Whomous and Westway bring a slinky little pop number in ‘So Vain’, all auto-tuned vocals and laid back vibes, while Lion Bark’s ‘Poolside’ is a chilled out love song. The feel is continued with Static Animal’s warm-weather instrumental track, ‘Easy, and ‘Carrie’ by London-based songwriter Nicko Franklin, a gentle and kindly pop song. Seattle’s LUWUM bring a little more lo-fi rumble to things, although as garage rock goes its still honey-smooth, before a brand new track from Harley Alexander (a familiar face here at WTD), which closes side A with their trademark suave and summery psychedelics.

Side B see a stylistic shift, with things getting hushed and acoustic and to me even better. First up is ‘No Mistake’ by Fake Laugh (which retains some of the A-side’s saunter), before Arthur Shea gets much more hushed and intimate), Clare Cottrill (which I like a lot – bedroom pop in the vein of Kissing Fractures or the solo Florist stuff) and Girlpool‘s Cleo Tucker (another quiet acoustic track with a metronomic beat).

The final track is ‘Kaleidoscope’ by Arbes, which utilises clattering percussion to enhance a song that falls somewhere between the laid back pop and quiet bedroom acoustics that appear on the compilation as a whole. A fitting end then, to a great showcase. If you’re anything like me then this taster will make you want to dive into the back catalogues of both the featured acts and the label itself. I’m sure there are tonnes of great things to discover.

So as the nights draw in and the air gets a chill, do yourself a favour and keep summer alive in your soul with RELAY. You can get it on cassette or digital download via the Sports Day Records Bandcamp page.

The post Sports Day Records – RELAY appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Until then, here’s our June Roundup, a playlist of songs rounding up everything we covered during June. Clever, huh? Click on the artist name in the tracklisting to be whisked away to the specific post.

Tracklisting:

1. Trisha Please Come Home – Advance Base
2. Slower Now – Star Horse
3. I Make Boys Cry – Adult Mom
4. Cordella – On The Water
5. Destroy – Henoheno
6. A Long Time Ago – Kalle Mattson
7. Only One Who Feels a Little Bit Bad – Fazed on a Pony
8. Ohio Snow Falls – Unraveler
9. Pylon Pile On – Benjamin Shaw
10. For Luck – Cyberbully Mom Club
11. The Offer – Yowler
12. When I Met Death – Right Away, Great Captain!
13. Patriarchaeth – Gwenno
14. Future Bones – Bells Atlas
15. Beautiful Brian – Harley Alexander and The Universal Lovers
16. Whip-Poor-Will – Morning River Band
17. I Admit I’m Scared – Eskimeaux
18. Ideal World – Girlpool
19. Observation Satellites – GRNDMS
20. Podesta – Peptalk
21. Cwm Llwm – Yucatan
22. Clouds – Estan
23. Lullaby – Long Neck
24. KiwiKisses – Trenton Point
25. My Only One – PONY
26. Return to View – The Wandering Lake
27. Clicking Clanking – Ylayali
28. Pull Me Apart – Lung Cycles
29. Red Coat – Adeline Hotel
30. Johnny Go Riding – Damien Jurado
31. When the Day is Fresh, and the Light is New – The Wooden Sky
32. The Crow – Sean Henry
33. Yolanda – O-FACE

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

“[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”

Amelia Gray is back with her third collection of short stories, Gutshot. As the title suggests, this is an uncomfortable book. Like, being-shot-square-in-the-guts level uncomfortable. There’s a man who vomits every time he speaks (and carries an empty pop bottle for convenience), mutual genital mutilation between a couple struggling to conceive a child, a family who carve up an over-sized heart with kitchen knives. There are giant snakes and desecrated graveyards and twins within twins. And yes, there is blood and shit and mucus in large quantities. 

