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.

Following on from the exquisite Skulls Example back in 2018, Dear Nora returns with new record human futures this autumn on Orindal Records. Lead single ‘Scrolls of Doom’ is every bit as idiosyncratic and inventive as the rest of Katy Davidson’s work. A view of the world from an oblique angle which somehow better portrays its folly and wonder. “I make billions in seconds flat / and I stuff it under my cowboy hat,” Davidson sings, deadpan. “Yeah, you punk me and I’m perplexed / but we all know what happens next.” A time capsule of a specific period, a prophecy of what’s to come. The human futures, here and now.

Eliza Edens – Westlawn Cemetery

Back in August we wrote about ‘I Needed You‘, the lead single from Eliza Edens‘s forthcoming release, We’ll Become the Flowers. “A meditation on the strangeness of an aftermath,” as we put it, “when nothing is as it used to feel and anger and longing are impossible split.” The latest track from the album, ‘Westlawn Cemetery’ balances fond visions of the past and concerns about the future through its titular location. A scene of familiarity from childhood nevertheless loaded with themes of death and change. The permanence of the headstones representing the ephemeral nature of life.

Hallelujah The Hills – God Is So Lonely Tonight

Back in July, Boston favourites Hallelujah The Hills released their first single since 2019’s I’m You with ‘Superglued to You’, a track of open hearts and racing momentum bound together by Ryan Walsh’s ever-inventive lyricism. Brand new single ‘God Is So Lonely Tonight’ pushes further onto this ground, albeit this time concerning a different relationship and with a more reflective, wry tone. But as the song develops so too does the energy underpinning it, contemplation transformed into conviction as another shout-a-long chorus arrives. “And you know he don’t even know my name / But he needs me, he needs me, he needs me all just the same,” Walsh sings. “You know that God is / God is / God is / so lonely tonight.”

‘God Is So Lonely Tonight’ is out now and available from the Hallelujah the Hills Bandcamp page.

Hunting – Piano Fire

Vancouver duo Hunting have announced their brand new LP, You’ve Got Love (But it Even Tears You Apart), will be released via Nevado Music this autumn, and have unveiled a cover of Sparklehorse‘s ‘Piano Fire’ by way of introduction. Released to coincide with Mark Linkous’s sixtieth birthday, their take captures both the energy and strangeness of the original, and the stop-motion video created by Hunting’s own Jessicka Lynne at Field and Glass Studio only pushes further into the track’s surreal nature.

You’ve Got Love (But it Even Tears You Apart) is out on the 11th November via Nevado Music.

JPW – Wealth of the Canyon

What better schooling can there be in music than consistently talking to the best? As the writer and host behind the ever-present Aquarium Drunkard, Jason Woodbury has had the opportunity to do just that, and his debut solo record Something Happening / Always Happening, out now on Fort Lowell Records, suggests he has been taking notes. Under the moniker JPW, Woodbury creates songs dialled in to both the surrounding landscape and the mystical dimensions above and beyond it. Classic cosmic folk rock which might well beam you up, if only to get a better look at the world below. Take single ‘Wealth of the Canyon’, its sound rich and enveloping, its easy rhythms so laidback as to be practically horizontal. But within the warmth lies something mysterious, something quite possibly sublime. A cloaked thing which you can only hope to catch in glances as time goes by.

Maripool – This Time Again

The moniker of Lisbon-born, London-based artist Natasha Simões, Maripool offers a brand of bedroom pop equal parts bright and moody. Released via Practice Music, new single ‘This Time Again’ captures the balance perfectly, with a certain tension between the easy-going instrumentation and Simões vocals. A juxtaposition caught in the lyrics, where the ostensibly frolicsome nature of the song is undermined by a shadowy edge. Something sinister lurking just beneath the surface.

And I get to see you when I see you
And I knew you were the one
To say I could see it in your eyes
With all of your lies

And I’d like to see you cry
And I’d like to see you die

Pony Girl – Running in Circles

Ahead of their new LP Enny One Will Love You on Paper Bag Records, Ottawa-Hull-based outfit Pony Girl have shared their latest offering, ‘Running in Circles’. A slow-burning pop number which slowly unravels into something more chaotic as another crushingly mundane day in work pushes the narrator to the brink. The song comes with a suitably cinematic video produced by K Collective in association with Dan Rascal & Cloud in the Sky, directed and edited by Dom Llanos with director of photography Santiago Trugeda. A flash horror movie which captures the enmeshed relationship between deadening boredom and overwhelming anger. Check it out below:

Enny One Wil Love You is out on the 14th October via Paper Bag Records and you can pre-order it now.

