Naomi Pop – S/T (REVIEW)
(RIYL: lo-fi, indie rock, other Z Tapes artists)

naps – one hundred percent confident (REVIEW)
(RIYL: ambient, experimental, naps with an uncapitalised-n)

Naps – You Will Live in a Cool Box (REVIEW)
(RIYL: lo-fi, garage rock, indie pop, Naps with a capitalised-N)

Nadia – I’m your protector now
(RIYL: dream pop, healing, electronic)

Newfoundland – Good News is Too True (REVIEW)
(RIYL: atmospheric folk, dream pop, Youth Lagoon, Meursault)

Noël – ’10
(RIYL: punk, emo, indie)

Ocean Floor – Old Haunts (REVIEW)
(RIYL: bedroom pop, lo-fi, Mount Eerie)

Oddigtl – solarium
(RIYL: beats, lo-fi, electronic, laidback summer soul)

Old Gray – dex
(RIYL: sad, bedroom pop, slo-mo emo)

Pasture Dog – Southern Gothic (REVIEW)
(RIYL: lo-fi, hymnals, all things Southern Gothic)

Prairie Empire – Sad Winter Songs (Outtakes and Demos)
(RIYL: folk, acoustic, sad bastard music)

Pet Cemetery – dietary requirements (REVIEW)
(RIYL: bedroom pop, ambient, Coma Cinema)

Phargo. – Rende’s
(RIYL: emo, Braid, anime)

Plums – Jen
(RIYL: dream pop, summer crushes, nostalgia)

PONY – CRUSHED (REVIEW) 
(RIYL: indie pop, Best Coast, Vivian Girls)

Pope – Fiction
(RIYL: noise, grunge, No Age)

Porridge radio – im not sure anymore
(RIYL: lo-fi, sadcore, bedroom pop)

The Pretty Greens – Lonely Hearts Club No Jerks Allowed
(RIYL: The Raincoats, Bratmobile, Brill Building pop)

Radiator Hospital & Martha – Split EP
(RIYL: indie rock, power pop, Radiator Hospital, Martha)

rchrd prkr – it’s getting worse
(RIYL: emo, punk, lo-fi)

Robbie Bankes – Through February Snow (REVIEW)
(RIYL: folk, Tyler Butler, winter)

Romantic States – s/t
(RIYL: minimalist pop, garage rock, blends of quiet & loud)

Ruth & Trudy – Still Pond (REVIEW)
(RIYL: indie pop, experimental, lo-fi)

We’ll be sharing a new section of the list every day this week, so be sure to check back for the complete collection. If you find something you like, or think we missed something life-changing, then why not let us know on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr or good old email.

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Whether Garth Risk Hallberg lived up to the hype is up for debate. I’d suggest there is a certain ‘hype threshold’ past which people will ensure you get a fair share of criticism regardless of what’s between the covers. What is not up for discussion is the beauty of the writing on show, nor is the sheer scope of the world it brings to life. Here we find a network of characters linked by blood or love or sheer chance which grows through schizophrenic POV changes and creative interludes. To give you some idea: There’s Mercer, a man struggling with being gay and black in 1970s New York and his relationship with punk musician/artist William, heir to the Hamilton-Sweeney fortune who’s music with the now-defunct Ex Post Facto “seemed to promise complete freedom, on the condition of complete surrender”. Then there’s William’s estranged sister Regan and her troubled relationship with husband Keith, who are themselves caught up in the Hamilton-Sweeney machine, plus loser-loner Charlie and his friendship with punk cool-kid Sam, and their link to the Post-Humanist Phalanx. That’s not to mention the police detective, the art dealer, the shock jock radio presenter. The investigative journalist, the firework-setter, the transvestite keyboard player. The anarchistic, arsonist cult leader.

So… yeah, it’s all too detailed to review properly, though the key plot is strangely simple. Packed with the sort of suspense/drama you might expect from a film or television show, the book is not as challenging (difficult, ‘literary’) as you might expect. What Hallberg does achieve is to conjure New York at a specific time. The web of characters produce a panoramic snapshot of a generation, palpable nostalgia and a good sprinkling of well-used topics (troubled artists, drug addicts, traumatised and/or damaged lovers) creating a view of the seventies perhaps as we’d like to remember them. The spirit of the book is captured nicely near the beginning, when the clock strikes midnight on New Year’s Day :

“For a second the city seemed to lean forward and make contact with a future self: ruined, de-peopled, and nearly still. In a sealed hanger, forensic economists move around numbered lots with scales and callipers. Believing themselves to have evolved beyond delusion and loneliness, beyond illness and longing and sex, they hum distractedly and wonder what it all meant”

As books go, City on Fire is pretty easy to soundtrack, so this playlist could have been a hundred songs. But anyway, here are twenty songs which go some way to capturing the time/place/mood Hallberg created. I’ve included a mix of classics and newer stuff to keep things interesting, and the order isn’t important.

