“Something has come over me in the past year. I can’t stop writing, I won’t stop writing.  It’s what I look forward to most in the day. Playing the guitar for hours, singing a little, driving 5 hours, then showing up in your town to show you what I’ve been working on. “

…but but but, unfortunately Quentin is all too aware of how much of a killjoy Real Life can be, with all of its inconvenient details like eating and sleeping and putting gas in the car:

“As you probably can imagine, the cash flow isn’t very steady in the music biz. Some days I’m on top of the world, eating 5$ hamburgers and changing the oil on the car 100 miles before it’s due. On other days, I’m coasting into the gas station on ‘E’ with a half eaten bag of craisens I found under the seat.”

Maybe eating scavenged food while riding on fumes is all part of the adventure, but unfortunately recording albums requires money. Just this February Quentin put out his superb album Still Talk; Second City (so recently we haven’t got around to writing about it yet), so the prospect of another expensive stint in the studio seems a long way off. In other words, while the romantic nomad musician can get by on little, his music cannot, and this is a particular problem for a romantic nomadic musician who is currently unable to stop writing.

So here’s the deal. You pledge on small amount of money in return for a digital download pre-order, and Quentin gets to make a new record and eat something other than craisens. It’s what crowd-funding was invented for! There are also luxury rewards for funders with a bit more cash to burn, from spots on the guest list to private house shows (almost) anywhere in the US, Canada, western Europe and Scandanavia (!). As if to prove his desire to get back into the studio, Quentin even signs off by saying “is there something else you’d want? Let me know, I’ll do it, I don’t even care what it is as long as we can get this album done.” So, if you need a lightbulb changing (almost anywhere in the US, Canada…) or something, make a donation and let him know.

It’s a fair bet that a Small Houses album will be a great album (see our review of Exactly Where You Wanted To Be) You can make your donation on the Small Houses GoFundMe page.

P.S. As if needed to placate us for this most welcome news, Quentin has put out a new song and video to accompany his request. Check out ‘Kinda Here’ below:

(The photo is from a roll of film Jeremy took on tour. You can view the other images here).

The post Help Fund a New Small Houses Album appeared first on Various Small Flames.

“She watched the valley burn
like a slow dancer doing turns,
my name was on every tongue.
And all of the smoking ash
like a memory of a time gone bad,
hanging like a shadow.”

Carry the Ghost is due to be released on the 21st of August via Dualtone Music and is available for pre-order now in all kinds of cool bundles.

P.S. Did you know that Noah isn’t the only talented Gundersen? Check out sister Abbie too.

The post Noah Gundersen – Slow Dancer appeared first on Various Small Flames.

“Rather than telling full stories, Timmins’ words instead come off as a stream of consciousness, a man alone and thinking, spilling words that he wishes he could share with those that need to hear them.”

Timmins is back with some new songs which continues this raw, finger-picked sound. Darker than anything on Six Songs, ‘To the Dark Horizion’ is as ominous as the title suggests, the restrained guitar providing a delicate frame upon which sit the haunting vocals which return to the prophetic phrase of the title. It’s the kind of defeated, sad mixture of plea and warning that is no doubt echoing around the UK after yesterday’s election – a belief that while we don’t have the answer, it can’t be what is happening.

“Imperfect dreams of an imperfect mind,
Time to pack up, take what’s left of mine
to the black horizon”

There a few more songs on his Soundcloud page, so head there if you want to hear more. Also, be sure to check out Six Songs if you haven’t already. Mark also does some great drawings so head on over to Tumblr to have a look at those.

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Nearly three years after Home (a stint in which some of the band played as Bummer), Young Jesus announced a new album and unveiled a brand new single, ‘G’, a song which prompted us to say:

“I don’t want to write too much based on one single, but this seems to be going a step further than your standard indie-rock fare”

As hinted above, we were predisposed to hold this opinion. Home left us with some pretty high expectations for the band, in particular their writing and lead John Rossiter’s delivery. ‘G’ and the album trailer (see below) merely confirmed our suspicions. After spending some time with the full-length, it’s safe to safe that these feelings were justified.

