With the release of Moonlight Hotel fast approaching, Tom Lark has shared brand new track, ‘Fuselage’. Again occupying fertile psych folk territory, the track is no less assured yet nevertheless decidely moodier than its predecessor. Where ‘Rock & Roll Baby’ possessed a loose-limbed confidence, ‘Fuselage’ is all shadowy attitude and brooding edge, a stylistic change which heralds a different reaction to the volatile conditions. Here the carefree spirit falters, change suddenly something dangerous and daunting. With the realisation comes a certain sense of resistance, that inner self-preservation which tells us to retreat to the familiar and refuse to recognise reality as is now exists. But accompanying this desire is a secondary emotion, one which comes to inform the tone of the track. A sense of frustration at this hesitancy and stasis. A desire to kick through the defensive barriers we create around ourselves in order to regain a sense of forward motion.

Watch the video, directed by Sam Kristofski, below:

Moonlight Hotel is out on the 4th April and you can pre-order it now.

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‘Skull Song’ opens with lean and bouncy guitar, the garage pop backing to Kaparos’s deadpan vocals, creating a tune that for all its rough-around-the-edges strangeness is actually catchy and uplifting, as if the band are able to bring together a bunch of disparate lo-fi elements to somehow conjure something with a glint of magic. “I’m moving too fast”, Kaparos sings, “in and out of the past / nobody living here could make me turn back”.

‘Woodclamp’ is a folk song with a palpable pulse, a steady muffled beat that keeps the rest of the song moving forward, the vocals on ‘Dogwhistle’ seem crowded right up to the mic, delivered in a disaffected drawl. The song’s final section is also remarkable in the way is manages to convey considerable emotion in the line “I’m not a spaceman I’m a dog”.

‘Alchemy’ is built on a steady strum, distorted guitar and murmured vocals that occasionally quaver and hit peaks of emotion or desperation. The guitars on ‘The Rise and Fall of Mulch’ sound very Appalachian indeed, a pleasantly hallucinogenic flow fueled on moonshine and late summer sun, before things go quiet as the guitars are plugged into a blown-out amp and the song transforms into something that’s all brash reverb and half-hearted shredding.

‘Reading the Obits on a Sunbaked Hillside’ is a slow burner, beginning with meditative guitar cycles before eventually dawning into frantic folk as Kaparos sings:

“This one below
now he’s a real hero
fought in a war that nobody knows
this one beside him
well she’s the queen of spain
but nobody gives a fuck anyway”

As the title suggests, closing track ‘Skull Song (Reprise)’ sees the first track resurrected, the melody familiar but somehow different too, like something recognised from a dream or deja vu. And like the rest of the album it’s deceptively fun. If there’s one thing Appalachian Yard Art excel at it’s the ability to tease out moments of clarity from their rough and homespun palette. I like Antiquated Future’s term “minimalist outsider mini-epics”, because that’s what these songs are, proof that beauty lies not in the meticulously polished but in the honest and messy strangeness of being alive.

You can get Fussy now on cassette tape from Antiquated Future Records or as a download via the Appalachian Yard Art Bandcamp page.

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From the opening track, ‘Century Woods’, we are introduced to the Lisa/Liza blueprint, what label Orindal Records describes as a “blend [of] psychedelia, Appalachian folk and dream pop”. All seven songs were recorded at home by Victoria, her complex poetry arising from a relatively simple set up, just straining finger-picked guitar and her gently wavering voice.

The album is deeply thematic, its subject inward-looking and reflective, although not necessarily in the way you may expect. Many artists regard the past as some trial that must be (or has been) overcome, the people we once were best forgotten, but with Desert of Youth, Victoria aims for something different. As she explains:

Deserts of Youth is an album about the parts of our past that remain within us, and visiting these landscapes with recognition of ourselves instead of a meditation on what has been lost, or is no longer a resource or a path we can use. It is about meeting the past and facing it with a sense of ownership instead of abandon; the idea that one can see a desert as a place of desolation or a place of needed reflection, full of life, and strength.

Second track, ‘Another Window’, has a similar effect, the acoustic guitar painting intricate patterns that are at times gnarled and thorny and others aloft and free, as if rising high on an updraft. Indeed, many of the songs possess this sort of duality, at times gossamer thin with Victoria’s vocals little more than hushed murmurs, though even in these quiet moments her words hold a kind of understated magnetism, a power which draws in the instrumentation and in turn becomes augmented by it.

So, as the gentle pysch-folk guitars tumble around the lyrics, her words grow into incantations, conjuring images of deep woods or lonely desert plains, of that ancient magic in the order of things. This is mixed with sorcery of a much more familiar, everyday kind, such as that on the nostalgic ‘Lady Day’, where Victoria mixes the arcane with the mundane to find pockets of fascination. “I went to the part of the movie, I like the best,” she sings. “We rolled in at dark to the feeling / Lady Day on the radio.”

