With the turn of winter and the fall of snow, everything is encased to appear more magical, more romantic. As the seasons change we’re here to kick of your week with the premiere of singer/songwriter Kimberly Wyma‘s video for “Hit and Run” from her EP “Escapistry.” It was filmed in the now New York City-based artist’s hometown of Grand Rapids, Michigan, the day after “a huge, magical blizzard.” We see Wyma running through a Narnia-like white forest and playing her heart out on a piano in an abandoned and graffiti-splattered building. The contradiction of the romance and brokedown palace quality of the video are both ethereal, always raw – much like the truth in the lyrics of a romance gone awry.
Vancouver singer-songwriter Lindsay Kupser recently released her new record Quiet Songs. A Berklee College of Music graduate, Kupser created five tracks that walk the line between poetry and lullaby, with a fitting description “quiet singer-songwriter” from the artist herself. While at Berklee, she studied jazz composition and performance. The album begins with the raw lyrics of “All of my Bones Broke on Thursday Evening,” a song composed of brutally honest and direct observations on love and heartbreak paired with calm and relaxing guitars. Immiedetely the listener understands why Kupser’s style has been compared to idols such as Sufjan Stevens, Joni Mitchell, and John Mayer. It is stripped down, and while still developing, strives for an exploration of turning one’s anguish and demons into relatable and lovely folk lyrics.
The stripped down soundscape continues into “Couldn’t Move to Brooklyn” where Kupser waxes poetic about her current backyard and decision not to follow suit of so many young artists and make the trek to Brooklyn. While the 23-year-old singer-songwriter may not see Brooklyn as a fitting home, we’re sure that her album will find its way into the ears of many Brooklyn residents. Brooklyn is a noisy and busy city, with sirens blaring and the hubub of bar conversation continuously spilling into the streets. If the landscape of her current location of Vancouver works for Kupser, the romantic artist might as well stick with her current locational muse.
“I’m not afraid of the light or the pain” sings Kupser on “It Is My Turn,” a mournful yet elegant track and our favorite of Quiet Songs. On “Tough Country” we get a peak into Kupser’s childhood memories, as she describes sitting on a floor of the home she grew up in unpacking and observing old photographs.
At times, the rough simplicity of the tracks leave the listener wanting more, and wondering what will come next. She is a skilled poetic writer with a lovely voice and an ear for a calm melody. Such a young artist, the women of AudioFemme look forward to keeping our eyes on her and what the future holds for Lindsay, even if she never does move to Brooklyn. The five-track Quiet Songs concludes with “Everything Feels So Hard Always,” an elegant and simplistic musing into the difficulties of big life decisions all young adults, in particular artists, grapple with.
The minimalist recordings of Quiet Songs feature Alec Watson of Absolute Paradise and Ethan T. Parcell of Vesper Chimes. Previously, Kupser released “The Boston EP.” Quiet Songs was released on March 14, 2015 and self produced and mastered by Alan Douches. Listen to “It Is My Turn” below. For more Lindsay Kupser, find her on Facebook, Twitter, and visit her website.
Even without knowing the emotionally turbulent backstory behind Flint Eastwood’s latest EP Small Victories, the first single “Find What You’re Looking For” paints a cathartic landscape that evokes the sensation of conserving breath and energy before climbing a mountain. The song resonates as whispered, yet resilient, triumph. Jax Anderson is no stranger to small victories, nor large ones, respectively. A statement released with the single informs that the song is an interpretation of the last words spoken to Anderson by her mother before she passed: “Don’t let this break you.” As the listener or compassionate voyeur we may not know what the “this” is and we may not know what we’re looking for, but it is with this haunting ambiguity that makes the track accessible and effective in its ability to sound both confident and cautious. In the wake of such loss, Anderson sounds as if she’s begging the sky, crooning, “I don’t want to lose you/this moment next to you/you tell me what to do.” What is most strangely refreshing about “Find What You’re Looking For” is that it shines as a great contrast to the gritty, danceable electro-indie-rock vibe of Eastwood’s 2013 release, Late Nights in Bolo Ties. If this track is any indication to the journey ahead both for Anderson and the audience, Small Victories (to release on October 9th, 2015)will likely encourage the defiant act of letting the light into the dark places.
Angel Deradoorian is a former member of the Dirty Projectors. As one of the band’s vocalists, she contributed to many of their trademark harmonies and long, sustained cries that used the singers’ voices more like an instrument than just a way to deliver words. Some of that sound creeps into her solo album The Expanding Flower Planet, but for the most part, Deradoorian chooses a bold, new direction.
The album, which will be released on August 21 via Anticon, appeals to my San Francisco roots: it’s filled with vibes that convey peace, love, and more than a hint of psychedelic drugs. Deradoorian’s voice ranges from serious and mystical to singsongy, like a butterfly that lands on your hand only to flit away suddenly, flying this way and that through the air. On tracks like “The Invisible Man,” the Middle Eastern inflections in her singing are perfectly mixed with echoes of her voice, low sustained tones, and rock drums. On other songs, however, the percussion seemed overwhelming yet too simple, even childish under the range and layers of her voice.
The Expanding Flower Planet is trance-inducing, but with it’s many, many percussive parts, vocal lines, and a constant stream of lyrics, it’s too busy for passive listening. The best song comes first with “Beautiful Woman,” which recalls Deradoorian’s work with the Dirty Projectors but repackages the sound in shiny, polished pop. Other noteworthy tracks include “Darklord,” which features a trilling surf guitar, the monk-like chanting of “Ouenya,” and the high-energy track “The Eye.” “Komodo,” a song about running from the deadly lizard with a fatal bite, was also enjoyable for its playfulness.
The Expanding Flower Planet is a fun trip through someone else’s mind, someone who may be in another universe entirely. It’s a great listen if you need to completely change your frame of mind. And, on some distant flower planet, aliens are probably dancing to it somewhere.
For some musicians, it’d be a bold enough move to wear their heart on their sleeve with lyrics like “Feeling so confused, don’t know what to do/ Afraid she doesn’t love you anymore” or admitting they’ll“Never believe in a heart like hers again.” On his latest album, Another One, Mac DeMarco goes one step further by giving listeners his home address and inviting them to share a cup of coffee in the track “My House By The Water.”
