Latest single ‘Sirens’ turns to the past in order to continue this investigation. Namely Greek myth and the story of Persephone, herself something of a contradiction. The goddess of death and the afterlife, as well as that of vegetation and spring. Otracami weaves these mythic elements with personal reflection, the track a folk song at heart yet blooming into something altogether richer and more nuanced as it develops. How far do the obligations of loyalty extend? Ortiz asks, using the tale of Persephone and her handmaidens. When you are linked to a person involved with something bad, how much responsibility are you expected to take? The themes are expanded upon by the accompanying video, starring Ortiz and made by long-term collaborator Sai Tripathi along with PA Dylan Karlsson, which pushes the song towards something closer to performance art. Watch below:

Runoff will be released on the 20th March via Figure & Ground and you can pre-order it now.

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The single was a fitting introduction to a decidedly existential record. Rudick uses the songs to dig into every facet of his identity in search of answers to life’s needling questions. Everything from the relationship between children and parents to the complications of maintaining a marriage, not to mention the spectres of violence and substance abuse (‘Fist Fight’), and the not insignificant effort of persisting in a band at a time when creativity is so often disregarded or disabused (‘Buyer’s Market’).

Those familiar with Young Elk’s previous work will recognise the atmosphere which emerges from such themes. Calm Down exists beneath the shadow of some great weight, representing the accumulated baggage of life that haunts every minute of our days whether we are aware of it or not. “I was also figuring out how to process the toxicity of my family after realizing their implications in childhood trauma and abuse,” as Rudick explains. The album does not offer an escape from this history, it doesn’t even try. Instead it acknowledges exactly what it is which sits above our heads in the hope that honesty and openness might go some way to lightening the load.

Living up to its title, ‘Little String’ explores these ideas further by positioning the American ideal of the family as a kind of tenuous binding, something which is supposed to hold a life (and society) together yet too often sees individuals lashed to people and places which drag them into darkness. “Give your fingertips some time / to unwind that tiny little string / that you used to bind your inner life / to someone’s complicated feelings,” Rudick sings in the opening verse, his voice as ever charged with equal parts compassion and fury, fighting to hold onto restraint amid the gravity of the realisations bestowed upon him. But, of course, it is not as simple as untying a knot. The past returns no matter what we do to release ourselves from its bindings. As demonstrated in the closer ‘Palmer ’68’, a song every bit as stark and tragic as anything else on the record, yet lit from within by something like love in spite of everything, even if it feels pitiful to admit.

palmer, alaska ’68
you were missing mother in a terrible way
you wrote her the same letter everyday
saying ‘baby, i still love you. are you ok?”

are you ok?

Calm Down is out now via Rue Defense and available from Bandcamp.

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Those familiar with previous Léna Bartels releases will appreciate how this multifaceted style applies to the very sound of her music. From the punchy, cathartic indie rock highs of debut Preservation to the intimate, wintery folk of recent split It’s Gonna Be a Wonderful New Year, the Portland-born, Brooklyn-based songwriter has explored a vast amount of terrain in a short space of time. The Brightest Silver Fish pushes this variation further still. Seventies songwriters such as Judee Sill are a touchstone, but so are alt rock and grunge acts from the nineties, electro pop and even mainstream country. The latter apparent on single ‘Bad Sugar’ with its simmering verses and bright, confessional choruses, as well as the genre’s classic concerns like working too hard for too little. But for all the stylistic shapeshifting, the album is notably cohesive, each venture out in a new direction not the consequence of idle wandering but the very thing demanded by the emotional landscape of each specific track. As though the songs are not traversing new spaces at all, rather showing the same thing viewed under a changing light.

Indeed, the image of light recurs across the record, reinforcing this sense of competing perspectives. Consider the morning rays on ‘Give Myself a Way’, a song loaded with double meanings right down to its playful title. Give myself a way easily becomes give myself away, agency flipped into submission depending on how you choose to hear it. Or ‘Amber’ with its rose-coloured curtains and shadows moving slow, at once a towering, shoegaze-inflected rock song and late night confession voiced to an empty room, where what might be a parent or lover speaks to the person submerged in their protective instincts. “While you’re sleeping I’ll brush the knots out” Bartels sings, an image that can again be split in two. A demonstration of tender intimacy that grows stranger and more foreboding within the song’s dark heft, the fine line between care and control blurred by the desperation of love.

