Pressing Concerns: Perennial, Dauber, Why Bother?, Mythical Motors

Welcome to the first Pressing Concerns of the week! New EPs from Perennial and Why Bother?, as well as new albums from Dauber and Mythical Motors, appear below. Three of these acts have appeared in Pressing Concerns before, and the other one is the debut from a project connected to some Rosy Overdrive-adjacent acts. Read on!

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.

Perennial – Perennial ‘65

Release date: April 4^th
Record label: Ernest Jenning Record Co.
Genre: Art punk, garage rock, post-hardcore, experimental
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Perennial ‘65

I’ve already written about both of the Perennial albums that have come out during the lifespan of Rosy Overdrive, as well as their EP of reimagined versions of songs from their first album (the only one to come out before I started blogging). Do I really need to cover this brief, five-song stopgap release from New England’s favorite “modernist punk” trio? Yes, I think so. Perennial ‘65 comes hot on the trail of last year’s Art History, which I suppose was the trio’s “breakout album” (although to me they’ll always be huge rockstars, and to the general public they’ll–well, I haven’t heard them on my local alt-rock station yet). Perennial ‘65 (named as a nod to the mid-career Beatles ‘65 compilation) gives the trio a chance to try some things that they perhaps didn’t have time for in the tight, twenty-one minute Art History while still sounding very much like the Perennial we’ve all come to know and love. We get one brand-new original Perennial rock and roll song, a cover of The Kinks’ “All Day and All of the Night”, two remixes from Cody Votolato and Chris Walla, and a track that continues the band’s exploration into experimental noise and electronic terrain. It also apparently marks the debut of the band’s new drummer, Ceej Dioguardi, who joins founding members Chad Jewett (guitar/vocals) and Chelsey Hahn (electric organ/vocals) (I had listed Dioguardi as being on Art History, but this presumably means that Perennial recorded their last album with former drummer Wil Mulhern, so a belated correction is in order there).

The opening title track is the “hit”–it’s as good as anything else the band have done, the now-classic combination of 60s garage rock/pop and furious post-hardcore dance punk hitting no less strongly than on their proper albums. “All Day and All of the Night” is perhaps an obvious choice for Perennial to cover, and it does indeed sound like Perennial covering The Kinks, but what’s most remarkable to me is that it actually doesn’t sound like a “Perennial song”. It’s a great garage rock recording, don’t get me wrong, but it just goes to show how unique and hard-to-replicate the band’s original material sounds. The rest of the EP doesn’t quite “rock” in the same way, but don’t tune out just yet–the remixes (both of songs from Art History) take Perennial in opposite directions, with Votolato (The Blood Brothers) turning “Tiger Technique” into a slick, slippery, but still slightly dangerous dance track, while Walla (Death Cab for Cutie) stretches out and slows down “Up-Tight”, keying in on the psychedelic and even dub elements of Perennial’s sound. “C Is for Cubism” continues an experimental series begun last year with “A Is for Abstract” and “B Is for Brutalism”–like those tracks, it’s also a relatively brief snippet, but it’s also the busiest one of these songs yet, indicating a real path here beyond interstitial material for Perennial to pursue should they feel inclined. Not that being constrained has ever been a real problem for Perennial, of course. (Bandcamp link)

Dauber – Falling Down

Release date: April 4^th
Record label: Recess/Dromedary/State Champion
Genre: Garage rock, power pop, punk
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Falling Down

The beloved underground rock trio Screaming Females sadly broke up in 2023–and while they didn’t point to a single reason as to why they hung it up, the members’ various other projects probably helped contribute to the decision. Former frontperson Marissa Paternoster has stayed busy with her project Noun, and now former bassist Mike Abbate’s band Dauber has released their debut LP, Falling Down. The trio didn’t exactly come out of nowhere–they put out a couple of demos over a year ago, and all three of them (Abbate on guitar and vocals, drummer Jenna Fairey, and bassist Quinn Murphy) also play together in The Straps and possibly Abbate’s quasi-solo project KMES (Fairey for sure drummed on their album, at least). While Paternoster’s recent singles with Noun have explored the heavier and more classic rock-indebted side of Screaming Females’ music, Dauber chart a different path on Falling Down. Recorded with legendary Cincinnati producer John Hoffman, Dauber embrace the more off-the-cuff, looser side of Screaming Females, ripping through a baker’s dozen tracks that triangulate melodic punk, garage rock, and power pop like Hoffman’s own band Vacation, Midwest punk lifers ADD/C, or their new labelmates Night Court.

