Here’s a list of thirty records we didn’t get a chance to tell you about properly in 2022. Releases we think you would do well to come to know.

The A’s – Fruit

Psychic Hotline

A collection of traditional folk songs, lullabies and one original, the debut album from The A’s—AKA Alexandra Sauser-Monnig (Daughter of Swords) and Amelia Meath (Sylvan Esso)—is a mélange of the whimsical and quietly devastating. The product of over a decade of close friendship (the pair make up two-thirds of Mountain Man), and rooted in a long history of American folk eccentricity, the record features beguiling vocal harmonies, pitch-perfect yodelling and a sonic potpourri of everyday orchestral elements (the liner notes list instruments like hair, shoes, ice chunk, gravel, frog sample and shoelace). Examined individually the ten songs share little in common, but as a whole they somehow work perfectly, capturing both a sense of fun and genuine beauty. As Sauser-Monnig puts it when describing compiling the tracklist, “If it doesn’t make you cackle or cry, it doesn’t belong.”

A.O. Gerber – Meet Me at the Gloaming

Hand in Hive / Father/Daughter Records

True to its title, A.O. Gerber’s Meet Me at the Gloaming invites the listener into a world between day and night. A space in which the binaries of light and dark are muddied, complicated, ultimately dissolved into insignificance. To inhabit such a place, Gerber shows us, is to confess new feelings and relinquish old shames. To move beyond ideas of good and bad in order to exist on your own terms, and heal from the years in which this was not the case. Because if anything emerges from the nuanced folk rock of the record, it is the sense that strict boundaries are counterproductive and often imaginary, fencing off the rich confluences in which life is truly lived.

Ashenspire – Hostile Architecture

code666 / Aural Music

‘Great’ Britain might have had a strange smell about it for years now, but 2022 was the year it quit pretending and died in full view. Nothing quite managed to capture the spirit of the time like Glasgow-based outfit Ashenspire, with their LP Hostile Architecture manifesting this broken feeling as avant-garde metal. It’s a record of fury and futility that rails against not only the misery of the moment but the abject cruelty of those who have allowed it to come to pass. “Always three months to the gutter / Never three months to the top,” goes a line in the typically forthright opening track ‘The Law of Asbestos’, “another set of fucking homeless spikes outside another empty shop.” Through a series of shapeshifting, endlessly inventive tracks, the album posits hostile architecture as the contemporary British landscape. A society designed to inflict discomfort on its citizens out of nothing but fear and malice. “This is not a house of amateurs,” as the opener concludes bitterly. “This is done with full intent.”

Bartees Strange – Farm to Table

4AD

If Bartees Strange’s debut record Live Forever confronted and ultimately rejected the pigeonholing and self-censorship too often required for a Black person to exist within a traditionally white space, then follow-up Farm to Table is a dispatch from the other side. A genre-hopping and often jubilant refusal to be put into a single box, or indeed to be anyone other than Bartees Strange. “That’s why I really can’t fuck with y’all / In fact I’m feeling more grown,” as he sings on ‘Escape This Circus’. “I really can’t fuck with y’all / And I don’t wanna act no more.” But though this embrace of the self comes with a sense of empowerment, there’s another side which proves equally important. Because just as Bartees Strange wasn’t all the things the industry (and society in general) demanded he be when chasing success, he’s not suddenly some saint or superhero having found it. He’s himself, a single person, communicating something important and hoping to reach whoever might need to hear.

billy woods – Aethiopes

Backwoodz Studioz

“I think Mengistu Haile Mariam is my neighbor,” declares billy woods in the opening line of Aethiopes. “Whoever it is moved in and put an automated gate up.” For most artists, this might be using their best material too early on, leading with the ace up their sleeve. But woods is only getting started. Allusions to the drug epidemic through the Challenger disaster, colonialists on cannibal tours, quotes from Wole Soyinka’s Kongi’s Harvest… and that’s only by track four. “Conceptually, it was one of the [most] complex ideas I’ve ever tried to tackle on an album,” woods told FADER. “It’s a lot of ideas, big and small, of a significant depth. I guess, to me, there’s a lot going on about Blackness as an idea, Africa as an idea, Africa as a reality.”

Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy – Once Again In The World

Antiquated Future Records

Antiquated Future Records has been steadily and quietly releasing collections of rarities from a range of artists as part of their Selected Songs series, delighting old fans and winning new ones, but perhaps most importantly preserving work which might otherwise have been lost. After the likes of Christopher Sutton, Twig Palace and Two White Cranes, this spring saw the turn of Will Oldham with two albums: Time From Work To Go which featured songs recorded as Palace Music, and Once Again In The World with tracks from Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy. “Will Oldham’s wide-ranging influence can be felt in nearly everything in the Selected Songs series so far,” Antiquated Future’s Andrew Barton explains in the liner notes, and thus the releases feel like a milestone in the project. A key text added to the library, important not only in and of itself but also in reading what came after. “As an elementary school teacher,” Barton continues, “I look back on making it a bit like one of my students looking at a final project for a unit they got really into and cared deeply about. A view from my seat in a room full of fellow enthusiasts. The glow of the interesting subject pulses like a star in the sky, always there.”

