With the album coming soon on Worried Songs, Cameron Knowler has returned with new single, ‘Secret Water’. A cast of musicians join the track, adding fiddle, upright bass and mandolin and highlighting how Knowler expands the traditional guitar instrumental style into something richer. Imagine the guitar work of Bert Jansch and John Renbourn combined with the older string band tradition from Appalachia and you’d be getting somewhere close. But true to the CRK spirit, the result is also specific to Arizona, working to conjure the landscape in both fine detail and broad strokes.

The post Cameron Knowler – Secret Water appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Last week saw the release of Melody Trail, the new record from the ever-prolific Sam Sodomsky’s The Bird Calls. Again put out by Ruination Records, the album in part deals with Sodomsky losing his position at Pitchfork after Condé Nast’s decision to absorb the site into GQ last year, pulling the rug from under his feet and throwing into doubt one of the last bastions of independent music criticism. But anyone expecting a minor key downer will be sorely disappointed, instead drawing on a range of left of centre pop and folk to create something quite unlike any previous The Bird Calls work. The title track is probably the best place to start, a catchy and breezy acoustic strum that somehow sounds both weary and hopeful, vowing to make a fresh start if not quite committing to actually doing it.

And I’m trying to get my life back
Riding on the right track
Time to move on

Born Ruffians – Mean Time

Having made their name in the indie rock boom of the 00s, Toronto’s Born Ruffians have constantly evolved over their near-two-decade lifespan, resisting the temptation to settle into a groove or rely on nostalgia to instead push their sound to new dimensions. Forthcoming this summer via Wavy Haze and Yep Rock Records, their new album Beauty’s Pride represents another reinvention, embracing change alongside the real-life experience of becoming a parent, as highlighted by lead single ‘Mean Time’. A “sort of autobiographical/speculative non-fiction inspired by Nabokov’s beautiful autobiography Speak, Memory,” as vocalist/guitarist Luke Lalonde puts it. “It’s about those two black voids, the before and the after, and all of the extraordinary moments in between.”

Beauty’s Pride is out on the 6th June via Wavy Haze Records and Yep Roc Records.

Cameron Knowler – Felicity

CRK, the (quasi-)self-titled by Arizona musician Cameron Knowler forthcoming on Worried Songs, is fundamentally a record of time and space. A meditation of Knowler’s hometown of Yuma, Arizona both in its physical presence and historical weight, all achieved via a style of instrumental folk both traditional and visionary. Together with a video featuring local landmarks ranging from the purple Gila Mountains to lettuce fields and a long abandoned adobe prison, single ‘Felicity’ offers the listener an introduction to this style. A soundscape littered with features of the past, indeed shaped by their weight, yet one which is neither overburdened by the load nor bewitched by the seductive will to return to that former place.

Watch the video shot, edited and directed by Steven Perlin below:

CRK will be out on the 4th April via Worried Songs and you can pre-order it from Bandcamp.

Elskavon – How Cold

Elskavon’s new album Panoramas, coming this summer via Western Vinyl, sees Chris Bartels continue to evolve the project, drawing on everything which came before but finding a novel form. As lead single ‘How Cold’ shows, this involves challenging preconceptions of genre and style, crossing boundaries and questioning conventions, be it around what exactly a song or album can be, or indeed the role vocals can play within this. This exploratory mindset allows for a real authenticity to develop, creating an emotional resonance unhindered by any constraints. “This album is a deep dive into everything that’s shaped me as a creator,” as Bartels explains. “My favorite songs and albums are tied to memories and seasons—beautiful, painful, grand, and small—and those experiences inform everything I do.”

Panoramas is out on the 20th June via Western Vinyl and you can pre-order it now.

Fake Dad – Machinery

Consisting of Andrea de Varona and Josh Ford, LA’s Fake Dad make crunchy pop rock that’s concerned with both having fun and making a point. With new EP Holly Wholesome and the Slut Machine on the horizon, the duo have unveiled single ‘Machinery’ to introduce this style. It’s a track which originated after a bad experience at a musical showcase, where female artists were forced to play into their own objectification in order to earn attention. “This song was written as a response to the way this kind of woman on woman (or more generally, artist on artist) hate perpetuates these spaces while the real culprits—our sick, sad society governed by narcissistic, billionaire white men—totally fly under the radar,” de Varona explains. “In the end, the man is the real one we’re calling out. The one that we’re sick and tired of watching get what they want, while we sit back eating from their palm.”

‘Machinery’ is out now and available at the usual places. Holly Wholesome and the Slut Machine is coming soon.

Hour – Hallmark (Live at Philamoca, Philadelphia)

Following on from beautiful 2024 album Ease the Work, a release we described in our review of last year’s best releases, as “perform[ing] the same small miracle of the previous records, presenting the everyday in all its joy and melancholy, comfort and strangeness,” Philadelphia ensemble Hour are returning this month with new live album Subminiature on Dear Life Records. Collected across two years of live performances, the album serves as what the label calls “a capstone for the band’s oeuvre to date,” offering versions of pieces from Tiny Houses and Anemone Red alongside brand new arrangements to best represent a project that’s always adapting and evolving. Different songs recorded at different shows, performed by a changing cast of musicians across various months and years, yet all linked by the same spirit. That vital piece of the Hour DNA which commits to such fluidity as a fundamental part of what the project represents.

Watch the video directed/edited by Matt Ober below:

Subminiature is out on the 14th February via Dear Life Records and you can pre-order it now.

Larum – O Virga Mediatrix (feat Bill Orcutt)

The recording project of Chet Doxas and Micah Frank, Larum combines woodwind and electronics to create a sound full of detail and intangible depth, something evident on 2022 EP The Music of Hildegard von Bingen Part One, which occupied a unique intersection between the early medieval and avant garde cutting edge. As the title suggested, the release was only the first instalment of the project, and this April Larum will return with appropriately named follow-up The Music of Hildegard von Bingen, Part Two. Again the result is almost paradoxical in form, managing to imbue the work of an eleventh-century theologian, mystic and composer not just with contemporary resonance but a sense of pioneering potential. Featuring guitarist and composer Bill Orcutt, single ‘O Virga Mediatrix’ embodies this aesthetic, the track representing a thread which stretches away from the present in both directions, inviting the audience to following towards the mysterious spaces beyond.

MacGregor Burns – Put It All On Me

Described as “a new wave sad boy anthem that is a longing cry to pass the blame,” ‘Put It All On Me’ is the latest single from LA-based singer-songwriter MacGregor Burns. Previous tracks ‘Silent Answers‘ and ‘Can’t Go Back‘ highlighted the artist’s idiosyncratic style, “combining nostalgic nods […] while forging a new path forwards, [looking] for further clues in the fertile space between the familiar and the new.” ‘Put It All On Me’ continues this vibe but with some stylistic differences. Namely the lack of guitar, leading to a decidedly wistful sound that nods to the likes of the Psychedelic Furs but nevertheless carries its own bright forward motion.

‘Put It All On Me’ is out now and available from the usual places.

Royal Oakie Records – Canyon Country: LA Fires Benefit Compilation

“[Displays] a sense of cohesion and togetherness which hints at the radical potential within the collective, something we need to remember now more than ever as the suite of challenges which marks the contemporary moment only widens and deepens,” so we wrote of if only i could fly, a compilation in support of those affected by the LA fires organised by  Little Mazarn, hemlock and Jolie Holland. But we could easily have been writing about Canyon County, the new benefit compilation from Royal Oakie Records too. Featuring a mix of unreleased and album tracks from the likes of Holy Matter, Half Stack, Michael James Tapscott and Lauren Helene Green, the comp is what the label describe as a “love letter to Los Angeles and its surrounding canyons and coastlines,” as embodied by the languid warmth of Sandy’s ‘Band Without A Song’.

The Taxpayers – At War With The Dogcatchers

Portland, Oregon emo outfit The Taxpayers might have been on hiatus from releasing new music for going on a decade, but this March puts an end to that. Released via Ernest Jenning Record Co., their latest full-length Circle Breakers reckons with the changes in the world in the time since their previous record, with understandably dark results. Alongside the global pandemic, continued climate breakdown and turn towards reactionary politics were a series of personal tragedies too, and the record sees The Taxpayers pushing through a seemingly unending experience of loss with both fury and hope for something better. Latest single ‘At War With The Dogcatchers’ draws on a run-in with the titular enemies after a deceased friend’s dog was seized and taken to a pound. A song about “loving the broken things in spite of the dogcatchers of the world,” as the band explain, “and trying to find meaning in those things amidst the tragedies.”

Watch the video by Preston Spurlock below

Circle Breaker will be released on the 21st March via Ernest Jenning Record Co. and you can pre-order it now.

Yael S. Copeland – 2AM

“Unable to lose the romantic notion that things can be different, can improve. Mellow Submarine looks for good thoughts amid the chaos, and might just have you believing they are just around the corner after all.” So we wrote of Yael S. Copeland‘s most recent full-length back in 2023, applauding the manner in which the Queens-based songwriter looks to preserve the small, fleeting moments within an often calamitous world. Detailing an after hours encounter between two receptive strangers, new single ‘2AM’ is no different, offering a distinctively nocturnal tone to conjure a sense of ethereal romance. A sort of lightning-in-a-bottle sensation both characters can only cling to while it lasts. “You know we / Will probably be / only friends / for this night,” as Copeland sings in the chorus, “Maybe till the morning?”

The post Weekly Listening: February 2025 #2 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Adeline Hotel – Whodunnit

Ruination Record Co.

“There’s always a strange combination of continuity and change within a new album from Adeline Hotel. Each record building upon what came before it while often in some respects also turning away to chart new ground. As though the project exists as a kind of world of its own, and the function of each release is to bring us a view of a different corner. Adeline Hotel as a vast space we’re discovering album by album, song by song, with Dan Knishkowy not so much engineering the experience as leading the way. This exploratory spirit is central to Whodunnit […] an album following a tradition which lists the likes of Gillian Welch, Neil Young and Van Morrison among its practitioners. Songs as a form of stream of consciousness, not only in terms of lyrics but the very sound itself. The sense of having tapped into some wellspring of movement or momentum and choosing to lean into the flow.” [Review]

Advance Base – Horrible Occurrences

Run For Cover / Orindal Records

“For while the setting is entirely imaginary, the narratives and characters owe much to real life. Indeed the killer [of ‘The Year I Lived in Richmond’] is inspired by an analogous figure who stalked a place Advance Base‘s Own Ashworth once called home, fictionalised to create some sense of distance and decency. If Horrible Occurrences can be distilled into one reductive image, then that is perhaps the most enlightening. A receptacle into which bad memories and old stories can be poured. A small town diorama in which they can play out again, change shapes, take on lives of their own. One we might approach and watch over along with Ashworth, feeling tall from that perspective, relatively safe in the top-down view.” [Review]

Anne Malin – Strange Power!

Dear Life Records

Released in tandem book-length poem What Floods under the name AM Ringwalt, Anne Malin‘s Strange Power! is an album which explores “how nature and its inherent motion might possess the key to the process of healing in the aftermath of trauma and loss,” as we wrote earlier in the year. Something which possesses a palpable momentum yet no clear conclusion. In other hands, this lack of answers or endings might be held up as the tragic farce of existence, but here is positioned more like an opportunity. To continue asking questions both of yourself and your surroundings, as though the act of interrogation is its own strange power. A sign of a faith in something human and sublime.

Being Dead – EELS

Bayonet Records

“If you thought [previous release] When Horses Would Run was inventive, then just wait until you hear what is coming next. Because the new Being Dead full-length EELS […] takes everything that made its predecessor special and pushes it further. Travelling to Los Angeles for a fortnight of writing and recording with John Congleton, the pair pushed themselves to embrace the singular spirit of their work. The result is a record that’s more intense, more raucous and decidedly darker than anything which has come before, without sacrificing that mischievous persona.” [Review]

Ben Seretan – Allora

Tiny Engines

Described by Ben Seretan as his “insane Italy record,” Allora represents a snapshot from a very specific time and place. Or rather it would, should ‘snapshot’ come anywhere close to describing the scale, heft and sheer abundance of moving parts on show. Seretan and his band were due to play a wedding at the tail end of “a wonderful but lightly disastrous tour” of Europe during the summer of 2019, only for rain to half play and leave them in the lurch. But rather than waste the curious mix of energy and exhaustion that sets in at the end of a tour, they decided to make an album instead. A three-day stint at a farmhouse in the hills overlooking Venice with renowned mixing engineer, producer, musician Matt Bordin was arranged. A brief moment where a plethora of emotions were processed and purged through joyful noise. The result is unashamedly maximalist, entirely heartfelt, and in possession of that lightning-in-a-bottle feel that suggests it could never have materialised anywhere else. Catharsis has long been a key thread of Ben Seretan’s work, but rarely has it gone quite so hard.

