Opening track ‘Hard to Say the Meaning’ grounds this perspective from the off. Fond and reflective and melancholic too, memories told with poetic detail, sharp edges sanded down by time. “I remember I missed you that night after a call from back home,” Marchant sings. “Michelle almost died but chose living / At dusk I walked in the pink / and looped ‘Ambulance Blues’ until the batteries died.”

‘Go Lightly’ follows with a heady mix of yearning and despair, before the synth-based ‘An Accident {from 3 perspectives}’ injects poppier sensibilities. Rooted in seething synthesizer, the song captures the curious interplay of haze and hyperawareness that comes with trauma, the titular accident rendered with genuine urgency. And if that song is positioned clearly in the present, ‘Dirty Snow’ inverts the style, its warm and sombre style facing up to past and future struggles with a sense of defiant hope.

The song was built from a recycled piano line that Marchant first wrote over four years ago, the morning after Trump won the 2016 election. “Almost 4 years later I found myself at the same piano, in the same studio, recording the finished version,” Marchant describes. “With three of the members from the last session, I was feeling a deep sense of gratitude for our reunion and for the rich contributions they were making to my new songs, along with a feeling of hope for all that might change for the better. In my life and in the world around me.”

I hope the ground we’re on
Will quit sinking
And that bright leaves
Lead us from the dark
And fireflies open my heart
I hope the dirty snow
Will melt soon

It’s this ability to play with time that makes Jesse Marchant such an evocative songwriter. The ability to transport the listener back to some momentous personal event while retaining a sense of distance too. The creeping sadness latent in all memories. The fact they’re never coming back. This sensation is loaded in the patient dappled synth of the title track and the nostalgic school dance drum machine of ‘The Steam Rushes On’, not to mention the arpeggiating guitar that makes up so many of the song structures. Where Antelope Running stands apart is how it treats such a feeling. How it finds no solution amid the reflections. No epiphany on how to live a life. Just a competing balance of fondness, longing and regret. An ongoing process of losing and gaining and losing again.

Antelope Running is out now and you can get in from the Jesse Marchant webstore.

The post Jesse Marchant – Antelope Running appeared first on Various Small Flames.

The first roots of the album were sunken in the past. Marchant returned to various memories while working on the songs at a friend’s bungalow in Hollywood, near where he’d lived when recording his debut. But the present worked against the nostalgia, not only in the changes visible around California, but also the situation upon his return to Brooklyn—a summer of protest, fear and disease. A period of isolation in the forest followed, and with it the green shoots of the future, most notably with the news he was to become a father for the first time.

The album’s lead single ‘Go Lightly’ captures something of this mood, a track of fluid motion that ebbs and flows with an easy naturalism. “I am proud of how it moves through it’s different sections seamlessly, like a stream that flows and forms into pools before continuing on to do so again and again,” Marchant explains. “Incidentally, I wrote the song in a rented Catskill home that overlooked a stream, so who knows if that somehow subconsciously played a part.”

Channeling this imagery, Jesse Marchant evokes wider themes, uniting the past and the future through the present’s clouded lens. And while the track’s rich warmth draws the listener in, the lyrics are far more ambiguous. Heartfelt, yearning, but shrouded in a dark dread.

Who are we
On a mountain
Still in repair
Old lover, the sea
I’m adrift
In your night fog

Hidden parts
Go lightly
I feel so bad
In my blood

Antelope Running is out later this summer on AntiFragile Music and you can find it on the Jesse Marchant website.

The post Jesse Marchant – Go Lightly appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Atticus Lish’s Preparation for the Next Life is, on the face of things, a relatively simple story. Girl meets boy under less than perfect circumstances and they struggle to make something of it. A classic love tale. But that’s where simplicity, or even any semblance of understanding, ends. This is a novel about post-9/11 New York, a tale of immense confusion, mistrust and paranoia, about poverty in a city smothered by it, about millions of people trying to make a life out of nothing.

