Pressing Concerns: The Maple State, Ivy Boy, Hyperviolets, Xay Cole

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For the Tuesday Pressing Concerns, we have four albums that have come out in the past month or so: new LPs from The Maple State, Ivy Boy, Hyperviolets, and Xay Cole. If you missed yesterday’s blog post (featuring Swearing at Motorists, Night Court, A Fish in the River, and The Cindys), check that out here.

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.

The Maple State – Don’t Take Forever

Release date: November 7th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Power pop, pop punk, emo-y indie rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Willow

The Maple State are new to me, but the Manchester quartet have been around for a while–they put out a couple of records in the mid-2000s (2005’s At Least Until We’ve Settled In, 2007’s Say, Scientist EP) before breaking up in 2008. Some combination of members released an album called The Things I Heard at the Party under The Maple State name in 2018, but the “original lineup” of the group (bassist/vocalist Greg Counsell, keyboardist William Pearson, guitarist Christian Counsell, and drummer John Goodwin) never reunited until a single called “Zero Days Since Last Incident” last year. It turns out that “Zero Days Since Last Incident” was just the beginning, as The Maple State have put out an entire album entitled Don’t Take Forever.

The Maple State came up in the early 2000s’ “emo-punk” scene, but Don’t Take Forever thankfully doesn’t sound like a band trying to recreate 2005. I certainly believe that American emo was an influence on this band, although these are big, catchy, and (yes) emotional pop songs of the sort that British bands from Frightened Rabbit to ME REX have made in The Maple State’s absence. “Winner Part II” breaks from tasteful piano about a minute into its runtime to open Don’t Take Forever with (still relatively tasteful) pop punk, and there’s some more traces of their roots throughout the album (like the “whoa-oh”s in “No Time to Waste”, or the folk-punk (in a British sense) found in “Dead Beneath the Stars”). Still, plenty of the rockers (“Zero Days Since Last Incident”, “Settle Down”, “Vacancy”) don’t slot neatly into pop punk or emo, and one of the best songs on the album comes when The Maple State bust out the dreaded acoustic guitar (“Willow”). Maybe it’s been awhile since The Maple State have been a “band”, but Don’t Take Forever is a pretty impressive way to return. (Bandcamp link)

Ivy Boy – Ivy Boy

Release date: October 24th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Folk-pop, indie pop, jangle pop, singer-songwriter
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Poppyseed

After a six-year gap, Boston jangle pop group Beeef returned with their long-awaited third album, Somebody’s Favorite, last year–hopefully we don’t have to wait another half-dozen years for the next Beeef album, but in the meantime, we have Ivy Boy. It’s a new project from Beeef’s lead vocalist and songwriter Perry Eaton, and he recorded their self-titled debut album with a handful of non-Beeef musicians (guitarist/bassist Aaron Brown, drummer Ryan Katz, and pianist/synth player Elio DeLuca). As a pop songwriter and vocalist, Eaton remains recognizable as the “guy from Beeef” on Ivy Boy, which begs the question: what makes Ivy Boy different from Eaton’s more well-known band? There’s certainly overlap, but Ivy Boy is more laid-back than the relatively tight jangle-rock of Somebody’s Favorite. The hummable “Honeybee” and the bright “Poppyseed” are, unambiguously, “infectious indie pop”, although the former is more of the folk rock variety (to say nothing of another one of the album’s catchier songs, the acoustic folk-pop “The Littlest Birds”). The second half of Ivy Boy leans even harder into the well-developed, even slightly twangy folk rock of decades past (with the possible exception of “‘80s Babies”, which I could imagine Beeef playing if it was sped up a bit). Leading two similar indie pop bands is hardly a “problem”, but Eaton starts to separate Ivy Boy by the time its first record wraps up. (Bandcamp link)

Hyperviolets – Vanitas

Release date: October 31st
Record label: Born Losers/Good Soil
Genre: Lo-fi pop, indie pop, synthpop, folktronica, dream pop
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Shadow Connected

I’ve written a few times about Frederick, Maryland musician Kenny Tompkins on this blog, via his indie pop/folk rock solo project Mr. Husband and as part of the power pop group The Trend, but Hyperviolets is a brand new collaboration from the prolific musician. For this project, Tompkins has partnered with Brendan Ekstrom, most famous for spending nearly twenty years as the lead guitarist for Philadelphia post-hardcore group Circa Survive–it may seem like an odd pairing, but western Maryland is a small place, and Ekstrom first started playing music in that area as a member of bands like Cumberland’s 200 North. Vanitas came about after Circa Survive went on indefinite hiatus in 2022, and, while you’d be disappointed if you expected the duo to make punk rock together, there’s a certain…weight to this strange, offbeat pop music. It’s a collision of disparate elements that nonetheless work together–drum machine beats, Tompkins’ always-melodic vocals, acoustic guitars, “spooky” synths, and more. At its brightest, Vanitas offers up sparkling synthpop songs like “Writing on the Wall” and “Shadow Connected”, while elsewhere, “Lost in the Fire” and “Prelude to Void” embrace hypnotic rhythms to shade their (still very apparent) pop cores. I’m not sure if either of these musicians have made anything quite like Vanitas before, but they’ve entered this new terrain deftly. (Bandcamp link)

Xay Cole – Lucy Birthday Black Hole

Release date: October 3rd
Record label: Cherub Dream/Dolphin Bomb
Genre: Experimental pop, noise, sound collage, lo-fi pop, electronic, outsider stuff
Formats: CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Brooklyn Hype (Not Me)

The San Jose-originating, San Francisco-based experimental musician Xay Cole has made a ton of music either as part of bands or under various aliases since the “early-mid 2010s”; see Discogs for a list of their two dozen apparent monikers. They joined Bay Area shoegaze label Cherub Dream for last year’s 21st Century Wrist, a partnership that has continued this year with an album called Lucy Birthday Black Hole. The fourteen-song, fifty-one minute album (released on CD and cassette) is an adventurous, abrasive, and wildly divergent listen–in addition to the lo-fi indie rock more typical of their record label and the bedroom pop that I’m prone to writing about on this blog, Lucy Birthday Black Hole features lengthy forays into experimental electronic, kitchen-sink industrial, noise, and post-rock. Some of the more pop moments (like opening track “Fight Night” and the genuine earworm “Brooklyn Hype (Not Me)”) kind of remind me of Mope Grooves’ posthumous magnum opus, though Xay Cole doesn’t seem like a musician who’s prone to thinking in terms of “pop music” all that often. With Lucy Birthday Black Hole, we’re faced with a “challenging” listen–sometimes we’re “rewarded” with softer moments, but just as often it’s the bumpy ride that’s the point. (Bandcamp link)

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