While such a statement might conjure the holy icons of celebrities on magazine covers or the communal prayers of sports crowds, or even the near-transcendental flutter experienced at the promise of large sums of money, Wallace’s truth is probably a lot more subtle and personalised, centred around our view of ourselves and the yearning for something more. As such, much of the worship goes on inside our heads, small hopes and habits we repeat over and over, as though incantation and ritual might invoke our better selves.

Don’t Hide From The Light, the debut release from PAT MOON, feels like this sensation committed to music. The solo recording project of Portland’s Kate Davis, who you might know as the face behind Track and Field Records, PAT MOON utilises analog synths and drum machines to create what could be described as dark dream dance or ecclesiastical electro-pop. At once insular and expansive, the album feels like a private ceremony within an abandoned church, solemn and serious and sacred in its own humble way, pertaining to no system of belief beyond that of human experience yet feeling instantly recognisable, a likeness of our own inner-thoughts. Such empathy is present from the first bars of ‘Feel You’, the opener possessing that warm-yet-cold feeling peculiar to cathedrals, where death and guilt and love and life are so entwined they become one.

Other highlights include ‘Show Me a Sign’, an echoing, synth-heavy plea for enlightenment, the spectral chorus of ‘I See You’ and ‘Love Me as I Am’, another song that manages to be at once intimate and vast, submissive and resolute, a steadfast hymn summoned from deep within. Closing track ‘Enter My Mind / All I Know is Now’ is imbued with a certain lightness, a candle-lit organ-drone which seems to brighten across its run-time.

With its melancholic seriousness punctuated with near-mystical frisson, PAT MOON’s debut is a reminder that worship is not some hotline for divine intervention but rather a process of feeling and thinking and believing. Sure, Davis may find her prayers unanswered, her rituals unrewarded, but you get the sense that the very process of acting and asking can be a route to confidence and love. One that does not rely on the whim of a deity or the alignment of the stars.

Don’t Hide From The Light is out now and you can buy it from the PAT MOON Bandcamp page.

Photo by Sam Velenne

The post PAT MOON – Don’t Hide From The Light appeared first on Various Small Flames.

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

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

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

Tracklisting:

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

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

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

Musically, the album falls somewhere between the bummed-out melancholy of Alex G/Elvis Depressedly and the angsty emo of acts like Molly Drag.  The record seems to grow in energy and desperation as it progresses, as if veering toward some climax. Opener ‘It Was You, Charlie’ is mostly acoustic, but develops in the second half into something more rocky. From here, elements of emo and punk are introduced, from the sunny-sounding ‘Holly and I are Soup Snakes’, to the indie rock of ‘Sugar Sugar’ and fuzzy noise of ‘What Went Wrong?’, before the 90s pop of ‘Korine’ leads into the slow-building closer, ‘On The Day You Knocked Out Jeffries’, a track which spirals into a triumphant post-rock conclusion.

All of the tracks are relatively short and snappy, allowing Nicastro to explore his ideas without the ever slipping into self-indulgence and losing the listener to boredom. This is no mean feat when taking on the kinds of ideas on display here. Nicastro himself is a boxer, and the pugilistic theme which runs through the record proves to be far more than an amusing novelty. One reading is made clear with a quote from Joyce Carol Oates on the Mrs. Hopewell Bandcamp blurb:

“I can entertain the proposition that life is a metaphor for boxing—for one of those bouts that go on and on, round following round, jabs, missed punches, clinches…and your opponent so evenly matched it’s impossible to see your opponent is you”

However, while this life-as-an-endless-fight-vs-yourself idea rings true, there is another, more prominent dimension which pertains to the ‘facing the void’ part of Nicastro’s description. Boxing is a brutal, dangerous sport (up to 20% of participants will suffer from the titular neurodegenerative disease), in which every Mayweather is balanced by thousands of names we’ll never know. It’s essentially a lottery where buying a ticket involves getting smacked repeatedly around the head and neck and body, and if you are lucky enough to win you get promoted to a bigger draw where larger, more powerful men do the same.

But, importantly, the intensive training, violence-related adrenaline and short-lived glory of victory provide a sense of purpose, which is pretty much our only response so far to the dreaded Existential Fear that keeps us up at night. That is, we’re aware that we are small, insignificant and certain to die, and thus adopt Void-Filling Strategies which may not be good for our physical and emotional wellbeing yet help us forget for a while. So really, when Nicastro sings about boxing, he could easily be singing about writing novels, or having sex with beautiful people, or a long-term heroin habit. This idea is set out in the opening track, where the narrator is feeling something deeper and far more painful than punches:    

“They say ‘jake you got an iron chin’
but fuck won’t you please tell me when
this sickness boiling up in me
will let go and finally set me free?”

