2nd Grade – Favorite Song
Adeline Hotel – Lightning
Adrianne Lenker – Cradle
Allison’s Gate – Traces
Anna McClellan – Heart of Hearts
Advance Base – Christmas in Nightmare City
Badlands – Slow it Down
Bambara – José Tries to Leave
The Beths – Whatever
Bodega – Jack in Titanic
boygenius – Me & My Dog
Camp Cope – UFO Lighter
Campdogzzz – Sorceress
Cave People – I Shall Believe
Damien Jurado – Percy Faith
Dead Painters – Fool on Fire
Dear Nora – Simulation Feels
Dehd – Dying For
Devon Welsh – Vampires
Diva Sweetly – Detox Island
Doe – Heated
Dusted – Outline of a Wolf
Field Report – Every Time
Frankie Valet – Something to do with a mouth
Gia Margaret – Birthday
Goodbye Max – Old Photos
Good Good Blood – Cannot Be Yours Forever
Gorgeous Bully – Patience
Great Health – Lazarus
Hop Along – How Simple
Hour – At the bar where you literally saved me from fatal heartbreak 
Houses – Fast Talk
Hovvdy – Brave
Hypoluxo – Kentucky Smooth
IAN SWEET – Hiding
Kal Marks – Today I Walked Down To The Tree, Read A Book, And When I Was Done, I Went Back Inside
Katy Kirby – Juniper
Kevin Morby & Waxahatchee – Dark Don’t Hide It
Kississippi – Easier to Love
Kraków Loves Adana – The Day the Internet Died
Lala Lala – Destroyer
Lisa/Liza – Tea Kettle
lowly loverboi – Graveyards in Space
Lucy Dacus – Yours & Mine
Mike Pace & the Child Actors – Escape the Noise
Miranda Winters – The Futuristic District
Mitski – Nobody
Moonface – Minotaur Forgiving Pasiphae
Moon Racer – Friendly Ghost
Nap Eyes – Every Time the Feeling
Nice Try – Micah
Nicole Dollanganger – Uncle
No Age – Drippy
Oceanator – Mistakes
Of The Valley – Ride Alone
Pale Kids – St. Theresa
Pat Moon – I Belong
Pema – Depend
Petal – I’m Sorry
Pink Navel – born-100.dev
Pizza Girl – Body Part
Protomartyr – Wheel of Fortune
Remember Sports – Dripping
Restorations – Nonbeliever
Rivulets – Everything Goes
Ryan Von Gonten – Fabrique
Sabriel’s Orb – Holding
Saccharine – Pumpkin Guts
Sam Moss – Snap
Sara Renberg – Take the Summer Off
Sobs – Sundae
Spartan Jet-Plex – Sweet
Strange Ranger – The Wires
Sun June – Slow Rise II
Swearin’ – Dogpile
Talk, Tired Thanatoid – Everything’s Cool
Tomberlin – Any Other Way
Trace Mountains – Salty Sweet
Trust Fall – Wild Fire/Flowers
TVU – All For Nothing
Weakened Friends – Blue Again
Whitney Baleen – Rainer
Why Bonnie – Stereo
Wild Pink – The Seance on St. Augustine Street
wished bone – reasons
Yellowfront – Cool Breeze
Young Jesus – For Nana
Young Statues – Somebody Else
Yowler – Where Is My Light?

If you missed it, we have also posted our favourite albums list, so check that out too.

The post Favourite Songs of 2018 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Atticus Lish’s Preparation for the Next Life is, on the face of things, a relatively simple story. Girl meets boy under less than perfect circumstances and they struggle to make something of it. A classic love tale. But that’s where simplicity, or even any semblance of understanding, ends. This is a novel about post-9/11 New York, a tale of immense confusion, mistrust and paranoia, about poverty in a city smothered by it, about millions of people trying to make a life out of nothing.

