“Picks through self-destructive tendencies in something like a lament, swapping guitar for organ to further amplify the sorrowful atmosphere of the Minneapolis-based songwriter’s work.” So we wrote of Annie Schultz’s recent single ‘MIS‘, a track which marked a conscious effort to move away from the blueprint of previous album It Bends Until It Breaks to open up new territory. Latest single ‘Search and Destroy’ is further proof such experimentation yields fruit. Schultz uses a woozily layered combination of drum machine and keyboards to evoke a dreamlike world, though a pressing electric bassline pulls the listener through. What emerges is something hypnotic and slightly ambiguous, playing somewhere between antagonistic and alluring and never quite showing its hand.

‘Search and Destroy’ is out now via Trailing Twelve and available from the usual places.

Bleary – Foyer

“If Bleary‘s new single ‘bug’ seems to carry a notable sense of depth, then it is with good reason,” we wrote in a preview of the Nashville band’s full-length Little Brain back in February, the song taken from a body of work first developed before the pandemic then more recently honed into something special. With the album’s release little over a month away via yk records, the outfit have shared brand new track ‘Foyer’, and the result is no less impressive. The perfect introduction to the signature Bleary aesthetic, where big wall-of-sound shoegaze sensibilities are paired with a mood more reflective and melancholic. The result is something equal parts visceral and thoughtful that’s sure to swallow you in its embrace.

Death Tennis – Racehorse

Based in Montreal, Death Tennis are a indie rock band unafraid of emotion, as new EP Thank You. No, Thank You attests. Talya Gad (vocals) Marco Petrella (guitar, vocals), Dave Hjin (electric guitars, acoustic guitars), Nathan Cann (electric guitars), Matthew McCormack (bass) and Daniel Pavkeje (drums) add healthy dollops of alt and shoegaze influences to bring these high stakes to life, allowing tenderness and weight to sit side by side. Take opener and single ‘Racehorse’, an emotive number which places Gad’s sincere vocals front and centre, though gradually deepens into something epic. “‘Racehorse’ is a song about loss, told from the perspective of the recently departed,” the band explain. “Do we get a chance to communicate with those we loved from the other side?”

Frog – Dark Out

“Thank you for the day but go slow when you walk out, its dark out,” sings Daniel Bateman on ‘Dark Out’, the latest single from Frog‘s new album Frog for Sale, coming soon via Audio Antihero. “The dogs are barking like Dachau / I need you when it’s dark out.” These lines might sound like depression condensed into half a verse, but the track itself is altogether more jaunty and cool, continuing the new sleek style introduced on previous albums 1000 Variations of the Same Song and The Count. The result has all the idiosyncratic style which has won the New York outfit such a following, managing to maintain a toe-tapping brightness despite the desperation and soul bubbling beneath the surface.

Golden Tiles – Peace

Portland trio Golden Tiles announced themselves to the world in late 2024 with The First EP. Back then we described their sound as “a bright, laidback brand of basement rock which combines playful melodies, fuzzy textures and reflective vocals,” inspired by the last forty-odd years of PNW lo-fi indie rock. Next month, Golden Tiles will release their debut LP, Set Up on the Leaves, via Antiquated Future Records, and the record looks to build on the band’s early promise. Expect catchy pop melodies, left-field song structures and an eye for improvisation, taking something that could feel nostalgic and twisting it into new shapes. Lead single ‘Peace’ is a great introduction. A fleeting sub two-minute rock song that feels warm and intimate but with an air of bittersweet mystery, there and then gone in a flash of satisfying guitar, rambling percussion and fragmentary lyrics.

Josephine Illingworth – The Mythical

The work of London-based musician and multi-disciplinary artist Josephine Illingworth sits at the intersection of song, storytelling and soundscape, drawing on traditions of folk music and folklore but with a modern, experimental edge. Her forthcoming EP, Bright Things I Found In The Dark, follows the narrative of a girl raised by wolves, mapped across the lunar cycle and enveloped in field recordings to intertwine each song in the rhythms of nature. Lead single ‘The Mythical’ was in some ways the record’s genesis, the first song written for it and a critical inflection point in the story where it is still unclear which direction it will take. “[‘The Mythical’] sits in the moment of childhood awakening where reality sharpens and the soft edges of fairytale fall away,” Illingworth describes, “when you can no longer see shapes in the clouds or voices under the bed. It’s about refusing to quite let that other world go.”

