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

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

22° Halo – Garden Bed

Lost Sound Tapes

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

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

Orindal Records

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

Cassandra Jenkins – An Overview on Phenomenal Nature

Ba Da Bing Records

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

Cla-ras – Five clusters

Lily Tapes & Discs

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

Damien Jurado – The Monster Who Hated Pennsylvania

Maraqopa Records

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

The Felice Brothers – From Dreams to Dust

Yep Roc Records

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

Giles Corey – S/T

The Flenser

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

Grouper – Shade

Kranky

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

The Hold Steady – Open Door Policy

Positive Jams

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

KUZU – The Glass Delusion

Astral Spirits

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

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson – Theory of Ice

You’ve Changed Records

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

Macie Stewart – Mouth Full of Glass

Orindal Records

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

Michael Beach – Dream Violence

Goner Records & Poison City Records

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

Natalie Jane Hill – Solely

Dear Life Records

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

Protomartyr – Ultimate Success Today

Domino

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

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

Self-released

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

Renée Reed – S/T

Keeled Scales

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

Space Afrika – Honest Labour

Dais Records

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

Sun June – Somewhere

Run For Cover Records / Keeled Scales

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

Tasha – Tell Me What You Miss The Most

Father/Daughter Records

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

Tobacco City – Tobacco City, USA

Scissor Tail Records

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

The Weather Station – Ignorance

Fat Possum Records

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

Wednesday – Twin Plagues

Orindal Records

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

Wendy Eisenberg – Bent Ring

Dear Life Records

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

Wes Tirey – The Midwest Book of the Dead

Dear Life Records

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

Will Stratton – The Changing Wilderness

Bella Union

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

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

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

— The Hold Steady, ‘Charlemagne In Sweatpants’

The imagery of film has long been running through the music of Craig Finn. His are characters attempting to live up to imagined ideas of Good Times, kids searching desperately to achieve an impossible, televisual experience — a technicolour life. Lifter Puller was the dreamer period, residual adolescent naivety suggesting everything was an opening scene to some great quest, the first rung on an ever-escalating adventure experienced only by the type of hero who never dies. The Hold Steady was the refusal-to-take-no-for-an-answer stage, a forging ahead with the drugs and the drinking and the not-sleeping in the hope of breaking through to the other side, or else achieving something like martyrdom. Lifter Puller journeyed toward something, then The Hold Steady tried to run away.

If Craig Finn’s solo career is telling us anything, it’s that the As Seen On TV idea applies not just to dreams but memories too. Those lucky enough to make it out and settle down in the closest thing to reality they can find are no longer haunted by the future but the past too—a past cut and edited, abridged and set to music, reduced to light and sound. A past with all physical sensations removed and replaced with the wispy-but-alluring ghost of a once-held sense of invincibility.

We All Want The Same Things, Finn’s third solo release, is a careful and sympathetic examination of this great dissatisfaction, a record full of people making do and pulling through in the hope that they’ll find something in which to believe.  After a jazzy interlude, opener ‘Jester & June’ makes clear his intentions immediately, the opening verse pretty much one tumbling line that perpetuates itself, stretching with each continuation, as though vitally important that a few more words are voiced. As you expect from Finn, the lyrics are conversational and packed with imagery, like the words of some half-drunk stranger desperately dragging you through their lives, trying to convey who and what and why they are, hoping you see it from their position, in that magical light.

“We would drink and fall in love
Drink and fall in love
Fall around the clubs
They used to call us Jester and June

We used to know all the tunes
We used to have our own church
But then it got worse”

As we described in an earlier preview, ‘Preludes’ “chart[s] a mid-90s return from college pitched at the exact point where loneliness and freedom intersect,” a semi-autobiographical take on a someone suddenly structureless and adrift. A similar sensation needles the characters of ‘Ninety Bucks,’ the narrator Nathan trying to help a bummed-out friend get into nursing school (“Stick with it and finally see it through / I’m sick of all this wilderness”), as she drinks vodka neat from paper cups and chasese the titular loan through what could be sincerity or flattery or just plain mistruth. ‘Birds Trapped in the Airport’ unfurls with ambient flourishes, sounding like the first tentative steps after some great change, high on freedom yet shaking in the face of the commitment, settling instead for a single night of respite carved from the car wreck of her life.

‘God in Chicago’ pushes further into poetic territory, like a Denis Johnson story knocked two notches back toward realism, a continual, everyday sadness permeating the fabric of ordinary things. A mom finds her son to be the latest casualty of the opioid epidemic, and a sister contacts her brother’s old friend to take care of some ‘unfinished business’ (“It’s roughly the size of a baseball”), before deciding to join him on a trip to Chicago to fence the stash. “The transaction was easy,” Finn says. “And counting all the money in front of him seemed silly / This isn’t the movies.” Deciding to stay the night, the sojourn becomes a mutual act of grieving, the pair finding comfort if not redemption amidst the city lights. However, the tale ends as quickly as it began, summoning nostalgia before it’s even over, the sort of memory that sits in the mind and grows impossibly brilliant, forever overpowering whatever the present might bring. Aware of this, the characters deflate on the drive home, dejected and depressed for having to return to Real Life. But, as Finn said, this isn’t the movies.

