Pressing Concerns: J. Robbins, Memory Cell, The Maureens, TV Star & Spiral XP

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Good morning, happy Monday, and welcome to the first Pressing Concerns of the week! This time around, we’ve got new albums from J. Robbins and The Maureens on the docket, as well as two EPs, one from Memory Cell and one made by TV Star and Spiral XP together.

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.

J. Robbins – Basilisk

Release date: February 2nd
Record label: Dischord
Genre: Post-punk, post-hardcore, 90s indie rock, alt-rock, art punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Gasoline Rainbows

Most of 2019 was a blur for me for personal reasons, but I do remember really enjoying Un-Becoming, the first ever solo album from longtime Washington, D.C. indie rocker and producer J. Robbins. Not that it’s surprising that I enjoyed Robbins’ solo work–I hear the influence of his bands Jawbox and Burning Airlines in countless modern artists I enjoy, from Mister Goblin and Two Inch Astronaut to Fox Japan to Hammer No More the Fingers, to say nothing of his prolific career in engineering and production work (for instance: that Arcwelder album I wrote about last month? He mixed it). To me, Jawbox–muscular, noisy post-punk/post-hardcore anchored by the dynamic but smooth vocals of Robbins–defines Dischord Records’ 90s sound (my favorite era of the label) better than any other band. Still, Un-Becoming was welcome proof that Robbins could helm a rock record and write new material with the zeal of his younger bands (not to mention his younger devotees). 

It makes some sense that it took five years for Robbins to follow up Un-Becoming given his engineering work and the fact that Jawbox have reunited and even released new material–really, we’re lucky that we’re getting a sophomore J. Robbins album at all. This new album, Basilisk, sounds familiar in a most welcome way. It’s not an exaggeration to say that Robbins is a key architect of the indie rock music that’s proliferated in the decades since his most canonical works, so to hear him return to this same well and pull up something that sounds no less fresh than For Your Own Special Sweetheart does today is quite remarkable. It’s reminiscent of current-era Bob Mould–it’s a short list, the number of indie musicians evoking their golden era as rewardingly as Robbins does here. That being said, Basilisk doesn’t exactly sound ripped from the world of Jawbox circa 1993–it picks up about where Un-Becoming left off, with Robbins writing art-punk anthems with both “maturity” and “edge” and a fearless awareness of the present.

Robbins kicks off Basilisk with some hammering synths to begin “Automaticity”, but he does it in a way that makes it sound exactly like a vintage Robbins-led song, and when the band (Robbins, Jawbox bassist Brooks Harlan, and Kerosene 454/Channel drummer Darren Zentek) kick into gear, it’s a natural transition. The cold but kinetic drama of “Exquisite Corpse”, the post-punk “Last War”, and the huge guitars that introduce “Gasoline Rainbows” usher in Basilisk with an impressive amount of energy, and if “Not the End” slows things down a little bit, “A Ray of Sunlight” and “Deception Island” are there to pick the record right back up. Robbins has never been a completely opaque lyricist but he’s not exactly a punk sloganeer, either–when he sings “No such thing, life after history / There’s no sleepwalking security / It’s not Weimar 1933 / But it’s not far enough for me,” he sounds like he’s staring down the present without completely tying his writing to it. And I’m thankful for that–I get the feeling that I’m still going to be listening to Basilisk several years from now, and I suspect that it’s going to sound just as fresh then as it does in 2024. (Bandcamp link)

Memory Cell – Holding on to It

Release date: February 2nd
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Math rock, experimental rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Portal

Between Wowza in Kalamazoo and Handturner, there’s a surprising amount of wild, experimental rock music coming out of Kalamazoo, Michigan these days, and recently I’ve heard another band to add to this list. Memory Cell are a quartet who are maybe a little less indebted to noise rock and krautrock than the previously-mentioned groups, but their indie rock is still very all over the place, dealing in math rock and even a bit of basement prog. They put out their debut album, Spatial Reasoning, in 2022, and followed it up last year with a three-song EP called Burden of a Body. They must’ve liked the three-song EP format, as they’re back with another one, Holding on to It, less than a year later, featuring tracks that the group (guitarist/vocalist Kayley Kerastas, guitarist Rory S., bassist Levi Hambright, and drummer Evan Asher) worked out last year while touring around the Midwest and playing shows with bands like Shady Bug, Negative Glow, Rust Ring, Cheer-Accident, The Fever Haze, Sorry Machine, The Ladybug Transistor, and Disco Doom (wow, they played with a lot of bands I’ve written about on the blog last year!).

