Speaking of language, every track on the debut Or Sobre Blau album, The Piri Piri Samplers, is named after a Portuguese phrase with a strong Catholic theme. The album was recorded in a studio in Alto São João, Lisbon, which just so happened to be opposite a large graveyard. “They remind me of the bleakness in that cemetery,” Leonard tells The Line of Best Fit of the songs’ titles, “the weird perseverance of its dark, devout language over people that are dead and structures that are in ruin.”

That thought serves as a good introduction to the record. These instrumentals are more akin to something put out by Lost Tribe Sound than the usual Memorials of Distinction fare, abstract soundscapes that crawl with claustrophobic drones and wiry guitars that come skewering to the fore from amidst a sense of atmosphere and tension. It’s like the soundtrack to some Euro acid western, playing against a backdrop of stoic hawks wheeling above the baked Iberian earth.

There’s a depth to ‘Do Menino Deus’, a kind of stereoscopic experimental track that pairs landscape-wide ruminations with picked guitar that feels a lot closer, like unseen creatures scuttling in the nearby scrub. The whole album continues like this, Serra and Leonard using their guitars to probe and search, creating something that’s unique in the way it combines the tense and the explorative, the ominous and the beautiful.

There’s wonder too in how the tracks are constructed, seemingly clashing guitars coming together in waves of constructive interference, creating a swirling whole that feels a lot more than the sum of its parts. Guitar is used as an atmospheric foil (‘Da Madalena’), as small blipped flourishes (‘De Passeio Pelo Alto De São João’), and even as pseudo percussion (‘Da Nossa Senhora Da Conceição’). ‘Mártires’ brings all this together in the album’s uneasy masterpiece, guitar as both taut mosquito-whir and deep moaning calls, evoking the feeling of watching strange lights flitting between moon-lit tombs, perhaps remnants of the martyrs of the title.

The Piri Piri Samplers is an impressive album, and one guaranteed to sound unlike anything else you’ll hear this year. Serra and Leonard make an odd couple, but as Or Sobre Blau proves, that can make for great music. “What do you find in the middle of noise and harmony?” asks label Memorials of Distinction. “A very old question, really. We know that the answer is usually endearing and a little tragic, like a bad translation.”

You can get The Piri Piri Samplers on cassette tape or name-your-price download from the Memorials of Distinction Bandcamp page.

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Moro is back already with a new EP, Songs of Loss. Opening with the title track, the release makes clear its intentions from the off, the vocals lonely and probing but layered behind a gauzy curtain. The result is an honest and heartfelt, playing with a blend of modesty and desperation like midnight thoughts voiced in an empty room.

‘Lush Night’ reinforces this aesthetic, living up to its name with a muted warm that slowly grows into something more vivid, while ‘The Boy With Eight Mothers’ follows a similar pattern. The opening is suppressed and stifled, a song as heard through a wall, though the disparate energy coalesces into a keen rhythm by the close.

Closer ‘Hark, the Angel’s Quiet Eyes’ is bedroom pop at its best, gentle and sad and pervasive beyond its modest sound, the emotion leaking into every gap and crack. Again, the primary feeling is that of sincerity—all pretence dropped and every persona left behind in an attempt to communicate as truthfully as one can.

Songs of Loss is out now via the Fields of Heaven Bandcamp page, where you can also find Forgiveness Songs.

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Chinatown, San Francisco is built from an array of beats, ambient textures and lo-fi pop jams, a sound that is avant garde but not ostentatious. This is all the more impressive as Burton does not use samples, with each element 100% original and crafted especially for its place on the record. The result is vivid and varied, a kind of neon-dripped nocturnal pop that draws on R&B and improvisational jazz, as well as the ominous air of the hauntological Ghost Box sound.

‘You’re All Strangers To Me’ opens in typical disorientating fashion, immediately setting out a hostile, boisterous environment in a style somewhere between Burial and Death Grips. However, follow-up ‘Turf War In Chinatown, SF’ tones down the aggression in favour of something more subtle and pervasive, revealing both the talent of Burton and the triumph of his record. For all of its noise and strangeness, Myshiuno’s music feels organic, lived in, the collision of styles bringing to life the late capitalist milieu of sadness and violence and constant movement.

