We 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. The list was still incomplete, of course, and we were left with a big list of great songs from great records we didn’t get a chance to mention.

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

Arooj Aftab – Mohabbat

A take on a piece by Hafeez Hoshiarpuri, Aftab’s multilayered masterpiece is suffused with the patience, sadness and meditative inner wandering of Sufi devotional poetry.

Anjimile – Stranger

As fragile as sandstone, tougher than rock, ‘Stranger’ packages a nuanced assessment of identity as a folk pop hit of which Sufjan would be proud.

Bea Troxel – Getting Where

An empowered anthem for the introverted, slowly circling towards a more truthful self.

Ben Seretan – Cicada Waves 1

Measured and patient piano embedded within an organic field recording, ‘Cicada Waves 1’ plays like a slow day passing in all its quiet details, all its hidden weight.

The Bird Calls – Ritual Crash

With satellites falling from the sky and the burning underworld breaking the surface, ‘Ritual Crash’ presented the most tender, intimate end of the world you were likely to hear in the year of our Lord 2021.

Bria – Buffalo Ballet

Travel to Abilene, TX with this take on John Cale’s “European version of the Old West,” from an EP of covers that both subverts and celebrates country music.

BRNDA – Perfect World

Stable job, accolades, friendly dogs and affirmation. “You’re in the perfect world and doing ok,” sings Leah Gage, voice flat and sardonic as the track eventually tips sideways and falls into an unhinged sax outro.

Canary Room – Lake Effect

Bittersweet folk captured in its best setting, supported by warm lo-fi textures and an ambient embrace of birdsong.

Carson McHone – Hawks Don’t Share

The lid peeled off artistic collaboration, showing the tug of war tension underneath, as well as the lingering regret that results.

Daniel Davies – Spies

On streets as dark and foreboding as this, the question isn’t whether you are paranoid, but whether you are paranoid enough.

Doran – Old Moon

A new song cut from ancient cloth, like a small scrap torn from the drape of the heavens and earth and old moon itself.

Dusted – Not Offering

“I have given up. I’ve given enough,” Brian Borcherdt sings on this tender lesson in regret and letting go. “I was so sure. So it goes, I am not anymore.”

Etran de L’Aïr – Toubouk Ine Chihoussay

A suitably joyous number from Agadez’s premier wedding band, drawing you into its infectious momentum.

Fog Lake – jitterbug

A typically aching and overcast pop song from the master of them.

Frances Chang – eros the love creator dividing chaos

Cosmic spoken word which finds universes within interiors, a daydream transportation away from these sorry lands.

Fust – The Last Days

A song for hard times made warm by the fundamental fondness gained only through shared suffering.

JOHN – A Military Alphabet (five eyes all blind) / Job’s Lament / First of the Last Glaciers / where we break how we shine (ROCKETS FOR MARY)

Some latent thing awoken by our way of living, rising in the name of revenge.

Heka – (a) wall

Anger simmered down to a velvety caramel, coating the tongue on a slow walk through nocturnal alleys.

Hilary Woods – I

One of Hilary Wood’s wordless hymns, to be sung in dark chapels deep underground.

illuminati hotties – Pool Hopping

Working on the logic that slowing down might equal admitting truths or figuring things out, ‘Pool Hopping’ grabs you by the hand and runs.

Indigo De Souza – Pretty Pictures

“I’m always trying to embody a balance between the existential weight and the overflowing sense of love I feel in the world,” Indigo De Souza explains, capturing the bummed-out brightness better than we ever could.

Johanna Samuels – Sonny

With its long shadows and golden light, it’s not clear whether the sun is dawning or setting on ‘Sonny’, but it heralds a new day nonetheless.

JOHN (TIMESTWO) – Return to Capital / Šibensko Powerhouse

The reek of ozone as thunderheads slowly gather / The unleashing of the storm. “I see an opening in the sky, high, wide.”

Keith Secola – Intaglio

Just one of the portals on Keith Secola’s latest record. Looking to the heavens, rooted to the ground, tied to everything in between.

