The project also coincided with the birth of a child, and with the adaptation to parenthood came a move away from hectic practice spaces to the solitude of a home studio. Where noisy freedom once reigned, Brownell now found himself working on headphones in the snatched moments he could manage, developing a newfound patience with the creative process. Throw in the pandemic and the accompanying inward turn, and Ground Loops became a project shaped by forces of isolation and reflection.

Unsurprisingly, this is born out in the Ground Loops sound. To call the tracks minimalist is to underestimate their energy, but something of that mindset is certainly present. These are detailed songs but spacious too, every element not only given space to be heard but also grow. The lasting impression is that of organic development, the various components reaching out in all directions and meshing with those around it, knitting together to form a dense and textured sound.

We’re delighted to share the release’s lead single, ‘They Weren’t Made to Last’. Rising out of a simple guitar line and pattering synths, the track intensifies as it progresses, developing ever more complex patterns. The sound is thematically relevant too, the song wrestling with the passing of time and all its accumulating complications. But within the wistful tone, the sense of progression never falters, a headlong advancement to which you can only give in.

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Doused, the third album from Brooklyn’s Dead Painters out today on Rue Defense, operates with this awareness. Tapping into the spirit of bands like The Cure and Talk Talk but stripping away their psychoactive excesses, the record instead relies on the universality on lived experience to reject the inhuman logic of society and forge connection. Lead single ‘Marigold’, which we shared last month, is one one such example, offering an empathetic take on anxieties around death and ageing and providing a glimpse into the key theme of the album. As we wrote in our preview:

The lyrics [of ‘Marigold’] are plagued by the vaguely vertiginous sense of time passing, months and years sliding past beneath your feet, but the vocals remain soft and kindhearted nonetheless. Because rather than homing in on the dread of death, Dead Painters reflect their focus off of its surface, facing not ahead in terrified wait of the approaching end but rather all around. For there are others on this slow march. The journey need not be alone.

Second single ‘Sit Tight’ has a similarly compassionate view of negative experiences. The track is “about wanting to do something great,” bassist and vocalist TC Brownell explains, “feeling frustrated that it’s not happening, and then realizing nobody but you really cares and we’re all gonna die someday.” But rather than being cynical or fatalistic, the song instead uses the realisation as a springboard toward a healthier, more compassionate mode of existence. If you mean nothing in the grand scheme of things, then neither do your problems—be they small personal hang-ups or vast existential concerns.

Doused is therefore a record not of answers but comforts. It’s an album which understands that unanswerable questions will always remain just that, and one which finds solace in the fact that this truth applies to everyone. For there is solidarity in our certain demise, our ubiquitous fear and suffering, and while recognising this idea will not save us in the end, it can open up a space in which we might live unburdened.

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Black Sea Dahu – Thaw
Will Henriksen – Nothing Left Behind
Dehd – Letter
Hovvdy – Ruin (my ride)
Maya Lucia – preteen
They Are Gutting A Body of Water – french
Jason Calhoun – moving
Dilary Huff – Overused Sayings
Two Meters – The Nightmare
Dead Painters – Marigold
The Deer – Confetti To The Hurricane
Pastel – Moon Landing
Hit Like A Girl – No More Dysphoria
Basement Revolver – Master’s Degree
Bodies on the Beach – Ghost
Highnoon – Lens
Distant Reader – Marie
Drakes Island – 4 Days
Wet Dream – Worried
Best Mann – Must Be Wrong
The Funs – Trains Across The Sea
Ganser – Buio
Nothings – Favorite Shirt
Corinne Sharlet – Hail Mary
ahem – Halloween
Max and the Martians – Please Hold On
A.S. Wilson – Taken Apart
Béret – Book of Hera
Joel Jerome – There’s Nothing Here To Bother You Anymore
Carpet City – Little Longer
Hannah Cranton – Kite
Zachary Lucky – Didn’t Know That You’d Come Along
Wintersleep – Fading Out
Coral – find me wrong
Boo Baby – “Jazz?”
Margaux – Palm

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

The post October 2019 Roundup appeared first on Various Small Flames.