Though certainly bold and unique, it’s not a completely risky move for the Canadian singer/songwriter. There’s little-to-no controversy in his music; DeMarco won’t have to worry about any irate listeners showing up, demanding explanations or apologies because his music has corrupted today’s youth (he lives in the Far Rockaways of Brooklyn, quite a commute even for most New Yorkers). DeMarco’s music is the chillest of the chill: slide guitar lines lazily trail his vocals, whammy bars are invoked gently, and drums keep a crisp, tight beat. His half-asleep voice invokes an incredibly laid back, slightly-stoned version of Jeff Tweedy. It’s so relaxed, some songs bleed into each other, but this gives the album a consistent, thematic quality. And at only 23 minutes long, mixing up the energy with more upbeat songs like “I’ve Been Waiting For Her” is enough variation.
It’s rare that an album can be so engrossing, yet casual and conversational. Another One feels almost like a high-production jam going on in Mac’s backyard.One might be going on right now, in fact- it wouldn’t be too hard to find out, considering we have his address. Road trip, anyone?
Mauro Remiddi has had quite a life. The Italian born singer/songwriter once joined a Berlin circus at age 21, playing percussion, accordion, and violin to accompany the acts. He’s visited North Korea as an Italian musical ambassador and shaken hands with Kim Jong-un. Recently, a new adventure brought him to Brooklyn, where he recorded the EP Half Awake under the name Porcelain Raft.Not content to settle down for long, he soon moved to Los Angeles to mix the tracks and start his own label, Volcanic Field.
Remiddi has the weary voice of an artist who’s seen a lot, but managed to hold onto some hope and gentleness. The songs on Half Awake, true to the release’s name, are mellow and dreamy with an infusion of energy just below the surface. On the opening track “Leave Yourself Alone,” that energy comes from fuzzy synths under sparse guitars. On “All In My Head,” a less subtle dance beat works perfectly under an organ intro and Remiddi’s smooth vocals. He proves his versatility by ending the EP with the folkier track “Something Is After Me,” a song are heavy on piano and soulfulness.
All of these elements are put into play on the title track. It starts with Remiddi humming a soulful intro, then a bass beat kicks in under his singing: “Should I come over? It seems that I’m half awake.” More drums and the plucking of a guitar are added as he makes up his mind: “I’m coming over/ I need to see you again.”
Half Awake is available now via Volcanic Field, and Porcelain Raft will be playing an album release show on Friday, June 26 at Baby’s All Right! Check out “Half Awake” below.
Though his exact height is unconfirmed, we do know a few things about The Tallest Man On Earth: His name is Kristian Matsson. He’s a singer/songwriter from Dalarna, Sweden- though it’s hard to tell from his folky sound, and influences that include American artists like Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan. He’s put out four albums, and his latest is Dark Bird Comes Home, released May 12th via Dead Oceans.
On this record, Matsson expands his sound with more instruments- keys, drums, the occasional harmonica. The new lineup doesn’t clutter his songs, but enhances them. Where his earlier relied mostly on his guitar work and rambling singing style, the band behind him now allows Matsson to leave space between his words. This makes his vocals more focused, particularly on songs like “Timothy,” and “Darkness of the Dream.” Though it’s still as quietly stunning as his earlier work, it’s now more accessible for those who need more than a voice and guitar to hold their attention.
Key tracks are the jaunty “Slow Dance,” “Darkness of the Dream” (“The letting go is here and now/ The beauty’s in your arms, no mind is out to wander/ Just let yourself out of your sight, careless/ And some love will be there”), and the bittersweet “Dark Bird Is Home.” Check out the track below!
The title of Hailey Wojcik‘s single “XO Skeleton” presents an excellent opportunity to examine the artist as a whole. It’s cute yet creepy, with a wink of charm that rightly earned her the description “the Wednesday Addams of her genre,” a characterization I wish I had come up with myself. Currently on tour with the Shondes, On March 3rd Hailey releases her upcoming EP Book of Beasts. The singer-songwriter described the five-track work as a “feminist album,” an empowering step in her career. She recorded the EP after a traumatic break-up, fleeing the country, then reclaiming her voice with the help of one of her best friends, fellow singer-songwriter Julie Peel. The result is a bold yet intimate look into a enchantingly wild mind. Hailey describes crushing a moth into powder in “XO Skeleton,” which has a clever music video chock-full of insects to accompany. As for all the animal references, after all, Hailey was raised by zookeepers.
Of all her musical skills, her song-writing talents shine the brightest on Book of Beasts. Her songs draw on raw experience, and always come across original and darkly amusing, like smoking a lover to the filter in “Cigarette.”
I caught up with Hailey on the road to talk about growing up with zookeepers, inspirational friendship, and thrift store clothing.
AF: Do you enjoy life on the road?
HW: Yeah, well this will be the longest tour I’ve ever done so I guess we’ll see. But I really do like being on the road and traveling. It’s good to be moving. It’s just nice to have a change of scenery.
AF: Any cities in particular you’re looking forward to visiting?
HW: I’m glad we’re going to several warm places. I have never been to the Pacific Northwest, and we’re going to Seattle and Portland and I’m very excited to see those places. Portlandia.
AF: What is the inspiration behind the songs that are coming out?
HW: The record is called Book of Beasts. I feel like I always, not intentionally, but have some kind of animal theme. My parents were zookeepers, and we’ve always had a lot of animals around. They’re mostly about, well some of them do deal with animals like “XO Skeleton” and “Dog Vs. Man,” so I guess I should say that it does inform the content. I’m a singer-songwriter who writes about my own life. Some people sort of look down upon “confessional songwriting” but that’s pretty much what I do. It’s mostly based on my life and experience, and I recorded it myself. This is the first time that I’ve done that, that I’ve engineered everything, and I played everything except for the drums, which were played wonderfully by Brian Viglione of The Dresden Dolls. He’s obviously a genius, and I’m super happy to have a drummer on this. But yeah, everything else was me.
