Now Valley Maker is back with a brand new single, ‘Mockingbird,’ a song which again sees Crane expand on the simple voice and guitar skeleton. Amy Godwin provides ethereal backing vocals, and Chris Icasiano subtle percussion, adding texture and poignancy to a track that is concerned with both memories of the past and concerns for the future.

“I wrote ‘Mockingbird’ within a week of moving to Columbia, SC,” Crane explains, “having just left my home of seven years in Seattle to return to the area and community I grew up in. It’s a song about trying to settle in while feeling quite unsettled.” Drawn to actions that might tie him to the place and give some link into the future, he planted a Japanese Maple in the yard. “There’s a line in the song that acknowledges how I’ll ‘sit for a while and watch it grow,'” Crane continues, “as a way of accepting that season of uncertainty and transition.”

This happened before the pandemic, and has come to take on new meaning in the ambiguous present. “The song resonates deeply, for me, with this strange season of life. Both the song and video meditate on memory, time and aging; they both try to embrace the uncertainty, absurdity and beauty of life; and they reflect a feeling of being in-between places and communities.”

The track comes complete with a video filmed and directed by Joseph Kolean and Zach Gutierrez, which includes Super 8 footage that Crane shot in and around his Columbia neighborhood. Memory and reflection are again the key themes and the combination of the domestic (family photos, familiar faces, a fridge magnetic collection) and the elemental (dramatic coastlines, woods and a strange, river-bound fire) capture visually what Valley maker does sonically.

‘Mockingbird’ is out now via Frenchkiss Records and you can get it from the Valley Maker Bandcamp page.

Cover photo by Bree Burchfield

The post Valley Maker – Mockingbird 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.

Valley Maker recently put out a brand new record, Rhododendron, and we’re pleased to report that they continue to deliver on their stellar brand of ruminative indie rock. Crane has always delivered his lyrics with a strangely intense composure, his distinctive vocals giving the lines a gentle power. This is certainly true on opener ‘A Couple Days’, a solemn song about missing the death of a loved one and ruminating on that person’s impact. It’s a reminder that the most lasting legacies are not physical or financial but in our minds, a way of seeing things or approaching the world.

To think that I will be like you
To think that I will be consumed
To know that I remain confused
To always see the world in bloom
To see it like you taught me to
To know that I will be amazed

In comparison ‘Light on the Ground’ feels slick and spry, but again the lyrics are weighty. Like most Valley Maker songs, the track is built upon a thematic bedrock of faith and religion, but anyone who baulks at the R-word need not worry, Crane is uninterested in creeds and doctrine, instead exploring metaphysical mysteries that we can all wonder about. “Prophetic and apocalyptic language shapes Crane’s lyrics,” label Frenchkiss Records put it, “but his outlook is not bound by dogma. Instead, he uses the metaphors of faith to explore the ineffable to navigate the intersection of belief, time, place, and the political present.”

Rhododendron was made with the help of producer/engineer Chaz Bear of Toro Y Moi, and his influence is seen in the album’s snaking melodies and beguiling rhythms. Songs that would be emotionally resonant with just guitar and vocals are elevated to rich and spacious indie rock songs, as atmospheric and complex as the issues Crane tackles. ‘Rise Up’ is a case in point, perhaps the most ambitious and celebratory song Valley Maker has ever made. It dips and sways, reminiscent of The Wooden Sky in the way it fuses soulful conventional folk with something more contemporary, trumpet and saxophone adding to the maximalist groove. Again Crane looks to the Gospel for his metaphors, the obvious Easter Sunday themes at the forefront of a song that’s actually a nuanced take on being raised with religion.

“Rise up
God as my witness
Set my mind on the end
Jesus Christ visits
In a dream I guess
I was five years old
Mumbled little meanings
Doing as I’m told”

‘Seven Signs’ is another rich pop song, although it’s packed full of anxiety about America, images of hurricanes and gun shops juxtaposed against the titular Rhododendron “in the mountain shade,” while the western twang of ‘Be Born Today’ continues the eschatological feel, evoking Jason Molina’s stark imagery. “The sky opens for me,” Crane sings, “The earth swallows my feet / Blackbird coming down so mean / Bloodstain on the silent street.”

There’s a persistent rhythm that drives ‘Baby, in Your Kingdom’, a typically sober and sincere love song that at once laments life’s complications and vows to endure in spite of them, with ‘Planted in the Tall Weeds’ playing as the idea in action, struggling back toward the light. If the light isn’t reached on ‘Wonder’, then it is certainly visible at the end of the tunnel, the track an abrupt realisation of good fortune, life sliding into context as the shadows lift.

