“In my body / On my skin / In the cool October wind / You’re there.” So sings country girl on ‘miracle’, a brand new single out now via FADER Label. Following on from debut EP meet me at the fountain, a richly nostalgic release we described as “reflecting on the joys of a rose-tinted past, looking to preserve that sense of possibility and fun in the face of life’s inevitable progression,” the new track again offers an earnest if dusky sound which presents the on-set of autumn as something to be celebrated. As though, having been battered by a summer heat for months, the October winds promise to arrive as something of a balm, country girl’s trademark fondness transforming what might normally be considered a melancholic time into something to be savoured.

‘miracle’ is out now via FADER Label and available from the usual places.

Greg Freeman – Salesman

The word-of-mouth success of 2022 debut I Looked Out earned Burlington, Vermont-based artist Greg Freeman something of a cult following. His twangy style of indie rock, evocative songwriting and strong sense of place that reflects his home of the northeastern US won lots of fans, and expectations for his sophomore album Burnover, released last week via Canvasback Music and Transgressive Records have been sky high. A steady stream of solid singles, like the “assured and surprising verbose” ‘Curtain’ allayed any concerns of a sophomore slump, and final single ‘Salesman’ is further proof that Freeman is firing on all cylinders. What he describes as “technically a serious song about something sad,” it’s actually one of the record’s livelier tracks, recorded almost entirely live with Freeman’s touring band to capture a sense of immediate energy.

Home Videos – the devil’s credit score

Described as “a tape obsessed band of slackers,” Rochester’s Home Videos has evolved across its lifetime. Debut EP (the fittingly titled EP) featured nothing but two acoustic guitars, a four track recorder and a whole lot of tape hiss, though the project has gradually blossomed into a full band. New album Home Taping is Killing Music, recently released via Raincoated Records, shows just what this change means, Home Videos retaining the intimacy that marked their early material but now capable of far greater depth. A reimagining of a track from the prior EP, single ‘the devil’s credit score’ offers the perfect comparison. None of the texture or tenderness is lost, but where the original never puntured its fuzzy wrappings, this version of the song carries a tangible weight, the emo underpinnings of the Home Videos sound fully apparent as the song rises towards its big, cathartic climax.

Jacob Faurholt – Painfully Alone

The first single from his forthcoming self-titled new album, ‘Painfully Alone’ finds Danish songwriter Jacob Faurholt stripping things back to the bare bones. Ever prolific, Faurholt has been making music for decades, releasing twelve records under his own name alongside work with experimental project Crystal Shipsss and Danish language outlet Statisk Støj. But the new album sees him breaking new ground. Recorded in “the quiet corners of his home studio,” it finds him at his most restrained and vulnerable, resulting in what he describes as “an intimate portrait of existential dread, inner turmoil, and fragile love.” ‘Painfully Alone’ proves the perfect introduction, a stark and intimate affair that builds from plucked guitar and Faurholt’s solitary vocals into something almost romantic, as his wife adds her voice too and they sing together “Alone, with you.”

Jacob Faurholt will be released later this year. Keep an eye on his Bandcamp page for updates.

Lydia Luce – Quiet

Born in Fort Lauderdale and now based in Nashville via Boston and LA, Lydia Luce has been on something of a journey in life, though her forthcoming full-length Mammoth centres on a journey of a different kind. One, that is, out of suffering, charting the path of recovery from chronic pain and the hard-won bonds which came with it. Lead single ‘Quiet’ embodies the tenderness with which Luce takes on this challenge. A song all about the slow process of learning to not only tolerate silence but embrace its power within a noisy world. Be that finding healing in the stillness of nature or coming to appreciate the beauty of sitting in quiet with the people you love. Watch a performance of the track below, with Luce supported by Lockeland Strings to bring the track’s subtle power to life.

Mammoth will be released on the 30th October and you can pre-order it now.

Mappe Of – Terraforming Moons

We are inching closer to the release of Afterglades, the new record from Mappe Of (the project of Toronto singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Tom Meikle). Following the weighty ‘A Scourge Laid Upon The Earth’, which we wrote about back in June, Meikle has unveiled another single ahead of the record’s September release date. Titled ‘Terraforming Moons’, it’s a song that takes very personal difficulties and sends them spinning into the cosmos, a gentle, folk-inflected indie pop song with an almost sci-fi twist. “A few years ago my partner got really sick,” Meikle explains. “I felt helpless, despite doing everything I could to make things better. I thought there was something romantic and terrifying about the idea of going as far as terraforming a planet to create the right conditions for a person you love to live.”

