The album, In My Dreams: Songs of Bill Vuono is a personal project. Bill Vuono is Bellissimo’s great-grandfather, who wrote songs “back when you had to sell sheet music to sell songs,” producing a series of 78s before stopping his writing career to raise a family. Several years ago, Bellissimo inherited the records and became invested in the music,  covering ‘Think of Me’ on the first Gay Angel album places i’ll eat, people i’ll meet, before several of tracks appeared on their epic floral project. To celebrate the third anniversary of Drunk With Love Records, Bellissimo decided to revisit the records and curate an album of their favourite songs, a Best of Bill Vuono, and plans to release it as an album accompanied with modern covers, featuring the likes of Emperor X, Devon Mello, Karen Walker (of The New Tarot) and Bellissimo themself.

In My Dreams will be released this month, and Drunk With Love have put out a video of the first single in preparation. Check out the video below. It uses footage from the wedding of Jake Bellisssimo’s grandmother Rachel, and features Bill Vuono playing the piano, set to one of his songs, ‘Think of Me’. The song captures Vuono’s 1940’s style perfectly, the gentle piano supporting vocals that quaver with love and emotion, feelings that if anything seem advanced when beamed 70 years into the future.

“In my dreams
I see a face sleep can’t erase”

As the project is such a special, personal endeavour, we decided to speak with Jake Bellissimo and their grandmother Rachel in order to get a better understanding of the music and the man behind it.

Have you always been aware that your great-grandfather / father was a musician? When was the first time you heard his music?

Jake: I can’t remember exactly when I learned he was a musician, but my grandmother shared a CD of his recordings when I was in high school and later gave me the original 78s. I don’t think I really processed/appreciated the music until I started playing the songs, after which I covered “Think of Me” on the first gay angel album (places i’ll eat, people i’ll meet).

Rachel: My father used to play them on the piano, in fact. Growing up I would sing them in exchange for a quarter, which I would then take to the park to spend on a Creamsicle ice cream.

Rachel, how do you feel when listening to them? Do they bring back specific memories? Does the voice you hear have a resemblance to the man you remember?

Rachel: Well, he never sang his songs, but on the album in places you can hear his voice in the background. These songs in general make me sad—years ago I couldn’t listen to them, but as time goes by I enjoy listening to them and they remind me of him. In the song “Dreaming at the Keyboard”, I can hear my brother Irving talking with my father in the background.

Jake, you never met him, so the closest you get to him as a person is listening to these recordings. How do they make you feel?

Jake: It’s weird, because I feel a connection to him through his music, despite having never met him. His songwriting, and the way he (and his wife, Barbara, who wrote lyrics sometimes) made songs all resonate with me. When I first heard his music I was surprised at how similarly I aligned with it despite starting my own songwriting with no prior knowledge of it.

How has his music influenced your own?

Jake: I started diving deeper and deeper into the recordings (about 1.5hrs worth) when I was making the 100 piece album floral, and I’m sure that influence was running through. There are also two songs that were just put on the album (‘I Have a Flower’ and ‘Dreaming at the Keyboard’) after unsuccessful tries to re-record them.

Why do you feel that now is the right time to release Bill’s music? What about them do you think appeals to a twenty-first century audience?

Jake: Drunk With Love Records was started with Bill’s music in mind, that it would be published when the time was right. Since over the past few years DWL has come to represent a celebration of emotion in many facets, beginning with a connection between the melodrama in modern emo music and early 20th century pop, it’s always made sense. I also think it’s a shame how long-lasting these songs feel as opposed to how few people knew of them, so to publish them for the first time is a pleasure. And, based on the people who have talked to me about him when I cover his songs at shows, it seems that other people want to hear them as well.

How do you feel about Jake re-releasing Bill’s music to a modern audience?

Rachel: I’m thrilled that Jake is releasing these songs, as now that they’re published people have an opportunity to hear Bill Vuono’s music, giving (at last) his songs a chance to live on.