The Big Easy – (It’s No Secret) The Truth As Bad As the View

Trash Casual Records

“It’s notable that The Big Easy’s latest album, (It’s No Secret) The Truth As Bad As The View, is the first to feature Berthomieux’s image on the cover. The first symbol on a record that looks to grapple with exactly how and why a person of colour might be made to feel an interloper within certain artistic circles. Berthomieux cites a James Baldwin statement as a key to realigning his perspective. ‘To be a Negro in this country,’ Baldwin wrote, ‘and to be relatively conscious is to be in a state of rage almost all of the time.’ Suddenly what had for so long seemed like a personal hang-up or imposter syndrome was revealed to be an intrinsic part of the Black experience, and to connect his own emotions with a historic struggle proved liberating. Thus the album became an exercise in owning his identity and finally voicing those things kept buried for so long. ‘It’s No Secret is kind of like a journal,’ as Berthomieux concludes, ‘a place where I can express the things that I haven’t been able to say out loud’.” [Review]

Brown Horse – Reservoir

Loose Music

“Call it distraction, call it despair / No matter what you call it you can feel it when it’s there.” These lines from the track ‘Bloodstain’ encapsulate the presiding mood of Brown Horse’s Reservoir. A sense of unease which permeates their alt-country style like something “drifted on the low tide,” as the song continues. Something that’s now “hell bent for to stay.” This disquiet is evoked not only in images of stark estuary mudflats and cold fields but also polycotton shirts and soulless expanses of megastores. In the nostalgic melancholy of opener ‘Stealing Horses’, or the Molina-esque lyricism of songs like ‘Sunfisher’ and ‘Outtakes’ with their burning houses, hummingbird hearts and singing birds. And like all the best Gothic atmosphere, it is not entirely clear whether the sensation is a haunting from some ancient thing or a dark harbinger of what is to come.

Cara Beth Satalino – Little Green

Worried Songs

“The success of Little Green is in no small part a result of the nuanced nature of Cara Beth Satalino’s approach. Early on you come to appreciate her uncanny ability to combine deep soul-searching with offhand observations and gentle humour, inventive imagery and smart turns of phrase creating something rich and full of life despite the surrounding turmoil. [A record] soft and fragile as a little green shoot but with a spark of energy too, a desire to keep on. It might be too dark to see what is in front of you, but the earth is still turning and the bright star is still burning. There is time yet to grow towards the light.” [Review]

Cassandra Jenkins – My Light, My Destroyer

Dead Oceans

Cassandra Jenkins intended to step away from music after her 2021 album An Overview on Phenomenal Nature, only for the album to resonant so deeply with audiences she found herself newly (and perhaps reluctantly) energised, pulled back towards the urge to create. My Light, My Destroyer is what emerged a few years later, a record which not so much builds upon its predecessor as explodes out in every direction. Sophistipop, jazz and New Age elements lift Jenkins’s indie rock sound to almost orchestral territory, while layers of found sounds and field recordings anchor the otherwise celestial style in the lived-in world. This duality between the grounded and the elevated is typical of the tone, where encroaching darkness is matched by a curiosity and attentiveness to wonder. The world is beautiful, the world is burning, and both of these facts are made more urgent by the other.

The Chairman Dances – Evening Song

Self-Released

“Originating as a narrative poem, The Chairman Dances‘ new album Evening Song traces the early days of a nascent relationship,” we wrote back in September. “A seminarian and a drummer mutually enamoured with one another, caught in the heady space of attraction and mystery, hungry to learn everything there is to know about the other.” Working from this point of intersection, Eric Krewson and co. bring the pair of characters to life, providing small glimpses into moments both special and seemingly mundane to achieve a strikingly intimate sense of humanity. As with much of The Chairman Dances’ catalogue, the beauty is in the detail. The hollow knock of shoes, the wail of an oven’s timer, the catch of a lock. Small confessions shared between two people daring to allow their lives to become enmeshed.

The Dead Tongues – Body of Light / I Am a Cloud

Psychic Hotline

Not content with releasing just one record this year, Ryan Gustafson’s The Dead Tongues put out two simultaneously. The albums, published as standalone digital releases but brought together in a double LP, display both aspects of the Asheville, North Carolina songwriter’s oeuvre. I Am A Cloud is an exercise is meandering cosmic Americana, what Gustafson calls “a fever dream of song and spoken-word about the toggle between identity and ephemerality,” while Body of Light sees things solidify into discrete folk rock songs. Joined by a stellar cast of collaborators and a sense of improvisational freedom, it’s the most expensive and ambitious Dead Tongues release to date.

Deerlady – Greatest Hits

Self-Released

Described as “a collection of songs about intimacy,” Greatest Hits sees Mali Obomsawin and Magdalena Abrego unite as Deerlady to conjure soundscapes simultaneously stark, tender and thunderous. Both Obomsawin and Abrego have backgrounds in jazz, and though some of the genre’s fluidity carries through, the Deerlady project exists outside of that sphere and the expectations it carries. Rather, Greatest Hits offers an indie rock style free to be more elemental and raw, one attuned to ideas of softness and hope within a hostile and violent world. As if in the face of colonial cruelty, sound might fill the gaps where words cannot suffice. “Brick and concrete / two hundred thousand years buried beneath / while the stars witnessed the unholy,” as Obomsawin, who is from the Abenaki First Nation at Odanak, sings on ‘Masterpieces’. “Well I take it in / I wrestle with the language to begin / I didn’t come to make a speech, I came to live.”

Desert Liminal – Black Ocean

Whited Sepulchre Records

“Released in 2021, Desert Liminal‘s Glass Fate found the Chicago band “settling into a higher form,” as we put it at the time, with violinist and noise artist Mallory Linehan (AKA Chelsea Bridge) joining Sarah Jane Quillin and Rob Logan to elevate their trademark dreamy aesthetic. [Black Ocean] in many ways represents a continuation of this process. With the outfit now cemented as a trio, Linehan joins Quillin as a songwriter and vocalist, grounding the nascent sense of collaboration and connection which emerged on Glass Fate as a core facet of Desert Liminal. A development which is thematically resonant too, the record exploring ways in which death can be faced communally, and grief transmuted into something affirming and meaningful. Chicago’s DIY scene carried Quillin through the worst experiences, and Black Ocean looks to distil this experience into its purest form. The resulting songs often seem like love letters to the people in these communities. Those figures who stood next to you through the best and worst of times.” [Review]

Distant Reader – Place of Words Now Gone

Lily Tapes & Discs

“No news in weeks from outside town,” announces Emmerich Anklam at the beginning of the latest Distant Reader album, Place of Words Now Gone, thrusting the listener into a world suddenly quiet along with his bewildered characters. “Who left me in the center of this desolation?” one such person asks, “Who’s hearing me talk? Does it matter at all? Is anyone still out there? And who can tell the difference between the end and the beginning?” The record took seed in Anklam’s brain during long train rides through the fabled American landscape, and although a clear work of fiction, it’s hard not to see reality in the community it describes—abandoned by those beyond it’s boundaries, succumbing to helplessness as they lose what little agency were ever afforded them. A portrait of an isolated and dislocated America where those left behind are left to struggle and mourn as a deepening silence floods the places they call home. “And everybody she knows goes quiet trying to forget about the ways they could diminish still,” as Emmerich sings on ‘From High Remove’, “the spiral closing in around all of them. Words vanish fold in on themselves, questions halved quartered eighthed. Absence of sound infects all who feel it. Tones, phrases returning to the ether.”

Emily Hines – These Days

Self-Released

“I don’t know about you, but I’m holding out hope.” So sings Emily Hines on ‘UFO’, a single which embodies the tone of her full-length These Days. As warm and soft as a blanket to wrap around yourself in the cold winter months, but with a sharp pang of something else too, a bittersweet bite more potent than the frost at the window. The entire album is an understated gem, full of quiet and wistful songs about difficult relationships, questions unanswered or unanswerable, hoping for something more. On ‘UFO’ this ranges from a desire to know the truth about the Roswell landings to wishing for the sublime reckoning of the Second Coming. But for all of its outlandish subject matter, the song, like These Days as a whole, is entirely straight with its underlying sentiment. There is still hope that wrongs can be righted, Hines insists. Things can change for the better.

Enumclaw – Home in Another Life

Run For Cover Records

Ever wondered what might happen if you were to cross the beams of don’t-give-a-shit slacker rock and confessional, emotionally intense emo? Home in Another Life, the latest album from Tacoma’s Enumclaw, is here to provide an answer. The record is unafraid of the largest themes, lead Aramis Johnson wrestles with everything from God, illness and death to self-doubt, relationships and sex, but does so with a sense of energy and swagger. As though faced with the tangle of life’s difficulties, Enumclaw make the conscious decision to charge headlong forwards, conscious of every possible branch and thorn but moving too purposefully to become ensnared in any one spot. Whether it be the denial of a difficult diagnosis in ‘Not Just Yet’ or the internalised shame of ‘I Still Feel Bad About Masturbation’, Home in Another Life takes emotions and experiences which so often feel unspeakable and shouts them aloud in an act of agency.

The Felice Brothers – Valley of Abandoned Songs

Million Stars / 15 Passenger

Since their inception in 2006, The Felice Brothers have established themselves as one of the premier acts of contemporary US folk rock, building a catalogue of urgent narratives and strange visions with enough depth to stand alongside their literary influences. “Poems and short stories packed with clever references and wry turns of phrase” as we wrote of 2021’s From Dreams to Dust. “A confrontation of the grim realities of our moment that nevertheless celebrates the fact of being alive.” As the title suggests, Valley of Abandoned Songs is a collection of tracks written throughout the project which never quite made it onto a record, but were nevertheless strong enough to convince Conor Oberst, no less, to set up a brand new label just to release them into the world. Single ‘Flowers By The Roadside’ is the perfect example of their ability to conjure entire lives and histories in the shortest of spaces.

Are you
High as Mr Albert was
When he drove the cross town bus
Straight into the sky
I’m just sitting in these flowers by the roadside
I’m not trying to flag a ride
Just happy watching the wide world go by

The Fourth Wall – Return Forever

DevilDuck Records

Kickstarted by a family story of a relative who left a child behind when emigrating to the United States, Return Forever by The Fourth Wall is “an album which,” as we put it in our review, “combs through the contradictions of the immigrant experience in order to voice feelings otherwise impossible to convey.” Delivered via a weighty brand of indie rock, the mood ranges from anger and confusion to catharsis and joy, and the result, as we continued, is “a mixture of hope, denial and genuine love which not only subverts expectations but confounds any attempt to properly reassess. As though some decisions can be so complicated, their impacts so profound, that the very physics of emotions are bent beyond their own laws.”

Gabriel Birnbaum – Patron Saint of Tireless Losers

Western Vinyl

“Gabriel Birnbaum has become increasingly interested in music’s narrative potential, and Patron Saint [of Tireless Losers] finds him at his most confident to date,” we wrote in June. An album where Birnbaum again evolves his sound and writing to present “vignettes which occupy the knife-edge between specificity and ambiguity, rewarding the return listener with layers of wry humour and naked human emotion.” Birnbaum introduces a diverse array of characters—young and old, male and female, lonely and in the throes of love—all troubled by the gap between their own views of the world and the evitable dawning reality. As though every person, be they nervous concert-goer or overeager prepper ostensibly ready for the end times, is at some point destined to realise the true, unforgiving nature of mortal existence.

h. pruz – No Glory

Mtn Laurel Recording Co.

Many albums exists within the giddy period of new beginnings, their creators emerging from a tumultuous period of suffering or drastic change with an almost epiphanic perspective. The bad thing is in the past now, life can show its light. But while h. pruz‘s latest album No Glory focuses its gaze on a variety of pivotal moments from the life of Hannah Pruzinsky—moments they withstood, survived, emerged from—and goes as far as to imagine the perfect life ahead, it refuses the temptation to bask in the transient warmth of such possibility. As though to present the experience of a newly hopeful present as something unmarked by regret or doubt is to fail to fully inhabit its complexities. “I keep seeing change,” as Pruzunsky sings on ‘I Keep Changing’. “Peel away the borders / Of things with weight like copper / Thought it was gold / Til it turned green / In the rain.”

Haley Heynderickx – Seed of a Seed

Mama Bird Recording Co.

In 2018, Haley Heynderickx released I Need To Start a Garden, an album “all about growth and the hope of new beginnings” we wrote, yet one which refused to “shy away from the necessary hard work that makes such growth possible.” Follow-up Seed of a Seed emerges from this process of emotional cultivation, Heynderickx learning how to continue and improve upon the previous album’s progress while coming to understand such things are rarely linear and never complete. Opening tracks ‘Gemini’ and ‘Foxglove’ are marked by a sense of urgency, seized by the haste of new growth, though by the second half the tempo levels out into something slower and more complex. A host of musicians support the trademark finger-picked style, creating a layered thicket, the Haley Heynderickx sound now a rich polyculture diverse and hardy enough to face whatever life might throw at it next.

