Michael Fox has been working in music in various guises over the past decade, and though Take Care, Stay Warm might be the first release under the Big Bluestem moniker, its assured quality carries all of this experience with it. Take the title track, a stripped-back folk song built around nothing but Fox’s vocals and careful acoustic guitar. Something which feels like the product of a byegone age, folk in its traditional sense, where a person sits down and records the feelings and stories of a life without ostentation. The result is earnest, tender, hushed though not without a certain intensity of feeling. A mood which seems to gather energy from the arrangement’s negative space. As though emotions voiced to the stillness of an empty room carry their own peculiar weight.

So I won’t pull you off the floor, brush the dust off of your coat
get back what’s been missing, or find the perfect quote
that could sum up all the feelings that are lodged inside our throats
but hey: Take Care, Stay Warm

Blue Bayou – New Wind, New Rain

Blue Bayou, who describe themselves as “a new wave, chamber pop band with horns and strings,” have just released their new EP, The Carousel, a five-song release which sees the Oxford-born, London-based project bring the energy of their live sound to tape. Think of a centre of a Venn diagram between the avant-folk of Black Country, New Road, the country rock twang of Brown Horse and the emotional clarity of Big Thief. Single ‘New Wind, New Rain’ is the perfect place to start. A song which feels far larger than its relatively convention three-and-a-half-minute runtime, heralded by mournful horns and driven forward by a bright and peppy percussion, all while the vocals swell together in heart and curiosity.

Charlie Vaughan – Don’t Wanna Drive

Fresh off touring with the likes of The Backseat Lovers and Hamilton Leithauser in 2025, London’s Charlie Vaughan is back with brand new single ‘Don’t Wanna Drive’ to further cement his place among the city’s most eclectic songwriters. The embodiment of his style, the track melds undeniable richness with the magic of happenstance, showing that careful craft and happy accident can exist side by side. “I wanted to write something dreamy and simple—no crazy structures” Vaughan explains of the track. “When we started to play the song on the road it changed a lot, we started playing it fast and with really driving drums. The bit at the end came from a beautiful fluke at a rehearsal and me and the band knew this was the perfect end.” Watch the video directed by La De La Studios below:

‘Don’t Wanna Drive is out now and available from the usual places.

The Dead Century – Hey Chicago

“Minneapolis has a rich heritage in energetic indie rock, so its great to see bands like The Dead Century carrying the flame onwards,” we wrote back in March, the band’s single ‘Been Better wearing its influences proudly, “taking the raucousness of The Replacements and some of The Hold Steady‘s buoyant positivity and applying them to the less than positive present.” Now the band have shared next single ‘Hey Chicago’ and the result is no less momentous or affirming. The track picks its way through the difficult terrain between staying put and moving on, but allows a sheer sense of energy to burn away any hesitation. The song “explores the hope and uncertainty that come from the end of a relationship,” say the band, “the delicate work of discerning what to carry with you and what to leave behind.”

Deer Tick – Everything Born

Folk rock stalwarts Deer Tick are returning with brand new full-length Coin-O-Matic this summer, an album which promises to delve into their homestate of Rhode Island and all of its peculiar histories (not least the collison betweenthe  ordinary working class American Dream and its shadow twin within the world of the mafia and organised crime). With the album set for release in June via ATO Records, the band have shared new single ‘Everything Born’ to give a flavour of this style, pitching the audience straight into the milieu of Providence and the personal dramas therein. “‘Everything Born’ was written quickly about the tenuousness of life and the precious time we have to spend with the people that come into our lives,” explains vocalist and guitarist Ian O’Neil “It’s about family, friends, neighbors, strangers and how these thoughts burrow a little deeper the older we get. I was thinking about my son and the people of Providence, RI while writing it.” Watch the video below, recorded at the Big Nice Studio and directed by Bradford Krieger and Rich Ferri:

Coin-O-Matic will be released on the 5th June via ATO and you can pre-order it now.

Hockitay – buttons

Guatemalan-born, Montreal-based artist Hockitay made a splash earlier in the year with single ‘over/over’, a song “where loneliness and restlessness overlap,” as we wrote. “That curiously digital phenomenon where even an empty room can now be overwhelming.” Follow-up single ‘buttons’ continues this exploration of the technological encroachment on our lives, asking how we might hope to maintain a sense of authentic self in a world automated by things like AI. The video, directed by Buvard and David S. Blouin, employs a full-spectrum modified camera (i.e. one which captures UV, visible and IR light simultaneously) to add a further haunting atmosphere to the track, portraying the digital experience in all of its eerie surreality.

‘buttons’ is out now via Future Gods and available from Bandcamp.

Jordan Whitlock & Memory Spells – You Tell Me / A Flower Blooming For No One

“This project began as an exchange of demos and became a deeply personal dialogue,” explained Jordan Whitlock of the collaboration with Matt Bauer’s Memory Spells, with the duo having now released their debut full-length This Is What It Feels Like. “Remarkably, Bauer and Whitlock only met in person when the record was already half completed, though far from hampering the intimacy and emotional connection of the music, this distance ultimately helped deepen it,” we wrote in a preview of the record, “the pair dialling into the themes of isolation, bonding and longing.” What the duo call “a quiet meditation on beauty without witness,” final single ‘A Flower Blooming For No One’ heralds the release of the album, offering a glimpse at the wonder which exists every day in the secrecy of isolation.

A hummingbird
Its ruby throat
Catching the light
And letting it go
A shadow cast
A cold white sun
A flower blooming for no one

King Ropes – Baby Bird

“If Dave Hollier and co. are taking on The Spirit of The West, you’d best expect a collection of songs attuned to the contradictions of the experience on the ground, where well-worn myths and old stereotypes rub up against everyday hardships and the outright oddness of twenty-first century living.” So we wrote of King Ropes‘ most recent album Idaho back in 2024, praising how the Bozeman, Montana outfit managed to evoke the landscape of the American West in all of its beauty and harshness. Now King Ropes are back with brand new single ‘Baby Bird’, and while the track might appear altogether more tender on the surface, there’s still room for a brooding dimension to the sound. A reimagining of a classic sixties/seventies love song that swaps out some of the honeyed glow of the period for a stranger, ambiguous contemporary folk style.

It may sound absurd
I’m a man she’s a bird
These things take time to understand

‘Baby Bird’ is out now and available from the usual places.

Luke Francis – Anywhere

Though recorded in LA this past winter with Derek Ted, Luke Francis‘s new single ‘Anywhere’ has roots in a period a year prior, with the Seattle-based songwriter noting a variety of key locations and experiences. “The Bamboo Village parking lot on a snowy Seattle night,” he lists, “the Historic Grand Canyon Hotel, and the front steps of my childhood home in California while a plumber rescued me from what had occurred inside the house.” As you might expect from such a specific set of influences, the resulting track is highly personal, Francis taking the moods and imagery of his own memories and applying a coat of classic country wistfulness to create a modern love song that nevertheless harks back to an old romantic style. “Honey ride with me tonight
I’ve got a bottle of wine and the moonlight on my mind,” as he sings in the opening lines. “We could left and right, through the night
don’t you wanna climb in and let the road unwind?”

‘Anywhere’ is out now and available from the usual places.

Paycheque – Generic Actress

Consisting of Alison Goldfarb and Jackson MacIntosh (TOPS, Drugdealer), Paycheque represent something of a collision between the retro and the contemporary. Though practising a decidedly eighties-flavoured style of indie pop, the duo aim for more than pure nostalgia, repurposing the sound to conjure the modern Los Angeles in all of its glitz, violence and precarity. Their self-titled debut full-length, coming this summer via Mansions and Millions, draws upon the sounds of the Reagan-Thatcher era to explore the present calamities seeded in that period, be they human-induced natural disasters, roving gangs of militarised immigration officers or the general superficiality of the great quest for stardom. Opener ‘Generic Actress’ offers a first glimpse. “In LA, when you go out, you end up spending a lot of time standing outside of whatever event or party you’ve decided to attend,” the band explain of the single. “You’re on the sidewalk, you’re in a strip mall parking lot, you’re on a patio. You smoke, you bump into friends, and you eventually realize you missed half the set you came to see, you never actually made it inside the gallery, the party is winding down. This song is an ode to never quite making it inside.”

Watch the video by Paycheque with additional footage shot by Jessica Dean Harrison below:

Paycheque will be released on the 12th June via Mansions and Millions and you can pre-order it now from Bandcamp.

Snake Orange Cake – Lucid

Åland-born, Berlin-based artist Julia Carlsson has released a number of singles under the moniker Snake Orange Cake in recent times, most recently ‘Vision’ back in January. A self-described “hypnotic ritual in sound” which “functions something like an incantation or mantra,” we wrote in a preview, “the vocals repeating a series of mystical images as though hoping to conjure some mystical effect. The pulsing beat only furthers the mesmeric vibe, leading the listener into a space somehow adjacent from every day reality.” Now Carlsson has unveiled Lucid, the project’s debut EP which collects these songs alongside the new title track, and the fresh offering just so happens to serve as the ideal calling card for the project. With an ambiguous tone that embraces playfulness, sensuality and a certain mystical charm, ‘Lucid’ capture the balance between intimacy and openness that marks the Snake Orange Cake sound, as well as the sense of otherworldly potential which emerges from its dreamlike flow.

Vesuvian – Fortunate Death

Vesuvian is a Philly-based outfit consisting of Garret Bollin (guitar, vocals), Joey DeGrado (vocals, guitar), Bill Magerr (bass) and Gavin Caffrey Perez-Canto (drums and percussion). Back in 2023 they released More Treble, a punk rock record concerned with everything from horror movies and actresses to the ancient Mediterranean, and now they’re back with a brand new self-titled album which looks push the sound even further. Take latest single ‘Fortunate Death’, which is certainly not your usual scrappy punk number, drawing upon the work of Julio Cortázar and accounts of Mesoamerican history to create something cathartic and boisterous. “Years ago, I read that Aztec sacrifices were honored to die that way,” De Grado explains. “Does this have historic validity? Who knows! But the idea stayed with me, waiting to come out in a song. I took this idea of being overjoyed at death and combined it with some of the images from ‘The Night, Face Up’.”

Waxahatchee – Where’s Your Love Now? (This Is Lorelei cover)

This Is Lorelei is about to release the super deluxe edition of their celebrated 2024 album Box for Buddy, Box for Star via Double Double Whammy, with the ten original album tracks joined by ten covers from an impressive range of artists. Momma, SASAMI, Snail Mail, Tim Heidecker and MJ Lenderman are just some of the acts offering versions of the songs, and Waxahatchee‘s take on ‘Where’s Your Love Now?’ is the latest to be revealed. “I think Nate is one of the best songwriters of this moment, making music that feels current and timeless and also somehow ahead of a curve,” Katie Crutchfield told Stereogum. “When I heard ‘Where’s Your Love Now?’ I thought it was one of the best songs I’ve ever heard.”

Box for Buddy, Box for Star (Super Deluxe) is out on the 17th April via Double Double Whammy and you can pre-order it now.

The post Weekly Listening: April 2026 #2 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

You might know Jude Lilley as part of London-based psych-pop outfit Moreish Idols, but after a strange experience during the pandemic lockdown, he is now setting out solo for brand new project Crook Decker. Debut full-length Graffiti Lagoon will be released later this month via Seb Wildblood’s acclaimed label all my thoughts, and Lilley has put out single ‘Beacon’ to give a taste of the unexpectedly humid, tropical tones of a release which reimagines Bermondsey as a bayou. “It was during an insanely hot, pandemic summer in 2020 that my astro-turfed terrace became an oasis,” as Lilley explains. “The world was getting sick, Peckham was a desert, and London was a swamp, but somehow, up there, I was protected from it all. I began to write through the eyes of Crook Decker, a lonesome swamp dweller who swears by the superficial mantra ‘ignorance is bliss’ as he trots through his environment, refusing to take in the real world around him.”

Graffiti Lagoon will be released on the 12th November via all my thoughts and you can pre-order it now.

G1rldad – Biter

“kissing on the bruise / that reminds me of you / and where you left your love,” sings G1rldad on new single ‘Biter’. Based in San Luis Obispo, California, the project makes an emotive style of indie rock in the vein of Sadurn, and the new track is the ideal introduction to their work. A song delivered with a certain level of restraint, built from a tender hush that is never quite punctured, but not lacking any force of feeling as a result. Because within the intimate style the vocals emerge with a confessional conviction, speaking to the private intimacies of queer love as though to reinforce their joy and meaning.

