Pressing Concerns: Yea-Ming and the Rumours, Aluminum, Motorists, Mui Zyu

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The third Pressing Concerns of the week looks at four albums that are coming out tomorrow, May 24th: new LPs from Yea-Ming and the Rumours, Aluminum, Motorists, and Mui Zyu. Just really great stuff all around, here. We had two posts go up earlier in the week; on Monday, we looked at Magic Fig, Crumbs, New Issue, and Masonic Wave, while Tuesday was Female Gaze, 2070, Sugar Candy Mountain, and The Wendy Darlings. 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.

Yea-Ming and the Rumours – I Can’t Have It All

Release date: May 24th
Record label: Dandy Boy
Genre: Indie pop, jangle pop, folk rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: I Can’t Have It All

Oakland musician Yea-Ming Chen isn’t exactly a newcomer to the Bay Area music scene–she’s been releasing music as Yea-Ming and the Rumours since the mid-2010s, and played in San Francisco’s Dreamdate before that. The second Rumours full-length and their debut for Dandy Boy Records, 2022’s So, Bird…, is what put them on my radar initially–it’s a guitar pop record that fits in well with their record label and the larger Oakland-San Francisco jangle pop/indie pop movement at large, even as it set itself apart by letting the steady, stable, yet fresh-sounding personality of its primary singer-songwriter peak through. I enjoyed So, Bird…, so I expected to like its follow-up, I Can’t Have It All, as well–even so, I was pleasantly surprised by just how much of a leap forward it feels like for Chen and the Rumors. I Can’t Have It All certainly doesn’t reinvent the Yea-Ming and the Rumors “sound”–Chen is still a sharp, 60s pop-inspired songwriter and a striking vocalist, and the band (longtime collaborators Eóin Galvin on lead guitar and lap steel and Sonia Hayden on drums and percussion, as well as newcomers Jen Weisberg on bass and R.E. Serpahin’s Luke Robbins on drums) give these songs a polished but utilitarian reading, recalling the calm end of Yo La Tengo and classic college rock.

What makes I Can’t Have It All feel so full-sounding is the well-earned, quiet but palpable confidence Yea-Ming and the Rumors display throughout the entire record. Every song on the first half is a “hit” in its own way–from opening track “Pretending”, which expertly says and does everything that it needs to in just over a minute, to the gorgeous simplicity to the title track’s Kaplan/Hubley-recalling refrain and plainspoken verses, to the zippy, heavenly twee-pop-rock of “Ruby”, to detours into folk-country (“I Tried to Hide”), winding dream pop (“Big Blue Sea”), and slowed-down girl-group-influenced pop a la Cindy and Tony Jay (“Can We Meet in the Middle”). I Can’t Have It All loses not an ounce of steam as it moves along to the second side–“Before I Make It Home” and “Somebody’s Daughter”, for two, are as fully-developed indie pop songs as anything else on the album. Chen also offers up a couple of “late-record gems” in the more classical sense–sparser and quieter than some of the more immediate tracks on the record, but with the ability to grow with time. “How Can I Leave”, which opens the B-side with a thorny, messy relationship set to some of the simplest, bluntest pop music on the record, is one such song, as is the acoustic folk-breather “Old Frog”. “If that water keeps rushing down, well that’s just the way it goes,” sings Chen-as-the-titular frog over a chorused keyboard and peacefully-plucked guitars. It’s a testament to the power of Chen and the Rumors that the babbling brook in the song feels very real–and even when the images aren’t so vivid, I Can’t Have It All is a transportive album. (Bandcamp link)

Aluminum – Fully Beat

Release date: May 24th
Record label: Felte
Genre: Shoegaze, noise pop, Madchester, fuzz rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Everything

