This autumn sees the release of Electric Bouquet, a new full-length from Anna McClellan on Father/Daughter Records. An account of the past four years, the album charts a period which saw McClellan go to school to become an electrician, move cross country and experience the end of relationships, and single ‘Endlessly’ captures the release’s atmosphere of bittersweet tenderness. A slow burner which slowly shakes itself from a melancholic piano-led opening into something freer and more affirming, McClellan rising from the blues in real time with an overarching message of hope. “‘Endlessly’ is definitely a mile marker song for me,” McClellan describes. “I think it retains all of the common traits of my songwriting while reaching a new level of maturity. It feels important and urgent to express this idea that we are each other’s truths. We can’t look to the supposed leaders of our system or the media for truth.”

Watch the video filmed by McClellan, Mychal Marasco and Ryan McKeever and edited by Harrison Martin below:

Electric Bouquet will be released via Father/Daughter Records on 25th October. Pre-order it now from the Anna McClellan Bandcamp page.

Anne Malin – River

“I saw my heart beating in a river and left it there for the earth to save / Some muscle wet in the weeds, and flooded through still I will sing.” So sings Anne Malin on ‘River’, the lead single from forthcoming album Strange Power!, set to be released next month via Dear Life Records. The lines not only capture the essence of the song but the wider thematic resonance of the album as a whole. The Durham, NC-based songwriter and poet explores how nature and its inherent motion might possess the key to the process of healing in the aftermath of trauma and loss. The album is being released in tandem with book-length poem, What Floods (published under the name AM Ringwalt), the two not only complimenting and deepening one another, but intersecting on ‘River’, whose lyrics appear within text.

Strange Power! is out on the 25th October via Dear Life Records and you can pre-order it now. What Floods will be published by Inside the Castle and you can find more here.

El Tee – Baby

Based in Naarm/Melbourne by way of California, El Tee (AKA songwriter Lauren Tarver) introduced itself in 2020 with debut full-length album, Everything Is Fine—an album built around an ongoing quest for self-realisation and acceptance. Building upon these themes, new single ‘Baby’ sees El Tee once against push against the grain in the knowledge that confronting discomfort is the only path towards the truth, and moreover directly calls out those who would prefer to avoid vulnerability via the sly tactic of self-sabotage. “I wrote ‘Baby’ about the experience of doing this to myself, but also about being on the receiving end of someone sabotaging a good thing when it feels hard,” as Tarver explains. “Self-sabotage can be a form of protection—creating predictability can give the illusion of safety. At least, that’s what my therapist says…”

Watch the video by Tarver herself below:

‘Baby’ is out now and available from the El Tee Bandcamp page.

Kareem Rahma & Tiny Guns – Baby I Could Never Win

Kareem Rahma might be best known as the comedian, host and creator behind viral TikTok and Instagram series Subway Takes and Keep The Meter Running, but also records as part of the band Tiny Guns along with Tyler McCauley (guitar), Joe Tirabassi (guitar), Matt Morello (bass, piano, backing vocals) and Dale Eisinger (drums, percussion). With new EP No Worries If Not coming next week, Rahma and co. have shared opener ‘Baby I Could Never Win’ to whet the appetite. A hectic dash of a track which pulls the audience into its forward momentum alongside Rahma’s uber cool delivery.

Oceanator – Get Out

Oceanator has long offered lead Elise Okusami a vehicle to explore the emotional landscape of life in a collapsing world, with previous albums Things I Never Said and Nothing’s Ever Fine wrestling with what it means to love and long for things in a time where the approaching end is so apparent. Their latest record, out now via Polyvinyl Records, is the culmination of these ideas, something written in its very title—Everything is Love and Death. As you might expect, the range of emotions on show is vast and ever-changing, but don’t be fooled into thinking such high stakes sap any of the defiant energy from the songs. Take ‘Get Out’, a promise to meet the world on its own stark terms and seize the moment to make itself heard.

Get up get up get out tonight
I’m not going down without a fight
I wanna be here not stuck in my head
Imagining all the things I never said

The track comes with a video directed by Paul DeSilva which casts Okusami as an actual demon slayer. Watch below:

Everything is Love and Death is out now via Polyvinyl and available from Bandcamp.