Honey I’m Home – Insecure

“Operating at the intersection of shoegaze, indie rock and post-punk” was how we described the work of Dutch band Honey I’m Home back in March, with single ‘Wishful Thinking‘ using shadowy textures and visceral energy to tap “into ethereal moods without sacrificing a certain emotional immediacy to achieve a cathartic sound.” Described by the band as a song “about the notion that carefree innocence doesn’t exist,” new single ‘Insecure’ dials up this cathartic element even further. A song which rallies against the patriarchal structures of society with both fury and something more hopeful, its soaring crescendos playing like a wish for a better version of the present, where everyone is free to live and move the world without fear.

‘Insecure’ is out now and available from the usual places.

Joyer – Favorite

Joyer‘s new album On the Other End of the Line… was created in novel conditions for the duo, siblings Nick and Shane Sullivan working through separation, loneliness, post-tour blues and the perpetual uncertainty around the purpose of making music. Previous singles like ‘Glare of the Beer Can‘ and ‘At the Movies‘ suggested potential escapes from this slow crush of life, but with the album now out via Julia’s War Recordings, the Sullivans have returned with new single ‘Favorite’ which takes a slightly different approach. Because instead of distracting themselves or dreaming of different worlds, the song sees the pair confront the frustrations of making art in a world of short attention spans and a thousand new acts a minute, emerging not with dismay but instead a regained conviction. Because, as the title suggests, making music is their favourite thing to do despite all the associated baggage, and On the Other End of the Line… is a testament to that undying passion.

Watch the visualizer by Nara Avakian below:

On the Other End of the Line… is out on the 24th October via Julia’s War Recordings and you can pre-order it now from the Joyer Bandcamp page.

Lia Kohl – Voting Line, Downtown Chicago

Back in October we introduced Various Small Whistles and a Song, the new album from Chicago-based composer Lia Kohl which takes inspiration from the Ed Ruscha work of a similar name to use a series of ostensibly humble tracks to evoke larger social situations and spaces. “The result is an attempt to convey the subtle textures of life in a way that feels at once incidental and carefully curated,” we wrote, “and one that ultimately adds up to something far greater than the sum of its parts.” With the record coming in a couple of weeks via Dauw, Kohl has shared new track ‘Voting Line, Downtown Chicago’, which, as the title suggests, was recorded while waiting to vote in 2024. “The person in front of me began whistling, and the sound carried through the marble lobby, adding levity to our collective anxious solemnity.” A track only a minute long but loaded with all the context of society and history, the sonic equivalent of Frederick Wiseman’s Cinéma vérité.

Lydia Luce – Belly

We’ve covered a couple of singles from Lydia Luce‘s new album Mammoth in recent months, establishing both the style and thematic concerns of a record all about pain and recovery. First ‘Quiet‘, a song, as we wrote, “all about the slow process of learning to not only tolerate silence but embrace its power within a noisy world.” Then ‘Ephemeral‘, a duet with Luke Sital-Singh which used strings, winds, piano, viola and cello to create a sound which rises towards almost classical peaks. With the album out now, Luce has shared a new single ‘Belly’. The first song written for the album, it is a fitting choice to celebrate the release. A track which originated in the depths of a period of suffering yet nevertheless asserted the potential of recovery, as though in some way instigating not only the rest of the record but also the path back to health Luce’s life would take. “This song is about being more than the state of my physical body,” she explains, as well as “being patient with ourselves as we heal.” Watch the video by by Jason Lee Denton and Aliegh Shields below:

Mammoth is out now and available from the usual places.

paer – Power Lines

LA duo paer have introduced themselves this year with a couple of singles, showing off a style which utilises layered vocals and shimmering guitars to evoke nostalgic soundscapes full of texture and light. To close out their debut year, paer have released ‘Power Lines’, the second track on a double single which does far more than establish the project’s tone. Delve into the hazy richness of the sound and you’ll find there’s an entire world beneath the surface, exploring ideas of grief and mourning with real nuance. The aftermath of loss, the song suggests, is a delicate balance. A push and pull between the past and the future where the seeming opposite desires to commemorate and move on must be handled with care. But far from championing one over the other, or indeed suggesting any sense of competition, paer instead paint a picture where apparent contradictions can coexist. “To be everything at once, to be nothing, in the same light.”

Rainwater – Bluebelly

Yesturday & Tamarlow, the new record from Rainwater sits at a crossroads between terror and wonder. Written following the birth of lead Blake Luley’s first daughter, the record explores both the anxieties and joys of parenthood, particularly its bewildering early days. All this is delivered in a style Luley sums up as “Arthur Russell fronting a 2000s era indie rock band,” proving the perfect vehicle as it slides from gently dreamy indie pop to taut indie rockers like single ‘Shadow’ which, as we described in a preview “sees the project lean further towards post-punk than ever before.” Today we’re focusing on ‘Bluebelly’, a lush and romantic look at the “devoured days” of a new baby which captures the record’s ethos perfectly. As Glen Boudin’s perceptive liner notes put it: “Becoming a parent is scary, a radical recontextualization of your entire life, but it’s also a beautiful, mysterious encounter with infinite love.”

Snocaps – Heathcliff

It can be easy to forget Katie and Allison Crutchfield started out their careers in collaboration, the Alabama twins winning acclaim in the beloved yet short-lived P.S. Eliot before going onto bigger things with Waxahatchee and Swearin’ respectively. So it is extra satisfying to see things come full circle with the surprise announcement of new project Snocaps. Comprised of the Crutchfields plus MJ Lenderman and Brad Cook, the project offers a new vehicle for them to explore the overlaps and divergences of their different solo paths. Their self-titled album shadow dropped via ANTI- on Halloween so there’s plenty to dig into, but where better to start than a track named after everyone’s favourite orange cat?

Tim Heidecker – Alone Until I’m Home

Last month we introduced Passages: Artists in Solidarity with Immigrants, Refugees, and Asylum Seekers, coming this December via Western Vinyl in support of Texas-based organisations, American Gateways and Casa Marianella. Produced and organised by Emilie Rex and Rick Alverson in response to the precarity and cruelty of the present moment,” we wrote, “Passages is a new project which asked artists to write and record a song in a place that feels like home.” A huge range of artists are involved, with the offerings from Alan Sparhawk and Benjamin Booker released as early singles to hint at the compassion and solidarity of the release. Now Western Vinyl have unveiled Tim Heidecker‘s similarly heartfelt ‘Alone Until I’m Home’. The compilation’s closing track and in many ways an embodiment of its message, the song is a lucid, sincere ballad for all those travelling or displaced, be they hoping to return home or else find a new place which might, in time, come to feel like one.

Van Chamberlain – Miracle Drug

Over the coming months, Brooklyn‘s Van Chamberlain will be sharing their second album As Far As the Eye Can See, a planned ‘waterfall release’ where a new single is shared month by month until the entire thing is released. Oh and five two-song cassettes will drop in-sync with the singles and videos too. For now, we have our first taste of the record with ‘Miracle Drug’, a lush track pitched somewhere between the dreamy haze of dream pop and something more jangly and bright. The result is decidedly bittersweet in nature, a nascent crush brought to life in all of its longing and shimmering potential. Where the line between melancholy and possibility is porous and the world itself feels new.

Watch the video below, conceived, directed and edited by Ricky Lewis with cinematography and color by Tony Carter and production support by David Olmsted:

‘Miracle Drug’ is out now and available from Bandcamp. As Far As the Eye Can See is coming soon.

The post Weekly Listening: November 2025 #1 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

And it’s a pretty impressive list, what the label call “an often-stunning gestalt of generational talent paying homage to one of the most gifted but underrated American songwriters.” Some of our very favourite artists feature, including Advance Base, Friendship, Trace Mountains, Sadurn, Hand Habits and a whole host more, reimagining a selection of songs from across Molina’s oeuvre.

Only two tracks have been released so far, but if they are any indication it’s going to be a pretty special release. Opening proceedings is MJ Lenderman‘s pretty faithful take on Songs: Ohia’s ‘Just Be Simple’, before Sun June put their own spin on Magnolia Electric Co. track ‘Leave the City’, moulding it into what could sound like a new Sun June track if you are not familiar with the original. It also features what is, in a particularly crowded field, one of Molina’s best opening lines.

Broke my heart to leave the city
I mean it broke what wasn’t broken in there already

I Will Swim to You: A Tribute to Jason Molina will be released on 5th September and available to pre-order via the Run For Cover Records Bandcamp page, including the fittingly titled Coxcomb Red, Comet Dust Red or Old Hen Black vinyl editions. 10% of profits will be donated to MusiCares® Mental Health and Addiction Recovery Fund.

The post I Will Swim to You: A Tribute to Jason Molina appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Adeline Hotel – Whodunnit

Ruination Record Co.

“There’s always a strange combination of continuity and change within a new album from Adeline Hotel. Each record building upon what came before it while often in some respects also turning away to chart new ground. As though the project exists as a kind of world of its own, and the function of each release is to bring us a view of a different corner. Adeline Hotel as a vast space we’re discovering album by album, song by song, with Dan Knishkowy not so much engineering the experience as leading the way. This exploratory spirit is central to Whodunnit […] an album following a tradition which lists the likes of Gillian Welch, Neil Young and Van Morrison among its practitioners. Songs as a form of stream of consciousness, not only in terms of lyrics but the very sound itself. The sense of having tapped into some wellspring of movement or momentum and choosing to lean into the flow.” [Review]

Advance Base – Horrible Occurrences

Run For Cover / Orindal Records

“For while the setting is entirely imaginary, the narratives and characters owe much to real life. Indeed the killer [of ‘The Year I Lived in Richmond’] is inspired by an analogous figure who stalked a place Advance Base‘s Own Ashworth once called home, fictionalised to create some sense of distance and decency. If Horrible Occurrences can be distilled into one reductive image, then that is perhaps the most enlightening. A receptacle into which bad memories and old stories can be poured. A small town diorama in which they can play out again, change shapes, take on lives of their own. One we might approach and watch over along with Ashworth, feeling tall from that perspective, relatively safe in the top-down view.” [Review]

Anne Malin – Strange Power!

Dear Life Records

Released in tandem book-length poem What Floods under the name AM Ringwalt, Anne Malin‘s Strange Power! is an album which explores “how nature and its inherent motion might possess the key to the process of healing in the aftermath of trauma and loss,” as we wrote earlier in the year. Something which possesses a palpable momentum yet no clear conclusion. In other hands, this lack of answers or endings might be held up as the tragic farce of existence, but here is positioned more like an opportunity. To continue asking questions both of yourself and your surroundings, as though the act of interrogation is its own strange power. A sign of a faith in something human and sublime.

Being Dead – EELS

Bayonet Records

“If you thought [previous release] When Horses Would Run was inventive, then just wait until you hear what is coming next. Because the new Being Dead full-length EELS […] takes everything that made its predecessor special and pushes it further. Travelling to Los Angeles for a fortnight of writing and recording with John Congleton, the pair pushed themselves to embrace the singular spirit of their work. The result is a record that’s more intense, more raucous and decidedly darker than anything which has come before, without sacrificing that mischievous persona.” [Review]

Ben Seretan – Allora

Tiny Engines

Described by Ben Seretan as his “insane Italy record,” Allora represents a snapshot from a very specific time and place. Or rather it would, should ‘snapshot’ come anywhere close to describing the scale, heft and sheer abundance of moving parts on show. Seretan and his band were due to play a wedding at the tail end of “a wonderful but lightly disastrous tour” of Europe during the summer of 2019, only for rain to half play and leave them in the lurch. But rather than waste the curious mix of energy and exhaustion that sets in at the end of a tour, they decided to make an album instead. A three-day stint at a farmhouse in the hills overlooking Venice with renowned mixing engineer, producer, musician Matt Bordin was arranged. A brief moment where a plethora of emotions were processed and purged through joyful noise. The result is unashamedly maximalist, entirely heartfelt, and in possession of that lightning-in-a-bottle feel that suggests it could never have materialised anywhere else. Catharsis has long been a key thread of Ben Seretan’s work, but rarely has it gone quite so hard.

