It is the beginning of April! We’re still enjoying the final week of March in Pressing Concerns, however, as this edition looks at four records that came out last week: new LPs from Hello Emerson, The Church, and Magana, plus a new EP from Fanclubwallet. The March 2024 playlist won’t be ready until next week (due to me being on vacation last week), but you can expect two more Pressing Concerns this week as per usual.
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.
Hello Emerson – To Keep Him Here
Release date: March 29th
Record label: Anyway/Hometown Caravan/K&F
Genre: Singer-songwriter, folk rock, alt-country
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Church
Hello Emerson is the project of Columbus-based folk musician Sam Emerson Bodary, who put out his debut album back in 2017 and linked up with Ohio stalwart imprint Anyway Records (St. Lenox, Smug Brothers, Joe Peppercorn) for 2020’s How to Cook Everything. The third full-length from the band (also featuring percussionist Daniel Seibert and keyboardist Jack Doran) and their first in four years is a concept record about an accident in 2017 that landed Bodary’s father, David, in the hospital, and the subsequent nine days of hazy uncertainty while the younger Bodary and the rest of his family waited to see if David would make it through to the other side–and what state, physically and mentally, he would be in. He eventually recovered, and To Keep Him Here stands as a chronicle of everything that such an event brings to the surface, from the inevitability of death to the mundane-seeming things that are forever changed by the loss of a loved one to whether or not a near-death experience could (or should) necessitate major life changes once one returns to “the living world”.
Bodary’s version of “indie folk” is crystal-clear-sounding, “confessional”-feeling, and relatively polished, which has garnered Hello Emerson comparisons to The Mountain Goats and Bright Eyes (the latter feels more accurate, although he might actually be closer to David Dondero, Conor Oberst’s mentor from which he, ah, borrowed a lot). Neither of them quite feel like apt touchpoints for To Keep Him Here, an album that veers between direct and existential lyrically while musically incorporating some rootsiness and “alt-country” without being overtly wedded to either (I hear more than a little bit of a more Midwestern Jason Isbell in Bodary’s delivery and writing). The songs on To Keep Him Here are actually interspersed with snippets of an interview that David did about the accident–these quotes aren’t long enough to fully explain and contextualize what happened to him, which fits with the somewhat scattered theme of the record, but they certainly echo the sentiments Bodary writes about in his songs.
“Tupperware for Glass” flits between a stark remembrance of the phone call informing Bodary of the accident and a meditation on the uselessness of living “healthy” when everything can end so suddenly–a sentiment echoed by the nevertheless upbeat-feeling “Church”. Bodary bounces between subjects, but every song on the record fits in with the album and says quite a lot–even the one-minute “Dinners I” is a key illustration of where the mind goes in this situation (“If we lose Dad, then how will we make dinner?”) while “Couch Song” functions to give meaning to the years before it and the time spent, regardless of how it “ends”. The album closes with the cheery-sounding “Tough Luck”–the quip about the ordeal being “Just a dress rehearsal for your hospice years” is a little “dark humor”, but it’s substantial enough to be thought of as more than “ironic”. In the next line, Bodary sings “Now we’ll know how to help you go,” in all sincerity–To Keep Him Here is too complex to boil everything in it down to one conclusion, but Bodary finds the way forward by taking whatever he can from the experience. (Bandcamp link)
Fanclubwallet – Our Bodies Paint Traffic Lines
Release date: March 29th
Record label: Cool Online
Genre: Dream pop, bedroom pop, indie pop, twee, synthpop
Formats: CD, digital
Pull Track: Complex Weather
Ottawa, Ontario’s Hannah Judge started releasing music as Fanclubwallet in 2020, putting out a steady stream of singles and eventually larger-scale records–2021’s Hurt Is Being EP, 2022’s You Have Got to Be Kidding Me, last year’s Small Songs, Vol. 1 EP. As a solo bedroom pop act, Fanclubwallet have achieved an impressive degree of success–“Car Crash in G Major” has been streamed 13 million times, which I think makes it a “hit”–but Judge has remained actively involved in her local scene in a way not necessarily characteristic of “out of nowhere”. Judge recently co-founded Club Records, which appears focused on fellow Ottawa acts (they’ve put out music from Dart Trees, among others), and has now assembled a full-time Fanclubwallet band out of “close friends” in the Ottawa music scene–bassist Nathan Reid, guitarist Eric Graham, and drummer Michael Watson (who co-founded Club with Judge). The five-song Our Bodies Paint Traffic Lines EP is the debut of full-band Fanclubwallet–not only do Reid, Graham, and Watson play on the EP, they’re also credited with composition and writing. The dream-y bedroom pop sound of Fanclubwallet is still intact on Our Bodies Paint Traffic Lines, but there’s definitely a hefty backbone to these songs that helps this EP stand out in a crowded scene.
