Pressing Concerns: Beeef, Mo Dotti, 40 Watt Sun, Tanukichan

Welcome to another week of new music here on the Rosy Overdrive music blog. Our first post of the week is the Monday Pressing Concerns, containing new LPs from Beeef, Mo Dotti, and 40 Watt Sun, plus a new EP from Tanukichan. Read on!

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.

Beeef – Somebody’s Favorite

Release date: September 6^th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Power pop, indie pop, jangle pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Observational Eros

For those in the know, there was hardly anybody making guitar pop music as consistently strong as Boston’s Beeef were in the late 2010s. That’s when the quartet (guitarist/vocalist Perry Eaton, guitarist Josh Bolduc, bassist Daniel Schiffer, and drummer Neil Patch) put out two excellent records of jangly college rock, more laid-back than Vundabar but maybe not quite as reclined as Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever (I’m partial to 2019’s Bull in the Shade, but their 2017 self-titled LP has plenty of fans, too). As the distance from Bull in the Shade increased, I did wonder if Beeef had quietly broken up, but singles began showing up at the end of last year, culminating in a full-on third Beeef LP. Somebody’s Favorite (intentionally or not, a nod to their cult status in the record title) is just about everything one could want in a New England guitar pop record–immediately catchy, smart, and friendly, with plenty of depth below the sparkle and shine that feels like it will age incredibly well. Somebody’s Favorite even existing at all feels like a victory, but it’s an even greater treat to hear that Beeef sound, more than ever, quite sturdy and built to last.

The advance singles from Somebody’s Favorite reaffirmed Beeef’s status as one of the greatest modern pop bands whenever they feel like being one, and these hits don’t lose anything in the context of the album. “Observational Eros” was my favorite of the three; in context, it’s the record’s five-minute, deceptively simple centerpiece, marrying slacker rock, twee, and undergrad-pop-rock together to create something that’s just about impossible to ignore–even as the song takes a few too many turns to hum/tap along to without a bit of practice. “Nice Clean Shirt” opens the album with an equally patient and peppy anthem, with the verses showing admirable restraint before the soda pop explosion of the refrain (nothing is ever going to fill the Bent Shapes-sized hole in my heart, but Beeef are doing the best they–or, probably, anyone–can here). “Narragansett Bay” wasn’t a single but certainly could’ve been, a surf rock nostalgia trip to the beaches of sunny Rhode Island with some salt-air imagery I can almost taste.

Somebody’s Favorite isn’t a “singles” record, thankfully, with album tracks like the giddy classic rock-friendly “Street Signs”, the smooth, slick danceable pop rock of “Primrose Path”, and wrecking ball-style power pop anthem “Something in the River” sounding as good as anything else on the album (with its earnest, fervent “ode to the city” lyrics, “Something in the River” needed to be a real winner to work, and it does–if anyone gets to write the millennial indie rock version of “Roadrunner”, that’s clearly Beeef). Somebody’s Favorite stretches to forty-five minutes pretty much entirely due to two songs–the six-minute guitar-pop-as-meditation “Hummingbird” in its first half and the eight-minute closing track “Guess I Shouldn’t Wait”. On the latter track, the bayside sunsets and seagulls of the rest of the record are still present, but just outside the reach of the victim of time narrating the song. “Guess I shouldn’t wait for it / To fall into my hands,” is the last thing Eaton sings in “Guess I Shouldn’t Wait”, but the real final statement of Somebody’s Favorite is the five-minute instrumental interlocking piece of music that Beeef launch into right after that. (Bandcamp link)

Mo Dotti – Opaque

Release date: September 20^th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Shoegaze, dream pop, indie pop, fuzz rock, noise pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Pale Blue Afternoon

