Pressing Concerns: Slaughter Beach, Dog, Patio, Flat Worms, Anton Barbeau

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This Thursday on Pressing Concerns, we’re looking at four albums that are coming out tomorrow, September 22nd: new ones from Slaughter Beach, Dog, Patio, Flat Worms, and Anton Barbeau. I’ve been a fan of all four of these acts for several years, predating the founding of Rosy Overdrive, and it’s a highlight of the blog’s lifespan that I’m writing about these albums here, together, in 2023. It’s been a busy week on the blog, with posts going up both on Monday (featuring Feefawfum, Phosphene, Lost Film, and American Cream Band) and on Tuesday (featuring Hearts of Animals, Affiliate Links, Dagwood, and POLes). Check both of those posts out if you haven’t yet; that’s a dozen records to take with you into the weekend!

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.

Slaughter Beach, Dog – Crying, Laughing, Waving, Smiling

Release date: September 22nd
Record label: Lame-O
Genre: Singer-songwriter, alt-country, folk rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Float Away

For the majority of the 2010s, Jake Ewald co-fronted a band whose appeal escaped me at the time, but I have enjoyed his other project, Slaughter Beach, Dog, effectively from the moment I heard the rickety indie rock of “Mallrat Semi-Annual” back in 2016. Ewald has grown quite a bit as a writer over the past few years–like a lot of emo-originating songwriters, he clearly learned a lot from Johns Darnielle and K. Samson, but he’s always come off as “informed by” rather than imitating others. The folk-indebted, earnest, and distinctly hand-drawn style that Ewald’s cultivated has been a treat to witness take shape across career highlights like the underappreciated Motorcycle.jpg EP and the relatively cold, engrossing opus Safe and Also No Fear. The fifth Slaughter Beach, Dog album is called Crying, Laughing, Waving, Smiling, and Ewald is once again both in motion and in his element. It follows up on the more-laid back moments of 2020’s At the Moonbase–it’s a record made by someone who’s always had a knack for songwriting but feels like he’s getting more comfortable and trusting in his work.

Part of this comfort is reflected by the nature of Crying, Laughing, Waving, Smiling’s recording sessions–it’s Slaughter Beach, Dog’s most band-centric album yet. Not only was it recorded by a solid five-piece lineup–it was also a collaborative effort, with the rest of the musicians playing “what they were hearing” for the song based off of Ewald’s skeletal versions. The band–which I simply must point out includes Rozwell Kid’s Adam Meisterhans on guitar, as well as Superheaven’s Zack Robbins on drums, longtime collaborator Ian Farmer on bass, and Logan Roth on piano and synths–don’t turn Crying, Laughing, Waving, Smiling into an out-of-character rock-and-roll album, rather working more subtly in lockstep to dress Ewald’s songs with a bit more refinement. Of course, Ewald has always put more than enough into his music to let it stand without too many bells and whistles, and even when Slaughter Beach, Dog kicks things up a little bit, the core of the album is vintage Ewald.

The first half of Crying, Laughing, Waving, Smiling is, understandably, the more showy side, with the band slipping into something of a folk rock groove on “Strange Weather”, “Float Away”, and “My Sister in Jesus Christ”. The starry guitar pop of “Float Away” is one of the most instantly infectious moments I’ve heard on a Slaughter Beach, Dog album, while “My Sister in Jesus Christ” pulls off marrying a particularly potent set of Ewald lyrics to raucous (well, for Slaughter Beach, Dog, at least) country rock. Still, the record opens with the fairly meditative “Surfin’ New Jersey”, which melts into dreamy, psychedelic folk rock in a less obvious but perhaps even more impressive display of the band’s power. The nine-minute “Engine” picks up this thread in the middle of the record’s second side, with the band stretching out just enough to guide Ewald, at the center, home. Almost reflecting on the success of “Engine”, the last two songs on the record dial things back a bit, but that doesn’t mean they’re relegated to afterthoughts; I’ve been turning the lyrics to “Easter” over in my mind for quite a bit now. I wouldn’t expect any less of a riddle than “In my ice cream stand, there’s french fries too” to close a Slaughter Beach, Dog album. (Bandcamp link)

Patio – Collection

Release date: September 22nd
Record label: Fire Talk
Genre: Post-punk, art punk
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Either Way

As far as I’m concerned, Patio’s second album has something for everyone (assuming everyone likes modern post-punk, which I choose to believe). Musically, Collection is a collection of quite aurally pleasing indie rock and art-punk (dealing in both garage-y bluntness and more restrained melodicism); approachable but not too “simple”, there’s plenty of unexpected and exciting moments. Lyrically, Collection is attention-grabbing too–not every moment on the album is straightforward (certainly not!), but plenty of moments are, and even when the lyricist (either bassist Loren DiBlasi or Lindsey-Paige McCloy, who trade off lead vocals) is a bit cagey, it’s not hard to, with a little bit of close listening and tone reading, latch onto what’s going on here to some degree. I do remember quite enjoying Patio’s 2019 debut, Essentials, and would’ve been happy to take in “more of the same” without too much thought, but I do appreciate Patio creating a record that prompts me to listen a bit more actively.

