Arena Rock Appetizer, the new EP from LA‘s Bridey (coming this summer on Anxiety Blanket Records), is a release which explores the sensation of “coming out of a fog.” “Sometimes it’s tough for me to see the light from whatever tunnel I’m in at the time,” she explains. But the EP fuses heartfelt emotion and upbeat energy, not only acting as a reminder of the promising glow somewhere down the line, but moreover having fun while doing so. Lead single ‘Her’ channels such a spirit, written after travelling to stay with her sister and newborn niece after a downer spell, finding some healing magic within the act of caring for other people. “It was intense and tiring and so cool,” Bridey explains. “I even bought a book about becoming a doula, but I never finished it. Maybe one day.”

dani mack – Nothing Better

We first wrote about Texas-born songwriter dani mack back in 2022 with the release of ‘someday‘, a track we described as displaying “a careful balance between strength and vulnerability,” where the “bright and disarmingly straightforward sound star[ed] the past straight in the eye and refus[ed] to blink.” Mack is now preparing to release her debut EP on Future Gods, and latest track ‘Nothing Better’ offers another assured and introspective glimpse into the personal. Though this time the slow-burning build carries with it a certain wry humour too, facing up to the chronic habit of overthinking. “What a lovely idea / letting go of things / that we have absolutely no control of,” she sings with a calm remove, “but I think I’m going to pass / and just drive myself mad / completely fucking mad.”

‘Nothing Better’ is out now and available via streaming services.

Juan Wauters – Modus Operandi

This summer, Uruguayan songwriter Juan Wauters is releasing his new album Wandering Rebel on Captured Tracks. Whether he be in Latin America, travelling north to collaborate with the likes of Mac DeMarco and Homeshake, or on the endless road of the tour, Wauters leads a nomadic existence—the titular wandering rebel manifest. Latest single ‘Modus Operandi’ captures some of the restless energy that marks his career. Wauters invites Frankie Cosmos into the fray for an earnest back-and-forth on place and movement, and reasons why people might leave and stay put in any one location.

See, it might be just my opinion
But it’s happened time and time again
That when it gets rough out here
People that have options go back to their suburbs
To them it was just like some kind of Disney World
Some kind of commodity
Dust them off a little bit
And see their real M.O.
Their modus operandi
Modus operandi

Watch Fatos Marishta’s video below as Wauters and Cosmos try to locate one another between NYC and Montevideo:

Wandering Rebel is out on the 2nd June via Captured Tracks and you can pre-order it now.

paper bee – I Don’t Talk To You

paper bee, the indie rock project led by Nick Berger, haven’t released a proper record since their 2015 debut Now I Know You and See How Wide You Are to the World, a split release with Loone. When the pandemic hit, Berger and a new lineup of bandmembers (including Maryn Jones of All Dogs/Yowler and Radiator Hospital‘s Sam Cook-Parrott) quarantined together in a cabin in rural Pennsylvania and recorded a brand new album, Thaw, Freeze, Thaw, which will be released by Get Better Records later this spring. Berger, who took his first shot of testosterone two days after wrapping up recording, describes the record as ” the last documentation of my old singing voice which I loved a lot […] a story about love and harm between traumatized trans people.”

Ryan Bourne – 100 Years

With new LP Plant City coming later this spring, Calgary‘s Ryan Bourne has unveiled latest single ‘100 Years’ to introduce another dimension of the album’s diverse sound. Because though the record spans glam rock, garage pop and baroque styles, the single highlights the psych folk spirit central to its sound. An idiosyncratic mood achieved via a woozy amalgamation of synths as well as samples of warped bird calls and the crackle of dried plants, resulting in a sound submerged in reflection. “The lyric came from a golden hour walk overlooking a neighborhood I’d lived and loved (and lost) in,” Bourne explains, “the kind of birds eye view of the landscape lending a beautiful sense of futility to the memory as it rose.” Watch the video by Rebecca Reid and Bourne himself below:

Plant City is out on the 5th May and you can pre-order it now.