As in Threats, many of the characters in Gutshot seem aware of their situation but unable to change, as if passengers on a train called Life or Destiny which they understand will arrive at its destination regardless of anything they might do. These are people caught in a strange stases, pervaded by vague sensations they can see and feel but not avoid, sensations which eat away at their insides until they are hulled and hollow. Opener ‘In The Moment’ is a good example, a story where a couple eradicate all references of the past or future from their apartment, removing all context from their existence and thus making life at once fascinating and impossible. See also ‘Away From’, the tale of a kidnapped woman who freezes at the top of the stairs when trying to escape. Reading these stories is like watching a fungus bloom across a wall, like watching a slow-motion video of yourself going up in flames.

This feeling hangs over the majority of the stories, even those in which the characters are decisive. Even ‘The Labyrinth’, which sees a not-so-brave man decide to be brave teeters toward a cryptic ending, or rather ends cryptically before any real conclusion. This is typical Gray, never quite giving the reader that satisfying click of recognition, the realisation of where a story is going or what it means. Good people aren’t rewarded and bad people aren’t punished and even passages that first appear clear allegories or fables skew into confusion. In ‘The Labyrinth’, the narrator, Jim, is forced to carry an (heavy) enigmatic disk through the maze:

“I don’t know about this,” I said.

“It’s the Phiastos Disk,” Dale said. “I paid a pretty penny so mind where you set it.”

It did seem to be imbued with some significance.

And so Jim takes the disk into the labyrinth without ever understanding why. Gray’s grotesque imagery is much the same. It remains important, vital, to her work without serving any clear function (ie. any ham-fisted metaphorical purpose), as if its meaning is so large it’s impossible to focus on. ‘Year of the Snake’ is set up like a strange and ambiguous fairy tale that never narrows down to some moral principle, while ‘The Swan as Metaphor for Love’ begins like an amusing love-is-actually-terrible gag before subverting the subversion, delving so far into horrible, biological truths that you’re left with an existential consideration so primal it registers as a taste in the mouth.

I could go on: ‘Device,’ ‘These Are Fables’ and the title story all seem to tee up some valuable punchline without following through, highlighting something that makes Gray’s writing so special. By not giving answers, or sending explicit messages, she manages to create characters and situations which feel real despite their surreality. Whether they have a device which can predict the future, an unending compulsion to say thank you or a prostitute locked in the heating ducts of their home, each and every character is vividly, fatally, human.

To review the collection as a whole is a difficult job. The book reads like a carefully constructed chaos too nuanced to be unified into a clear theme. Occasionally an image or theme is amplified by what seems like inadvertent recurrence, while other times they clash messily leaving once-clear messages and morals adrift in ambiguity. This gives Gray’s design an decidedly organic feel, each piece, ignorant of the rest, fulfils its own role as if it is the most important thing in the world, creating a system of blind parts working furiously toward some obscure goal, and giving Fernando Vicente‘s artwork a whole new meaning.

Gutshot is out now, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Seeing as we are primarily a music website, we thought we’d included a playlist of songs to accompany each book review. The tracks aren’t necessarily directly related to the anything in the stories, but rather get close to the same sorts of imagery and moods. Enjoy.

The post Amelia Gray – Gutshot appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Adeline Hotel

“Exists within that small and fleeting pocket in time and space that opens just before you take off from a familiar location” – we premièred the first song from an upcoming Adeline Hotel EP

Morning River Band

“Songs about those men down on their luck but too stubborn to change… doomed to making the same old mistakes and who continue chasing the same misguided remedies” – we wrote about Abyssal Chanelling, the latest album from Morning River Band

On The Water

“A strange stop-motion collage that sits perfectly with the lyrical themes of death, decay and, naturally, life” – we premièred a video by Nnamdi Ogbonnaya for ‘Born in Reverse’, the opening track from On The Water’s Cordelia.