Lael Neale – Blue Vein

“Guardian angel / Gather my losses / Keep them all safe / ‘Til I come to my cross”

Le Ren – Dyan

As warm as a mother’s hand, with all the clarity of an empty room.

Lewsberg – The Corner

Perfectly minimal, just guitar, percussion, and incense-scented violin. All backed up by monologue-like vocals that ring with pure patience.

Loretta’s Museum – The Rodney Ave Garage Sale

Instrumental folk and the ambient sounds of a garage sale combine to evoke one of those perfect glittery springtime days when the sky is blue and the leaves are green and the sun isn’t yet too hot to bear.

Lucie, Too – スーパームーン Super moon

A slice of big, radio-ready indie pop from a Japanese duo that seem destined to blow up.

Mal Devisa – Deja playing guitar

With slow guitar and lilting rhythm, a track which isolates the tenderness and patience within loneliness, yearning for connection with plainspoken charm

Marie/Lepanto – Gramps and Grandma

Justin Peter Kinkel-Schuster on reliably emotive form with the picture of familial love and heartbreak, and Jason Isbell shows up to shred some guitar for good measure.

Maxine Funke – Quiet Shore

A quiet meditation on the mundane aspects of a traumatic moment (a tea tray, a snatched umbrella, a slammed door) that illustrates the potency of memory and how a whisper is often louder than a shout.

Merpire – Heavy Feeling

Has an anxiety attack ever felt so cathartic?

Midwife – God is a Cop

“Am I heartless, or am I soft?” The pressing question at the heart of a track suspended between earnest confession and violent conflagration.

Myriam Gendron – Poor Girl Blues

Gendron combines a traditional Québecois folk song with an old blues one to distil their shared meaning, a lament for the lost, lonely and displaced.

Ovlov – Baby Shea

A 97 second eulogy to Brooklyn’s Shea Stadium played at breakneck pace.

Quivers – Gutters of Love

Ageless Aussie pop that’s a little bit 80s, a little bit 2010s, and a whole lot of joyous reassurance that heartbreak passes and things will be just fine.

Reiko and Tori Kudo – The Deep Valley of Shadow

A soft soliloquy on isolation grows quietly unsettling as warped strings whisper at the edges like anxious thoughts.

Sand Duney – Shadow Outside

Ramshackle country-tinged psych pop built on layered backing tracks thats equal parts meditative and energetic.

Space Mountain – Night Sky

A slacker jam.

Spread Joy – Kanst Du

Just one no wave pop nugget from a record that’s full of them, like pulling a weird sweet and sour German candy from a bag of pick ‘n mix.

Talons’ – Vampire

Talons’ tackle the experience of living through the pandemic in typically raw fashion, centring on an anxiety dream of being maskless in ALDI “between the meat, the fake meat and the gluten-free.”

Tiny Deserts – Wild Mt. Thyme

This beautifully unfussy and intimate take on an old Scots/Irish folk song captures that uniquely summertime feeling where the slow sunny evenings feel at once sorrowful and jubilant.

Trace Mountains – Eyes on the Road

The sound of a late-night self-reckoning while flying down the highway

TV Priest – Lifesize

A slurred and snarling assault on the patriarchal “strongmen” of politics and culture.

Typhoon – We’re In It

A band known for orchestral maximalism hone things to a razor edge in this emotional gut-punch on isolation, drifting friendship and, ultimately, persisting.

Valley Palace – Patch

Sky-blue guitar pop washed in hazy nostalgia that will have you dreaming of summer.

Weakened Friends – Quitter

A very nineties marriage of confession and catharsis, confronting fears over life’s direction by attaching heart to sleeve and blazing on ahead.

World Record Winner – Pockets of Nature

An honest-to-goodness ode to the joy of rooting around in the dirt and leaf litter away from worries and cares.

Wormy – Hungry Ghost (feat. Samia)

A whirlwind tour through the banal and heartbreaking details of life, gathering enough momentum to convince yourself everything might just be alright.

Yellow Ostrich – Timothy

“What’s a man? I’m just as soft as I can be” sings Alex Schaaf on this rumination on connection and the fallacies of masculinity.

