Michael Fox has been working in music in various guises over the past decade, and though Take Care, Stay Warm might be the first release under the Big Bluestem moniker, its assured quality carries all of this experience with it. Take the title track, a stripped-back folk song built around nothing but Fox’s vocals and careful acoustic guitar. Something which feels like the product of a byegone age, folk in its traditional sense, where a person sits down and records the feelings and stories of a life without ostentation. The result is earnest, tender, hushed though not without a certain intensity of feeling. A mood which seems to gather energy from the arrangement’s negative space. As though emotions voiced to the stillness of an empty room carry their own peculiar weight.

So I won’t pull you off the floor, brush the dust off of your coat
get back what’s been missing, or find the perfect quote
that could sum up all the feelings that are lodged inside our throats
but hey: Take Care, Stay Warm

Blue Bayou – New Wind, New Rain

Blue Bayou, who describe themselves as “a new wave, chamber pop band with horns and strings,” have just released their new EP, The Carousel, a five-song release which sees the Oxford-born, London-based project bring the energy of their live sound to tape. Think of a centre of a Venn diagram between the avant-folk of Black Country, New Road, the country rock twang of Brown Horse and the emotional clarity of Big Thief. Single ‘New Wind, New Rain’ is the perfect place to start. A song which feels far larger than its relatively convention three-and-a-half-minute runtime, heralded by mournful horns and driven forward by a bright and peppy percussion, all while the vocals swell together in heart and curiosity.

Charlie Vaughan – Don’t Wanna Drive

Fresh off touring with the likes of The Backseat Lovers and Hamilton Leithauser in 2025, London’s Charlie Vaughan is back with brand new single ‘Don’t Wanna Drive’ to further cement his place among the city’s most eclectic songwriters. The embodiment of his style, the track melds undeniable richness with the magic of happenstance, showing that careful craft and happy accident can exist side by side. “I wanted to write something dreamy and simple—no crazy structures” Vaughan explains of the track. “When we started to play the song on the road it changed a lot, we started playing it fast and with really driving drums. The bit at the end came from a beautiful fluke at a rehearsal and me and the band knew this was the perfect end.” Watch the video directed by La De La Studios below:

‘Don’t Wanna Drive is out now and available from the usual places.

The Dead Century – Hey Chicago

“Minneapolis has a rich heritage in energetic indie rock, so its great to see bands like The Dead Century carrying the flame onwards,” we wrote back in March, the band’s single ‘Been Better wearing its influences proudly, “taking the raucousness of The Replacements and some of The Hold Steady‘s buoyant positivity and applying them to the less than positive present.” Now the band have shared next single ‘Hey Chicago’ and the result is no less momentous or affirming. The track picks its way through the difficult terrain between staying put and moving on, but allows a sheer sense of energy to burn away any hesitation. The song “explores the hope and uncertainty that come from the end of a relationship,” say the band, “the delicate work of discerning what to carry with you and what to leave behind.”

Deer Tick – Everything Born

Folk rock stalwarts Deer Tick are returning with brand new full-length Coin-O-Matic this summer, an album which promises to delve into their homestate of Rhode Island and all of its peculiar histories (not least the collison betweenthe  ordinary working class American Dream and its shadow twin within the world of the mafia and organised crime). With the album set for release in June via ATO Records, the band have shared new single ‘Everything Born’ to give a flavour of this style, pitching the audience straight into the milieu of Providence and the personal dramas therein. “‘Everything Born’ was written quickly about the tenuousness of life and the precious time we have to spend with the people that come into our lives,” explains vocalist and guitarist Ian O’Neil “It’s about family, friends, neighbors, strangers and how these thoughts burrow a little deeper the older we get. I was thinking about my son and the people of Providence, RI while writing it.” Watch the video below, recorded at the Big Nice Studio and directed by Bradford Krieger and Rich Ferri:

Coin-O-Matic will be released on the 5th June via ATO and you can pre-order it now.

Hockitay – buttons

Guatemalan-born, Montreal-based artist Hockitay made a splash earlier in the year with single ‘over/over’, a song “where loneliness and restlessness overlap,” as we wrote. “That curiously digital phenomenon where even an empty room can now be overwhelming.” Follow-up single ‘buttons’ continues this exploration of the technological encroachment on our lives, asking how we might hope to maintain a sense of authentic self in a world automated by things like AI. The video, directed by Buvard and David S. Blouin, employs a full-spectrum modified camera (i.e. one which captures UV, visible and IR light simultaneously) to add a further haunting atmosphere to the track, portraying the digital experience in all of its eerie surreality.

‘buttons’ is out now via Future Gods and available from Bandcamp.

Jordan Whitlock & Memory Spells – You Tell Me / A Flower Blooming For No One

“This project began as an exchange of demos and became a deeply personal dialogue,” explained Jordan Whitlock of the collaboration with Matt Bauer’s Memory Spells, with the duo having now released their debut full-length This Is What It Feels Like. “Remarkably, Bauer and Whitlock only met in person when the record was already half completed, though far from hampering the intimacy and emotional connection of the music, this distance ultimately helped deepen it,” we wrote in a preview of the record, “the pair dialling into the themes of isolation, bonding and longing.” What the duo call “a quiet meditation on beauty without witness,” final single ‘A Flower Blooming For No One’ heralds the release of the album, offering a glimpse at the wonder which exists every day in the secrecy of isolation.

A hummingbird
Its ruby throat
Catching the light
And letting it go
A shadow cast
A cold white sun
A flower blooming for no one

King Ropes – Baby Bird

“If Dave Hollier and co. are taking on The Spirit of The West, you’d best expect a collection of songs attuned to the contradictions of the experience on the ground, where well-worn myths and old stereotypes rub up against everyday hardships and the outright oddness of twenty-first century living.” So we wrote of King Ropes‘ most recent album Idaho back in 2024, praising how the Bozeman, Montana outfit managed to evoke the landscape of the American West in all of its beauty and harshness. Now King Ropes are back with brand new single ‘Baby Bird’, and while the track might appear altogether more tender on the surface, there’s still room for a brooding dimension to the sound. A reimagining of a classic sixties/seventies love song that swaps out some of the honeyed glow of the period for a stranger, ambiguous contemporary folk style.

It may sound absurd
I’m a man she’s a bird
These things take time to understand

‘Baby Bird’ is out now and available from the usual places.

Luke Francis – Anywhere

Though recorded in LA this past winter with Derek Ted, Luke Francis‘s new single ‘Anywhere’ has roots in a period a year prior, with the Seattle-based songwriter noting a variety of key locations and experiences. “The Bamboo Village parking lot on a snowy Seattle night,” he lists, “the Historic Grand Canyon Hotel, and the front steps of my childhood home in California while a plumber rescued me from what had occurred inside the house.” As you might expect from such a specific set of influences, the resulting track is highly personal, Francis taking the moods and imagery of his own memories and applying a coat of classic country wistfulness to create a modern love song that nevertheless harks back to an old romantic style. “Honey ride with me tonight
I’ve got a bottle of wine and the moonlight on my mind,” as he sings in the opening lines. “We could left and right, through the night
don’t you wanna climb in and let the road unwind?”

