Pressing Concerns: Orcas, Jessica Boudreaux, Oneida, Mourning [A] BLKstar

Welcome to the Thursday Pressing Concerns! On the eve of a strong new music Friday, we’re looking at four records that come out tomorrow, July 19th: specifically, new albums from Orcas, Jessica Boudreaux, Oneida, and Mourning [A] BLKstar. If you missed Monday’s post (featuring Macseal, West of Roan, Other Half, and Tension Pets) or Tuesday’s (featuring Christina’s Trip, Donald Beaman, Lithobrake, and Dogbear), 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.

Orcas – How to Color a Thousand Mistakes

Release date: July 19^th
Record label: Morr Music
Genre: Dream pop, art rock, psychedelia, college rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Wrong Way to Fall

Sometimes, a well-selected cover version can explain the whole world of a band better than written biographies and reviews can. The first recording I heard from New York duo Orcas was their take on “Under the Milky Way” by longtime Australian college-psych rockers The Church, and that particular touchpoint goes a long way towards understanding Orcas’ sound–expansive, experimental, but grounded to some degree in the tangible world of rock music (even as it embraces sophisti-pop, electronica, and even ambient pop to a greater degree than the original version of the song). Their “Under the Milky Way” was a one-off single that came out this April and was actually the group’s first new recording in a decade–Rafael Anton Irisarri and Benoit Pioulard began making music together in the Seattle in the early 2010s, releasing Orcas (2012) and Yearling (2014) before going on a ten-year hiatus. How to Color a Thousand Mistakes is the duo’s third album, released on their longtime home of Morr Music (The Notwist, Dntel, Múm), and it has a deliberately-crafted, layered sound that (even if it wasn’t the actual case) feels like it took ten years to realize. The duo’s various backgrounds in rock, pop, and experimental music all factor into How to Color a Thousand Mistakes, an inventive, icy, but nevertheless frequently inviting record.

How to Color a Thousand Mistakes doesn’t pull any punches, throwing us back into the world of Orcas with an ambitious opening suite comprised of a one-minute ambient introduction (“Sidereal”) and the back-to-back expansiveness of “Wrong Way to Fall” and “Riptide” (taken together, spanning nearly a dozen minutes). The six-minute “Wrong Way to Fall” is Orcas’ version of a rocker–guitar-forward for nearly its entire length, occasionally leaping out of its refined backbone to deliver a wall-of-sound jolt, but still sounding powerful even in its relative lulls. “Riptide” showcases a more tender side of Orcas, embracing dream pop and even new wave to create something a little more “polished”, even as it’s comprised of the same basic ingredients as the song before it. The middle of How to Color a Thousand Mistakes feels like the most openly “pop” part, with “Next Life”, “Swells”, and “Fare” all delivering Orcas’ sound in relatively bite-sized, hazy psychedelic pop portions (although without abandoning or dumbing down the other parts of the band). The final left turn on the record is a finale that leans hard into the more ambient and electronic elements of Orcas–although “Bruise” eventually congeals into a pop rock song, “Without Learning” and closing track “Umbra” offer no such clarity. The latter song closes the book on How to Color a Thousand Mistakes with echoing vocals floating in a sea of sustained pianos and synths–even though Orcas don’t spend the majority of the album in this abyss, they’ve earned the right to sign off in the midst of it. (Bandcamp link)

Jessica Boudreaux – The Faster I Run

Release date: July 19^th
Record label: Pet Club
Genre: Power pop, alt-rock, indie pop, singer-songwriter
Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Suffering

Jessica Boudreaux was the lead vocalist for Portland indie rock group Summer Cannibals for ten years and four albums, releasing records on Kill Rock Stars and Tiny Engines before they formally disbanded last year. When Summer Cannibals broke up, Boudreaux was focusing on writing music for film and television and on her work as a producer in her new studio, Pet Club, but she soon had written enough material for a solo record, leading to The Faster I Run taking shape later that year and coming out through her own imprint this month. Boudreaux’s writing reflects the turmoil she experienced towards the end of Summer Cannibals’ run–a temporary separation from her current partner at the beginning of 2020, a breast cancer diagnosis and subsequent navigation of treatment during the pandemic a few months later. Musically, The Faster I Run is distinct from Summer Cannibals’ pop punk but still should be appealing to fans of that band–rather than a complete reinventing, the self-recorded and self-produced LP is a more subtle slowing down and polishing up of Boudreaux’s songwriting to better reflect the personal nature of her writing.

