Every Wednesday, the ugly hug shares a playlist personally curated by an artist/band that we have been enjoying. This week we have a collection of songs put together by Francie Medosch of the Philly-based project Florry.
This Friday, Florry is set to release their sophomore album Sounds Like… out via Dear Life Records, establishing the group in its fullest, and quite naturally, most rockin’ form yet. The music of Florry is pronounced in simplicity. Not of musical structure or emotional depth, but rather the way in which these songs stick to you and your surroundings with such ease; the simplicity of what can be the true pleasures in life. With rowdy guitar work and bona fide melodies, Florry plays like a shoot-the-shit with your closest friends, a pile of beer cans from the night before, a scenic route with good company, or a full tank of gas and no destination ahead.
“I mean, I have too much stuff,” Dan Wriggins says. “Shit, I’ve got a van full of too much stuff here,” shifting the phone to offer a glimpse to what was behind his driver’s seat; chair legs astray, boxes stacked with potential means, comforters keeping it all secure from the rough bumps of U.S. highway driving. En route from Iowa City back to Philly, Wriggins was parked, discussing a line he had stolen from folk artist Kath Bloom, recalling a time going through her garage that was also packed with too much stuff; “everything we have is given to us”, she said to him, the phrase now living on the song “Free Association”. “That line is something I wrote down while hanging out with her years ago. The song has nothing to do with her. It’s about other stuff, if it’s about anything really.” He continues, “it should go without saying that songs are usually lies. They are not a direct representation of things that happened.” It’s not necessarily a farce, breaking a “write-what-you-know” structure that every writer has been told at least once, but rather becomes an acknowledgment of the craft and how to embrace a story worth telling.
Dan Wriggins fronts the Philly-based group Friendship, who are sharing their highly anticipated new album Caveman Wakes Up this Friday. Following 2022’s beloved Love The Stranger, an album of epic road trip caliber. Marking the second release on their label home at Merge Records, Friendship continues to push the bounds of storytelling as Caveman makes a break for their most expansive release yet. Going further into the looseness of alt-country and Chesnutt-esque melodic fixations, there is a lost familiarity that a Friendship tune brings out from its hiding – the crunching of an unmarked gravel path, the intensity of humming a tune you can’t quite recognize. Caveman Wakes Up is litteredwith these feelings that begin to fill in the little gaps that we didn’t know were missing, and quite frankly, didn’t know were ever there in the first place.
“I think of it in the world of a Gary Larson The Far Side comic,” Wriggins says about the album’s title; primitive, comprehensive, funny –- a moment from the opening line off the standout track “Hollow Skulls”. A lot of the humor that resides in Larson’s use of Neanderthals is in the irony of trial and error, a glimpse at the earliest stages of habits that we consider to be of modern normalcy. Whether it be a spear falling short of a wooly mammoth with onlookers yelling “airrrr spearrrr”, or putting on a suit and tie to count rocks and sticks with corporate intensity, these quips become universal to cursing out junk radiators or watching dark clouds cover your wedding day, as Wriggins asks, “did people before us have the same grievances and annoyances that we do?” The line widens the lens from minor frustrations to asking if we’ve ever really learned how to balance very human concepts like dreams and expectations. “It’s sort of a joke about universality,” he says.
That universality is embedded in telling a good story, one that is easy to pick up, toss around for a bit, and put in your pocket for later on. These characters, some love-sick, some lost, other’s balancing grief with rusty reflections, feel like someone we know, but more importantly, someone we can see ourselves in. Wriggins’ writing gets coined often for playing with the ordinary, writing love letters of sorts to the mundane and the underappreciated, but it’s not something he particularly looks out for. “I’ve never really understood that,” he admits, questioning the description. “What do other people write about then?”
Whether singing of devotion or defeat, humorous quips mixed with an unpredictability that resonates just as casual as it is damning to the restless feelings in these stories, Wriggins doesn’t romanticize the specificity in the language he uses. But what Caveman does is build upon the spaces to confront whatever it is these stories set out to do. Where a song like “Free Association” plays towards love, yet we don’t quite know where it will lead. “I thought I was wise, thought I knew about love”, he sings, striking this contradiction in the very first line. But as a Friendship song goes, we put trust in the companionship that these feelings become, following each path that appears on its own, learning to question what we thought we knew, and knowing that the outcome will be worth it in the end. “In a real basic sense,” Wriggins says, “I think of it as you gotta follow the song wherever it goes.”
