My weekly further listening is now available via Apple Music.

5. The Spatulas Are Blooming Marvelous

Recently relocated to Indiana, The Spatulas is ostensibly Miranda Soileau-Pratt, also known as Miranda Spatula when working solo, whenever she decides to bring a full band into the picture. Miranda’s relocation from Oregon, where the seeds of this album, A Blue Dot, were planted, meant a new lineup was required, and with it a new sound, which, as they put it, “has transformed what was once a steady glimmering looseness with full-bore rock dynamisms”. While A Blue Dot won’t arrive until the middle of May via Post Present Medium, this week, The Spatulas shared the first taster of it, Flowers.

Flowers enters on a distinctly lo-fi flourish, with janky Velvet Underground-like guitars, humming bass and primal drum pattering. Atop the clatter, Miranda joins proceedings, her yelp-sing-speak vocals channelling the indie spirit of The Raincoats or those much missed Swedes Love Is All. The lyrics seem to touch on themes of friendship and admiration, which threatens to tip over into envy at the freedom the titular flower exhibits, as Miranda off-handily proclaims, “I’d kind of like to be her, to be inside her brain”, before quickly moving onto other topics. An intriguing introduction to what A Blue Dot might bring, and one that suggests The Spatulas’ ever-evolving sound might just have hit a new high.

A Blue Dot is out May 15th via Post Present Medium. For more information on The Spatulas visit https://mirandaspatula.bandcamp.com/

4. Greg Mendez Sure Writes Pretty Songs

It’s been three years since the last album by Philadelphia-based singer-songwriter Greg Mendez. Since then, there have been live albums, re-issues and the minimal, yet perfectly formed, EP First Time/Alone, with its straight-to-four-track immediacy. The period has also seen him begin working with the ever-reliable Dead Oceans imprint, who will release his next album, Beauty Land, at the end of May. Recorded direct to tape in his own makeshift home studio, “a small room with no natural light”, Beauty Land is a record he says picks up where his last record left off, “plumbing the depths of grief, love, and addiction”.

Ahead of Beauty Land’s arrival, this week Greg shared the first single from it, I Wanna Feel Pretty. Clocking in at barely over two minutes, the track showcases Greg’s nothing-wasted approach to songwriting; everything here seems picked for maximum impact. Particularly striking is the way he seems to run the vocal melodies down the drain with the descending guitars, reminiscent of how Elliott Smith would create those intense spirals of sound to wring so much emotion out of so little instrumentation. Lyrically the track seems to find Greg charting his own decline alongside that of the country he calls home, we find him down on his luck and somehow still sinking further whether he’s getting blind drunk at New Years party for one, or cursing his way to find bad luck even out of positive beginnings, “I got a new job and it’s not too sweet, last night I got robbed as I walked through the streets”. What stops this from becoming self-pitying is just how matter-of-factly he presents it, seeming almost numb to struggles, with nowhere left to go but where he always does, back into another mesmerising song.

Beauty Land is out May 29th via Dead Oceans. For more information on Greg Mendez visit https://www.gregmendez.net/

3. May I Draw Your Attention To Common Holly

It’s approaching a decade since Common Holly, aka songwriter Brigitte Naggar, first appeared on this site. That was around the release of the Montreal native’s debut album, Playing House. That record was quickly followed by 2019’s When I say to you Black Lightning, before, like the rest of the world, she took a breather for a while. Having struck up a creative relationship with Keeled Scales and Paper Bag Records, Common Holly returned last Summer with her third album, Anything Glass, Brigitte’s acclaimed attempt, “to capture the sound and energy her band has honed on stage”. This week, Common Holly shared the accompanying EP, They Will Draw Halos Around Heads, a collection Brigitte describes as, “an experiment in not overthinking it“.

With the EP consisting of, “five songs that didn’t know where they belonged, but that still wanted to be heard“, Brigitte decided this week to shine a specific light on the title track, which she says is, “an exploration of projections that get cast onto girls and women to embody the highest moral standard, the picture of perfect angels“. While Brigitte is correct, the song doesn’t shout particularly loudly; it more than makes up for that in the gentle, slow-burning beauty. The song starts with just Brigitte and whispers of acoustic guitar, reminiscent of Lisa/Liza in its spacious minimalism, as the lyrics flitter between anger and acceptance, “can’t decide if you want to be the small that they made you, having learned it so well”. As Brigitte comes to the titular line, “they will draw halos around our heads, halos around our heads”, she seems to almost pause, a distant wind-chime bristles where the voice once was, before the whole thing subtly swells, layered vocals dance atop increasingly dense layers of guitars, bringing to mind Squirrel Flower’s more stripped-bare moments. From there, the whole thing gently drifts out like a question left unanswered, a vengeance-seeking anger not yet sated, just paused, until the next time anyone tries to tell Common Holly who they think she should be.