Brian Harnetty – Words and Silences

Winesap Records

A portrait of the Cisteritan monk and writer Thomas Merton, Words and Silences sees Brian Harnetty add original musical compositions to recordings made by Merton himself during his hermitage in Kentucky in 1967. We hear him identify birdsong, listen to gunfire from Fort Knox, celebrate New Year’s Eve alone and comment on an array of topics from Sufi mysticism to Michel Foucault. But more than offering an extraordinary window into Merton’s solitude, the album elucidates the beauty and melancholy inherent within his reflections, honing the endearing doubt which permeates each monologue and furthering the strange contradictions at work. A communication to no-one, immediate in tone but of course now distant too, and very much aware of the artifice of the recording process. Brian Harnetty embraces such conflicts much as Merton did, and thus not only continues the conversation but opens it wider. Words and Silences is a meditation on curiosity, and one which understands uncertainty and inconsistency to be the very foundations of any will to learn.

The Cool Greenhouse – Sod’s Toastie

Melodic Records

British post-punks The Cool Greenhouse follow their self-titled 2020 debut with a sophomore effort that doubles down on the deadpan wit, surreal humour and thinly-disguised existential pain. Where else are you going to find references to “Jordan fucking Peterson”, talking ladybirds and the unending search for the end of the sellotape, all within the same song? But despite the weirdness, The Cool Greenhouse have polished some edges too, dialling up the accessibility with what the liner notes call “flirtations with–heaven forbid!–melody, chord progressions and arrange-ments.” ‘Get Unjaded’ is the closest thing to a pop song the band have written to date, and they even have a go at actual singing on the slo-mo jangler ‘I Lost My Head’, but regardless of any stylistic evolution, it’s that sardonic lyricism which will keep you coming back.

Craig Finn – A Legacy of Rentals

Positive Jams / Thirty Tigers

Last year, we described The Hold Steady‘s eighth album ODP as a glimpse “into the lives of imperfect figures dissatisfied or downtrodden and merely surviving.” Not so much a pivot from the self-destructive adventure of older THS releases as a natural evolution. With his fourth solo record A Legacy of Rentals, Craig Finn pushes things a step further. A move from the survivors to people who didn’t, as well as those left in their wake with nothing but imperfect memories. With vocal support from Cassandra Jenkins, Finn mines the full depth of this ground to reveal how we shape entire lives around such recollections. Stories we hold onto regardless of their veracity. The justification for toiling in a hostile world. Again we are introduced to characters on the margins—a man forced into drug dealing by financial necessity, a woman escaping life with vodka and a superhero matinee—and the detail and control of the writing is as impressive anything Finn has crafted to date, further cementing his place at the table of America’s best working writers, in music or elsewhere. Memories might not be perfect, A Legacy of Rentals tells us, but they are a way to survive after all.

Daniel McClennan – Unfurling Redemption

Cruel Nature Records

What fuels humanity’s incessant drive to conquer its surroundings? Why must we always seek to transcend? These are some of the questions explored on Unfurling Redemption, a solo album by Daniel McClennan (Warren Schoenbright, Why Patterns) which draws on a range of classical and avant-garde influences to conjure the full, dreadful weight of the subject at hand. Built from synthesised instruments and stock sound samples, the songs exist within a netherworld at once melancholic and ominous, as though having long come to understand transcendence as either an illusion or pyrrhic victory, and left to grasp blindly for redemption elsewhere in the dark.

Dear Nora – human futures

Orindal Records

In a piece for Talkhouse, Dear Nora’s Katy Davidson states confidently that human futures is the best thing they’ve ever made. “I’m just gonna come right out and say it,” they say, “this is the best one… all the previous Dear Nora recordings were practice for this moment, for this album. This is the culmination of them all.” It’s a bold statement for a project that’s been running since the late nineties, but it’s hard to disagree. human futures retains everything that has made Dear Nora a cult hit—the playful lo-fi pop vibe, the offbeat observational lyrics that have come to mark later releases—but feels somehow more complete, more cohesive. Few artists capture twenty-first century life as well as Davidson, images of natural beauty sitting next to wry humour and deadpan observations of our ruined world.

Fiver – Soundtrack to A More Radiant Sphere: The Joe Wallace Mixtape

You’ve Changed Records

Back in 2019, filmmaker Sara Wylie asked Fiver (AKA Simone Schmidt) if they might contribute music for her new project, A More Radiant Sphere. The hybrid documentary centres on Wylie’s great uncle Joe Wallace, a Canadian poet and political prisoner shunned in his home nation but celebrated in Eastern Europe and China, exploring how the role of Communists has been mostly excised from Canadian history. Fiver’s soundtrack furthers this examination, turning a selection of Wallace’s poems into song alongside instrumental pieces. “I have always felt a song is worth singing for what wisdom one can discover through its repetition,” Schmidt explains of the album’s style, “be that in beauty, prayer or, in time, prophecy.” Hopeful, heartfelt and unafraid of nuance, The Joe Wallace Mixtape captures a specific period of Canadian leftist nationalism in all of its passionate imperfection. A movement which threatened to forget its own colonial past in its hurry to attack American imperialism, yet nevertheless dared to imagine the possibility of a society beyond capitalism.

Friendship – Love the Stranger

Merge Records

Having established themselves as one of our favourite contemporary acts with Shock out of Season and Dreamin’, both on Orindal Records, Friendship‘s first LP for Merge is a continuation of their distinctive brand of introspective, country-tinged, slices of life. The songs again centre on lead Dan Wriggins’s plaintive vocals and everyday poetry, ably supported by the careful attention and creative flair of Michael Cormier-O’Leary, Jon Samuels, and Peter Gill. Be it distracting yourself with nature documentaries or a peek at the moon, Wriggins examines small, seemingly mundane details for their loaded meaning. Searching if not for answers then at least reasons to get up every day and keep looking. A way, in other words, to live and love when “gripped by a fear of no discernible beginning.”

