Pressing Concerns: The Conformists, Quiz Show, Carry Ripple, Mike Frazier

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It’s a Tuesday Pressing Concerns, and it’s time to get a little weird with it. A varied edition, we’ve got recent albums from The Conformists, Carry Ripple, and Mike Frazier in this one, as well as a new-ish EP from Quiz Show. If you missed yesterday’s blog post, featuring new music from VACATION, Nihiloceros, Leah Callahan, and Jon McKiel, check that one out here.

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 Conformists – Midwestless

Release date: April 5th
Record label: Computer Students
Genre: Noise rock, math rock, post-hardcore
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Mr. Biron

Who are The Conformists? Well, they’re a band that formed in November 1996 and are based out of St. Louis. For most of their existence, they’ve been a quartet, but in recent years they’ve pared down to a three-piece featuring founding member Chris Dee along with Pat Boland (since 2009) and Chris Boron (since 2011). Not exactly the most prolific band, The Conformists have moved steadily at their own pace–they put out their first album in 2004, and their most recent one before now, Divorce, came out in 2016. Midwestless is the fifth Conformists full-length, recorded by Steve Albini at Electrical Audio and released via Computer Students, a label I’d been primarily familiar with for their reissues before now. As one might expect from a band who’ve recorded the majority of their records with Abini–and who once appeared on a Dazzling Killmen tribute album–The Conformists are Midwestern noise rockers at their core, and that’s baked into Midwestless’ DNA. Much like Shellac, however, The Conformists have kept things interesting into their later years by getting weirder and spacier–jarring math rock construction, empty space, and a heavy emphasis on rhythm all mark their latest record.

Midwestless only has six songs on it, and one of those is a ten-second intro track before the stopping and starting starts (and stops, and starts again, and stops again…) with “Song for Rincón Pío Sound”. The other bookend of the record is a long, simple instrumental that eventually just cuts off mid-note at the end of a twelve-minute song called “Five-Year Napsence”–all of this ends up lending a quality of excerption to Midwestless, like Dee, Boland, and Boron have spent the eight years since their last record hoarding a stockade of riffs, rhythms, and noisy rock music and then pulled a selection together as an overview of their work. Much of the record’s 28 minutes are instrumental–when the vocals finally show up towards the end of “Song for Rincón Pío Sound”, they’re a tortured post-hardcore howl. The Conformists don’t end up letting loose in that kind of way again on the album–the meat of Midwestless, “Psh Psh”, “Wrong Off”, and “Mr. Biron,” finds the band settling into an uneasy-feeling but not overly fiery brand of sinewy math rock and post-punk. The latter of those three songs is at least affixed with an eerie noise rock sneer, and The Conformists threaten to really fire things up as the song builds to a climax…only for “Five-Year Napsence” to turn things into chilly yet beautiful indie rock and eventually lapse into the extended jam session that ends the record. The Conformists do what they have to to survive and advance–I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re still playing “Five-Year Napsence” right this moment. (Bandcamp link)

Quiz Show – Flotsam

Release date: March 29th
Record label: Magic Door
Genre: Post-punk, punk, alt-rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Super Concrete

Last year I wrote about the self-titled debut album from New Jersey’s Quiz Show, a record several years in the making. Chris Matthews, who co-founded the incredible Dischord group Shudder to Think in the late 80s, returned from a multi-decade hiatus from music in the late 2010s with a steady stream of Quiz Show singles that culminated in a full-length featuring twelve songs of weird but accessible art punk reminiscent of–but distinct from–his old band. Quiz Show was made with help from Guided by Voices drummer Kevin March and bassist Frank Gibbons, but Matthews had been playing live shows with bassist Jesse Krakow (who played in Shudder to Think during their 2000s reunion tour, as well as being a member of The Shaggs’ Dot Wiggin’s band) and drummer Joe Billy III at the time of its release, and now the new lineup has put out their first record together in the form of the three-song Flotsam EP. Despite the new band members, Flotsam picks up where Quiz Show left off, balancing the punk anthem-penning side of Matthews with his (and, likely, his co-conspirators’) more offbeat tendencies quite gamely.

Flotsam is a brief record, but it’s a rock-solid one, with each of its three songs being strong enough to stand on its own (and they’re all fairly different from one another, too). It’s easy to see why “Super Concrete” is the leadoff track and the lead single–it’s Dischord-adjacent music at its catchiest, walking the tightrope in between “post-punk” and just straight-up punk rock by switching together several different subsections into a continuous and catchy whole. The title is apparently inspired by Matthew’s deceased brother (it’s the name of a company for which he worked), but it’s hardly overly sentimental, with opaque but deeply-felt ideas (the bizarre language shift, the incredibly creepy delivery of the line about changing the locks, the huge chorus that just might hint at the sibling in question) crashing together all at once. The speedy punk bass and gang vocals of “Packing ‘Em In” probably makes it the biggest throwback on the EP, even throwing in a Shudder to Think-esque theatrical half-time slowdown halfway through the track. The relatively polished “China Glaze” starts with a college rock/Buffalo Tom-esque first half, kind of feeling like Matthews’ stab at late 90s “adult alternative” (which goes hand in hand with that extremely 90s cut-out bin-evoking artwork) before devolving into a hazy mess of dub and haphazard percussion but then landing the thing in a major-label-era Dinosaur Jr.-esque big alt-rock finish. It’s a strong conclusion for a record that, Flotsam or no, hardly sounds like it passively washed up on shore. (Bandcamp link)

