Pressing Concerns: Office Culture, Jim Nothing, Why Bother?, Bon Enfant

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It’s a Thursday, and we’ve got a great blog post for you below. This edition of Pressing Concerns looks at three albums coming out tomorrow, October 18th, from Office Culture, Jim Nothing, and Why Bother?, plus an LP from Bon Enfant that came out earlier this week. Speaking of earlier this week, if you missed Monday’s blog post (featuring Cast of Thousands, The Armoires, Black Ends, and Plastic Factory) or Tuesday’s (featuring Russel the Leaf, OOF, Khartomb, and Blue Zero), 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.

Office Culture – Enough

Release date: October 18th
Record label: Ruination
Genre: Art pop, jazz-pop, art rock, experimental rock
Formats: CD, digital
Pull Track: We Used to Build Things

Winston Cook-Wilson and his project Office Culture first appeared on this blog back in 2022, when I had the pleasure of writing about Big Time Things, the third Office Culture LP. The warm, sprawled-out soft rock and jazz-pop leanings of that album made it one of the best-sounding records of that year, Cook-Wilson and his collaborators allowing themselves to fully immerse themselves in the gentle grooves. For the fourth Office Culture album, though, Cook-Wilson decided to try something different–he decided to make a CD. The seventy-three minute, sixteen-song Enough was deliberately inspired by “the CD era”, when artists blew their work up to previously-unmatched proportions without any heed as to how they were going to pare it down to some forty-odd minutes. Says Enough: bring on the guest vocalists. Bring on a larger focus on experimental electronic instrumentation. Bring on songs that cross the five-minute barrier without breaking a sweat. And above all else, bring on the variety–for a band that spent their last record extending one vibe as far out as it could go, Enough sees just how many directions Office Culture can stretch Cook-Wilson’s distinct sophisti-pop songwriting at once. It’d be too much to list the twenty-something collaborators that show up Enough (peruse the album’s credits, you’ll see some names you’ll recognize if you read this blog regularly), but suffice it to say that Office Culture (the core of which here is Cook-Wilson, bassist Charlie Kaplan, and guitarist Ryan El-Solh) are incredibly serious about building something multifaceted.

Aiming for “experience”, Enough takes its time getting to some of Office Culture’s biggest departures. The low-key jazz, R&B, and pop rock that shade “Hat Guy” and “Counting Game” would imply that we’re in for yet another smooth ride from Cook-Wilson and company, and though “Imabeliever” does throw some prominent electronic touches into the mix, Nate Mendelsohn’s effects jut up against an otherwise pretty recognizable Office Culture creation. Cook-Wilson hands off lead vocal duties three times on the record–Alena Spanger takes on “Secluded”, a creation equally led by synthesizers and folk music that sounds like Office Culture attempting to make (or, maybe more accurately, accidentally stumbling into) a more zeitgeisty kind of indie pop. Armed with Sam Sodomsky of The Bird Calls’ folk storytelling voice, Office Culture pull off marrying it with dream pop fluttering in the title track, and Jackie West’s jazz-psych-pop closing “Everything” is a success, too. Cook-Wilson isn’t afraid to keep some of the more out-there moments on Enough for himself, though–the dizzying electronic rock of “Like I Was Different” stands out to me, and the five-minute jazz-funk-groove of “We Used to Build Things” (much more showy than any such material on Big Time Things) might just be the most satisfying thing on the entire album. There’s a certain amount of faith required to take a swing at making one’s own Enough–Cook-Wilson, a music writer himself, surely must be aware of the possibility of subtler moments of brilliance like “Was I Cruel” getting overlooked in this ocean. There’s the hope that listeners will stick with it for the long haul, long enough to let all these moments reveal themselves. Office Culture did the hard part–all we have to do is refrain from hitting the eject button. (Bandcamp link)

Jim Nothing – Grey Eyes, Grey Lynn

Release date: October 18th
Record label: Meritorio/Melted Ice Cream
Genre: Jangle pop, Dunedin sound, fuzz rock, lo-fi indie rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: The Shimmering

