Fast forward a little under two years and Just Cause are at it again. Just Cause Vol. 2 takes the blueprint of the original and expands upon it. There are over double the number of contributing artists, with an impressive total of sixty three songs from all corners of our current musical moment. Many of the artists have featured on these very pages (some multiple times), including the likes of Ben Seretan, Caitlin Pasko, Erika Dohi, hemlock, Mal Devisa, Michael Cormier-O’Leary, Nico Hedley, Pleasure Systems and Sam Wenc. There’s such a mix of genres, feelings and styles that there truly is something for everyone, and the minimum donation of $10 is brilliant value in anyone’s book.

But of course the compilation is about more than music. It is again raising money for another vital cause. All proceeds of Just Cause Vol. 2 go to the Immigrant Defense Project, who work tirelessly to fight the mass imprisonment and deportation of immigrants in the US. As their mission statement puts it: “IDP has remained steadfast in fighting for fairness and justice for all immigrants caught at the intersection of the racially biased U.S. criminal and immigration systems. IDP fights to end the current era of unprecedented mass criminalization, detention and deportation through a multipronged strategy including advocacy, litigation, legal advice and training, community defense, grassroots alliances, and strategic communications.”

Just Cause Vol. 2 is out now and available via Bandcamp.

Cover art by Aldrin Regina Valdez

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The EP’s title, repurposed from a line said by Elinor to Marianne in Jane Austen’s Sense & Sensibility (“Had I not been bound to silence I could have produced proof enough of a broken heart even for you”), forms the basis of this mission. “Lifting the idea out of the romantic context in which Austen was writing,” we wrote in our preview back in January:

Cormier-O’Leary uses Proof Enough to explore the innate desire to communicate and evidence one’s feelings within a familial setting. That is, to not only display our emotions to those around us, but to prove their validity and depth. The family unit is tight yet hierarchical, bound by figures of authority, though no one version of its life, be that exterior or interior, is more true than any other. Everything, spoken and unspoken, holds an equal significance. Only in the whole can we come to see reality.

Opener ‘Marilyn’ embodies the speculative, narrative-based style Michael Cormier-O’Leary adopts across the release, “blending,” as we continued, “fiction and autobiography to fully capture the cross-generational dynamics at play.” The titular five-year-old protagonist draws new worlds as a way to escape family life, not only evoking a distinctly youthful experience but also holding up a mirror in which older generations might recognise their own deep-seated desires. For adults also long find respite from everyday existence, even if the wish takes a different form from that of their children. The result sees Cormier-O’Leary expertly delineate the gap in understanding between the generations which persists despite shared commonalities. “It’s a story about a five-year-old named Marilyn who escapes into her crayon drawings to block out the noise of her home life and her parents’ desire but inability to do the same,” he explains. “In the song’s outro, there are two restated melodies that oscillate back and forth chromatically, suggesting a family unit out of sync or at least having a particularly bad day.”

This willingness to span the generations continues across Proof Enough, and forms a key part of its compassionate tone. The first song Cormier-O’Leary wrote for the project, ‘Del’ takes its name from his paternal grandfather and delves into the silences which can settle between fathers and sons, picking at the ways in which a failure to communicate represents both difference and, ironically, kinship, and how others ways of signalling closeness might emerge. “There’s some way even though it’s unspoken, that a kind of bond could occur with these two people that can’t really talk to each other,” Cormier-O’Leary explains. “They’re both internalizing the same songs.” Likewise, as with ‘Marilyn’ before it, the track is also able to hold apparently competing emotions simultaneously, recognising silence as a gesture of kindness or forbearance as well as something frustrating and limiting.

Maybe he thinks
Silence means safety
From all the harmful
Words he could say

The rest of the EP unfolds in a similarly nuanced manner. ‘Sky Is Blue’ grapples with mortality, especially the blast radius of death and how it impacts a family unit. The song is delivered from the perspective of the ailing individual and imploring those who will survive them to embrace life after their passing. ‘Gouache’ deals with death of a different kind, a child who breaks with the expectations of their lineage and buries a certain aspect of their identity, while the honeyed glow of ‘Staring’ considers the beauty of transience in order to better appreciate the present moment, however much water has already passed beneath the bridge.

