Pressing Concerns: The Chop, K9, Knowso, Clifford

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Welcome to the Monday Pressing Concerns! There are four quality albums to be found in this issue from The Chop, K9, Knowso, and Clifford. Some familiar faces, some new ones, but all worth checking out.

On a less exciting note, I unfortunately have to report that there will be no blog post on Tuesday this week; in fact, Rosy Overdrive may have to be going back down to a “Monday/Thursday” only schedule for the foreseeable future. I wish I had more time to devote to the blog, there’s still a bunch of great music to write about, but right now it’s not really in the cards.

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.

The Chop – It’s the Chop

Release date: August 1st
Record label: Wrong Speed
Genre: Post-punk, indie pop, art pop, no wave
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Out of Every Night

From (some of) the minds who brought you Dancer, It’s the Chop! Indeed, Gemma Fleet and Andrew Doig (aka Robert Sotelo) are most well-known these days for making up one-half of the scrappy Scottish indie pop/post-punk quartet Dancer, which have been going strong ever since their early 2023 debut EP. To me in my small corner of the music world, Dancer are superstars, garnering acclaim and notoriety outside the “Rosy Overdrive-core” bubble from which they arose, so it feels surprising to me that a brand-new Dancer side project (that actually sounds like Dancer, to a degree) hasn’t gotten more attention. Perhaps it’s intended to be a more low-stakes output source for Fleet and Doig (who, according to the album’s Bandcamp page, are a husband-and-wife duo, which I didn’t know before now); even compared to the more streamlined side of Dancer’s art pop, It’s the Chop is a minimal affair, with simple drum machines, bass riffs, and synth interjections all used fairly sparingly. Fleet’s vocals are much less inclined to go “off the rails” here; she’s still doing that conversational thing she does very well, but it’s less “mile a minute” and more “pensive” (one gets the sense that her trains of thought aren’t any less expansive, they just happen to be more internal with The Chop).

Gemma Fleet’s vocals and Andrew Doig’s basslines are two of the most important (perhaps the two most important) ingredients of Dancer, and they’re both right up front in It’s the Chop’s opening track, “Out of Every Night”. There are some Magnetic Fields-esque synth chimes in “Set the Bridge Alight”, but everything else about the song is much more dour and worrisome, grooves aside (a qualifier that can very well be applied to most of It’s the Chop anyway). The Chop quietly urge and cajole us throughout It’s the Chop, from Fleet and Doig joining forces to exhort us to “remember the good times” in “End of the Pier” to the surprisingly gentle “here we fucking go” in “Here We Go”. “The Trailer Was Better” continues this side of The Chop in the extreme; it’s everything that Dancer isn’t, subdued and opaque and leaving plenty of empty space right there on the table. Doig and Fleet can’t help themselves but to close out their latest album with another strong pop song in “Purely Incidental”, but the chilly undertones of the final track are harder to ignore in the aftermath of what The Chop explore in the nine songs before it. The duo have never been one to hide any aspect of their art completely, even at their oddest. (Bandcamp link)

K9 – Thrills

Release date: July 21st  (Digital)/October 3rd  (Vinyl)
Record label: Who Ya Know
Genre: Garage rock, power pop, punk rock
Formats: Vinyl, cassette (partial), digital
Pull Track: Arms Fall Off

Another good underground rock band from the great city of Richmond, Virginia! This time we’ve got a five-piece group simply called K9, co-led by vocalists Brenna and Jake (who also plays guitar) and also featuring guitarist Ian, bassist Evan, and drummer Christian. The quintet caught my attention last year on the strength of a three-song demo cassette called In Blistering Stereo, which came hot on the heels of their 2023 debut EP, Harmony Kills!!. Thrills is the group’s first full-length album, and the twenty-minute collection delivers on the potential that K9 have been flashing. This is a group that isn’t shy at all about their love of classic college rock and jangle pop, but they carry themselves like a bunch of garage rockers (or even, at time, punks)–the final product is somewhere around the midpoint between Lame-O and Feel It Records. On one end of the spectrum, the vocal interplay between Jake and Brenna and the zippy guitar melodies help K9 pull off “indie pop” or perhaps even twee pop, and on the other side of things, the six-strings are lobbing punk slingshots and the ferocious drumming approaches hardcore tempos. 

I hear everything from the rootsy Texas power pop of Cast of Thousands, the sloppy, tinny college rock revivalism of Silicone Prairie, and countless casual-pop K Records alumni in Thrills’ opening track, “Arms Fall Off”, and the garage rock runaway train of the first song gives way to a straight-up punk rock foundation in “Who Ya Know”. Pretty much everything on Thrills can be categorized as “explosive pop music” in some form–“The Island” is perhaps the album’s clearest merging of beautiful and snotty (it sounds kind of like the Meat Puppets), “Shades of Red” adds some post-punk confusion to the melodies, “A Race” is K9’s version of “pop punk”, and “Neurotic Break” gets just a little bit psychedelic with it. Every once in a while, K9 will drum up another punk song just to prove that they can–aside from Christian’s pummeling drums, “95x” and “Bootstraps” have just enough flexibility and hooks to fit in with the rest of Thrills. If you stick around until the end, you’re rewarded with a strange, quiet ballad called “This World” and “We All Feel the Same”, a concoction that closes the LP by whipping up just a bit of Guided by Voices-like bite-sized prog-rock in its extended intro. If you read this blog regularly, you’re well aware of my fondness for bands like this, and K9 are some of the freshest practitioners of this kind of music I’ve heard in recent memory. (Bandcamp link)

