Pressing Concerns: Beauty, Higher Selves Playdate, OK Cool, Josh Halper

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This Thursday Pressing Concerns is taking a look at three albums that come out tomorrow, August 1st (new LPs from Beauty, OK Cool, and Josh Halper), plus a new album from Higher Selves Playdate that came out earlier this week. Check them out below, and if you missed either of this week’s earlier blog posts (Monday’s featured Karl Frog, Fortunato Durutti Marinetti, Williamson Brothers, and Perfect 100, and Tuesday’s had The Symptones, Anton Barbeau, Material Objects, and Beagle Scout), check those out, too.

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.

Beauty – I’d Do Almost Anything for You

Release date: August 1st
Record label: Strange View
Genre: Power pop
Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Polar Bear Ice Cream

This is a good one. I’d been in a bit of a new music rut for a few days before hearing this one and it kicked me right out of it. Who do I have to thank for providing such a service? Apparently, a power pop trio from Red Bank, New Jersey simply called Beauty. Guitarist/vocalist Deaglan Howlett, bassist/vocalist Nic Makoto Palermo, and drummer Owen Flanagan have been making music together for quite some time now–their first single came out all the way back in 2018–but I’d Do Almost Anything for You is the group’s first proper album, out on vinyl and cassette via Baltimore’s Strange View Records (Powerwasher, Robber Robber, 9Million). Beauty’s first LP is nothing less than some of the finest 90s power pop revivalism I’ve heard in recent memory, harkening back to a time where acts like Sloan, Teenage Fanclub, Matthew Sweet, and Fountains of Wayne were able to smuggle Cheap Trick/Beatles-level hooks and huge guitars onto the periphery of the mainstream of so-called “alternative rock”. Beauty don’t overthink it, but they don’t miss anything either: where there should be harmonies, there are harmonies, where there ought to be a nice big guitar riff, a sharp solo, or some well-placed handclaps, they’re all right on time. 

“I want to be with you tonight,” Beauty sing over and over again in “Alive Tonight”, I’d Do Almost Anything for You’s opening track, and the excitement and euphoria with which the trio imbue this line (and everything else about the song) make it the perfect setup. It turns out that Beauty have plenty to be excited about on I’d Do Almost Anything for You–I’d be ecstatic too if I had songs like “Acid Baby Girl” (a beautiful piece of Sweet/Fountains of Wayne-esque melodic brilliance drenched in just enough fuzz) and “Polar Bear Ice Cream” (a slam-dunk Sloan-style groovy rock-and-roll rave-up) sitting in the pocket ready to go. Beauty keep the momentum going even when they break out the acoustics for the requisite mid-record ballad “Cherry Red”–of course, it helps to have something like “You Always Take Me” to kick off your album’s second half, too. I can’t entirely put my finger on what exactly makes something like “Let It Ring!” (probably my favorite song on the B-side of I’d Do Almost Anything for You) work, other than that it’s a prime example of the tension that goes into all great power pop–cliche-risking lyrical (and musical) choices delivered with the passion to pull them off, an extremely tightly-constructed pop creation played with just enough looseness to make it feel off-the-cuff. (Strange View link) (Bandcamp link)

Higher Selves Playdate – The New Apocalyptic

Release date: July 30th
Record label: Olly Olly
Genre: Psychedelic pop, indie pop, synthpop, power pop, new wave
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Tiltawhirl

Jessica Kallista and Steve Fitzpatrick are a pair of musicians based in Fairfax, Virginia who make music together as Higher Selves Playdate. Higher Selves Playdate has been around and steadily releasing singles since 2020, but, as far as I can tell, The New Apocalyptic is the duo’s first full-length album. Glancing at the artwork for their various singles reveals a band whose name, image, and music are all in sync–images of toys and dolls presented in bright, garish, psychedelic hues certainly seems in line with the name they gave their project, and The New Apocalyptic sounds like how those pictures feel, too. The New Apocalyptic is a colorful and glitzy pop album, equally anchored by sparkling synthesizers, taut and rhythmic basslines, and delirious sugar-high tempos. The duo name Devo, Grace Jones, and the B-52s as some of their favorite acts, and while The New Apocalyptic doesn’t precisely sound like any of those artists, it certainly sounds like an album made by people with a deep understanding of the freakier sides of dance music, the transformative power of new wave, and the rich inner mythologies suggested by those names (and it’s spiritually “Athens, Georgia”, even if Higher Selves Playdate call the D.C. metro area their home).

The New Apocalyptic is a glorious mess of glitter, danceable beats, and great pop smarts–it has the same bonkers, unhinged pop rock quality of bands like The Apples in Stereo and The Mae Shi, but with a more obvious post-punk-influenced sense of rhythm. “Tiltawhirl” and the title track are a pair of pedal-flooring hooks and infinite energy–the former is pure cotton candy, while the verses of the latter sound like a sped-up mid-period Pere Ubu song grafted onto a twee-noise-pop-punk chorus. Going through the tracklist, it kind of feels like all of The New Apocalyptic deserves a shout-out–the psychedelic rumble of “Orion’s Belt” finds the duo mastering a different kind of music entirely, the spoken-word new wave Sonic Youth vibes of “Another Fake Rebellion” ought to make it a throwaway but it isn’t, and “Even Stephen Adventures in the Ludic Realm” is the closest thing that Higher Selves Playdate have to a straight-ahead pop rock track (so, of course, I hear some dub influence in it, too). Higher Selves Playdate shake and vibrate their way through “Keeping Things Sunny”, “Keep Me Lite Brite”, and “The Million Year Picnic”, while the fuzzed-out noise pop of “Cafe Baudrillard” offers up the unofficial motto of The New Apocalyptic: “Our simulacrum’s better than your simulacrum”. When Higher Selves Playdate put it that way, it’s hard to argue with them. (Bandcamp link)

