“The cassettes have been emptied of their disgusting post-war shmaltz, and are now full to the brim with the best contemporary underground pop music attainable”

To whet your appetite, they have unveiled a track from 18 year-old one-man-band Zebrafi. ‘Bad Vibes’ takes after Pavement and Kurt Vile, the vocals flat and cool and the instrumentation prone to bursts of noise. Have a listen below:

You can pre-order Sentimental Journey from the Memorials of Distinction Bandcamp page.

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‘So Long’ is taken from Sister Lives, an EP released this summer on Furious Hooves. The song is a perfect example of the new, fleshed-out sound from Heavy Boots, helped by backing band Triathalon. Occupying a space between ambient folk, psychedelic rock and dream pop, ‘So Long’ is a melancholic late-summer jam for sunny days cut short by the encroaching winter. Coupled with the video, the song plays like hazy nostalgia dream, stitched together from threads of loss and joy and sorrow and bound by the overwhelming sensation of time passing. Indeed, the feeling is exacerbated as the track gains momentum through its runtime, the instruments growing more frantic and the memories blurring together, all the while haunted by a background whistle, like some eternal wind or the draught of passing ghosts.

You can buy Sister Lives now via all the usual digital places (iTunes, Amazon etc.) and also good old Bandcamp, including some rather lovely cassettes. 

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wrote about her album  back in May

“The track[s] gives the image of a distant lover missing her companion, staring at a sky full of shimmering stars and streaks and cosmic dust, impossibly the very same sky as the one above the person she is missing.”

We were lucky enough to ask Heeyoon a few questions about the working with It Takes Time for the reissue and Boosegumps as a whole.

Jon: Hi Heeyoon, thanks for talking to us. How is life in New Jersey at this time of year?

Heeyoon: Hi, Wake the Deaf! Life in New Jersey at this time of year is pretty overwhelming! Well, it’s always overwhelming and fast-paced since I live outside of New York City, but it’s also quite beautiful when you take a break from everything and watch the leaves start to change colors.

First off, I have to ask – what’s the story behind the name? I’ll admit to wanting it to be an R.L. Stine/Fox Kids reference, although Urban Dictionary suggests ‘boosegumps’ has its own meaning.

It IS an R.L Stine reference. I originally gave myself this moniker because at the time, I was making haunted house soundtracks for fun. I wanted a name that was spooky yet kind of silly. The name Boosegumps just stuck, even after I stopped making Halloween music, mostly because I’m really bad at naming things.

How’s it feel to be releasing on cassette with the guys at It Takes Time Records? And do you want to say anything about the collection of B-sides that are going to be included?

It feels really good to be working with It Takes Time Records! I feel really comfortable with working with Jordan. He’s been really supportive through the whole process.

I decided to include the B-Sides after Jordan asked me if I had any unreleased songs I’d like to include on the tape. Well, after the release of “:)” I had recorded some fun experimental stuff that I had hidden away or had uploaded to SoundCloud. I thought it would be really nice to put it on the other side of “:)” I just want people to get sad with me on Side A but then groove with me when they flip the tape.Your music falls into a category (“bedroom pop”) that is pretty prolific at the moment. Do you feel an affinity with other bedroom recording artists? Or is it frustrating to be put in a box? Do you feel it’s even a genre at all, or rather just young people sharing their homemade work a little wider than previously possible?

I’m not sure if I’d call “bedroom pop” a genre because there’s many different genres within the category, but I consider it a broad tag used to categorize some homemade recordings. Personally, I feel comfortable being categorized as “bedroom pop” and playing music with other bedroom recording artists. I definitely feel less pressure as a home-recording artist. It’s just nicer and easier to record whatever I want, however I want and to release it whenever I want, all without me having to leave my warm bed.

As a kind of follow on to that question – what would you list as your biggest influences? Do think you are inspired by any musicians/writers/artists in particular? Or do you draw upon personal experiences more?

Musically, I’m really influenced by different artists at different points of my life. Currently, I’m heavily into Haruomi Hosono and Yellow Magic Orchestra, who are Japanese electronic, synth-pop artists. I’m also really influenced by R&B, even though you might not hear it in my songs. Aside from music, I tend to find inspiration from my friends, my dreams and personal experiences. Also, ever since I got a live band together, I’ve really inspired by the people I make music with. My live band, which is Neil Torman, Andrew Gerber and Adam Kenter, are really talented musicians and I haven’t told them yet, but they inspire me to become a better musician.

Your songs deal with very personal issues, detailing the struggles and anxieties many young people will recognise. Would you say you record the songs as a way to help yourself, or do you have other people in mind when writing? How do you feel about making other people’s lives that little bit easier/better with your music?