Tracklisting:

1. Blank Generation – Richard Hell and the Voidoids
2. Art is Hard – Cursive
3. To Hell With Good Intentions – Japandroids
4. Kimberly – Patti Smith
5. Chinese Rocks – The Heartbreakers
6. Roar of Nothingness – Sun Organ
7. Docking Guard – Northern Primitive
8. Today, More Than Any Other Day – Ought
9. Aloha Steve and Danno – Radio Birdman
10. The Kids – Lou Reed
11. Orphans – Teenage Jesus and the Jerks
12. Stevie Nix – The Hold Steady
13. Who Do You Belong To? – The Spirit of The Beehive
14. You Can’t Hold The Hand of a Rock and Roll Man – Okkervil River
15. Our Lives Would Make a Sad, Boring Movie – The Hotel Year
16. Using – Sorority Noise
17. Fireworks – Radiator Hospital
18. Your Own Place To Ruin – Rivulets
19. New York Hardcore – Talons’
20. This Heart’s on Fire – Wolf Parade

City on Fire is out now via Knopf Doubleday (US) and Jonathan Cape and is available from all good book shops. Quiet, Constant Friends is available digitally and on cassette via the Wake The Deaf Bandcamp page.

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The first song, ‘Death & Taxis’ is soft acoustic bedroom pop which is almost overwhelmingly heartsick and romantic, with lines such as, “I long to live alone with you” and “my everything exists for you”. This is followed by ‘The Way It Goes’, which is way more upbeat, with ramshackle percussion and carefree guitar. Things are still loved-up though, which is no criticism, “I don’t believe in love” Sondermann sings, “but you’re all I’m dreaming of”. The song also contains the great line,”I hope you feel bored and lonely too”, which seems to sum up our fear of being different and desire to find solidarity, to find people just like us. ‘My God’ is another rattly DIY indie pop song, opening with the line, “I’m afraid of everybody, I’m afraid of you”. Both of these songs are reminiscent of a super-earnest Swim Lessons, which is high praise.

Things then get a whole lot sadder. ‘The Day Draws Near’ is just plaintive acoustic guitar and Sondermann’s voice and what feels like empty space. Its sad but in a cosy, reassuring way – sounding like being alone in an empty room on a rainy afternoon, when the not-quite-twilight has that blue-grey quality and the only sounds are raindrops on the glass and the shooooshing of passing cars. It’s just three minutes long and deceptively simple but the atmosphere it manages to conjure makes it one of my favourite songs of the year so far. Sondermann sums up the mood when he sings, “In your backyard, you talk to God / about the heartbreak you forgot”. ‘Downtown’ is another pretty sad song, with a lovely gentle flow to the melody of the lyrics:

“I will go to a forest where all tired souls are bound,
I will go downtown
I will sink to the bottom of the sea without a sound,
I will go downtown”

‘Constant’ is another love song, with just acoustic guitar and tender lyrics, “the morning light surrounds you, darling, the wind is in your hair / the afternoon I found you, darling, I knew that I was there”, while ‘Don’t Know a Thing’ reintroduces percussion and confronts self-doubt head-on, “I am scared, I’m unprepared, I’m unaware of the ways I’m wrong”. The final song, ‘Way Down’, is perhaps brighter and breezier than previous tracks, but retains the sensitive and sincere vocals, opening with the lines, “I hide my fears way down, way down / where you dry your tears, way down”. The track reminds me strongly of Cataldo’s Prison Boxing, although I have no idea of how to articulate why that’s so.

All in all it’s a really really great album and I’m again eternally grateful that the folks at Z Tapes brought it to my attention. Fans of Radiator Hospital, Field Medic and Talons’ will all find something to love I’m sure.

You can get WHATEVERLAND on limited run cassette tape, or a name-your-price download via the Z Tapes Bandcamp page.

P.S. The Washboard Abs Bandcamp page has a bunch of other releases, including a new EP which features a cool Yo La Tengo cover. Check it out, it’s good I promise.

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The album is a singular vision, a product of Cantor’s hard work during a year spent boarded up in a makeshift studio. The sound is difficult to define, sitting at a crossroads between introspective, lo-fi bedroom pop and catchy energetic power pop. We get the usual guitars and drums, but we also get samples and synths and orchestral strings, all melded together with the hiss and feedback of cassette tapes. This makes for a pretty eclectic record, no two songs quite alike.

