Ava Mirzadegan – Dark Dark Blue

Team Love Records [BUY]

Dark Dark Blue, the title of Ava Mirzadegan’s latest full-length, might refer to a mood, a time of day, the quality of light in a room. The album was written in Mirzadegan’s childhood bedroom in the wake of a break-up, a collection of finger-picked folk songs which paints a series of memories, longings and confessions in the palette of the titular hue. But though the present loss hangs heavy, Mirzadegan also digs towards a deeper seam of sadness. One ingrained at her centre, accumulated not only across one life but an entire family history. Here, old wounds are not so much sources of pain as shafts leading towards something older and more fundamental, and Ava Mirzadegan follows these passageways as deep as they might allow her in the hope that allowing light into these dark spaces is to begin to process and heal.

Dean Johnson – Nothing For Me Please

Mama Bird Recording Co. [BUY]

The Seattle-based singer-songwriter Dean Johnson (who is also a member of the band Sons of Rainier) has built a devoted following across the Pacific Northwest with his live shows, garnering almost mythical status with his anachronistic folk songs full of lonesome melodies and gruff heartbreak. Not wishing to change a winning formula, Johnson’s debut solo record Nothing For Me Please is almost completely devoid of bells and whistles, to the point where it often feels like he is singing from a chair in the corner or crooning from a sticky dive bar stage. He sings of pining for a lost love (‘Old TV’, ‘Shouldn’t Say Mine’) and false-smiling through a breakup (‘Acting School’), and the age-old existential woes of any cowboy worth his salt. Songs relatively simplistic in their construction and all the better for it, a reminder that less is oftentimes more. The album is relatively brief, clocking in at less than thirty minutes, though lingers in the mind like the sweet tones of a half-remembered dream.

Divide and Dissolve – Systemic

Invada Records [BUY]

“To make music that honours their ancestors and Indigenous land, to oppose white supremacy, and to work towards a future of Black and Indigenous liberation.” That’s how the liner notes of Divide and Dissolve‘s Systemic describes the intention at the heart of the duo’s crushing songs. The album felt like a fitting soundtrack to 2023, yet another year where the pervasive systems of violence and control have been all too visible, and those familiar with previous LP Gas Lit will recognise the dark, furious density Takiaya Reed and Sylvie Nehill manage to conjure. But far from being a mere sonic steamroller happy to only grind its audience into the ground, Systemic pairs its apocalyptic weight with something more fragile and light. Sections almost orchestral in their detail which move through the ruins of the doomworld in something like defiance. The dominant systems might seem as monolithic as they are malevolent, but there are other systems, other possibilities, and they are more persistent than you might think. As Minori Sanchiz-Fung reads on ‘Kingdom of Fear’:

If I am denied the kindness needed to transform sorrow
If I am denied the simple gentleness of existing
Then I will leave my gifts, like lichen, over the oak branches
Trusting they’ll be safe until you find them

Erik Kramer – Where the fish are as fine as the color of colors

Self-released [BUY]

When people talk about the ‘real world’, they’re not really talking about the real world. Words are not up to such an endeavour. But that’s where art comes in. Described as “music for Blue Sky (‘where the eagle that flies out of sight flies’),” this self-released cassette from Erik Kramer feels like a reminder of this fact, an exercise evoking in times, places and feelings that are incommunicable with mere words. Crafted from a hodgepodge of instruments and samples—from guitar, banjo and pump organ to bells and Casio keyboards, a tin whistle, field recordings, loon calls, snippets of poetry and the ambient sounds of “cars & trucks” and “Madison area teenagers”—the tape offers a series vignettes, small, snatched moments of beauty and nostalgia and wistfulness. Take the mantra-like repetition of ‘Hermit Guardian Angel’ or Eva Chudnow’s still and sweet rendition of the titular traditional folk song on ‘Just as the tide was flowing’, the gloomy slo-mo rock song of ‘Daylight Saving’ or the title track which swells and shivers with an inextricable mixture of sorrow and joy. In a world that seems to grow more complex and cruel with each rotation, it’s no small wonder to find escape routes, art that enables not selfish head-in-the-sand ignorance but a return to what really matters, what really is.

Florry – The Holey Bible

Dear Life Records [BUY]

The Holey Bible feels like a seminal moment in Florry’s history. The Philly band, led by Francie Medosch, have dabbled with country sensibilities ever since their inception, but this record is the moment they fully embrace the genre. It’s chock full of fiddle and mandolin, harmonica and pedal steel, meandering melodies and a heart-on-sleeve lyrical style that seems determined to look on the bright side. This positivity permeates the record, sidestepping the lonesome blues so common in the genre in favour of something genuinely joyful, though with a messy, ramshackle spirit that wards off any threat of things getting saccharine. Through woozy waltzes, fuzzy Country-fried rockers and no small amount of narrative attention, Florry rise from an uncertain, bleak world like a Roman candle, as though the only way to live nowadays is to meet despair with an equal and opposite force.

Gia Margaret – Romantic Piano

Jagjaguwar [BUY]

Writing in one of his journals, the Trappist monk Thomas Merton described the necessity of living in solitude in the woods. “The silence of the forest is my bride and the sweet dark warmth of the whole world is my love,” he wrote. “Out of the heart of that dark warmth comes the secret that is heard only in silence, but it is the root of all the secrets that are whispered by all the lovers in their beds all over the world.” It is this secret, not the lovers, with which Gia Margaret’s Romantic Piano is concerned. A collection of spare compositions whose title gestures not to rose petals and candlelit dinners but the melancholic wonder of the late eighteenth century. Because while Margaret’s first instrumental release Mia Gargaret was wrapped in insular detachment, these brief, meditative songs open the curtains if not entirely stepping outside. A picture of solitude not as some lonely retreat but rather the path towards recognising the wider connection of things. That sweet dark warmth of the whole world.

Kara Jackson – Why Does The Earth Give Us People To Love?

September [BUY]

“The title of my album, the question, is driven by grief,” explains Kara Jackson of debut album Why Does The Earth Give Us People To Love? “Why do we show up on this world alongside one another? To love and to mourn? To curse each other out? To die working every day?” Jackson works through this question in what feels like real time, swapping any hope of a definitive answer for the gradual process of learning. Songs at once intimate and grand, and as fond of playful humour as they are heart-on-the-sleeve sincerity. But the biggest irony of the album is that of its intention. Because for all of its immediacy and uncertainty, Jackson’s refusal to offer any simple, unifying answer comes to represent a solution in its own right. Why does the earth give us people to love? The answer might not reveal itself directly, but would songs like this exist if it did?

L’Rain – I Killed Your Dog

Mexican Summer [BUY]

The music of Taja Cheek’s L’Rain has never been content in a single box. Straddling pop, jazz, R&B and experimental styles, the songwriter and multi-instrumentalist has made name in refusing easy categorisation. This elusive fluidity extends through every aspect of latest album, I Killed Your Dog. A love record, a break-up record, an anti-break-up record. A record which reaches for commercial pop without ceding an inch of its avant garde ambition. “I’m envisioning a world of contradictions, as always,” Cheek describes. “Sensual, maybe even sexy, but terrifying, and strange.” Hence we get an intricate, tangled picture of what it means to love and hurt the people we care about, where shame need not preclude cruelty and love comes complete with both hope and despair. The style is encapsulated by the question Cheek poses in the liner notes: “Is the title an act of maliciousness and revenge or an expression of remorse and regret?” The answer, as always with L’Rain, isn’t as simple as one or the other. It’s everything, simultaneously.