Zou Lei is an illegal immigrant from China, a Muslim of the Uighur tribe, Skinner a PTSD-suffering Iraq vet who scraped through three tours of a war that’s followed him home in more ways than one. Queens is bursting at the seams with people looking for something better, or else ways to distract themselves from the present, a roiling, screaming sea of humanity. Lei and Skinner end up together, bonding through a common sadness and a shared appreciation of discipline and exercise. Their unsentimental yet gentle relationship serves as a recognisable, familiar way-in to a recognisable but wholly unfamiliar place. All of this is written in some of the best prose I’ve read in a long while. Beautiful and terrifying and sad, it captures New York as a gritty, humming place that’s crumbling in time with America’s perception of greatness.

Just like the characters, the reader is in alien territory. The overwhelming majority of us cannot fully understand the positions in which these protagonists find themselves. The fringes of society swamped by an overwhelming Lack Of. A lack of money and respect, of kinship and trust, as well as lack of material stuff (Zou Lei has a bed to sleep in but is essentially homeless, Skinner renting a basement with decidedly finite savings). But both are still subject to the American bombardment of dreams and nightmares that constitute the consumerist culture. They see shop-fronts and billboards, they see mistrust in the media and the faces of passers-by. The paradox of feeling isolated and lonely in a crowd of people seems designed specifically to torture them.

But the confusion is deeper than that, one that might impinge on Lei and Skinner more than most but hangs over us all. Not only are there no answers here, there are barely any questions. If 9/11 provided the West with a new narrative, a renewed sense of moral importance and superiority , then events like those at Abu Ghraib snatched away the veil. Technology has made it impossible to ignore that the ‘Bad Guys’ are mostly innocent, scared people like us, that our dirty secrets in exotic wars will not be buried. Everyone lives in this grey area but Skinner personifies it, pining for the purpose and friendship of war while being eaten alive by the truth of it.

“He took a drink from a flask of Bacardi Scorched Cherry and watched an execution on his laptop”

Here’s a collection of songs which we feel are somehow relevant to the themes and feel of the novel.

Tracklisting:

1. I’m New Here – Gil Scott Heron
2. Wish it Was True – White Buffalo
3. Drinking at the Dam – Smog
4. There I was in the pouring rain again, but this time I was at the drive-thru at Mac Donalds’ – Talons’
5. Beacon Hill – Damien Jurado
6. Heartbreaker – Noah Gundersen
7. Cold Apartment Floors – Vagabon
8. Travel Map – Hip Hatchet
9. Death By Dust – Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson
10. Linens – Water Liars
11. The Modern Leper – Frightened Rabbit
12. No Future (Pt. I) – Titus Andronicus
13. Shitty City – Moonface
14. The Whip – Jesse Marchant
15. Third of Life – A Weather
16. Bloodkin Push (Forget the Ones) – Will Johnson
17. Wall Around Your Heart – Huck Notari
18. The Trapeze Swinger (Iron & Wine Cover) – Gregory Alan Isakov
19. I Could Only Stand By – The Weather Station
20. Fake Empire – The National

Preparation for the Next Life by Atticus Lish is out now on Tyrant Books (US) and Oneworld (UK + Aus). Quiet, Constant Friends is available digitally and on cassette via the Wake The Deaf Bandcamp page.

The post Lit Links: Atticus Lish – Preparation for the Next Life appeared first on Various Small Flames.

This self-titled release is Island Eyes’ first album, and fans of Janzen’s previous work will be pleased to find that he is still crafting exciting, experimental pop/rock music that incorporates a range of instruments and electronics. An obvious comparison is Spencer Krug’s Moonface output, especially earlier releases like Organ Music and Heartbreaking Bravery, although both acts are distinctive and unusual and probably share less in common than the majority of conventional bands.

