Pressing Concerns: Shotmaker, The Van Pelt, My Pet Fossil, Carry Ripple

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This is the Monday Pressing Concerns! It features a reissue from Shotmaker and new albums from The Van Pelt, My Pet Fossil, and Carry Ripple. Check ’em out below.

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Shotmaker – Mouse Ear [Forget-Me-Not] (30th Anniversary Edition)

Release date: September 18th
Record label: Solid Brass
Genre: Noise rock, post-hardcore, 90s indie rock, post-punk, emo
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Sky

It’s time to revisit another plucked-from-obscurity noise rock band from the 1990s–are you ready? Specifically, we’re talking about Shotmaker, a trio who formed in 1993 in between Toronto and Ottawa (specifically, they arose from the towns of Belleville and Tweed), relocated to the latter city the following year, and put out two albums plus the requisite smattering of compilation appearances and EPs/singles before disbanding in 1999. The band (drummer Matt Deline, guitarist Tim McKeough, and bassist Nick Pye) partnered with reissue-focused label Solid Brass in 2023 for a career-spanning box set, and the success of that endeavor inspired the trio and the label to reissue their final album, Mouse Ear [Forget-Me-Not], as a standalone release for its thirtieth anniversary. Originally released in 1996 on Troubleman Unlimited (Lync, Dahlia Seed, Ex Models), Mouse Ear [Forget-Me-Not] is as a kinetic and uncompromising record of 90s-style emo-tinged post-hardcore as I’ve heard in recent memory.

Solid Brass’ bio for Shotmaker makes sure to list the impressive number of notable bands with which the trio rubbed elbows as a frequently-touring act in the 1990s: Modest Mouse! Unwound! Fugazi! Cap’n Jazz! Mouse Ear [Forget-Me-Not] does indeed appeal to devotees of multiple heavy indie rock scenes: early 90s emo, Dischord Records when they affixed “post-” to hardcore, and yes, the greyer, insular side of what was happening in the Pacific Northwest. Unwound is definitely the closest analogue among those big names, and I would also shout out a lesser-known Dischord band Shotmaker also played with in Hoover. In between the circular, depressive riffs and the shouted vocals drowned out by the music, though, there’s a more propulsive, “rock and roll” side to Mouse Ear [Forget-Me-Not] to which Unwound’s records didn’t really aspire even at their most “punk”. They’re not in any way really “accessible”, but you can hear the hard rock DNA in stuff like “Uninhibited” and “Bailer”. All these bands active concurrently had their own little variations on the sound of the day, and a more complete picture of it is certainly welcome. (Bandcamp link)

The Van Pelt – Remain Obscure

Release date: September 18st
Record label: Ernest Jenning
Genre: 90s indie rock, post-rock, art rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Arid as the Aral

Reviving a band after more than two decades of inactivity has been a tricky maze that many of our great 1990s indie rock groups have navigated in recent years to varying degrees of success, but New York-originating quartet The Van Pelt has a sound that naturally seems to lend itself to “elder statesmen” status. They were originally active from 1993 to 1997, and by the time of their second LP, 1997’s Sultans of Sentiment, founding members Chris Leo (vocals/guitar) and Neil O’Brien (drums) had been joined by guitarist Brian Maryansky and bassist Sean Greene. Leo (brother of Ted of The Pharmacists fame) sketched gripping sung-spoken images over music that pulled from 90s emo, post-hardcore, and post-rock, and when this lineup reunited for 2023’s Artisans & Merchants, the punk edges were stretched into a vast atmospheric sound, but otherwise The Van Pelt transitioned into the 2020s quite smoothly.