Would you like to say something about the covers album? How did you recruit the bands? And how did they choose which songs to cover?

Jake: All songs on the covers album are either artists who are associated with Drunk With Love or close friends. The songs were chosen through a list I gave that included all of the songs on the album plus some outtakes ranging from songs to lyrics without music to just abandoned song titles. The goal was to not just re-record the songs but re-interpret them, so I feel grateful to have such wonderful musicians and friends as collaborators who more than added beauty to this release with their covers.

You can find more info on the Drunk With Love website and pre-order In My Dreams: The Songs of Bill Vuono now via the Drunk With Love Records Bandcamp page. Each album comes with a super cool calling card from the late 1800s/early 1900s

It’s worth noting that 50% of all proceeds will be donated to the Alzheimer’s Foundation of America and the other 50% to Bill’s family for the preservation and storage of related mementos and sheet music. So what are you waiting for?

The post Drunk With Love Records presents In My Dreams: Songs of Bill Vuono appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Jake was kind enough to answer some questions about the release and let us premiere a brand new video for the track ‘Memento Mori’, made in collaboration with Marta Tiesenga. Watch Tiesenga’s animation below and then read what Jake had to say.

The video for ‘Memento Mori’ was made in collaboration with Marta Tiesenga. Why did you choose to make a video for this song? And how do you think it complements the music?
Marta is a good pal, great artist, and composer (also a recent signee to Drunk With Love–more on that some other time). We had been talking about collaborating on something for a while, and when I was putting together Piece of Ivy I let Marta choose which song to do a video for and ‘Memento Mori’ came up. It’s the song that has the most specific imagery (time and place) for me, so I think the animation suits it well.

The press release says that Piece of Ivy takes inspiration from travelling and states of flux. Would you say this upheaval is the main theme of the album? Was this necessary to create a blank slate after the mammoth floral project?
Yeah, I would say so. Releasing floral last summer coincided with me dropping things and moving to Berlin, so all of these events coming together at once put me in a state of worry over what to do next. Creating a blank slate was the next logical step, both musically and life-wise, so I decided to try taking away the moniker again as a way to be more honest with myself.

How did it feel to make songs without the gay angel ensemble? Was it a good feeling to strip things right back?
I think it has been a good exercise and has forced me to be more practical about exactly which sounds I want, how to achieve that, etc. The songwriting is the same, though, as gay angel was always more of a solo project and later calling in specific musicians to record certain parts. Naturally it feels different than being able to shove 20 people into a small room at once to record a song, but there are still musicians from the gay angel ensemble on Piece of Ivy (and the music I’ve recorded since floral), so I haven’t really felt like they’ve left.

What are your plans for the future? Are the days of Gay Angel over for good? Do you plan on making more solo records?
I’m currently working on a more large scale album under my real name that will be out next year on Drunk With Love, and Piece of Ivy has kind of played a role in setting up a clean slate for the music on this full-length. That doesn’t mean gay angel is dead, though; in fact, I originally intended to release the next album in January, but then things got more complicated, so the finished version has just been sitting on my hard drive for a while. I’ll be sharing more details about that in the near future, but just need the time to be right.

You can buy Piece of Ivy on 7″ lathe-cut vinyl or a name-your-price download from Drunk With Love Records.

The post Video Premiere: Jake Bellissimo – Memento Mori appeared first on Various Small Flames.

That release proved to be the Gay Angel project’s swansong, but that doesn’t mean that Bellissimo has stopped creating. After a few months break to return to writing again, he is back with new music under his own name and is prepping a release at the end of the month. It will be called Piece of Ivy and we’re lucky enough to be able to share with you the first single.

