Pressing Concerns: The Human Hearts, Dan Darrah & The Rain, The Age of Colored Lizards, Bounaly

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We’re in the middle of year-end season on Rosy Overdrive: our 100 favorite albums of 2023 went up last week, and a smaller but still gobsmacking list of EPs will be going up later this week. Pressing Concerns presses on nonetheless, and today’s entry is anything but a postscript: this is a classic one, absolutely full with music you’re going to like. A compilation of non-album tracks from The Human Hearts, as well as new albums from Dan Darrah & The Rain, The Age of Colored Lizards, and Bounaly appear in today’s post.

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The Human Hearts – Viable

Release date: October 20th
Record label: Open Boat
Genre: Indie pop, power pop, 90s indie rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Inland Valley Water Table Blues

Inland Empire-originating singer-songwriter Franklin Bruno has an impressive resume–his 90s indie rock group Nothing Painted Blue was one of the great undersung acts of that era, the two albums he made with the Mountain Goats’ John Darnielle as The Extra Lens (formerly The Extra Glenns) stack up against the best of Darnielle’s other band, and he’s got plenty of great solo records as well. Bruno’s current band, The Human Hearts, has been around for about as long as Nothing Painted Blue was by now, although it still feels like his “new” band. Part of that might be that there are only two Human Hearts albums (the long-awaited follow-up to 2012’s Another, previewed in 2020’s Day of the Tiles EP, does finally seem around the corner), but, as demonstrated by Viable, Bruno and his collaborators have put out plenty of other Human Hearts material in the form of EPs, singles, and compilation appearances. This new compilation collects non-album material from 2011 to 2015 on one LP–although it’s not the third Human Hearts full-length I was expecting, it’s a record that holds its own against Bruno’s “proper” albums.

As anyone who has heard Nothing Painted Blue’s Emotional Discipline or Bruno’s Local Currency compilations can attest, he’s a songwriter who doesn’t always save the “hits” for the albums. Viable confirms this remained true into the 2010s–the alt-rock meditation of “Flag Pin” (originally from the 2012 EP of the same name) and its lilting defiance is one of The Human Hearts’ finest moments. In my head, I’ve viewed The Human Hearts as less of an “indie rock” band than Nothing Painted Blue, and more of Bruno exploring pop music of several bygone eras (more attuned with his solo career), but with the help of a backing band. The Human Hearts offer several such selections on Viable (see the Jenny Toomey-sung “Loyal Opposition”, “Sell Pile”, and “Last Words of Her Lover”, sung by Bree Benton), but between the opening track, the firecracker power pop of “Inland Valley Water Table Blues”, the speedy “Plot of a Romance”, and the saxophone-aided sleaze of “Art Books”, The Human Hearts also rock a fair bit more than I remembered them rocking here.

Viable is a bit all over the place, as can be expected for a compilation, but Bruno’s songwriting feels instantly recognizable. “Distracted” bridges the gap between the rockier songs and the poppier ones on the compilation, with Toomey’s effortless-sounding vocals sliding alongside a brisk drumbeat from David Brown. “Top of My Lungs” is a breathtaking throwback to Bruno’s solo work, just his vocals and an electric guitar spilling out the kind of song that most would only dream of penning, and the piano-and-strings “Nick Cave” is a rumination on celebrity and fandom that’s moved me more than anything by its titular artist. Really, it’s the interspersed cover songs that mark Viable as a compilation above anything else. Not that that’s a bad thing–The Human Hearts’ takes on others’ songs result in both the most straightforward moment on the album (a pure jangle pop version of The Everly Brothers’ “June Is As Cold As December”) and its weirdest ones (“Business”, a frothing fifty-second thing apparently written by Pete Seeger, and “Terrible Criminal”, an interpretation of an unreleased song from Shrimper Records mainstays Wckr Spgt that’s sort of like…dub?). For those unfamiliar with Franklin Bruno, Viable is as good a place to start as any, and for those of us already on board, the gathering of some not-so-easy-to-find material on this record is a welcome development. (Bandcamp link)

Dan Darrah & The Rain – Rivers Bridges Trains

Release date: October 27th
Record label: Sunday Drive
Genre: Indie pop, jangle pop, folk rock, power pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Blue

I associate San Antonio record label Sunday Drive with punk and emo music, although they have, at the very least, dipped their toes into the world of breezy guitar pop this year with Rivers Bridges Trains. Dan Darrah is a Toronto-based singer-songwriter who’s been putting out music for a while–he released two albums in 2016, and another one in 2020–but his fourth full-length seems like a milestone for him. It appears to be his first record on vinyl, his first recorded in a studio, and the first record credited to “Dan Darrah & The Rain”, a backing band made up of Scott Downes, Jacob Hellas, Darian Palumbo, and Danielle Clarke. The five musicians of The Rain dress Darrah’s songs up in a blissful and wistful version of power pop, drawing on the more melancholic side of Teenage Fanclub in a way that tapers some of the album’s grander moments and bolsters some of its quieter ones.

