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.

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Floating in Space – The Edge of the Light

Floating in Space in a recording project of Spanish songwriter, composer and multi-instrumentalist, Ruben Caballero. Recorded, mixed and mastered in Alicante, his latest release The Edge of the Light blends evocative piano and orchestral arrangements with post-rock energy to create huge soundscapes worthy of the act’s name. Pre-order it now from the Deep Elm Bandcamp page.

Mt. Wolf – ‘Golden (feat. St. South)’

London’s Mt. Wolf put out an EP Hex earlier this year to critical acclaim, and are filling the gap to their debut full length in 2017 with ‘Golden’. Joined by Australian vocalist St. South, the track finds the band pushing their warm yet melancholic sound. The dual vocals play like the communication of some long held relationship, one full of pain and confusion yet now spoken of from a position of comfort, or at least context, allowing the mood to be fond and soft.

Hazel English – It’s Not Real

The third track from her forthcoming EP, Never Going Home, ‘It’s Not Real’ is the perfect introduction for anyone unfamiliar with Australian-turned-Californian Hazel English. With it’s washed out guitar and echoed vocals, the track is a late summer nostalgia jam, packing both indie pop energy and the gentle tug of shoegazy nostalgia. The EP is set for release on the 7th October via Marathon Artists and you can pre-order it now.

Tilman Robinson – Deer Heart 

Based in Melbourne, the Australian composer, producer and sound designer Tilman Robinson makes music “with focus on the psychological impact of sound”. His album, Deer Heart, utilises field recordings and body sounds alongside a multitude of instruments to create lush, cinematic soundscapes that fall somewhere between Benjamin Shaw and Keaton Henson. The record is set for release through Hobbledehoy Record Co. this October and you can pre-order it now from Bandcamp.

rgz – gaver en faar; gaver en gir

gaver en faar; gaver en gir, the latest album from Norway’s rgz, a collection of beguiling ambient and drone songs which ebb and flow between delicacy and harshness. ‘zzzz’ and ‘zszs’ are examples of shorter tracks, their uplifting electronics tempered by odd industrial glitches which threaten to strike into static, while songs like ‘Kom Ned’ offer a more tropical, vapourwave style. Our current favourite is ‘Venter’, a seven-minute slow burner which plays like the sci-fi soundtrack to some forgotten series of Twin Peaks set in space. Grab it from the rgz Bandcamp page.

Shana Falana – Here Comes The Wave

Okay, so we haven’t actually missed this one, but we wanted to tell you that Shana Falana has a new album, Here Comes The Wave, coming this October on Team Love Records. Made with partner Mike Amari, the record offers dream pop amped up to eleven, clashing warmth and wildness and whopping instrumental sections to create a sound both dark and thrilling and strangely empathetic. We’ll get a full review up closer to release but you can pre-order the album now from the Team Love website.

Tall Ships – Meditations on Loss

Brighton’s Tall Ships have been on our radar pretty much since we started WTD, with our post on There is Nothing But Chemistry Here one of the first on our fledgling Tumblr page. We’ve moved on somewhat from then, and so have Tall Ships, who are now atmospheric indie rock anthems like ‘Meditations on Loss’. The single, out on FatCat Records, comes complete with a video directed by Ben Phethean:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxXBzeMkrks

Jana Irmert – untitled (slow)

A sound artist based in Berlin, Jana Iremert is no mere musician. Her work in film sound, electroacoustic composition and audiovisual installation art has seen her appear at international festivals and exhibitions such as the New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival, the I-Park Environmental Arts Biennale and the Banff Centre in Canada. Her debut album, End of Absence, is being released on Austrian label Fabrique Records in October. This is the first single, a sound and video piece that shifts and blurs, inspired from fragments of text from Virginia Woolf’s novel The Waves.

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“[The album charts] the ups, downs, and quiet revelations of Luley’s young adulthood in Brooklyn, NY. Heartbreak, loss, and anxiety give way to newfound love, reconciliation, and hope as the album’s ten songs mark time spent fighting darkness, not in vain.”

Ahead of the release, Luley and Co. have put out the first single, ‘Ditmars’, to whet our appetites and properly introduce their sound. As promised, the track’s dreamy shimmer is cut through with shoegazey percussion and post-rock flourishes, melancholy and hope acting as counterbalances, light and dark swirling through one another in complex patterns.

“You are spots of light and color
swimming across my eyes
when I first step into darkness

You are as real as the memory of day,
couldn’t convince you to stay

You took my sunshine away
You took my light”

Swimming In Sunlight is out on the 12th of August on CD and cassette via Furious Hooves.

