And it’s a pretty impressive list, what the label call “an often-stunning gestalt of generational talent paying homage to one of the most gifted but underrated American songwriters.” Some of our very favourite artists feature, including Advance Base, Friendship, Trace Mountains, Sadurn, Hand Habits and a whole host more, reimagining a selection of songs from across Molina’s oeuvre.

Only two tracks have been released so far, but if they are any indication it’s going to be a pretty special release. Opening proceedings is MJ Lenderman‘s pretty faithful take on Songs: Ohia’s ‘Just Be Simple’, before Sun June put their own spin on Magnolia Electric Co. track ‘Leave the City’, moulding it into what could sound like a new Sun June track if you are not familiar with the original. It also features what is, in a particularly crowded field, one of Molina’s best opening lines.

Broke my heart to leave the city
I mean it broke what wasn’t broken in there already

I Will Swim to You: A Tribute to Jason Molina will be released on 5th September and available to pre-order via the Run For Cover Records Bandcamp page, including the fittingly titled Coxcomb Red, Comet Dust Red or Old Hen Black vinyl editions. 10% of profits will be donated to MusiCares® Mental Health and Addiction Recovery Fund.

The post I Will Swim to You: A Tribute to Jason Molina appeared first on Various Small Flames.

“An album born of travel and distance, pieced together from segments of other places, but ending up very much unique.” That’s how we described Bato Mato by Carmarthen’s Adwaith released by Libertino Records back in 2022. The record was an ambitious one, drawing upon “any number of psych, grunge and dream pop influences to realise its sound,” as we wrote, but follow-up Solas goes even further. A twenty-three track double album which serves as the closing part of a coming-of-age trilogy, tracing the arc of the band’s progression which sees them drawn back to their West Walian roots at the height of their powers. “I feel like we’re confident in ourselves as musicians, and our sound, and the world that we want to create,” as Hollie Singer explains. “We feel fully realised.”

Watch the video shot and edited by Rhys Grail below:

Solas will be released on the 7th February via Libertino Records.

Anna Arboles – By Any Means Necessary

LA-based songwriter Anna Arboles is gearing up to release Pure Fanfiction, a brand new album on Anxiety Blanket Records which fictionalises the personal in order to edge closer to the truth. “These songs are about passing into adulthood and clarifying who I wanted to be,” Arboles explains, “but are not necessarily about my life. I wrote these songs as soundtracks to movies, TV shows, books, or photographs that catalyzed introspection. They’re like fanfiction for my life.” Taking inspiration from seminal queer film By Hook or By Crook by Harry Dodge and Silas Howard, first single ‘By Any Means Necessary’ serves as an ode to friendship and its supportive power. Hence how the doubt of the repeated refrain—”I don’t know if I can do it”—is slowly conquered, the uneasy movement towards self-actualisation made easier by those there along the way.

Pure Fanfiction will be released on the 14th February via Anxiety Blanket Records

Dead Gowns – In the Haze

Early next year, Dead Gowns (that’s the project of Portland, Maine’s Genevieve Beaudoin) will release their debut album, It’s Summer, I Love You, and I’m Surrounded by Snow on New York label Mtn Laurel Recording Co. Second single ‘In the Haze’ is a beautiful introduction, a patient and spacious country-tinged indie rock song that put’s Beaudoin’s incredible vocals front and centre, shifting from a quiet hush to a quivering wail as she explores the complex emotions of dealing with a then-undiagnosed illness. It’s indicative of a record that takes real-life experiences and then stretches their edges, probing at possibilities and straying from fact into fiction. “There’s a sense of freedom by starting in an autobiographical place and then expanding into fiction,” Beaudoin describes. “I learn so much about what has happened by exploring what could have been.”

It’s Summer, I Love You, and I’m Surrounded by Snow will be released via Mtn Laurel Recording Co. on 14^th February. Pre-order it now from the Dead Gowns Bandcamp page.

georgie – 2d

Serving as a celebration to a specific corner of the DIY scene in Rochester, New York, spit takes and split tapes is a four-band split release by raincoated records. Featured artists include Bugcatcher (whose album Go! we covered last year), Home Videos and Kitchen (who we first mentioned way back in 2016), as well as georgie, the project led by Claire G. McClusky who “combin[ed] ecological, personal and political sensibilities” for the excellent album Intimacy Hangover in 2023. One of the latter’s contributions to the split release, ‘2d’ sees McClusky and co. push the georgie sound through its usual airy folk style until it disintegrates into a noisy crescendo.

Meagre Martin – Frankie

After a fantastic 12 months which has included appearance at the Reeperbahn Festival, Pop Montreal and Pitchfork London, as well as successful singles ‘Never Thought‘ and ‘Malcolm‘, Berlin-based indie rockers Meagre Martin are closing out the year with one final, celebratory single, ‘Frankie’, which also serves as the first preview of EP Up To Snuff coming next February on Mansions and Millions. Pairing gauzy shoegaze textures with a persistent rhythm, the track embraces a bright spirit of playfulness and curiosity. “I can’t help / But smile / I look at you like a child,” as the opening lines go, submitting to the thrilling sensation of falling for someone and letting the current move in whatever direction it sees fit.

Watch the video directed by Federico Corazzini and Meagre Martin below:

‘Frankie’ is out now via Mansions and Millions and available from Bandcamp.

Nona Invie – Forget My Name

Created as an antidote to ubiquitous feelings of anxiety and fear, Nona Invie‘s appropriately titled new album Self-soothing sees the Minneapolis songwriter aim to provide a safe haven of calm within an often terrible contemporary world. “These songs are a weighted blanket that comforted and supported me in a lonely time,” as Invie explains. “I hope that they can be supportive, comforting to others.” Opener and lead single ‘Forget My Name’ offers a glimpse of the meditative sound which brings this mission to life. A lesson in the necessity of loosening our grip and letting go those things which do us no good in order to more fully inhabit a healthy sense of self.

Watch the video by Ingrid Weise below:

Self-soothing will be released on the 28th February via Boiled Records and you can pre-order it now.

Raybody – Puddle

Then recording under her own name, Katy Rea released full-length The Urge That Saves You back in 2022, an album which, as we put it, “explor[ed] her life not directly but through imagined characters and metaphorical stories that feel something like modern fables.” Now having adopted the moniker Raybody, Rea has returned with ‘Puddle’, the first taste of a new era for an artist currently at work on her second album. “[The new name] allows me to step into a braver and more honest part of myself,” Rea explains. “I’m after a truth that requires me to unattach from my given name—which has always felt sweet, well mannered, and more feminine than I am.” The new single introduces this new spirit, combining classic singer-songwriter sensibilities with something more singular and strange, resulting in a sound able to paint an intimate picture of a blossoming relationship and the self-reflection inherent within the process of learning to love another person.

Watch the video shot by Sawyer Gaunt and directed by Nicole Townsend and Rea herself below:

‘Puddle’ is out now and available from the Raybody Bandcamp page.

Robert Ascroft – Where Did You Go feat. Britta Phillips (Luna, Dean & Britta)

With album Echo Still Remains coming in January via Hand Drawn Dracula, producer and artist Robert Ascroft has been releasing a series of collaborative singles in recent months, including ‘Faded Photographs’ with Ruth Radelet and ‘Empty Pages’ with Zumi Rosow of The Black Lips. The latter offered “a beguilingly ambiguous interplay between rhythm and fuzz” as we put it, complete with a cinematic video, and now Ascroft has enlisted vocalist and actress Britta Phillips (who you might know as part of Luna and Dean & Britta) for another dark and filmic track. With rhythmic percussion, sensual vocals and an enveloping night-time mood, ‘Where Did You Go’ channels a sultry Lynchian aesthetic full of nocturnal weight. The full record promises to feature the likes of Ora Cogan and Christopher Owens too, so is certainly one to watch out for in 2025.

Watch the video starring Phillips and directed by Ascroft himself below:

Echo Still Remains is out January 31st via Hand Drawn Dracula and you can pre-order it now.

Sun June – 41 Dollars

Described as a song about “listening to men talk,” Sun June‘s new single ’41 Dollars’ is the Austin band’s first proper release since last year’s Bad Dream Jaguar—a record we described as “painting impressionistic pictures of love and longing in quiet dusk-hued pastels, as though in effort to preserve that which might otherwise fade out into nothing. The single is every bit as emotive and assured as we’ve come to expect from the outfit, the sound holding reflection and longing within the same moment, and what results is a sound placid on the surface yet roiling with a myriad of unseen currents and pressures below. Released via Run For Cover Records, the single comes complete with a demo version of ’16 Riders’ as well as a remix of ‘Easy Violence’ by Porches.

Wasn’t it all in my head?
Wanted you
Fighting off all that I can
Watching the horizon waul
Trying my best in the cool water
Watching it rise and fall
Listening to you talk

Watch the video below:

’41 Dollars’ is out now via Run For Cover Records and available from Bandcamp.

The post Weekly Listening: December 2024 #1 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Ava Mirzadegan – Dark Dark Blue

Team Love Records [BUY]

Dark Dark Blue, the title of Ava Mirzadegan’s latest full-length, might refer to a mood, a time of day, the quality of light in a room. The album was written in Mirzadegan’s childhood bedroom in the wake of a break-up, a collection of finger-picked folk songs which paints a series of memories, longings and confessions in the palette of the titular hue. But though the present loss hangs heavy, Mirzadegan also digs towards a deeper seam of sadness. One ingrained at her centre, accumulated not only across one life but an entire family history. Here, old wounds are not so much sources of pain as shafts leading towards something older and more fundamental, and Ava Mirzadegan follows these passageways as deep as they might allow her in the hope that allowing light into these dark spaces is to begin to process and heal.

Dean Johnson – Nothing For Me Please

Mama Bird Recording Co. [BUY]

The Seattle-based singer-songwriter Dean Johnson (who is also a member of the band Sons of Rainier) has built a devoted following across the Pacific Northwest with his live shows, garnering almost mythical status with his anachronistic folk songs full of lonesome melodies and gruff heartbreak. Not wishing to change a winning formula, Johnson’s debut solo record Nothing For Me Please is almost completely devoid of bells and whistles, to the point where it often feels like he is singing from a chair in the corner or crooning from a sticky dive bar stage. He sings of pining for a lost love (‘Old TV’, ‘Shouldn’t Say Mine’) and false-smiling through a breakup (‘Acting School’), and the age-old existential woes of any cowboy worth his salt. Songs relatively simplistic in their construction and all the better for it, a reminder that less is oftentimes more. The album is relatively brief, clocking in at less than thirty minutes, though lingers in the mind like the sweet tones of a half-remembered dream.