Sarah La Puerta – A Gun

Artist, musician and calligrapher Sarah La Puerta embraces the in-between. Be it the spaces between artforms, between places themselves, or the metaphysical gap between so-called reality and everything else. It’s fitting then that debut album Strange Paradise, released last year on Perpetual Doom, started in Austin and finished in upstate New York, and took on a whole world of inspiration to inform its search for paradise in the smallest, strangest gaps of life. La Puerta has recently unveiled a new video for single the ‘A Gun’, where director Christopher Michael Hefner further excavates the record’s surreal and elusive spirit, ensuring the search continues on.

Strange Paradise is out now and available via Bandcamp.

Shalom – DTAP

Ahead of a debut album scheduled for sometime in 2023 on Saddle Creek, Brooklyn‘s Shalom has unveiled new single, ‘DTAP’. Packaged together with a cover of Hovvdy‘s ‘True Love’, the single offers an unabashedly upbeat vision of love. A breathless and overwhelming experience unique to those early, giddy days. As Shalom explains, the song is about “dreaming of someone and the magic that happens when you don’t really care where or when as long as the who is right, the right person.” And it rings true even if real life experiences didn’t quite line up at the time of recording. “Even though I was in the midst of processing my big breakup, there’s something so pure about that song so the joy prevails,” Shalom continues. “Joy prevails, different time, any place.”

DTAP / True Love is out now via Saddle Creek.

The post Weekly Listening: September 2022 #2 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Released to coincide with his birthday, and organised by Dan Wriggins (of Friendship) in collaboration with Dear Life Records, You Were Alone: An Owen Ashworth Almanac is a covers compilation featuring versions of Owen’s songs from family, friends, labelmates and fans. A celebration which recognises a birthday but also so much more than that. A body of work and the burgeoning legacy it has and continues to establish, not to mention the blossoming community fostered through Owen’s label Orindal Records.

And community feels like the right word for the compilation. Both in terms of the gathered artists and the characters they bring to life. Because hearing the songs in different voices really brings home the diversity of personalities present across Owen’s work. Pedro the Lion adds a weariness to ‘My Sister’s Birthday’ with his distinctively gruff fondness. Claire Cronin is the perfect person to fully excavate the spookiness of ‘Pamela’. MJ Lenderman and Karly Hartzman raise a glass to poor old Christmas Steve. Sinai Vessel captures ‘Kitty Winn’ in all its sad affection.

Some, like Lisa/Liza‘s ‘Rabbits’ or Karima Walker‘s ‘Same Dream’, take the original versions back to the traditional folk roots, while the likes of Ylayali, Moon Racer and Bedbug lean into the electronic, harking back to earlier CFTPA days. What’s impressive is how the distinctive “Ashworthian” voice remains across the spectrum. Even the tracks with no literal voice, be it Robert Stillman‘s take on ‘Christmas in Nightmare City’ or Gordon Ashworth‘s extended guitar version of ‘Nephew in the Wild’, lose none of their ability to evoke the tales we’ve grown to hold so dear. Because while Dan might have intended to organise a birthday party, it turned out more like a reunion. A gathering of Owen’s characters, our friends. Still here, still living, still with so many stories to tell.

Cover painting by Martha Miller

The post You Were Alone: An Owen Ashworth Almanac appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Thanks for being with us.

Advance Base – Animal Companionship

Run For Cover Records

““The songs are intended to be a comfort for folks going through their own tough times,” Ashworth explained in an essay for Talkhouse. “Commiseration has always been a guiding principle of my songwriting.” Love need not be hugs and hearts and kisses, and loyalty does not necessarily mean hanging in a relationship beyond all reason. But love is loyalty, and Owen Ashworth has been, and seemingly always will be, loyal to those who need it most.”

REVIEW / BUY

Basement Revolver – Heavy Eyes

Sonic Unyon / Fear of Missing Out Records

“An expansive and spacious sound that’s lit up with a slow-burning emotional resonance, centring around Hurn’s impassioned vocal delivery. Their music combines the magnitude and granular glitter of shoegaze, the personal songwriting of bedroom pop and the cathartic noise of 90s indie rock. [Basement Revolver] play a double game of big and small, switching from quiet personal sentiment to big bombastic broadcast, often within the same song.”

