Pressing Concerns: The 3 Clubmen, Shady Bug, Special Friend, Young Moon

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Hello! It’s a Thursday Pressing Concerns, and this one is going to look at four records that come out tomorrow: EPs from The 3 Clubmen and Shady Bug and albums from Special Friend and Young Moon. If you missed Monday’s post (which covered Tough Age, Pretty Matty, Motorbike, and Seriously) or Wednesday’s post (which covered the second half of my 1981 deep dive), I recommend checking those out too!

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.

The 3 Clubmen – The 3 Clubmen

Release date: June 30th
Record label: Lighterthief/Burning Shed
Genre: Psychedelic pop, psychedelic folk
Formats: CD, digital
Pull Track: Aviatrix

The post-XTC music career of Andy Partridge is vast, nonlinear, and full of more detours and alleyways that one would expect. You might know his Fuzzy Warbles series or the record he did with Robyn Hitchcock; I’m partial to the song he contributed to the most recent Monkees album and Wing Beat Fantastic, his collaboration with Mike Keneally. Two people that have been regular Partridge collaborators in his post-XTC era have been Swindon producer/multi-instrumentalist Stu Rowe and Albuquerque-based singer-songwriter Jen Olive. The three would pop on each other’s projects with some frequency: Partridge’s group Monstrance, Rowe’s band Lighterthief, Olive’s solo records. The idea for the three of them to form a band together dates back over a decade–work began, but perhaps fizzled out due to all three of their other projects and Olive’s physical distance. However, the pandemic found them reconnecting and putting together a real, fully developed 3 Clubmen release–a self-titled, four song CD EP.

The 3 Clubmen opens with an instant classic with “Aviatrix”. It’s a beautiful pastoral piece of folky-pop that feels right out of XTC’s Mummer era, with Partridge and Olive’s vocals floating around a hypnotic and peaceful instrumental. If you think that the EP is just going to be a revisitation of this period of Partridge’s past, however, “Racecar” immediately comes sliding in to disabuse you of that notion. It’s all blaring, groovy, trippy electric psychedelia, Olive’s vocals transforming into a droll taunt. The strangest song on The 3 Clubmen by far, “Racecar” feels like a fresh look on ingredients that Partridge has been using in his music for decades (this is perhaps where Rowe and Olive make themselves felt). “Green Green Grasshopper” and “Look at Those Stars” comprise the second half of the EP–the former splits the difference between the EP’s first two songs, with its folky, nature-inspired feeling slowly building to something more layered, and the latter sends the EP off with a perfect piece of fluttery psychedelic pop. It would be interesting to hear The 3 Clubmen create something longer than a four-track EP, but if The 3 Clubmen ends up being all that we get, that’s enough to call it a fruitful collaboration. (Burning Shed link)

Shady Bug – What’s the Use?

Release date: June 30th
Record label: Exploding in Sound
Genre: 90s indie rock, noise rock
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Zero Expectations

St. Louis’ Shady Bug first appeared on my radar with the release of 2019’s Lemon Lime, their second album and first for Exploding in Sound Records. It was a curious record, neither being one of the label’s more “accessible” albums nor one of the more “out-there” ones–on Lemon Lime, Shady Bug made music inspired by guitar-forward 90s indie rock, but primarily dealt with the insular and exploratory sides of it. The follow-up to that album took four years to materialize, and the What’s the Use? EP demonstrates the band growing as time has passed. They still make frequently noisy and unbridled indie rock, but the band (guitarist/vocalist Hannah Rainey, bassist Chris Chartrand, guitarist Ripple, and guest drummer Jack Mideke) sounds more streamlined and focused–perhaps to better serve the limited time an EP release offers–and Rainey’s vocals impress in their ability to command attention and deliver melody.

