Wilder Maker’s forthcoming album The Streets Like Beds Still Warm is a very different record to Male Models. One even more ambitious in scope (it’s the first of a planned triptych to be released across the next eighteen months) and unique in its creation which nevertheless seems driven by the spirit of its predecessor. As though the band itself was one such figure looking to move and progress and reach for something different. Birnbaum has called The Streets… “the inverse of the typical songwriter record,” the music recorded during open-ended sessions where core band members Adam Brisbin, Nick Jost, Sean Mullins improvised and swapped instruments at will, and guests including Katie Von Schleicher, Joseph Shabason, Macie Stewart, Chuck Johnson, Will Shore, Rebecca el-Saleh (Kitba) and Cole Kamen-Green added their own touches too, before Birnbaum took the result home and slowly whittled it into the form it takes today.

The result, made possible by both a band now experienced in working together and a label in Western Vinyl willing to trust them, swaps the sleek psych and goodtime rock sensibilities of its predecessor for something altogether more stark and lonely, less a house party than a late-night wander through unfamiliar streets. Which is not to suggest minimalism, the sound owing much to experimental and alt-jazz forebears, but rather the presiding mood. One indebted to the shadow and subtle desperation of noir cinema, the perfect soundtrack as Birnbaum’s worldweary narrator flits between bars and hospital rooms while nursing concerns both trivial and existential.

The trilogy of albums promises to chart an entire night in the city, with The Streets Like Beds Still Warm taking us from dusk to sometime after midnight. And the style makes good on the form. These are songs free from traditional structures but never sprawling. Ambiguous and often hypnotic but governed by linear motion. A path down which we follow the protagonist, watching as he moves through the night and the night moves through him, his own character and state of mind shifting as the hours slide on by. “Film noir detectives always start out looking immaculate, but by the end of the film they have a torn collar, a black eye, their slacks are stained, and they’ve started slapping people around in desperation,” Birnbaum says. “Are they the good guy anymore? I find this fascinating and I love the visual cues reflecting the internal landscape.” 

With the album set for release in September, Wilder Maker have unveiled the two opening tracks as singles. Listen to ‘Strange Meeting with Owls’ and ‘Skewered by the Daystar’ below and take your first few steps into what will be a long night indeed.

The Streets Like Beds Still Warm will be released on the 19th September via Western Vinyl and you can pre-order it now from the Wilder Maker Bandcamp page.

Photo by Keegan Grandbois

The post Wilder Maker – Strange Meeting with Owls / Skewered by the Daystar appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Adeline Hotel – Whodunnit

Ruination Record Co.

“There’s always a strange combination of continuity and change within a new album from Adeline Hotel. Each record building upon what came before it while often in some respects also turning away to chart new ground. As though the project exists as a kind of world of its own, and the function of each release is to bring us a view of a different corner. Adeline Hotel as a vast space we’re discovering album by album, song by song, with Dan Knishkowy not so much engineering the experience as leading the way. This exploratory spirit is central to Whodunnit […] an album following a tradition which lists the likes of Gillian Welch, Neil Young and Van Morrison among its practitioners. Songs as a form of stream of consciousness, not only in terms of lyrics but the very sound itself. The sense of having tapped into some wellspring of movement or momentum and choosing to lean into the flow.” [Review]

Advance Base – Horrible Occurrences

Run For Cover / Orindal Records

“For while the setting is entirely imaginary, the narratives and characters owe much to real life. Indeed the killer [of ‘The Year I Lived in Richmond’] is inspired by an analogous figure who stalked a place Advance Base‘s Own Ashworth once called home, fictionalised to create some sense of distance and decency. If Horrible Occurrences can be distilled into one reductive image, then that is perhaps the most enlightening. A receptacle into which bad memories and old stories can be poured. A small town diorama in which they can play out again, change shapes, take on lives of their own. One we might approach and watch over along with Ashworth, feeling tall from that perspective, relatively safe in the top-down view.” [Review]

Anne Malin – Strange Power!

Dear Life Records

Released in tandem book-length poem What Floods under the name AM Ringwalt, Anne Malin‘s Strange Power! is an album which explores “how nature and its inherent motion might possess the key to the process of healing in the aftermath of trauma and loss,” as we wrote earlier in the year. Something which possesses a palpable momentum yet no clear conclusion. In other hands, this lack of answers or endings might be held up as the tragic farce of existence, but here is positioned more like an opportunity. To continue asking questions both of yourself and your surroundings, as though the act of interrogation is its own strange power. A sign of a faith in something human and sublime.

Being Dead – EELS

Bayonet Records

“If you thought [previous release] When Horses Would Run was inventive, then just wait until you hear what is coming next. Because the new Being Dead full-length EELS […] takes everything that made its predecessor special and pushes it further. Travelling to Los Angeles for a fortnight of writing and recording with John Congleton, the pair pushed themselves to embrace the singular spirit of their work. The result is a record that’s more intense, more raucous and decidedly darker than anything which has come before, without sacrificing that mischievous persona.” [Review]

Ben Seretan – Allora

Tiny Engines

Described by Ben Seretan as his “insane Italy record,” Allora represents a snapshot from a very specific time and place. Or rather it would, should ‘snapshot’ come anywhere close to describing the scale, heft and sheer abundance of moving parts on show. Seretan and his band were due to play a wedding at the tail end of “a wonderful but lightly disastrous tour” of Europe during the summer of 2019, only for rain to half play and leave them in the lurch. But rather than waste the curious mix of energy and exhaustion that sets in at the end of a tour, they decided to make an album instead. A three-day stint at a farmhouse in the hills overlooking Venice with renowned mixing engineer, producer, musician Matt Bordin was arranged. A brief moment where a plethora of emotions were processed and purged through joyful noise. The result is unashamedly maximalist, entirely heartfelt, and in possession of that lightning-in-a-bottle feel that suggests it could never have materialised anywhere else. Catharsis has long been a key thread of Ben Seretan’s work, but rarely has it gone quite so hard.

The Big Easy – (It’s No Secret) The Truth As Bad As the View

Trash Casual Records

“It’s notable that The Big Easy’s latest album, (It’s No Secret) The Truth As Bad As The View, is the first to feature Berthomieux’s image on the cover. The first symbol on a record that looks to grapple with exactly how and why a person of colour might be made to feel an interloper within certain artistic circles. Berthomieux cites a James Baldwin statement as a key to realigning his perspective. ‘To be a Negro in this country,’ Baldwin wrote, ‘and to be relatively conscious is to be in a state of rage almost all of the time.’ Suddenly what had for so long seemed like a personal hang-up or imposter syndrome was revealed to be an intrinsic part of the Black experience, and to connect his own emotions with a historic struggle proved liberating. Thus the album became an exercise in owning his identity and finally voicing those things kept buried for so long. ‘It’s No Secret is kind of like a journal,’ as Berthomieux concludes, ‘a place where I can express the things that I haven’t been able to say out loud’.” [Review]

Brown Horse – Reservoir

Loose Music

“Call it distraction, call it despair / No matter what you call it you can feel it when it’s there.” These lines from the track ‘Bloodstain’ encapsulate the presiding mood of Brown Horse’s Reservoir. A sense of unease which permeates their alt-country style like something “drifted on the low tide,” as the song continues. Something that’s now “hell bent for to stay.” This disquiet is evoked not only in images of stark estuary mudflats and cold fields but also polycotton shirts and soulless expanses of megastores. In the nostalgic melancholy of opener ‘Stealing Horses’, or the Molina-esque lyricism of songs like ‘Sunfisher’ and ‘Outtakes’ with their burning houses, hummingbird hearts and singing birds. And like all the best Gothic atmosphere, it is not entirely clear whether the sensation is a haunting from some ancient thing or a dark harbinger of what is to come.

Cara Beth Satalino – Little Green

Worried Songs

“The success of Little Green is in no small part a result of the nuanced nature of Cara Beth Satalino’s approach. Early on you come to appreciate her uncanny ability to combine deep soul-searching with offhand observations and gentle humour, inventive imagery and smart turns of phrase creating something rich and full of life despite the surrounding turmoil. [A record] soft and fragile as a little green shoot but with a spark of energy too, a desire to keep on. It might be too dark to see what is in front of you, but the earth is still turning and the bright star is still burning. There is time yet to grow towards the light.” [Review]

Cassandra Jenkins – My Light, My Destroyer

Dead Oceans

Cassandra Jenkins intended to step away from music after her 2021 album An Overview on Phenomenal Nature, only for the album to resonant so deeply with audiences she found herself newly (and perhaps reluctantly) energised, pulled back towards the urge to create. My Light, My Destroyer is what emerged a few years later, a record which not so much builds upon its predecessor as explodes out in every direction. Sophistipop, jazz and New Age elements lift Jenkins’s indie rock sound to almost orchestral territory, while layers of found sounds and field recordings anchor the otherwise celestial style in the lived-in world. This duality between the grounded and the elevated is typical of the tone, where encroaching darkness is matched by a curiosity and attentiveness to wonder. The world is beautiful, the world is burning, and both of these facts are made more urgent by the other.

