“When I was young living with my parents, my mother would be worried about my mental state because of the music coming from my room,” Faurholt explains. “One album I listened to again and again was Sophia’s sadcore masterpiece Fixed Water. Indeed the music was gloomy, but to me it felt like a warm soothing blanket, and it resonated in me. ‘Comforting Sounds’ is a salute to the music that has meant so much to me over the years.” In the song’s lyrics he name-drops the bands that form what he calls the soundtrack of his life. “Galaxie 500, Low, Red House Painters,” slowcore/sadcore heavyweights that nevertheless provide comfort rather than desolation.

The mood is therefore downbeat but coloured by an overriding fondness. The kind of melancholy you can wrap yourself in. The tempo is heavy and unhurried, surrounded by a sense of homemade silence that recalls Down Colorful Hill-era Red House Painters. But, in spite of that, its not a dark song per se. The overwhelming feeling is one of grateful nostalgia, the lasting message a positive one. “Do you think music can save your soul?” Faurholt asks, before affirming, “I think music can save our souls, at least it did for me.”

When the Spiders Crawl will be released via Raw Onion Records in the second half of 2022. You can get ‘Comforting Sounds’ now from the Jacob Faurholt Bandcamp page.

Artwork by Nadia & Polly Faurholt

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This month sees Derek Ted return with a brand new EP, KEEP TRYING, and the opening singles suggest it is the most developed, fully-realised release to date. With a cordial acoustic sound that rises into something more assertive, ‘w h i s p e r s’ is a deceptively powerful track that packs more into its two verse, two minute run time that you might expect.

A similar effect is conjured by ‘better than u think’, its bright and candid style underpinned by simplicity yet allowed to roam with subtle synth textures and electric guitar. The rhythms of the track are pitched between reflective and urgent, capturing both the remove of retrospection and the persistent immediacy of love now lost, occupying the strange no-man’s land between breaking up and moving on.

If you’ve always had this place in my life
where you been?
If you’ve always known it’d be like this
then why pretend
I know you better than you think
I know this dance across the water
I stood there n watched wreckage sink
I see her walking past the altar

Until night brings a haunting voice inside my mind
collapse in just to pull apart & redefine

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With its simple arrangement of acoustic guitar and vocals, ‘My Nightmare’ is an intimate folk song that balances vulnerability and strength. Without the distraction of instrumental embellishment, Raggedy places the onus on the earnestness and feeling of the vocal delivery, finding a happy medium between confessional bedroom pop and a traditional country twang. Alongside the emotion and longing sits something more intense, the vocal style belying a forceful tone that borders on violent.

While again relying on the simplicity of acoustic guitar, ‘Brainwash’ is altogether more dreamy and wistful, the track haunted by wordless harmonies that swoop and swirl in the background. If ‘My Nightmare’ utilised lyrics to create feeling, then ‘Brainwash’ relies far more on atmosphere, the words not as important as the ambience into which they are released.

You can find Raggedy on Soundcloud and Spotify.

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The record, which has now been released, is not a bona fide concept album, though is dedicated to the Easbey’s late best friend Steven Roman Gonzales, and is built around voicemail recordings of his words. With plain simplicity lended weight by hindsight, the samples anchor the thematic resonance of the songs and provide a counterpoint to their frustration and confusion. This is an album about loss, yes, but more than that, it is a testament to the quiet joy of friendship. As Max Burke describes in the press release: “The existence of Roman is a direct rebuttal to Gonzales’ skepticism from years before—a meticulous, candid and tender exultation.”

After the poignant opening sample of Gonzales in ‘Radio Silence’, ‘The Freshman’ breaks out with a wistful energy, Gonzales’ words haunting the lulls in instrumentation, and the growing ‘Boston + Santa Cruz’ applies a tender restraint. The tracks set the tone of the record, where loss is matched by an equal and opposite sense of luminosity, as though for all of the suffering, the shining truth of the relationship—that it was challenging and special—refuses to fade to black.

