bedbug’s latest release, if i got smaller grew wings and flew away for good, sees further advancement in Citron’s sound and songwriting. The aforementioned flow has been developed further, with themes homed in on and explored across the thirteen songs, and the repetition of spoken word samples in the opening and closing tracks acting like a prologue and epilogue to the main narrative of the record. The experimental elements have also been improved and expanded, with an array of electronics and ambient noises flipping and spinning and haunting each track, adding a lovely depth to the otherwise simple melancholy.

Thematically, the album feels very much of our times, a chronicle of lonely young people comprising of honest, intimate thoughts, wistful, nostalgic instrumentation and the ever-pervasive interjections of pop culture. Televisual phrases pop up in and between songs, ghosts floating through the matrix of our digital world, falling into meaningful arrangements by fate or chance. This is backed up with song titles that could be half-ironic or pseudo-ironic or completely sincere, things like ‘animal crossing diary entries’ and ‘leaving town, moving to a national park’ and ‘i looked outside, it was hailing cactus needles’, all capped off with a <3. Quite whether these titles (and the childlike, pastel-coloured, equally-heart-strewn artwork) are earnest or sarcastic is unclear, perhaps even to Citron himself, though, a trademark of the 90s-born Sad Art aesthetic, that’s kind of the whole point.

We’re delighted to host the album in its entirety, so make yourself comfortable, kick back and lose yourself in the wonderfully sad/happy world of bedbug:

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The first single from an upcoming full-length, ‘Housemouse’ is a brand of acoustic bedroom pop with emo overtones and deliciously rough alt-folk delivery. The song plays as half apology, half plea for help, both the narrator and the target of his communication clearly suffering in one way or another, while also dealing with the concerns of solipsism that come with mental pain. Caught in the double whammy of feeling bad and feeling-bad-for-feeling-bad, the track bristles with a raw-throated intensity which gives the whole thing a sincere, cathartic air, even if no conclusion or solution can be reached.

“I left you in your state
Clouding the fact that
It wasn’t too late
Wouldn’t be the first one
Your suffering I’ve chosen to ignore

Didn’t even mean to do you harm
Didn’t even mean to leave you there
Didn’t even have to go that far
Hit me so that I could just not stare

[…]

We all have burdens
We all have burdens they feel the same
But they look different”

The full-length on which ‘Housemouse’ belongs is still in progress, but be sure to keep an eye on Wyndwood’s Soundcloud and Facebook pages for updates. In the meantime, why not head to the Wyndwood Bandcamp page and explore his previous releases?

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The album opens with ‘wild fire/flowers’, a track which sounds like a cross between Yowler and Moutain Man, the opening a wild hymnal (“let is spread like wild fire / let it grow like wild flowers / everything we know comes from water”) before the introduction of electric guitar and a hazy ambient background. The song is a good introduction to Trust Fall’s aesthetic, the gentle bedroom folk littered with small moments that threaten to be less gentle, the lyrics wrapped in imagery of the natural world, reassuring and timeless yet also volatile, too large to control.

“I had a life
before I was born
in the water”

‘Monsters Aren’t Scary’ is a delicate song buried beneath reverb, the low grumble representing the titular monsters, while ‘Winter Walking’ is a short track in the vein of free cake for every creature or Cyberbully Mom Club, full of small, sincere details that read like an internal practise of a conversation that will never take place (“Winter walking by the ocean / this is a good rock to sit down on / you are a good friend to sit next to”). ‘Boundlessness’ has a similar feel, although a dark cloud has passed over the narrator, the easy joy of the previous track replaced by uncertainty and unease.

“When did we invite the storm in our home?
And I envy the way you seem to know the way.
I’ll try not to rely on your ghost”

‘In yr truck’ opens sad and lonely, like Girlpool played at half-speed in an empty field, before building into a frenzy, the guitars accelerating and the vocals becoming almost unhinged. ‘Maria’ is slow and melancholic, occupying a flat space of acceptance where the things you love have slipped away. “Everything will change,” she sings. “I must remember that,” as if trying to convince herself such heartache is natural. It becomes clear that the song details a dissolving relationship, the dissipation of love through the slow erosion of time and space.