Boudreaux talks about The Faster I Run like she made it almost accidentally, but once she decided to make a solo record, she really committed to it–at a dozen tracks and forty-five minutes, there’s nothing about the album that feels like anything but a full investment. The songs themselves are incredibly spirited and substantial, reflecting the emotional clarity of somebody who’s stared down some hard alleyways and come out the other side. The chugging alt-rock of opening track “Back Then” explores a “before all of this happened” train of thought, while “Main Character” and “Suffering” pull offbeat but memorable perspectives from the heap (“The main character can’t die / So thank God that’s me,” she smirks in the former, and she straight-up just says “There’s something kinda funny about suffering,” in the latter). The spotlight on Boudreaux the writer is a good call by Boudreaux the producer–the smooth pop rock of late highlight “Smoke Weed” is a shining example of the push and pull at the heart of the record, a relaxed instrumental with a lyric about how the calmness required to do the titular activity remains out of reach for her (“I can’t wait to be that chill–it’ll happen, just you wait”). The Faster I Run ends with a great car song in “You’ll Say It Was Fun”, in which Boudreaux sings “I guess nobody’s winning when we both try to run,” over some of the most exciting music on the record. The reward comes with time, with care taken to sift through the depths from a higher vantage point. (Bandcamp link)

Oneida – Expensive Air

Release date: July 19^th
Record label: Joyful Noise
Genre: Garage rock, noise rock, psychedelic rock, krautrock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Here It Comes

Brooklyn’s Oneida are experimental rock legends at this point, steadily and consistently building a formidable back catalog of records dashed with krautrock, psychedelic rock, post-rock, and whatever other strange avenues the group (Bobby Matador, Kid Millions, Hanoi Jane, Shahin Motia and Barry London) can find to wander down. The previous Oneida album, 2022’s Success, came after a longer-than-usual four-year pause, and it felt like a rebirth of sorts–as rich as their previous albums had been, I found myself pleasantly surprised by just how well the band could set their sights on straight-ahead, pop-fluent garage rock (I mean, all graded on the scale of Oneida, but still an impressive achievement regardless). Not a band to stay stagnant, I wouldn’t expect Success, Part Two as a follow-up, but Expensive Air feels like the best-case scenario for the band–it starts at the point of accessibility the quintet had landed on with their last record, and then starts eroding, expanding, and mutating it to create a tangibly distinct beast of an album. And “beast” feels like the right term for Expensive Air–one thing that Oneida retain and hone in on throughout the record is their loud, unhinged-sounding rock and roll side.

Doing my work for me, Millions describes Expensive Air as a “darker, looser, louder, counterpart” to Success in the bio for the new record, and I certainly won’t dispute this, especially not with the seven-minute “Reason to Hide” on tap to kick things off. Oneida open the record with a chugging, devastating piece of krautrock that does sneak a precise, effective garage rock hook into the refrain nonetheless. The majority of Expensive Air comes in two to three minute bursts, but just because they’re pop-song shaped doesn’t mean these tracks are automatically accessible. Parts of the songs are, almost like they’re fighting against the tide–pop music wins out in the Success-esque single “Here It Comes”, and it has a foothold amongst the soaring drama of “Stranger”. The towering psych-rock sweater of “Spill” and the trash-punk “La Plage” are less conclusive (and entertainingly so), while the damaged atmospherics of the title track feel beamed in from a different world entirely. Oneida shore up Expensive Air with one last eight-minute sign-off, an inspired version of Swell Maps’ “Gunboats”, but while “Reason to Hide” was a dangerous runaway train, “Gunboats” represents a different kind of terror–that of a self-assured, slow-moving, sauntering war machine. “Gunboats” is confident and measured in its first half, and when Oneida guide it into chaos as the record ends, it feels like a controlled assault. (Bandcamp link)

