And it’s a pretty impressive list, what the label call “an often-stunning gestalt of generational talent paying homage to one of the most gifted but underrated American songwriters.” Some of our very favourite artists feature, including Advance Base, Friendship, Trace Mountains, Sadurn, Hand Habits and a whole host more, reimagining a selection of songs from across Molina’s oeuvre.

Only two tracks have been released so far, but if they are any indication it’s going to be a pretty special release. Opening proceedings is MJ Lenderman‘s pretty faithful take on Songs: Ohia’s ‘Just Be Simple’, before Sun June put their own spin on Magnolia Electric Co. track ‘Leave the City’, moulding it into what could sound like a new Sun June track if you are not familiar with the original. It also features what is, in a particularly crowded field, one of Molina’s best opening lines.

Broke my heart to leave the city
I mean it broke what wasn’t broken in there already

I Will Swim to You: A Tribute to Jason Molina will be released on 5th September and available to pre-order via the Run For Cover Records Bandcamp page, including the fittingly titled Coxcomb Red, Comet Dust Red or Old Hen Black vinyl editions. 10% of profits will be donated to MusiCares® Mental Health and Addiction Recovery Fund.

The post I Will Swim to You: A Tribute to Jason Molina appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Adeline Hotel – Whodunnit

Ruination Record Co.

“There’s always a strange combination of continuity and change within a new album from Adeline Hotel. Each record building upon what came before it while often in some respects also turning away to chart new ground. As though the project exists as a kind of world of its own, and the function of each release is to bring us a view of a different corner. Adeline Hotel as a vast space we’re discovering album by album, song by song, with Dan Knishkowy not so much engineering the experience as leading the way. This exploratory spirit is central to Whodunnit […] an album following a tradition which lists the likes of Gillian Welch, Neil Young and Van Morrison among its practitioners. Songs as a form of stream of consciousness, not only in terms of lyrics but the very sound itself. The sense of having tapped into some wellspring of movement or momentum and choosing to lean into the flow.” [Review]

Advance Base – Horrible Occurrences

Run For Cover / Orindal Records

“For while the setting is entirely imaginary, the narratives and characters owe much to real life. Indeed the killer [of ‘The Year I Lived in Richmond’] is inspired by an analogous figure who stalked a place Advance Base‘s Own Ashworth once called home, fictionalised to create some sense of distance and decency. If Horrible Occurrences can be distilled into one reductive image, then that is perhaps the most enlightening. A receptacle into which bad memories and old stories can be poured. A small town diorama in which they can play out again, change shapes, take on lives of their own. One we might approach and watch over along with Ashworth, feeling tall from that perspective, relatively safe in the top-down view.” [Review]

Anne Malin – Strange Power!

Dear Life Records

Released in tandem book-length poem What Floods under the name AM Ringwalt, Anne Malin‘s Strange Power! is an album which explores “how nature and its inherent motion might possess the key to the process of healing in the aftermath of trauma and loss,” as we wrote earlier in the year. Something which possesses a palpable momentum yet no clear conclusion. In other hands, this lack of answers or endings might be held up as the tragic farce of existence, but here is positioned more like an opportunity. To continue asking questions both of yourself and your surroundings, as though the act of interrogation is its own strange power. A sign of a faith in something human and sublime.

Being Dead – EELS

Bayonet Records

“If you thought [previous release] When Horses Would Run was inventive, then just wait until you hear what is coming next. Because the new Being Dead full-length EELS […] takes everything that made its predecessor special and pushes it further. Travelling to Los Angeles for a fortnight of writing and recording with John Congleton, the pair pushed themselves to embrace the singular spirit of their work. The result is a record that’s more intense, more raucous and decidedly darker than anything which has come before, without sacrificing that mischievous persona.” [Review]

Ben Seretan – Allora

Tiny Engines

Described by Ben Seretan as his “insane Italy record,” Allora represents a snapshot from a very specific time and place. Or rather it would, should ‘snapshot’ come anywhere close to describing the scale, heft and sheer abundance of moving parts on show. Seretan and his band were due to play a wedding at the tail end of “a wonderful but lightly disastrous tour” of Europe during the summer of 2019, only for rain to half play and leave them in the lurch. But rather than waste the curious mix of energy and exhaustion that sets in at the end of a tour, they decided to make an album instead. A three-day stint at a farmhouse in the hills overlooking Venice with renowned mixing engineer, producer, musician Matt Bordin was arranged. A brief moment where a plethora of emotions were processed and purged through joyful noise. The result is unashamedly maximalist, entirely heartfelt, and in possession of that lightning-in-a-bottle feel that suggests it could never have materialised anywhere else. Catharsis has long been a key thread of Ben Seretan’s work, but rarely has it gone quite so hard.

The Big Easy – (It’s No Secret) The Truth As Bad As the View

Trash Casual Records

“It’s notable that The Big Easy’s latest album, (It’s No Secret) The Truth As Bad As The View, is the first to feature Berthomieux’s image on the cover. The first symbol on a record that looks to grapple with exactly how and why a person of colour might be made to feel an interloper within certain artistic circles. Berthomieux cites a James Baldwin statement as a key to realigning his perspective. ‘To be a Negro in this country,’ Baldwin wrote, ‘and to be relatively conscious is to be in a state of rage almost all of the time.’ Suddenly what had for so long seemed like a personal hang-up or imposter syndrome was revealed to be an intrinsic part of the Black experience, and to connect his own emotions with a historic struggle proved liberating. Thus the album became an exercise in owning his identity and finally voicing those things kept buried for so long. ‘It’s No Secret is kind of like a journal,’ as Berthomieux concludes, ‘a place where I can express the things that I haven’t been able to say out loud’.” [Review]

Brown Horse – Reservoir

Loose Music

“Call it distraction, call it despair / No matter what you call it you can feel it when it’s there.” These lines from the track ‘Bloodstain’ encapsulate the presiding mood of Brown Horse’s Reservoir. A sense of unease which permeates their alt-country style like something “drifted on the low tide,” as the song continues. Something that’s now “hell bent for to stay.” This disquiet is evoked not only in images of stark estuary mudflats and cold fields but also polycotton shirts and soulless expanses of megastores. In the nostalgic melancholy of opener ‘Stealing Horses’, or the Molina-esque lyricism of songs like ‘Sunfisher’ and ‘Outtakes’ with their burning houses, hummingbird hearts and singing birds. And like all the best Gothic atmosphere, it is not entirely clear whether the sensation is a haunting from some ancient thing or a dark harbinger of what is to come.

Cara Beth Satalino – Little Green

Worried Songs

“The success of Little Green is in no small part a result of the nuanced nature of Cara Beth Satalino’s approach. Early on you come to appreciate her uncanny ability to combine deep soul-searching with offhand observations and gentle humour, inventive imagery and smart turns of phrase creating something rich and full of life despite the surrounding turmoil. [A record] soft and fragile as a little green shoot but with a spark of energy too, a desire to keep on. It might be too dark to see what is in front of you, but the earth is still turning and the bright star is still burning. There is time yet to grow towards the light.” [Review]

Cassandra Jenkins – My Light, My Destroyer

Dead Oceans

Cassandra Jenkins intended to step away from music after her 2021 album An Overview on Phenomenal Nature, only for the album to resonant so deeply with audiences she found herself newly (and perhaps reluctantly) energised, pulled back towards the urge to create. My Light, My Destroyer is what emerged a few years later, a record which not so much builds upon its predecessor as explodes out in every direction. Sophistipop, jazz and New Age elements lift Jenkins’s indie rock sound to almost orchestral territory, while layers of found sounds and field recordings anchor the otherwise celestial style in the lived-in world. This duality between the grounded and the elevated is typical of the tone, where encroaching darkness is matched by a curiosity and attentiveness to wonder. The world is beautiful, the world is burning, and both of these facts are made more urgent by the other.

The Chairman Dances – Evening Song

Self-Released

“Originating as a narrative poem, The Chairman Dances‘ new album Evening Song traces the early days of a nascent relationship,” we wrote back in September. “A seminarian and a drummer mutually enamoured with one another, caught in the heady space of attraction and mystery, hungry to learn everything there is to know about the other.” Working from this point of intersection, Eric Krewson and co. bring the pair of characters to life, providing small glimpses into moments both special and seemingly mundane to achieve a strikingly intimate sense of humanity. As with much of The Chairman Dances’ catalogue, the beauty is in the detail. The hollow knock of shoes, the wail of an oven’s timer, the catch of a lock. Small confessions shared between two people daring to allow their lives to become enmeshed.

The Dead Tongues – Body of Light / I Am a Cloud

Psychic Hotline

Not content with releasing just one record this year, Ryan Gustafson’s The Dead Tongues put out two simultaneously. The albums, published as standalone digital releases but brought together in a double LP, display both aspects of the Asheville, North Carolina songwriter’s oeuvre. I Am A Cloud is an exercise is meandering cosmic Americana, what Gustafson calls “a fever dream of song and spoken-word about the toggle between identity and ephemerality,” while Body of Light sees things solidify into discrete folk rock songs. Joined by a stellar cast of collaborators and a sense of improvisational freedom, it’s the most expensive and ambitious Dead Tongues release to date.

Deerlady – Greatest Hits

Self-Released

Described as “a collection of songs about intimacy,” Greatest Hits sees Mali Obomsawin and Magdalena Abrego unite as Deerlady to conjure soundscapes simultaneously stark, tender and thunderous. Both Obomsawin and Abrego have backgrounds in jazz, and though some of the genre’s fluidity carries through, the Deerlady project exists outside of that sphere and the expectations it carries. Rather, Greatest Hits offers an indie rock style free to be more elemental and raw, one attuned to ideas of softness and hope within a hostile and violent world. As if in the face of colonial cruelty, sound might fill the gaps where words cannot suffice. “Brick and concrete / two hundred thousand years buried beneath / while the stars witnessed the unholy,” as Obomsawin, who is from the Abenaki First Nation at Odanak, sings on ‘Masterpieces’. “Well I take it in / I wrestle with the language to begin / I didn’t come to make a speech, I came to live.”

Desert Liminal – Black Ocean

Whited Sepulchre Records

“Released in 2021, Desert Liminal‘s Glass Fate found the Chicago band “settling into a higher form,” as we put it at the time, with violinist and noise artist Mallory Linehan (AKA Chelsea Bridge) joining Sarah Jane Quillin and Rob Logan to elevate their trademark dreamy aesthetic. [Black Ocean] in many ways represents a continuation of this process. With the outfit now cemented as a trio, Linehan joins Quillin as a songwriter and vocalist, grounding the nascent sense of collaboration and connection which emerged on Glass Fate as a core facet of Desert Liminal. A development which is thematically resonant too, the record exploring ways in which death can be faced communally, and grief transmuted into something affirming and meaningful. Chicago’s DIY scene carried Quillin through the worst experiences, and Black Ocean looks to distil this experience into its purest form. The resulting songs often seem like love letters to the people in these communities. Those figures who stood next to you through the best and worst of times.” [Review]

Distant Reader – Place of Words Now Gone

Lily Tapes & Discs

“No news in weeks from outside town,” announces Emmerich Anklam at the beginning of the latest Distant Reader album, Place of Words Now Gone, thrusting the listener into a world suddenly quiet along with his bewildered characters. “Who left me in the center of this desolation?” one such person asks, “Who’s hearing me talk? Does it matter at all? Is anyone still out there? And who can tell the difference between the end and the beginning?” The record took seed in Anklam’s brain during long train rides through the fabled American landscape, and although a clear work of fiction, it’s hard not to see reality in the community it describes—abandoned by those beyond it’s boundaries, succumbing to helplessness as they lose what little agency were ever afforded them. A portrait of an isolated and dislocated America where those left behind are left to struggle and mourn as a deepening silence floods the places they call home. “And everybody she knows goes quiet trying to forget about the ways they could diminish still,” as Emmerich sings on ‘From High Remove’, “the spiral closing in around all of them. Words vanish fold in on themselves, questions halved quartered eighthed. Absence of sound infects all who feel it. Tones, phrases returning to the ether.”

Emily Hines – These Days

Self-Released

“I don’t know about you, but I’m holding out hope.” So sings Emily Hines on ‘UFO’, a single which embodies the tone of her full-length These Days. As warm and soft as a blanket to wrap around yourself in the cold winter months, but with a sharp pang of something else too, a bittersweet bite more potent than the frost at the window. The entire album is an understated gem, full of quiet and wistful songs about difficult relationships, questions unanswered or unanswerable, hoping for something more. On ‘UFO’ this ranges from a desire to know the truth about the Roswell landings to wishing for the sublime reckoning of the Second Coming. But for all of its outlandish subject matter, the song, like These Days as a whole, is entirely straight with its underlying sentiment. There is still hope that wrongs can be righted, Hines insists. Things can change for the better.

Enumclaw – Home in Another Life

Run For Cover Records

Ever wondered what might happen if you were to cross the beams of don’t-give-a-shit slacker rock and confessional, emotionally intense emo? Home in Another Life, the latest album from Tacoma’s Enumclaw, is here to provide an answer. The record is unafraid of the largest themes, lead Aramis Johnson wrestles with everything from God, illness and death to self-doubt, relationships and sex, but does so with a sense of energy and swagger. As though faced with the tangle of life’s difficulties, Enumclaw make the conscious decision to charge headlong forwards, conscious of every possible branch and thorn but moving too purposefully to become ensnared in any one spot. Whether it be the denial of a difficult diagnosis in ‘Not Just Yet’ or the internalised shame of ‘I Still Feel Bad About Masturbation’, Home in Another Life takes emotions and experiences which so often feel unspeakable and shouts them aloud in an act of agency.

The Felice Brothers – Valley of Abandoned Songs

Million Stars / 15 Passenger

Since their inception in 2006, The Felice Brothers have established themselves as one of the premier acts of contemporary US folk rock, building a catalogue of urgent narratives and strange visions with enough depth to stand alongside their literary influences. “Poems and short stories packed with clever references and wry turns of phrase” as we wrote of 2021’s From Dreams to Dust. “A confrontation of the grim realities of our moment that nevertheless celebrates the fact of being alive.” As the title suggests, Valley of Abandoned Songs is a collection of tracks written throughout the project which never quite made it onto a record, but were nevertheless strong enough to convince Conor Oberst, no less, to set up a brand new label just to release them into the world. Single ‘Flowers By The Roadside’ is the perfect example of their ability to conjure entire lives and histories in the shortest of spaces.

Are you
High as Mr Albert was
When he drove the cross town bus
Straight into the sky
I’m just sitting in these flowers by the roadside
I’m not trying to flag a ride
Just happy watching the wide world go by

The Fourth Wall – Return Forever

DevilDuck Records

Kickstarted by a family story of a relative who left a child behind when emigrating to the United States, Return Forever by The Fourth Wall is “an album which,” as we put it in our review, “combs through the contradictions of the immigrant experience in order to voice feelings otherwise impossible to convey.” Delivered via a weighty brand of indie rock, the mood ranges from anger and confusion to catharsis and joy, and the result, as we continued, is “a mixture of hope, denial and genuine love which not only subverts expectations but confounds any attempt to properly reassess. As though some decisions can be so complicated, their impacts so profound, that the very physics of emotions are bent beyond their own laws.”