“What do I do now? What do I say to you
in the kitchen, when you ask what I’ve been up to?
It’s not that you asked, it’s that you had to ask
It’s that you didn’t know that makes me so sad.
I miss you.”

The album closes with a cover of Keith Whitley’s ‘I’m No Stranger to the Rain’, which comes off as a triumphant finale, a moment of strength or assurance in the gloom, as if there’s a certain pleasure in passing through sadness and appearing intact on the other side. “But I’ll put this cloud behind me,” she sings. “That’s how the Man designed me / To ride the wind and dance in a hurricane / I’m no stranger to the rain”. It seems, perhaps ironically, that admitting to your metaphorical wet climate might just help you notice the sky brightening once in a while.

You can grab boundless and unafraid now from the Trust Fall Bandcamp page on a pay-what-you-can basis, and on cassette from Reflective Tapes.

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

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

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

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

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

“Run and tell everybody that Laetitia is
a small fish

I’m just a small fish.

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

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

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

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

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RIYL: Ambient, Ricky Eat Acid, the sounds of space.

Favourite tracks:

You can buy Six Songs on a pay-what-you-can basis from the Cat Be Damned Bandcamp page.

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Details about Henoheno are scarce. We know that he is based in Japan, but that he wrote this album before leaving wherever he was pre-Japan (hence the title). Aaaand… that’s about it. ‘Destroy’ is a lo-fi bedroom pop song with misleadingly chirpy instrumentation and some rather dark lyrics. Imprisoned within the adolescent cell of Home, the narrator deals with suffocating anxiety and dread, denouncing his situation and pleading for help:

“I hate my parents they really fuck me over. I just want to leave this house.
I hate my family they really fuck me over. Don’t want to see them ever again.
Get me out, get me out, I can’t say it enough. Get me out, get me out ‘cause living here is tough.
I go out, I go out, the stress is killing me. I go out, I go out where nobody knows me.”

With it’s imperfect instrumentation and candid, painfully honest lyrics, Henoheno has more than a bit in common with Coma Cinema. Here unbearable emotional suffering is presented in a detached manner, as if the narrator has transcended into an outer body experience or else knows the pain so well it lacks the immediacy it once possessed. The talk of drastic action in the strangely catchy chorus only furthers this sense of dissociation between the narrator’s body and self:

“I stopped that feeling but it has come back. I feel like shit and I just want to destroy myself”

The album might not be the easiest of listens, but will speak to many who feel alone and afraid and in need of connection. In a world where social media pushes photoshopped portraits and misleadingly exciting lives, artists like Henoheno are needed to remind us just how hard life can be.

I Made These Songs Before I Moved will be released on the 2nd of July on Fox Food Records. You can pre-order it now via Bandcamp, both digitally or on limited edition cassette tapes (which are a lovely pea green, see below).

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“Rather than telling full stories, Timmins’ words instead come off as a stream of consciousness, a man alone and thinking, spilling words that he wishes he could share with those that need to hear them.”

Timmins is back with some new songs which continues this raw, finger-picked sound. Darker than anything on Six Songs, ‘To the Dark Horizion’ is as ominous as the title suggests, the restrained guitar providing a delicate frame upon which sit the haunting vocals which return to the prophetic phrase of the title. It’s the kind of defeated, sad mixture of plea and warning that is no doubt echoing around the UK after yesterday’s election – a belief that while we don’t have the answer, it can’t be what is happening.

“Imperfect dreams of an imperfect mind,
Time to pack up, take what’s left of mine
to the black horizon”

There a few more songs on his Soundcloud page, so head there if you want to hear more. Also, be sure to check out Six Songs if you haven’t already. Mark also does some great drawings so head on over to Tumblr to have a look at those.

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Won is certainly not afraid to share her feelings with the listener, and I get the sense that that’s kind of the point, that writing songs about the things that get you down can sometimes pick you back up again, or at least give you a sense of perspective and shows how things are not as bad as they seem. The good news is that this effect works two ways, and what acts as therapy for Won as a writer/musician has the same effect on us as the listener. It’s one of my favourite things about this kind of music, the way that an entirely personal and cathartic process is released into the big wide world to help others too.  Some sad music can be dispiriting, sucking the hope from your brain via the auditory canal, but stuff like this has the opposite effect, neatly sidestepping melodrama in favour of unflinching sincerity.

