“I’ve got too much on my plate / I’ve got too much in my brain,” sings Brighton‘s alx frncs on new single ‘i can’t do anything right’. The track is an attempt to process an extremely difficult period via an intimate, gentle sound. “I wrote ‘i can’t do anything right’ after coming out of a deep depression,” frncs describes. “Personal situations were beginning to change and it finally felt like I could process what had happened to me both physically and mentally during the second half of the pandemic.” What results is confessional in tone yet empathetic in nature, serving as both an expression of gratitude to those who helped keep frncs afloat during those intensely difficult months, as well as a comforting hand extended backwards through time as a gesture of self-love and understanding.

you may think i’m lazy
when i fail to wash up dishes daily
hardly got a grasp on life
when death is constant on my mind

Anna Erhard – Botanical Garden

“I read this Google review from a guy who complained about the bad parking situation in the middle of the Atlantic,” explains Swiss indie pop artist Anna Erhard of the inspiration behind her latest single ‘Botanical Garden’. “Eventually this person who is incredibly judgmental and won’t be pleased by anything, not even by the flowers in the Botanical Garden, came to life.” The result is as sardonic as you’d imagine, skewering a specific brand of impossible-to-please (most often) man that seems so prevalent. But it’s full of a strange joy too. Erhard’s deadpan delivery only heightens the song’s humour, and the chorus is as catchy as anything you will hear all year.

they would not allow us
to pick our favorite flowers
kids were singing happy birthday
too close to the highway

Brenna Bruce – Kite and the Line

Taken from her forthcoming debut EP Honest Bloom on Ghost Mountain Records, ‘Kite and The Line’ is the new single from Brenna Bruce. With help from Taylor Heath (piano), Keith Lowe (bass), Trevor Church (drums), Lane King (pedal steel), Chris Coleman (synth) and Abby Gunderson (strings), Bruce brings to life a serene sound shadowed by a certain mournfulness, evoking the way even the most tranquil environment is in some way made poignant by the latent promise of its own end. Such ideas are central to Honest Bloom, where every emotional state is but part of a larger cycle, and beauty can be found in the acceptance of life’s ephemeral nature.

Jon Campbell – Arrow

“Depression dog / lead me to where / I can thrive.” So sings Jon Campbell on ‘Arrow’, the latest single from forthcoming album Still Life With Motion Sickness. Set against a backdrop of sparse piano and ambience, the words sound like a gentle plea as voiced to an empty room. The US-born, Berlin-based artist’s croon murmured as though not to puncture the stillness of the moment. But as the track develops, the vocals grow in desperation or conviction and the sound follows suit. A gradual blossom around Campbell’s increasingly impassioned voice as he airs frustrations, summoning strength from some inner well so as to draw the fortitude to face down one’s demons.

depression, dog!
try seein’ things from my eyes
you wouldn’t dare to try
you wouldn’t have the balls

Still Life With Motion Sickness is out on the 22nd March and you can pre-order it now.

Laurel Bluffs – Block 4

Back in November we introduced  Phoenix, Arizona-based project Laurel Bluffs with single ‘Richmond’. The story of a hungover drive to the titular location where a “folk rock sound and unadorned delivery [lent] an intimacy to the track, where fondness and longing are present without spilling into sugary sentiment.” Latest single ‘Block 4’ follows the same formula, another narrative-based track which blurs the line between fondness and regret in its recollections, told with unerring detail yet never anything other than earnest in tone. Echoes of Andy Hull’s Right Away, Great Captain! are present in the tales of love and violence, and the manner these stories of vengeance and punishment are told with the ache of remove.

‘Block 4’ is out now and available from the usual places.

Nico Paulo – Learning My Ways

This time last year, Portuguese-Canadian songwriter Nico Paulo released her self-titled album on Forward Music Group, a release we described as “marked in its ability to broach weighty topics with a sense of lightness and grace, all tied together by a vocal style at once compassionate and unerring in its focus.” To celebrate the record’s first birthday, Paulo has returned with a brand new video for the single ‘Learning My Ways’, a sweet and impassioned love song that isn’t afraid to explore the less idyllic side to relationships. Featuring tour footage shot and edited by Sarah Kierstead, the film is the ideal commemoration of everything which goes into making an album a success, as well as the singular joy of taking that music to different people every evening.

