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

The post Just Cause Vol. 2 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Montreal artist Cassandra Angheluta uses the moniker APACALDA to create an atmospheric blend of shadowy indie pop and emotive indie rock. Early next summer, she will release There’s a Shadow In My Room and It Isn’t Mine, a much-anticipated album that explores a person’s journey from unblemished purity to marked and bruised with life’s burdens. Displaying this dark mood in full effect, latest single ‘Dead Weight’ is a song about watching helplessly as a loved one spirals into addiction. “True love, whether romantic or platonic, can be imprisoning,” APACALDA explains of the song. “There are journeys—like addiction—that people ultimately have to face within themselves to find healing. Watching them go through this is incredibly hard because you’re constantly battling the fear of losing them.”

There’s a Shadow In My Room and It Isn’t Mine is due to be released in June next year.

Blood Lemon – Perfect Too

Uniting over a shared love of Kim Deal and 90s Riot Grrrl music, Boise three-piece Blood Lemon burst onto the scene in 2021 with their self-titled debut, combining musical expertise with political urgency to create a searing sound. Now the trio—Lisa Simpson (Finn Riggins, Treefort Music Fest), Melanie Radford (Built to Spill, Marshall Poole) and percussionist Lindsey Lloyd (Tambalka)—are preparing to release new EP Petite Deaths on Moon Ruins, and lead single ‘Perfect Too’ sees an escalation of this style. A seven-minute behemoth which sets its furious sights on the dead end of greed and endless treadmill in search of perfection.

Watch the video directed and edited by Grant Osman with animation by James W.A.R. Lloyd below:

Petite Deaths is out in the 17th January via Moon Ruins and you can pre-order it now.

Daneshevskaya – Scrooge

Daneshevskaya‘s Long Is The Tunnel was one of 2023’s most inventive and ambitious releases, using rich arrangements and distinctive vocals to present the individual experience as a patchwork of histories and hopes for the future. Again out via Winspear, new single ‘Scrooge’ is no less layered and finely crafted. Drawing loosely on the titular figure, the track brings to life a sense of growing alienation within a relationship, as though the significant other is slowing deforming into a stranger in real time. “Ebenezer, I wish you wouldn’t stay,” admits the opening line, and the rest of the track is equally frank. “When you talk like that I don’t recognize you,” as the chorus goes. “When you move like that I don’t recognize you / I don’t even think you notice.” Watch the video below, directed by Madeline Leshner and Zach Stone with cinematography by Stone and Isaac Berner:

‘Scrooge’ is out now via Winspear and available from the Daneshevskaya Bandcamp page.

David Allred – Oh Lauren

“Death, grief and loss are understandably key moods, but perhaps the most striking emotion is that of longing,” we wrote of David Allred‘s forthcoming album The Beautiful World on Erased Tapes. “Not only a desire to return to the past and that which is lost, but also for something better in the future.” After the title track weaved seemingly mundane details into a picture of a fulfilling life, new single ‘Oh Lauren’ continues this spirit with an even more direct focus. Dedicated to a childhood friend who took her own life at a young age, the song collects the tangle of competing emotions surrounding the event and aims to communicate them as honestly as possible. Mourning and confusion, a desire to understand, as well as the enduring sense of gratitude for having known her at all.

Don’t Worry – Ever So Clear

Released to coincide with the ten-year anniversary of the band and in preview of a third full-length album scheduled for sometime in 2025, ‘Ever So Clear’ sees Harlow, Essex indie rockers Don’t Worry continue the sense of heartfelt emotion and playful humour which made 2022 album Remorseless Swing so special. “All night I’m thinking for England / I can’t be with you at all,” sings songwriter Samuel Watson, casting an unflinching eye on a personal situation and reporting back every uncomfortable detail. The result might not be the most romantic of pictures, but the earnest delivery lends an affirming edge, and positions the singalong refrain as something between a promise and a plea.

I just need a little time
Stay with me
I just need a little time

 Free Lunch – rosebud

The recording project of Bournemouth brothers Henry and Ted Scanlan, Free Lunch rose from the ashes of two solo outfits—Sprog and Wilder respectively—and has come to welcome an array of friends and collaborators such as Michael Rea (Symbol Soup) and Dave ‘The Attic’ Mountain. New single ‘rosebud’ highlights the atmosphere and versatility of the resulting sound, building from warm, relaxed beginnings into something altogether deeper. A middle lull shimmers to near-silence as though to herald what is coming, and the closing third of the track makes good on the promise with a climax full of weight and soaring release.

Leif Vollebekk – Peace of Mind (Morning)

Leif Vollebekk‘s new album Revelation, out now on Secret City Records, is one keyed into mystery and ambiguity, drawing on Jung’s Dreams, Memories, Reflections to explore themes such as alchemy and the unknowable divine. The sort of release which appears to be inching closer to some truth with every listen. It is fitting then that Vollebekk has returned to some of the tracks again, recording different versions as though in search of that elusive perfection. ‘Peace of Mind (Morning)’ offers an acoustic take which looks to carve out its own space away from the album. A small pocket of calm to be maintained and returned to. Watch the visualiser by director, cinematographer and editor Andy Mann and colourist Beatrice Tremblay below:

Revelation is out now via Secret City Records.

leoblu – PEACHES

Following this summer’s EP Blu Lucid Nightmare and a recent collaboration with World Wide Web, leoblu (that’s Åland-born, Berlin-based producer and artist Julia Carlsson) returns with new single ‘PEACHES’. Making what we described previously as “ambiguous and atmospheric music which situates intimate emotion against the more mysterious forces at work around us,” leoblu specialises in the dark and haunting, and ‘PEACHES’ is no exception. An indie pop song filtered through a digital prism, it combines synths, beats and Carlsson’s signature vocals to create something at once emotional and oddly mesmerising.

