Though Mellow Submarine might offer calmer tone to the Borito sound, it also sees Yael S. Copeland engage with such worries far more directly. A decision to face up to the things which prove so unnerving within the contemporary moment, be it the collective helplessness experienced amid the unnatural heat of Tel Aviv’s recent summers (‘Over’) or more personal themes of social anxiety (‘metoo’) and relationships (‘Death to My Ladies Man’). But thanks to her intimate, dusk-hued sound, Copeland emerges through everything with a sense of hope intact. Unable to lose the romantic notion that things can be different, can improve. Mellow Submarine looks for good thoughts amid the chaos, and might just have you believing they are just around the corner after all.

We took the opportunity to speak with Yael S. Copeland in order to delve a little deeper into the album:

Hi Yael, thanks so much for speaking with us, and congratulations on Mellow Submarine! How does it feel to be letting your debut album free into the world?

Hello, very happy to share a little about my debut. Love Various Small Flames so this is extra special

I feel good releasing my solo debut. I’ve been creating and performing more seriously for the past couple of years so I felt ready for this moment. Especially after experiencing it with my band Borito. Being a musician during a time of a release can be tough so I’m happy to move back to a more creative space while still caring for and sharing Mellow Submarine.

How did the process of a solo album differ from that with Borito? Did you feel you were exploring new ground with this project?

I love being in a band and the special connection we have when playing together in a room. Like the other members I have different aspects that I wanted to explore as an artist. If it’s moving more towards producing on my own or musical genres and sounds I haven’t yet created with. I wanted to make music that reflects a more intimate side of myself. The side that exists in my room. Maybe a bit more melancholic, more anxious but also has a romantic view on the world.

Borito was released in the midst of the pandemic and it has a more escapist quality. I find that super important but like everyone else sometimes we just want to dance and forget and sometimes we want to face life, the world, ourselves.

Despite what the title might suggest, I think it’s fair to say Mellow Submarine is an anxious record? From the personal social anxiety of ‘metoo’ to global pandemics and the climate emergency, uncertainty is baked into each song. Could you speak a little on why you choose to face up to these worries so directly, especially with a sound that’s so wistful and warm?

I haven’t thought of the record in that way but I completely understand why that comes across. I do deal with anxieties. Social ones, ones that stem from the climate crisis and ones that stem from the issues that we deal with in Israel.

I do think that the album is very much my point of view on these issues. My way to deal with adulting in a world with an unknown future. I think for a lot of songwriters, the process of writing is therapeutic. It is a way to process these fears and anxieties, to control the narrative and to express fantasies that are not possible in real life. Maybe that’s why the album is also warm and wistful. Maybe I’m romanitizicing these problems, because it makes it easier to deal with.

Do you feel differently now, having written the songs? The final line of opening track ‘over’ really caught my attention. “Why should I care of the present,” as you ask, “if I don’t have a future to remember it as my past?” But the fact that it’s the first song seems important too. As though the rest of the record is trying to answer your own question, find reasons to live?

As I said in the previous question, I feel differently after each song I write because it allows me to view the situation from a spectator point of view. When I wrote ‘Over’, which was written on a very hot summer day in Tel Aviv, I was dealing with the thought that the climate crisis is going to be devastating for my generation and future ones. Writing the song gave those thoughts a clear voice. It focused on what was scary about it. I do believe in that line I wrote but I would like to offer a more hopeful message, that is an understanding that: I should be present in my life, cause right now I am here. As Lenny Kravitz said “It ain’t over till it’s over.”

Could we talk a little about influences? Is it fair to say there’s an American flavour to the sound? What artists do you draw on when making your own music? And are you inspired by non-musical things too?

I am currently based in Tel Aviv and I grew up in Israel. My parents moved here from the US when they were younger, wanting to start a family here. My identity is very much influenced by the American home I was brought up in. I grew up on American classic rock. some might say “Dad Rock”. Bruce Springsteen, Paul Simon, Randy Newman are just some of the storytellers I would listen to at home. This album and hopefully future songs under my solo project are a way to get back to folk and the amazing songwriters I heard in a new modern way.

