With that in mind, The Mirror Trap’s ferocious sound might come as a surprise upon first listen. Blending the energy of post-hardcore with deep, ominous drums The Twilight Sad would be proud of, Moore and Co. create weighty, atmospheric anthems inspired by the contemporary world. Financial inequality, technological identity (or the lack thereof), information overload and narcosis… The Mirror Trap are concerned with all of the things which make today’s society such a strange, confusing place. Lead single ‘Piranhas’ feels like the consequence of these pressures, a furious, frustrated scream which could be read as an act of rebellion, a burning of bridges or a desperate cry for help.

We’re up to our eyeballs, in half a million problems

Piranhas come calling and tear the flesh right off us.

I woke up this morning, with three bears in my porridge,

with no good news in paper, no let up in the weather.

I live for the weekend, a bowl to put my keys in,

I hide my desires, so you wont kick me out the gang.

As part of our Quiet, Constant Friends project, we’ve been asking people to make playlists based around a book of their choice, and thought The Mirror Trap might be just the folks to continue the Lit Links series. Lead Gary Moore stepped up the the plate with a collection of tracks inspired by a work by Orwell, which seems pretty suitable considering the themes they’re concerned with. Grab your headphones and have a read below!

George Orwell’s Keep The Aspidistra Flying
by Gary Moore

For some unknown reason I avoided George Orwell for years. I think the romantic in me insisted I only read exotic novels by wayward Frenchmen or stoic Russians. Reading the work of a British man whose real name was Eric seemed unthinkable. But a brief fascination with the Spanish Civil War led me to read Homage to Catalonia and the flood gates opened, I swiftly set about reading every word Orwell had ever written.

Keep The Aspidistra Flying is perhaps my favourite Orwell novel. Set in 1930’s London this is the story of a writer rejecting the constraints of money and the “evils” of consumer capitalism, giving up his humdrum day job in advertising to peruse his artistic passions. This appealed to me as booth a burgeoning creative and as a giant lefty. Gordon Comstock, the central character of the novel, is a man with a commendable plan and outlook but is shown throughout to be flawed and shambolic, he is not a hero or a villain, and he is just unreservedly human. He drinks too much, and smokes too much, he is neurotic and distracted.

Keep The Aspidistra Flying is raw, cynical and often bleak but is ultimately a brilliant book, in both the story it tells and the somewhat prophetic points it makes. I tend to feel a little bit dirty reading it, but in a way I rather enjoy

Tracklisting:

1) Work, Work, Work (Pub, Club Sleep) – The Rakes
2) This Charming Man – The Smith
3) Atmosphere – Joy Division
4) Cigarettes & Alcohol – Oasis
5) Shot By Both Sides – Magazine
6) ifwhiteamericatoldthetruthforonedayit’sworldwouldfallapart – Manic Street Preachers
7) Is This It – The Strokes
8) Common People – Pulp
9) I Love a Man in Uniform – Gang of Four
10) Lost in the Supermarket – The Clash
11) Bitter Sweet Symphony – The Verve
12) Fake Plastic Trees – Radiohead
13) For Tomorrow – Blur
14) Rat Race – The Specials
15 What a Waster – The Libertines

Simulations will be released on the 8th July via Riverman. The band have a few festival dates lined up before an European tour this autumn with Placebo (marked with *):

Jul 09: T In The Park, Stirling, United Kingdom
Jul 31: Y Not Festival 2016, Derby, United Kingdom
Aug 19: Astro Hall, Tokyo, Japan
Aug 21: Summer Sonic Festival, Tokyo, Japan
Oct 13: Train, Aarhus, Denmark*
Oct 14: Vega Main Hall, Copenhagen, Denmark*
Oct 16: Sentrum Scene, Oslo, Norway*
Oct 18: Cirkus, Stockholm, Sweden*
Oct 20: Hartwall Arena, Helsinki, Finland*
Oct 22: Riga Arena, Riga, Latvia*
Oct 24: St Petersburg Arena, Saint Petersburg, Russian Federation*
Oct 26: Moscow Olimpiyskiy, Moscow, Russian Federation*
Oct 29: Torwar, Warsaw, Poland*
Oct 31: Barclaycard Arena, Hamburg, Germany*
Nov 02: Laxness, Cologne, Germany*

P.S. Be sure to tune in next week, where we’ll be presenting a playlist from Gary’s cat based around Exile and the Kingdom by Camus.

