Alright, here we are on New Year’s Eve, with the last Pressing Concerns of 2024. There literally can’t be another one; it’s the last day of the year! I have to stop! But before we ring in 2025, we’re looking at a pair of reissues that came out late this year from MOVIELAND and W-2, as well as new albums/tapes from Austin Leonard Jones and Unforced Levers. If you missed the other “under the wire” post this week, from yesterday (featuring Assistant, Boyracer, Attract Mode, and Shoplifter), check that one out, too. Stay tuned for the results of the Rosy Overdrive 2024 Reader’s Poll, which should go up later this week.
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.
MOVIELAND – Then & Now
Release date: December 13th
Record label: 604 Decades
Genre: Shoegaze, fuzz pop, psychedelia
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: San Francisco
Alan D. Boyd was an Edmonton-born garage rocker bouncing around Canada, eventually settling in Vancouver in 1991. Despite this exciting new genre called “grunge” happening just south in Seattle, Boyd instead was infatuated with the nascent British shoegaze movement, and formed a band with drummer Justin Leigh and bassist John Ounpuu (later replaced by Clancy Denehy and Cam Cunningham after the original rhythm section formed the band Pluto) to try his own hand at it. MOVIELAND put out a couple of well-received cassettes EPs in the early 1990s, but it turns out the ceiling for a Canadian shoegaze band at the time was fairly low and the project petered out with Boyd relocating to England. That should have been the end of the MOVIELAND story, but luckily for them, one of their relatively few fans was Jonathan Simkin, who would go on to be the co-founder and president of powerful Canadian label 604 Records. Recently, 604 has found time in between releasing Carly Rae Jepsen records and keeping post-grunge radio well-stocked with CanCon-approved records to start a reissue imprint, and the first release is a collection of early MOVIELAND recordings called Then & Now. The fifty-four minute compilation (featuring songs from both cassettes and some odds and ends) is a compelling look at a high-flying band who was influenced by My Bloody Valentine and Slowdive, yes, but played with the sturdy backbone of a North American indie rock group.
The first four songs on Then & Now come from MOVIELAND’s first EP, and clearly the band already had an idea of what kind of music they wanted to make from the get-go. That being said, there’s a good deal of variety here–“Hello” is the wistful, dreamy opening anthem, “Rant” introduces a Madchester-influenced danceable bassline and sneering, fuzzed out instrumentation (and vocals) to the mix, “San Francisco” is the full-on fuzz-pop sugar rush, and “Everything” is the nearly ten-minute epic vapor trail. They hadn’t settled on a single “sound” by their next release, but they did seem to get sharper at their various lanes–“I Relate” feels like a more natural incorporation of psychedelia and alt-dance into their sound, “Cake” is a more aggressive foray into fuzzed-out rock and roll, “(A Sort of) Icarus” shaves the nine minutes of “Everything” down into a clean seven and a half, and so on. The compilation closes with the two songs that Boyd recorded with MOVIELAND’s second and final lineup (including the massive-sounding “She’s a Mountain”, which might’ve been the band’s heaviest and firmest embrace of full-on shoegaze) and a “soft” version of “I Relate” that keeps the psychedelic dance vibes of the louder version and makes it feel a little sleazier and hazier. There are plenty of also-ran first-wave shoegaze groups out there to discover, yes, but I was presently surprised by how much I enjoyed Then & Now from front to back. Good work, 604! (Bandcamp link)
W-2 – Demo Tape (1980)
Release date: December 6th
Record label: Vacant Stare
Genre: Post-punk, art punk, no wave, garage punk
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Dancing on the Head of a Pin
In the mid-1970s, Robin Hall was the vocalist for New York proto-punk/no wave group Jack Ruby. In the early 1980s, Russell Berke played bass for East Village post-punk band Certain General, appearing on the long-running band’s early releases before departing in 1983. In between these two bands, however, the two musicians met up and co-founded a group called W-2, which existed for less than a year and about a “half-dozen shows” between 1979 and 1980. W-2 (who never had a permanent drummer, but did have a bassist known only as Shelby) never made an album, but they did pass around a four-song demo tape to various New York club promoters. Jack Ruby received a reissue series last decade, but the members of W-2 believed their only recordings to be lost until one turned up via a donated archive from Jim Fouratt (the gay rights activist and co-founder of the Danceteria nightclub). With these recordings in hand, W-2 were finally able to release their demo tape via Rob I. Miller’s Vacant Stare Records; in addition to the four original songs, there’s also a rehearsal session recording of a song called “Goodbyes” and an interview between Hall and Miller (who is the former’s nephew, incidentally).
