Pressing Concerns: Bory, Common Thread, STOP MVP, Music for Cooking

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Yesterday and the day before, Rosy Overdrive published its Top 100 Albums of 2023. There’s a good chance you’ve read it; it’s a great list, so be sure to catch up on what you missed (unless you’ve already heard all 100 albums on there, in which case, reach out for a Rosy Overdrive commemorative plaque). However, bands and labels have stubbornly continued to release new music in December, and here we are to look at some of it: a new album from Bory (which actually appeared on Rosy Overdrive’s year-end list earlier this week), a reissue of a thirty-year-old album from Common Thread, and two new compilations from WarHen Records and SPINSTER Sounds.

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. And last but not least: don’t forget to vote in the 2023 Rosy Overdrive Reader’s Poll!

Bory – Who’s a Good Boy

Release date: December 8th
Record label: Earth Libraries/Earth Worms
Genre: Fuzz rock, power pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Our New Home

Who’s a Good Boy feels like the missing piece of a certain corner of indie rock. Bory is Brenden Ramirez, a Portland, Oregon-based singer-songwriter and guitarist who’s established himself as a part of the exciting new wave of power pop over the past few years. He’s associated with the great Mo Troper–Ramirez has played in Troper’s band, and he contributed guitar to Domino by Diners, an album that Troper produced. All the while, he’s done this without a full-length album–the sole Bory release, until this week, had been 2021’s Sidelined EP. Troper also produced Who’s a Good Boy, and like on Domino, he plays drums–everything else you hear on this record is played by Ramirez. Although shades of Troper and Diners’ Blue Broderick can certainly be heard in this album’s songwriting, Ramirez develops a style distinct from the sharp concision of Domino and the pop explosions of the last couple of Troper records.

Who’s a Good Boy is a comparatively cooler record–it’s a bit more muted, low-key, “slacker rock”-y in parts–which, in a way, makes the giant power pop choruses that Bory nonetheless offer up throughout the record hit even harder. The album is a pleasingly asymmetrical journey–a somewhat odd but transfixing beginning, a pure power pop center, and a muted but still quite potent conclusion. Album opener “The Flake” is a fuzzed-out piece of noise pop that’s far from the most immediate song on the record, and “Five-Course Meal” is a mid-tempo lo-fi rocker that feels like a strange choice for a single, but there’s a lot to like in both of them, and their warped catchiness makes it even more thrilling when Ramirez and Troper rip through three golden, straight-up power pop songs in the middle of the record in “Our New Home”, “North Douglas”, and “We Both Won”. Even at its most euphoric, Who’s a Good Boy has a bittersweet feeling, so it’s not surprising that Bory find plenty of melancholy to accompany the pacing tones of “Sidelines” and the acoustic “Take It from Me” to close the record. Does Ramirez still write great pop hooks into these final two songs? Well, have you even been paying attention? (Bandcamp link)

Common Thread – Fountain (30th Anniversary)

Release date: December 8th
Record label: Fort Lowell
Genre: Noise rock, shoegaze, 90s indie rock, post-punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Template

This year, Wilmington, North Carolina’s Fort Lowell Records have put out new music from a couple of longtime indie rockers in James Sardone and Summer Set, but for their final release of 2023, they’ve gone even further and grabbed a lost southeastern-U.S. indie rock record to hoist from relative obscurity in Common Thread’s Fountain. Common Thread originated in the late 1980s in the suburbs of Jacksonville, Florida, putting out Six Marbles and a Bowl of Mud in 1990 and following it up with Fountain, released only on cassette, in 1993. The band–guitarists Joe Parker and Travis Taylor, bassist Joey Zimmerman, and drummer Craig Parlet–toured the East Coast extensively, making an impression on the co-founders of Fort Lowell Records with their noisy but melodic mix of 1980s post-punk, noise rock, and shoegaze. The label’s James Tritten and Tracy Shedd have made it clear that this reissue campaign is especially personal for them–but, as someone who hadn’t heard of Common Thread at all before this year, I can confidently say that one didn’t have to “be there” at the time to appreciate their sophomore album. 

Last month, I wrote about The Veldt, another band who was making loud, layered indie rock at the same time in the same part of the country. It’s enough to suggest that the American Southeast is an underappreciated part of this era of underground music–not the least of which is because Fountain sounds so different from The Veldt’s Cocteau Twins-indebted sound. Common Thread were certainly influenced by Sonic Youth, as they had a similar attitude with regards to wringing noise out of their guitars, but they also brought a British sense of dour melody to their music that Parker, Taylor, and Zimmerman (all singers and songwriters) hid underneath their instruments. At the same time, the prominent, rumbling bass that marks songs like “Sesame” and “Digit” feels very American noise rock–coupled with Parlet’s tireless drumming, Common Thread boasted a rhythm section that a lot of contemporary “amplifier worship” guitar-heavy bands didn’t really have. Fitting of a band with three different leaders, Fountain feels like a lot–it’s absolutely a statement worth shining some more light on after three decades. (Bandcamp link)

