“Specialising in a style of atmospheric alt-rock that’s at once melancholy and anthemic, London outfit Dead Slow Hoot draw on a variety of genres to create something unique.” So we wrote when covering single ‘Take It Or Leave It’ last year, and DSH’s forthcoming new full-length Orbits Intervened takes things even further to become perhaps their most ambitious release to date. A collection of sprawling songs large and detailed enough to carry a range of narratives and thematic concerns, touching on everything from personal heartbreak and grief to the cultural trauma of things like the Magdalene laundries scandal. Lead single ‘Sleeping Before The Big Day’ hints at the release’s nuance and depth, a song full of tension despite its patient rhythm, caught between resistance to change and the desire to surrender to its constant flow.

Orbits Intervened will be released on the 5th June.

eggcorn – Hitler Was a Vegetarian

Last month we introduced Observer Effect, the new album from eggcorn coming soon on Spirit House. “Taking its name from the phenomenon where an observed system is disturbed by the very act of being observed,” we wrote, “[the record] sees songwriter Lara Hoffman explore the ways in which reflecting on one’s life and surroundings can shape our experiences.” After the title track used pop-inflected chamber folk to “bare vulnerabilities and reckon with their implications without sacrificing a certain playfulness,” latest single ‘Hitler Was a Vegetarian’ again finds Hoffman examining her own imperfections with unerring candour. As its title suggests, the song explores the ways in which individuals exist as systems of contradictions, with objectively cruel people still capable of tenderness and vice versa. “I am tender but that doesn’t make me nice,” as Hoffman sings at the climax of the song. “And I’m sorry and I’m sorry and it’s not fair to you.”

Ella Hanshaw – One More Hill

Born in 1934, Ella Hanshaw started playing guitar aged twelve, playing and singing for her family on their farm in Procious, West Virginia. From then until her death in 2020, Hanshaw wrote hundreds of songs, first heartsick ballads inspired by her favourite country singers and later Gospel songs she believed to be sent directly from God. Despite her obvious talents and huge repertoire, Hanshaw’s music was never recorded professionally, or released publicly, at least until now. Gathered from both home and church tape recordings by Hanshaw’s granddaughter, and released by the fine folks at SPINSTER, Ella Hanshaw’s Black Book brings together two distinct collections of her work. Side A features the Gospel songs, while Side B the country ones. Lead single ‘One More Hill’, recorded with Hanshaw’s band the Hallelujah Hill Quartet, opens the collection and is a good example of the its prevailing theme, what the label describe as “love and longing for what we cannot quite touch—not yet, anyway.”

Festiva – Ghosts and Lichens

Carver Arena-Bruce has long released music under the moniker Festiva, with albums like Songs I Don’t Sing for Anyone showing off the Portland, Maine singer and guitarist’s bold, cathartic garage rock style (“If there were a Venn diagram with Sonic Youth in one bubble and CCR in the other, Festiva’s [sound] would be in the middle,” as Arena-Bruce puts it). But the project also has a full-band iteration, with Noah Grenier-Farwell (drums) and Simi Kunin (bass) of Amiright? joining to help realise Festiva’s full noisy potential. Out via Repeating Cloud, new full-length Everything In Moderation shows how powerful this can be, with songs like ‘Ghosts and Lichens’ matching Arena-Bruce’s singular vocal style with a sense of heft and volatility.

Florry – First it was a movie, then it was a book

Philadelphia‘s DIY country superstars Florry have a new record on the way via Dear Life Records. It’s their second effort since bandleader Francie Medosch transformed what was once a solo project into a bona fide folk rock band, and early signs suggest it could see Florry hit yet another level. “A portrait of a ripping band cresting towards the height of their powers,” as the label describe it, “uniquely equipped to capture a wildly loving, barn-burning camcorder clip of a turbulent trip with your best friends, without dipping into nostalgia bait.” Released a couple weeks ago, single ‘First it was a movie, then it was a book’ confirms this hype, a freewheeling country-fried rocker that kicks off the album with limitless energy and dedication to the vision of what Florry means both to Medosch and the community that has formed around her.

First it was a movie, then it was a book
They chopped my life up, put it on tv so I had to take a look
Well that Holly Hunter is so relatable, when she screamed I cried
if I wasn’t feeling so empty baby Id give that movie five out of five

Watch the video directed and edited by Jon Cox below:

Sounds Like… is out on the 23rd May via Dear Life Records and you can pre-order it now.

