Hailing from California and now based in Glasgow, Alvidrez is a composer and writer who works at the intersection of faith and defiance. Album Antiphon, coming next month on Memorials of Distinction, is built around their renunciation of American evangelicalism, its mix of folk, ambient and drone both reaching back into the past and presenting an epiphanic present. Lead single and opener ‘Hymn For The Corner’ is the perfect example, its rich yet hazy sound conjuring the softened fog of memory, yet its core holds the immediate sense of bright revelation. The old dogmas might have revealed themselves hollow, but Alvidrez is here to show wonder exists beyond the orthodox.

tired of heaven
tired of chemtrails
signing the papers
for a house in this dark land
no one could tell me
how to sing all my songs
it’s a hymn that will show me
that I’ve got it all wrong

Any Other – If I Don’t Care

Any Other, the recording project of Italian singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and producer Adele Altro, will release their third album stillness, stop: you have a right to remember later this month on 42 Records. Latest single ‘If I Don’t Care’ serves an encapsulation of their idiosyncratic sound. “This song is about me learning to let go of things that make me angry,” Altro explains, “both personal and societal stuff. It’s reasonable to be angry about inequalities, but at some point you need to distance yourself from that stuff just a little, otherwise it will impact your mental health in an even more negative way.” But anyone expecting a song full of calm wisdom couldn’t be more wrong, with Altro reaching this newfound understanding via a mixture of frustration, impatience and defiance, all bound together to reach an urgent, building catharsis. Watch the video below, produced by 42 Records and EDERA (Milan) and directed by Giulio Rasi, with art direction by Cecilia Grandi.

stillness, stop: you have a right to remember will be released on 26th January via 42 Records. Pre-order a copy from their webstore.

Astrid Sonne – Boost

Later this month, London-based Danish composer Astrid Sonne will release her third record, Great Doubt, via Copenhagen label Escho. For an artist who has made a name in experimental and ambient fields, the album represents something of an evolution, adding vocals and beats for the first time in a foray into the realms of arty pop and contemporary singer-songwriter styles. Latest single ‘Boost’ is one of the record’s instrumental tracks, but the beats are front and centre, charging things with an energy fitting of the title. “I made ‘Boost’ lying in my bed, it’s a quite energetic track coming from a not very energetic place,” Sonne describes. “There’s a sense of release to Boost and a feeling of not caring too much, which can be good sometimes when you need to seek out new settings.”

Fela Dakota – Pour Your Soul

Describing themselves as “a trapeze artist of the midnight-thoughts,” Fela Dakota is a singer-songwriter from Bath whose work smoulders with intensity. Released by Folk Boy Records, ‘Pour Your Soul’ is their debut single and a bold introduction indeed. Built on a minimal background that evokes a dark and cavernous void, Dakota’s vocals arise from this abyss with a combination of romantic grace and tortured fervour, swinging from a quivering whisper to a full-throated roar that lights up the negative space with incandescent feeling. The result is an arresting song that falls somewhere between lament-like hymn and desperate cry into the night.

‘Pour Your Soul’ is out now via Folk Boy Records.

Loic Moonmattress – Sleepless in Eugene

Released as part of the Sunseekers collective, ‘Sleepless in Eugene’ is the title track of a new three-song EP by Edmonton artist Loic Moonmattress. Effortlessly straddling ambient, hip hop and folk styles, the song blurs the line between personal intimacy and wide open space, channelling that strange nocturnal headspace where everything is at once immediate and reflective. Such a liminal space speaks to the themes of the song too, which finds its narrator in a kind of limbo—between youth and adulthood, love and loneliness, consciousness and dreams. “I finished [the track] alone in Whitby, Ontario and very far away from the places and people that inspired it,” Loic Moonmattress explains. “I think of it like a letter to those places, those people, and those times.”

Malachi Graham – Spare Me

With album Caretaker on the horizon, we’ve featured Portland, Oregon-based songwriter Malachi Graham several times in recent months, most recently with single ‘Wonderful Life‘. Another example of Graham’s willingness to delve into the uncomfortable corners of personal relationships to better illuminate the love and suffering therein. Latest track ‘Spare Me’ is no less affecting, a song described as a “relationship meditation and post-mortem” which rakes the coals of a toxic relationship to find both pain and complicity. The work of Malachi Graham doesn’t emerge from its investigations with simple findings or much by way of comfort, and feels all the more authentic as a result.