The Big Easy – (It’s No Secret) The Truth As Bad As the View

Trash Casual Records

“It’s notable that The Big Easy’s latest album, (It’s No Secret) The Truth As Bad As The View, is the first to feature Berthomieux’s image on the cover. The first symbol on a record that looks to grapple with exactly how and why a person of colour might be made to feel an interloper within certain artistic circles. Berthomieux cites a James Baldwin statement as a key to realigning his perspective. ‘To be a Negro in this country,’ Baldwin wrote, ‘and to be relatively conscious is to be in a state of rage almost all of the time.’ Suddenly what had for so long seemed like a personal hang-up or imposter syndrome was revealed to be an intrinsic part of the Black experience, and to connect his own emotions with a historic struggle proved liberating. Thus the album became an exercise in owning his identity and finally voicing those things kept buried for so long. ‘It’s No Secret is kind of like a journal,’ as Berthomieux concludes, ‘a place where I can express the things that I haven’t been able to say out loud’.” [Review]

Brown Horse – Reservoir

Loose Music

“Call it distraction, call it despair / No matter what you call it you can feel it when it’s there.” These lines from the track ‘Bloodstain’ encapsulate the presiding mood of Brown Horse’s Reservoir. A sense of unease which permeates their alt-country style like something “drifted on the low tide,” as the song continues. Something that’s now “hell bent for to stay.” This disquiet is evoked not only in images of stark estuary mudflats and cold fields but also polycotton shirts and soulless expanses of megastores. In the nostalgic melancholy of opener ‘Stealing Horses’, or the Molina-esque lyricism of songs like ‘Sunfisher’ and ‘Outtakes’ with their burning houses, hummingbird hearts and singing birds. And like all the best Gothic atmosphere, it is not entirely clear whether the sensation is a haunting from some ancient thing or a dark harbinger of what is to come.

Cara Beth Satalino – Little Green

Worried Songs

“The success of Little Green is in no small part a result of the nuanced nature of Cara Beth Satalino’s approach. Early on you come to appreciate her uncanny ability to combine deep soul-searching with offhand observations and gentle humour, inventive imagery and smart turns of phrase creating something rich and full of life despite the surrounding turmoil. [A record] soft and fragile as a little green shoot but with a spark of energy too, a desire to keep on. It might be too dark to see what is in front of you, but the earth is still turning and the bright star is still burning. There is time yet to grow towards the light.” [Review]

Cassandra Jenkins – My Light, My Destroyer

Dead Oceans

Cassandra Jenkins intended to step away from music after her 2021 album An Overview on Phenomenal Nature, only for the album to resonant so deeply with audiences she found herself newly (and perhaps reluctantly) energised, pulled back towards the urge to create. My Light, My Destroyer is what emerged a few years later, a record which not so much builds upon its predecessor as explodes out in every direction. Sophistipop, jazz and New Age elements lift Jenkins’s indie rock sound to almost orchestral territory, while layers of found sounds and field recordings anchor the otherwise celestial style in the lived-in world. This duality between the grounded and the elevated is typical of the tone, where encroaching darkness is matched by a curiosity and attentiveness to wonder. The world is beautiful, the world is burning, and both of these facts are made more urgent by the other.

The Chairman Dances – Evening Song

Self-Released

“Originating as a narrative poem, The Chairman Dances‘ new album Evening Song traces the early days of a nascent relationship,” we wrote back in September. “A seminarian and a drummer mutually enamoured with one another, caught in the heady space of attraction and mystery, hungry to learn everything there is to know about the other.” Working from this point of intersection, Eric Krewson and co. bring the pair of characters to life, providing small glimpses into moments both special and seemingly mundane to achieve a strikingly intimate sense of humanity. As with much of The Chairman Dances’ catalogue, the beauty is in the detail. The hollow knock of shoes, the wail of an oven’s timer, the catch of a lock. Small confessions shared between two people daring to allow their lives to become enmeshed.

The Dead Tongues – Body of Light / I Am a Cloud

Psychic Hotline

Not content with releasing just one record this year, Ryan Gustafson’s The Dead Tongues put out two simultaneously. The albums, published as standalone digital releases but brought together in a double LP, display both aspects of the Asheville, North Carolina songwriter’s oeuvre. I Am A Cloud is an exercise is meandering cosmic Americana, what Gustafson calls “a fever dream of song and spoken-word about the toggle between identity and ephemerality,” while Body of Light sees things solidify into discrete folk rock songs. Joined by a stellar cast of collaborators and a sense of improvisational freedom, it’s the most expensive and ambitious Dead Tongues release to date.

Deerlady – Greatest Hits

Self-Released

Described as “a collection of songs about intimacy,” Greatest Hits sees Mali Obomsawin and Magdalena Abrego unite as Deerlady to conjure soundscapes simultaneously stark, tender and thunderous. Both Obomsawin and Abrego have backgrounds in jazz, and though some of the genre’s fluidity carries through, the Deerlady project exists outside of that sphere and the expectations it carries. Rather, Greatest Hits offers an indie rock style free to be more elemental and raw, one attuned to ideas of softness and hope within a hostile and violent world. As if in the face of colonial cruelty, sound might fill the gaps where words cannot suffice. “Brick and concrete / two hundred thousand years buried beneath / while the stars witnessed the unholy,” as Obomsawin, who is from the Abenaki First Nation at Odanak, sings on ‘Masterpieces’. “Well I take it in / I wrestle with the language to begin / I didn’t come to make a speech, I came to live.”

Desert Liminal – Black Ocean

Whited Sepulchre Records

“Released in 2021, Desert Liminal‘s Glass Fate found the Chicago band “settling into a higher form,” as we put it at the time, with violinist and noise artist Mallory Linehan (AKA Chelsea Bridge) joining Sarah Jane Quillin and Rob Logan to elevate their trademark dreamy aesthetic. [Black Ocean] in many ways represents a continuation of this process. With the outfit now cemented as a trio, Linehan joins Quillin as a songwriter and vocalist, grounding the nascent sense of collaboration and connection which emerged on Glass Fate as a core facet of Desert Liminal. A development which is thematically resonant too, the record exploring ways in which death can be faced communally, and grief transmuted into something affirming and meaningful. Chicago’s DIY scene carried Quillin through the worst experiences, and Black Ocean looks to distil this experience into its purest form. The resulting songs often seem like love letters to the people in these communities. Those figures who stood next to you through the best and worst of times.” [Review]

Distant Reader – Place of Words Now Gone

Lily Tapes & Discs

“No news in weeks from outside town,” announces Emmerich Anklam at the beginning of the latest Distant Reader album, Place of Words Now Gone, thrusting the listener into a world suddenly quiet along with his bewildered characters. “Who left me in the center of this desolation?” one such person asks, “Who’s hearing me talk? Does it matter at all? Is anyone still out there? And who can tell the difference between the end and the beginning?” The record took seed in Anklam’s brain during long train rides through the fabled American landscape, and although a clear work of fiction, it’s hard not to see reality in the community it describes—abandoned by those beyond it’s boundaries, succumbing to helplessness as they lose what little agency were ever afforded them. A portrait of an isolated and dislocated America where those left behind are left to struggle and mourn as a deepening silence floods the places they call home. “And everybody she knows goes quiet trying to forget about the ways they could diminish still,” as Emmerich sings on ‘From High Remove’, “the spiral closing in around all of them. Words vanish fold in on themselves, questions halved quartered eighthed. Absence of sound infects all who feel it. Tones, phrases returning to the ether.”

Emily Hines – These Days

Self-Released

“I don’t know about you, but I’m holding out hope.” So sings Emily Hines on ‘UFO’, a single which embodies the tone of her full-length These Days. As warm and soft as a blanket to wrap around yourself in the cold winter months, but with a sharp pang of something else too, a bittersweet bite more potent than the frost at the window. The entire album is an understated gem, full of quiet and wistful songs about difficult relationships, questions unanswered or unanswerable, hoping for something more. On ‘UFO’ this ranges from a desire to know the truth about the Roswell landings to wishing for the sublime reckoning of the Second Coming. But for all of its outlandish subject matter, the song, like These Days as a whole, is entirely straight with its underlying sentiment. There is still hope that wrongs can be righted, Hines insists. Things can change for the better.

Enumclaw – Home in Another Life

Run For Cover Records

Ever wondered what might happen if you were to cross the beams of don’t-give-a-shit slacker rock and confessional, emotionally intense emo? Home in Another Life, the latest album from Tacoma’s Enumclaw, is here to provide an answer. The record is unafraid of the largest themes, lead Aramis Johnson wrestles with everything from God, illness and death to self-doubt, relationships and sex, but does so with a sense of energy and swagger. As though faced with the tangle of life’s difficulties, Enumclaw make the conscious decision to charge headlong forwards, conscious of every possible branch and thorn but moving too purposefully to become ensnared in any one spot. Whether it be the denial of a difficult diagnosis in ‘Not Just Yet’ or the internalised shame of ‘I Still Feel Bad About Masturbation’, Home in Another Life takes emotions and experiences which so often feel unspeakable and shouts them aloud in an act of agency.

The Felice Brothers – Valley of Abandoned Songs

Million Stars / 15 Passenger

Since their inception in 2006, The Felice Brothers have established themselves as one of the premier acts of contemporary US folk rock, building a catalogue of urgent narratives and strange visions with enough depth to stand alongside their literary influences. “Poems and short stories packed with clever references and wry turns of phrase” as we wrote of 2021’s From Dreams to Dust. “A confrontation of the grim realities of our moment that nevertheless celebrates the fact of being alive.” As the title suggests, Valley of Abandoned Songs is a collection of tracks written throughout the project which never quite made it onto a record, but were nevertheless strong enough to convince Conor Oberst, no less, to set up a brand new label just to release them into the world. Single ‘Flowers By The Roadside’ is the perfect example of their ability to conjure entire lives and histories in the shortest of spaces.

Are you
High as Mr Albert was
When he drove the cross town bus
Straight into the sky
I’m just sitting in these flowers by the roadside
I’m not trying to flag a ride
Just happy watching the wide world go by

The Fourth Wall – Return Forever

DevilDuck Records

Kickstarted by a family story of a relative who left a child behind when emigrating to the United States, Return Forever by The Fourth Wall is “an album which,” as we put it in our review, “combs through the contradictions of the immigrant experience in order to voice feelings otherwise impossible to convey.” Delivered via a weighty brand of indie rock, the mood ranges from anger and confusion to catharsis and joy, and the result, as we continued, is “a mixture of hope, denial and genuine love which not only subverts expectations but confounds any attempt to properly reassess. As though some decisions can be so complicated, their impacts so profound, that the very physics of emotions are bent beyond their own laws.”

Gabriel Birnbaum – Patron Saint of Tireless Losers

Western Vinyl

“Gabriel Birnbaum has become increasingly interested in music’s narrative potential, and Patron Saint [of Tireless Losers] finds him at his most confident to date,” we wrote in June. An album where Birnbaum again evolves his sound and writing to present “vignettes which occupy the knife-edge between specificity and ambiguity, rewarding the return listener with layers of wry humour and naked human emotion.” Birnbaum introduces a diverse array of characters—young and old, male and female, lonely and in the throes of love—all troubled by the gap between their own views of the world and the evitable dawning reality. As though every person, be they nervous concert-goer or overeager prepper ostensibly ready for the end times, is at some point destined to realise the true, unforgiving nature of mortal existence.

h. pruz – No Glory

Mtn Laurel Recording Co.

Many albums exists within the giddy period of new beginnings, their creators emerging from a tumultuous period of suffering or drastic change with an almost epiphanic perspective. The bad thing is in the past now, life can show its light. But while h. pruz‘s latest album No Glory focuses its gaze on a variety of pivotal moments from the life of Hannah Pruzinsky—moments they withstood, survived, emerged from—and goes as far as to imagine the perfect life ahead, it refuses the temptation to bask in the transient warmth of such possibility. As though to present the experience of a newly hopeful present as something unmarked by regret or doubt is to fail to fully inhabit its complexities. “I keep seeing change,” as Pruzunsky sings on ‘I Keep Changing’. “Peel away the borders / Of things with weight like copper / Thought it was gold / Til it turned green / In the rain.”

Haley Heynderickx – Seed of a Seed

Mama Bird Recording Co.