Just as with Home, Grow / Decompose is not a traditional eleven-songs-with-three-singles record, but neither is it a full concept album. It’s something between the two, pinned together by a set of central themes and characters whilst escaping the pitfalls and constraints of a “concept album”. For this reason the album is reminiscent of Craig Finn’s writing, which to me is high praise indeed. The word ‘novelistic’ would come close if only Grow / Decompose didn’t bring to mind the very novels which play with the conventions of the form. Our preview mentioned David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest as a comparison and this seems to reach far further than the shared transvestic tendencies (of G / D’s Neil and IJ’s Tony Krause) cited as reasoning. Not only does the album have the same broad, scattered and vaguely cyclical structure as the novel, but Young Jesus’ music also shares Wallace’s metamodern style – a postmodern web of motifs and strange humour countered with a modernist sincerity and genuine sense of hope.

It’s not only in structure that Grow / Decompose brings to mind Infinite Jest. Their juxtaposition of bleak mental turmoil with buoyant (or at least fervent) emotion and hope is integral to the Young Jesus aesthetic. Again a parallel to The Hold Steady’s style, this combination provides a sense of depth that would be absent from something aligned purely to misery or joy. This makes the album, at least to my ears, very much a product of the twenty-first century. We aren’t always sad, or always happy, or always good or evil or apathetic or nihilistic or idealistic to the point of stupidity. We are all of these things and none of them and it can be hard work trying to fathom how to retain a sense of self while being in such a state of confusion. What I’m getting at is, like Infinite Jest, Grow / Decompose resists the temptation of satire and cynicism to paint real people stuck in this madness.

As the title describes so neatly, Grow / Decompose speaks of the familiar paths that human lives follow. Despite all the strangeness, the characters here are going through the age-old problems – depression, anxiety, identity crises, existential terror – the problems of being You and You alone, Molina’s “curse of a human’s life”. For all of the complexity of our existence, we are still locked in the atavistic pattern of life and death, everyone more or less condemned to the same mistakes and fears and joys that we as human beings have been experiencing for generations (“You don’t start clean,” tells the refrain of ‘Brothers’, “spines are twisting in the rings. This old tree, been around before you were born”). In this way the album is both pessimistic and hopeful, a statement that we seem unable to change for the better and a reminder that we are united by this monumental whammy. As Rossiter sings on ‘Oranges’: “She’s a believer in the relief / that we’re all receivers of suffering”.

Degeneration is a major theme and the whole record is imbued with an odd pleasure/pain relationship, accentuated with grotesque imagery. Take for example opener ‘EMP’: “So go ahead and search your chest, the slugs and inchworms know it best.” This brought to mind the book Threats by Amelia Gray, in which a man named David descends the spirals of grief after losing his wife. With death and decay quite literally pervading his house and life, David finds himself both terrified by his situation yet drawn towards some obscure peace with it, as if giving in to a dark and fungal siren. The characters on Grow / Decompose are similarly troubled and lonely, be they confused and unhappy with their identity (‘G’), saddled with unwanted children and gripped by overwhelming numbness (‘Oranges’) or using drugs and forming half-imagined relationships with television presenters (‘Slug’ and ‘Brothers’). Dissociated from others, they achieve the sort of heightened peculiarity of southern gothic hermits, existing within the confines of their own logic and physics, a world where the hope or possibility of connection or meaning flutters along rarely, staccato and unannounced.

The result is a manic-depressive relationship with their irregularity. On ‘Blood and Guts’ the character holds his weirdness aloft like a banner intended to confirm himself or terrify others, marching towards epiphany or entropy like Gray’s David. The title character in ‘Milo’, who sits somewhere near McCarthy’s Lester Ballard on the scale of Southern Gothic hermits, continues the perverse pleasure with the clear-eyed conviction of a serial killer, delighted by the gory truths of life and death. Milo is the depraved character, one who seems to have pushed past anxiety and apathy to realise his potential as a monster (“He paints his face and feels a brightness / glowing brighter inside / the cave he built out of the thorax / of the organist’s hide”). With his humanity stripped away he becomes a prophet who “sings the world as it’s shown”, the cyclical, elemental theme returning with its closing chant:

“All the birds singing
all the plants growing
all the wind blowing
all the bugs crawling
all the birds breaking
all the plants dying
all the wind crawling
and the blood flowing
and the waves breaking
with the birds singing
and the plants speaking
to the wind dying”

It seems important that the end of the final track ‘Dirt’ shares the same chords and drone as the opener, so that the end loops back to the beginning (another similarity to Infinite Jest). If played on repeat Grow / Decompose never ends, a musical ouroboros of well-worn paths that are both doomed and blessed and quite possibly all we have.