Hatis Noit – Aura (Rework Series)

Erased Tapes

In 2022, Hatis Noit released Aura, a full-length album “which draws from the vast array of Noit’s influences from Japanese classical music Gagaku and operatic performers to Bulgarian and Gregorian chanting,” we wrote previously, “not to mention avant-garde experimentalists and pop vocal styles.” Aura has had a new lease of life in subsequent years, with a series of reworkings made in collaboration with an equally diverse set of artists. After the likes of William Basinski and Matthew Herbert in 2023, this year saw Noit enlist the talents of Laraaji, Preservation and Armand Hammer to push the already kaleidoscopic sound even further.

Holland Andrews – Answers

LEITER

“Back in 2021, Brooklyn-based composer, producer, vocalist, and clarinetist Holland Andrews released Wordless, the first of a series of EPs under their own name (having previously recorded as Like A Villain). Released with label LEITER, the record introduced a distinctively transportive sound. Led by voice and clarinet and processed through a variety of electronics, the compositions offered soundscapes in which the listener might lose themselves. Rich tapestries of colour and texture crafted with an almost cinematic attention to detail. Subsequent EPs Forgettings and Doubtless furthered the scope and intention of the style, exploring themes of healing and transcendence as Andrews’s genre-bending sensibilities solidified into a style of their own […] Now Holland Andrews has returned with Answers, the fourth and final EP of the series which feels like both the clearest realisation of their creative ideals and a continued, active resistance against genre conventions.” [Review]

Hour – Ease the Work

Dear Life Records

With a studio’s worth of equipment in tow, the ensemble Hour took a ferry to Peaks Island, Maine out of season, and spent a week holed up together in an old theatre to record their latest album, Ease the Work. The project boasts a diverse cast of musicians—lead Michael Cormier O’Leary (electric guitar, classical guitar, percussion) joined by Jason Calhoun (synth), Em Downing (violin), Matt Fox (viola), Elisabeth Fuchsia (violin) Peter Gill (bass), Lucas Knapp (radio effects, field recordings, piano), Evan McGonagill (cello), Peter McLaughlin (drums, percussion), Keith J. Nelson (bass clarinet, clarinet), Erika Nininger (piano, rhodes) and Abi Reimold (electric guitar)—each bringing their own instincts and sensibilities to the project’s lush instrumental arrangements. The intimacy of the recording process allowed each separate contribution to coalesce into harmony. “Challenging any clear distinction between composition and improvisation,” as we wrote earlier in the year, the resulting record “performs the same small miracle of the previous records, presenting the everyday in all its joy and melancholy, comfort and strangeness.”

I Saw the TV Glow soundtrack

A24 Music

“The danger of nostalgia is that it tends to confuse the actual home with the imaginary one,” Svetlana Boym wrote in her 2001 book, The Future of Nostalgia. “In extreme cases it can create a phantom homeland.” The warning is explored in Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow, a film with a decidedly complex relationship with nostalgia. It can be something to wrap yourself in, bond over, shelter beneath, yet with this retreat comes the risk of a detrimental stasis, where fondness for the past comes to eat up the present. The interrogation is furthered by the film’s soundtrack, where the likes of Caroline Polachek, Florist, Frances Quinlan, Sadurn and King Women tap into the unapologetically sentimental nineties aesthetic. But it is the very first track that is perhaps the most thematically resonant. Yeule‘s cover of ‘Anthems For A Seventeen Year-Old Girl’ is so distorted by glitchy imperfections it becomes something of a Baudrillardian simulacrum. A memory denatured by overhandling, unpegged from reality, a figment of the imagination which has come to replace the real.

Jahnah Camille – i tried to freeze light, but only remember a girl

Winspear

“The songs offer a picture of late adolescence in all of its bittersweet nuance, its introspective contemplation matched only by its bold confessional attitude.” That’s how we described i tried to freeze light, but only remember a girl, the debut EP of Birmingham, Alabama-based songwriter and musician  Jahnah Camille earlier this year. The release reaches for a number of genres with real confidence, be it the nineties alt-rock swagger of ‘flesh’ or the country twang of ‘roadkill’. “[But it is] the lyrics which really see the artist stand apart,” we continued. “Because Camille has a knack for combining emotion and self-awareness, offering songs entirely committed to the feelings being explored but never lacking a wry wrinkle to add that extra layer of personality.”

Jess Ribeiro – Summer of Love

Poison City Records

Written amid a period of intense instability, Summer of Love finds Jess Ribeiro negotiating the liminal space between hope and reality, confronting the past and possible futures alongside the present moment to find a way towards healing. Ribeiro chose to lean into the turmoil during the recording process, undeterred by the fact collaborators could only visit individually thanks to the pandemic restrictions, and many never made it to the studio at all. Yet together with Nick Huggins, she nonetheless enlisted the talents of Jim White (drums), Darcy McNulty (saxophone), Leah Senior (keys), James Seymour (bass), Davie Mudie (percussion) and Carrie Webster (violin and viola), guiding each musician according to the release’s spirit. The result is improvised and exploratory yet bound by the same sense of longing. That will to work through tumultuous times towards something more solid. The hope that chaos might resolve itself into a more hospitable state.

Josaleigh Pollett – In The Garden, By The Weeds

Self-Released

“An excavation of the present which inevitably tends pastward, tracing a presiding cynicism back to its roots in search of a cause.” That’s how we described Josaleigh Pollett‘s third album In The Garden, By The Weeds. At first, the imagery of the title resonates on a surface level, the Salt Lake City songwriter surveying the ecosystem of their life, assessing which parts to nurture, which to pluck or prune. But spend a minute with this collection of stark and glitchy songs and it becomes clear things are operating on a deeper level. For Pollett not only gives the weeds their due but the subterranean conditions too. Those places dark and elemental we so often pretend have no relation to us higher beings. Places perhaps inside of our lives or our selves we must reach down into if we are to make any real progress in cultivating the kind of environment we want to live in. Even if it means getting our hands dirty, scrunching our eyes and grasping blind.

Joy Guidry – AMEN

Whited Sepulchre Records

“In AMEN,” explained Joy Guidry of their most recent album, “there is a lot experimentation with different forms of Black American music. I wanted to lean heavily on my Texas, Louisiana and Creole roots in this project. There were many days spent with my ancestors during the writing of this album and I’m eternally grateful for the music they sang to me during our time together.” The record saw the basoonist and composer develop their sound with the newly prominent influence of gospel and spiritual jazz, combining the sensibilities of church music with jazz invention to create something fundamentally devotional. “The result is at once communal and singular,” as we put it in our review. “Joy Guidry as realised in their most complete form to date.”

K. Freund – Trash Can Lamb

Soda Gong

We’ve been following the work of Akron, Ohio’s Keith Freund for the better part of two decades, originally with Trouble Books, then as one half of the experimental/neoclassical duo Lejsovka & Freund, and more recently with Lemon Quartet and Aqueduct Ensemble. Following 2022’s Hunter on the Wing, Trash Can Lamb is Freund’s latest release under his own name, and offers another exercise in minimal piano, degraded samples and an array of tactile electronics. It’s the neoclassical equivalent of the folk art eccentric, spinning singular homebrew beauty from a treehouse studio filled with strange gadgets and devices, at far remove from the polish and pretension of the auditorium, yet somehow deeper for it. Trash Can Lamb walks it own path straight to the heart of things, small moments and sensations that you couldn’t describe with words if you tried.

Kali Malone – All Life Long

Ideologic Organ

“Manages to suggest both academic rigour and unburdened instinct, but ultimately transcends any focus on its intentions as the listener becomes immersed in the soundscape. Some hymn or lament, latent with the suggestion of the sublime, be it total dread or transcendence, silence or all-encompassing sound.” So we wrote of Living Torch by Kali Malone back in 2022, though the description could be extended to much of the Stockholm-based composer’s work. Written for pipe organ, choir and brass quintet, latest release All Life Long possesses all the same clarity and depth, breathing new life into classical techniques to create something at once intimate and exalted. Not holy music, per say, but music which operates according to the same ends. Aiming to evoke those sensations felt in the face of things far greater than us, more mysterious, yet surrounding us all the same.

Keanu Nelson – Wilurarrakutu

Mississippi Records

Primarily a poet in his home of Papunya, northwest of Alice Springs, Keanu Nelson was inspired to start singing his work after meeting producer Yuta Matsumura in the local arts centre. The result is Wilurarrakutu, an album first released on Altered States Tapes last year, but put out to a wider audience back in August by Mississippi Records. With Casio beats programmed by Matsumura as support, Nelson delivers deeply personal poetry on themes of loneliness and family, home and loss, in both Papunya Luritja and English. Nelson incorporates reggae and gospel influences into a sound which emerges from an electronic sonic lineage that trails back to the likes of Suicide and Francis Bebey but represents its own singular style. One which aches with a sense of longing, the relative simplicity of the arrangements allowing the emotional depth of Nelson’s poetry to sit front and centre, blurring the classic and the contemporary into something genuinely moving.

Lia Kohl – Normal Sounds

Moon Glyph

“Able to evoke existence in all of its magic and mundanity.” That’s how we described the work of Chicago-based cellist, composer and multidisciplinary artist Lia Kohl back in July, describing her album Normal Sounds as “at once normal and very much not, or else it is extraordinarily normal—with Kohl turning her attention to the acoustics of everyday living and presenting them back to the listener as something as something new.” Existing somewhere between music and sound art, the record uses synths and cello (as well as occasional flute and electronics from Ka Baird and sax from Patrick Shiroishi) to accentuate field recordings of human-made sounds, reflecting our own world back to us in a new light. Here the incidental is elevated, each song a cacophony crafted from the sounds we so often ignore or phase out. Kohl isn’t so much crafting a soundscape for us to hear as rewiring our brains so that our attention might be heightened. What we encounter in such a state is sometimes playful, sometimes strange, occasionally unnerving and melancholic in the way the slow passage of life always is. The human world in granular detail. What it sounds like to live here and now.

Lindsay Reamer – Natural Science

Dear Life Records

“[Songs which] not only represent a study of a specific time and place—capturing a snapshot of environments both natural and human and the porous border between the two—but also a report on how it feels to exist within that period. As though Lindsay Reamer serves as our guide through contemporary America as she knows it. A squeezed no-man’s land between the past and the future. A place where great beauty and banality sit side by side, where old choices drag unforeseen consequences towards us and yet the smallest details still seem to hold life in all of its inscrutable charm.” [Review]

Little Kid – A Million Easy Payments

Orindal Records

“[The] ability to vary the focal length of its perspective so gracefully is a signature of A Million Easy Payments. “The urgency in Kenny Boothby’s voice matches the stakes of his lyrics,” writes Dan Wriggins in the liner notes [of Little Kid‘s latest album], “epic ballads and reveries that come at life from all angles and exposures, driving at and a little over the limits of self-reflection.” The sense of an artist never quite satisfied with the scene they have captured, always looking to widen the lens to better represent the truth before them, or else zoom in closer in search of the missing detail which might click everything else into place. Call it a search for meaning, or even God Himself. In other hands, songs reaching for such things with the expansive style of Dylan and Welch at their most ambitious might feel like novelty or pastiche. But in this context it seems the only logical outcome for Little Kid’s specific way of working.” [Review]

Lollise – i hit the water

Switch Hit Records

“Hailing from Francistown in Botswana and now based in New York, Lollise is an artist who draws from the entirety of her musical history when crafting her songs. Hence the sound of her debut full-length I hit the water owes a debt to the styles which soundtracked her childhood and early years—including Setswana and Kalanga folk songs, South African electronic bubblegum and kwaito from the eighties and nineties, Congolese soukous and Zimbabwean sungura—as well as genres like Afrobeat, art-pop and new wave which she immersed herself in after moving to the US. What results is a sound capable of evoking the future and past simultaneously, where traditional styles are repurposed to open new directions, and the line between history and imagination blurs into something entirely new.” [Review]

Mary Ocher – Your Guide to Revolution

Underground Institute

“To say Mary Ocher’s latest album Your Guide to Revolution is ambitious in its intentions is to risk understatement. A kaleidoscopic and politically charged collection of songs which draws on Ocher’s childhood (born in Moscow to Jewish-Ukrainian parents before emigrating to Tel Aviv during the Gulf War) as a way into wider themes of resistance and civil disobedience. A huge array of styles and influences are utilised across the record, both to evoke the gamut of emotions triggered within the contemporary struggle and to ground the release within a wider history of such subversive art. A central part of the album is a series of three tracks which rework pieces by harpist Dorothy Ashby based on the Rubaiyat of Omar Khyyam, a triptych of songs which Ocher has collected into a short film which echoes The Color of Pomegranates by Sergei Parajanov.” [Review]

Merce Lemon – Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wilds

Darling Recordings

“A collection of nine songs with dirt under their fingernails, equal parts wild and vulnerable as they reckon with the changing tides of love in all its guises […] Merce Lemon’s songwriting is often gentle, careful and sincere ruminations on love and solitude, but this underlying ferality is perhaps the record’s biggest strength, and the most obvious step forward from Moonth. A reminder the soft animal can still bear its teeth, a kind of wildness that turns heartfelt, mid-tempo folk rock songs into blown-out anthems, building towards crescendos of wailing guitar and pure feeling.” [Review]

Minor Moon – The Light Up Waltz

Ruination Record Co.