The Chairman Dances – Evening Song

Self-Released

“Originating as a narrative poem, The Chairman Dances‘ new album Evening Song traces the early days of a nascent relationship,” we wrote back in September. “A seminarian and a drummer mutually enamoured with one another, caught in the heady space of attraction and mystery, hungry to learn everything there is to know about the other.” Working from this point of intersection, Eric Krewson and co. bring the pair of characters to life, providing small glimpses into moments both special and seemingly mundane to achieve a strikingly intimate sense of humanity. As with much of The Chairman Dances’ catalogue, the beauty is in the detail. The hollow knock of shoes, the wail of an oven’s timer, the catch of a lock. Small confessions shared between two people daring to allow their lives to become enmeshed.

The Dead Tongues – Body of Light / I Am a Cloud

Psychic Hotline

Not content with releasing just one record this year, Ryan Gustafson’s The Dead Tongues put out two simultaneously. The albums, published as standalone digital releases but brought together in a double LP, display both aspects of the Asheville, North Carolina songwriter’s oeuvre. I Am A Cloud is an exercise is meandering cosmic Americana, what Gustafson calls “a fever dream of song and spoken-word about the toggle between identity and ephemerality,” while Body of Light sees things solidify into discrete folk rock songs. Joined by a stellar cast of collaborators and a sense of improvisational freedom, it’s the most expensive and ambitious Dead Tongues release to date.

Deerlady – Greatest Hits

Self-Released

Described as “a collection of songs about intimacy,” Greatest Hits sees Mali Obomsawin and Magdalena Abrego unite as Deerlady to conjure soundscapes simultaneously stark, tender and thunderous. Both Obomsawin and Abrego have backgrounds in jazz, and though some of the genre’s fluidity carries through, the Deerlady project exists outside of that sphere and the expectations it carries. Rather, Greatest Hits offers an indie rock style free to be more elemental and raw, one attuned to ideas of softness and hope within a hostile and violent world. As if in the face of colonial cruelty, sound might fill the gaps where words cannot suffice. “Brick and concrete / two hundred thousand years buried beneath / while the stars witnessed the unholy,” as Obomsawin, who is from the Abenaki First Nation at Odanak, sings on ‘Masterpieces’. “Well I take it in / I wrestle with the language to begin / I didn’t come to make a speech, I came to live.”

Desert Liminal – Black Ocean

Whited Sepulchre Records

“Released in 2021, Desert Liminal‘s Glass Fate found the Chicago band “settling into a higher form,” as we put it at the time, with violinist and noise artist Mallory Linehan (AKA Chelsea Bridge) joining Sarah Jane Quillin and Rob Logan to elevate their trademark dreamy aesthetic. [Black Ocean] in many ways represents a continuation of this process. With the outfit now cemented as a trio, Linehan joins Quillin as a songwriter and vocalist, grounding the nascent sense of collaboration and connection which emerged on Glass Fate as a core facet of Desert Liminal. A development which is thematically resonant too, the record exploring ways in which death can be faced communally, and grief transmuted into something affirming and meaningful. Chicago’s DIY scene carried Quillin through the worst experiences, and Black Ocean looks to distil this experience into its purest form. The resulting songs often seem like love letters to the people in these communities. Those figures who stood next to you through the best and worst of times.” [Review]

Distant Reader – Place of Words Now Gone

Lily Tapes & Discs

“No news in weeks from outside town,” announces Emmerich Anklam at the beginning of the latest Distant Reader album, Place of Words Now Gone, thrusting the listener into a world suddenly quiet along with his bewildered characters. “Who left me in the center of this desolation?” one such person asks, “Who’s hearing me talk? Does it matter at all? Is anyone still out there? And who can tell the difference between the end and the beginning?” The record took seed in Anklam’s brain during long train rides through the fabled American landscape, and although a clear work of fiction, it’s hard not to see reality in the community it describes—abandoned by those beyond it’s boundaries, succumbing to helplessness as they lose what little agency were ever afforded them. A portrait of an isolated and dislocated America where those left behind are left to struggle and mourn as a deepening silence floods the places they call home. “And everybody she knows goes quiet trying to forget about the ways they could diminish still,” as Emmerich sings on ‘From High Remove’, “the spiral closing in around all of them. Words vanish fold in on themselves, questions halved quartered eighthed. Absence of sound infects all who feel it. Tones, phrases returning to the ether.”

Emily Hines – These Days

Self-Released

“I don’t know about you, but I’m holding out hope.” So sings Emily Hines on ‘UFO’, a single which embodies the tone of her full-length These Days. As warm and soft as a blanket to wrap around yourself in the cold winter months, but with a sharp pang of something else too, a bittersweet bite more potent than the frost at the window. The entire album is an understated gem, full of quiet and wistful songs about difficult relationships, questions unanswered or unanswerable, hoping for something more. On ‘UFO’ this ranges from a desire to know the truth about the Roswell landings to wishing for the sublime reckoning of the Second Coming. But for all of its outlandish subject matter, the song, like These Days as a whole, is entirely straight with its underlying sentiment. There is still hope that wrongs can be righted, Hines insists. Things can change for the better.

Enumclaw – Home in Another Life

Run For Cover Records

Ever wondered what might happen if you were to cross the beams of don’t-give-a-shit slacker rock and confessional, emotionally intense emo? Home in Another Life, the latest album from Tacoma’s Enumclaw, is here to provide an answer. The record is unafraid of the largest themes, lead Aramis Johnson wrestles with everything from God, illness and death to self-doubt, relationships and sex, but does so with a sense of energy and swagger. As though faced with the tangle of life’s difficulties, Enumclaw make the conscious decision to charge headlong forwards, conscious of every possible branch and thorn but moving too purposefully to become ensnared in any one spot. Whether it be the denial of a difficult diagnosis in ‘Not Just Yet’ or the internalised shame of ‘I Still Feel Bad About Masturbation’, Home in Another Life takes emotions and experiences which so often feel unspeakable and shouts them aloud in an act of agency.

The Felice Brothers – Valley of Abandoned Songs

Million Stars / 15 Passenger

Since their inception in 2006, The Felice Brothers have established themselves as one of the premier acts of contemporary US folk rock, building a catalogue of urgent narratives and strange visions with enough depth to stand alongside their literary influences. “Poems and short stories packed with clever references and wry turns of phrase” as we wrote of 2021’s From Dreams to Dust. “A confrontation of the grim realities of our moment that nevertheless celebrates the fact of being alive.” As the title suggests, Valley of Abandoned Songs is a collection of tracks written throughout the project which never quite made it onto a record, but were nevertheless strong enough to convince Conor Oberst, no less, to set up a brand new label just to release them into the world. Single ‘Flowers By The Roadside’ is the perfect example of their ability to conjure entire lives and histories in the shortest of spaces.

Are you
High as Mr Albert was
When he drove the cross town bus
Straight into the sky
I’m just sitting in these flowers by the roadside
I’m not trying to flag a ride
Just happy watching the wide world go by

The Fourth Wall – Return Forever

DevilDuck Records

Kickstarted by a family story of a relative who left a child behind when emigrating to the United States, Return Forever by The Fourth Wall is “an album which,” as we put it in our review, “combs through the contradictions of the immigrant experience in order to voice feelings otherwise impossible to convey.” Delivered via a weighty brand of indie rock, the mood ranges from anger and confusion to catharsis and joy, and the result, as we continued, is “a mixture of hope, denial and genuine love which not only subverts expectations but confounds any attempt to properly reassess. As though some decisions can be so complicated, their impacts so profound, that the very physics of emotions are bent beyond their own laws.”

Gabriel Birnbaum – Patron Saint of Tireless Losers

Western Vinyl

“Gabriel Birnbaum has become increasingly interested in music’s narrative potential, and Patron Saint [of Tireless Losers] finds him at his most confident to date,” we wrote in June. An album where Birnbaum again evolves his sound and writing to present “vignettes which occupy the knife-edge between specificity and ambiguity, rewarding the return listener with layers of wry humour and naked human emotion.” Birnbaum introduces a diverse array of characters—young and old, male and female, lonely and in the throes of love—all troubled by the gap between their own views of the world and the evitable dawning reality. As though every person, be they nervous concert-goer or overeager prepper ostensibly ready for the end times, is at some point destined to realise the true, unforgiving nature of mortal existence.

h. pruz – No Glory

Mtn Laurel Recording Co.

Many albums exists within the giddy period of new beginnings, their creators emerging from a tumultuous period of suffering or drastic change with an almost epiphanic perspective. The bad thing is in the past now, life can show its light. But while h. pruz‘s latest album No Glory focuses its gaze on a variety of pivotal moments from the life of Hannah Pruzinsky—moments they withstood, survived, emerged from—and goes as far as to imagine the perfect life ahead, it refuses the temptation to bask in the transient warmth of such possibility. As though to present the experience of a newly hopeful present as something unmarked by regret or doubt is to fail to fully inhabit its complexities. “I keep seeing change,” as Pruzunsky sings on ‘I Keep Changing’. “Peel away the borders / Of things with weight like copper / Thought it was gold / Til it turned green / In the rain.”

Haley Heynderickx – Seed of a Seed

Mama Bird Recording Co.