‘PEACHES’ is out now via streaming services.

MacGregor Burns – Can’t Go Back

“Stretch[es] the gamut between despondent, desperate and something like tenuous hope as they strive towards a truer version of self, whatever that might look like.” So we wrote of MacGregor Burns‘s ‘Silent Answers’ back in September, introducing the artist’s idiosyncratic personality. Combining nostalgic nods to the likes of David Byrne while forging a new path forwards, latest single ‘Can’t Go Back’ looks for further clues in the fertile space between the familiar and the new. Going back might not be possible, but there’s no harm in looking to those who have walked before us for indications of what direction we might take next.

Pleasure Systems – Merry Christmas

Described by label Primordial Void as “not quite Christmas music,” ‘Merry Christmas’ is the new single from Clarke Sondermann’s Pleasure Systems. It’s our first glimpse of his new working relationship with producer Ivan Berko, and channels the signature Pleasure Systems ruminative indie pop towards the layers of bittersweet memory that the festive season can often break open and reveal to us. Grant Chapman provides drums and May Rio sings along as Sondermann reflects on Christmases past, pairing a warm nostalgic fondness and moments of small beauty with a sharp pang of loss. The 7″ single and digital download comes complete with a b-side ‘Signing in My Sleep (Demo)’, so be sure not to miss out on that too.

The storm took down the power lines
it ripped the needles off the pines
but I see you at the door
and I couldn’t ask for more
Merry Christmas

winded – wish on the mezzanine

Based in Miami, winded was originally the solo project of lead Thrin Vianale, but has since expanded into a four-piece featuring Nick Cody (guitar) James Sturges (bass) and Gunther Schenk (drums). Their latest release, a double single featuring the tracks ‘wish on the mezzanine’ and ‘mercy 27’ is therefore something of a reintroduction. The ramshackle lo-fi pop of 2022’s schwartz provides is levelled up into something with genuine mass, pairing thick noisy fuzz and shredding guitar with hooky melodies and bright harmonies. ‘wish on the mezzanine’ is the perfect introduction—power pop meets shoegaze meets crunchy lo-fi rock.

Yoshika Colwell & The Vernon Spring – This Weather

In early December, English songwriter Yoshika Colwell will release a collaborative EP with The Vernon Spring (London composer and producer Sam Beste). The record finds the pair’s creative spirits coming together in an effortless flow, The Vernon Spring taking Colwell’s classical folk songwriting and spinning it off into new, daring territory. The focus was very much on intuition and improvisation, from snippets of melodies that arrived as if from the ether, to the lyrics themselves. “I sang without letting my analytical mind get in the way,” Colwell explains. “The words came out like in a conversation or thought, complete with strangeness and non sequiturs and contradictions.” Take a listen to the title track for a taste of what this sounds like.

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But regardless of form, Sondermann’s music always constitutes a document of a life, one that has known its fair share of hardship. Prior to the release of 2017’s Antnumbra Pull, his partner Ed was diagnosed with cancer, a life-changing development which understandably became the focus of much of the songs. The result served as a “reminder that everything we have in this life deserves our utmost love and attention,” we wrote at the time, “and that we’d do well not to take it for granted for a single second.”

After Ed’s death in June 2019, Sondermann began writing songs in isolation, creating a mass of demos that would become the new Pleasure Systems album, Visiting the Well which releases on Orchid Tapes later this week. If previous records were about suffering and worry, this is an album about grief. An album where pain, confusion and love are woven into twelve songs as unflinchingly direct as diary entries, presenting loss as it is processed in real time. The lyrical immediacy is countered by an often dreamy and drifting sound, a duality that conjures the weightless aftermath of loss where time is both too quick and too slow. A shapeless pocket within which there is little to do but collect signs of what has been and what remains, a deep hollow in normal time that feels like it might just go on for ever. “This summer stretches to an empty swollen blur,” goes a particularly emblematic line on opening track ‘Blur,’ “I spend the days making mosaics out of hurt.”

Visiting the Well exists within and around this cavity, Sondermann never far from its mysterious depths. Emotions range from quiet despair (e.g. on ’10:13) and yearning (as on ‘Blur’ or ‘Through Your Eyes’), to a sense of pure disbelief. “Mom is it real?” asks ‘Life Sized,’ “oh I swore he would heal, I could feel it.” But even amongst the album’s bluntest moments, Sondermann retains an ability to find beauty in the most unlikely places. Like on ‘When Your Beard Fell Out’, which likens the moment his partner’s hair turned white overnight to the turn and fall of leaves in autumn. “There is beauty,” Sondermann sings, “in the colour palette of demise.”

