“I can’t see why there is nothing at all to do
there’s nothing at all that’s new.
And why don’t we pretend
we go see all our friends bands
yeah while we’re number one fans?
Let’s take a cigarette break
pretend we really know what we are doing here”

Self-Titled is to be released on the 13th May via Tiny Engines and you can pre-order it now.

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“[Bennett uses] what are often spare and concise lyrics to conjure scenes that have both an aesthetic and emotional appeal… She’s basically really good at writing seemingly simple lines that hold a disarming resonance”

Well, good news! There’s a new free cake for every creature full-length coming this April. Titled Talking Quietly of Anything With You, the album sees Bennett enlist the help of  Colin Manjoney (lead guitar, vocals), Francis Lyons (drums) and Ian Stewart (bass) and concerns subject matter such as “moving to a new city, looking for answers in books, making muffins, and bein’ in love”. 

To what your appetite and make the wait a little easier, they have released a video for lead single ‘For You’, well… for you. As ever, Bennett captures the bitter-sweet nature of everyday life, contrasting banal details with a wide-eyed sincerity to make a ballad for real people living normal, amazing lives.

“For you i’d write a shitty poem
on the wall of a dressing room at jc penny
leave a dime on the train tracks
drop our names down the shower drain
in the hopes that we never come back”

Talking Quietly Of Anything With You will be released by Double Double Whammy on the 15th April and you can pre-order it now.

Photo by Allyssa Yohana, album art by Domenica Pileggi

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“this summer was full of unrequited love and powdered donuts; our hearts were as broken as half the slushy machines in town. but we still managed 2 make some cool jams in the meantime”

The songs are bright and brisk, all seven clocking in at around 12 minutes. Opener ‘school starts’ is about feeling sick with stress at the beginning of the school year, while ‘talentless’ is about summoning the courage to dump that good-for-nothing partner. ‘strawberries’ is all gooey and gushing, that hot quick antsy feeling of crushing on someone real bad (“You’re the cutest thing I’ve seen / I think we’ve hung out in my dreams / at least 10 times since we first met / and I don’t know your name yet”), while ‘drive-thru’ is about being in love with more than just a person, but with being alive:

“i try to see the love in everything
and i am told that there is feeling
in the birds and the bees and the bark on the trees
in math equations and everything that u read”

‘pretty happy’ is about feeling just that, ‘softboy’ is about being frozen out by the guy/girl who only lives down the street and closer ‘wasted eyes’ is soft and dreamy and pretty sad (“every person wants somebody to keep them company / because the company is free / but u never invite me). It’s a fitting end to an album that has barely just begun. I guess you have no choice but to hit that old repeat button.

You can get very tiny songs as a pay-what-you-want download via the Honeyuck bandcamp page, or pre-order a cassette via the folks at Viridian Sounds (who btw also play in the cool band Naps who you should check out).

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The album’s title is a good introduction to its theme, that is: what happens after university finishes and takes all of your money and structure and most of your friends with it (a theme which is all too relevant for a lot of people I know). Put simply, Moving Songs is an album about being suddenly unmoored in the big wide world, about moving around trying to find a place in which you fit. So when on opener ‘Take on Me’ Bennett sings, “Sitting in my room, another year behind me, sitting on the floor…I’m not sure what I’m doing, all I know is I gotta keep on moving”, it’s pretty easy to see what kind of place she was in when writing these songs. ‘Moo Moo Movin’ is another track which deals with constant relocation (duh! look at the title!), “I lived in a pink room for a few weeks and I lived in a shed for almost a year and I lived in New Jersey ’til I was 13 and every since I’ve moved”.

And no matter what we’d like to believe, we aren’t all cowboys who can drift around without thinking, rambling lone wolves for whom physical passage is as inevitable as the passage of time. Moving is difficult. We form relationships with places and the people who live in them, relationships that can be painful to break. Listening to these songs it is apparent that Bennett knows this. So when, on ‘Moving Song’ she sings, “And honestly I don’t even wanna leave, cause I got my friend the oak tree, when the wind blows she says hey!”, it’s clear that she is, on some level at least, being entirely serious.

The album also touches on how this roaming can become a habit and, like all habits, can lead to some questionable decision making, about how moving can actually become more like running away, about resisting that thing they call “Home”. Take these lines from ‘Moo Moo Movin’:

“I eat grapefruit from a green bowl
and wonder why we’re moving to philly
when what I want now is an eggplant garden
and neither of us has spent much time in cities
feels to late to reconsider
even though it isn’t”

There is also a knock-on effect of this phenomenon, namely the occasional all-encompassing fear that can overwhelm even the most positive of us, the difficulty in experiencing and enjoying the world every day when there’s this big dark and stormy thing called “The Future” looming on the horizon. Bennett approaches this struggle head-on on ‘Day to Day’,

“I’ll try and think about
all I ever wanted
in their backseat
driving home from Brooklyn

Get caught up in dreading
to return to a routine I didn’t create
try not to worry about my life’s trajectory
and just see your face”

Of course, you couldn’t really write songs about moving on without doing some looking back too. Many of the tracks are infused with memories, rising like dust-specked vignettes from Bennett’s brain, evoking a sense of nostalgia and regret, that strange kind of quietly happy sadness that sets in when you really get to thinkin’ ’bout things. You can find examples of such reminiscence all over the album, e.g. on ‘So Much Strange to Give’, “Thinking about four summers ago, driving down quiet back roads in south Jersey, I was stinking of lake water and snack bar grease”, and particularly on ‘The First Time I Hung Out With You’, which is imbued with memories of harmless irresponsibility, full of great lines like:

“The twenty-third time I hung out with you
we lit sparklers from dollar general
in my dark dorm room,
before we did we’d been so blue
then your face lit like it was your birthday
til the sparks fizzled into dust in our hands
poof”

One of my favourite things about Moving Songs is the way it presents these anxieties but also provides reassurance. The most obvious example of this is ‘All You Got to Be When You’re 23’, which takes a soundbite from Ben Stiller’s Reality Bites and forms a kind and heartening chorus out of it:

“All you gotta be
when you’re twenty three
is yourself”

And take note that the above sentiment hold true whether you’re twenty three or fifty three or eighty three. The song acts as a prescribed remedy to worrying about the future and your place in it. There is an answer and the answer is simple – just be yourself. No matter where you wander be sure to hold on tight to the things that make you you (including the people you love) and do your best to enjoy the ride. It turns out the world is actually a pretty cool place. So if you’re reading this review and the worries feel all too familiar then remember remember remember it’s not all that bad. All these swirly scary unsettled times are just a part of growing up into the big boys and girls we’ll one day turn into. And these songs certainly aren’t all gloomy and miserable, there’s eagerness and anticipation here too. As Bennett puts it:

“New things are frightening
but they’re also the most exciting”

You can buy Moving Songs on cassette via Double Double Whammy or as a digital download via the Free Cake For Every Creature Bandcamp page.

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