Ny Oh – Aperture

It is fair to say UK-born, NZ-raised and LA-based songwriter Ny Oh has travelled a lot across her life and career. Be it fronting jazz outfit Neon Gru, collaborating with the likes of Margo Price and Madison Cunningham or performing as part of Harry Styles’s band across stadium tours. But her new single ‘Aperture’ is all about coming home. Written in Aotearoa and developed with producer Jonathan Wilson (Father John Misty, Angel Olsen, Conor Oberst), the song unfurls with the distinctive mix of dreaminess and clarity that any place dear to the heart comes to possess. “I deserved a glove touch / Softness played it school yard rough,” Oh sings in one verse, balancing the allure of the familiar in all of its soft comfort and with a tactile level of detail. “Light flooded in / Gentle and warm / Reveal where I came from.” Watch the video by Victor Grossling and Anna Anderson below:

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

Patrick Shiroishi – Mountains that take wing

“An attempt to wrestle with [racism] as both a historical fact and contemporary shame, and furthermore one which confronts the impossibility of living in this world without participating in its ongoing function. Acknowledging that if the desire to eradicate another is something allowed into the world, then no aspect of a culture can be said to exist above or beyond it.” So we wrote of Forgetting is Violent, the new album from Patrick Shiroishi forthcoming next month via American Dreams Records. Lead single ‘There is no moment in my life in which this is not happening’ offered what we described as “a window into the poignant and evocative sound which results,” and new single ‘Mountains that take wing’ is every bit as striking as its predecessor, as Gemma Thompson (Savages) and Aaron Turner (SUMAC, ISIS) join Shiroishi to conjure a sound which ebbs and flows between fierce intensity and elegiac quiet.

Forgetting is Violent is out on the 19th September via American Dreams Records and you can pre-order it now from the Patrick Shiroishi Bandcamp page.

Pickle Darling – Congratulations Champion

We have written about Pickle Darling a couple of times in recent months, songs which heralded a new era for Aotearoa/New Zealand-based producer and multi-instrumentalist Lukas Mayo. First the Robyn, Cher and Madonna-inspired pop gem ‘Massive Everything’, what we called “a love song with all the complications left in,” then the sprawling ‘Human Bean Instruction Manual‘. “A track perhaps not direct in terms of style,” we wrote, “but every bit as forthright as its predecessor when it comes to the message it carries,” urging us to stand together against the multitude of threats which haunt our present moment. With the album’s release via Father/Daughter Records a matter of weeks away, Pickle Darling is back with ‘Congratulations Champion’, a sub-ninety-second single which might sit at the opposite end of the spectrum in terms of runtime yet nevertheless packs an equal emotional punch. A collage of lines collected from Mayo’s phone, the song pieces together incomplete, ostensibly mismatched thoughts into a satisfying whole. “An Oscar for Jane Campion / I found a note written in crumbs inside a biscuit tin,” as one couplet goes. Or the final verse, which sums up the strange, playful and completely sincere style of Bots as a whole:

You know i’m gonna love you still
Like black mould loves the window sill
Like oceans love an oil spill
Like ducks towards an air rifle

Shabason, Krgovich, Tenniscoats – Departed Bird

“A snapshot of a group of musicians pitched together for a short window of time, subject to the small moments of chance and happenstance and all the more special for it.” That’s how we described Wao, the forthcoming album by Shabason, Krgovich, Tenniscoats back in July, writing of how the outfit—Joseph Shabason, Nicholas Krgovich and Saya and Takashi Ueno of Tenniscoats—embrace ephemerality and imperfection. With the album set for release at the end of the week via Western Vinyl, the quartet have shared new single ‘Departed Bird’. The opening track of the record which highlights the mix of melancholy and magic which marks a release able to conjure wonder at the simplest of things.

Watch the visualizer below, shot at at Guggenheim House in Kobe, Japan:

Wao will be released on the 29th August via Western Vinyl and you can pre-order it now.

Silver Synthetic – Happy Ever After

Back in March, Silver Synthetic released their second full-length Rosalie on Curation Records, an album which saw the New Orleans outfit push the self-described ‘Home Fi’ style of their debut (a self-titled LP released with Third Man Records in 2021) towards the full richness and confidence of classic indie rock. The label had wanted the specific song ‘Happy Ever After’ to be the lead single, though the band themselves feared the track was something of an outlier and ended up not featuring it on the record at all. Whether or not that was an error, you can now decide for yourself, because fast forward several months Silver Synthetic have released the track as part of a double single, Happy Ever After / Say The Wrong Word. Charged with the same sunny swagger that marked Rosalie, ‘Happy Ever After’ couldn’t have been timed better, the peppy rhythms, smooth delivery and slight pysch wooze combining into the ideal soundtrack to which to milk these last weeks of summer.