The kicker with the best Void-Filling Strategies is sudden cessation makes things ten times worse, presumably why so many sports stars end up in such a bad way after retirement. ‘Sugar Sugar’ gets at this idea (“so i’ll hang em up and put em down and move it away/hit the bottle weave and waddle and black out on the way”) and ‘What Went Wrong?’ serves as the post-meltdown confusion, with voices emanating from the off-kilter instrumentation like ghosts of a halcyon past before the final refrain, “I don’t know where I went wrong, I don’t know what went wrong.” These two tracks work well in tandem, capturing the absurd change of focus required from athletes after calling it a day (ie. going from spending every minute optimising your running/kicking/punching and feeling existentially justified, to having nothing to do except feel worthless and existentially exposed).

The Infinite Jest-referencing ‘James Orin Incandenza’ is the song which ties all of these ideas together, and tells the eagle-eyed listener that an album about boxing is in fact so much more. Aside from David Foster Wallace confronting all of the above issues better than anyone, Incandenza is applicable and interesting for a number of reasons. For one, the heavy-drinking obsessive film-maker/wraith has both his sons enrolled in serious-level sport, and indeed his eldest crashes into compulsive womanising and depression after an injury ends his football career. What’s more, Incandenza’s father was a failed actor, an “anti-Brando”, which sits nicely with the heavy On The Waterfront references across the record. It’s the sort of inclusion which transforms an entertaining album into something more meaningful, allowing nerds to think too much and write excessively-long, rambling pieces about existential voids.

You can buy Dementia Pugilistica now via the Mrs. Hopewell Bandcamp page.

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“Grow/Decompose… shares [David Foster] Wallace’s metamodern style – a postmodern web of motifs and strange humour countered with a modernist sincerity and genuine sense of hope …if played on repeat Grow / Decompose never ends, a musical ouroboros of well-worn paths that are both doomed and blessed and quite possibly all we have.”

We were lucky enough to get the opportunity to ask John and Eric from the band a few questions.

Jon: Thanks for speaking to us John. How is life in LA this time of year? Why did you decide to move from Chicago? 

Young Jesus: Life in LA is good. It’s certainly a strange place, easy to let it own you in a way, but also a highly motivating and inspiring place. There is a lot going on here that I really was not exposed to in Chicago. Chicago’s a wonderful place for me in many ways, but it became ‘home’ too much. I had an idea of what it was in my mind, so I wasn’t really open to a lot of the interesting things the city had to offer. It became a place where I drank a lot and played a lot of videogames. Both have their merits, but I personally needed to get out. It’s interesting that Home, to me, is a pretty straightforward record– almost journalistic. And I was hazy and drunk through a lot of it. Grow / Decompose is meandering, questioning, more subtle I hope. But I’ve never been more clear-headed. I guess the easier it is to think, the more questions come.

One thing I’ve noticed while reading up on Young Jesus is that no-one seems to agree as to who you sound like. I’ve seen Smashing Pumpkins, The Replacements, Staind, The National etc. etc., while I picked up some strong Hold Steady vibes, both in terms of your writing style and the dark-and-joyful sound. Do your listening habits reflect this wide(ish) range comparisons? Or are journalists and bloggers trying too hard to pin your sound? 

We listen to a lot of different things. From The Hold Steady and Pile to William Basinski and Stars of the Lid. It all plays a part in the thinking of a record. It might not be obvious while listening, but our musical influences affect things beyond melody/rhythm. Little eccentricities come out in strange ways. That’s what makes it interesting hopefully.

As a follow-on to that, how do you feel after releasing a new record to the world? Do you like that reviewers each come to their own conclusions? Or do you feel pretty certain of the narrative you’re trying to conjure? I was kind of guilty of bringing a lot of my own thoughts into my review of the album, and I guess I was conscious that perhaps that isn’t always a good thing for the artist? 

We have a narrative in our heads definitely. But a huge part of the narrative is that there is no absolute correct narrative. We’re glad to see people put their own interpretations on it cause that means they’re interacting with it. They’re having a similar process sorting through the album that we had sorting through life to create the album. I have a huge mental picture of records like Brand New’s Devil and God… or Weezer’s Pinkerton. And it’s probably so different from how they view it! That’s so great. That we ultimately have a point of intersection/relation and have– potentially– come to it from totally different places. Albums (as Roger Ebert said about movies) can be machines that generate empathy.

Grow / Decompose, just like your previous album Home, seems to focus on a defined set of themes and characters in a way that makes it not quite a traditional album but perhaps not quite a concept album. How do you feel about the term ‘concept album’ in relation to your releases? 