Grow / Decompose is out on the 13^th May via Hellhole Supermarket and you can pre-order buy it now on CD and cassette, or on vinyl via Gigantic Noise.

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So my plan is to write about some of my favourite of Molina’s songs in the hope of inspiring you to delve deeper into his back-catalogue yourself.

Firstly, a quick bit of background info. If you’re not already familiar with his work, you should know that Molina recorded under various guises, leading bands under the names Songs: Ohia and Magnolia Electric Co., and also recording solo records under his own name. He also released a really good album with Will Johnson (of Centro-matic) and also released a one off record under the moniker Amalgamated Sons of Rest with Will Oldham and Alasdair Roberts. The vast majority of his records were released by Secretly Canadian.

Unsurprisingly for a career which spanned over 15 years, Molina’s music morphed and modified, filling a variety of niches and casting the man himself in a variety of guises. There is the stark and haunting folk music of his earliest Songs: Ohia releases, the blood-and-thunder indie rock of later ones and even country-inflected classic rock on the later Magnolia Electric Co. albums. But every album also has something in common, something unique to the man himself. Much of his music deals with life as an outsider, the constant struggle with feelings of inadequacy and isolation. But there is also something else, a sliver of beautiful glittering hope in the darkness. This is illustrated by Molina’s refusal to simply give in, his determination to persevere, his emphasis on how important it is to “try”.

I’ve chosen a collection of my very favourite Jason Molina tracks. It is in no way intended to be definitive, and a second person could easily choose an entirely different set of songs. For example, ‘Hold on, Magnolia’, ‘Just Be Simple’ and ‘Don’t it Look Like Rain’ have not made it on the list, despite being songs that I love more than most. Anyways, here we go…

Honey, Watch Your Ass

My first choice is taken from Pyramid Electric Co., a solo album released in 2004. To me it displays some of the finest lyricism, not just in Molina’s vast discography, but in music in general. See for example:

“She nearly burned the town again
With the look that she gave him
She covers her heart
With her hands and says a little useless praying
Never hurt anything”

And, in what I think must be one of my favourite lines of all time:

“That must be her up there
Perfume and cigarette smoke in her wild hair
She smells a little like a train
Hauling lilacs through the rain”

Darling…

‘Darling…’ appeared on Hecla & Griper, an EP released by Songs: Ohia way back in 1997. It’s not actually a Molina song, rather a cover of country artist Conrad Twitty. The beauty for me is that there is not a shred of irony in this cover. It’s a raw and lonely-sounding break-up song, a desperate plea for reconciliation from a lost love:

“Hello darling, it’s nice to see you
It’s been a long time
How’s your new love are you happy
Hope you’re doing alright
Just to know this means so much to me
What’s that darling, how am I doing
Guess I’m doing alright except I can’t sleep
And I cry all night till dawn
What I’m trying to say is that I love you and
I miss you and I’m sorry that I done you wrong”

Hecla & Griper was reissued on its 15^th anniversary (plus bonus tracks). Get it via Secretly Canadian.

Didn’t It Rain

Another Songs: Ohia track next, this time from the 2002 album of the same name (which has also recently been reissued as a deluxe package). ‘Didn’t It Rain’ is a heartfelt ode to both the hope and the hopelessness of existence. It opens with a consolation:

“No matter how dark the storm gets overhead
They say someone’s watching from the calm at the edge”

And continues as a kind of empathetic pep-talk.

“If they think you got it they’re going to beat it out of you
With work and debt whatever all else there is
You got to watch your own back
Try to see the light of goodness burning down the track
Through the blinding rain through the swaying wires”

This is Molina addressing things head-on, saying to his listeners, “yeah things are tough but here’s what we can do about it”. Emphasis on the “we”. There is solidarity here, a we’re-all-in-this-together call to arms to just keep going.

