Pressing Concerns: Dr Sure’s Unusual Practice, Storm Clouds, Onceweresixty, The Silver Doors

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An exciting week over on Rosy Overdrive kicks off with a Pressing Concerns featuring two superb albums that came out last week (from Dr Sure’s Unusual Practice and The Silver Doors), as well as two records from earlier this year (an album from Storm Clouds and a “double EP” from Onceweresixty). You probably haven’t heard most of these, and Monday morning is a great time to get familiar with ’em!

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Dr Sure’s Unusual Practice – Total Reality

Release date: April 19th
Record label: Marthouse/Erste Theke Tontraeger
Genre: Garage punk, post-punk, punk rock, no wave
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Escalator Man

One band I’ve been wanting to feature in Pressing Concerns for a while now but hadn’t gotten around to is Dr Sure’s Unusual Practice, a ferocious punk band out of Melbourne led by frontperson Dougal Shaw and backed by some combination of Jack Mccullagh, Mathias Dowle, Miranda Holt, Tali Harding-Hone, and Jake Suriano. Dr. Sure has given us all plenty to explore–since the last proper Unusual Practice album, Remember the Future? Vol. 2 & 1, in 2021, they’ve put out a live album, a split 7”, a cassette “mixtape”, and a one-LP reissue of two early EPs. All of them have come out through Shaw’s own Marthouse Records, which is also co-releasing the latest Dr. Sure full-length with Erste Theke Tontraeger. Total Reality captures Dr Sure’s Unusual Practice at its best, expansive and frequently chaotic but always with higher goals in mind. The last Dr. Sure album was notable in that it marked the incorporation of Shaw’s live band in the recording process, evolving from its “solo project” past. Total Reality does it one better by roping in even more contributors–the instrumental credits for the album have crept into the double digits. Shaw takes full advantage of everything at his disposal to make a weird, hypnotic, and ambitious rock record that lands somewhere between the sleek, lean, synth-colored “egg punk” of bands like Delivery and Vintage Crop and a more psychedelic, layered sound reminiscent of Tropical Fuck Storm.

Total Reality opens with a song called “Slug” that, after about a half minute of noise and atmospherics, displays Dr Sure’s Unusual Practice at their most immediate and fun-sounding, barreling through a piece of bouncy, garage-y “Devo-core” post-punk that doesn’t skimp on either the synth hooks or the saxophone accents. If you’re looking for more from this side of Dr. Sure, I’d steer you to single “Escalator Man” (a foot-on-gas, barnstorming yet nervy rock and roller) and second-half highlight “Realest” (which gets a lot of mileage out of that creepy post-punk-revival grin of a chorus). The rest of Total Reality isn’t difficult, exactly, just rock music with slightly different aims. “Celebration” and “Keeps Ya Head Up” show off Dr. Sure’s ability to still be quite catchy while being just as concerned with rhythm (nearly to the point of delirium, especially in the mantra-like repetition of the latter song’s title). Total Reality goes all-in on a “big” sound quite frequently, although in different manners–on “Last Guy at the Disco”, Shaw and his collaborators turn their sound into a glossy, chorused piece of 80s-pop (if that kind of music featured rambling Australian vocalists), while “Elephant in the Room” leans into the weirdness and disconnectivity, Shaw sounding like 90s Mark E. Smith trying to hold his own in new and strange soundscapes. If you’re going to call your post-punk album Total Reality, it better sound like you’re ready to engage with it and able to reflect some small part of it–Dr Sure’s Unusual Practice can take us there. (Bandcamp link)

Storm Clouds – F.O.G.

Release date: February 5th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Slowcore, lo-fi indie rock, shoegaze
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Self/Image

How would you expect an album called F.O.G. by a band (actually a solo project) called Storm Clouds to sound? If you answered, “lo-fi, slowcore and shoegaze-esque indie rock”, then congratulations, you’re on the same wavelength as Dima Zadorozhny, the San Diego musician who makes music under that name. Music like this almost works better as something completely devoid of context or background information, but there is a little bit to Storm Clouds, which has existed in sporadic form (a CD-R in 2009, an EP in 2016) for some time now. In recent years, Zadorozhny had been working as an audio engineer but ended up getting incredibly burnt out on the technical aspects of music as a result. In order to get back into making music, F.O.G. was a necessarily streamlined affair–recorded entirely on a four-track, the record’s eight songs embrace simplicity in arrangement, execution, and production, sounding like the work of somebody who’s quietly but palpably zeroed in on a new-old method of inspiration.

Anyone who isn’t open to the most downtrodden, insular, and downright cold impulses of 90s-style indie rock is going to find F.O.G. a difficult listen. The songs are largely mid-to-slow tempo-wise, the guitars are nice and fuzzy but quiet and restrained for the most part, and Zadorozhny’s vocals are whispered and barely audible in various parts of the record. Bedhead, Codeine, and Duster look like rock stars next to the sheer greyness of the opening trio of “Fog”, “Self/Image”, and “To-Do List”, all of which crawl through straightforward song structures as slowly and meekly as possible, like F.O.G. is trying to disappear before our very ears. It’s so effective at lulling the listener that “Kosmonaut” sounds like it’s from another world merely by selecting a more rousing drum preset and embracing shoegaze-y guitars a bit (even throwing a bit of flagging but memorable-sounding guitar leads sticking out underneath the fuzz, too). The second half of F.O.G. pulls a similar trick, retreating into the familiar stoicness of “Stick Around” and “Spider/Man” before ending the record with its two weirdest songs–the six-minute drum-machine-sound-collage-rock of “No Rewind” and the five-minute outro of “Out of the Fog”, a really bare track that’s the closest the album comes to “ambient” music. One minute, F.O.G. is wholeheartedly embracing the restrictions Zadorozhny placed on its creation, and the next it’s doing its best to push against them. (Bandcamp link)