Divide and Dissolve – Systemic

Invada Records [BUY]

“To make music that honours their ancestors and Indigenous land, to oppose white supremacy, and to work towards a future of Black and Indigenous liberation.” That’s how the liner notes of Divide and Dissolve‘s Systemic describes the intention at the heart of the duo’s crushing songs. The album felt like a fitting soundtrack to 2023, yet another year where the pervasive systems of violence and control have been all too visible, and those familiar with previous LP Gas Lit will recognise the dark, furious density Takiaya Reed and Sylvie Nehill manage to conjure. But far from being a mere sonic steamroller happy to only grind its audience into the ground, Systemic pairs its apocalyptic weight with something more fragile and light. Sections almost orchestral in their detail which move through the ruins of the doomworld in something like defiance. The dominant systems might seem as monolithic as they are malevolent, but there are other systems, other possibilities, and they are more persistent than you might think. As Minori Sanchiz-Fung reads on ‘Kingdom of Fear’:

If I am denied the kindness needed to transform sorrow
If I am denied the simple gentleness of existing
Then I will leave my gifts, like lichen, over the oak branches
Trusting they’ll be safe until you find them

Erik Kramer – Where the fish are as fine as the color of colors

Self-released [BUY]

When people talk about the ‘real world’, they’re not really talking about the real world. Words are not up to such an endeavour. But that’s where art comes in. Described as “music for Blue Sky (‘where the eagle that flies out of sight flies’),” this self-released cassette from Erik Kramer feels like a reminder of this fact, an exercise evoking in times, places and feelings that are incommunicable with mere words. Crafted from a hodgepodge of instruments and samples—from guitar, banjo and pump organ to bells and Casio keyboards, a tin whistle, field recordings, loon calls, snippets of poetry and the ambient sounds of “cars & trucks” and “Madison area teenagers”—the tape offers a series vignettes, small, snatched moments of beauty and nostalgia and wistfulness. Take the mantra-like repetition of ‘Hermit Guardian Angel’ or Eva Chudnow’s still and sweet rendition of the titular traditional folk song on ‘Just as the tide was flowing’, the gloomy slo-mo rock song of ‘Daylight Saving’ or the title track which swells and shivers with an inextricable mixture of sorrow and joy. In a world that seems to grow more complex and cruel with each rotation, it’s no small wonder to find escape routes, art that enables not selfish head-in-the-sand ignorance but a return to what really matters, what really is.

Florry – The Holey Bible

Dear Life Records [BUY]

The Holey Bible feels like a seminal moment in Florry’s history. The Philly band, led by Francie Medosch, have dabbled with country sensibilities ever since their inception, but this record is the moment they fully embrace the genre. It’s chock full of fiddle and mandolin, harmonica and pedal steel, meandering melodies and a heart-on-sleeve lyrical style that seems determined to look on the bright side. This positivity permeates the record, sidestepping the lonesome blues so common in the genre in favour of something genuinely joyful, though with a messy, ramshackle spirit that wards off any threat of things getting saccharine. Through woozy waltzes, fuzzy Country-fried rockers and no small amount of narrative attention, Florry rise from an uncertain, bleak world like a Roman candle, as though the only way to live nowadays is to meet despair with an equal and opposite force.

Gia Margaret – Romantic Piano

Jagjaguwar [BUY]

Writing in one of his journals, the Trappist monk Thomas Merton described the necessity of living in solitude in the woods. “The silence of the forest is my bride and the sweet dark warmth of the whole world is my love,” he wrote. “Out of the heart of that dark warmth comes the secret that is heard only in silence, but it is the root of all the secrets that are whispered by all the lovers in their beds all over the world.” It is this secret, not the lovers, with which Gia Margaret’s Romantic Piano is concerned. A collection of spare compositions whose title gestures not to rose petals and candlelit dinners but the melancholic wonder of the late eighteenth century. Because while Margaret’s first instrumental release Mia Gargaret was wrapped in insular detachment, these brief, meditative songs open the curtains if not entirely stepping outside. A picture of solitude not as some lonely retreat but rather the path towards recognising the wider connection of things. That sweet dark warmth of the whole world.

Kara Jackson – Why Does The Earth Give Us People To Love?

September [BUY]

“The title of my album, the question, is driven by grief,” explains Kara Jackson of debut album Why Does The Earth Give Us People To Love? “Why do we show up on this world alongside one another? To love and to mourn? To curse each other out? To die working every day?” Jackson works through this question in what feels like real time, swapping any hope of a definitive answer for the gradual process of learning. Songs at once intimate and grand, and as fond of playful humour as they are heart-on-the-sleeve sincerity. But the biggest irony of the album is that of its intention. Because for all of its immediacy and uncertainty, Jackson’s refusal to offer any simple, unifying answer comes to represent a solution in its own right. Why does the earth give us people to love? The answer might not reveal itself directly, but would songs like this exist if it did?

L’Rain – I Killed Your Dog

Mexican Summer [BUY]

The music of Taja Cheek’s L’Rain has never been content in a single box. Straddling pop, jazz, R&B and experimental styles, the songwriter and multi-instrumentalist has made name in refusing easy categorisation. This elusive fluidity extends through every aspect of latest album, I Killed Your Dog. A love record, a break-up record, an anti-break-up record. A record which reaches for commercial pop without ceding an inch of its avant garde ambition. “I’m envisioning a world of contradictions, as always,” Cheek describes. “Sensual, maybe even sexy, but terrifying, and strange.” Hence we get an intricate, tangled picture of what it means to love and hurt the people we care about, where shame need not preclude cruelty and love comes complete with both hope and despair. The style is encapsulated by the question Cheek poses in the liner notes: “Is the title an act of maliciousness and revenge or an expression of remorse and regret?” The answer, as always with L’Rain, isn’t as simple as one or the other. It’s everything, simultaneously.

Lael Neale – Star Eaters Delight

Sub Pop [BUY]

Lael Neale’s music feels unmoored from time. Written and recorded at her family home in rural Virginia with help from collaborator Guy Blakeslee and without the involvement of a single screen, Star Eaters Delight draws on multiple lineages of American alternative music, from the lo-fi pop of Suicide and The Velvet Underground to folk singers like Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell. All in an attempt to reach out into the quiet of remote landscapes and fill them with sound and life. In contrast to Neale’s previous album Acquainted With Night, which turned inward to find peace away from the bustle of urban LA, the record explores the false divide between humans and the rest of nature (“I pledge allegiance to tree and meadow / I have no need to conquer or keep them” as Neale sings on opener ‘I Am the River’) and the value of tranquillity away from the information overload of modern life. There are many planes and dimensions, the songs at times crystalline and brittle, others amorphous and unbreakable as water, though it is this tranquillity that ultimately stands out. Minimalism not as a pretentious aesthetic choice or act of puritan self-denial, but, in true transcendentalist style, as an expression of freedom. As Neale puts it when explaining her outlook, she identifies as a minimalist “not because I don’t like things, but because I value freedom more.”

Lilts – Waiting Around

Better Company Records [BUY]

Wild Pink has been a VSF favourite for a number of years now, and we count Laura Wolf‘s Shelf Life among our favourite releases of 2023, so it is no surprise Lilts won our hearts too. Not that the collaboration between Wolf and Wild Pink’s John Ross is overtly indebted to the previous work of its duo. Rather, the pair allow their respective talents to compliment one another, setting their compass to Nineties shoegaze but allowing for whatever detours might occur along the way. Elements of dream pop and post-rock filter in, and there’s none of the derivative flatness of the revivalist movement. Indeed, there’s a freedom to ‘Dodge Street’ and the title track which feels wholly new. A product of the relationship between its creators, as though learning to trust another person allows an artist to escape the confines and expectations of the work they’ve done in the past.

Mark Jenkin – Enys Men OST

Invada Records [BUY]

Mark Jenkin’s 2019 film Bait took kitchen sink realism and bent it into something stranger, its use of a hand-cranked camera and style of dubbing distorting an otherwise familiar picture of tensions between rural traditions and the encroaching middle class. Again set in rural Cornwall, follow-up Enys Men leant more fully into this unsettling mood. Centring on a volunteer ecologist tasked with observing a rare flower on a remote island, the film presents time as both a line and a circle. The protagonist’s monotonous routine unfolds with striking similarity each day, even if the dates in her logbook progress, while strange visions appear across the island as though the thin present is merely draped over a many layered past. To say Enys Men sounded better than it looked is to pay it the highest compliment, with a soundtrack by Jenkin himself which embodies every inch of the film’s loneliness, stark beauty and hauntological mystery.

Meursault – S/T

Common Ground Records [BUY]

The self-titled record from Edinburgh‘s Meursault was initially designed as a concept album. The tale of two characters, including the titular Meursault, attempting to negotiate a post-apocalyptic world. A direct evolution, then, from the “urban horror vignettes” of 2019’s Crow Hill, as Neil Pennycook looked to lead the project in a more narrative-driven direction. But any short story worth its salt undergoes intense revision, and Meursault was pared down beyond its original idea. As though in delving further into the album’s themes, Pennycook felt able to remove the scaffold of the narrative and allow the songs to stand on their own. The character of Meursault remains, albeit under a different guise, and in offering a more autobiographical picture than anything Pennycook has shared to date, the songs come to form a wider meditation on what the ever-changing project means to him. “I am tired of this metaphor and I am bored of this poetry,” as he sings on the title track:

I am done with this ghost
and this ghost she is done with me
so I gave her a name and I set her to burn
and there in that moment this lesson I learned
you can kill them with kindness
just don’t kill them with love

and if you’ve nothing nice to say
try singing it to me

Natalia Beylis – Mermaids

Touch Sensitive Records [BUY]

Mermaids, the latest release from composer and sound artist Natalia Beylis, is in no small part indebted to a trip to a Leitrim recycling centre. It was there Beylis came across an unwanted CRB Elettronica Ancona Diamond 708 E Electric Keyboard, an instrument seemingly patient in its wait for a saviour. Beylis took it home, performed some surgery to remove the purple crayons rattling around inside, and took to playing. “When I found the cover picture of the three figures in a stack of old family photos,” Beylis says, “a confluence of the sounds and the image charged through me and [the album] began to flicker into being.” But as the record progresses, what might as first seem like serendipity deepens into something more profound. As though in committing to strange patterns of intuition and happenstance, Beylis is able to push deeper into nostalgia and unearth the lines of history and heritage within.