So rather than just an aggressive in-your-face narrative about gangs and loyalties, Myshiuno instead captures an entire world. The identity and meaning drawn from such a situation, the loneliness too. The addiction and suffering that underpins the whole scenario, a storm brewed by decades of power imbalances and political apathy, not to mention the cultural encouragement to earn and own.

Whether it be the swagger of ‘Scrambled Eggs’, with its eddies of frantic tempo playing like a running street brawl, or the intangible and fleeting light of ‘Epiphany’, Myshiuno has crafted a collection snapshots of young life within, or under, such a system. And young the tone is, with recognisable blend of humour and melodrama, bravado and playful irony one minute (‘lmao’, ‘I Showed Them My Knife :^D’) and deadly seriousness the next (‘I Hold My Dead Best Friend In My Arms’). This is the product of such a style, where attempt at grand explanations is forgone in favour of on the ground, first-person experiences—life as it unfolds for young people, meaning everything and nothing at once.

Chinatown, San Francisco is out now and you can get it from the Myshiuno Bandcamp page.

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Still, that’s not to say the record is one long dreary dirge of heartbreak. Indeed, one of its key motifs is that of juxtaposition. Clear guitars soundtrack muddied emotions as love and loss stab one another in the back, freedom and pain flashing in a constant cycle. How much value can be drawn from such an existence is up to interpretation. “Brambles are an interesting growth,” the press release describes. “They can bear flowers and fruit, but many consider them weeds due to their growth in neglected areas and sharp thorns. Whether brambles are worth eradicating or cultivating is all up to perspective.”

The continuation of a series of songs across all previous Morning River Band albums, opener ‘Drinking Blues Reprise (3,700 Brokenhearted Days)’ sounds exactly as you’d imagine, all hungover lonely cowboy blues. The wry pessimism lifts somewhat on ‘Monmouth County Blues,’ or at least shifts slightly into a different shape. The song more reflective, its narrator in a constant search, knocking on doors and interrogating the half moon in the heavens.

There’s another dose of red-eyed whiskey blues on ‘Drinking Blues, No. 3 (Bend, Fall, Break)’, while ‘Sun Alone’ finds our narrator contemplating a sunrise by himself, reflecting on wronged lovers and a lingering sense of guilt. It’s a song wrapped up in both regret and defiance, the familiar Morning River Band theme of men fated to make bad decisions and abandon those that try to love them. “I ain’t ever coming home,” goes the devastatingly simple final line, summing up the spirit of the track in a handful of words.

The first upbeat country song on the album, ‘Bury Me’ is infectious, full of bluesy guitar and carefree defiance. It begins like a story we’ve all heard before, as Field sings “The good Lord said to Noah, ‘son build yourself a boat, take two of each of everything out there that doesn’t float.’” But this Noah doesn’t want to listen, and vows to live (and die) on his own terms.

“But Noah turned away,
he said I don’t work for you.
I toil and sweat I do the things you refuse to do

so send the wind and send the rain,
I’ll die right where I stand,
bury me with my regrets”

Continuing the theme of juxtaposition, ‘(All of My Best Friends Are) Dead & Gone Blues’ bemoans the diurnal cycle, pining for the moon all day and the sun all night. Even the mourning suggested by the title is bittersweet, the loss altered by the knowledge that he too won’t be far behind them. After the playful interlude of ‘Space Boy Rag,’ ‘Ezekiel’s Wheel / Gloucester Skyline’ emerges, two songs in one separated by a void of guitar effects. However, the second half rises from quiet acoustic guitar into a rousing ballad, as though in defiance of the gaping space from which it crawled.

The album then ends on ‘The Last Red Bank Blues’, a track which serves as both the denouement and genesis story of Brambles. Here the broken-hearted narrator parks atop of a mountain and eases his foot from the brake, the only note he leaves behind that of a lyrical tune (the song, the album). This is a man finding betrayal and divorce hollowed out into their blackest nadir, and escaping through a headlong rush toward a hard ground.

Brambles is out now via Under The Counter Tapes and you can get it from Bandcamp.

