Pressing Concerns: Pelvis Wrestley, Lazy Sunday, Frances Chang, Prize Horse

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In the third and final Pressing Concerns of the week, we’ve got an absurd level of new music for you: new albums from Lazy Sunday, Frances Chang, and Prize Horse (all out tomorrow, February 16th), as well as the new Pelvis Wrestley album (which came out yesterday). If you missed Monday’s post (featuring Guitar, Westall 66, Dead Bandit, and Pinkhouse) or Tuesday’s post (featuring Friko, Tim McNally, Otherworldly Things, and Loveblaster), I’d heartily recommend adding those to your list as well.

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.

Pelvis Wrestley – ANDY, or: The Four Horsegirls of the Apocalypse 

Release date: February 14th
Record label: Earth Libraries
Genre: Synthpop, glam rock, indie pop, chamber pop, baroque pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: The World Is a Bucking Horse

One of my favorite albums of 2020 was something called Vortexas Vorever by Pelvis Wrestley, which is a project led by Austin, Texas musician Benjamin Violet. That album was a unique combination of synthpop and “glam country” that worked very well and was made up of some of the best pop music of this decade. Pelvis Wrestley had been quiet since their debut album, but last year they signed to Earth Libraries (Bory, Seriously, Cash Langdon) and reissued Vortexas Vorever (which had initially been put out by ATHRecords), as well as signaling new Pelvis music on the horizon. ANDY, or: The Four Horsegirls of the Apocalypse took four years after the debut album to appear, but its roots go even further back than that–the first part of the title refers to a synthpop band in which Violet played in Seattle before they moved back to their home state. Given the gap in releases, it’s understandable that Pelvis Wrestley sounds a bit different on ANDY; if Vortexas Vorever was Violet merging the synthpop of their past with the country music of the Lone Star State, this album merges the sound of the first Pelvis Wrestley record with a more polished, orchestral indie pop. The country moves of their last album are less obvious–not absent, but subsumed into a distinct “Pelvis Wrestley sound”.

Vortexas Vorever wasn’t “lo-fi”, but it was fairly barebones compared to ANDY, which isn’t afraid to add layer upon layer to its already gigantic-seeming pop music. Five-minute opening track “Found a Friend” is a scene-setter, kicking off this new era of Pelvis Wrestley with peak dramatic, building indie rock before cruising into the “hits” of the synth-glam “No One You Know” and “Act2ualize”. Even as catchy as they are, they’ve got full-band, cruising undercurrents to them, and it’s not until the soaring violins of “Holy Host” that Pelvis Wrestley openly embrace the sound of their previous record. Violet has plenty of other territory that they want to get to before the sun sets on ANDY–in one particularly memorable stretch, Pelvis Wrestley strut through the regal pop rock of “Open Letter”, dance through the busy of Montreal-esque bubblegum-synths of “Revenge”, and slink along to the tune of the slow-burning “Lily”. If you’re looking for the rootsy side of Pelvis Wrestley, I’d recommend following the horses–while “Horse Dreams” isn’t a country song, its beautiful chamber pop chorus evokes wide open spaces, and the band closes ANDY with its most energetic rocker in “The World Is a Bucking Horse”. Pedal steel dances through the country-dance-rock tune, Violet frantically describing life as a potential projectile “barely hanging on”. “I know people always come and go, I thought I should let you know / You were always on my mind, I can’t let go,” they sing, ending an album partially named after their past by trying to grab onto a piece of it before it fades away. (Bandcamp link)

Lazy Sunday – Another Summer

Release date: February 16th
Record label: Salinas
Genre: Pop punk, power pop, punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Ego Trip

For a certain strain of indie pop punk, Salinas Records is a pivotal institution. When it was at its most active, it was releasing landmark records from Martha, Swearin’, Big Nothing, Radiator Hospital, Delay, and Joyride! (among many others), music that would go on to shape the scrappy, back-to-basics era of indie rock that marked the second half of the 2010s. Salinas is still around, mostly releasing new music from older bands still on their roster (including the three of those six bands listed above in the past couple years), but their latest release is from a brand new group. It’s hard to say that Portland, Oregon quartet Lazy Sunday don’t fit on their roster, however. Barring a 2020 demo cassette, Another Summer is the band’s debut release, and it’s full of excellent Pacific Northwest indie rock–some of it is speedy pop-punk, some of the tracks hew towards rainy, mid-tempo fare, and both ends of Lazy Sunday’s sound are delivered with plenty of amplifier fuzz and hooks of one form or another. 