The sound of the album is in that bedroom pop vein (e.g. Kissing Fractures, Alanna McArdle, Free Cake For Every Creature et al.).  ‘Best Friends’ uses a drum machine and twinkling guitar to support Won’s questions of, “Where did all your best friends go?”, while ‘Fade Away’ sounds like jangle pop slowed to half pace. ‘Awake’ is largely instrumental with a slow build and some breathy background aahs and ‘March Sadness’ is all echoey lo-fi with added xylophone.

The songs also contain some really nice writing, such as on the anxiety-ridden, ‘I Feel So Small’, in which Won sings, “Hid in the floorboards til you came home, I feel so small without you” (which brought to mind this image). But it’s a line on the deceptively hopeful-sounding ‘Forever’ which steals the show, and sums up the entire album rather neatly:

“I don’t feel too alive today
this strange feeling won’t go away
I think it is here to stay
forever”

You can download on a name-your-price basis at the Boosegumps Bandcamp page. I’d recommend you get right to it.

P.S. Did you see Boosegumps on our Favourite Free Music of 2014 List?

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The album’s title is a good introduction to its theme, that is: what happens after university finishes and takes all of your money and structure and most of your friends with it (a theme which is all too relevant for a lot of people I know). Put simply, Moving Songs is an album about being suddenly unmoored in the big wide world, about moving around trying to find a place in which you fit. So when on opener ‘Take on Me’ Bennett sings, “Sitting in my room, another year behind me, sitting on the floor…I’m not sure what I’m doing, all I know is I gotta keep on moving”, it’s pretty easy to see what kind of place she was in when writing these songs. ‘Moo Moo Movin’ is another track which deals with constant relocation (duh! look at the title!), “I lived in a pink room for a few weeks and I lived in a shed for almost a year and I lived in New Jersey ’til I was 13 and every since I’ve moved”.

And no matter what we’d like to believe, we aren’t all cowboys who can drift around without thinking, rambling lone wolves for whom physical passage is as inevitable as the passage of time. Moving is difficult. We form relationships with places and the people who live in them, relationships that can be painful to break. Listening to these songs it is apparent that Bennett knows this. So when, on ‘Moving Song’ she sings, “And honestly I don’t even wanna leave, cause I got my friend the oak tree, when the wind blows she says hey!”, it’s clear that she is, on some level at least, being entirely serious.

The album also touches on how this roaming can become a habit and, like all habits, can lead to some questionable decision making, about how moving can actually become more like running away, about resisting that thing they call “Home”. Take these lines from ‘Moo Moo Movin’:

“I eat grapefruit from a green bowl
and wonder why we’re moving to philly
when what I want now is an eggplant garden
and neither of us has spent much time in cities
feels to late to reconsider
even though it isn’t”

There is also a knock-on effect of this phenomenon, namely the occasional all-encompassing fear that can overwhelm even the most positive of us, the difficulty in experiencing and enjoying the world every day when there’s this big dark and stormy thing called “The Future” looming on the horizon. Bennett approaches this struggle head-on on ‘Day to Day’,

“I’ll try and think about
all I ever wanted
in their backseat
driving home from Brooklyn

Get caught up in dreading
to return to a routine I didn’t create
try not to worry about my life’s trajectory
and just see your face”

Of course, you couldn’t really write songs about moving on without doing some looking back too. Many of the tracks are infused with memories, rising like dust-specked vignettes from Bennett’s brain, evoking a sense of nostalgia and regret, that strange kind of quietly happy sadness that sets in when you really get to thinkin’ ’bout things. You can find examples of such reminiscence all over the album, e.g. on ‘So Much Strange to Give’, “Thinking about four summers ago, driving down quiet back roads in south Jersey, I was stinking of lake water and snack bar grease”, and particularly on ‘The First Time I Hung Out With You’, which is imbued with memories of harmless irresponsibility, full of great lines like:

