Further Listening:

5. Jess Kallen Goes Well With A Nice Cup Of Tea

Living on Ancestral Tongva land in Los Angeles, Jess Kallen is a new name to me, although that’s only because I haven’t been paying enough attention to the credits. A highly in-demand guitarist, Jess has previously played on records and performed with the likes of Rosie Tucker, Alex Lahey and Temme Scott. A trained jazz guitarist at the Thornton School of Music, Jess started playing classical guitar aged just five and hasn’t really stopped since. Now stepping out on their own, this week saw Jess share the debut album Exotherm, which they marked by sharing a new single, Oolong.

A celebration of emotional growth, Jess recalls their pride at how Oolong has, “helped me understand my own stubbornness, and hold it with humility and tenderness”. The track deals with ideas of conflict and learning how not to let it upend your life, like much of Jess’ music focusing on the small moments of joy that add up to life’s more grand changes. Musically, the track is a thing of muted beauty, as Jess’ vocal is accompanied by a warm unfurling of keys, beatered drums and the meandering wonder of their unsurprisingly brilliant guitar work. Throughout the words play out like a hazy memory, Jess recalling, “I awoke to find an empty room, sometimes the wrong side’s right and the morning feels like doom”, the song seems to be longing for some sort of domestic bliss, a place of toasted rye bread, eggs over easy and sharing a crossword with a pot of tea. They might be songs of small moments, but Jess Kallen infuses their music with that intangible quality of weightiness, they make the minutiae of the every day seem like the shifting of a tectonic plate, the slow tiny moments, that almost unnoticeably change the fabric of a life forever.

Exotherm is out now via New Professor Music. For more information on Jess Kallen visit https://www.jesskallen.com/.

4. Florry Hit The Hight Notes

A self-styled country-rock band from Philadelphia, Florry is the brainchild of Francie Medosch, alongside, “a cast of the most daring and tasteful players of the underground”. The world last heard from Florry back in 2021 with the acclaimed album, Big Fall, a record of Cosmic American Music indebted to the likes of Gram Parsons, Neil Young and Wilco. Two years on, and freshly signed to Dear Life Records, Florry are back on the road, with a string of dates supporting Kurt Vile & The Violators on the horizon, and this week announced details of their new album The Holey Bible. While the album won’t arrive until August, this week Florry shared the first single from it, Drunk and High.

The Holey Bible is a record of hard-won optimism, a celebration of taking your time and the patience it can take to walk the road to wherever your life is headed. For Florry, the journey began at the start of the pandemic, when Francie found herself back at home, “with just her mom, dog, cats, time to re-approach music, and Bluto the pig”. There she lent into “hopeful abandon”, choosing to meet the potential for despair with, “a bombastically positive force”. Reminiscent of the likes of MJ Lenderman or Little Kid, Drunk and High is a boozy country classic in the making, full of a winning mix of adolescent misadventure and twanging guitars. Lyrically the song deals with unwanted attention, possibly hinting at a darker undercurrent below the boozy blur, “hey good lookin’, didn’t I tell you you can’t hold my hand? Yeah, I told you last night when you were too drunk to understand”. This brand of anarchic country rock is having a real moment, as spearheaded by the likes of Wednesday a generation of young Americans are redefining the boundaries of the genre in their own thrilling vision.

The Holey Bible is out August 4th via Dear Life Records. For more information on Florry visit https://linktr.ee/florryband.

3. Faye Webster Doesn’t Want To Kiss And Make Up

An always impossible-to-pin-down artist, the world last heard from Faye Webster on the 2021 masterpiece, I Know I’m Funny haha. That record saw the acclaimed photographer, sometimes model and “yo-yo enthusiast”, make her most focused and honest album to date, winning both critical acclaim and a celebrity fan in Barack Obama with its melding of country, R&B and whatever else Faye found inspiration from in Atlanta at the time. This week Faye returns with both a string of North American tour dates, and a new single, But Not Kiss.

