But Parcell’s experimentation always remains rooted in a sense of emotional honesty, and for all his innovation, it is this commitment to sincerity and modesty which shines as the most notable feature. Boundary pushing not as some search for novelty or exercise in aesthetic formulation, but a way to more fully communicate what lies at the heart of the work. A deep, varied engagement with ideas of sincerity and humbleness which stands as proof that within compassion lies genuine artistic and political utility.

Within this wider mission, releases under the The World Without Parking Lots moniker have tended to lean toward the intimate, straightforward folk end of Parcell’s body of work. Songs more overtly personal which position themselves alongside acts like Mount Eerie or Talons’. The trend continues on You’ll Have To Take My Word For It, a brand new TWWPL album out next month on Dear Life Records featuring intimate, domestic songs which are characteristically humane.

Today we have the honour of sharing the lead single and album opener, ‘Rotten Bouquet ’22’. It’s track of marbled sentiments in which vulnerability is matched by quiet assurance, and disbelief is leavened by a slow-dawning wisdom. A sense of understanding which builds gradually but builds nonetheless. “Would you believe it’s only just become clear?” as Parcell sings in the song’s final verse, “I need a lot of people and a handful of people need me.”

I’m not tired
at least not in that way
I’ll hang it upside down
my rotten bouquet

The song comes complete with a video by Parcell himself which you can check out below:

We also took the opportunity to ask Parcell a few questions, so read on below to hear more about intentions behind The World Without Parking Lots, his sources of inspiration and the impossibility of Cuphead.

Hi Ethan, thanks so much for speaking with us and congratulations on You’ll Have to Take My Word For It. Does the experience of releasing music change from record to record?

Thank you and thank YOU for speaking.

Short answer: on the surface, it’s basically the same, same pacing, same second-guessing, ebbs and flows of confidence, and then same rush of letting go, processing and moving on. Internally, it’s definitely different just in the sense that I’m in a different place in life, creatively and otherwise.

So I suppose the experience does definitely change from record to record for me – mostly in the sense that my life and worldview keeps changing a little. On the purely musical side of things: my relationship to the medium is always developing a little further. I always feel like a goof saying it, but I really believe in the idea of recorded music – it doesn’t feel like I’m lacking anything by making an album of songs, that is (somewhat arbitrarily) typical LP length. What can I say, I love it – I love records as they exist as cultural artifacts and sometimes feel like I have a slow and steady decrease in interest in pushing the medium any further or anything. My relationship to performing has something to do with it, I’m sure – I’m less interested in this band existing as a performing entity as I am making the record.

Anyway, more importantly, things feel different now for personal non-musical reasons too- things just look and feel different since my last public releases: I’ve gotten married, my priorities and work are different, my habits and day-to-day concerns.

The album sits at the simpler, solo folk end of your stylistic spectrum, slotting alongside previous World Without Parking Lots releases. Could you talk a little about the thematic and/or aesthetic qualities which mark something as a WWPL release, as opposed to something for your collaborations or to be released as Ethan T. Parcell?

The main unifying thought behind The World Without Parking Lots is that I sort of haphazardly declared to myself a long time ago that I would use this name when I’m using a recording project to sort of mark time in my life. No matter my musical predilections or style signifiers, I thought it would be interesting to sort of deal with the consequences of my taste and ideas changing through every iteration of the band being sonically pretty disparate from the next. Our first release technically turned 10 years old last year, but at that point The World Without Parking Lots was a sort of youthful free jazz orchestra? I was 19, I was enamored (still am) with Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra, and the European large ensembles in that vein, like Globe Unity and Instant Composer’s Pool. Needless to say, I’m not exactly itching for anyone to check that music out, but I’m all-in-all glad that it is documented and under the same umbrella.

The Focus Group LLC/Solutions releases, and the things under my given name have some sort of specific narrative or conceptual thrust to them that feel less diaristic, and in turn a little less tethered to the particulars of my actual life. With WWPL, I felt like I needed to mark time with what was on my mind musically and textually, so it ended up as another singing album. Sometimes singing feels best – who knows what it will be next.

I definitely didn’t know it at the time, but I’m constantly mentioning the artist/critic David Antin, who has a book and essay called “Radical Coherency” that helped me understand my own urge to do this a little better – when you explode all possible context, it helps to realize how inherently linked everything is, especially everything you can make as just one person with one body.

Your bio lists “smallness, hospitality, and union” as themes central to your work, and I wondered if you could expand a little on how these manifest on the new record? There’s a kind of humbleness to it, a domesticity?