Christchurch-originating, Auckland-based Jim Nothing came to my attention via 2022’s In the Marigolds; there have been a lot of great records out of New Zealand the past few years, but that brief collection of breezy but substantial guitar pop might be my personal favorite in recent memory. When they made In the Marigolds, Jim Nothing were a trio, but the materials for Grey Eyes, Grey Lynn use the name as a pseudonym for James Sullivan (also of Salad Boys), vocalist and songwriter. Drummer Brian Feary (Wurld Series) from In the Marigolds is still in the fold (and in fact co-produced and co-recorded this LP), and newcomers Paul Brown (bass) and Frances Carter and Adele Andrews (guest vocals) also appear on the album. Grey Eyes, Grey Lynn continues to mine the rich veins of classic Flying Nun-inspired jangle pop, psychedelic pop, and noise pop that Jim Nothing so effectively explored on In the Marigolds, but this one feels like a more wide-ranging take on this kind of music. Sometimes, the Jim Nothing of Grey Eyes, Grey Lynn feels like a sturdier, louder rock band than ever before, other times feeling like a home-recorded Sullivan solo project (and, given that it was half studio-recorded and half garage-recorded, this makes sense). Sullivan’s songwriting is still sublime, though, and more than capable of weathering a more involved journey.

The blissful, note-perfect power pop/college rock of opening track “Hourglass” blew me away as a standalone single and it’s certainly up to the task of opening Grey Eyes, Grey Lynn. The momentum keeps flowing with the feisty (for Jim Nothing, at least) garage-pop of “First Bite” and “Wildflowers”, a jangly tune that’s still got an upbeat swing to it. The next section of Grey Eyes, Grey Lynn slows down a bit and opens up some more space–in particular, “Easter at the RSC” is full-band guitar pop at its simplest and most streamlined, while the minute-long “Can’t Find It Now” lets Sullivan’s acoustic guitar make up the bulk of the instrumentation. Grey Eyes, Grey Lynn doesn’t really peter off–both the more electric and more insular sides of Jim Nothing show up in its second half, resulting in some of the project’s best material yet. My favorite moment on the album might be the back-to-back punches of “The Shimmering” and “The Present” in the ninth and tenth slots–the former is absolutely brimming with melody in every aspect of the recording, the one track that truly rivals “Hourglass” for the album’s immortal heavenly pop hit throne, and “The Present” is Jim Nothing’s best “contemplative” moment. Accompanied by Andrews, Sullivan sings “You are the present / I’m the afternoon,” in the chorus–and only that. The core of “The Present” is greatly enhanced by the musicians keeping things simple–somehow, Jim Nothing always finds the right meeting spot on Grey Eyes, Grey Lynn. (Bandcamp link)

Why Bother? – Hey, At Least You’re Not Me

Release date: October 18th
Record label: Feel It
Genre: Garage punk, punk rock, horror punk, lo-fi punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Chasing the Skull

The last time I wrote about Mason City, Iowa’s Why Bother? on this blog was a little over two years ago, when I looked at their first “proper” full-length record Lacerated Nights. For plenty of bands, that’d be about the time between albums, but not for the somewhat-shadowy quartet of Terry (vocals/synths), Speck (guitar/vocals), Pamela (bass), and Paul (drums). They put out one more cassette in 2022, unleashed two LPs in 2023, and Serenading Unwanted Ballads arrived in March of this year. Why Bother? have put something out in October of every year since 2021, and this time the group have brought forth their second LP of 2024, Hey, At Least You’re Not Me. All of the Why Bother? experiences are worth checking out for those who like their garage/punk rock spooky, macabre, and/or horror-inspired; there’s something about this one, though, that stands as a particularly strong singular argument in favor of Why Bother?’s whole “thing”. It’s a dozen basement garage punk tunes in a little over a half-hour, catchy and barebones but still creepy-feeling even beyond the lyrical subject matter (Terry’s synths are, as always, a key contributor to the “haunted” aspect of the band’s sound).

