Pressing Concerns: Teenage Tom Petties, Joel Cusumano, Fanclubwallet, Verity Den

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Thursday Pressing Concerns! Four albums coming out tomorrow, from Teenage Tom Petties, Joel Cusumano, Fanclubwallet, and Verity Den. Check ’em out, and if you missed either of this week’s earlier blog posts (Monday: Sueño Púrpura, Goodbye Wudaokou, Generifus, and Left Tracks; Tuesday: The Felt Tips, Missed Cues, Dylan Mondegreen, and Yuasa-Exide), dial those up, 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.

Teenage Tom Petties – Rally the Tropes

Release date: October 24th
Record label: Repeating Cloud/Safe Suburban Home
Genre: Fuzz pop, power pop, garage rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: East Coast Comebacks

Teenage Tom Petties albums seem to be a yearly occurrence–Tom Brown has dropped one every year since 2022’s self-titled debut, and Rally the Tropes make it four for four. This is all, of course, in addition to the Bath, England power pop musician’s solo work as Lone Striker and his time co-leading Rural France–with all that in mind, I can’t really complain that Rally the Tropes is “only” eighteen minutes long. It’s also the second Teenage Tom Petties album with the full five-piece bicontinental band (guitarists Galen Richmond and James Brown, bassist Jim Quinn, and drummer Jeff Hamm), and, like 2023’s Hotbox Daydreams, it was recorded by Bradford Krieger at Big Nice Studio in Rhode Island. It may seem like there’s a steady stream of new music from Tom Brown that he just can’t turn off, but he specifically wrote the songs of Rally the Tropes with this full-band New England jaunt in mind–after a pair of self-recorded albums in last year’s Teenage Tom Petties LP and the Lone Striker one, Brown is ready to once again put his songs in his friends’ hands to elevate them.

Even more so than the garage-y, punk-y, jangly power pop sound of Rally the Tropes, the band’s presence is felt via Brown’s writing; it’s communal in a winking (read: British) way, from the triumphant slacker-pop opening of “American Breakfast” (“I’m glad to be involved in it, I’m glad to play my part” goes the refrain, after Brown gets situated with a rental car and motel coffee) to a dizzying different kind of trip in “Kudzu Pop” (“dropping acid at the Peach Pit show / In my Bon Scott jacket phase”) to the excitement of “Teenage Thin Lizzys” (“Oh my god, it’s happening to me and all my friends / We’re all together and I hope it never ends”) to the victory lap closing track “East Coast Comebacks” (“Had some palpitations for lunch / … / In the Miller High Life we trust”; I do worry about Tom Brown’s long-term health sometimes).

The opener and closer feel like bookends for a concept album about making a garage-punk-power-pop album in New England–and in between them are a bunch of brief but great examples of the fruits of the Teenage Tom Petties’ labor. I’m personally partial to “Tough Cookies”, an amusing, incredibly catchy mid-tempo garage rock stomp in which the Beastie Boys memorably catch a stray (but there’s also “Faculty”, a song that sounds even more like Thin Lizzy than the song that’s called “Teenage Thin Lizzys”). It’s “East Coast Comebacks” that really sells Rally the Tropes as a mini-masterpiece, though–it starts with some arena rock-style Guided by Voices chords and pumped-in cheers (and Brown soaks the lyrics in beer to boot). It’s about as “indulgent” as a group like the Teenage Tom Petties can get–and though it may be Brown’s pen to paper, it’s the rest of his band giving him the freedom to fly on Rally the Tropes. (Bandcamp link)

Joel Cusumano – Waxworld

Release date: October 24th
Record label: Dandy Boy
Genre: Jangle pop, power pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Two Arrows

Power pop fans who read this blog may have heard Oakland musician Joel Cusumano via his work as the guitarist in R.E. Seraphin, or maybe they’re familiar with him as the frontperson of Sob Stories. Cusumano’s first-ever solo album, Waxworld, cements him as a key figure in the Bay Area indie pop scene I’ve written about extensively on this blog, as members of Chime School, Ryli, Yea-Ming and the Rumours, and The Pennys, among others, guest on the LP. Waxworld is a great spotlight-earning debut for a consistent indie pop practitioner, confirming that Cusumano can write jangle pop as well as his associates but also revealing that he’s a much different bandleader than the likes of Ray Seraphin or Andy Pastalaniec. 

