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.

At the same time, almost 2,000 miles away in California, musician and writer Claire Cronin was working on an album of her own. Although a very different record, Bloodless is a product of this same moment, and both encapsulate the American milieu at the beginning of the twenty-first century’s third decade. Released via Orindal Records, it is a collection of songs crafted at the bleeding edge of this world we have made, a world apparently unravelling at the seams. “Some days, the air was so toxic that we couldn’t leave the house,” Cronin says of recording at home in Berkeley during one of the worst wildfire seasons California has ever witnessed. “Days passed indoors with our air filters going, while the sky outside was orange and dark from morning until dusk.” This very physical destruction was chased by one less visible but no less brutal. The whole planet was rocked by the pandemic, prolonging the sense of confinement and inviting death into the everyday.

The time is captured in the album art, a portrait of Cronin at once intimate and oddly distant, blurred as though fine details failed to persevere in the face of such surreal fear and violence. “The recording process was almost hallucinatory,” she continues. “I would lose my sense of time in the music’s repetition and the heat of the tiny room where I was playing. I felt trapped and hopeless and terrified of the virus, of the fires, of what was going on in American politics.”

To return again, briefly, to Low—pressed in an interview about HEY WHAT, Sparhawk acknowledged the lack of hope on the record, but rejected the label of cynicism. Hopelessness can hold purpose, he argued, even if just to foster a sense of endurance or a deeper level of engagement with reality. “Maybe the first step in really being hopeful is to stop being hopeful,” he says. “Are you really being hopeful or are you hanging your hope on things, when clearly we can’t count on things?”

The opening and title track of Bloodless arrives at a similar conclusion, however reluctant the admission might be. “I know I’m a man, thorn in my eye,” Cronin sings, “and my mind is unbearable.” The lines describe a suffering rooted in the uncertainty of mortal existence. The only escape, the track suggests, is the complete transcendence of the physical world and its connotations. A move beyond the corporeal body itself. But even across this one song, Cronin follows Sparhawk in identifying the dishonesty at the heart of such wishes. The counterproductive nature of hoping beyond hope.

Must be strange not to see light and air
held back from the heat bodies bring
Taken to a field, never got blessed
swallowed by the sound of angel wings
Bloodless, bloodless
Bloodless, bloodless

I did not give up
I did not get drawn up
It was not my luck
or the book of trust

A lack of hope does not equate to a lack of possibility. Tracks like ‘Through the Walls,’ with its shadows and voices and bloody heads, emerge straight from the mystical imagery of predecessor Big Dread Moon, and those familiar with Claire Cronin will appreciate Bloodless as a continuation of an ongoing project. A receptivity to the metaphysical and occult that’s part of an attempt to communicate with an elsewhere, an action performed in the face of the impossible inevitability of death. Cronin has always felt like an artist reaching through the dark, wishing to hear or be heard, simultaneously fearing an answer and dreading the cold lack of response. Bloodless is more rooted in physical or human textures than the previous record, but this is its own horror. Presence and absence are the sinister twins of Cronin’s haunted world. Her suffering centred both on what might lurk in the dark and the very dark itself.

Feel this, feel this, feel this
I don’t want to be in your body
What I want is something above me
big as the law

This is the space Bloodless occupies. A heightened awareness of both life and death which offers a new physicality to the sound. The characters are “real as mammals,” or as ‘Through the Walls’ puts it, “Strong and wild and hot / Brave until you rot.” Both the delivery and arrangements remain sparse and ethereal, Cronin’s guitar supported for the most part only by layers of viola from Ezra Buchla. But there’s a notable immediacy too. The sense that whatever is being communicated, however dreamlike or strange, is happening in this world, in this moment. The shadows and light of ‘I Could Not Be Blood’, ‘No Forcefield’ and its taste of iron on the tongue. The themes of possession, of channelling, of floating high above oneself, perhaps never to return.

The move toward the physical is therefore not some renunciation of the spiritual, nor a denial of its influence, rather an incertitude in the exact shape of its power. A symptom of our inability to time its arrival. An acknowledgement that the only certain thing is us. As Sparhawk put it, “If you’re looking for landmarks to hang hope on, eventually they’ll all be gone and you find yourself still there.”