Nico Paulo is out now via Forward Music Group and you can get it from Bandcamp page.

SUB*T – Unearthly

This June will see the release of Spring Skin, the fittingly titled new EP from Brooklyn alt-rockers SUB*T which sees duo Jade Alcantara and Grace Bennett step firmly into the next stage of their growth. Lead single ‘Unearthly’ hints at what this might sound like, taking the nineties-inspired fuzzy rock energy of debut So Green and adding a darker edge to create something full of brooding swagger. “‘Unearthly’ is a song that’s been in our arsenal for a while,” the band explain. “We chose this as the first single off the EP because the taste of it is a little moodier than the other music we’ve put out […] It feels like a dark fairytale journey, and intentionally leaning into an image like that was new for us when writing this song.” Check out the video directed by Alcantara and Bennett themselves below:

Spring Skin is out in June via If This Then Records and you can pre-order it now.

Tara Kannangara – Apartment

Last week saw the release of Extraordinary People, the new EP from Sri Lankan-Canadian songwriter and musician Tara Kannangara. The Juno Award-nominated artist has long won acclaim for her inventive combinations of genres, drawing on classical training and jazz sensibilities to push synth pop to new heights. Extraordinary People is no less ambitious in its sound, as lead single and opening track ‘Apartment’ attests. A song which embraces the thrill of an early relationship where everything is undecided and the possibilities are endless, packed full of tender details yet blown up to epic proportions in a manner sure to win over fans of early Mitski. But as the track progresses and its full cathartic heft reveals itself, such comparisons are rendered insufficient, failing to suggest the scope of styles which knit into the finished whole.

youbet – Nurture

Walking a tightrope between self-love and self-loathing, ‘Nurture’ is a new single from Way To Be, the upcoming album by Brooklyn’s youbet on Hardly Art. The track’s bittersweet mood is a fitting introduction to a record crafted in the aftermath of a period doubt and disillusionment, a spell broken by a chance encounter at Penn Station with Patti Smith. “She wished me luck,” Nick Llobet explains, “and said, ‘Practice hard, Nick.'” Heeding the advice, Llobet pushed ahead with the new record with a newfound energy, meeting any doubts with curiosity and playfulness instead of succumbing to them. So while tracks like ‘Nurture’ might sound bummed out on the surface, their very existence is a testament to the value of keeping on in spite of things.

Watch the video below animated by Sabrina Nichols:

Way To Be is out on the 10th May via Hardly Art and you can pre-order it now.

The post Weekly Listening: April 2024 #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.

This week sees the release of The Land, The Water, The Sky, the new full-length record from Black Belt Eagle Scout. he album is both a celebration and mourning, born when Katherine Paul decided to leave leave Portland and head back toward her ancestral Swinomish home. To the Skagit River with its salmon and misted cedars, to the tide flats of the Salish Sea. A land marked by colonial violence, not only in terms of the historical theft of land and its lasting legacy but the climate disaster presently unfolding as a consequence of this very imperialist folly. But however difficult Paul’s journey, there’s an affirming power within every track of the album. A sense of connection which serves as a healing force. As though to stress that even within profound loss and loneliness, she is not alone. Final single ‘Spaces’ captures the spirit perfectly, as members of Paul’s close family join and making Black Belt Eagle Scout a communal thing. As she explains:

My parents lend their voices in the chorus melody, my dad with his strong pow wow voice and my mom with her wholesome tone that sounds so similar to mine you can barely notice the distinction between me and her. I want this song to be an offering for those who need to grasp onto something and feel because through feeling and being together, there is healing.

Check out the video filmed by Evan Benally Atwood and Morningstar Angeline below, which centres on the family trade of carving to further the sense of connection:

The Land, The Water, The Sky is out on the 10th February via Saddle Creek and you can pre-order it now.