As we described in our preview, ‘Ballad of Indifference’ is a “slow burning slice of lo-fi rock, the smoulder eventually drawing flame which quickly transforms into a hectic blaze of emotional release,” and follow up ‘Swim in Oceans’ “bursts into life from the ashes” in a rattling frenzy that brings to mind No Age. Though employing different strategies, both tracks are a testament to the transcendent catharsis of movement and energy, as though to register pain as motion and noise is to make it more manageable, less opaque and enveloping.

Representing something of a centrepiece for the record, ‘Healthcare’ approaches this idea most directly. Opening with Gonzalez’s uncomfortably direct questioning of Easbey’s dedication to making music, the song develops into a slow-burning love song that’s shows a strange blend of critical and caring that only love can offer, putting to bed the prior accusations in a kind of tortured, elated retrospection.

The spacious beginnings of ‘Dust’ herald the most patient and understated track of the record, every promise of crescendo or breakdown never quite coming to fruition, and, despite its clear heft, follow-up ‘Ghost’ could be described in much the same way. Rising from ominous feedback and marching drums that bring to mind The Twilight Sad’s unsettling rhythms, the track has a magnetic pull that drags Easbey’s vocals toward what is surely a climactic breakdown, though again the song plateaus before this precipitates.

To crown the album, The Phone Booth offer ‘Comfortable’ as one final epic simmer, where conflicting emotions—confusion and certainty, fondness and loss—centre on the final moments of palliative care. If the simplicity and forthright nature of the lyrics bring into relief the reality of the situation, then the soaring sound shows reality in all of its human depth and fervour, a desperation that will never end, impermanence as the everlasting experience.

Roman is out now and you can get it from the Phone Booth Bandcamp page.

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As with previous releases, the record offers a beguilingly casual brand of slacker bedroom pop, the languid tones so laid back they are near horizontal. The relaxed vibe extends far beyond the music itself, with elements of life and its background noise leaking into the songs, making them feel like authentic snapshots of specific moments in time.

And an interesting time at that. As opener ‘Cool Yeti Air’ hints, Dye Xanh came into being as Haya travelled Nepal, and his surroundings ooze through the tracks so that we are travelling with him. Be it the aeroplane intercom announcement upon landing in Kathmandu of the opening track, or the ambient birdsong that underpins the lush lo-fi shuffle of ‘Casio Thorn’, Sky Mata is a project rooted in the experiences that inform it.

The template is not only immersive but constantly surprising. Take ‘Temple Sky Salt’, a playful, understated pop song where Haya croon in wistful tones, though one which lurches into a higher gear toward a frenetic conclusion. ‘Way Home Bktpr’ finds inspiration in the bedroom pop stalwarts, offering a quivering vulnerability, though soon morphs into psychedelic textures, while the pure tones of ‘Lark Song’ have a devotional aesthetic, as crisp and crystalline as Himalayan air.

Dye Xanh is out now via Citrus City Records and you can get it from Bandcamp.

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To get us all further hyped up for the album, today we have the pleasure of unveiling a music video for ‘Why Blue’. In our last post we described the track as “part throwback pop, part shoegazy indie rock, with an uncanny habit of finding tempo and melody when you least expect it. Just as things seem to settle into a somnambulant shuffle, driving drums kick in and the song rides a little eddy of energy to somewhere entirely new.” The result is something equal parts fun and sad, twin emotions tied together in nostalgic fuzz.

The video, directed by Jeff Kardesch, captures the vibes of the song beautifully, hazy images of shadowy ripples, dead flowers and an obscured protagonist floating across the lens like scenes from a dream. The paradoxical lo-fi-yet-vivid aesthetic is perfect for the Frankie Valet sound, as is the simplicity and authenticity of the footage, the home-video filter lending a wistful edge that marks the track as a whole.

Check it out below!

stop apologizing is due for release on the 31st August via It Takes Time Records, pre-order it now!

