his debut novel which cast the reader into world in which the membrane between reality and nightmare is leaky at best, with blood sacrifice and serial killer couples complicating an already bleak coming-of-age tale.

While Donald Ray Pollock’s latest novel, The Heavenly Table, takes us back to the 1917, it’s still rooted in the area of America he is making his own. The narrative is snappy and unsettled, the short chapters jumping between various locations and points of view, slowly drawing inwards in an inescapable ring which corrals the characters into the inevitable finale at the town of Meade. We have Ellsworth Fiddler, a swindled farmer trying to save face, Jasper Cone, a painfully afflicted sanitation inspector, Lieutenant Bovard, a jilted husband turned homoerotic (would be) war hero, and finally the luckless Jewett brothers, Cane, Cob and Chimney, who grow tired of the poor life and turn to robbing banks as a path to salvation.

With the graphic violence, crude sex and odd scatological humour, this appears to be more or less Pollock’s odd twist on the standard Western fare. Where things get interesting is that the Jewetts are inspired by a cheap dime novel, The Life and Times of Bloody Bill Bucket. Every cliche can therefore be read as a secondhand gesture, the Jewetts wearing Bloody Bill’s persona like a tacky fancy dress costume, hoping some of his magic (ie. his fictional bravado, success, imperiousness to pain/failure/death) might rub off on them. Furthermore, as their ‘spree’ gains traction so does the media’s reaction, with stories of ‘Jewett’ crimes emanating from newspapers in other areas and states, despite the brothers never having been there.

So not only are the boys distorting fiction into reality, but their reality is distorting into fiction, leaving them having to live up to the magnificent/terrifying tales on both ends. And while it’s apparent the trio are not well-equipped for such pressures, they sure give it their (quite literal) best shot, working on the logic of faking it ’til you make it:

‘Leaning over the horn of his saddle, Chimney spat and then said, “Well, I don’t know who those ol’ boys are back there, but I don’t figure they can shoot any better than we can.”

“Maybe, but there must be fifteen of them in that pack.”

“So?” Chimney said. “That many don’t even amount to one box of shells.”‘

Here are some dust-strewn, blood-spattered songs to listen to as you read.

Tracklisting:

1) Devil Town – Bright Eyes
2) Blood Red Sentimental Blues – Cotton Jones
3) Bury Me in the Garden – Tyler Butler and his Handsome Friends
4) Tom Justice, The Choir Boy Robber, Apprehended at Ace Hardware in Libertyville, IL – Casiotone For The Painfully Alone
5) Murderous Joy – Carter Tanton
6) Christ Jesus – Deer Tick
7) You Should’ve Seen the Other Guy – Nathaniel Rateliff
8) Buriedfed – Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson
9) Fire & Fast Bullets – Blitzen Trapper
10) Brother’s Blood – Kevin Devine
11) I Dreamt of My Brother Dying – Oscar Lush
12) Drunk and On a Star – Kevin Morby
13) Weather of a Killing Kind – The Tallest Man on Earth
14) Whore – Low
15) Liars – Gregory Alan Isakov and the Colorado Symphony
16) Closer to Heaven – Pink Mountaintops
17) Killer – Samantha Crain

The Heavenly Table is out now via Harvill Secker and Doubleday. You can read about Donald Ray Pollock’s other works on the Knopf Doubleday website.

The post Lit Links: Donald Ray Pollock – The Heavenly Table appeared first on Various Small Flames.

The world has always been ending, but 2001 really upped the stakes for the first time since the end of the Cold War. Terror became the buzz word in a world of televised attacks and indefinite wars, Wikipedia emerging just in time for us to catalogue such events and believe they were getting more frequent, more severe, closer and closer to home. While art was probably playing catch-up to developments, cinema went for the escape route, with Shrek and Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings beginning their own seemingly endless campaigns, while music reminded us that, for the majority, life went on as normal. Here are some songs that let us know while the world has always been ending, in ways both crushingly huge and pathetically small, we’ve got little choice but to keep on living.

