Various Small Flames’

Songs of 2017

Anamon – Kneel Old
Android Automatic – Dark Roads*
Angie McMahon – Slow Mover
Basement Revolver – Johnny Pt. 2
Baxter Roy Long – Paribanou
Bea Troxel – Let Them Know
Big Thief – Mary
Black Belt Eagle Scout – Soft Stud
Bully – Running
Cayetana – Mesa
Charly Bliss – Percolator
Chastity Belt – Different Now
CHUCK – Happy Birthday
The County Liners – Maria
The Courtneys – Tour
Craig Finn – God in Chicago
Crumb – Locket
Crushing – Emery Board
Cut Worms – Like Going Down Sideways
David Bazan – Care
Distant Reader – First Try
Emperor X – God Save Coastal Dorset
Fits – Ice Cream on a Nice Day
German Error Message – 2017*
Gleemer – Soothe Me
Great Grandpa – Favorite Show
Haley Heynderickx – Oom Sha Lala
Hiccup – Teasin’
Horse Culture – Texaco
Illuminati Hotties – ‘(You’re Better) Than Ever’
Japandroids – No Known Drink or Drug
Jason Isbell & the 400 Unit – If We Were Vampires
Jay Som – The Bus Song
Jeremy Squires – Night Cars
Katie Ellen – Drawing Room
Lizzie No – Monuments
Lomelda – Bam Sha Klam
Mike Pace and the Child Actors – Audits & Surveys
Meursault – The Mill
Mount Eerie – Crow
Nice Legs – Mighty Three
Oceanator – Nowhere Nothing
Ohyeahsumi – Daisy
Old Earth – Pit Dynamics
PASTEL – Stammer
Peter Silberman – New York
Phoebe Bridgers – Motion Sickness
Pope – Talk Me Out of It
Protomartyr – Windsor Hum
Rainwater – Place
Ratboys – Elvis is in the Freezer
Rick Rude – Bald & Fat in Houston, TX
Roadkill Ghost Choir – Classics (Die Young)
Rose Dorn – Dirt
See Through Dresses – Lucy’s Arm
Shannen Moser – A Funeral, A Friend, My Sanity
Sinai Vessel – Died On My Birthday
Slaughter Beach, Dog – Phoenix
SOAR – Fort Funston
Soft Fangs – Jordan // Jackson Elementary
Spartan Jet-Plex – We Believe
Strange Ranger – House Show
Strawberry Runners – Garden Hose
Timid, The Brave – Alice
Us and Only Us – Bored of Black
Vagabon – Cold Apartment
Viewfinder – Instant Moonlight
The Washboard Abs – Veil
Waxahatchee – Never Been Wrong
Wild Pink – Albert Ross
William Ryan Fritch – In Our Blood
The Wooden Sky – Swimming in Strange Waters
Ylayali – Cherry Tomatoes

*Strictly released in 2016, but barely, and we covered it in Jan. 2017.

If you missed it, you can see our Favourite Albums of 2017 list here. Also, the curious can find such lists from previous years here.

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A book within a book, Hystopia is actually the novel left behind by Eugene Allen, a Vietnam vet from a slightly-alternate version of the 60s where John F. Kennedy survived Oswald’s assassination attempt and is serving his third term in office. Opened and closed by various notes and testimonies from friends and family members, Allen’s work makes up the majority of the novel, a narrative imagining characters from his time in Vietnam once they return home. The kicker, though, is that while they are back in the States, they never really ‘get home’, with the war following them back to a dystopian (but far from unrecognisable) America ravaged by biker gangs and forest fires.

In an attempt to solve the crisis of PTSD and violence, the government turn to an experimental psychiatric method called ‘enfolding’, where veterans reenact traumatic scenes while dosed up on a tranquilliser, Tripizoid. While even the doctors working on the project believe the technique to be without substance, it proves paradoxically effective for many subjects and blanks memories of combat. “Confusion is undoubtedly an element of the curative process,” writes Means. “In most cases the patient does forget about it, becoming fully immersed in the reenacted trauma’s nullification of the real trauma”.

Which isn’t to say it’s a silver bullet. Indeed the novel opens with a “failed enfold,” Rake, a man filled with the sort of all-consuming rage and propensity for violence unique to men forced into the sacrifices of war only to end up on the losing side. We find him with Allen’s sister, Meg (whom he has almost certainly kidnapped, and has undergone some degree of enfolding too), as they drive across Michigan on an anarchistic rampage of murder, drugs and destruction. Eventually, they reach the home of Hank, Rake’s former sidekick who has developed a love of trees since enfolding, a man who tries to protect Meg and figure out a way in which they can save themselves from Rake.

