Now Valley Maker is back with a brand new single, ‘Mockingbird,’ a song which again sees Crane expand on the simple voice and guitar skeleton. Amy Godwin provides ethereal backing vocals, and Chris Icasiano subtle percussion, adding texture and poignancy to a track that is concerned with both memories of the past and concerns for the future.

“I wrote ‘Mockingbird’ within a week of moving to Columbia, SC,” Crane explains, “having just left my home of seven years in Seattle to return to the area and community I grew up in. It’s a song about trying to settle in while feeling quite unsettled.” Drawn to actions that might tie him to the place and give some link into the future, he planted a Japanese Maple in the yard. “There’s a line in the song that acknowledges how I’ll ‘sit for a while and watch it grow,'” Crane continues, “as a way of accepting that season of uncertainty and transition.”

This happened before the pandemic, and has come to take on new meaning in the ambiguous present. “The song resonates deeply, for me, with this strange season of life. Both the song and video meditate on memory, time and aging; they both try to embrace the uncertainty, absurdity and beauty of life; and they reflect a feeling of being in-between places and communities.”

The track comes complete with a video filmed and directed by Joseph Kolean and Zach Gutierrez, which includes Super 8 footage that Crane shot in and around his Columbia neighborhood. Memory and reflection are again the key themes and the combination of the domestic (family photos, familiar faces, a fridge magnetic collection) and the elemental (dramatic coastlines, woods and a strange, river-bound fire) capture visually what Valley maker does sonically.

‘Mockingbird’ is out now via Frenchkiss Records and you can get it from the Valley Maker Bandcamp page.

Cover photo by Bree Burchfield

The post Valley Maker – Mockingbird 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.

Valley Maker recently put out a brand new record, Rhododendron, and we’re pleased to report that they continue to deliver on their stellar brand of ruminative indie rock. Crane has always delivered his lyrics with a strangely intense composure, his distinctive vocals giving the lines a gentle power. This is certainly true on opener ‘A Couple Days’, a solemn song about missing the death of a loved one and ruminating on that person’s impact. It’s a reminder that the most lasting legacies are not physical or financial but in our minds, a way of seeing things or approaching the world.

To think that I will be like you
To think that I will be consumed
To know that I remain confused
To always see the world in bloom
To see it like you taught me to
To know that I will be amazed

In comparison ‘Light on the Ground’ feels slick and spry, but again the lyrics are weighty. Like most Valley Maker songs, the track is built upon a thematic bedrock of faith and religion, but anyone who baulks at the R-word need not worry, Crane is uninterested in creeds and doctrine, instead exploring metaphysical mysteries that we can all wonder about. “Prophetic and apocalyptic language shapes Crane’s lyrics,” label Frenchkiss Records put it, “but his outlook is not bound by dogma. Instead, he uses the metaphors of faith to explore the ineffable to navigate the intersection of belief, time, place, and the political present.”

Rhododendron was made with the help of producer/engineer Chaz Bear of Toro Y Moi, and his influence is seen in the album’s snaking melodies and beguiling rhythms. Songs that would be emotionally resonant with just guitar and vocals are elevated to rich and spacious indie rock songs, as atmospheric and complex as the issues Crane tackles. ‘Rise Up’ is a case in point, perhaps the most ambitious and celebratory song Valley Maker has ever made. It dips and sways, reminiscent of The Wooden Sky in the way it fuses soulful conventional folk with something more contemporary, trumpet and saxophone adding to the maximalist groove. Again Crane looks to the Gospel for his metaphors, the obvious Easter Sunday themes at the forefront of a song that’s actually a nuanced take on being raised with religion.

“Rise up
God as my witness
Set my mind on the end
Jesus Christ visits
In a dream I guess
I was five years old
Mumbled little meanings
Doing as I’m told”

‘Seven Signs’ is another rich pop song, although it’s packed full of anxiety about America, images of hurricanes and gun shops juxtaposed against the titular Rhododendron “in the mountain shade,” while the western twang of ‘Be Born Today’ continues the eschatological feel, evoking Jason Molina’s stark imagery. “The sky opens for me,” Crane sings, “The earth swallows my feet / Blackbird coming down so mean / Bloodstain on the silent street.”

There’s a persistent rhythm that drives ‘Baby, in Your Kingdom’, a typically sober and sincere love song that at once laments life’s complications and vows to endure in spite of them, with ‘Planted in the Tall Weeds’ playing as the idea in action, struggling back toward the light. If the light isn’t reached on ‘Wonder’, then it is certainly visible at the end of the tunnel, the track an abrupt realisation of good fortune, life sliding into context as the shadows lift.

The album ends on ‘River Bend My Mind’, a characteristically spacious finale, all gathering shadows and negative space. It’s a song that confronts uncertainty with a clear-eyed sense of hope. “The running river only flows into the days I cannot know,” declares Crane, “when heaven takes me nice and slow, but heaven’s what I do not know.” Once more, 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.