I became pretty engrossed in this album over the past year. It took over my life in a lot of ways. I gave myself to this record rather than to people, and at one point couldn’t really see a love that was there for me because I was so absorbed in the story/writing. I loved Neil, Milo, and May. So the concept is a strange reflection of life. Grounded in reality. Without a traditional arc because life doesn’t have that. Some things end, some don’t.

There is a decidedly novelistic feel about your writing. Would you say literature has an influence on your writing style? (If yes) Which authors would you say have had the biggest impact? 

I work in a bookstore and am reading more than I’m listening to music probably. Literature has had a major influence. The five main books are Hilda Hilst’s The Obscene Madam D, Clarice Lispector’s Near to the Wild Heart, Mircea Cartrescu’s Blinding, Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor, and Suicide by Edouard Leve. And Muriel Spark. So six. These books very literally changed my life this past year. Oh and Jesse Jacobs By This Shall You Know Him.

Lispector/Cartrescu/Hilst showed me that it was okay (and beautiful) to think in absurd, non-normative logics. That you could create your own, and these logics are capable of carrying emotional/sentimental weight.

Reading Leve felt like breaking the law. It’s a work he turned in to his publisher and soon after killed himself. In fact, I could read it and feel safer. I do think it is a dangerous book, not for everyone, but for me it was a powerful life-affirming read. Almost named the record Les Atomes which is a band mentioned in one of Leve’s books (either Suicide or Autoportrait, I forget).

O’Connor and Spark deal with religion (specifically Christianity) in a rare way. They are ultimately believers, but are not afraid of examining the grotesque byproducts of belief. It’s easy to write off organized religion, maybe a bit harder then to look at it very honestly and specifically and turn the lens onto yourself as well. I’m an atheist, but some of my favorite thinkers (Spark, O’Connor, Jeff Mangum) are oddly Christian. Who knows what that means. Time to become a priest.

With its stories of addiction and general sadness shot through with a sense of hope, I compared Grow / Decompose to David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. Where do you stand on the whole irony vs. sincerity debate? Do you subscribe to the New Sincerity movement, or do you feel cynicism and darkness have role to play in the best, most enlightening/comforting art?   

I think you can confront darkness with sincerity and that the best stuff acknowledges the light that is in the dark and vice versa. We’re on board and interested with what New Sincerity could be about, and if people want to group us in with that, that’s okay. But we can also be sarcastic and ironic. So watch out.

You guys run the label Hellhole Supermarket that is putting out Grow / Decompose and take care of all of your own press and management. Is this sort of control important to you? I mean, I know there are some great labels out there, and some PR companies who make the effort to connect as human beings, but I can’t tell you how nice it is to get personal emails from acts about their new music. Does this increased involvement lead to a more rewarding process overall? Or is it an annoyance that gets in the way of music (or watching TV or whatever)?

I always tell Harrison, “if this label gets in the way of BBT (Big Bang Theory) one more time I’m gonna lose my smoothie.” I love those bang boys.

Finally, could you name 4-5 artists you are currently enjoying? They can be old or new, hidden gems or radio darlings, whatever you find yourself returning to at the moment.

Fragile Gang‘s For Esme, Pope, Mitski, Princess Reason, Earl Sweatshirt (‘solace’ is connecting a lot today).

Read our review of Grow / Decompose and then buy the album from Bandcamp or Hellhole Supermarket.

The post Interview: Young Jesus appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Nearly three years after Home (a stint in which some of the band played as Bummer), Young Jesus announced a new album and unveiled a brand new single, ‘G’, a song which prompted us to say:

“I don’t want to write too much based on one single, but this seems to be going a step further than your standard indie-rock fare”

As hinted above, we were predisposed to hold this opinion. Home left us with some pretty high expectations for the band, in particular their writing and lead John Rossiter’s delivery. ‘G’ and the album trailer (see below) merely confirmed our suspicions. After spending some time with the full-length, it’s safe to safe that these feelings were justified.

Just as with Home, Grow / Decompose is not a traditional eleven-songs-with-three-singles record, but neither is it a full concept album. It’s something between the two, pinned together by a set of central themes and characters whilst escaping the pitfalls and constraints of a “concept album”. For this reason the album is reminiscent of Craig Finn’s writing, which to me is high praise indeed. The word ‘novelistic’ would come close if only Grow / Decompose didn’t bring to mind the very novels which play with the conventions of the form. Our preview mentioned David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest as a comparison and this seems to reach far further than the shared transvestic tendencies (of G / D’s Neil and IJ’s Tony Krause) cited as reasoning. Not only does the album have the same broad, scattered and vaguely cyclical structure as the novel, but Young Jesus’ music also shares Wallace’s metamodern style – a postmodern web of motifs and strange humour countered with a modernist sincerity and genuine sense of hope.