It was recorded in the wake of a traumatic breakup. I had fled the country sort of impulsively, and was in France to see one of my best friends, Julie Peel who is also a singer-songwriter. She has a studio set up in her room, it kind of felt like an empowering thing for me. And really like a record that’s about self-reliance and female friendship. She was the one who encouraged me and told me I could do it. I had gone a year without playing a show. I hadn’t recorded, I hadn’t done anything, I was really depressed. She was like, ‘You can just figure out how to use logic, and you can do this in your bedroom.’ I’ve never made something without a bunch of dudes, not that they were trying…I’ve just never been navigating the entire thing. That was really important to me. It feels like a feminist record in that sense.
AF: What was it like growing up with zookeepers for parents and how did you discover music as a child?
HW: Until I was in about fourth grade my parents were both zookeepers, and I would go to the zoo like pretty much every weekend. Then after that my dad continued to work with animals in another educational program where he would take animals around. We had monkeys sometime in the house, we had a beaver, dogs, birds, snakes, all over the place. I started writing…I still kind of consider myself more of a songwriter. That’s the thing I identify the most with. So I started trying to write songs when I was in like 7th grade or something like that. I moved to New York to kind of pursue music a few years ago. I’m not there now, I would like to go back at some point but I’m trying to just be on the road as much as possible.
AF: There’s been a lot of commentary on the darkness in your music.
HW: I really identify with dark subject matters mixed with humor. Dark humor, I guess. I think that kind of shows in some of my stuff, like the video I made for the song “XO Skeleton.” I had insects that a lot of people are grossed out by moving around in a cute sort of way. Like jittery stop motion. I like to do stuff like that, I’ll have fake blood incorporated into videos and photo shoots as much as possible. The biggest compliment in the press I got is that was called ‘The Wednesday Addams’ of my genre. I identify with my inner-goth girl. She’s still there even though I don’t always look it on the outside.
AF: How would you describe your personal look?
HW: I do like things that are dark I guess. A dark wardrobe. Right now it’s so crappy because it’s so cold out; I feel like it’s the worst time of year for clothing. But yeah, I think I kind of have a little bit of a darkness. I like a lot of black clothes, and I obviously, well, music’s not particularly lucrative so a lot of my stuff is second hand.
AF: If you could collaborate with anyone, who would it be?
HW: So many people, but I love, I feel like everybody loves this person but I love John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats. Doing anything with him would be a dream. But I also love St. Vincent.
AF: Where would you see yourself if you weren’t working in music?
HW: Living under a bridge? That’s like the quarter-life crisis question, because music is not totally secure I guess. I would like to think I would be involved in writing in some capacity. I went to school for creative writing and that’s sort of have thought about trying to get things published. Short stories, non-fiction. I feel like I would be doing something writing related.
I’m not sure how common this practice is, but when I was in elementary school, teachers had this trick where they would whisper at a rowdy classroom to get the kids to quiet down instead of trying to yell over the noise. It worked: kids got curious after ten or fifteen seconds, and wanted to hear what the teacher was saying.
Swedish singer Alice Boman, with her silvery voice and light dusting of backing instrumentals, has the whisper trick licked. The songs on EP II (the digital version of which includes last year’s EP Skisser – Swedish for “Sketches”) draw attention precisely because they don’t overexert themselves trying to command your ears. It’s been well documented that Boman didn’t envision an international audience when she wrote EP II, and even less so with Skisser, which was recorded as a bunch of demos and don’t have titles beyond “Skiss 2,” or “Skiss 8,” etc.
Considering that the album that doesn’t really take audience into account, it’s worth noting that EP II persistently returns to themes of being observed and observing. What do you see when you look at me? kicks off the whole thing, the opening line of the opening track “What.” Lava lamp-like, that song drifts back and forth between melancholy – the eerie brokenness that comes naturally to Boman’s wispy songwriting style – and a surprising optimism. We float onward through “Over” and “Burns,” both of which hit some real transcendence in the high notes, despite lyrics like It burns, it burns, now you are gone. I am done. Those apex moments – usually underscored with an extra pop of vocal harmony or piano melody – pack a lot of wallop into just a little bit of momentum.
Like Skisser, this collection loses focus in places. This isn’t a direct result of its obliqueness, but Boman still seems like she hasn’t quite figured out how close she wants to be to her audience. Listening to the album takes patience: getting to the payoff requires your full attention but doesn’t seize it by force. EP II showcases a more mature collection than we saw with Skisser, but as a songwriter, Boman still operates very much in her own head on this new release. That will have to change before long–this EP will likely be the last she makes as a little-known performer. It will be interesting to see, on albums to come, what an Alice Boman song looks like when it has been intended for widespread consumption since its inception.
Until then, enjoy the rough drafts. You can go here to purchase the album, which came out last week– if you’re in the US, EP II will include the Skisser EP as well. Watch the video for “Waiting,” off EP II, below:
“I can’t wait ’til we’re afraid of nothing,” sings Sharon Van Etten, in her silvery and harmony-braided way, on the opening track of her new album Are We There. “I can’t wait ’til we hide from nothing.” The song– “Afraid Of Nothing”– has a sweeping clean-slate quality to it: it’s a fresh start, a New Year’s resolution. Maybe it’s the lyrics, or maybe it’s the flourishing, diva-esque piano chords, but there’s weight to this beginning. With its very first chords, Are We There establishes a low center of gravity. These songs are sturdy, they’re in it for the long haul.
That’s the power of skillfully deployed vocal acrobatics and complete mastery of your subject matter. Big, theatrical romantic breakdown has long been at the core of Van Etten’s musical landscape, and her sharpest tool is a voice that can be bent but never broken. Her albums–there are four of them now, beginning with 2009’s Because I Was In Love–are stories of how she uses the latter to navigate the former, a journey that the title of this latest record suggests is still ongoing.
And on Are We There that path is as satisfying and surprising as ever. Van Etten’s major themes haven’t changed much, but her aesthetic has expanded in every direction. On some tracks, like this album’s opener, she traverses an Adele-esque range and corresponding sense of drama–her sadness so straightforward it’s almost cloying–but elsewhere, her voice is stretched to its strange outer limits as pain gives way to blood-letting.
Just look at “Your Love Is Killing Me,” only three songs into this thing. It is possibly my favorite cut on the album, and it’s a great example of the far end of Van Etten’s sweet-spooky spectrum. The song begins with a vaguely militant beat that reappears in the chorus as triplets of crisply pissed off snare rapping. Then there’s her voice, so stridulent at its apex that she barely sounds human. “Break my legs so I won’t walk to you. Cut my tongue so I can’t talk to you,” she sings. This goes on: “Burn my skin so I can’t feel you. Stab my eyes so I can’t see… you like it when I let you walk over me.” Behind the exorcism, behind the declarations of brokenness, there’s powerful orchestration–swirling guitar lines, cycling piano chords–backing up these words.
