Today we are delighted to share a piece by Shana Hartzel, one half of the excellent, Philly-based music blog Swell Tone. If you are unfamiliar with the site, Hartzel and her partner in crime Victoria surf the high seas of new music and write about the best of it, with well-written reviews, cool sessions, innovative (and often pizza-based) guest appearances and regular mixtapes full of unearthed gems. Basically, it offers everything a music blog should.

As if that wasn’t enough, Shana also writes for The Wild Honey Pie, and is the assistant director of Philadelphia’s Y-Not Radio, and hosts the show ‘Aussie Unlocked’ on 2nd Fridays, 9-10pm (or you can find them on-demand via Mixcloud).

Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park
by Shana Hartzel

Though I’ve never been the most dedicated reader, my adoration for Jane Austen hasn’t waned since my first required reading of Pride and Prejudice. The English novelist’s romantic yet satirical fiction is an ideal match for my constantly shifting mental stream of humor and enchantment. It is a rare literary love that, at its peak, led to a full day of my life being dedicated to baking scones and lemon tarts, wearing frilly dresses, and plowing through the film adaptations of her three biggest novels in the company of a large pot of tea and my equally nerdy best friend.

There is something especially intriguing about Mansfield Park. Austen’s third novel is arguably her strongest exploration into the cloudy dichotomies of the British middle class and her most controversial work. Amongst an examination of the period’s morals and privileges and a slew of amorous entanglements, the story centers around the life of Fanny Price. Fanny is relocated at age ten from her markedly poor family to live with her wealthy relatives at Mansfield Park where she becomes a tiresome burden to everyone but her cousin Edmund.

Thanks to Edmund’s kindness, Fanny survives through an upbringing of monetary privilege and emotional abuse to become the most morally centered resident of the estate. As a character, Fanny isn’t nearly as agreeable or as openly charming as Austen’s other protagonists. Her emotional fragility appropriately reflects her constant treatment as an inferior. Yet, she always manages to imperfectly persevere through matters of affairs, slavery, debauchery, and consanguineous relationships. Seemingly unaffected by normal rules of decorum, her free will and clarity of thinking are always her best defense against the surrounding negativity. In the many ways it both defines and guides her, Fanny’s sincere approach to life is what has always drawn me back to this story in particular.

While the book itself portrays music as a skill that elevates character or a means by which affections are exchanged through dance, I have aimed to take a more modern musical approach to the grandeur and societal confines of Mansfield Park. Below, you’ll find an assortment of songs that challenge structural and melodic conventions in the way that Austen’s characters grapple with the expectations of their environment and upbringing. The sonic mix paints the spirit of the novel’s colorfully quaint world in stokes of humble grace, fearsome defiance, and (of course) irrevocable declarations of love.

Tracklisting

1. 1914 – Florist
2. Looking Out for You – Joy Again
3. For You – Free Cake For Every Creature
4. Super Rat – Honeyblood
5. The Garden – Flinter
6. Don’t Feel So Alive – Gabriella Cohen
7. p r e s c r i p t i o n – Good Try
8. Hey – The Twoks
9. Your Best American Girl – Mitski
10. Don’t Go – CBMC
11. Jogalong – Rozi Plain
12. Girl! – Terror Pigeon
13. Right Now – Amber Arcades
14. Tame One – Your Friend
15. All Day and All Night – And The Kids
16. No Room For Doubt – Lianne La Havas Ft. Willy Mason
17. Running with the Wolves – Aurora
18. You and I – Margaret Glaspy
19. Geranimo – Aphra
20. The Sun – BATTLE AVE.

You should most definitely add Swell Tone to your ‘blogs to check regularly’ list, and you can also find them on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Soundcloud and Playmoss. The Quiet, Constant Friends compilation is still available on our Bandcamp page, including a rather nice limited edition tape and art print bundle. All profits go to Worldreader so why not treat yourself?