It’s not only in structure that Grow / Decompose brings to mind Infinite Jest. Their juxtaposition of bleak mental turmoil with buoyant (or at least fervent) emotion and hope is integral to the Young Jesus aesthetic. Again a parallel to The Hold Steady’s style, this combination provides a sense of depth that would be absent from something aligned purely to misery or joy. This makes the album, at least to my ears, very much a product of the twenty-first century. We aren’t always sad, or always happy, or always good or evil or apathetic or nihilistic or idealistic to the point of stupidity. We are all of these things and none of them and it can be hard work trying to fathom how to retain a sense of self while being in such a state of confusion. What I’m getting at is, like Infinite Jest, Grow / Decompose resists the temptation of satire and cynicism to paint real people stuck in this madness.

As the title describes so neatly, Grow / Decompose speaks of the familiar paths that human lives follow. Despite all the strangeness, the characters here are going through the age-old problems – depression, anxiety, identity crises, existential terror – the problems of being You and You alone, Molina’s “curse of a human’s life”. For all of the complexity of our existence, we are still locked in the atavistic pattern of life and death, everyone more or less condemned to the same mistakes and fears and joys that we as human beings have been experiencing for generations (“You don’t start clean,” tells the refrain of ‘Brothers’, “spines are twisting in the rings. This old tree, been around before you were born”). In this way the album is both pessimistic and hopeful, a statement that we seem unable to change for the better and a reminder that we are united by this monumental whammy. As Rossiter sings on ‘Oranges’: “She’s a believer in the relief / that we’re all receivers of suffering”.

Degeneration is a major theme and the whole record is imbued with an odd pleasure/pain relationship, accentuated with grotesque imagery. Take for example opener ‘EMP’: “So go ahead and search your chest, the slugs and inchworms know it best.” This brought to mind the book Threats by Amelia Gray, in which a man named David descends the spirals of grief after losing his wife. With death and decay quite literally pervading his house and life, David finds himself both terrified by his situation yet drawn towards some obscure peace with it, as if giving in to a dark and fungal siren. The characters on Grow / Decompose are similarly troubled and lonely, be they confused and unhappy with their identity (‘G’), saddled with unwanted children and gripped by overwhelming numbness (‘Oranges’) or using drugs and forming half-imagined relationships with television presenters (‘Slug’ and ‘Brothers’). Dissociated from others, they achieve the sort of heightened peculiarity of southern gothic hermits, existing within the confines of their own logic and physics, a world where the hope or possibility of connection or meaning flutters along rarely, staccato and unannounced.

The result is a manic-depressive relationship with their irregularity. On ‘Blood and Guts’ the character holds his weirdness aloft like a banner intended to confirm himself or terrify others, marching towards epiphany or entropy like Gray’s David. The title character in ‘Milo’, who sits somewhere near McCarthy’s Lester Ballard on the scale of Southern Gothic hermits, continues the perverse pleasure with the clear-eyed conviction of a serial killer, delighted by the gory truths of life and death. Milo is the depraved character, one who seems to have pushed past anxiety and apathy to realise his potential as a monster (“He paints his face and feels a brightness / glowing brighter inside / the cave he built out of the thorax / of the organist’s hide”). With his humanity stripped away he becomes a prophet who “sings the world as it’s shown”, the cyclical, elemental theme returning with its closing chant:

“All the birds singing
all the plants growing
all the wind blowing
all the bugs crawling
all the birds breaking
all the plants dying
all the wind crawling
and the blood flowing
and the waves breaking
with the birds singing
and the plants speaking
to the wind dying”

It seems important that the end of the final track ‘Dirt’ shares the same chords and drone as the opener, so that the end loops back to the beginning (another similarity to Infinite Jest). If played on repeat Grow / Decompose never ends, a musical ouroboros of well-worn paths that are both doomed and blessed and quite possibly all we have.

Grow / Decompose is out on the 13^th May via Hellhole Supermarket and you can pre-order buy it now on CD and cassette, or on vinyl via Gigantic Noise.

The post Young Jesus – Grow / Decompose appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Out on Frenchkiss Records in 2005, this is an album infused with feel-good rock swagger, a trademark of The Hold Steady who are often tagged as a carefree band concerned only with beer and good times. For me (and many others, I’m not speaking of a revelation here), this misses the point entirely. It seems the kind of view held by people who dream of road trips after reading Kerouac. There is a glory in Finn’s work, but it is a glory intrinsically linked to sadness, a Christian glory consisting of everything from sweet nostalgia to cell-splitting, body-selling depression. The characters are going full-throttle because they are afraid of what will happen should they stop, something that brings to mind David Foster Wallace’s ideas on addiction vs. an existential void: “Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties – all these chase away loneliness by making me forget my name’s Dave.”