Coldwave – Spurs for Business Cards

Combining acerbic vocals and dynamic momentum, Coldwave are a post-punk outfit based on Kaurna land (Adelaide). New EP Same Window, Different House shows off the style in all of its nuanced dimensions: the genre’s menace and weight stretched by taut rhythms and some surprisingly bright tones. Take single and closer ‘Spurs for Business Cards’, which plays something like Wild Pink covering Protomartyr or the other way around, but the wry delivery lends a personality all of its own. A surreal dreamscape born of personal myths and delusions.

Dreams of horse riding on the beach
Well I’m the real cowboy
Never really liked my own teeth
Swans in antique stores are all I see
Do you see I’ve changed my hair now
Well I still wear the same hat
But now I’m wearing pinstripes
I swapped my spurs for business cards

Lael Neale – I Am the River

In April 2020, Lael Neale left behind the bright lights of LA to move back to her family’s farm in rural Virginia. While there, she wrote and recorded new material, taking advantage of the slower rhythms of her surroundings and the shelter they gave from the chaos of the period. The result was a brand new album, Star Eaters Delight, which is due for release this coming April on Sub Pop. Perhaps counterintuitively, it promises to be a louder, more dynamic affair than Neale’s previous record. “Acquainted with Night (recorded in 2019, and released in 2021) was a focusing inward amidst the loud and bright Los Angeles surrounding me,” she describes. “It was an attempt to create spaciousness and quiet reverie within. When I moved back to the farm, I found that the unbroken silences compelled me to break them with sound.” This is immediately apparent on lead single ‘I Am the River’, a dynamic yet minimalist slice of lo-fi pop that draws influence from the likes of The Velvet Underground and Suicide.

Star Eaters will be released via Sub Pop on 21st April. Pre-order it now from the Lael Neale Bandcamp page.

Shana Cleveland – A Ghost

“I am a ghost and I’m trying / to show you what I do / can I come through?” So asks Shana Cleveland on ‘A Ghost’, the opening track new LP  Manzanita, coming next month on Hardly Art Records. The lines are the perfect introduction to the album. Not only drawing attention to a portal between our world and some other, but requesting we allow the door to open. Because the record is a self-described “supernatural love album set in the California wilderness,” and those willing to submit to its charms will be greeted with a lush experience where the otherworldly and organic commingle into a seamless whole. Watch the video directed, produced and editing by Vice Cooler with director of photography Dalton Blanco

Manzanita is out on the 10th March via Hardly Art Records.

Spencer Thomas Smith – Little Apartment

Back in 2021 we wrote about Spencer Thomas Smith, with EP Tennessee Mud offering a welcoming mix of emotional immediacy and nostalgic charm. Latest single ‘Little Apartment’ once again settles in such a sweet spot. A slow-burning meditation on leaving a place you have come to love which finds itself caught between melancholic reminiscence, a fear of the unknown and the persistent hope latent within every instance of change. But what really stands out is Spencer Thomas Smith’s patience amid such a swirl of emotions. A sense of compassion and fondness which outlives any present uncertainty.

‘Little Apartment’ is out now and available on streaming services.

Sunny War – No Reason

Last week, Nashville-based guitarist and singer-songwriter Sunny War released her fourth record Anarchist Gospel on New West Records. A bruised but unflinching exploration of personal trauma, the album employs a wide variety of styles—from dusty folk and bluesy country to energetic punk and ecstatic gospel—to form a powerful expression of resilience, capturing both the pain and joy of existence in a distinctively empathetic manner. “Everybody is a beast just trying their hardest to be good,” she describes. “That’s what it is to be human. You’re not really good or bad. You’re just trying to stay in the middle of those two things all the time, and you’re probably doing a shitty job of it. That’s okay.” A sentiment captured by lead single ‘No Reason’ and its striking chorus:

“Cos you’re an angel and you’re a demon
Ain’t got no rhyme ain’t got no reason”

Anarchist Gospel is out now via New West Records. Buy it now from the Sunny War Bandcamp page.