The second strand of the story deals with another enfold Singleton and his colleague Wendy, government officials breaking protocol to meet up and fall in love, who somehow end up on the trail of Rake, as though their rule bending was in fact a conspiracy on the part of their superiors to engineer the operation. Again though, confusion reigns, with Singleton’s boss admitting that a key part of being a commander is having the “gumption to go back and revise history”, talking of writing operation plans after the operation in order to ensure they are correct.

This sense of counter-history runs throughout the novel, from Singleton and Wendy’s quest and Hank’s transformation into peaceful nature-lover, right down to Eugene Allen’s re-telling (re-imagining?) of his sister’s story. What becomes important for these troubled people is not discerning the capital-T Truth but rather finding a variation they can believe in. More often than not, this involves a sense of mission, the victim’s need for order in the face of chaos, the desire for purpose or meaning in “an age when everything else seemed to be spinning deeper and deeper into despair,” anything which enables them to form a narrative of the world in a way they would like it to exist.

“It was crazy, he admitted, but it kept him going and like all good delusions it was fuelled by genuine hope and dedication to the truth”

And that’s what sets apart David Means’ Vietnam from that of the postmodern cannon. Yes, it is full of claims and counter-claims and impenetrable paranoia, but rather than using these to trace a descent into bewilderment, Hystopia utilises them to chart a way out. In a world where confusion and conflict constitute the resting face of the planet, maybe disinformation is needed not to obscure the truth but rather create it?

Here’s a playlist of songs that are suitable or relevant in one way or another, or maybe just capture the mood of certain characters and scenes.

Tracklisting:

1) Search and Destroy – The Stooges
2) IN EVIL HOUR – Battle Ave.
3) High & Wild – Angel Olsen
4) My War – Black Flag
5) Everything Falls Apart – Hüsker Dü
6) Saigon Shrunken Panorama – The Mountain Goats
7) Rugged Country – Japanese Breakfast
8) Meg – Hovvdy
9) Love, Come Save Me – Right Away, Great Captain!
10) I Need You To Tell Me Who I Am – John Moreland
11) Drugs To Make You Sober – Jeremiah Nelson
12) Are We Failing? – Hallelujah The Hills
13) Flaming Home – Mount Eerie with Julie Doiron and Frederick Squire
14) Lovers as Mirrors – Paper Bee
15) Forgetting is Believing – Nathaniel Rateliff
16) Redemption:1 (An Army Man And His Self-Discovery) – Justin Vernon

Hystopia is out now via Faber & Faber (UK) and Farrar, Straus and Giroux (US) and you can get it from most good bookshops. Check out the other works by David Means on his Goodreads page.

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The album sees the band, husband and wife duo Keith Freund and Linda Lejsovka, continue their trademark blend of highly detailed, intelligent sound design and intimate pop sensibilities. Lejsovka was pregnant with the couple’s first child during the writing and recording of the album, a situation which undoubtedly had an effect on their creative process and therefore the end result. But this isn’t simply a musical account of pregnancy or early parenthood, as Freund says in the brief interview on the MIE website:

It’s definitely not an album about a baby or becoming parents, I don’t think we know how to or want to fit that into this project, but instead ended up being a portrait of the two of us clinging to each other throughout a tumultuous, difficult, and exciting time of change. Life got rather chaotic and messy and I can’t really tell you ‘this is what the album is trying to do’, and instead probably need to just say ‘this is what happened’.

The chaos and tension that Freund describes is certainly apparent on the record, albeit in short bursts. The opening of ‘The Very End, Again’ is a furore of harsh noise and sputtering feedback, the polar opposite to the warm and hazy ambience of the majority of the album. However there are other, more subtle examples of the blend of nerves and excitement. In ‘Profile of a Woman in Silk Hood’ the mood changes across the song, just as moods and feelings change across challenging times. The song swings between steady beats that bring to mind action, purpose, and ethereal calm, punctuated by fluttering elecronics that act as the musical equivalent of butterflies in the stomach, probing feelings that threaten to derail convictions of comfort.

