Pressing Concerns: Cootie Catcher, Penny Loafer, Takuro Okada, Mantarochen

On this Monday in April, Pressing Concerns has returned to bring you the latest in indie pop, post-rock, ambient jazz, post-punk, and twee music: new albums from Cootie Catcher, Takuro Okada, and Mantarochen, and a new EP from Penny Loafer, featured below.

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.

Cootie Catcher – Shy at First

Release date: March 14^th
Record label: Cooked Raw
Genre: Indie pop, twee, electronica, bedroom pop, experimental pop
Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Friend of a Friend

Vocalist/bassist Anita Fowl and vocalist/guitarist Nolan Jakupovski started the Toronto band Cootie Catcher earlier this decade, soon welcoming in vocalist/synth player/“DJ Scratches” contributor Sophia Chavez and releasing a couple of EPs, an LP, and a “remixes +b sides” album. The band’s sophomore album, Shy at First, seems like a step up for the group in a couple of different ways–for one, it’s the first with drummer Joseph Shemoun, and it’s also the first one recorded by an outside engineer (Rob McLay of Squiggly Lines and Westelaken, partially at his Sun Bear studio). I first heard the quartet last year via “Friend of a Friend”, Shy at First’s lead single, and was immediately hooked; the band call it “power pop”, I used descriptors like “twee-pop” and “fluffy indie pop” when describing it. As one might expect from a band with a “DJ scratcher” enlisted, “Friend of a Friend” has a foot in the world of electronic music, largely due to the wobbly, wavering synths that Chavez injects over top of the more traditional (albeit keyboard-led) indie pop instrumental. This balancing act is continued on the rest of Shy at First–sometimes Cootie Catcher lean more into guitar pop, sometimes into the stranger electronic impulses, and sometimes both flare up notably in the same song.

I still think “Friend of a Friend” is my favorite Cootie Catcher song, but fans of that song’s indie pop smarts will still find plenty of music on Shy at First that earns its place at the table. The title track is even more “twee” than “Friend of a Friend” is–it’s a brilliant piece of bashful, uncertain pop music (both in instrumental construction and subject matter) with some really pleasing vocal trade-offs (I don’t know who’s singing what; everyone but Shemoun is credited with vocals on the album). Some of the other Rosy Overdrive-certified hit singles on Shy at First include “Words Mean Less” (with its boisterous slacker rock vocals and bubbling synths, it sounds like a rough Kiwi Jr. song), “If It’s in Vogue” (a bright, lazy lo-fi jangly pop tune), and “Diary” (perhaps the most rocking song on the album, albeit in an exuberant Sharp Pins/Friko kind of way). “Do Forever” is also quite catchy, and its shuffling beat is helpful in bridging the gap between these kinds of songs and the electronica moments. It’s very “late 90s alt-pop” in how there’s that kind of post-pop electronic psychedelia but also a genuine guitar solo (I swear I saw somebody compare this band to Beck and it’s driving me crazy not being able to figure out who it was, please reach out if that was you so I can credit you). To be clear, stuff like “Musical Chairs” and “Acrostic Poem” and “Galleria” are all still “pop songs”, they just go about it in hazier fashion. I still feel like I understand Cootie Catcher, at least. (Bandcamp link)

Penny Loafer – Daily Deal

Release date: March 28^th
Record label: Indecent Artistry
Genre: 90s indie rock, fuzz rock, lo-fi indie rock, fuzz pop
Formats: CD, digital
Pull Track: Fridge

Penny Loafer is a new indie rock band formed by two Athens, Georgia grocery store co-workers, vocalist/guitarist/keyboardist Emma Barnes and drummer Seth Parker. They started making music after they discovered they had a “shared affinity” for 90s indie rock, and shortly after releasing their first song (“Lynx”) in late 2024, they enlisted multi-instrumentalist Iain Cooke and went to record their debut EP at Athens’ The Eye with producer Adam Wayton. Wayton is putting out Daily Deal on his own label, Indecent Artistry, and he also plays on the record–I’d previously been familiar with Wayton thanks to his work fronting the scuzzy, fuzzy indie rockers Telemarket and contributing to twee pop group Honeypuppy, and it turns out that Penny Loafer are right in the multi-hyphenate’s wheelhouse. The five songs of Daily Deal are crawling, mid-tempo 90s alternative rock in the vein of Penny Loafer’s heroes, The Breeders–not quite as chaotic as Telemarket or as polished as Honeypuppy, Barnes and Parker instead display an aptitude for unflappable, chugging, fuzzed-out (and, oddly enough, largely grocery-themed) pop music on their first EP. The guitars are ambush predators, Barnes’ voice is stoic but hardly wallflower-esque, and the songs are catchy in an incidental, shrugging 90s kind of way.

