Pressing Concerns: Charlie Kaplan, Aarktica, Friendship Commanders, People Mover

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Hey, folks. It’s the first Pressing Concerns of the week. Thanks for joining us. We’ve got new albums from Charlie Kaplan, Aarktica, Friendship Commanders, and People Mover below, which I think you’ll enjoy.

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.

Charlie Kaplan – A Hat Upon the Bed

Release date: October 10th
Record label: Glamour Gowns
Genre: Art rock, folk rock, psychedelia
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: No More Mistakes

I introduced the blog to New York musician Charlie Kaplan with his 2024 LP Eternal Repeater. In addition to his work running Glamour Gowns Records and playing bass in sophisti-pop group Office Culture, he’s also a heady and accomplished folk-indie-rock singer-songwriter in his own right, and those who enjoyed Eternal Repeater should be overjoyed to learn that Kaplan is back less than a year later with a sprawling fourteen-song, fifty-minute album partially inspired by the 2013 death of his father. Well, maybe “overjoyed” isn’t the word, but A Hat Upon the Bed is an exciting leap forward for the already fairly ambitious musician, as Kaplan and his recognizable group of collaborators (including pianist Winston Cook-Wilson of Office Culture, bassist Julian Cubillos, guest guitarist Nico Hedley, and Nate Mendelsohn of Market in the engineer’s chair) trust us to keep up with a sneakily grandiose LP.

We’re kind of thrown right into it at the beginning between the stark orchestral folk of the title track, the noisy torrent masking “Halley”, and the five-minute, meandering “Transmission”. “Have a Nice Day”, while still fairly intense, is the first relatively sunny moment on A Hat Upon the Bed, and the six-minute “Is It Gonna Be Alright” is large enough to incorporate some of those moments, too. Stick with Kaplan and you’ll find a couple of strong pop songs hidden in the middle of A Hat Upon the Bed’s morass–the back-to-back “Top of the Tree” and “No More Mistakes” land somewhere between the polished studio pop of Office Culture and Wilco, another studio-wielding band I’ve compared Kaplan to in the past. If A Hat Upon the Bed comes across as a little more “challenging” overall than Eternal Repeater, it’s in an organic way. It’s where the material took Charlie Kaplan and his band, and we’ve come all this way with them. (Bandcamp link)

Aarktica – Ecstatic Lightsongs

Release date: October 3rd
Record label: HanaqPacha
Genre: Dream pop, slowcore, post-rock, post-punk, experimental
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Trick of the Light

I wrote about Aarktica in 2022, when the group (largely the project of Los Angeles’ Jon DeRosa) released a gigantic double album called We Will Find the Light. It followed a relatively quiet period for Aarktica, but it was far from their first release–they’ve been making records in the realms of post-rock, ambient, and slowcore since 1999. Aarktica has thankfully stayed active in the wake of We Will Find the Light–they released the instrumental album Paeans in 2023, and they’re back with another (loosely-speaking) “rock” album called Ecstatic Lightsongs this month. With the help of cellist Henrik Meierkord, drummer Mike Pride, bassist Lewis Pesacov, and vocalist Britt Warner, Ecstatic Lightsongs is DeRosa’s attempt to make an album inspired by “classic darkwave and art-rock”, naming uncategorizable iconoclasts like Hood, The Durutti Column, and (perhaps most importantly) Talk Talk as touchpoints.

Compared to We Will Find the Light, in which slow folk songs were (more or less) cleanly separated by ambient pieces, Ecstatic Lightsongs is a more holistic mix of folk, rock, post-rock, and ambient music. The record’s first two songs are both overwhelming pieces of slowcore/art rock, and while “Why Say Anything?” and “Ecstatic Light Transmission” can be described as folk and ambient music respectively, the cavernous acoustic sound of the former and the twinkling instrumental melodies of the latter muddy the waters just a little further. The slightly psychedelic swirl of the bleary-eyed orchestral folk rock “Laughing in the Rain” is a beautiful closer, although the “bonus track”–an Aarktica-fied version of The Chameleons’ “Second Skin”–works as a coda as well. There’s a weight to all of Ecstatic Lightsongs, but not one that makes it a chore to pick up. (Bandcamp link)

Friendship Commanders – BEAR

Release date: October 10th
Record label: Magnetic Eye
Genre: Hard rock, stoner rock, noise rock, alt-rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Dripping Silver

Buick Audra and Jerry Roe are plenty busy on their own (the former with a genre-spanning solo career, the latter as a prolific session drummer), but the work the Nashville duo do together as Friendship Commanders is for what they’re best-known (or it ought to be if it isn’t). The duo have evolved from a scrappy, punk-influenced alt-rock group to a heavy and melodic stoner/sludge rock band (something underscored by a recent remixed re-release of their 2018 sophomore album, BILL). Audra’s writing tends towards the opaque and vague, real emotions but without obvious receipts to their origins–this contrasts with her quite visceral and specific quotes about what inspired her lyrics on BEAR, the latest Friendship Commanders album. It’s effectively a furious concept album about women who devote themselves to upholding patriarchal societal norms at the expense of their own gender and a vow by Audra not to be “one of them”. It’s a heavy and complex subject that permeates some really great rock music from opening track “Keeping Score” (“I’m not seventeen anymore, but I’m keeping score” is, I imagine, a dispatch from a life of witnessing the kinds of actions that inspired BEAR) to closing song “Dead & Discarded Girls”, which is about as evocative as Friendship Commanders get. It’s something to reflect on and an antidote to the all-pervasive black-and-white mentality we’d all do well to challenge, but, just as importantly, it rocks. (Bandcamp link)

People Mover – Cane Trash

Release date: September 12th
Record label: Little Lunch
Genre: Indie pop, jangle pop, lo-fi indie rock, garage rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: James St

We’ve got some good news: they’re still making good indie pop down in Australia. People Mover are a trio from Brisbane made up of siblings Lu Sergiacomi (vocals/guitar) and Dan Sergiacomi (drums) along with “good mate” Billy McCulloch on bass; their first release was a three-song self-titled 7” back in 2021 on Little Lunch Records (Olivia’s World, Soft Covers, Pretty in Pink), and four years later we get Cane Trash, their first LP. Little Lunch refers to the album’s sound as “nonchalant Australian indie-punk”, which is accurate enough that I’m reprinting here; Lu’s vocals are droll but melodic, the instrumentals are capable, barebones, and just a little roughed-up, and the songwriting is subtle but sneakily quite strong. They’re not as “twee” as some of Little Lunch’s other bands, instead adding a garage-y propulsion to their music that reminds me of acts like The Small Intestines and The Courtneys (whom People Mover mention as an influence). Opening track “James St” is People Mover at their cleanest and most buttoned-up, but there’s plenty of “pop” in the sloppier, fuzzier material that follows it. Occasional slapdash vibes aside, though, I never believe that People Mover don’t know what they’re doing on Cane Trash. (Bandcamp link)

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