‘Hornets! Hornets!’ introduces us to Holly, the Bones Brigade-watching, Kate Bush-miming, Nabokov-referencing woman who goes with whoever’s going to get her the highest. It’s never quite clear exactly where she is or what is happening, a vagueness which continues onto the next track and indeed throughout the whole album. ‘Cattle & the Creeping Things’, packed with Biblical references, has always made me think of AA/NA (especially as Holly mentions going through the program), the collection of dysfunctional characters and hijinks similar to those of Infinite Jest’s Ennet House. Whether Finn intended to portray this scene is unclear (Separation Sunday is that sort of album). ‘Little Hoodrat Friend’ goes on to describe how pain and joy are linked, as in addiction, something symbolised perfectly by talk of tattoos (she’s got blue black ink and it’s scratched into her lower back. It said: Damn right he’ll rise again”). ‘Banging Camp’ tells of her descent into the nitrous-fuelled tent community pitched on the banks of the Mississippi and her refusal to slow down despite the risks:

“Holly wore a cross to ward them off.
She said if they think you’re a Christian then they won’t bring in the dogs.
And if they think you’re a catholic then they’ll wanna meet your boss.
Holly wore a cross to ward them off”

‘Charlemagne In Sweatpants’ introduces the pimp Charlemagne, a figure with whom Holly becomes entangled (“and it’s not like she’s enslaved. It’s more like she’s enthralled”) and it seems likely that Holly is accelerating, increasing elevation to avoid the comedown (“first it makes her feel tall then it makes her feel small and it’s all a sweet fleeting feeling”).

But the second half of the album sees a transformation in Holly. During ‘Stevie Nix’ the first rays of light poke through (“I was half dead. Then I got born again. I got lost in all the lights but it was ok in the end”) and ‘Multitude of Casualties’ sees the beginning of redemption (“she was feeling out the 5:30 folk mass… the night that she got born again”). ‘Don’t Let Me Explode’ is Holly’s plea for rescue (with her calling on Saint Barbara, the patron saint of a number of occupations linked to sudden death) and ‘Chicago Seemed Tired Last Night’, while not mentioning any characters by name, comes across as an advert for The Scene that Holly is leaving behind:

“We mix our own mythologies. We push them out through PA systems.
We dictate our doxologies and try to get sleeping kids to sit up and listen.
I’m not saying we could save you.
But we could put you in a place where you could save yourself.
If you don’t get born again at least you’ll get high as hell”

But Holly is out the other side. Holly saves herself. ‘Crucifixion Cruise’ sees her wake in a confession booth, sick and tired but feeling brave enough to change or at least attempt it:

“She said Lord what do you recommend?
To a real sweet girl who’s made some not sweet friends.
Lord what would you prescribe?
To a real soft girl who’s having real hard times”

The final track, a contender for my favourite, ‘How a Resurrection Really Feels’, tells of Holly crashing from the confession booth into Easter Mass. She stands among the pews in her dishevelled state and says “Father, can I tell your congregation how a resurrection really feels?” The track is a culmination of all that Separation Sunday stands for, regret and joy swirl around the church as Hallelujah confesses her adventures and troubles and finally earns her full name.

There is a section of Don DeLillo’s Underworld (an extract later released as the title story in his collection The Angel Esmeralda) that captures this atmosphere perfectly. Two nuns travel to a run-down area of the Bronx where a crew of graffiti artists paint an angel for every child that dies. The two Sisters are disillusioned by the violence and sadness they see but at the end of the story witness the inexplicable appearance of an image upon a billboard in a busy street. An image of a murdered girl, Esmeralda:

“Her presence was a verifying force, a figure from a universal church… Everything felt near at hand, breaking upon her, sadness and loss and glory and an old mother’s bleak pity and a force at some deep level of lament that made her feel inseparable from the shakers and mourners, the awestruck who stood in tidal traffic.”

Holly is away from home for a long period, a victim of her generation, mourned by her loved ones whether she is dead or otherwise (“they wrote her name in Magic Marks, on stop signs and subway cars, they got a mural up on East 13^th that said Hallelujah rest in peace”). In her absence she’s a saint, in her return an angel, her redemption is full of the sadness, pity and glory. But the redemption is not hers alone. It is fundamentally personal yet communal, shared by all. What has come before happened to everyone and no-one, means everything and nothing. To return to DeLillo: “she was nameless for a moment… a disembodied fact in liquid form, pouring into the crowd.” What has happened has happened but, for that moment at least, Holly is not alone.

