Pressing Concerns: 2nd Grade, Charlie Kaplan, Aluminum, Lydia Loveless

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Hello, all! In this Thursday Pressing Concerns, we have two new albums coming out tomorrow (October 30th) from Charlie Kaplan and Aluminum, an LP from 2nd Grade that comes out physically tomorrow (and digitally in December), and a new EP from Lydia Loveless that also comes out tomorrow. Check them out below, and if you missed Monday’s blog post (featuring Pet Fox, Female Gaze, Porcelain, and Paper Jam), check that out too.

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2nd Grade – Girls and Boys

Release date: October 30th (physical) / December 4th (digital)
Record label: Lame-O
Genre: Power pop, jangle pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Slingerland Girls

Why don’t they make the entire airplane out of the black box? Why can’t they make a cake that’s all edge pieces? Why not make a power pop album that’s entirely songs titled “___ Girls” and “___ Boys”? It’s hard not to look at the twenty-song tracklist of 2nd Grade’s Girls and Boys and think about the academic way Peter Gill, a graduate student of power pop if there ever was one, must’ve approached this album. It’s not enough to just keep making excellent guitar pop albums like 2022’s Easy Listening and 2024’s Scheduled Explosions, nor is it enough to have a solo project where Gill can be a little looser and weirder (WPTR, whose Redness & Swelling at the Injection Site was actually Gill’s first release on 2nd Grade’s new label home of Lame-O Records).

Writing songs about various cohorts of “boys” and “girls” has resulted in a 2nd Grade album that doesn’t feel like any of their other records–it shouldn’t be that big of a deal, you’d think, but it is. Gill clearly believes songs gifted these titles ought to sound a certain way, and while on a typical 2nd Grade album they’d be interspersed with a few different strains of power pop, pretty much all twenty of Girls and Boys’ songs evoke the same feeling to me: vaguely hazy and nostalgic, heard from some kind of distance despite the crystal-clear sound and construction, and also almost always with a surprisingly long, meandering, but breathlessly delivered lyrical text.

For the first time ever, half of the songs on a 2nd Grade album are sung by bassist Catherine Dwyer, who you might know as a member of Remember Sports or through her solo project, Spring Onion. It’s a decision I puzzled over a lot while listening to Girls and Boys, because (aside from a literal interpretation of the album’s title) I wasn’t sure why Gill had decided to share the reins–Dwyer’s voice isn’t particularly different from Gill’s, so it’s not to sing songs Gill can’t, and the intimate, personal bedroom pop frontperson of Spring Onion wouldn’t have felt like an obvious choice to helm sparkling power pop.

Gill, who is certainly a more advanced scholar on the subject than I am, probably arrived at the decision due to some power pop trigonometry that I couldn’t understand–I trust him, and the songs are good, so at the end of the day it doesn’t really matter. But after thinking about it a fair amount, I do think that Dwyer’s less-than-typical approach to “power pop frontperson”, which does diverge from admitted Robert Pollard disciple Peter Gill, might be the key to placing Girls and Boys in its unique position in space and time, somehow evoking an extremely specific era and location but never tipping its hand as to where and when, exactly, that is. Or maybe it just is because Dwyer is a girl and Gill is a boy. Girls! And Boys! On the same album! Who would’ve thought of it? (Bandcamp link)

Charlie Kaplan – Dobro

Release date: October 30th
Record label: Glamour Gowns
Genre: Folk rock, singer-songwriter, alt-country
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Failed

The New York folk rock singer-songwriter Charlie Kaplan has released an album every year since 2023, an impressive clip that came to a head of sorts last year when he put out the intense (for him) and personal art rock double LP A Hat Upon the Bed. It makes some sense that, after putting so much out there with that album, Kaplan found himself embracing a “back to basics” approach on his next album, Dobro. Coming in at a clean twenty-eight minutes and nine songs, Dobro is the polar opposite of A Hat Upon the Bed; it’s Kaplan’s breezy, jaunty, and sometimes even funny version of classic folk-country-rock. Once again, Kaplan gathers up a few regular collaborators (his Office Culture bandmates Winston Cook-Wilson and Jason Burger on piano/organ/keys and drums, respectively, Julian Cubillos on bass, Little Mystery’s Ivy Meissner on backing vocals, Market’s Nate Mendelsohn on engineering and organ, and Andrew Daly Frank on guitar) to give stripped-down, casual, but nonetheless polished readings to these tracks.

