Pressing Concerns: I Will Swim to You, Alexei Shishkin, Cheerbleederz, Alien Eyelid

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Second blog post of the week! The Thursday one! Featuring four records out tomorrow September 5th! New albums from Alexei Shishkin and Alien Eyelid! A new EP from Cheerbleederz! A star-studded Jason Molina tribute album! Let’s get to it. Oh, also, check out Monday’s blog post (featuring Retirement Party, Wavers, Moviola, and Laminate) if you haven’t yet.

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.

Various – I Will Swim to You: A Tribute to Jason Molina

Release date: September 5th
Record label: Run for Cover
Genre: Country rock, alt-country, folk rock, slowcore
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Hard to Love a Man

It’s a slam dunk on paper, of course. A double-LP cover-compilation tribute album to the revered, canonical godfather of this current era of bastard-child alt-country/indie rock, featuring some of the most popular acts in this field, some of the most obvious successors to Jason Molina’s music, and some surprising inclusions. A lot more could be written about Molina’s music, its legacy, and how it’s all talked about a dozen years after his passing, but we’re looking at a small, interpreted slice of it today thanks to Run for Cover Records and a dozen artists they tapped to fill out I Will Swim to You. It makes sense for a New England-based record label who I associate more with emo and heavier alt-rock than anything else to emphasize the restlessness and innovation at the heart of the Midwestern folk singer-songwriter while presenting us with I Will Swim to You. Molina released a ton of albums during his too-short life, many of which were greeted with little more than a shrug at the time and have yet to be given proper retrospective reevaluations. Despite arguably shaping the current sound of “indie rock” more than any other indie musician, there’s a surprising lack of curiosity around huge swaths of Molina’s work at this present moment. I Will Swim to You isn’t equipped to change this, but it understands this, and it’s a good deal of how it stays interesting for its entirety.

The hits are up front here–as I alluded to earlier, Jason Molina isn’t one to be “distilled”, but I Will Swim to You opens by clearly illustrating the man’s influence on modern alt-country (via MJ Lenderman’s “Just Be Simple”), dark, slowcore-influenced indie rock (Horse Jumper of Love’s “Blue Factory Flame”), and tasteful folk rock/heartland rock/“Americana” (Trace Mountains’ “The Dark Don’t Hide It”). A good deal of you probably already like those bands, those songs, or both, and therefore you’ll enjoy these versions, but I Will Swim to You really breaks open with a regal, dreamy version of “Leave the City” by Run for Cover indie folk tentpole Sun June (a band who have, to be perfectly honest, never resonated with me before now). Run for Cover take advantage of having Advance Base on their roster to have Owen Ashworth, the only person on this album who could be described as a contemporary of Molina, offer up a very Owen Ashworth version of a Molina solo song I didn’t remember called “Everything Should Try Again”–enlisting Teen Suicide is much less intuitive, and I don’t really know what I expected from their version of “Whip Poor Will”, but it…wasn’t that. The two other tracks I want to make sure to acknowledge are my favorite band on the compilation’s contribution (Friendship, with a hypnotic, dark version of the Magnolia Electric Co. song “Hard to Love a Man” that lands somewhere between the coverer and the covered, somehow) and the version of Songs: Ohia’s signature song (Another Michael’s “The Farewell Transmission”, which is actually quite good and a more successful reinterpretation of a difficult-to-translate song than most have been able to muster). If you can’t tell from these two paragraphs, I have a lot more thoughts on the music of Jason Molina than what’s contained herein, and I Will Swim to You having the power to bring them to the surface again in 2025 is evidence that it’s been done right. (Bandcamp link)

Alexei Shishkin – Good Times

Release date: September 5th
Record label: Rue Defense
Genre: Indie pop, art rock, experimental pop, piano pop
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Disco Elysium

This is the first time we’ve checked in on prolific Queens musician Alexei Shishkin this year, but regular readers will remember the singer-songwriter from a pair of 2024 albums that appeared in Pressing Concerns. The three records that this particular lo-fi indie rock/bedroom pop revivalist put out in last year followed a recognizable pattern of sorts: February’s Dagger was the primer, a mostly home/self-recorded experimental pop album, June’s Open Door Policy was the main course, polishing and cleaning up Shishkin’s sound to make his version of a palatable indie pop album, and November’s Greenwich Mean EP was the postscript, a bunch of tossed-off “castaways” to tie everything up. Good Times, the first Shishkin album of 2025, contains bits and pieces of all of the above, believe it or not–it has the experimental streak of Dagger (it was “created from scratch in four days”), the studio/collaborative aspect of Open Door Policy (like that one, it was recorded at Bradford Krieger’s Big Nice Studio in Providence, and Krieger and bassist Dave Kahn are also key instrumental contributors), and, of course, the electric nature of Greenwich Mean.

