Seattle’s 129,600, the recording project of Jade Tcimpidis, is preparing to release their debut album Granular Convection with Ghost Mountain Records. Described as exploring the “limits of tradition in the consumer era,” the album sees Kalen Walther (bass), Kirsten Ourada (drums) and Neil Welch (baritone saxophone) join Tcimpidis to conjure a sound which straddles dustbowl folk and art pop invention, all while reaching towards psych and jazz. Lead single ‘Techi’ highlights this singular style, where all manner of details spin from a taut rhythm, making for a twitchy, volatile mood. Tcimpidis’s vocals are equally frantic, and coupled with the sax evokes the paranoid vibe of Coppola’s The Conversation, with all its schemes and surveillance.

‘Techi’ is out now and available from Bandcamp.

Casters – Memory

Casters is the recording project of Andrew Strader and a rotating cast of supporting musicians, based in Brooklyn via Nashville and Knoxville. With EP Walk on Home coming soon via Like You Mean It Records, Strader has shared single ‘Memory’ to give an indication of what to expect from the release. This time featuring Neil MacLean (Home Visions, Griffin Moyer) on keys/synths and Connor James (Pat & The Pissers) on drums, the track draws on Thomas Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again to explore the impossibility of returning to a place you’ve left behind. All cast in a dreamy drift that marbles fondness and regret into sound so rich you could suspend yourself within it.

Chris Chism – On The Run

Focusing on the working class experience and following a lineage through Dylan and van Zandt, Richmond, Indiana’s Chris Chism delves into the personal to emerge with a more universal picture of life’s joys and struggles. New EP Things Has Changed develops this style, and single ‘On The Run’ is the perfect place to jump in. A semi-autobiographical portrait of a young person beaten down by life—loosing those close to them, experiencing brushes with the law, and generally searching for reasons to continue on amid a slew of misfortune—though one captured with the patience and empathy only hindsight can bring.

 Hit Bargain – Degree Decree

Featuring members who are/have been parts of acts like The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, Beach Fossils and Cold Beat, Hit Bargain is a LA-based project led by Nora Singh which aims to stare the worst excesses of our society square in the eye. It is of no surprise then that new album A DOG A DEER A SEAL is charged by equal parts manic fervour and anxious frenzy, playing like the fevered delirium of a country’s dying mind. Single ‘Degree Decree’ might clock in at barely two minutes but portrays this mood in all of its maniacal panic, where the technological hubris of consumerism encroaches on our world as a synthetic blight.

Check out the video directed by Katharine Antoun below (though those with photosensitive epilepsy should note there are flashing images):

A DOG A DEER A SEAL is out on the 10th November via Get Better Records and you can pre-order it now.

June Rosewell – a solid state

Nashville songwriter June Rosewell recently released a new EP, the dog bit at such an angle. It’s a collection of songs in which frustration and tenderness coexist and hope refuses to ever quite evaporate. Take single ‘a solid state’, a track about moving home which sees Rosewell’s intimate croon relays scenes with an everyday poetry. “In the morning we were packing up our boxes,” the opening lines play, “and our friends / Brushed our backbones with their warm thumbs while they sent us off again.” Later the song reveals the significance of the EP’s title (“The dog bit at such an angle where I thought I’d need a stitch”), and endeavours to show the invisible bonds that persist even as all that is familiar is upended.

Sitting quietly in a pair in the back seat of mother’s car
While she hummed along to songs she chose to deaden worry’s roar
We’re moving states, we’re moving states
A solid state, a solid state

the dog bit at such an angle is out now and available from the usual places.

Kendl Winter – Humming Mantra

Beginning as a way to both explore the clawhammer banjo and share this process with fans and peers, Kendl Winter’s forthcoming album Banjo Mantras originated in a daily practice of improvisation. “The banjo mantras started off as morning writings, like morning pages but in musical form,” she explains. “Daily pen to paper, fingers to strings, listening, feeling, sliding and thumbing my way around my open back banjo.” But the more Winter committed to the concept, the more she became attached to the ideas which emerged, and eventually decided to expand the resulting mantras into fleshed out soundscapes. First single ‘Humming Mantra’ channels the Pacific Northwest’s verdant summertime, full of small details and a sense of invigorating clarity.