The upbeat songs on Dobro are some of the most fun songs I’ve heard in a minute–specifically, the drinking song “Chemical Reaction”, featuring “honky-tonk piano” from Cook-Wilson, “Failed”, an incredibly catchy piece of folk rock brilliance with an appropriately silly music video to go along with it (it’s a song that references “Peyton Manning’s chicken parm”, mind you), and “On Sunday”, Kaplan’s take on a weekend driving song (part of the melody reminds me of Crooked Fingers, and I figured I’d mention that because this album does feel in the same realm as Crooked Fingers). “Sick of You” is another sharp pop song, although the groove-based sound is a bit of an outlier (this is the most “Julian Cubillos” song on the album to my ears), and the gait of “Sleepwalking” is nonetheless a jaunty one (I’ve already said “jaunty” once in this review, but, in my defense, Dobro is quite jaunty). There isn’t anything lesser about the slower folk-country numbers like opening track “Why Not Try LA?” or closing track “Let’s Play a Show Together”, either; these songs, too, benefit from the straightforward performances. Kaplan wears the side of him we hear on Dobro very well. (Bandcamp link)

Aluminum – Iconoclast HaHa

Release date: October 30th
Record label: Felte/Dandy Boy
Genre: Shoegaze, fuzz pop, psychedelia
Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Give Me a Reason

Over the past few years, San Francisco shoegaze/noise pop quartet Aluminum have established themselves as one of the best and most exciting rock bands to come out of the Bay Area, as impressive as that is with all the competition they have out there. Founding members vocalist/bassist Ryann Gonsalves (Torrey), vocalist/guitarist Marc Leyda (Nothing Natural, Wild Moth), and guitarist Austin Montanari (also Nothing Natural and Wild Moth) are joined by new drummer Rick Altieri (Above Me, Blue Ocean, Blue Zero) on their second album, Iconoclast HaHa. Aluminum’s debut album, 2024’s Fully Beat, expanded on the shoegaze of their 2022 debut EP to include prominent alt-dance, Madchester, psychedelic and electronic elements; I would’ve expected Iconoclast HaHa to continue further in this vein, but Aluminum LP2 isn’t exactly as neat of an evolution.

Iconoclast HaHa comes out swinging with the swirling wall of sound opening track “Give Me a Reason” and keeps its foot on the gas with the high-octane rocker “Killing Time”; between those two and “Lovely People” not long after them, it feels like Aluminum proving they can still make loud, electric, guitar-overload 90s-style shoegaze with the best of them despite the detours featuring heavily on their debut album. The clearest Fully Beat callbacks happen in the middle of the LP–that’s where you’ll hear the loopy dream pop “Distant Noise”, which turns the non-shoegaze elements of Aluminum surprisingly towards late-90s alternative pop, and the one truly weird electronic moment on the LP with the minimal beat of “An Opportunist”. The acoustic fuzz pop of “Paper Cup” is the bridge back towards more shoegaze-rockers, and “Styptic Powder”, “I’ll See You There”, and “So Low” all ensure Iconoclast HaHa exits with as much zeal as it had upon its entry. The story of Iconoclast HaHa is one of a band with plenty of tools in its arsenal at this point carefully choosing the best ones with which to execute these thirteen tracks, resulting in a distinct but just-as-fun second album. (Bandcamp link)

Lydia Loveless – Accolades

Release date: October 30th
Record label: Honey, You’re Gonna Be Late/Bloodshot
Genre: Alt-country, singer-songwriter, heartland rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Accolades

Lydia Loveless has been making music pretty much their entire life, and it’s now been over a decade since their wildly beloved initial three-album run on Bloodshot Records. It might’ve not felt possible at the time, but they’ve transitioned nicely from an insurgent 2010s alt-country (actual alt-country, not what they’re calling that these days) star to an elder statesman, acknowledging the canonical status of their previous work (like in 2024’s Something Else, a piano re-recording of their 2014 LP Somewhere Else) while making new albums with a keen understanding of their strengths (like 2023’s Nothing’s Gonna Stand in My Way Again, a strong collection of songs that felt somewhere in between their earlier work and the departure of 2020’s Daughter).

That brings us to Accolades, a six-song EP featuring five new Loveless originals and a reprise of the title track. Loveless claims a Tom Petty influence on Accolades as well as a desire to “focus more on telling stories than dumping my life on everyone”; that’s a bold claim from one of the masters of uncomfortably-personal-lyric alt-country songwriting, and while it’s still Loveless as we know them (that title track really throws us right into it at the onset of the EP), I think they live up to their ambitions on this one. The title track and “Oklahoma” are great pop songs that walk the tightrope between “nice, polished Americana production” (courtesy of Matt Ross-Spang, who’s been behind the boards for Jason Isbell, the Mountain Goats, and the Drive-By Truckers) and “not getting in the way of Loveless’ writing”. “Avoiding Highways” and “Let Me Get My Hopes Up” nail the slower side of Loveless, and “What We Learned” does something else entirely by steadily building into an emotional alt-rock finale. It’s nice to get a strong check-in from a unique songwriter in the landscape–thank you, Accolades. (Bandcamp link)

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