Bright Things I Found In The Dark will be released on 1st May.

Motherhood – Kyle Hangs Ten

Canadian rock outfit Motherhood have never been content to sit still, constantly hopping between genres and moods across their five full-length albums, and often within those records too. When working on last year’s Thunder Perfect Mind, they couldn’t quite settle on a single form of one of the songs, vacillating between surf and spaghetti western sensibilities. The later vibe won out for the eventual album track ‘Kyle Hangs At Noon’, but the sister version was also recorded and is now being released as a b-side. ‘Kyle Hangs Ten’ is an interesting counterpart to its twin, ramping up the tempo to make for a perfect slice of summer, while also serving as a window into the creative spirit of a band constantly pushing at the boundaries of their own work. “Usually by the time we release a song, the original influences have been hidden under layers of subterfuge, with our attraction to play far outweighing our ability to stay put,” they explain. “With ‘Kyle Hangs Ten,’ we were trying to write the most surfy song we could without over-complicating a genre that, at it’s core, is just swaggy country music.”

Nic Panken – Out in the Rain

“An compassionate number which takes the image of its title further than you might expect, pushing the love song beyond romance and into something existential.” That’s how we described ‘2 Hearts‘ by Nic Panken back in March, the latest single from the Spirit Family Reunion frontperson’s forthcoming solo album, Near Divine or Merely Rhyme. With the record now just a week away, Panken has unveiled brand new single ‘Out in the Rain’ to further whet appetites. A song which again elevates a personal experience into something near spiritual, it finds Panken positioning love and beauty as things which connect us to older, more mysterious forces. “Did I see you baring your soul / Uncovered the holy portal,” as he sings in one typically striking verse, “Heart was free then, resting in flight / A parcel of light immortal.”

villagerrr – Swimming

Last month we shared ‘Locket’, the lead single from villagerrr’s new record Carousel. We described how the record celebrates the act of opening up, that combination of fear and joy involved in, as we put it “the attempt to communicate in earnest with another person within a world which often seems designed to hinder such a thing.” Winspear will release the record at the end of next month, and villagerrr have dropped a new track to tide us over until then. Titled ‘Swimming’, it’s another slice of sincere indie pop, this time nudged in a country-ish direction with sparkles of pedal steel and Mark Scott’s signature heart-on-sleeve lyrics that focus on small pleasures in the face of the day-to-day trials of existence. “I cried watching the TV, it felt a lot like healing,” he sings in a typically frank line that captures the song’s balance between struggle and self-acceptance. “This song will be my enemy / My brain it wants to kill me.”

Zoon – One Too Many Nights (feat. Sam Jr.)

We have previously described the work of Daniel Monkman’s project Zoon as “an ever-evolving sound rooted in shoegaze that explores themes of activism and Indigenous experience.” The Polaris Prize-shortlisted musician draws as much from traditional First Nations music as they do contemporary indie rock, and in doing so explores themes both national and intensely personal. June sees the release of a brand new Zoon record, Happy Thought School, on Paper Bag Records, and lead single ‘One Too Many Nights’ is our first glimpse. Monkman is joined by Sam Jr. for a cathartic exploration of the strange unmooring caused by the end of a relationship. “When a relationship ends, it’s not just the person you lose it’s the version of yourself that existed beside them,” Monkman describes. ‘“One Too Many Nights’ is about that recalibration. I don’t date often, so when something shifts, it shifts my whole orbit. In that moment, being alone felt like the honest path forward.”

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San Francisco band Cindy specialise in a dreamy, slo-mo brand of pop music, centred on lead Karina Gill’s distinctive vocals and poetic vision. At the beginning of April, Cindy will release a brand new record Why Not Now? via Tough Love and have unveiled lead single ‘A Trumpet on the Hillside’ by way of introduction. Landing somewhere between Galaxie 500 style slowcore and a half-speed Au Revoir Simone track, the song is a quietly transcendent hymn to the wonder that’s threaded into even the most mundane experiences. “It’s about being in a room with people, the closeness and distance involved in that,” Gill describes. “And it’s about the vividness and grandness (sometimes) of the most ordinary experience.”

