Pressing Concerns: True Green, Liquid Mike, Flight Mode, Sea Dramas

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Welcome to the second Pressing Concerns of the week! In this issue, we look at four records that have come out or will come out this week: new albums from True Green, Liquid Mike, and Sea Dramas, and a new EP from Flight Mode. It’s been an eventful week for Rosy Overdrive; if you missed the January 2024 wrap-up/playlist post or Monday’s Pressing Concerns (featuring Heavenly, Cheekface, Girls Know, and Fantastic Purple Spots), check those out, too.

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.

True Green – My Lost Decade

Release date: February 1st
Record label: Spacecase
Genre: Lo-fi indie rock, lo-fi pop, psych pop, singer-songwriter
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Polycarp

If I took every word of My Lost Decade at autobiographical face value, I’d have to conclude that True Green’s Dan Hornsby has lived a thousand lives. He’s danced every dance. He’s a ruthless self-made businessman. He’s “actually Elvis”, and his roommate is Jesus Christ. He owes you $3,000 and “eleven years of unconditional love”, but he’s good for it, he swears. I didn’t know it before I sat down to write this, but it doesn’t surprise me at all to learn that Hornsby is also a novelist. What does surprise me is how the Minneapolis singer-songwriter chooses to dress his storytelling–namely in lo-fi, reverb-y psychedelic guitar pop. There are acoustic guitars, but Hornsby isn’t a folk troubadour, rather making music that’s generally thought of as the domain of Beatlesesque bashers like The Cleaners from Venus and Guided by Voices. My Lost Decade is a pleasingly varied-sounding record, but Hornsby and multi-instrumentalist Tailer Ransom develop a distinct musical style, a busy, kitchen-sink pop attitude that reflects True Green’s confidence that Hornsby’s striking songwriting will shine even if they whip up an instrumental storm around it. And it does.

The first half of My Lost Decade is one “statement song” after another, different stories in different genres held together by Hornsby’s writing. The opening title track is lo-fi retro rock and roll, its attitude blunted by the narrator who’s spent the last ten years doing everything he shouldn’t have been doing and knows it. “Buzzerbeater” is gorgeous, trebly lo-fi guitar pop at its best, simple and warped in a way that is only enhanced by how simple Ransom and Hornsby make it sound. The next trio of tracks keep one-upping themselves–“My Peccadilloes” and “Midtown Matt” are both genuinely stunning in wildly different ways. The boisterous, cape-twirling pop rock of the former is a coming-in-hot tale of greed and throat-cutting that feels like a kid brother to Malkmus, Bejar, and Berman, while the mid-tempo, cold-air ballad of the latter sounds like if Alex G tried to write a Hold Steady song, its looseness married to some sharp observations worthy of fellow Twin Citean Craig Finn. In these moments, I see glimpses of Slaughter Beach, Dog’s Jake Ewald and (especially) Noah Roth–people who have taken “literate indie rock” as an influence and attempted to do something just as ambitious musically with it.

And similarly to Noah Roth and Slaughter Beach, Dog, True Green aren’t averse to a big pop hook–“My Peccadilloes” is an earworm of the most dangerous sort, and the middle of the record even has “Hopeless Diamond”, in which Hornsby and Ransom do their best to deliver a piece of all-in, straightforward power pop (if they’re not entirely successful, it’s because they ended up creating something even more interesting). And yet, my favorite song on My Lost Decade comes in the second half, and Hornsby doesn’t even sing it. Someone named Alice Bolin who I hadn’t heard of before sings a song called “Polycarp”, a beautiful piece of dream-y pop/folk rock, a song where every single lyric is deserving of an entire analysis of its own. After a record full of songs where Hornsby excels at situating us right in the middle of a certain character’s life (the Elvis-wannabe in “Comeback Special”, the Coors Light-light-bathed “Midtown Matt”), True Green just as effectively depict a complete unmooring (“You make me feel like a fishbowl in the ocean / I can’t tell the water from the glass”). I need all of the ambient-country closing track “Bugbomb” to decompress–although when I did finally focus on that one, there’s a lot floating in its ether to grab onto, too. Intermittent banjo picking closes out the record as Hornsby sings about dogs barking at ghosts and hearts the size of small cars. It feels like the sound of nowhere, but also arriving right where you’re supposed to be. (Bandcamp link)

