“A song which shows how the age-old themes of work, loss and responsibility are as much a facet of contemporary folk as any other era.” That’s how we described ‘Platform No. 12 (Old Friends)‘ last summer, the first taste of David James Allen‘s forthcoming album Potpurri Jubilation. The Prince Edward County, Ontario-based songwriter and multi-instrumentalist “writes classic country songs,” as we continued, “full of aching longing, wistful reflection and undying hope, as well as a small cosmic twist,” and latest single ‘By Your Side’ further cements these sensibilities ahead of the album’s release later this year via Littleknown Records. “There’s something in the way that she loves me / that keeps me warm through the coolin’ of the night,” Allen sings in the opening lines, immediately pulling the listener into the warmth and fondness of the track. An ode to the safe harbour of a significant other, where calm might be found no matter how stormy the outside world might prove. Tune in and allow the pressures of work, money and self-doubt to dissolve, if only for a while.

Fugue State – We Are Lasting

The new collaborative project fronted by Northampton, MA-based composer, producer and engineer Dan Langa, Fugue State refuses the typical distinction between solo project and traditional ensemble. An outfit which treats collaboration as its own form of compositional methodology, Langa practising what the press release describes as “an obsessive cultivation of studio recordings with a rotating cast of musicians, transformed into spectral, unrecognizable forms.” Released to celebrate signing with Switch Hit Records, and featuring vocalist Maia Friedman (Dirty Projectors, Coco) and VSF fav Erika Dohi on piano, single ‘We Are Lasting’ provides our first glimpse into this new world. The style draws on Langa’s wealth of experience across music, film and multimedia, as well as the sensibilities of its collaborators, though also follows the direction the present moment suggested. “That improvisation became the foundation, and we slowly built everything on top of it,” as Langa describes. “This was the first track that really found its identity, and I often found comfort in it during the creative process—whether for inspiration or just a moment to breathe.”

Gia Margaret – Everyone Around Me Dancing

“A picture of solitude not as some lonely retreat but rather the path towards recognising the wider connection of things. That sweet dark warmth of the whole world.” That’s how we described Gia Margaret‘s 2023 album Romantic Piano, a collection of careful, considered compositions which held a kind of melancholic curiosity for its surroundings. Now Margaret is gearing up to release her much anticipated follow-up, an album titled Singing coming via Jagjaguwar this spring, and opening track and lead single ‘Everyone Around Me Dancing’ suggests a continuation of such themes. The record might be the first to properly feature vocals since 2018’s There’s Always Glimmer (the consequence of illness, as we covered when reviewing Mia Gargaret), but it is far from a simple reversion to a previous mode of working. Rather, Margaret considers every lesson learnt through the difficult process, the resonance of every person she has ever been. The vocals might have returned, but Singing understands something greater. The voice is only part of who we are. There are deeper ways of communicating.

Watch the video directed by Catherine LoMedico below:

Singing will be released on the 24th April via Jagjaguwar and you can pre-order it now.

Little Lungs – The Heat

Little Lungs is a Baltimore folk rock project led by songwriter Leena Rhodes. With Brendan Russell (bass), Eli Simms (drums), Ricky Schwarzenberg (guitar) and an assembly of other friends and collaborators in support, Rhodes creates soundscapes inherently intimate yet often sweeping too. Songs personal, compassionate and often affirming, driven by equal parts warmth and energy. Next month, Little Lungs will put out the full-length album The Heat, and Rhodes and co. have shared the title track to establish the mood and themes of the record. A typically emotive track build around Rhodes’s vocals and the braid of tenderness and strength they are able to evoke. “Face down against the bed frame / You woke to the fire alarm,” she sings, in an opening snapshot that captures the vulnerability on display throughout.

Mary Ocher – The Narrative (First Movement)

“Has roots in the early twentieth century, both in terms of the minimalist sensibilities and the overarching themes, but it is impossible to think of the intra-war period of the 1900s without hearing ominous echoes of the present day.” So we wrote of Mary Ocher‘s forthcoming album Weimar back in January. The challenging, politically-charged album was introduced by lead single ‘The Dance’ (what we called “a mournful dirge for that which is slipping through our fingers”). And now Ocher has shared taut, plaintive new single ‘The Narrative (First Movement)’. Though it is perhaps the video which will earn the most attention. The expressionist piece is by Boris Eldagsen, one of the first ‘reputable’ artists to explore the possibilities of AI who nevertheless carries a strictly critical approach to the nascent medium (back in 2023 Eldagsen refused the Sony World Photography Award after winning for an AI-generated image). Whether this self-awareness might justify the use of such artistically disheartening technology is still very much in question, and personally we’d query whether the video achieves anything which might be unobtainable via more organic means, but if nothing else it fits into Ocher’s overall project in its willingness to push into uncomfortable places and ask the audience to examine exactly how they feel.

Weimar will be released on 13th March and is available to preorder via Bandcamp.

Miserable chillers – Bikeman

“I’ll be the bike, man / the basket and the bell / the breath before I fell / Open skin up to the air / my mouth to taste the day.” So sings Miguel Gallego in the opening lines of ‘Bikeman’, the delightfully smooth and strange introduction to Miserable chillers‘ latest album, Innocent victims, coming soon via Baby Blue. The New York-based composer and artist has covered plenty of ground with the Miserable chillers project over the years, moving from devotional to danceable and back again, or else occupying both moods simultaneously. But the uniting spirit across all releases has been one of curiosity, a mood delivered in sleek, eighties-adjacent pop that allows Gallego to push into surreal territory without losing an anchor to real life. With its anthropomorphic bicycle, ‘Bikeman’ might be the perfect encapuslation of the Miserable chillers aesthetic, and one which whets appetites for the full release.

Natalie Jane Hill – Colors

Natalie Jane Hill‘s forthcoming record Hopeful Woman is one of our most eagerly anticipated releases of the first half of this year. A collections of ten modest but supremely assured songs that explore love in its many facets. Hot on the heels of ‘Never Left Me’ and ‘I Thought Love Meant’, Hill has unveiled a third track, ‘Colors’ another richly imagined but still down to earth rumination on romance. “Simply put, ‘Colors’ is a love song- specifically about the beginning period of falling in love with someone,” Hill describes. “But it’s also about having a better understanding on personal boundaries and not losing yourself entirely in the potential of something new. It’s being able to enjoy the colorfulness of it, while leaving space for the mystery, too.” The song has a fittingly Spring-like feel, tender like new green shoots and ripe with a glorious sense of possibility.

Old Man of the Woods – Edges of Pleasure

Taken from the album Tendrils, Old Man of the Woods‘ most recent single ‘Meditation’ was “a self-described  ‘breathy, minimal ritual'” as we wrote in 2025, “[a song] which performs its own form of transubstantiation, taking a desire which might otherwise appear absurd and changing it into something charged and devotional.” Miranda Elliott appears to have taken such a style to heart, because new album Cape Perpetua sees the Seattle-based artist embrace aesthetics both religious and ecological to push their ambient avant-pop into an increasingly sacred terrain. Elliott intends to release a track every week, building up to the full release in March, and opener and single ‘Edges of Pleasure’ highlights the meditative style. A song of swirling layers which draws on the choral accumulation of Gregorian chants to conjure something that’s at once otherworldly and fundamentally present.

