This time, Be Softly has teamed up with Zoë Blair-Schlagenhauf to create Unfinished Apology Letters, a product of transatlantic communication and eventually friendship. Graduating from Loyola University New Orleans this year and since moving to Los Angeles, Blair-Schlagenhauf is the author of Chlamydia Summer and the co-founder of Tenderness Lit. Her work explores the twin forces of alienation and connection, as though loneliness explained well enough can be in salve in itself. The idea is wholly apparent on this collaborative record, as the album’s press release states:

Unfinished Apology Letters is about trying and failing and sometimes just not knowing what to do to help the ones you love most. But it’s also about the healing power of art and the joy that accompanies collaboration. It represents the solace we can find in the people who believe in us.

Opening track ‘Best Friend’s Vomit’ attempts to re-personalise the opioid crisis, moving away from the nebulous, far-away feel of stark headlines and dire open-eds, centring mundane life as Ground Zero for the tragedy. Indeed, Blair-Schlagenhauf draws upon image of 9/11 to force home this idea, the violence and suffering not some cultural norm or self-chosen curse, but rather a precipitation of far vaguer problems that lurk beneath our culture.

“A Yahoo article tells me that with 142 deaths a day, it is equivalent to 9/11 happening every three weeks,” Blair-Schlagenhauf says, her tone simple, kind of far-off, as though speaking more to herself, testing out the words, thinking it all through. “Because we can only measure things in terms of the worse thing that has ever happened ever.” Only, the Worst Thing Ever is something that happens on TV, impersonal and awesome, and this is not that. “But I’m crying,” she continues, “because I can only measure things in your names, or the amount of unfinished apology letters that selfishly sit with the lights on in my Google drive, like when I sit in my parked car for too long, hoping I’ll never have to go inside.”

‘g.o.m.’ is a slow shuffling track pitched somewhere between warmth and animosity, as though the two emotions are not so far apart, or two sides of the same coin. Blair-Schlagenhauf’s writing is keyed into such as idea, her daydreams tending toward violence or love, her thoughts toward diving in front of speeding cars. “I don’t want to die,” she explains flatly. “I just think this would be a great way for all of my bones to feel the same way at once.”

Exploring the discrepancy between reality and the ideas of hold of it, ‘falling’ is chock full of phony images and our pining for their truth, while ‘water molecules’ brightens with a slow dawning. The momentum in the repetitive structures lend something of a mantra-like quality, as though by stringing scientific facts into the correct arrangement, Blair-Schlagenhauf might unlock an answer that surpasses cold hard facts and get straight to the bloody beating heart.

Unfinished Apology Letters is out now and you can get it from the Be Softly Bandcamp page. The proceeds of the album will be donated to Shatterproof, a US nonprofit dedicated to ending opioid crisis, and Mind, the UK mental health charity.

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Following Sam Pink’s lead, the record is brutal and dark, the instrumentation allowing the violent alienation and dissatisfaction of his words to soar. ‘False-Bottomed Coffins’ opens with an introduction to the album’s themes, with self-consciousness disguised as misanthropy, caring too deeply masked as blank indifference, and the constant pressure of these repressed emotions pressing on the crown of the skull, like a volcano about to blow. ‘I Own You and You Own Me’ continues this, opening with a pretty clear sentiment—”Two types of eye contact: none and fuck you”—navigating a depressive state that feels like “all there is inside your skull is melted plastic.”  Again, the narrator is tangled within their own thoughts, their attempts at freeing themselves only furthering the bind, a predicament communicated with a Wallacean, inside-my-head tone.

“Living as three people: one inside your head saying hateful/depressed/hopeless shit, another as the one inside your head trying to deal with the first one, and the third one as visible to the outside world, trying to keep people from noticing any trace of the first two.

That moment when you start to have a little feeling/emotion and you look back on having just acted out of not having any feelings/emotions.”

‘Bonus Magnets for my Brain’ meanders in a way that could be relaxed or ominous or both, the instrumentation threatening to bubble over but never quite managing the energy required. Hyper-self-consciousness, banal everyday observations and macabre imagery coalesce into something at once relatable and unhinged, where lines like “The feeling that everything is obvious in a way that’s embarrassing” are followed by “Making friends with the firing squad.” ‘One Night, Your Pillow Will Swallow Your Head’ and ‘Making Friends With the Firing Squad’ furthers this feeling, growing increasingly morbid and strange as horror, paranoia and deep-seated anger make violent ends inevitable—either the narrator will be destroyed or else the entire world around them. All the while, a slow creeping dread advances, looming.

“Talking to the lone lobster left in the tank at the supermarket to calm down and feel connected.
Talking shit to the firing squad.
Smiling wide as you allow your latest ghost to slowly come out of you in front of others, unseen.
Smiling wide as you allow someone else’s latest ghost to go into you as if you earned it.
And you have.
You have you have you have!”

Both this nameless dread and the hope of escaping it fuel the entire collection, and these forces manifest themselves as monsters on ‘No Way to Defeat It but Jump In / No Way to Help It but Let It Die.’ The dread is “A monster with a head made of a hundred toothless mouths (No way to defeat it but jump in),” and the hope “A monster with a head full of knives that never dies, just stumbles around shrieking (And no way to help it but let it die).” Within this tale of suffering, a relationship is painted, though one so fiercely held that it becomes its own form of torment, the narrator’s performing a verbal self-flagellation as penance for their perceived inadequacy, lashing themselves into nothingness in lieu of any better ideas. After all there’s no way to help it but let it die.

