Pressing Concerns: Old Joy, Railcard, Summer Sleeves, CuVa Bimö

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Hey there! I was on vacation last week, but the blog still kept on updating. Now I’m back home (thus concludes the “personal life update” portion of this blog post), and I’m bringing you new albums from Old Joy, Railcard, Summer Sleeves, and CuVa Bimö here in Pressing Concerns. Read ’em 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.

Old Joy – Why Burn Bridges You Can Live Under

Release date: September 18th
Record label: Candlepin
Genre: Power pop, indie pop, jangle pop, folk rock, 90s indie rock
Formats: CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Gut Shot

For the past decade, Alex Reindl was a fixture in the Chicago indie rock scene, playing in acts like Sonny Falls and Dogs at Large and regularly releasing self-described “scum-pop” music inspired by 90s indie rock, singer-songwriter indie folk, and power pop as Old Joy. Why Burn Bridges You Can Live Under appears to be the third Old Joy album, and it’s something of Reindl’s goodbye to the Windy City–shortly after he recorded it at Jamdek with Keifer Douglas and Doug Malone and a long list of Chicago musicians, Reindel relocated to Austin. The final Old Joy LP of the project’s Midwestern era is nothing less than Reindel’s finest work yet, an ambitious thirteen-track, fifty-five minute affair that ping-pongs between immediately-hitting guitar pop anthems and more “involved” indie rock numbers.

Sonny Falls bandleader Ryan Ensley contributes guitar to several tracks on Why Burn Bridges You Can Live Under, and Sonny Falls’ distorted indie rock hooks are a clear reference point for this album. More polished Windy City guitar pop acts like Truth or Consequences New Mexico and Disaster Kid also come to mind, as well as West Coast indie poppers Poppy Patica. In terms of older influences, Old Joy invoke greats from Big Star to Elliott Smith to Fountains of Wayne to Death Cab for Cutie–it’s a mixture of classic power pop and sprawling indie rock that feels very fresh. Look no further than the crazy eight-minute opening track “Cinco de Mayo” spilling into the sparkling guitar pop of “Gut Shot” to get an immediate sense of what Why Burn Bridges You Can Live Under is capable of doing. “Pocket”, “Crucifiction Song”, and “My Brother” all match “Gut Shot” for exciting power pop moments, and repeated listens reveal more great songwriting in the tracks that stitch these “hits” together. We’ll all find out together what’s next for Reindl in Texas, but this chapter of Old Joy has closed out on top. (Bandcamp link)

Railcard – Two Steps at a Time

Release date: September 18th
Record label: Slumberland/Skep Wax
Genre: Indie pop, twee, chamber pop, folk rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Hillman Minx

Railcard are indie pop royalty, and so it’s only natural that their debut album comes to us via two labels also befitting of the title in Slumberland Records (the imprint who brought us Velocity Girl, The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, and Boyracer, among others) and Skep Wax (the label founded by members of twee legends Heavenly). Between the four of them (vocalist/guitarist/keyboardist Rachel Love, bassist Peter Momtchiloff, vocalist/guitarist/drummer Ian Button, and trumpeter Allison Thomson), they’ve played with Dolly Mixture, The Catenary Wires, Heavenly, and The Trash Can Sinatras, but they nonetheless released a couple of digital EPs with little fanfare in 2024 until Slumberland and Skep Wax stepped in to release the Railcard compilation physically earlier this year.

Two Steps at a Time quickly followed, and both the album title and the opening track for which it’s named reflect the pace Railcard is setting for themselves. The juxtaposition of “new, fresh project” and “long-time indie veterans” is key to understanding Two Steps at a Time and Railcard as a whole; these indie pop songs sound like they were written and bashed out quickly, but they also sound very carefully-constructed and considered. Songwriters Love, Button, and Momtchiloff (the first two co-writing the majority of the tracks and the latter contributing a couple songs George Harrison-style) have spent their entire musical lives leading up to the ability to make an album like Two Steps at a Time, where they can walk into a room with one another and stuff like the timeless lament of “When You Say You Love Me, Something’s Wrong”, the perky, electric indie-pop-power of “Hillman Minx”, and the chamber pop/dream folk of “Foxy” comes out of it. I’d hurry into the studio too if I knew that Two Steps at a Time was on the other end of the line. (Bandcamp link)

Summer Sleeves – I’m Shelling Real Daggers

Release date: September 4th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Power pop, college rock, pop rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Simple Matters

Summer Sleeves is Jeremy Wayne, a Seattle-based musician who expresses a devotion to guitar pop of the “power”, “indie”, and “jangle” varieties, citing everyone from Elvis Costello and The New Pornographers to Elephant 6 and The Rentals as influences. I’m Shelling Real Daggers is the third Summer Sleeves album since they debuted in 2021 with the Jigsaw Records-released In the Throes of Woes, and the twelve-track LP features bass on half of the songs from Ethan Jones of local indie pop trio Model Shop and flute and horns from a few different collaborators (Roni and Peter Schmiedeskamp, Alon Bassok, and Harry Rivera); otherwise, it’s all Wayne. If any album I’ve written about recently deserves the “college rock” tag, it’s probably I’m Shelling Real Daggers; looking at Wayne’s list of influences again, I’m detecting a pattern of new wave glitziness, 60s pop fluency, power pop catchiness, and (and this is important) blaring keyboard hooks. Throw in a bit of that pre-1990s jangle pop rootsiness and you’ve got I’m Shelling Real Daggers, an underdog power pop album that nonetheless isn’t shy about wrecking balls of key-led hooks in tracks like “Anywhere, Anytime”, “Simple Matters”, and “Now You Have Time”. Even the songs that don’t have obvious handclaps and tambourines feel like they could have them. It’s a clean thirty minutes, and the few relatively brief detours away from “pop rock hits” are calculated (the sixty-second piano ballad “Tiny Violins”, the stripped down penultimate track “Delegating Is Nice”). I’m Shelling Real Daggers is an undeniable display of Summer Sleeves’ masterful understanding of power pop songwriting and execution. (Bandcamp link)

CuVa Bimö – New Western Values

Release date: September 4th
Record label: Sell the Heart
Genre: Punk rock, garage rock, noise rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Charm Offensive

I wrote about CuVa Bimö back at the beginning of last year, when the Oakland group put out their debut album, CB Radio. In a Bay Area full of (very good) indie pop, the self-proclaimed “grunge rock” group’s embrace of garage punk and scuzzy noise rock stood out, and after dropping a single last December, the quartet (guitarist/vocalists Pete Vadelnieks and Sebastian Beltran-Moeller, drummer Ricky Cunliffe, and bassist Jake Bilich) got picked up by Sell the Heart Records (The Blackburns, Onesie, States of Nature) for their second LP. New Western Values is every bit the electric punk record that CB Radio was, from the sneering title track that kicks things off to the oddly melodic “Charm Offensive” to the nervous post-punk energy of “Graysin”. The rock-solid rhythms found in “Sound and Fury” and “800 Meter Tears” among other tracks continue to set CuVa Bimö apart from a horde of basement punk rock groups–there is something heavier and darker in New Western Values, unmistakably so. It’s in the occasionally theatrical vocals, the aforementioned low-end emphasis, but, really, just in how CuVa Bimö carry themselves. (Bandcamp link)

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