Turner Cody – Recognize a Friend

In a present milieu where country songs are as likely to be about Disneyland and Pepsi as heartbreak and whiskey, St. Louis-based songwriter Turner Cody shows that the traditional and alt forms of the style can coexist. Out via Capitane Records, latest full-length Out for Blood has all the thematic concerns of the giants of the field, mining the American psyche to explore ideas of freedom and fate, individualism, sin and salvation in a way which would make Van Zandt proud. Yet, as songs like single ‘Recognize a Friend’ show, there’s a playfulness within his style too. An idiosyncrasy which, by way of Prine, allows Cody to sit as comfortably next to his alt-country contemporaries as the old masters. The narrative of the track is a familiar one. Ordinary man Billy finds himself gradually growing despondent as he drifts from youthful optimism into the doldrums of normal living. The personification of an entire demographic which finds itself slipping out of its countercultural pep.

Watch the video below, directed and shot by Cam Kennedy, with editing by Ben Chace, co-direction by Ben Chace and color grading by Thomas de Hemptinne:

Out For Blood is out now via Capitane Records and you can get it from Bandcamp.

The Yum Yum Tree – Shine

It has been nineteen years since Georgia-based indie rock outfit The Yum Yum Tree released their last album Paint By Numbers, a hiatus long enough to make even the most optimistic fans fear for the future of the project. After all, the band have other things to think about, not least lead Andy Gish who has spend over two decades as an ER nurse, as well as working in harm reduction. But good things come to those who wait, and this April will see The Yum Yum Tree return with brand new full-length Turn Down the Noise, an album which builds upon the foundations of its predecessor while proudly displaying the extra wisdom, self-awareness and emotional bravery which comes with near enough twenty years of living. Single ‘Shine’ embodies the spirit of the release, packing that nineties-flavoured indie rock punch while showing a newly unguarded, introspective personality. “Shine is about wanting something that doesn’t belong to you,” as Gish explains, “being able to sit with that and still wanting the best for them.” Watch the video directed by Katherine Lucas below:

Turn Down The Noise will be released on the 10th April and you can pre-order it from Bandcamp.

The post Weekly Listening: February 2026 #2 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Ava Mirzadegan – Dark Dark Blue

Team Love Records [BUY]

Dark Dark Blue, the title of Ava Mirzadegan’s latest full-length, might refer to a mood, a time of day, the quality of light in a room. The album was written in Mirzadegan’s childhood bedroom in the wake of a break-up, a collection of finger-picked folk songs which paints a series of memories, longings and confessions in the palette of the titular hue. But though the present loss hangs heavy, Mirzadegan also digs towards a deeper seam of sadness. One ingrained at her centre, accumulated not only across one life but an entire family history. Here, old wounds are not so much sources of pain as shafts leading towards something older and more fundamental, and Ava Mirzadegan follows these passageways as deep as they might allow her in the hope that allowing light into these dark spaces is to begin to process and heal.

Dean Johnson – Nothing For Me Please

Mama Bird Recording Co. [BUY]

The Seattle-based singer-songwriter Dean Johnson (who is also a member of the band Sons of Rainier) has built a devoted following across the Pacific Northwest with his live shows, garnering almost mythical status with his anachronistic folk songs full of lonesome melodies and gruff heartbreak. Not wishing to change a winning formula, Johnson’s debut solo record Nothing For Me Please is almost completely devoid of bells and whistles, to the point where it often feels like he is singing from a chair in the corner or crooning from a sticky dive bar stage. He sings of pining for a lost love (‘Old TV’, ‘Shouldn’t Say Mine’) and false-smiling through a breakup (‘Acting School’), and the age-old existential woes of any cowboy worth his salt. Songs relatively simplistic in their construction and all the better for it, a reminder that less is oftentimes more. The album is relatively brief, clocking in at less than thirty minutes, though lingers in the mind like the sweet tones of a half-remembered dream.

Divide and Dissolve – Systemic

Invada Records [BUY]

“To make music that honours their ancestors and Indigenous land, to oppose white supremacy, and to work towards a future of Black and Indigenous liberation.” That’s how the liner notes of Divide and Dissolve‘s Systemic describes the intention at the heart of the duo’s crushing songs. The album felt like a fitting soundtrack to 2023, yet another year where the pervasive systems of violence and control have been all too visible, and those familiar with previous LP Gas Lit will recognise the dark, furious density Takiaya Reed and Sylvie Nehill manage to conjure. But far from being a mere sonic steamroller happy to only grind its audience into the ground, Systemic pairs its apocalyptic weight with something more fragile and light. Sections almost orchestral in their detail which move through the ruins of the doomworld in something like defiance. The dominant systems might seem as monolithic as they are malevolent, but there are other systems, other possibilities, and they are more persistent than you might think. As Minori Sanchiz-Fung reads on ‘Kingdom of Fear’:

If I am denied the kindness needed to transform sorrow
If I am denied the simple gentleness of existing
Then I will leave my gifts, like lichen, over the oak branches
Trusting they’ll be safe until you find them

Erik Kramer – Where the fish are as fine as the color of colors

Self-released [BUY]

When people talk about the ‘real world’, they’re not really talking about the real world. Words are not up to such an endeavour. But that’s where art comes in. Described as “music for Blue Sky (‘where the eagle that flies out of sight flies’),” this self-released cassette from Erik Kramer feels like a reminder of this fact, an exercise evoking in times, places and feelings that are incommunicable with mere words. Crafted from a hodgepodge of instruments and samples—from guitar, banjo and pump organ to bells and Casio keyboards, a tin whistle, field recordings, loon calls, snippets of poetry and the ambient sounds of “cars & trucks” and “Madison area teenagers”—the tape offers a series vignettes, small, snatched moments of beauty and nostalgia and wistfulness. Take the mantra-like repetition of ‘Hermit Guardian Angel’ or Eva Chudnow’s still and sweet rendition of the titular traditional folk song on ‘Just as the tide was flowing’, the gloomy slo-mo rock song of ‘Daylight Saving’ or the title track which swells and shivers with an inextricable mixture of sorrow and joy. In a world that seems to grow more complex and cruel with each rotation, it’s no small wonder to find escape routes, art that enables not selfish head-in-the-sand ignorance but a return to what really matters, what really is.

