Pressing Concerns: Tony Molina, Chaepter, Star Card, MARAUDEUR

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The Thursday Pressing Concerns is made up of four albums that are coming out tomorrow, November 14th. We’ve got new ones from Tony Molina, Chaepter, Star Card, and MARAUDEUR below, and if you missed either of this week’s earlier blog posts (Monday’s featured Swearing at Motorists, Night Court, A Fish in the River, and The Cindys, and Tuesday’s featured The Maple State, Ivy Boy, Hyperviolets, and Xay Cole), 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.

Tony Molina – On This Day

Release date: November 14th
Record label: Slumberland/Speakeasy Studios SF/Olde Fade
Genre: Folk rock, jangle pop, indie pop, lo-fi pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Livin Wrong

The two Tony Molina-related albums I’ve written about in Pressing Concerns before are the self-titled album from his old band Ovens, which features a lot of “loud and fuzzy power pop/alt-rock…with…triumphant guitar heroics”, and In the Store by his project The Lost Days, which dealt in “homespun-sounding, lo-fi, acoustic-based pop”. The common denominator with those two records (and, indeed, Molina’s discography as a whole) is strong guitar pop music–if you know anything about Tony Molina’s music, it’s probably that this is his specialty, typically delivered in sub-ninety-second nuggets. And that’s precisely what we get when we join the San Francisco singer-songwriter on On This Day, Molina’s first solo album in three years (which is also a return to Slumberland Records, who put out a couple of his releases in the late 2010s). On This Day, twenty-one songs in twenty-three minutes, was recorded by Molina and collaborators (Alicia Vanden Heuvel of Speakeasy Studios SF and The Aislers Set on piano and organ, drummer Steve Kerwin, guitarist Stephen Oriolo, Rachel Orimo on vocals, and Gary Olson of The Ladybug Transistor on trumpet) at home in an “unhurried” manner.

On This Day is subsequently on the “acoustic” and “laid-back” ends of the Tony Molina spectrum, leaning into his 60s folk-pop influences (the biography mentions The Byrds, as well as Bill Fox, one of the few “indie” musicians who feels similar to where Molina is at here), and the more languid side of Elephant 6 feels apt too (Olson couldn’t have picked a better record to show up on the horn). Aside from the fifteen-second instrumental title track, On This Day spends virtually every moment building a perfect pop song (jangle-, folk-, indie-, psych-; whatever qualifier suits you best), and then flitting to the next one as soon as the foundation is sturdy enough to stand. The fuzzy guitars of “Have Your Way” herald the only real electric Tony Molina moment here; it’s one of the highlights, but it’s far from the sole one, and I’m more likely to point to something like the blissful jangle pop creation “Livin Wrong”, the slightly-polished mid-tempo pop rock “Lie to Kick It”, or even the tactfully giddy cover of Eric Andersen’s “Violets of Dawn” as the standout of standouts. It’s a Tony Molina album, so we’ve plenty of options. (Bandcamp link)

Chaepter – Companion Music

Release date: November 11th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Art punk, post-punk, garage punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Lock the Door

Chicago-based art rock weirdo Chaepter Negro (aka Chaepter) has been on a tear lately. I first heard him thanks to last year’s Candlepin-released LP Naked Era, and he returned earlier this year with an EP called Empire Anthems. Companion Music is the third Chaepter record since the beginning of 2024, and it is “one of two records we have in the works”, according to the musician. All three records have honed in on a hard-to-describe sound that’s very “post-punk” while also keeping one foot in distorted, shoegaze-influenced indie rock. Companion Music is perhaps Chaepter’s clearest record yet, with a more tangible debt to garage rock, punk, and classic post-punk across its dozen tracks.

“Muses” may open Companion Music with a kind-of-dreamy chilliness, but Chaepter begins to get more confrontational and up-close with the Brainiac-ish skronk punk of “Lock the Door” and the dance-punk groove of “Dance Dance Die”. In the record’s midsection, “Cruisin’” and “Funny Living” combine prominent, sturdy rhythms with bursts of electric noise, but just when Companion Music seems to hesitantly embrace being an off-the-rails but boisterous rock and roll record, Chaepter veers into a different kind of strangeness in the record’s final third. The artist behind everything from “Melting Man” to “The Hope Collector” might as well have been a different one entirely, one inspired by dreamy, freaky basement folk more than tight indie/alternative rock. Companion Music hangs together because Chaepter stays front-and-center through the whole thing, guiding us from sharp guitars to disoriented strings and odd atmospherics. It’s enough to sell us on what seems to be a multi-record-spanning vision. (Bandcamp link)

Star Card – Trash World

Release date: November 14th
Record label: Already Dead
Genre: Art rock, noise pop, fuzz rock, 90s indie rock
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Even the Sun Can Hurt You

The Queens group Star Card started as the solo project of Calley Nelson, and Nelson played almost everything on the debut Star Card release, 2023’s Freak World EP. Fast forward two years later, and Star Card is now a quartet also featuring drummer Brendan Landis (of Receive, in which Nelson also plays), bassist Jackson Tarricone (Voicemail) and guitarist Jake Whitener (Sunshine Convention). The first Star Card LP and first Full Band Star Card release, Trash World, is a big one–it’s forty-seven minutes of greyscale but animated indie rock and noisy pop music. Opening track “Flowers” is one of the weirdest things on the whole album, a confrontational beginning before the propulsive indie rock and roll of “Even the Sun Can Hurt You” puts them closer to the realms of 90s acts like Superchunk, Versus, and Scrawl. Star Card differentiate themselves from the average “modern indie rock band with a familiarity with Kim Deal’s entire discography” by Nelson’s boisterous, larger-than-life lead vocals–we just don’t get dynamic, unpredictable vocal performances like the ones we hear in “One Hit Wonder” and “Ambitious Guy” enough these days. Trash World hits as hard as it does because it’s a full band tearing into these songs with the zeal to match their frontperson, I think. Star Card are hitting on something good here; let’s hear them out. (Bandcamp link)

MARAUDEUR – Flaschenträger

Release date: November 14th
Record label: Feel It/Kakakids
Genre: Post-punk, art punk, no wave, garage punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Syncope

An art punk band from eastern Germany? Yes, sure, I’m interested. Leipzig sextet MARAUDEUR have actually been around for a while now–they put out an album on Bruit Direct Disques in 2017, and somehow I missed their Feel It Records debut, 2022’s Puissance 4. I’m well on board for their latest album, Flaschenträger, though. The group (Bob Siegrist, Charlotte Mermoud, Camille Barth, Morgane Adrien, Lise Sutter, and Isumi Grichting) have a strong grasp on this incredibly specific sound that feels ripped from an uncertain and chaotic time in underground music–phantom rhythms and synths playing tug of war with more recognizable post-punk, garage rock, and even pop music. Flaschenträger lurches into focus between stop-start opening material like “EC Blah.Blah”, “La Jaguar”, and “ah”, and though this marks pretty much the rest of the LP, too, MARAUDEUR have put together a fairly surprising collection of this kind of thing. The skittering melodic guitar line is what puts “Syncope” over the top, “Clever Sneaker” has an out-of-place noise rock riff thrown in there, and closing track “Hollow” is surprisingly delicate. It feels light without being slight, and it’s a fun listen without sounding like a conscious attempt to be so. (Bandcamp link)

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