Pressing Concerns: Greg Saunier, Owen, Tara Jane O’Neil, Mandy

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Hey there, it’s the Thursday Pressing Concerns! A lot of heavy hitters have albums out this week, and this edition takes a look at four of them: new LPs from Greg Saunier (from Deerhoof), Owen (American Football), Tara Jane O’Neil (Rodan), and Mandy (Melkbelly). It’s been another busy week here, so if you missed Monday’s post (featuring Dr. Sure’s Unusual Practice, Storm Clouds, Onceweresixty, and The Silver Doors), Tuesday’s post (ADD/C, Johnnie Carwash, Miracleworker, L’appel Du Vide), or Wednesday’s post (on Mister Goblin’s Frog Poems), be sure to check those out, too.

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.

Greg Saunier – We Sang, Therefore We Were

Release date: April 26th
Record label: Joyful Noise
Genre: Art rock, noise pop, post-punk, math rock, garage rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Front-load the Fun

A recognizable name to anyone interested in the adventurous, experimental side of this century’s indie rock, Greg Saunier is the co-founder and drummer of long-running group Deerhoof (to the tune of three decades and nineteen albums). In addition to his key creative and instrumental work with Deerhoof, Saunier has had his hands on countless other indie rock records as a session drummer, producer, vocalist, and via mixing/mastering work. With all that background, it’s perhaps not surprising that Saunier can carry an album all on his own, but still, I was surprised by just how much I enjoyed We Sang, Therefore We Were, somehow his first-ever solo record. Saunier wrote, played, recorded, mixed, and mastered everything you hear on this album (Ryan Hover’s cover art being the only outside contribution), and, as it turns out, he’s a killer, unique pop songwriter when left to his own devices. The album’s dozen tracks certainly are recognizably “Deerhoof-esque”, but the one-man Saunier band is truncated and streamlined, throwing jagged, catchy guitar riffs and shapeshifting, form-fitting vocals over top of everything in a keen manner. 

I want to emphasize as much as possible just how fun it is to listen to We Sang, Therefore We Were–the cascading guitars and drill-bits of “There Were Rebels”, the otherworldly swagger of “Front-load the Fun”, the minimal math-funk of “Grow Like a Plant”, the junkyard power pop of “Not for Mating, Not for Pleasure, Not for Territory”–all of these are instantly likable, instantly memorable, sharply-deployed pop songs. One thing that stuck out to me reading about this record is Saunier (whose band was on Kill Rock Stars in the 1990s, by the way) mentioning being inspired by Kurt Cobain, both melodically and lyrically, when making this album. Saunier’s musings have a Cobain-esque sardonic, detrital quality to them amidst the chaos of the record, to be sure–in “Front-load the Fun” (“We care for each other, and it didn’t make the news / Celebrities I agree with”), the creepy ballad of “Don’t Design Yourself This Way” (“…to need water, to need food”), and in particular the hard-hitting “No One Displayed the Vigor Necessary to Avert Disaster’s Approach”, a musical rest stop that lets Saunier lay out his worldview at its bleakest and most clear-eyed (“It’s enough that you were in the way / You don’t need to have done a thing wrong”). 

The record ends with a song called “Playing Tunes of Victory on the Instruments of Our Defeat”, whose title reminds me of listening to Keep the Dream Alive, a podcast about fellow Bay Area musician John Vanderslice and his studio, Tiny Telephone. The podcast ends with the original studio shutting down, finally priced out of San Francisco–but both Vanderslice and Tiny Telephone are still around, the former making bizarre electronic-tinged music in Los Angeles and the latter in the form of an Oakland “successor”. In fact, a good deal of the instrumentals for the most recent Taylor Swift album were apparently recorded at Tiny Telephone Oakland. That could certainly be read as both a “victory” and a “defeat”, but thankfully we have a record like We Sang, Therefore We Were that finds some kaleidoscopic joy in looking at a bunch of different perspectives. (Bandcamp link)

Owen – The Falls of Sioux

Release date: April 26th
Record label: Polyvinyl/Big Scary Monsters
Genre: Singer-songwriter, folk rock, orchestral rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Qui Je Plaisante?

“Now in my forties, I travel with much more dirty laundry,” is one of the first lines you hear on The Falls of Sioux, the latest record from Mike Kinsella’s Owen. Kinsella chooses to start The Falls of Sioux–which I believe is the eleventh Owen full-length, and the first one in four years–with “A Reckoning”, an ornate, quietly intense piece of folk rock that showcases both the weary determination Kinsella displays in his writing throughout the record as well as the doggedness with which the American Football frontperson and Cap’n Jazz drummer has pursued making new music no matter how big the shadows of his 90s output loom (a doggedness perhaps only matched by his own brother and Cap’n Jazz bandmate, Tim). Owen has long been Kinsella’s “solo project”, but The Falls of Sioux pushes against this box by bringing in Russell Durham to compose string arrangements, Cory Bracken to play synths, and an overall embrace of several different extra textures (country-folk, electronic, orchestral) with which to dress Kinsella’s songwriting. 