Onceweresixty – Loco Sunset Boulevard / Ghetto Blast Noise Machine

Release date: March 22nd
Record label: Uglydog/Beautiful Losers/Pretty Ok
Genre: Indie pop, 90s indie rock, dream pop, college rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Don’t Get Stuck

Italian indie rock group Onceweresixty released their debut album back in 2021, but their roots go much further back than that. Founding members Marco Lorenzoni (guitar/vocals/keyboard) and Luca Sella (drums/guitar/vocals) played together in a band called MR60 for the majority of the 2000s, and after a break from music, they reunited as Onceweresixty in 2018. Their second album, Loco Sunset Boulevard / Ghetto Blast Noise Machine, is presented as a double EP, with the first four songs of the record making up the former and the final four tracks comprising the latter. It’s also the group’s first release as a trio, having added Enrico Grando (keyboard/vocals/saxophone) in between the release of The Flood and the recording of its follow-up (which took place in 2022 and 2023 at the band’s own studio in Villa Albrizzi Marini, located in the Venetian countryside in the northern part of their home country). Loco Sunset Boulevard / Ghetto Blast Noise Machine is an intriguing record (or two), with each half developing its own personality–the former is friendly, laid-back guitar-driven indie pop, while the latter is a bit noisier and more experimental.

Every song on the Loco Sunset Boulevard works as a strong pop song, although they take a few different paths to get there–“Don’t Get Stuck” introduces the record with slow, jangly college rock, “Running” evokes its title with its spirited, (relatively) uptempo chorus, and “Back in the Days” is nostalgic, dreamy pop rock. “Weird Times” is the oddest track on Loco Sunset Boulevard, and that’s really only because Onceweresixty pepper a “motherfucker” into the song’s floating dream pop chorus. “Pills” opens Ghetto Blast Noise Machine with something different–it’s a minute before any instruments even kick in at all, and when they do, it’s noisy, shoegaze-y guitars in the lead. It eventually transforms into stomping post-punk-pop, but they never abandon noise and feedback, something that also marks the lengthy instrumental passages of closing track “All That Glitter”. “Into Town” and “Consequence of Capitalism” are stretched-out versions of the more accessible side of the band, adding in moments of white noise (in the former) and distortion (in the latter) to push the songs a bit further. Onceweresixty is clearly a sturdy group of musicians at this point, and the structure of Loco Sunset Boulevard / Ghetto Blast Noise Machine ensures that they’re still keeping their indie rock fresh as veterans. (Bandcamp link)

The Silver Doors – The Silver Doors

Release date: April 15th
Record label: PHRC
Genre: Psychedelic rock, garage rock, orchestral rock
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Legwork

The Silver Doors are a new psychedelic rock quartet from Asheville, North Carolina which began releasing singles a year ago, culminating this month in their self-titled debut album. The band (bassist/vocalist Brett J Kent, violinist Justin Lawrence, drummer Bryce Alberghini, and guitarist/vocalist Alex Cox) refer to themselves as “Appalachian Desert Rock”, and they might be onto something with that. On the one hand, The Silver Doors are pretty clearly in conversation with the Ty Segall brand of West Coast garage-y psychedelic rock, but they’ve also got a heavy blues rock side that rears its head on some of the record’s louder moments, and Lawrence’s violin certainly sticks out throughout The Silver Doors, giving a uniquely Appalachian touch to these eight songs. Although The Silver Doors prove their psych-rock bona fides early on, the album (recorded ​​by Alex Farrar at Drop of Sun Studios) captures the band showing off some dexterity, finding time to offer up some poppier indie rock and even a ballad or two before the record’s over.

The Silver Doors make one strong opening statement with the back-to-back psych-rock epics of “Redeemer” and “Losing Hand” in the first two slots. Violin in tow, the group roar through an increasingly dramatic instrumental in the former before Kent’s vocals, hypnotic and in command, appear among the noise. “Losing Hand” follows it up with some smoking, riff-centric rock music, keeping things moving forward just as strongly. That being said, the heaviest moment on The Silver Doors has to be “Bulleteeth”, a stomping piece of distorted noise-punk that reminds me of The Baptist Generals at their lo-fi best. The rest of the album doesn’t slot so cleanly into garage-psych, however. The first indication of The Silver Doors’ other dimensions comes with “Shattered”, an earnest mid-tempo tune where the swooning violin shifts into “orchestral indie rock” mode. “Legwork” kicks off the second half of the album with a tight rhythm section, sounding closer to the post-punk side of garage rock than anything else, and even so, nothing quite prepares the listener for the six-minute power ballad of “Gone”. The Silver Doors close the album by returning to some more psych-rock riffs in the final two tracks, but they sound more sprawling and less hurried this time around–they’ve already proven themselves as capable psychedelic rockers, and then some. (Bandcamp link)

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