Adeline Hotel – Whodunnit

Ruination Record Co.

“There’s always a strange combination of continuity and change within a new album from Adeline Hotel. Each record building upon what came before it while often in some respects also turning away to chart new ground. As though the project exists as a kind of world of its own, and the function of each release is to bring us a view of a different corner. Adeline Hotel as a vast space we’re discovering album by album, song by song, with Dan Knishkowy not so much engineering the experience as leading the way. This exploratory spirit is central to Whodunnit […] an album following a tradition which lists the likes of Gillian Welch, Neil Young and Van Morrison among its practitioners. Songs as a form of stream of consciousness, not only in terms of lyrics but the very sound itself. The sense of having tapped into some wellspring of movement or momentum and choosing to lean into the flow.” [Review]

Advance Base – Horrible Occurrences

Run For Cover / Orindal Records

“For while the setting is entirely imaginary, the narratives and characters owe much to real life. Indeed the killer [of ‘The Year I Lived in Richmond’] is inspired by an analogous figure who stalked a place Advance Base‘s Own Ashworth once called home, fictionalised to create some sense of distance and decency. If Horrible Occurrences can be distilled into one reductive image, then that is perhaps the most enlightening. A receptacle into which bad memories and old stories can be poured. A small town diorama in which they can play out again, change shapes, take on lives of their own. One we might approach and watch over along with Ashworth, feeling tall from that perspective, relatively safe in the top-down view.” [Review]

Anne Malin – Strange Power!

Dear Life Records

Released in tandem book-length poem What Floods under the name AM Ringwalt, Anne Malin‘s Strange Power! is an album which explores “how nature and its inherent motion might possess the key to the process of healing in the aftermath of trauma and loss,” as we wrote earlier in the year. Something which possesses a palpable momentum yet no clear conclusion. In other hands, this lack of answers or endings might be held up as the tragic farce of existence, but here is positioned more like an opportunity. To continue asking questions both of yourself and your surroundings, as though the act of interrogation is its own strange power. A sign of a faith in something human and sublime.

Being Dead – EELS

Bayonet Records

“If you thought [previous release] When Horses Would Run was inventive, then just wait until you hear what is coming next. Because the new Being Dead full-length EELS […] takes everything that made its predecessor special and pushes it further. Travelling to Los Angeles for a fortnight of writing and recording with John Congleton, the pair pushed themselves to embrace the singular spirit of their work. The result is a record that’s more intense, more raucous and decidedly darker than anything which has come before, without sacrificing that mischievous persona.” [Review]

Ben Seretan – Allora

Tiny Engines

Described by Ben Seretan as his “insane Italy record,” Allora represents a snapshot from a very specific time and place. Or rather it would, should ‘snapshot’ come anywhere close to describing the scale, heft and sheer abundance of moving parts on show. Seretan and his band were due to play a wedding at the tail end of “a wonderful but lightly disastrous tour” of Europe during the summer of 2019, only for rain to half play and leave them in the lurch. But rather than waste the curious mix of energy and exhaustion that sets in at the end of a tour, they decided to make an album instead. A three-day stint at a farmhouse in the hills overlooking Venice with renowned mixing engineer, producer, musician Matt Bordin was arranged. A brief moment where a plethora of emotions were processed and purged through joyful noise. The result is unashamedly maximalist, entirely heartfelt, and in possession of that lightning-in-a-bottle feel that suggests it could never have materialised anywhere else. Catharsis has long been a key thread of Ben Seretan’s work, but rarely has it gone quite so hard.

The Big Easy – (It’s No Secret) The Truth As Bad As the View

Trash Casual Records

“It’s notable that The Big Easy’s latest album, (It’s No Secret) The Truth As Bad As The View, is the first to feature Berthomieux’s image on the cover. The first symbol on a record that looks to grapple with exactly how and why a person of colour might be made to feel an interloper within certain artistic circles. Berthomieux cites a James Baldwin statement as a key to realigning his perspective. ‘To be a Negro in this country,’ Baldwin wrote, ‘and to be relatively conscious is to be in a state of rage almost all of the time.’ Suddenly what had for so long seemed like a personal hang-up or imposter syndrome was revealed to be an intrinsic part of the Black experience, and to connect his own emotions with a historic struggle proved liberating. Thus the album became an exercise in owning his identity and finally voicing those things kept buried for so long. ‘It’s No Secret is kind of like a journal,’ as Berthomieux concludes, ‘a place where I can express the things that I haven’t been able to say out loud’.” [Review]

Brown Horse – Reservoir

Loose Music

“Call it distraction, call it despair / No matter what you call it you can feel it when it’s there.” These lines from the track ‘Bloodstain’ encapsulate the presiding mood of Brown Horse’s Reservoir. A sense of unease which permeates their alt-country style like something “drifted on the low tide,” as the song continues. Something that’s now “hell bent for to stay.” This disquiet is evoked not only in images of stark estuary mudflats and cold fields but also polycotton shirts and soulless expanses of megastores. In the nostalgic melancholy of opener ‘Stealing Horses’, or the Molina-esque lyricism of songs like ‘Sunfisher’ and ‘Outtakes’ with their burning houses, hummingbird hearts and singing birds. And like all the best Gothic atmosphere, it is not entirely clear whether the sensation is a haunting from some ancient thing or a dark harbinger of what is to come.

Cara Beth Satalino – Little Green

Worried Songs

“The success of Little Green is in no small part a result of the nuanced nature of Cara Beth Satalino’s approach. Early on you come to appreciate her uncanny ability to combine deep soul-searching with offhand observations and gentle humour, inventive imagery and smart turns of phrase creating something rich and full of life despite the surrounding turmoil. [A record] soft and fragile as a little green shoot but with a spark of energy too, a desire to keep on. It might be too dark to see what is in front of you, but the earth is still turning and the bright star is still burning. There is time yet to grow towards the light.” [Review]

Cassandra Jenkins – My Light, My Destroyer

Dead Oceans

Cassandra Jenkins intended to step away from music after her 2021 album An Overview on Phenomenal Nature, only for the album to resonant so deeply with audiences she found herself newly (and perhaps reluctantly) energised, pulled back towards the urge to create. My Light, My Destroyer is what emerged a few years later, a record which not so much builds upon its predecessor as explodes out in every direction. Sophistipop, jazz and New Age elements lift Jenkins’s indie rock sound to almost orchestral territory, while layers of found sounds and field recordings anchor the otherwise celestial style in the lived-in world. This duality between the grounded and the elevated is typical of the tone, where encroaching darkness is matched by a curiosity and attentiveness to wonder. The world is beautiful, the world is burning, and both of these facts are made more urgent by the other.

The Chairman Dances – Evening Song

Self-Released

“Originating as a narrative poem, The Chairman Dances‘ new album Evening Song traces the early days of a nascent relationship,” we wrote back in September. “A seminarian and a drummer mutually enamoured with one another, caught in the heady space of attraction and mystery, hungry to learn everything there is to know about the other.” Working from this point of intersection, Eric Krewson and co. bring the pair of characters to life, providing small glimpses into moments both special and seemingly mundane to achieve a strikingly intimate sense of humanity. As with much of The Chairman Dances’ catalogue, the beauty is in the detail. The hollow knock of shoes, the wail of an oven’s timer, the catch of a lock. Small confessions shared between two people daring to allow their lives to become enmeshed.

The Dead Tongues – Body of Light / I Am a Cloud

Psychic Hotline

Not content with releasing just one record this year, Ryan Gustafson’s The Dead Tongues put out two simultaneously. The albums, published as standalone digital releases but brought together in a double LP, display both aspects of the Asheville, North Carolina songwriter’s oeuvre. I Am A Cloud is an exercise is meandering cosmic Americana, what Gustafson calls “a fever dream of song and spoken-word about the toggle between identity and ephemerality,” while Body of Light sees things solidify into discrete folk rock songs. Joined by a stellar cast of collaborators and a sense of improvisational freedom, it’s the most expensive and ambitious Dead Tongues release to date.

Deerlady – Greatest Hits

Self-Released

Described as “a collection of songs about intimacy,” Greatest Hits sees Mali Obomsawin and Magdalena Abrego unite as Deerlady to conjure soundscapes simultaneously stark, tender and thunderous. Both Obomsawin and Abrego have backgrounds in jazz, and though some of the genre’s fluidity carries through, the Deerlady project exists outside of that sphere and the expectations it carries. Rather, Greatest Hits offers an indie rock style free to be more elemental and raw, one attuned to ideas of softness and hope within a hostile and violent world. As if in the face of colonial cruelty, sound might fill the gaps where words cannot suffice. “Brick and concrete / two hundred thousand years buried beneath / while the stars witnessed the unholy,” as Obomsawin, who is from the Abenaki First Nation at Odanak, sings on ‘Masterpieces’. “Well I take it in / I wrestle with the language to begin / I didn’t come to make a speech, I came to live.”

Desert Liminal – Black Ocean

Whited Sepulchre Records

“Released in 2021, Desert Liminal‘s Glass Fate found the Chicago band “settling into a higher form,” as we put it at the time, with violinist and noise artist Mallory Linehan (AKA Chelsea Bridge) joining Sarah Jane Quillin and Rob Logan to elevate their trademark dreamy aesthetic. [Black Ocean] in many ways represents a continuation of this process. With the outfit now cemented as a trio, Linehan joins Quillin as a songwriter and vocalist, grounding the nascent sense of collaboration and connection which emerged on Glass Fate as a core facet of Desert Liminal. A development which is thematically resonant too, the record exploring ways in which death can be faced communally, and grief transmuted into something affirming and meaningful. Chicago’s DIY scene carried Quillin through the worst experiences, and Black Ocean looks to distil this experience into its purest form. The resulting songs often seem like love letters to the people in these communities. Those figures who stood next to you through the best and worst of times.” [Review]

Distant Reader – Place of Words Now Gone

Lily Tapes & Discs

“No news in weeks from outside town,” announces Emmerich Anklam at the beginning of the latest Distant Reader album, Place of Words Now Gone, thrusting the listener into a world suddenly quiet along with his bewildered characters. “Who left me in the center of this desolation?” one such person asks, “Who’s hearing me talk? Does it matter at all? Is anyone still out there? And who can tell the difference between the end and the beginning?” The record took seed in Anklam’s brain during long train rides through the fabled American landscape, and although a clear work of fiction, it’s hard not to see reality in the community it describes—abandoned by those beyond it’s boundaries, succumbing to helplessness as they lose what little agency were ever afforded them. A portrait of an isolated and dislocated America where those left behind are left to struggle and mourn as a deepening silence floods the places they call home. “And everybody she knows goes quiet trying to forget about the ways they could diminish still,” as Emmerich sings on ‘From High Remove’, “the spiral closing in around all of them. Words vanish fold in on themselves, questions halved quartered eighthed. Absence of sound infects all who feel it. Tones, phrases returning to the ether.”

Emily Hines – These Days

Self-Released

“I don’t know about you, but I’m holding out hope.” So sings Emily Hines on ‘UFO’, a single which embodies the tone of her full-length These Days. As warm and soft as a blanket to wrap around yourself in the cold winter months, but with a sharp pang of something else too, a bittersweet bite more potent than the frost at the window. The entire album is an understated gem, full of quiet and wistful songs about difficult relationships, questions unanswered or unanswerable, hoping for something more. On ‘UFO’ this ranges from a desire to know the truth about the Roswell landings to wishing for the sublime reckoning of the Second Coming. But for all of its outlandish subject matter, the song, like These Days as a whole, is entirely straight with its underlying sentiment. There is still hope that wrongs can be righted, Hines insists. Things can change for the better.