Carry Ripple – Carry Ripple

Release date: March 21st
Record label: Public Interest
Genre: Lo-fi indie rock, fuzz country, experimental rock
Formats: CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Velma

I’m definitely intrigued by this current wave of weirdo lo-fi indie rock that’s been coming out of the American South in recent years. The most prevalent example of it is Asheville’s MJ Lenderman and those associated with him, but I’m also thinking about Chapel Hill’s Trash Tape Records and their recent release from Atlanta’s Hill View #73, as well as bands like Louisville’s Parister and Asheville’s Tombstone Poetry that have been chronicled by Candlepin Records. It’s more than time to add Knoxville-based, Memphis-originating Carry Ripple to that list. Citing acts like Lenderman, Feeble Little Horse, and Spirit of the Beehive as influences, the group (led by singer-songwriter Carter Earheart-Brown) has just put out its self-titled first record through Memphis label Public Interest, and it’s a brief but compelling collection of offbeat but substantial fuzz rock. Earheart-Brown even enlists frequent Lenderman collaborator Colin Miller on drums (in addition to Kaleb Collins on bass), but Carry Ripple isn’t a roaring country rock record, sounding more in line with the new wave of experimental, kitchen-sink shoegaze that’s being pioneered by labels like Julia’s War, and there’s also a lo-fi, 90s-style “slacker” indie rock core to these songs hidden beneath some of the wilder choices.

Running only 22 minutes in length, Carry Ripple nonetheless feels like a “full-length” due to the ground it covers in its eleven tracks. Sure, some of the songs–the sound collage-influenced opening dream pop “Blessed Memory”, the breakbeats interlude of “Feefo”, and the thirty-second blues junk of “Aced It”–are more like snippets, but they add shades to the album, and plenty more of the record’s shorter moments–such as the woozy, lumbering mid-tempo distorted indie rock of “Velma” and the hushed but passionate “Stop Drop & Roll”–feel as fully-developed as they need to be, “basement rock” sound or no. “Velma” is a brilliant piece of teetering-on-the-edge lo-fi pop that’s probably Carry Ripple at their most “Lenderman-esque”, but the record’s other high points end up in fairly different territory–“Jawbreaker” is an incredibly spirited but tired-sounding five-minute song that displays the band’s ability to cycle through distinct “subsections” within a single track and still hold it all together, while “Jigsaw” ups the distortion without losing the intriguing pop song at its core. It all amounts to an incredibly strong opening statement for Carry Ripple, a band that I expect will be worth watching in the near future. (Bandcamp link)

Mike Frazier – Secrets of Atlantis

Release date: April 26th
Record label: WarHen
Genre: Folk rock, psychedelic rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Secrets of Atlantis

Mike Frazier is a singer-songwriter from Winchester, Virginia–for the past half-decade or so, he’s been averaging an album a year and operating in the greater folk-country realm. I was only passingly familiar with Frazier’s music before now, but I’d heard enough of it to initially be surprised at what I heard when I listened to his sixth album and first for WarHen Records (Tucker Riggleman & The Cheap Dates, Dogwood Tales, Elkhorn). Secrets of Atlantis finds Frazier embracing 60s-inspired psychedelia in an enthusiastic and uninhibited way, with snaking guitars, bright and unhurried melodies, and an ever-present bass groove all featuring heavily into the record’s sound–reminiscent of the most well-known records from Daniel Romano, among others. Traces of Frazier’s country tinge are still present here and there, but he and his band (keyboardist Mark Masefield, bassist Danny Gibney, and string player Jenn Fantaccione) pull off an impressively complete transformation into a West Coast psychedelic pop/folk rock act on the brief but substantial 28-minute album. 

The busy “City of Telos” sets the stage for Secrets of Atlantis by veering in between polished pop rock and almost sound-collage-like sections of psychedelic interludes. “Disciple of Your Love” is Frazier’s version of straightforward psychedelic rock and roll, leaning heavily on the keys to add a bit of spice around its inner groove. After the quieter studio pop of “Love You Forever”, Secrets of Atlantis really starts scaling the walls with “Age of Ascension”–which comes storming out of the gate, feigns a retreat, and then rolls back in for a huge psych-rock conclusion–and the mess of shining instruments and melodies that is “Palm of the Sphinx”. Even in its most ambitious moments, Secrets of Atlantis is still a smart pop record, but some of the most straight-up “pop moments” come in some of the simpler songs on the second half of the record–the soaring, mid-tempo title track and the jangly folk rock of “Life of Aquarius” are two true late record gems. Frazier only really embraces his “folk troubadour” side with the acoustic closing track, “Many Lifetimes of Love”, but even so, he chooses to end that one with a sustained echo of the final guitar chord and then some fluttering strings– Secrets of Atlantis never misses a chance to do just a little more. (Bandcamp link)

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