Pressing Concerns: Toby the Tiger, The Submissives, Jamison Field Murphy, o’summer vacation

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Come one and come all to the Thursday Pressing Concerns! Today we’ve got three new albums that are coming out tomorrow, October 11th–new LPs from The Submissives, Jamison Field Murphy, and o’summer vacation–plus a new album from Toby the Tiger that is out today! It’s a great post, and if you missed either of the posts from earlier this week (Monday’s Pressing Concerns featuring Dancer/Whisper Hiss, Stomatopod, The Great Dying, and Bandy or the September 2024 playlist/round-up from Tuesday), be sure to 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.

Toby the Tiger – Demapper

Release date: October 10th
Record label: Peligroso es Mi Nombre Medio
Genre: Emo-y indie rock, singer-songwriter, folk rock, bedroom pop
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Bones

One aspect of running a music blog that I do love is being sent random albums from across the world on a regular basis. Sure, it can get overwhelming sometimes, and a lot of them don’t make it past an initial cursory listen, but every now and then I’ll hear something that really resonates with me, which makes it more than worth it. I’m filing Demapper, the debut album from a Boise, Idaho musician named Brock Ross who makes music under the moniker Toby the Tiger, under “transcendent”. Demapper is the debut Toby the Tiger album; we don’t know much about Ross’ musical history before this, but we can infer from the lengthy thank-you section on the record’s Bandcamp (which includes his wife of twelve years, his two kids, plenty more family and friends, and the host of a local open mic) that it was a long road for Ross to finally arrive at recording and releasing original music out into the world. As a writer, Ross is squarely in the realm of “emo-adjacent” indie rock–he specifically cites Kevin Devine, Pedro the Lion, and Pinback in his email to me, and there’s a good deal of Death Cab for Cutie in here too. Ross is adept at writing delicate pop melodies (any time I hear something that reminds me of the obscure Kentucky guitar pop group The Scourge of the Sea, I feel like I have to point it out), but there’s an electric side to Demapper, too, with Ross using as wide a spectrum as he can to capture what he’s composed for the record.

Demapper takes great pains to reveal itself in the sturdiest, most arresting fashion possible. “Bones” is one of the best album openers I’ve heard this year, starting off simple with just electric guitar and Ross’s vocals–but, given the literal Biblical torrent of emotion and violence he eventually gets around to depicting, it can hardly be described as a low-key or “soft” launch. “Do Not Go Gentle” is the first real rocker on the album, sounding almost out of Dischord Records with its mix of choppy, meaty guitar and dynamic vocals. Toby the Tiger settle into something of a groove with the next few songs, although Ross enlists his brother Mitch to play trumpet on “Letter to Screwtape”, and the orchestral-folk touches help make the acoustic guitar-led track into a mid-record highlight. It almost seems like Demapper gets a bit more ambitious as it goes on, with a couple of around-six-minute tunes in “Oldest Friend” and “Verdure & Neon” stretching the project’s sound out in sensible but still novel ways. Demapper comes full circle with closing track “Boardroom”, which returns to the stripped-down, emphatic emo-folk-rock sound of “Bones” to end the record. The dry, corporate setting of the final song is a sharp contrast with the much more elemental “Bones”, but it’s clear which realm is more captivating to Ross as he tunes out the droning “J Crew”. “I got nothing to say in your dialect / so I’m closing the door,” Ross declares in “Boardroom”, in the midst of speaking an alternate language quite well. (Bandcamp link)

The Submissives – Live at Value Sound Studios

Release date: October 11th
Record label: Celluloid Lunch/Rotten Apple
Genre: Art punk, post-punk, indie pop, twee
Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Perfect Woman

Montreal’s Deb Edison began making music as The Submissives in the mid-2010s–from 2015 to 2021, she released four albums under the name featuring material recorded and written entirely on her own. The fifth Submissives album is their first for Celluloid Lunch (Laughing, Feeling Figures, Rose Mercie) and also the first to be made by a full band, with a full cast of vocalist Talia Boguski, guitarist/trumpet player Christina Bell, bassist Emily Gray, drummer Marissa Cytryn, and flautist Olivier Dumont joining Edison for Live at Value Sound Studios. It appears that Edison has taken the opportunity of a proper band and studio to re-record some very early Submissives recordings, but given that it’s my introduction to the band (and will probably be the same for most readers), that’s hardly a complaint. Live at Value Sound Studios nails a hyper-specific type of indie rock/indie pop/punk music across its thirteen tracks, combining the expansive, spacious, uncertain art punk/post-punk of classic groups like The Raincoats with a clear interest and fluency in 60s pop music, in line with acts like The Roches as well as plenty of the original practitioners. The Submissives snake through a baker’s dozen love songs, crush songs, and break-up songs on Live at Value Sound Studios, the guidance of Edison and her backing band ensuring these tracks have an impact going significantly beyond their aged surface.

