Pressing Concerns: Railcard, Star Moles, Timeout Room, The Early

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It’s a Monday Pressing Concerns! It’s got a new compilation from Railcard, plus new albums from Star Moles, Timeout Room, and The Early! These are good!

No blog post this Tuesday, unfortunately. Need to catch up on some things; Pressing Concerns will be back on Thursday.

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.

Railcard – Railcard

Release date: February 6th
Record label: Slumberland/Skep Wax
Genre: Indie pop, power pop, twee, folk-pop
Formats: CD, digital
Pull Track: Born in ‘62

Peter Momtchiloff has probably been most heard as the founding guitarist of archetypal twee-pop quintet Heavenly, who have just returned with their first new album since 1996 in February. He’s also backed Jessica Griffin in her band Would-Be-Goods since 1999, and that band also returned with a new album in February. And if you’ve been paying attention to the indie pop world, you’d also know that there’s a third Momtchiloff-associated record that came out in February. Meet Railcard, a new indie pop supergroup co-founded last year by Momtchiloff (bass), Rachel Love of Dolly Mixture (vocals/guitar/keys), and Ian Button of Thrashing Doves, The Catenary Wires and the recently-reunited lineup of Heavenly (vocals/drums/guitar). After adding trumpeter Allison Thomson (Trash Can Sinatras, Heist) to complete the quartet, Railcard quickly released two digital EPs last October and December; this CD compilation from Skep Wax and Slumberland collects the seven songs from them as well as three new ones.

Although Button and Love (who also trade off lead vocals) are Railcard’s songwriting duo, Railcard is also very much in line with Momtchiloff’s other bands in its pursuit of timeless-sounding indie pop. Loosely speaking, the group have two different modes: a triumphant, confident, often horn-aided 60s-style pop rock side, and a softer, more pensive take on indie-soft-folk-rock-pop. Although Railcard is presented in chronological order (four songs from the Railcard EP, three from E.P. 2, and then the three new ones), it all feels of a piece; the original EP showcases both the direct (“Narcissus” and “Born in ‘62”, the year in which Momtchiloff, Love, and Button indeed all originated) and indirect (“Cherry Plum” and “Revolutionary Calendar”) sides of Railcard, and the rest of the record elaborates upon these poles. The trumpet showcase “Northern Soul Dancing”, the string-aided retro finale “Think About That”, and the propulsive “Disco Loadout” are all immediate highlights from the rest of Railcard, though don’t sleep on cuts like the sub-two-minute, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it dream pop of “Day Dream”, either. Railcard plan to follow this compilation with a “proper” album soon enough, but Railcard is an adequate first statement on its own. (Bandcamp link)

Star Moles – Highway to Hell

Release date: February 26th
Record label: Historic New Jersey
Genre: Singer-songwriter, folk rock, piano pop
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Halo

Star Moles is Emily Moales, a prolific Philadelphia-based singer-songwriter who’s been putting out music under the name since 2017 and as of late has been averaging at least one Star Moles record per year, sometimes on Earth Libraries (The Juniper Berries, The Medium, Pelvis Wrestley) and sometimes on Historic New Jersey Recordings. The latter, who’ve released Highway to Hell, is the label of Rubber Band Gun’s Kevin Basko; Basko (who also plays with Moales in the band Hot Machine) produced this album and played most of the instruments that Moales didn’t on it (Sam Sullivan of Sam & Louise plays some guitar, and Jem Seidel adds percussion on one song). Moales has described Star Moles’ music as “medieval-via-1960s folk-troubadour” before, and that’s not far off from the offbeat, transcendent, marching-to-the-beat-of-her-own-drum singer-songwriter I hear on Highway to Hell (it is an album for people who wish Mary Timony made more records that sound like Mountains, perhaps).

