“A song which shows how the age-old themes of work, loss and responsibility are as much a facet of contemporary folk as any other era.” That’s how we described ‘Platform No. 12 (Old Friends)‘ last summer, the first taste of David James Allen‘s forthcoming album Potpurri Jubilation. The Prince Edward County, Ontario-based songwriter and multi-instrumentalist “writes classic country songs,” as we continued, “full of aching longing, wistful reflection and undying hope, as well as a small cosmic twist,” and latest single ‘By Your Side’ further cements these sensibilities ahead of the album’s release later this year via Littleknown Records. “There’s something in the way that she loves me / that keeps me warm through the coolin’ of the night,” Allen sings in the opening lines, immediately pulling the listener into the warmth and fondness of the track. An ode to the safe harbour of a significant other, where calm might be found no matter how stormy the outside world might prove. Tune in and allow the pressures of work, money and self-doubt to dissolve, if only for a while.

Fugue State – We Are Lasting

The new collaborative project fronted by Northampton, MA-based composer, producer and engineer Dan Langa, Fugue State refuses the typical distinction between solo project and traditional ensemble. An outfit which treats collaboration as its own form of compositional methodology, Langa practising what the press release describes as “an obsessive cultivation of studio recordings with a rotating cast of musicians, transformed into spectral, unrecognizable forms.” Released to celebrate signing with Switch Hit Records, and featuring vocalist Maia Friedman (Dirty Projectors, Coco) and VSF fav Erika Dohi on piano, single ‘We Are Lasting’ provides our first glimpse into this new world. The style draws on Langa’s wealth of experience across music, film and multimedia, as well as the sensibilities of its collaborators, though also follows the direction the present moment suggested. “That improvisation became the foundation, and we slowly built everything on top of it,” as Langa describes. “This was the first track that really found its identity, and I often found comfort in it during the creative process—whether for inspiration or just a moment to breathe.”

Gia Margaret – Everyone Around Me Dancing

“A picture of solitude not as some lonely retreat but rather the path towards recognising the wider connection of things. That sweet dark warmth of the whole world.” That’s how we described Gia Margaret‘s 2023 album Romantic Piano, a collection of careful, considered compositions which held a kind of melancholic curiosity for its surroundings. Now Margaret is gearing up to release her much anticipated follow-up, an album titled Singing coming via Jagjaguwar this spring, and opening track and lead single ‘Everyone Around Me Dancing’ suggests a continuation of such themes. The record might be the first to properly feature vocals since 2018’s There’s Always Glimmer (the consequence of illness, as we covered when reviewing Mia Gargaret), but it is far from a simple reversion to a previous mode of working. Rather, Margaret considers every lesson learnt through the difficult process, the resonance of every person she has ever been. The vocals might have returned, but Singing understands something greater. The voice is only part of who we are. There are deeper ways of communicating.

Watch the video directed by Catherine LoMedico below:

Singing will be released on the 24th April via Jagjaguwar and you can pre-order it now.

Little Lungs – The Heat

Little Lungs is a Baltimore folk rock project led by songwriter Leena Rhodes. With Brendan Russell (bass), Eli Simms (drums), Ricky Schwarzenberg (guitar) and an assembly of other friends and collaborators in support, Rhodes creates soundscapes inherently intimate yet often sweeping too. Songs personal, compassionate and often affirming, driven by equal parts warmth and energy. Next month, Little Lungs will put out the full-length album The Heat, and Rhodes and co. have shared the title track to establish the mood and themes of the record. A typically emotive track build around Rhodes’s vocals and the braid of tenderness and strength they are able to evoke. “Face down against the bed frame / You woke to the fire alarm,” she sings, in an opening snapshot that captures the vulnerability on display throughout.

