Pressing Concerns: Helpful People, Ovef Ow, Wandering Years, Dabda

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On this Monday in August, we have once again gathered here to discuss, consider, and listen to new music. Specifically, new albums from Helpful People, Ovef Ow, and Wandering Years, and a new EP from Dabda. Those are the ones for today. If you don’t like them–well, first of all, you’ve probably got bad taste, but just wait a few days and we’ll have four other ones instead.

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.

Helpful People – Brokenblossom Threats

Release date: August 27th
Record label: Tall Texan/Burundi Cloud
Genre: Jangle pop, indie pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: You Don’t Have to Know Where to Go

As if Glenn Donaldson didn’t have enough going on with the near-continuous stream of new music he’s releasing as The Reds, Pinks & Purples (which just this year has included the excellent The Town That Cursed Your Name and a handful of EPs), the San Francisco jangle pop artist has also been known to take part in other, more collaborative projects from time to time. The most recent one had been Painted Shrines, a 2021 project with Jeremy Earl of Woods, but this month sees the debut full-length album from Helpful People, the duo of Donaldson and Carly Putnam (The Ollies, The Mantles, Art Museum). Five of the dozen songs from their first album, Brokenblossom Threats, had been released digitally by Burundi Cloud last year–2023 sees the record get a vinyl release via Tall Texan (Alien Eyelid, Idle Ray, David Nance), complete with seven new songs to turn it into a well-rounded full-length album.

Putnam sings lead vocals throughout Brokenblossom Threats but the two split music and lyric writing, something that is immediately apparent as the record kicks off with “You Don’t Have to Know Where to Go”. The track begins with a fuzzy melodic electric guitar line riding alongside a gentle acoustic strum–it has Glenn Donaldson written all over it, and indeed it hits the same mark as some of the more “electric” material on The Town That Cursed Your Name. What follows are eleven more songs that fully embrace guitar pop, sometimes also in a very Reds, Pinks & Purples way (particularly in the low-key “Bugs from Below” and “To Live with Yourself”, although the chorus to closing track “Wrong Way Rainbow” is also quite Donaldson-esque). Whether it’s Putnam’s influence or Donaldson probing new territory, however, Helpful People also explore some louder areas–the power chords of “Empty Heads” is the most obvious one, but several songs on the album punctuate their indie pop foundations with amplifier fuzz. Putnam’s vocals are less wistful than Donaldson’s and a bit more matter-of-fact, which fits this looser style. As a whole, Brokenblossom Threats is a seamless and effortless-sounding pop album, a successful collaboration between two artists in sync with each other. (Bandcamp link)

Ovef Ow – Vs. the Worm

Release date: August 25th
Record label: What’s for Breakfast?/Oort Cloud
Genre: Post-punk, dance punk, garage punk
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Fauxtography

Chicago’s Ovef Ow has been kicking around since 2015, and they put out three EPs in the second half of the last decade, but Vs. the Worm is the quartet’s first full-length album. The band (bassist/vocalist Marites Velasquez, drummer/vocalist Sarah Braunstein, synth player Kyla Denham, and guitarist Nick Barnett appear to fall on the new wave-y end of the modern post-punk spectrum, sporting a fun, synth-colored sound that reflects their stated love of The B-52’s. At the same time, though, there’s a garage-y edge to their sound that puts them not too far from fellow Windy City punk bands like Cel Ray and Abi Ooze–as well as Sweeping Promises, at whose home studio Ovef Ow recorded their debut album. Beneath Vs. the Worm’s shiny surface lurks a tough art punk group, one that finds room for experimentation in their sound but also delivers it with a full band might.

