Pressing Concerns: The High Water Marks, Corvair, FOOTBALLHEAD, Faunas

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It’s Pressing Concerns time! This one tackles four records that either came out or will come out this week: The High Water Marks, Corvair, FOOTBALLHEAD, and Faunas. Wow! Good music! If you missed Monday’s post, which looked at Lorelle Meets the Obsolete, Silver Car Crash, Stoner Control, and Mythical Motors, check that out here.

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The High Water Marks – Your Next Wolf

Release date: June 23rd
Record label: Minty Fresh
Genre: Lo-fi power pop, psych pop
Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Trouble from the East

When The Apples in Stereo formed in Denver in the early 1990s, the group sought to combine the sounds of contemporary indie rock (which were in vogue at the time) with 60s psychedelic pop (which very much wasn’t). Over three decades since they set out with that mission, founding Apples/Elephant 6 member Hilarie Sidney is keeping this dream alive with her current band, The High Water Marks. The High Water Marks, led by Sidney and her partner Per Ole Bratset, released a couple of albums in the 2000s, but the band (now featuring multi-instrumentalists Logan Miller and Øystein Megård) has been on a tear recently, reeling off three albums since 2010. 

What’s more–these new High Water Marks albums have only gotten better with time. 2020’s Ecstasy Rhymes was a solid re-introduction, last year’s Proclaimer of Things upped everything tightly, and Your Next Wolf just might be their strongest front-to-back record yet. Your Next Wolf is the first High Water Marks album from this lineup recorded in the same room–Miller’s Milford Sound studio in Kentucky (the rest of the band, I believe, still lives in Norway). The record was also mixed and mastered by Justin Pizzoferrato, the prolific engineer responsible for giving a lot of 90s indie rock bands and bands that sound like 90s indie rock bands a punch in their sound. All this together goes into making Your Next Wolf: seventeen songs and forty minutes of loud, fuzzy pop music with a full-band bite and a characteristic High Water Marks catchiness. 

The highlights are all over the album–in the first half, the giddy “Stork” introduces the record with a punch, “Trouble from the East” is a blast of jangly rock, “I Could Never Be a Vigilante” chugs along to its simple and sweet chorus, and “Boreal Forest” rises near the midsection with a slick noisiness. There’s plenty of gems hidden on the B-Side of Your Next Wolf as well; singles “An Imposed Exile” and “Let’s Hang Out Forever” are on there, as well as a couple of songs towards the end (“China Aster” and “Just an Ordinary Day”) that might fly under the radar on first listen, but reveal themselves over time to be some of the strongest material on the record. Your Next Wolf is immediate but sturdy as well–right now feels like the best and most exciting time to be a fan of The High Water Marks. (Bandcamp link)

Corvair – Bound to Be

Release date: June 23rd
Record label: Paper Walls/Where It’s At Is Where You Are
Genre: Indie pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Superstuck

In 2021, Corvair released their self-titled debut album, which ended up being one of my favorite albums of that year. Pulling from pop rock, power pop, and indie pop and rock of several decades past, the Portland-based husband-and-wife duo of Brian Naubert and Heather Larimer put together an ambitious and quite catchy record in Corvair–both were veterans of the Pacific Northwest music scene, but this new band was their first time playing together, and the results were immediate. Two years later, the second Corvair album, Bound to Be, pushes the band’s sound forward by continuing to probe vintage guitar pop music and songwriting. It feels slightly darker and pensive than Corvair was, but Naubert and Larimer (this time joined by Mike Musburger, formerly of the Fastbacks and The Posies, on drums) still offer up plenty of hooks in these ten songs.