Live at Value Sound Studios is a warped record–in the “offbeat” sense of the word, yes, but also in a transportive way, too. Edison’s ability to conjure up legitimate approximations of popular culture from the better part of a century ago and deliver them in fresh, appealing, but removed packaging is the main strength of The Submissives. They’re clearly not a nostalgia act, but I don’t really view The Submissives as rejectors of their music of inspiration so much as repositioners. One can view the confused, disoriented readings that The Submissives give ageless pop songs like “He Wanted Her” and “Do You Really Love Me” (or, conversely, the confident desperation of “Perfect Woman”) as an accurate reflection of the youthful feelings that the Beach Boys and contemporary girl groups sought to capture at the time, or also as a darker, more complete exploration of the reality of both the generation depicted in these songs and of the people making the soundtrack for them. One could read “Betty Told Me” as a subversion of the band and era’s typical subject matter, but this (admittedly reductive) reading gets shattered by the companion track “Friend Named Betty” not long afterwards. The Submissives let you figure these things out for yourself, although whether that reflects confidence in the listener or a lack of answers from the band’s brain trust is left open, too. (Bandcamp link)

Jamison Field Murphy – It Has to End

Release date: October 11th
Record label: Ramp Local
Genre: Bedroom pop, lo-fi pop, psych pop, slowcore
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Ermine Cloak

I’ve had the pleasure of charting the progression of Baltimore quartet Tomato Flower since their debut in 2022 with a pair of EPs up to the release of their first full-length album, No, earlier this year, and in the process watching the group evolve from fluttery psychedelic pop and airy space pop to incorporating some darker prog-pop and art rock influences. Along with Austyn Wohlers, Jamison Field Murphy is one of the band’s two singer-guitarists, meaning that It Has to End–Murphy’s debut solo album–is the second record this year to feature him as (at least) a co-leader. Given that No was made in the shadow of Wohlers’ and Murphy’s romantic break-up, it’d be tempting to attach a similar narrative to this quieter, more introspective solo release, but It Has to End isn’t a clean reflection of that particular moment in time–featuring recordings dating all the way back to 2016, the genesis of the album predates not only the recent breakup, but the beginning of Tomato Flower itself. I’m sure it’s felt in some of It Has to End’s more recent recordings, and sure, it’s not inaccurate to call the album “insular” or “intimate”, but it’s bigger than any one moment, capturing eight years of ideas, thoughts, and mile markers from a talented pop musician.

The fifteen songs of It Has to End float by quickly (largely staying in the one-to-three minute range), but the record as a whole hardly sounds hurried. It’s largely Murphy on his own, with a couple of outside contributions (Wohlers plays flute on three songs and Tomato Flower bassist Ruby Mars plays saxophone on “Queen View”, which also features violin from Miranda Sullivan), resulting in something of a photo negative of his main band’s busy, buzzing take on pop music. Yes, “Ermine Cloak”, “Fool to Ride”, and “That Boy” are slower and starker than anything we’ve heard from Murphy before, so it’s impressive that the musician is still able to conjure up similar sonic touchpoints (60s pop, Elephant 6, and, uh, Tomato Flower) with little more than just intermittent electric guitar, detached but melodic vocals, and even-more-intermittent percussion. It Has to End has an experimental streak and occasionally feels like it wasn’t recorded for public consumption, but it’s still almost entirely a “pop” album–the ambient “Señal” is the one exception, as even the drone-fuzz of “God on the Hill” contains shades of Phil Elverum-esque folk music. The distinction, I suppose, is that it’s perhaps not a song album–the Bandcamp description uses the word “collage” to describe this record, and that’s a good way to approach It Has to End, I think. Although, for me, the “greater than its parts” nature of It Has to End was apparent from the moment I was able to get a holistic look at it. (Bandcamp link)

o’summer vacation – Electronic Eye

Release date: October 11th
Record label: Alien Transistor
Genre: Noise rock, noise punk, art punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: 宿​痾​(​Shuku​-​a)

Way back in 2021, I wrote about Wicked Heart, the debut album from Kobe, Japan noise rockers o’summer vacation. The guitarless trio (members Ami, Mikiiii, and Manu are on vocals, bass, and drums, respectively) whipped through eleven songs in under twenty minutes of pummeling noisy, math-y punk rock in a way I compared to Ponytail and Melt-Banana. After putting out a three-song EP called Anti Christ 大体 Super Star the following year, o’summer vacation have jumped to Alien Transistor Records for their sophomore full-length album, Electronic Eye. The trio aren’t shying away from inviting classic Japanese noise rock comparisons on their new album, working with producer Shinji Masuko (who’s also worked with DMBQ and the Boredoms) and enlisting former Melt-Banana member Masaki Oshima to master the record. Once again, o’summer vacation insist that the lyrics are meaningless (Ami “does not like to communicate her thoughts through her music,” say the band), and once again this hardly matters–we can all get the gist of o’summer vacation without “coherent” “language”. Once again, o’summer vacation deliver a brief record of abrasive, stripped down bass-and-drums punk rock, this time coming out to thirteen tracks in twenty-three minutes.

Nearly a quarter of Electronic Eye is taken up by “宿​痾​(​Shuku​-​a)”, an uncharacteristically lengthy six-minute odyssey. As it turns out, o’summer vacation’s sound translates well to the bigger screen, starting off in the world of weirdo, art-y post-punk and eventually settling into a pummeling noise-punk groove in its second half. It almost makes me wish o’summer vacation had pursued this expansiveness more on Electronic Eye–but, alas, none of the rest of the songs on the album are longer than three minutes, and only one of them is over two. Nevertheless, I’m here to judge the album o’summer vacation made, not the one I wish they did–and, bite-sized though they are, the rest of Electronic Eye adds up to a substantial meal on the whole. Picking highlights here feels like a fool’s errand, but on this particular listen, the thumping post-punk of “Poodle”, the explosive, almost dance-punk “vs I”, and the careening, explosive “Aloooooone” stand out to me. o’summer vacation seem to sum up the majority of Electronic Eye via the title of “Days Go By Fast”, which, ironically, starts with a rare ten-second breather–Mikiiii plays a simple, unadorned bass riff for a third of song’s half-minute runtime, leaving only twenty seconds for o’summer vacation to let loose before the song comes to a close. As it turns out, that’s all that they need. (Bandcamp link)

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