SQORE – INTERNAL///VS.EXTERNAL[forces]

Recording under the moniker SQORE, New York-based producer, multi-instrumentalist and sound artist Em Sgouros blends field recordings with synthesized sounds to create small worlds of their own. Last week saw the release of reGENERATION, the sophomore SQORE EP, via Ambient Pasta, a collection of three tracks they say “explore the struggle of generating a new reality within yourself in the midst of fear and anger and ask as humans, ‘what are we capable of?'” Centrepiece ‘INTERNAL///VS.EXTERNAL[forces]’ is a good place to start, a song which sees field samples and drones play across waves of digital strings and flourishing arpeggios, resulting in something that feels part organic and part virtual. The track confronts fear and the strangling grip it can hold on both a personal and societal level, offering a sense of meditative understanding as a path towards joy and the regeneration of the record’s title.

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With the album’s release fast approaching, Shabason, Krgovich, Tenniscoats have now shared the album closer as a new single; their own take on My Bloody Valentine’s ‘Lose My Breath’. “Before the first show of our tour together Saya asked if I knew this My Bloody Valentine song and if I would join them and sing it as part of their set,” Krgovich explains. “Of course I was up for it but MBV is a bit of a blindspot for me. She was like “it’s called ‘Lose My Breath’,” and then as soon as the wordless oooh’s happened I was like “oh! That one!!!” I had a cassette copy of Isn’t Anything that I got at a thrift store while in high school and it was in my old Volvo as a teenager. I don’t remember listening to that tape all that much but I remember loving that melody, and I still do.”

The recorded version of the track goes some way to preserving this moment in amber. A snapshot of a group of musicians pitched together for a short window of time, subject to the small moments of chance and happenstance and all the more special for it. This atmosphere is indicative of the spirit of an album made in such a manner. The ephemerality of the moment is essentially the entire point. No overthinking, no ironing out creases or polishing flaws, just leaning into the simple magic of a couple of days and preserving it for the sake of prosperity.

Watch the visualizer created using footage shot at at Guggenheim House in Kobe, Japan below:

Wao will be released on the 29th August via Western Vinyl and you can pre-order it now.

The post Shabason, Krgovich, Tenniscoats – Lose My Breath (My Bloody Valentine cover) appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Brooklyn’s Alexei Shishkin might describe himself as a “DIY nobody of the internet void,” but that hasn’t stopped his prolific run of releases, with three in 2024 alone. That trio, dagger, Open Door Policy and Greenwich Mean EP showed the wildly varied style of Shiskin’s work, veering from rock to bedroom pop to jazz and back. Fast forward almost a year, a relative age in Shishkin-time, and he’s back with a brand new full-length, Good Times. To be released this September on Rue Defense, the album takes the level of invention to a new level, as demonstrated by lead single ‘Disco Elysium’. It’s inspired by the eponymous video game, Shishkin even incorporating sounds from the game into the track itself. “You’re a degenerate, amnesiac detective coming off a crazy bender, and you’re trying to solve a murder that happened in a small post-revolution town,” Shiskin explains of his inspiration. “The game covers everything from psychology to politics to lost love to life, death, and introspection. It’s honestly one of the most well-written, exciting things I’ve ever experienced.”

Josie – My Boy and I

Josie are a group from Copenhagen who make scrappy, jangly and impossibly catchy indie pop songs. Their debut album, A Life On Sweets Alone, comes out in September via perennialdeath and K Records, and the latter in particular should give you an idea of what to expect. Think sugary hooks, raw punky energy and lyrics and vocals that continue the long lineage of K Records-associated twee pop. Lead single ‘My Boy and I’ is our first taste of what to expect, barrelling headlong into two and a half minutes of indie pop as endearing as it is infectious.

Watch the video, directed and shot by Little Richard Perusi, below:

A Life On Sweets Alone will be released on 26^th September and is available to pre-order from the Josie Bandcamp page.

Lathe of Heaven – Aurora

Aurora, the second album from Brooklyn’s Lathe of Heaven coming later this summer on Sacred Bones, promises to function like a collection of sci-fi short stories. It takes inspiration from the work of authors like Ursula K. le Guin, Octavia Butler, Greg Egan, and Peter Watts to explore worldly themes in bold, imaginative ways. Loosely inspired by Arthur C. Clarke’s short story ‘If I Forget Thee, O Earth…’, the title track introduces one such tale, combining New Wave colour and post-punk cool into something not only transportive but almost devotional. “In the story a man and his son take a trip from their colony on the moon to a lookout point where Earth (long abandoned due to nuclear war) can be seen rising across the vast gulf of space,” the band explain. “Playing with this concept, I took a more personal and romantic approach, exploring similar themes of loss, love, and devotion at the end of the world.”