This is nicely illustrated on the first two tracks. Opener ‘Heavenly Blues’ is slow and reserved and thick with background ambience, while the second track, ‘Crossed Out’ immediately clears the air, bursting onto the scene with a clean guitar line and heralding the record’s first does of indie rock. This eclecticism continues throughout the album. ‘I’m Not Going to Your Heaven’ is a lo-fi rock song with a slight psych swagger – something along the lines of the less raucous tracks on Titus Andronicus’s debut, ‘Bells Underwater’ is a short and sweet acoustic track and ‘Personal Heaven’ is all jaunty indie pop (akin to something by Telekinesis!).

My current favourite song on Silver Blues is ‘Louder Than Summer, which builds from sad and ghostly beginnings, adding thumping drums and building real emotional intensity. Check it out below:

<a href=“http://thegoodbyeparty.bandcamp.com/album/silver-blues” data-mce-href=“http://thegoodbyeparty.bandcamp.com/album/silver-blues”>Silver Blues by The Goodbye Party</a>

From that slow-build we get another complete change of direction with the chugging guitars and catchy power pop of ‘Disrepair’. Other standouts include ‘Funeral Season’, a super-melancholic dirge, with lyrics like, “I remember you in dreams / you and your twin were still alive / your voice still ringing out on the machine / remnants of a disconnected life”, and the stark and mournful closer ‘White on White’.

Despite the variation from start to finish, Silver Blues is a coherent, complete album that is very much worth your time. You can pre-order the LP nowvia Salinas Records or download it on a pay-what-you-want basis from Bandcamp.

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Radiator Hospital is Sam Cook-Parrott and friends (friends with indie rock pedigree – including members of Waxahatchee, All Dogs and Swearin’), who join together to form a pretty formidable lo-fi rock band.

There are fifteen songs on this album, with not one deserving to have been left out, and the band smash through them in under 35 minutes. Opener ‘Leather and Lace’ sets the tone, with a hectic beginning sweeping you off your feet before you know what has hit you, and this continues through to ‘Blue Gown’, with the space for breath between songs small but welcome.

But this isn’t one of those quick albums that attempts to make you dizzy and smash your eardrums and little else. By ‘Cut Your Bangs’ you realise that there is something sad and sincere in the lyrics, forcing you back to the start to reconsider the opening pair. Once this moment of realisation has occurred, Torch Song spreads its wings into its true form, a mishmash of pop and punk and poetry. Sincerity and honesty set this aside from the usual ‘Let’s Fuck Shit Up’ garage rock bands, and allows Radiator Hospital to achieve something with much greater nuance and depth (while still having fun).

The lyrics are displayed as prose on the Bandcamp page and reading them really helps the narrative of Torch Song to stand out. A tale of love punctuated with joy and regret and depression, the story is highly detailed yet curiously vague, with names and genders left unclear, leaving a You and a Me and the feelings that You and Me always seem to share. The result is something which feels highly personal but could be applied to anyone. It’s highly personal for everybody.

“We walked further than I thought we would. You looked at me like I was your way out, I looked at you, thought I’d never stop lookin’.”

The Torch Song LP is out now on Salinas Records. Order it here!

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Be sure to check out the other volumes which can be found here. Enjoy.

Tracklisting:

1. Thirteen (Big Star cover) – The Point
2. Time After Time (Cyndi Lauper cover) – GRMLN
3. Sofia (Mannequins on 7th Street cover) – Spark Alaska
4. Sunflower (Low cover) – T E Morris
5. Hideaway (Kiesza cover) – Eliza Shaddad
6. It’s the End of the World as We Know It (R.E.M. cover) – Free Cake for Every Creature
7. Peach, Plum, Pear (Joanna Newsom cover) – FemFemFem
8. Fake Empire (The National cover) – Thad Kopec
9. No Lion (Boom Forest cover) – PHOX (Fuel/Friends Chapel Session)
10. Last To Swim (Strand of Oaks cover) – Our Griffins (Root Down in the Shadow Covers Club)
11. Unfucktheworld (Angel Olsen cover) – Nadia Reid
12. You’re Not the Only Monster (R.L. Kelly cover) – DIY Scarves
13. I’m on Fire (Bruce Springsteen cover) – Low
14. You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go (Bob Dylan cover) – My Bubba
15. Tugboat (Galaxie 500 cover) – Finnmark!
16. Frog Went a Courtin’ (Traditional) – Eef Barzelay
17. Lost on the River (Hank Williams cover) – Radiator Hospital (Birdtapes compilation)
18. Just Be Simple (Songs:Ohia cover) – Water Liars (Out of Town Films)
19. Goldheart Mountaintop Queen Directory (Guided By Voices cover) – Arms
20. Can’t Help Falling in Love (Elvis Presley cover) – Eels (KCRW)

Covers Mix #12 from Wake The Deaf on 8tracks Radio.

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