In 2018, Haley Heynderickx released I Need To Start a Garden, an album “all about growth and the hope of new beginnings” we wrote, yet one which refused to “shy away from the necessary hard work that makes such growth possible.” Follow-up Seed of a Seed emerges from this process of emotional cultivation, Heynderickx learning how to continue and improve upon the previous album’s progress while coming to understand such things are rarely linear and never complete. Opening tracks ‘Gemini’ and ‘Foxglove’ are marked by a sense of urgency, seized by the haste of new growth, though by the second half the tempo levels out into something slower and more complex. A host of musicians support the trademark finger-picked style, creating a layered thicket, the Haley Heynderickx sound now a rich polyculture diverse and hardy enough to face whatever life might throw at it next.

Hatis Noit – Aura (Rework Series)

Erased Tapes

In 2022, Hatis Noit released Aura, a full-length album “which draws from the vast array of Noit’s influences from Japanese classical music Gagaku and operatic performers to Bulgarian and Gregorian chanting,” we wrote previously, “not to mention avant-garde experimentalists and pop vocal styles.” Aura has had a new lease of life in subsequent years, with a series of reworkings made in collaboration with an equally diverse set of artists. After the likes of William Basinski and Matthew Herbert in 2023, this year saw Noit enlist the talents of Laraaji, Preservation and Armand Hammer to push the already kaleidoscopic sound even further.

Holland Andrews – Answers

LEITER

“Back in 2021, Brooklyn-based composer, producer, vocalist, and clarinetist Holland Andrews released Wordless, the first of a series of EPs under their own name (having previously recorded as Like A Villain). Released with label LEITER, the record introduced a distinctively transportive sound. Led by voice and clarinet and processed through a variety of electronics, the compositions offered soundscapes in which the listener might lose themselves. Rich tapestries of colour and texture crafted with an almost cinematic attention to detail. Subsequent EPs Forgettings and Doubtless furthered the scope and intention of the style, exploring themes of healing and transcendence as Andrews’s genre-bending sensibilities solidified into a style of their own […] Now Holland Andrews has returned with Answers, the fourth and final EP of the series which feels like both the clearest realisation of their creative ideals and a continued, active resistance against genre conventions.” [Review]

Hour – Ease the Work

Dear Life Records

With a studio’s worth of equipment in tow, the ensemble Hour took a ferry to Peaks Island, Maine out of season, and spent a week holed up together in an old theatre to record their latest album, Ease the Work. The project boasts a diverse cast of musicians—lead Michael Cormier O’Leary (electric guitar, classical guitar, percussion) joined by Jason Calhoun (synth), Em Downing (violin), Matt Fox (viola), Elisabeth Fuchsia (violin) Peter Gill (bass), Lucas Knapp (radio effects, field recordings, piano), Evan McGonagill (cello), Peter McLaughlin (drums, percussion), Keith J. Nelson (bass clarinet, clarinet), Erika Nininger (piano, rhodes) and Abi Reimold (electric guitar)—each bringing their own instincts and sensibilities to the project’s lush instrumental arrangements. The intimacy of the recording process allowed each separate contribution to coalesce into harmony. “Challenging any clear distinction between composition and improvisation,” as we wrote earlier in the year, the resulting record “performs the same small miracle of the previous records, presenting the everyday in all its joy and melancholy, comfort and strangeness.”

I Saw the TV Glow soundtrack

A24 Music

“The danger of nostalgia is that it tends to confuse the actual home with the imaginary one,” Svetlana Boym wrote in her 2001 book, The Future of Nostalgia. “In extreme cases it can create a phantom homeland.” The warning is explored in Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow, a film with a decidedly complex relationship with nostalgia. It can be something to wrap yourself in, bond over, shelter beneath, yet with this retreat comes the risk of a detrimental stasis, where fondness for the past comes to eat up the present. The interrogation is furthered by the film’s soundtrack, where the likes of Caroline Polachek, Florist, Frances Quinlan, Sadurn and King Women tap into the unapologetically sentimental nineties aesthetic. But it is the very first track that is perhaps the most thematically resonant. Yeule‘s cover of ‘Anthems For A Seventeen Year-Old Girl’ is so distorted by glitchy imperfections it becomes something of a Baudrillardian simulacrum. A memory denatured by overhandling, unpegged from reality, a figment of the imagination which has come to replace the real.

Jahnah Camille – i tried to freeze light, but only remember a girl

Winspear

“The songs offer a picture of late adolescence in all of its bittersweet nuance, its introspective contemplation matched only by its bold confessional attitude.” That’s how we described i tried to freeze light, but only remember a girl, the debut EP of Birmingham, Alabama-based songwriter and musician  Jahnah Camille earlier this year. The release reaches for a number of genres with real confidence, be it the nineties alt-rock swagger of ‘flesh’ or the country twang of ‘roadkill’. “[But it is] the lyrics which really see the artist stand apart,” we continued. “Because Camille has a knack for combining emotion and self-awareness, offering songs entirely committed to the feelings being explored but never lacking a wry wrinkle to add that extra layer of personality.”

Jess Ribeiro – Summer of Love

Poison City Records

Written amid a period of intense instability, Summer of Love finds Jess Ribeiro negotiating the liminal space between hope and reality, confronting the past and possible futures alongside the present moment to find a way towards healing. Ribeiro chose to lean into the turmoil during the recording process, undeterred by the fact collaborators could only visit individually thanks to the pandemic restrictions, and many never made it to the studio at all. Yet together with Nick Huggins, she nonetheless enlisted the talents of Jim White (drums), Darcy McNulty (saxophone), Leah Senior (keys), James Seymour (bass), Davie Mudie (percussion) and Carrie Webster (violin and viola), guiding each musician according to the release’s spirit. The result is improvised and exploratory yet bound by the same sense of longing. That will to work through tumultuous times towards something more solid. The hope that chaos might resolve itself into a more hospitable state.

Josaleigh Pollett – In The Garden, By The Weeds

Self-Released

“An excavation of the present which inevitably tends pastward, tracing a presiding cynicism back to its roots in search of a cause.” That’s how we described Josaleigh Pollett‘s third album In The Garden, By The Weeds. At first, the imagery of the title resonates on a surface level, the Salt Lake City songwriter surveying the ecosystem of their life, assessing which parts to nurture, which to pluck or prune. But spend a minute with this collection of stark and glitchy songs and it becomes clear things are operating on a deeper level. For Pollett not only gives the weeds their due but the subterranean conditions too. Those places dark and elemental we so often pretend have no relation to us higher beings. Places perhaps inside of our lives or our selves we must reach down into if we are to make any real progress in cultivating the kind of environment we want to live in. Even if it means getting our hands dirty, scrunching our eyes and grasping blind.

Joy Guidry – AMEN

Whited Sepulchre Records

“In AMEN,” explained Joy Guidry of their most recent album, “there is a lot experimentation with different forms of Black American music. I wanted to lean heavily on my Texas, Louisiana and Creole roots in this project. There were many days spent with my ancestors during the writing of this album and I’m eternally grateful for the music they sang to me during our time together.” The record saw the basoonist and composer develop their sound with the newly prominent influence of gospel and spiritual jazz, combining the sensibilities of church music with jazz invention to create something fundamentally devotional. “The result is at once communal and singular,” as we put it in our review. “Joy Guidry as realised in their most complete form to date.”

K. Freund – Trash Can Lamb

Soda Gong

We’ve been following the work of Akron, Ohio’s Keith Freund for the better part of two decades, originally with Trouble Books, then as one half of the experimental/neoclassical duo Lejsovka & Freund, and more recently with Lemon Quartet and Aqueduct Ensemble. Following 2022’s Hunter on the Wing, Trash Can Lamb is Freund’s latest release under his own name, and offers another exercise in minimal piano, degraded samples and an array of tactile electronics. It’s the neoclassical equivalent of the folk art eccentric, spinning singular homebrew beauty from a treehouse studio filled with strange gadgets and devices, at far remove from the polish and pretension of the auditorium, yet somehow deeper for it. Trash Can Lamb walks it own path straight to the heart of things, small moments and sensations that you couldn’t describe with words if you tried.

Kali Malone – All Life Long

Ideologic Organ

“Manages to suggest both academic rigour and unburdened instinct, but ultimately transcends any focus on its intentions as the listener becomes immersed in the soundscape. Some hymn or lament, latent with the suggestion of the sublime, be it total dread or transcendence, silence or all-encompassing sound.” So we wrote of Living Torch by Kali Malone back in 2022, though the description could be extended to much of the Stockholm-based composer’s work. Written for pipe organ, choir and brass quintet, latest release All Life Long possesses all the same clarity and depth, breathing new life into classical techniques to create something at once intimate and exalted. Not holy music, per say, but music which operates according to the same ends. Aiming to evoke those sensations felt in the face of things far greater than us, more mysterious, yet surrounding us all the same.