REVIEW / BUY

Benjamin Shaw – Megadead

Audio Antihero

“For all the frustration and (self-)loathing in show, there’s also something else. Perhaps the defining characteristics of Shaw’s music is its ability to transcend its own themes. He may be singing about hating his job, about going nowhere fast, but in doing so colours these things with meaning. To create art is to communicate, and as such the songs represent the antithesis to their own concerns, the simulated happiness and artificial connection punctured through their ironic presence.”

REVIEW / BUY

Campdogzz – In Rounds

15 Passenger

“[Closer ‘Sorceress’] at first might seem a slightly strange segue for a final track soon straightens out into an intuitive sense of logic and belonging, as though the album-long teeter on the edge of some epiphanic transformation has finally fallen headlong at the last moment.”

REVIEW / BUY

Damien Jurado – The Horizon Just Laughed

Secretly Canadian

“While it might be tempting to view [Jurado’s] songwriting career as a fruitless quest for his true identity, perhaps the complete opposite is true. His career is his identity, splinters of truth arriving through dreams or divined from another realm entirely, fractals that can be arranged into a whole that far surpasses the meaning of any one component. A manifesto of sorts, one full of prophecy and history, though rather than country-western stars of [Joseph Billie] Gwin’s vision, the Ten Prophets of Damien Jurado are merely alternate versions of himself—past, present, future, dream—each record its own style or consciousness, born of him, yes, but equal to him too.”

REVIEW / BUY

Dear Nora – Skulls Example

Orindal Records

“You can be anyone, we are told, do anything, though only superficially, a multitude of simulations all working toward to same goal, the means to the end of shifting units and making money. Dear Nora’s music attempts to undermine this by playing the same game, crafting an unreal reality of their own to overlay the other. And, by neutering the money-making end, they in effect invert capitalism’s technique, reestablishing the means (ie. living) as the purpose. Yes, Skulls Example might be a simulation, but it is one of the most meaningful and rewarding you could hope to find.”

REVIEW / BUY

Field Report – Summertime Songs

Verve Forecast

“The summertime theme might conjure ideas of cloudless, uptempo good times, but to limit Field Report’s use of the season to a more poppy sound is to miss the deeper point […] We cannot rely on grand promises or paradigm shifts. Rather, we must commit to the slow, considered process of letting go and working through, of deciding who we were and who we want to be. In these times, we’d be foolish to trust that will be enough, but belief in small moments of agency and human connection is more productive than misplaced prayers for epiphany.”

REVIEW / BUY

Free Cake For Every Creature – The Bluest Star

Double Double Whammy

“free cake for every creature don’t make sad songs exactly, usually tending toward a kind and hopeful feel. Yet there is something intangible about them, a strange sensation that weaves its way into quiet moments, like a kind of everyday poetry or nostalgia that we all recognise but don’t have a name for. The case in point is the penultimate song, ‘be home soon’, which somehow portrays a subway ride home as something beautiful and magical.”

REVIEW / BUY

Frog – Whatever We Probably Already Had It

Audio Antihero

“Contains lines of total sincerity that feel disarming in the face of what has come before, as though the truth of things slips out in quiet whispers to oneself, the party over and room emptied out. The truth being the soul-shearing reality of the American Dream, the tragicomedy of understanding your dreams and desires to be complete fictions while leaning on them with all of your weight.”

REVIEW / BUY

Gia Margaret – There’s Always Glimmer

Orindal Records

“The palette of Gia Margaret is built from shades of sadness—loss, regret, wistful longing, the arresting trap of nostalgia and plain old hurt—though again and again Margaret provides a counter-shade, as though the darkness’ true purpose is merely to highlight the warm, weak glow within. Because, while people up and leave, and time is certainly no kinder, Gia Margaret is here to prove that value is inherent in life itself, meaning and fulfilment not in spite of troubles, but within them. No matter how dark, there is always glimmer.”

REVIEW / BUY

Haley Heynderickx – I Need to Start a Garden

Mama Bird Recording Co.