In 2018, Haley Heynderickx released I Need To Start a Garden, an album “all about growth and the hope of new beginnings” we wrote, yet one which refused to “shy away from the necessary hard work that makes such growth possible.” Follow-up Seed of a Seed emerges from this process of emotional cultivation, Heynderickx learning how to continue and improve upon the previous album’s progress while coming to understand such things are rarely linear and never complete. Opening tracks ‘Gemini’ and ‘Foxglove’ are marked by a sense of urgency, seized by the haste of new growth, though by the second half the tempo levels out into something slower and more complex. A host of musicians support the trademark finger-picked style, creating a layered thicket, the Haley Heynderickx sound now a rich polyculture diverse and hardy enough to face whatever life might throw at it next.

Hatis Noit – Aura (Rework Series)

Erased Tapes

In 2022, Hatis Noit released Aura, a full-length album “which draws from the vast array of Noit’s influences from Japanese classical music Gagaku and operatic performers to Bulgarian and Gregorian chanting,” we wrote previously, “not to mention avant-garde experimentalists and pop vocal styles.” Aura has had a new lease of life in subsequent years, with a series of reworkings made in collaboration with an equally diverse set of artists. After the likes of William Basinski and Matthew Herbert in 2023, this year saw Noit enlist the talents of Laraaji, Preservation and Armand Hammer to push the already kaleidoscopic sound even further.

Holland Andrews – Answers

LEITER

“Back in 2021, Brooklyn-based composer, producer, vocalist, and clarinetist Holland Andrews released Wordless, the first of a series of EPs under their own name (having previously recorded as Like A Villain). Released with label LEITER, the record introduced a distinctively transportive sound. Led by voice and clarinet and processed through a variety of electronics, the compositions offered soundscapes in which the listener might lose themselves. Rich tapestries of colour and texture crafted with an almost cinematic attention to detail. Subsequent EPs Forgettings and Doubtless furthered the scope and intention of the style, exploring themes of healing and transcendence as Andrews’s genre-bending sensibilities solidified into a style of their own […] Now Holland Andrews has returned with Answers, the fourth and final EP of the series which feels like both the clearest realisation of their creative ideals and a continued, active resistance against genre conventions.” [Review]

Hour – Ease the Work

Dear Life Records

With a studio’s worth of equipment in tow, the ensemble Hour took a ferry to Peaks Island, Maine out of season, and spent a week holed up together in an old theatre to record their latest album, Ease the Work. The project boasts a diverse cast of musicians—lead Michael Cormier O’Leary (electric guitar, classical guitar, percussion) joined by Jason Calhoun (synth), Em Downing (violin), Matt Fox (viola), Elisabeth Fuchsia (violin) Peter Gill (bass), Lucas Knapp (radio effects, field recordings, piano), Evan McGonagill (cello), Peter McLaughlin (drums, percussion), Keith J. Nelson (bass clarinet, clarinet), Erika Nininger (piano, rhodes) and Abi Reimold (electric guitar)—each bringing their own instincts and sensibilities to the project’s lush instrumental arrangements. The intimacy of the recording process allowed each separate contribution to coalesce into harmony. “Challenging any clear distinction between composition and improvisation,” as we wrote earlier in the year, the resulting record “performs the same small miracle of the previous records, presenting the everyday in all its joy and melancholy, comfort and strangeness.”

I Saw the TV Glow soundtrack

A24 Music

“The danger of nostalgia is that it tends to confuse the actual home with the imaginary one,” Svetlana Boym wrote in her 2001 book, The Future of Nostalgia. “In extreme cases it can create a phantom homeland.” The warning is explored in Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow, a film with a decidedly complex relationship with nostalgia. It can be something to wrap yourself in, bond over, shelter beneath, yet with this retreat comes the risk of a detrimental stasis, where fondness for the past comes to eat up the present. The interrogation is furthered by the film’s soundtrack, where the likes of Caroline Polachek, Florist, Frances Quinlan, Sadurn and King Women tap into the unapologetically sentimental nineties aesthetic. But it is the very first track that is perhaps the most thematically resonant. Yeule‘s cover of ‘Anthems For A Seventeen Year-Old Girl’ is so distorted by glitchy imperfections it becomes something of a Baudrillardian simulacrum. A memory denatured by overhandling, unpegged from reality, a figment of the imagination which has come to replace the real.

Jahnah Camille – i tried to freeze light, but only remember a girl

Winspear

“The songs offer a picture of late adolescence in all of its bittersweet nuance, its introspective contemplation matched only by its bold confessional attitude.” That’s how we described i tried to freeze light, but only remember a girl, the debut EP of Birmingham, Alabama-based songwriter and musician  Jahnah Camille earlier this year. The release reaches for a number of genres with real confidence, be it the nineties alt-rock swagger of ‘flesh’ or the country twang of ‘roadkill’. “[But it is] the lyrics which really see the artist stand apart,” we continued. “Because Camille has a knack for combining emotion and self-awareness, offering songs entirely committed to the feelings being explored but never lacking a wry wrinkle to add that extra layer of personality.”

Jess Ribeiro – Summer of Love

Poison City Records

Written amid a period of intense instability, Summer of Love finds Jess Ribeiro negotiating the liminal space between hope and reality, confronting the past and possible futures alongside the present moment to find a way towards healing. Ribeiro chose to lean into the turmoil during the recording process, undeterred by the fact collaborators could only visit individually thanks to the pandemic restrictions, and many never made it to the studio at all. Yet together with Nick Huggins, she nonetheless enlisted the talents of Jim White (drums), Darcy McNulty (saxophone), Leah Senior (keys), James Seymour (bass), Davie Mudie (percussion) and Carrie Webster (violin and viola), guiding each musician according to the release’s spirit. The result is improvised and exploratory yet bound by the same sense of longing. That will to work through tumultuous times towards something more solid. The hope that chaos might resolve itself into a more hospitable state.

Josaleigh Pollett – In The Garden, By The Weeds

Self-Released

“An excavation of the present which inevitably tends pastward, tracing a presiding cynicism back to its roots in search of a cause.” That’s how we described Josaleigh Pollett‘s third album In The Garden, By The Weeds. At first, the imagery of the title resonates on a surface level, the Salt Lake City songwriter surveying the ecosystem of their life, assessing which parts to nurture, which to pluck or prune. But spend a minute with this collection of stark and glitchy songs and it becomes clear things are operating on a deeper level. For Pollett not only gives the weeds their due but the subterranean conditions too. Those places dark and elemental we so often pretend have no relation to us higher beings. Places perhaps inside of our lives or our selves we must reach down into if we are to make any real progress in cultivating the kind of environment we want to live in. Even if it means getting our hands dirty, scrunching our eyes and grasping blind.

Joy Guidry – AMEN

Whited Sepulchre Records

“In AMEN,” explained Joy Guidry of their most recent album, “there is a lot experimentation with different forms of Black American music. I wanted to lean heavily on my Texas, Louisiana and Creole roots in this project. There were many days spent with my ancestors during the writing of this album and I’m eternally grateful for the music they sang to me during our time together.” The record saw the basoonist and composer develop their sound with the newly prominent influence of gospel and spiritual jazz, combining the sensibilities of church music with jazz invention to create something fundamentally devotional. “The result is at once communal and singular,” as we put it in our review. “Joy Guidry as realised in their most complete form to date.”

K. Freund – Trash Can Lamb

Soda Gong

We’ve been following the work of Akron, Ohio’s Keith Freund for the better part of two decades, originally with Trouble Books, then as one half of the experimental/neoclassical duo Lejsovka & Freund, and more recently with Lemon Quartet and Aqueduct Ensemble. Following 2022’s Hunter on the Wing, Trash Can Lamb is Freund’s latest release under his own name, and offers another exercise in minimal piano, degraded samples and an array of tactile electronics. It’s the neoclassical equivalent of the folk art eccentric, spinning singular homebrew beauty from a treehouse studio filled with strange gadgets and devices, at far remove from the polish and pretension of the auditorium, yet somehow deeper for it. Trash Can Lamb walks it own path straight to the heart of things, small moments and sensations that you couldn’t describe with words if you tried.

Kali Malone – All Life Long

Ideologic Organ

“Manages to suggest both academic rigour and unburdened instinct, but ultimately transcends any focus on its intentions as the listener becomes immersed in the soundscape. Some hymn or lament, latent with the suggestion of the sublime, be it total dread or transcendence, silence or all-encompassing sound.” So we wrote of Living Torch by Kali Malone back in 2022, though the description could be extended to much of the Stockholm-based composer’s work. Written for pipe organ, choir and brass quintet, latest release All Life Long possesses all the same clarity and depth, breathing new life into classical techniques to create something at once intimate and exalted. Not holy music, per say, but music which operates according to the same ends. Aiming to evoke those sensations felt in the face of things far greater than us, more mysterious, yet surrounding us all the same.

Keanu Nelson – Wilurarrakutu

Mississippi Records

Primarily a poet in his home of Papunya, northwest of Alice Springs, Keanu Nelson was inspired to start singing his work after meeting producer Yuta Matsumura in the local arts centre. The result is Wilurarrakutu, an album first released on Altered States Tapes last year, but put out to a wider audience back in August by Mississippi Records. With Casio beats programmed by Matsumura as support, Nelson delivers deeply personal poetry on themes of loneliness and family, home and loss, in both Papunya Luritja and English. Nelson incorporates reggae and gospel influences into a sound which emerges from an electronic sonic lineage that trails back to the likes of Suicide and Francis Bebey but represents its own singular style. One which aches with a sense of longing, the relative simplicity of the arrangements allowing the emotional depth of Nelson’s poetry to sit front and centre, blurring the classic and the contemporary into something genuinely moving.

Lia Kohl – Normal Sounds

Moon Glyph

“Able to evoke existence in all of its magic and mundanity.” That’s how we described the work of Chicago-based cellist, composer and multidisciplinary artist Lia Kohl back in July, describing her album Normal Sounds as “at once normal and very much not, or else it is extraordinarily normal—with Kohl turning her attention to the acoustics of everyday living and presenting them back to the listener as something as something new.” Existing somewhere between music and sound art, the record uses synths and cello (as well as occasional flute and electronics from Ka Baird and sax from Patrick Shiroishi) to accentuate field recordings of human-made sounds, reflecting our own world back to us in a new light. Here the incidental is elevated, each song a cacophony crafted from the sounds we so often ignore or phase out. Kohl isn’t so much crafting a soundscape for us to hear as rewiring our brains so that our attention might be heightened. What we encounter in such a state is sometimes playful, sometimes strange, occasionally unnerving and melancholic in the way the slow passage of life always is. The human world in granular detail. What it sounds like to live here and now.