The album ends on ‘River Bend My Mind’, a characteristically spacious finale, all gathering shadows and negative space. It’s a song that confronts uncertainty with a clear-eyed sense of hope. “The running river only flows into the days I cannot know,” declares Crane, “when heaven takes me nice and slow, but heaven’s what I do not know.” Once more, 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.

Rhododendron is out now via Frenchkiss Records and you can get it from the Valley Maker Bandcamp page.

The post Valley Maker – Rhododendron appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Miranda Winters – The Futuristic District

Usually found fronting Chicago noise-rock band Melkbelly, Miranda Winters put out a solo record this summer that shows she is equally comfortable with the energy toned down a little. Which isn’t to say Xobeci, What Grows Here? is without its own bite, just that its intensity is not quite of the eardrum-busting variety. Opener ‘The Futuristic District’ is a good example, an electrically charged blend of bedroom pop and indie rock along that fans of Hop Along and Waxahatchee will appreciate, though Winters’ vocal rhythm carves out a space all her own.

You can get Xobeci, What Grows Here? now via the Miranda Winters Bandcamp page, or on cassette via Sooper Records.

Tuvaband – Wolfpack

The Berlin-based project of Norwegian singer/songwriter/producer Tuva Hellum Marschhäuser, Tuvaband create ethereal and emotive songs that sound something like a more radio friendly take on the reverb drenched drone pop of Midwife or Allison’s Gate. The latest Tuvaband single, ‘Wolfpack’, is a wonderful example, a smoky and twilit song that borrows elements of panoramically affecting singer-songwriters like Daughter and buries them in a dreamworld of smoke and twilit. The delicate shimmering beauty is offset with a sharper edge – as the title suggests, the track has teeth.

Be sure to keep an eye on the Tuvaband website for future releases.

Valley Maker – Light On the Ground

We’ve featured Austin Crane’s Valley Maker project numerous times here at VSF, culminating in a review of the excellent record, When I Was a Child released in 2015, which we described as “an album about belief and love in a variety of guises, about the big and unknowable questions, from love and growth and family to God and everlasting life.” Crane is back with a brand new Valley Maker album, Rhododendron, that will be released this autumn, and has released a single to whet our appetites, complete with a video from Joseph Kolean. It sounds like the album will be one to look forward to.

Rhododendron is set for release on the 12nd October via Frenchkiss Records and you can pre-order it now.

new casino – going for a walk

Taking their name from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Brooklyn’s new casino began as a solo project of Morgan Kaplan though has since expanded to incorporate Carlo Pisanu on bass. New single ‘going for a walk’, released in preparation of the band’s first full-length, Oshiki 2, gives a good flavour of the new casino aesthetic, combining a minimal slacker sound with an engaging lyrical flow. Every so often this rhythm gathers itself into something of a crescendo, which appears not in an increase in volume or energy but rather in the sincerity of the vocals, the feeling breaking through the disaffected cool of the genre to offer something a little more heartfelt.

Oshiki 2 is out now and you can listen via Soundcloud or Spotify.

Joe Kaplow – I Said I Was Going And I Went

After traversing the USA for the better part of three months playing all manner of clubs and bars, Joe Kaplow began to feel a profound longing for the tiny details of life at home. The idea of tour might conjure an image of exciting adventures, though Kaplow realised he was missing the decidedly unexciting, the household chores, cooking food from scratch. New single ‘I Said I Was Going And I Went’ channels this into an emotive and homesick sound in which uncertainty reigns, where the halcyon ideal of home is known not to be entirely true, though allowed to persist to drag him through the days away.

‘I Said I Was Going And I Went’ is available now from the Joe Kaplow Bandcamp page, alongside his previous EP release.

Baby Cages – flowers

We featured Baby Cages twice back in 2014, calling single ‘Dark Arts‘ a “shadowy three minutes that slither under your skin” and album Indelicate as akin to “taking a thousands of weird screenshots from Twin Peaks and Blue Velvet and Eraserhead to make one giant mosaic that is super-weird. Hyper-Lynchian.” Well, the Toronto-based music collective are back with a new EP, bitter melon, a release that maintains the off-kilter vibe though this time casting it in a light altogether more bright and peppy. ‘Flowers’ serves as a good introduction, the production relatively crystal clear when compared to that of Indelicate, the instrumentation possessing a manic, restless edge that is at odd with the lyrics.