Liquid Mike – Paul Bunyan’s Slingshot

Release date: February 2nd
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Power pop, pop punk, fuzz rock, alt-rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Mouse Trap

The breakout act of 2023 was a punk band from the upper peninsula of Michigan called Liquid Mike. The band has been putting out music at a steady clip for most of the 2020s, but it was their fourth full-length–last year’s self-titled album–that got them a fair amount of buzz. There’s so much to like on that eleven-song, 18-minute record–a pop punk energy, power pop hooks, a 90s indie rock sense of driven listlessness–and I was pleased to see it show up in the top ten of the Rosy Overdrive Reader’s Poll (by a fair amount, the smallest band to make the top ten). Liquid Mike took eleven months to follow up S/T with Paul Bunyan’s Slingshot, and I can’t help drawing a comparison with another forward-motion-themed fifth album from a band from a Midwestern state who released a few albums before getting much attention. When Guided by Voices released Propeller in 1992, it was to be the Ohio band’s final album, and they put everything they had into it–against all odds, it slingshotted them into the indie rock canon. 

Obviously, this is not a perfect comparison, but one thing feels right on the money: with Paul Bunyan’s Slingshot, Liquid Mike are giving it all they’ve got. It’s the sound of a band completely rising to the occasion–they’ve turned around and made a record that feels like a huge step forward from the (quite good, mind you) music that got them the modicum of attention in the first place. For one, it’s longer–sure, 25 minutes is still short for a full-length, but these thirteen songs are developed and lethally effective on their own and when grouped together. There are songs on here that power pop bands would kill to write that Liquid Mike didn’t even release as singles, and the songs that were singles sound even better in context (I’m particularly thinking about the 90s alt-rock wrecking ball “Mouse Trap”, a towering piece of guitar power that flexes even harder amongst poppier fare).

As good as the opening two songs are, “Town Ease”–with its buzzing synths, thump-thump rhythm, and aggressively delicate vocals from singer Mike Maple–is where I started to get the sense that this was a special album. Paul Bunyan’s Slingshot is basically a murderer’s row of guitar pop from that point forward–there’s the aforementioned “Mouse Trap”, whose dead-serious cartoon violence imagery and dramatic pauses take up so much real estate in my head these days, there’s the laser-precise, bouncy slacker pop rock of “Drug Dealer” and “Pacer”, a song that rides its jangly intro into a six-string-fireworks chorus. The two lo-fi snippet songs “AM” and “-” remind me of a certain lo-fi indie rock band I’ve already spent too much of this review talking about, and the latter is particularly welcome in the LP’s second half, where songs like the almost-contemplative “Small Giants” and the slow-burn “American Caveman” offer up stabs at what a more pensive Liquid Mike might sound like (it sounds pretty similar to normal Liquid Mike at this point, not that that’s a bad thing). Every second of Paul Bunyan’s Slingshot sounds exciting for several reasons, not the least of which is that it feels like it’s breaking something wide open, like it’s unlocking an exciting new Liquid Mike future. (Bandcamp link)

Flight Mode – Tøyen, ‘13

Release date: February 2nd
Record label: Sound As Language/Tiny Engines
Genre: Emo-y indie rock
Formats: Vinyl (as part of The Three Times), cassette, digital
Pull Track: Thirtysomething

Oslo’s Flight Mode first showed up on my radar in 2022, when I wrote about their Torshov, ‘05 EP. I enjoyed that record’s emo-adjacent indie rock sound, which was an apt vessel for bandleader Sjur Lyseid’s reminiscent, introspective songwriting. Torshov, ‘05 was a sequel to 2021’s TX, ’98, and, as it turns out, was also to be the middle of a trilogy which sees its conclusion with Flight Mode’s third EP, Tøyen, ‘13. The release of Tøyen, ‘13 also marks Flight Mode’s move from Sound As Language to its sister label, the recently-rebooted Tiny Engines (and a more fitting home for their sound, anyways); Tøyen, ‘13 is technically being released through Sound As Language, but Tiny Engines is putting out The Three Times, a vinyl compilation of all three EPs on one record. Lyseid continues to chronicle moments of his past–rather than his time as a teenager in Texas or a jaded young adult in Torshov, Tøyen, ‘13 finds the singer-songwriter losing his father and becoming a parent in the same year, certainly two defining adulthood moments.