Photo by Patrick Curry

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If my appreciation of Young Jesus’ last album, Grow/Decompose teetered on the edge of outright gushing, then it was only because the LA-based band are one such example, at least for me. While I’m not suggesting they deserve to be placed alongside the artistic giants of our day quite yet, there’s something about John Rossiter’s writing and vocals that captures the essence of today as I understand it. At once earnest and detached, devoted and deranged, his characters exist on the leading edge of our secular society, a wild, shapeless frontier whose inhabitants are paralysed by confusion yet subject to the age-old primitive brain-twitch that screams for transcendence.

Void as Lob is a new two-song EP from Rossiter and his updated line-up of Eric Shevrin (keys), Marcel Borbon (bass) and Kern Haug (drums), a release which demonstrates quite perfectly what we’re getting at with the whole important/relevant thing. The A-side ‘Baked Goods’ finds the narrator (and/or his brother, Steve) rising from a melancholic daze with a desperate logic, incoherent or too-coherent for us to grasp, demanding and willing and throwing himself wide open for the chance to raise above our meat-based animal existence. As on G / W‘s ‘Milo’, here the characters are delving deep into a pool of confusion with vigour, as if hoping they might break the surface on the other side and emerge into clarity.

“There is a logarithm entered backwards that acts to repeat
the right amount of existential crises from my brother Steve
the holiest of home made baked goods levitating in the street
the Steve-y cadence of losing control to access ways to see”

“I’m pretty sure I’m a kind of collection of things
scattered throughout the backyard
under the moon
pulling weirdo slow dance moves
maybe always losing it a little
I am ashamed to believe in myself!”

Young Jesus tell of a world where the capital-G God has been removed yet atheism remains a flimsy myth, its inhabitants left locked in a desperate search for something to believe in. Some manage to achieve a wide-eyed fanaticism in created powers, collapsing their existential worries into a bright white point, while others are doomed to shuffle around the fractured world, detached and ennui-filled, looking for themselves in fragments of televisual dreams.

Void as Lob is out today via the Young Jesus Bandcamp page, or on tape from Funeral Sounds. The band are about to head out on a pretty extensive tour (see below), sharing dates with Pope (marked with *) and Alaska (^), and will be bringing along a zine/experimental tape called Conceptual Beach in addition to the EP.

5/21 — Los Angeles @ The Smell
5/28 — San Diego @ Che Cafe
5/29 — Fullerton @ Intimate Warehouse
5/30 — Tucson @ Gary’s Place
5/31 — El Paso @ Boomtown
6/1 — Denton @ Rubber Gloves
6/2 — San Antonio @ Imagine Books and Records
6/3 — Austin @ Cheer Up Charlies
6/4 — Houston @ TBA
6/5 — Lafayette @ Wild Salmon *
6/6 — New Orleans @ Heavens Gate *
6/8 — Nashville @ Two Boots *
6/9 — Raleigh, NC @ Slim’s Downtown *
6/10 — Washington, DC @ Everglades *
6/11 — York, PA @ Skid Row Garage *
6/12 — Philadelphia, PA @ TBA *
6/13 — NYC @ Aviv w/ Very Fresh, Spit, Pope
6/14 — Providence, RI @ Aurora *
6/15 — NYC @ Silent Barn *
6/16 — Boston @ Ol Yeller *
6/18 — Columbus, OH @ Misfit Manor *
6/20 — Chicago @ Subterranean *
6/21 — Madison, WI @ Mickeys *
6/22 — Rock Island @ Rozz Tox *
6/23-25 — Yorkville, IL @ Summer Solstice Fest
6/26 — Kansas City @ House Show ^
6/27 — Denver @ Juice Church ^
6/28 — Albuquerque @ Dog House ^
6/30 — Las Vegas @ The Warehouse ^
6/01 — Los Angeles @ Roach Motel ^

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“The album takes the formula of Stewart’s previous releases and stretches it panoramic, bedroom pop on a mountainous scale, a departure from his norms in all the right ways. The band build dense layers of guitar which, paired with rumbling bass and crashing drums, create something imposing, a monolith rising through the fog.”

The great news is that the full album has now been released, and the promise saw at the start of the year has been realised. Eight songs of dense indie rock which borrow as much from the cathartic peaks of post-rock as they do from the slow and spectral sound we’ve come to associate with Stewart. We begin with ‘In Linear’, with it’s slow and considered start, all open spaces and dark winding guitars and Stewart’s signature vocals. The “choruses” spike with heavier instrumentation, our first taste of the album’s post-rock tendencies, while the gentler verses are full of lines like:

“You always cover the receiver with your hand
why don’t you want them to listen
why don’t you want them to understand?”