Lindsay Reamer – Natural Science

Dear Life Records

“[Songs which] not only represent a study of a specific time and place—capturing a snapshot of environments both natural and human and the porous border between the two—but also a report on how it feels to exist within that period. As though Lindsay Reamer serves as our guide through contemporary America as she knows it. A squeezed no-man’s land between the past and the future. A place where great beauty and banality sit side by side, where old choices drag unforeseen consequences towards us and yet the smallest details still seem to hold life in all of its inscrutable charm.” [Review]

Little Kid – A Million Easy Payments

Orindal Records

“[The] ability to vary the focal length of its perspective so gracefully is a signature of A Million Easy Payments. “The urgency in Kenny Boothby’s voice matches the stakes of his lyrics,” writes Dan Wriggins in the liner notes [of Little Kid‘s latest album], “epic ballads and reveries that come at life from all angles and exposures, driving at and a little over the limits of self-reflection.” The sense of an artist never quite satisfied with the scene they have captured, always looking to widen the lens to better represent the truth before them, or else zoom in closer in search of the missing detail which might click everything else into place. Call it a search for meaning, or even God Himself. In other hands, songs reaching for such things with the expansive style of Dylan and Welch at their most ambitious might feel like novelty or pastiche. But in this context it seems the only logical outcome for Little Kid’s specific way of working.” [Review]

Lollise – i hit the water

Switch Hit Records

“Hailing from Francistown in Botswana and now based in New York, Lollise is an artist who draws from the entirety of her musical history when crafting her songs. Hence the sound of her debut full-length I hit the water owes a debt to the styles which soundtracked her childhood and early years—including Setswana and Kalanga folk songs, South African electronic bubblegum and kwaito from the eighties and nineties, Congolese soukous and Zimbabwean sungura—as well as genres like Afrobeat, art-pop and new wave which she immersed herself in after moving to the US. What results is a sound capable of evoking the future and past simultaneously, where traditional styles are repurposed to open new directions, and the line between history and imagination blurs into something entirely new.” [Review]

Mary Ocher – Your Guide to Revolution

Underground Institute

“To say Mary Ocher’s latest album Your Guide to Revolution is ambitious in its intentions is to risk understatement. A kaleidoscopic and politically charged collection of songs which draws on Ocher’s childhood (born in Moscow to Jewish-Ukrainian parents before emigrating to Tel Aviv during the Gulf War) as a way into wider themes of resistance and civil disobedience. A huge array of styles and influences are utilised across the record, both to evoke the gamut of emotions triggered within the contemporary struggle and to ground the release within a wider history of such subversive art. A central part of the album is a series of three tracks which rework pieces by harpist Dorothy Ashby based on the Rubaiyat of Omar Khyyam, a triptych of songs which Ocher has collected into a short film which echoes The Color of Pomegranates by Sergei Parajanov.” [Review]

Merce Lemon – Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wilds

Darling Recordings

“A collection of nine songs with dirt under their fingernails, equal parts wild and vulnerable as they reckon with the changing tides of love in all its guises […] Merce Lemon’s songwriting is often gentle, careful and sincere ruminations on love and solitude, but this underlying ferality is perhaps the record’s biggest strength, and the most obvious step forward from Moonth. A reminder the soft animal can still bear its teeth, a kind of wildness that turns heartfelt, mid-tempo folk rock songs into blown-out anthems, building towards crescendos of wailing guitar and pure feeling.” [Review]

Minor Moon – The Light Up Waltz

Ruination Record Co.

Minor Moon‘s latest album The Light-Up Waltz is set within “speculative world, where civilisation has collapsed and the characters are made to exist in the aftermath,” as we wrote earlier in the year. “But far from some desolate landscape of grim suffering, this post-civilisation society is one coloured by the invention and playfulness of its inhabitants. As though steely determination can only be maintained with a suitable accompaniment of joy.” This is a collection of songs working under such a logic, finding its characters proactive in their search for meaning, and perhaps finding it through that very mindset. “To me,” as lead Sam Cantor puts it, “the antidote to fatalistic disillusionment is a kind of complicated dance with dread, hope and joy.”

MJ Lenderman – Manning Fireworks

Anti- Records

It’s fair to say MJ Lenderman has come a long way since we shared ‘Gentleman Jack’ from his 2021 album, Ghost of Your Guitar Solo. Through his what we’ve described previously as “masterful knack for combining details small and absurd into something which feels like life as it’s lived on the ground,” the last coulpe of years has seen Lenderman take the leap into the indie stratosphere, and latest album Manning Fireworks makes good on this acclaim without sacrificing the sensibilities which got him there in the first place. Often wacky yet always unabashedly earnest, these are songs of a different sort of American mythology. Colourful, chintzy, most likely temporary. A place of waterparks and McDonalds lots. Pocket Bibles, drunk drivers, Disney Pixar deleted scenes. A place inhabited by people who were once babies and now jerks. People like you and me.

Mol Sullivan – GOOSE

Self-Released

A self-described “long exposure photograph” charting growth both artistic and personal, Mol Sullivan‘s GOOSE serves as a portrait of a person within the arc of great change. With songs written in the aftermath of a relationship and during a nascent sobriety, the album opens with Sullivan “set deep in those early days of a new beginning,” as we wrote, “where everything feels possible yet tenuous and a little too vivid to bear,” but does not stay constrained to the present moment. Instead, we find an artist moving forwards and looking back, reflecting on who they were and who they want to be, reaching beyond stories of love and addiction for a more nuanced picture of life. An artist in dialogue with themselves, teasing out those fundamental things which exist beyond what happens to us within any given moment, and thus repositioning change as a positive force we might harness to become ourselves more fully.

mui zyu – nothing or something to die for / cantonese tasting menu EP

Father/Daughter Records

Last year’s Rotten Bun for an Eggless Century saw Hong Kong British artist mui zyu delve deep within themselves in search of a better understanding of their own identity. The songs mapped a vast labyrinth of history and personal experience and located the elusive truth not locked in some remote central chamber but rather via the process itself. But if the introspective survey of Rotten Bun charted the complex contours of its own small world, follow up nothing or something to die for flips its gaze outwards to take on a far bigger challenge—the chaotic, conflicted place we call home. Here human society is painted as an overwhelming and fundamentally lonely place, where an omnipresent technological connection belies the isolation at its core. Floating over this absurd space, mui zyu looks for the points where the veil between us is the thinnest, hoping a better existence might be possible while refusing to ignore evidence to the contrary. There might be nothing, there might be something to die for, or perhaps both of these things can be true at once.

Nap Eyes – The Neon Gate

Paradise of Bachelors

Through a string of ambitious, philosophical and playful albums, Halifax outfit Nap Eyes have established themselves as one of the most inventive, thematically interesting bands in contemporary indie rock. Even by their standards, The Neon Gate pushes the envelope on what songs can be and explore. Fans will recognise Nigel Chapman’s distinctively deadpan vocals, but the Nap Eyes sound has expanded in various directions, shapeshifting between tracks and unafraid of the abstract and improvised. Weird tangents are followed, eldritch stories are told, what rules there were are broken. The result is to witness something familiar transmogrify, metastasise, expand and contract before your eyes, the recognisable slowly twisted strange into a new, surreal landscape. A style inspired, at least in part, by the William Butler Yeats poem ‘I See Phantoms of Hatred and of the Heart’s Fullness and of the Coming Emptiness’. A poem which is adapted as a song near the end of the album:

I climb to the tower-top and lean upon broken stone,
A mist that is like blown snow is sweeping over all,
Valley, river, and elms, under the light of a moon
That seems unlike itself, that seems unchangeable,
A glittering sword out of the east. A puff of wind
And those white glimmering fragments of the mist sweep by.
Frenzies bewilder, reveries perturb the mind;
Monstrous familiar images swim to the mind’s eye.

Prostitute – Attempted Martyr

Self-Released

The past year has been desperate, dizzying and ferociously cruel for many, and no release captured this reality better than Attempted Martyr by Prostitute. Described as being “written and recorded under duress of a world in turmoil” and “dedicated to Lebanon, from Dearborn with love,” the album sits somewhere between noise rock, post-punk and jazz. A collection of songs twisted tight with intensity, always threatening to spin out of control, fired by the depthless fury of grief and somehow managing an air of plaintive sorrow too. Beneath the delivery’s bark and bite lies a deceptively diverse range of moods and emotions—from the mournful opening title track and spittle-flecked defiance of ‘Judge’ to poetic meditations on justice and resistance and even a certain wry humour (Prostitute one-up fellow Michigan punks Protomartyr by devoting an entire song to celebrity attorney Joumana Kayrouz). A timely reminder of the fertile relationship between anger and compassion, and a scream into the face of a world gone numb.

Rosali – Bite Down

Merge Records

“Help me, darling, I can’t seem to bite down on it / I can’t seem to feel what’s real anymore.” So opens the title track of Rosali‘s Bite Down, giving voice to a sentiment which underpins the entire album. But this is not a record of desperate pleas and drifting disconnection, rather the antidote to such things. As though having been touched by these emotions, Rosali chose to be proactive, confronting life’s ups and downs with a newfound defiance, determined to feel reality in all its forms. The title refers to “something more extreme than leaning in,” as Rosali told Mariana Timony for Bandcamp. “I’m taking a bite. I’m accepting it. I’m chewing it.” Again recorded with the David Nance Band to blur the line between solo and group effort, the resulting album effortlessly straddles folk and classic rock styles and builds upon everything which made 2021’s No Medium so special.

Roswit – Eternal Living

Mono Tapes

The debut album from self-described “olde punks” Roswit has one foot in classic Pacific Northwest indie pop and another across the ocean in a Flying Nun Records style jangle, with some wiry, stripped-back punk thrown in for good measure. From infectious opener ‘Grape’s Song’, which calls to mind fellow Vancouverites The Courtney’s, to the sleeves-rolled-up scrappiness of ‘King’s Song’, every song is packed with a sense of DIY fun. And to top it all there’s a throwback vibe, not to bygone decades but right back to the Middle Ages, a candy-coloured fantasy land of knights and dragons and damsels in distress. This is sometimes achieved with subtle lyrical nods, and others musically, such as ‘Princess’s Song’ which sounds like a lo-fi punk take on a Medieval ballad. Eternal Loving is perhaps best summed up by ‘Dreamer’s Song’, which has it all—supremely catchy hooks, galloping percussion, oohing and aahing harmonies, flutters of flute and daydreams of ye olden days.

Shovel Dance Collective – The Shovel Dance

American Dreams

“We want to play and experiment, layer and move between different spaces in recording, and extend the limits of our instruments to sing and break in new ways,” explained Shovel Dance Collective of their experimental folk sound. “Improvising, textural playing, and moving as one free organic organism are all part of the experiments we try and make in form. It’s all towards this one goal: constructing the Shovel Dance world and saying what we feel needs saying.” Latest album The Shovel Dance saw the outfit “position themselves within an exciting contemporary movement,” as we wrote in our review, “and The Shovel Dance is sure to join the likes of Lankum’s False Lankum and Shane Parish’s Liverpool in their mission to push old sounds and stories into new dimensions.”

S. Raekwon – Steven

Father/Daughter Records

A moniker can offer many things for an artist, not least a sense of separation between their ‘real’ and performing selves, but while Steven Raekwon Reynolds released his latest record Steven under the name S. Raekwon, the album’s title is suggestive of the manner in which the songs work to close this gap in search of authenticity. Because this is a personal album in the most practical sense. Reynolds did all the writing, production, engineering and mixing, not to mention played every instrument with the exception of the drums. What emerged is a collection of songs which serves to illuminate the different parts of their curator, as though the record is a prism through which he shines himself, each track a different wavelength of his personality stratified according to mood. “Maybe subliminally or unconsciously, the songs kind of grouped together in a certain way to explore different areas of myself,” he explains. “The beginning is rage and angriness in a certain way. The middle is this uncertainty of questioning yourself, who you are, and if you’re a good person. And then at the end, I think it comes to a place of resolution. I’m just examining myself and trying to come to a better understanding of who I am.”

Sinai Vessel – I SING

Keeled Scales

In October, Caleb Cordes announced that Sinai Vessel, his moniker for the past fifteen years, had come to an end. “You have taught me everything and I’m taking it all with me,” he wrote in a statement of social media, looking forward to new, healthier future without the constant striving for further success and recognition in the cockfight that is the music industry. Released back in the summer before this news broke, the fourth Sinai Vessel album I SING represents both a parting gift from a project that has meant so much to so many, and a frank examination of the factors which grind artists down to the point of submission, taking on themes so often absent from art with a sincere yet unromantic air. “I sing for a reason,” Cordes sings on the title track. “My reason’s the same // as the nurses buying rentals
/ and rides to broadway
/ who fill up big bars on buses
/ and fall off shit-faced / and the trained men who clock in / coming back from smoke breaks
/ who zoom in from satellites
/ to bomb palisades.” Because I SING is an album about the rarest of things: money, or the lack thereof. How contemporary society seems built to punish anyone who dares attempt a living through art, and the ways in which the compulsion to create persists in ways both magical and mundane. “I sing ‘cos I wake up
/ again and again,” as the title track continues. “It never stops coming
/ it doesn’t make sense.” Sinai Vessel is dead, long live Caleb Cordes.