Gabriel Birnbaum – Patron Saint of Tireless Losers

Western Vinyl

“Gabriel Birnbaum has become increasingly interested in music’s narrative potential, and Patron Saint [of Tireless Losers] finds him at his most confident to date,” we wrote in June. An album where Birnbaum again evolves his sound and writing to present “vignettes which occupy the knife-edge between specificity and ambiguity, rewarding the return listener with layers of wry humour and naked human emotion.” Birnbaum introduces a diverse array of characters—young and old, male and female, lonely and in the throes of love—all troubled by the gap between their own views of the world and the evitable dawning reality. As though every person, be they nervous concert-goer or overeager prepper ostensibly ready for the end times, is at some point destined to realise the true, unforgiving nature of mortal existence.

h. pruz – No Glory

Mtn Laurel Recording Co.

Many albums exists within the giddy period of new beginnings, their creators emerging from a tumultuous period of suffering or drastic change with an almost epiphanic perspective. The bad thing is in the past now, life can show its light. But while h. pruz‘s latest album No Glory focuses its gaze on a variety of pivotal moments from the life of Hannah Pruzinsky—moments they withstood, survived, emerged from—and goes as far as to imagine the perfect life ahead, it refuses the temptation to bask in the transient warmth of such possibility. As though to present the experience of a newly hopeful present as something unmarked by regret or doubt is to fail to fully inhabit its complexities. “I keep seeing change,” as Pruzunsky sings on ‘I Keep Changing’. “Peel away the borders / Of things with weight like copper / Thought it was gold / Til it turned green / In the rain.”

Haley Heynderickx – Seed of a Seed

Mama Bird Recording Co.

In 2018, Haley Heynderickx released I Need To Start a Garden, an album “all about growth and the hope of new beginnings” we wrote, yet one which refused to “shy away from the necessary hard work that makes such growth possible.” Follow-up Seed of a Seed emerges from this process of emotional cultivation, Heynderickx learning how to continue and improve upon the previous album’s progress while coming to understand such things are rarely linear and never complete. Opening tracks ‘Gemini’ and ‘Foxglove’ are marked by a sense of urgency, seized by the haste of new growth, though by the second half the tempo levels out into something slower and more complex. A host of musicians support the trademark finger-picked style, creating a layered thicket, the Haley Heynderickx sound now a rich polyculture diverse and hardy enough to face whatever life might throw at it next.

Hatis Noit – Aura (Rework Series)

Erased Tapes

In 2022, Hatis Noit released Aura, a full-length album “which draws from the vast array of Noit’s influences from Japanese classical music Gagaku and operatic performers to Bulgarian and Gregorian chanting,” we wrote previously, “not to mention avant-garde experimentalists and pop vocal styles.” Aura has had a new lease of life in subsequent years, with a series of reworkings made in collaboration with an equally diverse set of artists. After the likes of William Basinski and Matthew Herbert in 2023, this year saw Noit enlist the talents of Laraaji, Preservation and Armand Hammer to push the already kaleidoscopic sound even further.

Holland Andrews – Answers

LEITER

“Back in 2021, Brooklyn-based composer, producer, vocalist, and clarinetist Holland Andrews released Wordless, the first of a series of EPs under their own name (having previously recorded as Like A Villain). Released with label LEITER, the record introduced a distinctively transportive sound. Led by voice and clarinet and processed through a variety of electronics, the compositions offered soundscapes in which the listener might lose themselves. Rich tapestries of colour and texture crafted with an almost cinematic attention to detail. Subsequent EPs Forgettings and Doubtless furthered the scope and intention of the style, exploring themes of healing and transcendence as Andrews’s genre-bending sensibilities solidified into a style of their own […] Now Holland Andrews has returned with Answers, the fourth and final EP of the series which feels like both the clearest realisation of their creative ideals and a continued, active resistance against genre conventions.” [Review]

Hour – Ease the Work

Dear Life Records

With a studio’s worth of equipment in tow, the ensemble Hour took a ferry to Peaks Island, Maine out of season, and spent a week holed up together in an old theatre to record their latest album, Ease the Work. The project boasts a diverse cast of musicians—lead Michael Cormier O’Leary (electric guitar, classical guitar, percussion) joined by Jason Calhoun (synth), Em Downing (violin), Matt Fox (viola), Elisabeth Fuchsia (violin) Peter Gill (bass), Lucas Knapp (radio effects, field recordings, piano), Evan McGonagill (cello), Peter McLaughlin (drums, percussion), Keith J. Nelson (bass clarinet, clarinet), Erika Nininger (piano, rhodes) and Abi Reimold (electric guitar)—each bringing their own instincts and sensibilities to the project’s lush instrumental arrangements. The intimacy of the recording process allowed each separate contribution to coalesce into harmony. “Challenging any clear distinction between composition and improvisation,” as we wrote earlier in the year, the resulting record “performs the same small miracle of the previous records, presenting the everyday in all its joy and melancholy, comfort and strangeness.”

I Saw the TV Glow soundtrack

A24 Music

“The danger of nostalgia is that it tends to confuse the actual home with the imaginary one,” Svetlana Boym wrote in her 2001 book, The Future of Nostalgia. “In extreme cases it can create a phantom homeland.” The warning is explored in Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow, a film with a decidedly complex relationship with nostalgia. It can be something to wrap yourself in, bond over, shelter beneath, yet with this retreat comes the risk of a detrimental stasis, where fondness for the past comes to eat up the present. The interrogation is furthered by the film’s soundtrack, where the likes of Caroline Polachek, Florist, Frances Quinlan, Sadurn and King Women tap into the unapologetically sentimental nineties aesthetic. But it is the very first track that is perhaps the most thematically resonant. Yeule‘s cover of ‘Anthems For A Seventeen Year-Old Girl’ is so distorted by glitchy imperfections it becomes something of a Baudrillardian simulacrum. A memory denatured by overhandling, unpegged from reality, a figment of the imagination which has come to replace the real.

Jahnah Camille – i tried to freeze light, but only remember a girl

Winspear

“The songs offer a picture of late adolescence in all of its bittersweet nuance, its introspective contemplation matched only by its bold confessional attitude.” That’s how we described i tried to freeze light, but only remember a girl, the debut EP of Birmingham, Alabama-based songwriter and musician  Jahnah Camille earlier this year. The release reaches for a number of genres with real confidence, be it the nineties alt-rock swagger of ‘flesh’ or the country twang of ‘roadkill’. “[But it is] the lyrics which really see the artist stand apart,” we continued. “Because Camille has a knack for combining emotion and self-awareness, offering songs entirely committed to the feelings being explored but never lacking a wry wrinkle to add that extra layer of personality.”

Jess Ribeiro – Summer of Love

Poison City Records

Written amid a period of intense instability, Summer of Love finds Jess Ribeiro negotiating the liminal space between hope and reality, confronting the past and possible futures alongside the present moment to find a way towards healing. Ribeiro chose to lean into the turmoil during the recording process, undeterred by the fact collaborators could only visit individually thanks to the pandemic restrictions, and many never made it to the studio at all. Yet together with Nick Huggins, she nonetheless enlisted the talents of Jim White (drums), Darcy McNulty (saxophone), Leah Senior (keys), James Seymour (bass), Davie Mudie (percussion) and Carrie Webster (violin and viola), guiding each musician according to the release’s spirit. The result is improvised and exploratory yet bound by the same sense of longing. That will to work through tumultuous times towards something more solid. The hope that chaos might resolve itself into a more hospitable state.

Josaleigh Pollett – In The Garden, By The Weeds

Self-Released

“An excavation of the present which inevitably tends pastward, tracing a presiding cynicism back to its roots in search of a cause.” That’s how we described Josaleigh Pollett‘s third album In The Garden, By The Weeds. At first, the imagery of the title resonates on a surface level, the Salt Lake City songwriter surveying the ecosystem of their life, assessing which parts to nurture, which to pluck or prune. But spend a minute with this collection of stark and glitchy songs and it becomes clear things are operating on a deeper level. For Pollett not only gives the weeds their due but the subterranean conditions too. Those places dark and elemental we so often pretend have no relation to us higher beings. Places perhaps inside of our lives or our selves we must reach down into if we are to make any real progress in cultivating the kind of environment we want to live in. Even if it means getting our hands dirty, scrunching our eyes and grasping blind.

Joy Guidry – AMEN

Whited Sepulchre Records

“In AMEN,” explained Joy Guidry of their most recent album, “there is a lot experimentation with different forms of Black American music. I wanted to lean heavily on my Texas, Louisiana and Creole roots in this project. There were many days spent with my ancestors during the writing of this album and I’m eternally grateful for the music they sang to me during our time together.” The record saw the basoonist and composer develop their sound with the newly prominent influence of gospel and spiritual jazz, combining the sensibilities of church music with jazz invention to create something fundamentally devotional. “The result is at once communal and singular,” as we put it in our review. “Joy Guidry as realised in their most complete form to date.”

K. Freund – Trash Can Lamb

Soda Gong

We’ve been following the work of Akron, Ohio’s Keith Freund for the better part of two decades, originally with Trouble Books, then as one half of the experimental/neoclassical duo Lejsovka & Freund, and more recently with Lemon Quartet and Aqueduct Ensemble. Following 2022’s Hunter on the Wing, Trash Can Lamb is Freund’s latest release under his own name, and offers another exercise in minimal piano, degraded samples and an array of tactile electronics. It’s the neoclassical equivalent of the folk art eccentric, spinning singular homebrew beauty from a treehouse studio filled with strange gadgets and devices, at far remove from the polish and pretension of the auditorium, yet somehow deeper for it. Trash Can Lamb walks it own path straight to the heart of things, small moments and sensations that you couldn’t describe with words if you tried.

Kali Malone – All Life Long

Ideologic Organ

“Manages to suggest both academic rigour and unburdened instinct, but ultimately transcends any focus on its intentions as the listener becomes immersed in the soundscape. Some hymn or lament, latent with the suggestion of the sublime, be it total dread or transcendence, silence or all-encompassing sound.” So we wrote of Living Torch by Kali Malone back in 2022, though the description could be extended to much of the Stockholm-based composer’s work. Written for pipe organ, choir and brass quintet, latest release All Life Long possesses all the same clarity and depth, breathing new life into classical techniques to create something at once intimate and exalted. Not holy music, per say, but music which operates according to the same ends. Aiming to evoke those sensations felt in the face of things far greater than us, more mysterious, yet surrounding us all the same.

Keanu Nelson – Wilurarrakutu

Mississippi Records

Primarily a poet in his home of Papunya, northwest of Alice Springs, Keanu Nelson was inspired to start singing his work after meeting producer Yuta Matsumura in the local arts centre. The result is Wilurarrakutu, an album first released on Altered States Tapes last year, but put out to a wider audience back in August by Mississippi Records. With Casio beats programmed by Matsumura as support, Nelson delivers deeply personal poetry on themes of loneliness and family, home and loss, in both Papunya Luritja and English. Nelson incorporates reggae and gospel influences into a sound which emerges from an electronic sonic lineage that trails back to the likes of Suicide and Francis Bebey but represents its own singular style. One which aches with a sense of longing, the relative simplicity of the arrangements allowing the emotional depth of Nelson’s poetry to sit front and centre, blurring the classic and the contemporary into something genuinely moving.

Lia Kohl – Normal Sounds

Moon Glyph

“Able to evoke existence in all of its magic and mundanity.” That’s how we described the work of Chicago-based cellist, composer and multidisciplinary artist Lia Kohl back in July, describing her album Normal Sounds as “at once normal and very much not, or else it is extraordinarily normal—with Kohl turning her attention to the acoustics of everyday living and presenting them back to the listener as something as something new.” Existing somewhere between music and sound art, the record uses synths and cello (as well as occasional flute and electronics from Ka Baird and sax from Patrick Shiroishi) to accentuate field recordings of human-made sounds, reflecting our own world back to us in a new light. Here the incidental is elevated, each song a cacophony crafted from the sounds we so often ignore or phase out. Kohl isn’t so much crafting a soundscape for us to hear as rewiring our brains so that our attention might be heightened. What we encounter in such a state is sometimes playful, sometimes strange, occasionally unnerving and melancholic in the way the slow passage of life always is. The human world in granular detail. What it sounds like to live here and now.

Lindsay Reamer – Natural Science

Dear Life Records

“[Songs which] not only represent a study of a specific time and place—capturing a snapshot of environments both natural and human and the porous border between the two—but also a report on how it feels to exist within that period. As though Lindsay Reamer serves as our guide through contemporary America as she knows it. A squeezed no-man’s land between the past and the future. A place where great beauty and banality sit side by side, where old choices drag unforeseen consequences towards us and yet the smallest details still seem to hold life in all of its inscrutable charm.” [Review]

Little Kid – A Million Easy Payments

Orindal Records

“[The] ability to vary the focal length of its perspective so gracefully is a signature of A Million Easy Payments. “The urgency in Kenny Boothby’s voice matches the stakes of his lyrics,” writes Dan Wriggins in the liner notes [of Little Kid‘s latest album], “epic ballads and reveries that come at life from all angles and exposures, driving at and a little over the limits of self-reflection.” The sense of an artist never quite satisfied with the scene they have captured, always looking to widen the lens to better represent the truth before them, or else zoom in closer in search of the missing detail which might click everything else into place. Call it a search for meaning, or even God Himself. In other hands, songs reaching for such things with the expansive style of Dylan and Welch at their most ambitious might feel like novelty or pastiche. But in this context it seems the only logical outcome for Little Kid’s specific way of working.” [Review]

Lollise – i hit the water

Switch Hit Records

“Hailing from Francistown in Botswana and now based in New York, Lollise is an artist who draws from the entirety of her musical history when crafting her songs. Hence the sound of her debut full-length I hit the water owes a debt to the styles which soundtracked her childhood and early years—including Setswana and Kalanga folk songs, South African electronic bubblegum and kwaito from the eighties and nineties, Congolese soukous and Zimbabwean sungura—as well as genres like Afrobeat, art-pop and new wave which she immersed herself in after moving to the US. What results is a sound capable of evoking the future and past simultaneously, where traditional styles are repurposed to open new directions, and the line between history and imagination blurs into something entirely new.” [Review]

Mary Ocher – Your Guide to Revolution

Underground Institute

“To say Mary Ocher’s latest album Your Guide to Revolution is ambitious in its intentions is to risk understatement. A kaleidoscopic and politically charged collection of songs which draws on Ocher’s childhood (born in Moscow to Jewish-Ukrainian parents before emigrating to Tel Aviv during the Gulf War) as a way into wider themes of resistance and civil disobedience. A huge array of styles and influences are utilised across the record, both to evoke the gamut of emotions triggered within the contemporary struggle and to ground the release within a wider history of such subversive art. A central part of the album is a series of three tracks which rework pieces by harpist Dorothy Ashby based on the Rubaiyat of Omar Khyyam, a triptych of songs which Ocher has collected into a short film which echoes The Color of Pomegranates by Sergei Parajanov.” [Review]

Merce Lemon – Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wilds

Darling Recordings

“A collection of nine songs with dirt under their fingernails, equal parts wild and vulnerable as they reckon with the changing tides of love in all its guises […] Merce Lemon’s songwriting is often gentle, careful and sincere ruminations on love and solitude, but this underlying ferality is perhaps the record’s biggest strength, and the most obvious step forward from Moonth. A reminder the soft animal can still bear its teeth, a kind of wildness that turns heartfelt, mid-tempo folk rock songs into blown-out anthems, building towards crescendos of wailing guitar and pure feeling.” [Review]

Minor Moon – The Light Up Waltz

Ruination Record Co.

