Pressing Concerns: Soft on Crime, Hello June, Soft Covers, The Small Intestines

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Believe it or not, it’s Monday again, and today’s extra-soft edition of Pressing Concerns is here in your inbox and/or browser. We’re looking at new albums from Soft on Crime, Hello June, Soft Covers, and The Small Intestines below this introduction. This is a great entry if guitar pop is your thing, and we also get to visit some exotic locales (Australia! Ireland! West Virginia!) with these records.

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.

Soft on Crime – Rarities Vol. 1

Release date: October 6th
Record label: Eats It
Genre: Power pop, indie pop, jangle pop, lo-fi pop
Formats: Cassette, CD, digital
Pull Track: Bored Harder

Back in February, Soft on Crime released their debut full-length, New Suite–it’s an immediate collection of vintage power pop, college rock, new wave, and psychedelia that quickly became one of my favorite records of 2023. Although their first album is less than a year old, the Dublin-based trio of Padraig O’Reilly, Lee Casey, and Dylan Phillips have been making music together for a few years now–they put out an EP in 2019 and a single in 2020. Interestingly, Soft on Crime have decided to follow up their instant classic of a first LP by reaching back into their vault, giving us Rarities Volume 1. The recordings on this album span from before any Soft on Crime material had been released to songs recorded concurrently with New Suite to even a handful of tracks recorded earlier this year, after their first album came out.

Soft on Crime are more relaxed on Rarities Volume 1 than on New Suite; while their proper album was sequenced to reel the listener in with a stacked A-side, the trio offer up a couple of older (circa December 2017), mid-tempo cuts to begin this compilation in “Show’s Over” and “Two Sides”. It’s low-key pop music, but the two actually wind up being some of the most “normal” sounding of the early Soft on Crime songs–the band chooses to bookend the album with their first recordings, and the three tracks that end Rarities Volume 1 are the three oddest. The stripped-down, Phillips-led “I’m Starving” is so casual that it captures someone chatting with one of the band member’s dads at the end of the recording; the claustrophobic, jazz-influenced “Cranky Family Holiday” and the slow-building “Jack the Fatalist” are less bare, but they’re still the band on the outskirts of their own sound.

The newer songs on Rarities Volume 1 are the ones that feel like Soft on Crime in “pop hitmaker” mode, and they’re also from where the bulk of my personal favorites come (always a good sign for an active band). Mind you, this still isn’t exactly the Soft on Crime of New Suite–the psychedelic country rock of “(Try Not to Piss In) The River of Time” is a new look for the band, but one they wear quite well. “Fibbers Observation Deck” was recorded in May alongside “The River of Time”, and its simple conceit might’ve sounded off in the middle of New Suite, but its huge garage-y power pop punk chorus shines in this context. Maybe my favorite of all of them is “Bored Harder”, an especially laid-back 2021 piece of lo-fi power pop that sounds like a lost Connections song. Even though it’s a different stripe than most of New Suite, it’s hard to believe Soft on Crime would leave it off of their debut album–but then, I suppose, that’s what Rarities Volume 1 is for. (Bandcamp link)

Hello June – Artifacts

Release date: October 6th
Record label: 31 Tigers
Genre: Alt-country, singer-songwriter, roots rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Sometimes

Hello June’s self-titled debut album came out all the way back in 2018. Hello June was a solid collection of dream pop-fluent indie rock, with lightly fuzzy guitars dressing up singer-songwriter Sarah Rudy’s compositions, which also featured just a touch of alt-country that recalled the band’s home of West Virginia. The sophomore Hello June album, Artifacts, comes a half-decade later, and with it comes a pretty distinct reinvention of the band’s sound. Rudy challenged herself to write songs with more “straightforward” lyrics than the enigmatic nature of her writing on Hello June, and she and the band have given their music a similar streamlining. Artifacts is all crystal-clear, bare-sounding country rock, zeroing in on the “rootsiest” parts of the band’s past sound and embracing it in a way that Hello June, frankly, didn’t even really hint at. Perhaps the aspect of Hello June the band holds onto the most is its pensiveness–there’s a quiet intensity to Artifacts, recalling the more introspective, introverted material from troubadours like Sarah Shook, Lydia Loveless, and Lilly Hiatt.