Tracklisting:

1) Tonight Was a Disaster – Castiotone for the Painfully Alone
2) TV Zombie – The Rondelles
3) Ice Cube – Clem Snide
4) I Remember Me – Silver Jews
5) Adopduction – Les Savy Fav
6) Lucky Number Nine – The Moldy Peaches
7) Jenny & the Ess-Dog – Stephen Malkmus
8) Confusion is Nothing New – Beachwood Sparks
9) Miss My Lion – Scout Niblett
10) Wonder Wonder – Edith Frost
11) Up to My Neck in You –  Mark Kozelek
12) It’s a Wonderful Life – Sparklehorse
13) Sunflower – Low
14) Parks – Four Tet
15) Unearned – Patrick Phelan
16) I Want Wind to Blow – The Microphones
17) Bitters & Absolut – The National

Did we forget your favourite? Are our musical opinions now null and void? If so, let us know on Twitter or Facebook or something. Also, if you didn’t see it last month, you can find our post for the year 2000 here. Otherwise, we’ll see you next month as the world’s least efficient/useful time machine chugs along to 2002.

The post Millennium Mix: 2001 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

“While it’s easy to cast [Ashworth] as the lonely boy in front of a keyboard, the truth, at least in my eyes, is that he’s often hardly there at all, a transparent gateway into the lives of people you’ve never met feeling things you thought you had to suffer through alone”

In Bloomington is a recording of a full-band Advance Base show from December 11, 2015, presumably in Bloomington. The date and locale aren’t the important part of that sentence though, rather the ‘full-band’ descriptor – what the press release describes as a ‘Dream Band’, assembled for two nights only. The line-up features players from Okkervil River, Shearwater, Mike Adams at His Honest Weight and Sun Kil Moon, as well as Ashworth’s previous project Casiotone For the Painfully Alone. To give them their full due, Ashworth (himself responsible for the Rhodes, autoharp, loops & vocals) is joined by Mike Adams (drums & Mellotron samples), Nick Ammerman (bass), Matthew Barnhart (guitar & tambourine), Edward Crouse (piano) and Howard Draper (lap steel guitar & tambourine) to flesh out the humble solo efforts into things far more exuberant and rich.

The setlist draws mainly from Nephew in the Wild but also contains three tracks from 2012’s equally great A Shut-In’s Prayer (an album which we described as “a tangle of hopes and nostalgia… melancholy without melodrama”) and even a rather nice rendition of Etiquette stand-out/eternal comfort, ‘Bobby Malone Moves Home’. As we’ve mentioned already, the full-band set up elevates the songs to another level, the communal effort managing to inject a certain amount of joy into even the most lonely characters, even if it’s just the small wonder of being alive.

In Bloomington is set for release on the 8th July both digitally and on vinyl, the latter coming with packaging illustrated by Dan Black of Landland. You can pre-order it now via Orindal Records. Those of you who live in North America will most likely have a good chance to catch Advance Base on tour this summer, with a whole host of dates lined up with some pretty cool people. Check out the list below:

June 01 – Chicago, IL @ Lincoln Hall &
June 02 – Pontiac, MI @ Pike Room at The Crofoot &
June 03 – Columbus, OH @ Double Happiness &
June 04 – Cleveland, OH @ Grog Shop &
June 21 – Eau Claire, WI @ Ambient Inks
June 22 – Sioux Falls, SD @ Total Drag
June 26 – Gimli, Manitoba @ Real Love Summer Fest
June 27 – Duluth, MN @ Red Herring Lounge
June 28 – Minneapolis, MN @ Turf Club %
July 11 – Chicago, IL @ Subterranean ?
July 13 – Denver, CO @ Hi-Dive
August 16 – Chicago, IL @ The Hideout *
August 17 – Bloomington, IN @ The Bishop *
August 18 – Cincinnati, OH @ MOTR Pub *
August 21 – Chapel Hill, NC @ Local 506 *
August 24 – Brooklyn, NY @ Silent Barn *
August 26 – Portland, ME @ Apohadion Theatre *^
August 27 – Bar Harbor, ME @ Lompoc Cafe *
August 28 – Montreal, Quebec @ Casa del Popolo *
August 29 2016 – Winooski, VT @ The Monkey House *
September 10 – Houston, TX @ The Satellite #
September 13 – Fayetteville, AR @ Nomads Music Lounge #
September 16 – St Louis, MO @ Foam #

& w/ Yoni & Geti
% w/ Air Traffic Controller
? w/ Told Slant, Bellows & Spencer Radcliffe
* w/ Hello Shark
^ w/ Lisa/Liza
# w/ Mike Adams at his Honest Weight

The post Advance Base unveils new live album, In Bloomington appeared first on Various Small Flames.

