Lead single ‘Gem’ adds a little pop polish to the album’s organic folk, a song Sauser-Monnig describes as having a “messed up little drum beat and unrelenting optimism.” It’s bright-eyed and wondering, a bittersweet marvel at the poetry of the world that reveals itself truly (and fleetingly) when life’s key elements slide into place.

This intangible feeling continues across the album, from the timeless heart-worn country shuffle of ‘Easy Is Hard’ to the folk rock road song ‘Fields of Gold’, a track that’s rich with the possibility of the open highway. But it’s ‘Human’ that captures the album’s themes most directly, approaching endings and moments of change not with bitter hysterics but a patient sense of understanding. “Oh sweetheart you’re only human,” Sauser-Monnig sings, “don’t blame yourself so hard.” It’s indicative of a record that explores the knots and frayed ends of a relationship with a sense of perspective and compassion, that finds a curious sense of melancholic peace in plants and animals and the passage of the sun across the sky.

The closing title track is a deceptively simple folk song that sparkles with realization and possibility. The lyrics are minimal and perfect, mostly just two-word lines of staccato poetry that evoke the natural world in all its glory, Sauser-Monnig as the narrator becoming a red hawk, a sun dog, a sea. She describes it as a song “about waking to the day beautifully breaking around you, and waking also to the realization that the life you’ve been leading is breaking with it.” One of the first recordings she made across the whole album, this version of the song was intended as a rough initial take, but after playing it back it decided that the immediacy and gentle emotion of the song should be left in its bare-bones form.

As it’s title suggests, Dawnbreaker feels like an intake of breath, the pale and lucid hours before the events of the day. It’s a record that’s not afraid of change, embracing the freedom we usually associate with other creatures. To return to a line from ‘Human’:

You can’t will love to life
but you can do the loving thing
make like a bird and fly

Dawnbreaker is out now on Bella Union and Nonesuch Records. You can get it from the Daughter of Swords Bandcamp page. Daughter of Swords is also visiting UK shores in January. Check out the dates below:

Wednesday 22 January – Leeds – Hyde Park Book Club
Thursday 23 January Glasgow – Broadcast
Friday 24 January – Manchester – Gulliver’s Lounge
Saturday 25 January – Bristol – At The Well
Monday 27 January – Brighton – Latest Music Bar
Wednesday 29 January – London – St Pancras Old Church
Thursday 30 January – Dublin – The Sound House

Photo by Kendall Bailey Atwater

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Outer Spaces – Gazing Globe

Working under the moniker Outer Spaces, Baltimore-based Cara Beth Satalino creates off-kilter pop songs that shift and shimmer, like arcane messages from some place out of sync with our own—a distinct dimension, an outer space. Released last month on Western Vinyl, new album Gazing Globe suggests that such a place might not be a deviation from reality but a more distilled form, somewhere free of projections and expectations that can shape us beyond our control.

The record is a product of great upheaval, Satalino turning to meditation in the aftermath of a relationship. “I think I was trying to get back to myself and my identity,” she explains, “separate from my relationship.” Perhaps the Outer Space does not concern some external world but something far closer, an interior nonetheless separate from the quote-unquote ‘real’ world, a space where we can find ourselves.

Kali Malone – The Sacrificial Code

Stockholm’s Kali Malone makes expansive, organ-based ambient music that pleasures in patience and precision. Released by iDEAL Recordings, The Sacrificial Code is a double album where no minute is wasted, working within a self-imposed austerity to achieve a near-hypnotic focus. “By voluntarily giving up the freedom to do whatever momentarily comes to mind,” Steve Reich once said, “we are, as a result, free of all that momentarily comes to mind.” Malone operates according to this ideal, stripping back any sense of surroundings, organ music suspended in blank space. The result is a meditative, ascetic lesson in transcendence, where open-ended does not mean nebulous.

Big Joanie – Sistahs

Consisting of Stephanie Phillips (vocals/guitar), Estella Adeyeri (bass) and Chardine Taylor-Stone (drums), London punk trio Big Joanie draw on influences from across the spectrum to form their distinctive style. Owing as much to The Ronettes as to the Riot Grrrls, and borrowing some of the weight of the post-punk movement, the band refuse to settle in any one box. “[We wanted to be] completely ourselves as black women,” they describe, “and discover what was possible to realise in those spaces.” The result is Sistahs, a full-length album released late last year via the The Daydream Library Series of records and tapes, the independent house label of Thurston Moore and Eva Prinz’s publishing imprint Ecstatic Peace Library.