P.P.S. Not really.

The post Lit Links: The Mirror Trap appeared first on Various Small Flames.

As we explained in our previous post, Statz enlisted the help of a variety of musicians to bring his album to life. Jeffrey Foucault produced the album and lended his guitar and vocal skills, Caitlin Canty provided harmonies while Billy Conway (of Morphine) drummed, Mark Spencer (of Son Volt) played guitar, Jeremy Moses Curtis (of Booker T band) the bass and Matt Lorenz the fiddle. There is something gratifying about a range of talented people getting together to bring one man’s writing to reality, a more traditional sense of folk community opposed to the set line-up of most contemporary bands.

The album opens with the title track, an atmospheric all-American song made for driving long roads in beat-up cars, rife with that half-mean, half-defeated air of a compulsive whiskey drinker. It tells the tale of a sad traveller stuck working in a Tulsa casino after car trouble, playing on the uniquely soul-destroying mix of desperation and sadness that drifts around casinos and seeps through your skin:

“Working at the Cherokee casino,
watching people pull the slot machines.
Wasting all those precious hours,
wasting money like it’s free.

Working late into the mornings,
sleeping through the afternoons.
I still dream of Arizona,
but I guess Tulsa has to do.”

‘Old Pro’ is romantic in a different way, a classic country love song with wistful violins and pedal steel in which money and distance and time get in the way of what could have been. The album as a whole flits between emotions in this way, with the mood changing between the galvanised surety of chirpy Americana songs like  ‘Home at Last’ and ‘One Way Opens’, the late-night bourbon-scented blues of ‘Exposure’ and ‘Tanneburg’, and the contemplative melancholy of ‘Any Town Will Do’, ‘Roadkill Zone’ and the mournful Radiohead cover ‘Motion City Soundtrack’. The result is a complete picture of love and loss, the massive highs and crushing lows of a single lovelorn drinker, the stories he half-hears over the jukebox, the collective emotions of a room or time. A snapshot of Tulsa and all its characters.

You can buy Tulsa now from the John Statz Bandcamp page.

John is also about to embark on a tour of the UK and Ireland. Check out the dates below and then go along and support him!

The post John Statz – Tulsa appeared first on Various Small Flames.

I wrote a brief piece about Josh Scott’s Aero Flynn a few weeks back after reading some words by Field Report’s Chris Porterfield. The letter/essay (which you can read here) painted Scott as a supremely talented musician and songwriter and spoke of the self-titled Aero Flynn album as “quite seriously a life-or-death record” which should be heard as “a spit in the fucking face of the symptoms of disease, like rot and destruction and apathy and cynicism”. Given how much I respect Porterfield’s work, this sort of language got me excited.

The album begins with ‘Plates2’, a restrained track of gentle synths and countrified electric guitars, not a million miles away from Porterfield’s Field Report, while ‘Twist’, which brings to mind Radiohead, solidifies Scott’s subdued vocal delivery. ‘Dk/Pi’ opens with electronics backed by an ambient hum, the spacey bleeps and bloops of Spencer Krug’s Moonface layered on top of something older and less clear. Shambling drums kick in to create a sound akin to The War on Drugs, Scott’s dreamy vocals drifting through the nebulous arrangement with a delicacy that suggests impermanence, as if the sonic environment threatens to consume him. As the song progresses the instrumentation disintegrates, distorting into reverby fuzz and then a confused white noise before blinking out to leave a large cosmic swelling. This is an electrical anxiety, a malfunction in which communication is lost and isolation complete, Scott a lone astronaut surrounded by planetary screams and an airless dark.

The beginning of ‘Crisp’ is gentler but not without threat, an acoustic strum peppered with glitches which suggest the calm is a façade, a veil under which reside wrung hands and sharp edges. “Can I feel you?” Scott inquires over and over, one of many pleas for connection on the album, leaving the listener to wonder if he’s speaking to an individual or humankind as a whole. Or perhaps it’s just to himself in the mirror. Again the track unravels, the introduction of more prominent synths morphing in the final minutes into another hostile environment, a tumultuous sea or some geomagnetic storm that swallows Scott and drags him further from whatever he is trying to find.

