On this fine Tuesday, we’ve got an eclectic assortment of new records to look at in Pressing Concerns: new albums from Guidon Bear, Mythical Motors, and WUT, and the debut EP from Alejandro. An instant classic! If you missed yesterday’s post, featuring Public Opinion, Webb Chapel, Young Scum, and Trevor Sloan, 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.
Guidon Bear – Internal Systems
Release date: July 31st
Record label: Antiquated Future/YoYo
Genre: Indie pop, synthpop, folk
Formats: CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: TV Screen
It seems like I should be familiar with Guidon Bear, but I hadn’t heard of them until quite recently. It’s a duo made up of two Olympia indie pop veterans, Mary Water and Pat Maley, who originally played together in Little Red Car Wreck in the late 1990s. Maley has also been a frequent collaborator with fellow Olympia musician Lois Maffeo, playing in her bands Lois and Courtney Love, as well as running Yoyo Recordings (the Mountain Goats, The Microphones, Mirah) and its associated recording studio. At the end of last decade, the two reunited as Guidon Bear, releasing albums in 2019 and 2022; Internal Systems is the project’s third full-length. While their first two albums, Downwardly Mobile: Steel Accelerator and Unravel, are offbeat collections of music primarily in the realms of indie folk and guitar-based pop, the latter started to incorporate a bit more synth/electronic elements, and this side of the band blossoms fully on Internal Systems. Remarkably, the buzzing and chiming synths added by Maley to these songs fit perfectly alongside their guitar-based indie rock sound–it doesn’t reduce Guidon Bear’s “old” style so much as add to it, and it’s no less devoted to enhancing Water’s incredible songwriting.
Internal Systems is a winding, rich listen–counting an alternate acoustic version of one song, it’s a dozen tracks and nearly fifty minutes long, and Water’s lyrics are just as engrossing and vivid as the music they accompany, if not more so. Internal Systems jumps between indie folk, indie pop, and electronic music in a way that reminds me quite pleasingly of the great Emperor X, and the incredibly human writing at the center of it (in the vein of Dear Nora, John K. Samson, and Christine Fellows) goes a long way towards that, too. The six-minute opening track “TV Screen” is a half-asleep jumble of images glimpsed on the titular object (as well as one’s phone), fiction and reality blurring much like watching videos on Instagram tends to do, the simple synth backgrounds soundtracking Waters’ train of thought and guitars only showing up on the sparingly-used chorus–it’s maybe the best song I’ve heard all year. As hard as it should be to live up to the strength of “TV Screen”, Guidon Bear press on with highlights like “Animal Child”, which pulls acoustic guitars and piano tones together as Water paints a tender portrait that’s just as compelling.
In a just world, I (or someone better at this that me) would devote entire articles to individual songs on this record; there’s just so much going on musically, thematically, and vocally in tracks like “Wheels” (containing a very pleasing couplet that rhymes “cars” with “amplifiers”), “Family Shadow Trance” (a hard-hitting piece of folk rock that contains some of the most animated moments on the album), and “Death Ray” (a truly breathtaking, painfully open portrait of a complex familial relationship) for me to capture in this brief review. The last proper song on Internal Systems, “Grizzles or Sharks?”, is hard-earned–the peace and companionship explicitly laid out in the song comes out of the thorny stories that came before it on the record (not to mention the first verse of “Grizzles or Sharks?” itself, dealing with suicidal ideation that’s kept at bay but doesn’t disappear entirely). When Water sings “living’s hard work”, though, she’s doing it. (Bandcamp link)
Mythical Motors – Seven Is Circular
Release date: September 6th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Lo-fi power pop, psych pop
Formats: CD, digital
Pull Track: Impossible Symmetry
Regular readers of Rosy Overdrive will be well-acquainted with Chattanooga, Tennessee’s Matt Addison and his solo project Mythical Motors by this point. Since the advent of Pressing Concerns, I’ve written about four different Mythical Motors records, all of which have kept Addison’s prolific streak of bite-sized lo-fi power pop alive and strong. Seven Is Circular is the second Mythical Motors album of 2024, following April’s Upside Down World, which saw a cassette release via Repeating Cloud Records (Teenage Tom Petties, Dignan Porch, Log Across the Washer). At this point, one has a good idea of what one will get in a Mythical Motors record–electric guitar pop instrumentals and synth/MIDI-string-aided ballads with Addison’s distinctive, Tobin Sprout-esque eternally youthful voice delivering ace melodies atop them. That being said, after having listened to both of this year’s Mythical Motors records a fair amount, they do have distinct personalities. Upside Down World felt a bit like Addison leaning into the upbeat, rockier side of Mythical Motors, almost like he was trying to meet potential new listeners via the proper label with his most immediate side. Seven Is Circular, meanwhile, is the one for us already on board–it’s Mythical Motors unfettered, zipping through twenty songs in thirty-seven minutes and running the gamut of their sound.
