“this summer was full of unrequited love and powdered donuts; our hearts were as broken as half the slushy machines in town. but we still managed 2 make some cool jams in the meantime”

The songs are bright and brisk, all seven clocking in at around 12 minutes. Opener ‘school starts’ is about feeling sick with stress at the beginning of the school year, while ‘talentless’ is about summoning the courage to dump that good-for-nothing partner. ‘strawberries’ is all gooey and gushing, that hot quick antsy feeling of crushing on someone real bad (“You’re the cutest thing I’ve seen / I think we’ve hung out in my dreams / at least 10 times since we first met / and I don’t know your name yet”), while ‘drive-thru’ is about being in love with more than just a person, but with being alive:

“i try to see the love in everything
and i am told that there is feeling
in the birds and the bees and the bark on the trees
in math equations and everything that u read”

‘pretty happy’ is about feeling just that, ‘softboy’ is about being frozen out by the guy/girl who only lives down the street and closer ‘wasted eyes’ is soft and dreamy and pretty sad (“every person wants somebody to keep them company / because the company is free / but u never invite me). It’s a fitting end to an album that has barely just begun. I guess you have no choice but to hit that old repeat button.

You can get very tiny songs as a pay-what-you-want download via the Honeyuck bandcamp page, or pre-order a cassette via the folks at Viridian Sounds (who btw also play in the cool band Naps who you should check out).

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“Each [artist] present[s] a side of music that doesn’t sound written or recorded as much as spilled out and gathered back up quickly, out of necessity and through broken and hurried means. Busy and tired but still distracted, holding on to memories like crumpled drawings pulled from the trash”

If that doesn’t make you want to listen then I’m afraid you’ve wandered into the wrong corner of the internet.

Ylayali gets side A and starts as he means to go on with ‘Clicking Clanking’, counting himself in with some DIY knocks before presenting a lovely little lo-fi acoustic track, complete with reassuringly miserable lyrics such as, “Today I left my room twice, recorded a song I don’t really like”. ‘Blab’ is mainly all lo-fi guitar again, joined by some minimal percussion. It feels patient and intimate, enclosed in the same sense of everyday melancholy that makes Talons’ so great, that feeling of long afternoons in gloomy rooms, when the rest of the human population seem faraway and indistinct, like figures from barely remembered dreams.

“I really miss that shirt and that watch that I lost
and also spending every weekend together
and every summer
going further away from home”

‘Pinkies’ is a short song which follows a similar thread, full of vague lines which you feel mean the world to the characters involved. “There if you need me, not if you don’t”, he sings. “Walk to the store with you for us both. I want you to know that our pinkies broke”. ‘Crud’ is shorter still, clocking in under a minute yet carrying the same emotional heft (“Something good came out of both of us instead I saw some little bit of crud, a little thing about to fall off of the bigger better thing”), while ‘Cool Burnout’ starts with a jittery looped drum sample before vocals enter and the percussion settles into a simple beat, like the sound of someone striking a hollow bamboo shoot over and over. “After dinner the day feels over” Lyons sings, ensuring that the air of despondency lasts until the very end. The track finishes side A with some heavier reverb-laden guitars, which themselves cut very abruptly, paving the way for the next act.

‘April Journal Excerpts’, the first offering on Lung Cycles’s side B, is a sonic collage of slightly distorted audio clips and ambient recordings, things like people chattering and birdsong, what could easily quite literally be diary entries of the aural variety. After a while some gentle guitar work enters too, ticking over like time on fast-forward. ‘Pull Me Apart’ is a very pretty song with swirling tumbling guitar and hushed vocals, while the closer, ‘Hottest Day of the Year So Far (11pm version)’, is a measured guitar track with a background hum of tape hiss that sounds like running water or falling rain in some analogue dreamscape.

You can get the album on cool limited release cassette (see below), or as a digital download, via the Lily Tapes & Discs Bandcamp page.

