Our moderators listened to every track we were sent this week and have picked their favourites for your listening pleasure this weekend:

Listening Post: Batch 528

Untitled - 05-12-22

how many people

At the start of 2023, behind closed doors it wasn’t certain if Bare Jams would be able to continue. However, instead of throwing in the towel, it was through a cathartic writing process that the Bare Jams ship was steered into fresh and exciting waters, giving way to their second album “No Rain. No Flowers.” All written in a relatively short burst at the start of 2023, the album has an overall theme of keeping loved ones close, looking after them, and, more broadly, perseverance.

With this album Bare Jams show they are not afraid to take on the serious challenges we all face. However, they are eternal optimists and worldly-wise enough to know we can absolutely turn things around and find our way through the mire. Looking at the world around us, this positive reinforcement is perhaps what we all need to hear. Don’t go numb!

Orange Sunshine

Wear It So Well

Original by Louis Armstrong,  1967.  I got help with the piano backing track 😊

The sun is shining in Bergen today, and i felt for singing this ☀️😊

What a Wonderful World   (Cover)

"Sheet Ghost" is more than just a song—it's a haunting reflection on the invisible struggles we face in life. Like the spectral figure draped in a sheet, it delves into themes of abuse, homelessness, and the unraveling of relationships, capturing the feeling of being alone in a crowd or at a party surrounded by familiar faces yet feeling utterly disconnected. Through poignant lyrics and ethereal melodies, "Sheet Ghost" invites listeners to confront the specters of their own hidden turmoil and find solace in the shared experience of navigating life's unseen challenges.

(single)

Sheet Ghost

'among other influences'

Harmful & Mac - lyrics and music
Scotty - vocals

Are you paying attention? I guess you're not.
There’s too much information. Yeah, I hear that a lot...
And like a lot of fools you feel that you cannot improve without YouTube 
to help you through the bumps and bruises,
help you chew the lumps life chooses.
I don’t know if I wanna hold your hand.
If you follow me I’ll help you see that only I know how to breathe.
Come to stay and never leave.
See that violence leads to peace.
Instructions hid behind the crease.
Disruption to the sanity.

among other influences (with Harmful if Followed and Mac, 'Isaac and the Apple')

Every day it feels like the world’s getting a little more crazy
Every day the future feels a little bit more hazy

Well there’s one thing I like to do 
When I’m feeling blue
That makes me feel okay 
When I’m having a bad day

I pick up my dumbbells and I watch a fitness video on my TV
And I exercise all those negative thoughts right out of me
I lift those weights up and down and I huff and I puff 
And I keep on going at it until I think I’ve had enough

Every time I go to the grocery store the food is more expensive
I go home, I look at my bank account, I feel so apprehensive
I drive to work, every day and the commute is not that great
I turn on the news, it’s so bad, the world is in a sorry state

After a hard day of working 9 to five
Like Hans and Franz on Saturday Night Live
You can pick up your dumbbells
And pump yourself up. You can do it.
Or you can lie on the sofa and watch TV
If you want to bed rot it’s so easy
And the only burn you’ll feel is from the hot sauce on your chicken wings
It’s not the same.

I pick up my dumbbells and I lift them
And I embrace all the pain
And I push all the negative thoughts right out of my brain
I lift those weights up and down and I huff and I puff 
And I keep on going at it until I think I’ve had enough

Some people turn to donuts when they’re feeling overstressed
We all need to do that we think is the best
As for me I’d rather grab my dumbbells and work up a good sweat
As I try to keep up with the fitness coaches on my TV set
As for me I’d rather grab my dumbbells and work up a good sweat
As I try to keep up with the fitness coaches on my TV set

I Pick Up My Dumbbells

British Birds are back with 'My Bar', an absolute bouncing alt-pop corker.
British Birds bring their DIY ethic once again to create wistful acoustic psych combined with infectious, pure pop beats. Catchy, nostalgic, sing-along backing harmonies brilliantly complement Bobby's signature lullaby melody which wonderfully juxtapose the bridge's gnarly call to arms against My Bar's avian villain; the Cuckoo. 
This track's fun, vivacious, live-sounding energy is something you can't turn away from.


