We decided to expand things slightly this year, giving ourselves a chance to write a little something about the albums we wanted to cover but never got the opportunity. Albums which meant something to us at various points through 2021. The list was still incomplete, of course, and we were left with a big list of great songs from great records we didn’t get a chance to mention.

So here are some songs we really enjoyed in 2021. We hope you enjoy them too.

Arooj Aftab – Mohabbat

A take on a piece by Hafeez Hoshiarpuri, Aftab’s multilayered masterpiece is suffused with the patience, sadness and meditative inner wandering of Sufi devotional poetry.

Anjimile – Stranger

As fragile as sandstone, tougher than rock, ‘Stranger’ packages a nuanced assessment of identity as a folk pop hit of which Sufjan would be proud.

Bea Troxel – Getting Where

An empowered anthem for the introverted, slowly circling towards a more truthful self.

Ben Seretan – Cicada Waves 1

Measured and patient piano embedded within an organic field recording, ‘Cicada Waves 1’ plays like a slow day passing in all its quiet details, all its hidden weight.

The Bird Calls – Ritual Crash

With satellites falling from the sky and the burning underworld breaking the surface, ‘Ritual Crash’ presented the most tender, intimate end of the world you were likely to hear in the year of our Lord 2021.

Bria – Buffalo Ballet

Travel to Abilene, TX with this take on John Cale’s “European version of the Old West,” from an EP of covers that both subverts and celebrates country music.

BRNDA – Perfect World

Stable job, accolades, friendly dogs and affirmation. “You’re in the perfect world and doing ok,” sings Leah Gage, voice flat and sardonic as the track eventually tips sideways and falls into an unhinged sax outro.

Canary Room – Lake Effect

Bittersweet folk captured in its best setting, supported by warm lo-fi textures and an ambient embrace of birdsong.

Carson McHone – Hawks Don’t Share

The lid peeled off artistic collaboration, showing the tug of war tension underneath, as well as the lingering regret that results.

Daniel Davies – Spies

On streets as dark and foreboding as this, the question isn’t whether you are paranoid, but whether you are paranoid enough.

Doran – Old Moon

A new song cut from ancient cloth, like a small scrap torn from the drape of the heavens and earth and old moon itself.

Dusted – Not Offering

“I have given up. I’ve given enough,” Brian Borcherdt sings on this tender lesson in regret and letting go. “I was so sure. So it goes, I am not anymore.”

Etran de L’Aïr – Toubouk Ine Chihoussay

A suitably joyous number from Agadez’s premier wedding band, drawing you into its infectious momentum.

Fog Lake – jitterbug

A typically aching and overcast pop song from the master of them.

Frances Chang – eros the love creator dividing chaos

Cosmic spoken word which finds universes within interiors, a daydream transportation away from these sorry lands.

Fust – The Last Days

A song for hard times made warm by the fundamental fondness gained only through shared suffering.

JOHN – A Military Alphabet (five eyes all blind) / Job’s Lament / First of the Last Glaciers / where we break how we shine (ROCKETS FOR MARY)

Some latent thing awoken by our way of living, rising in the name of revenge.

Heka – (a) wall

Anger simmered down to a velvety caramel, coating the tongue on a slow walk through nocturnal alleys.

Hilary Woods – I

One of Hilary Wood’s wordless hymns, to be sung in dark chapels deep underground.

illuminati hotties – Pool Hopping

Working on the logic that slowing down might equal admitting truths or figuring things out, ‘Pool Hopping’ grabs you by the hand and runs.

Indigo De Souza – Pretty Pictures

“I’m always trying to embody a balance between the existential weight and the overflowing sense of love I feel in the world,” Indigo De Souza explains, capturing the bummed-out brightness better than we ever could.

Johanna Samuels – Sonny

With its long shadows and golden light, it’s not clear whether the sun is dawning or setting on ‘Sonny’, but it heralds a new day nonetheless.

JOHN (TIMESTWO) – Return to Capital / Šibensko Powerhouse

The reek of ozone as thunderheads slowly gather / The unleashing of the storm. “I see an opening in the sky, high, wide.”

Keith Secola – Intaglio

Just one of the portals on Keith Secola’s latest record. Looking to the heavens, rooted to the ground, tied to everything in between.

Lael Neale – Blue Vein

“Guardian angel / Gather my losses / Keep them all safe / ‘Til I come to my cross”

Le Ren – Dyan

As warm as a mother’s hand, with all the clarity of an empty room.

Lewsberg – The Corner

Perfectly minimal, just guitar, percussion, and incense-scented violin. All backed up by monologue-like vocals that ring with pure patience.

Loretta’s Museum – The Rodney Ave Garage Sale

Instrumental folk and the ambient sounds of a garage sale combine to evoke one of those perfect glittery springtime days when the sky is blue and the leaves are green and the sun isn’t yet too hot to bear.

