Out this week via Fire Talk, Frances’s new album Nested in Tangles plays like the thicket of flora which sprouts from the ground broken by its predecessor. The life brought forth from turned-over earth. A diversity present not only in theme or tone but style itself. Lead single ‘Falling From and Further’ took “the folk song as a backbone only,” we wrote in a preview, “elaborating the sound with layers of prog and jazz sensibilities so that the track becomes a world of its own without ever losing the core thread of personal vulnerability which has long run through Frances’s work,” while ‘Surviving You’ used a similarly inventive sound to explore, as we put it, “ideas of generational trauma and the coping mechanisms we develop in response.” Both singles came complete with videos Frances made in collaboration with Vanessa Castro, visual accompaniments which further expanded the reach of the songs and their inherent multiplicity.

With the release of the album imminent, Hannah Frances has returned with final single ‘The Space Between’. Serving as the crescendo of the record, the track rises from modest beginnings, the vocals a languid croon, the picked guitar like a dappled light, though soon develops into something intricate and exalted. Guest Daniel Rossen (Grizzly Bear) provides cello, piano, percussion and backing vocals to further enrich Frances’s arrangement, the sound ebbing and flowing with the kind of organic temperament which underpins the entire release. A healthy and fulfilling life is never just one thing, a monoculture neat and constant and happy, but rather an ecosystem of moods, periods and personas. A place where our different selves coexist and even care for one another, and there’s space for every shade of shadow and light.

True to form, the song comes complete with a video, the last in the series with Castro, featuring Frances performing a modern ballet sequence choreographed by New York City Ballet’s Emma Engel. “Inspired by Marcel Dzama’s plays and the surrealist imagination of Leonora Carrington, the piece follows Hannah’s younger self, also played by Engel, who guides her through a dialogue with her many parts,” as Castro describes. “These selves are embodied by a cast in animal masks, moving through a dreamlike world that blurs childhood imagination play with the discipline of growing up as a performer.”

Engel provides further detail behind the concept. “The choreography is dreamlike, built on playful shapes and gestures that return throughout the video,” they explain. “At first the movement is light and silly, but as the two characters grow closer, it transforms into something more powerful and heartfelt. Blending hints of ballet with free and abstract movement. The dance reflects connection, love and the joy of moving in sync with someone else and ultimately yourself.”

Nested in Tangles is out now via Fire Talk Records and available from the Hannah Frances Bandcamp page.

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Landing at what the press release describes as “the intersection of ambition and approachability,” the Facing sound pushes dream pop to new ground, embracing the ethereal richness of the genre without ever being beholden to its more restrictive conventions. The result is often as ominous as it is alluring, crafting decidedly cinematic soundscapes which swirl and sweep and screw in strange directions.

As single ‘Undiu’ shows, a certain sense of dissonance is present too, the trio unafraid to add abrasive textures to an often pillowy style, and thus the sound expands the meaning of dream within dream pop. One not always as grand or romantic as the genre suggests, but rather closer to the lived experience of our nighttime wandering. Ambiguous, suggestive, opaque, and ultimately held together by a curious intuitive logic which exists somewhere off behind our conscious reasoning.

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The guitar again sits front and centre, Swan and Schimpl’s use of the instrument seemingly endless in its variety. The record has country-inflected twangs and post-rock complexities, fuzzed out guitar drones and razor sharp melodies. The result is something of a landscape. One rural in tone which seems at once physical and emotional. Often stark and severe in its loneliness, a kind of haunted prairie or steppe, yet often possessing some kind of yearning fondness for the wide open space.

Lead tracks ‘Glass’ and ‘Half Smoked Cigarette’ serve as an introduction to this world. The former is a smoky, ambiguous number which seems to hover all around the listener. A memory of some old barroom ballad suspended in the air. And while the latter possesses more clarity with its motorik beat, there’s gloom to the sound which feels unending. An overcast sky as viewed from the flattest place on Earth. Grey stretching from one horizon to the next. But for all the tracks’ moodiness and portent, that sense of fondness is never far away. As though within the melancholy lies some inherent fear of loss, and with it a desire to hold on to that which is fragile, or else mourn it prematurely.

Dead Bandit will be released on the 14th March via Quindi Records and you can pre-order it now from Bandcamp.