Good Looks – Bummer Year

Keeled Scales

“I don’t think they’re evil, even when they’re awful / Not totally class conscious, but ultimately good.” So sings Tyler Jordan on the title track of Good Look’s Bummer Year, referring to his old high school friends in small town Texas. The line is indicative of the tension on a record where fondness and sentimentality are constantly challenged by life’s imperfect reality. A collection of songs willing to hold more than one idea in its head at a time, be it in celebrating close-knit communities while recognising their susceptibility to insular or reactionary turns, or charting the strange relationship between working pride and industrial exploitation. “Blue-collar” indie rock can sometimes comes off as inauthentic or condescending, but it is this nuance which allows Good Looks to come across as authentic, and moreover begin to imagine such communities as sites of revolutionary potential for positive change. “If we’re gonna make a comeback, we’re gonna need those people,” as Jordan concludes on the title track, “like my friends on the bottom who don’t know who to fight.”

Joy Guidry – Radical Acceptance

Whited Sepulchre

“One of the best guides to how to be self-loving is to give ourselves the love we are often dreaming about receiving from others.” So wrote bell hooks in All About Love, gracefully unmasking the cruelty which internalised trauma can bring. That Joy Guidry released Radical Acceptance in the year the world lost hooks feels like the most fitting testament to her legacy. A clear indication that her work is not only being acted upon but developed further, pushed in new directions. A personal practice brought to life in music, the album sees Guidry combine ambient, jazz and classical styles with direct and often humorous spoken word delivery to short-circuit the self-judgement of which hooks wrote. To connect with the reality of one’s identity in a way beyond labels, and learn to love it precisely for what it is.

June McDoom – S/T

Temporary Residence Ltd.

Influenced by a love for sixties and seventies folk, intricate jazz, early soul, and the reggae of her childhood home, the self-titled debut release from Florida-born, New York-based June McDoom takes relatively simple folk blueprints and weaves whole worlds of sound around them. Working with partner and collaborator Evan Wright, McDoom’s style feels like a constantly shifting collage of her influences, warm and rich and strangely dream-like. Highlighting her talents as a producer as much as a songwriter, the record is an exercise in texture and atmosphere, shifting from the earthily pastoral to something more spectral, hallucinatory echoes and psychedelic ambient flourishes moving the songs to some other strange plane.

Kali Malone – Living Torch

Portraits GRM

Driven by both the conceptual and intuitional, Stockholm-based composer Kali Malone has made a name pushing the boundaries of the pipe organ. 2019’s The Sacrificial Code subverted the traditions of the instrument to prove its power was not contingent on a grand, cathedralesque setting. Staying true to her exploratory style, Living Torch sees Malone continue to excavate music for new styles and perspectives, but this time swaps the organ for an altogether more diverse ensemble of instruments, from the trombone and bass clarinet to the boîte à bourdon and Éliane Radigue’s ARP 2500 synthesizer. The result again manages to suggest both academic rigour and unburdened instinct, but ultimately transcends any focus on its intentions as the listener becomes immersed in the soundscape. Some hymn or lament, latent with the suggestion of the sublime, be it total dread or transcendence, silence or all-encompassing sound.

LINQUA FRANQA – Bellringer

Ernest Jenning Record Co.

Meaning both “a jab to the face that knocks someone out completely” and someone who raises an alarm, Bellringer is the perfect title for the sophomore album by Linqua Franqa, the project of Athens, Georgia-based rapper Mariah Parker. Balancing music with work as a linguist, activist, parent and politician, Parker makes razor sharp, socially conscious hip hop that aims to both empower and critique. In provocative, sometimes dark, but always poetic verses, Parker takes on the prison industrial complex, police brutality, exploitative capitalism and mental health issues. There’s also a stellar guest list, which includes Georgia hip hop talent (like Dope Knife and Wesdaruler) as well as indie rock heavyweights like Jeff Rosenstock, of Montreal and Kishi Bashi, and even legendary civil rights activist Angela Davis. Ultimately, Bellringer is a record that sees music as a tool toward liberation. As Parker puts it “[using] the aesthetic pleasure of hip-hop to educate people about why things are so bad and what can we do about it.”

Logan Farmer – A Mold For the Bell

Western Vinyl

“It’s gonna be hard to talk about this when it’s done / Those days of plenty come and gone.” So opens A Mold For the Bell, the latest album from Logan Farmer. The Colorado songwriter has long been marked by a willingness to stare straight into the maw of whatever calamity is approaching, as typified by his almost singularly successful depiction of climate dread on 2020’s Still No Mother. The new record might shift its focus away from explicitly environmental concerns, but roots itself in the same shades and colours. As though the promise of impending loss hangs in the air like a fog. “It’s a full time job, just staying calm / Don’t read the papers,” he sings on ‘Horsehair’, but portents of doom reveal themselves all around. Through lines of silver in hair, or the very silence itself. Yet across all of this persists a very human spirit, small hopes flickering in spite of everything. Because what sets the work of Logan Farmer apart from the plethora of other such dark and pessimistic art is the intimacy with which he approaches such themes. There’s no sublime release to this apocalypse, just people living on through it.