‘LAFK’ opens with almost martial drumbeat before the advent of inky and slinky guitars, eventually blooming into a track which fuses a sheer rock passion with emotive vocals and reflective air of something else entirely, bringing to mind earlier Winterlseep releases and particular the music of Brian Borcherdt’s Dusted project. The song is punctuated by moments of almost pure silence, where the only sound is the receding reverb of the previous burst of instrumentation, a sound you can’t be sure doesn’t exist only in your inner ear. Eventually things build to a pinnacle, ending in a furious cacophony of pounding percussion and squealing guitars. ‘Careful Creators’ gathers itself and then comes crashing to life, the vocals sad and oddly serene, floating in during the intervals between the noise (“To be alive is to be alone”).

The title track is a patient and vaguely ominous song, guitars rolling in like surf on an abandoned shore, while ‘x’ shakes things up with its shimmering, shifting ambience, like ice crystals gliding through the great black expanse of outer space. A discordant clang announces the arrival of ‘Temporary Widow’, which has shades of Explosions in the Sky, epic crests of feedback and pummelled drums surrounding the soaring vocals like a big staticky storm cloud. ‘Concrete Plans’ marches out of a drone that sounds like some kind of cosmic wind, the drums holding a rhythm that feels almost heavy rock.

“Under someone else’s concrete plans
you’re not even a name
or the print of your own hand
you become so dependent”

Finale ‘Words’ is epic and reverberating, stretching over the nine minute mark and enduring all manner of tumult in its duration. It converges into perhaps the heaviest maelstrom on the entire album, before descending into a lull at the very finish, just sparse guitar and Stewart’s vocals, like the strange glowing hush in aftermath of a tempest.

“It’s alright if your words
don’t come as easily to you
if everything is overheard
maybe they’re not supposed to”

This is an album that has it all. It’s pretty easy to turn to cloying metaphors to describe the sense of vast space it conjures, the poignancy or Stewart’s vocals, the pure tangible noise that the band can summon. It takes a little bit of everything and melts them down into something that’s quite unique. Something that is quite distinctly Summering.

You can get Summering now via the Summering Bandcamp page.

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RIYL: post-rock, shoegaze, Mogwai, God is an Astronaut
Favourite songs:

You can get Snow Fled via the Vapour Night Bandcamp page.

P.S. The album artwork is a painting by Helen Carter.

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Tierpark are the latest act to emerge from this talent pool. Self-described as a “dreamgaze noise rock” band, the outfit draw upon a wide range of influences to create an experimental brand of post-rock. With complex rhythms, peculiar time signatures and a disregard for common conventions, the band produce songs of surprising intricacy without moving too far from the accessible pop/rock template, allowing the listener a way in to their strange dreamscapes. Their latest album, The Moment Two Worlds Meet, is out later this month, and we are delighted to share the second track with you now.

‘Shadow Play [그림자림그]’ is a perfect example of Tierpark’s atypical style. Think a mix of the idiosyncratic art-rock of Dirty Projectors and the eccentricity of Bjork, with post-rock overtones and a Minus The Bear-style mathy tinge, and you are getting somewhere near pinning down the sound. The vocals have shades of recent favourite Bells Atlas, adding a further texture to what is already a vivid track, and despite being an ignorant Westerner with no knowledge of Korean, Sehee Kim’s lyrics and delivery provide more than enough to convey the general concept behind the song. Have a listen below:

The Moment Two Worlds Meet is set to be released on the 20th September. You can pre-order it now via the Tierpark Bandcamp page.

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“neo-classical… draws on a wide range of styles and genres to create a surreal, cinematic slice of orchestral pop”

Now the album has been released and I’m glad to say it follows this same blueprint. Opener ‘Big Fish And The Sirens’ is a perfect example of this. The first thirty seconds unfold as a luscious, intricate instrumental before Weber’s vocals arrive and transform the track into a pop song. But just as his vocals take centre-stage and you think you have it pegged, the music responds accordingly, swelling once more so that Weber’s voice is reduced to just another element of a brilliant whole. The song barely reaches the 2:20 mark, yet by the time the music recedes to leave sirens traversing the silence, you feel in the aftermath of something important and on the verge of a larger burst of activity.

As we mentioned in other REW<< and Eric & Magill posts, Weber draws inspiration from across the globe, utilising an array of distinctive sounds side by side to create something akin to the multicultural world in which we live. ‘To Come Unglued’ opens with air-raid siren synths which morph quickly into an Eastern jaunt before the drums and vocals of Western pop kick in. The title track is similarly diverse, a collision of Bollywood and Hollywood scores with the slow, atmospheric percussion of a post-rock anthem. ‘The Lights in the Sands of Katumpkale’ is the soundtrack to a different cinematic world entirely, one where unknown Europeans committed weird to tape, while ‘Cupid’s Empty House’ is a grand dream-pop song, and ‘Swan’s Melody’ is piano-led and melancholic, full of lingering moments and gravid empty spaces.

