July 11th (which is tomorrow) is shaping up to be a big release week, and Pressing Concerns is on the scene documenting four of these imminent releases: new albums from Mal Blum, Allo Darlin’, The Queen & I, and The Wind-Ups. If you missed either of this week’s earlier blog posts (Monday’s featured Hannah Marcus, Abel, Jacob Freddy, and The Pond, and Tuesday’s featured Gauri Paighan, KD Surreal, Lain Fallow, and Mob Wife), check those out too.
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.
Mal Blum – The Villain
Release date: July 11th Record label: Get Better Genre: Alt-rock, fuzz rock, pop punk, slacker rock Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital Pull Track: Must Get Lonely
The New York-originating, Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter Mal Blum has been kicking around as a solo artist since the late 2000s. At first, they made charming, early Mountain Goats-inspired folk punk-adjacent pop music, and while I still like those records (2013’s Tempest in a Teacup in particular holds up), we all must grow up, and Blum eventually graduated to more electric indie rock with bits of pop punk and grunge-pop. The Villain continues this trend, but it’s also Blum’s first album in quite a while–their last LP, Pity Boy, was in 2019, with 2022’s Ain’t It Nice EP bridging the gap, so to speak. Blum’s always displayed flashes of brilliance, but The Villain is, for me, where they’ve finally “put it all together” and made a cohesive, potent, front-to-back classic album. It’s Blum’s first album made entirely with their “lower register after several years on testosterone”, and they’ve embraced their new voice’s ability to sell a specific kind of low-key, muttering darkness. The press release implies that The Villain isn’t entirely a break-up album, but there’s a lot of relationship ugliness in here, and the character that Blum adopts throughout the album–passively, sardonically observing one royal mess after another as if they aren’t even there at all–ends up being a very fascinating byproduct of a major personal transition.
“I killed the previous tenant in my head, or so they said / I think that’s pretty reductive, but I’m tired, so whatever,” Blum memorably sings in “Killer”, perhaps the clearest moment of realization in a record full of them. As the rest of The Villain makes abundantly clear, though, awareness can only get one so far–there’s an inevitability, even a fatalism to stuff like “I’m So Bored” and “Gemini v. Cancer”, both of which shrug and continue down the pothole-filled paths they’ve been down before and will go down again. As understated as Blum’s direness comes off from their perspective, the Mal Blum band and producer Jessica Boudreaux don’t lay down with them–the opening track “A Small Request” builds from a simple, classic Blum beginning to a full on alt-rock cathartic finish, “Must Get Lonely” is as breezy as it is uncomfortable, and “Gemini v. Cancer” is basically a dance song (one that few people other than Blum could get away with, I think). The Villain is an incredibly rich text about perception and agency hidden in a messy queer breakup album featuring songs with choruses like “The truth is out there–what if I wanna lie instead?” (“Truth Is Out There”) and “If I don’t ever see you again, it’d be too soon” (“Too Soon”). I was drawn in by Mal Blum the cigarette-wielding, quick-witted trans-masculine non-binary bad boy, yes, but when they drop both the act and their voice to a whisper in the title track, The Villain finally locks into place as something more than a (quite compelling) clarity-weaponizing persona. (Bandcamp link)
Allo Darlin’ – Bright Nights
Release date: July 11th Record label: Slumberland/Fika Recordings Genre: Folk-pop, indie pop, jangle pop Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital Pull Track: Tricky Questions
From 2008 to 2016, Allo Darlin’ was a quartet made up of two Australians (vocalist/guitarist/ukulele player Elizabeth Morris Innset and bassist/vocalist Bill Botting) and two Brits (drummer Michael Collins and guitarist Paul Rains) who met up in London and made twee-ish, folk-ish indie pop music together. After releasing three records that received just about as much attention and adoration that vintage-style indie pop music was capable of receiving in the early 2010s, Allo Darlin’ decided to hang it up, a decision that lasted for a few years until some reunion shows in 2023 led to the group fully reuniting and making another album together. Bright Nights arrives via their old home of Slumberland Records (given the label’s recent hot streak, it feels like the perfect time for a new Allo Darlin’ album) and via a new partnership with Fika Recordings (replacing their former British label, the now-defunct Fortuna Pop!). On their first album in more than a decade, Allo Darlin’ do indeed sound like an indie pop band who’ve allowed themselves to age–somewhere between the stalwart folk rock of The Innocence Mission and the elder-statespeople twee pop of The Catenary Wires, Bright Nights is the record that the four of them needed to take some time off to make.
Morris, who sings lead vocals on all but one of Bright Nights’ ten songs, retakes her place as frontperson with a kind of understated, fervent confidence that’s certainly the mark of somebody with a wealth of experience both inside and beyond “indie music”. The person who’s singing thoughtful, vibrant, slow-moving folk-pop songs like spare album opener “In the Spring” and the meandering “Northern Waters” is the same person who’s able to put on a show to the tune of busier but still unhurried indie pop hits like “My Love Will Bring Your Home” and “Tricky Questions”; it just takes time to develop this kind of subtle range. The rest of Allo Darlin’, of course, do exactly what Morris’ writing needs them to do, and guest musicians like mandolin player Michael Donovan, violinist Dan Mayfield, and vocalists Heather Larimer (Corvair), Hannah Winter, and Laura Kovic (Fortitude Valley) all make noticeable contributions to Bright Nights’ sound as well. One of the best songs on Bright Nights is the title track, which closes the record; Morris signs off with a poetic, devoted array of images, at one point sighing “Thank God summer is on its way,” in the chorus. Allo Darlin’ have a wealth of history to draw from now, but Bright Nights still has a lot it’s looking forward to as well. (Bandcamp link)
The Queen & I – At Peace
Release date: July 11th Record label: Self-released Genre: Psychedelia, noise pop, fuzz rock, post-Britpop, power pop Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Still I Wonder
At this point, it seems pretty rare for me to hear about a new band from the Bay Area and not recognize the various members from a half-dozen other projects. The Queen & I are a trio from Oakland who are, nonetheless, entirely new to me–the primary songwriter Andrew Ledford and Austin Gibbons have played in bands I don’t know called Tet Holiday (both of them) and The Pleasure Routine (just Ledford), while I can’t really tell you anything about the third member (or even who they are, exactly–on-record I believe it’s Brandon Farmer, who seems to have since been replaced by Greg Oertel). And yet, here we have At Peace, the project’s first album as a full band (Ledford apparently re-released a 2010s solo album called Statues under The Queen & I’s name last year), which is as strong a collection of guitar pop as any that I’ve heard from the Bay Area’s more familiar faces in recent memory. The Queen & I’s version of pop music is distorted and electric but immaculate and polished, with bits of psychedelic pop, shoegaze, and Britpop sneaking into material that could’ve just as easily been read as more traditional jangle pop and/or power pop.
At Peace feels like a classic rock album, in a way. It’s eight songs long and only a little over a half-hour, and bloated six-minute rockers sit right next to concise pop rock pieces because “rock music” can and should take us anywhere. “Everything Hurts” kicks things off on the more high-concept side of things–we get a nice, strong neo-psychedelia/alt-dance drumbeat and a wall of fuzzed-out guitars, and The Queen & I are able to smoothly move into a Brit-power-pop bliss-out in “Bitter” and a jangly fuzz-pop rave-up in “Still I Wonder” with little sweat. At The Queen & I’s punchier moments, they feel like a more overtly-psychedelic-indebted version of the Guided by Voices-influenced shoegaze-pop of Ex Pilots and Gaadge–hell, the exuberant penultimate track “We’re Still Here” is effectively a Mythical Motors song with more of a punk background. The more expansive songs on At Peace don’t sound like departures from this version of pop music so much as, well, expansions of it–the title track, the album’s centerpiece, doesn’t feel like a conscious attempt at making a six-minute song so much as “The Queen & I were able to get six great pop minutes out of it, so they did”. The Queen & I may be new to me, but they’ve already muscled their way near to the top of my “Oakland bands you ought to be keeping up with” list. (Bandcamp link)
The Wind-Ups – Confection
Release date: July 11th Record label: Dandy Boy Genre: Lo-fi punk, garage punk, fuzz rock, power pop Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: (That’s Just My) Dream Girl
The Wind-Ups are back! In a live setting, the Chico, California-based group is actually a full-on garage rock/power pop/punk rock band, but their records have effectively been the self-recorded domain of the project’s bandleader, Jake Sprecher. We last checked in with The Wind-Ups in 2023, dropping a 7” EP (Jonathan Says) and a full-length (Happy Like This) in quick succession; last year, they linked up with Dandy Boy Records to release a live album, and The Wind-Ups are back with the Oakland label for their latest LP, Confection. If you’ve enjoyed the incredibly lo-fi/fuzzed out sound, one-man-garage-band energy, and big hooks of previous Wind-Ups records, I’ve got good news with regards to what you’ll find on Confection. Sprecher hasn’t abandoned the world of self-recording, but he gets more help on this twenty-five-minute, eleven-track album than he had previously–vocalist/guitarist Connor Finnigan, vocalist Jason Wuestefeld, vocalist/lyricist Kerra Jessen, and cellist Jaed Garibaldi all make appearances here (not to mention a guitar part from Jonathan Richman, in whose band Sprecher plays, on “Little Boy Blue”, which initially appeared on the Jonathan Says EP). Confection still sounds as crunchy and clanging as ever, though, of course.
The pop songs start coming and they don’t stop landing blows. “A Fine Pink Mist” and “I Love Her” open up Confection with two Wind-Ups classics, mixes of no-fi scuzz, Ramones-y “oh-ohs”, and shambling power pop hooks. The garage punk side of The Wind-Ups never quite goes away on Confection, but single “(That’s Just My) Dream Girl” moves things closer to the world of straight-up jangle pop (through a hazy lens, of course), and then there’s “Cheer Up”, the song that features Jessen “narrating” the verses. Jessen’s stream-of-consciousness, nervous speaking is a departure from Sprecher’s typical fuzz pop, but he grafts one of those signature Wind-Ups choruses to it and it fits comfortably next to the rest of the record. There are a lot of little fun moments like the “Cheer Up” deviation on Confection–not quite as obvious, true, but the punk chanting of “Pain in Your Heart”, the noisy pummeling of “Flag Pin Theater”, and the steady, drum-beating march of “Ants on the Table” all ensure that Confections stays interesting in its second half, too. Not that The Wind-Ups’ primary means of communication was ever in all that much danger of becoming stale, but Confections goes the extra mile to put some more treats in the mix. (Bandcamp link)
In the second Pressing Concerns of the week, EPs reign supreme: we’ve got new ones from Gauri Paighan, KD Surreal, and Mob Wife, as well as a physical re-release of Lain Fallow‘s debut EP from last year. If you’re looking for LPs, try yesterday’s blog post (featuring albums from Hannah Marcus, Abel, Jacob Freddy, and The Pond).
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.
Gauri Paighan – Teen Error
Release date: June 8th Record label: Self-released Genre: Indie pop, fuzz pop, dream pop Formats: Digital Pull Track: November
Gauri “Gory” Paighan doesn’t exactly style herself as mysterious–she seems pretty active on social media–but I’m not sure exactly where she’s based. She appears to have toured southeast Asia a fair amount, so I’d say somewhere in that part of the world, but I suppose it doesn’t matter all that much. Paighan started self-releasing songs around 2022, leading up to what is her first EP (or multi-song release of any kind), Teen Error. Seven songs in around twenty-five minutes, Teen Error is nearly full-length size, giving us a wide and varied picture of a young, developing, but already quite compelling singer-songwriter. Loosely speaking, Paighan is making a familiar style of “indie rock” on Teen Error, one with a bit of fuzzy distortion, strong propulsion, and dreamy indie pop catchiness. Teen Error is nonetheless large enough to encompass quiet, chilly balladry, orchestral-tinged indie pop, and (in one memorable instance), reggae/hip-hop-inspired pop music as well. The different perspectives and roots visible throughout Teen Error make it a bit tricky to get a handle on the single figure responsible for all of these songs, but that’s hardly a problem for a debut release.
The first two songs on Teen Error are “November” and “Adventures of Us” (they’re swapped on Bandcamp vs. other streaming services), and they’re both wide-eyed, sweeping indie pop rock anthems that introduce us to the full extent of Gory’s range. “Adventures of Us”, perhaps appropriately given the title, is the more driving and forward-pushing one, while “November” is more content to revel in its massive fuzz-pop refrain–in both of them, I’m not entirely sure what Paighan’s words mean, but they both evoke an idealistic and excited writer grabbing ahold of the reins available to her. The rest of Teen Error doesn’t attempt to recreate the feelings of these two songs–Gory expands her sound and pursues a more thoughtful, pensive muse in the gentle ballad of “Behalf of Us” and the shaken, mournful “Rather Be a Tree”. The biggest black sheep on Teen Error by far is “Repeat It”, a reggae-infused pop-rock tune in which both Paighan and guest vocalist Alterno show off a completely different vocal style and attitude. It’s not my favorite song on the EP, but it’s a successful experiment, and helps ensure that nothing on Teen Error is forgettable or a throwaway–of the songs I have yet to mention, the orchestral-tinged closing track “Rare Nerine” is certainly a memorable one, and the dreamy indie rocker “Making Love” is the closest thing the second half of Teen Error comes to matching the gas-pedal vibes of the EP’s opening duo. With this first one neatly tied up, I do look forward to the next error of Gory. (Bandcamp link)
KD Surreal – In and Out of Torpor
Release date: July 4th Record label: Self-released Genre: Lo-fi folk, bedroom folk, singer-songwriter, slowcore Formats: Digital Pull Track: Me, at Arm’s Length
What would this world be without one-person bedroom folk projects from the Pacific Northwest? I’ve got one of them for you today–a musician who goes by the name KD Surreal and who hails from Abbotsford, British Columbia (it’s about an hour southeast of Vancouver, on the U.S.-Canada border). I don’t know much else about KD Surreal, but I can tell you that they’ve previously put out an album called If I Die Tonight, Bury Me in Song in 2021 and an EP called Footnotes to the Faultline in 2023. Their latest record is a four-song, twenty-minute EP called In and Out of Torpor (good title!) inspired by “the melody-driven fingerpicking styles of Elliott Smith or Nick Drake” and “melodramatic sensibility”, according to the author. While I wouldn’t compare Surreal’s songwriting structure to the tighter intricacies of Smith, I think that this description on the whole is pretty accurate–Surreal’s songs are sprawling, crawling, lengthy acoustic guitar-led folk pieces that I have no problem whatsoever calling “melodramatic”. Just about everything we hear on In and Out of Torpor is Surreal themself–this amounts to the aforementioned acoustic guitar, what sounds like a mandolin, some kind of bass, and some self-harmonies.