“I Need To Start a Garden is the perfect album for the onset of spring. It’s all about growth and the hope of new beginnings, but also doesn’t shy away from the necessary hard work that makes such growth possible. It’s a reminder that plants are not the only things that need to be tended and cared for, but also that they’re not the only things that can flourish and bloom either.”

REVIEW / BUY

Lisa/Liza – Momentary Glance

Orindal Records

“The context [of bereavement] is important not because we wish to suggest some ‘romantic’ mythology behind the record (indeed, the songs were written before the tragedy occurred), or that there is magical healing power in the making/consumption of art. Rather, Momentary Glance is a symbol of the power of community, generosity in the face of grief, and the album’s use of placidity over bombastic melodrama is indicative of such an authentic spirit.”

REVIEW / BUY

Long Neck – Will This Do?

Tiny Engines

“Despite the difficult circumstances, there is also a sense that things will be okay, that our narrator has gained the sense of strength and self-reliance necessary to move on. Or rather, is working toward being strong enough and self-reliant enough, with this album being the furthest possible reach forward toward that place. Of course, it’s likely full strength and self-reliance will never be achieved, but it’s the strive toward those ideas that is the most important. Of course this will do.”

REVIEW / BUY

Lung Cycles – S/T

Lily Tapes & Discs

“The placid natural flow continues whether we voice our concerns or not, and nothing in this external sphere is working to exacerbate our feelings. In this way, Lung Cycles reveals anxiety and melancholy to be no more than parasites of the human psyche, forces all too willing to consume us should we centre our existence within our own heads, but soon found dead in the vacuum of natural quiet.”

REVIEW / BUY

Monarch Mtn – days of sleepwater

Self-released

“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.”

REVIEW / BUY

Naps Eyes – I’m Bad Now

Paradise of Bachelors

“Behind the heavy-lidded blasé exterior lies a rich and tangled inner life, an invitation to fall into the folds of Chapman’s brain and watch his thoughts pass by […] Those with enough curiosity or desire can try to arrange the Nap Eyes lines into a magical formation, wrestling with the existential questions in the hope that they will be the first to figure it all out. The rest can take a back seat and let the Big Stuff drift around them, finding comfort in the fact that there are things bigger than us, and beauty in the understanding that they are beyond our grasp.”

REVIEW / BUY

Remember Sports – Slow Buzz

Father/Daughter Records

“Sincerity could be said to represent Slow Buzz as a whole, though sincerity not as some sentimental force rather a commitment to what feels true, no matter how messy and conflicting. There’s something in the Remember Sports story at the heart of this earnestness, the possibility of progressing without sacrificing an entire ideal, of reincarnation where one returns not as some different creature entirely, but a new version of oneself. A truer version, at least for now.”

REVIEW / BUY

Sun June – Years

Keeled Scales

“Years is a record shaped and propelled by the gentle forces of the world, currents in the substrates of the earth and life itself, invisible yet profound, capable of changes both minor and major […] a number of the tracks returning to a repeated phrase, cyclical patterns that rise in intensity like incantations, or else echo out into the fabric of the sound.”

REVIEW / BUY

Swearin’ – Fall Into the Sun

Merge Records

“We live in a time obsessed with the past. Our dreams now look backwards instead of forward, our deepest wish not for some utopian future but rather a return to an unreal past, one sanded of all trials and troubles by nostalgia and the constant passing of time. With Fall Into the Sun, Swearin’ rebel against such a mindset, redirecting our hopes toward the future once more, and compelling us to pay attention to the present while we still can.”

BUY

Talons’ – After Talons

Self-released

“Talons’ capture the futility and hopelessness of a content life in a creaking hyper-capitalist society, an existence often devoid of meaning and full of shame at the hypocrisy in caring about the world but doing little to change it. But it’s also kind-hearted too, its glowing core of humanity somehow comforting despite the heavy subject matter. In other words, there’s no optimism here, but there is hope.”

REVIEW / BUY

Valley Maker – Rhododendron

Frenchkiss Records

“Built upon a thematic bedrock of faith and religion, but anyone who baulks at the R-word need not worry, [Valley Maker] is uninterested in creeds and doctrine, instead exploring metaphysical mysteries that we can all wonder about […] Crane is not foolish enough to offer answers, though his words and voice work as a reassuring balm, even while acknowledging the ambiguity and turmoil that surely awaits. ”

REVIEW / BUY

The Washboard Abs – Lowlight Visions

Antiquated Future

“Clarke Sondermann’s music has always been intimate, but this album treads deeper into this ideal than any of his previous work. In the circumstances, it would be relatively easy to make an album of sad songs, but it’s a brave artist who takes the very personal worry and suffering and uses it to build something that’s this complex and multifaceted, vulnerable but not hopeless, forgoing nihilistic dejection in favour of a strange kind of love, an appreciation of what stands to be lost.”

