Various Swell Sounds is a new collaborative playlist series from Shana Hartzel of Swell Tone, Jon Chin of Cereal and Sounds, and myself. Instead of constantly exchanging tracks amongst each other, we have decided to work together to bring them to more ears. Every month, we will match a selection of our old and brand new favourites to a specific theme, as decided on a revolving basis month by month.

After the brutal summer, the leaves are finally turning, which can only mean one thing. Yep, it’s the time of year to slip on pavements, make tired jokes about pumpkin spice coffee and hide behind closed curtains to ignore the calls for candy from ghouling children. We’ve made a playlist of songs to see you through the cool and crispy season.

There’s a Playmoss and Spotify version below, so choose what suits you best, though due to incomplete catalogues the are slight discrepancies between the two.

Check out our other Various Swell Sounds entries here and here, and head over to Swell Tone and Cereal + Sounds for the edition over there.

The post Various Swell Sounds #9: Cool & Crispy appeared first on Various Small Flames.

The post Wake The Deaf’s Favourite Songs of 2015 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Evening Hymns – Quiet Energies
(REVIEW | INTERVIEW)

“The album takes the suffocating, nebulous shadow of grieving and distils it into something small and hard and strangely tactile, a mysterious object that will always be there in your pocket, radiating its secret and peculiar brand of comfort. This isn’t about forgetting death, or even really ‘moving on’, instead its about coming to a deeper understanding of one’s life, about how a person can be so shaped by another, and how such an impact can and should be a source of immense pride and joy, no matter how hard some days can be. In other words, Quiet Energies is about understanding how it is in fact life, not death, which shapes us and our view of the world.”

Kathryn Joseph – Bones You Have Thrown Me and Blood I’ve Spilled
(REVIEW)

“This is a simple album about things so complicated that it’s almost impossible to put them into words. It’s about those thoughts and feelings that we all experience but never admit, the things that we, be it through etiquette and embarrassment and fear, dare not confess to others or even ourselves. Bones You Have Thrown Me and Blood I’ve Spilled is an album about people: lonely and loved, corporeal and divine, mortal and terrified yet enduring with a resilient hope that never quite goes out.”

Young Jesus – Grow / Decompose
(REVIEW | INTERVIEW)

“As the title describes so neatly, Grow / Decompose speaks of the familiar paths that human lives follow. Despite all the strangeness, the characters here are going through the age-old problems – depression, anxiety, identity crises, existential terror – the problems of being You and You alone, Molina’s “curse of a human’s life”. For all of the complexity of our existence, we are still locked in the atavistic pattern of life and death, everyone more or less condemned to the same mistakes and fears and joys that we as human beings have been experiencing for generations.”

Danielle Fricke – Moon
(REVIEW)

“Moon is a lesson in stillness, a moment stretched out, questions asked but not answered, a monologue that might never leave the room. The wonder of the album is that the human emotions of love and longing never evaporate, continuing to push through the frost where they are warmed by earthshine, opening up the possibility that the very feelings which caused the pain could be the things which end it. So while the narrator is trapped, they never submit to the vacuous silence of space. Hopes are still hoped and dreams are still dreamed and wishes are cast from cold, cupped hands, skywards.”

Yowler – The Offer
(REVIEW)

“Burns with quiet intensity, its strange lyrics feeling oddly personal, giving the album the intimacy of hearing about someone else’s dreams. Guitars sidle and prowl like shadows and the whole thing seems on the verge of something vaguely dangerous. All eight tracks are a study in the art of minimalism, of the exchange between poetry and negative space. It’s certainly a lot more than just quiet and pretty folk music”

Advance Base – Nephew in the Wild
(REVIEW)

“I don’t know Owen Ashworth, and maybe I’m completely wrong, but he seems like a kind and empathetic generally nice human being, in the same way the best writers seem like people you could be friends with. Even if none of that is true, I guess it doesn’t matter – what is indisputable is the fact that he’s a damn good writer who tells stories that speak to and help us all. While it’s easy to cast him as the lonely boy in front of a keyboard, the truth, at least in my eyes, is that he’s often hardly there at all, a transparent gateway into the lives of people you’ve never met, feeling things you thought you had to suffer through alone.”

