Anyway, Saintseneca are back with a new full-length, Such Things, which is very much worth your time. Combining rock, pop, folk and punk with strong writing and clever word play, the band make catchy yet surprisingly deep songs which seem equally suited to live parties and solo headphones sessions. From the up-tempo celebration of ‘River’, which brings to mind Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, the Neutral Milk Hotel-inspired title track and the choral, almost acapella singalong of ‘House Divided’, Such Things is a nuanced collection of indie rock songs which will provoke a fair bit of existential thinking. ‘How Many Blankets Are In The World?’ provides a nice summation of the band’s philosophy and message:

“Life is long
long enough to be mean
Life is short
short enough to mean something
To those who long
those who long for longer”

Such Things is an album which confronts the mysteries of life in a celebratory and/or fulfilling way, favouring finding interest and comfort in the unknowable instead of the nihilism many turn to when thinking of, well… such things.

You can buy Such Things now from the Saintseneca Bandcamp page, or on vinyl from ANTI-.

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It’s up for debate whether Alexandra Kleeman’s début novel You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine is dystopian. I mean, it’s too familiar and life-like to be truly dystopian, although that’s exactly what makes it so terrifying. The world seems to be functioning pretty much as normal, as people go about their days with the aimless sense of duty we are all accustomed to, a far cry from the visions of Orwell or Burgess or Dick. But the definition of dystopia is “a community or society that is undesirable or frightening”, so who’s to say “normal” can’t also be dystopic?

Kleeman’s narrator ‘A’ is blank, mostly faceless with few discernible personality traits. Her job feels temporary and is barely mentioned. Many of her scenes involve her doing very little inside her apartment. Instead she is fleshed out through her exposure to-/interaction with her room-mate (‘B’), boyfriend (‘C’) and the vivid stream of entertainment and advertising (or entertaining advertisement) which seems part of the world’s very fabric. Obvious comparisons are Pynchon and Foster Wallace, plus George Saunders in his being-clever mode (as opposed to his sentimental one), although the focus is very much away from the large-scale political/societal systems in favour of personal, A-centric explorations. All background occurrences (the mystery of disappearing dads, an anti-veal activist who ends up marketing it, even B and C) are filtered through A’s experience.

As the story is told in first person this might seem obvious, but (to me at least) it goes much deeper than that. In most postmodern books the main character is subject to/lost amongst a world of disinformation, whereas in You Too… it’s A herself who feels like the disinformation. The question here isn’t “is the world as the media says it is?” but rather “am I who the media says I am? Who I think I am?” Whether this is an emerging trend in post-postmodern millennial literature, a natural reaction to a world in which identity is unsettled and fluctuating, or just a new, gender-based perspective on things traditionally written about by men is unclear. One thing is for certain, Kleeman is a name to watch among the new generation of writers building upon the work of the aforementioned greats.Here’s a collection of songs that I think are relevant or related to the novel. If you like a particular band, just click the artist name in the tracklisting to be whisked away for more information. Enjoy:

Tracklisting:

1. Too Dark – Frankie Cosmos
2. Sucks Hanging Out With You (It Sucks Even More When You Leave) – Free Cake For Every Creature
3. Slumber Party – Mommy Long Legs
4. What’s Another Lipstick Mark – Adult Mom
5. Unholy Faces – Florist
6. Bedroom – Alanna McArdle
7. TV – Oh, Rose & Sawtooth
8. Death Cult Paradise – Trace Mountains
9. I Saw My Twin – Hop Along
10. Nashville Parthenon – Casiotone For The Painfully Alone
11. Dear Sons and Daughters of Hungry Ghosts – Wolf Parade
12. Oranges – Young Jesus
13. 1994 – PWR BTTM
14. Washing Machine – SPORTS
15. Lookalike / I Lost My Mind – Titus Andronicus

You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine is out now on HarperCollins. Quiet, Constant Friends is still available as a download or on cassette via the Wake The Deaf Bandcamp page. You can read the other Lit Links posts here. If you have a book in mind and fancy a go yourself, just get in touch!

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“No One Knows That You’re Lost is an album inspired by the Norwegian coast and a human interior, by tight itching doubts and wide open spaces. Here, fragility, strength and beauty become one and the same, parts of a landscape in constant flux yet remaining fundamentally unchanged”

Tina very kindly agreed to write a guest post for our ‘Lit Links‘ series (part of the Quiet, Constant Friends project), where artists and writers create a playlist of songs based around a book of their choice. Arm yourself with headphones and have a read below.

Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding
by Tina Refsnes

I’ve never felt comfortable with answering questions that ask for «the best» or «your all time favourite» as I just feel there’s too much good and different material in the world to hold them up against each other like that. So, I’ll say that one of my favourite books that I enjoyed immensely reading is one called The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach. It’s set in an American College and with baseball as the back-drop, and it’s one of those slow books with great meaning but without the drama. It deals with the big hopes that young people usually have to life, with self doubt in performance, and with the social difficulties or shyness that young people sometimes struggle with. But, in a very down to earth way since, at least the main character, is so un-academic. I also imagined this suburban North-American setting for it: Long, wide streets with tall leaf trees on both sides of it. Really big and old campus buildings, and maybe since the characters were so alone in their minds I kept picturing everything as with never that many people around.

Tracklisting:

1. Jenny Come Home- Andy Shauf
   2. Gather, Form and Fly – Megafaun
   3. Own Side – Caitlin Rose
   4. Casimir Pulaski Day – Sufjan Stevens
   5. Easy – Laura Marling
   6. Blue Train – Emmy Lou Harris, Linds Ronstadt and Dolly Parton
   7. Out of the Woodwork – Courtney Barnett
   8. Big Black Road – Thousands
   9. That Knot Unties? – David Karsten Daniels
   10. Mr. Rodriguez – Rayland Baxter
   11. We Are Fine – Sharon Van Etten
   12. Horizons – The Staves
   13. Archie, Marry Me – Alvvays
   14. Friends – 22-20s
   15. Poison Oak – Bright Eyes

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The band haven’t put out a full-length album since 2012’s Time is Past, but did have a song (and award-winning video) on the OIM Records compilation out this summer. Not ones to rest on their (film festival) laurels, the act recently reworked Joanna Newsom’s ‘The Book of Right On‘, composing a completely new arrangement that is clearly novel yet still imbued with the special something Newsom weaves into all of her work. The result is a haunted indie pop song, the vocals (which are far crisper than Newsom’s) circled by an array of plucked guitars, glockenspiel and distortion and stalked by a vast empty space illuminated by pedal effects and echoes. Have a listen to the track below and download it for free via Soundcloud:

Discovering the track coincided with us planning Lit Links: a new, semi-regular feature as part of our Quiet, Constant Friends project, one which will hopefully allow us to examine to relationship between music and literature from a different angle. The idea is to create a playlist of songs that are in some way relevant to a particular book, be they songs which are related to the plot or themes, exist within the same general mood, or just bring to mind certain passages for whatever reason.

Well, the link might be tenuous but we saw ‘book’ in the title and thought Foxtails Brigade might be the perfect people to kick us off. Luckily for us, Weinbach agreed, and has put together an excellent piece/playlist centred on Like A Velvet Glove Cast In Iron by Daniel Clowes.

Daniel Clowes and Like A Velvet Glove Cast In Iron Speak To Me
by Laura Weinbach

Despite mild disappointment and passively hoping for something better, there is a kind of entertainment factor to simply observing the innately crude, grotesque nature of the world. Daniel Clowes has a knack for magnifying that film of abhorrence clung to most people, places and things. When I picked up my first issue of Eightball as an early twenty-something year-old, I was hooked from the get go feeling like this was was something that sees the world the way I do and Like A Velvet Glove Cast In Iron immediately became the series within that I most anticipated.

What’s cool about Clowes, particularly with regard to Like A Velvet Glove, is that he captures an essence that feels uncensored and honest and without seeming to try too hard; there’s fluidity to the pages. As a result, the story reads like the transcription of a dream in a mood of impending desperation on the brink of total apathy. But unlike just hearing someone talk about some dream they had that isn’t real and doesn’t make sense to the listener, this isn’t boring because it feels like it’s the reader’s dream too.

Anyway, there’s no doubt that this book and much of Clowes’s other work, has had an integral impact on my developing psyche and pushed its influence one way or another through the stuff I make. Though it’s sometimes hard to really know or see what’s at the core of one’s own art, I sense a similar condition to Clowes’s (or at least his characters) inside much of what I do.