I’m not very good at telling people how I feel, so I feel the need to express my feelings through music. Writing music for me is like writing in my diary. It’s a way for me to write down my thoughts and reflect on my experiences. I mostly write songs as a way to help myself but it feels good to know that my songs are helping others as well. I feel less lonely knowing that others can relate.

Finally, could you name 4-5 acts you think we should know about at the moment? They can be old or new, obscure or huge, whatever you find yourself listening to.

Haruomi Hosono

Homeshake

Brittle Brian

Good Morning

Old Maybe

You can pre-order on tape right now from the It Takes Time Records Bandcamp page ready for its release on October 31st. 

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“The good news is that this effect works two ways, and what acts as therapy for Won as a writer/musician has the same effect on us as the listener. It’s one of my favourite things about this kind of music, the way that an entirely personal and cathartic process is released into the big wide world to help others too”

If this sounds good to you then we have good news. Heeyoon Won has teamed up with the good folks as It Takes Time Records to put out a special edition of  on cassette, featuring the eight original EP tracks as well as seven so-far unreleased songs tacked on the end. The first single ‘Meditation’ was released a while back, the track seeing Won’s refrain “When will I see you again?” submerged beneath sparkling synths. The track gives the image of a distant lover missing her companion, staring at a sky full of shimmering stars and streaks and cosmic dust, impossibly the very same sky as the one above the person she is missing.

The second single, unveiled today, is ‘Stole Ur Bike’, a short song clocking in at just over one and a half minutes. While the track consists of little more than a couple of verses about taking someone’s bike (or dreaming of it), it manages to exist as a larger entity, a sincere love story unfolding between the lines, one which has a long beginning and most likely a longer end, somewhere off in the distant future.

“I had a dream I stole your bike,
I had a dream you took it for a ride.
It was new, it was blue,
it was tall, as tall as you.

I had a dream I stole your bike
I had a dream you took it for a ride
I took it when you weren’t looking
You were looking at the train tracks

I had a dream I stole your bike
I had a dream I took it for a ride”

You can pre-order the new edition of now from It Takes Time Records, including on “crazy awesome tape… with crazy awesome thank you note”, which sounds crazy awesome to us.

–

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Okay, here’s a second chance. Fox Food Records is preparing to release the début album from Sweden’s Fanpage (the solo project of Elsa Kristina Sundin), whose first EP Trip was very much up our alley. In fact we described it as:

[A combination of] DIY bedroom poppers’ lyrical style with a punky delivery and shoegazy soundscapes… the whole thing a few clicks too slow… an atmospheric release that is at once both sad and slightly creepy, with the angsty croon and eerie languidity of the Julee Cruise stuff on Twin Peaks

LYA consists of twelve songs which the press releases describes as “small pieces of life, floating in a river. Absorbing mud, iron, colour” which are “finally pulled together, processed and formed into being”. So far only two of these songs are available, but this coalescence is abundantly clear. First up is ‘Rain Days For Bad Songs’, an off-kilter electro pop song just managing to keep it’s head above a swirling noise, like a radio hit from your favourite recurring dream.

“Oh I got a splinter in my heart
I’ve got something to keep me occupied”

The second track, ‘Y U’, is similar in its combination of pop and noise but ups the ante in terms of weirdness, with some unnerving backing vocals/moans which play like the shrieks of an wounded demon or troubled mind. The result is something both unpleasant and alluring, like a dark secret you know you should avoid but can’t help but seek. Think the strangest parts of the new Oh, Rose record if the garage rock was switched out for atmospheric dream pop.

If that isn’t quite exciting enough, the album will be released on some rather special tapes. As the cryptic description reads:

Designed and created by Swedish artist Alexander Wirren the tapes and the accompanying artwork will be processed by nature, each one with it’s own form and tale of life to tell.

It looks like Fox Food Records are taking the tape game up a notch. Pre-order one now via Bandcamp ahead of release on the 1st October.

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“Each [artist] present[s] a side of music that doesn’t sound written or recorded as much as spilled out and gathered back up quickly, out of necessity and through broken and hurried means. Busy and tired but still distracted, holding on to memories like crumpled drawings pulled from the trash”

If that doesn’t make you want to listen then I’m afraid you’ve wandered into the wrong corner of the internet.

Ylayali gets side A and starts as he means to go on with ‘Clicking Clanking’, counting himself in with some DIY knocks before presenting a lovely little lo-fi acoustic track, complete with reassuringly miserable lyrics such as, “Today I left my room twice, recorded a song I don’t really like”. ‘Blab’ is mainly all lo-fi guitar again, joined by some minimal percussion. It feels patient and intimate, enclosed in the same sense of everyday melancholy that makes Talons’ so great, that feeling of long afternoons in gloomy rooms, when the rest of the human population seem faraway and indistinct, like figures from barely remembered dreams.

