Pressing Concerns: Heavenly, Royal Ottawa, Me, You, & My Metronome, Michael Cormier-O’Leary

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Welcome to a Monday Pressing Concerns! We’ve got a new album from Heavenly and new EPs from Royal Ottawa, Me, You & My Metronome, and Michael Cormier-O’Leary. Check them out below.

We do have 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.

Heavenly – Highway to Heavenly

Release date: February 27th
Record label: Skep Wax
Genre: Twee, indie pop, power pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Excuse Me

Highway to Heavenly has been a long time coming now. The legendary British twee-pop quintet understandably disbanded after the death of their drummer, Matthew Fletcher, in 1996, and Heavenly was let to lie until earlier this decade: the quintet began reissuing all of their records on Skep Wax (the label co-owned by Heavenly vocalist/guitarist Amelia Fletcher and bassist Robert Pursey), they played a few reunion shows with Ian Button on drums where they road-tested new music, and the single “Portland Town” showed up last June. It was only a matter of time before Heavenly released a new album, and here we are almost exactly twenty years after Operation Heavenly with the fifth Heavenly LP, Highway to Heavenly. The remaining original members (Fletcher, Pursey, guitarist Peter Momtchiloff, and keyboardist Cathy Rogers) formally welcomed Button in on drums, and the five of them recorded the songs of Highway to Heavenly in Kent and London with producer Toby Burroughs (Clémentine March, Sassyhiya, Rozi Plain).

More than most 90s indie rock groups, there seems to be a sense of trepidation around the idea of a “Heavenly reunion album”; it’s probably a combination of the simplicity of the “twee” music they pioneered, their tragic original end, and the personal connection many have to Heavenly’s music. The secret, though, is that the members of Heavenly never went away or stopped making good music–there were the two post-Heavenly bands in Marine Research and Tender Trap, and Fletcher, Pursey, and Momtchiloff all have multiple currently-active bands, many of which have appeared on this blog, including The Catenary Wires, Swansea Sound, Railcard, and Would-Be-Goods (Rogers, who pursued careers in reality television production and neuroscience after Marine Research ended, is the one exception). These acts may not be well-known outside of devoted indie pop lifers, but you can listen to them and learn that the members of Heavenly still very much know what they’re doing; this (as well as Fletcher and Pursey’s sharp taste in new indie pop bands exemplified by who they’ve signed to Skep Wax) was enough to have plenty of confidence in Highway to Heavenly before I heard it.

Highway to Heavenly sounds like how you’d want it to sound–Heavenly aren’t trying to erase twenty years of growing their sound and musicianship with other acts and revert to 1996, but they’ve naturally created something that slots nicely after Operation Heavenly nonetheless. The massive indie pop opening stretch from “Scene Stealing” to “Press Return” would make this whole Heavenly revival thing worth it even if the rest of Highway to Heavenly was disappointing (even if I don’t think I necessarily needed a Heavenly tribute to Portland, Oregon, the desire for refuge for nonconformists coming from these longtime fiercely independent upstream-swimmers is quite resonant). Thankfully, though, the rest of Highway to Heavenly continues the winning streak, giving us things to chew on between “Deflicted” and “The Neverseen” and nailing more indie pop hits with “She Is the One” and “Excuse Me”. “That Last Day” closes Highway to Heavenly with a sudden collision of sadness and loss; about the death of Fletcher’s mother, “The Last Day” is an affirmation both that tragedy and death are part of Heavenly’s story and that the band can continue on in the face of it. Fletcher ends “That Last Day” on an uncertain note, asking “Did I do all that I could?”; this query feels unlike anything Heavenly had broached before, but it’s also always been in their nature to tackle whatever lay before them with indie pop. (Bandcamp link)

Royal Ottawa – Here Comes Everybody

Release date: February 4th
Record label: The Beautiful Music
Genre: Psychedelic rock, Paisley Underground, college rock, desert rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Here Comes Everybody

The long-running Canadian band Royal Ottawa first came onto my radar in 2023 with their massive double album Carcosa, but they’ve been releasing music off and on since the 1990s (and their origins go back even further than that, as multiple band members played in short-lived 1980s post-punk group Bugs Harvey Oswald). Carcosa was a hefty dose of dense, hard-to-classify, long-in-the-tooth rock music; I referenced bands like Eleventh Dream Day, The Church, and The Dream Syndicate when I wrote about it, which should give you some idea. After a career spent releasing music fairly sporadically, it’s a pleasant surprise to get a brand-new EP from Royal Ottawa less than a year and a half after Carcosa; perhaps their new partnership with The Beautiful Music has encouraged them, as the Ottawa-based label has stepped up to put out the four-song, twenty-two-minute Here Comes Everybody on vinyl.