Aero Flynn is at once urgent and suspended, trapped between fight and flight in anxiety’s masterful double bind. “I’m so afraid of everybody else” he sings on ‘Tree’, a stuttering electro-pop song, while even ‘Floating’, a soaring track that’s all blue skies and wide open vistas, is permeated with a sense of dislocation, as if the freedom is not his to own. ‘Maker’ sounds like a Broken Social Scene track where lonely sadness is presented as matter-of-fact, at least until the end where Scott utters a single word (a word I can’t quite make out – Home? Whole?) in a way which sounds like the genuine emotion breaking through, a yelp of helplessness or cry for mercy held back or choked out after the first syllable.

‘Brand New’ feels like a crescendo of sorts, a move away from the futuristic electronics that bring to mind space’s dark void in favour of something more organic, a swelling Precambrian atmosphere where conditions are harsh and life is scarce but maybe not for long. Closer ‘Moonbeams’, a piano led track with elements of The National’s slower work, provides no such epiphany. Slow and nervous and sorrowful, the last track again casts Scott as the outlying astronaut looking back at Earth, the final waves of instrumentation mimicking the beautiful, heart-breaking joy of realising you are but the tiniest of specks subject to the largest of forces beyond your control.

This is not an album in which the emotional arc is self-contained and easily mappable. Instead the record feels like a part of a wider narrative, Scott’s story, the illness and suffering and terror that Porterfield alludes to in his piece. The redemption does not begin with an epiphany on track seven and end with clear-eyed certainty. The redemption is the very fact that Scott is creating words and sounds, that he is letting others know where he is and how he is and why he is. The album is the flare of hope hanging in the night sky, burning bright and incandescent.

Aero Flynn is out now on Ooh La La Records (and Dine Alone Records in Canada).

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Slows Down is the recording name of Alexander Hawthorne, a self-taught multi-instrumentalist from London who has just released his self-titled debut EP. He describes his music as, “between minimalist, melancholy chamber pop and dense, menacing psychedelic noise rock”. The record was written during Hawthorne’s travels in India and the USA and, quite incredibly considering the lush and layered sound, is an entirely solo effort. Taking inspiration from a wide range of luminaries including Swans, Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Radiohead, he uses a diversity of techniques, from humming, moaning drones to spiky, cathartic crescendos and a dash of psychedelic hypnotism. But despite the expansive instrumentation,things never stray too far from the refined, minimalist values, the glowing core at the centre of all the tumult and noise.

Opener ‘The Blues Easing’ kicks things off to a slightly ominous start, with stark guitars and a steady thudding drum beat and a haunting atmosphere snaking around everything. The music is backed by Alexander’s intimately mumbled vocals, sounding at once both sad and slightly dangerous. Next is ‘On The Street’, a meandering slow build of a track which eventually explodes into bright shining life in the last minute. ‘In My Room’ has an almost spaghetti western feel, with a militaristic drum beat and dramatic swells of instrumentation. Hawthorne cites Middle Eastern classical music as an influence and perhaps that is what comes to the fore here? On this track especially it is amazing to think that this is the effort of just one man, and I am interested to hear how these songs sound when Alexander puts together a full band to play live later this year. The EP closes with ‘The Way Down Leering’, over seven minutes of menacing post-rock-meets-lo-fi rock, something along lines of The Twilight Sad meets Liars, complete with subdued deadpan vocals and an airy, hushed lull of near-silence except the twinkling of a xylophone.

You can buy Slows Down EP on 12″ vinyl or as a pay-what-you-want download via the Slows Down Bandcamp page.

The post Slows Down – s/t EP appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Halfway through the recording process, Ebner’s father sadly passed away, and so the album took on a new focus. The track ‘To Remember’is based on an eulogy Ebner gave at his father’s funeral which addressed their relationship via a Fender Jaguar that his father bought back in the 60s.

You can buy the album right now, on your choice of white or clear vinyl, via the City States Bandcamp page.

The post City States – Geography appeared first on Various Small Flames.

McMurry wrote, performed, recorded, mixed and mastered every track himself in his bedroom, so the album serves as a testament to what you can achieve using DIY methods if you really put your heart and soul it. He is one talented young man and I would be very interested to see what he could do with more resources in the future.

The only information I can find for the album (apart from the fact that was recorded entirely in his bedroom) is this note on Bandcamp: “this album is a collection of thoughts, memories, conversations, walks, and dreams.”,which in my opinion is how all press releases should read.

You can download Enter Through the Exit from the Haunted Disco Bandcamp on a name-your-price basis, so there really is no excuse to miss out. He has also just released a new EP, Clost, which serves as an epilogue to the album and is certainly worth your time.

