Pressing Concerns: The Ekphrastics, Purseweb, Greaser Phase, Box Elder

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This Tuesday Pressing Concerns is an exciting one, collecting some LPs (from The Ekphrastics and Greaser Phase) and EPs (from Purseweb and Box Elder) that have come out over the past month and a half. If you like great under-the-radar indie rock, indie pop, emo, et cetera, you’ll find something here. And if you missed yesterday’s post, featuring Fast Execution, Real Companion, Cowgirl, and Brown Dog, 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 Ekphrastics – Make Your Own Snowboard

Release date: August 3rd
Record label: Harriet
Genre: Indie pop, 90s indie rock, singer-songwriter
Formats: CD, digital
Pull Track: The Arrival of the Graf Zeppelin

Fans of a certain style of 1990s American indie pop/lo-fi indie rock/twee will fondly remember the early work of Frank Boscoe, a Pittsburgh-originating singer-songwriter who led bands like Wimp Factor 14 and The Vehicle Flips in the nineties who released the bulk of their material on recently-revived indie pop label Harriet Records (Linda Smith, The Extra Glenns, Tullycraft). Like an unfortunately large number of 90s underground greats, Boscoe slowly retreated from making music in the following years (his post-Vehicle Flips band, The Gazetteers, seemed to peter out at the beginning of the 2010s), but like a fortunately substantial number of said greats, the pandemic kicked off a new era in the world of Boscoe. Now based in Maine, the musician began collaborating with his ex-Vehicle Flips bandmate Johnny Lancia (drums) and Sinkcharmer’s Paul Coleman (bass), with Mark Wolfe joining on guitar when The Ekphrastics became a real-world band in 2022. The first Ekphrastics album, Special Delivery, showed up the following year, and their sophomore LP, Make Your Own Snowboard, has materialized a mere sixteen months later. With only a passing familiarity with Boscoe’s previous work, I was immediately drawn in by his latest album, a fantastic exercise in storytelling with laid-back, folk-y indie pop as the fruitful vessel. 

Described as “a collection of short stories about doing one’s level best”, the eleven songs with words on Make Your Own Snowboard are all self-contained works that encourage close listening. Some songs on the album are pretty straightforward narratives (like the handyman movie theater employee who hacks a pinball machine in “The Intrepid Concessionaire” or the human enigma who’s the titular character of “Superbarista”), while songs like “Amy and Jens” (based on an essay Amy Rigby wrote about the song “Black Cab” by Jens Lekman) and “Keys to My Heart” (a brilliant metatextual piece) gain something with a bit of digging and context. Make Your Own Snowboard is refreshing in its ability to unpretentiously step into the world of nerdy, bookish 90s indie pop, recalling it both in its subject matter (looking at you, “The Arrival of the Graf Zeppelin” and “Searching for Lillian Gatlin”) and when The Ekphrastics explicitly nod to their own small corner of the world with “A Good Day for Sailing”, which begins with “I traded my Mountain Goats records for a small sailboat” and a clip of the familiar whirring of that band’s Panasonic RX-FT500 (Incidentally, the similarities between Boscoe and John Darnielle don’t go unnoticed by me, even as I’d personally suggest that Franklin Bruno and DiskothiQ would be equally correct touchpoints if we’re talking about early Shrimper Records/Inland Empire bands). 

There’s something very inspiring about Boscoe’s writing, the casualness with which he performs the public service of pulling things like the Graf Zeppelin and Lillian Gatlin from history rather than lean on what we already know and understand to be common reference points. It’s an antidote to the navel-gazing attitude I’ve come to detest from countless writers and culture vultures, the ones who spend more time debating whether people will “remember” a given album or movie in a hundred years than actually engaging with art. I don’t know or particularly care about how many people will remember Make Your Own Snowboard in 2124, but if they do, it’ll be because it’s an album that stubbornly refuses to dwell on this op-ed, horse-race mindset, rolls up its sleeves, and gets its hands dirty. As Boscoe sums things up the titular character in “The Intrepid Concessionaire”: 