It’s up for debate whether Alexandra Kleeman’s début novel You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine is dystopian. I mean, it’s too familiar and life-like to be truly dystopian, although that’s exactly what makes it so terrifying. The world seems to be functioning pretty much as normal, as people go about their days with the aimless sense of duty we are all accustomed to, a far cry from the visions of Orwell or Burgess or Dick. But the definition of dystopia is “a community or society that is undesirable or frightening”, so who’s to say “normal” can’t also be dystopic?

Kleeman’s narrator ‘A’ is blank, mostly faceless with few discernible personality traits. Her job feels temporary and is barely mentioned. Many of her scenes involve her doing very little inside her apartment. Instead she is fleshed out through her exposure to-/interaction with her room-mate (‘B’), boyfriend (‘C’) and the vivid stream of entertainment and advertising (or entertaining advertisement) which seems part of the world’s very fabric. Obvious comparisons are Pynchon and Foster Wallace, plus George Saunders in his being-clever mode (as opposed to his sentimental one), although the focus is very much away from the large-scale political/societal systems in favour of personal, A-centric explorations. All background occurrences (the mystery of disappearing dads, an anti-veal activist who ends up marketing it, even B and C) are filtered through A’s experience.

As the story is told in first person this might seem obvious, but (to me at least) it goes much deeper than that. In most postmodern books the main character is subject to/lost amongst a world of disinformation, whereas in You Too… it’s A herself who feels like the disinformation. The question here isn’t “is the world as the media says it is?” but rather “am I who the media says I am? Who I think I am?” Whether this is an emerging trend in post-postmodern millennial literature, a natural reaction to a world in which identity is unsettled and fluctuating, or just a new, gender-based perspective on things traditionally written about by men is unclear. One thing is for certain, Kleeman is a name to watch among the new generation of writers building upon the work of the aforementioned greats.Here’s a collection of songs that I think are relevant or related to the novel. If you like a particular band, just click the artist name in the tracklisting to be whisked away for more information. Enjoy:

Tracklisting:

1. Too Dark – Frankie Cosmos
2. Sucks Hanging Out With You (It Sucks Even More When You Leave) – Free Cake For Every Creature
3. Slumber Party – Mommy Long Legs
4. What’s Another Lipstick Mark – Adult Mom
5. Unholy Faces – Florist
6. Bedroom – Alanna McArdle
7. TV – Oh, Rose & Sawtooth
8. Death Cult Paradise – Trace Mountains
9. I Saw My Twin – Hop Along
10. Nashville Parthenon – Casiotone For The Painfully Alone
11. Dear Sons and Daughters of Hungry Ghosts – Wolf Parade
12. Oranges – Young Jesus
13. 1994 – PWR BTTM
14. Washing Machine – SPORTS
15. Lookalike / I Lost My Mind – Titus Andronicus

You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine is out now on HarperCollins. Quiet, Constant Friends is still available as a download or on cassette via the Wake The Deaf Bandcamp page. You can read the other Lit Links posts here. If you have a book in mind and fancy a go yourself, just get in touch!

The post Alexandra Kleeman – You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine appeared first on Various Small Flames.

“This is no chillwave side-project, no 80s-inspired synth revolution, just an extremely talented lyricist doing what he does best”

Instead of a drastic alteration of sound, what had changed was the focus and reach of Ashworth’s writing. There has long been a factoid in circulation that Owen Ashworth is a sad, angry-at-the-world young man who writes sad, angry-at-the-world music, most likely about himself. Of course, the moniker Casiotone For The Painfully Alone didn’t help matters, nor did his choice of theme or style (for those not familiar, CFTPA is a pretty much perfect description). However, the true strength of his writing is how he manages to cast outside of himself to create nuanced, believable characters from different walks of life. While early albums (arguably right up to Etiquette) focused on post-collegiates lost in their twenties, Ashworth has gradually cast his net wider, and Advance Base’s sophomore album Nephew in the Wild finds this evolution still in motion, with the characters slowly radiating from the sad teens in draughty apartments into a wide ensemble of (still mostly sad) misfits, dropouts and unfortunates (read: real human beings) occupying all sorts of lives and unfortunate situations.

The record opens with ‘Trisha Please Come Home’, in which a nameless narrator rues the disappearance of the titular Trisha from their small, blue-collar town. While the scenario might not seem all that original, Ashworth subverts the usual lost-love angst in favour of real-world worry and sincerity – small, poignant details replacing the sweeping melodrama and self-pity familiar to pop and country music. So when they say “You don’t call me ever on the phone / Am I supposed to listen to Thin Lizzy & get high on my own?” it comes off a half-joke, an attempt to make light of a situation that has hurt more than they would ever admit.