En Attendant Ana – Wonder

Back in January we wrote a little about ‘Same Old Story’ by Paris indie pop band En Attendant Ana, taken from their new LP Principia. We described it as “a blend of playful indie pop rhythms and post-punk angles… [that] pitch[es] the listener into a funhouse room of mirrors with only the smooth clarity of Margaux Bouchaudon’s vocals as a guide.” The album is out now on Trouble In Mind and the band have released an animated music video for single ‘Wonder’ to celebrate. A song that explores conflicting emotions of legitimacy, opening gentle and pensive before a motorik beat drops with a clockwork energy, building towards a cathartic close, embodying that weird blend of strength and doubt of trying to do your best but always second guessing yourself. Watch the video by Jérôme Papaphotiou below:

Principia is out now via Trouble in Mind and available from the En Attendant Ana Bandcamp page.

Eric Angelo Bessel – Secret Lake

We’ve written about Laura Mariposa Williams and Eric Angelo Bessel’s Lore City several times in the recent years, with 2021 LP Participation Mystique and last year’s Under Way highlighting the band’s evocative, esoteric style and the manner in which it blurs the physical and metaphysical so seamlessly. The pair set up Lore City Music to facilitate the release of their work, and April sees the imprint release Bessel’s debut solo album, Visitations. Single ‘Secret Lake’ invites us into the world of the record, its slack drift like some sitting bogland but soon deepening into something more. A depth alluring in its own way, beautiful and strange in the manner unique to hidden spaces, allowing the listener to descend through its column while refusing to give anything away freely.

Visitation comes out on 21st April and you can pre-order it from the Lore City Music Bandcamp page.

Foyer Red – Plumbers Unite!

Yarn The Hours Away, the debut full-length from Brooklyn‘s Foyer Red coming this spring on Carpark Records, is described as a collection of short stories—where each track aims to build a fully rendered sense of character and place. Previous single ‘Etc‘ hinted at the depth of such an intention (“exploring,” as we put it, “a mismatched relationship of indistinct philosophical musings and robotic computations.”), and new single ‘Plumbers Unite!’ is no less ambitious. A song which not only uses the relentless trials of a side-scrolling videogame as a metaphor for life’s daily grind, but then imagines the sentience of the console once the power has been cut. “When I was little I was obsessed with my Gamecube, but after entering cheat codes on my Harvest Moon game, I felt sooooooo guilty,” explains Elana Riorda. “I impulsively deleted my game data and later had recurring nightmares about my Gamecube’s anger towards me, something I knew was unrealistic but felt so creepy and real.” Watch the video filmed, edited and directed by Leif Morton below:

Yarn The Hours Away is out on the 19th May via Carpark Records.

Nicolas Krgovich – Front Stoop #2

“For years and years I guess I was lonely / but refused to call it so.” So opens ‘Front Stoop #2’, the first single from Nicolas Krgovich’s Ducks, out next month on Orindal Records. The realisation is prompted by a direct question on the titular front stoop, one the narrator answers simply. Yes, he is lonely. “
To answer a plain question with a plain reply / Feels new to me and good.” What follows is so rooted in specific details it almost feels, paradoxically, like a dream. That weird summer, the smoke, the deserted beach. Tossed pebbles and sand and shells and “things that don’t matter and things to forget.” With Ducks, Krgovich promises to explore how moments are catalogued and remembered via minutiae, and the manner in which complexity of any present is not so much reduced to images but coded in them. “I let them whirl, a little cyclone,” as he concludes at the end of the song. “Living in a world of love.”