Laila Smith – Diorama

Something Dreadful’s Going To Happen, the upcoming release from musician and artist Laila Smith, is more than your average EP. Not only are the songs themselves experimental in their own right, adding avant garde noise sensibilities to what are ostensibly folk arrangements, they are also accompanied by an immersive video game available on Smith’s website. Lead single ‘Diorama’ introduces the project, matching an interactive experience to the song to further its explorations of trauma and the power dynamics which shape us on both personal and societal levels. “I’ve created a digital twin of the physical diorama featured in my album art,” Smith explains, “an explorable environment where fans manipulate a miniature version of me through rooms filled with objects from my personal history.” Taking inspiration from the art style of 90s era internet, the work takes on a strangely retrofuturist vibe, harkening back to a time where the online space felt like fertile ground for a better, more creative future. As Smith puts it: “it’s an attempt to reclaim digital space as somewhere strange and sacred rather than optimized and consumable.”

‘Diorama’ is out now via streaming services.

Rival Consoles – Known Shape

“Might be the project’s most impressive [record] to date, focusing in on small details while retaining the grand sweeps of melancholy and euphoria too.” So we wrote of Landscape from Memory, the upcoming from Rival Consoles on Erased Tapes. The release sees Ryan Lee West delve into what he calls “a scrapbook of discarded audio snippets,” building from the flashes of memory and inspiration found within. Embodying the spirit of the release, latest single ‘Known Shape’ shows how Rival Consoles retains a sense of humanity within its digital sound. “I’ve always been obsessed by controls on machines because they produce beautiful sounds and they have their own rhythms,” West explains. “The drums are made from rotating switches and the synths are set in motion by invisible mechanical rhythms. Machines have a special connection to the human spirit, which is both good and bad but above all restless. There is a constant searching in ‘Known Shape’ for some kind of answer or emotion.”

Sally Anne Morgan – I Saw a Heron

The music of North Carolina artist and naturalist Sally Anne Morgan is inextricable from the landscape in which she creates it. Her blend of traditional instrumentation and more modern composition is an exploration of the people, places and nature that surround her home at the edge of North Carolina’s Pisgah National Forest. Morgan’s forthcoming record, Second Circle The Horizon, is a direct example, an attempt to translate both the rhythm and randomness of the natural world into a language more musical. “I wanted to capture the feeling of walking outside and encountering organic nature sounds,” she describes, “some with patterns, some with a randomness that also verges on its own kind of pattern.” Our first taste is ‘I Saw a Heron’, a piece built of fiddle, violin and piano that feels as fresh and lush as a spring morning walk through a sunlit valley.

Slow Mass – Freeze Frame

Next month sees the release of Low On Foot, the new album from Slow Mass on Landland Corportage. Their first since 2018, the record finds the Chicago outfit bigger and bolder than ever, their line-up increasing to six members (and subsequently seven after recording) and their sound pushing in all directions. Single ‘Freeze Frame’ bears the fruits of this evolution, a sound at once weightier than anything they released previously yet also more tender and heartfelt. Because Slow Mass haven’t merely taken their work down one specific road but added depth to everything, meaning their current iteration can be heavier and more delicate all at once. The juxtaposition is fitting for ‘Freeze Frame’, a song all about the tension between who you are and who you might have been, holding space for those desires to change as a person while learning to embrace one’s own identity.

Watch

Low On Foot is out on the 16th May via Landland Colportage and you can pre-order it now.

Symbol Soup – Miniatures

Back in 2023 Symbol Soup released full-length Slow Puncture via Sad Club Records, an album “brought to life with a decidedly American aesthetic, following a lineage rising in the 90s from songwriters like Mark Linkous and persisting through a myriad of contemporaries,” as we described in our review, “but one which draws parallels between the US and Rea’s hometown of Milton Keynes. A city with a short history inside a country with a long one, designed purely for modern living and possessing the strange balance between potential and hollowness of any ahistorical space.” New single ‘Miniatures’ is again concerned with place and a person’s identity within it, specifically how overly familiar surroundings can come to make a life seem rote and insignificant. But with Symbol Soup’s signature blend of melancholy and warmth, the song manages to reposition such feelings into something like relief. Perhaps being small isn’t the worst thing in the world?

Watch the video by Hello Mary below:

‘Miniatures’ is out now via Sad Club Records and available from Bandcamp.