And that’s all that KD Surreal needs. The first song on In and Out of Torpor, “Pray Your Shot Stay True”, is the shortest by a fair margin, yet it’s anything but slight. Surreal’s performance is relatively intense, and their lyrics (“Still you wish to scour me from you / Well, take aim now and pray your shot stay true”) introduce the dramatic side of themself right off the bat. The rest of the EP is a little less outwardly confrontational, but the uncomfortable, up-close edge to In and Out of Torpor isn’t lost in these longer recordings. “Me, at Arm’s Length” and “Don’t Let Me Retreat” both approach seven minutes in length–the winding folky slowcore of the former is an immediate highlight, subbing the direct-hit emotion of the record’s first song for a more puzzling, refracted kind of hurt. “You Will Not Know Peace” is a little more musically bright (the album’s one guest musician, Alex Rake, goes to town on the mandolin on this one), but there’s only so much one can do to brighten a song that imparts the unflinching lesson that “Caring is cancer / Caring is sin / Caring’s a fish hook,” as it reaches its climax. “Don’t Let Me Retreat” closes things out by playing the long game again; the electric guitar that appears in the second half of the song might as well be a lightning bolt. Things start to sound different when you’re In and Out of Torpor. (Bandcamp link)
Lain Fallow – The Path Less Chosen // Winning Culture
Release date: April 14th Record label: Spleencore/Panique! Paniek!/Slow Down Genre: Emo-punk, punk rock, post-hardcore Formats: Cassette, digital Pull Track: Absence / Presence
Last March, a Belgian emo-punk band called Lain Fallow released their first record, a four-song digital EP called The Path Less Chosen. Drummer Tommaso Capitello sings lead vocals in the Italian post-hardcore group Amalia Bloom, but it was coincidentally in Brussels where Capitello crossed paths with two more Italians (bassist/vocalist Lorenzo Conti, guitarist Lorenzo Leva), and the three of them linked up with French-Canadian guitarist/vocalist Charles Patterson to form Lain Fallow and record The Path Less Chosen, a record which showcases a group of musicians with a strong, firm grasp on dead-serious, heavy, emo-infused punk rock. A few different small labels throughout Europe took notice of Lain Fallow and teamed up to put out The Path Less Chosen on cassette earlier this year (Panique! Paniek! in Belgium, Spleencore in France, and Slow Down in Europe), a release that also includes the single “Winning Culture” the band put out in January. I’m not sure what exactly I’d expect from a bunch of Belgians (and Italians?) who self-describe their music as “emo punk”, but The Path Less Chosen // Winning Culture is a fresh and earnest take on the genre(s). Too polished for emocore but not polished enough for “pop punk”, the songs on this cassette are infectious, emotional rock and roll before anything else.
Maybe I’m putting too much stock into a solid bass part and whoever’s singing lead vocals first’s Peter Garrett-esque timbre, but The Path Less Chosen // Winning Culture’s opening track, “Swerve”, has a post-punk undercurrent to it, although Lain Fallow’s “emo-punk” instinct are readily apparent from this song. This core of the band becomes more obvious in the next song, “Absence / Presence”, which recalls 90s emo-ish indie punk groups like Seaweed and Knapsack. The rest of the original The Path Less Chosen is made up of a pair of dark, lean, punk songs in “Negative Mirror” (probably the closest the EP comes to the current alt-rock/“nu-grunge-gaze” revival) and “Bottleneck” (the closest Lain Fallow get to “melodic punk”). The newer song appended to the cassette, “Winning Culture”, is evidence that Lain Fallow have already evolved beyond their debut EP–it’s the band’s heaviest and most dynamic recording yet, a larger and more ambitious sound slowly starting to replace the scrappy punk energy of the original EP. “Winning Culture” does raise the question of where, exactly, Lain Fallow will end up on their next more-substantial release, but those involved in this cassette were right to put the spotlight on a band that hit the ground running in Lain Fallow. (Bandcamp link)
Mob Wife – ROT
Release date: June 6th Record label: Bullhead Genre: Post-punk, post-hardcore, noise rock, garage punk Formats: Digital Pull Track: Thank God for Car Parks
Mob Wife are a noise-punk trio from Belfast (made up of vocalist/guitarist Chris Leckey, bassist Carl Small, and drummer Wilson Davidson) who’ve been kicking around since the late 2010s. After a steady stream of singles over a few years, 2022 saw the release of their debut album, Eat With Your Eyes; for the group’s next record, they’ve gone the EP route, putting together a five-song, twenty-minute collection simply titled ROT. The trio claim to be inspired by “American underground” rock groups like Metz, Fugazi, and Protomartyr in their music; leaving aside the fact that Metz was Canadian (but I get what they mean), I do think that they fit alongside a slew of British bands mining a similar mix of punk rock, post-hardcore, and noise rock as of late between Hairpin, Percy, and the recently-reunited Mclusky. ROT sounds a bit like a concept record to me–Mob Wife are drawing from the industrial confusion and collision of capital they witness every day in their home city, using ugly, angry, abrasive rock music to sketch visions of greed, growth at the expense of human destruction, and an inevitable march towards a cliff of soullessness.
The spirit of Hot Snakes is alive in ROT’s opening track “Heard & Resented”, a shit-kicking garage punk song that adds an Irish tint to great noise punk groups like Meat Wave and Big Ups. Leckey’s characters are detestable types, not only delighting in their misdeeds but also going out of their way to pay tribute to the sociopathic universe that allows them to thrive. “Thank God for Car Parks” is probably ROT at its purest–you can hear the creepy, unfeeling grin as Leckey revels in “leveling old folks’ homes” to create the titular eyesore. After a post-punk workout in “Echo Chamber”, ROT closes out with two scorchers in “Burn the Former Things” and “Make You Rich” that bring the EP full-circle. The former song once again brings ROT into the world of real estate, a dark meditation on the pressure cooker that people are put through in order to “own” a place to live, and “Make You Rich” is one last trip down the mind of a champion of capitalism. This is, of course, the exact right kind of music for taking a stroll down these gold-plated roads, and Mob Wife certainly sound like they’re fed up enough with the world around them to pull it off. (Bandcamp link)
The Monday Pressing Concerns is a nice big one, featuring new albums from Hannah Marcus, Abel, Jacob Freddy, and The Pond. Three out of four of these acts have appeared in Pressing Concerns before (and the one that hasn’t features at least one person who has with a different project), so it’s nice to take the week after a (U.S.) holiday to catch up with some familiar faces.
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.
Hannah Marcus – Ten Bones from a Virgin Graveyard
Release date: June 6th Record label: Bar None Genre: Singer-songwriter, folk, slowcore, sadcore Formats: Digital Pull Track: Eric
I wrote a fair amount about the New York/San Francisco singer-songwriter Hannah Marcus last year–that was thanks to her longtime record label, Bar None Records, who released a career-spanning compilation pulled from Marcus’ six solo records called The Hannah Marcus Years: 1993-2004. The Hannah Marcus Years chronicled an impressive and undersung music career, one in which the titular musician collaborated with members of American Music Club, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, and Red House Painters (among others) to pursue her heady, drawn-out version of folk-ish slowcore songwriting. 2004’s Desert Farmers proved to be her final solo album for twenty years–it seemed like Marcus had moved on to other pursuits, playing in experimental groups like The Wingdale Community Singers and Wintersea Playboy and being an “olfactory artist”. However, Marcus had actually been working on another solo album in the years after Desert Farmers–Ten Bones from a Virgin Graveyard was recorded over a period of six years (2004-2010) in Montreal with Godspeed You! Black Emperor members Thierry Amar and Efrim Menuck. I don’t know why Ten Bones from a Virgin Graveyard took another decade and a half after its completion to see the right of day, but in 2025 it sounds like a worthy companion to The Hannah Marcus Years, continuing the singer-songwriter’s mission to stretch out and slow down the folk music upon which she bases her songs.
Ten Bones from a Virgin Graveyard reaches towards orchestral and chamber music more boldly than Marcus’ earlier work did, although it’s a fairly natural-sounding progression (I’m sure it helped that the album features many of the same musicians from her earlier albums, including Amar and Menuck). The two opening tracks on Ten Bones from a Virgin Graveyard–the leisurely instrumental “Ten Bones and a Screwdriver” and the whirlwind art-chamber pop of “Affirmative Infinity”–hint at a total departure for Marcus, but the folk storyteller of previous records comes into the frame soon enough with songs like “Bury Me Under the Elbow Room” and “A Virgin Graveyard” (the minimal epic crawl of the latter in particular feels like the “full Hannah Marcus experience”). From “Hey, Mister Goldminer” to sparse closing track “From English Planes”, there are plenty of more subtle, folk-inspired moments on Ten Bones from a Virgin Graveyard, but you never know when Marcus and her collaborators are going to sweep us all off our collective feet with something like the boisterous, horn-heavy piano ballad/sing-along “Eric”. Supposedly Marcus has been working on a new new album that’s slated to be released by the end of this year–perhaps the most chaotic decision involved in Ten Bones from a Virgin Graveyard by Marcus is to make something this immersive, hold onto it for twenty years, and then barely give us any time after it’s finally released before moving onto the next thing. (Bandcamp link)
Abel – How to Get Away with Nothing
Release date: May 28th Record label: Julia’s War/Candlepin/Pleasure Tapes Genre: Lo-fi indie rock, shoegaze, experimental rock Formats: Cassette, digital Pull Track: Grass
Last year, the band Abel first appeared on my radar thanks to Candlepin and Julia’s War Record’s co-release of an album called Dizzy Spell. It was far from the first release from the Columbus act–the band’s frontperson, Isaac Kauffman, has been releasing music under the name since the late 2010s–but Dizzy Spell appeared to be the first Abel album recorded by a proper full band. The shoegaze-inspired basement rockers have returned less than a calendar year later with another new album called How to Get Away with Nothing, once again released by Julia’s War and Candlepin (with Pleasure Tapes getting in on the fun this time, too)–the three-guitar quintet lineup from the previous LP has been pared down to a quartet, but Kauffman, guitarist John Martino, drummer Ethan Donaldson, and bassist Noah Fisher are still rolling full steam ahead. At least, as “full steam” as this kind of music can be–inspired by slowcore, noisy indie rock, and 90s emo, How to Get Away with Nothing is frequently loud but even more consistently insular and introverted. The album’s dozen tracks and forty-five minutes are an overwhelming, greyscale listen, more adventurous and sprawling than Dizzy Spell yet with that record’s scattered moments of beauty still intact.
Abel make the bold choice to start How to Get Away with Nothing with what’s easily the catchiest and most accessible song in “Grass”–and it’s also a red herring, as the slightly twangy (reminiscent of fellow Columbus act and previous collaborator Villagerrr) country rock of the opener doesn’t really come up again for the rest of the album. The next song on How to Get Away with Nothing is called “Daunting”, and that’s a good way to describe the five-minute track, which meanders its way from a light-touch, simple-guitar instrumental to a full-force wall-of-sound fuzz rock song that burns bright for the rest of its length. The broken ballad “Lung” and the acoustic/drum-machine lo-fi experiment “Loathe” provide a bit of a respite, relaxing in the margins of How to Get Away with Nothing’s sound and finding a little peace. The second half of How to Get Away with Nothing is even spacier–even the “rock” songs on the B-side (like “Parasympathetic”, “Scarecrow”, and “Six”) feel distant and lost, to say nothing of oddities like “Dusk” and “Talk”. Abel have continued making music in the way that makes sense to them with How to Get Away with Nothing, leading to an album that isn’t always legible to us but clearly always pushing towards something. (Bandcamp link)
Jacob Freddy – Sports Announcer
Release date: May 9th Record label: Self-released Genre: Lo-fi pop, bedroom pop, jangle pop, power pop, folk-pop Formats: Cassette, digital Pull Track: If Only
Last year, I introduced Rosy Overdrive to Jacob Frericks, a promising new guitar pop singer-songwriter originally from Orange County, California. Upon moving across the country to Brooklyn to attend school, he began a solo project called Jacob Freddy, and his debut album under the name, Songs from a Quiet Aliso Viejo Wasteland, was a “pleasingly lively and pop-forward” version of bedroom indie rock (as I called it at the time) that wore its Teenage Fanclub, Big Star, and Elliott Smith influences on its sleeve. It took Frericks a little over one year to return with a second Jacob Freddy album, this time a self-released cassette called Sports Announcer. Like Songs from a Quiet Aliso Viejo Wasteland, it’s a brief listen (eight songs, twenty minutes), and it continues Frericks’ pursuit of wistful, diamond-in-the-rough guitar pop music. The main difference this time around is that Frericks has put together a quieter, more subdued, and more melancholic collection of songs compared to the more upbeat Songs from a Quiet Aliso Viejo Wasteland. It’s not as immediate as Jacob Freddy’s debut, but there’s no sophomore slump here, either–I’ve started to view Sports Announcer as a more insular, thoughtful companion to the project’s initial burst of energy of a first LP.
Not that the first song on Songs from a Quiet Aliso Viejo Wasteland, “All Along”, was a punk track exactly, but its power pop is a lot more surging and upbeat than the rainy day indie pop of “I Don’t Want to Know”, the song Frericks tasks with opening Sports Announcer. If you’re looking for more straightforward jangle pop “hits”, there are still a few of them here–Jacob Freddy’s first attempt at it here is via the wobbly, daydreaming “If Only”, and “From the Start” and “All I Can Do” are electric numbers that more or less qualify as well. Otherwise, Frericks is in a more foggy, obscured mood on his latest album, as exemplified by the percussionless, dreamy folk-slowcore-pop track “Point of View” (which is effectively a Tony Jay song), the cavernous, echoing acoustic balladry of the title track (which could also be a Tony Jay song, I suppose), the confusing, almost psychedelic snippet song “Front Lines”, and the dream-folk closing track “Given Time”. All of these tracks have some kind of hook baked into their cores, because that’s how Frericks writes songs, but Sports Announcer, as brief and (relatively) barebones as it is, is an album with aims beyond merely delivering said hooks without anything extra attached. (Bandcamp link)
The Pond – A Year As a Cloud
Release date: May 9th Record label: Anything Bagel/Hidden Bay/Wood of Heart Genre: Folk rock, slowcore, lo-fi indie rock, 2000s indie rock Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital Pull Track: Burnt Plant
I’ve written about a handfulofreleases that have come out via the Butte, Montana DIY label Anything Bagel over the years, but this time around, the person who’s (co-)responsible for releasing all those albums is the one who’s stepping up to the mic. Anything Bagel co-leader Jon Cardiello previously made music under the name Bombshell Nightlight; for his latest album, A Year As a Cloud, he’s rechristened himself The Pond and put together a firm quartet rounded out by Sanders Smith on bass, Kale Huseby on drums, andNoelle Huser (of Bluest) on vocals. Montana may be a landlocked state, but The Pond are able to recall the rainy indie rock of the Pacific Northwest throughout their somewhat fuzzy, somewhat folky, somewhat slowcore debut album (I’m thinking specifically of The Microphones and Mount Eerie), but mixed together with a certain kind of East Coast lo-fi indie rock reminiscent of the spacier sides of LVL UP (and associated projects), Greg Mendez, and Friendship. There’s a tension between Cardiello’s downtrodden, low vocals and the expansive indie rock the four of them make to accompany it, and it helps A Year As a Cloud feel a lot more gripping than your average greyscale indie rock record.
The Pond’s Year As a Cloud begins more or less in media res with “Cup of Lilacs”, a mid-tempo slowcore-informed song that starts off as a low hum and steadily builds to something larger (or at least to a hint of something larger). The Pond’s version of fuzz rock is rumbling and electric–“Burnt Plant” is rousing, and while “Translucent” and “When a Song Dies” as a whole don’t reach this energy level, they certainly have their overwhelming moments. Although A Year As a Cloud is a relatively quick thirty-four minutes long, it feels larger than it is thanks to mood-setting interludes like “(The Stream)”, “(The Clouds)”, and “(The Lake)”, more than providing the space for stuff like the synth-folk psychedelic odyssey of “More Time” and mid-record slow-burn centerpiece “All the Dogs” to tower ever higher. Huser’s vocals drop in and out throughout the album, trading the lead with Cardiello or simply backing him up–while this alone doesn’t make The Pond feel like a “band”, it certainly leads to A Year As a Cloud sounding like something much more than a solo project. And that’s a good thing, because A Year As a Cloud wouldn’t be the same if it wasn’t a group effort. (Bandcamp link)
Welcome to the Thursday Pressing Concerns! Despite the holiday week, I was still able to cobble together four solid records that are out today, tomorrow, or earlier this week: we’ve got new albums from Gosh Diggity, Space Jaguar, Ali Murray, and Terror Management Band for you below. If you missed either of this week’s earlier blog posts (on Monday, we looked at new albums from Abe Savas, Ella Hanshaw, City Planners, and The Whimbrels, and on Tuesday the June 2025 Playlist went up), check those out, too.
