Adeline Hotel

“Exists within that small and fleeting pocket in time and space that opens just before you take off from a familiar location” – we premièred the first song from an upcoming Adeline Hotel EP

Morning River Band

“Songs about those men down on their luck but too stubborn to change… doomed to making the same old mistakes and who continue chasing the same misguided remedies” – we wrote about Abyssal Chanelling, the latest album from Morning River Band

On The Water

“A strange stop-motion collage that sits perfectly with the lyrical themes of death, decay and, naturally, life” – we premièred a video by Nnamdi Ogbonnaya for ‘Born in Reverse’, the opening track from On The Water’s Cordelia.

Bells Atlas

“Using precise imagery to trace imprecise, unknowable things, the words coalescing with the music to create something unclear but imbued with meaning, as if reaching somewhere deeper within your brain or soul than you can consciously go” – the vibrant and mystical Hyperlust EP from Bells Atlas

Frog

“Queens is the most diverse county in America, and maybe the world. Kind of Blah is about living here, in this city, which is sometimes incredibly wonderful and other times feels a lot like prison and most times probably both at once” – we spoke with Frog about listening to Jagged Little Pill with your mom, the brilliance of Lightning Bolt and some terrible advice from David BermanFuneral Sounds

“Casa Ruby strives to enable people to be treated as people” – a benefit compilation from Funeral Sounds in support of multicultural LGBTQ organisation Casa Ruby

Girlpool

“In a weird way, Girlpool have grown up – becoming confident enough to share their dreams and vulnerabilities and in turn galvanise a lonely generation too afraid of ridicule to live the lives they desire” – Girlpool’s new album Before The World Was Big sees the band offer a sustainable and productive antidote to the pressures of growing up

Advance Base

“Sweetly sad stories about lonely Midwesterners trying to make sense of their troubled pasts” – mark your calendars, August will see a new album from Owen Ashworth’s Advance Base

Two White Cranes

“A clear advancement from anything on Two White Cranes, fleshed out with electric guitar and drums and focussed in its writing” – we previewed Radisson Blue, the forthcoming album from Two White Cranes

Evening Hymns

“I could go on about how [Evening Hymns are] brave and heartbreaking and intensely personal, or how [they] made me feel okay and less alone” – Evening Hymns has us very excited for their new album Quiet Energies

Mitski

“I’m not the white boy. I’m not in a position to be heard whatever I make” – Mitski spoke with Caralyn Green for Pittsburgh City Paper about being an introverted person of colour in music. [See our review of Bury Me at Makeout Creek]

Katie Dey

“I remembered that I had earphones in my coat pocket. I plugged them into my phone and listened to asdfasdf and rested my head on the train window. Closing my eyes, what was initially a gloomy train ride turned into something more cathartic” – Gold Flake Paint talked about Katie Dey’s asdfasdf and the restorative power of music

Ornette Coleman

“A giant of 20th century music, pushing jazz into new harmonic territory and reconceiving the way in which musicians improvised” – Stewart Smith wrote about the career and legacy of Ornette Coleman for The Quietus

Long Neck

“An album with no season, or maybe it’s every season, or maybe it’s just the season when you feel most alone” – Stereogum are streaming Heights by Lily Mastrodimos’s Long Neck

Mitski (again)

Out of Town Films shot Mitski playing ‘I Will’ in the middle of nowhere

Swell Tone’s Summertime Sanity

“Getting lost in the heat and the sense of freedom inherent in the forthcoming season is tempting, to say the least” – Shana over at Swell Tone has put together a selection of summer songs, including Yowler, Girlpool, Hot Palms and The Washboard Abs. Any playlist that opens with ‘Skin of Your Yellow Country Teeth’ gets a thumbs up from us.

Kathryn Joseph

We liked Kathryn Joseph’s Bones You Have Thrown Me Blood I’ve Spilled an awful lot. Last week she played some songs for the Roddy Hart Show on BBC Scotland and it sounded great. Check it out on the BBC iPlayer.

And Finally… the 8tracks Playlist(s) of the Week

This week’s winner is mix-master Adam, AKA Songsfortheday, and his summer soundtracks. There are separate day and night editions, so he has you covered for all your musical needs.