Historical intrigue aside, these recordings sound quite fresh and spirited in 2024. Of the four proper demo recordings (engineered by Steve Rutt at Rutt Video and featuring Bill Bacon on drums), half of them are upbeat art punk/proto punk tunes and the other half veer into the weirder corners of New York no wave. In the former category, “Dancing on the Head of a Pin” and “Soho What” are built on Berke’s messy but showy rock and roll guitarplay, while “Toxic Love” also leans heavily on the guitars but to swampier and (yes) more toxic ends. The final track on the original demo tape, “Sprezzatura”, is perhaps the most “New York” track on the record; it’s a squall of noisy guitar, a firm rhythm section, and muttering sing-spoken vocals from Hall, in a way that puts W-2 squarely on a timeline from The Velvet Underground to Sonic Youth. The seven-minute rehearsal recording of “Goodbyes” (featuring Dougie Bowne on drums) doesn’t sound like any other W-2 song; it’s a seven-minute “funeral march” (Hall credits Browne for adding this new dimension to their sound) recalling the more pensive moments of Lou Reed as the band pay tribute to Hall’s then-recently departed Jack Ruby bandmate George Scott III. The archivist in me is happy that Demo Tape (1980) is out there in the world in and of itself, while the present-day music fan in me is pleased that it sits well alongside the modern-day punk and art rock I write about here. (Bandcamp link)
Austin Leonard Jones – Famous Times
Release date: November 26th
Record label: Perpetual Doom
Genre: Folk, country, singer-songwriter
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Bad Will
If an album gets a strong reaction out of you, that’s something worth interrogating, right? Well, I’ve certainly felt some things in my time with Austin Leonard Jones’ latest cassette release, Famous Times. I’ve felt skeeved out. I’ve felt highly uneasy. I’ve felt some lighter emotions, too, but varying shades of “unpleasant” are the vibes that emanate from the most recent release from the prolific alt-country troubadour. The last time I wrote about Jones, it was in the context of his 2022 album, Dead Calm, which used gentle pedal steel and gentler songwriting to evoke a confusing but warm neon-lit peacefulness; on the one hand, it’s hard to believe how different the general feel of Famous Times is, but on the other hand, Jones still sounds more or less the same here. It’s a pretty informal album–barely cracking twenty minutes in length, most of these songs are built off of little more than Jones’ voice and guitar (with occasional piano and percussion), and the majority of them are under two minutes in length, too. Jones recently collaborated with singer-songwriter Nick Flessa for his album The Politics of Personal Destruction, and you can hear more fleshed-out versions of a few of Famous Times’ tracks on that album, but I keep finding myself drawn toward this collection of skeletal sketches.
