Pressing Concerns: Brother of Monday, Wes Tirey, Exedo, Taxidermy

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This Tuesday, Pressing Concerns is offering up four great records from the past month or so: new LPs from Brother of Monday, Wes Tirey, and Exedo, and a new EP from Taxidermy. If you like lo-fi power pop, even lower-fi folk, goth-tinged post-punk, and math-y noise rock, I encourage you to keep reading. And if you missed yesterday’s blog post, featuring La Bonte, Sad Eyed Beatniks, Friends of the Road, and In-Sides, 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.

Brother of Monday – Humdinger

Release date: June 28th
Record label: Wilbur & Moore
Genre: Lo-fi indie rock, power pop, jangle pop
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Humdinger

It’s a special thing to hear an album that actually sounds like early Guided by Voices. It’s not hard to make an album “inspired by” Guided by Voices, of course–lo-fi recordings, sugary vocal melodies, some moments of real rock and roll beamed through the four-tracks–but Newark, Delaware’s Peter Bothum, aka Brother of Monday, doesn’t just stop at these cosmetic and superficial similarities. Bothum’s mostly-solo project debuted last year with a self-titled record (eventually released on CD by his current label, Wilbur & Moore) that doled out noisy, lo-fi power pop with a calm in the center of the chaos in the form of Bothum’s melodic, trebly vocals. Humdinger, the second Brother of Monday record, arrives eleven months later, and while it cleans up some of the material at the writing level (more earnestly embracing pop at the center and pushing the noise to the periphery), these dozen songs are just as lo-fi in their attitude. Mastered by longtime Robert Pollard collaborator Todd Tobias, Humdinger captures the basement melancholy of pre-Propeller Guided by Voices in Bothum’s songwriting, and the guitars push against their lo-fi recording but never in a way that makes it feel anything but the appropriate vehicle for the material.

I was going to say that Brother of Monday reminds me of fellow lo-fi GBV-evoking acolyte Graham Repulski, and it turns out I was onto something here–Repulski and Bothum actually play together in the band Von Hayes. It can’t be overstated just how potent the melodies on every song on Humdinger feel, like they were unearthed from an old Pollard demo tape (or, perhaps, one of his 60s pop influences). Opening track “Bro Inn” begins with the winning hook and makes the inspired choice to push it with a delirious acoustic-folk-pounding instrumental, while “Hunting Redemption” and “Kitteridge Farms” reaffirm Bothum’s ability to nail more “traditional”-sounding basement college rock. “Book of Buck” leans heavily on letting the guitar do the talking (as it should–it’s incredibly animated and welcoming), while the just guitar-and-vocals recording of the title track captures the pastoral urgency of some of Pollard’s most intimate Suitcase offerings. If you wanted to be bothered that “Better Done Than Good” nicks a bit of the vocal melody from “The Official Ironmen Rally Song”, I suppose you could, but the track is hardly a carbon copy, and one could just as easily choose to focus on the unique, spirited lo-fi pop thrashing the album explores in the second half (“Every Circle Can Have Two Centers”, “Buddy Crunch”) or its bizarre drum-machine closing in “Web”. “Web” is the one song on the album that doesn’t sound even really close to Self-Inflicted Aerial Nostalgia–but it does sound like Brother of Monday. (Bandcamp link)

Wes Tirey – Sings Selected Works of Billy the Kid

Release date: July 19th
Record label: Sun Cru
Genre: Folk, spoken word
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Work 2

Singer-songwriter Wes Tirey was born and raised near Dayton, Ohio, where he began his music career before he moved to his current home of Asheville, North Carolina. Over the past decade or so, Tirey has made a space for himself as a prolific member of the wider world of experimental/“cosmic” folk and country music, releasing records on labels like Dear Life, Orange Milk, and Scissor Tail and playing shows and/or collaborating with Shane Parish, Daniel Bachman, and Steve Gunn. Tirey’s latest record is a typically inspired endeavor–an album-length folk interpretation of selections from The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, the 1970 “experimental novel” about the titular figure from Canadian/Sri Lanken writer and poet Michael Ondaatje. Much like the varied nature of the material in the original novel, Wes Tirey Sings Selected Works of Billy the Kid presents itself from a few different angles, featuring a spoken word piece, timeless-sounding “traditional” folk songs, and a pair of instrumentals. Tirey sings and plays everything one hears on Sings Selected Works of Billy the Kid–his delicate guitar playing and haunting vocals have a somewhat muffled, “found” or “resurfaced” quality to them, appropriate for a collection explicitly placing itself in the lineage of an American story that’s been retold and mythologized to the point of being unrecognizable from its source.

This isn’t to say that Sings Selected Works of Billy the Kid is too obscure or garbled to interpret, however–far from it, in fact. From the opening spoken-word description of “the killed, by me”, Tirey-as-Ondaatje-as-Billy the Kid is crystal clear and engrossing. Tirey taps into the centuries-old “folk music as storytelling” well here–like with similar-minded contemporaries Spencer Dobbs and Jason Allen Millard (as well as the most renowned poet-musician the collection recalls, Leonard Cohen), any attic-accumulated dust on these recordings is outshone by what’s contained therein. Tirey gives all the songs incorporating Ondaatje’s writing the utilitarian titles of “Work 1”, “Work 2”, et cetera, which, combined with his simple acoustic guitar accompaniment, serves to mimic the original’s resistance of a clean linear narrative or structure. Tales of murder and fleeing from the law lose the immediate drama that’s kept them at the forefront of American culture for so long, replaced by a lonesome man recounting stories dispassionately, without tipping his hand as to whether it’s for posterity or for atonement. Like any good work of art about a towering piece of culture, Sings Selected Works of Billy the Kid dispels the navel-gazing “why this?” questions immediately upon engagement–and just as quickly begins offering up new, more worthwhile ones. (Bandcamp link)

