Pressing Concerns: Golden Apples, Spllit, Red Pants, Mint Field

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Wowee Zowee! What a week (as viewed through the lens of Pressing Concerns). We had a Monday Edition (Fox Japan, Hard Copy, Sexores, and Fig by Four), a Tuesday Edition (Promiseland BBQ, Noah Roth, Gold Dime, and Victory Peach), and a Wednesday feature on Bee Side Cassettes’ For Gaza benefit compilation. Thanks for sticking with us, and here’s your reward: today we’re talking about great new albums from Golden Apples, Spllit, Red Pants, and Mint Field. All of these 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.

Golden Apples – Bananasugarfire

Release date: October 27th
Record label: Lame-O
Genre: Noise pop, shoegaze, 90s indie rock, power pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Guard Stick

Russell Edling released a couple of EPs and an album as Cherry in the second half of the 2010s, but after changing the name of his project to Golden Apples, he’s found another gear in terms of putting out new music. Bananasugarfire is the third Golden Apples album in as many years, following 2021’s Shadowland and 2022’s Golden Apples. Last year’s self-titled Golden Apples album was my introduction to Edling’s music–it’s an intriguing indie rock record that revealed its primary architect as a solid pop songwriter playing in the sandbox of 90s indie rock (you could get away with calling that one a “slacker rock” record). Golden Apples was recorded by Edling and a “revolving door” of collaborators, but with Bananasugarfire the musical chairs have stopped and a solid four-piece lineup (drummer Melissa Brain of Amanda X and Cave People, bassist Matthew Scheuermann of Lowercase Roses, and guitarist Mimi Gallagher, also of Cave People) has emerged. Edling immediately takes advantage of having a full band behind him on Bananasugarfire–its loud, fuzzy sound is the most ambitious Golden Apples have sounded yet, gobbling up shoegaze, psychedelia, and power pop heedlessly to kickstart what feels like a new era for the band.

Bananasugarfire is sequenced to where it almost feels like Golden Apples are developing their sound in real-time, with opening track “Anti-Ant Car” starting with just Edling singing over a simple, clear(ish) electric guitar before the rest of the band slowly join in on the song. They then launch into “Guard Stick”, a song that takes a vintage Golden Apples-ish slacker-indie-rock chord progression and starts to adorn it with more bells and whistles than, say, “Let Me Do My Thing” or “Slime” from their last album, and then by “Little Bronco” and “Waiting for a Cloud”, they’ve blossomed into a full-on noise pop group. Bananasugarfire doesn’t stop there, though–it then kicks things into overdrive with a pair of five-plus minute tracks in “Sugarfire” and “Materia”, both of which are maximalist alt-rock expressions that pull together shoegaze, Madchester, psychedelic rock, and Yo La Tengo-ish refined-storm-rock. The album finishes things out by doing it all over again in a speed-run, in which the psych-fuzz-pop “Park (Rye)” and the downcast but catchy “Stuck” give way to six-minute closing track “Green”, which starts in the same vicinity as the song preceding it, shifts into a huge, burn-it-down distorted midsection, then fades away–but not before delivering one more burn scar to punctuate Bananasugarfire. (Bandcamp link) 

Spllit – Infinite Hatch

Release date: October 27th
Record label: Feel It/Tough Gum/Chrusimusi
Genre: Post-punk, art punk, experimental rock
Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Growth Hacking

Anyone who’s been following this blog is aware that Feel It Records has put out some of the best rock music of 2023. A lot of that falls under the garage-y power pop banner, a well-worn territory for Pressing Concerns, but the Cincinnati label has also facilitated the release of more experimental, wide-ranging fare from groups like The Drin, Hard Copy, and Advertisement. Their latest release, Infinite Hatch by Baton Rouge’s Spllit, decidedly falls into this latter camp. Spllit’s 2021 debut, Spllit Sides, was a post-punk album with an avant-garde undercurrent, but their follow-up album dives headfirst into the stranger corners of their sound. The band’s core duo of Matthew Urquhart and Ronni Bourgeois recorded all of Infinite Hatch themselves, and the final product toggles between the kinetic art punk that marks their live shows as a quartet and a curious studio-lab product that’s been disassembled and reassembled by the duo–sometimes with a surgeon-like punctuality, other times like a child dissecting a frog.

