Pressing Concerns: Assistant, Boyracer, Attract Mode, Shoplifter

It is (glances at calendar) New Year’s Eve’s Eve, and we’re still fitting in albums from 2024 in Pressing Concerns before the calendar flips (and we aren’t completely done with this year yet, so stay tuned). This time, we’ve got new albums from Assistant, Boyracer, and Attract Mode, plus the debut EP from Shoplifter. End your 2024 right with some indie pop, power pop, post-punk, and shoegaze!

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.

Assistant – Certain Memories

Release date: November 17^th
Record label: Laurie/Subjangle
Genre: Indie pop, folk rock, jangle pop, singer-songwriter, dream pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: My Phone Began to Ring

Assistant are a Brighton-based indie pop trio (made up of guitarist/vocalists Jonathan Shipley and Peter Simmons, keyboardist/vocalist Anne Sophie Marsh) who formed in 2002 and have released four albums in the last two decades. This year, they’ve signed with Subjangle Records and have been reissuing their discography with the label, culminating in a brand-new fifth Assistant LP called Certain Memories. Assistant have an enjoyably subtle guitar pop sound on their latest album–of the bands they mention as influences, I think that Felt and the quieter end of Yo La Tengo are the most accurate, but if you like any band on the more tired-sounding end of the C86 indie pop spectrum, you’ll appreciate where Assistant are coming from on Certain Memories. Unlike a lot of their influences, though, the overarching theme of Certain Memories is integral to everything about the album–it’s dedicated to Shipley’s mother, Jil, and the album chronicles living with a deteriorating illness in one’s family (either directly via songs like “Song for Jil” and “Jil Is Fading” or slightly more obliquely via “My Phone Began to Ring” and “Before and After You”).

Certain Memories is bookended by a pair of difficult lyrics–the acoustic-led folky indie pop of “My Phone Began to Ring” begins with “They said you couldn’t treat it with anything / And that’s just life, that’s just death”, while the minimal synth/ambient pop finale “A Million Stars” ends the record with “I love you so much / But it feels like you’re a million miles away”. In between this seemingly inevitable journey are songs about despair and hope, songs about the present and songs reminiscing about the past. The trio wind through these tracks with their typical laid-back take on guitar-driven indie pop, taking in every moment with equal weight. Certain Memories is by nature a very revealing album, even as Assistant don’t play up the drama in moments like “Jil Is Fading” (“And the pain is appalling / No amount of warning / Can prepare”) and “Overwhelming” (“Wake up / Got to do it all again / … / Somehow”). The song I keep coming back to is called “Raking Leaves”, though, which contains little explicit signs of the illness at the heart of Certain Memories. The narrator is just raking leaves (“Raking leaves / goes on forever”); over top of a relaxed, slowed-down instrumental, they have time to list every kind of leaf being raked (apple, cherry, beech, lilac, et cetera). “I don’t know what I’m doing it for,” concludes the singer, realizing that they’re just acting out another endlessly repeating task. This is the main strength of Certain Memories to me; it’s a record that captures how the present-tense drudgery continues to go on despite whatever mountains of grief and pain rise in the background. (Bandcamp link)

Boyracer – Seaside Riot

Release date: October 31^st
Record label: Emotional Response
Genre: Power pop, indie pop, twee, lo-fi pop, pop punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Stale Mate

When we last checked in on Stewart Anderson’s long-running indie pop project Boyracer, it was 2021, the British-originating musician (and head of Emotional Response Records) was in Arizona, and he’d recorded his fourteenth Boyracer album, Assuaged, with a lineup featuring guitarist/vocalist Christina Riley (of Artsick) and longtime multi-instrumentalist Matty Green. Fast forward to this year, and Anderson appears to have traded the desert for the seaside–Seaside, Oregon, to be specific, which is where Boyracer is currently based and is also presumably the namesake for the fifteenth Boyracer album, Seaside Riot. Riley is back for this one, and Anderson has also enlisted a couple different longtime Boyracer collaborators–Chuk Reutter, also of the Bright Lights, and Simon Guild, who first appeared on a Boyracer record in 1992–as well as Mario Hernandez of Kids on a Crime Spree. The quintet cobbled these songs together between their various homes (including, amusingly enough, the Monterey Bay town of Seaside, California), resulting in a joyfully sloppy fifteen-song collection of twee, indie punk, and power pop hits. If you’ve heard either of the two Under the Bridge compilations of ex-Sarah Records artists, you’ve already heard two of these songs, and, as “Larkin” and “Unknown Frequencies” demonstrated in 2022 and earlier this year, respectively, Boyracer’s well of ideas has hardly run dry.