Mourning [A] BLKstar – Ancient//Future

Release date: July 19^th
Record label: Don Giovanni
Genre: Soul, gospel, art rock, experimental, R&B
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Along The Red Rim, The Sun Settles

Mourning [A] BLKstar was formed in Cleveland in 2015 by RA Washington (bass/samples), and over the next nine years it has become a seven-piece “Afrofuturist collective” also comprised of vocalists James Longs and LaToya Kent, drummer Dante Foley, guitarist/bassist/percussionist Jah Nada, trumpeter Theresa May, and guitarist/keyboardist Pete Saudek, and sporting an eclectic, omnivorous sound containing pieces of soul, rock, hip-hop, gospel, blues, and jazz. Mourning [A] BLKstar consider Ancient//Future to be their first proper record since 2020’s The Cycle–they released Celestial Bodies, featuring collaborations with the Cleveland Museum of Art, dance company Christoph Winkler, and Adult Swim back in 2022, and a live album earlier this year, but Ancient//Future puts the focus back on the band’s core with a brief but substantial seven-song, twenty-five minute studio record. The six proper songs on the record are all fully-realized and immediate, with May’s trumpet, the rhythm section, and its pair of striking vocalists all bringing a polished, accessible attitude to the band’s ambition.

Aside from a thirty-second interlude later in the record, Ancient//Future opens with its shortest track, the two-and-a-half minute, fiery lead single “Literary Witches”. Thundering percussion and piercing horns introduce Mourning [A] BLKstar via an explosive piece of soul-rock, and its lyrics are just as confrontational as the song’s title suggests. The triumphant horns and hammering drums that open “Along The Red Rim, The Sun Settles” end up launching a seven-minute, multi-part epic that finds space for just about every aspect of Mourning [A] BLKstar to shine before it wraps things up. The collective settles down just a bit after this opening duo, although that certainly doesn’t mean what follows isn’t substantial–“Just Can’t Be” is a smooth-crawling funk-soul ballad that’s instantly memorable, while the group enlist violinist Caitlin Edwards (the one credited guest performer) in “Her Song”, a track that embraces its “throwback” feel both in its string-horn combination and the unabashed musical activism in its subject matter. Although the relatively low-key “Santi Murder” is perhaps the most subdued moment on the record, the simple, trawling rhythms undergirding the song are quite hypnotic, and Ancient//Future finishes with one last triumph in the form of “Junee”. Mourning [A] BLKstar guide the record to a smooth conclusion with just horns, drums, and the choir–it’s all they need. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

• Modern Silent Cinema – Anemic Music
• You’re Laughing – You’re Laughing EP
• Bryn Batani – Guest Room EP
• Thot – Delta
• Webbed Wing – Vol. III
• Fräulein – Sink or Swim
• Danger Trees – Too Much Sun
• Ruth Theodore – I Am I Am
• J Prozac – Obsession
• Jimrat – Jimrat EP
• Vague Fugue – ST EP
• MILLY – Your Own Becoming
• Magon – Wedding Song
• Les Salvatges – Ni la tristesa
• Broken Telepathy – S/T
• No Windows – Point Nemo EP
• Chris Cohen – Paint a Room
• Susan James – Time Is Now
• Dream Phases – Phantom Idol
• Nat Harvie – New Virginity
• WY Huang – Knots EP
• Softcult – Heaven EP
• Field Guide – Rootin’ for Ya
• Julia Gaeta – Blur Divine EP
• d’Eon – Leviathan