Further Listening:

5. Office Culture Are Really Opening Up

A band? A collective? A solo-with-friends project? Whatever you want to call Office Culture they’re certainly not easy to pigeon-hole. Led by singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and producer Winston Cook-Wilson, he’s joined in the band’s core trio by bassist Charlie Kaplan and guitarist Ryan El-Solh, and a list of guest collaborators longer than the closing credits of most movies. Back in 2022, Office Culture shared the well-received Big Time Things, which could probably be filed alongside Winston’s solo records and his ever-growing portfolio of production credits. For the next Office Culture move, Winston started with a dream, a dream about a pelican who appears on the cover of the band’s new record, or more accurately CD, Enough. I say CD because that was the aim here, to capture the feel of a compact disc in the 1990s, with its expansive runtime and the freedom to push the boundaries it brought. With Enough set to arrive later this month via Ruination Record Co, Office Culture recently shared two new singles from it, Beach Friday and my personal favourite Open Up Your Fist.

A shuffling, atmospheric piece, Open Up Your Fist seems to deal with moving on from difficult relationships, the dream-like quality of the music blurring the lines between reality and fantasy as Winston sings of, “hecklers in my head, new walls, a new atmosphere of regret”. Throughout, Winston seems to jump forward and back in time, at one moment they’re still plotting their separation, “I need a change you say, as soon as the weather’s warm”, then the next he’s into a brighter future when this is just a memory, “this is the background we cast the good times against”. Musically, the track is led by bright piano chords and rolling bass, adorned by a shifting cast of ideas from the gliding electric guitar to the skittering, tinkling percussion, which has a certain glassy quality I can’t quite put my finger on. A fascinating sprawling beast, everything about this feels like Office Culture spreading their wings, and like the cover star Pelican, against the odds they might soar.

Enough is out October 18th via Ruination Record Co. For more information on Office Culture visit https://linktr.ee/officeculture.

4. Bon Iver Do Like To Be Beside The Speyside

It feels slightly bizarre that it’s five years since the world last heard from Bon Iver. That was around the release of i,i the project’s 2019 Grammy-nominated fourth album. Since then Bon Iver’s main man Justin Vernon has played with the likes of Taylor Swift and Bruce Springsteen, performed for Kamala Harris, and spent a long time considering whether he was done with making music. Thankfully, for now, at least, it seems not to be the case, as Justin announced a new three-track EP, SABLE, and shared the, slightly annoyingly punctuated, first single from it S P E Y S I D E.

Recorded in Wisconsin alongside co-producer Jim-E Stack, SABLE is a record built on personal struggle, a projection of guilt and anguish, with the former writ large on the apologetic strains of S P E Y S I D E. Led by little more than a gorgeously understated acoustic-guitar, the track will draw inevitable comparisons to Bon Iver’s earliest work on For Emma Forever Ago, stripping back the expansive quality of Justin’s more recent output for something more straight-talking, perfectly suited to his musical apology. If the music is beautiful in its simplicity, the words could barely be more to the point, from the opening line, “I know now that I can’t make good, but how I wish I could”, as the song progresses he shifts mood slightly, moving from his guilt into just a hint of hope. His plea for another chance comes fittingly on the titular dock, “maybe you can still make a man from me, here on Speyside quay, with what’s left of me, as you live and breathe”. It’s of course no surprise to hear a new Bon Iver song all over the radio, yet this one really does seem to be resonating, like an old friend coming home, a little older, a little wiser, and perhaps with a tale to tell that’s really worth hearing.

SABLE is out October 18th via Jagjaguwar. For more information on Bon Iver visit https://boniver.org/.

3. Jennifer Castle Sings To The Soil

Hailing from Toronto, Canada, Jennifer Castle has been sharing her music with the world for the best part of two decades, most recently on 2020’s Monarch Season. Four years on from that record, Jennifer set to return with her, “chronicle of the artist in early middle age”, named after the legendary seat of King Arthur’s court in Early Middle Ages Britain, Camelot. With the album set to arrive at the start of next month via Paradise Of Bachelors, this week Jennifer shared the third single from the record, Earthsong.