“If you started writing something that happened and that was about something that you felt really strongly about, like, if I came up with these lines because they had to do with this heartbreak. But then I get further in and write some more and end up writing a chorus that really has nothing to do with heartbreak and has something to do with some other emotion that I feel like I can write about better, well, then you gotta follow that. You gotta delete the first part that perhaps was what you started off intending to write about,” Wriggins says. “In a way it feels like a very technical way of writing. I know some folks who don’t like to do it this way, but if something actually happened that does come through in the song, it might just be a coincidence, you know? I certainly would always prioritize a really good line over something that truly actually reflects something that happened to me.”
“Anything you’re writing ever, you’re always looking for balance,” Wriggins recognizes in practice. “Sometimes you need to be heavy handed, but a lot of the time, if you’re saying something that’s too intense, you often want to, not make it lighter, but make it more reflective of the truth, which is going to be pretty complicated. So you might add some other type of detail. I think a problem that I still have is trying to put too much into a song,” he admits, the complications not lost on him. “I mean, this might be kind of cowardly,” he continues, “but I’ve really come to believe that the medium of popular song is geared towards communicating one emotion really strongly. That’s what a pop or a country song can do really, really well, better than any other art form. And of course, sometimes you want to be ambitious and you want to push what it’s built for, but at other times I feel like, man, I want to get back to basics.”
Beyond Wriggins’ writing, Friendship’s sonic explorations are brought to life by the crew he has surrounded himself with for almost a decade now, consisting of Michael Cormier-O’Leary (Hour, Dear Life Records), Peter Gill (2nd Grade) and Jon Samuels (MJ Lenderman and The Wind, Dear Life Records). Songs like “Betty Ford” and “Wildwood in January” play with patient pacing, finding solace in the contradictions of tempered folk music and former first ladies. “Tree of Heaven” rips the album wide open with Gill’s harsh, static tones and Cormier-O’Leary’s conversational drumming while the grueling demeanor of “Resident Evil” creates a stirring awareness to the intuitive focus that the band accomplishes on this record. Especially the experimentation with synthesizers and saxophone at the climax of “Free Association” stands out as a fresh new taste to the already rich arrangements that reside on the album. “Often if you try something that’s really out there in the moment, you’re going to think, well, of course, we’re not keeping that. That’s just me experimenting.” Wriggins says, recalling Gill’s idea to add in these new voicings on the last day of recording. “And once in a while you do keep it,” he laughs.
But over the years, as Friendship continue to push the bounds of their sound, it’s noticeable that there is a type of sonic progression that solidifies each album in its own territory. “You got to be experimenting with new things, both for yourself and for listeners,” Wriggins says. “But you also have to still be including stuff you’re good at because you’re the expert. Over the years I’ve been developing this theory that you have a spectrum,” recalling a time he was talking to Kurt Wagner, the stamina behind the prolific project Lambchop. “On one hand, you can keep doing the same thing over and over again that you’re really good at, and on the other hand, you could do a totally new project every single time you make something. If the next Friendship album was that we all decided to make sculptures, it would be pretty crappy, because we’re not sculptors, you know? But the other side of just doing the same thing over and over again kind of sucks, too.”
“The process of knowing what is really good and what to keep and what to cut for the production and the arrangement is a kind of democratic thing,” Wriggins says, discussing the functionality of the group. Each member has spent the better half of a decade practicing their craft in their individual routes, but when it comes to Friendship, it’s a constant back and forth on ideas. “I kind of trust their musical impulses better than mine,” Wriggins laughs. “But when it comes to lyrics, I do really know what I think is good. I’m usually able to hear it myself and say, yep, that’s the type of thing I would listen to. Of course, you always are second guessing yourself and doubting things. But often the doubt is like, well, this is pretty good. Could I make it better?” He continues, “I think the other guys especially really liked recording this one more than other ones because we’re just better at messing around. And hopefully we just keep on getting better.”