Lael Neale – Star Eaters Delight

Sub Pop [BUY]

Lael Neale’s music feels unmoored from time. Written and recorded at her family home in rural Virginia with help from collaborator Guy Blakeslee and without the involvement of a single screen, Star Eaters Delight draws on multiple lineages of American alternative music, from the lo-fi pop of Suicide and The Velvet Underground to folk singers like Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell. All in an attempt to reach out into the quiet of remote landscapes and fill them with sound and life. In contrast to Neale’s previous album Acquainted With Night, which turned inward to find peace away from the bustle of urban LA, the record explores the false divide between humans and the rest of nature (“I pledge allegiance to tree and meadow / I have no need to conquer or keep them” as Neale sings on opener ‘I Am the River’) and the value of tranquillity away from the information overload of modern life. There are many planes and dimensions, the songs at times crystalline and brittle, others amorphous and unbreakable as water, though it is this tranquillity that ultimately stands out. Minimalism not as a pretentious aesthetic choice or act of puritan self-denial, but, in true transcendentalist style, as an expression of freedom. As Neale puts it when explaining her outlook, she identifies as a minimalist “not because I don’t like things, but because I value freedom more.”

Lilts – Waiting Around

Better Company Records [BUY]

Wild Pink has been a VSF favourite for a number of years now, and we count Laura Wolf‘s Shelf Life among our favourite releases of 2023, so it is no surprise Lilts won our hearts too. Not that the collaboration between Wolf and Wild Pink’s John Ross is overtly indebted to the previous work of its duo. Rather, the pair allow their respective talents to compliment one another, setting their compass to Nineties shoegaze but allowing for whatever detours might occur along the way. Elements of dream pop and post-rock filter in, and there’s none of the derivative flatness of the revivalist movement. Indeed, there’s a freedom to ‘Dodge Street’ and the title track which feels wholly new. A product of the relationship between its creators, as though learning to trust another person allows an artist to escape the confines and expectations of the work they’ve done in the past.

Mark Jenkin – Enys Men OST

Invada Records [BUY]

Mark Jenkin’s 2019 film Bait took kitchen sink realism and bent it into something stranger, its use of a hand-cranked camera and style of dubbing distorting an otherwise familiar picture of tensions between rural traditions and the encroaching middle class. Again set in rural Cornwall, follow-up Enys Men leant more fully into this unsettling mood. Centring on a volunteer ecologist tasked with observing a rare flower on a remote island, the film presents time as both a line and a circle. The protagonist’s monotonous routine unfolds with striking similarity each day, even if the dates in her logbook progress, while strange visions appear across the island as though the thin present is merely draped over a many layered past. To say Enys Men sounded better than it looked is to pay it the highest compliment, with a soundtrack by Jenkin himself which embodies every inch of the film’s loneliness, stark beauty and hauntological mystery.

Meursault – S/T

Common Ground Records [BUY]

The self-titled record from Edinburgh‘s Meursault was initially designed as a concept album. The tale of two characters, including the titular Meursault, attempting to negotiate a post-apocalyptic world. A direct evolution, then, from the “urban horror vignettes” of 2019’s Crow Hill, as Neil Pennycook looked to lead the project in a more narrative-driven direction. But any short story worth its salt undergoes intense revision, and Meursault was pared down beyond its original idea. As though in delving further into the album’s themes, Pennycook felt able to remove the scaffold of the narrative and allow the songs to stand on their own. The character of Meursault remains, albeit under a different guise, and in offering a more autobiographical picture than anything Pennycook has shared to date, the songs come to form a wider meditation on what the ever-changing project means to him. “I am tired of this metaphor and I am bored of this poetry,” as he sings on the title track:

I am done with this ghost
and this ghost she is done with me
so I gave her a name and I set her to burn
and there in that moment this lesson I learned
you can kill them with kindness
just don’t kill them with love

and if you’ve nothing nice to say
try singing it to me

Natalia Beylis – Mermaids

Touch Sensitive Records [BUY]

Mermaids, the latest release from composer and sound artist Natalia Beylis, is in no small part indebted to a trip to a Leitrim recycling centre. It was there Beylis came across an unwanted CRB Elettronica Ancona Diamond 708 E Electric Keyboard, an instrument seemingly patient in its wait for a saviour. Beylis took it home, performed some surgery to remove the purple crayons rattling around inside, and took to playing. “When I found the cover picture of the three figures in a stack of old family photos,” Beylis says, “a confluence of the sounds and the image charged through me and [the album] began to flicker into being.” But as the record progresses, what might as first seem like serendipity deepens into something more profound. As though in committing to strange patterns of intuition and happenstance, Beylis is able to push deeper into nostalgia and unearth the lines of history and heritage within.

Northwoods Baseball Sleep Radio – Northwoods Sleep Baseball

Worried Songs [BUY]

The title character of Robert Coover’s 1968 novel The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. might be miserable in his work life, but at night he escapes reality into a fantasy of his own creation. A fully functioning baseball league he runs as a tabletop game, where every pitch, hit and injury are governed by the roll of a dice. The sport’s essence is captured in the pursuit, a collision of hard statistics and ever-unfolding narrative at a pace slow enough to fill an entire life. Northwoods Sleep Baseball Radio lives in the spirit of Coover’s imagination, albeit with a zany Pynchonian twist. A podcast fronted by elusive Chicago humourist ‘Mr King’ which offers full-length and entirely fictional baseball games featuring players like Clifton Santiago, Lefty Thorn, Blink Retterson and Randy Chang, all narrated by commentator Wally McCarthy. This album, released by Worried Songs, serves as the perfect first step into the comforting and hilarious world of Northwoods Sleep Baseball. Where sedate rhythms draw you in, but wry imagination keeps you listening.

ØXN – CYRM

Claddagh Records [BUY]

The majestic Lankum might have deservedly taken 2023 by storm, but Radie Peat’s other project ØXN also released a masterful album this year. More adventurous still than False Lankum, CYRM offers mix of traditional and original folk songs loaded with aching hearts and portentous weight, charging folk with electronic and cinematic sensibilities to blur the line between blessing and curse. Take ‘Love Henry’, a tale of seduction and violence which screws taut as it progresses, every bit as black and fated as the darkest fairy tale, or ‘Cruel Mother’, where a woman pressured into infanticide sees herself become a slow slide towards damnation. A dread-laden version of Scott Walker’s ‘Farmer in the City’ closes out the album, a thirteen-minute epic which creeps and creeps until it as all around you, then collapses into a chaos of noise.

Pearla – Oh Glistening Onion, The Nighttime Is Coming

Spacebomb Records [BUY]

“I’m not certain about much,” sings Pearla on ‘Ming the Clam’, “But I’m certain how we touch / Is compelled by some great force / Other than us.” The song encapsulates the spirit of Oh Glistening Onion, The Nighttime Is Coming, where playful whimsy and unfiltered introspection are kept in check by a certain self-awareness, though cannot help but tend towards the potential of some higher mystery. Many of the songs are concerned with finding comfort within a hostile world, and often play like questions being processed in real time, drawing on both real life experiences and wider sources. From the experience of having a credit card stolen at a flower shop to the story of Ming, the oldest individual animal known to science which died as scientists studied its longevity (“I study all the little signs / Under fluorеscent light… Reminder of the grand creation / How did she keep on fighting?”). It’s an album that marks Pearla as a project that works in awe of life’s mysteries, determined to see the beautiful and the surreal rise above the grind of the everyday.