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In January, Chayse Porter will release his third album Endless / Boundless, what label Earth Libraries describe as “nine new musical excavations and epiphanies the Birmingham-based songwriter dug up from life’s bedrock and polished to a shine in his basement lair.” ‘Flowers in Chains’ is the final single before the record’s release and is the perfect introduction. On the surface it’s sweet and jangly, all warm breeze and syrupy sunlight, but this is a song of contrast and juxtaposition. Porter describes the lyrics as “jutting barbs left for someone clueless to their own cruelty,” and close inspection sees the sweetness sour and the breeze leave goosebumps on your skin.

Do you ever get the feeling
That you’re not so kind of a person
Do you ever stop to think
That your words, they hurt
You’re so sweet, sweet like dirt

Hank Tree – Sweet Saltpeter

With Fergus MacDonald (formerly of State Broadcasters) joined by Roy Shearer (Ultras, Inspector Tapehead) and Bart Owl (Eagleowl, Broken Chanter), Glasgow‘s Hank Tree take folk sensibilities and elevate them into something truly atmospheric with a mixture of field recordings and distortion. But amid their invention and subversion of genre, Hank Tree hark back to folk’s best roots, positioning themselves in the long lineage of artists using the form to write about social history and labour movements. Album The Big North is out now, and latest single ‘Sweet Saltpeter’ is the perfect entry point, capturing the individual experience within an industrial setting, where a worker is as replaceable as any other part of the machine. The track comes with a video by filmmaker Felipe Bustos Sierra, who saw clear links between the record and his documentary Nae Pasaran, and the result is a both moving and visually striking development of the presiding themes.

The Big North is out now and available from Bandcamp.

Islands – Headlines

Earlier this year, Montreal indie rock/pop stalwarts Islands released And That’s Why Dolphins Lost Their Legs, their latest full-length which further developed their idiosyncratic vision and infectious energy. They’ve now released a new video for the single ‘Headlines’ directed by Vali Chandrasekaran, who is perhaps better known as a TV comedy writer for the likes of 30 Rock and Modern Family. A short film which centres on an artist trying to achieve the apotheosis desired by all musicians—the transformation from fallible flesh and blood to mythical rock star deity.

And That’s Why Dolphins Lost Their Legs is out now and available from Bandcamp.

Lizzie No – Annie Oakley

Next January, New York‘s Lizzie No is releasing their latest full-length album, Halfsies, via Thirty Tigers / Miss Freedomland. The record follows on from the likes of Hard Won, as No braids the personal and the political into something unique. Latest single ‘Annie Oakley’ is a perfect example. A road song which embraces the affirming experience of moving through a landscape while refusing to succumb to the romantic side of the genre. ““Most of the great songwriters in the Americana genre have darkly determined road songs featuring dirty motels, gas station coffee, the exhilaration of seeing America’s plains rushing toward them from behind a car windshield as if on a roller coaster designed by Willa Cather,” No explains. “Behind the scenery are some difficult questions, like ‘why have I chosen to do this with my life?’ and ‘will I ever be one of the greats?’”

Watch the video directed by Cole Nielsen and Mary Glen Fredrick below:

Halfsies will be released on 19th January. Order it now from the Lizzie No Bandcamp page.

Meiwei – Stare at the Sun

The project of singer-songwriter Michelle Mouw, Meiwei specialises in fingerpicked guitar, stirring arrangements and emotive lyrics. Mouw was born and raised in Beijing, moving to the US aged eighteen, and her music is an effort to explore the disparate parts of her life, identity and the wider world. It contrasts the USA and China, the past and the present, and the bustle of the city and the calm of nature. The new Meiwei record, On This Trail Till I’m Home, is the culmination of all this exploration, full of themes both deeply personal and welcomingly universal. Single ‘Stare at the Sun’ is a case in point, what Mouw calls an “indie-folk queer anthem” which builds from earnest guitar strums into a rich arrangement that marbles wistfulness and hope, strength and vulnerability.

Other Vessels – Empty Afternoon

Other Vessels is an Austin indie folk outfit led by singer-songwriter Miranda Haney. Back in the Spring, the band got together to record the debut Other Vessels EP, Empty Afternoon, a collection of songs Haney describes as “intimate portraits of the partnerships – romantic, platonic, and familial – that shape (and save) our lives.” The title track is our first glimpse of how this might sound, a warm and serene folk pop song that Haney says is about “letting someone love you even though you feel like absolute dog shit.” “You’re coming over in 25 minutes, don’t trust my judgment when I’m so deep in it,” she sings, “Pulling a razor over my knees shaving my armpits to prove that I’m happy and clean.”