Embracing the characteristics that defined their past albums — the tenderness of Dreamin’, the solitude of Shock Out of Season and the camaraderie of Love the Stranger, Caveman Wakes Up is a powerhouse of enduring complexions. As each track fills the open spaces with both intuition and intensity, building up a collection of all the stuff they found and all that was once given, this band once again breaks the divide between what it means to experience and live art; a capture of the subtly, grace and often after-thought beauty that has become synonymous with the stories told by Friendship.
Along with this feature, the members of Friendship are taking over this week’s guest list at the ugly hug. Sharing The Cave Window, “three songs from each guy, all with some type of connection to the record itself, very loose inspiration.”
Caveman Wakes Up is set to be released this Friday, May 16th via Merge Records. You can pre-order the album now, as well as on CD and vinyl.
Every Wednesday, the ugly hug shares a playlist personally curated by an artist/band that we have been enjoying. This week we have a collection of songs put together by Maine-based artist Jesse Guerin of the project jes.
With sincere delivery and eager expression, the music put out under jes is intuitive to the environment in which it was derived from. Playing to the limitless opportunities given by open spaces, Guerin leads with faith towards whatever may lie ahead, allowing guitars to interact, building layers of individual voicings until that open space holds a brand-new meaning.
About the playlist, Jesse shared;
“songs that feel like a sunset, maybe a sunrise too. songs that feel like my hands are in the soil. a playlist for gardening. a playlist for the dusky dewy evenings in the field.”
Every Wednesday, the ugly hug shares a playlist personally curated by an artist/band that we have been enjoying. This week we have a collection of songs put together by Durham-based artist Aaron Dowdy of the group Fust.
Today we would like to welcome you all to the “Big Ugly Hug”, a celebration of Fust’s third album Big Ugly, shared last month via Dear Life Records. With a name built on contradictions, one that offers limitless imagery, Dowdy’s use of storytelling is unshaken by truth, letting intentionality mix with what has been right in front of us all along, but tapping into the heart that often gets left behind. It’s an album of hardships and traditions. An album of friends and the ghosts that we have not been acquainted with yet. It’s an album of flaws and retribution, not to overlook the moments of goodwill and tales of redemption. It’s a piece of historical contribution, bringing old stories out to get a peak at life once more.
About the playlist Dowdy shares;
I am excited for this big ugly hug. not exactly preliminary notes but things i’m thinking about now that big ugly is done and i am dreaming of the next record. kind of two sets here: the first ten are sort of electric and the second sort of acoustic. the first set is harsh and I’m trying to figure out their harshness. the second set i can’t even begin to play, they totally elude me, and they are songs I sing along to in languages i don’t speak. we’ll see what happens.
Listen to Aaron Dowdy’s playlist here;
You can listen to Big Ugly out everywhere now.
Written by Shea Roney | Featured Photo by Merce Lemon
There are elements within our environment that operate through layers of chaos. But it needs to be clear that chaos isn’t innately ugly, and as a matter of fact, Favorite Haunts continues to prove with each release that chaos can be an inherent source of comfort to an individual that finds themselves in the middle of it all. The way we look at a colony of ants from our height appears chaotic, yet functions as a collaborative and productive society that takes care of all. Chaos can be the inner workings of a kitchen, preparing the most lip-smacking food you’ve ever had, made at the hands of a sweaty, rag-tag team of chefs and line cooks working between smoke breaks. Chaos is the collection of noises, the rustling of brush, a dealer’s choice of bird species and the wings of a bee making acquaintance with your ear that orchestrates your favorite natural sceneries. But it’s in this chaos, when you take the time, where you can define the many happy accidents that create something that has never been experienced quite like this before.
Favorite Haunts is the recording project of LA-based artist Alex Muñoz, who has been releasing art under the name since his initial recordings back in 2020. With an extensive collection of albums, including some from the Favorite Haunts Sewing Circle (a live group configuration of LA creatives), Muñoz makes an effort to build a unique life within each collection of sounds that he discovers, honoring each happy accident as if they happen for a reason. Favorite Haunts recently released their latest album titled Floral Pedal, finding Muñoz sharing his most reflective and collaborative piece of work to date. After finding a floral designed loop pedal, “covered in a thin layer of dust and weighing as much as a brick”, the way in which this pedal opened up new layers of understanding – what are the stories from which these sounds may have been coming from – became strikingly influential to Muñoz throughout the process.