“teach me to relax
and i am reborn

flowers in the back
of a pair of patterned pants
so I pick up the past
and fall into your lap”

bitter melon is out now and you can grab it from the Baby Cages Bandcamp page.

Lauren O’Connell – Out of Focus

Hailing from Rochester, NY, songwriter Lauren O’Connell has been releasing a steady stream of albums and EPs since 2007, displaying a keen sense of storytelling within her country/folk style. Earlier this year, O’Connell put out a new record, Details, and her writing is as detailed and impressive as ever, managing to craft complex, near literary-level metaphors and imagery while losing none of the immediacy and atmosphere. Single ‘Out of Focus’ is a case in point, a piano-driven track falling somewhere between Leonard Cohen and Julien Baker, though it’s in O’Connell’s words and delivery that the real magic lies. Maintaining a conversational flow capable of accelerating and decelerating at the drop of the hat, the song sounds like thoughts and feelings unfurling straight from the brain, as though bypassing the awkwardness of phrasing and speaking entirely, emerging fully formed and disarmingly beautiful.

Details is out now and you can get it from Bandcamp, along with the rest of Lauren O’Connell’s back catalogue.

Harvey Trisdale – Baby

Based in Los Angeles, Harvey Trisdale make a restrained, languid brand of indie rock that’s perfectly suited to sunny climes. However, rather than being carefree tropicana, their songs possess an emotional depth too, resulting in a struggle between light and dark where neither side wins out. This summer saw the release of their self-titled EP, and such a to-and-fro can be seen across the record, the sunny energy of opener ‘corners’ dampened by the emo-tinged ‘Fit to be Found’. Though these conflicting moods even seem to compete within single songs, as typified in second single, ‘Baby’, with the depressed torpor of the vocal style eventually shaken by the instrumentation as the track rises into a stirring finale.

Harvey Trisdale is out now via Baby Blue Records and you can get in from Bandcamp.

Babehoven – Out Of This Country

Babehoven is the project of Portland resident Maya Bon, rounded out to a trio with the help of Skylar Pia and drummer Elias Williamson. Their latest release, a five-song EP titled SLEEP, is being released by our pals at Good Cheer Records later this summer. In preparation, they have released a single, ‘Out of This Country’, a soft and shambling bedroom pop song that swaddles real feeling in a blanket of restraint. The drums and guitar and Bon’s impressive vocals seem to grow in intensity only to recede and dissipate, a reminder that sometimes less is more, that something intangible can be captured when artists hold a little something back.

SLEEP is out via Good Cheer Records on 17th August, and you can pre-order it now from the Babehoven Bandcamp page.

Adam Arcuragi – Low Rain Parade

For a period from the mid-to-late-00s to 2012, American songwriter Adam Arcuragi was one of the most soulful and stirring songwriters plying his trade, releasing a series of albums and EPs that collected his probing writing within an evocative musical landscape. The good news is that Arcuragi is back, with a brand new full-length due sometime this year, though for now all we get by way of a taster is the single ‘Low Rain Parade’. The track falls on the restrained side of his oeuvre, the slow meandering rhythm dominating what is a contemplative and calm song, though Arcuragi does show flashes of his vocal range as the swells reach their highest points.

The as-of-yet untitled album is reportedly due to appear sometime in 2018, so keep an eye on the Adam Arcuragi website for more information.

The post Bright Sparks: Vol. 15 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Out on Frenchkiss Records in 2005, this is an album infused with feel-good rock swagger, a trademark of The Hold Steady who are often tagged as a carefree band concerned only with beer and good times. For me (and many others, I’m not speaking of a revelation here), this misses the point entirely. It seems the kind of view held by people who dream of road trips after reading Kerouac. There is a glory in Finn’s work, but it is a glory intrinsically linked to sadness, a Christian glory consisting of everything from sweet nostalgia to cell-splitting, body-selling depression. The characters are going full-throttle because they are afraid of what will happen should they stop, something that brings to mind David Foster Wallace’s ideas on addiction vs. an existential void: “Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties – all these chase away loneliness by making me forget my name’s Dave.”