Keanu Nelson – Wilurarrakutu

Mississippi Records

Primarily a poet in his home of Papunya, northwest of Alice Springs, Keanu Nelson was inspired to start singing his work after meeting producer Yuta Matsumura in the local arts centre. The result is Wilurarrakutu, an album first released on Altered States Tapes last year, but put out to a wider audience back in August by Mississippi Records. With Casio beats programmed by Matsumura as support, Nelson delivers deeply personal poetry on themes of loneliness and family, home and loss, in both Papunya Luritja and English. Nelson incorporates reggae and gospel influences into a sound which emerges from an electronic sonic lineage that trails back to the likes of Suicide and Francis Bebey but represents its own singular style. One which aches with a sense of longing, the relative simplicity of the arrangements allowing the emotional depth of Nelson’s poetry to sit front and centre, blurring the classic and the contemporary into something genuinely moving.

Lia Kohl – Normal Sounds

Moon Glyph

“Able to evoke existence in all of its magic and mundanity.” That’s how we described the work of Chicago-based cellist, composer and multidisciplinary artist Lia Kohl back in July, describing her album Normal Sounds as “at once normal and very much not, or else it is extraordinarily normal—with Kohl turning her attention to the acoustics of everyday living and presenting them back to the listener as something as something new.” Existing somewhere between music and sound art, the record uses synths and cello (as well as occasional flute and electronics from Ka Baird and sax from Patrick Shiroishi) to accentuate field recordings of human-made sounds, reflecting our own world back to us in a new light. Here the incidental is elevated, each song a cacophony crafted from the sounds we so often ignore or phase out. Kohl isn’t so much crafting a soundscape for us to hear as rewiring our brains so that our attention might be heightened. What we encounter in such a state is sometimes playful, sometimes strange, occasionally unnerving and melancholic in the way the slow passage of life always is. The human world in granular detail. What it sounds like to live here and now.

Lindsay Reamer – Natural Science

Dear Life Records

“[Songs which] not only represent a study of a specific time and place—capturing a snapshot of environments both natural and human and the porous border between the two—but also a report on how it feels to exist within that period. As though Lindsay Reamer serves as our guide through contemporary America as she knows it. A squeezed no-man’s land between the past and the future. A place where great beauty and banality sit side by side, where old choices drag unforeseen consequences towards us and yet the smallest details still seem to hold life in all of its inscrutable charm.” [Review]

Little Kid – A Million Easy Payments

Orindal Records

“[The] ability to vary the focal length of its perspective so gracefully is a signature of A Million Easy Payments. “The urgency in Kenny Boothby’s voice matches the stakes of his lyrics,” writes Dan Wriggins in the liner notes [of Little Kid‘s latest album], “epic ballads and reveries that come at life from all angles and exposures, driving at and a little over the limits of self-reflection.” The sense of an artist never quite satisfied with the scene they have captured, always looking to widen the lens to better represent the truth before them, or else zoom in closer in search of the missing detail which might click everything else into place. Call it a search for meaning, or even God Himself. In other hands, songs reaching for such things with the expansive style of Dylan and Welch at their most ambitious might feel like novelty or pastiche. But in this context it seems the only logical outcome for Little Kid’s specific way of working.” [Review]

Lollise – i hit the water

Switch Hit Records

“Hailing from Francistown in Botswana and now based in New York, Lollise is an artist who draws from the entirety of her musical history when crafting her songs. Hence the sound of her debut full-length I hit the water owes a debt to the styles which soundtracked her childhood and early years—including Setswana and Kalanga folk songs, South African electronic bubblegum and kwaito from the eighties and nineties, Congolese soukous and Zimbabwean sungura—as well as genres like Afrobeat, art-pop and new wave which she immersed herself in after moving to the US. What results is a sound capable of evoking the future and past simultaneously, where traditional styles are repurposed to open new directions, and the line between history and imagination blurs into something entirely new.” [Review]

Mary Ocher – Your Guide to Revolution

Underground Institute

“To say Mary Ocher’s latest album Your Guide to Revolution is ambitious in its intentions is to risk understatement. A kaleidoscopic and politically charged collection of songs which draws on Ocher’s childhood (born in Moscow to Jewish-Ukrainian parents before emigrating to Tel Aviv during the Gulf War) as a way into wider themes of resistance and civil disobedience. A huge array of styles and influences are utilised across the record, both to evoke the gamut of emotions triggered within the contemporary struggle and to ground the release within a wider history of such subversive art. A central part of the album is a series of three tracks which rework pieces by harpist Dorothy Ashby based on the Rubaiyat of Omar Khyyam, a triptych of songs which Ocher has collected into a short film which echoes The Color of Pomegranates by Sergei Parajanov.” [Review]

Merce Lemon – Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wilds

Darling Recordings

“A collection of nine songs with dirt under their fingernails, equal parts wild and vulnerable as they reckon with the changing tides of love in all its guises […] Merce Lemon’s songwriting is often gentle, careful and sincere ruminations on love and solitude, but this underlying ferality is perhaps the record’s biggest strength, and the most obvious step forward from Moonth. A reminder the soft animal can still bear its teeth, a kind of wildness that turns heartfelt, mid-tempo folk rock songs into blown-out anthems, building towards crescendos of wailing guitar and pure feeling.” [Review]

Minor Moon – The Light Up Waltz

Ruination Record Co.

Minor Moon‘s latest album The Light-Up Waltz is set within “speculative world, where civilisation has collapsed and the characters are made to exist in the aftermath,” as we wrote earlier in the year. “But far from some desolate landscape of grim suffering, this post-civilisation society is one coloured by the invention and playfulness of its inhabitants. As though steely determination can only be maintained with a suitable accompaniment of joy.” This is a collection of songs working under such a logic, finding its characters proactive in their search for meaning, and perhaps finding it through that very mindset. “To me,” as lead Sam Cantor puts it, “the antidote to fatalistic disillusionment is a kind of complicated dance with dread, hope and joy.”

MJ Lenderman – Manning Fireworks

Anti- Records

It’s fair to say MJ Lenderman has come a long way since we shared ‘Gentleman Jack’ from his 2021 album, Ghost of Your Guitar Solo. Through his what we’ve described previously as “masterful knack for combining details small and absurd into something which feels like life as it’s lived on the ground,” the last coulpe of years has seen Lenderman take the leap into the indie stratosphere, and latest album Manning Fireworks makes good on this acclaim without sacrificing the sensibilities which got him there in the first place. Often wacky yet always unabashedly earnest, these are songs of a different sort of American mythology. Colourful, chintzy, most likely temporary. A place of waterparks and McDonalds lots. Pocket Bibles, drunk drivers, Disney Pixar deleted scenes. A place inhabited by people who were once babies and now jerks. People like you and me.

Mol Sullivan – GOOSE

Self-Released

A self-described “long exposure photograph” charting growth both artistic and personal, Mol Sullivan‘s GOOSE serves as a portrait of a person within the arc of great change. With songs written in the aftermath of a relationship and during a nascent sobriety, the album opens with Sullivan “set deep in those early days of a new beginning,” as we wrote, “where everything feels possible yet tenuous and a little too vivid to bear,” but does not stay constrained to the present moment. Instead, we find an artist moving forwards and looking back, reflecting on who they were and who they want to be, reaching beyond stories of love and addiction for a more nuanced picture of life. An artist in dialogue with themselves, teasing out those fundamental things which exist beyond what happens to us within any given moment, and thus repositioning change as a positive force we might harness to become ourselves more fully.

mui zyu – nothing or something to die for / cantonese tasting menu EP

Father/Daughter Records

Last year’s Rotten Bun for an Eggless Century saw Hong Kong British artist mui zyu delve deep within themselves in search of a better understanding of their own identity. The songs mapped a vast labyrinth of history and personal experience and located the elusive truth not locked in some remote central chamber but rather via the process itself. But if the introspective survey of Rotten Bun charted the complex contours of its own small world, follow up nothing or something to die for flips its gaze outwards to take on a far bigger challenge—the chaotic, conflicted place we call home. Here human society is painted as an overwhelming and fundamentally lonely place, where an omnipresent technological connection belies the isolation at its core. Floating over this absurd space, mui zyu looks for the points where the veil between us is the thinnest, hoping a better existence might be possible while refusing to ignore evidence to the contrary. There might be nothing, there might be something to die for, or perhaps both of these things can be true at once.

Nap Eyes – The Neon Gate

Paradise of Bachelors

Through a string of ambitious, philosophical and playful albums, Halifax outfit Nap Eyes have established themselves as one of the most inventive, thematically interesting bands in contemporary indie rock. Even by their standards, The Neon Gate pushes the envelope on what songs can be and explore. Fans will recognise Nigel Chapman’s distinctively deadpan vocals, but the Nap Eyes sound has expanded in various directions, shapeshifting between tracks and unafraid of the abstract and improvised. Weird tangents are followed, eldritch stories are told, what rules there were are broken. The result is to witness something familiar transmogrify, metastasise, expand and contract before your eyes, the recognisable slowly twisted strange into a new, surreal landscape. A style inspired, at least in part, by the William Butler Yeats poem ‘I See Phantoms of Hatred and of the Heart’s Fullness and of the Coming Emptiness’. A poem which is adapted as a song near the end of the album:

I climb to the tower-top and lean upon broken stone,
A mist that is like blown snow is sweeping over all,
Valley, river, and elms, under the light of a moon
That seems unlike itself, that seems unchangeable,
A glittering sword out of the east. A puff of wind
And those white glimmering fragments of the mist sweep by.
Frenzies bewilder, reveries perturb the mind;
Monstrous familiar images swim to the mind’s eye.

