Pressing Concerns: Aux Caroling, Bungler, The Wind-Ups, Miracle Sweepstakes

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Welcome to a Monday Pressing Concerns! We’re staring down the barrel of November, but the new music has just not stopped coming; this issue looks at four great albums that came out last week. New records from Aux Caroling, Bungler, The Wind-Ups, and Miracle Sweepstakes grace this edition.

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.

Aux Caroling – Hydrogen Bonds

Release date: October 27th
Record label: Half a Person
Genre: Singer-songwriter, folk rock
Formats: CD, digital
Pull Track: Time

Aux Caroling is Scott Deaver, a North Carolina-based singer-songwriter who had a couple of singles and a Christmas album to his name until the release of Hydrogen Bonds, the first (as far as I can tell) non-holiday themed Aux Caroling album. Hydrogen Bonds has been kicking around for a while–two of its songs were initially released as a single back in 2020, and Deaver admits that it had sat gathering digital dust in a Dropbox folder until COVID-inflicted hearing loss spurred him to release it “while [he] can still sort of hear it”. Deaver comes off as a somewhat reluctant artist, at least in terms of being public-facing; like the release of Hydrogen Bonds, its recording was also the product of circumstance (in this case, recognizing that the upcoming birth of his daughter would make the completion of an album considerably more difficult going forward). This album (along with, apparently, a couple of more as-of-yet-unreleased records) was made in Athens, Georgia with help from Deaver’s friend and collaborator Mike Albanese (who also has played in Maserati and Cinemechanica). Albanese helps give these thirteen songs a polished indie rock sheen, but he doesn’t get in the way of Deaver’s compelling songwriting.

Hydrogen Bonds reminds me of last year’s Silent Reply by Kevin Dorff, another under-the-radar pop rock album with seemingly endless depths to it. While that record was explicitly and conceptually about death and mortality, Hydrogen Bonds’ preoccupation with the passing of time and what that means for its narrators is a bit subtler and reveals more gradually. That being said, the very first line on the record is “DNA”’s “You’ve been waiting around / I’ve been out there too,” and “Married Young” (“As if not to say I love you, but you’re turning me on”) and “Time” (“It’d be nice to get the answer before the ice caps melt / Or at least shortly after that”) both carry that torch forward in one way or another. “Time” has a really pleasing piano-rock sound, which is one of the wrinkles Deaver and Albanese give the album, along with the noise-into-big-rock-and-roll finish of “Boston, Baltimore, Dallas, Detroit”, the workmanlike power pop of “Fine” and “Face”, and the weary retro pop rock of “Company”. When the moment calls for it, though, Hydrogen Bonds is quiet and reserved, ruminating on “Whiskey”, “What You’d Pay, What You Bid”, and “Ready to Go”. “Nobody listening but the crickets and the melted ice,” Deaver sings in closing track “Friend”; it took a while, but Aux Caroling has finally contradicted that line. (Bandcamp link)

Bungler – Light in the Corner

Release date: October 24th
Record label: Strange Mono
Genre: Lo-fi indie rock, singer-songwriter, indie folk
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Melancholia Will Get You in the End

Paul Hewes is a Philadelphia musician who’s played in the bands Snoozer and Idiot Forever, but he’s also been putting out music on his own as Bungler since the mid-2010s. Hewes seems to have a steady stream of music coming out via this project–last year saw the release of two EPs and a cassette tape via Super Wimpy Punch (High Pony, Buddie, Birthday Ass). This year, Hewes has prepared Light in the Corner, a ten-song, 23-minute record that’s being put out on tape via local label Strange Mono. In what seems to be Hewes’ primary mode of operation, these songs are a mix of completely self-recorded material and full-band collaborations (for this record, the latter features Dan Angel of Nyxy Nyx, Sam Kassel of Sand Castle, and his Snoozer bandmate Kieran Ferris, who also plays in Joy Again).  Light in the Corner feels like a vintage lo-fi pop album–Hewes’ distinct and catchy writing shines through the occasionally minimal, occasionally chaotic arrangements.