If you enjoyed anything on this list, you may also be interested in our list of albums we missed in 2021. And of course, there were lots of amazing songs 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 Songs We Missed in 2021 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Tracklisting:

Typhoon – Rorschach
Cloud – Two Hands Bound
Trust Fall – do it right
Wooing – In Colour
Tree House – Nonsense
Long Neck – Milky Way
Sara Renberg – Take the Summer Off
Special Moves – Half and Half
Lying Down – Betty and Barney
Pastel – Close
Monarch Mtn – Saint in Armor II
Doomking – I Laid the Prairies to Rest
vierzig skizzen – passwords
Old Robes – The Spider and the Spectator
Jeremy Squires – Gift
Bill Vuono – Think of Me (feat. Earl McVeigh)
Kraków Loves Adana – Rapture
Cool American – Focus
Bucolic – Blue Tree
There’s Talk – Give It Up
Airium + Double Honey – Concrete House Of Dreams And Pools
The Saxophones – Just You
Jelani Sei – LVNDR TWN
Why Dogs Why – Linus

You can find all of our monthly roundup mixes here, and be sure to stick around into March to see what musical goodies we’ll be sending your way. And, of course, please reach out on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram if you have something you think we should hear.

The post February 2018 Roundup appeared first on Various Small Flames.

—Lee Harvey Oswald, in a letter to his brother

While the exact nature of ‘the struggle’ might have changed, Oswald’s belief in the salvation achieved through submersion in ideas bigger than yourself seems pretty timely and pertinent. Many of the twenty-first century’s major geopolitical events —from 9/11 to the Arab Spring to Trump and Brexit—seem to have been fueled by the conviction that participation in a wider movement, no matter how fantastical, can elevate a person above and beyond their own suffering. That is, to combat the erasure of self under tyrannical rulers or all-encompassing capitalism, one willingly forgets themselves amidst something bigger, letting go of all memories and histories to become part of a wider, manufactured abstraction.

Portland band Typhoon have long been crafting stellar indie rock that pushes the boundaries in terms of ambition and thematics, culminating in 2013’s majestic exploration of illness and recovery, White Lighter. The follow-up, Offerings, is no less aspiring and daring, a concept album that swaps the personal focus of their previous work for something more allegorical. The record is told “from the perspective of a mind losing its memory at precisely the same time the world is willfully forgetting its history,” explains lead Kyle Morton. “The urgent question becomes: without causality, without structures of meaning, without essential features of rational thought, is there anything that can save us from violence / oblivion?”

The exact narrative is left unclear, Typhoon favouring the implied rather than overt, though this is entirely in keeping with the themes being examined, and the almost filmic sound is more than capable of shouldering the responsibility. As the title suggests, opener ‘Wake’ finds the protagonist conscious with no awareness beyond the immediate present. He has no memories or sense of context, just the knowledge that he will eat when a nameless woman brings him food and then soil the bedclothes alone. In this way, his life flattened into the cyclical basics of life, higher consciousness is more or less annulled beyond a vague existential terror and the ghost of a song once heard, suggesting that the Nothing hasn’t always been so pervasive. “Au revoir my little memories,” he sings, clinging to barely there signs as protection against the nihilistic black. “Tell me: This is not your loss. This is your offering.”

‘Rorschach’ details a similar process occurring on a cultural level, forgetfulness (willful or otherwise) permeating society as fictions are re-imagined as fact, the sources used to double-check reality lost beneath the flood. As we described in our preview piece, “the system is whited out in an entropic blizzard, the overabundance of information causing an austerity of meaning,” resulting in a kind of endemic confusion that tends toward disaster. ‘Empiricist’ emerges within this new landscape, a strange superstitious place where nightmares and hallucinations replace the senses, and normal life plays like a superficial simulation over the top. The amnesiac is forced to join this charade, mimic the empty, repetitive cycle because it’s either that or Nothing.

“You find your land legs. And you learn to imitate.
You’ll wear any feathers and hope that your efforts attract a mate.
One day your children find you, locked in the bathroom,
staring in horror at the reflection of your face.”

