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.

Opener ‘Devotion’ serves as the perfect introduction, Maloney’s vocals deep and rich and almost mournful. However, the instrumentation is shot through with a brightness which conjures hope or wonder, an inextinguishable thread that strings together the entire album. The slow, folky yearning of ‘Highway Sketch’ is followed by ‘Exits’, a track lit bright and electric, reminiscent of the insistent emotion of Shearwater.

“If we can’t conquer the ends,
we’re slipping over time and time again,
’til nothing seems enough to satisfy the time left
[…]
the kindest thing that you could do
is tear it down and turn it into something new”

‘The Disenchanted Age’ returns to a more restrained brand of folk, a slow-motion sinuosity flicking behind Maloney’s croon, before the strikingly simple ‘No One Loves You (Like I Do)’ written by John Lennox, all acoustic guitar and Maloney’s velvety and yearning vocals. This is followed but the delicate intricacy of ‘Passing Phase’ which plays like VSF-fave Psalmships with an added dose of sunlight, before ‘No Warmth Against the Light’ brings a morose moment made cinematic with glorious strings and gliding piano. The cinematic edge continues into closer ‘Only Sometimes’, which again highlights Maloney’s ability to craft atmospheric arrangements, the vocal harmonies and gloomy grandeur capping off what is an unquestionably evocative album.

The Memory Game is out now and you can buy it from the Steve Maloney Bandcamp page.

The post Steve Maloney – The Memory Game appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Atticus Lish’s Preparation for the Next Life is, on the face of things, a relatively simple story. Girl meets boy under less than perfect circumstances and they struggle to make something of it. A classic love tale. But that’s where simplicity, or even any semblance of understanding, ends. This is a novel about post-9/11 New York, a tale of immense confusion, mistrust and paranoia, about poverty in a city smothered by it, about millions of people trying to make a life out of nothing.

Zou Lei is an illegal immigrant from China, a Muslim of the Uighur tribe, Skinner a PTSD-suffering Iraq vet who scraped through three tours of a war that’s followed him home in more ways than one. Queens is bursting at the seams with people looking for something better, or else ways to distract themselves from the present, a roiling, screaming sea of humanity. Lei and Skinner end up together, bonding through a common sadness and a shared appreciation of discipline and exercise. Their unsentimental yet gentle relationship serves as a recognisable, familiar way-in to a recognisable but wholly unfamiliar place. All of this is written in some of the best prose I’ve read in a long while. Beautiful and terrifying and sad, it captures New York as a gritty, humming place that’s crumbling in time with America’s perception of greatness.

Just like the characters, the reader is in alien territory. The overwhelming majority of us cannot fully understand the positions in which these protagonists find themselves. The fringes of society swamped by an overwhelming Lack Of. A lack of money and respect, of kinship and trust, as well as lack of material stuff (Zou Lei has a bed to sleep in but is essentially homeless, Skinner renting a basement with decidedly finite savings). But both are still subject to the American bombardment of dreams and nightmares that constitute the consumerist culture. They see shop-fronts and billboards, they see mistrust in the media and the faces of passers-by. The paradox of feeling isolated and lonely in a crowd of people seems designed specifically to torture them.

But the confusion is deeper than that, one that might impinge on Lei and Skinner more than most but hangs over us all. Not only are there no answers here, there are barely any questions. If 9/11 provided the West with a new narrative, a renewed sense of moral importance and superiority , then events like those at Abu Ghraib snatched away the veil. Technology has made it impossible to ignore that the ‘Bad Guys’ are mostly innocent, scared people like us, that our dirty secrets in exotic wars will not be buried. Everyone lives in this grey area but Skinner personifies it, pining for the purpose and friendship of war while being eaten alive by the truth of it.

“He took a drink from a flask of Bacardi Scorched Cherry and watched an execution on his laptop”

Here’s a collection of songs which we feel are somehow relevant to the themes and feel of the novel.