Unfurling with slow grace, ‘Fighter’ approaches a similar situation from a different angle. The narrator is another mother or lover twisted up with the blessing of caring for someone, afflicted by the curse of being unable to guarantee that person’s constant comfort and joy. The taut, urgent rhythm of ‘I Knew’ captures the same despair in a very different manner, playing like an anxious thought on a loop. The result is curious, its perpetual motion paradoxically suggesting stasis, like a mind struck in a single groove. And while the whispered opening of tentative follow-up ‘Nothing Makes Me Feel Touched’ could hardly be more contrasting in style, the effect turns out to be very similar. “I confess that nothing’s getting on me / And nothing gets me off / And so I lay back in the twirl / As they are watering the brush” Bartels sings in another image of inertia, only for the track to again into a fervent, noisy conclusion based upon a repeated refrain: “When I insist there’s light to see / When I hold it up.”

Given the title and the artwork, it is tempting to return to the metaphor of the fish. One hooked in the mouth perhaps, being reeled through its surroundings with dizzying speed, overcome with pain and panic and doubt. Until the moment the surface is finally breached and the angler confronted, this fish can have no idea of the future before it. Whether its fate is to be kissed and released to go on swimming, or cracked on the head and stowed hollow-eyed on ice.

It is this torment of not knowing, both for themselves and those they care about, that concerns Léna Bartels’s narrators. Figures stuck between the simultaneous desire to fight against the line and submit to its inevitable pull. The Brightest Silver Fish offers no solution to the problem, just a picture of those muddling through. Consider the title track again, opening as a hushed, almost hesitant folk song, the lines delivered with a contradictory tone somewhere between intense concentration and absent-minded distraction. As though something intense and dramatic is unfolding outside the frame of the track and Bartels is determined not to look at it. Feeling, perhaps, to ignore its presence is to make life liveable. To be occupied within the song is to go some way toward shaping the conditions of the world.

Only the brightest silver fish
Shows when the light hits
I suppose I imagined it
Gasping for air in the beak of a gold goose
Greedy to want and dumb to refuse

The Brightest Silver Fish is out now via Glamour Gowns and available from the Léna Bartels Bandcamp page.

Photo by Morgan Healani Mein

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Now Blue Deputy are back with a new single ‘Big Fleece’, and again the track finds an outfit willing to mix and match their stylistic influences in order to craft their own singular sound. The press release sites Alvvays, Slow Pulp, Indigo De Souza and The Beths as touchstones and with good reason, the song retaining the emotional vulnerability of its predecessor but adding shoegaze revival richness and sunbleached indie rock wooze. The resulting mood is also a patchwork of conflicting feelings, where the allure of romance and rawness of pain compete for the upper hand.

Watching through a lens, and getting in my head
Paralysed and seeing ceiling eyes
I target a flare to whom I feel it’s fair
The nerve I pressed, maybe I guess I acted out of turn

When you sink to cruelty, I button up my big fleece
And iron over the crease
And I will love you for just a bit too long

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Wilder Maker’s forthcoming album The Streets Like Beds Still Warm is a very different record to Male Models. One even more ambitious in scope (it’s the first of a planned triptych to be released across the next eighteen months) and unique in its creation which nevertheless seems driven by the spirit of its predecessor. As though the band itself was one such figure looking to move and progress and reach for something different. Birnbaum has called The Streets… “the inverse of the typical songwriter record,” the music recorded during open-ended sessions where core band members Adam Brisbin, Nick Jost, Sean Mullins improvised and swapped instruments at will, and guests including Katie Von Schleicher, Joseph Shabason, Macie Stewart, Chuck Johnson, Will Shore, Rebecca el-Saleh (Kitba) and Cole Kamen-Green added their own touches too, before Birnbaum took the result home and slowly whittled it into the form it takes today.

The result, made possible by both a band now experienced in working together and a label in Western Vinyl willing to trust them, swaps the sleek psych and goodtime rock sensibilities of its predecessor for something altogether more stark and lonely, less a house party than a late-night wander through unfamiliar streets. Which is not to suggest minimalism, the sound owing much to experimental and alt-jazz forebears, but rather the presiding mood. One indebted to the shadow and subtle desperation of noir cinema, the perfect soundtrack as Birnbaum’s worldweary narrator flits between bars and hospital rooms while nursing concerns both trivial and existential.

The trilogy of albums promises to chart an entire night in the city, with The Streets Like Beds Still Warm taking us from dusk to sometime after midnight. And the style makes good on the form. These are songs free from traditional structures but never sprawling. Ambiguous and often hypnotic but governed by linear motion. A path down which we follow the protagonist, watching as he moves through the night and the night moves through him, his own character and state of mind shifting as the hours slide on by. “Film noir detectives always start out looking immaculate, but by the end of the film they have a torn collar, a black eye, their slacks are stained, and they’ve started slapping people around in desperation,” Birnbaum says. “Are they the good guy anymore? I find this fascinating and I love the visual cues reflecting the internal landscape.” 