The imitation continues on ‘Algernon’, the man tested by the strange woman, who is revealed to be his wife, and pretending to understand as though a suitably consistent commitment to mistruth might transcend the amnesia. Here the protagonist works on the logic that crafting a habitable simulacrum of a life beats having no life at all. Returning to the wider scope, ‘Unusual’ paints an existence within a place where such a feat has been achieved, Oswald’s fantasy on a country-wide scale, maintained beyond all reasoning and rationality. As shown on ‘Beachtowel’, this relativistic illusion is near-on impossible to challenge, because dissent requires doubt, and doubt only grows the ambiguity, and adding weight to the dreamscape. How can you question the truth of a system in which history has been rendered obsolete?

In reaction to this, ‘Remember’ switches focus away from big answers and toward small comforts. The song charts a regression into symbolic rituals and fanaticism, as though pseudo-pagan gestures might fully enmesh one into the fabric of the fantasy, or else burn all meaning so that there can be no consequence or punishment for the delusion. Though through all this remains the lingering hope that the constructed ‘reality’ can be punctured, so long as one remains sober and lucid. As Morton sings: “You gotta calm yourself and try to concentrate: What survives in the fire? What small fragment after all else disintegrates?”

This idea of some intrinsic essence that survives beyond the loss of all else, something that makes us ‘us’, is key to Offerings. Much energy is devoted to questions of preserving it, and extracting it once all memory and history has been erased. Flipping back to the personal, the short track of ‘Mansion’ appears to represent a return to the senses, or at least the memory of senses, as though the rigid sensations of touch and taste and smell might jolt us from the collective vision and return us to our old selves. And, while ‘Coverings’ sees the “darkening stain” dissolve details from the scene, a further step is taken. Here, human connection is offered as some kind of answer, capable of slowing or reversing the free-fall into oblivion, or else just making it less lonely. Following this thread, ‘Chiaroscuro’ reduces the outside world to an “abstract puppet show,” preaching the idea that communication and empathy can preserve small details of a person. As though fragments of information are coded in plasmids and transmitted to others, allowing them be recombined into an exterior body, and survive the erasure of the self.

Which isn’t to say such a process is exclusively positive, nor anything akin to immortality. ‘Darker’ finds the void closing in, and “every source of pain, every sting of pride” coming from external sources, as though to disintegrate alone would prove relatively humane in comparison to doing so in front of loved ones. Here, death is posited as preferable to the act of fighting for life, an exhausted surrender, though ‘Bergeron’, setting up a vicious circle, suggests willing engagement in fantasy as a defence against this. So too does ‘Ariadne’, with the protagonist “hallucinating audiences just to hand me a lifeline,” though a rational section of his mind kicks in too, suspicious of seductive superstitions and the sinister forces beneath their guises.

“Images of the primitive awakened from a dream.
Console yourself with the morning bells
but you can’t shake the feeling of being tied down to a table;
the guests are sharpening their teeth.
Everyone is a hostage. How will we ever get free?
We can’t even go a minute without trying to burn an effigy”

With rational thought only making the void more conspicuous, and submersion in fantasy ultimately false and empty, Offerings closes at something of an enforced stalemate. Final track ‘Sleep’ again offers human connection as the only comfort. In effect, Morton and Co. invert Oswald’s claim, hoping not to grow outside of the pain of the personal, but rather boil down to the essential elements, shedding everything beyond this fundamental core that makes a human who they are. There’s no foolproof method to achieve this, but it appears intimacy and love are the only things able to both transcend the mortal truth of life and anchor you to the present, walking a kind of tightrope between reality and fiction. With others, Typhoon seem to say, emotions and memories can be exchanged and held dear. With others, the possibility of something better, something more, is able to feel as real as it ever can.

Offerings is out now via Roll Call Records and you can grab it from Bandcamp, including on CD and vinyl. Alternatively get it digitally from the Typhoon Bandcamp page.

