With the album’s release approaching, Lutalo has returned with a pair of singles, ‘The Bed’ and ‘The Broken Twin’, which further further introduce the sound. The former is a bright folk song which feels far larger than its relatively short runtime suggests, a band joining the acoustic rhythm and Lutalo’s vocals possessing some of that Dylan-esque swagger in the refrain. On the other hand, ‘The Broken Twin’ offers a far moodier atmosphere, its rhythm more conflicted and dark with its faltering drums. But the vocals emerge through this sound with a sense of insistence, driving through towards the momentous conclusion.

It started to phase me
No time can run out
It started to play me
The word had come round
I sorted the colors and followed the sound

Watch the video below by Hannah Cobb and Joey Cobb:

The Academy is out on the 20th September via Winspear and you can pre-order it now from the Lutalo Bandcamp page.

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Alive People therefore blurs line between live and not. An almost surreal tone, the sense of things heightened, life stripped to its weird, wonderful energies. The mood builds upon that of 2019’s Kleinmeister, also released by Orindal Records, which used an abundance of details to achieve its singular style. “Poetic and often bizarre, Kleinmeister is an album where light and dark are marbled into intricate swirls,” we wrote at the time. A record which straddled the organic, synthetic and spiritual through a sense of accumulation, where the sublime and absurd sat side by side. As we continued:

Juxtaposing Adirondack green and cemetery stone grey with a lurid latex shine, the record presents the environment as a museum of trash—rotting fruit and meat laid out next to polyethylene and polystyrene and plasma-powered TV screens. The physical mess dictates a mental one too, old wounds and shitty thoughts persisting, because no longer are discarded items out of sight and out of mind. Rather, the great drifting detrital mass looms over both the landscape and conscience, the past not buried but everywhere, clogging up the present and the future too, refuse refusing to degrade.

Alive People is no more frugal. After the self-reflective opener ‘No Mono Aware’, which sees Garbus reflect on creative insecurities, irony as armour and the manifold dimensions of any one personality, the record zips around a diversity of subject matter as it sees fit. ‘Healthy Gamer’ is an ode to the titular character, as well as the strange mix of confinement and freedom which marks their experience. “Stately gamer, living in your chair / Your arm’s length the limit of your stare,” as the opening lines go, though seconds later this is followed by a differing observation. “I see us in those candy lights, above the Sim sea / Arresting our development / But making us free, giving us wings.” The question then becomes, in a society so keen to scrub away purpose or connectivity beyond labour, which is more real—IRL or RPG?

Various collaborators helped shape the album, with elie mcafee-hahn (synth and bass), Julie Bodian (atypical guitars) and Julia Tadlock (voice and presence) all lending their talents on stage, Nick Bisceglia taking engineering duties and Justin Pizzoferrato the mixing. The result is a sound often understated but always surprising, the trademark Ruth Garbus invention extending to their use of space and patience too, allowing the songs to be some of the most visionary and intimate to be released this year. ‘Rubber Tree’ presents an interspecies relationship as a joyous mutualism, ‘Whispers in Steel’ the most delicate ballad to the traffic on Brattleboro streets you’re ever likely to hear, while ‘Waiting for the Sun’ meditates on self-care in all of its banal detail and mindful integrity.

Two small squares of dark chocolate
One or two vials of red wine
“You get the bags”
The candle smells of pine
Waiting for reality to strike
Anxiety is suffering but
Lightly, lightly
We’re waiting on the sun

And things don’t stop there. Songs about the unreality of cinema (‘Pastel Umbrella’) and the transcendence of sports (‘Sports’) are followed by one centring on the miracle of the town hall meeting, the appropriately titled ‘Reenchantment of the World’. “When you go to town meeting you will see people’s minds / Heaping the clay onto mounds under heaven / Reaping the harvests of offices,” as Garbus sings, “And there was government music.” The track brings to mind films like Frederick Wiseman’s City Hall, pushing through the mundane bureaucracy of civil service to reveal the marvel underneath. That energy which exists when people gather as a community, work to realise things they could not achieve alone.

This relationship between the individual and the collective threads right through Alive People—the struggle between protecting personal idiosyncrasies and the enriching potential of the group—right down to the process of its recording. In this way, Alive People could be described as a kind of musical vérité. The product of a single mind, recorded live yet edited to be more truthful than it might otherwise manage. The sound of an individual reaching out beyond their confines in order to share their energy. Songs are awake when you sing them. Between the performer and the performee flows an electricity.