“Hail to those who open the backs of things
And make the necessary hacks to things
Sometimes they are promoted
Other times they’re fired
Mostly all are unaware
What has transpired”

(Bandcamp link)

Purseweb – From Your Tears Came This Aquarium

Release date: June 29th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Lo-fi indie rock, bedroom pop
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Souls Attend

Jake Gascoyne is a Manchester-based musician who began releasing music as Purseweb in late 2022 with an EP called Come to Me With Every Hour. A few standalone singles have followed since that point, as well as another EP, The Cars and Birdsong Are Changing Me, in February of this year. The third Purseweb EP overall and second of 2024 came out at the end of June–continuing the tradition of heady and evocative titles, this one’s named From Your Tears Came This Aquarium. Running through four songs in fourteen minutes, From Your Tears Came This Aquarium reflects Gascoyne’s stated appreciation of dream pop, emo, and indie pop, sounding a lot like the greyscale, chilly mid-2010s era of lo-fi bedroom pop (Gascyone mentions one of the most prominent of these acts, Teen Suicide, as an influence, though he also reaches further back to classic indie pop group Rocketship and sad rock music godfathers The Cure). Gascoyne’s downcast, mumbled vocals and the dour streak to the instrumentals threatens to land From Your Tears Came This Aquarium on the bleaker end of the “bedroom pop” spectrum, but a layered pop attitude and upbeat moments turn the EP into something more than practiced wallowing.

From Your Tears Came This Aquarium starts with what’s probably its brightest moment–the brisk guitar pop instrumental that marks the beginning of “Souls Attend”. The track eventually cools its jets, but it never loses its edge, and the brakes squeal as Gascoyne murmurs “I’ll be availed always / A hundred times more so / Carry me wherever I go,” and the song bows out. The five-minute “Pylon Tower” is more of a slow burn, starting as sparse bedroom folk before the percussion arrives about a minute in and turns the track into something propulsive as well. The title track is both the shortest on the EP and the one that feels the most “classic lo-fi bedroom pop”–it wastes no time before jumping into a distorted vocal and a utilitarian indie rock backdrop, delivering a hefty portion of deeply-felt, dramatic opacity (“Croak my worth / Hide my feelings / When I think of you I start bleeding from my eyes”) in about two minutes. Closing track “Butter Knives” was released as an advance single, which feels strange to me, as it takes the “Pylon Tower” route of taking time to build on its acoustic foundation (over two minutes of ramping up, in fact), and even when it reaches the mid-tempo final swoon, it’s hardly the most accessible moment on the EP. If you’re making something like From Your Tears Came This Aquarium, though, I supposed that’s not foremost in your mind. You’re making something curious for the curious, something worth figuring out for the people who want to figure it out. (Bandcamp link)

Greaser Phase – Greaser Phase

Release date: June 28th
Record label: Shambotic
Genre: Power pop, garage rock, rock and roll
Formats: CD, digital
Pull Track: Lonely Hearts Killers

I’m not exactly sure what I was expecting a New York-based rock and roll duo named Greaser Phase to sound like, but their self-titled debut album feels like it’s probably the best-case scenario for such an act. On Greaser Phase, the band’s core duo (vocalist Jonny Couch and bassist/guitarist Benny Imbriani, assisted by Kevin Shea on drums) barrel through ten electric power pop songs in twenty-nine minutes, and the group’s barebones instrumental setup doesn’t stop Greaser Phase from incorporating early punk rock, mod, 60s pop rock, and even rockabilly into their pop music. Greaser Phase seem to get more confident in stretching out their material in real-time: every one of the first four songs are under three minutes long, and the last six are all longer than three minutes. There’s no dip in quality across the world of Greaser Phase, however–like The Cars’ self-titled record without any of those fancy synths, the duo’s debut album plays like an unearthed greatest hits from a band fully-formed at birth.