Perhaps the clearest statement of the record’s themes, ‘Rescue Blues’ finds a protagonist hiding out in the apartment of a kind semi-stranger, a widow he knows from the grocery store who shelters him from the men to whom he owes money. “Safest if I stay inside,” he says. “Jamie’s place is clean, her TV’s six feet wide, 250 channels coming crisp and clear through satellites.” The cynical view of the arrangement is one of self-preservation, something the narrator himself admits (he hasn’t told his friends at the pub as “They think I’m only doing this to have some place to hang my head”), but despite an absence of love, the relationship appears to scratch some common itch, another sign of the human connection that has always been part of Finn’s writing.

‘Tangletown’ finds a people ghosting through their own lives, working and sleeping and fooling around, positioning themselves near expensive items as though luxury (or the illusion thereof) might halt their downward spin. This is followed by slow-burn ballad ‘It Hits When It Hits’, something between Springsteen and The National, its tale of unexpected love cycling around to the same sentences and abstract imagery until meaning begins to seep through the repetition, although I suppose whether you believe the emotions on show are genuine depends on your levels of cynicism.

The breathless yet joyous ‘Tracking Shots’ confronts images head on, as though snapping to from the hypnotized notion of recreating movie scenes as the secret entrance to capital-L Love. “Still getting used to the new dream,” Finn sings, his characters not necessarily any better for the realization but at least more able to appreciate that which they do have. And, while what they have might be non-dramatic and banal, Finn’s knack for rhythm and cadence is more than capable of elevating such things into sacred territory:

“A way to live
A train to make
The whistle blows
The metal scrapes
The lighters and the burners
The kettle and the steam

Haunted houses
Bumper cars
Weekends at the water parks
Shut your eyes and shudder at the laughter and the screams”

While still focused on an individual, ‘Be Honest’ links the personal to a wider context, grounding the rest of the album so it feels less a gaggle of dysfunctional characters and more a survey of our times. These are people hurting despite no great dramatic arcs, suffering amidst a cast of six billion, a smallness that’s an insult to the general injury we call life. And worse, they’re suffering in prosperous times and spaces–years free of great wars and catastrophe, an age of science and medicine and relative freedom in which we have everything and more (“It’s not pain,” Finn sings. “It’s just a pressure but in some ways that’s much worse”). Sometimes there’s little to do but hope for something better, and sometimes this hope is all a person has to cling to. “If revolution is really coming,” goes the final line, “then we all need to be well / So maybe it’s just best if we both take care of ourselves.”

Most reviews link this sentence to the current political situation, though there’s a danger that pushing everything through the Trumpian prism collapses some of the intricacies and nuances of art. After all, The Donald is a product of the disaffection Finn is exploring here, not the cause. The problem is deeper and more complex than any government-related trouble, and Finn is too wise to offer much in the way of an answer. Instead, he suggests we shift the focus of our questions. Because We All Want the Same Things is an album about relationships, but not in the usual sense. Not the transcendental, star-aligned love of Billboard hits and Hollywood flicks but coupling based on common needs. Not life-changing answers but life-preserving strategies. Luckily, in the hands of Craig Finn, this version of ‘romance’ feels somehow more fulfilling, the opposite of cynical, for better or for worse, genuinely human. Perhaps the revolution in the conclusion isn’t some violent revolt or epiphanic break, rather a gradual yet constant commitment to challenging our own expectations. To stop wanting too much for ourselves and to start being sympathetic to others. A comeback story, of sorts.

We All Want The Same Things is out now via Partisan Records, and you can grab a copy from the Craig Finn Pledge Music website.

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Aside from his band work, Finn also has a burgeoning solo career, and March will see the release of We All Want The Same Things, his third record under his own name. Once again teaming up with producer Josh Kaufman (The National, Josh Ritter), the record appears to possess Finn’s most fleshed-out, developed sound to date as a solo artist, the degree of variety and melody suggesting something more far-reaching than his previous releases.

This is perhaps apt considering Finn’s thematic aims. The album looks to explore what love means in a contemporary setting. “Love seems like the biggest mystery in our modern days,” he told NPR. “No amount of science or advances in technology can help us fully understand the notion of love and the role it plays in our lives.” Through a series of character studies, Finn brings to life ordinary people moving through the world as best they can, trying to be better, or at least no worse, while figuring out with whom to share their time and energy.

First single ‘Preludes’ is what Finn calls the “closest to being autobiographical,” charting a mid-90s return from college pitched at the exact point where loneliness and freedom intersect. The relationship between this curious pair of emotional bedfellows has long haunted Finn’s worlds, and seems more pertinent than ever in current times. The fact title We All Want The Same Things seems both blackly ironic and fundamentally truthful right now says something of our current position, though we’re lucky to have people such as Craig Finn ready and able to explore them on a compassionate, human level.