‘Anywhere’ is out now and available from the usual places.

Paycheque – Generic Actress

Consisting of Alison Goldfarb and Jackson MacIntosh (TOPS, Drugdealer), Paycheque represent something of a collision between the retro and the contemporary. Though practising a decidedly eighties-flavoured style of indie pop, the duo aim for more than pure nostalgia, repurposing the sound to conjure the modern Los Angeles in all of its glitz, violence and precarity. Their self-titled debut full-length, coming this summer via Mansions and Millions, draws upon the sounds of the Reagan-Thatcher era to explore the present calamities seeded in that period, be they human-induced natural disasters, roving gangs of militarised immigration officers or the general superficiality of the great quest for stardom. Opener ‘Generic Actress’ offers a first glimpse. “In LA, when you go out, you end up spending a lot of time standing outside of whatever event or party you’ve decided to attend,” the band explain of the single. “You’re on the sidewalk, you’re in a strip mall parking lot, you’re on a patio. You smoke, you bump into friends, and you eventually realize you missed half the set you came to see, you never actually made it inside the gallery, the party is winding down. This song is an ode to never quite making it inside.”

Watch the video by Paycheque with additional footage shot by Jessica Dean Harrison below:

Paycheque will be released on the 12th June via Mansions and Millions and you can pre-order it now from Bandcamp.

Snake Orange Cake – Lucid

Åland-born, Berlin-based artist Julia Carlsson has released a number of singles under the moniker Snake Orange Cake in recent times, most recently ‘Vision’ back in January. A self-described “hypnotic ritual in sound” which “functions something like an incantation or mantra,” we wrote in a preview, “the vocals repeating a series of mystical images as though hoping to conjure some mystical effect. The pulsing beat only furthers the mesmeric vibe, leading the listener into a space somehow adjacent from every day reality.” Now Carlsson has unveiled Lucid, the project’s debut EP which collects these songs alongside the new title track, and the fresh offering just so happens to serve as the ideal calling card for the project. With an ambiguous tone that embraces playfulness, sensuality and a certain mystical charm, ‘Lucid’ capture the balance between intimacy and openness that marks the Snake Orange Cake sound, as well as the sense of otherworldly potential which emerges from its dreamlike flow.

Vesuvian – Fortunate Death

Vesuvian is a Philly-based outfit consisting of Garret Bollin (guitar, vocals), Joey DeGrado (vocals, guitar), Bill Magerr (bass) and Gavin Caffrey Perez-Canto (drums and percussion). Back in 2023 they released More Treble, a punk rock record concerned with everything from horror movies and actresses to the ancient Mediterranean, and now they’re back with a brand new self-titled album which looks push the sound even further. Take latest single ‘Fortunate Death’, which is certainly not your usual scrappy punk number, drawing upon the work of Julio Cortázar and accounts of Mesoamerican history to create something cathartic and boisterous. “Years ago, I read that Aztec sacrifices were honored to die that way,” De Grado explains. “Does this have historic validity? Who knows! But the idea stayed with me, waiting to come out in a song. I took this idea of being overjoyed at death and combined it with some of the images from ‘The Night, Face Up’.”

Waxahatchee – Where’s Your Love Now? (This Is Lorelei cover)

This Is Lorelei is about to release the super deluxe edition of their celebrated 2024 album Box for Buddy, Box for Star via Double Double Whammy, with the ten original album tracks joined by ten covers from an impressive range of artists. Momma, SASAMI, Snail Mail, Tim Heidecker and MJ Lenderman are just some of the acts offering versions of the songs, and Waxahatchee‘s take on ‘Where’s Your Love Now?’ is the latest to be revealed. “I think Nate is one of the best songwriters of this moment, making music that feels current and timeless and also somehow ahead of a curve,” Katie Crutchfield told Stereogum. “When I heard ‘Where’s Your Love Now?’ I thought it was one of the best songs I’ve ever heard.”

Box for Buddy, Box for Star (Super Deluxe) is out on the 17th April via Double Double Whammy and you can pre-order it now.

The post Weekly Listening: April 2026 #2 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Ava Mirzadegan – Dark Dark Blue

Team Love Records [BUY]

Dark Dark Blue, the title of Ava Mirzadegan’s latest full-length, might refer to a mood, a time of day, the quality of light in a room. The album was written in Mirzadegan’s childhood bedroom in the wake of a break-up, a collection of finger-picked folk songs which paints a series of memories, longings and confessions in the palette of the titular hue. But though the present loss hangs heavy, Mirzadegan also digs towards a deeper seam of sadness. One ingrained at her centre, accumulated not only across one life but an entire family history. Here, old wounds are not so much sources of pain as shafts leading towards something older and more fundamental, and Ava Mirzadegan follows these passageways as deep as they might allow her in the hope that allowing light into these dark spaces is to begin to process and heal.

Dean Johnson – Nothing For Me Please

Mama Bird Recording Co. [BUY]

The Seattle-based singer-songwriter Dean Johnson (who is also a member of the band Sons of Rainier) has built a devoted following across the Pacific Northwest with his live shows, garnering almost mythical status with his anachronistic folk songs full of lonesome melodies and gruff heartbreak. Not wishing to change a winning formula, Johnson’s debut solo record Nothing For Me Please is almost completely devoid of bells and whistles, to the point where it often feels like he is singing from a chair in the corner or crooning from a sticky dive bar stage. He sings of pining for a lost love (‘Old TV’, ‘Shouldn’t Say Mine’) and false-smiling through a breakup (‘Acting School’), and the age-old existential woes of any cowboy worth his salt. Songs relatively simplistic in their construction and all the better for it, a reminder that less is oftentimes more. The album is relatively brief, clocking in at less than thirty minutes, though lingers in the mind like the sweet tones of a half-remembered dream.

Divide and Dissolve – Systemic

Invada Records [BUY]

“To make music that honours their ancestors and Indigenous land, to oppose white supremacy, and to work towards a future of Black and Indigenous liberation.” That’s how the liner notes of Divide and Dissolve‘s Systemic describes the intention at the heart of the duo’s crushing songs. The album felt like a fitting soundtrack to 2023, yet another year where the pervasive systems of violence and control have been all too visible, and those familiar with previous LP Gas Lit will recognise the dark, furious density Takiaya Reed and Sylvie Nehill manage to conjure. But far from being a mere sonic steamroller happy to only grind its audience into the ground, Systemic pairs its apocalyptic weight with something more fragile and light. Sections almost orchestral in their detail which move through the ruins of the doomworld in something like defiance. The dominant systems might seem as monolithic as they are malevolent, but there are other systems, other possibilities, and they are more persistent than you might think. As Minori Sanchiz-Fung reads on ‘Kingdom of Fear’:

If I am denied the kindness needed to transform sorrow
If I am denied the simple gentleness of existing
Then I will leave my gifts, like lichen, over the oak branches
Trusting they’ll be safe until you find them

Erik Kramer – Where the fish are as fine as the color of colors

Self-released [BUY]

When people talk about the ‘real world’, they’re not really talking about the real world. Words are not up to such an endeavour. But that’s where art comes in. Described as “music for Blue Sky (‘where the eagle that flies out of sight flies’),” this self-released cassette from Erik Kramer feels like a reminder of this fact, an exercise evoking in times, places and feelings that are incommunicable with mere words. Crafted from a hodgepodge of instruments and samples—from guitar, banjo and pump organ to bells and Casio keyboards, a tin whistle, field recordings, loon calls, snippets of poetry and the ambient sounds of “cars & trucks” and “Madison area teenagers”—the tape offers a series vignettes, small, snatched moments of beauty and nostalgia and wistfulness. Take the mantra-like repetition of ‘Hermit Guardian Angel’ or Eva Chudnow’s still and sweet rendition of the titular traditional folk song on ‘Just as the tide was flowing’, the gloomy slo-mo rock song of ‘Daylight Saving’ or the title track which swells and shivers with an inextricable mixture of sorrow and joy. In a world that seems to grow more complex and cruel with each rotation, it’s no small wonder to find escape routes, art that enables not selfish head-in-the-sand ignorance but a return to what really matters, what really is.