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fawn spans just seventeen minutes across eight tracks, but somehow packs more into this condensed runtime than most bands do in a forty-five minute album. Stiebris plays guitar and sings while Blomquist plays bass and a little extra guitar, and together they conjure a rich lineage of forebears, from contemporary bedroom pop to Midwest emo and feedback-soaked shoegaze, while still keeping things fresh and experimental.

Indeed, perhaps the most notable aspect of fawn is its instinctive nature. Practically none of the songs follow a traditional structure, finding unusual melodies and earworm hooks where you least expect them, short and sweet and gloriously immediate. “It’s our ode to the demo,” Stiebris explains. “There’s not much that changed about the songs from the first draft to the final master, besides the production quality. We even kept all song titles in lowercase, exactly how the demos were saved on my computer.”

Take second track ‘normal c’, one of the EP’s longest at almost three minutes, which begins with sedate mathy riffs before morphing into a blazing rock song complete with clattering drums and snarled vocals. Check out the video by Justin Sheehan and Brian Garbrecht of Roadhouse Productions below:

Talking of music videos, we can’t not mention Joe Baughman‘s stop-motion creation for ‘nissanweekends’. Featuring a depressed rabbit who lives in a cuckoo clock, forced to trudge out to its little balcony to announce the new hour, it embodies the song’s exploration of the irrational shameful feeling of being unproductive in our hectic world. “It can feel like a waste of time to not be productive when there’s so many plates I’m trying to balance at once,” Blomquist tells Stereogum. “Ultimately making it hard to ever relax without feeling like ‘if I lay down, the earth will open up and leave me.’”

As you might expect, closer ‘soaked in’ finishes in a blaze of glory, two minutes twenty seconds that play like an OK Cool mission statement. “This song was super fun to write and I think it might be one of the most representative of the project as a whole,” Stiebris describes. “It’s got a lot of goofy guitar lines and fun instrumental sections going on, and I get to do a lot of yelling which is always a plus.” Tracy Conoboy’s shadowy psychedelic video is the perfect illustration, capturing the track’s live energy and bittersweet balance of dark and light.

With fawn, OK Cool show that sometimes caution and careful planning are the enemies of creativity. Through instinct and experimentation, they have captured a lightning-in-a-bottle energy. It’s the sound of two people completely attuned to one another’s inventiveness, growing together as artists in real time. Which comes to explain the EP’s title. “It definitely did, and still mostly does, feel like we’re just finding our legs in all of this,” says Blomquist. “The idea of a baby deer learning to walk felt pretty appropriate for the title of the EP–it parallels the vulnerability that comes with taking on new experiences.”

fawn is out now via Take a Hike Records and you can get it from the OK Cool Bandcamp page.

Photo by Tracy Conoboy

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Those familiar with Price’s work in Campdogzz will find lines between In Rounds and Doom Flower, though the two records are outwardly very different. The Campdogzz record sounded “scorched and dangerous,” we wrote in a preview, its sense of scale and weight lending the foreboding air of an approaching storm. While no less evocative, Doom Flower’s style is altogether more insular. Something more reserved, conjuring spaces small and introspective. As though the portent came good and a storm ravaged the land, leaving Price to pick through the wreckage and attempt to construct something resembling a life from the pieces.

Tracks like ‘Get a Job’ and ‘Anything’ wind their way through such a space, bereft of everything but unanswered questions. The environment might lack the Biblical weight of those conjured by Campdogzz, but they are no less hostile. The uneasy aftermath of something. A world of inherent sadness and suffering, the small cruelty of day to day living.

Which is not to paint listening to Doom Flower as an emotionally numb experience. There’s a certain anxiety throughout, be it the simmering, volatile kind present on ‘Headlights’ to the lightheaded, otherworldly sway of ‘House Warp’. This needling dread marbles with the overarching melancholy of the album, and this juxtaposition of stillness and movement gets under the skin. Take ‘Thrill Wheel’, an ostensibly slow, hushed track which hides a building disquiet. An opaque vessel filled slowly, holding for now but always threatening to spill over.

Doom Flower is out via Record Label and you can get it now from Bandcamp, including a vinyl edition.