Mary Ocher – The Narrative (First Movement)

“Has roots in the early twentieth century, both in terms of the minimalist sensibilities and the overarching themes, but it is impossible to think of the intra-war period of the 1900s without hearing ominous echoes of the present day.” So we wrote of Mary Ocher‘s forthcoming album Weimar back in January. The challenging, politically-charged album was introduced by lead single ‘The Dance’ (what we called “a mournful dirge for that which is slipping through our fingers”). And now Ocher has shared taut, plaintive new single ‘The Narrative (First Movement)’. Though it is perhaps the video which will earn the most attention. The expressionist piece is by Boris Eldagsen, one of the first ‘reputable’ artists to explore the possibilities of AI who nevertheless carries a strictly critical approach to the nascent medium (back in 2023 Eldagsen refused the Sony World Photography Award after winning for an AI-generated image). Whether this self-awareness might justify the use of such artistically disheartening technology is still very much in question, and personally we’d query whether the video achieves anything which might be unobtainable via more organic means, but if nothing else it fits into Ocher’s overall project in its willingness to push into uncomfortable places and ask the audience to examine exactly how they feel.

Weimar will be released on 13th March and is available to preorder via Bandcamp.

Miserable chillers – Bikeman

“I’ll be the bike, man / the basket and the bell / the breath before I fell / Open skin up to the air / my mouth to taste the day.” So sings Miguel Gallego in the opening lines of ‘Bikeman’, the delightfully smooth and strange introduction to Miserable chillers‘ latest album, Innocent victims, coming soon via Baby Blue. The New York-based composer and artist has covered plenty of ground with the Miserable chillers project over the years, moving from devotional to danceable and back again, or else occupying both moods simultaneously. But the uniting spirit across all releases has been one of curiosity, a mood delivered in sleek, eighties-adjacent pop that allows Gallego to push into surreal territory without losing an anchor to real life. With its anthropomorphic bicycle, ‘Bikeman’ might be the perfect encapuslation of the Miserable chillers aesthetic, and one which whets appetites for the full release.

Natalie Jane Hill – Colors

Natalie Jane Hill‘s forthcoming record Hopeful Woman is one of our most eagerly anticipated releases of the first half of this year. A collections of ten modest but supremely assured songs that explore love in its many facets. Hot on the heels of ‘Never Left Me’ and ‘I Thought Love Meant’, Hill has unveiled a third track, ‘Colors’ another richly imagined but still down to earth rumination on romance. “Simply put, ‘Colors’ is a love song- specifically about the beginning period of falling in love with someone,” Hill describes. “But it’s also about having a better understanding on personal boundaries and not losing yourself entirely in the potential of something new. It’s being able to enjoy the colorfulness of it, while leaving space for the mystery, too.” The song has a fittingly Spring-like feel, tender like new green shoots and ripe with a glorious sense of possibility.

Old Man of the Woods – Edges of Pleasure

Taken from the album Tendrils, Old Man of the Woods‘ most recent single ‘Meditation’ was “a self-described  ‘breathy, minimal ritual'” as we wrote in 2025, “[a song] which performs its own form of transubstantiation, taking a desire which might otherwise appear absurd and changing it into something charged and devotional.” Miranda Elliott appears to have taken such a style to heart, because new album Cape Perpetua sees the Seattle-based artist embrace aesthetics both religious and ecological to push their ambient avant-pop into an increasingly sacred terrain. Elliott intends to release a track every week, building up to the full release in March, and opener and single ‘Edges of Pleasure’ highlights the meditative style. A song of swirling layers which draws on the choral accumulation of Gregorian chants to conjure something that’s at once otherworldly and fundamentally present.

Turner Cody – Recognize a Friend

In a present milieu where country songs are as likely to be about Disneyland and Pepsi as heartbreak and whiskey, St. Louis-based songwriter Turner Cody shows that the traditional and alt forms of the style can coexist. Out via Capitane Records, latest full-length Out for Blood has all the thematic concerns of the giants of the field, mining the American psyche to explore ideas of freedom and fate, individualism, sin and salvation in a way which would make Van Zandt proud. Yet, as songs like single ‘Recognize a Friend’ show, there’s a playfulness within his style too. An idiosyncrasy which, by way of Prine, allows Cody to sit as comfortably next to his alt-country contemporaries as the old masters. The narrative of the track is a familiar one. Ordinary man Billy finds himself gradually growing despondent as he drifts from youthful optimism into the doldrums of normal living. The personification of an entire demographic which finds itself slipping out of its countercultural pep.