Listening to Hello June, it’s clear that Rudy was already destined for something behind the relative anonymity of “dream pop singer”–she was peeking out in those songs, but her personality is completely out in the open from the desert-sparse instrumental of “Sometimes”, Artifacts’ opening track. Some of the album’s songs are more “rock” than others–“Honey I Promise” and “Faded Blue” find the band playing louder than they typically do on the record–but Hello June never quite “let loose” here. It’s an incredibly focused album, with Rudy taking us on immersive rides everywhere from the since-faded relationship on the “Interstate” to the sense of finality that she experiences under the night sky in “The Moon”. On an album about sorting through pieces of what’s left of a once-whole past (the Artifacts to which the title refers), it’s fitting that it closes with a cover of “Take Me Home, Country Roads”. Back when I wrote about Spirit Night, I covered how that song and the state it’s come to represent are always looming over those who hail from it, regardless of where they go or what they do. I imagine, when choosing to end the album with it, Rudy had to weigh the fact that she and the people she knows have doubtless heard countless covers of the song–but Artifacts is, above anything else, an honest album. (Bandcamp link)

Soft Covers – Soft Serve

Release date: October 6th
Record label: Hidden Bay/Little Lunch
Genre: Indie pop, jangle pop
Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Point of View

Our first selection of Australian indie pop in this edition of Pressing Concerns comes to us via Soft Covers, a three-piece who formed in Brisbane and currently reside in Melbourne. The band’s three members, Laura, James, and Dean, linked up after playing in several bands separately over the years (Dumb Things, People Mover, Future Haunts) and put out the Permanent Part Time cassette EP as a debut in 2020. Soft Covers’ first full-length, Soft Serve, is being co-released by Hidden Bay and Little Lunch, two labels who also teamed up to put out the last Australian album I wrote about, Pretty in Pink’s Pillows. If you were into Pretty in Pink’s minimalist guitar pop, Soft Covers may be up your alley, although Soft Serve is a more uptempo and sunny record than Pillows, and the songwriting is more conversational and lyrically wide-ranging.

There’s plenty to like immediately on Soft Serve with opening track “Every Week”, which deploys a cheerily-strummed acoustic guitar, a duet in the chorus, and some nice Flying Nun-ish keyboard parts. Soft Covers aren’t afraid to keep things simple, hanging onto a single chord or two in a Clean-ish way–the organ-featuring, steadily-moving-forward “Coming and Going” in particular reminds me of that band, and it’s certainly baked into the DNA of the pure sugar of “Shampoo” as well. Some other nice touches throughout Soft Serve includes what sounds like a marimba on the wandering nostalgia of “Nth Qld, Late 80s”, some hovering-in-place synths on “Big Jack”, and the melodica that plays off the excellent jangle pop closing track “Point of View”. The bright sound of the band fits the brief but memorable characters and scenes that show up in these songs, from the getting-older-but-not-dead-yet “Big Jack”,  or their takes on Muriel’s Wedding and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy with “The Real Housewives of Porpoise Spit” and “The Ballad of Ricki Tarr”, respectively. Soft Serve feels like listening to a friend tell you about a movie they saw, or an eccentric acquaintance, comforting in its casualness. (Bandcamp link)

The Small Intestines – Hide in Time

Release date: September 29th
Record label: Meritorio/Lost and Lonesome
Genre: Jangle pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Horse Riding

It’s a two-for-one deal on Melbourne indie pop in this post! Like Soft Covers discussed previously, The Small Intestines are an Australian trio inspired by jangly guitar pop whose members come from other local bands (drummer/vocalist Matt Liveriadis and bassist/vocalist Rob Remedios played in Chook Race, guitarist/vocalist Tristan Peach had his Peach Happening solo project). The Small Intestines have apparently been together since 2016, but Hide in Time is their debut release, coming to us via Lost and Lonesome and Meritorio (the latter of which also put out another excellent Australian guitar pop album earlier this year–There’s No I in Spice World by Spice World). It’s a smooth journey, the “debut” tag seemingly out of place on an album made by a group of musicians who’ve been playing (with each other and otherwise) for quite some time now.

Not quite as peppy as Soft Covers nor as sparse as Spice World, The Small Intestines make distant-outpost rock music on Hide in Time. It feels like a thirty-minute excerpt from an infinitely-rolling tape, like these guys are making low-key, timeless-sounding indie rock on a constant basis regardless of whether we’re listening. This kind of music always exists in the shadow of Flying Nun Records, and I’m not going to tell you that The Small Intestines don’t sound like The Bats in places on Hide in Time, but they filter it through a power trio, almost classic rock-indebted lens. Remedios’ bass work in particular I want to single out–he’s really going to town under the radar in songs like “Chimes of Love” and “L.O.V.E. Love”. The psychedelic jangle of “Under the Weather”, the giddy pop rock of “Stripped Away”, and the melody-laden “Old Town” are some of the record’s more Kiwi moments, but there’s also a coolness throughout the record that skips past the New Zealand scene entirely and goes straight to the source, The Velvet Underground. In that way, The Small Intestines’ peers are as much American groups like Advertisement, Weak Signal, and Glyders as C86/Dunedin-indebted southern hemisphere groups–they’re a pop band that also doesn’t shy away from a groove. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

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