Closer ‘Pressed Flowers’ follows a similar theme, though exists at the opposite end of the spectrum. A song written in the wake of a wedding which looks to preserve the memories much like the activity of its title. An effort to cling onto the most precious of moments which by its very nature evokes the inevitable pull of loss. Notable events like weddings make this experience clear. But Proof Enough demonstrates how something similar occurs each and every day. There are special moments within the mundane which might be lost if we do not make the effort to catch them. And these moments come in a variety of forms, flavours and shades, much like any set of relations. One final reminder, then, that every family is a complicated system, and each individual contributes to its ever-changing shape.

Proof Enough is out now via Dear Life Records and available from the Michael Cormier-O’Leary Bandcamp page.

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Michael Cormier-O’Leary uses a speculative, narrative-based style to delve into this idea, blending fiction and autobiography to fully capture the cross-generational dynamics at play. Nowhere is this clearer than on lead single ‘Marilyn’, a song which follows its five-year-old protagonist as she attempts to escape family life by drawing new worlds of her own. “Marilyn / is off in her own little world again,” goes the opening verse, “where a crayon can / turn us into clowns / turn us inside out.”  Yet this youthful experience serves as a mirror too. It brings into relief the adult longing to also escape life with no more than a blank sheet of paper, as well as the gap in understanding between the generations, as though each is broadcasting on a slightly different frequency. “It’s a story about a five-year-old named Marilyn who escapes into her crayon drawings to block out the noise of her home life and her parents’ desire but inability to do the same,” Cormier-O’Leary explains. “In the song’s outro, there are two restated melodies that oscillate back and forth chromatically, suggesting a family unit out of sync or at least having a particularly bad day.”

Photo by Abi Reimold

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Like all of Greg Jamie’s work, the album is a singular vision, yet that is not to say he did not have help bringing it to life. Guests across the record include Robert Pycior (violin), Elisabeth Fuchsia (viola), Mark Fede (drums), Josephine Foster (backing vocals), Keith J Nelson (clarinet, bass clarinet), Tom Kovacevic (ney flute), Michael Cormier O’Leary (drums) and David Rogers-Berry (additional percussion), not to mention long-time collaborator Colby Nathan (bass, synth, guitar, vocals, and “de facto interpreter of ideas”). Each musician helps Jamie venture out into a world of his own making, slipping between styles and genres with the seamless yet striking logic of a dream. “The strength of Across a Violet Pasture is its intuitive rawness,” as Claire Cronin writes in the album notes:

It’s art made at home; the product of a deep inner life and a personal mythology. And like Greg Jamie’s uncanny watercolor paintings, this record juxtaposes muted, dark backgrounds with shocks of vibrant color. The “violet pasture” of the title evokes a mix of passionate red and cool, sorrowful blue. The resulting purple is mystical and a little extravagant. It’s a color hardly found in nature. And when it is, like the violet flower, it survives only in dappled forest shade. Admired by hermits, fauns, and idealistic weirdos, there’s a secretive, melancholy, and ephemeral beauty to this work.

The true pleasure of such an album is found only in setting off for a journey of your own, immersing yourself in the vast, intricate landscapes, pondering the ambiguous imagery and existential musings over repeated listens. But for now ‘I’d Get Away’ stands as the first leg of the trip. A taste of the wider experience in miniature. The song a small world of its own. “Making [‘I’d Get Away’] felt like a breakthrough for the whole record for me, sonically,” Jamie explains. “It’s sort of a surf ballad about letting go of what you can’t change, and moving on from what is final. Transcendence and fog. Clarity after death. Blow up nostalgia and just be. Check out that slide and drift away.”