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Such lofty aims require idiosyncratic approach, and Mentalease have crafted a singular style that weaves electronic, dream pop, shoegaze and ambient into a patchwork genre for the digital world. Opening track ‘Push a Button’ serves as a perfect example, the bedroom pop sincerity buried beneath electronic layers, a human soul looking for cracks in its robotic surroundings.

The slow-burn ‘Selfie’ is a brooding march of a song, though the assured sound belies the confused lyrical position (“Staring / Into a reflection / Maybe it’s just fiction / Baby what’s the difference?”), while confident rock of ‘Lost Opportunities” is lighter on its feet. However, the track’s sense of motion is interrupted by digital squeals and distortion, as though the track is actually a representation of a song, a hologram caught out by the errors in its matrix.

Closer ‘Avert a Gaze’ continues such themes, casting a world of ghosts and echoes, the truth buried beneath a million reflections. Mentalease offer no way out beyond the reminder that some kernel of reality exists within the sea of simulacra, and though their tone veers from cynical to hysterical to suddenly sad, the range of emotions serves as a reminder of that very fact.

Push a Button is out now and you can get it from Bandcamp.

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Opener ‘magnet’ begins with a hesitant wistfulness, unfurling gently and slowly to a warm ambient hum. The mood is crepuscular, late evening or early morning, the air shot pink and dusky and moved by sedate breeze. ‘crying in the carwash’ is altogether darker, though no less colourful, a dream walk through a neon-city, where a persistent sense of sadness follows at arm length. With it’s empathetic take on melancholy, the track conjures Broken Social Scene’s  ‘Anthem for a Seventeen Year-Old’, the sense of loss almost it’s own comfort, a blanket within which to warm before the future rewards you with something better.

‘anthem for healing’ takes a more expansive approach, a song of self-empowerment that rises into great, soaring spikes of sound. “You will not silence me,” Loefke repeats, the synths increasing in pitch as her vocals disintegrate into wordless yelps and guitars cut across the noise. ‘we have a dream’ picks up with a more restrained tone, a hushed strangeness cloaking the track before the final third reaches something warmer, before the lush swathes of synths that herald closer ‘beginning’. Loefke’s vocals emerge within pockets of space that mark the almost sci-fi futurism off this noise, before both aspects unite for the transcendental finale.

heart demos is out now and you can get it from the Pendulum Girl Bandcamp page.

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Following Sam Pink’s lead, the record is brutal and dark, the instrumentation allowing the violent alienation and dissatisfaction of his words to soar. ‘False-Bottomed Coffins’ opens with an introduction to the album’s themes, with self-consciousness disguised as misanthropy, caring too deeply masked as blank indifference, and the constant pressure of these repressed emotions pressing on the crown of the skull, like a volcano about to blow. ‘I Own You and You Own Me’ continues this, opening with a pretty clear sentiment—”Two types of eye contact: none and fuck you”—navigating a depressive state that feels like “all there is inside your skull is melted plastic.”  Again, the narrator is tangled within their own thoughts, their attempts at freeing themselves only furthering the bind, a predicament communicated with a Wallacean, inside-my-head tone.

“Living as three people: one inside your head saying hateful/depressed/hopeless shit, another as the one inside your head trying to deal with the first one, and the third one as visible to the outside world, trying to keep people from noticing any trace of the first two.

That moment when you start to have a little feeling/emotion and you look back on having just acted out of not having any feelings/emotions.”

‘Bonus Magnets for my Brain’ meanders in a way that could be relaxed or ominous or both, the instrumentation threatening to bubble over but never quite managing the energy required. Hyper-self-consciousness, banal everyday observations and macabre imagery coalesce into something at once relatable and unhinged, where lines like “The feeling that everything is obvious in a way that’s embarrassing” are followed by “Making friends with the firing squad.” ‘One Night, Your Pillow Will Swallow Your Head’ and ‘Making Friends With the Firing Squad’ furthers this feeling, growing increasingly morbid and strange as horror, paranoia and deep-seated anger make violent ends inevitable—either the narrator will be destroyed or else the entire world around them. All the while, a slow creeping dread advances, looming.

“Talking to the lone lobster left in the tank at the supermarket to calm down and feel connected.
Talking shit to the firing squad.
Smiling wide as you allow your latest ghost to slowly come out of you in front of others, unseen.
Smiling wide as you allow someone else’s latest ghost to go into you as if you earned it.
And you have.
You have you have you have!”