Middle Sattre – Hate Yourself to the Core

We’ve been anticipating Tendencies, the upcoming record from Austin-based outfit Middle Sattre ever since single ‘Pouring Water‘ had us making comparisons to Sufjan Stevens and Typhoon. Follow up ‘Stop Speaking‘ was no less evocative, with lead Hunter Prueger drawing on the experience of growing up queer in the Mormon church to castigate the cruelty of conservative voices. With the album set for release next month, Middle Sattre have returned with another single which challenges such poisonous influence. Namely, ‘Hate Yourself to the Core’ explores how no-one escapes from such an environment untouched, with pernicious views sinking into the subconscious no matter how differently you might feel. “I think a lot of people have a hard time understanding internalized homophobia,” Prueger explains. “There’s this idea that if you’re gay, then you can’t be homophobic. I wanted to write a song that very clearly lays it all out and explains how this can happen.”

Watch the video below, directed by Maya Lam with performance and choreography by Stephanie Shin:

Tendencies will be released on 9th February. Order it now from the Middle Sattre Bandcamp page.

Mol Sullivan – Goose

We previewed GOOSE, the forthcoming debut full-length album by Mol Sullivan back in November, with ‘Still Tryin’, introducing an exploration of a nascent sobriety. “[The single] uses a hushed, bruised style to welcome the listener into a raw period of life,” as we wrote, “but there’s a glimmer of something else too, a newfound freedom to move towards some better future. Set deep in those early days of a new beginning where everything feels possible yet tenuous and a little too vivid to bear.” With the record out later this month, Sullivan has returned with the title track to not only further develop the themes of personal introspection but introduce the spirit guardian that lends the album its name. It starts bright and folky, but soon slides into tricky complexity, emotions captured perfectly with the tense and idiosyncratic chamber pop instrumentation.

Am I a swan or just a goose
I’d bet the latter, grab my purse
it’s not so difficult a choice
between a joker and a fool
without giving them a voice
do you want an ocean or a pool?

Watch the video by Andrew Spohn below:

GOOSE is out on the 26th January and you can pre-order it now.

Sailor Honeymoon – Bad Apple

After winning comparisons to The Ramones, Kim Gordon and Bikini Kill with debut single ‘Cockroach’, South Korean punk trio Sailor Honeymoon have returned with new track ‘Bad Apple’. The song is the first teaser of a debut EP pencilled for release in the spring on Seoul and London-based label Good Good 굿굿. The band’s entire ethos revolves spontaneity and freedom, offering a sense of ragged, fun abandon as the perfect antidote to the dominant force of K-pop and the pristine polish it champions. ‘Bad Apple’ is an ideal entry point for the uninitiated. A raucous song which stares down a bigoted ‘friend’ without so much as a flinch. Watch the video directed by Kim Taeyoung below:

‘Bad Apple’ is out now via streaming services.

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This spring, the band put out two standalone singles with Memorials of Distinction that hinted at this newly vibrant sound. The first Porridge Radio songs to be recorded in a studio, the songs feel like both the end product of a band that have put in the hard yards, cutting their teeth with live shows, and the first steps into a new era where Margolin and co. are more fully-equipped to realise their artistic visions.

“The song displays a newfound clarity,” we wrote of ‘Give / Take‘, “the weirdo lo-fi bedroom pop vibes replaced with sharp and confident melodic pop.” But most importantly, the switch sees not a hint of betrayal of their DNA. “Best of all,” we continued, “this evolution is managed without sacrificing any of the emotional intensity that made Porridge Radio so great in the first place,” opening up an avenue of possibilities and representing a watershed moment in the band’s life.

Today the band release a video for ‘Give Take’, directed by Dream Wife’s Bella Podpadec, which probes further into the strange and tactile world of Porridge Radio, a dissociated cool juxtaposed with bright colours and absurd imagery. Despite a playfulness that veers between a decidedly 90s goth teen angst and even more 90s kids TV show bustle, mortality lurks behind every frame, as well as a bodily squash of flesh and fluid. “The video,” Popadec explains, “is a juicy exploration of messy polyamory, messy fruit, sex, death and that your pals and music are just as important as any of that shit.”