Floral Pedal is a beautiful collection of recordings, building little intrinsic settings from found samples and intuitively formed instrumentation. It’s also a strikingly intense album, not in any kind of sonic display, but rather from the strength of presence, following an individual’s ever shifting connection to the environment that surrounds them. It’s a meeting of ghosts, the old and new relationships in our lives, of indescribable beauty and momentary memorial lapses. Even the thin layer of dust becomes a lens of discovery into a different place – who we are and who we may be if the bigger picture was as easy to shift as the dust that we hold – that even our existence itself is a happy accident worth celebrating.
We recently got to talk to Alex Muñoz about Floral Pedal, discussing how the record came to be, finding inspiration in whatever is around you and embracing the magic that is right in front of us.
Tell me about this floral loop pedal. Where did you find it, what were your first experiences with it and how did it come to shape this record?
For a while I had been wanting to get a loop pedal to try improvising live after seeing Dustin Wong play a couple shows around LA, and was inspired by his way of looping guitar live. I had been wanting to change up my live set from strictly samplers to incorporate more guitars since some of the music I’ve been making/releasing lately is getting more guitar based than my previous ambient/sample based stuff. This past December, a buddy of mine from Colorado was selling some pedals on his instagram stories and I saw he was selling the Line 6 DL4 for a good price, so I decided to buy it! The DL4 was the loop pedal I had my eye on the most, since I’d seen some of my musical heroes using it here and there; Lightning Bolt, Nick Reinhart, Battles, etc.
It’s such a unique piece of gear with so many interesting features, like it’s supposed to mainly be a delay pedal, but people use it as strictly a looper mostly. It has a function that speeds up the loop or slows it down, depending on the mode you record it on, and combining loops at different speeds can create an amazing array of shimmery, melty, twinkle-y sounds! It also has a reverse function (with 2 different speeds as well), and has a button to play the loops manually, kinda like a sampler! These are things I discovered while messing around with it and watching YouTube videos to learn more, haha.
The very first thing I recorded with the pedal was the track “thru the woods”. It started as just another doodle/test, and the loop sounded cool to me, so I recorded it and kinda kept adding layers to it as the track progressed. There are about 3 or 4 different guitar riffs in that one track, that are just layered on top of each other until it sounded full and nice to me. I just used the voice memo app on my phone propped up to my amp to record it (along with all the main loops on the album). Those cool little functions really helped shape the sound of the album, they’re all over the record.
I was very intrigued by the singular word you used in parentheses when describing this pedal – the word magic. What parts of these recordings would you say came from magic? How do you interpret that word in your relationship to creativity?
I believe music is magic, like, it comes from the weirdest, most colorful parts of the human brain and brings people so much comfort and connection. It’s a very spiritual/holy thing to me. I’m not a trained musician by any means, everything i’ve learned is by ear or picking up from friends and other musicians along the way, I know very little music theory and cannot read music. So when I’m working on a track or improvising, and I play something by accident that ends up sounding cool, it almost always piques my interest, so I run with it and use it. To me that is magic, that accidental note or sound wanted to exist and found a way to use me as a vessel to escape into the world. I’m here for it and love that way of interacting with music and art as a whole. I’m super into “happy accidents”. Happy accidents are what this album is pretty much made of! I also believe that layer of “dust (magic)” were little particles from another place I had never been to (Colorado), that might have found their way into the DNA of the music, physically and spiritually. It was covered in adventure and the essence of Colorado!
That’s so interesting! What parts of these songs felt like your own adventure? Living vicariously through this dust, did this project influence your personal ideas of presence and environment?
It’s funny you say my own adventure, because while recording the album, I started to slowly imagine this surreal and psychedelic adventure using the song titles, possible track order, and sounds of each track. The “floral pedal” is kinda this loose concept in the story, but I was thinking of it as a colorful little glowing magic box that emits nice music, that our main character finds on the ground near the entrance to the woods while riding their bike. They decided to put in their backpack, thus being the catalyst for the whole adventure. So the story kinda sprawls out from there and forms a loose narrative. I’m inspired by a lot of folklore and also adventure stories, like The Odyssey by Homer, and how the classic story structure and tropes find their way into modern storytelling. Like for example, with the movies “O Brother, Where Art Thou” & “The Warriors”, etc. I wanted to create my own fairytale adventure type story to dive into, and let my imagination run wild while recording. I actually haven’t really told any of this made up lore to anyone other than to a couple close friends, and now y’all here! I hope to maybe make a little zine or something later, to go deep and explain what every track means! That’ll be fun I think. It would all be too much to explain here, so all I will say is, it’ll be a surreal fantasy adventure and the song titles are basically the theme of each “scene” from the story. Sorry if that was kind of a detour from your question a little bit, haha
Were there any ways in which you approached this project differently than in the past? Did you want to focus on any new techniques or challenge yourself where you were already comfortable?