‘Humming Mantra’ is out now and available from the usual places.

leoblu – dirty windows

“It’s unclear if the events [portrayed] are autobiographical or fiction,” we wrote of leoblu‘s ‘cake‘ back in January, “but the emotions are so keenly felt that whether these things actually happened seems almost besides the point.” The project of Åland-based songwriter Julia Carlsson, leoblu complicates the divide between truth and fiction in order to locate a deeper emotional honesty, weaving a layered and controlled sound that has been described as ‘dark pop’. Latest single ‘dirty windows’ pushes further into this style, taking the titular image to explore the cycles of stasis and rejuvenation that come with depression. Again the sound is beguilingly understated, growing subtly across its length as though slowly thawing from a deep freeze.

Watch the video shot and edited by Jonathan Carlsson below:

‘dirty windows’ is out now and available via streaming services.

Mali Velasquez – Shove

Next month Mali Velasquez is releasing full-length I’m Green on Acrophase Records. An album, as we described in a preview of single ‘Bobby‘, which explores “how our relationships with ourselves can be so conflicted and uneasy, and the way in which this is governed by our experiences with those around us.” Homing in on a specific relationship with a sound somewhere between vulnerable and visceral, latest single ‘Shove’ delves into the way our actions can be detrimental within such experiences no matter how pure the motivation. “I wrote this song in an attempt to explain the feeling of seeing myself doing the wrong things in the perfect moment,” as Velasquez puts it.

I’m Green is out on the 13th October via Acrophase Records.

The Rural Alberta Advantage – Conductors

Next month sees the return of Canadian indie stalwarts The Rural Alberta Advantage with their brand new full-length The Rise & The Fall on Paper Bag Records and Saddle Creek. Though, despite their experience, latest single ‘Conductors’ explores how the process of writing songs gets no easier no matter how many records you have under your belt. “There is so much I love about being in a band. But one of its most fundamental aspects causes me more mental anguish than anything else, and that’s actually writing songs,” as Nils Edenloff explains. “When I’m able to tune out the doubting voice in my head and get it done, there’s no greater feeling. But often the devil wins and it’s easier to just run away.” This time it took drummer Paul Banwatt’s threat to use AI generated lyrics for Edenloff to shake off the doubt, and the video by Good Job Hi Five channels Adam Curtis to foreground the sense of human creativity struggled against the encroachment of systems and machines.

Why, why do I run?
From the work and the words before it’s done
Sometimes I’m always waiting on what will never come
Before it’s done, now every thought weighs a ton
Taking it on the chin for a while
Taking it like a champ for a while

The Rise & The Fall is out on the 6th October via Paper Bag Records and Saddle Creek and you can pre-order it now.

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After the release of single ‘Had To’ last year, Richmond‘s Blush Face have returned with a new EP, Mirage Island. ‘Had To’ offered a maximalist sound to “confront the gap between expectation and reality, [looking] to find solace in the action,” and the new EP’s first single ‘Libby’ suggests the rich style continues into the new release. With the guitar, bass and percussion of four core members accentuated by violin, cello, trumpet and saxophone from a variety of guests, the song presents a lush and layered sound. One rooted in dream pop but grounded by a tangible physicality, blurring the line between reality and dreams. Fitting for a track about trying to manifest something dearly desired but never experienced through nothing but the imagination.

Bo Milli – FOMO

“Think Soccer Mommy meets The Beths, telling tales of hungover bus rides, dancing to The Strokes and a lingering unease that persists despite.” That’s how we previously described the work of Bergen‘s Bo Mili. Latest track ‘FOMO’ again taps into the zeitgeist to explore the pitfalls of love in the digital age, where everything is recorded and curated for your viewing no matter how uncomfortable it might be. “You make me feel dumb / sitting at home,” Bo Milli sings, “wondering if you’re out with someone / staring at my phone.” There’s genuine feeling to the song as it gathers momentum, but no small amount of wry humour too. This is the strange world we inhabit now, and blissful ignorance is a thing of the past.