Bells Atlas

“Using precise imagery to trace imprecise, unknowable things, the words coalescing with the music to create something unclear but imbued with meaning, as if reaching somewhere deeper within your brain or soul than you can consciously go” – the vibrant and mystical Hyperlust EP from Bells Atlas

Frog

“Queens is the most diverse county in America, and maybe the world. Kind of Blah is about living here, in this city, which is sometimes incredibly wonderful and other times feels a lot like prison and most times probably both at once” – we spoke with Frog about listening to Jagged Little Pill with your mom, the brilliance of Lightning Bolt and some terrible advice from David BermanFuneral Sounds

“Casa Ruby strives to enable people to be treated as people” – a benefit compilation from Funeral Sounds in support of multicultural LGBTQ organisation Casa Ruby

Girlpool

“In a weird way, Girlpool have grown up – becoming confident enough to share their dreams and vulnerabilities and in turn galvanise a lonely generation too afraid of ridicule to live the lives they desire” – Girlpool’s new album Before The World Was Big sees the band offer a sustainable and productive antidote to the pressures of growing up

Advance Base

“Sweetly sad stories about lonely Midwesterners trying to make sense of their troubled pasts” – mark your calendars, August will see a new album from Owen Ashworth’s Advance Base

Two White Cranes

“A clear advancement from anything on Two White Cranes, fleshed out with electric guitar and drums and focussed in its writing” – we previewed Radisson Blue, the forthcoming album from Two White Cranes

Evening Hymns

“I could go on about how [Evening Hymns are] brave and heartbreaking and intensely personal, or how [they] made me feel okay and less alone” – Evening Hymns has us very excited for their new album Quiet Energies

Mitski

“I’m not the white boy. I’m not in a position to be heard whatever I make” – Mitski spoke with Caralyn Green for Pittsburgh City Paper about being an introverted person of colour in music. [See our review of Bury Me at Makeout Creek]

Katie Dey

“I remembered that I had earphones in my coat pocket. I plugged them into my phone and listened to asdfasdf and rested my head on the train window. Closing my eyes, what was initially a gloomy train ride turned into something more cathartic” – Gold Flake Paint talked about Katie Dey’s asdfasdf and the restorative power of music

Ornette Coleman

“A giant of 20th century music, pushing jazz into new harmonic territory and reconceiving the way in which musicians improvised” – Stewart Smith wrote about the career and legacy of Ornette Coleman for The Quietus

Long Neck

“An album with no season, or maybe it’s every season, or maybe it’s just the season when you feel most alone” – Stereogum are streaming Heights by Lily Mastrodimos’s Long Neck

Mitski (again)

Out of Town Films shot Mitski playing ‘I Will’ in the middle of nowhere

Swell Tone’s Summertime Sanity

“Getting lost in the heat and the sense of freedom inherent in the forthcoming season is tempting, to say the least” – Shana over at Swell Tone has put together a selection of summer songs, including Yowler, Girlpool, Hot Palms and The Washboard Abs. Any playlist that opens with ‘Skin of Your Yellow Country Teeth’ gets a thumbs up from us.

Kathryn Joseph

We liked Kathryn Joseph’s Bones You Have Thrown Me Blood I’ve Spilled an awful lot. Last week she played some songs for the Roddy Hart Show on BBC Scotland and it sounded great. Check it out on the BBC iPlayer.

And Finally… the 8tracks Playlist(s) of the Week

This week’s winner is mix-master Adam, AKA Songsfortheday, and his summer soundtracks. There are separate day and night editions, so he has you covered for all your musical needs.

The post Week in Review: #5 (8th – 13th June) appeared first on Various Small Flames.

“I’m sure the music world has long had it’s own version of [Vonnegut’s] Girl Pool. Picking up where Bikini Kill et al. left off, Girlpool’s music seems like a reaction against this… Coupling lyrics of everyday feelings with high-pitched screams of frustration, they come across not as hyper-realistic freedom fighters, but as real people with a just cause, people growing bolder with every small success, people ready to stand up for what is right”