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.
Gosh Diggity – Good Luck! Have Fun!
Release date: July 3rd Record label: Worry Genre: Chiptune-punk, pop punk, power pop, emo Formats: Cassette, digital Pull Track: Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter!
Well, it seems like emo-chiptune-pop-punk-rock music is in good hands in 2025. I’m not talking about the similar but distinct “chiptune-slacker-rock” that’s practiced by blog favorite (T-T)b, but of a different strain of music that nonetheless seeks to combine big power pop hooks, rock band instrumentation, and video game-inspired synth bleating. It’s time for all of us to meet a trio from Chicago called Gosh Diggity, co-founded in 2018 by vocalist/guitarist/synth programmer Joe Marshall and vocalist/bassist CJ Hoglind and eventually (after a few different members cycled through) joined by drummer Kelson Zbichorski. From 2019 to 2023 Gosh Diggity put out three EPs and an album through labels like Rat Poison Recordings (a Lauren Records sublabel run by Avery Springer of Retirement Party) and Worry Records (Rust Ring, Truth or Consequences New Mexico, Snow Ellet); the latter of the two is putting out cassettes of the trio’s long-awaited sophomore album, Good Luck! Have Fun!. As one should be able to surmise for the album’s, ah, memorable cover art, Good Luck! Have Fun! is absolutely loaded with bright colors, quick energy, and 8-bit/chiptune hooks strewn all over the place. Hoglind and Marshall are an excellent tag-team, both displaying the ability to emote like proper emo/pop-punk frontpeople and not sound absurd with the technicolor, digital symphony going on around them.
Every part of Gosh Diggity is doing the absolute most on Good Luck! Have Fun!–take lead single “The Season”, which features everything from a sprawling sing-song manifesto of a lyric and vocal performance that reminds me of the great Bad Moves, bouncing and bounding 8-bit touchstones, and nice, big, shiny guitars. I’m not even sure if it’s the biggest wrecking ball of a pop song on Good Luck! Have Fun!–there are at least two other main contenders in the mood-swinging, weather-dependent “10 Simple Tricks Your Doctor Does NOT Want You To Know About (#6 Will Shock You!!!)” and the synth-pop-punk sing-speaking extravaganza of “Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter!” (I think that that’s Hoglind on lead vocals; whoever it is, it might be my favorite vocal performance of the year thus far). Like a good emo-punk band, there are instrumental intros (“Good Luck!”), skits (“Gosh Diggity Dental”, I guess)…songs built around dog barking (“Dog Song”)? Mostly, though, it’s great chiptune-punk-pop, whether it’s done a little more laid-back (the slacker rock detour of “It’s Too Crowded in Here”) or zippier (the ninety-second “Mediocre”) than is typical for Gosh Diggity. Gosh Diggity doesn’t sound like a band who does anything half-assed, and Good Luck! Have Fun! sounds as great as it does because it’s one big swing after another. (Bandcamp link)
Space Jaguar – If You Play Expect to Pay
Release date: July 4th Record label: Subjangle Genre: Power pop, jangle pop Formats: CD, digital Pull Track: Please Come Around
The debut record from British jangle pop group Space Jaguar has been a while in the making–bandleader Mark Grassick first tipped me off to it at the beginning of last year over email. The album that would eventually become If You Play Expect to Pay went through a few iterations before Grassick settled on a core of jangle pop great Andrew Taylor (of The Boys with the Perpetual Nervousness and Dropkick) and bassist Michael Wood (of Singing Adams and Whoa Melodic), who recorded the majority of this album in late 2024. The first Space Jaguar album is also marked by an impressive slate of guitar pop musicians making guest appearances–backing vocals from Hurry’s Matt Scottoline, extra guitars from Mike Connell (The Connells), Matt Ashton (Mirrored Daughters), and Josh Salter (Laughing). Taylor’s trademark euphoric jangly guitar melodies and sparkling production certainly put his stamp on If You Play Expect to Play, but these are Grassick’s songs, and that’s Grassick on lead vocals–all these embellishments wouldn’t amount to much without a capable bandleader. Thankfully, Grassick is a natural at this kind of thing, casually leading the rest of Space Jaguar through classic jangle pop and college rock hooks.
If You Play Expect to Pay does its business in ten songs and twenty-four minutes, with only one track crossing the three-minute barrier–Space Jaguar are acolytes of brevity, to be sure. The brief runtime isn’t because the band speeds things up too much–much like the aforementioned Scottoline’s band Hurry, Space Jaguar favor electric, mid-tempo performances that let the vocals and melodies hang in the air a bit. Despite the United Kingdom/Ireland origin of the band’s key personnel, there’s a surprising Americana streak to “Alone Now” (it reminds me a bit of Labrador), but Space Jaguar spend plenty of time on their bread and butter of jangly power pop with excellent material like “Please Come Around”, “Fall to Pieces”, and “Forward Momentum”. It’s becoming more apparent to me listening to this one closer and closer that If You Play Expect to Pay is a really sharply-honed album, even as it’s very unassuming in how it presents itself. “No Martyrs, No Victims”, “Nowhere Is My Home”, and “Standing in Your Way” all have a legitimate claim to the best chorus on the entire record (and, yes, the third of those three only has a one-line refrain, but it’s a really good line). The obligatory acoustic closing song “Untitled (23 February)” is the record’s only real departure, but stripping away (some of) the extra touches doesn’t change Space Jaguar’s timbre and only shows us just how much of Grassick is in the rest of the album anyway.
Ali Murray – The Summer Laden
Release date: July 1st Record label: Dead Forest Genre: Folk rock, dream pop, slowcore, fuzz rock Formats: Digital Pull Track: Heaven All the Way
The best-kept secret of the northern reaches of Scotland is Ali Murray, a singer-songwriter who calls the Isle of Lewis home. I’ve written about a coupleof Murray’s records over the years, but I’ve really only scratched the surface of the prolific musician–under a variety of projects, he’s made music encompassing the worlds of slowcore, folk (both “traditional” and “indie rock”-focused), dream pop, ambient, shoegaze, fuzz rock, and more. Murray hasn’t gone anywhere in recent years–last year, he put out a four-song solo EP called Highway to the End, and earlier this year he debuted a project called Felines of the Night (whose music is self-described as “dark, eerie, mournful death ballads sung entirely by cats”), but the first Murray record I’ve written about in a couple of years is a strong return to form to the music that first got him on my radar. The Summer Laden has its own detours, but it’s primarily an album fully re-embracing folky, slowcore-inspired indie rock of both the acoustic and electric varieties. Sometimes The Summer Laden is pin-drop quiet, sometimes it’s relatively amped-up, but it pretty much always feels like a delicate, thoughtful thirty-minute journey through the world of a talented and somewhat iconoclastic singer-songwriter.
The range of Murray is on full, constant display in The Summer Laden’s first half–he begins the record with the title track, a carefully-arranged chamber pop exercise that folds unexpectedly into the fuzzed-out indie rock of “Heaven All the Way” (the record’s loudest song and the one with the most divergent vocal performance from Murray) and then once again veers into a different world, this time via the acoustic folk of “Toby”. The verses of “Heaven All the Way” may feel pretty dark and obscure for Murray, but the singer surfaces for a beautiful shoegaze-pop chorus, and he’s able to unite some of The Summer Laden’s more disparate moments in this way, too, like the mid-record duo of “Don’t Fade on Me” and “July the Spiral”, which jump a little further into the realms of electronic-touched, rhythmic dream pop. The one song that rivals “Heaven All the Way” in terms of pure electricity is the album’s penultimate track, “Last to Leave”–this one is based on chugging power chords, typically held in some restraint but every now and then offering up minor explosions to go alongside Murray’s star-reaching vocals (see also the acoustic track “Starlit Beaches”, in which Murray gives so much to the barebones recording that it feels much “fuller” than it is on paper). It’s a good a time as any to get in on this particular secret. (Bandcamp link)
Terror Management Band – Austerity Gospel
Release date: July 1st Record label: Belladonna/Ashtray Monument Genre: Noise rock, post-punk, post-hardcore Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Chamber Music
And now we have a noise rock group from Florida called “Terror Management Band”. The quartet of Kevin Kelley (drums), Jeremy Rogers (bass), Alan Mills (“weird guitar”), and Mike Taylor (“regular guitar”) came together incrementally beginning in 2018 in the St. Augustine area, eventually releasing an album called Big Box Apocalypse in 2023 and a two-song single called “Landlord/WW1099” last year. Terror Management Band are clearly on a hot streak, as they’ve already returned to spread the Austerity Gospel via their second full-length record. The AmRep and “Side 2 of My War” references the group claimed for their first album largely still apply on Austerity Gospel; Terror Management Band say that their newest record “documents the psychic spiral between the Trump administrations”, but it just sounds like classic dark, angry, chaotic noise rock to me (which, I suppose, is as appropriate a soundtrack for this era as anything). Terror Management Band are somewhere on a spectrum between Lungfish and Pissed Jeans–sometimes they can be almost psychedelic in their slow-moving, low-end-worshipping post-punk sound, sometimes they’re more into straight-up pummeling, and they move between poles effortlessly.
Terror Management Band arrive with a buzz and a thud with “Deincarnation” (a classic noise rock song title if I’ve ever heard one), a blunt-force object of rock and roll featuring shouted-out vocals (“everyone sings on this record”, notes the Bandcamp page; good thing, as this would be an exhausting task for just one person). The group then impart a little bit of local history to us with a song called “Minorcan”, and one of Terror Management Band’s key dynamics–that of Mills’ “weird guitar” chiming and drilling alongside the more cavemen-like crunch of the rest of the band–begins to reveal itself. Through the Pile-like atmospherics of “Chamber Music” and the Devo-core banal paranoia of “Exit Interview”, Austerity Gospel remains hot to the touch; side two of the album kicks off with yet another noise rock classic title in “The Chisel”, which lives up to its name with a bit of Drive Like Jehu/Hot Snakes-esque screeching. Terror Management Band don’t lose their fire in the closing stretch of Austerity Gospel so much as employ it more strategically–the tricky dynamics of stuff like “Neon Pond” and “Hornets” sound like deep cuts from an unsung 90s-era Dischord record, and it also has a bit of that slow-dawning terror that I loved in last year’s American Motors album. Well, they did call themselves the “Terror Management Band”. (Bandcamp link)
June 2025 playlist! Bunch of great new music, much of which has appeared on this blog before but you’ll see some new faces, too. Hopefully you’ll find something to take with you to your Fourth of July picnic (for the Americans, at least).
Graham Hunt and HLLLYH have three songs on this playlist; Idle Ray, WPTR, Hallelujah the Hills, and Whitney’s Playland have two. Abe Savas has five, sort of.
Here is where you can listen to the playlist on various streaming services: Spotify, Tidal (BNDCMPR was bugging out when I tried to use it; check back later). Be sure to check out previous playlist posts if you’ve enjoyed this one, or visit the site directory. If you’d like to support Rosy Overdrive, you can share this (or another) post, or donate here.
“Bad July”, Ryli From Come and Get Me (2025, Dandy Boy)
Ryli are effectively a supergroup when it comes to Bay Area jangle pop–the group’s “co-leaders” are Yea-Ming Chen (of Yea-Ming and the Rumours) on lead vocals and guitar and Rob Good (of The Goods) on lead guitar, and the rhythm section features Luke Robbins of R.E. Seraphin and The Rumours on bass and Ian McBrayer, formerly of Sonny & the Sunsets, on drums. Everybody in Ryli is familiar with what goes into making a solid pop song, and Come and Get Me absolutely reflects this–practically the entire first half of the album is one long parade of brisk tempos, jangly arpeggios, deft lead guitars, and tons of hooks. “Bad July” is based on some chiming guitar riffs and precise percussion–it’s my favorite one on the album, but there’s plenty of competition. Read more about Come and Get Me here.
“Spiritual Problems”, Graham Hunt From Timeless World Forever (2025, Run for Cover)
It’s like an intricate and smooth version of “slacker pop”, the Graham Hunt sound, indie rock with bits of 90s alt-pop as well as electronic and dance touches delivered in a skewed but ultimately sincere fashion. Timeless World Forever might be the most “Graham Hunt” Graham Hunt album to date, and I think that might make it his best work so far. “Spiritual Problems” is a jaw-dropper; that chorus is sweeping and mountain-summiting, and Hunt just puts so much into the lines that end with “This weight is a gift that you’ve given to me” that it feels like whatever healing he’s talking about here is just within reach. Read more about Timeless World Forever here.
“Yellow Brick Wall”, HLLLYH From URUBURU (2025, Team Shi)
HLLLYH is effectively a new version of a 2000s art punk group from Los Angeles called The Mae Shi who put out a few albums before dissolving, seemingly for good. Three years ago, a bunch of former Mae Shi members got together to create what they envisioned as the final Mae Shi album, but instead, they decided that it was something new, and URUBURU became the first HLLLYH album instead. URUBURU is drawn from “unearthed half-written Mae Shi songs” as well as freshly-written material–regardless of where and when these songs came from, HLLLYH have done an excellent job of recapturing that supercharged, ornery kaleidoscopic rock and roll energy that The Mae Shi had. “Yellow Brick Wall”, my favorite song on URUBURU, is perfect glitzy power pop in spite of itself, a strange and kinetic journey through giant hooks. Read more about URUBURU here.
“Quiet Cab”, Idle Ray From Even in the Spring (2025, Life Like Tapes)
When the self-titled first Idle Ray album came out back in 2021, the Michigan “band” was pretty much entirely a Fred Thomas solo project; in the four years since, they’ve become a solid power trio with bassist Devon Clausen and guitarist Frances Ma joining Thomas, and the new members even wrote a few of the songs on Even in the Spring. Ma and Clausen’s contributions fit right in with Thomas’ lo-fi power pop/indie rock style, and the three of them zip through ten songs in a mere twenty-four minutes on this one. “Quiet Cab” is one of the two Ma-helmed songs, and as much as I’ve been on-record as loving Thomas’ songwriting, this might actually be the crown jewel of Even in the Spring between Ma’s capably lounging dream pop vocals and punchy drum machine/tinny-guitar lo-fi pop.
“In Bruges”, WPTR From Redness & Swelling at the Injection Site (2025, Lame-O)
WPTR is the new solo project of 2nd Grade frontperson Peter Gill, and his debut album under the name, Redness & Swelling at the Injection Site, stands out from his main band by following a more personal, insular brand of pop music–lo-fi, outsider bedroom pop and jazz/bossa nova-influenced instrumentals replace the full-band power pop rock and roll of 2nd Grade. If WPTR is looking for number one hit singles from a distant galaxy, Redness & Swelling at the Injection Site has ‘em–there’s a song in the middle of the album called “In Bruges” that’s sixty seconds of absolutely perfect lo-fi power pop, like, genuinely up there with the best 2nd Grade songs (I assume it’s named after the 2008 Colin Farrell/Brendan Gleeson movie I saw once and don’t remember very well). Read more about Redness & Swelling at the Injection Site here.
