Pressing Concerns: Thanks for Coming, Modern Nature, Grass Jaw, Seablite

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Thursday? Indeed. After an eventful week on Rosy Overdrive, the third and final Pressing Concerns of the week has arrived, offering up some thoughts on new albums from Modern Nature, Grass Jaw, and Seablite, and a new EP from Thanks for Coming. All of these records are out tomorrow, except for the Grass Jaw record, which is out today. If you missed either of this week’s earlier posts–Monday’s tackled records from Coventry, The Garment District, Soft Screams, and Guest Directors, while Tuesday’s rounded up releases from Puppy Problems, Neil Jung, Grand Drifter, and Surf Harp–I recommend checking those out too.

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.

Thanks for Coming – What Is My Capacity to Love?

Release date: September 29th
Record label: Danger Collective
Genre: Lo-fi indie rock, singer-songwriter, bedroom pop
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Depends

Water from Your Eyes are certainly a good band, and I’m happy for them that they’ve finally started receiving critical attention for their unique and layered version of indie rock. Funnily enough, though, I personally gravitate towards the Brooklyn duo’s respective solo projects more often. I’ve written about a couple of Nate Amos’ records as This Is Lorelei, and while What Is My Capacity to Love? is the first time that Rachel Brown’s Thanks for Coming has appeared on Pressing Concerns, they’ve popped up here and there on the blog before as well. Like This Is Lorelei, Thanks for Coming is a prolific lo-fi pop project that’s slowed down a little bit as Water from Your Eyes has taken off–last year, Danger Collective put together a cassette of highlights from the eighty-something releases Brown’s put up on Bandcamp under the name (the compilation is a great starting place if one’s overwhelmed). The eight-song, twenty-one minute What Is My Capacity to Love? EP is the first new Thanks for Coming material since Brown joined up with Danger Collective, and I’m pleased and unsurprised to say that the immediacy and casual-yet-substantial feel of the project hasn’t been lost as it’s moved to a proper label and a somewhat more normal release schedule.

What Is My Capacity to Love? comes against the backdrop of a disintegrated romantic relationship as well as the rise of Water from Your Eyes, which found Brown touring more than ever before, and in new places unfamiliar to them. Although it certainly feels “raw” in places, the EP’s primary perspective feels like a necessary step back, with Brown writing more analytically and walking us (and themself) through questions like the one posed in the record’s title. Brown gives What Is My Capacity to Love? a typically stripped-down arrangement, with their guitar and vocals given barebones accompaniment. Their vocal delivery is typically stoic to the point where, when they do inject more emotion into it, it’s immediately attention-grabbing. Some of the EP’s strongest moments come on “Depends” and “Let It Be 10,000 Years (Or Just 0.01cm from Each Other)”, both of which feature Brown turning over lyrics like “I loved you like my life depended on it / You loved me like the moth to the flame,” over nothing more than a distorted electric guitar. Elsewhere, the loop-featuring “Loop”, the messy “Postcard”, and the dizzy synths and drum machine of “Melted” continue to no less effectively sketch the varying contours of the record’s central relationship and what Brown determines about themself through it. What Is My Capacity to Love? is a “working things out” record from someone who seems to always be on the move; thankfully, they put a pause on things long enough to put these songs together. (Bandcamp link)

Modern Nature – No Fixed Point in Space

Release date: September 29th
Record label: Bella Union
Genre: Post-rock, jazz, chamber pop, baroque pop, psychedelia
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Tonic

After the breakup of his garage-y, psych-fuzzy-y indie rock duo Ultimate Painting, Cambridge’s Jack Cooper has followed a decidedly different path as the leader of Modern Nature. The debut Modern Nature album, How to Live, embarked on an exploration of the world of Woods-y psychedelic folk rock; it was already a departure from Ultimate Painting, and Cooper has spent the last few years moving even further away from it with 2020’s Annual mini-album and last year’s Island of Noise. As Modern Nature has become more of a rolling cast of contributors led by Cooper, he’s moved away from indie rock and cultivated a sound heavy on Mark Hollis-esque empty space utilization, as well as one prominently taking advantage of the jazz-and-woodwinds background of Sunwatchers’ Jeff Tobias, the project’s most consistent contributor other than Cooper. The Modern Nature of No Fixed Point in Space has, at this point, fully transformed into something else entirely–finally casting off the folk rock of its past, the album zeroes in on the freer moments from Island of Noise to create a record of seven expansive, lush, and completely unmoored post-rock songs.