Daily Deal floats into focus with “Backyard”; an alien synth and a lazy guitar riff are the first things we hear, and Barnes’ first words are “Rice Crispy cereal brains / Started a serious fire”. The lyrics to “Backyard” are glimpses into a dark American South in between moments of shambolic indie rock (“Someone’s in the backyard / I am gonna shoot their head off / Don’t know who your neighbors are / They’re probably dumb and ugly”). “Fridge” is a little more upbeat (I guess that’s the word for it); it starts with a live-wire guitar part that’d make the Deal Sisters proud, and, like many great Deal songs, it never fully punctures the tension that’s present from the first second. “Orange Peel” is yet another part of Penny Loafer’s completely unsettling breakfast (“I hate the orange / I eat the peel,” begins Barnes), and the hook is built from some actually pretty pleasing guitar soloing. The sneaky “Nothing at All” has some of the best melodic vocal work on Daily Deal, but closing track “Ugly” is Penny Loafer at their most cryptic. The music floats along uncertainly while Barnes sings “I want you, I” over and over again–the only other words to the song are “I want you to myself” and “Wanting you to be my ugly”, the latter of which is obscured under fuzz. Daily Deal is a curious debut–you can trace the influences, but there’s still plenty of mystery to Penny Loafer. (Bandcamp link)

Takuro Okada – The Near End, The Dark Night, The County Line

Release date: March 7^th
Record label: Temporal Drift
Genre: Ambient, post-rock, jazz
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Shadow

This isn’t the first time in recent memory that I’ve written about a U.S.-released compilation album from a Japanese musician who’d mostly had their music released solely in their home country up until that point. Compared to the explosive punk/art rock of Ging Nang Boyz, however, the music of Tokyo’s Takuro Okada is in a completely different universe. Okada got his start in the 2010s indie rock group Mori Wa Ikiteiru, but he’s been pursuing a solo career over the better part of the last decade that’s dabbled in jazz, ambient, and experimental electronic music. The Near End, The Dark Night, The County Line is Okada’s first album with Temporal Drift (Les Rallizes Dénudés, Hiroshi Yoshimura, Coffin Prick), a Los Angeles-based label who’s been working to make a lot of Japanese records available in the United States in recent years. The goal of The Near End, The Dark Night, The County Line is to showcase Okada himself–though he’s collaborated with notable names like Carlos Niño, Nels Cline, and Jim O’Rourke in the past, these recordings are almost entirely by Okada alone. Some of these tracks appear to have been released in earlier forms on Bandcamp, while others may have only recently been unearthed from Okada’s “expansive archive of recorded material”.

The Near End, The Dark Night, The County Line may not have been initially conceived as a standalone album, and the different styles Okada tries on throughout the 48-minute album reflect this, but it’s an engrossing collection nonetheless. It begins on a minimal but friendly note between the sparse ambient opening track “Following Morning” and the barebones jazz construction of “The Room”. “Shadow” is the first song with vocals on the album, and it’s a genuine pop song–sure, it’s stretched out to six minutes and its folkiness is undercut with jazz instrumentation, but that’s not enough to dampen its shine. Things get more challenging as The Near End, The Dark Night, The County Line goes on–the electronic clattering or “Mizu” and the sustained, gentle drone of “Mirror” are brief detours, but the sound collage of “Reflections / Entering #2” is a nice six minutes in length. Starting with “Evening Song”, jazz-pop begins to creep back into Okada’s compositions, although in bits and pieces–the guitar in “Evening Song”, the woozy horns of “Taco Beach”, the string-laden sigh of “Ohme”, and the upright bass in the blues-inspired “Howlin’ Dog”. The title track sends The Near End, The Dark Night, The County Line out with a complete instrumental jazz guitar song–it’s more immediate than a lot of the songs before it, but it’s all part and parcel of getting a grip on Takuro Okada. (Bandcamp link)