Rhododendron is out now via Frenchkiss Records and you can get it from the Valley Maker Bandcamp page.

The post Valley Maker – Rhododendron appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Miranda Winters – The Futuristic District

Usually found fronting Chicago noise-rock band Melkbelly, Miranda Winters put out a solo record this summer that shows she is equally comfortable with the energy toned down a little. Which isn’t to say Xobeci, What Grows Here? is without its own bite, just that its intensity is not quite of the eardrum-busting variety. Opener ‘The Futuristic District’ is a good example, an electrically charged blend of bedroom pop and indie rock along that fans of Hop Along and Waxahatchee will appreciate, though Winters’ vocal rhythm carves out a space all her own.

You can get Xobeci, What Grows Here? now via the Miranda Winters Bandcamp page, or on cassette via Sooper Records.

Tuvaband – Wolfpack

The Berlin-based project of Norwegian singer/songwriter/producer Tuva Hellum Marschhäuser, Tuvaband create ethereal and emotive songs that sound something like a more radio friendly take on the reverb drenched drone pop of Midwife or Allison’s Gate. The latest Tuvaband single, ‘Wolfpack’, is a wonderful example, a smoky and twilit song that borrows elements of panoramically affecting singer-songwriters like Daughter and buries them in a dreamworld of smoke and twilit. The delicate shimmering beauty is offset with a sharper edge – as the title suggests, the track has teeth.

Be sure to keep an eye on the Tuvaband website for future releases.

Valley Maker – Light On the Ground

We’ve featured Austin Crane’s Valley Maker project numerous times here at VSF, culminating in a review of the excellent record, When I Was a Child released in 2015, which we described as “an album about belief and love in a variety of guises, about the big and unknowable questions, from love and growth and family to God and everlasting life.” Crane is back with a brand new Valley Maker album, Rhododendron, that will be released this autumn, and has released a single to whet our appetites, complete with a video from Joseph Kolean. It sounds like the album will be one to look forward to.

Rhododendron is set for release on the 12nd October via Frenchkiss Records and you can pre-order it now.

new casino – going for a walk

Taking their name from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Brooklyn’s new casino began as a solo project of Morgan Kaplan though has since expanded to incorporate Carlo Pisanu on bass. New single ‘going for a walk’, released in preparation of the band’s first full-length, Oshiki 2, gives a good flavour of the new casino aesthetic, combining a minimal slacker sound with an engaging lyrical flow. Every so often this rhythm gathers itself into something of a crescendo, which appears not in an increase in volume or energy but rather in the sincerity of the vocals, the feeling breaking through the disaffected cool of the genre to offer something a little more heartfelt.

Oshiki 2 is out now and you can listen via Soundcloud or Spotify.

Joe Kaplow – I Said I Was Going And I Went

After traversing the USA for the better part of three months playing all manner of clubs and bars, Joe Kaplow began to feel a profound longing for the tiny details of life at home. The idea of tour might conjure an image of exciting adventures, though Kaplow realised he was missing the decidedly unexciting, the household chores, cooking food from scratch. New single ‘I Said I Was Going And I Went’ channels this into an emotive and homesick sound in which uncertainty reigns, where the halcyon ideal of home is known not to be entirely true, though allowed to persist to drag him through the days away.

‘I Said I Was Going And I Went’ is available now from the Joe Kaplow Bandcamp page, alongside his previous EP release.

Baby Cages – flowers

We featured Baby Cages twice back in 2014, calling single ‘Dark Arts‘ a “shadowy three minutes that slither under your skin” and album Indelicate as akin to “taking a thousands of weird screenshots from Twin Peaks and Blue Velvet and Eraserhead to make one giant mosaic that is super-weird. Hyper-Lynchian.” Well, the Toronto-based music collective are back with a new EP, bitter melon, a release that maintains the off-kilter vibe though this time casting it in a light altogether more bright and peppy. ‘Flowers’ serves as a good introduction, the production relatively crystal clear when compared to that of Indelicate, the instrumentation possessing a manic, restless edge that is at odd with the lyrics.

“teach me to relax
and i am reborn

flowers in the back
of a pair of patterned pants
so I pick up the past
and fall into your lap”

bitter melon is out now and you can grab it from the Baby Cages Bandcamp page.

Lauren O’Connell – Out of Focus

Hailing from Rochester, NY, songwriter Lauren O’Connell has been releasing a steady stream of albums and EPs since 2007, displaying a keen sense of storytelling within her country/folk style. Earlier this year, O’Connell put out a new record, Details, and her writing is as detailed and impressive as ever, managing to craft complex, near literary-level metaphors and imagery while losing none of the immediacy and atmosphere. Single ‘Out of Focus’ is a case in point, a piano-driven track falling somewhere between Leonard Cohen and Julien Baker, though it’s in O’Connell’s words and delivery that the real magic lies. Maintaining a conversational flow capable of accelerating and decelerating at the drop of the hat, the song sounds like thoughts and feelings unfurling straight from the brain, as though bypassing the awkwardness of phrasing and speaking entirely, emerging fully formed and disarmingly beautiful.