Darrah sings in a gentle tone throughout Rivers Bridges Trains–the central voice of the record sounds so humble that it almost masks just how big these songs are. Nevertheless, these ten songs aren’t ones to fade into the background–opener “Charade” is all hooks, from its instrumental to every line, and the jaunty “Look Away” continues the strong rollout. Whether it’s Darrah or The Rain, the guitar melodies throughout Rivers Bridges Trains are some of the most captivating I’ve heard this year, stealing the show on highlights like “Rule of Three” and “Blue”. Darrah is also influenced by folk rock and 60s psychedelia, but Rivers Bridges Trains is such a pop-focused record that he and The Rain can only give these sides of his songwriting a few glimpses. They primarily come in the second half in the form of acoustic-based “I’ll Be Surprised” and “High Note” as well as the backmasked interpolations of “May Moon Interlude”, but even then Darrah and the Rain intersperse them with the soaring, maximal power pop of “Thorn” and the sweeping chorus that marks “Rivers Without Swimmers”. Rivers Bridges Trains is an impressive statement of an album, establishing Dan Darrah & The Rain as quite skilled at writing and executing pop songs. (Bandcamp link)

The Age of Colored Lizards – Diver

Release date: November 16th
Record label: Sotron
Genre: Jangle pop, bedroom pop, lo-fi pop
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Don’t Say Goodbye

Here at Rosy Overdrive, we love a good prolific lo-fi jangle pop project, and so it was only a matter of time before we shone the spotlight on Oslo’s The Age of Colored Lizards. The band is led by singer/guitarist Christian Dam, sometimes with a backing band, sometimes on his own; on Diver, the third Age of Colored Lizards album of 2023, Dam is assisted on bass by Anders Bøe and on drums by Håvard Berstad. Back in April, Dam put out Hang On, an album that contained a solid amount of noisy, distorted indie pop songs as well as some quieter moments; it appears that the trio are zeroing in on the project’s sparser, more subdued side to close out the year. The louder guitars are in the minority this time, with the bulk of Diver’s 26 minutes taken up by deliberate, delicate pop songs that even trend towards slowcore territory in some places.

“Another Sorrow” is an impressively low-key opener, relying on little more than whispered vocals and heavily-reverbed guitar strumming to ease us into Diver just about as leisurely as possible. In the second slot, “Don’t Say Goodbye” is a sleepy but fuzzier piece of jangle pop with a hook that perhaps cements it as the album’s “hit”. The only other real rocker on the record, “All My Friends Are Gone”, also occurs in the first half, although it has a darkness to its noise pop that fits its title. Songs like the acoustic-based “Heaven” and “Winter” represent the other end of The Age of Colored Lizards–skeletal, unconcerned with meeting the “pop” side of the band halfway at all. Somewhere in the middle is the title track and “Sirens”, which give the second side of Diver a mellow but still jangly feeling. There are moments of warmth throughout Diver, but it certainly feels like a winter record–the haunted “I Will Never See Tomorrow” is a pretty dark send-off for something that can be as friendly as Diver is in its catchiest moments, but it’s far from out of step from The Age of Colored Lizards as a whole. (Bandcamp link)

Bounaly – Dimanche à Bamako

Release date: November 17th
Record label: Sahel Sounds
Genre: Electric desert blues
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Wato To

A few years ago, one of my cousins got married, and I couldn’t attend the wedding in Pittsburgh because I was out of the country for an extended period of time. When I got back, my entire family kept telling me what a great, exciting, exhilarating event I’d missed out on–knowing the bride and groom, I was skeptical, but if they’d told me that they had flown out Ali “Bounaly” Traore from Mali to play their wedding, there’d certainly be no question about it. Dimanche à Bamako is the full-length debut from the guitarist–from Niafounke in central Mali, currently living in the country’s capital–and it was indeed recorded live at a wedding performance, with Bounaly accompanied by vocalists Alousseyni Maïga and Abdoulaye Touré (aka DJ Sali), drummer Mahamadoun Samba (aka Sangho), and calabash player Ibrahim Cissé. For 45 minutes and a half-dozen songs, Bounaly gets absolutely everything he can out of his guitar, shredding through noisy and kinetic rock-and-roll informed by the desert sound of his place of origin.

The title of Dimanche à Bamako refers to Sunday, the day of celebration in Mali, and Bounaly and his band–playing to a crowd of Northern Mali diaspora–conjure up just that with their set. Bounaly’s guitar screams throughout the eight-minute opening track “Wato To”, punctuated by shouts from Alousseyni Maïga and DJ Sali as well as Sangho’s frantic percussion. “Ma Chérie” only lets up on the gas a little bit–every inch of empty space opened up in this song is filled by Bounaly’s playing–then it’s back to noisy, rocking blues with “Touré Iseye”. The nine-minute “Mali Mussow” is perhaps the climax of Dimanche à Bamako, with Sangho pounding out a steady, sprinting beat for the first half, and Bounaly’s guitar absolutely exploding in the second half, swirling and smoldering in the form of a never-ending, transfixing solo. Closing track “Tamala” is the exclamation mark, a concise, five-minute take on Bounaly’s sound that starts to resemble a blues rock stomp. It only tilts in that direction, however–Bounaly is just as impossible to corral on that one than he is throughout Dimanche à Bamako. (Bandcamp link)

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