We All Want The Same Things is out on the 24th March via Partisan Records and you can pre-order it now from the Craig Finn Pledge Music page, which includes some nice exclusive items.

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Whether Garth Risk Hallberg lived up to the hype is up for debate. I’d suggest there is a certain ‘hype threshold’ past which people will ensure you get a fair share of criticism regardless of what’s between the covers. What is not up for discussion is the beauty of the writing on show, nor is the sheer scope of the world it brings to life. Here we find a network of characters linked by blood or love or sheer chance which grows through schizophrenic POV changes and creative interludes. To give you some idea: There’s Mercer, a man struggling with being gay and black in 1970s New York and his relationship with punk musician/artist William, heir to the Hamilton-Sweeney fortune who’s music with the now-defunct Ex Post Facto “seemed to promise complete freedom, on the condition of complete surrender”. Then there’s William’s estranged sister Regan and her troubled relationship with husband Keith, who are themselves caught up in the Hamilton-Sweeney machine, plus loser-loner Charlie and his friendship with punk cool-kid Sam, and their link to the Post-Humanist Phalanx. That’s not to mention the police detective, the art dealer, the shock jock radio presenter. The investigative journalist, the firework-setter, the transvestite keyboard player. The anarchistic, arsonist cult leader.

So… yeah, it’s all too detailed to review properly, though the key plot is strangely simple. Packed with the sort of suspense/drama you might expect from a film or television show, the book is not as challenging (difficult, ‘literary’) as you might expect. What Hallberg does achieve is to conjure New York at a specific time. The web of characters produce a panoramic snapshot of a generation, palpable nostalgia and a good sprinkling of well-used topics (troubled artists, drug addicts, traumatised and/or damaged lovers) creating a view of the seventies perhaps as we’d like to remember them. The spirit of the book is captured nicely near the beginning, when the clock strikes midnight on New Year’s Day :

“For a second the city seemed to lean forward and make contact with a future self: ruined, de-peopled, and nearly still. In a sealed hanger, forensic economists move around numbered lots with scales and callipers. Believing themselves to have evolved beyond delusion and loneliness, beyond illness and longing and sex, they hum distractedly and wonder what it all meant”

As books go, City on Fire is pretty easy to soundtrack, so this playlist could have been a hundred songs. But anyway, here are twenty songs which go some way to capturing the time/place/mood Hallberg created. I’ve included a mix of classics and newer stuff to keep things interesting, and the order isn’t important.

Tracklisting:

1. Blank Generation – Richard Hell and the Voidoids
2. Art is Hard – Cursive
3. To Hell With Good Intentions – Japandroids
4. Kimberly – Patti Smith
5. Chinese Rocks – The Heartbreakers
6. Roar of Nothingness – Sun Organ
7. Docking Guard – Northern Primitive
8. Today, More Than Any Other Day – Ought
9. Aloha Steve and Danno – Radio Birdman
10. The Kids – Lou Reed
11. Orphans – Teenage Jesus and the Jerks
12. Stevie Nix – The Hold Steady
13. Who Do You Belong To? – The Spirit of The Beehive
14. You Can’t Hold The Hand of a Rock and Roll Man – Okkervil River
15. Our Lives Would Make a Sad, Boring Movie – The Hotel Year
16. Using – Sorority Noise
17. Fireworks – Radiator Hospital
18. Your Own Place To Ruin – Rivulets
19. New York Hardcore – Talons’
20. This Heart’s on Fire – Wolf Parade

City on Fire is out now via Knopf Doubleday (US) and Jonathan Cape and is available from all good book shops. Quiet, Constant Friends is available digitally and on cassette via the Wake The Deaf Bandcamp page.

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Titus Andronicus, a band not shy of pushing musical boundaries, are a case in point. Their new album, The Most Lamentable Tragedy (hereinafter referred to as TMLT), is a 29-song, five-act “rock opera” centring on an unnamed protagonist (hereinafter referred to as Our Hero), based loosely on Patrick Stickles, and his battle with mental illness. After meeting his doppelgänger, Our Hero is sent “on a transformative odyssey”, confronting the past and living the present and looking at the future in a new way. Clocking in at over 90 minutes, the album is ambitious and demanding, as if, lost for words, Stickles gave up trying to convey his manic depression in normal terms and went all out with his band. There’s something to be said here about the noble pursuit of ‘difficult’ (challenging?) art in a world where singles have replaced albums and the news is presented in lists, but it’s probably been said before and it will be said again. So just know this: How much you get out of the record is pretty much up to you.

