Pressing Concerns: Sam Woodring, Cusp, E.R. Visit, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

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Welcome to the first Pressing Concerns of the week! It features new albums from Cusp, E.R. Visit, and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, and a new EP from Sam Woodring. It’s all pretty good, in my opinion.

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.

Sam Woodring – Mechanical Bull

Release date: October 17th
Record label: Pretzle
Genre: Singer-songwriter, folk
Formats: CD, digital
Pull Track: Back Then

Mister Goblin is dead; long live Sam Woodring. From 2018 to 2024, the artist formerly known as Sam Goblin made a unique mixture of post-hardcore, folk rock, and guitar pop under the “Mister Goblin” moniker, including two of my favorite albums of this decade so far. The D.C.-area-originating Woodring spent time in Indiana and Florida before ending up in Louisville, Kentucky (where he also plays in the band Deady); whether it was the change in scenery or something else, Woodring announced he was retiring the Mister Goblin name (for the moment at least) earlier this year. Mechanical Bull is the first record Woodring has ever put out under his own name (well, first and middle name, apparently), and it’s certainly the furthest he’s wandered yet from his punk/math rock/Exploding in Sound-core roots. Even the bedroom pop touches of 2021’s Four People in an Elevator and One of Them Is the Devil wouldn’t prepare us for these five stark songs, recorded by Deady member Chyppe Crosby and featuring nothing but Woodring’s voice and acoustic guitar.

It’s not like there weren’t acoustic moments on those Mister Goblin records, and Woodring is still the same songwriter even in his “solo troubadour” era; gentle folk playing aside, opening track “1,000 Ways to Die” is full of Mister Goblin-isms like images of “spider eggs in your eyes” and references to both Faces of Death and “Nick Cannon’s Wild N’ Out”. As understated as a writer like Woodring could ever be, Mechanical Bull takes us on a flatly un-nostalgic trip down memory lane in “Back Then” (“Back then they didn’t want me / Now I’m old / … / I don’t want them either now / It’s just a circle jerk of jerk offs anyhow”), to another entry into the Woodring “songs taking place in or near rock shows” canon with “Wait Outside”, and, most scarily of all, to “2014” (“‘We Dem Boyz’ ‘Move That D’ blaring from every speaker in twos”). Woodring has called this EP “the best songs I’ve written” and there’s plenty to be proud of here–it can’t be easy to write something as direct as “You’ll Live” and as dodgy as “2014”, play them back to back without any accompaniment, and have it all work out. Mechanical Bull is something new, to be sure, but I wouldn’t call Sam Woodring’s first release a debut. (Bandcamp link)

Cusp – What I Want Doesn’t Want Me Back

Release date: October 17th
Record label: Exploding in Sound
Genre: Art rock, folk rock, math rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Give Up Your Garden

When Cusp first got on my radar in 2021, they were a quartet from Rochester led by vocalist/guitarist Jen Bender and making noisy but punchy indie rock that I explicitly compared to Exploding in Sound Records’ discography. A lot has changed in the time since that debut EP, Spill–Bender and guitarist Gaelen Bates relocated to Chicago, added bassist Matt Manes, keyboardist/synth player Tessa O’Connell, and drummer Tommy Moore to their lineup, and released a slew of new music: 2023’s You Can Do It All, last year’s Thanks So Much EP, and now What I Want Doesn’t Want Me Back, their second LP and first for (who else?) Exploding in Sound.

It’s been a steady progression, but jumping into What I Want Doesn’t Want Me Back (the first album made entirely by the Chicago iteration of Cusp) reveals a different band entirely, one that has immersed themselves in the world of kind-of-“poppy”, kind-of-“arty” Windy City indie rock–the album, it should be noted, was recorded at Electrical Audio and at Chicago mainstay Seth Engel’s Ohmstead Recording. The common thread between the synth-heavy indie pop opening track “Healthy Living”, the Ratboys-like indie-alt-country “The Upper Hand”, and the doom-tinged fuzz of “I Like My Odds”? Well, they’re all quite good–I’m not sure if I can come up with anything else that would connect them, and especially not with further disparate material like the breezy folk rock of “Give Up Your Garden” and the quick punk-pop detour “Lie Down”. However Cusp got to What I Want Doesn’t Want Me Back, though, it sounds like where they should be. (Bandcamp link)

E.R. Visit – My Children Will Ignore You, My Children Will Type Amen

Release date: October 24th
Record label: LocalHost3000/Funnybone
Genre: Psychedelic folk, experimental pop, lo-fi pop, prog-pop
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Tea Water

Stone Filipczak is one-half of the annoyingly-named Philadelphia folk-pop duo @, and, though I haven’t really gotten into his more well-known band, the debut release from his new solo project E.R. Visit caught my attention nonetheless. My Children Will Ignore You, My Children Will Type Amen came about parallel to @ taking off via a 2023 album and 2024 EP, and followed Filipczak as he moved to Philly from Baltimore (forced out of his apartment by a landlord who “believed Filipczak was a spy”). An ambitious “bedroom pop” album, My Children Will Ignore You, My Children Will Type Amen dresses itself in laid-back acoustic colors at first but throws orchestral pop music, psychedelia, and bits of classic 60s prog and pop into its twenty-five-minute journey, too. Easy strummers like “Tea Water”, Animal Collective/Bruiser & Bicycle-ish psych-folk like “Wind Through the Trees”, bursts of lo-fi angst like “Absolute Midnight”–My Children Will Ignore You, My Children Will Type Amen never fully settles down, but there’s a picture of Stone Filipczak that emerges through the change-ups. E.R. Visit is a pop act at its core, with even its most challenging material (the eight-minute campfire psych glow of “Bracken Mountain Funeral Pyre”) displaying a devotion to brightness and melody. It’s a brief but promising glimpse of a new-to-me songwriter, to the point where I may indeed find myself listening to a band named @ sooner or later. (Bandcamp link)

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson – Live Like the Sky

Release date: October 24th
Record label: You’ve Changed
Genre: Art rock, dream pop, folk rock, singer-songwriter
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: White Kites and Sky Blue

I first heard the Michi Saagig Nishinaabeg writer and musician Leanne Betasamosae Simpson via her first album for You’ve Changed Records, 2021’s Theory of Ice. Loosely-speaking a folk record, it was a forceful but gentle collection of writing about Canada (and much more) from a sharp writer’s perspective. Simpson’s latest record, Live Like the Sky, follows the thread of Theory of Ice but drifts even further from recognizably “folk music”. Simpson cites fellow Indigenous Canadian acts like OMBIIGIZI and Status / Non Status as inspirations for the music for this album, and it comes through on a collection of songs that owe just as much to dream pop and classic indie/alternative rock (which she says she heard via the “static and poor reception” of Toronto radio stations while growing up in rural Ontario) as folk. An impressive cast of Canadian musicians (including Steven Lambke, Nick Ferrio, and Simpson’s sister Ansley) helps shape the music on large-sounding, dynamic rock songs like “White Kites and Sky Blue” and “Niizhoziibing” and more electronic-tinged dream pop ones like “Pyrrhic Victories” and “Murder of Crows”, but it’s the quietly intense frontperson and writer that holds the tapestry together. This is the kind of rich LP that can’t really be done justice in two-hundred-odd words, but I’m parking it in Pressing Concerns in hopes that it reaches the right people nonetheless. (Bandcamp link)

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