They Will Draw Halos Around Our Heads is out now via Keeled Scales. For more information on Common Holly visit https://commonholly.com/

2. Invest In Rural France Early And Reap The Benefits

Based in my home county, the musically underrepresented spot of Wiltshire, Rural France are the duo of Rob Fawkes and Teenage Tom Petties’ Tom Brown. Despite sharing a house in London in their mid-twenties, the pair never picked up a guitar, “except for one drunken, failed attempt at writing a Spoon song”, until they moved out, had families and, “began assembling songs as a way of meeting up”. They appeared on these pages back in 2021, around the release of their second album, RF, which they followed three years later with the well-received Exacamondo! Now with a fourth album, SLOTHS, on the way in May, this week they shared their sprightly new single, Lonely Heart Pyramid Scheme.

Recalling the writing of the song, Tom admits it took a few false starts, “it was only once I fully committed to this idea of ‘timeshare scam for sad people’ that it all clicked into place“. Taken alongside the Rural France back catalogue, Lonely Heart Pyramid Scheme feels both winningly familiar and quietly progressive. The slacker-jangle of the interwoven guitars and slapped drum rhythm are classic Rural France, but there’s a polish to the way it’s all mixed, courtesy of Carpet’s Rob Slater, and in the closing, a subtle mood shift, which suggests the band are quietly maturing, whether they want to or not, into something more than their lo-fi roots. The song fit neatly into one of my favourite musical dichotomies, sad songs that sound oddly triumphant, not least because of John Hare’s majestic brass, which the band recalls made it an obvious single, “we just loved how this loser anthem felt so triumphant”. The music industry might have led us to believe that bands should be burnt out ruins by their early thirties, but with SLOTHS, Rural France seem to be celebrating the triumph or starting later, slowly growing and enjoying the experience of time passing you by.

SLOTHS is out May 8th via Safe Suburban Home Records / Meritorio Records. For more information on Rural France visit https://ruralfrance.bandcamp.com/.

1. Mirror Mirror On The Wall Angelo De Augustine’s Songs Are The Fairest Of All

Although already an artist with a cult following (I’m particularly fond of his bathtub-recorded debut for Asthmatic Kitty, Swim Inside The Moon) it was probably A Beginner’s Mind, his 2021 collaborative album with Sufjan Stevens, that really brought Angelo De Augustine to a wider audience. The follow-up to that record, 2023’s Toil and Trouble, certainly lived up to its name as Angelo recalls, “I was in a really bad state, having just been released from the hospital and only about halfway through the recording of the album. I had accepted that I was going to die and that I should do all I could to finish the record”. That experience led to a sense of everything breaking down, and Angelo approached his new record Angel In Plainclothes, “trying to pick up the pieces of who I was and figure out who I am now”.

With Angel In Plainclothes set to arrive at the end of next month, this week Angelo shared the first track from the album, Mirror Mirror. The track came from something of a change of approach for Angelo as he explains, “the song came from experimenting with layering sound in a very free way and watching as the structure of a song revealed itself“. The root of the song is the droning sound of a bowed psaltery, an ancient zither-like chordophone, which was run through a, “tape machine’s varispeed function- seeing what would happen if I slowed down what I’d recorded”. Atop the anxious drone, initially we get a lone nylon-stringed guitar before Angelo’s velveteen vocal enters with the typically thoughtful, “all of my life I have been afraid of losing touch and fading away”. While the questioning lyrics suit the initially downbeat Beta Band-like musical backing, the song really comes alive in the chorus. Angelo’s vocal seems to shoot upward, throwing the curtains wide as he’s joined by a backing of luxurious strings that bring to mind George Harrison’s solo work, “tell me your mother in heaven won’t cry in vain, the way you treat your life like it’s just a game, tumbling down like an endless waterfall”. It’s a song that seems to exist in different headspaces, sometime Angelo seems to be going into himself, imagining life if he just faded out, “mirror, oh mirror on my wall, I don’t see my reflection at all”, while at other times cursing a life led with reckless abandon, “with certainty, you believe you have nothing to fear at all”. Angelo has spoken of Angel In Plainclothes being the result of discovering, “I may have been given a second chance at life, and I’d like to live it“, and perhaps Mirror Mirror speak to the difficulty in doing that, the difference between wanting to grab life by the horns and ride your wildest ride, and the reality of actually committing to doing it.

Angel In Plainclothes is out April 24th via Asthmatic Kitty. For more information on Angelo De Augustine visit https://angelodeaugustine.com/

Header photo is Angelo De Augustine by Wendy Fraser