Yeah absolutely, I approached this project in almost an entirely different way than other projects, except maybe my previous album “Music from Big Green” which was recorded on my phone and mixed/layered via SP404. I started recording these loops on my voice memo app in January, just as a way to document the ideas, and I was only really planning on maybe just making a little EP out of it and that’s it. Then I just kept recording more and more of them, and having fun with adding samples and other stuff. It just kind of blossomed into this garden of accidents and colorful little pocket symphonies. After having a large collection of recordings on my phone, I started feeling like maybe I can add more to these recordings. I reached out to my friend Johnny (The Fruit Trees) who I have collaborated with in the past and is also a member of my group Favorite Haunt’s Sewing Circle, because he had offered after hearing some of the recordings, to maybe overdub some saxophone or clarinet. I liked that idea and recorded a new track for him to play over which became the track “Mystery Spot/Enchanted”. It kinda grew from there and we ended up working on adding more elements to the entire album together. I like working with him because I think we are both sometimes reading each other’s minds, and know exactly what to do next. We’ve shared creative epiphanies more than words at times when working together, which is cool and special to me. I recruited more awesome friends (Fletcher Barton, RJ Wilks, Stress Actual) to overdub various instruments to more tracks, and it really started to feel like it was becoming this living breathing organism of an album.
Around the time of recording I was also listening to Pet Sounds a lot, so you can probably tell where my head was at during this time. Like, “let’s add everything we got to this thing”, and getting excited about it when we listen back to it after recording. I felt like a kid making a fort with my friends or like when people band together to make a huge Rube Goldberg machine in their backyard. This process was still totally new to me at the time, and it presented me with more creative ideas than challenges I’d say. The way I made my music previously was honestly more challenging and sort of limiting at times. I would usually use a lot more samples and some phone recordings still, then put them all into my SP404 sampler and kind of use it as a workstation, slowly layering things on top of each other. That process takes forever but I think it helped me learn how to make something with limited gear (I usually don’t use any DAWS).
What sort of paths did limiting yourself lead you down? Was it a challenge for you to limit what you used?
Having those limits early on has definitely pushed me to want to branch out and try making music differently. I’d been making my music using that sampler method since about 2019 or so. Since then I’ve interacted with so many different musicians that have inspired me with the ways they write and record their music. It all just looks so fun, and my old method was starting to bore me a bit, because the music I have been wanting to make has been evolving. This project started as just me making lofi beats in my room in 2019, using pretty much only samples, and not really showing them to anybody. Now it’s really expanded, and I’m collaborating with more people, and things have felt a lot more free with how I can express myself and get creative through this project. I think I was feeling pretty stuck around this time last year, with what I wanted to make, how it sounded, and how I wanted to make it. I’m really glad I kept making things regardless of all those feelings, and I’m really grateful for where I’m at creatively and for the folks who have found my music thus far and told me they resonate with it. I think the biggest challenge for me overall was actually letting go and letting the music have a life of its own in the world and other people’s worlds, since this project started as such a private thing for me to occupy my time during the pandemic. You are actually also the first person to ever write about my music, which means a lot to me, and realizing where I am in my music life now really reminds me that I’ve grown a lot since my socially anxious pandemic hermit days.
You offered a long list of names and ideas that you gave gratitude towards for making this record happen. In what ways do you interpret inspiration for these recordings?