Pari Eskandari – Chador

‘Chador’ is a new single from Iranian-German artist Pari Eskandari, offered in memory of Mahsa Amini, the 22-year-old Iranian killed in custody in Tehran in 2022. It is a statement of defiance sent to those who would use violence in the name of so-called morality. Released via Tricky’s False Idols label, the song is dark and dramatic and full of ominous power. It comes complete with a video directed by Nikolas Meyberg which depicts a female ritual designed, as Eskandari explains, “to elevate the women from the ordinary to the sublime.” An expression of solidarity conducted through music and dance “for the women in Iran who risk their lives every day.”

‘Chador’ is out now via False Idols and available from Bandcamp.

Shady Baby – All Too Late

Life has been a bit of a rollercoaster for Brighton‘s Shady Baby since we last featured them. Bursting onto the scene after a single gig, they signed with tastemaker label Nice Swan Records and were played on BBC Radio 1. But a series of interruptions, including the departure of their lead guitarist and the cost of living crisis, slowed this momentum and things have been quiet since. That is, until now, as Shady Baby are back with a brand new single, ‘All Too Late’, a fittingly rousing and cathartic ode to fresh starts. “‘All Too Late’ is a song about looking to the future and wanting to feel in control of your own life,” describes lead Sam Leaver. “It was written as a piece of advice to myself to not be stuck in the past, to take charge of my own life and to know I have the power to change it.”

‘All Too Late’ is out now via streaming services.

Symbol Soup – Husky Dawgs

Sad Club Records label-mates Symbol Soup and Kitty Fitz have teamed up to write a Christmas song, ‘Husky Dawgs’. A warm and cosy slice of charming indie pop, it’s a song about seeing old friends when returning home for Christmas, complete with two fictional huskies named after Duster and Shuggie Otis. It’s jingly, jangly and perfect for a warm room on a cold festive evening. And you never know, could catapult the band to Christmas royalties stardom. As Symbol Soup’s Michael Rae puts it: “every family friend or person you meet at a wedding will tell you that the way to make money is to have one Christmas hit.”

‘Husky Dawgs’ is streaming everywhere now.

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The album spins off this idea in a number of directions. ‘Appetite‘ explores the conflicting pressures of modern living, “where the urge to live an exciting life is always present,” as we put it in a preview, “yet some dissatisfaction sits at the edge of every experience.” ‘Airglow‘ takes on the information age and ways we might lose ourselves in its constant deluge, ‘Gameshow’ a surreal melding of TV and reality, while ‘Overdressed‘ explores cynicism within social interactions and a desire to move beyond superficiality into something deeper. Then there’s ‘Tire’, the most obvious reference to the title, which returns to the puncture metaphor directly, searching for the hole through which life is escaping, as though to locate site of the damage might be to stem the sense of loss.

This mood is brought to life with a decidedly American aesthetic, following a lineage rising in the 90s from songwriters like Mark Linkous and persisting through a myriad of contemporaries from Alex G and Trace Mountains to Field Medic, Free Cake For Every Creature and Hovvdy. But one which draws parallels between the US and Rea’s hometown of Milton Keynes. A city with a short history inside a country with a long one, designed purely for modern living and possessing the strange balance between potential and hollowness of any ahistorical space.

We took the opportunity to speak with Rea about the record, touching upon its themes, imagery and inception.

Thanks for speaking to us, and congratulations on the release of Slow Puncture. How does it feel letting the record out into the world?

Thank you! It feels good, the record definitely reflects what I wanted Symbol Soup to be when I started, including the artwork and everything. Curious as to what people are gonna get from it too!

I guess the title is a good a place to start. There’s plenty of metaphorical baggage to unpack with Slow Puncture, some of which is especially pertinent. The sense of being chronically damaged, tending towards eventual ruin, yet nevertheless existing within a functioning state so that you can ignore the damage day to day. How does the image of a slow puncture figure in your view of the songs? Did you start with the title in mind?

Some of the songs, like ‘Gameshow’ and ‘Appetite’ are pretty old and predate the title, but the majority came after I had Slow Puncture in mind. I tried to have the arc of a puncture across the album, with the early songs being a bit more energetic, and the later songs in general being more subdued. The song ‘Tire’ is more explicitly about that theme, trying to pinpoint where that background sense of loss comes from. I also wrote a really long song called ‘Slow Puncture’ which didn’t make it onto the album!