Details is out now and you can get it from Bandcamp, along with the rest of Lauren O’Connell’s back catalogue.

Harvey Trisdale – Baby

Based in Los Angeles, Harvey Trisdale make a restrained, languid brand of indie rock that’s perfectly suited to sunny climes. However, rather than being carefree tropicana, their songs possess an emotional depth too, resulting in a struggle between light and dark where neither side wins out. This summer saw the release of their self-titled EP, and such a to-and-fro can be seen across the record, the sunny energy of opener ‘corners’ dampened by the emo-tinged ‘Fit to be Found’. Though these conflicting moods even seem to compete within single songs, as typified in second single, ‘Baby’, with the depressed torpor of the vocal style eventually shaken by the instrumentation as the track rises into a stirring finale.

Harvey Trisdale is out now via Baby Blue Records and you can get in from Bandcamp.

Babehoven – Out Of This Country

Babehoven is the project of Portland resident Maya Bon, rounded out to a trio with the help of Skylar Pia and drummer Elias Williamson. Their latest release, a five-song EP titled SLEEP, is being released by our pals at Good Cheer Records later this summer. In preparation, they have released a single, ‘Out of This Country’, a soft and shambling bedroom pop song that swaddles real feeling in a blanket of restraint. The drums and guitar and Bon’s impressive vocals seem to grow in intensity only to recede and dissipate, a reminder that sometimes less is more, that something intangible can be captured when artists hold a little something back.

SLEEP is out via Good Cheer Records on 17th August, and you can pre-order it now from the Babehoven Bandcamp page.

Adam Arcuragi – Low Rain Parade

For a period from the mid-to-late-00s to 2012, American songwriter Adam Arcuragi was one of the most soulful and stirring songwriters plying his trade, releasing a series of albums and EPs that collected his probing writing within an evocative musical landscape. The good news is that Arcuragi is back, with a brand new full-length due sometime this year, though for now all we get by way of a taster is the single ‘Low Rain Parade’. The track falls on the restrained side of his oeuvre, the slow meandering rhythm dominating what is a contemplative and calm song, though Arcuragi does show flashes of his vocal range as the swells reach their highest points.

The as-of-yet untitled album is reportedly due to appear sometime in 2018, so keep an eye on the Adam Arcuragi website for more information.

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Evening Hymns – Quiet Energies
(REVIEW | INTERVIEW)

“The album takes the suffocating, nebulous shadow of grieving and distils it into something small and hard and strangely tactile, a mysterious object that will always be there in your pocket, radiating its secret and peculiar brand of comfort. This isn’t about forgetting death, or even really ‘moving on’, instead its about coming to a deeper understanding of one’s life, about how a person can be so shaped by another, and how such an impact can and should be a source of immense pride and joy, no matter how hard some days can be. In other words, Quiet Energies is about understanding how it is in fact life, not death, which shapes us and our view of the world.”

Kathryn Joseph – Bones You Have Thrown Me and Blood I’ve Spilled
(REVIEW)

“This is a simple album about things so complicated that it’s almost impossible to put them into words. It’s about those thoughts and feelings that we all experience but never admit, the things that we, be it through etiquette and embarrassment and fear, dare not confess to others or even ourselves. Bones You Have Thrown Me and Blood I’ve Spilled is an album about people: lonely and loved, corporeal and divine, mortal and terrified yet enduring with a resilient hope that never quite goes out.”

Young Jesus – Grow / Decompose
(REVIEW | INTERVIEW)

“As the title describes so neatly, Grow / Decompose speaks of the familiar paths that human lives follow. Despite all the strangeness, the characters here are going through the age-old problems – depression, anxiety, identity crises, existential terror – the problems of being You and You alone, Molina’s “curse of a human’s life”. For all of the complexity of our existence, we are still locked in the atavistic pattern of life and death, everyone more or less condemned to the same mistakes and fears and joys that we as human beings have been experiencing for generations.”

Danielle Fricke – Moon
(REVIEW)

“Moon is a lesson in stillness, a moment stretched out, questions asked but not answered, a monologue that might never leave the room. The wonder of the album is that the human emotions of love and longing never evaporate, continuing to push through the frost where they are warmed by earthshine, opening up the possibility that the very feelings which caused the pain could be the things which end it. So while the narrator is trapped, they never submit to the vacuous silence of space. Hopes are still hoped and dreams are still dreamed and wishes are cast from cold, cupped hands, skywards.”