Inspiration is all colors to me. Like, the type of reverb used in my favorite song that week is one color, the meal I ate for breakfast that morning is another color, a movie I saw a couple days prior is another color. It all sort of comes together for me while making something, either consciously or subconsciously. Nothing feels like it goes to waste. This album really felt like I tuned in to what inspires me, recent happenings and from my childhood in particular. Every track really felt like an appreciation of the things that have made me who I am today. The way a sour note on a guitar chord somehow ended up making the loop remind me of the soundtrack to the movie Coraline, or how another loop started giving me the same feelings and imagery as walking through the South Pasadena tunnels (that were covered in vines and surrounded by trees when exposed in certain areas) with my pals as teenagers many years ago, or when my friends and I would wake up early after hanging out late that night, and take an early morning drive into the Angeles National Forest and listen to Bryter Layter by Nick Drake. Just magical moments and media from my life. Stuff like that was coming up a lot and really inspiring during the making of this album. I’m really happy that I got to translate those moments of my life into this music! Also, as for the long list of inspiration and special thanks, I was inspired by the inside CD booklet of Person Pitch by Panda Bear, he includes a very long list of his favorite artists and inspiration for the album. When I saw that, I thought that was awesome. I can’t stand gatekeeping.
You’ve previously mentioned that this is the first release that you actually hope people listen to and hold in their hearts. What kind of life do you hope for this album to have once it’s out of your hands and in the world? Is it easy to let projects go?
Yeah, I didn’t really mean that as in, like, that I didn’t care at all before or anything. It’s just with this album, I made it with the hope of bringing comfort to people, because the process and sounds were also bringing me so much comfort. I just really wanted to share this whole experience. I wanted to make something that I wanted to listen to, and for others to want to listen to as well. Which is actually a first for me, because I think before I was just making stuff because I had ideas that were more like “wouldn’t it be funny or cool if ___” and just making it just to make it. Which was still fun and fulfilling, but lately I’ve just wanted to focus on making things with more intention, to bring people comfort and connection.
This album was very easy to let go into the world. I can’t wait for it to be out. This album feels like a school project I remember making in the 1st grade, where I had to make a little diorama of a rainforest. I was so proud of it and excited to bring it to class the next day! This feels a lot like that rainforest diorama, in more ways than one.
Every Wednesday, the ugly hug shares a playlist personally curated by an artist/band that we have been enjoying. This week, we are pairing our guest list with our feature of LA- based artist Alex Muñoz of favorite haunts.
About the playlist, Alex shares;
I put this playlist together, like I have a ritual of doing with every project I work on, as a way to stay inspired and focused when im not at home working on the project. This playlist consists of music that I’d been really enjoying at the time of making the album. Some of the music has been in my constant listening rotation for almost a decade. There are a couple tracks in particular that I wanted to mention:
1. Ethio Invention #1 by Andrew Bird
This piece came into my life after a long night of hanging out, driving around los angeles with my friends in maybe 2018(?). We were on our way to our friend’s place to crash for the night, and my friend Nate played this song on the aux, and I was absolutely floored. The combination of being deliriously tired after a long fun day and driving through the hills of Los Feliz in LA, overlooking the city below, clad in flickering lights…was the perfect moment. That moment still continues to inspire my art.
This track basically inspired the whole album. Starting with the pizzicato style plucking of the strings of his violin, a sound that i’m obsessed with, to being able to hear him clicking his loop pedal in the recording. The track eventually gets so dense with loops and effects layered on themselves that it turns into ambience. A perfect piece of music.
2. Miracle by Jurassic Shark
Jshark was a local band from my hometown that had a huge impact on me. They lived more or less down the street from me. They were my first diy show. They are the reason I started making music, recording, and playing shows, etc. They had something really special and unique that set them apart from the surfy so-cal bands at the time. Their songs were beautiful and everytime they played, they filled the room with reverb, energy, colors, and sparks. They also sometimes used to play with stacks of books on their amps, and patterned fabric on their amp faces which was funny and awesome to me. Truly a magical band!
Listen to Alex’s playlist here;
Floral Pedal is out everywhere now!
Written by Shea Roney | Featured Photos Courtesy of Favorite Haunts
Every Wednesday, the ugly hug shares a playlist personally curated by an artist/band that we have been enjoying. This week, we have a collection of songs put together by LA-based artist RL.
RL is the project of Rachel Levy, who began sharing music under the moniker with the release of Life’s a Bummer back in 2013. Now with a handful of beloved releases out, the songs that live on an RL project are built out of curiosity towards the relationships around us, where moments of absurdity and humor weigh just as heavy as love, heartbreak and promises, and melodies simply linger in your noggin for the rest of the day.
