“Quite incredibly considering the lush and layered sound, [Slows Down EP] is an entirely solo effort. Taking inspiration from a wide range of luminaries including Swans, Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Radiohead, [Hawthorne] uses a diversity of techniques, from humming, moaning drones to spiky, cathartic crescendos and a dash of psychedelic hypnotism. But despite the expansive instrumentation,things never stray too far from the refined, minimalist values, the glowing core at the centre of all the tumult and noise.”

Now Hawthorne has released a second EP which sees a return of his dense and layered brand of home-recorded dream/chamber pop. The whole things feels big and monochrome from the very beginning with ‘Wall’, a droning instrumental which sets the atmosphere for what’s to come. The second track, single ‘I’m Not Inside Your Heart,’ introduces Hawthorne’s vocals and is a song which fuses the dream pop of acts such as Beach House with a darker, post-punk edge.

‘I Don’t Know’ sounds almost like a skewed country-rock song from a bad dream, all martial percussion and slashed, squawked electric guitar. ‘Machine’ closes proceedings another heavy and foreboding instrumental built on thick swirls of feedback and shadowy winding guitars. All in all EP2 is an evocative, agitated listen, a thunderhead dream dark and ripe and ready to burst.

You can get the EP on a name-you-price basis via the Slows Down Bandcamp page.

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West America‘s offering is ‘Past is Personal’, a messy garage rock song which lurches from slow to quick to slow again, always feeling on the cusp of something erratic and dangerous. Think the rough noise of Times New Viking meets the peculiar delivery of Krill. The vocals are difficult to discern for the most part (the lyrics read “♩є(･◇･｡)э♩є(･◇･｡)” over and over on Bandcamp), adding to the unsettling feel, as if you are amidst something important but impossible to understand, all meaning and context reduced to sharp energy in the air.

Porridge Radio‘s track ‘Born Confused’ is less ramshackled, an odd and desperate pop song which somehow manages to twin the deadpan drawl of disaffected youth with a fervid, otherworldly catharsis.  To go out on somewhat of a limb, the track sounds like a lo-fi version of a great punk song The National never wrote, offbeat and dreamlike and curiously detached, the attempts to communicate to an unnamed second person through this fog building into frantic, Berninger-esque regurgitations of a simple phrase. What emerges is a track enormously relevant to our generation, the tide of anger and fear and hope breaking through the barriers which normally keep it below the surface (that is, feelings of loneliness, ineptitude, an intense aversion to appearing naive) to make a song uplifting but never glib, and true without ever really understanding why. Thank you for making me happy.

hello dog friendly is out tomorrow (Wed 13th) on Memorials of Distinction. If you are in/near Brighton (UK) then there’s a release show tomorrow evening at Green Door Store (doors at 19:00, 18+), so get along to that, and we’ll try and get a full review of the release written up ASAP.

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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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Admissions of weakness and misery paradoxically suggesting bravery or strength in a weak-to-be-strong sort of way. The whole thing is admirable and relatable and impressively moving, holding a flame to the inherent confusion and grief of being young in the twenty-first century.

Hansford is back with a new track, ‘Open Casket Hidden Meaning’. The song, inspired by the first open casket funeral he attended as a child, as well as the death of his first dog, Noah. As you might expect, the sound is sad and remorseful in a child-like sort of way, the existential anxiety of adults not yet formed so that his grief can occupy a pure, selfless sort of level.

“It’s my fault I don’t believe,
don’t waste time in saving me.”

You can listen to the song now thanks to the good folks over at Indoors Outdoors.

Be sure to grab your copy of Deeply Flawed over on Bandcamp. If tapes are your thing then you can grab one at a show, or I believe you can get in touch which Hansford personally to strike a deal.

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The album opens with ‘Party’, an eerie introduction to the slow, dark aesthetic of Lake Michigan, mixing a dreamy dissociation with the cutting awareness of said isolation, leading to something that is sad and apologetic in equal measure. This continues into ‘Snow’, where Marks channels Malcolm Middleton in that I’m-so-miserable-even-my-surroundings-are-after-me sort of attitude, where the border between laughing and crying seems incredibly small and pretty insignificant.