When I wrote about Los Angeles quartet Mo Dotti back in 2022, I described their genre as “loud pop music”–two years later, Mo Dotti have returned with a record that certainly merits that tag as well. The record I wrote about was Guided Imagery, the second EP from the band (made up of founding members Gina Negrini on guitar and vocals and guitarist Guy Valdez, now joined by drummer Andrew Mackelvie, and bassist Greg Shilton), and after releasing a compilation of both of their EPs last year, Mo Dotti have unveiled their first full-length album, the self-released Opaque. On their debut LP, Mo Dotti plant their flag right in the middle of “indie pop” and “shoegaze”, feeling the pull of both sides nearly equally; they’re noisier and louder than their (literal) sibling band Janelane, but certainly more indebted to jangly indie pop than the pummeling version of the genre practiced by Mutation Records acts like Shaki Tavi and Clear Capsule. As it turns out, the center is a great place for Mo Dotti to be, as Opaque delights in keeping us on our toes–will the band tease out a song with extra layers and experimentation like their friends in Dummy and Aluminum? Or will they rip into an amped-up, fuzzed-out pop song like their onetime labelmates Ex Pilots are wont to do?

Sometimes, it’s a bit of this, a bit of that in the same song–take first track “Pale Blue Afternoon” for instance, which opens Opaque armed with melodic guitar lines and dream pop (with emphasis on the “pop”) vocals from Negrini, but they’re taken for a ride in the guise of a sturdy four-minute loud rocker. “Lucky Boy” adds a bit of psychedelic and dance elements to Mo Dotti’s sound to create another expansive pop tune, but “Really Wish” nails the other end of the spectrum by offering up straightforward, vintage melancholic jangly guitar pop. Opaque is a deceptively substantial album–the pop elements are still right in plain view, which does a bit to obscure just how drawn out and (relatively) lengthy these songs are. This is more prevalent in the record’s second half, where Mo Dotti lean on their new rhythm section to pull off pop-shoegaze daggers (“Whirling Sad”) and five-minute, noise-infused rock odysseys (“For Anyone and You”, “Wasted Delay”) in a way that embraces heft and heaviness without dropping Mo Dotti’s formative pop music. The final track (on the album proper, there are some digital download-only bonus tracks if these ten songs didn’t sate you) is a nearly seven-minute one called “Dead to Me”, which functions as one last showcase for the Mo Dotti of Opaque. The swirling shoegaze is still there, but so are Negrini’s strong vocals peeking out from the storm and more bright guitar lines–and there’s some impressive locking-in full-band moments, too. There’s enough to Mo Dotti to fill a seven-minute song completely–and enough to carry a debut LP, too. (Bandcamp link)

40 Watt Sun – Little Weight

Release date: September 6^th
Record label: Cappio/Fisher’s Folly
Genre: Slowcore, post-metal, shoegaze
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Pour Your Love

Patrick Walker has been making interesting and heavy rock music for some time now. The British musician founded doom metal band Warning in Essex in 1994–the group only released two proper albums before disbanding in 2009, but they’re still two highly-regarded and fondly-remembered records within the genre today. After Warning broke up, Walker began making music as 40 Watt Sun, releasing three albums from 2011 to 2022 under the project name. The most recent of those three, 2022’s Perfect Light, caught my attention–it’s an absolutely gorgeous record of sprawling, orchestral slowcore in the vein of American Music Club that ended up being one of my favorite albums of that year. Walker has always seemed to work at the pace of five years (at least) between records, so it was a surprise when 40 Watt Sun’s fourth album, Little Weight, arrived only two years and change after Perfect Light. That was an intentional choice by Walker, who, after spending years laboring on Perfect Light, gave himself and his collaborators (longtime collaborator Andrew Prestige on drums and relative newcomer Roland Scriver on bass) strict deadlines to write and record its follow-up, wanting to capture “rawness and spontaneity”. The resultant record picks up Perfect Light’s thread and adds more electricity, injecting just a bit more of Walker’s past to make something “heavy” in a different way.

Little Weight spans six songs and forty-five minutes (practically an exercise in brevity after Perfect Light’s eight songs in sixty-seven), and indeed leans on the core trio of Walker, Prestige, and Scriver to sketch songs largely falling in the six-to-eight minute range. Walker’s distinct, regal voice sits perched atop these tracks just like in previous 40 Watt Sun releases, but here they’re just as likely as ever to be accompanied by swooning, droning electric guitars. His singing has always been a major draw, but Walker’s performances in songs like “Half a World Away” are striking even considering that qualifier. With the “tighter” setup, it makes sense that Little Weight would be (comparatively) streamlined–these songs feel driven and in motion despite their long lengths, and 40 Watt Sun bow out after giving all they’ve got to the album’s one ten-minute track, “The Undivided Truth”. 40 Watt Sun seem to be fairly popular and acclaimed in doom metal circles but I rarely see them mentioned outside of those, which is a shame because these records are beautiful and hardly pure (or even primarily) “metal” albums. These days, “slowcore” is more likely to mean “bands that sound like Duster” than anything all that close to 40 Watt Sun–but anybody who’s unaware of or has forgotten just how powerful this side of the genre can be need only to throw on Little Weight. (Bandcamp link)