Enumclaw – Home in Another Life

Run For Cover Records

Ever wondered what might happen if you were to cross the beams of don’t-give-a-shit slacker rock and confessional, emotionally intense emo? Home in Another Life, the latest album from Tacoma’s Enumclaw, is here to provide an answer. The record is unafraid of the largest themes, lead Aramis Johnson wrestles with everything from God, illness and death to self-doubt, relationships and sex, but does so with a sense of energy and swagger. As though faced with the tangle of life’s difficulties, Enumclaw make the conscious decision to charge headlong forwards, conscious of every possible branch and thorn but moving too purposefully to become ensnared in any one spot. Whether it be the denial of a difficult diagnosis in ‘Not Just Yet’ or the internalised shame of ‘I Still Feel Bad About Masturbation’, Home in Another Life takes emotions and experiences which so often feel unspeakable and shouts them aloud in an act of agency.

The Felice Brothers – Valley of Abandoned Songs

Million Stars / 15 Passenger

Since their inception in 2006, The Felice Brothers have established themselves as one of the premier acts of contemporary US folk rock, building a catalogue of urgent narratives and strange visions with enough depth to stand alongside their literary influences. “Poems and short stories packed with clever references and wry turns of phrase” as we wrote of 2021’s From Dreams to Dust. “A confrontation of the grim realities of our moment that nevertheless celebrates the fact of being alive.” As the title suggests, Valley of Abandoned Songs is a collection of tracks written throughout the project which never quite made it onto a record, but were nevertheless strong enough to convince Conor Oberst, no less, to set up a brand new label just to release them into the world. Single ‘Flowers By The Roadside’ is the perfect example of their ability to conjure entire lives and histories in the shortest of spaces.

Are you
High as Mr Albert was
When he drove the cross town bus
Straight into the sky
I’m just sitting in these flowers by the roadside
I’m not trying to flag a ride
Just happy watching the wide world go by

The Fourth Wall – Return Forever

DevilDuck Records

Kickstarted by a family story of a relative who left a child behind when emigrating to the United States, Return Forever by The Fourth Wall is “an album which,” as we put it in our review, “combs through the contradictions of the immigrant experience in order to voice feelings otherwise impossible to convey.” Delivered via a weighty brand of indie rock, the mood ranges from anger and confusion to catharsis and joy, and the result, as we continued, is “a mixture of hope, denial and genuine love which not only subverts expectations but confounds any attempt to properly reassess. As though some decisions can be so complicated, their impacts so profound, that the very physics of emotions are bent beyond their own laws.”

Gabriel Birnbaum – Patron Saint of Tireless Losers

Western Vinyl

“Gabriel Birnbaum has become increasingly interested in music’s narrative potential, and Patron Saint [of Tireless Losers] finds him at his most confident to date,” we wrote in June. An album where Birnbaum again evolves his sound and writing to present “vignettes which occupy the knife-edge between specificity and ambiguity, rewarding the return listener with layers of wry humour and naked human emotion.” Birnbaum introduces a diverse array of characters—young and old, male and female, lonely and in the throes of love—all troubled by the gap between their own views of the world and the evitable dawning reality. As though every person, be they nervous concert-goer or overeager prepper ostensibly ready for the end times, is at some point destined to realise the true, unforgiving nature of mortal existence.

h. pruz – No Glory

Mtn Laurel Recording Co.

Many albums exists within the giddy period of new beginnings, their creators emerging from a tumultuous period of suffering or drastic change with an almost epiphanic perspective. The bad thing is in the past now, life can show its light. But while h. pruz‘s latest album No Glory focuses its gaze on a variety of pivotal moments from the life of Hannah Pruzinsky—moments they withstood, survived, emerged from—and goes as far as to imagine the perfect life ahead, it refuses the temptation to bask in the transient warmth of such possibility. As though to present the experience of a newly hopeful present as something unmarked by regret or doubt is to fail to fully inhabit its complexities. “I keep seeing change,” as Pruzunsky sings on ‘I Keep Changing’. “Peel away the borders / Of things with weight like copper / Thought it was gold / Til it turned green / In the rain.”

Haley Heynderickx – Seed of a Seed

Mama Bird Recording Co.

In 2018, Haley Heynderickx released I Need To Start a Garden, an album “all about growth and the hope of new beginnings” we wrote, yet one which refused to “shy away from the necessary hard work that makes such growth possible.” Follow-up Seed of a Seed emerges from this process of emotional cultivation, Heynderickx learning how to continue and improve upon the previous album’s progress while coming to understand such things are rarely linear and never complete. Opening tracks ‘Gemini’ and ‘Foxglove’ are marked by a sense of urgency, seized by the haste of new growth, though by the second half the tempo levels out into something slower and more complex. A host of musicians support the trademark finger-picked style, creating a layered thicket, the Haley Heynderickx sound now a rich polyculture diverse and hardy enough to face whatever life might throw at it next.

Hatis Noit – Aura (Rework Series)

Erased Tapes

In 2022, Hatis Noit released Aura, a full-length album “which draws from the vast array of Noit’s influences from Japanese classical music Gagaku and operatic performers to Bulgarian and Gregorian chanting,” we wrote previously, “not to mention avant-garde experimentalists and pop vocal styles.” Aura has had a new lease of life in subsequent years, with a series of reworkings made in collaboration with an equally diverse set of artists. After the likes of William Basinski and Matthew Herbert in 2023, this year saw Noit enlist the talents of Laraaji, Preservation and Armand Hammer to push the already kaleidoscopic sound even further.

Holland Andrews – Answers

LEITER

“Back in 2021, Brooklyn-based composer, producer, vocalist, and clarinetist Holland Andrews released Wordless, the first of a series of EPs under their own name (having previously recorded as Like A Villain). Released with label LEITER, the record introduced a distinctively transportive sound. Led by voice and clarinet and processed through a variety of electronics, the compositions offered soundscapes in which the listener might lose themselves. Rich tapestries of colour and texture crafted with an almost cinematic attention to detail. Subsequent EPs Forgettings and Doubtless furthered the scope and intention of the style, exploring themes of healing and transcendence as Andrews’s genre-bending sensibilities solidified into a style of their own […] Now Holland Andrews has returned with Answers, the fourth and final EP of the series which feels like both the clearest realisation of their creative ideals and a continued, active resistance against genre conventions.” [Review]

Hour – Ease the Work

Dear Life Records

With a studio’s worth of equipment in tow, the ensemble Hour took a ferry to Peaks Island, Maine out of season, and spent a week holed up together in an old theatre to record their latest album, Ease the Work. The project boasts a diverse cast of musicians—lead Michael Cormier O’Leary (electric guitar, classical guitar, percussion) joined by Jason Calhoun (synth), Em Downing (violin), Matt Fox (viola), Elisabeth Fuchsia (violin) Peter Gill (bass), Lucas Knapp (radio effects, field recordings, piano), Evan McGonagill (cello), Peter McLaughlin (drums, percussion), Keith J. Nelson (bass clarinet, clarinet), Erika Nininger (piano, rhodes) and Abi Reimold (electric guitar)—each bringing their own instincts and sensibilities to the project’s lush instrumental arrangements. The intimacy of the recording process allowed each separate contribution to coalesce into harmony. “Challenging any clear distinction between composition and improvisation,” as we wrote earlier in the year, the resulting record “performs the same small miracle of the previous records, presenting the everyday in all its joy and melancholy, comfort and strangeness.”

I Saw the TV Glow soundtrack

A24 Music

“The danger of nostalgia is that it tends to confuse the actual home with the imaginary one,” Svetlana Boym wrote in her 2001 book, The Future of Nostalgia. “In extreme cases it can create a phantom homeland.” The warning is explored in Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow, a film with a decidedly complex relationship with nostalgia. It can be something to wrap yourself in, bond over, shelter beneath, yet with this retreat comes the risk of a detrimental stasis, where fondness for the past comes to eat up the present. The interrogation is furthered by the film’s soundtrack, where the likes of Caroline Polachek, Florist, Frances Quinlan, Sadurn and King Women tap into the unapologetically sentimental nineties aesthetic. But it is the very first track that is perhaps the most thematically resonant. Yeule‘s cover of ‘Anthems For A Seventeen Year-Old Girl’ is so distorted by glitchy imperfections it becomes something of a Baudrillardian simulacrum. A memory denatured by overhandling, unpegged from reality, a figment of the imagination which has come to replace the real.

Jahnah Camille – i tried to freeze light, but only remember a girl

Winspear

“The songs offer a picture of late adolescence in all of its bittersweet nuance, its introspective contemplation matched only by its bold confessional attitude.” That’s how we described i tried to freeze light, but only remember a girl, the debut EP of Birmingham, Alabama-based songwriter and musician  Jahnah Camille earlier this year. The release reaches for a number of genres with real confidence, be it the nineties alt-rock swagger of ‘flesh’ or the country twang of ‘roadkill’. “[But it is] the lyrics which really see the artist stand apart,” we continued. “Because Camille has a knack for combining emotion and self-awareness, offering songs entirely committed to the feelings being explored but never lacking a wry wrinkle to add that extra layer of personality.”

Jess Ribeiro – Summer of Love

Poison City Records

Written amid a period of intense instability, Summer of Love finds Jess Ribeiro negotiating the liminal space between hope and reality, confronting the past and possible futures alongside the present moment to find a way towards healing. Ribeiro chose to lean into the turmoil during the recording process, undeterred by the fact collaborators could only visit individually thanks to the pandemic restrictions, and many never made it to the studio at all. Yet together with Nick Huggins, she nonetheless enlisted the talents of Jim White (drums), Darcy McNulty (saxophone), Leah Senior (keys), James Seymour (bass), Davie Mudie (percussion) and Carrie Webster (violin and viola), guiding each musician according to the release’s spirit. The result is improvised and exploratory yet bound by the same sense of longing. That will to work through tumultuous times towards something more solid. The hope that chaos might resolve itself into a more hospitable state.

Josaleigh Pollett – In The Garden, By The Weeds

Self-Released

“An excavation of the present which inevitably tends pastward, tracing a presiding cynicism back to its roots in search of a cause.” That’s how we described Josaleigh Pollett‘s third album In The Garden, By The Weeds. At first, the imagery of the title resonates on a surface level, the Salt Lake City songwriter surveying the ecosystem of their life, assessing which parts to nurture, which to pluck or prune. But spend a minute with this collection of stark and glitchy songs and it becomes clear things are operating on a deeper level. For Pollett not only gives the weeds their due but the subterranean conditions too. Those places dark and elemental we so often pretend have no relation to us higher beings. Places perhaps inside of our lives or our selves we must reach down into if we are to make any real progress in cultivating the kind of environment we want to live in. Even if it means getting our hands dirty, scrunching our eyes and grasping blind.

Joy Guidry – AMEN

Whited Sepulchre Records

“In AMEN,” explained Joy Guidry of their most recent album, “there is a lot experimentation with different forms of Black American music. I wanted to lean heavily on my Texas, Louisiana and Creole roots in this project. There were many days spent with my ancestors during the writing of this album and I’m eternally grateful for the music they sang to me during our time together.” The record saw the basoonist and composer develop their sound with the newly prominent influence of gospel and spiritual jazz, combining the sensibilities of church music with jazz invention to create something fundamentally devotional. “The result is at once communal and singular,” as we put it in our review. “Joy Guidry as realised in their most complete form to date.”