Yielding to the darkness of the moment, closer ‘Now I Don’t Leave’ reimagines the individual’s role in the present, and illuminates its starkest truth. “I came out of the rain and the backwards glance / but the coming was not good,” go the opening lines. “Now I don’t leave, now I don’t leave / Those who persevere will be destroyed / and I am not the destroyer in this story.” There is no hoping our way out of our situation, just as there is no wishing God down to save us from our bodies. If He is present and watching, His intentions remain mysterious. With no way to transcend the physical moment, we must instead embrace it, endure it, come to terms with our own flesh. After all, if God gave us anything, it was blood.

Bloodless is out now via Orindal Records and you can get it from the Claire Cronin Bandcamp page or Orindal webstore, including special ‘Smoke’ or ‘Black’ vinyl editions.

Photos by Vlada Syrkin Werts, video by Marcos Sánchez, cover photography, illustrations & design by Claire Cronin

The post Claire Cronin – Bloodless appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Cronin was kind enough to answer some questions about the record, and lots of other things besides. Take a look below.

First off, I wanted to congratulate you on releasing a record and completing a PhD in such a condensed period. Did it feel like one related endeavour, or a bunch of competing entities? How does it feel to see Big Dread Moon in the world?

Thank you! Both my PhD and the record were several years in the making, so it didn’t feel unduly stressful. I just happened to finish the degree a month before Orindal wanted to release the album.

While it took years to write the songs on Big Dread Moon (the oldest ones are six or seven years old), we recorded the whole thing in one weekend trip to Brooklyn and mixed it over another weekend a few months later. A PhD is a lot of work, but almost all of it is on your own time. I have a lot of anxious energy and find it helpful to shift from one project to the next; working on music was a good counterpoint to studying for comprehensive exams, writing scholarly papers, and planning my dissertation. Also, it became difficult for me to write my own poetry while reading so much poetry, but music was still available to me as an outlet.

I see all of my work as interconnected. The research I did during my PhD (on horror films, poetry, and occultism) bled into the lyrics of the songs. I have only one mind.

It feels good to see Big Dread Moon in the world. Although, besides when I’m performing live, the release also feels virtual. So much takes place on music websites, social media, and streaming platforms. It’s hard to know what the record is actually doing out there.

On that note, I’m interested in the dividing line between your songwriting and poetry. How do you decide which to pursue for any given idea? Does a poem ever become a song, or vice versa?

It’s never a logical decision. My poems and songs cover the same territory; the words come out of the same notebooks. In hindsight, I find that I sometimes test out an idea in one form and then bring it to fruition in another. For example, I have a long poem called “The Wolfman Poem” that I wrote around the same time as the ‘Wolfman’ song, but the poem is much angrier, much bloodier. The same thing happens in reverse, where a song turns into a poem. Sometimes they’re both good enough to publish or record, but usually one is clearly stronger.

One of the most impressive and interesting features of the record for me was how you centre on eerie and mythic qualities yet evoke a modern setting too. The world of the record is antiquated yet contemporary, with TV screens and oil lamps existing within the same setting. Did you work toward this, or did the environment of the album emerge naturally?

This is the product of being a person with a superstitious, medieval mind who lives in our contemporary world. Like most of us, I spend much of my day looking at screens. I also read a lot of old stories, recite ancient prayers, and have a fondness for period piece films and TV shows. Musically, some of the songs sound old because they’re basically folk songs played on electric guitar. These melodies and lyrical structures have been transmitted down to us through generations. I’m singing as a living person to living audiences in the twenty-first century, though the music is much older than us.

One of the interesting things about ghost stories is the degree of repetition. The slamming door, the extinguished lights, the levitation. I think this is how I made the link to the alien abduction phenomenon in my review—both ideas rely on well-worn motifs, to the degree that it becomes impossible to know whether this similarities support or weaken the claims. Shared experience might normally be corroborative, be there’s the possibility of a kind of unconscious conditioning, a replication of an old tale. I wondered if you could expand a little on the idea of repetition and its importance to your work.

I’m not sure that my work uses repetition in the way that you’re describing it, but I agree that this is an interesting topic.