Exedo – The Body Remembers

Release date: June 28th
Record label: Dirt Cult
Genre: Post-punk, garage rock, goth
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: The Longest Night

San Antonio imprint Dirt Cult Records has had a hand in some of the most vital garage rock and punk records of the past few years (releasing material from Schedule 1, The Pretty Flowers, and Weird Numbers, among others), and one of their most intriguing new additions is a quartet from Chicago called Exedo. Per their Bandcamp page, the quartet is made up of ringers from various other Windy City punk bands (vocalist/keyboardist/guitarist Christine Wolf and guitarist David Wolf both played in Daytime Robbery, with Christine also playing in Primitive Teeth, David also playing in Endless Column, bassist Milo Mendoza in Melanin and Staring Problem, and drummer Vince Miller in Permanent Residue), and The Body Remembers is their first album together, following a 2020 demo EP. The Body Remembers is an electric first statement, finding the band taking a trip to post-punk/goth rock ground zero using their sharp, hefty garage punk as their DeLorean (Christine’s keyboard is used sparingly, meaning that, for a lot of the LP, Exedo forge ahead as a power trio instrumentally). The group’s not-to-secret weapon is Christine’s vocals, one showstopping performance after another that hangs with some of the best throughout “alt-rock” history (Siouxsie Sioux, Dolores O’Riordan, hell, even Bjork at some points–they’re all there).

After an icy, keyboard-touched introduction, opening track “Dead Room” transforms into a power chord-led, goth-tinged garage rock anthem, setting the tone down which much of The Body Remembers is all too happy (well, in a dark and moody way) to continue. Everything on the record’s first half is a discrete and essential moment on The Body Remembers’ journey–“The Longest Night” and its embrace of guitar-forward post-punk, the thrashing punk rock drama of “Collide”, the heavier alt-rock smokiness of “Signs of You”,  the burnt-rubber garage-punk of the title track, and the triumphant return of the keyboards in “Damage Up Ahead”. The Body Remembers is a confident and substantial debut LP–eleven songs in thirty-six minutes–and while the second half settles into what might be considered Exedo’s “comfort zone” (dramatic, post-punk/goth-tinged guitar-forward rockers), it hardly runs out of steam, and even offers up one of its clearest highlights in “Victims of Convenience”, its closing track. “Victims of Convenience” is a mid-tempo ballad, meeting in between haunting goth-rock and new wave pop-rock. It’s a fresh take on the tightrope that Exedo have been walking for the entirety of The Body Remembers, one last pleasing digression to sum up a success of a first statement. (Bandcamp link)

Taxidermy – Coin

Release date: June 14th
Record label: Pink Cotton Candy
Genre: Noise rock, post-hardcore, experimental rock, math rock, post-punk
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Today

Fans of the skronkier and thornier ends of noise rock would be well-advised to cast their eyes upon Denmark. A five-piece band from Copenhagen called Taxidermy has just released their four-song debut EP, Coin, on Pink Cotton Candy Records (the premier Danish indie rock record label–and by that, I mean the only one I’m aware of), and the quintet have certainly hit the ground running. Vocalist/guitarist Osvald Reinhold and guitarist Toke Brejning Frederiksen are the band’s songwriting duo, and they’re rounded out by third guitarist Malthe Junge, bassist Joachim Lorck-Schierning, and drummer Johan Knutz Haavik on their first release. Taxidermy are adventurous art rockers on Coin–hunkering down in pummeling noise rock/post-hardcore position, the group drag these four songs out with bits of post-punk propulsion, math rock unpredictability, and pieces of Slint-like basement claustrophobia (the biography that lists their modern peers as Sprain and Black Midi isn’t wrong, but I’d also take “Sonic Youth if they weren’t concerned with sounding ‘cool’”).

Coin opens with “Today”, the one song on the EP that’s shorter than five minutes long and the record’s “hit” by default. A spiky, unfriendly piece of mid-period Unwound post-punk/hardcore, “Today” undoubtedly has something of a hook to it–the cyclic, blunt guitar riff that kicks off the song is hypnotic, and Reinhold’s droll continental European vocals eventually soar into a cantankerous but sweeping chorus. The next two songs on Coin are both over six minutes long, and they both find Taxidermy stretching out and sculpting something more intricate and slow-building. “Rot” takes the late-era Sonic Youth scenic route, spending nearly two minutes puttering around before a blaring guitar wakes the track out of its stupor–and then Taxidermy perform the whole routine again, but with a fiery post-hardcore conclusion the second time around. “Echoes” is both similar to the song that preceded it and not like it at all–like “Rot”, it takes the majority of the track’s length before Taxidermy reveal their full might, but unlike “Rot”, “Echoes” sounds dangerous and doomed from the get-go. The roaring final third of the song is less a transformation than the heart of the track finally snapping into focus. The closing title track might just be the greatest trick on Coin–it takes the sharper noise rock tools of “Today” and applies the gravitas of the middle of the EP to them, ensuring that Taxidermy’s first record is just about as full of a statement as a four-song underground rock record can be. (Bandcamp link)

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