Thavoron – Struck

“A song concerning the often difficult process of coming to understand and accept yourself brought to life with all the stark solitude of such an experience.” That’s how we described ‘Twin Sized Bed’ by Thavoron back in November. The Seattle-based Cambodian-American artist moves between a variety of genres, from indie folk and emo to something closer to commercial pop, but this sense of the personal underpins all of their work. New single ‘Struck’ approaches new love with a sense of restraint, but as the ache of the vocals offers a gravity, the sound slowly unfurls into something quietly powerful. Watch the video directed by Maddie Ludgate and Thavoron themselves below:

‘Struck’ is out now via Trailing Twelve Records.

Victoria Wijeratne – Above & Beyond (feat. niemba)

Having made a name scoring film and television, composer and multi-instrumentalist Victoria Wijeratne is no stranger to the cinematic side of music. But recent EP Graces & Muses highlights how such sounds need not stay exclusive to the screen. Released by Dragon’s Eye Recordings, the EP draws from the breadth of Wijeratne’s experience to create something transportive and ever-changing, from the careful piano and mournful strings of the title track to brooding drama of ‘A Strange Time’. Closer ‘Above & Beyond’ even introduces vocals to the mix, Wijeratne joined by singer-songwriter niemba to push her music further than ever towards a more conventional dream pop. Attempting to cover so many moods and styles within four songs might prove the downfall of less assured artists, but here the changeable tone only furthers the thematic resonance of a release crafted around ideas of inspiration and intuition.

Wau Wau Collectif – Thiaroye 1944

Back in November, Sahel Sounds released Mariage, the second album by Wau Wau Collectif, the long-distance collaboration between musicians in Senegal (led by Aurora Kane) and Swedish songwriter and producer Karl Jonas Winqvist. We missed it at the time, but discovered it recently and thought it too good not to share. A record which collides a multitude of styles, utilizing guitar, synths and hip-hop beats in addition to West African instruments like the kora and balafon. The standout is the indescribably formidable ‘Thiaroye 1944’, a song of simmering power that combines stark guitar, spoken vocals and singing children—recounting a massacre by French commanding officers of Black African soldiers towards the end of the Second World War.

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“A diverse album entirely committed to whatever direction each song takes, as though leaning into the spontaneity of the moment.” That’s how we have previously described Wise Blood, the forthcoming album by Blue Yonder on Earth Libraries. With the release now on the horizon, the band have unveiled final single, ‘Nightingale’, and this time they pitch us right into the middle of a seventies spaghetti western. The song opens with a nocturnal simmer, Karalena Fjortoft’s vocals emerging with an almost haunting croon, though soon the rhythm picks up and adds a sense of urgency, as though the dark figures at the door have been evaded and now we are racing across the desert floor with only the moon in pursuit.

Wise Blood is out on the 24th February via Earth Libraries.

Dari Bay – Same Old Bumpy Road

Described as “an ongoing thought experiment disguised as a band,” Dari Bay is the project of Burlington, Vermont’s Zack James. Though originating as something rough and chaotic, new album Longest Day of the Year sees the Dari Bay style morph into an altogether smoother sound, albeit with some of the strangeness left intact. Take ‘Same Old Bumpy Road’, the country pop jangle a clear departure from the harsh and often abstract noise of the previous releases, while a certain playfulness underpins everything. Life is no less odd for Dari Bay, they are just finding new ways to describe it.

Emelia Austin – Shifting Weather

With debut album From Another Sky coming very soon via Anxiety Blanket Records, Emelia Austin has been releasing a series of single to offer glimpses into her style. Tracks like ‘Hand Soft’ and ‘Desire to Reveal’ hinted at the amalgamation of sparkle and cloudiness which constitutes her shoegaze-adjacent sound, though it is the hefty closer ‘Shifting Weather’ which is perhaps the perfect introduction to From Another Sky. A slow song which gathers weight behind itself gradually, like a thunderhead coalescing into something dense and charged before its tumultuous finale, offering a cathartic view of possible futures where you come to accept yourself just as you are.