About the playlist, RL asks;
You ready to get some feelings out while you dance? K let’s go!
Listen to RL’s playlist here;
You can listen to all of RL’s releases out everywhere now.
Written by Shea Roney / Featured Photo by Snapchat Filter
Every Wednesday, the ugly hug shares a playlist personally curated by an artist/band that we have been enjoying. This week, we have a collection of songs put together by artist Caelan Burris of the Asheville-based project, Tombstone Poetry.
Since 2021, Tombstone Poetry has been forging a musical identity that paints a certain country warmth onto alternative rock and noise heavy walls. The six piece’s sound took to its most formidable shape yet last year with the release of How Could I Be So In Debt?, where they harnessed an addicting balance of twangy instrumentals and emotionally charged angst in a dense 33-minute listen. The album’s layers of screamed harmonies, shimmery distortions, religious motifs and garagey dissonance are ultimately sewn together by the band’s ability to exert sincerity, their introspections bleeding poignantly amidst every style and technique they experiment with.
Listen to Burris’ Playlist here;
You can listen to all Tombstone Poetry releases and purchase a copy of How Could I Be So In Debt? on cassette or vinyl on their bandcamp.
Written by Manon Bushong | Featured Photo by Shea Roney
Every Wednesday, the ugly hug shares a playlist personally curated by an artist/band that we have been enjoying. This week we have a collection of songs put together by Al Menne of the Seattle-based group Great Grandpa.
After a long break, each member taking route in different directions in their life, Great Grandpa has returned with a handful of singles teasing what will be Patience, Moonbeam, their first album in six years out this Friday. To celebrate, we asked singer-songwriter and lead vocalist of Great Grandpa, Al Menne, to curate this week’s guest list on the ugly hug.
Called ‘Out the Window’, Al describes the playlist as;
Songs that make me feel a timeless warmth. Something to look wistfully out the window to on a long drive, to a familiar place perhaps with a smirk or a gentle tear in the eye.
Patience, Moonbeam is set to be released this Friday March 28th via Run For Cover Records. You can listen to the previously released singles out everywhere now, as well as pre-order the album digitally or on vinyl and CD!
Every Wednesday, the ugly hug shares a playlist personally curated by an artist/band that we have been enjoying. This week we have a collection of songs put together by Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter Annie Blackman.
With both a gripping passion and a keen eye, Annie Blackman lattices the incongruent feelings of heartbreak, insecurities and maturing into the most vivid and beautiful lyrical stories and folk-tinged songs. Her latest EP Bug released back in 2023 is a brief, yet poignant display of the casualties that often go unnoticed in the grand scheme of it all. But the butterflies in our stomachs ought to know something is up when Annie’s lyrical intuition blends irresistibility with the relatable scenarios she recites, like a fist bump before bed by a lover, that stings just as much as solidifies our own confusing and giddy emotions.
Listen to Annie’s playlist here;
You can listen to Bug and the rest of Annie’s music everywhere now!
Written by Shea Roney | Featured Photo by AleiaghHynds
Every Wednesday, the ugly hug shares a playlist personally curated by an artist/band that we have been enjoying. This week we have a collection of songs put together by the electronically collaborative duo amigos imaginarios.
Arbol Ruiz (Paris via Columbia) and Caleb Chase (Worcester, MA) have been partners in crime since 2021, with two albums made electronically by sending files back and forth. Their most recent release, their TV-14 Recordings debut called Ice Cream, is a rather engaging and eccentric collection and the first composed in person since the duo’s initial launch. An amigos imaginarios listen is not one made for multi-tasking, as their delipidated ecosystem of trinkety hooks and experimental charisma offer a rewarding experience when you embark into their beautifully bizarreo world that they so graciously have invited us into.
About their playlist, Ruiz and Chase shared;
Our Playlist is Lunatics: Moon Pretty moon that goes around the whole world Tell my love that I still love her Tell her that I still have her photo smiling Streets full of people All alone Roads full of houses Never home Church full of singing Out of tune Everyone’s gone to the moon
Listen to amigos imaginarios playlist here;
Listen to an incomplete version of the LUNATICS playlist here.
You can listen to Ice Cream out everywhere now as well as purchase a cassette tape via TV-14 Recordings.
Written by Shea Roney | Featured Photo Courtesy of the amigos imaginarios
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