Fast forward a little under two years and Just Cause are at it again. Just Cause Vol. 2 takes the blueprint of the original and expands upon it. There are over double the number of contributing artists, with an impressive total of sixty three songs from all corners of our current musical moment. Many of the artists have featured on these very pages (some multiple times), including the likes of Ben Seretan, Caitlin Pasko, Erika Dohi, hemlock, Mal Devisa, Michael Cormier-O’Leary, Nico Hedley, Pleasure Systems and Sam Wenc. There’s such a mix of genres, feelings and styles that there truly is something for everyone, and the minimum donation of $10 is brilliant value in anyone’s book.

But of course the compilation is about more than music. It is again raising money for another vital cause. All proceeds of Just Cause Vol. 2 go to the Immigrant Defense Project, who work tirelessly to fight the mass imprisonment and deportation of immigrants in the US. As their mission statement puts it: “IDP has remained steadfast in fighting for fairness and justice for all immigrants caught at the intersection of the racially biased U.S. criminal and immigration systems. IDP fights to end the current era of unprecedented mass criminalization, detention and deportation through a multipronged strategy including advocacy, litigation, legal advice and training, community defense, grassroots alliances, and strategic communications.”

Just Cause Vol. 2 is out now and available via Bandcamp.

Cover art by Aldrin Regina Valdez

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The recording project of Texas musician Daniel Bryson (who also plays drums in Skirts), A.L. West is an outlet for lo-fi bedroom pop meets indie rock. He recently released a new double single, Nothing At All / Rabbitbrush 2, which is the perfect introduction for newcomers. ‘Nothing At All’ is a lovely patient indie pop song, but it’s ‘Rabbitbrush 2’ that sees things kicked into another gear. As its name suggests, the track is something of a sequel to one from 2023 A.L. West album The Store, but whereas the original was a gentle folk-inflected bedroom pop song, ‘Rabbitbrush 2’ is thick with a heavy fuzz, building from lulls of plodding percussion and Bryson’s draw out vocals into peaks of triumphant noise.

Watch the video by Alex Montenegro below:

Nothing At All / Rabbitbrush 2 is out now via the A.L. West Bandcamp page.

Casper Skulls – Roddy Piper

Turning the page onto a new chapter for the Sudbury/Toronto indie rock outfit, new album Kit-Cat promises to see Casper Skulls push themselves to new heights. Single ‘Spindletop‘ introduced this refreshed sound, drawing on There Will Be Blood to create a moody, ominous atmosphere, and now ‘Roddy Piper’ introduces a more energetic and soaring dimension. Drawing on the titular figure, the track uses a wrestling analogy to explore confrontation within a relationship, the combination of upbeat rhythm and fuzzy weight evoking the dramatic ups and downs of a choreographed bout. Watch the Mortal Kombat-inspired video, directed by Curtis Carriere and Jordan Vandenberg (of Goodscreen Media) along with the band themselves, below:

Kit-Cat will be released on the 11th April via Next Door Records and you can pre-order it now.

Celeste Madden – Lapdog

Having signed with Sad Club Records, recent months have seen Celeste Madden unveil a handful of singles, with tracks like ‘Joan of Arc‘ and ‘Fever Dream‘ embodying the London-based songwriter’s singular style. Songs both unashamedly melodramatic and undeniably strange, drawing the listener directly into Madden’s psyche so that we too might experience the diverse range of moods and feelings therein. Having announced that EP Is It Really Goodnight? will be released next month, Madden has now returned with new single ‘Lapdog’. Another dreamlike folk song where placid surfaces hide a roiling depth beneath, reflecting on difficult experiences in order to exorcise the hold of the past.

‘Lapdog’ is out now and available via the Celeste Madden Bandcamp page. Is It Really Goodnight? will be released on the 27th March via Sad Club Records.

Craig Finn – People of Substance

Anyone who caught Craig Finn on his This Is What It Looks Like tour last autumn will be champing at the bit for a new album, Finn using the solo sets to introduce a number of new narrative-driven songs full of the detail, emotion and empathy which has so long marked his work. The record, it turns out, is called Always Been, and will be released this spring. A fitting addition to Finn’s oeuvre in the year The Hold Steady‘s Separation Sunday celebrates its twentieth anniversary, the album traces the arc of a protagonist through a rise and fall and eventual redemption, the character committing the life of a priest despite his lack of faith. A whole cast of characters pass into the frame within the telling of this story, but for now we have single ‘People of Substance’ as a glimpse at the world within.

Watch the visualizer by David Kelling below:

Always Been is out on the 4th April and you can pre-order it now.