It’s in this way that, almost inadvertently, Visiting the Well becomes as much a celebration of love as a document of loss. Immediate thoughts coalesce with memories, anguish swirls with past joys and the current stark absence muddles with a previous, very real, presence. As with all loss, there is no simple lesson learned, no lasting consolation. There is only what was and what still can be, all there below the surface. Love, like grief, is a depth that will always be present. You can visit it at any time.

Clarke was kind enough to answer some questions about the record, so read on for more in-depth discussion on style, working with Orchid Tapes, and grief in twenty-first century America.

You describe Visiting the Well as “pretty raw, even embarrassingly earnest.” Even for someone who’s used to writing and sharing music about personal subject matter, this one must be scary to release into the world?

It’s very intimidating for me to release, and I’ve gone through a lot of cycles of wanting to scrap it or even move on from making music altogether. Ultimately, my personal hope in releasing these songs is to achieve a sense of catharsis; holding onto these songs over the last year has felt like a heavy secret and I’m ready to get it off my chest.

The album is being released on Orchid Tapes, which is very cool. How did that come about?

I’ve been a long time admirer of Orchid Tapes, and connected with Warren Hildebrand (who runs the label) online last year. We started talking after he responded to a video I posted of me taking my PrEP dose while drinking a grapefruit Moscow mule, which is absurd in retrospect, but we became good friends shortly after. At some point I sent him the album and he said that it “destroyed” and “devastated” him, which I took as a good sign.

I had already been talking to a couple other labels, but decided I wanted to work with Orchid Tapes because of Warren’s careful respect for the project and willingness to let me maintain control over the direction of the release. He approaches releases from the perspective of collaborating to make something beautiful, rather than maximizing market appeal. As it turns out, I wouldn’t have been able to finish the album without his guidance, encouragement, mixing help and excellent mastering.

Since finishing this album, we’ve also been working on a slate of new songs collaboratively, where we send each other barebones song ideas and help each other flesh them out, which I’m really excited about. Warren’s a brilliant musician and engineer, and working together continues to be one of the best collaborative relationships I’ve found.

Musically speaking, the new album is a pretty big departure from your last release, Terraform. What were you aiming for style-wise when writing it, and where do you see it fitting in your body of work as both Pleasure Systems and The Washboard Abs?

I had actually set an intention for myself to not consider any kind of “listener” or share any of my work with friends for the first six months of writing after my partner’s death, so I wasn’t making conscious decisions when it came to style or sound. Removing the consideration of how it would be received was very generative for me – this album is a trimmed collection of 35 songs that I wrote one after another in a pretty fluid way during that time.

The most obvious departure from my typical process was that I got very interested in playing guitar again after having steered towards electronic music. At that time I was living with my close friend Kasra (of the band Palm) and he let me borrow his nylon string guitar for months on end, which helped everything click and pour out of me. I was still finding great comfort in listening to a lot of minimal synth music – I was particularly obsessed with Colleen’s album A Flame My Love, A Frequency, Steve Hauschildt’s album Strands, and Meitei’s album Komachi. I think that deeply listening to such beautiful and environmental yet sparse electronic albums informed the arrangements and meshed well with the confessional, guitar-oriented writing I was doing.

I’m curious about the title – What does Visiting the Well refer to and why did you choose that phrase to name the album?

It was actually directly inspired by a tweet I was really impacted by, which feels funny to say. One of my favorite accounts, @chunkbardey tweeted “my experience of grief has been that the deep well of sadness has never gone away I just visit it less.” I loved this visual, but I wanted the title to be a bit of a double entendre as well. In the year and a half leading up to my partner’s death, my life was completely enmeshed in a world of sickness, spending endless days and nights in hospitals. Emerging from that world felt like I was merely visiting the “well,” as opposed to the “sick.” A huge part of me felt like it was still stuck in the hospitals. Funny enough, one of my close friends, who records under the name Body Meat, came to a similar place independently of me with his single ‘The Well’ from last fall. I think it’s a really versatile visual.

We last did an interview like this for Antumbra Pull in late 2017. One of your quotes stood out. “I’m sitting with a lot of fear and it shows up in the songs more than I want it to,” you said, “so I’m consciously trying to shift into writing from a more hopeful perspective.” Do you hear courage and hope in these new songs?

Not really, to be honest. I think it’s a fairly direct style of songwriting, like an observation log of whatever I was reflecting on that day. The album isn’t entirely sequential in terms of the order the songs were written in, but the final two songs, ‘When I Picture You Now’ and ‘The Maze’ I wrote several months later than the rest. My grief had transformed and settled a bit by then, and I think there’s an audibly different perspective in those two – a little more acceptance maybe, but not quite hope. It was a devastating loss and I’m still processing it in many ways. I think that trying to twist it into a hopeful narrative would have been dishonest to both myself and the listener.

Was making the album a purely personal way for you to move through your feelings? Or do you think about the effects it will have on that nameless, faceless “listener” too?

It was purely personal – like I said before, I forced myself to go at least six months without even showing friends what I was working on. Once I had the songs selected for the album, it took me over a year to finish editing and refining them, but the motivation was much more to make something that felt true to my experience as opposed to just making songs that would be well received.

This is a difficult time for lots of people, and many are going through similar experiences of grief. If there is someone reading this who is going through what you have/are, would you like to say anything to them?