Lou Turner – Microcosmos

Spinster

Nashville’s Lou Turner returned with a cosmic country record that keeps both feet firmly on the ground. Rooted in a welcoming sense of domesticity, Microcosmos finds a sense of wonder in the infinite detail of our immediate surroundings, gently probing at some pretty big questions without the need for some epic quest. Musically it could be from some long-hidden seventies folksinger (think Joni Mitchell, Michael Hurley), but refuses to fall into many long established tropes. There are hints too of David Berman in the songwriting, which melds philosophical musings with observational images—a bird’s nest at a gas station, rising bread dough—and ultimately decrees that an artist is not doomed to tortured wandering.

Medicine Singers – S/T

Stone Tapes / Joyful Noise Recordings

In a year of many great albums, it’s hard to imagine one as bold and committed as the self-titled debut by Medicine Singers. Something of a groundbreaking supergroup, the band are the product of collaboration between Algonquin powwow drum outfit Eastern Medicine Singers and Israeli guitarist Yonatan Gat, and also features contributions from ambient music visionary Laraaji, Thor Harris and Christopher Pravdica of Swans, Ikue Mori of no wave icons DNA and trumpeter jaimie branch. Together the group collide traditional powwow and experimental music, resulting in a distinctive and often joyously cathartic experience. Take the colossal ‘Hawk Song’, or the first sudden burst of pure rock n’ roll guitar that comes blazing in near the beginning of ‘Sunrise (Rumble)’. “These two cultures can work together, and blend together,” Medicine Singers leader Daryl Black Eagle Jamieson explains, “to show people how we can work together and make something beautiful.” What emerges is a piece of contemporary art which serves as a map to its own history, following its roots back into a myriad of traditional styles.

MJ Lenderman – Boat Songs

Dear Life Records

“Listening to Boat Songs by MJ Lenderman is like joining your best friends out on the porch,” describes author Ashleigh Bryant Phillips in the album’s liner notes. “The neighbors might be yelling and the bugs might be biting. But y’all are shooting the shit and letting loose, telling the same old stories again and again.” There’s wrestling, basketball, sightings of Dan Marino in a South Carolina cereal aisle. Drained out swimming pools and birds pecking seeds off the ground. But most of all there’s the masterful knack for combining details small and absurd into something which feels like life as it’s lived on the ground. Lenderman, much like Phillips herself, represents the contemporary face of a certain type of storyteller. One living on the margins or else in the great rural stretches too often ignored, presenting life back to us with all its shine and sharp edges intact.

Posmic – Sun Hymns

Let’s Pretend Records

Clocking in at under twenty minutes, Posmic’s Sun Hymns feels like watching an old Super 8 home movie found at the thrift store, unknown people and scenes flashing by, wrapped in nostalgic film grain and warm colours. Comprising of members of several Baltimore and DC bands (Post Pink, Wildhoney, Ultra Beauty), the outfit make music that collides grungy nineties guitar rock and sixties psych weirdness, resulting in something that feels both fresh and strangely familiar. There are noisy alt-rock jams, incense-scented folk numbers and sunny, easy-going pop, the whole thing adding up to a brief but oh so welcome escape to some other time or place. Sun Hymns might be the sleeper hit of the year, so load it up and bask in its glow.

Réverbérations d’une crise – Une enqu​​​ê​​​te sonore sur le logement à Montr​​​é​​​al

Cuchabata Records

Described as existing “at the border of music and sound art,” and “produced during a collective process of sound inquiry,” Réverbérations d’une crise: une enquête sonore sur le logement à Montréal is a work seeking to evoke a fuller picture of Montreal‘s housing crisis, and make audible what is otherwise silent or silenced. Hubert Gendron-Blais (ce qui nous traverse, Devenir-ensemble) leads a collective featuring Aidan Girt (Gospeed You! Black Emperor), Claude Périard (Claude L’Anthrope), Christine White, Stefan Christoff (Anarchist Mountains) and others, with each track setting out to capture the multifaceted impact of the crisis through political, socio-economic, psychological and existential planes. Take one of Gendron-Blais’s own offerings ‘À la multiplicité fragile d’une ruelle de Parc-Ex’, a collection of sounds from the multicultural, working-class neighbourhood Parc-Extension which evokes both the diversity of the space and the growing precarity as gentrification closes in.

Sarah Davachi – Two Sisters

Late Music

Following the thread back from contemporary drone music through a variety of chamber and choral styles, Sarah Davachi’s Two Sisters is as influenced by medieval sacred music as it is modern minimalism. As though the two forms are not separate entities but the same thing manifest differently across the years—a perpetual attempt to communicate something near inexplicable, some great mystery known only in flashes. Because while spiritual endeavors in music have driven many toward ostentation, Davachi is far more astute. After all, if the mystery shows itself only in glimmers, then what use is show and noise? Two Sisters follows the lead of its forebears and instead turns toward quiet; a hushed, elusive collection of pieces loaded with all the hope, fear and strangeness inherent in that which we cannot fully comprehend.

Silica Gel – Wooden Shoe

Noumenal Loom

Listening to Wooden Shoe, the latest release from Providence, Rhode Island outfit, it’s difficult to ascertain what exactly is going on. Has the past slipped through a crack in the world, returned as some strange, haunting force? Or have we moved in the other direction entirely? Been transported to some unnamed future where old things have reoccurred as the great wheel turns? Having made their name with debut May Day, reinterpreting songs from the fourteenth century satirical text Roman de Fauve, Silica Gel continue the art song tradition by merging Early folk styles with contemporary (or even futuristic) noise, capturing both the ever-spinning cycles of suffering, exploitation and superstition, as well as the interminable dream that something better might lie just beyond the horizon.