Florry – The Holey Bible

Dear Life Records [BUY]

The Holey Bible feels like a seminal moment in Florry’s history. The Philly band, led by Francie Medosch, have dabbled with country sensibilities ever since their inception, but this record is the moment they fully embrace the genre. It’s chock full of fiddle and mandolin, harmonica and pedal steel, meandering melodies and a heart-on-sleeve lyrical style that seems determined to look on the bright side. This positivity permeates the record, sidestepping the lonesome blues so common in the genre in favour of something genuinely joyful, though with a messy, ramshackle spirit that wards off any threat of things getting saccharine. Through woozy waltzes, fuzzy Country-fried rockers and no small amount of narrative attention, Florry rise from an uncertain, bleak world like a Roman candle, as though the only way to live nowadays is to meet despair with an equal and opposite force.

Gia Margaret – Romantic Piano

Jagjaguwar [BUY]

Writing in one of his journals, the Trappist monk Thomas Merton described the necessity of living in solitude in the woods. “The silence of the forest is my bride and the sweet dark warmth of the whole world is my love,” he wrote. “Out of the heart of that dark warmth comes the secret that is heard only in silence, but it is the root of all the secrets that are whispered by all the lovers in their beds all over the world.” It is this secret, not the lovers, with which Gia Margaret’s Romantic Piano is concerned. A collection of spare compositions whose title gestures not to rose petals and candlelit dinners but the melancholic wonder of the late eighteenth century. Because while Margaret’s first instrumental release Mia Gargaret was wrapped in insular detachment, these brief, meditative songs open the curtains if not entirely stepping outside. A picture of solitude not as some lonely retreat but rather the path towards recognising the wider connection of things. That sweet dark warmth of the whole world.

Kara Jackson – Why Does The Earth Give Us People To Love?

September [BUY]

“The title of my album, the question, is driven by grief,” explains Kara Jackson of debut album Why Does The Earth Give Us People To Love? “Why do we show up on this world alongside one another? To love and to mourn? To curse each other out? To die working every day?” Jackson works through this question in what feels like real time, swapping any hope of a definitive answer for the gradual process of learning. Songs at once intimate and grand, and as fond of playful humour as they are heart-on-the-sleeve sincerity. But the biggest irony of the album is that of its intention. Because for all of its immediacy and uncertainty, Jackson’s refusal to offer any simple, unifying answer comes to represent a solution in its own right. Why does the earth give us people to love? The answer might not reveal itself directly, but would songs like this exist if it did?

L’Rain – I Killed Your Dog

Mexican Summer [BUY]

The music of Taja Cheek’s L’Rain has never been content in a single box. Straddling pop, jazz, R&B and experimental styles, the songwriter and multi-instrumentalist has made name in refusing easy categorisation. This elusive fluidity extends through every aspect of latest album, I Killed Your Dog. A love record, a break-up record, an anti-break-up record. A record which reaches for commercial pop without ceding an inch of its avant garde ambition. “I’m envisioning a world of contradictions, as always,” Cheek describes. “Sensual, maybe even sexy, but terrifying, and strange.” Hence we get an intricate, tangled picture of what it means to love and hurt the people we care about, where shame need not preclude cruelty and love comes complete with both hope and despair. The style is encapsulated by the question Cheek poses in the liner notes: “Is the title an act of maliciousness and revenge or an expression of remorse and regret?” The answer, as always with L’Rain, isn’t as simple as one or the other. It’s everything, simultaneously.

Lael Neale – Star Eaters Delight

Sub Pop [BUY]

Lael Neale’s music feels unmoored from time. Written and recorded at her family home in rural Virginia with help from collaborator Guy Blakeslee and without the involvement of a single screen, Star Eaters Delight draws on multiple lineages of American alternative music, from the lo-fi pop of Suicide and The Velvet Underground to folk singers like Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell. All in an attempt to reach out into the quiet of remote landscapes and fill them with sound and life. In contrast to Neale’s previous album Acquainted With Night, which turned inward to find peace away from the bustle of urban LA, the record explores the false divide between humans and the rest of nature (“I pledge allegiance to tree and meadow / I have no need to conquer or keep them” as Neale sings on opener ‘I Am the River’) and the value of tranquillity away from the information overload of modern life. There are many planes and dimensions, the songs at times crystalline and brittle, others amorphous and unbreakable as water, though it is this tranquillity that ultimately stands out. Minimalism not as a pretentious aesthetic choice or act of puritan self-denial, but, in true transcendentalist style, as an expression of freedom. As Neale puts it when explaining her outlook, she identifies as a minimalist “not because I don’t like things, but because I value freedom more.”

Lilts – Waiting Around

Better Company Records [BUY]

Wild Pink has been a VSF favourite for a number of years now, and we count Laura Wolf‘s Shelf Life among our favourite releases of 2023, so it is no surprise Lilts won our hearts too. Not that the collaboration between Wolf and Wild Pink’s John Ross is overtly indebted to the previous work of its duo. Rather, the pair allow their respective talents to compliment one another, setting their compass to Nineties shoegaze but allowing for whatever detours might occur along the way. Elements of dream pop and post-rock filter in, and there’s none of the derivative flatness of the revivalist movement. Indeed, there’s a freedom to ‘Dodge Street’ and the title track which feels wholly new. A product of the relationship between its creators, as though learning to trust another person allows an artist to escape the confines and expectations of the work they’ve done in the past.

Mark Jenkin – Enys Men OST

Invada Records [BUY]

Mark Jenkin’s 2019 film Bait took kitchen sink realism and bent it into something stranger, its use of a hand-cranked camera and style of dubbing distorting an otherwise familiar picture of tensions between rural traditions and the encroaching middle class. Again set in rural Cornwall, follow-up Enys Men leant more fully into this unsettling mood. Centring on a volunteer ecologist tasked with observing a rare flower on a remote island, the film presents time as both a line and a circle. The protagonist’s monotonous routine unfolds with striking similarity each day, even if the dates in her logbook progress, while strange visions appear across the island as though the thin present is merely draped over a many layered past. To say Enys Men sounded better than it looked is to pay it the highest compliment, with a soundtrack by Jenkin himself which embodies every inch of the film’s loneliness, stark beauty and hauntological mystery.