Florry – The Holey Bible

Dear Life Records [BUY]

The Holey Bible feels like a seminal moment in Florry’s history. The Philly band, led by Francie Medosch, have dabbled with country sensibilities ever since their inception, but this record is the moment they fully embrace the genre. It’s chock full of fiddle and mandolin, harmonica and pedal steel, meandering melodies and a heart-on-sleeve lyrical style that seems determined to look on the bright side. This positivity permeates the record, sidestepping the lonesome blues so common in the genre in favour of something genuinely joyful, though with a messy, ramshackle spirit that wards off any threat of things getting saccharine. Through woozy waltzes, fuzzy Country-fried rockers and no small amount of narrative attention, Florry rise from an uncertain, bleak world like a Roman candle, as though the only way to live nowadays is to meet despair with an equal and opposite force.

Gia Margaret – Romantic Piano

Jagjaguwar [BUY]

Writing in one of his journals, the Trappist monk Thomas Merton described the necessity of living in solitude in the woods. “The silence of the forest is my bride and the sweet dark warmth of the whole world is my love,” he wrote. “Out of the heart of that dark warmth comes the secret that is heard only in silence, but it is the root of all the secrets that are whispered by all the lovers in their beds all over the world.” It is this secret, not the lovers, with which Gia Margaret’s Romantic Piano is concerned. A collection of spare compositions whose title gestures not to rose petals and candlelit dinners but the melancholic wonder of the late eighteenth century. Because while Margaret’s first instrumental release Mia Gargaret was wrapped in insular detachment, these brief, meditative songs open the curtains if not entirely stepping outside. A picture of solitude not as some lonely retreat but rather the path towards recognising the wider connection of things. That sweet dark warmth of the whole world.

Kara Jackson – Why Does The Earth Give Us People To Love?

September [BUY]

“The title of my album, the question, is driven by grief,” explains Kara Jackson of debut album Why Does The Earth Give Us People To Love? “Why do we show up on this world alongside one another? To love and to mourn? To curse each other out? To die working every day?” Jackson works through this question in what feels like real time, swapping any hope of a definitive answer for the gradual process of learning. Songs at once intimate and grand, and as fond of playful humour as they are heart-on-the-sleeve sincerity. But the biggest irony of the album is that of its intention. Because for all of its immediacy and uncertainty, Jackson’s refusal to offer any simple, unifying answer comes to represent a solution in its own right. Why does the earth give us people to love? The answer might not reveal itself directly, but would songs like this exist if it did?

L’Rain – I Killed Your Dog

Mexican Summer [BUY]

The music of Taja Cheek’s L’Rain has never been content in a single box. Straddling pop, jazz, R&B and experimental styles, the songwriter and multi-instrumentalist has made name in refusing easy categorisation. This elusive fluidity extends through every aspect of latest album, I Killed Your Dog. A love record, a break-up record, an anti-break-up record. A record which reaches for commercial pop without ceding an inch of its avant garde ambition. “I’m envisioning a world of contradictions, as always,” Cheek describes. “Sensual, maybe even sexy, but terrifying, and strange.” Hence we get an intricate, tangled picture of what it means to love and hurt the people we care about, where shame need not preclude cruelty and love comes complete with both hope and despair. The style is encapsulated by the question Cheek poses in the liner notes: “Is the title an act of maliciousness and revenge or an expression of remorse and regret?” The answer, as always with L’Rain, isn’t as simple as one or the other. It’s everything, simultaneously.

Lael Neale – Star Eaters Delight

Sub Pop [BUY]

Lael Neale’s music feels unmoored from time. Written and recorded at her family home in rural Virginia with help from collaborator Guy Blakeslee and without the involvement of a single screen, Star Eaters Delight draws on multiple lineages of American alternative music, from the lo-fi pop of Suicide and The Velvet Underground to folk singers like Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell. All in an attempt to reach out into the quiet of remote landscapes and fill them with sound and life. In contrast to Neale’s previous album Acquainted With Night, which turned inward to find peace away from the bustle of urban LA, the record explores the false divide between humans and the rest of nature (“I pledge allegiance to tree and meadow / I have no need to conquer or keep them” as Neale sings on opener ‘I Am the River’) and the value of tranquillity away from the information overload of modern life. There are many planes and dimensions, the songs at times crystalline and brittle, others amorphous and unbreakable as water, though it is this tranquillity that ultimately stands out. Minimalism not as a pretentious aesthetic choice or act of puritan self-denial, but, in true transcendentalist style, as an expression of freedom. As Neale puts it when explaining her outlook, she identifies as a minimalist “not because I don’t like things, but because I value freedom more.”

Lilts – Waiting Around

Better Company Records [BUY]

Wild Pink has been a VSF favourite for a number of years now, and we count Laura Wolf‘s Shelf Life among our favourite releases of 2023, so it is no surprise Lilts won our hearts too. Not that the collaboration between Wolf and Wild Pink’s John Ross is overtly indebted to the previous work of its duo. Rather, the pair allow their respective talents to compliment one another, setting their compass to Nineties shoegaze but allowing for whatever detours might occur along the way. Elements of dream pop and post-rock filter in, and there’s none of the derivative flatness of the revivalist movement. Indeed, there’s a freedom to ‘Dodge Street’ and the title track which feels wholly new. A product of the relationship between its creators, as though learning to trust another person allows an artist to escape the confines and expectations of the work they’ve done in the past.

Mark Jenkin – Enys Men OST

Invada Records [BUY]

Mark Jenkin’s 2019 film Bait took kitchen sink realism and bent it into something stranger, its use of a hand-cranked camera and style of dubbing distorting an otherwise familiar picture of tensions between rural traditions and the encroaching middle class. Again set in rural Cornwall, follow-up Enys Men leant more fully into this unsettling mood. Centring on a volunteer ecologist tasked with observing a rare flower on a remote island, the film presents time as both a line and a circle. The protagonist’s monotonous routine unfolds with striking similarity each day, even if the dates in her logbook progress, while strange visions appear across the island as though the thin present is merely draped over a many layered past. To say Enys Men sounded better than it looked is to pay it the highest compliment, with a soundtrack by Jenkin himself which embodies every inch of the film’s loneliness, stark beauty and hauntological mystery.

Meursault – S/T

Common Ground Records [BUY]

The self-titled record from Edinburgh‘s Meursault was initially designed as a concept album. The tale of two characters, including the titular Meursault, attempting to negotiate a post-apocalyptic world. A direct evolution, then, from the “urban horror vignettes” of 2019’s Crow Hill, as Neil Pennycook looked to lead the project in a more narrative-driven direction. But any short story worth its salt undergoes intense revision, and Meursault was pared down beyond its original idea. As though in delving further into the album’s themes, Pennycook felt able to remove the scaffold of the narrative and allow the songs to stand on their own. The character of Meursault remains, albeit under a different guise, and in offering a more autobiographical picture than anything Pennycook has shared to date, the songs come to form a wider meditation on what the ever-changing project means to him. “I am tired of this metaphor and I am bored of this poetry,” as he sings on the title track:

I am done with this ghost
and this ghost she is done with me
so I gave her a name and I set her to burn
and there in that moment this lesson I learned
you can kill them with kindness
just don’t kill them with love

and if you’ve nothing nice to say
try singing it to me

Natalia Beylis – Mermaids

Touch Sensitive Records [BUY]

Mermaids, the latest release from composer and sound artist Natalia Beylis, is in no small part indebted to a trip to a Leitrim recycling centre. It was there Beylis came across an unwanted CRB Elettronica Ancona Diamond 708 E Electric Keyboard, an instrument seemingly patient in its wait for a saviour. Beylis took it home, performed some surgery to remove the purple crayons rattling around inside, and took to playing. “When I found the cover picture of the three figures in a stack of old family photos,” Beylis says, “a confluence of the sounds and the image charged through me and [the album] began to flicker into being.” But as the record progresses, what might as first seem like serendipity deepens into something more profound. As though in committing to strange patterns of intuition and happenstance, Beylis is able to push deeper into nostalgia and unearth the lines of history and heritage within.