Protomartyr – Formal Growth in the Desert

Domino [BUY]

“In case I don’t see you, well, for a little while, I just want to tell you, it’s been lovely. Every bit of it. The whole fifty years. I’d sooner have been your wife, Bark, than anyone else on earth.” So says Lucy “Ma” Cooper in the closing scene of Leo McCarey’s 1937 drama Make Way For Tomorrow, a film which feels relevant to Protomartyr’s fifth album, Formal Growth in the Desert, not least because it is referenced by the titles of opening pair of tracks. The songs were written in a period which saw lead Joe Casey lose his mother and be forced out of his childhood home, and while the records holds no small amount of grief and darkness, it also serves as an unguarded declaration of love. Which might sound strange for a band who have won deserved acclaim for their foreboding sound, their fury and doom, but Protomartyr have always been so much more than another snarling, depressed post-punk outfit in a crowded field. “Time’s your enemy / Every gift you see will be taken for sure,” Casey sings on ‘The Author’, the most direct tribute to his mother. “So I figure while you live / Kiss the ones that love you / For thе song you sing.” In case I don’t see you for a little while, I just want to tell you, it’s been lovely.

Sluice – Radial Gate

Ruination Record Co. [BUY]

The title of Radial Gate, Justin Morris’s second album under the moniker Sluice, follows the project name and doubles down on the imagery of water. Namely its control, the mechanisms and machinery developed in order to stop, raise and coax waterways in the manners most functional. Morris’s songs, cut from a nostalgic, patient style of folk and elevated by a rich palette of instrumentation, feel like miniature versions of such systems. Only here the flow is not a canal or estuary but the ever pulling course of time, complete with its attached stream of memories and meaning. Tracks like ‘Centurion’ find affirming momentum in this current, while others dam the passage to contemplate the depths of a single moment. But whether Morris is skimming along the surface or submerging himself in plunge pools, the lasting sense is that of control. For if life is a flowing river, Radial Gate represents an attempt to apply structures along its course so that we might more fully engage with the power and potential to be found therein.

Measure, Pour & Mixtape: Music for Cooking

SPINSTER [BUY]

As its title suggests, this compilation by the fine folks at SPINSTER invited artists to explore links between food and music. From shared conceptual themes of creativity and community to parallels between melody and harmony and texture and flavour, each song celebrates both the act of preparing food and sharing it with others. The result is what the label call “an auditory cookbook of songs, poems, field recordings, and aural experiments, inspired by recipes, food preparation processes, dishes, and the experience of eating.” There ain’t a dud across the sixteen tracks, but personal favourites include Andy McLeod & Sarah Bachman’s timeless folk opener, a new song from Lou Turner inspired by a line from Robert Frost, Sally Anne Morgan’s soil-to-plate ‘Grain Song’ that’s all blue skies and wide open fields, and Little Mazarn’s exploration of food’s ability to evoke memories, in this case of an uncle who she says “briefly played on the Dallas Cowboys but mostly played football with me on Thanksgiving.”

Stephen Steinbrink – Disappearing Coin

Western Vinyl [BUY]

Since releasing his last record Utopia Teased in 2018, Oakland’s Stephen Steinbrink busied himself with other things, both musical and not. He dove into the craft of engineering records for other bands, enjoying the sense of communal creativity in contrast to the solo endeavour of writing and recording for himself. He also studied an apprenticeship at a stained glass studio and became deeply interested in Buddhism, enrolling in lay monastic training before being interrupted by the global lockdowns of 2020. All of which is important when considering Disappearing Coin, an album which represents something of a reinvention for Steinbrink. A wilful attempt to make music with the same creativity and sense of awe-filled wonder that he felt when exploring these other avenues. The spirit is captured in the conjurer’s trick of the title, where reality is ruptured by a brief spark of magic. Buoyed by the experience and wisdom gleaned from outside activities, Steinbrink returns to music as a kind of magician himself. A figure who, guided by invention and playfulness, looks to use mastery of a physical craft in order to open the door to small, intangible miracles.

Strawberry Runners – S/T

Self-released [BUY]

Released a decade since the project’s inception in 2013, Strawberry Runners is the self-titled debut full-length from Emi Night’s songwriting project. Written following a period of great personal upheaval and echoing back to past trauma, the record returns to dark places with disarming candour and an easy grace, folding folk and pop into shapes that feel at once fresh and familiar. Night runs their fingers over old wounds to confront feelings of loneliness and heartbreak, but does so with a renewed spirit and sense of unrestrained creativity. Because despite the sometimes heavy subject matter, Strawberry Runners is a warm and colourful record. One full of gentle melodies and tactile textures, small details that evoke the multisensory nature of our chaotic world in all of its pain and joy and mysterious beauty. Take the sunny, devotional love song ‘Alison’, a shot of sunshiney summer where you can almost hear the wistful smile bend Night’s voice as they sing.

And I miss you
I hope you’re alright
I remember stayin’ up all night
Last June

And when I get back
To the midwest
To the bluegrass
And the sassafras trees
And the yellowwood

Sun June – Bad Dream Jaguar

Run For Cover Records [BUY]

There’s always been a distance in the music of Sun June, from the disconnect between lovers and family members to the wide open vistas of the Austin band’s home state. But third album Bad Dream Jaguar was inspired by distance of another order of magnitude. Founding members Laura Colwell and guitarist Stephen Salisbury have been in a relationship for the last few years, and the record was written after Salisbury moved 1,300 miles away to North Carolina, the couple swapping demos of new songs as a way to both process and alleviate the sense of separation and longing. The hazy dream-like quality of the Sun June sound is therefore as nostalgic and nebulous as it has ever been, painting impressionistic pictures of love and longing in quiet dusk-hued pastels, as though in effort to preserve that which might otherwise fade out into nothing. The present comes to feel like a temporary space between the gravity of the past and the vast shadowed sweep of whatever comes next, though we are given little choice but live in it as best we can.

Truth Club – Running From the Chase

Double Double Whammy [BUY]

“Is this working? Are you working hard? Is it working for you?” Such questions might only be asked outright in the closing track of Truth Club’s Running From The Chase, but their desperate weight hangs over its every moment, threatening to pull an entire life off-kilter or else bury it altogether. The North Carolina outfit’s 2019 debut Not An Exit nodded to Dante by way of Bret Easton Ellis, though its despair was matched with an infectious forward motion which meant the listener could step off at the end with their pessimism shaken loose. But here the songs are more expansive, the textures dense and submerging. A sonic representation of twenty-first century living, with lead Travis Harrington left to murmur and yell within the noise, mimicking a world which demands energy for even the most basic of things. “I am scared we will end up like his friend,” as Harrington sings on the title track. “work until he’s dead / work until we’re dead / is there any other plan?”

White Boy Scream – Tent Music

Whited Sepulchre Records [BUY]

Travelling from Los Angeles to New Mexico in 2021, White Boy Scream’s Micaela Tobin stopped off for a few nights in Arizona to stay with violinist and composer Joshua Hill, who was staying with his parents to shelter from the pandemic and care for his dementia-stricken father. They pitched a tent in the backyard and decided to record something in the spur of the moment, setting up microphones as wildfires raged only miles away. A confined space within a world unravelling. Tent Music is what emerged from those nights. Music stripped of intention and thus open to ancient or esoteric influence, Tobin and Hill acting not so much musicians but mouths for unseen voices, tools for invisible hands. When shaping the recordings over the next few years, the task felt more like relaying an old mythology than creating something new. “Both of us have a pretty long practice with improvised and experimental music,” as Tobin explains, “but there were voices coming out of me in those two nights that I’ve never used before. It felt like channelling something. When we started listening back to it, the story emerged.”