Watch the video directed by Devan Davies below:

Aurora will be released on the 29th August via Sacred Bones Records and you can pre-order it now.

Michael Nau – Smokeflowers

His first new music since 2023 album Accompany, Michael Nau has returned with a double single, Smokeflowers / Sing To via Karma Chief Records. Something of a departure from the previous record’s full-band arrangements, both songs were recorded at home alone, written and recorded without a new record in mind. “I was testing out a new tape machine that I had, and then I sold it,” Nau explains. “They’re single songs that just kind of happened without other songs around.” The result is something unhurried and almost devotional and its soft and shimmering atmosphere. ‘Smokeflowers’ in particular is oddly powerful in it’s understated majesty, Nau’s opaquely poetic lyrics unfurling in a syrupy, waltzy melody.

pôt-pot – WRSW

In September, Irish/Portuguese quintet pôt-pot will release a new record, Warsaw 480km, on Felte Records. The band, led by vocalist/guitarist Mark Waldron-Hyden, deal in a raw and hypnotic blend of psych, krautrock and post punk, a sound rich and multi-layered, but somehow delivered with taut economy. Many of the songs were penned during a period of grief and personal upheaval, and lead single ‘WRSW’ is the prime example. Waldron-Hyden explains the song is based on his experience of “being driven in a very nice car to collect and deliver my father’s ashes,” and captures feelings both of grim forward motion and numb unreality perfectly. This journey is also where the record gets its title. “At one point the driver told me about a journey he’d taken from Ireland to Poland,” Waldron-Hyden continues, “where after days of driving, in the dead of night, a single road sign appeared, reading WARSAW 480 KM. I identified with that image of blackness punctuated suddenly by some faraway but tangible relief.”

Shabason, Krgovich, Tenniscoats – Our Detour

When touring Japan together in 2024, Joseph Shabason and Nicholas Krgovich met Saya and Takashi Ueno of Tenniscoats, who played as a backing band. The four had little time to rehearse but quickly discovered they did not need it, the subsequent shows fluid, unpredictable and spontaneous, successful in the way only genuine artistic connection could allow. So successful, in fact, the quartet took the opportunity to further the collaboration, spending two days at the Guggenheim House in Kobe with nothing prepared and only their mutual curiosity for direction. The result, released as Shabason, Krgovich, Tenniscoats with Western Vinyl, is full-length album Wao, and first single ‘Our Detour’ is the first glimpse at this lightning-in-a-bottle creative process. A lesson in instinct and invention which reaches for inspiration from the everyday and returns it back to us as something bright and magic.

Wao will be released on the 29th August via Western Vinyl and you can pre-order it now.

Simple Shapes – Mallard

Portland indie rockers Simple Shapes have just announced their debut LP Sundial, which is slated for release later this summer. Their first new music since 2022’s Soundtrack EP, the record promises to build on the foundations of previous releases (think late 90s alt rock meets contemporary indie pop) and expand the Simple Shapes sound in new directions. Lead single ‘Mallard’ is a great start, introducing the band’s sonic range and loud-quiet dynamics. It opens with a spry and sunny energy before erupting into yelled vocals and blasts of noisy emotion, effortlessly moving between the two until a final cathartic denouement.

Studio Electrophonique – David and Jayne

The solo project of singer-songwriter James Leesley, Studio Electrophonique has made a splash in its local Sheffield and beyond, releasing two EPs which use a warm, nostalgic brand of indie pop to mine the mundane everyday of its inherent emotional resonance. With his self-titled debut full-length coming this September via Paris-based label Valley of Eyes Records, Leesley has unveiled bittersweet new single ‘David and Jayne’. The first song he wrote for the album and the one which paved the way for the rest. “It felt like the opening scene to a film; the words came to me more as dialogue, or script, than lyrics,” Leesley explains, “and that opened up a new and very appealing writing perspective—I was almost tempted to pretend to be Alain Resnais directing an imaginary film at the British seaside.” Watch the video directed by Leesley himself below:

Studio Electrophonique will be released on the 26th September via Valley of Eyes Records.