Nevertheless, Kinsella is still at the center of The Falls of Sioux’s expanding universe, and as much as “A Reckoning” is a statement in its razor-shape instrumental production and focused lyricism, Owen deliver just as much of a statement by following it up with two songs that tread in different waters in the form of “Beaucoup” and “Hit and Run”.  Both tracks cross the five-minute mark, and both are sprawling folk epics that sound unhurried and patient, letting themselves develop to their full potential. It’s an unmooring, perhaps even an acknowledgement that for Owen to continue feeling fresh, Kinsella (who has multiple other creative outlets at this point, including the reunited American Football and the experimental duo LIES) has to approach it with this looseness. The attitude is helpful in breathing life into the more structured folk rock beauty of “Cursed ID”, the synth-touched indie rock of “Virtue Misspent”, and the dark, rushing “Mount Cleverest”, the “busiest” song on the record. Kinsella certainly never completely gives the reins over to anything but his songwriting on The Falls of Sioux, but it feels like he takes a little more control back to deliver the refined country tones of “Qui Je Plaisante?” and the string-laden, sweeping closing track “With You Without You”. “In my middle of age of discovery, every mistake’s a luxury,” Kinsella sings in the middle of the latter, although the more revealing line might be a few seconds later–“This is life now, so sorry about the mess”. Every step taken and choice made on The Falls of Sioux, while frequently adventurous, is still undertaken with great care and deliberation. (Bandcamp link)

Tara Jane O’Neil – The Cool Cloud of Okayness

Release date: April 26th
Record label: Orindal
Genre: Folk rock, post-rock, art rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Curling

Last time I wrote about Tara Jane O’Neil in Pressing Concerns, it was in the context of 1996’s II, the second album from her 1990s post-rock/slowcore group The Sonora Pine, which had just been reissued by Touch & Go and Husky Pants Records. Although II proved to be the Sonora Pine’s swansong, O’Neil (who originally got her start playing bass in cult Louisville post-rock/post-hardcore group Rodan) never went away, releasing a slew of solo records on labels like Quarterstick, K, and Kranky over the past twenty years. O’Neil’s recent output has been of the “odds-and-ends” variety–a live album, a demo collection, an ambient album on Orindal Records released as “TJO”, a collection of music made to accompany dances performed by her partner, Jmy James Kidd–so it might be easy to miss that it’s been seven years since the last proper O’Neil solo album, 2017’s self-titled LP. O’Neil had been working on these songs for a while, despite the tumult going on around her–O’Neil and Kidd’s home in Upper Ojai, California was destroyed in a fire and the duo subsequently spent time elsewhere in California and Kentucky, working on new music, before returning and rebuilding their home, where The Cool Cloud of Okayness was recorded.

As evidenced by the experimental nature of her recent music, O’Neill has come a long way from the 90s indie rock of The Sonora Pine, although that’s not to say that the parallels aren’t there. For several reasons–the “solo” name, the southern California locale, the lilting acoustic opening title track–it’s tempting to call The Cool Cloud of Okayness “folkier”, but I do still hear plenty of echoes of her post-rock and slowcore past in the way that O’Neil and the various musical contributors (including Sheridan Riley of Alvvays and Meg Duffy of Hand Habits) use rock instrumentation to sculpt vast empty spaces. Songs like “We Bright” and “Glass Island” are refreshingly minimal, proving that O’Neil can still say a lot with relatively little. At the same time, though, The Cool Cloud of Okayness pushes forward, whether it’s the orchestral rock touches of early highlight “Seeing Glass” or the busy, swirling, almost psychedelic experimental grooves of “Curling”. An explicitly “song-based” album, even tracks like the six-minute dreamy odyssey of “Fresh End” are grounded by just enough structure, and the one song that doesn’t quite follow this pattern–the closing instrumental “Kaichan Kitchen”–nevertheless feels like a fitting conclusion. At this point, O’Neil has been a rock musician for over three decades, and she sounds just as free and driven as she did at the beginning. (Bandcamp link)

Mandy – Lawn Girl

Release date: April 26th
Record label: Exploding in Sound
Genre: 90s indie rock, alt-rock, fuzz rock, lo-fi rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Mickey’s Dead Stuff

Miranda Winters is best-known as the frontperson of Chicago noise rock/pop group Melkbelly (who recently released a two-song single, breaking four years of silence after 2020’s excellent PITH LP). She’s also released music under her own name, including a twenty-minute album called Xobeci, What Grows Here? in 2018 and a two-song single for Exploding in Sound Records in 2020. So what differentiates Mandy, the name she’s chosen to release her latest record, from her other material? Well, truncated version of her name aside, it’s perhaps a more formal introduction to Winters as a solo artist, with a full band (guitarist Linda Sherman, bassist Lizz Smith and drummer Wendy Zeldin) in tow as compared to her previous, more skeletal-sounding material. Winters is able to draw herself closer to Melkbelly’s Breeders/Veruca Salt-indebted 90s alt-rock sound on Lawn Girl, the first Mandy record, but it does still sound like a “solo” album underneath its fuzzed-out guitars. Winters doesn’t have to shout over the band, as they shape their sound so that her voice can be quietly intense and still command full attention.

Lawn Girl is something of a patchwork album–rockers like “High School Boyfriend”, “Forsythia”, and “A Series of Small Explosions” take full advantage of a backing band, while, on the other end of the spectrum, Winters stands alone and sounds particularly lo-fi on “Come on and Do Thee Exist”, “Elder Fire”, and “Now That I’m a Woman” (which, yes, is a cover of the song from The Last Unicorn). It’s held together by a strong sense of pop songwriting–in order to make alt-rock this catchy, one must be able to write memorable guitar hooks, and the album starts with two tracks (“High School Boyfriend” especially) that shine in this regard. Meanwhile, “Mickey’s Dead Stuff” stumbles into mid-tempo pop brilliance, and even the lo-fi songs have a memorable wandering sense of melody to them. The other connecting thread would be the album’s loose but clear interest in womanhood and girlhood as a subject, from the title and album cover (Winters’ mother is the titular lawn girl) to the earnest reading of “Now That I’m a Woman” to the youthful scenes captured in several of Lawn Girl’s tracks. Winters builds these touchstones through flashbacks and trains of thought, and uses the rock music she knows inside and out to ensure all of Lawn Girl’s disparate moments hang together. (Bandcamp link)

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