Selah Broderick – I Am

Having been born into a strict Catholic family only to be freed by the countercultural turn of the sixties and seventies, Selah Broderick followed a love of music and art around the country, though ultimately put her own aspirations on hold when falling pregnant with her children. Fast forward a number of decades and Pegdoll Records are releasing Moon In The Monastery, a collection of songs by Selah Broderick ranging from the late seventies to the contemporary moment, as collected by her son Peter Broderick and featuring music from him and his sister Heather Woods Broderick. Single ‘I Am’ hints at the richness and depth of the work, with Peter’s neo-classical backdrop supporting Selah’s poetic spoken word inspired by her deep interest in non-Western spirituality.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6AdLPVJAYc&ab_channel=PegdollRecords

Moon In The Monastery is out on the 9th June via Pegdoll and you can pre-order it now.

Speedy Ortiz – Scabs

Their first new music in five years, ‘Scabs’ is the latest single from indie rock cult heroes Speedy Ortiz, released via Wax Nine, the Carpark Records imprint record label and poetry journal run by lead Sadie Dupuis. What Dupuis describes as a song “about self-designated ethicists who don’t quibble about crossing a picket line for individual benefit,” ‘Scabs’ is a both wryly humorous and downright furious attack on those whose activism starts and ends with empty words and public gestures. “Born-to-scab solipsists are boogying for big commission,” as the opening goes. “Yes in your backyard you take handshake squeezes to extremes. Nihilistic greeting to a flytrap hungry for a fist. Don’t talk to me. Don’t talk.”

‘Scabs’ is out now via Wax Nine Records and is available from the Speedy Ortiz Bandcamp page.

Sun Kin x Guppy – I’m in the Band

Described as a “cross-collaboration” between Kabir Kumar’s LA post-pop project Sun Kin and punk band GUPPY (with whom Kumar plays lead guitar), ‘I’m in the Band’ is something of a meta-single. A song about writing songs, and all the ickiness which comes with such a revealing experience. The music was written in collaboration with Miguel Gallego (aka Miserable chillers) and Guppy frontperson J Lebow helped with the lyrics, which they says are about “how expressing yourself through music can be a vulnerable and embarrassing affair, but worth it for the self-esteem it can give, and the relief of pressure it provides for the people who love us.”

Your Heart Breaks – Snow Dusted Ponies

Led by musician, artist and filmmaker Clyde Petersen, Your Heart Breaks is a project based in a Bellingham “townie dream house” which gave artists the space to experiment outside of pressures and expectations. Released via Kill Rock Stars, new album The Wrack Line feels like the culmination of years of friendships and memories, as typified by the line-up which brought it to life. With a band consisting of Eli Moore and Ashley Eriksson (of LAKE) and Katherine Paul (Black Belt Eagle Scout), as well as a stellar line-up of guest stars including the likes of Kimya Dawson, Christine Fellows, John K. Samson, R.Ring and Nana Grizol‘s Theo Hilton, the album is a sonic manifestation of something larger. Single ‘Snow Dusted Ponies’ gives an indication of the tone, with Fellows and Samson backing Petersen’s vocals in their affirming sincerity.

The Wrack Line is out via Kill Rock Stars on the 7th July and you can pre-order it now.

The post Weekly Listening: April 2023 #3 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Tracklisting:

1) Lost (Season One) – Camp Cope
2) Johnny – Basement Revolver
3) Can U Hear Me Now? – Porridge Radio
4) All 4s – ARMS
5) If You’re on the Water – The Saxophones
6) In Ribbons – Psychic Shakes
7) a good pet – Real Swell
8) Breadcrumbs – The Perennials
9) Father is a Craftsman – Modern Studies
10) Aligning With the Sun – Dear Tracks
11) Cake Bath – Cloud Cover
12) Postdoc Blues – John K. Samson
13) Room For Love – Wooden Dinosaur
14) Crab Line – Trust Fund
15) 1 – Young Jesus
16) Life’s Rough – Serial Chiller
17) Never Lonely – Space Mountain
18) I Wish I Was Plural – Free Space
19) More Than Science – Sunshine Faces
20) Maya – Competition
21) Fireball – Albosel
22) It Hurts- A Day Without Love
23) That Went Well- Guppy
24) Kids Playing Outside – Almanac Mountain
25) Patience To Undo the Patience – Psalmships

You can check out the previous monthly roundups here, and our various other playlists and mixtapes here. Be sure to pop back throughout September and beyond to see what autumn brings!

