Further Listening:

5. There’s Mali Obomsawin & There’s Magdalena Abrego

While I’m as guilty as any writer of seeking neat labels to put onto music, like the caramelised/burnt bits of a cottage pie, it is often those fabulous blurry bits on the edges that are the most exciting. It’s for that reason that cross-genre collaborations are always rather enticing, as demonstrated this week by Mali Obomsawin and Magdalena Abrego. Mali is a bassist and composer from Abenaki First Nation at Odanak, best known as a member of the indie-folk band Lula Wiles with a background in a variety of music traditions. Magdalena Abrego is a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based guitarist, composer, and teaching artist known for genre-bending improvisation, most recently a set of nine duo compositions written for combinations of alto saxophones, bass clarinet, voice, electric guitar, and electronics. Coming together at a studio in Maine, they’ve produced an album, the tongue-in-cheekly named Greatest Hits, which they showcased this week with their new single There There.

As Mali recalls, There There was written, “during lockdown at a moment when the whole world felt incredibly vulnerable, like if someone gave it the tiniest poke it would crumble“. The sense of brittle fragility comes across in the finished recording, “when we recorded it we were trying to capture that energy. The mics are so hot, the drums are played very, very carefully. Magdalena’s guitar choices are gentle and precise. The song is like a cradle”. Despite their disparate, and potentially complex musical backgrounds, there’s something delightfully subtle about There There, the fluid guitars meandering beneath Mali’s swooping Tenci-like vocals and minimal stomping percussion. At one point we even hear what sounds suspiciously like the whistle of a kettle, only adding to the sense of being welcomed into a musical home that you feel like you might just end up being a place you’re very happy resting for a while. Lyrically the track feels almost like a promise, a reminder to the song’s intended target that whatever happens she’ll be there, “if you dare, if you don’t, if you try, if you wanna cry, ooo im there, ooo there there”. It might be unlikely to end up cracking the album chart, but make no mistake this is one Greatest Hits package that is well worthy of the name.

Greatest Hits is out later this year. For more information on Mali Obomsawin visit https://www.maliobomsawin.com/ and for more information on Magdalena Abrego visit https://www.magdalenaabrego.com/.

4. I’ll Never Get Tired Of Sufjan Stevens

This week Sufjan Stevens returned with news of his latest album, Javelin, his first solo release of any sort since 2020’s The Ascension, and perhaps more relevantly his first in, “full singer-songwriter mode”, since the critically lauded 2015 offering, Carrie & Lowell. Despite its ambitious sound, the album was largely home-recorded, Sufjan working with a small circle of friends as he attempted to recreate the sound of, “70s Los Angeles studio opulence”. With the album due at the start of October, this week Sufjan shared the first single from it, So You Are Tired.

Although it appears midway through Javelin, So You Are Tired feels almost like an in-breath, a moment of calm before the floodgates break and the emotions pour forth. The track enters on a flourish of piano the meandering low notes, contrasted by the pulsing rhythms of the high-end chords. From there it’s a piece of subtle shifting, Sufjan’s always ornate vocal accompanied always by the piano, but also at times with strings, banjos, choral backing vocals and subtle percussive crashes. While it might be easy to cast your mind back to Carrie & Lowell for references, this actually feels like an earlier incarnation, reminiscent of the gently crushing moments on Seven Swans when his personal feelings crept into view. Lyrically it seems to emerge from a relationship on the precipice, Sufjan clinging on when every fibre of his being is telling him it is done, “so you are dreaming of after, was it really all just for fun? I was the man still in love with you when I already knew it was done”. It’s an astonishing return, at once comfortingly familiar and overwritten with a slash of fresh musical ideas, where Sufjan Stevens is concerned, did you ever really expect anything less?

Javelin is out October 6th via Asthmatic Kitty Records. For more information on Sufjan Stevens visit https://sufjan.com/.

3. Fig By Four Don’t Go Anywhere Without Their Lifejackal

While you might not yet know the music of Fig By Four, if you’re a regular reader of this page you’ll almost certainly have heard the work of the band’s main creative, Sarah Statham. As a touring member of Living Body and the bassist in Crake, Sarah has quickly established a reputation as one of the hardest-working musicians on the Leeds music scene. Now stepping into the limelight with her own project, Sarah is set to share the debut Fig By Four album, Capture Reveal, this October, and this week shared the latest single from it, Lifejackal.