Northwoods Baseball Sleep Radio – Northwoods Sleep Baseball

Worried Songs [BUY]

The title character of Robert Coover’s 1968 novel The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. might be miserable in his work life, but at night he escapes reality into a fantasy of his own creation. A fully functioning baseball league he runs as a tabletop game, where every pitch, hit and injury are governed by the roll of a dice. The sport’s essence is captured in the pursuit, a collision of hard statistics and ever-unfolding narrative at a pace slow enough to fill an entire life. Northwoods Sleep Baseball Radio lives in the spirit of Coover’s imagination, albeit with a zany Pynchonian twist. A podcast fronted by elusive Chicago humourist ‘Mr King’ which offers full-length and entirely fictional baseball games featuring players like Clifton Santiago, Lefty Thorn, Blink Retterson and Randy Chang, all narrated by commentator Wally McCarthy. This album, released by Worried Songs, serves as the perfect first step into the comforting and hilarious world of Northwoods Sleep Baseball. Where sedate rhythms draw you in, but wry imagination keeps you listening.

ØXN – CYRM

Claddagh Records [BUY]

The majestic Lankum might have deservedly taken 2023 by storm, but Radie Peat’s other project ØXN also released a masterful album this year. More adventurous still than False Lankum, CYRM offers mix of traditional and original folk songs loaded with aching hearts and portentous weight, charging folk with electronic and cinematic sensibilities to blur the line between blessing and curse. Take ‘Love Henry’, a tale of seduction and violence which screws taut as it progresses, every bit as black and fated as the darkest fairy tale, or ‘Cruel Mother’, where a woman pressured into infanticide sees herself become a slow slide towards damnation. A dread-laden version of Scott Walker’s ‘Farmer in the City’ closes out the album, a thirteen-minute epic which creeps and creeps until it as all around you, then collapses into a chaos of noise.

Pearla – Oh Glistening Onion, The Nighttime Is Coming

Spacebomb Records [BUY]

“I’m not certain about much,” sings Pearla on ‘Ming the Clam’, “But I’m certain how we touch / Is compelled by some great force / Other than us.” The song encapsulates the spirit of Oh Glistening Onion, The Nighttime Is Coming, where playful whimsy and unfiltered introspection are kept in check by a certain self-awareness, though cannot help but tend towards the potential of some higher mystery. Many of the songs are concerned with finding comfort within a hostile world, and often play like questions being processed in real time, drawing on both real life experiences and wider sources. From the experience of having a credit card stolen at a flower shop to the story of Ming, the oldest individual animal known to science which died as scientists studied its longevity (“I study all the little signs / Under fluorеscent light… Reminder of the grand creation / How did she keep on fighting?”). It’s an album that marks Pearla as a project that works in awe of life’s mysteries, determined to see the beautiful and the surreal rise above the grind of the everyday.

Protomartyr – Formal Growth in the Desert

Domino [BUY]

“In case I don’t see you, well, for a little while, I just want to tell you, it’s been lovely. Every bit of it. The whole fifty years. I’d sooner have been your wife, Bark, than anyone else on earth.” So says Lucy “Ma” Cooper in the closing scene of Leo McCarey’s 1937 drama Make Way For Tomorrow, a film which feels relevant to Protomartyr’s fifth album, Formal Growth in the Desert, not least because it is referenced by the titles of opening pair of tracks. The songs were written in a period which saw lead Joe Casey lose his mother and be forced out of his childhood home, and while the records holds no small amount of grief and darkness, it also serves as an unguarded declaration of love. Which might sound strange for a band who have won deserved acclaim for their foreboding sound, their fury and doom, but Protomartyr have always been so much more than another snarling, depressed post-punk outfit in a crowded field. “Time’s your enemy / Every gift you see will be taken for sure,” Casey sings on ‘The Author’, the most direct tribute to his mother. “So I figure while you live / Kiss the ones that love you / For thе song you sing.” In case I don’t see you for a little while, I just want to tell you, it’s been lovely.

Sluice – Radial Gate

Ruination Record Co. [BUY]

The title of Radial Gate, Justin Morris’s second album under the moniker Sluice, follows the project name and doubles down on the imagery of water. Namely its control, the mechanisms and machinery developed in order to stop, raise and coax waterways in the manners most functional. Morris’s songs, cut from a nostalgic, patient style of folk and elevated by a rich palette of instrumentation, feel like miniature versions of such systems. Only here the flow is not a canal or estuary but the ever pulling course of time, complete with its attached stream of memories and meaning. Tracks like ‘Centurion’ find affirming momentum in this current, while others dam the passage to contemplate the depths of a single moment. But whether Morris is skimming along the surface or submerging himself in plunge pools, the lasting sense is that of control. For if life is a flowing river, Radial Gate represents an attempt to apply structures along its course so that we might more fully engage with the power and potential to be found therein.

Measure, Pour & Mixtape: Music for Cooking

SPINSTER [BUY]

As its title suggests, this compilation by the fine folks at SPINSTER invited artists to explore links between food and music. From shared conceptual themes of creativity and community to parallels between melody and harmony and texture and flavour, each song celebrates both the act of preparing food and sharing it with others. The result is what the label call “an auditory cookbook of songs, poems, field recordings, and aural experiments, inspired by recipes, food preparation processes, dishes, and the experience of eating.” There ain’t a dud across the sixteen tracks, but personal favourites include Andy McLeod & Sarah Bachman’s timeless folk opener, a new song from Lou Turner inspired by a line from Robert Frost, Sally Anne Morgan’s soil-to-plate ‘Grain Song’ that’s all blue skies and wide open fields, and Little Mazarn’s exploration of food’s ability to evoke memories, in this case of an uncle who she says “briefly played on the Dallas Cowboys but mostly played football with me on Thanksgiving.”

Stephen Steinbrink – Disappearing Coin

Western Vinyl [BUY]

Since releasing his last record Utopia Teased in 2018, Oakland’s Stephen Steinbrink busied himself with other things, both musical and not. He dove into the craft of engineering records for other bands, enjoying the sense of communal creativity in contrast to the solo endeavour of writing and recording for himself. He also studied an apprenticeship at a stained glass studio and became deeply interested in Buddhism, enrolling in lay monastic training before being interrupted by the global lockdowns of 2020. All of which is important when considering Disappearing Coin, an album which represents something of a reinvention for Steinbrink. A wilful attempt to make music with the same creativity and sense of awe-filled wonder that he felt when exploring these other avenues. The spirit is captured in the conjurer’s trick of the title, where reality is ruptured by a brief spark of magic. Buoyed by the experience and wisdom gleaned from outside activities, Steinbrink returns to music as a kind of magician himself. A figure who, guided by invention and playfulness, looks to use mastery of a physical craft in order to open the door to small, intangible miracles.

Strawberry Runners – S/T

Self-released [BUY]

Released a decade since the project’s inception in 2013, Strawberry Runners is the self-titled debut full-length from Emi Night’s songwriting project. Written following a period of great personal upheaval and echoing back to past trauma, the record returns to dark places with disarming candour and an easy grace, folding folk and pop into shapes that feel at once fresh and familiar. Night runs their fingers over old wounds to confront feelings of loneliness and heartbreak, but does so with a renewed spirit and sense of unrestrained creativity. Because despite the sometimes heavy subject matter, Strawberry Runners is a warm and colourful record. One full of gentle melodies and tactile textures, small details that evoke the multisensory nature of our chaotic world in all of its pain and joy and mysterious beauty. Take the sunny, devotional love song ‘Alison’, a shot of sunshiney summer where you can almost hear the wistful smile bend Night’s voice as they sing.

And I miss you
I hope you’re alright
I remember stayin’ up all night
Last June

And when I get back
To the midwest
To the bluegrass
And the sassafras trees
And the yellowwood

Sun June – Bad Dream Jaguar

Run For Cover Records [BUY]

There’s always been a distance in the music of Sun June, from the disconnect between lovers and family members to the wide open vistas of the Austin band’s home state. But third album Bad Dream Jaguar was inspired by distance of another order of magnitude. Founding members Laura Colwell and guitarist Stephen Salisbury have been in a relationship for the last few years, and the record was written after Salisbury moved 1,300 miles away to North Carolina, the couple swapping demos of new songs as a way to both process and alleviate the sense of separation and longing. The hazy dream-like quality of the Sun June sound is therefore as nostalgic and nebulous as it has ever been, painting impressionistic pictures of love and longing in quiet dusk-hued pastels, as though in effort to preserve that which might otherwise fade out into nothing. The present comes to feel like a temporary space between the gravity of the past and the vast shadowed sweep of whatever comes next, though we are given little choice but live in it as best we can.

Truth Club – Running From the Chase

Double Double Whammy [BUY]

“Is this working? Are you working hard? Is it working for you?” Such questions might only be asked outright in the closing track of Truth Club’s Running From The Chase, but their desperate weight hangs over its every moment, threatening to pull an entire life off-kilter or else bury it altogether. The North Carolina outfit’s 2019 debut Not An Exit nodded to Dante by way of Bret Easton Ellis, though its despair was matched with an infectious forward motion which meant the listener could step off at the end with their pessimism shaken loose. But here the songs are more expansive, the textures dense and submerging. A sonic representation of twenty-first century living, with lead Travis Harrington left to murmur and yell within the noise, mimicking a world which demands energy for even the most basic of things. “I am scared we will end up like his friend,” as Harrington sings on the title track. “work until he’s dead / work until we’re dead / is there any other plan?”

White Boy Scream – Tent Music

Whited Sepulchre Records [BUY]

Travelling from Los Angeles to New Mexico in 2021, White Boy Scream’s Micaela Tobin stopped off for a few nights in Arizona to stay with violinist and composer Joshua Hill, who was staying with his parents to shelter from the pandemic and care for his dementia-stricken father. They pitched a tent in the backyard and decided to record something in the spur of the moment, setting up microphones as wildfires raged only miles away. A confined space within a world unravelling. Tent Music is what emerged from those nights. Music stripped of intention and thus open to ancient or esoteric influence, Tobin and Hill acting not so much musicians but mouths for unseen voices, tools for invisible hands. When shaping the recordings over the next few years, the task felt more like relaying an old mythology than creating something new. “Both of us have a pretty long practice with improvised and experimental music,” as Tobin explains, “but there were voices coming out of me in those two nights that I’ve never used before. It felt like channelling something. When we started listening back to it, the story emerged.”

As ever, thanks for sticking with us for another year. Your support does not go unnoticed.