Alive People is out now via Orindal Records you can get it from the Ruth Garbus Bandcamp page.

Cover painting by Audrey Weber

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Opener ‘PLPH’ introduces the blend of folk, rock and soul which constitutes the Lutalo sound, as well as the critique of capitalist and racist systems that extends across the release. “I sit inside your pretty little painted house,” go the opening lines, calling out the window dressing on these violent levers of power, and the song ends with a defiant refrain. “I won’t play your game / It’s making me go insane.” With its languid rhythm and grungy attitude, ‘Hold My Head’ is no less evocative, a meditation on addiction that feels like a response to the previous track. A picture of the coping mechanisms required to live in a broken world.

Take my blood
Till I’m bone dry
Give it to me
A bold face lie
Throw my vote
Into the box
Cast me away
An old pair of socks

The rest of the songs on the release cover a variety of topics, though all circle back to the oppression built into our society. “I’m analysing those systems and patterns, and also asking, ‘Can we continue to not perpetuate this?’” Lutalo explains. “Because it’s hurt a lot of people historically. I’m just asking people to question it.” ‘The Old Cast’ asks to be lifted beyond the fate which seems inevitable, and ‘Push Back Baby’ confronts corporate greed head on, both tracks understated in sound but cutting beneath the surface. ‘Strange Folk’ smoulders with a volatile energy, threatening to spill over, but instead just embraces it own momentum. Closer ‘WAR’ rises from this energised, a call to arms which shakes free from the fuzz of the record and grows confident in its contempt.

Held in paper skin
One just wants to feel care
Torn apart from within
In defiance or despair
To war again

AGAIN is out now via Winspear and available from the Lutalo Bandcamp page.

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This phenomenon is central to Somethinghood. Present in the desert sky of opener ‘Sorbet’, or a kitchen’s steam and sunlight in ‘Heaven’. And furthermore it’s used as the foundation for more philosophical musings. Take ‘Museum of Light’, a track which uses the underappreciated miracle of hot water as the basis for metaphysical contemplations, and comes to find beauty and sustenance in everything. “My sink spills god when I run the faucet,” Lerman sings. “Hot water holy father I’m coming back to life.”

I saw bankers buying flowers
And babies clutching fingers
Of mothers who weren’t always
But forever now shall be
I saw Catholics praying
Buddhists meditating
Atheists existing
And that’s proof enough for me

Which isn’t to say there’s no unease in the songs. ‘Jenny When the Blues‘ is marked by a tangible loneliness, ‘Motion Sickness’ by a premature mourning, and the striking ‘Frankie is Alive’ is entirely balanced on the knife-edge of mortality. However, what darkness there is on the record only serves to highlight the delights it holds too, as though life’s ephemeral nature is an inherent part of its joys. ‘Frankie Alive’ is the perfect example, a strikingly fond track which charts the life of dog against a backdrop of news both brutal and banal. Bushfires in the outback, dolphins in the canals of Venice, Ozzy Osbourne opening a chain a gothic BBQ restaurants. The news grows increasingly astounding as the song develops, from extraterrestrial contact to the separation of the soul from the body, all while the titular hero outlives science and expectation.

On the day Frankie turned 30
She became the first dog to ever turn 30
And above packed arena seating
She was knighted in front of a crowd of one billion

The contrast of catastrophes and miracles is typical of Somethinghood, even if the miracles are not always as obvious as Frankie’s. “The world you know is ending / You can feel it in the quiet,” goes ‘Big Hole in the Sky’, “in the junkyard breeding lightyears / of upturned cars on fire.” But against the apocalyptic imagery, the track operates on another plane. The ground level existence, a sense of love persevering against everything else. The song, and indeed the album as a whole, not only serves as a confrontation of our unravelling world, but also the near divine moments of peace we might still find within it.

Somethinghood is out now and available from the A Box of Stars Bandcamp page.

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Combining the sensibilities of lo-fi rock and slow burn country rock, Vermont‘s A Box of Stars have made a name re-examining life’s small moments in search of their weight and meaning. Single ‘Jenny When the Blues’ is the perfect introduction for the uninitiated, a tender, near-whispered folk duet which blooms into life across its runtime, drawing the listener through a seemingly ordinary moment to reveal the depth beneath the surface.