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Spirit Tamer, the forthcoming Mia Joy album on Fire Talk Records, acts as something of a chronicle of Rocha’s history. A way of collecting the seemingly disparate pieces that make up a life in the hope of making sense of them, and learning more about the resulting whole. The range of influences on show add to this form, like snapshots from different times accumulating into something personal and unique, as well as always growing.

The first glimpses of the record highlight both the varied nature of its mood and tone, but also reinforce how such a changeable atmosphere evokes a cohesive, compelling picture of a human life. Dealing with Rocha’s experiences of suicidal ideation, ‘Haha’ is richly textured and wryly amusing, a balance of naked vulnerability and self-deprecation that ends up being something of a protection spell. In refusing to settle into any one-dimensional view of the situation, Mia Joy brings to life the true depth of such things, where conflicting and counterintuitive shades of emotion can exist side by side. If the ultimate fear is the binary of life and death, the track suggests, then embracing ambiguity might be the key to transcending the dread.

Though in a different manner, second single ‘See Us’ is equally nuanced. The final song Rocha wrote for the record, it found her beyond some of the troubles referenced elsewhere, and within a new love. “I could see a promising future with plenty of opportunities,” she explains, “filled with optimism of love and expansion that we could better our lives.” Months after the track was finished, the pandemic hit and took the relationship as one of its many casualties, revealing what was ostensibly a song about new beginnings to be something more distant and interesting. Not a track about the new dawn, but rather the possibility of any number further down the line, waiting to save us just in time.

Spirit Tamer is out via Fire Talk Records on the 7th May and you can pre-order it now from the Mia Joy Bandcamp page.

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This year sees Nectar return with a series of new singles, and the first, ‘Blister’, takes this idea and finds new ground. With its upbeat pop punk momentum, the track delves into dark and unsettling themes, exploring how pain and pleasure are intertwined, and how the marks and scars (or blisters) suffered in the process of doing something you love take on a peculiar kind of meaning.

The song was written in the aftermath of a serious injury to lead Kamila Glowacki, when a skateboarding accident left her with fractures in both arms and the fear that she might never be able to play guitar again. “The new version of my arm felt very grotesque as it was healing,” Glowacki explains. “Long scars, dark and exaggerated hair growth, swelling, bruising, and metal plates that keep the bones in place.”

‘Blister’ picks up within this strange space, where the curious pride of a skating wound clashes with the fact that it hinders other passions and outlets. “The brick wall pattern [of the artwork] is an obstacle and interruption to overcome,” Glowacki says, and the single represents an engagement with such barriers. Because Glowacki did heal, and the time in recovery allowed her to find a new level of focus and intention in even the smallest of things.

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Such lofty aims require idiosyncratic approach, and Mentalease have crafted a singular style that weaves electronic, dream pop, shoegaze and ambient into a patchwork genre for the digital world. Opening track ‘Push a Button’ serves as a perfect example, the bedroom pop sincerity buried beneath electronic layers, a human soul looking for cracks in its robotic surroundings.

The slow-burn ‘Selfie’ is a brooding march of a song, though the assured sound belies the confused lyrical position (“Staring / Into a reflection / Maybe it’s just fiction / Baby what’s the difference?”), while confident rock of ‘Lost Opportunities” is lighter on its feet. However, the track’s sense of motion is interrupted by digital squeals and distortion, as though the track is actually a representation of a song, a hologram caught out by the errors in its matrix.

Closer ‘Avert a Gaze’ continues such themes, casting a world of ghosts and echoes, the truth buried beneath a million reflections. Mentalease offer no way out beyond the reminder that some kernel of reality exists within the sea of simulacra, and though their tone veers from cynical to hysterical to suddenly sad, the range of emotions serves as a reminder of that very fact.

Push a Button is out now and you can get it from Bandcamp.

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Combining the ruminative atmosphere of a Lily Tapes release with the understatedly devastating writing of Talons’, Mount Eerie or early Trouble Books, Seventh Song Counts the Engines sees The World Without Parking Lots make something that’s equal parts sad and hopeful, bummed out bedroom folk songs for the twenty-first century.

