Pressing Concerns: The Sylvia Platters, Rural France, Writhing Squares, The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick

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Hey, hey! You can think of today’s Pressing Concerns as part two of a saga that began with last Thursday’s post, as I continue to look at a bunch of great music that came out last Friday (4/26) in this one. New albums from The Sylvia Platters, Rural France, Writhing Squares, and The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick (all bands I’ve written about before in some form on the blog) appear this time around.

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.

The Sylvia Platters – Vivian Elixir

Release date: April 26th
Record label: Grey Lodge
Genre: Jangle pop, power pop, indie pop
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Kool Aid Blue

Vancouver’s The Sylvia Platters first came on my radar with 2022’s Youth Without Virtue EP, an excellent five-song collection of Teenage Fanclub-esque power/jangle pop with just a bit of dream pop distortion baked into it. The quartet (guitarist Alex Kerc-Murchison, bassist Stephen Carl O’Shea, guitarist/vocalist Nick Ubels, and drummer/vocalist Tim Ubels) had been active for the better part of a decade before that EP and continued to put out music after it–the solid non-album single “Norman 3” later that year, and a live EP in 2023–but 2015’s Make Glad the Day has remained their only proper “full-length” album until now. At eight songs and 24 minutes, Vivian Elixir is on the shorter side, but the band consider it more than just another EP, and when you’ve got a bunch of songs that are as strong as these are, you can call it just about whatever you want. The Sylvia Platters continue to assert themselves as one of the best guitar pop bands going with Vivian Elixir, offering up power pop songs of varying stripes but consistent in quality and catchiness.

Vivian Elixir opens with an instant winter in “Creased Sneaker”, a deceptively huge power pop song whose chorus stealthily comes out of nowhere to sweep us all off our collective feet–it feels like it must be the record’s “hit”, but just two songs later, The Sylvia Platters complicate the matter with “Severance”, a toe-tapping buffet of melodic guitars and vocal hooks that I’d call “subtle” if it wasn’t so obviously catchy. The second half of Vivian Elixir isn’t without its contenders to the throne, either–just check out the most upbeat track on the album, “Heated Meeting”, a fizzy, caffeinated piece of indie-pop-punk that reminds me of one of the best indie pop bands of the past decade or so, Bent Shapes. Oh, and then there’s closing track “Kool Aid Blue”, a positively gorgeous piece of jangle pop that could only have been made by a band that loves Teenage Fanclub but is strong enough at songcraft that the finished product easily steps out of the long shadow cast by their idols. At this point, I’ve put half of the record into the “maybe the biggest pop song on the album” category, but that’s no shade to songs like the mid-tempo guitar showcase “Fools’ Spring” and the token ballad “St. Catherine”, both of which give Vivian Elixir some extra character and help it feel more like a proper album (and the latter track captures another, perhaps more undersung, side of Teenage Fanclub with a characteristic deftness). I suspect The Sylvia Platters will continue to intermittently dig up excellent guitar pop in the future, but Vivian Elixir is something that’ll stand on its own for quite a while. (Bandcamp link)

Rural France – Exactamondo!

Release date: April 26th
Record label: Meritorio
Genre: Power pop, jangle pop, lo-fi pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Stay Away from the Widow, Sidney

If you’ve been reading this blog regularly, you’ve assuredly come across the Teenage Tom Petties, the solo project-turned-five-piece-band helmed by Wiltshire, England’s Tom Brown. Brown put out a solid self-titled debut record recorded on his own in 2022, and then last year’s Hotbox Daydreams was a huge step forward and one of my favorites of 2023. Before all that, however, Brown played in a band called Rural France alongside Rob Fawkes, putting out an album back in 2018 and another in 2021. Despite how prolific the Teenage Tom Petties have turned out to be (seriously, expect to hear more from them this year, too), I’m pleased to see that Rural France is going strong, with Fawkes and Brown having put together an entire third Rural France LP, Exactamondo!. If you like Teenage Tom Petties, I’ve got good news for you–there’s plenty of overlap here. Brown is the lead vocalist for both bands, and they’re both operating in the universe of “power pop/jangle pop/indie pop with some distortion added”, so this is to be expected–although Rural France has a bit more of a pastoral/vintage 80s college rock/C86/indie pop undercurrent, as opposed to the Teenage Tom Petties minoring in garage rock and pop punk.

Not that the fizzy, “power” part of power pop isn’t still present in Exactamondo!, in the same way that Teenage Tom Petties still have moments of wistfulness. The sentiment espoused in the first line of early highlight “Sunsplit” as well as the revved-up lead guitars in between the verses contain the more “Petties”-esque side of Rural France, but the same song has a melancholic streak to it, acoustic guitars and keyboards sounding anything but “gleeful”. Those who want hooky basement rock and roll will find “The Song She Skips” and “Boy With the Shortest Fuse” to be particularly of their liking, but I’d suggest not being so devoted to instant garage-y gratification that you miss Rural France’s other commendable qualities, like the messy jangle pop of “Ghost Dance” (which reminds me a bit of The Smashing Times) or the steel guitar-led country-dream-jangle of “Blabbermouth”. The former of those songs has some harmonica buried in the mix, but Rural France put the instrument front and center in penultimate track “Stay Away from the Widow, Sidney”, which might be the band’s finest single moment yet–huge pop chorus, gradually unspooling folk rock narrative, exploratory around the edges. Exactamondo! ends with “Prize Goose”, a much simpler piece of slacker pop that impresses me in just how confidently Brown and Fawkes take their time and let the song breathe. I’ve heard plenty of bands that sound somewhat like Rural France, and I’ve heard plenty of Brown’s own music over the past couple of years, but Exactamondo! reassures me that I haven’t heard everything yet. (Bandcamp link)

