Pressing Concerns: Dazy, Orillia, Weird Magazines, Glo-worm

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The first Pressing Concerns of the week! On a Monday, even! We’ve got a new album from Orillia, new EPs from Dazy and Weird Magazines, and a reissue from Glo-worm below. Check ’em out!

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.

Dazy – Bad Penny

Release date: October 21st
Record label: Lame-O
Genre: Power pop, Madchester, alt-dance, fuzz pop, pop punk
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: I Don’t Wanna Think About the Money

Dazy’s James Goodson releases music on his own timeline, one must respect that. After building a lot of anticipation via earlier digital singles, Dazy did do the “long-awaited debut album” thing with 2022’s OUTOFBODY, but since then the Richmond fuzz-pop legend has gone back to the realms of surprise-releases, EPs, and outtake collections. It makes it hard to keep up with Dazy as an album-centric blog sometimes, but I’m certainly not ignoring Bad Penny, a seven-song, twenty-two minute EP that’s Goodson’s most substantial release in over two years. Every time Dazy puts out something that sounds like Dazy, I’m once again forced to marvel at how obvious Goodson makes mixing power pop, pop punk, Madchester/alt-dance, Britpop, and fuzzed-out garage rock together seem. Who knew there was a huge vacancy right at the midpoint of Green Day and Primal Scream?

Look, it’s all good. My favorite song is probably “I Don’t Wanna Think About the Money”–I’m not sure what’s making the hook (a synth?), but it sounds like a dolphin to me. “Delusions of…” might be the most impressive “more with less” moment on Bad Penny–it’s less than two minutes long, and needs little more than a simple sunshine pop structure and some batshit percussion. “Bull Around the Porcelain” and “Straight 2 You” are classic Dazy songs I don’t take for granted, both matching their undeniable rock guitar riffs with the laser-precision of electronica. Most of the obvious highlights are in the EP’s first half, I suppose, but the closing title track makes up for any frontloaded tendencies. At about six and a half minutes, “Bad Penny” is Dazy’s longest song thus far (and I don’t even think it’s particularly close), a long-overdue embrace of electronic-tinged pop music’s ability to stretch things out and go from on a journey from “simple” to “disorienting sensory overload”. It’s neat that we get to hear new versions of this stuff pretty regularly. James Goodson doesn’t sound tired of it, and I’m certainly not either. (Bandcamp link)

Orillia – Fire-Weed

Release date: October 24th
Record label: Far West/Magic Mothswam
Genre: Country rock, folk rock, singer-songwriter
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: My My

We got a good look at Chicago folk rock singer-songwriter Andrew Marczak late last year thanks to his solo project Orillia’s self-titled debut album, which itself came hot on the heels of new music from his bands The Roof Dogs and Toadvine. Orillia was a fairly stripped-down sampler of Marczak the songwriter and performer, quickly skipping through traditional folk, bright alt-country, and a few nicely-chosen covers adeptly. Less than a year later we get the second Orillia LP, Fire-Weed; like Orillia, it’s pretty short (just under thirty minutes) and isn’t entirely new material (there’s a recording of a traditional folk song here, as well as a reworking of a Roof Dogs track), but it feels like a more clear attempt at creating a coherent “album” this time around. The full-band songs feature a more stable line-up (rhythm section Nico and Matt Ciani on drums and bass, lead guitarist Lucas Chamberlain, fiddle player Lydia Cash, banjo player Dylan Sage, and Nicole Murray on Wurlitzer), leading to a comfortable country rock sound permeating the majority of the album (“Weather”, “Rich Chicago People”, and “Oreo Ice Cream” most prominently). Some of the best songs on the album are still lo-fi, mostly Marczak recordings–“Hoyt Axxton” and “My My”, which he hides towards the end of the record’s second side, and the quite brilliant sixty-second “gaff piano” opening track “Shot of Malört”–but they’re natural breathers in between the “hits” and the grand finale of “Oreo Ice Cream”. None of that, of course, shakesFire-Weed’s strong foundation. (Bandcamp link)

Weird Magazines – Out of Faith

Release date: October 3rd
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Post-punk, dream pop, indie pop
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Talk About Debord

The Brooklyn group Weird Magazines debuted in 2023 with a single called “Yves Klein Blue”; at the time they were a duo featuring vocalist/guitarist Sean Earl Beard and guitarist Arun Marsten, but they added bassist Jon Rocha and drummer Akul Penugonda sometime between then and the release of their debut EP, Out of Faith. The band (who have since added keyboardist Chantal Marie Wright to their lineup) helpfully describe their sound as “jangly post punk”, and that’s fairly accurate to these four songs. Perhaps even more accurate would be “dour, propulsive, guitar-led dream pop”–the key elements of Out of Faith are Beard’s deep, murmured vocals, reverb-heavy guitars, and pop hooks that prefer to sneak up on us in the midst of Weird Magazines’ 80s-indebted haze. “Dress Nicely” is a languid and low-key introduction, and while “Ugly Jazz (Out of Faith)” does have some guitar parts that could be called “ugly jazz” if one squints, it’s still pretty subdued. The second half of Out of Faith is peppier (almost by default, but still); the incredibly catchy “Talk About Debord” is very nearly a send-up of classic indie pop’s bookish/academic tendencies (“Yeah, he’s read DuBois / Shit, I mean Debord”), and “Get Some Action!” does just enough to justify that exclamation mark in its title. It’s all enough for me to keep an eye on Weird Magazines now. (Bandcamp link)

Glo-Worm – Glimmer (Vinyl Release)

Release date: September 19th
Record label: K
Genre: Indie pop, twee, folk-pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Change of Heart

Like so many indie pop bands from the 1990s, Washington D.C. trio Glo-Worm lasted for just under three years (approximately early 1993 to late 1995) and left behind only a smattering of singles and EPs before disbanding. K Records released Glimmer, a fourteen-song CD and cassette compilating Glo-Worm’s discography, in 1996, but it had never been available on vinyl until now, thirty years after the dissolution of the group. Vocalist Pam Berry (Black Tambourine, The Shapiros), drummer Dan Searing (Whorl, The Saturday People), and guitarist Terry Banks (Dot Dash, St. Christopher) put out singles on K and Slumberland, and Glimmer shows that they brought an East Coast sophistication to the 90s indie pop underground–Banks cites Tracey Thorn’s guitar playing as an influence for these songs, and it’s not hard to hear her rainy, somewhat jazzy folk-pop stylings on early highlights like “Travelogue” and “April Street” (originally released together on a 7” in 1995). I tend to enjoy Glo-Worm’s original songs more than their handful of covers (in addition to the aforementioned, “Change of Heart” and “Holiday” are perfect indie pop songs), but I do like their version of Velocity Girl’s “Crazy Town”, which links them to some of their contemporaries (another band featuring former members of Whorl and Black Tambourine). Glo-worm made enough great music for this record to hold its own three decades after their initial run.  (Bandcamp link)

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