There’s repetition in the formal conventions of the ghost story genre and in the ghost itself, who repeats her own traumatic death when haunting. And my songs have a haunted quality in part because they contain the fragments of older narratives and images and melodies. This is more of an unconscious effect. I suspect that this kind of haunting repetition is true of all popular forms, particularly folk music and folklore (which ghost stories and alien abduction narratives are part of).

Within Big Dread Moon, certain motifs also recur, but I think this is because the songs were were written from the same well of feelings. In several songs, I was trying to get at the same sentiment or memory, and I made this attempt from different angles.

We can’t talk about Big Dread Moon without the general horror film question. Which eras/directors are your favourites, or influences?

I love supernatural horror the most. I watch a lot of contemporary films but also appreciate the haunted house cycle from the 1970s, as well as the usual classics. Some random favorites include Suspiria (1977), The Shining (1980), The Others (2001), The Ring (2002), Insidious (2011), Unfriended (2014), Demon (2015), and Hereditary (2018). I’ve also watched many seasons of the paranormal show A Haunting (2005-2018).

I wanted to ask you about Jason Molina. I’ll admit that, when I read the title before listening to the record, I read it in his voice. I mean, try it. Big Dread Moon. Of course, no one person can have a claim on such imagery, and I’m perhaps betraying my naivety in regard to the wider folk/poetic tradition here, but I wondered if you consider Molina an influence?

Jason Molina was definitely an influence. I’ve been a fan of his music since I was in college (more than a decade ago) and I helped promote a show for him when I worked at the student radio station. We met for a moment at a venue. I felt very sad when he passed away.

We come from pretty different backgrounds (though we both attended Oberlin College for a time), but there is something about the earnest despair of his voice and the religious, mythic imagery in his songs that resonates with me.

We always ask this to close, so here goes. Could you name four or five artists you find yourself drawn to at the moment? They can be new, classics, popular or obscure, whatever you find yourself returning to.

Reading: Eugene Thacker on pessimism; Jeffrey Sconce on technology and psychosis; ghostly short stories by Edith Nesbit, Sheridan Le Fanu, and Robert Aickman.
Listening: Aldous Harding’s latest record, John Fleagle’s covers of medieval folk songs.

Big Dread Moon is out now on Orindal Records, and you can get it from them or the Claire Cronin Bandcamp page.

Photo by Stephanie Sutton

The post Interview: Claire Cronin appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Claire Cronin – What the Night is Thinking
Michael Cromier – Foghorn
Ylayali – little caterpillar graveyard
Forrest Moody & Jake Bellissimo – Selige Sehnsucht
Grotto Terrazza – Was Leben Will Muss Sterben
Trying – If I Don’t Get a Job
Giant in The Lighthouse – Sprinting
Soften – Iridescent
Champ Major – Abbeville
Grebes – Plum
Jack M. Senff – Old Days
Sam Lynch – Not My Body
Tyler Key – Change My Mind
Ē – Afraid of the Ocean
Dehd – Wild
Pancho and the Wizards – Rot
TV People – Healthier Days
Plastic Cactus – Mystery Boy
Bibi Club – Jean Rene
It’s Sunday – Comme Un Fool
Little Slugger – Impossible
runnner – fan on
Hostxess – Time
omes – wyd
Oliver Ray – Ol’ Coyote
Will Johnson – Cornelius
Merival – No Brakes
My Father’s Son – Dust to Rust
Jordan Klassen – Virtuous Circle
Ditty – Deathcab

Check out our previous Monthly Roundup playlists, and be sure to read or Reviews and Previews throughout the month.

The post June 2019 Roundup Mix appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Big Dread Moon, the latest album from Georgia-based songwriter and poet Claire Cronin and her first on Orindal Records, has nothing to do with aliens. Yet, as the title suggests, the record exists under the same shadow, a world darkened by something large and looming. The creatures that populate it might not be from outer space but they are certainly from another world—wolfmen and wailing birds, wraiths that drift through the night—and the setting too owes something to Dean’s idea of cyberspace. Cronin offers a contemporary moment superimposed with archaic folk sensibilities and Gothic symbolism, presenting a world in which horror and joy and spiritual meaning are just as likely to emerge from a screen as any other source.