Abe Hollow – Paradise

Abe Hollow is the the recording project of Oakland-based composer, producer and multi-instrumentalist Adam Hirsch, and its songs display the full range of his talents. Born of an obsessive interest in family history and his Jewish heritage, debut album A Palace in Time is a collaborative, improvised journey through the many layers of Hirsch’s psyche—“a Yiddish gothic trip” according to one friend.

Single ‘Paradise’ gives some clue as to what such a thing might sound like, a single full of radiant shimmers and ethereal vocals where nothing is quite as it seems. With help from Ryan McGill (aka Ryan Von Gonten on guitar), Andrew Maguire (drums) Doug Stuart (bass) and June Hong (piano), Hirsch weaves a pleasantly surreal soundscape that’s at once forward-facing and reflective, proving that digging into one’s history can lead to discoveries as meaningful and rewarding as any other.

Slow Pulp – Big Day

Based in Madison, Wisconsin, Slow Pulp bring to life dreamy soundscapes with a minimalist touch, angular riffs punctuating the gauzy space. Released with our friends at Citrus City Records, Big Day goes a long way in perfecting the style, borrowing from shoegaze and post-punk but maintaining its own unique spirit. Which is fitting, seeing as the EP is concerned with ideas of development and learning, focused on the formative years where everything is strange and new and nothing is set in stone. Slow Pulp take this idea into their music, moving forward without hesitation or preconception, letting the experience speak for itself in the present moment.

Nathalie Joachim – Papa Loko (Interlude: September 24, 1918)

Nathalie Joachim is a Haitian-American composer, flutist and vocalist who draws upon hip hop, indie rock, electronic and classical music to form a sound capable of forging new directions while maintaining an awareness and respect of cultural traditions. Joachim is set to release her debut solo record later this summer via New Amsterdam Records, an album which sees her joined by the Grammy-nominated string ensemble Spektral Quartet.

Fanm d’Ayiti, or “Women of Haiti”, is something of a celebration of Haiti’s female performers and storytellers, featuring recorded interviews with these artists, including Joachim’s grandmother and the the girls choir of her family’s home farming village of Dantan. Opening track gives a view ‘Papa Loko (Interlude: September 24, 1918)’ gives a glimpse into this vivid blend of music and oral history, and hints at what promises to be a special release.

Joyer – Here

Drawing inspiration from slowcore, 90s-era slacker rock and the contemporary bedroom pop movement, New Jersey’s Joyer make richly textured songs that often barely break a murmur. The songs exist in a crepuscular lethargy, favouring a kind of slow dawning rather than any immediacy or confrontation.

The duo are interested in movies and new album Peeled is no different, with Counterzine going into the influences of Harmony Korine and Andrei Tarkovsky on the lyrics. But there is a filmic quality to the sound itself too, with single ‘Here’ showing off the image-based, atmospheric style.

Mauno – Vampire

Montreal experimental pop duo Mauno have a new record on the way. Out later this summer, Really Well sees the band delve into high weirdness in order to explore the absurdity of life under late capitalism, where everything from art, love and even the self are assaulted by the drive for productivity and growth. With its playful tone and metaphorically ripe title, single ‘Vampire’ is the perfect example of Mauno’s style, fiercely critical yet grounded in humour, as though in wit lies a truly subversive power.

The song comes complete with a video directed by Max Taeuschel which further layers the critique, Mauno made to exercise non-stop for an hour during recording as a comment on the reality of creating and promoting music today. The duo can barely sing at times, exhausted and visibly sweating upon bikes stripped of their purpose, going nowhere.

Really Well is out on the 2nd August and you can pre-order it from the Mauno Bandcamp page.

Kate Tempest – Holy Elixir

If performance poetry and spoken word artists are experiencing something of a boom, then Kate Tempest can stake some claim for instigating a new urgency in the movement. While the form gets co-opted from all angles, popping up on every other advert as banks try to mimic a human face, Tempest stands resolute as an example of the true power of words. Recorded with Rick Rubin, her latest album The Book of Traps and Lessons builds on what has come before, its tracks alive with some electrical frisson, something related to both love and dread.