REVIEW / BUY

The World Without Parking Lots – Seventh Song Counts the Engines

Self-released

“Seemingly simple but rendered dense and cryptic with the addition of Parcell’s poetry […] Seventh Song Counts the Engines is a beautiful collection of songs, one which somehow makes a bold statement in a circuitous whisper, deceptively complex instrumentation and ambiguous lyrics capturing decidedly unambiguous emotion.”

REVIEW / BUY

Young Jesus – The Whole Thing is Just There

Saddle Creek

“How do you adopt a more sincere, hopeful position without becoming a flat Sincere, Hopeful Person, and everything that image entails? Young Jesus have put their hope in a spontaneous, endlessly recursive form of questioning, where every hard fought answer only exists to be questioned further. The endeavour might well take a life time, but the prospect of circling closer to the truth is something of a solution in its own right. So, while it’s tempting to think that the true message or meaning of the songs on The Whole Thing Is Just There is always just out of frame, the reality is in fact the other way around. The message of the songs is that meaning is always just out of frame, and that there is no more valuable an enterprise than the constant search outside and beyond.”

REVIEW / BUY

Yowler – Black Dog in My Path

Double Double Whammy

“The writing is vague and affecting, words imbued with an esoteric power that fuses intimate internal thoughts from the corporeal world with something altogether more supernatural. “I bear the mark, I am sigil,” Jones sings, “to the spirits and the sprites, but I promised not to listen and stay in my life.” The natural and supernatural converge on Black Dog In My Path, and Jones has re-purposed Yowler as the conduit between these two dimensions.”

REVIEW / BUY

We’re be sharing our favourite songs, books and Bandcamp name-your-price releases in good time, so keep an eye on the ‘Lists‘ category for those.

The post Favourite Albums of 2018 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

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.

Opening tracks ‘White Fur’ and ‘Morning Glories’ sound like a sunny morning, evoking the gentle natural rhythm of the waking world, that quiet period of chirping birds and opening blossoms. But these songs aren’t just pure surface image. Davidson crafts music with impressive depth, even the seemingly simplest lines revealing themselves to be finely wrought with metaphor or meaningful imagery. Take ‘White Fur’ for example, playing this gentle naturalism against imagery altogether more preternatural (“cremate me in snow and firewater, skulls example is my name”), electric guitar swooping around in a manner reminiscent of To La Tengo’s soundtrack to Kelly Reichert’s Old Joy.

‘Morning Glories’ on the other hand has the cosy ambience of a nostalgic daydream. “I long to wander in the wild wood, where those rippling waters flow,” Davidson sings, “and go drifting back to childhood where, where the morning glories grow.” The songs on Skulls Example feel disarmingly simple, a collection observations and recollections that somehow knit into this whole. Think of them as the simple DIY pinhole viewer you fashion from an old cardboard box that allows you to see something as grand and cosmic as a solar eclipse. Nowhere on the album captures this simplicity as well as ‘New To Me’, barely 100 seconds of crystal clear sentiment that feels incredibly evocative, Davidson painting a scene removed from all trappings of modern life.

But then, as if to prove the breadth of Dear Nora’s interests, Skulls Example flips on its head four tracks in, serving up two C21st pop songs that focus a lens on our digital age, specifically the wholly unreliable nature of reality in our age of screens. “Simulation feels real every day,” Davidson sings at the very beginning of the Baudrillardian ‘Simulation Feels’, a song that somehow manages to feel groovy and loose-limbed despite its complex subject matter. This 1-2 is completed with ‘Sunset on Humanity’, which again uses gentle melody as a vector to deliver probing lines about the dissolution of the membrane between our “real” and virtual lives. “Sunset in the video game,” goes the first line. “And I’m walking on the beach. The colours are radiant, orange, blue, purple, red, yellow. I’m reaching, it’s all within reach.”

