Pressing Concerns: Sorrows, Saoirse Dream, Samuel Aaron & Noah Roth, The Illness

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Good morning! Pressing Concerns time! This Monday edition of the column brings us a long-lost third album from early 1980s band Sorrows, new albums from Saoirse Dream and The Illness, and a collaborative EP between Samuel Aaron and Noah Roth. A bunch of strong music down below!

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Sorrows – Parting Is Such Sweet Sorrow

Release date: February 28th
Record label: Big Stir
Genre: Power pop, garage rock, rock and roll
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Never Mind

There’s nothing scarier than an angry power pop band. A bunch of polished-up guys in skinny ties performing Beatlesque melodies with tightly-controlled harmonies with all of their rage trained on their intended target–watch out! And in 1981, the New York power pop band Sorrows were angry. And the object of their fury was a classic power pop bugaboo: label-executive meddling in their music (ranking somewhere behind a girl that’s “done them wrong” and ahead of an authority figure with an unbridled hatred for “rock and roll music”). After a promising debut album in 1980 with Teenage Heartbreak, the messiness that came with recording and releasing its follow-up, Love Too Late, was so strenuous that they broke up not long after recording a single overnight session with Mark Milchman at Mediasound Studios in 1981. These final recordings seemed to disappear with Sorrows’ demise, but a recent partnership with Big Stir Records–who have recently released a solo album from guitarist/vocalist Arthur Alexander and a “corrected” version of Love Too Late–led to the opportunity for Parting Is Such Sweet Sorrow to see the light of day, finally. We’re left with a compelling and timeless-sounding belated final statement–with little if any studio trickery, Arthur, vocalist/guitarist Joey Cola, vocalist/bassist Ricky Street, and drummer Jett Harris bash out eleven originals and three covers with the attitude of a bar band with nothing to lose.

Arthur was the band’s primary songwriter, and Parting Is Such Sweet Sorrow reveals him as a gifted power pop composer who took his songs even further whenever he got the chance. Quite possibly the album’s strongest track, opener “Never Mind” achieves every power pop band’s dream of combining early Beatles bubblegum pop with punk rock, and if most of his other tracks can be slotted neatly into either “power pop” (“Out of My Head”, “Kiss You Later”) or “garage rock” (“Let Me Know”, “Too Much Love”), they’re still excellent examples of them, and they’re just as impressive as the album’s lone “epic”, Side B opener “Cricket Man” (a highly colorful, imaginative, Beatles-y tribute to John Lennon, which gains a lot of power for originating in the immediate aftermath of the singer’s assassination). By and large, the cover songs and other-band-member-penned tracks keep the foot on the gas–Street contributes three solid songs, but it’s Cola’s lone writing credit, the 50s-bitten dancefloor number “That’s Your Problem”, that might be my favorite of this category. The non-originals are chosen expertly, too–their take on the Stones’ “Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing In The Shadow?” is probably the most “fun” one, but their blistering version of “You Don’t Own Me” (a song by The Pirates, the former backing band for 60s rock and roller Johnny Kid who later reformed without him) is the one that closes the album with a defiant statement.  They don’t indeed, Sorrows. (Bandcamp link)

Saoirse Dream – Saoirse Dream

Release date: February 28th
Record label: Lauren
Genre: Hyperpop, synthpop, indie pop, bedroom pop, noise pop, chiptune, pop punk
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Catherine Never Broke Again

First off, let me get this out of the way. Lauren Records signed a power pop/pop punk band called Star 99 out of San Jose whose lead singer is named Saoirse Alesandro, but they’ve also recently signed a solo project from Portland, Oregon called Saoirse Dream that’s led by one Catherine Egbert. I’ve gotten my Saoirses crossed before, but now that I’ve familiarized myself with Saoirse Dream and their self-titled debut album, I don’t anticipate having that problem any longer. Since the beginning of this decade, Egbert has been connected to “hyperpop” as a movement, both through her work as Saoirse Dream (which debuted in 2021 with everything✱, with star★☆ following the next year) and as part of collectives like webcage and User-177606669. Her debut album for Lauren Records is indeed a charged mix of chiptune pop blasts, pop punk guitars, emo angst, lo-fi bedroom pop intimacy, and the garish manipulations that I personally associate with hyperpop. Compared to the last hyperpop-ish artist I wrote about, May Leitz, Saoirse Dream isn’t as sonically chaotic–I could imagine more typical pop punk/indie pop versions of most of these songs (in fact, they might already be in there somewhere), but Egbert has such a handle on these extra touches and tools that they pretty much always feel like they add to the music.

Saoirse Dream has a ton of ideas in any case, and most of these are executed in the context of sweeping pop music. We’ve got “Initialize” in the first slot, which begins with chirping 8-bit synths and then offers up a soaring emo-pop chorus, “Down in Flames” walks a tightrope between “blaring post-MGMT-style synth hooks” and “almost-whispered bedroom pop verses”, and the two ends of “Broad Shoulders!! Gold Stars!!” are 90s alt-slacker-pop and crunchy hard rock guitars. Most of my favorite songs on Saoirse Dream I’d categorize as “hyper-pop punk bangers”; “Montage” kicks its chorus out like it’s trying to soundtrack the titular sequence (“It’s sort of like being alive!”), then there’s “Catherine Never Broke Again”, two minutes of high-flying, high-stakes mundanity (Incidentally, if I was trying to explain to someone how transmisogyny is just misogyny, I don’t think I could come up with anything more succinct than “I still get catcalled in jeans and a T-shirt / When I wear high heels, still get misgendered”), and the ska punk-tinged closing track “Something Cool” (nice Rosenstockian gang vocals on this one!). Egbert resists the urge to blow up “God Knows I Could Tear Us Apart” to unrecognizable proportions–that one needs subtlety to make us sit with the discomfort at the heart of the track. Usually, the growth in Saoirse Dream isn’t very obvious–but there’s no sweat from Egbert when it has to be, too. (Bandcamp link)

