Julia Brown Archives - Various Small Flames

Favourite Free Music of 2016: I – N

Liam Doyle — Mon, 09 Jan 2017 09:30:03 +0000

Part three of the list of our favourite free music of 2016, this time covering artists beginning I – N. For an important explanation re. ‘free’ vs. ‘name your price’, head to the first post.

And, of course, being comprehensive is impossible these days, so let us know if we missed your favourite and maybe we’ll add it to the collection.

If I Die in Mississippi – Artless
(RIYL: bedroom pop, ambient, Sam Ray, sad)

In Love With a Ghost – Let’s Go
(RIYL: electronic, chillwave, dream pop)

Jake Bellissimo – Piece of Ivy
(RIYL: indie pop, Gay Angel)

Jemima Coulter – lampshade ep
(RIYL: bedroom pop, chilled out, Volcano Choir)

Joyride! – Half Moon Bay
(RIYL: pop punk, indie rock, All Dogs)

Julia Brown – An Abundance of Strawberries
(RIYL: experimental, indie pop, Elephant 6)

Lake Michigan – Gleaming
(RIYL: bedroom pop, late night vibes, Arrange)

Lance Bangs – Lance Mountain
(RIYL: lo-fi, indie pop, Colin Thibodeauxxx)

Lazy Legs – s/t
(RIYL: shoegaze, noise pop, feedback)

Little Kid – Flowers
(RIYL: fuzz pop, bedroom folk, reflective thoughts)

Long Neck – Spring Cleaning
(RIYL: bedroom pop, Cyberbully Mom Club, Jawbreaker Reunion)

Max Gardener – Memory Lounge
(RIYL: dream pop, bedroom pop, slacker)

Mineral Girls – Seven Inches of Release
(RIYL: noise pop, emo, indie rock)

Moin Moin – Dawn
(RIYL: folk, bedroom pop, delicate, quiet)

MOLAR / Pale Kids – Split
(RIYL: pop punk, riot grrrl, The Courtneys)

Molly Drag – Tethered Rendering
(RIYL: bedroom pop, experimental, dreamy vibes)

Monarch Mtn – Everyone is Here
(RIYL: grand melancholy, nighttime)

Monster Rally – Mystery Cove
(RIYL: experimental, hip hop, tropicana)

Moving In – Sunburn
(RIYL: bedroom pop, lo-fi, teenage heartbreak)

Naps – Happy All the Time Forever Always
(RIYL: ambient, experimental, tape hiss)

No Museums – The Drifting Knives
(RIYL: basement rock, indie pop, lo-fi)

Nice Try – s/t
(RIYL: lo-fi, indie pop, Frankie Cosmos)

Nikolas Escudero – 100
(RIYL: lo-fi, indie pop, slacker)

No Dice Tapes – 2016: the year all bad things went away and everything turned out to be fine
(RIYL: lo-fi, indie pop, good causes, ironic titles)

Noname – Telefone
(RIYL: hip hop, rap, courageous poetry)

Be sure to check out the previous sections of our favourite free music list here.

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March 2016 Roundup – A Mixtape

Jon Doyle — Sun, 03 Apr 2016 12:05:01 +0000

Here’s a mixtape featuring every artist we wrote about during March 2016. There are plenty of gems in there so if you’ve spent the last month spring cleaning, gorging on chocolate eggs, or rubbing your eyes after a long hibernation, be sure to check this out.

Tracklisting:

1. Fire – Mal Devisa
2. wild fire/flowers – Trust Fall
3. Home Alone – Max Gardener
4. Your Love – Jeremy Squires
5. Veins – Camp Howard
6. How To Dance – Mount Moriah
7. Good Evening – Adeem the Artist
8. Shallow – Candy
9. Francie Cool – Francie Cool
10. Bad Vibes – Zebrafi
11. Piece of Ivy – Jake Bellissimo
12. Snow Day – Julia Brown
13. Alive – Dear Tracks
14. Ted the Radical Westy – Ravetank
15. ft1 – naps
16. We Have The Perimeter Surrounded – Hallelujah the Hills
17. Bullet in a Broken Gun – Oscar Lush
18. Color Peels – The Wandering Lake
19. Nowhere Nothing – Oceanator
20. Suagr Skull – The Washboard Abs
21. Of Wandering – Littler
22. bicycle – Twelve Gardens
23. Ya Ya Ya – You Won’t
24. Find You – Family Video
25. Jack Campbell (Quick Jammer) – Dingus.
26. Candy – Fish Food
27. It May Very Well Do – 100 Watt Horse
28. Life – Whim
29. Meg – Hovvdy
30. Piano Player – The Hotelier
31. Calvary – Chris Bathgate
32. Postman – Sam Moss

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Julia Brown – An Abundance of Strawberries

Liam Doyle — Fri, 04 Mar 2016 18:37:23 +0000

Maryland lo-fi pop act Julia Brown almost never made this record. The band tried making an album two years ago, before effectively closing for business and leaving the record in an awkward limbo, only released to the world as an online leak. Luckily, songwriter Sam Ray (also known for his work with Ricky Eat Acid and Teen Suicide) thought it a shame to simply discard all that material and decided to take things into his own hands, teaming up with singer and violist Caroline White to call on a range of friends (and former members) to finally get the thing finished. The result is An Abundance of Strawberries, an album which takes the familiar lo-fi/bedroom pop template and sends it fizzing cloudwards, forgoing the traditional band set-up by using drum machines and looped samples in place of conventional percussion and tying everything together with a ribbon of strings and horns.