Tan Cologne – In Resin

“Represents both a continuation of [their previous] style and a broadening of its horizons,” was how we described Tan Cologne‘s new album Unknown Beyond with back in June. “Almost literally, in fact, with [Lauren] Green and [Marissa] Macias turning their attention skyward with the same curiosity, openness and longing which has always underpinned their work.” Lead single ‘Cool Star’ showed how central grief is to the record, possessing what we called “a vibe again ambivalent in its meaning, sounding at once like an otherworldly escape from our terrestrial suffering and some mournful elegy delivered in its aftermath,” and new single ‘In Resin’ is no less nuanced and dramatic. What the band describe as an encapsulation of the past few years, which uses its gauzy layers to present the various lives we live simultaneously, a series of selves superimposed.

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Having won acclaim as part of noise pop outfit The Beatings, Cameron Keiber went on to start the project Eldridge Rodriguez, releasing albums like Slightest of Treason and Atrophy which explored a plethora of contemporary issues with equal parts passion and disillusionment. Now recording under his own name, Keiber is returning next spring with new full-length Nurser, a record which continues this examination of the current state of things with a newly immediate, personal edge. The addition of loops and beats offers a new dimension too, though as single and opener ‘Habsburg Jaw’ shows, it is Keiber’s distinctive vocals and lyricism which represents the sound’s core. A track about depression and the insidious impact of those who belittle its dimensions, Keiber’s delivery slightly weary and a little bit wry as it challenges those who believe all it takes is a bit of bootstrap pulling and positive thinking. But above all else it’s empathetic in its picture of someone straining within such a hostile world.

Nurser will be released on the 14th March via Midriff Records.

Camille Schmidt – Stanley

“Each of the six songs on the album deal with the different masks we might hide behind, [but] the very nature of its creation see the true [artist] reaching out from behind the disguise.” That’s how we described Camille Schmidt‘s Good Person back in June, a release which explored ideas of authenticity and the lack thereof with a sense of cathartic release. With the Brooklyn artist’s debut full-length Nude #9 coming early next year, Schmidt has returned with equally affirming new single, ‘Stanley’. A song which displays the richer sound of a growing supporting band without sacrificing any of Good Person‘s raw immediacy, pairing a gathering momentum with a sense of aimlessness to bring to life a playful, idiosyncratic vibe. Watch the video directed by Henry Nelson and produced by Brooke Goldman below:

Nude #9 is out on the 10th January and you can find more on the Camille Schmidt website.

Chris Chism – Drive My Car

“Focusing on the working class experience and following a lineage through Dylan and van Zandt, Richmond, Indiana’s Chris Chism delves into the personal to emerge with a more universal picture of life’s joys and struggles.” So we wrote back in 2023 when covering the North Carolina-based songwriter’s EP Things Has Changed. Now Chism is back with ‘Drive My Car’, a song which taps into melancholic peace of a night alone on the road. “I like to drive my car at night / get lost in the dark / everything gets left behind,” Chism sings in the opening lines, finding some sense of direction within the dark isolation. “The road goes on and on / the headlights show my way.”

‘Drive My Car’ is out now and available from the usual places.

Cici Arthur – All So Incredible

Cici Arthur is a new collaboration between Toronto artists Joseph Shabason, Chris A. Cummings and Thom Gill. Cummings previously recorded under the name Mantler, releasing jazz, lounge and R&B-inflected pop via Tomlab, and Cici Arthur sees Shabason and Gill bend their sound towards such styles to give Cummings’ writing and vocals the grand, vivid backdrop they deserve. A stellar cast of guests like Owen Pallet, Nicholas Krgovich, Phil Melanson and Dorothea Paas lend their talents too, and the result is a lesson in both cinematic scale and artistic control. Lead single ‘All So Incredible’ shows off the aesthetic in all its technicolour glory:

Watch the video edited and directed by Nicholas Krgovich below:

Way Through is out on the 21st February via Western Vinyl and you can pre-order it now.

CULTBABY – mr. pouch

Moniker of LA-based multidisciplinary artist Richard Benjamin Greer, CULTBABY is less a name and more the key to the project’s themes and style. Born into a small Christian Metaphysical organization in Berkeley, CA, Greer’s origin story is far from typical, and though he left the group with his mother at a young age, his links to the group—be they literal or psychological—persisted for far longer. Forthcoming via Anxiety Blanket Records, new CULTBABY release cut the arm, preserve the body is a compilation of recordings which explores this experience, pairing a detailed picture of collapsed relationships while preserving fondness for those involved. The album is both stylistically and narratively ambitious, but single ‘mr. pouch’ gives an idea of what to expect. Watch the video directed by The Fanza below:

cut the arm, preserve the body is out on the 21st February via Anxiety Blanket Records.

