Pressing Concerns: Tales of a Kitchen Porter, John Davis, Fantasy of a Broken Heart, Being Dead

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Welcome to the Thursday Pressing Concerns! This one has four great albums coming out tomorrow, September 27th: new LPs from John Davis (of Superdrag), Fantasy of a Broken Heart (featuring members of Water from Your Eyes), and Being Dead (featuring members of Zero Percent APR), as well as a brand-new Martin Newell/Cleaners from Venus tribute album put together by Dandy Boy Records. This is the third Pressing Concerns of the week; if you missed Monday’s post (featuring Beeef, Mo Dotti, 40 Watt Sun, and Tanukichan) or Tuesday’s (featuring Rose Melberg, Shredded Sun, Addicus, and The Gabys), 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.

Various Artists – Tales of a Kitchen Porter: A Tribute to Cleaners from Venus

Release date: September 27th
Record label: Dandy Boy
Genre: Jangle pop, lo-fi pop, power pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Mercury Girl

Something has been cosmically wrong for the last few years. We’re living in a golden era of homespun, jangly guitar pop, much of it coming out of the San Francisco Bay area, and yet somehow nobody had thought to gather a bunch of these bands up and have them cover a bunch of songs from the godfather of this entire movement–Martin Newell, aka the mind behind The Cleaners from Venus. It appears that there was one Newell tribute album (appropriately titled ReNewell) that came out back in 2000 and featured Stuart Moxham of Young Marble Giants, Dave Gregory of XTC, and R. Stevie Moore, but it’s long since been time to let the kids have a crack at these songs. That’s where Tales from a Kitchen Porter comes in, assembled by Oakland’s Dandy Boy Records and featuring fifteen bands’ takes on songs from the Cleaners from Venus discography stretched across two sides of a vinyl record and a “special edition” extra 7″. I’ve written about around half of these bands on this blog before now (and several of the ones I haven’t written about feature members of bands I have covered), so it’s not exactly a huge surprise that I enjoy Tales from a Kitchen Porter front-to-back. It’s also not shocking that, given the amount of Newell in these bands’ DNA, that these covers are largely fairly faithful. That doesn’t mean that the acts don’t put their own unique stamps on them, however–some are dreamier, some are noisier, some are more polished, some are more ramshackle-sounding.

There’s plenty to spotlight on Tales from a Kitchen Porter. Regular readers of the blog will recognize Yea-Ming Chen (albeit with a different backing band, The Gloomers) bringing her Yo La Tengo-esque folk/dream pop to “Night Starvation” to open the compilation, as well as Baltimore’s The Smashing Times adding a bit of their disorganized psychedelic mod-pop to personal favorite “Drowning Butterflies” while keeping the desperate gloominess of the original intact to close the proper LP. The familiar faces are responsible for some of the most surprising moments on Tales from a Kitchen Porter (Whitney’s Playland turning the offbeat “Corridor of Dreams” into a straight-up gorgeous dream-jangle ballad) and some of the most upbeat ones (Chime School’s “Mercury Girl”, which is better than sex). I’ve never written about The Dates on Rosy Overdrive before, but I was pleased to see their name on this album as they put out one of the greatest and most obscure jangle pop albums of the past few years in 2019’s Ask Again Later–their take on “Felicity” is louder and more power pop-friendly, but predictably excellent.

The 7” offers a couples of debuts–Inflatable Men (supposedly featuring members of The 1981 and The Goods) make a great first impression with a cheery jangly power pop reading of “He’s Going Out With Marilyn”, and Lauren Matsui of Seablite launches her new synthpop solo project Rhymies with a take on “Gamma Ray Blue”. Also showing up on the extra record is Sleepworld, a band I hadn’t heard of (one of their members plays in Fast Execution, apparently), whose cover of “I Can’t Stop Holding On” is shot through with a sort of wistful but purposeful jangle and might just capture the feeling of those ’80s Cleaners albums more than anything else on Tales from a Kitchen Porter. There’s a piece of that in every song on Tales from a Kitchen Porter, of course–but it’s still really enjoyable to hear who picks up which pieces, and how. (Bandcamp link)