But frustrated screaming is a tiring business, especially when it has little effect. Perhaps this is why their début album, Before The World Was Big, sees the duo take a new direction, swapping out the aggressive energy for wide-eyed sincerity, a yearning for simpler times where big issues passed over oblivious heads. This simplicity is present both musically and lyrically, with sparse instrumentation employing a minimal number of chords used to support their conversational vocals. And that’s conversational in subject and tone, with delivery ranging from hushed intimate whispers (e.g. on ‘Dear Nora’)  to chipper, excited babbling (‘Before The World Was Big’). The effect is something alluringly childish, a return to the (pre-)adolescent values of happiness, friendship and trust which lots of adults would do well to aspire to. Opener ‘Ideal World’ sets this up, acting as a bridge from the previous Girlpool releases by declaring the aims and intentions of the new record and giving context to the new direction:

“I was taught what to believe,
now I’m only certain that no one is free.
Tranquillise me with your ideal world”

The title track faces this directly, admitting a boredom with familiar surroundings and pining for a time when expectations were lower, when the idea of being bored or stuck in a dull town didn’t occur, when time was marked by board games and bath times and candy bars. But this is not one of those twee bands that uses juvenile imagery ironically. Girlpool aren’t saying we’re-so-cool-we-can-even-be-cool-playing-with-dolls. Rather, they’re saying that their minds are scary and their bodies are scary and world is very scary. They are opening up, voicing their insecurities and flaws.

Mom and Dad, I love you
do I show it enough?
I just miss how it felt standing next to you,
wearing matching dresses before the world was big

What makes this sharing of worries and secrets so cathartic and uplifting is that Tividad and Tucker are doing it together. Whatever her/his circumstances, the listener can’t help but feel part of something, recognised and included, not alone. When they ask “Do you feel restless when you realise you’re alive?” on ‘Chinatown’, you feel like shouting affirmatives, so when the song continues “I’m still looking sureness in the way I say my name / I am nervous for tomorrow and today,” you know you are on the same wavelength. As they sing on ‘Pretty’:

“I could only stare at my feet
when you said you felt
close to me.
Transfixed on lullabies,
I’m suspended when I find myself needing you
talk to me, tell me any story,
see me.
You don’t have to be alone”

It seems crazy that we have to write about a young band ‘returning’ to simplicity, especially as Tividad and Tucker are still teenagers. But in reality this is not regression but progression. The band have realised that the modern world wants (and forces) young people to grow up unnaturally fast, and while the first self-titled EP was thrashing against this, Before The World Was Big manages to offer a more sustainable and productive antidote. In a weird way, Girlpool have grown up – becoming confident enough to share their dreams and vulnerabilities and in turn galvanise a lonely generation too afraid of ridicule to live the lives they desire.

Before The World Was Big is out now on Wichita Recordings.

The post Girlpool – Before The World Was Big appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Keep In Touch is a year long subscription series that re-imagines the bygone era of pen pals. Each month you’ll receive a 7” x 7” postcard with a record pressed directly into a full color image curated by that month’s artist.

Just to clarify- the postcard can be played on your turntable! If you’re as impressed with that as I am then you’ll be rushing off to sign up right now. There is already an impressive list of confirmed contributors – including:

The So So Glos
Sadie Dupuis of Speedy Ortiz
Ava Luna
Cloud Nothings
Ricky Eat Acid
Mutual Benefit
Big Ups
Into It. Over It.
TOPS
Girlpool

…and lots of more!

So if you know someone who likes really cool music, and you think that someone would like to receive said really cool music in the post every month (on a musical postcard!), then why not sign them up to Keep In Touch? They’ll have that Christmas-morning feeling once a month for a whole year!

Subscribe now on the KIT website. Do it before the 21st December to be in with the chance of winning a second subscription (you can keep TWO friends happy!)