With the album set for release in September, Wilder Maker have unveiled the two opening tracks as singles. Listen to ‘Strange Meeting with Owls’ and ‘Skewered by the Daystar’ below and take your first few steps into what will be a long night indeed.

The Streets Like Beds Still Warm will be released on the 19th September via Western Vinyl and you can pre-order it now from the Wilder Maker Bandcamp page.

Photo by Keegan Grandbois

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All that said, latest single ‘summer’s scorch’ shows My sunny oath! is far from a one-dimensional release. More restrained and tender than the EP’s other tracks, the song utilises additional instrumentation from Farrar (drums, bass, guitar, keyboards) and Libby Rodenbough (strings) to reveal the record’s contrasting spirit. A blend of soft and heavy, dark and light tones to create something gritty yet still in possession of real heart.

Get induced with rolling sickness
When I feel my heart get bigger
Don’t watch movies but I’ll try
Feel the earth rest in my thighs

Watch the video by Harrison Shook below:

My sunny oath! is out on the 13th June via Winspear and you can pre-order it now from the Jahnah Camille Bandcamp page.

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The result is what the band call “a series of vignettes and character sketches that examine agency, belief, and the tensions between the natural and the human-built environment,” all delivered with the trademark nuance of the Constellation Myths sound. A record which began during the depths of the pandemic and only grew more timely in the volatile aftermath. “The songs that make up The Cost of Living are preoccupied with things very much at the heart of our current social and political crisis,” they continue, “class resentments, petty jealousies, false prophets, vigilante justice, the warping of our shared sense of reality by a toxic online culture.”

Lead single and opening track ‘Spare Room’ provides a glimpse into the album. A slow-burning, downbeat meditation on separation and aging which nevertheless carries a certain warmth, tapping into a long lineage on down-your-their-luck country singers to locate a certain wistful charm within the loneliness. The song builds as it progresses, leaning into the small comforts of such a feeling, culminating in an affirming, harmony-laden finale as though to remind itself life continues in even the wake of great change.

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With the release of the album fast approaching via Next Door Records, Casper Skulls are back with ‘Dying in Eight Verses’, a brand new single that introduces another string to their bow and further whets appetites for the full release. The song is personal, reflective and bittersweet, led by its narrative in a manner stemming from the lineage of Dylan et al. and confessing its innermost fears in a way at once melancholic and affirming. “And ‘remember whens’ are our conversations / Until it no longer brings alleviation,” as one verse goes. “When we can’t express all that we invest / We took a vow but I guess we’re just memories now / Until no one’s left to remember us.” Though written before Melanie and Neil had their baby, “I think I could feel that I was ready to be a father when I wrote this song,” Bednis explains. “I think this is my most personal song and I can’t help but think of my grandparents, my parents, my wife and my daughter when I hear it. I think there’s a lot of sadness in the song but also so much hope. ”

Kit-Cat is out on the 11th April via Next Door Records and you can pre-order it from the Casper Skulls Bandcamp page.

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[The album is] about facing the endless horrors of the world and remembering to pay attention to the good. People on the ground, activism, and remembering that we shouldn’t be hardened by everything we witness or we can lose empathy. And it feels like without empathy we’ll never be able to achieve class consciousness, and lose our sense of community.

Pulling no punches with its observations, lead single ‘All My Friends Are Depressed’ plays like a dispatch from the trenches of the present. An attempt to shake life into an exhausted population beaten down by work and expectations so that we might act to shape a better world. The song represents “my observation of the mental health crisis we’re in, how widespread it feels and how sociopolitical factors are playing such a huge part,” Cook explains. “It’s also a reminder to myself that I need to stop distracting myself from my issues and try and change something or face things or nothing will happen and I’ll never shake off the episode.”

Wield Your Hope Like A Weapon is out on the 16th May via Specialist Subject Records and you can pre-order it now from the Soot Sprite Bandcamp page.

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Latest single ‘In the weeds’ continues this process. Nattrass provides vocals, guitar, bass, keys, synthesizers and percussion, and is joined by Evan House (drums), Kyle Musselwhite (pedal steel) and Elyse Lankford (vocals), as well as additional production from House and Alex Heubel. The track finds Drench Fries at its most vivid and enveloping. A song once again wrapped in wistful nostalgia though  certainly not rooted to the spot. Something of a sonic road trip fuelled by yearning, as though a movement into the future is driven only by the unshakeable desire to recapture days now gone.

It’s rainin’ so hard I can barely see
but “if its good for the grass, then its good for me”
I tell myself
bitterly
I’m a vine tangled up in a thousand weeds
I’ll spend a lifetime lookin’ for that golden tree
I know it’s there
waiting for me

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