Light in the Corner’s opening track, “Melancholia Will Get You in the End”, is a chilly but friendly piece of folk rock, with Hewes’ melodies being the main draw over top of the laid-back instrumental. One gets the feeling that Hewes can easily write an album’s worth of songs in this mode (see: the just-as-good “Run”), but I will give him credit for pushing his solo compositions into some odd places throughout the record, from the 60s baroque pop of “Panic Pending” to the minimal experimentalism of “Sympathy Symphony” to the sub-one-minute lo-fi rock and roll of “Lazy Dazy”. The latter of the three is the closest to the Bungler tracks which feature a full lineup–the grungy “Knot”, the downer fuzz of “Calm”, and the appropriately unhinged-sounding “Rant” set themselves apart from the rest of the album, adding even more variety to a record already excelling on that front. One version of Bungler doesn’t sound any more “complete” than the other–the extraordinarily sparse closing two songs on Light in the Corner are as fully-fleshed-out as the noisiest full-band numbers. (Bandcamp link)

The Wind-Ups – Happy Like This

Release date: October 27th
Record label: Mt. St. Mtn.
Genre: Lo-fi indie rock, power pop, garage punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Oh I Know

California’s The Wind-Ups appeared on Pressing Concerns not that long ago–back in August, in fact, with the release of the four-song Jonathan Says EP. However, the project of Jake Sprecher (Smokescreens, Terry Malts, Jonathan Richman) had more than just that up their sleeves–Happy Like This, the second proper Wind-Ups record, follows less than three months later. The title track to Jonathan Says turns up on this one, but otherwise it’s all new material that, in typical Wind-Ups fashion, was written and recorded almost entirely by Sprecher himself. Also typical of The Wind-Ups is the short, distorted, lo-fi pop-punk hit singles that make up the bulk of Happy Like This. The 20-minute album is only about twice as long as Jonathan Says, but it spans eleven songs, all of which have hooks–even if they only repeat them just enough for them to stick more often than not.

The majority of Happy Like This’ tracks are under two minutes in length, and only one of them crests the three-minute mark–zone out for a second and The Wind-Ups are already wrapping up side one. Honing in on the album, however, reveals a musician unafraid to present his hooks in a pleasingly garbled manner–the first half of Happy Like This is the less accessible on to my ears. Sprecher gets things warmed up with the mostly-instrumental noise-punk opening track “Petri Dish” (a co-write with Wind-Ups live band members Nick Justice and Jason Wuestefeld), the garage-y glam-trash of “Starting to Lose”, and the sub-60-second “Dumb”, the biggest pop song on Side A. The flipside of Happy Like This doesn’t turn down the fuzz, but the majority of the biggest “hits” on the album can be found here by my reckoning. “Oh I Know” is The Wind-Ups at their Ramones-iest, and it also finds them peeking into the world of Upper Wilds-y massive fuzz-power-pop sounds. “Tell Me Again (How Pretty I Am)” follows one song later, almost besting the prior song at its own game, and “My Rene” somehow achieves a not-insignificant amount of subtlety in its 60s-pop-influenced sound. “Jonathan Says” closes the EP, and its gleeful, noisy, celebratory tone is the perfect final statement. (Bandcamp link)

Miracle Sweepstakes – Last Licks

Release date: October 27th
Record label: One Weird Trick
Genre: Psychedelia, prog-pop, experimental rock, dream pop
Formats: CD, digital
Pull Track: Ooh Ahh

New York’s Miracle Sweepstakes have been around for longer than I realized. Half of the band (vocalist/lyricist/multi-instrumentalist Craig Heed and guitarist Justin Mayfield) also play in the un-Googleable band Hit, which I wrote a little bit about last year. Hit has only put out a couple of singles since their inception at the beginning of the decade, but Miracle Sweepstakes (Heed, Mayfield, bassist Doug Bleek, and drummer Ian Miniero) have been around for ten years; Last Licks is their third full-length record, and first in four years. The first two Miracle Sweepstakes albums are both electric jangle/power pop records with some vintage studio pop undertones; perhaps now with Hit existing to exorcise some of the band’s noisy post-punk energy, Last Licks further refines the quartet’s sound into something even more polished and layered across its eleven tracks.

Last Licks creeps past the 45-minute mark as Miracle Sweepstakes try to get the absolute most of every one of these eleven songs. The title track is a statement of an opener–the song journeys through several iterations of itself recalling 60s progressive pop in its adventurousness and catchiness. “O-Pine” and “Ooh Ahh” start as clanging indie rock and straightforward guitar pop, respectively, but the Miracle Sweepstakes of Last Licks aren’t interested in stopping there, adding several layers to each of the songs. The middle of the record contains its noisiest moment in “Bad Bee”, suggesting that the group can still make a hell of a racket when they want to, but the second half of Last Licks only serves to further deconstruct their sound. The ethereal “Let Something Happen” moves into the underwater-sounding “How True” into the mostly-wordless “Aah Ooh” into the seven-minute “Nor’easter”. In something of a meta moment, closing track “All This Way to Come Back Now” ends things by returning to Miracle Sweepstakes’ poppier side, although its extended outro indicates that they learned something on their round trip. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

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