Pressing Concerns: Ganser, Modern Nature, The Beths, Foot Ox

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Pressing Concerns checking in! This Friday (August 28th, tomorrow) is one of the best weeks for new music in recent memory, and we’re taking a manageable chunk out of the lineup today by looking at new albums from Ganser, Modern Nature, The Beths, and Foot Ox. Read on below! If you missed Monday’s post (featuring Katsy Pline, The Problem with Kids Today, Sub/Shop, and Joel vs Joel), check that one out here. And if you like the band Silkworm and/or the possibility of reading my writing in print, you should look at Tuesday’s blog post.

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.

Ganser – Animal Hospital

Release date: August 29th
Record label: Felte
Genre: Post-punk, noise rock, art punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Black Sand

Like a lot of people, I got into Ganser somewhere after the release of their sophomore album, 2020’s Just Look at the Sky. The first release of theirs I heard was the following year’s Look at the Sun remix EP, and I followed them through 2022’s Nothing You Do Matters (featuring two new songs and another remix). It feels unusual for a band to keep growing in stature while taking a five-year gap in between albums, but that’s what the Chicago post-punk group seems to have done, and these stopgap releases and constant touring (with Ted Leo and Mclusky, among others) have certainly helped. Still, Animal Hospital is the one we’ve been waiting for for a half-decade now, and Ganser have finally returned with an album worthy of a larger spotlight. The band is down to a trio for the first time ever–founding guitarist Charlie Landsman left the band during recording (he’s still on the record, although it’s unclear how much of Animal Hospital’s guitars are by him), leaving vocalist/bassist Alicia Gaines, vocalist/keyboardist Sophie Sputnik, and drummer Brian Cundiff to soldier on. Nonetheless, Animal Hospital sounds like the Ganser we’ve continued to get glimpses of over the past few years: sometimes nervous, sometimes angry, always dark and loud.

Ganser are a boring band–I mean, in the sense that their music drills and bores intensely and incessantly into anything and anyone that happens to be nearby. Pretty much every instrument takes up this task throughout Animal Hospital–the rhythm section is pounding, of course, the guitars are an assault, and the synths whir and seethe at the base of it all. Sometimes, the vocals match this cacophony, but they’re just as likely to go against the grain–like on one of the best songs on the album, opening track “Black Sand”. Instead of mechanically mimicking the instrumental, Sophie Sputnik’s performance as a frontperson is sneering and taunting (if you’ve ever seen Ganser live, you know just what Sputnik is capable of). Ganser don’t exactly try to recreate “Black Sand” again, but Animal Hospital’s biggest rockers–“Ten Miles Tall”, “Half Plastic”, “Lounger”, “Creature Habits”, “Plato”–are all quite animated and frayed. The stranger, quieter moments on the album– “Dig Until I Reach the Moon”, “Stripe”, “Discount Diamonds”–at first only register as comedowns from the rest of the record, but sticking with Ganser for enough time reveals a different version of “post-punk” in these tracks, one that’s more limber and slippery (but there’s still quite a bit of bite in all of those songs, too). It’s not surprising that Ganser have all of this up their sleeves on Animal Hospital–yet it’s still exciting to hear them perform their tricks this well. (Bandcamp link)

Modern Nature – The Heat Warps

Release date: August 29th
Record label: Bella Union
Genre: Chamber pop, folk rock, post-rock, sophisti-pop, psychedelia
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Pharaoh

I wrote about Modern Nature in 2023, on the occasion of the release of their third (or fourth, if you count the 2020 “mini-album” Annual) LP, No Fixed Point in Space. At the time, it felt like Jack Cooper and his collaborators had been making a single, linear multi-record-long statement: starting with the psychedelic folk rock of How to Live, Modern Nature began to get more abstract and post-rock/chamber music-influenced until they were conjuring up the likes of late-period Talk Talk on No Fixed Point in Space (the of-a-piece artwork for all of these records helped with the cohesion). In hindsight, No Fixed Point in Space looks like the endpoint of something major, and it makes sense that Modern Nature would start from scratch after its conclusion. For The Heat Warps, the band’s core trio (guitarist/vocalist Cooper, bassist Jeff Tobias, drummer Jim Wallis) welcomed second guitarist Tara Cunningham into the fold, and together they’re making music in the realm of “indie” and even “folk” “rock” yet again. The vast blank space of previous Modern Nature LPs hasn’t completely dissipated, but the quartet have allowed more of it than ever to fill with Tobias and Wallis’ steady rhythms and Cunningham and Cooper’s snaking guitars.