“Hit and Run”, Career Woman From Lighthouse (2025, Lauren)
Lighthouse, the long-awaited debut album from San Jose’s Career Woman,is world-conquering music. It’s the sound of a young songwriter and band excitedly reaching new heights together. These songs are massive and polished, gigantic indie pop rock anthems that balance the clear might of the Career Woman Band with the just-as-obvious spotlight on bandleader Melody Caudill herself. Listening to Lighthouse is to be taken in by a powerful universality that can only really be achieved by saying “fuck it” and just putting everything “you” that you can fit into your music–exemplified greatly by “Hit and Run”, which is restless to the point of catastrophe (“This morning, we fucked up / And not Walgreens, Target, Best Buy, or Wal-Mart could pick us back up” might be my favorite lyric on this entire album). Read more about Lighthouse here.
“Long Rehearsal”, Whitney’s Playland From Long Rehearsal (2025, Meritoro/Dandy Boy)
One of my favorite debuts of 2023 was Sunset Sea Breeze by Whitney’s Playland, a San Francisco-based indie pop group co-founded by George Tarlson and Inna Showalter and whose first statement delivered several records’ worth of lo-fi power pop hooks. The second Whitney’s Playland record, an EP called Long Rehearsal, is pretty short–three songs in about ten minutes. Still, this gives the quartet plenty of time to revisit and reaffirm their ability to hit all the high points they did on their last album–jangly, bubblegum-flavored guitar pop, electric and fuzzy power pop, and rainy, dreary, dreamy indie pop all make appearances on Long Rehearsal. Long Rehearsal opens with the title track, which comes in at under two minutes and spends every second of it offering up melodies in its jangly guitars and Inna Showalter’s vocals–it’s a high point for a band that’s already collected several of them. Read more about Long Rehearsal here.
“Freee”, Peaceful Faces From Without a Single Fight (2025, Glamour Gowns)
The first-ever Peaceful Faces album I heard was 2023’s Sifting Through the Goo, Reaching For the Candlelight, whichplaced itself firmly on the “soft” side of indie pop music. I was a bit surprised to press play on their follow-up, Without a Single Fight, and immediately be greeted not by delicate, chamber-ish indie pop sound but by the guitar distortion and bounding power pop tempo of opening track “Freee”. Not everything on Without a Single Fight is as much of a departure as this first statement, no, but there’s a concision to Peaceful Faces’ latest record that seems to be bandleader Tree Palmedo’s driving force. Read more about Without a Single Fight here.
“Frog in the Shower”, Graham Hunt From Timeless World Forever (2025, Run for Cover)
If It wasn’t for “Frog in the Shower”, “Spiritual Problems” would be the clear peak of Timeless World Forever, but as it is, Graham Hunt sticks what’s probably my favorite pop song of the year in his latest album’s second half. It’s just immaculate fuzzy power pop, stitched together with the skill of somebody who’s spent enough time outside the world of straight-ahead guitar pop to find a little extra gas. I think that screaming “Come back in a century and try it again” with a crowd of people at a Graham Hunt show sometime in the next year will fix me. Read more about Timeless World Forever here.
“Secret”, Salem 66 From SALT (2025, Don Giovanni)
Boston’s Salem 66 released all four of their albums on Homestead Records, played shows with Butthole Surfers, Flipper, and Big Black (among others), and were featured on 2020’s Strum & Thrum: The American Jangle Underground 1983-1987 compilation. With company like that, I’d say they’re probably pretty good! Judging by this new career-spanning compilation, SALT, Salem 66 are perhaps most easily defined as “college rock”–hardly “power pop”, “jangly” enough to fit in with Strum & Thrum, early R.E.M., and their ilk, marked by a guitar-led psychedelic sound that, presumably coincidentally, fits alongside the Paisley Underground happening on the other coast of the United States. The selections from their final two albums–like “Secret”, from 1988’s Natural Disasters, Natural Treasures–are my favorites, displaying a band who’d fully synthesized their parts into something confident, smooth, and heavy. Read more about SALT here.
“Burn This Atlas Down (2 of Clubs)”, Hallelujah the Hills featuring Craig Finn From DECK: CLUBS (2025, Discrete Pageantry/Best Brother)
Hallelujah the Hills have spent the 2020s working on a project called DECK: four albums, fifty-two songs (and two “jokers” as bonus tracks), with every track corresponding to a card in a traditional deck of playing cards (with an actual deck designed by frontperson Ryan H. Walsh available for purchase with the albums). Stephin Merritt must be furious he didn’t come up with this one! Every single song on DECK feels fully developed, the band doing their damndest to avoid anything that could get tagged as filler, and every album of the “deck” has a handful of songs that are among the Hills’ best. Clubs, for instance,has “Burn This Atlas Down”, a surging melancholic-rocker that does its best to live up to the “featuring Craig Finn” tag (it does). Read more about DECK here.
“(He’s Been) Phoning It in Again”, “Rise to the Occasion”, “The Lost Footage of the Magnificent Ambersons”, “Melodyne”, and “Jingle Work”, Abe Savas From 99 Songs (Plus One) (2025, Badgering the Witness)
The album is called 99 Songs (Plus One), and that’s exactly what it offers us. This ambitious project is the brainchild of a Kalamazoo, Michigan-based musician named Abe Savas. 99 Songs (Plus One) fits its ninety-nine tracks in seventy-eight minutes (enough for one CD)–you can do the math, but this means a lot of these songs are snippets a few seconds long, and even the more fully-developed tracks are almost all under two minutes. The songs range from incredibly goofy to surprisingly poignant, genre-wise hopping from power pop to acoustic folk to more genre side-excursions than I can count. There’s a lot of Elvis Costello in Savas’ pop music instincts, and this chaotic collection will likely also appeal to fans of Tony Molina, They Might Be Giants, and maybe even Fountains of Wayne. What follows are five of my favorite moments on 99 Songs (Plus One) (on streaming services, this selection is different, as Savas has combined a bunch of the songs into single tracks). Read more about 99 Songs (Plus One) here.
“Classy Plastic Lumber”, Modest Mouse From Sad Sappy Sucker (2001, K/Glacial Pace)
Obviously not a new song, and there’s no anniversary or reissue or anything attached to this. I listened to Modest Mouse’s initially-shelved debut album for the first time ever last month on the recommendation of a friend (I’ve only heard like their three biggest albums in full, I think) and what do you know, it’s very much up my alley. Nearly unrecognizable from the band that would make The Lonesome Crowded West, Sad Sappy Sucker is a no-fi, shit-wave collection of home-recorded experiments and, surprisingly frequently, great fragments of pop music. Early Built to Spill’s an obvious point of comparison, as well as early Guided by Voices, and there’s stuff that just straight-up sounds like Daniel Johnston. “Classy Plastic Lumber” is the best song on Sad Sappy Sucker, a shambolic 90s indie rock anthem that, of course, begins with a thirty-second garbled answering machine message.
“The Lindens, The Lindens, The Lindens!”, Lightheaded From Thinking, Dreaming, Scheming! (2025, Slumberland/Skep Wax)
The latest record from the New Jersey indie pop group Lightheaded features great brand-new guitar pop and provides a great excuse to revisit their earlier material. The vinyl and CD editions of Thinking, Dreaming, Scheming! include the entirety of the band’s 2023 debut EP Good Good Great!, marking the first time those songs have been available on either format. Placing their earliest and newest material right beside each other allows us a chance to really witness the progress of the band. The new songs feel like Lightheaded’s most confident, smoothest pop recordings yet to my ears–they’re bright, shiny jangle pop tunes that can’t be obscured by a little bit of echo. “The Lindens, The Lindens, The Lindens!” might be my favorite one, a bright chorus that arrives and leaves in the blink of an eye. Read more about Thinking, Dreaming, Scheming! here.
“Sound of the Rain (Alternate Mix)”, Tired of Triangles From Splendid Hour: Dave J. Andrae and Associates (1997-2023) (2025)
Splendid Hour: Dave J. Andrae and Associates (1997-2023) encompasses more than a quarter-century of various musical endeavors whittled down to twenty-five songs and sixty-six minutes, beginning in the titular singer-songwriter’s hometown of Milwaukee and ending in his current residence of northwest Florida, featuring both long-defunct bands and projects and Andrae’s still-active solo project Tired of Triangles. Splendid Hour is a lot to take in, but to me that’s part of its appeal. Not every song here is a lost underground classic, but there are plenty of moments on here that stand on their own as single triumphs–for example, Tired of Triangles’ unassuming, Yo La Tengo-ified cover of The Dils’ “Sound of the Rain” is a shining example of the blank-canvas brilliance of the indie rock of the 1990s. Read more about Splendid Hour: Dave J. Andrae and Associates (1997-2023) here.
“I’ve Just Seen the Rock of Ages”, Drunken Prayer From Thy Burdens (2025, Dial Back Sound)
Drunken Prayer’s Morgan Geer conceived Thy Burdens with Drive-By Truckers bassist Matt Patton, sharing a desire to shine a light on the “core values” of gospel songs: “the incontrovertibly true and inconceivably vast principles of kindness, right and wrong, and social justice”. That’s all noble and good, of course, but Thy Burdens wouldn’t be able to reach across the aisle so effectively if Drunken Prayer’s self-described “snarling country-soul” sound wasn’t so immaculately-executed. “I’ve Just Seen the Rock of Ages” might be the best of Thy Burdens distilled into four heat-packing minutes–it’s country music, it’s folk music, it’s the blues. It’s the Gospel, delivered by a bunch of southern rock-and-rollers who–despite what they might say–are the exact right people for the message. Read more about Thy Burdens here.
“Recolor”, The Western Expanse From The Western Expanse (2025, Dimensional Projects)
California indie rock group The Western Expanse was active in the late 1990s and early 2000s, but almost none of their recordings saw an official release during their lifespan–1999’s Hollywood Nights 7” single was the only one. The band’s Jae Rodriguez recently started up a record label called Dimensional Projects for the purpose of finally getting these recordings to see the light of day–an album and an EP from The Western Expanse, plus a compilation from the members’ previous band, Emery. Combining the rock-band precision of Emery with the patient, measured outlook of the EP, The Western Expanse’s LP is the best, fullest collection that the band’s members would make. “Recolor” lands on a sound that doesn’t sound unlike a lot of the “big name” 90s indie rock bands with which you’re likely already familiar, but getting to trace The Western Expanse’s journey to this song is rewarding in its own right. Read more about The Western Expanse here.
“Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey”, The Feelies From Rewind (2025, Bar/None)
Rewind is an archival compilation of cover songs that legendary New Jersey post-punk/proto-indie rock group The Feelies have recorded across their entire career. Rewind may be a hodgepodge (of these nine songs, seven are from the band’s initial run from 1976 to 1992, and two of them from their “reunion” era in the 21st century), but these recordings have a unified feel to them. Veering away from the folky and pastoral side of the band, these nine recordings find The Feelies reveling in their love and understanding of electric, rollicking classic rock that’s just too simple and powerful to ever lose anything to time. Including “Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey” from their classic debut album Crazy Rhythms feels like cheating, but I can’t argue that it doesn’t fit on here, particularly in the extra-frantic second half of the album. Read more about Rewind here.
“Florencia”, Friends of Cesar Romero (2025, Doomed Babe/Kit Fox)
It’s time to check in on the great J. Waylon Porcupine and his Friends of Cesar Romero power pop project. If you’re already familiar with the prolific South Dakota-based act, it probably won’t surprise you to learn that they had a busy June–we saw a new EP called All Goodbyes Aren’t Bad Cause This Goodbye Is for Good, the two-song “Can’t Get You” single, and the one-off “Florencia”. There are several winners among this recent crop (check out “Summer Boyfriend” from the EP too) but “Florencia” is my favorite of them by a wide margin. It’s unsubtle, collar-grabbing, punked-up power pop for all of its wrecking-ball two minutes. It’s a feverish paean to the titular character (who “love[s] The Smiths and anarchy”, among other things).
“Evolver”, HLLLYH From URUBURU (2025, Team Shi)
“Evolver” is one of the instant-classics of URUBURU, a huge-sounding, big-picture indie rock anthem that nonetheless twists and turns and refuses to settle into anything too comfortable. Does it sound like an older version of HLLLYH’s previous incarnation, The Mae Shi? Perhaps, but there’s no depletion of energy in the maximalist, twitching power pop of “Evolver”, an excellent piece of post-Apples in Stereo noisy hook assault. And don’t be worried, there’s plenty of wordless “way-oh, way-oh” vocals here, too. Read more about URUBURU here.
“You Can’t Get It Back”, Jeanines From How Long Can It Last (2025, Slumberland/Skep Wax)
Massachusetts indie pop trio Jeanines continue to favor a much more clean and direct sound on their latest album–How Long Can It Last is still very much in the world of “jangly indie pop”, but the more streamlined side of classic folk rock is in there too, and vocalist Alicia Jeanine’s distinct vocals are right in the center throughout the album. How Long Can It Last remains wedded to the “Jeanines ethos”–of the record’s thirteen songs, only two are (barely) longer than two minutes, and the entire thing is done in under twenty-two. “You Can’t Get It Back” is one of those fabulous quick-hitters, hurrying along with the perfunctory spookiness of a 1960s folk-pop tune. Read more about How Long Can It Last here.
“Backwards”, Idle Ray From Even in the Spring (2025, Life Like Tapes)
I highlighted “Quiet Cab” earlier on this playlist, but surely I wasn’t going to let the new Idle Ray album go by without highlighting one of Fred Thomas’ own songs, no? “Backwards” is classic Fred Thomas lo-fi power pop and the perfect choice to open Even in the Spring–after the wildly sprawling 2024 Thomas solo album Window in the Rhythm, it feels so good to hear him knock out two-minute pop songs with just as much zeal as anything on the first Idle Ray album (which is probably the best “pop” Thomas-led album in recent memory).
“Mi Si Ma Io”, Lùlù From Lùlù (2025, Howlin Banana/Taken by Surprise/Dangerhouse Skylab)
The self-titled Lùlù debut album is power pop in its most freewheeling, energetically fun form. Luc Simone and his collaborators gleefully roll around in the histories of garage rock and punk rock to make ten massively hooky rock and roll knockout punches. Far removed from the refined, cosmopolitan sound that I associated with French indie pop, Lùlù has more in common with Australian garage-power-poppers, American retro-pop groups and, honestly, even a little bit of the brighter side of melodic lifer punk rock (“orgcore”) groups. The cowbell-heavy classic rock throwback “Ma Si Ma Io” might be the most triumphant moment on Lùlù, but there is plenty of competition for that. Read more about Lùlù here.
“Bitter Blue”, Max Look From Cruise (2025, Kestrel)
Another unknown power pop musician? You bet! We’re highlighting Los Angeles’ Max Look, a “director and editor” who appears to make guitar pop music as a solo artist in his spare time. The latest Max Look release is a four-song cassette EP called Cruise on a San Francisco label I don’t know called Kestrel Records. Closing track “Bitter Blue” is probably the black sheep of Cruise–compared to the more rocking power pop of the three songs preceding it, this one is more of a starry-eyed jangly ballad. Nonetheless, it’s my favorite Max Look song that I’ve heard yet, a bittersweet final statement on a brief EP that hints at future heights for the singer-songwriter to scale.
“I Want to Remember It All”, Laura Stevenson From Late Great (2025, Really)
I will probably need more time with this Laura Stevenson album. The singer-songwriter’s first record of new material in four years (oddly enough, released by Jeff Rosenstock’s Really Records instead of her longtime home of Don Giovanni) is pretty subtle and unbothered, even for her, but Late Great has all the makings of a “sleeper favorite”. It’s a breakup album of some kind, but if that’s exactly what “I Want to Remember It All” is about, I’m not entirely sure. “…Even the tallest of hurts,” is how Stevenson completes the titular thought, which is a pretty fervent way to describe some conflicting emotions. Late Great probably sounds exactly like it should, with that in mind.
