Opener ‘Bed’ sounds like a sonic time capsule from a rainy wartime evening, Williams’s voice rising from a dusty gramophone in the corner sounding both cinematic and distant. The delicate guitar on ‘Tired Mind’ tumbles as if caught on a breeze, the vocals supported by gentle coos and a tidal background hum, before the piano-led ‘The Rain Thief’. The track sounds somehow apprehensive, at least at first, as if someone is playing in a dark and empty room at midnight, though eventually settles into a more certain groove of melancholy.

The title track closes the EP, stretching over 8 minutes with gentle quite and Williams’s quiet croon. After the halfway mark the song descends into a rumbling, disonant noise, like a relentless wind battering a flat and barren landscape, the vocals reduced to just another brief echo in time.

You can get Wail now from the Canigou Records Bandcamp page. Its available as a digital download, or on cassette, which comes complete with a bonus track and an unique hand-drawn artwork. Oh and 10% of sales goes to Refuge, so what are you waiting for? Also, be sure to check out the Honey Stretton Soundcloud page for a few more tracks.

-Photo credit: Jack Goodwin-

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The band have recently completed their second EP, Daytime TV 2, recorded with Connor Jones at Malthouse Studios in Bristol. The new release will continue with the band’s signature sound of “poppy melodies and harmonies, balanced with a subtle lo-fi and psychedelic aesthetic”. But it’s not all bright and sunny. As they describe, “Lyrically the EP is personal, telling of the frustration of our current situation, and the realities we never expect but have to deal with”.

This lyrical darkness is apparent on ‘Cigarettes’, the first single from Daytime TV 2 which we are proud to present today. Like all the best pop songs, it’s laidback sense of cool has undercurrents of something more sombre which lays meat on the bones of the track’s catchy immediacy.

“I wonder why you never put up a fight,
favour solitude and cigarettes in the night,
I wonder why you sit and stare at the walls,
waiting for nothing to happen at all”

The EP will be released track-by-track via the Daytime TV Bandcamp and Soundcloud pages, and will eventually be available in its entirety as a free download.

Photo by André Baumecker

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Boston’s Hallelujah The Hills are a band which seem to create according to similar aims and aspirations. Ryan H. Walsh and Co. release detailed, carefully-written albums without ruining their status as a bona fide rock band, their songs resonating on an emotional level irrespective of whether or not the listener wants to delve into the more cerebral aspects. The band went a good way to nailing the complicated/fun trade-off on 2014’s Have You Ever Done Something Evil?, a record we described as “good-time rock and roll with a weird edge”, but their new release, A Band is Something to Figure Out, sees the formula refined once more. Here the dichotomy has been stapled back together, the songs no longer working on several levels but rather across wide open vistas, accessible and interesting simultaneously. Even the most abstract lyrics feel important on an subconscious level. This is an album built from symbolism (one of the tags on Bandcamp is ‘hieroglyphics’, to give you an idea) but, like all the best mysteries, a sense of significance floats to the top, independent of any hidden code.

This intuitive meaning is present from the off. The album’s opener ‘What Do The People Want’ is a rousing, strangely emotional, indie rocker which proceeds with a tone that can only be termed bewildered hope. What the people actually want is never made clear, though they experiment with a multitude of strange situations in an attempt to find out, “calling the M’s from the dictionary” and “telling jokes in the ossuary” and “waving backwards to Massachusetts / trying to win the ‘World’s Best Haunt’©” (itself reference to a song from their début, Collective Psychosis Begone). There’s a real feeling of disorientation here but it never feels isolating. Rather it seems uniting, a force of perplexment so ubiquitous it has become a source of solidarity. ‘We Have The Perimeter Surrounded’ follows in emphatic manner, a song which raises a number of questions. Such as: Does Woody Guthrie dream of punk bands? Do the FBI chase indie rock musicians? In the blur between reality and fiction, a postmodern confusion reigns, though the celebratory, earnest tone (which is positively nostalgic by the midway mark) is set it apart from the usual paranoid sort of deal.

“Woody
Guthrie
once had
a weird dream
he fronted
a punk band
called Exed Out
they were amazing
every single thing that I could think of
we have the perimeter surrounded”

Full of catchy hooks, ‘The Mountain That Wanted More’ tells of a modern dissatisfaction where even the grandest, most impressive, among us are victims to a constant desire for more, and ‘The Girl With Electronics Inside’ sounds like a 90s indie hit written by George Saunders, a man/machine love song whose Big Feeling instrumental section suggests a complete lack of irony. ‘Spin the Atoms’ is slow and slinky and cartoonish in the Pynchonian sense, the background whirring bleep sounding like some covert analysis in a deep desert bunker, before ‘I’m in the Phone Book, I’m On the Planet, I’m Dying Slowly’ provides a pretty succinct summation of what its like to be alive. The song finds its characters bumping through life yet seized by a chemically assisted pseudo-wisdom, their conclusions (the title/chorus) morbid and moving and monstrous enough for decisive action (“a ritual in a Motel 6 / to make us one, at least for a night… Let me lay my hands on top of glowing spheres of endless light!”).