Van Etten’s speaking voice is downright cute, and sometimes, listening to her talk, it’s easy to imagine that she sings love songs of the quietly forlorn, tea-drinking-while-moodily-gazing-out-windows-onto-overcast-skies variety. And though there’s plenty of sadness on Are We There, it never sounds neutered: even the songs that never rise above a whisper come with the reminder that they know how to snarl.
Are We There ends on another highlight: the deceptively simple, deceptively sweet “Every Time The Sun Comes Up.” Van Etten arranges the lyrics into a sing-song-ish pattern, like a riddle, and the mood straddles optimism and gloom. There are flashes of self-contained thoughts, like the coyly meta “People say I’m a one hit wonder, but what happens when I have two?” Then the song settles into a kind of moody anti-love song, with “I washed your dishes then I shit in your bathroom.” Listening to the song feels like being inside Van Etten’s head, trying to follow a string of thoughts and fluctuations that aren’t explained or organized into a performance. It’s the most interior song on the album, and in a way, it’s also the most obscured. The journey from the album’s opening track “Afraid Of Nothing,” which is a performance not only in its theatricality but also in the sense that Van Etten has a specific audience–the complicated, ever-present love interest that has ravaged and fascinated her music since she began playing publicly.
But by this album’s end, we feel that Van Etten isn’t on stage anymore, but is right beside us, spilling her guts in a less organized, and perhaps more mundane way. That doesn’t make her guts uninteresting–the evocative snippets that we get on “Every Time The Sun Comes Up” are some of the most intriguing on an album full of compelling lyrical lines. Mundanity, in Sharon Van Etten’s case, is anything but.
Are We There dropped on May 27th via Jagjaguwar. Go hereto buy it via iTunes. Watch the great and profoundly depressing video for “Every Time The Sun Comes Up” below:
Brooklyn-based singer songwriter Melaena Cadiz is a a great storyteller. This Michican native combines folk, country, and pop in her music to create scenes which showcase lonely lives across America. Her new album Deep Below Heaven, out May 20th, is what Cadiz calls a book of short stories. The title comes from a Sam Shepard story about a man who has the sense of being deep below heaven when he falls off of his motorcycle during an accident. Cadiz’s own collection of stories chronicles Americans who are all struggling in their own universe, but united in that space deep below.
Cadiz has a great voice, eloquent and elucidated. Though she tries to lend each of her characters the emotion and energy they deserve, she can come off as almost too cerebral, lacking a bit of soul. But a strong sense of wanderlust is palpable in the music, a good reflection of the words. These characters are all “striving for a better place in the world” or a way to “quiet the deep ache within their bones.” They attempt to find an escape from their inner demons, wandering around, searching, but not finding any true release. Everyone is in transit on this record, physically or mentally. The track “Home Town” is great example of this movement. It’s a very personal account of someone who feels alienated instead of comfortable in their home, someone who decides to travel West, and the catchy tune mimics the gusto with which someone might attempt such a feat.
At times, Cadiz falls into a more pop-oriented indie vibe, which can feel out of place. But for the most part, her voice and lyrics keep it all from becoming too generic or one-note. In the same way that she explores different people and parts of America, the music moves between genres. There’s the occasional rasping trumpet. Sometimes there’s a simple, classic country feel and Cadiz’s voice has the timeless echoes of Tammy Wynette. But other times it bursts with modern undertones, reaching toward something more thumping and lively like KT Tunstall. Her strong references to Americana roots haven’t appeared so dramatically on the indie scene since Saddle Creek’s days of shelling Bright Eyes or Rilo Kiley releases. Cadiz, however, is perhaps a bit too ambitious. She has wonderful, engaging ideas, but she fails to capture them in their entirety, especially in the music, and she doesn’t completely own them or make them fully hers. But ultimately this is a fun, thoughtful ride.
Listen to “Hometown” below and check out the rest of Deep Below Heaven May 20th!
Last War is immediately, unmistakably different than any record Haley Bonar‘s made before. Her catalogue is impressive: with ten releases in just ten years, and four full-lengths excluding the newest one, Bonar, pronounced bawn-er, has put a solid stake into her style of dark, quiet, vocal-heavy folk music. Her voice is cradle-rocking singalong, and she tends to end verses in extremely sad-sounding sustained notes that back the bleak lyrics of the lines she’s singing. On her sparsest album, 2006’s Lure The Fox, Bonar’s minimalism crosses over into what feels more like a live recording than anything laid down in a studio. String squeaks and between-verse breath exhalations creep onto the tracks; listening to it is like sitting in Bonar’s lap. That kind of microscopic access to Bonar’s vocal acrobatics is a treat, but interior minimalism piled on top of grim lyrics makes for a bit much of a muchness, and sometimes the bleaker extremes of Bonar’s early stuff drag her voice from prettily sorrowful into dour and self-indulgent.
Simply put, Last War is Bonar’s scuzziest record. In the pros column, the greater dose of reverb and percussion here rescues the album from any danger of turning weepy. In fact, she sounds sadder than she does pissed off, especially on early single “No Sensitive Man.” For them that would complain that her most acoustic stuff gets boring, Last War offers a more twisted take on Bonar’s alt-country licks and lullaby lonesomeness. On the other hand, I’m inclined to argue that shaking up the style comes at the expense of her voice, which still paints broad-brush singalong arcs and still hovers in a held note over the emotionally ripe ends of each verse, but is on this album less of a focal point. Bonar’s vocal line gets swept up along with the larger machine of grit and distortion on this album, and that really saps the liveliness that made her folk persona so remarkable in the first place.
Now, that isn’t true from cover to cover. Last week I criticized Bonar’s disparaging vocals on “No Sensitive Man” as bored-sounding: I really struggled with the way she brought lyrical themes of exasperation into her vocal lines, which ultimately weren’t any more likable than the feelings the song describes. But other tracks, like “Bad Reputation,” display a lot more complexity on both lyrical and musical fronts without letting go of Bonar’s large, flexible vocal range. “I got a bad reputation,” she sings on that track, “I probably need medication.” Baldly delivering grim sentiments in a pretty voice, Bonar finally seems to hit the right balance between showcasing her vocals and showing us her teeth.