Bobbie Lovesong – Inner Sea

Bobbie Lovesong is the recording project of Madelyn Strutz, whose debut album On the Wind is set to be released early next year via Woodsist. Written and recorded in an unfinished Earthship in Taos, New Mexico where a small group of musician rode out the lockdown, the album promises to be a surreal kaleidoscopic ode to the region, bringing together sixties pop, oddball psych and LSD-warped Americana. Lead single ‘Inner Sea’ is a great introduction, a strange warbling pop song that feels conjured from Taos’ desert landscape, the melody and ethereal vocals refracted into dreamlike unreality. Check out the video by Michael Stasiak below:

On the Wind will be released on 20^th January via Woodsist. Preorder it now from the Bobbie Lovesong Bandcamp page.

Greyon Greene – Sunken Meadow Causeway

After the release of the crepuscular creeper Belong To It on Lily Tapes & Discs in 2019, Grayon Greene turned to their Low Pressure System catalogue with the release of LPS001. A series of compositions described as “Weather Channel music” which combines ambient textures and beats to conjure something at once nostalgic and unreal. The third in the catalogue, Transactional Memories furthers this style, slowly weaving a world based on our own but somehow separate too. Soundscapes drawn from charts and maps but made dreamlike with computerised graphics, digital textures and neon overlay.

Hack-Poets Guild – Daring Highwayman

A collaboration between Marry Waterson, Lisa Knapp and Nathaniel Mann, Hack-Poets Guild is a project with a forward-looking attitude to traditional folk styles. Their debut Blackletter Garland will be released next year via One Little Independent Records, a high-concept album which draws on history and folklore to dig into meaty themes of life and death with a decidedly idiosyncratic style. Lead single ‘Daring Highway’ is the introduction to this world, a breathless tale of the titular rover which crackles with danger and volatility, the rhythm conjuring a sense of lawless freedom sliding toward some climax, be it glorious or calamitous or some fickle combination of the two.

Jessica Breanne – Bad Shape

Released earlier this month via Perpetual Doom, Jessica Breanne’s Rosebud Queen is album concerning resilience in the face of difficult conditions, and how the spirit finds ways in which to survive. An attempt to find joy and beauty in the darkest situations, be it through hard perseverance or openness to change. Single ‘Bad Shape’ feels like an encapsulation of the album, a piece which began as a short story and gradually evolved into a song, morphing into what it needed to become to communicate its message most fully. Then director Kevin Doyle came along and took the concept further, adding his own ideas to create a new narrative for the video, and serving to highlight the way in which connection can create new things in unexpected ways.

Rosebud Queen is out now via Perpetual Doom and you can get it from Bandcamp.

The Bird Calls – Auditioning For The Part

The recording project of the prolific New York songwriter Sam Sodomsky, The Bird Calls has released over thirty records across the last decade or so, with the most recent Tarot on Ruination Record Co. his first with a label. Later this week Sodomsky returns to Ruination with My Life in Hollywood, a brand new record which continues the style established on Tarot—an idiosyncratic take on on classic country and folk which utilises and often subverts genre tropes to create something decidedly new. Take latest single ‘Auditioning For The Part’, a song fully aware of its place in a lineage of songwriters, or rather at the convergence of several lineages, be it George Jones and Johnny Paycheck or something more like The Mountain Goats, and thus able to play with the listener’s expectations in a way only the more learned songwriters can.

TV Room – Pretend

Back in December last year, we wrote about ‘Balcony‘, the debut single of Lucy Rushton’s TV Room released via Sad Club Records. Described as a subliminal message to someone they were unable to speak to, the song represented “an earnest if indirect attempt to communicate the nuances of emotion,” as we put it. “A human song in which no feeling is held back.” Rushton has now returned with a brand new single, ‘Pretend’, a track no less emotionally charged but something of an inversion of its predecessor. A song about being close to someone, almost too close to say what needs to be said. A love unrequited, even as the significant other goes through the motions and says all the right things.