Seminar Shadow – Luring (Excerpt)

Seminar Shadow, AKA duo Lucie Vítková and Teerapat Parnmongkol, are preparing to unveil their new release HEATWAVE via Dear Life Records. Recorded on a pair of baby grand pianos during the August 2022 heatwave and comprising of two improvised side-length tracks, the release probes the present for the full weight of the past, exploring how any apparently ‘live’ moment rests upon an unseen foundation of everything which preceded it. “Liveness as in a self-organization in action can’t detach or distinguish from skeleton of memory,” as they explain. “A wave of heat is rinsing out inseparably within this heat, where the liveliness is revealing itself as a part of motion and movement that lives through this instinctual response to the environment around it.” You can hear an excerpt of the opening track ‘Luring’ now:

Shit Present – Voice in Your Head

“It really did come as breaking news to me in 2016 that I am not my thoughts and I might learn to have some agency over them,” explains Shit Present’s vocalist and guitarist Iona Cairns of new single ‘Voice in Your Head’. What they describe as a ‘textbook’ I’ve-been-to-therapy song which serves as the perfect introduction for those unfamiliar with the Bristol outfit’s blend of emo and power pop. Committed to offering honest dispatches from the trials of mental health, wide open in their vulnerability but armed with the power of noisy catharsis. ‘Voice in Your Head’ is sincere in its message, wry in its tone, and ultimately empowered by the realisation that you can learn to live with your thoughts. “I could fucking destroy you or be your best friend,” sings the titular being in the chorus. “I’m here ’til you’re dead.”

talker – Don’t Want You To Love Me (Oceanator Remix)

“Indie rock with glitter all over it,” that’s how Celeste Tauchar describes the talker sound. Last year’s In Awe of Insignificance showed off the style in all its vivid glory, working to elevate Tauchar’s moody, emotionally-driven vocals. Following on from the success of the release, talker is putting out a brand new EP of remixes, with offerings from the likes of Overcoats and FRENSHIP. Latest single sees VSF fav Oceanator reimagine ‘Don’t Want You To Love Me’, adding gauzy textures over the clarity of the original without losing any of the sound’s urgent motion.

Zoon – Manitou

‘Manitou’ is the second single from Bekka Ma’iingan, the forthcoming sophomore record by Daniel Monkman’s Zoon on Paper Bag Records. Regular readers will by now be familiar with Monkman’s work, an ever-evolving sound rooted in shoegaze that explores themes of activism and Indigenous experience. The new song continues this trajectory, a lush orchestral piece that strips any notion of shoegaze back to its bare bones, emotional swells rising up amidst the atmosphere of lingering melancholy. “‘Manitou’ is about the group of friends I had growing up in Selkirk Manitoba,” Monkman explains. “We’d run a cross the red bridge and have fires and drink. Our little piece of heaven.” But far from a simple rose-tinted exercise in nostalgia, ‘Manitou’ reflects on the difficulties of that time too, acknowledging struggles and vowing never forget friends lost before their time.

And live out your youth
And all the stars shine fine
And keep this close to me
And live out your youth

Bekka Ma’iingan will be released by Paper Bag Records on 28th April and you can pre-order it now from the Zoon Bandcamp page.

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

“A diverse album entirely committed to whatever direction each song takes, as though leaning into the spontaneity of the moment.” That’s how we have previously described Wise Blood, the forthcoming album by Blue Yonder on Earth Libraries. With the release now on the horizon, the band have unveiled final single, ‘Nightingale’, and this time they pitch us right into the middle of a seventies spaghetti western. The song opens with a nocturnal simmer, Karalena Fjortoft’s vocals emerging with an almost haunting croon, though soon the rhythm picks up and adds a sense of urgency, as though the dark figures at the door have been evaded and now we are racing across the desert floor with only the moon in pursuit.

Wise Blood is out on the 24th February via Earth Libraries.

Dari Bay – Same Old Bumpy Road

Described as “an ongoing thought experiment disguised as a band,” Dari Bay is the project of Burlington, Vermont’s Zack James. Though originating as something rough and chaotic, new album Longest Day of the Year sees the Dari Bay style morph into an altogether smoother sound, albeit with some of the strangeness left intact. Take ‘Same Old Bumpy Road’, the country pop jangle a clear departure from the harsh and often abstract noise of the previous releases, while a certain playfulness underpins everything. Life is no less odd for Dari Bay, they are just finding new ways to describe it.