As ever, thanks for sticking with us for another year. Your support does not go unnoticed.

The post Albums We Missed in 2023 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

The result is Personal Best, the first TRAAMS full-length in seven years, to be released this summer on Fatcat Records. An album somewhere between evolution and revolution, clearly indebted to the TRAAMS style but unafraid of bold changes to break new ground. So while some tracks are clearly rooted in the old aesthetic, others represent a transformation. Take the prudent quiet of lead single ‘Sleeper’, swapping out the ferocity of previous releases in favour of something subtle, more human, infused with a certain light.

‘Sleeper’ sees Lowly’s Soffie Viemose lend her vocals, and latest single ‘The Light At Night’ is similarly collaborative. “I had this part where I was trying to sound like a preacher, or someone with unequivocal authority, delivering this ranting speech,” Hopkins explains. “And as much as I tried to get a good version of me doing it, it just wasn’t working. It just sounded like I was trying to be Joe [Casey, of Detroit’s Protomartyr].” So, unlike many a post-punk outfit before them, TRAAMS decided against the cheap knock-off routine and did the only thing left. They asked the man himself.

Building from Hopkin’s hushed beginning, the track ratchets tighter and tighter before unspooling in the back half, Casey stepping in with trademark fervour as the tension releases in the song’s spiralling crescendo. “They implicit in desperation,” he sings. “They wasted hours with Jesuits / They partied in the House of Royal Values / They were partitioned by robots / They saw both cross and boss-eyed.” A sermon delivered in total conviction, walking the line between derangement and assurance with the hermetic logic of an unhinged man.

But the lips still move
What did they say?
What’s that old saying?
Kill the body the head dies

The song comes complete with a video directed and edited by Charlotte Gosch and Lee Kiernan, with production from Holding Hands with Horses and further work by Rob French:

Personal Best is out via Fatcat Records on the 22nd July and you can pre-order it from Bandcamp.

The post TRAAMS – Personal Best appeared first on Various Small Flames.

We’ve decided to expand things slightly this year, giving ourselves a chance to write a little something about the albums we wanted to cover but never got the opportunity. Albums which meant something to us at various points through 2021. Some cemented themselves early as our favourites of the year, others were relatively late additions that held our attention as the calendars changed, and a few break the rules in being albums released in previous years but earn their inclusion here having proved constant companions through last twelve months.

So here are some records we really enjoyed in 2021. We hope you enjoy them too.

22° Halo – Garden Bed

Lost Sound Tapes

Led by Will Kennedy (Sleeper Records) and supported by the likes of Heeyoon Won (Boosegumps) and Francis Lyon (Ylayali, Free Cake For Every Creature), 22° Halo are something of a Philadelphia DIY lo-fi pop supergroup. Their third release, Garden Bed is as sweet and soft as the peachy pink cover art, taking the gloomy fog of slowcore and holding a light beneath it, the cloud suddenly enveloping and bright. Paired with the earnest tenderness of Kennedy’s vocals, the songs come to feel like old companions. Fond and quietly contemplative, strangely familiar and hopeful in a manner not quite explicable. Songs easy to be around and easier to return to, comforting in the very fact they exist.

Advance Base – Wall of Tears & Other Songs I Didn’t Write

Orindal Records

In ‘Kitty Winn’, a song on Advance Base’s 2015 record Nephew in the Wild, Owen Ashworth described watching The Exorcist and recognising the actor from Panic at Needle Park. “It felt like seeing an old friend,” he sings, “The way I wondered where she’d been.” Ashworth has introduced us to a lot of characters of his own over the years, but Wall of Tears & Other Songs I Didn’t Write performs a different kind of introduction. Inspired by the conspicuous absence of karaoke during recent times, the release takes tracks from acts both old and new and reimagines them in the image of Ashworth’s distinctively hushed and empathetic style. With a mixture of classics (Lucinda Williams, Iris DeMent, St. John Prine) and contemporaries/Orindal Records label mates (Dan Wriggins, Gia Margaret, Wednesday). The collection will resonate differently depending on who’s listening, but chances are there’ll be at least one occasion where the introduction is more like a reintroduction. An old friend smiling through the years, suddenly before you once again. 

Cassandra Jenkins – An Overview on Phenomenal Nature

Ba Da Bing Records

“I’m a three-legged dog, working with what I’ve got,” sings Cassandra Jenkins on ‘Michaelangelo’, the opening track from An Overview on Phenomenal Nature. “And part of me,” she continues, “will always be looking for what I’ve lost.” It’s one of the few tracks that directs its focus on Jenkins herself rather than reflections from those around her. The record is inspired by the work of Indian sculptor Mrinalini Mukherjee, an artist who explored the line between allegory and abstraction with an intuitive fluidity, and Jenkins follows this lead to spin her surroundings into representations of her own. Be that the characters and objects encountered in the travel diary of ‘Hard Drive’, the accumulated wisdom of ‘New Bikini’, or the startlingly pretty instrumentation that builds across the record thanks to a whole host of musicians. Songs shaped by Jenkins’s careful but fleeting hand, like sculptures allowed to dissipate as soon as they have formed. Moments captured, meaning what they will.

Cla-ras – Five clusters

Lily Tapes & Discs

The first full length by multidisciplinary artist Jeremy Ferris, Five clusters takes inspiration from nature’s long game. With subtle intricacies growing from every crevice, its ambient folk style sees the organic slowly overwhelm the electronic, evoking ecology’s reclamation of abandoned industrial land. The sense of some circular pattern, the past returning as the future, post-humanity imagined as prehistoric verdancy. The sensation is both delicate and strangely visceral. Keyed into the botanical surface and the supporting undergrowth, where fine mycelium threads facilitate pungent decomposition, enriching the soil so that the songs might bloom with their damp, bodily life.     

Damien Jurado – The Monster Who Hated Pennsylvania

Maraqopa Records

The world of The Monster Who Hated Pennsylvania is familiar in the way a dream is familiar. Or is that foreign in the way dreams are foreign? Damien Jurado presents each track as a space between the known and unknown, their characters hanging on in the hope such positions are transitory, and in doing so blurs the line between the characters and the songwriter himself. Take Majestic centrepiece ‘Johnny Caravella’, which calls to mind ‘Percy Faith’ from The Horizon Just Laughed but this time takes inspiration from fictional DJ Dr. Johnny Fever from WKRP in Cincinnati. But ‘taking inspiration’ doesn’t quite capture the song’s true extent, as Jurado channels the fictional doctor, his delivery neither quite Fever or himself but a blend of the two. “Who’ll wear the crown when the change is approaching / Of some other season renown?” this hybrid figure asks as the track winds tighter with every line. This latent intensity is brought to the surface in the finale, an urgent beseeching that we hang on a little longer. “As I exited north the radio spoke / ‘All is not lost even if you’re without a direction’,” goes the final verse. “Go west, go west, 1972 / The sun hasn’t set, the stars very few / Just stick around ’til the light pushes into the darkness.”