Lead single ‘Holy Elixir’ serves as a fine example, its force conjured from the unfurling sentences, as though within the correct sequence of syllables an energy can form. This energy lies at the heart of all things, both good and bad, though Tempest seeks to harness it, channel it in the right direction. “I hope that people feel connected,” Tempest explains. “I hope they connect with the work, and that this connection enables them to connect with themselves, and that this connection encourages a deeper connection to others. It might sound like high hopes. At this stage in the game, you have to know your motives. Otherwise, why even try?”

The Book of Traps and Lessons is out now via Fiction and you can get it from the usual places.

Daughter of Swords – Dawnbreaker

Daughter of Swords is the moniker of Alexandra Sauser-Monnig, who you might know as part of folk trio Mountain Man. Setting out solo, Sauser-Monnig uses Daughter of Swords to explore a break-up before it even happened, both pre-empting the sadness to come and dreaming of the things that couldn’t happen on her current course. As the title track highlights, the result is something elegiac and warmly hopeful, as though only through some great, earth-shaking catastrophe can the new shoots of life break through the topsoil.

Dawnbreaker is out now via Bella Union and Nonesuch, and you can get it from the Daughter of Swords website.

High Sunn – Our Perception

High Sunn is the recording project of San Francisco’s Justin Cheromiah, who makes an upbeat and glimmering brand of bedroom pop. New record Our Perception was released earlier this year, with Tristin Souvannarath joining to lend drums, as well as mixing and mastering duties, leading to the most vivid and immersive High Sunn tracks to date.

Indeed, the process of creating the record was the most involved too. “Never have I ever spent months on a release,” Cheromiah explains. “I’ve ached, cried, stressed, and felt joy writing these songs of love, real life experiences, struggles, and pure gratitude.” Lead single ‘Grateful’ shows off the care and attention that constitutes the release, a jangle pop so lush you can fall back into it and not hit the ground.

Our Perception is out now via Spirit Goth Records and you can buy it now.

Briston Maroney – Fool’s Gold

After a nomadic childhood strung between Florida and Tennessee, Briston Maroney eventually settled back in Nashville, laying down roots and cutting his teeth in the DIY music scene. Winning fans one living room at a time, Maroney built up a reputation and has now released an EP, Indiana, with Parlophone Records. Despite the big label, single ‘Fool’s Gold’ shows off Maroney’s grounded and intimate style. There’s a tenderness to the sound, a gilded nostalgia that drives a hope for the future, kicks of reverb hinting at the dissatisfaction with the present.  Check out the video directed by Joey Brodnax below:

Indiana is out now on Parlophone Records and available from all the usual places.

That’s all folks. Check the tag for previous editions of Bright Sparks.

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Various Swell Sounds is a new collaborative playlist series from Shana Hartzel of Swell Tone, Jon Chin of Cereal and Sounds, and myself. Instead of constantly exchanging tracks amongst each other, we have decided to work together to bring them to more ears. Every month, we will match a selection of our old and brand new favourites to a specific theme, as decided on a revolving basis month by month.

After the brutal summer, the leaves are finally turning, which can only mean one thing. Yep, it’s the time of year to slip on pavements, make tired jokes about pumpkin spice coffee and hide behind closed curtains to ignore the calls for candy from ghouling children. We’ve made a playlist of songs to see you through the cool and crispy season.

There’s a Playmoss and Spotify version below, so choose what suits you best, though due to incomplete catalogues the are slight discrepancies between the two.

Check out our other Various Swell Sounds entries here and here, and head over to Swell Tone and Cereal + Sounds for the edition over there.

The post Various Swell Sounds #9: Cool & Crispy appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Our choice of songs for this one perhaps isn’t the most subtle, and might well highlight our naivety/ignorance when it comes to the geographic differences between American folk music, but we just went with tracks which we felt capture the mood of Hinojosa’s work in some way. The tracklisting carries links to the artists we’ve covered in the past, if you want to read our thoughts on their music.

Tracklisting:

1) Will the Circle Be Unbroken – Marisa Anderson
2) Floating Rhododendron – Sarah Louise
3) Out West – The Coal Creek Boys
4) Fable – Sam Moss
5) Impress My Memory – Stephen Steinbrink
6) Sometimes – Noel’le Longhaul
7) Hands in Our Names – Karima Walker
8) Mexican Blanket – Wes Tirey
9) Stained Glass Eye – The Dead Tongues
10) Around and Around – Mountain Man
11) Revelation Drift – dbh
12) Dark Was the Night – Ry Cooder

The post Rolando Hinojosa – Klail City appeared first on Various Small Flames.