Minor Moon‘s latest album The Light-Up Waltz is set within “speculative world, where civilisation has collapsed and the characters are made to exist in the aftermath,” as we wrote earlier in the year. “But far from some desolate landscape of grim suffering, this post-civilisation society is one coloured by the invention and playfulness of its inhabitants. As though steely determination can only be maintained with a suitable accompaniment of joy.” This is a collection of songs working under such a logic, finding its characters proactive in their search for meaning, and perhaps finding it through that very mindset. “To me,” as lead Sam Cantor puts it, “the antidote to fatalistic disillusionment is a kind of complicated dance with dread, hope and joy.”

MJ Lenderman – Manning Fireworks

Anti- Records

It’s fair to say MJ Lenderman has come a long way since we shared ‘Gentleman Jack’ from his 2021 album, Ghost of Your Guitar Solo. Through his what we’ve described previously as “masterful knack for combining details small and absurd into something which feels like life as it’s lived on the ground,” the last coulpe of years has seen Lenderman take the leap into the indie stratosphere, and latest album Manning Fireworks makes good on this acclaim without sacrificing the sensibilities which got him there in the first place. Often wacky yet always unabashedly earnest, these are songs of a different sort of American mythology. Colourful, chintzy, most likely temporary. A place of waterparks and McDonalds lots. Pocket Bibles, drunk drivers, Disney Pixar deleted scenes. A place inhabited by people who were once babies and now jerks. People like you and me.

Mol Sullivan – GOOSE

Self-Released

A self-described “long exposure photograph” charting growth both artistic and personal, Mol Sullivan‘s GOOSE serves as a portrait of a person within the arc of great change. With songs written in the aftermath of a relationship and during a nascent sobriety, the album opens with Sullivan “set deep in those early days of a new beginning,” as we wrote, “where everything feels possible yet tenuous and a little too vivid to bear,” but does not stay constrained to the present moment. Instead, we find an artist moving forwards and looking back, reflecting on who they were and who they want to be, reaching beyond stories of love and addiction for a more nuanced picture of life. An artist in dialogue with themselves, teasing out those fundamental things which exist beyond what happens to us within any given moment, and thus repositioning change as a positive force we might harness to become ourselves more fully.

mui zyu – nothing or something to die for / cantonese tasting menu EP

Father/Daughter Records

Last year’s Rotten Bun for an Eggless Century saw Hong Kong British artist mui zyu delve deep within themselves in search of a better understanding of their own identity. The songs mapped a vast labyrinth of history and personal experience and located the elusive truth not locked in some remote central chamber but rather via the process itself. But if the introspective survey of Rotten Bun charted the complex contours of its own small world, follow up nothing or something to die for flips its gaze outwards to take on a far bigger challenge—the chaotic, conflicted place we call home. Here human society is painted as an overwhelming and fundamentally lonely place, where an omnipresent technological connection belies the isolation at its core. Floating over this absurd space, mui zyu looks for the points where the veil between us is the thinnest, hoping a better existence might be possible while refusing to ignore evidence to the contrary. There might be nothing, there might be something to die for, or perhaps both of these things can be true at once.

Nap Eyes – The Neon Gate

Paradise of Bachelors

Through a string of ambitious, philosophical and playful albums, Halifax outfit Nap Eyes have established themselves as one of the most inventive, thematically interesting bands in contemporary indie rock. Even by their standards, The Neon Gate pushes the envelope on what songs can be and explore. Fans will recognise Nigel Chapman’s distinctively deadpan vocals, but the Nap Eyes sound has expanded in various directions, shapeshifting between tracks and unafraid of the abstract and improvised. Weird tangents are followed, eldritch stories are told, what rules there were are broken. The result is to witness something familiar transmogrify, metastasise, expand and contract before your eyes, the recognisable slowly twisted strange into a new, surreal landscape. A style inspired, at least in part, by the William Butler Yeats poem ‘I See Phantoms of Hatred and of the Heart’s Fullness and of the Coming Emptiness’. A poem which is adapted as a song near the end of the album:

I climb to the tower-top and lean upon broken stone,
A mist that is like blown snow is sweeping over all,
Valley, river, and elms, under the light of a moon
That seems unlike itself, that seems unchangeable,
A glittering sword out of the east. A puff of wind
And those white glimmering fragments of the mist sweep by.
Frenzies bewilder, reveries perturb the mind;
Monstrous familiar images swim to the mind’s eye.

Prostitute – Attempted Martyr

Self-Released

The past year has been desperate, dizzying and ferociously cruel for many, and no release captured this reality better than Attempted Martyr by Prostitute. Described as being “written and recorded under duress of a world in turmoil” and “dedicated to Lebanon, from Dearborn with love,” the album sits somewhere between noise rock, post-punk and jazz. A collection of songs twisted tight with intensity, always threatening to spin out of control, fired by the depthless fury of grief and somehow managing an air of plaintive sorrow too. Beneath the delivery’s bark and bite lies a deceptively diverse range of moods and emotions—from the mournful opening title track and spittle-flecked defiance of ‘Judge’ to poetic meditations on justice and resistance and even a certain wry humour (Prostitute one-up fellow Michigan punks Protomartyr by devoting an entire song to celebrity attorney Joumana Kayrouz). A timely reminder of the fertile relationship between anger and compassion, and a scream into the face of a world gone numb.

Rosali – Bite Down

Merge Records

“Help me, darling, I can’t seem to bite down on it / I can’t seem to feel what’s real anymore.” So opens the title track of Rosali‘s Bite Down, giving voice to a sentiment which underpins the entire album. But this is not a record of desperate pleas and drifting disconnection, rather the antidote to such things. As though having been touched by these emotions, Rosali chose to be proactive, confronting life’s ups and downs with a newfound defiance, determined to feel reality in all its forms. The title refers to “something more extreme than leaning in,” as Rosali told Mariana Timony for Bandcamp. “I’m taking a bite. I’m accepting it. I’m chewing it.” Again recorded with the David Nance Band to blur the line between solo and group effort, the resulting album effortlessly straddles folk and classic rock styles and builds upon everything which made 2021’s No Medium so special.

Roswit – Eternal Living

Mono Tapes

The debut album from self-described “olde punks” Roswit has one foot in classic Pacific Northwest indie pop and another across the ocean in a Flying Nun Records style jangle, with some wiry, stripped-back punk thrown in for good measure. From infectious opener ‘Grape’s Song’, which calls to mind fellow Vancouverites The Courtney’s, to the sleeves-rolled-up scrappiness of ‘King’s Song’, every song is packed with a sense of DIY fun. And to top it all there’s a throwback vibe, not to bygone decades but right back to the Middle Ages, a candy-coloured fantasy land of knights and dragons and damsels in distress. This is sometimes achieved with subtle lyrical nods, and others musically, such as ‘Princess’s Song’ which sounds like a lo-fi punk take on a Medieval ballad. Eternal Loving is perhaps best summed up by ‘Dreamer’s Song’, which has it all—supremely catchy hooks, galloping percussion, oohing and aahing harmonies, flutters of flute and daydreams of ye olden days.

Shovel Dance Collective – The Shovel Dance

American Dreams

“We want to play and experiment, layer and move between different spaces in recording, and extend the limits of our instruments to sing and break in new ways,” explained Shovel Dance Collective of their experimental folk sound. “Improvising, textural playing, and moving as one free organic organism are all part of the experiments we try and make in form. It’s all towards this one goal: constructing the Shovel Dance world and saying what we feel needs saying.” Latest album The Shovel Dance saw the outfit “position themselves within an exciting contemporary movement,” as we wrote in our review, “and The Shovel Dance is sure to join the likes of Lankum’s False Lankum and Shane Parish’s Liverpool in their mission to push old sounds and stories into new dimensions.”

S. Raekwon – Steven

Father/Daughter Records

A moniker can offer many things for an artist, not least a sense of separation between their ‘real’ and performing selves, but while Steven Raekwon Reynolds released his latest record Steven under the name S. Raekwon, the album’s title is suggestive of the manner in which the songs work to close this gap in search of authenticity. Because this is a personal album in the most practical sense. Reynolds did all the writing, production, engineering and mixing, not to mention played every instrument with the exception of the drums. What emerged is a collection of songs which serves to illuminate the different parts of their curator, as though the record is a prism through which he shines himself, each track a different wavelength of his personality stratified according to mood. “Maybe subliminally or unconsciously, the songs kind of grouped together in a certain way to explore different areas of myself,” he explains. “The beginning is rage and angriness in a certain way. The middle is this uncertainty of questioning yourself, who you are, and if you’re a good person. And then at the end, I think it comes to a place of resolution. I’m just examining myself and trying to come to a better understanding of who I am.”

Sinai Vessel – I SING

Keeled Scales

In October, Caleb Cordes announced that Sinai Vessel, his moniker for the past fifteen years, had come to an end. “You have taught me everything and I’m taking it all with me,” he wrote in a statement of social media, looking forward to new, healthier future without the constant striving for further success and recognition in the cockfight that is the music industry. Released back in the summer before this news broke, the fourth Sinai Vessel album I SING represents both a parting gift from a project that has meant so much to so many, and a frank examination of the factors which grind artists down to the point of submission, taking on themes so often absent from art with a sincere yet unromantic air. “I sing for a reason,” Cordes sings on the title track. “My reason’s the same // as the nurses buying rentals
/ and rides to broadway
/ who fill up big bars on buses
/ and fall off shit-faced / and the trained men who clock in / coming back from smoke breaks
/ who zoom in from satellites
/ to bomb palisades.” Because I SING is an album about the rarest of things: money, or the lack thereof. How contemporary society seems built to punish anyone who dares attempt a living through art, and the ways in which the compulsion to create persists in ways both magical and mundane. “I sing ‘cos I wake up
/ again and again,” as the title track continues. “It never stops coming
/ it doesn’t make sense.” Sinai Vessel is dead, long live Caleb Cordes.

Slippers – So You Like Slippers

Lame-O Records

“It was childhood residence Atlanta that lit Madeleine BB’s creative fire. The city is home to the headquarters of Cartoon Network, which inspired not only her interest in animation, but indie rock too. ‘Cartoon Network… was a big part of my life growing up,’ she says. ‘They always had a lot of indie bands in the fold there—I remember there was this Powerpuff Girls music compilation that had Devo and Apples in Stereo and Shonen Knife on it. My dad bought that for me and I just became obsessed with it.’ Many of the tracks on [Slippers‘] So You Like Slippers? are a product of this kind of cross pollination, either inspired by or written specifically for BB’s animations. ‘I was trying to make these jokey kid’s songs, sort of like They Might Be Giants, to go along with my animations,’ she describes, and it’s clear this visual starting point provided a sense of creative freedom. License to write quickly and without inhibition, and the ability to explore themes and feelings that could be painstakingly overwrought with charming ease.” [Review]

Tasha – All This and So Much More

Bayonet Records

“Finds an artist embracing the pace and breadth of their new life. Confronting each day with a sense of defiance rather than looking for somewhere to hide.” So we wrote of Tasha‘s All This and So Much More in a preview back in the summer, an album written amid a flurry of experiences that ran the gamut between agonising (unexpected grief, an abrupt separation) and amazing (a role in the Tony-nominated Broadway musical Illinoise). Where many might have sought some form of retreat from life’s constant barrage of change, the Chicago artist instead decided to lean into the momentum to embrace the potential of forward motion. “I’m overcome at the wonder around me,” she sings on the quasi-title track ‘So Much More’. “I fill my lungs, feel the air rush inside me / Could this be fun? Could I be happy?” The album works through the doubt of such questions with decisiveness, choosing to believe that the impossible might be true, life a joyous experience after all. “What if my hope didn’t have a ceiling? / What I want most, all I imagined / What if I chose to settle for nothing less than magic?”

Trace Mountains – Into the Burning Blue

Lame-O Records

Glance at the title of Trace Mountains‘ latest album Into the Burning Blue and you’d be forgiven for expecting a descent into something deep and dark, an assumption only strengthened by opener ‘In a Dream’. “A dispatch from whatever stage of capitalism we’re calling contemporary America as delivered from a breathless nighttime bike ride,” as we wrote of the track back in the summer. “The effect is passing through a dark passage full of eerie shadow without quite knowing if there’s an exit at the other end.” Yet rather than barrelling down towards some nadir, the track’s glittering eighties rock sensibilities manage to invert the arc, the climax instead finding Dave Benton breaching the surface into a wider world. Which isn’t to say the rest of Into the Burning Blue is bright and affirming, it is after all a record concerning the end and aftermath of a long-term relationship, rather that the shades of blue on offer are far more nuanced and diverse than you might at first expect. A picture of person moving through conflict and loss attuned to all the accompanying tones that come with it, and one delivered with all the widescreen confidence of Petty or Springsteen to boot.

villagerrr – Tear Your Heart Out

Darling Recordings

Zeroing in on life’s small, ostensibly ordinary moments to find the meaning within, villagerrr‘s latest album Tear Your Heart Out sees Mark Allen Scott embrace his Midwestern roots for a country-inflected brand of indie rock. Chillicothe, Ohio might have felt constrictive growing up, but home is home and soon a sense of fondness began to blossom, and with it came a desire to acknowledge the fact. “I want to wear where I’m from and my family on my sleeve,” Scott explains. “I’m proud of the twangy influence in my music from corny country songs I’d hear on the bus rides to school. I feel like I’m reclaiming where I come from and making it my own.” The result is a decidedly empathetic collection of songs able to zoom close to the smallest details of small town life, be it light through a sunroof, the smell of cut grass or pencil drawings made in an effort to preserve memories. Some of the tracks are tortured in their own quiet way (“Falling in and out of trust / With the ones you loved before,” as he sings on ‘Cry On’, “It’s not the way I hoped it would be / Oh, no”), some wryly funny (“I see you wearing your Carhartt jeans / Talking ’bout how you don’t got money,” is a refrain in ‘Car Heat’), but all are wrapped in a sense of understanding, as though villagerrr attempts to see through the tangle of emotions to see the fallible humans struggling underneath.

Waxahatchee – Tigers Blood

Anti- Records

When released in 2020, Waxahatchee‘s fifth full-length Saint Cloud felt like the pinnacle of the project, Katie Crutchfield pivots towards an alt-country aesthetic so seamless and fitting it appeared to be some form of completion. Only for Tigers Blood to roll around a few years later, an album which sees the Waxahatchee star rise even further. Unfazed by recent popularity, Crutchfield and co. resisted all the trappings of success and temptations to transcend into the mainstream to instead focus on the present. There are no synths on Tigers Blood. No cinematic pop flourishes. No indication of burning through a newly weighty budget. Which is to say, the album finds Crutchfield not so much dreaming of what Waxahatchee could become, but instead concentrating on exactly what it is. The result is full of heart, romance and hard-won authenticity that could only stem from a place of confidence. Waxahatchee might have found its final form, but you sense this is only its beginning.