Northwoods Baseball Sleep Radio – Northwoods Sleep Baseball

Worried Songs [BUY]

The title character of Robert Coover’s 1968 novel The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. might be miserable in his work life, but at night he escapes reality into a fantasy of his own creation. A fully functioning baseball league he runs as a tabletop game, where every pitch, hit and injury are governed by the roll of a dice. The sport’s essence is captured in the pursuit, a collision of hard statistics and ever-unfolding narrative at a pace slow enough to fill an entire life. Northwoods Sleep Baseball Radio lives in the spirit of Coover’s imagination, albeit with a zany Pynchonian twist. A podcast fronted by elusive Chicago humourist ‘Mr King’ which offers full-length and entirely fictional baseball games featuring players like Clifton Santiago, Lefty Thorn, Blink Retterson and Randy Chang, all narrated by commentator Wally McCarthy. This album, released by Worried Songs, serves as the perfect first step into the comforting and hilarious world of Northwoods Sleep Baseball. Where sedate rhythms draw you in, but wry imagination keeps you listening.

ØXN – CYRM

Claddagh Records [BUY]

The majestic Lankum might have deservedly taken 2023 by storm, but Radie Peat’s other project ØXN also released a masterful album this year. More adventurous still than False Lankum, CYRM offers mix of traditional and original folk songs loaded with aching hearts and portentous weight, charging folk with electronic and cinematic sensibilities to blur the line between blessing and curse. Take ‘Love Henry’, a tale of seduction and violence which screws taut as it progresses, every bit as black and fated as the darkest fairy tale, or ‘Cruel Mother’, where a woman pressured into infanticide sees herself become a slow slide towards damnation. A dread-laden version of Scott Walker’s ‘Farmer in the City’ closes out the album, a thirteen-minute epic which creeps and creeps until it as all around you, then collapses into a chaos of noise.

Pearla – Oh Glistening Onion, The Nighttime Is Coming

Spacebomb Records [BUY]

“I’m not certain about much,” sings Pearla on ‘Ming the Clam’, “But I’m certain how we touch / Is compelled by some great force / Other than us.” The song encapsulates the spirit of Oh Glistening Onion, The Nighttime Is Coming, where playful whimsy and unfiltered introspection are kept in check by a certain self-awareness, though cannot help but tend towards the potential of some higher mystery. Many of the songs are concerned with finding comfort within a hostile world, and often play like questions being processed in real time, drawing on both real life experiences and wider sources. From the experience of having a credit card stolen at a flower shop to the story of Ming, the oldest individual animal known to science which died as scientists studied its longevity (“I study all the little signs / Under fluorеscent light… Reminder of the grand creation / How did she keep on fighting?”). It’s an album that marks Pearla as a project that works in awe of life’s mysteries, determined to see the beautiful and the surreal rise above the grind of the everyday.

Protomartyr – Formal Growth in the Desert

Domino [BUY]

“In case I don’t see you, well, for a little while, I just want to tell you, it’s been lovely. Every bit of it. The whole fifty years. I’d sooner have been your wife, Bark, than anyone else on earth.” So says Lucy “Ma” Cooper in the closing scene of Leo McCarey’s 1937 drama Make Way For Tomorrow, a film which feels relevant to Protomartyr’s fifth album, Formal Growth in the Desert, not least because it is referenced by the titles of opening pair of tracks. The songs were written in a period which saw lead Joe Casey lose his mother and be forced out of his childhood home, and while the records holds no small amount of grief and darkness, it also serves as an unguarded declaration of love. Which might sound strange for a band who have won deserved acclaim for their foreboding sound, their fury and doom, but Protomartyr have always been so much more than another snarling, depressed post-punk outfit in a crowded field. “Time’s your enemy / Every gift you see will be taken for sure,” Casey sings on ‘The Author’, the most direct tribute to his mother. “So I figure while you live / Kiss the ones that love you / For thе song you sing.” In case I don’t see you for a little while, I just want to tell you, it’s been lovely.

Sluice – Radial Gate

Ruination Record Co. [BUY]

The title of Radial Gate, Justin Morris’s second album under the moniker Sluice, follows the project name and doubles down on the imagery of water. Namely its control, the mechanisms and machinery developed in order to stop, raise and coax waterways in the manners most functional. Morris’s songs, cut from a nostalgic, patient style of folk and elevated by a rich palette of instrumentation, feel like miniature versions of such systems. Only here the flow is not a canal or estuary but the ever pulling course of time, complete with its attached stream of memories and meaning. Tracks like ‘Centurion’ find affirming momentum in this current, while others dam the passage to contemplate the depths of a single moment. But whether Morris is skimming along the surface or submerging himself in plunge pools, the lasting sense is that of control. For if life is a flowing river, Radial Gate represents an attempt to apply structures along its course so that we might more fully engage with the power and potential to be found therein.

Measure, Pour & Mixtape: Music for Cooking

SPINSTER [BUY]

As its title suggests, this compilation by the fine folks at SPINSTER invited artists to explore links between food and music. From shared conceptual themes of creativity and community to parallels between melody and harmony and texture and flavour, each song celebrates both the act of preparing food and sharing it with others. The result is what the label call “an auditory cookbook of songs, poems, field recordings, and aural experiments, inspired by recipes, food preparation processes, dishes, and the experience of eating.” There ain’t a dud across the sixteen tracks, but personal favourites include Andy McLeod & Sarah Bachman’s timeless folk opener, a new song from Lou Turner inspired by a line from Robert Frost, Sally Anne Morgan’s soil-to-plate ‘Grain Song’ that’s all blue skies and wide open fields, and Little Mazarn’s exploration of food’s ability to evoke memories, in this case of an uncle who she says “briefly played on the Dallas Cowboys but mostly played football with me on Thanksgiving.”

