Pressing Concerns: Hearts of Animals, Affiliate Links, Dagwood, POLes

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Surprise! It’s a Tuesday Pressing Concerns. As it turns out, I’ve gotten to hear a lot of great new music lately, more than I’d normally be able to cover. Thankfully, though, I had some down time last weekend, and now I’m able to present to you the second of three Pressing Concerns that’ll go up this week. This one features a new album from Hearts of Animals, new EPs from Affiliate Links and Dagwood, and a cassette reissue of an EP from POLes. This is all hot on the heels of yesterday’s post, which presented albums from Feefawfum, Phosphene, Lost Film, and American Cream Band, and I also recommend going back to that one if you missed it.

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.

Hearts of Animals – Imaginary Heartbreak

Release date: September 1st
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Folk, baroque folk
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Imaginary Heartbreak

Mlee Marie has been recording music since at least the mid-2000s. The Houston-based multi-instrumentalist has contributed her talents to albums and/or live performances by everyone from Daniel Johnston to Alien Eyelid (the latter being the most recent, having played saxophone and sang on Bronze Star earlier this year). Concurrently, Marie has been putting out music on her own as Hearts of Animals for just as long–there are four full-length albums under the name, as well as a handful of EPs. As Hearts of Animals, Marie has made music ranging from southern garage rock to dreamy jangle pop, but her latest record, Imaginary Heartbreak, is a decidedly different affair. On her fifth album, Marie dives headfirst into baroque, orchestral folk music–Marie mentions that it’s her first album that “doesn’t have any drums”, and it instead fills this gap with woodwinds, strings, and even a harmonica that all shade her delicate, acoustic song foundations in a different manner.

The opening title track is one of the album’s most meditative (and best) moments, a slow-moving four-minute song in which Marie sings an understated vocal in the beginning, and a hypnotic sustained note marks the song’s second half. The poppiest songs on Imaginary Heartbreak occur in the first half–“Beautiful” features cello and bass (performed by Evan Leslie and Alien Eyelid’s Brett Taylor, respectively) alongside a nice acoustic guitar core and sweet vocals from Marie, and she sings alongside a fluttering flute in “Spell Song”. These two songs sandwich a calming, peaceful instrumental take of “Crepe Myrtle”, a song whose initial version I highlighted in a playlist earlier this year. The record’s subtler midsection might be its high point–from the deliberate pacing of “Chapter” to the deconstructed baroque pop of “Joey’s Bedroom” to the minimalist retro-pop of “Neap Tide”, Marie keeps us all engaged before sending us off with the 13-minute ambient piece “Pictures of Trees”. Hearts of Animals took a winding journey to end up in the midst of the odyssey of Imaginary Heartbreak’s final song, but listening to the record as a whole, it all makes sense. (Bandcamp link)

Affiliate Links – Grave Desecrator

Release date: August 22nd
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Indie pop, dream pop, alt-country, chamber pop
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Grave Desecrator

Hamilton, Ontario’s Brad Davis is new to me, but it seems like he’s been at this for quite a while, playing in several bands over the years (Oval-Teen, Lake Holiday, Fresh Snow). His latest project is called Affiliate Links, a solo-ish endeavor which made its full-length debut last year with Enough Light on We Are Busy Bodies Records. Although there’s no Affiliate Links LP on the decks for 2023, Davis has something even more ambitious planned this year. After marking the first half of 2023 with a standalone cover of Guided by Voices’ “Optional Bases Opposed” (points for creativity in choosing that one), Davis plans to put out three EPs under the Affiliate Links banner before the end of the year. The first one, Grave Desecrator, was mastered by frequent Robert Pollard collaborator Todd Tobias, and it’s a compelling collection which falls on the lush, orchestrated end of bright guitar pop.