Siskiyou – Nervous
(REVIEW)

“Nervous is an album of dizzying scope and ambition, quite literally the tumult of sound and emotion inside one man’s head. It is by turns dark and creepy, shimmering and vibrant. Siskiyou have never sounded so eerie, so threatening, or so expansive. And I have to admit, I don’t think they have ever sounded so good.”

Samantha Crain – Under Branch & Thorn & Tree
(REVIEW | INTERVIEW)

“These are songs played like inner thoughts or secret diary entries of persons not usually able to or justified in expressing their true sentiments, people who are not as tough as they let on, but tougher than they think in the middle of the night. A selection of underdogs living the lives they have been given, not pining for more or complaining at a cosmic injustice. Quiet, noble people in the trenches of everyday life, those with the broadest shoulders and smallest voices and a hard, buried sense of pride who treat hardship like a member of the family.”

Lejsovka & Freund – Fatal Strategies
(REVIEW)

“Fatal Strategies inspires a multitude of strange, lateral thoughts – a soundtrack that doesn’t need a film. The musical translation of the postmodern ruminations of an over-active, twenty-first century brain. Music unearthed by a post-society people, who’ll turn it up loud and sit in their ruined cities, reclaimed by branches and vines, and wonder and wonder about us.”

Frog – Kind of Blah
(REVIEW | INTERVIEW)

“Kind of Blah is a product of this place, an album imbued with the spirits of a sparkling past… Judy Garland is America. Lusty teenagers are America. Jesus Christ is America. So is Dr Pibb and dusty valleys and shut-down bowling alleys and all the communal memories shared by millions just like you. Kind of Blah is America, the U S of A in eleven songs – quirky, joyous, breathless, exhausting, addictive, heartbreaking and downright weird, accelerating towards a distant horizon while keeping its eyes firmly on a halcyon past that sure seems like it should have been more fun.”

Oh, Rose – SEVEN
(REVIEW | REVIEW OF ‘SEVEN’, THE VIDEO)

“Olivia Rose’s voice carries the tracks beyond the genre norms into peculiar territories. Raw and versatile, her vocals range from whelps and wails to quiet, haunted whispers. On their début full length SEVEN, a record on which, if anything, Rose pushes things even further. Lean and wiry guitars lead proceedings while a lo-fi buzz envelopes everything, Rose’s words cutting through like shards of glass. The vocals have the quality of an exorcism, like the unnatural utterings of a twelve year old as some jaded man of faith flicks holy water at her forehead.”

Valley Maker – When I Was a Child
(REVIEW | INTERVIEW)

“When I Was a Child is an album about belief and love in a variety of guises, about the big and unknowable questions, from love and growth and family to God and everlasting life. It’s an album about all of us, basically.”

Eskimeaux – O.K.
(REVIEW)

“O.K. is about reality, the moment we live in and the people we share it with. It’s about the things we want and the things we wish for and the things we can’t control. It’s about doing the best you can and hoping it’s enough, about accepting and learning and growing so that whatever hand you’re dealt, you carve out some semblance of meaning and happiness to make everything worthwhile”

Aero Flynn – S/T
(REVIEW)

“This is not an album in which the emotional arc is self-contained and easily mappable… The redemption is the very fact that Scott is creating words and sounds, that he is letting others know where he is and how he is and why he is. The album is the flare of hope hanging in the night sky, burning bright and incandescent.”