Indeed, the video helped to further develop exactly what the song means, even to Margolin herself. “We had a lot of fun with it, but we also had some big honest conversations about what the song was about,” she says, “and I think that openness translated into something really exciting and quite raw, and I love how it turned out.”

‘Give / Take’ is out now via Memorials of Distinction, as is the other stand alone single, ‘Don’t Ask Me Twice’, and you can buy them both from Bandcamp.

Photos by Christopher Fenner

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But that’s not to say Porridge Radio, now a four-piece lead by founder Dana Margolin, have been laying low. Instead they’ve played lots of shows, and gained a reputation for live performance both locally (in Brighton and London) and beyond. New single ‘Give / Take’ is therefore a landmark for Porridge Radio. Not just because it breaks a 2+ year drought, but because it’s the first recorded in a studio.

And it really shows. The song displays a newfound clarity, the weirdo lo-fi bedroom pop vibes replaced with sharp and confident melodic pop. Best of all, this evolution is managed without sacrificing any of the emotional intensity that made Porridge Radio so great in the first place.

Margolin describes ‘Give / Take’ as a track “about desire and confusion and being a robot with constantly changing emotions,” and “also about learning how to know what you need, how to ask for it, how to take it,” a fact confirmed as she sings the lines:

And how do I say no?
And you do as you’re told
And how do I say no?
And I say what I need

It’s a very exciting step forward for Porridge Radio, and it leaves us eager to see where they go next.

‘Give / Take’ is out now via Memorials of Distinction and you can get it via Bandcamp.

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Speaking of language, every track on the debut Or Sobre Blau album, The Piri Piri Samplers, is named after a Portuguese phrase with a strong Catholic theme. The album was recorded in a studio in Alto São João, Lisbon, which just so happened to be opposite a large graveyard. “They remind me of the bleakness in that cemetery,” Leonard tells The Line of Best Fit of the songs’ titles, “the weird perseverance of its dark, devout language over people that are dead and structures that are in ruin.”

That thought serves as a good introduction to the record. These instrumentals are more akin to something put out by Lost Tribe Sound than the usual Memorials of Distinction fare, abstract soundscapes that crawl with claustrophobic drones and wiry guitars that come skewering to the fore from amidst a sense of atmosphere and tension. It’s like the soundtrack to some Euro acid western, playing against a backdrop of stoic hawks wheeling above the baked Iberian earth.

There’s a depth to ‘Do Menino Deus’, a kind of stereoscopic experimental track that pairs landscape-wide ruminations with picked guitar that feels a lot closer, like unseen creatures scuttling in the nearby scrub. The whole album continues like this, Serra and Leonard using their guitars to probe and search, creating something that’s unique in the way it combines the tense and the explorative, the ominous and the beautiful.

There’s wonder too in how the tracks are constructed, seemingly clashing guitars coming together in waves of constructive interference, creating a swirling whole that feels a lot more than the sum of its parts. Guitar is used as an atmospheric foil (‘Da Madalena’), as small blipped flourishes (‘De Passeio Pelo Alto De São João’), and even as pseudo percussion (‘Da Nossa Senhora Da Conceição’). ‘Mártires’ brings all this together in the album’s uneasy masterpiece, guitar as both taut mosquito-whir and deep moaning calls, evoking the feeling of watching strange lights flitting between moon-lit tombs, perhaps remnants of the martyrs of the title.

The Piri Piri Samplers is an impressive album, and one guaranteed to sound unlike anything else you’ll hear this year. Serra and Leonard make an odd couple, but as Or Sobre Blau proves, that can make for great music. “What do you find in the middle of noise and harmony?” asks label Memorials of Distinction. “A very old question, really. We know that the answer is usually endearing and a little tragic, like a bad translation.”

You can get The Piri Piri Samplers on cassette tape or name-your-price download from the Memorials of Distinction Bandcamp page.

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Like most Memorials of Distinction releases, Allison’s Gate makes music built on a sense of loneliness, dissociation and pain. But that doesn’t mean it’s not beautiful. It’s art that feels weary and bruised but somehow defiant, creativity as both an outlet and a remedy. As the title suggests, Waves / Bona Fide can be split into two parts. Comprising of the first five tracks, Waves has the ethereal, submerged vibe of Grouper, what Memorials of Distinction describe as “the lulls and flows of abstracted noises, delays and flutters, tender vocals flitting in and out of audibility.” The eerily affecting opener ‘Glass Bed’ sets the tone, an instrumental that plunges us into a strange and shadowy world that’s not quite our own.