Emelia Austin – Shifting Weather

With debut album From Another Sky coming very soon via Anxiety Blanket Records, Emelia Austin has been releasing a series of single to offer glimpses into her style. Tracks like ‘Hand Soft’ and ‘Desire to Reveal’ hinted at the amalgamation of sparkle and cloudiness which constitutes her shoegaze-adjacent sound, though it is the hefty closer ‘Shifting Weather’ which is perhaps the perfect introduction to From Another Sky. A slow song which gathers weight behind itself gradually, like a thunderhead coalescing into something dense and charged before its tumultuous finale, offering a cathartic view of possible futures where you come to accept yourself just as you are.

Kassi Valazza – Watching Planes Go By

Having introduced herself in 2019 with debut album Dear Dead Days and consolidated the style with last year’s EP Highway Sounds, Kassi Valazza has established herself among the new generation of country songwriters who build their craft around celebrating and subverting the traditions of the genre. With new album Kassi Valazza Knows Nothing out via Loose Music (UK) and Fluff & Gravy Records (US), Valazza is now a labelmate of acts like of Anna Tivel, Margo Cilker and Courtney Marie Andrews, and single ‘Watching Planes Go By’ shows she belongs among such company. A song centred on ideas of loss and the inability to move on which draws a psych-inflected richness around itself, it bears all the hallmarks of the best retro tracks while refusing to fall for nostalgic imitation.

Kassi Valazza Knows Nothing is out on the 26th May. UK fans can preorder from Loose Music and US fans from Fluff & Gravy Records.

 L.T. Leif – Gentle Moon

Back in December we previewed Come Back To Me, But Lightly, the a release from L.T. Leif released by Lost Map Records in collaboration with OK Pal. An album in which the Calgary-born, Scotland-based artist “draws on both the imagery of these northern climes and the talent which resides there to create songs able to explore intimate processes of development.” The album has just been released, and opener ‘Gentle Moon’ captures the compassionate and striking tone for anyone who still needs convincing. A song which uses lunar imagery to explore the wax and wane of relationships, not to mention the gravitational pull which seems to hold some power over the smallest and largest of things. Check out the lyric video by Bart Owl below:

Gentle moon
you are shining
in the shape
of a human body

Come Back To Me, But Lightly is out now via Lost Map Records and OK Pal Records and you can get it from Bandcamp.

Party of the Sun – Forget Me Knot

“Psych-inflected folk songs anchored to the natural environments in which they were created, tracks possessing both tension and harmony.” So we wrote of Capsule II, the previous EP from New Hampshire‘s Party of the Sun on Trailing Twelve Records. Next month sees the release of the appropriately named follow-up Capsule III, and lead single ‘Forget Me Knot’ suggests the psych-folk outfit are continuing to push this style. A song which lives up to its title, the careful details and easy intuition evoking the patterns of a forest or perhaps the knotted layers of the trunks themselves, eventually rising into a soaring crescendo in the closing minutes.

Saloon Dion – I Don’t Feel

Bristol post-punks Saloon Dion are back with a new single, ‘I Don’t Feel’, the first taste of their forthcoming debut EP on Mucker Records. It follows a spate of singles in the last few years that have established the five piece’s distinctive style, what we previously described as “an eclectic blend of punk and funk topped by raw and volatile energy.” Delivered with considerable pop polish, ‘I Don’t Feel’ is built on grooving beats and bass riffs, its big chorus hinting at a future of radio airtime and festival appearances. “[It’s] a song about being reluctant to seek help from others,” Saloon Dion explain. “What it isn’t, is a song about having no feeling, but more of choosing what to feel and when to feel it. It speaks of the barriers we all put up to protect ourselves, no matter the damage they may do in the long run”.
Watch the video by Clump Collective below:

‘I Don’t Feel’ is out via Mucker Records and available from the Saloon Dion Bandcamp page.

Symbol Soup – Overdressed

The project of London-based songwriter Michael Rea, Symbol Soup takes inspiration from folk, country, indie pop and electronica to create something that sounds sunny and insouciant. Latest single ‘Overdressed’ is a great introduction, fusing a classic British folk charm with something rather more American, including faint notes of country and a couple of spoonfuls of Alex G-style lo-fi indie rock. What Rea describes as “a love song from the perspective of someone who’s overly cynical,” ‘Overdressed’ takes aim at the superficial nature of human interaction, its narrator sick and tired of meaningless etiquette and small talk, yearning instead for something deeper. “They don’t learn a whole lot by the end of the song,” Rea continues, “but they are fully connected to one person, and that’s the connection to something deeper that they’re desperate for.” Check out the lighthearted if indigestion-inducing video, directed by Kirsty Wells of Kondor Films, below:

‘Overdressed’ is out now. Get it from the Symbol Soup Bandcamp page.

