Pressing Concerns: Misophone, The Brights, Gabby’s World, Get Wrong

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December is upon us, and before we dive into year-end list season, the first Friday of the last month of the year has a surprisingly stacked line-up of new releases for our collective consideration. I’ll be highlighting four of them below: new albums from Misophone, The Brights, and Gabby’s World, and a new EP from Get Wrong. This busy week has also featured the November 2023 Playlist/Round-Up and a Monday Pressing Concerns (featuring Neighboring Sounds, Dot Dash, Flat Mary Road, and Colt Wave), so check those too if you missed them earlier. And last but not least: don’t forget to vote in the 2023 Rosy Overdrive Reader’s Poll!

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.

Misophone – A Floodplain Mind

Release date: December 1st
Record label: Another Record/Galaxy Train
Genre: Chamber pop, folk rock, psych pop
Formats: CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: All the Ghosts of Evening

Around Christmastime 2017, I discovered The Machine That Made Us by Flotation Toy Warning because somebody (I believe it was Trust the Wizards) had put it on their year-end list. The sophomore album from the cult chamber pop group was like nothing I’d heard before at the time, a collection of grandiose pop statements that seemed to materialize out of nothing and hover around in the ether indefinitely. I bring this up because I’m about to suggest you spend time with a two-hour-long album called A Floodplain Mind that checks a lot of the same boxes that those two Flotation Toy Warning albums do for me. The English band Misophone (led by the songwriting duo of S. Herbert and M.A. Welsh and featuring a host of other instrumental contributors) arose in the mid-2000s, releasing at least seven albums between 2007 and 2013. However, their only release in the past decade has been the archival And So Sinks the Sun on a Burning Sea–but the massive, ten-years-in-the-making A Floodplain Mind more than bridges that gap. The album–being offered as a double CD or double cassette–is as overwhelming in its composition (thirty songs and, as stated previously, 120 minutes) and adventurous in its arrangements as it is friendly and welcoming at its core.

A Floodplain Mind is certainly a lot to take in at once, but Misophone’s sense of pop songwriting makes it just about as “digestible” as something of this size can be. “All the Ghosts of Evening” and “Heart for Hills” ease us all into the album with a pleasing mix of chamber pop, orchestral psych pop, and earnest folk rock–they cite Elephant 6 as an influence, and the record comes off as something like a more-put-together older sibling to that scene’s scattered psychedelia. Featuring over a dozen guest musicians, A Floodplain Mind is more prone to surprise the listener in discrete moments throughout the record than throw everything at you at once–yes, there’s harp and bassoon and hurdy gurdy strewn throughout the album, but the core of Welsh and Herbert’s sprawling but accessible folk-pop writing is rarely flooded. Picking favorite songs from this one is difficult because just about the entire album is made up of legitimately well-crafted pop music and can strike at any given listen, but I will say to make sure you stick around for the second half of the album, because plenty of the most immediate numbers (“Night Comes Early”, “Strange and Sombre”, “Flickering Lights”) come after the break. To every band that’s been away for a decade–the bar for their returns has been set incredibly high with A Floodplain Mind. (Bandcamp link)

The Brights – Oyster Rock!

Release date: December 1st
Record label: Meritorio/Stable
Genre: Folk rock, indie pop, jangle pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Everyone in Town

Between Spice World, The Small Intestines, and Wurld Series, Meritorio Records has dug up plenty of odd but captivating indie pop from the edge of the world this year. Their latest foray Down Under comes in the form of the debut record from Sydney quintet The Brights, who’ve put out a couple of EPs since their origin in the late 2010s. Oyster Rock! contains plenty of the jangly guitars that are a hallmark for their label, but the band (vocalist/guitarist Sunny Blayney, vocalist/bassist Samuel Morris, drummer Cooper Anderson, guitarist Dylan Ferguson, and keyboardist Will Maddock) dress up these dozen tracks in laid-back, wandering folk rock skins that lead to this album sounding even more timeless and stateless than those of their peers. Oyster Rock! is (for the most part) slow-moving, but it’s not exactly “minimal”, with Maddock’s keys and Blayney and Ferguson’s six-strings frequently stacking on top of each other to make an album that’s either on the “ornate” side of “plain” or vice versa.