When they do appear on ‘I Should Go’, the vocals are run through effects so as to be made strange, as if emanating from the shifting walls of a dream. There’s a similar effect on ‘Infatuation (up and down)’, its layered vocals ringing out like the indistinct cries of yearning ghosts, while ‘January’ is all electronic bubbles and glitches beneath the billowing curtain of McPhail’s wordless voice.

The final three songs are Bona Fide, tracks that are more conventional in structure, the murky nature of Waves seared away by uncontainable feeling. It begins with the title track which simmers with sardonic rage, the repetitive guitar line woozy and hypnotic as McPhail calls out a “bona fide piece of shit.”

There’s a slower start to ‘Leave the Lights on’, which recalls Yowler in its stark and spacious sound, but things soon become shot through with feeling as the vocals rise in waves that crash around the thin thread of guitar at the song’s centre. Finale ‘Traces’ closes out the album with urgent lo-fi guitar and a breathless and desperate stream of lyrics. Think emotional pop smash hit but at the bottom of a pond at midnight. It might be the strongest song on the release, and means next year’s proper full-length can’t come soon enough.

You can get Waves / Bona Fide on a name-your-price basis via the Memorials of Distinction Bandcamp page.

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A new volume will be posted every few weeks and will offer a collection of really great songs that we’re determined not to let slip past our radar.

Kraków Loves Adana – Rapture

The second single from upcoming full-length Songs After The Blue, ‘Rapture’ sees Kraków Loves Adana perfect their slightly weird and fully nostalgic brand of pop music. The project of Hamburg-based duo Deniz Cicek and Robert Heitmann, the sound here is one of ominous romance, as though working emotions loose from the past, exploring the strange spaces and film-grain footage of sun-bleached tapes, their contents at once dark and neon-lit, love and heartbreak entwined into cinematic spectacle.

“Tell me what’s next
Tell me what’s best
Put a cassette into the tape deck

Gotta play it for me
Hear the voices weep
Let the sad poets sing me to sleep”

The single comes complete with a fantastically fitting video by Wy’s Ebba Ågren, which also fulfils the slightly weird/fully nostalgic criteria:

Songs After The Blue is set for release on the 6th April via Better Call Rob. In the meantime, be sure to check out the first single ‘American Boy‘ too.

Cool American – Focus

Following up 2017’s excellent Infinite Hiatus, Portland’s Cool American are back with the latest instalment of their better luck next year series, which collects the b-sides and demos that didn’t fit on the full releases. That, however, does not mean a dip in quality. As ‘Focus’ attests, the differences between these songs and those on Infinite Hiatus are just stylistic, swapping out the runaway energy for something a little more languid and dreamy. Therefore the band get a chance to flex their musical muscles and try out some different formulae, and in doing so explore other faces of the millennial ennui they are making a career exploring.

better luck next year: vol 3 is out on the 16th February via Good Cheer Records and you can pre-order it now from Bandcamp. The first and second volumes, as well as Infinite Hiatus, are available there too.

Bucolic – Blue Tree

The recording project of New Jersey’s Seth Carpenter, Bucolic makes music combining dream and bedroom pop to create something at once downbeat and uplifting. Taken from a forthcoming EP, Glow Worm, ‘Blue Tree’ serves as a great introduction for those new to his sound. Opening with a an emotional sparseness, the Carpenter’s vocals enter to portray a kind of detached regret, as though too sad to properly register the loss. Or else, the Bucolic sound is one so used to the idea of regret, so rooted in the melancholic way of things, that the loss becomes proof of something, using time passing as a way to remember what we still have left.

Glow Worm will be released in March so keep an eye on the Bucolic Bandcamp page.

There’s Talk – Give It Up

The latest single of Oakland’s dreampop trio There’s Talk, ‘Give It Up’ is the opening track of a new EP, bathed water moon. The title of the release feels pertinent, because if ever a string of three near-abstract words could describe the There’s Talk sound then it is this—ethereal and lightweight yet hiding a darker side, the bright face of Olivia Lee’s vocals masking some cold, desolate flip-side, of which her melancholic style seems all too aware.