Watch the video below, directed and shot by Cam Kennedy, with editing by Ben Chace, co-direction by Ben Chace and color grading by Thomas de Hemptinne:

Out For Blood is out now via Capitane Records and you can get it from Bandcamp.

The Yum Yum Tree – Shine

It has been nineteen years since Georgia-based indie rock outfit The Yum Yum Tree released their last album Paint By Numbers, a hiatus long enough to make even the most optimistic fans fear for the future of the project. After all, the band have other things to think about, not least lead Andy Gish who has spend over two decades as an ER nurse, as well as working in harm reduction. But good things come to those who wait, and this April will see The Yum Yum Tree return with brand new full-length Turn Down the Noise, an album which builds upon the foundations of its predecessor while proudly displaying the extra wisdom, self-awareness and emotional bravery which comes with near enough twenty years of living. Single ‘Shine’ embodies the spirit of the release, packing that nineties-flavoured indie rock punch while showing a newly unguarded, introspective personality. “Shine is about wanting something that doesn’t belong to you,” as Gish explains, “being able to sit with that and still wanting the best for them.” Watch the video directed by Katherine Lucas below:

Turn Down The Noise will be released on the 10th April and you can pre-order it from Bandcamp.

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Back in May we wrote about Turn Around For Me / See You Soon, the new double single from Glasgow‘s Constant Follower ahead of their anticipated second album The Smile You Send Out Returns To You, coming early next year via Last Night From Glasgow. “[Stephen] McAll and co. breathe extra life into the arrangement,” we wrote of ‘Turn Around For Me’, “and the song swells with an affirming rhythm which tips it towards indie rock territory.” The follow-up ‘See You Soon’ is no different. A continuation of the band’s exploration of memory which draws on the concept of saudade—the nostalgic longing for some absent person or thing—the song captures a picture of everyday life as haunted by a missing piece. Something which can never be resolved, a wound which will go on hurting.

Jordan Whitlock, Memory Spells – Heaven and Here

Back in February, we wrote about the collaboration between songwriter/producer Jordan Whitlock and Matt Bauer‘s Memory Spells, describing single ‘Take My Hand’ as “Suffused with the lush, shadowy grandeur of Lynch at his most romantic.” Now the duo have returned with a brand new single ‘ Heaven and Here’, another impressively atmospheric piece of cinematic pop music. Combining ambient and classical elements with Whitlock’s piercingly poignant vocals, it has all the drama and aching emotion of a tragedy. Sombre strings ache and sway over glitchy atmospherics and the muted thump of percussion as Whitlock delivers lyrics that possess a spare and opaque poetry.

Wildflowers bloom
Bend toward the sun
I follow you out through the waves
Nothing between
Heaven and here
Only the words I couldn’t say

‘Heaven and Here’ is out now via streaming services.

Lutalo – Ocean Swallows Him Whole

Following on from 2023’s AGAIN, a record which explored the various forms of oppression woven through our societies, Lutalo is returning this September with debut full-length The Academy on Winspear. Described as a time capsule of lessons learnt in their first chapter of life, the album sees the Vermont-based singer-songwriter delve into their past and invite the audience along for the ride. Single ‘Ocean Swallows Him Whole’ uses the doomed figure of Icarus to capture the peaks and troughs of this journey, drawing an energizing momentum from adrenaline rush, even if it comes from a fall.

Watch the video by director, cinematographer and editor Rich Smith below:

The Academy is out on the 20th September via Winspear and you can pre-order it now.