Writhing Squares – Mythology

Release date: April 26th
Record label: Trouble in Mind
Genre: Psychedelic rock, space rock, noise rock, garage rock, prog rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Barbarians

One of my favorite albums of 2021 was Chart for the Solution by Writhing Squares, a wild ride of a double LP–71 minutes of garage-prog, space rock, and psychedelic saxophone that hit just about every right note, landing somewhere between the classic rock-indebted garage rock and roll of Purling Hiss (in which band member Daniel Provenzano used to play) and the crushing free jazz of their Trouble in Mind labelmates Sunwatchers. Somehow, that album was largely the work of just two people–the core duo of Provenzano (basses, keyboards, drums, vocals) and Kevin Nickles (sax, flute, clarinet, keyboards, vocals). Following up Chart for the Solution is a daunting task, and with Mythology, Writhing Squares attempt to do something arguably even more difficult–retain the chaotic, cosmic squall of their last album while keeping it to the length of one record. Their fourth album is the first one to “fully” feature longtime collaborator and live drummer John Schoemaker, and the three of them turn in something that reins in their sound (no ten-minute synth-drone odyssey here) but, if anything, sharpens its point–Writhing Squares are just as devoted to fiery, primordial garage rock and uninhibited jazz-rock as ever across the record’s eight songs.

Writhing Squares have such a specific combination of sounds–incredibly loud guitars, screeching saxophones, a propulsive, krautrock-y rhythm section, and roared vocals–that it’d be impossible to mistake the pure blast of Mythology’s opening track, “Barbarians”, for anybody else. The pounding drumbeat that opens “Eternity” heralds the arrival of a song that’s no less ferocious, even as it leans slightly more into the band’s motorik side, and while the band don’t lose their incredibly potent energy, they train it towards a few groovier and more psychedelic arenas in the center of the record (between the garage rock showdown of “Acid Rain”, the exhilarating saxophone-punk of “LEM”, and the alien funk of “Chromatophage”). And while they do get things done in under 40 minutes, Writhing Squares still find time to (at the very least) nod towards the more expansive parts of their sound–the two-minute saxophone piece “Ferrell” is a brief but substantial tribute to Pharaoh Sanders, while “The Damned Thing” ends the album with one good eight-minute noise-prog barnburner. “The Damned Thing” caps Mythology by blowing up Writhing Squares’ sound to gargantuan proportions, with prowling punk rock in its first half and then just a bit of a slowdown to engage in some classic heavy rock riffage. You’ll hear just a glimpse of a fluttering flute as the carnage comes to its conclusion–one last moment where Writhing Squares put their unique stamp on Mythology. (Bandcamp link)

The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick – The Iliad and the Odyssey and the Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick

Release date: April 25th
Record label: Count Your Lucky Stars
Genre: Slowcore, emo, post-rock, folk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: System of One

Philadelphia group The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick emerged in 2020 with Ways of Hearing, a beautiful and captivating record of emo-tinged, orchestral slowcore that garnered a fair bit of attention for the band (I wrote about it the following year, when it received a vinyl edition). The sextet (drummer Alyssa Resh, violinist Ana Hughes Perez, keyboardist/vocalist Becky Hanno, guitarist/vocalist Ben Curttright, bassist/vocalist Michael Foster, and guitarist Sean Matthew Kelley) chose to take their time on their follow-up record–in the four interstitial years, they added harpist Keely McAveney, McAveney and Curttright moved to Nebraska and released a good album as a duo, and then all of them hammered out what would become The Iliad and the Odyssey and the Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick together. The sophomore Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick was recorded in Philadelphia and Omaha and co-engineered by the band, Mark Watter, Scoops Dardaris, and Jasper Boogaard (Nagasaki Swim), and it’s a big step forward for the group. Containing shades of the slow, icy beauty of their debut, the minimalist folk of the Ben & Keely album, and a new, bright indie rock sensibility, The Iliad and the Odyssey… is a fully developed record that clearly benefited from its long gestation time.

Opening track “Leaf” flutters into existence with a stark acoustic opening, and then it cuts off right as it begins to develop into a bright folk-pop tune–it’s something of a fake-out, because from that moment forward, The Iliad and the Odyssey… never again shies away from embracing fleshed-out moments of lightness. Sometimes The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick do so more subtly– “Hole Underneath the Surface of the Swimming Pool” and “April 25” are vintage Goalie symphonic-slow-folk tunes with just a bit more sunshine peaking through the cracks, while the gently rolling folk rock of “Tightroper Walker Stranger in These Dark Times” and the earnest, uplifting-sounding “System of One” (which sets its violins toward “swoon”) are completely uncharted territory for the band. “Wild Rose” and “Mr. Settled Score”, on the other hand, are some of the band’s best “rock” moments, as the both of them (particularly the six-minute latter track) show that the band’s patient side remains intact, taking their time to crescendo to big finishes. This ends up reflecting the single biggest reason as to why The Iliad and the Odyssey… is an unqualified success of a sophomore album: it retains just about everything strong about Ways of Hearing and then adds onto it. (Bandcamp link)

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