The changes and uncertainty that are a part of our lives nowadays affected music and brought some new interpretations to the world of folk and Americana which I love. I am drawn to mix these classic influences with new voices, new sounds that lean more towards freak folk/lo-fi aesthetic. Alex G, Elvis Depressedly, Car Seat Headrest are some of the names that lead these trends. I’ll also mention Adrianne Lenker (Big Thief) who in my mind is one of the best songwriters of recent years and Natalie Bergman who put out a beautiful album called Mercy.

Which brings us onto Ghost Mountain Records. How did that relationship come about? And do you know what’s next for your music?

I actually started talking to Andrew from Ghost Mountain on IG. It’s amazing that today it doesn’t matter as much where you physically are. Andrew is wonderful and helped me a lot with the release. In terms of the label—the main focus is cassette tapes, and that’s what we did for Mellow Submarine! On April 7th they will be released on Bandcamp and they are shimmering gold and perfect for the twilight vibe of the album.

In terms of what’s next – I am travelling with my band Borito to NXNE, a showcase in Toronto, Canada this June. After I am planning to travel to NY and maybe some other places in the U.S. Would love to be where a lot of my inspirations create their own music. I feel like now that the album is out I am able to start writing again so hopefully new music soon. Also a new album from Borito this year. You are invited to follow on social media and stay updated

Mellow Submarine is out now digitally on the Yael S. Copeland Bandcamp page, with cassettes coming via Ghost Mountain Records on the 7th April.

Photos by Edo Asoulin, album art photo by Yuval Rozin, album design by Yael S. Copeland

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The project of Gothenburg-based musician, producer and visual artist Lela Amparo, Amparo is an outlet for atmospheric and cinematic music that blends electronic, ambient and folk. Taken from new album Day and Night, out now on Bikiniwax Records, latest single ‘After Ours’ is a great example. Drawing on the likes of Bonobo and The Cinematic Orchestra, the song builds from simple guitar and plaintive strings into a rich, jazz-inflected track that’s thick with a sense of late-night drama and emotion. ‘After Ours’ is “inspired by a night spent in Paris before changing the course of my life,” Amparo explains. “It’s about being in the moment and knowing nothing will ever be the same.”

 Getdown Services – Cream Of The Crop

If John Cooper Clarke’s ‘Evidently Chickentown’ conjured the end days through pictures of a tedious, ruined Britain, then ‘Cream of the Crop’ by Bristol’s Getdown Services offers a new vision of the non-future. A world polished to within an inch of its life and then polished a bit harder. A stage of capitalism so late they’ve stopped updating the time on the board. Think branded boozers and no-change-from-a-tenner street food cuisine. The milieu is brought to life by shiny disco beats, though it is the conversational snark of vocalist Josh Law the grabs the attention. A figure who finds himself in a place so soulless he’s not sure whether to self-immolate or burst out laughing. Either way, he’s stuck there and so are you. Roll up everybody, Chickentown’s had a fresh coat of paint.

Jeffrey Silverstein – Cowboy Grass

Later this spring, Jeffrey Silverstein will release Western Sky Music, his second LP for Arrowhawk Records and first full-length since 2020’s You Become the Mountain. Promising an evolution of Silverstein’s cosmic brand of country, the album again features contributions from Barry Walker Jr (pedal steel) and Alex Chapman (bass), and also adds Akron/Family’s Dana Buoy on drums, as well as guest appearances from William Tyler and VSF fav Karima Walker. Lead single ‘Cowboy Grass’ is our first taste, a song with a little more dust and dirt and barroom boogie than anything Silverstein has made to date. Watch the video, directed by Austin Abbott and starring Eric DuRant, below:

Western Sky Music releases via Arrowhawk Records on 12th May. Pre-order a copy now from the Jeffrey Silverstein Bandcamp page.

Melati ESP – BAHASA BARU

With LP hipernatural coming soon on Carpark Records, Indonesian-American experimental pop artist Melati ESP has unveiled new single, ‘BAHASA BARU’. The record is notable in the way it draws on the breadth of Melati’s cultural influences to achieve its vivid sound (Javanese radio Dangdut, gamelan cassettes, Moving Shadow-era liquid jungle and Japanese chill-out are all listed as inspirations), and the new single serves as the ideal introduction to a style which exists outside of the usual categorization of genre or geography. “It’s a personal statement of intent,” Melati explains, “being comfortable in occupying the third space, and creating new ways of communicating that are tethered to intuition, empathy and understanding.” The song comes complete with a video, directed by Melati’s sister Kathleen Malay, which celebrates this embrace of otherness despite, as Melati puts it, “mostly feeling like a baby alien while growing up in Jakarta, always between two worlds.”

hipernatural is out on the 28th April via Carpark Records.

