Pressing Concerns: Dancer, A Day Without Love, The World Famous, Lightheaded

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It’s been a historically busy week over here on Rosy Overdrive. The blog has seen four posts in four days–on Monday, we looked at albums from Soft on Crime, Hello June, Soft Covers, and The Small Intestines, Tuesday’s post featured Norm Archer, The Croaks, Luggage, and Blues Lawyer, and on Wednesday, we took a deeper look at the upcoming Pacing album. To cap it all off is the traditional Thursday Pressing Concerns, this time looking at new albums from A Day Without Love and The World Famous and new EPs from Dancer and Lightheaded. All four of them come out tomorrow!

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.

Dancer – As Well

Release date: October 13th
Record label: GoldMold
Genre: Indie pop, post-punk
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Cordon Bleu

Good news, everyone–Glasgow’s Dancer are back already with their second EP (overall, and of 2023). The self-titled Dancer EP was such a compelling mixture of bright indie pop and sharp post-punk that it broke the implicit “no EPs” rule to show up on Rosy Overdrive’s Favorite Albums of 2023 So Far. The quartet of vocalist Gemma Fleet, guitarist/keytarist Chris Taylor, bassist Andrew Doig, and drummer Gavin Murdoch have plenty of notable musical background between them (Fleet, Taylor, and Doig play together in Order of the Toad, Fleet is also in Current Affairs, Doig is also in Robert Sotelo and Nightshift), but Dancer immediately established themselves as a promising “more than a sum of its parts” situation, which their sophomore record, As Well, only solidifies. The pop touches of Dancer are still here, but these five songs find the band sounding a little less fluffy, jumping fully into the pool of post-punk experimentation rather than just dipping a toe in the water.

That being said, Dancer still open As Well with “Cordon Bleu”, a jangly guitar pop number that falls somewhere in the Motorists realm of marrying pop with post-punk touches. “Chill Pill” one song later introduces a heavier Dancer while nevertheless being catchy in its own weird way–almost industrial in its deployment of fuzzy, drill-like guitars, the song clangs along with a still-pretty-melodic vocal from Fleet. The meditative indie pop of “Love” contains some math-y guitars (the press release for this EP mentions Slint and I can’t not hear it in the main riff), even as it’s probably the one song that can rival “Cordon Bleu” in terms of friendliness. Dancer ended itself with the darker “Telemark” and As Well isn’t to be outdone in this field–with “Pulp Thriller”, the band once again get to drilling, jerking, stopping, and starting as they make something standoffish but nonetheless intriguing, and “And Jesus Wept” throws together chunks of fuzzy guitar playing, a loping rhythm section, some blaring synths, and an all-over-the-place performance from Fleet to create a most interesting concoction of a sendoff. Maybe As Well is Dancer’s version of a “difficult second record”; luckily for us, they’re the kind of band where even that is quite enjoyable to listen to. (Bandcamp link)

A Day Without Love – A Stranger That You Met Before

Release date: October 13th
Record label: Ur Mom
Genre: Lo-fi indie rock, bedroom pop, emo, folk punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Show Friends

Like a basement show where you can tell something memorable is about to happen, A Day Without Love’s Brian Walker attempts to clear out those who aren’t “all in” early on in his latest album, A Stranger That You Met Before. “I sing in houses, and you sing for corporate / I know one of us sucks,” is how Walker begins “DIY or Die”,  the second song on the record, and he follows this with more lyrics making it clear how important maintaining artistic independence is for him. It’s a bold pronouncement, and it’s going to be a turn-off for those who don’t see the vitality in building something outside of the structures that rule our day-to-day lives, but Walker spends all of A Day Without Love making clear that he’s not all bluster, and he’s just as (if not more) devoted to the positive aspects of community-building. It’s an album coming from someone who’s completely immersed himself in the world of underground punk, emo, folk, and indie rock, and who chooses every day to look at the beautiful art of that world, be thankful for the people he’s met while in the pursuit of it, and channel all this into excellent music of his own.