I admittedly have a terrible track record at predicting these things, but if you told me that Collection was going to launch Patio into the stratosphere, I’d believe you wholeheartedly. Just listening to something like “Either Way”, an album track that offers up increasingly affecting vocals, welcome pockets of earnest rolling indie rock and whoa-nelly, jerk-stop moments, and writing that reflects said push and pull (“I don’t need to know everything you’ve thought” on one end, “How can I do this right? How can I take your side?” on the other)–what’s not to like? Or the way that “Sixpence” balances its “oh shit” bone-dry chorus by sliding into offbeat pop-weird mode for the rest of the song? I appreciate every time that McCloy unexpectedly revvs their guitar into a brief ringing, and I think it’s cool how the album opens with a slow-builder (“The Sun”) and then launches into a song that starts at 100% before pulling the curtain back and then opening it again (“Relics”). I like how “Performance” will drop a crystal clear line like “I am not a cloak to be worn on particular days” in the middle of everything else going on in it. There’s a lot to like on Collection; it’s a pop album that’s also a grower. (Bandcamp link)

Flat Worms – Witness Marks

Release date: September 22nd
Record label: GOD?/Drag City
Genre: Garage rock, post-punk, fuzz rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Sigalert

True, there have been a lot of bands trying to nail the midpoint between post-punk and garage rock over the past decade or so, but there’s something about Los Angeles’ Flat Worms that makes them particularly compelling practitioners of the art. Call it a back-against-the-wall edginess, or a no-nonsense, song-first, “workmanlike” attitude–they’ve got that dog in them, so to speak. I recognized it on 2019’s Into the Iris EP, and the band (Will Ivy, Justin Sullivan, and Tim Hellman) only continued their run into 2020’s Antarctica (one of my favorite records from that year). For a band that put out two albums and two EPs in a four-year period, going over three years between albums is a pretty notable gap, but Witness Marks sounds like a group that hasn’t lost a step. Even for a band that excels at making music like this, the album particularly has a “back in the saddle” feeling, even more laser-focused on rolling through sharp garage rock as a single, in-lockstep unit.

Opening track “Sigalert” is Flat Worms’ version of a raveup–careening guitars, fuzzed-out bass guitar, and barked but subtly malleable vocals all combine to what I’d consider to be an excellent two-point-five minute pop song. “Orion’s Belt” and “Time Warp in Exile” continue the sharp garage punk excellence in the record’s first-half, and even slightly restrained tracks like the stomping “SSRT” and the prowling “Suburban Swans” still cut. While its surface remains unreadable, there’s grief at the heart of Witness Marks, the lyrics of which were written in the aftermath of Ivy and his wife losing their unborn child. Ivy’s writing largely deals with this in the form of powerful but fairly opaque imagery, like the “helicopter in the burning sky” in “Wolves in Phase”, although “16 Days” throws metaphor out the window and the closing title track has a couple of gut-punch lines. Musically, Flat Worms don’t soften their blows as they take on Ivy’s writing. They sharpen the tools they know how to use best, lock themselves in, and proceed forward together. (Bandcamp link)

Anton Barbeau – Morgenmusik/Nachtschlager

Release date: September 22nd
Record label: Think Like a Key/Gare du Nord
Genre: Psychedelic pop, power pop
Formats: CD, digital
Pull Track: Waiting on the Radio

Gather ‘round, children–Anton Barbeau has a thirty-one song double album to impart upon all of us. Barbeau–who was splitting his time between his native California and more recent home of Berlin during the recording of Morgenmusik/Nachtschlager–has been a scourge on the genre of offbeat pop rock for over three decades now, and if anything, he’s only ramped up his output in recent years. The 77-minute Morgenmusik/Nachtschlager (which follows last year’s Power Pop!!! and Stranger, 2021’s Oh the Joys We Live For, 2020’s Manbird and Kenny Vs. Thrust…) is both a victory lap and a statement that Barbeau still has a lot left to sculpt. It’s full of contributions from guest musicians that prove Barbeau has successfully worked his way into the stratosphere of his influences–XTC’s Colin Moulding, The Soft Boys’ Andy Metcalfe, the dB’s Chris Stamey, Elf Power’s Bryan Poole–but the amount of ground covered here suggests he’s not content to sit on his laurels now (and if he’s not now, he likely will never be).

Realistically, I’m not going to be able to capture everything about Morgenmusik / Nachtschlager in 300-400 words–I encourage you to immerse yourself in it and figure out which corners of Barbeau’s mind resonate with you the most. Barbeau makes getting into this album as easy as it could be, mind you–“Waiting on the Radio” is a gorgeous, nostalgic jangle pop opener, and the next few tracks may have odd moments but all are pop successes (the proggy “Bop”, the composed “Milksnake”, the synth-funk touches of “Mothership Projection”). The Morgenmusik side is probably the more immediate one (“Coming Clean” and “Demand a Dream” highlight the rest of this side), although Nachtschlager does contain “Come Back”, which finds Barbeau pulling out a song structure straight from the best of 60s girl group singles. “Crankin’ em out, I’m a wizard with a wand, yeah,” Barbeau sings with a wink on the record’s penultimate song, “…the scent of zeitgeist in the air”. The punchline to this is, perhaps, the record’s final track, “Help Yourself to a Biscuit”, a six-minute, multi-stage piece of fully-loaded psychedelic fuzz-pop that sounds, well, timeless. (Bandcamp link)

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