“Sometime”, Options From Beast Mode (2025)
Chicago recording engineer and musician Seth Engel was incredibly active as Options in the late 2010s and early 2020s, but Beast Mode is his solo project’s first record in three years. Beast Mode is slick, snappy, heavily AutoTuned bedroom pop music (indeed, Engel writes that it was recorded “in my room 2021-2024”) that reminds me of a more fully-developed version of 2021’s On the Draw, one of my favorite Options releases. It hits the same “fucking around and making timeless pop songs” sweet spot that, like, early This Is Lorelei did. The whole thing is full of casually hard-hitting pop songs, but the opening track, “Sometime”, lays down the gauntlet right at the beginning and is a pretty hard one to top.
“Treasures in the Magic Hole”, W. Cullen Hart & Andrew Rieger From Leap Through Poisoned Air (2025, Cloud Recordings)
Twenty-five years ago, two key figures in the Elephant 6 movement/Athens, Georgia indie rock (The Olivia Tremor Control’s Will Cullen Hart and Elf Power’s Andrew Rieger) were roommates, and they made a bit of music together–short, curious, dark pop pieces largely made up of instrumentals from the former and lyrics and vocal melodies from the latter. These four songs, finally seeing the light of day, come in at under six minutes total in length–nothing here crosses the two-minute mark. The first three songs on Leap Through Poisoned Air all feature strange, minimalist instrumentals from Hart–“Treasures in the Magic Hole” is a collision of Hart’s electronic tinkering and the darker side of 60s pop music, and Rieger is just the right person to helm it. Read more about Leap Through Poisoned Air here.
“Dark Pleasure of Endless Doing”, Little Mazarn From Mustang Island (2025, Dear Life)
The third Little Mazarn album is the Austin experimental folk group’s first as a trio, with the Chicago-based Carolina Chauffe (of Hemlock) officially joining the band on harmonies on every song. Synths and flutes join the familiar sounds of banjos and singing saw on Mustang Island, but while there are a few busy moments of psychedelic pop music, the trio’s expanded sound still frequently finds its way to the big wide empty. The fluttering, synth-led dream pop of “Dark Pleasure of Endless Doing” is a first-half highlight, coming out of nowhere to completely rearrange the whole Little Mazarn sound in a couple of sweet, bright minutes. Read more about Mustang Island here.
“Queen of the Hill”, Frizbee From Sour Kisses (2025, Painters Tapes/Noise Merchant)
Frizbee are an Indianapolis quartet who are expert practitioners of fast-paced, furious (almost hardcore) Midwestern garage punk. On Sour Kisses, we get seven brand-new Frizbee tracks as well as fresh-sounding versions of a couple tracks from Splat, their debut split EP with Cleveland’s PAL. I’ve heard plenty of great music along these lines coming out of Detroit and Chicago in recent memory, and it kind of feels like Frizbee synthesizes the infinitely-cool, fuzz-rock-and-roll-reverent vibes of the former with the sarcastic punk-y irreverence of the latter. Look, regardless of where Sour Kisses falls on your imagined egg/chain punk spectrum-graphics, it’s a really cool seventeen-minute rock record from a new band that’s already operating at a high and lethal level. “Queen of the Hill” is a second-half highlight from Sour Kisses, with frontperson Maude Atlas delivering the fuzz-pop excoriation we didn’t know that we all needed. Read more about Sour Kisses here.
“Dirt Nap”, Michael Robert Chadwick From Illusion of Touch (2025, Anxiety Blanket)
Made “over several years in several different places”, Illusion of Touch is a more polished, teased-out version of what seems to be the “Michael Robert Chadwick sound”–synth-led pop music that recalls a nice bite-sized, portable version of soft rock and sophisti-pop. The icy synths that kick off opening track “Dirt Nap” eventually give way to bass grooves, jazzy saxophones, and smooth indie pop vocals, setting up a lot of the key ingredients that go into Illusion of Touch. Read more about Illusion of Touch here.
“Only Daughter”, Whitney’s Playland From Long Rehearsal (2025, Meritoro/Dandy Boy)
“Only Daughter” follows Long Rehearsal’s sublime opening title track and holds its own against it–neither it nor the song after it are as concisely, immediately brilliant as “Long Rehearsal”, but they’re not exactly trying to best it at its own game. “Only Daughter”, for one, is the most electric song on the EP, opening with a nice, coiling guitar solo and the guitars continue giving off static (albeit in a more backgrounded form) as the track advances. I do hope that the next Whitney’s Playland release gives us more than three new songs, yes, but Long Rehearsal is a strong collection regardless of size. Read more about Long Rehearsal here.
“Lockjaw”, Idiot Mambo From Shoot the Star (2025, Strange Mono)
Shoot the Star is Philadelphia duo Idiot Mambo’s most ambitious and best release yet. The band (Benji Davis and Leah G.) sought and received more outside help on this one than ever before, but Idiot Mambo lose none of their vibrancy by adopting a higher level of production, and Shoot the Star only enhances their skewed indie pop music. Indeed, it only helps Davis and Leah G. bring the attitude of They Might Be Giants, Sparks, and the more pop side of Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 to the world of modern-day Philadelphia guitar pop. The surreal yet crystal-clear power pop of “Lockjaw” only needs two minutes to firmly lodge its way into one’s head. Read more about Shoot the Star here.
“Help”, The Apartments From Can’t Stop It! Australian Post-Punk 1978-82 (2001, Chapter Music)
“Post-punk” is at its best when it’s a wide-ranging term for a host of good, boundary-pushing rock music, and Australia must’ve gotten this memo–this compilation of early Aussie post-punk compiled by Chapter Music (newly reissued with six bonus tracks) ranges from sparkling indie pop, bizarre synth experiments, fiery garage-y rock, rhythmic “art punk”, and everything in between (sometimes more than one in a single track!). Classic guitar pop heroes The Apartments contribute “Help” to Can’t Stop It!, making a strong case that the story of the catchier side of early indie rock doesn’t end with Flying Nun Records in nearby New Zealand or C86 in the United Kingdom. Read more about Can’t Stop It! Australian Post-Punk 1978-82 here.
“Possession”, Ty Segall From Possession (2025, Drag City)
I’ve enjoyed a few Ty Segall-related releases over the past few years, but it seems like I always run out of space for them on these playlists. Well, good news–I was able to fit the title track of Possession, Segall’s most recent solo album, on this one. It’s most similar to the album Segall released earlier this year with Corey Madden as Freckle (especially compared to Segall’s most recent solo album, the percussion-led Love Rudiments)–some quite accessible glammy, poppy garage rock and roll. “Possession” does everything I want a Ty Segall song to do–offer up some cathartic guitar play, roll along in a nice groove, nail some easy, shambling hooks.
“Why Am I Here”, Subsonic Eye From Singapore Dreaming (2025, Topshelf)
Subsonic Eye’s fifth album, Singapore Dreaming, doesn’t reinvent the Singaporean band’s formula, but, considering how energized and focused they sound on this LP, there’s no need to worry about them running out of steam. As per usual with Subsonic Eye, Singapore Dreaming is a brief, sub-thirty minute listen; the band say it’s inspired by their hometown city-state, and while it might be a little more uptempo, busy, and/or direct than their last album, the threads that went into creating this one aren’t easy to differentiate from their earlier ones on the surface. Early on in the album, Subsonic Eye ask “Why Am I Here” with a song that takes a minute to really get going but which eventually builds into a triumphant, explosive guitar tangle in its final minute or so–for them, it’s quite “jammy”. Read more about Singapore Dreaming here.
“I Just Need Enough”, Graham Hunt From Timeless World Forever (2025, Run for Cover)
Three Graham Hunt songs on this playlist, huh? I think it’s safe to say that this one’s going to be on rotation for me for a while now and it’s pretty easily the pinnacle of the Wisconsinite’s career thus far. “I Just Need Enough” is Timeless World Forever’s opening track, and it’s a fascinating, intricate first statement. “I Just Need Enough” is so much more than its chorus, and the winding roads it takes to get there are just right, but it’s that huge refrain that’ll stick with me most of all. Read more about Timeless World Forever here.
“I Like to Think”, Void Participant (2025)
“I Like to Think” is the debut single from Void Participant, but the act already has a couple of connections to bands I’ve previously written about on Rosy Overdrive. It’s the solo project of Maria Muscatello, who was one-half of the San Jose folk-pop duo Comets Near Me (they appear to no longer be active, I think), and “I Like to Think” was produced by awakebutstillinbed guitarist Brendan Gibson. “I Like to Think” is something of a soft launch (is there any other kind for indie folk rock singer-songwriter solo projects?); there’s actually quite a bit of impressive instrumentation and orchestration going on underneath Muscatello’s acoustic surface, but it’s delivered pretty subtly. Seems like a new project to watch.
“Flex It, Tagger”, HLLLYH From URUBURU (2025, Team Shi)
The third song from URUBURU I’ve chosen for this playlist is the most “rocking” one. The writhing, taunting post-punk-revival scorcher “Flex It, Tagger” is a sneakier, punchier highlight compared to the gigantic, star-shooting anthems surrounding in the first half of the album. It’s no less effective at what it does, of course, with HLLLYH confirming their off-the-rails rock and roll side hasn’t been lost amidst the name change. Read more about URUBURU here.
“Waiting Again”, The Parkways From Quick Hitters (2025)
I mean, this is just excellent pop rock. I’m not sure if I have a whole bunch to say about The Parkways, a band from South Jersey who describe their live shows as “energetic and frenzied performances of original music alongside classic dive bar staples”. Quick Hitters is their debut EP, and it’s a post-Strokes collection of guitar pop music with shades of garage rock, surf rock, and classic rock. Those surf-y indie rock bands were kind of like the 2010s version of “landfill indie”, no? Well, regardless, “Waiting Again” sounds great in 2025.
“No Star General”, WPTR From Redness & Swelling at the Injection Site (2025, Lame-O)
Redness & Swelling at the Injection Site’s closing track, “No Star General”, is up there with the previously-mentioned “In Bruges” in terms of pop brilliance, just less frantic and more “aw, shucks” in terms of power pop archetypes. Redness & Swelling at the Injection Site has its immediate rewards like those two tracks, but it is, of course, also about the journey to get to (and away from) them. Redness & Swelling at the Injection Site has me ready to put my faith in Peter Gill, the No Star General, to helm such missions. Read more about Redness & Swelling at the Injection Site here.
“A Lot of Super Weird Stuff Went Down Right Before I Met You (Jack of Spades)”, Hallelujah the Hills From DECK: SPADES (2025, Discrete Pageantry/Best Brother)
Spades is kind of the sore thumb of the four-song DECK collection to me; it’s a lot looser and offbeat, allowing some genuine oddities to creep into the until-now fairly buttoned-up project. Even on Spades, though, “A Lot of Super Weird Stuff Went Down Before I Met You” is a titanic song that is one of the best things I’ve ever heard from Hallelujah the Hills yet. It’s a very surreal, viola-marked (thanks David Michael Curry) ballad featuring some evocative but head-scratching lyrics from the great Ryan H. Walsh. The contextless snippets we get of a, yes, “super weird” story could be gimmicky without the skill of Walsh, Curry, and the rest of Hallelujah the Hills here. Read more about DECK here.
Hey there! It may be a holiday week, but I’m planning on making it a full one nonetheless, and we’re beginning with a Pressing Concerns featuring new albums from Abe Savas, City Planners, and The Whimbrels, plus an archival collection from Ella Hanshaw. Check it out!
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.
Abe Savas – 99 Songs (Plus One)
Release date: June 20th Record label: Badgering the Witless Genre: Power pop, bedroom pop, folk-pop Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital Pull Track: (He’s Been) Phoning It in Again
The album is called 99 Songs (Plus One), and that’s exactly what it offers us. This ambitious project is the brainchild of one Abe Savas, a Kalamazoo, Michigan-based musician who made a record in 2023 with a backing band called “The New Standards of Beauty”. 99 Songs (Plus One) has (perhaps unsurprisingly) been in the works for longer than that; the bulk of the material was recorded between “2021 and 2025”, but some of its ideas and recordings have been bouncing around since the late 1990s. 99 Songs (Plus One) fits its ninety-nine tracks in seventy-eight minutes (enough for one CD)–you can do the math, but this means a lot of these songs are snippets a few seconds long, and even the more fully-developed tracks are almost all under two minutes in length. The songs range from incredibly goofy to surprisingly poignant, genre-wise hopping from power pop to acoustic folk to more side-excursions than I can count. There’s a lot of Elvis Costello in Savas’ pop music instincts, and this chaotic collection will likely also appeal to fans of Tony Molina, They Might Be Giants, and maybe even Fountains of Wayne. There’s a ton of brilliant moments on 99 Songs (Plus One), and for the less-memorable ones, one only needs to wait a couple of seconds for them to pass.
The first stone-cold classic on 99 Songs (Plus One) comes in the first five tracks with the cinematic complaint of a Costelloian punk-power-pop anthem in “(He’s Been) Phoning It in Again”, and the thirty-second NDA paean “Severance Package” is another great early rocker. Other perfect moments of power pop on 99 Songs (Plus One) include the surprisingly edgy garage rock of “The Lost Footage of The Magnificent Ambersons”, the euphoric bounce of “Melodyne”, and “Jingle Work”, which might as well be the theme song for the entire album. On the more acoustic side of the spectrum, “Rise to the Occasion” is a short Elliott Smith-like song about solitude that’s as good as anything else on the album, and there’s a really brilliant self-pitying song hidden near the end of the record called “Boring Dracula”. A few songs on 99 Songs (Plus One) are effectively just punchlines–they’re not my favorite songs on the album, of course, but I’ll admit that “Rock & Roll Taco” made me laugh and “In My Electric Car” is pretty great too. The songs that aren’t jokes maybe aren’t as immediately memorable as stuff like “Theme from MimeCop” (“He has the right to remain silent”), but stuff like “Freeze” and “Pay Phone” and “I’ll Wash, You Dry” (Jesus Christ, regarding the latter of those three) stick out in a raw emotional way. But maybe 99 Songs (Plus One) is at its best when it combines a bit of everything, like in the bizarre sixty-second new wave storytelling of “Radar”. You can choose whichever parts of 99 Songs (Plus One) work the best for you; there’s no shortage of pieces to pick up. (Bandcamp link)
Ella Hanshaw – Ella Hanshaw’s Black Book
Release date: June 13th Record label: Spinster Genre: Gospel folk, country Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital Pull Track: Reaching for Heaven/Reaching for You
The first-ever archival release from Appalachian folk record label Spinster Sounds is a remarkable unearthing: an entire album of recordings from Ella Hanshaw (1934-2020), a West Virginia gospel and country musician who devoted much of her life to writing and performing music for Baptist (and later Pentecostal) churches in Clay County (as well as across the state with the Hallelujah Hill Quartet, featuring her husband Tracy and Maxine and Chester Spencer). Ella Hanshaw’s Black Book was compiled by her granddaughter from “home and church recordings”, and it’s actually two collections in one–Side A, the Big Black Book, is made up of Hanshaw’s original gospel songs, largely recorded with the quartet, and Side B, the Little Black Book, features Hanshaw’s earliest, secular country material she recorded on her own before her faith and music became completely intertwined. The Big Black Book is the second gospel album I’ve written about this month, but while Drunken Prayer’s Thy Burdens was made with a (nonetheless very reverent) remove by a few alt-country musicians, Hanshaw and her quartet were quite literally an arm of the Church, and Hanshaw saw her work as an extension of God himself, who she credited with “giving” her these songs.