OK Cool – Chit Chat

Release date: August 1st
Record label: Take a Hike/Klepto Phase
Genre: Alt-rock, fuzz pop, math rock, noise pop, emo-punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Safety Car

Chit Chat is OK Cool’s debut album, but I feel like I’ve been hearing updates about the Chicago-based duo ever since I started this blog at the beginning of the decade. Bridget Stiebris and Haley Blomquist Waller put out their first release (a three-song EP called Anomia) in 2020, and they’ve been regularly active ever since–two more EPs followed in 2021 and 2023, and they released a two-song single in 2022, too. In addition to that, the duo co-run Take a Hike Records, which has put out music by good Windy City bands like Nora Marks in addition to all of OK Cool’s records. With all that in mind, Chit Chat is a “debut” by a pair of musicians with plenty of experience under the belt already, and it sounds like it–OK Cool confidently take their place in the middle of a very specifically “Chicago” style of indie rock that’s equal parts “folky” and “Exploding in Sound-inspired guitar explorations”, somewhere in between Ratboys, Moontype, Patter (and Seth Engel’s other bands), and Morpho, among others. OK Cool have always had a bit of a “playful” side to their music, and while it’s still there in Chit Chat, the duo sound locked-in and focused on making a palpable step forward in the form of a coherent long-player.

“Intro” (despite the name, it’s a full-on song, if only a ninety-second one) captures the spirit of OK Cool in miniature–a spare, chilly, folky opening moves into a wistful acoustic rocker which then finishes in the realm of huge electric catharsis. It’s not emo, precisely, but it feels emo. Chit Chat’s lead single, “Waawooweewaa” (yeah, I know), is positively grandiose, reminding me of the “widescreen”-style indie rock of earlier Wild Pink and a bunch of other Tiny Engines bands, while the other single, “Safety Car”, shrinks OK Cool down to the world of a more personal, grounded style of guitar pop (which, as it turns out, sounds good when practiced by the duo, too). Whether OK Cool are busting out the jagged, revved-up indie rock of “Splitting”, the delicate, piano-shaded folk-pop balladry of “Loop”, or the mid-tempo, early Strange Ranger alt-rock chugging of “Sledding”, everything on Chit Chat has a similar feel, which I attribute to the strength of the personalities that built the album (and the merging thereof on-record). Perhaps Chit Chat will win the Midwest indie-emo lottery, perhaps not, but it’s built to last regardless. (Bandcamp link)

Josh Halper – Schlemiel

Release date: August 1st
Record label: Glamour Gowns
Genre: Folk rock, folk, alt-country
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Use a Friend

Josh Halper’s debut album, Alrightnik, came out back in 2020, an early release on the ever-increasingly-powerful Dear Life Records. The Nashville-originating guitarist has been busy in the five years between solo albums playing with everyone from Lilly Hiatt to Tommy Prine to MJ Lenderman, but Schlemiel finds the sideman returning to the mic once again for an intriguing collection of curious, skewed folk rock and “Americana”. Now based in New York and linked up with local imprint Glamour Gowns, Halper gathered a ton of like-minded talents together–Cameron Carruss (Rich Ruth, Nicki Bluhm) on bass, Simon Knudtson (Oginalii, Olivia Jean) on drums, Ross Collier (Katy Kirby, Lou Turner, Trevor Nikrant) on “gong”, and many more. Schlemiel is a charmingly freewheeling listen–sometimes, Halper sounds like spacey, jazz-influenced, “cosmic Americana” guitar explorers like William Tyler, Ryley Walker, and Steve Gunn, other times like he just wants to make offbeat alt-country like fellow Dear Life-associated acts Styrofoam Winos, Ryan Davis, and Michael Cormier-O’Leary. The common denominator is Halper himself, taking a break from playing lead guitar for hire to make–well, pretty much whatever kind of music he wants to make at any given moment, it seems.

The beginning of Schlemiel should be catnip for those who love their folk and Americana music weird, with the jaunty, jazzy instrumental “For Chavah” and the slightly jammy, slightly psychedelic, jazz-folk-pop creation “And How” subverting what you’d expect from a Nashville hired gun’s solo album. Halper and his players aren’t above embracing a great alt-country tune every now and again, though–there’s certainly nothing wrong with the fluttering folk rock pick-me-up of “Use a Friend”, and while the meandering “Paul and Jane” is a little less in-one’s-face with it, it has the same mix of country-rock drama and pensive inner monologue that recent music from Friendship has nailed so well. Halper doesn’t abandon the sun-drenched, trippy side of folk music (see “Schlemiel” and “Schlimazel”, among others), but Schlemiel works as well as it does because he isn’t afraid to veer from this kind of material to songs like “Sorry in B Major”, a song that manages to capture the brilliance of “traditional” folk and country music without being overly reverent towards either. “Sorry in B Major” is cleverly-written (I don’t mean, like, it winks at you every once in a while–it’s like actually clever), as is the rest of Schlemiel; it doesn’t fit itself together for us neatly on first listen, but the pieces are all laid out for us. (Bandcamp link)

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