Unveiling an upcoming EP of the same name on Future Gods, Anni Rossi‘s ‘Wild West‘ established the artistic vision of the Brooklyn-based songwriter, performer and multi-instrumentalist. The EP, collaboration with cinematographer Sarah Tricker, sits “at the intersection of various modes of expression,” we wrote, “ideally placed to draw from [audio-visual] fields to create singular and inventive pieces of work.” New single ‘Chasing the Tiger’ follows with another evocative sound, the piano helping find a delicate balance between the ethereal and the human and emerging with something both sensual and reflective.

Wild West is out now via Future Gods.

Apollo Ghosts – Spilling Yr Guts

Vancouver‘s Apollo Ghosts made a splash in 2010 with their Polaris-nominated record, Mount Benson, though seemingly disbanded in 2013 as lead Adrian Teacher moved on to found COOL TV and other projects. But stories of their demise turned out to be exaggerated as Apollo Ghosts returned in 2019 with Living Memory, and the comeback appears to be a lasting one as this month saw the release of brand new album Pink Tiger on You’ve Changed Records. Single ‘Spilling Yr Guts’ is just one of twenty-two bright and inventive tracks, but its fresh, buoyant rhythm serves as the perfect point of entry for those looking to be swept away.

Spilling your guts on the sidelines
Spilling your guts on the stage
When you’ve got fuck all inside you
You’ll finally have something to say

A Starving Viking – Leaves

The moniker of Connecticut-based songwriter Matt Jarrett, A Starving Viking is a folk project which primarily relies on an intimately simple balance of guitar and vocals. His debut record Semblance was released in 2019 via Resonating Wood Recordings, though in anticipation of a new EP the label has released an amended version, now titled reSemblance. Single ‘Leaves’ is a great introduction to A Starving Viking‘s patient and kind-hearted sound, the melancholy of its murmured style counterbalanced by an ever-present compassion.

Fake Fruit – No Mutuas

Just over a year ago, Oakland, California indie rock band Fake Fruit released a self-titled album on Rocks In Your Head Records. Lead by guitarist/vocalist Hannah D’Amato, the band draw on classic post-punk to create something fresh and often acerbic, drawing on the frustration and general weirdness of 21st century living. A standout was single ‘No Mutuals’, a song that rallies against empty, point-scoring social interactions (what they call “Cool Guy Syndrome”) and now Fake Fruit have returned with a reworking of the track that adds an extra layer of attitude and translates the lyrics into Spanish. “This recording feels true to the original, but it’s sporting new haircut energy, an extra spring in its step and feels more aligned with how it sounds when played live,” D’Amato explains. “Plus it just feels good to scream in Spanish.” Check it out below:

Greet Death – Panic Song

Following on from 2019’s majestic New Hell, Flint’s Greet Death have spent the past few months unveiling a series of new singles. The subdued ‘I Hate Everything’ drew the listener into reserved yet resentful frame of mind, the familiar Greet Death weight hovering just out of view. ‘You Love is Alcohol’ introduced a woozy country vibe, ‘Punishment Existence’ simmered with latent intensity too. So the manner in which ‘Panic Song’ bathes the listener in its gauzy textures and insistent energy feels something like the deferred release promised on the previous tracks. Even if the release is excessive and all-consuming with its adrenaline-filled shakes.

Got onto something new
To repossess your blues
Another panic song
And sirens all night long

Jack Keyes – Gray Balloons

Last year we wrote about Kentucky artist Jack Keyes and his upcoming record, Dissolving in Dusk. Single ‘Nowhere’ introduced a sound “wrapped in an easy-going sincerity that holds both melancholy and fondness,” and latest track ‘Gray Balloons’ is similarly conflicted. Again based around the simplicity of acoustic guitar, the single confronts a difficult situation with tender charm. “This song was written after my girlfriend had her visa revoked,” Keyes explains. “She had to very suddenly leave our town in Kentucky to go back to her family nearly 10,000 miles away. In our last days together, I wanted to be happy and celebrate the good times, while also mourning a future loss.”

Dissolving in Dusk will be released later this year.

Kelly Hoppenjans – Stain

We’ve previously described the work of Nashville singer-songwriter Kelly Hoppenjans as “Channeling the spirit of riot grrrl while maintaining a folk sensibility,” with debut OK, I Feel Better representing “music of empowerment, facing up to expectations and staring them down.” Taken from new EP, Can’t Get the Dark Out, latest single ‘Stain’ is a direct follow-up to a single from that record, a kind of antidote to the toxic headspace ‘Band-Aid Girl’ asked Hoppenjans to re-enter every time she played it. As she puts it: “I decided to write a song, inspired by the same relationship, that I could perform after ‘Band-Aid Girl’ to lift me out of that funk.”