Stephen Steinbrink – Disappearing Coin

Western Vinyl [BUY]

Since releasing his last record Utopia Teased in 2018, Oakland’s Stephen Steinbrink busied himself with other things, both musical and not. He dove into the craft of engineering records for other bands, enjoying the sense of communal creativity in contrast to the solo endeavour of writing and recording for himself. He also studied an apprenticeship at a stained glass studio and became deeply interested in Buddhism, enrolling in lay monastic training before being interrupted by the global lockdowns of 2020. All of which is important when considering Disappearing Coin, an album which represents something of a reinvention for Steinbrink. A wilful attempt to make music with the same creativity and sense of awe-filled wonder that he felt when exploring these other avenues. The spirit is captured in the conjurer’s trick of the title, where reality is ruptured by a brief spark of magic. Buoyed by the experience and wisdom gleaned from outside activities, Steinbrink returns to music as a kind of magician himself. A figure who, guided by invention and playfulness, looks to use mastery of a physical craft in order to open the door to small, intangible miracles.

Strawberry Runners – S/T

Self-released [BUY]

Released a decade since the project’s inception in 2013, Strawberry Runners is the self-titled debut full-length from Emi Night’s songwriting project. Written following a period of great personal upheaval and echoing back to past trauma, the record returns to dark places with disarming candour and an easy grace, folding folk and pop into shapes that feel at once fresh and familiar. Night runs their fingers over old wounds to confront feelings of loneliness and heartbreak, but does so with a renewed spirit and sense of unrestrained creativity. Because despite the sometimes heavy subject matter, Strawberry Runners is a warm and colourful record. One full of gentle melodies and tactile textures, small details that evoke the multisensory nature of our chaotic world in all of its pain and joy and mysterious beauty. Take the sunny, devotional love song ‘Alison’, a shot of sunshiney summer where you can almost hear the wistful smile bend Night’s voice as they sing.

And I miss you
I hope you’re alright
I remember stayin’ up all night
Last June

And when I get back
To the midwest
To the bluegrass
And the sassafras trees
And the yellowwood

Sun June – Bad Dream Jaguar

Run For Cover Records [BUY]

There’s always been a distance in the music of Sun June, from the disconnect between lovers and family members to the wide open vistas of the Austin band’s home state. But third album Bad Dream Jaguar was inspired by distance of another order of magnitude. Founding members Laura Colwell and guitarist Stephen Salisbury have been in a relationship for the last few years, and the record was written after Salisbury moved 1,300 miles away to North Carolina, the couple swapping demos of new songs as a way to both process and alleviate the sense of separation and longing. The hazy dream-like quality of the Sun June sound is therefore as nostalgic and nebulous as it has ever been, painting impressionistic pictures of love and longing in quiet dusk-hued pastels, as though in effort to preserve that which might otherwise fade out into nothing. The present comes to feel like a temporary space between the gravity of the past and the vast shadowed sweep of whatever comes next, though we are given little choice but live in it as best we can.

Truth Club – Running From the Chase

Double Double Whammy [BUY]

“Is this working? Are you working hard? Is it working for you?” Such questions might only be asked outright in the closing track of Truth Club’s Running From The Chase, but their desperate weight hangs over its every moment, threatening to pull an entire life off-kilter or else bury it altogether. The North Carolina outfit’s 2019 debut Not An Exit nodded to Dante by way of Bret Easton Ellis, though its despair was matched with an infectious forward motion which meant the listener could step off at the end with their pessimism shaken loose. But here the songs are more expansive, the textures dense and submerging. A sonic representation of twenty-first century living, with lead Travis Harrington left to murmur and yell within the noise, mimicking a world which demands energy for even the most basic of things. “I am scared we will end up like his friend,” as Harrington sings on the title track. “work until he’s dead / work until we’re dead / is there any other plan?”

White Boy Scream – Tent Music

Whited Sepulchre Records [BUY]

Travelling from Los Angeles to New Mexico in 2021, White Boy Scream’s Micaela Tobin stopped off for a few nights in Arizona to stay with violinist and composer Joshua Hill, who was staying with his parents to shelter from the pandemic and care for his dementia-stricken father. They pitched a tent in the backyard and decided to record something in the spur of the moment, setting up microphones as wildfires raged only miles away. A confined space within a world unravelling. Tent Music is what emerged from those nights. Music stripped of intention and thus open to ancient or esoteric influence, Tobin and Hill acting not so much musicians but mouths for unseen voices, tools for invisible hands. When shaping the recordings over the next few years, the task felt more like relaying an old mythology than creating something new. “Both of us have a pretty long practice with improvised and experimental music,” as Tobin explains, “but there were voices coming out of me in those two nights that I’ve never used before. It felt like channelling something. When we started listening back to it, the story emerged.”

As ever, thanks for sticking with us for another year. Your support does not go unnoticed.

The post Albums We Missed in 2023 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Gruñona is a journey without a clear destination, a question without an answer. An attempt to map identity not to achieve some clear-cut conclusion but rather in the hope of better understanding how history and culture and personal beliefs shape the people we are and were, the people we will be.

This August sees Half Gringa return with a brand new album, Force to Reckon, and though the focus of the songs might be different, the same powers are at work. Blending pop, indie rock and folk, with harmonies and piano from fellow Chicagoan Gia Margaret, the record is one of reflection, written following a personal loss and amid all the strangeness that follows. “None of the songs on this record resolve, really,” Olive explains. “Many end in the middle of a thought, because this record is about how much I’m still in the middle of my grieving process.”

For mourning is not finite, not some penance to served and finished. Rather it is open-ended and strangely familiar, as though it has always been present at some level, waiting for death to reveal how deep it goes back. “Lines like ‘Time will tell if nothing else’ and ‘I will mourn you in advance, but I never really get the chance’ sound like hindsight, but they were more like predictions when I wrote them,” Olive continues. “I spend a lot of time looking away from things I don’t want to deal with, but I know they’re still there. And my eyes are getting tired, I guess.”

With this in mind, lead single ‘1990’ might prove surprisingly upbeat and playful. But within its wry humour and uplifting motion lies a keen sense of pain. A kind of joined up hurt where the past will always govern the present, and the future will never be free of either.

Force to Reckon is out on the 28th August and you can pre-order it now from the Half Gringa Bandcamp page.

Photo by Rachel Winslow

The post Half Gringa – 1990 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

The record’s rich sound relied on Margaret’s vocals, which acted as an even, compassionate guide through the lonely rooms. The solid force around which everything else could coalesce. But then came illness, and Gia Margaret lost the ability to sing. “This left me feeling like a shell of myself,” she explains, “so I turned to my synthesizer for comfort.” The result, Mia Gargaret, might not be the expected follow-up to There’s Always Glimmer, but the one required in the moment. “These compositions helped me hold onto my identity as a music maker,” Margaret says. “At times this music helped soothe my anxiety more than therapy or anything else could.”

The record brings Gia Margaret’s abilities as a musician and composer to the fore. Crafted mainly from synthesizer, piano and acoustic guitar, the songs also draw upon other sounds and textures, from church bells and lapping water to spoken word samples. Despite this, or perhaps even because of it, the tracks retain a minimalist feel, the samples drifting through the often spare instrumentation like fleeting ghosts. The effect is one of remove,  these elements of life presented translucent and secondhand, like memories projected onto a blank wall by a dying bulb.

