Pressing Concerns: Fox Japan, Hard Copy, Sexores, Fig by Four

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We’ve got another excellent and full week ahead of us on Rosy Overdrive in terms of new music, and we’re starting out with an absolute blast of a round-up. This issue of Pressing Concerns looks at new albums from Hard Copy, Sexores, and Fig by Four, and a new EP from Fox Japan.

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Fox Japan – Cannibals

Release date: October 16th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Power pop, post-punk
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: The Performer

Fox Japan emerged from Morgantown, West Virginia in the late 2000s, around the tail end of the golden age of “blog rock”. The four-piece band of brothers Charlie Wilmoth, Sam Wilmoth, and Pete Wilmoth plus Andrew Slater initially made sharp, nervous-sounding post-punk revival-ish music, the kinetic energy of the band bouncing off of Charlie Wilmoth’s grandiosely sardonic lyrics (I still think of their grotesque ode to Glenn Beck whenever that man is in the news), but they’ve certainly mellowed in recent years. They’ve aged gracefully into a guitar pop sound closer to Teenage Fanclub or The Chills, although Charlie’s writing never lost its bite–their most recent album, 2020’s What We’re Not, was probably my favorite album of that year due to this uniquely compelling combination.

The members of Fox Japan have moved to different locales in recent years–Pittsburgh, Bloomington, Los Angeles, Fairmont–and Charlie has spent the past few years exploring side projects that have gotten increasingly further from the guitar-based sound of his past (his duo Oblivz with Slater balanced guitars with prominent synths, and his solo project Charles the Obtuse dispensed with the six-strings entirely). With all this in mind, it wouldn’t have been a shock to see Fox Japan fade into the rearview mirror. And yet, here we are with Cannibals, a five-song Fox Japan EP that picks up where the quartet left off those three or so years ago–sort of. If anything, Fox Japan sound looser here than they have of late–almost like, after a couple years wandering away from indie rock, Charlie (and subsequently the rest of the band) are enthused to be inhabiting this skin yet again. Charlie’s writing matches the energy of the band by being less “buttoned up” and more “mask off” than normal; while his recent writing has examined the rot and pain at the heart of “official”-seeming institutions, he’s tapping into something a bit more primal in these five songs.

The EP opens with a couple different sides of Fox Japan–we’ve got the orchestral indie rock of “The Performer” and the 60-second post-punk-pop thrashing of “Mouth of the Century”–but the connection is in the characters here, from the vampiric entity in the former who destroys lives while flourishing his cape and the all-consuming, pretty dickish sentient mouth in the latter (depicted in an unsettling video from Spirit Night/Librarians/Good Sport’s Ryan Hizer). The rest of Cannibals may not be quite as stark, but it fills itself out quite nicely–the detritus rattled off over a mid-tempo, layered instrumental in “Pity Party” feels like the most Oblivz-y moment here, and while “Good Morning” and closing track “Who Are You” feature more “traditional” Fox Japan lyrical moments, the gargantuan and deliberate alt-rock in the latter and equally intentional pop rock in the former give them shapes as distinct as anything else on the EP. In that final track, Wilmoth asks version after version of the titular pointed question–do you belong in Fox Japan’s cadre of cannibals, too? (Bandcamp link)

Hard Copy – 12 Shots of Nature

Release date: October 20th
Record label: Feel It
Genre: Post-punk, garage punk, art punk, experimental rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Torpedo

The latest release from Feel It Records takes the label back to its roots–it’s putting out the debut album of a band hailing from their original hometown of Richmond, Virginia. The quartet of Hard Copy sound ahead of schedule on 12 Shots of Nature, their second release following 2021’s Hidden Beat EP. The band (Michael McBean, Ben Harsel, Ian McQuary, and Louis Henninger) sound like they’ve been playing together for a long time on this record, ripping through a dozen songs that flow together beautifully and wear their influences openly without biting too much from any one band. There’s an undeniable Mark E. Smith influence in the lead vocals, there’s an experimental/rock dichotomy recalling Pere Ubu and Wire, and there’s a Talking Heads/krautrock-esque sense of rhythm going on throughout the album as well. I do want to emphasize that 12 Shots of Nature has a lot of its own personality; there’s nothing rote or uninspired about Hard Copy’s moves on it.