Kassi Valazza – Watching Planes Go By

Having introduced herself in 2019 with debut album Dear Dead Days and consolidated the style with last year’s EP Highway Sounds, Kassi Valazza has established herself among the new generation of country songwriters who build their craft around celebrating and subverting the traditions of the genre. With new album Kassi Valazza Knows Nothing out via Loose Music (UK) and Fluff & Gravy Records (US), Valazza is now a labelmate of acts like of Anna Tivel, Margo Cilker and Courtney Marie Andrews, and single ‘Watching Planes Go By’ shows she belongs among such company. A song centred on ideas of loss and the inability to move on which draws a psych-inflected richness around itself, it bears all the hallmarks of the best retro tracks while refusing to fall for nostalgic imitation.

Kassi Valazza Knows Nothing is out on the 26th May. UK fans can preorder from Loose Music and US fans from Fluff & Gravy Records.

 L.T. Leif – Gentle Moon

Back in December we previewed Come Back To Me, But Lightly, the a release from L.T. Leif released by Lost Map Records in collaboration with OK Pal. An album in which the Calgary-born, Scotland-based artist “draws on both the imagery of these northern climes and the talent which resides there to create songs able to explore intimate processes of development.” The album has just been released, and opener ‘Gentle Moon’ captures the compassionate and striking tone for anyone who still needs convincing. A song which uses lunar imagery to explore the wax and wane of relationships, not to mention the gravitational pull which seems to hold some power over the smallest and largest of things. Check out the lyric video by Bart Owl below:

Gentle moon
you are shining
in the shape
of a human body

Come Back To Me, But Lightly is out now via Lost Map Records and OK Pal Records and you can get it from Bandcamp.

Party of the Sun – Forget Me Knot

“Psych-inflected folk songs anchored to the natural environments in which they were created, tracks possessing both tension and harmony.” So we wrote of Capsule II, the previous EP from New Hampshire‘s Party of the Sun on Trailing Twelve Records. Next month sees the release of the appropriately named follow-up Capsule III, and lead single ‘Forget Me Knot’ suggests the psych-folk outfit are continuing to push this style. A song which lives up to its title, the careful details and easy intuition evoking the patterns of a forest or perhaps the knotted layers of the trunks themselves, eventually rising into a soaring crescendo in the closing minutes.

Saloon Dion – I Don’t Feel

Bristol post-punks Saloon Dion are back with a new single, ‘I Don’t Feel’, the first taste of their forthcoming debut EP on Mucker Records. It follows a spate of singles in the last few years that have established the five piece’s distinctive style, what we previously described as “an eclectic blend of punk and funk topped by raw and volatile energy.” Delivered with considerable pop polish, ‘I Don’t Feel’ is built on grooving beats and bass riffs, its big chorus hinting at a future of radio airtime and festival appearances. “[It’s] a song about being reluctant to seek help from others,” Saloon Dion explain. “What it isn’t, is a song about having no feeling, but more of choosing what to feel and when to feel it. It speaks of the barriers we all put up to protect ourselves, no matter the damage they may do in the long run”.
Watch the video by Clump Collective below:

‘I Don’t Feel’ is out via Mucker Records and available from the Saloon Dion Bandcamp page.

Symbol Soup – Overdressed

The project of London-based songwriter Michael Rea, Symbol Soup takes inspiration from folk, country, indie pop and electronica to create something that sounds sunny and insouciant. Latest single ‘Overdressed’ is a great introduction, fusing a classic British folk charm with something rather more American, including faint notes of country and a couple of spoonfuls of Alex G-style lo-fi indie rock. What Rea describes as “a love song from the perspective of someone who’s overly cynical,” ‘Overdressed’ takes aim at the superficial nature of human interaction, its narrator sick and tired of meaningless etiquette and small talk, yearning instead for something deeper. “They don’t learn a whole lot by the end of the song,” Rea continues, “but they are fully connected to one person, and that’s the connection to something deeper that they’re desperate for.” Check out the lighthearted if indigestion-inducing video, directed by Kirsty Wells of Kondor Films, below:

‘Overdressed’ is out now. Get it from the Symbol Soup Bandcamp page.

