Pressing Concerns: Hurry, William Matheny, TIFFY, Twin Bloom

Posted byrosyoverdrivePosted inPressing ConcernsTags:, , , , , , , ,

In this Monday Pressing Concerns, we’re looking at new albums from Hurry and William Matheny as well as new EPs from TIFFY and Twin Bloom. This also would’ve more or less been last Thursday’s Pressing Concerns if I’d been able to post a “normal” one (I’ve been experiencing computer difficulties lately, which has impacted the blog schedule a little bit). I’m hoping to get things back on track this week, though.

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.

Hurry – Zoned Out

Release date: July 10th
Record label: Lame-O
Genre: Power pop, jangle pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: All Sunk In

Hurry has been the anchor of Philadelphia’s jangle and power pop scenes for over a decade now; every three years or so, we seem to be able to count on Matt Scottoline to show up with ten great Teenage Fanclub-inspired guitar pop songs regardless of which political party is in the White House or which microgenres Uproxx happens to be extolling. We are now at Zoned Out, which is the seventh Hurry album. Once again it was released by Lame-O Records, recorded by Slaughter, Beach Dog’s Ian Farmer, and features a similar cast of musicians to the last Hurry album (Scottoline, Farmer, Rob and Joe DeCarolis, and Justin Fox). This is the one where Teenage Fanclub co-founder Gerard Love (one of the biggest influences–quite possibly the biggest influence–on Hurry) sings on a track, and it’s also the one where Scottoline decides to cover a song from his labelmates U.S. Highball (to me, that’s just as exciting as the Gerard Love thing).

In a not-totally-hopeless future in which Hurry keeps adding to their stack of records at a steady clip, those abovementioned wrinkles might be how I keep Zoned Out separate from Fake Ideas and Don’t Look Back in my mind. But the core of Zoned Out is exactly what I would expect from Scottoline–world-class delicate power pop. The first song on the album, “All Sunk In”, is already one of my favorite Hurry songs –I love how simply it starts, just clean guitar chords and Scottoline’s voice for forty-five seconds. It’s a moment that brings “How does he keep doing it?” to the tongue, but the rest of Zoned Out is a humble but inarguable reminder of the pop talent that allows Scottoline to, indeed, get away with it. There’s something fascinating about how “The Dumbest Person You’ve Ever Seen” is built around some really gripping guitar soloing and “Just Fine” almost mathematically cuts away any excess, yet they still evoke the same mood. The U.S. Highball cover is impressive, too–I’ve never once listened to that Glasgow indie pop duo’s quick-hit drum machine jangle-pop and thought “you know, I wish somebody slowed this song’s tempo down and stretched it out a lot”. And yet, “Laughing in Reverse” is a Hurry song now, with Scottoline wringing every bit of melody out of it. Hearing Hurry do what they do never gets old. (Bandcamp link)

William Matheny – Material Witness

Release date: July 10th
Record label: Diamond Teeth
Genre: Alt-country, country rock, power pop, roots rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Babylon Man

William Matheny has been playing in bands in and around his native West Virginia since the early 2000s, and he’s as booked as ever lately between playing the bass for alt-country star John R. Miller and the keys for Washington, D.C.-based Music Critic Rock act The Paranoid Style. Despite his commitments, Matheny found time to write and record Material Witness, his third solo LP and first in three years–in a pleasant surprise, he halved the time it took between his 2017 debut Strange Constellations and 2023’s That Grand, Old Feeling. Not only that, but Matheny gathered up some of his talented collaborators (bassist Tucker Riggleman of The Cheap Dates, guitarists Adam L. Meisterhans of Rozwell Kid and Slaughter Beach, Dog and Bud Carroll of American Minor, pianist Jeremy John Batten, and drummer Clint Sutton) to head down to Nashville to record with Justin Francis, a Pittsburgh-originating producer with big-name country and underground punk rock records on his resumé.