This post has rambled on too long already and I’ve barely mentioned the array of references scattered across the album from Nelson Algren to Rod Stewart, Mary Tyler Moore to Jackie Onassis. I’ve not mentioned how Finn references old Hold Steady songs and even older Lifter Puller songs. I’ve not revealed that Holly reappears later in The Hold Steady catalogue. What’s worse, I’ve passed over killer lines that make the whole thing so special (“She drove it like she stole it. She stole it fast and with a multitude of casualties”). The truth is you could do a PhD on this thing. Maybe somebody already has.

The post How a Resurrection Really Feels: Separation Sunday appeared first on Various Small Flames.

This is good-time rock and roll with a weird edge, with frontman Ryan Walsh addressing the complications and absurdities of modern life in a way that is more often seen in modern lit. The album kicks off with a manic drum roll and dives head first into a manic indie rock track, ‘We Are What We Say We Are’, complete with rousing shout-along chorus.

The album doesn’t really waver from thereon, with a continued description of the incongruities in contemporary life, lyrics that are both funny and terrifying and very much now. While having the lyrics to hand would make writing this review a lot easier, the pleasure of Have You Ever… comes from repeated listens, each re-run unearthing a new lines or phrases.

“Just read me my rights in the cadence we agreed on” from ‘Try This Instead’, and: “I’m doing okay I guess, I’ll walk with a limp but I’ll do my best to hide it / I’ll show up to your party with bandages on, covering every part of my head but my eyes. You’ll see me don’t worry” from ‘Destroy This Poem’ are just a few that jumped out in my time with the record so far. ‘I Stand Corrected’ another smart, lean indie rock song (which I do have the lyrics to), opens with the lines:

“You’ve been selected to participate
In a survey about this call.
You can press 3 to get on with it
Or smash the phone into the wall.”

and goes on to the Salinger-esque:

“You can always press the star key to see if I’m around
But I probably won’t be around
Because the world tends to swallow us whole
and I’d rather risk oblivion
Then wait around to play some phony role.”

The track comes complete with a self-made video in which the band take you on a tour of Boston’s legendary (and completely fictitious) music landmarks. Check it out over at Youtube.

But if this social commentary stuff isn’t your thing, don’t let us put you off. These are still spirited rock songs that bring to mind some of my favourite bands – Titus Andronicus, Oxford Collapse, Wintersleep, The Walkmen, not to mention the impressive HtH back catalogue. Whether this triumphant tone is ironic or genuinely celebratory is up to you to decide. I’d say a bit of both. And I’d also ask whether it matters, this is easily my favourite rock and roll album of the year so far.

Have You Ever Done Something Evil? is out on the 13th of May on Discrete Pageantry Records. You can pre-order it via the Hallelujah the Hills Bandcamp page.

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The above is a quote attributed to David Foster Wallace (as a scribbled note at the bottom of a manuscript of ‘Good Old Neon’, a story featured in Oblivion: Stories). It’s a comforting thought, in a way. That ghosts aren’t these creepy figures that wander around at night, rattling chains and tapping on the window pane, they’re just what we have left of the people we used to know. I found myself thinking about it after a few consecutive spins of Fireworks and the Dead City Radio, the new album from Sketches For Albinos. The album uses voice recordings to provide the sole vocal accompaniment to the music. Some of the recordings are clear, others almost unintelligible.  We hear men, women and children. I have no idea who these voices belong to, and I don’t think it matters.

Sketches For Albinos is the recording project of composer and “sound artist” Matthew Collings. Fireworks and the Dead City Radio is the project’s first album since 2010’s Days Of Being Wild and Kind, although Collings does also release music under his own name, as well as comprising one half of Graveyard Tapes with Euan McMeeken of The Kays Lavalle. The album has been brewing for six years, and symbolizes a period of great development and upheaval in the life of its creator, “a time where the possibilities of life unfolded in a profound and life changing manner… where euphoric joy and great sadness collided.” The album is being released on the ever-brilliant Mini50 Records, home to WTD faves Old Earth, and fans of any of their previous releases would be well advised to check it out.

Collings experiments with electronics to create something truly unique. The strange mix of ambient, drone and noise creates a surreal, dream-like atmosphere, an atmosphere only heightened by the juxtaposition between tracks. A good example is the transition between track five, ‘the sailor in the city is buying up time’ and track six, ‘she drew a pentagon’; the former sedate and peaceful with this almost underwater-sounding piano, the latter buzzing with reverb or feedback and is more garage rock than drone. The other notable aspect of the album is the aforementioned voice recordings. They add something that traditional vocals could not and, for me, really make the album what it is. I wish this album had been around when we were trying to get our Voicebox mixtape together many moons ago, it would have been perfect.

The album is deep and challenging, but not oppressively so. Collings leaves room for the listener to breathe and to think and, perhaps most importantly, to feel. It’s an emotionally charged record, despite not having conventional lyrics, perhaps even for that very reason. It feels like Collings put something tangible into making this, as if each track is a little slice of his mind, of his thoughts and wishes and memories. Of the ghosts of his past, the voices inside his head. Perhaps that’s what those voices are after all.