A distinctly modern love song, of sorts, Faye notes how But Bot Kiss, “could be a really romantic song or a really anti-romantic song”, existing in the middle ground of romantic longing and cold ambivalence, “it’s something I’ve looked for but struggled to find in other love songs, for them to describe this conflict or contradiction”. Faye sets this tale of questioning and indecision to a shifting soundtrack her whispered vocals accompanied by a backing that seems to break down and then roar back, going from minimal piano lines to grand, near-orchestral crescendos. Whether the relationship she describes is set to flourish or flop, her musical career seems to only be headed one way, Faye Webster is a star.

But Not Kiss is out now via Secretly Canadian. For more information on Faye Webster visit https://www.fayewebster.com/.

2. Muriel Really Light Up A Room

Based out of Cardiff, Muriel are a lo-fi project led by songwriter and tattoo artist Zak Thomas, alongside a cast of friends and musicians from the Welsh capital. The band appeared on these pages at the start of May, with their excellent single, Seaside Painter, the first taste of their as yet unannounced debut album, due later this year on Venn Records. This week Muriel shared the second taster of that record in the shape of their new single, Body Of Light.

Zak has spoken of the influence of both grief and spirituality on Muriel’s debut album, and both are prominent on Body Of Light, as he explains, “not long after my father passed away, I went to the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. I found it hauntingly beautiful and people were crying in the aisles…I’ve come to the age where you expect to have things figured out and I have moments where I feel I have, until something shakes my foundation all over again“. Noting inspiration from the likes of Sparklehorse and The Microphones, Muriel’s sound walks the line between lo-fi and ambition, they may not polish every sound beyond recognition, but they don’t strip the song bare either. Here, Zak’s vocal is adorned with rhythmically urgent Modest Mouse-like guitars, swelling backing vocals and a surprisingly driving drum beat, creating a track that swirls and dances around your ears, anxiously skittering like a butterfly, never truly settling. They may be a band still working things out, yet make no mistake Muriel are a very exciting prospect just waiting to explode.

Muriel’s debut album will be out later this year via Venn Records. For more information on Muriel visit https://linktr.ee/murielband.

1. Firestations Hit Some Heavy Traffic

Grandee’s of the Walthamstow dream-pop scene, it is easy to forget that Firestations have only actually released one album. That was 2018’s The Year Dot, a collection of harmony-driven dream-pop and environmental dread, that was rightfully lauded. Since then they’ve been exploring other formats, with a collection of EPs, brought together as the Automatic Tendencies project. Since then they’ve gone through line-up changes, with bassist Giles Littleford departing for the Midlands to be replaced by Neil Walsh before the whole band headed to Warwickshire in the summer of 2022 to create, “a set of songs which felt like they belonged together”, which will be released next month as their new album, Thick Terrain. Ahead of the release, this week the band shared their new single, Travel Trouble.

Travel Trouble is quite possibly Firestation’s most nakedly political statement to date, as vocalist Michael Cranny explains, “it’s impossible to avoid the ramping up of the ‘hostile environment’ rhetoric from the Tories right now“. The song is something of a plea for compassion, “with an understanding that, on a very basic level, it’s a complete accident where you’re born and the circumstances you find yourself in”. If the themes are rightfully angry, that’s present too in the music, which is quite possibly the band’s most aggressive-sounding release to date, full of expansive, distorted guitars and clattering, driving drums, perhaps less dream-pop and more howling nightmare-rock. Lyrically, Firestations lay it out straight as they put themselves into the shows of the refugees seeking solace on these shores, “travel trouble, find a new home, travel trouble, wherever you roam, travel trouble, I want what you want”. A potent reminder that for all the nonsense rhetoric of a “migrant crisis”, the truth is that the only real crisis belongs with the homeless and dispossessed people just looking for a piece of basic humanity. A record of identity, and conflict and one in search of some semblance of progress, Thick Terrain is shaping up to be Firestations strangest and most compelling record yet.

Thick Terrain is out July 14th via Lost Map. For more information on Firestations visit https://linktr.ee/firestations.

Header photo is Firestations by Katherine Leedale