Still, she’s ultimately a singer best appreciated under a microscope. This album represents several steps in the hookier direction for Bonar, but it’s still not a record that will necessarily grab you if you’re hearing it passively. That’s why I’m puzzled by so much of the noisier parts on this album, which aren’t as rewarding to an intimate listen as Bonar’s voice would be unadorned. She proves on this album that she can turn out a decent rocker, but with a songwriterly vision like the one she showed us on Golder in 2011, or the Sing With MeEP the year before that, why would Bonar want to? Compared to the intricacy of those albums, the reverb-y sections on Last War seem to water down the album more than they enhance it.
Last War comes out May 20th. Preorder here via Graveface. Til then, try “Bad Reputation” on for size! You can also listen to “No Sensitive Man” and spend more time with Haley Bonar on Facebook.
Eight years ago, Alan Sparhawk of Low spotted twenty-year-old Haley Bonar performing at an open mic and invited her and her drummer on tour with his band. Since then, Bonar’s been busy: she’s put out five solo studio albums and started a punk side project called Gramma’s Boyfriend, which we hear involves performing in eighties figure skating outfits. Bringing anxious bass lines together with elegant vocal harmony, Bonar brings a songwriting style to each of her albums that’s appealing and complex, with a way of cloaking grisly lyrics in catchy hooks.
“No Sensitive Man” opens with a rousing drum line and dreamy, smeared vocals that seem draped over the music. “Shut your eyes and play me something good,” Bonar sings, sounding exasperated. “I don’t wanna talk. We can get away with anything these days.” It’s a flat, unsentimental meditation with a choppy bass line that sprawls over the track. This is Bonar at her most disaffected– “No Sensitive Man” bristles in a way that’s new for Bonar’s solo material, and though it’s exciting to see her snarl, the self-isolation of the vocals on this track ultimately sound lazy, and disengaged from the rest of the music. In the absence of the sweet, story-telling style that have made her albums so good up to this point, the flat disappointment and dismissiveness that colors this track feels kind of unengaging, especially since the instrumental lines don’t fill out to take over the spotlight from Bonar’s narrative persona. While I like the idea of Bonar taking the thematic bleakness her music has always had and drawing it into the music’s aesthetic a bit more, “No Sensitive Man” lacked focus without Bonar’s vocals front and center.
Bonar’s new album, Last War, will be in stores May 20th via Graveface. Until then, check out “No Sensitive Man” below and let us know what you think!
Classifying Australia’s Falls as sweet, love-driven indie folk makes them sound pretty bland. In fact, that’s a good description of what they’re like at their worst: more often, the duo—consisting of Melinda Kirwin and Simon Rudston-Brown, who met as conservatory students in Sydney—makes music that’s much livelier than standard fare. Their slim debut EP Into The Fire, released in Australia last year under the title of Hollywood, takes Kirwin and Rudston-Brown’s close vocal harmony as its foundation, rolling elaborate string arrangements and fine-tooth rhythms in with more reflective sections and an abiding undertow of palpable love. Sounds complicated, right?
But the group comes off seasoned beyond their discography. Falls juggles every element of the music into its right place, without breaking a sweat. The album is spectacularly well organized, with rhythmic synchronicity that feels inborn; Kirwin and Rudston-Brown sound like they might be musical twins (more on that later.) Emotionally, too, each song on Into The Fire is hugely ambitious, blitzing through four or five moods in a single track. Many of the lyrics could be taken at least two ways, both of which seem like, even if they might be contradictory elsewhere, they could both be true in the Into The Fire-world. “There’s the woman I want,” Rudston-Brown sings in the opening verse of the catchy—but bait-and-switch devastating– “Girl That I Love,”. “There’s the woman that makes me wanna run away from it all.” After a brief melodica solo that’s cute enough to be the soundtrack to a Michael Cera movie, the vocals launch into much wilder outlands, with a dramatically downward-plodding piano line and crashing rhythms, and a feeling of suddenly being lost.
Elsewhere, in “Hollywood,” Rudston-Brown and Kirwin’s twin vocal lines lean on each other like the twin support beams of an arched bridge, with their tag-team duet structure as the keystone. Operating in parallel lines, the call-and-response style emerges like a prayer each voice is saying for each other, even as their melodies drift apart as the song goes on. The singers’ personalities, and relation to each other, are a strong presence on this track. Regarding their musical project, the two sometimes describe themselves as “barefoot collaborators,” as much best friends as bandmates. That emphasis on their extra-musical bond comes through loud and clear on this collection. Their biography will tell you that that Kirwin and Rudston-Brown were a couple while writing most of the EP, and that when they went to record the tracks—right after they’d broken up—they realized they had documented the story of their relationship.
In principle, I’m leery of couple music’s gimmickry, especially when the love story is already over—if Into The Fire is the story of a relationship that’s now ended, what are they going to write about for their next release?–but the pair say the autobiographical story line emerged organically, nigh unintentionally. The way they’re able to finish each other’s thoughts on this album is pretty spectacular. Some of the best moments on the album come during the sad parts of the songs—the duo has said that “Girl That I Love” can still be pretty tough to perform—when the turmoil in the song gets so wild and devastating, it seems like it must be coming from someplace close to home for the players.
So although the backstory heavily informs the music, it shouldn’t get more attention than the EP itself. Lively and sophisticated, Falls covers impressive ground in only six songs, organizing complicated elements together into beautifully structured pop songs. You can pick up your copy in Into The Firehere, and listen to “Girl That I Love” below:
By mid-February, NYC concertgoers have grown just about impervious to the slushy trek from subway to venue. Anyway, I wasn’t about to miss Nicole Atkins‘ set at the Bowery Ballroom on Thursday on account of what I’ll optimistically say was a “wintry mix.” It rained, it snowed, it rained again; puddles as deep as kiddie pools menaced every corner of every block, making street-crossing a kind of Choose Your Own Adventure where the worst case scenario always meant plunging calf-deep in ice bath (or falling in it, God forbid, which I haven’t yet seen somebody do, but I’ve heard stories). In the Lower East Side, I walked gingerly along the beams of some dismantled wooden packing crates an enterprising person had propped up as bridges over the teeming slush rivers. But all that would have been fine—standard, even—if the actual apocalypse hadn’t occurred on Thursday, about an hour and a half before Nicole Atkins was slotted to go on stage. For about ten minutes, the snowfall dipped into a theatrical, pummeling, rainstorm, with lightening that lit up the whole island and claps of thunder that brought one man flying at the door of his apartment building in a panic as I passed by. He thought we were being bombed.