“We’re extremely proud of this record. For the first time, The Freaks came together as a collaborative unit, and crafted what we think is our best album yet. It was recorded on a hillside overlooking the ocean in coastal California, and we hope that some of that beauty comes through in the music.”

The first track to be unveiled was ‘The Rest’, a breezy jam which channels the aesthetic of the Californian coast, sounding like an endless drive through a 60s American evening, all the while possessed by a free spirit and powered by a gentle cosmic energy which smooths heartbreak into something tactile and gratifying.

“Sometimes it seems like trouble just won’t let me be
but now I know it just likes my company.
I’ll leave this town behind just to tell myself I’m free
I’ll leave the light on but it’s still to dark to see

But you ran away
Nothing to say
sometimes it just works out that way.
I heard you found a man
started again
I don’t need more fans
I got enough of them.”

Second single ‘Sealong Hair’ is a simpler affair, stripped down to acoustic strumming and basic percussion, but is still gilded with the golden Pacific light. The track even comes complete with a lovely video by Laura Lynn Petrick to enhance the imagery. Have a peep below:

You can pre-order Country Agenda now via Sinderlyn, including on some rather lovely vinyl. Cover photo by Laura Lynn Petrick

The post New music from Alex Bleeker & The Freaks appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Listen to the mix via the player below, and be sure to check out the other volumes which can be found here, and are available on our 8tracks page.

Tracklisting:

1. Midnight City (M83 Cover) – The Last Bison
2. Anthems For A Seveteen Year Old Girl (Broken Social Scene Cover) – Dancing Years
3. Goodbye Horses (Q Lazzarus Cover) – Hayden Thorpe & Jon Hopkins
4. Native American Summer (Beat Happening Cover) – Small Wonder
5. Semi-Charmed Life (Third Eye Blind Cover) – Frontier Ruckus
6. Passionate Kisses (Lucinda Williams Cover) – Shakey Graves
7. Do You Realize (The Flaming Lips Cover) – Fossil Collective
8. Crazy In Love (Beyonce Cover) – Melissa Laveaux
9. Car (Built To Spill Cover) – Emily Reo
10. Perfect Day (Lou Reed Cover) – Phosphorescent
11. Father & Daughter (Paul Simon Cover) – The River Has Many Voices
12. Blues Run the Game (Jackson C. Frank Cover) – Oscar Lush
13. In Spite of Ourselves (John Prine Cover) – Kyle Morton & Danielle Sullivan
14. Around and Around (John Denver Cover) – Mountain Man
15. I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry (Hank Williams Cover) – Fog Lake
16. The Way the Whole Thing Ends (Gillian Welch Cover) – Night Beds
17. I Am Not Waiting Anymore (Field Report Cover) – Blind Boys of Alabama
18. Will the Circle be Unbroken? (Traditional) – Emily Lacy
19. Oblivion (Grimes Cover) – Wilsen
20. Teenage Spaceship (Smog Cover) – How To Dress Well
21. Fare Thee Well (Dink’s Song) (Dave van Ronk Cover) – Oscar Isaac

The Covers Mix: Volume #10 from Wake The Deaf on 8tracks Radio.

The post The Covers Mix: Volume #10 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

The band was expanded during the recording of Labor, with Dave Hadley (on pedal steel) and Andy Stack (of Wye Oak – on bass) joining regular members Bob Keal, Austin Stahl and Andy Abelow (who provided a lovely cover of ‘Two Years on Film’ on Slowcoustic’s J. Tillman tribute). These additions are particularly apparent on several tracks, including ‘The Salt’ (which you can hear in the player below) which has a bassline reminiscent of Elephant Micah (an artist the band profess a love for on their blog).

The entire album is filled with beautiful writing, poetic vignettes which compliment the style and pace of the instrumentation perfectly. I don’t have the lyrics to hand but from what I could gather by ear, there are several references to water and the sea, see for example on ‘The Salt’:

“Wandered into the water just in time to watch the salt lines climb up the wall”.

and on ‘Bloomington’

“I can’t follow you into the brackish water, where the oysters make their beds”.

The closing track, ‘Through The Blue’ is also heavily based around this theme and, again, is superbly written. My current favourite is the title track, with it’s opening of:

“Oh I swear I will find even more light in this coming year,
And the darkness will subside or bring focus unto the light.
I will build a shrine and within place my present mind,
Shaped from water, auburn earth, I will favour my lover over others.”