Goon – Death Spells

Having just signed with Born Losers Records for an upcoming full-length, LA’s Goon have shared standalone new single ‘Death Spells’ as something of a reintroduction. The track emerged from a difficult period in the life of lead Kenny Becker, and its plaintive opening plays as something of a dirge. “Death spells are coming down / don’t go outside,” as the opening lines go. “Helpless for higher ground / helpless to hide.” But slowly it blossoms with the addition of xylophone and vocal harmonies as well as various chirps and chimes, and by the close begins to sound less like some lament as a talisman offered in protection against such loss. The entire Goon band joined for the recording, including founding guitarist Drew Eccleston on backing vocals, and the result takes on a communal power. “I wanted everyone to play on this one,” Becker explains. “It feels really special, and comforting. The way your friends gather around you in tough times, when you’re hurting, to make music together.”

‘Death Spells’ is out now via Born Losers Records and available from Bandcamp.

Luah – Small Time

Writing back in 2023, we wrote about the work of Luah—the Florida-born, Baltimore-raised and Kingston, New York-based songwriter Brendan Paul Sullivan—through single ‘To Relate’. “A slow unfurling of a song,” as we put it, “as though in committing to the flow, Sullivan not only accepts the changeable currents but finds beauty in every small eddy and pull.” Now preparing to release a new album, Luah is back with ‘Small Time’, another downbeat, assured track full of swampy twang and lo-fi textures. With the languid, slightly woozy flow comes a certain sense of reflection, as though the echoed backing vocals chasing Sullivan’s lyrics are emerging from some other time or plane.

‘Small Time’ is out now via streaming services.

Mol Sullivan – On the Balcony

Cincinnati songwriter Mol Sullivan kicked off 2024 with GOOSE, an album “set deep in those early days of a new beginning,” as we put it, “where everything feels possible yet tenuous and a little too vivid to bear,” and has released a series of videos in support of the record through the months (we recommend the title track and ‘Cautiously‘ in particular), though is closing out the year by reaching back into the past to polish an old gem. First recorded in 2013 in her aunt and uncle’s basement, ‘On the Balcony’ offers a glimpse of a more lo-fi version of the Mol Sullivan sound, albeit here remastered for the re-release. But although it might differ stylistically to the polished sound of GOOSE, the track still evidently possesses the same DNA, its hushed intimacy full of the compassion and confessional honesty that has come to mark Sullivan’s work.

‘On the Balcony’ is out now and available from the usual places.

Oldest Sea – All Shall Love Me And Despair

Originating as the solo project of Sam Marandola but now expanded to become a full band, Oldest Sea is a vessel built to navigate the heaviest seas of experimental folk, pushing into dark, tempestuous waters in order to most fully explore soundscapes at once elemental and otherworldly. Latest release Judith Slaying Holofernes serves as the ideal introduction for the uninitiated, a two-song collaboration with masters of the genre Have a Nice Life. Opening track ‘All Shall Love Me And Despair’ embodies the release’s weight, rising from hushed beginnings with a stark insistence towards its transcendently dark climax, possessing all the Old Testament drama of the double single’s apocryphal title.

othermusic – pretty please

A new project between Portland, OR’s Ezekiel J. Rudick (Young Elk, goodgrief etc.), Kathrin Skiff and Tony Reyes, othermusic combines richly fuzzed synths with dramatic drums and guitars to create a shoegaze sound able to straddle both delicate emotion and crushing heft. Single ‘pretty please’ serves as the perfect introduction, its tender, almost music box opening soon ceding way to a thunderous march, the track thereafter cycling with a quiet-loud dynamic able to evoke both closeness and distance. “Can you / please find / a way / to be kinder / to me / so I / can fall / asleep,” the lyrics ask, situating the audience in the heart of a troubled relationship. “Come on / pretty please?”

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Opener ‘Seabirds’ is an almost ten minute slide into Wildflower’s Green World, serving as both a journey into its calm and verdant lands and mission statement as to what the record is all about. An extended jam with space to breathe, its snaking sax and winding pedal steel evoke panoramic views and contemplations of a better life. “Seabirds rising through the fog,” O’Barr sings when his voice arrives a third of the way in, “Dreaming of a place I’d like to live.” This same spirit is present across the album, many of the songs wrapped in the quiet promise of early morning or the dusky calm of evening, the quiet wonder of the present becoming its own kind of reverie.

We took the opportunity to chat with O’Barr about the album, his collaborators, and the influence of British folk rock and Brian Eno.

Thanks for speaking to us! How is life now that Green World is released?

