Pressing Concerns: The Telephone Numbers, Guitar, Giant Day, Massage

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It’s time for Pressing Concerns of the week number three! We’ve got brand-new albums from The Telephone Numbers, Guitar, Giant Day, and Massage for you to peruse below. Mark my words, this one’s going down as a classic. Also, if you missed either of this week’s earlier blog posts (on Monday, we looked at new ones from Kilkenny Cats, Matthew Smith Group, Why Bother?, and Novelty Island, and on Tuesday it was Ambulanz, Creative Writing, Time Thief, and Nape Neck), 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.

The Telephone Numbers – Scarecrow II

Release date: October 10th
Record label: Slumberland
Genre: Jangle pop, power pop, college rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Telephone Numbers Theme

The San Francisco Bay Area is full of interesting, distinct singer-songwriters at the moment–Yea-Ming Chen, Michael Ramos, and Glenn Donaldson all come to me right off the dome–but The Telephone Numbers’ Thomas Rubenstein is remarkable in how he manages to carve out his own signature style while giving so much of himself over to the towering jangle pop, college rock, and power pop that’s shaped the entire scene around him. Andy Pastalaniec and Rob I. Miller have done it to some degree, but Rubenstein has been the king of it since 2021’s breakthrough LP The Ballad of Doug. The one-off singles and compilation appearances in the intervening four years have only increased my anticipation for Scarecrow II, the second Telephone Numbers LP and the first one for Slumberland Records. A lot of familiar faces have popped up on Telephone Numbers recordings over the years–Scarecrow II is no exception, but it’s worth noting that the band are now a solid quartet featuring Rubenstein’s longtime collaborator Charlie Ertola (The Love-Birds) on bass, mercenary Phil Lantz (Neutrals, The 1981, Chime School) on drums, and Umbrellas co-leader Morgan Stanley on guitar and vocals.

Scarecrow II may be The Telephone Numbers’ coming-out party, but the quartet sound pretty unhurried as they take the stage for the big show. “Goodbye Rock n Roll” is a minimal first statement, allowing us to take in Rubenstein’s striking, Scott Miller-esque vocals and a simple, brilliant jangle before lead single “Be Right Down” sweeps us all away. The mid-record ballad “Falling Dream” injects a bit of Tommy Keene into Rubenstein’s performance, and it gives way to a keyboard-infused rave-up called “Pulling Punchlines” (judging by the album credits, that one’s been in Rubenstein’s arsenal for a long time now). The beautiful music industry disillusionment anthem “This Job Is Killing Me”, originally the B-side to the 2023 “Weird Sisters” single, is re-recorded here, slowed down and given strings to draw out the titular expiration even more dramatically. The Telephone Numbers save one of their best tricks for the penultimate slot, giving Stanley the lead to sing “Telephone Numbers Theme”, a triumphant indie-power-pop track that’s every bit good enough to be the group’s theme song. Stanley’s voice is pretty far removed from Rubenstein’s vocals, but the trick of Scarecrow II, like all the Telephone Numbers numbers before it, is that it hangs together. (Bandcamp link)

Guitar – We’re Headed to the Lake

Release date: October 10th
Record label: Julia’s War
Genre: Lo-fi indie rock, lo-fi pop, fuzz pop, garage rock
Formats: CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: A+ for the Rotting Team

Three Guitar records, three reinventions. And We’re Headed to the Lake might be the one that finally gets Portland musician Saia Kuli the notoriety he’s been due for a hot minute. The sophomore Guitar LP ditches both the lo-fi post-punk of the 2022 self-titled EP and the shoegaze-infused noise-fuzz assault of 2024’s Casting Spells on Turtlehead and embraces clarity and pop songwriting like never before. All of a sudden, Kuli and some familiar collaborators (drummer Nikhil Wadhwa and vocalist Jontajshae Smith) are making exquisite 90s-influenced indie rock that reminds me quite a bit of Guided by Voices, Pavement, and (maybe because I just saw them live) Silkworm. 