I’m going to try my best to resist making puns about weird weather patterns and the absolutely killer set that was brewing over the Bowery—but jokes aside, Nicole Atkins’ performance was, uh, electrifying. In a seventies-inspired, color-saturated kimono, she took the stage before the (relatively) few but faithful to ecstatic applause, and launched promptly into the passionate, glamorous “Vultures.” It turned out to be one of the only songs of the night off Mondo Amore. The overwhelming majority of the set list came off Slow Phaser, the New Jersey singer/songwriter’s February 4th release. Next up came “Who Killed The Moonlight,” the opener off the new album, with all the vocal drama and tempo-pushing guitar work of the studio version. Atkins stuck to vocals for the length of the set, leaving instrumentation in the capable hands of her six-piece backing band, which featured a grand total of three Daves and two Zachs (!), as well as a rogue Sam. They kept in synch with each other—and Atkins—with the momentum of a single, powerful machine. Atkins brought back up vocalists into a track or two as well, adding to the playful surge of glam-rock power that has always lined Atkins’ work.
“Girl You Look Amazing” was a feel-good highlight of the night, as Atkins bounced around the stage and pointed flirtatiously at women in the front row as she sang the line from which the song takes its title. Atkins told NPR in an interview that she got the idea for that line– “Girl, you look amazing,” after half-singing her praises for a tasty-looking plate of sushi, and then had a dream in which the song had been turned into a dance hall glam hit. I imagine that might be typical of Atkins’ songwriting style—the numbers she performed on stage felt like kaleidoscopic collages of different snatches of imagery and turns of phrase, half experienced and half dreamt up. Slow Phaser comes across this way. It’s easy to submerge yourself in its powerful, sometimes otherworldly, orchestration, but at the same time, the focal point never drifts far from Atkins’ voice.
“It’s Only Chemistry,” followed by “The Tower” as an encore, closed out the night. As comfortable in the new material as she was in the old, Atkins made a virtual showcase out of Slow Phaser on Thursday. The endeavor was a little risky, but garnered enthusiastic response—the new album might be Atkins’ most ambitious, broad-spanning album to date, and the blazing vocal lines and catchy, powerful beats translated sparklingly to live performance.
Listen to “It’s Only Chemistry,” off Slow Phaser. This song made for a great finale on Thursday night, although I did miss the banjo line that only appears in the studio version:
Though his songwriting dwells in intimately confessional territory, Canadian singer/songwriter Barzin Hosseini himselfis a pretty enigmatic figure. Publicly, he appears as Barzin or Barzin H, with little biographical detail apart from what’s in in his songs. His presence as a songwriter, though, displays a poetics-heavy musical sensibility, with spotlight awarded to lyrical rhythms and manipulations. Instrumental lines—melancholic and cyclical—take their cues from the themes the words set in motion. “In this place, I’m loyal to memory,” Barzin sings in the fourth, and most urgent, track on his new album, To Live Alone In That Long Summer, “Stealing Beauty.” “You look inside houses to see how others live/ and you make the same mistakes, the knowledge comes too late.” Guitars dust pretty arpeggios over the track, always in support of the vocals.
If Barzin’s last release, 2009’s Notes To An Absent Lover, was a breakup album, To Live Alone deals with the reorganization of life after that breakup. The song collection plods through the process of re-learning how to live alone, and to that end, Barzin first envisioned an instrumentally minimalist album. That idea adapted, as his project took shape, to include input from a slew of musician friends. Bolstered by backup vocals from Tony Dekker, Daniela Gesundheit, and Tamara Lindeman, To Live Alone—while circling lyrical themes of isolation and loneliness—is Barzin’s most inclusive record.
Since its inception as Hosseini’s solo act in 1995, the project has regularly expanded to incorporate an array of musicians. Despite all those additions, alterations, and guest appearances, the group’s musical foundation hasn’t changed much. Although additional musicians make for a more filled-out record, you can hear the minimalist impulses behind Hosseini’s voice no matter how many people he’s playing alongside, and the melancholic lyrics and matching sad music that are the new record’s signature have been key to Barzin’s work from the beginning. It’s no surprise that, by now, Hosseini has mastered the turf. He’s able to more or less eschew over-sentimentality on this record, which is a feat considering how introspective and nostalgic the songs unfailingly are. That’s because, as much as To Live Alone becomes engrossed in remembrance, the album details an obsession with deliberate forward motion. Like stacking building blocks, the tracks take us through the work of building (or re-building) a life, and the anxiety of not being able to figure out how other people have successfully done so.
The record shows growth for Barzin in a few different categories—instrumentally, there’s a bit more dynamic range than on previous releases—but not as much as you might imagine, given that the outfit’s been around for almost twenty years, and that their last album came out way back in 2009. The guitar lines, though clean, are extremely repetitive—sometimes frustratingly so—and the songs’ build-ups come very subtly, with faint pay-off. The forward momentum of To Live Alone‘s moving-on idea is its most interesting component, and the biggest source of progression over the duration of the album.
To Live Alone In That Long Summer is out February 25th via Monotreme Records. Pre-order it here. Or, for a taste of the new album, listen to the first track “All The While” below via Soundcloud:
She’s the one with the haunting warble, sometimes menacing or self-deprecating, but always a bit fragile and always a bit bold. Angel Olsen is a singer-songwriter with a unique talent for forging emotional connections with her listeners—that is, the ability to make any member of her audience freeze, cry, or reach deep into some hollow part of themselves. For her newest album, Burn Your Fire For No Witness, her unwavering self-possession is strong as ever, stretched across more present instrumentation and, of course, her gorgeous crooning.