Both this nameless dread and the hope of escaping it fuel the entire collection, and these forces manifest themselves as monsters on ‘No Way to Defeat It but Jump In / No Way to Help It but Let It Die.’ The dread is “A monster with a head made of a hundred toothless mouths (No way to defeat it but jump in),” and the hope “A monster with a head full of knives that never dies, just stumbles around shrieking (And no way to help it but let it die).” Within this tale of suffering, a relationship is painted, though one so fiercely held that it becomes its own form of torment, the narrator’s performing a verbal self-flagellation as penance for their perceived inadequacy, lashing themselves into nothingness in lieu of any better ideas. After all there’s no way to help it but let it die.

Check out the striking video from Wild Child Studios below:

Your Glass Head Against the Brick Parade of Now Whats plays like the fever dream manifesto of the archetypal Disillusioned Kid, someone who, instead of shooting up his school or oxycontin, decided to let the tirade out as language. Stinging and self-loathing and strange, the narrator is sick and tired of a phony world and phony people yet dying of cold within this self-imposed exile. The record then, feels like one final, fatal gesture—self-immolation just to feel that half-second of warmth before the pain sets in, just to see your own blazing reflection in eyes of the faces around you.

Your Glass Head Against the Brick Parade of Now Whats is out now and you can get it from the Be Softly Bandcamp page. Find out more about Sam Pink on the Lazy Fascist Press website.

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“Music large and loud and lively, the kind of great so-serious-its-not (or maybe so non-serious-its-serious) energy that should be filmed for a live concert VHS-special”

Not content to stop there, the intervening months have seen Pace looking for ways to further flesh out his sound. The answer to moving forward it seemed, involving digging through the past, gathering the multitude of loose ends that constitute his favourite hits and weaving them into one long and complicated rope. As Pace describes: “For this latest batch of tunes, I figured since I’m probably never performing live again, why not indulge my myriad musical tastes by jumping headfirst into hard-to-replicate mini-epics?”

Get Soft is the resulting EP, a release of four songs which “travel from sleek mid 80’s inspired ‘sophisti-pop’ to smooth jazz fusion to mid-tempo psych groove-fests to melancholy synthesized mediations and back.” If this sounds quite the journey then that’s because it is, packing the sort of energy unique to pre-millennium TV, where everything is loud and bright and bursting with positivity.

Opener ‘Audits & Surveys’ is the perfect example, kicking things off like some glorious new dawn of old feelings. With lead vocals by Alana Amram, the track plays like an early 90s corporate lifestyle, maintaining a flashy optimism that seems both genuine and not, as though beneath this world of surfaces lies a fear or dissatisfaction that triggers not some deep existential demise but rather a deeper love of the shiny top layer. So while the lyrics are packed with self-deprecation and regret, the music itself never slips from its jubilant tone, and, because Pace never leans more to one direction, the track feels like neither a sugary nostalgia-trip nor some ironic attack. Instead, and this could be said of the entire Child Actors output to date, it’s more a symbiosis between the two, a celebration that’s as interested in the fun banal stuff as it is with the more human centre.

“I cut corners like a real close shave
Business casual is my middle name
I may look like a fool but I’m really a knave
four out of five would agree”

The title track plays like the theme to the best sunny cop farce never written, Adam Swierczynski and Ian Evans setting the tempo with bass and drums before the delightfully big guitar finale. ‘Caravan the Coast’ sees Lira Yin offer dreamy backing vocals, the track a glad-to-be-alive ode to cross country travelling, and a pop number for optimists more generally. There’s more than a hint of melodrama behind the buoyancy (the enthusiasm for utopian escape must suggest there’s something to run away from, after all), though again Pace refuses to let the elated tone slip, the track building into a frenetic crescendo which serves as a figurative ride into the sunset, even if a literal one is some way off.