The post August 2016 Roundup appeared first on Various Small Flames.

The bright plinking on opener ‘That Went Well’ is enveloped in a buzzing drone, like the dark clouds of anxiety and unease, and the juxtaposition serves well as a symbol for the whole record. It sounds constantly unsettled and unsure, even the pretty bits played over ambience that’s nervous and twitchy or rumbling with dread. Shaw says the album was “recorded and mixed entirely at Preston Library in Melbourne when I should’ve been applying for jobs”, so perhaps it’s unsurprising that such a sound materialised. “I’m now working in a call centre”, he says. “Actions have consequences, remember that.”

So despite this being an instrumental album, the themes are crystal clear. Shaw doesn’t need words to express existential anxiety, the constant (rhetorical?) am-I-wasting-my-life question that seems to hover over the best of us. Unsurprisingly for a song titled ‘Team Leader Funeral :'(‘, the second track is morose, the percussion skittering over a primary drone that has the air of a funeral dirge. This makes the jaunty panpipes of ‘Bluelight Surprise!’ all the more conspicuous, although they’re slowly overtaken by a creeping fuzz that’s thick like storm cloud static.

Elegant piano takes the lead on ‘Sell Dumb For Sunshine’, flowing over ambient recordings of people interacting and going about their day. The effect is one of isolation, of sitting alone in a crowded cafe, drowning in the bright and cheerful conversations of others. Indeed, one of Shaw’s triumphs is his ability to weave everyday sounds into his work. ‘Sell Dumb For Sorrow’ is something like the previous song’s twin, the piano again at the forefront, but this time haunted by the voice of a young boy. “Ohh its not going to work”, he says. “Ohh its not going to work”. See also ‘On Top of Turd Mountain (Microwave Dinner)’, underpinned by the beeping of a reversing heavy vehicle, surely one of life’s most banal and lonely sounds, and managing to make even splendid birdsong sound more annoying than amazing.

The penultimate track ‘Deep Vein Thrombosis Blues’ is a complete change of pace, sounding warm and rich and dynamic, before closer ‘Tram Sleep (Is He Dead)’ with it’s elegiac strings and minimal electronics, reminiscent of Lejsovka & Freund in its ability to wordlessly capture a mood. It hints at something beyond the present, the sound of thunderheads gathering at the edges, sliding off to rain on someone else for a while. Or maybe that’s just wishful thinking on my part. But you try listening to the song and then telling me there isn’t a glimmer of something.

And that’s something that’s very important in Shaw’s work. Yes life can be a bummer, and he’s not afraid to run headlong at that fact, but he’s still making music, right? Even beneath the crushing weight of every day life, there’s space for these beautiful sounds and the communication they represent, still a small but unrelenting hope that things can get better. When they do, on that one, memorable day, we’ll laugh about all this.

You can get the album now via the Guppy Bandcamp page.

The post Guppy – One Day We’ll Laugh About All This appeared first on Various Small Flames.

His new album, Guppy, definitely falls into the latter category, an album of lush ambient music bookended with genre-bending tracks which hint at Shaw’s thinking. Opener ‘Pride Of Canada’ is the first, an industrial-sounding song of shambling drums and throbbing noise which swells toward what are pretty much the only vocals on the album, with Shaw sounding pretty defeated and self-loathing:

“I don’t know what I should do
with all this great potential,
I’ll probably piss it up the wall
and claim artistic intention.

“I don’t know who I should blame
for all my bad decisions,
there’s so many, they’re all such dicks
I haven’t time for this.”