Minor Moon‘s latest album The Light-Up Waltz is set within “speculative world, where civilisation has collapsed and the characters are made to exist in the aftermath,” as we wrote earlier in the year. “But far from some desolate landscape of grim suffering, this post-civilisation society is one coloured by the invention and playfulness of its inhabitants. As though steely determination can only be maintained with a suitable accompaniment of joy.” This is a collection of songs working under such a logic, finding its characters proactive in their search for meaning, and perhaps finding it through that very mindset. “To me,” as lead Sam Cantor puts it, “the antidote to fatalistic disillusionment is a kind of complicated dance with dread, hope and joy.”

MJ Lenderman – Manning Fireworks

Anti- Records

It’s fair to say MJ Lenderman has come a long way since we shared ‘Gentleman Jack’ from his 2021 album, Ghost of Your Guitar Solo. Through his what we’ve described previously as “masterful knack for combining details small and absurd into something which feels like life as it’s lived on the ground,” the last coulpe of years has seen Lenderman take the leap into the indie stratosphere, and latest album Manning Fireworks makes good on this acclaim without sacrificing the sensibilities which got him there in the first place. Often wacky yet always unabashedly earnest, these are songs of a different sort of American mythology. Colourful, chintzy, most likely temporary. A place of waterparks and McDonalds lots. Pocket Bibles, drunk drivers, Disney Pixar deleted scenes. A place inhabited by people who were once babies and now jerks. People like you and me.

Mol Sullivan – GOOSE

Self-Released

A self-described “long exposure photograph” charting growth both artistic and personal, Mol Sullivan‘s GOOSE serves as a portrait of a person within the arc of great change. With songs written in the aftermath of a relationship and during a nascent sobriety, the album opens with Sullivan “set deep in those early days of a new beginning,” as we wrote, “where everything feels possible yet tenuous and a little too vivid to bear,” but does not stay constrained to the present moment. Instead, we find an artist moving forwards and looking back, reflecting on who they were and who they want to be, reaching beyond stories of love and addiction for a more nuanced picture of life. An artist in dialogue with themselves, teasing out those fundamental things which exist beyond what happens to us within any given moment, and thus repositioning change as a positive force we might harness to become ourselves more fully.

mui zyu – nothing or something to die for / cantonese tasting menu EP

Father/Daughter Records

Last year’s Rotten Bun for an Eggless Century saw Hong Kong British artist mui zyu delve deep within themselves in search of a better understanding of their own identity. The songs mapped a vast labyrinth of history and personal experience and located the elusive truth not locked in some remote central chamber but rather via the process itself. But if the introspective survey of Rotten Bun charted the complex contours of its own small world, follow up nothing or something to die for flips its gaze outwards to take on a far bigger challenge—the chaotic, conflicted place we call home. Here human society is painted as an overwhelming and fundamentally lonely place, where an omnipresent technological connection belies the isolation at its core. Floating over this absurd space, mui zyu looks for the points where the veil between us is the thinnest, hoping a better existence might be possible while refusing to ignore evidence to the contrary. There might be nothing, there might be something to die for, or perhaps both of these things can be true at once.

Nap Eyes – The Neon Gate

Paradise of Bachelors

Through a string of ambitious, philosophical and playful albums, Halifax outfit Nap Eyes have established themselves as one of the most inventive, thematically interesting bands in contemporary indie rock. Even by their standards, The Neon Gate pushes the envelope on what songs can be and explore. Fans will recognise Nigel Chapman’s distinctively deadpan vocals, but the Nap Eyes sound has expanded in various directions, shapeshifting between tracks and unafraid of the abstract and improvised. Weird tangents are followed, eldritch stories are told, what rules there were are broken. The result is to witness something familiar transmogrify, metastasise, expand and contract before your eyes, the recognisable slowly twisted strange into a new, surreal landscape. A style inspired, at least in part, by the William Butler Yeats poem ‘I See Phantoms of Hatred and of the Heart’s Fullness and of the Coming Emptiness’. A poem which is adapted as a song near the end of the album:

I climb to the tower-top and lean upon broken stone,
A mist that is like blown snow is sweeping over all,
Valley, river, and elms, under the light of a moon
That seems unlike itself, that seems unchangeable,
A glittering sword out of the east. A puff of wind
And those white glimmering fragments of the mist sweep by.
Frenzies bewilder, reveries perturb the mind;
Monstrous familiar images swim to the mind’s eye.

Prostitute – Attempted Martyr

Self-Released

The past year has been desperate, dizzying and ferociously cruel for many, and no release captured this reality better than Attempted Martyr by Prostitute. Described as being “written and recorded under duress of a world in turmoil” and “dedicated to Lebanon, from Dearborn with love,” the album sits somewhere between noise rock, post-punk and jazz. A collection of songs twisted tight with intensity, always threatening to spin out of control, fired by the depthless fury of grief and somehow managing an air of plaintive sorrow too. Beneath the delivery’s bark and bite lies a deceptively diverse range of moods and emotions—from the mournful opening title track and spittle-flecked defiance of ‘Judge’ to poetic meditations on justice and resistance and even a certain wry humour (Prostitute one-up fellow Michigan punks Protomartyr by devoting an entire song to celebrity attorney Joumana Kayrouz). A timely reminder of the fertile relationship between anger and compassion, and a scream into the face of a world gone numb.

Rosali – Bite Down

Merge Records

“Help me, darling, I can’t seem to bite down on it / I can’t seem to feel what’s real anymore.” So opens the title track of Rosali‘s Bite Down, giving voice to a sentiment which underpins the entire album. But this is not a record of desperate pleas and drifting disconnection, rather the antidote to such things. As though having been touched by these emotions, Rosali chose to be proactive, confronting life’s ups and downs with a newfound defiance, determined to feel reality in all its forms. The title refers to “something more extreme than leaning in,” as Rosali told Mariana Timony for Bandcamp. “I’m taking a bite. I’m accepting it. I’m chewing it.” Again recorded with the David Nance Band to blur the line between solo and group effort, the resulting album effortlessly straddles folk and classic rock styles and builds upon everything which made 2021’s No Medium so special.

Roswit – Eternal Living

Mono Tapes

The debut album from self-described “olde punks” Roswit has one foot in classic Pacific Northwest indie pop and another across the ocean in a Flying Nun Records style jangle, with some wiry, stripped-back punk thrown in for good measure. From infectious opener ‘Grape’s Song’, which calls to mind fellow Vancouverites The Courtney’s, to the sleeves-rolled-up scrappiness of ‘King’s Song’, every song is packed with a sense of DIY fun. And to top it all there’s a throwback vibe, not to bygone decades but right back to the Middle Ages, a candy-coloured fantasy land of knights and dragons and damsels in distress. This is sometimes achieved with subtle lyrical nods, and others musically, such as ‘Princess’s Song’ which sounds like a lo-fi punk take on a Medieval ballad. Eternal Loving is perhaps best summed up by ‘Dreamer’s Song’, which has it all—supremely catchy hooks, galloping percussion, oohing and aahing harmonies, flutters of flute and daydreams of ye olden days.

Shovel Dance Collective – The Shovel Dance

American Dreams

“We want to play and experiment, layer and move between different spaces in recording, and extend the limits of our instruments to sing and break in new ways,” explained Shovel Dance Collective of their experimental folk sound. “Improvising, textural playing, and moving as one free organic organism are all part of the experiments we try and make in form. It’s all towards this one goal: constructing the Shovel Dance world and saying what we feel needs saying.” Latest album The Shovel Dance saw the outfit “position themselves within an exciting contemporary movement,” as we wrote in our review, “and The Shovel Dance is sure to join the likes of Lankum’s False Lankum and Shane Parish’s Liverpool in their mission to push old sounds and stories into new dimensions.”

S. Raekwon – Steven

Father/Daughter Records

A moniker can offer many things for an artist, not least a sense of separation between their ‘real’ and performing selves, but while Steven Raekwon Reynolds released his latest record Steven under the name S. Raekwon, the album’s title is suggestive of the manner in which the songs work to close this gap in search of authenticity. Because this is a personal album in the most practical sense. Reynolds did all the writing, production, engineering and mixing, not to mention played every instrument with the exception of the drums. What emerged is a collection of songs which serves to illuminate the different parts of their curator, as though the record is a prism through which he shines himself, each track a different wavelength of his personality stratified according to mood. “Maybe subliminally or unconsciously, the songs kind of grouped together in a certain way to explore different areas of myself,” he explains. “The beginning is rage and angriness in a certain way. The middle is this uncertainty of questioning yourself, who you are, and if you’re a good person. And then at the end, I think it comes to a place of resolution. I’m just examining myself and trying to come to a better understanding of who I am.”

Sinai Vessel – I SING

Keeled Scales

In October, Caleb Cordes announced that Sinai Vessel, his moniker for the past fifteen years, had come to an end. “You have taught me everything and I’m taking it all with me,” he wrote in a statement of social media, looking forward to new, healthier future without the constant striving for further success and recognition in the cockfight that is the music industry. Released back in the summer before this news broke, the fourth Sinai Vessel album I SING represents both a parting gift from a project that has meant so much to so many, and a frank examination of the factors which grind artists down to the point of submission, taking on themes so often absent from art with a sincere yet unromantic air. “I sing for a reason,” Cordes sings on the title track. “My reason’s the same // as the nurses buying rentals
/ and rides to broadway
/ who fill up big bars on buses
/ and fall off shit-faced / and the trained men who clock in / coming back from smoke breaks
/ who zoom in from satellites
/ to bomb palisades.” Because I SING is an album about the rarest of things: money, or the lack thereof. How contemporary society seems built to punish anyone who dares attempt a living through art, and the ways in which the compulsion to create persists in ways both magical and mundane. “I sing ‘cos I wake up
/ again and again,” as the title track continues. “It never stops coming
/ it doesn’t make sense.” Sinai Vessel is dead, long live Caleb Cordes.

Slippers – So You Like Slippers

Lame-O Records

“It was childhood residence Atlanta that lit Madeleine BB’s creative fire. The city is home to the headquarters of Cartoon Network, which inspired not only her interest in animation, but indie rock too. ‘Cartoon Network… was a big part of my life growing up,’ she says. ‘They always had a lot of indie bands in the fold there—I remember there was this Powerpuff Girls music compilation that had Devo and Apples in Stereo and Shonen Knife on it. My dad bought that for me and I just became obsessed with it.’ Many of the tracks on [Slippers‘] So You Like Slippers? are a product of this kind of cross pollination, either inspired by or written specifically for BB’s animations. ‘I was trying to make these jokey kid’s songs, sort of like They Might Be Giants, to go along with my animations,’ she describes, and it’s clear this visual starting point provided a sense of creative freedom. License to write quickly and without inhibition, and the ability to explore themes and feelings that could be painstakingly overwrought with charming ease.” [Review]

Tasha – All This and So Much More

Bayonet Records

“Finds an artist embracing the pace and breadth of their new life. Confronting each day with a sense of defiance rather than looking for somewhere to hide.” So we wrote of Tasha‘s All This and So Much More in a preview back in the summer, an album written amid a flurry of experiences that ran the gamut between agonising (unexpected grief, an abrupt separation) and amazing (a role in the Tony-nominated Broadway musical Illinoise). Where many might have sought some form of retreat from life’s constant barrage of change, the Chicago artist instead decided to lean into the momentum to embrace the potential of forward motion. “I’m overcome at the wonder around me,” she sings on the quasi-title track ‘So Much More’. “I fill my lungs, feel the air rush inside me / Could this be fun? Could I be happy?” The album works through the doubt of such questions with decisiveness, choosing to believe that the impossible might be true, life a joyous experience after all. “What if my hope didn’t have a ceiling? / What I want most, all I imagined / What if I chose to settle for nothing less than magic?”