As a consequence of this careful writing ability, you always get the sense that the characters in Ashworth’s music are almost real – three-dimensional, complex people who have lives outside of the incidents and accidents detailed in the songs. Take ‘Might of the Moose’ for example, an indie pop vignette where the narrator hits a moose with their car. The tale alone seems odd and dramatic enough to warrant telling, but the song is loaded with greater meaning, subtle details woven in with a master’s precision.

“On my way home from Traverse City
I hit a moose it wasn’t pretty
Walked ’til I found a Citgo payphone down the road
& I called your house it’s the only number that I know”

As is often the case with Ashworth’s work, a simple love story emerges from beneath (or rather within) the primary details, with small references to everyday events and gestures (ie. calling a familiar face for a tow truck after totalling your car) allowing a higher story to blossom. The song brings to mind ‘The Perfect Gerbil’, an essay by George Saunders from his collection The Braindead Megaphone, where he explains the genius of Donald Barthelme’s ‘The School’ and the economy of its language. The story is essentially a recurring pattern of increasing severity: things associated with the school die. It starts with an unsuccessful gardening project and escalates into classroom pets fatalities and eventually human death. The piece is funny and entertaining, with sharp wit and intrigue carrying your attention (ie. “what’s going to die next!?”) but the ending unfurls with a deft turn, allowing the true meaning to dawn on the reader. The teacher is asked by his class to make love to the teaching assistant Helen (“so that we can see how it is done… We know you like Helen”). The teacher refuses, although admits he likes the woman, and Helen just “looked out of the window”. As Saunders explains:

“A few lines ago we didn’t even know Helen existed, but we do now, and so does The Narrator, and the small voice in our mind that has all along been  registering that The Narrator has no personal life… is assuaged: this is now, writ small, a love story. It’s a love story!”

I suppose what I’m trying to say is that I think all of Ashworth’s songs are love stories in one way or another. ‘Christmas in Dearborn’ has an almost lullaby-style opening and a ‘hushed snowfall, fire in the hearth’ kind of vibe. Sad but warmly so, the song charts a holiday season with the people you don’t get along with but love all the same, describing the various guests and dull conversations while hinting at the failed marriage of the narrator. ‘Pamela’ is yet another spin of a love song, telling of a girl born to teenage parents, the father a drug dealer (“Sold acid & mescaline”) and the mother a fast food worker (“She worked at Dairy Queen/and no matter how she cleaned/she still had the smell of death in her hair”). This is a familiar theme in Ashworth’s work, a broken home where the father is absent (or worse) and love or the lack of it shapes both mother and child into forms they would rather not fill.

“You were born into a world of sin
You are the devil’s kin
The sign of the beast on your skin

You have come to fulfill a prophecy
To level humanity
& burn everything that you see”

‘Christmas in Milwaukee’, the second festive song, tells of a person trying to keep their head above water (both figuratively and literally) with a baby in tow. The love here is not the cotton-candy kind but rather one of pacts and promises, a binding force which makes even the most cheerful days unneeded complications (“You want a Christmas in Milwaukee/I’ve got trouble enough”). ‘Summon Satan’ goes a step further, with love conspicuous in its absence. Concerning teenage dabblings in the occult, this is a story of loneliness and isolation and the violent messed-up means a person can resort to abate them. “You had tried to summon Satan” sings Ashworth, “but screwed up the incantation, and left an open portal on your parents’ kitchen wall”, before going on to describe the brutal-yet-detached ‘curse’ in almost tender detail, as if he is looking back at something irreconcilable. Things don’t get any more conventional (or should that be fictional? Romantic?) with ‘My Love For You is Like a Puppy Underfoot’, with Jody Weinmann’s lyrics detailing lots of clever analogies of love.

“My love for you
It’s not an atom bomb
My love for you
It’s not a lightning storm
My love for you
It’s like a puppy underfoot
Better watch my step
You know I could trample it

My love for you
It’s not a movie script
Doesn’t make sense
To my friends when I describe it”

‘The Only Other Girl From Back Home’ plays like an old folk-song updated for the teens of maybe the eighties or nineties, with loneliness and liquor and lookers to fight over, and a good heap of tragedy to wrap things up. The title track is similarly tragic, the ghosts of absent fathers haunting the story of a family torn up by silly mistakes and blind chance (“In hard times kids grow up fast / Please be there for him / your sister would ask”). Again, the song feels from a previous time, not old per se but pre-internet, and indeed all of Nephew in the Wild sits somewhere in this not-so-distant past, The Year of the Painfully Alone, in which things appear simpler yet further apart, stretched wide by a lack of technology, a place where disappearances are easy and final.

