A song that she says “comes from acknowledging the type of magic that exists all around us and yearning to get a taste of it,” ‘rosemary’ is the new single from addy (the project led by Philadelphia’s Addy Watkins). Her first new music since last year’s temperance, the song takes indie pop and stripped-back folk and refracts them into a new shape entirely, something warm and fond and all-enveloping.  “I was in love with a witch once,” Watkins describes of the song’s inspiration, “who taught me rosemary hung over my bed would help with my crippling nightmares. which it did and still does whenever I remember to hang it.”

Alice Hebborn – Saisons – Movement 2

December sees the release of Saisons, the debut album from Belgian composer Alice Hebborn on Western Vinyl. Created following a move to the countryside, the record draws inspiration from theories of ecofeminism and environmental harmony and presents a world cast volatile and disordered in the wake of human impacts. Across seven movements, built of piano and electronics, Hebborn imagines a different future. One in which humans cease to throw the natural balance and instead become a key link in a harmonious web of reciprocal relationships. Lead single ‘Movement 2’ is “the starting point of Saisons,” Hebborn describes. “It was written in the spring and draws its inspiration from the captivating images of this season: the awakening of nature and our senses, the great activity of all living things.”

Banti Buli – Hennessy Song

“Refusing to commit fully to irony or sincerity […] as though a song about relationships couldn’t really function without equal doses of heartfelt emotion and tongue-in-cheek humour.” So we wrote of Banti Buli‘s ‘Something Like a Honda Odyssey’ last year, a song which mixed languid rhythms with a distinctively verbose lyricism. Ahead of an album due next spring, Banti Gheneti is now back with ‘Hennessy Song’, a track which see the US-based Dutch-Oromo artist take samples from his surroundings to build an earnest soundscape exploring the transience of even the most steadfast habits. “The closest thing to a home (the Ethiopian corner store) becomes a hole in the ground and your lover leaves you,” as Gheneti says. “Even routines and promises are ephemeral.”

figure eight – 1999 (cherry)

A mainstay of the Bay Area scene, figure eight originated as the experimental noise project of duo Nash Rood and Abby Goeser, starting out with nothing but a distorted synthesizer and acoustic drum kit. However, on welcoming a number of additional members in recent years (including Nicholas Coleman on bass and Nicky Esparza on drums), the band has now evolved into something altogether more full-bodied. Take new single ‘1999 (cherry)’, a song with finds the outfit at their most boisterous and reserved within the same three minutes. The searing opening is indebted to hardcore, though the crushing momentum soon breaks into something almost delicate. These twin threads of lightness and weight weave across the track into what appears to be the spirit of this new version of figure eight—a band aware of the transcendent power available at both ends of the spectrum.

His His – My Friend Wants to be a Freemason

We last featured Aidan Belo’s His His project almost exactly a year ago when we covered the single ‘Ford Econoline’, a song about life in a tour van that we said felt “like the sensation of returning home in your mind as you cruise down an unfamiliar stretch of highway in some faraway city.” The Toronto-based artist returns with a new EP, Good Gold, coming out next month, and has just released the final single ahead of the release. Informatively titled ‘My Friend Wants to be a Freemason’, it’s a track about a childhood friend who became obsessed with joining a masonic lodge. “The idea of joining this secret society consumed my friend, and for a couple of months it was all that he’d talk about,” as Belo describes. Musically the song follows a familiar His His formula, a gentle and folk-inflected indie pop song that wears an air of weary wistfulness like the grain in an old film photograph.

Good Gold is due to be released on 15th November via Victory Pool Records. You can pre-save it now on streaming services.

Kassie Krut – Reckless

Kassie Krut are wasting no time introducing themselves. “K / A / S / S / I / E / K / R / U / T / T / T / T,” goes the opening line of new single ‘Reckless’, a de facto theme song for the new project of Kasra Kurt, Eve Alpert (formerly of Palm) and Matt Anderegg (Mothers, Body Meat). The band have just signed to Fire Talk Records, and new single offers a glimpse at the core of the project. Something undoubtedly contemporary yet possessing a rawer dimension too, as though through the idiosyncratic art pop style comes an altogether more atavistic, primal energy. Directed by Guy Kozak, the video for the song was filmed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and offers a visual representation of the sound’s frantic playfulness.

‘Reckless’ is out now and available via the Kassie Krut Bandcamp page.