‘Jenny When the Blues’ is out now. Find A Box of Stars in all the usual places.

Cooper Wolken – Hold Me Under

Back in March we premiered ‘So Down‘, the lead single from Cooper Wolken‘s new album Chapters on Earth Libraries. “The album sees Cooper Wolken apply such observations to his personal life,” as we explained, “mining the fine details to illuminate the fundamental truths at the core of his experiences, no matter how vulnerable this might make him.” The album has now been released, and latest single ‘Hold Me Under’ continues this introspective, unguarded mood. A song which combines shimmering textures with an urgent edge, Wolken again pacing out into the woods of his childhood and finding something sacred there.

I left those woods behind my home
The place where I first heard your song
Then I saw your face, unexpected place
If we meet again, if we meet again
If we meet you can

Hold me under holy water

Chapters is out now via Earth Libraries.

Graves – Cavin’ In

Last month we introduced Gary Owens: I Have Some Thoughts, the upcoming album by Graves on Perpetual Doom and Curly Cassettes, with single Little ‘Dumb Dogs’. The song highlighted how the album represents “a throwback to Nashville’s golden age, loaded with a sense of bittersweet nostalgia and a wry humour that brings new vigour to a timeless style.” Latest track ‘Cavin’ In’ continues the vibe, what the label describes as an “upbeat downer” which evokes the bygone simplicity of the previous age while offering a self-deprecating melancholy too, utilizing this style to explore age old themes of regret and mortality.

Olivia Reid – Central Park West

Following 2021 debut Earth Water, Olivia Reid is releasing a series of new songs this year, and latest ‘Central Park West’ highlights the careful arrangements and emotional depth which marks her work. Written after the passing of her aunt and uncle, the track is an effort to preserve specific memories of times shared, its mourning leavened by an overriding gratitude. Because though illness altered and ultimately ended the walks in Central Park Reid would share with her family, she makes a point of choosing to cherish what they shared rather than lament what is lost.

Paper Lady – Swan Song

The esoteric Allston, Massachusetts project Paper Lady has won our attention on several occasions in recent months, from the dense shoegaze spiritualism of ‘Five of Swords‘ to the excoriating romance-gone-bad ‘Starcross‘, the latter “burn[ing] with what could be spurned fury or frustrated embarrassment,” as we put it, “building nonetheless into with unerring intensity of an ancient curse.” Ahead of new EP Traveling Exploding Star, latest single ‘Swan Song’ sands down the sharpest edges of the previous tracks yet loses none of the intensity, building from smouldering beginnings into an all-out blaze, the sound’s sluggish melancholy transcended in a final moment of release.

Traveling Exploding Star is out now and available via streaming services.

Puppy Angst – TKO

Lead vocalist and guitarist Alyssa Milman (Past Life, Blushed), Puppy Angst is a Philly-based outfit which draws upon everything from dream and power pop to shoegaze to capture life’s contradictions. Hence the PA sound embraces raw energy and dreamy hazy, and Milman’s writing is happy to explore vulnerability and strength within the same song. Released via Fire Talk‘s digital singles imprint Open Tab, new single ‘TKO’ is an encapsulation of the sound, its momentum possessing a cathartic empowerment even as the vocals announce their fatalistic conclusions.

Maybe I’m a masochist
I’ll put you first if you insist
Baby I’m a pacifist
Don’t wanna fight so I let you win
I let you win

‘TKO’ is out now and available from the Puppy Angst Bandcamp page.

Rival Consoles – Coda

Back in October we wrote about Now Is, an album by London-based musician and producer Ryan Lee West’s Rival Consoles on Erased Tapes. A record which “sets out to explore the full spectrum of minimalism and the moods which can result,” as we explained, “from anxious isolation to playful curiosity and everything in between.” New single ‘Coda’ is equally ambitious in its reach, looking to portray the duality of the nocturnal environment through haunting quiet and pulsing energy. What results is a soundtrack for the spectrum of night, from the still darkness of an empty room to the house clubs glittering on across the city.

Wombo – Thread

We’ve covered Wombo a number of times in recent years, culminating in last year’s full-length Fairy Rust on Fire Talk Records. A released we described as “a collection of songs which explores the contemporary preoccupation with the unreal.” This month sees Wombo return with Slab, an EP which looks to harness the outfit’s instinctive creativity, favouring immediacy over perfection with stylistic freedom and scratch take guitar. Single ‘Thread’ hints at the result—a picture of a band in constant motion, always looking to challenge themselves with new directions while nevertheless growing increasingly assured upon the ground they’ve made their own. Watch the video directed by Wombo’s own Cameron Low below:

Slab is out now via Fire Talk Records and you can get it from Bandcamp.