‘Hornets! Hornets!’ introduces us to Holly, the Bones Brigade-watching, Kate Bush-miming, Nabokov-referencing woman who goes with whoever’s going to get her the highest. It’s never quite clear exactly where she is or what is happening, a vagueness which continues onto the next track and indeed throughout the whole album. ‘Cattle & the Creeping Things’, packed with Biblical references, has always made me think of AA/NA (especially as Holly mentions going through the program), the collection of dysfunctional characters and hijinks similar to those of Infinite Jest’s Ennet House. Whether Finn intended to portray this scene is unclear (Separation Sunday is that sort of album). ‘Little Hoodrat Friend’ goes on to describe how pain and joy are linked, as in addiction, something symbolised perfectly by talk of tattoos (she’s got blue black ink and it’s scratched into her lower back. It said: Damn right he’ll rise again”). ‘Banging Camp’ tells of her descent into the nitrous-fuelled tent community pitched on the banks of the Mississippi and her refusal to slow down despite the risks:

“Holly wore a cross to ward them off.
She said if they think you’re a Christian then they won’t bring in the dogs.
And if they think you’re a catholic then they’ll wanna meet your boss.
Holly wore a cross to ward them off”

‘Charlemagne In Sweatpants’ introduces the pimp Charlemagne, a figure with whom Holly becomes entangled (“and it’s not like she’s enslaved. It’s more like she’s enthralled”) and it seems likely that Holly is accelerating, increasing elevation to avoid the comedown (“first it makes her feel tall then it makes her feel small and it’s all a sweet fleeting feeling”).

But the second half of the album sees a transformation in Holly. During ‘Stevie Nix’ the first rays of light poke through (“I was half dead. Then I got born again. I got lost in all the lights but it was ok in the end”) and ‘Multitude of Casualties’ sees the beginning of redemption (“she was feeling out the 5:30 folk mass… the night that she got born again”). ‘Don’t Let Me Explode’ is Holly’s plea for rescue (with her calling on Saint Barbara, the patron saint of a number of occupations linked to sudden death) and ‘Chicago Seemed Tired Last Night’, while not mentioning any characters by name, comes across as an advert for The Scene that Holly is leaving behind:

“We mix our own mythologies. We push them out through PA systems.
We dictate our doxologies and try to get sleeping kids to sit up and listen.
I’m not saying we could save you.
But we could put you in a place where you could save yourself.
If you don’t get born again at least you’ll get high as hell”

But Holly is out the other side. Holly saves herself. ‘Crucifixion Cruise’ sees her wake in a confession booth, sick and tired but feeling brave enough to change or at least attempt it:

“She said Lord what do you recommend?
To a real sweet girl who’s made some not sweet friends.
Lord what would you prescribe?
To a real soft girl who’s having real hard times”

The final track, a contender for my favourite, ‘How a Resurrection Really Feels’, tells of Holly crashing from the confession booth into Easter Mass. She stands among the pews in her dishevelled state and says “Father, can I tell your congregation how a resurrection really feels?” The track is a culmination of all that Separation Sunday stands for, regret and joy swirl around the church as Hallelujah confesses her adventures and troubles and finally earns her full name.

There is a section of Don DeLillo’s Underworld (an extract later released as the title story in his collection The Angel Esmeralda) that captures this atmosphere perfectly. Two nuns travel to a run-down area of the Bronx where a crew of graffiti artists paint an angel for every child that dies. The two Sisters are disillusioned by the violence and sadness they see but at the end of the story witness the inexplicable appearance of an image upon a billboard in a busy street. An image of a murdered girl, Esmeralda:

“Her presence was a verifying force, a figure from a universal church… Everything felt near at hand, breaking upon her, sadness and loss and glory and an old mother’s bleak pity and a force at some deep level of lament that made her feel inseparable from the shakers and mourners, the awestruck who stood in tidal traffic.”

Holly is away from home for a long period, a victim of her generation, mourned by her loved ones whether she is dead or otherwise (“they wrote her name in Magic Marks, on stop signs and subway cars, they got a mural up on East 13^th that said Hallelujah rest in peace”). In her absence she’s a saint, in her return an angel, her redemption is full of the sadness, pity and glory. But the redemption is not hers alone. It is fundamentally personal yet communal, shared by all. What has come before happened to everyone and no-one, means everything and nothing. To return to DeLillo: “she was nameless for a moment… a disembodied fact in liquid form, pouring into the crowd.” What has happened has happened but, for that moment at least, Holly is not alone.

This post has rambled on too long already and I’ve barely mentioned the array of references scattered across the album from Nelson Algren to Rod Stewart, Mary Tyler Moore to Jackie Onassis. I’ve not mentioned how Finn references old Hold Steady songs and even older Lifter Puller songs. I’ve not revealed that Holly reappears later in The Hold Steady catalogue. What’s worse, I’ve passed over killer lines that make the whole thing so special (“She drove it like she stole it. She stole it fast and with a multitude of casualties”). The truth is you could do a PhD on this thing. Maybe somebody already has.

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