Tracklisting:

1. I’m New Here – Gil Scott Heron
2. Wish it Was True – White Buffalo
3. Drinking at the Dam – Smog
4. There I was in the pouring rain again, but this time I was at the drive-thru at Mac Donalds’ – Talons’
5. Beacon Hill – Damien Jurado
6. Heartbreaker – Noah Gundersen
7. Cold Apartment Floors – Vagabon
8. Travel Map – Hip Hatchet
9. Death By Dust – Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson
10. Linens – Water Liars
11. The Modern Leper – Frightened Rabbit
12. No Future (Pt. I) – Titus Andronicus
13. Shitty City – Moonface
14. The Whip – Jesse Marchant
15. Third of Life – A Weather
16. Bloodkin Push (Forget the Ones) – Will Johnson
17. Wall Around Your Heart – Huck Notari
18. The Trapeze Swinger (Iron & Wine Cover) – Gregory Alan Isakov
19. I Could Only Stand By – The Weather Station
20. Fake Empire – The National

Preparation for the Next Life by Atticus Lish is out now on Tyrant Books (US) and Oneworld (UK + Aus). Quiet, Constant Friends is available digitally and on cassette via the Wake The Deaf Bandcamp page.

The post Lit Links: Atticus Lish – Preparation for the Next Life appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Tracklisting:

1. I Don’t Know – Tina Refnes (+ Lit Links)
2. If I Were a Portal – Evening Hymns
3. Cradle Robber – Tyler Butler and His Handsome Friends
4. Calvander – Mount Moriah
5. The Way It Is, The Way It Could Be – The Weather Station
6. Porch – Long Beard
7. Small Wind Power – Fraternal Twin
8. Mourning Dove – Danielle Fricke
9. 3 – Cat Be Damned
10. Cold Apartment Floors – Vagabon
11. I Used To Be A Bird – Fairweather Currents
12. Drive-Thru – Honeyuck
13. Ghosts – The Washboard Abs
14. Litany – Tyler Key
15. Aviator Shades – Quiet Hollers
16. Book of Right On (Joanna Newsom cover) – Foxtails Brigade (Lit Links)
17. Judy Blume – Mal Devisa
18. So Long – Dot & Logic
19. A Swift Thing – EP
20. Stuck w/ Me – Home Lives
21. Close Call (Adderall Anxiety) – Shaky Shrines
22. Boys – Dicktations
23. Nothing – Strange Friends
24. Careful Creators – Summering
25. Blinding White – Vapour Night
26. Pull – Slow Dancing Society (Hidden Shoal compilation)
27. Calmest – Naps
28. As He Walked Into the Field – Robert Stillman
29. Church Bells – Tommy Perman, Simon Kirby & Rob St. John
30. Seven – Oh, Rose
    31. No Hell – Cloud Cult

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Recorded with Afie Jurvanen (AKA Bahamas), the album expands upon her previous releases by adding a lush sense of precision and confidence. Here Lindeman’s writing is careful and lucid and wise, humble and shrewd in a manner normally reserved for those who have seen many years, been through many troubles. The result is an album warm and clever and clear, an album to turn to. Take opening track ‘Way It Is, Way It Could Be’ as an example

You looked small in your coat, one hand up on the window,
so long now you’d been lost in thought.
No snow on the road – we’d been lucky,
and it looked like we would be well past Orléans
and past Montmagny, the road giving way to river
the frozen Saint Lawrence white and blue.
We went out on the ice, and I turned back to you, a figure
distant and small in the long view.

Was it a look in your eye? I wasn’t sure.
The way it is and the way it could be – both are.
We got back in the car.

RIYL: folk, Field Report, Joni Mitchell

Favourite songs:

You can buy Loyalty now from The Weather Station’s Bandcamp page (or the Paradise of Bachelors Bandcamp page for those of us outside of Canada).