K. Freund – Trash Can Lamb

Soda Gong

We’ve been following the work of Akron, Ohio’s Keith Freund for the better part of two decades, originally with Trouble Books, then as one half of the experimental/neoclassical duo Lejsovka & Freund, and more recently with Lemon Quartet and Aqueduct Ensemble. Following 2022’s Hunter on the Wing, Trash Can Lamb is Freund’s latest release under his own name, and offers another exercise in minimal piano, degraded samples and an array of tactile electronics. It’s the neoclassical equivalent of the folk art eccentric, spinning singular homebrew beauty from a treehouse studio filled with strange gadgets and devices, at far remove from the polish and pretension of the auditorium, yet somehow deeper for it. Trash Can Lamb walks it own path straight to the heart of things, small moments and sensations that you couldn’t describe with words if you tried.

Kali Malone – All Life Long

Ideologic Organ

“Manages to suggest both academic rigour and unburdened instinct, but ultimately transcends any focus on its intentions as the listener becomes immersed in the soundscape. Some hymn or lament, latent with the suggestion of the sublime, be it total dread or transcendence, silence or all-encompassing sound.” So we wrote of Living Torch by Kali Malone back in 2022, though the description could be extended to much of the Stockholm-based composer’s work. Written for pipe organ, choir and brass quintet, latest release All Life Long possesses all the same clarity and depth, breathing new life into classical techniques to create something at once intimate and exalted. Not holy music, per say, but music which operates according to the same ends. Aiming to evoke those sensations felt in the face of things far greater than us, more mysterious, yet surrounding us all the same.

Keanu Nelson – Wilurarrakutu

Mississippi Records

Primarily a poet in his home of Papunya, northwest of Alice Springs, Keanu Nelson was inspired to start singing his work after meeting producer Yuta Matsumura in the local arts centre. The result is Wilurarrakutu, an album first released on Altered States Tapes last year, but put out to a wider audience back in August by Mississippi Records. With Casio beats programmed by Matsumura as support, Nelson delivers deeply personal poetry on themes of loneliness and family, home and loss, in both Papunya Luritja and English. Nelson incorporates reggae and gospel influences into a sound which emerges from an electronic sonic lineage that trails back to the likes of Suicide and Francis Bebey but represents its own singular style. One which aches with a sense of longing, the relative simplicity of the arrangements allowing the emotional depth of Nelson’s poetry to sit front and centre, blurring the classic and the contemporary into something genuinely moving.

Lia Kohl – Normal Sounds

Moon Glyph

“Able to evoke existence in all of its magic and mundanity.” That’s how we described the work of Chicago-based cellist, composer and multidisciplinary artist Lia Kohl back in July, describing her album Normal Sounds as “at once normal and very much not, or else it is extraordinarily normal—with Kohl turning her attention to the acoustics of everyday living and presenting them back to the listener as something as something new.” Existing somewhere between music and sound art, the record uses synths and cello (as well as occasional flute and electronics from Ka Baird and sax from Patrick Shiroishi) to accentuate field recordings of human-made sounds, reflecting our own world back to us in a new light. Here the incidental is elevated, each song a cacophony crafted from the sounds we so often ignore or phase out. Kohl isn’t so much crafting a soundscape for us to hear as rewiring our brains so that our attention might be heightened. What we encounter in such a state is sometimes playful, sometimes strange, occasionally unnerving and melancholic in the way the slow passage of life always is. The human world in granular detail. What it sounds like to live here and now.

Lindsay Reamer – Natural Science

Dear Life Records

“[Songs which] not only represent a study of a specific time and place—capturing a snapshot of environments both natural and human and the porous border between the two—but also a report on how it feels to exist within that period. As though Lindsay Reamer serves as our guide through contemporary America as she knows it. A squeezed no-man’s land between the past and the future. A place where great beauty and banality sit side by side, where old choices drag unforeseen consequences towards us and yet the smallest details still seem to hold life in all of its inscrutable charm.” [Review]

Little Kid – A Million Easy Payments

Orindal Records

“[The] ability to vary the focal length of its perspective so gracefully is a signature of A Million Easy Payments. “The urgency in Kenny Boothby’s voice matches the stakes of his lyrics,” writes Dan Wriggins in the liner notes [of Little Kid‘s latest album], “epic ballads and reveries that come at life from all angles and exposures, driving at and a little over the limits of self-reflection.” The sense of an artist never quite satisfied with the scene they have captured, always looking to widen the lens to better represent the truth before them, or else zoom in closer in search of the missing detail which might click everything else into place. Call it a search for meaning, or even God Himself. In other hands, songs reaching for such things with the expansive style of Dylan and Welch at their most ambitious might feel like novelty or pastiche. But in this context it seems the only logical outcome for Little Kid’s specific way of working.” [Review]

Lollise – i hit the water

Switch Hit Records

“Hailing from Francistown in Botswana and now based in New York, Lollise is an artist who draws from the entirety of her musical history when crafting her songs. Hence the sound of her debut full-length I hit the water owes a debt to the styles which soundtracked her childhood and early years—including Setswana and Kalanga folk songs, South African electronic bubblegum and kwaito from the eighties and nineties, Congolese soukous and Zimbabwean sungura—as well as genres like Afrobeat, art-pop and new wave which she immersed herself in after moving to the US. What results is a sound capable of evoking the future and past simultaneously, where traditional styles are repurposed to open new directions, and the line between history and imagination blurs into something entirely new.” [Review]

Mary Ocher – Your Guide to Revolution

Underground Institute

“To say Mary Ocher’s latest album Your Guide to Revolution is ambitious in its intentions is to risk understatement. A kaleidoscopic and politically charged collection of songs which draws on Ocher’s childhood (born in Moscow to Jewish-Ukrainian parents before emigrating to Tel Aviv during the Gulf War) as a way into wider themes of resistance and civil disobedience. A huge array of styles and influences are utilised across the record, both to evoke the gamut of emotions triggered within the contemporary struggle and to ground the release within a wider history of such subversive art. A central part of the album is a series of three tracks which rework pieces by harpist Dorothy Ashby based on the Rubaiyat of Omar Khyyam, a triptych of songs which Ocher has collected into a short film which echoes The Color of Pomegranates by Sergei Parajanov.” [Review]

Merce Lemon – Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wilds

Darling Recordings

“A collection of nine songs with dirt under their fingernails, equal parts wild and vulnerable as they reckon with the changing tides of love in all its guises […] Merce Lemon’s songwriting is often gentle, careful and sincere ruminations on love and solitude, but this underlying ferality is perhaps the record’s biggest strength, and the most obvious step forward from Moonth. A reminder the soft animal can still bear its teeth, a kind of wildness that turns heartfelt, mid-tempo folk rock songs into blown-out anthems, building towards crescendos of wailing guitar and pure feeling.” [Review]

Minor Moon – The Light Up Waltz

Ruination Record Co.

Minor Moon‘s latest album The Light-Up Waltz is set within “speculative world, where civilisation has collapsed and the characters are made to exist in the aftermath,” as we wrote earlier in the year. “But far from some desolate landscape of grim suffering, this post-civilisation society is one coloured by the invention and playfulness of its inhabitants. As though steely determination can only be maintained with a suitable accompaniment of joy.” This is a collection of songs working under such a logic, finding its characters proactive in their search for meaning, and perhaps finding it through that very mindset. “To me,” as lead Sam Cantor puts it, “the antidote to fatalistic disillusionment is a kind of complicated dance with dread, hope and joy.”

MJ Lenderman – Manning Fireworks

Anti- Records

It’s fair to say MJ Lenderman has come a long way since we shared ‘Gentleman Jack’ from his 2021 album, Ghost of Your Guitar Solo. Through his what we’ve described previously as “masterful knack for combining details small and absurd into something which feels like life as it’s lived on the ground,” the last coulpe of years has seen Lenderman take the leap into the indie stratosphere, and latest album Manning Fireworks makes good on this acclaim without sacrificing the sensibilities which got him there in the first place. Often wacky yet always unabashedly earnest, these are songs of a different sort of American mythology. Colourful, chintzy, most likely temporary. A place of waterparks and McDonalds lots. Pocket Bibles, drunk drivers, Disney Pixar deleted scenes. A place inhabited by people who were once babies and now jerks. People like you and me.

Mol Sullivan – GOOSE

Self-Released

A self-described “long exposure photograph” charting growth both artistic and personal, Mol Sullivan‘s GOOSE serves as a portrait of a person within the arc of great change. With songs written in the aftermath of a relationship and during a nascent sobriety, the album opens with Sullivan “set deep in those early days of a new beginning,” as we wrote, “where everything feels possible yet tenuous and a little too vivid to bear,” but does not stay constrained to the present moment. Instead, we find an artist moving forwards and looking back, reflecting on who they were and who they want to be, reaching beyond stories of love and addiction for a more nuanced picture of life. An artist in dialogue with themselves, teasing out those fundamental things which exist beyond what happens to us within any given moment, and thus repositioning change as a positive force we might harness to become ourselves more fully.

mui zyu – nothing or something to die for / cantonese tasting menu EP

Father/Daughter Records

Last year’s Rotten Bun for an Eggless Century saw Hong Kong British artist mui zyu delve deep within themselves in search of a better understanding of their own identity. The songs mapped a vast labyrinth of history and personal experience and located the elusive truth not locked in some remote central chamber but rather via the process itself. But if the introspective survey of Rotten Bun charted the complex contours of its own small world, follow up nothing or something to die for flips its gaze outwards to take on a far bigger challenge—the chaotic, conflicted place we call home. Here human society is painted as an overwhelming and fundamentally lonely place, where an omnipresent technological connection belies the isolation at its core. Floating over this absurd space, mui zyu looks for the points where the veil between us is the thinnest, hoping a better existence might be possible while refusing to ignore evidence to the contrary. There might be nothing, there might be something to die for, or perhaps both of these things can be true at once.

Nap Eyes – The Neon Gate

Paradise of Bachelors

Through a string of ambitious, philosophical and playful albums, Halifax outfit Nap Eyes have established themselves as one of the most inventive, thematically interesting bands in contemporary indie rock. Even by their standards, The Neon Gate pushes the envelope on what songs can be and explore. Fans will recognise Nigel Chapman’s distinctively deadpan vocals, but the Nap Eyes sound has expanded in various directions, shapeshifting between tracks and unafraid of the abstract and improvised. Weird tangents are followed, eldritch stories are told, what rules there were are broken. The result is to witness something familiar transmogrify, metastasise, expand and contract before your eyes, the recognisable slowly twisted strange into a new, surreal landscape. A style inspired, at least in part, by the William Butler Yeats poem ‘I See Phantoms of Hatred and of the Heart’s Fullness and of the Coming Emptiness’. A poem which is adapted as a song near the end of the album:

I climb to the tower-top and lean upon broken stone,
A mist that is like blown snow is sweeping over all,
Valley, river, and elms, under the light of a moon
That seems unlike itself, that seems unchangeable,
A glittering sword out of the east. A puff of wind
And those white glimmering fragments of the mist sweep by.
Frenzies bewilder, reveries perturb the mind;
Monstrous familiar images swim to the mind’s eye.

Prostitute – Attempted Martyr

Self-Released

The past year has been desperate, dizzying and ferociously cruel for many, and no release captured this reality better than Attempted Martyr by Prostitute. Described as being “written and recorded under duress of a world in turmoil” and “dedicated to Lebanon, from Dearborn with love,” the album sits somewhere between noise rock, post-punk and jazz. A collection of songs twisted tight with intensity, always threatening to spin out of control, fired by the depthless fury of grief and somehow managing an air of plaintive sorrow too. Beneath the delivery’s bark and bite lies a deceptively diverse range of moods and emotions—from the mournful opening title track and spittle-flecked defiance of ‘Judge’ to poetic meditations on justice and resistance and even a certain wry humour (Prostitute one-up fellow Michigan punks Protomartyr by devoting an entire song to celebrity attorney Joumana Kayrouz). A timely reminder of the fertile relationship between anger and compassion, and a scream into the face of a world gone numb.