Wendy Eisenberg – Viewfinder

American Dreams

“When Wendy Eisenberg finally got Lasik surgery after a lifelong struggle against an assortment of ocular and vision-based afflictions, the resulting impact went far deeper than they perhaps expected […] Viewfinder emerges from within this new experience of the world, reckoning with exactly what it means to see and not to see, and how beauty and meaning are inherent within both experiences […] How does our understanding of the physical world change according to our ability to visually perceive it? And what about other planes—the emotional, spiritual and metaphysical?” [Review]

West of Roan – Queen of Eyes

Spinster

“A god of doorways and portals, a god of seeing in the dark and in dreams, a saint of weeping in sorrow or in joy.” That’s how Laurel Premo, writing in the album notes, describes the titular figure of West of Roan‘s latest record Queen of Eyes. The guide which leads Annie Schermer and Channing Showalter deep into a realm of myth, archetype and imagery, some otherworld beneath our own which bears the load of all that has been before and will surely arrive in time. A place where both personal, historical and cultural trauma unwinds itself as story. When we say West of Roan is a project steeped in the folk tradition, we mean it in a fundamental sense beyond any musical style. That urge to communicate, console, explain or contextualise. To take on the largest of themes in the ways humans always have. The result isn’t so much ambiguous as multifaceted. Stark, beguiling, full of glory and grief. As mysterious as the Queen herself, demanding you submit to its forces to discover the transcendence within.

Why Bonnie – Wish On The Bone

Fire Talk

“How do we live authentically within a world which demands we perform and pretend? Is it possible to confront the true dismal nature of things and still retain a sense of hope? Such questions have weighed on [Blair] Howerton since previous Why Bonnie album 90 in November, not least because she felt she had evolved beyond the wistful country-inflected style those songs presented. “I’ve changed since that album, and I trust that I’ll probably continue to change,” as Howerton explains. Wish On The Bone looks to pinpoint who she is at this point in time without committing to any lasting identity. To possess the confidence to work beyond the expectations of preconception and present however feels right within the current moment. Hence an album which foregoes easy pigeonholing in terms of style, unified instead by the defiant new self-confidence which underpins it. “You owe it to the people who are experiencing the worst to just keep pushing,” as Howerton concludes. “These songs were written out of hope for a better future. I’m not naïve, the world is fucked up, but I think you can radically accept that while still believing it’s possible to change things.” [Review]

Wild Pink – Dulling the Horns

Fire Talk

If recent years have seen Wild Pink’s star rise, then Dulling the Horns could be said to see it begin its arc back earthward, returning not to obscurity but a gravity-saddled weight and heft, the loud rush of the atmosphere roaring in its ears. Recorded live with all the grit and raw energy of the band’s live show left intact, it feels like both a throwback to their early work and a new chapter entirely, losing the wide-screen scope and sparkling electronics in favour of something with a little less polish.  “I didn’t want to clean up anymore,” says lead John Ross. “In doing so we’ve arrived at a new place.” Thematically it leaps around, touching on everything from Dracula and Michael Jordan to the Waco siege and Lefty Ruggiero, and this willingness to reach wide and chase tangents only furthers the sense of immediacy, resulting in the most urgent Wild Pink album to date.

Wishy – Triple Seven

Winspear

Released hot on the heels of December 2023’s successful EP Paradise, Wishy‘s debut full-length Triple Seven seemed to confirm suspicions the Indiana outfit possess the magic Midas touch, a spontaneous jackpot on first pull of the lever which included an NME cover among other such acclaim. And though the journey to that recognition was far more convoluted in reality, something about this iteration, led by songwriters Kevin Krauter and Nina Pitchkites, possesses an undeniable lightning-in-a-bottle charm. A sound which “pays homage to forebears […] while fashioning the nineties-nostalgic sound into something entirely their own,” as we put it, combining dream pop, shoegaze and indie rock influences into something as polished as it is fun.

Young Jesus – The Fool

Saddle Creek

“The pressures of touring had seen the original Young Jesus band slowly disintegrate, and the mosaic pop of Shepherd Head demanded hours spent alone in front of a computer. Exhausted and disillusioned by the process, Rossiter pined for something less abstract. A way to express his creativity rooted in the real world. So he turned to gardening, studying permaculture and the slow process of nurturing it demands. Only then came a chance encounter with Shahzad Ismaily, originating in a shared interest in the work of Milford Graves, and a slow process of coaxing. Rossiter would work on music then tend Ismaily’s New York garden between sessions. At home in LA, he did the reverse, planting trees and laying paths with Alex Babbitt and Alex Lappin before gathering around the piano to play and sing. Slowly the compulsion to make music returned, though now informed by the lessons learnt whilst working on the natural world. The resulting album The Fool feels like another milestone for Young Jesus. A continuation of the searching style which has so long marked the project, but one armed with a new array of tools and techniques to perhaps arrive closer to a satisfying end.” [Review]

The post Year in Review: 2024 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Richmond. A fictional town. Generic. All-American. Perhaps belonging to the Midwest if anywhere, but could fit into essentially any state you might have in mind. Owen Ashworth cites Springfield from The Simpsons as an influence on this first fully imagined setting, plus Haddonfield from John Carpenter’s Halloween. And you don’t have to look far to find echoes of Carpenter’s slasher in ‘The Year I Lived in Richmond’, though it is the classic story inverted. For the killer sneaks into a bedroom window one night, in search of his next victim, only to fall under the kitchen knife of a woman named Deborah Lee.

Deborah Lee leaves Richmond once the coroner has taken the body, but her story remains, lingering in the town like some psychic stain. “Any child could tell you how that killer died,” the closing verse states, as though to live within the town limits is to be bathed within its ever accumulating history of ill-fortune. “Richmond is just this place where all the bad memories live,” as Ashworth puts it. One he created in part to serve that very purpose.

For while the setting is entirely imaginary, the narratives and characters owe much to real life. Indeed the killer is inspired by an analogous figure who stalked a place Ashworth once called home, fictionalised to create some sense of distance and decency. If Horrible Occurrences can be distilled into one reductive image, then that is perhaps the most enlightening. A receptacle into which bad memories and old stories can be poured. A small town diorama in which they can play out again, change shapes, take on lives of their own. One we might approach and watch over along with Ashworth, feeling tall from that perspective, relatively safe in the top-down view.

It’s unsurprising then that Horrible Occurrences is the darkest Advance Base record to date. The tale of the killer killed is followed by ‘The Tooth Fairy’, a snapshot of a father-daughter relationship that taps into the primal fears of children and parents alike. With his wife out of town, the father finds himself needing change for Tooth Fairy duties, but a quick trip out of the house sees an innocent intention unravel into pure terror. The trauma is deep and double-edged—the parent arriving home to find their child’s bed empty, the child alone on the street, hysterical in asking the gut punch question that forms the song’s denouement. “Where did you go, Dad? / I couldn’t find you.”

There’s no let up with ‘Big Chris Electric’, the album’s second murder ballad in its opening trio. The titular Big Chris falls for Yvonne after working on her house, becomes a father figure to her daughter, soon has a child of his own on the way. Only Yvonne’s jealous ex intervenes and shoots him dead, leaving Yvonne to live out her days with Big Chris’s van in her driveway, his name still stencilled on the side. Again Ashworth twists the story, bending it beyond the trope at its heart. For the song is narrated by Big Chris’s child, now at least halfway grown, living with their mother yet resenting the fact. “I know that she’s had a hard time / raising kids on her own,” as the closing verses start. “We fight all the time / I hate being at home.” The development plays as an added complication to tragedy, both a rejection of the romantic neatness which might otherwise accompany such a tale of heartbreak, yet also an extension of this very romance. Because the narrator offers another angle, another myth conjured in the wake of one taken too soon.

Someday I’ll fix up his van
I’ll keep his name on the side
I’m gonna get out of Richmond
& vanish into the night

The tension at the song’s heart is one central to Horrible Occurrences. Fearing the loneliness and mystery of disappearance while simultaneously desiring its transcendent promise of escape. A sizeable number of songs in the Advance Base catalogue deal with such ideas—close friends now strangers, familiar sights now a leering void—and much of Ashworth’s success as a writer stems from his willingness to maintain a restricted narrative frame. Rarely told more than the characters themselves, the listener is placed alongside them, left to feel the ache of unanswered questions, the latent sense of possibility, and invited to fill in the gaps with stories of their own. The single town concept of Horrible Occurrences is essentially this same device across an entire album. Richmond itself the frame of the stories, as though it were the only illuminated part of the world.

Hence the ambiguity of ‘Rene Goodnight’, where an apparently friendly companion is revealed to have a reputation of domestic abuse out of town (“Now I see you in my dreams / Sometimes sinister & mean / Sometimes sweet as hell / I don’t know what to believe”), and perhaps even the pivotal mystery of the exceptional ‘Little Sable Point Lighthouse’. Partners Elise and CJ visit Michigan for a birthday celebration, only for a sleepless CJ to wander to the nearby lighthouse and vanish into the night. To leave town and step into the world, the song suggests, is to risk getting lost in the dark.

Standing under at the tower
Watching the big light spin
Hypnotized by the silver beam
that cut right through the dim
That’s how Elise imagined him
He was never seen again

The closing track, ‘Richmond’, plays like the testimony of one such disappeared character returned. A figure stepping back into frame, now forced to reckon with everything which happened before and since, as though unable to leave old stories peter out into the dark no matter how painful it might be to dredge them up. It’s difficult not to hear Ashworth himself in this character, a reluctant homecomer persevering (sometimes against his better judgement) to share what might be his most difficult, personal collection of songs. “I drove back to Richmond / to see how you’ve been,” he sings. “To learn more about all / the life that you’ve lived / & to talk about CJ / & to talk about Chris / & all my reasons for leaving / & everything that I’ve missed/ I’ve been so sad & angry / I know you’ve been too / but I can’t take the silence.”

But to stress the melancholy and darkness of the album is to miss what has long made Advance Base so special. “[Ashworth’s] is an ever evolving body of work which stands out in its deftness and humility and empathy and care,” we wrote back in summation of his style back in 2022, “bringing to life individuals from across the spectrum of human experience while remaining unerringly attuned to the tender, fallible heart at the centre of each.” The same compassionate attention is present here too, be it in a story of serial killers, strange premonitions or solitary singers, shivering as they make their way back towards home.

“You’ll be fine,” a paramedic tells the titular character in ‘Brian’s Golden Hour’, a teen skater and would-be Days of Heaven-era Malick who plans to film himself dropping in on a homemade ramp from the roof of his parents house only to bail and shatter his spine. “You’re 15 & paralyzed / & lucky to be alive,” as the refrain goes. But Brian doesn’t actually commit to the trick. His only paralysis is a hesitation at the top of the ramp. This horrible occurrence takes place entirely in his head. Yet the paramedic’s words echo all the same. Kind, if slightly hollow. What they want to be true, or need to be true. Or rather what might as well be true inside that moment, until the opposite is confirmed. You’ll be fine. Words so brittle and tender and heartfelt. Somehow the epitome of both security and vulnerability. The essence of not only Horrible Occurrences but perhaps Ashworth’s entire body of work. Voices heard from beneath the weight of all that has happened, and all that possibly could. You might be dying. The darkness might all be in your head. You’ll be fine.

Horrible Occurrences is out now via Run For Cover Records and you can get it from the Advance Base Bandcamp page.

The post Advance Base – Horrible Occurrences appeared first on Various Small Flames.

“An album born of travel and distance, pieced together from segments of other places, but ending up very much unique.” That’s how we described Bato Mato by Carmarthen’s Adwaith released by Libertino Records back in 2022. The record was an ambitious one, drawing upon “any number of psych, grunge and dream pop influences to realise its sound,” as we wrote, but follow-up Solas goes even further. A twenty-three track double album which serves as the closing part of a coming-of-age trilogy, tracing the arc of the band’s progression which sees them drawn back to their West Walian roots at the height of their powers. “I feel like we’re confident in ourselves as musicians, and our sound, and the world that we want to create,” as Hollie Singer explains. “We feel fully realised.”

Watch the video shot and edited by Rhys Grail below:

Solas will be released on the 7th February via Libertino Records.

Anna Arboles – By Any Means Necessary

LA-based songwriter Anna Arboles is gearing up to release Pure Fanfiction, a brand new album on Anxiety Blanket Records which fictionalises the personal in order to edge closer to the truth. “These songs are about passing into adulthood and clarifying who I wanted to be,” Arboles explains, “but are not necessarily about my life. I wrote these songs as soundtracks to movies, TV shows, books, or photographs that catalyzed introspection. They’re like fanfiction for my life.” Taking inspiration from seminal queer film By Hook or By Crook by Harry Dodge and Silas Howard, first single ‘By Any Means Necessary’ serves as an ode to friendship and its supportive power. Hence how the doubt of the repeated refrain—”I don’t know if I can do it”—is slowly conquered, the uneasy movement towards self-actualisation made easier by those there along the way.

Pure Fanfiction will be released on the 14th February via Anxiety Blanket Records

Dead Gowns – In the Haze

Early next year, Dead Gowns (that’s the project of Portland, Maine’s Genevieve Beaudoin) will release their debut album, It’s Summer, I Love You, and I’m Surrounded by Snow on New York label Mtn Laurel Recording Co. Second single ‘In the Haze’ is a beautiful introduction, a patient and spacious country-tinged indie rock song that put’s Beaudoin’s incredible vocals front and centre, shifting from a quiet hush to a quivering wail as she explores the complex emotions of dealing with a then-undiagnosed illness. It’s indicative of a record that takes real-life experiences and then stretches their edges, probing at possibilities and straying from fact into fiction. “There’s a sense of freedom by starting in an autobiographical place and then expanding into fiction,” Beaudoin describes. “I learn so much about what has happened by exploring what could have been.”

It’s Summer, I Love You, and I’m Surrounded by Snow will be released via Mtn Laurel Recording Co. on 14^th February. Pre-order it now from the Dead Gowns Bandcamp page.

georgie – 2d

Serving as a celebration to a specific corner of the DIY scene in Rochester, New York, spit takes and split tapes is a four-band split release by raincoated records. Featured artists include Bugcatcher (whose album Go! we covered last year), Home Videos and Kitchen (who we first mentioned way back in 2016), as well as georgie, the project led by Claire G. McClusky who “combin[ed] ecological, personal and political sensibilities” for the excellent album Intimacy Hangover in 2023. One of the latter’s contributions to the split release, ‘2d’ sees McClusky and co. push the georgie sound through its usual airy folk style until it disintegrates into a noisy crescendo.

Meagre Martin – Frankie

After a fantastic 12 months which has included appearance at the Reeperbahn Festival, Pop Montreal and Pitchfork London, as well as successful singles ‘Never Thought‘ and ‘Malcolm‘, Berlin-based indie rockers Meagre Martin are closing out the year with one final, celebratory single, ‘Frankie’, which also serves as the first preview of EP Up To Snuff coming next February on Mansions and Millions. Pairing gauzy shoegaze textures with a persistent rhythm, the track embraces a bright spirit of playfulness and curiosity. “I can’t help / But smile / I look at you like a child,” as the opening lines go, submitting to the thrilling sensation of falling for someone and letting the current move in whatever direction it sees fit.

Watch the video directed by Federico Corazzini and Meagre Martin below:

‘Frankie’ is out now via Mansions and Millions and available from Bandcamp.

Nona Invie – Forget My Name

Created as an antidote to ubiquitous feelings of anxiety and fear, Nona Invie‘s appropriately titled new album Self-soothing sees the Minneapolis songwriter aim to provide a safe haven of calm within an often terrible contemporary world. “These songs are a weighted blanket that comforted and supported me in a lonely time,” as Invie explains. “I hope that they can be supportive, comforting to others.” Opener and lead single ‘Forget My Name’ offers a glimpse of the meditative sound which brings this mission to life. A lesson in the necessity of loosening our grip and letting go those things which do us no good in order to more fully inhabit a healthy sense of self.