‘The Angry Hour’ opens like the mist lifting from our tale, the peaceful note interrupted by harsh, lurching drone like the awful realisation it was all just a dream. Indeed, the opening lines on ‘No Future Part IV: No Future Triumphant’ confirm this, going some way to paint Our Hero’s mindset from the off:

“Some days start with an earthquake
The bed shakes until it breaks
And I hate to be awake
Most days start with a dull ache
Enough weight to crush my face
And I hate to be awake”

The rest of the track describes depression and self-loathing in typically imaginative fashion, conveying not only the bleakness but also the imprisonment of serious mental health issues (Stickles refers to his locale (read: mind) as a “dungeon” and a “house of pain”). The track ends with a refrain of “I hate to be awake!”, another addition to the band’s repertoire of cathartic, self-flagellating choruses, and from here it’s clear that Our Hero’s rut is dark and deep.

However, the growling, soaring ‘Stranded (On My Own)’ hints at another side to Our Hero, a “crazy heart”, the upward cycles of manic depression. Musically, the song is boisterous and brash, while the lyrics are pessimistic and forlorn, the conflict between the track’s two elements decidedly bipolar. ‘Lonely Boy’ is similarly dissonant, a veritable rock song with an ending like the theme to the best 80s kids cartoon they never made, the lyrics charting Our Hero’s loneliness (“I ain’t gonna leave the building/Just lie here and stare at the ceiling”) and his simmering, internalized anger (“Stay away, he doesn’t wanna hurt you/A lonely boy is an angry boy”).

Similarly, the midway sojourn into hope and belief in love is dressed in mixed signals, from lyrical doubt to heavy instrumentation. ‘(S)HE SAID / (S)HE SAID’ sees Our Hero turn to sex as a possible escape, although he finds he wants to spill his problems onto this near stranger, form a real, nourishing human connection. The song concludes with him asking sincere questions aloud, her already asleep. “Talking myself again,” he sings. “Talking to myself again”. However, this female (eventually named as Siobhán) returns in the following songs. Our Hero claims to be able to control the “something” inside him on ‘Funny Feeling’, and worries about the consequences with Siobhán should he lose his grip (“She’s looking after me / She doesn’t know the kind of things I could do if I lose control”). Things take a downward spin once more, but, optimistically, the last proper song ‘Stable Boy’ is an ode to living hyper-aware of death, preaching life not through some escapism or feigned ignorance but instead through an understanding of permanence. While it might sound strange of a song so preoccupied with death, the track is triumphant, altruism in it’s biological form, Our Hero speaking from a position of clarity in the hope that others will offer similar advice should he ever find himself again thinking irrational thoughts.

This high/low combination is present across the album’s 29 songs, along with a near countless number of musical, literary and philosophical references and nods to the Titus Andronicus back catalogue. The narrative, structured into five acts, is pretty clear for the most part (at least if you have the lyrics to hand), but the change in tempo and general atmosphere is less organised, with Stickles going from 0 to 100 and back again whether the story warrants it or not. This acts as a further complication of an already challenging album, with several songs sounding, at least musically, like epiphanies, before turning out to be false dawns or else sadness or anger dressed up differently. But of course, life (and especially mental illness) isn’t a neat Freytagian pyramid, so why should a representation of it conform to expectations?

The other thing that doesn’t conform to much at all is the musical style across TMLT. ‘Mr E. Mann’ picks up from Local Business’s bar-room jangle, while  ‘Fired Up’ is classic punk rock, the slow(ish) verses’ clear and coherent lyrics punctuated with louder sections (including the “FIRED UP!” refrain). ‘Dimed Out’ is a full-throttle jumble of the band’s past and present sound, ‘More Perfect Union’ is a brooding 9-minute marathon, ‘Sun Salutation’ is a hymn of a forgotten religion, and ‘No Future Part V’ a piano ballad. There are nods to Springsteen and The Replacements, The Rolling Stones and Dexy’s Midnight Runners. There’s a Pogues cover, a Daniel Johnston quasi-cover, a rendition of Auld Lang Syne. And then a whole lot more. You are left with the impression that the band have said “fuck it, we’re doing it our way”, rejecting a clear genre in favour of whatever felt right at any given time. This kind of zealous self-belief in their own work is interesting, as it’s at odds with Our Hero’s struggles to accept himself as Himself, and sees Titus Andronicus cutting swathes through the field of wannabes, imposters and pretenders and stepping up to the plate as the twenty-first century’s bona fide punk rock band.

Closer ‘A Moral’ consists of the same drone from the opening, ending on a sharp intake of breath which could prelude ‘The Angry Hour’ or even ‘Fear and Loathing in Mahwah, NJ’ (the opening track of the band’s debut album), as if we are going to do it all over again in a constant loop. The effect is an important one, not only mirroring the endless battle that is mental illness, or indeed life itself, but also encouraging the listener to immerse themselves in the work. Because that seems to be the key to the whole record – immersion.

Because, even after 1000+ words, trying to write about this seems besides the point. Stickles is trying to communicate something vast and complicated and quite possibly incommunicable. It might work and it might not, but that’s between you and him. Besides, I could be wrong, but I have a sneaking suspicion that every review so far, be they claiming success or failure, is little more than a guess, a sneaking suspicion based upon χ repeat listens. The album is just too large to properly judge in weeks and probably months. If that alone means the album doesn’t work then fine, Titus Andronicus are not the band for you.