Lyseid the subject has grown older, but the Flight Mode telling the story (guitarist Anders Blom, also of the similarly-minded Neighboring Sounds, drummer Eirik Kirkemyr, and bassist Rudi Simmons) sound as sharp as ever, their large-sounding, polished emotional indie rock ebbing and flowing as necessary to match. “For future reference, I’ve stopped counting the years,” Lyseid confesses in opening track “Thirtysomething”, a song that opens Tøyen, ‘13 with weighed-down, contemplative verses before launching into a cathartic chorus. The middle of the EP contains the two biggest rockers–single “Hyperventilate”, a living, heavy-breathing example of how age doesn’t always necessarily bring tranquility, and the big-picture uneasiness of “Surprised At All”. Lyseid closes Tøyen, ‘13 and this entire chapter of Flight Mode with “My Brothers & My Sister at the Funeral”, an explicit rumination on the death of his father–when he sings “I am not here, these are not my tears / Spaced out and sad as fuck, something got stuck,” one can either interpret it as an attempt at capturing real-time feelings or that of attempting to revisit them a decade later. What Tøyen, ‘13 and The Three Times as a whole seem to suggest, however, is that this isn’t such a clean dichotomy. (Bandcamp link)

Sea Dramas – Escape Scenes

Release date: February 2nd
Record label: Royal Okie
Genre: Folk rock, psychedelic pop, jangle pop, dream pop
Formats: CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Long Goodbye

San Francisco’s Sea Dramas are a new-to-me group, but they’ve been around for a while, releasing three full-length records in the 2010s as well as a few more recent, pandemic-era home recordings uploaded to their Bandcamp page. It appears that plenty of musicians have played with and/or in Sea Dramas over the years, but the band is led by singer-songwriter Scott Pettersen, and the majority of what you hear on the fourth Sea Dramas album was recorded by Peterson himself. On Escape Scenes, Sea Dramas make a beautiful version of guitar pop that fits both their band name (somewhere between “unsettled” and “tranquil”) and their Bay Area home; Petterson is an ace songwriter of vintage college rock, containing shades of folk rock, C86 indie/jangle pop, and dream pop across the record’s ten songs. Escape Scenes feels in line with yet distinct from a lot of California jangle pop I’ve covered, coming off as a folkier version of Melancolony’s 80s-revival college rock or a more polished version of Evening Glass’ nautical, Dunedin-inspired pop.

Aside from a few remote contributions (violin and vocals from Sara Mohan on “No Poetry” and percussion from David Brandt on “Daybreak”), Escape Scenes was recorded by Petterson at his Livermore home studio. With plenty of home recording experience, Sea Dramas sound anything but “lo-fi” here–Petterson manages to turn these songs into fully-fleshed-out pieces of baroque, psychedelic pop music with a toolkit far beyond his languid guitar playing and wistful vocals. The instrumental folk of “Daybreak” is a disarming opening statement, setting the scene for the listener to become fully engrossed in the lush psychedelic folk rock of “Long Goodbye” and the smooth, dreamy pop feeling of “Nite Passengers”. The busy bassline and slightly-sped-up tempo of “Running Thoughts” helps it earn its “single” status without disrupting the record’s main vibe, and although the album flows from one song to the next seamlessly, instrumental choices in “Moon Breaks” and “No Poetry” are attention-grabbing second-half choices. By the titles alone, it’s clear that Sea Dramas are wrapping things up with the final two tracks on Escape Scenes (“Sundown” and “Turn the Tide”), although these songs will stick with you after the waves have receded and night has fallen. (Bandcamp link)

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