‘Palette Cleanser (So’s Your Face)’ begins with whirling strings which slowly subside into a single furious whine. This is eventually joined by warm drones akin to those on Lejsovka & Freund’s Mold on Canvas, before falling victim to distorted buzzes and the concluding sounds of haunted piano and poltergeistic percussion. The drones grow again into ‘Pylon Pile-On’, which we described in our preview as “something comfortably sad and vividly alive, like watching rain fall onto a city from the window of a train”. This mood is interrupted comically by the retro shampoo ad on ‘Good Arrows’ (“Everyone knows that beautiful hair makes a girl look beautiful!”), as if your view from the train is broken by the empty promises of billboards. The track evolves into a Trouble Books-y song of spacey electronics and background noises which sounds like vocals either ancient or alien or both. The conclusion features the disembodied voice from a vintage radio programme, playing on a loop like a broken museum exhibit, gradually fading behind the noise like the ever decreasing echoes of a history slipping to the back of public consciousness.

“Coal mines and slag heaps, narrow cobbled alleyways and ugly rows of back to back houses”

The next few tracks continue the memory theme. ‘Hell’s Teeth’ is a low deep hum adorned with minimal piano and a field recording of people chatting, with wobbles with bursts of noise like something from a horror soundtrack, as if a troubled mind is trying and failing to look back with rose-tinted glasses. ‘Dreams of Fields (Cows)’ opens with what can only be described as a weird little squelchy froggy noise, before muffled piano carries the track through flitting electronics and dripping water and an insectile hum. The damp imagery continues with ‘Fishing with Dad (No Dad)’, a track which buzzes with life yet still sounds distant, the musical equivalent of looking back at old photos and crying with equal parts fondness and regret, amazed at how you managed to bumble through life taking everything you had for granted.

As if acknowledging the emotional turmoil across the record, second bookend ‘Not Today, Satan’ is built around a voice, omniscient and semi-robotic but also kind-sounding. Like one of those disarmingly sincere internet scams, the voice is hugely compelling despite setting off major alarm bells in the cynical part of your brain, tempting you into believing everything can be solved without time or pain or effort by one magical arrangement of words.

“Let’s clear the air about some certain things, let’s talk heart to heart. Are you saying to yourself, just about now, ‘I can’t change, I’ve tried and tried many times but failed. There’s something terribly wrong with me that makes me different form other people. There’s a deep dark secret that keeps me from being a total person’. Let me clue you into something, my dear friend. Everyone has something wrong with them, whether it be drinking, or drugs, or perversion. Now listen very closely because I’m going to say something very imp-”

Guppy is about being human, an album which tries to provide instinctive answers to unanswerable questions. Or rather, one which formulates the human-questions correctly, allowing the creator (and, by proxy, us) to transcend their bifocal, street-level view, their smallness, to look down on things from a comfortable position, making the absurd, confusing and overwhelming world become, for the shortest of whiles, knowable. The result (for the creator and us both) is a weird sense of attachment to our situations, a form of nostalgia for a life never easy but uniquely ours, that feeling of calm wonder which visits all too rarely (when driving home after a happy family gathering or watching a foreign sunset) where some semblance of context is achieved and a strange joy is found in melancholy. We know we have to go back down, but for now at least, that is okay.

Guppy is out now on Kirigirisu Recordings, and you can buy in now from Bandcamp.

The post Benjamin Shaw – Guppy appeared first on Various Small Flames.

“Guppy then eschews the whole singing thing for waves of many-coloured drone, field recorded texture, and sun-struggling-to-break-through-heavy-cloud burnished flakes of melody”

You can pre-order Guppy now via the Kirigirisu Recordings Bandcamp page. If you liked Ricky Eat Acid or Danielle Fricke’s Burrow (or, probably more likely, you are familiar with Shaw’s other instrumental work) then you’d be wise to do so right away. 

The post A New Album From Benjamin Shaw appeared first on Various Small Flames.