Quarterly – Illuminati

Last week saw the release of Adonis, the third album from Brooklyn duo Quarterly. The husband and wife duo Kristen Drymala and Christopher DiPietro work at the intersection of folk and neoclassical, combining guitar and cello in wordless compositions of rich depth and sober intensity. Their most formally adventurous yet, the new record sees the pair throw off the shackles of trying to make something that can be played live in favour of experimental tunings, polyrhythms and innovative forms. Album closer and final single ‘Illuminati’ is a good introduction. What the press release calls an “A24-soundtrack-ready track [which] imagines the sound of pre-Christian folk music,” it’s mysteriously beautiful, Drymala’s cello following DiPetro’s guitar in intricate passages before soaring off on its own.

Sea Lemon – Crystals (feat. Benjamin Gibbard)

Hot on the heels of 2023 album Stop At Nothing on Luminelle Recordings, Sea Lemon has returned with a brand new single ‘Crystals’. The previous record saw the Natalia Lew draw on ideas more typically seen in horror films or literary fiction, with narrators which feel, as we put it, “at once fearful and dangerous, some absence at the heart of their existence pushing them toward the darkest of places.” The new single, which sees Benjamin Gibbard lend vocals too, might not be quite so foreboding, but still bucks expectation with its willingness to forgo escape attempts and instead embrace the gloomy present. “I wrote most of the song after coming to this realization that ‘manifesting’ or looking for signs in nature or everyday life is mostly just a coping mechanism to get by day to day,” Lew explains. “When Ben came on and wrote his verse, I loved his added angle—rather than attempting lighter coping mechanisms, just submitting oneself to being upset and living in that darkness for a while can be a way to cope in and of itself.”

‘Crystals’ is out now via Luminelle Recordings and you can get it from Bandcamp.

Shovel Dance Collective – The Rolling Wave

“A stripped back sea shanty hushed with the inevitable loss of grand adventure, the titular vessel just another claimed by the ocean’s mysterious whims.” So we wrote of The Shovel Dance, the forthcoming album from Shovel Dance Collective on American Dreams. As it progressed, the track revealed itself as more than a simple folk song, landing alongside the likes of Lankum and Shane Parish in its mission, as we put it, “to push old sounds and stories into new dimensions.” With the album’s release fast approaching, the London nine-piece have shared new single, ‘The Rolling Wave’. It’s another example of the depth and intricacy of the Shovel Dance Collective sound, not to mention the intuitive spirit which hangs everything together. The humble three-minute runtime might seem modest compared with the previous single, but with a wistful and inherently playful arrangement, the track again offers a portal through which the audience is invited.

Check out the video by Tom Hardwick-Allan, with finishing and colour by Rafi Siraj and bleeds by Nick Granata:

The Shovel Dance is out on the 11th October via American Dreams and you can pre-order it now from the Shovel Dance Collective Bandcamp page.

The post Weekly Listening: September 2024 #3 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

MacCaig and the coastal wilderness which so often features in his work are inspirations Constant Follower have always worn proudly, and the songs of Even Days Dissolve feel like direct descendants from this lineage of Scottish literature. But the record goes further to cement the link by having “the grand old man of Scottish poetry” posthumously appear on a pair of the tracks. “Bringing two of these songs together with the voice of our beloved Norman MacCaig has been a real highlight of this project,” McAll explains. “His poetry was introduced to me by my high school teacher Mrs Tatarkowski, and it was the first prose I was able to read and understand when I was recovering from a traumatic head injury. So his work holds a deep space in my heart. I don’t think any poet or songwriter has matched his ability to capture the space and wonder of the natural beauty of Scotland.”

The first example of this is ‘Wildlife Cameraman (Summer Farm)’, where McAll splices his own story of the titular cameraman into MacCaig’s rendition of the poem ‘Summer Farm’. An ode to a life in the outdoors, where solitude inverts upon itself so as to find company in open spaces. Be it through the ducks and hens and swallows, or even the “straws like tame lightnings” hung from from hedges and strewn on grass. The poem offers the landscape as a place in which to escape interior turmoil if never quite transcend it, and serves as an archetypal example of MacCaig’s ability to bend the apparently trivial into something with true existential significance.

I lie, not thinking, in the cool, soft grass,
Afraid of where a thought might take me—as
This grasshopper with plated face
Unfolds his legs and finds himself in space.

