Real Life Buildings – Racing the Sun
Nice Apple – Are You Still There?
V.V. Lightbody – Babe, Honestly
Nico Hedley – Late Bloomer
Gracie Gray – Morphine
Spencer Radcliffe & Everyone Else – Bloodletting
Pleasure Systems – Heirloom
Ana Roxanne – Slowness
Kin Hana – Fog
Rainwater – Pink Flowers
Christelle Bofale – U Ouchea
Prudence – Smile & Nod
Operators – Faithless
Belaver – Driver
Mr Husband – Friends
Rose Hotel – Running Behind
Jeremy Squires – Somersault
Bad Books – Lake House
Yammerer – Poisonous Reptilian Colleague’s & Co
Britt – Trial Period
Wild Yawp – Femme Girl
Forest Management – Blue Leaves
Robert Stillman – Ritual
Everyone is Dirty – Hit-Girl
Merin – Coral Island
Lavender Bones – Over Again
Luke De-Sciscio – R.O.B.Y.N.
Anna Wiebe – Fortune
Young Elk – Gossip Magazines
Emma Frank – I Thought
Eamon McGrath – GUTS
Jacob Faurholt – The Dark Isn’t Right

Like what you hear? Catch up with the rest of our Monthly Mixes.

The post May 2019 Roundup Mix appeared first on Various Small Flames.

If you’re unfamiliar with Real Life Buildings, previous album Significant Weather is a good starting point. In our review, we described the album as “a fun indie rock record and a lesson in paying attention to what’s going on both inside and outside your head.” Van Asselt’s writing is fundamental to this detailing “quiet, everyday, scenes [which act] as backdrops to a rich internal life, small practical thoughts mixed up with big philosophical ones,” where his “matter of fact descriptions of a snow day fli[p] into metaphors on dreams and relationships.”

Ironically, it took the threat of losing the ability to make music to forces outside of his control for Van Asselt to come to the decision willingly. A series of emergency surgeries last spring left his vocals cords in a bad way, meaning he couldn’t even speak above a whisper, let alone sing. “During my time in the hospital, though, I made peace with it. I felt fine – even good – about music,” he describes. “I also felt good about stepping back from singing and performing my own songs. Writing music never felt like a choice that I made, even participating in DIY never really felt like a choice. So it’s perhaps ironic that in that moment when my ability was really being decided for me, it felt like all of a sudden I had a choice to sit down.”

Van Asselt had already made one last Real Life Buildings album, a record which in retrospect hints at decisions to come. Ohio and West is an album that confronts “a feeling of being stuck, and of being frustrated of wanting something more of myself and of others.” This is all captured on lead single ‘Bitter’, a song that forgoes any sort of traditional song structure, opening with manic scrappy guitar before unfolding into big fuzzy expanses and moments of near-silence. “Maybe everything here is no longer for us,” Van Asselt wonders, “but I guess in the end I’m just another voice in the chorus, saying ‘I want something else’.”

But again ironically, many of the anxieties and frustrations the album explores have since been solved, both by coming to terms with the whole making music thing, and by moving from Brooklyn to Pittsburgh (and setting up the very cool screenprinting workspace, Pullproof Studio). But this doesn’t make the album void or irrelevant. Real Life Buildings have always made music about movement and cycles, from seasons and weather patterns to the unpredictable structures of the songs themselves, and Ohio and West feels like watching these cycles rotate in retrospect.

Opener ‘Road Block’ throws us straight into the band’s trademark blend of the thoughtful and unpredictable. Lyrically, the song feels like a stepping stone between previous albums and this one, combining musings on validation and restless anticipation and the kind of winter weather imagery that was so important on Significant Weather and It Snowed. Everything we’ve grown to love about Real Life Buildings is present, the song veering between a fluttery punk rock rush and an altogether more intimate hush, Van Asselt mumbling earnest lyrics backed with just subtle percussion and snaking guitar.

Seasonal imagery is used again on ‘Backwards Glance’, a track that confronts how we often spend our time pining for something else, the absurdity of forever complaining about being too hot in summers and too cold in winters both literal and metaphorical. The passage of time is also the focus of ‘A Mark on the Wall’, although in this instance across a lifetime rather than annually. But as well as anxieties over getting older, the song uses a songwriting metaphor to talk about that fleeting magic that sometimes seems to spread its fingers across everything. “There is a chorus,” Van Asselt sings, “there is a place where somehow everything comes together – everybody knows just what to say.”