The more immediate songs on Waxworld are some of the best guitar pop I’ve heard this year–the bottle-rocket power pop of opening track “Two Arrows”, the triumphant Martin Newell-worthy jangle of “Mary Katharine”, the self-contained wistful guitar pop meditations of “Another Time, Another Place” and “Maybe in a Different World” (which kind of reminds me of the last Spirit Night album). The mythology, art history, and religious references dotted throughout Waxworld reflect somebody alight with the kind of inspiration that, while far removed from Cusumano’s direct musical influences, has historically resulted in some of the most interesting “college rock” and/or indie pop music. I see why Cusumano tapped the titular uncanny lifelike art form to represent Waxworld–it’s a good metaphor, but it’s also an entire medium beyond that. No doubt an intriguing prospect for somebody seeking to make something striking with these well-worn tools. (Bandcamp link)

Fanclubwallet – Living While Dying

Release date: October 24th
Record label: Lauren
Genre: Indie pop, dream pop, bedroom pop, synthpop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Me Time

After beginning as the solo bedroom pop project of Hannah Judge in the early 2020s, the Ottawa-based Fanclubwallet recently swelled to a four-piece band also made up of guitarist Eric Graham, drummer Michael Watson, and bassist Nat Reid, a lineup that made its debut with last year’s Our Bodies Paint Traffic Lines EP. Living While Dying, Fanclubwallet’s second LP, accomplishes a few milestones–it’s their first album for Lauren Records, and the first recorded as a quartet (Judge and Watson made 2022’s You Have Got to Be Kidding Me as a duo). The title of Living While Dying refers to Judge’s experience being diagnosed and living with chronic illness, and the vehicle with which Fanclubwallet tackle this hurdle is with their by-now-recognizable dreamy, vibrant, but somewhat chilly kind of indie pop. Bleary-eyed but determined, Fanclubwallet tackle quick-paced nerve-pop (“Cotton Mouth”), bouncy, almost danceable synthpop (“Know You Anymore”), and straight-up gorgeously-unfolding dream pop (“Head On”). Single “New Distraction” desperately searches for the balm of its title to the tune of, well, just about as close as a band like Fanclubwallet can get to “mall punk”, and a pair of dark synthscapes in “I Love the Hell I Know” and “Guts” give way to one last pounding indie pop closer in “Me Time”. “Me Time” is an abrupt ending, both musically and thematically–Judge is “setting up for…a little downtime”, but it’s clear from the rest of the song that she hasn’t done it yet. And so it (it being life, death, various struggles, Fanclubwallet, a growing list of indie pop bangers) continues. (Bandcamp link)

Verity Den – Wet Glass

Release date: October 24th
Record label: Amish
Genre: Experimental rock, post-rock, dream pop, 90s indie rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Green Drag

Last March brought the self-titled debut album from Verity Den, a North Carolina trio of musicians with backgrounds in both indie rock and experimental music. Verity Den reflected the varied talents of Casey Proctor, Trevor Reece, and Mike Wallace, ranging from pop-forward shoegaze to post-rock and ambient territory; not long after its release, live member Reed Benjamin joined on full-time to make the band a quartet and work on a sophomore LP began. Wet Glass picks up where Verity Den left off, more or less, merging odder instrumental turns with catchy Yo La Tengo/Sonic Youth-esque fuzz rock and dream pop in album opener “Vacant Lot” and the title track. In between punches like the wiry post-punk rocker “Spit Red” and underwater fuzz-pop of “Green Drag” are the trickier ones–we’ve got an ambient noise collage sitting in the track number three slot with “Unresolved Mystery”, and the uncertain haze of “Push Down Hard / Tess II” stretches for seven minutes. There’s something compelling and even tangible to be glimpsed throughout the latter’s journey, though, much like how “To Trees” and “Highway Fifty Four” close the book on Wet Glass by drifting in and out of lucidity. Verity Den aren’t the first ones to mix indie rock with the further reaches of music, but the balancing act they’ve been honing on two LPs and counting is impressive and not to be taken for granted. (Bandcamp link)

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