Tunes To Listen To While Thinking About Like A Velvet Glove Cast In Iron
(in no particular order):

1. Laura Palmer’s Theme – Angelo Badalamenti
2. Can We Kiss – Calvin Johnson
3. Took You Two Years To Win My Heart – Final Fantasy
4. Never Had No One Ever – The Smiths
5. Lightening Rods – Faun Fables
6. Shine On You Crazy Diamond – Pink Floyd
7. The Artifact and Living – Michael Andrews
8. Red Head Walkin – Beat Happening
9. In Boxes – Aurora Aksnes
10. I’m An Outlaw – Kurt Vile
11. Unloved – Foxtails Brigade
12. Barragan – Blonde Redhead
13. Seven Two – Blonde Redhead
14. Another One – Mac Demarco
15. The Perfect Timing – Nedelle Torrisi (from the 2013 Paradise In Piano Album)

To find out more about our Quiet, Constant Friends project you should head here. You can buy the Quiet, Constant Friends compilation now from the Wake The Deaf Bandcamp page: All tapes come with limited-edition postcard prints (which you can browse here) and all proceeds go to the global literacy charity Worldreader.

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We wrote about Aimee Lin’s Kissing Fractures late last year, describing how she writes “candidly about her fears and anxieties in simple but poetic verse” on Lost Self. We were therefore delighted when she agreed to be part of Quiet, Constant Friends, submitting a new song. ‘I Drank Phosphorus With My Aunt Lucy’ is a similarly short-but-oh-so-sweet track, disarmingly sincere and sad, sounding like a late autumn afternoon where the fading sun casts everything in a melancholic light. As Don DeLillo once wrote, “…the time of year, time of day, for small insistent sadness to pass into the texture of things.”

The artwork for this one is by Liam.

You can pre-order Quiet, Constant Friends now via the Wake The Deaf Bandcamp page. All tapes come with super-limited edition postcard prints, and all profits go to Worldreader. Treating yourself + helping somebody = win/win.

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So we’re unveiling the tracks one by one in a sort of music-streaming drumroll, and tonight we are delighted reveal a song by New Zealand’s Nadia Reid. ‘Runway’ closes out the compilation, a track as fitting as it is beautiful. Here, as with all of Nadia’s music, she speaks with the rich texture of experience beyond her years, her words defiant and fragile and human in the very best sense of the word.

“When I hit the ground in all my glory
I will know
where I have come from.

In the shadow of the doubt that meets the morning
I have come,
I have faced it”

If you like what you hear her record, Listen to Formation, Look for the Signs, is out on the 27th November on Sputnik and Scissortail Records, so be sure to get your pre-order in.

The artwork in response to ‘Runway’ is by the brilliant Heather Swenson, who uses an array of different techniques and styles for her strange, vibrant pieces. You can find all of her work on her website, follow her on Tumblr and keep an eye on her work with Mt. Home Arts. Christmas is coming, you know. Who wouldn’t like something to put on the wall?

Remember that you can/should order Quiet, Constant Friends on cassette via the Wake the Deaf Bandcamp page,* a limited release which comes with a few postcard prints of original artworks. Who knows, you might get Heather’s. Better still, every penny of the profits go straight to Worldreader, so you can spoil yourself and help others in one fell swoop.

*Digital downloads are available for those of you living in modern day society. And of course all tapes have downloads too.

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Until then, here’s our June Roundup, a playlist of songs rounding up everything we covered during June. Clever, huh? Click on the artist name in the tracklisting to be whisked away to the specific post.

Tracklisting:

1. Trisha Please Come Home – Advance Base
2. Slower Now – Star Horse
3. I Make Boys Cry – Adult Mom
4. Cordella – On The Water
5. Destroy – Henoheno
6. A Long Time Ago – Kalle Mattson
7. Only One Who Feels a Little Bit Bad – Fazed on a Pony
8. Ohio Snow Falls – Unraveler
9. Pylon Pile On – Benjamin Shaw
10. For Luck – Cyberbully Mom Club
11. The Offer – Yowler
12. When I Met Death – Right Away, Great Captain!
13. Patriarchaeth – Gwenno
14. Future Bones – Bells Atlas
15. Beautiful Brian – Harley Alexander and The Universal Lovers
16. Whip-Poor-Will – Morning River Band
17. I Admit I’m Scared – Eskimeaux
18. Ideal World – Girlpool
19. Observation Satellites – GRNDMS
20. Podesta – Peptalk
21. Cwm Llwm – Yucatan
22. Clouds – Estan
23. Lullaby – Long Neck
24. KiwiKisses – Trenton Point
25. My Only One – PONY
26. Return to View – The Wandering Lake
27. Clicking Clanking – Ylayali
28. Pull Me Apart – Lung Cycles
29. Red Coat – Adeline Hotel
30. Johnny Go Riding – Damien Jurado
31. When the Day is Fresh, and the Light is New – The Wooden Sky
32. The Crow – Sean Henry
33. Yolanda – O-FACE

The post June Roundup – A Mixtape appeared first on Various Small Flames.