The artwork goes some way to describing the themes and atmosphere on offer on Island Eyes, a mystical blend of nature and obscure, mythological imagery packed onto an island surrounded by sea. The narrative across the album has the feel of a classic quest – a pursuit of love, noble or otherwise, which begins on the very opening track:

“There’s a wind in my heart
There’s a sword in the air, on the ocean
I lay down, waiting for someone to love”

The entire album could be interpreted from this perspective, an epic captured in the protagonist’s poetic words or thoughts as he’s propelled across land and life by the voice and hands of his love (“As the morning sun wakes the sleeping wolves / I’ll be in your room; I’ll be in your home” continues ‘Pale Moon’). However, the odyssey is not a Hollywood movie with heroic deeds and happy endings. Instead it’s littered with confusion and menace, ominous imagery invoking random violence of nature and other forces, clear narrative replaced by the intuitive jumble of a dream. ‘Every House Is On Fire’ opens with a drum machine reminiscent of Handsome Furs and dives straight into the aforementioned unsettling imagery:

“I heard your voice inside the room
As all your storming clouds came in for you
I called your name, I called on high
But everybody’s houses are on fire

I won’t run, I won’t hide
In the dark of the night
Now I know, you were right
I’ll remain in the light of the sun”

If the first half of the album channelled a weird fantasy world then the second becomes dreamier still, as titles such as ‘You Had a Dream About Love’ and ‘October Mirage’ suggest. The latter again returns to the imagery of islands and swords, all shrouded in an oneiric fog like some fever dream of a would-be hero:

“To dream of the sea
Where I’m washed to the shore
With the clouds coming in
Like the waters before
I lift up my voice
To the ruinous waves
For the lights that once shone
Are beginning to fade”

The strange thing is that as things get weirder, you get the impression that the album is not really an epic at all. Or rather, it is an epic metaphor, an extended attempt to convey the modern-day feelings of the narrator through grand, legendary means. And the narrator could very well be Janzen himself – maybe the island in question Vancouver Island, the sea the Pacific ocean or the Strait of Georgia? What once seemed an interesting and magical tale becomes something more meaningful and unsettling: ‘Throw My Ashes Off the Pier’ deals with the admittedly morbid yet very real/common musings on how you want your loved ones to continue after your death (“O will you wait for me after I disappear? Or will you throw, will you throw all my ashes off of this pier, O my dear?”), while ‘Over Waves’ ends the release on an uncomfortable but cathartic note. “O I’m afraid of this heart,” Janzen sings, the track relatively bare in comparison to the electronic layers of the others, “I’m afraid of your ghost, I’m afraid of your love”. Here he confronts the uncertainty of every life, admitting his fear about pretty much every possible scenario while finding solace in the fact that this uncertainty binds us all.

Whether you want to listen to a fantasy, or a reality that can only be conveyed through the fantastic, this album will not disappoint. Island Eyes is out now via Legwarmer Records. You can grab a rather fetching cassette (see below) from the Island Eyes Bandcamp page.

The post Island Eyes – S/T appeared first on Various Small Flames.

I wrote a brief piece about Josh Scott’s Aero Flynn a few weeks back after reading some words by Field Report’s Chris Porterfield. The letter/essay (which you can read here) painted Scott as a supremely talented musician and songwriter and spoke of the self-titled Aero Flynn album as “quite seriously a life-or-death record” which should be heard as “a spit in the fucking face of the symptoms of disease, like rot and destruction and apathy and cynicism”. Given how much I respect Porterfield’s work, this sort of language got me excited.

The album begins with ‘Plates2’, a restrained track of gentle synths and countrified electric guitars, not a million miles away from Porterfield’s Field Report, while ‘Twist’, which brings to mind Radiohead, solidifies Scott’s subdued vocal delivery. ‘Dk/Pi’ opens with electronics backed by an ambient hum, the spacey bleeps and bloops of Spencer Krug’s Moonface layered on top of something older and less clear. Shambling drums kick in to create a sound akin to The War on Drugs, Scott’s dreamy vocals drifting through the nebulous arrangement with a delicacy that suggests impermanence, as if the sonic environment threatens to consume him. As the song progresses the instrumentation disintegrates, distorting into reverby fuzz and then a confused white noise before blinking out to leave a large cosmic swelling. This is an electrical anxiety, a malfunction in which communication is lost and isolation complete, Scott a lone astronaut surrounded by planetary screams and an airless dark.