Self under self, a pile of selves I stand
Threaded on time, and with metaphysic hand
Lift the farm like a lid and see
Farm within farm, and in the centre, me.

The song comes complete with a stop-motion video directed by Erentia Bedeker and the animation studio Wreckless Creative, furthering the track’s strange sense of solitude/non-solitude:

‘Space Between Stars’ offers a moodier sound, a certain tension runs through Urquhart’s guitar even as it evokes the sprawling distances of its title, while ‘Ash Wednesday Slow’ sees hip hop artist CRPNTR deliver an evocative spoken word segment which itself seems to charge the guitar with a newfound momentum, as though Urquhart taps into the energy found between the words themselves. The song serves as a perfect example of what Urquhart offers the record. Because if MacCaig and McAll capture an image of the landscape, then his guitar offers the movement, be it fine detail or sweeping elegance, lifting the songs from static poems into something breathing, tableaus animated with moving time.

Closer ‘Comes A Silence (Basking Shark)’ is a fitting conclusion, the guitar this time accentuated by saxophone and harp by Matt Carmichael and Andy Aquarius respectively as MacCaig returns to detail an encounter with the titular creature via his poem ‘Basking Shark’. A “roomsized monster with a matchbox brain” met while rowing on a “sea tin-tacked with rain,” which inadvertently triggers something of a crisis of identity. Because for all of its ancient size and cryptic silence, MacCaig experiences the shark not as some mystery rising from the depths but a thing in its proper place. Rather it is he who is cast adrift, representative of humankind having forgotten its position within the natural order of things. “Swish up the dirt and, when it settles, a spring,” MacCaig writes. “Is all the clearer. I saw me, in one fling, / Emerging from the slime of everything.” Here the basking shark is a kind of sublime experience, a visitation able to submerge us back into the ecosystems we have spent so long trying to escape.

It’s an apt encapsulation of the message at the heart of Even Days Dissolve. Let us head back into the environment around us, Scott William Urquhart and Constant Follower suggest. Stitch ourselves back into the fabric of the land. For the land is already within us and always has been. It just takes a moment to remember it, to understand.

Even Days Dissolve is out now and available from the Constant Follower Bandcamp page.

The post Scott William Urquhart & Constant Follower – Even Days Dissolve appeared first on Various Small Flames.

This time, Be Softly has teamed up with Zoë Blair-Schlagenhauf to create Unfinished Apology Letters, a product of transatlantic communication and eventually friendship. Graduating from Loyola University New Orleans this year and since moving to Los Angeles, Blair-Schlagenhauf is the author of Chlamydia Summer and the co-founder of Tenderness Lit. Her work explores the twin forces of alienation and connection, as though loneliness explained well enough can be in salve in itself. The idea is wholly apparent on this collaborative record, as the album’s press release states:

Unfinished Apology Letters is about trying and failing and sometimes just not knowing what to do to help the ones you love most. But it’s also about the healing power of art and the joy that accompanies collaboration. It represents the solace we can find in the people who believe in us.

Opening track ‘Best Friend’s Vomit’ attempts to re-personalise the opioid crisis, moving away from the nebulous, far-away feel of stark headlines and dire open-eds, centring mundane life as Ground Zero for the tragedy. Indeed, Blair-Schlagenhauf draws upon image of 9/11 to force home this idea, the violence and suffering not some cultural norm or self-chosen curse, but rather a precipitation of far vaguer problems that lurk beneath our culture.

“A Yahoo article tells me that with 142 deaths a day, it is equivalent to 9/11 happening every three weeks,” Blair-Schlagenhauf says, her tone simple, kind of far-off, as though speaking more to herself, testing out the words, thinking it all through. “Because we can only measure things in terms of the worse thing that has ever happened ever.” Only, the Worst Thing Ever is something that happens on TV, impersonal and awesome, and this is not that. “But I’m crying,” she continues, “because I can only measure things in your names, or the amount of unfinished apology letters that selfishly sit with the lights on in my Google drive, like when I sit in my parked car for too long, hoping I’ll never have to go inside.”

‘g.o.m.’ is a slow shuffling track pitched somewhere between warmth and animosity, as though the two emotions are not so far apart, or two sides of the same coin. Blair-Schlagenhauf’s writing is keyed into such as idea, her daydreams tending toward violence or love, her thoughts toward diving in front of speeding cars. “I don’t want to die,” she explains flatly. “I just think this would be a great way for all of my bones to feel the same way at once.”