After the future-synth sounds of the 30-second “Moonbeams”, Ovef Ow kick off their first album with a few tunes that work best played loud. “MAD” is a synthpunk prowler, letting its instrumental rise and fall excitingly, before the surf-punk of “Fauxtography” finds the band hitting the gas pedal even harder. Ovef Ow excel in the world of distorted, scorching post-punk tunes–the slow-burn “First Day”, the murky but still sharp “Daylight”, and the big riff of “Anatomy” all find the band cruising through a genre of music that seems to come naturally to them. The offbeat dance-punk of “Big Black and the Preacher” kicks off side two of Vs. the Worm with a welcome curveball, and while neither “Time Zones” nor “Makibaka” are huge departures from the record, the drama of the former and subtlety of the latter lend further variety to the album’s back end. Still, Ovef Ow wrap up their opening statement with “Do the Wurm!”, a meaty piece of “Devo-core” punk that finds Ovef Ow fully in their element. (Bandcamp link)

Wandering Years – Mountain Laughed

Release date: August 25th
Record label: Candlepin
Genre: Slowcore, 90s indie rock
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Two Days

Brooklyn’s Wandering Years have put out a couple of home-recorded releases since their debut in 2021–the first I’d heard of them was last year’s Wandering Years Retirement Community EP, their first release on Candlepin Records. Mountain Laughed is the first full-length studio album from Wandering Years, and its slowcore, fuzzy indie rock, and space-y folk rock-influenced sound is right at home on Candlepin’s roster. Wandering Years remains the project of Gene Stroman, but both the recording of the album (made with Bradford Krieger of Courtney and Brad at his Big Nice Studio) and the participation of other musicians (a half-dozen other people are credited with instrumental contributions on the album) push Mountain Laughed beyond the modern lo-fi, downcast bedroom indie rock boilerplate album. 

Stroman and the rest of the album’s contributors aim high on Mountain Laughed’s thirteen songs and fifty minutes, and they end up with an album that summits these peaks and then some. The album is a lot to take in, but the range that Wandering Years displays helps one grab ahold of it–there are great, big displays of electric indie rock in songs like the twin-six-minute pair of “New Year Song” and “House Party”, but these are complimented by shorter and quieter valleys of tracks that connect them. The sub-two minute acoustic “Rained Today” buffers the upbeat, fuzzy “Morning” and the curious spoken-word atmospheres of “Satori”. In Mountain Laughed’s second half, the lightly-twangy rock of “News from Outside” peeks out in between “Tabebuia” and the title track, while the pedal-steel-featuring “Nashville, Etc” rises and falls all on its own.  Wandering Years use whatever they have to create this feeling–one of the best songs on the album, the wide-eyed heartland rock of “Two Days”, gets so much mileage out of getting two days off work in September. The mountain is made up of small things like that. (Bandcamp link)

Dabda – Yonder

Release date: August 25th
Record label: Electric Muse
Genre: Math rock
Formats: CD, digital
Pull Track: Playing with Fire

Dabda are an explosive math-y indie rock band from Seoul, South Korea who have an album and an EP under their belt since they began in the mid-2010s. The quartet (vocalist/guitarist Jiae Kim, drummer Seunghyun Lee, bassist Keohyun Noh, and guitarist Joseph Lee) sound sharp and in tune with one another on their third record, the five song Yonder EP. Released on Seoul’s Electric Muse (who have also put out music from Say Sue Me and Drinking Boys and Girls Choir, among others), Yonder finds the band stretching out and exploring subtlety while also putting together an excellent rock band performance, frequently within the same song.

Yonder kicks off with “Playing with Fire”, a true math rock barnburner of a track if I’ve ever heard one. The guitars rage and spiral, the percussion hits with full force, and the band break it down in the song’s second half only to let loose even more intently as the song comes to a close. Although Dabda prove they can rock again on the EP (closing two tracks “Cloud City” and “One, World, Wound” both have their moments, they take the rest of Yonder to push outwards in a couple directions. “Flower Tail” is Dabda’s version of a pop song–there’s some guitar heroics and odd chord changes here and there, but also one hell of a melody. The languid “Origin” is Dabda at their most unhurried, letting the song reveal itself on its own timeline, while “One, World, Wound” unexpectedly builds to a big, wide-eyed conclusion to wrap Yonder up. (Bandcamp link)

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