The song starts with a gentle guitar but swells and gains momentum as it progresses. The narrator delivers a pretty hopeful message of inspiration and promises to labour for his lover. I got some Strand of Oaks vibes, particularly from the electric guitar work later in the song. That has to be a good thing.

Every six months or so I tend to fall hard for a hushed and delicate folk album (past examples include Mountain Man’s Made The Harbor and Spirit Guides by Evening Hymns) and I think I have found my next one. The album has been on repeat all week and but I still can’t stop listening. Any fan of this type of music should be checking this out right away.

You can buy the album now on beautiful 140-gram white vinyl (in a sleeve featuring the art you can see above by artist Skye Gilkerson) or as a digital download, from the band’s Bandcamp page. As you may guess, it comes with my seal of approval.

P.S. The band are also going out on a North American tour with Peals, an experimental outfit made up of William Cashion of Future Islands and Bruce Willen of Double Dagger, who have recently released a very good album, Walking Field, on Thrill Jockey. Also check out the ingenious Furniture on their website, an interactive track comprised of 16 sound clips that the listener can play or adjust at their will. Get the tour dates here.

P.P.S. If you’re not familiar with Small Sur’s previous release, Tones, then 1. Take a good long look at yourself and 2. Get it here.

The post Small Sur – Labor appeared first on Various Small Flames.

The album is a beautiful one. The sound (prehaps aided by the meadow artwork) evokes a summer wilderness. Not a harsh desert or tropical forest, but rather a sweeping landscape of sepiatone hills and fragrant grasses. For the ‘dream folk’ label, the vocals are very clear and I think it’s fair to say the driving force of each song. The result is somewhere along the lines of First Aid Kit, Sharon van Etten, and Mountain Man if they were based somewhere in the past; luscious voices crooned over smooth and gentle tracks that meander by like childhood summers (in the track ‘New Love’ they even proclaim ’Summer drags on, these sunsets keep on coming’).

Valley is an album of escapism, a record that allows you to slip out of whatever grey scenery that surrounds you and into a world of golden sunshine and gentle winds. There is a sense of sadness here too, as if both you and they know that such a time and place is hard to find and all too fleeting when you do.

You can buy the album on Bandcamp and the single ‘Valley’ is available for free. be sure to check out their debut album The Living Room from which the video below is taken.

West from Magic! Magic Roses on Vimeo.

The post Magic! Magic Roses – Valley appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Tracklisting:

1. Lovecrimes (Frank Ocean Cover) – The Afghan Whigs
2. Little Dreamer (Future Islands Cover) – Doe Paoro
3. Bad Days (Flaming Lips Cover) – Siskiyou
4. Again (Janet Jackson Cover) – How To Dress Well
5. Dog Song (Mountain Man Cover) – Stupid Loser
6. Celebrated (Husker Du Cover) – Mark Kozelek
7. Say Say Say (Michael Jackson & Paul McCartney) – Woodpigeon
8. Zebra (Beach House Cover) – Yellow Ostrich
9. Atmosphere (Joy Division Cover) – Flowers Of Hell
10. Climbing Up The Walls (Radiohead Cover) – The Twilight Sad
11. Islands In The Stream (Kenny Rogers & Dolly Parton) – Constantines & Feist
12. Louie Louie (Richard Berry/The Kingsmen Cover) – The Royal Iguana Fur
13. Harvest Moon (Neil Young Cover) – The Sour Notes
14. Into The Fire (Bruce Springsteen Cover) – Paul Baribeau
15. Forgiveness (Patty Griffin Cover) – The Local Strangers
16. Calling And Not Calling My Ex (Okkervil River Cover) – Ola Podrida
17. Please Please Please Let M Get What I Want (The Smiths Cover) – Pickering Pick
18. Jesus, Etc. (Wilco Cover) – Bill Fay
19. Look At Miss Ohio (Gillian Welch Cover) – Blind Pilot
20. The Party’s Over/No Children (Willie Nelson/Mountain Goats Cover) – Manchester Orchestra

Please support the artists by exploring their other releases and becoming huge and dedicated fans.

The Covers Mix: Volume #4 from Wake The Deaf on 8tracks Radio.

The post The Covers Mix: Volume #4 appeared first on Various Small Flames.