Pressing Concerns: Neighboring Sounds, Dot Dash, Flat Mary Road, Colt Wave

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I’m hoping all U.S.-based Rosy Overdrive readers had a nice holiday weekend. Since I’m guessing a lot of you missed the second post from last week (it went up the day before Thanksgiving and featured The Veldt, Feeling Figures, The Ground Is Lava, and The Anderson Tapes), I’ll go ahead and re-share it before we dive into today’s Pressing Concerns. Caught up? Great–now it’s time to look at some great new albums from Neighboring Sounds, Flat Mary Road, and Colt Wave, as well as a compilation from Dot Dash.

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.

Neighboring Sounds – Cold in the Smart City

Release date: October 13th
Record label: Friend of Mine/Adagio 830/Friend Club/Lilla Himmel/Sound Fiction/BCore/strictly no capital letters
Genre: Emo-y indie rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Grandhotel

Cold in the Smart City is the first full-length record to bear the name of Neighboring Sounds, but the roots of this Bergen, Norway-based emo-indie rock band go back more than twenty years. The band formed as Crash (n) in 2000 and were then known as The First Cut for a few years afterwards, releasing at least one album under each name. After a lengthy hiatus, the band (vocalist/guitarist Arild Eriksen, guitarist Kristian Gundersen, and drummer Thomas Milford) reconvened as Neighboring Sounds in 2014, putting out a few singles before finally (after adding Flight Mode’s Anders Blom on bass) getting their debut album out last month. In what I’m certain is a Pressing Concerns record, Cold in the Smart City is being put out by seven different labels across various nationalities–between this fact and its long gestation time, there’s a certain weight attached to Cold in the Smart City. Thankfully, Neighboring Sounds have put together an album more than up to the task of bearing it.

Norway has been a fertile ground for emo-tinged anthemic indie rock bands in recent years (Blom’s other band being but one prominent example), and Cold in the Smart City similarly falls along an “early Death Cab for Cutie to 90s emo-punk” axis. Although they’re clearly inspired by it, I’d hesitate to call Neighboring Sounds “punk” here–there’s energy here, to be sure, but they’re refined in a way that comes back as relatively slick (but still emotional and not cheap-sounding) alternative rock. The quartet gives these ten songs a gravitas that makes it feel much grander than its 30-minute runtime–from the chilly opening title track to the fast-paced “No Commons” to the giant chorus of “Grandhotel” to the steady-building crescend-emo of “Of the Woods”, Cold in the Smart City establishes itself as an animated and all-in record. An incredibly tight album, its only true breather is the 90-second interlude “Moss/Pine”, after which Neighboring Sounds gear up for another side of rockers. “Polis” is the band at their most blistering, and the one song where their hardcore roots really show (although it’s more in the form of fiery post-hardcore). No steam is lost as Cold in the Smart City chugs to its conclusion, although “Sleepercar” does end things on a somewhat pensive note. Leave it to Neighboring Sounds to sound purposeful and inspired singing about sleep, though. (Bandcamp link)

Dot Dash – 16 Again

Release date: October 13th
Record label: Country Mile
Genre: Power pop, college rock, jangle pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Holly Garland

I received my introduction to Washington, D.C.’s Dot Dash last year in the form of Madman in the Rain, a brilliant collection of jangly power pop that nevertheless contained a bit of post-punk ruminations on death and mortality and would probably be even higher on my year-end list if I redid it today. Even though they were new to me, however, Dot Dash (vocalist/guitarist Terry Banks, drummer Danny Ingram, and bassist Hunter Bennett) have been amassing a pretty impressive back catalog over the past decade or so–Madman in the Rain was actually preceded by six other full-length records since 2011. All seven Dot Dash full-length albums received CD releases through The Beautiful Music, but they’ve never put out a vinyl record, which seems like a major missing piece for a band that so deftly makes music that sounds straight out of the vinyl era. Thankfully, Country Mile Records has rectified this with 16 Again, a compilation of fifteen songs selected from across Dot Dash’s discography (plus one new cover)–the band calls it “a ‘greatest hits’ album by a band with no hits”, which is, frankly, the best kind.

16 Again makes the intriguing decision to go in reverse chronological order, which means that it starts with four selections from Madman in the Rain. I won’t go too much into them since I already covered that one (I might’ve found room here for “Dead Gone”, but it’s already the most well-represented album so I can’t complain), but the band keep the quality consistent as they plow further backwards. The three songs from 2018’s Proto Retro are all ace (particularly the soaring New Order-jangle pop “Unfair Weather”), and the one song from Searchlights (“Holly Garland”) packs enough energy for three. By the time we get to the selections from Half-Remembered Dream, we’re a decade back, showing that the band was always fully capable of delivering transcendent pop rock anthems (“(Here’s to) the Ghosts of the Past”) and slightly weirder but still hooky pieces of guitar pop (“The Sound in Shells”). If you stick around to hear the two songs from their 2011 debut spark>flame>ember>ash, you get to hear the only “rough-around-the-edges” moments on the record, with the garage-mod “The Color and the Sound” and the somewhat pained post-punk of “There and Back Again Lane” being curious but still worthwhile offerings. The whirlwind tour complete, Dot Dash end with a new cover of Television Personalities’ “Jackanory Stories”, which is an appropriate sendoff to this summary of Dot Dash–not shy about their debt to the past, but nevertheless continuing to offer something new. (Bandcamp link)

