Pressing Concerns: The Michael Character, United Stare, Dan Darrah, Boreen

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Merry “week of Christmas”, but Rosy Overdrive isn’t taking Monday off (or Tuesday, so stay tuned). We’ve got new albums from The Michael Character, Dan Darrah, and Boreen, plus (I guess) an EP from United Stare below.

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. And last but not least: don’t forget to vote in the 2025 Rosy Overdrive Reader’s Poll!

The Michael Character – The Impermanent Coffee Can

Release date: November 7th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Folk rock, indie pop, singer-songwriter, folk punk
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: The Impermanent Coffee Can

Boston musician James Ikeda has led The Michael Character for a decade and a half now, with the project on its eighteenth album of folk rock/folk punk/somewhat jittery singer-songwriter material. Over this journey, Ikeda has amassed a substantial list of regular contributors to his albums, including Miss Bones’ June Isenhart and Lonesome Joan’s Amanda Lozada–and that’s a good thing, because it sounds like The Michael Character needed all hands on deck for their most recent album, The Impermanent Coffee Can. In this case, the vibrant, sweeping Michael Character sound is used to tackle the “divorce album”: Ikeda takes us to some understandably difficult places in his writing, but the wings of his band–Isenhart and Lozada on guitar, Mattie Hamer on drums, Eugene Umlor on keys, Addison Waco Michalowski on bass, and several of them providing arrangements–aren’t clipped, allowing them to ride their typically freewheeling sound across the tough terrain.

The Impermanent Coffee Can speedruns the set-up–we aren’t given a chance to breathe as the prelude of “The Artist Retreat (January 2025)” (arranged by Ulmor) collapses quickly into “35 (May 2025)” and “Remembering Gasquet” (both by Isenhart); it’s not until “Stay pt. 2 (February 2025)” that The Michael Character slow down a bit. As it turns out, slowing down there is a pretty uncomfortable place to be, and the three “Anecdote” songs subsequently take us on a diversion from the present right afterwards. The jolt of “2024 Anecdote (The Strangest Places)”, however, leads us right back to the current status of The Impermanent Coffee Can and its particularly tricky final stretch. The title track is the most beautiful song on the album, an unflinching and subtle account of what it’s like to have permanency blink out in front of one’s self along with all its taken-for-granted mundanity. The penultimate track, “The Cotton Anniversary (April 2025)”, is beautiful too, in three or four different ways, but The Impermanent Coffee Can ends on “July 2025 Forever”, a truly bleak note. Choosing to end The Impermanent Coffee Can in any less strong terms than “I see decades of the present / And not in a good way” wouldn’t be true to the events depicted herein, one surmises. Perhaps the inevitable impermanence illustrated by this record is the very thing to break the never-ending cycle depicted in “July 2025 Forever”…but that’s not what The Impermanent Coffee Can is about. (Bandcamp link)

United Stare – United Stare

Release date: June 20th
Record label: Kill Enemy
Genre: Liftoff Jam (White Boys in E)
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Garage punk, noise punk, lo-fi punk

United Stare are a new band from Pittsburgh–they’ve “4 unremarkable gigs under their belt”, boasts their label, Kill Enemy Records. I don’t know who all’s in this band, but Eli Kasan of The Gotobeds and The Sewerheads designed the layout of their self-titled debut cassette, so that’s kind of cool. Kill Enemy has been chronicling Pittsburgh hardcore for a few years now, and The Gotobeds have been operating as a chaotic garage punk band as of late, which gives us at least something to go off of in terms of expectations for United Stare. To once again lean on the Bandcamp description, Kill Enemy deems it “essentially just Punk but not Hardcore”–which, sure, but United Stare’s fast-paced, knuckleheaded, and noisy take on punk rock will, at the very least, appeal to “adventurous” hardcore fans, too. United Stare start their first release by calling in the cavalry with “Liftoff Jam (White Boys in E)”, a nearly six-minute noise-punk land speed record, and while the rest of United Stare doesn’t even try to top that, there’s still plenty of good rock and roll moments to follow. Tracks like “Burn Down Spirit”, “The Stare”, and “I Follow You Everywhere You Go” are just great garage rock, “Violet Cleanse” asserts the group’s ability to rip through 60-second punk bangers, and “Goin Against the Extreme” is a mid-tempo garage punk excursion that doesn’t drag. A pretty good start overall! (Bandcamp link)

Dan Darrah – Vacationland

Release date: December 12th
Record label: Sunday Drive
Genre: Jangle pop, folk rock, singer-songwriter, indie pop
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: A Little a Lot

Toronto singer-songwriter Dan Darrah put out his fifth album, There’s a Place, in June of this year–aided by his backing band The Rain (who also played on the Darrah album before that, 2023’s Rivers Bridges Trains), that LP was nearly fifty minutes of “sprawling, unhurried, melancholic guitar pop” (as I said at the time). Surprisingly, Darrah ended 2025 by quietly dropping another album, Vacationland; unlike his last couple of LPs, this one is digital-only, and it doesn’t appear that The Rain play on this one (drums from Leigh Fisk and pedal steel from Doug Mcbrien are the only other instrumental credits on the record). Maybe Vacationland is subsequently supposed to be a more casual or lower-stakes Dan Darrah record, but there isn’t a drop-off in quality compared to his last few albums here. Darrah still finds plenty of inspiration in his frequent stomping grounds of “halfway between folk rock and jangle pop”, evoking The Byrds and the more wistful side of Teenage Fanclub across these eleven songs. Even by Darrah standards, Vacationland is pretty laid-back and meandering–aside from the drum-machine-propelled opening track “A Little a Lot”, these are pretty slow-paced folk/pop songs. Many are acoustic-led, but the more electric moments in highlights like “Supercontinental” and “Four” aren’t really out of place. And Vacationland as a whole fits comfortably next to the rest of Darrah’s sturdy recent records. (Bandcamp link)

Boreen – Heartbreak Hill

Release date: November 21st
Record label: Bud Tapes
Genre: Folk rock, art rock, psychedelic pop, indie pop, experimental pop, power pop
Formats: CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Lace

I’m introducing Boreen to the blog on the occasion of their fifth and final album, Heartbreak Hill. The Portland, Oregon project had an impressive ten-year history leading up to this point, starting as the mid-2010s-style bedroom pop project of Morgan O’Sullivan and eventually becoming a real-deal indie rock band with a rotating lineup of notable Portland musicians like Emmet Martin (Jack Habegger’s Celebrity Telethon, Bud Tapes), Harrison Smith (Turtlenecked, The Dare), and Steven Driscoll (A Fish in the River, Holloway). I don’t know why O’Sullivan’s decided to end Boreen now, but I do know that the fourteen-song, fifty-minute Heartbreak Hill is an impressive send-off of adventurous and wide-ranging indie rock, folk, and pop music. There are lovely, sweet indie/jangle/power pop songs hidden in the midst of this tape, if you’re a fan of the diamond-in-the-rough experience (check “Lace”, “I Can Almost Taste It”, and “Remind Me”), just-as-pleasing rockers (the title track, “Don’t Die!”, “Right by You”), restrained indie folk (“Highway of Love”, “Angel in My Mouth”), and an eight-minute prog-kraut-bedroom rocker called “Plumsucker”. Boreen seem to have put everything they had left into this final release; they’re not precisely an overly “showy” project, but this is how a band like this “goes out with a bang”. (Bandcamp link)

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