The title track is a gentle indie pop song, like late morning sunshine with strummed acoustic guitar and good-natured vocals. The lyrics tell of a life transplanted into a new environment, of adapting to change eventually using the analogy of a piece of ivy taken inside:

“Piece of ivy why
are you the one who’s growing up in size
forget your life
cut from your branch and placed onto the
table in my room was that too soon
I kinda like how you look from across the room
growing roots”

Piece of Ivy will be released as a lathe cut 7″ record on the 31st of March on Drunk With Love Records. The release marks the first of a new era for Drunk With Love Records, what Bellissimo describes as a shift in focus “from a cathartic art project to a more serious record label”. So be sure to stay tuned to their brand new website for news of future releases, as well as the Jake Bellissimo website for all his updates.

The post Song Premiere: Jake Bellissimo – Piece of Ivy appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Daytime TV – S/T (REVIEW)
(RIYL: indie rock, lo-fi, 80N7)

Debaser – MOOD RING
(RIYL: mixtapes, lo-fi, weird)

Derek – Rookie of the Year
(RIYL: indie rock, lo-fi)

Devon Mello – Constance All Grown Up (REVIEW)
(RIYL: indie pop, lo-fi, bedroom pop)

Dicktations – Words Don’t Love You (REVIEW)
(RIYL: garage rock, Weezer, Black Lips)

Diners – It’s All True
(RIYL: indie pop, Telekinesis)

Diocese – S/T 
(RIYL: garage rock, Krill)

Eerie Summer – The Way I Don’t Understand Anything Anymore (REVIEW)
(RIYL: indie pop, shoegaze, jangle, The Pains of Being Pure at Heart)

EP – Ashland (REVIEW)
(RIYL: indie rock, lo-fi)

Fairweather Currents – Things Get Better (REVIEW)
(RIYL: bedroom pop, folk, acoustic Nana Grizol)

Fanpage – L Y A (REVIEW)
(RIYL: noise pop, shoegaze, Jenny Hval)

Faux Discx – Where We Were (COMPILATION)
(RIYL: indie rock, post-punk, shoegaze)

Fazed on a Pony – Hunch
(RIYL: lo-fi, indie rock)

Field Medic – Light is Gone (REVIEW)
(RIYL: bedroom pop, folk, lo-fi, J. Tillman)

Fog Lake – Victoria Park (REVIEW)
(RIYL: experimental, atmospheric pop, solitude)

Fox Academy – Elsie (REVIEW)
(RIYL: indie pop, summer nostalgia, golden oldies)

Fraternal Twin – s m a l l  w i n d  p o w e r (REVIEW)
(RIYL: gentle acoustics, natural glitches, intimate songwriting)

Free Cake For Every Creature – Moving Songs (REVIEW)
(RIYL: bedroom pop, folk, post-collegiate blues [or, overcoming them])

Furnsss – New Moves (REVIEW)
(RIYL: indie rock, deadbeat disinterest, Abe Vigoda, Hallelujah The Hills)

Gay Angel – Floral (REVIEW)
(RIYL: indie pop, weird, early CFTPA)

Gleemer – No Goobyes (REVIEW) / Moving Away (REVIEW)
(RIYL: pop punk, grunge, Pains of Being Pure at Heart)

GoldFlakePaint – The Human Noise We Sat There Making https://goldflakepaint.bandcamp.com/album/the-human-noise-we-sat-there-making
(RIYL: indie pop, lo-fi, compilations, all the cool stuff GFP write about)

Good, Good Blood – S/T (REVIEW)
(RIYL: indie pop, lo-fi, atmospheric folk)

The Grey Estates Vs Gold Flake Paint – The Pale Light Between (REVIEW)
(RIYL: indie pop, lo-fi, compilations, Gold Flake Paint, The Grey Estates)

Griffin Washburn – S/T
(RIYL: chill indie pop, psych, The Lagoonas)

GRNDMS – Capitol Mill (REVIEW)
(RIYL: bedroom pop, folk, Frankie Cosmos)

We’ll be sharing a new section of the list every day this week, so be sure to check back for the complete collection. If you find something you like, or think we missed something life-changing, then why not let us know on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr or good old email.

The post Favourite Free Music of 2015: D-G appeared first on Various Small Flames.

So where do you begin when reviewing 100 songs? At the start of course!