Although Davis is the sole songwriter and seemingly the only “permanent” member of Affiliate Links, Grave Desecrator features eight guest musicians contributing everything from trumpet to violin to pedal steel. The EP contains flourishes by these instruments throughout, but the core of the record is Davis’ pop songwriting. The opening title track is a breezy, laid-back piece of guitar pop that nevertheless has a chorus that grabs the listener. The dreamy haze of “Enough Light” is accentuated by pedal steel (provided by Jimmy Hayes and Hamilton McKay Belk), as is the brisk “Abdicate the Throne”, the song on the EP that hews closest to “alt-country”. The piano, organ, and vibraphone coloring “Scar Maps” push it into ornate chamber pop territory, and the whole thing ends with the seven-minute “Sky to Fall”, a steady, trudging piece of slow-building dream-folk. At 24 minutes, Grave Desecrator offers more across its six songs than a lot of bands do on their full-lengths; if Davis truly has two more of these up his sleeve, 2023 is going to be a fertile time for Affiliate Links. (Bandcamp link)

Dagwood – Everything Turned Out Alright

Release date: August 2nd
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Power pop, pop punk
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Sheep on Mars

Although they’ve apparently been putting out music since 2011, New Haven power-pop-punk quartet Dagwood first showed up on my radar in July, when I heard their single “Sheep on Mars”– a song that I then proceeded to highlight on the blog and declare “one of my favorite singles in recent memory” (which I stand by, by the way). Containing a borderline greedy amount of hooks delivered with a blast of fuzzy 90s alt-rock energy, the band (guitarist/vocalist Grady Hearn, guitarist Mike Nagy, bassist Tim Casey, and drummer Kilian Appleby) were an easy addition to my (unofficial, in my head) list of “bands to watch”. Last month, Dagwood gathered up the three singles they’d released so far this year (including “Sheep on Mars”), tacked on three brand-new songs, and, viola, the Everything Turned Out Alright EP was born. 

I’ve already made my position on “Sheep on Mars” clear, but the other two previously-released singles are no slouches either–both the fuzzed-out slacker anthem “I Am a Loser” and the choppy, gnarly “Worse for the Wear” are charming pop songs that earn their places buffeting “Sheep on Mars”. However, it’s the new songs that steal the show on Everything Turned Out Alright. The opening title track is Dagwood at their slickest and cleanest–it’s a bouncy, smooth piece of alt-power-pop in which Hearn tries an enjoyable falsetto on for size. On the other end of the spectrum is “Dagdream”, in which Hearn’s voice gets pushed to the background as the band explore swirling, almost shoegaze-y space rock (the chorus is no less catchy, though). And then, of course, there’s nothing more power pop than ending the album with “Every Time It Ends the Same”, a stomping piece of defeatist rock and roll. A dozen minutes, a half-dozen songs, energy and pop smarts everywhere–Everything Turned Out Alright, indeed. (Bandcamp link)

POLes – Pamplemoustique (Cassette Reissue)

Release date: September 3rd
Record label: Tapes from the Crypt
Genre: Math rock, noise rock, post-hardcore, post-rock
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Puy des goîtres

POLes are an instrumental rock trio, formed in 2010 by then-library coworkers Bruno Kuchalski (guitar), Marc Lobjoit (drums), and Mickaël Gomes (guitar). The band was fairly active in the first half of the 2010s, putting out a handful of releases including 2012’s Marmyteran LP and the Pamplemoustique EP in 2014. The latter appears to still be the most recent POLes release, as the band went on hiatus shortly after. However, with the group (which is currently split between Paris and Lyons) “considering getting back to its aural nonsense” (per Kuchalski) soon, they’ve remastered their nearly-decade-old EP and partnered with Tales from the Crypt Recordings to give Pamplemoustique a cassette release. It’s a noisy, dissonant, and compelling collection of swirling, probing, and punishing guitars that doesn’t seem to have lost any of its bite over time.

Although Pamplemoustique only runs four songs long, one doesn’t feel shortchanged listening to it. For one, all the songs are fully-developed (all of them except for the three-minute “Les nains” are pushing five minutes), and for another, POLes are colliding their instruments together in a shower of sparks for pretty much its entire length. “Puy des goîtres” kicks things off with a nice, meaty noise rock/post-hardcore riff, one that continues boring into the listener’s skull for most of its length before POLes offer up a thrashing conclusion. The high-flying “Les nains” is the mathiest one, drum squalls stopping and starting over twisting guitars, while the wobbly but sturdy march of “Complainte d’Yvonne” is a tough piece of noise punk with which to close things out. Pamplemoustique is far from the “friendliest” record I’ve written about this year, but its strengths reveal themselves to those willing to let POLes take them underground. (Bandcamp link)

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