Descriptors like “no-frills” and “barebones” come to mind while listening to Falling Down, which does its business in under a half hour and features very little in terms of contributions outside of its power trio setup (the entirety of which is “additional synth and vocals” from Rebecca Borrer, who’s previously played with Fairey in something called “Chicken Run the Musical”). While Dauber claim Hudson, New York as their home, some of Hoffman’s Ohio charm must’ve rubbed off on the three of them when recording Falling Down, as there’s a real “hammering out massive pop songs in a Midwestern basement with garage rock as the medium” vibe throughout the record. Dauber renew their punk credentials with the self-explanatory “No Use for a Pig”, a song that’s as righteous as it is fun and catchy as hell–and “fun and catchy as hell” is the theme of Falling Down that wins out over and over again. Early highlights “Falling Down” and “Metal Rectangle” are huge balls of melodic punk-pop energy, and “Screaming at Orion” takes the tempo down just a little bit to nail a fuzzy college rock/power pop excursion. Maybe there are a little more obvious hits in the record’s first half, but it’s not entirely frontloaded–in particular, the closing trio of stop-start garage rock banger “Just Wanna”, slacker rock puncher “Sweet Tooth”, and fuzz-pop-punk finale “Memory Lane” are as good as anything else on the album. Dauber have come running right out of the gate–as they should. (Bandcamp link)

Why Bother? – You Are Part of the Experiment

Release date: April 18^th
Record label: Feel It
Genre: Garage punk, garage rock, horror punk, art punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: I Got Your Number

New music from Why Bother?? That’s always welcome. Mason City, Iowa’s premiere basement-garage-horror-punk-rockers have been regularly dropping solid collections of their stuff since 2021, but last October’s Hey, At Least You’re Not Me was a particularly strong one, and the quartet’s hot streak has continued with You Are Part of the Experiment. Terry (vocals/synths), Speck (guitar/vocals), Pamela (bass), and Paul (drums) sound like they’re auditioning for the current political administration’s Department of Health and Human Services with this EP’s description (“Why are young and old people getting sicker and weaker in the mind and body every year? What if we have all been lied to by governments, religious leaders, science and industry about our biology and the history of human kind?”), but I did say they were horror-inspired, and You Are Part of the Experiment is a dark, troubling trip into underground noise rock, art punk, and fuzzed-out rock and roll that seemingly allows Why Bother? to get even weirder and unhinged than their “proper” (if anything about this band can be called that) records. These five songs are all pretty distinct from each other, but Why Bother? have stitched them together with the skill of history’s most unethical surgeons nonetheless.

Let’s start with “Listen”, a track that begins with a commercial for corn flakes before launching into a classically Why Bother?-type garage rock ripper. It’s great! And it’s the second-catchiest moment on the EP, even though the dietary diatribe at the heart of the song is hardly pop music fodder. The first-most catchiest thing on You Are Part of the Experiment is the record’s biggest outlier, an exuberant and surprisingly faithful cover of Cock Sparrer’s “I Got Your Number” that proves that Why Bother?’s basement scuzz translates very well into power pop and first-wave punk rock hooks. The rest of the EP is a real freak show, though–“Inside the Medium” starts out recognizable enough, a Crampsian crawling thing that quickly folds in on itself and mutates into a cacophony of noise. “Speck’s Lament” does rock, but the instrumental does so in a heavy, explosive manner, combining lumbering hard rock riffs with a few simpler post-punk moments in between. And then there’s the closing song, “The Older Witness”, a true departure from the world of “rock music” for all of its three minutes except for a couple of seconds in the middle where (accidentally, it feels like) the band bleeds into the post-industrial sound collage. I suspect that the experiment isn’t yet over and that I’m still a part of it, although I’ve enjoyed taking part in Why Bother?’s clinical trial. (Bandcamp link)

