But anyway, You Cant Go Back If There Is Nothing To Go Back To is the band’s eleventh record (at least by my count). They recently put out a trailer for the release, which hints at some rather atmospheric Americana, as well as the lead track ‘Wake Up Ray’. Have a look/listen below:

You Cant Go Back If There Is Nothing To Go Back To is set for release on the 4th March 2016 via Décor Records​. The Free came out last year on Faber & Faber and is available from all good book shops.

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Tracklisting:

1. Townie – Mitski
2. Prosthetic Love – Typhoon
3. Seven – Oh, Rose
4. Pylon Pile-On – Benjamin Shaw
5. Lost in Time – Jom Comyn
6. Sweet Surrender (Sarah McLaughlin Cover) – Evening Hymns
7. In Evil Hour – Battle Ave.
8. N.M.S.S. – Elvis Depressedly
9. Welcome To Heaven – Gay Angel
10. Background Painters – Daytime TV
11. Ocean Song – The Wailin’ Smithers
12. Art School Wannabee – Sorority Noise
13. Good Morning, August – K. Adem
14. Alone At The Party – Eskimeaux
15. Someone Else – Acid Ghost
16. Go – Eerie Glue
17. The Lights In The Sands of Katumpkale – REW<<
18. Sandspurs – Naps
19. Winning Streak – Glen Hansard
20. Beautiful Blue Sky – Ought
21. The Race – Oh Pep!
22. Midnight Cross – Fog Lake
23. Sweet Gin – Leisure Suite
24. Motorcycle – Helen
25. Sleep Talk – Diet Cig
26. The Knower – Youth Lagoon
27. The Closing Door – LVL UP
28. That Kind of Girl – All Dogs
29. Hesitate – Dude York
30. Elk City – Samantha Crain
31. The Grass Is Always Greener – Say Hi
32. James Orin Incandenza – Mrs. Hopewell
33.Choking on Flowers – Fox Academy

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

“You started skipping in a running race,
5m from the finish line you fell from grace.
Do you need to go and walk it off?
Have a sit down, maybe stretch it out.
It’ll heal itself if you give it some time.
Take a deep breath, let it unwind.

Now you’re swimming, the best exercise for pain,
out past those shark nets, you heard your name called again.
He was inviting you in with his grin,
He’s a real fast mover so swim swim swim.

Living will be released on Star House Collective on the 21st August, and the band have announced they are recording their debut full length this summer. In the mean time, you should check out their previous releases on Bandcamp.

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“maintains the band’s tight, twitchy, economical sound. Ought pursues an artistically apposite austerity in committing these new songs to tape, referencing the arid and unvarnished production of no-wave and early indie rock “

If you’re still undecided, why not check out the first single, ‘Beautiful Blue Sky’, in the player below?

You can pre-order the album now via Constellation Records.

Header image by Brett Davis

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Daytime TV make a pleasing brand of lo-fi, psych-tinged, rock music, fusing the DIY indie rock ethos of the 80N7 compilations with mid 2000’s British garage rock. Opener ‘Background Painters’ is a good introduction, with its lo-fi guitars and thumping drumbeat, simultaneously ballsy and chilled out and perfect for the summertime. ‘Orange River’ is all jangling guitars and galloping drums before the entry of a synth line and droll vocals about the titular orange river, and ‘Hounoured If I’m Honest’, has shimmering guitars preceding familiarly deadpan, uber-cool vocals. Later in the song a weird squealing and distorted clarinet gives things a slightly surreal edge, like the shadowy figure of (a clarinet wielding) Colin Stetson hovering at the edge of the scene. Closer ‘Back in the Roc’ has a groovy swagger and a catchy breezy pop chorus of, “Come on and get over, don’t take your time”. It’s just the right blend of catchy and cool and it’s not difficult to imagine the folks over at 6Music grabbing hold of this and sending it on a meteoric rise.

You can get DAYTIME TV on a name-your-price basis via the band’s Bandcamp page.

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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

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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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Mattson has just announced a new EP, Avalanche, which picks up directly where Someday left off. That said, the first track sees a significant departure from his sound, swapping out the Wooden Sky-style indie rock for gently strummed guitars and slow-burning drum machine beats which conjure a vivid, nostalgic image, like a city as seen from a dark shore at night.

Avalanche will be released on the 21st August by Home Music Co. If you haven’t already, be sure to head to the Kalle Mattson Bandcamp page and pick up his previous albums.

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“Eskimeaux is basically me: it’s an empowered persona that has brought me warmth and fulfilment in times of isolation and confusion about my origins”

And with this knowledge of the origins of the name comes a glimpse into what has shaped Smith’s sound. This is not a beginning. Smith has more or less grown up with Eskimeaux, grown into Eskimeaux. New album O.K. feels like the product of that development, borne out of a sense of purpose and artistic confidence that comes with long hard years of trial and error.