Watch the video by Ingrid Weise below:

Self-soothing will be released on the 28th February via Boiled Records and you can pre-order it now.

Raybody – Puddle

Then recording under her own name, Katy Rea released full-length The Urge That Saves You back in 2022, an album which, as we put it, “explor[ed] her life not directly but through imagined characters and metaphorical stories that feel something like modern fables.” Now having adopted the moniker Raybody, Rea has returned with ‘Puddle’, the first taste of a new era for an artist currently at work on her second album. “[The new name] allows me to step into a braver and more honest part of myself,” Rea explains. “I’m after a truth that requires me to unattach from my given name—which has always felt sweet, well mannered, and more feminine than I am.” The new single introduces this new spirit, combining classic singer-songwriter sensibilities with something more singular and strange, resulting in a sound able to paint an intimate picture of a blossoming relationship and the self-reflection inherent within the process of learning to love another person.

Watch the video shot by Sawyer Gaunt and directed by Nicole Townsend and Rea herself below:

‘Puddle’ is out now and available from the Raybody Bandcamp page.

Robert Ascroft – Where Did You Go feat. Britta Phillips (Luna, Dean & Britta)

With album Echo Still Remains coming in January via Hand Drawn Dracula, producer and artist Robert Ascroft has been releasing a series of collaborative singles in recent months, including ‘Faded Photographs’ with Ruth Radelet and ‘Empty Pages’ with Zumi Rosow of The Black Lips. The latter offered “a beguilingly ambiguous interplay between rhythm and fuzz” as we put it, complete with a cinematic video, and now Ascroft has enlisted vocalist and actress Britta Phillips (who you might know as part of Luna and Dean & Britta) for another dark and filmic track. With rhythmic percussion, sensual vocals and an enveloping night-time mood, ‘Where Did You Go’ channels a sultry Lynchian aesthetic full of nocturnal weight. The full record promises to feature the likes of Ora Cogan and Christopher Owens too, so is certainly one to watch out for in 2025.

Watch the video starring Phillips and directed by Ascroft himself below:

Echo Still Remains is out January 31st via Hand Drawn Dracula and you can pre-order it now.

Sun June – 41 Dollars

Described as a song about “listening to men talk,” Sun June‘s new single ’41 Dollars’ is the Austin band’s first proper release since last year’s Bad Dream Jaguar—a record we described as “painting impressionistic pictures of love and longing in quiet dusk-hued pastels, as though in effort to preserve that which might otherwise fade out into nothing. The single is every bit as emotive and assured as we’ve come to expect from the outfit, the sound holding reflection and longing within the same moment, and what results is a sound placid on the surface yet roiling with a myriad of unseen currents and pressures below. Released via Run For Cover Records, the single comes complete with a demo version of ’16 Riders’ as well as a remix of ‘Easy Violence’ by Porches.

Wasn’t it all in my head?
Wanted you
Fighting off all that I can
Watching the horizon waul
Trying my best in the cool water
Watching it rise and fall
Listening to you talk

Watch the video below:

’41 Dollars’ is out now via Run For Cover Records and available from Bandcamp.

The post Weekly Listening: December 2024 #1 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Any new album from Advance Base is going to rank near the very top of our most anticipated of a given year, but the description of newly announced full-length Horrible Occurrences couldn’t be any more exciting. A record “all centered around a fictional town called Richmond and featuring an interlinked cast of characters,” as the press release explains. “You will hear stories of death and disappearance, climactic confrontations and unsolved mysteries.” Fans of the project will recognise songs like ‘Little Sable Point Lighthouse’ and ‘How You Got Your Picture on the Wall’, but new single ‘The Year I Lived in Richmond’ is what serves as an introduction to Owen Ashworth’s most conceptual release to date. A song which does more in three verses than the majority of published stories, and one which effortlessly displays Ashworth’s unrivalled ability to mine ostensibly ordinary lives for their brilliant slivers of heartbreak and strangeness.

Horrible Occurrences will be released on 6th December via Run For Cover and Orindal Records. Pre-order it now from the Advance Base Bandcamp page.

Anlaki – Escape ’til Dead

Based in Iruña-Pamplona, Spain, Anlaki is the bedroom music project of Julen Izkue which uses a classic DIY spirit to explore both the difficulties of adulthood and discomfort of modern life. Latest album Wind Call shows just how fun and inventive this lo-fi style can be, lovingly wrapping up a mix of slacker rock and power pop sensibilities in a warm blanket of fuzz. Single ‘Escape ’til Dead’ is the perfect example. The hazy tones are by no means a barrier to a sense of forward motion that propels things, the track embracing its title as a kind of motto to push itself onward with carefree brightness in spite of everything.

Constant Follower – All Is Well

Last month we introduced The Smile You Send Out Returns To You, the forthcoming album by Constant Follower via Last Night From Glasgow, with single ‘Whole Be’. A song about the contradiction inherent in the way we long for wholeness while acknowledging imperfection, the track not only introduced a newly ethereal sound for the outfit, but also furthered the visual element of their work through both cover art and video. Latest single ‘All Is Well’ is no different. Stephen McAll and co. mine the title for all of its complications, delving into the ways in which the contemporary reliance on comfort and convenience masks an ever-present dread below the surface of our society. It is notable that the band dedicate the song to Jake ‘Taurus Mortimer’, a young person killed in the care of NHS Forth Valley Psychiatric services back in 2023. Watch the video filmed and directed by Kris Boyle below:

The Smile You Send Out Returns To You will be released on the 28th February via Last Night From Glasgow.

The Convenience – Routiner

Duncan Troast and Nick Corson started The Convenience after meeting at Loyola University in New Orleans, using the project as a space in which to experiment within the wide genre of pop. Released in 2021 via Winspear, album Accelerator felt like the culmination of this practice, evolving the sound of their earlier releases towards its most vivid, far-reaching state. However, not satisfied to rest on their laurels, The Convenience are now pushing their boundaries again. New double single Routiner / Postcard sees the duo strike out towards a guitar-led art-rock which sits closer to the likes of Cate Le Bon and Parquet Courts. Take the first track, which is strung across a taut bassline but spins in various directions with a volatile twitching energy, capturing the push and pull of life, from deadening repetition to sharp alarm.

Routine / Postcard is out now via Winspear and available from Bandcamp.

Doctor Delia – What a Drag!!

“We literally had gendered uniforms,” explains Doctor Delia of growing up in suburban Tampa schools. “We were stuck in them like little toy soldiers. The whole time, or much of the whole time, I wanted to dress like a woman, or more feminine. Deep down I knew it felt good, and right for some reason, but there was so much shame around it.” New single ‘What a Drag!!’ serves as both a refutation of the strictures experienced during this time and a celebration of living as the person you truly are. “What a drag not to be yourself,” as the song goes, progressing with the kind of calm, assured rhythm that only comes with lessons learnt the hard way.

Holding Hour – Can I Leave Me Too?

‘Can I Leave Me Too?’, the latest track from Des Moines duo Holding Hour, is a lesson in juxtaposition. For while the song is set within the ostensibly celebratory, communal scene of a birthday party, the overriding mood is one of alienation and doubt. The sound itself follows a similarly contrasting style, its brooding undertones threatening to engulf the vocals as the percussion presses forward as though towards some imminent break or change. What results is a track full of conflict, between calmness and motion, darkness and light, not to mention that internal disquiet of a person coming to understand how they might be responsible for the less than perfect conditions of a relationship.

‘Can I Leave Me Too?’ is out now via streaming services.

Leoblu x World Wild Web – Utopia

Emerging from the heart of Berlin‘s underground music scene, ‘Utopia’ is a single which sees Leoblu and World Wild Web pair their styles into something at once ethereal and charged with vivid energy. We’ve written about the ambiguous and atmospheric sound of Julia Carlsson’s Leoblu several times in recent years, most recently with Blu Lucid Nightmare, and the addition of World Wide Web’s rhythms and beats pushes it into new territory—one still shadowed yet shot through with a kind of transcendent possibility. “’Utopia’ came from a deep place of questioning,” Carlsson explains, “both within myself and the world around us. It’s an emotional journey through grief, but also a declaration of hope, defiance and change.”

‘Utopia’ is out now via streaming services.

Melanie MacLaren – Laika

“The product of a period marked by experiences of grief, loss and illness, the new songs look to confront life in its truest state. To push beyond the myths we tell ourselves and look at mortality with a clear gaze.” So we wrote last month of the forthcoming release from  Nashville singer-songwriter Melanie MacLaren. New single ‘Laika’ is no less direct in its focus, using the tragic story of the titular Soviet space dog as a way into humanity’s propensity to exploit the vulnerable more generally, and how the powerful continue to disregard the rights and dignity of everyone else. The result is a lesson in restraint, though beneath the slow, soft folk style is a vast chasm of anger at everything we have done and continue to do.

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

This Frontier Needs Heroes – Truck Driver

Writing back in July, we described Brad Lauretti of This Frontier Needs Heroes as “a folk artist in the traditional sense, wandering and entertaining audiences with equal parts playfulness, protest and heartbreak while always pining for places left in the rear view mirror.” Inspired by a period driving an RV across America for another artist’s tour, latest single ‘Truck Driver’ leans into this spirit more fully, injecting a sense of constant momentum to the folk rock style to equate the life of a touring musician with that of a long-haul driver. “I got to live the life of a truck driver for a few weeks,” as Lauretti says, “driving all night, sleeping in the cab, eating in gas stations, with all the crazy things that happened along the way.”

The post Weekly Listening: September 2024 #5 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Over the past thirty years, Cursive have established themselves as one of the most consistent and inventive indie rock/emo bands, providing a series of albums which delve into dark, challenging themes with a searing energy. And they show no signs of letting up, with new album Devourer coming later this year on new label Run For Cover. Every bit as intense as anything in their back catalogue, the record explores ideas of consumption in its various guises and how this inevitably slides towards imperialistic exploitation of power. Lead single ‘Up and Away’ introduces the themes with a surprisingly poppy style, though one which squares melody and dissonance off against one another to better capture the tension at the album’s heart. “‘I had the ‘up, up, up, up, up, up and away’ section of lyrics in my head from its inception but hadn’t planned on using something so bright, cheery and arguably trite,” explains singer/guitarist Tim Kasher, “until it occurred to me that what I was really singing about was something floating away from me, something I was losing, not my personal elevation into some stratosphere.”

Watch the video by Brea Grant below, the first in a series of collaborations between Cursive and genre directors which draws on horror tropes to bring the themes of depression further into relief.

Devourer is out on the 13th September via Run For Cover Records and you can pre-order it now.

Evan Uhlmann – Lake Michigan

After penning his first song at the tender age of five and later studying under Ray Davies of The Kinks, it’s fair to say songwriting is in Evan Uhlmann‘s blood. The Chicago-based musician has now enlisted the help of brother Greg Uhlmann (who you might now from his collaboration with Hand Habits as Duffy x Uhlmann on Orindal Records) to record a new collection of songs to be released via Future Gods. First single ‘Lake Michigan’ is the perfect introduction to the kind of intimate, reflective tone of this phase of Uhlmann’s career, tapping into the quotidian rhythms of life to better explore a deep well of emotions. “I wrote this song while grappling with self-doubt in a new relationship, consumed by the fear of not being worthy and the anxiety of anticipating where things might lead before they even started,” he explains. “Lake Michigan became my reflective space; a place to process this unfolding experience.”

Watch the video below with art direction and animation by Sam Congdon:

‘Lake Michigan’ is out now via Future Gods and available from Bandcamp.

Great Klons – Twilight Gardener

Starting out as the bassist for indie pop outfit Eureka Birds in the 2010s before moving to record solo as Great Klons, Scott Klon has been making music for over a decade now, exploring everything from dub-adjacent noise pop to Spaghetti Western-inspired psych folk. The latest Great Klons EP expands upon this with another inventive collision of genres, as indie rock, psych, folk and Krautrock influences all coalesce into a singular sound able to explore ideas of instability within the contemporary moment. With its dual vocals, woozy organ and underlying Motorik beat, single ‘Twilight Garden’ uses Klon’s current home of Finger Lakes, NY as an example of the friction and unease of our present. A time when wealth and poverty make uneasy bedfellows and once proud places crumble amid a wider gentrification. “Lakeside transitory towns / and in between a hundred more,” as Klon sings in the opening verse, “and in the middle the church is falling down / where there are more graves than people.”

‘Twilight Gardener’ is out now via streaming services and you can follow Great Klons on Instagram.

Herr God – jesus candle in the liquor store

The side project of songwriter Chloe Gallardo, San Francisco-based slowcore outfit Herr God is named for a line in a Sylvia Plath poem, a reference which goes some way to illustrate its bruised, introspective style. Herr God has recently released debut single ‘jesus candle in the liquor store’, a song which introduces this style perfectly with its lethargic, downbeat atmosphere. Distorted guitars grumble and smoulder behind shuffling percussion and Gallardo’s listless, mumbled vocals, all coming together to evoke something dark and gloomy but with a strange fatalistic energy.

Watch the video by Ella May Sahlman (director), Liz Charky (director of photography), Zoé Kraft (editor) and Natalia Minguez (PA/BTS) below:

‘jesus candle in the liquor store’ is out now and available from the usual places.

Holy Matter – Wishing Well

Last October we wrote about Leanna Kaiser’s Holy Matter, describing how single ‘Autumn’s Envy’ “occupies the liminal space between the real, emotional and spiritual, as though through loss and introspection, one can lead themselves towards uncanny places.” Again released via Royal Oakie Records, latest single ‘Wishing Well’ sees the LA-based musician and experimental filmmaker continue to mine the rich strangeness of such spaces, where desires are matched by the understanding of their own impossibility. Amid a dreamy, retro soundscape, Kaiser admires a crush from afar while knowing deep down any potential romance is doomed to fail, a weightless headspace where things are both decided and not. “This was a rare instance of knowing exactly how I wanted a song to sound as I was writing it, and it actually turning out identically to how I heard it in my head,” as she explains. “I kept thinking about this restaurant I went to as a kid called The Wishing Well, which had a faux stone well in the middle of its wood-panelled dining room. I imagined this song playing in that dingy room over some crappy 70s restaurant speakers.”

Watch the video directed by Kaiser herself below:

‘Wishing Well’ is out now via Royal Oakie Records and available from Bandcamp.

Luce Rushton – Slinky

Back in April we introduced Slinky, the debut EP from Luce Rushton. Then writing of single ‘How It Works’, we described how the EP is “follows the travails of a young artist attempting to negotiate their own tricky interior within an already overwhelming world,” delivered with a “seamless blend of wry humour and earnest emotion.” Now the record is out in full, Rushton has released a video for the title track which furthers the exploration of gender presented across the release. “The word originally referred to feeling forced into ‘slinky’ women’s clothing throughout my life,” Rushton explains. “In the song, I look back on those feelings and reflect on how much I’ve changed and learned about myself.’’

look how hard i try to
climb up to the ladies room
and what you made me do
sped all day and it costs a fortune
debtor
corner
but you wouldn’t catch me dead in it anymore though

Slinky is out now via Sad Club Records and available from Bandcamp.