The sequencing of Ella Hanshaw’s Black Book is wonderful, and it’s probably the only way it would’ve made sense to arrange it. The gospel side is what Hanshaw considers her life’s work, and it’s not hard to hear and understand why a devoted servant of God would and should be proud of these songs. Hanshaw sings about laboring joyfully for the Lord and spiting the Devil, another frequent character in her songs. It seems appropriate that the Big Black Book ends with “Will My Lord Be Proud”, a question by which Hanshaw seemed to live her life. This bridges the gap to the Little Black Book, a set of home-recorded folk-country songs that humanize the divinely-inspired bandleader of the record’s first side. The lo-fi recordings only enhance the sharp country sadness in ballads like “I’ll Cry Tomorrow”, “Reaching for Heaven/Reaching for You”, and “Back in Your Heart”, and “Mr. B’s” and (especially) “Nobody’s Fool” are really fun country songs that shine through the barebones get-up. The Little Black Book is closer to the type of music I’m more likely to listen to for pleasure in the year 2025, but I appreciate that we get to see both sides of Ella Hanshaw the artist in one document. Most musicians end up projecting one image over another regardless of their true journey; Spinster and the Hanshaw family paint a truer portrait with Ella Hanshaw’s Black Book. (Bandcamp link)
City Planners – Plastic and Metal
Release date: March 20th Record label: The Off Allen Recording Company Genre: Indie pop, power pop, synthpop, new wave Formats: Digital Pull Track: Angles Are Everywhere
It seems like jangly indie pop is positively thriving up there in Portland, Maine. It’s the headquarters of Rosy Overdrive favorite Repeating Cloud Records, but the scene extends beyond just one label, and City Planners is the latest to join the party with their debut album, Plastic and Metal. They’ve played some shows with Field Studies, and their relaxed, vintage-sounding pop rock sound also evokes Maine groups like Crystal Canyon and Little Oso–but even though they’re only just now putting out their first LP, City Planners actually seems to predate most of those bands. They released a demo EP in 2019, and the quintet (vocalist/synth player Becky Brosnan, guitarist/vocalist Katie Gallegos, guitarist Steve Soloway, bassist Dave Ragsdale, and drummer Zac Hansen) took six years to arrive with an album featuring polished versions of those five songs plus seven new ones. Long wait time aside, there’s no arguing with the “pop”-forward version of indie pop that City Planners have unveiled with Plastic and Metal–between the front-and-center vocals, the bright, bubbly guitars, and the prominent swooning synths, the band (as well as producer Todd Hutchisen) deserve credit for pursuing hooks on just about every frontier that’s open to them.
“The Moon” opens up Plastic and Metal with some perfectly-executed synth-forward indie pop–between the starry electronic touches, the steady pulse of the drums, and the triumphant vocal duet, it’s the grandeur of 1980s pop music perfectly scaled to City Planners’ size. The Pixies-esque guitar riff and scurrying verses of “Doing Fine” keep the pop hooks coming via a different angle, and the retro girl-group inspired pop-rock of “Gone” is another fun example of City Planners’ range. Plastic and Metal crawls near the forty-five minute mark (it’s been a long time in the making, and I certainly can’t say that City Planners short-changed us); the midsection of the record is brightened up by the jangly “Rachel Carson” and the zippy “Pendulum”, while the Game Theory-esque new wave of “Angles Are Everywhere” keeps things curious and vibrant as Plastic and Metal begins to draw to a close. There are hints of a band with aims beyond sculpting pop pieces, particularly in the six-minute slow-burn “Blue Jacket”, but even that song is built on recognizable pop motifs that happened to be slowed down and stretched out until they become something entirely different. That just seems like how they do things up there in Maine. (Bandcamp link)
The Whimbrels – The Whimbrels
Release date: June 27th Record label: Dromedary Genre: Art rock, post-punk, garage rock, post-rock Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital Pull Track: She Is the Leader
The Whimbrels certainly have the pedigree. Primary songwriter and guitarist/vocalist Arad Evans was a longtime member of Glenn Branca’s ensemble, from the 1980s up until the New York composer’s death in 2018. Secondary songwriter and bassist/vocalist Matt Hunter co-founded cult 90s indie rock group New Radiant Storm King, played with Silver Jews and J. Mascis, and has been spending time in SAVAK as of late. Guitarist Norman Westberg has performed the same role in Swans for forty years, playing on most of the singular art rock/post-rock group’s albums. Drummer Steve DiBenedetto has played with Jad Fair and Phantom Tollbooth’s Dave Rick, in addition to being a renowned painter. Third guitarist Luke Schwartz is another Branca alum, and–okay, I need to talk about The Whimbrels and their self-titled debut album now. The Whimbrels is an art rock album that really, actually rocks–there’s plenty of New York no wave and noise in their sound, to be sure, but just about any underground band that knows how to combine “experimental” sounds with rock and roll–Sonic Youth, Yo La Tengo, Eleventh Dream Day, Oneida–are apt points of comparison for the quintet’s first album together.
The Whimbrels is seven songs long–a few of these songs are pretty lengthy jams, and while no one track is completely “out there”, the LP certainly has its moments. The album’s first track, “She Is the Leader”, has all of this–it slowly but surely comes into focus with clean, droning guitars, eventually adding in rambling sing-speaking vocals, and then the final two minutes (of a total of six) are devoted to a more serious style of noise exploration. Hunter’s “Monarchs” kicks out some sweeping but somewhat murky New York indie rock, and The Whimbrels continue to rock in both the shortest (the two-minute noise punk “That’s How It Was”) and longest (eight-minute sprawling closing track “Four Moons of Galileo”) moments on the album. “Scream for Me” is basically New York punk rock stretched and contorted into a six-minute electric journey, and “Eclipse Eye” (Hunter’s other contribution) brings a bit of lightly-psychedelic Lee Ranaldo vibe to its tension and empty space. The Whimbrels has plenty of flare-ups that you can tell were sculpted by people who’ve tested the outer limits of the guitar as an instrument, but it’s entirely a “rock” record and it’s entirely a joy to listen to. (Bandcamp link)
Happy Thursday! Tomorrow (June 27th), plenty of good new records will be released, and this blog post looks at four of them: new albums from Lightheaded, HLLLYH, Ryli, and Jeanines. It’s an indie pop-heavy edition! If you missed either of this week’s earlier blog posts (Monday’s Pressing Concerns featured Six Flags Guy, Dave J. Andrae, Nac/Hut Report, and Peaceful Faces, and Tuesday’s featured The Stick Figures, Hectorine, Grey Causeway, Docents), check those out, too.
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.
Lightheaded – Thinking, Dreaming, Scheming!
Release date: June 27th Record label: Slumberland/Skep Wax Genre: Jangle pop, dream pop, indie pop Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital Pull Track: The Lindens, The Lindens, The Lindens!
Thinking, Dreaming, Scheming! is an EP, but it’s also an LP. Maybe it’s a “double EP”, or a compilation with extra new material? Regardless of what one ought to file it under (I’ll figure it out later), the latest record from the New Jersey indie pop group Lightheaded features great brand-new guitar pop and provides a great excuse to revisit their earlier material. This makes three records in three years for the Cynthia Rittenbach/Stephen Stec project–they burst onto the scene in 2023 with a cassette EP called Good Good Great!, and the full-length Combustible Gems followed the year after. The 2025 Lightheaded release features five new songs recorded by Gary Olson (The Ladybug Transistor) and Alicia Vanden Heuvel (The Aislers Set) and “drenched in lush reverb on tape” by Fred Thomas. The vinyl and CD editions of Thinking, Dreaming, Scheming! don’t stop there, however–they both include the entirety of Good Good Great!, marking the first time those songs have been available on either format. Placing their earliest and newest material right beside each other allows us a chance to really witness the progress of the band (who I believe have changed members beyond the founding duo recently).
I’ve already written about Good Good Great! before (and I have nothing to add; it still sounds very good), so I’ll focus on the first five songs on the album (and the only five songs on the cassette version, if you’re keeping track). These new songs feel like Lightheaded’s most confident, smoothest pop recordings yet to my ears; they may have let Thomas reverb them up, but the first three tracks in particular are bright, shiny jangle pop tunes that can’t be obscured by a little bit of echo. “Same Drop” is the sweeping opener, taking a full three minutes to unfurl and build into Lightheaded’s version of “maximalism”; the next three songs are all under two minutes, lest we worry that Lightheaded might get a little too lost in the woods. “The Lindens, The Lindens, The Lindens!” might actually be my favorite one, a bright chorus that arrives and leaves in the blink of an eye. “Me and Amelia Fletcher” is an on-brand creation from a band who wear their influences on their sleeves and seem to take every opportunity to work with them–I’m sure I won’t be the first one to point out that Thinking, Dreaming, Scheming! is being co-released by Fletcher’s label Skep Wax. “The View from Your Room” and “Crash Landing of the Clod” close out this chapter of Lightheaded by reembracing their regal, airy, dream pop side–the former is as short as the mid-section of the EP and the latter sprawls to four minutes, but both sort through the haze of indie and pop music past to find curious sweetness. As good as the older songs that follow them are, the new recordings on Thinking, Dreaming, Scheming! are what’ll keep my eyes on Lightheaded. (Bandcamp link)
HLLLYH – URUBURU
Release date: June 27th Record label: Team Shi Genre: Art rock, noise pop, power pop, 2000s indie rock Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Yellow Brick Wall
The story behind the album URUBURU by the band HLLLYH is a bit convoluted, but this project is effectively a new version of a 2000s art punk group from Los Angeles called The Mae Shi who put out a few albums before dissolving, seemingly for good. The Mae Shi were very much a “blog rock” band in my eyes (and this is a blog, after all); their sound was very technicolor, noisy 2000s indie rock/pop music with all sorts of bizarre stuff thrown into the mix, somewhere between, say, The Unicorns and Parts & Labor. Three years ago, Mae Shi co-founder Tim Byron (now based in the Bay Area) got a bunch of former members together–original vocalist and the other co-founder Ezra Buchlan, as well as Jeff Byron, Brad Breeck, and Corey Fogel–to create what they envisioned as the final Mae Shi album. Instead, they decided that it was something new–something called HLLLYH (which means, somewhat confusingly, that The Mae Shi’s 2009 album, also called HLLLYH, will remain their final LP). Tim Byron has since welcomed three new members to HLLLYH and plans to make “several interconnected albums” under the name; the degree to which the other former Mae Shi members will be involved in those records isn’t clear to me, but we’re getting a bit ahead of ourselves here.
URUBURU–there’s a lot of good stuff on it! It’s drawn from “unearthed half-written Mae Shi songs” as well as freshly-written material–regardless of where and when these songs came from, HLLLYH have done an excellent job of recapturing that supercharged, ornery kaleidoscopic rock and roll energy that The Mae Shi had (Do they sound a little older? Sure, but I’m not sure I’d say it’s a more “mature” album). It’s an exhilarating start between two huge-sounding, big-picture indie rock anthems in “Uru Buru” and “Evolver” and the writhing, taunting post-punk-revival scorcher “Flex It, Tagger” that connects the two. “Evolver” in particular twists and turns and refuses to settle into anything too comfortable–traits it shares with my personal favorite song on the record, “Yellow Brick Wall”. “Yellow Brick Wall” is perfect glitzy power pop in spite of itself, and instead of trying to top that peak, HLLLYH just get weirder throughout URUBURU (although, after a wonky middle, the big rockers come back towards the end with “(Guess Who’s) Back from the Spirit World”, “Black Rainbows”, and “Dead Clade”). In classic Mae Shi/HLLLYH fashion, URUBURU feels like it has multiple ending-worthy moments between the leaving-it-all-out-there avant-pop rock of “Dead Clade” and the surprise acoustic closing track “I’m Glad You’re Alive”. It’s business as usual for the forces behind URUBURU, which means that it sounds like anything but that. (Bandcamp link)
Ryli – Come and Get Me
Release date: June 27th Record label: Dandy Boy Genre: Jangle pop, power pop Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital Pull Track: Bad July
I’ll stop writing about indie pop albums from the San Francisco Bay Area when they stop being good, but I don’t think we’re anywhere near the end of this era yet. And, if you’re already reasonably familiar with the bands and labels associated with this scene, it’s no surprise that the debut album from Ryli keeps the winning streak going. Ryli are effectively a supergroup when it comes to Bay Area jangle pop–the group’s “co-leaders” are Yea-Ming Chen (of Yea-Ming and the Rumours) on lead vocals and guitar and Rob Good (of The Goods) on lead guitar, and the rhythm section features Luke Robbins of R.E. Seraphin and The Rumours on bass and Ian McBrayer, formerly of Sonny & the Sunsets, on drums. The first Ryli single, “I Think I Need You Around”, came out on Dandy Boy late last year, and the quartet have moved quickly, as they’ve already put together a full-length called Come and Get Me. Chen writes the lyrics and all four of them write the music; compared to Chen’s work in The Rumours, Ryli’s version of jangle pop hews closer to “power pop” and contains a bit less of the folky tones of her most recent album with her other band, I Can’t Have It All.
Still, Come and Get Me is an album led by Chen’s vocals, and her stately, striking voice (one that doesn’t suffer in the least with a more electric backing band) is a clear connecting thread. Everybody in Ryli is familiar with what goes into making a solid pop song, and Come and Get Me absolutely reflects this–practically the entire first half of the album is one long parade of brisk tempos, jangly arpeggios, deft lead guitars, and tons of hooks. The cool-down moments on the LP are few and far between, but they’re there–like “Silent Colors” and “Downtown” in the middle of the record, bookending a new version of “I Think I Need You Around” that doesn’t mess with the sublimity of the original, and “Careful” and “Still Night”, which wrap the album up on a subdued (and, in the latter’s case, folk-y and acoustic) note. Everything else rocks, from the riffs-and-drums-based “Bad July” to the cautionary tale “Friend Collector” to early-R.E.M. jangly bliss of the title track. I have no complaints when it comes to Come and Get Me–it’s another solid record from a bunch of people with a good track record of making them, and it lays the foundation for Ryli to keep pursuing this noble goal. (Bandcamp link)
Jeanines – How Long Can It Last
Release date: June 27th Record label: Slumberland/Skep Wax Genre: Indie pop, jangle pop, power pop, twee Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital Pull Track: You Can’t Get It Back
Two Slumberland Records bands from the American Northeast are releasing LPs on the same day, and they’ve both teamed up with Skep Wax Records to release them in the United Kingdom and Europe. And furthermore, these two bands–Jeanines and Lightheaded (see above)–are touring the Kingdom together next month, with shows with British acts like Heavenly, Sassyhiya, The Gentle Spring, and Swansea Sound on the docket. Of the two, I’d say that I have less history with Jeanines–last time I wrote about them was three years ago and they were a duo in Brooklyn, but now they’re a trio in Massachusetts (founding members Alicia Jeanine and Jed Smith have since formally welcomed Maggie Gaster, the band’s longtime live bassist, into the group). It’s been a minute since their last album, yes, but they’ve remained active, putting out a single and an EP in between then and How Long Can It Last, and this new record sounds a lot like the Jeanines I remember. Compared to the reverb of Lightheaded, Jeanines favor a much more clean and direct sound–they’re still very much in the world of “jangly indie pop”, but the more streamlined side of classic folk rock is in there too, and Jeanine’s distinct vocals are right in the center throughout the album.