John Davis – JINX

Release date: September 27th
Record label: Lost in Ohio
Genre: Power pop, alt-rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Please Be My Love

Given the kind of music I generally cover on Rosy Overdrive, it can’t be a huge surprise that I’m a fan of Knoxville’s Superdrag, who took power pop merged with 90s alt-rock straight to #17 on the Billboard’s Modern Rock Tracks before disbanding in the early 2000s. I came to the band a little later than some people who had their minds blown by them in real time, but Regretfully Yours and Head Trip in Every Key are clearly brilliant records, and though they did reunite briefly for the album Industry Giants in 2009, it was still a welcome surprise to find out the band were working on their first LP in a decade and a half back in 2022. In the end, things didn’t work out, leading to Superdrag frontperson John Davis to rescue the songs from these sessions and put them out as a solo record called JINX, which is what the Superdrag album was tentatively going to be called, too (thankfully, it seems there hasn’t been a huge rift with the rest of the band over it, as they announced and played a few shows together just earlier this year). Regardless of who’s playing on JINX (in this case, it’s Davis, producer/bassist/father Stewart Pack, and engineer/drummer/son Henry Pack), Davis was right to ensure these songs saw the light of day after the previous false start.

Between Davis’ solo career and newer bands like The Lees of Memory, Epic Ditch, and The Rectangle Shades, there’s been no shortage of new music from the singer-songwriter over the past decade, and no lack of exploration in it, too. The songs of JINX, however, certainly bear the “earmarked for a Superdrag album” stamp, even as it doesn’t quite sound like Superdrag’s most beloved works. JINX is comparatively more stripped-down and laid-back–Davis and the Packs embrace being a power trio on these ten songs rather than attempting to layer themselves to a bigger sound. It works, in no small part because the trio are more than able to conjure up a Superdrag-esque “loud, fuzzed-out take on power pop” vibe by merely ripping through these songs as if they were live. Davis has spent plenty of time in this world, and he knows how to connect the relatively heavy, almost Failure-esque downer-rock of opening track “The Future” with the immediate guitar pop hits (“Please Be My Love” and “Take My Brains Out” brightening the corners on the first side, “Indifferent Stars” and “In Between the Waves” giving a healthy kick to Side B). It’s a fairly short (almost exactly a half-hour) album that doesn’t feel that way–all of these songs are full-scale rockers that merely pare down any and all excess. There’s still just enough time for Davis to remind us of his six-string melody skills in “Cold Advice”–much of the record, like this song, feels pretty thematically dark, but the John Davis trio doesn’t sound bogged down by it in their performance. (Bandcamp link)

Fantasy of a Broken Heart – Feats of Engineering

Release date: September 27th
Record label: Dots Per Inch
Genre: Art pop, experimental rock, psych pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Loss

I think it’s a good bit that all of Water from Your Eyes’ solo and side projects are more accessible than the members’ “main” and most popular band. There’s the straightforward bedroom pop of Rachel Brown’s Thanks for Coming, Nate Amos’ ever-expanding folk-power-pop This Is Lorelei, the cheery-sounding indie pop of Amos’ My Idea, and now we can enjoy the ambitious, “artistic”, but quite hooky pop music of Fantasy of a Broken Heart and their debut album, Feats of Engineering. Al Nardo and Bailey Wollowitz round out the Water from Your Eyes touring quartet, but the duo are much more than just hired guns, having played in a bunch of other bands over the years, frequently together (most notably in Sloppy Jane). Fantasy of a Broken Heart has been kicking around for a while–Nardo and Wollowitz seem like they were destined to co-lead a band together, and the pandemic kicked off a project that began to take shape amid their time touring the world in other groups (the title of their first album is at least partially a nod to the patchwork nature of the record). The duo are remarkably in sync on Feats of Engineering, allowing them to add an impressive amount of interesting ideas to their songs but without losing each other in the fog.