“Soon enough we’ll be somewhere warm just beyond the chill
Caught outside in a summer storm
Like you hope we would

Long time leaving – tougher than most
But I’d love to have you join me
Join me as we caravan the coast”

The electronic instrumental ‘Eleuthera’ closes the release with a slice of digital tropicana, perhaps the clearest sign of melancholy on the record. However, with its swelling synths providing a near-spiritual promise of sustenance, it’s unclear whether it’s that late-evening vacation sort of emotion that’s somehow linked to transcendence, or a deeper sadness triggered by the confrontation of yet another image. Maybe the seascape here is being beamed from the fogged-up window of a travel agency’s concrete office, the warmth on your face merely the promise of sun, or just radiation from the screen’s cathode glow.

Get Soft is out now and you can get it on a ‘name your price’ basis via the Mike Pace Bandcamp page.

Cover photography by Greg Andreacchi

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In a recent interview with Trevor Elkin over at Gold Flake Paint, Smith revealed his recent issues with depression, and Heart Land marks a shift towards a more honest, transparent brand of songwriting. Despite being made in what Smith describes as “pretty much the lowest time in my life,” the EP is lighter than many previous releases, with opener ‘Never Doubt Us’ the perfect introduction, an instrumental of shifting, shimmering guitar.

‘Shake off the Present’ sees Good Good Blood doing what he does best, taking what’s essentially a folk song and running it through a twenty-first century filter – guitar and floaty atmospherics and crunchy percussion. The lyrics, which deal pretty explicitly with Smith’s recent mental health struggles, bring to mind the style of Strand of Oaks’ Timothy Showalter, self-deprecating in a heart-on-the-sleeve way and propelled by urgent momentum, as though drawing a certain joyous energy from the catharsis of exposing inner thoughts and feelings:

“I been riding around on the subway
feet are turning round and round
feeling like I let my whole family down
but I just cannot seem to shake of the present
worrying about the pas
knowing that my futile future ain’t gonna last”

The title track sways with gentle percussion and buzzing keys, Smith’s vocals a soft croon, before the surprisingly bright ‘I’m So Ugly’, the guitar here like sunlight prismed through water droplets on the morning after a storm. Gathering momentum just beyond the minute mark, the song becomes what can only be described as a mournfully upbeat dream pop jam that defies its own lyrics (“I’m so ugly / you dare not hold me / I know, I know”).

‘Spiralling’ is another track that sounds deceptively buoyant, and a look at the lyrics raises the question as to whether the music is conquering the sadness or merely working to mask it (“here I go / spiralling / out of control / when did this begin? “). There’s also an audio sample of everyone’s favourite misanthrope, Bukowski, who we’ll quote at length because he gets at the kind of awful stasis of contemporary living, where freedom has been contorted into bars of its own and the struggle for identity and meaning is swamped by the well-worn script of adult responsibilities and should-dos:

“Generally speaking, you’re free until you’re about four years old. And then five arrives, then you go to grammar school and then you start becoming demented and solved and orientated and shoved into areas. You lose what individualism you have. If you have enough, of course, you retain some of it. But most don’t have enough so you become watchers of game shows, you know, and things like that.”

The release finishes on a second instrumental track which, despite its wordless nature, somehow rings as true as any of the others. An all-pervading drone rings bright and clear behind picked guitar and barely-there snatches of real life, the clatter of kitchen utensils, the cries of children, but mostly tape hiss and rustling movement. It’s delicate and pretty at first but soon becomes claustrophobic, a tinnitus-ridden paralysis that something like a view of the inside of your own head, life rolling by oblivious, as is its way.

You can get Heart Land now from the Fox Food Records Bandcamp page. All proceeds go to The Samaritans, so give a couple of pounds and everyone’s a winner.

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The new year has seen a new track from the Nashville act. Appropriately titled ‘2017’, the song is probably best described as organic folk, following the above description in its use of various tones and textures which bring the acoustic strum into relief. Couple this with Kintzing’s gentle vocals and evocative writing and you have a song that’s quietly devastating, music that’s captured perfectly in the accompanying video, late-night solitude made strange by stark, staccato forces emerging from the sky or within the skull.

“Maybe I’ll leave my house
in 2017
‘The year of the Lord’
I’ll grow wings and fly into the sun
Is that God or just my own thoughts?”

You can get ‘2017’ now on a ‘name your price’ basis from the German Error Message Bandcamp page.

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