Floral, Pt. 1

Things open with ‘tempelhofer flughafen’, a slice of anxious sadcore which tells the story of a visit from an old friend and the subsequent experiences of worry and guilt. It’s full of lines like:

“Two times i’ll call him, two times i said…
two times i thought that i’d never see him again.
i’m so afraid that he won’t like me because one time he said that he was in love with me.
so two times i’ll hang up, i’ll put down my phone…
i’ll put down the vicodin that got me to pick up the phone”.

The second track, ‘the words i read’, introduces some of the array of instruments, including drums, piano and trumpet, and deals with the collapse of a relationship Bellissimo had with an older man, with how things (including people) change with time and how actions and events are open to ever-changing interpretation. The album then takes its first foray into instrumentalism, from guitar-based compositions to toy piano lullabies. ‘silly river’ is a song about solipsism, about how the bad things disappear when you close your eyes, but also about how you can’t close your eyes forever:

“If I blink my eyes the world goes away
but if I leave them closed the solitude never does stay
…So I’ll keep them this way
because no matter how much I sleep
the birds still sing the river still rings
and there are still four seasons.”

Floral continues in this vein across its 25 tracks, alternating between lo-fi pop and rather more experimental touches. ‘i refuse to fall’ sounds like early Casiotone For the Painfully Alone, while ‘trouble in tahiti’ is all screeching noise and unintelligible voices, like whale song for the industrial age.

Floral Pt. 2

Pt. 2 kicks off with a sound clip from a Valentine’s Day advertisement, complete with a little kids wishing you a “HAPPY VALENTINE’S DAY! (yuck!)”, before getting into the music proper. Like Pt. 1, this is a surprisingly cohesive blend of orchestral chamber pop and lo-fi, DIY bedroom recording. ‘growing leaves’ is wordy and impassioned, sounding not unlike Nana Grizol or Defiance, Ohio, as Bellissimo yelps lines such as “I wish I could still drive a fucking car without being afraid of what I see on the road”.

This is followed by the amp-frying lo-fi of ‘on a screen’, and then the comparatively breezy ‘i made peace’, which contains the line, “I made a mistake, I downloaded the first season of the Golden Girls instead of the Gilmore Girls. I got the wrong girls, and it’s not a big deal, it’s just the little mistakes are the ones that annoy me.” This would stand out on any album, but even more so here as it precedes, ‘i have a flower’, a song quite literally from the past. Incredibly, the song was written by Bellissimo’s great-grandfather, and this is the original recording made in the 30s by him and his friends. It’s a bona fide love song:

“I have a flower for you to wear. It is a flower so sweet and fair. Never a garden it knew. Never the sun, never the dew.

It never looked at the blue sky, this flower I give to you cannot die. You may throw it away, you may tear it apart. ’tis not a flower, ’tis my heart.”

The rest of the album is equally as varied – ‘letter to brazil’ details a period Bellissimo spent in Brazil as a teenager and sounds almost like doo wop, while ‘i won’t take ecstasy’ is pretty sad, containing the line, “I wish I had someone to make the bad parts of my life not seem so bad.” Add to that ‘J. Robert Oppenheimer’, a pseudo-biographical account of the father of the atomic bomb and ‘in flight’, with its oddly surreal guitar and bursts of ominous mechanical noise: “Last night I fell into a hole”, Bellissimo sings, “I thought it was an episode of The Twilight Zone.” The album also contains several instrumental interludes, including two botanically named piano tracks (‘an orchid’ and ‘a tulip’) and two which rely on the unmistakable sound of an organ (one of which, the final track, clocks in at over 24 minutes!). There are further eccentric flourishes, such as ‘whose fault is it?’, which sounds like a weird vocal test, and ‘music is stupid’, a collection of audio recordings of people saying just that.