The album opens with ‘Famous Horse Race’, a song that introduces this hushed and undeniably affecting vibe excellently. Opening with a despondent bus ride, things grow increasingly opaque, ending with murmured free verse that feels like an Impressionistic portrait of a thousand thoughts and feelings, lending new significance to the superimposed writing of the album’s artwork. “There’s a place where the lightness behind heaviness sits,” Parcell sings, “that I can only hold when the message hits behind an impulse and electric stay-awake but staying awake has it’s limits.”

There’s a lot of emotional abstraction in ‘The Inventor of Common Law Marriage’ too, Parcell’s words creeping sidelong at the edges of a situation, somehow saying nothing and capturing everything with its talk of narrow eyes and rodent-killing vultures.

Perhaps the saddest song you’ll ever hear about the “ever entertaining jewels” of colourful TV, ‘Cartoon’ is stripped right back, just gentle guitar and barely-there vocals. The whole thing is infused in sombre melancholy, but it’s the last line that stands out, a starkly beautiful piece of poetry that somehow feels like the perfect ending, a glimmer among the subdued hues.

“Grey estate, golden age blood moon
tear my winter coat in two”

Rattling around for a minute or so, ‘The Petition on the Emptier Parts’ eventually finds its rhythm as Parcell sings from a post-industrial malaise. “He’s reopening all the old factories,” he sings, “and this town could really use it right now.” ‘Seventh Song’ is a gentle instrumental interlude, guitar softly chiming beneath a layer of radio crackle, before closer ‘Sorel & Mare’ arrives in the rhythmic sway of guitar. Typically oblique, the song is seemingly simple but rendered dense and cryptic with the addition of Parcell’s poetry, packing a huge emotional punch in the process.

“and he counts the engines
one by one by one by the sound alone
by one by one by one
and he weighs his bringings
one by one by one hand alone”

Seventh Song Counts the Engines is a beautiful collection of songs, one which somehow makes a bold statement in a circuitous whisper, deceptively complex instrumentation and ambiguous lyrics capturing decidedly unambiguous emotion. Quite where Parcell takes The World Without Parking Lots next is left unclear, though we cannot wait to find out.

The album is out now and you can get it as a name-your-price download from The World Without Parking Lots Bandcamp page.

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From the early days of Casiotone For The Painfully Alone right through to the current moniker Advance Base, the songwriting of Owen Ashworth has always had a humanising quality. Providing glances into the lives of an array of characters, Ashworth produces vignettes of moments of loneliness, vulnerability and grief, or else the slow aftermath where the world’s continued spin does little to shake the feeling. And, while heartbreak and separation are key themes in these stories, Ashworth far from limits himself to the genre favourites of death and divorce. There has been bank robbers, unlucky swimmers, adolescent satanists turned killers—a cast of characters united by a common, human tendency for suffering.

The use of short glimpses into the worlds of fictional characters plays a fundamental role in Ashworth’s style, serving to free the songs from excessive introspection and self-pity. Which is to say, he does not deal in the woe-is-me solipsism of teen mope movies, or indeed that of middle-aged marriage trouble so familiar from quote-unquote ‘high’ literature. Ashworth provides us with people living through pain and loss, not obsessively analysing and attributing it to their own character. And through this, he opens up a space for the very features Robinson fears devalued and lost.

Ashworth is back with a brand new Advance Base record, Animal Companionship, out via Run For Cover and Orindal Records. Though not a concept album, pets (especially of the canine variety) are a recurring motif, and the idea proves fundamentally relevant to his continued examination of the human condition. If love is loyalty, the record asks, then how better to portray it than through the relationship a person shares with their dog?

Opener ‘True Love Death Dream’ is typically rich and narrative-driven, telling the story of the death of a teenage crush over slow and lush keyboard and drum machine. As with much of Ashworth’s work as Advance Base, the story is told from the distant future of middle age, the narrator naming her dog after the long-gone (but certainly not forgotten) boyfriend. It’s a song about intense emotions of love and hurt, set not in their burning midst but from a temporal distance, a wash of blue-grey melancholy punctuated with little jabs of glimmering golden hope. “It was true love,” Ashworth sings, “don’t let them tell you any different,” the sense of heart-strong defiance a reminder that even memories tinged with tragedy can be a solace.

