With the EP’s release fast approaching, Caroline Strickland has returned with one final single, ‘Prettiest Girl of Heaven’. Again utilising a sense of infectious energy to its benefit, the song adopts its title as a kind of mantra, repeating the phrase over and over as though to convince or make true via force of will. “Can I / Grab a hold of your hand make you understand / That I / Am in love with you now?” Strickland asks in one verse, and the desire behind this question fires the entire song.

Holding onto you I see it
Broken in disguise
Sunset on a blue pacific
Prudent emerald eyes

You are one of the prettiest girls of heaven, heaven

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To bring this to life, King Ropes offer a sound to match the landscape. One where beauty and harshness sit side by side, and imperfections are just part of the rustic charm. Whether that be the bright and buoyant opener ‘Two Shoes’ or the brooding ‘Radio Jane’ which flickers with an edge of what might be sultry romance or latent violence. ‘Way Too High’ follows with a far smoother, languid flow, though beneath the lazy haze lies a simmering unease. As though, true to the title, the narrator is finding themselves overtaken by a sense of deepening unreality, peculiarities bleeding into the everyday, the sense nothing is quite what it seems.

It is this balance between the ordinary and the extraordinary that marks Idaho, just as it has the other records in the King Ropes oeuvre, and represents that elusive Spirit of The West. The upending combination of familiarity and alienation that comes with living in the middle of nowhere, where isolation is both a confine and a wide-open space. Sun-baked, unrefined, a world within a world. Something as evident in the laconic rhythm of songs like ‘Broken Cup’ and ‘Ride In Your Car’ as it is spacious wonder of ‘International Shortwave’ or the sleek mischievousness of ‘Succulent Thief’, not to mention ‘Live Like an Animal’ with its mean swagger and bite. A song in which sardonic humour meets something primal to the point where you are never quite sure what its next move might be.

Idaho is out now via Big and Just Little and available from the usual places.

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With the record coming out just as the world shut down at the onset of the pandemic, the band—that is Cameron Keiber (guitar, keys, vocals), David Grabowski (bass, keys), Clayton Keiber (guitar) and Dennis Grabowski (drums, percussion)—saw themselves shelving plans to tour in support of the release and instead returned to the studio. A productive period saw them put over twenty five new songs in the can, and so originated the fifth Eldridge Rodriguez full-length, Atrophy.

The new material is perhaps typified by ‘Megalodon‘, the record’s lead single which shows off new pop and slacker influences. “A sound that’s a little brighter, possessing a carefree bounce however wry and cutting the lyrics,” as we put it in a preview. “As though the band have stumbled across a certain slacker rock acceptance amid the trauma of the moment.” If Slightest of Treason was the alarmed soundtrack to a country sliding ever rightward, then here we find life after such a turn has taken root. More specifically, an attempt to exist in spite of ignorance, cruelty and unvented anger. “The best you can do is move on,” as the refrain offers.

But to live among (and be governed by) bad people requires you to in some way turn the lens upon yourself. To ask whether you live up to such standards. A process perhaps exacerbated by the pandemic and strange blend of isolation and public duty it asked of us all. Hence Atrophy is often more introspective in its themes, seeking forgiveness and redemption as much as anything else. “I’m burying hatchets, I’m making a mess,” as Keiber sings on ‘The Strange Things That Happen to People‘. “Trying to be a better person /gonna be a better friend.” The track is contemplative in tone, bearing the past as an accumulated weight which grows more apparent year on year until there’s no option but to confront it.

This becomes the album’s central theme. Take ‘Have I Gone To Far’, a picture of lockdown loneliness in all of its dull repetition, the taut rhythm contained with an overarching slackness, like an anxious mind stuck within an empty house. “There is a silence in this room,” as Keiber sings, “there is a silence you get used to.” Other tracks place volatility at the forefront, be it the plea of ‘Help Me Help Me’ or the unhinged ‘Casual Jesus’, which plays like patience unravelling in real time, complete with escalating momentum and throaty yelped vocals. By comparison, ‘Without All Your Teeth You Can’t Get into Heaven’ is far more relaxed, though some of the needle and desperation still shows itself. The sense of being judged in some manner, the idea salvation is contingent on the present and perhaps the past too. The fear, ultimately, of being locked out of the possibility of redemption and scratching at the door before it is too late.