The post Albums We Missed in 2023 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

If Dirt Buyer II, the forthcoming album from Joe Sutkowski’s project on Bayonet Records, offers a clear message, it is that of survival. But any true acknowledgement of being alive can only come from brushes with mortality, and the songs see Dirt Buyer engage with the full darkness of the past in order to more fully appreciate the brighter future. Lead track ‘Fentanyl’ captures the full nuance of this process with a sound which far exceeds its relatively short length. An inky black slice of alt/emo rock which swings between stagnant gloom and bracing rolls of thunderous weight.

Dirt Buyer II is out on the 20th October via Bayonet Records and you can pre-order it now.

Eversame – Warm Flower Sided Road

Originating from jamming sessions between drummer Marek Šmidovič and guitarist Richard Špirko, Žilina’s Eversame have been in development as a band since 2018. But it was only on adding Matúš Ratveiský and then later Pauline Struhárová in 2022 that they really started working towards recorded music. After a debut standalone single, the band turned their attention to full-length Tell Me Where the Flowers Are, and the album is now being released by Filip Zemčík’s Start-track for a limited edition cassette release. Single ‘Warm Flower Sided Road’ serves as the ideal introduction for those unfamiliar with the outfit, blending brooding grunge tones with math rock invention to hint at both the weight and fluidity of the Eversame sound.

Indianna Hale – Hollow The Words

Described as “a love song to my friend family,” ‘Hollow The Words’ is an encapsulation of Indianna Hale’s hybrid country/dream pop style and the bright yet wistful mood which results. The latest song from upcoming LP Yesterday’s Glitter on Perpetual Doom, the single is typical of the album’s atmosphere, where the beauty of joyful things is shadowed by their inevitable passing. What results is an ambivalent sound which could be described as sweet, sad or even surreal, with Western overtones adding some cosmic desert spirit too. Watch the video directed by Sean Olmstead below:

Yesterday’s Glitter is out on the 1st September via Perpetual Doom and you can pre-order it now.

Meagre Martin – Please Clap

Led by Boston-born, Berlin based songwriter Sarah Martin, Meagre Martin has been described as a vehicle for survival and catharsis within our unstable world. With debut album Gut Punch, coming later this year on Mansions and Millions, Martin uses this distance from the US to better examine her home country, be it religious fundamentalism or the ever-worsening climate catastrophe, all delivered with a country-inflected brand of indie rock. Latest single ‘Please Clap’ draws on an image of Jeb Bush floundering before a crowd as an archetypal example of the strange mix of brutality, banality and insecurity which marks the present American psyche. Watch the video directed by Alessandra Corazzini and produced along with Ruby Chopping below:

Gut Punch is out on the 10th November via Mansions and Millions and you can pre-order it now.

Ocie Elliott – Free

Hailing from Victoria, BC, Ocie Elliott (that’s duo Jon Middleton and Sierra Lundy) have made their name with a compassionate and often romantic brand of folk music. Writing of previous single ‘With the Lights Down‘, we described how their intimate style conjured “a moment to remember the things you appreciate while they are still close at hand,” and the description could serve the outfit’s sound more generally. Latest track ‘Free’ is another example, again charged with the wistful fondness we’ve come to expect, welcoming the listener into their music’s mindful peace.

Head up, I’m going down
New paths on old ground
Wildflowers and bird songs
These hours, I feel strong

Pleasure Systems – Everything I Need (ft. Melody English)

His first new music since devastating 2021 album Visiting the Well, ‘Everything I Need’ is the new single from Clarke Sondermann’s Pleasure Systems. It’s a collaboration with New York‘s Melody English and sees a continuation of Pleasure Systems’ unique relationship with time. “Immediate thoughts coalesce with memories,” as we wrote of the previous album, “anguish swirls with past joys and the current stark absence muddles with a previous, very real, presence.” ‘Everything I Need’ is rooted in the present but finds itself drifting across the temporal spectrum. Flashing back to what has now passed, daring to imagine a future. And in the end, settling for what sits in the here and now.

When the evening dies
And we’re sharing the surprise
Past and present sitting softly in your eyes

Turn another day
In the getting in the way
Everything I need is here to stay

Roselit Bone – Ofrenda

Written in the aftermath of the loss of several friends and acquaintances, the title track of Roselit Bone’s Ofrenda is a song haunted by a spectre of death. “Grief would knock me down for weeks or months at a time,” as lead Charlotte McCaslin explains. “But I noticed that, for some brief little moments, the pressure of grieving would give way and I would suddenly feel ‘okay’. I would then be flooded with pangs of guilt for surviving, for not suffering alongside the dead.” The song, and indeed the album as a whole, doesn’t so much try to exorcise this spectre as step out from beneath its shadow. A blend of country and Mexican ranchera music which owes as much to Ennio Morricone as it does punk, emerging with a strangely triumphant air as it faces the most difficult question head on. How do we go on living in full knowledge of what is coming? What does it mean to live in a world which seems to be dying too?

Ofrenda is out via Get Loud Recordings on the 25th August and you can pre-order it now.

Sun June – Get Enough

Bad Dream Jaguar, the forthcoming album by Sun June on Run For Cover Records, sees the band lean further into the style they’ve established across their previous records. A mix of emotional immediacy and ethereal weightlessness, a picture where the line between the ground and the sky is blurred into insignificance. A spacious mirage that’s something like a dream, something like Texas, caught between the comfort of memory and the vertiginous realisation that memory might be all we have. New single ‘Get Enough’ appears to be aware of its position within this environment, embracing its untethered status to drift towards what could be bitter end or absolute truth.

Bad Dream Jaguar is out on the 20th October via Run For Cover Records and you can pre-order it now.

Thomas Powers – Li (ft. Chelsea Jade)

Having risen to fame as part of New Zealand synth pop outfit The Naked and Famous, Thomas Powers was gearing up to release a new record with the band just as the pandemic hit and curtailed their plans. The intervening downtime provided an opportunity to pursue solo work, and debut single ‘Li’ shows the first fruits of the endeavour. Featuring fellow Aotearoa artist Chelsea Jade, the song presents an altogether more reserved soundscape than those of TN&F, though one which nevertheless offers a considerable emotional punch. The introspection of an empty room blown up into cinematic grandeur. Watch the video directed by Thomas Powers, Chelsea Jade & Luna Shadows below:

‘Li’ is out now and available from the usual places.

Truth Club – Exit Cycle

Since the release of debut Not An Exit on Tiny Engines back in 2019, Raleigh outfit Truth Club have looked to push the boundaries of what the band could sound like. The addition of Yvonne Chazal to the line-up only furthered this motivation, the newly formed quartet deciding to work with a more communal brand of songwriting. A process intended to “hold space for criticism, critique, input, and inspiration from the rest of the band in any context.” Having now signed with Double Double Whammy, Truth Club are set to release new record From the Chase, and latest single ‘Exit Cycle’ is an encapsulation of their new methods. A track which always felt like it was missing something until collaboration kicked in, with Indigo De Souza adding vocals to finally realise its proper form. “The emotional path of the song parallels the journey of writing it,” lead Travis Harrington explains. “It begins in the most private and insular place, and finally grows into a joyfully collective outpour.” Watch the video directed by Alex Montenegro below:

From the Chase is out on the 6th October via Double Double Whammy and you can pre-order it now.

The post Weekly Listening: August 2023 #4 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Binker & Moses – Accelerometer Overdose

The recording project of saxophonist Binker Golding and drummer and composer Moses Boyd, Binker & Moses are representative of a new wave of acts within London who look to combine the jazz tradition with hip-hop, Caribbean rhythms and various electronic styles. The latest single from forthcoming record Feeding The Machine on Gearbox Records, ‘Accelerometer Overdose’ welcomes the tape loops of Max Luthert, pushing things into ambient territory and further increasing the possibilities of the Binker & Moses sound.

Sun June – Somewhere + 3

Last year saw the release of Sun June’s excellent album Somewhere on Run For Cover Records, which recently featured on our Albums We Missed in 2021 feature. The record was released from isolation, and when the band were finally able to get back together they channelled both the frustration of those lost months and the joy of being reunited into new songs. The result is Somewhere + 3, a deluxe edition of last year’s record with three previously unreleased tracks.

The vibe of these new songs is captured perfectly on lead single ‘Easy’. “[It] is a romantic struggle song,” explains says Laura Colwell. “It’s about love and partnership and longstanding arguments that are hard to get past.”

Want it to be easy
Swore we’d be better by now
Picture of your mother
In Vietnam, 1977

Widowspeak – Everything is Simple

“Everything is simple ’til it’s not,” sings Molly Hamilton of Widowspeak on ‘Everything is Simple’, the lead single from the New York duo’s forthcoming album, The Jacket. It’s a song about how things grow complicated with time, how even situations which begin as pure potential eventually become knotted with limitations, and how, unreliable narrators that we are, we often bend reality to adapt. But despite that, the song sounds surprisingly vibrant, unfurling with a patient confidence that we’ve come to expect from Widowspeak. Check out the video, directed by OTIUM, below:

The Jacket is out via Captured Tracks on the 11th March and you can pre-order it now from the Widowspeak Bandcamp page.

Good Good Blood – The Dizzying Parade

Back in November we introduced you to The Dizzying Parade, the latest album from Good Good Blood on Team Love Records, with single ‘Green Bank’. “A densely layered track which balances a propelling drum beat with an dreamy weightlessness,” we described, “Smith’s vocals finding that neo-psychedelic line between attitude and ethereality.” Ahead of the album’s release this week, Good Good Blood have unveiled the title track. Another propulsive song which gradually builds in intensity as it unfolds, the tension growing and growing before unravelling into a sonic kaleidoscope of colour and sound. A finale as disorientating as the title suggests.

Allegra Krieger – Taking It In

Brooklyn-based songwriter Allegra Krieger is back with Precious Thing, a new LP out via Northern Spy Records this spring. Lead single ‘Taking It In’ introduces the album’s distinctively inviting and wistful sound, Krieger’s gentle croon sitting within a changeable arrangement of strings that conjure the sense of memories ebbing and flowing around the present moment. “Where am I now? Where was I three years ago?” she asks, “Where is my mother where is anyone I know?” Check out the video by Samuel Ogoe, Melissa Lozada-Oliva and Koa Ho below:

Precious Thing releases via Northern Spy Records on the 4th March and you can pre-order it now from the Allegra Krieger Bandcamp page.

 chores – Trip Wire

chores are a post punk slash dream pop band from Rochester NY. They recently released their debut single, ‘Trip Wire’, taken from a forthcoming EP. It’s a wonderful introduction, the kind of lo-fi indie pop gem that would be right at home on an early 90s Sarah Records sampler. As the title suggests, it’s a song about trying to avoid all those little everyday triggers that spark anxiety. As lead Heather Swenson sings “it’s a thick mire, avoiding any tripwire / that could signal friendly fire somewhere in my brain, so many times a day.”