Zoon – A Language Disappears

Following the success of recent EPs Big Pharma and A Sterling Murmuration, Daniel Monkman’s Zoon is set to release brand new full-length Bekka Ma’iingan this spring on Paper Bag Records. The Zoon sound is a constantly evolving thing, and with guests and contributors including Owen Pallett, Michael Peter Olsen, Andrew McLeod (Sunnsetter) and Lee Ranaldo (Sonic Youth), the new album is no exception. But as single ‘A Language Disappears’ suggests with its themes of lost heritage, the sense is that Zoon is not morphing away from its origin but rather moving closer to some central truth. “This album is about acknowledging a part of me that I felt was there the whole time,” as Monkman puts it. Check out the 3D animated video directed by Tkaronto-based multimedia sculptor Shawn Chiki below:

Bekka Ma’iingan is out on the 28th April via Paper Bag Records and you can pre-order it now.

The post Weekly Listening: January 2023 #3 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Not resting on the laurels of Big Pharma, Zoon is already back with brand new EP A Sterling Murmuration. Again out via Paper Bag Records, the release represents a continuation of the project set out previously. “A Sterling Murmuration as a body of work is material from ten plus years ago,” Monkman explains, “I then recorded these songs with my high school friends in Winnipeg but broke the record into a few different movements. Big Pharma was the first movement and this is the second.”

If Big Pharma offered a view of the contemporary issues facing Monkman’s hometown, the new EP suggests a tangible mode of resistance. “The title […] comes from the movement that a flock of birds do for safety from predators,” he says. “They use this technique for other reasons such as warmth at night, also to exchange information about feeding areas. I feel very connected to this concept, I see it in humans and how we need a strong community to protect each other.” If so much of the harm is caused and accentuated by isolation, then A Sterling Murmuration offers community as an antidote. A path to healing and sustainable progress which wards off predatory forces through an embrace of the common good.

Opener ‘Play Ground’ captures the mood of the release. One informed as much by a sense of compassion as its melancholy. “‘Play Ground’ was written in Winnipeg around 2010,” Monkman continues. “At that time I had just experienced a huge loss which was a close friend of mine. I returned to our hometown, Selkirk, Manitoba, to find some closure. One evening I visited the school that we attended together. I noticed so much change.” New buildings, new fences and lawns, the sense of progress masking not only the loss of familiarity but the underlying continuation of old means of power.  “I saw both decay and a dying civilization clinging to rebuilding a crumbling empire,” he concludes. “But also beauty.” The gauzy shoegaze sound captures this in all of its nuance, and cements the Zoon voice as both a storyteller and social commentator.

A Sterling Murmuration EP, is out now via Paper Bag Records and you can get it from the Zoon Bandcamp page.

The post Zoon – A Sterling Murmuration EP appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Cave Cricket is the project of Portland, OR‘s Kira Sassano, who makes drone and ambient-inspired folk music that seems to emanate from another plane entirely. Her latest album, The World, is being released later this week on cassette by the good folks at bud tapes, a release in which the label say “cascading tones and abounding noises ebb and flow like the mellow waves of a lake or sand on a beach shifting in the breeze.” Lead single ‘The World Pt 1’ offers a glimpse of this in action, a song that feels at once spacious and intimate, Sassano’s vocals ringing out like an otherworldly choir above soaring drones and pulsating drum machine.

There are so many problems in our world
Oh the world moves so fast
it makes my head spin
Oh the world is so vast
with all its moving parts

hojascirculares – asleep

hojascirculares is the recording project of Mexican-American producer, songwriter, and visual artist Ara Hernandez. Latest single ‘Asleep’, released to coincide with last month’s full moon, sees hojascirculares continue to perfect a dark and spiritual brand of synth-based ambient music. There’s a ghostly, gauziness to the song, something which shares an uncanny alignment with its overall sense of dissociation, of feeling somehow unreal. “It’s about those states, gliding through life like a ghost, stuck and frozen inside my own mind,” Hernandez describes. “Paralyzed by my fears of the unknown, the future.” But the song isn’t a simple descent into inky anxiety, it offers a sense of reprieve and respite too. “But I know the flood always returns and sets me free again.” she continues “I am grateful for those moments, when I can feel everything again.”