The post Lit Links: Shana Hartzel appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Opener ‘peach to a peach’ talks about meeting James Oglethorpe, who Wikipedia reliably informs me was a British MP and founder of the colony of Georgia, and who Heck reliably informs me is probably a “fucking dork”. Then we get ‘waves’, a simple acoustic song about long hot summers and ‘Mikey’, which is all lazy little needly guitars. ‘For luck’ is a song about moving on from something or someone (“I know you’re right but I can’t forget her”), complete with echoey vocal effects reminiscent of Snow Mantled Love. ‘song for ari’ is a sweet song about watching a little relative grow up, “when my baby falls, she gets right back up / sun brings out her freckles, i stick ’em in my cup / doesn’t shed a tear when she falls, whispers ‘i love you too’ over phone calls”. ‘everyone I love’, which sounds like indie rock slowed to folk pace, with acoustic guitar and bursts of slapped drums and some really nice lyrics:

“i don’t believe in god but i still pray when i’m afraid
feels like i’m using him, or using faith, or something
anyway, i don’t write poems but i wrote one in my sleep and it goes,
‘everyone i love in walking distance from my home’
that’s what i pray for when i start to feel all alone”

‘Feels nice (a little more than alright)’ is a perfect bedroom love song, with very sweet lyrics (“go outside and look up at the sky, it looks right but I can’t see the stars at night so I think of the light in your eyes”), which then segues into a song about piling up cans (more on which in a little while). ‘what can be taken’ has slow and lolling electric guitars and vocals which appear and cut abruptly, giving the track a slightly surreal, fractured feeling. The lyrics address the postmodern paradox of love, the fear and pain of never having versus the fear and pain of losing, and eventually settles on the compromise of loving the people you do as much as you can for as long as possible:

“you can’t enjoy it, you’re always scared of losing it
what can be taken, the good that we clutch all more tight,
what can be taken
is always the good, warmer nights by your side
i’ll keep my love on my breath till i die”

‘The sit down, stay down’ reads like manic flowing poetry of the anxious (“every thought is a yearning when i sit down, i can’t stay / i get mad when i calm down, need a habit every day”), while ‘pile cans up to pass time’ is mostly gently picked guitars, and simple lyrics. The song has a cyclical nature, guitar line and lyrics circling around and repeating, perhaps as a symbol of things being stuck at a certain point, doomed to repeat until something dramatic breaks the pattern. The album then ends on the short and surreal ‘secret’, which has a wobbly, almost creepy sci-fi vibe and fuzzy vocals repeating the line, “we’ve got a secret they’re never gonna find out”.

Softer and dreamier than previous CBMC stuff, the album is  perfect to drift away in and allow the lyrics to take your mind places and feel things. ÒOR is out now on the CBMC bandcamp page.

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Until then, here’s our June Roundup, a playlist of songs rounding up everything we covered during June. Clever, huh? Click on the artist name in the tracklisting to be whisked away to the specific post.

Tracklisting:

1. Trisha Please Come Home – Advance Base
2. Slower Now – Star Horse
3. I Make Boys Cry – Adult Mom
4. Cordella – On The Water
5. Destroy – Henoheno
6. A Long Time Ago – Kalle Mattson
7. Only One Who Feels a Little Bit Bad – Fazed on a Pony
8. Ohio Snow Falls – Unraveler
9. Pylon Pile On – Benjamin Shaw
10. For Luck – Cyberbully Mom Club
11. The Offer – Yowler
12. When I Met Death – Right Away, Great Captain!
13. Patriarchaeth – Gwenno
14. Future Bones – Bells Atlas
15. Beautiful Brian – Harley Alexander and The Universal Lovers
16. Whip-Poor-Will – Morning River Band
17. I Admit I’m Scared – Eskimeaux
18. Ideal World – Girlpool
19. Observation Satellites – GRNDMS
20. Podesta – Peptalk
21. Cwm Llwm – Yucatan
22. Clouds – Estan
23. Lullaby – Long Neck
24. KiwiKisses – Trenton Point
25. My Only One – PONY
26. Return to View – The Wandering Lake
27. Clicking Clanking – Ylayali
28. Pull Me Apart – Lung Cycles
29. Red Coat – Adeline Hotel
30. Johnny Go Riding – Damien Jurado
31. When the Day is Fresh, and the Light is New – The Wooden Sky
32. The Crow – Sean Henry
33. Yolanda – O-FACE

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

Ben Seretan Group

“I wanted these recordings to sound huge. I wanted them to sound massive, gravitational, full of a swirling largeness that could eat up large portions of iTunes libraries” – we previewed Yellow Roses, a new release from Ben Seretan Group.

Yucatan

“Ethereal, celestial ambient post-rock” inspired by the Welsh landscape – we reviewed Uwch Gopa’r Mynydd, an album from Welsh band Yucatan

Benjamin Shaw

“comfortably sad and vividly alive, like watching rain fall onto a city from the window of a train” – a few words about ‘Pylon Pile-on’, the first song from Guppy, the upcoming album from Benjamin Shaw.