Soul Glo – Diaspora Problems

Epitaph

The recipe goes something like this: Take two handfuls of post-hardcore for every one of hip hop, take equal parts punk rock and poetry. Don’t skimp on the humour, don’t forget to stir in the grief. Then preheat the oven to fucking furious and roast the whole thing until the smoke alarm goes off. With the myriad of ingredients and processes, Soul Glo’s Diaspora Problems risks biting off more than it can chew, but with every track it keeps biting, keeps chewing, lets you know there’s no way it’s going to blink before you. From the college scam and reselling economy to the false allyship of the white left, no topic is too much for this record. It bites off your head and chews.

Tenci – A Swollen River, A Well Overflowing

Keeled Scales

Tenci‘s 2020 debut My Heart Is An Open Field was a record of catharsis, with lead Jess Shoman moving beyond pain and trauma via a process of purging. The result was a certain emptiness, a blank space residing where negativity had once lived. Follow-up A Swollen River, A Well Overflowing is an attempt to repopulate this space. A conscious effort to collect the small joys and wonders of the world, and to reposition one’s relationship with things previously difficult to live with so that they might exist comfortably too. With a sound somewhere between bedroom pop introspection and folk hymn timelessness, each song serves as a spell, as Shoman puts it, to “fill my heart back up.”

Titus Andronicus – The Will to Live

Merge Records

“It is the same misery that is all around us,” said Werner Herzog in his 1982 film Burden of Dreams. “The trees here are in misery, and the birds are in misery. I don’t think they sing, they just screech in pain.” Titus Andronicus reach an equally difficult picture of the world on their seventh album, The Will to Live, yet the New Jersey punk royals thoroughly reject nihilism in the process. Written in the wake of tragedies both personal and global, the album sees lead Patrick Stickles dare to embrace life despite the inevitable pain, coming to understand suffering not as the default form of existence but merely the shadow of life itself. Screeching in pain they might be, but Titus Andronicus are singing too, and it is as loud and heartfelt as anything else they have sung for years.

Young Jesus – Shepherd Head

Saddle Creek

Even for a band that has shapeshifted throughout its history, Shepherd Head feels like a departure for Young Jesus. After completing the mathy, jazzy epic Welcome to Conceptual Beach in 2020, the band were burnt out, and lead John Rossiter decided to take a different tack. Working primarily alone, armed with a Macbook, a microphone and a newfound patience, he began to piece together songs from found sounds, audio recordings and white noise. The result is, at least stylistically, a glimpse at Young Jesus in a different form—a stripped-back singer-songwriter approach wrapped in meditative electronic pop, more interested in the emotional, or even spiritual, than the cerebral. It’s a record which faces up to fear and grief but somehow feels suffused with hope, a personal, quasi-solo record that feels anything but lonely (with cameos from friends dotted throughout, including collaborations with Tomberlin and Arswain). As we wrote in a preview of lead single ‘Ocean’ back in the summer, Shepherd Head is “a tapestry both vulnerable and tender, where great loss and transcendence are not so different after all.”

Thanks to everyone who stopped by during 2022, your continued interest and support means the world to us.

The post Albums We Missed in 2022 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

TV Ready “will take you on the road trip you never knew you needed,” the band claim, their ability to combine fun energy and emotional earnestness harnessing the goodwill of a spontaneous summertime sojourn. The dual vocals of Olivia Hendrick and Oliver Holloway help to develop this affirming mood, building a sense of community that underpins everything. Not only is this a trip you didn’t know you needed, you get to take it with friends you didn’t know you had.

Strapped in for the ride, the album drives you across the various highways and backroads. Be it the high speed energy of ‘Trapper Keeper’ with its irrepressible drums and runaway momentum, the easy going cruise of ‘New Reckless’ or the nuanced heart of slow-burning single ‘Standing At All.’ “I’ll laugh when you tell me that we could be hopeless,” Hendrick sings:

Or maybe I won’t laugh at all
because I’ll be standing here
and you’ll be standing there
at least that’s something
at least we haven’t given up yet

This sentiment runs through the Knuckle Pups sound like a rich seam. Whether on the reflective ‘Cheap Flesh’, the moody groove of ‘Letters’ or impassioned catharsis of ‘Sandwich’. The sense of going through something together, both good times and bad, often with no idea of what lies beyond. Finding strength not in the knowledge that things will work out fine and all the answers will reveal themselves, but rather the knowledge that we need not ask those questions alone. Closer ‘Wealthy Diner’ encapsulates the spirit. A smouldering track which burns brighter and brighter, full of uncertainty an confusion but finding empowerment in its shared feelings.

Lovely the way you lie with me
Just where we’re supposed to be
All across the moonlit line
We would watch the wealthy dine
Upon our time

TV Ready is out now and available from the Knuckle Pups Bandcamp page.

The post Knuckle Pups – TV Ready appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Beyond the McCarthyian desolation, something else stirs. The sense that, perhaps, the dark is not some adjacent threat, but the very space around us. Perhaps we’re already sitting in darkness, and our inability to flee is not a fearful reaction but a steadfast show of strength. If we’re already in the vale, or indeed are the vale itself, then thoughts can turn in a different direction. Be it hope of future illumination, or merely the knowledge that we can withstand such a space, and learn to live within it.