P.S. Lindeman is currently toruing the UK and Europe with The Mountain Goats (!). Check out the dates below and good luck getting a ticket:

Nov 12 – Leeds (UK), Brudenell Social Club
Nov 13 – Glasgow (UK), Art School
Nov 14 – Dublin (IE), Whelans
Nov 15 – Manchester (UK), Gorilla
Nov 17 – Bristol (UK), Trinity
Nov 18 – Brighton (UK), Komedia
Nov 19 – London (UK), O2 Shepherds Bush Empire
Nov 20 – Brussels (BE), Autumn Falls Festival @ Botanique
Nov 21 – Utrecht (NL), Le Guess Who Festival
Nov 22 – Amsterdam (NL) Paradiso Noord Tolhuistuin

The post Flash Review: The Weather Station – Loyalty appeared first on Various Small Flames.

“[How Strange It Is To See] exists within that small and fleeting pocket in time and space that opens just before you take off from a familiar location, everyday objects taking on new importance as the seconds tick away and your surroundings can be seen outside of the context of your own unimportant worries and wishes”

It was a release that left me with questions, and Knishkowy very kindly agreed to answer a few of them.

Hi Dan, thanks for speaking to us! Congratulations on the release of How Strange It Is To See. I saw you played a release show in a winery?

Thanks! Yeah, a solo show in Pittsburgh, where I recorded these songs. Then we’re doing a full band thing in Brooklyn this week (with Wake the Deaf fav, Ben Seretan).

As I mentioned in my review, the EP was created in the midst of a move, written in one city and recorded in another. Did you intend to write the songs as a direct reaction to the relocation? Or did you just find your life coloured your writing?

There wasn’t much intention at first. I’d been writing songs for a new record, and like most people I know, had developed a love/hate thing with New York. It felt like a good time to try somewhere new for a bit. I was messing around with ‘Everything Is Going To Be Fine’ and the other 3 came out very stream of consciousness. That’s rare for me and I wanted to capture them on record the same way. Quickly and immediately. They’re all in the same key and feel more like one song written from four narrators’ perspectives, so it felt right to put them together in a concise format. To be honest, it’s a bit weird listening now, especially being back in NY, because they are of a very specific moment.

What would you list as the main influences on your writing? Would you say other musicians have had the biggest impact? Have novels/poetry played a role too?

Writing, definitely Jeff Tweedy….people like Neil Young, Elliott Smith, Jason Molina who have this duality of solo acoustic and blown out rock band. On guitar, British folkies like Bert Jansch and John Martyn. Lyrically, Chris Porterfield [of Field Report] is in another world; he completely changed the game for me in terms of what I thought I wanted out of songs.

Honestly, I struggle to break out of familiar points of view, so literature hasn’t found it’s way into the songs yet, but it helps my approach to writing – stuff like Flannery O’Connor, Borges, Murakami, where the seriousness is propped up by an absurdist element. The more fucked up the funnier it is. With music, I just always take shit too seriously. Something to work on.Coming from a background strictly in the written word, I’m always fascinated by songwriting. Having to marry the two strands of music and lyrics from scratch seems like such a difficult task from the outside. How do you go about it? Do you fit the music around the lyrics or vice versa? Or is it some middle ground that only a musician could understand?

Hah, well I’m fascinated by your writing — I feel like we get to cheat because a good melody can pull the weight when the words don’t and vice versa, but every line you write has to stand on it’s own.

Most things start for me on the guitar, but I keep notebooks and iPhone notes to draw from for when that happens. I trade lyrics from song to song a lot, though not always on purpose.

Some of your songs seem pared down to the bare minimum (I’m think of ‘Left on Jewel’ in particular), with a pretty clear narrative condensed into a few short, poetic verses. Do the extended versions of these stories exist in your head, and you distil them to fit into a song? Or do you choose words and imagery more instinctively, allowing the stories to emerge, for you as well as the listener?