‘Wander’ marks the album’s halfway point and encapsulates the subtle intensity of the record as a whole, showing you don’t necessarily need to raise your voice to make a statement, that even quiet songs can be imbued with a blazing energy.

“It’s a holiday – to wander,
Sometimes we get in trouble,
Because we wander all the time.
I put off work, again, for tomorrow,
So we could chat about the garden,
And laugh about our stupid bosses.”

‘Red Pine’ is a lovely folk song, full of strange, sylvan imagery (“The red pine turns white / just as a blue spruce glows / in our living room”), while ‘Prospect Street’ explores the concept of finding ‘home’, both literally and figuratively. The title track then closes the album in beautiful fashion, its imagery at once bizarre and beguiling, dragging us from our hazy routine to kneel with Victoria and praise the wild around us.

“Waking up in meadows where
We were told to become
Deserts of Youth
And worship some young,
Teenage moon”

Deserts of Youth will be released via Orindal Records on the 9th September and you can snag your copy from their website.

Album artwork photography by Brian Doody

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“Clean War arrives during uncertain times – hollow leaders, blurred friends and foes, a heavy mix apathy and aggression divide much of our society, a need to label people, places, and ideas so quickly in order to usher them away to our like and dislike piles with no more than a crooked word from our sponsors.”

Clean War addresses a wide range of societal issues, all linked in ways that become clear as you listen and digest what’s going on. Take for example the ruminations on war and art, of how our short 21st Century attention spans reduce all art (and especially music) to brief summations which are quickly lost in the tempest of the internet, and how the same willingness to forget and move on extend to the life and (admittedly mostly) death concerns of war. Like all great artists, William Ryan Fritch focuses on questions and personal feelings, apparently fully aware that preaching answers to questions as big as these is futile. Instead, he shakes loose his thoughts and emotions. As the label put it “[he] must purge these dark psalms in order to not be consumed by them”.

‘Squander’ opens the album with atmospheric drone, sounding like echoes of some catastrophic event reaching out from the past, echoes we’d perhaps do well to heed when looking toward the future. ‘Storms’ gathers like an ominous weather front, eventually bursting forth in a great thudding, clanging downpour.

“For with the clearest skies, and the most sterile whites…
Are when looks are most deceiving and danger is most nigh.
May it’s shroud of dank and dark surround us still.
We pray for storms”

‘Blue Birth’ sounds downright ghostly, with its swirling atmosphere and disembodied handclaps. Fritch’s vocals are initially wordless but eventually coalesce into decipherable lyrics fraught with a macabre mysticism (“A blue birth thrust into the world too soon / A red death culled from this life too soon”). ‘Our Strange Progression’ begins slow and creepy and blooms into something grand and somehow wonky, its lyrics like something from a newly-translated classical text, while a ghostly choir opens ‘A Slow Collapse’, the track rumbling to life with galloping drums and dissonant instrumentation. Fritch’s vocals sit at the centre, floating out in all directions, the softest, smoothest element of all. That’s followed by ‘The Fall’, another instrumental that sounds like little more than wind in the branches of a tree, while ‘Protracted’ is grand and sweeping, like the motion of a turbulent sea.

The intro to the title track sounds somehow haunted, murmurs and wails and squeaking iron gates and spooky midnight clocktower tolls. Eventually Fritch’s vocals enter and the track takes on a Gothic majesty which aims headlong at the themes I mentioned previously.

“There is no clean war.
There is no absolute truth
There is no victimless deed
but we are deaf to the echoes of each”

‘Aftermath’ is about as apt a title as I could think of for the closing track. It sounds like the soundtrack to dust-flecked film of the devastation of some needless war, injured soldiers and orphaned children and cities reduced to rubble.

In short, the album is a triumph. It’s wonderful to know that there are still people out there concerned with more than Souncloud playcounts and impressing PR drones. William Ryan Fritch is an artist, and as such his work demands effort on the part of the listener as well as the creator. For all the gloom and fog present on the album, it still clings to a sense of hope, meaning it’s a rewarding and ultimately heartening experience. As they’ve put this last thought so eloquently, I’ll leave the guys at Lost Tribe Sound have the last word:

“Clean War is an undeniably human album, proudly displaying it wounds and disgust…Yet in the mire, a gentler tone resides, one that knows there is still good in humanity. He leaves us with a solemn prayer – a call to be decent to one another, to be more than hollow beasts, to upset a future of poor repetitious behaviors.”

Clean War is out now on Lost Tribe Sound and you can get it from the William Ryan Fritch Bandcamp page.