“I’m watching falling foliage, it dances between stone slabs.
The suburbs are screwing me and I want out.
I’m picturing you walking in, it makes me feel chill, inebriated.
I’m trying to remember if it was you I saw when my eyes closed”

‘Sober’ deals with the peaks and troughs of loving (“The thing about being alone and not in love is that it makes you feel sober… But when you start feeling it again, you are intoxicated. Blissfully stupidly ignorantly uninformed, yet smiling”), while ‘Real (Ad Breaks Pt. 2)’ runs with the idea of the passage of time and reality getting in the way of good times. Just as we described in our Free Cake for Every Creature write-up, post-collegiate blues can hit hard, and anyone who has left university will relate to Marks’ writing here:

“Guess who’s just another cross on the road maps, a place to get to via train.
The hours ran out and so did the days. I stopped trying to try.
We’ll never talk shit on my front step again,
we’ll never grace that beer garden again.
I wish that we could go back to that mismatched old room,
but people messed up and the rest of us grew up.
Now all that’s left is to keep on walking,
the breaks are now over
and real life has hit.”

The EP is out now on Wolf Town DIY and Ruined Smile Records, or you can buy it from the Lake Michigan Bandcamp page.

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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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Butterfly House is a band from Brighton, led by Martyn Lewis, who make a dark brand of sadcore preoccupied with death, loss and depression. His latest album, By Ghostlight, is strangely both relatable and obscure, a familiar angst filtered through an eerie lens made of ground up bones and spider webs. Indeed, the term ghostlight has pretty creepy connotations. As Lewis describes:

“In victorian theatres, a ghostlight was a lamp left on over night to ensure that the gas they used at the time didn’t build up in the system. Legend began to wrap around this custom, and eventually the ghostlight was said to be used as a beacon for ghosts to put on their own performances when the theatre was closed, and by appeasing them, they wouldn’t cause havok.”

By mixing the bedroom pop aesthetic with lyrics that sound like something Malcolm Middleton might deliver if he lived in a haunted mansion, Butterfly House straddle the hopeful youth/miserable acceptance divide. ‘Birds Strung Together’ is a love song that deals with hesitation and fear (“When you spread your wings, I’m paralysed”), ‘God is Laughing at Me’ covers Lewis’ insecurities about his singing voice and questions the justification of songwriting (”God is laughing at me because self-importance is blasphemy”), while closer ‘Phantoms Forever’ faces up to worries of death and the loss of self (“If I die keep me alive in your dreams and memory”)

It would be easy to say Lewis has created an album for goths too bashful to wear black lipstick. But not only does By Ghostlight have all of the peculiarity of such subcultures without the self-awareness, playing as the odd machinations of a mind rather than a conceited performance, there is more to the album than a vaguely supernatural darkness. Because despite how the song titles may sound, Lewis offers hope on these songs. Rather than pretend everything is bright and breezy, By Ghostlight finds hope through accepting reality, acknowledging our minuscule position in the grand scheme of things and remembering that everyone else is in the same boat. In this way, the album is a light in the gloom, a reminder that we are all alone together.

You can grab By Ghostlight now on a pay-what-you-can basis via Bandcamp. The artwork is by Jasmine Scott.

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Slows Down is the recording name of Alexander Hawthorne, a self-taught multi-instrumentalist from London who has just released his self-titled debut EP. He describes his music as, “between minimalist, melancholy chamber pop and dense, menacing psychedelic noise rock”. The record was written during Hawthorne’s travels in India and the USA and, quite incredibly considering the lush and layered sound, is an entirely solo effort. Taking inspiration from a wide range of luminaries including Swans, Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Radiohead, he uses a diversity of techniques, from humming, moaning drones to spiky, cathartic crescendos and a dash of psychedelic hypnotism. But despite the expansive instrumentation,things never stray too far from the refined, minimalist values, the glowing core at the centre of all the tumult and noise.

Opener ‘The Blues Easing’ kicks things off to a slightly ominous start, with stark guitars and a steady thudding drum beat and a haunting atmosphere snaking around everything. The music is backed by Alexander’s intimately mumbled vocals, sounding at once both sad and slightly dangerous. Next is ‘On The Street’, a meandering slow build of a track which eventually explodes into bright shining life in the last minute. ‘In My Room’ has an almost spaghetti western feel, with a militaristic drum beat and dramatic swells of instrumentation. Hawthorne cites Middle Eastern classical music as an influence and perhaps that is what comes to the fore here? On this track especially it is amazing to think that this is the effort of just one man, and I am interested to hear how these songs sound when Alexander puts together a full band to play live later this year. The EP closes with ‘The Way Down Leering’, over seven minutes of menacing post-rock-meets-lo-fi rock, something along lines of The Twilight Sad meets Liars, complete with subdued deadpan vocals and an airy, hushed lull of near-silence except the twinkling of a xylophone.

