Pressing Concerns: Swansea Sound, Proper., Melancolony, Bark

Good morning, all! This Monday’s Pressing Concerns rounds up four great records from the past couple of weeks: new albums from Swansea Sound, Melancolony, and Bark, and a new EP from Proper.. Look for the August playlist to go up later this week, and the normal Thursday Pressing Concerns as well. For now, though, enjoy the four that I write about below.

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.

Swansea Sound – Twentieth Century

Release date: September 8^th
Record label: Skep Wax
Genre: Indie pop, power pop, twee
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: I Made a Work of Art

Over the past couple of years, Skep Wax Records has released indie pop records from new faces (Special Friend’s Wait Until the Flames Come Rushing In), reissued old classics (Heavenly’s Vs. Satan and Le Jardin de Heavenly), and facilitated the release of new music from longtime indie pop stalwarts (The Orchids’ Dreaming Kind, the Under the Bridge compilation). Swansea Sound is a five-piece group that falls into the latter of those three categories–the band is co-led by Heavenly’s Amelia Fletcher and The Pooh Sticks’ Hue Williams, and also features Heavenly’s Rob Pursey on guitar and bass, The Dentists’ Bob Collins on guitar, and Death in Vegas’ Ian Button on drums. Over the course of one full-length album and a handful of singles/EPs (including late 2022’s bilious Music Lover EP), Swansea Sound presented themselves as musicians who, “experience” be damned, have no interest in slowing down or settling into soft rock. Which leads us to their sophomore album, Twentieth Century, a spirited collection of energetic indie-pop-punk.

Swansea Sound undeniably have a sound right out of the late twentieth century–the members’ twee, jangle pop, and post-punk backgrounds pretty much guarantee this from the get-go. With a British sense of irony, Twentieth Century also looks askance at several developments from the time period immediately following it via surf-pop (“Paradise”) and groovy 60s-influenced music (“Greatest Hits Radio”). Lesser bands would take the position of “old folks complaining about the youth”, but songs like “Punish the Young”, “I Don’t Like Men in Uniform”, and the title track flip this on its head by painting flawed portraits of twentieth century-bred people making their way in the modern world, sometimes maliciously, sometimes cluelessly. In “Keep Your Head On”, Fletcher and Williams play a pair of students who seem all too aware of the nefariousness around them (“Keep your head on,” they sing to each other, “‘Cause they will do / Anything to gaslight you”). That these observations are interspersed between songs like “Seven in the Car” and “Pack the Van”, which portray Swansea Sound finding real, genuine inspiration in music, community, and nature, only serve to illustrate that Twentieth Century isn’t interested in being stuck in the past any more than decades of lived experience force its creators to be. (Bandcamp link)

Proper. – Part-Timer

Release date: September 8^th
Record label: Father/Daughter
Genre: Emo, punk
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Middle Management

My favorite song on last year’s The Great American Novel, Proper.’s third full-length record, was “Shuck & Jive”, a towering and raging piece of emo-punk in which the band’s lead singer, Erik Garlington, rages against the still-pernicious corpse of the music industry over an instrumental storm. With that in mind, I was predisposed to like Part-Timer, the New York band’s follow-up EP that fully explores this avenue of songwriting. “A band writing about being in a band” is a topic that falls flat for me more often than not, but Proper. (Garlington, bassist Natasha Johnson, and drummer Elijah Watson) are clearly animated and driven by what they’ve experienced over the past few years. Calling a record a “snapshot” is a cliche by now, but Part-Timer deserves the designation–it captures a band on the upswing, experiencing new heights and asking questions you’re not necessarily supposed to ask (How much bigger are they going to get? Do they *want* to get any bigger?).

The bookends to Part-Timer are the two most restrained songs musically, even as “Marquee” is Proper.’s version of a boast (to those nitpicking at their success: “I agree but wouldn’t change a thing if I could”, they’re “your favorite band’s favorite band with barely 10K listeners”). The three central songs of the EP are more indebted to louder emo-punk, although the PUP-esque aggression of “Middle Management” is the one song where the band truly let loose (What’s triggered this? Well, “More money would be nice, yeah, but I always refuse to play the fucking game” is a key line here). “Potential” is a slick emo-y indie rock tune that’s appropriately pensive, watching someone they “regarded as a peer” in Bartees Strange blowing up. Garlington seems repelled by the idea of getting as big as Strange (like Garlington sings in “Middle Management”, in response to fans telling him his band should be bigger: “I thought we were where we’re supposed to be”). Proper. end by singing “Fuck it, what’s the worst that could happen? / See y’all for LP4 next year” in “Lull”, and it’s anyone’s guess what things will look like for them by then. (Bandcamp link)

Melancolony – Qualia Problems

Release date: September 1^st
Record label: Louder Than Milk
Genre: Dream pop, indie pop, post-punk, new wave, synth pop, jangle pop, college rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Pebbles to Throw