Floral Pt. 3

If you’ve made it this far then you’ll probably know what to expect from pt. 3. It opens with dramatic orchestral swells, before segueing into ‘love’, a steady, Magnetic Fields-style pop song with a jaunty, 80s/90s-cheese sax line. ‘the library’ comes crashing into being before settling into a fun slice of indie pop that uses Bellissimo’s library late fees as a metaphor for everything else he has on hold:

“i went to the library today
and i realized i couldn’t run away
from the things i thought i didn’t have to see
if i close my eyes, the world is easier to deal with”

‘summer voicemails’ is an oddly lovely little song full of “ooh ooh oohs” and “doo doo doos” and pitter patter percussion. The lyrics are delivered in little interludes and are comprised of messages Bellissimo wishes he could have left at various points in the past. In his own words, “I’ve had a lot of different summers out in a field, looking at the stars. i always wanted to call home, call someone, tell them how i’m feeling, leave a voicemail, but there is never cell phone service up there. these are a few of those moments from various years that would have become voicemails if i had service.” ‘getting up, falling over’ sounds like a prewar tune playing on a damaged wireless, with a strange wonky viola aria accompanied by squeaking jolts of static and distortion from a guitar. The track is one of a varying multitude of instrumentals on Pt. 3, each of which is its own distinct entity (just check the contributors in the liner notes!), such as the harp-based ‘wildflowers, wild thorn’, the dark and shadowy ‘i’m not sorry for anything’ and ‘running my fingers through your hair’, which is all twinkling xylophone. One of my favourite tracks is ‘dreaming at the keyboard’ which was again written and performed by Bellissimo’s great-grandfather Bill Vuono. Placed in the context of the rest of the album the song sounds like listening through the walls as ghosts from a byegone age relieve happy memories.

Things get even more experimental (and a little x-rated) towards the end which won’t be to everyone’s taste, but Bellissimo’s strengths is his willingness to put everything on display, whether it makes for easy listening or not.

Floral Pt. 4 

Maybe it’s just me, but Pt. 4 seems to have a slightly different feeling to the rest of the parts. It feels lighter both in the sense of it seeming weightless and less dark, and I think this is a result of it facing thoughts on death and heaven (hence the artwork). The list of contributors is also much shorter this time around, although the array of instruments still puts the majority of albums to shame. And remember, this is Gay Angel – eccentric eclecticism is their speciality, so expect plenty of tracks to contradict this statement. The first track is ‘welcome to heaven’, a very gentle song comprised mainly of xylophone and soft vocals. The lyrical content is darker though, written about a time in Bellissimo’s life in which he was suffering with paranoia-inducing mental illness and became convinced that two people were trying to kill him. The lyrics deal with his then belief that he would have to beat them to it and get to heaven himself. Thankfully, he seems a lot better now, and it’s a testament to his strength that he is able to project these struggles into the world.

‘no better’ is a folk song for the twenty-first century, with tumbling guitars and lyrics about life in the city which meditate on the reasons for washing every day (or, as Bellissimo puts it, “when i shower, who is it for? do i keep myself clean for whoever touches my body next? do i actually care about how i look to others? or do i just like cleaning, scrubbing at something?”). ‘your light’ somehow lives up to its name, a bright glowing drone and ‘a dahlia’ sounds like a delicate old music box in a musty attic. ‘a rose’ sounds like the bedroom pop of someone like Cyberbully Mom Club or Free Cake For Every Creature, while ‘train thoughts’ is quite literally that, a collection of sad thoughts Bellissimo had about his dog and his grandma while on public transport. The whole thing finishes with ‘gay angel’, a self-titled track which ends things on a powerful note:

“and so i’ll know that days are often short
and it’s my job to make them feel as long as
i can trust myself with (in order to be strong)
let’s see if i can really last that long.

i’ll grow a pair of gorgeous wings
and clean my lungs so i can start to sing.

you’ll see me up there someday
and after all we’ve been through
i don’t think i can ever say
‘i’m glad we had this talk,
so let’s go back to our lives and learn to walk.'”