Lucie, Too – スーパームーン Super moon

A slice of big, radio-ready indie pop from a Japanese duo that seem destined to blow up.

Mal Devisa – Deja playing guitar

With slow guitar and lilting rhythm, a track which isolates the tenderness and patience within loneliness, yearning for connection with plainspoken charm

Marie/Lepanto – Gramps and Grandma

Justin Peter Kinkel-Schuster on reliably emotive form with the picture of familial love and heartbreak, and Jason Isbell shows up to shred some guitar for good measure.

Maxine Funke – Quiet Shore

A quiet meditation on the mundane aspects of a traumatic moment (a tea tray, a snatched umbrella, a slammed door) that illustrates the potency of memory and how a whisper is often louder than a shout.

Merpire – Heavy Feeling

Has an anxiety attack ever felt so cathartic?

Midwife – God is a Cop

“Am I heartless, or am I soft?” The pressing question at the heart of a track suspended between earnest confession and violent conflagration.

Myriam Gendron – Poor Girl Blues

Gendron combines a traditional Québecois folk song with an old blues one to distil their shared meaning, a lament for the lost, lonely and displaced.

Ovlov – Baby Shea

A 97 second eulogy to Brooklyn’s Shea Stadium played at breakneck pace.

Quivers – Gutters of Love

Ageless Aussie pop that’s a little bit 80s, a little bit 2010s, and a whole lot of joyous reassurance that heartbreak passes and things will be just fine.

Reiko and Tori Kudo – The Deep Valley of Shadow

A soft soliloquy on isolation grows quietly unsettling as warped strings whisper at the edges like anxious thoughts.

Sand Duney – Shadow Outside

Ramshackle country-tinged psych pop built on layered backing tracks thats equal parts meditative and energetic.

Space Mountain – Night Sky

A slacker jam.

Spread Joy – Kanst Du

Just one no wave pop nugget from a record that’s full of them, like pulling a weird sweet and sour German candy from a bag of pick ‘n mix.

Talons’ – Vampire

Talons’ tackle the experience of living through the pandemic in typically raw fashion, centring on an anxiety dream of being maskless in ALDI “between the meat, the fake meat and the gluten-free.”

Tiny Deserts – Wild Mt. Thyme

This beautifully unfussy and intimate take on an old Scots/Irish folk song captures that uniquely summertime feeling where the slow sunny evenings feel at once sorrowful and jubilant.

Trace Mountains – Eyes on the Road

The sound of a late-night self-reckoning while flying down the highway

TV Priest – Lifesize

A slurred and snarling assault on the patriarchal “strongmen” of politics and culture.

Typhoon – We’re In It

A band known for orchestral maximalism hone things to a razor edge in this emotional gut-punch on isolation, drifting friendship and, ultimately, persisting.

Valley Palace – Patch

Sky-blue guitar pop washed in hazy nostalgia that will have you dreaming of summer.

Weakened Friends – Quitter

A very nineties marriage of confession and catharsis, confronting fears over life’s direction by attaching heart to sleeve and blazing on ahead.

World Record Winner – Pockets of Nature

An honest-to-goodness ode to the joy of rooting around in the dirt and leaf litter away from worries and cares.

Wormy – Hungry Ghost (feat. Samia)

A whirlwind tour through the banal and heartbreaking details of life, gathering enough momentum to convince yourself everything might just be alright.

Yellow Ostrich – Timothy

“What’s a man? I’m just as soft as I can be” sings Alex Schaaf on this rumination on connection and the fallacies of masculinity.

If you enjoyed anything on this list, you may also be interested in our list of albums we missed in 2021. And of course, there were lots of amazing songs that we did write about in the last year, so have a look back through our Reviews and Previews sections to find more.

The post Songs We Missed in 2021 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

“The album takes the formula of Stewart’s previous releases and stretches it panoramic, bedroom pop on a mountainous scale, a departure from his norms in all the right ways. The band build dense layers of guitar which, paired with rumbling bass and crashing drums, create something imposing, a monolith rising through the fog.”

The great news is that the full album has now been released, and the promise saw at the start of the year has been realised. Eight songs of dense indie rock which borrow as much from the cathartic peaks of post-rock as they do from the slow and spectral sound we’ve come to associate with Stewart. We begin with ‘In Linear’, with it’s slow and considered start, all open spaces and dark winding guitars and Stewart’s signature vocals. The “choruses” spike with heavier instrumentation, our first taste of the album’s post-rock tendencies, while the gentler verses are full of lines like:

“You always cover the receiver with your hand
why don’t you want them to listen
why don’t you want them to understand?”