The opening title track begins soft, acoustic guitars and Ray’s vocals sprinkled like powder, before it hurtles into a transformation, sounding like a DIY version of Animal Collective’s dense and swirling psych, a joyously ramshackle clatter of a pop song. ‘Snow Day’ is glitchy and twitchy, Ray’s smooth vocals juxtaposed against the looped percussion and lyrics about an errant snow day in 2015, while ‘All Alone in Bed’ is an indie pop track that comes across something like Bellows meets Eskimeaux, telling the story of bad relationships and drugs and psychological struggle.

“are you coming home?
have you been losing weight again?
does your mother know that you’re skin and bones?
does your mother know those things you do
when you’re all alone in bed?”

’25 Days (may 15)’ has almost spiritual zen-like start before layering samples and Ray’s straining, impassioned vocals, creating something that extends beyond the pensive sorrow that exists on the rest of the album, a desperate, grasping regret encapsulated when he sings “this world could have been so many things and so could I”. ‘Without You’ more glitched beats behind high and sad and dreamy vocals (“what’s the point of the leaves changing colors
if I can’t watch them change with you?”), while ‘Abby’s Song’ is a change of tack which sees Abby Trunfio take over vocal duties on an acoustic bedroom pop track.

The wildly complex ‘You Can Always Hear Birds’ begins with atmospherics and a rapid barrage of digital drums and undergoes several careening changes of tone and tempo, before the palette-cleansingly short and sweet ‘The Way You Want’ and ‘Loved’, a subdued bedroom pop track with deceptively dark lyrics about death and mutilated birds (“a flightless bird though not by choice / on the side of the road with both wings cut off / another bird found by the lake / its severed head lying two feet away”). ‘The Body Descends’ is permeated with an audio clip of someone saying the strange phrase that is the album title, and becomes something pretty sincere, complete with piano and stirring atmospherics, the stomping percussion building and building into something like a crescendo, like a late night epiphany.

“I am what I’m not, my problems are God’s
when the body descends, we both sit and watch
& the strongest love I’ve felt in my life
rises up from the dark
to pull me aside
& across the room
& out in the hall
& outside my house
& out in the yard”

‘Possession’ deals with overcoming narcotic ghouls, while penultimate track ‘Closing on a Roof’ is slow and heartfelt with elegant viola and cello, before the music subsides and an audio clip enters of a girl reading a passage from Psalms, like a cryptic answer phone message left by a stranger in a dream. And then the album closes with ‘Bloom’, which feels happy and hopeful in a non-flashy way, just Ray and his guitar and lyrics about finding heaven when alone in the church parking lot, “it’s not art it’s something much softer than that”, he sings, “it was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever felt and probably ever seen.”

An Abundance of Strawberries is a convoluted mass full of idiosyncrasies and distinctive flourishes. But unlike many experimental albums, it also has a solid core, a sense of heart or humanity which elevates it beyond the realms of sonic speculation. The complexity of the compositions mirrors that of the narrator’s life, of his worries and regrets and confusion, and the communal spirit involved in the album’s creation seems somehow a response to that. It’s as if the album’s biggest artistic endeavour was added at the end, that it may have been conceived and developed by Julia Brown, but the result is something far bigger than any one band, something that took a collective spirit to complete.

You can get An Abundance of Strawberries on vinyl, cassette or CD via Joy Void Recordings, or as a name-your-price download via the Julia Brown Bandcamp page.

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The Covers Mix: Volume #11

Jon Doyle — Thu, 29 May 2014 18:40:00 +0000

We have somehow managed to see this Covers Mix malarkey through to an eleventh (!) volume. There’s a real mix of genres on this one, with folk, pop, rock, electronic and experimental all accounted for. There are old songs by new bands and new songs by new bands and we like them all.

As ever, please support any of the acts you like and buy their own music. There are some super-talented and prolific acts on here who release a lot of their stuff for free, and I’m sure a few dollars, or even just an email of appreciation, would be very welcome.

Tracklisting:

1. Seasons (Waiting On You) (Future Islands Cover) – Slow Club
2. Don’t Let Me Get Me (P!nk Cover) – Arrange
3. Doin’ It Right (Daft Punk Cover) – Verdigrls
4. Flotus (Flying Lotus Cover) – Spazzkid
5. This Charming Man (The Smiths Cover) – SKATERS
6. Ain’t That Enough (Teenage Fanclub Cover) – Nai Harvest
7. Son Of Sam (Elliott Smith Cover) – The Provincial Archive
8. Her Sinking Sun (Coma Cinema Cover) – Julia Brown
9. Thru The Wall (Paul Baribeau Cover) – Matthew Lee Cothran & Delaney Mills
10. It Is What It Is (Blood Orange Cover) – How Sad
11.Dreams (Fleetwood Mac Cover) – Emily Reo
12. Is This Is (The Strokes Cover) – Total Warr
13. Everything Is Embarrassing (Sky Ferreira Cover) – Saturday Looks Good To Me
14. Bein’ Around (The Lemonheads Cover) – Courtney Barnett
15. Call It What You Will (Joe Pug Cover) – Vandaveer
16. Waking Hour (Vandaveer Cover) – Joe Pug
17. The Promise (When In Rome Cover) – Sturgill Simpson
18. The Mother We Share (CHVRCHES Cover) – SOAK
19. Game Of Pricks (Guided By Voices Cover) – Meursault
20. Ooh La La (Faces Cover) – Manchester Orchestra
21. Romulus (Sufjan Stevens Cover) – Donovan Woods
22. Drive All Night (Bruce Springsteen Cover) – Sharon van Etten