The result is both eerie and moving. Like a sadness so sudden and immersive that it scarcely feels real. “Do you ever feel like you’re living your life / but you’re also barely there?” Margaret asks on ‘barely there’, encapsulating the record’s uncanny relationship with presence and absence. “I wanted to capture the feeling of a truly strange time in my life,” Margaret says, “even though I would prefer to forget it altogether.” At times There’s Always Glimmer felt like an out of body experience, floating high above the moment and achieving a new perspective. But Mia Gargaret is a dream departure not from the moment but from what has always been, and one that might never break. An experience not out of body, but out of life.

With this comes a change of tack. The need to be more proactive in optimism. More directly protective. “I wanted to make something that sounded hopeful,” Margaret says, “which is a little ironic because I felt essentially hopeless during the entire process. I was making music to self-soothe.” Take opener ‘apathy’, its warm currents overlaid with mournful piano, the spoken word sample of Margaret’s own vocal therapy playing as though from some speaker in the corner of the room. Sounding like hope abstracted, some artificial thing produced with the correct actions and conditions.

With words from the British philosopher Alan Watts, ‘body’ achieves a humming warmth, that half-panicked feel of hearing one’s suffering put into words. Of someone—some stranger— truly understanding, assuring you that you are not crazy at all. There’s comfort too in the languid tones of ‘no sleep no dream’, though it’s the transient kind that arrives only at the end of things, and tracks such as ‘sadballad’ and ‘3 movements’ offer a keener edge to the sorrow. The closing track ‘lesson’ ensures that the sense of sadness and turmoil remains. “Did I miss a lesson when I was younger / when I should have learned,” Margaret asks in the only real vocals on the album. “How to be a person / and how to believe in what I deserve?”

Of course, the music of Gia Margaret has always been melancholic, and the sound of this new record bears clear relation to what came before. “The palette of [There’s Always Glimmer] is built from shades of sadness,” we wrote of the previous record. “Loss, regret, wistful longing, the arresting trap of nostalgia and plain old hurt—though again and again Margaret provides a counter-shade, as though the darkness’ true purpose is merely to highlight the warm, weak glow within.”

It is in this second half that the difference emerges on the new album. Margaret has not thrown away the colours of her previous music, but paints according to a different end. If There’s Always a Glimmer was concerned with finding the persistent light within even the darkest of moments, then Mia Gargaret acknowledges the fragility of this spark. Because sometimes it is not a matter of perspective. There is no bright side to look upon. The work then becomes not finding the light but working to keep it alive, if only in memories, so that in some undecided future, it might burn bright once again.

Mia Gargaret is out now via Orindal Records (US) and Dalliance Recordings (rest of the world) and you can get it from the Gia Margaret Bandcamp page.

The post Gia Margaret – Mia Gargaret appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Thanks for being with us.

Advance Base – Animal Companionship

Run For Cover Records

““The songs are intended to be a comfort for folks going through their own tough times,” Ashworth explained in an essay for Talkhouse. “Commiseration has always been a guiding principle of my songwriting.” Love need not be hugs and hearts and kisses, and loyalty does not necessarily mean hanging in a relationship beyond all reason. But love is loyalty, and Owen Ashworth has been, and seemingly always will be, loyal to those who need it most.”

REVIEW / BUY

Basement Revolver – Heavy Eyes

Sonic Unyon / Fear of Missing Out Records

“An expansive and spacious sound that’s lit up with a slow-burning emotional resonance, centring around Hurn’s impassioned vocal delivery. Their music combines the magnitude and granular glitter of shoegaze, the personal songwriting of bedroom pop and the cathartic noise of 90s indie rock. [Basement Revolver] play a double game of big and small, switching from quiet personal sentiment to big bombastic broadcast, often within the same song.”

REVIEW / BUY

Benjamin Shaw – Megadead

Audio Antihero

“For all the frustration and (self-)loathing in show, there’s also something else. Perhaps the defining characteristics of Shaw’s music is its ability to transcend its own themes. He may be singing about hating his job, about going nowhere fast, but in doing so colours these things with meaning. To create art is to communicate, and as such the songs represent the antithesis to their own concerns, the simulated happiness and artificial connection punctured through their ironic presence.”

REVIEW / BUY

Campdogzz – In Rounds

15 Passenger

“[Closer ‘Sorceress’] at first might seem a slightly strange segue for a final track soon straightens out into an intuitive sense of logic and belonging, as though the album-long teeter on the edge of some epiphanic transformation has finally fallen headlong at the last moment.”

REVIEW / BUY

Damien Jurado – The Horizon Just Laughed

Secretly Canadian

“While it might be tempting to view [Jurado’s] songwriting career as a fruitless quest for his true identity, perhaps the complete opposite is true. His career is his identity, splinters of truth arriving through dreams or divined from another realm entirely, fractals that can be arranged into a whole that far surpasses the meaning of any one component. A manifesto of sorts, one full of prophecy and history, though rather than country-western stars of [Joseph Billie] Gwin’s vision, the Ten Prophets of Damien Jurado are merely alternate versions of himself—past, present, future, dream—each record its own style or consciousness, born of him, yes, but equal to him too.”

REVIEW / BUY

Dear Nora – Skulls Example

Orindal Records

“You can be anyone, we are told, do anything, though only superficially, a multitude of simulations all working toward to same goal, the means to the end of shifting units and making money. Dear Nora’s music attempts to undermine this by playing the same game, crafting an unreal reality of their own to overlay the other. And, by neutering the money-making end, they in effect invert capitalism’s technique, reestablishing the means (ie. living) as the purpose. Yes, Skulls Example might be a simulation, but it is one of the most meaningful and rewarding you could hope to find.”

REVIEW / BUY

Field Report – Summertime Songs

Verve Forecast

“The summertime theme might conjure ideas of cloudless, uptempo good times, but to limit Field Report’s use of the season to a more poppy sound is to miss the deeper point […] We cannot rely on grand promises or paradigm shifts. Rather, we must commit to the slow, considered process of letting go and working through, of deciding who we were and who we want to be. In these times, we’d be foolish to trust that will be enough, but belief in small moments of agency and human connection is more productive than misplaced prayers for epiphany.”

REVIEW / BUY

Free Cake For Every Creature – The Bluest Star

Double Double Whammy

“free cake for every creature don’t make sad songs exactly, usually tending toward a kind and hopeful feel. Yet there is something intangible about them, a strange sensation that weaves its way into quiet moments, like a kind of everyday poetry or nostalgia that we all recognise but don’t have a name for. The case in point is the penultimate song, ‘be home soon’, which somehow portrays a subway ride home as something beautiful and magical.”

REVIEW / BUY

Frog – Whatever We Probably Already Had It

Audio Antihero

“Contains lines of total sincerity that feel disarming in the face of what has come before, as though the truth of things slips out in quiet whispers to oneself, the party over and room emptied out. The truth being the soul-shearing reality of the American Dream, the tragicomedy of understanding your dreams and desires to be complete fictions while leaning on them with all of your weight.”