Seaside Riot is perhaps a bit more wide-ranging than Assuaged was, but both records come from the “blow through as many ideas for pop songs as quickly and enthusiastically as possible” school of thought. At the very least, you can always count on Boyracer to put a bunch of hits right up front–between the handclap-laced opener “Salt on My Tongue”, the bouncy, Riley-sung “Stale Mate”, and the bundle of guitar hooks that is “Larkin”, Seaside Riot draws us in as well as any indie pop record could. Boyracer doesn’t “get experimental” in the middle of the record, per se, but we’re given some alternate models of Boyracer songs–“Boosey and Hawkes Childhood” and “Midweek Soulcrusher” are noisier and more cacophonous, “Roads” is a bit quieter, “You Don’t Love Me” features a bit more swagger. Of course, we’re still given perfect guitar pop songs like the agreeably-titled “Graeme Downes” and “Unknown Frequencies” (which I don’t mind hearing again at all, it’s still very good) in the meat of the record. And some of the best pop songs on Seaside Riot benefit from Boyracer mussing them up a bit, too–the lo-fi, slacker attitude they bring to late-record highlight “Sharp Edges” only allows it to shine brighter, while the shrill edges of “Rails” enhance its ample energy, too. The players and locales may change, the years pass by, but Boyracer is still doing Boyracer things. (Bandcamp link)

Attract Mode – The Art of Psychic Self-Defense

Release date: December 6^th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Post-punk, college rock, new wave, power pop, darkwave
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: “Sure”

Chris McCrea is a Washington, D.C.-based musician who has a simple goal with his current project, Attract Mode: combine classic post-punk and darkwave of the 1980s with 60s pop rock/power pop hooks. It’s a mission I can get behind, and regardless of how clean of a synthesis it is of those two tentpoles, The Art of Psychic Self-Defense is certainly a catchy collection of songs. McCrea used to play in the synthpop trio Motion Lines and put out an Attract Mode album (SYZYGY) in 2018, but this appears to be the musician’s first new music of any kind in six years. The Art of Psychic Self-Defense is a brief reintroduction (eight songs in under twenty minutes), but there’s no fluff here–from the insistent post-punk basslines to the punk-clip drumming to McCrea’s melancholic vocal melodies (often helped out by Cinema Hearts’ Caroline Weinroth), everything about this record is whittled and sharpened down to exactly what it needs to be maximally effective. Attract Mode is hardly the only modern indie rock band utilizing post-punk as a vehicle for pop music (see Humdrum’s romantic college rock in Chicago, or the propulsive jangle practiced by Motorists in Canada), but the juxtaposition between McCrea’s deep vocals and grey instrumentation with undeniable hooks is particularly stark.

The Art of Psychic Self-Defense certainly gets off on a “punchy” note–the in-one’s-face bassline of “Vanish/Doom” is the first thing we hear, and it gives way to a brisk post-punk energy jolt that gets the job done in about two minutes, and the noisy but focused “Spite As an Act of Affection” marries verses in the trenches with a soaring, sweeping refrain to keep the dark party going. Although the swooning new wave of “Fade” is just a little brighter and more overtly New Order-y than what preceded it, don’t mistake this for a tonal shift; The Art of Psychic Self-Defense gets right back to it with the swirling, hazy alt-rock-tinged “Absolute Monster”, the catchy, thrashing garage-post-punk of “’Sure’”, and the warped, compacted balladry of “Twitch” (featuring some of the best backing vocals on a record with plenty of solid ones). Just a blink or two and we’re at the eighth and final song on The Art of Psychic Self-Defense, the percussionless “Dreams”. It’s the only “breather” on the album, McCrea crooning over an electric guitar, Weinroth’s harmonies, and some suspended synths. Attract Mode sounds pretty good in “subdued” mode too, but their ability to keep the foot on the gas for so long without sacrificing anything else in these songs is the real hook of The Art of Psychic Self-Defense. (Bandcamp link)

Shoplifter – EP

Release date: November 15^th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Noise pop, shoegaze, post-punk, garage punk, lo-fi indie rock
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Goof Ball

