Kraków Loves Adana used this style to explore the gap between the human and the digital, from the loneliness of life among jpeg images and collected memories to the failure of the internet to fulfil its promise of utopian democracy. Deniz Çiçek and Robert Heitmann have released another album in the meantime, though again they channelled their distinctive sound into explorations of contemporary living. A space in which the boundaries between physical reality, virtual reality and dreams began to merge and blur.

This autumn sees Kraków Loves Adana return with a brand new record, Follow the Voice, and the lead singles suggest a further dive into such themes. Take the title track, a stark and shimmered song that walks a line between cold and heartfelt. The sound is as dramatic as ever, at times almost sinister in its tone, but Çiçek’s vocals harness the track’s rhythm to emerge above this. A human voice searching for meaning amongst shadows and shining lights.

Haven’t seen you for ages
How are you
Still burning with the pages
But how are you
I fall asleep mid-sentence
At unexpected meetings
I’m a pale phantom of myself

The track comes complete with a video directed by the band themselves in collaboration with director of photography Philip Jestädt, and with additional art design by Hannes & Johannes.

Follow the Voice is out on the 12th November and you can pre-order it now from the Kraków Loves Adana Bandcamp page.

The post Kraków Loves Adana – Follow The Voice appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Comb For Gold is a brand new Desert Liminal EP, out on Chicago’s new cassette label Fine Prints (which was set up by Ziyad Asrar of Whitney/Smith Westerns and Robbie Haynes of Strange Magic Recording). The four song release builds upon the band’s previous record, honing their style into tight aesthetic. Their Facebook page lists an array of influences, from Owen Ashworth and John Maus to John Prine and Arthur Russell, as well as those outside of music like Jean Baudrillard and Ottessa Moshfegh, and their distinctive sound makes such a wide net make perfect sense.

To start, ‘Gauze Cave’ draws on Ashworth’s lonely synths in the opening, though soon these are overridden by electrical streaks and thunderous reverb. As on Static Thick, Quillin’s delivery remains somewhat even against this tumult, crooned and poetic, emerging not beyond the instrumentation but from within it. This lends a sense of intuition to the abstract vocals, their organic cadence linked as though the words of some spell or incantation.

“spectral sunrise, lock and dam decay
the wind, the wings of soft ascension
saw you braid the blackbirds, clear as day

specter, doctor, cop
on where i paint my hatred
cryin’ loud, but no one flies the plane”

The title track leans a little more toward a synth pop style, though one half speed and haunted. The detached vibe brings to mind the apparent influence of Moshfegh, sharing that sense of dislocation from so-called ‘real’ life that sets her writing apart. Desert Liminal continually maintain a similarly odd feel, a kind of singular strangeness that suggests this world is not quite their own.

The Moshfegian vibes are stronger still on ‘Flashbacks’, the track calling to mind her most recent novel, My Year of Rest and Relaxation. The book involves an unnamed narrator in 00s New York who attempts to hibernate for an entire year, working toward her personal renewal through a psychopharmaceutical haze. Punctuating her stupor are memories of her parents and their untimely deaths, like vivid flashes amidst the fog, and ‘Flashbacks’ sets up a similar dynamic. The song is subdued and sedate, rising to moments of clarity that could themselves be false—memory, dream and hallucination rendered indistinguishable.

i got a knife if he comes back
clean nights you want, and the ones you ask for
knock it loose and write if he come on home
flashbacks you know, and the ones you stole from

lone mass was a chair and a Sazerac
strange memory love that couldn’t give back to me

whether I set it up, whether he’s real or not
whether the wind, the wings, the things I saw
were true or false or Halcion”

The drums on closing track ‘Lilac Signal Fires’ are deeper and more pressing, so while Quillin’s delivery keeps its ethereal level, the song is somewhat more urgent. Indeed, the track forms something of a nightmare, an apocalyptic vision vivid enough to trigger a fight-or-flight response, though again the boundary between dream and reality feels tenuous, if not altogether absent.

when the horizon fell, i knelt like velvet rope
when the sky vault falls, i’ll fight like hell

we surf an end tide
money cult of children, cryptobillionaires
some old man reptiles wiling out
you held my lost earth inside
those lilac eyes, like signal fires
some old man reptile couldn’t buy

Comb For Gold is out now via Fine Prints and you can get it from Bandcamp.

