Pressing Concerns: The Declining Winter, Charlie Kaplan, The Smashing Times, Market

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It is Thursday, and we’re here to look at some great new music that’s coming out tomorrow, November 1st. New LPs from The Declining Winter, Charlie Kaplan, The Smashing Times, and Market get the spotlight this time around. Check them out, and be sure to check out all of this week’s earlier blog posts (Monday’s featured 2nd Grade, THEMM!, Dazy, and Podcasts, Tuesday’s was Hell Trash, Recalculating, Testbild!, and Grapes of Grain, and Wednesday was on Mope Grooves’ Box of Dark Roses) if you haven’t yet.

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.

The Declining Winter – Last April

Release date: November 1st
Record label: Second Language Music
Genre: Folk, singer-songwriter, slowcore, orchestral folk
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Last April

Richard Adams established himself in the realms of slowcore and post-rock by co-leading the cult Leeds group Hood throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, and he’s continued to follow this path via his long-running solo project The Declining Winter. Last year’s offering from The Declining Winter, Really Early, Really Late, was a breathtaking and ornate confirmation that Adams’ music has, if anything, benefited from the experience and age of its creator, and the months following its release have reassured us of the continuation of another key aspect of Adams–his prolific nature. Since Really Early, Really Late’s release last March, he’s put out an album as one half of Great Panoptique Winter (his electronic-ambient duo with Jason Sweeney) and a collection of recent castoff material called Buried Songs 2018-2021. This all brings us to Last April, which is I believe the ninth Declining Winter album, and one that immediately stands out in the midst of a vast body of work. The six (non-bonus) songs of Last April were written on the same night, in a period of “shock, grief and trauma” brought upon by the loss of Adams’ mother (Last April refers to the month of her passing). Musically, it’s a stark departure from the skillfully orchestrated Really Early, Really Late, as Adams’ voice is accompanied only by his acoustic guitar and Sarah Kemp’s violin, and Adams’ writing is unmistakably, entirely drawn from a place of mourning.

Discounting the two Bandcamp-only bonus tracks, Last April spans only a half-dozen songs and barely over a half-hour in length, but there’s no mistaking it for a minor entry in Adams’ oeuvre. Adams and his guitar step lightly through the opening track, “Eyes on Mine”–he almost sounds like he’s learning to walk, talk, and play music again as the minimal guitar playing gets a much-welcome boost from Kemp’s sweeping violin. About a minute into the song, Adams finally begins singing, and he steps into his mother’s shoes with a mixture of pain, reference, and disbelief. “All I want is to hear your voice,” Adams urgently whispers in the nearly eight-minute title track, which continues the bare, plodding pace of the record, the aural equivalent of an extraordinarily heavy walk alone through the chilly British autumn. Those familiar with The Declining Winter shouldn’t be surprised that Last April finds particular feelings and lingers on them at length, but the ones that Adams and Kemp find on this record are singularly stinging. “Mother’s Son” is a reworking of sorts of Purple Mountains’ “I Loved Being My Mother’s Son”; the music is pretty different, and so are some of the lyrics, but the inspiration is clearly there, and the solace is felt in the link to the former song, if not in this particular recording itself. The guitars and strings in “My Greatest Friend” feel just a little more hopeful, the relatively brief track reminding me a bit of a “slowcore-folk” version of Martin Phillipps’ writing, and the record leaves us with another song with just a bit of brightness peeking through, “August Blue”. The last words Adams sings on the song, however, are “You’re not here, and I’m to blame”; Last April absolutely sounds like an album that came tumbling out of its creator at once, but its recording–with even the bare minimum of accompaniment–adds another shade to that painful, fruitful evening. (Bandcamp link)

Charlie Kaplan – Eternal Repeater

Release date: November 1st
Record label: Glamour Gowns
Genre: Folk rock, psychedelic rock, art rock, singer-songwriter
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Everyone Calling Your Name