No Beauty – JUNE

Led by Helena Alexandria alongside Jonathan Malstrom and Will Fachin, No Beauty is a Hamilton, Ontario-based project gearing up to release their new EP, No Beauty Will Remain, this summer. Single ‘June’ typifies the blend of lightness and weight which constitutes their brand of indie rock. Weighty guitars are propelled by a driving drum line, positioning No Beauty alongside the likes of Basement Revolver in their cathartic heft. But amid the density lies an altogether brighter dimension, with ‘JUNE’ offering a picture of summertime love radiant enough to transcend any encroaching darkness.

a cashmere glow from a small window
fell on the bed
we talked for all the hours on the bed
we found out we had perfect bodies on the bed

Watch the video by Alice Hirsch (director, DOP, editor) and Helena Zogogiannis (AD, creative director, props) below:

No Beauty Will Remain will be released later this summer. No Beauty can be found at the usual places.

Sam Weber – Oregon

Ahead of hitting the road with Anna Tivel this month, Vancouver Island-based singer-songwriter and guitarist Sam Weber has revealed the latest track from his forthcoming album, Clear + Plain. ‘Oregon’ typifies the fusion of traditional and contemporary sensibilities which marks Weber’s sound, with strong percussion and bass anchoring layered vocals and his signature guitar work to offer an ode to its titular state. “‘Oregon’ was written on a trip to Ashland,” as Weber expands. “We were renting a casita on this big property where all these hippies lived. It’s a bit of a sensory abstract poem that just sort of emerged. I think the imagery is my own from the I-5 corridor, seeing the lush green flora, very pagan-beautiful, natural imagery of the state, contrasted with the scraps of humanity strewn around. And the progressive culture of Portland.”

Clear + Plain will be released on the 23rd August and you can find Sam Weber at the usual places.

Secret Flowers – Malibu Burns

Los Angeles fourpiece Secret Flowers—that’s Michael Hentz (vocals, guitar), Jacquelyn Sky (vocals, drums), David Greening (guitar), and Abraham Rodriguez-Smith (bass)—fall somewhere at the intersection of dream pop, psych and shoegaze, offering a sound as confident with dark romance as with laidback jams. New release Balboa EP shows off the full potential of this blend, as shown by lead single ‘Malibu Burning’. Inspired by the wildfires in California over recent years, the song offers slow, lush duet which envelops the listener, evoking not only the stasis of our alarming moment, but the wish to retreat to the small comforts of our loved ones amid encroaching catastrophe.

Slice – Shopping

Consisting of Megan Magiera (guitar, vocals), Barbara Barrera (bass) and Alex Hattick (keys, vocals), Slice have developed a loyal fanbase in Long Beach with their impassioned indie rock sound. After almost a decade of playing together, new single ‘Shopping’, out via Selenite Records, signals a new era for the outfit. It’s the culmination of what has come before, drawing equal does of angst and catharsis to explore themes both personal and political. “When I was writing the lyrics, I was thinking about the different clear-outs of unhoused communities in Echo Park, in Santa Monica, even in Downtown Long Beach,” Hattick explains. “The irony of unhoused communities being cleared out while unaffordable high-rise loft apartments are being built is impossible to ignore. When you’re removing people from these spaces, where do they go? Where do you expect people to go when there’s nowhere to go?”

Thavoron – My Man

Seattle-based Cambodian-American artist Thavoron has made a name for emotive, searching songwriting through a series of singles with Trailing Twelve Records, exploring themes of grief, desire and cultural identity from within the queer experience. Latest track ‘My Man’ is every bit as evocative as we’ve come to expect. A slow-burn anthem which aches with longing, shot through with striking imagery and unguarded emotion. But the sound escalates as the song progresses, gathering a momentum as though Thavoron finds a newfound conviction within it’s build, coming to reach the conclusion that the other he so desires does not hold the key to his own identity. That feeling at home in one’s body is a process to be face on their own terms. Watch the video directed by Thavoron and Maddie Ludgate below:

‘My Man’ is out now via Trailing Twelve Records.

The post Weekly Listening: June 2024 #2 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Australian duo Simon Lam and Hamish Mitchell, AKA Armlock, are releasing album Seashell Angel Lucky Charm later this summer on Run For Cover Records, and single ‘Ice Cold’ is the ideal point at which to dive in. The Armlock style beams electronic music through the prism of indie rock, conjuring sounds at once ethereal and eccentric, something the album opener encapsulates perfectly. A lesson in minimalism which rather than forgo detail, offers it with a sense of purpose and control. Be that in the simple beat and subtle textures, or the pared-back lyricism which lends the track its ambiguous charm.

Ice cold ankle deep
Head tilt, turn a cheek
I won’t be around for the rest of the week
Takes one to know one
We were born in the air sign
I’m gonna come back with the sword you left behind

Seashell Angel Lucky Charm is out on the 12th July via Run For Cover Records.

Cereus Bright – Ride

Following on from recent EP Boys, a release we described as “an ode to every tired soul and person without direction,” Knoxville’s Cereus Bright is back with ‘Ride’, a brand new single via Nettwerk. Boys preached the value of giving in to life’s unpredictable currents, and the new single follows in a similar vein. A brightly peppy track imbued with enough forward motion to propel even the most uncertain person to confront their fears and seize the bull by the horns. “Do you wanna ride?” as the chorus asks, and with the momentum of the drums and warm psych-inflected textures, it’s difficult to refuse the offer. Watch the video below with visuals by Peel:

‘Ride’ is out now via Nettwerk.

 César Alvarez – Normal, IL

“Would it be okay to wander off?” asks César Alvarez on ‘Normal, IL’, the opening track from new album egg. “I’ll take the shitty car, I’ll leave the credit cards / Drive to the Midwest, sleeping at rest stops / Play jazz on the sidewalks.” Delivered with a tone somewhere between wistful longing and boundless curiosity, the song introduces an artist navigating the competing wills to preserve the moment and escape for good. Where life’s tiny details represent the component parts of everything we hold dear. Things to drag around year after year, things to hold tight to your chest in the hope of better days. “A few years ago I was under-employed artist parent trying to figure out how to survive capitalism and still be a composer,” Alvarez explains. “I was genuinely trying to figure out if we could keep surviving in NY. This song is that feeling of being about to give up.”

Gold Dime – Denise

Recently, New York art rock/post punk outfit Gold Dime released album No More Blue Skies via No-Gold, an album which took avant garde sensibilities and elevated them into cinematic experiences. Led by Andrya Ambro (formerly of Talk Normal), the project has long reached for increasingly inventive and immersive sounds. The new record feels like the closest they have come to the zenith of such a style, what the liner notes describe as “a widescreen, fiercely intense, hair standing up on the back of your neck kind of art rock.” Take opener and single ‘Denise’, a song somehow at once opaque and charged with clarity, Ambro’s vocals cutting through the volatile sax and shifting percussion to blur the line between foreboding and transcendence.

Watch the video directed by Andrya Ambro and Joe Wakeman below:

No More Blue Skies is out now via No-Gold and available from the Gold Dime Bandcamp page.

Kathryn Mohr – Cut (Low Cover)

Originating from a conversation between The Flenser and Planning For Burial’s Thom Wasluck, Your Voice Is Not Enough is a compilation of covers celebrating the breadth and beauty of Low‘s musical oeuvre. A whole host of Flenser artists and friends are involved, with VSF favs Midwife and Allison Lorenzen joined by Drowse, Have A Nice Life, Cremation Lily and Holy Water among others. The latest single sees Kathryn Mohr take on ‘Cut’, maintaining the sparse simmer of the original while deepening its shadowy corners with an electrified edge. “It was the lyrics that immediately drew me into this song,” Mohr explains. “The intimacy of a hair cut. The loss of a version of someone you knew as they turn themselves inside out to survive. It’s one of the saddest things in the world to me, watching someone harden and loose themselves to their pain.”

Your Voice Is Not Enough is out on the 24th May via The Flenser.

LEOBLU – full moon & snow boots

Julia Carlsson’s LEOBLU has caught our ears on a number of occasions in recent times, be it the gloom pop of single ‘Cake‘ or more recently a collaboration with Sad Dad which probed into the strangeness of love. “The impression is not one of grand gesture and romantic inevitability,” we wrote of the later, “but rather the sense of being exposed to mysterious forces. The physics of things larger than yourself, moving life beyond your control.” With new EP Blu Lucid Nightmare coming later this year, LEOBLU has returned with single ‘full moon & snow boots’, and again the track sees Carlsson setting personal emotions against larger, almost mystical backdrops. As though the natural world was our own longing manifest. Watch the video, shot in California by Hannah Gonzalez, below:

Blu Lucid Nightmare will be released later this year.

My Best Unbeaten Brother – Time on Our Hands, Spider-Man

Back in January we told you about My Best Unbeaten Brother, the latest project from the Parker brothers of Nosferatu D2, The Superman Revenge Squad Band and Tempertwig. Back then we were writing about standalone single ‘Slayer on a Sunny Day’, but as promised the band are now readying their debut mini-album Pessimistic Pizza, which will be release via Audio Antihero. To whet appetites, they have released lead single ‘Time on Our Hands, Spider-Man’, a mid-to-late-00s style indie rock song electrified with desperate emotion. Ben Parker says the song is about, “being a father and being a son, passing on memories of years and years of processing stuff and turning it into landfill indie, how we all need a Spider-Man or a Superman and how this doesn’t change the older you get,” which goes some way to illustrating the mixture of sadness, sincerity and frustration that sit just below the up-tempo surface.

Wild Yaks – Desperado

With almost two decades and (roughly) five albums under their belts, Wild Yaks have made a name with an affirming and often riotous brand of rock music, filling the gap between hopes and realities with a carefree embrace of the present. Out next month via Ernst Jenning Record Co. latest album Monumental Deeds feels like both a continuation of this spirit and the culminative product of twenty years spent pining and singing and howling at the moon. Born on a drive back to Florida lead Rob Bryn took with his 79-year-old mother, single ‘Desperado’ is a fitting combination of desperation and defiance. When the ghosts of past selves and possible futures are strung out on the road before you, sometimes the only option is to roll the windows down, put the pedal to the metal and feel that wind in your hair.

Watch the video below filmed on VHS tape by Renée Muza and edited by Sameer Kapoor:

Monumental Deeds is out on the 21st June via Ernest Jenning Record Co. and you can pre-order it now.

Zoya Zafar – Clumsy

“Time allowed Zafar opportunity to understand the tracks beyond the usual level, and thus gradually shape them towards their ideal, essential form.” So we wrote of Zoya Zafar‘s Some Songs, an album interrupted by real life difficulties which only came to realise itself more fully in the intervening years. Tracks like ‘Sweet Talk’ “condens[e] months of suffering into a single prayer released into an empty room,” as we put it in a preview, a testament to the value of patience and care brought to life with a tender folk pop style. Latest single ‘Clumsy’ invites the listener further into this space, a song produced by friend Gia Margaret which shares Margaret’s quiet, sometimes cryptic sincerity. “You were the light in the dark,” as Zafar sings, “giving away your sad, sad heart / living inside a house of cards.”

The post Weekly Listening: May 2024 #2 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Ava Mirzadegan – Dark Dark Blue

Team Love Records [BUY]

Dark Dark Blue, the title of Ava Mirzadegan’s latest full-length, might refer to a mood, a time of day, the quality of light in a room. The album was written in Mirzadegan’s childhood bedroom in the wake of a break-up, a collection of finger-picked folk songs which paints a series of memories, longings and confessions in the palette of the titular hue. But though the present loss hangs heavy, Mirzadegan also digs towards a deeper seam of sadness. One ingrained at her centre, accumulated not only across one life but an entire family history. Here, old wounds are not so much sources of pain as shafts leading towards something older and more fundamental, and Ava Mirzadegan follows these passageways as deep as they might allow her in the hope that allowing light into these dark spaces is to begin to process and heal.

Dean Johnson – Nothing For Me Please

Mama Bird Recording Co. [BUY]

The Seattle-based singer-songwriter Dean Johnson (who is also a member of the band Sons of Rainier) has built a devoted following across the Pacific Northwest with his live shows, garnering almost mythical status with his anachronistic folk songs full of lonesome melodies and gruff heartbreak. Not wishing to change a winning formula, Johnson’s debut solo record Nothing For Me Please is almost completely devoid of bells and whistles, to the point where it often feels like he is singing from a chair in the corner or crooning from a sticky dive bar stage. He sings of pining for a lost love (‘Old TV’, ‘Shouldn’t Say Mine’) and false-smiling through a breakup (‘Acting School’), and the age-old existential woes of any cowboy worth his salt. Songs relatively simplistic in their construction and all the better for it, a reminder that less is oftentimes more. The album is relatively brief, clocking in at less than thirty minutes, though lingers in the mind like the sweet tones of a half-remembered dream.

Divide and Dissolve – Systemic

Invada Records [BUY]

“To make music that honours their ancestors and Indigenous land, to oppose white supremacy, and to work towards a future of Black and Indigenous liberation.” That’s how the liner notes of Divide and Dissolve‘s Systemic describes the intention at the heart of the duo’s crushing songs. The album felt like a fitting soundtrack to 2023, yet another year where the pervasive systems of violence and control have been all too visible, and those familiar with previous LP Gas Lit will recognise the dark, furious density Takiaya Reed and Sylvie Nehill manage to conjure. But far from being a mere sonic steamroller happy to only grind its audience into the ground, Systemic pairs its apocalyptic weight with something more fragile and light. Sections almost orchestral in their detail which move through the ruins of the doomworld in something like defiance. The dominant systems might seem as monolithic as they are malevolent, but there are other systems, other possibilities, and they are more persistent than you might think. As Minori Sanchiz-Fung reads on ‘Kingdom of Fear’:

If I am denied the kindness needed to transform sorrow
If I am denied the simple gentleness of existing
Then I will leave my gifts, like lichen, over the oak branches
Trusting they’ll be safe until you find them

Erik Kramer – Where the fish are as fine as the color of colors

Self-released [BUY]

When people talk about the ‘real world’, they’re not really talking about the real world. Words are not up to such an endeavour. But that’s where art comes in. Described as “music for Blue Sky (‘where the eagle that flies out of sight flies’),” this self-released cassette from Erik Kramer feels like a reminder of this fact, an exercise evoking in times, places and feelings that are incommunicable with mere words. Crafted from a hodgepodge of instruments and samples—from guitar, banjo and pump organ to bells and Casio keyboards, a tin whistle, field recordings, loon calls, snippets of poetry and the ambient sounds of “cars & trucks” and “Madison area teenagers”—the tape offers a series vignettes, small, snatched moments of beauty and nostalgia and wistfulness. Take the mantra-like repetition of ‘Hermit Guardian Angel’ or Eva Chudnow’s still and sweet rendition of the titular traditional folk song on ‘Just as the tide was flowing’, the gloomy slo-mo rock song of ‘Daylight Saving’ or the title track which swells and shivers with an inextricable mixture of sorrow and joy. In a world that seems to grow more complex and cruel with each rotation, it’s no small wonder to find escape routes, art that enables not selfish head-in-the-sand ignorance but a return to what really matters, what really is.

Florry – The Holey Bible

Dear Life Records [BUY]

The Holey Bible feels like a seminal moment in Florry’s history. The Philly band, led by Francie Medosch, have dabbled with country sensibilities ever since their inception, but this record is the moment they fully embrace the genre. It’s chock full of fiddle and mandolin, harmonica and pedal steel, meandering melodies and a heart-on-sleeve lyrical style that seems determined to look on the bright side. This positivity permeates the record, sidestepping the lonesome blues so common in the genre in favour of something genuinely joyful, though with a messy, ramshackle spirit that wards off any threat of things getting saccharine. Through woozy waltzes, fuzzy Country-fried rockers and no small amount of narrative attention, Florry rise from an uncertain, bleak world like a Roman candle, as though the only way to live nowadays is to meet despair with an equal and opposite force.