How to interpret the Dead Painters sound is left entirely to the audience, with a certain ambiguity encouraged and developed […] In many ways, this is not unlike our experience of life, where we are given snatches of information, glances at faces, though never the complete picture, instead conjuring our own understandings from whatever we can glean from what’s around us.

Dead Painters are back with their third full-length album, Doused. Looking to develop the styles set out on previous records while forging ahead into new territory too, the album is indebted to a number of genres, from lean indie rock to psychedelica. However, far from satisfied with replicating old sounds or creating loving pastiche, the outfit delve into the centre of such style and reconfigure their focus and meaning. “Thinking about psychedelic rock and its deep connections to drug culture in the 1980s,” reads the press release, “the band pushed away from the more traditional associations in favor of more alternative means of expression found in bands like Talk Talk and the Cure.”

Therefore, in considering themes such as ageing and mortality, “the songs on this album place more stock in meditative ideas rather than psychoactive substances.” The result is a record with a foot in the past while looking forward too, a space carved out within the bustle of the city in which self-examination and reflection are once again possible.

Today, we’re delighted to share the first single, ‘Marigold’. Wistful and glimmering, the track concerns death and its inevitability, the persistent rhythm of the sound echoing time’s constant motion. The band describe the song as about “getting older, sleeping less, and the feeling that the clock is slowly counting down toward the end,” the burnt orange of the title evoking autumnal change and the day of the dead.

The lyrics are plagued by the vaguely vertiginous sense of time passing, months and years sliding past beneath your feet, but the vocals remain soft and kindhearted nonetheless. Because rather than homing in on the dread of death, Dead Painters reflect their focus off of its surface, facing not ahead in terrified wait of the approaching end but rather all around. For there are others on this slow march. The journey need not be alone.

Doused is out on the 6th December via Rue Defense and you can pre-order it now.

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Song list:

Options – Waiting
2nd Grade – Favorite Song
Alexander – Going to Sleep
Ryan Van Gonten – Fabrique
Haunted Continents – What Were You Born For?
Weakened Friends – Blue Again
Shybaby – Lazy Hazy
Frankie Valet – April
Primo! – You’ve Got a Million
Hypoluxo – Kentucky Smooth
Basement Revolver – Knocking
Dead Painters – Output
HALEY – Infinite Pleasure Part 2
Doe – Heated
Ing – Dust
Benjamin Shaw – Terrible Feelings!
internet boy crush – ghost friend
lowly loverboi – Dumb Phone
Dead Tooth – Liars
Kin Hana – You
Bodega – The Truth is Not Punishment
The Cordial Sins – Not Enough
Indoor Cats – Fun 2
Upstairs – Trust the Process
Sabriel’s Orb – Holding
John Atkinson – Bakwaves // Rye
Fanclub – Leaves
The Chairman Dances – Acme Parking Garage
Con Davison – Talk
Ivy Dye – Diminish
Elizabeth Owens – I Long
The Last Bison – Don’t Look Away
Our Fastest Typist – It’s Nice Outside, but My Head is Killing Me

You can find all of our monthly round-up posts here, and our complete array of mixtapes here.

The post September 2018 Roundup appeared first on Various Small Flames.

First, for the unfamiliar, let us (re)introduce the band. “Dead Painters balance a nostalgic sense of sadness with soaring jubilance in a manner reminiscent of Frog,” we wrote in our previous piece, with Oliver Beardsley (percussion), TC Brownell (bass, vocals, keys), Marlene Bowles (guitar) and Japeth Mennes (vocals, guitar, bass) “weaving a harmonious sound across which Mennes’ baritone emerges, pitching somewhere between laconic and loving.” Endless Idle utilises this in order to create vivid representations of contemporary characters, pictures that could be both detailed or impressionistic, depending on your focus.