Zoon – A Language Disappears

Following the success of recent EPs Big Pharma and A Sterling Murmuration, Daniel Monkman’s Zoon is set to release brand new full-length Bekka Ma’iingan this spring on Paper Bag Records. The Zoon sound is a constantly evolving thing, and with guests and contributors including Owen Pallett, Michael Peter Olsen, Andrew McLeod (Sunnsetter) and Lee Ranaldo (Sonic Youth), the new album is no exception. But as single ‘A Language Disappears’ suggests with its themes of lost heritage, the sense is that Zoon is not morphing away from its origin but rather moving closer to some central truth. “This album is about acknowledging a part of me that I felt was there the whole time,” as Monkman puts it. Check out the 3D animated video directed by Tkaronto-based multimedia sculptor Shawn Chiki below:

Bekka Ma’iingan is out on the 28th April via Paper Bag Records and you can pre-order it now.

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London‘s Automotion, AKA Jesse Hitchman (vocals/guitar), Lennon Gallagher (vocals/guitar), Otis Eatwell-Hurst (drums) and Luke Chin-Joseph (bass), have followed up their debut EP In Motion with a new release that builds upon its ideas. The band identify a multifaceted approach as a key component of their work, and Ecstatic Oscillations sees them lean into dynamic changes. As the title suggests, each song oscillates at its own unique frequency, the fluctuations between tracks lending the EP an almost collage-like style. Latest single ‘Desire’ offers one such example, itself a track of peaks and troughs which plays off the understated, downbeat vocals with real energy and weight.

Ecstatic Oscillations is out now and available from streaming services.

Jackie Cohen – Ghost Story

Back in 2020, amid a personal crisis, Jackie Cohen found herself asking whatever powers might exist for a sign that things would work out alright in the end. At that moment, a large moth swooped in and committed self-immolation via the oil lamp at Cohen’s side. The incident came to inform Pratfall, an album recently released via Earth Libraries which proffers the value of giving oneself up to tension and turmoil rather than fighting against it. To reach for catharsis, find sublime release in motion, heat and light. Single ‘Ghost Story’ weaves an entirely different story to that of the moth, but the abrupt and decisive beauty of its act remains. “It’s a song about annihilation and acceptance,” Cohen explains. “It’s hopeless and serene… Essentially, if you wanna wake up, you’re gonna have to jump.”

Pratfall is out now via Earth Libraries and you can get it from Bandcamp.

Marlais – Out of the Window

Recording under the moniker Marlais, Michael Culme-Seymour draws upon British and Irish folk traditions to create reimaginings of old songs. Tales he can step inside and live within, if only for a moment. Out via Treibender Teppich Records, new album Stream of Forms is a collection of such reworkings, its traditional instruments supported by digital choirs and electronics. Single ‘Out of the Window’ demonstrates how Marlais evades any sense of anachronism or irony in this practise, the sound coalescing into a convincing whole, the emotions explored readily transposed onto a new place and period. “Time and time again I am amazed at the cut-throat nature of traditional songs,” Culme-Seymour explains. “How hopes and dreams can be dashed in one line or couplet.”

Melanie MacLaren & Lorkin O’Reilly – Clearance Aisle

Ahead of a forthcoming EP, and with a joint tour of the UK and Ireland on the horizon, songwriters Melanie MacLaren and Lorkin O’Reilly have released new single, ‘Clearance Aisle’. It’s a duet which allows both artists to display their storytelling chops and knack for conjuring intimate emotion. The track is set within two distinct spaces, the mundanity of real life, as represented by the Walmart clearance aisle, but also the less tangible plane of hopes and regrets. Just how pleasant and welcoming either of these places prove varies day to day, but the truth at the heart of ‘Clearance Aisle’ is that we have no choice but to inhabit both, day after day.

Queen Kwong – Sad Man

This summer saw Queen Kwong release their latest album, Couples Only, on Sonic Ritual. It’s a record which sees Carré Kwong Callaway confront the despair of loss and deception with caustic anger, its ominous nocturnal tones conjuring a noir-like combo of swagger and danger. Single ‘Sad Man’ is the perfect introduction, showing off both the wrath and wry humour of the album, and a new video directed by Joe Cardamone and starring Johnny Knoxville as the titular sad man takes inspiration from Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant to further elevate this heady blend.

