Tracklisting:

Hop Along – How Simple
Remember Sports – Pull Through
Fresh Kill – San Diego
Badlands – Slow it Down
Foundlings – Misery
Squirrel Flower – Conditions
Valley Queen – Chasing the Muse
Nap Eyes – Every Time the Feeling
wished bone – reasons
Pearl Crush – True Blue
Samia – 21
plant food – baked beans
Gillian Frances – Blue Shit
Luton – Ice Museum
naps – ninth
Allison’s Gate – Traces
Mess – Cave
runner – awash
I’m Kingfisher – Sarajevo
Sam Moss – Snap
The Duke of Norfolk – Dylan Thomas / Bitter Bitter
Michael Nau & The Mighty Thread – Less Than Positive
lung cycles – dcs

You can check out all of our past monthly roundup mixes here, and be sure to follow us on Spotify and Playmoss for all our future playlists.

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

I was involved with that camp for about ten years—as a camper, an intern and then a music instructor and band coach,” Frances explains. “It was there that I learned about the misrepresentation of women, queer people and people of colour in the music industry. I began learning about sexism, feminism, and the power behind protest music.

Born Yesterday feels like a culmination of these themes and ideas, though the record does not play as an explicit statement. Rather, it feels a natural gathering of thoughts and opinions, the logical product born of the lessons Frances has been learning. This requires a certain degree of opening up, working through feelings in real-time via music, and is manifested as a palpable vulnerability in the songs and lyrics.

Opening track ‘Blue Shit’ is a good example, a brand of folk that delves deep into the unspoken dimensions of human character, though implicitly, hinting at the sense of sadness and dissatisfaction rather than displaying them in overwrought focus. Furthermore, Gillian Frances utilises a meditative sound that combats any danger of mawkish sentiment, the vocals delivered in an even tone that suggests simple and organic communication.

‘Pet Diamond’ follows a similar pattern, utilises ambient noises and field recordings to flesh out the dreamy background atmosphere, and while ‘Vanilla’ is more focused and driven, the poetic nature of the lyrics allows a lightness to remain. “We’re still children now,” Frances sings, her comforting croon skating along the foggy instrumentation. “Vanilla-scented adolescents / with hooks in the clouds, dragging lines in our messes / Our minds swirling in a fluorescent tide / emptied and ready for the flight.”

Allowing space back into the instrumentation, closer ‘Gold’ is a slow-burner hung upon rhythmic guitar, and though the expectation is for this to smoulder into something more fierce, Frances remains in the restrained track, again allowing what is left absent to act as the driving force. The result, like much of the EP, is something akin to a daydream. Though this is not a fanciful vision where the impossible becomes real, rather a introspective reflection, a space in which Frances has room to say what might otherwise be impossible, or else not say what she might else feel compelled to.

Born Yesterday is out via Good Cheer Records and you can snag a copy via the Gillian Frances Bandcamp page.

Cover art by Jonathan Benz

The post Gillian Frances – Born Yesterday appeared first on Various Small Flames.