But I didn’t think to say that to you in the moment
I guess I only come up with the good stuff once you walk away
My mistake

I think it’s your fault

Check out the video directed by Crystal Bowersox below:

Can’t Get the Dark Out will be released on the 22nd May and you can get it from Bandcamp.

Kraków Loves Adana – Open The Door

Last year Hamburg‘s dream pop duo Kraków Loves Adana released Follow the Voice, a record which “in which the boundaries between physical reality, virtual reality and dreams began to merge and blur.” However the sometimes there is more to a song than the single take which makes it to the record, and new EP Swim in the Blue reimagines three tracks to allow them to exist in a different form. “I wanted to revisit these three pieces from a different perspective,” Deniz Çiçek explains, “never imagining that the songs would develop a whole new life of their own as a result.” A reworking of ‘Dream House’, ‘Open The Door’ is a perfect example of how these different spins manifest, with the sparkling synths toned down in favour of a fuller bodied sound.

Swim in the Blue is out now and you can get it from the Kraków Loves Adana Bandcamp page.

Laura Loriga – Passes the Flame

Born in Bologna and now based in Brooklyn, songwriter and pianist Laura Loriga has spent the last ten years honing her craft between Italy and the US, a geographic diversity which mimics the layered and shifting style of her work. Recording as both Mimes of Wine and now under her own name, Loriga has slowly veered away from an abstract classical sound toward something more immediate and intuitive, a move facilitated by a switch from acoustic piano to organ. Latest album Vever, out via ears&eyes Records, utilises this along with a variety of acoustic and electric elements, with single ‘Passes the Flame’ highlighting the shadowy, nuanced sound.

Max García Conover – Mud

Back in 2018, Max García Conover released Among Horses III, a superb collaboration with Haley Heynderickx on Barcelona label Son Canciones. Following on from a series of singles, this spring sees return Conover return with Deer, a brand new album on the same label which again leans into collaborative work. Take lead single ‘Mud’, written and recorded with Massachusetts folk trio The Ballroom Thieves. A song every bit as sincere and searching as anything in Conover catalogue, looking for substance in a strange world. “I don’t need to find the centre, I just need another song,” he sings. “So what if I write it wrong?”

Proper. – The Great American Novel

“This record is a concept album that’s meant to read like a book,” explains Proper. vocalist Erik Garlington of new record The Great American Novel. “Every song is a chapter following the protagonist through their 20s. Imagine a queer, Black Holden Caufield-type coming up in the 2010s.” Produced by Bartees Strange and released via Father/Daughter (US) and Big Scary Monsters (UK), the record is a searing critique of a society dedicated to and built upon denying Black genius. One which refuses to extend a hand to those who uphold this system of violence, deciding that for once it must be them who do the work to meet the album on its own terms.

The Great American Novel is out now via Father/Daughter (US) and Big Scary Monsters (UK).

Slow Down Molasses – Street Haunting (Vator Sessions)

Back in 2021 Saskatoon‘s Slow Down Molasses released their latest record, Minor Deaths. What we called ” a committed decision to embrace the energies of the contemporary moment in all of their frustrations, aggressions, vulnerabilities and dread.” Ahead of a UK tour this May, the band have unveiled a live version of single ‘Street Haunting‘ recorded with Vator Sessions. A take which encapsulates the bristling intensity of a SDM live show.

Minor Deaths is available from the Slow Down Molasses Bandcamp page, and you can find the full performance on the Vator Sessions Youtube page. Details of the tour are available here.

Uma Bloo – Strange Actress

The recording project of Molly Madden, Uma Bloo came into being when Madden left behind a strict conservative background and headed to Chicago. Among other artforms, songwriting soon became a way to express the dimensions of her personality that had otherwise been repressed. “Once I accepted the fact that I wanted to create my own music, these songs started pouring out of me in an effort to unpack the life I had and what I thought I wanted to build,” Madden explains. “In a lot of ways this album has been in process since I was eight years old without me fully knowing it.” Latest single ‘Strange Actress’ carries all the ferocity and feeling you might expect from such a process, holding desire, desperation and defiance in its hands and refusing to apologise for any contradiction.

You think I’m very strange
But the way I live makes sense to me
I think I’ll stay the same

The post Weekly Listening: March 2022 #4 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

The result is something full of both detail and weight, and one which rewards repeated listens. For these are songs that work on a visceral level, pulling the listener into frantic eddies and wide swells, but within these currents lie hidden depths. Be it clever lyricism, dual meanings or ambiguities in the mood that warrant closer inspection. Songs like opener ‘I Need the Darkness’ might feel like a kind of stalemate at first glance, the heaviness unable to blast away the sense of needling dread, but the reality is more dynamic. Slow Down Molasses are too interested in contradiction, too taken with change. There is no prevailing mood or conclusion, just a committed decision to embrace the energies of the contemporary moment in all of their frustrations, aggressions, vulnerabilities and dread.