My Bar

Before and After Language....This song is a Markov Blanket between the two.....

Before and After Language

flakebelly // with knowing

https://flakebelly.bandcamp.com/album/lo-fidelity

https://linktr.ee/flakebelly
https://songwhip.com/flakebelly

(P) 2024 flakebelly - all rights reserved
(C) 2024 flakebelly - all rights reserved

Lo Fidelity

With Knowing

Death Is Cheap

The Boy In The Bagging Area

Les Echanges (Frank's Mix)

Bushman

2024-08-16

Atmospheric Disturbance

[Ourselves] - (Prod. by allweleftunsaid)

Fresh On The Net is a music blog hosted by Tom Robinson and Team Freshnet, offering independent artists an open door and a level playing field for their music. Our inbox is open at http://freshonthenet.co.uk every Monday to Thursday morning - if you share a track with us there it will be heard by every member of our moderation team.

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Indie, Acoustic & Psychedelic music from The Western Isles of Scotland.

Hidden away in the windswept landscapes of the Outer Hebrides, flakebelly shapes songs that wander between psychedelic indie rock, folk-jazz, and the quiet strangeness of the everyday. Acoustic warmth, blues-stained guitars, jazz-streaked piano, and dreamlike textures fold into each other, creating music that drifts between clarity and haze.

His track In Parks Of Tall Trees found its way to Tom Robinson’s BBC 6 Music Introducing Mixtape, a small ripple in what has become a steady tide of restless ideas. From first picking up a guitar in the late 90s and stumbling through those formative songs in the early 2000s - many of which later resurfaced on Apprentice Green - flakebelly’s path has been one of constant diversion and reinvention. The early singles collections - The Orkney Tapes (2022) and The Christmas Morning Outcome (2023) - were restless, experimental documents of sound-searching, sketchbooks where ideas were tested, broken apart, and pieced together again in the pursuit of a voice. Those experiments fed directly into the indie-folk EP Behaviours (2022), the rough-edged Lo Fidelity (2024), and the kaleidoscopic album Apprentice Green (2024), described by SNACK Magazine as “like being Alice in Wonderland, transported through a maze of moments in flakebelly’s imagination.”

Now comes The Boy In The Diving Bell - out now - a 17-track reckoning with past ghosts, unfinished business, and the fragments of memory that refuse to settle. It is a psych alt-folk soup of acoustic laments, fractured tape loops, and warped dreamscapes. Much of the sound was dragged through the teeth of a battered 1960s reel-to-reel, used not as a recorder but as an instrument - reels halted, jolted, rewound, coaxed into blurples, screeches, and ghostly echoes. Mistakes are left in, first takes are preferred, imperfections celebrated. The result is an antidote to the sterilised sheen of digital perfection and the creeping spread of AI-reproduced music: deliberately irregular, defiantly human.

The Boy In The Diving Bell is only the beginning - the first of three interconnected albums, the demos for which are already written. Yet even as that arc unfolds, flakebelly has begun detouring into a very different landscape: a new project built from vinyl samples, drum loops, and dirty guitars driven through vintage outboard gear, cassette recorders, and battered mixers. It is dark, abrasive, and deliberately uncomfortable - sound pushed to the point of collapse, distorted tape glued together with transformer saturation, live mixes through old delay units, dials twisted until frequencies scream. If The Diving Bell trilogy is haunted by memory, this parallel work dives into raw sound destruction and the strange beauty of degradation.

True to his solitary instincts, flakebelly writes, records, and produces everything from his home studio. The result is music that feels lived-in and handmade - always shifting, never fixed, and forever searching for new shapes in the sound.

All socials: @flakebelly //

"Extensive and wildly eclectic sonic adventures" - Tom Robinson, BBC 6 Music

"flakebelly is ultimately the sort of the artist we need more of – a genuine weirdo-auteur carving his own path purely for the love of the game." - Lewis Wade, Is This Music?

"Refreshingly individual and very likeable" - Neil March, Trust The Doc Media

With Knowing

flakebelly

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