Pressing Concerns: Mythical Motors, Bill Baird, Hour, Trummors

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Hey there! We’re starting up a stacked week with a Pressing Concerns featuring four albums that came out last week: new LPs from Mythical Motors, Bill Baird, Hour, and Trummors. If you like power pop, psychedelic alt-country, synth-rock, and/or chamber music, there’s something here for you.

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.

Mythical Motors – Upside Down World

Release date: April 12th
Record label: Repeating Cloud
Genre: Lo-fi power pop
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Court of the Beekeeper

After inducting Grass Jaw into the four-years-in-a-row club last month, Chattanooga’s Mythical Motors have become the second act to have at least one record appear in Pressing Concerns in every year from 2021 to 2024. Like Grass Jaw, Mythical Motors is largely the work of one prolific singer-songwriter–in this case, Matt Addison, who–aside from mastering assistance from Meritorio Records’ Álvaro Lissón–is responsible for everything you’ll hear on Upside Down World. Mythical Motors (whose discography spans significantly beyond the four records that have appeared in Pressing Concerns) have spent the better part of this century hammering out a distinct sound in the field of lo-fi power pop–stitched together from familiar faces, sure, but delivered in such a way that I don’t think I’d mistake a Mythical Motors song for anything else.There’s the evocative but frequently-opaque lyrics and lo-fi attitude of Robert Pollard and Tobin Sprout, the whimsical earnestness of Martin Newell, the electricity of The Bevis Frond, and the laid-back hookiness of vintage college rock/C86 indie pop–and some new wave-y synths for good measure. Repeating Cloud Records has already done the public service of exposing one such Guided by Voices-inspired prolific bedroom act (New Jersey’s Hello Whirled) to a wider audience, so it’s the perfect match to give Addison’s latest record, Upside Down World, a cassette release.

Addison brings a lot of energy and consistency with him to Upside Down World–at this point, I expect a certain baseline of quality from a Mythical Motors album, but some of the project’s strongest moments can be found within this 27-minute, fourteen-song collection. Mythical Motors are at their fizziest in the opening stretch of Upside Down World, with “Take a Trip”, “Temporary Giants”, and the title track all going down as instant power pop classics. All three of them are anthems, but of different stripes–“Upside Down World” is jangly and just a little melancholic, “Take a Trip” is sweeping, all-in power pop, and “Temporary Giants” is just a little punchier and rockier (and although it’s still technically in the realm of myth, the refrain of “Temporary giants, your time has come to fall” feels like one of Addison’s more straightforward moments as a lyricist). The acoustic guitars that open “The Office of Royal Delivery” are the only respite in the album’s first half, but even that one rolls into a swooning, electric finish–and then it’s off to the races again with perhaps the best song on the record (the chaotic, synth-heavy power pop single “Court of the Beekeeper”, a huge-sounding song that isn’t dampened a bit by the electronic discord). Mythical Motors don’t exactly offer up any string-laced ballads this time around, but there are subtler moments of beauty–like the jangly, slightly shy-sounding “The Wind and Away”, or the melodic guitars that run through “Grand January High”. They’ve just released a career highlight without a moment of wasted space–if Mythical Motors have passed you by thus far, Upside Down World is a great starting point. (Bandcamp link)

Bill Baird – Astral Suitcase

Release date: April 8th
Record label: Perpetual Doom
Genre: Folk rock, psych rock, art rock, synth-rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Night of the Living Dad

Bill Baird is a musician and writer who came up in the Austin, Texas rock, folk, psychedelic, and experimental scenes in the mid-2000s, playing in the band Sound Team and releasing a slew of solo work over the past fifteen years. Baird has since lived in Oakland, California and San Antonio, but for Astral Suitcase, he trekked across the Atlantic to Iceland to record with producer Ulfur Hansson (who he met in Oakland while pursuing a degree in electronic music from Mills College). His first record since 2022’s Eternal Space Bar, Astral Suitcase is being released alongside an instrumental ambient album called Soundtracks–according to Baird, inspired by the divisions on David Bowie’s Low. The friendlier side of Berlin-era Bowie is probably a decent reference point for what Hansson and Baird have put together with Astral Suitcase, a record of sleek and deep but streamlined and immediate-sounding synth-driven rock music. It’s pop music more often than not, albeit slow-moving–you can see the train coming down the tracks, but that doesn’t make these nine songs any less impactful.

As deliberately-paced as it is, Astral Suitcase also takes pains not to repeat itself too much in its A-side. “Couch Olympics” is the only wordless song on the record, but the synths and vocalizations more than make up for the lack of lyrics in the melodic department. “Night of the Living Dad” is an excellent piece of minimal synth-rock (it’s poppy but not quite “synthpop”) that gives the record a bit of a kick, and while the two songs after it both take things slower, they do it in different ways–“Key Open Sky (Teleport)” with tired-sounding psychedelic pop and “Stjörnutaska” with a laid-back but slightly eerie acoustic-led folk sound and lyrics that I assume are in Icelandic (although I do not speak Icelandic). Single “World Series of Solitaire” marks the middle of Astral Suitcase with a big, towering piece of synth-led rock that nevertheless feels appropriately lonely at its core. It’s tempting to project a Low-esque transition onto Astral Suitcase by itself as “Steam Slow” steers the record into hypnotic, rhythm-based territory and the two songs immediately after it retreat into the exhale of swooning synths, intermittent singing, and only light instrumental touches elsewhere. Nevertheless, “Cloud Seat Head” ends the album with one last polished pop gem, a skipping drum machine beat gliding alongside Baird’s pleasantly dreamy lyrics before the song ascends to its closing instrumental part–if this is what a Texan making music in Iceland sounds like, I’d support the founding of a more formal cultural exchange program between the two. (Bandcamp link)