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In a recent interview, we asked North Carolinan folk musician Sarah Louise to name five acts that ours readers should hear. One of her suggestions was Wes Tirey, a familiar name around here – we have already reviewed his albums, collaborations and indeed even chatted with him too. Wes has since put out the tape Louise mentioned on Columbus label Cabin Floor Esoterica.

‘Old Ohio Blues’ starts the release as it means to go on, a slow, sad folk song surrounded by atmospheric drone which creeps and clings like an oneiric fog. A similar technique is employed across the remaining songs, the combination of traditional folk and electronic effects producing a sound that is disconcerting and alluring, Tirey’s vocals cutting through the mist like an unknown narrator, doomed to repeat his regrets. ‘Ballad of the Black Hills Woman’ plays like the late night echoes of a man who has outlived his company, while ‘The Body’s Better’ tells of someone so indebted to their vices that they have given up pretending otherwise. ‘Akhnilo Blues’ reduces the ambient levels in favour of stark guitar and ‘Mexican Blanket’ offers an evocative instrumental interlude, the ever-present reverb creating a strange sense that the song is a recording of the song, a memory that has not lost its lustre. Closer ‘Buffalo Bones’ is a current favourite, combining macabre dream imagery with a tender beauty, creating a song that’s unsettling and striking and would please any of the past masters.

“And I dream the trees were singing
and I dream the river was on fire
and I dream rattlesnakes were upon me,
and my name was cursed for all time.
And I dream the sky had teeth
and I dream of buffalo bones
and I dream the moon was bleeding
and I dream my body was stone.
And I dream of your lily white hands
and I dream of the flowers on your dress
and I dream wild horses surround you
and I dream your stomach grew.”

The tape is packed with so many vivid images that the bigger picture becomes indistinct, like the recollections of a man so old and tired that the border between reality and fantasy has become porous. Gripped by a fever dream, he is desperate and delirious but determined to say what needs to be said before time runs out on him.

All this is a way of saying that Journeyer/Forward, Melancholy Dream is one of Tirey’s best yet. The release is available as a great little cassette via Cabin Floor Esoterica (see below). While you are there, why not dig into the Cabin Floor back catalogue? But consider yourself warned: it can eat up your day pretty quick.

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Danielle Fricke is an artist and musician from London, Ontario, who you might know from her work with Snow Mantled Love (who we featured here and here). Fricke and the others have put the band on an indefinite hiatus while they pursue other projects and, while Fricke has been releasing a steady dribble of songs and videos, this EP is her first physical release.

Burrow is a four-song EP of rich, atmospheric ambient music. ‘i.’ opens with samples of birdsong and the sound of the wind before gentle and poignant piano meanders with what could be melancholy or wonder, the last mammal left before winter or the first to rise from hibernation. ‘ii.’ sees the piano swapped out in favour of something even more subdued, a fragile electronic breeze which whistles over a land muted with snow. ‘iii.’ is slightly weird and skewed, overlayed with staccato fuzz which appears with the skittish unpredictability of moths around a lamp, while ‘iv.’ opens out into something larger and more intense, a blend of cinematic instrumentation and electronic drone with Fricke’s voice swirled into the mix. Behind each track is a delicate yet ever-present hum, a continuous noise that (paradoxically) mimics silence, the sound of air in your ears when all else is absent that gives a sense of intimacy and isolation.

While Fricke is certain to have success as a conventional indie/pop musician and vocalist, Burrow shows that she has many other avenues to explore and exploit. Don’t be surprised if her instrumental music forms the soundtrack to the best, saddest film that hasn’t yet been made.

You can buy the album now from Fricke’s Bandcamp page.

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Fox Food Records have been busy releasing really good music, so much so that we’re running behind on writing about it (we have already featured one great release this year). This self-titled album from Good, Good Blood is their latest release and in no way bucks the trend of Fox Food quality.

The opening track acts a prologue, an atmospheric and instrumental introduction supplemented with an ambient recording of children. This sets the tone of the album and unfolds into six subsequent songs of gentle, lo-fi indie pop, both sort of sad and sort of not, and generally a pleasure to listen to. See for example the ‘Hold Me Like a Child’ which you can check out in the player below:

My current favourite tracks are numbers five and six, almost as much for the transition between the two as the songs themselves. ‘Suffer Silent’ sounds like those little grey and rainy storms of worry and doubt that sometimes come blowing through your mind, ending in a Continental sample that sounds how I imagine walking through the sodden streets of Paris might feel. But if this track sounds like a gloomy drizzle then the following one, ‘Settle Down’, feels like a spring morning, like birdsong and breezes and rippling waves at the lakeshore, the dawn of something bright and new.