The Most Lamentable Tragedy is out now on Merge Records.

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GRNDMS

“Capitol Mill is proof that sunny little songs need not be mindless nonsense, and that you don’t need to write explicitly sad songs to resonate with the listener” – we reviewed the début album from GRNDMS, out now on Fox Food Records.

Eskimeaux

“About doing the best you can and hoping it’s enough, about accepting and learning and growing so that whatever hand you’re dealt, you carve out some semblance of meaning and happiness to make everything worthwhile” – Eskimeaux’s O.K., out now on Double Double Whammy and Mt. Home Arts, is a triumphant success.

Peptalk

“Peptalk paint ecosystems, thriving arrangements of geology and biology where plants and animals and wind and rain follow their own instinctive patterns. However, things are not quite what they seem…” – We welcomed you to the weird and beautiful world of Peptalk’s Islet.

Craig Finn

“Finn’s sharp turn of phrase… elevates mundane situations to something meaningful, transforming everyday words and imagery into things imbued with symbolism” – the first song from a new album by The Hold Steady’s Craig Finn.

Henoheno

“Emotional suffering is presented in a detached manner, as if the narrator has transcended into an outer body experience or else knows the pain so well it lacks the immediacy it once possessed” – we were delighted to premiere ‘Destroy’, the first track from Henoheno’s upcoming album I Made These Songs Before I Moved.

Kalle Mattson

“Strummed guitars and slow-burning drum machine beats which conjure a vivid, nostalgic image, like a city as seen from a dark shore at night” – ‘A Long Time Ago’, a new song from Kalle Mattson’s upcoming EP Avalanche.

PONY

“Sun-kissed and salt-lipped… four songs about romance and break-ups during the summer months” – we reviewed CRUSHED, the debut EP from Toronto band PONY.

Old Earth

“[Milwaukee] completely shaped and nurtured me. I grew up and spent most of my life here, so going from being a teenager seeing punk shows in VFW halls in the early ’90s to being an artist that some people know and read about in the city is kind of crazy” – Old Earth spoke to Milwaukee Record about the pros and cons of moving to California.

Kathryn Joseph

“I never felt like we were making something beautiful. I just thought my songs were shit, and that this is all really embarrassing” – Kathryn Joseph spoke to The Skinny before winning Scottish Album of the Year award for Bones You Have Thrown Me and Blood I’ve Spilled. We reviewed the album here, and certainly aren’t surprised.

Joseph also unveiled a new song, ‘the worm’, via The Line of Best Fit.

Jenny Hval

I feel a little intimidated at the prospect of writing about Apocalypse, girl, the new album from Jenny Hval. Luckily there are already some great reviews out there, we particularly liked these from The Quietus and God is in the TV.

Crosslegged

“In the past, my summers have been defined by the artists that manage to capture the heaviness of a muggy afternoon or the confusing side of a fleeting romance. I know Speck will be a record that falls into that special category for me this year” – The Le Sigh are streaming Speck by Keba Robinson’s Crosslegged.

Naps

“Finding out about Naps felt like being told a really good secret” – understanding that there can never be enough quality new music, The Le Sigh also premièred a new song from Florida band Naps (who we have featured on numerous occasions).

Frog

“Irreverent, strange and just a little addictive” – Clash premiered a video for Frog’s ‘Judy Garland’. ICYMI, we reviewed (and loved) Kind of Blah and spoke to Frog about their music.

Titus Andronicus

Titus Andronicus have released Sorry About the Delay, a mix of demos, rarities and unheard album cuts in preparation for the forthcoming album The Most Lamentable Tragedy. Pitchfork have all the details, including the link for a free download.

Strand of Oaks

“Filled with bite and sometimes regret, but also a good deal of warmth” – The indomitable Timothy Showalter visited NPR’s Tiny Desk Sessions. We have written about Strand of Oaks quite a bit, but probably still haven’t conveyed how much we love Showalter’s work.

And… our favourite 8tracks playlist of the week was this one by beneller (that cover art!!)

the ultimate summer playlist from beneller on 8tracks Radio.

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Finn has unveiled a new song to accompany the announcement. ‘Newmyer’s Roof’ is far more restrained than The Hold Steady but still relies on Finn’s sharp turn of phrase which elevates mundane situations to something meaningful, transforming everyday words and imagery into things imbued with symbolism. “They had the cross in the car, they had the pig in the pen,” he sings, “I was in the bathroom doing my best to ascend.”

The songs comes with a note which provides some context to the themes of the song:

“I was working at an office in Union Square and my friend and boss Chris Newmyer suggested we come to his apartment on 2nd Avenue in the East Village. We could see the towers from the roof he said.

We went up there and saw the towers burn and then collapse. At some point he suggested we get some beer. I didn’t know what to feel that day, most of us had no emotion to access. So we got some beer, and drank them while watching the World Trade Center go down. It sounds detached now, but at the time it made sense on a day when nothing else made sense. I spent some years after that in darkness.”