Trace Mountains – Into the Burning Blue

Lame-O Records

Glance at the title of Trace Mountains‘ latest album Into the Burning Blue and you’d be forgiven for expecting a descent into something deep and dark, an assumption only strengthened by opener ‘In a Dream’. “A dispatch from whatever stage of capitalism we’re calling contemporary America as delivered from a breathless nighttime bike ride,” as we wrote of the track back in the summer. “The effect is passing through a dark passage full of eerie shadow without quite knowing if there’s an exit at the other end.” Yet rather than barrelling down towards some nadir, the track’s glittering eighties rock sensibilities manage to invert the arc, the climax instead finding Dave Benton breaching the surface into a wider world. Which isn’t to say the rest of Into the Burning Blue is bright and affirming, it is after all a record concerning the end and aftermath of a long-term relationship, rather that the shades of blue on offer are far more nuanced and diverse than you might at first expect. A picture of person moving through conflict and loss attuned to all the accompanying tones that come with it, and one delivered with all the widescreen confidence of Petty or Springsteen to boot.

villagerrr – Tear Your Heart Out

Darling Recordings

Zeroing in on life’s small, ostensibly ordinary moments to find the meaning within, villagerrr‘s latest album Tear Your Heart Out sees Mark Allen Scott embrace his Midwestern roots for a country-inflected brand of indie rock. Chillicothe, Ohio might have felt constrictive growing up, but home is home and soon a sense of fondness began to blossom, and with it came a desire to acknowledge the fact. “I want to wear where I’m from and my family on my sleeve,” Scott explains. “I’m proud of the twangy influence in my music from corny country songs I’d hear on the bus rides to school. I feel like I’m reclaiming where I come from and making it my own.” The result is a decidedly empathetic collection of songs able to zoom close to the smallest details of small town life, be it light through a sunroof, the smell of cut grass or pencil drawings made in an effort to preserve memories. Some of the tracks are tortured in their own quiet way (“Falling in and out of trust / With the ones you loved before,” as he sings on ‘Cry On’, “It’s not the way I hoped it would be / Oh, no”), some wryly funny (“I see you wearing your Carhartt jeans / Talking ’bout how you don’t got money,” is a refrain in ‘Car Heat’), but all are wrapped in a sense of understanding, as though villagerrr attempts to see through the tangle of emotions to see the fallible humans struggling underneath.

Waxahatchee – Tigers Blood

Anti- Records

When released in 2020, Waxahatchee‘s fifth full-length Saint Cloud felt like the pinnacle of the project, Katie Crutchfield pivots towards an alt-country aesthetic so seamless and fitting it appeared to be some form of completion. Only for Tigers Blood to roll around a few years later, an album which sees the Waxahatchee star rise even further. Unfazed by recent popularity, Crutchfield and co. resisted all the trappings of success and temptations to transcend into the mainstream to instead focus on the present. There are no synths on Tigers Blood. No cinematic pop flourishes. No indication of burning through a newly weighty budget. Which is to say, the album finds Crutchfield not so much dreaming of what Waxahatchee could become, but instead concentrating on exactly what it is. The result is full of heart, romance and hard-won authenticity that could only stem from a place of confidence. Waxahatchee might have found its final form, but you sense this is only its beginning.

Wendy Eisenberg – Viewfinder

American Dreams

“When Wendy Eisenberg finally got Lasik surgery after a lifelong struggle against an assortment of ocular and vision-based afflictions, the resulting impact went far deeper than they perhaps expected […] Viewfinder emerges from within this new experience of the world, reckoning with exactly what it means to see and not to see, and how beauty and meaning are inherent within both experiences […] How does our understanding of the physical world change according to our ability to visually perceive it? And what about other planes—the emotional, spiritual and metaphysical?” [Review]

West of Roan – Queen of Eyes

Spinster

“A god of doorways and portals, a god of seeing in the dark and in dreams, a saint of weeping in sorrow or in joy.” That’s how Laurel Premo, writing in the album notes, describes the titular figure of West of Roan‘s latest record Queen of Eyes. The guide which leads Annie Schermer and Channing Showalter deep into a realm of myth, archetype and imagery, some otherworld beneath our own which bears the load of all that has been before and will surely arrive in time. A place where both personal, historical and cultural trauma unwinds itself as story. When we say West of Roan is a project steeped in the folk tradition, we mean it in a fundamental sense beyond any musical style. That urge to communicate, console, explain or contextualise. To take on the largest of themes in the ways humans always have. The result isn’t so much ambiguous as multifaceted. Stark, beguiling, full of glory and grief. As mysterious as the Queen herself, demanding you submit to its forces to discover the transcendence within.

Why Bonnie – Wish On The Bone

Fire Talk

“How do we live authentically within a world which demands we perform and pretend? Is it possible to confront the true dismal nature of things and still retain a sense of hope? Such questions have weighed on [Blair] Howerton since previous Why Bonnie album 90 in November, not least because she felt she had evolved beyond the wistful country-inflected style those songs presented. “I’ve changed since that album, and I trust that I’ll probably continue to change,” as Howerton explains. Wish On The Bone looks to pinpoint who she is at this point in time without committing to any lasting identity. To possess the confidence to work beyond the expectations of preconception and present however feels right within the current moment. Hence an album which foregoes easy pigeonholing in terms of style, unified instead by the defiant new self-confidence which underpins it. “You owe it to the people who are experiencing the worst to just keep pushing,” as Howerton concludes. “These songs were written out of hope for a better future. I’m not naïve, the world is fucked up, but I think you can radically accept that while still believing it’s possible to change things.” [Review]

Wild Pink – Dulling the Horns

Fire Talk

If recent years have seen Wild Pink’s star rise, then Dulling the Horns could be said to see it begin its arc back earthward, returning not to obscurity but a gravity-saddled weight and heft, the loud rush of the atmosphere roaring in its ears. Recorded live with all the grit and raw energy of the band’s live show left intact, it feels like both a throwback to their early work and a new chapter entirely, losing the wide-screen scope and sparkling electronics in favour of something with a little less polish.  “I didn’t want to clean up anymore,” says lead John Ross. “In doing so we’ve arrived at a new place.” Thematically it leaps around, touching on everything from Dracula and Michael Jordan to the Waco siege and Lefty Ruggiero, and this willingness to reach wide and chase tangents only furthers the sense of immediacy, resulting in the most urgent Wild Pink album to date.

Wishy – Triple Seven

Winspear

Released hot on the heels of December 2023’s successful EP Paradise, Wishy‘s debut full-length Triple Seven seemed to confirm suspicions the Indiana outfit possess the magic Midas touch, a spontaneous jackpot on first pull of the lever which included an NME cover among other such acclaim. And though the journey to that recognition was far more convoluted in reality, something about this iteration, led by songwriters Kevin Krauter and Nina Pitchkites, possesses an undeniable lightning-in-a-bottle charm. A sound which “pays homage to forebears […] while fashioning the nineties-nostalgic sound into something entirely their own,” as we put it, combining dream pop, shoegaze and indie rock influences into something as polished as it is fun.

Young Jesus – The Fool

Saddle Creek

“The pressures of touring had seen the original Young Jesus band slowly disintegrate, and the mosaic pop of Shepherd Head demanded hours spent alone in front of a computer. Exhausted and disillusioned by the process, Rossiter pined for something less abstract. A way to express his creativity rooted in the real world. So he turned to gardening, studying permaculture and the slow process of nurturing it demands. Only then came a chance encounter with Shahzad Ismaily, originating in a shared interest in the work of Milford Graves, and a slow process of coaxing. Rossiter would work on music then tend Ismaily’s New York garden between sessions. At home in LA, he did the reverse, planting trees and laying paths with Alex Babbitt and Alex Lappin before gathering around the piano to play and sing. Slowly the compulsion to make music returned, though now informed by the lessons learnt whilst working on the natural world. The resulting album The Fool feels like another milestone for Young Jesus. A continuation of the searching style which has so long marked the project, but one armed with a new array of tools and techniques to perhaps arrive closer to a satisfying end.” [Review]

The post Year in Review: 2024 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Philly songwriter Alex Barkats is releasing new album Here we are in the garden later this summer via Ghost Mountain Records, and lead single and opening track ‘Jewels’ gives a window into what to expect from the release. A song of conflicted feelings, where the bright folk sound is shaded by something more melancholic. As though every good moment will also be shadowed by the understanding such a time can only be temporary. But Barkats works against this mood in an effort to carve out a more fulfilling frame of mind. “It’s about finding comfort in routine,” he explains. “Especially when the world is still crumbling. You have to go through so much trial and error to know how to build joy for yourself.”

Antonia Estelle – Don’t Know Why

Back in 2023 we wrote about the Edmonton-based songwriter Antonia Estelle with the EP Poser, describing how the title track embellished acoustic guitar with “syrup-heavy drums,” “gusts of distorted guitar,” and “vocals swaying with quiet intensity like a flickering flame” to explore “the strange balance of a dysfunctional relationship and the ultimate unknowability of selfhood.” Now based in Berlin to study Audio Production at Funkhaus, Estelle is gearing up to release her debut full length, and latest single ‘Don’t Know Why’ introduces the idiosyncratic yet intuitive nature of her work. A sleek pop song which embraces a sense of movement and flow. “My goal while creating this piece was to lean into freedom and playfulness,” Estelle explains. “In the past, I have relied heavily on words and finding meaning in music, but with this song, I wanted to let go of meaning and rather create something that made me want to move my body.”

Blaine Todd – Everyman

Based on Alameda, a former naval base and island in the San Francisco Bay, Blaine Todd is a folk artist in the wanderer tradition. The songwriter as a kind of outlaw perpetually passing through. New album Goodbye ‘Til I Do Good By You follows Todd on this journey, its authentic country sound having an eye on the stars as well as the road, its subtly cosmic style charged with equal parts melancholy and wry humour. “Well, my days go like smoke,” as he sings at the beginning of opener ‘Everyman’, I want to laugh but I choke / Must I be the punchline in some cosmic joke / While just around the bend / Another fire starts smoldering / It flummoxes my ass to no end.” What results is a jaunt to the heart of the human condition, as well as the picture of the beauty and cruelty of the world we’re made to walk.

I nearly found it just today
Held hysteria at bay
But all I can recall is my mother sayin:
Every man rides the horse that he deserves

Jack Gaby – Young Adult

Naarm / Melbourne-based songwriter Jack Gaby has made a name with a bright and jangly brand of indie pop, but there’s more to his work than sunbleached positivity. New single ‘Young Adult’ shows an altogether more contemplative dimension to Gaby’s sound, drifting with a slack rhythm as he considers the wonders and pitfalls of early adulthood. “I went through a period at this age when I was a mess,” as Gaby puts it. “This track is about the tumultuous emotions I experienced at the time.” But rather than present this headspace as a chaotic sound, the sluggish momentum makes for a different kind of experience. One suggestive of the real kicker of such periods, where it feels like you might never gather enough energy to escape the pull of negative feelings, and instead drift within their circular currents forever.

Las Nubes – Enredados (Misty’s Mix)

“Deals with the ways in which activism can be co-opted and exploited,” we wrote of ‘Pesada‘, the recent single from Las Nubes‘ new album Tormentas Malsanas, “the sound [as] tumultuous and hefty as you might expect for such a subject, taking no prisoners with its crushing weight.” With the album now out, the Miami, Florida duo have released one final single, ‘Enredados (Misty’s Mix)’. Not sacrificing one iota of the raucous spirit which marks the work of Ale Campos and Emile Milgrim, the song ramps up the rhythm underpinning the sound to offer something more energetic, grabbing the listener and pulling them along for the ride with all the uncompromising attitude they’ve made their own.

Mary Ocher – The Rubaiyat Medley

To say Mary Ocher’s latest album Your Guide to Revolution is ambitious in its intentions is to risk understatement. A kaleidoscopic and politically charged collection of songs which draws on Ocher’s childhood (born in Moscow to Jewish-Ukrainian parents before emigrating to Tel Aviv during the Gulf War) as a way into wider themes of resistance and civil disobedience. A huge array of styles and influences are utilised across the record, both to evoke the gamut of emotions triggered within the contemporary struggle and to ground the release within a wider history of such subversive art. A central part of the album is a series of three tracks which rework pieces by harpist Dorothy Ashby based on the Rubaiyat of Omar Khyyam, a triptych of songs which Ocher has collected into a short film which echoes The Color of Pomegranates by Sergei Parajanov. Watch it below:

Your Guide to Revolution is out now via the Underground Institute and available from Bandcamp.