Prostitute – Attempted Martyr

Self-Released

The past year has been desperate, dizzying and ferociously cruel for many, and no release captured this reality better than Attempted Martyr by Prostitute. Described as being “written and recorded under duress of a world in turmoil” and “dedicated to Lebanon, from Dearborn with love,” the album sits somewhere between noise rock, post-punk and jazz. A collection of songs twisted tight with intensity, always threatening to spin out of control, fired by the depthless fury of grief and somehow managing an air of plaintive sorrow too. Beneath the delivery’s bark and bite lies a deceptively diverse range of moods and emotions—from the mournful opening title track and spittle-flecked defiance of ‘Judge’ to poetic meditations on justice and resistance and even a certain wry humour (Prostitute one-up fellow Michigan punks Protomartyr by devoting an entire song to celebrity attorney Joumana Kayrouz). A timely reminder of the fertile relationship between anger and compassion, and a scream into the face of a world gone numb.

Rosali – Bite Down

Merge Records

“Help me, darling, I can’t seem to bite down on it / I can’t seem to feel what’s real anymore.” So opens the title track of Rosali‘s Bite Down, giving voice to a sentiment which underpins the entire album. But this is not a record of desperate pleas and drifting disconnection, rather the antidote to such things. As though having been touched by these emotions, Rosali chose to be proactive, confronting life’s ups and downs with a newfound defiance, determined to feel reality in all its forms. The title refers to “something more extreme than leaning in,” as Rosali told Mariana Timony for Bandcamp. “I’m taking a bite. I’m accepting it. I’m chewing it.” Again recorded with the David Nance Band to blur the line between solo and group effort, the resulting album effortlessly straddles folk and classic rock styles and builds upon everything which made 2021’s No Medium so special.

Roswit – Eternal Living

Mono Tapes

The debut album from self-described “olde punks” Roswit has one foot in classic Pacific Northwest indie pop and another across the ocean in a Flying Nun Records style jangle, with some wiry, stripped-back punk thrown in for good measure. From infectious opener ‘Grape’s Song’, which calls to mind fellow Vancouverites The Courtney’s, to the sleeves-rolled-up scrappiness of ‘King’s Song’, every song is packed with a sense of DIY fun. And to top it all there’s a throwback vibe, not to bygone decades but right back to the Middle Ages, a candy-coloured fantasy land of knights and dragons and damsels in distress. This is sometimes achieved with subtle lyrical nods, and others musically, such as ‘Princess’s Song’ which sounds like a lo-fi punk take on a Medieval ballad. Eternal Loving is perhaps best summed up by ‘Dreamer’s Song’, which has it all—supremely catchy hooks, galloping percussion, oohing and aahing harmonies, flutters of flute and daydreams of ye olden days.

Shovel Dance Collective – The Shovel Dance

American Dreams

“We want to play and experiment, layer and move between different spaces in recording, and extend the limits of our instruments to sing and break in new ways,” explained Shovel Dance Collective of their experimental folk sound. “Improvising, textural playing, and moving as one free organic organism are all part of the experiments we try and make in form. It’s all towards this one goal: constructing the Shovel Dance world and saying what we feel needs saying.” Latest album The Shovel Dance saw the outfit “position themselves within an exciting contemporary movement,” as we wrote in our review, “and The Shovel Dance is sure to join the likes of Lankum’s False Lankum and Shane Parish’s Liverpool in their mission to push old sounds and stories into new dimensions.”

S. Raekwon – Steven

Father/Daughter Records

A moniker can offer many things for an artist, not least a sense of separation between their ‘real’ and performing selves, but while Steven Raekwon Reynolds released his latest record Steven under the name S. Raekwon, the album’s title is suggestive of the manner in which the songs work to close this gap in search of authenticity. Because this is a personal album in the most practical sense. Reynolds did all the writing, production, engineering and mixing, not to mention played every instrument with the exception of the drums. What emerged is a collection of songs which serves to illuminate the different parts of their curator, as though the record is a prism through which he shines himself, each track a different wavelength of his personality stratified according to mood. “Maybe subliminally or unconsciously, the songs kind of grouped together in a certain way to explore different areas of myself,” he explains. “The beginning is rage and angriness in a certain way. The middle is this uncertainty of questioning yourself, who you are, and if you’re a good person. And then at the end, I think it comes to a place of resolution. I’m just examining myself and trying to come to a better understanding of who I am.”

Sinai Vessel – I SING

Keeled Scales

In October, Caleb Cordes announced that Sinai Vessel, his moniker for the past fifteen years, had come to an end. “You have taught me everything and I’m taking it all with me,” he wrote in a statement of social media, looking forward to new, healthier future without the constant striving for further success and recognition in the cockfight that is the music industry. Released back in the summer before this news broke, the fourth Sinai Vessel album I SING represents both a parting gift from a project that has meant so much to so many, and a frank examination of the factors which grind artists down to the point of submission, taking on themes so often absent from art with a sincere yet unromantic air. “I sing for a reason,” Cordes sings on the title track. “My reason’s the same // as the nurses buying rentals
/ and rides to broadway
/ who fill up big bars on buses
/ and fall off shit-faced / and the trained men who clock in / coming back from smoke breaks
/ who zoom in from satellites
/ to bomb palisades.” Because I SING is an album about the rarest of things: money, or the lack thereof. How contemporary society seems built to punish anyone who dares attempt a living through art, and the ways in which the compulsion to create persists in ways both magical and mundane. “I sing ‘cos I wake up
/ again and again,” as the title track continues. “It never stops coming
/ it doesn’t make sense.” Sinai Vessel is dead, long live Caleb Cordes.

Slippers – So You Like Slippers

Lame-O Records

“It was childhood residence Atlanta that lit Madeleine BB’s creative fire. The city is home to the headquarters of Cartoon Network, which inspired not only her interest in animation, but indie rock too. ‘Cartoon Network… was a big part of my life growing up,’ she says. ‘They always had a lot of indie bands in the fold there—I remember there was this Powerpuff Girls music compilation that had Devo and Apples in Stereo and Shonen Knife on it. My dad bought that for me and I just became obsessed with it.’ Many of the tracks on [Slippers‘] So You Like Slippers? are a product of this kind of cross pollination, either inspired by or written specifically for BB’s animations. ‘I was trying to make these jokey kid’s songs, sort of like They Might Be Giants, to go along with my animations,’ she describes, and it’s clear this visual starting point provided a sense of creative freedom. License to write quickly and without inhibition, and the ability to explore themes and feelings that could be painstakingly overwrought with charming ease.” [Review]

Tasha – All This and So Much More

Bayonet Records

“Finds an artist embracing the pace and breadth of their new life. Confronting each day with a sense of defiance rather than looking for somewhere to hide.” So we wrote of Tasha‘s All This and So Much More in a preview back in the summer, an album written amid a flurry of experiences that ran the gamut between agonising (unexpected grief, an abrupt separation) and amazing (a role in the Tony-nominated Broadway musical Illinoise). Where many might have sought some form of retreat from life’s constant barrage of change, the Chicago artist instead decided to lean into the momentum to embrace the potential of forward motion. “I’m overcome at the wonder around me,” she sings on the quasi-title track ‘So Much More’. “I fill my lungs, feel the air rush inside me / Could this be fun? Could I be happy?” The album works through the doubt of such questions with decisiveness, choosing to believe that the impossible might be true, life a joyous experience after all. “What if my hope didn’t have a ceiling? / What I want most, all I imagined / What if I chose to settle for nothing less than magic?”

Trace Mountains – Into the Burning Blue

Lame-O Records

Glance at the title of Trace Mountains‘ latest album Into the Burning Blue and you’d be forgiven for expecting a descent into something deep and dark, an assumption only strengthened by opener ‘In a Dream’. “A dispatch from whatever stage of capitalism we’re calling contemporary America as delivered from a breathless nighttime bike ride,” as we wrote of the track back in the summer. “The effect is passing through a dark passage full of eerie shadow without quite knowing if there’s an exit at the other end.” Yet rather than barrelling down towards some nadir, the track’s glittering eighties rock sensibilities manage to invert the arc, the climax instead finding Dave Benton breaching the surface into a wider world. Which isn’t to say the rest of Into the Burning Blue is bright and affirming, it is after all a record concerning the end and aftermath of a long-term relationship, rather that the shades of blue on offer are far more nuanced and diverse than you might at first expect. A picture of person moving through conflict and loss attuned to all the accompanying tones that come with it, and one delivered with all the widescreen confidence of Petty or Springsteen to boot.

villagerrr – Tear Your Heart Out

Darling Recordings

Zeroing in on life’s small, ostensibly ordinary moments to find the meaning within, villagerrr‘s latest album Tear Your Heart Out sees Mark Allen Scott embrace his Midwestern roots for a country-inflected brand of indie rock. Chillicothe, Ohio might have felt constrictive growing up, but home is home and soon a sense of fondness began to blossom, and with it came a desire to acknowledge the fact. “I want to wear where I’m from and my family on my sleeve,” Scott explains. “I’m proud of the twangy influence in my music from corny country songs I’d hear on the bus rides to school. I feel like I’m reclaiming where I come from and making it my own.” The result is a decidedly empathetic collection of songs able to zoom close to the smallest details of small town life, be it light through a sunroof, the smell of cut grass or pencil drawings made in an effort to preserve memories. Some of the tracks are tortured in their own quiet way (“Falling in and out of trust / With the ones you loved before,” as he sings on ‘Cry On’, “It’s not the way I hoped it would be / Oh, no”), some wryly funny (“I see you wearing your Carhartt jeans / Talking ’bout how you don’t got money,” is a refrain in ‘Car Heat’), but all are wrapped in a sense of understanding, as though villagerrr attempts to see through the tangle of emotions to see the fallible humans struggling underneath.