‘Pretend’ is out now via Sad Club Records and you can get it from Bandcamp.

Will the Whale – Next to Me

The new solo project of Will Boesl, Will the Whale is gearing up to release debut album Only Things of the Heart Remain early next year, and single ‘Next to Me’ gives an indication as to what to expect. With Bennett Littlejohn (Hovvdy, Katy Kirby) joining on bass, the track is described as a “celebration of commitment and deep love.” A love letter to Boesl’s wife penned amid a myriad of personal and collective challenges, aiming to reassert what is the most important facet of any life. And furthering this compassionate style, all proceeds from the album are going to the Oceanic Preservation Society (OPS), with Boesl hoping to encourage further links between art and social action, using creative means as a positive force. You can find the video for ‘Next to Me’ below:

Only Things of the Heart Remain is out on the 24th February.

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The music of old man of the woods […] is a forest of its own. One often still and quiet, mournful in the way woods can be, but quietly powerful too. Because the systems of life and consumption within the natural world are different to those of our own, and within the lonely forest and its constant regrowth lies a humble secret. A comfort, a humble triumph over death.

Fast forward a year and Old Man of the Woods is preparing to release its debut full-length album, Votives. Out via Totally Real Records, the album develops the style introduced on dissolve, pushing beyond the natural world and into that of dreams, thereby inviting us further into Elliott’s distinctive imagination.

To introduce the release, Old Man of the Woods has unveiled the title track. It proves a fitting choice, as the album took root in the image at the song’s heart. “I wrote ‘Votives’ after seeing friends that had coincidentally ordered love candles from the same witchy shop,” Elliott explains. “I imagined lighting one and watching my last relationship reignite. I’d regret ending it for too long, but envisioning it play out again, I realized I’d end it again. There was so much relief in that realization. I held that flame in my mind and blew it out.”

With a sparse synth line suspended upon an ethereal depth beyond, the track throws us into the deep end of this newfound dreaminess. Elliott’s vocals swing between soft and plainspoken, invoking the bittersweet confrontation mentioned above, as the song gradually builds into a languid electro pop hit.

This development mimics the intuitive logic of dreams, where the subconscious strips away layers of complication and instead presents feelings as images abstract and strange. “That night, I dreamt that peoples’ minds were little churches filled with votives burning for everyone they’d ever loved,” Elliott continues. “That image really stuck with me and played a large role in bringing the rest of the album together.”

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Ahead of a forthcoming EP, Blush Face are releasing brand new single, ‘Had To’. The track builds on the previous record, holding onto its spirit while pushing the sound into an increasingly maximalist direction. As such, the single welcomes an array of guest contributors to realise its potential, with Linnea Morgan (violin) Ali Morgan (cello), Reyna Pannell (violin),
Erin Roukous (harp), Stephen Moser (trumpet), Kevin Sabik (trumpet) and Joshua Smith (saxophone) all lending their talents.

“I wanted the song to grab people’s attention and stand out from the rest since so many people are listening to playlists these days and songs can bleed into one another,” Smith explains. “We kinda joked ‘what if we just start it off with the harp glissando?’ and ending up loving it.'”

Thematically, the song confronts the gap between expectation and reality, and looks to find solace in the action. “‘Had To’ is a song about acceptance of your current place in the world,” Smith concludes, “despite the fact that perhaps in another dimension things could have gone the way you hoped.” Maybe there is a reason behind such disappointments, Blush Face suggest. Perhaps there are opportunities for personal growth within set backs and failure. Maybe things had to happen like this, and couldn’t be any other way.

‘Had To’ is out now and available from the Blush Face Bandcamp page.

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As is evident on the subtly upbeat ‘Beneath the Pines’ or the bittersweet sway of ‘Face in the Stars’, Lucky Pennies is a collection of songs that use a classic folk blueprint to build something personal and singular. The title track is a standout, which like all good folk songs is equal parts sunshine and rainclouds, folding hope and sadness into three and a half minutes of bright acoustic guitar and soft vocals.