MF Tomlinson – A Cloud

Born in Brisbane/Meanjin and now based in London, MF Tomlinson is a singer-songwriter who knits psych and sixties sensibilities into his folk style to conjure something as detailed as it is evocative. Having recently signed with PRAH Recordings, Tomlinson has unveiled new track ‘A Cloud’ in preview of his second album which is due sometime next year, developing his sound into an almost orchestral richness. The song picks up where the last record left off, finding Tomlinson suspended within a bittersweet dream-state, where the pain of longing is counterbalanced by an appreciation of the beauty inherent in even the smallest moments of life. Check out the video by Daisy JT Smith below:

‘A Cloud’ is out now via PRAH Recordings and you can grab it from Bandcamp.

PACKS – iknowiknow

Fresh off the back of debut album Take the Cake released via Fire Talk Records and Royal Mountain Records last year, Toronto‘s PACKS is back with a brand new EP, WOAH. We described the previous release as “a delightfully fuzzed-out balance between dreamy stasis and forward motion, all tied together by [Madeline] Link’s inventive, wry lyrics.” WOAH continues the conversational-yet-poetic style within more subdued, acoustic arrangements. Latest single ‘iknowiknow’ is a great example, a confessional track undercut by a sardonic edge that’s all tumbling acoustic guitar and downbeat vocals.

RA Washington / Jah Nada – Bobbi Lynn

It seems futile to attempt to sum up In Search of Our Father’s Gardens with a single track. The debut record from Cleveland duo RA Washington and Jah Nada out later this year on Astral Spirits, the release is an epic double LP split into four sides (or five, if you count the bonus digital addition), with each taking on very different moods and styles. They are even designed so that they can be played simultaneously if you have two record players at hand. All that said, single ‘Bobbi Lynn’ isn’t exactly an average song either. Representing ‘side D’ of the album and a culmination of everything which comes before, it clocks in at over eighteen minutes and highlights the full ability of the supporting fourteen-piece ensemble.

Trout – bugs

Trout is a throwback to the golden age of MP3 blog gems, when mysterious projects emerged from nowhere with no social media presence, no EPK or press campaign, hardly any information on who they are at all. New single ‘bugs’ is “about watching the bugs outside your window be more productive than you,” is as much as we get by way of explanation, though no more is needed. A song sitting between bedroom pop confession and gauzy Gleemer-esque weight, its downbeat drift captures a day passing in a torpor, sparks of energy appearing and disappearing like flares of frustration.

Waterbaby – Thin Air

Avant pop duo Waterbaby, AKA sisters Martha and Jessica Kilpatrick, have made their name weaving soundscapes which play with the distinction between lightness and weight. Having signed with untitled (recs), the pair are back with single ‘Thin Air’ to further this style, a track at once ethereal and dense. “It’s a song about duality,” they explain. “We shapeshift from being in the driver’s seat to going along for the ride […] and travel from day to night.” And further changes take place across this journey, not least a rise and fall which offers the listener both the joy of the ascent and the rush of the plummet back down. As the band put it “Throughout the song you soar and crash, sometimes looking down on the world below, existing somewhere in the clouds like an angel watching earth.”

‘Thin Air’ is out now via untitled (recs) and you can find it in all the usual places.

Zoon – Oil Pastel / Dope Sick (ft. Cadence Weapon)

A few weeks ago we previewed Big Pharma, a forthcoming album from Hamilton‘s Zoon on Paper Bag Records. An exploration of the “enduring face of colonialism via the power and violence of the pharmaceutical industry,” as we described, which also worked to uphold indigenous language. Latest single ‘Oil Pastel/Dope Sick’ invites Cadence Weapon to meld shoegaze and hip hop into a sound rich and detailed enough to capture the experience of being on the ground amid the opioid crisis. His intuitive, flowing verses take aim at the corporations who caused the catastrophe, looping in meditative cycles until they become something like a mantra for instigating change from the bottom up.