Rosali – Bite Down

Merge Records

“Help me, darling, I can’t seem to bite down on it / I can’t seem to feel what’s real anymore.” So opens the title track of Rosali‘s Bite Down, giving voice to a sentiment which underpins the entire album. But this is not a record of desperate pleas and drifting disconnection, rather the antidote to such things. As though having been touched by these emotions, Rosali chose to be proactive, confronting life’s ups and downs with a newfound defiance, determined to feel reality in all its forms. The title refers to “something more extreme than leaning in,” as Rosali told Mariana Timony for Bandcamp. “I’m taking a bite. I’m accepting it. I’m chewing it.” Again recorded with the David Nance Band to blur the line between solo and group effort, the resulting album effortlessly straddles folk and classic rock styles and builds upon everything which made 2021’s No Medium so special.

Roswit – Eternal Living

Mono Tapes

The debut album from self-described “olde punks” Roswit has one foot in classic Pacific Northwest indie pop and another across the ocean in a Flying Nun Records style jangle, with some wiry, stripped-back punk thrown in for good measure. From infectious opener ‘Grape’s Song’, which calls to mind fellow Vancouverites The Courtney’s, to the sleeves-rolled-up scrappiness of ‘King’s Song’, every song is packed with a sense of DIY fun. And to top it all there’s a throwback vibe, not to bygone decades but right back to the Middle Ages, a candy-coloured fantasy land of knights and dragons and damsels in distress. This is sometimes achieved with subtle lyrical nods, and others musically, such as ‘Princess’s Song’ which sounds like a lo-fi punk take on a Medieval ballad. Eternal Loving is perhaps best summed up by ‘Dreamer’s Song’, which has it all—supremely catchy hooks, galloping percussion, oohing and aahing harmonies, flutters of flute and daydreams of ye olden days.

Shovel Dance Collective – The Shovel Dance

American Dreams

“We want to play and experiment, layer and move between different spaces in recording, and extend the limits of our instruments to sing and break in new ways,” explained Shovel Dance Collective of their experimental folk sound. “Improvising, textural playing, and moving as one free organic organism are all part of the experiments we try and make in form. It’s all towards this one goal: constructing the Shovel Dance world and saying what we feel needs saying.” Latest album The Shovel Dance saw the outfit “position themselves within an exciting contemporary movement,” as we wrote in our review, “and The Shovel Dance is sure to join the likes of Lankum’s False Lankum and Shane Parish’s Liverpool in their mission to push old sounds and stories into new dimensions.”

S. Raekwon – Steven

Father/Daughter Records

A moniker can offer many things for an artist, not least a sense of separation between their ‘real’ and performing selves, but while Steven Raekwon Reynolds released his latest record Steven under the name S. Raekwon, the album’s title is suggestive of the manner in which the songs work to close this gap in search of authenticity. Because this is a personal album in the most practical sense. Reynolds did all the writing, production, engineering and mixing, not to mention played every instrument with the exception of the drums. What emerged is a collection of songs which serves to illuminate the different parts of their curator, as though the record is a prism through which he shines himself, each track a different wavelength of his personality stratified according to mood. “Maybe subliminally or unconsciously, the songs kind of grouped together in a certain way to explore different areas of myself,” he explains. “The beginning is rage and angriness in a certain way. The middle is this uncertainty of questioning yourself, who you are, and if you’re a good person. And then at the end, I think it comes to a place of resolution. I’m just examining myself and trying to come to a better understanding of who I am.”

Sinai Vessel – I SING

Keeled Scales

In October, Caleb Cordes announced that Sinai Vessel, his moniker for the past fifteen years, had come to an end. “You have taught me everything and I’m taking it all with me,” he wrote in a statement of social media, looking forward to new, healthier future without the constant striving for further success and recognition in the cockfight that is the music industry. Released back in the summer before this news broke, the fourth Sinai Vessel album I SING represents both a parting gift from a project that has meant so much to so many, and a frank examination of the factors which grind artists down to the point of submission, taking on themes so often absent from art with a sincere yet unromantic air. “I sing for a reason,” Cordes sings on the title track. “My reason’s the same // as the nurses buying rentals
/ and rides to broadway
/ who fill up big bars on buses
/ and fall off shit-faced / and the trained men who clock in / coming back from smoke breaks
/ who zoom in from satellites
/ to bomb palisades.” Because I SING is an album about the rarest of things: money, or the lack thereof. How contemporary society seems built to punish anyone who dares attempt a living through art, and the ways in which the compulsion to create persists in ways both magical and mundane. “I sing ‘cos I wake up
/ again and again,” as the title track continues. “It never stops coming
/ it doesn’t make sense.” Sinai Vessel is dead, long live Caleb Cordes.

Slippers – So You Like Slippers

Lame-O Records

“It was childhood residence Atlanta that lit Madeleine BB’s creative fire. The city is home to the headquarters of Cartoon Network, which inspired not only her interest in animation, but indie rock too. ‘Cartoon Network… was a big part of my life growing up,’ she says. ‘They always had a lot of indie bands in the fold there—I remember there was this Powerpuff Girls music compilation that had Devo and Apples in Stereo and Shonen Knife on it. My dad bought that for me and I just became obsessed with it.’ Many of the tracks on [Slippers‘] So You Like Slippers? are a product of this kind of cross pollination, either inspired by or written specifically for BB’s animations. ‘I was trying to make these jokey kid’s songs, sort of like They Might Be Giants, to go along with my animations,’ she describes, and it’s clear this visual starting point provided a sense of creative freedom. License to write quickly and without inhibition, and the ability to explore themes and feelings that could be painstakingly overwrought with charming ease.” [Review]

Tasha – All This and So Much More

Bayonet Records

“Finds an artist embracing the pace and breadth of their new life. Confronting each day with a sense of defiance rather than looking for somewhere to hide.” So we wrote of Tasha‘s All This and So Much More in a preview back in the summer, an album written amid a flurry of experiences that ran the gamut between agonising (unexpected grief, an abrupt separation) and amazing (a role in the Tony-nominated Broadway musical Illinoise). Where many might have sought some form of retreat from life’s constant barrage of change, the Chicago artist instead decided to lean into the momentum to embrace the potential of forward motion. “I’m overcome at the wonder around me,” she sings on the quasi-title track ‘So Much More’. “I fill my lungs, feel the air rush inside me / Could this be fun? Could I be happy?” The album works through the doubt of such questions with decisiveness, choosing to believe that the impossible might be true, life a joyous experience after all. “What if my hope didn’t have a ceiling? / What I want most, all I imagined / What if I chose to settle for nothing less than magic?”

Trace Mountains – Into the Burning Blue

Lame-O Records

Glance at the title of Trace Mountains‘ latest album Into the Burning Blue and you’d be forgiven for expecting a descent into something deep and dark, an assumption only strengthened by opener ‘In a Dream’. “A dispatch from whatever stage of capitalism we’re calling contemporary America as delivered from a breathless nighttime bike ride,” as we wrote of the track back in the summer. “The effect is passing through a dark passage full of eerie shadow without quite knowing if there’s an exit at the other end.” Yet rather than barrelling down towards some nadir, the track’s glittering eighties rock sensibilities manage to invert the arc, the climax instead finding Dave Benton breaching the surface into a wider world. Which isn’t to say the rest of Into the Burning Blue is bright and affirming, it is after all a record concerning the end and aftermath of a long-term relationship, rather that the shades of blue on offer are far more nuanced and diverse than you might at first expect. A picture of person moving through conflict and loss attuned to all the accompanying tones that come with it, and one delivered with all the widescreen confidence of Petty or Springsteen to boot.

villagerrr – Tear Your Heart Out

Darling Recordings

Zeroing in on life’s small, ostensibly ordinary moments to find the meaning within, villagerrr‘s latest album Tear Your Heart Out sees Mark Allen Scott embrace his Midwestern roots for a country-inflected brand of indie rock. Chillicothe, Ohio might have felt constrictive growing up, but home is home and soon a sense of fondness began to blossom, and with it came a desire to acknowledge the fact. “I want to wear where I’m from and my family on my sleeve,” Scott explains. “I’m proud of the twangy influence in my music from corny country songs I’d hear on the bus rides to school. I feel like I’m reclaiming where I come from and making it my own.” The result is a decidedly empathetic collection of songs able to zoom close to the smallest details of small town life, be it light through a sunroof, the smell of cut grass or pencil drawings made in an effort to preserve memories. Some of the tracks are tortured in their own quiet way (“Falling in and out of trust / With the ones you loved before,” as he sings on ‘Cry On’, “It’s not the way I hoped it would be / Oh, no”), some wryly funny (“I see you wearing your Carhartt jeans / Talking ’bout how you don’t got money,” is a refrain in ‘Car Heat’), but all are wrapped in a sense of understanding, as though villagerrr attempts to see through the tangle of emotions to see the fallible humans struggling underneath.

Waxahatchee – Tigers Blood

Anti- Records

When released in 2020, Waxahatchee‘s fifth full-length Saint Cloud felt like the pinnacle of the project, Katie Crutchfield pivots towards an alt-country aesthetic so seamless and fitting it appeared to be some form of completion. Only for Tigers Blood to roll around a few years later, an album which sees the Waxahatchee star rise even further. Unfazed by recent popularity, Crutchfield and co. resisted all the trappings of success and temptations to transcend into the mainstream to instead focus on the present. There are no synths on Tigers Blood. No cinematic pop flourishes. No indication of burning through a newly weighty budget. Which is to say, the album finds Crutchfield not so much dreaming of what Waxahatchee could become, but instead concentrating on exactly what it is. The result is full of heart, romance and hard-won authenticity that could only stem from a place of confidence. Waxahatchee might have found its final form, but you sense this is only its beginning.

Wendy Eisenberg – Viewfinder

American Dreams

“When Wendy Eisenberg finally got Lasik surgery after a lifelong struggle against an assortment of ocular and vision-based afflictions, the resulting impact went far deeper than they perhaps expected […] Viewfinder emerges from within this new experience of the world, reckoning with exactly what it means to see and not to see, and how beauty and meaning are inherent within both experiences […] How does our understanding of the physical world change according to our ability to visually perceive it? And what about other planes—the emotional, spiritual and metaphysical?” [Review]

West of Roan – Queen of Eyes

Spinster

“A god of doorways and portals, a god of seeing in the dark and in dreams, a saint of weeping in sorrow or in joy.” That’s how Laurel Premo, writing in the album notes, describes the titular figure of West of Roan‘s latest record Queen of Eyes. The guide which leads Annie Schermer and Channing Showalter deep into a realm of myth, archetype and imagery, some otherworld beneath our own which bears the load of all that has been before and will surely arrive in time. A place where both personal, historical and cultural trauma unwinds itself as story. When we say West of Roan is a project steeped in the folk tradition, we mean it in a fundamental sense beyond any musical style. That urge to communicate, console, explain or contextualise. To take on the largest of themes in the ways humans always have. The result isn’t so much ambiguous as multifaceted. Stark, beguiling, full of glory and grief. As mysterious as the Queen herself, demanding you submit to its forces to discover the transcendence within.