Can we talk a little about nostalgia? The record seems to sit at the strange juncture so many of us find ourselves in. Where the promises of the past didn’t quite manifest in the present, and the future feels like it could easily be filled with looking back on better, especially childhood, days—something manifest in the album art. Do you think Slow Puncture is a nostalgic album? Or an album working against nostalgia?

I think it’s very nostalgic yeah, and my preference for folky and fuzzy sounds definitely is because it feels like something lacking in my environment, rather than reflecting it. My sense is that the world is just a lot more complicated than any of us can get our head around, and so we’re necessarily taking part in a ‘make believe’ version of reality. So it’s kind of acknowledging that your situation won’t ever meaningfully mirror that over-simplified version of life we’re taught to work towards.

The balance between the real and the surreal is a striking feature of your work, be it the blurring of reality and the internet (‘Airglow’) or television (‘Gameshow’), or just in its playful style more generally. You’ve described ‘Appetite’ as “thematically… about feeling totally overwhelmed and totally underwhelmed at the same time,” which seems to capture this mood in some way. As though the world is both amazingly weird and numbingly dull simultaneously.

Exactly, every moment of reality is seen through our own lens. The experienced mundanity or mystery is a bit of a choice there. So you can know that the internet ‘cloud’ is physically a big room full of server boxes, but also confront the phenomenon of it, as this invisible mass of data between us, hanging in the air like pollution. Both perspectives are true!

There’s an interesting duality of locales on the record, with the lived experience of English suburbia (in this case Milton Keynes) processed through a semi-fictious small-town Americana represented by the picturesque Pacific Northwest. Could you talk through these ideas a little more, and what these places mean to you and your work?

Milton Keynes does mirror those places visually. There’s the grid system and warehouses and Costco, and also a lot of beautiful wooded area. Because it’s only sixty years old there’s a lack of British cultural baggage there, so driving around it’s easy to imagine you’re anywhere. You’re conscious of being on the outskirts, I wasn’t aware of much of a scene while I was there, and that made me more interested in making recordings rather than things which would immediately go down well live. The imagined vision of the Pacific Northwest comes mostly from Twin Peaks and Mount Eerie I guess.

Can we talk a little about influences? There’s a clear link to the US indie/bedroom scenes of recent years? Who do you consider the biggest influences on the Symbol Soup sound?

Absolutely, the approach to songwriting and production that’s come about there just hits the spot for me. Some biggies are Spencer Radcliffe, Hovvdy, Jodi, Runnner, MJ Lenderman. And an extra biggie is Trace Mountains—Dave [Benton] mixed the album, and the song ‘Tire’ came out of a songwriting workshop he was doing in lockdown.

Slow Puncture is out now via Sad Club Records and you get it from Bandcamp.

The post Symbol Soup – Slow Puncture appeared first on Various Small Flames.

The Symbol Soup project was merely gearing up, and the Milton Keynes-born, London-based artist has now unveiled his debut album Slow Puncture with Sad Club Records. It’s a release which explores Rea’s childhood with the above duality in mind, where brightness is always counterbalanced by disappointment or unease. “A tyre with a slow puncture needs constant effort and maintenance just to keep moving, but usually doesn’t get repaired or replaced until it’s too late,” Rea explains. “A running theme of the album is living with our own limitations or flaws—ideally through acceptance, other times through pure laziness. The metaphor also relates to the process of growing older, feeling that you’re imperceptibly losing something as time passes.”

Latest single ‘Appetite’ processes these ideas through our strange relationship with desires and expectations. Where the urge to live an exciting life is always present, yet some dissatisfaction sits at the edge of every experience. As though, having grown up in front of the television, real-life can’t quite match up. “Thematically it’s about feeling totally overwhelmed and totally underwhelmed at the same time” Rea says of the single. “Being endlessly greedy for more excitement and experiences, then when things come to fruition turning straight to anxiety and being unable to savour them. Being ‘seasick’, out in a vast ocean but confined to your own nausea.”

Never carried
On the crest of any wave
You got seasick
Blood drained from your face
With a shot of salty water in its place

Slow Puncture is out on the 21st July via Sad Club Records and you can pre-order it now.

The post Symbol Soup – Appetite appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Described as a song “about having the capacity to love different people (friends, partners, etc) in different ways, using a lot of silly car and public transit metaphors along the way,” ‘Something Like a Honda Odyssey’ is the latest single from Cambridge, Massachusetts artist Banti Gheneti, AKA Banti Buli. The track emerges with all the heart and playfulness this description suggests, with a languid rhythm ticking over below Gheneti’s verbose vocal style, refusing to commit fully to irony or sincerity, instead hovering in the ambiguous middle ground. As though a song about relationships couldn’t really function without equal doses of heartfelt emotion and tongue-in-cheek humour.

