‘Hotel Room’ is exhibit A in backing this up, the vocals airy and fuzzy, rising in steady cadence and tethered to earth by nothing beyond the constant rhythm of the guitar. Lyrically, the track is tacit, pushing numerous snippets of unclear imagery that add up to something almost sensory, recognisable in shape and weight if not directly. Because this is a placid love song for indistinct summer times, where days and dates blur into one, a memory melted into tactile sensations of heat on skin and hazy sunshine.

“Could I be new, you are in a hotel
Reaching me in the summer night swell
Meet me at the top of the road
Head on down whilst it’s still warm on our backs
You are what every night lacks”

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And flourish it does, varying from track to track to make a delightfully multifaceted record that never quite settles into one niche. Songs such as ‘Runaway’ and ‘Unfound’ provide the polished melancholy of Daughter but with small twists, be they traditional instruments like flugelhorn and cello, or even subtle mathy undertones. ‘Occhiolism’ pushes further into rock territory, the vocals rising to frantic, frustrated shouts, while ‘Strawberry’ struts and swells like a dream of false confidence, before ‘Joshua’ utilises field recordings to accentuate the lonely feel. The voices are shrouded in a gentle ambient hum, sounding like old family videos played through a TV in the next room. Price’s vocals, meanwhile, stay even, emotions ironed flat by a wistful distance.

You are a ghost inside
An attic I left behind
Poison that tastes like wine
I made up my mind

The variety continues. The slow-burn of ‘A Leap Too Tall’ sees Arora take over vocal duties, the track unfurling into a digital ballad fit for prime-time radio, while ‘Avenoir’ is the complete opposite, an experimental interlude of warm instrumentation and a recording of pages being turned. But, while closer ‘The Pining’ brings us back to the sad dream folk of the opening tracks, we didn’t need reminding. Every moment on the album, from the dazzling highs to the locked-away lows, is threaded not just with an unshakeable sense of isolation but the equally persistent suspicion that things need not always be this way. In a way, What’s The Point? answers it’s own question. Communication is its own way out.

What’s the Point? is out now and you can grab it from the Sea Offs Bandcamp page, including on CD.

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The intervening years have seen the duo release a variety of singles along with 2015’s full album, White Noise, which saw the Twin Oaks sound grow into grander, more epic soundscapes full of ethereal guitars and pounding drums. Now the band are preparing a brand new EP, Collapse, to be put out sometime this summer. After the unveiling of lead single ‘Eighteen Minutes‘ late last year, we’re delighted to present second single ‘Nothing’ to further increase the anticipation of the EP.

Mixed and mastered by Grammy Award-winning engineer Cassidy Turbin, the track perfects Twin Oaks’ odd ability to sound at once stark and lush, Brown’s contained, ominous vocals cycling with unnerving rhythm, each repetition triggering an escalation in the instrumentation. So while the first verse plays to dark dream folk along the lines of Daughter, the second is accompanied by a near post-rock drum thump, the intensity surging by the closing minutes with a wall of electric guitar and feedback drone.

“Please forgive me, for I have sinned
I’m not my own friend
Feel the weight of the world sink in
I’m drowning in this

Pulling back my skin
Digging deep with it
I’m finding nothing
I’m finding nothing”

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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. 

The post Premiere: A new video for ‘So Long’ from Heavy Boots appeared first on Various Small Flames.

The album is a beautiful one. The sound (prehaps aided by the meadow artwork) evokes a summer wilderness. Not a harsh desert or tropical forest, but rather a sweeping landscape of sepiatone hills and fragrant grasses. For the ‘dream folk’ label, the vocals are very clear and I think it’s fair to say the driving force of each song. The result is somewhere along the lines of First Aid Kit, Sharon van Etten, and Mountain Man if they were based somewhere in the past; luscious voices crooned over smooth and gentle tracks that meander by like childhood summers (in the track ‘New Love’ they even proclaim ’Summer drags on, these sunsets keep on coming’).

Valley is an album of escapism, a record that allows you to slip out of whatever grey scenery that surrounds you and into a world of golden sunshine and gentle winds. There is a sense of sadness here too, as if both you and they know that such a time and place is hard to find and all too fleeting when you do.

You can buy the album on Bandcamp and the single ‘Valley’ is available for free. be sure to check out their debut album The Living Room from which the video below is taken.

West from Magic! Magic Roses on Vimeo.

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