I’ve been making a conscious effort to write more concisely. Restraint is such a beautiful thing, but not one of my strengths at all. I usually overwrite (like seven verses for a three verse song) and then edit down. Sometimes the best lyrics aren’t really part of the story and need to be left out, which is a bummer.

I see you are releasing a run of cassettes with Lily Tapes & Discs, who we have covered a few times in various guises. How did this come about? I’m almost completely ignorant when it comes to this sort of thing – did you approach the label? Did they come to you?

Ben Lovell, who runs Lily, is actually an old childhood friend. He taught me about Elephant 6 when we were 12 and I probably returned the favor with something like Through Being Cool. We’d been out of touch for years but started seeing each other at shows in NY and the timing worked out. His own music as Lung Cycles is so great too.

Why did you decide on tapes rather than CD or vinyl? It’s something I’ve thought about a lot recently – if physical releases aren’t the primary method of listening anymore, have they become strictly aesthetic things, nice things to put on a shelf?

I do most of my listening digitally (no streaming, just the old iPod classic), but I buy vinyl at shows. There’s still a level of independent music that’s healthy enough to sell records and make a sustainable income, but for everyone below that level (musicians and labels) it’s become about just connecting with people. There’s been a shift towards limited edition releases, tapes, lathe cuts, etc. which I think is fantastic. With digital music beginning to feel valueless, giving someone a lovingly handmade artefact puts personal value back into that relationship, even if they only play the songs via the download. I love collaboration, so with Ben and Lily that means tapes. He did the art and I think it’s beautiful.

Finally, could you name 4-5 acts you are currently enjoying? Old or new, popular or obscure, whatever you find yourself returning to.

Adrianne Lenker’s a-sides is an everyday listen; The Weather Station, especially last year’s EP; so much Mitski; Will Stratton’s ‘The Relatively Fair‘; Evan Dando’s Baby I’m Bored. I’m biased because I play in her band sometimes, but Johanna Samuels is truly one of the best songwriters around.

You can buy How Strange It Is To See now from the Adeline Hotel/Lily Tapes & Discs Bandcamp Pages.

The post Interview: Adeline Hotel appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Young Jesus

“I think you can confront darkness with sincerity and that the best stuff acknowledges the light that is in the dark and vice versa” – an interview with Young Jesus, chatting about concept albums, life-changing novels & the balance between darkness and light.

Sharon Van Etten

“Heartfelt, brave and benevolent, not exactly an answer but a reassuring hand to hold while you’re working on the question” – You should be excited about the new EP from Sharon Van Etten.

Elvis Depressedly

“Elvis Depressedly will not mend broken bones or cast out demons or have you walking across hot coals. Instead they… offer an achievable version of optimism, one which does not require manic enthusiasm or God-like goodwill but instead a pinch of determination and a firm belief in love” – we get to grips with the new Elvis Depressedly record New Alhambra.

Bells Atlas

“Blending the visceral emotions of R&B and soul with an off-the-wall, avant-garde vibe akin to Dirty Projectors and tUnE-yArDs” – ‘Bling’ welcomes you to the eclectic world of Bells Atlas.

Gay Angel

“The sound of one creative mind expressing itself in the most maximalist way imaginable” – The second floret of Gay Angel’s 100-song bonquet is .

Zee Town and the Dog Boys

“Think Beach House in their sad teenage bedroom years” – the self-titled album from Zee Town and the Dog Boys combines shoegazy fuzz with intimate bedroom pop.

Aisha Badru

“The confessional, angry-but-still-in-love style of all the best break-up songs” – an introduction to the organic folk of Aisha Badru.

Noah Gundersen

“A rousing, textured love song that would be a radio hit in any just world” – we get the first taste of the new Noah Gundersen album with ‘Slow Dancer’.

Ruth & Trudy

“An unorthodox brand of lo-fi pop that blends a laidback hipness with heartfelt naivete” – Still Pond Songs, an album from Ruth & Trudy, out on Slovakian label Z Tapes.

