Pressing Concerns: Smug Brothers, Squiggly Lines, DAIISTAR, Soft Science

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Welcome to this Thursday’s Pressing Concerns! Four great new albums will shortly be introduced to you, the reader–and all of them come out tomorrow, September 8th. We’ve got new ones from Smug Brothers, Squiggly Lines, DAIISTAR, and Soft Science in this edition. If you missed Tuesday’s post featuring Star 99, Onesie, Pretty in Pink, and Telemarket, I’d recommend sidling up to that one as well.

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.

Smug Brothers – In the Book of Bad Ideas

Release date: September 8th
Record label: Anyway
Genre: Lo-fi power pop, post-punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Mistaken for Stars

Columbus’ Smug Brothers are true lo-fi indie rock lifers, with the Kyle Melton-led band having been at it for nearly twenty years (almost all of it also with drummer, “co-pilot”, and former Guided by Voices member Don Thrasher). The group has been putting out records of mid-fi bite-sized power pop at a steady clip and haven’t slowed down in recent years (see the three albums they released in 2019, for example). Their newest album, In the Book of Bad Ideas, is yet another collection of distorted, hooky fare that puts them in line with bands like fellow Ohioans Connections and Tennessee’s Mythical Motors, but with a hint of the post-punk darkness that frequently lurks outside of Smug Brothers’ jangle. The new album sports the same lineup as last year’s Emerald Lemonade EP–Melton, Thrasher, bassist Kyle Sowash and lead guitarist Scott Tribble–although the latter of the four left the band amicably mid-recording, leaving Melton to supply a good portion of the record’s leads.

While they’re not exactly a full-on punk rock group, the three-and-a-half Smug Brothers give full-band weight to Melton’s pop songs. It might’ve been easy for Thrasher and Sowash to step back a bit given that Melton has embraced synths and vintage, new wave-y college rock on In the Book of Bad Ideas, but instead we get songs like “Helium Drag”, a classic Smug Brothers tune, just with some synths laid over it. And “classic Smug Brothers” really does describe this album as a whole–one hit after another, from the stop-start laser melodies of “Stiff Arm at the Still Water” to the sub-two minute subtle beauty of “Mistaken for Stars” to the bouncy power pop of “Let Me Know When It’s Yes” (I love how this one sounds like Connections). If you stick around for the second half of In the Book of Bad Ideas, you’re rewarded with Smug Brothers at their most offbeat–the sixty-second “Knee-High by the Fourth of July” dispenses with percussion entirely, “An Age in an Instant” meditates in a pastoral field but still can’t help sticking in a soaring guitar solo, and “Enceladus Lexicon” is like if The Cars were a computer program that got corrupted by a virus. In the Book of Bad Ideas certainly defies its title with a collection of songs built out of good ones. (Bandcamp link)

Squiggly Lines – Re: Love Songs

Release date: September 8th
Record label: Sun Bear
Genre: Folk rock, singer-songwriter, indie pop
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: We’re in a Mouth and It’s Chewing

The person behind Squiggly Lines seems like somebody who’s compelled to just make music. I’m talking about Toronto’s Rob McLay, who has a nice, big back catalog on Bandcamp as Squiggly Lines, in addition to playing drums for Westelaken and having a host of other projects (Daffodil, Made of Moss, The Sweetheart Vine) going on at the same time under the umbrella of Sun Bear Records. Re: Love Songs is the first Squiggly Lines release in three years or so, and it seems to be McLay’s attempt to make a proper album rather than releasing tracks in steady drips. Aiding in this endeavor is a solid lineup of Westelaken’s Alex Baigent on drums, Nicole Cain on bass, and Dan McLay on guitar, in addition to several guest contributions (including keyboard from another Westelaken member, Lucas Temor). More than anything else, though, across its eight tracks Re: Love Songs just feels like a front-to-back album rather than a collection of songs. 

