‘Wait it Out’ is a lesson in noisy but reflective indie rock, with plenty of heavy growly guitar, though the vocals provide most of the melody and ensure things don’t descend into a muddy puddle of reverb. ‘Blurs’ is more pop punk, with galloping drums driving the whole thing forward, creating a track that would sound great as you tear down a sunny highway in your crappy car. The finale gets heavier and heavier, building into a dense fog of sound reminiscent of early Japandroids releases as Germain-Poitras sings about the perils of constant touring “Wake me up on Monday morning / clean the footprints off the ceiling”. Closer ‘Shine’ sound wide and flat and sunny, experimental noodly guitar snaking around lyrics that hint that perhaps Solids haven’t come out of this hectic period with their sanity intact, “I just close the curtains for the sun to burn them all down / And shine”. The EP then ends on a long outro that sounds like a lonely wind blowing through a window pane on some barren desert plane, a sound that makes me wonder where Solids are headed next.

Else is due for release on he 15th of April on Topshelf Records and Dine Alone Records. You can also preorder it on CD, cassette or 12″ vinyl via the Solids Bandcamp page.

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The Wall Street Journal premièred the lead single, ‘Amerika’, last week, a track which frontman Paul Murphy says was inspired by Walt Whitman. His poem ‘America’ is a hopeful 1888 view of the nation (“Centre of equal daughters, equal sons / All, all alike endear’d, grown, ungrown, young or old”), something Murphy tries to channel in the lyrics, although the Amerika-with-a-K spelling also brings to mind Kafka and his abstruse, crushing systems. The result is something decidedly of the now, a track about being an individual in the arrangement, torn between romanticism and cynicism, hope and dread. About finding shelter and not giving in. Check it out below:

The Great Detachment will be released on the 4th of March. You can pre-order it now via Dine Alone Records.

Photo by Norman Wong

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I wrote a brief piece about Josh Scott’s Aero Flynn a few weeks back after reading some words by Field Report’s Chris Porterfield. The letter/essay (which you can read here) painted Scott as a supremely talented musician and songwriter and spoke of the self-titled Aero Flynn album as “quite seriously a life-or-death record” which should be heard as “a spit in the fucking face of the symptoms of disease, like rot and destruction and apathy and cynicism”. Given how much I respect Porterfield’s work, this sort of language got me excited.

The album begins with ‘Plates2’, a restrained track of gentle synths and countrified electric guitars, not a million miles away from Porterfield’s Field Report, while ‘Twist’, which brings to mind Radiohead, solidifies Scott’s subdued vocal delivery. ‘Dk/Pi’ opens with electronics backed by an ambient hum, the spacey bleeps and bloops of Spencer Krug’s Moonface layered on top of something older and less clear. Shambling drums kick in to create a sound akin to The War on Drugs, Scott’s dreamy vocals drifting through the nebulous arrangement with a delicacy that suggests impermanence, as if the sonic environment threatens to consume him. As the song progresses the instrumentation disintegrates, distorting into reverby fuzz and then a confused white noise before blinking out to leave a large cosmic swelling. This is an electrical anxiety, a malfunction in which communication is lost and isolation complete, Scott a lone astronaut surrounded by planetary screams and an airless dark.

The beginning of ‘Crisp’ is gentler but not without threat, an acoustic strum peppered with glitches which suggest the calm is a façade, a veil under which reside wrung hands and sharp edges. “Can I feel you?” Scott inquires over and over, one of many pleas for connection on the album, leaving the listener to wonder if he’s speaking to an individual or humankind as a whole. Or perhaps it’s just to himself in the mirror. Again the track unravels, the introduction of more prominent synths morphing in the final minutes into another hostile environment, a tumultuous sea or some geomagnetic storm that swallows Scott and drags him further from whatever he is trying to find.

Aero Flynn is at once urgent and suspended, trapped between fight and flight in anxiety’s masterful double bind. “I’m so afraid of everybody else” he sings on ‘Tree’, a stuttering electro-pop song, while even ‘Floating’, a soaring track that’s all blue skies and wide open vistas, is permeated with a sense of dislocation, as if the freedom is not his to own. ‘Maker’ sounds like a Broken Social Scene track where lonely sadness is presented as matter-of-fact, at least until the end where Scott utters a single word (a word I can’t quite make out – Home? Whole?) in a way which sounds like the genuine emotion breaking through, a yelp of helplessness or cry for mercy held back or choked out after the first syllable.

‘Brand New’ feels like a crescendo of sorts, a move away from the futuristic electronics that bring to mind space’s dark void in favour of something more organic, a swelling Precambrian atmosphere where conditions are harsh and life is scarce but maybe not for long. Closer ‘Moonbeams’, a piano led track with elements of The National’s slower work, provides no such epiphany. Slow and nervous and sorrowful, the last track again casts Scott as the outlying astronaut looking back at Earth, the final waves of instrumentation mimicking the beautiful, heart-breaking joy of realising you are but the tiniest of specks subject to the largest of forces beyond your control.

This is not an album in which the emotional arc is self-contained and easily mappable. Instead the record feels like a part of a wider narrative, Scott’s story, the illness and suffering and terror that Porterfield alludes to in his piece. The redemption does not begin with an epiphany on track seven and end with clear-eyed certainty. The redemption is the very fact that Scott is creating words and sounds, that he is letting others know where he is and how he is and why he is. The album is the flare of hope hanging in the night sky, burning bright and incandescent.

Aero Flynn is out now on Ooh La La Records (and Dine Alone Records in Canada).

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The album opens with ‘Poor Man’s Son’ (which will probably be familiar if you’ve ever been lucky enough to see Noah Gundersen perform live), a sort of gospel folk song which begins in an a cappella style very reminiscent of age-old traditional folk music (more O’ Brother Where Art Thou? than Inside Llewyn Davies). It’s very simple, but also very effective, carried on the strength of the vocal harmonies and, just as importantly, the periods of silence in between. It becomes a little more rousing towards its close and sets up the rest of the album perfectly.

‘Boathouse’ is a classic folk-rock tune, chronicling the story of lost love in the Mississippi mud. The title track has a catchy chorus and represents perhaps Noah Gundersen’s most obvious chance at commercial success (or it would if he were concerned about any of that), while ‘Poison Vine’ is a different beast entirely, a hushed and intimate folk song, more akin to the work of someone like J. Tillman.

Gundersen has reportedly declined several offers from major labels, turning down presumably valuable contracts, preferring instead to remain the master of his own artistic output. This decision is summed up rather nicely in a repeated line in ‘Poor Man’s Son’, where he sings:

“I don’t need no gold or silver
I only need a few new things.
I will buy pearls for my lover
And a brand new set of guitar strings”

The album ends with ‘Time Moves Quickly’, a mournful piece of piano music written and played by Abby (and rather confusingly shares a name with her recent EP), supported by half whispered vocals from Noah. It’s a sombre end to the album, but one which certainly has beauty, a fitting end then.

You can buy Ledges now via Noah Gundersen’s website, and via Dine Alone Records.

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