That said, while Eskimeaux is Smith, it would be a misnomer to label the project a solo venture. Quinn Moreland‘s pretty extensive history of Smith’s music career to-date for Impose hints at the influence other musicians have had on Smith, tracing the evolution of Eskimeaux from inception to present, which sees Smith at the centre of a talented group of people in Brooklyn (partly as The Epoch collective) who work together on their various musical projects. When you thank the likes of Told Slant, Bellows, Yours Are The Only Ears, Florist, Small Wonder, Sharpless and Mitski for helping create your record, you know you are in good hands. As our preview of the album stated back in March:

“While the proof will be in the pudding, it seems O.K. is a testament to the power of gathering good friends and kind strangers who are all pulling in the same direction, a reminder that good, carefully put together art has infinitely more value than whatever the PR men and women try to push at you”

O.K. feels like an epiphany, where Smith has found the required confidence (almost certainly with the help of her friends) to speak openly without distortion or the safety-net of irony. The biggest temptation when feeling isolated and alone is to accentuate the feeling of dissociation, to lie to yourself or others by claiming that being understood (ie. less alone) is not needed. This could be through angry, primal art which strives to remind everyone that they are merely phony, bullshit-ridden animals who will grow old and die, or by creating art so abstract and inhuman that no-one can recognise it, retreating into the false security of faux-mysticism which aims to transcend the need for human connection. While Eskimeaux was never near the extreme ends of these avenues, Smith’s early work did see her feelings/message buried beneath a haze of ambient noise. O.K. sees this stripped back in favour of candid pop songs which fit very nicely into The Epoch back catalogue.

The album confronts loneliness head-on, outlining the strange but undeniable fact that each of us are distinct creatures cut off from the thoughts of anyone else, even those who mean the world to us. In lieu of telepathy, we are forced to communicate in crude alternatives, arranging words and gestures haphazardly in the hope of them saying what we really mean. ‘I Admit I’m Scared’, a song which worries about the effects you have one your loved ones, puts this quite beautifully:

“And everything I said
spewed like sparklers from my mouth
they looked pretty as they flew
but now they’re useless and burnt out”

While all the songs are linked by sincerity, there is a variation of sounds and styles across the album. Opener ‘Folly’ is a folk song bathed in reverb and guitars, the narrator casting a significant other as something magnificent and unknowable. ‘Pocket Full of Posies’ is a creepy, gritty track of vulnerability, while ‘Broken Necks’ is a bona fide pop song, a heartbreaking collapse of a relationship rendered danceable with synths and clap-along percussion and a catchy chorus. Current favourite ‘The Thunder Answered Back’ is more fierce, bubbling with certainty before exploding in the cathartic refrain of “You coward, you hummingbird”. The track continues with a dramatic closing, euphoric and elemental: 

“I screamed out how’d it get this bad? And the thunder answered back
if you know not what you lack then you must unturn your back
Your inside is overcast you are tethered to your past
and it must feel like fucking hell to be a patchwork of yourself,
a bunch of scraps thrown and sewn around your bones
and though you’re alone it’s holding you too tightly.
But who are you?
From where do you come?
What do you believe in?
Whom do you love?”

The sense of loneliness never leaves, but it’s joined by the acceptance of the weird paradoxical truth that you can never be OK without first recognizing the fact that you won’t always be OK. And, perhaps more importantly, the understanding that everyone is in the same boat. Obviously, for this to be a comfort then people need to make it known, so it’s lucky indeed that ‘Alone at the Party’ is the anthem of this realisation, finding solace and community in the fact that we are all at some level lonely. This is what Eskimeaux does best, she says things that might not be cool or pretty or ‘normal’ in order to help. In this way O.K. is like an unveiling, an opening of the chest, with Smith delving into herself to show us every gruesome detail that we too possess. We see her heart and lungs and rounded ribs, the fragile threads of nerves and blood vessels which twitch and tremble in the spotlight, we see a space lined with thorns or glass or thick black bile in which sits something hard and smooth and bright, something that we recognise despite it having no shape or weight or name. Closer ‘That’s OK’ concludes the viewing, cleansing the cavity with peace and sewing herself back up safe in the knowledge that communication has finally been achieved:

“Frankie is face down in our bed,
you are downstairs
and all I want is to hear you say
is ‘we’re not the same but that’s ok’.”

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.

You can buy the album digitally from Eskimeaux’s Bandcamp, on CD/vinyl from Double Double Whammy or on beautiful cassettes from Mt. Home Arts (see below).

Embroidery artwork by Susannah Lee Cutler

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