REVIEW / BUY

Gia Margaret – There’s Always Glimmer

Orindal Records

“The palette of Gia Margaret is built from shades of sadness—loss, regret, wistful longing, the arresting trap of nostalgia and plain old hurt—though again and again Margaret provides a counter-shade, as though the darkness’ true purpose is merely to highlight the warm, weak glow within. Because, while people up and leave, and time is certainly no kinder, Gia Margaret is here to prove that value is inherent in life itself, meaning and fulfilment not in spite of troubles, but within them. No matter how dark, there is always glimmer.”

REVIEW / BUY

Haley Heynderickx – I Need to Start a Garden

Mama Bird Recording Co.

“I Need To Start a Garden is the perfect album for the onset of spring. It’s all about growth and the hope of new beginnings, but also doesn’t shy away from the necessary hard work that makes such growth possible. It’s a reminder that plants are not the only things that need to be tended and cared for, but also that they’re not the only things that can flourish and bloom either.”

REVIEW / BUY

Lisa/Liza – Momentary Glance

Orindal Records

“The context [of bereavement] is important not because we wish to suggest some ‘romantic’ mythology behind the record (indeed, the songs were written before the tragedy occurred), or that there is magical healing power in the making/consumption of art. Rather, Momentary Glance is a symbol of the power of community, generosity in the face of grief, and the album’s use of placidity over bombastic melodrama is indicative of such an authentic spirit.”

REVIEW / BUY

Long Neck – Will This Do?

Tiny Engines

“Despite the difficult circumstances, there is also a sense that things will be okay, that our narrator has gained the sense of strength and self-reliance necessary to move on. Or rather, is working toward being strong enough and self-reliant enough, with this album being the furthest possible reach forward toward that place. Of course, it’s likely full strength and self-reliance will never be achieved, but it’s the strive toward those ideas that is the most important. Of course this will do.”

REVIEW / BUY

Lung Cycles – S/T

Lily Tapes & Discs

“The placid natural flow continues whether we voice our concerns or not, and nothing in this external sphere is working to exacerbate our feelings. In this way, Lung Cycles reveals anxiety and melancholy to be no more than parasites of the human psyche, forces all too willing to consume us should we centre our existence within our own heads, but soon found dead in the vacuum of natural quiet.”

REVIEW / BUY

Monarch Mtn – days of sleepwater

Self-released

“Darkness breeds darkness, and allowed to fester can become a self-perpetuating thing that metastazises unto ubiquity. Here, Monarch Mtn do not pretend that suffering is abating, or can be dispelled by a mere shift in perspective, but rather choose to fight the phenomenon. days of sleepwater exists to fight the creeping dark, and not embrace it.”

REVIEW / BUY

Naps Eyes – I’m Bad Now

Paradise of Bachelors

“Behind the heavy-lidded blasé exterior lies a rich and tangled inner life, an invitation to fall into the folds of Chapman’s brain and watch his thoughts pass by […] Those with enough curiosity or desire can try to arrange the Nap Eyes lines into a magical formation, wrestling with the existential questions in the hope that they will be the first to figure it all out. The rest can take a back seat and let the Big Stuff drift around them, finding comfort in the fact that there are things bigger than us, and beauty in the understanding that they are beyond our grasp.”

REVIEW / BUY

Remember Sports – Slow Buzz

Father/Daughter Records

“Sincerity could be said to represent Slow Buzz as a whole, though sincerity not as some sentimental force rather a commitment to what feels true, no matter how messy and conflicting. There’s something in the Remember Sports story at the heart of this earnestness, the possibility of progressing without sacrificing an entire ideal, of reincarnation where one returns not as some different creature entirely, but a new version of oneself. A truer version, at least for now.”

REVIEW / BUY

Sun June – Years

Keeled Scales

“Years is a record shaped and propelled by the gentle forces of the world, currents in the substrates of the earth and life itself, invisible yet profound, capable of changes both minor and major […] a number of the tracks returning to a repeated phrase, cyclical patterns that rise in intensity like incantations, or else echo out into the fabric of the sound.”

REVIEW / BUY

Swearin’ – Fall Into the Sun

Merge Records

“We live in a time obsessed with the past. Our dreams now look backwards instead of forward, our deepest wish not for some utopian future but rather a return to an unreal past, one sanded of all trials and troubles by nostalgia and the constant passing of time. With Fall Into the Sun, Swearin’ rebel against such a mindset, redirecting our hopes toward the future once more, and compelling us to pay attention to the present while we still can.”

BUY

Talons’ – After Talons

Self-released

“Talons’ capture the futility and hopelessness of a content life in a creaking hyper-capitalist society, an existence often devoid of meaning and full of shame at the hypocrisy in caring about the world but doing little to change it. But it’s also kind-hearted too, its glowing core of humanity somehow comforting despite the heavy subject matter. In other words, there’s no optimism here, but there is hope.”

REVIEW / BUY

Valley Maker – Rhododendron

Frenchkiss Records

“Built upon a thematic bedrock of faith and religion, but anyone who baulks at the R-word need not worry, [Valley Maker] is uninterested in creeds and doctrine, instead exploring metaphysical mysteries that we can all wonder about […] Crane is not foolish enough to offer answers, though his words and voice work as a reassuring balm, even while acknowledging the ambiguity and turmoil that surely awaits. ”

REVIEW / BUY

The Washboard Abs – Lowlight Visions

Antiquated Future

“Clarke Sondermann’s music has always been intimate, but this album treads deeper into this ideal than any of his previous work. In the circumstances, it would be relatively easy to make an album of sad songs, but it’s a brave artist who takes the very personal worry and suffering and uses it to build something that’s this complex and multifaceted, vulnerable but not hopeless, forgoing nihilistic dejection in favour of a strange kind of love, an appreciation of what stands to be lost.”

REVIEW / BUY

The World Without Parking Lots – Seventh Song Counts the Engines

Self-released

“Seemingly simple but rendered dense and cryptic with the addition of Parcell’s poetry […] Seventh Song Counts the Engines is a beautiful collection of songs, one which somehow makes a bold statement in a circuitous whisper, deceptively complex instrumentation and ambiguous lyrics capturing decidedly unambiguous emotion.”

REVIEW / BUY

Young Jesus – The Whole Thing is Just There

Saddle Creek

“How do you adopt a more sincere, hopeful position without becoming a flat Sincere, Hopeful Person, and everything that image entails? Young Jesus have put their hope in a spontaneous, endlessly recursive form of questioning, where every hard fought answer only exists to be questioned further. The endeavour might well take a life time, but the prospect of circling closer to the truth is something of a solution in its own right. So, while it’s tempting to think that the true message or meaning of the songs on The Whole Thing Is Just There is always just out of frame, the reality is in fact the other way around. The message of the songs is that meaning is always just out of frame, and that there is no more valuable an enterprise than the constant search outside and beyond.”