There’s an almost post-rock vibe on the first half of ‘Racing the Sun’, sparsely melodic guitar and lazy percussion falling off a cliff edge of blown-out fuzz and battered drums. Once that’s subsided shared vocals emerge, giving the song an Act Of Estimating as Worthless vibe while delivering gentle yet cathartic lines about perspective and contentment, backed with a rousing drop into more loud guitar.

You said productivity and happiness
mean two different things
and sure there’s a relationship
but it’s important to remember
you don’t need this
just making the drive is a reason in itself

‘168’ is a rollicking folk punk song about new trains and double parked u-hauls, while ‘An Expectation’ is a mumbled acoustic track about getting priorities straight. There’s an unpredictability again on ‘Irony’, a song that languishes in calm lulls and sweeps into fuzzy punk rock, full of self doubt and nods to being a musician (“I should have settled for just two chords / restricted my rambling in favor of a melody).

In that way, the song acts as the perfect embodiment of the record as a whole. As Van Asselt describes, “[the album] is about music and about cycles: the movement through a song, only to be followed by another song, the ups and downs of touring, time passing, trying again.” But if anything is clear after listening to Ohio and West, it’s that these cycles are not only ever-changing but part of a bigger process, one that sometimes isn’t for us to question. “Maybe if you don’t think about it,” goes the final line of closer ‘A Different Place’, “it will all fall into place.”

Ohio and West is out now on Lauren Records and you can get it from the Real Life Buildings Bandcamp page.

The post Real Life Buildings – Ohio and West appeared first on Various Small Flames.

The project ended with those releases, some members passing into the equally excellent Real Life Buildings, though 2019 will see a new band rise from the ashes. Act Of will release a full album in the coming months, and, excitingly, have released two tracks to (re)introduce themselves.

‘An Invitation’ is as poetic a song about leaving an unattended pan on a high heat as you’re ever likely to hear (they describe the resulting smoke as “a supercell storm cloud rising,” if you need evidence). In terms of vocals, the members of Act Of sometimes take turns and sometimes bring all their distinctive voices together, making for a poignant and unpredictable ride.

‘I Am a Fungus’ begins quiet too, although eventually muscular guitars crank up the energy, and the whole thing blossoms into wide-screen indie rock. Again, there’s a poetic style to the vocals, though the abstract images and actions coalesce into something altogether more tangible, sounding like longing and confusion recorded and committed to tape. The tone hovers somewhere between desperate and adamant, and within the growing fervour stirs a sense of hope, as if the correct string of notes and words might transcend the situation, the requisite level of conviction.

“darling blue eyes turn around again
help me realize that I’m not dead yet
I’m just hungrier now than I’ve ever been
alone at last all alone
and I guess this is my home”

Both songs are great, and we can’t wait to hear the rest of the record. You can listen both of them over at the Act Of Bandcamp page, although you’ll need to wait for the full release to purchase anything.

The post Act Of – Singles 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

The post Favourite Albums of 2017 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

In support of this are Van Asselt’s lyrics, delivered in a comfortingly deadpan sing-speak. They share something with the work of Nicholson Baker, quiet, everyday, scenes acting as backdrops to a rich internal life, small practical thoughts mixed up with big philosophical ones. It’s like being inside van Asselt’s daydreams—his mind making subconscious links, wandering towards the bigger questions. he can go from worrying about broken locks to ruminating on his place in the world, his matter of fact descriptions of a snow day flipping into metaphors on dreams and relationships.

As the title suggests, Significant Weather draws much of its imagery from the climate, perhaps the one thing that’s as ephemeral and changeable as our internal selves. Take for example the opening track ‘Cold’, which from its very first lines paints a picture not just of the weather but also the feelings of our narrator (“I am cold for the first time in a week / and I finally left my room / to find a pink sky light almost gone / and the mosquitos finally died at least I hope”). The voice is an anxious one, the aforementioned ups and downs plotting the understated rollercoaster ride of day-to-day living where dips and drops could appear at any moment.