The final track acts as the epilogue, a deviation from the album’s template and the antithesis of the opener’s childlike naivete. The song contains a reading of Charles Bukowski’s poem ‘Dinosauria, We’, an incredibly cynical and pessimistic account of the decline of society and the world in general. It contains lines such as:

“We are born into a government 60 years in debt
That soon will be unable to even pay the interest on that debt
And the banks will burn
Money will be useless
There will be open and unpunished murder in the streets
It will be guns and roving mobs”

And:

Trees will die
All vegetation will die
Radiated men will eat the flesh of radiated men
The sea will be poisoned
The lakes and rivers will vanish
Rain will be the new gold
The rotting bodies of men and animals will stink in the dark wind

Luckily, this doom and gloom is cut through by the musical accompaniment, the guitars offering some kind of hope and giving the dire prophesies (even more of) an ironic edge, less a wink and a nudge and more a gentle pat on the back saying that perhaps things might not get all that bad.

Unfortunately (i.e. because we were so slow in writing about this) the cassettes have all sold out, but you can (and should) download it via the Fox Food Records Bandcamp page.

P.S. The artwork was provided by Rachael Perisho.

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Boston rocker Jake Rollins first came to our attention on the second volume of 80N7’s super cool compilations. The label are obviously big fans because they have just put out Spend a Few, Make a Few, Rollins’s new album, which is stocked full of catchy lo-fi indie rock, guaranteed to get your feet tapping and head nodding and generally make your day that little bit brighter. You see, Rollins one of our favourite kinds of musician, that is, the kind who makes music because it’s lots and lots of fun, which to me is as good a reason as any to do just about anything. I know this because it is clearly apparent in his songs, you can just tell they were made by a man doing his own thing and enjoying himself.

But trying to cut it as a young indie musician (even one as cool as Rollins) is no walk in the park. Lots of the songs on the album touch upon themes of self-doubt and that general creeping feeling that maybe there is something better you should be doing with your time (an emotion not unfamiliar with small-time music bloggers, trust me). See for example the opening track, ‘Maybe I’m Wasting My Time’, in which he sings, “Trying to make it sound cool, playing the drum out of tune / Why is music so fun? Maybe because I’m so young / Or maybe I’m wasting my time”, and again on ‘Rattle & Hiss’ which includes the line, ‘Do you know how much time I’ve wasted thinking about all the time I’ve wasted?” These emotions are most clearly expressed on ‘All the Good Things’, which slows things down to a slinking swagger as Rollins sings, “I don’t know why I’m sad, all the good things are bad”.

What’s really good about the album is that despite expressing these anxieties, Rollins produces 11 tracks that are lots of fun to listen to and are more likely to cause positive thoughts to come bubbling to the surface. Inadvertently or otherwise, he seems to solve all of his worries as he sings about them. What’s better than carefree rock and roll when you need to see the good in things. The fact is, Rollins hasn’t been wasting his time at all, and all the proof is right here. Try listening as the composed verses veer into a screechy instrumental chorus on ‘Your Voice’, or to the sinuous guitars that open ‘Out of Tune’, and try telling me this isn’t pretty great.

On top of everything else, his timing is impeccable. Spring is finally starting to commence, meaning summer is just around the corner, meaning there will soon be no shortage of warm sunny evenings to drive around with your windows down and forget about the bad things for a while. If you know what’s good for you, your stereo will be blaring Jake Rollins as you go.

You can get Spend a Few, Make a Few via the 80N7 Bandcamp page and can be downloaded for however much you’d like to give. This includes absolutely nothing at all, but for pete’s sake try to spare a few pounds/dollars/magic beans, Jake deserves it.