We had the opportunity to ask the band a few questions, so read on below to find out more about the record.

Thanks for much for speaking with us. Congratulations on the release of Minor Deaths. How’s does it feel to have new music out in the world?

Tyson: Thank you so much. It’s so exciting and amazing to have it released, but also totally weird. It was supposed to come out in 2020, but the pandemic scuttled those plans, then we were supposed to spend the release week on tour in the UK, then pandemic cancelled those plans as well. So there is an odd underwhelming element to it with us not being on tour, but equally, we’ve received some very great support and have had many kind words written about it, so that has been really lovely. And just before the release we played packed festival shows in Germany and Estonia that were our first shows since the pandemic and were some of the most joyous moments I’ve ever had on (or off) stage.

Could we talk a little about the title? Minor Deaths. There are a number of ways to interpret it, but there’s a certain contradiction in the pair of words.

Tyson: There is definitely a certain contradiction to that pair of words, which worked well with this album. Lyrically, there are a lot of ruminations on how we interpret or react to changes whether they be within ourselves or society-wide. Often it is really easy to take something overly seriously and be over the top in your reaction to it, when in the long run it’s likely relatively minor.

This seems to be particularly true with men in our current era. How many men do you know that were called out or “cancelled”, but then within a short period of time, it was as if nothing had happened? But the frequent drama and self-pity of having to accept (often very minor) consequences is pretty ridiculous consider the impacts others have had to endure. One song, Revisionists, is specifically speaking to that. The fragility and outsized drama in many men’s reactions is remarkable. Not that the whole album is about that, but I think there is something to that mindset of questioning the out-sized reactions to your own personal situation that permeates a lot of the songs.

Also, from a more general perspective, I think the contradiction of those two terms suits the band and this album well. At first glance it SOUNDS like a badass album title, then you realize it isn’t, then you see the see the very lovely album cover and it all nicely contradicts how this is by far our most aggressive album. I think that captures our band well. No matter how dark or aggressive we may get, we’ll always undermine any overly self-serious or macho elements that may exist.

I’m interested in the interplay between anxiety and release on the record, often within the same song. The tone is set from ‘I Need the Darkness’, where nervous post-punk energy meets a sheer force of sound. Even a song like ‘Some Fine Action’, one of the album’s most buoyant, has a twitchy, ominous section after the big middle chorus that circles back to this disquiet. Did you consciously set out to fashion something so caught up between catharsis and unease? Looking back at it now, does either win out for you?

Aaron: That’s an interesting way to think about the album. No, I don’t recall that we had any discussions about intentionally writing uneasy or boisterous parts that would counter the more melodious moments; it just happened that way. During the early writing periods for Minor Deaths, I began bringing song ideas to the band that were far outside the scope of what we were doing at the time, and those riffs were rightly rejected. But even if the idea wasn’t going to be used by the band, playing something different was a good exercise for us, so I kept bringing various ideas no matter what they were. There was even a Brainbombs-sounding riff that we played over and over again while I screamed. Because the band had opened itself to trying new ideas even if they didn’t gel, we naturally began writing in a different direction and taking more chances.

As to your question about whether catharsis or unease is the triumphant feeling on the album, I think that depends on the listener. What you hear is reflective of what you bring to the listening experience

Tyson: I think Aaron’s answer does a great job capturing the significant changes in our writing process. For years the band typically deferred to me on arrangements, despite my protests and desire to be challenged, but after touring 100% Sunshine we’d fallen into a much more collaborative approach with Aaron bringing a lot more ideas and taking more leadership in shaping songs. To me, this was amazing and at times uncomfortable, but amazing because I desperately wanted to be pushed outside my comfort zone. Despite my love of the more challenging, abrasive or tense free jazz or post-punk, I wasn’t always able to capture that in my writing. My writing tends to fit with some of that but more often leaned more towards building into those big cathartic releases, so it was amazing to have someone as thoughtful and musically knowledgeable as Aaron bringing new ideas to finally push us beyond what came intuitively to me.

So I guess, to answer your question more directly, yes, there was a conscious decision to change how we wrote, but maybe not to explicitly ride the line between tension and release. In the end I’m so happy that that is what you took away from it as it does really better capture what we as a band tend to like and want to be playing.