Which is not to say Big Dread Moon hides behind irony and artifice. Rather, cyberspace is presented as one space of many, another plane of our hypermediated world through which gods and ghosts can move unhindered. Claire Cronin is also a scholar, and her interest in “death and spectrality in visual media” is telling in this regard, her writing positioning the horror genre not as some camp or schlocky thrill but rather an allegorical engagement with the human experience. “Was a blue room she sank into,” Cronin sings on ‘Six Guns’, echoing a piece she published with Bennington Review. “Was a spell black as thinking / And between the two came a passing mood / that could break the back of breathing.” Images blend with reality on Big Dread Moon, replace reality, represent reality in ways that ‘real’ life cannot manage. As ‘Six Guns’ continues:

“What the eyes see on TV screens decays
I have lost all my images this way
I have known what would come before it came
Lost names: I am opened in this”

Big Dread Moon should be viewed not as the musical tentacle of Cronin’s many-limbed talents but rather the product of the whole beast, the musician and scholar and poet working as one. Crafted around electric guitar, Ezra Buchla’s viola and sparse synths from Shahzad Ismaily, the songs are elegant in their simplicity and elemental in intensity. Opener ‘Tourniquet’ sets the tone with its fragile beauty and worming dread, sounding at once haunting and haunted as the instrumentation swirls miasma-like around the plain-spoken vocals. “By the time I left, I was vacant,” Cronin sings, “a haunted house with no basement. / If you hate the night, then replace it / with visions of light underground / Dissolvable, impossible, transparent.”

Something between a poem and dark hymn, ‘What the Night is Thinking’ feels intensely personal yet somehow larger too, witness to forces that touch us in profound ways yet transcend any individual. Just as Jodi Dean describes of alien abductions, the wonder of experiencing such otherworldly phenomena is balanced by a dark uncertainty, as though violent judgement lurks within the high ambiguity of the strange and the sublime. “Who knows what the night is thinking?” Cronin asks, every inch of the mystery present in her tone.

Such a force is personified (or lycanthropified) in ‘Wolfman’. “I was in the black woods, not the bitter land,” Cronin begins, “with my gut-string murmur and my oil lamp / He appeared—come shining— / like a blue shock of rain.”  Advancing with an off-kilter creep, the track is stalked by this awful, awesome thing, its possibilities hovering over every moment. “I was bored with silence and emergency,” sings Cronin, putting this sensation into words. “And the wolf was reckless and he followed me.”

The song is a stark example of the horror-inspired world Cronin has built, where oil lamps and TV screens co-exist without any sense of anachronism. An old and mysterious age bleeds into our own, as though overlaid and gradually merging. More strikingly, it is a world we recognise, if not on a conscious level then somehow deeper, like something we’ve been waiting for, the dread of a forgotten past returning. If, as Jodi Dean argues, alien abductions are a manifestation of disfigured dreams not realised, then perhaps ghost stories are uncanny versions of the past, both phenomena merely apparitions of alternate times as they leak into the present.

There is loss of autonomy in being rendered such a witness, perturbed by the untimely appearance of the past and future. ‘Saint’s Lake’ suggests a turn to prayer and gesture, as though metaphysical forces might be appeased a certain string of words or actions. Though Cronin’s God, as described in closing track ‘The Lamb’, is “calm and decisionless.” He is not absent. He is not powerless. But He is satisfied with the arcane way of things, and will not see His creation tamed by simple ceremony. The truth will not give itself up so easily, and thus the search for it must itself become esoteric.

Researching the alien abduction phenomenon, eminent psychiatrist John E. Mack posits that abductees display a kind of ontological shock—”the realisation that one’s conception of reality does not hold.” Dean equates this to the alienation of an existence within the consensus reality of late capitalism, the abductions born not of personal trauma but of that emerging in the world, cultural-level tensions made manifest. Which is to say, far from being delusional departures from actuality, such phenomena might represent an overabundance of it, truths condensed into strange shapes. The paranormal poses “profound questions about how we experience the world around us,” Mack writes, “and how as a society we decide what is real.” On Big Dread Moon, Claire Cronin looks to immerse herself in such questions, leaning outside of the totality of Western thought, as though only in abandoning reality can we truly map its contours.

Big Dread Moon is out now via Orindal Records and you can buy it from Bandcamp.