Whatever the “Alexei Shishkin sound” is, Good Times contains plenty of it–elements of surreal psychedelic pop and piano-and-saxophone-led soft rock filtered through the lens of grayscale 90s indie rock and decades of home-recording oddballs. Krieger, Kahn, and saxophonist Ivan Rodriguez are clearly all in tune with Shishkin’s musical style–the players on Good Times pretty effortlessly congeal into a proper pop rock band (not one without its quirks, of course). Shishkin writes that he and Krieger “built” the album around Kahn’s basslines–while the bass isn’t always “prominent” in the mix, Good Times nonetheless feels like an album built on a sturdy foundation, and rhythm is equally important on the record’s most ornate and most chaotic tracks. Not that there’s always much of a clean divide–from the opening track “Disco Elysium”, where tasteful piano playing and crunchy distortion sit side by side, it’s apparent that Shishkin and Krieger are following their own conception of pop music. Tracks like “Tough (Ugly Ghosts)”, “Ode to Carl Dennis”, “Baltimore”, and the title track are nearly Frog-level in their collision of offbeat pop music and gorgeous pianos, but Good Times doesn’t really sound even close to an album that’s attempting to imitate anything that came before it. It’s a casual conversation between a couple of good musical friends, nothing less and nothing more. (Bandcamp link)

Cheerbleederz – (Prove Me Wrong)

Release date: September 5th
Record label: Alcopop!
Genre: Power pop, indie pop, indie-pop-punk stuff
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Passenger Princess

I doubt they’d call themselves one, but Cheerbleederz are effectively a London indie rock supergroup–between Kathryn Woods (Fresh, ex-ME REX), Phoebe Cross (ME REX, Happy Accidents), and Sophie Mackenzie (Felicette, Supermilk), the trio have had a hand in some of the best (loosely-defined) “indie pop” music to come out of their home city this decade. Cheerbleederz themselves actually predate quite a bit of their members’ accomplishments: they put out EPs in 2018 and 2020, leading up to a 2022 LP called Even in Jest. Cheerbleederz went a little quiet after their debut album, however–(Prove Me Wrong) actually represents their first new music in three years, a little surprising for a band that had been pretty consistently putting out singles up until Even in Jest. The band mention about “extreme periods of loss and grief” in their personal lives during the interstitial period–between all of what that might entail and their other projects, it wouldn’t be surprising if Cheerbleederz fell by the wayside, but thankfully that hasn’t been the case, as these four brand-new songs make clear. Fans of the uniquely British, Martha-ish style of “indie pop punk”/power pop will find (Prove Me Wrong) much to their liking, and no previous knowledge of their scene or band histories is necessary to appreciate this loud, cathartic-sounding pop music.

Recorded once again by Rich Mandell (ME REX, Happy Accidents), (Prove Me Wrong) skips along all too briefly but not without leaving a trail of bubblegum-flavored carnage in its wake. “I Deserved Better” is toe-tapping surfy indie pop that’s as catchy as it is bitter (does anybody else remember the band Diet Cig?); that song’s wordless “ba-ba-ba-da” chorus is doing a lot of heavy lifting. “Passenger Princess” might be even better, a song about learning to drive as an adult that, I suspect, is about a little more than even that insurmountable-feeling topic.  As we move into (Prove Me Wrong)’s B-side, we get “Sleepwalking”, the closest thing to a “quiet song” as we get on the EP; when Cheerbleederz cajole us to “come on, get your wisecracks in”, it’s an encouragement to take advantage of a brief breather. “You Got It in for Me” ends the EP with a question mark, a puzzling sketch of the subject (do they really “have it in” for Cheerbleederz? Do they know themselves?) and a just-as-strange stitched-together instrumental of lazy psychedelic guitar lines and moments of clear-eyed rock (I think there’s some backmasking in there?). A lot to take in from a humble four-song indie pop EP. (Bandcamp link)

Alien Eyelid – Vinegar Hill

Release date: September 5th
Record label: Tall Texan
Genre: Country rock, neo-psychedelia, folk rock, baroque country
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Vinegar Hill

I wrote about Houston quintet Alien Eyelid a little over two years ago, back when they’d just released their debut album, Bronze Star. The band (vocalist/guitarist Tyler Morris, guitarist/pedal steel player Will Adams, drummer Justin Terrell, bassist/guitarist Brett Taylor, and saxophonist/flautist/vocalist Mlee Marie) put together a solid debut collection featuring “traditional country songwriting, breezy, Woodsist-esque folk rock, and a few genuinely weirder turns” (as a wrote about it at the time), but they’d kind of slipped my mind up until the advent of their sophomore album, Vinegar Hill. Based on my description of Bronze Star, it shouldn’t be all that unusual that Vinegar Hill once again finds the band veering between traditional country-inspired music and strange psychedelia, but Alien Eyelid’s sophomore album surprised me nonetheless–the quintet are more committed than ever to digging into the strange, sun-drenched corners of Texas roots rock this time.

One of the first things we hear on Vinegar Hill is Marie’s flute, which helps opening track “Blistered & Burned” feel even spacier and more psychedelic as it winds its way into focus. Marie also makes chamber-folk music as Hearts of Animals, and this side of her playing likely helps Alien Eyelid to arrive in the form of a leisurely, orchestral six-minute psychedelic folk rock opening statement. The starry-eyed countrydelic ballad of “F.I.T.” is both a world away from “Blistered & Burned” and still somehow comfortable right next to it–the directness and flair of Morris’ vocals is a nice counterbalance to the beautiful oddness creeping around the song’s edges. “Flys” and “Jail” ensure that Alien Eyelid sticks to the warped rhythms and twang even when they attempt “rockers”, and–if that wasn’t enough–the two tracks are linked together by the Marie-sung dream-folk ballad “Petition”, which sounds like nothing else on Vinegar Hill. And speaking of “like nothing else”, how about that ten-minute title track hiding out on the B-side of the album? For a few minutes, “Vinegar Hill” is just about the most accessible song on the album, a laid-back country-rock rambler that sounds like Alien Eyelid finally let some concision slip into their songwriting…until it just keeps going, and expanding, and deconstructing, and ascending. We can decompress via the relatively low-key closing track “Easy Street”, but that climb to the top of Vinegar Hill and back isn’t fading from sight and memory any time soon. (Bandcamp link)

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