Pressing Concerns: Laika Songs, Broken Hearts Are Blue, Pat’s Alternative Bus Tour, Mantarochen

It is, once again, a Tuesday Pressing Concerns! I’m writing this a few days in advance, so hopefully I have a working computer again by the time this goes up, but either way I’ve finished this one up on my partner’s computer to ensure that you aren’t deprived of these great records. This edition features an album from last month from Laika Songs, an LP from way back in February from Pat’s Alternative Bus Tour, a remastered cassette reissue of Broken Hearts Are Blue’s first album, and an EP from Mantarochen. If you missed yesterday’s post, featuring TJ Douglas, The Drin, Percy, and Big Fat Head, you should check that 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.

Laika Songs – Slowly Spiraling Towards the Light

Release date: June 14^th
Record label: Galaxy Train/Two Worlds
Genre: Folk rock, Americana, heartland rock, dream pop
Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital
Pull Track: SPF Infinity

Last year, I wrote about Infinity Is Whatever, the debut EP from Brooklyn indie rock quartet Neil Jung. A laid-back but sharp collection of fuzzy guitar pop, it was a strong introduction to the work of its lead singer and primary songwriter, Evan Brock. For the second straight year, Brock is debuting a new project, but this time it’s a solo endeavor called Laika Songs, and its opening statement is a nearly forty-five minute long-player. Eschewing the relative concision of Neil Jung, Slowly Spiraling Towards the Light is a sprawling, meandering album–Brock, a lifelong musician and former Fueled by Ramen staffer, came out the other side of an industry-fueled disillusion with making music with a new appreciation for it after attending writing workshops from Dave Benton (Trace Mountains) and Phil Elverum. Benton ended up mixing Slowly Spiraling Towards the Light and contributed “loops” and “drone”, joining a long list of musicians guesting on the album (drummer Ian Romano of Daniel Romano’s Outfit, pedal steel player Zena Kay, and trumpet player Danny T. Levin, among others). Brock’s 90s indie rock and classic guitar pop influences are still here, but Laika Songs embraces a wide-eyed indie-Americana sensibility not unlike Brock’s two most recent inspirations.

Brock’s vision for Laika Songs is pretty effectively sketched out in the first three songs of Slowly Spiraling Towards the Light–if those don’t do it for you, then chances are Laika Songs isn’t your thing. Brock doesn’t rush into his first-ever solo album–“Are we gettin’ there?” is a slow-moving, quiet opener, containing mostly empty space before breaking free with a guitar solo in its final minute. “In the Trees” and “SPF Infinity” follow with the record’s “hits”–both singles, they’re a pair of sweeping heartland rockers that earn their impressiveness with layered, vibrant instrumentals, surging into a plainly beautiful chorus in the former and moving more subtly between sections in the latter. The slight country tinge of “The Glow” is Slowly Spiraling Towards the Light’s first real flirtation with that kind of music (thank Kay’s pedal steel), but the bounding “Living Room” (the shortest song on the record at a clean two minutes) and the starry ballad of “So Many Ways” make it a key characteristic of Laika Songs. In the latter of those songs, Brock sings, “Here comes your man,” in the refrain, a weary reading that’s one of his most memorable as a vocalist. “Field of Vision” one song later offers up another such moment, Brock declaring “I keep trying to tell you / I like your haircut,” with help from Far/Onelinedrawing’s Jonah Matranga on backing vocals. “Field of Vision” is a grand-feeling song that’s on par with some of the record’s first tracks–and like those songs, part of their strength is Brock staying calm and real at the center of it all. (Bandcamp link)

Broken Hearts Are Blue – The Truth About Love (Remastered)

Release date: June 28^th
Record label: Poptek/Sweet Cheetah/Council/Summer Darling
Genre: Midwest emo, 90s indie punk
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Because I Am

