Pressing Concerns: Swearing at Motorists, Night Court, A Fish in the River, The Cindys

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Welcome to the first Pressing Concerns of the week! We have new albums from Swearing at Motorists and A Fish in the River, a compilation from Night Court, and a “mini-album” from The Cindys this time. Read below!

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Swearing at Motorists – 31 Seasons in the Minor Leagues

Release date: October 24th
Record label: BB*ISLAND/Bone Voyage
Genre: Garage rock, art rock, folk rock, lo-fi indie rock, 90s indie rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Italian Wine

Is there a better title for a new album from a long-running underground indie rock band than “31 Seasons in the Minor Leagues”? If there is, I haven’t heard it, and it’s probably attached to an album that isn’t as good as Swearing at Motorists’ latest LP, anyway (it’s named after a Magnolia Electric Co. song that they do indeed cover on the album). Dave Doughman started the band in the mid-90s in Dayton, Ohio, and a revolving door of drummers and occasional other instrumentalists has been stabilized by Martin Boeters ever since Doughman relocated to Hamburg, Germany sometime before 2014. That’s the year Swearing at Motorists put out While Laughing, the Joker Tells the Truth, which was the band’s most recent album until 31 Seasons in the Minor Leagues broke an 11-year hiatus. 

Self-recorded by the band “in a Bundesliga soccer stadium”, 31 Seasons in the Minor Leagues is a barebones, blunt-force indie rock “duo” album (additional electric guitar by Florian Dürrmann on two songs being the only outside contribution). It’s neither a “roots rock” or “garage rock” record, but it will appeal to fans of either of those genres (Swearing at Motorists leave just enough blank space that you can fill it in with whatever you’d like in your head). There’s quite a bit of death on 31 Seasons in the Minor Leagues–I’m not familiar enough with Swearing at Motorists to know if that’s par for the course or not, but it’s right front and center in “All That I Have”, “Naked and Famous”, and their cover of Scout Niblett’s “Your Beat Kicks Back Like Death” (and that’s not even including stuff like the wage-slave blues of “Didn’t Cross the Ocean”, which is also about death in a way). Swearing at Motorists are not dead, though, and, if anything, being intimately familiar with death only seems to have helped them in creating an experienced but lively indie rock record. (Bandcamp link)

Night Court – Nervous Birds

Release date: October 17th
Record label: Snappy Little Numbers/Debt Offensive/Drunk Dial/Shield
Genre: Pop punk, garage rock, power pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Bride of Frankenstein

The Vancouver trio Night Court have made a name for themselves in recent years via albums stuffed to the gills with brief, energetic bursts of punk-pop (as in “it’s punk, it’s pop, but I’m not sure if it’s ‘pop punk’”) like 2023’s HUMANS! and last year’s $HIT MACHINE. I suppose it makes sense that the band (whose members are known to me only as “Dave-O, Jiffy, and Emilor”) began their work together with a pair of twin cassettes stocked almost exclusively with sub-two-minute garage-pop jolts. 2021’s Nervous Birds! One and 2022’s Nervous Birds Too have since been released together on CD and cassette, but Nervous Birds is the collection’s first vinyl release: twenty-six songs shoved together on one thirty-eight minute LP (“as originally intended”, per the band).

It’s maybe a little more sloppy than the records that would follow these songs, but it sounds like Night Court arrived more or less fully-formed on Nervous Birds. They aren’t really orthodox punks or garage rockers–it’s in their DNA, to be clear, but your average two-minute-men garage band isn’t going to have the patience to churn out mid-tempo, Guided by Voices-ish hooky indie rock like “Boat in Idle” or the post-Sugar Ray fuzz-pop of “Fractions”.  This hypothetical garage band might be able to put together the horror-themed power-pop-punk of “Bride of Frankenstein” (inexplicably opening the compilation with a song from the 2023 Frater Set EP, the only track not originally from one of the Nervous Birds cassettes) or the snotty fuzz-punk swagger of “Diagnosis – Weirdo” or even the slow rollout of “Johnny Rocket”. Could they do it all, though? If so, they might have a Night Court-level journey ahead of them. (Bandcamp link)

A Fish in the River – Glimmers

Release date: October 17th
Record label: Bud Tapes
Genre: Doom folk, experimental rock, fuzz rock, metal
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Glimmers

Portland, Oregon trio A Fish in the River have been a solid addition to Bud Tapes’ eclectic roster ever since last year’s Forest God EP, a wide-ranging record with bits with “traces of art rock, prog, and folk” (as I wrote at the time) in its five songs. I would expect a full-length from the band (bassist/vocalist John Durant, drummer Steven Driscoll, and guitarist Cole Gann) to be similarly all over the map and Glimmers, A Fish in the River’s debut LP, delivers on that front. Bud Tapes writes that the record combines “elements of doom and death metal with the melodies and sensibilities of pnw indie rock”, which doesn’t tell the whole story but does help one wrap one’s head around the makeup of tracks like “Uniformity” and “Check Out the Big Rock”, which graft earnest melodies and shimmering guitars on top of heavier instrumentals. While penultimate track “Wire” is genuinely death metal (at least partly), most of Glimmers is indeed a cavernous Cascadian rock album, with highlights like the title track and “Putrid Slop” maintaining their heaviness in a more Exploding in Sound-ish post-hardcore direction. There’s even a song called “Beach Day” that sort of doesn’t completely not sound like the Beach Boys. Glimmers isn’t compromising in its ambition, but it does feel like A Fish in the River meet us halfway. (Bandcamp link)

The Cindys – The Cindys

Release date: November 7th
Record label: Ruination/Breakfast
Genre: Indie pop, jangle pop, power pop
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Dry TV

Not to be confused with Cindy or Cindy Lee, The Cindys are a band from Bristol, England founded by Jack Ogborne, who’s previously made art rock under the name Bingo Fury. The Cindys arose out of a desire by Ogborne to make music inspired by 80s guitar pop (touchstones like C86 and Flying Nun have been thrown around), and he enlisted Naima Bock, Finlay Burrows and “members of Belishas” to help him make the project’s self-titled debut record. The Cindys is a pretty unimpeachable debut, a twenty-one-minute, seven-song “mini-LP” that’s nonetheless stocked with fully-fleshed-out ideas and confident pop performances. The majority of the album may have been recorded on 8-track cassette in a basement, but it’s on the more polished, stately side of the “indie pop spectrum”. The melodies that practically fall out of “Eternal Pharmacy” and “Dry TV” are as catchy as they are deliberate, and “If It’s Real” and “Marble Lobby” slow things down to a nearly challenging level (without abandoning “pop” in either case). “Isaac’s Body” and “Liquid Stitch” are the album’s “rockers”, but The Cindys end their first statement with one last curiosity in “Dish Water”; even before it, though, they’d already established themselves as a band inclined to wrap things up neatly. (Bandcamp link)

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