Exploring the discrepancy between reality and the ideas of hold of it, ‘falling’ is chock full of phony images and our pining for their truth, while ‘water molecules’ brightens with a slow dawning. The momentum in the repetitive structures lend something of a mantra-like quality, as though by stringing scientific facts into the correct arrangement, Blair-Schlagenhauf might unlock an answer that surpasses cold hard facts and get straight to the bloody beating heart.

Unfinished Apology Letters is out now and you can get it from the Be Softly Bandcamp page. The proceeds of the album will be donated to Shatterproof, a US nonprofit dedicated to ending opioid crisis, and Mind, the UK mental health charity.

The post Zoë Blair-Schlagenhauf & Be Softly – Unfinished Apology Letters appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Following Sam Pink’s lead, the record is brutal and dark, the instrumentation allowing the violent alienation and dissatisfaction of his words to soar. ‘False-Bottomed Coffins’ opens with an introduction to the album’s themes, with self-consciousness disguised as misanthropy, caring too deeply masked as blank indifference, and the constant pressure of these repressed emotions pressing on the crown of the skull, like a volcano about to blow. ‘I Own You and You Own Me’ continues this, opening with a pretty clear sentiment—”Two types of eye contact: none and fuck you”—navigating a depressive state that feels like “all there is inside your skull is melted plastic.”  Again, the narrator is tangled within their own thoughts, their attempts at freeing themselves only furthering the bind, a predicament communicated with a Wallacean, inside-my-head tone.

“Living as three people: one inside your head saying hateful/depressed/hopeless shit, another as the one inside your head trying to deal with the first one, and the third one as visible to the outside world, trying to keep people from noticing any trace of the first two.

That moment when you start to have a little feeling/emotion and you look back on having just acted out of not having any feelings/emotions.”

‘Bonus Magnets for my Brain’ meanders in a way that could be relaxed or ominous or both, the instrumentation threatening to bubble over but never quite managing the energy required. Hyper-self-consciousness, banal everyday observations and macabre imagery coalesce into something at once relatable and unhinged, where lines like “The feeling that everything is obvious in a way that’s embarrassing” are followed by “Making friends with the firing squad.” ‘One Night, Your Pillow Will Swallow Your Head’ and ‘Making Friends With the Firing Squad’ furthers this feeling, growing increasingly morbid and strange as horror, paranoia and deep-seated anger make violent ends inevitable—either the narrator will be destroyed or else the entire world around them. All the while, a slow creeping dread advances, looming.

“Talking to the lone lobster left in the tank at the supermarket to calm down and feel connected.
Talking shit to the firing squad.
Smiling wide as you allow your latest ghost to slowly come out of you in front of others, unseen.
Smiling wide as you allow someone else’s latest ghost to go into you as if you earned it.
And you have.
You have you have you have!”

Both this nameless dread and the hope of escaping it fuel the entire collection, and these forces manifest themselves as monsters on ‘No Way to Defeat It but Jump In / No Way to Help It but Let It Die.’ The dread is “A monster with a head made of a hundred toothless mouths (No way to defeat it but jump in),” and the hope “A monster with a head full of knives that never dies, just stumbles around shrieking (And no way to help it but let it die).” Within this tale of suffering, a relationship is painted, though one so fiercely held that it becomes its own form of torment, the narrator’s performing a verbal self-flagellation as penance for their perceived inadequacy, lashing themselves into nothingness in lieu of any better ideas. After all there’s no way to help it but let it die.

Check out the striking video from Wild Child Studios below:

Your Glass Head Against the Brick Parade of Now Whats plays like the fever dream manifesto of the archetypal Disillusioned Kid, someone who, instead of shooting up his school or oxycontin, decided to let the tirade out as language. Stinging and self-loathing and strange, the narrator is sick and tired of a phony world and phony people yet dying of cold within this self-imposed exile. The record then, feels like one final, fatal gesture—self-immolation just to feel that half-second of warmth before the pain sets in, just to see your own blazing reflection in eyes of the faces around you.

Your Glass Head Against the Brick Parade of Now Whats is out now and you can get it from the Be Softly Bandcamp page. Find out more about Sam Pink on the Lazy Fascist Press website.