Knowso – Hypnotic Smack

Release date: August 1st
Record label: Sorry State
Genre: Garage punk, post-punk, egg punk, noise rock, no wave
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Club Music Is the Soundtrack

Last January, I set the tone for all of 2024 by choosing an album called Pulsating Gore by a bunch of punk freaks from Cleveland as one of the first records I wrote about that year. At the time of Pulsating Gore’s release, Knowso were a trio led by Nathan Ward (also of Perverts Again and Cruelster); I called the group’s third album “serious-feeling, blunt garage-post-punk” at the time, complimented Ward’s “horrifying, mundane, disquieting version of Americana”, and did indeed get around to using the terms “egg punk” and “Devo-core”. Much of this applies once again to the fourth Knowso album, Hypnotic Smack, which comes a year and a half after Pulsating Gore. Knowso apparently are down to a duo for this one, with longtime drummer Jayson Gerycz (Cloud Nothings) being the only other member now. Does Knowso’s violent, dead-eyed version of egg punk accordingly sound more stripped-down on Hypnotic Smack? I mean, kind of, but it’s not overly noticeable–Ward and Gerycz are, apparently, more than capable of whipping up something as chaotic as Pulsating Gore on their own. Ward isn’t any less potent of a writer and performer, and Knowso don’t sound any less like music made by and for goblins on this record, either.

Knowso jerk and writhe their way through “You Climb the Sphinx”, a frantic, incomprehensible dissection of religion that gives way to a really disorienting piece of goblin-y post-punk called “Blue”. If there’s a theme to Hypnotic Smack, it’s probably to be found within the duo of “There Is No Connection” (a quick alienated mental breakdown about “primitive times”) and “Perfect for Bleach” (the first lines of which are “The car was optimized / Smart technology / Straight off a cliff”). Hypnotic Smack is never really “on the rails”, but the second half of the record is where Knowso really push the boundaries of what their sound can be between the synthpunk capitalist kaleidoscope of “Consumer Talk”, the rumbling, dramatic “Panopticon”, and the record’s “epic”, the five-minute fever dream impressions of “Club Music Is the Soundtrack”. The body horror and unreality of the latter ensure that “Club Music Is the Soundtrack” hits as hard as anything on Pulsating Gore, even as it’s an incredibly stretched and deconstructed mess of a song. Knowso, having stretched themselves sufficient for one go-around, close out Hypnotic Smack with a couple more freaky rockers in “Sin of Property” and “Blood in Your Memory”. It’s equally uneasy-feeling no matter how the duo present their findings. (Bandcamp link)

Clifford – Golden Caravan

Release date: July 25th
Record label: Sipsman
Genre: Slowcore, 90s indie rock, art rock, noise rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Ink Blot

Boston indie rock band Clifford have been around since the beginning of this decade, at least. Led by vocalist/guitarist Miles Chandler and rounded out by drummer Ben Curell, guitarist Danny Edlin, and bassist Nate Scaringi, the quartet have put out a couple of EPs as well as an album called Projections of a Body Electric in 2021. For their second album, Golden Caravan, they’ve linked up with Sipsman (Krill, Truth Club, Katie Von Schleicher) and they’ve gotten a bit of help, too–Mei Semones (who has appeared on previous Clifford releases) contributes backing vocals, and Mairead Guy, Maddy Simpson, and Zack Wiggs contribute banjo, fiddle, and pedal steel, respectively. Clifford claim inspiration from local heroes like Pile and Horse Jumper of Love, and Golden Caravan sounds like a chilly version of that kind of New England underground rock music. Despite drawing from bands known for pursuing a single, unified sound, Clifford don’t necessarily constrain themselves to one lane on Golden Caravan–a lot of the album is “slowcore”, but sometimes it’s the slow-moving, rickety electric variety and sometimes it’s more folky, and every once in a while the quartet swing out a genuine hard-hitting rocker, too.

“Trackstarr” is hardly the most immediately attention-grabbing song on Golden Caravan, but it’s a good opener for the album, steadily and slowly moving through a song that never exactly “goes” anywhere but still sounds very good doing it. Chandler lets some anxiety and horror creep into their performance in “C Song”, roaring “I know it’s sick / But I can’t look / I can’t look away,” over lumbering electric guitars. Between “C Song” and “Ink Blot”, Clifford seem to be setting themselves up as noisy indie rock guitar heroes, but the more subdued, lost-sounding midsection of tracks like “Gifthorse” and “Dearest One” end up more reflecting of Golden Caravan’s core. Songs like the freaked-out alt-country of the title track eventually end somewhere loud and rocking, but it’s not until the pummeling post-punk of “Exaltation Forms” in the penultimate slot that Clifford fully break out of their possessed funk for an entire full-on rock song. These gear shifts are just frequent enough to ensure that Golden Caravan never settles into a clear rhythm or groove; like their influences, Clifford like to keep us on our toes. They’re well on their way to solidifying their own unique ways of doing so, too. (Bandcamp link)

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