You can squint at Highway to Hell’s opening track, “The End”, and see both a boozy dive-bar ballad and a traditional folk song (as far as album-length theses go, exploring the space, or lack thereof, between the two seems like a fairly promising one). Highway to Hell doesn’t necessarily feel like a reaction to anything, per se, but it does serve as a nice antidote to the polished, glossy, “SSRI-core” side of modern “indie folk”; stuff like “Real Magic” and “Factory Train” are very well-executed and disciplined, do not get me wrong, but the vision that Moales and Basko have in mind with these songs is something beautiful in a more challenging way. That’s all well and good, but Highway to Hell also works because it’s quite fun; stuff like the tinkering pop rock of “Time”, the meandering piano ballad “Overdog”, and ever-so-slightly “Philly alt-country”-curious closing track “Halo” are all going to stick with me. If not immediately rewarding, Highway to Hell is instantly intriguing, and there’s a clear road to the full charms of the album from there. (Bandcamp link)

Timeout Room – Celebration Station

Release date: February 20th
Record label: Tough Gum
Genre: Garage rock, lo-fi pop, pop punk, power pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Night Eye

Timeout Room crash-landed into view back in 2023 with an album called Tight-Ass Goku Pictures, a brilliant, skewed, and bizarre collection of guitar pop that was like The Cleaners from Venus as interpreted by a lo-fi punk from Baton Rouge, Louisiana (S.T. McCrary, responsible for everything on that LP). A follow-up LP took three years to materialize, but Celebration Station is a fantastically frayed collection of jangle pop, power pop, and garage punk that meets the high bar set by Timeout Room’s debut. McCrary gets some more help this time around (Kallie Tiffault on bass and backing vocals for a few songs, Atticus Lopez drums on half the album, Stevie Spring plays a guitar solo on “Don’t You Feel Better Off?”), and some of the more overtly silly aspects of Tight-Ass Goku Pictures are absent (there are no fake rock radio interlude tracks, for instance), leading to a tighter, more rocking collection of tracks that is nonetheless still very fun.

“Don’t You Feel Better Off?”, “Night Eye”, and “Keep Me Up”  are an incredibly strong opening trio (discounting the intro track “STMS”, with which I have no beef); the first of those three, with its blistering guitar solo, is some nice, gritty, post-Wipers rock-and-roll, “Night Eye” continues McCrary’s mission to shove pop punk-level hooks and attitude into lo-fi guitar pop, and “Keep Me Up” is sloppy, tinny college rock in the vein of acts like Silicone Prairie. Some of the best power pop on Celebration Station comes afterwards, though–“All Away” slips more of an overt British Invasion interpretation over top of McCrary’s melody, and the tick-ticking drum machine pop of “Domino” and “I Hope It Don’t Take Long” (the latter of which feels right out of Tight-Ass Goku Pictures) are true Side-Two gems. After the excitement of Tight-Ass Goku Pictures, Celebration Station feels like Timeout Room settling down just a little bit and confirming that they’ve got more up their sleeves yet. (Bandcamp link)

The Early – I Want to Be Ready

Release date: February 27th
Record label: Island House
Genre: Post-rock, experimental, jazz, electronica
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Hill Forms

The Early is the instrumental, experimental post-rock duo of drummer/percussionist Jake Nussbaum (who’s also played with Ben Seretan) and guitarist/korg player Alex Lewis (also of Flat Mary Road), currently based in Philadelphia and Chicago, respectively. The Early’s roots go all the way back to Lewis and Nussbaum’s time as high schoolers in New Jersey in the early 2000s, but they really took off again after reuniting in Philadelphia at the beginning of this decade, releasing records like On Juniper, Impatient, and Squashed Dragons from 2022 to 2024. Nussbaum is now a lecturer in Liberal Arts at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, but The Early haven’t slowed down, releasing a three-song EP called Cusp last December and quickly following it with a full-length called I Want to Be Ready this February.

Named after choreographer and dancer Danielle Goldman’s book of the same name, I Want to Be Ready is a five-song, forty-one minute exploration of spontaneity and improvisation drawing heavily from the duo’s formative Chicago-based 90s post-rock. Like a lot of post-rock, I Want to Be Ready often starts in a challenging, minimal place and builds to something bigger and louder, though there’s no clear roadmap to these five songs. “Hill Forms” is beautiful, relatively approachable instrumental jazz-post-rock, sure, but “The Laughing Earth” is ten minutes of mostly-percussion-led emptiness before getting a little busy in the last couple, and thirteen-minute penultimate track “Flossless” ends more or less as it begins. The Early’s playing sounds natural and fluid, but I can also hear the communication between Nussbaum and Lewis in how they guide these tracks along. I Want to Be Ready stands out among experimental rock music thanks to the titular desire expressed and, eventually, realized by it. (Bandcamp link)

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