Between “Down in the Vault” and “Chasing the Skull”, Why Bother? kick off Hey, At Least You’re Not Me with two strong contenders for their “signature song” (the second one in particular is just as lethal from a pop-song perspective as it is aesthetically). If you make it out of the catacombs, the bright (for Why Bother?, at least) synthpunk of “The Wayside” is your reward, but don’t let your eyes get accustomed to the daylight just yet. Many of the most vivid moments on Hey, At Least You’re Not Me, while not being explicitly Halloween-like in structure, retain the cobwebs and eeriness that always permeates Why Bother?, from the imbalance of “Out of Tune” to the snotty misanthropy of “(I’m Gonna) Pin It on You” to the frantic “Tag the Train” to the five-minute penultimate lumbering dirge “I Fall Down”. The semi-title track “At Least You’re Not Me” does bring some horror movie elements into the record’s second half, jumping into the skin of “test subject number three” (possibly the mouse on the album cover, but you can imagine that it’s who- or whatever you like, I suppose). “You say you’re tortured at your day job / You get so angry at your phone / You feel so cheated stuck in traffic / As I lay dying all alone,” growls Terry before reaching the chorus (something tells me that Why Bother? think Black Mirror sucks, if they even know about it). It’s old-fashioned, analog terror all the way down for Why Bother?. (Bandcamp link)

Bon Enfant – Demande sp​é​ciale

Release date: October 15th
Record label: Duprince
Genre: Art punk, post-punk, power pop, new wave, art pop, garage rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Demande sp​é​ciale

I hadn’t heard of Bon Enfant before the advent of their brand-new third album, Demande spé​ciale, but the quintet seem to be doing fairly well for themselves in their home city of Montreal, as well as over in Europe, where they’re set to tour this new record. Bon Enfant apparently simply refer to their sound as “Québécois rock”, which is a good a term as any to describe what I hear on Demande sp​é​ciale. It’s an incredibly fun-sounding rock album, with bits of psychedelic pop, power pop, post-punk, dream pop, and plenty more influences sparkling around the record’s dozen tracks. The French-language group (made up of vocalist Daphné Brissette, guitarist Guillaume Chiasson, drummer Étienne Côté, keyboardist Mélissa Fortin, and bassist Alex Burger) will occasionally evoke the polished indie pop of fellow Montreal group Bibi Club or the catchy art rock of Parisians En Attendant Ana, but Bon Enfant’s version of pop and rock music is especially wide-ranging and vibrant. The group are pretty much always putting something hooky to tape, but Bon Enfant aren’t afraid to take different routes to get there–sometimes they’re groovy, suave, and rhythmic, other times they go all-in with the “big” guitars and vocals. It’s an album that feels grander than its forty minutes, but never in a tiring way.

Demande sp​é​ciale starts off in a relatively low-key manner with the streamlined post-punk of “Trompe-l’oeil”–at least it seems like it at first, but eventually a sharply-deployed refrain from Brissette and Chiasson matches the power of Côté and Burger’s rhythm section. Fortin’s synths get their moment in the sun with the new wave-y title track, but the guitars remain huge, too–this is probably what “French-Canadian power pop” is, and it’s an excellent argument in favor of Montreal getting a little more into Shoes (or at least Blondie). Even if these opening tracks are hard to beat, Demande sp​é​ciale remains a catchy and friendly listen, offering up excellent moments from the jangly guitars of “Oiseau rare” to the five-minute dream pop haze of “Minimum” to the art-punk-funk of “Passion rock”. It takes no small amount of skill to pull together the songs of Demande sp​é​ciale into a coherent record, but Bon Enfant are up to the task, molding the soft rock of “Enfant de l’air” to the melancholic indie pop of “Bouquet” and the swooning garage-pop of “Gardienne de nuit” with the two-minute psych-folk comedown of “Décollage”. The artists behind Bon Enfant throw a lot against the wall on Demande sp​é​ciale, but the results are much too harmonious and entire to be realistically called “experimental”. “Art pop” it is, then. (Bandcamp link)

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