At this point you get the impression that the song is going to be something vast and detached, charting the fear and confusion of post-9/11 life. While that sounds cool and worth exploring, Finn’s next sentences flip the whole thing:

There was a girl in the 33rd floor of one of the towers that was a receptionist at an investment bank. She went to work that day and when the plane hit they asked her to stay where she was. They said it was safest. She decided against that and walked out of the towers and, like the rest of us, did her best to get on with her life.

Some years later I went to a birthday party. I talked to this girl. We talked all night. We fell in love and are still together. I came out of the darkness. I’m glad she didn’t do what they told her to do.

So what at first seems impersonal and ominous turns out to be the opposite. While Finn goes on to say that the song isn’t explicitly about that event, it’s pretty clear it is. He may not describe the scene or mention names beyond the cryptic Newmyer in the title, but this is a song about battling through darkness into the light, about healing and about faith in the future.

You can read the rest of Finn’s note and watch the video right now over at NPR.

Faith In The Future will be released on Partisan Records and you can pre-order it now through Pledge Music. As you would expect there are a whole host of rewards for pre-ordering the various levels, from signed CDs, t-shirts and custom mixes to drinks with Finn (!), running with Finn (!!) and entry into the Craig Finn book club (!!!). All pre-orders come with an immediate download of the Newmyer’s Roof EP too, so what are you waiting for?

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“Grow/Decompose… shares [David Foster] Wallace’s metamodern style – a postmodern web of motifs and strange humour countered with a modernist sincerity and genuine sense of hope …if played on repeat Grow / Decompose never ends, a musical ouroboros of well-worn paths that are both doomed and blessed and quite possibly all we have.”

We were lucky enough to get the opportunity to ask John and Eric from the band a few questions.

Jon: Thanks for speaking to us John. How is life in LA this time of year? Why did you decide to move from Chicago? 

Young Jesus: Life in LA is good. It’s certainly a strange place, easy to let it own you in a way, but also a highly motivating and inspiring place. There is a lot going on here that I really was not exposed to in Chicago. Chicago’s a wonderful place for me in many ways, but it became ‘home’ too much. I had an idea of what it was in my mind, so I wasn’t really open to a lot of the interesting things the city had to offer. It became a place where I drank a lot and played a lot of videogames. Both have their merits, but I personally needed to get out. It’s interesting that Home, to me, is a pretty straightforward record– almost journalistic. And I was hazy and drunk through a lot of it. Grow / Decompose is meandering, questioning, more subtle I hope. But I’ve never been more clear-headed. I guess the easier it is to think, the more questions come.

One thing I’ve noticed while reading up on Young Jesus is that no-one seems to agree as to who you sound like. I’ve seen Smashing Pumpkins, The Replacements, Staind, The National etc. etc., while I picked up some strong Hold Steady vibes, both in terms of your writing style and the dark-and-joyful sound. Do your listening habits reflect this wide(ish) range comparisons? Or are journalists and bloggers trying too hard to pin your sound? 

We listen to a lot of different things. From The Hold Steady and Pile to William Basinski and Stars of the Lid. It all plays a part in the thinking of a record. It might not be obvious while listening, but our musical influences affect things beyond melody/rhythm. Little eccentricities come out in strange ways. That’s what makes it interesting hopefully.

As a follow-on to that, how do you feel after releasing a new record to the world? Do you like that reviewers each come to their own conclusions? Or do you feel pretty certain of the narrative you’re trying to conjure? I was kind of guilty of bringing a lot of my own thoughts into my review of the album, and I guess I was conscious that perhaps that isn’t always a good thing for the artist? 

We have a narrative in our heads definitely. But a huge part of the narrative is that there is no absolute correct narrative. We’re glad to see people put their own interpretations on it cause that means they’re interacting with it. They’re having a similar process sorting through the album that we had sorting through life to create the album. I have a huge mental picture of records like Brand New’s Devil and God… or Weezer’s Pinkerton. And it’s probably so different from how they view it! That’s so great. That we ultimately have a point of intersection/relation and have– potentially– come to it from totally different places. Albums (as Roger Ebert said about movies) can be machines that generate empathy.

Grow / Decompose, just like your previous album Home, seems to focus on a defined set of themes and characters in a way that makes it not quite a traditional album but perhaps not quite a concept album. How do you feel about the term ‘concept album’ in relation to your releases? 

I became pretty engrossed in this album over the past year. It took over my life in a lot of ways. I gave myself to this record rather than to people, and at one point couldn’t really see a love that was there for me because I was so absorbed in the story/writing. I loved Neil, Milo, and May. So the concept is a strange reflection of life. Grounded in reality. Without a traditional arc because life doesn’t have that. Some things end, some don’t.

There is a decidedly novelistic feel about your writing. Would you say literature has an influence on your writing style? (If yes) Which authors would you say have had the biggest impact? 

