Song list:

Options – Waiting
2nd Grade – Favorite Song
Alexander – Going to Sleep
Ryan Van Gonten – Fabrique
Haunted Continents – What Were You Born For?
Weakened Friends – Blue Again
Shybaby – Lazy Hazy
Frankie Valet – April
Primo! – You’ve Got a Million
Hypoluxo – Kentucky Smooth
Basement Revolver – Knocking
Dead Painters – Output
HALEY – Infinite Pleasure Part 2
Doe – Heated
Ing – Dust
Benjamin Shaw – Terrible Feelings!
internet boy crush – ghost friend
lowly loverboi – Dumb Phone
Dead Tooth – Liars
Kin Hana – You
Bodega – The Truth is Not Punishment
The Cordial Sins – Not Enough
Indoor Cats – Fun 2
Upstairs – Trust the Process
Sabriel’s Orb – Holding
John Atkinson – Bakwaves // Rye
Fanclub – Leaves
The Chairman Dances – Acme Parking Garage
Con Davison – Talk
Ivy Dye – Diminish
Elizabeth Owens – I Long
The Last Bison – Don’t Look Away
Our Fastest Typist – It’s Nice Outside, but My Head is Killing Me

You can find all of our monthly round-up posts here, and our complete array of mixtapes here.

The post September 2018 Roundup appeared first on Various Small Flames.

With so much collaboration on the go, Options offers Engel the chance to do everything for himself. The project lets him write, record and mix albums that take the influences of his other work, melt them down, and, with a rigourous attention to detail, create something entirely his own. His latest effort, Vivid Trace, promises to be both the “darkest and most melodic” Options record yet, what the blurb describes as “a candid quiltwork of pop-rock intricacy that exhibits Engel as both a product of his prolific environment and a powerfully unique songwriting talent.”

Vivid Trace is an album of succinct songs, though this conciseness belies the complexity and ambition of the release. The songs, many of which clock in at two minutes or less, push out in all directions, the style shifting between tracks and the tempo within them to chart the whole gamut of indie rock influences. Take for example opener ‘Waiting’, which is something of a rollercoaster, the pace rising from hip langour into impassioned crescendos. These peaks and troughs mark the release, such as the passage from rockers ‘Hold Out’ into ‘Knocked’ into the restrained ‘Wash’, though the latter itself rises into gradually into an unsettling rhythm and style.

Indeed, the rollercoaster analogy fits Options neatly. The changes in tone and pace are not just surprising and welcome but feel engineered as part of a wider experience, Engel able to maintain a supple, agile nature to his sound that allows a sense of fluid motion. Even the more arrhythmic and angular moments feel part of this overriding logic, breaks in the flow that only highlight the ultimate progression of the record. Think of those Rube Goldberg marble runs, contraptions of perpetual motion where the whole system appears to grind off course before a tiny detail unlocks the obstruction and shoots the ball on its way once more.

Which is how single ‘Fog’ can tramp forward with lo-fi cool, ‘True’ ignite in explosive energy and ‘Wandering’ dial down to an unadorned ballad all within the space of five minutes, and how ‘Go Without’ and ‘And On’ can emerge with fluctuations of their own, and yet Vivid Trace remains the opposite of jarring. Options have crafted a ride of tiny details and epic proportions, a mosaic of moods and emotions that only grows more impressive on closer examination.

Today we have the pleasure of hosting a stream of the album a few days ahead of release.

09/11 – St Louis, MO @ CBGB ^
09/12 – Lawrence, KS @ Replay Lounge ^
09/13 – Rock Island, IL @ Rozz Tox ^
09/14 – Chicago, IL @ The Hideout ^
10/01 – Detroit, MI @ Deluxx Fluxx *
10/02 – Toronto, ON @ Baby G *
10/03 – Montreal, QC @ Bar Le Ritz PDB *
10/04 – Burlington, VT @ ArtsRiot *
10/05 – Portsmouth, NH @ Book and Bar *
10/06 – Boston, MA @ Lilypad *
10/07 – New York, NY @ Baby’s All Right *
10/09 – Philadelphia, PA @ PhilaMOCA *
10/10 – Washington, DC @ Songbyrd *
10/11 – Norfolk, VA @ TOAST *
10/12 – Raleigh, NC @ Kings *

* SOOPER Tour w/ Nnamdi Ogbonnaya
^ w/ Fond Han

Cover photo by Vanessa Valadez, album art by Mary Clemens

The post Options – Vivid Trace appeared first on Various Small Flames.