The album is sensitive, soft, subtle, occasionally sweet, and all together that complexity makes it very human. Her uncertainty about what it means to be lonely, about what she truly feels, is what makes these songs so engaging. This ambiguity makes it easy for the listener to enter that space and recall their own inexplicable melancholy. Her voice is difficult to describe, a bit like folk singer Karen Dalton or Emmylou Harris; shaky, but clear.
Burn Your Fire For No Witness begins with “Unfuck the World.” For such a powerful title, this song is incredibly soft. There’s an immediate sense of interiority, a passiveness: “Here’s to thinking that this all meant so much more / I kept my mouth shut and opened up the door.” But her voice soars in the chorus with a lo-fi melancholy that is just heartbreaking: “I am the only one now / You may not be around,” she repeats and repeats like a mantra, a tiny peek into her aloneness. Normally, break-up songs can get a bit irritating, especially when they harp on a lover’s absence. This song is all personal reflection, rather than a reflection on the other person or even the relationship itself.
In “White Fire,” the track the album is named for, her vocals sound almost dead. The song itself is immediately sad, and there are waves of guitar strumming that paint a dark atmosphere. She tells us herself: “Everything is tragic / It all just falls apart.” From here, we move into an uncomfortably empty mind. Even when she’s singing about anger or bitterness, she’s nearly flat, but it conveys as much as if she’d been shaky or close to tears. In fact, it’s more effective than singing with movement, at least for this song, which describes Olsen’s feelings of disillusionment. You’re only “fierce and light and young,” she tells us, “When you don’t know that you’re wrong / or just how wrong you are.” This may be my favorite track.
Olsen plays up the guitar and drums in “Forgiven/Forgotten” and “High & Wild.” Both songs are forcefully catchy in an unexpected way. “Forgiven/Forgotten” has heavy drums and bass and the words drive you through with repetition. Her voice is bolder and far more scornful in “High & Wild” with its grungy riffs. It’s not as sad as most of the other songs, and there’s a powerful melody that recalls ’60s femme rock. It comes close to being somber, but then she sarcastically sings: “Well, this would all be so much easier / if I had nothing to say.”
“Hi-five” is another song that positions itself outside of the sorrowful, instead tip-toeing on the edge before diving into bitterness. The simple guitar chords and drums go well with the blues-y, old country lyrics: “I feel so lonesome I could cry.” Olsen’s definitely warbling here, reflecting the movement in the instrumentation. There’s such sudden raw emotion when she shouts “someone who believes” that the entire tone of the song turns around. “Are you lonely, too?” she asks. “So am I,” she says after calling for a hi-five. But then, in a completely delicious twist at the very end she reveals herself: “I’m stuck too / I’m stuck with you.”
The whole album is narrative and extremely emotional, with Olsen occasionally throwing in an endearing word like “darlin.'” There’s also a great deal of experimentation here—songs are different in tone, in rhythm, but they all run smoothly from one to the next. If you’re okay with your own feelings lurching out, and maybe shedding a tear or two that you didn’t know was lurking inside, then give this album a good, long listen.
Check out “White Fire” from Burn Your Fire For No Witness:
Sondre Lerche‘s shadowy soundtrack to the Sundance contender The Sleepwalker opens with a love ballad turned inside out: “You Sure Look Swell”, is a familiar melody of lullaby arpeggios, touched with a creepy distortion that becomes more prevalent as the album progresses. Picture an empty gas station with flickering lights, at a nowhere intersection in the middle of the night, with an old radio behind the counter playing Skeeter Davis, the song slowly being overtaken by radio static. That’s the effect.
The track—one of a minority of vocals-heavy songs on the record—ends with a total disintegration into the white noise that has been threatening it from the very first chord, the initially sweet lyrics melting into something sinister. The vocal lines recall the balladry of sixties country pop, and their incongruency with the surrounding music defamiliarizes their warmth. The contrast is further accentuated, in the three subsequent vocal tracks on the record, by silvery female vocals. Ably handled by Marit Larson, Nathalie Nordnes and Sylvia Lewis, the mournful prettiness of the singing offers relief against the instrumental tracks, where the album is at its bleakest.
Spooky ambience and chaotic classical influences mark a sharp departure for the Norwegian musician and composer, whose discography since his debut in 2000 has circled around friendly indie rock melodies flecked with jazz, lounge and eighties pop influences. Sleepwalker is his second soundtrack (in 2007, Lerche recorded a pop collection for Dan In Real Life that bore his musical signature so strongly it could easily have been released as a standalone album). This was a credit to Lerche: his music framed the film without deferring to it, and although the album shifted gracefully into the role of chronicling for a visual storyline, the album was still essentially a collection of songs.
Not so in Sleepwalker. Lerche wrote the music for the soundtrack with Kato Ådland, an actor and composer who had an acting role in Dan In Real Life. The result—Lerche’s first collaboration—is a far-reaching, textured soundscape with elements of spiny, jumbled classical and jazz. Particularly on the less linear second half of the album, the songs don’t feel so much like songs as they feel like one large, shapeshifting piece of music. The guitar arpeggios that predominate in the first track fade in and out of the less melody-driven back half of Sleepwalker, but feel farther away, as if they’re emerging out of a thick fog or through a dream. A common beat—a foreboding, clock-like rhythm shared by strings, electronics, and percussive instruments—recurs as the tracks wear on.
The Sleepwalker soundtrack may come as a surprise from Lerche, but it’s perfectly in line with the aesthetic of the film, which tells the story of Christine, who makes an unexpected appearance at the estate where she grew up as her sister Kaia is in the midst of renovating the property with her partner Andrew. It soon becomes clear that Christine’s grip on reality is growing progressively looser, and the unraveling of family grudges and relationships that ensues is heightened by the uncanny element of Christine’s sleepwalking. Themes of night and obscurity loom large, both visually and in this soundtrack. Moments of ambience serve as blank spots, unrevealed secrets.
And Lerche more than does justice to the creepiness of the mysterious stranger trope on this album. Flanked by warmth—pretty songs, lines of gentle pop harmony—Lerche bottoms out the murky depths of the story, and ends on the ambiguously resolved “Take Everything Back,” a gorgeously harmonized duet between Larsen and Lewis. In the song’s chorus, the bass line descends into a surprising minor modulation, diverging subtly from the predominant thread of the music. At its end, the album’s resolution is ambiguous, retaining a lot of the mystery that it started with.