I work in a bookstore and am reading more than I’m listening to music probably. Literature has had a major influence. The five main books are Hilda Hilst’s The Obscene Madam D, Clarice Lispector’s Near to the Wild Heart, Mircea Cartrescu’s Blinding, Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor, and Suicide by Edouard Leve. And Muriel Spark. So six. These books very literally changed my life this past year. Oh and Jesse Jacobs By This Shall You Know Him.

Lispector/Cartrescu/Hilst showed me that it was okay (and beautiful) to think in absurd, non-normative logics. That you could create your own, and these logics are capable of carrying emotional/sentimental weight.

Reading Leve felt like breaking the law. It’s a work he turned in to his publisher and soon after killed himself. In fact, I could read it and feel safer. I do think it is a dangerous book, not for everyone, but for me it was a powerful life-affirming read. Almost named the record Les Atomes which is a band mentioned in one of Leve’s books (either Suicide or Autoportrait, I forget).

O’Connor and Spark deal with religion (specifically Christianity) in a rare way. They are ultimately believers, but are not afraid of examining the grotesque byproducts of belief. It’s easy to write off organized religion, maybe a bit harder then to look at it very honestly and specifically and turn the lens onto yourself as well. I’m an atheist, but some of my favorite thinkers (Spark, O’Connor, Jeff Mangum) are oddly Christian. Who knows what that means. Time to become a priest.

With its stories of addiction and general sadness shot through with a sense of hope, I compared Grow / Decompose to David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. Where do you stand on the whole irony vs. sincerity debate? Do you subscribe to the New Sincerity movement, or do you feel cynicism and darkness have role to play in the best, most enlightening/comforting art?   

I think you can confront darkness with sincerity and that the best stuff acknowledges the light that is in the dark and vice versa. We’re on board and interested with what New Sincerity could be about, and if people want to group us in with that, that’s okay. But we can also be sarcastic and ironic. So watch out.

You guys run the label Hellhole Supermarket that is putting out Grow / Decompose and take care of all of your own press and management. Is this sort of control important to you? I mean, I know there are some great labels out there, and some PR companies who make the effort to connect as human beings, but I can’t tell you how nice it is to get personal emails from acts about their new music. Does this increased involvement lead to a more rewarding process overall? Or is it an annoyance that gets in the way of music (or watching TV or whatever)?

I always tell Harrison, “if this label gets in the way of BBT (Big Bang Theory) one more time I’m gonna lose my smoothie.” I love those bang boys.

Finally, could you name 4-5 artists you are currently enjoying? They can be old or new, hidden gems or radio darlings, whatever you find yourself returning to at the moment.

Fragile Gang‘s For Esme, Pope, Mitski, Princess Reason, Earl Sweatshirt (‘solace’ is connecting a lot today).

Read our review of Grow / Decompose and then buy the album from Bandcamp or Hellhole Supermarket.

The post Interview: Young Jesus appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Nearly three years after Home (a stint in which some of the band played as Bummer), Young Jesus announced a new album and unveiled a brand new single, ‘G’, a song which prompted us to say:

“I don’t want to write too much based on one single, but this seems to be going a step further than your standard indie-rock fare”

As hinted above, we were predisposed to hold this opinion. Home left us with some pretty high expectations for the band, in particular their writing and lead John Rossiter’s delivery. ‘G’ and the album trailer (see below) merely confirmed our suspicions. After spending some time with the full-length, it’s safe to safe that these feelings were justified.

Just as with Home, Grow / Decompose is not a traditional eleven-songs-with-three-singles record, but neither is it a full concept album. It’s something between the two, pinned together by a set of central themes and characters whilst escaping the pitfalls and constraints of a “concept album”. For this reason the album is reminiscent of Craig Finn’s writing, which to me is high praise indeed. The word ‘novelistic’ would come close if only Grow / Decompose didn’t bring to mind the very novels which play with the conventions of the form. Our preview mentioned David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest as a comparison and this seems to reach far further than the shared transvestic tendencies (of G / D’s Neil and IJ’s Tony Krause) cited as reasoning. Not only does the album have the same broad, scattered and vaguely cyclical structure as the novel, but Young Jesus’ music also shares Wallace’s metamodern style – a postmodern web of motifs and strange humour countered with a modernist sincerity and genuine sense of hope.

It’s not only in structure that Grow / Decompose brings to mind Infinite Jest. Their juxtaposition of bleak mental turmoil with buoyant (or at least fervent) emotion and hope is integral to the Young Jesus aesthetic. Again a parallel to The Hold Steady’s style, this combination provides a sense of depth that would be absent from something aligned purely to misery or joy. This makes the album, at least to my ears, very much a product of the twenty-first century. We aren’t always sad, or always happy, or always good or evil or apathetic or nihilistic or idealistic to the point of stupidity. We are all of these things and none of them and it can be hard work trying to fathom how to retain a sense of self while being in such a state of confusion. What I’m getting at is, like Infinite Jest, Grow / Decompose resists the temptation of satire and cynicism to paint real people stuck in this madness.