The Felice Brothers – From Dreams to Dust

Yep Roc Records

‘Jazz on the Autobahn’, the opening track of what is The Felice Brothers’ eighth and perhaps most compelling record, finds two people fleeing their old lives. It’s never revealed exactly what Helen and The Sheriff are leaving in the rear-view mirror of their “doomed Corvette,” but what waits for them at the end of the road is imagined in vivid detail. Helen dreams of the apocalypse arriving as an anthropomorphic tornado, as poisoned lakes and acid rain, a force as “loud as a mushroom cloud” yet “ghostly like a glockenspiel.” The Sheriff disagrees, tries to “make a distinction between death and extinction” as Helen spits melon seeds and drinks 7-Up in his car. His is an apocalypse stripped of its fictions and graces. No saving angels, no hand of God, no spared billionaires on Mars. The track is the standard bearer of From Dreams to Dust. A record of cutting fury and crushing sadness set to rich and affirming rhythms. Poems and short stories packed with clever references and wry turns of phrase. A confrontation of the grim realities of our moment that nevertheless celebrates the fact of being alive. “What is freedom?” The Sheriff wonders in his closing verse. To be empty of desire? To find everything we’ve lost or have been in search of? Does it feel like jazz on the autobahn?

Giles Corey – S/T

The Flenser

The side project of Have a Nice Life’s Dan Barrett, Giles Corey picked up the threads of Deathconsciousness and followed them deep underground. The self-titled record, originally released in 2011 but given a new lease of life by The Flenser for its tenth anniversary, feels like a haunting committed to tape. At once intense and eerily hushed, spacious yet claustrophobic, lonely but never alone. A picture of depression as an intensely personal experience which nevertheless transcends the individual. A torment too large for a single skin. When ‘Empty Churches’ opens with paranormal investigator Raymond Cass talking of voices of unknown origin appearing on radio frequencies, the mood is not so much disturbing as alluring. A dimension beyond all this. Something to lose yourself in. To submit to. To hope for beyond all we know and can know, in spite of it all.

Grouper – Shade

Kranky

Described as a record about “respite and the coast, poetically and literally,” Shade is every bit as considered and in-depth as you might expect from an album fifteen years in the making. The mutual relationship between person and place is conjured with Harris’s cloudy abstraction, the line between strange and familiar blurred beyond its binary simplicity, and so too the border between intimacy and solitude. An overarching sense of a distance drapes over the record, evoking isolation in space or time, and the hushed tone carries with it hidden depths which speak to the unknowable nature of the sea. The result is simultaneously elemental and fundamentally human, and one of Grouper’s finest records to date.

The Hold Steady – Open Door Policy

Positive Jams

The Hold Steady universe has always been something of a gauntlet for its characters. A high-speed race with a whole lot of entrants but not so many finishers. To say Open Door Policy picks up with these winners is to assume the race has finished, when in fact it has merely changed. The participants are older, their communities atomised, their world having been sliced up and commodified by tech-savvy barons both ruthless and polite. In this way, the band’s eighth album feels a closer descendant of Craig Finn’s solo records than more recent Hold Steady records. A considered, cohesive album of narrative-driven songs which offer glimpses into the lives of imperfect figures dissatisfied or downtrodden and merely surviving. Finn & Co. mean many different things to many different people, but too often their work is (mis)understood as a mere good time. As though the joy of The Hold Steady is solely the joy of the party. But like so many of their records before it, Open Door Policy is proof of something deeper and more profound. The quiet, ugly dignity of humans persevering, and the irreplaceable value of a community to see them through.

KUZU – The Glass Delusion

Astral Spirits

Glass delusion is a manifestation of a psychiatric phenomenon witnessed primarily across the wealthy classes of Early Modern Europe where the individual feared they were made of glass. King Charles VI of France allegedly forbade anyone from touching him, so acute was his fear of shattering, and took to wearing protective clothing. It was a fear intensely human yet inorganic, recasting life as a path with danger around every bend. Chicago‘s KUZU throw us into such a heightened state, their improvisational jazz guarding its hand, leaving the listener no choice but to strap in and follow the slow-burning yet ever shifting lines. But from within the anxiety of this undetermined ride, an overarching conviction emerges. The sense everything is barrelling toward some spectacular finale. The dreadful shattering event. The screw turns and turns, the sound needling with increasingly deranged energy, leaving the listener like Gene Hackman’s Harry Caul at the end of The Conversation, tearing their surroundings rather than break apart themselves.

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson – Theory of Ice

You’ve Changed Records

Michi Saagig Nishnaabeg artist Leanne Betasamosake Simpson has made her name in poetry, fiction, music and scholarship, and Theory of Ice feels like a culmination of this body of work. A lesson in world building, in communication, in history and preservation and life. A weapon against settler colonisation that carries no dull weight or serrated edge, indeed no violence at all. “The settler colonial state is not hated, it is pitied,” describes Steven Lambke in the liner notes, “for its smallness, its evil, its perpetual cruelty.” Theory of Ice turns this force against itself, utilising an absence of violence to illuminate the absence within violence. The dark, meaningless lacuna at the heart of the imperialist project, a space never filled despite the visceral physicality of its rule. Moreover, Simpson evokes the persistent presence of the peoples who have suffered at its hand, kept alive in acts of community and gesture, in the work of a searching artist’s life. “In realization / we don’t exist without each other,” go the record’s closing lines. “She says: there’s nothing about you / I’m not willing to know.”

Macie Stewart – Mouth Full of Glass

Orindal Records

To describe the career of Macie Stewart is to describe a career of collaboration. The multi-instrumentalist founded bands such as Kids These Days, Marrow and OHMME, played as part of Ken Vandermark’s Marker ensemble, improvisational act The Few and with Lia Kohl as a violin/cello duo, as well as lending her talents to records by a plethora of acts including V.V. Lightbody, Whitney, Adeline Hotel and S.Z.A. But within these collaborations, Stewart became aware her own individual sound was being left to atrophy. Indeed, she had no idea what her individual sound might be. With its unflinching eye and succulent arrangements, Mouth Full of Glass represents an attempt to find out. An artist surveying their own inner workings through considered and open-ended exploration, leaning into solitude as a medium of discovery and learning from all that has occurred before without ever becoming beholden to the past. “What pleasure I choose to keep after I buried it deep,” as Stewart sings across the sinuous sax of ‘Garter Snake’. “Try to uncover it all.”

Michael Beach – Dream Violence

Goner Records & Poison City Records

On Dream Violence, Naarm/Melbourne-based Michael Beach reaches into the grab bag of rock history and fashions what he finds into something timely and unique. Imagine Neil Young meeting The Velvet Underground on a dark and hopeless night in our late-capitalist hellscape to muse on the meaninglessness of existence. Ripping rockers rub shoulders with heartfelt piano ballads and genuine, capital-E earworms, all in an attempt to communicate what Beach describes as “human futility, passion, desire, anger, frustration, and the struggle to maintain hope in a somewhat hopeless time.”

Natalie Jane Hill – Solely

Dear Life Records

Following on from 2020’s stunning Azaela, Natalie Jane Hill’s second record sees a reversal of perspective. Because while the first album looked to the expansive roll of the land for its focus, Solely turns inward to examine an environment far more personal. Themes of loss and loneliness emerge from this introspection, by-products of any quest for self-discovery, though Hill’s intricate arrangements are too deft and nuanced to be consumed by such emotions. What instead emerges is an ecosystem as detailed and changeable as any conjured on Azaela, an interior environment as mysterious as that of the Blue Ridge Mountains. One that holds the best and worst of life and, importantly, holds enough space to sit with both simultaneously, never losing sight of the possibility of change on the horizon.