Feats of Engineering is a pop album that takes its lumps, getting hit with bullets from prog rock, “art rock”, and experimental synth-based music and coming out the other side all the stronger for it. It isn’t being released by Ramp Local, but it feels very much in line with Ramp Local bands like Tomato Flower, Kolb, and Turbo World–pop rock for people who just can’t be normal about it for too long (Wollowitz’s Spencer Krug-esque deep-sounding but emotional talk-singing vocals also go a long way in having Fantasy of a Broken Heart remind me of the Wolf Parade/Moonface/Sunset Rubdown-iverse, too). The first proper song on the album, “AFV”, has moments that feel like sweeping, grandiose indie rock and moments that feel allergic to any of that kind of polish, and “Loss” opens with saccharine piano pop only for Wollowitz to ramble somewhat troublingly over the instrumental and Nardo’s vocal hooks. Feats of Engineering has no shortage of simple beauty and just as many moments of pure chaos–highlights like “Mega” and the title track happily steer their way through both ends of the spectrum. Feats of Engineering doesn’t run out of steam–far from it, was “Tapdance 1” and “Tapdance 2” are some of the most inspired compositions on the album, and closing track “Catharsis” ends the LP by giving us more than enough to take in. There’s a strong partnership at the center of Feats of Engineering, and I look forward to seeing where its architects go from here. (Bandcamp link)

Being Dead – EELS

Release date: September 27th
Record label: Bayonet
Genre: Indie pop, power pop, twee, psych pop, garage rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Godzilla Rises

Austin’s Being Dead weren’t really on my radar before I noticed their 2023 debut LP, When Horses Would Run, popping up on some quality best-of-year lists, but the duo didn’t come out of nowhere. Their debut EP, Fame Money Death By Drive By, came out on Austin Town Hall Records in 2019, and while the follow-up LP took some time to come together, Juli Keller and Cody Dosier busied themselves in the meantime by releasing a few albums under the name Zero Percent APR (who I had heard of and enjoyed before knowing of the connection). Actually, sorry–Keller and Dosier are in Zero Percent APR, but the core duo of Being Dead is “Falcon Bitch” and “Smoofy”, names more than appropriate for the bonkers, trippy indie rock/indie pop/jazz-pop extravaganza that is When Horses Would Run. Being Dead kind of remind me of a more Americana version of The Bug Club, with the latter’s British sophisti-twee dialed back in favor of a classic Texas freak-rock energy. The group (now featuring bassist Nicole Roman-Johnston, too) wanted a quick turnaround rather than a long-drawn-out process for their sophomore album–apparently, they were writing new material right up until the time they’d booked with legendary producer John Congleton to make what would become EELS. 

I thought that When Horses Would Run sounded lively enough as it was, but whatever goals Being Dead had for EELS, the result is something that manages to feel both unpredictable and laser-focused on pop music at the same time. The trio zip through sixteen tracks in under forty minutes, but the majority of the album is made up of robust, smart, hooky indie rock songs that are complete thoughts on their own. The Being Dead of EELS are constantly in motion, setting the stage with the 60s-infused power pop of “Godzilla Rises” and the dizzying catchiness of “Van Goes”, getting a bit more melancholic in “Problems”, heavier in “Firefighters”, shoegazier in “Gazing at Footwear” (which, despite the gimmicky name, is a intriguing piece of weirdo art rock that’s as good as some of the more “proper” songs). Being Dead pace themselves nicely on EELS–there are mid-record highlights like “Nightvision” and “Big Bovine” that could’ve come from a more traditional indie/jangle pop band, the trio not overdoing their “Being Dead”ness in songs that don’t call for that and saving their stop-start, turn-on-a-dime energetic operatic pop rock for things like “Ballerina” and “Love Machine” that really benefit from it. Hidden behind the band that cracks themselves up while singing “rock and roll will hurt your soul” is one that decided to bet on themselves following up a noteworthy first album–and EELS is vindication. (Bandcamp link)

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2 thoughts on “Pressing Concerns: Tales of a Kitchen Porter, John Davis, Fantasy of a Broken Heart, Being Dead”

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