The Saxophones – Desert Flower

Released to announce their third album, coming early this summer on Full Time Hobby, ‘Desert Flower’ is the new single from The Saxophones. For the uninitiated, The Saxophones is the project of married duo Alexi Erenkov and Alison Alderdice, who make slinky Lynchian lounge music that’s dark and velvety, confronting existential concerns with a smoky sophistication. What Erenkov describes as “about avoidance and fear impeding personal growth and the deepening of relationships,” ‘Desert Flower’ is no different. Creeping and cryptic, it blends the material and the mystical, eventually swelling to emotive peaks as Erenkov’s croon gives way to radiant sax. It’s an intriguing glimpse of what promises to be a strange and sublime record.

There are symbols everywhere
signs that even I can’t deny.
Only if they aligned,
I could lift away the veil.

To Be a Cloud will be released via Full Time Hobby on 2^nd June. Pre-order it now from Bandcamp.

Strange Ranger – Rain So Hard

Strange Ranger are a band who have been defined by a sense of self-reinvention. Winning initial acclaim within the spheres of indie rock, 2019’s Remember The Rockets saw the first shoots of shoegaze and pop influences breaking the surface, and by No Light in Heaven the following year they were entirely rebranded as an experimental electronic outfit. New single ‘Rain So Hard’, out via Fire Talk Records, emerges from this electro ground, its lush and layered sound playing as some nameless immensity above the vocals, be it a looming cityscape or wide open sky. This overwhelming scale registers as a kind of melancholy, the vocals adrift within something to large for them to navigate or control. “How do I get out of this movie now?” asks the repeated refrain, hoping for nothing more than another person to cling onto for the ride. Watch the video directed by Ben Turok below:

‘Rain So Hard’ is out now via Fire Talk Records.

Women Tied to Railroad Tracks – Fake Tans

Back in 2019 we wrote about Women Tied to the Railroad Tracks, describing the sound of their album And Levitating as “indie pop that sits in a strange space between mundane reality and freaky dreams.” With their debut record on the horizon with Anxiety Blanket Records, the LA outfit have shared the brand new single, ‘Fake Tans’. A bright summertime track loosely based on Doris Lessing’s novel The Golden Notebook, where the protagonist speaks of an encounter with a man with a crack in his personality: “like a gap in a dam, and through that gap the future might pour in a different shape—terrible perhaps, or marvelous, but something new.”

Yael S. Copeland – Pool

Having made a name fronting Borito, Tel Aviv’s Yael S. Copeland is setting out alone for her first solo release. If the Borito sound occupied a colourful, retro bracket of the dream pop/rock genre, then Copeland’s solo work turns more toward the intimate and lo-fi, having more in common with Alex G and Elliott Smith. With an album set for release later this month, latest single ‘Pool’ shows how this stripped back style is no less immersive or heartfelt, the lyrics playing like something between a daydream and a poem in their gentle reflection, the sound still managing to envelop the listener in its lush layers.

big sky
like a big pool
blue and clear
but I can’t see my
reflection when I look down here

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Here, she started to explore the electronic and ambient scene, eventually meeting sound designer and producer Aviad Zinemanas. Together, the pair began to work on demos Polanski had written, a collection of songs that would eventually become the debut Zoe Polanski full-length, Violent Flowers, which is being released next month on New York label Youngbloods.

Today we have the pleasure of unveiling the album’s first single, ‘Pharoah’s Island’. The song is inspired by the titular island, located in the Gulf of Aqaba, which has been the site of a fortress for centuries. Now, like many shallow areas of the Red Sea, the island is renowned for a different reason. “What enchanted me about the place was the fact that underneath this militarized land there is a parallel universe that exists underwater,” Polanski explains. “In the base of the island [lives] an exceptionally rich colony of corals and marine life.”

This sense of submerged tropical diversity bubbles forth immediately. Arising from the unplanned marriage between a guitar loop and a goblet drum rhythm, the song is bathed in blue-green atmospherics, shimmering with hazy streaks of colour. There are elements of Beach House’s dreamy soundscapes, crossed with the near-devotional tones of Julianna Barwick and the alternate-dimension pop of Purity Ring, a blend which marks Zoe Polanski as a creative force to watch.