The two-minute “Zero Expectations” comes crashing in to introduce What’s the Use?, the opening squall of guitars giving way to something quite catchy, but the noisy interjections decline to abate as Rainey delivers her lyrics and gets her hooks in. “Frog Baby” and “Popsicle” are less loud than “Zero Expectations”, at least at first. The former floats along like said frog on a lily pad, peacefully-seeming on the surface but ready to leap at any moment–and in the chorus, Shady Bug do just that. “Favor” is about as straightforward as Shady Bug get, with the noisiness reduced to some discordant guitar stabs and a few moments towards the end as Rainey reels off a long train of thought on working endlessly to please others and Chartrand’s bass soars. Closing track “Lizard” is the one song that balloons to a notably longer length (six-and-a-half minutes), but for the most part it’s as accessible as the rest of What’s the Use? just with an extended outro where the band finally fully let loose, for just a little bit. (Bandcamp link)

Special Friend – Wait Until the Flames Come Rushing In

Release date: June 30th
Record label: Skep Wax/Hidden Bay/Howlin Banana
Genre: 90s indie rock, noise pop, dream pop, slowcore
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Wait Until the Flames Come Rushing In

Special Friend is the Paris-based duo of guitarist/vocalist Guillaume Siracusa and drummer/vocalist Erica Ashleson, who formed in 2018 and have put out an album and an EP over the past couple of years on familiar labels like Hidden Bay and Howlin Banana. Their second album, Wait Until the Flames Come Rushing In, is being co-released with Skep Wax in the United States and United Kingdom, and it’s a compelling collection of classic indie rock. Sometimes dreamy, sometimes distorted, sometimes poppy, the record’s ten songs move at their own pace and roam in whichever direction Special Friend feels they should go.

Wait Until the Flames Come Rushing In marries noise and pop in a way that suggests Special Friend have listened to their fair share of Yo La Tengo, but there’s also ingredients from dream pop, shoegaze, C86, and slowcore in these tracks as well. The album’s first few songs have fuzzy undertones but deliver wistfulness and melancholy above everything else (if bands like Scrawl, Velocity Girl, and The Spinanes mean anything to you, I hear them in this album). The album veers into a more electric nervousness with “Fault Lines”, although Side B’s “Applause!” is the record’s one true unqualified rocker. The runaway fuzz rock of “Applause!” is great, although Special Friend have just as much if not more success in how they incorporate their louder side into multi-part songs like the captivating title track or the slow-building “Maze”. Although Special Friend mostly stick to their guitar-and-drums setup, they offer up more than enough energy and dexterity to flesh out and deliver Wait Until the Flames Come Rushing In. (Bandcamp link)

Young Moon – Triggered by Sunsets

Release date: June 30th
Record label: Orindal
Genre: Synthpop, post-punk, new wave, singer-songwriter
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: September Youth

Trevor Montgomery was a San Francisco-based musician who, during the 2000s, played with post-rock legends Tarentel and made music on his own as Lazarus. During the following decade, Trevor Montgomery began his Young Moon project, releasing two records in 2012 and 2016. The first two Young Moon albums are both reverb-y collections of dreamy indie rock–there are traces of this sound on Triggered by Sunsets, but Montgomery’s third album under the name is a bit of a departure. The wide gap between Young Moon albums found Montgomery making a major life change–after the loss of a close friend at the end of 2019, he moved from the Bay Area to Nelson, New Zealand and weathered the pandemic far away from anyone he knew. The record he made during this time is a dark but clear-sounding album, built around relatively minimal synths, drum machines, and guitar parts moving slowly along with Montgomery’s baritone vocals.

Triggered by Sunsets is Young Moon’s first record with Orindal Records, and it feels kin to bands on the label like Friendship and Owen Ashworth’s projects (Advance Base, Casiotone for the Painfully Alone).  Songs like “Dance Yer Sadness”, “Heart of Glass”, and “Say Young Moon” dive headfirst into this starker side of Young Moon, with Montgomery really shining in all the empty space that the music creates. Young Moon still knows how to create shining guitar pop or post-punk tunes, mind you–“I Laid on My Back with Death” strums its way toward being a side one highlight, while the soaring “September Youth” and “Take on Thee” rely on busy bass and jangly, melodic guitars toward the album’s end to give it a back-half kick. Triggered by Sunsets is a gentle-sounding album, but Montgomery’s voice and writing makes it an active listen as well. (Bandcamp link)

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