You can pre-order bathed water moon now from the There’s Talk Bandcamp page, including lovely 7″ vinyl edition complete with an art print and pin badge.

Doomking – I Laid the Prairies to Rest

We featured Doomking, the recording project of Victoria-based musician Jordan Soles, back in 2015 upon the release of their album, A Mark of Something No Longer In Existence. We described the album as “a release very much of and for our times,” with a “mixture of impassioned sentiments and general despondency shrouded in a haze of confusion,” all fuelled by the fracturing of human connection as we increasingly move contact online.

Stripping things back from A Mark of Something, Doomking’s new single ‘I Laid the Prairies to Rest’ feels like the aftermath of the previous album. With the last thrashings of resistance all but ended, an insulated sense of isolation has taken over—sparse and lonely and poignantly pretty, the prairies committed to sound.

‘I Laid the Prairies to Rest’ is available now from the Doomking Bandcamp page.

Airium + Double Honey – Concrete House Of Dreams And Pools

A collaboration between producer Airium and vocalist Double Honey, ‘Concrete House Of Dreams And Pools’ is a rich, expansive electronic pop song inspired by the work of David Hockney. Here, the honey-thick vocals and soaring instrumentation are coloured by an over-arching melancholy, a kind of life-affirming gloom that descends as the sun sets over a city. Indeed, the vocals and instrumental brightness fade into the night-time solemnity, so that the closing stages play like the sun’s dip below the horizon, replaced by shadows and blinking neon.

Airium + Double Honey can be found on Soundcloud.

The Saxophones – Just You

Back in October we told you about ‘Aloha’, the new single from California’s The Saxophones, a track which we described as “both sad and somehow not… like gentle moonlight glinting across a tropical bay.” We also mentioned that the b-side was a cover of ‘Just You’ from the Twin Peaks soundtrack, and the band have now released this into the world too. As we expected it’s pretty much the perfect material for The Saxophones, unfurling in a ways that’s equal parts sultry and strange.

Get ‘Aloha’ from The Saxophones Bandcamp page.

Jelani Sei – LVNDR TWN

Released last autumn, LVNDR TWN was the latest genre-bending release from Hartford’s Jelani Sei—combining r&b, indie rock, pop and soul, as well as mathy flourishes and a sprinkling of a Dirty Projectors-esque oddness, to make a sound that’s as entertaining as it is unpinnable. If, like us, you are late on this one, then allow ‘Divinity’ to win you over. Starting sunny and driven forward by a strong drum beat, the subverts the pop genre by refusing to settle into any familiar pattern, the style, tempo and vocals changing at will to create a thriving collage of musical goodness.

LVNDR TWN is out now and available from the Jelani Sei Bandcamp page.

Why Dogs Why – Linus

Why Dogs Why is the recording project of Alex Johnson from Northridge, LA. Formed after his previous outfit Bedbugs ceased toward the end of 2017, the moniker will be used by Johnson for a series of singles, one every two weeks until the summer. Mixed by Derek Ted, ‘Linus’ is the first such track, detailing a bittersweet opinion of suburban life in the San Fernando Valley that manifests as an agoraphobic terror. As such, ‘Linus’ is a frantic panic of a song, racing with anxious statements and a certain volatility, as if the whole thing might come apart at the seams at any given moment.

Grab ‘Linus’ now from the Why Dogs Why Bandcamp page.

Tree House – Nonsense

Tree House, the project of London resident Will Fortna, released his debut EP, Into the Ocean, back in September on Memorials of Distinction Records. We missed the boat at the time, but a recent video for the EP’s opening track, ‘Nonsense’, gives us the perfect opportunity to catch up. The song exists on the smoother end of the bedroom pop spectrum, minimalist grooves undulating behind Fortna’s gently sighing vocals. The video is equally dreamy, a video collage featuring doves and lizards and pastel-hued clouds.

You can get Into the Ocean from the Memorials of Distinction Bandcamp page.