‘Dolores & Kimberly’ follows with another richly imagined story, the narrator leaving behind a life and family for someone in a new city. The most memorable scene comes in the final third, when our narrator gets a divorce, a full two years after moving away, and celebrates by listening to ‘Moon River’ with their new love in an empty bar. “That night after closing,” Ashworth sings, “we opened up some good champagne and we slow danced across the floor.” It’s a story that could have been made seedy or scandalous, or washed with a Raymond Carver-style middle age ennui, but Ashworth writes it with a sense of pathos, sad but never cold or heartless.

“The streets were so empty
you’d think it was the rapture
Our midnight world
Just me & you”

The style draws the mind back to Marilynne Robinson, and her ability to weave heartbreak and suffering throughout her fiction without ever losing a sense of kindness and empathy. ‘Your Dog’ is another case in point, a break up song in retrospect, triggered when the dog of the now-gone other recognises the narrator, flipping out and barking like he always did. The track is devastating in its own gentle way, though its loneliness is derived not from the surface rejection of a failed relationship but a force more nebulous and vague—something to do with time passing, and the endearing yet debilitating innocence that lies at the heart of so many things.

Coming complete with a video by Karima Walker, ‘Christmas in Nightmare City’ is autobiographical, detailing a period of restlessness and insomnia that Ashworth suffered as he tried to give up drinking. The song creates a wonderful late-night atmosphere, a quiet and subdued story of driving around at night, your only company a college game on the radio. As if to up the stakes, it happens to be Christmas too, and no-one writes Christmas songs like Ashworth. His aesthetic and temperament are the perfect medium to capture the strange mix of sad and magical, the way the only promise the ‘most wonderful time of the year’ can keep is that of making tough times worse.

After the daydream pop of The Magnetic Fields cover ‘You & Me & the Moon’ and the instrumental interlude of ‘Walt’s Fantasy’, a lingering weariness heralds ‘Rabbits’. The track pairs a simple and reassuring account of a regular morning (“Woke up late in a fog,” Ashworth sings, “Took a pill walked the dog / Down Levon onto Birch / Heard the sound of the organ inside the church”), with aching recollection (“last that I heard / you’d settled down in South Bend / and married a girl, who’s folks own the bar that you tend”) to make the mundane magical and vice versa. It’s a neat little trick that captures both the simple pleasures of the present and the rich internal dialogue of a wandering mind.

As though to reinforce the commitment to empathetic, outwardly-looking portrayals of suffering, ‘Same Dream’ returns to another trope of Ashworth’s music with the narrator expecting a baby. Though it might well be perceptive, the empathy comes not from Ashworth’s imaginative portrayal of pregnancy but the narrator herself, her struggle through a world that couldn’t care less about her blessing/curse couched in thoughts of another person—her burden directed toward some higher purpose, her dreams no longer merely her own.

The idea could be said to form something of a credo for Animal Companionship, and is reiterated in the strikingly sad ‘Care’. The song paints a relationship through incidences of trauma, a dependency forming within the external violence and loss, two people leaning on one another, propping each other up. The refrain circles around twice, the slight differences providing all the difference. That’s when I knew,” goes the first, in response to a house fire, “that I could take care of you.” “That’s when I could see,” runs the second, a close friend dying of cancer, “the way you take care of me.”

Again, we find ourselves back at Marilynne Robinson. “That’s what the family is for,” a pastor character asserts, willing his family to be as open to receiving help as they are to giving. “Calvin says it is the Providence of God that we look after those nearest to us. So it is the will of God that we help our brothers, and it is equally the will of God that we accept their help and receive the blessing of it.” Advance Base has stripped all dogma and religion from this message, keeping only the important stuff, though the sentiment of ‘Care’ is exactly that of Robinson’s writing.

“The songs are intended to be a comfort for folks going through their own tough times,” Ashworth explained in an essay for Talkhouse. “Commiseration has always been a guiding principle of my songwriting.” Love need not be hugs and hearts and kisses, and loyalty does not necessarily mean hanging in a relationship beyond all reason. But love is loyalty, and Owen Ashworth has been, and seemingly always will be, loyal to those who need it most.

Animal Companionship is out now via Run For Cover Records and Orindal Records and you can get it from Bandcamp on vinyl and cassette, as well as digital. Advance Base is currently on a mammoth North American tour with other VSF favs like Gia Margaret, Friendship and Lisa/Liza, so be sure to check the dates here.

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