This complicated relationship between darkness and light is the cornerstone of Tender, Allison Lorenzen’s debut full-length on Whited Sepulchre Records. Written and recorded in the aftermath of a relationship, as well as her previous project School Dance, the album took shape in a strange moment for Lorenzen. Several of her life’s defining characteristics had been removed at once, leaving not only pain and sadness but a deteriorating sense of self. ‘Vale’ is representative of this liminal space. Shadow-veiled and vacant, dreamlike in its intangible swirl but no less heavy, its dark burden weighing on both spirit and mind.

But it is Lorenzen’s vulnerability within this milieu which truly informs the record. Consider the nuance of the title. Tender. Not tough. Easy to cut through. Sensitive to pain. But also warm, affectionate, kindly in outlook and gentle in action. This heightened receptivity and inclination for compassion repositions the vale from terminal nadir to just another milestone on a far longer path. Take ‘Chalk’, a song of movement and change which charts if not the impermanence of pain then at least its habit of fading with time. Jack Manzi’s video finds Lorenzen alone but empowered within a stark environment, aligning her own internal weather with that of the surrounding landscape, thus evoking its grand cycles and propensity for change no matter how severe the present moment.

The style is a subversion of the traditional healing narrative. A rejection of linear progress, an acknowledgement of the uneven topography of life. It’s this embrace of contradictions that allows the ethereal fondness of ‘In a Dream’ to be sandwiched between ‘Vale’ and the stricken ‘Afterthought’ with its needling unease. That allows too for the value of both solitude and company, for loving and being loved, for having both the confidence to walk one’s own path and the ability to submit to the grace of others when in need.

Tender might be a survey of Allison Lorenzen’s emotional journey, though it is less a complete map than an ongoing journal. Or perhaps a map that is so far incomplete, still in progress, drawn in situ and prone to change. The locations might reappear, be reimagined or given new names. Many have no name at all, just feelings judged in comparison to everywhere else. A transience which feels deeply compassionate, hope manifest as an understanding of the potential for change. A complete map would be a key to existence. A definite answer, a solution to life. Tender is not an answer, and this is its greatest strength.

Tender is out now via Whited Sepulchre Records and you can buy it from the Allison Lorenzen Bandcamp page.

The post Allison Lorenzen – Tender appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Now Allison Lorenzen has returned with a second song, ‘Be a Fortress’, along with the news that it will join ‘VALE’ on a full-length record out via Whited Sepulchre Records later this year. Emerging from the liminal space between conclusions and new beginnings, the track is a break-up song in the strict definition of the style. The half-paced twirl and textured washes of the sound, the bittersweet intimacy of the delivery. The opening lines rooted in a kind of romantic melancholy. “This is the last time / so smile and walk away.”

But ‘Be a Fortress’ subverts the classic break-up aesthetic by changing the direction of address, altering the entire mood and coming to form a counterpoint to the darkness of ‘VALE’. Because the track is not an outward address to the now absent other, but rather an interior (re)commitment to the deep rooted convictions driving the whole situation. A song about “saying ‘no thank you’ to that which doesn’t serve me,” Lorenzen explains, “and to situations/people that aren’t actually a fit, and to stay connected with the deeper parts of myself where my truth and creativity reside.”

Written in the aftermath of both a romantic relationship and the School Dance project, ‘Be a Fortress’ steps beyond the minutiae of circumstance to present a mood more universal. One as applicable to one end as any other. The process of trusting oneself in order to live a life as truthful as any life might be.

‘Be a Fortress’ is out now and available from the Allison Lorenzen Bandcamp page. Be sure to stay tuned to Whited Sepulchre Records for more info on the album.

Photo by Kyle Johnson

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This month saw the release of ‘VALE’, the first song Allison Lorenzen has released under her own name. Building upon and pushing beyond the School Dance style, the track embraces the stark and the mysterious, with Madeline Johnston (AKA Midwife) lending guitar and backing vocals to further deepen the sound. What results is a song that lives up to its title, a shadow space of glisten and reverb that is as ominous as it is alluring, daring the listener to peer over the edge into the dark depths beyond.

But as ‘VALE’ unfolds, a different perspective dawns. For beyond the McCarthyian desolation, something else stirs. The sense that, perhaps, the dark is not some adjacent threat, but the very space around us. Perhaps we’re already sitting in darkness, and our inability to flee is not a fearful reaction but a steadfast show of strength. If we’re already in the vale, or indeed are the vale itself, then thoughts can turn in a different direction. Be it hope of future illumination, or merely the knowledge that we can withstand such a space, and learn to live within it.

In the pale of the warmth,
the pale of the fire.
I’m like a vale in the night

Art by Travis Hetman, photo by Kyle Johnson

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But, however these depictions square with the coming (or ongoing) reckoning, they rarely have the desired effect. For things so drastic are beyond our comprehension, destined to feel distant and impersonal by their sheer scale. How can we take seriously what we cannot imagine?

Still No Mother, the latest album from the Colorado-based songwriter Logan Farmer and the first under his known name (as opposed to Monarch Mtn), looks for an answer through a more oblique approach to climate breakdown. Released by Western Vinyl, the record sets its focus not on the storm at the horizon, nor its first winds on our shores, but instead into the minds of those who will experience it. Those waiting and dreading. All of us.