Gia Margaret – Romantic Piano

Jagjaguwar [BUY]

Writing in one of his journals, the Trappist monk Thomas Merton described the necessity of living in solitude in the woods. “The silence of the forest is my bride and the sweet dark warmth of the whole world is my love,” he wrote. “Out of the heart of that dark warmth comes the secret that is heard only in silence, but it is the root of all the secrets that are whispered by all the lovers in their beds all over the world.” It is this secret, not the lovers, with which Gia Margaret’s Romantic Piano is concerned. A collection of spare compositions whose title gestures not to rose petals and candlelit dinners but the melancholic wonder of the late eighteenth century. Because while Margaret’s first instrumental release Mia Gargaret was wrapped in insular detachment, these brief, meditative songs open the curtains if not entirely stepping outside. A picture of solitude not as some lonely retreat but rather the path towards recognising the wider connection of things. That sweet dark warmth of the whole world.

Kara Jackson – Why Does The Earth Give Us People To Love?

September [BUY]

“The title of my album, the question, is driven by grief,” explains Kara Jackson of debut album Why Does The Earth Give Us People To Love? “Why do we show up on this world alongside one another? To love and to mourn? To curse each other out? To die working every day?” Jackson works through this question in what feels like real time, swapping any hope of a definitive answer for the gradual process of learning. Songs at once intimate and grand, and as fond of playful humour as they are heart-on-the-sleeve sincerity. But the biggest irony of the album is that of its intention. Because for all of its immediacy and uncertainty, Jackson’s refusal to offer any simple, unifying answer comes to represent a solution in its own right. Why does the earth give us people to love? The answer might not reveal itself directly, but would songs like this exist if it did?

L’Rain – I Killed Your Dog

Mexican Summer [BUY]

The music of Taja Cheek’s L’Rain has never been content in a single box. Straddling pop, jazz, R&B and experimental styles, the songwriter and multi-instrumentalist has made name in refusing easy categorisation. This elusive fluidity extends through every aspect of latest album, I Killed Your Dog. A love record, a break-up record, an anti-break-up record. A record which reaches for commercial pop without ceding an inch of its avant garde ambition. “I’m envisioning a world of contradictions, as always,” Cheek describes. “Sensual, maybe even sexy, but terrifying, and strange.” Hence we get an intricate, tangled picture of what it means to love and hurt the people we care about, where shame need not preclude cruelty and love comes complete with both hope and despair. The style is encapsulated by the question Cheek poses in the liner notes: “Is the title an act of maliciousness and revenge or an expression of remorse and regret?” The answer, as always with L’Rain, isn’t as simple as one or the other. It’s everything, simultaneously.

Lael Neale – Star Eaters Delight

Sub Pop [BUY]

Lael Neale’s music feels unmoored from time. Written and recorded at her family home in rural Virginia with help from collaborator Guy Blakeslee and without the involvement of a single screen, Star Eaters Delight draws on multiple lineages of American alternative music, from the lo-fi pop of Suicide and The Velvet Underground to folk singers like Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell. All in an attempt to reach out into the quiet of remote landscapes and fill them with sound and life. In contrast to Neale’s previous album Acquainted With Night, which turned inward to find peace away from the bustle of urban LA, the record explores the false divide between humans and the rest of nature (“I pledge allegiance to tree and meadow / I have no need to conquer or keep them” as Neale sings on opener ‘I Am the River’) and the value of tranquillity away from the information overload of modern life. There are many planes and dimensions, the songs at times crystalline and brittle, others amorphous and unbreakable as water, though it is this tranquillity that ultimately stands out. Minimalism not as a pretentious aesthetic choice or act of puritan self-denial, but, in true transcendentalist style, as an expression of freedom. As Neale puts it when explaining her outlook, she identifies as a minimalist “not because I don’t like things, but because I value freedom more.”

Lilts – Waiting Around

Better Company Records [BUY]

Wild Pink has been a VSF favourite for a number of years now, and we count Laura Wolf‘s Shelf Life among our favourite releases of 2023, so it is no surprise Lilts won our hearts too. Not that the collaboration between Wolf and Wild Pink’s John Ross is overtly indebted to the previous work of its duo. Rather, the pair allow their respective talents to compliment one another, setting their compass to Nineties shoegaze but allowing for whatever detours might occur along the way. Elements of dream pop and post-rock filter in, and there’s none of the derivative flatness of the revivalist movement. Indeed, there’s a freedom to ‘Dodge Street’ and the title track which feels wholly new. A product of the relationship between its creators, as though learning to trust another person allows an artist to escape the confines and expectations of the work they’ve done in the past.

Mark Jenkin – Enys Men OST

Invada Records [BUY]

Mark Jenkin’s 2019 film Bait took kitchen sink realism and bent it into something stranger, its use of a hand-cranked camera and style of dubbing distorting an otherwise familiar picture of tensions between rural traditions and the encroaching middle class. Again set in rural Cornwall, follow-up Enys Men leant more fully into this unsettling mood. Centring on a volunteer ecologist tasked with observing a rare flower on a remote island, the film presents time as both a line and a circle. The protagonist’s monotonous routine unfolds with striking similarity each day, even if the dates in her logbook progress, while strange visions appear across the island as though the thin present is merely draped over a many layered past. To say Enys Men sounded better than it looked is to pay it the highest compliment, with a soundtrack by Jenkin himself which embodies every inch of the film’s loneliness, stark beauty and hauntological mystery.

Meursault – S/T

Common Ground Records [BUY]

The self-titled record from Edinburgh‘s Meursault was initially designed as a concept album. The tale of two characters, including the titular Meursault, attempting to negotiate a post-apocalyptic world. A direct evolution, then, from the “urban horror vignettes” of 2019’s Crow Hill, as Neil Pennycook looked to lead the project in a more narrative-driven direction. But any short story worth its salt undergoes intense revision, and Meursault was pared down beyond its original idea. As though in delving further into the album’s themes, Pennycook felt able to remove the scaffold of the narrative and allow the songs to stand on their own. The character of Meursault remains, albeit under a different guise, and in offering a more autobiographical picture than anything Pennycook has shared to date, the songs come to form a wider meditation on what the ever-changing project means to him. “I am tired of this metaphor and I am bored of this poetry,” as he sings on the title track:

I am done with this ghost
and this ghost she is done with me
so I gave her a name and I set her to burn
and there in that moment this lesson I learned
you can kill them with kindness
just don’t kill them with love

and if you’ve nothing nice to say
try singing it to me

Natalia Beylis – Mermaids

Touch Sensitive Records [BUY]

Mermaids, the latest release from composer and sound artist Natalia Beylis, is in no small part indebted to a trip to a Leitrim recycling centre. It was there Beylis came across an unwanted CRB Elettronica Ancona Diamond 708 E Electric Keyboard, an instrument seemingly patient in its wait for a saviour. Beylis took it home, performed some surgery to remove the purple crayons rattling around inside, and took to playing. “When I found the cover picture of the three figures in a stack of old family photos,” Beylis says, “a confluence of the sounds and the image charged through me and [the album] began to flicker into being.” But as the record progresses, what might as first seem like serendipity deepens into something more profound. As though in committing to strange patterns of intuition and happenstance, Beylis is able to push deeper into nostalgia and unearth the lines of history and heritage within.

Northwoods Baseball Sleep Radio – Northwoods Sleep Baseball

Worried Songs [BUY]

The title character of Robert Coover’s 1968 novel The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. might be miserable in his work life, but at night he escapes reality into a fantasy of his own creation. A fully functioning baseball league he runs as a tabletop game, where every pitch, hit and injury are governed by the roll of a dice. The sport’s essence is captured in the pursuit, a collision of hard statistics and ever-unfolding narrative at a pace slow enough to fill an entire life. Northwoods Sleep Baseball Radio lives in the spirit of Coover’s imagination, albeit with a zany Pynchonian twist. A podcast fronted by elusive Chicago humourist ‘Mr King’ which offers full-length and entirely fictional baseball games featuring players like Clifton Santiago, Lefty Thorn, Blink Retterson and Randy Chang, all narrated by commentator Wally McCarthy. This album, released by Worried Songs, serves as the perfect first step into the comforting and hilarious world of Northwoods Sleep Baseball. Where sedate rhythms draw you in, but wry imagination keeps you listening.

ØXN – CYRM

Claddagh Records [BUY]

The majestic Lankum might have deservedly taken 2023 by storm, but Radie Peat’s other project ØXN also released a masterful album this year. More adventurous still than False Lankum, CYRM offers mix of traditional and original folk songs loaded with aching hearts and portentous weight, charging folk with electronic and cinematic sensibilities to blur the line between blessing and curse. Take ‘Love Henry’, a tale of seduction and violence which screws taut as it progresses, every bit as black and fated as the darkest fairy tale, or ‘Cruel Mother’, where a woman pressured into infanticide sees herself become a slow slide towards damnation. A dread-laden version of Scott Walker’s ‘Farmer in the City’ closes out the album, a thirteen-minute epic which creeps and creeps until it as all around you, then collapses into a chaos of noise.

Pearla – Oh Glistening Onion, The Nighttime Is Coming

Spacebomb Records [BUY]

“I’m not certain about much,” sings Pearla on ‘Ming the Clam’, “But I’m certain how we touch / Is compelled by some great force / Other than us.” The song encapsulates the spirit of Oh Glistening Onion, The Nighttime Is Coming, where playful whimsy and unfiltered introspection are kept in check by a certain self-awareness, though cannot help but tend towards the potential of some higher mystery. Many of the songs are concerned with finding comfort within a hostile world, and often play like questions being processed in real time, drawing on both real life experiences and wider sources. From the experience of having a credit card stolen at a flower shop to the story of Ming, the oldest individual animal known to science which died as scientists studied its longevity (“I study all the little signs / Under fluorеscent light… Reminder of the grand creation / How did she keep on fighting?”). It’s an album that marks Pearla as a project that works in awe of life’s mysteries, determined to see the beautiful and the surreal rise above the grind of the everyday.

Protomartyr – Formal Growth in the Desert

Domino [BUY]

“In case I don’t see you, well, for a little while, I just want to tell you, it’s been lovely. Every bit of it. The whole fifty years. I’d sooner have been your wife, Bark, than anyone else on earth.” So says Lucy “Ma” Cooper in the closing scene of Leo McCarey’s 1937 drama Make Way For Tomorrow, a film which feels relevant to Protomartyr’s fifth album, Formal Growth in the Desert, not least because it is referenced by the titles of opening pair of tracks. The songs were written in a period which saw lead Joe Casey lose his mother and be forced out of his childhood home, and while the records holds no small amount of grief and darkness, it also serves as an unguarded declaration of love. Which might sound strange for a band who have won deserved acclaim for their foreboding sound, their fury and doom, but Protomartyr have always been so much more than another snarling, depressed post-punk outfit in a crowded field. “Time’s your enemy / Every gift you see will be taken for sure,” Casey sings on ‘The Author’, the most direct tribute to his mother. “So I figure while you live / Kiss the ones that love you / For thе song you sing.” In case I don’t see you for a little while, I just want to tell you, it’s been lovely.

Sluice – Radial Gate

Ruination Record Co. [BUY]

The title of Radial Gate, Justin Morris’s second album under the moniker Sluice, follows the project name and doubles down on the imagery of water. Namely its control, the mechanisms and machinery developed in order to stop, raise and coax waterways in the manners most functional. Morris’s songs, cut from a nostalgic, patient style of folk and elevated by a rich palette of instrumentation, feel like miniature versions of such systems. Only here the flow is not a canal or estuary but the ever pulling course of time, complete with its attached stream of memories and meaning. Tracks like ‘Centurion’ find affirming momentum in this current, while others dam the passage to contemplate the depths of a single moment. But whether Morris is skimming along the surface or submerging himself in plunge pools, the lasting sense is that of control. For if life is a flowing river, Radial Gate represents an attempt to apply structures along its course so that we might more fully engage with the power and potential to be found therein.

Measure, Pour & Mixtape: Music for Cooking

SPINSTER [BUY]

As its title suggests, this compilation by the fine folks at SPINSTER invited artists to explore links between food and music. From shared conceptual themes of creativity and community to parallels between melody and harmony and texture and flavour, each song celebrates both the act of preparing food and sharing it with others. The result is what the label call “an auditory cookbook of songs, poems, field recordings, and aural experiments, inspired by recipes, food preparation processes, dishes, and the experience of eating.” There ain’t a dud across the sixteen tracks, but personal favourites include Andy McLeod & Sarah Bachman’s timeless folk opener, a new song from Lou Turner inspired by a line from Robert Frost, Sally Anne Morgan’s soil-to-plate ‘Grain Song’ that’s all blue skies and wide open fields, and Little Mazarn’s exploration of food’s ability to evoke memories, in this case of an uncle who she says “briefly played on the Dallas Cowboys but mostly played football with me on Thanksgiving.”

Stephen Steinbrink – Disappearing Coin

Western Vinyl [BUY]

Since releasing his last record Utopia Teased in 2018, Oakland’s Stephen Steinbrink busied himself with other things, both musical and not. He dove into the craft of engineering records for other bands, enjoying the sense of communal creativity in contrast to the solo endeavour of writing and recording for himself. He also studied an apprenticeship at a stained glass studio and became deeply interested in Buddhism, enrolling in lay monastic training before being interrupted by the global lockdowns of 2020. All of which is important when considering Disappearing Coin, an album which represents something of a reinvention for Steinbrink. A wilful attempt to make music with the same creativity and sense of awe-filled wonder that he felt when exploring these other avenues. The spirit is captured in the conjurer’s trick of the title, where reality is ruptured by a brief spark of magic. Buoyed by the experience and wisdom gleaned from outside activities, Steinbrink returns to music as a kind of magician himself. A figure who, guided by invention and playfulness, looks to use mastery of a physical craft in order to open the door to small, intangible miracles.

Strawberry Runners – S/T

Self-released [BUY]

Released a decade since the project’s inception in 2013, Strawberry Runners is the self-titled debut full-length from Emi Night’s songwriting project. Written following a period of great personal upheaval and echoing back to past trauma, the record returns to dark places with disarming candour and an easy grace, folding folk and pop into shapes that feel at once fresh and familiar. Night runs their fingers over old wounds to confront feelings of loneliness and heartbreak, but does so with a renewed spirit and sense of unrestrained creativity. Because despite the sometimes heavy subject matter, Strawberry Runners is a warm and colourful record. One full of gentle melodies and tactile textures, small details that evoke the multisensory nature of our chaotic world in all of its pain and joy and mysterious beauty. Take the sunny, devotional love song ‘Alison’, a shot of sunshiney summer where you can almost hear the wistful smile bend Night’s voice as they sing.

And I miss you
I hope you’re alright
I remember stayin’ up all night
Last June

And when I get back
To the midwest
To the bluegrass
And the sassafras trees
And the yellowwood

Sun June – Bad Dream Jaguar

Run For Cover Records [BUY]

There’s always been a distance in the music of Sun June, from the disconnect between lovers and family members to the wide open vistas of the Austin band’s home state. But third album Bad Dream Jaguar was inspired by distance of another order of magnitude. Founding members Laura Colwell and guitarist Stephen Salisbury have been in a relationship for the last few years, and the record was written after Salisbury moved 1,300 miles away to North Carolina, the couple swapping demos of new songs as a way to both process and alleviate the sense of separation and longing. The hazy dream-like quality of the Sun June sound is therefore as nostalgic and nebulous as it has ever been, painting impressionistic pictures of love and longing in quiet dusk-hued pastels, as though in effort to preserve that which might otherwise fade out into nothing. The present comes to feel like a temporary space between the gravity of the past and the vast shadowed sweep of whatever comes next, though we are given little choice but live in it as best we can.