Royal Ottawa continue cataloguing their version of post-college rock, post-Paisley Underground psychedelia/folk rock on these four songs: like a lot of the greatest moments on Carcosa, opening track “Golden Eyes” is a rocker that sounds like it just came into being one day, or like it’s an excerpt of some kind of eternal jam. “Range Road” similarly conjures up this lost feeling, though it’s a bit of a softer folk rock take on it, pairing nicely with “Pine” (probably the closest thing to the “guitar pop” side of college rock on here). Of course, half of Here Comes Everybody is taken up by the ten-minute title track, and it’s here where Royal Ottawa fully give in to the motorik vibes and endurance-test desert rock music that hover around the edges of their sound. There are plenty of different “kinds” of ten-minute songs out there; “Here Comes Everybody” is the steady, forward-chugging kind, one that doesn’t flag for a second and achieves meditative bliss in a way that’s not unlike how it feels to take in Carcosa as a whole. Royal Ottawa are clearly locked into something–their sound is aged, but as exciting as any new band. (Bandcamp link)

Me, You, & My Metronome – Hooray for the Status Quo

Release date: February 6th
Record label: Petite Village
Genre: Indie pop, jangle pop, dream pop, chamber pop
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Settle Down

Me, You, & My Metronome is Jon Sakata, a lo-fi pop artist who has apparently been making music under the name since the mid-2000s and during stints in San Francisco and Austin. Some of those early recordings are collected on Bandcamp, but Me, You & My Metronome’s recent history begins in late 2024, when Sakata, now based in Montreal, released an EP called Red Pipes under the name via Petite Village Records (The Wesleys, Museums, Othello Tunnels). A little over a year later, Me, You & My Metronome is back with another EP, again on Petite Village–this time it’s a seven-song, twenty-three minute affair called Hooray for the Status Quo (“Things can go south pretty quickly, so waking up feeling the same as the day before can be pretty special,” Sakata writes on Bandcamp regarding the title).

I know exactly the kind of music in which Me, You, & My Metronome deals, and you likely do too if you read this blog reguarly: dreamy, lo-fi, romantic, 80s-inspired guitar pop, with bits of new wave, synthpop, jangle pop, college rock, and C86-inspired indie pop all in play here. I can think of countless bands and projects currently toiling away in relative obscurity nailing this kind of thing, from Goodbye Wudaokou in England to Melancolony in the Bay Area to EEP and Ross Ingram in El Paso to Lost Film in New England; Petite Village mentions fellow Montrealers Prism Shores as a similar act, I don’t disagree. We get one lilting, catchy but melancholic pop song after another to start off Hooray for the Status Quo; if you can be patient with the deliberate chamber pop opening track “Neighborhood Anthem” and the swelling strings of “Cut Back the Sound”, you’re rewarded with fuzz-pop hit “Embroiled in Meaning”, the EP’s one unqualified “rocker”. Hooray for the Status Quo is ultimately a record for those of us who can appreciate material like the mini-orchestral, Sparklehorse-evoking pop music of “Settle Down”; if this is Me, You, & My Metronome’s status quo, they’re maintaining a high standard. (Bandcamp link)

Michael Cormier-O’Leary – Proof Enough

Release date: February 25th
Record label: Dear Life
Genre: Indie folk, chamber folk, singer-songwriter
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Pressed Flowers

Michael Cormier-O’Leary stays busy: he’s busy co-running Dear Life Records (the Rosy Overdrive-staple alt-country/folk label he founded), he’s busy leading the instrumental chamber music ensemble Hour, he’s busy playing in bands like Friendship and 2nd Grade (that latter one’s new since we last checked up on him). He makes solo records too, of course; in recent years we’ve gotten two “song”-based ones (2021’s More Light!! and 2023’s Anything Can Be Left Behind) plus a piano-improvisation collection (2022’s Heard from the Next Room). Cormier-O’Leary’s latest solo release is a six-song cassette EP called Proof Enough that explores “family roots” and “generational pain”; created almost entirely by Cormier-O’Leary himself (backing vocals from Heeyoon Won of Boosegumps and 22º Halo the only accompaniment), it’s the kind of release that naturally gets overshadowed by someone with a large and constantly-expanding body of work.

Nonetheless, it’s worth digging into Cormier-O’Leary’s writing here, as it’s very deliberate and thoughtful. Inspired by memories of his own family, his own marriage and fatherhood, and fiction (the EP’s title comes from Sense and Sensibility), Proof Enough is empathetic, intricate chamber-folk music; the imparting of “Sky Is Blue” and the portrait of “Del” are some of the most complete writing I’ve heard from Cormier-O’Leary yet. The music is humble but it, too, feels very developed; it’s in line with his previous work, but fans of slow-moving chamber folk like American Music Club or Lambchop will appreciate the compositions here. “Pressed Flowers” closes Proof Enough with an undeniably beautiful song inspired by Cormier-O’Leary’s marriage; like so much related to “family”, it’s saccharine on the surface and layered deeply below. (Bandcamp link)

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