Further Listening:

5. Don’t Let A Little Thing Like Being Dead Stop Your Dreams

Based out of Austin, Texas, Being Dead are the best-friend duo of Falcon Bitch and Gumball (quite possibly not the names on their passports). The duo make various claims about their origins, whether claiming they met as Chimney sweeps in the mid-1700s, as shoemakers in Middle England, or as competing acrobats in a travelling circus – all excellent if completely untrue stories. Thankfully what they do rather wonderfully, is make the sort of music you can only make if you know someone well enough to have a fictional origin story. The world last heard from the pair on their 2019 EP, Fame Money Death, but they’re set to return next month with the release of their debut long-player When Horses Would Run via Bayonet Records. Ahead of that, this week the band shared their new single, Daydream.

Daydream is something of a genre-fluid romp, it starts with a wordless chorus of las, as racing drums and twangy guitars tap into a rich vein of American psychedelia. The runaway horse of an intro then screeches to a halt, as the words emerge and it shifts gears into a dreamy indie-pop song, the melodic minimalism nodding to the likes of Blush or Cindy. As the pair share vocal duties they offer a song that seems to sit on the precipice of optimism, as they sing, “you and me we’ll bloom in the sun, we’ll lift our tongues and swallow the whole sky whole”. A delicate scratch of the surface though reveals certain insecurities, hinted at first with the fragility of the line, “feeling like a newborn baby, a delicate daisy pushing up through the dirt”, and then amplified by the chorus, its hopeful start and doubt-filled closing, “take me with you, sweet as they can be, I’m coming too…if you will let me”. Being Dead should keep that optimism, these two platonic soulmates are cooking up something very special, and as the lyrics suggest they’re ready to bloom.

When Horses Would Run is out July 14th via Bayonet Records. For more information on Being Dead visit https://linktr.ee/falconbitch.

4. It’s No Surprise To Find Patio Outside In The Open Air

Patio made their name on the New York DIY scene in the 2010s, earning a reputation as darlings of the Brooklyn underground with their precise and minimal take on post-punk. After emerging in 2016 with their well-received debut EP, Luxury, 2019 saw the band share their full-length debut Essentials before 2020 came along and brought their momentum to a skidding halt. It would mark the end of an era for the band, who subsequently spread out and now find themselves dotted between Los Angeles, New York and Berlin. Thankfully, before that spreading they found time to coalesce in Hudson Valley in the Spring of 2021, working on new music, the first taste of which they shared this week in the shape of their new single, En Plein Air.

En Plein Air lifts its name from the artistic approach of painting outside, a technique made possible by changes in paint technology in the 1870s and popularised by the Impressionists. Written in the Spring of 2021, Patio’s version of En Plein Air is more of a dream of fresh air than a reality, an attempt at writing a good time into reality when most of us were cooped up inside. After going through various iterations, the final version leaned heavily into the joyous qualities of Disco, channelling Donna Summer and The Bee Gees, with the pulsing rhythm sections sitting beneath the wiry, Television-like qualities of the lead guitars. If musically it is a breath of fresh air, lyrically too the track seems to yearn for clarity even if it comes too late in the day, as Patio explain it is about, “winning a fight, for once, but by proxy — finding the right thing to say, but five years too late”. Despite the passing of time, the song is not too proud to enjoy its moment of glory, “thank you for letting me make this all about me, I can be exactly as selfish as you made me out to be”. The track ends with the sort of pulsating dance-floor adjacent strut that made The Rapture short-lived superstars, as Patio seek to ensure you’ve understood, “Hey hey – am I being clear enough? Hey hey – am I making myself clear enough?”. Savage and joyous all in one, En Plein Air is a stunning return for a band well overdue their moment in the limelight.

En Plein Air is out now via Fire Talk. For more information on Patio visit https://patio-bandcamp.bandcamp.com/.

3. Tapir! Live On A Strictly Grassy Diet

I recently had the pleasure of catching the six-piece London band Tapir! when they stole the show at Get Together Festival. Alongside their intricate take on indie-folk, they also caught the eye with their choice of first song headgear, a sort of red alien-like mask, which they quite sensibly ditched early in the set, on what was a surprisingly warm Spring day in South Yorkshire. The same headgear of choice seems to also appear in this week’s press release, which found the band celebrating their signing to the ever-intriguing Heavenly Recordings, as well as sharing a new single, On A Grassy Knoll (We’ll Bow Together), the opening track of their EP, Act 1 (The Pilgrim).

What’s clear where Tapir! are concerned, is that they are not lacking in imagination, Act 1 (The Pilgrim) is the first part of a, “multidisciplinary narrative album“, which is set to contain everything from plays to puppetry as it aims to, “immerse listeners over time“. For now, there’s On A Grasy Knoll (We’ll Bow Together), the starting point of a journey into, “a fictional universe of green hills, choppy seas and red creatures“, through which our intrepid adventurer, The Pilgrim wanders in search of the universe’s history and characters. The track, which features backing vocals and violin from Lilo and the production of Joe Futák, is something of a contradiction, it is both a folk-ditty, all light twiddly guitars and airy Stornoway-like vocals, and a deftly complex piece of songcraft, a cacophony of sonic ideas from burbling, watery synths and scattering drum machines through to the organic tones of saxophones and pianos. A band with a tonne of ideas and a twinkle in their eyes, Tapir! might just have found a perfect home in Heavenly, a creative collaboration that might just let this band go wherever their wonderfully unusual dreams take them.