Even though the genres don’t quite match up, the iconoclastic, deep-thinking, conversational nature of Walker’s writing (and his refusal to be intimidated by being “too much”) reminds me a bit of St. Lenox, and while he’s clearly a folk punk veteran, on A Strange That You Met Before he veers more towards an offbeat bedroom folk sound (see “How Did We?” and “Rise”) or electric indie-emo-punk (“Day By Day” and “Caffeine”, a mode reminiscent of Proper., a band Walker mentions as one of the “friends” he’s talking about in highlight “Good Friends Are Hard to Find”). More than anything, Walker emphasizes the importance, the necessity, of real-life relationships at the base of any community from opening track “House” (“Let’s pretend that we’re friends / So I don’t have to be alone”) to the slick pied-piper rock of “Show Friends” to the couple of charming spoken-word dialogue-interludes between Walker and some acquaintances. The substantial number of guest musicians and vocalists on the album also reflects this, and this turns out to be another strength of A Stranger That You Met Before–it’s a wide-ranging and eclectic record led by a charismatic tour guide, to be sure, but it’s a journey that’s far from being taken alone as well. (Bandcamp link)

The World Famous – Totally Famous

Release date: October 13th
Record label: Lauren
Genre: Power pop, pop punk
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Lipstick Trick

Back in August, Lauren Records released Bitch Unlimited by Star 99, which is hands-down one of the best West Coast power-pop-punk records in recent memory. Well, the label is back once again two months later with a record to rival that one in Totally Famous, the debut album from Los Angeles’ The World Famous. The five-piece band is led by singer Will Harris, who (along with the majority of the rest of the band) is originally from Massachusetts. The quintet cites two bands as cornerstones for their guitar pop sound, one from their place of origin and one from their adopted home–Weezer and The Lemonheads. They aren’t inaccurate starting points, but I’d also point to a surf-pop song construction, the suburban wandering pop of Fountains of Wayne, and the wide-eyed California inhabited by Jason Lytle as further bicoastal anchors for the sound of Totally Famous, an incredibly inviting and promising power pop debut.

The first half of Totally Famous gets off to a memorable start with the opening punch of the sparkling guitar pop of “Everyday Fear” and the punched-up classic 60s pop of “Nobody in LA”, and the Scarves-esque “Love Song for a Long Lost Friend” is certainly another early highlight. That being said, the B-side of Totally Famous is very close to perfect. The verses of “Lipstick Trick” are so catchy that it doesn’t even really compute to me when the chorus comes through and kicks its ass at its own game, and then the Teenage Fanclub-indebted “Danvers Opening” waves the “pure power pop” flag high. “O.C. Psychic” is a smart zippy song that’s only “minor” in comparison to what it has to compete with, like the multi-chorus, Grandaddy-ish deliberate fuzz-pop beast of “Candy Clouds” and the laid-back send-off of “Heartburst”. Band name aside, I’m aware that putting together a perfect power pop album isn’t enough to turn The World Famous into the next big stars–but they’re more than ready to be the next Big Star. (Bandcamp link)

Lightheaded – Good Good Great!

Release date: October 13th
Record label: Slumberland
Genre: Jangle pop, dream pop, indie pop, lo-fi pop
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Mercury Girl

New Jersey’s Lightheaded are an indie pop group who put out a self-released album back in 2019 but are introducing themselves to the world (or, at least, the corner of it in which Rosy Overdrive lives) with their Slumberland debut, the five-song Good Good Great! EP. The band’s “core” (which I assume means “primary songwriters”) is Stephen Stec and singer Cynthia Rittenbach, and Sara Abdelbarry and Justin Lombardo round out the ensemble. On Good Good Great! Lightheaded come off as musicians who are first and foremost big fans of the kind of C86, jangle pop, and dream pop that fits well on their home label (both in terms of legacy bands and their modern peers; the group has posted an excellent playlist on streaming services featuring a ton of great current guitar pop groups, many of which have appeared on this blog in some form).

One of the strongest aspects of Good Good Great! is that it establishes in a relatively short amount of time the range of Lightheaded’s songwriting. Opening track “Mercury Girl” combines a reverb-y Cleaners from Venus-esque jangle (is it a coincidence that it shares a title with one of my favorite Martin Newell songs?) with a confident, polished vocal take, while the prominent bass and steady drumbeat on “Orange Creamsicle Head” is a more pastoral version of their sound (something that marks the breezy, folky “The Garden” as well). The electric guitar riff that’s at the foundation of “Patti Girl” is pure college rock, perhaps even in Guided by Voices territory, even as Rittenbach steers it into a more refined, Heavenly version of indie pop. Lightheaded close out the EP on an appropriately weightless note with the 60s pop of “Love Is Overrated”; the band cobble together something perhaps a bit more minimal than the classic “wall of sound”, but no less effective. (Bandcamp link)

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