Of those three things, smallness is always the one that feels like an ongoing quest. I think it’s different than being specific, or making art about particular things – “small” is something else, and I still have a hard time articulating it. Sometimes it definitely manifests how you’re suggesting – humility, domesticity. Most of these songs are definitely swimming in that water. I think I became interested in spoken text years ago in Focus Group LLC because it seemed smaller than singing (I’m not sure it actually is).

I think in general, my ambitions to be small and hospitable also have to do with my working methods – whether an orchestra, or a band of my closest people I always want make sure the working environment and feeling is hospitable and unified. My hope is that the concerns that motivate my methods also show up audibly in the work. This time around, it resulted in the delight of just writing down the personnel on the album – my brothers, my spouse and my oldest friend.

Dear Life is a gem of a label. How did you end up working with them this time around?

I love that you asked this because the answer is literally YOU. Michael Cormier-O’Leary reached out a couple summers ago after hearing Plays from Operas Alone, thanks to your write-up on it. Of course, it’s a small world, I love Friendship (which Michael is in) and had seen them play here in Chicago a few months before that, and adore so much of the music coming out from Dear Life right now. It’s been a treat having them alongside.

Where would you position work within the contemporary music scene? Are there any artists (musical or otherwise) you particularly admire or see yourself in conversation with?

I’m honestly not sure – I really am inspired by my most immediate peers, my longest musical and personal relationships are with Alec Watson, whose music is DPCD and Kenan Serenbetz. The volleying of support we do for each other has really helped us all individuate our own creativity in a way that I’m always grateful for – so I suppose we are literally always “in conversation,” but that’s what comes to mind first.

Otherwise, I’m always in admiration of those taking big swings for the love of the game. Or better yet, I find myself new inspiration and admiration by paying attention to the various non-all-consuming ways people seem to fit their music-making into their broader life as people. I suppose that’s what has been on my mind the most – where does this fit in to everything else? At this particular moment I’m excited whenever Jim O’Rourke puts out another Steamroom release, Cyrus Pireh changed my life years ago and has a new one coming out soon with a perfect title. George Lewis’ book on the AACM shifted things around a lot in me in this regard too. I teach and find a lot of inspiration in that work, so I hope to continue to be in conversation with people in that realm too.

Do you have any idea where the future leads in terms of your music?

More of it, God willing! This Summer here in Chicago we are fully staging the second Focus Group opera, Wasted Light for the first time ever, which I’m very excited about. Otherwise, lots of ideas and projects are in the pipeline but I’m taking my time and making sure it all stays fun.

Finally, for a bit of fun, ‘First and Last Name’ references a final boss and it has me curious. What’s the toughest boss you’ve encountered (from a video game or otherwise)?

Oh man how exciting to be asked. To be honest, I had some collegial relationships that seemed absolutely impossible at the time of writing, though I definitely also had Earthbound on the brain. I’ve accepted within myself that I will never reach the end of Cuphead, though I have also started Disco Elysium recently – which might not have a final boss besides my own psyche, which rings pretty true.

You’ll Have To Take My Word For It is out on the 27th May via Dear Life Records and you can pre-order it now.

The post The World Without Parking Lots – Rotten Bouquet ’22 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Thanks for being with us.

Advance Base – Animal Companionship

Run For Cover Records

““The songs are intended to be a comfort for folks going through their own tough times,” Ashworth explained in an essay for Talkhouse. “Commiseration has always been a guiding principle of my songwriting.” Love need not be hugs and hearts and kisses, and loyalty does not necessarily mean hanging in a relationship beyond all reason. But love is loyalty, and Owen Ashworth has been, and seemingly always will be, loyal to those who need it most.”

REVIEW / BUY

Basement Revolver – Heavy Eyes

Sonic Unyon / Fear of Missing Out Records

“An expansive and spacious sound that’s lit up with a slow-burning emotional resonance, centring around Hurn’s impassioned vocal delivery. Their music combines the magnitude and granular glitter of shoegaze, the personal songwriting of bedroom pop and the cathartic noise of 90s indie rock. [Basement Revolver] play a double game of big and small, switching from quiet personal sentiment to big bombastic broadcast, often within the same song.”