These elements were there in Guitar’s earlier, more chaotic material, but it’s still a shock to the system when We’re Headed to the Lake opens with tinny but otherwise clearly-delivered Robert Pollard-level guitar pop in “A+ for the Rotting Team” (and if the instrumental veers into a weird ditch at one point–well, it’s not like Guided by Voices never did that, either). The Smith-sung “Chance to Win” is legit dreamy jangle-rock, and songs like “Cornerland”, “Every Day Without Fail”, and “A Toast to Tovarishch” may have some garage-punk roughness around the edges, but they’re clearly pop music. Almost as if to reassure us that Guitar is still a bizarre project at its core, We’re Headed to the Lake closes on a song that’s as melodically beautiful as it is headscratching (“The Chicks Just Showed Up”) and a multi-part rocker called “Counting on a Blowout”. If we’re lucky enough to see Guitar pick up some steam in 2025, it’ll be due to the same Saia Kuli instincts that got them to We’re Headed to the Lake in the first place. (Bandcamp link)

Giant Day – Alarm

Release date: October 10th
Record label: Elephant 6
Genre: Art rock, art pop, psychedelia, synth-rock, dream pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Out of Hand

Derek Almstead and Emily Growden are a pair of longtime Elephant 6 musicians who, upon leaving Athens for rural Pennsylvania and becoming “caretakers of a family farm”, started up a new project called Giant Day. The debut Giant Day album, last year’s Glass Narcissus, sported a “dense electronic, post-punk, and futuristic synth-rock” sound (as I said at the time) that wasn’t totally out of line with, say, the darker side of The Olivia Tremor Control (in which Almstead has played), but was still fairly distinct from the majority of “Elephant 6 bands”. Merely a year later, Giant Day are back with Alarm, a sophomore album that doubles down on dark synth-based indie rock music with copious electronic elements. 

The pop moments are there, albeit often in unusual ways–“Out of Hand” kicks off the album with a jangly, college rock-style guitar riff, but the song that follows is a much more nervous post-punk creation. Almstead references Cocteau Twins as an inspiration for “Golden Times”, an influence I hear throughout the record (aside from the aforementioned song, perhaps most obviously in “Back to the Corner”). The funk-post-punk of “Devil Dog” and the minimal synthpop “Spite 28” are a little brighter, although the inspired groove-based instrumentals undergirding nearly all of Alarm help bridge the lighter and darker moments. Giant Day may not be plugging in and churning out “classic Elephant 6 music”, but they’re pushing boundaries decades after the label’s most canonical works, which seems even more appropriate. (Elephant 6 link)

Massage – Coaster

Release date: October 10th
Record label: Mt.St.Mtn./Bobo Integral/Prefect
Genre: Jangle pop, power pop, college rock, folk rock
Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital
Pull Track: No North Star

It’s been a minute since we’ve heard from the Los Angeles indie pop quintet Massage–specifically, the year 2021, in which they put out both an LP and an EP (though they did reissue their debut album, 2018’s Oh Boy, in 2022). They fit right into the current West Coast jangle pop revival (that impressive lineup of labels teaming together to put out Coaster should give that away), but Massage have gotten there by doing their own thing, one that pulls together pastoral folk rock, New Order-influenced melodicism, and plenty of “college rock”. On their third LP, Coaster, it’s apparent that the group (vocalist/guitarists Alex Naidus and Andrew Romano, vocalist/keyboardist Gabrielle Ferrer, bassist David Rager, and drummer Natalie de Almeida) have yet to miss a beat–Massage deliberately unfold their jangle pop flag on sprawling opener “No North Star” only to veer right into the synths and Peter Hook basslines of “Daffy Duck”. There are bands who’ll spend their entire career trying to nail the Teenage Fanclub guitar pop sound as neatly as Massage do on “Hang on to That Feeling”–and it’s not even one of my favorite tracks on Coaster. Not that it really matters–I’m equally likely to be impressed by the simple jangle of “Psychic”, the “big music” vibes of “Fading Out”, or the melancholy melodies of “We’re Existential” on any listen. (Bandcamp link)

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