Pressing Concerns: ADD/C, Johnnie Carwash, Miracleworker, L’appel Du Vide

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A top-tier edition of Pressing Concerns awaits you today, pulling from a bunch of great records from the last month or so: new albums from ADD/C, Johnnie Carwash, and L’appel Du Vide, and a new EP from Miracleworker. You’d also probably enjoy yesterday’s post (featuring Dr. Sure’s Unusual Practice, Storm Clouds, Onceweresixty, and The Silver Doors), so be sure to check that one out if you missed it.

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.

ADD/C – Ordinary Souls

Release date: March 29th
Record label: Let’s Pretend
Genre: Punk rock, pop punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Ghost Ship

ADD/C are new to me, but they’re far from a new band–they’ve got releases dating back to around 2000, and while Ordinary Souls may only be their third “proper” album, they’ve released a healthy amount of splits, EPs, and compilations (including a reissue through Dead Broke Rekerds) over the years. They’re originally from Chattanooga, Tennessee, and my sense is that the band’s four members (bassist Grady O’Rear, drummer Cole Champion, guitarist/vocalists Harold Guenthner and Daniel Westcott) are spread out through the American heartland now–their latest record was mostly recorded in Dayton, Kentucky with Cincinnati garage rock veteran John Hoffman (Vacation, BEEF) and released by Bloomington, Indiana-based Let’s Pretend Records. Ordinary Souls appears to be ADD/C’s first new music in over a decade, and the album–featuring seventeen songs in under forty minutes–is a sweeping, wide-ranging punk rock record from a band with nothing to lose and no reason to keep “doing this”–other than the many reasons that the LP (both explicitly and implicitly) enumerate throughout its length.

“Heartland rock” has come to mean Bruce Springsteen-influenced, grandiose indie rock with epicenters in New Jersey and Philadelphia, and while I like a lot of that music, I’d suggest that something like Ordinary Souls is a more accurate reflection of the term–it’s catchy and decidedly unpolished pop punk made by two-decade-plus rock and roll veterans strewn across tertiary-market cities with several lifetimes’ worth of fucked up shit to write about. The record comes out of the gate catchy and energized with “Rattle and Shake” and “Routine”, but it’s “Fireflower” that’s the first indication that this record is going to be as powerful, deft, and real as it ends up being. Against all odds, “Fireflower” is a deeply empathetic and sincere fully-developed portrait, but the gigantic hooks contained in the uncomfortable-to-hear “Fatherless” one song later don’t give us much time to process any of that. The faces and cities that turn up throughout the record are fascinating to observe, but ADD/C hit on some of the record’s best moments by scooping it up and getting a little general, from the flag-waving “Econ 101” to “Legalize It” (which is both as straightforward as it sounds and a bit surprising, too) to the urgent-sounding “Carpe Diem”.

One of the best songs on the record is “Ghost Ship”, a mid-tempo pop punk power chord-heavy anthem about the deadly San Francisco warehouse fire. “I’ve got no right to remember it / Wasn’t my people who were lost in there / But that was only due to random chance,” is the empathetic and contradictory heart of the song, acknowledging both that it’s strange for a punk band to be ruminating on an electric/house music tragedy while at the same time being perfectly lucid about the thin line between the people at punk basement shows and the Ghost Ship (and, really, just about every community below the surface of society). As Jenga-tower-full as Ordinary Souls is, “Endurance Challenge” pretty clearly had to be the end of the album, a song about playing empty, endless, and transcendent shows. I won’t reprint the lyrics to the song’s last verse here, as I don’t want to out them as incredibly earnest punk rockers, but I will quote the song’s refrain, which takes on different meanings as the song progresses until it’s the last thing you hear on Ordinary Souls : “Come on, come on, come on / Play us another song / … / You ain’t even close to being done”. (Bandcamp link)

Johnnie Carwash – No Friends No Pain

Release date: March 29th
Record label: Howlin’ Banana
Genre: Power pop, indie pop, twee, garage rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: What a Life

There is a lot of good indie rock coming out of France these days, but I’m not sure I’ve heard anything quite as immediately sugary and peppy as Johnnie Carwash. After EPs in 2018 and 2020, the Lyons-based trio released Teenage Ends, their debut full-length, back in 2022–and have spent plenty of time on the road in the moments between releases. Their seasoned status as power pop road warriors is reflected on No Friends No Pain, their rollicking second LP out through Howlin Banana (Special Friend, TH Da Freak, SIZ). Recorded live in Carpentras’ Studio Vega by Romain Da Silva between tours, No Friends No Pain is a rock-solid sophomore album, ten songs in 30 minutes featuring a streamlined power trio setup that’s brimming full of pop hooks nonetheless. The record reminds me of Poughkeepsie’s Spud Cannon–a band that’s clearly a force in their live shows, so the goal of the record becomes to capture that energy in a studio setting. And while I haven’t actually seen this band play a show, No Friends No Pain taps into something strong enough upon which to rest an entire record.