One of the last songs Jennifer wrote for Camelot, Earthsong is a track she describes as, “seeded from hope, imagination, destiny and resistance”, underpinned by the gorgeous simplicity of the line, “I belong to the world”. The whole song has an undercurrent of ownership and liberty, of freeing yourself from unidentified shackles and being at one with the universe, “sometimes I feel that pull succumb to it and start to twirl”. If the song seems to seek a connection with something ancient, the music is like a mirror to that feeling, this is a classic American folk song, one that could have been passed down from Karen Dalton and Peggy Seeger through to more modern practitioners like Shannon Lay and Laura Veirs. When we talk of raw music we’re often put in mind of something harsh and abrasive, yet here Jennifer Castle finds the earthiness in the word, the sense of something bigger than humanity, like tectonic plates sliding and the sun-rising, as ancient as the tales of King Arthur and every bit as intriguing.

Camelot is out November 1st via Paradise Of Bachelors. For more information on Jennifer Castle visit https://www.jennifercastlemusic.com/.

2. These Skirts Were Made For Running So That’s Just What They’ll Do

Hailing from Dallas, Texas, Skirts, aka songwriter Alex Montenegro, came crashing to the world’s attention back in 2021 with the sprawling majesty of her debut album Great Big Wild Oak. That record was something of a departure from the lo-fi roots of Alex’s early material, where she was armed with little more than a slightly out-of-tune guitar, a loop pedal and a tape machine. For her next move as Skirts, Alex set out to try and continue her exploration of that dichotomy of DIY and high-fidelity, and the result is evident in her new single, Run.

The song, or at least its opening, was inspired by a failed dream on a 2022 West Coast tour when Alex really wanted to see Wild Horses, which sadly became unfeasible, “the idea of seeing these beautiful creatures just run free for hours is still such a dream of mine”. The song came to Alex, like much of the songwriting she has done following the pandemic, when she was sat at a piano, although the final version features a full band, and a particularly abrasive, squalling guitar line, finding a surprisingly unjarring meeting point in the sweetness of Lomelda and the crash of Wednesday. What Alex manages to do so beautifully here is capture a sense of freedom, the open plain, the galloping horses, those unfathomably huge American vistas, and with one simple command, “run”, she lets the whole thing loose. A beautiful return that’s a timely reminder of just how thrilling Skirts music truly can be.

Run is out now via Double Double Whammy. For more information on Skirts visit https://linktr.ee/skirtsmusic

1. You Could Do Worth Than To Live A Year With Advanced Base

Based out of Chicago, Illinois, Advance Base is the, “melancholic soft rock recording project” of Owen Ashworth, formerly of Casiotone For The Painfully Alone, and currently the head honcho at the ever-brilliant Orindal Records. This week Owen announced details of his new record Horrible Occurrences, the first album of Advance Base originals since 2018’s Animal Companionship. Recorded in Owen’s home studio, the record will see the light of day in December via Run For Cover Records, and alongside the announcement he shared the latest track from it, The Year I Lived In Richmond.

Discussing the inspiration behind the track Owen is quick to point out he’s never actually lived in any of the many places called Richmond, instead it’s a fictional setting for a, “place where all the bad memories live”. In the case of The Year I Lived in Richmond, Owen was inspired by a series of violent crimes that occurred in a city he lived in the early 2000s, which he admits, “I haven’t been able to corroborate the events through internet searches or conversations with old friends from that period of my life”. From that personal mystery, came a song, and it took on a life of its own, “a fiction more vivid than my hazy memories, with its own specific details and invented names”, that formed in Owen’s mind over the best part of two decades. Musically, the track has an ominous sweetness, reminiscent of Mark Kozelek’s collaboration with Jimmy Lavalle, the gentle meandering synth-lines and sing-speak vocals adding an innocence to a tale of ominous intruders and kitchen knives in the chest. An intriguing introduction to the Horrible Occurences to follow, this feels like Owen Ashworth at the peak of his enviable talents, and ready to get the acclaim his songwriting has always so richly deserved.

Horrible Occurrences is out December 6th via Run For Cover Records. For more information on Advance Base visit https://advancebasemusic.com/.

Header photo is Advance Base courtesy of Owen Ashworth.