Melk – Yankee Division Highway

Self-described “aspiring optimists” from Washington D.C., Melk make dreamy, punky indie pop that nevertheless traverse some pretty serious emotional depths. Comprising of Melissa Kain (guitar & vocals), AJ DiGregorio (bass) and Alex Scheuer (drums), Melk have just released their second EP, a three-song collection called Somebody, Nobody, Anybody. The standout is the slow-burning final track, ‘Yankee Division Highway’, a song the band say is “about how apathy can erode the trust you have in loved ones.” Kain guides us through the patient build, matching the intensity of the instrumentation before drifting into a rueful croon.

Carrie Biell – See Through the Trees

“I’ve been living my whole damn life trying to make everybody feel alright,” sings Seattle-based singer-songwriter Carrie Biell in latest single, ‘See Through the Trees’. “Maybe I’m sick of trying.” The line captures the track’s strange relationship between uncertainty and conviction, where beliefs are felt with palpable force even when solutions might not be easy or accessible. “This is about feeling maxed out in life by people and life commitments,” Biell explains, “but still trying to open up and be vulnerable in a new relationship. It’s about responding to your own needs while also giving to a new partner and learning to trust.”

Modern Nature – Performance

Rising from the ashes of previous band Ultimate Painting, Modern Nature is the new moniker of London‘s Jack Cooper. A project which takes the compositions and songwriting developed with Ultimate Painting and builds upon them with a newfound willingness to improvise and experiment. This month sees the release of latest record Island Of Noise on Bella Union, with lead single ‘Performance’ offering a glimpse of what’s to come. A song “written from the perspective of someone seeing or realising something overwhelming for the first time,” as Cooper puts it, consisting of a multitude of moving parts that mimic a kind of irrepressible curiosity.

Check out the video by Conan Roberts, Phoebe Cooper and Cooper himself below:

Island Of Noise is out on the 28th January via Bella Union and you can pre-order it from the Modern Nature Bandcamp page.

Pompey – Overwhelmed

Montreal based artist Pompey has played in a variety of acts within the city, lending his talents to the likes of Thanya Iyer, Corey Gulkin and Paper Beat Scissors, but Overwhelmed is the first full-length album of his own. Released by Anything Bagel, the record is a self-professed pandemic album. A product not so much of the prolonged anxiety of the present but rather Pompey’s methods of coping. A deliberate search for comfort and kindness within the constant pressure, carving out a space in which to rest. The title track illustrates the mood as good as any on the record, delivered with a deliberate tenderness which invites the listener to share the safe harbour for a while.

I try not to frown
Smile spreads light throughout my crown
I will trust myself
Over time

Nuisance – Kuchisabishii

A collaboration between William J. Seidel and Ryan E. Weber (REW<<, Eric & Magill), Nuisance craft a version of dream pop coloured by folk and classical sensibilities, though the process is far more notable than that. Weber spent two years recording instruments and coding them into software, building up a library of sounds which can be downloaded at Poetic Devices. After such a laborious process, the pair decided their first use of the program should be as immediate as possible, and the first Nuisance album Kuchisabishii, (out now via Katuktu Collective) came together in just two days. A shifting, impressionistic exploration of intimacy and immediacy, it’s a wonderful example of music made from the ground up, from atomic level building blocks to an album-sized ecosystem.

Don’t Worry – Crushing Weight / Head’s Chocka

Fronted by co-leads Ronan Van Kehoe and Samuel Watson, Don’t Worry have won recognition with their blend of wry observation and nostalgic charm. Following last year’s single ‘As If By Magic‘, the outfit are returning with full-length Remorseless Swing on Specialist Subject Records, and the first singles suggest the Don’t Worry style is evolving in several directions beyond their indie rock/emo roots. Be it the poppy (or poppier) rhythms of ‘Crushing Weight’ or the sweet romance of ‘Head’s Chocka’, though the lyrics still have signature flashes of wit.

Why can’t we just take this moment
Flatter it with rapturous applause and leave early doors
Listen, my head is chocka
But I can no longer forget here and now

Oh, how
I’m tongue tied over you

The post Weekly Listening – Jan 2022 #1 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

We’ve decided to expand things slightly this year, giving ourselves a chance to write a little something about the albums we wanted to cover but never got the opportunity. Albums which meant something to us at various points through 2021. Some cemented themselves early as our favourites of the year, others were relatively late additions that held our attention as the calendars changed, and a few break the rules in being albums released in previous years but earn their inclusion here having proved constant companions through last twelve months.

So here are some records we really enjoyed in 2021. We hope you enjoy them too.

22° Halo – Garden Bed

Lost Sound Tapes

Led by Will Kennedy (Sleeper Records) and supported by the likes of Heeyoon Won (Boosegumps) and Francis Lyon (Ylayali, Free Cake For Every Creature), 22° Halo are something of a Philadelphia DIY lo-fi pop supergroup. Their third release, Garden Bed is as sweet and soft as the peachy pink cover art, taking the gloomy fog of slowcore and holding a light beneath it, the cloud suddenly enveloping and bright. Paired with the earnest tenderness of Kennedy’s vocals, the songs come to feel like old companions. Fond and quietly contemplative, strangely familiar and hopeful in a manner not quite explicable. Songs easy to be around and easier to return to, comforting in the very fact they exist.

Advance Base – Wall of Tears & Other Songs I Didn’t Write

Orindal Records

In ‘Kitty Winn’, a song on Advance Base’s 2015 record Nephew in the Wild, Owen Ashworth described watching The Exorcist and recognising the actor from Panic at Needle Park. “It felt like seeing an old friend,” he sings, “The way I wondered where she’d been.” Ashworth has introduced us to a lot of characters of his own over the years, but Wall of Tears & Other Songs I Didn’t Write performs a different kind of introduction. Inspired by the conspicuous absence of karaoke during recent times, the release takes tracks from acts both old and new and reimagines them in the image of Ashworth’s distinctively hushed and empathetic style. With a mixture of classics (Lucinda Williams, Iris DeMent, St. John Prine) and contemporaries/Orindal Records label mates (Dan Wriggins, Gia Margaret, Wednesday). The collection will resonate differently depending on who’s listening, but chances are there’ll be at least one occasion where the introduction is more like a reintroduction. An old friend smiling through the years, suddenly before you once again. 

Cassandra Jenkins – An Overview on Phenomenal Nature

Ba Da Bing Records

“I’m a three-legged dog, working with what I’ve got,” sings Cassandra Jenkins on ‘Michaelangelo’, the opening track from An Overview on Phenomenal Nature. “And part of me,” she continues, “will always be looking for what I’ve lost.” It’s one of the few tracks that directs its focus on Jenkins herself rather than reflections from those around her. The record is inspired by the work of Indian sculptor Mrinalini Mukherjee, an artist who explored the line between allegory and abstraction with an intuitive fluidity, and Jenkins follows this lead to spin her surroundings into representations of her own. Be that the characters and objects encountered in the travel diary of ‘Hard Drive’, the accumulated wisdom of ‘New Bikini’, or the startlingly pretty instrumentation that builds across the record thanks to a whole host of musicians. Songs shaped by Jenkins’s careful but fleeting hand, like sculptures allowed to dissipate as soon as they have formed. Moments captured, meaning what they will.

Cla-ras – Five clusters

Lily Tapes & Discs

The first full length by multidisciplinary artist Jeremy Ferris, Five clusters takes inspiration from nature’s long game. With subtle intricacies growing from every crevice, its ambient folk style sees the organic slowly overwhelm the electronic, evoking ecology’s reclamation of abandoned industrial land. The sense of some circular pattern, the past returning as the future, post-humanity imagined as prehistoric verdancy. The sensation is both delicate and strangely visceral. Keyed into the botanical surface and the supporting undergrowth, where fine mycelium threads facilitate pungent decomposition, enriching the soil so that the songs might bloom with their damp, bodily life.     

Damien Jurado – The Monster Who Hated Pennsylvania

Maraqopa Records

The world of The Monster Who Hated Pennsylvania is familiar in the way a dream is familiar. Or is that foreign in the way dreams are foreign? Damien Jurado presents each track as a space between the known and unknown, their characters hanging on in the hope such positions are transitory, and in doing so blurs the line between the characters and the songwriter himself. Take Majestic centrepiece ‘Johnny Caravella’, which calls to mind ‘Percy Faith’ from The Horizon Just Laughed but this time takes inspiration from fictional DJ Dr. Johnny Fever from WKRP in Cincinnati. But ‘taking inspiration’ doesn’t quite capture the song’s true extent, as Jurado channels the fictional doctor, his delivery neither quite Fever or himself but a blend of the two. “Who’ll wear the crown when the change is approaching / Of some other season renown?” this hybrid figure asks as the track winds tighter with every line. This latent intensity is brought to the surface in the finale, an urgent beseeching that we hang on a little longer. “As I exited north the radio spoke / ‘All is not lost even if you’re without a direction’,” goes the final verse. “Go west, go west, 1972 / The sun hasn’t set, the stars very few / Just stick around ’til the light pushes into the darkness.”

The Felice Brothers – From Dreams to Dust

Yep Roc Records

‘Jazz on the Autobahn’, the opening track of what is The Felice Brothers’ eighth and perhaps most compelling record, finds two people fleeing their old lives. It’s never revealed exactly what Helen and The Sheriff are leaving in the rear-view mirror of their “doomed Corvette,” but what waits for them at the end of the road is imagined in vivid detail. Helen dreams of the apocalypse arriving as an anthropomorphic tornado, as poisoned lakes and acid rain, a force as “loud as a mushroom cloud” yet “ghostly like a glockenspiel.” The Sheriff disagrees, tries to “make a distinction between death and extinction” as Helen spits melon seeds and drinks 7-Up in his car. His is an apocalypse stripped of its fictions and graces. No saving angels, no hand of God, no spared billionaires on Mars. The track is the standard bearer of From Dreams to Dust. A record of cutting fury and crushing sadness set to rich and affirming rhythms. Poems and short stories packed with clever references and wry turns of phrase. A confrontation of the grim realities of our moment that nevertheless celebrates the fact of being alive. “What is freedom?” The Sheriff wonders in his closing verse. To be empty of desire? To find everything we’ve lost or have been in search of? Does it feel like jazz on the autobahn?