Why Bonnie – Wish On The Bone

Fire Talk

“How do we live authentically within a world which demands we perform and pretend? Is it possible to confront the true dismal nature of things and still retain a sense of hope? Such questions have weighed on [Blair] Howerton since previous Why Bonnie album 90 in November, not least because she felt she had evolved beyond the wistful country-inflected style those songs presented. “I’ve changed since that album, and I trust that I’ll probably continue to change,” as Howerton explains. Wish On The Bone looks to pinpoint who she is at this point in time without committing to any lasting identity. To possess the confidence to work beyond the expectations of preconception and present however feels right within the current moment. Hence an album which foregoes easy pigeonholing in terms of style, unified instead by the defiant new self-confidence which underpins it. “You owe it to the people who are experiencing the worst to just keep pushing,” as Howerton concludes. “These songs were written out of hope for a better future. I’m not naïve, the world is fucked up, but I think you can radically accept that while still believing it’s possible to change things.” [Review]

Wild Pink – Dulling the Horns

Fire Talk

If recent years have seen Wild Pink’s star rise, then Dulling the Horns could be said to see it begin its arc back earthward, returning not to obscurity but a gravity-saddled weight and heft, the loud rush of the atmosphere roaring in its ears. Recorded live with all the grit and raw energy of the band’s live show left intact, it feels like both a throwback to their early work and a new chapter entirely, losing the wide-screen scope and sparkling electronics in favour of something with a little less polish.  “I didn’t want to clean up anymore,” says lead John Ross. “In doing so we’ve arrived at a new place.” Thematically it leaps around, touching on everything from Dracula and Michael Jordan to the Waco siege and Lefty Ruggiero, and this willingness to reach wide and chase tangents only furthers the sense of immediacy, resulting in the most urgent Wild Pink album to date.

Wishy – Triple Seven

Winspear

Released hot on the heels of December 2023’s successful EP Paradise, Wishy‘s debut full-length Triple Seven seemed to confirm suspicions the Indiana outfit possess the magic Midas touch, a spontaneous jackpot on first pull of the lever which included an NME cover among other such acclaim. And though the journey to that recognition was far more convoluted in reality, something about this iteration, led by songwriters Kevin Krauter and Nina Pitchkites, possesses an undeniable lightning-in-a-bottle charm. A sound which “pays homage to forebears […] while fashioning the nineties-nostalgic sound into something entirely their own,” as we put it, combining dream pop, shoegaze and indie rock influences into something as polished as it is fun.

Young Jesus – The Fool

Saddle Creek

“The pressures of touring had seen the original Young Jesus band slowly disintegrate, and the mosaic pop of Shepherd Head demanded hours spent alone in front of a computer. Exhausted and disillusioned by the process, Rossiter pined for something less abstract. A way to express his creativity rooted in the real world. So he turned to gardening, studying permaculture and the slow process of nurturing it demands. Only then came a chance encounter with Shahzad Ismaily, originating in a shared interest in the work of Milford Graves, and a slow process of coaxing. Rossiter would work on music then tend Ismaily’s New York garden between sessions. At home in LA, he did the reverse, planting trees and laying paths with Alex Babbitt and Alex Lappin before gathering around the piano to play and sing. Slowly the compulsion to make music returned, though now informed by the lessons learnt whilst working on the natural world. The resulting album The Fool feels like another milestone for Young Jesus. A continuation of the searching style which has so long marked the project, but one armed with a new array of tools and techniques to perhaps arrive closer to a satisfying end.” [Review]

The post Year in Review: 2024 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Originating as a narrative poem, The Chairman Dances‘ new album Evening Song traces the early days of a nascent relationship. A seminarian and a drummer mutually enamoured with one another, caught in the heady space of attraction and mystery, hungry to learn everything there is to know about the other. Lead single ‘We Rifled Through’ drops us into the middle of this burgeoning intimacy, a scene which might appear mundane elevated by its details. A snapshot of two people meeting which not only evokes the connection growing between them, but the paths their lives have taken to lead them to that moment.

“Your parents give you this?” “Which? No that’s mine.
I’m the lone church goer.” “How does that happen?”
“One day, I went to church. I stayed. That’s it.”
“That’s it? How did you know to go?” “I stole
a book with an address.” Chris laughs. “You what?”
“You know those bins that sit outside of schools—
you put your textbooks in them when you’re done,
maybe a blanket; someone comes and drives
them off to needy kids? One day, my friends
and I—we’re young, we’re bored—we rifled through.
There, at the bottom, four or five of…”, she points.

Charlotte Jacobs – mala

Speaking of narrative poems, Belgium-born, New York-based vocalist, composer, and producer Charlotte Jacobs is releasing debut full-length a t l u s next month via New Amsterdam Records, and the album’s vocal-centric style could be said to represent its own contribution to the form. Jacobs’s spoken word delivery is held within soundscapes which blur the line between avant pop and contemporary classical, the style marrying the intentional craft of minimalism with intricate detail to create something almost otherworldly. Single ‘Mala’ highlights how the vocals serve as the anchor and guide for the listener. The thread which leads them through this strange and beautiful world.

Honeypuppy – Understatement

The led by songwriter Josie Callahan and featuring Adam Wayton (bass), Will Wise (lead guitar) and Jack Colclough (percussion), Honeypuppy is an Athens, Georgia-based project based on fun and mischief. The first in a new series of monthly singles ahead of forthcoming release DIRTY TV, ‘Understatement’ serves as the perfect introduction for anyone unacquainted with Callahan and co. A song typical of the band’s bittersweet sound where sincere emotion and sardonic wit sit side by side and neither comes out on top.

DIRTY TV is out later this year on Indecent Artistry.

jason calhoun + cla-ras – cruel work carols

Recorded for a tour earlier this year, cruel work carols is a new split release from jason calhoun and Jeremy Ferris’s cla-ras. The pair have long held our attention with their use of sound and textures. The former most recently with small circle on Dear Life Records, a release which blended “organic and synthetic noises into a kind of constellation,” we wrote in our review, “small points to grasp as we move downward, to contemplate in all of their fleeting insignificance. And the latter on releases like Five clusters, “with subtle intricacies growing from every crevice,” we wrote of Ferris’s work, “its ambient folk style sees the organic slowly overwhelm the electronic, evoking ecology’s reclamation of abandoned industrial land. cruel work carols is no less evocative, calhoun offering a world of static and scrambled light and cla-ras something altogether weightier and stark. But although quite different, both suggest some approaching transcendence, however ambiguous that force might be.

cruel work carols is out now and available from Bandcamp.

kennedy mann – On Video

“I watch my life on video / How the time just seems to fly / I put my whole life on video / With all the things that slip my mind.” So sings kennedy mann on deliciously nostalgic new single ‘On Video’, the latest solo track from an artist you might know as having fronted Philly dream pop outfit Highnoon. Mann’s previous singles were hushed lo-fi affairs, though while this maintains the emotional resonance, the sound possesses a layer of cinematic gloss fitting for the title. Ava Mirzadegan adds backing vocals to lift the track further, leading to something both trapped by and longing for the ever-alluring past.

Like how everything looks different
But I still feel the same
Holding onto glimpses
It’s better off that way

Kitty Fitz – Life of the Party

Last year the London-based songwriter Kitty Fitz put out All My Own Stunts via Sad Club Records, an EP which mixed equal parts vulnerability and charm to offer a sound at once laid back and emotionally charged. New EP The Man in Me, coming later this autumn via Sad Club once again, promises to build upon these foundations and push the Kitty Fitz sound further. Single ‘Life of the Party’ holds all of the tenderness and self-deprecative wit that made the previous EP so special, but held within a vivid pop sound that nods to the likes of Caroline Polachek. “At its heart it’s a song about social anxiety, which is something I’ve always wanted to write a song about” Fitz explains. “My mental health has been a really turbulent journey, and as someone who naturally comes off as very extroverted, I wanted to expose that I have always really struggled to fit in.”

Watch the visualiser by Amy Ryder below:

The Man in Me is out on the 31st October via Sad Club Records.

Klô Pelgag – Sans visage

This autumn sees the release of Abracadabra, the new album from Quebec‘s Klô Pelgag on Secret City Records which channels the magic, playfulness and wishful thinking of its titular exclamation in search of some miraculous answer to life’s questions. Latest single ‘Sans visage’ is an alluring introduction to Pelgag’s vivid brand of dream pop. An enveloping experience earnest in its emotion yet full of experimentation and curiosity. If, at its heart, Abracadabra is a spell designed in hope of or belief in the transformative potential of fun, then ‘Sans visage’ signals how such an incantation might be delivered with a straight face.

You have the clover and I, the luck
It seems to me
That we share the same silence
Without understanding
That time is not what changes us
That no trap has managed to catch us

Watch the video by Laurence Baz Morais below:

Abracadabra is out on the 11th October via Secret City Records and you can pre-order it now.

Masayoshi Fujita – Desonata

Migratory, the forthcoming album from Japanese composer, vibraphonist and marimba player Masayoshi Fujita “draw[s] upon the phenomenon of avian migration as a central image,” we wrote in a preview, and explores “the possibilities that exist in the spaces between electronic and classical music.” With the record out at the end of the week via Erased Tapes, Fujita has shared final single ‘Desonata’, and the origins of the track underline the process of experimentation and invention which underpin the release. “I remember when I tried to record the melody for this song. While improvising with the backing track, I was hearing a melody in my head and tried to play it, but somehow I kept hitting different notes than what I wanted,” Fujita explains. “When I listened back, it gave me a strange feeling, but I liked its unique mood and the new image it evoked, so I decided to use it for the song.”

 Robert Ascroft – Empty Pages

Following on from a successful single ‘Faded Photographs’ with Ruth Radelet, Rochester-based musician, producer and artist Robert Ascroft has returned with a new collaborative single, ‘Empty Pages’, on Hand Drawn Dracula. This time Zumi Rosow of The Black Lips fame lends vocals to a song straight out of the seventies. Derek James channels Mo Tucker in his drumming, leading to a beguilingly ambiguous interplay between rhythm and fuzz. To top things off, Ascroft puts his expertise in direction and photography to good use with a suitably cinematic video to accompany the track. Check it out below:

‘Empty Pages’ is out now Hand Drawn Dracula and available from Bandcamp.

roman around – Moves

We’ve written about Roman Rivera’s roman around a few times in recent times, appreciating the way they use a wide palette of post-punk, pop and R&B sensibilities to challenge the norm, be that of genre or gender. Again out via Trailing Twelve Records, new single ‘Moves’ continues the mission with an energetic examination of loss and adversity, or more specifically how to survive and thrive in the face of them. “‘Moves’ encapsulates the pivotal moments of my youth,” Rivera explains. “These experiences pushed me to surround myself with positive influences. My boundaries with love have been continually tested, such as being unable to contact my brother, watching old friends struggle with addiction, and being abruptly cut off by friends without explanation.”

‘Moves’ is out now via Trailing Twelve Records.

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

So opens the title track from Small Comforts, the new album from Philadelphia-based outfit The Chairman Dances. The scene is typical of the record, built as it is around the titular phenomena. The most ordinary of details—be it plums in a bag, the sharp smell of boxwood, familiar faces on a screen—facets of life easy to take for granted but impossible to live without. The seemingly insignificant things through which comfort is manifest.

Eric Krewson’s songwriting has always had a literary bent, but Small Comforts sees him lean consciously into the short story form, with each track shaped so as to be enjoyed not only as a song but on the page too. This duality became the guiding force of the record, seeing The Chairman Dances for the most part scale back the rich sound for which they have become known in favour of something more stripped back. An economy of sound and words in the manner of the best short fiction, crafted with intention, where every element earns its place.

The style is apparent from opener ‘Alone at Waverly’, where the life of the protagonist is brought into relief through a phone call with a friend. “I live alone at Waverly,” the track opens, immediately characterising its narrator. “Have my own house with a big TV / Haven’t watched TV since the kids were young.” As the sound ebbs and flows with the conversation, we learn of kids and grandkids, part time work and the passing of his wife, but moreover we get a picture of the rhythms of his days. A real-life glimpse into the life of another. Fleeting, but so full of human truth. “Say, John, could you hold a minute?” the track concludes, reinforcing its casualness and loaded poignance. “Someone’s on the other line. Probably, [his daughter] Becky. She calls me every day.”