But I just wanna grow up
I’m too old for this shit
Paying rent by selling guitars and DJing shitty bars
I don’t want to be another sad man in another sad band Dropping the same names
Playing the same games
I just wanna grow up
He’s a sad sad man

Couples Only is out now via Sonic Ritual and you can get it from Bandcamp.

Raavi – no bodies

“Its nods to the 90s are evocative without feeling derivative, and for all its blunt honesty and self-deprecating worry, it rocks hard enough to bring a genuine sense of catharsis.” That’s how we described ‘Lazy Susan‘ from Raavi‘s last EP, It Grows on Trees, back in April. Since then, Raavi Sita has wasted no time in working on new material. Released as part of the Hardly Art Records 15th anniversary single series, the project has just unveiled brand new single ‘no bodies’. A meditation on the pitfalls of striving for success in the music industry, where reaching the top of one ladder merely sees you emerge at the bottom of a bigger, more dauting climb.

Remember Sports – Leap Day

Philadelphia‘s Remember Sports returned this month with Leap Day, a brand new four-song EP on Father/Daughter Records. With a slightly less frantic tempo than the sound they’ve perfected over four records, the release offers a more reflective, patient side to the band, though do not be fooled. The emotional ferocity and immediacy that has so long marked Remember Sports has not been lost but redirected. Their energies channelled into a newly layered sound with drum machine, electronics and distortion complimenting the pop rock anthems we’ve come to love.

Leap Day is out now via Father/Daughter Records and you can get it from the Remember Sports Bandcamp page.

Ruby Gill – I’m gonna die with this frown on my face

Last year we wrote about South Africa-born, Melbourne/Naarm-based artist Ruby Gill, describing single ‘You Should Do This For a Living‘ as “setting its sights on the overbearing, patronising force of male entitlement,” and “aris[ing] from a very personal situation but end[ing] up speaking to a far wider experience.” Gill has now released her debut full-length I’m gonna die with this frown on my face, and the title track shows that the same combination of fury and compassion underlines these songs too. “I’m gonna die with this frown on my face / they’re going to lower me down,” she sings in the opening lines. “Asking why I’ve been this angry all of my days / even when you came around / and I don’t have the answers.” Check out the video directed and edited by Samuel H. Galloway below:

I’m gonna die with this frown on my face is out now and available from the usual places.

Yara Asmar – it’s always october on sunday

Yara Asmar is a multi-instrumentalist, video artist and puppeteer based in Beirut who recently unveiled her debut release on Brighton label Hive Mind Records. Titled Home Recordings 2018 – 2021, the album is a collection of pieces Asmar recorded to cassette and her phone in the last few years, utilising a range of instruments from piano and synths to deconstructed music boxes and an old accordion she found in her grandparents’ attic. Add in field recordings of Lebanese hymns sung in churches across the country and you’ve got an ambient/classical collection quite unlike any other. Opening track ‘it’s always october on sunday’ is a good place to start, its pensive atmosphere capturing something about the record as a whole. As the label put it, “The atmosphere of melancholy that pervades the album should be familiar to anyone living in the twenty-first century.”

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Based in Nashville, Anne Malin is a poet and songwriter whose work exists at the intersection of country, freak folk and indie rock. New album Summer Angel, coming this June on Dear Life Records, works this space to explore the conflicted themes of love and violence, Malin at its centre both curious about the possibilities of the world and painfully aware of its cruel extremes. Serving as the perfect introduction to the release, lead singles ‘Destroyer’ and ‘Redeemer’ are harrowing in both senses of the word. Vulnerable songs which descend into distress and pain, but also songs sharp and toothed, capable of breaking new ground and imagining the field anew.

Summer Angel releases on 17th June via Dear Life Records. You can pre-order it now from the Anne Malin Bandcamp page.