Giles Corey – S/T

The Flenser

The side project of Have a Nice Life’s Dan Barrett, Giles Corey picked up the threads of Deathconsciousness and followed them deep underground. The self-titled record, originally released in 2011 but given a new lease of life by The Flenser for its tenth anniversary, feels like a haunting committed to tape. At once intense and eerily hushed, spacious yet claustrophobic, lonely but never alone. A picture of depression as an intensely personal experience which nevertheless transcends the individual. A torment too large for a single skin. When ‘Empty Churches’ opens with paranormal investigator Raymond Cass talking of voices of unknown origin appearing on radio frequencies, the mood is not so much disturbing as alluring. A dimension beyond all this. Something to lose yourself in. To submit to. To hope for beyond all we know and can know, in spite of it all.

Grouper – Shade

Kranky

Described as a record about “respite and the coast, poetically and literally,” Shade is every bit as considered and in-depth as you might expect from an album fifteen years in the making. The mutual relationship between person and place is conjured with Harris’s cloudy abstraction, the line between strange and familiar blurred beyond its binary simplicity, and so too the border between intimacy and solitude. An overarching sense of a distance drapes over the record, evoking isolation in space or time, and the hushed tone carries with it hidden depths which speak to the unknowable nature of the sea. The result is simultaneously elemental and fundamentally human, and one of Grouper’s finest records to date.

The Hold Steady – Open Door Policy

Positive Jams

The Hold Steady universe has always been something of a gauntlet for its characters. A high-speed race with a whole lot of entrants but not so many finishers. To say Open Door Policy picks up with these winners is to assume the race has finished, when in fact it has merely changed. The participants are older, their communities atomised, their world having been sliced up and commodified by tech-savvy barons both ruthless and polite. In this way, the band’s eighth album feels a closer descendant of Craig Finn’s solo records than more recent Hold Steady records. A considered, cohesive album of narrative-driven songs which offer glimpses into the lives of imperfect figures dissatisfied or downtrodden and merely surviving. Finn & Co. mean many different things to many different people, but too often their work is (mis)understood as a mere good time. As though the joy of The Hold Steady is solely the joy of the party. But like so many of their records before it, Open Door Policy is proof of something deeper and more profound. The quiet, ugly dignity of humans persevering, and the irreplaceable value of a community to see them through.

KUZU – The Glass Delusion

Astral Spirits

Glass delusion is a manifestation of a psychiatric phenomenon witnessed primarily across the wealthy classes of Early Modern Europe where the individual feared they were made of glass. King Charles VI of France allegedly forbade anyone from touching him, so acute was his fear of shattering, and took to wearing protective clothing. It was a fear intensely human yet inorganic, recasting life as a path with danger around every bend. Chicago‘s KUZU throw us into such a heightened state, their improvisational jazz guarding its hand, leaving the listener no choice but to strap in and follow the slow-burning yet ever shifting lines. But from within the anxiety of this undetermined ride, an overarching conviction emerges. The sense everything is barrelling toward some spectacular finale. The dreadful shattering event. The screw turns and turns, the sound needling with increasingly deranged energy, leaving the listener like Gene Hackman’s Harry Caul at the end of The Conversation, tearing their surroundings rather than break apart themselves.

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson – Theory of Ice

You’ve Changed Records

Michi Saagig Nishnaabeg artist Leanne Betasamosake Simpson has made her name in poetry, fiction, music and scholarship, and Theory of Ice feels like a culmination of this body of work. A lesson in world building, in communication, in history and preservation and life. A weapon against settler colonisation that carries no dull weight or serrated edge, indeed no violence at all. “The settler colonial state is not hated, it is pitied,” describes Steven Lambke in the liner notes, “for its smallness, its evil, its perpetual cruelty.” Theory of Ice turns this force against itself, utilising an absence of violence to illuminate the absence within violence. The dark, meaningless lacuna at the heart of the imperialist project, a space never filled despite the visceral physicality of its rule. Moreover, Simpson evokes the persistent presence of the peoples who have suffered at its hand, kept alive in acts of community and gesture, in the work of a searching artist’s life. “In realization / we don’t exist without each other,” go the record’s closing lines. “She says: there’s nothing about you / I’m not willing to know.”

Macie Stewart – Mouth Full of Glass

Orindal Records

To describe the career of Macie Stewart is to describe a career of collaboration. The multi-instrumentalist founded bands such as Kids These Days, Marrow and OHMME, played as part of Ken Vandermark’s Marker ensemble, improvisational act The Few and with Lia Kohl as a violin/cello duo, as well as lending her talents to records by a plethora of acts including V.V. Lightbody, Whitney, Adeline Hotel and S.Z.A. But within these collaborations, Stewart became aware her own individual sound was being left to atrophy. Indeed, she had no idea what her individual sound might be. With its unflinching eye and succulent arrangements, Mouth Full of Glass represents an attempt to find out. An artist surveying their own inner workings through considered and open-ended exploration, leaning into solitude as a medium of discovery and learning from all that has occurred before without ever becoming beholden to the past. “What pleasure I choose to keep after I buried it deep,” as Stewart sings across the sinuous sax of ‘Garter Snake’. “Try to uncover it all.”

Michael Beach – Dream Violence

Goner Records & Poison City Records

On Dream Violence, Naarm/Melbourne-based Michael Beach reaches into the grab bag of rock history and fashions what he finds into something timely and unique. Imagine Neil Young meeting The Velvet Underground on a dark and hopeless night in our late-capitalist hellscape to muse on the meaninglessness of existence. Ripping rockers rub shoulders with heartfelt piano ballads and genuine, capital-E earworms, all in an attempt to communicate what Beach describes as “human futility, passion, desire, anger, frustration, and the struggle to maintain hope in a somewhat hopeless time.”

Natalie Jane Hill – Solely

Dear Life Records

Following on from 2020’s stunning Azaela, Natalie Jane Hill’s second record sees a reversal of perspective. Because while the first album looked to the expansive roll of the land for its focus, Solely turns inward to examine an environment far more personal. Themes of loss and loneliness emerge from this introspection, by-products of any quest for self-discovery, though Hill’s intricate arrangements are too deft and nuanced to be consumed by such emotions. What instead emerges is an ecosystem as detailed and changeable as any conjured on Azaela, an interior environment as mysterious as that of the Blue Ridge Mountains. One that holds the best and worst of life and, importantly, holds enough space to sit with both simultaneously, never losing sight of the possibility of change on the horizon.

Protomartyr – Ultimate Success Today

Domino

Across five albums, Protomartyr’s Joe Casey has cemented his status as a cynic in both the ancient and modern sense. A fatalistic Irish Catholic from working class Detroit writing songs that weave dense webs of references to ancient philosophy and arcane literature. The everyday man alienated, an outsider enraged at what is unfolding around him. Written during a spell of illness, Ultimate Success Today sees Casey confront not only his own mortality but the wider prospect of hope in the contemporary neoliberal society. His father, whose untimely death has haunted each Protomartyr album to varying degrees, died during a routine medical procedure, and Casey’s pain is matched by a dread of the doctor’s office. A cynicism of medicine rooted not in partisan politics or misinformation but existential terror—the sense even the surgeons won’t be able to save him. The explicit goodbye of closing track ‘Worm in Heaven’ might play as a cathartic acknowledgement of this fear, but Casey chooses to undercut himself, mocking his own attempts to conquer dread through music. A cynicism wrapped around itself to include a doubt in the utility or power of art. “Dumb aphorist embrace obscurants,” he sings of himself on ‘The Aphorist’, “and write in ogham for your final lines.” A cynic, old and new, to the very end.

R.A.P. Ferreira – The Light Emitting Diamond Cutter Scriptures

Self-released

Whether recording as milo, scallops hotel or most recently R.A.P. Ferreira, Nashville-based Rory Ferreira has been releasing some of the most inventive and interesting rap music of the past few years. The Light Emitting Diamond Cutter Scriptures is his most cohesive record to date, the full maturity of his lyricism on show without losing any of the DIY aesthetic that has long lended his work its authenticity. Because Ferreira is a rapper in the purest sense. A radical, a philosopher, a comedian. Interested in nothing but the words. “What’s morbid is there’s poets who want to be on the Forbes List,” he sings on ‘uptown 37’, “I will be gorgeous and homeless.” And gorgeous this is, the lyrics skating over a whole gamut of moods and subjects, reaching for whatever cultural reference he can get his hands on, however high or low. Where else are you going to find Ansel Adams, Inspector Clouseau, Euripedes and Mr Bean all living on the same record?

Renée Reed – S/T

Keeled Scales

Born into a family of musicians and folklorists, Renée Reed grew up amid the best of Cajun and Creole music. Her work contains a hundred shades and small details pointing toward this history, but its lasting influence is less tangible. A sense of intuition threads through the songs. A phenomenon which lends them a certain timelessness, the sense they haven’t been so much written as teased out of some half-remembered space. The intricate arrangements are rendered simple in their instinctive rhythm, Reed’s poetic lyrics given the weight of the land. “We’d stand in the dark and cry,” she sings near the end of the record, “Oh, if only we could / For our bones, they belong to the country.” These songs feel like they belong to the country too, Reed more a guardian than a creator. For now they are travelling with her, and a worthy custodian she makes. 

Space Afrika – Honest Labour

Dais Records

The UK has always been a kind of dreamstate. A society held up on imagined pasts and false notions, a deluded fantasy stretched to breaking point yet never relinquishing its hold. This dark dread is in the dense Twin Peakian synths of Honest Labour’s opening moments, but Manchester‘s Space Afrika are here to do more than recapitulate the moribund British dream. For within the dreamstate live the dreamers, and each dreamer—however isolated and despondent—has their own dreams. Feeling more like a documentary than album, the record details the visions of this nameless population. A tessellated blend of samples, field recordings and vocal cameos which emerge haphazardly from dark layers of instrumentation. The result is an expressionistic picture of a society, one dazed and delirious, left to wander this long night with all their love and fear and loss in the hope some dawn might lend this intangible reality some weight.  

Sun June – Somewhere

Run For Cover Records / Keeled Scales

Take a look at the artwork of Sun June’s Somewhere and you might see a pillar of smoke gradually fade into a pastel sky. The image is fitting for a sound they developed on 2018’s Years, a record of gently swaying country pop songs which traced feelings of loss and grief as they dispersed into the wider context of a life. Sadness drifting away from its source, becoming more translucent with distance but always present in some diffuse concentration. Though clearly building on the previous record, Somewhere sees a certain inversion. Love stirs from within the tracks and with it a poppier, full-bodied sound. The sense the quiet melancholy is coalescing into something more tangible and immediate, gathering weight and sinking toward some intensity on the ground. Perhaps we got it backward, we’re looking at the artwork upside down.