Hard Copy hit the gas on opening track “Chew”, a brisk piece of art punk that actually offers up a garage-y anthem in its chorus. The impact of that chorus is only emphasized by the rest of 12 Shots of Nature–Hard Copy aren’t looking to write that kind of music merely for the sake of it; it just happened to serve the song well. Likewise, the inclusion of decidedly not-“rock” instrumentals like “100,000 Negatives on Glass Plates” and “Wheel Route” only serves to normalize songs like “Stray Dog” and “Torpedo”, which are certainly “weird” but have a transfixing post-punk quality to them. The former zigzags from spoken word impressions to impenetrable noise rock, and the latter contains some lines (“I’ll never live down the fact that my parents made torpedoes for a living / More man than machine, I’m capable of one hundred feelings,” to open) indicating that these lyrical diatribes are more than just space-fillers for the band. “Airlines” and “Paradise” in 12 Shots of Nature’s second half are probably the friendliest moments on the record outside of its opening track, fitting alongside the jagged edges nicely. Post-punk hitmakers Hard Copy are dramatic art rockers Hard Copy (“Pile of Rocks”) are the noise-slinging Hard Copy of “Slapstick”–it’s all one copy. (Bandcamp link)

Sexores – Mar del Sur

Release date: October 20th
Record label: Buh
Genre: Dream pop, synthpop
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Las Aguas en Los Bordes de Fuego

For almost two decades now, Lima, Peru’s Buh Records has been chronicling the experimental and underground sides of Latin American music, both of its past (in the form of archival releases) and present (in its promotion of new bands and musicians). One of these current groups is Quito, Ecuador’s Sexores–since 2010, the band (which has also existed for stints in Barcelona and Mexico) have released four full-length records and an EP before returning with their fifth album, Mar del Sur, this month. The pseudonymous duo (“2046” is on vocals and guitar, “606” on drums) have a dream pop-indebted sound that’s similar to the last Buh Records band I wrote about, Lima’s Thank You Lord for Satan, but while the latter band favored an eclectic, psychedelic take on the genre, Sexores are more comfortable zeroing in on a synthpop, 1980s electronica-influenced version of it. Not that the six songs of Mar del Sur aren’t adventurous, but they make their homes within the warm confines of dreamy, reverby pop music.

With only a half-dozen songs, Sexores have to make every entry on Mar del Sur count, and indeed, all of these tracks feel fully-realized and completely fleshed-out. Opening track “Magallanes” runs about five minutes in length (half of the record does the same, and the other three songs aren’t far behind), with the steady drumbeat anchoring the array of distorted guitars and synths that float alongside 2046’s vocals. “Aequorea” strikes a similar balance, even throwing a bit of 1990s-esque kitchen-sink electronic “alternative” pop into the mix, while songs like “Las Aguas en Los Bordes de Fuego” and “Legos de Lirios” have more than enough fuzzy guitars in their structures to indicate that their stated shoegaze influence is informing these songs as well. There’s a surprising guest rap verse (done in Kichwa, a native Andean language) from rapper DRK on “Biolumínica” that also feels particularly 90s, even as the synthpop/darkwave instrumental is still very much 80s-originating. Mar del Sur closes things out with the steady backbeat of “Albatros”, gliding the record to a fittingly satisfying finish. (Bandcamp link)

Fig by Four – Capture Reveal

Release date: October 20th
Record label: Bomb the Twist
Genre: Alt-rock, dream pop, singer-songwriter, art pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Mea Culpa

Capture Reveal is the debut full-length solo album from Sarah Statham, but she’s hardly a new face in indie rock. She’s been playing music in her hometown of Leeds for fifteen years, serving as a bassist for the band Crake and a drummer for Living Body along with a good deal of session work, guest appearances, and engineering. As Fig by Four, Statham’s version of indie rock is a confident one–both layered and accessible, the ten songs of Capture Reveal reflect the skills she’s been honing for a long time as a musician (she wrote and performed everything you hear on the record), but this long-in-the-gestation-period debut allows for a less-familiar side of Statham (the songwriter) to take center stage without too much window dressing. Capture Reveal is a pop album–her playing and singing seal this, even as it doesn’t feel like Statham goes out of her way to emphasize the friendliness of these songs (letting them speak for themselves).

Taking Capture Reveal in at once, I remain impressed by the ground that Fig by Four cover over its forty minutes. “Otherwirldly” is a perfect slow-building opening track, its melded dream-y pop and rising alt-rock introducing several of the album’s strengths (make your way towards “All Seeing A” if you’re seeking the latter genre, “Cut” for the former). Capture Reveal doesn’t stop moving, offering up the acoustic-based, quietly pretty “3539” in is midsection, then transitioning to synth-colored, exploratory art pop with “It Is, Is It” and “Ferrules” (Statham spent some time in Brooklyn working in youth music education, and, interestingly, she groups the latter two songs together as “Brooklyn” songs). Two of the biggest pop moments on Capture Reveal come near the end: the steadily-moving dream pop of “Lifejackal” and the crunchy electric pop-rock of “Mea Culpa”. An artist only sticks songs like that towards the end of an album if they’re confident and satisfied with the overall statement they’ve made–which Statham should be with Capture Reveal. (Bandcamp link)

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