Chris Bathgate – Don’t Look Back

Next month sees the release of The Significance of Peaches, the latest album from Michigan songwriter Chris Bathgate on Quite Scientific Records. Continuing Bathgate’s distinctively evocative style, new single ‘Don’t Look Back’ evokes the mythic tale of Orpheus and Eurydice to explore a more personal mythology. A love story coloured by both tragedy and defiance, finding compassion in its hard won wisdom. “Ain’t it strange how the things we’ve done,” he sings, “often are the cause of us undone– / that’s love, or something.” Check out the video by Kevin Romeo and Bathgate himself below:

The Significance of Peaches is out on the 13th May via Quite Scientific and you can pre-order it now.

HUSHPUPPY – Nervous

The project of New York‘s Zoë Brecher, HUSHPUPPY makes a cathartic brand of indie rock, as highlighted by latest track, ‘Nervous’. The latest in Hardly Art‘s Singles Series, the track confronts difficulty with defiance, finding empowerment in the knowledge that others suffer too. “As someone who suffers from anxiety and depression, I often struggle to leave the house,” Brecher describes. “This song is about acknowledging I’m not the only one who feels that way.”

Keeps – Over Again

Keeps are an indie rock four-piece from Nashville, Tennessee. Following on from their second album Affectianado released in 2020, they have returned with a brand new single, ‘Over Again’. Written by singer Agustin Escalante and guitar player Robbie Jackson through the lens of pandemic-induced isolation, the song charts the pressures time and distance can put on a relationship, the warm jangle and melancholic vocals combining into a decidedly wistful air.

Kisskadee – Black Hole Era

Next month sees the release of Black Hole Era, the new album by Kisskadee on Anxiety Blanket. The project of LA multi-instrumentalist Kasie Shahbaz, the record combines folk, pop, psych and ambient styles to realise its distinctive sound. Its title track displays just how evocative this blend can be. The various styles knit together into a near cosmic bed of sound which holds Shahbaz’s vocals, the lyrics probing into universal mysteries and possibilities beyond what we understand as reality, a very human line of questioning amid the spacey sound.

Black Hole Era releases on 3rd June via Anxiety Blanket. Pre-order it now from the Kisskadee Bandcamp page.

Metavari – Kings Die Like Other Men (Rediscovery)

Described as “in communion with the decade past,” Soft Continuum sees Nathaniel David Utesch’s Metavari reimagining their 2009 debut full-length, Be One of Us and Hear No Noise. Out this June on Joyful Noise Recordings, the new record functions as both a work by and tribute to founding member Ty Brinneman who passed away in 2020, his recordings expanded into what eventually became the album. With stellar contemporary electronics elevated by a range of styles, from Italian horror movie dramatics to the cosmic experimentation of kosmische and new age music. Lead single ‘Kings Die Like Other Men (Rediscovery)’ drops the listener straight into this style, especially when paired with the video directed by Alex Osmolovsky along with director of photography Vlad Voronin.

Soft Continuum (Studies Vol.2) is out via Joyful Noise Recordings on the 10th June and you can pre-order it now from the Metavari Bandcamp page.

Riches – The Frequency

Riches is described as the “manifestation of an ongoing dialogue” between Catherine McCandless (of Young Galaxy) and the choreographer Wynn Holmes. “A glowing and airy slice of pastoral folk,” was how we described previous track ‘Light of Dawn‘, and though new single ‘The Frequency’ retains some of the lightness, it heads into altogether deeper territory with a full band arrangement that introduces an almost gothic dream pop sound. “The frequency is: being swept up, being in love, longing and belonging, soothing and alive,” the band explain. “It is a calling on the ethereal to take on form, on music to bring touch and connection over the frontiers of physical walls and distances.”

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“Sharp mind, eternal youth
I’ll be the first to never die
Nice thought, and I’m never gonna lose it”

If that all sounds dark then that’s because it is, but there is something both fascinating and thrilling in songs so direct and confrontational. Protomartyr’s music is imbued with a certain sense of exciting terror, a DeLillian dread that we know we should escape yet can’t help but stand beneath in open-mouthed awe. At least now you know you are not standing alone.

RIYL: Post-punk, Ought, ruminations on death

Favourite songs:

You can buy The Agent Intellect now from Hardly Art or the Protomartyr Bandcamp page.

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