Hour – Ease the Work

Release date: April 12th
Record label: Dear Life
Genre: Post-rock, contemporary classical, orchestral, chamber music
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: The Most Gorgeous Day in History

I’ve been writing about Dear Life Records and it extensive network of bands and musicians for a while now, and co-founder Michael Cormier O’Leary is right in the center of all of it–through his solo work, through playing in bands like 2nd Grade and Friendship, through constantly popping up on others’ records, and so on. In addition to all of that, Cormier-O’Leary leads the instrumental ensemble Hour, who put out two albums in 2018 but hadn’t released anything else up until now. Hour never went away, and last year Cormier O’Leary took nine frequent collaborators to his home state of Maine to record Ease the Work, the third Hour album and first in a half-dozen years. A lot of the musicians appearing on Ease the Work have helped make excellent folk and rock music I’ve written about over the years–drummer Peter McLaughlin with Jordan Holtz and Dead Gowns, pianist Erika Nininger with Strawberry Runners, bassist Peter Gill with Friendship and 2nd Grade alongside Cormier-O’Leary–but the dozen songs on this album are something else entirely. 

The closest analogues in the “indie rock”-verse are 90s post-rock acts on labels like Thrill Jockey and Quarterstick (the bio for this album mentions Rachel’s, which feels right), but Ease the Work might be better thought of as straight-up chamber music or contemporary classical compositions as played by guitarists, cellists, violinists, clarinetists, drummers, and pianists from all sorts of backgrounds. Ease the Work feels like an apt title, as the gorgeous, laid-back “Island Time” opens the album in very gentle fashion, and the brief “Stoner” not long after is similarly tranquil. Although the title track and “Brain Scrub” do contain busier undercurrents, the “work” really feels like it begins in earnest with “KC & Clem” (a piece that gets louder as the instruments spiral around each other but which never loses control) and “Dying of Laughter” (which starts off with a light breeze but is toppling everything around it over by the end of its five-minute run). As Ease the Work backs off this peak, Hour still has yet to deliver some of its best individual moments, which come in the wandering guitar melody that guides “The Most Gorgeous Day in History” and the piano and violins tugging the record towards its conclusion in “Mom Calls and You Answer”. The strings swell on their own on closing track “Kelly’s House” to play Ease the Work out, and the absence of the rest of the instruments only underscores just how well everything fits together throughout the eleven songs before it. (Bandcamp link)

Trummors – 5

Release date: April 12th
Record label: Ernest Jenning Record Co.
Genre: Alt-country, country rock, psychedelia
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Calico Gown

Trummors are a folk-country duo from Taos, New Mexico who have, at this point, been making music together for a dozen years. Singer-songwriters Anne Cunningham and David Lerner (who used to play bass in Ted Leo and the Pharmacists) have sculpted their own version of southwestern “cosmic country” over four full-lengths for Ernest Jenning Record Co. (Savak, Beauty Pill, Worriers) since 2012, honing a sound that feels particularly song-forward, the psychedelic touches creeping in around the edges like a faded and lightly water-stained photograph. 5, their fifth album, took a while to come together–the songs arose during the pandemic, and eventually Cunningham and Lerner made their way to Los Angeles to record the record with former collaborator Dan Horne (Neal Casal, Cass McCombs, Beachwood Sparks). The result is one of the best-sounding country albums I’ve heard this year, an incredibly free-feeling collection of songs dressed in pedal steel, piano, and harmonica. The instrumentation never gets in the way of the simple, laid-back feeling of the album, while at the same time the “front porch-ready” sound of 5 doesn’t diminish the excellent writing from Lerner and Cunnningham.

Pedal steel and Cunningham and Lerner’s intertwined vocals introduce the record on the 90-second “Hey Babe”, an earnest, timeless-sounding but nevertheless fresh piece of country music that sets the tone for 5. “Calico Gown” crosses the two-minute barrier but it, too, feels streamlined and sharp to the point where every note is in its right place with no excess at all. The consequence of starting 5 this way is that when Trummors open the songs up a bit with “Yellow Spanish Roses” and “Jalisco Kid” it feels like the whole sky has unfolded in front of you, and when the band finally bust out the sitar (provided by Clay Finch) in “Cosmic Monster”, it’s about as disorienting as a record this gentle could possibly be. The ten songs of 5 ease into the record’s second half with just as much as skill as the first–the loping “Horse Named Blue” is a B-side highlight, and the penultimate full-sounding, harmonica-aided folk rock of “Supermoon Moonshine” feels like the record’s big finish. The four-minute country ballad of “I Can Still Make Cheyenne” is 5’s actual conclusion, however, a cold and lonesome song (originally by George Strait) that’s a bit of a comedown after what preceded it. That’s country music, though, and Trummors channel it better than most throughout 5. (Bandcamp link)

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