It makes sense that Memory Cell have played with multiple Exploding in Sound bands, because I hear a good deal of vintage EIS thorny, mathy indie rock (bands like Shell of a Shell, Maneka, and Pet Fox) on Holding on to It. It’s a short EP–under ten minutes long–but the band still finds the time to cram a bunch of twists and turns into it. Opening track “Portal” starts off as a lost-sounding, jammy number before picking up the tempo into a jittery piece of math-pop in its second half (if you liked Palm, it’s reminiscent of what that band loved to do). “Shapes” also follows the two-sided format the previous song does, although this one comes out as a swirling rocker and kind of folds in on itself as it goes along. At nearly five minutes long, closing track “Shadows” is Holding on to It’s “big finish”, and it’s also the EP’s least structured moment, cycling through several different types of rock music in the first two minutes before crashing its way into a feedback-heavy noise outro. Holding on to It definitely feels like an EP whose songs were honed and sharpened live, and Memory Cell have ended up with something that translates amazingly to tape. (Bandcamp link)

The Maureens – Everyone Smiles

Release date: January 19th
Record label: Meritorio
Genre: Jangle pop, indie pop, folk rock, psych pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Fell in Love

I wrote about Belgian quintet Capsuna a couple weeks ago, and now we’re stopping in another one of the Low Countries thanks to the latest from Utrecht’s The Maureens. I have admittedly not covered a lot of indie pop from The Netherlands in Pressing Concerns–there’s been traces of it in the folk rock of Nagasaki Swim and Grapes of Grain, sure, but Everyone Smiles is pure guitar pop, through and through. Although Everyone Smiles is their first record for Meritorio Records, The Maureens aren’t exactly a new group–they’ve been around since 2013, and although the lineup has changed from its inception (the band currently features drummer Stefan Broos, bassist Wouter Zijlstra, and guitarist Ruud Oude Avenhuis), singer-songwriter Hendrik-Jan de Wolff has been the steady bandleader for four full-lengths now. Everyone Smiles does sound like the work of seasoned veterans–its thirteen songs are all smartly-penned guitar pop which pull from 60s psychedelic pop and folk music as well as jangle pop, power pop, and college rock.

Even within the field of jangly indie rock, Everyone Smiles is a subtle record–I’ve known that it’s good for a while now, but I had to really dig into this one to get at the nuances The Maureens give to these songs. Upon closer inspection, it’s hard not to come away even more impressed with songs like the opening track, “Stand Up!”, which stitches together propulsive, bass-led verses and a slowed-down, triumphant chorus in a way that feels like two different pop ideas welded together seamlessly. The Maureens are definitely a “jangle pop” band–if “Sunday Driver” and “Fell in Love” aren’t jangle pop, I’m not sure what is–but with so many of modern janglers burying their vocals under reverb-y, dreamy guitars, de Wolff’s up-front, full-sounding singing feels especially fresh. On songs like “Do You”, there’s a confident clarity to it that reminds me of pop rock studio wizard Jon Brion. The second half of Everyone Smiles is just as strong as the first, if a bit less immediate–I eventually keyed in on the breezy, acoustic-led “Warning Sign”, the mid-tempo power pop of “Only Child”, and the quietly brief but memorable “Morning Papers”. As the rest of Everyone Smiles comes clearer into focus, it becomes apparent that The Maureens never run out of material from their seemingly-endless bag of guitar pop tricks. (Bandcamp link)

TV Star & Spiral XP – TVXP

Release date: February 2nd
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Fuzz rock, psychedelic pop, shoegaze, dream pop
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: TVXP

TV Star and Spiral XP: the collaboration that none of us knew we needed until we got it. The two Seattle bands both initially came to my attention last year–the latter released a good EP of psychedelic, noisy shoegaze called It’s Been Awhile that I wrote about, and the former put out two EPs of fuzzy power pop that I didn’t write about (but were still good, particularly last February’s Hallucinate Me). With a co-headlining West Coast tour set for later this month, the two bands did what more indie rock bands worth their salt should think about doing–they all (ten band members between the them) filed into TV Star’s practice space last December and bashed out a four-song collaborative EP. The resulting TVXP EP (mixed by Cameron Heck and mastered by Justin Pizzoferato) doesn’t sound exactly like either band, but moments of both are certainly present–it’s as catchy as TV Star’s best songs, as noisy as Spiral XP, and with a surprising Madchester/alternative dance vibe that was sort of present on It’s Been Awhile but not to the degree that gets teased out here.

TVEXP starts off with what seems like its most musically simple song in “Winter Snow”, but that’s not a slight–with Max Keyes’ wistful, downcast vocals combined with the rainy-day, Paisley Underground-esque jangly instrumental, it’s perhaps the most “TV Star” song on the EP, despite the Spiral XP frontperson singing it and the psychedelia floating underneath the song’s surface. “Maida” then rolls into the noisiest moment the two bands kick up, but it’s not so noisy that the Madchester-style beat gets buried over top of its Pumpkins-y 90s alt-rock sheen. “Space Person” is yet another left turn for TV Star and Spiral XP–it keeps both the danceable vibes of the previous song and the noisiness, but funnels it into a song that’s not all that different from bizarre but catchy late-90s “alternative pop”. The closing title track feels like what the entire EP has been working up towards–a full-bloom piece of blissed-out, fuzzed-up psychedelic-dance-pop that feels right out of 1991 but also right at home for Spiral XP and TV Star. Featuring some of the best work either of these groups have done thus far, TVXP is a strong argument for bands attempting to learn and expand through collaboration. (Bandcamp link)

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