Floral is a bold artistic statement, an unflinching portrait of a rich, messy and confusing life. It sounds like Bellissimo’s every single thought and dream translated into music and committed to tape, mixing moments of gentle beauty with grating ugliness and frank confessions too obscene for the radio. It’s not going to be for everyone, but to me that’s just another reason to admire it.

You can get the entire thing in a deluxe box set (with cool extras such as old sheet music and photographs) for just twenty US dollars, via the Gay Angel Bandcamp page. You can also download all one hundred songs on a name-your-price basis at the same page. Once you’ve bought it, be sure to follow Bellissimo’s notes and photos at Drunk With Love.

The post Gay Angel – Floral appeared first on Various Small Flames.

The May Roundup mix below contains a track from every artist we featured during the month (apart from Sharon van Etten and Noah Gundersen, sorry!), so plug your headphones in and enjoy some new music. Click the artists’ names in the tracklisting below to be taken to the post in question.

Tracklisting:

1. No More Sad Songs – Elvis Depressedly
2. Catchyalater – Frog
3. The Day Draws Near – The Washboard Abs
4. Every House is On Fire – Island Eyes
5. Forever – Boosegumps
6. Open Casket Hidden Meaning – Molly Drag
7. The Arp – Aidan Knight
8. Atheist Money – Adam Stafford
9. Lynx – The Tarantula Waltz
10. Milo – Young Jesus
11. Slow Dark Water – Furnsss
12. Aubrey – Debris Slide
13. Foreign Hands – Aisha Badru
14. I Need Never Get Old – Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats
15. Outside the Pale – Samantha Crain
16. Home – The Modern Folk
17. Staggers and Rise – Small Houses
18. Yannina – Jake Houlsby
19. To the Black Horizon – Mark Timmins
20. Heart – Bobby’s Oar
21. Bling – Bells Atlas
22. And You Meant the Sea – Ruth & Trudy
23. Party – Lake Michigan
24. Growing Leaves – Gay Angel
25. On and On – Zee Town and the Dog Boys
26. Travel Map – Hip Hatchet
27. Zoa – Batte Ave.
28. The Bird – Kathryn Joseph
29. …Until They’re Called – Old Earth

May 2015 Roundup from Wake The Deaf on 8tracks Radio.

The post May Roundup – A Mixtape appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Young Jesus

“I think you can confront darkness with sincerity and that the best stuff acknowledges the light that is in the dark and vice versa” – an interview with Young Jesus, chatting about concept albums, life-changing novels & the balance between darkness and light.

Sharon Van Etten

“Heartfelt, brave and benevolent, not exactly an answer but a reassuring hand to hold while you’re working on the question” – You should be excited about the new EP from Sharon Van Etten.

Elvis Depressedly

“Elvis Depressedly will not mend broken bones or cast out demons or have you walking across hot coals. Instead they… offer an achievable version of optimism, one which does not require manic enthusiasm or God-like goodwill but instead a pinch of determination and a firm belief in love” – we get to grips with the new Elvis Depressedly record New Alhambra.

Bells Atlas

“Blending the visceral emotions of R&B and soul with an off-the-wall, avant-garde vibe akin to Dirty Projectors and tUnE-yArDs” – ‘Bling’ welcomes you to the eclectic world of Bells Atlas.

Gay Angel

“The sound of one creative mind expressing itself in the most maximalist way imaginable” – The second floret of Gay Angel’s 100-song bonquet is .

Zee Town and the Dog Boys

“Think Beach House in their sad teenage bedroom years” – the self-titled album from Zee Town and the Dog Boys combines shoegazy fuzz with intimate bedroom pop.

Aisha Badru

“The confessional, angry-but-still-in-love style of all the best break-up songs” – an introduction to the organic folk of Aisha Badru.

Noah Gundersen

“A rousing, textured love song that would be a radio hit in any just world” – we get the first taste of the new Noah Gundersen album with ‘Slow Dancer’.