Photo by Paige Jamie Bedard, album artwork by Greg Jamie with design and layout by Gordon Ashworth

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Lead single ‘Reward’ comes from 22° Halo, the recording project of Philadelphia-based songwriter and producer Will Kennedy. We’ve followed 22° Halo for a good while, most recently with album Lily of the Valley on Tiny Library Records. An album which “displayed the easy lo-fi nature that Kennedy projects so well,” as we wrote, “small and soft indie pop songs that handle real-life struggles with a shining sense of hope.” Continuing this style, ‘Reward’ makes for the ideal introduction to True Names. Something in its gentle compassion embodies the project’s spirit, Kennedy’s familiar willingness to broach difficulties with empathy and warmth aligning perfectly with the mission set out by Worry Bead Records.

Album art by Sami Martasian

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The Friendship sound has always existed within an ambiguous space. Each release plays as a stagnant dispatch from a world in motion, Wriggins left to pick the bones out of any given moment in futile hope of making sense of his existence. The grand narratives of life—be that love, work, success or self-improvement—are often revealed to be emptier than he had hoped, yet the inverse is also shown to be true. The ordinary, the everyday, that is where the sublime lurks for those with the time or motivation to look.

Caveman Wakes Up promises to delve deeper into this idea, a record which finds the familiar vocals and lyricism supported by Friendship’s most ambitious and exploratory sound to date. The core group of Peter Gill (guitar, synth, vibraphone, vox), Michael Cormier-O’Leary (drums, percussion, piano, organ, synth, vibraphone, drum machine, string and woodwind arrangement), Jon Samuels (bass, synth) and Wriggins (vox, guitar) are supported with occasional appearances from Adelyn Strei (flute, clarinet) and Jason Calhoun (violin), and the result further tests the boundaries between country and its adjacent genres—leaning out across the various schools of folk rock and even further still.

‘Free Association’ is the ideal entry point to this freshly curious sound. “Another one about love and other people and how the only hope we’ve got in the search for meaning is to make it up,” as Wriggins told Stereogum. “The Mellotron sax and voice patch were both jokes that we ended up loving. Also the only song with synth bass. We’re proud as hell of the production.”

Watch the video directed by Zach Puls below:

Caveman Wakes Up will be released on the 16th May via Merge Records and you can pre-order it now from the Friendship Bandcamp page.

Cover art: Matthew Reed, Tenant’s Rights, acrylic on canvas. Design: Daniel Murphy

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Lead single ‘Figs and Peaches’ hints at the depth of Natural Science, as Lindsay Reamer weaves a set of what might appear to be disparate threads into a nuanced picture of humanity’s relationship with the environment. “I wrote ‘Figs and Peaches’ after reading a trail sign about invasive plants somewhere along the Natchez Trace in Mississippi,” Reamer explains. “I learned that Japanese Stiltgrass was first introduced to North America because it was used as packing material for shipments of fragile porcelain in the early 20th century. Stiltgrass is now found pretty much everywhere east of Texas.”

But the stiltgrass is only one such example within this song alone. Reamer offers a wider picture of an environment constantly changing according to human development, something notable for how inadvertent it often proves to be. Like the stories of tropical fish gathering around the recently demolished B. L. England Generating Station in south Jersey. “It’s rumoured that the warm water surrounding the plant attracted fish that might usually migrate south which made it an excellent fishing spot. This all got me thinking about unintended consequences, which is a heavy theme within environmental history,” Reamer continues:

On an individual level, I think there’s something oddly comforting about knowing we can affect the things around us… for better or worse. In this song I’m focusing on the former. This framing makes me feel less hopeless. So, I think this song is about me trying to remember that in my own little life; to be less passive. To reach out, pick my own fruit, and own the consequences instead of waiting for it all to come to me.

A variety of collaborators bring Lindsay Reamer’s sound to life, with Tyler Bussey (guitars, banjo), Artie Sadtler (bass), Lucas Knapp (synthesizers, percussion), Juliette Rando (drums), Will Henriksen (fiddle) and Eliza Niemi (cello) all lending their talents, and appearances from Victoria Rose (vocals), Michael Cormier-O’Leary (drums), Peter Gill (guitar), Frank Meadows (bass) and Jon Samuels (vocals) on specific tracks too. What results is a sound evocative and malleable enough to chart these environmental changes. And, fittingly for a lead single searching for a more active disposition, ‘Figs and Peaches’ seizes the listener immediately with what might be the loudest track on the record.

