Until then, here’s our June Roundup, a playlist of songs rounding up everything we covered during June. Clever, huh? Click on the artist name in the tracklisting to be whisked away to the specific post.

Tracklisting:

1. Trisha Please Come Home – Advance Base
2. Slower Now – Star Horse
3. I Make Boys Cry – Adult Mom
4. Cordella – On The Water
5. Destroy – Henoheno
6. A Long Time Ago – Kalle Mattson
7. Only One Who Feels a Little Bit Bad – Fazed on a Pony
8. Ohio Snow Falls – Unraveler
9. Pylon Pile On – Benjamin Shaw
10. For Luck – Cyberbully Mom Club
11. The Offer – Yowler
12. When I Met Death – Right Away, Great Captain!
13. Patriarchaeth – Gwenno
14. Future Bones – Bells Atlas
15. Beautiful Brian – Harley Alexander and The Universal Lovers
16. Whip-Poor-Will – Morning River Band
17. I Admit I’m Scared – Eskimeaux
18. Ideal World – Girlpool
19. Observation Satellites – GRNDMS
20. Podesta – Peptalk
21. Cwm Llwm – Yucatan
22. Clouds – Estan
23. Lullaby – Long Neck
24. KiwiKisses – Trenton Point
25. My Only One – PONY
26. Return to View – The Wandering Lake
27. Clicking Clanking – Ylayali
28. Pull Me Apart – Lung Cycles
29. Red Coat – Adeline Hotel
30. Johnny Go Riding – Damien Jurado
31. When the Day is Fresh, and the Light is New – The Wooden Sky
32. The Crow – Sean Henry
33. Yolanda – O-FACE

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Yowler

“Water permeates the record in all of its guises, in rain and in blood and in sinks, in rivers and seas and oceans, in sheet ice and snow melt and the film over an eye” – The Offer by Yowler gives Maryn Jones a chance to create something intensely personal.

Samantha Crain

“Music has the power to change minds and to nudge humanity down a different path but for the most part I feel like most music just wants to follow the mass around asking what they like and what they want from them. There are bigger things going on, music and art needs to direct attention towards those injustices.” – We chatted to Samantha Crain her forthcoming album Under Branch & Thorn & Tree.

Late Night Music in the Museum

“The evenings showed that museums can be innovative, adaptable and welcoming to all, centres of the community rather than simple tourist novelties…What better way to ensure the survival of an institute than to make it central to the lives and well-being of the people it serves?” – We were left feeling inspired by recent events at the National Museum in Cardiff.

Fevered Press, Fevered Certainty

Cool people cover cool songs by cool bands for a cool zine. What’s not to like? The Epoch Fanzine from Fevered Press, Fevered Certainty.

Right Away, Great Captain

“The journey is an epic one, written in novelistic detail that surpasses the overwhelming majority of albums – tracing the sailor’s time at sea…and his return to land” – Andy Hull’s Right Away, Great Captain release entire catalogue in one anthology.

Harley Alexander

“Just the right blend of luminous and languorous to occupy your headphones during the summer (or dreams thereof)” – Glorious summer vibes from Harley Alexander on Gold Shirt.

Fazed On a Pony

Fox Food Records continue their hot streak with this slice of “raucously rad” indie rock from Fazed On a Pony.

Star Horse

“Keepin’ it dreamy with yearning vocals and a resounding crystalline shimmer” – A few words about ‘Slower Now’ by Star Horse, which premièred on No Fear of Pop earlier this week.

May Roundup mixtape

If you missed the chance to read everything we posted during May, do yourself a favour and catch up with all the cool bands via this handy mixtape.

Introverted Stars

“When I hear Alessia [Cara] valorize her love of staying at home, it feels like an affirmation that my preternatural quietness is a bearable tic rather than a curse. She wants to be alone in her room, and she has the courage to tell it to the whole world” – Molly Long wrote a fantastic piece for The Fader about being introverted and shy… while also being a pop star.