Whip-poor-will

This track didn’t appear on a proper album until a re-worked version was included on Magnolia Electric Co.’s 2009 album Josephine. But the version I am including on my list is a demo played by a lone Molina on his guitar (which you can hear on the bonus disc of the 10^th anniversary edition of Magnolia Electric Co.). ‘Whip-poor-will’ is wonderfully simple and full of a certain sense of resolute melancholy. With lines such as:

“So all of you folks in heaven not too busy ringing the bell
Some of us down here ain’t doing very well”

And:

“Still waiting
For you to sing that song again
The one you were singing at the very fall of man
It ain’t hallelujah but it might as well have been”

O! Grace

‘O! Grace’, from Josephine, is the latest of my choices and is included mainly to illustrate the deviance in sound from the earlier Songs: Ohia albums. What we get here is almost a traditional country song, complete with a pseudo-sing-along chorus of:

“Oh Grace, if you stop believing
That don’t mean that it just goes away
It’s a long way between horizons
And it gets farther every day”

Farewell Transmission

This is the opening track on Magnolia Electric Co., the album which many regard as Molina’s magnum opus. ‘Farewell Transmission’ is a rock song of epic scope, in which Molina threw together all of his friends and creative energies in seven and a half minutes of pure searing force. It begins with a swagger, and immediately sounds bigger than anything Molina had made before. The real highlight is the lyrics, which are jam-packed with stark, forlorn imagery of dying moons and strange shamanistic rituals. With passages such as:

“After tonight if you don’t want us to be a secret out of the past
I will resurrect it, I’ll have a good go at it
I’ll streak his blood across my beak and dust my feathers with his ashes
I can feel his ghost breathing down my back”

And:

“Mama here comes midnight, with the dead moon in its jaws
Must be the big star about to fall”

The song also contains some lines which relate back to Molina’s favourite lyrical themes, and turns out to be one place where he expresses himself particularly eloquently:

“The real truth about it is no one gets it right
The real truth about it is we’re all supposed to try”

It is lines like this which created the adoring fandom, which turned people from casual listeners to zealous followers (including Strand of Oaks’s Timothy Showalter). And the reason? Because they offer comfort. Here is a man who spent his artistic career documenting his life’s struggles, beaming out his thoughts to thousands of lonely people around the country. And his message (in these two short lines at least) was a powerful one. He’s saying that we should all just keep going, that we are all doing okay.

Long Desert Train

To conclude I have chosen what is perhaps my favourite Jason Molina song of all. ‘Long Desert Train’ is another solo track, the shattering terminus of Pyramid Electric Co.. This is a very, very sad song, even for a man who made a living writing sad songs. It looks the sensation of inadequacy and a complete lack of self-worth straight in the eye. It feels like an outpouring of vulnerability, a rare faultering in the noble intentions of resilience and perseverance. It is a sad song with sadder end, and one which has added poignancy after Molina’s premature demise:

“Said you’d never be old enough
Or young enough
Tall enough
Or thin enough
Or smart enough
Or brave enough
Rich enough
Pretty enough
Strong enough
Good enough
Well you were to us

You wanted silence by itself
Just the word
You wanted peace by itself
Just to learn
There were things you couldn’t change
You got the dull pounding rain
You got the last car in the long desert train

You almost made it”

You can buy the vast majority of Jason Molina’s music via Secretly Canadian.

P.S. The last year or so has seen various Jason Molina tribute albums, including Farwell Transmission: A Tribute To Jason Molina from Rock The Cause and a collection of tributes and compilations from The Wave Pictures.

The post No Matter How Dark: Jason Molina appeared first on Various Small Flames.

At serious risk of repeating ourselves (as most of our pieces of songwriters end up analysing this angle), the secret to a good folk song is in the writing. Here Butler excels. The lyrics are expertly crafted and you get the impression that these are snapshots of much wider stories that we are lucky enough to glimpse, fleeting impressions of continuing feelings and emotions. There is a feeling that the songs are set in a time passed, a simpler period where love is more innocent and romance is just that, which, along with a yearning for a simpler way of life (not exactly Walden but a desire for a modest life that probably speaks to many an office worker on a monday morning) is ideal against the stark guitar and mournal vocals.This removal from the tedious complications of modern living is a clever one, allowing a real sense of intimacy and tragedy that may (rightly or wrongly) appear trite in a modern setting. The track ‘Ben’, which can be heard below, sums up the style perfectly, reading:

“All I want is a piece of land by the water 
when the cold wind comes and dries my nose and mouth. 
I would raise an early home and face to the east 
and bring only my hands and wife and mind.”