Ruth & Trudy

“An unorthodox brand of lo-fi pop that blends a laidback hipness with heartfelt naivete” – Still Pond Songs, an album from Ruth & Trudy, out on Slovakian label Z Tapes.

Alynda Segarra

“Blues women foreshadowed a movement of feminists of color that is vibrantly alive today… leaving behind the embarrassing and soul crushing caricatures of women of color that I was fed my whole life” – Hurray for Riff Raff leading lady Alynda Segarra (who we have had the pleasure of talking to) has written a great piece on the feminist legacy blues women for American Songwriter.

The Weather Station

“Country songs are always about driving, journeys, and these sorts of things. I found that these songs were about journeys but not” – Exclaim talk to Tamara Lindeman about Loyalty, the excellent new album from The Weather Station.

Bedroom Pop

“The qualities they share are somewhat intangible, more emotional than sonic, and can be more easily felt than described” – Jacob W. Moore wrote a primer on bedroom pop for the uninitiated, citing bands such as R.L. Kelly, Ricky Eat Acid, Alex G and Foxes in Fiction, as well as the overwhelming influence of the folks at Orchid Tapes. Head to Flavorwire to check it out and then browse our ‘bedroom pop’ tag as further reading.

Sufjan Stevens

“The striking sense of solemnity hangs like a noose around its neck, rugged and impossible to ignore, from the first moment to the last” – A little late to this one, but GoldFlakePaint’s review of Sufjan’s new album is really lovely (and mentions Cormac McCarthy, which is never a bad thing).

King of Cats

DIY Magazine are streaming the new King of Cats album, which will be released on Art Reeks, a joint label that combined Art is Hard and Reeks of Effort…

Barna Howard

…and you can stream the new Barna Howard album at Line of Best Fit.

Bellows

Bellows did a Tiny Desk Concert at NPR!

And Finally… the 8tracks Playlist of the Week

The inaugural winner of this coveted accolade is Ratfriend, with this round-up of the best music so far in 2015:

Be sure to follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and 8tracks to keep up to date with the best new music.

The post Week in Review: #1 (11-15th May 2015) appeared first on Various Small Flames.

The album kicks off with a sound clip from a Valentine’s Day advertisement, complete with a little kids wishing you a “HAPPY VALENTINE’S DAY! (yuck!)”, before getting into the music proper. Like Pt. 1, this is a surprisingly cohesive blend of orchestral chamber pop and lo-fi, DIY bedroom recording. ‘Growing Leaves’ is wordy and impassioned, sounding not unlike Nana Grizol or Defiance, Ohio, as Bellissimo yelps lines such as “I wish I could still drive a fucking car without being afraid of what I see on the road”. This is followed by the amp-frying lo-fi of ‘On A Screen’, and then the comparatively breezy ‘I Made Peace’, which contains the line, “I made a mistake, I downloaded the first season of the Golden Girls instead of the Gilmore Girls. I got the wrong girls, and it’s not a big deal, it’s just the little mistakes are the ones that annoy me.” This would stand out on any album, but even more so here as it precedes, ‘I Have A Flower’, a song quite literally from the past. Incredibly, the song was written by Bellissimo’s great-grandfather, and this is the original recording made in the 30s by him and his friends. It’s a bona fide love song:

“I have a flower for you to wear. It is a flower so sweet and fair. Never a garden it knew. Never the sun, never the dew.

It never looked at the blue sky, this flower I give to you cannot die. You may throw it away, you may tear it apart. ’tis not a flower, ’tis my heart.”

The rest of the album is equally as varied – ‘Letter to Brazil’ details a period Bellissimo spent in Brazil as a teenager and sounds almost like doo wop, while ‘I Won’t Take Ecstasy’ is pretty sad, containing the line, “I wish I had someone to make the bad parts of my life not seem so bad.” Add to that ‘J. Robert Oppenheimer’, a pseudo-biographical account of the father of the atomic bomb and ‘In Flight’, with its oddly surreal guitar and bursts of ominous mechanical noise: “Last night I fell into a hole”, Bellissimo sings, “I thought it was an episode of The Twilight Zone.” The album also contains several instrumental interludes, including two botanically named piano tracks (‘An Orchid’ and ‘A Tulip’) and two which rely on the unmistakable sound of an organ (one of which, the final track, clocks in at over 24 minutes!). There are further eccentric flourishes, such as ‘Whose Fault It It?’, which sounds like a weird vocal test, and ‘Music Is Stupid’, a collection of audio recordings of people saying just that.