‘No News’ faces up to the internet age malaise symptomatic of an endless supply of (mostly bad) news. “In my bedroom I don’t read the paper, I don’t click the links,” van Asselt sings, his words forming their own perpetual scroll, the sentence refusing to be ended by punctuation or the need to breathe. “I just scroll past them through an endless feed of headlines each one is worse than the last one I just blink my eyes and let it all slide by.” The feeling is a familiar one, seeing more and feeling less, the creeping apathy and residual guilt of consciously blocking other people’s tragedies.

‘Tare’ is classic Real Life Buildings, opening with van Asselt’s hushed vocals, delivering their unique brand of droll poetic waxing on the commonplace, before building into rousing indie rock. The final lines capture the song’s ultimate message, a reassuring reminder that even in times of struggle, uncertainty or inertia, you remain yourself underneath. Van Asselt captures this message using the metaphor of a garden, in lines that are empathetic and kind, illustrating that his writing moves far beyond jittery bummed-out vibes.

“When my feet get stuck, the weeds just grow
but the plants remain,
it’s okay if it stays like that for now
sometimes my feet get stuck, and the weeds just grow and grow
but the garden doesn’t disappear”

‘Other Windows’ is set in the city, those days where you don’t leave your home, the only link to the outside world other people’s photos on social media. A sense of sadness seeps between the notes, the loneliness of midwinter workdays “where at lunch we can talk about the weather, or talk about what we made for dinner.” The whole band join van Asselt at the beginning of ‘Black Kettle’, singing of being snatched cruelly from a dream of wanting to sleep (by waking up, naturally). The sudden appearance of other voices is oddly moving, perhaps because until now we’ve been stuck inside van Asselt’s head. The track is like those dreams you sometimes have, the ones where your childhood friends are back and the same as always, everything dipped in a kind of dreamy golden light.

The second of a trio of songs recycled from 2014’s It Snowed, ‘Thaw’ tells of driving into New York in the snow, the sheer amount of small details and odd observations giving the whole thing a hyperactive life. “Mounds of snow pushed toward the kerb and covered in all of the dirt of New York,” van Asselt notes. “But the sun is peeking out, and all of its wavelengths get absorbed by my black jeans, and my skin gets too hot so the ice must be starting to melt.” The last of the re-recorded songs is ‘Ground Cover’, which also uses snowy imagery, this time to explore the difference between dreams or relationships first imagined and then realised (“but we ruined it, by walking through it, it was only perfect until we got there”).

‘The Same Hook Repeating’ rattles along in a punkish gallop, the lyrics seeing the narrator sneak out of a party, retreat home, “slide into a chair” and waste time online, before the record closes with ‘Ripple Effect’, a song about more than just houseplants and lengthening days, a final example of the Real Life Buildings deft use of imagery and turns of phrase.

“But the days are getting longer and the road is getting clearer
because I got a stronger prescription
but other than that not much has changed so I still check my email every half hour
to see if anything will
I know I’ll get something some day soon”

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.

You can get Significant Weather now from the Lauren Records webstore or Bandcamp page.

The post Real Life Buildings – Significant Weather appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Vagabon is the recording project of Lætitia Tamko who, along with Eva Lawitts (bass) and Elise Okusami (drums), makes a robust blend of indie rock and bedroom pop. Persian Garden, which came out last November, is a mini-album centred on the departure (and continued absence) of a friend or loved one which pushes and pulls in all directions, as if straining against some emotional shackles (self-imposed or otherwise). Opener ‘Cold Apartment Floors’ is a good example. The lyrics and instrumentation conjure a disconsolate air for the most part, but brimming beneath is a sense of something else, a certain charge in the guitar and Tamko’s vocals which add another dimension, hinting at a greater depth to the whole situation:

“I know its my fault, I gave up on everything
and I see you happy, it warms my heart.