The album that Matheny and his band recorded sounds a lot like a William Matheny album, which is a very good thing to sound like. Material Witness is as comfortable as ever between the “power pop” and “alt-country” labels frequently applied to its creator, made by a singer-songwriter with new wave and honky tonk in his DNA but who doesn’t really make either of them. I’d say that Material Witness is Matheny’s “tightest” album, but they’re all very tight so this might be recency bias talking. At the very least, the six-piece barrelling through the ragged, longing pop of opening track “Babylon Man” sounds as close to Matheny’s rock-and-roll live act as they’ve ever gotten on-record. Matheny isn’t the first musician to explore the “roots rock” end of Nick Lowe and Marshall Crenshaw (and probably not even the first one to put an Appalachian twist on it, though we could always use more of that). But he’s the only person who could write “If I Were a River”, a road-worn hymn about punk sticker-covered bathrooms, canaries in coal mines, and trying to make something out of the intrinsic pain and randomness of being. At the very least, I don’t think anyone else could write and sing “If I Were a River” and make it go down as easy as Matheny does. (Bandcamp link)

TIFFY – I Wanted to Know

Release date: July 10th
Record label: Repeating Cloud/Totally Real
Genre: Indie pop, fuzz pop, dream pop, power pop
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: IRB

Somerville, Massachusetts’ Tiffany Sammy has been making self-described “dream-rock” music since the late 2010s as TIFFY, eventually adding other musicians like guitarist Tom Stevens, bassist JK Wong, and drummer Palana to the project. Sammy’s pursuit of the “dream-rock” sound has led to her crossing paths with plenty of notable Northeastern indie rock institutions, releasing records on labels like Totally Real and Dollhouse Lightning and recording with Justin Pizzoferrato of Easthampton, Massachusetts’ Sonelab. TIFFY’s latest EP, I Wanted to Know, links up with three more like-minded collaborators–it’s being co-released on cassette by Maine’s Repeating Cloud Records, features Sadie Dupuis (Sad13, Speedy Ortiz) on guitar on one track, and also contains a track recorded live at Bradford Krieger’s Big Nice Studio in Rhode Island.

The “proper” version of I Wanted to Know–the one you’ll hear on streaming services–is five tracks long and comprised of three new compositions, an interlude, and the aforementioned Big Nice-recorded alternate take of one of the new tracks. The physical cassette contains a lot more than that, namely two demos and an entirely different four-song EP called Divine Hand. I’ll refrain from commenting too much on Divine Hand in anticipation of if and when it gets a wider release (in summary: it’s pretty good) but the I Wanted to Know side is enough on its own to continue TIFFY’s strong streak. Sammy’s songwriting, inspired by classic dream pop, 60s girl-group melodies, and jangly indie rock, is once again punched up by a full-band sound–the sublime “Scam Likely” is enhanced by Stevens’ pedal steel, “Drive Thru Deja Vu” surges into the realm of power pop power chords and heroic guitar soloing, and “IRB” has just a bit of Dupuis’ math-pop in its DNA. I Wanted to Know is a snippet of where TIFFY is currently at, and both the digital and expanded cassette versions of this snapshot paint a promising picture. (Bandcamp link)

Twin Bloom – Twin Bloom

Release date: July 10th
Record label: Dandy Boy
Genre: Dream pop, indie pop, shoegaze, post-punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Summer’s Gone

Twin Bloom are a new indie rock quartet from Oakland; their debut single, “Magazine Dreams” b/w “Summer’s Gone”, was released early last year by Bay Area indie pop label Dandy Boy Records. Both of these songs are on Twin Bloom’s self-titled debut EP, which the group (guitarist/vocalist Gvir Aviv, guitarist Mickle Nguyen, bassist/keyboardist Joshua Cano, and drummer Sandra Alva) recorded with Spacemoth’s Maryam Qudus at Oakland’s Tiny Telephone and Best House Studios. While Twin Bloom can indeed be described as “indie pop”, these four songs are less directly inspired by the straightforward jangly twee pop of many of their labelmates and instead chase a more cavernous, 1980s-evoking sound–Twin Bloom’s pop music is filtered through ambitious reverb-y dream-gaze and new wave sheens. 

Opening track “Magazine Dreams” is large enough to introduce us to Twin Bloom’s range of influences–it’s a big, glitzy, blinking, synth-tinged 80s pop rock statement, although I can still glimpse that guitar pop center of the track among the trappings. The dream pop “Signals” is a little more subdued in the verses, but the chorus shoots for the stars, too; the same can be said for closing track “Under the Current”, an earnest jangle-dream-rock send off. The closest thing to “Bay Area indie pop” on Twin Bloom is probably “Summer’s Gone”; it fits in with the rest of the EP, but it’s a little more overtly “Teenage Fanclub-y guitar pop”. No one direction “works” more than the others for Twin Bloom, and I look forward to hearing how they present themselves on a longer-form record sooner or later. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Leave a comment