My love is no tesla model e
It’s something like a honda odyssey
Don’t worry though, it’ll play nice with a model e
If that’s how you want things to be
So let me know what you think
Any takers out there?

Gorgeous – Raindrop

Gorgeous are a “frenetic yet friendly” noise pop duo from New York, comprising of Dana Lipperman (guitar and vocals) and Judd Anderman (drums). Next month they will release their sophomore album, Sapsucker, via Sad Cactus Records, which promises to develop the band’s dynamic signature blend of fractured rhythms, cynical lyricism and sweet and sour melodies. The record features songs about everything from “technological dread,” to “literal and figurative monsters, liars, dreamers, and true believers,” and lead single ‘Raindrop’ drops us in the deep end. “Our bones are made of cosmic dust,” Lipperman sings over jerky clockwork percussion before the track slams into life, “exploded stars, we’ve come apart.” Strange, unpredictable and gloriously noisy. What’s not to love?

Graves – Little Dumb Dogs

California-based Greg Olin has been releasing music under the Graves alias for almost two decades. On his next release, Gary Owens: I Have Some Thoughts, which comes out late June via Perpetual Doom and Curly Cassettes, he adopts a new name as a kind of Country music alter-ego. The album’s sixteen songs are a throwback to Nashville’s golden age, loaded with a sense of bittersweet nostalgia and a wry humour that brings new vigour to a timeless style. As Perpetual Doom put it, “[they] sway with the moonstruck sweetness of classic country, blending the sounds of golden age AM radio with a laidback West Count vibe.” Lead single ‘Little Dumb Dogs’ is a good introduction, its laidback atmosphere and gently cutting lyrics (“If little dumb dogs and the finest of drugs don’t kill you / and a smile from a child and walking down the aisle don’t thrill you”) capturing the album’s essence in less than two minutes.

Gary Owens: I Have Some Thoughts will be released on 30th June. Pre-order it rom the Perpetual Doom Bandcamp page.

The High Water Marks – American Candy

Led by Hilarie Sidney, founding member of the revered Elephant Six Recording Company and flagship band The Apples In Stereo, The High Water Marks are making their third ‘comeback’ this summer, with album Your Next Wolf coming very Minty Fresh. Based between Lexington, Kentucky and Grøa, Norway, the outfit had never played in the same room before opening for Pavement in Oslo is 2022, and the new record is their first recorded together and in-person. If latest single ‘American Candy’ is anything to go by, the set-up was conducive to the band’s creative energies, kicking along with an infectious momentum, capturing all the addictive sweet and sour overtones of its namesake and drenched in fuzz for good measure.

Lauren O’Connell – Joangeline

‘Joangeline’, the latest single from LA-based multi-instrumentalist and songwriter Lauren O’Connell, is a song of strength and vulnerability. “I saw me there in the half light / As shapeless there as the dawn,” they sing near the beginning of, a tenderness juxtaposed by tangible weight of the the drums. “And every promise it brings / Dying to feel even half right.” What quickly becomes apparent is that the source of the fragility is not any sense of uncertainty or hesitation, rather the inherent sensitivity of exposing core truths. Shedding outer armour as an act of defiance, deciding to be open no matter how much pain this might invite.

And all I wanted to know
All I wanted to know
Who would want me
The way I want you

Drag me out, baby
Drag me out, baby I’m in it now

Leeann Skoda – Little Star

With EP Living Room Sessions out later this month, Leeann Skoda has unveiled the slow-burning ‘Little Star’ by way of introduction. Emerging from the “familial Americana scene” of LA’s The Grand Ole Echo, and recorded with on one afternoon in the living room of Malachi DeLorenzo (Langhorne Slim, Izaak Opatz), the release is one built around an authentic folk spirit, and the single embraces the style with its lush, intimate warmth. A track stripped of all excesses, standing instead on its own simplicity, like some lullaby which has been crafted through years of repetition into a perfect state of function.

Living Room Sessions will be released on 26th May and is available via the Leeann Skoda Bandcamp page.

Paper Lady – Starcross

Back in January we introduced Paper Lady, an “immortal crone” brought to life by Allston’s Alli Raina and company in a kind of musical ritual. Previous single ‘Five of Swords‘ saw the project push their spiritualism out into noisier, shoegaze territory, and new single ‘Starcross’ continues the path with gauzy textures and a pummelling momentum. Described as “a scathing account of an almost-romance with a farmer gone awry,” the song burns with what could be spurned fury or frustrated embarrassment, building nonetheless into with unerring intensity of an ancient curse.