The post Desert Liminal – Comb For Gold appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Under the Miserable Chillers moniker, Gallego has just released Adoration Room, a split album with Kabir Kumar’s Sun Kin. The pair began as digital-age pen pals, connecting over a love of music and a shared appreciation of the American experience for immigrants and first generation kids. The latter is more than a bio-ready factoid, because conversations about such topics shaped the music the pair made once they started collaborating, the synth-pop sound a sparkly vehicle in which they can explore the pressing concerns of the contemporary age.  “Anxieties induced by social media,” play a role, explains Gallego, as do “misgivings and fears about making art in a time where a tidal wave of history seems poised to crash down on us,” with the final purpose of the music geared around “the need to hold on to faith that another future is possible.”

Conversation has a thematic resonance on Adoration Room too. The split sees an alternation between Miserable Chillers and Sun Kin, with neither taking the baton for more than two songs before passing on to the other, and as such the the album forms something of a dialogue. Sun Kin opens proceedings with ‘Veena’, an archetypal example of his polished pop sound, before Miserable Chillers responds with ‘Un canto a Galicia’, a track pitched halfway between surf rock and synth pop that conjures long Mediterranean days as seen in dreams.

“what’s the sun feel like in Spain?
we’re in a cafe, it’s afternoon
i smell fish and lemon.
we can sit in the shade!

Suppose our hearts are unblossomed flowers
and when they bloom what color do
you think we’ll see?”

After the deep tropical shimmer of Sun Kin’s ‘Teri Ankhen’, Miserable Chillers follow with two tracks. ‘Natural History’ maintains the dreamy aesthetic through natural imagery, though frames it firmly in the modern age, as seen in museum collections, while ‘Adoration’ slows the tempo into a late-night crawl, like floating on your back in the pool of a cheap motel at 2AM. This is something of a theme on the record, the intangible or transcendental instrumentation always balanced by something more real and banal—be it mention of Bitcoin exchanges or, as in Sun Kin’s ‘Neglect’, the trappings of social media.

The track feels an important one for the album, suggesting the paradisaical pop might be nothing but artifice, a simulated landscape beneath which a search for meaning and connection continues. There’s something of an unease here, one not assuaged by the bright music but accentuated, the sonic veneer that merely masks what lies beneath, and one which might evaporate at any moment to reveal the true nature of things.

‘Ringing’ follows in a similar vein, mapping the ghost of a relationship as seen on Facebook, accidental invites and conspicuously absent likes serving to make clear what is no longer present. The track is less a technophobic comment on social media and more an agitated view of the world as it now exists, what has been preventing what might be, the past displayed alongside the present to prevent any view of the future. A similarly anxious state exists on Miserable Chillers’ ‘Horse Opera’, though this time the scope widens, the political crashing into the personal whether invited or not.

“This big city
isn’t so big at all!
if you trace the train,
our paths stay small.
this city ain’t so big at all!

little by little
we’ll all disappear
they’ll pull you by the toes
they’ll pull you by the ears
Born in the USA
But we won’t die in it.”

There might appear to be a difference in scale or focus between heartsick hating on Facebook and the chronic unease of immigrant life in the US, though in presenting them side by side, Sun Kin and Miserable Chillers tease out links. Something about a lack of privacy, a lack of grace, an inability to unplug from the system and live your own life. The low-level awareness that the system could turn on you at any moment, information barrelling through its synapses with your number, operating according to rules set by people far richer and more powerful than is imaginable.

Miserable Chillers and Sun Kin put a human face to these ideas, blending the big issues of our time with small personal vignettes and touches of emotion to reframe the narrative. To discuss such conceptual themes directly is to risk sounding like the synopsis of an overly familiar sci-fi film, but Gallego and Kumar circumvent this and instead paint a world very much in the realist style. And, if it sounds too fantastic or futuristic to be realism, then perhaps that is the whole point. Welcome to the contemporary world.

Adoration Room is out now and you can get it from the Miserable Chillers Bandcamp page.