Photos by Claire Cronin and Stephanie Sutton

The post Claire Cronin – Big Dread Moon appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Hallelujah The Hills – A Band is Something to Figure Out
(REVIEW | INTERVIEW)

“This is an album built from symbolism (one of the tags on Bandcamp is ‘hieroglyphics’, to give you an idea) but, like all the best mysteries, a sense of significance floats to the top, independent of any hidden code. Hallelujah the Hills reconstruct the human experience through sheer enthusiasm, using their joyous hooks and choruses as earnest expressions of emotion rather than ironic juxtapositions.  Walsh and Co. aren’t sitting us down to share a smirk and a wink, or to reel off some abstract philosophical theories, but rather taking us by the hand and running through their strange world, leaving it up to us to catch something meaningful in the breathless blur. And what a world this is, one which has been evolving since their first album, an ecosystem based on a strange molecule – twin strands of confusion and intuition tightly bound and swirled into a double helix – the DNA of Hallelujah the Hills.”

Camp Cope – S/T
(REVIEW)

“For those of us that want to hope that maybe everything doesn’t have to be shit forever, there’s an atmosphere of dissent that seeps into every line. Not in that horrible on-the-nose Billy Bragg/Frank Turner way, but more subtle, funny and heartbreaking, with throwaway lines that leave you a bit off-balanced. I think that’s what I like most about Camp Cope – the constant switch between personal and protest, heartache and anger, and all the while feeling completely and utterly helpless.”

Beat Radio – Take It Forever
(REVIEW | INTERVIEW)

“Beat Radio’s fifth album Take It Forever feels like a culmination of ideas, the product of some long, hard thinking… With a large dose of hope and a pervading sense of goodwill, Take It Forever plays like the manifesto of someone who doesn’t know all the answers but finds meaning in asking the questions, the words not of a revolutionary or prophet but an ordinary man striving to make life extraordinary, just as it should be.”

Talons’ – Work Stories
(REVIEW)

“Explores the pervasive disillusionment in a society that hasn’t yet lived up to what it promised, a society run for interests other than those of the people who make up its majority. A society that offers hopes and dreams of resplendent lives in exchange for your hard earned $$$s, education courses that leave people stranded with more knowledge but no money, opportunities or sympathy. These are songs for people who wonder ‘when did it become not okay to do what I want with my life?’ Work Stories is a reminder that it’s okay to occasionally feel afraid or sad, that the things which trouble you are probably not as much your fault as you think, and most of all that, despite how it might sometimes feel you are never, ever, alone.”

Mount Moriah – How To Dance
(REVIEW)

“Mount Moriah push past their troubles into something positive and mysterious, a conglomeration of symbolism, mysticism, universality and other cosmic forces which pretty much equates to Southern Gothic 2.0. How to Dance is crafted from spirit and faith, carved out of a high, wide hope capable of healing any wounds, giving us the courage not just to survive, but to live.”

The Chairman Dances – Time Without Measure
(REVIEW | INTERVIEW)

“The Chairman Dances succeed in bringing characters to life in three dimensions, though on Time Without Measure the feat is even more impressive as the roster of figures are not only numerous but also known to history in decidedly superhuman terms. Now more than ever we should remember that activists and political heroes, for all of their spirit and unimaginable resolve, are as prone to doubt and death as anyone, and not half as powerful without our support and belief. Likewise, we’d do well to remember that villains and bigots are human too, flames that, however fierce and bright, will be snuffed out without the oxygen that is our backing. This album is a reminder that belief and faith can save us. It’s just a matter of choosing the right thing in which to invest our energies.”

Karima Walker – Hands in Our Names
(REVIEW)

“Hands in Our Names sees Karima Walker reconstruct an array of varied elements into something larger and more meaningful than they could ever be alone. Field recordings from her present and found recordings from someone else’s past swirl above and beneath her own words and guitar notes, drones of every pitch filling the background and stretching the songs into worlds of their own. When atomised into separate parts, the album is impressionistic, blurry and strange and difficult to describe, though when listened to as a whole, a blanket of stitches, it becomes something vivid and intuitive. As such, Hands in Our Names is able to convey things normal songs cannot, a freedom not just born of trope-avoiding experimentalism but somehow inherent in the very combinations of sounds, as though arranged into secret patterns or codes, magic spells that trump postmodern convictions. Rather than dying in open air upon leaving her mouth, Karima Walker’s communications bubble from within, stirring that dormant empathy that lies somewhere near the centre of us all.”