The post Typhoon – Offerings appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Now, after Morton’s strong solo album What Will Destroy You, the band are back with Offerings, a brand new record to be released early next year. In what promises to be their most ambitious work yet, Typhoon channel everything from Bosch and Rorschach to Fellini and Lynch to create a rich concept album centring on a protagonist slowly succumbing to an amnesic abyss. As Morton describes:

“It’s a record from the perspective of a mind losing its memory at precisely the same time the world is willfully forgetting its history. The urgent question becomes: without causality, without structures of meaning, without essential features of rational thought, is there anything that can save us from violence / oblivion?

With no past and no future, there is only suffocating, annihilating present, looping on and on ad infinitum (to me, one plausible definition of hell) and the best you can hope for is that somewhere in the void there exists some small, irreducible certainty—a fragment, a kernel, something—that you may have the good fortune to stumble upon before it’s all over.”

And while we should probably reserve judgement until the full review, the record seems to exist within a wholly post-postmodern space. That is, detailing the reaction to our prolonged exposure to mass media and runaway capitalism, an instinctive (re)turning to primitive modes of belief and ritual in the hope of rescuing some semblance of meaning from our existence. In other words, an important and timely exploration of everything that’s going on in America and the world right now.

There is an extended super-cut preview of the album available (which forms the record’s first of four ‘movements’), but the first single proper, ‘Rorschach’, came out last month with a video directed by Matthew Thomas Ross (Neighborhood Films). Starring the memory-less protagonist described above, the song explores how our current state of information overload can, paradoxically, lead to an increase in ignorance and confusion. Here, the system is whited out in an entropic blizzard, the overabundance of information causing an austerity of meaning.

“Eyes on the screen.
We have all the information now
but what does it mean?
Reason’s a tease.
Drank up all that hemlock,
here I am just reading the leaves”

Offerings is set for release on the 12th January via Roll Call Records and you can pre-order it now.

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While Typhoon’s fourth record is still in the works, Morton last month released a surprise solo album, What Will Destroy You. Again the twin themes of tragedy and pleasure are central, as is the idea of catharsis and release. Opener ‘Poor Bastard’ finds the narrator at his funeral, being lowered into the ground to the sound of a stranger’s eulogy, though he refuses to settle in his eternal bed. “I was done with being dead,” Morton sings, “I leapt out from the casket, looking like Dracula’s revenge”. And while this leads to an awkward moment where the narrator is standing up front laughing as the crowd filters away, kind of put out at the now-deathless funeral, it allows for a post-casket/pre-death epiphany:

“And in that moment I believed in
karma, and in my mouth the mantra formed

It will come back eventually
You will be reborn”

However, while mortality is an intrinsic element, the album does not tread the exact same ground as previous Typhoon releases. What Will Destroy You shifts the focus onto love, more specifically what Morton describes as “the ambivalence of erotic love,” leading to an intimate, surprisingly honest album which delves into things both more wonderful and mundane than your average love songs. Take ‘Innuendos’, opening with playful horns and maintaining a certain joy across its run-time. The track appears full of vim and vigour on the surface yet hides an ordinary character, a narrator full of spectacular thoughts in an unspectacular existence. Amidst this love story he stands naked in front of his partner, feeds birds in his dressing gown and imagines murdering the reckless driver who almost T-boned him, though the encounter ends in awkward apology as hard feelings drift away.

‘Survivalist Fantasy’ is a morose love song about the end of the world in the vein of Strand of Oaks’ ‘Bonfire‘ or talons’ Songs For Boats, though the duo find being the last people alive removes a certain thrill from love, mating rituals made redundant (“The garden’s ours now we’re competitionless / But suppose a third party’s necessary / Just to get it on”). ‘The Aftermath’ is sensual in a literal sense, full of sights and smells and still strong thoughts, a gentle memory growing tragic with the passing of time, while the ‘Gestalt of Original Pain’ is equally backward looking. Here the past is a tangible thing, something with form and shape and weight which pulls at your mind through the day and invites you in at night, its halls dark and empty, its door and windows locked. But hope still pushes through, that bright-white cord of defiance that threads its way through all of Kyle Morton’s writing, insisting that escape from that place is always possible, no matter how long it takes.