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Viewfinder is the recording project of Joel Burton, the latest addition to the Memorials of Distinction roster. Burton makes music that straddles many genres, but is probably destined to rest finally in the bedroom pop bracket. According to the label’s bio, his latest album was made during a period of personal upheaval. “After disbanding his Edinburgh based noise-rock band and dropping out of university”, it reads, “Joel Burton returned home to London disillusioned. Using cheap synths, an FX unit, and some multi-track cassettes as his compass, he set about re-discovering how to write songs with subtlety and meaning.”

The result is Born Ticking, an album that may not be instantly recognisable as “bedroom pop”, in the original Orchid Tapes-led definition, but ticks all the boxes in terms of pure self expression. It’s part slacker rock, part lo-fi pop, part post-post-punk with some rickety, almost country-style nostalgia thrown in. Add to this lyrics that read like the paranoid poetry of a listless wanderer and your getting close to the Viewfinder style. A straightforward mope record this is not.

The title track, one of the album’s strongest, makes this clear from the off. A beautifully meandering song with echoes of Mazzy Star and the languid folk rock of Nap Eyes, this is an opener loaded with vague but significant turns of phrase and a sense of cynical fatalism.

“some nasty spirit mixer
drunk in the church
so far has it come
so deep has it sunk
and buried beneath
all the crap and the junk
that funnelled itself
from the sky since the start
into the mouth of the babe freshly bawling
born ticking”

In comparison, follow-up ‘Money’ is from a different universe, a bold and brash descent into some weird, wobbly weekend, where wide boys stumble upon a briefcase stuffed with fifties and trip out in a mixture of fearless delight and creeping paranoia. The track is the first sign that Viewfinder doesn’t intend on playing by the rules, at least not those set by anyone other than himself. Much of the album feels personal in this way, painted in broad and instinctive brush strokes, with an almost free associative approach to themes and imagery. ‘Vibrations’ is like a twisted ‘Parklife’ for the Twenty-First Century, the spoken-word vocals full of Millennial angst and crippling self-awareness, the narrator becoming increasingly panicked and clammy before descending into blazing insect-induced madness.

There are also two instrumental tracks on the the record, which, instead of offering brief respite, feel as urgent and necessary as any of the other tracks. ‘Instrumental 1’ is all elegant piano and shuffling drums and croaky horns, all the while maintaining some intangible sense of unease. The second wheezes slowly into life, eventually opening with sparse piano and the unfurling clatter of drums.

‘Instant Moonlight’ is another standout, a down-tempo lo-fi indie pop song that despite its sprawled and exhausted misanthropy (“you didn’t ask to be born” goes the opening line), somehow sparkles with some kind of positivity. The effect is like seeing a divine image in the burn mark your cigarettes have left on a battered sofa, or some symbolic order to the constellations of bargain beer cans that litter the carpet. Closing track ‘Nightime Rider’ is sparse and clear, Burton’s vocals ringing with newfound clarity over muffled drums and subtle electronics, building throughout into an almost devotional bright-white glow.

With Born Ticking, Viewfinder has not only shown why bedroom pop is such an important genre, he’s also challenged just what the tag entails and in the process epitomised why we champion DIY artists. The album takes a melting pot of influences and creates something entirely new, something that’s difficult to put into words. Yes, it’s a record borne out of feelings of confusion and imperfection, but it somehow works through these struggles simply by presenting them in a raw and unique way. As MoD put it, “There is melancholy, sadness, and a rumbling undercurrent of anger—yet creeping out of Born Ticking’s meditative tape-hiss is a profound sense of hope.”

Born Ticking is out now and you can get it on cassette or name your price download from the Memorials of Distinction Bandcamp page.

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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.

Peach Club – The Bitch Diaries
(RIYL: punk, rock, lo-fi)

Pet Cemtery & Henoheno & Brittle Brian & Francie Cool – Split
(RIYL: bedroom pop, sad music, lo-fi)

Porridge Radio – Rice, Pasta and Other Fillers
(RIYL: lo-fi, bedroom pop, carbohydrates)

Post-Trash – Volume Two
(RIYL: compilations, bedroom pop, indie rock)

Psychic Shakes – Psychic EP
(RIYL: lo-fi pop, chilled out vibes, down-tempo beats)

Ratbath – Dead Skin Cells
(RIYL: bedroom pop, folk, sad)

Ravetank – Wasting Your Life From 9-5
(RIYL: alternative, pop, lo-fi)

Real Swell – everything else is terrible!
(RIYL: lo-fi, experimental, lo-fi pop)