Gardens on the land
Castles on the beaches
I trust my hand and
Pluck my figs and peaches

It’s what I want, it’s what I want

Watch the video below by John Mitchell and Reamer herself below:

Natural Science will be released on the 16th August via Dear Life Records and you can pre-order it now.

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When writing about In Heaven, we described how the EP arose from a collection of sixteen tracks recorded at Big Nice Studio, with a potential double album shelved in favour of an EP/LP release. A year later, Tuxis Giant is preparing to put out resulting album The Old House, a sibling to In Heaven which both continues and expands upon its themes. With band members Eleanor Elektra (guitar, backing vocals, piano, synth) and James Steinberg (bass, drums, aux percussion) now joined by Michael Cormier-O’Leary (keys), the songs find Tuxis Giant offering a sonic representation of solitude in all of its nuance. The inherent safety in being removed from the wider world is challenged by an inevitable anxiety and loneliness, but there is another complicating factor too. Because the Vermont cabin that was the site of this isolation was where the first Tuxis Giant LP was written back in 2014, meaning the period was haunted not only by the uncertain future but also the all too familiar present. The result was a strangely nostalgic alienation. Or as O’Connor puts it: “Like visiting an old house you don’t belong in anymore.”

The latest single from the record and the song which closes out the release, ‘Daughter of the Pines’, serves as a kind of bookend together with opener ‘The Woods’. It’s a song that presents its surroundings as both hospitable and halfway menacing, where the illusion of familiarity is tested by strange sights and sounds within the Vermont wilderness. “Fisher cats are common up there, and their cries are horrific—like screaming children,” O’Connor explains. “I also remember watching blue smoke floating up the hill toward the house. Still don’t know what that was.”

The sound achieves a similar effect. There’s pleasure in returning to something familiar, and the instantly recognisable Tuxis Giant style offers the listener a sense of comfort. But across Elektra’s spectral harmonies and the needling unease which lurks beneath the arrangement, ‘Daughter of the Pines’ reveals its more sinister edge. The sense of things working against us, or else blind to our wishes and needs, and the terror such forces can bring. Because while this is ostensibly a view of one person in Vermont, the image is held as a mirror of a national picture. Where unknowable things are spreading their wings.

blue smoke
climbed up the hill
like water in reverse
it scared me shitless
I saw the devil’s wings
stretch over America

Album artwork by Sami Martasian, layout by Louis Roe

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The latest offering in Antiquated Future‘s ever-reliable Selected Songs series, Somehow We​’​ll Grow Into Some Overlapping Oak offers a glimpse into the fluid, experimental world of The Binary Marketing Show. The Portland, Oregon-based project has welcomed various members into its fold across over two decades, and this release focuses on the period headed by duo Abram Morphew and Bethany Carder. A time in which the pair created music the label describe as “existing on the outskirts of experimental pop, indie electronic, singer-songwriter, and electro-acoustic composition,” where the line between the familiar and strange is blurred by an immersive blend of homemade instruments, synths, bass and found sounds. Though only representing a snapshot of this style, single ‘Daydream (I Cannot)’ is as good a place as any to enter into this world, offering a sound somewhere between Trouble Books and Cloud Cult in its experimental yet emotionally engaging tone.

Divorce Court – 140

The music of Divorce Court stands as a representation of its creator Lynden Williams’s subconscious, its rich and often hazy soundscapes able to evoke the smallest of distances alongside deceptively cavernous crescendos. The ideal vehicle to explore all things introspective. With new album Two Hours coming later this year, lead single ‘140’ introduces this style with an indirect examination of how therapy and psychedelics helped to restore Williams’s inner child. “No one in your corner / Days almost over,” Williams sings, though the loneliness is counteracted by the vivid sound and the transportive secret inherent within it. That the subconscious is a world of its own, and escapism is possible no matter where you might be trapped. “Your body’s a safe place,” as Williams continues, “Eyes closed and melt away.” Watch the video directed by Trevor Free below:

Two Hours will be released on the 8th July. ‘140’ is available now from the Divorce Court Bandcamp page.