Meursault – S/T

Common Ground Records [BUY]

The self-titled record from Edinburgh‘s Meursault was initially designed as a concept album. The tale of two characters, including the titular Meursault, attempting to negotiate a post-apocalyptic world. A direct evolution, then, from the “urban horror vignettes” of 2019’s Crow Hill, as Neil Pennycook looked to lead the project in a more narrative-driven direction. But any short story worth its salt undergoes intense revision, and Meursault was pared down beyond its original idea. As though in delving further into the album’s themes, Pennycook felt able to remove the scaffold of the narrative and allow the songs to stand on their own. The character of Meursault remains, albeit under a different guise, and in offering a more autobiographical picture than anything Pennycook has shared to date, the songs come to form a wider meditation on what the ever-changing project means to him. “I am tired of this metaphor and I am bored of this poetry,” as he sings on the title track:

I am done with this ghost
and this ghost she is done with me
so I gave her a name and I set her to burn
and there in that moment this lesson I learned
you can kill them with kindness
just don’t kill them with love

and if you’ve nothing nice to say
try singing it to me

Natalia Beylis – Mermaids

Touch Sensitive Records [BUY]

Mermaids, the latest release from composer and sound artist Natalia Beylis, is in no small part indebted to a trip to a Leitrim recycling centre. It was there Beylis came across an unwanted CRB Elettronica Ancona Diamond 708 E Electric Keyboard, an instrument seemingly patient in its wait for a saviour. Beylis took it home, performed some surgery to remove the purple crayons rattling around inside, and took to playing. “When I found the cover picture of the three figures in a stack of old family photos,” Beylis says, “a confluence of the sounds and the image charged through me and [the album] began to flicker into being.” But as the record progresses, what might as first seem like serendipity deepens into something more profound. As though in committing to strange patterns of intuition and happenstance, Beylis is able to push deeper into nostalgia and unearth the lines of history and heritage within.

Northwoods Baseball Sleep Radio – Northwoods Sleep Baseball

Worried Songs [BUY]

The title character of Robert Coover’s 1968 novel The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. might be miserable in his work life, but at night he escapes reality into a fantasy of his own creation. A fully functioning baseball league he runs as a tabletop game, where every pitch, hit and injury are governed by the roll of a dice. The sport’s essence is captured in the pursuit, a collision of hard statistics and ever-unfolding narrative at a pace slow enough to fill an entire life. Northwoods Sleep Baseball Radio lives in the spirit of Coover’s imagination, albeit with a zany Pynchonian twist. A podcast fronted by elusive Chicago humourist ‘Mr King’ which offers full-length and entirely fictional baseball games featuring players like Clifton Santiago, Lefty Thorn, Blink Retterson and Randy Chang, all narrated by commentator Wally McCarthy. This album, released by Worried Songs, serves as the perfect first step into the comforting and hilarious world of Northwoods Sleep Baseball. Where sedate rhythms draw you in, but wry imagination keeps you listening.

ØXN – CYRM

Claddagh Records [BUY]

The majestic Lankum might have deservedly taken 2023 by storm, but Radie Peat’s other project ØXN also released a masterful album this year. More adventurous still than False Lankum, CYRM offers mix of traditional and original folk songs loaded with aching hearts and portentous weight, charging folk with electronic and cinematic sensibilities to blur the line between blessing and curse. Take ‘Love Henry’, a tale of seduction and violence which screws taut as it progresses, every bit as black and fated as the darkest fairy tale, or ‘Cruel Mother’, where a woman pressured into infanticide sees herself become a slow slide towards damnation. A dread-laden version of Scott Walker’s ‘Farmer in the City’ closes out the album, a thirteen-minute epic which creeps and creeps until it as all around you, then collapses into a chaos of noise.

Pearla – Oh Glistening Onion, The Nighttime Is Coming

Spacebomb Records [BUY]

“I’m not certain about much,” sings Pearla on ‘Ming the Clam’, “But I’m certain how we touch / Is compelled by some great force / Other than us.” The song encapsulates the spirit of Oh Glistening Onion, The Nighttime Is Coming, where playful whimsy and unfiltered introspection are kept in check by a certain self-awareness, though cannot help but tend towards the potential of some higher mystery. Many of the songs are concerned with finding comfort within a hostile world, and often play like questions being processed in real time, drawing on both real life experiences and wider sources. From the experience of having a credit card stolen at a flower shop to the story of Ming, the oldest individual animal known to science which died as scientists studied its longevity (“I study all the little signs / Under fluorеscent light… Reminder of the grand creation / How did she keep on fighting?”). It’s an album that marks Pearla as a project that works in awe of life’s mysteries, determined to see the beautiful and the surreal rise above the grind of the everyday.

Protomartyr – Formal Growth in the Desert

Domino [BUY]

“In case I don’t see you, well, for a little while, I just want to tell you, it’s been lovely. Every bit of it. The whole fifty years. I’d sooner have been your wife, Bark, than anyone else on earth.” So says Lucy “Ma” Cooper in the closing scene of Leo McCarey’s 1937 drama Make Way For Tomorrow, a film which feels relevant to Protomartyr’s fifth album, Formal Growth in the Desert, not least because it is referenced by the titles of opening pair of tracks. The songs were written in a period which saw lead Joe Casey lose his mother and be forced out of his childhood home, and while the records holds no small amount of grief and darkness, it also serves as an unguarded declaration of love. Which might sound strange for a band who have won deserved acclaim for their foreboding sound, their fury and doom, but Protomartyr have always been so much more than another snarling, depressed post-punk outfit in a crowded field. “Time’s your enemy / Every gift you see will be taken for sure,” Casey sings on ‘The Author’, the most direct tribute to his mother. “So I figure while you live / Kiss the ones that love you / For thе song you sing.” In case I don’t see you for a little while, I just want to tell you, it’s been lovely.

Sluice – Radial Gate

Ruination Record Co. [BUY]

The title of Radial Gate, Justin Morris’s second album under the moniker Sluice, follows the project name and doubles down on the imagery of water. Namely its control, the mechanisms and machinery developed in order to stop, raise and coax waterways in the manners most functional. Morris’s songs, cut from a nostalgic, patient style of folk and elevated by a rich palette of instrumentation, feel like miniature versions of such systems. Only here the flow is not a canal or estuary but the ever pulling course of time, complete with its attached stream of memories and meaning. Tracks like ‘Centurion’ find affirming momentum in this current, while others dam the passage to contemplate the depths of a single moment. But whether Morris is skimming along the surface or submerging himself in plunge pools, the lasting sense is that of control. For if life is a flowing river, Radial Gate represents an attempt to apply structures along its course so that we might more fully engage with the power and potential to be found therein.