 Melanie MacLaren – Heaven Is

A song she says is “about a lot of the myths and imagery we’re fed about the afterlife,” ‘Heaven Is’ is the latest single from Nashville singer songwriter Melanie MacLaren. Delivered in an easy country-pop style and with equal helpings of bittersweet feeling and wry humour, it combines existential musings with observations altogether more terrestrial. So heaven becomes both “a place up in the air” filled with lost loved ones and something in the here and now, like “sipping beer in folding chairs,” or “eating fruit straight off the vine.” “[‘Heaven Is’] is about the experience of how deconstructing those myths leads to reality check that we really have no idea what happens,” MacLaren describes, “besides that we leave, and everyone else does too.”

Heaven is the place where the dead girls go
Heaven is the place up in the air
Heaven is a place i don’t think about much
But I’ll have to one day I’m aware

‘Heaven Is’ is out now via streaming services.

Miserable chillers – Great American Turn Off

Miserable chillers has made a name with an idiosyncratic, constantly inventive sound, following a myriad of creative directions from Kate Bush-esque art pop to SNES soundtracks and field recordings. A mixtape featuring recordings made between 2018 and 2024, Great American Turn Off not only personifies the spirit of Miguel Gallego’s work, but serves as the ideal introduction for those looking to dive in for the first time. The release functions best as a full entity, rewarding those who take forty minutes to lose themselves in its easy rhythms, but we recommended single ‘The Shaft’ for anyone who needs a quicker dose.

Great American Turn Off is out now and available to hear in full here.

Molly Murphy – Seabird

Specializing in what she calls “lo-fi folk tunes summoned from the Blue Ridge and set loose in New York City,” Molly Murphy makes bright and emotionally resonant folk music. Her latest single is a cover of  The Alessi Brothers 1976 song ‘Seabird’. Complete with vocal harmonies, subtle mandolin and slide guitar, it’s a lush and laidback take on the original. Murphy’s vocals take centre stage, confidently but vulnerably delivering lyrics that use the imagery of the titular bird covering vast distances of remote ocean as a metaphor for distances altogether more human. “Like a lonely seabird,” Murphy sings, “you’ve been away from land too long / Oh, too long.”

Old Amica – Tiden far

Described as a release about time, Old Amica‘s ‘Tiden far’ sees the Swedish project turn their attention memory, looking to invoke how we experience the past, where the amorphous drift comes to form strange patterns and meanings. As such, the single is suitably hazy and slow-moving, its drama arising from a concealed hand as though always masked by something. Familiar sights and sensations as experienced through a gauze curtain. Old voices coming through a crackling radio, messages moving through the accumulated years with something to offer us yet.

Shady Baby – Feel It

Following a couple of singles in 2023, Brighton garage rockers Shady Baby are back with a brand new single, ‘Feel It’. Comprising of Sam Leaver (vocals, guitar), Nick Varnava (bass) and Tom Jackson (drums), Shady Baby draw on late 90s and early 00s alternative rock, and ‘Feel It’ is no different. A rich,  enveloping wall of sound is punctured by energizing electric guitar and crisp percussion, with enough hooks to appeal to the radio and festival circuit and enough grunge to bring in the rock-heads. All this raw energy is used to explore feelings of agitation and doubt. “‘Feel It’ started off as a song about grappling with impatience,” says Leaver, “but along the way it evolved into exploring the uncertainties of new relationships.”

‘Feel It’ is out now on streaming services.

Special World – Cloak in the Attic

This month saw Special World, that’s the solo recording project of Philly‘s Andy Molholt (who you might know from Speedy Ortiz), released their debut physical release with a self-titled collection. Described as ‘early’ songs, the cassette provides a peek into the inventive and often idiosyncratic style of the Special World sound, something demonstrated by the single and opener ‘Cloak in the Attic’. Starting with a glass smash but progressing with a lethargic rhythm, the song slowly crawls over the listener and absorbs them into its peculiar world. A place often strange and always colourful, where the light bends in odd shapes and everything takes on the loaded, abstract logic of dreams.