Something of an exception to the stripped back rule, ‘A Year Spent Floating’ injects a full brightness, with Ashley Cubbler (vocals), Will Schwarz (bass), Dan Comly (piano), and Mike Szekely (drums) coming together in a playful and intuitive manner, following the moods of Krewson’s lyrics to lift what at first seems another mundane experience into something luminous. A father joins a Zoom call, hesitant with the technical issues and etiquette of such a space but talked through the process by the group. Seven people meeting online, praying together, taking turns to occupy the software’s ‘large square’ to talk through their intensely personal losses. We hear from Jason speaking on the death of his brother, coaxed by the others. “He says he’s scared, if he lets go, he’ll lose / himself, be carried away. / We say it’s OK to let go.” The reluctance leads to quiet, but the patience doesn’t wane. “We sit in silence for one, two, three minutes. / Jason opens his eyes. He’s surprised he’s still / with us, surprised he’s still in the large square.” 

Jason rubs his eyes with his fingers. Lets out a
“Woo.” We tell him we love him. We promise to
check in again next week.

We finish the prayers, sit in silence, and, one by
one, log off.

A great deal of variation exists across the songs. If ‘Everything Slant’ and ‘The Day’s Length’ sit on the page more like poetry, the the title track is perhaps a prose poem. While the likes of ‘Margaret’, a vignette told in the style of a 50s ballad, even come complete with dialogue, and it is a testament to Krewson’s writing how the different voices can come through even in singing, allowing for some humour too. “Don’t I know you?” one character asks. “I don’t think so.” / “What do you do?” / “I’m a singer.” / Esther snorts. “I mean, ‘What do you do for money?'”

But despite this stylistic experimentation, the album functions as a cohesive suite, the fluidity of the sound and the shared thematic resonance allowing each song to pass seamlessly into another. The effect is to conjure a sense of community, as though across the polyphony of voices and diversity of experiences exists some shared spirit. Something human, searching for solace wherever it might be found.

Small Comforts is out now and available from The Chairman Dances Bandcamp page.

Album art by Heather Swenson, photos by Rachel Del Sordo

The post The Chairman Dances – Small Comforts appeared first on Various Small Flames.

But rather than channeling the numbness and dread of the contemporary age, the outfit actively work against it. “The Chairman Dances have never been satisfied with highlighting the worst of society,” we wrote in a review of 2018’s Child of My Sorrow. “This is a band more concerned with the shining spirit of humanity in the face of such turmoil, drawing not just hope but meaning from those working against the cold individualism of our time.” As we continued:

Even the most morose and melancholic songs possess a bright spirit and call to change, as though subject to the realisation that we can be more than consumerist shells. Of course, this is not some pure white epiphany of goodwill. Often […] the sensation registers as a nameless confusion, as though the world is suddenly too strange to inhabit normally, or perhaps the protagonists too strange to live in the mundane world.

Krewson got to work on new material in 2019 while serving as an artist in residence in the Cascade mountains of Washington State. Though lodging and sharing meals with two other artists, his days were spent in solitude, but the songs that emerged tended toward human connection. The result is the strength of your arm, a brand new record to be released in the coming months. And with contributions from Dan Comly, Dan Finn, Will Schwarz, Kevin Walker and Luke Pigott joining Krewson, the album is as richly woven as we’ve come to expect from The Chairman Dances.

Today sees the release of the record’s lead single, ‘I pulled the sheet back over my head’. Serving as an introduction to the narrative voice of the strength of your arm, the song is frank in its depiction of contemporary living, where difficulties constantly test our resilience, attempt to drag us under. Where perseverance is not some monolithic quality but something uneven and fluctuating.

“I spent a week in bed. I thought it might help,” Krewson sings in the opening lines. “And when it didn’t help / I pulled the sheet back over my head / However long it takes, I’ll get better.” In this way, the record presents our world back at us. A time and space where there is no flawless living, where conditions range from unsatisfactory to hellish and there is no choice but to make do. The question then becomes, can we recognise such struggles in others? Can we reconcile our own concerns in order to help?

The strength of your arm is out on 23rd July and in the meantime you can get ‘I pulled the sheet back over my head’ from The Chairman Dances Bandcamp page.

Artwork by Heather Swenson, photo by Brooke Marsh

The post The Chairman Dances – I pulled the sheet back over my head appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Last year saw the release of a new album, Child of My Sorrow, which saw a continuation of Eric Krewson’s distinctively detailed style. Positioning itself in the present day, the record presents “a clash between the human and inhuman, individual spirit butting up against insidious forces that seem determined to break it.” The result is a collection of songs with an emptiness at its core, something missing from the experience of life that cannot be shaken.

Longing could be said to be the presiding sensation of the record, though it’s one far removed from the material-orientated kind that drives our age. Instead, this is longing for something more, meaning garnered through connection, be it with another person or higher power, a value whose absence is marked by a kind of mortal pain.

We took the time to speak with Krewson again in an attempt to dig a little deeper into the album’s themes.

Child of My Sorrow has been out in the world for a number of months now. How do you view the record with that degree of hindsight?

It’s an interesting thing. The band performs the material regularly, which keeps it in the foreground – the songs continue to unfold or elaborate themselves. As a result, I continue to get thoughtful responses from people about the album’s characters/narrators. This is a good thing, though it prevents me from seeing the album in hindsight and giving a definitive answer. I will say, I’m proud of what my bandmates and I made in the recorded album of Child of My Sorrow. I think it’s our most compelling work.

The recording process had something of an international flavour, with time spent in Clarksboro, Chattanooga and Galicia, Spain. What’s the story behind this?

The majority of Child of My Sorrow was tracked live in Clarksboro, NJ. My friends Luke Pigott and Ashley Hartman, who recorded with us in Clarksboro on previous records, now live elsewhere, Luke in Chattanooga and Ashley in Spain. After recording with my bandmates in Philadelphia, I took the nascent album to Luke and he and I added to it. Ashley recorded her parts on her own and emailed them to me. Both of these situations afforded us a bit more creative space.

The twin themes of protest and faith form a major part of your writing, and indeed in a previous conversation we touched upon the idea of a progressive religious history being lost to consensus. In many ways, Child of My Sorrow doubles as a mourning of this loss and a dedication to its spirit, as though suffering the mischaracterisation or misappropriation of religion is itself a test of faith, and the effort to tell a different narrative its own form of protest. Could you delve a little deeper into your view of the record in this light?

I find it alarming that everywhere I look, an otherwise intelligent person is rashly denouncing something: a particular person or a group of people or – more often, given the circles in which I find myself – large swaths of history rich in religious, artistic, and scholastic thought, which they deem not progressive enough or conservative enough – ultimately, not enough like themselves. Incredible to think, it’s common for me to read someone’s definitive judgment on everyone who lived and died in a particular era, for example, the Enlightenment.

Closing oneself off to that which is not familiar limits understanding of God, it diminishes faith and, subsequently, art and knowledge. “God isn’t powerful enough to do a good thing byway of x.” When you reframe an offhanded judgment in that way, it’s clear where the problem lies. Another reframing could be “I have set defined limits for myself, my understanding, my art – I go no further.” One thing that John Calvin (in his Institutes) and Teresa of Ávila (in her The Interior Castle) both write about, both quite beautifully, is the idea that, in searching for yourself, you find God, and in searching for God, you find yourself. When you arbitrarily circumscribe your range of vision, you lose sight of both paths.

An appreciation or reverence for all things – especially what you do not know intimately – is something you find in great writing, which is always a kind of protest.

I read piece on the record that spoke of the ‘prophets’ and ‘poets’ in life—those that tell us what is happening and those that merely give voice to the sensations of life—positioning you in the latter camp against the likes of Jordan Peterson and Harold Bloom. Prophet might not be the word I’d use for those figures, but it does open up an interesting point in the current culture. Is there room for the nuanced and indirect in a world of reductive opinions and binary positions?

Yes, I believe there’s space for nuance in art and scholarship and day-to-day conversation. In some ways, there is a great chasm waiting to be filled. It does require a particular posture, though, and a willingness to live and create without assumption. I suppose this necessitates a sense of peace that doesn’t seem possible for most of us, myself included, most days.

If I may argue against the poet/prophet divide: in religious thought (and it feels a little weird to remove “prophet” from that sphere) the defining characteristic of a prophet is their ability to lead people to right worship, which has much to do with turning away from greed and self-advancement, taking up the cause of the poor, etc. Historically, fiction has done this work (I’ll mention just Charles Dickens’ Bleak House as an example – it helped advance judicial reforms). On the other hand, many prophets engaged and continue to engage in performance art.

Do you have any idea of what the future holds for The Chairman Dances?

For me, in writing an album, you need to clear an acre of land in order to build a modest home. I’m clearing brush at the moment.

Finally, could you name four or five acts you think we should know about right now?

I’m listing, for the most part, artists who are friends of mine. Often, they started as musicians and writers with whom I felt an affinity.

Magic Video: Luke Pigott and Ashley Hartman, mentioned earlier, run this project. (I contributed just the slightest bit to a self-titled album that’s on its way).

Brother Martin: Maria Mirenzi, who sometimes plays baritone sax with The Chairman Dances, and Dan Espie are the permanent members of this musically sophisticated group (named for a beloved canine).

Michele Ward, based in Baltimore, Maryland, is an excellent poet.

Lambert, Hendricks & Ross was a vocalese jazz group active in the late fifties and early sixties. Their recordings are incredible.

Child of My Sorrow is out now and you can get it from The Chairman Dances Bandcamp page.

Photo by Bob Sweeney

The post Interview: Eric Krewson of The Chairman Dances appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Song list:

Options – Waiting
2nd Grade – Favorite Song
Alexander – Going to Sleep
Ryan Van Gonten – Fabrique
Haunted Continents – What Were You Born For?
Weakened Friends – Blue Again
Shybaby – Lazy Hazy
Frankie Valet – April
Primo! – You’ve Got a Million
Hypoluxo – Kentucky Smooth
Basement Revolver – Knocking
Dead Painters – Output
HALEY – Infinite Pleasure Part 2
Doe – Heated
Ing – Dust
Benjamin Shaw – Terrible Feelings!
internet boy crush – ghost friend
lowly loverboi – Dumb Phone
Dead Tooth – Liars
Kin Hana – You
Bodega – The Truth is Not Punishment
The Cordial Sins – Not Enough
Indoor Cats – Fun 2
Upstairs – Trust the Process
Sabriel’s Orb – Holding
John Atkinson – Bakwaves // Rye
Fanclub – Leaves
The Chairman Dances – Acme Parking Garage
Con Davison – Talk
Ivy Dye – Diminish
Elizabeth Owens – I Long
The Last Bison – Don’t Look Away
Our Fastest Typist – It’s Nice Outside, but My Head is Killing Me

You can find all of our monthly round-up posts here, and our complete array of mixtapes here.

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

Now more than ever we should remember that activists and political heroes, for all of their spirit and unimaginable resolve, are as prone to doubt and death as anyone, and not half as powerful without our support and belief. Likewise, we’d do well to remember that villains and bigots are human too, flames that, however fierce and bright, will be snuffed out without the oxygen that is our backing. This album is a reminder that belief and faith can save us. It’s just a matter of choosing the right thing in which to invest our energies.