Mantarochen – Cut My Brainhair

Release date: February 15^th
Record label: It’s Eleven
Genre: Post-punk, synthpunk, darkwave
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Steamy Nights

Leipzig post-punk trio Mantarcohen first appeared in Pressing Concerns last year when I wrote about their six-song mini-album/EP In the Badgers Cave, their debut for It’s Eleven Records (Ambulanz, Fotokiller, Distant Relatives) and second record overall. A brief and promising collection of lo-fi drum machine-led darkwave, post-punk, and synth-punk, In the Badgers Cave got the group (Diana, Sebi and Tom) on my radar, and Mantarochen are back less than a year later with a new cassette called Cut My Brainhair that picks up where their last record left off. Featuring eight songs (well, seven and an intro track) in eighteen minutes, it’s barely longer than In the Badgers Cave–and while I wouldn’t really call it an EP, it functions nicely as a sequel to the band’s previous one. Dark and gothic but minimal and catchy, Mantarcohen’s take on post-punk remains quite compelling throughout Cut My Brainhair. The bass is front-and-center, the guitar lines frantic but satisfying, the synths intermittent but always welcome, and the vocals understated but plenty capable for what the rest of the band are doing here. Mantarochen are skilled at tension and dread–they only rarely release the darkness they bottle up throughout Cut My Brainhair, but it’s fascinating no matter what they’re doing with it.

The introduction to Cut My Brainhair, “Delta”, is a bit of echoing piano drone that segues quite cleanly into “Not a Rabbit”, which has a brisk drum machine beat but is otherwise a restrained, atmospheric mood-setter of a first statement. “Steamy Nights” is just a little busier but keeps the thickening tension coming, as does the particularly gothic “Shadow” (although the vocals are the most inventive that they have been on the record up until this point). “Count the Dust” is probably the most “garage rock” moment on Cut My Brainhair–the dour vocals and prominent bassline keep it squarely in Mantarochen’s wheelhouse, but that guitar is Feel It Records-worthy. “Count the Dust” doesn’t turn out to be a harbinger of a louder, more rocking second half, however–“Pull Me” is one of the oddest things on Cut My Brainhair, synths and jangly guitars colliding in an almost psychedelic, dubby haze, while the minimal synthpop “Sometimes” is Mantarochen at their most streamlined. Things pick up just a bit for the album’s final track, “Desert”, but the steadily-rolling post-punk instrumental is content to stay in its lane right up until its conclusion, landing the smooth ride that is Cut My Brainhair. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

• April Magazine – Falling Window EP
• Texas 3000 – Weird Dreams EP
• Volena – Volena EP
• Cactus Lee – Cactus Lee
• Salin – Rammana
• Sky Patterns – Answers on a Postcard
• Babebee – All That Heaven Allows
• Rincs – Swimming Pool Disco EP
• The Lucky Shots – Second Tongue
• Bailter Space – Radio London EP
• Snapped Ankles – Hard Times Furious Dancing
• Smoking Popes – Lovely Stuff
• Sacred Paws – Jump into Life
• Cash & Skye – Just a Stranger
• Jason Riddell – Some Grief EP
• The Useless 4 – s/t
• Thank – Live @ Damaged Goods EP
• Eliza Waters – Forever / Schizophrenia Is A Blessing, But You Don’t Like The Labels / Mystery in Space, Forbidden Worlds, and Mr. Machine 
• Chris Berardo & The DesBerardos – Wilder All the Time
• Jules Reidy – Ghost/Spirit
• Tiger Saw with Dan Sullivan and Friends – The Magnolia Electric Co. Live at the Dance Hall, Kittery, Maine, Oct. 11, 2024
• Various – What Else Is Sacred? A Compilation of Grief
• Various – TDoV Compilation 1
• Bad Town – This Time Last Year EP
• Hamilton Leithauser – This Side of the Island