Atrophy is out now via Midriff Records.

Cover Photo by Cameron Keiber, design by Bea Talplacido

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Out this autumn, forthcoming release The Electric River sees Matthew Squires continue his journey into America’s strange heart, again joined by trusty backing band the Learning Disorders. With Gianni Sarmiento (lead guitar, backup vocals), James Lavery (lead guitar), Savanah Shanks (synth, backup vocals), Zane Frisch (bass guitar) and Ray Flynt (drums, backup vocals), the release sees a pivot toward a starker, country-psych sound. One attuned not only to the revelationary terror of our current situation but also the search for meaning and goodness within such a world.

There could be no better introduction to the release than lead single ‘The Ballad of Norm MacDonald’. A classic highway visitation song updated for late capitalism—an age of precarious labour, commodification and ubiquitous entertainment. Like Steve Earle’s ‘The Tennessee Kid’ if it wasn’t Satan who visited the narrator but some kind of modern-day saint. Norm MacDonald to be exact. Fittingly written after a long shift at Whole Foods.

“I had been chewing on the almost Andy Kaufmanesque way he died and listened to some very enigmatic interviews he had given about life and death, where he seemed to me to have a strong Kierkegaardian streak,” Matthew Squires explains. “When I wrote the song, in a way I was trying to pay homage to the spirit of his idiosyncratic brand of humour, what with my sort of ironic playing around with the trope of the balladeer who talk-sings at the beginning of a song about walking down a highway.” Just as MacDonald repurposed old tropes with a balance of irony and earnestness, so to does Squires this country archetype. A religious experience both terrifying and thrilling and utterly bizarre.

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“The songs would be like cut-out pieces from magazines and the little weird segue interludes would be the glue that holds it all together,” Nelson explains. “I was thinking about how all of the art and music we make are like little time capsules, tangible forms of memories captured and frozen in time, like little plot points in our lives that exist now and we get to dig them up years later and revisit them.” The Overseas Artist Recordings release embraces this concept,  each coming with a thumb drive loaded not only with the songs but videos too, as well as printed album artwork, industrial hemp seeds cultivated by Nelson himself and a physical ticket to a Particle Kid show scheduled for twenty years in the future.

No single track can quite capture the entirety of the project’s ambitious breadth or the Particle Kid sound, but slow burning psych folk song ‘All One Day (Shadow of the Sun)’ is as good a place as any to dive in. The expansive song sees Nelson invite Jim James and father Willie Nelson for a lockdown celebration. “[James], my dad and I all share birthdays in the same week,” Nelson explains, “so I invited him to sing on this song […] I liked the idea of all of us sharing a birthday week, singing a song together about the illusion of time.”

Time Capsule is out via Overseas Artists Recordings on the 22nd April and you can pre-order it now.

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Next year sees Sara Rachele return with Heartstrings, a brand new album released via Ropeadope Records. Recorded with between London, Brooklyn and Rachele’s hometown of Little 5 Points in Atlanta, Georgia, and with a wide array of collaborators and friends, the album’s diversity is apparent in its very essence. With elements of pop, folk, Americana and jazz all comingling, the songs are tied together by a sixties retro-polish, casting Rachele as the archetypal troubadour—a figure always moving, always searching, never content in one place for too long.

Single ‘Go South’ encapsulates this aesthetic. A rich country rock jam carved from the Americana tradition, equal parts smouldering emotion and heart-on-the-sleeve vulnerability. Though it is far more polished than anything on Scorpio Sun, the mood is as stark as ever, Rachele’s croon emerging through the brooding bluesy style with a hard won wisdom.

Get wise or go south
New York will spit you out
Get tough or just get out
Get wise
Get wise or go

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All these styles comprise You Said Something, the new Alberta and The Dead Eyes full-length record released this month. Though while the shadowy sashaying of ‘See Saw‘ and sinuous confidence of ‘Lil’ Bird‘ sat within the former aforementioned categories, ‘Muck’ falls firmly within the latter. A folk song wrapped in nostalgia but not fully taken with its allure, possessing the kind of impassioned yet fatalistic charm of Water Liars’s Justin Peter Kinkel-Schuster. Alberta and the Dead Eyes are just as interested in the past as the future, and all too aware of how both have their own false bottoms and trap doors.