REVIEW / BUY

Yowler – Black Dog in My Path

Double Double Whammy

“The writing is vague and affecting, words imbued with an esoteric power that fuses intimate internal thoughts from the corporeal world with something altogether more supernatural. “I bear the mark, I am sigil,” Jones sings, “to the spirits and the sprites, but I promised not to listen and stay in my life.” The natural and supernatural converge on Black Dog In My Path, and Jones has re-purposed Yowler as the conduit between these two dimensions.”

REVIEW / BUY

We’re be sharing our favourite songs, books and Bandcamp name-your-price releases in good time, so keep an eye on the ‘Lists‘ category for those.

The post Favourite Albums of 2018 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Various Swell Sounds is a new collaborative playlist series from Shana Hartzel of Swell Tone, Jon Chin of Cereal and Sounds, and myself. Instead of constantly exchanging tracks amongst each other, we have decided to work together to bring them to more ears. Every month, we will match a selection of our old and brand new favourites to a specific theme, as decided on a revolving basis month by month.

After the brutal summer, the leaves are finally turning, which can only mean one thing. Yep, it’s the time of year to slip on pavements, make tired jokes about pumpkin spice coffee and hide behind closed curtains to ignore the calls for candy from ghouling children. We’ve made a playlist of songs to see you through the cool and crispy season.

There’s a Playmoss and Spotify version below, so choose what suits you best, though due to incomplete catalogues the are slight discrepancies between the two.

Check out our other Various Swell Sounds entries here and here, and head over to Swell Tone and Cereal + Sounds for the edition over there.

The post Various Swell Sounds #9: Cool & Crispy appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Featuring:

Petal – I’m Sorry
Wild Pink – The Seance On St. Augustine St
Big Thing – Spin
Bombshell Nightlight – Death Day
Mount Goldie – Summer
Elsa Lester – Pretty Bad, Man
Why Bonnie – Gold Rush
Devon Welsh – Vampires
Max García Conover – Another Travelling Man
Floating Room – Dog
Izaak Opatz – Bathing in the Ganges
Free Cake For Every Creature – Around You
Indigo De Souza – Home Team
Museum Food Court – bad song
Crisco Dreams – I Like Your Bed
You’re Sister – I Think About You
Russel the Leaf – Let ‘Em Run
Fresh – Daytime
Stevhen Peters – Phone Talk
Tender Age – Don’t Mind
Lord Youth – Do You Have Anything To Add?
Quiet Hollers – Addicted
Blue J – Hard to Know
Post Moves – The Arc of Life
Angus & Julia Stone – Nothing Else
Gia Margaret – Birthday
Sun June – Discotheque
Campdogzz – Souvenir
Field Report – Every Time

*(Due to various issues of availability and licensing, neither playlist has the complete quota of acts, but welcome to the modern age).

You can find all of the previous instalments of Bright Sparks here, and be sure to check back in a few weeks to see what makes the next edition.

The post July 2018 Roundup appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Gia Margaret makes music that exists in a strange dreamlike world that looks a lot like our own, what the label describe as “a blend of loner folk, bedroom pop, shoegaze & ambient electronic.” While the album sounds ethereal and otherworldly, its themes and emotions are rooted in something very real. This is not escapism into some dreamy, floaty fantasy land, but an attempt to capture the equally beguiling, and sometimes fleeting, relationships between friends, family and everyone else. Margaret’s lyrics are devoid of melodrama, often describing everyday events that at first glance might seem unremarkable, though her unique focus elevates them to something near transcendental, illuminating our lives from within and casting light on the sad magic of existence.

The result feels somehow both cautious and decisive, sleepy and sincere, all wrapped up in a silvery sentimentality that’s hard to ignore. This is typified by opener ‘Groceries’, its gently woozy keys and Margaret’s slow and sombre vocals possessing a near sedated feel. “It’s safe to say it’s been a hard year,” she sings, as if to set the scene for what’s to come, though this sluggish sadness is shot through with a steely-eyed hope.

“Though it’s not easy to see
there’s always glimmer
you bought the groceries
and you let the light in”

The album’s lead single, ‘Birthday’ pairs electric guitar with a captivating synth-led backdrop, the percussion picking things up slightly from the opener. It’s a song about loss and absence, of full minds and empty spaces, a thousand small and seemingly mundane associations changed forever as two people move apart. “Wouldn’t it be so strange,” Margaret asks during the chorus, “not to be with you on your birthday?” The track forms the perfect example of the record’s ability to impart deep meaning from shallow things, simple words and observations used to imply whole histories, tone and cadence imagining futures, or no future at all.

‘Figures’ is built on disarmingly simple strummed acoustic guitar and a sense of heavy-hearted reminiscence. But it somehow feels light and airy too, small tendrils of the titular glimmer snaking in at the edges, a sense that things are finally moving on. Still, however, recognition flickers on the periphery, even if disproved in the next moment. “The lights are on in the buildings downtown,” Margaret sings in the opening line, “and the figure inside moves like you.”

‘Smoke’ is a sombre piano track, Margaret whispering her lines as if revealing long-known truths and swallowed emotion (“I’ll never tell you I cried in the bathroom/ The first night we moved in/ And you went out to smoke,”), while ‘In Normal Ways’ sounds like a stripped-back Grouper song, distorted double-vision guitar and relative lyrical clarity, as if someone has dredged Liz Harris’s vocals from the bottom of a lake and set them to dry in the weak shoreline sun.

“Your hands are on my shoulder
keep me from going overboard
although I felt alive when you were carving out the snow
for my feet”

The tracks ‘Looking and ‘Sugar’ are perhaps the closest thing to conventional folk songs on the record, wire-thin acoustic guitar gently ticking behind Margaret’s vocals, while ‘For Flora’ is a song rooted in the past, the piano’s tempo something like the rhythm of time, the answering machine voices burbling behind like spectral glitches in the constant motion. ‘Exist’ plays like an affectionate dream, all edges dulled into tactile grace, and ‘Wayne’ maintains the atmosphere while the vocals take on a quality somewhere near yearning, before closer ‘West’ emerges from beneath a tape hiss fog. The track is as soporific as anything on the record, though Margaret’s vocals tick into small rhythms and harmonies, as though shaking free from the somnolence, or perhaps just the opposite, attempting to mimic its currents in the hope of being carried off.

The palette of Gia Margaret is built from shades of sadness—loss, regret, wistful longing, the arresting trap of nostalgia and plain old hurt—though again and again Margaret provides a counter-shade, as though the darkness’ true purpose is merely to highlight the warm, weak glow within. Because, while people up and leave, and time is certainly no kinder, Gia Margaret is here to prove that value is inherent in life itself, meaning and fulfilment not in spite of troubles, but within them. No matter how dark, there is always glimmer.

There’s Always Glimmer is out now on Orindal Records. Get it from their website on black of coke bottle green LP, or as a digital download from the Orindal Bandcamp page.

The post Gia Margaret – There’s Always Glimmer appeared first on Various Small Flames.