The beginning of ‘Crisp’ is gentler but not without threat, an acoustic strum peppered with glitches which suggest the calm is a façade, a veil under which reside wrung hands and sharp edges. “Can I feel you?” Scott inquires over and over, one of many pleas for connection on the album, leaving the listener to wonder if he’s speaking to an individual or humankind as a whole. Or perhaps it’s just to himself in the mirror. Again the track unravels, the introduction of more prominent synths morphing in the final minutes into another hostile environment, a tumultuous sea or some geomagnetic storm that swallows Scott and drags him further from whatever he is trying to find.

Aero Flynn is at once urgent and suspended, trapped between fight and flight in anxiety’s masterful double bind. “I’m so afraid of everybody else” he sings on ‘Tree’, a stuttering electro-pop song, while even ‘Floating’, a soaring track that’s all blue skies and wide open vistas, is permeated with a sense of dislocation, as if the freedom is not his to own. ‘Maker’ sounds like a Broken Social Scene track where lonely sadness is presented as matter-of-fact, at least until the end where Scott utters a single word (a word I can’t quite make out – Home? Whole?) in a way which sounds like the genuine emotion breaking through, a yelp of helplessness or cry for mercy held back or choked out after the first syllable.

‘Brand New’ feels like a crescendo of sorts, a move away from the futuristic electronics that bring to mind space’s dark void in favour of something more organic, a swelling Precambrian atmosphere where conditions are harsh and life is scarce but maybe not for long. Closer ‘Moonbeams’, a piano led track with elements of The National’s slower work, provides no such epiphany. Slow and nervous and sorrowful, the last track again casts Scott as the outlying astronaut looking back at Earth, the final waves of instrumentation mimicking the beautiful, heart-breaking joy of realising you are but the tiniest of specks subject to the largest of forces beyond your control.

This is not an album in which the emotional arc is self-contained and easily mappable. Instead the record feels like a part of a wider narrative, Scott’s story, the illness and suffering and terror that Porterfield alludes to in his piece. The redemption does not begin with an epiphany on track seven and end with clear-eyed certainty. The redemption is the very fact that Scott is creating words and sounds, that he is letting others know where he is and how he is and why he is. The album is the flare of hope hanging in the night sky, burning bright and incandescent.

Aero Flynn is out now on Ooh La La Records (and Dine Alone Records in Canada).

The post Aero Flynn – s/t appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Dan Boeckner’s Handsome Furs (who I wrote about briefly back in April) have produced a strong contender for my album of the year in Sound Kapital. They have taken their work onto a new level and seem to have found their perfect niche – somewhere between indie rock and industrial music. This may sound a curious mix but rest assured, it works, both on record and live. I was lucky to catch the couple on tour back in April and was blown away by their ability to combine thumping keyboards with the familiar vocals of Boeckner, neither was required to be subdued to allow the other to be heard.

Sound Kapital is out now, available on Sub Pop and from all the usual outlets.

___

Moonface is the latest of an ever increasing list of works involving Spencer Krug. If you are unfamiliar then all are worth checking out: Sunset Rubdown, Canadian ‘supergroup’ Swan Lake, Frog Eyes (now ‘Krug-less’) and the instrumental Fifths of Seven. Sunset Rubdown, originally used to release solo recordings, have formed into a fully fleged band so Krug has established Moonface as his solo moniker.

Organ Music not Vibraphone Like I’d Hoped is only six songs long but seeing as the shortest track is over 6 minutes long you don’t feel it is too short. Experimental is the obvious blanket term for the album but this doesn’t really explain the sound very well. High tempo electronic sounds are interspersed with Krug’s characteristic vocals (prehaps not at their yelping best but unmistakable nonetheless), producing what a few other reviewers have described as reminiscent of late 70s experimental music with the retro sounding drum machines. It’s probably best you just have a listen and decide for yourself, the highlight of the album ‘Fast Peter’ is available to download here.

Organ Music not Vibraphone Like I’d Hoped is available from Jagjaguwar.

Both Moonface and Handsome Furs are on Spotify for you to sample if you so wish.

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