Neilyk describes the album as “a three track representation of the Antarctic polar night, starting at the onset of winter, as the sun disappears for a good couple of months and ending just as the first rays start climbing the horizon.” Perhaps unsurprisingly then, the predominant image on Antarctica is that of the cold. Moon Gravity use all of the tools in the shoegaze/ambient arsenal to conjure a dark and frozen wasteland, soaring glacial guitars and shimmering indistinct vocals, not unlike the aurora borealis that grace the cover.

‘Nightfall’ opens with a gentle melancholy, the levity shot through the track slowly dropping away, first into deep drone and then an eventual insulated hush, allowing the song to be transcendental in a way unique to last things. ‘Snow Storm’ forms from within this blanketed quiet, the ebbing hum punctuated by echoing noise like some vast geological force creeping over a barren land. The intensity gathers over the mammoth play-length, becoming loud and mean and awesome in the way of natural phenomena too big for us to fully grasp. An insistent drum beat kicks in around the eight-minute mark as the nebulous atmosphere shrinks inwards and a sense of forward motion returns, dragging the release through to the closer ‘Purpling’, an airy number of celestial swirls and luminous peaks. The finale of the entire thing has planetary weight, slow and huge and glorious, operating according to strict laws yet appearing somehow above them, as though some God could not resist this part of his jigsaw being cast with wonder.

Artwork by Rebecka Katalina Johansson

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“Saying goodnight has never been so hard
when you’re the sealant sealing water towers
now you’re gone and water starts it’s seepin’
wetting streets sending windshields swayin’
filling garden beds and gutters
maybe tomorrow there’ll be flowers”

‘Rental Textbook’ is a lean indie pop song, the vocals again taking centre stage as Mollenkopf sings “I’m a rental textbook, and I was due last week”, before ‘Heavy Snow’ with its prominent bass line and constantly mashed background guitar. Finale ‘Tea Leaves’ is a fuzzy indie rocker, Mollenkopf”s voice quivering on a slightly higher plane then everything else.

Perhaps due to its origins as a solo bedroom work, the EP has a much stronger dark and emotional core than many indie rock records (see for example on ‘Rental Textbook’ – “And you don’t know a thing about me / a girl of clay that you can tweak / a vacant space for you to occupy / believing I am yours to keep”). The strength of First Responder as a band lies in how they elevate these themes rather than smother them. As Mollenkopf explained to The Grey Estates, “With the accompaniment of noise guitar and a full band the songs become less like diary entries, and more like lifelike dreams or visions of the past. Discussions of past abuse are tinged with hope, clarity found in retrospect, and can be summarized with the line ‘…maybe tomorrow there’ll be flowers’.”

In My Dreams My Windows Faced West is due for release on the 16th of December. Keep an eye on the First Responder Bandcamp page to grab it when it comes out.

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Today we’re pleased to reveal the second single from the EP. ‘Limbaud’ is something of an anomaly on the record, by far the most sedate track of the seven. It’s short and sweet, clocking in at under two minutes, a kind of deadpan bedroom pop track, the woozy, sinuous atmosphere joined by lazy snaking guitars and Bedford’s impassive vocals.

“I feel so blessed in nothingness
hope you do too,
you’ve seen the dark behind those eyes
you’re in Limbaud
why don’t you know?”

American Enthusiasm will release Holy Wow on the 9th of December on Specialist Subject Records. It’s definitely one worth pre-ordering, because the whole thing is great (we’ll have a full review closer to release). The band also go on a short tour of the South in early December – dates below:

Dec 3rd: Bristol – The Old England
Dec 8th: Falmouth – Mono
Dec 9th: Southampton – house show
Dec 10th: Exeter – Phoenix
Dec 17th: London – Montague Arms
Jan 8th: Bristol – Milk Thistle
Jan 14th: Falmouth – Mono
Jan 19th: London – Old Blue Last

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As if to prove this immediately, the first track, ‘WEN’ is super fuzzed-out indie pop, all shimmering, screeching feedback. It’s the kind of song that has a grainy sweetness, as if your speakers are reaching out with staticky arms to give you a loving embrace.

This theme is extended on tracks such as ‘cool’, which slo-mo shreds in a wash of feedback, the calm vocals smooth beneath the squall of guitar. This full-bodied sound can also be found on ‘see you there’, which eventually blooms into an almost post-rock roil.