This coherence stems both from the playing of the band and McLay’s writing. For the former, Squiggly Lines contains some of the folk rock of their sibling band in Westelaken, but there’s an offbeat, almost experimental indie rock/pop side to them on Re: Love Songs (see the saxophone breakdown in “I Wanted This to Be a Love Song” and the noisy conclusion to “Woke Up Wearing a Wedding Dress”) that evokes everything from Nature’s Neighbor to Nick Thorburn to plenty of their bedroom pop peers. For McLay’s part, the lyrics to Re: Love Songs circle around the concept named in the title, whether it’s the “putting the cart before the horse” of “Woke Up Wearing a Wedding Dress”, the control-costing lovesickness in “That Ain’t Saying Much”, or the blunt takedown in “All of Our Fucking Friends” whose intricacies can only be developed by observing someone closely and intimately. McClay comes off as exhausted throughout Re: Love Songs, particularly on closing track “Daily”. McClay captures a feeling of overwhelmingness as the song’s narrator mulls canceling plans and wonders if this self-destructive cycle is all that’s on the horizon–one gets the sense that the writer wouldn’t be trying to break said cycle and move forward if they weren’t being driven by something as strong as love. (Bandcamp link)

DAIISTAR – Good Time

Release date: September 8th
Record label: Fuzz Club
Genre: Fuzz pop, shoegaze, dream pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Star Starter

Austin quartet DAIISTAR formed in early 2020, although it took until this year for any recorded music to surface under their name. Good Time, their debut album, has been preceded by three singles, one of which was paired with a version of Primal Scream’s “Burning Wheel” as a B-side. Their choice in cover songs is a pretty good indicator of where DAIISTAR (guitarist/vocalist Alex Capistran, drummer Nick Cornetti, bassist Misti Hamrick, and keyboardist Derek Strahan) are coming from musically–they’re drawing inspiration from British bands from the late 1980s and early 90s who combined loud, fuzzy guitars with a palette that reached beyond rock music. Primal Scream is, of course, an obvious one, as are names like Spacemen 3 and Loop. While other modern bands like Dazy use distortion and Madchester in service of punk-y power pop, DAIISTAR leans into psychedelia with their sound–although there’s plenty of pop hooks on Good Time too. 

“Star Starter” does what its title suggests–it opens Good Time with a massive song that could’ve been a lost college rock hit from 1989, putting its best foot forward with a dancing beat, cruising guitars, and Capistran’s melodic vocals. “Star Starter” is perhaps the most “alternative dance” that DAIISTAR get on Good Time, but prominent drum machines and grooves mark even the songs that revel in more guitar-forward, shoegaze-y textures. On Good Time, DAIISTAR either rock right out of the gate (as heard on fuzz-fests like “LMN BB LMN” and the heavy floating of “Repeater”) or they build to their finalized walls of sound (like they do in “Purified” and “Say It to Me”). The guitars swirl around the shuffling beat in “Tracemaker” to make a particularly kaleidoscopic highlight, and they do something similar but in a more stretched-out fashion towards the end of the record with “Speed Jesus”. It’s a polished and fully-formed debut from a band that feels like they’ve got a lot ahead of them. (Bandcamp link)

Soft Science – Lines

Release date: September 8th
Record label: Shelflife/Spinout Nuggets/Fastcut
Genre: Dream pop, indie pop, shoegaze, jangle pop, fuzz pop, synthpop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Kerosene

Soft Science’s origins date back to 2009, but the Sacramento sextet is comprised of musicians that have been at it for even longer–the members’ credits include California Oranges, Holiday Flyer, The Sinking Ships, English Singles and Forever Goldrush, to name an incomplete list. Lines is the fourth album from the band (vocalist Katie Haley, guitarist/synth player Ross Levine, guitarist Matt Levine, drummer Tony Cale, bassist Becky Cale, and “electronics” player Hans Munz), and their first in five years. Soft Science have put together a heavy indie pop record with Lines, one that mixes in distortion and fuzz with a palette ranging from guitar-forward jangle pop to layered synthpop–it sure sounds like the work of a half-dozen collaborators hammering away at these songs for nearly a half-decade, although, importantly, without lapsing into “too much”.

A lot of the balance struck on Lines is achieved by keeping the songs grounded despite all that’s going on in them–opening piece “Low” is the band at their most maximalist and unmoored, but the rest of the first side of the album is laser-focused pop songs, from the brisk fuzziness of “Grip” to the light groove of “Deceiver” to the dreamy jangle of “Sadness”. It’s hard to top the stratosphere-launch of “Kerosene”, in which Haley delivers a hook every bit deserving of its grandiose backing music, although the band don’t stop trying on side two–particularly in the wide-eyed, sweeping synthpop of “True”. They do take a couple detours in Lines’ back half (the psychedelic “Hands” wouldn’t be out of place on that DAIISTAR album I wrote about earlier, and the minimal percussion on “Zeroes” also makes it stick out), and they mirror the record’s opening in final track “Polar” with another noisy excursion. It feels appropriate that Lines ends by closing that particular circle, driving home its full, self-contained feeling. (Bandcamp link)

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