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German Error Message (the alias of multi-instrumentalist Paul Kintzing) provides the first three tracks, making what the blurb wonderfully describes as “densely-layered and blanket-thick bedroom folk” (a line I plan on stealing the next time someone asks me what music I’m into). It’s something along the lines of the melancholy mumble of Talons’ crossed with earthy folk-rock and gauzy bedroom pop. That’s a pretty terrible description, so just check it out for yourself.

Ben Lovell (who, unless I am mistaken used to record as Squanto) then chips in with two tracks of his own, under the moniker Lung Cycles. But this is no flying visit as they come in at 10+ and 7+ minutes respectively. The songs are subtle and restrained for the most part but prone to the odd grand gesture, like some post-rock that got to feeling really sad and wandered off into the fog.

I’m going to go back to LT&D’s blurb to finish, mainly because they’ve already done it far better than I’m going to. “Bear with us as we stumble through the snow, wondering about who lives behind all the windows on the way to our own. Keep these songs close to you this winter and they’ll keep you warm”. That sums up how I feel about this release rather nicely. It’s perfect for a quiet, cosy moment on a pitch-black night in the dead of the oncoming winter. To put it succinctly, it’s hibernation music.

You can buy the EP on a lovely casette tape in a letterpress printed, watercolour painted package via Lily Tapes and Discs. Follow the same link to grab it as a name-your-price download.

Another option is the ‘2014 Batch’ which, for a reasonable $20, gets you a tape copy of every Lily Tapes and Discs release from this year. What better way to familiarise yourself with one of the coolest little labels around?

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Sarah Winchester – Northeast Kingdom

Sarah Winchester is a member of the really rather excellent Oregon-based band A Weather, If you are a fan of A Weather and bemoan the fact they only have two albums, Winchester also records solo under her own name, namely this excellent release entitled Northeast Kingdom. The EP (which was originally released way back in 2009 by Team Love Records) contains six songs and each is as beautiful as the next. J. Tillman-esque finger-picked acoustics support writing that is nothing short of poetry. The lyrics, along with Winchester’s distinctive delivery, capture hope and beauty amidst loneliness, a white-bright flicker in a twilit world of isolation and weariness and pain.

Get Northeast Kingdom on cassette, together with artwork by Winchester and artist Heather Swenson via Mt. Home Arts. If anything, the package is even prettier than the music.

Baby Mollusk – Baby Mollusk and the Big Babies

Baby Mollusk is Rachel Gordon. She plays guitar and sings spiky and sort-of-sad songs very sweetly. The Big Babies are Matt Van Asselt and Mike Ditrio. Those guys play bass and drums. Sometimes they all join in together and crash things around a bit in a wondrously joyous noise. Baby Mollusk and The Big Babies is a self-titled album and a really good one at that. You should all buy it on an incredibly good-looking cassette via Mt. Home Arts. You can also download it for however much you want via Bandcamp.

Whatever, Dad – 100% Take Home! Grade Pending

Whatever, Dad is the recording project of Elaiza Santos and sometimes some of her friends. She makes down-tempo rock music that sounds like an internal monologue of a young person written down and backed by a makeshift band. It is every bit as good as that sounds.

You can get the album via Bandcamp. Had you (or we) been more prompt, you could have gotten a cassette that came with buttons and butter (yep) and silkscreen napkins, a package that takes the tape game to a whole new level.

Real Life Buildings – It Snowed

Real Life Buildings is one of the songwriters from The Act of Estimating as Worthless (who also have releases on Mt. Home Arts), and the drummer too! Their names are Matthew Van Asselt and Mike Ditrio (remember them?). It Snowed is their debut album and is due for release on the 6th of November. It has quiet moments and loud moments, ramshackle lo-fi rock and intimate bedroom pop musings (often in the same song).

You can pre-order It Snowed on cassette right now via the Mt. Home Arts website.

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