Flat Mary Road – Little Realities

Release date: September 22nd
Record label: Whatever’s Clever
Genre: Folk rock, college rock, psychedelic rock, singer-songwriter
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: The Grifter

Flat Mary Road is a quartet from Philadelphia, led by guitarist/vocalist Steve Teare and also featuring a pair of Alexes (Alex Irwin on drums, Alex Lewis on guitar) and bassist Dan Papa. The band has been around since the early 2010s–their latest album, Little Realities, is at least their fourth full-length. Little Realities showed up earlier this year on Whatever’s Clever (Dave Scanlon, Keen Dreams, Office Culture), and while there isn’t exactly a shortage of indie rock records coming out of Philly these days, Flat Mary Road have an interesting and striking sound that helps them stick out from the pack. Some of Little Realities‘ ingredients are familiar–one part folk rock and alt-country, another part jangly power pop–but there’s also an almost-psychedelic, Paisley Underground-like fullness to the album, and Teare’s distinct vocals help the band land somewhere in the midst of Miracle Legion-like college rock as well.

Little Realities cheerily rejects a “band record” versus “singer-songwriter” record dichotomy–it clearly builds itself around Teare’s writing across its eleven songs and 45 minutes, but it also devotes plenty of time to lengthy instrumental passages and lets the musicians wander on plenty of occasions (even two entire songs’ worth in “Running the Tape Back” and “A Lofting Song”). Busy opening track “The Announcement” gets mileage out of Papa’s plodding, prominent bass, Irwin’s brisk drumbeat, and Teare’s strangely-veering but no less effective melodies. It feels like a more contemporary indie rock single, while the song that follows it (the laid-back, relatively more straightforward “The Grifter”) is more of a vintage college rock radio hit. “Friends” balances simplicity and intricacy, and sides one and two are buffered by two of the strongest choruses on the record (the surprisingly urgent-sounding “The Gardener and I” and the starry power pop of “Change Is Not Enough”). These are some of the more immediate ones, but the other end of Little Realities–best exemplified by the record’s final two songs, which combine to reach over twelve minutes in length–contains plenty to enjoy as well. Once the melodic guitar solo kicks in about halfway through closing track “Landscape”, it becomes clear that there isn’t so much daylight in between them, anyway. (Bandcamp link)

Colt Wave – On Call

Release date: November 3rd
Record label: Too Deluxe
Genre: Lo-fi pop, jangle pop, post-punk, dream pop
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Deep Regret

Colt Wave is the California-based project of Colby Mancasola (best known as the drummer for Knapsack) and Ken Lovgren (who is occasionally a touring member for The Wind-Ups). The two of them are longtime musical acquaintances–they apparently first played together before Knapsack even emerged in the mid-90s, and with On Call (which appears to be the fourth Colt Wave album since 2021), the duo confidently take on a genre of music very different from the emo-punk of Mancasola’s other band–lo-fi, dreamy, jangly guitar pop. It’s a casual but nonetheless substantial-feeling album–Mancasola and Lovgren float through eleven songs in twenty-two minutes, declining to add too many bells and whistles to any of them but displaying a knack for writing memorable pop hooks which are more than enough to carry On Call.

“Dark Night Soul” opens up the album by sounding just a tad offbeat–there’s just a bit of 60s psychedelia in here, even as Colt Wave still keep the song barebones enough to let the melodies reverberate completely. The folk-y undertones of “Cold Cold Heart” back up On Call’s strong start, while the lo-fi basement pop of “Deep Regret” feels like a more West Coast version of early Guided by Voices’ hidden retro-pop. On Call breezes by, not spending too much time overthinking any of its offerings, but there are certainly plenty of moments that stick out on the quick but unhurried journey–the upbeat “Shaking You” is Colt Wave mustering up just enough zeal to nail their version of power pop, “Survive You” balances handclaps and hovering guitar lines to marry “dream” and “pop”, and “CALL U” feels just a bit more “full” than the rest of the record as Mancasola and Lovgren add a bit of Western desert rock to it. Colt Wave wrap it up with the 75-second “Only Night”, which goes from the “Be My Baby” drum intro to a piece of hazy jangle pop and then ends with a chorus of crickets. In spite (or perhaps because) of how low-key On Call is, it remains engrossing right up to its close. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

One thought on “Pressing Concerns: Neighboring Sounds, Dot Dash, Flat Mary Road, Colt Wave”

  1. Dot Dash was new to me last year as well, but what a revelation! It felt like showing up late to a party that had been in full swing for awhile.

    As for 16 Again, I know this sounds silly, but it feels like it was made as a “record of all the songs Kevin likes.” Most of my faves from each record are on here. I don;t know if I’ll do a “best of” list for remixes/remasters/compilations, but if I do, this’ll be close to the top.

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