“Give yourself a million years to wake up in the morning
And give yourself a million more then if you’re still tired
There is nothing
There is nothing
There is nothing but time
We are not sick you and I
Don’t you listen to lies”

‘Automatic’ is a song of compulsion and addiction, and those who lean on strange comforts when faced with a deeper void, even if such habits create a narcotic fog which only deepens the original issues. “It’s my head, It’s my head,” sings Morton, “breaking itself to make a thought but instead / Just some pornographic images to stave off my death / It’s all automatic”. The track feels startlingly relevant and contemporary, like all those drinking blues folk songs updated for our digital world, where intimacy is never further nor closer than a half-inch through an LED screen. ‘Water Torture’ finds a narrator in a similar stasis, rendered motionless by the absence of his lover, a tragicomedy in which Morton pushes further than most songwriters dare, where the sadness and anxiety are still real and the humour is no cheap gag.

“I’ll be discovered by explorers
My body fossilized in torpor
And all the while
my thoughts repeat like
Chinese water torture

[…]

In disbelief at your misfortune you say
Hell I was only gone the weekend
And then I burst to flames
You see I’ve lived entire lives
In a single a moment”

‘Perverse Fascination’ sees intimacy permitted on one level but withheld on another (“If I couldn’t have your heart / I would have your body,”) while ‘What Will Save You” sees a surrender of aspirations in favour of simplicity, dreams of grandeur dropped for love. This theme continues into closer ‘My Little Darlin Knows My Nature’, the narrator overcoming an aversion to the banality of love as he understood it, thus experiencing the healing, life-altering sort of human-human connection that is strong enough to fill the cracks of life and, ultimately, make living worth your while.

“I never learned to trust a love song
It was not because the words were trite
But I felt the love itself was trite

Now my little darlin I’ll sing you a love song
One you can hang your hat on every night
I will be your witness if you be mine
I will be your witness if you be mine
I will be your witness if you be my wife”

What Will Destroy You is out now and you can grab it from the Typhoon Bandcamp page or on vinyl via Bug Hunt. Kyle Morton is going on a solo tour of the US/Canada this January, and you can find a full list of dates here.

Photography by Matthew Thomas Ross

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The EP opens with ‘Drinking Song’, a track which began life as a simple, finger-picked number but is here brought to life with full instrumentation. There is an ebb and flow to the rhythm, the lyrics expanding into hummed harmonies before contracting back into words which snap, taunt feeling, and relax once more. “There’s a light at the end where I smoke,” she sings, quite breezily, before the impassioned continuation. “And you’re name puffs and colours with people I know / and the song that was stuck in her head becomes all the words you forget”.

‘First I’m Sorry’ is almost Mitski-esque, a folk song electrified and submerged in reverb from which Heynderickx’s warbled vocals leap and dive. Detailing a change of heart or mind, the track accelerates gradually, as if the confidence in her words grows as the song progresses, before slowing into a quiet clarity in the final lines.

“Mother knows I drown in my lies
Father knows I learned my lesson the second time.
Ask me where I’ll go I’ll say do not know
No, I do not know”

Here, Heynderickx’s describes a sense certainty which cannot be explained, a gut feeling, a belief that change can be right without possessing any answers or plans. The title track sees this flipped on its head, the pace dropping and ambiguity flooding into the spaces between notes. The intricate guitar and slow, steady thump of percussion lends an air of dusty Americana, and the whole song is cloaked in something strange, the vague menace of Southern Gothic backwoods. “Am I down in the river bed this time” she sings, “picking fish heads and eating out their eyes?” The understated vocals and hushed harmonies rise toward a tumultuous finale, where guitar and drums run a frenzied race leaving Heynderickx to shout through the squall. Closer ‘Sane’ emerges with renewed hope, returning to a point of comfort as an anchor against the anxiety and confusion in an Angel Olsen-style folk/rock hybrid, which is somehow vulnerable and defiant all at once.