the cloak in the attic is hidden
obscured by a flowering gem
where is the proof?
no fumes left to reduce
cannot refuse a bargain which i cannot lose

night after night we misconstrue

Stelth Ulvang and the Tigernips – Dissolve

Described as “a visceral journey through the late-night mental crumblings of summer, capturing the essence of spontaneity and sincerity,” ‘Dissolve’ is the first single from Stelth Ulvang’s upcoming self-titled album, Stelth Ulvang and the Tigernips. Ulvang might be best known as the pianist for folk sensation The Lumineers, but has long pursued a variety of creative outlets, and the new album is something of an antidote to radio-friendly anthemic polish which has come to mark The Lumineers sound. ‘Dissolve’ is our first glimpse of a collection of songs which instead leans into the vulnerable and raw side of things, allowing Ulvang to show a slightly stranger but altogether more authentic side to his work.

YULLOLA – Silk Nightdress

At the end of last month, Maine songwriter and producer YULLOLA released Zen Maiden, a brand new record that exists in an unreal world of its own. Direct, pop-inflected indie rock songs sit next to cinematic spiritual jazz segues and dreamy spoken word sections. All of which makes sense when you understand where the album came from. “This year I truly was considering becoming a nun whilst getting obsessed with vocal inflections of kulning and female Bulgarian choirs,” YULLOLA describes, “spending hours in the forests of Maine just making sounds.” Opener ‘Silk Nightdress’ is the perfect introduction, a spoken word track with all the shimmering unreality and dark cinematic romance of Twin Peaks at its most melodramatic.

Zen Maiden is out now and available via the YULLOLA Bandcamp page.

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In the intervening years, Gallego has pushed the Miserable chillers project in new directions, from a full soundtrack for totally 100% real SNES sleeper hit to an album based entirely around field recordings taken inside an apartment. Written during a baking kick, latest single ‘Wild Ferment’ takes its inspiration from fermentation, namely how life and decay are so inherently tangled together. For a process of transformation can come to form its own kind of preservation, and sometimes change is the only way to avoid losing everything altogether.

Bubbling up In these long dark days
I change my form so I won’t disappear
For what leaves and what slips away
Our only test is to somehow find a taste

Cover art taken from the ‘Splendor Solis’

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In many ways the record feels like a culmination of Gallego’s creative journey and confirms the transition of Miserable chillers from a lo-fi indie rock project to a fully fledged baroque pop endeavour. Gallego emphasizes the formative effect of afternoons spent listening to Prefab Sprout, Clube da Esquina and Kate Bush, and the diversity of these influences shines through—highlighting how he is not content for Miserable chillers to be just another bedroom lo-fi band. Gallego called upon the help of several collaborators to realise this ambition, including Jeremy Stoddard Caroll on pedal steel, Isaac Gillespie on guitar and Sarah Goldfarb on cello, as well as backing vocals from Megan Braaten, Kabir Kumar and Lele Dai.

Opener ‘Saga’s Sword’ could have been beamed in from some lost era of the 80s, upbeat guitar and slapped percussion juxtaposed against Gallego’s sombre vocals and a background lattice of poignant synths. Indeed, the music of the Eighties is a definite point of reference across the record. Take for example the high-summer easy groove of ‘La nave del olvido,’ the smooth vulnerability of ‘The Glass,’ or the  slow-burning but richly layered odd-pop closer ‘Antipodes,’ all of which hark back to bygone era while still sounding very much of the here and now.

Thematically, Audience of Summer draws on multiple sources, both cultural and personal. A complex tapestry is woven, one capable of exploring personal growth and the passage of time, and interrogate humankind’s relationship with the natural world. Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is a big influence, particularly on songs which find Gallego meditating on his upbringing in suburban New Jersey and the not-so-wild nature that surrounded him. Despite ostensibly being pop songs, Audience of Summer borrows Dillard’s sense of stillness, her appreciation of the seasons and insistence on careful observation of one’s surroundings.

‘Calendar for Annie’ is the most obvious example (opening “i pressed the peach to get a feel for time”), but others follow the theme more subtly, and it ends up being the takeaway of the record. Built upon a field recording from East Williamsburg, ‘City of Eyes’ is the perfect example, finding Gallego ruminating inwardly while observing the city he now calls home. “All the lordly idiot light,” Gallego and Braaten sing, a nod to James Agee. “In the morning, this summer in the city of eyes / that’s what’s making me cry I guess.”

