Pressing Concerns: Star 99, Will Stratton, Frog Eyes, Taxidermists

Hello, all! We’re putting a cap on this week by looking at four albums coming out tomorrow, March 7th: new LPs from Star 99, Will Stratton, Frog Eyes, and Taxidermists. We also had a Monday Pressing Concerns this week (featuring Sorrows, Saoirse Dream, Samuel Aaron and Noah Roth, and The Illness), and the February 2025 playlist/round-up went up on Tuesday, so check those out too 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.

Star 99 – Gaman

Release date: March 7^th
Record label: Lauren
Genre: Power pop, pop punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: IWLYG

A couple years ago, I heard Bitch Unlimited, the debut album from a San Jose quartet called Star 99. “Just about every second of it is crammed with hooks,” I said a month after its release, and those hooks only sounded better and better throughout the rest of 2023 until, all of a sudden, it was my second-favorite album of that entire year. Needless to say, I was keen to hear more from the band (vocalist/guitarist Saoirse Alesandro, vocalist/guitarist Thomas Calvo, bassist Chris Gough, and drummer Jeremy Romero), and a year and a half after Bitch Unlimited, we’ve gotten a sophomore Star 99 album called Gaman, bringing with it a fifth bandmember (guitarist/keyboardist Aidan Delaney) and a more wide-ranging sound. I’d be despondent if Star 99 completely abandoned the sugary power-pop-punk (evoking bands like golden-era Charly Bliss, Remember Sports, and Chumped) that they’d mastered on their last album, and thankfully Gaman is not a reinvention so much as an expansion. Star 99 has once again put together a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it (twenty-five minutes, actually shorter this time around) collection of sock-knocking-off pop songs, with Calvo and Alesandro both getting to deliver knockout punches. They’ve merely diversified the way that they go about landing these blows, is all.

Gaman starts with a flex or two–“Kill”, the opening track, is a fizzy power pop avalanche that does everything the best songs on Bitch Unlimited did in two whirlwind minutes, and the strategically-deployed power chords of “Simulator” make the Calvo-led track just as catchy in a sneaky way. A subtle middle ground opens up on Gaman as the record goes on, exemplified by songs like “IWLYG” and “Emails”; the energy and hooks are still there, but Star 99 take a page from the books of slightly-older bands like Big Nothing and Dogbreth and add a jangly, Teenage Fanclub-esque wrinkle to their songwriting. These songs aren’t going to be a bridge too far to anyone (I’d think)–but Star 99 have a few more obvious departures to offer up on Gaman, too. “Brother”, stuck right in the middle of the first half of the record, is unavoidable, and the way that it turns Star 99’s power pop on its head to make something this delicate-sounding is remarkable (the lyrics, which take a trip into the past to sketch a family portrait of sorts, may have something to do with that). The beat-driven bedroom pop of “Gray Wall” is even weirder, but the sweet, intertwining vocals of Alesandro and Calvo ensure that it’s more than just a curious experiment. “Brother” seems to connect with the final two songs on the record, “Esta” and the title track–the heavier, emo-tinged anger of the former song is completely new territory for Star 99, but Calvo and the band pull it off, and “Gaman” is completely acoustic and ends with a link back to “Kill”. The sort of exhausted, overflowing acoustic finality with which Alesandro ends the album isn’t necessarily what I expected the final statement from Star 99’s second record to be, but that’s a good thing. (Bandcamp link)

Will Stratton – Points of Origin

Release date: March 7^th
Record label: Ruination/Bella Union
Genre: Folk, alt-country, singer-songwriter
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Higher and Drier