I think it’s fair to say Slow Down Molasses has always balanced a variety of styles, and of course there’s been an evolution across the years too. Who do you consider your biggest musical influences? And has this changed since the earlier years of the project?

Chrix: The membership of Slow Down Molasses has changed drastically since the bands’ first iteration came together in 2007, and with it has always come a diverse array of influences. It’s always been interesting seeing how our individual influences diverge and overlap, and, in more recent years, how our collective love of noisy indie rock, punk and more challenging instrumental music has simmered to the forefront of our songwriting.

Tyson: The sound throughout has definitely changed, but there have always been some pretty consistent touch points, specifically bands like Mogwai, My Bloody Valentine and Slowdive. I think what’s changed is what element of those bands’ influences was brought to the forefront with the changing lineups that we’ve had and what other influences got brought along or highlighted. Obviously there has been a shift from the prettier, more hazy elements of those bands, to the more intense and aggressive elements. To me it feels like it’s been a fairly natural progression, though some days Minor Deaths feels like after years of dancing around our more intense or aggressive influences, we finally just jumped off the cliff and fully embraced them.

With its nods to Virginia Woolf, songs like ‘Street Haunting’ show how you reach beyond music for influence too. Are there any particular artists, writers or artforms that you consider important to your own creative style?

Tyson: To me, the built environment and how we interact with it and exist within it has always been somewhat of a primary influence on how I’ve thought about music and lyrics. I think visualizing the spaces and interactions I’m trying to capture goes hand in hand with song writing both on the musical and lyrical side of things. When I stumbled up the Virginia Woolf essay Street Haunting, it immediately had me inspired, as she so wonderfully captured that feeling of moving through an urban environment and the multitude of ways react to it or interpret ones existences within it.

Similarly our 2015 album Burnt Black Cars was inspired by a series of photos my father had taken in Paris during the protests of May, 1968. None of the lyrics were necessarily protest anthems or directly referencing specific occurrences, but they tried to capture the feeling of unrest and inspiration that existed at that time, in that place.

‘Street Haunting’ also explores life and art away from traditional centres of culture. I wondered if you could speak a little on being a band based in a place like Saskatoon, and the pros and cons versus somewhere like, I don’t know, Toronto? We’ve noticed how many people still seem intent on moving to Brooklyn to ‘make it’, even in this interconnected age.

Chrix: Most of us grew up during a time when regional scenes would blow up and ultimately bands associated with those scenes—I’m thinking Halifax, Montreal, etc.—would suddenly get a lot more notice. I’m not certain that this type of hype phenomenon happens to the same extent anymore, so we’ve never been inclined to relocate for the sake of being more centrally-located. For the most part, we’ve found a lot of success abroad as opportunities to play international festivals come up. We’ve been fortunate to play across the world, in scenes as far away as the UK, Iceland, Germany and, most recently, Estonia. And while we’re stoked to get to travel as much as we have, Saskatoon has always had an amazingly supportive scene that we are happy to be a part of.

Minor Deaths is out now via Noyes Records and Divine Schism and is available from the Slow Down Molasses Bandcamp page, including special vinyl and CD editions. Fans in the UK/Europe can order via Divine Schism for better shipping rates.

Cover photo by Levi Manchak

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This month sees the return of Slow Down Molasses with a brand new single, ‘Street Haunting’, ahead of album Minor Deaths this autumn. Inspired by the Virginia Woolf essay of the same name, the track continues to develop the style that marks the outfit, using visceral sounds to explore sophisticated themes. “The song ruminates on the casual, but oft-underappreciated beauty of the urban environment and the predictability of a person’s daily tasks,” frontman Tyler McShane explains. “A place sometimes overflowing with creative energy, but where it’s often necessary to remind oneself of the casual brilliance of one’s peers and the places we typically tend to haunt.”

But Woolf haunted London, walking the streets of Westminster, Trafalgar Square and Regent’s Park. Slow Down Molasses position themselves within less renowned Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. The song therefore serves something of a dual purpose, finding that the ‘rest’ of which Woolf speaks is still present in the smaller urban spaces, while also exploring the strange isolation inherent in places so far removed from traditional centres of culture. This is captured in a taut, twitchy sound, McShane’s vocals fighting against growing disorder as peals of feedback threaten to unhinge the track. Though just as it rises to breaking point, the tense rhythm wins out. Just another flash of unease on the ever-spinning world.

A street haunted that’s the missing link for us
Built of bricks and the failing state of man
Tells the story of a secret history of
Something new. Something that won’t change at all.

Let me hide as I walk right past it all
A faded ghost in this new dialectic’s drone
I step aside of the reasons that got you there
Someone lost, or someone set to lose their way

Artwork by Brandi Strauss, layout by Chrix Morix

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