Pressing Concerns: Flat Mary Road, Rocket Bureau, Annabelle Chairlegs, Tacoblaster

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Welcome to a Pressing Concerns Monday! We’ve got new EPs from Flat Mary Road and Rocket Bureau and new albums from Annabelle Chairlegs and Tacoblaster! Check ’em out below!

There will be a Tuesday blog post this week!

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.

Flat Mary Road – The Camping EP

Release date: January 30th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Folk rock, college rock, indie pop, jangle pop
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Therapy Anthem

I first heard Philadelphia quartet Flat Mary Road in 2023, when they released Little Realities, an indie rock album I thought was strong at the time and have only appreciated more in the interim. Flat Mary Road’s warm and clever take on folk rock, jangly power pop, and Paisley Underground reminded me of classic college rock (I mentioned Miracle Legion at the time, which still holds), influences sorely underappreciated in the current landscape. Vocalist/guitarist Steve Teare, bassist Dan Papa, drummer Alex Irwin, and guitarist Alex Lewis’s first new music since Little Realities is the three-song Camping EP, a brief dispatch that nonetheless reaffirms that Flat Mary Road are remarkably adept at what they do. 

The opening quasi-title track “The Last Time I Went Camping” is just beautiful, a shimmering, semi-psychedelic indie folk rock epic, winding its way like it’s traversing in the canoe on the cover (and in the lyrics) across miles of terrain on its own pace. It starts slow and gets giant. In most instances, “The Last Time I Went Camping” would be the “hit”, but Camping ends with an even larger-sounding one in “Therapy Anthem”. Unlike the EP’s opener, “Therapy Anthem” effectively starts at 100%, with a guitar riff that sounds like the sun rising over mountains and Teare declaring “Nobody wants to hear about somebody else’s dream anymore,” and Flat Mary Road are off to the races. When Teare sings “I am going into therapy again,” it’s given none of the winking awkwardness writers are all too prone to lapse into when talking of such matters; it’s given the same mystical but tangible feeling as the camping trip in “The Last Time I Went Camping” or the matter-of-fact goodbyes in “Parking on the Lawn”. I imagine it’s easier to commit to something when you have a band as strong as Flat Mary Road backing you, of course. (Bandcamp link)

Rocket Bureau – Maybes of Gold

Release date: February 3rd
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Power pop, jangle pop
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Don’t Take Too Long

Madison, Wisconsin power pop project Rocket Bureau first came onto my radar last year thanks to their Party Armz EP; I called it a “seasoned, expertly-wielded collection of classic power pop touched with bits of early punk rock, garage rock, and straight-up rock and roll” and was impressed by one-man-band Kyle Urban’s ability to conjure all that up himself. Party Armz was the first Rocket Bureau record in five years, but we didn’t have to wait so long for Urban to return with new music: merely four months after that five-song EP, we’ve gotten another one called Maybes of Gold.

As a companion piece to Party Armz, Maybes of Gold is a coda that leans a little more into jangle pop and college rock than garage rock, although the “windows down anthems” are still present, particularly in closing track “Don’t Take Too Long”. Nonetheless, Maybes of Gold starts on a more subdued note with the ennui-laden pop rock of “Early Riser”, and the jangly title track feels like a more direct version of mid-tempo Guided by Voices classics. “Josie Lane”, right in the middle of the EP, is the record’s true ballad, complete with pensive arpeggios and self-harmonies, before “Til the Night Don’t Love You Anymore” initiates a more dramatic “big finish” completed by the aforementioned “hit” in “Don’t Take Too Long”. Over the course of two records and a third of a year, Kyle Urban’s put out ten spirited power pop songs and turned Rocket Bureau into a name that modern guitar pop fans ought to know. (Bandcamp link)

Annabelle Chairlegs – Waking Up

Release date: January 30th
Record label: TODO
Genre: Psychedelic rock, garage rock, desert rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Concrete Trees

Annabelle Chairlegs is Lindsey Mackin, a musician who first got her start in the Santa Fe band Treemotel and then began her current project after moving to Austin in 2013. Self-released Annabelle Chairlegs albums followed in 2015 and 2020; Waking Up is her first album in a half-decade, though she did release a few singles and an EP in the interim. This time, Mackin has partnered with new Texas/New York label TODO (The Narcotix, Surfbort, Porcelain) and enlisted garage rock maven Ty Segall to produce Waking Up, a confident collection of Lone Star State garage-psych rock. Waking Up reintroduces Annabelle Chairlegs by jumping around her areas of expertise: the opening title track is built from an a capella introduction and a simple groove once the music kicks in, “Concrete Trees” is sleek, quick-paced garage rock and roll, “Ice Cream on the Beach” is synth-drenched psychedelic pop, and “Above It All” veers into sunny 60s acoustic folk-pop. Eventually, Annabelle Chairlegs settles into a more overtly Western-evoking garage-psych-rock sound, but that doesn’t mean the second half is any less interesting (“Patty Get Your Gun” is an incredibly fun workout of this kind of thing, “Heavy Sleeper” is some toe-tapping retro-fuzz-pop, et cetera). It doesn’t sound like Mackin had any rust in need of shaking off, and Waking Up is as fresh and shined-up as anything in the genre. (Bandcamp link)

Tacoblaster – Digital Fun-Zone!

Release date: January 30th
Record label: Les Disques Du Paradis/Flippin’ Freaks/Howlin’ Banana
Genre: Garage rock, psychedelic pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: I Stay

Tom Caussade is one of the several Bordeaux, France-based musicians trying to turn their mid-sized European home city into a garage rock hub (see also TH Da Freak, Opinion, and SIZ). Tacoblaster is a power trio (featuring drummer Rémi Tourneur and bassist Sabina Ben Marzouk) as a live act, but in the studio, it’s more or less Caussade’s solo project. Digital Fun-Zone!, the fifth Tacoblaster album since 2021, was made almost entirely by Caussade and producer/multi-instrumentalist Stéphane Gillet (Ben Marzouk drops by for vocals on one track, and Jach Ernest’s Stéphane Jach plays trumpet on one). Caussade and Gillet take their curation of this “fun zone” quite seriously; they’re alchemists combining the elements of classic new wave-y power pop and trashy (er, I mean “surf-y”) turn-of-the-2010s garage rock. Either the post-punk bass, treadmill tempo, whirring synths, and Wavves-y chorus of opening track “Toxic Surfer” will do it for you or they won’t. But even if that isn’t your cup of tea, odds are that something will hit: the flowering psych-pop of “Pyjama”, the mid-tempo stroll of “Wendy”, the lo-fi pop punk of “Magic Dog”, the sludgy detour of “Toyland”, the perfect Ramones-core power pop of “I Stay”. This piece of bubblegum is an easy additional point towards Bordeaux in the garage-pop sweepstakes. (Bandcamp link)

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