Even the album’s cover art–a warm yellow, depicting the four players–indicates a change to something more approachable and evenly-split. “Pharaoh” is a mesmerizing streamlined-psychedelic opening piece, chugging along in a groove only enhanced by what Cooper and Cunningham are doing over top of it (it kind of sounds like sophisti-pop The Feelies, if you can imagine that). It’d probably be easy for Modern Nature to lock in and pull together nothing but further jams of this nature (and there are a few more similar enough to “Pharaoh”, don’t you worry), but the quartet display an ability to adapt and fit themselves around different types of compositions, too–for “Radio”, they become a gorgeous and deliberate folky slowcore act like early Low, “Source” is a twinkling post-country meanderer, and “Jetty” a sparse, brief backwards-glancer. In between, the rigidly smooth grooves keep coming via cuts like “Glance” and “Alpenglow”, and The Heat Warps closes with three tracks that could (to varying degrees) be reasonably described as “ballads”. The final stretch of The Heat Warps is where Modern Nature sound the most comfortable with their new sound, like they’re most confident in their ability to make music missing many of the hallmarks of their previous work. The road to Modern Nature reaching “Totality” and “Takeover” is, of course, just as interesting as the destination itself. (Bandcamp link)

The Beths – Straight Line Was a Lie

Release date: August 29th
Record label: Anti-
Genre: Power pop, indie pop, The Beths
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Straight Line Was a Lie

Everybody loves The Beths, the scrappy yet polished indie pop quartet from Auckland, New Zealand led by a clever singer-songwriter named Elizabeth Stokes. There’s been something refreshingly classic about their rise in popularity: the sleeper hit debut (2018’s Future Me Hates Me), the moodier, underrated sophomore album (2020’s Jump Rope Gazers), and the blockbuster third album that seemingly cemented their position (2022’s Expert in a Dying Field). For their fourth album, Stokes apparently struggled with health-based writer’s block–from the outside, it merely meant that we had to wait three years for a follow-up instead of the like-clockwork two-year schedule that the quartet had reliably maintained. The Beths (Stokes, guitarist Jonathan Pearce, bassist Benjamin Sinclair, and drummer Tristan Deck) make it sound like Straight Line Was a Lie was their most difficult record to make, and I can believe it based on how it sounds: the melancholy that’s always been at the periphery of their sound is explored more thoroughly here than ever before, and it’s easy to imagine a band as tight and well-sculpted as The Beths struggling to let some of these songs sit as unadorned as they ended up sounding on-record.

In terms of bittersweet flag-waving anthems, the phrase “Straight Line Was a Lie” is right up there with “Expert in a Dying Field”, and the opening title track is as huge and “power pop” as anything else in The Beths’ arsenal. As good as that first song is, The Beths’ mind is in other places for most of Straight Line Was a Lie: the band that put songs like “Mosquitos”, “Mother, Pray for Me”, and “Til My Heart Stops” to tape is one that isn’t laser-focused on “power pop” at all (but, of course, pop music is still baked into these sparse ballads, too). Somewhere in between is close to the “heart” of Straight Line Was a Lie–thoughtful, wandering mid-tempo guitar pop songs like “Metal”, “Roundabout”, “Ark of the Covenant”, and “Best Laid Plans”, or the songs like “Take” and “No Joy” that intently sound like they’re trying to outrun something. The Beths have always been a band that seems to take seriously the placement and inclusion of every track on their records, and Straight Line Was a Lie is a Beths album through and through. For a band like this to make their unflappable, instantly-recognizable sound tell greater stories, a good deal of behind-the-curtain work must go into their records, and The Beths remain strong performers when the lights go dim. (Bandcamp link)

Foot Ox – A Lighthouse With Silver Dog Eyes

Release date: August 29th
Record label: Ernest Jenning
Genre: Indie pop, folk rock, alt-country, twee, singer-songwriter
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Bleached Yellow

The band Foot Ox formed in Tempe, Arizona in the late 2000s, self-releasing a handful of albums (such as Songs for Sam Oliphant, It’s Like Our Little Machine, and ooo) before their output slowed down in the late 2010s and then seemingly stopped entirely for a bit. The project reemerged in 2023, however, now based in Portland, Oregon and with a new LP called Judee & the Sun. As far as I can tell, founder Teague Cullen has been the project’s only consistent member, and that remains true for A Lighthouse With Silver Dog Eyes, Foot Ox’s latest album and first for Ernest Jenning Record Co. That being said, Cullen seems to have drawn both from Foot Ox’s home state and from across the West Coast for help making A Lighthouse With Silver Dog Eyes: it was recorded in Los Angeles with David J, and the musicians featured on the album include members of Pigeon Pit, Lake, AJJ, and La Luz, among others. It’s a bit hard to predict what A Lighthouse With Silver Dog Eyes sounds like based on that disparate cast of artists, but the warm folk-pop and alt-country that the album embraces shouldn’t be a bridge too far for those interested in any of the aforementioned acts. 

A Lighthouse With Silver Dog Eyes is a rambling album–it was written and recorded over several years, and it sounds like it. The individual songs are digestible and polished rootsy pop songs, but Foot Ox winds their way through a lengthy and leisurely set of them without worrying much about punctuality or brevity. I can imagine Cullen slowly but surely adding to this collection while traveling around the American West over the past few years. The melodies are slow but unimpeachable, the fiddles and steel guitars generous but not overdone, Cullen’s stories intriguing but rarely straightforward. This is an album from which I have trouble singling out individual songs; it’s really just one long pop trip through the desert, the redwoods, and the Rockies (kind of like if Dear Nora had a more Diners-ish pop music inclination). Hopefully, the new label and an album clearly made with a lot of care are both indications that, nearly twenty years since their debut album, Foot Ox still have a lot of music like this in their system. (Bandcamp link)

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