Audience of Summer is out now via Baby Blue and you can get it from the Miserable chillers Bandcamp page.

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Tracklist:

Act Of – I am Fungus
Static Animal – See You Around
Skirts – Brite Boy (Alex G cover)
Space Mountain – Cloud
Alexander – Going To Sleep
German Error Message – Murmuring
Thelma – Take Me To Orlando
Jeffrey Silverstein – Make Yr Peace (And Have It Too)
camp counselor – museum of broken relationships
Spartan Jet-Plex – Stop
Lala Lala & Why? – Siren 042
Shrimpwitch – Leerers
Sir Babygirl – Flirting With Her
Spielbergs – Five On It
Stella Donnelly – Lunch
Mentalease – Avert a Gaze
Priests – The Seduction of Kansas
Mike Pace and The Child Actors – Hazy, Hot & Humid
Swim Camp – Circle K
BURLY – Kent Lame
Miserable chillers – Cider Palace
Imp of Perverse – Tripping Thru a Hallway On Fire
Go Fever – Olivia
Polyan – Dan Song
Morning River Band – Bury Me
Nigel Wright – Overcast
Denmark – I Know
Sister Wanzala – I Went Whaling in My Gap Year
Body Meat – Nairobi Flex
Derek Piotr – Repeating Bloom (Simon Whetham Remix)
Michael Chinworth – Good As It Gets
Mesa Luna – Dispel
yot club – jaded

The post January 2019 Roundup Mix appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Gallego is back with a brand new Miserable chillers album, and is once again pushing the boundaries of the project. To be released this February on Baby Blue, Schoënblintsjia expands the aesthetic beyond synth-driven sophisti-pop into a more experimental, ambient-focused sound.

We’re delighted to be able to share ‘Cider Palace,’ the lead single from the record, to back this up. The song combines the organic wash of field recordings with an improvisational acoustic foreground that accentuates the mindful and strangely melancholic textures. The effect is a sound that feels less like a lived moment and more a memory, some aspects smoothed and blurred, others washed out or glitchy, and all wrapped in a fondness reserved for the backward gaze.

“The track combines acoustic improvisation with a field recording of the wild monk parrots living in Edgewater, NJ,” Gallego says, “a town I lived in briefly after graduating from college. They are very loud birds that live in apartment style in large nests that lined the electrical poles of the street I lived on. To me, they were a very striking presence that imbued the ordinary and quotidian with this surreal quality; some process of history akin to ship wreckage coming ashore, mounting up, threatening to topple over as you’re walking to the bus stop to commute to work.”

Those of you familiar with Dicktations or read our review of their record back in 2016 might recognise the spirit of ‘Cider Palace’. “It was a weird time of my life that I wrote a lot about on in the Dicktations album ‘Super Paradise’,” Gallego explains, adding that the same field recording appeared on that album too, “but revisiting it […] was an interesting experience in reacquainting myself with this particular iteration of my once-everyday.”

Indeed, the time and space between Gallego and his past allowed its full peculiarity to emerge, and as such the song represents a meditation on ideas of habituation and  “[The] strangeness [is] more pronounced outside the context of its living-with,” Gallego says. “I kind of think of the processing of the guitar improvisation as a kind of enactment of that estrangement; a motif repeated with only mild variations but submerged in different subjectivities as it goes on.” What seems normal now might not always be so, and by the same logic the surreal can grow familiar too.

Schoënblintsjia will be released on the 22nd February via Baby Blue.