Jeanine’s singing style is perhaps the most immediately noticeable aspect of How Long Can It Last–conversational and laid-back, absent-minded to almost bored-sounding (perhaps “lackadaisical” is a better word). In terms of the music behind Jeanine, she and her co-composer Smith keep it simple and impactful; the skipping percussion and cheery bass guitar of opening track “To Fail”, for instance, are so completely capable of holding down the fort on their own that it’s actually kind of startling when the strings kick in. How Long Can It Last remains wedded to the “Jeanines ethos”–of the record’s thirteen songs, only two are (barely) longer than two minutes, and the entire thing is done in under twenty-two. “You Can’t Get It Back” hurries along with the perfunctory spookiness of a 1960s folk-pop tune, “Coaxed a Storm” is automatic, classic jangle pop, “On and On” is Jeanines’ version of a pogo-anthem, and so on. No time is wasted on How Long Can It Last–the trio launch into a smart, fully-realized, tiny pop song, bring it home, and move onto the next one with little fanfare. I can still hear plenty of excitement in the Jeanines way of doing things–they may cut out some excess, but that always stays intact. (Bandcamp link)
Round two, on a Tuesday! Today’s Pressing Concerns brings us an archival album from The Stick Figures, a new EP from Docents, and new albums from Hectorine and Grey Causeway. If you missed yesterday’s blog post (featuring Six Flags Guy, Dave J. Andrae, Nac/Hut Report, and Peaceful Faces), be sure to check that one out, too.
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.
The Stick Figures – Disturbance
Release date: June 1st Record label: Self-released Genre: Post-punk, dance punk, art punk, college rock Formats: CD, digital Pull Track: The Other Myth
I wrote about The Stick Figures back in the early days of this blog on the occasion of the release of 2021’s Archeology, and I was happy to do so. An early-adopter post-punk band from the underheralded music scene of late-70s Tampa, Florida, the five-piece “collective” (David and Rachel Bowman, Bill Carey, Sid and Robert Dansby, all of whom were attending the University of South Florida at the time) only ever released one EP (a 1981 self-titled one) before Floating Mill Records released an expanded version of it featuring a full album’s worth of unreleased recordings forty years later. At the time, the band stated that they had a second album’s worth of entirely unreleased material that they hoped to release soon after Archeology, and while their initial targets of 2022 and 2023 didn’t come to fruition (which may have had something to do with unspecified issues with their erstwhile record label), Disturbance is finally here in 2025, and it was worth the wait. Work on these songs apparently began in Tampa and continued after the band moved to New York, leading to the eleven tracks finally unleashed here on one LP. Why The Stick Figures disintegrated and these songs sat unreleased for so long isn’t really given a satisfying answer by the liner notes (Carey admits to only having “patchy recollections” of their break-up, Robert Dansby mentions Sid and David Bowman leaving New York City at some point), it’s clear that the music was important for all five of them when the project was active, and Disturbance reflects a band hell-bent on pushing forward (in multiple senses) no matter what.
Recorded in places like Davis Island’s PMS and Noise New York in Manhattan between 1980 and 1982, Disturbance is not “high-fidelity” as we know it (there’s a swampy murkiness to these songs that harkens back to their southeastern origins), but it does bear the mark of songs labored over and teased out carefully. Sometimes, this is more obvious than other times (I’m thinking of the deconstructed post-punk of “14 Days”, the floating, polished art rock of “Zone”, and the muddy jangle-funk of “Loudspeaker”), but The Stick Figures know what to keep “immediate” and when. “The Other Myth” is a great lost college rock/post-punk/dream pop anthem, easily hitting the best parts of all of those genres with the skill of a band not confined by such labels, “Worried” and its absurd spoken-word ranting is the most “Athens, Georgia” moment on the album, stuff like “After Me”, “Dusseldorf – Gleis 9”, and “Notes from Now On” incorporate empty space, surf-synth-punk, and dub into their sound without going to overboard, and the violin in the Mekons-y “Oil Painting” is a welcome modest excess. Disturbance is probably the closest thing we’ll get to a Stick Figures “album”–we had to wait forty-five years, but now we can finally hear the band at their most focused and locked-in. (Bandcamp link)
Hectorine – Arrow of Love
Release date: May 23rd Record label: Take a Turn Genre: Folk rock, soft rock, indie pop, singer-songwriter Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Heart of Stone
Hectorine–aka Sarah Gagnon–is an Oakland-based musician with some ties to the Bay Area indie pop scene–stalwart lo-fi pop label Paisley Shirt put out her 2021 album Tears (as well as a live cassette), Arrow of Love is being released by Take a Turn, the label co-run by Ray Seraphin and Luke Robbins (Ryli, Yea-Ming and the Rumours), and Matthew Ferrara of The Umbrellas and Magic Fig has mastered at least one of her albums. Assumed mutual admiration aside, Gagnon does something different from the majority of her peers with Hectorine, pursuing a sound drawn from classic folk rock and soft rock; names like Christine McVie, Leonard Cohen, Yoko Ono, and Bridget St. John (among others) have been thrown around in an attempt to describe her project. Arrow of Love is Gagnon’s third album as Hectorine and her first in four years, but she and her collaborators (returning contributors Betsy Gran and Max Shanley, new faces Geoff Saba, Jon Wujcik, Joel Robinow, and Lizzy Dutton) continue mining in Hectorine’s chosen corner of popular music history as if no time has been lost between Tears and now.
Arrow of Love is incredibly full-sounding throughout its ten songs and forty-one minutes–sometimes Hectorine tilts towards maximalism in its “easy-listening” (in theory) pop music, sometimes it attempts a more streamlined presentation, but everything on here sounds like Gagnon and Saba (who co-produced the album) really used the studio to sharpen and hone the songs down (or up) to their truest versions. I can hear the 80s influences in the synth-touched regal pop of “Is Love an Illusion?”, and this attitude bleeds into the more traditional piano-folk-pop balladry of “Everybody Says”. The organ-based polish of “No Hallelujah” and the cheerful indie pop of “Heart of Stone” (perhaps the most “Bay Area pop” moment on the LP by default) are some of Hectorine’s simplest pop moments, although the swooning studio pop of “Roses & Thorns” shows that Gagnon can still deliver strong pop hooks through the gauze of a little more studio glitz and tinkering. On the other hand, the title track sprawls to six minutes and “Throw Caution to the Wind” is content to wander around in its vintage folk-rock/soft-rock dressings without trying too hard to overly impress; Arrow of Love is equally at home catching a vibe and marinating thoughtfully in it. Saba adds a notable amount of harpsichord to Arrow of Love, which certainly helps the album feel lost in time, although she does her best to let it take its place alongside more “normal”-sounding synths and keys. Picking out individual elements of Arrow of Love can be fun and interesting to examine, but it’s the full-on blend that makes this album work as it does. (Bandcamp link)
Grey Causeway – Grey Causeway
Release date: May 27th Record label: Dandy Boy Genre: Post-punk, college rock, garage rock Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: No Condition
Grey Causeway are a new band made up of four veterans of the San Francisco Bay Area indie rock, garage rock, punk, and post-punk scenes. Vocalist/guitarist Andy Asp and guitarist/keyboardist Omen Starr are both ringers who’ve most recently been spotted in the dark early-punk/garage rock revivalists Smokers, bassist Frankie Koeller was a longtime member in dreamy indie pop group Papercuts, and Chris Appelgren played in countless Bay Area punk groups and co-owned Lookout Records until it folded. Grey Causeway arrived last year with two digital EPs released on Mouth Magazine Records, and these songs make up about half of their self-titled debut album (co-released by local scene chronicler Dandy Boy Records and Mouth Magazine). The Oakland band certainly are drawing from early punk and post-punk music on Grey Causeway, but there’s a delicate and hook-filled side to their songs that fits in well with the Bay Area’s bustling world of indie pop (in fact, it’s significantly more indebted to classic guitar pop music than the most recent Smokers record). Displaying their experience, Grey Causeway lock into their various roles easily–Asp’s punk rasp softens just a bit to fit the more college rock/jangle pop-evoking material, the guitars and keys neatly arrange themselves as needed, and Koeller’s bass playing displays all the skill one wants in a post-punk bassist.
Perhaps the most “punk” thing about Grey Causeway is its devotion to brief, perfunctory bursts of catchy but somewhat dark rock music–none of its thirteen songs are all that short, but the group only push things past the three-minute mark when it’s really necessary. Opening track “I-580” is not one of those moments (it’s a clean two-and-thirty), but it is one of the most complete-sounding songs on the album and a perfect introduction to Grey Causeway–slightly dark, slightly rough, slightly smooth, quite “pop”. “Lost Squadron” is arguably even more impressive, combining lost, wallflower-y British indie pop with a somewhat dangerous post-punk edge, and “Unsettled Weather” has the whole “melancholic” and “rhythm section-forward” thing down very well. Grey Causeway have arrived at their debut LP with a songbook full of tricks, and the record is full of striking moment after striking moment–the awash-with-synths crawl of “Narcolepsy”, the jangly cheeriness of “No Condition”, the creepy “Girlfriend’s Boyfriend” (it’s just so much more unsettling than that Killers song, somehow), the punk firecracker of “The Raft”. Grey Causeway is evidence of a band of musicians who know both how to make strong music together and how to harness that into a strong first statement. (Bandcamp link)
Docents – Shadowboxing
Release date: May 16th Record label: Ten Tremors Genre: Noise rock, no wave, post-punk Formats: CD, digital Pull Track: Garden
Alright, we’ve got some New York noise rock for you today! Specifically, we have the latest release from a quartet called Docents, a CD EP called Shadowboxing. These four (vocalist/guitarists Will Scott and Noah Sider, bassist Kabir Kumar-Hardy, and drummer Matthew Heaton) debuted back in 2021 with a self-titled cassette EP, returned in 2023 with a full-length called Figure Study, and released a pair of two-song singles last year. Like everything else that Docents have released, Shadowboxing is out via the New York “collective” label Ten Tremors, and it’s more than enough to get a solid handle on the kind of music in which Docents specialize. At a clean five songs in ten minutes, Shadowboxing is short and sweet (okay, maybe not “sweet”), delivering quick blasts of noisy rock music with bits of post-punk, no wave, and industrial clang in the mix. I hear the New York unflappability of SAVAK, the explosiveness of Open Head, and the dead-seriousness art-rock sensibilities of FACS in these songs; Shadowboxing may be over in the blink of an eye, but the quartet still have an ear for the dynamics here, as well as inflicting as much damage as they reasonably could in a limited amount of space.
Comparably speaking, Shadowboxing’s opening track, “Garden”, shows a bit of restraint–the instrumental is all frantically-paced garage-y post-punk, yes, but the vocals rest at a monotone, dryly observing the ensuing chaos. Things get just a little more dire in the title track, which tries to walk a similarly understated tightrope, but the vocal hollering wins out in the end and Docents whip up an instrumental storm to match it. “Double Fantasy” is where Shadowboxing truly goes off the deep end, a horrifying wasteland of industrial, static-y noise and blind-shooting, and the ninety-second in-the-red hammering of “Shouldn’t We” certainly doesn’t do anything to clean up the ever-increasing inferno. “Workout” ends Shadowboxing with one minute of pummeling noise-punk–the EP offered a few different pathways for Docents to traverse down, but by this point, the group have set fire to everything and charged into their wildest impulses head-on. The brevity of Shadowboxing starts to feel more and more like a feature rather than a bug upon repeated listening–if it was depicted in some kind of graphical analysis, it’s a steadily-increasing line that all of a sudden bolts off the charts, and we only have our imaginations to figure out where Docents have ended up after these recordings abruptly stop. (Bandcamp link)
This very hot Monday in June will soon be a little more bearable, thanks to the albums in this week’s first Pressing Concerns. We’ve got new albums from Six Flags Guy, Nac/Hut Report, and Peaceful Faces below, as well as a career-spanning compilation featuring the various bands and projects of one Dave J. Andrae. Read on!
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.
Six Flags Guy – You Look Terrible
Release date: June 6th Record label: 329 Genre: Post-rock, 90s indie rock, noise rock, post-hardcore, slowcore Formats: Digital Pull Track: Everything I’ve Ever Found Useful I’ve Stolen
Do you like the band Slint? Six Flags Guy sure do. In fact, they even sound like them sometimes! 2023’s And Nothing Did So What was the sleeper post-rock hit of that particular summer, a trio of indie rockers from central Ohio making “smoky, dingy soundscapes unmoored from recognizable structure”, as I referred to the record’s eight songs at the time. I think Six Flags Guy might’ve changed up their lineup between that album and their follow-up LP (founding members Jonah Krueger and RJ Martin are still here on vocals/guitar and guitar, respectively, but this time there are newcomers in drummer Sean Pierce and bassist Colton Hamilton), but You Look Terrible more or less picks up where the band’s first record left off. Like And Nothing Did So What, You Look Terrible is a difficult, not-so-friendly collection of lengthy songs indebted to 90s indie rock chronicled by Touch & Go & Quarterstick Records (is it more difficult and less friendly than their debut? I don’t know; I think you reach a certain threshold with this music where the squares are sufficiently repelled regardless). Six Flags Guy’s resting state on this album is one of eerie slowcore and guitar-based post-rock; if you’re looking for respectable indie rock and cathartic post-hardcore moments, they’re both here, but you’re going to have to get to them Six Flags Guy’s way.
You Look Terrible begins with its back to us, hunched over equipment and avoiding even a hint of eye contact–at the very least, that’s how I imagine Six Flags Guy putting together “I’m All Out of Sorts Bro (Not a Goodbye)”, the album’s first track and a four-minute piece of sustained, droning organ and whispered vocals. The next few songs on You Look Terrible bring a familiarity of sorts–Krueger’s voice is still at a low mutter for the most part, but the guitars are back, and there are a few moments in the seven-minute “Everything I’ve Ever Found Useful I’ve Stolen” that genuinely smoke (that’s a rock and roll term, I think). With “My Brother My Killer” and “Ikea Way Gemini Place”, Six Flags Guy follow the tried-and-true method of “post-rock-slowcore song that wakes up from its slumber to deliver a crashing crescendo”, but they decide not to get to predictable by zagging towards the steady “The Children Yearn for the Mines” and “Emerald” (which, lol). You may not be surprised to learn that a band that prefers long song lengths made a long album (51 minutes, in the no-man’s land between one and two LPs known as the “CD zone”), and it all comes to a peak with the eleven-minute penultimate track, “Sleepy Hollow Elementary School”. The guitars rumble and the band lies in wait as they incorporate the likes of “Silverfuck” and Crazy Horse into their mad science. For a band that’s pretty obvious about their influences, Six Flags Guy seem to enjoy tweaking them just enough time and time again. (Bandcamp link)
Various – Splendid Hour: Dave J. Andrae and Associates (1997-2023)
Release date: May 1st Record label: Kaji-Pup Genre: 90s indie rock, lo-fi indie rock, experimental rock Formats: CD, digital Pull Track: Sound of the Rain (Alternate Mix)
We have a career-spanning retrospective compilation from an unknown (to me, at least), underground longtime indie rocker here for you today. How exciting! Dave J. Andrae is many things, including a film writer and director (he has a BFA in film from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, though he calls himself “semiretired” these days from the medium), a novelist (he put out a book called Rem’s Chance last year), and (most relevant to our interests here at Rosy Overdrive) a musician. Like I said, I wasn’t familiar with Andrae before hearing this compilation, but Splendid Hour: Dave J. Andrae and Associates (1997-2023) is enough to catch anyone up. It encompasses more than a quarter-century of various musical endeavors whittled down to twenty-five songs and sixty-six minutes, beginning in Andrae’s hometown of Milwaukee and ending in his current residence of southwest Florida, featuring both long-defunct bands and projects and Andrae’s still-active solo project Tired of Triangles. Andrae is the common link, of course, but these “associates” include other lead vocalists, writers, and all manner of musicians, certainly a key feature in these tracks’ ability to leap from 90s-style indie rock to “oddball novelty music”, “breezy funk”, and “abstract noise” (as Andrae himself puts it).