“I think we all share an interest in writing songs that combine aspects of portraiture (of people we may or may not know personally),” Mennes explains, “along with a dose of autobiography.” The modus operandi is clear on opener ‘Fool on Fire’, with inspiration taken from Hal Hartley’s 1997 movie Henry Fool. As we wrote previously, the song presents “a series of distinct sights and sounds that are interlinked by their presence in the narrator’s experience,” from the opening sunrise to the narrator’s passage through New York City.

‘Not My Overlord’ is a spacious indie rock song, guitar swaying and then squealing between pockets of relative calm, in which Mennes’ vocals gather an insistent tone when delivering lines of defiance (“not going out tonight”, he sings “yeah I would rather stay at home / where nothing will guide my hands into the festering unknown”). The calm, interweaving guitar lines and shuffling drums at the beginning of ‘Output’ call to mind Invitation Songs era Cave Singers, although the song soon builds into something far more urgent than their backwoods folk rock. The vocals don’t appear until the song slows down again, a plodding outro that sounds strangely bummed out when repeating the line “here’s to feeling good all the time”.

After the meandering ‘New Year’s Day’, things turn dark and epic with ‘We Turned Out’, a shadowy and ominous rocker that opens with off-kilter blare of guitar and a smatter of drums. It has everything that you need in a great indie rock song, both chaotic and catchy, emotionally resonant and a little bit weird, drawing on influences as diverse as Jason Molina and early 2000s indie superstars.

“Past the lights of the town,
lies a terrible darkness,
we don’t know what it is,
we can only guess”

From this emerges the dawning interlude ‘North Henry’, and the title track is more sedate still, always threatening to accelerate but falling back into wistful languor, with almost Pavement-esque vibes where gaining pace is just too much effort. The album ends with ‘Turn the Lock’ , dreamy guitar skating across the vista as the tone becomes contemplative. The songs serves as a fitting end to a record built from lyrical detail and instrumental craft, a kind of patient testament to songwriting as an evocative force, and one as striking and moving as any formed in the past by long dead painters.

Endless Idle is out now via Rue Defense and you can grab it from the Dead Painters Bandcamp page.

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Tracklisting:

Dear Nora – White Fur
Lawn – 2000 Boy
Pearl Crush – True Blue
Dead Painters – Fool On Fire
Slowcoaches – Found Down
Two Meters – Left Behind
Kerem Atalay – Winter 2
Pat Moon – I Belong
Blood Hype – Not Too Good
Talons’ – Driving Home From Shows
The Nova Darlings – I Like Crashing My Car (Into Yours)
Dead Sullivan – Swallow
Onlyness – Comfortable
Of the Valley – Italy
Nice Knees – Backout
Suburban Pets – Candy
Minor Moon – It’s Okay
Caroline Lazar – Georgia
Heatwarmer – American Dog
Jacob Furr – Life Comes At You Fast
Deux Trois – Dave
Grace Turner – Dead or Alive
Britton Patrick Morgan – Southern Drawl

The post June 2018 Roundup appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Indeed, how to interpret the Dead Painters sound is left entirely to the audience, with a certain ambiguity encouraged and developed. The effect is both distinctive and effective, the spaces left for the audience’s imagination giving each track a more real organic feel, gaps that allow context and meaning to be decided individually. In many ways, this is not unlike our experience of life, where we are given snatches of information, glances at faces, though never the complete picture, instead conjuring our own understandings from whatever we can glean from what’s around us.

The band are set to release their sophomore album, Endless Idle, later this year on Rue Defense, and we’re happy to share the lead single. Taking inspiration from Hal Hartley’s 1997 movie Henry Fool, ‘Fool on Fire’ really speaks to the above themes, presenting a series of distinct sights and sounds that are interlinked by their presence in the narrator’s experience. Opening like a wistful sunrise, the song’s narrator (who could be the titular character from Hartley’s film) rise and move through New York, the city full of life around him.

“He was a business man
and I was a fool
all full of fire
a tool on fire

He’s gone for good

Alone in Woodside, Queens
I made my move
Where all the garbage sleeps
I hit the snooze
all full of fire
a tool on fire

All full of fire”

Endless Idle is out sometime in 2018 on Rue Defense, so keep an eye on their Bandcamp page for further information.

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