You feel it
Logic overrun
Conceal it
What else is there to be done

‘Starcross’ is out now and available via streaming services.

Ruth Radelet – Leaving the Table

Though best known as the front of synth pop stars Chromatics, Ruth Radelet has recently turned toward solo music as a means of exploring dimensions perhaps neglected in her work thus far. The Other Side EP confronted classic themes of love, loss and renewal after a traumatic period, with songs like ‘Crimes’ retaining the vivid Chromatics sound while those such as ‘Strangers’ allowed Radelet to break new ground with its almost orchestral pop tones. Ruth Radelet’s latest single, a take on Leonard Cohen’s ‘Leaving the Table’, straddles the fence between pop and folk, with the timeless vocals and echoing melancholy adding a dash of Julee Cruise to Cohen’s classic.

‘Leaving the Table’ is out now and available from the Ruth Radelet Bandcamp page.

Symbol Soup – Airglow

Writing of previous single ‘Overdressed‘, we described Symbol Soup (AKA London‘s Michael Rea) as a combination of “classic British folk charm with something rather more American, including faint notes of country and a couple of spoonfuls of Alex G-style lo-fi indie rock.” Latest track ‘Airglow’, again on Sad Club Records, continues the arrangement, the intimate sensibilities of bedroom pop polished with a golden psych-folk sheen, resulting in a sound able to evoke the slow hours of a summer afternoon without sanding down the snags and edges beneath the surface. The sound plays into the themes too, with Rea offering a take on the information overload of the internet age, though subverting its usual framing to instead present it on more grounded terms. So there’s no dystopian chill here, just a willingness to float above the sea of data and embrace peaceful ignorance instead.

‘Airglow’ is out now via Sad Club Records and available via the Symbol Soup Bandcamp.

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“A diverse album entirely committed to whatever direction each song takes, as though leaning into the spontaneity of the moment.” That’s how we have previously described Wise Blood, the forthcoming album by Blue Yonder on Earth Libraries. With the release now on the horizon, the band have unveiled final single, ‘Nightingale’, and this time they pitch us right into the middle of a seventies spaghetti western. The song opens with a nocturnal simmer, Karalena Fjortoft’s vocals emerging with an almost haunting croon, though soon the rhythm picks up and adds a sense of urgency, as though the dark figures at the door have been evaded and now we are racing across the desert floor with only the moon in pursuit.

Wise Blood is out on the 24th February via Earth Libraries.

Dari Bay – Same Old Bumpy Road

Described as “an ongoing thought experiment disguised as a band,” Dari Bay is the project of Burlington, Vermont’s Zack James. Though originating as something rough and chaotic, new album Longest Day of the Year sees the Dari Bay style morph into an altogether smoother sound, albeit with some of the strangeness left intact. Take ‘Same Old Bumpy Road’, the country pop jangle a clear departure from the harsh and often abstract noise of the previous releases, while a certain playfulness underpins everything. Life is no less odd for Dari Bay, they are just finding new ways to describe it.

Emelia Austin – Shifting Weather

With debut album From Another Sky coming very soon via Anxiety Blanket Records, Emelia Austin has been releasing a series of single to offer glimpses into her style. Tracks like ‘Hand Soft’ and ‘Desire to Reveal’ hinted at the amalgamation of sparkle and cloudiness which constitutes her shoegaze-adjacent sound, though it is the hefty closer ‘Shifting Weather’ which is perhaps the perfect introduction to From Another Sky. A slow song which gathers weight behind itself gradually, like a thunderhead coalescing into something dense and charged before its tumultuous finale, offering a cathartic view of possible futures where you come to accept yourself just as you are.

Kassi Valazza – Watching Planes Go By

Having introduced herself in 2019 with debut album Dear Dead Days and consolidated the style with last year’s EP Highway Sounds, Kassi Valazza has established herself among the new generation of country songwriters who build their craft around celebrating and subverting the traditions of the genre. With new album Kassi Valazza Knows Nothing out via Loose Music (UK) and Fluff & Gravy Records (US), Valazza is now a labelmate of acts like of Anna Tivel, Margo Cilker and Courtney Marie Andrews, and single ‘Watching Planes Go By’ shows she belongs among such company. A song centred on ideas of loss and the inability to move on which draws a psych-inflected richness around itself, it bears all the hallmarks of the best retro tracks while refusing to fall for nostalgic imitation.