Zou Lei is an illegal immigrant from China, a Muslim of the Uighur tribe, Skinner a PTSD-suffering Iraq vet who scraped through three tours of a war that’s followed him home in more ways than one. Queens is bursting at the seams with people looking for something better, or else ways to distract themselves from the present, a roiling, screaming sea of humanity. Lei and Skinner end up together, bonding through a common sadness and a shared appreciation of discipline and exercise. Their unsentimental yet gentle relationship serves as a recognisable, familiar way-in to a recognisable but wholly unfamiliar place. All of this is written in some of the best prose I’ve read in a long while. Beautiful and terrifying and sad, it captures New York as a gritty, humming place that’s crumbling in time with America’s perception of greatness.

Just like the characters, the reader is in alien territory. The overwhelming majority of us cannot fully understand the positions in which these protagonists find themselves. The fringes of society swamped by an overwhelming Lack Of. A lack of money and respect, of kinship and trust, as well as lack of material stuff (Zou Lei has a bed to sleep in but is essentially homeless, Skinner renting a basement with decidedly finite savings). But both are still subject to the American bombardment of dreams and nightmares that constitute the consumerist culture. They see shop-fronts and billboards, they see mistrust in the media and the faces of passers-by. The paradox of feeling isolated and lonely in a crowd of people seems designed specifically to torture them.

But the confusion is deeper than that, one that might impinge on Lei and Skinner more than most but hangs over us all. Not only are there no answers here, there are barely any questions. If 9/11 provided the West with a new narrative, a renewed sense of moral importance and superiority , then events like those at Abu Ghraib snatched away the veil. Technology has made it impossible to ignore that the ‘Bad Guys’ are mostly innocent, scared people like us, that our dirty secrets in exotic wars will not be buried. Everyone lives in this grey area but Skinner personifies it, pining for the purpose and friendship of war while being eaten alive by the truth of it.

“He took a drink from a flask of Bacardi Scorched Cherry and watched an execution on his laptop”

Here’s a collection of songs which we feel are somehow relevant to the themes and feel of the novel.

Tracklisting:

1. I’m New Here – Gil Scott Heron
2. Wish it Was True – White Buffalo
3. Drinking at the Dam – Smog
4. There I was in the pouring rain again, but this time I was at the drive-thru at Mac Donalds’ – Talons’
5. Beacon Hill – Damien Jurado
6. Heartbreaker – Noah Gundersen
7. Cold Apartment Floors – Vagabon
8. Travel Map – Hip Hatchet
9. Death By Dust – Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson
10. Linens – Water Liars
11. The Modern Leper – Frightened Rabbit
12. No Future (Pt. I) – Titus Andronicus
13. Shitty City – Moonface
14. The Whip – Jesse Marchant
15. Third of Life – A Weather
16. Bloodkin Push (Forget the Ones) – Will Johnson
17. Wall Around Your Heart – Huck Notari
18. The Trapeze Swinger (Iron & Wine Cover) – Gregory Alan Isakov
19. I Could Only Stand By – The Weather Station
20. Fake Empire – The National

Preparation for the Next Life by Atticus Lish is out now on Tyrant Books (US) and Oneworld (UK + Aus). Quiet, Constant Friends is available digitally and on cassette via the Wake The Deaf Bandcamp page.

The post Lit Links: Atticus Lish – Preparation for the Next Life appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Incredibly, Ross plays each of the 20+ instruments himself and also designed and created the beautiful artwork. Each tile on the cover holds a paper-cut image of one of sixteen Canadian animals, and along with the songs, Ross intends for them to “represent the ten provinces, three territories and three oceans that reside within these fragile Canadian habitats.” Ross says that his aim was to marry “art, music and design for the greater social good.”

If you visit the Peirson Soundcloud page, you can see each tile in more detail. What’s really cool about this is that each tile has some information on the species of animal it depicts, including its common name, its binomial name and its conservation status in Canada. All of the information was obtained from COSEWIC (Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada) so it’s all legit and scientifically accurate. So why not listen to the album and learn a little about each animal as you go? Did you know that the burrowing owl, Atlantic salmon and beluga whale are all classified as endangered? Or that species such as the harlequin duck and polar bear are now classed as requiring special concern?