I actually wrote about Charlie Kaplan not that long ago, due to his work as the bassist in New York art pop/soft rock trio Office Culture, who released their fourth album mere weeks ago. As it turns out, Kaplan is also a solo artist who’s put out just as much music on his own–since 2020, there have been three Charlie Kaplan LPs and two EPs, all via the Glamour Gowns imprint. Although Office Culture bandleader Winston Cook-Wilson contributes piano to Eternal Repeater, Kaplan’s latest solo album is pretty distinct from his other band–it’s much more based in the realm of folk rock, ranging from the “ornate and beautiful” to the “swirling and psychedelic” ends of the genre. It’s the work of a well-seasoned group of collaborators who’ve all played on each other’s records–Kaplan, Cook-Wilson, lead guitarist Andrew Daly Frank, bassist Frank Meadows, drummer Ben Wagner, and producer Nico Hedley. Together, they give Eternal Repeater a joyfully comfortable feeling–on the record’s quieter moments, Kaplan’s subtly attention-commanding vocals help the group sound like a dead ringer for vintage Red House Painters (a comparison that, understandably, Andy Cush’s well-written essay accompanying the album leaves out) and the more busy moments collide psychedelia, indie rock, and folk like the best Wilco albums (a comparison Cush is more than happy to make, as he should).

The first proper song on Eternal Repeater is one of its best, the gorgeous “Everybody Calling Your Name”, which is more than content to leave empty space up until Daly Frank starts shredding as the song draws to a close. Things get a bit more cosmic with “Mescarole”, a rhythmic track in which Kaplan intones “Asshole / asshole / You spilled my drink, spilled my drink, yeah,” over top of the band’s smooth, smoky delivery (it’s a song about a bad experience at a concert, yes, although the Charlie Kaplan band doesn’t really do “bad vibes”). The middle of Eternal Repeater is where Kaplan and his collaborators sound the most “focused”–not that “Feelin Alright” doesn’t have a loose, jammy undercurrent to it, but the band commit just enough to seeing the song’s ragged country rock core through, and the euphoric “Edie Got Away” is the record’s version of breezy, rambling rock and roll. The momentum is strong enough to lead us into two seven-minute songs back to back in the record’s second half–one could get lost in “Idiot” and “Now That I’m Older” if they aren’t careful. Not that that would be a bad thing–the latter one in particular features Kaplan and the band really giving it their all. On the other side of the mountain is “In a Little Bit of Time”, an out-of-nowhere garage-fuzz-rock closing song. “In a little bit of time, I will be waiting at your door / In a little bit of time, you’ll see that justice has been served,” Kaplan sings quietly but confidently. Oh, shit. You know that folk band in the back of the bar that you thought were just playing merrily along and not paying attention? They’re looking right at you. (Bandcamp link)

The Smashing Times – Mrs Ladyships and the Cleanerhouse Boys

Release date: November 1st
Record label: K/Perennial
Genre: Jangle pop, psychedelic pop, psychedelic folk, twee
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Wednesday, on a Hummingbird’s Wing

Mrs Ladyships and the Cleanerhouse Boys is the fifth album from The Smashing Times, and it’s the fourth in as many years. The calendar flips, summer turns to fall, and Baltimore’s premier mod revival quintet return with another collection of gloriously fractured and free-ranging guitar pop. 2022’s Bloom got the group on my radar, vocalists Thee Jasmine Monk and Zelda-Anais trading off on scattershot, scrambled 60s melodies while bassist Britta Leijonflycht, drummer Paul Krolian, and guitarist Blake Douglas amble along gamely. Last year’s This Sporting Life took a step forward, congealing just enough into something a little more solid and song-focused, resulting in their best record yet. Mrs Ladyships and the Cleanerhouse Boys doesn’t reverse this step, per se–but it is a bit more offbeat than The Smashing Times’ last album. All the blissful psychedelic jangle-beat melodies are still here, yes, but (as one might gather from its title, which verges on self-parody) Mrs Ladyships and the Cleanerhouse Boys leans into the eccentricities of British pop of the past across its fourteen tracks. It’s more obvious in some places (the dry intro and outro of “I Paint the Pictures”, the children’s-show goofiness hijacking “Rupert Tingle”) than others, but the whole record is clearly indebted to the weirdest detours from some of the most classic rock albums.