Check out the striking video from Wild Child Studios below:

Your Glass Head Against the Brick Parade of Now Whats plays like the fever dream manifesto of the archetypal Disillusioned Kid, someone who, instead of shooting up his school or oxycontin, decided to let the tirade out as language. Stinging and self-loathing and strange, the narrator is sick and tired of a phony world and phony people yet dying of cold within this self-imposed exile. The record then, feels like one final, fatal gesture—self-immolation just to feel that half-second of warmth before the pain sets in, just to see your own blazing reflection in eyes of the faces around you.

Your Glass Head Against the Brick Parade of Now Whats is out now and you can get it from the Be Softly Bandcamp page. Find out more about Sam Pink on the Lazy Fascist Press website.

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Opener ‘glass machines discovering water’ introduces us to the unique sound of Corvus B. It’s built on frantic banjo and lo-fi percussion and rapidly delivered spoken word poetry, with lines like:

“last night I was on the Merrimack river
and the lights were watching me so I stared back
and they looked like they were make of plastic
and I felt like I was made of plastic
but we’re really just made of metal and glass bits”

‘a lampshade plagues with poison ivy’ is similarly constructed, but the drums take a backseat, leading to a quieter, more insular atmosphere. “I want to tell the tree how tall it’s gotten”, Lake sings, “without the forest laughing at how small my view is”. The track picks up momentum for a little while around two-thirds through, although even that little burst of energy doesn’t last long. Death and decay are never far away on ‘birds nesting in shoes on telephone wire’, with its rotting birds and oxidation and talk of building your own coffin.

‘children in grass while trees grow taller’, with it’s haunted banjo and gentle field recorded ambience, confronts the album’s themes most directly. The issue of gender (or rather society’s perception of it) is raised most explicitly in the line “you don’t like my leg hair / cause it doesn’t match my gender / but I don’t have one”. Another theme is the yo-yoing emotions that many have to try to deal with, the double bind of dealing with personal troubles while still retaining compassion and patience for others. Or, as Lake puts it:

“on days where I feel big
it’s hard to remember I’m not
on days where I feel small
it’s hard to remember the ants I’ve stepped on”

Closing track, ‘snow where it’s usually not’ descends into an almost post-rock catharsis, capping the album with a sense of release, though whether it’s through transcendence or chaos is up to you.

I often have a hard time with poetry, mainly due to failings of my own than of its writers. No matter how lyrical and well-written a verse, I can’t help but read it as overblown and pretentious, something that’s often amplified when hearing a certain class of performance poets who adopt that oh-so-sincere tone and read their own work in someone else’s voice. But this poetry isn’t like that, teamed with the music it takes on a meditative quality, the earthy, pastoral imagery of moss and bugs and leaves adding to the effect. Listening feels like walking deep into the woods at sunset, clearing a space on the forest floor to lay down in and feel safe.

You can get France, Later on a name-your-price download or handmade CD from the Corvus B. Bandcamp page or Skip, Jump Records.

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Syracuse, his new album, is very different from that record. The title track that opens proceedings is a strange and otherworldly spoken word piece that builds into something cinematic, the soundtrack of a weird old sci-fi film set in a future year that has already passed. It ends with an alarm clock sound just as the song was building toward a climax, as if Adem was exploring an alternate reality where he played with computers rather than guitars. It’s an effective opening that certainly makes you sit up to see where the album takes you next.

The album flits between with traditional songwriting with guitar strumming and experimental nods to other genres, refusing to sit nicely in the ‘folk’ box. With spoken word bits and different instruments appearing throughout, you never quite know what is around the corner. ‘St. John’s Ukrainian Catholic Church’ is an urgent message that John Darnielle would be proud of, and the next track ‘I am Alright’ is a regular folk song that you might expect after Armour, but then ‘I Am Not’ defies all expectations and does whatever the hell it pleases. It’s a tangled jungle of a song with snaking tendrils feeling in all sorts of directions from 80s electronica to hip-hop and rap and even a Paul Simon inspired ending.

There is something admirable about Kyle Adem. We mentioned last time that he left a career in buisness to pursue his creative ideals and that attitude is present on Syracuse. This is the record, these are the songs, listen to them. If they are hard to characterise then, frankly, that is none of his concern. Where he goes next will be very interesting to see.

Buy Syracuse now from the Kyle Adem Store or on iTunes.

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“People have to talk about something just to keep their voice boxes in working order, so they’ll have good voice boxes in case there’s ever anything really meaningful to say.”

Tracklisting:

1. One – La Dispute

2. Bosnia – Prairies

3. Apex Of Excitement – Ethan M.

4. Giant Zero – Arrange

5. Most Of Us Are Maniacs Through Which The Universe Is Looking At Itself – Bewildered Hallelujah

6. Greywolf – USF

7. Dream. – of Architects

8. Her Favourite Song – Birkwin Jersey

9. Thin City – Matthew A. Wilkinson

10. Witch Dream – Dustin Wong

11. Waterpunches – PhaRo

12. I Felt Like I Understood It – Stupid Loser

13. I Saw A Body Floating Above Jerusalem – Cuddle Formation

14. Phthalo Blue – Lone

15. Black Hole – Man Meets Bear

16. Robot 30931 Feel Existential Despair – Neat Beats

17. Mrs Morris – Charles Spearin

18. Light At The End Of The Tunnel – Cloud Cult

19. Like Totally – Gold Panda

20. Have You Passed Through This Night? – Explosions In The Sky

As usual this mix is meant as a small taster, go out and support the bands by buying music and going to shows.

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