Protomartyr – Ultimate Success Today

Domino

Across five albums, Protomartyr’s Joe Casey has cemented his status as a cynic in both the ancient and modern sense. A fatalistic Irish Catholic from working class Detroit writing songs that weave dense webs of references to ancient philosophy and arcane literature. The everyday man alienated, an outsider enraged at what is unfolding around him. Written during a spell of illness, Ultimate Success Today sees Casey confront not only his own mortality but the wider prospect of hope in the contemporary neoliberal society. His father, whose untimely death has haunted each Protomartyr album to varying degrees, died during a routine medical procedure, and Casey’s pain is matched by a dread of the doctor’s office. A cynicism of medicine rooted not in partisan politics or misinformation but existential terror—the sense even the surgeons won’t be able to save him. The explicit goodbye of closing track ‘Worm in Heaven’ might play as a cathartic acknowledgement of this fear, but Casey chooses to undercut himself, mocking his own attempts to conquer dread through music. A cynicism wrapped around itself to include a doubt in the utility or power of art. “Dumb aphorist embrace obscurants,” he sings of himself on ‘The Aphorist’, “and write in ogham for your final lines.” A cynic, old and new, to the very end.

R.A.P. Ferreira – The Light Emitting Diamond Cutter Scriptures

Self-released

Whether recording as milo, scallops hotel or most recently R.A.P. Ferreira, Nashville-based Rory Ferreira has been releasing some of the most inventive and interesting rap music of the past few years. The Light Emitting Diamond Cutter Scriptures is his most cohesive record to date, the full maturity of his lyricism on show without losing any of the DIY aesthetic that has long lended his work its authenticity. Because Ferreira is a rapper in the purest sense. A radical, a philosopher, a comedian. Interested in nothing but the words. “What’s morbid is there’s poets who want to be on the Forbes List,” he sings on ‘uptown 37’, “I will be gorgeous and homeless.” And gorgeous this is, the lyrics skating over a whole gamut of moods and subjects, reaching for whatever cultural reference he can get his hands on, however high or low. Where else are you going to find Ansel Adams, Inspector Clouseau, Euripedes and Mr Bean all living on the same record?

Renée Reed – S/T

Keeled Scales

Born into a family of musicians and folklorists, Renée Reed grew up amid the best of Cajun and Creole music. Her work contains a hundred shades and small details pointing toward this history, but its lasting influence is less tangible. A sense of intuition threads through the songs. A phenomenon which lends them a certain timelessness, the sense they haven’t been so much written as teased out of some half-remembered space. The intricate arrangements are rendered simple in their instinctive rhythm, Reed’s poetic lyrics given the weight of the land. “We’d stand in the dark and cry,” she sings near the end of the record, “Oh, if only we could / For our bones, they belong to the country.” These songs feel like they belong to the country too, Reed more a guardian than a creator. For now they are travelling with her, and a worthy custodian she makes. 

Space Afrika – Honest Labour

Dais Records

The UK has always been a kind of dreamstate. A society held up on imagined pasts and false notions, a deluded fantasy stretched to breaking point yet never relinquishing its hold. This dark dread is in the dense Twin Peakian synths of Honest Labour’s opening moments, but Manchester‘s Space Afrika are here to do more than recapitulate the moribund British dream. For within the dreamstate live the dreamers, and each dreamer—however isolated and despondent—has their own dreams. Feeling more like a documentary than album, the record details the visions of this nameless population. A tessellated blend of samples, field recordings and vocal cameos which emerge haphazardly from dark layers of instrumentation. The result is an expressionistic picture of a society, one dazed and delirious, left to wander this long night with all their love and fear and loss in the hope some dawn might lend this intangible reality some weight.  

Sun June – Somewhere

Run For Cover Records / Keeled Scales

Take a look at the artwork of Sun June’s Somewhere and you might see a pillar of smoke gradually fade into a pastel sky. The image is fitting for a sound they developed on 2018’s Years, a record of gently swaying country pop songs which traced feelings of loss and grief as they dispersed into the wider context of a life. Sadness drifting away from its source, becoming more translucent with distance but always present in some diffuse concentration. Though clearly building on the previous record, Somewhere sees a certain inversion. Love stirs from within the tracks and with it a poppier, full-bodied sound. The sense the quiet melancholy is coalescing into something more tangible and immediate, gathering weight and sinking toward some intensity on the ground. Perhaps we got it backward, we’re looking at the artwork upside down.

Tasha – Tell Me What You Miss The Most

Father/Daughter Records

In a year of weighty foreboding and needling menace, Tasha’s Tell Me What You Miss The Most came to represent a safe haven. An introspective album which excavates personal ground not as some exercise in regret or sadness but to carve a space in which to rest and ponder. Be it musing on the pasts that were and the presents that never came to be, or the unknown futures still up in the air. Imagery of beds and sleep recurs across the record, and the songs come to knit their own mattress and sheets. A place where time passes in reassuring cycles and the pressing outside is held at bay, one’s troubles suddenly small and tactile enough to be examined in the palm of a hand. 

Tobacco City – Tobacco City, USA

Scissor Tail Records

Listening to Chicago’s Tobacco City is to be transported to the imagined locale of its title, a loving patchwork of country music settings; like searching for radio waves from a porchside rocking chair or feeding quarters into a jukebox in the musty refuge of a dark barroom. Lonesome ballads wind slow with regret and pedal steel, folk songs get cosmic on sunburn and psychedelics, and honky-tonk shuffles flow easy as that three-beers-in second wind after a long day on the production line. Hard-earned wisdom sits side by side with wry humour, capturing the tragedy, hope and absurdity of broken people going about their lives the best they can. Riding out heartbreak on the buzz of cheap booze and bright lights. As Lexi Goddard sings at one point, “Being alone ain’t so bad when you’re half in the bag.”

The Weather Station – Ignorance

Fat Possum Records

“I never believed in the robber,” sings The Weather Station‘s Tamara Lindeman on Ignorance’s opening track. “I never saw nobody climb over my fence.” The lines contain a multitude of meanings. Stress a different word and you get a different shade of the album’s eponymous state. The robber doesn’t exist. At least to my knowledge. At least not around these parts. But the truth lies in the volatile swirl of instrumentation, a jazzy swell of cymbals and piano and drums, sax licking staccato like the devil’s tongue or the threatening word of God. ‘Robber’ is a confession, a plea, a waking fever dream. The colonial past and capitalist present manifest in all its unease. A violence which seeps out, haunting even the record’s most tender moments. Lindeman repeatedly turns to the natural world as an escape, from the birds of ‘Parking Lot’ to the “cold metallic scent of snow” in ‘Subdivisions’, the sky, the green, the soft of ‘Heart’. But as it says in ‘Loss’, “At some point you’d have to live as if the truth was true.” Nature might still persist, but it is the robber who built the world around us. His hand is still in our pockets. Even the sunset on ‘Atlantic’ is blood red.

