Pressing Concerns: Maneka, Camp Trash, Radioactivity, Andrés Miguel Cervantes

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Welcome to the Thursday Pressing Concerns, featuring three albums coming out tomorrow, October 31st (from Camp Trash, Radioactivity, and Andrés Miguel Cervantes), plus one album that came out yesterday (Maneka). If you missed either of this week’s earlier blog posts (Monday’s featured Sam Woodring, Cusp, E.R. Visit, and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, and Tuesday’s featured Oruã, Suzie True, Garden of Love, and Six Flags Guy), 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.

Maneka – bathes and listens

Release date: October 29th
Record label: Topshelf
Genre: Art rock, slowcore, experimental rock, fuzz rock, 90s indie rock, math rock, Maneka
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Yung Yeller

The Washington, D.C.-originating, Philadelphia-based musician Devin McKnight has been making music as Maneka since the mid-2010s; I’ve long associated him with the noisy, fuzzed-out indie rock of Exploding in Sound Records (who put out the first two Maneka records, as well as music from other bands McKnight has played in like Speedy Ortiz and Grass Is Green). Much of Maneka lands in the realms of slowcore-ish, greyscale indie rock, but the project has always been a bit more than that, and 2022’s Dark Matters reflected that by incorporating jazz and experimental pop. McKnight’s newest album as Maneka, bathes and listens, was recorded with Alex Farrar, who’s becoming the go-to producer for modern slowcore and/or shoegaze-inspired bands (Wednesday, Shallowater, Colin Miller), and is subsequently a renewal of vows with distorted, 90s-influenced indie rock.

bathes and listens doesn’t feel like a retreat from Dark Matters’ stranger impulses–it’s still kind of hard to get a handle on Maneka, even though it’s pretty easy to understand that “Shallowing” and “Dimelo” are supposed to rock, so they rock (the former in a slow-burn kind of way, the latter a blazing inferno from the get-go). As McKnight moves past that initial gauntlet-throwing, we get a bit more reserved with some acoustic/folk-y-touched tracks (“Sad Bot”, “Pony”), and the harmonics in the mid-tempo “Yung Yeller” are some of the most pleasing sounds I’ve heard this year. The wild, dreamy, saxophone-infused “5225” and “Why I Play 2K/Land Back” ensure that bathes and listens is an interesting and lively record right up to the end, the surprising atmospherics of the former giving way to an almost metal introduction to the closing track. The nature of the music Devin McKnight makes will probably keep him “underappreciated” territory, but bathes and listens can certainly hold its own against some of the biggest names currently making music that is (correctly or otherwise) called “shoegaze”. (Bandcamp link)

Camp Trash – Two Hundred Thousand Dollars

Release date: October 31st
Record label: Count Your Lucky Stars
Genre: Pop punk, power pop, emo
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Bigger Better Drug

I’ve been enjoying the musical stylings of Florida pop punk/power pop/etc band Camp Trash for the entirety of Rosy Overdrive’s run–I highlighted their first EP Downtiming in 2021 and first LP The Long Way, the Slow Way in 2022, but they also had a good song on a four-song split last year and they put out a split EP with Dowsing earlier this year.  On their second album, Two Hundred Thousand Dollars, founding members Bryan Gorman, Levi Bradford, and Keegan Bradford are joined by new drummer Kyle Meggison (Worst Party Ever), but the four of them (with help from Pretty Rude/Taking Meds’ James Palko, who recorded the album) continue to steer the Camp Trash ship into the familiar waters of “indie rock” with bits of poppy alt-rock and guitar pop of several stripes. 

If Two Hundred Thousand Dollars differs from its predecessors, it probably has to do with cohesion; supposedly, it’s a “loosely connected collection of stories” about “hapless con men, gamblers, low level mobsters, and cult members”, and while I couldn’t tell you any plot points or anything, the images we get glimpses of are certainly befitting of a band with a love of Mountain Goats and Hold Steady-style storytelling. The tracks flow into each other in a way that the overexcited The Long Way, the Slow Way didn’t necessarily do–it’s hard to pick out highlights, but the Sugar-flavored “Bigger Better Drug” and requisite jangler “Alibi” both stick out. I’m also quite into the closing track, “Heaven or Wisconsin”, which starts out with an arena rock-riff (or, at least, a riff I’d want to hear in an arena). The song that follows that attention-grabbing opening is vintage Camp Trash though, a serious pop band first and foremost no matter how many squealing guitars they sneak into their hooks. (Bandcamp link)

Radioactivity – Time Won’t Bring Me Down

Release date: October 31st
Record label: Dirtnap/Wild Honey
Genre: Garage punk, garage rock, power pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Time Won’t Bring Me Down

Jeff Burke is revered in certain circles for the music he’s made via a collection of bands since the early 2000s, perhaps most famously The Marked Men (four albums in the 2000s) and Radioactivity (two LPs in the 2010s). The Austin-based musician’s groups have consistently pursued an incredibly pleasing mixture of garage rock, power pop, and punk rock that we maybe take for granted now, but was hardly all that common when those bands were getting started. It’s been ten years since the last Radioactivity album, but Burke and his team of fellow longtime Texas garage rockers (Mark Ryan, Daniel Fried, and Gregory Rutherford) pick things up effortlessly on Time Won’t Bring Me Down, their long-awaited third LP. There’s a workmanlike quality to this eleven-track album, the band playing these songs in a straightforward manner and letting them speak for themselves. The title track and “Watch Me Bleed” have the propulsion and energy of punk rock to be sure, but there’s something a little more reserved about them that only gets more pronounced in the less-speedy tracks like “This One Time” and “I Thought”. Radioactivity could be a beloved power pop band or a punk band, but Time Won’t Bring Me Down is clearly the album they wanted to make themselves–one that gives them the freedom to jump from no-fat quick pop hits like “One Day” to the nearly-five-minute garage rock odyssey of “Shell”. They know that there are those of us who can hang with that. (Bandcamp link)

Andrés Miguel Cervantes – Songs for the Seance

Release date: October 31st
Record label: Speakeasy Studios SF
Genre: Folk, blues, country, singer-songwriter
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Omen

Andrés Miguel Cervantes’ first album, 2022’s The Crossing, was the first album released by Speakeasy Studios SF, the record label founded by founded by producer and Aislers Set member Alicia Vanden Heuvel that has gone onto put out records from The Lost Days, Galore, and The Softies, among others. I missed The Crossing when it came out, but I’m fully on board with Songs for the Seance, Cervantes’ second full-length. Like The Crossing, Songs for the Seance was recorded with a healthy list of instrumentalists (Heuvel on bass and percussion, Jacob Aranda on pedal steel and violin, Hall McCann and Graham Norwood on guitar, Raphi Gottesman on drums, and Jessie Leigh Smith on harmonica), but it’s still an intimate country-folk record that emphasizes the singer-songwriter at the center. At his folkiest, Cervantes combines the stark, steady atmosphere of Leonard Cohen with something more “western”, and on the other end of the spectrum (seen in the LP’s first three songs), there’s a more full-sounding country-blues practitioner. I get a glimpse of empty-country folk singers like Damien Jurado and Richard Buckner in songs like “A Silver Wind”, although the musician who’s singing “A Thing for Charge” (for instance) is drawing from something older than them (probably even earlier than Townes Van Zandt, of whom that song reminds me the most). Songs for the Seance, indeed. (Bandcamp link)

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