To achieve this, Logan Farmer looked into history. The American folk song has evolved alongside the nation’s tragedies, long used as balm against pain both personal and political, or as a direct confrontation of this suffering. ‘Folk’ as in music of the people, grounded in struggle. Farmer used this framework and applied it to present and future pain, originally envisaging the songs farm workers might sing as their land is devastated by fire or flood in the vein of Woodie Guthrie’s Dust Bowl Ballads.

Still No Mother doesn’t quite follow this idea through to Guthrie’s concept style, but still it homes in on the people at the centre of the devastation, moments of humanity caught in the lulls between nature’s revolt. “The music is intentionally gentle and delicate with shards of piercing dissonance scattered throughout,” explains Farmer. “The intention was to capture the quiet moments of contemplation before the storm comes, as we peek through the cracks in the wall to catch a glimpse of the approaching danger, now a growing dot on the horizon.”

Those familiar with Monarch Mtn will recognise the sombre depth of the songs, but Farmer’s ambient-folk style is at its most organic yet. Listen to lead single ‘Rome, Through a Fog’ or opener ‘River Black’ and find an instinctive simplicity within the starkness, acoustic guitar anchoring Annie Leeth’s string arrangements, Farmer’s vocals lacking the effects of previous records. Even the use of drone and spoken word recordings possess a natural air, the surrounding environment leaking into the spaces of the songs, be it a far off electrical transmission or the slow hum of the world itself.

Evoking the title, ‘Vessels’ paints a world abandoned not just by God by Mother Earth too. “Still no mother on our side, desertion,” Farmer sings, humanity now outside of any relationship or coexistence, a gathering on a hostile rock. The song paints a soul dizzied and static, frozen with fear and anger and the cold tendrils of complacency, the sense that it is too late, that we are damned by our own inaction. Closer ‘No One Owes Us Anything’ takes this up more directly. An engagement with the climate and the politics underpinning its collapse, it represents the sad wrath of the underclass as it tries to remember the real point of blame. “If we lose our strength, it’s gone,” Farmer sings. “If we lose our faith, it’s gone.” But the sentiment grows hazy, even the most obvious injustice and inequality lost in the fog of guilt, our own ties to the destructive system eroding the ground beneath our feet.

Forty years later
when there’s no more ice
I’m gonna end my days on a kitchen knife
everything together better add up to a lot

A place on the wall where I paint my hand
I’m gonna betray
the call of modern man
but I’m terrified every time the service drops

The acceleration of ‘War is Body’ is a distillation of the entire album. The track places the intensely personal within global strife, capturing the contemporary mood better than perhaps any song has managed to date. The abrasive, poltergeistic fury of the opening plays like some warning cut off by the track’s lush swells, some hideous thing ignored but left standing outside our door as violins sweep our attention elsewhere. There’s a sense of disembodied calm, a kind of stupefied melancholic float at odds with the apocalyptic verses it holds. Just when it seems we can drift along in this reverie forever a faint hum emerges, the outside threat making itself known again as the piano winds down almost to nothing. Then a sudden quickening, as though the bottom has fallen out of the track and sent us tumbling down and there is nothing to grab on to and no way back up and suddenly melancholy and reflection count for nothing, not here. We can only be witness to what is about to unfold. It’s gone, it’s gone, it’s gone.

Still No Mother is out now via Western Vinyl and you can get it from the Logan Farmer Bandcamp page.

Photos by Ben Ward

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Following their debut EP, Good Luck!, released in 2017, the band are readying their first full-length, titled Hurts Being Alive. Produced by Patrick Riley and Alaina Moore of Tennis, the record builds on what the previous album started but also signals a real development in the ambition and range of the Down Time sound. Optimism and compassion still form the heart of the music, and now the trio have new ways of conveying it, leading to a newly authentic heart.

The album’s lead single, ‘Not a Complicated Person’, captures this ethos wonderfully. There’s a real welcoming warmth to the melodies, a carefree bounce to the drums, all complemented perfectly by Maunders’s earnest vocals. There’s something kindly about the whole thing, something almost child-like, but not in a way that’s cutesy or shallow. Rather, it has a gently irrepressible spirit, something simple and sincere and wholesome.

The band say the song is “about the oft-overlooked simple pleasures of a home cooked meal—creating something from nothing.” The idea captures the essence of Down Time. It’s music made the way grandma used to, rich and wholesome and good for the soul, and most importantly free from the pretensions or ambitions that so often haunt such artists.

The press release puts it nicely. “Listening to Down Time is like dropping in on a friend,” it says, “someone who’s there to listen or challenge or provide a new perspective. Down Time brings excitement to familiarity. It’s a conversation between three friends that invites the listener to be part of the family.”

Today we have the pleasure of unveiling a video for ‘Not a Complicated Person’. Shot in the style of a kitsch family sitcom, the video has the same endearing glow as the music, and that’s before things get weird. Click play below to see Maunders pulled into a surreal pie-world, while Camilli and Weaver skate to the local roller rink for garishly-costumed fun.

Hurts Being Alive is out on the 6th March on vinyl, CD and cassette, and you can pre-order it now from the Down Time Bandcamp page.