Dead Bandit – Pink

“Something of a landscape,” was how we described Dead Bandit‘s self-titled album, coming soon on Quindi Records, in a preview back in January. “One rural in tone which seems at once physical and emotional. Often stark and severe in its loneliness, a kind of haunted prairie or steppe, yet often possessing some kind of yearning fondness for the wide open space.” New single ‘Pink’ furthers the style. A cryptic, slow-building number which possesses a kind of shadowed mystery, the layered guitar and creeping beats never puncturing the understated air, as though the truth of the track is always drifting just out of view.

Jacob Faurholt – I Will Hold You

We’ve featured the prolific Danish songwriter Jacob Faurholt multiple times in recent years, an outsider artist in the vein of Daniel Johnston and co. who looks to explore existential themes via lo-fi, idiosyncratic combination of folk, rock and pop. Recorded in the room beneath his children’s bedroom while they were asleep, the most recent release of Faurholt’s we covered embraced a hushed style, but new single ‘I Will Hold You’ pivots away from this entirely. It was written in the aftermath of a Dinosaur Jr. gig, post-show tinnitus still ringing, which anchors its poignant emotion and melodies with a dense undercurrent of noise.

‘I Will Hold You’ is out now and available from the usual places.

Léna Bartels – January is the Loneliest Month

It’s Gonna be a Wonderful New Year, a split between NYC’s Léna Bartels and Nico Hedley, is the first release on new label Rock For Sale Records who release music on cassette tapes and not streaming services. Bartels and Hedley have collaborated across a range of projects (both realised and not quite), and this EP is from the intimate end of the spectrum. The pair describe it as a collection of “songs from winter. Songs for the new year. Songs to get by by,” and if lead single, Bartels’s ‘January is the Loneliest Month’ is anything to go by, it makes good on the promise of its admirably optimistic title. Though not with saccharine cheerfulness but a quiet persistence and steady belief in new beginnings.

Lucy Liyou – Arrested

‘Arrested’ is the lead single from Every Video Without Your Face, Every Sound Without Your Name, the new record from Lucy Liyou. Released next month via Orange Milk Records, the album promises to be the Los Angeles musician’s most pop-oriented to date, but anyone expecting a collection of up-tempo dancefloor fillers might be disappointed. As ‘Arrested’ attests, Liyou’s distinctive style is far more complex than that, possessing both a fragile minimalism and lush melodrama, the understated ethereality of the sound and poignant longing of the vocals combining into a reflective and melancholic mood. The sensation of watching a fond memory fade at the edges as the desire to return to its smallest details only grows.

Watch the video shot and directed by Park Seung Won below:

Every Video Without Your Face, Every Sound Without Your Name is out on the 21st March via Orange Milk Records and you can pre-order it now.

Mumu The Free Diver – Blossoms

The project of Raleigh, NC-based singer-songwriter Aki Laakso, Mumu The Free Diver offers an evocative brand of indie folk which embraces the authenticity of the DIY aesthetic. Recorded at home with what Laakso describes as “a cheap mic, an old guitar and a bargain-bin audio interface,” new song ‘Blossoms’ swaps out technical polish for a sense of immediacy, sounding like a direct communication from within a moment of grief-stricken vulnerability. But don’t let the description fool you, for though the arrangement is based around acoustic guitar and humble, near-spoken vocals, the track possesses a real sense of richness too. As though through its unguarded nature flows a certain intensity, be it born of compassion, panic, plain hard longing, or indeed a combination of all three.

Penny Loafer – Fridge

Consisting of Emma Barnes (vocals, guitar, keys) and Seth Parker (drums, percussion), Penny Loafer make self-described “post-college rock” which draws from nineties heavyweights like Fugazi and Sonic Youth to offer songs about everyday life which nevertheless possess real weight and bite. With debut EP Daily Deal set for release via Indecent Artistry next month, the Athens, GA-duo have shared single ‘Fridge’. It’s an example of all the ingredients which make the Penny Loafer sound so enticing, with deadpan observation and wry humour meeting tangible heft, all strung together by a chugging momentum which pulls the audience along for the ride. A little bit salty, a little bit sweet and with a noticeable acidic edge.

Tractor Beam – SHOW YOU

“Draws from across the ages in their work, owing as much to 00s indie as 60s folk, and all wrapped up the the contemporary DIY aesthetic, leading to a sound both emotionally immediate and tangibly nostalgic.” So we wrote of Toronto-born, Vancouver-based artist Tractor Beam back in 2023. Now Sasha Balazic and co. are set to return with Monoliths & The Early Reflection, and latest single ‘SHOW YOU’ sees the outfit combine their usual freak folk sensibilities and a more chaotic noise pop style within a single track. The result feels like witnessing a band solidify their ambitions in real time, expanding the possibilities of the Tractor Beam project and pushing closer to their final form. Watch the video directed by Aiden Millroy below:

Monoliths & The Early Reflection is out on the 19th February via Good Stones // Calm Water.

