Pressing Concerns: OCS, The Moment of Nightfall & Tony Jay, The Innocence Mission, Hamburger

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Happy Thanksgiving! Thank you for reading this blog on an American holiday (or if you’re reading it at a later date, I hope you had a nice holiday/normal week if you aren’t from the States). New music is still coming out this week, and there’s enough I wanted to cover to have a Thursday Pressing Concerns: today’s post looks at a live record from OCS, a collaborative LP between The Moment of Nightfall & Tony Jay, the newest album from The Innocence Mission, and a new EP from Hamburger. It’s been a busy week here: on Tuesday, we published the 2024 Rosy Overdrive Label Watch, featuring a drop-in on a dozen or so of the blog’s favorite record labels, and we had a Monday Pressing Concerns (featuring The Old Ceremony, Big Nobody, EggS, and a Count Your Lucky Stars Records split 7″), so there’s some more music and words about it for you to check out during this (potentially) long weekend.

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.

OCS – Live at Permanent Records

Release date: November 29th
Record label: Rock Is Hell
Genre: Folk, lo-fi pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: If I Had a Reason

I have a confession: a couple of years ago, I made the decision to try to listen to every album by John Dwyer’s Thee Oh Sees (aka Osees, aka The Ohsees, aka OCS) in order–but I bailed out long before I finished the project. I did nonetheless gain an appreciation for the group’s earliest works, much of which was released under the name “OCS” in the early-to-mid-2000s. In recent years, Dwyer has dusted off the “OCS” name for music that recalls the early, quiet lo-fi psychedelic folk songs of those particular records, and it also generally involves collaborations with early (but post-original-OCS) member Brigid Dawson. Dwyer and Dawson returned to this well in 2017 with Memory of a Cut Off Head, and they also reunited last year for a handful of acoustic “holiday” shows; these 2023 performances at the Lodge Room and Permanent Records Roadhouse in Los Angeles form the source material for the latest OCS album. Live at Permanent Records is being released by Rock Is Hell in a six-7” box set format (or a boring old double LP for people who hate constantly standing up), and the bulk of it is Dwyer and Dawson strumming and singing acoustic songs from across the OCS discography (“some new, some very old that I’ve never played live ever” per Dwyer).

I’m sure it’d be a shock for those who know Dwyer’s band as ferocious garage-punk warriors, but for those of us who know and appreciate this side of OCS, it’s a welcome revisitation. Live at Permanent Records sounds great–the stripped-down setup ensures that Dwyer’s guitar and the duo’s vocals shine through clearly (and, as Dwyer more or less alludes to in some of the banter, it sounds “better” than a lot of those early OCS records anyway). Dwyer is pretty chatty on the record, and plenty of between-song banter is left in the album–I’ve heard him speak before, so I was prepared, but it is a bit surprising how the guy who makes goblin-mode psychedelic garage-prog consistently sounds pretty approachable (albeit foul-mouthed, yes). A lot of Dwyer’s stories involve reminiscing about the various drugs he was taking during the making of those OCS albums and the questionable artistic decisions spurred on by them–and then it’s time for another excellent two-minute folk song from the duo.

There are some great folk-pop tunes here, like “Dreadful Heart”, “If I Had a Reason”, and “I Am Slow”, but OCS are also able to reach the fringes of folk and psychedelic music on Live at Permanent Records, too (according to the notes, there are at least seven different guitar tunings to be found here, which I’m sure contributes to that feeling). After the lengthy drone of “Highland Wife’s Lament”, OCS decide to play “one rock song”, which happens to be an eighteen-minute version of “Block of Ice” with Tom Dolas on piano and Nick Murray on drums. It sounds just like Thee Oh Sees–even though we literally hear the setup happen as the band rearranges instruments and calls up the extra players to the stage, it’s still quite hard to fathom how we got from the humble beginnings of the band to where they are now. I guess I need to listen to all of their records in order to figure it out. (Bandcamp link)

The Moment of Nightfall & Tony Jay – Winter Dream

Release date: November 29th
Record label: KiliKiliVilla
Genre: Slowcore, dream pop, jangle pop
Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Cutting Marble From a Mountain

Pretty much every time I write about Michael Ramos on this blog I have to acknowledge how prolific he is–every time I turn around, there’s a new record from his solo project Tony Jay, or his duo Flowertown is back, or he’s popping up on a compilation or on new music from another San Francisco Bay-area band. So when Ramos took Tony Jay on a tour of Japan this August, it shouldn’t be a surprise that he saw it as an opportunity to collaborate with musicians from across the Pacific Ocean. Specifically, he linked up with Tokyo sextet The Moment of Nightfall, and the seven of them (Ramos, Masato Saito, Yoko Satori, Yuji Usui, Tomomi Usui, Miki Hirose, and Masayuki Takahashi) recorded six songs over two days together, which are now being released as a 10” vinyl record called Winter Dream. As it turns out, the two acts are quite complimentary–Ramos brings his slow, dreamy indie pop instincts to Winter Dream, and The Moment of Nightfall are more than capable of playing to this familiar sound. Tony Jay’s solo material often sounds so ghostly and fragile that it’s on the brink of disappearing, but with The Moment of Nightfall at his side, there’s a more robust, grounded feeling to Winter Dream–but it’s still delicate in its construction.