Hip Hatchet – Hold You Like a Harness
(REVIEW)

“[Speaks] of that vulnerable core at the heart of every man, and the desperate, ridiculous attempts to suffocate it with cigarette smoke or drown it in whiskey or cover it over with scars. Hold You Like a Harness is an album about tough guys who know deep down that they aren’t so tough. Yeah they fight and drink and make merry, but they’re also sentimental and lovesick and terrified of everything.”

Mike Pace & the Child Actors – Best Boy
(REVIEW)

“Best Boy is for the children of the 80s and 90s, reminiscing about the age where entertainment exploded, where VHS tapes and cable TV transformed us into constant consumers. Of course, as consumers we were sold promises, told we merely needed x, y and z to be happy and successful and pretty and popular. It’s kind of ironic that a time built on visions of the future is now seen as a utopia locked in the past. Pace gets at this feeling by writing feel-good songs tinged with longing, nothing too sad or serious, nor a Father John Misty-style ironic assault. Instead, Best Boy is a wistful celebration of what we had and presents some convincing reasons for why we feel the way we do.”

Fanpage – LYA
(REVIEW)

“Fanpage’s music occupies a space between life and imitation, too mechanical to be described as organic yet too intuitive and mysterious for machines. It wanders a strange distance ahead of the human race, amongst a chaos born of our need for order. Love and delirium and bright white fear roil beneath the feedback, humanity kicking and twisting within a noise filled with myth and magic and dread. Terrifying and beautiful and glorious, LYA is an album for the information age, where data has exploded to incomprehensible volumes and become its own wilderness.”

Titus Andronicus – The Most Lamentable Tragedy
(REVIEW)

“Life (and especially mental illness) isn’t a neat Freytagian pyramid, so why should a representation of it conform to expectations? […] You are left with the impression that the band have said “fuck it, we’re doing it our way”, rejecting a clear genre in favour of whatever felt right at any given time. This kind of zealous self-belief in their own work is interesting, as it’s at odds with Our Hero’s struggles to accept himself as Himself, and sees Titus Andronicus cutting swathes through the field of wannabes, imposters and pretenders and stepping up to the plate as the twenty-first century’s bona fide punk rock band.”

Elvis Depressedly – New Alhambra
(REVIEW)

“This is not a born-again Love-The-World-Because-Life-Is-Great sort of album. Elvis Depressedly will not mend broken bones or cast out demons or have you walking across hot coals. Instead they say that afflictions are not all there is, that you are not defined solely by your circumstances. They say that peace and hope are never out of reach and offer an achievable version of optimism, one which does not require manic enthusiasm or God-like goodwill but instead a pinch of determination and a firm belief in love.”

Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats – S/T
(REVIEW)

“Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats could be your favourite anti-heroes of the sixties, the forgotten friend of Otis Redding and Sam & Dave, or maybe from even further back, a band of villains rolling into nameless pre-war towns to cause shitstorms in cowboy brawl-bars and put smiles faces for one night only. That there is a serious side is less a surprise than a foregone conclusion, because no man has conjured this kind of bone-level fervour out of a pleasant existence. No, here are people staring down the barrel, people stranded in a sea of beer, locked inside some breakneck motion in which a grin and a grimace are practically indistinguishable. Whether this is a defiant two fingers or last hurrah seems unclear even to Rateliff, himself too caught up in a compulsion to dance and scream and shout. Whatever you take from this record, one thing is clear: They can’t put you in the ground if you’re still moving.”

What were your favourite albums of the year? Let us know through one of the usual channels – we’re on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and Instagram.

The post Wake The Deaf’s Favourite Albums of 2015 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

January was a bit of a scrappy month in terms of regular posts, but we still managed to cover some excellent artists. Why not catch up with any you missed with this tailor-made mixtape? Click the artist names in the tracklist to be whisked off to the review.