McMurry also records music under his own name which is worth checking out on Bandcamp.

The post Haunted Disco – Enter Through the Exit appeared first on Various Small Flames.

To describe the music I’ll have to resort to genre cliches. It’s certainly pop music. It’s also electronic. And experimental. And it’s definitely dreamy.The album consists of ten songs which pulse and shimmer with blissful synths and some very catchy choruses. Some are mellow and pretty (see the title track ‘Call’ and album closer ‘Sickle’), while others are a lot more dynamic and energetic, with frantic drumming (for example ‘Island’). Another thing which I noticed while listening is the quality of the production on show, I’m not sure whether the band are signed or not (due to their mysterious online presence), but everything really is flawless.

I have seen several comparisons with Radiohead (presumably because the vocals are evocative of a certain Thom Yorke), but the band that I kept thinking about whilst listening was Magic Man (who I coincidentally wrote about yesterday), particularly on tracks such as ‘Comma’ and ‘Boon’ (admittedly that could be due to the fact I’d been listening to Real Life Colour all morning after writing about their new track).

You can buy the album for $10 (£6.65) over at Bandcamp and I would highly suggest you do so.

The post Brother – Call appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Tracklisting:

1. Lovecrimes (Frank Ocean Cover) – The Afghan Whigs
2. Little Dreamer (Future Islands Cover) – Doe Paoro
3. Bad Days (Flaming Lips Cover) – Siskiyou
4. Again (Janet Jackson Cover) – How To Dress Well
5. Dog Song (Mountain Man Cover) – Stupid Loser
6. Celebrated (Husker Du Cover) – Mark Kozelek
7. Say Say Say (Michael Jackson & Paul McCartney) – Woodpigeon
8. Zebra (Beach House Cover) – Yellow Ostrich
9. Atmosphere (Joy Division Cover) – Flowers Of Hell
10. Climbing Up The Walls (Radiohead Cover) – The Twilight Sad
11. Islands In The Stream (Kenny Rogers & Dolly Parton) – Constantines & Feist
12. Louie Louie (Richard Berry/The Kingsmen Cover) – The Royal Iguana Fur
13. Harvest Moon (Neil Young Cover) – The Sour Notes
14. Into The Fire (Bruce Springsteen Cover) – Paul Baribeau
15. Forgiveness (Patty Griffin Cover) – The Local Strangers
16. Calling And Not Calling My Ex (Okkervil River Cover) – Ola Podrida
17. Please Please Please Let M Get What I Want (The Smiths Cover) – Pickering Pick
18. Jesus, Etc. (Wilco Cover) – Bill Fay
19. Look At Miss Ohio (Gillian Welch Cover) – Blind Pilot
20. The Party’s Over/No Children (Willie Nelson/Mountain Goats Cover) – Manchester Orchestra

Please support the artists by exploring their other releases and becoming huge and dedicated fans.

The Covers Mix: Volume #4 from Wake The Deaf on 8tracks Radio.

The post The Covers Mix: Volume #4 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

15. Tune Yards – W H O K I L L
(4AD)

14. Oneohtrix Point Never – Replica
(Mexican Summer/Software)

13. Youth Lagoon – The Year of Hibernation
(Fat Possum/Lefse)

12. Parts & Labor – Constant Future
(Jagjaguwar)

11. Radiohead – The King of Limbs
(XL/TBD)

10. Clams Casino – Instrumentals Mixtape
(Self Released)

9. South of Lincoln – Homes

 (Self Released)

8. Blanck Mass – Blanck Mass
(Rock Action)

7. Conrad Plymouth – Comrade Plymouth
(Ten Atoms)

6. St. Vincent – Strange Mercy
(4AD)

5. The Antlers – Burst Apart
(French Kiss/Transgressive)

4. Gil Scott Heron / Jamie XX – We’re New Here
(XL/Young Turks)

3. James Blake – James Blake
(A&M/Atlas)

2. Handsome Furs – Sound Kapital
(Sub Pop)

1. Bon Iver – Bon Iver
(4AD/Jagjaguwar)

If you’d like a sample of the above, check out the Wake The Deaf Top Albums of 2011 playlist on Spotify. Click here to be taken straight there.

The post Wake the Deaf’s Top 15 Albums of 2011 appeared first on Various Small Flames.