Wednesday – Twin Plagues

Orindal Records

Though Twin Plagues is a record of memories, there’s nothing polished about the experiences being relayed, no rose-tinted gloss applied through repeated telling. There’s no nostalgia either. No intention to preserve or wish to return. Rather, Wednesday portray the past as something still present. The rugged surface across which the present is overlain. Its contours reveal itself on even the most ordinary days, be it in the gut-drop of a missed step, a suddenly interrupted view. Memories held for no good reason, not exclusively bad but always haunting. Memories as they return to you in dreams. The kid with a fucked up buzzcut. The burned down Dairy Queen. Birds in the air, flies in the bug light, brawls at the baseball and crossbows in old family photographs. Sometimes these memories are traumatic, sometimes they are sad, sometimes they mean nothing beyond their own shape and texture but then again, that’s just how life unfolds.        

Wendy Eisenberg – Bent Ring

Dear Life Records

Even in the crowded field of the internet age, Wendy Eisenberg stands apart in their prolific invention. Since the beginning of 2020, they have released at least five solo records (as well as working as part of Editrix), each offering intricate and thematically precise sounds which serve as frameworks through which to examine a particular space or time. The latest, Bent Ring, began as a self-imposed challenge to make an album with no guitar, but really stands apart in the direction of its gaze. A record looking back across a period of great productivity and achievement nevertheless attenuated by the hostile conditions of the surrounding environment. A contemplation of what it means to be an artist in our world, and how the endurance, commitment, frustration and joy of the vocation come to shape the artist too. With the earthy, temperamental twang of its salvaged banjo, Bent Ring encapsulates both the exhaustion and energy of an artist’s life, its steadfast rhythm always threatening to slow or speed up but ultimately pressing on regardless.     

Wes Tirey – The Midwest Book of the Dead

Dear Life Records

“Silos stand like chapels / Chapels stand like graves / Graves stand like corn / Corn stands like waves.” So opens ‘Bang the Drum Slowly’, a song which encapsulates the spirit of Wes Tirey’s tenth album. One populated with blue heron and crawdads and creek beds, a land of fields and factories stalked by stray dogs and innumerable ghosts. But more than a survey of this very American landscape, Tirey offers us characters too. People presented in snatches, sometimes nothing more than the distinctive ring of their voice. What emerges is not a clear narrative, at least not in the linear sense, but rather a patchwork of vignettes which combine into a picture far larger and more extensive. The dead are plural in this book, and each has their own story to tell.

Will Stratton – The Changing Wilderness

Bella Union

A fundamentally exploratory songwriter, Will Stratton has never been one to settle in a single groove. But if one feature has stretched through his work, it’s the art of introspection. But then came the late 2010s and the intensification of our rightward spiral down. Faced with such pressing political issues, Stratton went into The Changing Wilderness with a new desire to engage with the wider world. To write a record which might catalogue the atrocities of this moment. As he sings on ‘When I’ve Been Born (I’ll Love You)’: “The present is prosaic / The future, a disgrace / We can’t just look away now / It stares us in the face.” Capturing the tone of the record, the song charts the profound sickness of our times, and can’t help but slip back toward self-examination in the face of such horror. A search which emerges with no solution beyond a determination to face the worst undaunted. “When I get my prize, I’ll love you,” goes the chorus. “As the oceans rise, I’ll love you / When the air gеts thin, I’ll love you / If the fascists win, I’ll love you.”

If you enjoyed anything on this list, you may also be interested in list of songs we missed in 2021, which will be published shortly. And of course, there were lots of amazing records that we did write about in the last year, so have a look back through our Reviews and Previews sections to find more.

The post Albums We Missed in 2021 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Described as the first of four multimedia works that will make up their self-titled debut EP, ‘Pica’ is a slouching beast of song that possesses a strange tension between menacing weight and haunting ethereality. The result is something densely physical yet intangible too, existing across a variety of planes and brought to life in sounds both menacing and sublime.

Such paradoxical sensations speak to the overarching themes. Pica refers to the compulsion of the same name, where individuals crave and consume non-nutritive substances. The condition is treated as a psychological disorder, abnormal behaviour that leads people to foods seen as unacceptable. “We wanted to focus on this attribution of ‘unacceptable’ characteristics,” the band explain. “This creation of abnormal value connections between objects. Our desire was to invoke similar divergent attributions of value within the visual space—specifically between the nouveau digital landscapes created by machine learning and other digital manipulations, and the body as it is experienced in the hyper-digitized moment.”

If both nature and the human body are sites of wonder and spiritual depth, then what is the implication of our increasing digitization of such sites? Bloodslide utilise medical imaging software to push further into this question, exploring how such technology reconfigures relationships with our bodies and environments. “Our digitization of these almost sacred elements allows us to highlight the divergent attributions of value we assign to these elements when experiencing them in the digital space,” they continue. “And the fact that we—like those who suffer from Pica—are constantly fighting an appetite to consume these digital ghosts.”

The track’s accompanying video aims to represent these ‘ghosts’ for what they really are. “Hybrids of value,” a myriad of innumerable elements constantly shifting and assembling into new forms. What Bloodslide call “a new evolution,” where an infinite number of novel forms are possible, as it is no longer constrained by the limits of physical space.

*WARNING: You may want to give the video a miss if you have photosensitive epilepsy*

‘Pica’ is out now and available from the Bloodslide Bandcamp page. Their self-titled EP will be released in July.

The post Bloodslide – Pica appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Here is a list of songs from 2020 that we liked but didn’t get around to writing about.

If you find something you like, follow the link in the embed to support the artists and labels on Bandcamp. And of course, there is a whole year’s worth of pieces on releases we did manage to write about, so have an explore through our reviews, previews and interviews from 2020.

The post Music We Missed in 2020 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

2nd Grade – Favorite Song
Adeline Hotel – Lightning
Adrianne Lenker – Cradle
Allison’s Gate – Traces
Anna McClellan – Heart of Hearts
Advance Base – Christmas in Nightmare City
Badlands – Slow it Down
Bambara – José Tries to Leave
The Beths – Whatever
Bodega – Jack in Titanic
boygenius – Me & My Dog
Camp Cope – UFO Lighter
Campdogzzz – Sorceress
Cave People – I Shall Believe
Damien Jurado – Percy Faith
Dead Painters – Fool on Fire
Dear Nora – Simulation Feels
Dehd – Dying For
Devon Welsh – Vampires
Diva Sweetly – Detox Island
Doe – Heated
Dusted – Outline of a Wolf
Field Report – Every Time
Frankie Valet – Something to do with a mouth
Gia Margaret – Birthday
Goodbye Max – Old Photos
Good Good Blood – Cannot Be Yours Forever
Gorgeous Bully – Patience
Great Health – Lazarus
Hop Along – How Simple
Hour – At the bar where you literally saved me from fatal heartbreak 
Houses – Fast Talk
Hovvdy – Brave
Hypoluxo – Kentucky Smooth
IAN SWEET – Hiding
Kal Marks – Today I Walked Down To The Tree, Read A Book, And When I Was Done, I Went Back Inside
Katy Kirby – Juniper
Kevin Morby & Waxahatchee – Dark Don’t Hide It
Kississippi – Easier to Love
Kraków Loves Adana – The Day the Internet Died
Lala Lala – Destroyer
Lisa/Liza – Tea Kettle
lowly loverboi – Graveyards in Space
Lucy Dacus – Yours & Mine
Mike Pace & the Child Actors – Escape the Noise
Miranda Winters – The Futuristic District
Mitski – Nobody
Moonface – Minotaur Forgiving Pasiphae
Moon Racer – Friendly Ghost
Nap Eyes – Every Time the Feeling
Nice Try – Micah
Nicole Dollanganger – Uncle
No Age – Drippy
Oceanator – Mistakes
Of The Valley – Ride Alone
Pale Kids – St. Theresa
Pat Moon – I Belong
Pema – Depend
Petal – I’m Sorry
Pink Navel – born-100.dev
Pizza Girl – Body Part
Protomartyr – Wheel of Fortune
Remember Sports – Dripping
Restorations – Nonbeliever
Rivulets – Everything Goes
Ryan Von Gonten – Fabrique
Sabriel’s Orb – Holding
Saccharine – Pumpkin Guts
Sam Moss – Snap
Sara Renberg – Take the Summer Off
Sobs – Sundae
Spartan Jet-Plex – Sweet
Strange Ranger – The Wires
Sun June – Slow Rise II
Swearin’ – Dogpile
Talk, Tired Thanatoid – Everything’s Cool
Tomberlin – Any Other Way
Trace Mountains – Salty Sweet
Trust Fall – Wild Fire/Flowers
TVU – All For Nothing
Weakened Friends – Blue Again
Whitney Baleen – Rainer
Why Bonnie – Stereo
Wild Pink – The Seance on St. Augustine Street
wished bone – reasons
Yellowfront – Cool Breeze
Young Jesus – For Nana
Young Statues – Somebody Else
Yowler – Where Is My Light?