And we said its not the end but she wore that white dress
and I changed, we are not the same but i thought you’d wait

So we sit on my cold apartment floor where we thought we’d stay in love”

From here the album accelerates with ‘Shadows’, an urgent track with ramshackle banjo and steel guitar supporting lyrics centred on wandering and movement (Vagabon is a meaningful moniker). The song has the breathless feel of constant action, Tamko stealing gasps between lines as she lets her words stream out in a desperate rush. ‘Vermont II’ deals with the longing that comes with a change of heart (“Freddy come back I know you love where you are /
but I think I changed my mind”) while ‘Heroine’ traces addiction through small towns and cold winters, detailing the disappointment of relapsing into old habits (“winter will never be the same now that you’re back to your old ways”), the guitars rising into squally chaos and forcing Tamko to wail behind the noise. ‘Vermont’ squirms in a different direction: backwards. Here the secondary character (Freddy?) is packing for Vermont, allowing us to see the narrator pre-mind change, wounded by deceit but trying to heal, if only to prove a point. ‘Sharks’ picks up from this point, capturing the slump in self-worth that succeeds lies and rows.

“Run and tell everybody that Laetitia is
a small fish

I’m just a small fish.

And you’re a shark that hates everything.
You’re a shark that eats every fish”

Vagabon make the special kind of sad and confused music that has the opposite effect on the listener. The sort of music that makes you feel part of something, a big sad and confused gang spread out all over the world, connected by shared experience and a sneaky feeling that life is worth living.

You can buy Persian Garden now from the Vagabon Bandcamp page. It was out on cassette via Miscreant Records but we’re waaaay too late for that. Check Ebay, maybe?

P.S. Lætitia plays guitar in Real Life Buildings, who we like very much.

The post Vagabon – Persian Garden appeared first on Various Small Flames.

NAH – WOE

(RIYL: hip hop, noise, Death Grips)

Naked Days – Chai Knees

(RIYL: indie pop, lo-fi, Neutral Milk Hotel, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah)

Names – Billow Green

(RIYL: experimental, folk, Akron/Family)

Nana Grizol – Night Lights I-III & Tacoma Centre 1600(free d/l but donations go to charity!)

(RIYL: indie rock, punk pop)

Nathaniel – Fellatio

(RIYL: hip hop, soul, steamy jams)

Nature Walker – Clairvoyance

(RIYL: experimental, ambient, psych, lo-fi)

NEO – Snufkin Left, Never to Return

(RIYL: Strange things, Final Fantasy soundtracks, Moominwave)

Nice Legs – Lullaby Land

(RIYL: dream pop, lo-fi, Twin Sister. Song: Two)

Noah Young – Colorado

(RIYL: folk, singer-songwriter, Blind Pilot, Bright Eyes)

Nouns – Still

(RIYL: indie rock, punk, heavy emotion)

Of Us Giants – Nova Scotia

(RIYL: Punk, Hardcore, Manchester Orchestra)

Oh, Rose – 1919

(RIYL: indie rock, Angel Olsen, Mitski)

Old Amica – Fabula

(RIYL: ambient, experimental, electronic folk)

Orchid Tapes – Boring Ecstasy: The Bedroom Pop of Orchid Tapes (Compilation)

(RIYL: bedroom pop, ambient, dream pop, Orchid Tapes)

Orlok – Linear Story of a Relationship

(RIYL: electronic, ambient, dream pop)

Oquoa – S/T

(RIYL: folk, Americana, Great American Desert)

Painted Zeroes – S V A L B A R D

(RIYL: indie rock, “dream punk”, The Pixies)

The Past – AIRLESS

(RIYL: pop, experimental, Fang Island)

Petrichoral – S/T EP

(RIYL: surf rock, summer jams, The Beach Boys)

Pill Friends – Fade Into Nothing

(RIYL: indie rock, punk, lo-fi)

Piqua – Finds God

(RIYL: lo fi, punk folk, Defiance, Ohio)

QUARTERBACKS – Quarterboy

(RIYL: indie rock, lo-fi, Radiator Hospital, Julia Brown)

Radiator Hospital – Torch Song

(RIYL: power pop, bedroom rock, Born Ruffians)

Real Life Buildings – It Snowed

(RIYL: indie rock, lo-fi, bedroom pop)

Real Swell – Dull Dreams

(RIYL: bedroom pop, lo-fi, Happy Trendy)

Remambran – Drawing Out Cassette

(RIYL: indie rock, lo-fi, Krill)

Rick Ross – Bright Moon Cottage

(RIYL: experimental, electronic, samples)

Ricky Eat Acid – Three Love Songs (D/L here)

(RIYL: ambient, electronic bedroom pop, film scores)

rituals. – Ceramic Spaces

(RIYL: ambient, experimental, new age)

Run The Jewels – Run The Jewels 2

(RIYL: hip hop, rap, Killer Mike, Danny Brown)

Favourite Free Music of 2014 (N-R) from Wake The Deaf on 8tracks Radio.