Part of my anxiety around releasing this album is that, as you said, this is an incredibly difficult time for so many people, and there is so much grief surrounding all of us right now; the immediate grief of those lost to Covid, but also grieving the loss of our “normal” lives for a year now, grieving the more existential idea of lost futures, the disappearance of more hopeful political futures, etc.

Our society in America champions individualism above all else, and I do in some ways feel conflicted about promoting such an individual and isolated account of loss when we are all embedded in such a profound communal grief. I wish I was better equipped to tackle these things through a strictly collectivist lens. But, in the depths of my own grief, I benefited a lot from hearing my experience reflected back to me in music that centered something comparable to what I was going through. If my work can have a similar impact on someone else in the throes of grief, then it’s all worth it. There is a beautiful kind of solidarity in the connection that the listener can have with intimate, emotionally-driven music.

Visiting the Well will be released on 26th March. Pre-order it now on LP or cassette from the Orchid Tapes webstore, or digitally via their Bandcamp or the Pleasure Systems Bandcamp.

Photos by Emily Burtner, cover painting by Tina Scarpello

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Excitingly, this summer is Antiquated Future Records’ seventh birthday, and to celebrate the label are releasing The First Seven Years, a compilation that spans their releases to date. Mastered by Fred Thomas, the nineteen-song release is a celebration of the entire Antiquated Future Records roster. Today, we have the pleasure of hosting the whole thing ahead of the physical release next month.

The album opens with the pleasingly retro-sounding (and previously unreleased) ‘A Fast Ska’ by Evan Hashi’s Little Angry & The Sweets, and from there dives into the last seven years of Antiquated Future releases. From the sultry slow burn of Flying Circles to the unmistakable, oddly graceful folk of David Thomas Broughton, the compilation illustrates both the range of the Antiquated Future discography and the common thread that unites every artist, a spirit more than a sound—an unwavering dedication to make art in their own unique way. There are moments of power too, like Tucker Theodore‘s ‘Movement 9 (High Descent)’ with it’s distorted post-rock vibes, and the slow tidal rhythms of Midwife‘s ‘Angel’, Madeline Johnston’s voice grainy as though beamed from the bottom of a murky pool of static.

This variety continues across the entire compilation. The subtly euphoric crystalline dreamscape of Reighnbeau‘s ‘Gold Face’ segues into the sparkling but emotionally poignant pop gem ‘Never Finds You’ by VSF fav The Washboard Abs, a track we previously described as “quietly devastating […] forgo[ing] any sense of metaphor or allusion in favour of a brave and direct account of dealing with the serious illness of a loved one.” There’s a devotional quality to Jordan O’ Jordan‘s ‘Patience is Gruesome’, a wheezing hymn that escalates into a shrieking choir, while Sara Renberg brings wry humour that wouldn’t be out of place in a whip-smart graphic novel, and Eleanor Murray delivers a smooth and intimate folk song to close things out.

But don’t take our word for it, stream the whole thing below and find your favourite:

Design and layout by Andrew Barton at Two Plum Press

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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.

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The stylistic shift is clear from opener ‘Eden Vision’, an electronic pop song collaged from a short looped vocal clip, groovin’ guitar, subtle beats and a sort of angelic background ambience. But when Sondermann’s vocals arrive it’s clear this is still Pleasure Systems, their wistfulness providing a beguiling counterpoint to the dancey instrumentation.

I don’t believe in what I can’t see
your memory starts to recede
I don’t believe that spirits linger
there is no form
I can’t see you anymore

‘Heirloom’ sounds like Dan Deacon on downers, twinkling keys and weird vocal effects swirling around earnestly poetic lines like “my mom and dad remain conjoined by nothing more than not to be alone.” Indeed, the song reveals itself to be white hot with hurt, grief and pain both highly personal (“my fingertips are running through your alopecian hair,” Sondermann sings of experiencing his partner’s illness, “and this is home”), and more universal, namely the plight of the LGBTQ community at large, what Sondermann describes as “a legacy of fear and paranoia.” But at it’s heart this is still a love song, albeit one with the sugary veneer stripped away, a fact illustrated in the final line.

I cling to you
for in each other’s pain and grief
is where we feel at home

And this is how Terraform continues, the fun and experimental digitally-modulated pop a vehicle for exploring very human emotions. It’s a testament to Sondermann’s songwriting that even when buried beneath sampler loops and smothered in vocal effects, the messages feel achingly human. Much electronic dance music would fail to pass the Voigt Kampff test, keeping the listener at arm’s length due to its lack of personal centre, but the infectious rhythms and melodies Sondermann stitches together coalesce around an intimate and emotional core.

‘Idle’ seems to be disintegrating as it advances, pixels breaking away and whirling into the digital ether, while ‘Envelop’ sounds calm and chill, built on a smoothly spherical synth line, the verses punctuated with sample loops and subtle beats. The kaleidoscopic ‘Milk & Honey’ feels like playing an arcade platformer at double speed, and ‘Folded’ is all woozy flutter, its panoply of percussion adding an almost tropical lilt.

Perhaps the closest thing the album has to a typical Washboard Abs song, ‘Cautiously’ sees acoustic guitar bubbling up from the vocal samples. The song sounds soft and wistful, but it’s actually a clear-eyed look at the legacy of abuse, the perfect example of the Pleasure Systems combination of the pretty and the painful.