If you missed it, we have also posted our favourite albums list, so check that out too.

The post Favourite Songs of 2018 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Various Swell Sounds is a collaborative playlist series from Shana Hartzel of Swell Tone, Jon Chin of Cereal and Sounds, and myself. Instead of constantly exchanging tracks amongst each other, we have decided to work together to bring them to more ears. Every month, we will match a selection of our old and brand new favourites to a specific theme, as decided on a revolving basis month by month.

2018 Warped: the final Various Swell Sounds offering of the year, and perhaps of all time. Here, all constraints go out of the window, and instead we present a collection of songs from all styles, sounds and eras that have been with us this year.

If you enjoy 2018 Warped, be sure to check out the other instalments of Various Swell Sounds. You can find those we hosted here, and the others on Swell Tone and Cereal + Sounds.

The post Various Swell Sounds #11: 2018 Warped appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Various Swell Sounds is a new collaborative playlist series from Shana Hartzel of Swell Tone, Jon Chin of Cereal and Sounds, and myself. Instead of constantly exchanging tracks amongst each other, we have decided to work together to bring them to more ears. Every month, we will match a selection of our old and brand new favourites to a specific theme, as decided on a revolving basis month by month.

Following the dangerous freedom of Shana’s Unguarded Beach, and the angsty heartbreak of Jon’s Violet’s Aren’t Blue, the third edition sees us take up the mantle with something altogether more unsettling. Because, let’s be honest, we live in unsettling times. Silicon Valley is (allegedly) controlling our elections, Russian spies are being attacked on foreign soil and Infowars has a White House press pass. Yes, we’re paranoid. But are we paranoid enough?

1. Crystal Stilts – Alien Rivers
2. Sixteen Jackies – VHS #1
3. The Paranoyds – Sleep Paralysis
4. The Buttertones – Ghost Safari
5. Total Control – Stonehenge
6. WINT – Dark Matter) We (Endless
7. Iguana Death Cult – Whispers
8. Screaming Females – Glass House
9. Vundabar – No People to Person
10. Liza Anne – Paranoia
11. Big Air – Mr. Mind Control
12. Matias Aguayo & The Desdemonas – Cold Fever
13. Baby Brains – Walk Alone (The Cave Collection)
14. Pye Corner Audio – The Black Mill Video Tape
15. Protomartyr – Here Is The Thing
16. Eddy Current Suppression Ring – Colour Television
17. Silly Pillows – Figment of Your Imagination
18. Stef Chura – Becoming Shadows
19. JACK – Fear Of
20. Eerie Wanda – Happy Hard Times
21. Cave & Lenderson – Friedgeman
22. La Luz – Cicada
23. Snakadaktal – Fall Underneath
24. Institute – Familiar Stranger
25. NOTS – Fluorescent Sunset
26. CLINIC – The Return of Evil Bill
27. Lying Down – Betty and Barney
28. Dr Dog – Listening In
29. Timber Timbre – Creep on Creepin On
30. Good Good Blood – Dinosauria

Spotify:

Playmoss:

Artwork by Liam Doyle, logo by Stolen Chapstick

The post Various Swell Sounds #3: Paranoid Style appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Various Small Flames’

Songs of 2017

Anamon – Kneel Old
Android Automatic – Dark Roads*
Angie McMahon – Slow Mover
Basement Revolver – Johnny Pt. 2
Baxter Roy Long – Paribanou
Bea Troxel – Let Them Know
Big Thief – Mary
Black Belt Eagle Scout – Soft Stud
Bully – Running
Cayetana – Mesa
Charly Bliss – Percolator
Chastity Belt – Different Now
CHUCK – Happy Birthday
The County Liners – Maria
The Courtneys – Tour
Craig Finn – God in Chicago
Crumb – Locket
Crushing – Emery Board
Cut Worms – Like Going Down Sideways
David Bazan – Care
Distant Reader – First Try
Emperor X – God Save Coastal Dorset
Fits – Ice Cream on a Nice Day
German Error Message – 2017*
Gleemer – Soothe Me
Great Grandpa – Favorite Show
Haley Heynderickx – Oom Sha Lala
Hiccup – Teasin’
Horse Culture – Texaco
Illuminati Hotties – ‘(You’re Better) Than Ever’
Japandroids – No Known Drink or Drug
Jason Isbell & the 400 Unit – If We Were Vampires
Jay Som – The Bus Song
Jeremy Squires – Night Cars
Katie Ellen – Drawing Room
Lizzie No – Monuments
Lomelda – Bam Sha Klam
Mike Pace and the Child Actors – Audits & Surveys
Meursault – The Mill
Mount Eerie – Crow
Nice Legs – Mighty Three
Oceanator – Nowhere Nothing
Ohyeahsumi – Daisy
Old Earth – Pit Dynamics
PASTEL – Stammer
Peter Silberman – New York
Phoebe Bridgers – Motion Sickness
Pope – Talk Me Out of It
Protomartyr – Windsor Hum
Rainwater – Place
Ratboys – Elvis is in the Freezer
Rick Rude – Bald & Fat in Houston, TX
Roadkill Ghost Choir – Classics (Die Young)
Rose Dorn – Dirt
See Through Dresses – Lucy’s Arm
Shannen Moser – A Funeral, A Friend, My Sanity
Sinai Vessel – Died On My Birthday
Slaughter Beach, Dog – Phoenix
SOAR – Fort Funston
Soft Fangs – Jordan // Jackson Elementary
Spartan Jet-Plex – We Believe
Strange Ranger – House Show
Strawberry Runners – Garden Hose
Timid, The Brave – Alice
Us and Only Us – Bored of Black
Vagabon – Cold Apartment
Viewfinder – Instant Moonlight
The Washboard Abs – Veil
Waxahatchee – Never Been Wrong
Wild Pink – Albert Ross
William Ryan Fritch – In Our Blood
The Wooden Sky – Swimming in Strange Waters
Ylayali – Cherry Tomatoes

*Strictly released in 2016, but barely, and we covered it in Jan. 2017.

If you missed it, you can see our Favourite Albums of 2017 list here. Also, the curious can find such lists from previous years here.

The post Favourite Songs of 2017 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

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