Act 1 (The Pilgrim) is out now via Heavenly Recordings. For more information on Tapir! visit https://linktr.ee/tapir_band.

2. Allegra Krieger Is Always On The Move

Based out of Brooklyn, Allegra Krieger last appeared on these pages at the start of 2022, that was around the release of her excellent debut album, Precious Thing on Northern Spy Records. With dates supporting Angelo Olsen on the horizon and freshly signed to Double Double Whammy, Allegra is set to return this summer with her second long-player, I Keep My Feet on the Fragile Plane. Ahead of the release, this week she shared the first single from it, Nothing In This World Ever Stays Still.

Nothing In This World Ever Stays Still is something of a celebration of the chaotic nature of life, it was written during a brief stint living in Los Angeles, “everything felt connected and in constant motion, work came and work went, wildfires were raging, a relationship was failing…I was embracing the movement and the chaos, and the way everything fit together. Everything felt wrong, but the wrongness felt correct”. That sense of chaotic positivity is writ large on the finished product, as is the sound of the West Coast, channelling the likes of Joni Mitchell and Kevin Morby into a sun-drenched wistfulness, “a brief but brilliant sun touched the hills, everything’s leaving just as it’s coming in”. To a backing of warm slide-guitar and propulsive acoustics, Allegra seems to inhabit the only stillness in the world, as if the world is spinning around her, from an agile sparrow to the tedious punters she serves in a dead-end sports bar, yet she remains completely detached, even the simple pleasure of a stunning vista is lost to her own struggle, “layers of pain give the landscape some depth, when you feel like heaven, you’re closer to death”. Intriguing and complex, Allegra Krieger’s music always seems to exist on multiple plains, songs that reward patience and repetition, give Allegra Krieger your time and the rewards come tumbling out in waves.

I Keep My Feet on the Fragile Plane is out July 21st via Double Double Whammy. For more information on Allegra Krieger visit https://www.allegrakrieger.com/

1. Strawberry Runners Are Doing The Rounds

In a rare moment of feeling musically uninspired, a few months back I found myself digging through old lists in search of a spark. I worked my way back through the years, searching for something I’d forgotten, not knowing what I was looking for, or whether what I wanted even existed. I found various answers to my unformed question, and one of them was In The Garden, In The Night, my favourite EP of 2017 by Strawberry Runners, the Brooklyn-based project of Emi Knight. Listening to those five tracks again, I remembered just how wonderful that record was, the way it seemed to appear from nowhere and then disappear again just as quickly. As any musically hungry blogger would, I went in search of more. On exploration, a collection of home-recorded demos aside there was nothing to suggest Strawberry Runners was even still a thing, in hope more than expectation, I vowed to check in more regularly and went about my day. Then this week, like a slightly late reward for my endeavours an email appeared, “Strawberry Runners shares new single Circle Circle”, and with that the slight flicker of hope turned to at first excitement, and then that slight trepidation that comes with new material from any band you love, will it live up to my over-inflated expectation? Thankfully I needn’t have worried.

The first Strawberry Runners track in six years, Circle Circle was co-produced by Emi and Michael Cormier O’Leary as well as featuring additional instrumentation from, among others, Benedict Kupstas, aka Field Guides. Reflecting on the track’s creation, Emi recalls how it was written, “one delirious evening while I was sick with a fever – experiencing cyclical thoughts, rumination, and anxiety during the strange waking hours illness brings”. The song served as something of an anchor in a rocky time, “a pillar of stability to cling to, to climb and gain your bearings, to witness the whole stormy sea thrashing about without being swept up in its current”. Lyrically, the track seeks to be seeking meaning, looking for enlightenment in the seeming insignificance of small everyday events, and finding a way of, “maintaining curiosity in what can be simultaneously a mundane, cruel, chaotic, lonely, and beautiful world”. The song was designed to sound like a struggle, but not a dramatic one, as Emi explains, “I wanted to create a song that would evoke the sensation of climbing a mildly sloped but deceptively long hill on an old road bike during a spring day”. The track begins with glitchy electronic pulses, as if trying to find its footing, before Emi’s vocal enters and seems to stitch the disparate bleeps into something resembling cohesion. That sense grows throughout as first rich piano chords and then a choppy, processed beat arrive alongside swells of layered vocals. Like the titular circle, it doesn’t seem to so much arrive at a destination but to just loop, finding comfort in repetition, “we all move so slow, bet we don’t even know, but circle circle circle us all, we’re all needed somewhere, though we’re all so small”. A return that is all the more exciting because there felt a real possibility it might never arrive, Strawberry Runners’ return should be cherished. The world feels a better place with Emi Knight’s music in it.

Circle Circle is out now via Duper Moon Records. For more information on Strawberry Runners visit https://linktr.ee/strawberryrunners.

Header photo is Strawberry Runners by El Black