Some of the songs take a completely different tack, such as the hushed and mumbled ‘the scent of a salesman’ and the sedate dream pop of ‘virile poetry’. The final track of the tape’s first side begins in an equally quiet manner, but soon opens out into dissonant guitar and rolling clouds of fuzz.

Side 2 is equally eclectic, opening with a galloping homebrew percussion which wobbles and dissipates as quickly as it arrives, transitioning into the murky pop of ‘the agency’. ‘aching stomach – version 2’ is a strange pop song, swaying as if the soundtrack to a surreal dream sequence, a shadowy atmosphere that’s furthered on ‘the honey soaked leg of the worker bee’. Things are refreshed with the searing guitar of ‘and the weather report 2 maybe…’. which sounds like someone singing along to a blaring indie rocker in the apartment next door, before the slow plodding slacker pop of ‘leaning on the parapet’.

“I try to focus on the probability
of succeeding in this field
its difficult to see”

The album ends on ‘tracey barlow playing kiddies keyboards’, a mammoth ten minute track that could’ve made a short EP all of its own. It has all the hallmarks that you’d expect from glider having come this far, unconventional structures and echoey disaffected vocals and peaks of crackled feedback. If that sounds like your thing, then you’d be wise to check out the whole album.

You can get demos now on cassette via French label Hidden Bay Records, or as a free download from the glider Soundcloud page.

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Each of the EP’s four songs hover around the two minute mark, with the dark and spiky ‘You Won’t Remember This’ opening proceedings, marching along with a kind of elbows-out attitude. ‘Oh No’ follows a similar pattern, backed by guitars that bend and sway like a vision on the bare-brick walls of some sweaty club.

‘Heat’ is all shambling percussion and tightly wound guitar, the voices of Gryfydd and Tucker emerging from seemingly nowhere to repeat the title, the song’s only lyric, while the record closes with ‘Careless’ and its sneeringly defiant chorus:

“I don’t even care about you
I never really liked you
I don’t even really know you”

Stationary Suns is out tomorrow (21st Oct) on Identical Records. Those of you in Melbourne can head along to the release show at The Tote.

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“Listening to its twenty minutes now, I experience a fleeting era distilled into a single day. I hear the first few miles of a long ride, hands released from handlebars’ grip, arms splayed out to the sides, coasting with abandon, rounding a blind corner without worry for what might slam into me beyond the immediately visible… These tracks have felt three summers melt away, relearning the same cruelty each year: that summer’s start initiates a countdown to its end, that the first day’s light stretches infinitely outward before shrinking back from a dilating night.”

The slow dawn drone of ‘i’ opens the release, the flutter and hum of one steady note playing like the gradual creep of sun over the land, bringing subtle changes to the tints and hues and angles of light. Following Silberman’s explanation, the track rarely changes dramatically in a short space of time yet seems to be constantly evolving, imparting the sense that what’s been has gone, and what is unfolding will surely follow.

‘ii’ sees something of a disruption, the ambient notes restless and skittish, all set against a background whoosh like that of some desert wind. This gale follows into ‘iii’, though here the instrumentation is warmer and perhaps most-recognisable as that of The Antlers main man, while ‘iv’ is more restrained, swapping out the carefree vibes for distant melancholy so it sounds less immediate, the memory of something dear weathered smooth by constant handling.

Transcendless Summer is out now on ANTI- and Transgressive Records and available on iTunes and Spotify. People Teeth are also making a run of cassettes to be released later in the year, which you can pre-order now. Also, Peter Silberman will head out on a solo tour at the end of the year to “debut new material, repurpose old Antlers songs, undertake covers, etc.”, which sounds like a pretty cool thing. He’s stopping off along the west coast of the US as well as two nights in London:

November 7 – Los Angeles, CA @ Resident
November 11 – San Francisco, CA @ Swedish American Hall
November 14 – Seattle, WA @ Triple Door
November 16 – Portland, OR @ The Old Church
December 7 – London, UK @ Forge
December 8 – London, UK @ Forge

Cover photograph by Peter Silberman

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From the opening track, ‘Century Woods’, we are introduced to the Lisa/Liza blueprint, what label Orindal Records describes as a “blend [of] psychedelia, Appalachian folk and dream pop”. All seven songs were recorded at home by Victoria, her complex poetry arising from a relatively simple set up, just straining finger-picked guitar and her gently wavering voice.