Addison might not be keeping things as tight as on his previous record here, but he still knows how to string together a bunch of power pop hits to kick Seven Is Circular into gear. Opening track “A Stolen Echo” (Halloween organ aside), “When We All Come Alive”, and “Queen Domino” all get the job done; while the bittersweet guitar meandering of “Dream Us In” flirts with tapping the brakes, it’s not until the acoustic “Slow March to Clown City” that Mythical Motors announce that they’re going to stretch out for a bit. And stretch out they do–the middle of the record is marked by the three-minute “The Tunnel Keeps Moving” and the arena rock turn of “Ignominious Glome”, indicating that Addison is paying just as much attention to the heavier, prog-indebted moments on later Guided by Voices records as he is to the bubblegum sections. Songs like “Spinning Tops Over Silver Sets” and “Tune Your Sun Dial” find Mythical Motors exploring sun-drenched psychedelia, quietly in the former and quite loudly in the latter, but both display a willingness by Addison to let his writing and his guitar playing meander just a bit. Mythical Motors are never going to be a “dark” or “heavy” band, but songs like “Curse of the Fallen Rainbow” ensure that Seven Is Circular feels like one of the colder entries into the band’s discography. Of course, that might just be because Addison allows himself time to explore these reaches on the record–we still end up at the bright-shining guitar pop of “Impossible Symmetry” at the end. (Bandcamp link)
WUT – Mingling with the Thorns
Release date: August 23rd
Record label: HHBTM
Genre: Twee, indie pop, jangle pop, C86
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Beuys Oh Beuys
Drummer Lauren Smith plays bass in the excellent Tough Age, while guitarist Kaity McWhinney and bassist Tracey Vath have a history together in the bands Knife Pleats and Love Cuts (alongside Rose Melberg in the former). Since 2018, the Vancouver-based trio have been playing together as WUT, releasing their debut album, Now, independently in 2020. The group has linked up with HHBTM Records (Outer World, The Garment District, My Favorite) for their sophomore album, Mingling with the Thorns, which solidifies their status as a valuable member of the West Coast jangle pop/twee/guitar pop scene. With all three members contributing vocals and songwriting to the record, Mingling with the Thorns is a deceptively breezy listen that’s nonetheless overflowing with ideas, hooks, and things to say. It’s not just their grasp of simply-brilliant Pacific Northwest guitar pop that recalls the region’s indie rock history; their label refers to them as “riot-twee”, and all three members of WUT connect with each other via writing worthy of such a description. The eleven songs of Mingling with the Thorns largely navigate relationships–romantic, familial, whatever–both with a conscious and stalwart understanding of patriarchy (riot!) and by still largely hewing to people-first, emotional explorations of such situations (twee!).