Tasha – Tell Me What You Miss The Most

Father/Daughter Records

In a year of weighty foreboding and needling menace, Tasha’s Tell Me What You Miss The Most came to represent a safe haven. An introspective album which excavates personal ground not as some exercise in regret or sadness but to carve a space in which to rest and ponder. Be it musing on the pasts that were and the presents that never came to be, or the unknown futures still up in the air. Imagery of beds and sleep recurs across the record, and the songs come to knit their own mattress and sheets. A place where time passes in reassuring cycles and the pressing outside is held at bay, one’s troubles suddenly small and tactile enough to be examined in the palm of a hand. 

Tobacco City – Tobacco City, USA

Scissor Tail Records

Listening to Chicago’s Tobacco City is to be transported to the imagined locale of its title, a loving patchwork of country music settings; like searching for radio waves from a porchside rocking chair or feeding quarters into a jukebox in the musty refuge of a dark barroom. Lonesome ballads wind slow with regret and pedal steel, folk songs get cosmic on sunburn and psychedelics, and honky-tonk shuffles flow easy as that three-beers-in second wind after a long day on the production line. Hard-earned wisdom sits side by side with wry humour, capturing the tragedy, hope and absurdity of broken people going about their lives the best they can. Riding out heartbreak on the buzz of cheap booze and bright lights. As Lexi Goddard sings at one point, “Being alone ain’t so bad when you’re half in the bag.”

The Weather Station – Ignorance

Fat Possum Records

“I never believed in the robber,” sings The Weather Station‘s Tamara Lindeman on Ignorance’s opening track. “I never saw nobody climb over my fence.” The lines contain a multitude of meanings. Stress a different word and you get a different shade of the album’s eponymous state. The robber doesn’t exist. At least to my knowledge. At least not around these parts. But the truth lies in the volatile swirl of instrumentation, a jazzy swell of cymbals and piano and drums, sax licking staccato like the devil’s tongue or the threatening word of God. ‘Robber’ is a confession, a plea, a waking fever dream. The colonial past and capitalist present manifest in all its unease. A violence which seeps out, haunting even the record’s most tender moments. Lindeman repeatedly turns to the natural world as an escape, from the birds of ‘Parking Lot’ to the “cold metallic scent of snow” in ‘Subdivisions’, the sky, the green, the soft of ‘Heart’. But as it says in ‘Loss’, “At some point you’d have to live as if the truth was true.” Nature might still persist, but it is the robber who built the world around us. His hand is still in our pockets. Even the sunset on ‘Atlantic’ is blood red.

Wednesday – Twin Plagues

Orindal Records

Though Twin Plagues is a record of memories, there’s nothing polished about the experiences being relayed, no rose-tinted gloss applied through repeated telling. There’s no nostalgia either. No intention to preserve or wish to return. Rather, Wednesday portray the past as something still present. The rugged surface across which the present is overlain. Its contours reveal itself on even the most ordinary days, be it in the gut-drop of a missed step, a suddenly interrupted view. Memories held for no good reason, not exclusively bad but always haunting. Memories as they return to you in dreams. The kid with a fucked up buzzcut. The burned down Dairy Queen. Birds in the air, flies in the bug light, brawls at the baseball and crossbows in old family photographs. Sometimes these memories are traumatic, sometimes they are sad, sometimes they mean nothing beyond their own shape and texture but then again, that’s just how life unfolds.        

Wendy Eisenberg – Bent Ring

Dear Life Records

Even in the crowded field of the internet age, Wendy Eisenberg stands apart in their prolific invention. Since the beginning of 2020, they have released at least five solo records (as well as working as part of Editrix), each offering intricate and thematically precise sounds which serve as frameworks through which to examine a particular space or time. The latest, Bent Ring, began as a self-imposed challenge to make an album with no guitar, but really stands apart in the direction of its gaze. A record looking back across a period of great productivity and achievement nevertheless attenuated by the hostile conditions of the surrounding environment. A contemplation of what it means to be an artist in our world, and how the endurance, commitment, frustration and joy of the vocation come to shape the artist too. With the earthy, temperamental twang of its salvaged banjo, Bent Ring encapsulates both the exhaustion and energy of an artist’s life, its steadfast rhythm always threatening to slow or speed up but ultimately pressing on regardless.     

Wes Tirey – The Midwest Book of the Dead

Dear Life Records

“Silos stand like chapels / Chapels stand like graves / Graves stand like corn / Corn stands like waves.” So opens ‘Bang the Drum Slowly’, a song which encapsulates the spirit of Wes Tirey’s tenth album. One populated with blue heron and crawdads and creek beds, a land of fields and factories stalked by stray dogs and innumerable ghosts. But more than a survey of this very American landscape, Tirey offers us characters too. People presented in snatches, sometimes nothing more than the distinctive ring of their voice. What emerges is not a clear narrative, at least not in the linear sense, but rather a patchwork of vignettes which combine into a picture far larger and more extensive. The dead are plural in this book, and each has their own story to tell.

Will Stratton – The Changing Wilderness

Bella Union

A fundamentally exploratory songwriter, Will Stratton has never been one to settle in a single groove. But if one feature has stretched through his work, it’s the art of introspection. But then came the late 2010s and the intensification of our rightward spiral down. Faced with such pressing political issues, Stratton went into The Changing Wilderness with a new desire to engage with the wider world. To write a record which might catalogue the atrocities of this moment. As he sings on ‘When I’ve Been Born (I’ll Love You)’: “The present is prosaic / The future, a disgrace / We can’t just look away now / It stares us in the face.” Capturing the tone of the record, the song charts the profound sickness of our times, and can’t help but slip back toward self-examination in the face of such horror. A search which emerges with no solution beyond a determination to face the worst undaunted. “When I get my prize, I’ll love you,” goes the chorus. “As the oceans rise, I’ll love you / When the air gеts thin, I’ll love you / If the fascists win, I’ll love you.”

If you enjoyed anything on this list, you may also be interested in list of songs we missed in 2021, which will be published shortly. And of course, there were lots of amazing records that we did write about in the last year, so have a look back through our Reviews and Previews sections to find more.

The post Albums We Missed in 2021 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

The Estok’Gna have survived hundreds of years of genocide and oppression since the arrival of Europeans, and continue to face severe threats to their culture, history and way of life. Now, three natural gas pipelines are planned on traditional Carrizo/Comecrudo Tribe territory, which would destroy scared sites and make it a felony for the Estok’Gna to occupy them. Not to mention the project’s lack of consideration to it’s non-human impacts—current plans will see it destroy over 300 acres of important habitat that is home to 21 endangered species.

As you would expect from Keeled Scales, the album contains recordings from a whole host of great artists. From indie rock heavyweights like Big Thief and Sharon Van Etten, to the countless whose releases we have written about and loved over the last few years, including (takes breath) Black Belt Eagle Scout, Erin Durant, Jess Williamson, Jo Schornikow, Karima Walker, Sun June, Will Johnson, and Tenci.

There is considerable diversity across the 31 tracks, but all are united by a common spirit. Renée Reed brings her distinctive and dreamlike Cajun folk with ‘J’ai Trouve’, while Christelle Bofale shows off her wonderful soulful vocals with a stripped-back demo titled ‘And I’ll Go’ and Aisha Burns sets the tone with the collection’s first track, the beautiful and immersive ‘Chinati’. A personal favourite is Little Mazarn’s take on the classic cowboy folk song ‘Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie,’ which sounds at once bright and mournful.

100% of donations from the album will go directly to the Estok’Gna to support their fight for their land, culture and very existence. As Keeled Scales put it: “As indigenous people continue to lead the fight against the reckless fossil fuel industry, we are honored to offer this compilation and its earnings in solidarity with everyone in the fight for racial justice and a livable future for all beings on planet earth.”

To the People of the Land is out now and available via the Keeled Scales Bandcamp page.

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Excitingly, Bain has made a video for the song ‘Dad Rock’, shot with the help of Sun June band-mate Stephen Salisbury on Bain’s family’s ranch in Blanco, Texas. Check it out below:

Bain was also kind enough to speak to us about his music, so read on below to find out more about his creative process, the ‘Dad Rock’ video, and what it’s like to be a member of Sun June.

The album is very much a personal project, a change from your previous work with other bands. Was it liberating or terrifying to have full control over the creative process?

It was liberating/exciting and sort of daunting in equal parts, but once I had two or three of the tracks mostly recorded and got some momentum I developed some genuine confidence in the process. I was really excited to see what kind of fine details and textures I could create on my own. Even though I did technically have full control over the creative process I often found it useful to sort of artificially create scenarios that would loosen my sense of control over the material in order to generate fresher ideas and so that I wouldn’t be too married to the original conception of the song.

One way of doing this was to not listen to an unfinished track for quite a while and then go into a recording session without having anything written and then record takes of whatever I came up with in the moment. Quite a bit of the final overdub parts where generated this way. I did sometimes wish that I had someone there to put a fire under me because you can go a bit mad over-analyzing tracks on your own if you have all the time in the world. I think I would actually thrive on a deadline and enjoy working with a little external pressure, but I’m glad that I got to take my time for the first record.

How does your songwriting process work? Do you start with a melody or with the lyrics? And how does the recording work when you’re playing most parts yourself?

I write the basic chord progression on a guitar or piano and then slowly develop vocal melodies and lyrics over that part from notes and voice memos taken on my phone. I usually track the initial core parts very quickly and then take my time developing/adding overdubs and then stripping the song back and editing it to a point where something appealing emerges. I recorded about half of the songs core rhythm section and main melodic instrument with my lifelong friend Will Patterson (Sleep Good) at his then studio called Blackland Hall in Coupland, Texas. We live tracked either drums and guitar or drums and piano together straight to tape to give the recordings a live/organic heart and then I took those core tracking sessions and worked on overdubs in my home studio.

The other five songs I tracked entirely in my home studio recording every part myself and building the songs from the ground up. Recording songs in this piecemeal way can be dangerous in that it can often feel clinical or desiccated if you are recording to a click track and don’t have that element of live performance, but I looked to artists like Kevin Parker from Tame Impala or early Todd Rundgren as examples of people who are able to make really vibey and emotionally rich sounding recordings even though it’s just them in the studio. I think one way to eschew that rigidity/coldness of tracking by yourself is to allow some of the mistakes that you make to stay in the recording. That’s probably kind of a cliché by now but it’s true and those happy accidents are often my favorite parts of the songs. I also think the biggest challenge in recording solo is getting the rhythm section to feel right.