Narwhals – Moor Fires

Based between Manchester and the West Yorkshire borough of Calderdale, Narwhals is an indie rock/shoegaze project led by singer-songwriter Jacob Patrick. Drawing on The North’s rich post-punk history, the Narwhals style combines needling guitar and dynamic percussion with Patrick’s signature deep and morose vocals to craft something that sounds big and rich and poignant. Nowhere is this more apparent than on new single ‘Moor Fires’, what the press release calls “a track about grief and heartbreak […] about rebirth and finding peace.” It displays everything that’s great about the Narwhals sound, somber and sonorous but full of energy. Perhaps most impressive is the composure and poise that sits at its centre like the tranquil eye of of a gigantic storm. Frequent collaborator Thē Jaffa also makes an appearance, their backing vocals bringing a lighter counterpoint to Patrick’s and thereby leavening the song as a whole.

Peiriant – Taflu Dŵr

With an experimental sound that draws on everything from folk and post-rock to classical and sound art, mid Wales duo Peiriant combine traditional and electronic styles with samples and found objects for semi-improvised pieces. What results is an almost sculptural approach to music, with Rose and Dan Linn-Pearl building out from a skeleton of an idea with layers of drone and dissonance. One which relies on the push and pull between the main components of violin and electric guitar. New single ‘Taflu Dŵr’ is the perfect introduction for the uninitiated, encapsulating both the detail of the Peiriant sound and the duo’s expert ability to utilise space.

Where’s Beth – Quiet

Writing of single ‘Wide Eyes’ back in March, we described how New York’s Where’s Beth channelled the likes of Sufjan Stevens and Connie Converse in embracing and “idiosyncratic style with conviction and grace to create a sense of authenticity.” Ahead of the debut Where’s Beth full-length Bone Broth, Sarabeth Weszely is back with new single ‘Quiet’. The song again uses a fond, intimate sound to explore wider themes. Written during a trip to Romania where she was struck by the low cost of living and wide open spaces in comparison to New York, the song charts the difficulties of urban living with a tangible warmth. “I was thinking about my relationship to land in the context of a competitive capitalist market (realizing how wild the cost of “air-space” in my home city was compared to the fertile and beautiful land I was spending a few dollars a day to live on),”  This song gives voice to a tension that is familiar to many people who choose to live in cities, whether for career goals or the intoxicating thrill of a crowd.”

Wishy – Triple Seven

With the release of Wishy‘s Triple Seven looming next month on Winspear, the  Indianapolis band have unveiled the title track to allow audiences to get a little more acquainted with the forthcoming full-length. A slice of lush dream pop which both pays homage to forebears likes The Cranberries and Cocteau Twins while fashioning the nineties-nostalgic sound into something entirely their own. “A little bit uncertain / I wasn’t really sure / I walked out in silence / I shut that door,” Nina Pitchkites sings in the opening, but the bright sound soon smothers any sense of doubt, instead offering an affirming if slightly wistful track to soundtrack your later summer evenings as the sun dips below the horizon.

Watch the video directed, filmed and edited by Haoyan of America below:

Triple Seven is out on the 16th August via Winspear and you can pre-order it now.

The post Weekly Listening: June 2024 #3 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Best known as the songwriter and lead of Baltimore indie rock band Outer Spaces, Cara Beth Satalino spent the last fifteen years living a strangely predictable existence. Playing shows, writing and releasing records, attempting to follow an assumed blueprint as to what a musician’s life should look like. Eventually Satalino decided to get out, upping roots and moving to New Jersey with partner and fellow Outer Spaces member Chester Gwazda to go back to school and start a new chapter. But the universe had other plans, both on a personal and global scale. Satalino fell pregnant, was diagnosed with a chronic illness, and battled “looming mental health issues,” all while the pandemic hit and the world changed for pretty much everyone. Forced to drop out of school, she had to find a way to deal with all this upheaval.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Satalino took to writing songs, looking for solutions to the current turmoil by examining the present and delving into the past. Musically, she looked back to her earliest influences, namely her upbringing in upstate New York where her father (himself an accomplished instrumentalist) immersed her in what she describes as “the vibrations of fiddle, banjo, guitars and mandolin.” Working in this traditional folk tradition felt like both a fresh start and a return to her roots. The unveiling of a true self that had previously sat beneath a noisier indie rock surface.

The result of this work is Little Green, a collection of ten of the most stripped back and vulnerable songs Satalino has ever written. There are gentle folk numbers and moments of warm and organic country rock, fleshed out with additional instrumentation (namely percussion, pedal steel and cello) from Gwazda, Angie Boylan, Nicholas Metz and Dan Kassel. But though the arrangements might sound like safe harbours from the chaos of the wider world, these are songs unafraid to face up to the deepening sense of uncertainty which marks our times. As though unease has wormed its way into our most personal, comforting habits in the day-to-day.

“I would take daily walks to to watch a family of eagles in their nest, tending to their eggs,” Satalino describes of the period in late 2020 when she escaped the city to stay with family. “The world felt big to me at the time, like it had its own agenda and we were all just along for the ride.” Tracks like ‘The Great Liberator’, which directly references this time, are imbued with such a mood, their warm fondness chilled by the shadow of impending change as it looms above. “Things felt like they had reached a standstill and yet we knew things were changed and changing,” she continues. “Like pushing a big boulder toward the edge of a cliff, it was difficult to move it, but soon it would be free falling at breakneck speed into the abyss.”

It goes around and round again
It’s all begun to change again

The success of Little Green is in no small part a result of the nuanced nature of Satalino’s approach. Early on you come to appreciate her uncanny ability to combine deep soul-searching with offhand observations and gentle humour, inventive imagery and smart turns of phrase creating something rich and full of life despite the surrounding turmoil. “I float above my body like a tetherball,” she sings in a typically wry line on opener ‘Warmth of a Golden Sun’. Or the opening lines of ‘Time’—“Got plenty of things to get into, when time abides and fear subsides, I’m a block of ice just melting in my shoes”—a track which explores old fears and uncertainties with a deceptively light hand, turning philosophical musings on the unstoppable march of the clock into something warm and buoyant and hopeful.

Nowhere is this balance more apparent than on the title track. A slow, hushed song which exudes a kind of bravery and self-acceptance with its dawning richness, embracing frailty rather than trying to hide it and finding some semblance of freedom in dropping such pretences. “It’s partly about finding compassion for myself as a young person, despite all my mistakes and troubles,” Satalino says of the song. “It’s saying something about identity: who we tell ourselves we are, how limiting those perceptions can be and how freeing it can feel sometimes to let go of them.” It’s a fitting encapsulation of the record as whole, soft and fragile as a little green shoot but with a spark of energy too, a desire to keep on. It might be too dark to see what is in front of you, but the earth is still turning and the bright star is still burning. There is time yet to grow towards the light.

Little Green is out now via Worried Songs. Get it from Bandcamp.

The post Cara Beth Satalino – Little Green appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Ava Mirzadegan – Dark Dark Blue

Team Love Records [BUY]

Dark Dark Blue, the title of Ava Mirzadegan’s latest full-length, might refer to a mood, a time of day, the quality of light in a room. The album was written in Mirzadegan’s childhood bedroom in the wake of a break-up, a collection of finger-picked folk songs which paints a series of memories, longings and confessions in the palette of the titular hue. But though the present loss hangs heavy, Mirzadegan also digs towards a deeper seam of sadness. One ingrained at her centre, accumulated not only across one life but an entire family history. Here, old wounds are not so much sources of pain as shafts leading towards something older and more fundamental, and Ava Mirzadegan follows these passageways as deep as they might allow her in the hope that allowing light into these dark spaces is to begin to process and heal.

Dean Johnson – Nothing For Me Please

Mama Bird Recording Co. [BUY]

The Seattle-based singer-songwriter Dean Johnson (who is also a member of the band Sons of Rainier) has built a devoted following across the Pacific Northwest with his live shows, garnering almost mythical status with his anachronistic folk songs full of lonesome melodies and gruff heartbreak. Not wishing to change a winning formula, Johnson’s debut solo record Nothing For Me Please is almost completely devoid of bells and whistles, to the point where it often feels like he is singing from a chair in the corner or crooning from a sticky dive bar stage. He sings of pining for a lost love (‘Old TV’, ‘Shouldn’t Say Mine’) and false-smiling through a breakup (‘Acting School’), and the age-old existential woes of any cowboy worth his salt. Songs relatively simplistic in their construction and all the better for it, a reminder that less is oftentimes more. The album is relatively brief, clocking in at less than thirty minutes, though lingers in the mind like the sweet tones of a half-remembered dream.

Divide and Dissolve – Systemic

Invada Records [BUY]

“To make music that honours their ancestors and Indigenous land, to oppose white supremacy, and to work towards a future of Black and Indigenous liberation.” That’s how the liner notes of Divide and Dissolve‘s Systemic describes the intention at the heart of the duo’s crushing songs. The album felt like a fitting soundtrack to 2023, yet another year where the pervasive systems of violence and control have been all too visible, and those familiar with previous LP Gas Lit will recognise the dark, furious density Takiaya Reed and Sylvie Nehill manage to conjure. But far from being a mere sonic steamroller happy to only grind its audience into the ground, Systemic pairs its apocalyptic weight with something more fragile and light. Sections almost orchestral in their detail which move through the ruins of the doomworld in something like defiance. The dominant systems might seem as monolithic as they are malevolent, but there are other systems, other possibilities, and they are more persistent than you might think. As Minori Sanchiz-Fung reads on ‘Kingdom of Fear’:

If I am denied the kindness needed to transform sorrow
If I am denied the simple gentleness of existing
Then I will leave my gifts, like lichen, over the oak branches
Trusting they’ll be safe until you find them

Erik Kramer – Where the fish are as fine as the color of colors

Self-released [BUY]

When people talk about the ‘real world’, they’re not really talking about the real world. Words are not up to such an endeavour. But that’s where art comes in. Described as “music for Blue Sky (‘where the eagle that flies out of sight flies’),” this self-released cassette from Erik Kramer feels like a reminder of this fact, an exercise evoking in times, places and feelings that are incommunicable with mere words. Crafted from a hodgepodge of instruments and samples—from guitar, banjo and pump organ to bells and Casio keyboards, a tin whistle, field recordings, loon calls, snippets of poetry and the ambient sounds of “cars & trucks” and “Madison area teenagers”—the tape offers a series vignettes, small, snatched moments of beauty and nostalgia and wistfulness. Take the mantra-like repetition of ‘Hermit Guardian Angel’ or Eva Chudnow’s still and sweet rendition of the titular traditional folk song on ‘Just as the tide was flowing’, the gloomy slo-mo rock song of ‘Daylight Saving’ or the title track which swells and shivers with an inextricable mixture of sorrow and joy. In a world that seems to grow more complex and cruel with each rotation, it’s no small wonder to find escape routes, art that enables not selfish head-in-the-sand ignorance but a return to what really matters, what really is.

Florry – The Holey Bible

Dear Life Records [BUY]

The Holey Bible feels like a seminal moment in Florry’s history. The Philly band, led by Francie Medosch, have dabbled with country sensibilities ever since their inception, but this record is the moment they fully embrace the genre. It’s chock full of fiddle and mandolin, harmonica and pedal steel, meandering melodies and a heart-on-sleeve lyrical style that seems determined to look on the bright side. This positivity permeates the record, sidestepping the lonesome blues so common in the genre in favour of something genuinely joyful, though with a messy, ramshackle spirit that wards off any threat of things getting saccharine. Through woozy waltzes, fuzzy Country-fried rockers and no small amount of narrative attention, Florry rise from an uncertain, bleak world like a Roman candle, as though the only way to live nowadays is to meet despair with an equal and opposite force.

Gia Margaret – Romantic Piano

Jagjaguwar [BUY]

Writing in one of his journals, the Trappist monk Thomas Merton described the necessity of living in solitude in the woods. “The silence of the forest is my bride and the sweet dark warmth of the whole world is my love,” he wrote. “Out of the heart of that dark warmth comes the secret that is heard only in silence, but it is the root of all the secrets that are whispered by all the lovers in their beds all over the world.” It is this secret, not the lovers, with which Gia Margaret’s Romantic Piano is concerned. A collection of spare compositions whose title gestures not to rose petals and candlelit dinners but the melancholic wonder of the late eighteenth century. Because while Margaret’s first instrumental release Mia Gargaret was wrapped in insular detachment, these brief, meditative songs open the curtains if not entirely stepping outside. A picture of solitude not as some lonely retreat but rather the path towards recognising the wider connection of things. That sweet dark warmth of the whole world.

Kara Jackson – Why Does The Earth Give Us People To Love?