Floral Pt. 2 is nothing if not original, the sound of one creative mind expressing itself in the most maximalist way imaginable. It’s difficult not to admire Bellissimo’s bravery, his insistence on doing exactly what he wants in his art. Let’s hope he doesn’t take too long in releasing Pt 3!

You can get Floral Pt. 2 via the Gay Angel Bandcamp page as a digital download or on limited edition CD, made in association with Dead Drunk With Love Records.

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Gay Angel is a project lead by Jake Bellissimo from Rochester in New York, a raggedy band of musicians who create experimental and theatrical chamber pop which is at turns extravagant and intimate, think sad and angsty bedroom pop with scores of eccentric flourishes.

The liner notes on Bandcamp list 28 contributing musicians who provide everything from electric guitar, drums and vocals, to saxophone, harp, marimba, flute and cello. There’s even a credited conductor! Bellissimo himself provides vocals, autoharp, balalaika, banjo accordion, viola, piano, acoustic and electric guitar, bass guitar and celeste, and that is on top of writing, recording and producing (almost) everything. Add to this snippets from the film ‘alt-berlin’ and an Edith Piaf recording of ‘polichinelle’, and you’ve got an album quite unlike any other. In fact, this isn’t actually an album at all, but the first part of a larger album, or as Bellissimo puts it, “each track is a flower, and this is the first of four bouquets making up the 100-track album Floral”. So these 25 songs are the first quarter of something huge and ambitious, and it will be interesting to hear how the whole thing fits together once it is all completed.

The album opens with ‘tempelhofer flughafen’, a slice of anxious sadcore, telling the story of a visit from an old friend and the subsequent experiences of worry and guilt. It’s full of lines like:

“Two times i’ll call him, two times i said…
two times i thought that i’d never see him again.
i’m so afraid that he won’t like me because one time he said that he was in love with me.
so two times i’ll hang up, i’ll put down my phone…
i’ll put down the vicodin that got me to pick up the phone”.

The second track, ‘the words i read’, introduces some of the array of instruments, including drums, piano and trumpet, and deals with the collapse of a relationship Bellissimo had with an older man, with how things (including people) change with time and how actions and events are open to ever-changing interpretation. The album then takes its first foray into instrumentalism, from guitar-based compositions to toy piano lullabies. ‘silly river’ is a song about solipsism, about how the bad things disappear when you close your eyes, but also about how you can’t close your eyes forever:

“If I blink my eyes the world goes away
but if I leave them closed the solitude never does stay
…So I’ll keep them this way
because no matter how much I sleep
the birds still sing the river still rings
and there are still four seasons.”

Floral continues in this vein across its 25 tracks, alternating between lo-fi pop and rather more experimental touches. ‘i refuse to fall’ sounds like early Casiotone For the Painfully Alone, while ‘trouble in tahiti’ is all screeching noise and unintelligible voices, like whale song for the industrial age.

If all this sounds weird and scattershot, well that’s because it is, and that in turn is because people can be weird, and the thoughts and anxieties which swirl around in their brains are nothing if not scattershot. Floral pt. 1 is a deeply personal piece of work from one man, blown up to billboard scale by a bunch of his friends and the desire to be heard.

You can get Floral pt. 1 on limited release CD, made by Bellissimo’s Drunk With Love Records, via the Gay Angel Bandcamp page. That should also be your destination if pay-what-you-want downloads are more your thing. Note that the CD comes a selection of random extras, including old sheet music, photographs, letters, postcards and flowers.

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