The post Keep in Touch Vinyl Series appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Tracklist:

1. Deserter – Siskiyou
2. Pill – Ought
3. There’s a GIrl In the Corner – The Twilight Sad
4. Kill What You Love – Scotdrakula
5. PS You Still Do This To Me – Kissing Fractures
6. Walls – Two White Cranes
7. Lifetime Warranty – Cyberbully Mom Club
8. The Great Big World – R.L. Kelly
9. Misery Loves Company – Gorgeous Bully
10. Blah Blah Blah – Girlpool
11. My Song – Spencer Radcliffe
12. Summer Lawns – Mike Pace & The Child Actors
13. Crossroads – Sally Fowler
14. Sweet Isolation – Nathan Reich
15. Home At Last – John Statz
16. Our Town – Chalk
17. Mole – The Mountain Goats
18. Easy It Goes – Eric & Magill
19. Slow Thickening – German Error Message
20. Cabin Lights – Lung Cycles
21. The Day is Past and Gone (Variations) – Sarah Louise
22. Holding – Grouper

November 2014 Mix from Wake The Deaf on 8tracks Radio.

The post November 2014 Roundup – A Mixtape appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Girlpool is Cleo Tucker and Harmony Tividad. The pair met at high school and developed their musical aspirations in LA at The Smell, an all ages, drug/alcohol free underground club that has played a part in the career of a number of noise bands (see The Mae Shi, No Age, Abe Vigoda). Unlike the aforementioned bands, Girlpool make relatively simple indie rock music sans drums, relying on their distinctive vocals and cutting lyrics to make the impact. The result is a slightly skewed guitar-driven EP that feels continuously on the verge of spilling over, restrained but for how long?

You can probably guess the main target of this barely restrained fervour from what I’ve already said about the band’s name. Tasked with listening to the “faceless voices of scientists on dictaphone records,” the women of the Vonnegut’s Girl Pool leave their “cloister of cement” only once a year to go “a-carolling” and get chocolate bars at Christmas time. The song ‘Blah Blah Blah’ captures the ridiculousness of the fact that these women (read: any women) are controlled by “anybody with a dictaphone,” i.e. even the most uninspiring, unoriginal, banal men:

“You leave me crying in the fucking rain
I want you
You’re too busy watching other girls
In the little skirts, with their pretty curls
Why don’t you
Hot one you know you want it
Then when you find you got it
You call me

I hear you talking like
BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH
BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH
BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH”

Next song ‘Paint Me Colours’ looks at privilege through the prism of teenage heartbreak: “I’ll never understand what it means to be a man who is white ‘cos he never has to fight.” This grounding of big ideas (racial/gender discrimination) in ‘normal’ things (teen angst) works really well, although of course the big ideas are intrinsically linked with and impact upon normality. ‘Slutmouth,’ opening with the line “sometimes I want to be a boy,” challenges just what ‘normal’ is in our society, dealing with the belittling ‘norms’ such as street harassment (I don’t wanna get fucked / by a fucked society / cos everywhere I look / someone’s blaming me / I don’t really care about the clothes I wear”) and social expectation (“I go to school every day / just to be made a housewife one day”).

The single ‘Jane’ gets back to more hopeful messages. Detailing how the titular character punches a boy called Tommy in the mouth (bear with me). The song implores people in similar situations to heed their advice, a call to arms to all facing inequality, a conviction that things can and will be better:

“Girls and boys if you are listening
Don’t ever feel imprisoned
Feeling like your mouth is glued tight shut.

You were born for a reason
Share all of your feelings
If you are a Jane put your fists up too.”

While I’ve never seen the cloister of cement, or handed out sweets to it’s inhabitants during the holidays, I’m sure the music world has long had it’s own version of the Girl Pool. Picking up where Bikini Kill et al. left off, Girlpool’s music seems like a reaction against this. But it is to their credit that the album isn’t a scream-filled futile rage but instead an assured confidence, a determination to say things as they are. Coupling lyrics of everyday feelings with high-pitched screams of frustration, they come across not as hyperrealistic freedom fighters, but as real people with a just cause, people growing bolder with every small success, people ready to stand up for what is right. Things have changed for the better but the playing field still isn’t level, and the unerring confidence of Tucker and Tividad plays like the hammer blows against any remaining walls of the cloister of cement.

The EP is out now on Wichita Recordings and you can buy it here.

The post Girlpool – S/T EP appeared first on Various Small Flames.