September [BUY]

“The title of my album, the question, is driven by grief,” explains Kara Jackson of debut album Why Does The Earth Give Us People To Love? “Why do we show up on this world alongside one another? To love and to mourn? To curse each other out? To die working every day?” Jackson works through this question in what feels like real time, swapping any hope of a definitive answer for the gradual process of learning. Songs at once intimate and grand, and as fond of playful humour as they are heart-on-the-sleeve sincerity. But the biggest irony of the album is that of its intention. Because for all of its immediacy and uncertainty, Jackson’s refusal to offer any simple, unifying answer comes to represent a solution in its own right. Why does the earth give us people to love? The answer might not reveal itself directly, but would songs like this exist if it did?

L’Rain – I Killed Your Dog

Mexican Summer [BUY]

The music of Taja Cheek’s L’Rain has never been content in a single box. Straddling pop, jazz, R&B and experimental styles, the songwriter and multi-instrumentalist has made name in refusing easy categorisation. This elusive fluidity extends through every aspect of latest album, I Killed Your Dog. A love record, a break-up record, an anti-break-up record. A record which reaches for commercial pop without ceding an inch of its avant garde ambition. “I’m envisioning a world of contradictions, as always,” Cheek describes. “Sensual, maybe even sexy, but terrifying, and strange.” Hence we get an intricate, tangled picture of what it means to love and hurt the people we care about, where shame need not preclude cruelty and love comes complete with both hope and despair. The style is encapsulated by the question Cheek poses in the liner notes: “Is the title an act of maliciousness and revenge or an expression of remorse and regret?” The answer, as always with L’Rain, isn’t as simple as one or the other. It’s everything, simultaneously.

Lael Neale – Star Eaters Delight

Sub Pop [BUY]

Lael Neale’s music feels unmoored from time. Written and recorded at her family home in rural Virginia with help from collaborator Guy Blakeslee and without the involvement of a single screen, Star Eaters Delight draws on multiple lineages of American alternative music, from the lo-fi pop of Suicide and The Velvet Underground to folk singers like Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell. All in an attempt to reach out into the quiet of remote landscapes and fill them with sound and life. In contrast to Neale’s previous album Acquainted With Night, which turned inward to find peace away from the bustle of urban LA, the record explores the false divide between humans and the rest of nature (“I pledge allegiance to tree and meadow / I have no need to conquer or keep them” as Neale sings on opener ‘I Am the River’) and the value of tranquillity away from the information overload of modern life. There are many planes and dimensions, the songs at times crystalline and brittle, others amorphous and unbreakable as water, though it is this tranquillity that ultimately stands out. Minimalism not as a pretentious aesthetic choice or act of puritan self-denial, but, in true transcendentalist style, as an expression of freedom. As Neale puts it when explaining her outlook, she identifies as a minimalist “not because I don’t like things, but because I value freedom more.”

Lilts – Waiting Around

Better Company Records [BUY]

Wild Pink has been a VSF favourite for a number of years now, and we count Laura Wolf‘s Shelf Life among our favourite releases of 2023, so it is no surprise Lilts won our hearts too. Not that the collaboration between Wolf and Wild Pink’s John Ross is overtly indebted to the previous work of its duo. Rather, the pair allow their respective talents to compliment one another, setting their compass to Nineties shoegaze but allowing for whatever detours might occur along the way. Elements of dream pop and post-rock filter in, and there’s none of the derivative flatness of the revivalist movement. Indeed, there’s a freedom to ‘Dodge Street’ and the title track which feels wholly new. A product of the relationship between its creators, as though learning to trust another person allows an artist to escape the confines and expectations of the work they’ve done in the past.

Mark Jenkin – Enys Men OST

Invada Records [BUY]

Mark Jenkin’s 2019 film Bait took kitchen sink realism and bent it into something stranger, its use of a hand-cranked camera and style of dubbing distorting an otherwise familiar picture of tensions between rural traditions and the encroaching middle class. Again set in rural Cornwall, follow-up Enys Men leant more fully into this unsettling mood. Centring on a volunteer ecologist tasked with observing a rare flower on a remote island, the film presents time as both a line and a circle. The protagonist’s monotonous routine unfolds with striking similarity each day, even if the dates in her logbook progress, while strange visions appear across the island as though the thin present is merely draped over a many layered past. To say Enys Men sounded better than it looked is to pay it the highest compliment, with a soundtrack by Jenkin himself which embodies every inch of the film’s loneliness, stark beauty and hauntological mystery.

Meursault – S/T

Common Ground Records [BUY]

The self-titled record from Edinburgh‘s Meursault was initially designed as a concept album. The tale of two characters, including the titular Meursault, attempting to negotiate a post-apocalyptic world. A direct evolution, then, from the “urban horror vignettes” of 2019’s Crow Hill, as Neil Pennycook looked to lead the project in a more narrative-driven direction. But any short story worth its salt undergoes intense revision, and Meursault was pared down beyond its original idea. As though in delving further into the album’s themes, Pennycook felt able to remove the scaffold of the narrative and allow the songs to stand on their own. The character of Meursault remains, albeit under a different guise, and in offering a more autobiographical picture than anything Pennycook has shared to date, the songs come to form a wider meditation on what the ever-changing project means to him. “I am tired of this metaphor and I am bored of this poetry,” as he sings on the title track:

I am done with this ghost
and this ghost she is done with me
so I gave her a name and I set her to burn
and there in that moment this lesson I learned
you can kill them with kindness
just don’t kill them with love

and if you’ve nothing nice to say
try singing it to me

Natalia Beylis – Mermaids

Touch Sensitive Records [BUY]

Mermaids, the latest release from composer and sound artist Natalia Beylis, is in no small part indebted to a trip to a Leitrim recycling centre. It was there Beylis came across an unwanted CRB Elettronica Ancona Diamond 708 E Electric Keyboard, an instrument seemingly patient in its wait for a saviour. Beylis took it home, performed some surgery to remove the purple crayons rattling around inside, and took to playing. “When I found the cover picture of the three figures in a stack of old family photos,” Beylis says, “a confluence of the sounds and the image charged through me and [the album] began to flicker into being.” But as the record progresses, what might as first seem like serendipity deepens into something more profound. As though in committing to strange patterns of intuition and happenstance, Beylis is able to push deeper into nostalgia and unearth the lines of history and heritage within.

Northwoods Baseball Sleep Radio – Northwoods Sleep Baseball

Worried Songs [BUY]

The title character of Robert Coover’s 1968 novel The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. might be miserable in his work life, but at night he escapes reality into a fantasy of his own creation. A fully functioning baseball league he runs as a tabletop game, where every pitch, hit and injury are governed by the roll of a dice. The sport’s essence is captured in the pursuit, a collision of hard statistics and ever-unfolding narrative at a pace slow enough to fill an entire life. Northwoods Sleep Baseball Radio lives in the spirit of Coover’s imagination, albeit with a zany Pynchonian twist. A podcast fronted by elusive Chicago humourist ‘Mr King’ which offers full-length and entirely fictional baseball games featuring players like Clifton Santiago, Lefty Thorn, Blink Retterson and Randy Chang, all narrated by commentator Wally McCarthy. This album, released by Worried Songs, serves as the perfect first step into the comforting and hilarious world of Northwoods Sleep Baseball. Where sedate rhythms draw you in, but wry imagination keeps you listening.

ØXN – CYRM

Claddagh Records [BUY]

The majestic Lankum might have deservedly taken 2023 by storm, but Radie Peat’s other project ØXN also released a masterful album this year. More adventurous still than False Lankum, CYRM offers mix of traditional and original folk songs loaded with aching hearts and portentous weight, charging folk with electronic and cinematic sensibilities to blur the line between blessing and curse. Take ‘Love Henry’, a tale of seduction and violence which screws taut as it progresses, every bit as black and fated as the darkest fairy tale, or ‘Cruel Mother’, where a woman pressured into infanticide sees herself become a slow slide towards damnation. A dread-laden version of Scott Walker’s ‘Farmer in the City’ closes out the album, a thirteen-minute epic which creeps and creeps until it as all around you, then collapses into a chaos of noise.

Pearla – Oh Glistening Onion, The Nighttime Is Coming

Spacebomb Records [BUY]

“I’m not certain about much,” sings Pearla on ‘Ming the Clam’, “But I’m certain how we touch / Is compelled by some great force / Other than us.” The song encapsulates the spirit of Oh Glistening Onion, The Nighttime Is Coming, where playful whimsy and unfiltered introspection are kept in check by a certain self-awareness, though cannot help but tend towards the potential of some higher mystery. Many of the songs are concerned with finding comfort within a hostile world, and often play like questions being processed in real time, drawing on both real life experiences and wider sources. From the experience of having a credit card stolen at a flower shop to the story of Ming, the oldest individual animal known to science which died as scientists studied its longevity (“I study all the little signs / Under fluorеscent light… Reminder of the grand creation / How did she keep on fighting?”). It’s an album that marks Pearla as a project that works in awe of life’s mysteries, determined to see the beautiful and the surreal rise above the grind of the everyday.

Protomartyr – Formal Growth in the Desert

Domino [BUY]

“In case I don’t see you, well, for a little while, I just want to tell you, it’s been lovely. Every bit of it. The whole fifty years. I’d sooner have been your wife, Bark, than anyone else on earth.” So says Lucy “Ma” Cooper in the closing scene of Leo McCarey’s 1937 drama Make Way For Tomorrow, a film which feels relevant to Protomartyr’s fifth album, Formal Growth in the Desert, not least because it is referenced by the titles of opening pair of tracks. The songs were written in a period which saw lead Joe Casey lose his mother and be forced out of his childhood home, and while the records holds no small amount of grief and darkness, it also serves as an unguarded declaration of love. Which might sound strange for a band who have won deserved acclaim for their foreboding sound, their fury and doom, but Protomartyr have always been so much more than another snarling, depressed post-punk outfit in a crowded field. “Time’s your enemy / Every gift you see will be taken for sure,” Casey sings on ‘The Author’, the most direct tribute to his mother. “So I figure while you live / Kiss the ones that love you / For thе song you sing.” In case I don’t see you for a little while, I just want to tell you, it’s been lovely.

Sluice – Radial Gate

Ruination Record Co. [BUY]

The title of Radial Gate, Justin Morris’s second album under the moniker Sluice, follows the project name and doubles down on the imagery of water. Namely its control, the mechanisms and machinery developed in order to stop, raise and coax waterways in the manners most functional. Morris’s songs, cut from a nostalgic, patient style of folk and elevated by a rich palette of instrumentation, feel like miniature versions of such systems. Only here the flow is not a canal or estuary but the ever pulling course of time, complete with its attached stream of memories and meaning. Tracks like ‘Centurion’ find affirming momentum in this current, while others dam the passage to contemplate the depths of a single moment. But whether Morris is skimming along the surface or submerging himself in plunge pools, the lasting sense is that of control. For if life is a flowing river, Radial Gate represents an attempt to apply structures along its course so that we might more fully engage with the power and potential to be found therein.

Measure, Pour & Mixtape: Music for Cooking

SPINSTER [BUY]

As its title suggests, this compilation by the fine folks at SPINSTER invited artists to explore links between food and music. From shared conceptual themes of creativity and community to parallels between melody and harmony and texture and flavour, each song celebrates both the act of preparing food and sharing it with others. The result is what the label call “an auditory cookbook of songs, poems, field recordings, and aural experiments, inspired by recipes, food preparation processes, dishes, and the experience of eating.” There ain’t a dud across the sixteen tracks, but personal favourites include Andy McLeod & Sarah Bachman’s timeless folk opener, a new song from Lou Turner inspired by a line from Robert Frost, Sally Anne Morgan’s soil-to-plate ‘Grain Song’ that’s all blue skies and wide open fields, and Little Mazarn’s exploration of food’s ability to evoke memories, in this case of an uncle who she says “briefly played on the Dallas Cowboys but mostly played football with me on Thanksgiving.”

Stephen Steinbrink – Disappearing Coin

Western Vinyl [BUY]

Since releasing his last record Utopia Teased in 2018, Oakland’s Stephen Steinbrink busied himself with other things, both musical and not. He dove into the craft of engineering records for other bands, enjoying the sense of communal creativity in contrast to the solo endeavour of writing and recording for himself. He also studied an apprenticeship at a stained glass studio and became deeply interested in Buddhism, enrolling in lay monastic training before being interrupted by the global lockdowns of 2020. All of which is important when considering Disappearing Coin, an album which represents something of a reinvention for Steinbrink. A wilful attempt to make music with the same creativity and sense of awe-filled wonder that he felt when exploring these other avenues. The spirit is captured in the conjurer’s trick of the title, where reality is ruptured by a brief spark of magic. Buoyed by the experience and wisdom gleaned from outside activities, Steinbrink returns to music as a kind of magician himself. A figure who, guided by invention and playfulness, looks to use mastery of a physical craft in order to open the door to small, intangible miracles.

