Pressing Concerns: 12 Rods, Wandering Summer, Fort Not, The Illness

Posted byrosyoverdrivePosted inPressing ConcernsTags:, , , , , , , ,

Welcome, welcome to a Thursday Pressing Concerns! Today’s post covers three records that are coming out tomorrow: new long-players from 12 Rods and Fort Not and a new EP from Wandering Summer, plus an EP from The Illness that came out a couple of weeks ago. If you missed Rosy Overdrive’s June 2023 Playlist with the holiday weekend and all, I’d recommend checking that 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.

12 Rods – If We Stayed Alive

Release date: July 7th
Record label: American Dreams/Husky Pants
Genre: Indie-alt-pop-new-wave-rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Comfortable Situation

Minneapolis’ 12 Rods are from a different era of indie rock, one in which the ascendent world of music blogging and the declining but still real power of record labels created an environment where a band could experience a palpable “rise and fall” that moved beyond idle internet chatter. The Ryan Olcott-led band rose on the strength of acclaimed pop rock records like 1996’s Gay? EP and 1998’s Split Personalities, got turned on hard by critics with 2000’s Todd Rundgren-produced Separation Anxieties, and got dropped by their label and subsequently petered out a couple years later. Ryan Olcott (who, along with his brother Ev, had been the only consistent member of the band during its initial run) discovered a few unfinished 12 Rods demos during the pandemic and finished them himself, resulting in the fifth 12 Rods album and first in twenty-one years: If We Stayed Alive.  If We Stayed Alive certainly sounds like 12 Rods–its seven songs evoke the turn-of-the-century moment that bands like them and the Dismemberment Plan were cracking open indie rock to evoke new wave and prog-pop influences like XTC and Rundgren. 

Perhaps reflecting the solo nature of the album as well as the passing of time, If We Stayed Alive is a lot more mellow than the louder, full-band sound of their older records. This doesn’t blunt the pop impact of these songs, however–in actuality, it leads to an album that feels like how a “2023 12 Rods album” should sound like, in conversation with their earlier work but not coming off as an attempt to recreate the past. Subtle opening track “All I Can Think About” and the two tracks that immediately follow it put 12 Rods to work immediately in creating layered, smart, and engaging pop songs, and when Olcott deploys a bit of fuzz and distortion in “Comfortable Situation” it’s just another tool to serve the song rather than overwhelming it. The post-punk-indebted first half of “Hide Without Delay” is probably the most “classic 12 Rods”-sounding moment on If We Stayed Alive, and even that devolves into a floating, dream pop second half (and what’s more, it comes right after the rocksteady-evoking “The Beating”). Incredibly accessible but not without sonic depth, If We Stayed Alive is a welcome return from a pop songwriter who’s been away for too long. (Bandcamp link)

Wandering Summer – Wandering Summer

Release date: July 7th
Record label: Repeating Cloud/Safe Suburban Home
Genre: Noise pop, 90s indie rock, fuzz rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Show Me the Way

Earlier in the year, Safe Suburban Home introduced us to the fuzzy but poppy indie rock of York’s Sewage Farm, and for their latest release, they’re hopping over to Leeds to present another winning practitioner of this kind of music. The self-titled debut EP from Wandering Summer is being co-released with Repeating Cloud Records, and it’s a collection of vintage indie rock landing somewhere between the louder end of C86/indie pop and the friendlier side of Sonic Youth noisy indie rock. The four-piece Wandering Summer (led by guitarist/vocalist Geddy Laurance and also featuring guitarist Luke Wheeler, drummer Jamie Deakin, and bassist Niall Kennedy) contains enough might to truly pull off some noisy freakouts while squarely keeping one foot in pop rock as well. 

Wandering Summer opens with the triumphant-sounding fuzz-pop of “Show Me the Way”, a song which ends up setting the stage for the rest of the record. It is perhaps the EP’s most straightforward and accessible moment, but it’s not the only song that qualifies as such–both the stomping “Kick In” and the almost jangly “Ghost in Your House” rival the opening track in terms of pure catchiness, directing their noise and distortion to the hookiest possible end result. The other two songs on Wandering Summer are a bit more exploratory, although they’re not impenetrable either– “A New Mastery” is a sprint of a song, offering up a pleasing Stereolab/Yo La Tengo-esque propulsion, while closing track “Hexagons” is the band at their most Sonic Youth-evoking, tiptoeing forward uncertainly before exploding into a noise rock squall of a finish. (Bandcamp link)

Fort Not – Depressed for Success

Release date: July 7th
Record label: Meritorio
Genre: Lo-fi indie pop, twee
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Ringo Starr

Fort Not are a Kungälv, Sweden-based indie pop duo, and Fredrik Söderström and Robert Carlsson make a kind of lo-fi, rickety version of indie rock with a long and storied history. They cite (and their music reflects) decades of offbeat music, from The Velvet Underground to 80s “outsider” artists like Half Japanese to classic twee bands like Beat Happening to more “traditional” (but still weird) 90s flagship indie rock. Depressed for Success is their second full-length album, and it contains thirteen pop songs dressed simply in pop structures and basic indie rock instrumentation, but delivered with a conviction essential for making this kind of music work.

As simple as Depressed for Success’ songs may sound, there’s a desperation to the songwriting (sometimes provided by Söderström alone, sometimes in collaboration with Carlsson)–Fort Not’s narrators are preoccupied with unstable, waning, and perhaps unrequited love, a pop subject as old as time. Songs like “Longing” hit on universal “big feelings”, sporting a timeless melody over lyrics that very much tackle the titular subject. Throughout Depressed for Success, no matter where Fort Not are in regards to their relationships, they offer up catchy indie rock, either as a celebration or a balm. The optimistic uncertainty of “Ringo Starr” (“Do you wanna be my girlfriend…I don’t know for sure”), the complete dependence of “Candy Crush” (“Without you, I’m so stupid I can’t talk”), the disturbingly cheery suicidal ideation of “Stop Mclovin” (“If you don’t want me, I’ll go [varying measures of offing one’s self]”)–Fort Not don’t see why one can’t dance through it all. (Bandcamp link)

The Illness – Summerase

Release date: June 23rd
Record label: Sea
Genre: Indie pop, 90s indie rock, baroque pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Summerase

The Illness are a British-based “collective” that apparently have no set lineup but feature members of several groups I don’t know too much about (Ambulance, Wolf Solent, Broken Arm, Alisia Casper). Their debut single (2020’s “The Illness”)  featured contributions from Pavement’s Steve West and Bob Nastanovich, although their first record, the Summerase EP, doesn’t exactly sound like that band’s brand of indie rock–at least, not exclusively so. Truthfully, the four songs of Summerase are all over the map–all of them are varying degrees of “pop song”, although The Illness take a few different tacks over the EP’s 13 minutes in presenting them.

The casual pop rock of “Everybody Knows That I’m a Fool” opens Summerase with the closest the EP comes to “slacker rock”, its staggered delivery failing to mask its charms. The Illness then immediately veer into their weirdest moment, the spoken word post-punk-y “Alone/Aline”, which is effectively an instrumental with some muttered vocals on top of it. The second half of Summerase offers up as many surprises as the first half, in the form of the sparse, slowcore beauty of “I Was a Quarrelsome Youth” (the band bio mentions Smog and Papa M for this one, which is on the money to my ears) and the gorgeously full-sounding baroque pop of the closing title track. Summerase is an intriguing debut from a band that is perhaps mysterious, but not difficult to listen to. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Leave a comment