Long Neck

“Captures that feeling of creeping slowly over that threshold into adulthood and the revelation that it turns out not to be the whole new room you always thought” – Heights by Long Neck offers candid and reassuringly familiar thoughts on the plight of post-collegiate life.

Cyberbully Mom Club

“Music that feels like the words of an old friend, the sort of person who requires no formalities or effort and is happy to just sit and shoot the breeze” – a few thoughts on ‘For Luck’, the first song from a forthcoming EP by Cyberbully Mom Club.

Estan

“Raging against the pompous nature of professionals and academics…how ridiculous we are to think we can assign logic to a universe of chaos far too big for our tiny heads” – Our review of The Vanity of Reason by Estan.

Trenton Point

“Imagine John Maus teaming up with Small Black and The Cure to soundtrack a melodramatic 80s teen movie where the misunderstood hero finds herself walking home alone from the disco time and time again” – The three-song EP by Brooklyn’s Trenton Point, out on Vacant Magic.

The Wandering Lake

“Part indie rock and part psychedelic folk, all weaved together with Kupillas’ distinctive vocals, which are not quite a warble and not quite a croon and sometimes drawn out landscape-scale without a hint of breaking.” – we reviewed A Wend to Why, the new album from The Wandering Lake.

Ylayali / Lung Cycles

“enclosed in a sense of everyday melancholy…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.” – Another great split cassette release from Lily Tapes & Discs.

Damien Jurado

“Jurado writes songs that reflect what it is like to be alive in the years either side of the millennium, songs for a landscape both cruel and kind, everyday and surreal, songs that can be sad and exciting and slightly scary and sometimes weird as hell” – We selected our very favourite Damien Jurado songs for our latest Through the Archives feature.

Mike Comite / Hop Along

“When I think about new rock idols, I don’t envision sold out arenas. I don’t hear Top 40 singles or perfect pitch, and I don’t think about stage personas and attitude. What I do think of is transparency, and a struggle” – Not quite last week, but Mike Comite of Old Best Friend wrote a fantastic piece about Hop Along for Property of Zack.

Coke Machine Glow / Jenny Hval

“Have you had breakfast? I was just about to make some eggs and huma—forgive me, I meant to say ham. Wink wink” – Coke Machine Glow presented a conversation about Jenny Hval’s Apocalypse, Girl between Hannibal‘s Hannibal Lecter and Will Graham, suggesting that I’m not the only person in the world who finds the show a little… overblown. All we need now are some meaningless close-ups of food and we’ll have an ‘intellectual’ TV hit.

Grantland / Jason Isbell

“It’s hard to keep up a James Dean type of facade if you’re thanking somebody for your salvation. But when you’re writing the kinds of songs that I do, I think your job is to try to be as honest as you possibly can and write about those things that make you uncomfortable sometimes.” – Stephen Hyden of Grantland talks through a list of Jason Isbell’s most gut-wrenching songs with the man himself.

Aero Flynn

We liked Aero Flynn’s self-titled album an awful lot. That’s why it’s so cool to see the band perform this live session for Audiotree.

Distant Records

“An hour of radical ladies influenced by that vintage surf rock reverb because, you know, it must be summer or something.” – Joanna, the face behind Distant Records, has a show on KPSU called The Muse in Music. This week’s show, ‘Must Be Summer or Something’, is all about… you guessed it, summer! Stream below or download this and previous shows over on the KPSU website.

Nice Legs

Seoul-based band and all round good eggs Nice Legs put together a video diary of a recent tour, featuring some lovely shots of the pair doing pretty much everything besides playing music. Check out their Youtube channel for other visual goodies.

And Finally… the 8tracks Playlist of the Week:

Heartbreaking Bravery‘s roundup of the best 2015 has had to offer so far is pretty comprehensive.

2015: Halfway Home from heartbreakingbravery on 8tracks Radio.

The post Week in Review: #7 (22nd – 26th June) appeared first on Various Small Flames.

“The main strength of Heck’s songwriting is the sense of empathy she manages to create. Her sadness feels comforting but not in a cruel, schaudenfreude sense, but rather a sense of solidarity. Instead the sadness feels like a warm blanket, an old pair of slippers, something familiar and reassuring”

Heck and co. have a new EP coming this August. Details are currently scarce beyond the first track ‘For Luck’, a laid-back and ever-so-slightly mournful song about relationships and the accompanying heartache.

“I know you’re right but I know better,
I know you’re right but I can’t forget her”

Keep your eyes peeled for further information!