Yowler – The Offer
(REVIEW)

“Burns with quiet intensity, its strange lyrics feeling oddly personal, giving the album the intimacy of hearing about someone else’s dreams. Guitars sidle and prowl like shadows and the whole thing seems on the verge of something vaguely dangerous. All eight tracks are a study in the art of minimalism, of the exchange between poetry and negative space. It’s certainly a lot more than just quiet and pretty folk music”

Advance Base – Nephew in the Wild
(REVIEW)

“I don’t know Owen Ashworth, and maybe I’m completely wrong, but he seems like a kind and empathetic generally nice human being, in the same way the best writers seem like people you could be friends with. Even if none of that is true, I guess it doesn’t matter – what is indisputable is the fact that he’s a damn good writer who tells stories that speak to and help us all. While it’s easy to cast him as the lonely boy in front of a keyboard, the truth, at least in my eyes, is that he’s often hardly there at all, a transparent gateway into the lives of people you’ve never met, feeling things you thought you had to suffer through alone.”

Siskiyou – Nervous
(REVIEW)

“Nervous is an album of dizzying scope and ambition, quite literally the tumult of sound and emotion inside one man’s head. It is by turns dark and creepy, shimmering and vibrant. Siskiyou have never sounded so eerie, so threatening, or so expansive. And I have to admit, I don’t think they have ever sounded so good.”

Samantha Crain – Under Branch & Thorn & Tree
(REVIEW | INTERVIEW)

“These are songs played like inner thoughts or secret diary entries of persons not usually able to or justified in expressing their true sentiments, people who are not as tough as they let on, but tougher than they think in the middle of the night. A selection of underdogs living the lives they have been given, not pining for more or complaining at a cosmic injustice. Quiet, noble people in the trenches of everyday life, those with the broadest shoulders and smallest voices and a hard, buried sense of pride who treat hardship like a member of the family.”

Lejsovka & Freund – Fatal Strategies
(REVIEW)

“Fatal Strategies inspires a multitude of strange, lateral thoughts – a soundtrack that doesn’t need a film. The musical translation of the postmodern ruminations of an over-active, twenty-first century brain. Music unearthed by a post-society people, who’ll turn it up loud and sit in their ruined cities, reclaimed by branches and vines, and wonder and wonder about us.”

Frog – Kind of Blah
(REVIEW | INTERVIEW)

“Kind of Blah is a product of this place, an album imbued with the spirits of a sparkling past… Judy Garland is America. Lusty teenagers are America. Jesus Christ is America. So is Dr Pibb and dusty valleys and shut-down bowling alleys and all the communal memories shared by millions just like you. Kind of Blah is America, the U S of A in eleven songs – quirky, joyous, breathless, exhausting, addictive, heartbreaking and downright weird, accelerating towards a distant horizon while keeping its eyes firmly on a halcyon past that sure seems like it should have been more fun.”

Oh, Rose – SEVEN
(REVIEW | REVIEW OF ‘SEVEN’, THE VIDEO)

“Olivia Rose’s voice carries the tracks beyond the genre norms into peculiar territories. Raw and versatile, her vocals range from whelps and wails to quiet, haunted whispers. On their début full length SEVEN, a record on which, if anything, Rose pushes things even further. Lean and wiry guitars lead proceedings while a lo-fi buzz envelopes everything, Rose’s words cutting through like shards of glass. The vocals have the quality of an exorcism, like the unnatural utterings of a twelve year old as some jaded man of faith flicks holy water at her forehead.”

Valley Maker – When I Was a Child
(REVIEW | INTERVIEW)

“When I Was a Child is an album about belief and love in a variety of guises, about the big and unknowable questions, from love and growth and family to God and everlasting life. It’s an album about all of us, basically.”

Eskimeaux – O.K.
(REVIEW)

“O.K. is about reality, the moment we live in and the people we share it with. It’s about the things we want and the things we wish for and the things we can’t control. It’s about doing the best you can and hoping it’s enough, about accepting and learning and growing so that whatever hand you’re dealt, you carve out some semblance of meaning and happiness to make everything worthwhile”

Aero Flynn – S/T
(REVIEW)

“This is not an album in which the emotional arc is self-contained and easily mappable… The redemption is the very fact that Scott is creating words and sounds, that he is letting others know where he is and how he is and why he is. The album is the flare of hope hanging in the night sky, burning bright and incandescent.”

Hip Hatchet – Hold You Like a Harness
(REVIEW)

“[Speaks] of that vulnerable core at the heart of every man, and the desperate, ridiculous attempts to suffocate it with cigarette smoke or drown it in whiskey or cover it over with scars. Hold You Like a Harness is an album about tough guys who know deep down that they aren’t so tough. Yeah they fight and drink and make merry, but they’re also sentimental and lovesick and terrified of everything.”

Mike Pace & the Child Actors – Best Boy
(REVIEW)

“Best Boy is for the children of the 80s and 90s, reminiscing about the age where entertainment exploded, where VHS tapes and cable TV transformed us into constant consumers. Of course, as consumers we were sold promises, told we merely needed x, y and z to be happy and successful and pretty and popular. It’s kind of ironic that a time built on visions of the future is now seen as a utopia locked in the past. Pace gets at this feeling by writing feel-good songs tinged with longing, nothing too sad or serious, nor a Father John Misty-style ironic assault. Instead, Best Boy is a wistful celebration of what we had and presents some convincing reasons for why we feel the way we do.”