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“This past year was pretty nightmarish for me – a grandmother whom I was very close to passed away after quick mental decay and hallucinatory visions, a dear friend attempted suicide by pill overdose, I left a long term relationship, and our original guitar player quit to form a new band.  My whole world flipped in a matter of months and all of the songs I began to write were dark, brooding, wallowing meditations in sadness – and quite frankly, I didn’t like it. So I hired a new guitar player (who became our producer/engineer, too – Dave Cerminara) and asked the band to help me write a record where I could be honest and scared and confused, but that remained upbeat with bright, happy melodies. I didn’t want to sing sad songs with sad music because depression sucks.”

This is a perfect summation of the record, fast-paced, energetic and strangely celebratory in terms of sound, yet lyrically honest and quite often dark to the point of bleak. From the laid back psychedelica of ‘Close Call (Adderall Anxiety)’ and ‘Sneakin’ Out’, to the heavy riffs of ‘Liar’ and ‘Yr House Isn’t Haunted’, the songs are shot through with a detached sense of doom, an understanding of personal weakness that obliterates any chance of sentimental hope or self-absorbed melodrama. The feeling is captured perfectly on the punky ‘Tomato Tomato’:

“Id rather suffer than recover from my daily addictions
because at least I know exactly what it is I am getting
its nice to feel like I am in control in control of something”

But that does not mean personality and humour are absent, far from it. ‘It Was Mine (the Whole Time)’ is a cheeky tale of teenage audacity (although is kind of sad if you think about it too much), ‘Sun Spits’ utilises some impressively weird descriptives (“the car crawls like a saturated centipede”) and the blackly triumphant sing-a-long refrain of ‘Thru The Night’ is hard not to love. All together now… “I made it through the night! I made it through the night!”

To put it simply, Shaky At Best is an album about people addicted to trouble, folks gripped by a love-hate relationship with chemicals and loud noises, stuck within the paradox of crippling anxiety coupled with a good-time death wish. It’s about living too hard as a way to escape thinking too hard. Sometimes ideals and bleeding hearts can’t save us, and it’s up to people like Shaky Shrines to make us feel less alone.

You can stream Shaky At Best in it’s entirety below, and buy it from Bandcamp right now.

If you like what you hear, be sure to check out Shaky Shrines’ previous releases, including a 7″ out on Velocity of Sound.

–

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The vocals on opener ‘I Hope I Meet All of You Again’ sound a little like J. Tillman crossed with Hamilton Leithauser, and indeed Tillman/Father John Misty and (Lisbon-era) The Walkmen were the acts my mind kept referring to as I listened to the album. The vocals are supported by meandering laid-back acoustics and some of The Wandering Lake’s trademark otherworldly “ooohs”. ‘Mono No Aware’ is more reminiscent of Angel Olsen, with quavering lead vocals and a sedate and dreamy atmosphere, while ‘Lily Pad’ is swooning and rhythmic and ‘Memphis’ uses strummed acoustic guitars to produce the musical equivalent of a lazy summer’s day. ‘Return to View’ sets Kupillas’s vocals to thumping indie rock with a fuzzed out background, producing something akin to The War on Drugs, something exciting and vaguely triumphant, a punchy peak in an otherwise mellow sea of azure blue.

Personal stand-out ‘O Sky’ is wonderfully sinuous and hazy, before a crescendo breaks in with drawn out howling vocals and a barrage of drums. It’s a really great song. Like, one of my favourites of the year good. Next up is ‘Swimming Hole’, which is half-paced and languid, swaying along as if in a warm breeze, and then ‘It’s You!’ teams lush, almost tropical instrumentation with languorous percussion. The album closes with ‘Then Where To Go’, which has a by-now familiar vibe basking blissfully in the warm glow of long afternoon.

You can get Wend to Why via the Whatever Tapes Bandcamp page. You can also get a super cool, 20-page art zine, made by Paul Sanders and Kupillas’s brother Joe (see below), if you’re so inclined. The band are also going out on tour very soon. Check the dates via their Bandcamp page.

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The EP consists of four songs, all of which represent quite a departure from the otherworldly experimentalism of previous releases. The sound here is more immediate, more confident, a step towards psych tinged folk rock. They sound more like super-chill campfire jams than shamanistic campfire wails. The good news is that each track is great! Check them out in the player below.

I suppose it’s important to bear in mind that what we’re listening to is not quite the finished product. As Kupillas says on his Bandcamp page, “Here is a moment, imperfect as it was, captured and dressed for you. This isn’t all of it. This is a first glance of what was. There is more to come.” I for one am certainly excited for what comes next.

P.S. Here are The Wandering Lake’s upcoming tour dates. If any of the shows are near you, why not go check them out?