As though the music audience was tuned into such ideas, Time Without Measure proved something of a breakout record for the band. It earned a place on CMJ’s Top 200 chart, garnered respect from the BBC and saw support slots for some impressive acts, essentially gaining far more attention than their previous work. Lead Eric Krewson used this as a signal to double down on his artistic direction, taking time out not only to write new songs but to edit and hone them, before teaming up with Daniel Smith at his studio in New Jersey (where the likes of Sufjan Stevens and Will Oldham have recorded).

The result is Child of My Sorrow, a brand new full-length album, and one every bit as ambitious and sophisticated as the previous The Chairman Dances releases. Setting the tone, ‘Amce Parking Garage’ throws us headlong into a world of anxiety, the supermarket setting befitting of an experience so coloured by consumerist forces. The song is something of a clash between the human and inhuman, individual spirit butting up against insidious forces that seem determined to break it.

This is clear on ‘Mascot’ too, a person not only reduced to ludicrous banality but threatened by it, existentially. Here the protagonist plays the Chick-fil-A cow mascot, a bad experience made worse by the competitive configuration of our society. If competition is the Great Commandment of capitalist thought, then dressing up as a cow to hawk mass-produced fast food brings not only the immediate discomfort of poor ventilation and limited vision, but also something wider and more wounding. This is sweaty embarrassment not as an end but a means to realizing your place and so-called ‘value’ to society. Your failing position in the competition of life.

“From eight to nine on weekends, you called to check in, to make amends with your sister living on the east coast. You in a cow suit, her writing for the Washington Post. It was a sad scene—you spread out on the floor, all those dads crying, you crawling toward the door.

It was a sad scene—you spread out on the floor, tired of wanting, wanting more”

However, The Chairman Dances have never been satisfied with highlighting the worst of society, and Child of My Sorrow is far from a one-dimensional jab at neoliberal culture. As hinted at on ‘Iridescent’, this is a band more concerned with the shining spirit of humanity in the face of such turmoil, drawing not just hope but meaning from those working against the cold individualism of our time. ‘No Compass, No Map’ feels like a direct challenge to such a blank rigidity, a song so intricate it is tempting to imagine a complex machinery behind, only such an image does nothing to suggest the spontaneity and sheer life of the track.

The song seems an important one, because it triggers something of a turning point for the record. From here on in, even the most morose and melancholic songs possess a bright spirit and call to change, as though subject to the realisation that we can be more than consumerist shells. Of course, this is not some pure white epiphany of goodwill. Often, as on ‘A Half-Mile From Allentown,’ the sensation registers as a nameless confusion, as though the world is suddenly too strange to inhabit normally, or perhaps the protagonists too strange to live in the mundane world.

There’s wariness too, and no small amount of regret, as highlighted by the warmly nostalgic pair ‘No One Can Hurt You (Like A Friend Can Hurt You)’ and ‘Hannah, I Know It Wasn’t Always Easy’. Punctuated with synths, the latter is a slow-burn memory as held late at night. Indeed, this kind of longing could be said to be the presiding sensation of the record, though it’s one far removed from the material-orientated kind that drives our age. Instead, this is longing for something more, meaning garnered through connection, be it with another person or higher power, a value whose absence is marked by a kind of mortal pain.

But what if absence is the natural state, The Chairman Dances ask? If there is no conscious loss to which to attribute our pain, then it is all too easy to assume that suffering is the default setting. Hence the confusion, the disaffection, the wide-eyed stumbles down gaudy supermarket aisles. The constant competition where even the winners feel like they are losing. But this doesn’t have to be the way. As the closing title track goes:

I sat down in a folding chair and we formed a semicircle. We formed a human chainfull of smiles, full of care. I wouldn’t let go. And if he would call to me, well I would gladly leave. I would gladly believe in just about anything. And I wouldn’t let go. I remember my mother’s voice, her kind and quiet way. And when her heart stopped, I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t let go. When Jesus finally comes for us, I will gladly go. I’d be glad to know there’s more to life than pain.

Jesus, be near me

Child of My Sorrow is out via Black Rd Records and you can get it from The Chairman Dances Bandcamp page.

The post The Chairman Dances – Child of My Sorrow appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Hallelujah The Hills – A Band is Something to Figure Out
(REVIEW | INTERVIEW)

“This is an album built from symbolism (one of the tags on Bandcamp is ‘hieroglyphics’, to give you an idea) but, like all the best mysteries, a sense of significance floats to the top, independent of any hidden code. Hallelujah the Hills reconstruct the human experience through sheer enthusiasm, using their joyous hooks and choruses as earnest expressions of emotion rather than ironic juxtapositions.  Walsh and Co. aren’t sitting us down to share a smirk and a wink, or to reel off some abstract philosophical theories, but rather taking us by the hand and running through their strange world, leaving it up to us to catch something meaningful in the breathless blur. And what a world this is, one which has been evolving since their first album, an ecosystem based on a strange molecule – twin strands of confusion and intuition tightly bound and swirled into a double helix – the DNA of Hallelujah the Hills.”

Camp Cope – S/T
(REVIEW)

“For those of us that want to hope that maybe everything doesn’t have to be shit forever, there’s an atmosphere of dissent that seeps into every line. Not in that horrible on-the-nose Billy Bragg/Frank Turner way, but more subtle, funny and heartbreaking, with throwaway lines that leave you a bit off-balanced. I think that’s what I like most about Camp Cope – the constant switch between personal and protest, heartache and anger, and all the while feeling completely and utterly helpless.”

Beat Radio – Take It Forever
(REVIEW | INTERVIEW)

“Beat Radio’s fifth album Take It Forever feels like a culmination of ideas, the product of some long, hard thinking… With a large dose of hope and a pervading sense of goodwill, Take It Forever plays like the manifesto of someone who doesn’t know all the answers but finds meaning in asking the questions, the words not of a revolutionary or prophet but an ordinary man striving to make life extraordinary, just as it should be.”

Talons’ – Work Stories
(REVIEW)

“Explores the pervasive disillusionment in a society that hasn’t yet lived up to what it promised, a society run for interests other than those of the people who make up its majority. A society that offers hopes and dreams of resplendent lives in exchange for your hard earned $$$s, education courses that leave people stranded with more knowledge but no money, opportunities or sympathy. These are songs for people who wonder ‘when did it become not okay to do what I want with my life?’ Work Stories is a reminder that it’s okay to occasionally feel afraid or sad, that the things which trouble you are probably not as much your fault as you think, and most of all that, despite how it might sometimes feel you are never, ever, alone.”

Mount Moriah – How To Dance
(REVIEW)

“Mount Moriah push past their troubles into something positive and mysterious, a conglomeration of symbolism, mysticism, universality and other cosmic forces which pretty much equates to Southern Gothic 2.0. How to Dance is crafted from spirit and faith, carved out of a high, wide hope capable of healing any wounds, giving us the courage not just to survive, but to live.”

The Chairman Dances – Time Without Measure
(REVIEW | INTERVIEW)

“The Chairman Dances succeed in bringing characters to life in three dimensions, though on Time Without Measure the feat is even more impressive as the roster of figures are not only numerous but also known to history in decidedly superhuman terms. Now more than ever we should remember that activists and political heroes, for all of their spirit and unimaginable resolve, are as prone to doubt and death as anyone, and not half as powerful without our support and belief. Likewise, we’d do well to remember that villains and bigots are human too, flames that, however fierce and bright, will be snuffed out without the oxygen that is our backing. This album is a reminder that belief and faith can save us. It’s just a matter of choosing the right thing in which to invest our energies.”

Karima Walker – Hands in Our Names
(REVIEW)

“Hands in Our Names sees Karima Walker reconstruct an array of varied elements into something larger and more meaningful than they could ever be alone. Field recordings from her present and found recordings from someone else’s past swirl above and beneath her own words and guitar notes, drones of every pitch filling the background and stretching the songs into worlds of their own. When atomised into separate parts, the album is impressionistic, blurry and strange and difficult to describe, though when listened to as a whole, a blanket of stitches, it becomes something vivid and intuitive. As such, Hands in Our Names is able to convey things normal songs cannot, a freedom not just born of trope-avoiding experimentalism but somehow inherent in the very combinations of sounds, as though arranged into secret patterns or codes, magic spells that trump postmodern convictions. Rather than dying in open air upon leaving her mouth, Karima Walker’s communications bubble from within, stirring that dormant empathy that lies somewhere near the centre of us all.”

Sioux Falls (now Stranger Ranger) – Rot Forever
(REVIEW)

“Sioux Falls’ sound reads like a melting pot of the last twenty years of rock music. Taking the indie rock of the likes of Built to Spill et al., the band add thoughtful emo (like The Hotelier) and smart pop punk vibes (think LVL UP etc.) to create something wonderfully varied and entertaining, cycling through these genres not just between songs but within them. The narrator is centred within the stories of which they sing, sounding like another confused player in violent, unfair game operating to rules outside of anyone’s understanding. In the face of bewilderment they turn to anger and sorrow and joy, feelings easy to recognise, easy to submit to, decidedly non-ambivalent chemical reactions which remind them that they’re still alive.”

John K Samson – Winter Wheat
(REVIEW)

“The Weakerthans frontman’s first release since 2012 is everything we’ve come to expect, exploring his favourite themes of contemporary loneliness and isolation in his uniquely warm manner, his characters not ready to give up hope that connection (that is, real human connection) is still possible in our digital world.”

Nap Eyes – Thought Rock Fish Scale

“Nova Scotia’s Nap Eyes return with a sophomore album of rhythmic, ear-worming slacker folk rock songs, recorded completely live with no overdubs in just four days. Nigel Chapman’s lethargic monotone vocals give the whole thing the feel of a daydream, like the wandering high-brow thoughts of a sleepy philosophy/psychology major.”

Jeremy Squires – Shadows
(REVIEW | INTERVIEW)

“Does what the very best folk music can do, an outpouring from one human being to a multitude of others. It’s a record borne out of legitimate heartbreak, the end of a marriage and the death of a loved one, a brave and honest attempt to deal with big life-changing events. Deft songwriting allows Squires to expand these specific, individual scenes into large, engaging metaphors, in which we can find shards of our own experiences. The beauty of it is that the finished work is not just healing and revelatory for the artist. It can help us too.”

Loone & Paper Bee – Now I Know You and See How Wide You Are to the World
(REVIEW)

“Now I Know You and See How Wide You Are to the World is a terrific album. It’s as rich and as complex as life itself, steeped in passion and poetry, whirring like the universe and everything in it. There’s a line at the end of ‘Ugly, I’m Sorry’ that sums up the whole release rather nicely, capturing its in a handful of words far better than I am able to in this review: ‘And I wanna hold your hand / and go explore the pulsing humming darkness’.”

Spartan Jet-Plex – Get Some
(REVIEW)

“Taken at face value, Get Some is an indistinct album, the themes and meanings wrapped in layers of abstract lyrics and varied instrumentation. However, this vagueness itself curls and contorts and creeps into your head, eluding inclinations to describe and detail and thus bypassing the whole processing machinery most music must enter. As such, Kells’s thoughts and feelings arrive whole, unaltered, meaning that you feel what’s being said, even if it’s impossible to put into words.”

Kyle Morton – What Will Destroy You
(REVIEW)

“While Typhoon’s fourth record is still in the works, Morton last month released a surprise solo album, What Will Destroy You. Again the twin themes of tragedy and pleasure are central, as is the idea of catharsis and release. However, while mortality is an intrinsic element, the album does not tread the exact same ground as previous Typhoon releases. What Will Destroy You shifts the focus onto love, more specifically what Morton describes as “the ambivalence of erotic love,” leading to an intimate, surprisingly honest album which delves into things both more wonderful and mundane than your average love songs.”