Which is going to be the legacy of Terraform, an album built on a solid emotional core that takes electronic dance music and lo-fi bedroom pop and sends them spinning in new directions. Penultimate track ‘See It Thru’ is wonderfully slick and streamlined, a great example of the poppier end of the Pleasure Systems spectrum, while finale ‘From the Ground’ frowns with an earnest direction, a love song that, just like the whole album, feels as vulnerable as it does powerful.

Terraform is out now and you can get it on cassette or download from the Pleasure Systems Bandcamp page.

The post Pleasure Systems – Terraform appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Big Thief – Capacity

Saddle Creek

“[Lenker’s vocals] unfurl like a magician’s silk scarves, a perpetual unravelling shaped by a poetic, negentropic logic. [It] is as though the meaning is summoned from the words themselves, something in the syllabic arrangement dragging stories and emotions into our world from somewhere else entirely. Lenker’s gift is her ability to recognise the strange, innate forces within language, surrender to them, and present them back to us with a crystal-clear clarity.”

REVIEW / BUY

Wild Pink – S/T

Tiny Engines

“Ross feels like a narrator dropped into an ongoing narrative, not fully aware of the beginning or end, or even any coherent context, yet haunted by profound sensations of sadness, fear and guilt—an unshakeable, existential dread that suggests we’re going to pay for how this story is panning out. Wild Pink haven’t come to us amidst this chaos with magic cures or quick-fix solutions, but they’ve come to us nonetheless. Right now, that’s probably the most valuable and noble thing any of us can do.”

REVIEW / BUY

The Wooden Sky – Swimming in Strange Waters

Chelsea Records / Nevado Music

“The Wooden Sky are making music with emotion, intelligence and integrity, songs in which you can both lose and find yourself, and perhaps even connect with the plight of others. We’re all trying to survive strange waters to some degree, and the record’s intent on illuminating this fact—both appreciating your constant kicking beneath the surface, and imploring you to help those that may be tiring, or entering even rougher seas.”

REVIEW / BUY

Vagabon – Infinite Worlds

Father/Daughter Records

“This is the sort of music that makes you feel part of a something, it does reflect a big sad and confused gang spread out all over the world, and we should be connected by shared experience and a sneaky feeling that life is worth living. However, to mark Infinite Worlds as simply sad or lonely falls into to the very trap of binarism that the album spends so much time fighting. Yes, it’s mournful but joyous too. It’s bedroom pop and indie rock and experimental ambient. It’s immensely personal and broadly relatable. It’s Vagabon, though only as it sounds right now.”

REVIEW / BUY

Protomartyr – Relatives of Descent

Domino

“Casey returns to his own struggles with the irony of being an artist in such a world, where to not speak against the absurdity of the system is to become complicit, yet knowing those very absurdities render his words meaningless. Rather than give up, or persevere nobly, Casey twists his art into the shape of this double-bind, using self-deprecation to cover any hint of naivety. “I have a backlog of so-called prophets,” a character tells a Messiah-like oracle near the beginning of the [final song]. “You are of a multitude.” The preacher insists he witnesses truth, to which the first character reacts with genuine confusion and interest. “The truth?” he asks. “What is it?””

REVIEW / BUY

Julia Lucille – Chthonic

Keeled Scales

“Part folk, part dream pop, part something else entirely, her music combines equal parts delicacy and foreboding with an impressive patience and emotional intensity […] concerned with the underworld, more specifically descending into as a mode of growth and rebirth (a la Persephone), and [showing] off the interplay between shadow and light that constitutes the record’s aesthetic.”

REVIEW / BUY

Friendship – Shock Out Of Season

Orindal Records

“In many ways, Friendship are in a Bardo of their own, caught between how life has been and could be, unsure how and when, if ever, they might pass into the next part. Shock Out of Season is concerned with finding this exit, figuring out some act or combination of words that allow passage into the next life. Or maybe it’s about making peace with the current space, acknowledging that perhaps true communication is impossible, and that trying to live with this understanding might be the most sympathetic and empathetic path available to us.”

REVIEW / BUY

Real Life Buildings – Significant Weather

Lauren Records

“Real Life Buildings capture both the quiet minutiae of day to day living—the soft feeling you get in an empty room with just a ticking clock and raindrops on the window pane for company—and the exhilarating rush of joy that is still sometimes possible. It’s music that, despite its anxiety and concern, still sees that silvery sheen of magic in the mundane, a fun indie rock record and a lesson in paying attention to what’s going on both inside and outside your head.”

REVIEW / BUY

Distant Reader – Home Power

Lily Tapes & Discs

“Distant Reader weav[es] a dense web of not just personal reflections, but reflections on the lives of those he cares about. Home Power is a deep record, one that withstands, even requires, a lot of thought and rumination, but after repeated listens the key points of empathy and kindness begin to resonate deeply. It’s a reminder that we’re all able to help ourselves and each other, and that we will be better people for both.”

REVIEW / BUY

Alex Napping – Mise En Place

Father/Daughter Records / Sports Day Records

“Less like a chronicle of a disintegrating relationship than the beginning of a process of self-examination, of moving forward, of weighing things up day-by-day and acting accordingly […] On Mise En Place, Alex Napping somehow manage to marry the immediacy of good pop songs with a slow-burning complexity, proving that meaningful songs can still be fun, and that great pop songs need not be a simple shallow sugar rush.”