In addition to Tobias and longtime drummer Jim Wallis, Cooper’s ensemble on No Fixed Point in Space includes Pere Ubu/This Is Not This Heat’s Alex Ward, The Necks’ Chris Abrahams, and singer Julie Tippetts (who’s been making music since the 1960s as Julie Driscoll, and whose voice adds a key dimension to the album’s sound). The beginning of the album finds Modern Nature in full-on Spirit of Eden/Laughing Stock territory, with twin seven-minute songs “Tonic” and “Murmuration” slowly traversing cavernous terrain featuring upright bass, woodwinds, and minimal percussion. Cooper’s voice is perhaps the only true anchor on the album–either on its own or accompanied by Tippetts, it’s the friendliest and most consistent feature throughout No Fixed Point in Space. At least, that is, until Cooper largely hands over those duties to Tippetts towards the end of the album–trusting her equally to land the bass-plodding of “Tapestry” and the sweeping “Ensō”. No Fixed Point in Space may be a relaxed-sounding album in places, but it isn’t a complacent one–it’s probing until its end. (Bandcamp link)

Grass Jaw – OH NO

Release date: September 28th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Fuzz rock, lo-fi indie rock, alt-country, noise rock, slowcore
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Two Things at Once

Grass Jaw is becoming a Pressing Concerns regular, a development that makes me happy to observe happening. Today, we’re greeted with the third album that Ithaca’s Brendan Kuntz has released under the name in as many years, following 2021’s Anticipation and last year’s Circles. Over his recent output, Kuntz has pursued a recognizable and underappreciated sound that mixes downcast, Exploding in Sound-style noisy indie rock, slowcore, and alt-country–and those who enjoyed his last two offerings will find plenty to enjoy on OH NO, the sixth Grass Jaw album. After leaning into the weary aspects of his sound on Circles, the follow-up feels a little bit more rousing than what Grass Jaw had been doing. Kuntz leans a little more into post-punk, noise rock, post-hardcore, and even a little bit of math rock on this one while still leaving plenty of space for the slower and subtler aspects of his sound, creating a distinct wrinkle in the ever-expanding Grass Jaw tapestry.

OH NO starts out humbly enough with the acoustic-led “No Reminders”, a song where Kuntz’s holler puts it into “gothic country/dark Americana” territory, before ending with a woozy, fuzzy rock final minute or so. The first side of OH NO picks up on the busier thread with which that song ends, from the worried, uneasy chaos of “Blue Skies” and the fascinating “Two Things at Once”,  which uses saxophone (provided by Tom Yagielski) and prominent noise-punk bass to put it closer to something off of Dischord Records than anything else I’ve heard from Kuntz. Kuntz saves the less rocky material for the record’s second half, although the steady “Enough (To Feel About About)” and big closing track “Things You Can’t Take Back” both take advantage of Grass Jaw’s electric side. The most unique song on the record is the penultimate title track–there’s a crushing heaviness to it in a completely different way, one that embraces instrumental, glacial post-rock. It’s another side of Grass Jaw, but distinctly them as well. (Bandcamp link)

Seablite – Lemon Lights

Release date: September 29th
Record label: Mt. St. Mtn.
Genre: Shoegaze, fuzz pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Monochrome Rainbow

(Author’s note: after publication, it came to my attention that I listened to this album with an incorrect track order, and some of the writing reflects this. I’ve decided to leave it as-is; please consult your vinyl copy or digital provider of choice for comparison.)

The newest addition to Mt. St. Mtn.’s stable of exciting guitar pop groups is the San Francisco quartet Seablite, who have joined with the label to put out their sophomore album, Lemon Lights, after releasing an album and EP in 2019 and 2020, respectively, on Emotional Response. Across Lemon Lights’ dozen tracks, the band (co-led by guitarist Lauren Matsui and bassist Galine Tumasyan, also featuring Wax Idols’ Jen Mundy on guitar and the excellent Andy Pastalaniec of Chime School on drums) establishes themselves as true shoegaze devotees. The album (which was mastered by Ride’s Mark Gardener) offers up a sharp collection of fuzzed-out pop songs–some of them whip up more of a wall of sound than others, but all of them display the band’s ability to pull off effortless-sounding but still substantial pieces of indie pop.

Lemon Lights gets off to an attention-grabbing start with “Blink Each Day”, a noisy and fuzzy piece of shoegaze that is firing on all cylinders from the get-go, and while the somewhat darker “Drop of Kerosene” is a little more of a slow-burner, it works itself up into a distorted frenzy in its chorus too. Although the amped-up “Frozen Strawberries” and the overstuffed Britpop-fluent “Hit the Wall” continue the record’s shoegaze-heavy streak on side one, the lighter “Faded” reveals Seablite’s dreamy jangle pop side. It’s in the minority in Lemon Lights’s tracklist, but side two highlights like “Monochrome Rainbow” and “Smudge Was a Fly” reveal that the band is quite effective in this mode as well. It’s certainly not an either/or proposition, mind you, as tracks like “Hold My Kite” and “Pot of Boiling Water” are plenty heavy despite offering up some of the best pop hooks on the album as well. It’s not a simple thing to make loud music while still allowing the songs enough space to shrine through, but Seablite certainly pull it off throughout Lemon Lights. (Bandcamp link)

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