Justin Loudermilk first appeared on my radar back in March of this year, when his project Melancolony released Dreaming Backwards, a brief but compelling EP of jangle pop, dream pop, and synthpop. As it turns out, the Santa Cruz-based musician had something even more substantial up his sleeve–a nearly fifty-minute full-length record stuffed full of the same kind of music that graced Dreaming Backwards. The first Melancolony album in three years, Qualia Problems repurposes one of Dreaming Backwards’ five songs (the sublime “Colorless”) and adds eleven brand new Melancolony tracks to create an immersive 80s indie pop-inspired experience. Loudermilk, a middle school teacher, was inspired by being around teenagers to revisit the music of his own youth, citing The Church, The Cure, and R.E.M., among others, as inspiration for Qualia Problems’ sound. 

Qualia Problems begins with the dreamy, textured “Maysong”, before offering up a more pop-based number in “Misophonia”. The brisk “Pebbles to Throw” incorporates synthpop and jangle pop in equal measure, using both to dress up what’s probably the most hummable melody on the record’s first side. The ambitious “Disconnection” blooms into a multilayered, post-punk/new wave explosion in its second half, signaling where the B-side of Qualia Problems aims to travel. The final half-dozen songs stretch out to longer lengths, exploring lengthier instrumental breaks and asking for a little more patience. There’s still plenty of “hits” in the back end–see the fuzzy pop of “Watch Out for the Quiet Ones”, the bright, new wave-y “First Song of Summer”, and closing synthpop piece “Fight or Flight (It’s Over)”. Qualia Problems is an album to get lost in, to be sure, but there’s plenty of memorable markers along the way. (Bandcamp link)

Bark – Loud

Release date: September 5^th
Record label: Dial Back Sound/Cool Dog Sound
Genre: Garage rock, southern rock, power pop, alt-country
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Love Minus Action

One of the great undersung bands of the 1980s was Jackson, Mississippi’s The Windbreakers, an excellent jangle pop/college rock/power pop group co-led by Tim Lee and the late Bobby Sutliff. Maybe you heard “All That Stuff” on the 2020 compilation Strum & Thrum: the American Jangle Underground 1983-1987; if you haven’t heard their 1985 album Terminal, do yourself a favor and seek that one out. Lee began a solo career while The Windbreakers were still a going concern, and when their output slowed after the 80s, his own albums became his primary creative outlet. One fixture in Lee’s solo material for two decades has been his wife, Susan Bauer–it’s no surprise, then, that they eventually began a collaborative duo, Bark, in the mid-2010s. Loud is the band’s fourth full-length album, and it’s a sharp collection of Mississippi rock and roll from Tim (on the six-string bass) and Susan (on drums; they both sing lead).

On Loud, the band (featuring a host of guest musicians, including Drive By Truckers’ Matt Patton on bass and Jay Gonzales on keys) marry Tim’s power pop roots with deep southern rock with the skill of seasoned veterans. The record opens with a big hook in “Love Minus Action”, with sharp garage rock guitars filling the space in between repetitions of said hook. “Radar LUV” is humble, handclap-aided roots-y power pop track reminiscent of The Bottle Rockets, and crunchy rockers like “Work in Progress” and “Gutters of Fame” give Loud a sturdy backbone throughout. Still, Bark have plenty in the tank in terms of variety–they’re not going to get fancy, but they can still shape their sound into scorching, country-folk-rock in a cover of David Olney’s “James Robertson Must Turn Right”, twangy new wave/glam in “Rock Club”, and exploratory, cavernous indie rock in closing track “Present Tense”. Pretty much the whole way through, though, the rumbling tones of Bark demand to be played Loud. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

• Dark Satellite – Death of a Classic EP
• Tube Alloys – Magnetic Point
• Blimp – Big City Blimpin’ EP
• Half Thought – Blackout Curtain
• Docents – Figure Study
• Various – Poor Substitutes: A Tribute to Ricked Wicky
• Brian Damage – Previous Episodes
• Smile Too Much – EP 2
• Optic Sink – Glass Blocks
• Hey Colossus – In Blood
• Superfriends – Superfriends Are Online EP
• S.G.A.T.V. – S.G.A.T.V.
• Shaene – Time Lost / Time Regained
• Elle Belle – How Do I Feel?
• Kellan Miller and the Basterds – Juvenillia
• Robert Dallas Gray – The Rain Room
• Lathe of Heaven – Bound by Naked Skies
• Obscure Son – 4 Songs EP
• Tyler Childers – Rustin’ in the Rain
• The Acid Flashback at Nightmare Beach – Jazz from the Other Side of the House
• Family Worship Center – Kicked Out of the Garden
• Slowdive – Everything Is Alive
• Mary Jane Dunphe – Stage of Love
• The Gypsy Moths – Sounds On
• Neptune’s Core – Called Upon EP