Thurs. Jan 29th – Nashville, TN @ The East Room
Fri. Jan. 30th – Lexington, KY @ The Green Lantern
Sat. Jan. 31st – Athens, OH @ The Pink Mattress
Sun. Feb. 1st – Murray, KY @ Terrapin Station
Mon. Feb. 2nd – St. Louis, MO @ FOAM
Tues. Feb. 3rd – Iowa City, IA @ Trumpet Blossom
Wed. Feb. 4th – Kansas City, MO @ Harlings
Thurs. Feb. 5th – Lawrence, KS @ The Replay Lounge
Fri. Feb. 6th – Fayetteville, AR @ JR’s Lightbulb Club
Sat. Feb. 7th – Little Rock, AR @ White Water Tavern

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The product of the tour was a tour album, entitled Milwaukee To Edinburgh, 2013, comprised of recordings made at various venues that Umhoefer visited whilst in Scotland. The tracks range from recordings from shows (e.g. ‘Less Words’ at Henry’s Cellar Bar) and live sessions for Song, By Toad, to rather more intimate performances in less conventional environments. A personal favourite is ‘Unanswered Echo Verse’ from Small Hours, a field recording at Euan and Ali’s (presumably the home of mini50’s Euan McMeeken), with its ambient baby noise and resulting shushing from its parents.

There is also a video of the tour, filmed by Lindsay Slepekis, basically a short film, a collage of performances in a multitude of locations. The film ends with an incredibly intimate shot of Umhoefer’s performance of ‘Unanswered Echo Verse’ which I mentioned above, in which he is approached by the baby from the front and a cat from behind.  The whole thing is great and serves as a collage that perfectly illustrates the trip. It also shows that Old Earth’s songs hold up well in the live setting, and sort of proves what I already knew in that I could sit and listen to him play guitar for hours.

You can buy Milwaukee To Edinburgh, 2013 via Old Earth’s Bandcamp page.

P.S. Old Earth are playing a show with White Hinterland and S. Carey on April the 24th, so if you’re in Milwaukee get yourself along!

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The songs have that mix of casual and and growly vocals that bring to mind scenes of parading egos in enclosed and sweaty spaces. The opening track ‘When I Found You’ is the connection between Mike Tod’s solo stuff and the garage band sound before the tempo gradually increases across the release. ‘Break a Ghost Part 2’ is a slow sneering challenge, the prelude to the bar brawl in ‘Part 3’, the same song as Part 2 but sped up to have a swaggering sloppiness, a frantic but loose urgency that doesn’t adhere to any sort of sense outside of whiskey and hot smoky rooms.

We have written about Mike Tod a few times (here and here) and he featured on HI54LOFI’s side of our Canada Day mixtape. If you are as big a fan of him as we are, I’m sure you will enjoy No. 0.

Grab it over at The Flying Blackbyrds Bandcamp page for a price of your choice.

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a low place at The Old Place is an album that Umhoefer released last year, consisting of six songs which appear as a single track, which comes in at just over 18 minutes in length. Several of the tracks have been previewed on Bandcamp in the past (most notably ’more wrung in the wrong?’ which was the track that introduced me into Old Earth) but this is certainly the definitive collection. The album was recorded in the basement of Umhoefer’s grandparents’ vacant home, where he says ghosts are abound. This eerie atmosphere pervades the entire album and some of the haunting experimentation on show really is rather beautiful. There’s also this strange and ominous side to it that makes the whole thing fell like some sort of weird fever dream. The sparse lyrics provide a perfect accompaniment to the music. Below are the lyrics of ’wait less, more strings’, which I think give a good indication of the atmosphere of the album as a whole:

What if it’s all in the fall? 
What if it’s all in the fall? 
What if it won’t happen now? 
What if it’s all in the fall? 
What if it rains again? 
What if it’s all in the fall? 
What if it’s an old house? 
What if it’s a wait? 
What if it’s an older word? 
What if it’s a weight? 
What if it’s alone? 
What if it’s a wait? 
What if the word was so? 
What if it’s all in the fall? 
What if it’s a wait? 
What if it’s a weight? 
What if it’s a wait? 

The album was produced by Christopher Porterfield of Conrad Plymouth and Field Report (who we are very big fans of), who also lends vocals on the album. Nick Berg and Travis Whitty, two other members of Field Report, also lend their talents to the project. You can buy the album on vinyl, CD or digital download via Bandcamp – and it’s really really good so I would suggest that you strongly consider it.

Old Earth has also recently signed with mini50, a label based in Edinburgh, and has a release, titled Small Hours, scheduled for release in the Spring. I have embedded the teaser trailer (which was created by Blackbox Visual, using footage from Don Ford) below:

Old Earth – Small Hours album trailer from Blackbox Visual on Vimeo.

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