3/6: Denver, CO – Lost Lake
3/14: Fort Collins, CO – Hotel Hillcrest
3/15: Provo, UT – Free Provo Radio
3/17: Sonora, CA – Waterwheel
3/18: Santa Cruz, CA – SubRosa
3/19: Berkeley, CA – Sweehearts
3/20: Ashland, OR – Oberon’s
3/21: Portland, OR – Fixinto
3/23: Seattle, WA – Belltown Yacht Club
3/27: Boise, ID – Treefort Day Party

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The thing with creating such vivid worlds is that their confines are vague and distant, and Monarch Mtn’s noir metropolis is crammed with stories yet untold. Which is perhaps why, mere months later, Farmer is back with days of sleepwater, a brand new record that is every bit as darkly atmospheric as its predecessor. However, to say the album is a direct continuation would be misleading. There is a distinctive change in the spirit of the music here, days of sleepwater seeking out space and autonomy as though reacting to the suffocating oppression that marked I Woke At The Station.

Take for instance the slow and considered first track ‘canyon blues’, Naarah Strokosch’s cello bringing an air of elegant sorrow as it saws sombre against a backdrop of subtle percussion. As on I Woke At The Station, the lyrics bristle with desperation and implicit violence, though while the previous songs felt as though they were careering toward these emotions, ‘canyon blues’ is more of a retreat or escape—leaving the dense tangle of civilisation for something more open and free.

“Highway 1 like a cancer in my mind
Scattered ashes on the sheets
I’m too nervous to be happy all the time
Hope you never get scared of me”

Follow-up ‘trick of the light’ is a sparse and candle-lit croon, Farmer’s velvety vocals unfurling across barely-there guitar and snaking sax, while, in comparison, ‘no embrace’ sounds rich and graceful, a song about being isolated as the world ignites in celebration or disaster. “Fell asleep with headphones on,” Farmer sings, “as royal city burned / Not for me, this other man’s concerns.” The result is sad and strangely isolated, synths like an angelic choir adding a gravitas to an otherwise ordinary scene, dispatches from a dark and lonely room illuminated only by the light of the 24 hour news on the TV.

Cello again winds itself across ‘the glow’, a stripped-back acoustic song, before the eight-plus minute epic ‘iron sphere’ unfurls patiently from a quiet artificial dawn, ending eventually with sci-fi synths that bring an ominous air. The track is fraught with guilt and loss, and the synthetic nature of its close carries its own dread, as though the characters within are overtaken by some great pressing force as penance for past actions, or perhaps emancipation from the forces that held them.

The strangeness carries over onto ‘on the stone’, its weird dreamy blurriness presenting open spaces which the ghosts of Farmer’s characters haunt, before closing track ‘bedlam goes quiet’ presents what is perhaps the strongest narrative of all—a series of images bathed in neon and shadow.

Bedlam goes quiet
And she leaves the bed
Beer in the shadows
With a Texaco attendant

She drives all night
Just to clear her head
Nearing Montana
A wild dog’s spirit

Rises from the earth
Finds the traveller
Carrying her load with tired limbs
There is no wrong that time forgives

There was a sense of inevitability about I Woke At The Station. Every scene and interaction eventually lead to death and destruction, its inhabitants moving with the vaguely depraved self-interest that is the cultural logic of such a space. The world of days of sleepwater is no lighter, but Farmer’s interpretation of and reaction to the atmosphere signals a change. Darkness breeds darkness, and allowed to fester can become a self-perpetuating thing that metastazises unto ubiquity. Here, Monarch Mtn do not pretend that suffering is abating, or can be dispelled by a mere shift in perspective, but rather choose to fight the phenomenon. days of sleepwater exists to fight the creeping dark, and not embrace it.

days of sleepwater is out now and you can get it from the Monarch Mtn Bandcamp page.

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The band are set to release their debut EP, San Panino, via Wild Baby Records, and we’re delighted to be able to share the single ‘Bottom Baby’ a few days early. Opening with warm instrumentation, the track kicks into a satisfying rhythm, Holloway’s distinctive delivery at once playful and earnest. There is something idiosyncratic about the cadence of his lyrics too, yet the flow seems organic and uninhibited, as though rising from some place of sincerity, not filtered or edited.

Such an idea marks the track, and possibly the Knuckle Pups style as a whole, and goes some way to explaining their cross-genre sound. Because this is a band operating with natural rhythms, riding the peaks and troughs of energy as they emerge from within the music itself.  The journey from indie pop to punk is not so much a change as a logical development, an evolution which tends toward one final swelling transcendence. This is typified by the vocal harmonies at the close of ‘Bottom Baby’, their stirring communal feel like some collective expression of emotion, and one which by its very nature suggests solidarity and compassion.

“Oh, how we roll down to the bottom baby
Out of control, upside the inside maybe
And all the saints and all the men
They march on and capture significant
it’s on their list of things to do

You know why I’m here
You know why I came for you”

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The opener ‘Saint in Armour II’ sets the tone for the release, a slow, heartbroken shuffle like the introspective thoughts of a figure suspended in grief, the outside world sliding past in bleak monochrome. This joyless metropolis is the setting for all nine songs, what we described in our preview of single ‘Overtime in the Underworld’ as “a sad, shadowy city where numb people wander and sometimes collide.” Farmer’s triumph is capturing such a sparse, lonely place in a sound so rich. Every word and observation is imbued with melancholic meaning, every stray thought of the various sad and eccentric characters lends a certain weight, as though within their perseverance lies some noble intention.

We’re honoured to be able to share the album in its entirety a few days early, so do yourself a favour and turn out the lights, put on your headphones and descend into the dark world of Monarch Mtn.

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