There seem to be a fair amount of bands called “Shoplifter” (or some variation on the word), but the one we’ll be fixing our attention upon today is a trio from Victoria, British Columbia, Canada who have just released their debut EP. The trio of Curtis Lockhart, Cam, and Matt E previously played together in another Victoria group called Numbing, which I only know about thanks to a Swim into the Sound article about a live show they played with Guitar and Pardoner earlier this year. When Lockhart reached out to me about this EP, he referred to Shoplifter as a “shoegaze band”, which is partially true; those two aforementioned bands who shared the bill with them back in May are helpful reference points, particularly the latter. Like Pardoner (and Guitar, to a lesser degree), Shoplifter make a weird, distorted, and oddly catchy kind of music that synthesizes basement 90s indie rock, arty post-punk, and, yes, wall-of-sound shoegaze. It’s a particularly subdued take on these genres, too; compared to the relatively wild attitude of Guitar towards their recordings and Pardoner’s bouts of high energy, the debut Shoplifter record really does sound like it was made by a band with their gaze fixed firmly on their footwear.

Not that EP doesn’t lean into the “rock” side of indie rock when Shoplifter feel like it; opening track “Goof Ball” is a nice ninety-second catchy fuzz-pop tune that sounds like the band wanted to do a Dinosaur Jr. thing but didn’t really commit to seeing it through (but isn’t a half-assed Dinosaur Jr. song a fitting tribute to J. Mascis?). The sturdy and relatively clean post-punk of “HW” is probably just about as “polished” as Shoplifter are going to get–after holding the line nicely for nearly five minutes, they reward themselves by letting “Weaver” lapse into some moments of fuzzed-out feedback in between the “song” parts. The most Pardoner-like moment on the EP is “Cohesive”, a clanging, metallic-sounding piece of garage-egg-punk with some relatively unhinged sing-speaking vocals. Aside from “Goof Ball”, every track on EP is four to five minutes long–one must imagine silent, stoic jam sessions mainly composed of distortion at band practices and gigs like the one I keep leaning on for reference. After showing just a bit of emotion in “Cohesive”, Shoplifter dial it back to close things out via the mid-gaze finality of “Softie”, which rides steady fuzzed-out guitars to the very end of the record. You do kind of have to speak Shoplifter’s language to get the most out of EP, but it’s a promising debut for the fluent. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

• Refrigerator – Get Lost
• Natural Velvet – Perma-Blues
• Sad Eyed Beatniks – Munro’s Sacred Hutch
• Pillowinde – pine!pine!pine!
• Des Demonas – Apocalyptic Boom! Boom!
• Stoner Control – Smoke in the Valley EP
• Fantastic Purple Spots – Spotsylvanian Lullabies EP
• Hello Whirled – Momentum / 50 Songs / Big Little Things / The Show on Earth / Old and New Stuff
• Lazarus Clamp – How I Quit Being
• Sgt. Papers – Fuga!
• Bill Callahan – The Holy Grail: Bill Callahan​’​s “Smog” Dec. 10, 2001 Peel Session EP
• The Hold Steady – Teeth Dreams: Revisited
• The Psych Fi’s – Can Con
• Gleemer – End of the Nail
• Slipping – Pulling at the Thread
• Body Futures – Do Not Befriend the Reaper
• Will Johnson – Sleuthed/Full Cuts EP
• Local Phonies – Static Prismatic
• Brief Candles – Unfinished Nature
• The Bawl Slant – Stitches / Mallrats EP
• Stick Figures in Love – Someone Took the Sun / People Playing with Clouds
• Babe City – I Love You Forever
• Blinker the Star – Occult Classic
• Heavy Moss – Dead Slow
• phoneswithchords – The Present Is Water EP
• The Chilling Alpine Adventure – The Chilling Alpine Adventure
• Ian McCuen – As the Oceans Rise and the Empire Falls
• Todd Tobias – First Man on the Rock
• Infinitefreefall – Belief Systems
• Various – Group Picture Vol. 14
• FOND – Black Sand EP
• Mountain Time – Dream Homes
• Ferals – Love & Other Obsessions EP
• Matthew Hoopengardner – Reserved Space
• Stavro – You Turning World
• PICKAXE – PROVOCATEUR EP
• Skegss – Pacific Highway Music
• Garciaphone – Ghost Fire
• Barefoot Young – Sleep Score
• Isik Kural – Moon in Gemini