Remain Obscure, the fourth Van Pelt LP (fifth if you count the archival release Imaginary Third), picks up the quartet’s wandering thread, having explored the reaches of their whole deal to the point where they’re making largely unclassifiable post-indie rock “art” music. On the one hand, the music of The Van Pelt is sculpted to be the backdrop for what’s effectively “aging New York artist poetry” from Leo, but that minimizes the effect that these musical choices have on the final LP. It reminds me of the sprawling Fred Thomas solo LP from a few years ago, a collection of alternatively fuzzy and stark remembrances given an appropriate reading from adept veterans of “indie music”. Remain Obscure is a knowing title, although it would have been so no matter what kind of album The Van Pelt would’ve made in 2026. With that in mind, The Van Pelt took advantage of being themselves for thirty years and made something only they could’ve made. (Bandcamp link)

My Pet Fossil – Live My Valley Life

Release date: August 21st
Record label: Cherub Dream
Genre: Punk rock, noise rock, garage punk
Formats: CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Dedicated Turning Lane

Who doesn’t like noise rock? People whose only interactions with that genre have been Jesus Lizard and Swans clones might not jump to call My Pet Fossil “noise rock”, but this Sacramento quartet display a deeper and more understanding knowledge of 1980s SST and Touch & Go Records’ discographies than most modern acts. The second album from the band (guitarist/vocalist Julian Hall, guitarist Alejandro Magallan, bassist Claire Tauber, and drummer Eric Frankenstein), Live My Valley Life, is a punk record that is sometimes heavy, sometimes downtuned, and frequently ugly, but most importantly, it’s an LP that understands that this kind of underground U.S. indie (as in “independent”) rock music is at its best when it’s holding up a mirror to the seedy underbelly of Americana. You can do this in any part of the country if you’re good enough, but Sacramento, California has got to be one of the most fertile breeding grounds for this kind of thing.

Live My Valley Life is effectively a concept album about the “American West” as an ideal–sometimes it’s a violent exorcism of its demonic influence, other times it’s a more curious exploration, but the subject is certainly dark enough to give My Pet Fossil enough fuel for a thirty-minute record. “Michael P. Fossil” and “Dedicated Turning Lane” are exciting, skeevy rock songs that imagine a world where Wipers and Thin White Rope crossed paths at the peak of their powers, and My Pet Fossil throw some real curveballs into the record’s second half between the (ironically) somewhat psychedelic ballad “Not So Psychedelic”, the heart-on-sleeve jangly indie rock of “My Heart Won’t Wait”, and the stuck-between-stations finale of “For Morro Rock”. It’s a cloudy and beautiful dispatch from the frontier that’s going to stick with me for a while. (Bandcamp link)

Carry Ripple – Carry Ripple 2

Release date: September 4th
Record label: Machine Duplication
Genre: Lo-fi indie rock, experimental rock, lo-fi folk, electronic
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Mathematics of the Infinite

Carry Ripple is the project of Carter Earheart-Brown, a Memphis-based musician whose 2024 debut album was pegged as part of the American South’s “current wave of weirdo lo-fi indie rock” by me. Carry Ripple’s synthesis of MJ Lenderman, Feeble Little Horse, and Spirit of the Beehive into experimental shoegaze-alt-country-90s-slacker-indie-rock made it one of the more intriguing debut LPs of that year, and I’m pleased to hear that Earheart-Brown decided to get even weirder with Carry Ripple 2. Although the album features performances from names like Colin Miller, Darryl Johns, and Heaven Schmitt, Carry Ripple 2 is ultimately a trip deeper and deeper into the mind of Earheart-Brown. That’s an arena large enough to contain the molasses-slow “Whisper”, the beautiful folk-country-tinged numbers “Birdbath” and “Mathematics of the Infinite”, the experimental ecological folk-tronica of “Ailanthus Altissima”, and soundscapes like “Trepanning” (which is quite beautiful) and “Goofy” (which indeed is). Despite the wide-ranging nature of Carry Ripple 2, Earheart-Brown takes us on this trip slowly and deliberately in a way that helps it feel like Carry Ripple’s most coherent work yet. (Bandcamp link)

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