That said, Levi Douthit is not your average folk musician. He also plays with Richmond synth punks Teenage Cenobite and has recorded music for post punk band Black Buttons, and this behind the scenes experience of the local DIY scene is a big influence too. With the help of Tanner White, Will Fennessey and Kevin McCormick, Douthit turns what could be simple guitar and vocals songs into something heavier and more complex. Songs like ‘Losing Time’ lean towards shadowy indie rock and even the sweet strum of ‘Dog Song’ has peaks of wailing atmospherics.

But it’s lead single ‘Water the Plants’ that’s the perfect illustration, a gently turbulent lo-fi folk rock song which uses the metaphor of caring for a houseplant to explore intimate themes of recovery and self-care. “At the time, I was having some past traumas blow up in my face,” Douthit explains, “I thought I had finished dealing with them but I was reminded that you don’t ever finish dealing with them, you manage and tend to them, just like watering a plant.”

This theme of dealing with past trauma is a recurring one on Lucky Pennies and adds another dimension of depth and darkness. “There’s death all around me and more to come” Douthit sings in a moment of vulnerability on ‘Move On,’ a track that combines reflective folky moments of acoustic guitar and fragile vocals with moments of noisy and stormy anxiety. But, as on much of the album, the enduring emotion is one of strength and resilience, as captured in the final lines.

so keep on moving on
just keep on moving on

Lucky Pennies is out now and you can get it from the Levi Douthit Bandcamp page, or on cassette via Citrus City Records. Proceeds will be donated to Richmond Mutual Aid.

Photo and album art by Kevin McCormick

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The music of old man of the woods […] is a forest of its own. One often still and quiet, mournful in the way woods can be, but quietly powerful too. Because the systems of life and consumption within the natural world are different to those of our own, and within the lonely forest and its constant regrowth lies a humble secret. A comfort, a humble triumph over death.

Since we wrote about the record, old man of the woods has teamed up with Totally Real Records to release the EP on cassette. The first run of silver glitter tapes sold out in days, but there is now a second run. To celebrate the release, old man of the woods reimagined one of its tracks, switching out the synths of opener ‘made your bed’ in favour of piano. “The original felt much more defiant,” Elliott explains. “This feels like open windows and curtains blowing in the breeze and wondering where the time went.” So what previously felt confrontational is now rendered intangible and strange, an echo of a previous thought or action left to float high up around an empty room.

We’re delighted to be able to share the track today, so grab your headphones and dissolve with old man of the woods.

The post old man of the woods – Made Your Bed (Piano Version) appeared first on Various Small Flames.

old man of the woods, the recording project of Richmond-based songwriter and producer Miranda Elliott, shares more than a name with the fungus. The only child of a landscape painter, Elliott describes how the “forest felt like kin,” and this closeness to the nature extends into her music. As the title suggests, debut EP dissolve blurs the line between the personal and the natural world, conjuring a vivid and sometimes eerie soundscape as damp and rich as the woodland floor.

Opening tracks ‘make your bed’ and ‘floating leaves’ welcome you into the world of dissolve, highlighting how the release shares some of the strategies of fungal life. For within the fertile hush and pattering synths lies confusion and pain, but through the music these emotions are processed into something life-giving. What Elliott calls “that alchemy of shit into sustenance.”

The subtle electronics of ‘coast in bloom’ swell gently with an organic idiosyncrasy, bringing to mind the detailed compositions of Lejsovka & Freund. While the fleet-footed beats of ‘talking heads’ has a Sylvan Esso-esque quality, the song pushing out into the inorganic world of abstract opinions and information overload. The lushness of ‘fill me’ feels like a reaction against this, facing up to the empty promise of this world, longing for some deeper meaning to emerge and perhaps finding it within its own organic sound.