“It’s the porno, a police procedural / Snail-trailin’ all around the studio,” Jones sings in “Theme from the Dick Gibson Show”–this little acoustic country number might take the “unsettling imagery” sweepstakes, but there’s more to be found in the deceptively jaunty “Nightlife of a Southern Apologist” (“It’s five o’clock forever, my life won’t ever change,” Jones sings over rinky-dink piano) or the burnt-out folk carcass of “What They Did to Marcus Fiesel”. Interspersed between these moments of blackness are tracks that remind me just how strong of a traditional country songwriter Jones can be–specifically, the wavering “This One’s for the Watchers” and the one-long-metaphor “Any Given Sunday” find him tapping into something difficult to pull off successfully. “I’m Gonna Leave” is much in the same vein, saying more in about ninety seconds than most writers accomplish in a whole record, while the swaying “Bad Will” sounds like the clearest descendant of Dead Calm here, its balladry reduced to a quietly earnest vocal, guitar, and occasional piano. Maybe Jones intended to flesh these songs out some more before deciding to let them be, maybe the brevity is the point, but the result is a full album’s worth of ideas contained within songs stubbornly refusing to pad themselves out. (Bandcamp link)
Unforced Levers – Clear
Release date: November 10th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Experimental, post-rock, drone, lo-fi, psychedelia, industrial
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Second Sounds
I first wrote about Minneapolis musician Jason Allen Millard last year with the release of The Truth Is Always Changing, his latest solo album, which was an excellent collection of minimalist, lo-fi acoustic folk songs. Millard’s other solo releases and bands have ranged from experimental and deconstructed to punk and rock and roll, and his latest one is a far cry from the folky intimacy of The Truth Is Always Changing. Unforced Levers is a new duo made up of Millard and Rebekah Teague, who came together due to a shared love of experimental rock, jazz, and psychedelic acts (naming Can, Faust, Les Rallizes Denudes, and Milford Graves, among others) and whose debut album (a cassette called Clear) reflects these touchstones. Clear is an instrumental record, and the bandmembers are credited with playing eighteen different instruments (including “wooden flute”, “ocean drum”, and “Sansula thumb piano”) between the two of them. Although some of the acts claimed as inspirations build their music from solid rhythmic foundations, Clear is much more unmoored–these nine compositions drift and wander through the worlds of clamorous, beautiful post-rock and free jazz.
At the very least, Clear starts with a bang–that would be the ninety-second industrial clatter of “Lil Hit”, which sounds more or less like a trash compactor serenaded by mournful wood instruments somewhere underneath the noise. After the relatively tense, minimal-percussion-built “Second Sounds”, Unforced Levers find some “peace” in the middle of the tape between the ambient sounds, string hauntings, and more rhythmic ruckus found in “Third Rain”, “First Mood”, and “Second Mood”. By the end of “Second Mood”, Unforced Levers sound like they’re ready to make some more noise, but “Big Hit” doesn’t quite deliver on the threat of its title, and Clear is content to drift into the minimal, droning pieces “Beret 2” and “Careful Day 2” instead. Clear never sounds completely relaxed, but aside from its opening warning shot, it’s never quite outright hostile either–this experience continues all the way to the finale, “Second Rain”, which is the closest Unforced Levers get to “rock music” (meaning that they sort of sound like an instrumental rock group as the track finally fades away). I don’t write about this kind of music all that often, and I’m not really sure what Millard and Teague are doing, exactly, to make Clear stick with me more than most records of its kind have done, but I’m happy to keep listening to maybe find some clarity. (Bandcamp link)
Also notable:
- Steatopygous – The Demos EP
- Comfy – Goated & Forboded
- The Michael Character – My Cow!
- Henrik Appel – Shadows
- The Cheap Cassettes – They’ll Never Forgive You for Pop
- Adam Hattaway and the Haunters – High Horse
- Our Girl – The Good Kind
- Ryan Christopher Parks – Billy Goat Acres and Other Words I Know How to Spell EP
- The Arrival Note – …Home Is So Far from Here
- Wild Billy Childish & The Chatham Singers – Step Out!
- Stubai – We Were Here
- The Circulators – Insufficient Fun
- The Search – Indulgence
- HOO – III
- Mother Night – Hungry Ghosts
- Neighbours Burning Neighbours – Burning Neighbours
- Cadmium Rock Band – Thanks for That Letter EP
- The Eurosuite – Totally Fine
- Blind Yeo – Echoes / Anam Cara
- Tasha – All This and So Much More
- Mo Kenney – From Nowhere
- Caley Conway – Partner
- Orange Gold Red – Porcelain EP
- Ex-Easter Island Head – Norther
- Ben Katzman – Tears on the Beach
- IST IST – Light a Bigger Fire
- Uncle Emmington – Prophecies EP
- Jarrow – SKIP INTRO EP
- Adrián de Alfonso – Viator
- Black Pus – Terrestrial Seethings
- Geech Sorensen – Some Kind of Detente EP
- Wonderbug – Scrap EP
- Caitlin Edwards – Candy Corn EP
- Miracle Blood – Hello Hell
- Ground Swell – Things That Were Yours EP
- Devarrow – Heart Shaped Rock
- Care Again. – Sit Outside
- Ella Raphael – Mad Sometimes
- Sun Blood Stories – Shadow Loud
- Dork – I’m Not a Good Person EP
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