Measure, Pour & Mixtape: Music for Cooking

SPINSTER [BUY]

As its title suggests, this compilation by the fine folks at SPINSTER invited artists to explore links between food and music. From shared conceptual themes of creativity and community to parallels between melody and harmony and texture and flavour, each song celebrates both the act of preparing food and sharing it with others. The result is what the label call “an auditory cookbook of songs, poems, field recordings, and aural experiments, inspired by recipes, food preparation processes, dishes, and the experience of eating.” There ain’t a dud across the sixteen tracks, but personal favourites include Andy McLeod & Sarah Bachman’s timeless folk opener, a new song from Lou Turner inspired by a line from Robert Frost, Sally Anne Morgan’s soil-to-plate ‘Grain Song’ that’s all blue skies and wide open fields, and Little Mazarn’s exploration of food’s ability to evoke memories, in this case of an uncle who she says “briefly played on the Dallas Cowboys but mostly played football with me on Thanksgiving.”

Stephen Steinbrink – Disappearing Coin

Western Vinyl [BUY]

Since releasing his last record Utopia Teased in 2018, Oakland’s Stephen Steinbrink busied himself with other things, both musical and not. He dove into the craft of engineering records for other bands, enjoying the sense of communal creativity in contrast to the solo endeavour of writing and recording for himself. He also studied an apprenticeship at a stained glass studio and became deeply interested in Buddhism, enrolling in lay monastic training before being interrupted by the global lockdowns of 2020. All of which is important when considering Disappearing Coin, an album which represents something of a reinvention for Steinbrink. A wilful attempt to make music with the same creativity and sense of awe-filled wonder that he felt when exploring these other avenues. The spirit is captured in the conjurer’s trick of the title, where reality is ruptured by a brief spark of magic. Buoyed by the experience and wisdom gleaned from outside activities, Steinbrink returns to music as a kind of magician himself. A figure who, guided by invention and playfulness, looks to use mastery of a physical craft in order to open the door to small, intangible miracles.

Strawberry Runners – S/T

Self-released [BUY]

Released a decade since the project’s inception in 2013, Strawberry Runners is the self-titled debut full-length from Emi Night’s songwriting project. Written following a period of great personal upheaval and echoing back to past trauma, the record returns to dark places with disarming candour and an easy grace, folding folk and pop into shapes that feel at once fresh and familiar. Night runs their fingers over old wounds to confront feelings of loneliness and heartbreak, but does so with a renewed spirit and sense of unrestrained creativity. Because despite the sometimes heavy subject matter, Strawberry Runners is a warm and colourful record. One full of gentle melodies and tactile textures, small details that evoke the multisensory nature of our chaotic world in all of its pain and joy and mysterious beauty. Take the sunny, devotional love song ‘Alison’, a shot of sunshiney summer where you can almost hear the wistful smile bend Night’s voice as they sing.

And I miss you
I hope you’re alright
I remember stayin’ up all night
Last June

And when I get back
To the midwest
To the bluegrass
And the sassafras trees
And the yellowwood

Sun June – Bad Dream Jaguar

Run For Cover Records [BUY]

There’s always been a distance in the music of Sun June, from the disconnect between lovers and family members to the wide open vistas of the Austin band’s home state. But third album Bad Dream Jaguar was inspired by distance of another order of magnitude. Founding members Laura Colwell and guitarist Stephen Salisbury have been in a relationship for the last few years, and the record was written after Salisbury moved 1,300 miles away to North Carolina, the couple swapping demos of new songs as a way to both process and alleviate the sense of separation and longing. The hazy dream-like quality of the Sun June sound is therefore as nostalgic and nebulous as it has ever been, painting impressionistic pictures of love and longing in quiet dusk-hued pastels, as though in effort to preserve that which might otherwise fade out into nothing. The present comes to feel like a temporary space between the gravity of the past and the vast shadowed sweep of whatever comes next, though we are given little choice but live in it as best we can.

Truth Club – Running From the Chase

Double Double Whammy [BUY]

“Is this working? Are you working hard? Is it working for you?” Such questions might only be asked outright in the closing track of Truth Club’s Running From The Chase, but their desperate weight hangs over its every moment, threatening to pull an entire life off-kilter or else bury it altogether. The North Carolina outfit’s 2019 debut Not An Exit nodded to Dante by way of Bret Easton Ellis, though its despair was matched with an infectious forward motion which meant the listener could step off at the end with their pessimism shaken loose. But here the songs are more expansive, the textures dense and submerging. A sonic representation of twenty-first century living, with lead Travis Harrington left to murmur and yell within the noise, mimicking a world which demands energy for even the most basic of things. “I am scared we will end up like his friend,” as Harrington sings on the title track. “work until he’s dead / work until we’re dead / is there any other plan?”

White Boy Scream – Tent Music

Whited Sepulchre Records [BUY]

Travelling from Los Angeles to New Mexico in 2021, White Boy Scream’s Micaela Tobin stopped off for a few nights in Arizona to stay with violinist and composer Joshua Hill, who was staying with his parents to shelter from the pandemic and care for his dementia-stricken father. They pitched a tent in the backyard and decided to record something in the spur of the moment, setting up microphones as wildfires raged only miles away. A confined space within a world unravelling. Tent Music is what emerged from those nights. Music stripped of intention and thus open to ancient or esoteric influence, Tobin and Hill acting not so much musicians but mouths for unseen voices, tools for invisible hands. When shaping the recordings over the next few years, the task felt more like relaying an old mythology than creating something new. “Both of us have a pretty long practice with improvised and experimental music,” as Tobin explains, “but there were voices coming out of me in those two nights that I’ve never used before. It felt like channelling something. When we started listening back to it, the story emerged.”

As ever, thanks for sticking with us for another year. Your support does not go unnoticed.

The post Albums We Missed in 2023 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

If Dirt Buyer II, the forthcoming album from Joe Sutkowski’s project on Bayonet Records, offers a clear message, it is that of survival. But any true acknowledgement of being alive can only come from brushes with mortality, and the songs see Dirt Buyer engage with the full darkness of the past in order to more fully appreciate the brighter future. Lead track ‘Fentanyl’ captures the full nuance of this process with a sound which far exceeds its relatively short length. An inky black slice of alt/emo rock which swings between stagnant gloom and bracing rolls of thunderous weight.

Dirt Buyer II is out on the 20th October via Bayonet Records and you can pre-order it now.

Eversame – Warm Flower Sided Road

Originating from jamming sessions between drummer Marek Šmidovič and guitarist Richard Špirko, Žilina’s Eversame have been in development as a band since 2018. But it was only on adding Matúš Ratveiský and then later Pauline Struhárová in 2022 that they really started working towards recorded music. After a debut standalone single, the band turned their attention to full-length Tell Me Where the Flowers Are, and the album is now being released by Filip Zemčík’s Start-track for a limited edition cassette release. Single ‘Warm Flower Sided Road’ serves as the ideal introduction for those unfamiliar with the outfit, blending brooding grunge tones with math rock invention to hint at both the weight and fluidity of the Eversame sound.

Indianna Hale – Hollow The Words

Described as “a love song to my friend family,” ‘Hollow The Words’ is an encapsulation of Indianna Hale’s hybrid country/dream pop style and the bright yet wistful mood which results. The latest song from upcoming LP Yesterday’s Glitter on Perpetual Doom, the single is typical of the album’s atmosphere, where the beauty of joyful things is shadowed by their inevitable passing. What results is an ambivalent sound which could be described as sweet, sad or even surreal, with Western overtones adding some cosmic desert spirit too. Watch the video directed by Sean Olmstead below:

Yesterday’s Glitter is out on the 1st September via Perpetual Doom and you can pre-order it now.