I’m not sure if an album like Another Summer can be “subtle”, exactly, but if one can, this would be what it sounds like. Bandleaders Rani Gupta and B Okabe (who both play guitar and trade off vocals) sing a bit lower in the mix against the tuneful racket of their band (aided by bassist KT Austin and drummer Jeremy Dunlap). Generally speaking, I can make out their voices, but they’re not always the focal point of these eleven tracks. Even when the guitars are roaring, however, Gupta and Okabe’s voices are delivering sharp melodies, holding the kinetic rock and roll of the record’s first few songs (the zippy, riffy “Everything You Wanted”, the blaring, fuzzed-out indie pop of “Differentiation”, the…wistful pop punk of “Long Con”) together nicely. The ability of “Long Con” to be noisy and hooky while still coming off as quite insular is a core tenant of Another Summer, and it gives extra oomph to songs like “You Said” and “Ego Trip”. Of course, Lazy Sunday never abandon the full-on rocker, and they shine as a unit when they hit the gas–Austin’s bass anchors “Peaches” as the rest of the band stomp through the anthem, while Dunlap hammers “Flutter” home in particular. Another Summer ends with “Closer”, a song in which Gupta and Okabe sing “Ooh, I wanna get closer to you,” in harmony while the band play loud, distorted rock music around them. It might seem contradictory, but Lazy Sunday make it sound congruous. (Bandcamp link)

Frances Chang – Psychedelic Anxiety

Release date: February 16th
Record label: Ramp Local
Genre: Experimental rock, art pop, folk rock, prog-pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Eye Land

Back in 2022, I wrote about Support Your Local Nihilist, the solo debut album from Brooklyn’s Frances Chang. One of the more intriguing first statements from that year, I was impressed with how Chang–already a veteran of experimental soundscapes and musique concrète with her work in several other bands–used indie rock as a jumping point to make unpredictable mazes of guitars, synths, and percussion that nevertheless all hung together as a pop (or, at the very least, pop-adjacent) statement. That album came out on Chang’s own Destiny Is a Dog imprint, but she’s jumped to Ramp Local (a natural fit) for her sophomore album, Psychedelic Anxiety. The album’s title in addition to Chang’s own description of her solo records (deeming them “slacker prog”) are both incredibly accurate, succinct summations of what she’s accomplished on her latest record, but I’ll do my best to elaborate on them. When Psychedelic Anxiety rocks, it rocks harder than Chang had previously, but she doesn’t lose track of her stranger, more insular side as well on these eight songs.

The way Psychedelic Anxiety centers Chang while surrounding her with busy but not-too-obtrusive music feels very “bedroom pop”, but it has a full-band might to it (aided by several guest musicians, including Liza Winter of Birthing Hips, the now-defunct rock band which also featured Wendy Eisenberg and perhaps pioneered a more “explosive rock” version of what Chang is pursuing here). If one isn’t prepared for it, the frayed-at-the-edges folk rock of opening track “Spiral in Houston” and the stop-start, woozy rock of “Eye Land” are going to sound off, but if you come in with a wider definition of pop music, then they’ll both positively sound like aural candy. Chang and her collaborators glide from there into the more challenging midsection of Psychedelic Anxiety–from “Sci Fi Soap Opera” to “Body of the Lightning”, Chang is more likely to surround herself with synths and/or other strange effects, and in the former of those songs, she becomes a spoken-word narrator. Still, even in this part of the record, the sparse woodwinds-featuring ballad “First I Was Afraid” and the slowcore art pop “Darkside” are both friendlier moments. The five-minute closing track “Rate My Aura” wraps up “psychedelic anxiety” quite nicely, Chang pouring out line after line against a rhythmic instrumental–“We don’t have control over what we don’t yet have control over,” is one such offering. (Bandcamp link)

Prize Horse – Under Sound

Release date: February 16th
Record label: New Morality Zine
Genre: Fuzz rock, alt-rock, space rock, shoegaze, post-hardcore
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Dark Options

After kicking around for a few years, Minneapolis heavy shoegaze/grunge-revivalists Prize Horse made their debut in the beginning of 2022 with their Welder EP. Their downcast, blown-out sound recalled serious, focused 90s alt-rockers like Hum and Failure and was a key part of what felt like a great time for this kind of music (just in the first half of 2022, Clear Capsule, Downward, and ASkySoBlack also released EPs in a similar vein, with Prize Horse’s label New Morality Zine being responsible for the bulk of them). The band (singer/guitarist Jake Beitel, drummer Jon Brenner, and bassist Olivia Johnson) didn’t rush a follow-up to Welder, instead taking two more years to deliver Under Sound, their debut full-length. Once again out via New Morality Zine and once again produced by Gleemer’s Corey Coffman, it’d be easy for Prize Horse to merely run back the sound of Welder for a half-hour and change, but signs of development abound throughout these ten songs. 

The band seem to have given real consideration to what a longer-form Prize Horse release should look like, and they’ve come up with something more expansive and dynamic than their previous work. Welder was impressive with how just about every moment seemed like it could’ve been pulled from a lost heavy 90s alt-rock single; Under Sound is just as impressive with how it fills in the gaps with something less immediate but still sharp and hard-hitting. One such valley is nearly the entirety of first track “Dark Options”, which is a restrained, mid-tempo, five-minute opener that has more in common with chilly emo and even slowcore than anything even remotely “grunge” aside from a (surprisingly brief) loud moment towards the end. “Your Time” and “Further From My Start” are a little heavier, although they still deal in the uncertain climes of “Dark Options”, and by the title track and “Leave It”, Prize Horse are even more resistant to straightforward rock music. It’s easy to get lost among the band’s stone-faced riffs and Beitel’s just-as-stony vocals, although the second half of Under Sound actually contains more fire on average than the first (everything from “Reload” to “Know Better” has at least a few moments of heaviness). “Awake for It” closes the record by veering even further away, almost into dream pop territory, appropriately summing up a record that does plenty of fascinating work at the margins. (Bandcamp link)

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