The post Miserable Chillers / Sun Kin – Adoration Room appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Far from limited to the slacker rock vibe, Gallego also records as Miserable Chillers, a synth pop outfit worlds away from the Dicktations sound. His latest release under that moniker, A Flower You Would Like To Eat, consists of a mix of live instrumentation, MIDI orchestration, samples and found sounds, all culminating in retro hits dragged into the now from a few decades back: songs part glam, part glum, the soundtrack to a heartbroken disco.

Opener ‘Love Theme (For The Wilderness)’ is a slow-burn ballad that starts out with cheap church organ and metamorphosizes into sparkling synths, the whole thing shot through with a keen devotional lilt. ‘An Enchanted World’ is altogether more danceable, Gallego’s conversational verses bookmarked by a catchy chorus and skippy groove, while ‘Gentle’ is laid-back and languid, though the lyrics hide nostalgic sadness and sense of loss.

“I saved the wedding portrait
where you two are forever
young and in each other’s arms
and you look so gentle”

The magical digital interlude of ‘The Children Board The Balloon’ is followed by ‘Habits’, a strange bedroom-pop number that’s at once intimate and odd, a lost love consuming all feeling, leaving the world curiously vacuous. Closer ‘Night Time In The Old Homes’ unfurls with a careful groove, a dream pop track played at half-speed and piped through old speakers, the quivering voice conveying a certain anxious need to communicate that pervades the entire release. As Gallego describes: “This is an album about being scared as a kid and scared as an adult, and discovering your capacity to love and be loved. It’s a record about rare moments when you can taste divinity—and that palpable sense that in trying to cling to those moments you might crush them.”

We’re delighted to share the entire thing for your streaming pleasure. Hit play below and add a bit of feeling to your Friday.

You can explore the Miserable Chillers oeuvre on their Bandcamp page.

Artwork by Styles Munson

The post Premiere: Miserable Chillers – A Flower You Would Like To Eat appeared first on Various Small Flames.

‘Clean Air’ opens proceedings with a joyously messy indie pop song, David Pressler’s vocals juxtaposing the dynamic instrumentation. ‘Heaven’s Gates’ is another pop jewel, practically demanding frantic toe-tapping at the very least, with lyrics possessing a lovably odd quality…

“Awake ’til we’re alone
with streetlights made of spider eggs
I’m looking over anyway
to see you, this clear
storming heaven’s shores and gates
and crossing over interstates
to meet you right here”

The rest of the record has a similarly weird vibe, as if written in some other dimension that fractured from ours just slightly. There’s a decidedly sci-fi feel to ‘Ganymede’, Pressler’s vocals cramming in lines, barely keeping up with the rattling pace of the song (“The weight of all the suns in space today the stars can trace your name / The time it takes to stay awake the dirt and grass above the graves”). ‘Neptune’ has a surfy vibe along with something a little stranger, like the soundtrack to one of those shock-endings in a movie where the camera pans back to take in the seascape and planet Earth sits on an apparently alien horizon, while ‘Sadie’ is stirring and triumphant, the sort of song guaranteed to make you feel that little bit better. Pressler’s vocals are still a downbeat drawl, but sound somehow hopeful as he sings

“Golden hearts in the ground
you taste like Seven Crown
and bottle rockets at night
racing to the light “

‘Eucahrist’ is a lo-fi clatter, the punk-style drive and energy rushing things to a stop in just two minutes, before ‘Say When’ picks up this infectious energy and channels it into percussion. ‘Kickball Katy’ is a rollicking punk song with group vocals that shout the refrain “I hate everything but kickball Katy!”, while ‘Cowboys’ is a searing slice of guitar rock, the vocals somehow staying afloat on the maelstrom of noise. Penultimate track ‘Coronada’ delivers one last blast of indie rock before the more reserved closer, ‘Voyager’, which plods along in a lazy shuffle as Brielle Stango joins Pressler to sing:

“And it’s alright, and it’s ok
if you’re scared of the new day
And it’s alright, it’s ok
Last night was miles away”

The track picks up pace around the halfway mark, descending into a glorious guitar-led outro that signs Great Lakes off in style. It’s an album of many layers, equally adept as a straight-up indie rock LP as it is a weird and almost cosmic journey into the galaxies of the human mind.

You can get Great Lakes on a name-your-price basis from the Ghost Camp Bandcamp page or on cassette via Third Floor Tapes.

The post Ghost Camp – Great Lakes appeared first on Various Small Flames.