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The latest Pasture Dog release is Southern Gothic, a collection of songs that uses a combination of everyday life-type scenes and vivid, strange imagery to create something equal parts unsettling and comforting, just as the title suggests. Lots of music that is inspired by Southern Gothic fails to get past the weird-for-weird’s-sake sort of deal where oddity or perversity or violence is included because it seems to add indistinct depth, but Masi’s songwriting manages to capture the wider perspective. Here, the strangeness is specific and targeted, cathartic confessional hymns to critique human behaviour and the good ol’ Social Norms it has created.

‘Lazarus Saturday Sulking’ kicks things off, a song packed with Biblical references that serves as an intimate exploration of gender roles and sexual identity. Masi’s narrator is isolated and, worse, understands enough to resent the isolation to the degree that it forces her into deeper isolation (and so on etc.), a sort cyclical it-really-fucking-sucks-that-this-has-to-be-so-hard-and-that-makes-it-harder situation, as made clear by the inability to communicate which lays at the core of the song:

“I’ve been coughing up “sweetheart” into the crook of my arm. It’s force of habit, it’s the crime I commit. But he calls me baby like an insult. To bury my love is an old art. And I’ll do it again.”

Masi’s lyrics are poetic, reading like a stream of thoughts scribbled down late at night when gripped by an overwhelming urge to say everything, be it to a loved one or herself. “Because I can’t stay so long in the same static place,” Masi sings on “Louie’, “and I can’t sustain to make all the same mistakes, over again and over again.” ‘Garden Tomb’ has a dreamy feel, the slight reverb acting as a subtle funhouse mirror, rippling the track in odd ways, while ‘Labrador Blue’ opens with a more hopeful guitar strum: “I don’t worry anymore,” declares Masi, “I don’t get so overwhelmed,” although this positivity does not seem to last as the song closes with the narrator feeling blue while reminiscing about the past.

‘Lizard Patrol’ speaks of the confused line between positive/negative identity perspectives, the indecision of (or oscillation between) 1. hating yourself, 2. understanding that you don’t hate yourself and 3. working towards conditions where it would be considered normal not to have to hate yourself should you choose to embrace the image you envisage as You. It’s bizarre situation of understanding what is right and moral while being susceptible to all the pain and doubt that the human body/mind is so good at, pain and doubt which leads to self-limitation and sabotage even though your rational clear-headed opinions know you are moving in the right direction:

“I can’t let my thoughts get so outstretched. but really I was limiting myself, and limited the ways that I could fix – oh god how am I gonna fix it?”

The theme of an internal dissonance between love, hate and acceptance is made clearer on the final track. ‘Everything That Rises Must Converge’ is named after a Flannery O’Connor story, a tale concerning a recent graduate named Julian. The man is ashamed of his mother’s racist perspective yet fails to connect with any of the African American characters, highlighting an inherent racism in his own personality. “True culture is in the mind” he argues, only for his mother to counter “it’s in the heart.” Julian feels like a transitionary stage between past bigotry and future tolerance – he knows what he ought think yet still harbours the subconscious prejudices that are a product of the society in which produced him. For me, Pasture Dog explores the twenty-first century equivalent of this, that is, the exact same thing. Be it with racial equality or sexual/gender identity, it seems many have accepted the theory of equal rights (ie. in their minds) without fully embracing the change of attitude on a deeper subconscious level (in their hearts). Masi explores the very real pain suffered by someone on the wrong end of this inconsistency, someone trapped in and tormented by the outdated heart-shaped morality that pokes through in even the most well-meaning person or society.

You can grab the album on a pay-what-you-can basis via Bandcamp.

P.S. For those of you who are into pictures and words, Masi also runs the art magazine Field Notes, which collects a variety of visual and literary pieces into a colourful journal. All of the issues are available online here.

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Tracklist:

1. Something About Us (Daft Punk cover) – Spazzkid
2. Waves and Waves and Waves (Playlounge cover) – Two White Cranes
3. Dogmas (Kississippi cover) – Cyberbully Mom Club
4. Call Me Maybe (Carly Rae Jepsen cover) – The Yellow Dress
5. Clouds (One Direction cover) – Shunkan
6. Lodi (Creedence Clearwater Revival cover) – Advance Base
7. Emma’s House (The Field Mice cover) – Lost Film
8. Pitseleh (Elliott Smith cover) – Marissa Nadler
9. Pink Rabbits (The National cover) – Matt Paxton
10. Ontario Gothic (Foxes in Fiction cover) – Julia Brown
11. Australia (Attic Abasement cover) – R.L. Kelly
12. Sister of the Moon (Fleetwood Mac cover) – Globelamp
13. I’m On Fire (Bruce Springsteen cover) – Wakes
14. When the Sun Hits (Slowdive cover) – Mao Ra Sun (Feat Dems)
15. Tomorrow is a Long Time (Bob Dylan cover) – Phosphorescent
16. Smells Like Teen Spirit (Nirvana cover) – Noah Gundersen
17. The Best Ever Death Metal Band In Denton (The Mountain Goats cover) – Nathaniel Rateliff
18. Museum of Flight (Damien Jurado cover) – Winterpills

Covers Mix Volume #13 from Wake The Deaf on 8tracks Radio.