Fanpage – LYA
(REVIEW)

“Fanpage’s music occupies a space between life and imitation, too mechanical to be described as organic yet too intuitive and mysterious for machines. It wanders a strange distance ahead of the human race, amongst a chaos born of our need for order. Love and delirium and bright white fear roil beneath the feedback, humanity kicking and twisting within a noise filled with myth and magic and dread. Terrifying and beautiful and glorious, LYA is an album for the information age, where data has exploded to incomprehensible volumes and become its own wilderness.”

Titus Andronicus – The Most Lamentable Tragedy
(REVIEW)

“Life (and especially mental illness) isn’t a neat Freytagian pyramid, so why should a representation of it conform to expectations? […] You are left with the impression that the band have said “fuck it, we’re doing it our way”, rejecting a clear genre in favour of whatever felt right at any given time. This kind of zealous self-belief in their own work is interesting, as it’s at odds with Our Hero’s struggles to accept himself as Himself, and sees Titus Andronicus cutting swathes through the field of wannabes, imposters and pretenders and stepping up to the plate as the twenty-first century’s bona fide punk rock band.”

Elvis Depressedly – New Alhambra
(REVIEW)

“This is not a born-again Love-The-World-Because-Life-Is-Great sort of album. Elvis Depressedly will not mend broken bones or cast out demons or have you walking across hot coals. Instead they say that afflictions are not all there is, that you are not defined solely by your circumstances. They say that peace and hope are never out of reach and offer an achievable version of optimism, one which does not require manic enthusiasm or God-like goodwill but instead a pinch of determination and a firm belief in love.”

Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats – S/T
(REVIEW)

“Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats could be your favourite anti-heroes of the sixties, the forgotten friend of Otis Redding and Sam & Dave, or maybe from even further back, a band of villains rolling into nameless pre-war towns to cause shitstorms in cowboy brawl-bars and put smiles faces for one night only. That there is a serious side is less a surprise than a foregone conclusion, because no man has conjured this kind of bone-level fervour out of a pleasant existence. No, here are people staring down the barrel, people stranded in a sea of beer, locked inside some breakneck motion in which a grin and a grimace are practically indistinguishable. Whether this is a defiant two fingers or last hurrah seems unclear even to Rateliff, himself too caught up in a compulsion to dance and scream and shout. Whatever you take from this record, one thing is clear: They can’t put you in the ground if you’re still moving.”

What were your favourite albums of the year? Let us know through one of the usual channels – we’re on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and Instagram.

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

On a related note, things are gradually getting busier for us in other areas – Liam works full-time and I’ve gone back to school – so the old two posts a day routine might not be maintained too often any more. That said, in an effort to keep things ticking over, we’re going to introduce a new ‘Flash Review’ feature where we cover albums in less words than we would otherwise use. It’s not ideal but a short piece is better than no piece. There’ll still be a good smattering of the usual style too.

Tracklisting:

1. Birthstone (Reprise) – Pet Cemetery
   2. Vice – Roundheels
   3. Forever – Boosegumps
   4. So Long – Heavy Boots
   5. Long Walk To All Sorts of Place – Fanpage
   6. Feathers & Leaves – Ocean Floor
   7. Down Predator Souvenirs – Lejsovka & Freund
   8. Vacation – Florist
   9. 2. – Old Earth
   10. Never Good Enough – Eerie Summer
   11. EZ River – Wilder Maker
   12. Thumbs – Claire Cottrill
   13. If I Were A Portal – Evening Hymns
   14. Jenny Come Home – Andy Shauf
   15. Only Friend – Valley Maker
   16. The Flood – Mike Pace & the Child Actors
   17. Close Call (Adderall Anxiety) – Shaky Shrines
   18. Nancy Kerrigan – Frog
   19. Kaleidoscope – Arbes
   20. The Book of Love – ARMS

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

If you’re new to the band, just know that Crane lists Will Oldham, Damien Jurado and Jason Molina as key influences, which should tell you all you need to know. ‘Oh Lightning’ opens with floating oooohs and gentle acoustic guitars, before the introduction of Crane’s trademark plaintive vocals, which interweave with those of Amy Godwin. The first of many love songs, the track dives straight into some pretty heartfelt sentiments:

“I cannot break your vision
of a future of light
give me your time
I just want to know you better.
Talking shit
I said I want to be the one you miss
I said I want to be your only friend
I said I want to mean something”

Next up is ‘By My Side’, another good example of the scope of Valley Maker’s songwriting, a love song which also addresses the potential of an infinite afterlife and a divine deity. The lyrics appear to describe romantic love in the midst of religious love, and the discovery that it’s possible to love another person more than said divine deity, “When the sun lights up your face / don’t give me God don’t give me grace / just give me something that I can taste like you right by my side”.