Sketches For Albinos’ Fireworks and the Dead City Radio is out on the 24th of March on Mini50 Records.

EDIT: You can now purchase the album here.

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First of all, how did Old Earth come into being? Was it something personal that developed into something bigger? Or did you always plan to have collaborators?

It started out personal by necessity… I’ve always been a collaborator for other people’s projects, but didn’t write full songs until I was about 26 (I’ve been playing guitar since I was 15, and I turn 34 tomorrow). In ‘05, I didn’t have a band, so I bought an acoustic guitar and started from the ground up.

I met most of my collaborators in ’06 doing open mics around Milwaukee. They focus on Field Report now, but back then, we regularly shared members and shows. I drummed for Conrad Plymouth, which became Field Report, and it was the most fun I’ve ever had as a collaborator. I think of Berg, Porterfield, and Whitty as my core team. They’re my go-to guys when I start recording, and my network grew through them. We’re friends first, though, because I’m hard to work with. I’m untrained. I use my own tuning, my own structures, and I don’t know a thing about theory. When people ask what key I’m in, they might as well be speaking another language.

The pool I’m able to draw from right now is incredible, and there’ll probably be about a dozen people on the next record.

What inspires your song writing process? Are you mostly influenced by other musical acts? Or do things like literature play a part too?

Rap has inspired me since I was 11. That genre is propelled by innovation, competition, and a sense of hustle that isn’t present in the indie rock scene. I’m equally motivated by acts that disgust me by their lack of ideas, energy, and hard work… Small Hours was very driven by things I don’t like. It’s what I’m NOT doing on that record that’s important to me.

Yes, other mediums play a huge part, and finding ways for it all to interweave makes for a rich experience. I have my hands in a lot of disciplines and my mind in even more. I like poetry (esp. the Beat poets) and short stories, visual art, and always have movies on (mainly for atmosphere).

For me, many Old Earth songs are cinematic, not in way that the word is often used (you know, big orchestral sounds and over-production) but in that they conjure imagery. This is very difficult to properly describe but the sounds have an underlying sense of action or violence that produces pictures or events without the need for words. Maybe it is because the music is so psychological, with abstract sounds and phrases rather than a traditional narrative.  Does film have any impact on your work? Or is this just a consequence of releasing your mind through your music?

Film has a huge impact on my work- movies are about pacing and dynamics, creating and changing a mood in an instant, and marrying words and images to sound. I’d say that has more to do with my work than any other medium. I even think of certain riffs or words as characters, because they recur and represent a time, place, or person to me. When I do recordings, I put myself in the role of director, composer, and most often, curator. I’m also doing more scoring for other people’s film work, and it feels very natural.

The process of writing music such as this is really interesting to me. I find the idea of sitting down with the intention of putting together a song that will eventually sound organic and fully intended overwhelming in the extreme. I can see how people sit and write traditional folk songs, with maybe a poem or a story set to guitar strumming, but when the instrumentation plays such an important, visceral role I find it hard to imagine someone sitting down and working it out. How do you assemble something so convincing from the basic units of notes and words? Do you focus equally on the lyrics and the music? Or are the words governed by the music (or vice versa)?

Well, you have to bear in mind that I’m never starting from scratch. I have riffs and words and half-formed songs that I’ve been playing on for years, and I don’t have rules about one element governing another. For me, the song is the basic unit, and the riffs and words arrange themselves around it. Patiently living with the songs will tease out what they want to be… Writing never happens the same way twice, and it’s best for me to think of it as magic and leave it at that.

I’ve found that working on a few songs at once is really useful because they innately speak to each other, and the motifs become inherent. And, sometimes, you have to write three (or more) to get the one you want. Sometimes a song will spring from practicing an older one, or trying to play someone else’s.

Writing is constant, though. Singing with a guitar is only part of the process… As I’m doing a chore, running errands, or riding the bus, I’m working in my mind or on paper. I don’t think I can completely isolate the process from myself and describe it, it’s just what I do.

I once heard Damien Jurado speak on his writing process, something I’ve mentioned before on the blog, where he stated that songs always exist in some unknowable place within an artist, and that there is a spontaneous moment where each song is realised and takes form. Is this the case for you? Do songs tumble from your mind in something like a cohesive manner? Or is it more of an arduous process of trial and error, experimenting with different things?

Some seem to pop out fully-formed, but again, that’s only because I’ve played guitar basically every day for over half my life. You could argue that every song I make now has taken my entire life to write, rendering any spontenaity an illusion.

