Pressing Concerns: Villagerrr, Gibson & Toutant, Sucker, Andrew Collberg

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I’m on vacation this week, but thankfully I’ve heard a bunch of great music over the past month and have plenty already written about it, so you can expect another full week here at Rosy Overdrive. The first Pressing Concerns of the week looks at three albums that came out last Friday (LPs from Villagerrr, Gibson & Toutant, and Andrew Collberg), plus an EP from Sucker than came out last month.

If you’re looking for more new music, you can visit the site directory to see what else we’ve written about lately. If you’d like to support Rosy Overdrive, you can share this (or another) post, or donate here.

Villagerrr – Tear Your Heart Out

Release date: March 22nd
Record label: Darling
Genre: Lo-fi indie rock, folk rock, bedroom rock
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: River Ain’t Safe

Mark Allen Scott is from Chillicothe, Ohio, and his music sounds like it. Starting in 2021, Scott began steadily putting up music on Bandcamp as Villagerrr, mostly recorded by himself deep in his remote area of the southern Midwest. The Bandcamp page for Tear Your Heart Out refers to it as the fourth Villagerrr album, although this seems to be a conservative figure, as there are several more LPs’ worth of material available under the name. Now based in Columbus, Scott has a proper band (bassist Cam Garshon, drummer Zayn Dweik, and guitarists Ben Malicoat and Colton Hamilton), label (Darling Records), and is even part of a wider scene (having played and collaborated with Vermont folk rockers Lily Seabird and Greg Freeman, as well as Pittsburgh’s Merce Lemon). Although he may now live in the 46th-largest metropolitan area in North America, Tear Your Heart Out still evokes the rolling farmland of his place of origin–roughly speaking, Scott trades in the sort of mid-2010s bedroom-y folk rock sound recalling landmark releases from everyone from Alex G and Hovvdy to Spencer Radcliffe and Elvis Depressedly. It’s not as easy as it sounds to make this kind of music sound fresh in 2024, but these eleven songs are sturdy and eminently relistenable. 

Like the best of this genre, Tear Your Heart Out has plenty going on underneath its unassuming surface construction and plain-spoken/sung vocals. Part of that is assuredly due to Scott’s willingness to collaborate–for instance, guest musician Boone Patrello’s pedal slide/slide guitar work on “Runnin’ Round” and “See” is integral to both of those songs. Villagerrr is still Scott’s project, though, and he’s credited with a lot of instrumentation, and the way he chooses different tacks to take Tear Your Heart Out’s sound (warm folk rock with bright lead guitar melodies in “Neverrr Everrr”, early Alex G-ish pianos and distortion in “See”, the instant-gratification acoustic guitar and vocal hook that kicks off closing track “River Ain’t Safe”) is the primary reason why the album feels as full and vibrant as it does. Although Tear Your Heart Out is more laid-back and pensive than the drama of Lily Seabird’s latest album, I do hear a bit of her fuzzed-out folk/country sound in “Low” and “Car Heart”, even as both of those songs fit perfectly well alongside the clearer folk rock of “Barn Burnerrr” (a song that isn’t quite as intense as its title suggests but whose guitar lines are more than enough to carry the song regardless) and the banjo-featuring “Come Right Back”. Villagerrr begin “River Ain’t Safe” with the most urgency they’d mustered up to that point, but Scott and Dweik (who’s credited with “arrangement” as well as drums on the song) subsequently let the track and the record float away, seemingly accepting the tough truth at the track’s heart. (Bandcamp link)

Gibson & Toutant – On the Green

Release date: March 22nd
Record label: Sleepy Cat
Genre: Indie pop, art rock, noise pop, post-punk, psychedelia, folk rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Quoth My Baby

Gibson & Toutant are an indie pop duo based out of Durham, North Carolina whose members are originally from Australia (Josephine McRobbie) and Texas (Joe O’Connell), and together they have a sound that merges the retro simplicity of Fakebook-era Yo La Tengo, the minimalist post-punk of Young Marble Giants, a rogue experimental streak, and the folk/Americana of their adopted home. The duo put out a couple of EPs on Flannelgraph Records in 2019 and 2020, but On the Green (released via Sleepy Cat) is their debut full-length album. Their neighbors in Appalachia and the South chip in throughout the record’s seven songs and 33 minutes–notable folk musicians like Jake Xerxes Fussell (guitar/vocals), Joseph Decosimo (fiddle), and Nathan Bowles (keyboard) contribute to the album, and fellow Durham transplant Andy Stack (Wye Oak) recorded it. Although On the Green isn’t exactly “folk” music, these various contributors (also including pedal steel player Nathan Golub and O’Connell’s brother, Matthew, on bongos) are essential to pulling this record off, as every song on the album sounds like it’s from a different group despite McRobbie and O’Connell doing everything they can to hold it together.