I can’t imagine what it’s like to be from California. Singer-songwriter Will Stratton has called Beacon, New York home for over a decade and grew up “all over the greater Pacific Northwest and mid-Atlantic”, but he was born in a town outside of Sacramento, and his eighth album is a journey back to his state of origin. I was surprised to learn that Points of Origin is actually Stratton’s first album for Ruination Record Co., as I already associate him with the New York (city and upstate) folk rock world of Ruination acts like Blue Ranger and Adeline Hotel (as well as adjacent acts like Jodi, Wild Pink, and Ben Seretan). Members of several of these acts contribute to Points of Origin (as well as longtime contemporary Christian music guitarist Phil Keaggy, interestingly enough, among many others), but this album is entirely owned by Stratton and his storytelling. Like an underappreciated LP from last year, Distant Reader’s Place of Words Now Gone, Points of Origin is a record that attempts to grapple with the climate change-induced “natural” disasters for which the Golden State has become ground zero, although Stratton’s take on it is a character-led one. “Dense” and “novelistic”, the aforementioned Seretan calls it in his biography for the album, but while the storylines may require some lyrical analysis to follow, the shifting and disintegration happening ambiently (or, in some cases, quite actively) in the background is quite clear through the smoke.

Points of Origin is a very rich text, and there are a few different threads I could choose to tug at here, but one thing I found appreciating about the record is the central role that inmates and prisons play in it. It makes a lot of sense–“criminals” are frequently the ones blamed for the raging California wildfires as a way of obscuring larger trends (which, as “Centinela” drives home, remains insufficient even when “correct” in a sense) but they’re also on the front lines of fighting these infernos (like in “Jesusita”, whose narrator “separat[es] fire from fuel” with chainsaws and axes), and these jails are where many victims of fires and mudslides inevitably end up. My favorite song on Points of Origin is the self-contained tapestry of “Higher and Drier”–several of Stratton’s collaborators are credited on it, but they stay on the periphery, letting the singer-songwriter unspool his story of an ex-artist turned real estate salesman selling beautiful, doomed mountain/beachfront houses (a different kind of criminal breaking-bad balladry than what I discussed previously, I suppose). In addition to being engrossing as a story, “Higher and Drier” is an excellent showcase of Stratton’s musical gifts–he snakes his way through delicate 2000s “indie folk”-style verses and surprisingly grafts a campfire-song chorus to it. Staring down the barrel of a California-sized sample of the ecosystem collapse that awaits many more of us, Stratton instead looks closer and offers a way to meet an overwhelming certainty: one story at a time. (Bandcamp link)

Frog Eyes – The Open Up

Release date: March 7^th
Record label: Paper Bag
Genre: Art rock, garage rock, psychedelic rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: E-E-Y-O-R-E (That’s Me!)

Who here remembers Frog Eyes? I remember them a little bit. They didn’t end up as the biggest band of the Canadian 2000s indie rock explosion, but they’ve done alright for themselves, as the band (always featuring guitarist/vocalist Carey Mercer and drummer Melanie Campbell, along with a rotating cast that as of lately has included keyboardist Shyla Seller and bassist Ryan Beattie) are now on their tenth LP since 2002. The Vancouver Island-originating band had a sound more or less in line with the weirder end of their Canadian peers–Mercer was in a supergroup called Swan Lake with Dan Bejar and Spencer Krug, and both Krug and former Wolf Parade guitarist Dante DeCaro played in Frog Eyes at one point, to give you a sense of what I mean–but this kind of big-picture indie rock is hard to reduce down in such a way. With that in mind, it’s best to just take in The Open Up (their second album since they reformed in 2022 after breaking up for a whole four years) as its own thing. Twenty years into their career, Frog Eyes sound surprisingly upbeat and energetic on their latest album, which offers up a bunch of offbeat but hooky garage rock/pop tunes with a handful of more drawn-out Frog Eyes moments hidden in the B-side. 

Mercer is still a classically bizarre indie rock vocalist and lyricist, but Frog Eyes have no issue shaping themselves sleekly and naturally around their frontperson. In The Open Up’s opening track, “Television, a Ghost in My Head”, Frog Eyes channel classic garage rock, post-punk, and the brighter side of Oneida for a whirlwind of a first statement, even though Mercer still finds a way to work the phrase “I shan’t be long” into the lyrics. “E-E-Y-O-R-E (That’s Me!)” is a positively bouncy song that’s much more in line with the exclamation point than the titular children’s character, and there are a few more quick-tempoed pop-rock tracks that find Mercer chewing on the titular phrase in “I’m a Little at a Loss” and “Put a Little Light on the Wretch That Is Me”. The final five songs on The Open Up almost feel like they’re from a different album–Frog Eyes transition hard into five-minute song lengths, wandering instrumentals, and much fewer obvious “hooks”. Stick with them, though, and you’ll see the same group within the more mystical second half–the wobbly, almost Crazy Horse-like “I See the Same Things”, the dramatic, brisk-drumbeat-featuring “Chin Up”, and the seven-minute progressive pop epic “Trash Crab” all end up being album highlights. Frog Eyes sound like a group that still knows how to excite themselves on The Open Up, and that’s good news for all of us. (Bandcamp link)