Tracklist:

1. Jesus in the 70s – Siskiyou
2. 2 Broke 2 Old – Gorgeous Bully
3. Another Way To Go – Adeline Hotel
4. Scene Sick – Diet Cig
5. Dog Burial Theme – Dicktations
6. Up the Academy – Mike Pace and the Child Actors
7. Con/ A Sewer/A Cat – Amateur Love
8. The End is a Vicious Thing – Puzzlecuts
9. Manic Pixie Dream Girl – Furnsss
10. Party Girls – Gleemer
11. Soft Reputation – Unlikely Friends
12. Passing Through – Harley Alexander
13. Coward’s Luck – Hip Hatchet
14. Memphis – The Wandering Lake
15. How a Resurrection Really Feels – The Hold Steady
16. Fire in My Eyes – Yours Are The Only Ears
17. Traffic is Okay – Sitcom
18. Gold & Rose – Dear Sister

Also make sure you check out our mammoth collection of our Favourite ‘Free’ Music of 2014. Finally, if you enjoy long, rambling pieces that try and draw connections between my favourite music and my favourite books, check out this piece on The Hold Steady’s Separation Sunday (Craig Finn said he enjoyed it, so it carries his stamp of approval).

January 2015 Roundup from Wake The Deaf on 8tracks Radio.

The post January 2015 Roundup – A Mixtape appeared first on Various Small Flames.

However, in the year following the release of their last album, Huebert began to suffer from a severe inner ear condition, a problem which evaded conventional diagnosis. Anyone who has suffered from ear problems will know that they can be far more crippling than you would imagine. You can’t hear other people and can’t tell if they can hear you, leading to a profound sense of isolation and often panic. Indeed, Huebert suffered from anxiety and depression, a problem accentuated by the fact that the one sense he relied on to make sense of his emotions was taken away from him.

In lieu of a clinical solution, Huebert turned to meditation and prolonged silence and eventually began to piece together a new album, rehearsing with his band at very low volumes to ease the pain. The resulting songs ultimately became Nervous, an album that charts the period and explores the interplay between physical and psychological suffering, utilizing a beguiling brand of gothic art rock and the dream-logic of a labyrinthine haunted house, or perhaps of Huebert’s mind during the troubling period.     

The record opens with discordant instrumentation and unsettling children’s choir vocals that swirl menacingly like the theme of an evil cartoon. Huebert’s familiar vocals kick in after a minute or so, whispered through the reappearing choir and Colin Stetson’s sax with an earnest desperation, imploring you to listen. “Sometimes you get caught,” he sings, “sometimes you get away. It goes without saying.” The track sets a precedent of unorthodox song structure, with tracks on the album often morphing into distant relations of their former selves, swerving off in directions unseen.

The second track, ‘Bank Accounts and Dollar Bills’, is the pure embodiment of the aforementioned shapeshifting. It begins with a laidback tropical vibe with breezy vocal melodies, before entering a big, punchy (almost Arcade Fire-esque) chamber pop phase. Around two-thirds through it then mutates again, this time to feature sci-fi synths, before finally reverting to the easygoing slide guitar and thus completing the song’s varied cycle.

‘Violent Motion Pictures’ feels like a dream, with its opaque imagery (“Do you really want to see statues turn all the way around to say hello?”) and abnormal, fluctuating narrative. Stetson’s sax makes another appearance, snaking around like the tendrils of a nightmare and making the childlike falsetto “la la la” chorus sound more than a little ominous. The song switches at the halfway point, escaping its cramped and claustrophobic corridors, a creaky old door opening onto a wide and open plain. Huebert’s whispered vocals ride the swirling air currents, “The devil on your shoulder, it’ll get the best of you”.