Although I certainly meant it when I said Greaser Phase retains its quality throughout its entire length, there’s a certain pleasing immediacy to the record’s first three songs that will undoubtedly particularly appeal to those of us who like their guitar pop short, strong, and sweet. “Lonely Hearts Killers” is a brilliant opener, a power pop propeller in love with rock both classic and punk in a way that recalls the more bite-sized moments of Ted Leo and the Pharmacists, while “Back in California” is Greaser Phase’s sunny, groovy entry into the “surf rock songs about the Golden State” sweepstakes, and “Believe It” has just a hint of country-rock-and-roll in its laid-back lead guitars. As Greaser Phase get into their longer material, even more shades to their sound are unlocked–sometimes they’re content to just ride out the power pop-rock and roll dragon for an extra minute or two (“Knockin on Your Window”, “False Paradise”), but we also get “The Belle of Clarksville Mississippi”, a song in which Imbriani dares to indulge in some vox combo organ to enhance Couch’s pop frontperson storytelling, and “Nervous Minds”, a somewhat faded-sounding power (pop) ballad that doesn’t overdo the modulating guitars and vocals too much. Greaser Phase closes with a song called “Over and Out”–yet again, it’s incredibly catchy, but the song feels jagged and dissonant around the edges like a lot of inventive “classic rock era” music. It’s hard to say what exactly makes it work as well as it does, other than “it keeps doing what Greaser Phase clearly excel at doing”. (Bandcamp link)

Box Elder – Between Endings and Beginnings

Release date: July 31st
Record label: Wheelbite
Genre: Pop punk, emo, emo-punk
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Bug

I’m not sure what malady causes someone to form an emo band in Wyoming, but Box Elder has a clear case of it. The quintet from Jackson was founded by singer/guitarist Christopher Archuleta in the early 2020s, and a couple of Box Elder EPs (2021’s These Distractions Are Constant, 2022’s Sell the Heart Records-released Minimums) surfaced as an Archuleta solo project with some guest contributions. A couple of these collaborators (drummer Oscar Garcia-Perez, synth player Claire Holden) soon became full members, guitarist Ian Tompkins and bassist Wil Ziegler joined the fray, and a proper full-band Box Elder began touring the Western U.S., playing shows with bands like Bug Seance. The six-song Between Endings and Beginnings EP is Box Elder’s first as a five-piece, featuring three new songs and three reworkings from their previous releases. Archuleta’s new bandmates instantly get to work polishing and expanding his emo-shot songwriting, giving Between Endings and Beginnings a loud but still somewhat downcast reading that incorporates bits of pop punk and chilly alt-rock. It comes out to a record that recalls the turn-of-the-century moment where emo went “pop” into the mainstream–but still with an underdog charm to it.

“The devil’s taking notes on you / Seeing through the person that he thought he knew,” is how Archuleta chooses to start “Takes One to Know One”, the EP’s lead-off track. What follows is a four-something-minute-long track in which Box Elder lean hard on their emo and melodramatic tendencies, but Between Endings and Beginnings doesn’t just keep trying to get more juice out of that combination. “Bug”, on the other hand, is a big alt-rock/power pop anthem, dealing in soaring instrumentals marked by guitar heroics–the earnestness of Archuleta’s vocals being the biggest “emo” marker on the track. There are no “down moments” on Between Endings and Beginnings–“Clarity” is a little bit “dreamo”, but in a “cavalcade of guitars” way, while “Minimums” turns its refrain into, improbably, the most memorable hook on the record. After the brisk, swinging backbeat of “Arrows” injects even more life into a record hardly suffering for lack of it, “Keeper” closes the EP out with the classic slow burn final track. Even in its first, quietest minute, though, the guitars are still doing tricks and the drums sound pretty tough–I can’t imagine anyone being surprised that Box Elder eventually charge into an all-hands-on-deck crescendo. Seeing it on the horizon doesn’t lessen the impact once we get there, though. (Bandcamp link)

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