There are two things to know about O-FACE: 1) their sound is complex and intricate, whirring like a well-oiled machine of cogs and gears which achieves so much more than its composite parts suggest, and 2) they are committed to taking seriously the fact that they don’t take themselves too seriously. Take opening track ‘740 Turbo’ as an example, a song about true love which centres upon the gloriously American image of a luxury station wagon:

“baby you can drive my car;
it’s a luxury station wagon.
you can go wherever you want;
it’s a luxury station wagon”

The track thunders into existence and doesn’t let up until the closing bars, mixing humorous lyrics with sincere delivery and sound to produce something which wins you over instantly. ‘Yolanda’ is begins with mathy guitar before evolving into a bouncy pop song, half-sentimental, half-carefree and wholly fun to listen to. Think the rollercoaster power pop of Fang Island blended with 90s emo rock. ‘O-FACE is Breaking Up’ hits the brakes but ramps up the volume for a pretty epic slow-burner which contains the line “Now I’m dressed up like Davy Crockett trying to grin down a bear”, which is good enough reason to buy the release in itself. Closer ‘Torres’ continues the grand scale, a post-hardcore instrumental which leaves the band’s immaculate arrangements fresh in the mind of the listener long after the final chord.

Mint is out now through Father/Daughter and Miscreant Records.

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Talking to Indie88.com Gardiner said:

“We were trying to do something that was a little bit more indicative of our live show. We’ve been talking within the band a lot about how difficult it is to capture, because it’s not just about what you’re playing, it’s about the energy that’s in the room, and the experience, and the visual cues, and the physical feeling of sound.”

There is a definite urgency in the tracks, at least compared to the previous Wooden Sky releases. Opener ‘Saturday Night’ is a slice breezy indie rock that goes at quite a clip, a positive beginning that raises a sense of excitement and anticipation (although dig a little deeper into the lyrics and things don’t seem quite so rosy). Songs like ‘When the Day is Fresh, and the Light is New’ continue this theme, the driving guitars celebratory in their energy, a tune to be played with the windows down while driving into a new town under a wide blue sky (which is a long-winded way of saying the title is apt).

Another favourite track of mine is ‘Our Hearts Were Young’, with it’s snappy, shuffling rhythm reminiscent of something Okkervil River would have put on The Stage Names. Okkervil River are actually a pretty good reference point for this album, with the meaningful (and often dark) lyrics concealed beneath a veneer of rock & roll. Gardiner even provides some Will Sheff-esque vocal explosions, such as his yelps of “Come on, come on!” on the aforementioned song.

For all of the rock songs, it’s not just in terms of tempo that they manage to capture energy on the record. Slower songs such as the title track have an intimate feel, with Gardiner’s vocals clear over the instrumentation and laced with passion and emotion, every change in volume and break of his voice adding to the sense of immediacy. This is what he alludes to in the above comment, the ’the energy that’s in the room… the physical feeling of sound.’ It’s not necessarily raw noise or thumping drums but rather the vibration of a note, the slight echo of a voice.

Gardiner’s writing and voice have always been central to The Wooden Sky’s sound and Let’s Be Ready feels like the consolidation of everything that has made them a success. His distinctive vocals have always seemed real, not pristine or manufactured but rather a product of a feeling he shares with the characters in his songs. And of course this is only effective with strong writing capable of weaving these tales, making the protagonists alive and nuanced enough for us to care. Luckily this is something which Gardiner excels at. For example on the title track:

“Oftentimes, I wonder
What she must think of me.
I’m riding on the wind;
On the shoulders of the kin,
Like some drunken, fucked up dream.

So lover, take these arms
And build me a boat.
You know, half the time,
I think I’d rather not know.
So, Sarah, baby, let’s be ready,
‘Cause when it all comes down,
You know it’s gonna be heavy.
Oh, what Memphis has that I don’t,
I may never know.”

Lets Be Ready is another confident and accomplished release from a band of whom we’ve come to expect such things.

The album has been available for the best part of a year from Chelsea Records, but it now has a worldwide release on Nevado Music.

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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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