REVIEW / BUY

Benjamin Shaw – Megadead

Audio Antihero

“For all the frustration and (self-)loathing in show, there’s also something else. Perhaps the defining characteristics of Shaw’s music is its ability to transcend its own themes. He may be singing about hating his job, about going nowhere fast, but in doing so colours these things with meaning. To create art is to communicate, and as such the songs represent the antithesis to their own concerns, the simulated happiness and artificial connection punctured through their ironic presence.”

REVIEW / BUY

Campdogzz – In Rounds

15 Passenger

“[Closer ‘Sorceress’] at first might seem a slightly strange segue for a final track soon straightens out into an intuitive sense of logic and belonging, as though the album-long teeter on the edge of some epiphanic transformation has finally fallen headlong at the last moment.”

REVIEW / BUY

Damien Jurado – The Horizon Just Laughed

Secretly Canadian

“While it might be tempting to view [Jurado’s] songwriting career as a fruitless quest for his true identity, perhaps the complete opposite is true. His career is his identity, splinters of truth arriving through dreams or divined from another realm entirely, fractals that can be arranged into a whole that far surpasses the meaning of any one component. A manifesto of sorts, one full of prophecy and history, though rather than country-western stars of [Joseph Billie] Gwin’s vision, the Ten Prophets of Damien Jurado are merely alternate versions of himself—past, present, future, dream—each record its own style or consciousness, born of him, yes, but equal to him too.”

REVIEW / BUY

Dear Nora – Skulls Example

Orindal Records

“You can be anyone, we are told, do anything, though only superficially, a multitude of simulations all working toward to same goal, the means to the end of shifting units and making money. Dear Nora’s music attempts to undermine this by playing the same game, crafting an unreal reality of their own to overlay the other. And, by neutering the money-making end, they in effect invert capitalism’s technique, reestablishing the means (ie. living) as the purpose. Yes, Skulls Example might be a simulation, but it is one of the most meaningful and rewarding you could hope to find.”

REVIEW / BUY

Field Report – Summertime Songs

Verve Forecast

“The summertime theme might conjure ideas of cloudless, uptempo good times, but to limit Field Report’s use of the season to a more poppy sound is to miss the deeper point […] We cannot rely on grand promises or paradigm shifts. Rather, we must commit to the slow, considered process of letting go and working through, of deciding who we were and who we want to be. In these times, we’d be foolish to trust that will be enough, but belief in small moments of agency and human connection is more productive than misplaced prayers for epiphany.”

REVIEW / BUY

Free Cake For Every Creature – The Bluest Star

Double Double Whammy

“free cake for every creature don’t make sad songs exactly, usually tending toward a kind and hopeful feel. Yet there is something intangible about them, a strange sensation that weaves its way into quiet moments, like a kind of everyday poetry or nostalgia that we all recognise but don’t have a name for. The case in point is the penultimate song, ‘be home soon’, which somehow portrays a subway ride home as something beautiful and magical.”

REVIEW / BUY

Frog – Whatever We Probably Already Had It

Audio Antihero

“Contains lines of total sincerity that feel disarming in the face of what has come before, as though the truth of things slips out in quiet whispers to oneself, the party over and room emptied out. The truth being the soul-shearing reality of the American Dream, the tragicomedy of understanding your dreams and desires to be complete fictions while leaning on them with all of your weight.”

REVIEW / BUY

Gia Margaret – There’s Always Glimmer

Orindal Records

“The palette of Gia Margaret is built from shades of sadness—loss, regret, wistful longing, the arresting trap of nostalgia and plain old hurt—though again and again Margaret provides a counter-shade, as though the darkness’ true purpose is merely to highlight the warm, weak glow within. Because, while people up and leave, and time is certainly no kinder, Gia Margaret is here to prove that value is inherent in life itself, meaning and fulfilment not in spite of troubles, but within them. No matter how dark, there is always glimmer.”

REVIEW / BUY

Haley Heynderickx – I Need to Start a Garden

Mama Bird Recording Co.

“I Need To Start a Garden is the perfect album for the onset of spring. It’s all about growth and the hope of new beginnings, but also doesn’t shy away from the necessary hard work that makes such growth possible. It’s a reminder that plants are not the only things that need to be tended and cared for, but also that they’re not the only things that can flourish and bloom either.”

REVIEW / BUY

Lisa/Liza – Momentary Glance

Orindal Records

“The context [of bereavement] is important not because we wish to suggest some ‘romantic’ mythology behind the record (indeed, the songs were written before the tragedy occurred), or that there is magical healing power in the making/consumption of art. Rather, Momentary Glance is a symbol of the power of community, generosity in the face of grief, and the album’s use of placidity over bombastic melodrama is indicative of such an authentic spirit.”

