“Both the lyrics and instrumentation preach a kind of relinquishment, a cessation of over-analysis and self-reflexive thinking in favour of something more natural, even if the space feels empty or alien. Push forward instinctively, they seem to be saying. Push forward with doubt.”

We were intrigued, then, when Los Angeles based Half Stop Sessions announced a five video series with the band, keen to see how the Young Jesus aesthetic transmits to live performance. Pleasingly, thanks to the energy and enthusiasm of the band and the talents of the Half Stop crew, the session encapsulates everything that makes Young Jesus great. There’s a song being unveiled every day this week, with the ‘Untitled’ opening interlude and ‘Green’ already showing how Rossiter and co. threw everything at the performance.

We’re honoured to share the third instalment, which happens to be a brand new song that is assumedly going to be included on some future release. ‘Saganism vs. Buddism’ is based on a dream “about the cosmos, potentially meditation as well.” As you might imagine, the meaning of such a song is difficult to pinpoint, but Rossiter invites us to “find out together, right now.” What is clear is that the song explores spirituality in our secular society, and the ideas in the title seem less like direct competitors and more like two impossible poles of a spectrum, complete with their own ironies. To indulge our own opinion, Young Jesus seem to capture the reality, us left to scrabble around somewhere near the middle, where banality and transcendental emotion seem tightly entwined, as though we’re trying to impose some religious impulse from a primitive part of our brain on whatever happens to catch our eye.

“I have begun seeing with my third eye
I begun investments with my dad
I have begun contacting various mystics
I have began buying rocks in stores”

The video was filmed, directed and edited by Travis Button, with Jordan Epstein on second camera and Brad Dujmovic taking care of the sound. Enjoy!

Young Jesus is out now and you can get it from Gigantic Noise. The band are also currently on tour with Pope. Half Stop Sessions have kindly listed all the dates on their page, so if the idea of Young Jesus travelling with the Pope to sing about finding fulfilment in the laws of nature and Eastern practises, be sure to check for a show near you.

While you are over at Half Stop’s website, why not explore the previous sessions, with some great videos with the likes of Palehound, The Weather Station and Kevin Morby. And, finally, remember to check back each day this week for the remainder of the session with Young Jesus. For convenience, why not follow Half Stop Sessions of Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, or subscribe on Youtube?

Photo by Travis Button

The post Video Premiere: Half Stop Sessions – Young Jesus appeared first on Various Small Flames.

After the lonely space-synth drone of the titular opener, ‘Weekends’ emerges as a chilled-out rumbling rock song, invoking parts of Local Natives, Roadkill Ghost Choir and Water Liars to form their own unique vibe. Dove’s vocals croon and quaver, at once driven and dreamy, conjuring a sense of desperate isolation as heard from within a huge yet gradual drift. ‘Tiny Rooms’ has a tangible sense of mass, at times big and heavy yet also switching to fleet-footed punk pop, all tied together with periods of subdued negative space.

“She stopped calling
and I’m not sure why
but I feel like
I should apologise”

Things start slow on ‘Flock’, Dove’s quavering voice weaving around sparse guitar ( “I was your peaceful dove once, you were my wild woman”), before eventually descending into a fully-fledged rock song with a squall of guitar and pounding percussion. This drive continues into ‘Rotten Apples’, which itself eventually founders, stranded on rocks to leave Dove’s falsetto floating around a sea of pulsing bass and shimmery guitar. The final track ‘Human Bruise’ is slathered in a kind of defiant self-loathing, countered by a repeated line towards the end.

“Its cool to be alive
most of the time”

You can get Groan on vinyl via Gigantic Noise (released 17/02/2017), cassette via Citrus City Records, or digitally from the Antiphons Bandcamp page.

The post Antiphons – Groan appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Nearly three years after Home (a stint in which some of the band played as Bummer), Young Jesus announced a new album and unveiled a brand new single, ‘G’, a song which prompted us to say:

“I don’t want to write too much based on one single, but this seems to be going a step further than your standard indie-rock fare”

As hinted above, we were predisposed to hold this opinion. Home left us with some pretty high expectations for the band, in particular their writing and lead John Rossiter’s delivery. ‘G’ and the album trailer (see below) merely confirmed our suspicions. After spending some time with the full-length, it’s safe to safe that these feelings were justified.

