In January, Chayse Porter will release his third album Endless / Boundless, what label Earth Libraries describe as “nine new musical excavations and epiphanies the Birmingham-based songwriter dug up from life’s bedrock and polished to a shine in his basement lair.” ‘Flowers in Chains’ is the final single before the record’s release and is the perfect introduction. On the surface it’s sweet and jangly, all warm breeze and syrupy sunlight, but this is a song of contrast and juxtaposition. Porter describes the lyrics as “jutting barbs left for someone clueless to their own cruelty,” and close inspection sees the sweetness sour and the breeze leave goosebumps on your skin.

Do you ever get the feeling
That you’re not so kind of a person
Do you ever stop to think
That your words, they hurt
You’re so sweet, sweet like dirt

Hank Tree – Sweet Saltpeter

With Fergus MacDonald (formerly of State Broadcasters) joined by Roy Shearer (Ultras, Inspector Tapehead) and Bart Owl (Eagleowl, Broken Chanter), Glasgow‘s Hank Tree take folk sensibilities and elevate them into something truly atmospheric with a mixture of field recordings and distortion. But amid their invention and subversion of genre, Hank Tree hark back to folk’s best roots, positioning themselves in the long lineage of artists using the form to write about social history and labour movements. Album The Big North is out now, and latest single ‘Sweet Saltpeter’ is the perfect entry point, capturing the individual experience within an industrial setting, where a worker is as replaceable as any other part of the machine. The track comes with a video by filmmaker Felipe Bustos Sierra, who saw clear links between the record and his documentary Nae Pasaran, and the result is a both moving and visually striking development of the presiding themes.

The Big North is out now and available from Bandcamp.

Islands – Headlines

Earlier this year, Montreal indie rock/pop stalwarts Islands released And That’s Why Dolphins Lost Their Legs, their latest full-length which further developed their idiosyncratic vision and infectious energy. They’ve now released a new video for the single ‘Headlines’ directed by Vali Chandrasekaran, who is perhaps better known as a TV comedy writer for the likes of 30 Rock and Modern Family. A short film which centres on an artist trying to achieve the apotheosis desired by all musicians—the transformation from fallible flesh and blood to mythical rock star deity.

And That’s Why Dolphins Lost Their Legs is out now and available from Bandcamp.

Lizzie No – Annie Oakley

Next January, New York‘s Lizzie No is releasing their latest full-length album, Halfsies, via Thirty Tigers / Miss Freedomland. The record follows on from the likes of Hard Won, as No braids the personal and the political into something unique. Latest single ‘Annie Oakley’ is a perfect example. A road song which embraces the affirming experience of moving through a landscape while refusing to succumb to the romantic side of the genre. ““Most of the great songwriters in the Americana genre have darkly determined road songs featuring dirty motels, gas station coffee, the exhilaration of seeing America’s plains rushing toward them from behind a car windshield as if on a roller coaster designed by Willa Cather,” No explains. “Behind the scenery are some difficult questions, like ‘why have I chosen to do this with my life?’ and ‘will I ever be one of the greats?’”

Watch the video directed by Cole Nielsen and Mary Glen Fredrick below:

Halfsies will be released on 19th January. Order it now from the Lizzie No Bandcamp page.

Meiwei – Stare at the Sun

The project of singer-songwriter Michelle Mouw, Meiwei specialises in fingerpicked guitar, stirring arrangements and emotive lyrics. Mouw was born and raised in Beijing, moving to the US aged eighteen, and her music is an effort to explore the disparate parts of her life, identity and the wider world. It contrasts the USA and China, the past and the present, and the bustle of the city and the calm of nature. The new Meiwei record, On This Trail Till I’m Home, is the culmination of all this exploration, full of themes both deeply personal and welcomingly universal. Single ‘Stare at the Sun’ is a case in point, what Mouw calls an “indie-folk queer anthem” which builds from earnest guitar strums into a rich arrangement that marbles wistfulness and hope, strength and vulnerability.

Other Vessels – Empty Afternoon

Other Vessels is an Austin indie folk outfit led by singer-songwriter Miranda Haney. Back in the Spring, the band got together to record the debut Other Vessels EP, Empty Afternoon, a collection of songs Haney describes as “intimate portraits of the partnerships – romantic, platonic, and familial – that shape (and save) our lives.” The title track is our first glimpse of how this might sound, a warm and serene folk pop song that Haney says is about “letting someone love you even though you feel like absolute dog shit.” “You’re coming over in 25 minutes, don’t trust my judgment when I’m so deep in it,” she sings, “Pulling a razor over my knees shaving my armpits to prove that I’m happy and clean.”