Kassi Valazza Knows Nothing is out on the 26th May. UK fans can preorder from Loose Music and US fans from Fluff & Gravy Records.

 L.T. Leif – Gentle Moon

Back in December we previewed Come Back To Me, But Lightly, the a release from L.T. Leif released by Lost Map Records in collaboration with OK Pal. An album in which the Calgary-born, Scotland-based artist “draws on both the imagery of these northern climes and the talent which resides there to create songs able to explore intimate processes of development.” The album has just been released, and opener ‘Gentle Moon’ captures the compassionate and striking tone for anyone who still needs convincing. A song which uses lunar imagery to explore the wax and wane of relationships, not to mention the gravitational pull which seems to hold some power over the smallest and largest of things. Check out the lyric video by Bart Owl below:

Gentle moon
you are shining
in the shape
of a human body

Come Back To Me, But Lightly is out now via Lost Map Records and OK Pal Records and you can get it from Bandcamp.

Party of the Sun – Forget Me Knot

“Psych-inflected folk songs anchored to the natural environments in which they were created, tracks possessing both tension and harmony.” So we wrote of Capsule II, the previous EP from New Hampshire‘s Party of the Sun on Trailing Twelve Records. Next month sees the release of the appropriately named follow-up Capsule III, and lead single ‘Forget Me Knot’ suggests the psych-folk outfit are continuing to push this style. A song which lives up to its title, the careful details and easy intuition evoking the patterns of a forest or perhaps the knotted layers of the trunks themselves, eventually rising into a soaring crescendo in the closing minutes.

Saloon Dion – I Don’t Feel

Bristol post-punks Saloon Dion are back with a new single, ‘I Don’t Feel’, the first taste of their forthcoming debut EP on Mucker Records. It follows a spate of singles in the last few years that have established the five piece’s distinctive style, what we previously described as “an eclectic blend of punk and funk topped by raw and volatile energy.” Delivered with considerable pop polish, ‘I Don’t Feel’ is built on grooving beats and bass riffs, its big chorus hinting at a future of radio airtime and festival appearances. “[It’s] a song about being reluctant to seek help from others,” Saloon Dion explain. “What it isn’t, is a song about having no feeling, but more of choosing what to feel and when to feel it. It speaks of the barriers we all put up to protect ourselves, no matter the damage they may do in the long run”.
Watch the video by Clump Collective below:

‘I Don’t Feel’ is out via Mucker Records and available from the Saloon Dion Bandcamp page.

Symbol Soup – Overdressed

The project of London-based songwriter Michael Rea, Symbol Soup takes inspiration from folk, country, indie pop and electronica to create something that sounds sunny and insouciant. Latest single ‘Overdressed’ is a great introduction, fusing a classic British folk charm with something rather more American, including faint notes of country and a couple of spoonfuls of Alex G-style lo-fi indie rock. What Rea describes as “a love song from the perspective of someone who’s overly cynical,” ‘Overdressed’ takes aim at the superficial nature of human interaction, its narrator sick and tired of meaningless etiquette and small talk, yearning instead for something deeper. “They don’t learn a whole lot by the end of the song,” Rea continues, “but they are fully connected to one person, and that’s the connection to something deeper that they’re desperate for.” Check out the lighthearted if indigestion-inducing video, directed by Kirsty Wells of Kondor Films, below:

‘Overdressed’ is out now. Get it from the Symbol Soup Bandcamp page.

Zoon – A Language Disappears

Following the success of recent EPs Big Pharma and A Sterling Murmuration, Daniel Monkman’s Zoon is set to release brand new full-length Bekka Ma’iingan this spring on Paper Bag Records. The Zoon sound is a constantly evolving thing, and with guests and contributors including Owen Pallett, Michael Peter Olsen, Andrew McLeod (Sunnsetter) and Lee Ranaldo (Sonic Youth), the new album is no exception. But as single ‘A Language Disappears’ suggests with its themes of lost heritage, the sense is that Zoon is not morphing away from its origin but rather moving closer to some central truth. “This album is about acknowledging a part of me that I felt was there the whole time,” as Monkman puts it. Check out the 3D animated video directed by Tkaronto-based multimedia sculptor Shawn Chiki below:

Bekka Ma’iingan is out on the 28th April via Paper Bag Records and you can pre-order it now.

The post Weekly Listening: January 2023 #3 appeared first on Various Small Flames.