San Francisco’s Aluminum are a quartet made up of a bunch of notable Bay Area musicians–I’ve covered the other projects of vocalist/bassist Ryann Gonsalves (Torrey, a solo album) and drummer Chris Natividad (Marbled Eye, Public Interest) in Pressing Concerns before, while vocalist/guitarist Marc Leyda and guitarist Austin Montanari have played together in Nothing Natural and Wild Moth. Aluminum themselves have shown up on the blog before, too, as I named their debut EP, 2022’s Windowpane, one of my favorites of that year, finding myself impressed with their ability to whip up both Stereolab-eque motorik indie rock and wall-of-sound shoegaze in short order. Despite all the members’ other projects, Aluminum is back about a year and a half later with Fully Beat, their debut full-length. Released on their new home of Felte Records (Vulture Feather, Mint Field, Ganser), Fully Beat is a huge leap forward for Aluminum, both sharpening and expanding their sound to create some of the most exciting, spirited, and downright fun rock music I’ve heard this year. 

Aluminum are still a “shoegaze” band, although the studied, carefully-constructed version of the genre that I heard on Windowpane has been replaced with a commitment to loud, bursting-at-the-seams rock music throughout Fully Beat. From the unspooling opener “Smile” to the hard-charging noise pop of “Pulp” to the massive-sounding dream-pop-as-stadium-rock “Everything” to the speedy, somewhat greyscale closing track “Upside Down”, Aluminum have a strong argument for being one of the most impactful rock bands in any genre at the moment when they want to be (and it helps that, while not overly showy vocalists, Gonsalves and Leyda both hover above the swirling instrumentals even at their most tempestuous). The guitars are set to overdrive, surging forward with textured melodies above the tracks’ fuzzed-out foundations–while “Smile” and “Everything” have up-front, melodic vocals, the guitars threaten to steal the show in the former, and they do outright swipe it in the latter. 

When Aluminum aren’t trucking the listener with this side of them, they’re incorporating new avenues to their sound–most obviously, there’s a delirious-sounding, alternative dance (arguably even trip hop) streak to the album, arriving with a bang in Gonsalves’ first lead-vocal song on the album, the precise rhythms of “Behind My Mouth”. Aluminum nail it again in “Beat” (in which the reverb-soaked instrumental gets a danceable, Madchester backbeat) and “Call An Angel” (a strangely-inverted-sounding tune that feels like the late 90s in the best way). Elsewhere on Fully Beat, Aluminum find time to flirt with overwhelming psychedelia in the form of “Always Here, Never There” and a different, chamber-pop version of psych pop in “HaHa”. Fully Beat is the result of a band taking a big swing on their first full statement–it comes at you like a stampede in its loudest, most chaotic moments, but devotes plenty of time to filling in the gaps that Aluminum blast into their foundation, as well. (Bandcamp link)

Motorists – Touched by the Stuff

Release date: May 24th
Record label: Bobo Integral/We Are Time
Genre: Power pop, jangle pop, college rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Decider

Toronto guitar pop trio Motorists released their debut album, Surrounded, back in 2021, and the band (co-led by vocalist/bassist Matt Learoyd and vocalist/guitarist Craig Fahner) made their first impression with an impressive collection of college rock and jangle pop-inspired music with a surprisingly tough post-punk backbone frequently rearing its head, too. They came off as punchy understudies in a vibrant Toronto power pop scene (featuring Kiwi Jr., Ducks Ltd., and Young Guv, among others), and Surrounded snuck onto my best-of list for the year. For their sophomore album, Touched by the Stuff, Motorists have changed drummers (Nick MicKinlay replaces Tough Age’s Jesse Locke, although given that Locke’s We Are Time imprint is co-releasing the record, one must imagine the split was amicable), and the group display a subtle but palpable sonic evolution as well. The post-punk edge is less pronounced and more seamlessly baked into the sound, as Motorists embrace being a straight-up, rollicking power pop group more than ever across Touched by the Stuff’s dozen tracks.