Yvonne Hercules – Phoenix

Based in Cambridge, Yvonne Hercules is a singer-songwriter whose work draws on the rich lineages of folk, Blues and soul, tying them together with a contemporary twist. Last week she released Olive, a brand new EP on Trapped Animal Records, a collection of songs which “celebrate the strength of Black Women and the ability to rise up and overcome adversity” and fully captures her rich and varied style. Closing track ‘Phoenix’ is perhaps the standout, a soulful, quietly epic ode to Hercules’s mother and her resilience and compassion in the face of adversity.

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Next Month, Old Saw will release a new record, Country Tropics, on Lobby Art. Comprised of just four tracks, the album is the perfect introduction to the Old Saw ethos, combining elements of folk, country, ambient and drone into long bending hymns to the American landscape in all its beauty and disorder. It’s as patient as the seasons, finding wonder and devotion not in the cotton-wool clouds of some celestial realm but the dust, dirt and decay of the here and now.

The result is something unique, an atmosphere quite unlike any other. Country Tropics evokes an ambience of prayer-like solemnity that celebrates something decidedly terrestrial, what the label describe as “a rusted and granular shadow world where the dive bar meets the divine.” It recalls one of those junkyard shrines built by some sincere eccentric, improbably wonderful forms of weathered stone and scrap metal standing like totems to an unrecognised religion rooted in the earth around us. As Lobby Art continues, Country Tropics approaches this broken and corroded world “as an iceberg,” the ensemble “dredg[ing] up silt, clay, weeds, and trash to craft a more holy image of our tattered landscape.”

Today we have the pleasure of unveiling the record’s closing track, ‘Chewing the Bridle.’ Surfacing from a single ambient tone, the song unveils its textures with slow grace, the various elements coalescing around the pure drone bedrock to achieve a sacred air. But rather than being transportive, the sound is anchored by that which surrounds it. Concerned not with the looming sky or unseen heavens or even the refuge of one’s own mind, but very ground before us. Old Saw give us devotional music folded back on itself, ethereality inverted, arms aloft and palms out, digging into the tactile dirt.

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Clever Girls recently unveiled a brand new single from the album. Titled ‘Baby Blue’, the song dials back the raucous bite of ‘Spark’ in favour of raw sentiment. Jean says it’s “about the absolute euphoria that occurs when love and emotional safety are reciprocated in the face of loneliness,” and the track glides effortlessly between a sense of solitude and one of connection. Subtle guitars sparkle and swirl like thoughts in the quiet of an empty room, while the beat that kicks in after the chorus sounds uncannily like the intimate thump of a human pulse.

‘Baby Blue’ was initially written three years ago, but wasn’t recorded until early 2020. It has since taken on renewed meaning, recalling what Jean describes as “the darkest days of the pandemic” in the spring of 2020. “I spent all of May, while Vermont was still very much on lockdown, in complete isolation with the exception of my cat,” they explain. “It was exactly the type of experience that the song was born out of in the first place—feeling isolated, and cut off from the world even when it was still turning—if not on fire—outside of my door.”

Constellations is out on 20th February on Egghunt Records and you can pre-order it now from the Clever Girls Bandcamp page.

Cover photo by Kay Dargin

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Titled ‘Spark’, the song feels like an evolution for Clever Girls, meatier indie rock elements adding a raw directness to the dreamy emoti-pop of previous songs. The verses sit in lulls between bursts of big guitars and crashing drums, Jean’s vocals at times soft and unassuming but always edged with something darker. As the title suggests, the song uses the imagery of starting a fire to explore similarly destructive and purging phenomena in our lives.

Therefore, ‘Spark’ might have all the emotion of previous Clever Girls songs, but there’s a sense of violence that’s new. Images of gasoline and fights and buried teeth sit next to vulnerable sentiment, a juxtaposition that is perhaps best illustrated in a line near the beginning. “And this hallway stinks like piss,” Jean sings, in a moment that mixes grimy reality with something tender, “but I still feel her fingertips pressed against my lips.”