Just as with Home, Grow / Decompose is not a traditional eleven-songs-with-three-singles record, but neither is it a full concept album. It’s something between the two, pinned together by a set of central themes and characters whilst escaping the pitfalls and constraints of a “concept album”. For this reason the album is reminiscent of Craig Finn’s writing, which to me is high praise indeed. The word ‘novelistic’ would come close if only Grow / Decompose didn’t bring to mind the very novels which play with the conventions of the form. Our preview mentioned David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest as a comparison and this seems to reach far further than the shared transvestic tendencies (of G / D’s Neil and IJ’s Tony Krause) cited as reasoning. Not only does the album have the same broad, scattered and vaguely cyclical structure as the novel, but Young Jesus’ music also shares Wallace’s metamodern style – a postmodern web of motifs and strange humour countered with a modernist sincerity and genuine sense of hope.

It’s not only in structure that Grow / Decompose brings to mind Infinite Jest. Their juxtaposition of bleak mental turmoil with buoyant (or at least fervent) emotion and hope is integral to the Young Jesus aesthetic. Again a parallel to The Hold Steady’s style, this combination provides a sense of depth that would be absent from something aligned purely to misery or joy. This makes the album, at least to my ears, very much a product of the twenty-first century. We aren’t always sad, or always happy, or always good or evil or apathetic or nihilistic or idealistic to the point of stupidity. We are all of these things and none of them and it can be hard work trying to fathom how to retain a sense of self while being in such a state of confusion. What I’m getting at is, like Infinite Jest, Grow / Decompose resists the temptation of satire and cynicism to paint real people stuck in this madness.

As the title describes so neatly, Grow / Decompose speaks of the familiar paths that human lives follow. Despite all the strangeness, the characters here are going through the age-old problems – depression, anxiety, identity crises, existential terror – the problems of being You and You alone, Molina’s “curse of a human’s life”. For all of the complexity of our existence, we are still locked in the atavistic pattern of life and death, everyone more or less condemned to the same mistakes and fears and joys that we as human beings have been experiencing for generations (“You don’t start clean,” tells the refrain of ‘Brothers’, “spines are twisting in the rings. This old tree, been around before you were born”). In this way the album is both pessimistic and hopeful, a statement that we seem unable to change for the better and a reminder that we are united by this monumental whammy. As Rossiter sings on ‘Oranges’: “She’s a believer in the relief / that we’re all receivers of suffering”.

Degeneration is a major theme and the whole record is imbued with an odd pleasure/pain relationship, accentuated with grotesque imagery. Take for example opener ‘EMP’: “So go ahead and search your chest, the slugs and inchworms know it best.” This brought to mind the book Threats by Amelia Gray, in which a man named David descends the spirals of grief after losing his wife. With death and decay quite literally pervading his house and life, David finds himself both terrified by his situation yet drawn towards some obscure peace with it, as if giving in to a dark and fungal siren. The characters on Grow / Decompose are similarly troubled and lonely, be they confused and unhappy with their identity (‘G’), saddled with unwanted children and gripped by overwhelming numbness (‘Oranges’) or using drugs and forming half-imagined relationships with television presenters (‘Slug’ and ‘Brothers’). Dissociated from others, they achieve the sort of heightened peculiarity of southern gothic hermits, existing within the confines of their own logic and physics, a world where the hope or possibility of connection or meaning flutters along rarely, staccato and unannounced.

The result is a manic-depressive relationship with their irregularity. On ‘Blood and Guts’ the character holds his weirdness aloft like a banner intended to confirm himself or terrify others, marching towards epiphany or entropy like Gray’s David. The title character in ‘Milo’, who sits somewhere near McCarthy’s Lester Ballard on the scale of Southern Gothic hermits, continues the perverse pleasure with the clear-eyed conviction of a serial killer, delighted by the gory truths of life and death. Milo is the depraved character, one who seems to have pushed past anxiety and apathy to realise his potential as a monster (“He paints his face and feels a brightness / glowing brighter inside / the cave he built out of the thorax / of the organist’s hide”). With his humanity stripped away he becomes a prophet who “sings the world as it’s shown”, the cyclical, elemental theme returning with its closing chant:

“All the birds singing
all the plants growing
all the wind blowing
all the bugs crawling
all the birds breaking
all the plants dying
all the wind crawling
and the blood flowing
and the waves breaking
with the birds singing
and the plants speaking
to the wind dying”

It seems important that the end of the final track ‘Dirt’ shares the same chords and drone as the opener, so that the end loops back to the beginning (another similarity to Infinite Jest). If played on repeat Grow / Decompose never ends, a musical ouroboros of well-worn paths that are both doomed and blessed and quite possibly all we have.

Grow / Decompose is out on the 13^th May via Hellhole Supermarket and you can pre-order buy it now on CD and cassette, or on vinyl via Gigantic Noise.

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