Mythical Motors – Travelogues and Movie Stills

Release date: April 18^th
Record label: Repeating Cloud
Genre: Lo-fi power pop
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: The Luck of Saints

It’s 2021, and I’m writing about the new Mythical Motors record. It’s 2022, and I’m writing about the new Mythical Motors record. It’s 2024, and I’m writing about the first Mythical Motors album of the year, and then the second one. As long as Chattanooga, Tennessee’s Matt Addison keeps making rock-solid, unimpeachable one-man lo-fi power pop and putting it out either on his own or via any record label that’ll have him, then I’ll keep writing about them. Travelogues and Movie Stills is the first Mythical Motors album of this year, and it reunites Addison with RO favorite Repeating Cloud Records, who put out last year’s Upside Down World (arguably the best Mythical Motors record of the last couple of years). Addison is unflaggingly devoted to Robert Pollard/Tobin Sprout-inspired guitar pop that’s surreal in its lyrics and cotton candy in its execution, and all his records have the same surface-level sound. Some of them are more electric, some a little more saccharine, some weirder, but it’s all coming from the same wellspring. Travelogues and Movie Stills feels a little more stripped-down–sometimes that means “more rocking”, but even the quieter moments are more streamlined on this LP.

Travelogues and Movie Stills skates through fifteen tracks in under half an hour–certainly well within Addison’s range, but it is pared down compared to his previous album’s twenty songs and thirty-seven minutes. “The Red Bank Balloon Race” is an instant classic Addison composition, a triumphant power pop ride much like the niche sport its title references–and one that’s over in a mere forty-five seconds. The mid-tempo, jangly “Finer Thrills” and the acoustic “Wild Souls Companion” showcase what I mean by stripped-down–neither of them are “bangers”, but both of them do exactly what they set out to do with virtually no frills. If you want upbeat power pop anthems, though, “The Luck of Saints”, “On New Wings”, and “The Chasing Fairground” will have you covered, but the songs in between them–like the jangly duo of “This Proud Moment” and “Hamilton’s Eyes”, both pulling their tricks off with different tempos–are more than just bridges between them. “Anne Eternally”, the final track on Travelogues and Movie Stills, is perhaps the record’s most “epic” track–one of the few moments where Addison gets a bit more exploratory structure-wise, the song stops and starts a bit in between the declaration in its title. After the prog-folk midsection detour, though, Addison finishes things off by returning to what this album does best. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

• Honeypuppy – Dirty TV
• Jay Gonzalez / Sloan Brothers – Jay Gonzalez vs Sloan Brothers EP
• Magic Rockers of Texas – Gorging on American Fare
• West Coast Music Club – Need You Beside Me EP
• Datura – Songs from a Dark House
• Camp Trash/Dowsing – Split EP
• Myriads – Find Ourselves Again EP
• Spitcurl – Spitcurl
• Rosser Electronics – This Time It’ll Work
• Treewax/Icosandria – Void Intention EP
• Dr. Strangely Strange – Anti-Inflammatory
• The Last Mile – Holding on to Hope
• Dead Pioneers – PO$T AMERICAN
• S.G.A.T.V. – Collected Recordings 2020-2023
• Kills Birds – Crave EP
• Clutter – Loves You EP
• (+39) 375-649-94-64 My Telephone Number – Album #01
• Blood Cannery – Cannery Not Canary
• Death Pyre – Between Shadow and Substance
• Flesh Narc – You’re Done
• Bridge the Gap – Gainsayer
• SSIK – Inferior Health EP
• The Bedbugs – 6-Pack Series, Vol. 9 EP
• Sofia Hardig – Lighthouse of Glass
• Teen Mortgage – Devil Ultrasonic Dream