Pressing Concerns: Grr Ant, The Long Lost Somethins, Floral Print, Dark Surfers

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We’re back with a Tuesday post! In this edition, we’ve got new albums from Grr Ant and Floral Print, plus new EPs from The Long Lost Somethins and Dark Surfers. Some real hidden gems here! If you missed yesterday’s post, featuring Maggie Gently, Apples with Moya, Modern Silent Cinema, and D. Sablu, check that out here.

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.

Grr Ant – Once Upon a Time in Battersea

Release date: April 26th
Record label: Crafting Room
Genre: Jangle pop, lo-fi pop, power pop, indie pop
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Vital Signs

Grant Gillingham is a British musician with a somewhat scattered resumé–he’s played in the bands Baltimore at an Angle, Men in Action, and Rest of the World, lived in Bournemouth for a while but has been based in London for four years now, and has recently debuted a solo project, Grr Ant. Released via Crafting Room Recordings (a Brighton label I’d previously heard of due to their series of various-artist Pavement tribute albums), Once Upon a Time in Battersea is an overstuffed, eager album of guitar pop anthems. Gillingham has made no secret of his love of 80s underground music–post-punk, C86 indie pop, college rock–and Once Upon a Time in Battersea reflects this, pulling together all of these influences ambitiously and successfully. Gillingham also mentions that he’d been obsessed with country music while recording this album (both vintage and modern, referencing both Chris Stapleton and Gram Parsons in his email to me)–while I can’t say it sounds much like a country record to me, I’ll grant that it has a bit of wide-open Americana in its jangly indie rock–recalling a bit of the British-Invasion-via Midwestern basement rock of early Guided by Voices, or modern GBV-inspired bands like The Laughing Chimes and Patches.

The hallmarks of Once Upon a Time in Battersea make themselves known fairly on in the record–bright, clanging guitar leads, solid post-punk basslines, galloping drumbeats, low-key but melodic vocals. “Vital Signs” kicks off the record with a gigantic statement, sounding trebly and warbly and yet absolutely huge at the same time, with synthesizers braying over the tuneful wall of sound and Gillingham’s steady vocal performance. “Titanic 20” has a lo-fi XTC feel to it, danceable but somewhat bashful, and if you want to say that there’s a country swing to the skipping tempos of “Lovestuck” and “Never Enough”, I won’t stop you. Post-punk is all over Once Upon a Time in Battersea in some form, but the dramatic, show-stopping “Carnation” is one of the few moments on the record where Gillingham lets it bubble to the surface. A forty-six minute, thirteen-song album that feels anything but tedious, Once Upon a Time in Battersea breaks new ground in its second half to the tune of rich melodic guitar explorations (“Dance the Night Away”), synth-y New Order worship (“Hope Is Not Lost”) and suspended-animation dream pop (“Space Ranger”). Gillingham closes the record with a song called “County Gates”, a no-nonsense piece of soaring college rock that hits all of Once Upon a Time in Battersea’s best pop beats and adds a palpable melancholic side to it as well. The end product is something like a British person’s conception of an American’s conception of British pop-rock music–if this is the sound of Grant Gillingham taking us full circle, it’s very enjoyable to listen to. (Bandcamp link)

The Long Lost Somethins – Farm

Release date: May 10th
Record label: Exclaim
Genre: Alt-rock, folk rock, 90s indie rock, alt-country, emo-rock
Formats: Vinyl (with Barn), digital
Pull Track: Soak Up the Sun

Huntington, West Virginia singer-songwriter Jake Wheeler passed away last year at the age of 24, leaving behind an extensive catalog of music dating back to when he was a teenager, some released under his own name and some recorded with his band, The Long Lost Somethins. The Long Lost Somethins began as a Wheeler solo vehicle as well, but starting with 2022’s Barn, it became a full band featuring drummer Kris Adkins, bassist Josh Dyer, and guitarist Tyler Rice. Unfortunately, Barn also proved to be the last Long Lost Somethins record released within Wheeler’s lifetime, but the band had recorded four original songs and a cover before his death, and these comprise the quartet’s final release, Farm. Released as a standalone digital EP and as part of a vinyl collection with Barn, Farm displays a singer-songwriter and a backing band who’d found cathartic harmony in each other. Although The Long Lost Somethins aesthetically embraced their Appalachian home, their music wasn’t overtly traditional–the collage on Farm’s cover includes influences such as Jason Molina and Paul Westerberg, and the songs contained therein mix folk and roots rock with louder 90s alt-rock, indie rock, and even a bit of emo.

Wheeler starts Farm effectively on his own with the acoustic “Phantom Pain”, the one track on the EP that truly recalls his bedroom folk beginnings. It’s a beautiful but dark folk song–some of the lyrics are a bit hard to hear knowing Wheeler’s no longer with us. I don’t think Wheeler’s being entirely facetious when he sings “At least I got a swing in my hips”, but he still has to temper it one line later with “I’m the most unhappy hedonist”. The rest of The Long Lost Somethins amble into frame on “Some Dodging Crows”, an icy, Pacific Northwest-recalling emo-rocker, and while the ruminative “Count My Antlers” isn’t exactly “positive vibes”, its rootsy indie rock is a bit more upbeat and recalls fellow West Virginia rockers Tucker Riggleman & The Cheap Dates. The final two songs on Farm are the longest and biggest two and end up showcasing the full range of The Long Lost Somethins. “Count My Antlers” bleeds into the loudest, most spirited track on the EP, a cover of Sheryl Crow’s “Soak Up the Sun” that the band transforms into a blaring, fuzzed-out power-pop-punk rocker–Wheeler sings the shit out of the song, a performance that grabs ahold of the ideals of the original and rides them for all they’re worth. On the other hand, the six-minute “Green Thumb” closes the EP with Wheeler wandering in a slowed-down, chilly desert of an instrumental as he sings about falling apart and destruction (self- and otherwise). Lyrically, my observations about “Phantom Pain” hold here, too–but at least Wheeler was able to close The Long Lost Somethins with his friends playing alongside him. (Bandcamp link)