Another commendable aspect of Our Bodies Paint Traffic Lines is that it plays like a full record rather than a collection of songs (not always a given for this kind of music)–the way that Fanclubwallet slowly roll out the carpet in the slow-moving synth-dream-pop title track only to launch into the starry-eyed, big-chorused indie rock of “Complex Weather” is quite deft, as is the self-evident manifestation contained in the exclamation mark of a closing track, “Band Like That”. “Picture of Her” and “Easy” are hardly “album tracks” (I mean, the latter was literally a single), with the dueling vocals in the forming helping the mid-tempo song develop a distinct identity and the quick, skipping-speed and buzzing synths of the latter setting its own course. “Complex Weather” and “Band Like That” are both massive pop songs, although the former immediately locks into place by dropping us all in the middle of a pivotal moment while the latter is a little more comfortable taking its time in crafting its narrative. “Band Like That” is a song about hearing a band on the radio, seeing them live, and feeling a strong desire to do just that. The final lyrics are a question (“You could see it, right? / Me in a band like that”)–Judge leans on the rest of her band to provide the answer. (Bandcamp link)
The Church – Eros Zeta and the Perfumed Guitars
Release date: March 29th
Record label: Communicating Vessels
Genre: Psychedelic rock, college rock, post-punk, folk rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Amanita
Every rock band should strive to be as inventive, as active, and as weird in their fifth decade of existence as legendary college rockers The Church have turned out to be. In recent years, the Sydney-based group have leaned fully into the psychedelic rock that, in their early days, hovered around the edge of their post-punk/jangle-rock sound, creating dense soundscapes like those of last year’s thirteen-song, hour-long The Hypnogogue. The band (led by founding and sole consistent member Steve Kilbey on vocals and bass, alongside drummer Tim Powles and guitarists Ian Haug, Ashley Naylor, and Jeffrey Cain) didn’t wait long to follow up The Hypnogogue–the twenty-seventh Church LP, Eros Zeta and the Perfumed Guitars, is a “continuation” of the previous record’s storyline, following “a failed rockstar (‘Eros Zeta’) trying to reclaim his faded glory through the use of a dream extractor (‘The Hypnogogue’)”. Kilbey has apparently written an eBook elaborating on this story as well. Do I follow the two records’ shared concept? Not really–but Kilbey is pretty clearly inspired by it, as he’s used it as a jumping-off point to put together two different late-career highlights now.