Life has been good, rich and busy! We did a two week tour around the Northeast U.S. and into Canada to celebrate the record release and it was really lovely. Played great shows, stayed with old friends, made new ones… The album seems to be really moving people and having it live its own life in the world is bringing me a lot of joy. Releasing music always feels like setting a bird free, exciting but also kind of unburdening. Now I am kind of free of it and can start fully immersing myself in the next batch of songs.

Your music has always struck me as having a very evocative sense of place. Like, if you were a painter, you would paint landscapes. Are there specific locations that inspired this record? And if so, does each song have a particular one? Or is it more something that creeps across the album as a whole?

With this record, I wanted it to be fully present in my home on the Maine coast. I even thought about calling it Atlantic Ocean or something like that at first, with each song title as a place name on a reimagined map of the coast as an album cover. There are definitely songs rooted in very precise places, but it also kind of crept into a more general mood/concept for the record. We live in Portland, which is in the southern part of the state, but also spend a lot of time down east in this really small fishing village along the Canadian border called Lubec. A bunch of songs are about that area and the spiritual connection my wife and I feel with that landscape. It is kind of harsh up there, stunted and windblown with huge tides, but it is so resonant for us. Kind of a thin place between worlds. I really wanted to capture that feeling in the songs.

I also wanted to make sure I captured that sense of place for our actual home in Portland, and title track ‘Green World’ is about the Casco Bay where the city sits. I work as a carpenter by day and spent a couple years fixing old houses on some of the islands that are just offshore. One spring in particular I was noticing a ton of blue herons around the bay as we would ferry out to work. I mentioned it to a friend who was pruning trees on the island and he told me that the indigenous name for the bay was ‘Aucocisco’ which means a place of herons. This really moved me. This is idea that there are things that are innate to our landscapes that we just have to slow down to notice. Also this idea of being able to see a city as a natural place, a part of the natural world rather than seeing it as somehow separate.

Perhaps related to that last question. I’m interested in the title—Green World. What does that phrase mean to you? And what is its significance across the record?

In the most specific sense, the title comes from a line in the last song on the record, ‘Open Ocean’. It was one of the first things I wrote for the album and I think it’s kind of the emotional crux of it: “but you can’t escape the sky or plastic on the beach. Those rolling hills and sweet roads, this green world with its gold shores…” There’s really no escaping the damage we’ve already done to our environment, felt through the ever changing weather and the trash that washes up in even the most remote places, but I find myself just completely in love with this world, and wanted to make an album that celebrated that without ignoring the existential crises we face. Green World felt like the right name for this place we love.

Unavoidably, it’s also kind of a reference to the Eno album. I wanted to make a folk rock album that had a high ratio of long instrumental passages and contained some of the ideas of ambient music (best reflected in ‘Seabirds’). I had the title and was thinking of “Another Green World”, and the idea that a better place is elsewhere. The full title for me is really “This Green World”, encapsulating the idea that a better place is contained in the one we have, and that realizing it is a matter of seeing it. Maybe that’s what Eno meant as well…

Andrew Barton’s excellent liner notes talk about how your songs tap into the “quiet that settles inside you when you really notice the world,” which I thought was a lovely description. Is this sense of peaceful presence something you set out to capture in your music? Is there a spiritual side to your evocation of the natural world?

Definitely! One of my favorite pastimes is walking my dogs, either with my wife or alone with my thoughts. Every once in a while there are these perfect moments where everything kind of freezes and I feel like I am gone, or sort of absorbed into the world. I always try to hold that feeling, then let it go, not really cataloging it, but just fully feeling it. A similar thing happens to me when I play guitar (my other favorite way to spend time)… I disappear into the search for new melodies and kind of lose myself in those moments. I see songwriting as a way to try to reaccess those portals, to find those feelings and communicate them. My hope is that this translates into the finished songs and that they kind of become portals for others. This walking, guitar playing, searching is sort of the essence of my pedestrian spirituality, and it all about being a part of the natural world.

Musically speaking, this is still very much a Wildflower record, but there are subtle changes too. Is it fair to say you have leant more heavily into the 70s? And perhaps taken inspiration from the other side of the Atlantic too?

Yeah, I really wanted to make a record that was a little closer to the music I actually listen to all the time. I am huge fan of traditional Celtic music and British folk rock from the 70s: Bert Jansch, Andy Irvine, Sandy Denny, all that stuff. Those are the records that I am always spinning at our house, kind of the deep well I can always draw from. Wildflower used to get a lot more Neil Young comparisons (which I definitely welcomed) but I wanted to consciously move away from that Laurel Canyon/West Coast sound. As I said before, I also listen to a lot of ambient music, especially the Cluster records from the 70s. I feel like instrumental music can convey a sense of place in a way that lyrical songs sometimes can’t, and took inspiration from that idea, trying to build in longer instrumental passages to convey the landscape here. I also enjoyed thinking of the songs as landscapes themselves and of the different instruments as things moving through them, the wind, clouds, stray beams of light. Like the ensemble are the elements that animate the landscape, if you know what I mean?