If this variety sounds jarring then that’s because it is. Weber does not knit all the elements into a seamless whole but rather plays with order and explores the joins, in doing so creating music which addresses our fragmented, postmodern existence. His biggest achievement is managing to assemble the pieces into something listenable for all of it’s idiosyncrasies, with the pop elements acting as a string to follow into the unfamiliar territories beyond.

Olive Skinned, Silver Tongued Sirens Sing Swan Songs is out now on Hidden Shoal. You can buy it from Bandcamp.

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You should probably know from the outset that Yucatan are from Wales, a location which the band rely on for much of their inspiration. Indeed they describe their music as recorded “beneath vaporous skies, at the foot of slate grey peaks…from where song rises from within the soil.” The band come from Snowdonia, an area of incredibly scenic mountainous national park, and capture the natural beauty of their homeland by writing almost exclusively in their native tongue (the title of the album translates as ‘Above the Mountain Summit’), a language of which J.R.R. Tolkien said “For many of us it rings a bell, or rather it stirs deep harp-strings in our linguistic nature”. As someone who is currently attempting to learn the language for more practical reasons, it’s nice to hear it used to construct something so otherworldly, to be reminded its mythical, ancient quality.

The album opens with ‘Ffin’ (which translates roughly as border or frontier), with its thudding drumbeat and quivering violin/cello in background. Things are lushly understated until halfway point, when big guitars enter the fray and things get a little more bombastic. ‘Cwm Llwm’ (‘Bleak Valley’) is a patient build, its soft guitars and vocals undergoing a gradual increase in intensity, eventually joined by an insistent, anticipative drumbeat and mournful strings, the eventual payoff arriving as everything marries together and drums come crashing down. The track also has a piano-led cooling off period, ending in atmospherics that sound like ghosts real or imagined on misty a hillside. This is followed by the only English-language song on the album, ‘Word Song’, which begins with gentle icy tinkles before blossoming with lush arrangements and cooing background vocals. Next up is ‘Halen Daear a Sŵn y Môr’ (‘Ground Salt and the Sound of the Sea’ – I think!), another shimmering slice of panoramic beauty.

‘Ochenaid’ (‘Sigh’) continues in the ethereal majesty with glacial vocals and strings, minimal electric guitar and thumping The National-style drums, while ‘Llyn Tawelwch’ (‘Peace Lake’) opens with sparse instrumentation, the vocals taking centre stage, building and building to a finale which swoops and soars over snowy peaks. Lead single ‘Angharad’ twinkles and floats before a pounding, cymbal-heavy climax. The title track closes up in suitably resplendent fashion, its triumphant horn-led final third finishing things with a celebratory air.

You can buy Uwch Gopa’s Mynydd right now as a download, CD or vinyl (heck the Yucatan website for a list of suppliers). People of Germany, Austria and Switzerland can grab a copy via Stargazer Records.

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The album opens with ‘Party’, an eerie introduction to the slow, dark aesthetic of Lake Michigan, mixing a dreamy dissociation with the cutting awareness of said isolation, leading to something that is sad and apologetic in equal measure. This continues into ‘Snow’, where Marks channels Malcolm Middleton in that I’m-so-miserable-even-my-surroundings-are-after-me sort of attitude, where the border between laughing and crying seems incredibly small and pretty insignificant.

“I’m watching falling foliage, it dances between stone slabs.
The suburbs are screwing me and I want out.
I’m picturing you walking in, it makes me feel chill, inebriated.
I’m trying to remember if it was you I saw when my eyes closed”

‘Sober’ deals with the peaks and troughs of loving (“The thing about being alone and not in love is that it makes you feel sober… But when you start feeling it again, you are intoxicated. Blissfully stupidly ignorantly uninformed, yet smiling”), while ‘Real (Ad Breaks Pt. 2)’ runs with the idea of the passage of time and reality getting in the way of good times. Just as we described in our Free Cake for Every Creature write-up, post-collegiate blues can hit hard, and anyone who has left university will relate to Marks’ writing here:

“Guess who’s just another cross on the road maps, a place to get to via train.
The hours ran out and so did the days. I stopped trying to try.
We’ll never talk shit on my front step again,
we’ll never grace that beer garden again.
I wish that we could go back to that mismatched old room,
but people messed up and the rest of us grew up.
Now all that’s left is to keep on walking,
the breaks are now over
and real life has hit.”

The EP is out now on Wolf Town DIY and Ruined Smile Records, or you can buy it from the Lake Michigan Bandcamp page.

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