When you’ve got a song like “Decider” in your pocket, that’s a no-brainer for Side A, track 1,  and Motorists don’t miss the layup to kick Touched by the Stuff off. The all-in power pop fervor is straight out of the 1970s, a slight 90s alt-rock kick to it being the only thing marking it as something more recent. Between “Decider” and the slightly psychedelic-yet-chunky power chords of “Barking at the Gates”, Motorists have never sounded more like Sloan, but this only describes a portion of what the band have to offer on Touched by the Stuff. The quick tempos of “Phone Booth in the Desert of the Mind”, “Call Control”, and “Back to the Queue” bear more than a little bit of the band’s post-punkier debut, although they’re primarily bouncy pop rock tunes with laser-precise melodic guitars on display. Motorists lock into some kind of guitar pop zen throughout Touched by the Stuff, polishing and teasing out these songs to where all of them sound like “hits”. The “extremes” of the record aren’t huge departures, but when Motorists want to sharpen up their alt-rock crunch (see “L.O.W.”) or deliver a delicate, Teenage Fanclub-esque ballad (“Embers”), they’re able to guide Touched by the Stuff toward those ends with just as much smoothness. Really, the only outlier on the record is closing track “Light Against the Shade”, which leans on mechanical drums, woozy synths, and falsetto vocals to take a fascinating detour into their version of dream pop. It’s something of an aural runaway truck ramp, three minutes to let Motorists’ power pop engines cool down as the record draws to a close. Once we’ve come to a stop on top of the mountain, it’s the perfect time to queue up “Decider” again. (Bandcamp link)

Mui Zyu – Nothing or Something to Die For

Release date: May 24th
Record label: Father/Daughter
Genre: Art pop, indie pop, dream pop, synthpop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Everything to Die For

Last year, I wrote about Rotten Bun for an Eggless Century, the debut album from London-based, Hong Kong-originating musician Eva Liu’s solo project Mui Zyu. Liu, who also plays in indie rock group Dama Scout, embraced a large-but-sparse ambient pop sound on her first solo LP, which was inspired by an insular examination of her own Chinese heritage. I wasn’t expecting a second Mui Zyu album hardly a year later, but with Nothing or Something to Die For, Liu expands her discography by fifteen tracks, forty minutes, and one huge step forward. Recorded by Liu and producer (and Dama Scout bandmate) Luciano Rossi at Middle Farm Studios in Devon, this is the first Mui Zyu release assembled outside of their home studio, and it sounds like it. Nothing or Something to Die For is somehow Mui Zyu at its fullest and most streamlined–rather than the buzzing ambience of Rotten Bun for an Eggless Century, Liu and Rossi shoot for crystal clear-sounding indie pop. Synths and strings are deployed strategically and, while Liu’s writing isn’t going to be mistaken for a top 40 hitmaker, the extra polish further illuminates her sense of melody.

Nothing or Something to Die For takes us all on a journey in the first couple of minutes, as the swelling strings that kick off the record with “Satan Marriage” give way to “The Mould”, a piece of minimalist synthpop which keeps its odder side in check with a strong and sturdy foundation. This propulsive version of Mui Zyu pops up a few more times on the record to varying degrees (I hear it in the expansive “The Rules of What an Earthling Can Be”, and especially in the slow-building, refined “Sparky”, which features fellow British-Chinese musician Lei,e of Emmy the Great), although it’s the rich balladry of Nothing or Something to Die For that ended up hooking me. Coming after “The Mould”, the twin successes of “Everything to Die For” and “Donna Like Parasites” really blow the album open–the gorgeously simple “Mui Zyu as a folk artist” of the former is impressive, and “Donna Like Parasites”, which combines nervous, skipping verses with a suspended-animation refrain, does it one better. Nothing or Something to Die For impressively hangs onto this spirit through highlights like “What’s the Password Baby Bird?” (which is positively hypnotizing) and “Cool As a Cucumber” (a piano-led track that sounds like its title suggests it should). Nothing or Something to Die For is the rewarding sound of a talented, wide-ranging artist taking a step back and letting everything come into focus together. (Bandcamp link)

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