Slippers – So You Like Slippers

Lame-O Records

“It was childhood residence Atlanta that lit Madeleine BB’s creative fire. The city is home to the headquarters of Cartoon Network, which inspired not only her interest in animation, but indie rock too. ‘Cartoon Network… was a big part of my life growing up,’ she says. ‘They always had a lot of indie bands in the fold there—I remember there was this Powerpuff Girls music compilation that had Devo and Apples in Stereo and Shonen Knife on it. My dad bought that for me and I just became obsessed with it.’ Many of the tracks on [Slippers‘] So You Like Slippers? are a product of this kind of cross pollination, either inspired by or written specifically for BB’s animations. ‘I was trying to make these jokey kid’s songs, sort of like They Might Be Giants, to go along with my animations,’ she describes, and it’s clear this visual starting point provided a sense of creative freedom. License to write quickly and without inhibition, and the ability to explore themes and feelings that could be painstakingly overwrought with charming ease.” [Review]

Tasha – All This and So Much More

Bayonet Records

“Finds an artist embracing the pace and breadth of their new life. Confronting each day with a sense of defiance rather than looking for somewhere to hide.” So we wrote of Tasha‘s All This and So Much More in a preview back in the summer, an album written amid a flurry of experiences that ran the gamut between agonising (unexpected grief, an abrupt separation) and amazing (a role in the Tony-nominated Broadway musical Illinoise). Where many might have sought some form of retreat from life’s constant barrage of change, the Chicago artist instead decided to lean into the momentum to embrace the potential of forward motion. “I’m overcome at the wonder around me,” she sings on the quasi-title track ‘So Much More’. “I fill my lungs, feel the air rush inside me / Could this be fun? Could I be happy?” The album works through the doubt of such questions with decisiveness, choosing to believe that the impossible might be true, life a joyous experience after all. “What if my hope didn’t have a ceiling? / What I want most, all I imagined / What if I chose to settle for nothing less than magic?”

Trace Mountains – Into the Burning Blue

Lame-O Records

Glance at the title of Trace Mountains‘ latest album Into the Burning Blue and you’d be forgiven for expecting a descent into something deep and dark, an assumption only strengthened by opener ‘In a Dream’. “A dispatch from whatever stage of capitalism we’re calling contemporary America as delivered from a breathless nighttime bike ride,” as we wrote of the track back in the summer. “The effect is passing through a dark passage full of eerie shadow without quite knowing if there’s an exit at the other end.” Yet rather than barrelling down towards some nadir, the track’s glittering eighties rock sensibilities manage to invert the arc, the climax instead finding Dave Benton breaching the surface into a wider world. Which isn’t to say the rest of Into the Burning Blue is bright and affirming, it is after all a record concerning the end and aftermath of a long-term relationship, rather that the shades of blue on offer are far more nuanced and diverse than you might at first expect. A picture of person moving through conflict and loss attuned to all the accompanying tones that come with it, and one delivered with all the widescreen confidence of Petty or Springsteen to boot.

villagerrr – Tear Your Heart Out

Darling Recordings

Zeroing in on life’s small, ostensibly ordinary moments to find the meaning within, villagerrr‘s latest album Tear Your Heart Out sees Mark Allen Scott embrace his Midwestern roots for a country-inflected brand of indie rock. Chillicothe, Ohio might have felt constrictive growing up, but home is home and soon a sense of fondness began to blossom, and with it came a desire to acknowledge the fact. “I want to wear where I’m from and my family on my sleeve,” Scott explains. “I’m proud of the twangy influence in my music from corny country songs I’d hear on the bus rides to school. I feel like I’m reclaiming where I come from and making it my own.” The result is a decidedly empathetic collection of songs able to zoom close to the smallest details of small town life, be it light through a sunroof, the smell of cut grass or pencil drawings made in an effort to preserve memories. Some of the tracks are tortured in their own quiet way (“Falling in and out of trust / With the ones you loved before,” as he sings on ‘Cry On’, “It’s not the way I hoped it would be / Oh, no”), some wryly funny (“I see you wearing your Carhartt jeans / Talking ’bout how you don’t got money,” is a refrain in ‘Car Heat’), but all are wrapped in a sense of understanding, as though villagerrr attempts to see through the tangle of emotions to see the fallible humans struggling underneath.

Waxahatchee – Tigers Blood

Anti- Records

When released in 2020, Waxahatchee‘s fifth full-length Saint Cloud felt like the pinnacle of the project, Katie Crutchfield pivots towards an alt-country aesthetic so seamless and fitting it appeared to be some form of completion. Only for Tigers Blood to roll around a few years later, an album which sees the Waxahatchee star rise even further. Unfazed by recent popularity, Crutchfield and co. resisted all the trappings of success and temptations to transcend into the mainstream to instead focus on the present. There are no synths on Tigers Blood. No cinematic pop flourishes. No indication of burning through a newly weighty budget. Which is to say, the album finds Crutchfield not so much dreaming of what Waxahatchee could become, but instead concentrating on exactly what it is. The result is full of heart, romance and hard-won authenticity that could only stem from a place of confidence. Waxahatchee might have found its final form, but you sense this is only its beginning.

Wendy Eisenberg – Viewfinder

American Dreams

“When Wendy Eisenberg finally got Lasik surgery after a lifelong struggle against an assortment of ocular and vision-based afflictions, the resulting impact went far deeper than they perhaps expected […] Viewfinder emerges from within this new experience of the world, reckoning with exactly what it means to see and not to see, and how beauty and meaning are inherent within both experiences […] How does our understanding of the physical world change according to our ability to visually perceive it? And what about other planes—the emotional, spiritual and metaphysical?” [Review]

West of Roan – Queen of Eyes

Spinster

“A god of doorways and portals, a god of seeing in the dark and in dreams, a saint of weeping in sorrow or in joy.” That’s how Laurel Premo, writing in the album notes, describes the titular figure of West of Roan‘s latest record Queen of Eyes. The guide which leads Annie Schermer and Channing Showalter deep into a realm of myth, archetype and imagery, some otherworld beneath our own which bears the load of all that has been before and will surely arrive in time. A place where both personal, historical and cultural trauma unwinds itself as story. When we say West of Roan is a project steeped in the folk tradition, we mean it in a fundamental sense beyond any musical style. That urge to communicate, console, explain or contextualise. To take on the largest of themes in the ways humans always have. The result isn’t so much ambiguous as multifaceted. Stark, beguiling, full of glory and grief. As mysterious as the Queen herself, demanding you submit to its forces to discover the transcendence within.

Why Bonnie – Wish On The Bone

Fire Talk

“How do we live authentically within a world which demands we perform and pretend? Is it possible to confront the true dismal nature of things and still retain a sense of hope? Such questions have weighed on [Blair] Howerton since previous Why Bonnie album 90 in November, not least because she felt she had evolved beyond the wistful country-inflected style those songs presented. “I’ve changed since that album, and I trust that I’ll probably continue to change,” as Howerton explains. Wish On The Bone looks to pinpoint who she is at this point in time without committing to any lasting identity. To possess the confidence to work beyond the expectations of preconception and present however feels right within the current moment. Hence an album which foregoes easy pigeonholing in terms of style, unified instead by the defiant new self-confidence which underpins it. “You owe it to the people who are experiencing the worst to just keep pushing,” as Howerton concludes. “These songs were written out of hope for a better future. I’m not naïve, the world is fucked up, but I think you can radically accept that while still believing it’s possible to change things.” [Review]

Wild Pink – Dulling the Horns

Fire Talk

If recent years have seen Wild Pink’s star rise, then Dulling the Horns could be said to see it begin its arc back earthward, returning not to obscurity but a gravity-saddled weight and heft, the loud rush of the atmosphere roaring in its ears. Recorded live with all the grit and raw energy of the band’s live show left intact, it feels like both a throwback to their early work and a new chapter entirely, losing the wide-screen scope and sparkling electronics in favour of something with a little less polish.  “I didn’t want to clean up anymore,” says lead John Ross. “In doing so we’ve arrived at a new place.” Thematically it leaps around, touching on everything from Dracula and Michael Jordan to the Waco siege and Lefty Ruggiero, and this willingness to reach wide and chase tangents only furthers the sense of immediacy, resulting in the most urgent Wild Pink album to date.

Wishy – Triple Seven

Winspear

Released hot on the heels of December 2023’s successful EP Paradise, Wishy‘s debut full-length Triple Seven seemed to confirm suspicions the Indiana outfit possess the magic Midas touch, a spontaneous jackpot on first pull of the lever which included an NME cover among other such acclaim. And though the journey to that recognition was far more convoluted in reality, something about this iteration, led by songwriters Kevin Krauter and Nina Pitchkites, possesses an undeniable lightning-in-a-bottle charm. A sound which “pays homage to forebears […] while fashioning the nineties-nostalgic sound into something entirely their own,” as we put it, combining dream pop, shoegaze and indie rock influences into something as polished as it is fun.

Young Jesus – The Fool

Saddle Creek

“The pressures of touring had seen the original Young Jesus band slowly disintegrate, and the mosaic pop of Shepherd Head demanded hours spent alone in front of a computer. Exhausted and disillusioned by the process, Rossiter pined for something less abstract. A way to express his creativity rooted in the real world. So he turned to gardening, studying permaculture and the slow process of nurturing it demands. Only then came a chance encounter with Shahzad Ismaily, originating in a shared interest in the work of Milford Graves, and a slow process of coaxing. Rossiter would work on music then tend Ismaily’s New York garden between sessions. At home in LA, he did the reverse, planting trees and laying paths with Alex Babbitt and Alex Lappin before gathering around the piano to play and sing. Slowly the compulsion to make music returned, though now informed by the lessons learnt whilst working on the natural world. The resulting album The Fool feels like another milestone for Young Jesus. A continuation of the searching style which has so long marked the project, but one armed with a new array of tools and techniques to perhaps arrive closer to a satisfying end.” [Review]

The post Year in Review: 2024 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Here’s a list of thirty records we didn’t get a chance to tell you about properly in 2022. Releases we think you would do well to come to know.

The A’s – Fruit

Psychic Hotline

A collection of traditional folk songs, lullabies and one original, the debut album from The A’s—AKA Alexandra Sauser-Monnig (Daughter of Swords) and Amelia Meath (Sylvan Esso)—is a mélange of the whimsical and quietly devastating. The product of over a decade of close friendship (the pair make up two-thirds of Mountain Man), and rooted in a long history of American folk eccentricity, the record features beguiling vocal harmonies, pitch-perfect yodelling and a sonic potpourri of everyday orchestral elements (the liner notes list instruments like hair, shoes, ice chunk, gravel, frog sample and shoelace). Examined individually the ten songs share little in common, but as a whole they somehow work perfectly, capturing both a sense of fun and genuine beauty. As Sauser-Monnig puts it when describing compiling the tracklist, “If it doesn’t make you cackle or cry, it doesn’t belong.”

A.O. Gerber – Meet Me at the Gloaming

Hand in Hive / Father/Daughter Records

True to its title, A.O. Gerber’s Meet Me at the Gloaming invites the listener into a world between day and night. A space in which the binaries of light and dark are muddied, complicated, ultimately dissolved into insignificance. To inhabit such a place, Gerber shows us, is to confess new feelings and relinquish old shames. To move beyond ideas of good and bad in order to exist on your own terms, and heal from the years in which this was not the case. Because if anything emerges from the nuanced folk rock of the record, it is the sense that strict boundaries are counterproductive and often imaginary, fencing off the rich confluences in which life is truly lived.

Ashenspire – Hostile Architecture

code666 / Aural Music

‘Great’ Britain might have had a strange smell about it for years now, but 2022 was the year it quit pretending and died in full view. Nothing quite managed to capture the spirit of the time like Glasgow-based outfit Ashenspire, with their LP Hostile Architecture manifesting this broken feeling as avant-garde metal. It’s a record of fury and futility that rails against not only the misery of the moment but the abject cruelty of those who have allowed it to come to pass. “Always three months to the gutter / Never three months to the top,” goes a line in the typically forthright opening track ‘The Law of Asbestos’, “another set of fucking homeless spikes outside another empty shop.” Through a series of shapeshifting, endlessly inventive tracks, the album posits hostile architecture as the contemporary British landscape. A society designed to inflict discomfort on its citizens out of nothing but fear and malice. “This is not a house of amateurs,” as the opener concludes bitterly. “This is done with full intent.”