As the title describes so neatly, Grow / Decompose speaks of the familiar paths that human lives follow. Despite all the strangeness, the characters here are going through the age-old problems – depression, anxiety, identity crises, existential terror – the problems of being You and You alone, Molina’s “curse of a human’s life”. For all of the complexity of our existence, we are still locked in the atavistic pattern of life and death, everyone more or less condemned to the same mistakes and fears and joys that we as human beings have been experiencing for generations (“You don’t start clean,” tells the refrain of ‘Brothers’, “spines are twisting in the rings. This old tree, been around before you were born”). In this way the album is both pessimistic and hopeful, a statement that we seem unable to change for the better and a reminder that we are united by this monumental whammy. As Rossiter sings on ‘Oranges’: “She’s a believer in the relief / that we’re all receivers of suffering”.

Degeneration is a major theme and the whole record is imbued with an odd pleasure/pain relationship, accentuated with grotesque imagery. Take for example opener ‘EMP’: “So go ahead and search your chest, the slugs and inchworms know it best.” This brought to mind the book Threats by Amelia Gray, in which a man named David descends the spirals of grief after losing his wife. With death and decay quite literally pervading his house and life, David finds himself both terrified by his situation yet drawn towards some obscure peace with it, as if giving in to a dark and fungal siren. The characters on Grow / Decompose are similarly troubled and lonely, be they confused and unhappy with their identity (‘G’), saddled with unwanted children and gripped by overwhelming numbness (‘Oranges’) or using drugs and forming half-imagined relationships with television presenters (‘Slug’ and ‘Brothers’). Dissociated from others, they achieve the sort of heightened peculiarity of southern gothic hermits, existing within the confines of their own logic and physics, a world where the hope or possibility of connection or meaning flutters along rarely, staccato and unannounced.

The result is a manic-depressive relationship with their irregularity. On ‘Blood and Guts’ the character holds his weirdness aloft like a banner intended to confirm himself or terrify others, marching towards epiphany or entropy like Gray’s David. The title character in ‘Milo’, who sits somewhere near McCarthy’s Lester Ballard on the scale of Southern Gothic hermits, continues the perverse pleasure with the clear-eyed conviction of a serial killer, delighted by the gory truths of life and death. Milo is the depraved character, one who seems to have pushed past anxiety and apathy to realise his potential as a monster (“He paints his face and feels a brightness / glowing brighter inside / the cave he built out of the thorax / of the organist’s hide”). With his humanity stripped away he becomes a prophet who “sings the world as it’s shown”, the cyclical, elemental theme returning with its closing chant:

“All the birds singing
all the plants growing
all the wind blowing
all the bugs crawling
all the birds breaking
all the plants dying
all the wind crawling
and the blood flowing
and the waves breaking
with the birds singing
and the plants speaking
to the wind dying”

It seems important that the end of the final track ‘Dirt’ shares the same chords and drone as the opener, so that the end loops back to the beginning (another similarity to Infinite Jest). If played on repeat Grow / Decompose never ends, a musical ouroboros of well-worn paths that are both doomed and blessed and quite possibly all we have.

Grow / Decompose is out on the 13^th May via Hellhole Supermarket and you can pre-order buy it now on CD and cassette, or on vinyl via Gigantic Noise.

The post Young Jesus – Grow / Decompose appeared first on Various Small Flames.

January was a bit of a scrappy month in terms of regular posts, but we still managed to cover some excellent artists. Why not catch up with any you missed with this tailor-made mixtape? Click the artist names in the tracklist to be whisked off to the review.

Tracklist:

1. Jesus in the 70s – Siskiyou
2. 2 Broke 2 Old – Gorgeous Bully
3. Another Way To Go – Adeline Hotel
4. Scene Sick – Diet Cig
5. Dog Burial Theme – Dicktations
6. Up the Academy – Mike Pace and the Child Actors
7. Con/ A Sewer/A Cat – Amateur Love
8. The End is a Vicious Thing – Puzzlecuts
9. Manic Pixie Dream Girl – Furnsss
10. Party Girls – Gleemer
11. Soft Reputation – Unlikely Friends
12. Passing Through – Harley Alexander
13. Coward’s Luck – Hip Hatchet
14. Memphis – The Wandering Lake
15. How a Resurrection Really Feels – The Hold Steady
16. Fire in My Eyes – Yours Are The Only Ears
17. Traffic is Okay – Sitcom
18. Gold & Rose – Dear Sister

Also make sure you check out our mammoth collection of our Favourite ‘Free’ Music of 2014. Finally, if you enjoy long, rambling pieces that try and draw connections between my favourite music and my favourite books, check out this piece on The Hold Steady’s Separation Sunday (Craig Finn said he enjoyed it, so it carries his stamp of approval).

January 2015 Roundup from Wake The Deaf on 8tracks Radio.

The post January 2015 Roundup – A Mixtape appeared first on Various Small Flames.