Bound to Be opens with the relatively barebones “Shady Town”, whose infectious charms shine over top of a guitar riff and some synth accents. “We Fall Down” and “Right Hook” feel a little downcast for Corvair, with Naubert and Larimer’s vocals sounding melancholic and synths rising and falling over the instrumentals (they’re still quite poppy, though, particularly the latter song). “Superstuck” kicks off side two with what’s probably Bound to Be’s most straightforward upbeat pop moment, rolling forward over Naubert’s simple but effective singing and an effortless-sounding chorus. Bound to Be offers up some subtler but no less intriguing moments in the full-sounding ballad of “Wrong Again”, the hazy, floating “Ghost Perfume”, and the slightly nervous “Moon Was a Bowl”, all of which are successful detours. The melodic bass-led closing track “Kill My Time” ends Bound to Be with one last big pop finish, although Corvair don’t sound in a rush to get it over with, letting the song stop and start as they see fit. (Bandcamp link)

FOOTBALLHEAD – Overthinking Everything

Release date: June 20th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Power pop, alt-rock, fuzz rock, pop punk
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Etched You In

FOOTBALLHEAD is the project of Chicago’s Ryan Nolen, starting as a solo endeavor but expanding to include collaborators Snow Ellet and Adam Siska (The Academy Is…/Say Anything) on their first full-length album. Overthinking Everything follows last year’s Kitchen Fly EP and was preceded by a slow stream of singles that appear on the record and foreshadowed the band’s specific brand of catchy, 90s alt-rock indebted power pop. They’re in the same sphere as Ellet’s own music–FOOTBALLHEAD has a harder, rockier edge than Suburban Indie Rock Star, but Nolen doesn’t spend any less effort on catchiness on Overthinking Everything, nor does he neglect the bittersweet and melancholic touches that characterize many a great power pop record.

Racing through thirteen songs in under thirty minutes, FOOTBALLHEAD have plenty of ideas to present on Overthinking Everything. The tracks run the gamut from big-sounding fuzzy pop rock to dark and meaty alt-rock to cavernous and restrained-sounding quieter numbers. Nolen’s understated, melodic vocals shine over the guitars–for the first three songs, the music gets louder while Nolen keeps things steady throughout. Nolen haunts the empty space of “Like a Blister”, an eerie post-grunge mid-tempo tune that threatens to “kick in” but never relents (it’s less stark, but FOOTBALLHEAD pull of a similar trick in the hypnotic “Pilot”). Overthinking Everything tosses out catchy and heavy in equal measure through the giddy “Habits” to the nü-grunge of “Ugly Day” to “Etched You In”, an exhilarating side two highlight that combines punk speed with jangly guitars and an all-time pop punk chorus. FOOTBALLHEAD have a sound down already, and there’s more than enough quality tunes on Overthinking Everything; it’s a fully-realized and ready-to-go debut album. (Bandcamp link)

Faunas – Paint the Birds

Release date: June 20th
Record label: Shitbird
Genre: Folk rock, indie folk
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Avid

Faunas is the Washington, D.C.-based duo of Genevieve Ludwig and Erin McCarley. They’ve been playing music for a while (Ludwig played in Big Hush), and their collaboration as Faunas dates back to 2016. The first Faunas release was 2017’s Shit Show EP, and it’s a record of very lo-fi, noisy garage punk. Ludwig and McCarley took six years to make a proper follow-up to Shit Show, and on Paint the Birds, they sound like a completely different band. On their newest record, Faunas veer hard into folk rock, offering up a collection of clean-sounding, beautiful songs. There’s a fuzziness that loosely connects it to their older work, but it’s hardly the most striking feature of Paint the Birds. 

Opening with the instrumental “Cicadas”, in which some minimal guitar playing accompanies synths and ambient sounds, Paint the Birds already feels like a departure, which Faunas then cement with the first “proper” song, the acoustic “Jennings”. The track builds from its bare beginnings, even as it remains a folk song for its entire run. The next song, “Avid”, then turns into something else entirely–grand, sweeping heartland rock. Even with the muted power chords and jangly leads, the close-sounding vocals ground “Avid” and help it fit in with the quieter, more intimate side of the record. A few songs on Paint the Birds–the dark “Waxing Moon”, the lightly distorted “Sally’s High Priestess”, and the slick “Dear Johnny”–play around the edges of Faunas’ new folk rock sound, but they leave it mostly intact. They’re right to do so–the songs of Paint the Birds stand on their own. (Bandcamp link)

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