The post The Covers Mix: Volume #13 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Tracklist:

1. Deserter – Siskiyou
2. Pill – Ought
3. There’s a GIrl In the Corner – The Twilight Sad
4. Kill What You Love – Scotdrakula
5. PS You Still Do This To Me – Kissing Fractures
6. Walls – Two White Cranes
7. Lifetime Warranty – Cyberbully Mom Club
8. The Great Big World – R.L. Kelly
9. Misery Loves Company – Gorgeous Bully
10. Blah Blah Blah – Girlpool
11. My Song – Spencer Radcliffe
12. Summer Lawns – Mike Pace & The Child Actors
13. Crossroads – Sally Fowler
14. Sweet Isolation – Nathan Reich
15. Home At Last – John Statz
16. Our Town – Chalk
17. Mole – The Mountain Goats
18. Easy It Goes – Eric & Magill
19. Slow Thickening – German Error Message
20. Cabin Lights – Lung Cycles
21. The Day is Past and Gone (Variations) – Sarah Louise
22. Holding – Grouper

November 2014 Mix from Wake The Deaf on 8tracks Radio.

The post November 2014 Roundup – A Mixtape appeared first on Various Small Flames.

The EP begins with ‘smoking to death’, a tale of uncertainty and frustration that arises from a relationship turned sour, from the breakdown of once simple communications. “Don’t think i don’t detest the way you go on and on,” she sings near the close, ”and pretend that’s nothing wrong.“

‘Lifetime Warranty’ is probably my favourite track on the EP. It’s lyrics have a really nice fluidity and Heck’s breathless delivery makes it sound like each verse is comprised of just one really long line. My favourite line in the song is this one: ”Is my vision getting clearer now that I can barely see? I wish I lived inside a tiny box with fish and birds and leaves(?)“ Don’t we all?

The last track ‘Poem Song’ is a bit different; shambling, reverb-y lo-fi and offers another hint of what Cyberbully Mom Club could be like as a fully-fledged band.  There’s also a really nice cover of Kississippi’s ‘Dogmas’, which is probably worth the $1 entry fee alone.

The main strength of Heck’s songwriting is the sense of empathy she manages to create. Her sadness feels comforting but not in a cruel, schaudenfreude sense, but rather a sense of solidarity. Instead the sadness feels like a warm blanket, an old pair of slippers, something familiar and reassuring. It’s the way Heck uses her music to say “sometimes I don’t feel okay” that speaks to us the listeners, and makes us feel better when we ourselves feel that way.

You can buy amy locust whatever for a dollar or more over at the Cyberbully Mom Club bandcamp page.

P.S. Heck is rather prolific so be sure to check out her bandcamp page for lots more like this.

The post Cyberbully Mom Club – amy locust whatever appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Tracklist

1. Boat – The Tallest Tree
2. Lonely – Rivergazer
3. I Think I’m Old Enough – Adult Mom
4. Thought u were better than that – Cyberbully Mom Club
5. Way Gross – Aunts
6. Fierce Resource Allocation – Emperor X
7. Dark Arts – Baby Cages
8. Stranded (On My Own) – Titus Andronicus
9. Singapore – Reid
10. Attak (ft. Danny Brown) – Rustie
11. Gold (Chet Faker re-work) – Flume
12. Duals – Bonobo
13. Ongoing Thing (ft. Oddisee) – 20syl
14. Animal – The Acid
15. Heirloom Luna – Chemists // 化学者
16. Triumvirate – Lewis & Clarke
17. Holly Would – Benjamin J Woods
18. Terrified – The Rural Alberta Advantage
19. Friday Night – The Parade Schedule
20. Falling Stars – Jacob Furr
21. Red Thread – Spark Alaska
22. Blood – Ahava
23. Stars Pt. 2 – Psalmships
24. Goodbye Letter – Adieu Caribou

You can also listen over at Minilogs.

July Mix from Wake The Deaf on 8tracks Radio.

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