REVIEW / BUY

Craig Finn – We All Want The Same Things

Partisan Records

“There’s a danger that pushing everything through the Trumpian prism collapses some of the intricacies and nuances of art. After all, The Donald is a product of the disaffection Finn is exploring here, not the cause. The problem is deeper and more complex than any government-related trouble, and Finn is too wise to offer much in the way of an answer. Instead, he suggests we shift the focus of our questions. Because We All Want the Same Things is an album about relationships, but not in the usual sense. Not the transcendental, star-aligned love of Billboard hits and Hollywood flicks but coupling based on common needs. Not life-changing answers but life-preserving strategies. Luckily, in the hands of Craig Finn, this version of ‘romance’ feels somehow more fulfilling, the opposite of cynical, for better or for worse, genuinely human. Perhaps the revolution in the conclusion isn’t some violent revolt or epiphanic break, rather a gradual yet constant commitment to challenging our own expectations. To stop wanting too much for ourselves and to start being sympathetic to others. A comeback story, of sorts.”

REVIEW / BUY

The Courtneys – II

Flying Nun Records

“There’s something joyfully nostalgic [about II]…the aural equivalent of the era it borrows from musically. It’s wrapped up in the warm fuzzy tape hiss of the late 80s / early 90s, that period of endless possibility, where everything was colourful and exciting and came with a free toy.”

REVIEW / BUY

Pleasure Systems – Antumbra Pull

Antiquated Future Records

“Essentially a collection of love songs. Each track is pure and sincere and deceptively rich, each created within its own little world, or perhaps conjuring a snapshot of a particular time/place in our own. The positive outlook never seems like some near-forgotten memory. It’s as if Sondermann is using Pleasure Systems to focus all of the hope and love into a beam which is aimed at the shadow, a beam which might not make the problem go away, but can at least be used as a formidable weapon in the forthcoming struggle.”

REVIEW / BUY

Midwife – Like Author, Like Daughter

Whited Sepulchre

“On Like Author, Like Daughter, Midwife have made an album of dualities…both powerfully elemental and somehow intangible, the unrestrained power of nature versus the invisible waves that surround us, emotionally pure messages coded in digital distortion. This duality goes for the atmosphere too. It’s impossible to pack the album away into an explicit genre or emotion, somehow conveying the whole spectrum, swelling triumph and crushing defeat, bright white hope and oil-black despair. But, ultimately, almost unbelievably, the message is positive. Even during the moments where the music sounds like the apocalypse, a tangible, sonic manifestation of loneliness and despair, Johnston provides a thread to hold on to, a reminder that the human spirit is the one thing that can, and will, endure.”

REVIEW / BUY

Black Belt Eagle Scout – Mother Of My Children

Self-released

“For all the difficulty and heartache that clearly went into it’s creation, Mother of My Children ultimately feels like Black Belt Eagle Scout making a clarion call, a proud statement that is intended to encourage other queer people of colour to use art as a source of strength, self-knowledge and empowerment. But it’s more than just an artistic statement. The album has both focus and depth, exploring themes directly with its lyrics and more indirectly with the atmosphere it conjures.”

REVIEW / BUY

CHUCK – Franenstein Songs For the Grocery Store

Audio Antihero

“Frankenstein Songs for the Grocery Store finds CHUCK doing what he does best, making songs that are catchy and funny and unashamedly “pop” and all undoubtedly good fun. But there’s always that something else to his songs too, something that’s harder to put a finger on, a nod to the vacuum at the centre of our 21st century consumerist culture.”

REVIEW / BUY

Half Gringa – Gruñona

Self-released

“Unpick[ing] the knots and tangles that have developed through[out] life, both retracing steps and forging ahead to discover something closer to [an] authentic self […] Gruñona is a journey without a clear destination, a question without an answer. An attempt to map identity not to achieve some clear-cut conclusion but rather in the hope of better understanding how history and culture and personal beliefs shape the people we are and were, the people we will be.”

REVIEW / BUY

Meursault – I Will Kill Again

Song, By Toad Records

“This is an album full of ghosts, both literal and metaphoric, from the disembodied voices that sometimes interrupt the broadcast, to Pennycook’s characters themselves, all coalescing to create a grand sense of melancholy […] but [the final song] see a sense of advancement, a suggestion that the ghosts might finally be confined to the past, where they belong.”

REVIEW / BUY

Adult Mom – Soft Spots

Tiny Engines

“Soft Spots finds Adult Mom with a new sense of self-assurance. These songs contain genuine hurt but also genuine hope, the narrator finally in possession of the bravery necessary to open up to people. It’s hard to think of a more fitting illustration of the album than the pickled pink peaches on the cover art. Yes, the fruits may get bruised if the jar is opened, but how else would anyone know how soft and sweet they are?”

REVIEW / BUY

Bea Troxel – The Way That It Feels

Self-released

“The album is an introspective one, based around big questions of where the narrator wants to be and what kind of life they want to live. In that way, it feels like a re-evaluation, the bright and hopeful result of much thought and worry […] The Way That It Feels hits a nice balance between the weighty and the not. It’s an album as poetic and pretty as it is serious and sincere, and marks Bea Troxel as a name to watch among contemporary folk musicians.”