I wouldn’t expect anything other than pop music on The Smashing Times’ terms with Mrs Ladyships and the Cleanerhouse Boys, but the band’s latest album really does introduce itself by emphasizing the unhurried, leisurely snaking version of their jangle-folk-rock. The opening title track and “Rabbit of June” right after it both qualify, although in different ways–the former by locking onto a classic pop song structure and giving it a classically shambling reading, the latter by waiting until the song is nearly done to get itself together and deliver a big finish. There are always moments on Smashing Times records that go a little “out there”, but between the backmasking “Can I Have Some Tea” and the ambient glow of “Moon Viewing Party” (both full-length songs), there seems to be more real estate given to these than in the rest of their recent output. On the other end of the spectrum, the aforementioned “Rupert Tingle” is The Smashing Times at their most pure pop, but it’s hardly the only winner in that department. I don’t know if “Wednesday, on a Hummingbird’s Wing” is The Smashing Times’ best song yet, but it’s certainly on the short list for the most straight-up gorgeous thing the band have put to tape–it’s five-and-a-half minutes of wobbly but perfect pastoral guitar pop. Plenty of other tracks rise to the occasion, but “Tarts and Vicars” is the one that comes the closest to “Wednesday…” for me personally. I enjoy the nicking from “You Won’t See Me” at the beginning of the lyrics, but I enjoy the bumpy but propulsive, familiar but original pop song that follows even more. (Bandcamp link)

Market – Well I Asked You a Question

Release date: November 1st
Record label: Western Vinyl
Genre: Soft rock, folk rock, chamber pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Sertraline

As a producer and multi-instrumentalist, Brooklyn musician Nate Mendelsohn has contributed to records from a bunch of notable indie rock acts, including Office Culture, Wendy Eisenberg, and Max Blansjaar, among others (he even mixed the Charlie Kaplan LP that appears earlier in this blog post!). All the while, he’s been making music as Market with a cast of frequent collaborators like Stephen Becker and Katie Von Schleicher, both of whom appear on the latest Market record, Well I Asked You a Question (and the former of which even plays in the “core” Market band alongside Natasha Bergman and Duncan Standish). In 2022 Mendelsohn linked up with Western Vinyl (Young Moon, Wilder Maker, Nat Baldwin) to put out The Consistent Brutal Bullshit Gong, and despite seemingly working with increasingly more high-profile acts in recent years (Frankie Cosmos, Yaeji, Sam Evian), Market is still going strong, back two years later with another full-length LP. Well I Asked You a Question is a relaxed but intricate art pop album, with Mendelsohn and his collaborators consistently meeting each other in just the right places to best serve these tracks. Mendelsohn is a low-key vocalist but never too small for Well I Asked You a Question, whose keys and strings ensure a rich but form-fitting tapestry over which the bandleader sings amiably. 

Well I Asked You a Question never feels overloaded, but there’s a lot going on in it–the record’s baseline sound of soft rock and indie folk can feel like a gently-rocking lullaby, but Market slowly, steadily take the record to unexpected places before it’s all said and done. The chamber pop opening title track and the psychedelic, seam-bursting “Apple” have their own interesting charms, but the six-minute almost ambient-pop excursion of “Around” really turns Well I Asked You a Question into something more, and the dark, relatively zippy folk rock of “Sertraline” seizes on the opportunity to find even more surprises. There’s a liveliness to songs like “Rachel Getting Married” and “Bigger Problem” that keep the strong pop rock moments coming well into Well I Asked You a Question’s second half and even gives Mendelsohn some cover to pull the band into quieter corners with the spare folk of “On the Barn” and the slow-moving drone-pop of “Fantasy”. Market confidently, humbly roll all the way up to closing track “Reason to Shout”, whose foundational strings and drums are, again, just right in the mix. Like any good producer-by-trade-made record, Well I Asked You a Question bears the mark of its creator’s comfort in the studio but doesn’t forget to take this advantage and do something with it. (Bandcamp link)

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