So, for all the worries about changes of direction, Nephew in the Wild sees Ashworth following the same path he always has. Any changes are because he’s getting better at what he does, refusing to stand still. The final song, ‘Kitty Winn’, feels like a milestone along this road. The track’s autobiographical air is conspicuously different to the rest of the album, although the storytelling is if anything even more effective. It finds Ashworth older and wiser, accepting his past as something sometimes damaging and instead focussing on his new family and life at home. This too is very much a love song, in fact the most sincere, ardent one on the record.

“We got married in September
The baby came the next December
So I got off the road
It’s the longest I’ve been home
since I remember
I wake up earlier these days
to dress the kid & fix her eggs
Then we’ll walk down to the park
if it’s nice out
There’s a swing set where she plays

I’m not out looking for something
I haven’t found
You won’t see me around
I’ve got a family now”

It’s a wonderful song, and one which is imbued with perhaps the holiest of all emotions: contentment. And I for one hope it truly is autobiographical. I don’t know Owen Ashworth, and maybe I’m completely wrong, but he seems like a kind and empathetic generally nice human being, in the same way the best writers seem like people you could be friends with. Even if none of that is true, I guess it doesn’t matter – what is indisputable is the fact that he’s a damn good writer who tells stories that speak to and help us all. While it’s easy to cast him as the lonely boy in front of a keyboard, the truth, at least in my eyes, is that he’s often hardly there at all, a transparent gateway into the lives of people you’ve never met feeling things you thought you had to suffer through alone.

Nephew in the Wild is out now and you can download it from the Advance Base Bandcamp page or grab a physical copy from the Orindal store/Tomlab.

The post Advance Base – Nephew in the Wild appeared first on Various Small Flames.

“[David] descends the spirals of grief after losing his wife… With death and decay quite literally pervading his house and life, David finds himself both terrified by his situation yet drawn towards some obscure peace with it, as if giving in to a dark and fungal siren”

Amelia Gray is back with her third collection of short stories, Gutshot. As the title suggests, this is an uncomfortable book. Like, being-shot-square-in-the-guts level uncomfortable. There’s a man who vomits every time he speaks (and carries an empty pop bottle for convenience), mutual genital mutilation between a couple struggling to conceive a child, a family who carve up an over-sized heart with kitchen knives. There are giant snakes and desecrated graveyards and twins within twins. And yes, there is blood and shit and mucus in large quantities. 

As in Threats, many of the characters in Gutshot seem aware of their situation but unable to change, as if passengers on a train called Life or Destiny which they understand will arrive at its destination regardless of anything they might do. These are people caught in a strange stases, pervaded by vague sensations they can see and feel but not avoid, sensations which eat away at their insides until they are hulled and hollow. Opener ‘In The Moment’ is a good example, a story where a couple eradicate all references of the past or future from their apartment, removing all context from their existence and thus making life at once fascinating and impossible. See also ‘Away From’, the tale of a kidnapped woman who freezes at the top of the stairs when trying to escape. Reading these stories is like watching a fungus bloom across a wall, like watching a slow-motion video of yourself going up in flames.

This feeling hangs over the majority of the stories, even those in which the characters are decisive. Even ‘The Labyrinth’, which sees a not-so-brave man decide to be brave teeters toward a cryptic ending, or rather ends cryptically before any real conclusion. This is typical Gray, never quite giving the reader that satisfying click of recognition, the realisation of where a story is going or what it means. Good people aren’t rewarded and bad people aren’t punished and even passages that first appear clear allegories or fables skew into confusion. In ‘The Labyrinth’, the narrator, Jim, is forced to carry an (heavy) enigmatic disk through the maze:

“I don’t know about this,” I said.

“It’s the Phiastos Disk,” Dale said. “I paid a pretty penny so mind where you set it.”

It did seem to be imbued with some significance.