The post Favourite Free Music of 2014 (N-R) appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Tracklisting

1. Saturday Night – The Wooden Sky
2. Wings – Field Report
3. Infestation – Bear Medicine
4. Cigarettes – Oquoa
5. Chris Bell – M. Lockwood Porter
6. Ride On, Molina – Rivulets
7. Farewell Transmission – Songs: Ohia
8. HSKT – Sylvan Esso
9. Reconstruct (feat. Seafloor) – Photay
10. Second Night – Mansionair
11. Beacon – DEAREST
12. Sweetness – Wayne Szalinksi
13. Yellow Leaves – Ezkiel
14. Travel Advisory – Baby Mollusk
15. ESRT (2001) – Whatever, Dad
16. Black Kettle – Real Life Buildings
17. Six Dollar Sunglasses – Steve Palmer
18. I Have Heard of a Land – C.Strøm
19. Blue Ridge Mountain Blues – Wes Tirey
20. Breaking Bad – Talons’
21. Raft – Sarah Winchester
22. Ontario Gothic – Foxes in Fiction
23. Thrown – Kiasmos
24. You (Nate Connelly Rework) – Nils Frahm
25. Form By Firelight (With Raphaelle Standell) – Jon Hopkins
26. Lights – Mt. Judge
27. I Love – David Karsten Daniels

Remember that we make a mix like this every month, so if you want even more cool new music then head over to the Wake the Deaf 8tracks page, or read the site itself!

October 2014 Mix from Wake The Deaf on 8tracks Radio.

The post October 2014 Roundup – A Mixtape appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Sarah Winchester – Northeast Kingdom

Sarah Winchester is a member of the really rather excellent Oregon-based band A Weather, If you are a fan of A Weather and bemoan the fact they only have two albums, Winchester also records solo under her own name, namely this excellent release entitled Northeast Kingdom. The EP (which was originally released way back in 2009 by Team Love Records) contains six songs and each is as beautiful as the next. J. Tillman-esque finger-picked acoustics support writing that is nothing short of poetry. The lyrics, along with Winchester’s distinctive delivery, capture hope and beauty amidst loneliness, a white-bright flicker in a twilit world of isolation and weariness and pain.

Get Northeast Kingdom on cassette, together with artwork by Winchester and artist Heather Swenson via Mt. Home Arts. If anything, the package is even prettier than the music.

Baby Mollusk – Baby Mollusk and the Big Babies

Baby Mollusk is Rachel Gordon. She plays guitar and sings spiky and sort-of-sad songs very sweetly. The Big Babies are Matt Van Asselt and Mike Ditrio. Those guys play bass and drums. Sometimes they all join in together and crash things around a bit in a wondrously joyous noise. Baby Mollusk and The Big Babies is a self-titled album and a really good one at that. You should all buy it on an incredibly good-looking cassette via Mt. Home Arts. You can also download it for however much you want via Bandcamp.

Whatever, Dad – 100% Take Home! Grade Pending

Whatever, Dad is the recording project of Elaiza Santos and sometimes some of her friends. She makes down-tempo rock music that sounds like an internal monologue of a young person written down and backed by a makeshift band. It is every bit as good as that sounds.

You can get the album via Bandcamp. Had you (or we) been more prompt, you could have gotten a cassette that came with buttons and butter (yep) and silkscreen napkins, a package that takes the tape game to a whole new level.

Real Life Buildings – It Snowed

Real Life Buildings is one of the songwriters from The Act of Estimating as Worthless (who also have releases on Mt. Home Arts), and the drummer too! Their names are Matthew Van Asselt and Mike Ditrio (remember them?). It Snowed is their debut album and is due for release on the 6th of November. It has quiet moments and loud moments, ramshackle lo-fi rock and intimate bedroom pop musings (often in the same song).

You can pre-order It Snowed on cassette right now via the Mt. Home Arts website.

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