Evening Hymns – Quiet Energies
(REVIEW | INTERVIEW)

“The album takes the suffocating, nebulous shadow of grieving and distils it into something small and hard and strangely tactile, a mysterious object that will always be there in your pocket, radiating its secret and peculiar brand of comfort. This isn’t about forgetting death, or even really ‘moving on’, instead its about coming to a deeper understanding of one’s life, about how a person can be so shaped by another, and how such an impact can and should be a source of immense pride and joy, no matter how hard some days can be. In other words, Quiet Energies is about understanding how it is in fact life, not death, which shapes us and our view of the world.”

Kathryn Joseph – Bones You Have Thrown Me and Blood I’ve Spilled
(REVIEW)

“This is a simple album about things so complicated that it’s almost impossible to put them into words. It’s about those thoughts and feelings that we all experience but never admit, the things that we, be it through etiquette and embarrassment and fear, dare not confess to others or even ourselves. Bones You Have Thrown Me and Blood I’ve Spilled is an album about people: lonely and loved, corporeal and divine, mortal and terrified yet enduring with a resilient hope that never quite goes out.”

Young Jesus – Grow / Decompose
(REVIEW | INTERVIEW)

“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.”

Danielle Fricke – Moon
(REVIEW)

“Moon is a lesson in stillness, a moment stretched out, questions asked but not answered, a monologue that might never leave the room. The wonder of the album is that the human emotions of love and longing never evaporate, continuing to push through the frost where they are warmed by earthshine, opening up the possibility that the very feelings which caused the pain could be the things which end it. So while the narrator is trapped, they never submit to the vacuous silence of space. Hopes are still hoped and dreams are still dreamed and wishes are cast from cold, cupped hands, skywards.”

Yowler – The Offer
(REVIEW)

“Burns with quiet intensity, its strange lyrics feeling oddly personal, giving the album the intimacy of hearing about someone else’s dreams. Guitars sidle and prowl like shadows and the whole thing seems on the verge of something vaguely dangerous. All eight tracks are a study in the art of minimalism, of the exchange between poetry and negative space. It’s certainly a lot more than just quiet and pretty folk music”

Advance Base – Nephew in the Wild
(REVIEW)

“I don’t know Owen Ashworth, and maybe I’m completely wrong, but he seems like a kind and empathetic generally nice human being, in the same way the best writers seem like people you could be friends with. Even if none of that is true, I guess it doesn’t matter – what is indisputable is the fact that he’s a damn good writer who tells stories that speak to and help us all. While it’s easy to cast him as the lonely boy in front of a keyboard, the truth, at least in my eyes, is that he’s often hardly there at all, a transparent gateway into the lives of people you’ve never met, feeling things you thought you had to suffer through alone.”

Siskiyou – Nervous
(REVIEW)

“Nervous is an album of dizzying scope and ambition, quite literally the tumult of sound and emotion inside one man’s head. It is by turns dark and creepy, shimmering and vibrant. Siskiyou have never sounded so eerie, so threatening, or so expansive. And I have to admit, I don’t think they have ever sounded so good.”

Samantha Crain – Under Branch & Thorn & Tree
(REVIEW | INTERVIEW)

“These are songs played like inner thoughts or secret diary entries of persons not usually able to or justified in expressing their true sentiments, people who are not as tough as they let on, but tougher than they think in the middle of the night. A selection of underdogs living the lives they have been given, not pining for more or complaining at a cosmic injustice. Quiet, noble people in the trenches of everyday life, those with the broadest shoulders and smallest voices and a hard, buried sense of pride who treat hardship like a member of the family.”

Lejsovka & Freund – Fatal Strategies
(REVIEW)

“Fatal Strategies inspires a multitude of strange, lateral thoughts – a soundtrack that doesn’t need a film. The musical translation of the postmodern ruminations of an over-active, twenty-first century brain. Music unearthed by a post-society people, who’ll turn it up loud and sit in their ruined cities, reclaimed by branches and vines, and wonder and wonder about us.”

Frog – Kind of Blah
(REVIEW | INTERVIEW)

“Kind of Blah is a product of this place, an album imbued with the spirits of a sparkling past… Judy Garland is America. Lusty teenagers are America. Jesus Christ is America. So is Dr Pibb and dusty valleys and shut-down bowling alleys and all the communal memories shared by millions just like you. Kind of Blah is America, the U S of A in eleven songs – quirky, joyous, breathless, exhausting, addictive, heartbreaking and downright weird, accelerating towards a distant horizon while keeping its eyes firmly on a halcyon past that sure seems like it should have been more fun.”