REVIEW / BUY

Long Neck – Will This Do?

Tiny Engines

“Despite the difficult circumstances, there is also a sense that things will be okay, that our narrator has gained the sense of strength and self-reliance necessary to move on. Or rather, is working toward being strong enough and self-reliant enough, with this album being the furthest possible reach forward toward that place. Of course, it’s likely full strength and self-reliance will never be achieved, but it’s the strive toward those ideas that is the most important. Of course this will do.”

REVIEW / BUY

Lung Cycles – S/T

Lily Tapes & Discs

“The placid natural flow continues whether we voice our concerns or not, and nothing in this external sphere is working to exacerbate our feelings. In this way, Lung Cycles reveals anxiety and melancholy to be no more than parasites of the human psyche, forces all too willing to consume us should we centre our existence within our own heads, but soon found dead in the vacuum of natural quiet.”

REVIEW / BUY

Monarch Mtn – days of sleepwater

Self-released

“Darkness breeds darkness, and allowed to fester can become a self-perpetuating thing that metastazises unto ubiquity. Here, Monarch Mtn do not pretend that suffering is abating, or can be dispelled by a mere shift in perspective, but rather choose to fight the phenomenon. days of sleepwater exists to fight the creeping dark, and not embrace it.”

REVIEW / BUY

Naps Eyes – I’m Bad Now

Paradise of Bachelors

“Behind the heavy-lidded blasé exterior lies a rich and tangled inner life, an invitation to fall into the folds of Chapman’s brain and watch his thoughts pass by […] Those with enough curiosity or desire can try to arrange the Nap Eyes lines into a magical formation, wrestling with the existential questions in the hope that they will be the first to figure it all out. The rest can take a back seat and let the Big Stuff drift around them, finding comfort in the fact that there are things bigger than us, and beauty in the understanding that they are beyond our grasp.”

REVIEW / BUY

Remember Sports – Slow Buzz

Father/Daughter Records

“Sincerity could be said to represent Slow Buzz as a whole, though sincerity not as some sentimental force rather a commitment to what feels true, no matter how messy and conflicting. There’s something in the Remember Sports story at the heart of this earnestness, the possibility of progressing without sacrificing an entire ideal, of reincarnation where one returns not as some different creature entirely, but a new version of oneself. A truer version, at least for now.”

REVIEW / BUY

Sun June – Years

Keeled Scales

“Years is a record shaped and propelled by the gentle forces of the world, currents in the substrates of the earth and life itself, invisible yet profound, capable of changes both minor and major […] a number of the tracks returning to a repeated phrase, cyclical patterns that rise in intensity like incantations, or else echo out into the fabric of the sound.”

REVIEW / BUY

Swearin’ – Fall Into the Sun

Merge Records

“We live in a time obsessed with the past. Our dreams now look backwards instead of forward, our deepest wish not for some utopian future but rather a return to an unreal past, one sanded of all trials and troubles by nostalgia and the constant passing of time. With Fall Into the Sun, Swearin’ rebel against such a mindset, redirecting our hopes toward the future once more, and compelling us to pay attention to the present while we still can.”

BUY

Talons’ – After Talons

Self-released

“Talons’ capture the futility and hopelessness of a content life in a creaking hyper-capitalist society, an existence often devoid of meaning and full of shame at the hypocrisy in caring about the world but doing little to change it. But it’s also kind-hearted too, its glowing core of humanity somehow comforting despite the heavy subject matter. In other words, there’s no optimism here, but there is hope.”

REVIEW / BUY

Valley Maker – Rhododendron

Frenchkiss Records

“Built upon a thematic bedrock of faith and religion, but anyone who baulks at the R-word need not worry, [Valley Maker] is uninterested in creeds and doctrine, instead exploring metaphysical mysteries that we can all wonder about […] Crane is not foolish enough to offer answers, though his words and voice work as a reassuring balm, even while acknowledging the ambiguity and turmoil that surely awaits. ”

REVIEW / BUY

The Washboard Abs – Lowlight Visions

Antiquated Future

“Clarke Sondermann’s music has always been intimate, but this album treads deeper into this ideal than any of his previous work. In the circumstances, it would be relatively easy to make an album of sad songs, but it’s a brave artist who takes the very personal worry and suffering and uses it to build something that’s this complex and multifaceted, vulnerable but not hopeless, forgoing nihilistic dejection in favour of a strange kind of love, an appreciation of what stands to be lost.”