The album is deeply thematic, its subject inward-looking and reflective, although not necessarily in the way you may expect. Many artists regard the past as some trial that must be (or has been) overcome, the people we once were best forgotten, but with Desert of Youth, Victoria aims for something different. As she explains:

Deserts of Youth is an album about the parts of our past that remain within us, and visiting these landscapes with recognition of ourselves instead of a meditation on what has been lost, or is no longer a resource or a path we can use. It is about meeting the past and facing it with a sense of ownership instead of abandon; the idea that one can see a desert as a place of desolation or a place of needed reflection, full of life, and strength.

Second track, ‘Another Window’, has a similar effect, the acoustic guitar painting intricate patterns that are at times gnarled and thorny and others aloft and free, as if rising high on an updraft. Indeed, many of the songs possess this sort of duality, at times gossamer thin with Victoria’s vocals little more than hushed murmurs, though even in these quiet moments her words hold a kind of understated magnetism, a power which draws in the instrumentation and in turn becomes augmented by it.

So, as the gentle pysch-folk guitars tumble around the lyrics, her words grow into incantations, conjuring images of deep woods or lonely desert plains, of that ancient magic in the order of things. This is mixed with sorcery of a much more familiar, everyday kind, such as that on the nostalgic ‘Lady Day’, where Victoria mixes the arcane with the mundane to find pockets of fascination. “I went to the part of the movie, I like the best,” she sings. “We rolled in at dark to the feeling / Lady Day on the radio.”

‘Wander’ marks the album’s halfway point and encapsulates the subtle intensity of the record as a whole, showing you don’t necessarily need to raise your voice to make a statement, that even quiet songs can be imbued with a blazing energy.

“It’s a holiday – to wander,
Sometimes we get in trouble,
Because we wander all the time.
I put off work, again, for tomorrow,
So we could chat about the garden,
And laugh about our stupid bosses.”

‘Red Pine’ is a lovely folk song, full of strange, sylvan imagery (“The red pine turns white / just as a blue spruce glows / in our living room”), while ‘Prospect Street’ explores the concept of finding ‘home’, both literally and figuratively. The title track then closes the album in beautiful fashion, its imagery at once bizarre and beguiling, dragging us from our hazy routine to kneel with Victoria and praise the wild around us.

“Waking up in meadows where
We were told to become
Deserts of Youth
And worship some young,
Teenage moon”

Deserts of Youth will be released via Orindal Records on the 9th September and you can snag your copy from their website.

Album artwork photography by Brian Doody

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The label describe the album’s sound as, “Sparse instrumentation, droning tape experiments, and ambient passages… coupled with the songwriter’s ability to create eerie, hypnotic moods through sound.” However, as first single ‘Cannibalism’ showed, there’s a certain light present in Cloud Cover’s music, a fragility or tenderness that elevates it beyond exercises in plain, one-tone weirdness. As Disposable America puts it: “The dark intensity of the album is offset by its warmness; Tuite’s voice a ghost texture, guitars delicately picked like tree-branches”.

Today we’re excited to share the second single from the album. ‘Cake Bath’ builds slowly with hollow chimes emerging as if from an empty room, the lonely flow peppered with abrupt sparks of poltergeistic noise, harsh and brash and violent. Tuite’s soft vocals unfold through this, her tranquil cadence disrupted and distracted by both the vibrating silence and vicious commotion. It’s almost as though the song is that of a malfunctioning satellite drifting somewhere deep in outer space. Battered by radiation and cosmic forces, the spectral vocals play like some glitch-ridden radio transmission, a once important message now scrambled by static, repeating itself to the dark.

You can pre-order MIRROR ME now on vinyl or cassette via the Disposable America Bandcamp page, or digitally via the Cloud Cover Bandcamp page.

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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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If you are acquainted with the band already (we liked their album very tiny songs a lot), you’ll know that the single, ‘best thought, has all the hallmarks of a Honeyuck song. It’s a sweet indie pop song about having a crush and trying to summon the courage to act on it.

“And there’s something I want to ask you
but I don’t know how to
would it be weird if I gave you a kiss?
there is something telling me that it is
your hand I should be holding so
would it be weird if
I kissed you for the hell of it?”

The B-side is a cover of Jesus and Mary Chain’s ‘Just Like Honey’, a quiet rendition with simple synths and tambourine percussion, swapping the melodrama of the original for a gentle sadness, sounding like a murmured sing-along in a still room. Like all of Honeyuck’s music, it’s simply really nice.

You can get the ‘best thought’ on a name-your-price basis via the Lavender Sounds Bandcamp page.

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