Rhucle – Rustic Lullaby
(RIYL: ambient, mindfulness, field recordings)

Ryan Tanner – Promised Land
(RIYL: folk, Americana, country)

Ryder Eaton – Peach Pit
(RIYL: folk, lo-fi, experimental)

Saint Clementine – If We Are Falling / I Wish I Knew What You Did Last Summer
(RIYL: indie rock, lo-fi, pop punk)

The Saxophones – If You’re on the Water
(RIYL: ambient folk, dream pop, alternative)

Sea Offs – Sea the Blind
(RIYL: ambient, folk, dream pop)

See You At Home – The Future’s Here and It’s Terrible
(RIYL: indie, emo, dream pop)

Shalash (or, ШАΛАШ) – X
(RIYL: ambient, drone, compilations)

Skittish Arm – The Dog EP
(RIYL: ambient, drone, experimental)

Soccer Mommy – For Young Hearts
(RIYL: bedroom pop, lo-fi, indie)

Svelte – svelte EP
(RIYL: post-rock, noise, shoegaze)

Swell Tone & Z Tapes – Summer of Sad
(RIYL: bedroom pop, sad songs, compilations)

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

The post Favourite Free Music of 2016: P – S appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Galloping drums herald the entrance of ‘Danish Pastry Lyrics’, a song that updates the morning routine of Blur’s Parklife for 2016, all twitchy self-loathing and existential woes:

“the first thing I can do
when I wake up in the morning on any given day is say hello
I am alive
but I do not do this
I stumble out of bed confused and upset
that the world exists
and so do I”

‘Lemonade’ has a sassy drumbeat and cooing vocals, a track that, at least at first glance, sounds more lo-fi pop than punk and probably the sunniest two and a half minutes on the album. ‘Barks Like a Dog’ opens in near silence, the almost a capella vocals creeping from the gloom, eventually climbing out and becoming increasingly frantic, with twanged guitar and crescendos of percussion and harmonic background vocals joining the desperate lead.

Then there’s a rumbling lo-fi take on Daniel Johnston’s ‘Walking the Cow’, Margolin’s disaffected vocals adding a hefty does of irony compared to Johnston’s signature childlike croon, and ‘Can U Hear Me Now?’, an epic seven-plus minutes of clattering catharsis, descending into the album’s heaviest moments as Margolin repeats the same lines over and over, by the end in little more than a howl.

“I am talking to you
I wish you were here
Can you hear me now?”

‘Sorry’ is a lo-fi pop song about finding yourself at the bottom of a hole (“There’s one hundred ways of dealing with this shit / but I think i’ve only got the energy to cry”), while ‘worms’ sounds a lot brighter, at least on the surface, and ‘And I Was Like’ is a messy and fun pop song about birthday girls in birthday worlds and cringing at your mother when she get her genre labels mixed up. Closer ‘Eurgh’ snakes into life, a soft love song which gradually builds into something less than romantic, the refrain of “don’t be a jerk” repeated a few times too many for the narrator as she tries to erect a barrier between herself and her would-be other

“Don’t touch me I’m afraid of feelings rushing back in
God knows you know how to make me feel like shit and
God knows I know how to make myself feel sick and
God knows how long it took me to get over it”

You can get Rice, Pasta and Other Fillers now on cassette or name your price download via Memorials of Distinction or the Porridge Radio Bandcamp page.

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Well today we bring you a stream of Jake Rollins’ contribution to said compilation. If you are unfamiliar with his work, Rollins is a Boston-based musician who makes lovably lo-fi indie rock. As we said in our review of his album Spend a Few, Make a Few, “[He’s] the kind who makes music because it’s lots and lots of fun, which… is as good a reason as any to do just about anything”.  ‘Figure It Out’ is no exception, a vaguely tropical surf rock/Brit pop hybrid smothered in reverb, the vocals swimming through the instrumentation to give a gloriously languid long summer feel, where problems are indistinct things that only carry weight in the distant future.

Sentimental Journey is set for release on the 20th April and you can pre-order it now from the Memorials of Distinction Bandcamp page. There are only 25 cassette available so be quick! For more of Jake Rollins, check out his Bandcamp page.

The post Song Première: Jake Rollins – Figure It Out appeared first on Various Small Flames.