On the Green starts off simply enough between the minimalist, floating synthpop of “Carolina Shred” (whose sound collage undertones don’t corrupt McRobbie and O’Connell’s cheery vocals) and the bouncy, bass-led pop rock of “Quoth My Baby”. The first moment on On the Green where the weirdness is able to take the reins for an extended period of time is “Norm’s Oranges”, which starts off as a spoken-word piece and then slips into groovy, lightly-fuzzed psychedelic rock. Gibson & Toutant are quite adept at this kind of music, and one song later, when they’re playing bright, orchestral, almost twee indie pop in “The Click”, they’re excelling at that one, too (McRobbie gets so much more out of “I ride on my bike, I stop at the tollbooth,” than should be possible). Of course, it’s the second side of On the Green where things really start to get out of hand–the twin seven-minute songs “Little Rider” and “Vicky’s Chimes” don’t sound all that similar to each other but both pull from everything at Gibson & Toutant’s disposal. The former is impressively restrained, McRobbie walking out on a joyful but sparse instrumental and only really ever being rivaled by a little bit of distortion, while the Bill Callahan-ish latter track finds all sorts of bells and whistles to throw at its slow-moving folk rock center. The synths, pedal steel, drum machines, and fiddle all float around in the ether of closing track “The Fairway”, feeling only like Gibson & Toutant at that point. (Bandcamp link)

Sucker – Seein’ God

Release date: February 14th
Record label: Cherub Dream
Genre: Shoegaze, noise pop, fuzz rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Pretty

Sucker are a new fuzz-pop quartet hailing from Oakland, California, made up of guitarist/vocalist Lauren R. Melton (most notable for playing in Blue Zero along with Chris Natividad of Marbled Eye and Public Interest) along with guitarist Chichi Castillo, bassist/vocalist Allie M. Pollak, and drummer Semaj Peltier (a trio I’m not familiar with, although Castillo and Peltier seem to be active in the Bay Area filmmaking scene). Following a demo cassette EP last year, the four-song, eleven-minute Seein’ God EP (recorded at High Command Studio in Olympia, Washington) is the group’s first release for Cherub Dream Records. Far from the most accessible record to come out of the Bay Area in recent years, Sucker drench their pop music in layers of distortion and feedback, and the vocals (regardless of which member of the band is providing them) don’t go out of their way to be heard amongst the noise and subsequently are always on the brink of being swallowed up. Jagged hooks eventually come into focus with a closer look at Seein’ God, however–Sucker clearly have put a good deal of effort into shaping how this brief EP sounds, and reward people who approach it the same way.

It takes a while for it to really sink in, but opening track “Pretty” is probably the catchiest moment in Seein’ God, with the guitars offering up plenty of sweetness in addition to the tempest they eventually become. Melton is also a sneakily melodic vocalist–it’s apparent in moments in the first track, but the other song they sing, the swirling closing ballad “Going Home”, is a slightly clearer example. Seein’ God’s middle two tracks have their charms as well–Pollak sings “Drop”, which has a fuzzed-out, lo-fi-shoegaze sound to it that’s actually working hard to sound as listless as it does. The Peltier-sung “Lackluster” is another moment where the West Coast indie pop influence peaks in through the storm clouds–the band float through a simple pop core even as they continue to crank out the noise, and Peltier’s vocals are fragile-sounding but strong enough to make the impression they need to. Perhaps destined to fly under the radar, it’s worth sussing out the contours of Seein’ God, and when Sucker have their breakout moment in a couple of years, you’ll be more than ready. (Bandcamp link)

Andrew Collberg – Popcorn Graveyard

Release date: March 22nd
Record label: Papercup
Genre: Baroque pop, chamber pop, folk rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Spiritual Cult Love Story

Andrew Collberg is a singer-songwriter originally from Tucson, Arizona but currently based in Cologne, Germany. In the past, he’s collaborated with acts from his home state like Golden Boots and Howe Gelb (in addition to England’s Modern Nature), but he’s maintained a steady stream of solo albums since the mid-2000s as well. Collberg has experienced an uptick in productivity this decade–since linking up with Papercup Records in 2020, he’s put out three full-lengths. Popcorn Graveyard, the sixth Andrew Collberg LP, follows 2022’s 1986, and it finds the southwesterner in Germany exploring a polished studio pop and orchestral folk rock sound. Aside from some extra help on “Goodbye Troubles”, the instrumentals on Popcorn Graveyard are handled entirely by Collberg and pedal steel/electric guitarist Connor Gallaher, although–in a credit to the both of them as well as producer Miccel Mohr–it sounds like the work of a much larger group. Popcorn Graveyard is as pretty as any “chamber pop” album, but its baroque pop has a Wilco-esque country-rock rootsiness to it as well.

I’m not just making the Wilco comparison because Popcorn Graveyard also has a song with “Germany” in the title, but opening track “Grey Grey Germany” has an “inland Beach Boys” feeling that reminds me a bit of Joe Kenkel of Styrofoam Winos and, yes, Jeff Tweedy’s band. The slick orchestrations of “Temporary Cruise” and “Sympathy” feels like Papercuts territory, although the synth grooves of “Where Do the Hardtimes Go?” and the airy pop of “Young Blood, Fresh Leather” keep the record’s surprises coming. On “Goodbye Troubles”, Collberg enlists upright bassist David Helm and drummer Jan Philipp, but the song’s timeless murky country-pop actually sounds a bit less busy than the rest of the album–in fact, it’s the song after it, the jaunty but offbeat country rock “Spiritual Cult Love Story”, that sounds the most like the work of a full band (and is also the moment on Popcorn Graveyard where Collberg really establishes himself as a desert weirdo in the vein of Giant Sand and Golden Boots). “Old Navigator” then sends the record off with chiming synths and Gallaher’s pedal steel playing against each other, the refined European and vast American sides of Popcorn Graveyard both getting one last say. (Bandcamp link)

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