Floral Print – Floral Print’s Guide to Practical Living and Magical Thinking

Release date: May 17th
Record label: Bee Side Cassettes/Rope Bridge/Pleasure Tapes
Genre: Art rock, math rock, noise pop, psych pop
Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Dorsal

Atlanta trio Floral Print were a pre-hiatus Tiny Engines band, putting out an album (2017’s Mirror Stages) and an EP (2019’s Floral Print) before getting to work on their sophomore full-length, which took “almost exactly five years” to complete. The band is co-led by Nathan Springer and Clover Demerritt, and over the course of the making of Floral Print’s Guide to Practical Living and Magical Thinking, original bassist Josh Pittman left the band and was replaced by Paris Watel-Young–both ended up contributing to the fifteen-song, 45-minute album. Although I vaguely remember the self-titled Floral Print EP, Floral Print’s Guide to Practical Living and Magical Thinking is for all intents and purposes my first real look at this band, and it definitely sounds of a piece with a lot of the intriguing experimental pop/rock acts that came out of the underground in the late 2010s (The Spirit of the Beehive, Palm, Bruiser & Bicycle). Floral Print’s Guide to Practical Living and Magical Thinking is a lot to take in at once–it might make some sense to take it in as two different records, as the two sides of the record came about in different ways.

The first five songs of Floral Print’s Guide… are relatively lengthy (4-5 minutes per track), busy, ornate math-y pop rock songs that were part of the band’s live set for years before finally being set to tape. Despite how ballooned and stuffed these songs are, they’ve still got plenty of “pop”, and one senses that the different tacks the songs take (from the laid-back opener “Dorsal” to the noisy rave-ups of “Ecco/Flipper” and “Hover” to the post-punk groove of “Mumble Jumble”) were ironed out over time. Starting with the atmospheric “Am I Awake?”, however, Floral Print (somewhat paradoxically) get a lot looser, more concise, and more psychedelic. Two minute art-pop nuggets like “Thumbprint Roulette” and “Gracie and Zarkov” certainly stick out among the polite onslaught of interesting music that is the record’s B-side, although weird folk-y stuff like “Mappo” and “The Walls Still Move” and the jazz-influenced “Ada’s World” aren’t just filler (in fact, they provide a bridge to songs like “Keke’s Funeral” and “Playing Needles”, pop songs that incorporate bits and pieces of the odder fringes of Floral Print’s sound quite deftly). Floral Print’s Guide… is a record that keeps digging and tweaking until the basement-yacht rock harmonies of “Dolphins Over the Moon” close out the album–not every band needs to (or should) squeeze the absolutely maximum out of a forty-five minute LP, but it’s refreshing to hear Floral Print square up to the challenge. (Bandcamp link)

Dark Surfers – Songs from a Wednesday Night

Release date: March 30th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Folk rock, soft rock, indie pop, alt-country
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Open Window

Back towards the end of the 2000s, Trenton, New Jersey singer-songwriter Christopher Yaple put out a couple of releases as Dark Surfers–there was an album, Dreamland, in 2009, and a split EP with fellow Trenton act Ba Babes the following year. Dark Surfers then went on a “13-14 year hiatus” before resurfacing in 2022 with an EP called Can Dreams Be Real?, featuring Yaple and some collaborators (guitarist/bassist Ian Everett, drummer George Miller, vocalist Rachel Razza, and saxophonist Mark Gallagher) who would go on to form the core of the following Dark Surfers releases, 2023’s Lariat EP and last March’s Songs from a Wednesday Night. Dark Surfers appear to have some connection with New Hampshire/New York folk rock group John Andrews & The Yawns–their 2010 split EP was billed as “Dark Surfers & The Yawns”, while Andrews himself plays piano on the band’s newest EP–and the vintage, polished soft pop rock of that band’s most recent output is a good starting point for the five songs of Songs from a Wednesday Night. The instrumental smoothness is counterbalanced by Yaple’s deep, deliberately-delivered vocals, reminiscent of The Magnetic Fields’ Stephin Merritt.

Just about everything great about Songs from a Wednesday Night is on display on the EP’s opening track, “Rain (When You’re Around)”. Everything is in the right place to evoke the jaunty melancholy of Yaple’s writing–Everett’s subtly deft bass, Gallagher’s not-so-subtle but just as deft saxophone, Andrews’ steady hands on the piano, and just a little bit of underlining from Razza. We’re in a bit more lush territory, but one can’t help recall Merritt’s penchant for singing lost, timeless-sounding pop songs, something that the finger-snapping, saxophone-led instrumental of “Your Shadow” does nothing to shake (nor should it). The jangly guitars of “Open Window” (in addition to the duetting between Yaple and Razza and some organ-y keyboard work from Andrews) make it the most “indie pop” moment on the EP–it’s an impressive but not seismic shift, yes, but Dark Surfers still have one last trick up their sleeves in the form of final track “Waiting for the One Called Love”. The two-minute closer snags a bit of a country twang with help from pedal steel player Hamilton Belk, skipping through a Western showtune with a studious breeziness–it’s the perfect cap for what Dark Surfers accomplish on Songs from a Wednesday Night. (Bandcamp link)

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