Meagre Martin – Please Clap

Led by Boston-born, Berlin based songwriter Sarah Martin, Meagre Martin has been described as a vehicle for survival and catharsis within our unstable world. With debut album Gut Punch, coming later this year on Mansions and Millions, Martin uses this distance from the US to better examine her home country, be it religious fundamentalism or the ever-worsening climate catastrophe, all delivered with a country-inflected brand of indie rock. Latest single ‘Please Clap’ draws on an image of Jeb Bush floundering before a crowd as an archetypal example of the strange mix of brutality, banality and insecurity which marks the present American psyche. Watch the video directed by Alessandra Corazzini and produced along with Ruby Chopping below:

Gut Punch is out on the 10th November via Mansions and Millions and you can pre-order it now.

Ocie Elliott – Free

Hailing from Victoria, BC, Ocie Elliott (that’s duo Jon Middleton and Sierra Lundy) have made their name with a compassionate and often romantic brand of folk music. Writing of previous single ‘With the Lights Down‘, we described how their intimate style conjured “a moment to remember the things you appreciate while they are still close at hand,” and the description could serve the outfit’s sound more generally. Latest track ‘Free’ is another example, again charged with the wistful fondness we’ve come to expect, welcoming the listener into their music’s mindful peace.

Head up, I’m going down
New paths on old ground
Wildflowers and bird songs
These hours, I feel strong

Pleasure Systems – Everything I Need (ft. Melody English)

His first new music since devastating 2021 album Visiting the Well, ‘Everything I Need’ is the new single from Clarke Sondermann’s Pleasure Systems. It’s a collaboration with New York‘s Melody English and sees a continuation of Pleasure Systems’ unique relationship with time. “Immediate thoughts coalesce with memories,” as we wrote of the previous album, “anguish swirls with past joys and the current stark absence muddles with a previous, very real, presence.” ‘Everything I Need’ is rooted in the present but finds itself drifting across the temporal spectrum. Flashing back to what has now passed, daring to imagine a future. And in the end, settling for what sits in the here and now.

When the evening dies
And we’re sharing the surprise
Past and present sitting softly in your eyes

Turn another day
In the getting in the way
Everything I need is here to stay

Roselit Bone – Ofrenda

Written in the aftermath of the loss of several friends and acquaintances, the title track of Roselit Bone’s Ofrenda is a song haunted by a spectre of death. “Grief would knock me down for weeks or months at a time,” as lead Charlotte McCaslin explains. “But I noticed that, for some brief little moments, the pressure of grieving would give way and I would suddenly feel ‘okay’. I would then be flooded with pangs of guilt for surviving, for not suffering alongside the dead.” The song, and indeed the album as a whole, doesn’t so much try to exorcise this spectre as step out from beneath its shadow. A blend of country and Mexican ranchera music which owes as much to Ennio Morricone as it does punk, emerging with a strangely triumphant air as it faces the most difficult question head on. How do we go on living in full knowledge of what is coming? What does it mean to live in a world which seems to be dying too?

Ofrenda is out via Get Loud Recordings on the 25th August and you can pre-order it now.

Sun June – Get Enough

Bad Dream Jaguar, the forthcoming album by Sun June on Run For Cover Records, sees the band lean further into the style they’ve established across their previous records. A mix of emotional immediacy and ethereal weightlessness, a picture where the line between the ground and the sky is blurred into insignificance. A spacious mirage that’s something like a dream, something like Texas, caught between the comfort of memory and the vertiginous realisation that memory might be all we have. New single ‘Get Enough’ appears to be aware of its position within this environment, embracing its untethered status to drift towards what could be bitter end or absolute truth.

Bad Dream Jaguar is out on the 20th October via Run For Cover Records and you can pre-order it now.

Thomas Powers – Li (ft. Chelsea Jade)

Having risen to fame as part of New Zealand synth pop outfit The Naked and Famous, Thomas Powers was gearing up to release a new record with the band just as the pandemic hit and curtailed their plans. The intervening downtime provided an opportunity to pursue solo work, and debut single ‘Li’ shows the first fruits of the endeavour. Featuring fellow Aotearoa artist Chelsea Jade, the song presents an altogether more reserved soundscape than those of TN&F, though one which nevertheless offers a considerable emotional punch. The introspection of an empty room blown up into cinematic grandeur. Watch the video directed by Thomas Powers, Chelsea Jade & Luna Shadows below:

‘Li’ is out now and available from the usual places.

Truth Club – Exit Cycle

Since the release of debut Not An Exit on Tiny Engines back in 2019, Raleigh outfit Truth Club have looked to push the boundaries of what the band could sound like. The addition of Yvonne Chazal to the line-up only furthered this motivation, the newly formed quartet deciding to work with a more communal brand of songwriting. A process intended to “hold space for criticism, critique, input, and inspiration from the rest of the band in any context.” Having now signed with Double Double Whammy, Truth Club are set to release new record From the Chase, and latest single ‘Exit Cycle’ is an encapsulation of their new methods. A track which always felt like it was missing something until collaboration kicked in, with Indigo De Souza adding vocals to finally realise its proper form. “The emotional path of the song parallels the journey of writing it,” lead Travis Harrington explains. “It begins in the most private and insular place, and finally grows into a joyfully collective outpour.” Watch the video directed by Alex Montenegro below:

From the Chase is out on the 6th October via Double Double Whammy and you can pre-order it now.

The post Weekly Listening: August 2023 #4 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

We last covered the work of AJ Lambert as part of Bloodslide, an experimental group featuring members of Preoccupations and Protomartyr. But she also records under her own name and has assembled another stellar band for her new album, Dirt Soda. Together with musicians who have played with Joan As Policewoman, Yves Tumor, Dave Harrington and Julia Holter, Lambert uses the record to further her creative, genre-bending style, creating self-described ‘distorted anthems’ which blur the line between reality and dreams.

Lead single ‘Staff of the Flag’ is a great example, based around the notorious stretch of road where James Dean and many others have met their end. “I found it interesting that so many people know that one person who died there, but so many others have met the same fate and go unrecognized except by the people who loved them,” Lambert explains. “The song is about an imaginary woman who, after selling flowers to tourists on their way to the Dean site all day, takes the leftovers to the nearby site where her own loved one died.”

‘Staff of the Flag’ is out now and available via the AJ Lambert on Bandcamp. Dirt Soda is out in July.

CLAMM – Bit Much

Melbourne punks CLAMM say their music is an attempt to “explore the confusion of what it is to be a young person trying to live an honourable life in this fucked up world,” something they achieve by forgoing all restraint and throwing themselves into unrelenting cathartic noise. The band have recently announced their sophomore LP Care on Meat Machine and Chapter Music, a record which promises to be “bigger, louder and darker” than their 2020 debut Beseech Me. This is in part thanks to the fact the band are now a trio, bassist Maisie Everett joining Jack Summers (guitar and vocals) and Miles Harding (drums) to expand CLAMM into what the band say is “its ultimate form.” In anticipation of the new record, they have released lead single ‘Bit Much’, a song about the barrage of bad news that is modern life which ricochets around at typically breakneck speed.