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The album, coming later this week on Ruination Record Co., embraces this frustration wholeheartedly. With a sound far looser and louder than fans of previous album Painterly might expect, Nico Hedley uses resentment and anxiety as fuel for the pursuit, though it remains unclear whether the mythical bounty is indeed a white whale to be speared or line of windmills on the hill. To the point where, across seven tracks heavy on distortion and feedback, it appears the record’s only real conquest is that of coming to understand that happiness might be its own kind of myth.

In this way, it feels like the logical successor to Painterly. An album, as we wrote back in 2021, “of deferred epiphanies, brief moments of enlightenment come and gone. One which understands there is no endpoint to aim for, just the constant, changing process of moving forwards, and hoping to be somehow better for embracing the ride.” The sound of …That It Makes It Alright could therefore be read as the aftermath of such an understanding. A seesaw between anxiety and anhedonia that can do little but lean into the swing.

It’s little wonder then Hedley chose to depart from his folk sensibilities. As nuanced and conflicted as Painterly might have been, but there’s an inherent hope within country music. A kind of wilful dreaming. “I hope there is a hopefulness,” as he told us in an interview, “a sense that we can move beyond the ways we have been and be better.” But to constantly preach hope can feel like its own kind of betrayal. Sometimes abandon is required. Recklessness. Catharsis. Thus Hedley turned back towards the punk and noise rock that constituted a large part of his musical upbringing in 00s/10s New York, encouraging bandmates Andrew Stocker (bass) and Jeff Widner (drums) to forgo precision in favour of visceral passion. If there’s a certain desperation to the will to be alright, then it’s only right the sound should follow suit.

Today we get to share the latest single from the record, ‘Rosy’. A kind of twin sister to Painterly‘s ‘Lioness’, where the narrator maps the personal via an exterior image. As though the world is only too willing to serve as a mirror of ourselves, or else reflect back that which we lack. ‘Lioness’ presented a creeping warmth, its arms slowly wrapping the listener and eventually lifting them towards towards the light even as the lyrics tended towards bitterness, whereas ‘Rosy’ inverts the pattern. It’s a song which foregrounds the antagonism, Hedley’s vocals emerging through a teetering swirl of feedback that threatens to escalate and overwhelm, only occasionally thinning enough to give glimpses of the wistful tone still evident underneath.

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The relaxed yet intimate sound carving a space in which urgent thoughts can unspool with an unhurried grace. Think of the melancholy of a late summer’s night, beams of halogen glow cutting through the dark on an empty street, bits and bugs and tumbling motes of dust caught briefly, beautiful in their fall, before returning the dark.

After a lovely split single with Field Guides earlier in the year, Nico Hedley is back with his debut full-length record, Painterly. If his style was established on previous releases, the album sees it both refined and challenged. There is more depth to the classic country self-reflection, but also more jazzy deviations and intuitive idiosyncrasies. A newfound richness that nevertheless possesses a certain raw, off the cuff charm.

And the conflicts extend further, for the tracks offer a more considered engagement with Hedley’s own interiors—the anxieties, the injuries, the cruelty—but also an effort to step beyond the confines of the self. To elevate the study by widening the frame, turning the perspective outward.

But to say Painterly‘s carefully balanced contradictions represent a perfection, or even realisation, of the Nico Hedley aesthetic is incorrect. Because the idea suggests the songs as some terminus of the creative and emotional process, a notion which betrays the record’s principal concept. Painterly is an album of deferred epiphanies, brief moments of enlightenment come and gone. One which understands there is no endpoint to aim for, just the constant, changing process of moving forwards, and hoping to be somehow better for embracing the ride.

We were lucky enough to ask Hedley some questions to delve deeper into the themes and intentions of the record. Read on for in-depth insight into country music, creative communities and the transition from side guy to leading man.

Can we delve into the title and its wider meaning – Painterly?

“Painterly” from a very early stage in working on this music was a sort of mantra for me. I wanted the music to feel painterly, the decisions I made to be made in that spirit. I think it means to reveal the process to a certain extent, to not make things too slick, but also to have a certain naturalistic movement. I wanted the music to feel human, to see the brush strokes if you will. Before I had decided to call the record painterly—which I decided when I wrote the song of the same name about halfway through the process—I would use “make it more painterly” as a note for the band as we were arranging the tunes. I like to give vague notes like that, to lead the people I’m collaborating with toward something without telling them where to go.