“Waiting”, the track with which Oyster Rock! opens, feels aptly named. It manages to sound joyous while opting for a hold music level of quietness–we’re almost in Belle & Sebastian territory here. The Brights shift into gear a song later on “Enough of You”, which that takes its time getting to the meat of the track and borrows a bit of drone-y guitar pop charm from their neighbors over in New Zealand. There’s a rainy and melancholy streak that turns up throughout the record–it really comes into focus on the shimmering “Quiet as a Cloud” and the folk strumming of “You Know That I’m Wrong”, but these aren’t the only instances (for example, there’s a song called “Overcast Hangover” on here, and it sounds like it). The swaggering power pop of “Everyone in Town” is the one true rocker on Oyster Rock!, although some of the more hushed moments are also broken up by the country-rock groove of “River Dogs” (which might be one of the most “early Wilco”-sounding songs I’ve ever heard come out of Australia) and the slow-building dream-psych-pop conclusion of “Detour Sign”.  The Brights’ primary mode is more casual and subtle than these louder moments, but when taken as a single piece of relaxed but developed guitar pop, everything makes sense. (Bandcamp link)

Gabby’s World – Gabby Sword

Release date: December 1st
Record label: Carrot All
Genre: Indie pop, synthpop, indie folk, singer-songwriter
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Just for You to Hear

Gabby’s World is the project of Gabby Smith, a New York singer-songwriter who initially came up during the bedroom pop/indie folk boom in the mid-2010s alongside acts like Told Slant, Florist, Bellows, and Free Cake for Every Creature. A handful of records and singles led to 2015’s Double Double Whammy-released O.K., a stunning, dexterous album that remains one of my favorites to come out of that entire era, and the just-as-good Year of the Rabbit EP the following year. Smith’s songs could range from delicate folk constructions to grandiose, sweeping indie rock, something that remained true with O.K.’s full-length follow-up, 2018’s Beast on Beast. That album was underappreciated in its time, and preceded a half decade of silence from Gabby Smith the musician. Gabby’s World went on ice for a half-decade as Smith took a break from music, until inspiration from their now-wife, fellow musician Barrie Lindsay, led to Gabby Sword. Released song by song over 2023’s twelve months, the album reflects Lindsay and Smith’s romantic and creative partnerships in the music (which probes new territory for Gabby’s World) and in the subject matter (dealing with Smith’s newfound queer identity and the partner they found in Lindsay). 

The thirteen tracks of Gabby Sword embrace the “pop” end of bedroom pop–although it’s not exactly a “studio as instrument” reinvention of their entire style, the indie folk of past Gabby’s World records is largely superseded by a wider-ranging, synth-driven indie pop rock sound. I’d still consider it on the more minimal side of synthpop, and though the prominent drum machine beats of songs like “Just for You to Hear”, “Powerful”, and “Open the Door” are certainly stark, there are plenty of moments more reflecting of their previous output, like the quiet “33” and the electric folk rock of “Restore”. Even as the music changes, however, Smith remains the focal point, and their writing is recognizable even as it covers some different ground. The question that hangs at the end of “Just for You to Hear” feels like a look into their mind as they stepped away from music while at the same time sounding like vintage Gabby’s World, and the piano pop of “Fabby” lets Smith deliver a straight (well, er…) love song in a way I don’t think they’ve gotten to do as of yet. Smith and Lindsay balance the new and familiar on Gabby Sword in a way that makes for a welcome return. (Bandcamp link)

Get Wrong – Get Wrong

Release date: December 1st
Record label: Father/Daughter/Alcopop!
Genre: Synthpop, indie pop
Formats: CD, digital
Pull Track: Too Late to Hide

Get Wrong is a new project that brings together two underground indie rock ringers in Naomi Griffin of Martha and Adam Todd of The Spook School–although the duo take a turn away from the fizzy British power-pop-punk that’s defined both of them in my mind on their debut EP as a group. The five-song Get Wrong EP was recorded and produced by Peter Brewis of Field Music, and finds Griffin and Todd diving headfirst into full-on 1980s-inspired synthpop. It’s a bit surprising that these DIY indie rockers have committed so completely to their new sound on the EP, but given that their backgrounds are nevertheless in pop music (whenever Martha comes up, I simply must mention that 2016’s Blisters in the Pit of My Heart is one of the best albums of any kind from the past decade), it’s not a shock to see them excel at it as well.

Although Get Wrong isn’t a lush, oversaturated work of electronic music, it’s not rudimentary either, displaying Griffin and Todd’s intent to actually explore the various new doors and openings that synthpop affords them rather than just plugging in keyboards where guitars would’ve been. Synth accents and flourishes color these five songs, adding to a rich pop canvas that’s already quite strong due to the singers’ emotional, full vocals bursting through the music. Griffin’s hooks on “Something to Tell You” (“…I don’t wanna hurt you, but keeping it in would hurt you too”) and “Crying My Eyes Out” (“…for hours, thinking of you”) are as tangible and potent as anything she’s done with Martha, and while the music is a bit subtler on these slightly rawer ones, it’s still just as polished an exploration of synthpop as the more straight-up anthems found earlier in the EP (although as massive as something like “Too Late to Hide” sounds, there’s still plenty going on under the surface of that one, too). All told, it’s more than enough to make Get Wrong an intriguing starting point. (Bandcamp link)

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