Some of these songs initially appeared on the deluxe edition of The Hypnogogue, and the entire record was apparently available for purchase as a live show exclusive when they were touring its predecessor, but The Church made the right decision in releasing Eros Zeta and the Perfumed Guitars properly as a standalone album. If it’s possible for a 70-minute, 15-song double LP to be “streamlined”, Eros Zeta and the Perfumed Guitars is, relatively speaking–there are less lengthy instrumental passages and wall-of-sound psychedelic rock on this one as compared to The Hypnogogue, with Kilbey’s songwriting feeling a bit more grounded this time around. The first few songs on the album are fairly accessible pieces of post-college rock, with jangle pop, folk rock, psychedelia, post-punk, and orchestral rock all adding shades to the likes of “Realm of Minor Angels” and “Amanita” but without any one aspect overtaking the others. There are a few “spacier” songs in the first half of the record–“2054” and “The Immediate Future” come to mind–but they’re the exception rather than the rule, with songs like “Manifesto” and “Song 18” always coming in with a more pop-friendly version of The Church’s sound. The one truly “out there” moment on Eros Zeta and the Perfumed Guitars is the nine-minute space-prog-psych odyssey of “A Strange Past”, but it fits quite well alongside the record’s smaller-scale desert rock. After all, at this point, the Hynogogue era of The Church is as key a part of their history as Starfish is. (Streaming link)
Magana – Teeth
Release date: March 25th
Record label: Audio Antihero/Colored Pencils
Genre: Indie folk, art rock, singer-songwriter, indie pop
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: In My Body
I didn’t recognize the name of Los Angeles’ Jeni Magaña when I first heard Teeth, the singer-songwriter’s second full-length album, but that doesn’t mean she hasn’t been busy over the past decade or so, serving as the touring bassist for Mitski and Lady Lamb as well as making indie pop as one half of Pen Pin. At the same time, Magaña has steadily been releasing music on her own as Magana, with records ranging from ambient to folk rock. Her first “rock” album, 2020’s You Are Not a Morning Person, was a spirited batch of modern indie folk and rock with some orchestral touches. Given her other musical activities, it’s not surprising that it took a few years for a proper follow-up to emerge, but Teeth is a fully-realized sophomore effort–fourteen songs and forty minutes that recall her previous work, but as a whole it’s a distinct record that takes a different tack than her last one. The orchestral moments are more prominent, and the electric indie rock–while still being present–recedes a bit as Magana creates something that utilizes a wide array of musical styles.
Magana has a dramatic, floating vocal style that puts her in line with a lot of the big “indie folk” acts of today, but it’s her embrace of more adventurous instrumentation that sets Teeth apart from the crowd more than anything else. The uneven strums the open the record on “Garden” are simple yet somewhat strange, especially in combination with the eerie synths and sung-spoken lyrics, and the two songs that immediately follow it (the minimal, handclap-aided indie pop of “Beside You” and the delicate but giant-sounding synth-rock of “Matter”) are a bit friendlier but without receding into anonymity. The bigger-sounding songs like “Break Free” and (especially) “Afraid of Everybody” are well-done, but Teeth really shines in the margins, with quiet numbers like “Paul” (a touching orchestral folk ode to a friend who passed away) and “In My Body” (an upright bass-led piece whose silence only enhances the determination at the song’s heart) being some of the record’s most memorable moments. Magana takes on “Mary Anne” with just an acoustic guitar, her voice, and some white noise in tow, and comes out to an instrumental “Clarinet Jam” once she’s made it through. Both sides of Teeth are equally important to its foundation as a whole. (Bandcamp link)
Also notable:
- Constant Greetings – Showpony
- Thank You, I’m Sorry – Repeating Threes EP
- Teens in Trouble – What’s Mine
- Homework – Easy Money EP
- Mirtils – Fall Off
- Alejandro Escovedo – Echo Dancing
- Gentle Heat – Trick EP
- Cheem – Fast Fashion EP
- Carpool – My Life in Subtitles
- Sahra Halgan – Hiddo Dhawr
- Comeback Kid – Trouble EP
- Beige Banquet – Ornamental Hermit
- Cheap City – Blue Dancers
- King Isis – Shed EP
- Library Card – Nothing, Interesting
- Maximilian – Surrender
- Sarah Shook & The Disarmers – Revelations
- Abandoned Pools – The Haunted House
- CNTS – Thoughts & Prayers
- Shabazz Palaces – Exotic Birds of Prey
- Chicano Batman – Notebook Fantasy
- Omar Souleyman – Erbil
- You Said Strange – Trade Your Soul EP
- Distorted Reflection – Doom Rules Eternally
- Kelly Moran – Moves in the Field
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