And so Jim takes the disk into the labyrinth without ever understanding why. Gray’s grotesque imagery is much the same. It remains important, vital, to her work without serving any clear function (ie. any ham-fisted metaphorical purpose), as if its meaning is so large it’s impossible to focus on. ‘Year of the Snake’ is set up like a strange and ambiguous fairy tale that never narrows down to some moral principle, while ‘The Swan as Metaphor for Love’ begins like an amusing love-is-actually-terrible gag before subverting the subversion, delving so far into horrible, biological truths that you’re left with an existential consideration so primal it registers as a taste in the mouth.

I could go on: ‘Device,’ ‘These Are Fables’ and the title story all seem to tee up some valuable punchline without following through, highlighting something that makes Gray’s writing so special. By not giving answers, or sending explicit messages, she manages to create characters and situations which feel real despite their surreality. Whether they have a device which can predict the future, an unending compulsion to say thank you or a prostitute locked in the heating ducts of their home, each and every character is vividly, fatally, human.

To review the collection as a whole is a difficult job. The book reads like a carefully constructed chaos too nuanced to be unified into a clear theme. Occasionally an image or theme is amplified by what seems like inadvertent recurrence, while other times they clash messily leaving once-clear messages and morals adrift in ambiguity. This gives Gray’s design an decidedly organic feel, each piece, ignorant of the rest, fulfils its own role as if it is the most important thing in the world, creating a system of blind parts working furiously toward some obscure goal, and giving Fernando Vicente‘s artwork a whole new meaning.

Gutshot is out now, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Seeing as we are primarily a music website, we thought we’d included a playlist of songs to accompany each book review. The tracks aren’t necessarily directly related to the anything in the stories, but rather get close to the same sorts of imagery and moods. Enjoy.

The post Amelia Gray – Gutshot appeared first on Various Small Flames.

So as you can probably guess, Advance Base has announced a new album. Nephew in the Woods, coming this summer, will be Ashworth’s second full release under the Advance Base moniker, following his début A Shut-In’s Prayer (which we wrote about here) and his exalted spell as Casiotone For The Painfully Alone. The only bad news here is that weird sort of apprehension which surrounds a new release from one of your favourites, the faint possibility that they’ll betray your ideas of what makes them great, possibly alienating you in the process. What would I do if Ashworth reinvented himself and declared that lonely people are actually all nerds and recorded a decadent autotuned pop album about drinking champagne in gold-plated swimming pools with bikini-clad ladies?

Fear not! If the opening track ‘Tricia Please Come Home’ (which is streaming now over at Brooklyn Vegan) is anything to go by, we are in safe hands. It sees Ashworth plying his own unique brand of folk storytelling scored with lo-fi electronics. If that’s not enough, the press release will quell your fears:

“Sweetly sad stories about lonely Midwesterners trying to make sense of their troubled pasts… Disappearance, displacement, hell-raising, child-raising, Christmas, Michigan, arson, aging & animals are recurring themes throughout the album”

Nephew in the Wild is out on the 21st August via Orindal (North America) and Tomlab (UK/EU) and you can pre-order it right now.

The post Nephew in the Wild: a New Album From Advance Base appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Ashworth has just released Plastic Owen Band, a new “album” of covers, demos, compilation tracks and rarities produced between 2011 and 2014. The covers include Creedence Clearwater Revival, Bill Withers, Neil Young and even Casiotone’s own ‘Natural Light’.’Natural Light’ is classic Ashworth, a low-key, yearning song for a lost love. It is has lines like this:

“I got some news on you from a friend
you’re in Charlotte again
teaching Spanish at high school

he said you’re going by Joy
you cut your hair like a boy
& you don’t talk to your old friends

I found a picture from before the fight
we’re in natural light
& you’re sitting on my lap
like everything’s alright”

There’s also a remix of Advance Base’s ‘Summer Music’ (featuring Julie Byrne, who we wrote about here) which appeared on the aforementioned A Shut-In’s Prayer. It’s a great illustration of how a change of name has not meant a change of direction (or quality for that matter).

“There’s no comfort in sympathy
she’s upstate with her family
I’m still at the same address
I still believe I could love her best”

It also has a bizarre video in which Ashworth reveals himself to be a little fuzzy blue guy, a longlost inhabitant of Sesame Street.

Plastic Owen Band also has some rather nice instrumental tracks that show that Ashworth’s talents extend far beyond song writing. Advance Base has an album of them here, if you would like to hear more.

You can grab Plastic Owen Band on a pay-what-you-can basis right now.

P.S. If you’re not familiar with Ashworth’s work then please put that right immediately.

The post Advance Base – Plastic Owen Band appeared first on Various Small Flames.