REVIEW / BUY

The post Favourite Albums of 2017 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Hi Clarke, thanks for speaking to us! How does it feel to have you new album Antumbra Pull out in the world?

Hi! Thank you for reaching out. It feels good having the songs out there, and it mostly felt good to give the album a little bit of a spontaneous/quick release. I don’t particularly enjoy the promotion process or sitting on material for too long, so it feels like a weight off my chest to call these songs done and move on in a sense. Joshua from Antiquated Future is wonderful to work with, he handled nearly everything while still keeping my creative vision central. We wound up releasing the album less than two weeks after we decided to work together on it, which is a dream for me.

You’ve described the songs on the album as “thank you notes and love letters” to your partner, who is currently going through some pretty terrifying health issues. First of all, are you both holding up okay? And what influence did the news have on you releasing these songs now?

Thanks for asking, we’re trying to keep our heads up (which he’s better at than me most of the time). I gave him the final version of the album as an anniversary present, which happened to only fall four days before the initial hospital visit and diagnosis (stage IV renal cancer with metastasis in the lungs, spine and ribs). It was timed perfectly in a sense, I was able to give him this (in my opinion) grandiose statement of love and gratitude right before everything got distorted and scary. The songs on the album mean a lot to him, they’re a reflection of our time spent together and he tells me constantly how much strength he’s found in them.

I had talked briefly with Antiquated Future about releasing it before I got the news that he was sick (which rapidly transformed my world – the vast majority of my time was immediately focused on supporting him) so I’m grateful that we were able to get the album out so quickly. Like I said, I have a hard time sitting on material prior to release and I really wanted these songs out in the public as sort of a declaration of love.

We’ve been following your work (as The Washboard Abs and Pleasure Systems) for a while now. To me this seems like your most accomplished work to date, but I’d be interested to know how you feel your music has changed and matured over the last few years.

Thank you! This record is some of my proudest work to date. In the last couple years (really since I started collaborating with my current bandmates in the Washboard Abs, who are all far more skilled musicians than I am) I’ve started to take my musicianship much more seriously and really expand my vocabulary of harmony. But more than that, I write as an immediate reflection of whatever is happening in my life at the time, and I think that’s a much better way of charting the growth of the material. I wrote have u scanned ur club card? from the depths of a depression that followed the death of a couple close friends, I wrote Recurring Chasms as a statement on my recovery process from a sexual assault, and I wrote Antumbra Pull mostly about being head over heels in love and finding a lot of healing within a relationship. Goes without saying that I view Antumbra Pull as my happiest album, but it also feels like my most mature album. I think it’s reflective of the clarity I gained after writing so much material during the darkest points of my life.

How does the music you make as Pleasure Systems differ from the Washboard Abs stuff? Are they two very separate entities in your mind? Or do you use songs for either project depending on what you’re working on at the time?

The idea behind Pleasure Systems came about after the Washboard Abs evolved into a fully collaborative band. Working with my bandmates has been a transformative experience and I’m really humbled to be playing with them, but I had self recorded under the name for about three years at that point and really missed the process of creating music entirely on my own. The key distinction between the two projects for me is the recording and arrangement style, I listen to a lot of electronic music and wanted an outlet to explore digital sounds further – the band is a fairly standard two guitars, bass and drums lineup. There’s a little bit of give and take between the two projects though, I scrapped my Pleasure Systems version of “Through the Air” when my bandmates wanted to play it with me, “Haunt Me” became a pleasure systems song when the rest of the band wasn’t enthused about arranging it, and we’ve been playing “Bathroom Stall Prayer” as a full band in the last couple months.

Besides the aforementioned highly personal stuff, what are the current big influences on your songwriting?

Like I said above, I tend to write from a perspective informed by whatever’s consuming my exterior life. So these days, I’m writing a lot of pretty sad songs about watching someone you love battle serious illness. I’m sitting with a lot of fear and it shows up in the songs more than I want it to, so I’m consciously trying to shift into writing from a more hopeful perspective.

Past that, I have a deep admiration for the arrangements of Stephen Steinbrink’s songs, his music has this every-element-in-its-place type of perfection to me, there’s so much nuance and texture that all fits together seamlessly and somehow still feels restrained. In a similar vein, I find myself very drawn to the deceptively restrained songwriting of the bands Florist and Big Thief, both melodically and lyrically. My friend Mat Cothran (Coma Cinema/Elvis Depressedly) will always be one of my biggest lyrical influences, I’m constantly moved by his unflinching honesty through songwriting (this newest/final Coma Cinema album especially). Chris Weisman is my absolute favorite songwriter and has been a huge inspiration for me, but his music is so complex and intelligent I’m not sure his influence will ever be audible in my work.

What are your plans for the foreseeable future? Do you plan to tour Antumbra Pull? And can we expect more Pleasure Systems releases?

We have a couple exciting Washboard Abs shows lined up this spring in Washington state, and this February I’m going on a short east coast US tour as Pleasure Systems with Body Meat and Ada Babar. I’ve already started working on recording the next batch of Pleasure Systems songs, and the Washboard Abs are gonna start recording our next album early next year. No idea when those songs will see the light of day though. I’m still working on new material, but for the last few months (and into the foreseeable future) my energy has been pulled away from creative outlets and refocused on helping my partner. He’s recovering from two major surgeries pretty rapidly and regaining a lot of his strength, so hopefully we’ll be able to return to more normalcy soon. For me, normalcy is constant creative work.