Pari Eskandari – Chador

‘Chador’ is a new single from Iranian-German artist Pari Eskandari, offered in memory of Mahsa Amini, the 22-year-old Iranian killed in custody in Tehran in 2022. It is a statement of defiance sent to those who would use violence in the name of so-called morality. Released via Tricky’s False Idols label, the song is dark and dramatic and full of ominous power. It comes complete with a video directed by Nikolas Meyberg which depicts a female ritual designed, as Eskandari explains, “to elevate the women from the ordinary to the sublime.” An expression of solidarity conducted through music and dance “for the women in Iran who risk their lives every day.”

‘Chador’ is out now via False Idols and available from Bandcamp.

Shady Baby – All Too Late

Life has been a bit of a rollercoaster for Brighton‘s Shady Baby since we last featured them. Bursting onto the scene after a single gig, they signed with tastemaker label Nice Swan Records and were played on BBC Radio 1. But a series of interruptions, including the departure of their lead guitarist and the cost of living crisis, slowed this momentum and things have been quiet since. That is, until now, as Shady Baby are back with a brand new single, ‘All Too Late’, a fittingly rousing and cathartic ode to fresh starts. “‘All Too Late’ is a song about looking to the future and wanting to feel in control of your own life,” describes lead Sam Leaver. “It was written as a piece of advice to myself to not be stuck in the past, to take charge of my own life and to know I have the power to change it.”

‘All Too Late’ is out now via streaming services.

Symbol Soup – Husky Dawgs

Sad Club Records label-mates Symbol Soup and Kitty Fitz have teamed up to write a Christmas song, ‘Husky Dawgs’. A warm and cosy slice of charming indie pop, it’s a song about seeing old friends when returning home for Christmas, complete with two fictional huskies named after Duster and Shuggie Otis. It’s jingly, jangly and perfect for a warm room on a cold festive evening. And you never know, could catapult the band to Christmas royalties stardom. As Symbol Soup’s Michael Rae puts it: “every family friend or person you meet at a wedding will tell you that the way to make money is to have one Christmas hit.”

‘Husky Dawgs’ is streaming everywhere now.

The post Weekly Listening: December 2023 #2 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

As his moniker suggests, Cox uses his songwriting to explore the black experience, with a special focus on the rural south where he grew up. As such, Magic Boy fuses the intensely personal with the societal and historical, creating a record that manages to be both intimate and sweeping in its commentary, and it’s a testament to the Bartees sound that such a balance is so well achieved. The main emotion of this style is a deformed nostalgia, a kind of wistful sense of heartbreak that shifts momentarily into anger or despair without warning. As on the troubled love song opener ‘You’re Here’, where a failing relationship is viewed not just with the usual melancholy but flashes of violence too. ‘Going Going’ takes this a step further, crafted out of the unforgiving culture and Christianity of the south, the racist soul of a town lingering well past the Civil Rights Act. Worse, the the narrator finds they cannot escape this spirit, even when fleeing.

“Black folks who dance when we’re glad on the tight rope
The women that loved me whipped me with switches
Back in them ditches, dodging tornados, hoping the calvary come
Come on down and get me, Come on down and get me

Now ya gone, (how you left for the coast by yourself)
Now ya gone (when you screamed you don’t need no one else)
How’d you know that I always won
Now I’m gone”

‘Count it Back’ is a soulful folk song that would be at home on any mainstream radio station, the anger and fear that the track communicates is all the more pressing for it. Here, Cox cleverly plays the white expectation against itself, co-opting the gentle pop-folk style that is so often used to tell banal stories of love and loss. The racial violence then comes as a shock to those of us outside of its daily impact, and jarring too, as though such topics should only be told in furious anger or sombre retrospect, or else packaged with a neat redemption or concluding freedom. This stylistic choice, and refusal to play into the set narratives whites deem suitable for such stories, ends up saying so much more than any single lyric ever could.