It’s not an exaggeration to say that Mingling with the Thorns is overflowing with personality befitting a band with multiple strong songwriters, particularly in its opening salvo. “Powering Through” is nothing short of timeless indie pop–WUT are zipping through a clear winner of a pop tune, and they know it. The skipping twee-pop “Here for You”, the jangly storytelling of “Quiet Quiet”, and the rainy Cascadia guitar pop of the title track all have just as much to offer, but the writing is where the world of WUT really breaks open. The complete relationship subordination of “Here for You” is the flipside of the absolute scorn directed at a detestable patriarchal figure in “Quiet Quiet” (the vocal trade-offs in the latter are to die for, by the way), and the weak but sincere smile of “Mingling with the Thorns” is disarming in the face of what came before it. WUT’s ability to smoothly examine plenty of different perspective continues into the second half of Mingling with the Thorns–“Your Feelings” is a palpably frustrated song about trying to read somebody and failing, and then “Beuys Oh Beuys” is a satisfyingly sugary sneering song about a specific type of asshole (“You’re not a shaman, just a powerful man / A man in control–what’s so radical about that?”). When WUT bow out with “When I’m Gone”, we’re left with one last catchy indie pop song and the question of how sincerely we’re supposed to take the lyrics. That’s a lot of the appeal of Mingling with the Thorns–it’s eager to continuously give us more than it has to. (Bandcamp link)
Alejandro – Anaheim
Release date: August 16th
Record label: Good Eye
Genre: Indie pop, folk rock, soft rock, art rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Anahiem
One of the most underappreciated new-to-me acts of the first couple years of this blog was Brooklyn’s Personal Space. The quartet put out an album on Tiny Engines in 2016, and after a while of silence returned at the beginning of this decade with two great records (2021’s A Lifetime of Leisure and 2022’s Still Life EP) that put together a unique mix of shining indie pop, languid soft rock, and relaxed but still sharp math rock. Personal Space quietly went on hiatus last year (very quietly–I don’t think they announced it publicly), but guitarist/vocalist Alex Silva was already working on new material, and he teamed up with Personal Space drummer Jesse Chevan and newcomers Charlie Hack (bass) and Justin Gonçalves (guitar) to form Alejandro. The Alejandro quartet debuted only slightly-less-quietly in mid-August of this year with a three-song digital EP called Anaheim, offering the first taste of a life post-Personal Space for Silva and Chevan. As it turns out, Alejandro shares plenty of superficial similarities with Personal Space, but a closer look reveals a group of musicians clearly not trying to just emulate their predecessor band. So much of Personal Space’s music relied on subtle interplay and subsequent meandering structures–Alejandro comes out of the gate with seemingly little interest in beating around the bush.
Anaheim does indeed sound like the work of musicians who had been constrained by the pandemic and are now eager to get back at making music together, the three songs bursting with an immediacy and core simplicity that Personal Space was more likely than not to eschew. It’s hard to think of a better introduction to Alejandro than the EP’s opening title track, a gorgeous piece of guitar pop that eagerly serves the whirlwind, confusing story that Silva delivers in the song’s lyrics. Silva sounds surprisingly messy on “Anaheim”, and while the rest of Alejandro can’t quite be called that, they’re dynamic enough to soundtrack this side of Silva appropriately. The travelogue continues in the tropical depression of “Rio”, in which the narrator, in passages described enthusiastically and grandly by Silva, thinks “I just want to be home in my room alone,” as they crawl across South America. The EP closes with “Folly Tree”, in which Alejandro’s acoustic, folk rock undertones bubble to the surface, and the story of visiting a “friend’s arboretum” is classically Personal Space in its mixture of ritzy cultural signifiers, personal uncertainty/uneasiness, and hyperspecificity in isolation. There’s a wine glass on the table; in several senses, no one knows how it got there. (Bandcamp link)
Also notable:
- Freak Genes – Delirik
- AW – Simple Songs EP
- Operants – Mass Monomania EP
- Wand – Vertigo
- Amáutica – Sin Altares
- The Subtheory – Shark Tank
- Double Deüce – Warm Ham in a Foreign Home
- Belong – Realistic IX
- The Raft – Look at the Patterns
- King Rib – Missing People
- Gracie Gray – Magnet
- Rose Hotel – A Pawn Surrender
- The BellRays – Heavy Steady Go!
- Palehound – Live at First Continental Church
- Malice k – AVANTI
- Potionseller – When They Get Old EP
- Mass Lines – Enlightened Age EP
- Goodnight, Texas – Signals
- Sun Kin – Painting Whales
- SIKM – Now I Must Comply EP
- Joe George – Folk Cinema
- Katherine Nagy – Sweetlove
- Steve Earle – Alone Again
- Blind Pilot – In the Shadow of the Holy Mountain
- Creeping Jean – Business Is Dead
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