Care will be released on 19th August on Meat Machine (UK, Europe & Asia) and Chapter Music (everywhere else). You can preorder it now from the CLAMM Bandcamp page.

Friendship – Ugly Little Victory

Fresh from signing with Merge Records, Philadelphia‘s Friendship have unveiled a brand new single, ‘Ugly Little Victory’. Those familiar with the band’s live set might recognise the tune from on the road, but even those who don’t will find an uncanny sense of familiarity. Something in the way the band collects details and sensations within their work, bringing to life quietly devastating circumstances which feel halfway our own. Songs about nothing and everything all at once.

Salmon head in the sink
wax paper turning pink
music playing low
and you on your phone
loading up a recipe

‘Ugly Little Victory’ is out now via Merge Records and available from the Friendship Bandcamp page.

Katie Bejsiuk – Onion Stalk

After years heading up free cake for every creature and later recording as Katie Bennett, Katie Bejsiuk has adopted her father’s original surname for brand new album The Woman on the Moon, out next month on Double Double Whammy. With its hushed acoustic style, lead single ‘Onion Stalk’ blends childlike wonder with reflective melancholy, though as it develops an electric edge emerges, braiding these twin threads into something determined and defiant.

we wrote the field guide
to the left-behind
we wore beer tab rings
and wild violet crowns
made a bed of the moss on the ground

I believe

The Woman on the Moon is out via Double Double Whammy on the 24th June and you can pre-order it now from the Katie Bejsiuk Bandcamp page. As a related aside (Weekly Reading, if you will), Lithub recently published Bennett’s fantastic essay on Joan Vollmer Burroughs which is very much worth your time.

Langkamer – Soul Bucket

Bristol‘s Langkamer have made a name with a sound that’s hard to nail down. A bit of folk, a bit of indie rock, a ton of playful personality. Following on from the brightly boisterous ‘Teeth’, they have returned with a brand new single ‘Soul Bucket’ on Breakfast Records. Taking a slightly more subdued, reflective air, the track faces up to the realities of growing older by leaning into the contemplative folk end of their sensibilities, though their distinctively mischievous side isn’t far below the surface. “‘Soul Bucket’ is an ode to ageing,” the band explain. “To realising that the time is rolling away from you and you can’t catch up no matter how fast you run.” Check out the video by JJ Jarman below:

‘Soul Bucket’ is out now via Breakfast Records and available from the Langkamer Bandcamp page.

Mote – Defying Ephemera

Having met at Binghamton University and won the hearts of the local scene, New York‘s Mote have just released their debut record, Defying Ephemera. Though not strictly a concept record, there’s a narrative arc from love to lonely longing across the twelve tracks, the nasty dose of heartbreak smack bang in the middle bringing a conflicted, anguished mood. The lead single and title track opens the record, existing before the worst has come to pass, but the growing chaos which envelops the spoken vocals hints at the turmoil to come.

Sunflower Thieves – Lichtenberg Figures

The project of Leeds-based childhood friends Amy Illingworth and Lily Sturt-Bolshaw, Sunflower Thieves make emotive music that draws on the ethereal tones of dream pop and the lyrical honesty of folk. Late last month they released their latest EP Someone To Be There For, a collection of five songs that captures nurturing warmth and bracing honesty which mark them as songwriters to watch. Perhaps the standout is ‘Lichtenberg Figures’, a song which celebrates the hard-won beauty of overcoming trauma through the metaphor of the tree-like pattern of lesions sometimes left on the skin when a person is hit by lightning.

You were struck by lightning walking in the rain to your car
and when you woke the lightning left a beautiful scar.

The post Weekly Listening: May 2022 #1 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

On the surface, Sunk feels like an expression of anguish’s long tail. The weeks and months and years after a loss, when exhaustion sets in yet grief loses none of the its teeth. “You look like you’re tired,” goes ‘Getter Better’ in a typically weary moment. “I don’t know how I / got along before / somehow, I just keep going.”

With tiredness comes fatalism. The constant realisation that the future looks no more promising. That there’s plenty more shit coming down the line. “I’m thinking how can I plan a life in turn,” Bon sings on ‘The Way That Things Burn’, “when everything is hopeless?” And fatalism in the future comes with a wider pessimism too. As ‘Creature’ captures:

You’re standing tall, though you’re upside down
It’s a crisis
I don’t know how to love anymore
I don’t know what love is

But Sunk is not a record that is content to dwell on these worries. In fact, its central message is rather different, offering if not a solution to the multitude of problems then at least an able coping mechanism. “What would happen if, rather than constantly fighting against the immovable tides of unfixable things,” reads the EP’s press release, “[Bon] gave herself permission to stop struggling altogether?”

Closer ‘Twenty Dried Chilies’ collects all of these thoughts into one final communication, presenting the thesis of the EP with Babehoven’s signature blend of thought and emotion. A song about disconnecting from things as the existential weight of the present bears down upon us. “I’m at a loss at what happens in this world,” Bon sings. “It is a cruel sensation, remembering I am human / And I’m prone to accidents of heart.” Accidents increasing in frequency by the day. In the face of personal loss, our increasingly fractious and atomised society, and the existential threats of conflict and climate change, battling every loss can feel worthless. Why waste so much energy struggling against such a powerful current? Why cause so much distress? Better to still oneself, to drift to the bottom. To become sunk.

Sunk it out now via Double Double Whammy and you can get it from the Babehoven Bandcamp page.

The post Babehoven – Sunk appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Here is a list of songs from 2020 that we liked but didn’t get around to writing about.

If you find something you like, follow the link in the embed to support the artists and labels on Bandcamp. And of course, there is a whole year’s worth of pieces on releases we did manage to write about, so have an explore through our reviews, previews and interviews from 2020.

The post Music We Missed in 2020 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Perhaps the biggest change is the lack of muffled fuzz that enveloped previous releases. Calling on the help of engineer and producer Ben Littlejohn, the band have expanded their repertoire beyond languid rhythms and mumbled vocals. These songs are still undoubtedly Hovvdy, but hold a newfound confidence, a clarity of thought and purpose that wasn’t so clear on previous records.

Take single ‘Ruin (my ride)’ as an example, a song which the band say “explores the often complicated nature of social and professional rejection, and aims to celebrate the power in genuine connection.” It still sounds introspective, but the scenes it captures are easier to make out, evocative snapshots that skate over simple beats and subtle autotuned elements. It’s more rhythmic than anything Hovvdy have done before, and perhaps a signal of a wider change that’s seeing a blurring of the lines between pop and hip hop. The track comes complete with a video shot by Riley Engemoen and Marlon Hedrick and edited by Will Taylor, which you can see below:

‘So Brite’ follows a similar pattern, an earnest and patient song that holds both anxiety and an easy warmth. Unfolding slow and sweet as syrup, the song hinges on a central refrain that focuses on uncertainty and doubt, although never abandons the nostalgic vibes that made us all fall for Hovvdy in the first place.

i don’t know why that I wanted it
to stay like that
i knew that everything would change
when the light came back
once the sun came back

what if i start to lose my mind
what if i start to lose my shine

Heavy Lifter will be released on the 18th October via Specialist Subject and Double Double Whammy and you can pre-order it now. The band are heading out on an extensive US tour this autumn, so check out the dates below.