Artwork by Jill McFarland 

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Tracklisting:

Mike Pace and the Child Actors – Everyone Out of the Car
Miranda Winters – The Futuristic District
Exam Season – Strawberry Milk
Saccharine – Pumpkin Guts
Tuvaband – Wolfpack
Devon Welsh – Dreams Have Pushed You Around
Mending – Alan after the Fire
Reddening West – Even If
Valley Maker – Light on the Ground
The Washboard Abs – Return to You
Manatree – Brushfire
Miserable Chillers – Horse Opera
Saint Charles – She Don’t Wanna Know
new casino – going for a walk*
Frankie Valet – Why Blue
Goodbye Max – Old Photos
Adeline Hotel – Habits
Joe Kaplow – I Said I Was Going and I Went
Pecas – Tuesdays
Sun Kin – Neglect
Baby Cages – flowers
Crooked Spine – Skinned Knees
Lauren O’Connell – Out of Focus
Mount Goldie – Summer
Harvey Trisdale – Baby
american poetry club – the sum of your parts
Babehoven – Out of the Country
Adam Arcuragi – Low Parade Rain
Jason Bemis Lawrence – Southern Midwest
Campdogzz – Sorceress
Barfoot – A Thin Place Between Worlds

* not on Playmoss

The post August 2018 Roundup appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Under the Miserable Chillers moniker, Gallego has just released Adoration Room, a split album with Kabir Kumar’s Sun Kin. The pair began as digital-age pen pals, connecting over a love of music and a shared appreciation of the American experience for immigrants and first generation kids. The latter is more than a bio-ready factoid, because conversations about such topics shaped the music the pair made once they started collaborating, the synth-pop sound a sparkly vehicle in which they can explore the pressing concerns of the contemporary age.  “Anxieties induced by social media,” play a role, explains Gallego, as do “misgivings and fears about making art in a time where a tidal wave of history seems poised to crash down on us,” with the final purpose of the music geared around “the need to hold on to faith that another future is possible.”

Conversation has a thematic resonance on Adoration Room too. The split sees an alternation between Miserable Chillers and Sun Kin, with neither taking the baton for more than two songs before passing on to the other, and as such the the album forms something of a dialogue. Sun Kin opens proceedings with ‘Veena’, an archetypal example of his polished pop sound, before Miserable Chillers responds with ‘Un canto a Galicia’, a track pitched halfway between surf rock and synth pop that conjures long Mediterranean days as seen in dreams.

“what’s the sun feel like in Spain?
we’re in a cafe, it’s afternoon
i smell fish and lemon.
we can sit in the shade!

Suppose our hearts are unblossomed flowers
and when they bloom what color do
you think we’ll see?”

After the deep tropical shimmer of Sun Kin’s ‘Teri Ankhen’, Miserable Chillers follow with two tracks. ‘Natural History’ maintains the dreamy aesthetic through natural imagery, though frames it firmly in the modern age, as seen in museum collections, while ‘Adoration’ slows the tempo into a late-night crawl, like floating on your back in the pool of a cheap motel at 2AM. This is something of a theme on the record, the intangible or transcendental instrumentation always balanced by something more real and banal—be it mention of Bitcoin exchanges or, as in Sun Kin’s ‘Neglect’, the trappings of social media.

The track feels an important one for the album, suggesting the paradisaical pop might be nothing but artifice, a simulated landscape beneath which a search for meaning and connection continues. There’s something of an unease here, one not assuaged by the bright music but accentuated, the sonic veneer that merely masks what lies beneath, and one which might evaporate at any moment to reveal the true nature of things.

‘Ringing’ follows in a similar vein, mapping the ghost of a relationship as seen on Facebook, accidental invites and conspicuously absent likes serving to make clear what is no longer present. The track is less a technophobic comment on social media and more an agitated view of the world as it now exists, what has been preventing what might be, the past displayed alongside the present to prevent any view of the future. A similarly anxious state exists on Miserable Chillers’ ‘Horse Opera’, though this time the scope widens, the political crashing into the personal whether invited or not.

“This big city
isn’t so big at all!
if you trace the train,
our paths stay small.
this city ain’t so big at all!

little by little
we’ll all disappear
they’ll pull you by the toes
they’ll pull you by the ears
Born in the USA
But we won’t die in it.”