“They burning crosses from west Texas to Memphis
I seen em burning out there by the lake
No one gives a fuck when they up there burning.
They hit you later like hey blood you OK?
I call my mother every morning for power
And if I didn’t I’d have died or wrecked
I count it back so I can stay with my people
Count it back so I can be there for Mijo”

Featuring the aforementioned Lizzie No, ‘Get Over It’ is a love duet concerning the ability (or lack thereof) to move on from a situation, when “Patience and virtue go off to the wind like embers” and the burden of it all gets too much to bear. ‘Best of You’ is similarly exhausted and beaten, before the dark nostalgia returns in ‘Little Brother’, where the past haunts the present once more, though the bond between brothers shines through despite the failure in communication. The is followed by ‘Eat Your Heart Out’, a track which pushes right into folk-punk territory, Cox’s frantic refrain the opposite of a solution or salvation, rather just the catharsis of airing his frustration and committing it to tape. This is followed by an outro from jazz singer Donna Mitchell-Cox, Bartees’s mother, her gentle croon sounding over slightly off-kilter instrumentation, again evoking the souring of the past, where fond memories are distorted by outside forces.

Magic Boy serves as a lesson, making the point that racial trauma permeates every aspect of the black experience, so that even tender songs about family and friends and lovers are haunted by the chronic spectre, and a constant sense of exhaustion lingers. I think, as a white audience, we’re predisposed to expect protests about racism to end with some final victory. We like the fury and trauma to be backed up with perfect examples of the unbreakable black spirit, as though there might be some value or romance within suffering. In portraying something closer to reality, Bartees & the Strange Fruit refuses us this—with the hope more focused on survival than triumph, and prone to serious lapses—and instead gives a snapshot of the genuine black experience.

Magic Boy is out now via Pineapple Record Co., and you can get it now from Bandcamp.

The post Bartees & the Strange Fruit – Magic Boy appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Various Small Flames’

Songs of 2017

Anamon – Kneel Old
Android Automatic – Dark Roads*
Angie McMahon – Slow Mover
Basement Revolver – Johnny Pt. 2
Baxter Roy Long – Paribanou
Bea Troxel – Let Them Know
Big Thief – Mary
Black Belt Eagle Scout – Soft Stud
Bully – Running
Cayetana – Mesa
Charly Bliss – Percolator
Chastity Belt – Different Now
CHUCK – Happy Birthday
The County Liners – Maria
The Courtneys – Tour
Craig Finn – God in Chicago
Crumb – Locket
Crushing – Emery Board
Cut Worms – Like Going Down Sideways
David Bazan – Care
Distant Reader – First Try
Emperor X – God Save Coastal Dorset
Fits – Ice Cream on a Nice Day
German Error Message – 2017*
Gleemer – Soothe Me
Great Grandpa – Favorite Show
Haley Heynderickx – Oom Sha Lala
Hiccup – Teasin’
Horse Culture – Texaco
Illuminati Hotties – ‘(You’re Better) Than Ever’
Japandroids – No Known Drink or Drug
Jason Isbell & the 400 Unit – If We Were Vampires
Jay Som – The Bus Song
Jeremy Squires – Night Cars
Katie Ellen – Drawing Room
Lizzie No – Monuments
Lomelda – Bam Sha Klam
Mike Pace and the Child Actors – Audits & Surveys
Meursault – The Mill
Mount Eerie – Crow
Nice Legs – Mighty Three
Oceanator – Nowhere Nothing
Ohyeahsumi – Daisy
Old Earth – Pit Dynamics
PASTEL – Stammer
Peter Silberman – New York
Phoebe Bridgers – Motion Sickness
Pope – Talk Me Out of It
Protomartyr – Windsor Hum
Rainwater – Place
Ratboys – Elvis is in the Freezer
Rick Rude – Bald & Fat in Houston, TX
Roadkill Ghost Choir – Classics (Die Young)
Rose Dorn – Dirt
See Through Dresses – Lucy’s Arm
Shannen Moser – A Funeral, A Friend, My Sanity
Sinai Vessel – Died On My Birthday
Slaughter Beach, Dog – Phoenix
SOAR – Fort Funston
Soft Fangs – Jordan // Jackson Elementary
Spartan Jet-Plex – We Believe
Strange Ranger – House Show
Strawberry Runners – Garden Hose
Timid, The Brave – Alice
Us and Only Us – Bored of Black
Vagabon – Cold Apartment
Viewfinder – Instant Moonlight
The Washboard Abs – Veil
Waxahatchee – Never Been Wrong
Wild Pink – Albert Ross
William Ryan Fritch – In Our Blood
The Wooden Sky – Swimming in Strange Waters
Ylayali – Cherry Tomatoes

*Strictly released in 2016, but barely, and we covered it in Jan. 2017.

If you missed it, you can see our Favourite Albums of 2017 list here. Also, the curious can find such lists from previous years here.