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Next month sees the release of a brand new Bleach Day album, as if always, recorded over two years between other projects (such as performing on Wished Bone‘s Cellar Belly). Having since grown into a five piece, the record finds Bleach Day at their most versatile and vivid, ambling bass and twelve-string guitar and deep, dawning percussion combining to form a sound that possesses a rich, translucent form. Equally adept at spacey expanses and sun-bleached warmth, this “impressionistic and painterly palette” allows the band a broad scope in theme and focus, from introspective intimacy to soaring trips beyond the self and back again. As the press release explains:

as if always composes a sonic language that takes the listener through a story of growth and self discovery in its most primeval form, which mirrors a full life cycle from birth to death. Through struggle you learn to confront your fears, your shadows, and your limitations to become the person you are meant to be. It’s a journey to a place that feels far away—until you realize it’s actually within yourself, and always has been.

Today we’re delighted to be able to share the album’s lead single, ‘in limbo’. Taking the languid cordiality of classic pop and applying a lo-fi sheen, the song has an uncanny edge, a certain spectrality, phasing in and out of solid existence as the verses and refrain cycle through. The result is something like a haunted transmission, a hopeful message from the past coloured melancholic by distance and context, and one that fades into the empty, barren distortion of blank tape.

as if always is out on the 6th March via Birdwatcher Records and you can pre-order it now on vinyl, CD and cassette from Bandcamp.

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Similar ideas run through Kleinmeister, the forthcoming album from Ruth Garbus on Orindal Records. Juxtaposing Adirondack green and cemetery stone grey with a lurid latex shine, the record presents the environment as a museum of trash—rotting fruit and meat laid out next to polyethylene and polystyrene and plasma-powered TV screens. The physical mess dictates a mental one too, old wounds and shitty thoughts persisting, because no longer are discarded items out of sight and out of mind. Rather, the great drifting detrital mass looms over both the landscape and conscience, the past not buried but everywhere, clogging up the present and the future too, refuse refusing to degrade.

“Waste has a solemn aura now,” DeLillo continues. “An aspect of untouchability.” To live in our world is to live amongst the debris of what has gone before.

Ruth Garbus has built a reputation in the New England arts scene as one of the most distinctive and divergent songwriters currently plying their trade. Aside from her work with buzz-pop band Happy Birthday, the psych-folk group Feathers and an experimental quintet alongside Wendy Eisenberg, the Brattleboro, VT-based artist has four solo releases that push against genre tropes in order to craft something weirder and more meaningful. As songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Chris Cohen puts it, “[Garbus’s] songs reaffirm the power of music itself and its basic elements—big and small intervals placed just so in time, the play of sound and meaning in words, parts put together without force or artifice.”

Her fifth solo record, Kleinmeister represents the perfection of Garbus’s esoteric art. Recorded with Travis Laplante and with production and mixing by Ryan Power, Kleinmeister is altogether more vivid than previous releases, and Garbus herself has worked to develop her own sound too—spending two years under the tutelage of opera singer Jim Anderson to fully realise her mezzo soprano vocal range.

Far from dampening Ruth Garbus’s idiosyncratic vision, the studio recording and professional training elevate it to a higher plane, lending a sanctified edge to the singular tone. Poetic and often bizarre, Kleinmeister is an album where light and dark are marbled into intricate swirls, the lasting emotion not anything as simple as happy or sad but rather a kind of extra-personal awe, that of standing before the great overwhelming forces of the world and still having to remember to breathe.

Today, we’re delighted to share the first single and opening track from Kleinmeister, ‘Strash’, a song which shares DeLillo’s reverence for and dread of garbage. Inspired by Elizabeth Royte’s Garbage Land, Ruth Garbus allows waste its true sensual dimensions, the track loaded with fecund imagery that blurs the line between life and death. The “insurmountable heaps, hot and green” and “visceral viscera wet cardboard steam” is set against an artificial backdrop of plastic toys and technology, the man-made sinking into the tangible world. Here, that which we throw away is not willed out of existence by distance and depth but all around us—Knee high, waist high—and Garbus leads us by the hand as we wade through it, looking for something we might recognise, something we thought we’d be able to forget.

Plasticated paper and popsicle sticks covered in algae
Leppy my stuffed animal being with me till I’m old now
This giant hole
Is the way
That I use
To say
Oooooo
Oooooo she say

The song comes complete with a video directed by Joey Agresta. Check it out below:

Photos by Annie Flanagan, album art by Ruth Garbus

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