“I really miss that shirt and that watch that I lost
and also spending every weekend together
and every summer
going further away from home”

‘Pinkies’ is a short song which follows a similar thread, full of vague lines which you feel mean the world to the characters involved. “There if you need me, not if you don’t”, he sings. “Walk to the store with you for us both. I want you to know that our pinkies broke”. ‘Crud’ is shorter still, clocking in under a minute yet carrying the same emotional heft (“Something good came out of both of us instead I saw some little bit of crud, a little thing about to fall off of the bigger better thing”), while ‘Cool Burnout’ starts with a jittery looped drum sample before vocals enter and the percussion settles into a simple beat, like the sound of someone striking a hollow bamboo shoot over and over. “After dinner the day feels over” Lyons sings, ensuring that the air of despondency lasts until the very end. The track finishes side A with some heavier reverb-laden guitars, which themselves cut very abruptly, paving the way for the next act.

‘April Journal Excerpts’, the first offering on Lung Cycles’s side B, is a sonic collage of slightly distorted audio clips and ambient recordings, things like people chattering and birdsong, what could easily quite literally be diary entries of the aural variety. After a while some gentle guitar work enters too, ticking over like time on fast-forward. ‘Pull Me Apart’ is a very pretty song with swirling tumbling guitar and hushed vocals, while the closer, ‘Hottest Day of the Year So Far (11pm version)’, is a measured guitar track with a background hum of tape hiss that sounds like running water or falling rain in some analogue dreamscape.

You can get the album on cool limited release cassette (see below), or as a digital download, via the Lily Tapes & Discs Bandcamp page.

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“The goal of my site is to feature what i think of as “folk music”, which is music made by people who are trying to get by leading lives in our modern world who love to express themselves through music”

That sentiment resonates with us here at WTD, and it should with you too. Folk songs don’t require banjos and fiddles, it’s something a little deeper than that. You’d be a fool not to follow that link above and spend all evening trawling through the (sometimes rough) gems that get posted on a regular basis.

But! This post isn’t all about singing the praises of The Modern Folk Music of America. What I really want to tell you about is that J. Moss, the guy who runs the site and Practice Records, also makes music of his own – under the moniker The Modern Folk. The last six months has seen three releases from The Modern Folk, each of which represents a slightly different approach to making DIY music. Surround Me is an album of gutsy, lo-fi garage rock, recorded in warehouse spaces with a drummer and everything turned up to eleven, whereas Leather Jacket is much more reserved, recorded at home with the aid of an “ancient” drum machine. The album has this great swaggering, half-soaked coolness about it, all mumbling vocals and lazy guitars – basically exactly how a record called Leather Jacket should sound. The final release is American Sewer, which was reportedly recorded on a cellphone under a bridge in Portland in the space of just two hours. It kinda sounds like it too, all blown-out rumbling blues rock guitars and yelpy vocals, the sort of thing they play in bars frequented by tough guys (I’d imagine).

This is bona fide DIY music. Don’t let the lo-fi tag deceive you, a lot of hard work has gone into these recordings, right down to the artwork, which Moss produced himself. Check out a few of my current favourite tracks below:

You can get each of the releases on a pay-what-you-want basis via The Modern Folk’s Bandcamp page. There are also plans for physical releases so keep your eyes peeled and ears to the ground!

The post The Modern Folk appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Brooklyn’s Radical Dads are about to release Universal Coolers, their third album and the follow up to last year’s Cassette Brain EP. The band, comprised of ex-Clap Your Hands Say Yeah drummer Robbie Guertin, Chris Diken and guitarist/vocalist Lindsay Baker, draw inspiration from the guitar rock of heavyweights such as Pavement and Yo La Tengo, creating a hook-laden, melodic brand of twin guitar (zero bass) indie rock.

Opener ‘Absurd Tests’ sets the tone, a sub-two minute shot in the arm of carefree and ramshackle DIY rock. ‘Tomorrow’s Trash’ is all squealing guitars and Baker’s volatile delivery, while ‘Slammer’ is a blend of spiky rock and romantic dream pop, with some pretty odd (but funny) lyrics. “Snakes on the sidewalk / all over my block / I won’t go outside any more/ Good lord, they’re up to my front door”.

‘In the Water is a song about the repression of the masses, “And the negative creeps keep coming around / piling up as we’re shutting down / you can’t see it from the surface you can’t identify its purpose / its in the water”, but my current favourite track is ‘Don’t Go’, which has a really great, catchy chorus of, “Prepared pianos in our room / the kids come up to dance in the doom / new signs will soon appear in space / don’t worry dear, don’t go away”.