The post Favourite Songs of 2017 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Tracklisting:

Basement Revolver – Johnny Pt. 2
Ramonda Hammer – Too Much, Too Recently
Nana Grizol – Photos From When We Were Young
Blood Cultures – Detroit
Spartan Jet-Plex – All the World Pt. 2
Why Not – Ground
Horse Culture – Ruins
Devon Sproule – Trees At Your Mom’s
somesurprises – Late July
Midwife – Song for an Unborn Son
Alder & Ash – The Merciless Dusk
Matt Paxton – Baby Don’t Go
Captain – Hotel Room
Decoration Day – Palms
Magana – Inches Apart
Lizzie No – Monuments
Wilt – Pane of Glass
Blaketheman1000 – Blake
The Wooden Sky – Black Gold
Phoebe Bridgers – Motion Sickness

Be sure to check out our previous monthly roundup mixes, and stayed tuned in August for yet more of the good stuff.

The post July 2017 Roundup appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Opener ‘Crying Wolf’ provides an immediate idea of the sense of force and feeling behind the music, a stark momentum that seems to draw energy from its own motion. As we wrote in a preview of the album, “[the] vocals, led by the music or else leading, possess a repetitive cadence which suggests an almost trance-like quality, a gradually dawning delirium from which wisdom is channelled.”

While there’s considerable variation across the record, from the pensive peace of ‘The Mountaineer’ to the warm, country-tinged abandon of ‘Centralia’, the above description gets at something within the core of Lizzie No’s sound. Even within the calmest of songs there’s a keenness to the music, if not anger then something equally intense, some insistent force that drives the words. In ‘Please Don’t Change Your Mind’ and ‘Outlaws’ it’s a desperate kind of love (albeit with a certain irony on the latter), while ‘The Wedge’ explores something more like regret and personal pride, a struggle to communicate adequately in a complex situation. ‘Monuments’ is more dramatic still, a haunting travelling song marked by vistas and faces and built from forward motion, littered with small moments—sights and scenes and snippets of conversation made significant by perhaps nothing more than chance.

“I met a girl back east
who said don’t trust the weatherman
you never know when a southern storm
is gonna consecrate the land.
She said, on nights like these
I can hear the monuments
Just like us they’re drinking poison
singing what they can’t forget”

After the sorrowful restraint of ‘The Killing Season’, where life is devalued and ultimately lost to the persistent racist flattening of people into nothing more than a colour, ‘100 Rooms’ is more playful, the experimental instrumentation bringing to mind Field Report’s excellent Marigolden in it’s willingness to expand on the traditional folk sound without losing any of its essential elements. As if to remind us that she is equally adept working to a more classic formula, the title track closes with a heartfelt ballad of considerable depth. At once seemingly personal and wider in scope. The song uses injustice and suffering as a mode of growth, and anger as a curative force, without ever making light of the costs or consequences the pain incurred.

Indeed, the closer highlights the great strength of Hard Won and Quinlan’s writing as a whole. The ability to write songs where strength and fragility can coexist allows the message to transcend the usual, one-dimensional position often taken, thus hurdling the reductive either/or mentality that frequently permeates music. Lizzie No is not supernaturally strong, nor fatally open-chested, but something between the two. Something a lot more human.

Hard Won is out now and you can grab a copy via the Lizzie No Bandcamp page.

Album Art by Christina Graham

The post Lizzie No – Hard Won appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Ohyeahsumi – Daisy

Ohyeahsumi are Rena and Lena Vernon from California, a pair who describe their journey as going “from wombmates to bandmates to your mates.”  Their album, Your Friends Are Looking For You, is due out at the end of the month on the ever reliable Sports Day Records, and you can hear the first single, ‘Daisy’ right now. Dark and languid, the track plays like the midnight meandering of some city river, dreamy and dappled with light yet mildly dangerous, as though beneath the fascinating surface lies something altogether more strange and ominous.

“Scared of being pretty
Room is dirty, mind is filthy
My dress curves clearly
At the waist”

Your Friends Are Looking For You is to be released on the 31st March and you can pre-order it now via Bandcamp, including a special edition cassette complete with cards designed by Bronwyn Walls.

Lizzie No – Crying Wolf

Lizzie No is a songwriter and harpist based in Brooklyn who is set to release her debut album, Hard Won, this spring. Written during a “lonely night shift at the box office of a midtown venue in NYC”, lead single ‘Crying Wolf’ is energetic-yet-dark folk song. No’s vocals, led by the music or else leading, possess a repetitive cadence which suggests an almost trance-like quality, a gradually dawning delirium from which wisdom is channelled.

