The post Wake The Deaf’s Favourite Songs of 2015 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

January was a bit of a scrappy month in terms of regular posts, but we still managed to cover some excellent artists. Why not catch up with any you missed with this tailor-made mixtape? Click the artist names in the tracklist to be whisked off to the review.

Tracklist:

1. Jesus in the 70s – Siskiyou
2. 2 Broke 2 Old – Gorgeous Bully
3. Another Way To Go – Adeline Hotel
4. Scene Sick – Diet Cig
5. Dog Burial Theme – Dicktations
6. Up the Academy – Mike Pace and the Child Actors
7. Con/ A Sewer/A Cat – Amateur Love
8. The End is a Vicious Thing – Puzzlecuts
9. Manic Pixie Dream Girl – Furnsss
10. Party Girls – Gleemer
11. Soft Reputation – Unlikely Friends
12. Passing Through – Harley Alexander
13. Coward’s Luck – Hip Hatchet
14. Memphis – The Wandering Lake
15. How a Resurrection Really Feels – The Hold Steady
16. Fire in My Eyes – Yours Are The Only Ears
17. Traffic is Okay – Sitcom
18. Gold & Rose – Dear Sister

Also make sure you check out our mammoth collection of our Favourite ‘Free’ Music of 2014. Finally, if you enjoy long, rambling pieces that try and draw connections between my favourite music and my favourite books, check out this piece on The Hold Steady’s Separation Sunday (Craig Finn said he enjoyed it, so it carries his stamp of approval).

January 2015 Roundup from Wake The Deaf on 8tracks Radio.

The post January 2015 Roundup – A Mixtape appeared first on Various Small Flames.

“We are trying to make the ultimate pop album….Charles has got a really good voice…and I sound like a muppet….so it is kind of a Paul Simon and Kermit the Frog-funkel feel. We each wrote half of the 13 songs for SOLID GOLD COWBOYS. 6.5 for each of us…he wrote lyrics on one of my songs, and I on one his.”

In a way, Solid Gold Cowboys deals with the same sort of issues that Mike Pace described on his recent album Best Boy, comparing golden dreams with the insipid reality. But whereas Pace was singing with a longing for the promises of the 80s/90s, Unlikely Friends are more concerned with the present, singing about the banality of modern existence in a land where the Good Ol’ American Dream is a plastic model of an empty smile. This is captured perfectly in the first song, ‘Ride off into the Sunset’, where a normal man harbours dreams of cowboy freedom:

“I’m a twenty-first century American male,
I make a wheezing sound when I exhale,
I’ve got a supercharged chevy that I built myself,
it sits in my garage and has a musty smell.”

‘Soft Reputation’, the lead single, continues this trend with a video that manages to capture the essence of America with a compilation of baseball clips and adverts, a mixture of silly details and the very real glory of victory. This focus on silly but relatable details is a feature of the album (e.g. ‘Pizza Crust Trust’ – “you ate all of the pizza, except for the crust”), as are comments on the unsatisfying freedom felt by middle-class Americans (e.g. ‘Golden Telephone’ – “You can go anywhere that you want, there’s nothing here you really need”).

Of course, with this type of music the lyrics are only there for those who really want to listen. Others will sit back and bathe in the feel-good vibes. ‘Satellite Station’ and ‘Golden Telephone’ are breezy summer hits, shoegaze numbers with the fuzz removed, ‘Please Lorraine’ a big catchy love song with the melodramatic power-pop refrain, “Please Lorraine, pick up the pieces, make them whole again”. ‘Gold Hills Theme’ adds a spaghetti Western jangle (a hole in the pop market, I believe) and closer ‘Gold Coat Marauders’ again pines for a vision of America that has disappeared or maybe never existed. “Pull me up, dust me down and take me to the place where I thought I was from”.

You can grab the the cassette from Mirror Universe Tapes, the CD from Jigsaw Records or download a digital copy from the Unlikely Friends Bandcamp page.

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