Feeling needs to be conveyed through both sound and lyrics, and both of these need to align and sound natural together. Where some artists and bands fall down is their failure to address differences between sound and subject matter. Tyler Butler sounds like a man in situ, a natural writer and musician that needs no banjo or corduoy trousers to signify his root-sy leanings, he relies on affecting strumming and beautifully developed narratives and imagery. This is proper music.

Violence is set for release on Cabin Songs, a folk offshoot of Old Ugly Recording Co., on Oct 22nd. Pre-order a CD or digital copy from Bandcamp or, if you are lucky enough to be in/near Edmonton next Saturday (20th Oct) then why not get yourself down to the Cabin Songs launch/Violence release party at The Rutherford House?

The post Tyler Butler – Violence appeared first on Various Small Flames.

The album is both very different and reassuringly similar from If I Don’t Come Home…, with the band experimenting with their sound while keeping the familiar vocals and lyrics, the strong core of The Wooden Sky’s success. For me, this is where The Wooden Sky excel, offering the listener the choice of two listening experiences; an entertaining mix of slow and quicker rock songs or a much deeper exploration of often deeply emotional themes. While it could be argued that this is the case with most music, there is something about frontman Gavin Gardiner’s style of delivery that offers a choice, the kind of voice that you could sing along with without really knowing what he has said and enjoying yourself immensely. The variation in pace keep things interesting and the album passes as a pleasant indie-rock listen.

However as I have already said, it is in the lyrics that the true strength of Every Child… lies, and hence the album is a real grower. With each listen a song gives up another detail that was previously missed, another insight into the underlying story. The way in which these ideas unfold suggest a much wider narrative, allowing the listener to flesh out the situation themselves and thus make each story personal and appealing. For example, the opening track ‘Child of the Valley’ is an affecting tale of loneliness and redemption but remains rather vague for the most part, allowing our imaginations to apply the words in any way we see fit. This effect continues to build across the 13 tracks and by the end we each have a slightly different but no less complete picture that addresses some of the most important aspects of the human condition. This isn’t the head-on, painfully personal outpouring familiar to some songwriters, but something a lot more subtle and layered. The messages are hidden, woven into stories and metaphors. They are there if you want to interpret them. If not, there is a confident rock band to love too.

The Wooden Sky are coming to Europe very soon and will tour the US and Canada in October and November. We are hoping to get the chance to ask the band a few questions soon so look out for that too.

The post The Wooden Sky – Every Child a Daughter, Every Moon a Sun appeared first on Various Small Flames.

The Wooden Sky will tour the UK (see below). Excitingly, they will be joined by fellow Canadians Evening Hymns, who are also on the verge of releasing a new album. Spectral Dusk is said to be influenced by the experiences of lead Jonas Bonnetta when losing his father in 2009. He has said that his aim was to create “11 moments of reflection or introversion.” Again, what I have heard of the album has got me excited; an atmospheric and visceral exploration of feeling and genuine pain. Getting excited about such a thing sounds a little strange but you get the drift. Stream a track below and watch (a personal favourite) ‘Asleep In The Pews’ at the bottom.

Both albums are shaping up to be some of my favourites this year so hopefully I will be able to write more detailed views on each album when the time comes. Until then, have a listen and try and catch them on tour. The UK dates are below and check here for more European dates.

• 03/10 – CARDIFF, Buffalo Bar
• 04/10 – LONDON, Windmill
• 05/10 – PRESTON, Mad Ferret
• 09/10 – LONDON, Slaughtered Lamb
• 10/10 – GLASGOW, Captain’s Rest
• 11/10 – HARTLEPOOL, The Studio
• 12/10 – SUNDERLAND, Independent
• 13/10 – OXFORD, Oxjam

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EDIT – Also check out the video for Morana here.

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