On a more intellectual level I think the word really encapsulates what I meant to say with the music as well. The sort of heartbreak and uncertainty that I was working through in these songs seemed to me to be best described as painterly. detached from reality, a product of misremembering much in the way a painting is in relation to it’s supposed subject, a symbol. I was less interested in telling stories as much as transmitting their emotional content through the music.

The soul-searching, confessional country album is a well worn tradition, but Painterly approaches this from an oblique angle, or reverses the line entirely. As though the truth of self-examination lies in everything around us, and its just a matter of being attuned. Could you speak a little on the process of reaching beyond yourself when writing the album?

I have been playing music for a very long time. but have always been a little too scared to write my own songs. For a long time I had convinced myself that I was totally happy to just be a side guy, playing bass in bands, contributing to the writing process in that capacity when appropriate. I think the main thing I was scared of was being confessional, or just like some guy with a guitar up on stage being all woe is me etc. Like I didn’t think the world needed more of that. I still don’t think it does. But in starting to write this record I forced myself to get over it and just gave it a shot.

In that process I found that I could overcome that anxiety by trying for something more universal. And looking outward became the way that I was able to walk that line and allow myself to make this stuff. It was a very collaborative process with my band, this music really wasn’t made alone in my room even though that’s how the bones of the songs came to be. I also just stole some lines here and there. An Emily Dickenson poem I was fixated on in “Painterly”, and a line that I stole from Neil Young who stole it from Don Gibson in “Sound So Familiar” among others.

I wanted to be emotionally precise without being narcissistic, which is kind of funny I guess because one of the themes of the record I think is trying to move beyond my own narcissism.

Musically, the record is something of a melting pot. Country twang, jazzy flourishes, left-field turns that break a sense of linear structure. Did you set out to challenge genre boundaries, or is this simply another example of the intuitive, collaborative process?

I definitely didn’t set out to genre bend. If anything I was just trying to write country songs because that’s mostly what I was listening to at the time. George Jones, Lucinda Williams, Gram Parsons, and a ton of others were just what was resonating with me. I think how it turned out has everything to do with the collaborative process of making the music, I trusted the band implicitly and wrote everything with them in mind or in many cases with them in the room. There’s also the fact that I don’t know how to write a country song but this is the closest I could get. It also came from just sort of trusting the material to take us where it wanted to go if that makes sense.

The record begins stranded in the south on ‘Tennessee’, but moves on to the streets of NYC. What role does this varied geography play across the songs, and how does a sense of place shape your work?

It’s funny, I didn’t notice this until after the record was done. I have spent a lot of time traveling playing in touring bands so I guess my life has had a pretty varied geography which naturally gets reflected. The circumstances that led to this record being made also had a lot to do with the fact that I wasn’t traveling. When I started writing this record (late 2017 or early 2018 I think) all of the bands I had been traveling with were either defunct or taking breaks, I found myself home in NYC with no touring or prepping to tour to distract me from myself, and that state sort of made it possible (or necessary?) for me to start working on this stuff.

Could you speak a little of the band which feature on the album? Like so many Whatever’s Clever releases, there’s a real sense of kinship at its heart. A trust, a freedom to let the songs become what they are meant to be. How different a collection of songs would this be without that backing?

I was living with Carmen Rothwell, Ryan El-Sohl, and Adam Robinson in an apartment in Bushwick when I first started trying to write songs in earnest. We were all musicians and would spend a lot of time hanging out in the living room listening to records, and often would all be in our respective rooms playing. It was a really nice time, Ryan playing guitar in one room, Carmen practicing bass, Adam in the shed in his room, me messing around trying to learn how to write songs in mine, and then we would all get together and have these really fun active listening sessions. Just putting on records for hours and listening together.

One day someone brought up that we had never all played together so we just made a time the next week when we would all be home (I think we all had Mondays off from work) to just set up in the living room and play. I had 3 or 4 sort of finished songs at the time and we messed around with those and that first day we had pretty much the finished arrangement for “Waking Dreams” and “The Tower” as they appeared on the record even though I hadn’t finished lyrics yet. It was a big step for me, I think hearing the disjointed song ideas I had kicking around coming together with a band made me realize I had something worth pursuing.

I got Jeff Widener involved soon after who I had played with briefly in a band called Prima, and we started rehearsing and booking some shows. All the songs I was writing from then on were made specifically with them in mind. I really can’t express enough how integral they all were to conceiving of this music. I don’t think they would be a different collection of songs, they just wouldn’t “be” at all.