Big Pharma is out now via Paper Bag Records and you can pre-order it now from Bandcamp.

The post Weekly Listening: July 2022 #2 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Following previous single ‘Shelf’, a song which also saw Gillian Stone make her directorial debut with a video made with Toronto filmmaker John M. Hall, she is back with a brand new single, ‘Amends’. Again deepening the folk style with ambient and post-rock sensibilities, the song holds a weightless quality in its opening, levitating with a strange dreaminess in part thanks to the work of multi-instrumentalist Michael Peter Olsen (Zoon). Though as the track progresses and Spencer Cole’s drums kick in, a newfound heft emerges, as though the various layers coalesce into something chaotic yet grounded in weighty truth.

The song focuses on the anger stage of grief, acknowledging the power of naming in overcoming personal issues. “It is a fearless moral inventory, an understanding of the effect on self and other, an odyssey through four and five of The Twelve Steps,” Stone explains. “My recovery journey has been riddled with shame that still lives in my bones. The final line of the song, ‘regret is a wily muse, but I’ll name it out loud’, is an attempt to exorcize this shame from my body. By acknowledging the ruins of my Anger, I am attempting to destroy the destroyer.”

I felt you under my breath,
growling, mewling in my chest.
A fountain of youth I whetted then left.
Regret is a wily muse, but I’ll name it out
loud.

The video is again directed by Gillian Stone and John M. Hall, with photography by Hall and photographer Joel Gale. “A movement piece that conveys my body in fragments,” as Stone describes, “drawing from the concept of the Split Self in Internal Family Systems. It builds into a cathartic somatic experience as I dance to fuse myself back together.” Check it out below:

‘Amends’ is out now and is available from the Gillian Stone Bandcamp page.

Album photography by Joel Gale and assisted by Danielle Fried

The post Gillian Stone – Amends appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Following on from the success of the album, this month sees Zoon return with a brand new EP, Big Pharma, again on Paper Bag Records. As the title suggests, the release continues to explore the enduring face of colonialism via the power and violence of the pharmaceutical industry. “I talk about how they destroyed my community of Selkirk, Manitoba and many more small towns and cities,” Monkman explains. “A whole generation completely changed in just a matter of five years. Families torn apart and loved ones lost to addiction and overdoses.” The medical insurance schemes available via treaty cards often only offer the most addictive medication, fuelling an epidemic of opioid addiction within communities already ravaged by genocide.

The release sees Monkman collaborate with an array of talent, with each of the five tracks welcoming artists like Cadence Weapon, Michael Peter Olsen, Sunnsetter and Jasmine Trails. Lead single ‘Astum’ sees Leanne Betasamosake Simpson join to explore themes of addiction more directly. The experience of being caught within the immediate grip of the phenomenon, where the will to change is smothered by a cycle of suffering, survival instincts kicking in as the need to anesthetise the pain returns. “While in active addiction, it’s extremely difficult to function in the known society and it leaves you feeling even more lost,” Monkman explains. “You’re longing for a great relationship but know it could never happen because you’re constantly trying to numb out past traumas.”

The song also sees Zoon explore survival in another form. “‘Astum’ was the first Cree word that my late father, Glen Olsen, taught me as a child,” Monkman explains. “It means ‘hurry up’ or ‘quickly’. He would walk in front of me and at the door say ‘Astum, Daniel! Astum!'” The idea of upholding language via music is something important to the Zoon project, allowing Monkman to contribute to something he was prevented from doing while growing up. “Passing down language was something that I prayed for as a kid,” he continues. “I remember wanting to attend the reservation school to learn but our Ojibway teacher disappeared one month earlier and never came back.”

And you, wanted your freedom
We’ll see, mourning, you’ll be crying
We’ll seek, somebody else, love
We’ll be, somebody else now

Watching as we speak into
the ocean
Holding back our years in the mourning

Check out the video directed by boy wonder with production Co. RAINBOW LAND below:

Big Pharma is out via Paper Bag Records on the 21st June and you can pre-order it from the Zoon Bandcamp page.

Photos by Vanessa Heins

The post Zoon – Astum appeared first on Various Small Flames.