“The twenty-third time I hung out with you
we lit sparklers from dollar general
in my dark dorm room,
before we did we’d been so blue
then your face lit like it was your birthday
til the sparks fizzled into dust in our hands
poof”

One of my favourite things about Moving Songs is the way it presents these anxieties but also provides reassurance. The most obvious example of this is ‘All You Got to Be When You’re 23’, which takes a soundbite from Ben Stiller’s Reality Bites and forms a kind and heartening chorus out of it:

“All you gotta be
when you’re twenty three
is yourself”

And take note that the above sentiment hold true whether you’re twenty three or fifty three or eighty three. The song acts as a prescribed remedy to worrying about the future and your place in it. There is an answer and the answer is simple – just be yourself. No matter where you wander be sure to hold on tight to the things that make you you (including the people you love) and do your best to enjoy the ride. It turns out the world is actually a pretty cool place. So if you’re reading this review and the worries feel all too familiar then remember remember remember it’s not all that bad. All these swirly scary unsettled times are just a part of growing up into the big boys and girls we’ll one day turn into. And these songs certainly aren’t all gloomy and miserable, there’s eagerness and anticipation here too. As Bennett puts it:

“New things are frightening
but they’re also the most exciting”

You can buy Moving Songs on cassette via Double Double Whammy or as a digital download via the Free Cake For Every Creature Bandcamp page.

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Eskimeaux is the recording project of Brooklyn-based musician and producer Gabrielle Smith. Adopting the moniker in 2007, Smith has put out a series of albums which vary from weird experimental noise to sad bedroom folk. Her forthcoming album O.K. on Double Double Whammy is said to be ‘beat-driven and poetic bedroom pop’, which sounds pretty good to us.

The usual Eskimeaux band consists of Felix Walworth (of Told Slant), Lago Lucia, Oliver Kalb (of Bellows) and Jack Greenleaf (of Sharpless), who also helped Smith arrange, mix and produce O.K. It seems clear that Smith has enlisted the talents of her friends to ensure that her album is as good as it could possibly be. As well as the DDW links, she is also a founding member of the Brooklyn songwriting/art collective The Epoch, and this release utilises all of her connections in the independent scene. Aside from the aforementioned band members, Smith also thanks Henry Crawford (of Small Wonder) and Mitski Miyawaki (AKA just plain Mitski) among others. The artwork is no less a team effort, with the main embroidery design by Susannah Lee Cutler (of Yours Are The Only Ears) adapted from a photo by Andrew Piccone, the cover photos by Richard Gin, the insert by Colin Alexander (of Flashlight O) and the spine by Emily Sprague (who you may know as Florist). While the proof will be in the pudding (i.e. how the full release sounds), it seems O.K. is a testament to the power of gathering good friends and kind strangers who are all pulling in the same direction, a reminder that good, carefully put together art has infinitely more value than whatever the PR men and women try to push at you.

Only one song is available right now but it definitely whets the appetites. ‘Broken Necks’ fulfils the poetic pop promise, with Smith’s sincere lyrics of love and altruism supported by unsteady percussion which give the whole thing that weird feeling where life has you sad and scared but you wouldn’t change it for the world.

“When I had a million arms I would wrap them around all your body parts
try to keep away all that could do you harm
try to keep out sickness and keep you warm

but every time the going got tough one by one they were falling off
While you were breaking your neck trying to keep your head up
I was breaking my neck just to stick it out for you
and I know we’d hang out everyday if I wasn’t 100 miles away

from our tadpoles gathering in the creek
and our baby birds learning how to shriek
All the eagles I still haven’t seen and the trees proudly alive and green
I could swear they are there just for you and me
whether friends or in love there’s an indisputable beauty”

You can pre-order O.K. now from Double Double Whammy on variety of vinyl designs. If cassette tapes are more your thing then luckily the good folks over at Mt. Home Arts have you covered (in what promises to be quite spectacular style – see below for an early prototype). We’ll write a full review once we get to hear it but trust our instincts and put your order in now.

P.S. The main photo is by the supremely talented Andrew Piccone.

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