Claire Cronin – What the Night is Thinking
Michael Cromier – Foghorn
Ylayali – little caterpillar graveyard
Forrest Moody & Jake Bellissimo – Selige Sehnsucht
Grotto Terrazza – Was Leben Will Muss Sterben
Trying – If I Don’t Get a Job
Giant in The Lighthouse – Sprinting
Soften – Iridescent
Champ Major – Abbeville
Grebes – Plum
Jack M. Senff – Old Days
Sam Lynch – Not My Body
Tyler Key – Change My Mind
Ē – Afraid of the Ocean
Dehd – Wild
Pancho and the Wizards – Rot
TV People – Healthier Days
Plastic Cactus – Mystery Boy
Bibi Club – Jean Rene
It’s Sunday – Comme Un Fool
Little Slugger – Impossible
runnner – fan on
Hostxess – Time
omes – wyd
Oliver Ray – Ol’ Coyote
Will Johnson – Cornelius
Merival – No Brakes
My Father’s Son – Dust to Rust
Jordan Klassen – Virtuous Circle
Ditty – Deathcab

Check out our previous Monthly Roundup playlists, and be sure to read or Reviews and Previews throughout the month.

The post June 2019 Roundup Mix appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Back with a brand new record, Local Support, Key has taken something of a new direction. Joined by Seth Key (electric guitars), Harrison Cloud (drums and percussion), Mark Plemmons (piano and organ) Robbie Horlick (saxophone) and Brad Gerke, Jessica Gerke and Ian Morrison (back-up vocals), the record represents Key’s most vivid and energetic release yet and places him firmly within the folk rock camp. This is made clear from opening track, ‘Change My Mind’, a fully-fledged country rock song complete with that playful barroom swagger.

I’ve been trying lately now to try and change my mind
I’ve been treading through the daylight without seeing the sunshine
I’ve been staring out the window
hoping for something that ain’t never gonna come
The walking man walks, the talking man talks, the running man’s gotta run

There’s a distinctively blue collar tone to the record, taking on the age-old themes of living and ageing in a land full of promise that never quite seems to yield. “Run of the mill old milltown blues,” Key sings on ‘Hills Like White Elephants’, going a long way to explain the record as a whole. Identity too, or perhaps the lack of it, forms an important thread. “You can lay my bones in Macedonia ground, or bury me by Indian Creek” goes the brooding shuffle of ‘No Difference Macedonia’. “It don’t make no difference to me.” Times are changing and history counts for little, let alone the romanticised version of it (moonshine has been replaced by Ambien and Xanax, by trucker’s speed).

The title track celebrates the modesty of the regional over the short-lived wider trends, while ‘West Bethlehem’ is the twenty-first century economic struggle through the classic country lens, pleas to employers and Jesus himself ignored without so much as an acknowledgement of receipt. The traditions of folk are once again present in ‘Living in a Song’, the bad luck and the blues and the attempts to escape, before ‘Mississippi Hallelujah’ closes the album with a fittingly epic finale. Clocking in at over seven minutes, the track is a lesson in the patient build, pitched in the no man’s land between golden dreams and empty promises.

Local Support is out now and you can get it from the Tyler Key Bandcamp page.

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The album opens with ‘Running My Life’, a gently soulful, folk-inflected track that brings to mind the Cave Singers. The song immediately references the increasingly murky concept of “truth” in twenty-first century America, drawing on a classic mystery. “Two plus two is often five,” Key sings. “Elvis Presley is still alive.”

‘Lucky Man’ returns from Grows Wings, what described previously as “swingin’ barroom country”. It bears some of the hallmarks of Father John Misty, rollicking along with half a tongue in cheek. The song is re-recorded, crisper and clearer with an extra dash of verve, which serves to add a little more bite to the story of the central lucky man, who sees fame, fortune and power fall into his lap, though not quite the presidency yet. “Well there’s a tower in Manhattan that bears my name, big guilty letters on a big guilty frame, it reads high, I got lucky man”

‘Ordinary Guy’ is the flipside, a blue-collar folk song about getting off work and watching football at Applebee’s. It has the same kind of wry humour as the previous track, but is also surprisingly heartfelt, especially the sequence about dreaming of dead parents.

“In my dreams where they’re standing next to me
my father’s hardened hand from the factory
slaps my knee as I begin to cry”

There’s an impressive range of atmosphere and tone across the record, proving that Tyler Key can’t simply be filed away into the folk singer-songwriter category. Take for example, ‘Happy Birthday Sad Whiteboy Nation’, with its serpentine funkiness, Key’s vocals rising in pitch compared to the other tracks. A reworking of a song from his first album, ‘Willowbrook’ is what Key describes as “the saddest and simplest song I ever endeavoured to write.” It’s a Jason Isbell style country/folk ballad, the song is a triumph, rich and emotive and stirring.

The record ends with ‘Penelope (Hold On)’, a fan favourite that has finally been committed to tape. It’s another of the album’s direct and sincere songs, which Key describes as an attempt to prove to a girl he could “best Conor Oberst.” The verses display an effortless wordy poeticism, while the chorus goes straight for the heart, with the simple lines “you gotta hold on.”

Long Runs the Fugitives is an interesting fusion of the timely and the timeless, built on sturdy foundations of classic country/folk, but thematically very much rooted in the present day. Like folk of bygone years, it combines sly humour with raw emotion, wide-lens societal commentary with introspective ballads. It’s no mean feat to capture both ironic detachment and that sense of quiet everyday tragedy that occurs in every “ordinary” life.

You can get Long Run the Fugitives now from the Tyler Key Bandcamp page.

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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

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

Opener ‘City Life’, a reserved country track with Key’s trembly vocals placed front and centre, is about the fear of getting on the wrong side of drink and so-called “good times”, while ‘Lucky Man’ sounds like swingin’ barroom country played at half pace, with shades of Father John Misty, the vocals getting increasingly throaty and whiskey-burned. Key says the song was written on a whim after watching the GOP debates, and is all about a certain Republican clown (yes there are lots of those, but this is about that one in particular). ‘Litany’ is a more sedate acoustic folk song, but with impassioned vocals.

“Well if God made me
its proof that God could make a mess.
And if God make you its proof that he could do much better than the rest”

The EP then takes a new direction, with a trio of songs based on the legend of the Mothman, a humanoid moth creature that is said to stalk West Virginia. Key explains in the blurb: “[The Mothman] may or may not be a cult leader in the vein of Charles Manson, who may or may not be in collaboration with the Russians in a plot to escalate the Cold War…No.1 is the credo, No.2 is the origin story, No.3 is where the shit hits the fan”.

The vocals on ‘Mothman No. 1 (…at night I will grow wings)’ have the fervoured twang of a preacher, as if Key is delivering his verses from a dark and dusty stage in a stifling hot tent at some God-fearing convention (“Go bathe in holy water/ Go make your body new / I got the loaves and fishes and a good idea what we could do”), while ‘Mothman No. 2 (…sunflowers into the bonfires)’ is all crackled electric guitar and wobbly, echoed vocals, Key sounding burned out, all staring tired eyes and an exhausted twichy stance. The final track, ‘Mothman No. 3 (Zacheus in the clocktower with a .45)’, is a piano-led ballad, with shades of Timber Timbre, which details the story of the Mothman and its purported association with the collapse of the Silver Bridge in Point Pleasant:

“Talk to your daughters
and talk to your sons
Steer clear of the bridge
before the whole town burns”

You can get Grows Wings as a name-your-price download via the Tyler Key Bandcamp page.

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