Sioux Falls (now Stranger Ranger) – Rot Forever
(REVIEW)

“Sioux Falls’ sound reads like a melting pot of the last twenty years of rock music. Taking the indie rock of the likes of Built to Spill et al., the band add thoughtful emo (like The Hotelier) and smart pop punk vibes (think LVL UP etc.) to create something wonderfully varied and entertaining, cycling through these genres not just between songs but within them. The narrator is centred within the stories of which they sing, sounding like another confused player in violent, unfair game operating to rules outside of anyone’s understanding. In the face of bewilderment they turn to anger and sorrow and joy, feelings easy to recognise, easy to submit to, decidedly non-ambivalent chemical reactions which remind them that they’re still alive.”

John K Samson – Winter Wheat
(REVIEW)

“The Weakerthans frontman’s first release since 2012 is everything we’ve come to expect, exploring his favourite themes of contemporary loneliness and isolation in his uniquely warm manner, his characters not ready to give up hope that connection (that is, real human connection) is still possible in our digital world.”

Nap Eyes – Thought Rock Fish Scale

“Nova Scotia’s Nap Eyes return with a sophomore album of rhythmic, ear-worming slacker folk rock songs, recorded completely live with no overdubs in just four days. Nigel Chapman’s lethargic monotone vocals give the whole thing the feel of a daydream, like the wandering high-brow thoughts of a sleepy philosophy/psychology major.”

Jeremy Squires – Shadows
(REVIEW | INTERVIEW)

“Does what the very best folk music can do, an outpouring from one human being to a multitude of others. It’s a record borne out of legitimate heartbreak, the end of a marriage and the death of a loved one, a brave and honest attempt to deal with big life-changing events. Deft songwriting allows Squires to expand these specific, individual scenes into large, engaging metaphors, in which we can find shards of our own experiences. The beauty of it is that the finished work is not just healing and revelatory for the artist. It can help us too.”

Loone & Paper Bee – Now I Know You and See How Wide You Are to the World
(REVIEW)

“Now I Know You and See How Wide You Are to the World is a terrific album. It’s as rich and as complex as life itself, steeped in passion and poetry, whirring like the universe and everything in it. There’s a line at the end of ‘Ugly, I’m Sorry’ that sums up the whole release rather nicely, capturing its in a handful of words far better than I am able to in this review: ‘And I wanna hold your hand / and go explore the pulsing humming darkness’.”

Spartan Jet-Plex – Get Some
(REVIEW)

“Taken at face value, Get Some is an indistinct album, the themes and meanings wrapped in layers of abstract lyrics and varied instrumentation. However, this vagueness itself curls and contorts and creeps into your head, eluding inclinations to describe and detail and thus bypassing the whole processing machinery most music must enter. As such, Kells’s thoughts and feelings arrive whole, unaltered, meaning that you feel what’s being said, even if it’s impossible to put into words.”

Kyle Morton – What Will Destroy You
(REVIEW)

“While Typhoon’s fourth record is still in the works, Morton last month released a surprise solo album, What Will Destroy You. Again the twin themes of tragedy and pleasure are central, as is the idea of catharsis and release. However, while mortality is an intrinsic element, the album does not tread the exact same ground as previous Typhoon releases. What Will Destroy You shifts the focus onto love, more specifically what Morton describes as “the ambivalence of erotic love,” leading to an intimate, surprisingly honest album which delves into things both more wonderful and mundane than your average love songs.”

CHUCK – My Band is a Computer
(REVIEW | INTERVIEW)

“Playing like a collaboration between Owen Ashworth and Bret Easton Ellis, the CHUCK brand of observant and at times cringe-inducingly honest indie pop will no doubt prove divisive. But there’s far more to My Band is a Computer than drugs and self-pity and empty sex. Like the Frog release that Audio Antihero brought us last year, it crams an awful lot into its run-time, covering everything that’s terrible and everything that’s not about being a young adult in the twenty-first century, somehow managing to tap into the human kernel at the centre of our zombified lurch of nostalgia and regret.”