Mark Trecka – Witch’s Hat (ft. Midwife & An Heap)

The work of Mark Trecka never sits still, the Chicago-born artist and activist utilising sound to explore a diverse set of styles and themes in a practice as inventive as it is ambitious. More recent work has turned towards post-punk as an avenue of exploration, and latest single ‘Witch’s Hat’ continues to plough that same furrow. Recorded between Paris and Colorado, the track is described as Trecka’s “Halloween song,” existing with the common ground between that which is haunting and beautiful. Midwife joins on backing vocals and An Heap on synths to further elevate the dynamic, the song moving from apparent minimalism into a gauzy atmosphere as though pushing through the layers of time itself.

Michael Younker – Bad News

Michael Younker is a Detroit-born, Brooklyn-based production designer who also makes rock & roll music that he says “melds lighthearted cynicism with unashamed big rock motifs.” He has just released his debut EP, Sweet Things, a four-song record that’s brash and chaotic and amped up with bratty energy. “Sonically & lyrically, Sweet Things feels like the kid who ate too much sugar, bounced off walls, and passed out on the floor,” Younker describes. “Music of obsession, excess, indulgence, and…consequences?” ‘Bad News’ is perhaps the best place to start, capturing the EP’s manic motion and carefree bravado. “I can’t make you love me,” Younker sings, before snottily trying his best anyway in the following line – “C’mon, give it a go!”

Old Man of the Woods – Ghost

“A visceral exploration of a villain’s arc, tracing her devolution from possession to obsession to dissolution.” So reads the album notes for Triptych I: Devolve, the latest release from Seattle-based project Old Man of the Woods. The first in a series of EPs, the three-song collection offers a self-described “goth ethereal mycelial” sound to chart a fall from grace in all of its tragedy, majesty and strange avenues of agency. Such as with single ‘Ghost’, where the central character moves from resentment to something closer to power with the realisation that the ability to haunt can represent its own form of control.

Orchid Mantis – Dead Malls (feat. Cathedral Bells)

Following a collaboration with Sign Crushes Motorist earlier this year, not to mention several more singles in the meantime, Orchid Mantis (the recording project of Atlanta‘s Thomas Howard) has returned with a new single ‘Dead Malls’. This time featuring Orlando, Florida shoegazey bedroom pop act Cathedral Bells, the track uses imagery of an abandoned shopping mall to explore emotions altogether more personal. Where past hopes, once bright and shiny and full of promise, have withered on the vine, now little more than empty husks. But the atmosphere is not downbeat, rather wistful and hazy, looking back on old memories as though flickering warm and grainy from an old film projector.

The post Weekly Listening: October 2024 #1 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Bay Area songwriter Asha Wells is releasing a double single ahead of forthcoming album Water Words on Royal Oakie Records. Written during a testing period of a relationship, Water Words traces the arc of a partnership from dreamy beginnings to the new paths of the aftermath, and this pair of singles sits in the strange space at the heart of this progression. The period where nothing is decided in any one direction, the potential of both promise and regret latent within every detail. Take ‘Blue Angels’ and the way it marbles intimacy and hesitance into its tender tones, like an open palm wanting to grasp what is before it, though wary of the thorns hidden out of view.

Elisapie – Uummati Attanarsimat

Recording under her first name, Juno Award-winning Inuk musician, filmmaker and activist Elisapie Isaac makes music that reflects Canada’s complex history, singing in English, French and the Inuit language of Inuktitut as she combines contemporary pop with her ancestral culture. Her latest single ‘Uummati Attanarsimat’ is a cover of Blondie’s new wave classic ‘Heart of Glass’ translated into Inuktitut. A song that transports Elisapie to her childhood, bringing back memories of dancing to the radio with her cousins. “I remember one night when they played ‘Heart of Glass,'” she recalls. “I must have been five or six years old. They all started dancing like crazy. I observed their joy with admiration. I felt like I was free.” The cover also comes with a video, directed by Philippe Léonard, which comprises of Super 8 archival footage from Quebec’s northern reaches. Watch it below:

‘Uummati Attanarsimat’ is out now via Bonsound and available to download from the Elisapie Bandcamp page.

Her New Knife – douglasland.v1

Philadelphia outfit Her New Knife have recently released lead dreams/flayed so light, a new EP via Julia’s War Records. Through a combination of noise and shoegaze elements, the band weave a deliciously dark sound somewhere between 90s alt rock and contemporary acts like Greet Death, the controlled simmer of its brooding dark always threatening to spill over into chaos. Inspired by the band’s dog, who is said to have the regular old name of Halo 3, ‘douglasland.v1’ is the ideal intro to the aesthetic for anyone uninitiated, its palpable weight settling over the listener and gathering like a thunderhead before the searing climax.