You can buy Slows Down EP on 12″ vinyl or as a pay-what-you-want download via the Slows Down Bandcamp page.

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So begins Lost Summer, the new EP from Talons’. If you’re not familiar with Talons’ then you should be. It’s primarily the recording work of Mike Tolan, although various others have contributed along the way. Tolan makes hushed, very sad songs which could be described as bedroom pop or post-folk or some other such phrase. All you need to know is that it’s really good. The great news is that Lost Summer is intended to precede a brand new album, After Talons’, which I am very excited about.

The EP plays like the internal musings of a normal person. That’s ‘normal’ in that their thoughts are filled with an honesty and sincerity so earnest that it comes off as a certain brand of weirdness. ‘Normal’ in that they spend the rest of their time anxious about this dysfunctionality and how apparent it must be to everyone else.

“And in between bands, I nurse my one beer and stare at the floor, wishing that I had an iPhone, so it wouldn’t be so clear that I’m not talking to anyone”

While the lyrics may seem like an internal dialogue, other sections reveal that there is a second part here, a signifcant other, and the words begin to read like a collections of worries, admissions of weakness and joy that are achingly simple. There are no grand promises, cinematic splits and reunions, no explicit declarations. Lost Summer says “I Love You” in a much more affecting way than any of that.

“When the plane went down/you were at home. But then the phone rang/but it was just me checking in from work. It slid across a road and into someone’s back yard and when it stopped- No one we knew died. No one we’d ever know died.”

Get Lost Summer on a pay-what-you-want basis via the Talons’ Bandcamp page.

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The Meanest Creature Ever Known is Matthew Healy and Oliver Roditi from Edinburgh, and they have just put out their first album, You, Having Fun. Apparently the album is about “being alive and a bit sad.” As you might expect from that description, You, Having Fun is folky slowcore release that brings to mind quite a range of influences, from Phosphorescent to talons’

The album is available on a pay-what-you-can basis over at bandcamp.

Kississippi – I Can Feel You in My Hair Still

Kississippi is a sad girl from Phildelphia. She writes songs that are not mere catchy ditties, but instead full blown poetry. Stuff like this:

“You were swallowing god damning dogmas 
rough palmistry your hands could not align 
unsexed you borrowed callow spit, not lost 
no, looking for a space, just not mine 

redolent with skin of unknown 
unwary hands, nomadic ghost 
levied words from my spiteful throat 
understanding where my thoughts go 
you’d build a boat out of my bones.”

You can buy her album on Bandcamp for whatever you can afford.

James Junius – I’ll Hide Myself/Sleepers

Salt Lake City’s James Junius combines folk, ambient and jazz music to make atmospheric tracks “in an attempt to portray the world as he sees and the people he has met in various late night conversations out under the ferments.” Further details on Junius are few and far between, but you can download both tracks via Bandcamp.

Thad Kopec – Noble Neighbor

I stumbled across Thad Kopec’s cover of ‘Fake Empire’ a few days ago (and included it on our latest mix), and as luck would have it, he has a new(ish) album out right now. If folk music (with a touch of ambient music thrown in) complete with Biblical lyrics is your thing, Thad Kopec is probably your thing too. You can buy the album from Bandcamp, or grab it for whatever donation you can muster via Noisetrade.

Sea Wolf – Song Spell, No. 1: Cedarsmoke

The first release from Sea Wolf frontman Alex Brown Church’s Song Spell series, Cedarsmoke is a welcome reminder of how good Sea Wolf are. My listening relationship with the band is eerily similar to that of Jeremy over at HI54LOFI, and I am very much enjoying catching up with what I have been missing. There will be more Song Spell releases in between the ‘proper’ studio albums, so keep your eyes peeled and ears open for what Sea Wolf have to offer. Don’t make the same mistake we did.

Miss America By Wheary – All is Not Lost

Miss America by Wheary have been whetting our appetite over the past few weeks with singles from the EP All in Not Lost. Well you can stop dribbling and chow down on the full release. They make a brand of Americana that brings to minds acts like Jason Isbell and Water Liars, with an added experimental/ambient lilt which gives the whole thing a nice cinematic feel.

You can grab this one from Bandcamp too.

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