Like many emo bands who formed around the same time, Broken Hearts Are Blue’s initial run was brief but eventful. The story’s a not-unfamiliar one–a group forms in the mid-90s in a mid-sized college town (Kalamazoo, Michigan), records one album (1997’s The Truth About Love), and is already broken up by the time it gets formally released. Their album came out on emo artifact Caulfield Records, which put out music from Mineral, Christie Front Drive, and Giants Chair before (like many emo labels who formed around the same time) shuttering in the early 2000s. Vocalist/lyricist Ryan Gage, guitarist Charles Wood, bassist Daniel Buettner, and drummer Derek Brosch scattered across the United States but reformed as a long-distance collaboration in the mid-2010s–they’ve actually put out three new albums since 2018, including last March’s Meeting Themselves. Although it might not have the full-on cult classic designation of some of their contemporaries, there definitely seems to still be an affection for the record that started it all–The Truth About Love got a limited vinyl reissue shortly after Broken Hearts Are Blue reformed in 2018, and it’s recently been remastered and is seeing its first-ever cassette release in 2024.

90s or “second-wave” emo is a lot more varied and unpredictable than its reputation suggests, so when I say that The Truth About Love sounds right out of that scene, that certainly doesn’t mean it’s interchangeable with any given Braid or Texas Is the Reason LP. Broken Hearts Are Blue are energetic on The Truth About Love and they’re frequently messy, but they’re not exactly “punk” and nowhere close to “hardcore” whatsoever. The louder songs on the record feel like marathons, pushing their way across amped-up, frantic, but weirdly sturdy foundations, while the quieter ones feel like mazes, the quartet soundtracking Gage’s vocals with a measured dirge that feels lost but hardly aimless. The Truth About Love is gripping from “Because I Am”, a song that doesn’t burn everything down so much as leave a nice scorch mark on the album, and “Get’n Over My Sassy Self” (whose title sounds like one of those emo in-jokes that doesn’t actually get sung, but you’d better believe Gage actually does utter that phrase multiple times) continues forward by plodding purposefully. The workmanlike rocker “And Then” feels a bit out of place, almost like it’s the band’s apology for closing the record with two six-minute slow-burners and a two-minute acoustic epilogue. Of course, one doesn’t need to apologize for making a record with enough quirks and contours that we’re still here talking about it over a quarter-century later. (Bandcamp link)

Pat’s Alternative Bus Tour – Virtual Virgins

Release date: February 1^st
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Indie pop, jangle pop, folk rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Down at the Casino

Around a decade ago, Glasgow’s Andrew Paterson played in a Scottish indie pop group called The Felt Tips–their last album, Symbolic Violence, came out back in 2013, but Paterson has recently resurfaced with a brand new solo endeavor called Pat’s Alternative Bus Tour. A decade removed from his last band, Paterson now has a family and full-time job, but he’s finding time for his new project–the debut Pat’s Alternative Bus Tour album, Virtual Virgins, came out earlier this year, and he’s promised a second one by the end of 2024. Virtual Virgins is anything but a soft-launch–a dozen songs and forty-five minutes long, the record immerses the listener completely into the world of Paterson’s writing. With its creator a guitar pop veteran, Virtual Virgins hardly disappoints on this front–the songs are based around breezy, acoustic, C86-influenced indie pop foundations, and Paterson’s conversational, heavily-Scottish-accented vocals always find their way back to the right melodies. Where Virtual Virgins distinguishes itself is via Paterson’s knack for storytelling and character-building–these songs stretch out for longer than your typical “indie pop”, but Paterson is an engrossing narrator throughout. 

Paterson has helpfully included fairly utilitarian descriptions of each song on its respective Bandcamp page (“Hypnotic guitar-driven classic-sounding indiepop about someone going out for the first time during a wildfire-induced curfew,” reads the one on “Cinders”), but one would be equally well-served to sit back and see where Pat’s Alternative Bus Tour takes us on any given track. Virtual Virgins rolls through an ambivalent, psychedelic tale of a sci-fi future (“Looking Through a Telescope Backwards”), watches the downfall of a wunderkind politician (“Snakes & Ladders”), and falls down the rabbit hole of “online financial gurus” (“Freaky Finance”). One of the most polished pop moments on Virtual Virgins is mid-record highlight “Down at the Casino”, a song as deceptively bright and cheery as the machinery about which Paterson sings (“If it makes you feel better, we’re no longer enjoying ourselves”, as the characters populating the song relinquish their savings to slots and online gambling apps), and another one (“Bouley Bashers”) takes a simple overheard interaction and finds a world of profundity in it. While nothing on the album is quite as overt as Paterson’s recent single “Please Don’t Vote Conservative”, the album closes with “Dorian” and its plain suggestion that perhaps we should treat the people who the right-wing faction of his country have spent the past few years relentlessly demonizing as human beings. Virtual Virgins can be long-winded at times, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a point. (Bandcamp link)