East Forest x Peter Broderick – Landscape

Written and recorded during a stay in County Clare’s karst/glaciokarst landscape known as The Burren, Burren is a new collaboration between multi-genre artist East Forest and composer Peter Broderick. The pair met for the first time in person during the period and arrived with no plan beyond an openness to the surrounding landscape. What emerged is both a testament to the chemistry between the two artists and the striking climate in which they were housed. Single ‘Landscape’ offers a glimpse into the folk-inflected ambient soundscapes they created, managing to convey the fine beauty and fierce drama of the Irish environment as Marissa Radha Weppner’s spoken word vocals add to the mystery of the scene.

Lisa/Liza – Held Together

Under the moniker Lisa/Liza, Portland, Maine songwriter Liza Victoria makes what we have previously described as “deliberate, unhurried songs made in the image of nature’s patient rhythms […] that examine how surrounding landscapes are tied to our most intimate emotions and memories.” In April, Victoria returns with Breaking and Mending, her first full-length since 2020’s excellent Shelter of a Song, again on Orindal Records. Written while working through chronic illness and the heavy legacy of past trauma, the record captures what Victoria describes as her “emotional landscape in the last two years,” and lead single ‘Held Together’ introduces these themes with tender beauty. Constructed of picked guitar and softly crooning vocals, its a song about weathering changing seasons of an internal nature, about holding on for metaphorical buds of spring.

Maruja – Kakistocracy

With a thunderous amalgamation of punk, post-rock and jazz, Manchester‘s Maruja have been winning fans with a sound at once menacing and cathartic for a while now, and debut EP Knocknarea looks to only further their standing. New single ‘Kakistocracy’, AKA ‘rule of the villains’, throws listener into the deep end of the Maruja style, a general sense of foreboding escalating across its length with desperately yelled vocals and driving drums and eventually unhinged sax too. What results is something both crushing and transcendent, like some great rough thing slouching towards us with a decidedly sublime doom.

Knocknarea is out now and available on streaming services.

Michael Cormier-O’Leary – Letter From Alan

Following 2021’s More Light!!, multi-instrumentalist, songwriter & Dear Life Records founder Michael Cormier-O’Leary has a new album on the way later this spring. Titled Anything Can Be Left Behind, the record is a wildly creative meditation on constant change and the bonds of perceived identity. Utilising unexpected melodies, liberating improvisation and a mélange of fact and fiction, it explores life’s oddities and uncertainties in inquisitive and good-natured style, turning up the contrast until every story pops with colour. Nowhere is this more apparent than on latest single ‘Letter From Alan,’ a bouncy indie pop song which, as its title suggests, details the correspondence between two friends. It’s funny, inventive and as one line puts it “a bit surreal and a little mundane,” and somehow feels all the more true because of it.

His letter said:
“It’s your friend Alan
Greetings amigo
From Pamplona, Spain
Didn’t run with the bulls
If that’s what you’re thinkin’
I can get crazy
But I’m not insane!

Mike Tod – The Coo Coo

Described as “a wry and raspy tenor that sings well-worn traditionals,” Canmore, Alberta musician and ethnomusicologist Mike Tod has dedicated his life to ushering old-time folk music into the present day. Next month he will release a new self-titled album, and has unveiled single ‘The Coo Coo’ to whet appetites. Originating in the Scottish borders, the song traversed the Atlantic and was popularized by Ramblin’ Jack Elliott on the rodeo circuit in the forties. Tod’s version is wonderfully dark and ominous, transforming it from cowboy song into something of a psychological horror tale. “If you listen closely to the lyrics of the song, they really are quite horrific,” he explains. “You have all the elements of a horror film: Living on the fringes of society, obsession, potential addiction, loss of love, loss of life.” The video, animated by Molly Little, follows the story using a crankie, a form of storytelling popular at the turn of the twentieth century. Check it out below:

Mike Tod will be released on 13^th April. Pre-order a CD or LP now via the Mike Tod website.