Bartees Strange – Farm to Table

4AD

If Bartees Strange’s debut record Live Forever confronted and ultimately rejected the pigeonholing and self-censorship too often required for a Black person to exist within a traditionally white space, then follow-up Farm to Table is a dispatch from the other side. A genre-hopping and often jubilant refusal to be put into a single box, or indeed to be anyone other than Bartees Strange. “That’s why I really can’t fuck with y’all / In fact I’m feeling more grown,” as he sings on ‘Escape This Circus’. “I really can’t fuck with y’all / And I don’t wanna act no more.” But though this embrace of the self comes with a sense of empowerment, there’s another side which proves equally important. Because just as Bartees Strange wasn’t all the things the industry (and society in general) demanded he be when chasing success, he’s not suddenly some saint or superhero having found it. He’s himself, a single person, communicating something important and hoping to reach whoever might need to hear.

billy woods – Aethiopes

Backwoodz Studioz

“I think Mengistu Haile Mariam is my neighbor,” declares billy woods in the opening line of Aethiopes. “Whoever it is moved in and put an automated gate up.” For most artists, this might be using their best material too early on, leading with the ace up their sleeve. But woods is only getting started. Allusions to the drug epidemic through the Challenger disaster, colonialists on cannibal tours, quotes from Wole Soyinka’s Kongi’s Harvest… and that’s only by track four. “Conceptually, it was one of the [most] complex ideas I’ve ever tried to tackle on an album,” woods told FADER. “It’s a lot of ideas, big and small, of a significant depth. I guess, to me, there’s a lot going on about Blackness as an idea, Africa as an idea, Africa as a reality.”

Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy – Once Again In The World

Antiquated Future Records

Antiquated Future Records has been steadily and quietly releasing collections of rarities from a range of artists as part of their Selected Songs series, delighting old fans and winning new ones, but perhaps most importantly preserving work which might otherwise have been lost. After the likes of Christopher Sutton, Twig Palace and Two White Cranes, this spring saw the turn of Will Oldham with two albums: Time From Work To Go which featured songs recorded as Palace Music, and Once Again In The World with tracks from Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy. “Will Oldham’s wide-ranging influence can be felt in nearly everything in the Selected Songs series so far,” Antiquated Future’s Andrew Barton explains in the liner notes, and thus the releases feel like a milestone in the project. A key text added to the library, important not only in and of itself but also in reading what came after. “As an elementary school teacher,” Barton continues, “I look back on making it a bit like one of my students looking at a final project for a unit they got really into and cared deeply about. A view from my seat in a room full of fellow enthusiasts. The glow of the interesting subject pulses like a star in the sky, always there.”

Brian Harnetty – Words and Silences

Winesap Records

A portrait of the Cisteritan monk and writer Thomas Merton, Words and Silences sees Brian Harnetty add original musical compositions to recordings made by Merton himself during his hermitage in Kentucky in 1967. We hear him identify birdsong, listen to gunfire from Fort Knox, celebrate New Year’s Eve alone and comment on an array of topics from Sufi mysticism to Michel Foucault. But more than offering an extraordinary window into Merton’s solitude, the album elucidates the beauty and melancholy inherent within his reflections, honing the endearing doubt which permeates each monologue and furthering the strange contradictions at work. A communication to no-one, immediate in tone but of course now distant too, and very much aware of the artifice of the recording process. Brian Harnetty embraces such conflicts much as Merton did, and thus not only continues the conversation but opens it wider. Words and Silences is a meditation on curiosity, and one which understands uncertainty and inconsistency to be the very foundations of any will to learn.

The Cool Greenhouse – Sod’s Toastie

Melodic Records

British post-punks The Cool Greenhouse follow their self-titled 2020 debut with a sophomore effort that doubles down on the deadpan wit, surreal humour and thinly-disguised existential pain. Where else are you going to find references to “Jordan fucking Peterson”, talking ladybirds and the unending search for the end of the sellotape, all within the same song? But despite the weirdness, The Cool Greenhouse have polished some edges too, dialling up the accessibility with what the liner notes call “flirtations with–heaven forbid!–melody, chord progressions and arrange-ments.” ‘Get Unjaded’ is the closest thing to a pop song the band have written to date, and they even have a go at actual singing on the slo-mo jangler ‘I Lost My Head’, but regardless of any stylistic evolution, it’s that sardonic lyricism which will keep you coming back.

Craig Finn – A Legacy of Rentals

Positive Jams / Thirty Tigers

Last year, we described The Hold Steady‘s eighth album ODP as a glimpse “into the lives of imperfect figures dissatisfied or downtrodden and merely surviving.” Not so much a pivot from the self-destructive adventure of older THS releases as a natural evolution. With his fourth solo record A Legacy of Rentals, Craig Finn pushes things a step further. A move from the survivors to people who didn’t, as well as those left in their wake with nothing but imperfect memories. With vocal support from Cassandra Jenkins, Finn mines the full depth of this ground to reveal how we shape entire lives around such recollections. Stories we hold onto regardless of their veracity. The justification for toiling in a hostile world. Again we are introduced to characters on the margins—a man forced into drug dealing by financial necessity, a woman escaping life with vodka and a superhero matinee—and the detail and control of the writing is as impressive anything Finn has crafted to date, further cementing his place at the table of America’s best working writers, in music or elsewhere. Memories might not be perfect, A Legacy of Rentals tells us, but they are a way to survive after all.

Daniel McClennan – Unfurling Redemption

Cruel Nature Records

What fuels humanity’s incessant drive to conquer its surroundings? Why must we always seek to transcend? These are some of the questions explored on Unfurling Redemption, a solo album by Daniel McClennan (Warren Schoenbright, Why Patterns) which draws on a range of classical and avant-garde influences to conjure the full, dreadful weight of the subject at hand. Built from synthesised instruments and stock sound samples, the songs exist within a netherworld at once melancholic and ominous, as though having long come to understand transcendence as either an illusion or pyrrhic victory, and left to grasp blindly for redemption elsewhere in the dark.

Dear Nora – human futures

Orindal Records

In a piece for Talkhouse, Dear Nora’s Katy Davidson states confidently that human futures is the best thing they’ve ever made. “I’m just gonna come right out and say it,” they say, “this is the best one… all the previous Dear Nora recordings were practice for this moment, for this album. This is the culmination of them all.” It’s a bold statement for a project that’s been running since the late nineties, but it’s hard to disagree. human futures retains everything that has made Dear Nora a cult hit—the playful lo-fi pop vibe, the offbeat observational lyrics that have come to mark later releases—but feels somehow more complete, more cohesive. Few artists capture twenty-first century life as well as Davidson, images of natural beauty sitting next to wry humour and deadpan observations of our ruined world.

Fiver – Soundtrack to A More Radiant Sphere: The Joe Wallace Mixtape

You’ve Changed Records

Back in 2019, filmmaker Sara Wylie asked Fiver (AKA Simone Schmidt) if they might contribute music for her new project, A More Radiant Sphere. The hybrid documentary centres on Wylie’s great uncle Joe Wallace, a Canadian poet and political prisoner shunned in his home nation but celebrated in Eastern Europe and China, exploring how the role of Communists has been mostly excised from Canadian history. Fiver’s soundtrack furthers this examination, turning a selection of Wallace’s poems into song alongside instrumental pieces. “I have always felt a song is worth singing for what wisdom one can discover through its repetition,” Schmidt explains of the album’s style, “be that in beauty, prayer or, in time, prophecy.” Hopeful, heartfelt and unafraid of nuance, The Joe Wallace Mixtape captures a specific period of Canadian leftist nationalism in all of its passionate imperfection. A movement which threatened to forget its own colonial past in its hurry to attack American imperialism, yet nevertheless dared to imagine the possibility of a society beyond capitalism.

Friendship – Love the Stranger

Merge Records

Having established themselves as one of our favourite contemporary acts with Shock out of Season and Dreamin’, both on Orindal Records, Friendship‘s first LP for Merge is a continuation of their distinctive brand of introspective, country-tinged, slices of life. The songs again centre on lead Dan Wriggins’s plaintive vocals and everyday poetry, ably supported by the careful attention and creative flair of Michael Cormier-O’Leary, Jon Samuels, and Peter Gill. Be it distracting yourself with nature documentaries or a peek at the moon, Wriggins examines small, seemingly mundane details for their loaded meaning. Searching if not for answers then at least reasons to get up every day and keep looking. A way, in other words, to live and love when “gripped by a fear of no discernible beginning.”

Good Looks – Bummer Year

Keeled Scales

“I don’t think they’re evil, even when they’re awful / Not totally class conscious, but ultimately good.” So sings Tyler Jordan on the title track of Good Look’s Bummer Year, referring to his old high school friends in small town Texas. The line is indicative of the tension on a record where fondness and sentimentality are constantly challenged by life’s imperfect reality. A collection of songs willing to hold more than one idea in its head at a time, be it in celebrating close-knit communities while recognising their susceptibility to insular or reactionary turns, or charting the strange relationship between working pride and industrial exploitation. “Blue-collar” indie rock can sometimes comes off as inauthentic or condescending, but it is this nuance which allows Good Looks to come across as authentic, and moreover begin to imagine such communities as sites of revolutionary potential for positive change. “If we’re gonna make a comeback, we’re gonna need those people,” as Jordan concludes on the title track, “like my friends on the bottom who don’t know who to fight.”

Joy Guidry – Radical Acceptance

Whited Sepulchre

“One of the best guides to how to be self-loving is to give ourselves the love we are often dreaming about receiving from others.” So wrote bell hooks in All About Love, gracefully unmasking the cruelty which internalised trauma can bring. That Joy Guidry released Radical Acceptance in the year the world lost hooks feels like the most fitting testament to her legacy. A clear indication that her work is not only being acted upon but developed further, pushed in new directions. A personal practice brought to life in music, the album sees Guidry combine ambient, jazz and classical styles with direct and often humorous spoken word delivery to short-circuit the self-judgement of which hooks wrote. To connect with the reality of one’s identity in a way beyond labels, and learn to love it precisely for what it is.

June McDoom – S/T

Temporary Residence Ltd.

Influenced by a love for sixties and seventies folk, intricate jazz, early soul, and the reggae of her childhood home, the self-titled debut release from Florida-born, New York-based June McDoom takes relatively simple folk blueprints and weaves whole worlds of sound around them. Working with partner and collaborator Evan Wright, McDoom’s style feels like a constantly shifting collage of her influences, warm and rich and strangely dream-like. Highlighting her talents as a producer as much as a songwriter, the record is an exercise in texture and atmosphere, shifting from the earthily pastoral to something more spectral, hallucinatory echoes and psychedelic ambient flourishes moving the songs to some other strange plane.

Kali Malone – Living Torch

Portraits GRM

Driven by both the conceptual and intuitional, Stockholm-based composer Kali Malone has made a name pushing the boundaries of the pipe organ. 2019’s The Sacrificial Code subverted the traditions of the instrument to prove its power was not contingent on a grand, cathedralesque setting. Staying true to her exploratory style, Living Torch sees Malone continue to excavate music for new styles and perspectives, but this time swaps the organ for an altogether more diverse ensemble of instruments, from the trombone and bass clarinet to the boîte à bourdon and Éliane Radigue’s ARP 2500 synthesizer. The result again manages to suggest both academic rigour and unburdened instinct, but ultimately transcends any focus on its intentions as the listener becomes immersed in the soundscape. Some hymn or lament, latent with the suggestion of the sublime, be it total dread or transcendence, silence or all-encompassing sound.

LINQUA FRANQA – Bellringer

Ernest Jenning Record Co.

Meaning both “a jab to the face that knocks someone out completely” and someone who raises an alarm, Bellringer is the perfect title for the sophomore album by Linqua Franqa, the project of Athens, Georgia-based rapper Mariah Parker. Balancing music with work as a linguist, activist, parent and politician, Parker makes razor sharp, socially conscious hip hop that aims to both empower and critique. In provocative, sometimes dark, but always poetic verses, Parker takes on the prison industrial complex, police brutality, exploitative capitalism and mental health issues. There’s also a stellar guest list, which includes Georgia hip hop talent (like Dope Knife and Wesdaruler) as well as indie rock heavyweights like Jeff Rosenstock, of Montreal and Kishi Bashi, and even legendary civil rights activist Angela Davis. Ultimately, Bellringer is a record that sees music as a tool toward liberation. As Parker puts it “[using] the aesthetic pleasure of hip-hop to educate people about why things are so bad and what can we do about it.”