Infinite Hatch is one of those albums that seem to exist out of time–it’s 27 minutes and twelve songs long, but you could’ve told me those figures were doubled or halved and I wouldn’t have been sure. “Canned Air” opens the album by managing to sound like Thee Oh Sees and Animal Collective in different parts while somehow also being under 90 seconds in length, while “Growth Hacking” is a spiky glam-punk number that eats itself alive in a Circus Devils-esque frenzy in its final thirty seconds. “Fast Acting Gel” jerks itself around with such whiplash that one starts to wonder if we’re in “math rock” territory; regardless, it make sense to me as the sharper turns in the singular, winding trail that Infinite Hatch blazes. “Cloaking” and “Curtain Lift” are art rock mini-epics in the record’s second half, while the two longest songs that make up the album’s mid-section expand the territory with some psychedelic anti-pop (“Bevy Slew”) and live-wire synthpunk (“Gemini Moods (Return)”). There’s some impressive melding going on between Bourgeois and Urquhart here–both in terms of their voices, frequently intertwined above the stretched-thin instrumentals, and in Infinite Hatch as a whole, which sprints out to no man’s land but never feels lost. (Bandcamp link)

Red Pants – Not Quite There Yet

Release date: October 27th
Record label: Meritorio
Genre: Shoegaze, noise pop, lo-fi indie rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Watch the Sky

Red Pants are the sturdy duo of Jason Lambeth and Elsa Nekola, a Madison-based pair that have been making music since 2018. To be a fan of Red Pants is to be subjected to a steady stream of albums and EPs of fuzzy, lo-fi, deceptively-tuneful indie rock–in the time that Pressing Concerns has existed, this has included the twin 2022 releases of When We Were Dancing, which came out on Paisley Shirt (Whitney’s Playland, Galore, Flowertown) and Gentle Centuries, on Lambeth’s own imprint Painted Blonde. For Not Quite There Yet, the third Red Pants full-length, they’ve jumped to Meritorio (Jim Nothing, The Small Intestines, Sumos), and they reintroduce themselves yet again with a smart and driven collection of songs that feel like the most focused record yet from the band. Red Pants have always garnered Yo La Tengo comparisons due to their fuzzy, layered take on underground music–this time around, they’re honing in on the “rock” side of their New Jersey forebearers, and even trend into “mellower side of Sonic Youth” territory here as well.

Red Pants showcase a lot of their ingredients in the first three songs of Not Quite There Yet–one doesn’t need to be familiar with all of them in order to enjoy this record, but if you are, then this one is especially for you. The confident, sleek “Witching Hour” finds Lambeth and Nekola cruising in Sonic Youth mode, the lo-fi, jangly “Watch the Sky” is their Flying Nun/Robert Pollard moment, and opening track “Crimson Words” recalls a bit of the Stereolab-ish drone pop that they explored more thoroughly on Gentle Centuries. The organ-aided “Forever” and “See You at the Turnstile” also fall into the latter of those three camps, but for the most part, Not Quite There Yet is a finely-stirred blend rather than a band operating in discrete “modes”. Side two highlights “On a Wire” and “Quiet Eyes” are both noisy and catchy, with even the sweetest moments on the record (the Nekola-sung “Rockwell Kent” and the penultimate “Visions of Gloria”) featuring weirder turns. I suspect that we’ll hear from Red Pants again before too long–but not so soon that their next record isn’t as developed and fulfilling as Not Quite There Yet is. (Bandcamp link)

Mint Field – Aprender a Ser

Release date: October 27th
Record label: Felte
Genre: Dream pop, shoegaze, psychedelic pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Respiro Profundo

Mexico City’s Mint Field have been making their version of shoegaze, dream pop, and psychedelia for a half-decade now, debuting with 2018’s Pasar de Las Luces and jumping to Felte (Vulture Feather, Ganser, Gold Class) for 2020’s Sentimiento Mundial. The third Mint Field album, Aprender a Ser (that’s “learning to be” in English) also follows Figura de Cristal, a solo album from the band’s Estrella del Sol (who comprises the core duo along with Sebastian Neyra) that came out in June. On her own, del Sol explored an unmoored dreaminess that veered into ambient-pop, and while Aprender a Ser doesn’t exactly follow this pathway, it shares with del Sol’s solo work an embrace of the experimental and adventurous. What Mint Field end up with is something entirely new for them–less straightforward “rock” than Sentimiento Mundial, but keeping one foot in that world thanks to both the grounding drum contributions of Ulrika Spacek’s Callum Brown and the guitars, which are the record’s main focus only sometimes but still assert themselves even when in a supporting role. 

Aprender a Ser casts a pretty wide net at the extremes of their sound–closing track “Antes De Que Se Acabe El Año” is five-minute piece of synth-led psychedelic pop that makes a pretty strong final statement, while “Respiro Profundo” breaks out the distorted guitars almost as a reassurance to fans of shoegaze-y Mint Field. Most of Aprender a Ser rests in the middle of these two tentpoles, but that isn’t to say that they don’t match them in quality–the carefully-stepping dream pop of “Nuevo Sol” and the rhythm-section-led “Puerta Abierta” are more subtle, yes, but del Sol, Neyra, and Brown put no less thought and effort into their compositions. Brown’s shuffling drumbeats give parts of Aprender a Ser almost a trip hop feeling, especially in more electronic-based songs like “Moronas” and “Sueño Despierto” (although it shows up in the dream pop-y “Cinco Días” too). Aprender a Ser can feel like an otherworldly experience at times–but the moments where the seams show and it becomes “merely” a recording of a three-piece rock band playing together aren’t any less strong. (Bandcamp link)

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