Samuel Aaron & Noah Roth – Two of Us

Release date: February 21st
Record label: Happen Twice
Genre: Folk-pop, singer-songwriter, lo-fi pop, indie folk
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Lighter Touch

There was a twelve-month period in 2022 and 2023 where I wrote about three different albums from Chicago-originating singer-songwriter and Beatles superfan (I mean, I’m presuming) Noah Roth, a disparate trio of LPs that established them as a talent both in producer-tinkerer and acoustic folk bard mode. It’s been a minute since a Noah Roth solo release, but they’ve kept busy between their fuzz rock supergroup Mt. Worry and experimental art-folk-pop duo Hell Trash. The latest Roth-related release is another duo, but this time it’s with an unfamiliar (to me) figure in Samuel Aaron. What I’ve sampled from Aaron’s work thus far suggests a musician who’s also interested in classic folk and pop songwriting, perhaps more of a traditionalist than Roth but with offbeat instincts, too (the bio from their new label, Happen Twice, explicitly mentions Lennon-McCartney–Aaron, I think, is Paul in this comparison). Their debut EP together, Two of Us, is subsequently the most pop-forward Roth release in some time; the duo put together four laid-back, comfortable folk-pop originals and one cover (yes, the titular Beatles song) with an ease that’s quite impressive for a new collaboration.

There’s a nice throughline for a five-song, fifteen-minute EP within Two of Us–it starts off with relatively buttoned-up folk-pop music and gets a little more curious as it goes on, perhaps cataloging the evolution of this new songwriting team-up in real-time (the record was written and recorded in one day, per Happen Twice). Like I said earlier, I’d been unfamiliar with Aaron before now, but he earns his spot alongside Roth pretty quickly on opening track “My Guitar’s Got a Leak”, with his earnest, almost country-ish vocals contrasting nicely with Roth’s lower, steadier register (that Beatles-y undercurrent to the instrumental is pretty swell, too). There’s an interesting theological bent to “I’ll Never Win” (both Roth and Aaron get some mileage out of their respective “namesakes” in this one), and the banjo/drum machine creation “Squirrels in the Walls” is a nice lo-fi watery, domestic tune (sample verse: “I think you’re hair’s clogging the shower drain / It’s much longer than my hair / I believe it is your hair / That’s clogging up the shower drain”). These are all successes, but I think that the oddest song on the EP, “Lighter Touch”, is my favorite–Roth breaks the 1970s cosplay fully by AutoTuning their vocals, a fiery but very catchy song about a recovery of sorts (“I don’t think about you much anymore / I’ve adopted a lighter touch than before”) that bleeds into the closing cover of “Two of Us”.  It’s a nice “end credits” closer, although I certainly wouldn’t mind a sequel or two. (Bandcamp link)

The Illness – Macrodosed

Release date: February 14th
Record label: Sea
Genre: Indie pop, post-punk, art rock, psychedelia
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Glitter Witches

My familiarity with The Illness, a “collective” based in “Liverpool-York (and beyond)”, began in 2023 with their Summerase EP. Summerase was their second release, following a two-song self-titled EP in 2020 that featured Steve West and Bob Nastanovich; Summerase may not have had any cameos from members of Pavement, but I was impressed with the range of the twelve-minute EP, which featured four indie pop songs with shades of everything from post-punk to slacker rock to slowcore to baroque pop contained within them. A couple of years later, The Illness have put together their debut full-length, Macrodosed, and they return to the well of enlisting 90s indie rock royalty by having David Pajo of Slint and Papa M play guitar on the record and even sing lead vocals on one song (considering that I noted the Papa M vibes of “I Was a Quarrelsome Youth” from Summerase when I wrote about it, this seems like a very apt collaboration; Smog also came up with regard to that track, so I look forward to Bill Callahan appearing on The Illness LP2 in 2027). Regardless of who’s on the album, The Illness continue to sack indie rock and indie pop history on their most substantial release yet, their trademark freewheeling guitar pop music remaining intact.

After the instrumental introduction, Macrodosed wastes no time getting to work and delivering the goods–“Championship DNA” is an awesome first proper statement, a bit garage-y, a bit power poppy, and a bit noisy, throwing the gauntlet down in under two minutes. The Illness give Pajo “Speedway Star” to sing, and the indie rock veteran leads the collective down into a haze of psychedelic, clattering, Sonic Youth-y noisy mid-tempo rock. “Glitter Witches” wrests Macrodosed out of this jagged ditch with shiny 80s synths, skittering basslines, and a gorgeous new wave-y chorus–even for The Illness, it’s a bit out of nowhere. After the string-laden 60s pop of “Waiting for the 2nd Bell”, Macrodosed consistently gets a bit more zoned-out and stoned, but The Illness are still very active through odysseys like “Slow Conductor” and the vocoder pile-up of “Entropolis”. The chilly distortion-ocean of “The Depths” eventually careens its way into an almost sea shanty-like singalong refrain (you might have to listen closely to hear it under the fuzz, but it’s there), and semi-title track “Macrodoser” pulls everything together for a six-minute post-punk/synthwave/sophisti-pop conclusion. The Illness have no problem blowing up their whole deal to fit a forty-minute LP; it seems like the struggle would’ve been figuring out how to grind things to a halt. (Bandcamp link)

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