Truth Club – Running From the Chase

Double Double Whammy [BUY]

“Is this working? Are you working hard? Is it working for you?” Such questions might only be asked outright in the closing track of Truth Club’s Running From The Chase, but their desperate weight hangs over its every moment, threatening to pull an entire life off-kilter or else bury it altogether. The North Carolina outfit’s 2019 debut Not An Exit nodded to Dante by way of Bret Easton Ellis, though its despair was matched with an infectious forward motion which meant the listener could step off at the end with their pessimism shaken loose. But here the songs are more expansive, the textures dense and submerging. A sonic representation of twenty-first century living, with lead Travis Harrington left to murmur and yell within the noise, mimicking a world which demands energy for even the most basic of things. “I am scared we will end up like his friend,” as Harrington sings on the title track. “work until he’s dead / work until we’re dead / is there any other plan?”

White Boy Scream – Tent Music

Whited Sepulchre Records [BUY]

Travelling from Los Angeles to New Mexico in 2021, White Boy Scream’s Micaela Tobin stopped off for a few nights in Arizona to stay with violinist and composer Joshua Hill, who was staying with his parents to shelter from the pandemic and care for his dementia-stricken father. They pitched a tent in the backyard and decided to record something in the spur of the moment, setting up microphones as wildfires raged only miles away. A confined space within a world unravelling. Tent Music is what emerged from those nights. Music stripped of intention and thus open to ancient or esoteric influence, Tobin and Hill acting not so much musicians but mouths for unseen voices, tools for invisible hands. When shaping the recordings over the next few years, the task felt more like relaying an old mythology than creating something new. “Both of us have a pretty long practice with improvised and experimental music,” as Tobin explains, “but there were voices coming out of me in those two nights that I’ve never used before. It felt like channelling something. When we started listening back to it, the story emerged.”

As ever, thanks for sticking with us for another year. Your support does not go unnoticed.

The post Albums We Missed in 2023 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

If Dirt Buyer II, the forthcoming album from Joe Sutkowski’s project on Bayonet Records, offers a clear message, it is that of survival. But any true acknowledgement of being alive can only come from brushes with mortality, and the songs see Dirt Buyer engage with the full darkness of the past in order to more fully appreciate the brighter future. Lead track ‘Fentanyl’ captures the full nuance of this process with a sound which far exceeds its relatively short length. An inky black slice of alt/emo rock which swings between stagnant gloom and bracing rolls of thunderous weight.

Dirt Buyer II is out on the 20th October via Bayonet Records and you can pre-order it now.

Eversame – Warm Flower Sided Road

Originating from jamming sessions between drummer Marek Šmidovič and guitarist Richard Špirko, Žilina’s Eversame have been in development as a band since 2018. But it was only on adding Matúš Ratveiský and then later Pauline Struhárová in 2022 that they really started working towards recorded music. After a debut standalone single, the band turned their attention to full-length Tell Me Where the Flowers Are, and the album is now being released by Filip Zemčík’s Start-track for a limited edition cassette release. Single ‘Warm Flower Sided Road’ serves as the ideal introduction for those unfamiliar with the outfit, blending brooding grunge tones with math rock invention to hint at both the weight and fluidity of the Eversame sound.

Indianna Hale – Hollow The Words

Described as “a love song to my friend family,” ‘Hollow The Words’ is an encapsulation of Indianna Hale’s hybrid country/dream pop style and the bright yet wistful mood which results. The latest song from upcoming LP Yesterday’s Glitter on Perpetual Doom, the single is typical of the album’s atmosphere, where the beauty of joyful things is shadowed by their inevitable passing. What results is an ambivalent sound which could be described as sweet, sad or even surreal, with Western overtones adding some cosmic desert spirit too. Watch the video directed by Sean Olmstead below:

Yesterday’s Glitter is out on the 1st September via Perpetual Doom and you can pre-order it now.

Meagre Martin – Please Clap

Led by Boston-born, Berlin based songwriter Sarah Martin, Meagre Martin has been described as a vehicle for survival and catharsis within our unstable world. With debut album Gut Punch, coming later this year on Mansions and Millions, Martin uses this distance from the US to better examine her home country, be it religious fundamentalism or the ever-worsening climate catastrophe, all delivered with a country-inflected brand of indie rock. Latest single ‘Please Clap’ draws on an image of Jeb Bush floundering before a crowd as an archetypal example of the strange mix of brutality, banality and insecurity which marks the present American psyche. Watch the video directed by Alessandra Corazzini and produced along with Ruby Chopping below:

Gut Punch is out on the 10th November via Mansions and Millions and you can pre-order it now.

Ocie Elliott – Free

Hailing from Victoria, BC, Ocie Elliott (that’s duo Jon Middleton and Sierra Lundy) have made their name with a compassionate and often romantic brand of folk music. Writing of previous single ‘With the Lights Down‘, we described how their intimate style conjured “a moment to remember the things you appreciate while they are still close at hand,” and the description could serve the outfit’s sound more generally. Latest track ‘Free’ is another example, again charged with the wistful fondness we’ve come to expect, welcoming the listener into their music’s mindful peace.

Head up, I’m going down
New paths on old ground
Wildflowers and bird songs
These hours, I feel strong

Pleasure Systems – Everything I Need (ft. Melody English)

His first new music since devastating 2021 album Visiting the Well, ‘Everything I Need’ is the new single from Clarke Sondermann’s Pleasure Systems. It’s a collaboration with New York‘s Melody English and sees a continuation of Pleasure Systems’ unique relationship with time. “Immediate thoughts coalesce with memories,” as we wrote of the previous album, “anguish swirls with past joys and the current stark absence muddles with a previous, very real, presence.” ‘Everything I Need’ is rooted in the present but finds itself drifting across the temporal spectrum. Flashing back to what has now passed, daring to imagine a future. And in the end, settling for what sits in the here and now.

When the evening dies
And we’re sharing the surprise
Past and present sitting softly in your eyes

Turn another day
In the getting in the way
Everything I need is here to stay

Roselit Bone – Ofrenda

Written in the aftermath of the loss of several friends and acquaintances, the title track of Roselit Bone’s Ofrenda is a song haunted by a spectre of death. “Grief would knock me down for weeks or months at a time,” as lead Charlotte McCaslin explains. “But I noticed that, for some brief little moments, the pressure of grieving would give way and I would suddenly feel ‘okay’. I would then be flooded with pangs of guilt for surviving, for not suffering alongside the dead.” The song, and indeed the album as a whole, doesn’t so much try to exorcise this spectre as step out from beneath its shadow. A blend of country and Mexican ranchera music which owes as much to Ennio Morricone as it does punk, emerging with a strangely triumphant air as it faces the most difficult question head on. How do we go on living in full knowledge of what is coming? What does it mean to live in a world which seems to be dying too?

Ofrenda is out via Get Loud Recordings on the 25th August and you can pre-order it now.

Sun June – Get Enough

Bad Dream Jaguar, the forthcoming album by Sun June on Run For Cover Records, sees the band lean further into the style they’ve established across their previous records. A mix of emotional immediacy and ethereal weightlessness, a picture where the line between the ground and the sky is blurred into insignificance. A spacious mirage that’s something like a dream, something like Texas, caught between the comfort of memory and the vertiginous realisation that memory might be all we have. New single ‘Get Enough’ appears to be aware of its position within this environment, embracing its untethered status to drift towards what could be bitter end or absolute truth.

Bad Dream Jaguar is out on the 20th October via Run For Cover Records and you can pre-order it now.

Thomas Powers – Li (ft. Chelsea Jade)

Having risen to fame as part of New Zealand synth pop outfit The Naked and Famous, Thomas Powers was gearing up to release a new record with the band just as the pandemic hit and curtailed their plans. The intervening downtime provided an opportunity to pursue solo work, and debut single ‘Li’ shows the first fruits of the endeavour. Featuring fellow Aotearoa artist Chelsea Jade, the song presents an altogether more reserved soundscape than those of TN&F, though one which nevertheless offers a considerable emotional punch. The introspection of an empty room blown up into cinematic grandeur. Watch the video directed by Thomas Powers, Chelsea Jade & Luna Shadows below:

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

Truth Club – Exit Cycle

Since the release of debut Not An Exit on Tiny Engines back in 2019, Raleigh outfit Truth Club have looked to push the boundaries of what the band could sound like. The addition of Yvonne Chazal to the line-up only furthered this motivation, the newly formed quartet deciding to work with a more communal brand of songwriting. A process intended to “hold space for criticism, critique, input, and inspiration from the rest of the band in any context.” Having now signed with Double Double Whammy, Truth Club are set to release new record From the Chase, and latest single ‘Exit Cycle’ is an encapsulation of their new methods. A track which always felt like it was missing something until collaboration kicked in, with Indigo De Souza adding vocals to finally realise its proper form. “The emotional path of the song parallels the journey of writing it,” lead Travis Harrington explains. “It begins in the most private and insular place, and finally grows into a joyfully collective outpour.” Watch the video directed by Alex Montenegro below:

From the Chase is out on the 6th October via Double Double Whammy and you can pre-order it now.

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A collaboration between long-time friends Katherine Dohan and David B. Greenberg, New Jersey‘s Ambrosia is a project based around spontaneity and sincerity. Their Tears EP draws on elements of bedroom pop, indie rock and psychedelia to realise this goal, their style as stirring as it is playful and full of affirming joy. With its upbeat rock rhythm, eponymous opener ‘Ambrosia’ shows the duo at their most energetic, while ‘I Saw Your Heart’ offers a more cryptic tone—an off-kilter pop sure to win over fans of acts like Dear Nora.

Billow – Swimming Pool

Based in Veselí Nad Moravou, Czechia, Billow is a lo-fi pop three piece led by Lenka Zborilova. Ahead of latest EP IV coming later this month on Z Tapes, they have unveiled a brand new single, ‘Swimming Pool’. Taking an altogether lighter tone from previous album III, the single is indicative of the intimate warmth of the new release, though its fond textures are shadowed by a pervasive melancholy too.

Crake – Winter’s Song

Exploring grief and cruelty through an evocatively cryptic style, Humans’ Worst Habits by Leeds-based outfit Crake take Nan Shepherd’s focus on the natural world and add the unsettling dark of Shirley Jackson. A collision of the organic and metaphysical which sees lead Rowan Sandle conjure a world both alien and very much our own. Such a paradox is just one of the complexities at work on the record, and is nicely captured by latest single, ‘Winter’s Song’. “That time I saw the moon rise / And I swore it was a sun set,” Sandle sings. An image remarkable or ominous, or perhaps both simultaneously.

Fontanarosa – OH ID

Are You There ?, the debut album of Lyon-based Fontanarosa, is coming next month on Howlin’ Banana Records and lead single ‘OH ID’ gives a glimpse into the excitable sound which awaits. Combining agitated post-rock angles with smooth pop energy, the band practices tight execution within an off-the-wall playfulness, leading to something of many moving parts that will get your parts moving too. Check out the video by Documavision below:

Are You There ? is out on the 18th March via Howlin’ Banana Records.

Frog Eyes – When You Turn on the Light

Despite supposedly splitting up four years ago and repurposing as Soft Plastics, Toronto-based indie rock stalwarts Frog Eyes are set to return this spring with a brand new record, The Bees. Lead single ‘When You Turn on the Light’ captures the idiosyncratic style lead Carey Mercer has made the Frog Eyes M.O. A song somehow both sprawling and understated, partially inspired by the time Mercer painted a fresco on the wall of his rented Vancouver apartment. “A hellish umber landscape” which poisoned the air with paint fumes and accelerated if not wholly caused Mercer’s subsequent eviction. Check out the video directed by Derek Janzen below:

The Bees is out via Paper Bag Records on the 29th April and you can pre-order it now.

Granny Smith – Out Of My Head

The recording project of Toronto‘s Jason Bhattacharya, Granny Smith is a one man band indebted to the classic pop of yesteryear. Latest track ‘Out of My Head’ is a bite-sized meditation on the dissociative episodes Bhattacharya faced after being put into a coma by a series of seizures. An unreal swirl of piano and dreamy vocals are underpinned by a variety of bass lines shooting off in different directions. “I wanted to express the feeling of having multiple narratives going on at once,” Bhattacharya explains, “trying to listen but your mind is telling you a thousand things.”

KMRU – shela

Under the moniker KMRU, Nairobi’s Joseph Kamaru has made a name crafting expansive yet intimate compositions through a layered variety of ambient, drone and field recording styles. A sound at once thoroughly immersive and thematically probing, examining the relationship between people and their surroundings, as well as change both spatial and temporal. Taken from latest release there was nothing in between, ‘shela’ exists within the slipstream of the present moment. An energetic bustle already haunted by its coming absence.

Melanie MacLaren – Deep Dark Sleep

Writing of single ‘Graveyard Shift‘ last summer, we described the music of Nashville-based songwriter Melanie MacLaren as “indebted to the past and the present without being beholden to either, managing to possess the timeless country spirit without sacrificing any sense of immediacy.” The final single from her EP Kill My Time, ‘Deep Dark Sleep’ continues this style. Its classic wistful tone rooted in the acoustic guitar, the sound made richer with washes of synths, all coalescing around the piercing clarity of MacLaren’s vocals.

Kill My Time is out now and you can find out more from the Melanie MacLaren webpage.

Ross Jenkins – Small House

Next month sees the release of Free All Day, the latest album Vancouver-based songwriter Ross Jenkins. Building upon the DIY style first shown on 2019’s Green EP, the records sees Jenkins joined by Ryan Jewell (drums) and Barry Walker Jr. (pedal steel) and making his richest, most considered songs to date. Spacious first single ‘Music is Sweet’ showed both the sharp writing and easy-going confidence which informs the new album, and latest track ‘Small Houses’ not only doubles down but opens up new avenues too with a subtle mysticism.

Sadurn – snake

Originally the solo project of Genevieve DeGroot, Philadelphia‘s Sadurn have evolved into a quartet and announced their debut album on Run For Cover Records. Recorded in a DIY studio the band created in an Airbnb in Pennsylvania’s Poconos Mountains, Radiator sees everything that was good about the lo-fi early Sadurn recordings polished up, dusted off and matured into a folk-inflected style that draws as much genuine emotion from its melodies as it does its introspective lyrics. Lead single ‘snake’ is a good example and you can check it out below:

Sooner – Thursday

Ahead of the debut album Days and Nights on Good Eye Records, Brooklyn’s Sooner have unveiled a brand new single, ‘Thursday’. The track is an encapsulation of the band’s style. A melding of dream pop lightness with heavier alt/shoegaze elements, the vocals of lead Federica Tassano proving equally malleable in their ability to pivot from soft croon to urgent energy as they chart a toxic relationship. Juxtaposition lies at the heart of the Sooner sound, and ‘Thursday’ is the perfectly bittersweet introduction.

Days and Nights is out via Good Eye Records on the 25th March and you can pre-order it from the Sooner Bandcamp page.

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