Monarch Mtn – Everyone is Here
(REVIEW)

“It would be wrong to consider the music of Monarch Mtn as simply a two dimensional mope-fest, with Farmer’s poetic lyrics and warm delivery hint at something beyond the misery. The palette is undoubtedly gloomy, blacks and greys and deep blues, but Farmer’s warm vocals and poetic turns of phrase flicker across this twilight like threads of gold.”

Claire Cronin – Came Down a Storm
(REVIEW)

“The real success of Down Came a Storm is how Claire Cronin and John Dieterich combine to spin stories and landscapes from their combined talents, every element given equal standing to conjure not only folk tales but the worlds in which they exist. Here you can feel the wind on your skin, hear it move in the trees, smell its scent of salt and earth and ozone. You can feel it move the characters too, propelling them into dark, poetic places where nature rules and comfort can be found in the starkest of elements.”

Adeem the Artist – Kyle Adem is Dead
(REVIEW | INTERVIEW)

“The word ‘sincere’ is often taken as synonymous for affectionate or sentimental. With Kyle Adem is Dead, Adeem the Artist strives to be sincere in every sense, finding the bravery not just to declare his love for his wife but to voice his fears, his weaknesses, his exasperation with life as we live it. With everything on the table, no lingering mysteries or secrets withheld, there is nothing left to corrupt the good things. Because, after all, Kyle Adem is dead.”

Mal Devisa – Kiid
(REVIEW)

“Kiid is a personal record and plays like condensed version of life, reaching high and falling low, crackling and bursting and simmering under the surface, at times exploding in urgent streams of consciousness as if the words and thoughts can no longer be held in. This is an album that refuses to be reduced to something easily describable, persevering in it’s complexity against the binarizing forces of anxiety or genre or gender or race. Kiid isn’t a self-doubt record or political record, nor a sad record or a happy record. It’s not jazz or gospel or indie rock. Kiid is everything. Kiid is whatever it wants to be.”

Lisa/Liza – Deserts of Youth
(REVIEW)

“Wonderfully minimal and psych-tinged songs that will doubtless appeal to fans of  soft and sad outsider folk artists such as Sarah Winchester. At times it’s gossamer thin, with Victoria’s vocals little more than hushed murmurs, though even in these quiet moments her words hold a kind of understated magnetism, a power which draws in the instrumentation and in turn becomes augmented by it. Deserts of Youth shows you don’t necessarily need to raise your voice to make a statement, that even quiet songs can be imbued with a blazing energy.”

Old Earth – Lay For June
(REVIEW | INTERVIEW)

“Trying to put Old Earth’s music into words seems futile and kind of besides the point. There’s never going to be a satisfactory way to describe art so fluid and weird and instinctive, so all we can tell you is what it sounds like to us. It’s operating on a deeper level, one not easily outlined, playing on some atavistic region of the subconscious that reacts to fear and beauty, that treats intense wonder and dread as the same emotion. It’s the same area of the brain that tells us to light candles and throw coins down wells no matter how secular our society becomes.”

What were your favourite albums of 2016? Let us know through one of the usual channels – we’re on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and Instagram.

The post Wake the Deaf’s Favourite Albums of 2016 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Tracklisting:

1) Evening Loving – Jenny Gillespie
2) Luxury – Patio
3) Low – Yours Are The Only Ears
4) Either Way – Sorority Noise
5) Home at Last – The Sports
6) Braver – Sally Fowler
7) Chow Chow – FAYE
8) Meant – Spartan Jet-Plex
9) Stained Glass Eye – The Dead Tongues
10) October – These Bashful Claws
11) Bad Vibrations – Naps
12) Baked Goods – Young Jesus
13) Heroine – BB Cream
14) Winona Death Ryder – Boy Problems (No Dice Tapes comp)
15) The Only Other Girl From Back Home – Advance Base
16) When it Feels – Soft Spell (STAY RAD SAV comp)
17) The Unnatural – Claire Cronin
18) Same Old Ocean – Crabapple
19) Diet Coke – Lake Michigan
20) Ferris Beuller – Flatsound
21) See Good – Jobless
22) Anything but Yourself – Tom Greenwood
23) Under the Mountain II – Mermaidens
24) Liars – Gregory Alan Isakov
25) Warning Sign – Mikko Joensuu
26) Candy – Fish Food
27) White Gold – Good Good Blood
28) We Bury Our Dead Alive – Coping Skills
29) Joke/Rope – Haybaby
30) Slacker – Will B & the Teen Creeps
31) Double Bacon Cheeseburger – Yikes
32) All I Have – Derek Ted
33) Try Hard – Hovvdy
34) Dark & Gloomy – Horse Teeth
35) Migratory Birds – Western Skies Motel
36) Endless Wave – Hanging Valleys