‘Play it as it Loops’ is a metafictional oddity for the time of instant gratification while ‘Hassle Magnet’ is heavy and relentless, the instrumentation and vocals rattling toward distortion. The track can be heard in various ways – the neurotic interior of a blank faced citizen, a cryptographic bulletin from an enigmatic sect, the ravings of some brain-fried wacko – though those of you with energy, time and grey matter will probably find clear threads leading elsewhere within the Hallelujah the Hills labyrinth. ‘New Phone Who Dis’ emerges with surprising tenderness, a song which sounds like the lone voice in a desolate expanse of digital echoes and cyber-ghosts, a person stripped and scorched by the constant beam of information yet still trying to maintain a sense of pride and an openness to connection:

“you now know
there’s a code word for you in the files

it’s certainly been awhile
the parts of me you reviled
have all been removed
but I didn’t do it for you

new phone who dis?”

‘The Dangers Are Doubled’ sees a return to the celebratory tone, Walsh’s words riding the crest of bright instrumentation and taking pleasure in absurd details and ambiguities, while ‘Realistic Birthday Music’ is carried by a similar energy. Returning to the themes of fiction vs. truth, the track crosses the wires of image and reality to paint a mimetic scene of the 21^st century. Here the characters are trying to act with sincerity according to what they’ve seen on screen, their ideas of human connection coloured or constructed by televisual representations of those very things.

“i’ve seen this in a movie
but never without a soundtrack of folk music
to coax and guide me toward your bed

And I’m coming at you with realistic birthday music
i’m coming at you with my hands above my head
And I’m coming at you with realistic birthday music
you’ve heard this song before
you’ve heard this song before”

There’s a lot of postmodern confusion present on A Band is Something to Figure Out but Hallelujah the Hills are not a postmodern band. Rather they are post-postmodern, reconstructing the human experience through sheer enthusiasm, using their joyous hooks and choruses as earnest expressions of emotion rather than ironic juxtapositions.  Walsh and Co. aren’t sitting us down to share a smirk and a wink, or to reel off some abstract philosophical theories, but rather taking us by the hand and running through their strange world, leaving it up to us to catch something meaningful in the breathless blur. And what a world this is, one which has been evolving since their first album, an ecosystem based on a strange molecule – twin strands of confusion and intuition tightly bound and swirled into a double helix – the DNA of Hallelujah the Hills.

You can buy A Band is Something to Figure Out now from the Hallelujah The Hills Bandcamp page.

The post Hallelujah The Hills – A Band is Something to Figure Out appeared first on Various Small Flames.

As with the majority of Orchid Tapes releases, expect lots of pitch-perfect lo-fi pop, undercut with a decidedly gloomy, lonely atmosphere. As with Coma Cinema before him, Alex G has a downbeat feel with an almost monotone delivery that kind of embodies the detachment of many young people today. Some tracks do buck this trend slightly, while keeping with the general distaste of arriving into adulthood at present. For example ‘Harvey’ has a Why? vibe, with lyrics and vocals that possess that heart-on-your-sleeve sincerity with a slightly weird/self-deprecating underbelly that is so familiar to Yoni Wolf’s writing.

I don’t want this to descend into a typical blogger over-analysis – where something that is good/true because it is simple/real is intellectualised to become less simple/real, and therefore less good/true – but I do feel this whole idea is an important one. It is the success in capturing this detachment in music that makes Alex G (and other acts in this crowd, Ricky Eat Acid, Matt Cothran’s Coma Cinema/Elvis Depressedly, etc.) such important songwriters. They are amongst the few people who are tackling the current feeling of young people (or Millenials, but that seems to be a frowned-upon buzz word used by authors of think pieces).

The bottom line is that most music (and indeed art) ditches any attempt at tackling this in favour of some form of escapism (be it nostalgia, melodrama, adrenaline, etc.). Those that do try usually use irony to ridicule the situation – the Youtube ‘star’ Sam Hyde and his MillionDollarExtreme videos are a good current example, and there have been many books that aim for the same thing (Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney etc. etc.). The problem with mocking vapidity is that after a while it becomes just as shallow and empty as problem in the first place.

Alex G and his colleagues seem to be doing a bit more. There seems to be an element of positivity, even if that positivity is nothing more than a connection, an appreciation that we are not alone. Even bringing up the emptiness faced by young people risks appearing naive or falling victim to the everything-is-lame ironists (I can imagine this post being made fun of as I’m writing it), so laying things out in a way that is open and halfway-constructive is as admirable as it is important. It’s sort of like saying that yes, sometimes thing are shit, and no, we don’t have any real answers and no one would listen if we did, but we are here feeling the exact same thing as you and that has got to count for something, right?

So, umm… this wasn’t really much of a review, but DSU is a special album and you should buy it. Maybe I’ve got the wrong end of the stick, but if the album speaks to you as strongly as it does to me then it has done it’s job, and the rest is a matter of interpretation.

You can get it on vinyl from Orchid Tapes (currently on its third pressing, after proving hugely popular via pre-order. I can attest that the folks at Orchid Tapes are really nice and throw in goodies like stickers and sweets and teabags), and on a pay-what-you-can basis from Bandcamp. and be sure to check out Alex G’s back catalogue on his Bandcamp page.

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