‘Only Friend’ references growing up in a southern town and living in a foreign land, both hints at the album’s conception, which took place during a time of change and upheaval in Crane’s life as he moved around on various grad studies and travels, taking him to Colorado, Kentucky, Eastern Europe and, ultimately, Washington, the place he now resides. The song also takes aim at some big existential questions, even if it doesn’t offer any answers, “And if it all just goes away/ or if it all decides to stay / I believe my body ends / and I believe you are my friend”. This sense of doubt or unknowing is a key element to the record. As Crane put it in our interview,

The songs do at times wrestle with what can and can’t be known, and try to make peace with that. But the value of music and art for me is to creatively engage that process, not necessarily to arrive at or broadcast the conclusions.

‘Only Time’ is another love song (“I don’t wanna live, I don’t wanna die without you”), while ‘Something Like Someone’ is slow and solemn, with brushed drums and languidly morose guitar – an exercise in passionate slow burn, eventually flaring towards the end as the percussion gathers intensity and Godwin joins in on vocals. ‘Pretty Little Lifeform’, with its references to evolutionary history and everlasting life, contains one of my favourite lines on the entire album, a sentence which elucidates the nagging feeling that much of Valley Maker’s music gives me. When Crane sings “What is anything for if it’s not to feel and it’s not to need?”, it seems to hint at something that’s increasingly important in our current times. It might sound trite or unoriginally new-agey, but it’s true that in a modern world run by $$$s, individuals are judged primarily by how much money they can make or how many nice things they own or how successful their careers are. People seem to be forgetting how amazing it is to simply exist. The line (and song, and album) acts as a reminder that aspirations should not take ultimate precedence, that sometimes being alive on planet earth, with all these other people, is enough.

‘Take My People Dancing’ is another love song, one which Crane wrote after leaving college and was suffering from all the doubt and uncertainty that comes from that (incidentally, a topic we have mentioned in reviews a few times this year). ‘Another Way Home’ is an acoustic track, while ‘Partial View’ pairs stark guitars with rumbling drums (and is to me reminiscent of a release by another young songwriter which we covered last year). ‘The Mission’ deals explicitly with Crane’s numerous relocations and the consequent personal development, a song about moving on and finding you can be okay:

“I found a new home I found some new friends
I met a good heart I’m learning lessons
I made some teeth marks I cursed some blessing
I miss my parents I miss the mission”

Even though the songs are at the quieter, sadder end of the spectrum, there is a hope inherent in them, most notably on penultimate track ‘Goodness’. A patient build imbued with negative space in the vein of Molina, the song’s second half becomes something akin to an incantation, simultaneously a sincere attempt to summon goodness/kindness/hope and a prayer of thanks for the world and everything in it.

All that’s left, then, is for ‘When I Was a Child’ to close the album on a sombre note, led by intimate acoustic guitars and Crane’s vocals, with jagged bolts of electric guitar puncturing things every now and then. It is a fitting close, the ache of sadness and hope melding into something intensely personal yet bigger than an individual. All of Valley Maker’s music seems to come back to a similar theme. When I Was a Child is an album about belief and love in a variety of guises, about the big and unknowable questions, from love and growth and family to God and everlasting life. It’s an album about all of us, basically.

You can get When I Was a Child now on CD, LP or download via Brick Lane Records.

The post Valley Maker – When I Was a Child appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Tracklisting:

1. By My Side – Valley Maker
   2. Shadow Play – Tierpark
   3. West Texas – PWR BTTM
   4. Console – Joplin Rice
   5. Lightning Dream Shuffle – Will Stratton (for Genius Loci)
   6. Dazed By You – PINS
   7. Y U – Fanpage
   8. The Rest – Alex Bleeker and the Freaks
   9. I’m Not – Hoshifo
   10. Nothing, Just Looking at the Moment – Lejsovka & Freund
   11. Stole Ur Bike – Boosegumps
   12. Our Headache Years – Nudes
   13. Worry, Glory – The Silence Set
   14. Sand – Frankie Cosmos
   15. xplodineyez – Field Medic
   16. Walking The Line – Sam Moss
   17. Bedroom – Alanna McArdle
   18. Tired – Captain Samurai
   19. Birds – M Caridi & The Glow
   20. Gardensong – Funeral Advantage
   21. Snow Bird – Ama Moii
   22. So Long, Suzie (The Damage is Done) – Morning River Band
   23. Cracks in the Sidewalk – Naomi Pop
   24. Burn This – Mauno
   25. What Coast – Grubs
   26. Pulled Over – Generifus
   27. EZ River – Wilder Maker

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

Jon: Hi Austin, thanks for speaking with us! How are things with you? And how are preparations for the new album?