Winter Dream may have been recorded in the middle of Japan’s “sweltering [August] heat”, but this twenty-one minute mini-album lives up to the snowy chilliness evoked by its title. The record’s opening track, “kori no mori (Ice Forest)” is classic Ramos, leaning on little more than a clean, plain electric guitar, occasional bass, and a beautiful duet between Ramos and one of The Moment of Nightfall’s members (a few of them have vocal credits here). “Angel” is similarly restrained, but “Cutting Marble From a Mountain” and “Tell Me Why” really start opening up the possibilities of this particular collaboration; the former is a fully-realized, confident jangle pop success, deliberate and measured but nonetheless triumphant-sounding, and the latter gets creative with backing vocals as a foundational song element, handclaps, and droning organ like a layer of white snow across the nearly five-minute creation. “She Came from a Colder Place” is, appropriately, the most “wintry” moment on Winter Dream, with the cavernous percussion echoing in the song’s cold, damp, expansive body, but all hands return on deck for closing track “Time Goes By”, organs and guitars and rhythms all moving in slow but orchestrated lockstep to end a brief but fruitful link-up whose results we’re fortunate to be able to hear. (Bandcamp lnk)

The Innocence Mission – Midwinter Swimmers

Release date: November 29th
Record label: Thérèse/Bella Union/P-Vine
Genre: Folk-pop, chamber pop, folk rock, twee
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Midwinter Swimmers

Lancaster, Pennsylvania’s The Innocence Mission and their distinct folk-pop sound have been a cult success since they formed in the mid-1980s–over the course of nearly forty years, the trio of lead vocalist/songwriter/guitarist Karen Peris, guitarist Don Peris, and bassist Mike Bitts have consistently soldiered on through a career comprised of a dozen albums, brushes with college rock success, and stints on both major labels and notable independent ones (the departure of founding drummer Steve Brown around the end of the 90s being the band’s only lineup change). Here The Innocence Mission are in 2024 with their thirteenth full-length album called Midwinter Swimmers, which gets us ready for the cold weather with a collection of 1960s-esque folk-pop music, chamber pop, and the indie pop that characterized what “alternative rock” was in the pre-grunge era from where the band initially rose. Midwinter Swimmers is both timeless and locationless–everything from Peris’ unique voice to her understandable but hard-to-categorize writing to the band’s paradoxically rich yet stripped-down sound makes this record sound particularly unmoored from any kind of geographical or temporal context.

Midwinter Swimmers is, at its core, a collection of great pop music. Like another longrunning indie pop band that returned this year, The Softies, The Innocence Mission haven’t lost their clear skill at turning skeletal acoustic folk songs into full-on indie pop. It’s not as stark as The Softies’ music is, at least not always–there are some relatively unadorned moments on the album, but the band layer pianos and strings (not to mention Bitts’ upright bass) to create subtle but unmistakably vivid chamber pop throughout the record. A good majority of the album clearly sounds like it was built over top of fully-formed acoustic skeletons–everything from the low-key opening duo of “This Thread Is a Green Street” and the title track to late-record highlights “Cloud to Cloud” and “A Hundred Flowers” all start in this iteration, with some (like “A Hundred Flowers”) being content to more or less stay there and others (“Cloud to Cloud”) ending up somewhere else entirely. It seems like the theme of this blog post is winter, and Midwinter Swimmers is an excellent exercise in conjuring it up in the form of an album–it’s hazy and somewhat easy to get lost in, but its psychedelia is a much starker, colder, and blanketing type than the overstuffed deliriousness of “summer” albums. We’ve got The Innocence Mission with us as we navigate the toughest season change of the year. (Bandcamp link)

Hamburger – Beat Back the Ghouls

Release date: November 29th
Record label: Specialist Subject
Genre: Lo-fi indie rock, fuzz pop, power pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Toothless

Bristol, England’s Hamburger was co-founded by Fearghall Kilkenny and Tom Kelly in 2018, and while they’ve only put out one EP in the ensuing six years (2020’s Teenage Terrified), they’ve also grown into a six-piece band (also featuring Doug Hayman, Katie Stentiford, Liv Pilkington, and Mike Baker), played shows with Martha and Trust Fund, and linked up with Specialist Subject Records (Witching Waves, Supermilk, Long Neck). The Hamburger sextet is now ready to double their recorded output thus far with their second EP, a six-song collection called Beat Back the Ghouls. The twenty-two minute record has an intriguing sound; it’s not really the indie punk sound I associate with Specialist Subject and their ilk, opting for fuzzy, sometimes meandering bedroom rock instead. It’s perhaps a more delicate version of the inventive shoegaze-adjacent fuzz pop going on over in the States, adding a more overt British indie pop/twee sound to the distortion and post-bedroom pop “lo-fi indie rock”. Sometimes Hamburger sound like an anonymous project uploaded to Bandcamp circa 2014, other times like aspiring stadium rockers, but they wear both outfits well on Beat Back the Ghouls.

“Buffalo” introduces Beat Back the Ghouls at its own pace, offering up roaring Weezer-y alt-rock guitars and switched-off lead vocals–but delivered slowly and deliberately rather than rushing out to greet us. Nonetheless, “Buffalo” rises to the occasion with a purposeful attitude, and it’s the next song, “Toothless”, where Hamburger really start wandering. It’s catchy, too, with some inspired synths and jangly guitars delivered in the sound’s sonic gumbo–all of which dress up the simple central melody of the track, which is again unhurried. The majority of the second half of Beat Back the Ghouls is taken up by the longest song on the EP, the nearly six-minute “Frankenstein” (and that’s not even counting “Shelley”, which basically serves as an instrumental introduction to it). It’s a brilliant power ballad in its own way, a slow dance for the balls and galas of the warped world of Hamburger. It’s such a winner that it almost overshadows the sub-ninety-second closing track, “Rip”, but that one’s not to be missed either, as it quickly launches from hammered-out acoustic bedroom folk song to sweeping synth-aided power pop anthem at a moment’s notice and closes the EP out in grand fashion. If well-written, impeccably-orchestrated indie rock is a ghoul’s kryptonite, we can consider them beaten back. (Bandcamp link)

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