Finally, I’m interested in the lasting impression of the record. The sense of transience, a lack of easy answers, of epiphanies experienced but never lasting. It’s a conflicted conclusion. One sad and unsettling and a little daunting in its own way—a world where nothing quite stays as you’d like it—but also freeing, almost joyous, in how progression sloughs off the accumulated baggage of life.

Painterly is a breakup record, they are love songs, which is to say songs about the ways love is experienced, not professions of love necessarily. But they are also about getting better. Not just feeling better but being better. Better to those you love, to those who love you, to those who have hurt you. A better friend, a better companion.

There is a self reflective aspect to all of this I suppose. It’s about the ways we can be cruel to each other, and about regarding that cruelty and trying to commit to being less cruel. It is not lost on me though that the act of me making these songs is not an ameliorative sort of process, that has to be done in the real world.

This record is just a sort of exploration of these things I suppose. I hope there is a hopefulness, a sense that we can move beyond the ways we have been and be better. Not to have those things washed away but to hold them, examine them, and set them aside. To commit to being better and to allowing ourselves to be OK. That’s all a process, it isn’t binary, and frankly we have agency in it. I’m not interested in the ‘I’m so lonesome since you left me’ sort of model of remembering these sorts of things, though I obviously play with that trope on the record.

Ultimately I think the world simply is “a world where nothing stays as you’d like it” as you say, there are no easy answers. Maybe the point here is that that is OK. Shana Tovah!

Painterly is out now via Whatever’s Clever and you can get it from the Nico Hedley Bandcamp page.

Photos by Caleb Bryant Miller, album design by Benedict Kupstas

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Real Life Buildings – Racing the Sun
Nice Apple – Are You Still There?
V.V. Lightbody – Babe, Honestly
Nico Hedley – Late Bloomer
Gracie Gray – Morphine
Spencer Radcliffe & Everyone Else – Bloodletting
Pleasure Systems – Heirloom
Ana Roxanne – Slowness
Kin Hana – Fog
Rainwater – Pink Flowers
Christelle Bofale – U Ouchea
Prudence – Smile & Nod
Operators – Faithless
Belaver – Driver
Mr Husband – Friends
Rose Hotel – Running Behind
Jeremy Squires – Somersault
Bad Books – Lake House
Yammerer – Poisonous Reptilian Colleague’s & Co
Britt – Trial Period
Wild Yawp – Femme Girl
Forest Management – Blue Leaves
Robert Stillman – Ritual
Everyone is Dirty – Hit-Girl
Merin – Coral Island
Lavender Bones – Over Again
Luke De-Sciscio – R.O.B.Y.N.
Anna Wiebe – Fortune
Young Elk – Gossip Magazines
Emma Frank – I Thought
Eamon McGrath – GUTS
Jacob Faurholt – The Dark Isn’t Right

Like what you hear? Catch up with the rest of our Monthly Mixes.

The post May 2019 Roundup Mix appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Released as a 7″ single, Late Bloomer / Hydrangeas is a fitting welcome into Nico Hedley’s world, the tracks diverging in terms of style yet linked by a common spirit, an attention to the textures of things, the minute movements and sparks of life. The differences in sound are unsurprising, the release serving as something of a study, investigations that trace future possibilities and directions. “These two songs were written and recorded in my bedroom while learning to use an 8 track reel to reel machine,” Hedley explains. “They are experiments in stream of consciousness songwriting, controlled chaos, and seeing how broken a guitar can sound.”

A lesson in patient folk, A-side ‘Late Bloomer’ submerses itself in rich blend of timbres, the relaxed yet intimate sound carving a space in which urgent thoughts can unspool with an unhurried grace. Think of the melancholy of a late summer’s night, beams of halogen glow cutting through the dark on an empty street, bits and bugs and tumbling motes of dust caught briefly, beautiful in their fall, before returning the dark.

Hold me to the things I said
Spend hours with my regrets
Hide out with the most of it
Sleep tight darling I hope you did
Oh won’t you wait? I did
I’m a late bloomer too

We’re lucky enough to be able to share a video for ‘Late Bloomer’ in support of the release. Directed by Esy Casey, the video captures the modest, low-lit majesty of the track, Hedley alone but visited by past scenes and experiences.

B-side ‘Hyrangeas’, which, incidentally, can be found on the fantastic new GoldFlakePaint compilation, is altogether more urgent, Adam Robinson’s saxophone lending an unhinged edge to a track that rises and rises until its haunting the roof beams.

Late Bloomer / Hydrangeas is out on the 31st May via Whatever’s Clever and you can pre-order it now.

Photo by Phillippe de Sablett, album art by Benedict Kupstas

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