Fire away, it’s a landslide
Too many times you held back
Fire away, crystal soldier
You are soon to forget
What goes down
In your heart that burns with endless fire
In your heart that takes you higher and higher
In your heart that burns with endless fire
In your heart

Violent Flowers is out July 15th on LP and digital via Youngbloods. You can pre-order it from the Zoe Polanski Bandcamp page.

Main photo by Ori Kroll

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Nowhere is this made more clear than on opening track, ‘Funeral’, a song directly inspired by the death of Elias’s parents. Specifically, the focus is placed on her mother’s funeral, conjuring the disconcerting disembodiment of such an occasion, where the gravity of the situation manifests as eerie and unreal.

I won’t shed a tear for you
Even if you wanted me to
Shed your worries, come dear
Promises you feel to keep in

‘I Can’t Sleep’ is the slow aftermath, a time alone after the fact where ghosts seep into the silence of the room and the pain begins to reconfigure identity to allow for its presence. The off-kilter tones of ‘Wonder’ swirl and stir into their own dream logic, the vocals possessing an unsettling innocence that brings to mind Nicole Dollanganger. “He went to London, out of town,” Elias sings in her disarming tone. “Never came back, they said that she drowned.” Such a juxtaposition is indicative of the TESHA aesthetic, where violence lurks beneath the supernal textures.

‘See So Good’ finds Elias smoky and sinister, a Cold Specks-esque blend of hymnal folk and gauzy ambience that emerges with a creeping immersiveness and seems to preach a relinquishment of past trauma, paving the way for ‘Soft And Smooth But Not Silent’. The release’s closing track, the song might maintain an uncanny sensibility but it is altogether lighter, as through rising through or above the troubles detailed previous, and turning once more toward the possibility of living and growing.

Growing Pain II is out now and you can listen via Spotify.

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Joined by Matyas Wolter (surbahar), Chris Murphy (trumpet), Franz Bargmann (ebow guitar) and Amir Sinai Weisglass (electric piano and violin), Altman crafts an experimental blend of folk and ambient music, using synths and vocals to complete the detailed, nuanced sound. In a preview post for track ‘ Heroic Bee’ we wrote how “the song has a peculiarly natural rhythm, cyclical and familiar but also idiosyncratic, packed with small quirks and details which accumulate into a breathing ecosystem,” and the description holds true for the record as a whole. With small deviations from the rhythmic sound, each track explores the continuity of life and death, forming a familiar yet constantly evolving picture within which we all exist. So, while decidedly more upbeat than Fairydust, these songs are no less poignant, finding wonder and sadness and beauty within the natural way of things, as though in accepting our position in the grand scheme of nature we might find comfort in our tiny scale. As he sings in ‘Just Like The Rain’:

“Now I’m a man
I do what I can to be happy
Just like a flower
Just like a bee
I don’t waste my time counting how fast i’m falling
Just like the rain
Just like the leaves on a tree

When its time for me to leave this bag of bones
Someone might say “I can’t believe that he’s gone”
Everything keeps on going no need to cry
In to the ocean
In to the sky”

The song was written while Altman was reading a book by the Vietnamese Buddhist monk and activist Thich Naht Hanh, which accounts for the themes of reincarnation and continuity. To further this vibe, Altman created a breathing sound by filtering white noise through two analog filters, both inhalation and exhalation represented. Indeed, thanks to his technical skills as a producer and engineer, Altman employs a number of novel methods and inventive techniques to enhance the sound across the album as a whole. For example, ‘Heroic Bee’ utilises a dazzling array of sound samples and filters, including piano played over a recording from a beehive and then passed through a telephone filter to add age and character. For those interested in the techincal details, Altman writes about his process in depth here and here.

The album can be heard in its entirety below. Due to the immense care taken in regard to themes and sound, we suggest you listen to it in one sitting, with the best headphones or speakers you have.