Logan Farmer – A Mold For the Bell

Western Vinyl

“It’s gonna be hard to talk about this when it’s done / Those days of plenty come and gone.” So opens A Mold For the Bell, the latest album from Logan Farmer. The Colorado songwriter has long been marked by a willingness to stare straight into the maw of whatever calamity is approaching, as typified by his almost singularly successful depiction of climate dread on 2020’s Still No Mother. The new record might shift its focus away from explicitly environmental concerns, but roots itself in the same shades and colours. As though the promise of impending loss hangs in the air like a fog. “It’s a full time job, just staying calm / Don’t read the papers,” he sings on ‘Horsehair’, but portents of doom reveal themselves all around. Through lines of silver in hair, or the very silence itself. Yet across all of this persists a very human spirit, small hopes flickering in spite of everything. Because what sets the work of Logan Farmer apart from the plethora of other such dark and pessimistic art is the intimacy with which he approaches such themes. There’s no sublime release to this apocalypse, just people living on through it.

Lou Turner – Microcosmos

Spinster

Nashville’s Lou Turner returned with a cosmic country record that keeps both feet firmly on the ground. Rooted in a welcoming sense of domesticity, Microcosmos finds a sense of wonder in the infinite detail of our immediate surroundings, gently probing at some pretty big questions without the need for some epic quest. Musically it could be from some long-hidden seventies folksinger (think Joni Mitchell, Michael Hurley), but refuses to fall into many long established tropes. There are hints too of David Berman in the songwriting, which melds philosophical musings with observational images—a bird’s nest at a gas station, rising bread dough—and ultimately decrees that an artist is not doomed to tortured wandering.

Medicine Singers – S/T

Stone Tapes / Joyful Noise Recordings

In a year of many great albums, it’s hard to imagine one as bold and committed as the self-titled debut by Medicine Singers. Something of a groundbreaking supergroup, the band are the product of collaboration between Algonquin powwow drum outfit Eastern Medicine Singers and Israeli guitarist Yonatan Gat, and also features contributions from ambient music visionary Laraaji, Thor Harris and Christopher Pravdica of Swans, Ikue Mori of no wave icons DNA and trumpeter jaimie branch. Together the group collide traditional powwow and experimental music, resulting in a distinctive and often joyously cathartic experience. Take the colossal ‘Hawk Song’, or the first sudden burst of pure rock n’ roll guitar that comes blazing in near the beginning of ‘Sunrise (Rumble)’. “These two cultures can work together, and blend together,” Medicine Singers leader Daryl Black Eagle Jamieson explains, “to show people how we can work together and make something beautiful.” What emerges is a piece of contemporary art which serves as a map to its own history, following its roots back into a myriad of traditional styles.

MJ Lenderman – Boat Songs

Dear Life Records

“Listening to Boat Songs by MJ Lenderman is like joining your best friends out on the porch,” describes author Ashleigh Bryant Phillips in the album’s liner notes. “The neighbors might be yelling and the bugs might be biting. But y’all are shooting the shit and letting loose, telling the same old stories again and again.” There’s wrestling, basketball, sightings of Dan Marino in a South Carolina cereal aisle. Drained out swimming pools and birds pecking seeds off the ground. But most of all there’s the masterful knack for combining details small and absurd into something which feels like life as it’s lived on the ground. Lenderman, much like Phillips herself, represents the contemporary face of a certain type of storyteller. One living on the margins or else in the great rural stretches too often ignored, presenting life back to us with all its shine and sharp edges intact.

Posmic – Sun Hymns

Let’s Pretend Records

Clocking in at under twenty minutes, Posmic’s Sun Hymns feels like watching an old Super 8 home movie found at the thrift store, unknown people and scenes flashing by, wrapped in nostalgic film grain and warm colours. Comprising of members of several Baltimore and DC bands (Post Pink, Wildhoney, Ultra Beauty), the outfit make music that collides grungy nineties guitar rock and sixties psych weirdness, resulting in something that feels both fresh and strangely familiar. There are noisy alt-rock jams, incense-scented folk numbers and sunny, easy-going pop, the whole thing adding up to a brief but oh so welcome escape to some other time or place. Sun Hymns might be the sleeper hit of the year, so load it up and bask in its glow.

Réverbérations d’une crise – Une enqu​​​ê​​​te sonore sur le logement à Montr​​​é​​​al

Cuchabata Records

Described as existing “at the border of music and sound art,” and “produced during a collective process of sound inquiry,” Réverbérations d’une crise: une enquête sonore sur le logement à Montréal is a work seeking to evoke a fuller picture of Montreal‘s housing crisis, and make audible what is otherwise silent or silenced. Hubert Gendron-Blais (ce qui nous traverse, Devenir-ensemble) leads a collective featuring Aidan Girt (Gospeed You! Black Emperor), Claude Périard (Claude L’Anthrope), Christine White, Stefan Christoff (Anarchist Mountains) and others, with each track setting out to capture the multifaceted impact of the crisis through political, socio-economic, psychological and existential planes. Take one of Gendron-Blais’s own offerings ‘À la multiplicité fragile d’une ruelle de Parc-Ex’, a collection of sounds from the multicultural, working-class neighbourhood Parc-Extension which evokes both the diversity of the space and the growing precarity as gentrification closes in.

Sarah Davachi – Two Sisters

Late Music

Following the thread back from contemporary drone music through a variety of chamber and choral styles, Sarah Davachi’s Two Sisters is as influenced by medieval sacred music as it is modern minimalism. As though the two forms are not separate entities but the same thing manifest differently across the years—a perpetual attempt to communicate something near inexplicable, some great mystery known only in flashes. Because while spiritual endeavors in music have driven many toward ostentation, Davachi is far more astute. After all, if the mystery shows itself only in glimmers, then what use is show and noise? Two Sisters follows the lead of its forebears and instead turns toward quiet; a hushed, elusive collection of pieces loaded with all the hope, fear and strangeness inherent in that which we cannot fully comprehend.

Silica Gel – Wooden Shoe

Noumenal Loom

Listening to Wooden Shoe, the latest release from Providence, Rhode Island outfit, it’s difficult to ascertain what exactly is going on. Has the past slipped through a crack in the world, returned as some strange, haunting force? Or have we moved in the other direction entirely? Been transported to some unnamed future where old things have reoccurred as the great wheel turns? Having made their name with debut May Day, reinterpreting songs from the fourteenth century satirical text Roman de Fauve, Silica Gel continue the art song tradition by merging Early folk styles with contemporary (or even futuristic) noise, capturing both the ever-spinning cycles of suffering, exploitation and superstition, as well as the interminable dream that something better might lie just beyond the horizon.

Soul Glo – Diaspora Problems

Epitaph

The recipe goes something like this: Take two handfuls of post-hardcore for every one of hip hop, take equal parts punk rock and poetry. Don’t skimp on the humour, don’t forget to stir in the grief. Then preheat the oven to fucking furious and roast the whole thing until the smoke alarm goes off. With the myriad of ingredients and processes, Soul Glo’s Diaspora Problems risks biting off more than it can chew, but with every track it keeps biting, keeps chewing, lets you know there’s no way it’s going to blink before you. From the college scam and reselling economy to the false allyship of the white left, no topic is too much for this record. It bites off your head and chews.

Tenci – A Swollen River, A Well Overflowing

Keeled Scales

Tenci‘s 2020 debut My Heart Is An Open Field was a record of catharsis, with lead Jess Shoman moving beyond pain and trauma via a process of purging. The result was a certain emptiness, a blank space residing where negativity had once lived. Follow-up A Swollen River, A Well Overflowing is an attempt to repopulate this space. A conscious effort to collect the small joys and wonders of the world, and to reposition one’s relationship with things previously difficult to live with so that they might exist comfortably too. With a sound somewhere between bedroom pop introspection and folk hymn timelessness, each song serves as a spell, as Shoman puts it, to “fill my heart back up.”

Titus Andronicus – The Will to Live

Merge Records

“It is the same misery that is all around us,” said Werner Herzog in his 1982 film Burden of Dreams. “The trees here are in misery, and the birds are in misery. I don’t think they sing, they just screech in pain.” Titus Andronicus reach an equally difficult picture of the world on their seventh album, The Will to Live, yet the New Jersey punk royals thoroughly reject nihilism in the process. Written in the wake of tragedies both personal and global, the album sees lead Patrick Stickles dare to embrace life despite the inevitable pain, coming to understand suffering not as the default form of existence but merely the shadow of life itself. Screeching in pain they might be, but Titus Andronicus are singing too, and it is as loud and heartfelt as anything else they have sung for years.

Young Jesus – Shepherd Head

Saddle Creek

Even for a band that has shapeshifted throughout its history, Shepherd Head feels like a departure for Young Jesus. After completing the mathy, jazzy epic Welcome to Conceptual Beach in 2020, the band were burnt out, and lead John Rossiter decided to take a different tack. Working primarily alone, armed with a Macbook, a microphone and a newfound patience, he began to piece together songs from found sounds, audio recordings and white noise. The result is, at least stylistically, a glimpse at Young Jesus in a different form—a stripped-back singer-songwriter approach wrapped in meditative electronic pop, more interested in the emotional, or even spiritual, than the cerebral. It’s a record which faces up to fear and grief but somehow feels suffused with hope, a personal, quasi-solo record that feels anything but lonely (with cameos from friends dotted throughout, including collaborations with Tomberlin and Arswain). As we wrote in a preview of lead single ‘Ocean’ back in the summer, Shepherd Head is “a tapestry both vulnerable and tender, where great loss and transcendence are not so different after all.”

Thanks to everyone who stopped by during 2022, your continued interest and support means the world to us.

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Released to coincide with his birthday, and organised by Dan Wriggins (of Friendship) in collaboration with Dear Life Records, You Were Alone: An Owen Ashworth Almanac is a covers compilation featuring versions of Owen’s songs from family, friends, labelmates and fans. A celebration which recognises a birthday but also so much more than that. A body of work and the burgeoning legacy it has and continues to establish, not to mention the blossoming community fostered through Owen’s label Orindal Records.

And community feels like the right word for the compilation. Both in terms of the gathered artists and the characters they bring to life. Because hearing the songs in different voices really brings home the diversity of personalities present across Owen’s work. Pedro the Lion adds a weariness to ‘My Sister’s Birthday’ with his distinctively gruff fondness. Claire Cronin is the perfect person to fully excavate the spookiness of ‘Pamela’. MJ Lenderman and Karly Hartzman raise a glass to poor old Christmas Steve. Sinai Vessel captures ‘Kitty Winn’ in all its sad affection.

Some, like Lisa/Liza‘s ‘Rabbits’ or Karima Walker‘s ‘Same Dream’, take the original versions back to the traditional folk roots, while the likes of Ylayali, Moon Racer and Bedbug lean into the electronic, harking back to earlier CFTPA days. What’s impressive is how the distinctive “Ashworthian” voice remains across the spectrum. Even the tracks with no literal voice, be it Robert Stillman‘s take on ‘Christmas in Nightmare City’ or Gordon Ashworth‘s extended guitar version of ‘Nephew in the Wild’, lose none of their ability to evoke the tales we’ve grown to hold so dear. Because while Dan might have intended to organise a birthday party, it turned out more like a reunion. A gathering of Owen’s characters, our friends. Still here, still living, still with so many stories to tell.

Cover painting by Martha Miller

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Lead single ‘Someone Get The Grill Out Of The Rain’ introduced the record, a barely sixty second snapshot of the country-infused, rough-around-the-edges approach that MJ Lenderman offers. With as many nods to punk as to folk, and influenced by Deep South outcasts like Harry Crews and Larry Brown, Lenderman finds wry lightness and absurdity in things. A style sometimes cutting and sometimes playful, unapologetically odd and always centred on the curious banalities of life, where humour and sadness marble into one.

Today we have the pleasure of sharing the record’s second single, ‘Gentleman’s Jack’. Delivered with a hushed intimacy, the song has a disarming directness so typical of MJ Lenderman’s work. A mood at once affirming and unnerving in its ability to evoke an honest thought (and one captured perfectly in the confined, shadowed video). In doing so, it captures the Crews-style eccentric in its true form, a character standing oblique to the world but somehow staring it down too. As though only from the left field does a proper view emerge, and the veil can be lifted from the American Dream.

Of course I know we are so small
I put it in perspective, still I can’t help believe that someday I’ll have it all
Jack Nicholson’s courtside seat
purple foam imprinted with celebrity ass cheek
and if the Lakers get beat, well it won’t mean much to me

Of course I know we are in charge
Eight billion little bosses doing eight billion little jobs
still I find myself stressing like I’m tied to the tracks
so I bought myself a hammock to try to relax
and I found two trees with the nerve enough to hold me

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