The post Be Softly / Sam Pink – Your Glass Head Against the Brick Parade of Now Whats appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Opener ‘glass machines discovering water’ introduces us to the unique sound of Corvus B. It’s built on frantic banjo and lo-fi percussion and rapidly delivered spoken word poetry, with lines like:

“last night I was on the Merrimack river
and the lights were watching me so I stared back
and they looked like they were make of plastic
and I felt like I was made of plastic
but we’re really just made of metal and glass bits”

‘a lampshade plagues with poison ivy’ is similarly constructed, but the drums take a backseat, leading to a quieter, more insular atmosphere. “I want to tell the tree how tall it’s gotten”, Lake sings, “without the forest laughing at how small my view is”. The track picks up momentum for a little while around two-thirds through, although even that little burst of energy doesn’t last long. Death and decay are never far away on ‘birds nesting in shoes on telephone wire’, with its rotting birds and oxidation and talk of building your own coffin.

‘children in grass while trees grow taller’, with it’s haunted banjo and gentle field recorded ambience, confronts the album’s themes most directly. The issue of gender (or rather society’s perception of it) is raised most explicitly in the line “you don’t like my leg hair / cause it doesn’t match my gender / but I don’t have one”. Another theme is the yo-yoing emotions that many have to try to deal with, the double bind of dealing with personal troubles while still retaining compassion and patience for others. Or, as Lake puts it:

“on days where I feel big
it’s hard to remember I’m not
on days where I feel small
it’s hard to remember the ants I’ve stepped on”

Closing track, ‘snow where it’s usually not’ descends into an almost post-rock catharsis, capping the album with a sense of release, though whether it’s through transcendence or chaos is up to you.

I often have a hard time with poetry, mainly due to failings of my own than of its writers. No matter how lyrical and well-written a verse, I can’t help but read it as overblown and pretentious, something that’s often amplified when hearing a certain class of performance poets who adopt that oh-so-sincere tone and read their own work in someone else’s voice. But this poetry isn’t like that, teamed with the music it takes on a meditative quality, the earthy, pastoral imagery of moss and bugs and leaves adding to the effect. Listening feels like walking deep into the woods at sunset, clearing a space on the forest floor to lay down in and feel safe.

You can get France, Later on a name-your-price download or handmade CD from the Corvus B. Bandcamp page or Skip, Jump Records.

The post Corvus B. – France, Later appeared first on Various Small Flames.

We covered Henry Demos, the solo project of Mark Lentz of Seoul-based Nice Legs, back in April, writing about his split release with Lewtrakimou on Fox Food Records and utilising superlatives such as ‘kinda weird” and “thoroughly original & enjoyable”. ‘Not Her’ is a slight departure from the semi-psychedelic rock of I Was Trying To Get There…, a swirling, mostly-instrumental track that sounds positively cosmic, which is perhaps unsurprising as the finale contains what is allegedly the world’s oldest poem (although don’t hold us to this fact):

“Your eyes

The stars

Ten thousand years

Your eyes

The stars”

The artwork is by Wake The Deaf’s resident artist Erika (who also designed the album cover), drawing upon the mewling of the opening.

You can pre-order Quiet, Constant Friends now ahead of its release on the 17th October, including some rather pretty cassettes (even if I do say so myself).

The post Quiet, Constant Friends: Henry Demos – Not Her appeared first on Various Small Flames.

The latest Pasture Dog release is Southern Gothic, a collection of songs that uses a combination of everyday life-type scenes and vivid, strange imagery to create something equal parts unsettling and comforting, just as the title suggests. Lots of music that is inspired by Southern Gothic fails to get past the weird-for-weird’s-sake sort of deal where oddity or perversity or violence is included because it seems to add indistinct depth, but Masi’s songwriting manages to capture the wider perspective. Here, the strangeness is specific and targeted, cathartic confessional hymns to critique human behaviour and the good ol’ Social Norms it has created.

‘Lazarus Saturday Sulking’ kicks things off, a song packed with Biblical references that serves as an intimate exploration of gender roles and sexual identity. Masi’s narrator is isolated and, worse, understands enough to resent the isolation to the degree that it forces her into deeper isolation (and so on etc.), a sort cyclical it-really-fucking-sucks-that-this-has-to-be-so-hard-and-that-makes-it-harder situation, as made clear by the inability to communicate which lays at the core of the song:

“I’ve been coughing up “sweetheart” into the crook of my arm. It’s force of habit, it’s the crime I commit. But he calls me baby like an insult. To bury my love is an old art. And I’ll do it again.”