‘Oval Window’ is perhaps the most similar to previous Siskiyou releases, a surprisingly upbeat song about the psychological problems linked to Huebert’s ear condition. “Maybe I’m just dreaming,” he sings, “sometimes it’s hard to tell”. The song manages to take a difficult subject and make it somehow triumphant, culminating in the refrain “the roof is spinning around me and I can feel the world below my feet”. The title track begins hushed and restrained (“does it hurt all the time? Yeah, I can empathize”) before turning psychedelic, while ‘Imbecile Thoughts’ is a folk-rock song, like a woodsy version of Wolf Parade, picking up the pace as the lyrics tell the tale of an introvert girl, “you gotta get out of the door girl and go look at the sky and wonder why the sun don’t shine like it should and why you are always so misunderstood”. The song builds and builds as Huebert breathlessly delivers the vocals and drums clatter and guitar feedback wails over everything.

Nervous is an album of dizzying scope and ambition, quite literally the tumult of sound and emotion inside one man’s head. It is by turns dark and creepy, shimmering and vibrant. Siskiyou have never sounded so eerie, so threatening, or so expansive. And I have to admit, I don’t think they have ever sounded so good.

Nervous is out now on Constellation Records.

The post Siskiyou – Nervous appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Tracklist:

1. Deserter – Siskiyou
2. Pill – Ought
3. There’s a GIrl In the Corner – The Twilight Sad
4. Kill What You Love – Scotdrakula
5. PS You Still Do This To Me – Kissing Fractures
6. Walls – Two White Cranes
7. Lifetime Warranty – Cyberbully Mom Club
8. The Great Big World – R.L. Kelly
9. Misery Loves Company – Gorgeous Bully
10. Blah Blah Blah – Girlpool
11. My Song – Spencer Radcliffe
12. Summer Lawns – Mike Pace & The Child Actors
13. Crossroads – Sally Fowler
14. Sweet Isolation – Nathan Reich
15. Home At Last – John Statz
16. Our Town – Chalk
17. Mole – The Mountain Goats
18. Easy It Goes – Eric & Magill
19. Slow Thickening – German Error Message
20. Cabin Lights – Lung Cycles
21. The Day is Past and Gone (Variations) – Sarah Louise
22. Holding – Grouper

November 2014 Mix from Wake The Deaf on 8tracks Radio.

The post November 2014 Roundup – A Mixtape appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Nathan Reich – Motion Sadness

One of the joys of Bandcamp is finding artists and albums that would have otherwise passed you by via the music feed page. Nathan Reich, a songwriter and guitarist from Nashville, is one such find. Motion Sadness was recorded in one take and is, in Reich’s words, “filled with imperfections” as a result. This gives the release an organic feel, a real sense of the human behind the tales told, bringing to mind folks like Hip Hatchet and Psalmships.

You can buy the album on Reich’s Bandcamp page.

Brian Laidlaw and the Family Trade – Jeremiad b/w Glad For Every Burden

A couple of weeks back we featured a lovely record by Ben Weaver which was released by a new label run by the folks at Hymie’s Records in Minneapolis. Those good folks have also put out this 7″ by Brian Laidlaw and the Family Trade. A-side ‘Jeremiad’ is a pretty, reflective folk song with some nice strings and a rousing, romantic chorus. The record’s B-side, ‘Glad For Every Burden’ is a lot more countrified, with lyrics that hark back to a classic era of country and folk music. He sings in the chorus: “Oh honey I’m glad I’m glad for every sorrow that I’ve had, I’m glad for every burden / Without this old heart to weight me down, I’d fly away for certain.” You can get the single now via Hymie’s Records and if you haven’t got the Ben Weaver one yet then why not grab that too?

P.S. You can hear some of Laidlaw’s previous releases over at his Soundcloud page. I’d highly recommend it.

Sally Fowler – These Lines Laid Down

These Lines Laid Down is the fourth release from Virginia’s Sally Fowler. She has a fairly traditional sound, employing acoustic instruments and lyrics about sorrows and devils and crossroads, and her voice is strong and mournful and really rather great. If you like First Aid Kit or Laura Marling then it will be right up your street.

Sally started off covering songs via Youtube before progressing into her own material. You can find them on her Youtube channel.

You can buy the album on a pay-what-you-can basis via Bandcamp.