Mantarochen – In the Badgers Cave

Release date: May 31^st
Record label: It’s Eleven
Genre: Post-punk, darkwave, synthpunk
Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Im Sand

Over the past six months or so, I’ve been keeping an eye on It’s Eleven Records, an intriguing underground east German post-punk label that’s put out some of the most rewarding rock music I’ve heard out of continental Europe as of late. The wild, synth-tinged garage punk of Leipzig’s Ambulanz caught my attention last December, and the dark basement noise rock/post-punk of L’appel Du Vide (hailing from It’s Eleven’s home of Chemnitz) continued a winning streak. The label’s newest release is from another Leipzig-based band, although the second record from Mantarochen (following a self-titled debut last year) is in a different realm than Ambulanz’s frenetic garage rock. The self-recorded and self-mixed In the Badgers Cave EP fits squarely into the world of lo-fi darkwave, post-punk, and synth-punk. The band (“Diana, Sebi and Tom”, per It’s Eleven) build their songs off of quick, simple drum machines and striking, melodic, but still dark-feeling basslines, and augment them with intermittent guitar parts, synth interjections, and lead vocals that feel “cool” without being “expressionless”.

The fifteen-minute In the Badgers Cave spends its first five zipping through two excellent examples of Mantarochen’s sound at full force. “Reflection” and “Im Sand” are both heavily rhythmic songs, with the minimal, chugging backbone of the first song never losing ground to the synths, guitar, and vocals that eventually come into frame along with it. The latter continues Mantarochen’s stoic sprint, its theatrics limited to the drum machine briefly dropping out in the second half before it picks up again as if nothing happened. The clanging “Jaguar” is perhaps the biggest deviation from In the Badgers Cave’s core sound, although that’s not saying a whole bunch (mainly that the guitars are louder and the vocals are a little more freaked-out sounding), while the bass set to maximum “throb” and the vocals set to full-on “goth” in “Grey” keep us on our toes, as well. “Blue Heads” might be a tinge more “upbeat” and “Still Black” a tinge more “ethereal”,  but In the Badgers Cave is primarily an underground rock music record for those of us who like taking them in as a single, ominous monolith of sound. That’s the biggest success of In the Badgers Cave–it’s fairly intangible, but I know it when I hear it. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

• Rui Gabriel – Compassion
• Glass-Beagle – Spring Sword Chatter EP
• Bird Language – Chasing Echoes EP
• Gabriel Birnbaum – Patron Saint of Tireless Losers
• World News – Escape EP
• Tiny Stills – We Really Felt Something
• The Yardarm – On a Tipping Sea
• Faint Shape – Faint Shape
• Slow Fiction – Crush EP
• Swamp Dogg – Blackgrass: From West Virginia to 125th Street
• Jonathan Patrick – Cascade Moon
• Mombius Hibachi – Loosen Up the Noose EP
• Habibi – Dreamachine
• Bill MacKay – Locust Land
• The Lethargics – Southern Living EP
• Josienne Clark – Parenthesis, I
• Stereocrown – Late Night Snack
• Strelitzia – Winter
• VAZUM – Western Violence
• Black Decelerant – Reflections Vol. 2: Black Decelerant
• Goldenboy – Qualmbum
• Heartwells – The New Old School
• Yuni Wa – You’ve Come So Far
• Marucoporoporo – Conceive the Sea
• Hot Water Music – Vows