You can even play the fun game of trying to match the tile to the song. For example, there is a repeated line in the track ‘The Year That Winter Never Came’ which goes, “Like the sun shining through the rain, a message from the lonesome whooping crane“, and if you look up the track on the , the art for the track features (you guessed it) a whooping crane.

Musically, Wild Ones sounds pretty much as you’d expect one man’s love letter to the natural world to sound. You could define it using the umbrella phrase “folk”, but with the 20+ instruments on show that doesn’t really do it justice. Fans of JBM (or Jesse Marchant as we’re calling him now) will like it, as will fans of more straightforward singer-songwriters (online biographies mention Nick Drake and Ray LaMontagne a lot). Let’s just say that it is as diverse and beautiful as the landscapes and habitats which inspired it.

Ross puts it best himself when he says, “Wild Ones is a dedication album not only for endangered species and their natural habitats at risk but also for the independent thinkers who have fought to preserve their wild sub-culture, rituals, values and essential spirit that was born out of our natural world. This is for the wild ones.”

You can buy the album right now via the Peirson Bandcamp page.

The post Peirson – Wild Ones appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Tracklist:

1. Kids Will Be Kids – Praything
2. Do You Have Romantic Courage – Hallelujah The Hills
3. The Shore And The Coastline – Now Wakes The Sea
4. The Corrections – Alphabetical Order Orchestra
5. Give Me Time – Roo & The Howl
6. To Remember – City States
7. Vow – Sales
8. In The Rain – Cut Ribbons
9. Feel What – Jacques Greene
10. Down On My Luck – Vic Mensa
11. Greater Than – Sharpless
12. Tennis Court (Flume Remix) – Lorde
13. Warehouses – Kane Ikin
14. Wild Geese – Small Sur
15. Youth – Best Wishes
16. Early Morning – Eagle Lake Owls
17. Dust To Settle – Rough River
18. Slow Down – Scott Orr
19. Gray Lodge Wisdom – Will Stratton
20. Brother, Do You Know The Road? – Hiss Golden Messenger
21. Something Like That – Wolf Collage
22. Muscle and Bone – John Joseph Brill
23. All Your Promises – Jesse Marchant
24. Echo Tropism – Inventions
25. Veiled Grey – Christian Löffler
26. All I Want – Dawn Golden

If you missed them, we have such mixes for January, February, March and April too.

May Mix from Wake The Deaf on 8tracks Radio.

The post May 2014 Roundup – A Mixtape appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Jesse Marchant (the artist formerly known as JBM) is readying a new album. This track, ‘All Your Promise’, is the first release and is available for free over at Marchant’s website. Fans will be pleased to know that Marchant is nothing if not consistent.

The post Jesse Marchant releases video for All Your Promise appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Stray Ashes is available from Western Vinyl and we can’t recommend it enough.

The post JBM – Stray Ashes @ Isokon appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Stray Ashes follows similar threads and is the sound of a man very much in his element. Again the vocals are stark, echoing to the listener as if across an empty room. I heard ‘Only Now’ a few weeks back and at first I thought there was some departure from the norm with the inclusion of beats but it takes seconds to be reassured. Desperate piano kicks in and builds up to a climatic line which is belted out: ’Mother, is this how we lie? Alone in our frozen beds//I am only now, and a long way out//Don’t you feel it now more than ever?’ This song perfectly sums up one of my favourite things about this album – the juxtaposition of barren, ghost-filled landscapes with the charged deliverance of certain lyrics give a feel of intense introspection, of sitting alone in silence, head awash with anger and sadness and hope.

Obviously all of this is subjective and open to any interpretation (Sorry Jesse if I have it all wrong!) so don’t take my word for it. Stray Ashes can be streamed in full over at The AV Club so head on over and see if you agree. The album will be released next week on Western Vinyl.

The post JBM – Stray Ashes appeared first on Various Small Flames.