Masi’s lyrics are poetic, reading like a stream of thoughts scribbled down late at night when gripped by an overwhelming urge to say everything, be it to a loved one or herself. “Because I can’t stay so long in the same static place,” Masi sings on “Louie’, “and I can’t sustain to make all the same mistakes, over again and over again.” ‘Garden Tomb’ has a dreamy feel, the slight reverb acting as a subtle funhouse mirror, rippling the track in odd ways, while ‘Labrador Blue’ opens with a more hopeful guitar strum: “I don’t worry anymore,” declares Masi, “I don’t get so overwhelmed,” although this positivity does not seem to last as the song closes with the narrator feeling blue while reminiscing about the past.

‘Lizard Patrol’ speaks of the confused line between positive/negative identity perspectives, the indecision of (or oscillation between) 1. hating yourself, 2. understanding that you don’t hate yourself and 3. working towards conditions where it would be considered normal not to have to hate yourself should you choose to embrace the image you envisage as You. It’s bizarre situation of understanding what is right and moral while being susceptible to all the pain and doubt that the human body/mind is so good at, pain and doubt which leads to self-limitation and sabotage even though your rational clear-headed opinions know you are moving in the right direction:

“I can’t let my thoughts get so outstretched. but really I was limiting myself, and limited the ways that I could fix – oh god how am I gonna fix it?”

The theme of an internal dissonance between love, hate and acceptance is made clearer on the final track. ‘Everything That Rises Must Converge’ is named after a Flannery O’Connor story, a tale concerning a recent graduate named Julian. The man is ashamed of his mother’s racist perspective yet fails to connect with any of the African American characters, highlighting an inherent racism in his own personality. “True culture is in the mind” he argues, only for his mother to counter “it’s in the heart.” Julian feels like a transitionary stage between past bigotry and future tolerance – he knows what he ought think yet still harbours the subconscious prejudices that are a product of the society in which produced him. For me, Pasture Dog explores the twenty-first century equivalent of this, that is, the exact same thing. Be it with racial equality or sexual/gender identity, it seems many have accepted the theory of equal rights (ie. in their minds) without fully embracing the change of attitude on a deeper subconscious level (in their hearts). Masi explores the very real pain suffered by someone on the wrong end of this inconsistency, someone trapped in and tormented by the outdated heart-shaped morality that pokes through in even the most well-meaning person or society.

You can grab the album on a pay-what-you-can basis via Bandcamp.

P.S. For those of you who are into pictures and words, Masi also runs the art magazine Field Notes, which collects a variety of visual and literary pieces into a colourful journal. All of the issues are available online here.

The post Pasture Dog – Southern Gothic appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Fox Food Records have been busy releasing really good music, so much so that we’re running behind on writing about it (we have already featured one great release this year). This self-titled album from Good, Good Blood is their latest release and in no way bucks the trend of Fox Food quality.

The opening track acts a prologue, an atmospheric and instrumental introduction supplemented with an ambient recording of children. This sets the tone of the album and unfolds into six subsequent songs of gentle, lo-fi indie pop, both sort of sad and sort of not, and generally a pleasure to listen to. See for example the ‘Hold Me Like a Child’ which you can check out in the player below:

My current favourite tracks are numbers five and six, almost as much for the transition between the two as the songs themselves. ‘Suffer Silent’ sounds like those little grey and rainy storms of worry and doubt that sometimes come blowing through your mind, ending in a Continental sample that sounds how I imagine walking through the sodden streets of Paris might feel. But if this track sounds like a gloomy drizzle then the following one, ‘Settle Down’, feels like a spring morning, like birdsong and breezes and rippling waves at the lakeshore, the dawn of something bright and new.