But yeah, my goal is to try and make what I call “Atlantic music” and I feel a real kinship with the music from across the sea.

I’ve seen you refer to Green World as “the end of an era”. How has the Wildflower line-up changed from previous records? Who plays on this one? And what does this collaboration bring to the finished product?

Wildflower used to be a set lineup with some of my closest friends, some of whom were around from the beginning. As we got a little older and the pandemic stopped us in our tracks, people’s lives shifted enough that playing music just became less of a priority for them. I already wrote everything for the band, so I decided to kind of fully own the project and seek out new people to collaborate with. I really thought about making this album as a solo record, but ultimately just decided to really claim and embody the Wildflower name, and set about changing the sound.

Two of the old members (Jason Eckerson and Matt Maiello) played on Green World as a nice send off to the old version of the project and also provided a sense of continuity. My good friend Andrew Weaver, who tours with Widowspeak and also writes amazing songs, really helped shift the center of the sound. He is also a big fan of Fairport, Pentagle, all that stuff, so he was immediately able to hear the vision when I sent the acoustic demos. The pedal steel is played by Hamilton Belk who is an absolute ace living here in Maine. The sax was played by a genuine hero of mine, Joseph Shabason who used to play with Destroyer and makes incredible solo music. Kaputt was a really foundational album for me, so hearing him blow on some my songs kind of brought some parts of musical journey full circle. My friend Kevin Sullivan who I met touring plays bass on a few of the songs and, finally, MorganEve Swain who’s band Huntress and the Holder of Hands I love, played fiddle on the title track and sang harmonies on a few of the songs.

I think all these people brought a ton to the album. I see my job as making the songs and vision of the project as crystal clear as possible, as if the initial seed I create almost contains the whole. It took me a while, but over time I’ve learned that you get more out of people if you let them really express themselves and don’t try to control what they do. If they can understand the vision, they find their own way to participate in it and elevate it. So yeah, I work with people for who they are and how they play, and the generosity of what all the people bring to the music really amazes me. Also, when I listen to the album I just hear all these people I love playing, which brings me so much joy!

On a related note, if this is an end of an era, do you know what comes next for Wildflower?

It’s a good question! I’ve been finding a lot of gratification in playing solo, so I have been working on that practice and am planning to tour a bunch that way this year. I have a new record mostly written and am probably going to return to the studio this fall… hopefully just continuing to pursue a path in music that is both fulfilling and financially sustainable. Thanks for all of these truly thoughtful questions to respond to. They were lovely to answer.

Green World is out now and available from the Wildflower Bandcamp page.

The post Fully Present In My Home: A Conversation With Wildflower appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Joseph Shabason’s work has always mined the personal, from 2018’s Anne and its exploration of his mother experience of degenerative illness, to the interrogation of an upbringing in an Islamic/Jewish dual-faith household which constituted most recent album The Fellowship. In each case, the Toronto-based composer and multi-instrumentalist renders otherwise unbroachable subjects into music so as to better articulate their contours, not only for his own benefit but that of the listener too. A language beyond language, able to communicate through invention and style.

A method, in its own curious manner, not all that different from skateboarding. Which makes Joseph Shabason’s latest full-length Welcome to Hell all the more fitting. A joint release by Western Vinyl and Telephone Explosion Records, the album takes the seminal Toy Machine VHS and transmutes it into his jazz-adjacent ambient music. Shrinking the distance between the creative energies of skating and musical composition, the result is a concept album which channels the movement and style of figures like Mike Maldonado and Elissa Steamer, not to mention the Toy Machine aesthetic.

A huge list of collaborators were involved too, with Kieran Adams (sound design, percussion), Michael Davidson (vibraphone), Bram Gielen (upright bass, bass guitars), Thom Gill (guitar, keys, piano, electric guitar, vocals), Hugh Marsh (violin), Phil Melanson (drums, percussion, electric drums), Vincent Spilchuk (trumpet) and Felicity Williams (vocals) all lending their talents. As lead single ‘Jamie Thomas’ shows, the result is striking. Soundscapes full of detail, movement and laidback swagger, which get at something almost intangible, the spirit of the era.

Welcome To Hell is out on the 20th October via Western Vinyl and Telephone Explosion Records and you can pre-order it now from Bandcamp.

The post Joseph Shabason – Jamie Thomas appeared first on Various Small Flames.