O Slow – Two

The recording project of Brooklyn-based multi-instrumentalist Jacqui Miranda, O Slow is a dream pop project which draws its beauty and ambiguity from the real world. Shaped by Miranda’s time within a religious cult during childhood and her travels across California by train, the songs evoke both internal and external environments with all of their strange nuances intact, as typified by single, ‘Two’.  A track inspired by Miranda’s favourite freeway which allows itself to bask in nostalgia for specific times and places even if the context now loaded onto such periods is less rosy in retrospect. A sign of O Slow’s willingness to sit with conflicting ideas in order to better represent a lived truth—you can still long for something, even if it no longer means what it once did.

Summersets – Afterall

Small Town Story, the forthcoming album by Ontario duo Summersets, has echoes in the history of its creators. Kalle Mattson and Andrew Sowka, who themselves met growing up in Sault Ste. Marie, decided to tell the story of two fictional individuals brought together by chance, following the relationship from this origin to its eventual climax. “I was really interested in telling the story of a relationship across a collection of songs,” as Mattson explains. “Changing perspectives and spanning milestones, both big and small, over the course of a lifetime.” At turns melancholic and hopeful, lead single ‘afterall’ is a great snapshot of the feeling of the album’s style, a song which finds the characters some years down the line with a break-up between them, hinting at the golden threads of reconciliation which will see the relationship continue on through.

The years pass on by
One by one, out of sight
Still there was you & I
The years passed on by

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As well as being a part of Friendship and 2nd Grade, JR Samuels has a made a name with his experimental, improvised releases, as captured by 2019’s In Brend on Dear Life Records. “An eight-song album of improvised guitar that exists for no purpose beyond enjoyment and intuition,” as we put it. “Ambitions are dropped, artistic ideals and intent left behind, the songs allowed to flow.” Out next month on Lily Tapes & Discs, Spasm sees Samuels push further into this intuitive space, delving deep within himself and presenting whatever he finds, unfiltered and in real-time. What emerges is an at times dense, undeniably strange record, though one somehow more human for its refusal to shape itself for mass consumption. Listen to the short single, ‘Wearing a Groove’, below.

KT Laine – Again

Drawing inspiration from contemporaries like Big Thief and classics such as Judee Sill, KT Laine is a songwriter from Victoria, BC who is soon to release her debut full-length Knock Knee on Victory Pool. New single ‘Again’ is the perfect introduction to the nuance of her work, its warm fondness complicated by uncertainty, lending the track an inscrutable air which never quite reveals its hand. ‘Again’ centres on a relationship in some kind of turmoil, its pieces pushing apart, though it is never quite clear if the longing at the track’s heart wants to reconnect these parts or sever the ties for good.

‘Again’ is out now and available from Bandcamp.

Langkamer – Total Motion

We last featured Bristol‘s Langkamer back in May, when we wrote about their single ‘Soul Bucket’, what we described as “a bit of folk, a bit of indie rock, a ton of playful personality.” Now Langkamer have announced a brand new EP on Breakfast Records. Titled Red Thread Route, the record promises to expand on the band’s signature combination of slacker era indie rock and easy country-influenced melodies, albeit with a few surprises up its sleeve. Lead single ‘Total Motion’ is a great introduction, its twisty, loud-quiet dynamic giving way to an anthemic singalong chorus. Willie J Healey provides guest vocals, one of several guests of the EP seemingly cherrypicked from Bristol’s music scene. Check out the video by JJ Jarman and Jimmy Taylor below:

Red Thread Route comes out on 30th November via Breakfast Records. Pre-order it now from Bandcamp.