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Butterfly House is a band from Brighton, led by Martyn Lewis, who make a dark brand of sadcore preoccupied with death, loss and depression. His latest album, By Ghostlight, is strangely both relatable and obscure, a familiar angst filtered through an eerie lens made of ground up bones and spider webs. Indeed, the term ghostlight has pretty creepy connotations. As Lewis describes:

“In victorian theatres, a ghostlight was a lamp left on over night to ensure that the gas they used at the time didn’t build up in the system. Legend began to wrap around this custom, and eventually the ghostlight was said to be used as a beacon for ghosts to put on their own performances when the theatre was closed, and by appeasing them, they wouldn’t cause havok.”

By mixing the bedroom pop aesthetic with lyrics that sound like something Malcolm Middleton might deliver if he lived in a haunted mansion, Butterfly House straddle the hopeful youth/miserable acceptance divide. ‘Birds Strung Together’ is a love song that deals with hesitation and fear (“When you spread your wings, I’m paralysed”), ‘God is Laughing at Me’ covers Lewis’ insecurities about his singing voice and questions the justification of songwriting (”God is laughing at me because self-importance is blasphemy”), while closer ‘Phantoms Forever’ faces up to worries of death and the loss of self (“If I die keep me alive in your dreams and memory”)

It would be easy to say Lewis has created an album for goths too bashful to wear black lipstick. But not only does By Ghostlight have all of the peculiarity of such subcultures without the self-awareness, playing as the odd machinations of a mind rather than a conceited performance, there is more to the album than a vaguely supernatural darkness. Because despite how the song titles may sound, Lewis offers hope on these songs. Rather than pretend everything is bright and breezy, By Ghostlight finds hope through accepting reality, acknowledging our minuscule position in the grand scheme of things and remembering that everyone else is in the same boat. In this way, the album is a light in the gloom, a reminder that we are all alone together.

You can grab By Ghostlight now on a pay-what-you-can basis via Bandcamp. The artwork is by Jasmine Scott.

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Human Behavior are an experimental, genre-bending band from Tucson, Arizona, led by chief songwriter Andres Parada. Following 2013′s Golgotha, Bethphage is the second album in a trilogy which combines classical folk music with drone and spoken word and Bibilical imagery to explore dark themes like death and unhappiness. In an interview with Valley Hype Parada was asked how Bethphage differs from his previous work:

Long answer: This album was written in sequence, a technique we’ve never done. It is two long tracks, split up by chapters. We tried to make this album a cinematic experience. It is also our first studio album, which allowed us to experiment in ways we haven’t before.

Short answer: It’s weirder.

Weird is a good word to describe Bethphage, with each of the various ‘Chapters’ flitting between styles and genres at will. For example ‘Chapter 2′ begins as a traditional folk song before morphing into a spoken word poem that itself gradual changes into a hymn. ‘Chapter 3′ is a western soundtrack akin to Ry Cooder which is peppered with abstract samples, from a man yelling “hey!” to a strange droney conversation between an adult and an upset child. The use of white noise over a classic folk sound is unsettling, a weird modern confusion against the comfortable nostalgia that folk music offers, changing a romantic lonliness to a sharp a threat of isolation, a seething radio silence. ‘Chapter 5′ is minimal yet expansive, bringing to mind vast empty spaces with nothing but dust, and ‘Chapter 6′ grows out of this, beginning with gentle vocals before becoming a ramshackled punk-folk song with the repeated refrain: “The end is nigh.”

Bethphage does not sit comfortably but its purpose is not to comfort, at least not explicitly. That said, the use of folk music as a medium to explore things such as depression and suicide and Catholic guilt suggests that Human Behavior are not nihilists. If they wanted to convince us all that everything is worthless and stupid and fucked then there are plently of other more suitable genres. Instead they attempt something more constructive, something that pulls no punches while criticising traditions while also acknowledging that they can form part of the solution. Bethphage is too honest to take a distinct and definite view of anything.

You can buy Bethphage from the Human Behavior Bandcamp page, grab a CD through Diet Pop Records, or a vinyl from Folktale Records.

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Vio/Miré are a band from Providence, Rhode Island, led by Brendan Glasson. Their fourth album, You Will be Spending Time Outdoors, in the Mountains, Near Water, came out last September. Their music is a mixture of folk and ambience, with reed organ, cello, chorals and synths used to create lush soundscapes upon which Glasson’s poetic vocals float. Think Sea Wolf mixed with an orchestral Sufjan Stevens, folk songs written over the top of cinematic compositions.

