Pressing Concerns: The Felt Tips, Missed Cues, Dylan Mondegreen, Yuasa-Exide

Posted byrosyoverdrivePosted inPressing ConcernsTags:, , , , , , , ,

For the second Pressing Concerns of the week, we’ve flagged new albums from Missed Cues, Dylan Mondegreen, and Yuasa-Exide, as well as a new reissue from The Felt Tips. If by chance you missed yesterday’s blog post (featuring Sueño Púrpura, Goodbye Wudaokou, Generifus, and Left Tracks), you ought to check that one 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 Felt Tips – Living and Growing (Reissue)

Release date: October 17th
Record label: Unspun Heroes
Genre: Indie pop, jangle pop, twee
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Garden of Roses

Since 2024 I’ve written about two albums from Pat’s Alternative Bus Tour, the solo project of a Glasgow singer-songwriter named Andrew Paterson. After a decade or so away from releasing music, Virtual Virgins and World to Rights were both strong, catchy, and amusing indie pop records that were a return to form from the former frontperson of The Felt Tips. On the heels of all this new music, Paterson’s old band is seeing their debut album, 2010’s Living and Growing, reissued and given a vinyl release for the first time thanks to Unspun Heroes. If you’ve enjoyed those Pat’s Alternative Bus Tour records, you’ll be pleased to hear that Paterson sounded virtually the same a decade and a half ago, with the more full-band (but still very indie pop) sound being the primary difference.

Guitarist Miguel Navarro, drummer Kevin Carroll, and bassist Neil Masson give Living and Growing an electric jangle pop/C86-influenced sound, carrying on a lineage Paterson is happy to make clear via “Dear Morrissey”, a song about the limits of those formative influences that unsurprisingly still sounds pretty prescient today. It really is remarkable how ageless Paterson’s voice apparently is, although there are subtle differences in his songwriting in parts of Living and Growing. There’s a bluntness to songs like “Silver Spoon” and “Not Tonight” that works well in the full-band setting but doesn’t crop up in Pat’s Alternative Bus Tour as much–and yet, there are diatribes, cyphers, and Scottish tapestries to be had in songs like “Lifeskills” and “Engaged for a Visa” nonetheless. It’s a time capsule and it’s good indie pop, for all who appreciate both such attempts at hanging on to a bit of youth. (Bandcamp link)

Missed Cues – Don’t Turn Off the Lights

Release date: August 22nd
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Pop punk, punk rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Don’t Turn Off the Lights

I’ve got good news for those of you who enjoy the more haggard side of pop punk. It’s called Missed Cues, a new quartet from New Haven and Middleton, Connecticut (band member names: Matt, Tim, Marty and Matt) who’ve just put out their debut album, Don’t Turn Off the Lights (engineered by New England singer-songwriter Ezra Cohen). The band referenced Lookout Records, The Replacements, and Tom Petty when they sent this album to me, and the resulting no-frills, thirty-one minute LP seems determined to get me to work the term “orgcore” into this review somehow. Words like “workmanlike” and “unassuming” come to mind with regards to Missed Cues’ lead vocalist(s) (see, I can’t even tell if there are more than one), but don’t let that fool you–they’re very good at bashing out frayed power-pop-punk hits. You can’t fake this kind of thing–it takes true devotees to rip through a dozen of these, from the bouncy 90s gruff-punk opening title track to the Lookout-worthy spleening of “It’s a Long Way” to the rueful “You and I” to the sped-up sprint “In Your Head” to the power pop winner “Don’t Wanna Break Your Heart” (positively handclap-worthy, that one). Missed Cues don’t seem like ones to show off, but Don’t Turn Off the Lights is a shining example of how to pull this kind of thing off regardless. (Bandcamp link)

Dylan Mondegreen – A Sound Rings True

Release date: September 5th
Record label: Fastcut/Saiko
Genre: Soft rock, sophisti-pop, synthpop, indie pop, twee, chamber pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Moleskine Notebook

Dylan Mondegreen is Børge Sildnes, a longtime Oslo-based indie pop musician who’s been making albums in the realms of folk pop, soft rock, and chamber pop since 2007. A Sound Rings True is Mondegreen’s sixth LP and his first since 2018; he writes that “vocal issues” impaired his ability to sing for a “few years” and thus the instrumentals of A Sound Rings True had more time than normal to incubate. Without much familiarity with Mondegreen’s previous discography, I can’t tell how much more comparatively “developed” the songs of A Sound Rings True are, but I do know that the incredibly-polished, synth-forward 80s pop (some call it “sophsti-pop”) sound of this album is incredibly apt for Mondegreen’s songs. The music is still fairly demure and delicate enough to reflect a singer-songwriter well-versed in the realms of “twee” and chamber pop, but when the garish synths and smooth-jazz saxophones show up in “Moleskine Notebook”, Mondegreen has done a good job of paving the road to get there without a hitch. Eighties debt aside, A Sound Rings True could’ve come out during any point in the past twenty-five years as part of the “lush indie pop” universe, and a more sketched-out instrumental palette hasn’t removed Mondegreen from the more direct end of that spectrum. (Bandcamp link)

Yuasa-Exide – Go to Hell Encyclopaedia Britannica

Release date: August 29th
Record label: Round Bale Recordings/Ape Sanctuary
Genre: Garage rock, fuzz rock, lo-fi indie rock
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Wrong End

It’s high time we check back in on Douglas Busson and his Yuasa-Exide project. A brief recent history of the Twin Cities-based musician: seventeen records of no-fi, clanging, fuzzy, frequently catchy indie rock from 2022 to 2024, eventually linking with Round Bale Recordings last year to release some of them via cassette. 2025 has seen “only” three Yuasa-Exide records so far: Hyper at the Gates of Dawn in March, a split cassette with Madison’s Boo/Hiss in July, and now Go to Hell Encyclopaedia Britannica, once again out on tape via Round Bale. If you’ve heard any previous Yuasa-Exide album, you shouldn’t be surprised that Busson and his team of Twin Cities-area collaborators have turned in another collection of tinny, garbled garage rock and lo-fi pop; perhaps it is a little more refined and ambitious than the slew of earlier Yuasa-Exide albums (it’s looking like it’ll be the only full-length we’ll get this quarter–that’s a lot of weight to put on it!). You’ll get the slacker fuzz-fests where you have to strain a bit to hear the melodies, but stuff like “More Surreal” and (especially) “Wrong End” feels really automatic and immediate. Yuasa-Exide were born into distortion–they know when to ride it and when to cut right through. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Leave a comment