Oh, Rose – SEVEN
(REVIEW | REVIEW OF ‘SEVEN’, THE VIDEO)

“Olivia Rose’s voice carries the tracks beyond the genre norms into peculiar territories. Raw and versatile, her vocals range from whelps and wails to quiet, haunted whispers. On their début full length SEVEN, a record on which, if anything, Rose pushes things even further. Lean and wiry guitars lead proceedings while a lo-fi buzz envelopes everything, Rose’s words cutting through like shards of glass. The vocals have the quality of an exorcism, like the unnatural utterings of a twelve year old as some jaded man of faith flicks holy water at her forehead.”

Valley Maker – When I Was a Child
(REVIEW | INTERVIEW)

“When I Was a Child is an album about belief and love in a variety of guises, about the big and unknowable questions, from love and growth and family to God and everlasting life. It’s an album about all of us, basically.”

Eskimeaux – O.K.
(REVIEW)

“O.K. is about reality, the moment we live in and the people we share it with. It’s about the things we want and the things we wish for and the things we can’t control. It’s about doing the best you can and hoping it’s enough, about accepting and learning and growing so that whatever hand you’re dealt, you carve out some semblance of meaning and happiness to make everything worthwhile”

Aero Flynn – S/T
(REVIEW)

“This is not an album in which the emotional arc is self-contained and easily mappable… 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.”

Hip Hatchet – Hold You Like a Harness
(REVIEW)

“[Speaks] of that vulnerable core at the heart of every man, and the desperate, ridiculous attempts to suffocate it with cigarette smoke or drown it in whiskey or cover it over with scars. Hold You Like a Harness is an album about tough guys who know deep down that they aren’t so tough. Yeah they fight and drink and make merry, but they’re also sentimental and lovesick and terrified of everything.”

Mike Pace & the Child Actors – Best Boy
(REVIEW)

“Best Boy is for the children of the 80s and 90s, reminiscing about the age where entertainment exploded, where VHS tapes and cable TV transformed us into constant consumers. Of course, as consumers we were sold promises, told we merely needed x, y and z to be happy and successful and pretty and popular. It’s kind of ironic that a time built on visions of the future is now seen as a utopia locked in the past. Pace gets at this feeling by writing feel-good songs tinged with longing, nothing too sad or serious, nor a Father John Misty-style ironic assault. Instead, Best Boy is a wistful celebration of what we had and presents some convincing reasons for why we feel the way we do.”

Fanpage – LYA
(REVIEW)

“Fanpage’s music occupies a space between life and imitation, too mechanical to be described as organic yet too intuitive and mysterious for machines. It wanders a strange distance ahead of the human race, amongst a chaos born of our need for order. Love and delirium and bright white fear roil beneath the feedback, humanity kicking and twisting within a noise filled with myth and magic and dread. Terrifying and beautiful and glorious, LYA is an album for the information age, where data has exploded to incomprehensible volumes and become its own wilderness.”

Titus Andronicus – The Most Lamentable Tragedy
(REVIEW)

“Life (and especially mental illness) isn’t a neat Freytagian pyramid, so why should a representation of it conform to expectations? […] You are left with the impression that the band have said “fuck it, we’re doing it our way”, rejecting a clear genre in favour of whatever felt right at any given time. This kind of zealous self-belief in their own work is interesting, as it’s at odds with Our Hero’s struggles to accept himself as Himself, and sees Titus Andronicus cutting swathes through the field of wannabes, imposters and pretenders and stepping up to the plate as the twenty-first century’s bona fide punk rock band.”

Elvis Depressedly – New Alhambra
(REVIEW)

“This is not a born-again Love-The-World-Because-Life-Is-Great sort of album. Elvis Depressedly will not mend broken bones or cast out demons or have you walking across hot coals. Instead they say that afflictions are not all there is, that you are not defined solely by your circumstances. They say that peace and hope are never out of reach and offer an achievable version of optimism, one which does not require manic enthusiasm or God-like goodwill but instead a pinch of determination and a firm belief in love.”

Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats – S/T
(REVIEW)

“Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats could be your favourite anti-heroes of the sixties, the forgotten friend of Otis Redding and Sam & Dave, or maybe from even further back, a band of villains rolling into nameless pre-war towns to cause shitstorms in cowboy brawl-bars and put smiles faces for one night only. That there is a serious side is less a surprise than a foregone conclusion, because no man has conjured this kind of bone-level fervour out of a pleasant existence. No, here are people staring down the barrel, people stranded in a sea of beer, locked inside some breakneck motion in which a grin and a grimace are practically indistinguishable. Whether this is a defiant two fingers or last hurrah seems unclear even to Rateliff, himself too caught up in a compulsion to dance and scream and shout. Whatever you take from this record, one thing is clear: They can’t put you in the ground if you’re still moving.”