The whole album can be viewed this way, with the default ambience set somewhere near serenity and other sonic emotions constantly appearing or fading. The result is a near perfect picture of the ephemerality of human emotion, where extreme pain or joy or fear or confusion are stacatto drops in space, a void that is not at all unpleasant. Even in the most emotional of hours the feelings eventually pale and a sense of placid reflection settles. It is this sense, tinged with love and sadness and empathy, that helps us carry on, to be okay.

Some of the lyrical themes on Love At Dusk reminded me strongly of the band’s debut album (The United Colours of Trouble Books), for example on ‘Fake Fern Shadows’ Lejsovka sings:

“I just need, simple things.
Clean socks, warm bed,
An extra comet to destroy this shitty planet”

And on ‘The Very End, Again’, Freund this time:

“I was cleaning up the dishes
my friend was saying something about her needs
Then the sun exploded burning soil and bone and leaving our
souls to drift like dandelion seeds.”

Both of these lines, to me at least, are reminiscent of the opening lines of ‘For All Our Dead Friends’ (from their debut), where Freund rather charmingly describes a post-apocalyptic landscape and lists several potential causes. Again this comes back to the idea transient feelings, where the dramatic event (in this case the apocalyptic event) is followed by something much less urgent, something more manageable. ‘Fake Fern Shadows’ in effect shows life before the event, again something much simpler and kinder. The event becomes a fleeting violence that felt like the end of the world but soon passed.

So overall, if you are already a fan of Trouble Books then you should buy this album, if you have never heard of Trouble Books but are a fan of experimental ambient pop music (think The Microphones or Mount Eerie meet Emeralds) then you should buy this album. If you don’t fall into either of those categories, you should take a long hard look at yourself and/or watch the video below for the piano-led instrumental track, ‘Chiaroscuro’, and see what you think:

The album is set to be released on the 18th of November. If you like what you hear, you can pre-order it via MIE Music here. Be aware that the LP is limited to a run of just 400 copies so act now if you want one. Alternatively, if you live in North America, you can pre-order the album via Bark & Hiss.

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Small Hours follows a similar pattern to previous old earth releases, although that is about the only ‘convention’ that it follows at all. Umhoefer is a great believer in experimentation and in taking risks. He says:

“If you want to be an inoffensive “regular” musician that just aims to please everyone, go ahead, but meaningful art comes out of making extraordinary choices. There are plenty of ways to avoid challenges and risks in life, and nothing interesting, unpredictable, unique, or inspiring comes from cowards.This is the most valuable lesson I learned from punk – celebrate yourself, whether everyone likes it or not.” 

This attitude is very apparent when listening to the album. It consists of just three tracks, all of which exceed five minutes in length (the longest clocks in at over ten minutes). The titles of these tracks are extremely vague, simply 1, 2 and 3 (although there is a more detailed list on old earth’s bandcamp which splits each track into several more). From that evidence alone I think it’s pretty clear that Umhoefer does whatever he wants, and that he is unconcerned about generating huge media buzz, or getting prime-time radio coverage. What he makes is art, and he makes it because he feels compelled to do so. This fact seems to have further relevance this week, when hundreds of bands and music people descend on Austin and huge, multi-million dollar companies splash their logos all over stages that are meant to be the platform for aspiring artists.

The music itself is in the same vein as previous old earth releases. Traditional folk music serves as a bedrock on which Umhoefer does his experimentation. The atmosphere is strange and dreamlike and Umhoefer’s vocals only add to the surreality, sporadically sounding like ominous demands or earnest pleas or the shamanistic chants of some psychedelic ritual. If you are a fan of lo-fi folk music (e.g.Phil Elvrum or The Wandering Lake) or even of drone/ambient stuff such as Grouper,  then I suggest that you quickly get familiar with old earth.

Small Hours will be released on the 22nd of April and is now available for pre-order via mini50 records. The CD comes with a beautiful lyric booklet that contains art by Jamie Mills (check out his website, some of his work is simply amazing). There are several packages on offer – you can just get the CD, the CD plus and old earth tote bag or a bundle which contains the CD, the bag, a bonus EP and a download for old earth’s previous album a low place at The Old Place. This is a very limited release, so I’d strongly recommend you order yourself a copy right away.

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The album was released by Norwegian label Ikenai! Records and is a free download on Bandcamp. It really is an interesting listen and is well worth your time. We look forward to seeing what these guys do next.

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