Waxahatchee – Tigers Blood

Anti- Records

When released in 2020, Waxahatchee‘s fifth full-length Saint Cloud felt like the pinnacle of the project, Katie Crutchfield pivots towards an alt-country aesthetic so seamless and fitting it appeared to be some form of completion. Only for Tigers Blood to roll around a few years later, an album which sees the Waxahatchee star rise even further. Unfazed by recent popularity, Crutchfield and co. resisted all the trappings of success and temptations to transcend into the mainstream to instead focus on the present. There are no synths on Tigers Blood. No cinematic pop flourishes. No indication of burning through a newly weighty budget. Which is to say, the album finds Crutchfield not so much dreaming of what Waxahatchee could become, but instead concentrating on exactly what it is. The result is full of heart, romance and hard-won authenticity that could only stem from a place of confidence. Waxahatchee might have found its final form, but you sense this is only its beginning.

Wendy Eisenberg – Viewfinder

American Dreams

“When Wendy Eisenberg finally got Lasik surgery after a lifelong struggle against an assortment of ocular and vision-based afflictions, the resulting impact went far deeper than they perhaps expected […] Viewfinder emerges from within this new experience of the world, reckoning with exactly what it means to see and not to see, and how beauty and meaning are inherent within both experiences […] How does our understanding of the physical world change according to our ability to visually perceive it? And what about other planes—the emotional, spiritual and metaphysical?” [Review]

West of Roan – Queen of Eyes

Spinster

“A god of doorways and portals, a god of seeing in the dark and in dreams, a saint of weeping in sorrow or in joy.” That’s how Laurel Premo, writing in the album notes, describes the titular figure of West of Roan‘s latest record Queen of Eyes. The guide which leads Annie Schermer and Channing Showalter deep into a realm of myth, archetype and imagery, some otherworld beneath our own which bears the load of all that has been before and will surely arrive in time. A place where both personal, historical and cultural trauma unwinds itself as story. When we say West of Roan is a project steeped in the folk tradition, we mean it in a fundamental sense beyond any musical style. That urge to communicate, console, explain or contextualise. To take on the largest of themes in the ways humans always have. The result isn’t so much ambiguous as multifaceted. Stark, beguiling, full of glory and grief. As mysterious as the Queen herself, demanding you submit to its forces to discover the transcendence within.

Why Bonnie – Wish On The Bone

Fire Talk

“How do we live authentically within a world which demands we perform and pretend? Is it possible to confront the true dismal nature of things and still retain a sense of hope? Such questions have weighed on [Blair] Howerton since previous Why Bonnie album 90 in November, not least because she felt she had evolved beyond the wistful country-inflected style those songs presented. “I’ve changed since that album, and I trust that I’ll probably continue to change,” as Howerton explains. Wish On The Bone looks to pinpoint who she is at this point in time without committing to any lasting identity. To possess the confidence to work beyond the expectations of preconception and present however feels right within the current moment. Hence an album which foregoes easy pigeonholing in terms of style, unified instead by the defiant new self-confidence which underpins it. “You owe it to the people who are experiencing the worst to just keep pushing,” as Howerton concludes. “These songs were written out of hope for a better future. I’m not naïve, the world is fucked up, but I think you can radically accept that while still believing it’s possible to change things.” [Review]

Wild Pink – Dulling the Horns

Fire Talk

If recent years have seen Wild Pink’s star rise, then Dulling the Horns could be said to see it begin its arc back earthward, returning not to obscurity but a gravity-saddled weight and heft, the loud rush of the atmosphere roaring in its ears. Recorded live with all the grit and raw energy of the band’s live show left intact, it feels like both a throwback to their early work and a new chapter entirely, losing the wide-screen scope and sparkling electronics in favour of something with a little less polish.  “I didn’t want to clean up anymore,” says lead John Ross. “In doing so we’ve arrived at a new place.” Thematically it leaps around, touching on everything from Dracula and Michael Jordan to the Waco siege and Lefty Ruggiero, and this willingness to reach wide and chase tangents only furthers the sense of immediacy, resulting in the most urgent Wild Pink album to date.

Wishy – Triple Seven

Winspear

Released hot on the heels of December 2023’s successful EP Paradise, Wishy‘s debut full-length Triple Seven seemed to confirm suspicions the Indiana outfit possess the magic Midas touch, a spontaneous jackpot on first pull of the lever which included an NME cover among other such acclaim. And though the journey to that recognition was far more convoluted in reality, something about this iteration, led by songwriters Kevin Krauter and Nina Pitchkites, possesses an undeniable lightning-in-a-bottle charm. A sound which “pays homage to forebears […] while fashioning the nineties-nostalgic sound into something entirely their own,” as we put it, combining dream pop, shoegaze and indie rock influences into something as polished as it is fun.

Young Jesus – The Fool

Saddle Creek

“The pressures of touring had seen the original Young Jesus band slowly disintegrate, and the mosaic pop of Shepherd Head demanded hours spent alone in front of a computer. Exhausted and disillusioned by the process, Rossiter pined for something less abstract. A way to express his creativity rooted in the real world. So he turned to gardening, studying permaculture and the slow process of nurturing it demands. Only then came a chance encounter with Shahzad Ismaily, originating in a shared interest in the work of Milford Graves, and a slow process of coaxing. Rossiter would work on music then tend Ismaily’s New York garden between sessions. At home in LA, he did the reverse, planting trees and laying paths with Alex Babbitt and Alex Lappin before gathering around the piano to play and sing. Slowly the compulsion to make music returned, though now informed by the lessons learnt whilst working on the natural world. The resulting album The Fool feels like another milestone for Young Jesus. A continuation of the searching style which has so long marked the project, but one armed with a new array of tools and techniques to perhaps arrive closer to a satisfying end.” [Review]

The post Year in Review: 2024 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

After the critical success of 2021’s An Overview on Phenomenal Nature—a collection of songs we described as “shaped by [a] careful but fleeting hand, like sculptures allowed to dissipate as soon as they have formed. Moments captured, meaning what they will”—Cassandra Jenkins is returning this summer with a brand new album, My Light, My Destroyer. Again released via Dead Oceans, the record promises to push Jenkins’s sound to new heights, building upon indie rock foundations with sophistipop, jazz and new age sensibilities. Latest single ‘Petco’ gives a hint at exactly what this sounds like, all tied together by a distinctive lyricism that’s as confessional, wry and ambitious as anything on An Overview.

My Light, My Destroyer is out on the 12 July via Dead Oceans and you can pre-order it now.

Closebye – Pilates

Hammer of My Own, the forthcoming full-length from New York‘s Closebye, embraces both the destructive and constructive connotations of its titular tool. The early 2020s saw the outfit on the verge of break-up, and the heavy cost of the pandemic on the music industry left them in need of a complete rebuild. The new album finds catharsis in razing what stood before, clearing the ground for a new version of Closebye to slowly rise. In doing so, it finds the band exploring pressing themes of work and self-reliance in a world which too often demands we pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. Single ‘Pilates’ sees Margaux join for an exploration of self-improvement and its attached baggage, discovering how change requires as much dismantling (be that of doubt, denial etc) as it does building.

Watch the video directed by Elizabeth Kroner below:

Hammer of My Own is out on the 23rd August and you can pre-order it now.

Dustin O’Halloran – Spiritus Naturae Aeternus

Having started out as a founding member of the dream pop outfit Dēvics while also working solo under his own name, composer and pianist Dustin O’Halloran found himself invited by Sofia Coppola to provide music for Marie Antoinette, triggering an adjacent career scoring films. If that wasn’t enough, he’d later go on to form A Winged Victory for the Sullen with Adam Wiltzie (Stars of the Lid), but has continued to release music under his own name too. Probing at the intersection of technology and human consciousness, latest album 1 0 0 1 originated as a collaboration with choreographer and dancer Fukiko Takase, and single ‘Spiritus Naturae Aeternus’ offers a small glimpse of the conceptual whole which results.  A “representation of the beauty and chaos of nature,” as O’Halloran describes, where piano, solo violin, orchestral strings and the female voice create a celebration of the natural world and a requiem for that we stand to lose. Watch the video directed by Markus Englmair and featuring Takase below:

1 0 0 1  is out now via Deutsche Grammophon.