“Why am I frightened if it’s all just a game?
But the look in your eyes kept me sane”

If that doesn’t convince you that Haley Heynderickx is worth your time, then listen to the Fish Eyes EP in its entirety below and see for yourself.

Fish Eyes EP will be released on the 29th January and you can pre-order it now via the Haley Heynderickx Bandcamp page. Heynderickx’s Facebook page hints at a full-length later this year, so keep your fingers crossed and eyes peeled.

Artwork by Hasmood

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Mitski/Eskimeaux/Elvis Depressedly/Dude York

“Try as we might to describe why a night of live music can comfort us, relieve us, inspire us, confront us or sometimes even change us entirely, the actual phenomenon is something you have to be present to fully understand” – Erika wrote about the Mitski/Eskimeaux/Elvis Depressedly/Dude York show in Seattle, and drew some pictures too.

Daytime TV

“Lo-fi, psych-tinged, rock music, fusing the DIY indie rock ethos with mid 2000’s British garage rock” – Our thoughts on the self-titled EP from Daytime TV

Ought

Canadian rockers Ought have a new album coming very soon on Constellation Records.

Don DeLillo

“Don DeLillo is a hero of mine. The finest writer of our times… ” – We made a playlist of songs to soundtrack DeLillo’s White Noise, together with some gushing words.

K. Adem

“If further evidence was needed, Beautiful Dreamer confirms Adem’s eclectic songwriting abilities” – Our thoughts on the latest release from K. Adem.

Oh Pep!

“What should perhaps be labelled multi-instrumental indie pop, something akin to Sylan Esso meets Vampire Weekend” – We previewed the upcoming EP from Oh Pep! with some words about first song ‘The Race’

Sorority Noise

“Teenage, I’m-so-misunderstood melancholy is doubly effective, providing a sense of connection to anyone unlucky enough to find themselves in the throes of an adolescent heartbreak, while proving immensely gratifying to everyone else in the way that manufactured grief is always gratifying – a distracting and digestible simulacrum of suffering, a romantic and wistful removed-from-Real-Life pain, like watching an episode of The OC with your name in the main credits. But the thing is, anyone listening closely will soon discover that Sorority Noise are different…” – we explained why Sorority Noise are more than just another emo band

Typhoon

“Let it be known, the stripped back, piano led performance of ‘Prosthetic Love’ is gorgeous” – Typhoon put out a seven-inch featuring some lovely alternate versions of songs from White Lighter

National Museum Cardiff

Finally… We told you about the exciting things coming up in July at the National Museum Cardiff

The post Week in Review: #9 (6th-10th July) appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Rather than scribbling his name down to somehow transcend death, Morton acknowledges it. For him, this fear is not vanity in the face of impermanence but rather an attempt to make sense of time we have had and still have. Through tales of childhood joy and optimism, nostalgia and hope, Morton urges the listener to act upon the knowledge of death, to live.

Well, the band have (not-so-recently) released a 7″ containing alternate versions of ‘Prosthetic Love’ (piano version) and ‘100 Years’ (as Beat & Weathered/One Hundred Years), thus giving us a chance to post something and go some way to addressing the lack of Typhoon on the site. There’s little point in writing too much more as things will descend into uncomely gushing, but let it be known, the stripped back, piano led performance of ‘Prosthetic Love’ is gorgeous:

“This time I wake I’m still alive
Outlived my expiration date imagine my surprise
Some backwards take on the book of Job
His life was a wager and mine’s a joke
Give him what he wants, he will never know
He’s tied up trying to let himself go

Of everyone I ever knew
I’ve gotten used to use
I’ve grown attached to you being here
With everyone I ever knew
I’ve learned to count on you
As not on my fingers”

You can grab the (digital) 7″ now from the Typhoon Bandcamp page.

The post Typhoon – Prosthetic Love (Piano Version) appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Well the band have now put out an EP, Seasons, and I’m pleased to say that ‘Little Bird’ was not a one off. ‘Memento Mori’ and ‘Spirits’ shows that the band are capable of big songs on record too, with similarly powerful sing-/shout-along moments where the chorus of voices takes over the instrumentation for a stirring climax. The title track shows that the band have other strings to their bow, this a slower, more mellow song infused with melancholy.