‘LAFK’ opens with almost martial drumbeat before the advent of inky and slinky guitars, eventually blooming into a track which fuses a sheer rock passion with emotive vocals and reflective air of something else entirely, bringing to mind earlier Winterlseep releases and particular the music of Brian Borcherdt’s Dusted project. The song is punctuated by moments of almost pure silence, where the only sound is the receding reverb of the previous burst of instrumentation, a sound you can’t be sure doesn’t exist only in your inner ear. Eventually things build to a pinnacle, ending in a furious cacophony of pounding percussion and squealing guitars. ‘Careful Creators’ gathers itself and then comes crashing to life, the vocals sad and oddly serene, floating in during the intervals between the noise (“To be alive is to be alone”).

The title track is a patient and vaguely ominous song, guitars rolling in like surf on an abandoned shore, while ‘x’ shakes things up with its shimmering, shifting ambience, like ice crystals gliding through the great black expanse of outer space. A discordant clang announces the arrival of ‘Temporary Widow’, which has shades of Explosions in the Sky, epic crests of feedback and pummelled drums surrounding the soaring vocals like a big staticky storm cloud. ‘Concrete Plans’ marches out of a drone that sounds like some kind of cosmic wind, the drums holding a rhythm that feels almost heavy rock.

“Under someone else’s concrete plans
you’re not even a name
or the print of your own hand
you become so dependent”

Finale ‘Words’ is epic and reverberating, stretching over the nine minute mark and enduring all manner of tumult in its duration. It converges into perhaps the heaviest maelstrom on the entire album, before descending into a lull at the very finish, just sparse guitar and Stewart’s vocals, like the strange glowing hush in aftermath of a tempest.

“It’s alright if your words
don’t come as easily to you
if everything is overheard
maybe they’re not supposed to”

This is an album that has it all. It’s pretty easy to turn to cloying metaphors to describe the sense of vast space it conjures, the poignancy or Stewart’s vocals, the pure tangible noise that the band can summon. It takes a little bit of everything and melts them down into something that’s quite unique. Something that is quite distinctly Summering.

You can get Summering now via the Summering Bandcamp page.

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We had originally planned for 15 songs each but found it was too difficult to fit in all the artists we felt needed to be included and decided to go with 20 each. Luckily, HI54LOFI included some of our favourites and I think we had some of his on ours, so we helped each other out a bit.

Granted, there are far more than 40 noteworthy Canadian artists out there and there were some hard decisions. Any disappointed acts crying into their maple syrup or taking out frustrations on their teamates on the ice, please don’t despair, there is always next year.

We hope you enjoy listening to it as much as we enjoyed making them. These songs certainly haven’t helped banish our romantic view of Canada.

Wake The Deaf side:

1.Docking Guard – Northern Primitive
2. Drop It – NEEDLES//PINS
3. Flyingshot Lake – The Flaming Moes
4. Ask Me Something – Wind & the Wild
5. Left and Leaving – The Weakerthans
6. Snow Ghosts – Paul Stewart
7. Voyageur – Doug MacNearney
8. The Future Of Tradition – Frederick Squire
9. Bruises – Dusted
10. Ben – Tyler Butler
11. Warning – Postdata
12. Margaret Downe – Aidan Knight
13. Coming Back Home – Zachary Lucky
14. Sask – Donovan Woods
15. Young Glass – Hey Rosetta!
16. Lightshow – Plants & Animals
17. And I Thank You – Pink Mountaintops
18. Cloud Of Evil – Blackout Beach
19. Sing! Captain – Handsome Furs
20. Continuous Thunder – Japandroids

HI54LOFI side:

1. Welcome To The Heart – Eamon McGrath
2. Broken Knees. – Different Skeletons
3. Sunset – Two Bicycles
4. Brook and Branch – The Weather Station (featuring Baby Eagle)
5. Skinny Ghost – HAPPY TRENDY
6. Deny, Deny, Deny – Joel Plaskett
7. You’re Cool – The Joe
8. Oh My God (It Still Means A Lot To Me) – The Wooden Sky
9. Necromancy – Jessica Jalbert
10. Scared – The Tragically Hip
11. Family Tree – Evening Hymns
12. Wind Driving Dogs – Chad VanGaalen
13. Were You In Love With Me – Andy Shauf
14. Big Bird In A Small Cage – Patrick Watson
15. I Need You Closer – LadyFace
16. Where are you? – nick everett
17. The Very Best – Mike Tod
18. Vapours – Islands
19. Sugar Mama – The Deep Dark Woods
20. Road Regrets – Dan Mangan

You can find both mixes here as a collection.

EH? – A Canadian Mixtape (Wake The Deaf Side) from Wake The Deaf on 8tracks Radio.

EH? – A Canadian Mix Tape (HI54LOFI Side) from HI54LOFI on 8tracks Radio.

If anyone can think of any more Canada-themed cliches or stereotypes then please don’t hesitate to let us know for next year’s mix. Going by this collection of songs, being insanely talented might just be one more.

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