What is the album about? Are there themes that link the songs?

I don’t want to say too much about what I think this record is about, because I might be wrong and the meaning is already changing for me when I listen back to it. I think a general thing that I feel comfortable saying about the record is that it does seem to be about looking back at a younger version of yourself and wishing to impart some solace to someone who is very anxious. Also, imagining a future version of yourself consoling your present self.

You cite bands like Steely Dan and Fleetwood Mac as big influences, and while the song sort of makes a joke about your embrace of “dad rock,” it’s clearly something you genuinely love. What is it about the maligned genre that speaks to you so much?

I think the maligned genre speaks to me right now because I am interested in trying to reconcile seemingly opposites in music. I wanted to try to marry elements of experimental and lo-fi music with more accessible/palatable ‘dad rock’ or just pop.

I grew up sort of obsessed with the lo-fi home recording aesthetic of artists like early Ariel Pink and Smog and I have countless home recordings that fit that description. I wanted to see if I could go to the other extreme and get really clean and professional sounding recordings (even though I mostly recorded in my bedroom studio), and I wanted to have the weird/unexpected chord progressions, tight arrangements and clean hi-fi production of Steely Dan with the emotionally raw and direct lyrics/vocal performance of my favorite lo-fi artists.

Also, around the time I started writing Tidal Ways I was quite enamored of this idea of creating psychedelic sounding music without using any effects. I think that I got pretty heavy into Steely Dan largely because that’s something that I think they pull off brilliantly. I don’t think I’ve ever heard really heavy reverb, delays or phasers in a Steely Dan song and yet they achieve deeply rich and textured recordings that sort of defy your expectations and even disorientate you at times the way psyche music often does. I still definitely used some effects on the album, but compared to my previous recordings its relatively minimal. I tried to use the arrangement and chord progressions to create that sense of unfamiliarity or liminality rather than relying solely on effects.

Did you grow up listening to these bands? Or is it something you’ve discovered later in life?

No, I didn’t really start listening to those bands until a few years ago, but my parents did take me to see Christopher Cross (my dad went to high school with him) at SeaWorld when I was like five. So, maybe some of those diminished jazz fusion chords got lodged in my young mind and made it easier for me to latch onto the Dan later in life.

What else influences your work, apart from other musicians? Do you seek out the same kind of unencumbered creation in other forms of art?

I used to write short stories my freshmen and sophomore year of college, but haven’t really delved into that too recently. I took this great creative writing class my freshmen year of college that really sparked my interest in short stories and I’m still a big fan of short story writers like George Saunders, Thomas McGuane, Denis Johnson, and Flannery O’Connor. The economy of language required in the short story is something that I find inspiring in relation to writing lyrics and evoking images or narratives in the fairly contained format of a pop song. I also love biographies and have recently read a Van Gogh biography, as well as a Captain Beefheart biography called Through the Eyes of Magic by Magic Band drummer John French aka Drumbo. This is going to sound cheesy, but I also get really inspired by going on really long walks or runs. Something happens towards the end of a really long walk where your thoughts become much more fluid and a lot of musical and lyrical ideas I have had fall into place when I’m on the latter half of a long hike. I often wish I had a pen with me when I go on these walks/runs but I always forget, and part of me thinks that if the idea doesn’t commit to memory then maybe it’s not worth keeping anyway.

Could you tell us a little about the video for Dad Rock? Where was it shot and where did the idea come from?

I shot the video for ‘Dad Rock’ at my family’s ranch in Blanco, TX, about an hour outside of Austin, with the help of my Sun June bandmate, Stephen Salisbury, who used to edit for Terrance Malick. He helped generate and refine some of the ideas that we ended up incorporating in the video like the groundhog dayesque waking up sequence, as well as the cow sequence. He acted as the cinematographer and editor and I occasionally provided some feedback/suggestions both during the shoot and in the editing phase.

The video generally has to do with feeling sort of stuck or leading an unsustainable life, and then having some unnamed element come into your life that coaxes you out of that lifestyle and that provides a window into another perspective. At first I imaged shooting more literal scenes of debauchery or chaotic environments in places like a bar or downtown somewhere to illustrate that unsavory lifestyle, but I instead chose to go for more abstract imagery namely the debris/rubble that I come across in the video. It also has to do with intuition and communing with nature and with cows. All of these ideas were mostly just extrapolated from the lyrics of the song.

We can’t really do an interview without mentioning Sun June. How has being part of that band been? And what was it like to record and tour an album like Years?

Being is Sun June has definitely been a learning experience for me. I have a tendency to over arrange parts for my songs and fill every square inch of the recording with instrumentation and Laura and Stephen have a starker approach to composition, which I find really inspiring. It’s that whole idea that Debussy talked about when he said that music is the space between the notes. They seem to intuitively understand that and sculpt the songs in such a way that allows you to breathe and fill in some of the gaps yourself. I like the idea that the best melodies are the ones you are hearing within the song that aren’t actually recorded. The ghost melodies that are obliquely suggested. Anyway, I’m still trying to learn and implement this in my playing. I love being part of the band though, and they allow everyone to write their own parts, which definitely helps generate uniqueness since we all have fairly distinct influences.

Recording Years was a dream. My bandmates are such an unassuming bunch and I didn’t really have any expectations about how the recording would go, but we slowly developed a quiet confidence in the material and by the time I listened back to some of the first tracks we recorded on the nice studio speakers at Estuary Studios, I had a real kind of pinch myself moment where I was like ‘Wait what? I’m in this band? Far out.’

I also really enjoyed generating ideas for guitar overdubs in the very last days of tracking. For instance, I came up with my main lead guitar line on ‘Young’ the day before we finished tracking that one and the band dug it and it stayed on the track, which felt amazing. Justin Harris, our bass player, also came up with a last minute saxophone part on ‘Homes’, which really elevates the song to another level in my opinion. So, it was really exciting to have that spontaneity and openness to new ideas even at that those very final stages of tracking a song. Touring has also been a lot of fun. I used to consider myself a bit of a home body, but I actually really enjoy life on the road much more than I anticipated.

Tidal Ways is out now and you can get it from the Michael Bain Bandcamp page, or listen via Spotify. Visit the Michael Bain website for more info.

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Featuring:

Petal – I’m Sorry
Wild Pink – The Seance On St. Augustine St
Big Thing – Spin
Bombshell Nightlight – Death Day
Mount Goldie – Summer
Elsa Lester – Pretty Bad, Man
Why Bonnie – Gold Rush
Devon Welsh – Vampires
Max García Conover – Another Travelling Man
Floating Room – Dog
Izaak Opatz – Bathing in the Ganges
Free Cake For Every Creature – Around You
Indigo De Souza – Home Team
Museum Food Court – bad song
Crisco Dreams – I Like Your Bed
You’re Sister – I Think About You
Russel the Leaf – Let ‘Em Run
Fresh – Daytime
Stevhen Peters – Phone Talk
Tender Age – Don’t Mind
Lord Youth – Do You Have Anything To Add?
Quiet Hollers – Addicted
Blue J – Hard to Know
Post Moves – The Arc of Life
Angus & Julia Stone – Nothing Else
Gia Margaret – Birthday
Sun June – Discotheque
Campdogzz – Souvenir
Field Report – Every Time

*(Due to various issues of availability and licensing, neither playlist has the complete quota of acts, but welcome to the modern age).

You can find all of the previous instalments of Bright Sparks here, and be sure to check back in a few weeks to see what makes the next edition.

The post July 2018 Roundup appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Years is a record shaped and propelled by the gentle forces of the world, currents in the substrates of the earth and life itself, invisible yet profound, capable of changes both minor and major. The album opens with the swaying slo-mo folk rock song ‘Discotheque’, Colwell showing off her impressive vocals with a kind of husky and effortless passion. The track conjures gentle winds that swirl in plaintive yearning, lifting memories and images and twisting them into a full nostalgic picture with the slow rhythm of nature.

‘Slow Rise II’ is equally patient, beginning with snake-like guitar and a kind of wary soul-bearing. “Go ahead and look me in the eye,” Colwell sings, “tell me everything will be alright, oh I’m lonely too.” It’s a moment of unguarded honesty that closes distances, and which lays the groundwork for the catharsis that comes later. The last minute of the song distils what has until then been encoded between the lines, infused with a golden energy as it whips up into a rousing finale, Colwell repeating the line “I’m coming home” with increasing fervour.

Indeed, repetition forms a key part of Sun June’s sound on Years, a number of the tracks returning to a repeated phrase, cyclical patterns that rise in intensity like incantations, or else echo out into the fabric of the sound. ‘Young’ is an example of the former, a track we described previously as “staring back in time not to find answers or cast blame, but instead for the fleeting chance to warm your face on the now lost glow of past love.” After a restrained start, the song eventually kicks into a little eddy of motion, spurred by the catchy chorus, as though each cycle generates further motion.

Whispered and winey, ‘Johnson City’ features emotions fermented, made velvety with age, the taste haunting tongues beyond the moment, before ‘Homes’ presses forward with a sense of brooding intimacy that oozes and creeps. ‘Records’ is carried as if by a fresh spring breeze, with Colwell singing “I’ll try to love you right” and the rhythm possessing a warmth that goes halfway to fulfilling the promise. This warmth leaks through into ‘Apartments’, intensifying as the crispness is replaced by the humid heat of confused dreams, before ‘Baby Blue’ cools into an icy certainty. This is the darkest, most brooding track on the record, the drums tight and insistent, the vocals likewise, the track gathering momentum under its own motion, and though descending evenly from great height.

“Even though your baby blue
still carries the sky
Heaven knows where you’re looking to
but the ground still won’t move.

Forget about everything”

From this, ‘I’ve Been’ shakes into life slowly, a languid sway to the vocals and instrumentation both. This extends across the track, a melancholic sluggishness where emotions dull the outside the world, but while closer ‘Underneath’ retains the same spirit, some greater sense of clarity is evoked through the drums and guitar. The track has a decisive edge, a commitment to evasive action made clear through the repeated refrain of “gonna to hide from you,” and though the track sets itself up to be a long, lazy sprawl, the precipitous end realises the decision.

Years is one of our favourite albums so far this year, and is out now on Keeled Scales. You can get it an LP, CD or cassette tape from their website or their Bandcamp page. or a download from the Sun June Bandcamp page.

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