10/18 – Austin, TX @ Barracuda ^
10/19 – Dallas, TX @ Ruins +
10/23 – New Orleans, LA @ Gasa Gasa ^ #
10/25 – Carrboro, NC @ Cat’s Cradle (Back Room) ^ #
10/26 – Philadelphia, PA @ First Unitarian Church ^ #
10/27 – Allston, MA @ Great Scott ^ #
10/29 – Brooklyn, NY @ Rough Trade ^ #
10/30 – Washington, DC @ Songbyrd ^ #
10/31 – Richmond, VA @ The Camel ^ #
11/1 – Charlotte, NC @ Snug Harbor ^ #
11/2 – Atlanta, GA @ The Earl ^ #
11/3 – Memphis, TN @ The Hi Tone Cafe ^ #
11/14 – San Diego, CA @ SPACE ^ ~
11/15 – Los Angeles, CA @ Moroccan Lounge ^ ~
11/16 – San Francisco, CA @ Cafe Du Nord ^ ~
11/18 – Seattle, WA @ Barboza ^ ~
11/19 – Vancouver, BC @ Biltmore Ballroom ^ ~
11/21 – Portland, OR @ Mississippi Studios ^ ~
11/23 – Salt Lake City, UT @ Kilby Court ^ ~
11/24 – Denver, CO @ Larimer Lounge ^ ~

^ w/ Caroline Says
+ w/ Christelle Bofale
# w/ Kevin Krauter
~ w/ Nick Dorian

photo by Santiago RD

The post Hovvdy – Ruin (my ride) / So Brite 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.

Take for example ‘shake it out’, as patient and considered an indie pop song as you’ll hear all year. The opening hush is broken after almost a minute, dawning guitar heralding the first chorus. It’s undeniably affecting, despite the fact Bennett barely raises her voice beyond a whisper. It’s just one of many songs that’s shaded with lots of feelings, a heart-swelling joy and sense of connection tempered by the difficulty of allowing people to drop out of your life.

But, as with all free cake for every creature releases, everything on the bluest star feels smooth and sunny, with even the sadder songs illuminated with a gentle golden glow. Importantly, it avoids the pitfalls of becoming too sugary or twee, maintaining a genuine sincerity across it’s fourteen tracks. ‘around you’ is giddy with feeling, built of observations that come straight from the schoolyard (“you left some things unsaid and I liked you more for that” Bennett sings “and in the girls room, hip to hip / a circle of ‘I admit I… I just want to hang around you'”). ‘hometown hero’ also looks back to earlier times, a nostalgic story of riding bikes to the edge of town and covering The Cure in the graveyard, while ‘tom or mike or pat or’ looks back at a relationship in a series of poetic but specific images.

“tom,
come to me
two smudges on the breeze
sick with our untold stories”

‘sideline/skyline’ echoes with Pete Gill‘s pedal steel, a slow blue country song for the twenty first century (“I’m nobody’s mother,” Bennett sings, “and I don’t have to hold it all together”), while ‘sunday afternoon’ perfectly captures that small freedom of an purposeless weekend, of stepping outside of the bustle of everyday life and just floating along at your own pace for a while.

“walked for hours aimlessly
washed in the nothing, happily
the world went on without me
and i let it, happily”

It’s refreshing to hear a record that’s about the uncomplicated joy of friendship, the breathless pleasure of relating to someone and having them relate right back. ‘in your car’ is a great example, featuring Felix Walworth on banjo and Meghan Center with additional vocals. It’s a song about whiling away long summer evenings in a parked car with Pavement on the radio, and again displays what Bennett does so well, focusing on small details to infer larger feelings, all wrapped up in a transportive atmosphere and a genuine gladness.

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.

“eating clementines on the subway
put the peels on my blue jeans
should i offer my seatmate a piece?
turn up the song in my headphones,
this afternoon will be so naturally sweet”

the bluest star is out now and you can get the LP, cassette or digital download via Double Double Whammy, or the free cake for every creature Bandcamp page. free cake for every creature are heading across the Atlantic to the UK/EU this winter, and you can see the full dates below.

Tour poster by Nora Einbender Luks

The post free cake for every creature – the bluest star appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Opener ‘Angel’ begins relatively sedate, a song built on acoustic guitar and gentle percussion that wouldn’t be too out of place on The Offer. Although as it grows it reveals itself to have a clarity that wasn’t present on the previous album, a kind of loose-limbed easiness that feels like a development for Yowler. ‘Holy Fire’ is another song that begins gently, a lonely attic-corner folk song that’s all murmured guitar and almost whispered vocals. But its final third signals a more conspicuous change, ushering in the stylistic shift that makes Black Dog in My Path so compelling. First the acoustic guitar drops in tone, a subtle portent of what’s to come, before a tumultuous wave of noise rolls in like a force of nature, washing away everything in its torrent, including any misconceptions that this record is merely The Offer part 2.

As if to immediately back this up, ‘Where is My Light?’ is a great ominous beast of a thing, crushing guitars like something from a Midwife record giving Jones’ words a newfound gravity. The sentiments roil and snarl, ominous messages from a troubled mind, or rather a mind troubled by its surroundings. As Jones explains: “It’s about being an artist under capitalism and all the mess that that can cause in your brain. It’s about missing the natural world and all the beauty you see when you’re on the road, and hating your stupid fucking phone.”

And where is joy among these pieces that we scream into the space?
Where is my gentle reason, and the light within my cave?
Where have you been?

The intimate crooned regret of ‘Awkward’ is followed by the positively ethereal ‘Aldebaran’, a space age hymn of pulsing synths and arcane veneration, a mismatch of style and scope that Jones pulls off with grace. The grooviest Yowler song to date, the beguilingly blaspheming downbeat disco of ‘WTFK’ is another change of pace. The background bass rumbles like an unseen basement party bouncing up to street level, a room full not of dancing kids but something unnatural, a coven or dark congregation swaying in the dark.

All this is not to say that Yowler has abandoned what made The Offer so great. ‘(Holidays Reprise)’ is a wordless return to a song from that album, while ‘No’ is breathy midnight folk where the soft tones take nothing away from the almost Biblical writing, its stark and visceral images of blood and marrow and blazing suns. Another quieter song, ‘Petals’ is as delicate and pretty as its title suggests, hushed and emotive in both sound and theme. “Sing softly the song you wrote like honey from your throat,” Jones urges. “Petals fall in front of you, stick in your hair, it’s all I can do I leave undone and bend to your bow.”

‘Grizzly Bear II’ casts the narrator as a kind of superstitious figure, doomed to bring misfortune to those that cross their path, and the suffering such a curse entails. The idea carries through to closer ‘Spirits & Sprites’, which again returns to bare-bones guitar and vocals that often seem barely there yet burn with uncanny feeling all the same. 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.

Black Dog In My Path is out now via Double Double Whammy and you can get it from their webstore, or the Yowler Bandcamp page.

The post Yowler – Black Dog In My Path appeared first on Various Small Flames.