CHUCK – My Band is a Computer
(REVIEW | INTERVIEW)

“Playing like a collaboration between Owen Ashworth and Bret Easton Ellis, the CHUCK brand of observant and at times cringe-inducingly honest indie pop will no doubt prove divisive. But there’s far more to My Band is a Computer than drugs and self-pity and empty sex. Like the Frog release that Audio Antihero brought us last year, it crams an awful lot into its run-time, covering everything that’s terrible and everything that’s not about being a young adult in the twenty-first century, somehow managing to tap into the human kernel at the centre of our zombified lurch of nostalgia and regret.”

Monarch Mtn – Everyone is Here
(REVIEW)

“It would be wrong to consider the music of Monarch Mtn as simply a two dimensional mope-fest, with Farmer’s poetic lyrics and warm delivery hint at something beyond the misery. The palette is undoubtedly gloomy, blacks and greys and deep blues, but Farmer’s warm vocals and poetic turns of phrase flicker across this twilight like threads of gold.”

Claire Cronin – Came Down a Storm
(REVIEW)

“The real success of Down Came a Storm is how Claire Cronin and John Dieterich combine to spin stories and landscapes from their combined talents, every element given equal standing to conjure not only folk tales but the worlds in which they exist. Here you can feel the wind on your skin, hear it move in the trees, smell its scent of salt and earth and ozone. You can feel it move the characters too, propelling them into dark, poetic places where nature rules and comfort can be found in the starkest of elements.”

Adeem the Artist – Kyle Adem is Dead
(REVIEW | INTERVIEW)

“The word ‘sincere’ is often taken as synonymous for affectionate or sentimental. With Kyle Adem is Dead, Adeem the Artist strives to be sincere in every sense, finding the bravery not just to declare his love for his wife but to voice his fears, his weaknesses, his exasperation with life as we live it. With everything on the table, no lingering mysteries or secrets withheld, there is nothing left to corrupt the good things. Because, after all, Kyle Adem is dead.”

Mal Devisa – Kiid
(REVIEW)

“Kiid is a personal record and plays like condensed version of life, reaching high and falling low, crackling and bursting and simmering under the surface, at times exploding in urgent streams of consciousness as if the words and thoughts can no longer be held in. This is an album that refuses to be reduced to something easily describable, persevering in it’s complexity against the binarizing forces of anxiety or genre or gender or race. Kiid isn’t a self-doubt record or political record, nor a sad record or a happy record. It’s not jazz or gospel or indie rock. Kiid is everything. Kiid is whatever it wants to be.”

Lisa/Liza – Deserts of Youth
(REVIEW)

“Wonderfully minimal and psych-tinged songs that will doubtless appeal to fans of  soft and sad outsider folk artists such as Sarah Winchester. At times it’s gossamer thin, with Victoria’s vocals little more than hushed murmurs, though even in these quiet moments her words hold a kind of understated magnetism, a power which draws in the instrumentation and in turn becomes augmented by it. Deserts of Youth shows you don’t necessarily need to raise your voice to make a statement, that even quiet songs can be imbued with a blazing energy.”

Old Earth – Lay For June
(REVIEW | INTERVIEW)

“Trying to put Old Earth’s music into words seems futile and kind of besides the point. There’s never going to be a satisfactory way to describe art so fluid and weird and instinctive, so all we can tell you is what it sounds like to us. It’s operating on a deeper level, one not easily outlined, playing on some atavistic region of the subconscious that reacts to fear and beauty, that treats intense wonder and dread as the same emotion. It’s the same area of the brain that tells us to light candles and throw coins down wells no matter how secular our society becomes.”

What were your favourite albums of 2016? Let us know through one of the usual channels – we’re on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and Instagram.

The post Wake the Deaf’s Favourite Albums of 2016 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

If any of the above points make you feel a little down, here’s a playlist of every band we featured during September to cheer you up. As always, click the artist name in the tracklisting to be whisked away to the specific post.

Tracklisting:

1. Hidden Driver – LVL UP
2. Death – CHUCK
3. Seskinore – Hiva Oa
4. Shut Out the Light – Tiny Dinosaurs
5. Foothills – Simon Balto
6. Lie 2 Me – Shana Falana
7. annie – moving in
8. A Lonely Road – Jordan O’Jordan
9. Augustine – The Chairman Dances
10. Golden – Mt. Wolf (feat. St. South)
11. I – Slenko & McKeys
12. zszs – rgz
13. Meditations – Tall Ships
14. Tossing & Turning – Saint Clementine
15. Century Woods – Lisa/Liza
16. Clear Section – Spartan Jet-Plex
17. Trancendless Summer – Peter Silberman
18. Where We Began – Tilman Robinson
19. will you?/you will – Fossil Jane
20. Ya w/Me? – Lomelda (from Swell Tone’s Summer of Sad)
21. Soon Soon – Praything
22. Drive – Mere Women
23. See Through – Suzy Callahan
24. Untitled (Slow) – Jana Irmert
25. Beyond the Stars – The Edge Of The Light
26. Northern Arm – Evening Hymns
27. It’s Not Real – Hazel English

You can check out the previous monthly roundups here, and our various other playlists and mixtapes here.

The post September 2016 Roundup appeared first on Various Small Flames.

The Chairman Dances succeed in bringing characters to life in three dimensions, though on Time Without Measure the feat is even more impressive as the roster of figures are not only numerous but also known to history in decidedly superhuman terms. Now more than ever we should remember that activists and political heroes, for all of their spirit and unimaginable resolve, are as prone to doubt and death as anyone, and not half as powerful without our support and belief.

We were lucky enough to get the opportunity to put a few questions to lead Eric Krewson to see just how such an album comes into being.

Hi Eric, thanks for taking the time to speak with us. How’s life been since the release of Time Without Measure?

Hello, Jon. My pleasure. Much of the past month has been taken up with performances and preparation for those performances. This past Friday, for instance, we gave a talk and played at Dorothy Day’s Maryhouse in NYC, which was a real thrill for me. Dorothy writes about life in that community in The Long Loneliness. We stayed overnight at Maryhouse and, walking down the stairs to breakfast the next morning, I felt as though I had walked into her text: the radio flooded the room with WNYC’s classical music programming, there was plenty of food and many demands on my attention—to do this please, move that please—all of which precluded the reading I had hoped to do, just as these exact things (Rossini on WNYC, etc.) interrupted Dorothy’s reading over half a century earlier. It was a surreal experience.

Each track on the album is about a different person (or several people) from history. Were they figures you were familiar with before sitting down to write the record? How did you go about selecting/researching them?

I was familiar with Dorothy Day and Augustine only. I thought the record—once I knew what it was—would be a good opportunity for me to explore my religious tradition. The research I did turned out to be a great history lesson as well. I was surprised and heartened to read about the many peaceful religious protests in the 1960s and 70s. I read with awe about the Baltimore 4, the Catonville 9, the Camden 28. I’m progressive and live across the river from Camden, NJ, and yet I had never heard of the Camden 28. Progressive religious history has no share in our collective memory.

I picked the record’s protagonists somewhat arbitrarily. One person often led to another. At all points, I tried to be aware of the emerging narrative, the effect that a person included or excluded would have. Representation was an important concern.

While the album is entirely historical in its focus, I was struck by just how relevant it felt to our times. Did you pursue the themes of activism in response to any particular modern movement or event? Is protest in the air in contemporary America?

In some ways, the United States was at a different place when I started writing the album. News outlets were not sharing footage of men being murdered in the streets as often as they are now, and I am glad they’re reporting this news, even as they need to spotlight the causes, not just the effects. Subaltern groups—black men, especially, but also Native Americans, those with disabilities—have always been killed by the state, both physically and spiritually (byway of incarceration). Now we are seeing the desolation with our own eyes and being made aware of these issues by protests. The state has responded to the collective outcry with more violence toward these marginalized groups.

I could go on at length, but suffice it to say this is an evil time in America. It is heartbreaking.

I’ve used this quote before but it’s something I think about a lot. David Foster Wallace once said “there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.” For me, Time Without Measure is almost an attempt to give us something meaningful to worship, an alternative to cheering a racist politician or lining up all night for the latest smartphone. Does this align with your motives at all?

Those are wise words. Nietzsche says something similar in his On the Genealogy of Morality. (While, as a twenty-year-old, I was enamored with that text, as a thirty-year-old, I don’t recommend it.) Lots of other non-religious thinkers have come to that conclusion and in fact the New Testament bears witness to it when it denounces greed as idolatrous. I recently read a helpful gloss on the Epistle to the Colossians by Brian J. Walsh. Walsh calls the letter “seditious” in that it “demythologiz[es]… the empire” by asking its readers to cease its worship of the state, of the principalities, of Cesar. Psalm 146 warns “Do not put your trust in princes, in mortals, in whom there is no help.”

Yes, one of my aims was to provide an alternative narrative. As I mentioned, progressive religious history has been forgotten (including, sadly, religion’s role in the abolition of U.S. slavery). As a result, even the most well meaning journalists, artists, etc., fail to adequately represent religion. Every time NPR or the New York Times mentions faith, I cringe.

The record deals with special people in a particularly real way, so they aren’t quite mere mortals but not saints or angels either, sort of meeting us halfway in a place we can reach (or aspire to). You did a great job humanizing these figures, but I was wondering if there were any individuals you wanted to include but couldn’t? Was there a person impossible to reanimate convincingly?

I’ve very glad you feel that way. For most of the people included, it took roughly two tries to get a text I felt I could work with. Yes, there were some I felt I couldn’t represent adequately. Takashi Nagai, who miraculously survived the United State’s atomic bombing of Nagasaki, wrote a memoir, The Bells of Nagasaki, which should be required reading for all. I would have liked to throw some light on his story but ultimately I couldn’t. All of that death—it doesn’t lend itself to anything but grief. There is a work by Hildegard of Bingen wherein all of the characters sing except for the devil—he speaks. It is hard to sing evil.

I would have also liked to include a song for Marilynne Robinson, but I know her work too well. It’s difficult to frame my admiration and gratitude for her thought.

What do you consider your biggest influences as a songwriter? Are there any musicians/authors/artists who really stand out? Do you draw upon the other members of The Chairman Dances?

I’ve come to embrace the very full life I lead, my more-or-less two full-time jobs and home life, thus I try to learn what I can from whatever I come across. If I hear spirituals or Messiaen, and I listen to both gladly, then I try to glean something from that experience. In terms of intentional listening, I remember hearing the Magnetic Fields 69 Love Songs and Springsteen’s Born to Run prior to recording the album. Both were influential.

The band arranges the songs together, as a group. Absolutely, each individual’s playing informs everyone else’s, including mine. Additionally, a few Chairman Dancers are involved in other projects. (Kevin plays in a band called Man Illuminated. Luke and Ashley perform as September. Ben Rosen plays bass in Bird Watcher; he’s also a great composer.) All of what we do, both in other groups and in our own study, affects the music we make together in some way.

Of course, the writing of and about those included in the album (Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison, Daniel Berrigan’s play The Trial of the Catonsville Nine, etc.) were all influential.

Finally, could you name 4-5 acts you think we should be listening to, be they old, new, popular or obscure?

I feel obliged to mention artists unknown in our sphere, thus I recommend Even Oxen; the young and gifted producer Corey Smith West; Anonymous 4 (stars in the classical music world); and the author William Stringfellow.

Time Without Measure is out now via Black Rd. Records and you can buy it from the Chairman Dances Bandcamp page. Also, why not check out a feature Krewson wrote for us earlier in the year, detailing the genius of Marilynne Robinson?

Photo by Jonathan Brown

The post Interview: The Chairman Dances appeared first on Various Small Flames.