Josie Toney – Extra

With album Extra coming soon on Like You Mean It Records, Olympia‘s Josie Toney has shared the title track to whet appetites for her distinctive blend of traditional and contemporary country styles. It’s a tale of longing dressed in a wistful brightness, inspired not so much by the heartbreak so familiar to the genre but rather the missed opportunity that comes with lonely living. “Is there anybody out there / who wants what I’ve got to give?” she sings in the opening lines. “I have so much extra / more than any one girl needs to live.” But more than that, Toney recognises that others are out there feeling the exact same way, and the song becomes a kind of ode to the possibility of a mutual love, if not yet the love itself.

Extra is out now via Like You Mean It Records.

Jude Brothers – practicing silence / looking for water!

There’s a curious mix of sorrow and whimsy on ‘practising silence / looking for water!’, the lead single from Jude Brothers’ render tender / blunder sunder coming soon on Gar Hole Records. The sense that the distance between the confusion of loss and clarity of peace isn’t all that large, with a considerable overlap between the experiences. Consisting of just Celtic lever harp and vocals, the song explores this territory with a delicate, compassionate tone, cataloguing those things lost amid living while coming to a sense of acceptance too. The track also has a video directed by Adeliza Backus-Pace which featured puppets made by Flying Wall Studios and controlled by Damon and Sabrina Griffith:

render tender / blunder sunder is out via Gar Hole Records and you can pre-order it now.

Langkamer – Hatchet

With new album The Noon and Midnight Manual coming this May on Breakfast Records,  Bristol‘s Langkamer are unveiling a steady stream of new tracks. First single ‘Sing at Dawn’ found “the sweet centre of a Venn diagram of twangy Americana and insouciant indie rock,” as we described it, though in doing so worked through heavier themes and depressive moods. New single ‘Hatchet’ again uses left-field pop energy as a Trojan horse to push into darker territory, taking inspiration from an old poet vocalist/drummer Josh Jarman knew. “He read me a poem about going to the supermarket with his wife, and how much of a struggle it was,” Jarman explains. “His words really stuck with me. How difficult such everyday things had become for them. Even just getting out of a car. It was heartbreaking, the matter-of-fact way he spoke about it.”

The Noon And Midnight Manual is out on the 8th May via Breakfast Records and you can pre-order it now from the Langkamer Bandcamp page.

Matthew Danger Lippman – And

Matthew Danger Lippman practises what has been called “stream-of-consciousness songwriting,” blending psych, pop and indie rock into an inventive and endlessly shifting style able to evoke the flights of fancy of our inner worlds. New album Once You Get Low You’ve Gotta Start Flying Baby promises to build upon this style is all of its bizarre glory, with lead single ‘And’ typifying Lippman’s ability to be earnest and absurd in the same breadth. The sort of thing which only makes sense when caught up within it, dream logic fired by its own momentum and charged by the endearing brightness of its rhythm.

And I had that dream last night
Where I pissed on the third rail
And the charge climbed up the piss trail
And it shot into my dickhole
And electrified me

And I walked around glowing
And I fried everything that I touched
And then I ran into my third grade teacher and she said
“You better watch where you piss”
And watch me now!

Palm Shadow – You Wouldn’t Have It Any Other Way

Based in southern California, Palm Shadow is a songwriter and musician who combines elements of dream pop, shoegaze and folk to create lush, diaphanous songs that shimmer and swirl in an enveloping haze. Debut single ‘You Wouldn’t Have It Any Other Way’ is the perfect introduction, taking the stark emotion of the likes of Phoebe Bridgers or Lucy Dacus and wrapping it up in ethereal ambience. Subtle arpeggiated synths add a cinematic poignancy as the song looks head-on at the tender regrets and heart-quickening inevitability of a complicated relationship, touching on what the liner notes describe as “bad timing, tabled ambitions, missed connections and procrastination guilt.”

Wayfinding – Hiro Up From The Woodshop

Wayfinding is an Edmonton-based project consisting of nêhiyawak members Marek Tyler and Matthew Cardinal alongside musician/artist Cassia Hardy (Wares) and Ryan Beattie (Himalayan Bear, Chet). The band introduced their shoegaze-inflected pomo pop back in November with ‘Bad Bloods’, which turned out to be the opening track of a self-titled EP set for release next month. It is a collection of songs which explores the full spectrum of memories both personal and cultural to Canada’s colonial history and the people shaped within it. Latest single ‘Hiro Up From the Woodshop’ moves through loneliness and humble compassion to capture the essence of a friendship, as well as the existential weight bubbling beneath even the quietest of moments.

And if you should inscribe
Iambic pentameter on my gravesite
make it a couple of lines
about the first part of my life
No empty accolades
Or poetry infantilized
Just the good times

The post Weekly Listening: March 2023 #4 appeared first on Various Small Flames.