Recorded at the increasingly influential Greenmount Studios, Lifejackal is a song about, “knowing when to let go”, and also about knowing that isn’t always even possible, “everything you’ve ever done or has happened to you, or anyone around you, is carried forward in some way forever. Becoming legacy ripples after you’re gone. If you can make peace with the more difficult examples, it’s a beautiful reality to imagine”. Musically the track walks the line between anthemic indie and intimate modern folk, flowing organically from the punchier chorus-like sections into spacious breakdowns, before swelling to the urgent instrumental outro. There’s a constant sense of the instruments fusing and then breaking apart as if someone is flipping their magnetic poles for fear of getting too close, it makes for a listen that’s at one moment euphoric and the next distinctly lonely as if slightly unwilling to give itself completely, “it’s okay to share everything with you, but I am careful to time and word things right before I do”. If Sarah’s past musical endeavours weren’t already enough reason to be excited about Capture Reveal, here is further evidence that this is her moment to take centre stage, and she sounds more than ready to shine.

Capture Reveal is out October 20th via Bomb The Twist. For more information on Fig By Four visit https://linktr.ee/figbyfour.

2. Mali Velasquez Puts Bobby On The Beat

Based out of Nashville, Mali Velasquez recently traded the Texas Panhandle home for the verdant foothills of Tennessee, there she became inspired by the lushness of the environment around her, resulting in her fittingly titled debut album, I’m Green. Working with producer Josef Kuhn, I’m Green compiles Mali’s folk-rooted indie rock songs, a series of tracks that explore, “familiar feelings of discomfort as an opportunity for release”. With the album set for release this October on Acrophase Records, this week Mali shared the latest single from it, Bobby.

Bobby digs deep into Mali’s personal story, exploring the pained experience of losing her mum when she was in high school, the chorus here, “largely about my coping with her loss, mostly being unable to move or stop staring at the wall“. The track seems to take Mali back to her school days in West Texas, a blurred catalogue of memories shared via a backing that starts with a gentle guitar strum and then swells to via a propulsive drum-beat, layered vocals and wailing lead guitar recalling the likes of Skullcrusher or Masterpiece-era Big Thief. As with most of I’m Green, Bobby explores ideas of grief and coping, and finding a route between them as Mali explains, “moving from unhealthy coping mechanisms to safer ones is a thick and embarrassing struggle that seeps into a lot of these songs“. Mali Velasquez’s songwriter may come from life’s most difficult moments, yet in digging in the dirt she’s found something raw, vulnerable and really rather magical, that might just resonate with an awful lot of people with similar stories of their own.

I’m Green is out October 13th via Acrophase Records. For more information on Mali Velasquez visit https://www.instagram.com/malivelasquez/.

1. And I Just Can’t Seem To Get Enough Of Sun June

The world last heard from Sun June back in 2021 when they teamed up with Run For Cover Records to share the acclaimed record Somewhere. Having always been a distinctly Austin band, the subsequent years have changed things for Sun June, guitarist and co-songwriter Stephen Salisbury left Austin for North Carolina. For the first time Stephen and band leader Laura Colwell were both collaborating and maintaining a relationship at a distance, songs written and shared over 1300 miles of air space, lending a new privacy to their creative processes. It also changed the recording process, where once their records were made quickly by five people in a room, now they took in multiple sessions, stolen moments in various studios, before bringing it all together with Loma-member and producer, Dan Duszynski. The result is the band’s upcoming album Bad Dream Jaguar, which they previewed this week with their new single, Get Enough.

A song about, “spring-time mania, justifying delusions, and absolutely losing it but still loving it”, Get Enough was written at a time when, “Laura and Stephen were bouncing back and forth between Texas and North Carolina, each unsure of where life was headed“. The track plays out with that unmistakable Sun June shimmer, a kind of modern Americana in a heat-haze, like a melting plastic statuette of Uncle Sam glistening in the Texan sun. That slight warping of reality is married in the lyrics, Laura sounding on the edge of an ending throughout, but falling back to familiarity and nostalgia, “yeah the Beatles getting back together. Got to give the people what they want”. Throughout though there’s a sense of actuality creeping in, her sentences become clipped, unwilling or unable to fully articulate a thought, “it’s all I can do to be lonely. Me and you. When it all comes down to an ending, I can feel it. I can almost save it“. If the lyrics are perched on the cusp of the past and the present, musically too Sun June seem to be shuffling into a new phase, it starts with their traditional luxurious rhythmic strut, as Laura’s goosebump-inducing vocals are accompanied by the  “dust ol’ Texas sound” of Michael Bain’s lead guitar. Just as you think you’ve got the track pinned though, it makes an arresting move, the cymbals start to clatter, the guitars become delightfully discordant, the whole thing starts to lurch in and out of time and the poise departs as it ends stumbling and thrashing, Laura the only remaining calm in a storm of noise. Sun June have always sounded great, now they’re leaving space for the messiness to creep in, thrilling, honest and rather remarkable, Bad Dream Jaguar might just be as terrifyingly exhilarating as its title suggests.

Bad Dream Jaguar is out October 20th via Run For Cover. For more information on Sun June visit https://sunjunemusic.com/.

Header photo is Sun June by Alex Winker.