Alynda Segarra

“Blues women foreshadowed a movement of feminists of color that is vibrantly alive today… leaving behind the embarrassing and soul crushing caricatures of women of color that I was fed my whole life” – Hurray for Riff Raff leading lady Alynda Segarra (who we have had the pleasure of talking to) has written a great piece on the feminist legacy blues women for American Songwriter.

The Weather Station

“Country songs are always about driving, journeys, and these sorts of things. I found that these songs were about journeys but not” – Exclaim talk to Tamara Lindeman about Loyalty, the excellent new album from The Weather Station.

Bedroom Pop

“The qualities they share are somewhat intangible, more emotional than sonic, and can be more easily felt than described” – Jacob W. Moore wrote a primer on bedroom pop for the uninitiated, citing bands such as R.L. Kelly, Ricky Eat Acid, Alex G and Foxes in Fiction, as well as the overwhelming influence of the folks at Orchid Tapes. Head to Flavorwire to check it out and then browse our ‘bedroom pop’ tag as further reading.

Sufjan Stevens

“The striking sense of solemnity hangs like a noose around its neck, rugged and impossible to ignore, from the first moment to the last” – A little late to this one, but GoldFlakePaint’s review of Sufjan’s new album is really lovely (and mentions Cormac McCarthy, which is never a bad thing).

King of Cats

DIY Magazine are streaming the new King of Cats album, which will be released on Art Reeks, a joint label that combined Art is Hard and Reeks of Effort…

Barna Howard

…and you can stream the new Barna Howard album at Line of Best Fit.

Bellows

Bellows did a Tiny Desk Concert at NPR!

And Finally… the 8tracks Playlist of the Week

The inaugural winner of this coveted accolade is Ratfriend, with this round-up of the best music so far in 2015:

Be sure to follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and 8tracks to keep up to date with the best new music.

The post Week in Review: #1 (11-15th May 2015) appeared first on Various Small Flames.

The album’s title is a direct reference to this period in Stratton’s life (the Twin Peaks reference a result of repeated bed-ridden viewings during his recovery). The Gray Lodge represents a midway point between the White and Black Lodges which serve as epicentres of good and evil in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks. “What struck me about what I was going through was that all the notions of good and bad and pain and pleasure, darkness and lightness, were all gone,” he says. “They no longer made any sense to me because my frame of reference was completely different. The Gray Lodge was the hospital for me, and the Northwest in general―this really gray, dark, rainy place where I was going to heal. The album title is about coming out of that experience feeling a bit wiser than I was before.”

Musically, Gray Lodge Wisdom is a worthy addition to Stratton’s impressive canon. His finger picked guitar and beautiful string arrangements are present, as are his woderfully eloquent lyrics. The album also contains some very nice guest appearances. Tamara Lindeman (aka The Weather Station) provides a guest verse on the title track, and Hollie Fullbrook (Tiny Ruins) sings on ‘The Arrow Darkens’. The sound is subtle, gentle and reflective, not mournful nor angry or jubilant.

But the legacy of the album is its impact on Stratton’s attitude towards his disease. This is not an album based entirely on the pain and suffering of that period of his life. Rather it is a portrait of a young man feeling his way into the world. Yes his disease has left an indelible mark on him, but he refuses to be defined by the disease alone, and is now attempting to hang on to the positive effects it had on him. “I feel like I have to choose the things to hold onto that I want to remember and that I want to continue to make a part of who I am,” he explains. “Coming out on the other side of this and having an immense feeling of gratitude is a pretty powerful thing.” The album is one of acceptance: a recognition that suffering and death are part of life, and a conviction that these things should not define our existence.

“Why sing about death when I almost died? Why sing about life when I’m still alive?”

You can buy Gray Lodge Wisdom right now via French label Talitres

P.S. You can still get If You Wait Long Enough the excellent benefit album that was put together to help Stratton pay his medical bills.

The post Will Stratton – Gray Lodge Wisdom appeared first on Various Small Flames.