Mark Kozelek Being Offensive Pt. XXVI

“He can use sexually violent language to reduce female critics to the status of groupies, knowing that while male musicians’ misogynist acts are examined for nuance and defended as traits of “difficult” artists, women and those who call them out are treated as hysterics who don’t understand art” – Laura Snapes wrote about her recent run-in with Mark Kozelek for The Guardian…

“Maybe a feminist reimagining of popular music doesn’t just involve putting more women onstage. Maybe it includes creating spaces without stages: where power is fluid, where no one can play god, where art can be shared without elevating artists three feet above their audiences” – …and Sasha Geffen wrote a great piece for Consequence of Sound about Kozelek’s recent behaviour and how he is far from the only example.

Sufjan or ETs?

If you’re like me then you quite like Sufjan Stevens, and you ABSOLUTELY LOVE UFOs and all that weird stuff. Test your knowledge (of either category) with this fun list from Mandala Laura over at McSweeney’s.

Jenny Hval

You can stream the new Jenny Hval album over at the New York Times:

Titus Andronicus

And Titus Andronicus unveiled another track from their forthcoming album ‘The Most Lamentable Tragedy‘:

And Finally… the 8tracks Playlist of the Week

This week’s winner is this gem from Badical Turbo Radness.

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Through both lyrics and tone of voice he illustrates the joy, grief, desperation and downright loneliness of human relationships. Themes straight out of the classics; love and hate, forgiveness and revenge. The albums are about being far away from what you care about and our struggles to return. They are about our inability to appreciate the the thoughts and motives of others

For those who aren’t familiar, The Bitter End, The Eventually Home and The Church Of The Good Thief are a trilogy of concept albums based around the travels, and subsequent return, of a nameless sailor and father who retreats to sea after discovering his wife and brother are having an affair. The journey is an epic one, written in novelistic detail that surpasses the overwhelming majority of albums – tracing the sailor’s time at sea (and his relationship with the captain of the ship before the mentor dies) and his return to land, where he falls to an opiate addiction and mental breakdown. All the while the sailor harbours the grudge against his loved ones, something which blossoms into violence by the time of the third album. 

The albums are a study in loneliness and isolation, tracking the effects of betrayal on a man too deeply in love to cope. The first album sees a recognisable (albeit severe) sense of angst and grief, but this warps into something more sinister by the end, with the protagonist unable to get off his ship to greet his family for fear that he will kill them all. Drugs and confinement further detach him from reality and logic on the second album, where things get weird and stray from the typical tortured romantic you might have been expecting. Indeed, by the finale the tale resembles a Shakespearean tragedy, so deeply bitter and sad you get the sense that death is the only possible conclusion.

If you like your music with a detailed and sprawling narrative, Right Away, Great Captain! will be the project for you. You can buy the RAGC Anthology now from the Right Away, Great Captain! Bandcamp page.

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Head over to Bandcamp to buy a CD of the album for $10 CAD (£6.25), which is more than worth it just for the lovely artwork (some hasty research shows it to be an oil painting by Rockwell Kent that was completed around 1925). The album is also available for download for $8 CAD (£5 – which is a steal).

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Manchester Orchestra always seem to be placed somewhere between conventional indie rock and the teen angst driven market led by Brand New and the like. This isn’t meant as an attack on those sorts of bands but it sometimes appears that MO fail to get the recognition they deserve with their blend of the epic and the restrained producing stories about ordinary people but of near-biblical proportion. RAGC! takes this further and masters the idea.

As with all of the very best songwriters, Andy Hull is more than a musician. He is a storyteller, someone who can spin a narrative with all of the related emotions and feelings in just a few fragmented sentences. Through both lyrics and tone of voice he illustrates the joy, grief, desperation and downright loneliness of human relationships. Themes straight out of the classics; love and hate, forgiveness and revenge. The albums are about being far away from what you care about and our struggles to return. They are about our inability to appreciate the the thoughts and motives of others.

The story resolves around a sailor away at sea, a man separated from his wife and children. I’ll say little more and let the tale unravel for you in your own time but I urge you to read Hull’s thoughts on the trilogy to fully develop the plot as he intended.

As with The Antlers’ Hospice, the albums are enjoyable as a straight narrative but can also be taken as a giant metaphor or expanded upon within your own imagination. I guess it depends how much you want to read between the lines.

Bandcamp is the place to go to acquire The Bitter End, The Eventually Home and The Church Of The Good Thief. You will not regret it.

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