Artwork by Stefano Campus

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Loverboy Wanderers – Big Boy

Philadelphia’s Loverboy Wanderers put out their self-titled debut earlier this month and welcomed us to their chaotic brand of indie pop music. Opening track ‘Big Boy’ serves as the perfect introduction, starting out as a half-paced rock number, the track gradually unravels into disorder. The vocals and lyrics are the first thing to go, lead Emmett Drueding growing increasingly unhinged as the music follows suit and descends into joyous commotion, resulting in a strangely uplifting finale filled with the kind of conviction unique to those who’ve stopped caring about conventions.

You can get Loverboy Wanderers now from Bandcamp.

Julia Lucille – Eternally

‘Eternally’ is the second single and opening track from Julia Lucille’s upcoming album, Chthonic. As the title suggests, the album is concerned with the underworld, more specifically descending into as a mode of growth and rebirth (a la Persephone), and ‘Eternally’ shows off the interplay between shadow and light that constitutes the record’s aesthetic.

“Call but I don’t answer
I long to be eternally free
Not like my mother
Not like my father
But what feels good to me”

Chthonic is set for release via Keeled Scales on April 7th and you can pre-order it via Bandcamp.

The Wooden Sky – Swimming in Strange Waters

Toronto band The Wooden Sky have long been putting out exemplary indie rock albums, and this spring sees the release of their fifth and perhaps most impressive. Named after a quote from Frank Herbert’s Dune (“Survival is the ability to swim in strange water”), Swimming in Strange Waters finds the band battling their own unfamiliar currents, traversing barroom barrages, acoustic eddies and psychedelic squalls in what is their most experimental and visceral record to date. The result is cacophony in the best sense, loud and fiery, personal and political, seemingly always on the verge of veering out of control. Pretty much the perfect album for our current times.

We’ll leave it there in order to keep our powder dry for the full review, but there are two singles currently available, with the lush, wistful ‘You’re Not Alone’ premiering over on Clash and the rousing title track hinting at the true sound and fury on the record.

Swimming in Strange Waters is out on Nevado Music on the 7th April and you can pre-order it now.

Idan Altman – Expiration Date

Israel-born, Berlin-based producer and songwriter Idan Altman creates organic folk music with an electronic twist, blending traditional, technical guitar work with ambient flourishes. The opening track from a forthcoming concept album, ‘Expiration Date’ sets out Altman’s themes of impermanence and continuity, his vocals finding wonder in the ephemeral, the background instrumentation like a flowing river, constant and repetitive yet never quite the same.

You can grab the album from the fairydust Bandcamp page.

Nnamdi Ogbonnaya – dOn’t turn me Off Ft. JD AKA ThrashKitten & Mal Devisa

Aside from being associated with projects such as Monobody, Itto and Teen Cult, Nnamdi Ogbonnaya also has a burgeoning solo career. His latest album, Drool, comes out this March, and as if to start firing on all cylinders, the first single sees Ogbonnaya joined by JD/Thrash Kitten and WTD-favourite Mal Devisa for ‘dOn’t turn me Off’, a verbose experimental track that combines rapid wordplay with a big chorus to tick all boxes.

DROOL is out March 3, 2017 via Sooper Records and Father/Daughter Records.

Winter Coat – Into The Blue

Winter Coat are a four-piece from Cardiff who make “swirly sonic soundscapes…inspired by movies, Mr Whippy and their over-active imaginations”. Their latest track, ‘Into the Blue’ is a lush dream pop song in the vein of Cocteau Twins or The War on Drugs, all gauzy atmospheric guitars and epic, percussion-heavy crescendos.

Listen to the song on Soundcloud and check out the Winter Coat website for previous releases and future new material.

Lord Youth – Gray Gardens

Lord Youth is the songwriting project of Micah Blaichman from Queens, NY, who is all set to release his debut self-titled EP this spring. If lead single ‘Grey Gardens’ is anything to go by, the release will sound something like the midnight mourning of a half-drunk ghost, too caught up with cheap whiskey and past regrets to move on to the other side.

The Lord Youth EP is out on the 24th of March on 10″ vinyl via BB*Island. Pre-order it now.

Lady Pills – Old Song

Finally, Boston punk band Lady Pills went to Berklee Internet Radio Network to play a version of their (assumedly new?) ‘Old Song’. Those familiar with last year’s album Despite will recognise the attitude and energy on show, the track opening with an insistent clatter before mutating into great swells of noise which rise and recede beneath increasingly unhinged vocals.

Keep an eye on the Lady Pills Facebook page for news on shows and new material.

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