Intentionally or otherwise, the name “Johnnie Carwash” evokes 1950s early American rock and roll/rockabilly to me–and while No Friends No Pain’s sound might be more directly traced to pop punk, bedroom pop, and twee, it has a similarly breathless pop rock quality to its music. In its first half in particular, No Friends No Pain is brief but impactful garage-pop hit after hit–the “woo-oohs” in opening track “Sunshine”, the foot-on-gas rave-up found in “I’m a Mess”, the garage-y pop punk “Stuck in My Head”, and “What a Life”–which basically puts together a bit of the best of every song that came before it–are all single-ready. The second half of the record can only be really thought of as “darker” and “slower” by comparison, as it’s still full of catchy guitar pop music, but “I Wanna Be in Your Band”, “Anxiety”, and “Waste My Time” all let a bit more fuzzed-out garage rock into Johnnie Carwash’s sound than normal, and “Hate Myself” has a little bit of glam rock snottiness to it. “WALIAG” closes the record with a mid-tempo, woozy singalong that sounds like the party after the show–it’s not quite like anything else on No Friends No Pain, but it’s an excellent cap to the excitement. (Bandcamp link)

Miracleworker – Arrows

Release date: March 8th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Power pop, lo-fi indie rock, pop punk, alt-rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Arrows

Miracleworker are a band from New Jersey who spell their name as all one word, which is how you can tell them apart from Miracle Worker, the Brooklyn-based project of Annie Sullivan and Spirit Night’s Dylan Balliett. The Jersey Miracleworker is made up of Chris Ross (drums/vocals), Peter Hart (guitar/vocals), and Dan Cav (bass), all of whom are apparently veterans of the East Coast hardcore scene (Nora, Ensign, Second Arrows, Nine Lives, Damn This Desert Air–these names don’t mean anything to me, but if you like hardcore more than I do, perhaps you’ll recognize some of them). Miracleworker isn’t even close to hardcore punk, as the trio use the band as a vehicle to bash out hooky, melodic power pop/heartland punk rock in Ross’ basement on their latest EP, Arrows. The band seem to like their brief, three-song EPs (how hardcore of them), as they put out three of them last year, and Arrows similarly barrels through the title track, “Wide Awake”, and “Disappear” in under ten minutes–going three for three and knocking all of them out of the park in the process.

“Arrows” is the “hit” that opens the EP, with Miracleworker immediately launching into a song that has a melodic pop punk attitude with a lo-fi power pop delivery and contains a fair bit of 90s alt-rock radio catchiness as well (Ross’ “whoa-oh” backing vocals really sell the hook in this one). “Wide Awake” picks up right where the previous song left off, with the tempo feeling more appropriate for slick power pop but still being punched up by some more excellent backing vocals and a very catchy main guitar riff (and Cav’s prominent melodic bass work towards the end of the song shouldn’t go unnoticed, either). Arrows contains clues that it’s the work of people who’ve been around this planet a few times throughout the EP–the title track is very clearly about being a parent, and the insomnia in “Wide Awake” is one that comes with plenty to reflect upon–but closing track “Disappear” is the closest the record gets to a “slowdown” moment. It’s still bouncy, but there’s a delicateness to the way Hart delivers “Close your eyes and watch this disappear,” in the chorus. The disappearance to which Hart refers isn’t an ending, however–it’s the letting go of past ties and “giv[ing] yourself another chance”, which seems to explain Miracleworker quite well. (Bandcamp link)

L’appel Du Vide – Metro

Release date: March 29th
Record label: It’s Eleven/Sabotage
Genre: Post-punk, garage punk, noise rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Verschwiegen

Late last year, I wrote about the sophomore album from Leipzig garage punk group Ambulanz, released by German garage rock imprint It’s Eleven Records. Between them and Trouble in Mind Records’ Onyon, it seemed like the Leipzig punk scene was one to keep an eye on, and while It’s Eleven’s latest record is technically from nearby Chemnitz, it nevertheless continues to argue in favor of what’s going on in basements in east Germany. L’appel Du Vide actually features It’s Eleven labelhead Flatty Lugosi on guitars and synth, along with vocalist Rene Thierfelder, bassist/vocalist Suse, and drummer Friday, and Metro is their debut full-length after a handful of demos and EPs over the past four years. Compared to the synth-heavy garage punk of Ambulanz, L’appel Du Vide is a different creature, and a darker one–still garage-y, but with a heavier debt to post-punk and even noise rock. Metro reminds me of something out of the Future Shock/Cincinnati/Feel It Records nuclei scene, post-punk/noise rock that’s too limber and nervous-sounding to get lumped in with the “knucklehead” side of those genres.

The press release for Metro somewhat sardonically refers to Chemnitz as “the San Francisco of the very little man” (presumably because nobody in Saxony knows about Cincinnati), and L’appel Du Vide make it clear that they’re inspired by the decay, seediness, and industry surrounding them. That being said, that doesn’t mean Metro has to be a chore to listen to, and the band find comfort in quick tempos and high-flying garage punk throughout the record’s nine songs and 33 minutes. Metro comes out of the gate oscillating between punk and post-punk–between the chugging opening track “Nacht”, the pounding, noisy “Verschwiegen”, and the breakneck speed of “Offenbarungseid”, L’appel Du Vide do more than enough to hook the listener early on. The band never really lose that energy, although the middle of the record (between the stop-start “Woanders” and the mid-tempo, plodding “Verbrennen”) adds just a bit of variety. L’appel Du Vide nevertheless spend the majority of Metro with their foot on the gas, including the majority of closing track “Fragezeichen”–at least until it trails off with a subdued-sounding instrumental. Having outran the decay for an entire album, L’appel Du Vide end things by letting it consume them. (Bandcamp link)

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