Siskiyou – ‘Deserter’

‘Deserter’ is the first single from Nervous, a brand new album from Canadian folk (?) band Siskiyou. The new album promises to be an advancement of the sparse and ghostly atmosphere of the band’s previous work, a foray into chamber pop territories recently inhabited by artists such as PJ Harvey, Nick Cave and Tindersticks. The mood and texture of the album is a product of health problems faced by lead singer Colin Huebert, who battled an inner ear condition which left him hyper-sensitive to certain volumes and frequencies. Also look out for the impressive roster of guest musicians, including Colin Stetson and Owen Pallett.

Nervous is being released on Constellation Records on the 20th of January. Pre-order it now to get a 12″ x 12″ art print of the beautiful Indian ink artwork by Michael Drebert.

Sarah Louise – Field Guide

Sarah Louise is the recording project of Sarah Henson, a young lady from North Carolina who makes music that feels as old as the Black Mountains which inspire her. “More than anything, these songs are a reflection of my home in the Black Mountains of North Carolina,” she says, “smooth-stone creek bottoms, delicate lunar-born mushrooms beneath rhododendron boughs, extreme changes in elevation.” Her new album Field Guide is coming out in the New Year on Scissor Tail Editions and it feels like a lost disc from Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music. Some of the tracks are inspired by old Appalachian hymns, while others have an almost far-Eastern meditative feel. It’s really, really good.

You can get Field Guide right now on a pay-what-you-want basis over at the Sarah Louise Bandcamp page.

The post Feet on the Ground: Vol 14 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Tracklisting:

1. Lovecrimes (Frank Ocean Cover) – The Afghan Whigs
2. Little Dreamer (Future Islands Cover) – Doe Paoro
3. Bad Days (Flaming Lips Cover) – Siskiyou
4. Again (Janet Jackson Cover) – How To Dress Well
5. Dog Song (Mountain Man Cover) – Stupid Loser
6. Celebrated (Husker Du Cover) – Mark Kozelek
7. Say Say Say (Michael Jackson & Paul McCartney) – Woodpigeon
8. Zebra (Beach House Cover) – Yellow Ostrich
9. Atmosphere (Joy Division Cover) – Flowers Of Hell
10. Climbing Up The Walls (Radiohead Cover) – The Twilight Sad
11. Islands In The Stream (Kenny Rogers & Dolly Parton) – Constantines & Feist
12. Louie Louie (Richard Berry/The Kingsmen Cover) – The Royal Iguana Fur
13. Harvest Moon (Neil Young Cover) – The Sour Notes
14. Into The Fire (Bruce Springsteen Cover) – Paul Baribeau
15. Forgiveness (Patty Griffin Cover) – The Local Strangers
16. Calling And Not Calling My Ex (Okkervil River Cover) – Ola Podrida
17. Please Please Please Let M Get What I Want (The Smiths Cover) – Pickering Pick
18. Jesus, Etc. (Wilco Cover) – Bill Fay
19. Look At Miss Ohio (Gillian Welch Cover) – Blind Pilot
20. The Party’s Over/No Children (Willie Nelson/Mountain Goats Cover) – Manchester Orchestra

Please support the artists by exploring their other releases and becoming huge and dedicated fans.

The Covers Mix: Volume #4 from Wake The Deaf on 8tracks Radio.

The post The Covers Mix: Volume #4 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Siskiyou have another album, Keep Away The Dead, due out in the very near future (October 4th on Constellation Records). If you are impatient (like myself) or need more convincing then you can stream the album now on the Exclaim! website. I’ve only heard the album fully once (although I’ve heard ‘Twigs & Stones’ quite a bit) but I can confidently say it’s a strong follow up.

If you are lucky enough to live in/near Vancouver then get yourself to the Waldorf Hotel on October 13th for the release party of Keep Away The Dead.

The post Siskiyou appeared first on Various Small Flames.