I’m coming in hot now, but you’ll find that I’m the same.
Sipping on my booze, backwashing truths and memories.
I’m moving past my prime ever so clumsily.
If you travel to the future—or maybe to the past
would you come and find me?

Check out the video by Paul P! Snyder below:

You Said Something is out now and available on vinyl from the Alberta and The Dead Eyes webstore.

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Ahead of their upcoming album on Hidden Shoal Records, Otinget have released a new single, title track ‘The Greatest Thing That Never Happened’. With Dungen’s Reine Fiske joining on guitar, the track is a perfect introduction for the uninitiated. The opening minutes creep into life with affectionate warmth, the various elements rising and falling and clicking into place as shuffling drums introduce themselves. The song seems to draw energy from its own growing rhythm, charging an internal energy across a series of ebbs and flows before rising toward its revelatory climax.

Then one dark night, around 3am,
they escaped the narrative prepared for them
And it was the greatest thing that never happened

The Greatest Thing That Never Happened… will be released in September via Hidden Shoal and you can pre-order it now.

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Reed has since gone quiet, though after a successful crowdfunding campaign, he put the finishing touches to Young Runner, a brand new Alabama Deathwalk release that will come out early in 2021. With Austin Norman (drums), Chad Jaso (bass), Amber Reed (violin, piano, vocals) and Conor Davison (synths), the album sees Reed develop the Alabama Deathwalk style while retaining the heart and warmth of his previous releases.

First single ‘Bluff’ introduces the aesthetic, finding the sweet spot between the emotional intensity of emo and earnest nuance of indie rock bands like Cataldo and The Weakerthans. The style is put to great effect, allowing for a searching, reflective tone that comes with an immediacy too. The warmth of the track starts out as a smoldering flame, but without any one clear explosion, the closing moments arrive with the knowledge that the fire has grown, burning with an evocative ferocity.

now I see that you and I both needed
more than we could give back then
now I see that we both needed the same thing
more than we could give back then
pain in my chest
I gave all that I had to give
pain in your chest
you gave all that you had to give
pain in my chest
I gave all that I had to give

call it a bluff
call it anything you want
but I know the truth

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The idiosyncratic sound works in harmony with the themes of the EP. The release draws its name from what Wolfe sees as the oscillation between positive and negative baked into the human experience, and how our current shadowed state still displays evidence of the other side. What he describes as the “process of being in a dark part of the cycle, but being rebirthed in light like we are every day.” With help from Pat Keen (bass) and Jack Lussenden (drums), this sentiment is brought life through curiosity and strangeness, a constant propensity for the unexpected, for change, that both captures the pessimism of the moment and the brightness beyond its boundaries.

Lead single and opener ‘Lightning’ makes this apparent, an inventive track that blends a surreal floaty ambience with a frenetic lyrical flow. “I wrote [the song] while sitting on a bridge in Eau Claire, Wisconsin,” Wolfe explains. “I was awestruck by a massive golden lightning storm that intricately painted the entire horizon in the distance.” But despite this sublime natural display, many pedestrians on the bridge barely looked up from their phones. “The juxtaposition of these two events felt so acute,” Wolfe continues, “as if being offered up as an archetype of western civilization in the 21st century.”

There’s more of a traditional folk rock vibe to ‘Little Car’, though the apparent simplicity of opening rhythm branches out with a searching intricacy, while ‘Highly Likely’ positions itself in an altogether more intangible space. Exploring the ambiguous territory between escapism and destruction, in particular in a context of addiction, Wolfe’s vocals arrive soft and fragile above the art pop discordance. However, they eventually pulled into the glitching confusion of the sound itself with the searching refrain—Why can’t we be alright?—ending the track with no judgement or wisdom.

‘Love Breaks’ emerges from the chaos with a meandering calm, a laid-back lounge jazz made almost surreal by its positioning. The escape itself perhaps, cut off from the noise and movement of the world but always temporary. Indeed, the EP can function as a loop itself, the peace of the closing track feeding back into the manic twitch of the opener, the wax and wane of life we have to live.

Lightness is out now and available from the Dex Wolfe Bandcamp page.

Artwork and photography by Leeya Rose Jackson

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