The title track features a simple shout-along chorus of “Universal Coolers!”, with ‘verses’ comprised of lots of squally noise and mumbled vocals. The yelled chorus trend continues on ‘Desperado Dude Lens’ (“Your name on a plaque at the world’s end / white hairs flying back in the wind / he’s going up the trail / he’s got that ex-explorer desperado dude lens”), before ‘Flight To NZ’ shakes things up with an almost spoken word account of the titular flight to New Zealand (“hey we were going away / headed for a new place / sitting on the tarmac / a couple, a couple of former sad sacks”), complete with roaring guitars and slamming drums.

The final two tracks are DJ Pancake, with its time-bomb percussion, and Cassette Brain (which you may recognise from the aforementioned EP), which is all low rumbling guitars and a pounding drum beat, and, at its core a love song. “We won’t get swept away / you will clear the toxic sludge from my head / we’ll go to the library and hammer away each day we’re not dead”. Basically, Universal Coolers is a really great indie rock record and if you find you can’t enjoy it then perhaps there is something wrong with you. I firmly believe that the “virtues” of innovation and trendsetting are majorly over-rated. If every band poured as much love, care and carefree energy into their records then the world would be a better place, both musically and otherwise.

You can order Universal Coolers now via Old Flame Records (who have also released albums by Shark?, Swimming and You Won’t), on either CD or limited edition blue or black vinyl.

P.S. Here’s a fun fact for you – The artwork was produced by Steve Keene, the prolific Greenpoint artist who designed some pretty famous album covers such as Pavement’s Wowee Zowee.

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The album opens with Tomorrow’s Tulips, who provide a slice of effortless Californian uber-cool, a catchy rock song with a loveable slacker vibe and lines like “check me out as I walk down the street / Life’s a drag so I drag my feet / I just stay here, I just drink beer / And check me out the door”. The second track, from Ohio’s Eternally Dizzy, sets a trend of frantic indie rock instrumentation paired with (semi) nonchalant vocals, before Ringo Deathstarr (who’s ‘Big Bopper’ sounds like shoegaze fed through a crunchy alt-rock filter), Dan the Human (who covers sad lyrcis with a veneer of bright and breezy indie rock) and Harley Alexander (no not Rizzle Kicks – who apparently shares the name – but a much cooler guy from Canada who has this smooth soulful swagger and sounds like he keeps his shades on when serenading his audience inside dark and smokey clubs) take to the stage.

Oh there’s also oddball pop from Blessin’, yelpy goodtime rock n’ roll from Joe Bordenaro and a DIY (unrequited) love song from Boy Spit. There’s Kachi Ebiringah with his Eddie Argos-esque (Argosian?) sing-shout, Jake Rollins’ erratic guitar and the ominous deadbeat disinterest of Furnsss. There’s a windows-down summer gem from Dude York, sundrenched surf-rock from Hot Flash Heat Wave, hilarious energy-drink-fuelled teenage rebellion from White Fang and, finally, a restrained, wistful bedroom pop strum-along with DRGN King.

Phew. Deep breaths, that’s it! I’m sure you get the idea. This is compilation jam-packed with goodness (as long as you class DIY indie rock music as goodness – which you should). It’s a testament to the hordes of talented people who are making music any way they can, a celebration of those writing and singing and smashing drums because they feel like it and it’s fun and perhaps makes them and their listeners just that little bit happier. All-American Edition is what music is all about.

You can get it right on a nice-looking casette via the 80N7 bandcamp page.

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Tracklisting:
1. Le Sigh – Johnny Foreigner
2. What You Need – Jacques Greene
3. Opinion Piece – Jon Hynes
4. Is What It Is – She Keeps Bees
5. Dead Lamb – King of Cats
6. Full of Minnows – Happyness (from 80n7)
7. Gypsy Dead Girl – Field Medic
8. Do Girls – Theophilus London
9. Fireworks (Reprise) – Radiator Hospital
10. Garden – Hiatus
11. All the Experts Say – Joyride!
12. 24 – Shipwrecks
13. The Way He Looks at Me – Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross
14. G – Young Jesus
15. Spring Sheet – Fairweather Currents
16. 925 – Gorgeous Bully (from 80n7)
17. On the Rocks – The Rural Alberta Advantage
18. Never Catch Me – Flying Lotus ft. Kendrick Lamar
19. Seraphine – Peirson
20. Colorado – Noah Young

September Mix from Wake The Deaf on 8tracks Radio.

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