“Not bringing what I’ve learned through this process into my future songwriting and albums would be impossible,” Lerche has said of creating the Sleepwalker soundtrack. “It’s been so fucking liberating, I can’t turn around now.” Many of the new directions the music takes in this album do, indeed, feel like revelations, most visibly in the way Lerche plays with time, ambience and rhythm on the soundtrack. Will this mean a permanent shift in Lerche’s work? We’ll have to wait and see. For now, enjoy the Sleepwalker soundtrack, which comes out next Tuesday, January 14th via Mona Records.
Listen to “Palindromes,” off The Sleepwalker Original Soundtrack, and watch the trailer for The Sleepwalker below!
Karen Dalton’s mystique, largely a product of her personal misfortunate, makes her an easy candidate for legend: it’s fun to imagine her, half Irish, half Cherokee, in a wooly, bohemian large-pocketed coat, Dalton had thick dark bangs and two missing bottom teeth knocked out when she got between two fighting boyfriends, and spent the sixties wandering Greenwich Village, palling around with Bob Dylan and enchanting tiny apartments full of literati with her banjo and her incomparable voice.
Most often liked to a folksy Billy Holday, Dalton’s voice is bluesy and husky, perfectly timed, but especially haunting for the sadness behind it. Dalton was criminally overlooked during her lifetime, and barely recorded, both because of her inconsistencies with the kind of pop music that got signed at the time and because of her own stubbornness and famous refusal to perform. The story of how her debut album, It’s So Hard To Tell Who’s Going To Love You The Best, was made has become a legend unto itself:a friend tricked her into playing the songs, and secretly recorded the performance. Dalton released that album and one other, In My Own Time, and then disappeared off the scene. She struggled with drug use until her death from AIDS in 1993.
In My Own Time, released initially in 1971 and then again in 2006, epitomizes something of the intimacy and romance that had haunted her voice on It’s So Hard. The record was undoubtedly more comfortable, and Dalton’s experiments into the bluesier aspects of her voice (“When A Man Loves A Woman”), which even switches some of the lyrics of that song around to fit a female protagonist, feel natural alongside the beautifully archaic banjo-based tune “Katie Cruel.” Then there’s “Take Me,” a simple, heart-shattering song built around fermatas and soul, that hits a new peak of earnestness in Dalton’s career. However, the most memorable track on this album, for me, is the first one, “Something On Your Mind.”
The mythologizing of Karen Dalton, as much as it skews the life it imagines, lets you take the music for your own, and so it is with this song. “Something On Your Mind,” honest and comforting, utilizes a set of lyrics just vague enough to apply to anything—Yesterday, anyway you made it was just fine/So you turned your days into nighttime/Didn’t you know you can’t make it without ever even trying? And something’s on your mind, isn’t it—and cutting enough to feel like a conversation. More than thirty years after the song was recorded, “Something On Your Mind” is balm for the wounds of the lonely two thirty AM subway rider, the recently dumped or the recently unemployed, the weary traveler, or the woolen-jacketed wanderer through a snowy Greenwich village. Her voice, an acute blend of lonely weariness and deep strength, sounds like nothing to come out before or since.
Take a listen to “Something On Your Mind,” off In My Own Time, below:
Honestly, I’m still at a loss as to why this 12″–an assembly of three remixed tracks off 2013’s full-length Sleeper–exists. Carmen Hillestad, alias Carmen Villain, who ended a successful modeling career three years ago to focus on playing and writing music, released Sleeper this past March, bringing with it a delicately crafted blend of ethereal psych-rock and lo-fi nineties grit. The vocals on that album–the best and most conspicuous aspect of Villain’s performance–seemed to by turns float over and grab at the melodies, always with a palpable undertone of something ominous in the background. The first single off that album, “Lifeissin,” struck that balance exquisitely, creating out of Villain’s voice a persona that was empathetic as well as occasionally becoming a bit obscured and even scary. Unadorned bored-but-beautiful vocals, which, at some points, channelled Nico of The Velvet Underground & Nico, made creepy lyrics (“Stories be told, this is a life, open the curtains/Do you believe I’m going to hell?”) creepier.
But the least satisfying aspects of Sleeper–the album’s floating directionlessness that couldn’t, for all its distortion-licked guitar lines and catchy, cyclical vocal hooks, carry momentum through all twelve tracks–can only be magnified through remix. The original album needed more grabbing and less floating. On the most recent EP, Villain abandons all semblance of storytelling in the vocals in favor of creating an entirely atmospheric sound. Her voice has no life of its own on this recording, and merely operates in service to the instrumentals.
Which would be fine, if the original versions of the songs didn’t depend so heavily on the persona Villain created to fit them when she released her first album. The mysterious, mysteriously dark character that we first encountered moving through Sleeper does not really make an appearance on this newly envisioned collection of tracks. However, since the songs were initially created with a heavier vocal presence, the listening experience feels lacking, as if there’s a giant hole in the sound.
“Most of my songs are about escaping something–escaping this weird vacuum, an unsatisfying world,” Villain has said. Indeed, the three extended tracks on this album– “Dreamo (Peaking Lights Remix),” “Obedience (Bjørn Torske Remix)” and “How Much (A JD Optimo Mix)”–all have a hunted feel to them. This is mostly due to the percussion line, which carries strong weight on every track, leading the surrounding collection of instrumentals in gentle, almost playful, journeys up and down their registers. The color of the melody is always shifting slightly, never sitting still for longer than a few seconds. The attention paid to keeping the instrumentals alive and vibrant on this album adds nice dimension to each track, although (for me, at least) this is no substitution for the strong vocal presence we saw on the full-length release. That being lacking, the mystery on its way towards being developed in Sleeper now feels flattened, overly obscure and boring.
Imagine going to a play, and discovering that in this play there will be no actors and no story line, only an elaborate stage set and really, really good lighting. That’s kind of the experience of listening to Carmen Villain’s remixes. Somewhere in the reinterpretation, these songs have lost a lot of their pull since appearing as originals on Sleeper.
You can go hereto purchase the Sleeper Remixes EP via Amazon, or herefor the original Sleeper CD via Saki Store. Also, be sure to check out “Dreamo (Peaking Lights Remix)” via Soundcloud below!