What were your favourite albums of the year? Let us know through one of the usual channels – we’re on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and Instagram.

The post Wake The Deaf’s Favourite Albums of 2015 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Tracklisting:

1. Red Coat – Adeline Hotel (Interview)
   2. S.O.B. – Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats
   3. Daughter of the Sea – House of Wolves (Interview)
   4. Monarchy – Table People
   5. Ruin – Doomking
   6. Lonely Boy – Titus Andronicus
   7. New York Hardcore – talons’
   8. Roar of Nothingness – Sun Organ
   9. Slow Dark Water – Furnsss
   10. You Are Arrived (But You’ve Been Cheated) – The Spirit of the Beehive
   11. It Was Gone – Orchid Mantis
   12. Big Sis – SALES
   13. No Comprende – Low
   14. The Washing Machine – SPORTS
   15. Shark? – Shark? (Everything Is Teeth by Evie Wyld and Joe Sumner)
   16. Christmas in Milwaukee – Advance Base
   17. Only Friend – Valley Maker
   18. My Track ’92 – Pet Cemetery
   19. Dusk; Falling Asleep, Know That You Are Loved – Sabbatical Wilderness
   20. Theremin Demonstration – Leon Theremin (Us Conductors by Sean Michaels)
   21. The Lemon’s Cousin – Boy Scouts
   22. Audrey Horne – Teen Love
   23. Mia – Spencer Radcliffe
   24. Return To The Moon – EL VY
   25. Bug – Alex G
   26. Wild Hearts – Kodiak Deathbeds
   27. Waves – Abby Gundersen
   28. UR = UO – No Touching
   29. Sparrow & Stone – Eva Foote
   30. What Can Be Taken – ÒOR

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

You have probably heard that Rateliff is back, not least because of his rather explosive performance of Jimmy Fallon’s Tonight Show, and this time he has company. It’s fair to say that Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats are not finger-picking folkers, but the raw energy of his solo work remains, as highlighted by album opener ‘I Need Never Get Old’. A good indicator of the shambling, soulful rock that The Night Sweats have brought to the table, the track is still recognisably Rateliff but with a showy, jubilant flourish. The track also serves as an introduction to the main theme of the record, a marriage of celebration and introspection, needles of regret poking through the haze of adrenaline and alcohol.

“I know that some will say it matters but little babe
Come on and mean it to me I need it so bad
Mean it to me I need it so bad.

I needed to try
Needed to fall
I needed your love I’m burning away
I need never get old”

‘Howling At Nothing’ sees the dial swing further toward soul, an impassioned, swaying tune for good times amongst bad days, where sincere, starlit promises spark into brilliant existence before fading with the dawn. As with much of the record the sense of embracing the moment is palpable, as if everyone involved understands that despite what might happen later, while sober and tired and desperate, every word he sings is heartfelt and genuine:

“Some were playing in a round
Some were dipping so low
It never seemed to matter as the night slipped away
Cause there was soul in the air”

That’s not to say, however, a party can drown out all of the darker thoughts. ‘Trying So Hard Not To Know’ speaks of the struggle to sell the idea of goodtimes-as-an-answer, Rateliff labouring to convince himself let alone anyone else (“You never stand up long enough to pull it together/ Well who gives a damn and very few can / When they’re trying so hard not to know”). ‘I’ve Been Failing’, with it’s finger-clicking and tinkling piano, sounds like the midnight confessions of a liquor-loosened tongue. “I’ve been failing you”, wails Rateliff, “but I can’t stop trying”, and you get the impression the trying and failing will continue for a good while yet.

With its blend of self-deprecation, defiance and cathartic yelling, ‘S.O.B’ is central to the album, the creed to the Night Sweats faith. Rising out of handclaps and wordless hums, the song finds Rateliff possessed with zeal, a pacing preacher electrified by the communal energy of his congregation:

“I’m gonna need someone to help me
I’m gonna need somebody’s hand
I’m gonna need someone to hold me down
I’m gonna need someone to care
I’m gonna writhe and shake my body
I’ll start pulling out my hair
I’m going to cover myself with the ashes of you and nobody’s gonna give a damn”

It’s as if his life depends on getting these words out, be it as a warning for others, a last plea for help or just a clearing of his head and mouth before the next big drink. Here Rateliff is caught between the very human (male?) solipsism, the star-of-a-movie-called-Me attitude of grand statements and gestures and (imaginary?) heroines waiting for rescue, and the depressive notion that the buck stops with him, that no-one else cares all that much, probably because they are all too busy in a spotlight of their own imagining. What’s more, Rateliff seems to understand his position without fully submitting to either side. Instead, he whips himself into a frenzy, rebuking himself while all the while hoping for an epiphany. Every so often he is tipped over the threshold, though whether into ecstasy or anguish it’s never quite clear.