Hard Won is out this spring, so keep on eye on Lizzie No’s Bandcamp page.

Amanda Glasser – Bed

Amanda Glasser is a multi-instrumentalist and songwriter from Baltimore. Not content with her output with her band Purrer, Glasser is set to release her solo debut album, Caelesti Radio, an album which she says “is a light that shines on the difficult emotions surrounding trauma, love, fighting to be heard and moving on.” ‘Bed’ is our first taste of the album and has certainly whet our appetite, a superior slice of bummed out, downbeat indie rock. It’s reminiscent of Low in its use of plaintive melancholy and A Weather in the way it melds the sad and insular rainy-day vibe with swelling instrumentation, primarily throaty guitar and galloping drum beat.

It’s a great introduction and has me anticipating the album impatiently. Keep an eye on the Amanda Glasser Bandcamp page for details.

Batwings Catwings – Sky Blue Haze

LA’s Batwings Catwings make what they describe as “Inspired radio-friendly noise pop with no pretences”. On a recent tour of Japan, the band made a video for the three minute blast of infectious noise that is ‘Sky Blue Haze’, the standout track from last year’s Coast to Coast. The video captures visually what the song does aurally, just a rollicking, no-frills good time that highlights the raw energy of a band with a growing reputation for their live shows.

You can get Coast to Coast now via Broken World Media or the Batwings Catwings Bandcamp page.

Caroline Lazar – Nevermine

Taken from a forthcoming EP of the same name, Caroline Lazar’s ‘Nevermine’ introduces her pop/folk fusion, all built up around striking vocals which gather in slow intensity, the energy and intent inching forwards with fluid force like an approaching tide. By the finale Lazar seems barely held together, her voice positively exploding with a depth and energy beyond her years.

Nevermine is set for release on the 24th March and you can pre-order it now from Bandcamp.

Why a fox – Cleland

Why a fox is the recording project of Australian-native, Japan-based songwriter Hayden Marks. With his debut LP Old forest. Young trees. set for release this April, opening track ‘Cleland’ sets the tempo with a pacey, lyric-filled two-and-a-half-minutes, like a cross of Camp Cope and the Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2 soundtrack.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsCi5wtlAt8

You can pre-order Old forest. Young trees. now from the Why a fox Bandcamp page.

Brice Randall Bickford – Paro

Brice Randall Bickford made his name with the folk-country band The Strugglers back in the 2000s, before moving back to North Carolina in 2011 and starting to record under his own name. His latest album, Paro, released recently on Keeled Scales explores “themes such as humanity’s tendency toward greed, control over others, systems of government, and the consequences of the adoption of agriculture”. Standout ‘The First Grain’  makes good on this promise, what at first appears a pleasant country-rock song slowly revealing its world-weary literary edge.

“When you cut your teeth on
Whatever you were handed
The first time thinking, I don’t belong
You didn’t know the half of it”

You can get Paro now from Keeled Scales webstore and the Brice Randall Bickford Bandcamp page.

Lizzie Kent – EP

Lizzie Kent is a singer-songwriter from Vancouver, BC, who released her debut self-titled EP last summer. Luckily for those of us who missed it the first time around, the songs are probably more suited to these grey windy days than August’s sun, so now is a great time to right the wrong and get to know Kent’s sound. ‘Secrets’ is a good place to start, a melancholy, nostalgia-filled song where the vocals take centre stage while guitar plucks at the surrounding silence.

“Take me back to just last spring,
when the flowers bloomed and the birds would sing
Take me back to the time in our lives
when all things lost were bound to survive”

You can buy the Lizzie Kent EP now from Bandcamp.

Mt. Doubt – Tourists

Edinburgh-based Leo Bargery, AKA Mt. Doubt, has teamed up with Dunfermline band Foreignfox to put out an AA-side single Tourists / Lights Off, Carry Me Home, out the end of the month on Scottish Fiction. Mt. Doubt’s ‘Tourists’ is best described as a happy collision between The National and The Twilight Sad, Bargery’s baritone vocals and joined by insistent drums and sizeable guitars which sweeps you up within its heft, even possessing a manic Berningerian on-the-verge-of-losing-it shouty finale.

The single is out on the 31st March and you can pre-order it now, though it’s also the first single from a forthcoming EP The Loneliness of the TV Watchers, which judging by the title is a record that’s going to be right up our alley.

The post Best of the Rest: Things We Have Missed #10 appeared first on Various Small Flames.