The title track closes the release and sums up the binding spirit of dissolve. Emerging from a still, low-hanging fog, the track is at once sparse and richly textured, the seeming emptiness of the echoing sound belying the dewy fecundity at its heart. For ‘Dissolve’, and indeed the music of old man of the woods as a whole, is a forest of its own. One often still and quiet, mournful in the way woods can be, but quietly powerful too. Because the systems of life and consumption within the natural world are different to those of our own, and within the lonely forest and its constant regrowth lies a humble secret. A comfort, a humble triumph over death.

i will dissolve
not rot in graveyards of stale thoughts
i will absolve
the weight that you can’t recall
making mine

dissolve is out now and you can get it from the old man of the woods Bandcamp page.

Album art and photograph by Miranda Elliott, portrait by Linda Moses

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Big Baby are about to release a new EP, Fizzy Cola, on Hidden Bay Records and Jigsaw Records, the follow-up to 2017’s Sour Patch on Egghunt Records. Opener ‘Cherry Coke’, the first song Big Baby wrote for this EP, sets the tone and introduces the soda and candy imagery of the title. Its indie pop sweetness is balanced with a lemon wedge of wistfulness, and the extra gear it finds after around a minute shows Big Baby are equally adept at doing sugar rush as they are syrupy nostalgia.

‘String of Pearls’ is another standout, a fun but semi-serious song about killing the long lonesome hours when a loved one is at work. “Sometimes I would get bored and do mundane tasks to pass the time,” Mislowsky describes. “I was untangling the strands of my string of pearls plant when the chorus just kind of fell out of my mouth.”

The EP closes on a breezy and nostalgic note with ‘Mid-June’, a bittersweet pop song that pines for a perfect early summer afternoon that is now consigned to the past. The song also has a fittingly crunchy finale as Big Baby flex their indie rock muscles one last time in a thundering last 15 seconds.

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The release opens with ‘supermarket’, a track that manages to sound triumphant despite its restrained nature, pinpointing the tiny joys with small moments that can shine against personal strife. ‘china bus’ has a more dreamy feel, wider and more expansive yet coloured by a morose edge, while ‘glow v.2’ is a delicate ode to delicate feelings, something precious presented with sensitive care in a way not unlike that of Valley Maker.

‘bug’ is a collision of bright sparks and melancholic stretches, the result a wistful song that finds comfort within itself own pain. Which is not to say that there’s anything self-indulgent or self-pitying here, the songs not romanticizing sadness but reminding us that beauty is possible in spite of it. The idea forms the central pillar of the Addy sound, and closer ‘magnolia’ is a fitting conclusion. Pushing as far as the record does in a purely folk direction, the song presents sorrow and joy side by side, the pensive lyrics lifted by glimmering instrumentation that warms the whole thing through—offering a vision of rebirth that can heal the deepest wounds.

Rose Eyes is out now and you can buy it now from the Addy Bandcamp page., where half of the profits from the digital sales will be donated to Planned Parenthood.

Cover artwork by Keven Zweerink, photo by Farrah Fox

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House seems able to conjure its own atmospheric patterns, unseen forces called forth from homebrew hexes, leaving the listener dazed and amazed, like a torn page that’s been swirled around and left strewn on the ground.

Again released by our friends at Furious Hooves, new EP Follow sees Horse Culture develop this aesthetic, delving further into the dark and moody corners of indie rock. From the opening salvo the title track the tone is set, like the stomping approach of some great black beast that stops for nothing and no one. The tempo might drop for the sludgy vocals, though the beat remains, taking on an ominous, creeping quality that soon finds a new level of frantic zeal.

The only sub-six minute track on the release, ‘Anteo’ blooms from uncertain beginnings into demonic fury, like the howls of some reluctant entity exorcised from its host. ‘Angels’ sees a return to the lurching horror of the opener, the unrelenting cadence like some hellforce on the warpath. Indeed, there’s something Brueghelian about this iteration of Horse Culture, and closer ‘Blue’ only reinforces the feeling. There’s a repetitive, hypnotic quality to the music, a sense of inevitability in the reiteration. Darkness rising from the earth, darkness metastasising. Darkness as compelled by marching drums. A triumph of darkness through its sheer conviction, some terrible looming thing determined to make itself known.

Follow is out now via Furious Hooves and you can get it from Bandcamp, including a nice cassette edition.

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