Pressing Concerns: Great Plains, The Chutes, Inland Years, Me, You, & My Metronome

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It’s a Monday Pressing Concerns! We’ve got new records from The Chutes, Inland Years, and Me, You, & My Metronome, plus a reissue from Great Plains. Check them out below!

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.

Great Plains – Naked at the Buy, Sell, and Trade (40th Anniversary)

Release date: June 5th
Record label: Tone Scholar
Genre: College rock, jangle pop, post-punk, cowpunk, punk rock, new wave
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Dick Clark

If you were to design one of those web-map graphics to represent “Columbus, Ohio indie rock”, Great Plains might as well be in the center of it. The central Ohio quintet–vocalist/guitarist Ron House, guitarist Matt Wyatt, keyboardist Mark Wyatt, bassist Paul Nini, and drummer David Green–released three albums on Homestead Records in the mid-to-late 1980s, and they went on to either play in, inspire, or support in some way a staggering amount of the “indie rock” bands in their home city that followed in their footsteps. Great Plains’ second album, Naked at the Buy, Sell and Trade, turned forty last year, and the band have celebrated this milestone with a vinyl and CD reissue through Elastic Stage and Tone Scholar Recordings, the latter of which is run by Nini (also of Closet Mix and Sanpaulo).

Naked at the Buy, Sell and Trade (presented with four bonus tracks on the CD version) is shining proof of just what a weird, difficult, and unique band Great Plains were while they were active. Certainly a “college rock” band, this LP is equal parts catchy jangle pop, bizarre 1980s American-style post-punk, and a bit of Midwestern roots rock–they appeared on the landmark Strum & Thrum jangle pop compilation back in 2020, but this album is equally comparable to underground misfits like The Dead Milkmen, Violent Femmes, or even Pere Ubu. Just in Naked at the Buy, Sell and Trade’s first half, we’re treated to the catchy jangle-power pop opening track “Dick Clark” (which imagines an Ohioan Meat Puppets to some degree), the sardonic new wave “Letter to a Fanzine”, and the seven-minute post-punk endurance test “Chuck Berry’s Orphan”. Naked at the Buy, Sell and Trade (and Great Plains as a whole) doesn’t fit neatly into the boxes into which music from forty years ago gets reduced, but their records are still right there to listen to for anyone who wants to hear what the underground actually sounded like. (Bandcamp link)

The Chutes – The Chutes

Release date: July 24th
Record label: Dandy Boy
Genre: Jangle pop, power pop, indie pop, twee
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Scraping the Last Bits of Light

You’re probably wondering when Rosy Overdrive is going to introduce a new jangle pop band from the Bay Area, preferably with a new record on one of the San Francisco region’s leading lights like Dandy Boy Records. Well, wait no longer, because the self-titled debut EP from a San Francisco husband-and-wife duo called The Chutes is here to give you everything you could possibly want in a seven-song guitar pop record. Kenneth Turner (vocals/instruments) and Erika Calderon-Turner (vocals) actually have a very different background from your typical indie pop duo, however: the former is most famous for leading the San Francisco hardcore bands Foghorn and Fentanyl, and while I’m not sure the specifics of the latter’s music history, she’s also been involved with the Bay Area hardcore scene in some way. 

Some hardcore musicians bring a more punk edge to indie pop when they pick it up, but The Chutes bears virtually no signifiers of that scene. Kenneth and Erika trade lead vocals over top of jangly, sunny guitars like they’re veterans of the art form: opening track “Scraping the Last Bits of Light” sounds like a band who are students of British C86-style indie pop, and “What Have I Gotten Myself Into” is just as sugary and vibrant. “Like Waves” and “Nowhere in Particular” have a nice propulsion to them, and while only two of the seven tracks have anything of a “ballad” quality to them, The Chutes pull off the more melancholic vibes of “Mise en Place” and “Twin Lens” as well as anything else on their debut record. The Chutes is anything but a dabbling by a couple of genre tourists; Kenneth and Erika are very good at this already, and hopefully this EP is the start of more contributions to the modern jangle pop movement. (Bandcamp link)

Inland Years – Nowadays

Release date: July 14th
Record label: BSDJ
Genre: Lo-fi pop, bedroom pop, lo-fi indie folk
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Nothing Left to Say

Last year, I wrote about Keep Your Eyes on the Road, a cassette of jangly, lo-fi, folky guitar pop from a longtime punk musician named Ryan Daniels. Daniels’ Inland Years solo project is quite prolific: we’re only a year and a couple of months out from Keep Your Eyes on the Road, but they’ve put out The Bunker Sessions (featuring full-band recordings of a few older Inland Years songs), a cassette called The Meadow, and Nowadays, which finds Daniels once again linking up with Japanese tape label BSDJ for a thirteen-song, fifteen-minute record. As you can probably tell from that length breakdown, Daniels favors shorts bursts of pop music hovering around the 60 to 90 second range, sounding like a lo-fi Teenage Fanclub with a Tony Molina or early Guided by Voices attitude to song construction. One shouldn’t necessarily mistake “lo-fi” for “simple”, as the self-harmonies and interesting instrumental interjections of “Morning Train” prove, although the more straightforward folk-pop of “I Know This More Than Anyone”, the tape-hiss indie pop of “A Thousand Miles”, the rustic power pop of “Haunt”, and the jangly sendoff of penultimate track “Nothing Left to Say” are all equally as effective. It’s another dispatch in brevity from Inland Years, who seem to be experts at paring things down without leaving us shortchanged. (Bandcamp link)

Me, You, & My Metronome – Family Plan

Release date: July 24th
Record label: Petit Village
Genre: Dream pop, indie pop, jangle pop, fuzz pop
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Zip Codes

I wrote about Jon Sakata and his noise pop project Me, You & My Metronome just a couple months ago, when the Montreal-based artist put out the seven-song Hooray for the Status Quo EP. Sakata has been making music since the mid-2000s (and apparently has lived everywhere from Hawaii to Japan to Austin to San Francisco before settling in Quebec), but Family Plan is the debut full-length album from his current project, and it expands upon the dreamy guitar pop Hooray for the Status Quo displayed. The forty-one minute album kicks off with two songs displaying Me, You & My Metronome’s range in the sublime, meditative opening track “Big Stadium” and the full-on, fuzzed-out, shoegaze-inspired pop of “Zip Codes”. Rockers like “Sunday Someday” and “Embroiled in Meaning” sit gamely alongside more thoughtful dream pop material like “Sad Waterpark” and “Westward Bound”, both sides of which highlight Sakata’s ability to write a pop song with the best of them. Me, You & My Metronome seems like it’s on a hot streak between the quick turnaround and the expansion of themselves to a larger stage, so those who appreciate Sakata’s strain of indie pop would do well to check out Family Plan. (Bandcamp link)

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