There might appear to be a difference in scale or focus between heartsick hating on Facebook and the chronic unease of immigrant life in the US, though in presenting them side by side, Sun Kin and Miserable Chillers tease out links. Something about a lack of privacy, a lack of grace, an inability to unplug from the system and live your own life. The low-level awareness that the system could turn on you at any moment, information barrelling through its synapses with your number, operating according to rules set by people far richer and more powerful than is imaginable.

Miserable Chillers and Sun Kin put a human face to these ideas, blending the big issues of our time with small personal vignettes and touches of emotion to reframe the narrative. To discuss such conceptual themes directly is to risk sounding like the synopsis of an overly familiar sci-fi film, but Gallego and Kumar circumvent this and instead paint a world very much in the realist style. And, if it sounds too fantastic or futuristic to be realism, then perhaps that is the whole point. Welcome to the contemporary world.

Adoration Room is out now and you can get it from the Miserable Chillers Bandcamp page.

The post Miserable Chillers / Sun Kin – Adoration Room appeared first on Various Small Flames.

In the meantime, check out the mix below to hear everything we covered during June 2017, and click through the links in the tracklisting to be whisked away to the specific posts.

Tracklisting:

Roadkill Ghost Choir – Classics (Die Young)
Julia Lucille – Darkening
girl valley – faceback
Deer Scout – Sad Boy
Crushing – Emery Board
Crumb – Plants
Alex Napping – You’ve Got Me
Squirrel Flower – Daylight Savings
Andrew Younker – Pretend Therapist
Outside The Academy – Anaesthetise
Sammus – Perfect, Dark
Miserable Chillers – Love Theme (For The Wilderness)
Ohyeahsumi – Cosmos Bowling
Maud Scheltinga – I’ve Come to Know You Well
Midwestern Exposure – Riverboat
Will Graefe – Blood Feather
Baxter Roy Long – Purpose Against An Unavailing Balance
Idan Altman – Heroic Bee
american poetry club – how i felt about most things
About a Million – Young Bull
Flamingods – Bhima
Headless Pin Up Girl – Forever Watching the Skies
Wild Pink – Albert Ross

Check out the previous round-up mixes here, and stick around next month for yet another selection of the best new music.

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

Far from limited to the slacker rock vibe, Gallego also records as Miserable Chillers, a synth pop outfit worlds away from the Dicktations sound. His latest release under that moniker, A Flower You Would Like To Eat, consists of a mix of live instrumentation, MIDI orchestration, samples and found sounds, all culminating in retro hits dragged into the now from a few decades back: songs part glam, part glum, the soundtrack to a heartbroken disco.

Opener ‘Love Theme (For The Wilderness)’ is a slow-burn ballad that starts out with cheap church organ and metamorphosizes into sparkling synths, the whole thing shot through with a keen devotional lilt. ‘An Enchanted World’ is altogether more danceable, Gallego’s conversational verses bookmarked by a catchy chorus and skippy groove, while ‘Gentle’ is laid-back and languid, though the lyrics hide nostalgic sadness and sense of loss.

“I saved the wedding portrait
where you two are forever
young and in each other’s arms
and you look so gentle”

The magical digital interlude of ‘The Children Board The Balloon’ is followed by ‘Habits’, a strange bedroom-pop number that’s at once intimate and odd, a lost love consuming all feeling, leaving the world curiously vacuous. Closer ‘Night Time In The Old Homes’ unfurls with a careful groove, a dream pop track played at half-speed and piped through old speakers, the quivering voice conveying a certain anxious need to communicate that pervades the entire release. As Gallego describes: “This is an album about being scared as a kid and scared as an adult, and discovering your capacity to love and be loved. It’s a record about rare moments when you can taste divinity—and that palpable sense that in trying to cling to those moments you might crush them.”

We’re delighted to share the entire thing for your streaming pleasure. Hit play below and add a bit of feeling to your Friday.

You can explore the Miserable Chillers oeuvre on their Bandcamp page.

Artwork by Styles Munson

The post Premiere: Miserable Chillers – A Flower You Would Like To Eat appeared first on Various Small Flames.