Gabriel Birnbaum – A Feeling Unbroken

“Now that you’re on your way / how does it feel to remember / from thirty thousand feet / to those apartments where the air pressed down / down on your throat you’re waking choking in hell?” So asks Gabriel Birnbaum on ‘A Feeling Unbroken’, the latest single from his forthcoming album Patron Saint of Tireless Losers on Western Vinyl. It’s a line which captures the essence the record both tonally and stylistically. Birnbaum has become increasingly interested in music’s narrative potential, and Patron Saint finds him at his most confident to date. It presents vignettes which occupy the knife-edge between specificity and ambiguity, rewarding the return listener with layers of wry humour and naked human emotion. ‘A Feeling Unbroken’ might be one of the more sonically restrained songs, but its sense of downward pressure seems central to a record of characters desperate for a few inches of fresh air within the choking hell of their present.

god is a feeling unbroken
long may you run in the open
god is a feeling unbroken
long may you run in the open
I’ll be watching

Joseph Decosimo, Luke Richardson, Cleek Schrey –  Rockingham

Back in 2021, Joseph Decosimo, Luke Richardson and Cleek Schrey convened at a cabin in Tennessee to work on an album, Beehive Cathedral. Each of the musicians are storied stewards of the traditional folk style and the record provided an opportunity for them to share, exchange and elevate their collective repertoire to not only preserve Old-time American and Appalachian songs but fashion the next link in the long chain of musical history. The album will be released later this month via Dear Life Records, but for now latest single ‘Rockingham’ offers a prime example of the trio’s intentions. Keeping alive a rich cultural heritage while mining the old tunes for the full depth of their interpretive possibilities.

 Mark Trecka – Sense of Fiction

We’ve followed the work of Chicago-born, Paris-based writer, sound artist, performer and activist Mark Trecka since 2021’s Acknowledgement. It was what we described as “more akin to an intertextual artwork than a conventional album” which explored the connective tissue which links individuals in a society no matter how oppressed or invisible those people might be. Subsequent releases have built upon this compassionate style, be it Implication‘s continued exploration of community and connection or The Bloom of Performance which used an amalgamation of post-punk and art pop to push Trecka’s work further still. The first in a series of singles released with Beacon Sound, ‘Sense of Fiction’ sees the continuation of this style. What the artist describes as “a paean to self-mythologizing as an instrument for overcoming emotional darkness,” the song sits adjacent to the eerie beauty and strangeness established on the previous record, reaching towards an almost Bowie-esque confidence with a soundscape of dream pop bass, drum machine beats and Trecka’s signature avant garde experiments.

 Moonheart – people’s prayer (after​/​w/ Lucille Clifton)

Moonheart is the project of songwriter, composer and poet Kim Mayo, who has recently released a new single, ‘people’s prayer’. Inspired by and featuring a Lucille Clifton poem, Mayo says the song is “an ode, thank u letter, & prayer for all the freedom fighters, truth tellers, mess-makers, & courageous, principled hearts who have been planting such fertile seeds for the new world now blooming.” It’s calm and unhurried but with a gentle power, a burning belief in a better world free of violence and war and inequality. As May continues, the song is for “[Those] who have created portals to show us that new world where care reigns supreme, who have made stunning dents in the war machine & the ruling class’s pockets full of blood & shown us how, who have created beautiful noise & mess & chaos in the name of love, freedom & justice.”

Pure Hex – Web and Wick

San Francisco‘s Pure Hex—that’s Marta Alvarez (vocals), Zach Dighans (guitar) Hussain Khan (guitar), Luke Clingerman (bass) and Jon Annunziato (drums)—are taking an unorthodox approach to their new album, Spilling/Five of Tears. Though envisaged as a full-length record, the release is separated into two discrete sections (as suggested by the title), and the band decided to share it in two parts via Neon Bloodbath. Hence Spilling, the first six songs, is out now, while fans have to wait for the second half. Closing out this section, latest single ‘Web and Wick’ has the job of not only concluding a set of songs but opening up towards what might come next. It proves itself more than ready for the task, this mammoth, shoegaze-inflected slice of indie rock which blends dreamlike imagery with a visceral weight to leave the audience desperate for what comes next.

I had a dream that we parted
When I woke up it was fake
It isn’t safe to come home anymore
Maybe you’ll burn me like a witch at the stake

 Warik – Biscuits

Later this summer Chicago-based music and video artist Warik is releasing the follow-up to 2016 album Warik’s Tape, the appropriately titled Warik’s Tape 2. Landing somewhere between indie rock and pop, the previous album offered an ideal summer sound, full of enough hazy tones and playful energy to satisfy those pining for 00s buzz bands like Wavves and Abe Vigoda. The opening tracks of the new record find Warik continuing with the bright pop sensibilities but add a layer of sleek polish. Be it ‘Yellowish’ with its combination of languid rhythm and glitchy detail, or the soulful, loose-limbed confidence of ‘Biscuits’. The sound of an artist to watch for sure, not to mention an early addition to your summer playlists.

Warik’s Tape 2 will be released later this summer, so keep an eye on the Warik Bandcamp page.

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Kalle Mattson – Twice The Gifts

We’ve been fans of Kalle Mattson for a number of years now, appreciating his distinctly emotive and perceptive songwriting. So, though we’re not big on Christmas music as a rule, his new single ‘Twice the Gifts’ forced us to reconsider—a delicate, tender song that uses the holiday season as a pressure on already existing cracks.

“My parents got divorced something like the day after I was born,” Mattson explains. “So my only memories of Christmas & the holidays are divorced ones. Spending half the day at one house then driving to the next. Two dinners, double the families, and yes twice the gifts.” The song is Xmas stripped of its idealist image, an ode to the non-nuclear family at a time when traditional structures are broadcast from every screen.

Supermercat – Johnny Rack

Self-describing as “friendly punk with a splash of Sheryl Crow,” LA’s Supermercat make a boisterous yet accessible brand of rock that combines the attitude of punk with the singalong value of pop and ties them together with something of a country swagger. Therefore, single ‘Johnny Rack’ could be seen a bouncy slice of fun or a scathing stare down, depending on your frame of mind, though in reality it is likely that is both at once—showing that, with a fierce enough spirit, you can let the good times and heads roll.

You can find Supermercat on Bandcamp.

Be Forest – Bengala

Be Forest are a trio from Italy that create a shoegaze-inspired post-punk, and next February sees them release, Knocturne, their first album in five years. The enlisting of Josh Bonati (Zola Jesus, David Lynch) should give a clue as to the direction of the new record, pushing out in surreal, mesmeric directions to create a rich black sound not entirely of our world.

Lead single ‘Bengala’ is the case in point, though however brooding, represents one of the brightest moments on the record, the song that helps us navigate the rest. “Bengala is the spotlight that lights up the stage after the curtains open,” the band explain. “A celestial body which at the moment of its impact allows us to glimpse our surroundings it’s the brightest point, the north of the compass. This is, though, only ONE of the coordinates of Knocturne. Perhaps the most reassuring.”

Gabriel Birnbaum – Stack the Miles

You might know Gabriel Birnbaum from Wilder Maker, the Brooklyn band who themselves put out a great record this year, and those familiar with his writing will be pleased to learn of a solo album due out on 2019. There’s not much to go on yet, though lead single ‘Stack the Miles’ certainly raises expectations, with Birnbaum’s distinctive delivery driving a track that’s understated yet shot through with real feeling and some brilliant turns of phrase (“the highway’s all police like Chekov’s gun”). As such, the track joins the likes of Monarch Mtn. in painting detailed canvases of American life through poetic imagery and a pervasive atmosphere—a detached, anxious world where miracles and meaninglessness intertwine.

“Water patterns on the window shift like static on tv
in the parking lot by the restaurant, silently
without even the desire for desire, watch the rain rearrange
it’s alphabet an infinite meaningless

I stack the miles I hope it’s enough
I stack the miles I hope it adds up
too many miracles here and I can’t take no more of the good times I’m done”

Grab the single now from the Gabriel Birnbaum Bandcamp page, and keep your eyes peeled for more information on the record.

Castle Pines – Castle Pines

Working out of Corona, CA, Castle Pines make music by and for the disaffected and uncool, anthems not for the performative weirdos of hipster scenes but those quiet, honest folks from blue collar and suburban households. Though the band are prolific, this self-titled single works as culmination of their previous work, bringing their ideals into one track. “We have been performing some version of this song live since we started back in 2009,” the band explain. “It has taken similar iterations but has always held this hazy recollection of the street Castle Pines and all the things that went down […] ‘Castle Pines’ is the capstone of our story as a band, and it is’ both a sad chronicle of suffering and a bright start to better times ahead.”

The song is composed from different facets of contemporary suffering, playing as American dread viewed through a compound eye. Death, poverty, addiction and terrorism are the backdrop, and the foreground the persistent hope of finding a safe home—though one that is itself shaped by nostalgia, pining for a time that can no longer return, the Second Coming of a once famous glory.

No Aloha – The Big One

Based in Portland and with close ties to Salem, No Aloha are a five-piece led by principle songwriters Blake Ferrin and Brette Irish,  the latter having just signed with the fine folks at Good Cheer Records as a solo artist. Which is to take nothing away from the band themselves, because No Aloha are just as worthy of your time. Drawing on the vague doom that hangs over the tectonically-active Pacific Northwest, ‘The Big One’ is a single “about being in a big earthquake and only being able to worry what your crush is doing.” The result is cataclysm for the romantics, where ever the bone-shaking earth can’t break the ties of young love.