Leggy – Lipstick on the Mic

We first covered Cincinnati‘s Leggy back in 2019, describing how the innate tension of single ‘Taffy‘ offered “a tautness that always appears on the verge of snapping.” While the rambunctious punk rock style of that track has been swapped out in favour of something more languid on new single, ‘Lipstick on the Mic’, the sense of building pressure remains. This time a sensuous combination of desire and frustration, the song sitting on the knife edge of pleasure and pain yet wrapped within a hazy shawl. A sense of remove which allows a view into the paradox of the situation even as it plays out. “I love to be alone,” as the chorus puts it, “why do I live to be in love?” Check out the suitably sultry and surreal video by Twenty Twenty Productions below:

‘Lipstick on the Mic’ is out now and available from the Leggy Bandcamp page.

Levi Thomas – Shasta

The title track of the third album from Oakland‘s Levi Thomas, ‘Shasta’ is a song seized by the sublime scale of the American West. “The neons fade / To the pink cascade / And right now I can’t feel a thing,” Thomas sings. “The sun don’t rise / Under wild skies / All the shit just starts to shine.” The revelatory experience is captured with a decidedly seventies style, equal parts classic country and cosmic psych which invites the listener into the moment, never losing control of its relaxed rhythms despite everything.

My mind left my body north on the five
And I feel like the last man alive

Macie Stewart – Defeat

Released on Orindal back in 2021, Macie Stewart‘s Mouth Full of Glass was a journey in solo creation after a career of collaboration. The sound of “an artist surveying their own inner workings through considered and open-ended exploration,” as we put it. “Leaning into solitude as a medium of discovery and learning from all that has occurred before without ever becoming beholden to the past.” The album is getting a new release next month via Full Time Hobby, and has been expanded to include two new singles. One of the tracks, ‘Defeat’, is a direct confrontation of the stresses of working with others, warning of the dangers of overcommitting and how it can end up withering the very creativity is should foster. Stewart takes on all the instrumentation on the song, with the exception of flutes from V.V. Lightbody, and sings with the calm of a lesson learnt. “Composing a word to take back the meaning,” she sings, “I promised my best and that’s not what I’m giving.” Watch the video directed and edited by Sid Branca below:

‘Defeat’ is out now and available from Bandcamp., and the expanded edition of Mouth Full of Glass is available from Full Time Hobby.

Michael Cormier O’Leary – Heard From The Next Room

To describe the work of Michael Cormier O’Leary takes some time. From the playful warmth of last year’s solo album More Light!! to the almost fragile intricacy of Hour, not to mention his work in Friendship, Cormier O’Leary spans the full spectrum between free and controlled. Out next month of Lily Tapes & Discs, new solo release Heard From The Next Room moves completely toward the former, an exploratory, spontaneous collection of improvised piano compositions recorded on a single day earlier this year. The resulting two pieces live up to the release’s title in their unguarded charm, following the haphazard rhythms of the moment without any sense of outside audience, and thereby capturing an easy comfort only possible at home. Hear an excerpt from the first below:

Volunteer Department – Swell

Back in September we wrote about ‘Make It Easy‘ by Nashville‘s Volunteer Department, the first track from a forthcoming release on Like You Mean It Records. A scathing track with vocals “barely more than a whisper,” we wrote, “almost unpalatably bitter in [its] acerbic tone.” Latest single ‘Swell’ might possess a brighter rhythm, but thanks to the wry and fatalistic songwriting, the sour tone remains. “I’ll cut my fingers off and mail them to France,” sings Oliver Hopkins, “at least then some small part of me won’t be stuck here arguing the ins and outs of something which has no shape.”

Wayne Graham – How Was Your Night?

With new album ISH on the horizon via K&F Records, Wayne Graham have shared one last single as a final taster of what to expect before release. Primarily the project of brothers Kenny and Hayden Miles, the Whitesburg, Kentucky outfit wrote a new album in the years since previous record 1% Fruit, though decided to change course for what would eventually become ISH. What emerged was something more intimate and ambitious, drawing on science, fiction and scripture to search for meaning in this strange world. ‘How Was Your Night?’ not only opens the album but poses the question which hangs over everything which follows.

Don’t you know I’m not alright?
Can’t you taste my mind?
Just trying to make it through the night,
no reason and no rhyme

ISH is out on the 11th November via K&F Records.

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