The final track acts as the epilogue, a deviation from the album’s template and the antithesis of the opener’s childlike naivete. The song contains a reading of Charles Bukowski’s poem ‘Dinosauria, We’, an incredibly cynical and pessimistic account of the decline of society and the world in general. It contains lines such as:

“We are born into a government 60 years in debt
That soon will be unable to even pay the interest on that debt
And the banks will burn
Money will be useless
There will be open and unpunished murder in the streets
It will be guns and roving mobs”

And:

Trees will die
All vegetation will die
Radiated men will eat the flesh of radiated men
The sea will be poisoned
The lakes and rivers will vanish
Rain will be the new gold
The rotting bodies of men and animals will stink in the dark wind

Luckily, this doom and gloom is cut through by the musical accompaniment, the guitars offering some kind of hope and giving the dire prophesies (even more of) an ironic edge, less a wink and a nudge and more a gentle pat on the back saying that perhaps things might not get all that bad.

Unfortunately (i.e. because we were so slow in writing about this) the cassettes have all sold out, but you can (and should) download it via the Fox Food Records Bandcamp page.

P.S. The artwork was provided by Rachael Perisho.

The post Good, Good Blood – s/t appeared first on Various Small Flames.

The music of Kissing Fractures can be filed in that wonderful sub-genre of DIY sad-girl-and-guitar bedroom pop. If you like artists such as Frankie Cosmos, Adult Mom and Florist, then you’ll love this. The album sees Lin write candidly about her fears and anxieties in simple but poetic verse. See for example on ‘past tense’, where she sings:

“a woman once told me that if i mixed my tears with honey
i would feel nothing
but i’m not numb yet
and the winter solstice is oddly warm
and not knowing is slowly killing me
i just want to go back to sleep,”

The strength of the record lies in the fact that despite the overwhelmingly negative subject matter, it never feels overly heavy or intense. Each song is short and sweet and yeah Lin is sad but she’s soldiering on. Perhaps my favourite track is ‘faulty palmistry’, in which Lin likens her current woes to those she experienced as a small child:

“i’m sitting all alone in my bedroom
burying my head in my knees and all i do is cry
i am five years old and i just saw
a boy skin his knees and all i do is cry
i’m sitting on one of those things in the playground
that spin around, holding on tight”

Two of the tracks were not written by Lin at all. The title track and ‘PS you still do this to me’ were originally poems by Cutting Flashlight, a project by Boston-based Lucy Martirosyan. This makes for some really interesting songwriting, with lines such as:

“PS you still do this to me
it looks like scribbles
but it sounds like a bee
stop feeding me your honey
you need it to live”

Lin says that Lost Self is a collection of songs that “reveal how i dealt with everything that plagued me in the past year, and how i managed to find temporary solace.” It’s pretty obvious that, for Lin, writing these songs served a purpose higher than simply raising a few dollars on Bandcamp. As she goes on to say “[the album is] very personal to me, and the process of putting together his full length has been incredibly cathartic and comforting.”

If there’s one thing I look for in music it’s sincerity. This is ultimately the reason I spend inordinate periods of my spare time consuming sounds made by people in their bedrooms, or in a musty old garage with their friends. So what if the recording isn’t crystal clear? If they’re not a virtuoso on the guitar? If their vocals can’t hit a certain range or break under the slightest strain? If an artist is honest and really means what they’re saying then I’m invariably a fan. As Lin sings at the end of ‘faulty palmistry’,

“this is by no means good but at least it’s honest
and that’s what matters, right?”

And while I disagree that the album isn’t good (it is), Miss Lin got one thing spot on, and that is certainly what matters the most. Get Lost Self via the Kissing Fractures Bandcamp page.

>P.S. Kissing Fractures also has a newer EP of demos, which she released last month. I’m not so familiar with that one but early listens suggest it’s definitely worth your attention too. Get Srr on a pay-what-you-want basis via Bandcamp.

The post Kissing Fractures – Lost Self appeared first on Various Small Flames.

The product of this inspiration was released early last month, a solo EP entitled Time Moves Quickly. The record is a departure from the Pacific Northwest folk revival (and therefore from what we’ve come to expect from the Gundersen family), instead offering five beautifully arranged tracks of piano, violin and cello. Gundersen says that the main aim of the record was to address society’s forward-thinking nature, to help the listener forget about what’s coming next and focus on what they have right now – something which she refers to as “the never-ending struggle to remain in the present”.

My current favourite track is ‘Farewell Summer’, which ends with (what sounds like) an old recording of The Public Garden, a poem by Robert Lowell. Have a listen below.

You can buy the EP over at Abby’s Bandcamp page.

The post Abby Gundersen – Time Moves Quickly appeared first on Various Small Flames.