The blurring of real and unreal is central to Skulls Example, and such tension can be applied to almost every track on the record. As the press release tries to summarise:

[The album is about] how our weird, techno-futuristic present (VR, self-driving cars, drones, Tinder dates, reality TV show government, Starbucks ubiquity, iPhone as extension of human body, Blade Runner-esque income inequality, cryptocurrency “utopias”, etc.) juxtaposes so absurdly against the never-ending backdrop of inexorable, ancient elements (fire, ice, wind, storms, mountains, rocks, human instinct, etc).

However, it might not be a simple to and fro between the technological unreal and elemental real. Because nothing is quite as it seems on Skulls Example. Even before being translated into language and crafted into songs (which is another can of worms entirely), Dear Nora’s most immediate, evocative imagery of the so-called real world is often revealed to be drawn from memory or imagination. Meaning, in effect, they are no more real (or unreal) than the virtual reality of technology. Rather, this imagery is just another simulation, a hyperreality in which notions such as fact and fiction are rendered obsolete.

Which goes some way to describing the calm and spacious title track, one of several inspired by a trip Davidson took to Oaxaca and Mexico City. The scene is crafted expertly, grand landscapes and strangely significant details combining to transport the listener to another world. “Ancient black volcanic rock courtyard heat waves rising,” Davidson sings, the song pitched somewhere between realism and surreal myth. “Two crows on a splintered cross living and dying, distant ranchero music and a scary peacock squawking near a hot pink bougainvillea.” The commitment to the physical world could be seen as a protest against the virtual, however, what might seem like an effort to disrupt the illusionary present could instead be the opposite—an attempt to weave a better, more gratifying illusion, like some omnipotent being building a simulation of its own. That magical thing: a simulation capable of feeling more real and meaningful than the blindly efficient simulation of late capitalism.

All thunderclaps and rain-scent, ‘Ancient Plain’ plays like a wide-screen desert revelation, like a considered attempt to transcend banal life. “This job don’t mean shit to me,” Davidson sings, “so I hit the freeway, bought a full tank of gas, and drove out of the city.” But, of course, this is not some Hollywood-style adventure of quick victories—our narrator is still very much of our world, trying to chat to a Starbucks barista and watching Friends in a bar on six flat screen TVs. Skulls Example could be viewed as a struggle between two competing images. An attempt to superimpose a unique vision of life over the established model, yet unable to stop the signs and symbols of the ‘old’ new world seeping through.

And that’s the big draw of Dear Nora as a whole. Despite the fact it’s strange and singular and quite unlike anything else you’ll hear this year, this desire to create a better, more meaningful idea of existence is undeniably familiar, fundamentally human despite the god-like connotations (well, we were supposedly made in His image). It’s as if the songs aspire to somehow become more than the sum of their parts, fitting together just so, like words in a spell to conjure something otherwise incommunicable. As Davidson explains:

The album is specifically about humanity. Our capacities and feats are so incredible – we’re godlike – and yet we’re scrounging for happiness and basic survival, we’re heavily addicted, we just want love, we want family. We’re simultaneously so brilliant and so basic. To me, this feels like the worst and best time to be alive. I experience some level of horror and bliss on a daily basis.

In an ideal world, Skulls Example is a far simpler album. The soul-sucking ubiquity of technology is countered by a reintroduction of a more organic sensibility. The unreal is vanquished by the real, and we realise we can touch and feel again. But we do not live in an ideal world. Late capitalism is the master of co-option, capable of assimilating anything and everything and turning them toward its own ends. Charity events seeking to warn of ecological ruin come complete with plastic toys and polyester costumes. Political and social movements, even those in direct opposition to consumerist ideology, become photo opportunities, or chances to sell t-shirts and pin badges. Try to escape to the wilderness, and they’ll sell you camping gear. You can be anyone, we are told, do anything, though only superficially, a multitude of simulations all working toward to same goal, the means to the end of shifting units and making money.

Dear Nora’s music attempts to undermine this by playing the same game, crafting an unreal reality of their own to overlay the other. And, by neutering the money-making end, they in effect invert capitalism’s technique, reestablishing the means (ie. living) as the purpose. Yes, Skulls Example might be a simulation, but it is one of the most meaningful and rewarding you could hope to find.

Skulls Example is out now via Orindal Records and you can get it from their website or Bandcamp in a variety of formats.

The post Dear Nora – Skulls Example appeared first on Various Small Flames.