Strawberry Runners – S/T

Self-released [BUY]

Released a decade since the project’s inception in 2013, Strawberry Runners is the self-titled debut full-length from Emi Night’s songwriting project. Written following a period of great personal upheaval and echoing back to past trauma, the record returns to dark places with disarming candour and an easy grace, folding folk and pop into shapes that feel at once fresh and familiar. Night runs their fingers over old wounds to confront feelings of loneliness and heartbreak, but does so with a renewed spirit and sense of unrestrained creativity. Because despite the sometimes heavy subject matter, Strawberry Runners is a warm and colourful record. One full of gentle melodies and tactile textures, small details that evoke the multisensory nature of our chaotic world in all of its pain and joy and mysterious beauty. Take the sunny, devotional love song ‘Alison’, a shot of sunshiney summer where you can almost hear the wistful smile bend Night’s voice as they sing.

And I miss you
I hope you’re alright
I remember stayin’ up all night
Last June

And when I get back
To the midwest
To the bluegrass
And the sassafras trees
And the yellowwood

Sun June – Bad Dream Jaguar

Run For Cover Records [BUY]

There’s always been a distance in the music of Sun June, from the disconnect between lovers and family members to the wide open vistas of the Austin band’s home state. But third album Bad Dream Jaguar was inspired by distance of another order of magnitude. Founding members Laura Colwell and guitarist Stephen Salisbury have been in a relationship for the last few years, and the record was written after Salisbury moved 1,300 miles away to North Carolina, the couple swapping demos of new songs as a way to both process and alleviate the sense of separation and longing. The hazy dream-like quality of the Sun June sound is therefore as nostalgic and nebulous as it has ever been, painting impressionistic pictures of love and longing in quiet dusk-hued pastels, as though in effort to preserve that which might otherwise fade out into nothing. The present comes to feel like a temporary space between the gravity of the past and the vast shadowed sweep of whatever comes next, though we are given little choice but live in it as best we can.

Truth Club – Running From the Chase

Double Double Whammy [BUY]

“Is this working? Are you working hard? Is it working for you?” Such questions might only be asked outright in the closing track of Truth Club’s Running From The Chase, but their desperate weight hangs over its every moment, threatening to pull an entire life off-kilter or else bury it altogether. The North Carolina outfit’s 2019 debut Not An Exit nodded to Dante by way of Bret Easton Ellis, though its despair was matched with an infectious forward motion which meant the listener could step off at the end with their pessimism shaken loose. But here the songs are more expansive, the textures dense and submerging. A sonic representation of twenty-first century living, with lead Travis Harrington left to murmur and yell within the noise, mimicking a world which demands energy for even the most basic of things. “I am scared we will end up like his friend,” as Harrington sings on the title track. “work until he’s dead / work until we’re dead / is there any other plan?”

White Boy Scream – Tent Music

Whited Sepulchre Records [BUY]

Travelling from Los Angeles to New Mexico in 2021, White Boy Scream’s Micaela Tobin stopped off for a few nights in Arizona to stay with violinist and composer Joshua Hill, who was staying with his parents to shelter from the pandemic and care for his dementia-stricken father. They pitched a tent in the backyard and decided to record something in the spur of the moment, setting up microphones as wildfires raged only miles away. A confined space within a world unravelling. Tent Music is what emerged from those nights. Music stripped of intention and thus open to ancient or esoteric influence, Tobin and Hill acting not so much musicians but mouths for unseen voices, tools for invisible hands. When shaping the recordings over the next few years, the task felt more like relaying an old mythology than creating something new. “Both of us have a pretty long practice with improvised and experimental music,” as Tobin explains, “but there were voices coming out of me in those two nights that I’ve never used before. It felt like channelling something. When we started listening back to it, the story emerged.”

As ever, thanks for sticking with us for another year. Your support does not go unnoticed.

The post Albums We Missed in 2023 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Later this summer Middleman returns with a new record, this time under the moniker Edsel Axle. Titled Variable Happiness, the album will be released by Worried Songs and proves something of a change of pace. Forgoing vocals in favour of wandering, cosmic-minded instrumental compositions, Edsel Axle is an outlet for solo guitar work, recorded at home straight to a four-track cassette rig. “[Middleman’s] voice takes a winter hibernation,” as the label put it, “to showcase the prodigious slow burn thump of her solo electric guitar playing.”

You can now listen to the title track and lead single to hear this in action, a warm and patient slice of meditative Americana which bubbles forth from a deceptively simple cyclical guitar line, trembling with psychedelic energy as it unfurls like the scented smoke from an incense stick. It’s proof that lyrics are not required to conjure tangible, lingering feelings, that sometimes music can strike right at the heart of things we otherwise find difficult to describe.

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The project of Baltimore’s Bob Keal, Small Sur has released four albums (as well as a couple of singles and an EP) over the last decade and a half. Attic Room is the first Small Sur album since 2013’s Labor, and more significantly, it is also the first since the birth of Keal’s daughter in 2014. During these intervening years, he created “hundreds of song fragments scratched into the margins of life,” and spurred on by sound engineer Matthew O’Connell (Chorusing) and his brother Joseph (aka Elephant Micah), Keal began the laborious process of sifting through this collection of voice memos and half-formed ideas, eventually hammering them into ten completed songs.

But the next steps were far from simple. Forced by the pandemic to cancel a five-day recording session at a cabin in North Carolina in March 2020, Keal took a few months to deal with more pressing concerns before turning to alternative plans for the album. He began to work with O’Connell remotely, laying down his vocal and guitar work in the basement of a local chapel while O’Connell handled the engineering and played piano and Telecaster. Eventually they reached out to other collaborators too, the limitations on a conventional full-band setup paradoxically ploughing the earth for a different kind of community to grow.

Keal describes Attic Room as a “bedroom country” record, a tag anyone familiar with the Small Sur oeuvre will intuitively understand. Keal makes music that is quiet and minimal, intimate in the truest sense. The sound of one person’s experience of life here on Earth, focusing not on grand narratives but the gentle wax and wane of everyday existence. The new album evokes images of weather patterns (such as the thundercloud of opener ‘A Clean Patch of Ground’), the changing seasons and countless small moments that are infused with a poetic gravity. Moments like the day’s last cigarette (‘Rays of Light’), watching harbour lights reflecting on dark nighttime water (‘Monhegan Island, 2012’), or even the warm-hued tones of a cherished memory (‘Aperture’).

It’s high tide in Tucson
and I’m bathing in the sun
in those western waters gleaming
with my lover in my arms

Small Sur has always excelled in these fine details, and Attic Room therefore fits neatly into the discography. But there are changes too, as is to be expected for work so inherently personal. Just like the landscapes and relationships he explores, Keal is slowly changing. Because of fatherhood and his relationship with his partner, not to mention the challenges of the last few years.

Nowhere is this new perspective more apparent than on ‘Sun’, a song which harks back to another called ‘I Love the Sun’ from 2008’s We Live in Houses Made of Wood. As its title suggests, the original was a simple ode to the most important star (“I love the sun /And its rays / Which fall by day from the heavens”). ‘Sun’ is the same song but sung from a different position, Keal now sharing his appreciation with his daughter. “I will show you the sunrise,” he sings, “in the meadow at dawn.” It’s a moment that, perhaps inadvertently, captures the essence of the record—the idea of finding fortitude and beauty in time passing, in cycles repeating, in the fact the sun continues to rise and set despite whatever else is going on in the world. What is love, after all, if not a study in time?

Congratulations on the release of Attic Room. How does it feel to have a new record out in the world?

Thank you! I haven’t recorded much since our last full-length, Labor, from 2013, so I feel happy to have some new music in people’s ears. It’s a bit surreal, too, mostly because of how people consume music these days, even compared with 2013. It feels like there is so much music being released—not sure if that’s reality or just my perception—so I’m just really thankful a few folks have given the album some time to sink in.

As with most artists over the last few years, the recording process was far from a simple one. How did you manage to work around the restraints of the pandemic, and do you think the album sounds different because of the circumstances it was born in?

First and foremost, my co-conspirator, Matthew O’Connell of Chorusing and Elephant Micah, brought so much to the table in terms of technical know-how and creative input. He engineered most of the record and co-produced it with me. I stand by the songs themselves, but the album would’ve been very different if I’d recorded it live with a band and added a handful of overdubs afterward. That’s what I’ve done in the past because of time and budget constraints, and that approach has its limitations. Because of the pandemic, Matt and I hunkered down and built things up from their basic parts, usually starting with voice and nylon string guitar. I’ve always tried to layer in sounds and parts in a way that feels subtle and intentional, but our overall approach really allowed that to take center stage rather than being an afterthought. In the end, I don’t think this album would be what it is without the limitations, so that’s one of the few positives I’m taking away from the pandemic’s many negatives.

Although Small Sur is very much your project, you enlisted the help of a pretty stellar cast of collaborators. How big an influence did each individual bring to the record?

I’ve always loved inviting folks to put their own stamp on my songs. I offer my opinions and input, but the spontaneity of having others just going for it is really fun. Aside from Matthew’s technical contributions to the album, he also played on piano, Telecaster, tape dubs, bass, and percussion. Erik Hall delivered an incredible mix and played some crucial piano parts. Andy Stack of Wye Oak/Joyero had a huge impact on these recordings, too. He has a super intuitive approach and special relationship with my songs, and I loved what he brought to the table, as always. Andy Abelow has played saxophone on my songs for 15 years, and he has some amazing contributions here, too, as does Will Ryerson, who’s played bass in the band for almost a decade. Cara Satalino of Outer Spaces on backing vocals, Joseph Decosimo on fiddle, Dave Hadley on steel guitar, Joe O’Connell on bass—all incredible contributions, too, and I can’t imagine the record without them.

One unique part of making this record was that most folks did their own engineering. The feedback/revision loop is a bear when working remotely, so I tried to communicate what I was looking for pretty clearly and to also be flexible and run with folks’ ideas even if they weren’t exactly what I had in mind. It was pretty fun, and everyone who played on the album brought so much talent to the table that I didn’t feel the need to clutch too tightly to control. I feel so thankful to have friends and acquaintances who were willing to chip in to flesh these songs out, and I can’t imagine what the album would be without each and every one of their contributions.

This is your first release since the birth of your daughter, and while I’m sure this had a practical impact on the album’s creation, I’m interested in how parenthood and the idea of family seeped into the songs themselves. Are you a different songwriter now? Did you write these songs with your daughter in mind?

Aside from the song ‘For Juniper,’ which I specifically wrote for my daughter, I didn’t write any of the other songs with her in mind. Parenting in general and the partnership I have with my wife Monique played a huge role in the lyrical content of the album and my ability to have the time to make it. We’ve weathered a lot together in the 16 years of our friendship and relationship, especially leading up to and during the pandemic. Continually growing in my ability to be supportive and present through the peaks and troughs of life has been a welcome education, and my reflections on that experience are all over the album.

My approach to writing songs has changed over the last decade because I often only have short windows of time in which to work. Most of the voice memos and quick ideas I record have lots of ambient noise in the background: my daughter singing or screaming, dishes clanking, the dog barking or his nails clicking on the hardwood floor. It makes me think of some of Mick Turner’s recordings, especially Moth, and I’d love to incorporate some of those sounds in finished recordings sometime.

The press release also refers to how the record evokes the “Midwestern landscapes of [your] childhood.” Does parenthood cast your mind back to your own childhood? Did you set out to explore these cycles of growth and development directly?

I’m a pretty nostalgic person, so I spend a lot of time thinking about my childhood and other past experiences. The farm in South Dakota where I grew up had a deep impact on who I am, and “place” in general has always inspired me—hence the name of the band and many songs named after specific places and times. I honestly don’t really set out to explore anything directly. Whatever happens just happens naturally.

Talking of cycles, nature has always been very present in your work. Again, is this intentional, or just something that happens as you write? And what is it about the natural world and its rhythms that can bring us so much strength and solace?

I am very intentional about spending time outside. My yearly goal is to sleep in a tent for three weeks, and on a good year I can push it close to a month. In the midst of these blocks of time, I am often—not always—calm and clear and open. During fall 2020, I wrote ‘For Juniper’ while camping in the Catskills. The lyrics and ideas that became ‘Sun’ were written while camping, too. I take great solace in the fact that I can return to places year after year and see things grow and shift and change. And I let those changes illuminate and reflect the shifts happening in my life, too. The natural world is the filter through which I understand and see my life in its clearest form. Some of the poets and songwriters I love most have similar approaches—Mary Oliver, Phil Elverum, Kyle Field of Little Wings, Joe O’Connell of Elephant Micah—so that surely inspires my work and funnels my approach in some way, too

Attic Room is out now. Order it via Worried Songs or the Small Sur Bandcamp page.

The post Small Sur – Attic Room appeared first on Various Small Flames.