Austin: Thanks for getting in touch! I’m doing well. Seattle is a beautiful place in the summer so I’ve been trying to spend a lot of time outside in parks and in the mountains. Things are coming along nicely with preparations for the release. This is the first time I’ve released new music through a label, so it’s been fun to learn about everything it takes to release a record at this scale, and to be intentional about setting things up well. The band in Seattle has been playing together a lot recently. I’m excited to play some more shows and share the songs with people.

How would you describe the themes of When I Was A Child? What did you set out to achieve with it (if anything)? The press release says it “contemplate[s] life, love, and death, faith and doubt, time and space”. Would you agree with that?

The majority of these songs were written during a 3-year season of my life when I wasn’t really playing shows out at all. Most were written without the idea of any upcoming release in mind. During much of this time I was living in Kentucky and teaching, taking classes, and working on my master’s thesis for 12+ hours a day. Songwriting has always been a way for me to engage with the sort of themes mentioned in your question, but I think especially in that season of intense grad studies, these songs became a way for me to maintain a dialog with where I had been and where I was going. It was only during the process of compiling songs for recording that I noticed how they were cohesive, or at least complementary, thematically. Since these songs come from a time of life that saw a lot of change for me personally, I guess they are a testament to that change, growth, and movement.

The lyrics on the album are packed with doubt and questions, yet there seems to be an overarching clarity, as if you now have answers or else have accepted the answers aren’t coming. It got me thinking of a Checkov quote, something along the lines of “art can’t answer questions, but it can help us formulate them correctly”. Does creating your own music help focus serious personal stuff in ways you didn’t expect when starting out?

I like that conception of art by Checkov very much. I studied Russian language and literature for my undergrad, and I think I resonated with the overarching approach of authors like Dostoevsky, Gogol, and Tolstoy to the human condition – precisely because they honestly engaged how fragile our minds are, how limited our understanding can be, and how mysterious it is to be alive and in community with others, let alone a deity. Personally, I’ve always been drawn to songs that contain an element of mystery or open-endedness, songs that invite your mind to inhabit them with your own reality and questions. Songwriting, for me, can be an exercise in engaging difficult questions – whether those are questions of faith and doubt, or questions of what it means to move away from home, or even to share your life with someone else. The songs on When I Was A Child do at times wrestle with what can and can’t be known, and try to make peace with that. But the value of music and art for me is to creatively engage that process, not necessarily to arrive at or broadcast the conclusions.

Kind of related to the above question, but do you think of others when writing? Like, do you have a perceived audience, or do you do what works for you and hope that it resonates? And do you ever think about how your music can help other people with these big questions too?

While I don’t feel like I write songs with any particular audience in mind, and I would probably have written these exact songs even if they didn’t have an anticipated audience at all, I do think the audience is immensely important to the process of revision and performance. I’ve always had an impulse to share a song soon after it’s written with a bandmate or friend, or sometimes even to try it out at a show. I feel like having someone else present and gauging their reaction helps me figure out where I’m at with it personally. But perhaps most importantly, it gives me a sense of whether or not the song feels honest to play in front of others. If it feels honest when I share it, that’s the most meaningful thing for me.

I do hope others find meaning in the songs as well. It’s always really special to know that someone else has connected with a song I’ve written – but exactly how that happens is totally out of my control. Aside from overtly religious or political kinds of writing (such as hymns or protest songs), I’ve never liked the idea that songs are 100 percent “about” x, y, or z. People sometimes ask me what certain songs are about and I never know how to answer that question, it kind-of makes me uncomfortable. Obviously there is the static artifact of a recorded song, and of course songs are written in particular moments with unique intentions and thought processes – but I see songs as living entities that we engage with differently over time, whether we are playing them or listening to them. So the twelve songs on When I Was A Child came from specific moments and events in my life, but how they remain meaningful for me is always changing. That’s the only way I can keep playing them into 2016 and beyond and not feel like a fraud. Insofar as people listen to the lyrics, I hope they will find meaning in them over time in their own ways. If the songs are helpful with sorting through big existential questions, that’s great. Or sometimes just listening to music as a background to driving or walking through a park is nice too.Where do you get the inspiration for your music? Lots of coverage focuses on your upbringing and religion, but what else inspires you? Do you draw upon the work of other musicians? Or perhaps works of literature?

Well my music is certainly inspired by where I’m from. I think that my upbringing in the US South in a fairly conservative religious community is one reason I’ve taken a lot from writings by the likes of Flannery O’Conner, William Faulkner, and Walker Percy, or from 19^th and 20^th century Russian literature. Generally speaking, one of the most fascinating things to me about music and literature is how people’s sense of place comes to bear on their work. It seems to me that people usually have fairly complicated or conflicting relationships with their homes and upbringings – it’s rarely simple. For me and for many friends that I grew up with, our coming into knowledge of the world and our place in it was infused with religious belief and practice, as interpreted by our families, communities, and churches. There was a lot of beauty and love in that upbringing, and I’m thankful for it, but there are also aspects of evangelicalism that I now find fairly troubling, personally and politically. Songwriting has been one way to work through that, but I wouldn’t say it’s the focus or key inspiration for my music any more than present realities of my life are.