Lastly, could you recommend 4/5 artists that you’ve been liking lately? They can be new releases or golden oldies, it’s up to you.

Well, my all time favorite album has slowly become Rendezvous With Rama by Ruth Garbus. I can’t recommend this record highly enough – it’s the perfect blend of soothing and energizing, it’s really mystical and healing music to me. My best friend Chris (who mastered Antumbra Pull) has a project called Body Meat that I think is the best band in the world at this point. The Washboard Abs put out a split tape with him on the label Citrus City this summer. His whole discography is mind blowing to me, and he’s been a tremendous help with critique and motivation. He constantly makes me want to work harder. Angela, the other guitarist (besides me) in the Washboard Abs, makes mesmerizing loop-based ambient music on her own under the name noneforme. She’s taught me an immeasurable amount about harmony and has really helped shape me into the songwriter I am today. The two of us also used to play in our friend Ben Varian’s backup band ‘The Ben Varian Approach’. Ben’s music is triumphant, melancholic and uplifting. He’s an absolute master of weirdo pop. Lastly, I guess what I’ve found myself putting on most often in the past year are the many projects of Lily Konigsberg. She plays in the group Palberta, is half of the magnificent electronic pop duo Lily & Horn Horse and released a wonderful split under her own name with Andréa Schiavelli this summer. Past that I’ve been listening to a kind of silly amount of Steely Dan.

Be sure to check out all we’ve written about Pleasure Systems and The Washboard Abs, purchase Antumbra Pull from Antiquated Future and support the rest of Clarke’s music via Bandcamp.

Photo by Heidi Kleder

The post Interview: Clarke Sondermann appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Tracklisting:

Friendship – If You See My Beloved
Rainwater – Ordinary Pain
Vivian Fantasy – Florist
Anamon – Kneel Old
Human Kitten – Stuck Neverlasting
American Poetry Club – You Don’t Have To vs. Anyone
Merce Lemon – Johnny When He’s Sweet and John For All The Rest
Beverly Tender – Whose Taxidermy Horse?
Big Thief – Shark Smile
Pleasure Systems – Crumbs
CIVIC – Down & Distant

We’re winding down for the holiday season right now, so the posts will be even more sporadic through December. We plan to use the time to check off a few gems that we missed through the year. Sometime near the end of the month, we’ll be putting up the requisite Favourite Albums/Songs of the Year lists, plus our annual round-up of the best Name-Your-Price releases on Bandcamp.

The post November 2017 Roundup appeared first on Various Small Flames.

The first song, ‘Living’, exists in a calm, hushed space, rippling guitar, gently thumping percussion and disembodied wordless vocals combining to create a sound that’s all rounded edges. Eventually Sondermann’s vocals enter, their familiar considered cadence adding an extra emotive edge. ‘Crumbs’ is an immediate change, the opening synths more direct, the lyrics both stark and sweet.

“He spills his sweetness on me
tells me it’s alright
but I feel my body pull away
when the shadows come at night”

As those lyrics suggest, Antumbra Pull is essentially a collection of love songs. Each track is pure and sincere and deceptively rich, each created within its own little world, or perhaps conjuring a snapshot of a particular time/place in our own. Take for example the diversity of effects and percussion on ‘Saw U Glow’, which evoke some weird jungle ecosystem, a lush green backdrop for lyrics about transcendental sights and feelings, or ‘Pool’, which is built on the sound of running water, the synths like dappled sunlight on its surface.

I guess, in light of the circumstances, Antumbra Pull is an album that deals with suffering and tragedy, but almost never directly. Those thoughts and fears exist in inference only, invisible-inked between the lines, and probably wouldn’t exist at all if, as a listener, I didn’t know its wider context. It’s a reminder that everything we have in this life deserves our utmost love and attention, and that we’d do well not to take it for granted for a single second. ‘Satellite’ is one of the few songs that hints at the shadow that Sondermann mentions in his note, as though charting the true importance of the love by exploring the consequences of losing it. “I don’t wanna be alone again,” he sings, “I don’t wanna try to build another home again, so I, so I feel afraid again“.

‘Crystal Plane’ is part introspective bedroom pop, part Stranger Things OST, the delicate vocals and nostalgic lyrics backed with emotive 80s synths, while ‘Blue’ sounds brighter and more purposeful, the driving beat embellished with birdsong. The final track ‘Haunt Me’, distils what has come before, a bittersweet love song that brings to mind the David Foster Wallace phrase: “every love story is a ghost story.”

“All I want
for you to haunt me like a shadow
all I want
to feel the grace inside your power?”

There’s a positivity that threads through the album, and the timing of the release is important. Here, the positive outlook never seems like some near-forgotten memory, instead it’s as if Sondermann is using Pleasure Systems to focus all of the hope and love into a beam which is aimed at the shadow, a beam which might not make the problem go away, but can at least be used as a formidable weapon in the forthcoming struggle.

You can get Antumbra Pull now via Antiquated Future Records on cassette and download. Head to Bandcamp to get your copy.

The post Pleasure Systems – Antumbra Pull appeared first on Various Small Flames.