The post May 2016 Roundup – A Mixtape appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Came Down a Storm opens with ‘The Unnatural’, which sees Cronin’s vocals front and centre, on top of gothic guitar and background instrumentation that’s strange and unsettling, whining like whalesong or huge train cars swinging slowly around a bend in the desert. It’s the first taste of an album that is distinctive and somewhat paradoxical, the songs sparsely arranged and yet ornately delivered, Cronin’s more traditional folk sound bent weird by the addition of Dietrich, a decision that suits her dark and image-heavy lyrics just perfectly. “Notes form the funeral dirges, prayers memorised in churches” she sings on ‘Unnatural’, “restrung in combinations, hung high for celebrations”. The whole album is full of lines such as this, lines that feel instinctive and immediately deeper than their surreal surface. As the blurb from the record label puts it, “[Cronin] sings of death in a field, death at sea, dreams of dying, and a vision of a future where death is no longer allowed”.

“Death quitted us completely
left all his old machinery
tie ribbons ’round your letters
let’s bury them together “

Follow-up ‘In the Field’ is more conventional, Cronin’s vocals dragging and aching over acoustic guitar, while ‘Valentine’ pairs her vocals with a shambling folk rock, the Claire Cronin take on a lazy bar-room love song. ‘Meet Me Undertakers’ has a sad Gothic edge, like the work of those southern writers who got to the bottom of the human condition in the shadowy corners of existence.

“Meet me in a field
with your coat on fire
stalks of hemlock yield
taken by desire

Find me in the snow
white, I hide the trees
white, the ash and bone
show you all my teeth

Turn me in your arms
while the music plays
sway me into dark
too much moonlight in this place”

‘Dark Water’ comes on quick and surreal, the reverberating landscape in a feverish dream, super-charged and strobing like a massive, neon-flashed electrical storm. “Tie me to the mast, the trap,” Cronin sings in another line steeped in cryptic portent, “the tragedy”. Eventually the track dissipates, ending with what feels like the lull after the clattering tumult where the landscape can catch its breath, just vocals and some delicate strings. Closer ‘Dreamt the Sea’ is slow-burning finale, over eight minutes of Cronin and Dietrich’s interpretation of a narrative-driven folk song. Sonically, it begins with the gentle acoustic guitar of earlier tracks, but drags on into more experimental territory, the percussion like detritus blowing around some desolate wasteland, over the salty foamed-tipped breakers that crash on a lonely shore.

“I dreamt the sea wouldn’t take you
wouldn’t break you in its waves

But I was wrong — you are salt-strung
still a line inside this place

On the green backs of our new love
you were ruthless, unafraid

I was soundless, left you down with
all the bright ships of your pain”

At it’s halfway point the song seems to slip into night-time, as if the sun has fallen from the horizon, and long creaking moans creep across the water from vessels that lie far beneath, ghostly shapes of grey and green in the moonless night. By the outro, Cronin’s voice has become just another instrument, a plaintive coo amongst others, part of the fabric of the music.

The real success of Down Came a Storm is how Claire Cronin and John Dieterich combine to spin stories and landscapes from their combined talents, every element given equal standing to conjure not only folk tales but the worlds in which they exist. Here you can feel the wind on your skin, hear it move in the trees, smell its scent of salt and earth and ozone. You can feel it move the characters too, propelling them into dark, poetic places where nature rules and comfort can be found in the starkest of elements.

You can order Came Down a Storm on CD or LP via the Ba Da Bing! Records online store.

The post Claire Cronin – Came Down a Storm appeared first on Various Small Flames.

The post Claire Cronin – Football appeared first on Various Small Flames.