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From the echoey and gentle melancholy opening of ‘Ride On’, to the bummed out surfy vibes of ‘I Refuse to Say Goodbye’, Suburban Pets have crafted an album of considerable diversity, one that’s simultaneously strange, sad and stirring. There’s a fine balance between nostalgic emotion and playful invention, the former keeping the latter in check and vice versa, meaning that the ultimate tone of the record is difficult to pinpoint. Rather, the spirit of Suburban Pets is fun and emotion intertwined, a twist that comes to look a lot like life itself.

Today we unveil Life in a Citycar in its entirety a few days ahead of release. Hit play below to check it out. Standouts include ‘Yellow’, with its devotional organ-style synths and yelled backing vocals, an understated epic conjured from a quiet apartment floor, and the aching, glittering slo-mo synth pop of ‘Dracula’s Lament’, the lyrics stretched and pulled into entracing shapes, like a low-lit hall of mirrors. Also, be sure to to spend some time with the gentle strum of ‘Candy’, which slowly becomes wrapped up with cooing vocals and dreamy guitar lines, forming a gauzy shimmer of song, a moment of peace and respite, like a thin morning mist soon to be burned off by summer sun.

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After the success of Friends, the folks at Good Cheer have decided to look back into the Boreen catalogue and re-release their first album, Cartoons. The aesthetic of this record is altogether rougher, though the lo-fi sound pushes the same qualities of earnestness and connection, the songs inspired by the experiences of a young loved one mourning the loss of a close friend. In order to cope, they had turned to Disney movies, and O’Sullivan explores the idea of escapism through a mixture of live/toy instruments and field recordings.

The result is somewhere between Mt. Eerie and Alex G, the mundane captured in stark detail and woven into something altogether more fantastical. From driving a car to take a walk to the Youtube-induced miss of Halley’s Comet, O’Sullivan’s writing is rooted in the banalities of every day, banalities which either require escape or become escape tactics themselves, once viable distractions transmogrified into a prison of their own making. As such, despite the dreamy sound and sincerity of the emotions, a sense of dissatisfaction permeates the record, an itch that no cartoon or weed or sugary snack can quite scratch. And through this, Boreen avoid any accusations of being silly or twee, the childlike naivety not some affected front but rather a genuine attempt to preserve some sense of joy in a world where loss is all around.

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Opener ‘magnet’ begins with a hesitant wistfulness, unfurling gently and slowly to a warm ambient hum. The mood is crepuscular, late evening or early morning, the air shot pink and dusky and moved by sedate breeze. ‘crying in the carwash’ is altogether darker, though no less colourful, a dream walk through a neon-city, where a persistent sense of sadness follows at arm length. With it’s empathetic take on melancholy, the track conjures Broken Social Scene’s  ‘Anthem for a Seventeen Year-Old’, the sense of loss almost it’s own comfort, a blanket within which to warm before the future rewards you with something better.

‘anthem for healing’ takes a more expansive approach, a song of self-empowerment that rises into great, soaring spikes of sound. “You will not silence me,” Loefke repeats, the synths increasing in pitch as her vocals disintegrate into wordless yelps and guitars cut across the noise. ‘we have a dream’ picks up with a more restrained tone, a hushed strangeness cloaking the track before the final third reaches something warmer, before the lush swathes of synths that herald closer ‘beginning’. Loefke’s vocals emerge within pockets of space that mark the almost sci-fi futurism off this noise, before both aspects unite for the transcendental finale.

heart demos is out now and you can get it from the Pendulum Girl Bandcamp page.

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January opens with ‘intro’, an 80-second lo-fi instrumental that builds from a careful beginning into a searing guitar and gentle handclaps, before ‘You Know What the Last Song is Going to Be’ introduces Hoey’s vocals behind searing guitar and slapped drums. Final track ‘Half and Half’ is the most substantial, a indie rock song that rounds off the release in gloriously DIY style, a rousing end to a great little collection.

You can get January now on cassette or digital download via the Reflective Tapes Bandcamp page. It’s actually the first release in a Special Moves monthly “cassingle” series, and has already been followed with February, a live recording of three more DIY rock songs.

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