The album is one of contradictions, somehow sounding intimate and expansive, gentle and harsh, poetically abstract and beautifully simple. In this way it manages to mirror nature in all of its guises – spellbindingly beautiful and callous and cruel and innocent in a way humans are no longer able. For example on ‘Dogs 1′:

dogs are barking in an alley way
they’re fighting over bones
I love the moment till I curse the day
breaking bottles over stones
and I have seen the grass’s easy sway
under spruces overgrown
and I have known the near to move away
how the wind was overblown

As with anything related to the natural world, mortality and death is a major theme. Much of the beauty and sorrow on the record can be traced to the transient nature of life, something that manages to be bleak and comforting and harrowing and joyous all at once. Much of this is barely explainable, much better felt through the music than explained by words, but it is something similar to the curious mixture of wonder, satisfaction and melancholy felt when looking at a range of mountains or rugged coastline. ‘Snakes’ closes with a contemplation of life:

sent to hell to stir and swelter,
I returned and sought my love

but if the way were many days,

if present passed as present does,

how would you ask someone how his journey was?

You would be forgiven for thinking this all sounds a bit New Age-y but it is anything but. You Will be Spending Time Outdoors, in the Mountains, Near Water feels less like a 45-minute album than a landscape, a world which existed long before the album was recorded. Vio/Miré offer a way into this place, and you would be a fool not to take their hand and experience it for yourself.

You can buy the album from the Vio/Miré Bandcamp page.

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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).

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We first featured Field Medic (the recording project of San Francisco’s Kevin Patrick) back in September when we wrote a criminally short piece on his great little release PEGASUSTHOTZ. Luckily for us, he is a pretty prolific music-maker and so we have the chance to redeem ourselves with a proper write-up of his latest release, Me, My Gibberish & the Moon, which he unveiled late last month.

To describe the sound of Field Medic is to get into some pretty deep contemplations about what we mean when we talk about “folk” music. His music is largely based on delicate finger-picked guitar and intimate vocals with lovelorn lyrics. So far so “folk”. But Patrick’s brand of folk is a long way from the earthy and pastoral nature traditionally associated with the genre. This folk music is not inspired by dusty prairies and snow-capped peaks, but rather reclusive twilit bedrooms and the grey and rain-streaked view of a grey and rain-streaked city.

Opener ’M.M.G.A.T.M’ (a shorthand title track) sounds like a simple and unfussy bedroom folk track, but a look at the lyrics reveals a weird love song, with lines like:

“I crouch low and smoke with the spiders
To keep the raindrops off my head
I’m singing about your ghost love
In reverie like you were dead”.

This odd, dream-like imagery is apparent throughout the release and elevates it beyond the vast majority of contemporary guy-and-guitar acts. See for example ‘Prowler’:

“I was led to your spirit at dusk by the black dogs
I awoke at midnight and i saw you perched there
I said it’s feeling like a dream but it’s looking like a nightmare”.

However, these lyrical eccentricities do not detract from the wistful air, meaning the record still feels genuine and heartfelt. The second song, ‘Full Grown’, begins with, “We used to meet on Tuesdays, beneath the moon down by the mill”, a line that would feel at home in any classic folk song. The fact is that for all its strangeness, this is a record that feels real. When Patrick sings you know he means it, and if you don’t believe me then listen to the final track, ‘Shadowboxing’ and tell me that his desperation is not palpable.

I suppose the lesson of this short write-up is that if you like folk music (and all of its connotations) then you’ll like this music too. Okay, so it might not be the sound of a back-porch banjo or a silky smooth croon, but the sentiment is there, that heart-on-sleeve honesty. Perhaps us modern people are not quite as eloquent in expressing our feelings (romantic or otherwise), but that doesn’t mean we don’t feel them. This is folk music for the twenty first century, tales of surreal love and loss and dissociation, strange little hymns for the lonely and confused.

As Patrick sings on the title track:

“I stalk the streets alone now
Just me my gibberish and the moon
For I speak a different language
If I cannot speak with you”.

You can buy Me, My Gibberish & the Moon on cassette via Sunroom Recordz, or get it digitally from the Field Medic Bandcamp page.

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