Taxidermists – 20247

Release date: March 7^th
Record label: Danger Collective
Genre: Lo-fi indie rock, garage rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Grow Up

You may not know Taxidermists, but the Massachusetts-based duo has been part of the New England indie rock scene since the late 2000s. Guitarist/vocalist Cooper B. Handy and drummer Salvadore McNamara started putting out music at the beginning of the 2010s together, self-released, self-recorded, and at a prolific pace, but the duo slowed in the latter half of that decade and came to a halt entirely after 2019’s Feeding Tube-released TAX (although Handy has been busy with his solo project, LUCY). Last year, however, the duo signed with Danger Collective and released an EP called KO, and the first Taxidermists LP in a half-decade has followed less than a year later in 20247. Recorded entirely in McNamara’s garage last winter (with most songs coming together in a “single night”), 20247 is a humble but strong reminder of the power of home-recorded indie rock. Both the informal quality of the recordings and the simple duo set-up (guitarist Avery W S appears on two songs, the only outside contribution) keep 20247 squarely in the realm of “lo-fi” music; the draw is Taxidermists enthusiastically ripping through a dozen superb Handy-penned pop songs in under half an hour.

Taxidermists are stripped-down enough to be a blank page; I can imagine the turn-of-the-2010s “shitgaze” movement, 2010s Bandcamp “bedroom pop”, and the current wave of “GBV-gaze” bands all claiming them–and who wouldn’t want to have 20247 as part of their scene? The dexterity of Taxidermists is key to making something with 20247’s limited palette remain interesting and captivating nonetheless–the stumbling folky exploration of “Sweet Guilt” is a surprising opening track, but they barrel into the garage-y pop punk of “Grow Up” with ease, and they just as easily wander back into the wilderness with “2099”. The full-on basement rockers (“Grow Up”, “Gone Away”, “Does the Wind Know”) are no-nonsense bangers, almost like a 90s indie rock-influenced basement version of the Ramones, but they’re only a piece of 20247’s brief but substantial tapestry. On the more “complicated” end of the spectrum, songs like “Service Disservice”, “Needles to Say”, and “Good Job Done” all try to cram a bunch of sonic surprises and left-turns in their 2-and-change-minute runtimes; those of us who appreciate Robert Pollard’s ability to write a pop song that seems just a bit out of reach will enjoy these mini-epics. The last “proper” song on 20247 is maybe the fluffiest guitar pop song on the record, “Let the Music Save Them”. Like the more streamlined moments of Ethan Oliva (Ex Pilots, Gaadge), “Let the Music Save Them” is a pop success armed with little more than a winning melody and attitude, both attributes that Taxidermists have in spades on 20247. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

• Jason Isbell – Foxes in the Snow
• The Tubs – Cotton Crown
• Monde UFO – Flamingo Tower
• Swervedriver – The World’s Fair EP
• Domestic Drafts – Only the Singer
• Split Moon – More Clouds More Stars
• Seasonal Falls – Improvised Sinking
• Smoked Salmon – Smoked Salmon
• LAKE – Bucolic Gone
• Chase Petra – Lullabies for Dogs
• Biche – B.I.C.H.E.
• Winky Frown – ;(iii
• Caroline Strickland – Martha’s Calling EP
• Katy Pinke – Strange Behavior
• Jane Baker – Jane Baker EP
• Agender – Berserk
• The Guy Hamper Trio featuring James Taylor – The Goddess Tree
• ERRTH – ERRTH
• Cici Arthur – Way Through
• Ironic Hill – Taciturnity
• Sunny War – Armageddon in a Summer Dress
• Killing Daisies – Echoes of Tomorrow
• Stubai – Were We Here?
• Belted Sweater – Belted Sweater
• Pure Hex – Five of Tears EP