In general, I spend a lot of time listening to records and going to shows in Seattle these days. When I hear or see something great, it always makes me want to be a better writer and performer. I’m inspired by songwriters like Will Oldham, Bill Callahan, Damien Jurado, Chan Marshall, Phil Elverum, and Dan Bejar, to name a few, who have made diverse and compelling songwriting records over the last two decades and are still going. Jason Molina’s songs have been a source of inspiration to me since I first heard Didn’t It Rain at age 17. I never met him personally, but his records are such a gift. It’s been hard to come to terms with his passing.

Do you feel more distant from some of the songs because they were written a few years ago? Or do you feel that they have finally been given the treatment they deserve?

This record has been over two years in the making, between sessions at Archer Avenue Studios with Kenny McWilliams in Columbia, South Carolina and at the Unknown with Trevor Spencer in Anacortes, Washington. Good friends contributed to the recordings in each location (Amy Godwin and Nathan Poole in both). So I feel proud of what the record represents as a whole – in a big way because it is representative of my communities of friends and musicians on both ends of the country. I’m glad that it will be coming out on vinyl. Thanks to everyone involved, I ultimately feel like it developed into an appropriate treatment of these songs that I’m excited to put into the world.

Does this feel like the start of a new chapter, and can we expect more Valley Maker material in the future?

I think moving to Seattle in late-2013 was the start of a new chapter for the project. Upon moving here I started to play a lot more shows and I’ve gotten to know some amazing musicians and people in this city and wider region. Amy Godwin, who sang on both Valley Maker records, is living here now and I’m so honored to be able to play with her on a regular basis, along with Drew Fitchette (bass, guitar) and Wendelin Wohlgemuth (drums, percussion). I’m always writing new songs, and I’ll be excited for the time to come to start compiling material for the next record, but now seems like the proper season to inhabit the songs on When I Was A Child. Some of these have indeed been around for a while, but I don’t feel particularly distant from them. What the songs mean to me is always developing, and part of my vision for this project is to interpret the songs differently with the band in various live settings – that helps keep things fresh as well.

I saw that you recently uploaded your self-titled debut album to Bandcamp. Why did you decide to make it available after all this time? And do you still feel proud of those songs, which were written a part of your senior thesis project in 2010?

That record is a strange beast for me. I do feel proud of it as a collection of songs, and I see it as a foundational moment for this songwriting project. It was the first time Amy and I worked together; it was the first time I wrote mostly on the nylon guitar with alternate tunings; and it was the first time I really tried to give the songs I recorded space to breathe – to only bring to the recording what the songs needed. I had the first record online to download for free for about two years, and it was fascinating to me how people around the world found it and connected with it, with hardly any promotional efforts on my part. The internet has interconnected our lives in strange ways, but I guess that’s not always a bad thing.

As you wrote in your question, that record was written in 2010 for my undergraduate senior thesis project at the University of South Carolina, and it focused thematically on narratives from the Biblical Book of Genesis. So songwriting-wise, it was a momentary, structured focus on stories of beginnings that I had grown up being taught were foundationally true. For me it was both an academic and personal project to look at them in a new light by focusing on their humanity and mystery. But as years went past, and particularly as I moved to Seattle and actually started to play music regularly again, it felt increasingly strange for these to be the only songs people could access from the project. I didn’t want Valley Maker to be pigeonholed as a sort-of “Bible songs” conceptual project, because for me it had already evolved far beyond the thesis record into a general songwriting project. All that being said, I am still happy for people to be able to access that record. It just seemed appropriate to bring it back in concert with plans for new material to be released. That way 22 and 27 year-old me are both represented.Finally could you name 4 or 5 bands/artists that you’ve been enjoying lately? They can be brand new or from a hundred years ago, whatever you like.

I saw Tinariwen play in Seattle a few weeks ago and it was mind-blowingly good. I’ve been trying to learn as much as I can about guitar-based music from Africa over the last few years, and it was really incredible to be in the presence of that style of playing. I’m really moved right now by the work of Sidi Toure and Boubacar Traore, who are both guitarists and singers from Mali. I’ve been a big fan since Michigan, but Sufjan Steven’s latest record was nearly the only thing I listened to for several months – just incredible songwriting. My most listened to record of the last two years is probably Joanna Newsom’s Ys; it’s a gift that keeps giving. I’ve also been really enjoying Chad Vangaalen’s last two records. Finally, my friend Chris Staples in Seattle is a wonderful songwriter; we’ve played some fun shows together recently and I love his latest record. Sorry, that’s more than five.

When I Was A Child will be released on the 25th September. You can (and definitely should!) pre-order it now via Brick Lane Records. We’ll get a full review up nearer to release. You can read our review here.

The post Interview: Valley Maker appeared first on Various Small Flames.