Pressing Concerns: Shrubs, Eliksa, Smirk, Mirrorball

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Welcome to the Thursday Pressing Concerns! It’s a bit of a hodge-podge this week (it’s a holiday weekend in the States, which may have something to do with it), but there’s still plenty to enjoy here with a new album from Smirk, a posthumous release from Shrubs, and new EPs from Eliksa and Mirrorball. Check them out below, and if you missed Monday’s blog post (featuring Fire Man, NAYAN, Lovewell, and The Hobknobs), check that 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.

Shrubs – Rising

Release date: July 4th
Record label: FABCOM!
Genre: College rock, folk rock, power pop, roots rock, garage rock
Formats: CD, digital
Pull Track: Here We Go Again

From 1994 to 2018, Shrubs were a New Jersey rock trio making what we’d sometimes call “college rock”, a mixture of power pop, garage rock, psychedelia, folk rock, and roots rock that recalls bands like Refrigerator, several Flying Nun Records acts, and The Feelies (with whom Shrubs rubbed elbows on multiple occasions). Just as Shrubs started work on what was to be their sixth album, the death of guitarist/vocalist Jay LoRubbio brought the band to a sudden and seemingly final halt. Last year, though, drummer/vocalist Rob Takleszyn and bassist/vocalist Bob Torsello met up with Feelies frontperson Glenn Mercer to record the two songs that Shrubs had written for their next album. These two new recordings lead off Rising, a posthumous Shrubs CD collection that’s augmented by two WFMU radio sessions the band recorded in 2008 and 2011. 

Of the two “new” songs, I’m most partial to “Let’s Go”, a Torsello-penned guitar pop tune that sounds like a great lost NRBQ recording, but there’s no denying the poignancy of “Lou’s Place”, which LoRubbio wrote in tribute to what I can only imagine was one of his biggest influences in Lou Reed and which Takleszyn sings in his departed bandmate’s stead. Not only do Shrubs get a nice coda to their career, though, we also get to hear twenty-one tracks’ worth of the band, vibrant and alive, plowing through their catalog on WFMU. If you’re intrigued by bands who “sound like they should be on WFMU” and garner Feelies and NRBQ comparisons, Rising is a must-listen as an introduction to Shrubs’ whole thing. There’s something very compelling about hearing a band rocking stripped-down versions of their own original pop songs (like highlights “Gone to Hell” and “Here We Go Again”) and paying tribute to their influences and peers (they cover The Bevis Frond and, of course, The Feelies here) all in one. It speaks very well of Shrubs that they conducted themselves such that something as strong as Rising could be assembled in their wake. (Bandcamp link)

Eliksa – From Falmer Court

Release date: July 3rd
Record label: Crafting Room
Genre: Folk rock, indie pop
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Only a Matter of Time

We all only get one chance to make a first impression, and the Brighton project Eliksa seems intent on putting together a unique one. Eliksa is led by the eponymous, mononymous singer-songwriter who grew up “in the French countryside” before moving to Brighton and assembling a backing band including Noah Fox, Tim Spencer, Monty Taft, and Mina-Mae Alexander. Eliksa’s debut EP, From Falmer Court, was recorded live at something called The Great Thatch Barn in the record’s titular city (it’s a historic 13th century “Tithe Barn”, a concept I admit I didn’t learn about until now) over an “intensive five-hour window”. They filmed this five-song, fifteen-minute session, and it was first released as a video on Elika’s YouTube channel before Crafting Room Recordings put out the audio as a standalone digital EP this week. The video is very nicely done and you ought to watch it if Eliksa’s thing sounds up your alley, but this is technically just about the audio of From Falmer Court and I do need to get around to talking about what it sounds like.

Crafting Room calls Eliksa a “slacker-folk” act, but I’m not sure many slackers make high-concept, well-produced concert film debut releases in historic British barns. There’s a compelling contradiction between the polish of the video and the music, which is ultimately pretty simple and stripped down folk-pop. Basically, we get four pieces of laid-back, acoustic-driven British indie pop as well as one instrumental interlude connecting them. “Never Enough” was the advance single and it’s strong enough to be one, but I might have a slight preference for “Only a Matter of Time” in terms of immediately-hitting guitar pop. The low-key rock and roll of “Aquamarine Lampshade” and the bittersweet closing track “After All the Trouble” aren’t slouches either, though. On From Falmer Court, Eliksa do indeed have the material to back up their ambition.

Smirk – Speculative Fiction

Release date: July 3rd
Record label: Smoking Room
Genre: Garage punk, punk rock, post-punk
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Perfect World

When we last checked in on Los Angeles garage rock group Smirk, it was late 2022, and the Nick Vicario-led project had just put out their debut LP, Material, on Feel It Records; I called it classic West Coast punk rock with a “dark streak” at the time. Vicario has actually been playing in garage bands since the early 2000s (first in his hometown of Portland, Oregon), although that tantalizing edge I detected in Material hasn’t dulled a bit over the years and various projects. The first three Wipers albums loom large over Speculative Fiction, an album that takes a garage punk’s sound, slows it down and cleans it up just a bit, but keeps (and, arguably, enhances) the fresh-feeling dark post-punk energy at the heart of Smirk. At thirteen songs and nearly forty-five minutes, Speculative Fiction is by far the most substantial Smirk release yet, and features members of Advertisement, Ceremony, Pardoner, and Poison Ruin backing Vicaro up at various points on the LP. 

The band claim relatively lighter, more pop-forward acts like Big Star and Guided by Voices as influences for Speculative Fiction, which I find amusing, as I find very little overt reference to that kind of sound in these songs. Do not get me wrong, it’s a pretty catchy punk album, but the strongest examples of the art on Speculative Fiction are either snotty garage rock rippers like “I Shall Be Released” or loud, all-out punk rock like “Perfect World”. Then, after that all-out sprint, we’re treated to “Abide”, the “Wipers doing a post-punk update of a Christian hymn” exercise we never knew we needed, and “Ritual Torture”, which is, of course, the closest thing to genuine “jangle-punk” on the LP. Speculative Fiction is anything but an abandoning of Smirk’s earlier releases, but Vicario is clearly wrestling with something here, and it’s just what this album needs. (Bandcamp link)

Mirrorball – Mirrorball

Release date: July 3rd
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Dream pop, indie pop, psychedelic pop
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Take a Shot

Mirrorball are a duo from Los Angeles made up of vocalist Alexandra Johnstone and guitarist/keyboardist Scott Watson who’ve been putting out singles together since 2019. As best as I can tell, though, Mirrorball is the band’s first EP, made up of three songs released in the past few years and two new ones. Mirrorball evoke a very specific, 2010s kind of dreamy, psychedelic indie pop–it’s no coincidence that they recorded these songs with Chris Coady, who’s produced records from Beach House, DIIV, and Smith Westerns, among others. Mirrorball is polished but hazy-sounding, evoking several decades’ worth of southern California history. “Red Hot Dust” introduces us to Mirrorball with perfunctory piano keys and up-front, meandering vocals from Johnstone; it’s intriguing, and they keep us on such a ride through the Mazzy Star-like guitars of “Take a Shot”, the (relatively) glitzy indie pop of “Tinsel for a Tear”, and the busier, lightly sunshine-psych touches of closing track “Devil Mirror”. With that, the first chapter of Mirrorball’s hopefully lengthy career is wrapped up quite neatly. 

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