There’s something special running through these songs, a seam of courage or determination or passion that makes them really stand out from a genre that has been flooded with inoffensive, radio-friendly mediocrity. They have all of the capabilities to make something good, but Hollow Wood are not happy to settle for merely good. Instead they clap the hands and raise their voices and push for more.

You can buy the EP from the Hollow Wood store right now.

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The other candidate is a bit of a cheat. Unplug is a live album from Cloud Cult, recorded at a sold-out show at the Southern Theater in Minneapolis. “We dug through the Cloud Cult discography,” frontman Craig Minowa describes after the first track, “and picked out the songs that had the philosophical messages that we want to be putting out there right now.” That essentially means that they dig out the jewels in their back catalogue and shine them up with brand new orchestrations so that they become even more precious.

I’ve been a big fan of Cloud Cult for a long while, from their often bizarre avant-garde beginnings to their more hopeful recent albums such as Light Chasers and Love. Apart from being one of the most musically innovative bands around, and one of the most experimental (their live shows often have people painting on-stage during the show), they are also pioneers in terms of ethical and moral ways to progress in the music business. Rejecting labels in favour of self-publishing, the band were practicising green methods of releasing and touring their music back when that sort of thing should have started (the band’s merch is all postconsumer recycled or made from organic materials, they have planted thousands of trees to absorb the band’s CO2 output, and they donate renewable energy project such as those that generate revenue on Native American reservations). In other words, these are good people, folks trying to do it right.

Following the death of his two year-old son Kaidin, Minowa and his wife went through some very tough times. “There was a very, very low point, where I really wanted to follow our son and find out where he was.” Unplug is a collection of songs that charts their ascension from these depths, drawing heavily from the post-Aurora Borealis Cloud Cult catalogue that is based around/born from an epiphanic moment described by Minowa during the performance: “I all of the sudden felt this light around me and heard voices as clear as day… it became apparent that… for all of us, there is a much bigger calling for everybody. We just have to listen.”

I don’t want to write too much about the songs themselves. I’ve tried a few times and trying to put my feelings into words makes the whole thing seem clumsy and saccharine. Just let it be known that the album is a special one, and songs like ‘Breakfast With My Shadow,’ ‘Running With The Wolves,’ ‘Chemicals Collide,’ ‘Chain Reaction’ and ‘You Were Born’ all feel important. I think that a pair of songs around halfway through sum up the record perfectly:

‘We Made Up Your Mind For You’:

“We made up your mind for you last night,
so you can decide that you’ll be alright.
It’s no small trick to beat-beat
the pessimistic motherfucker sleeping inside your head.
Do you believe in you?
Cuz no one else can do that for you.
Are you ready yet? Are you ready yet?
you don’t want to hear it.”

‘That Man Jumped Out The Window’

“It’s the thoughts that you feed
It’s the habits you need
It’s the things that you don’t think that you’re seeing
When you’re really seeing.
That man jumped out the window
Come back in the window.

It’s your tone in my mouth
It’s the things that we’re too scared to talk about
It’s the feeling that you’re dreaming
(You’re not really dreaming)”

In a time where irony and skepticism are valued above all else, Cloud Cult are a breath of fresh air (it could be argued that the act of appearing intelligent/sophisticated/worldly (i.e. not naive) is the biggest drain on the time and energy of young people today). Their music is forthright, their positivity and hope border on something of a spiritual level, something which could leave them open to ridicule. That their songs and ideas don’t come off as New Age-y clap-trap is a testament to 1) how much we (or at least I) want to hear/identify with what they are saying, and 2) the sense of authenticity that surrounds their work. This is something that is heightened with the Unplug arrangements and recordings. It is clear, at least to me, that the band fundamentally believe what they are playing. You get the impression they would be singing these songs even if nobody was listening.

You can buy Unplug from the Cloud Cult store page. Be sure to check out the original albums too. (And if you, like us, aren’t from the US, think about sticking with the digital download. Shipping = carbon emissions).

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