Tanukichan – Circles

Release date: September 20^th
Record label: Carpark
Genre: Dream pop, indie pop, shoegaze
Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital
Pull Track: City Bus

Oakland’s Hannah van Loon has been making music as Tanukichan since at least 2016, making a name for herself with a handful of records made with Chaz Bear of Toro y Moi. The most recent of those collaborations was an LP released last year called GIZMO, on which, frankly, I missed the boat. I kind of dismissed it as part of a corner of indie pop that wasn’t all that interesting to me without giving it a fair shake, but after a few people whose tastes I respect said some positive things about the album I went back to it and found myself enjoying its welcoming mix of fuzzy indie pop, dream pop, and shoegaze. Thankfully, Tanukichan is releasing a new five-song EP just a year and a half later that’s also quite good so I can finally talk about the project in Pressing Concerns for a bit. Not only is it another strong collection of songs–Circles is also an important record in van Loon’s discography as the first one to be produced by someone other than Bear (this time, it’s Franco Reid). Circles is also Tanukichan’s debut for indie rock stalwart imprint Carpark Records, and (probably coincidentally) it feels more rock-focused than GIZMO–the “ethereal vibes” dream pop is still here, but there’s also a heavier shoegaze undercurrent that’s just prevalent enough to give the EP a kick.

The EP opens with an instant dream pop classic in “City Bus”, a sharp piece of indie pop that melds hard-hitting rhythms with a vapory performance from van Loon–it’s actually not all that indicative of where Circles ends up going, but it’s good enough that this hardly matters. The revved-up shoegaze guitars introduce themselves not long afterward in the EP’s title track, the wall of sound rising up to meet van Loon’s vocals but never fully engulfing them. “It Gets Easier” notably features a cameo from TikTok-famous nu-shoegaze act Wisp, aka Natalie Lu–again, it feels like an area of pop music that I’m not all that interested in, but Lu acquits herself quite nicely on the burgeoning noise pop song. The best moment on the EP, however, might be “Low”, which injects a danceable groove into Tanukichan’s sound but (wisely) keeps the louder, electric side Circles has explored intact, too. If I had to choose one “sound” on the relatively varied EP that I think would be most fruitful for Tanukichan to explore in the future, it’d be the one found on “Low”, but there’s no wrong answers on Circles–not even closing track “In a Dream”, the token pin-drop-quiet acoustic one. Something tells me “In a Dream” wouldn’t make the cut on a “proper” album, but that’s one of the strengths of grab-bag, stopgap EPs that sometimes can upstage the “main” acts. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

• Neato – Future Stunts EP
• Terry Gross – Huge Improvement
• Sunset Rubdown – Always Happy to Explode
• Linda Dunnavant – Hidden Lake
• Dog Day – A T-Shirt with Writing on It
• Uzumaki – Waded
• Thurston Moore – Flow Critical Lucidity
• Lutalo – The Academy
• Easers – Easers
• Party Dozen – Crime in Australia
• Tamar Berk – Good Times for a Change
• The Peelers – The Holy Crux of Honour
• Fairy Fingers – Fairy Fingers EP
• Jody Stecher – Instant Lonesome and the Twinkle Brigade
• Beastii – Follower
• Cheridomingo – Shapeshift
• Tom Emlyn – Rehearsal For The Rain: Scaredycat, Vol​.​2 
• Gooseberry – All My Friends Are Cattle
• Odie Leigh – Carrier Pigeon
• Nala Sinephro – Endlessness
• Masayoshi Fujita – Migratory
• Well Well Well – Summertime Heat
• Ibibio Sound Machine – The Black Notes EP
• Jana Mila – Chameleon
• Ward Richmond – Spaciousness