Various Artists – STOP MVP: Artists From WV, VA & NC Against the Mountain Valley Pipeline

Release date: December 1st
Record label: WarHen
Genre: Folk, country rock, bluegrass, experimental, ambient, hip hop
Formats: CD, digital
Pull Track: The Coal Tattoo

As if the people and environment of Appalachia have not already experienced enough destruction at the hands of extraction capitalism from the fossil fuel industry (an industry whose profits never seem to reach the people whose livelihoods are most impacted by it), the Mountain Valley Pipeline is on track to weave a trail of damage through Virginia and West Virginia by next year (with bipartisan support, mind you). As with anything with this kind of money behind it, the government is fully on the side of capital, and courts have been utilized to harass, intimidate, and imprison activists for exercising their First Amendment rights. WarHen Records, based out of Charlottesville, has curated an impressively stacked compilation with this in mind–over the course of two CDs, forty musicians from Virginia, West Virginia, and North Carolina offer up a wide variety of songs for a collection whose proceeds go to the Appalachian Legal Defense Fund, specifically for “bail, legal defense and defendant support”.

Although Stop MVP showcases a host of genres, those expecting to find traditional “Appalachian music” here will certainly not be disappointed–folk, bluegrass, and country feature heavily into this lineup, in the form of everything from Joe Bachman’s smoldering acoustic blues-folk “The Coal Tattoo”, Jimmy Costa’s rendition of “old railroad song” “The Dolly Womack Wreck”, and instrumental exercises like Joseph Decosimo’s banjo-heavy “Mulberry Gap” and Rosy Overdrive favorite Yasmin Williams’ joyous-sounding “Hawksbill Summit”. Other familiar faces to Pressing Concerns readers here are two WarHen artists in Dogwood Tales and Tucker Riggleman & the Cheap Dates, both of whom combine traditional country with rock and roll on their selections, the former from a new EP and the latter from an upcoming LP. STOP MVP also finds plenty of other types of music reverberating in these hills, from conscious rap (geonovah’s “STAY Alive” and Prolo’s “John Brown”) to psychedelic (Høly River’s “Spirit Riot”) and garage rock (New Boss’ “Frantic”) to experimental fare from Tallulah Cloos and Dog Scream (as well as selections from modern folk darlings Nathan Bowles and Daniel Bachman which remind us that “experimental” and “folk music” don’t have to be oppositional). I’ve really only scratched the surface of STOP MVP, a compilation full of artists who brought their best in service of a cause that merits it. (Bandcamp link)

Various Artists – Measure, Pour & Mixtape: Music for Cooking

Release date: December 1st
Record label: Spinster
Genre: Folk, experimental, ambient, country, bluegrass, singer-songwriter
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Whistlin’ Down the Rows

We’re two for one on loosely Appalachian/folk music-based various-artists compilations this week, as we’re also going to be looking at North Carolina/West Virginia-based SPINSTER Sounds’ Measure, Pour & Mixtape: Music for Cooking. The label refers to the cassette release as an “auditory cookbook”, made up of exclusive tracks inspired by eating, kitchen maintenance, recipes, cooking, and anything in this realm. SPINSTER has enlisted an impressive array of musicians to contribute to Measure, Pour & Mixtape, including their own Lou Turner, folk legend Michael Hurley, Texas folk experimentalists Little Mazarn, and, (somewhat oddly, albeit not in a bad way) Animal Collective’s Avery Tare (if you’re thinking “this feels like very similar territory to the WarHen compilation”, you’d be right–in fact, multiple artists have contributed a song to both albums, including SPINSTER co-founder Sally Anne Morgan).

Some of the artists on Measure, Pour & Mixtape offer up selections that are recognizably structured as folk songs, while others interpret the assignment in a more deconstructive manner, although in both cases it’s not difficult to make the connection between cooking and what they’ve put together for the compilation. The album begins with the gorgeous “Whistlin’ Down the Rows”, a deep but immediate piece of folk songwriting from Sarah Bachman and Andy McLeod that’s so striking that it’s hard to believe that it’s the first ever piece of recorded music from the former. Measure, Pour & Mixtape has plenty of music that excels in this vein–Turner and Morgan both offer up folk highlights, and Little Mazarn and Lavender Blue’s contributions keep one foot in this world while probing a bit outside of it. The leisurely pace of Hurley’s “Clatskanie” and the way it deals in repetition without ever tiring (in actuality, getting more spirited as the song crawls along) particularly feels like a capturing of the singer-songwriter’s attitude towards cooking. The second half of the cassette steps into the world of improvisation, ambient, and experimental electronic music, but comes full circle with the quiet acoustic “Folly of Tomato” by Ziona Riley as its final course. SPINSTER hit on something here by asking artists to step out of the box and into the kitchen. (Bandcamp link)

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