Trial and error plays a role, and it can be challenging at times, but I’m lucky if music is the most arduous part of my life. Cohesive moments are rare and can’t be counted on, so I just keep working. As for what Mr. Jurado is saying, I instead think of my songs as existing somewhere outside of myself, and I’m just witnessing and interpreting them.

For me there is a duality in your music, two aspects which combine to form a very convincing whole. The instrumentation represents the atavistic emotions and sensations, the instinctive things like fear and joy and unease, and the words are the complex thought, the reasoning that tries to bind the first category together into something that can be understood or shared. The music and lyrics together form something that is very human. Is this something you ever consider? Or is it a by-product of writing your mind?

I don’t think reason enters into it, especially with the lyrics. They’re intentionally vague, contradictory, and sometimes irrational. I like homonyms and multiple interpretations- sometimes the lines are a conversation, sometimes narration, and sometimes simply a human voice needed to be present and it felt good to sing there.

Music is inhuman if it isn’t saying “I love everything and it all makes sense” one moment and then “I’m confused and hateful” the next. The duality is more honest about the experience of being alive.

In our review of your album we included a quote where you essentially say that you take risks in order to make your art, and that pleasing people is not at the forefront of your thinking when trying to create something true to yourself. I read an interview with the Steinberg Principle where you go on to say that it is easy to pad yourself against criticism by being ironic. This remark brought to mind an essay by David Foster Wallace on TV and literature where he basically says that whole generations have grown up into superficial/empty people because they have been continually pumped full of ironic and clever TV characters who make fun of everything to appear ‘cool’. He pointed out that cynicism and irony can only ever be destructive, and truly brave art will stop poking fun at things and be itself, however hideously revealing that may be. Do you think this applies to music too, where it’s maybe not as clear as Family Guy or The Simpsons or a Mark Leyner novel? I’m thinking of artists such as yourself versus the current trend of ‘folk’ bands.

Overall, much of what’s popular is very sad and shallow to me, and I don’t need that kind of trash in my life. I’m not worried about any current trend because I’ve seen so many of them come and go. The joke’s on those bands, really. They’ll look back and feel foolish for dressing up and behaving that way. Fuck irony. I’m trying to make something to uplift myself, and it’s reassuring to me that other people can relate to it.

Finally, could you name 4-5 artists that you are currently listening too? They could be brand new or decades old, whatever you are enjoying at the moment.

My lady plays a lot of 60’s country and punk, I love Golden Oldies, I always have Gucci Mane in my headphones, and I couldn’t fairly list all my friends who are doing music that excites me. Milwaukee is an amazing place to be right now. The stuff that I’ve bought on bandcamp and shows up in the “collection” tab has a lot of good suggestions.

To better answer your question, though, the last month has been a lot of Drake’s Take Care, Fabolous’s The Soul Tape 2, J. Cole’s Truly Yours 2, and as for rock stuff, Ladyhawk’s No Can Do is ruling my world.

Jon: If you want to get some Old Earth music then head on over to his Bandcamp page. Mini50 Records have put out Small Hours, and a low place at The Old Place is now available on vinyl.

Also, in some strange twist of fate, Old Earth is playing with Small Sur and Peals, bands we featured just last Friday, this Tuesday (11th June ’13). If you are in the Milwaukee area then you would be silly to miss it. More information can be found here.

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Advance Base sees Ashworth (along with Nick Ammerman, Edward Crouse, & Jody Weinmann) is an evolution from CFTPA but everything that made it so great remains intact. This is no chillwave side-project, no 80s inspired synth revolution, just an extremely talented lyricist doing what he does best. I think Casiotone songs manage to capture that nameless feeling in young people (especially in this day and age, I can’t speak for previous generations) of sadness even in everyday life. A tangle of hopes and nostalgia, the past and present and future. Melancholy without melodrama. I remember watching a video with David Foster Wallace where he comes across the same sort idea. The below quote is his attempt to address what he aimed to achieve with Infinite Jest:

“For the upper-middle class in the US, particularly younger people, things are often materially very comfortable and there is also often a great sadness and emptiness. It’s difficult to think about and difficult to come up with answers in the abstract.”

Advance Base continues this. Narratives unfold in Ashworth’s lugubrious voice, often very simple stories describing nothing more than ordinary life – situations that you or I could realistically find ourselves in, and that sense of emptiness is nailed down a bit better, it becomes easier to see. And of course acknowledging and sharing these feelings with the whole point of art. I would guess that the whole reason Wallace wrote in the first place was to attempt to fill the emptiness in himself and through that maybe help others.

The first album, ’A Shut-In’s Prayer’, is to be released on Orindal Records in the US (May 15th) and Tomlab in the UK (today apparently). If you haven’t heard CFTPA then please please please go back and explore all of the past releases. You won’t be disappointed.

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