REVIEW / BUY

The World Without Parking Lots – Seventh Song Counts the Engines

Self-released

“Seemingly simple but rendered dense and cryptic with the addition of Parcell’s poetry […] Seventh Song Counts the Engines is a beautiful collection of songs, one which somehow makes a bold statement in a circuitous whisper, deceptively complex instrumentation and ambiguous lyrics capturing decidedly unambiguous emotion.”

REVIEW / BUY

Young Jesus – The Whole Thing is Just There

Saddle Creek

“How do you adopt a more sincere, hopeful position without becoming a flat Sincere, Hopeful Person, and everything that image entails? Young Jesus have put their hope in a spontaneous, endlessly recursive form of questioning, where every hard fought answer only exists to be questioned further. The endeavour might well take a life time, but the prospect of circling closer to the truth is something of a solution in its own right. So, while it’s tempting to think that the true message or meaning of the songs on The Whole Thing Is Just There is always just out of frame, the reality is in fact the other way around. The message of the songs is that meaning is always just out of frame, and that there is no more valuable an enterprise than the constant search outside and beyond.”

REVIEW / BUY

Yowler – Black Dog in My Path

Double Double Whammy

“The writing is vague and affecting, words imbued with an esoteric power that fuses intimate internal thoughts from the corporeal world with something altogether more supernatural. “I bear the mark, I am sigil,” Jones sings, “to the spirits and the sprites, but I promised not to listen and stay in my life.” The natural and supernatural converge on Black Dog In My Path, and Jones has re-purposed Yowler as the conduit between these two dimensions.”

REVIEW / BUY

We’re be sharing our favourite songs, books and Bandcamp name-your-price releases in good time, so keep an eye on the ‘Lists‘ category for those.

The post Favourite Albums of 2018 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Combining the ruminative atmosphere of a Lily Tapes release with the understatedly devastating writing of Talons’, Mount Eerie or early Trouble Books, Seventh Song Counts the Engines sees The World Without Parking Lots make something that’s equal parts sad and hopeful, bummed out bedroom folk songs for the twenty-first century.

The album opens with ‘Famous Horse Race’, a song that introduces this hushed and undeniably affecting vibe excellently. Opening with a despondent bus ride, things grow increasingly opaque, ending with murmured free verse that feels like an Impressionistic portrait of a thousand thoughts and feelings, lending new significance to the superimposed writing of the album’s artwork. “There’s a place where the lightness behind heaviness sits,” Parcell sings, “that I can only hold when the message hits behind an impulse and electric stay-awake but staying awake has it’s limits.”

There’s a lot of emotional abstraction in ‘The Inventor of Common Law Marriage’ too, Parcell’s words creeping sidelong at the edges of a situation, somehow saying nothing and capturing everything with its talk of narrow eyes and rodent-killing vultures.

Perhaps the saddest song you’ll ever hear about the “ever entertaining jewels” of colourful TV, ‘Cartoon’ is stripped right back, just gentle guitar and barely-there vocals. The whole thing is infused in sombre melancholy, but it’s the last line that stands out, a starkly beautiful piece of poetry that somehow feels like the perfect ending, a glimmer among the subdued hues.

“Grey estate, golden age blood moon
tear my winter coat in two”

Rattling around for a minute or so, ‘The Petition on the Emptier Parts’ eventually finds its rhythm as Parcell sings from a post-industrial malaise. “He’s reopening all the old factories,” he sings, “and this town could really use it right now.” ‘Seventh Song’ is a gentle instrumental interlude, guitar softly chiming beneath a layer of radio crackle, before closer ‘Sorel & Mare’ arrives in the rhythmic sway of guitar. Typically oblique, the song is seemingly simple but rendered dense and cryptic with the addition of Parcell’s poetry, packing a huge emotional punch in the process.

“and he counts the engines
one by one by one by the sound alone
by one by one by one
and he weighs his bringings
one by one by one hand alone”

Seventh Song Counts the Engines is a beautiful collection of songs, one which somehow makes a bold statement in a circuitous whisper, deceptively complex instrumentation and ambiguous lyrics capturing decidedly unambiguous emotion. Quite where Parcell takes The World Without Parking Lots next is left unclear, though we cannot wait to find out.

The album is out now and you can get it as a name-your-price download from The World Without Parking Lots Bandcamp page.

The post The World Without Parking Lots – Seventh Song Counts the Engines appeared first on Various Small Flames.