You can find No Aloha on Bandcamp and Facebook, and watch Good Cheer Records for more on Brette Irish.

The Beths – Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas

Auckland’s The Beth’s have had a whirlwind year, releasing their debut full-length Future Hates Me on Carpark Records, and touring all over the world. Their festive offering is a take on ‘Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas’, which sees them dial back their pop punk energy in favour of strings, what the band describe to The Spinoff as the Beths version of the Ella Fitzgerald version. All proceeds go to Girls Rock! Camp Aotearoa and Women’s Refuge too, so it’s all for a good cause.

Blue Ranger – Ah My

It’s been a weird year with lots of distractions, meaning a fair number of great records have slipped past before we could write about them. One such album was Saving a Beauty by Blue Ranger, so in lieu of the attention it deserves, we’re going to suggest you start with single ‘Ah My’ and discover the rest for yourself. The track highlights Josh Marre’s folk-leaning style and warm writing, giving a glimpse at the affectionate atmosphere that permeates the record. Christmas is a time for fondness, after all.

“Please would you mind
put your arms around me
please keep in mind
you’re sure that someone’s listening

keeping mine in mind”

Lampland – Don’t Drive

Ahead of a full-length album out early next year, New York’s Lampland has unveiled a new single, ‘Don’t Drive’. Fittingly, the song concerns the approach of a winter storm, snow and ice immobilising the city and trapping the principle characters within their apartment. The moment opens up a space within normal time, a relaxing of life that allows a certain magic inside, made all the more precious by the certainty that it will be over as quickly as it began. What could be more Christmassy than that?

“Don’t try to drive tonight
Pressures dropping I was right
Heavy shiver in the air
I don’t know why I’m laughing
You know the bridges freeze first?
And then the gin in your purse
And then the swimming pool where you work”

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Their latest release, though created under different circumstances and presented in a different context, is an even clearer statement on the Wilder Maker ethos. Opening with a carefree shuffle, the track has a languid lust for life, what lead songwriter Gabriel Birnbaum describes as “an attempt to catch the kind of everyday euphoria and friendship that’s usually taken for granted and forgotten shortly after and put it in a gilded frame, like a Renaissance oil painting of a casual summer night in 2017.” This nostalgia-for-the-present vibe is aided by bright guitar and sleek saxophone, Katie Von Schleicher’s vocals starting out leisurely before rising into a buoyant refrain.

The Document series, which has so far seen a release from Seattle’s Posse, is Saddle Creek’s way of celebrating the individual communities from which their artists hail. Originating in Omaha, Nebraska, Saddle Creek has evolved into something far more global, and they see this series of 7″ vinyls as a way of ensuring they stay connected to grassroots scenes. As founder Robb Nansel explains: “We see Document as a unique way to reference our past, while at the same time reaching out to bands that aren’t already part of the Saddle Creek family and allowing them to shine a light on the art and music of their own communities. It’s our way to try to capture a band and their community in a specific place at a specific time, and share that with the world.”

New Streets is out on 7″ vinyl on the 2nd of June via Saddle Creek and you can pre-order it now. Alternatively head to the Wilder Maker Bandcamp page.

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For those unfamiliar with the previous EPs (I admit I was, until this one landed in my inbox), this piece by Nathan Huffstutter for Paste Magazine serves as a neat introduction into the style and aims of Wilder Maker. After failing to make an impression with 2013’s Year of Endless Light, Birnbaum did the only thing a capital-A Artist can, dig in and make more. The Everyday Crimes Against Objects of Desire trilogy rose from this situation like an idiosyncratic phoenix, reacting to the indifference of a too-busy, painted-by-numbers-favouring world by celebrating experiment and creativity. Despite all dealing with the basic subject matter of a hard break-up, the EPs vary in style and were recorded in different studios. After the opener ‘Hope Springs’, Volume I is dark, angry and desperate, the mood switching between strange (like duet ‘White Knuckled On The Wheel’: “I take you cause you’re mine/forever this time/your teeth are on my neck/I’m ready to die”) and outright apocalyptic (e.g. ‘Zion’: “even in my terror mind when the gates are all wide open and the fire climbs from room to room/and the beasts are screaming and my heart is screaming and the sky is screaming and god is fast asleep and the bottle ain’t no good”). Volume II is sparser, recorded mostly live to give a smooth folk/rock sound akin to Bill Callahan. Heartbreak is once again the focus, with the narrator unable to let go of love yet also fearing the consequences of keeping it. As detailed on ‘Careless’:

“The waiting now is the hardest part
it’s insane I cannot touch you while we lean on your car
oh I can love again, please don’t make me love again”

I have just finished reading Jonathan Franzen’s Purity, a book which, like most of Franzen’s writing, concerns characters of various levels of depth kicking lumps out of one another in the name of love and happiness. As ever his ability to capture the depressing paradox at the heart of a failing relationship. Even the smallest word is packed with malicious intent yet the grandest gesture is found abstract and empty, a fantasy of a solipsistic mind. The kicker for most of Franzen’s characters is that once they achieve ‘freedom’ from the suffocating oppression of a loved one, they learn that the real source of the torment is within themselves, the removal of other people merely removing blame and false hope of reprieve. Which brings us to Volume III of Wilder Maker’s trilogy, where the narrator is experiencing this very realisation in slow motion as the pain of the break-up is eroded by time. Opener ‘Only Wanted You’ plays like the lost words of resignation in a silent aftermath, the sad soliloquy once the phone lines have been cut and new rules drawn, while ‘Summer Drifts’ is an attempted escape into sun and drink and good times where trouble lurks just under the surface. Both songs find the narrator ignoring (or maybe genuinely not seeing/understanding) something vast and dangerous below his own surface, the nagging sense of woe persisting through his new start and leading into the central track of the EP.

‘EZ River’ sounds like Van Morrison meets M. Ward, Birnbaum’s vocals cutting through the meandering soundscape dominated by laconic saxophone. The tone is at odds with the lyrical message though, at least upon first listening, with the easy rhythm hiding a deep uneasiness and sense of caustic, internal pain. However, after a few repetitions and closer attention, the very opposite begins to feel true. The music feels less juxtaposed against the lyrical torment as actively working for it, sweeping the narrator along in an misleadingly strong current of illusionary peace. So, rather than floating away from his troubles, he is floating with them, every metre he travels downstream a second lost in his attempt to be satisfied and happy.

“Oh easy river I want my heart to bend
the way the light just runs you through
but I just feel the sweat begin to bead

oh easy river watching me with my own eyes
too blank to even be a simple enemy I could use
all this splendor laughs at me and my fickle moods

where there should be bliss, oh god
there is emptiness

I am bored to tears counting echoes til I leave this behind
I wait beneath the infinite my toes in the infinite but my my my my
my heart is immeasurable untouchable illegible to me
some days it’s just too much work to love and so I don’t “

But, luckily, that is not the end. ‘California’ comes out the other side, as Katie Von Schleicher takes over lead vocals to produce a slow and eerie song, the aural equivalent of the tentative morning after a storm, while ‘No Xmas In Bushwick’ is a full-bodied pop song with almost celestial backing vocals, the closest thing to liberation on the record. The closing track is a special recording of ‘Hope Springs’, the original version of the song that opened the trilogy on Volume I. While the track is the first one written after the break-up, it is one of hope and forgiveness, where kindness blossoms despite the pain. It’s telling that the project should cycle back to this, as if for all the anger and torment and despair, the default human setting is one of empathy and grace.

Everyday Crimes Against Objects of Desire Vol. III is out on the 9th October on Bleaksploitation Records. You pre-order it from the Wilder Maker Bandcamp page.

Cover Art by David Foarde

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“Genius Loci is partly an experiment to see how much of a set of songs can be unified by a concept or mood, partly an excuse for me to commission new work by some of my favorite songwriters, and partly an experiment in pushing people out of their comfort zones & giving them new creative avenues in their writing via obstacles.”

Volume One, the Summer 2015 edition, is titled Dreams Like Bark Peeled Off By Lightning. The inspiration is the poetry of Frank Stanford, the rule is that all lyrics must be written before any of the music, and the songwriters include WTD-fav Will Stratton, Jonah Furman (Krill), Felicia Douglass (Ava Luna) and Birnbaum himself.  Check out the full tracklisting below:

1. Felicia Douglass – Might
2. Renata Zeiguer – Neck of the Moon
3. Will Stratton – Lightning Dream Shuffle
4. David Lackner – Infants in the Wood
5. Cassandra Jenkins – The Girl With Black Hair
6. Nick Jost – I Am The Captain
7. Tiny Hazard – Thirsty Sponge
8. Jonah Furman – Meat
9. Gabriel Birnbaum – Bright Crimson
10. Katie Von Schleicher – My Body on Through
11. LAUDS – She Was a Fire of Pine Cones
12. Workman Song – Holy Holy Holy

You can pre-order the release digitally or on cassette right now from the Genius Loci Bandcamp page.

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