“Son of a bitch
Give me a drink
Won’t more night
This can’t be me
Son of a bitch
If I can’t get clean
I’m gonna drink my life away”

A return to the regret-filled confessional style, ‘Wasting Time’ finds Rateliff musing on all the hours he has wasted “falling down” and “hiding under”, as well as the time lost “in constant reflection”. ‘Thank You’ is an apology to his loved one for this outlook (“Spend your years / Spend your time / With all these tears”), while ‘Look it Here’ is an attempted explanation, a cathartic admission of guilt which builds into frustrated yelling of simple truths: “I got a love so hard I can’t stand it / And with a heart so weak and abandoned”.

If this seems like the turning point before a Happy-Ever-After then don’t be fooled. ‘Shake’ is hot and humid, snaking like a low mist, the fever-dreams of a man pinning hope of reprieve on some erotic encounter, while ‘I’ll Be Waiting’ is based in reality, Rateliff alone and weary and still gripped by the need for love (“I’m tired and worn / But I’m still standing / I’ll be waiting ah baby just to dance with you”). Closing track ‘Mellow Out’ finds him pocketing advice you feel he could never follow, and, be it his honesty or bravado or both, you can’t help but not hold it against him.

“Someone came in rushing dragging feet and nails and I could pretend
Wanting more of nothing, feel it wearing on me
Just keep it hid

Mellow out, and find a better way you’re feeling it shut down
Take it easy baby, maybe find some time to just calm down
Keep on telling me”

Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats could be your favourite anti-heroes of the sixties, the forgotten friend of Otis Redding and Sam & Dave, or maybe from even further back, a band of villains rolling into nameless pre-war towns to cause shitstorms in cowboy brawl-bars and put smiles faces for one night only. That there is a serious side is less a surprise than a foregone conclusion, because no man has conjured this kind of bone-level fervour out of a pleasant existence. No, here are people staring down the barrel, people stranded in a sea of beer, locked inside some breakneck motion in which a grin and a grimace are practically indistinguishable. Whether this is a defiant two fingers or last hurrah seems unclear even to Rateliff, himself too caught up in a compulsion to dance and scream and shout. Whatever you take from this record, one thing is clear: They can’t put you in the ground if you’re still moving. 

Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats is out on the 21st of August via Stax / Caroline, and you can buy it here.

The post Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats – S/T appeared first on Various Small Flames.

“mid-barroom, drunk-but-honest proclamations when compared to [his solo work]… challenging whatever fear or sadness or regret is lurking in the dark corners of the world with a clear-eyed, defiant joy”

I’m not 100% sure of the exact details but it seems Howling At Nothing only got a European (UK?) release, and Rateliff has gone ahead and put a whole self-titled album together instead. Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats doesn’t drop until next week but they have released a few videos to rope you in. Watch below, and witness the miracle of live-show energy being caught on record.

The album will be released on the 21st August via Stax / Caroline. Stay tuned for a full review.
P.S. The band will be heading out on tour this autumn:
September 30th – Bristol – The Fleece
October 1st – Glasgow – Stereo
October 2nd – Leeds – Belgrave Music Hall
October 16th – Brighton – Patterns
October 19th – London – Village Underground
October 20th – Manchester – The Ruby Lounge
October 21st – Dublin – The Workman’s Club

Photograph by Malia James

The post New videos from Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Well good news! We have something more concrete. Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats have announced their début EP, Howling At Nothing, will be released on the 29th June on Stax/Caroline International. Until then, you will have to make do with the first single, ‘I Need Never Get Old’, below:

The new material continues with the jaunty, boisterous vibes that set apart Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats from his solo work, sounding like mid-barroom, drunk-but-honest proclamations when compared to the restrained (albeit passionate) confessions of In Memory of Loss and Falling Faster Than You Can Run. Significantly though, Rateliff does not throw away serious considerations with this upbeat project but instead faces them head on, challenging whatever fear or sadness or regret is lurking in the dark corners of the world with a clear-eyed, defiant joy.

Hopefully this is just a taster for a full record at some point in the no-too-distant future. We’ll let you know of any details on pre-ordering the EP as and when we get them.

The post Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats Announce EP appeared first on Various Small Flames.