Splendid Hour is a lot to take in, but to me that’s part of its appeal. Not every song here is a lost underground classic, but there are plenty of moments on here that stand on their own as single triumphs–for example, Tired of Triangles’ unassuming, Yo La Tengo-ified cover of The Dils’ “Sound of the Rain” is a shining example of the blank-canvas brilliance of the indie rock of the 1990s. A lot of the songs on here are instrumental or pretty close to it, and Andrae shines in this context between off-the-cuff guitar brilliance like “Letraset To-Do List” and “Resolving the Calm”. On the other hand, a few selections from a project called “Astronaut Ice Cream Headache” veer into intentionally-obnoxious novelty fuckery, but I’m not kidding when I saw that “Dancing Cosmonauts” and “Let’s Be Carnies” help Splendid Hour feel like the archival deep-dive that it is (if Andrae spent a notable amount of time since the mid-90s making music like this, it should be represented here, after all). And then there’s everything in between–songs like “Matt Simmons” and “Underwater Cave Diving Stress”, both of which could be throwaways but there’s a weird brilliance to them, too. There’s too much on Splendid Hour for me to cover fully here (I haven’t even gotten to the psych-folk-tinged material that Andrae recorded with “Leila M.”, for instance), but that’s okay–much like Splendid Hour itself, this is just a relatively brief attempt to capture something larger and hypnotically inviting. (Bandcamp link)
Nac/Hut Report – Blue Afternoon
Release date: April 24th Record label: Enjoy Life Genre: Dream pop, ambient pop, lo-fi pop Formats: CD, digital Pull Track: Blinking
Nac/Hut Report are new to me, but the “Polish-Italian duo” (made up of two people known only to me as Jadwiga and Luca) have been around for quite a bit now–they have albums on their Bandcamp page dating all the way back to 2010. They’re currently based in Kraków, and their latest album, Blue Afternoon, appears to be their first for Warsaw’s Enjoy Life Records, who are putting the record out via CD. Nac/Hut Report traffic in the worlds of experimental but delicate pop music, and Blue Afternoon is a particularly delicate listen. According to Jadwiga, Nac/Hut Report wanted to make a “soundtrack to a sad, gloomy afternoon”, as well as something that they somewhat nebulously refer to as “dead music”. These ten songs are marked by crackling reminiscent of a “gramophone stylus eroding”, faded-sounding vocals, and distant orchestration and pianos–it’s all an attempt to evoke a look back into an era of music (both in terms of genre and in how we experience or “consume” it) that Nac/Hut Report view as now “dead”. However, there’s a line where the fuzz and distance stop being past-tense signifiers and start being deliberate choices in how to make music in the present day, and Blue Afternoon doesn’t sound completely dead (maybe undead?).
It’s hard to get a handle on Nac/Hut Report’s songwriting, as real as it is. There are quality dream pop melodies hidden beneath the gramophone sounds and sepia-toned instrumentation, but you need to pay close attention to these disintegrating tracks in order to tell where one ends and the other begins. Some of the songs on Blue Afternoon, like the opening duo of “Blinking” and “Always Watching”, let the pop cores show themselves a little more readily–other tracks, such as “Elements” and most of “Silver”, are basically noise pieces with a little bit of radio interference peeking through. Most of Blue Afternoon is somewhere in between, and it’ll take some time and tuning to see the beauty of “Screen Glow” and “Comet” and “Other Side” through the clouds. Both the difficulty in grabbing onto these moments in Blue Afternoon and the just-barely-enough hints beckoning at the listener to want to do so regardless are very intentional decisions on the parts of Jadwiga and Luca–more important than the music of Blue Afternoon being “dead” is that the experience of listening to it is still an alive and active one, and regardless of the big-picture societal questions about the role of music that led Nac/Hut Report to creating this record, it stands above all else as a roadmap to keeping this way of interacting with art alive. (Bandcamp link)
Peaceful Faces – Without a Single Fight
Release date: June 6th Record label: Glamour Gowns Genre: Indie pop, power pop, indie folk, chamber pop Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Freee
The Boston-originating, New York-based Tree Palmedo is a singer-songwriter, composer, and trumpet player for hire who’s been making music under a couple of different names for the better part of this past decade. Palmedo leads the instrumental ensemble Drinking Bird, but Peaceful Faces appears to be his “pop” project; Without a Single Fight is the third Peaceful Faces LP since Palmedo debuted it on-record with 2020’s Letters from Late Adolescence. I first heard Peaceful Faces via their 2023 sophomore album Sifting Through The Goo, Reaching For the Candlelight; I didn’t get around to writing about it, but I enjoyed its delicate, chamber-ish indie pop sound, and it was more than enough to get me to queue up the third Peaceful Faces album (and first for Glamour Gowns). Sifting Through the Goo… placed itself firmly on the “soft” side of indie pop music, so I was a bit surprised to press play on Without a Single Fight and immediately be greeted by the guitar distortion and bounding power pop tempo of opening track “Freee”. Not everything on Without a Single Fight is as much of a departure as this first statement, no, but there’s a concision to Peaceful Faces’ latest record that seems to be Palmedo’s driving force.
Co-produced by Dylan McKinstry, Nate Mendelsohn (Market), and Palmedo and featuring a bunch of outside instrumental help, Without a Single Fight nonetheless remains focused on fulfilling a singular vision of pop music across its brisk half-hour. The specific instrumentation and dressings of these songs vary quite a bit–they range from Sufjan Stevens/Elliott Smith-inspired folk-pop compositions in “Half a Secret” and “The Danger” to the full-on power pop of “Freee” and “Feel Around in My Heart” to the electric-based but comparably subdued “Doin’ It Wrong” to the romantic piano-accented “Union” and everywhere in between. The melodies delivered by Palmedo in his comforting, relaxed vocal style are as strong a binding force as anything else on Without a Single Fight–somebody has to hold all these rock, pop, and orchestral instrumentals together, and Palmedo seems up to the task. Without a Single Fight signs off with something called “She’s Getting Married”; from its Sgt. Pepper-evoking title to the tasteful piano that leads the majority of the song to a sudden, out-of-nowhere sweeping orchestral climax to a just-as-quickly-back-to-subtlety finish, we get the Without a Single Fight experience in miniature. (Bandcamp link)
Happy Juneteeth, everybody! Perhaps because of the holiday, it appears like this Friday (6/20) is a bit of a light week in terms of new music, but since there were enough upcoming releases I wanted to write about to make a full Pressing Concerns, we’re doing it anyway! We have an archival album from The Feelies, an EP from Whitney’s Playland, and new albums from Michael Robert Chadwick and Little Mazarn! If you missed Monday’s Pressing Concerns (featuring Hallelujah the Hills, Idiot Mambo, Drunken Prayer, and a compilation from Chapter Music) or Tuesday’s (featuring Emery/The Western Expanse, Nape Neck, W. Cullen Hart and Andrew Rieger, and Frizbee), check those out, too.
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.
The Feelies – Rewind
Release date: June 20th Record label: Bar/None Genre: Folk rock, post-punk, dad rock, classic rock, garage rock Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital Pull Track: I Wanna Sleep in Your Arms
Everybody shut up and pay attention: The Feelies are playing your favorite cool-dad rock classics. Well, I should say “played”, because Rewind is an archival compilation of cover songs that the legendary New Jersey post-punk/proto-indie rock group have recorded across their entire career. Of these nine songs, seven are from the band’s initial run from 1976 to 1992, and two of them from their “reunion” era in the 21st century (specifically the year 2016). But I do think “are playing” still makes sense when talking about these songs, as The Feelies are somewhat well-known for their affinity for playing cover songs live; indeed, judging by recent setlists, you’re likely to hear at least a few of these at a Feelies show in 2025. To me, the purpose of Rewind feels like cementing a key part of The Feelies’ whole deal that hadn’t really been properly documented (aside from their recently-released live album tribute to The Velvet Underground, which perhaps began setting this right on its own). Rewind may be a hodgepodge, but these recordings–forty-some years apart or not–have a unified feel to them. Veering away from the folky and pastoral side of the band, these nine recordings find The Feelies reveling in their love and understanding of electric, rollicking classic rock that’s just too simple and powerful to ever lose anything to time.
If you’re looking for “variety” or “obscurity”, Rewind may not be the covers album for you. There are two Beatles songs and two Neil Young songs, and the rest of the artists covered here are, in order: Patti Smith, Bob Dylan, The Doors, The Rolling Stones, and The Modern Lovers. The trick of Rewind is how the band take all these well-worn songs made by bands and artists with distinct auras and flatten them with their signature nervous-rocking steamroller into a single statement. The opening version of “Dancing Barefoot” is the biggest outlier simply because bassist Brenda Sauter sings lead vocals on it; otherwise, the band tune it to the key of the simple rock and roll rhythms and chords that they go on to hone for the rest of the album. Dylan’s “Seven Days” and The Doors’ “Take It As It Comes” are the newest recordings–if I don’t consider either a highlight of the album as a whole, that has more to do with the originals being my least favorites among their selections than with the band’s energy (which sounds no weaker here than it did decades previously). Including “Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey” from their classic debut album Crazy Rhythms feels like cheating, but I can’t argue that it doesn’t fit on here, particularly in the extra-frantic second half of the album also marked by a wild “Paint It Black” and an explosive “Sedan Delivery”. And then off The Feelies go, uncoupled from time in more ways than one. (Bandcamp link)
Whitney’s Playland – Long Rehearsal
Release date: June 20th Record label: Meritorio/Dandy Boy Genre: Jangle pop, power pop, psych pop Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Long Rehearsal
One of my favorite debuts of 2023 was Sunset Sea Breeze by Whitney’s Playland, a San Francisco-based indie pop group co-founded by George Tarlson and Inna Showalter and whose first statement delivered several records’ worth of lo-fi power pop hooks. Apparently, the quartet (rounded out by Evan Showalter and Paul DeMartini, who had joined by the time of Sunset Sea Breeze’s release but didn’t play on it) took a “brief hiatus” after the release of their first record, although a little over two years is hardly too long for a follow-up release (and, plus, Inna Showalter put out an album with her other band, Magic Fig, in the meantime). Admittedly, the second Whitney’s Playland record, an EP called Long Rehearsal, is pretty short–three songs in about ten minutes. Still, this gives the quartet plenty of time to revisit and reaffirm their ability to hit all the high points they did on their last album–jangly, bubblegum-flavored guitar pop, electric and fuzzy power pop, and rainy, dreary, dreamy indie pop all make appearances on Long Rehearsal. The quick break, the doubling of their membership–neither seems to have caused Whitney’s Playland to deviate from their established talents for even a moment.
Long Rehearsal opens with the title track, which comes in at under two minutes and spends every second of it offering up melodies in its jangly guitars and Inna Showalter’s vocals. It’s a high point for a band that’s already collected several of them, and it should be pretty hard to top. “Only Daughter” follows and holds its own against “Long Rehearsal”–neither it nor the song after it are as concisely, immediately brilliant as the opening track, but they’re not exactly trying to best “Long Rehearsal” at its own game. “Only Daughter”, for one, is the most electric song on the EP, opening with a nice, coiling guitar solo and the guitars continue giving off static (albeit in a more backgrounded form) as the track advances. The B-side of Long Rehearsal, meanwhile, is occupied by “Talk”, a five-minute song that veers into the wilderness of Whitney’s Playland’s sound. Don’t expect anything as far-out as the psychedelia of Magic Fig, exactly, but the melancholic, mid-tempo guitar-led dream pop is fairly far removed from the rest of the EP and classic “B-side” fodder that eventually floats away in a blissed-out finale. I do hope that the next Whitney’s Playland release gives us more than three new songs, yes, but Long Rehearsal is a strong collection regardless of size. (Bandcamp link)
Michael Robert Chadwick – Illusion of Touch
Release date: June 20th Record label: Anxiety Blanket Genre: Synthpop, sophisti-pop, jazz-pop, soft rock Formats: Cassette, digital Pull Track: Dirt Nap
Michael Robert Chadwick is a Los Angeles-based visual artist who’s made music videos and/or album artwork for Stuck, Amby Moho, and Sam Wilkes, among others, according to his website. He has also been “prolifically making music for almost 20 years”, although I had to do some more digging to find that–if this Discogs page is to be believed, he played in the bands Plum Professional and The Armchairs as well as appearing on the three most recent Weyes Blood albums (playing synths, which seem to be his instrument of choice). He also put out two jazzy, synth-y indie pop albums in 2019 called Tourist and Salad, which seem to be his only solo releases before now. Illusion of Touch is Chadwick’s first album for Anxiety Blanket Records (La Bonte, Jac Aranda, Daniel Brouns), and while it’s been six years since those aforementioned solo records, this new one isn’t so far off from what he was doing with them. Made “over several years in several different places”, Illusion of Touch is a more polished, teased-out version of what I must assume is the “Michael Robert Chadwick sound”–synth-led pop music that recalls a nice bite-sized, portable version of soft rock and sophisti-pop.
The icy synths that kick off opening track “Dirt Nap” eventually give way to bass grooves, jazzy saxophones, and smooth indie pop vocals, setting up a lot of the key ingredients that go into Illusion of Touch. The squirmy jazz-pop of “Longing for Scissors” and the minimal synth balladry of “Vans of Desire” find Illusion of Touch stretching itself towards different extremes, although songs like singles “A Song for the Cows” and “Pleasure Picture” always return to a centering of sharp pop hooks. The latter of those two songs features a vibrant chorus where Chadwick sings “I don’t subscribe to the theory of friendship / It’s only a guess”; Illusion of Touch is a “solo album” in more ways than one, very much coming off as the work of a single artist tinkering away on his own. Chadwick is an animated leader, though, and both his friendly, pleasing arrangements and his unadorned emoting as a vocalist prevent Illusion of Touch from coming off as too much of an “exercise”. Maybe it is an exercise, though, and making intricate yet breezy one-man-show pop music is how Michael Robert Chadwick stays in shape. Whichever need or desire got us to Illusion of Touch is a productive one. (Anxiety Blanket link)
Little Mazarn – Mustang Island
Release date: June 20th Record label: Dear Life Genre: Folk rock, psychedelia, chamber pop Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital Pull Track: Dark Pleasure of Endless Doing
Perhaps the platonic ideal of a Dear Life Records band, the Austin experimental folk group Little Mazarn first became known to me via their 2022 sophomore album, Texas River Song. They were a duo then, with Lindsey Verrill on vocals and banjo and Jeff Johnston on singing saw; I called them “somewhat spacey” at the time and enjoyed how they were able to conjure up a cosmic, Lone-Star-big sound with simple and slow ingredients. Little Mazarn have been busy in the three years since Texas River Song–there’s been an EP, a live album, and Verrill helped organize two benefit compilations (for Los Angeles and western North Carolina). Still, it’s been a minute since the last Little Mazarn LP, which Mustang Island now rectifies. The third Little Mazarn album is their first as a trio, with the Chicago-based Carolina Chauffe (of Hemlock) officially joining the band on harmonies on every song. Synths and flutes join the familiar sounds of banjos and singing saw on Mustang Island, but while there are a few busy moments of psychedelic pop music, the trio’s expanded sound still frequently finds its way to the big wide empty.
Warm harmonies and Casios welcome us into Mustang Island on opening track “Crystal Cave”; it’s a smoother version of Little Mazarn than the one I heard on their last album, but it’s still incredibly intimate. The slow, loping “New New San Antonio Rose” injects just a bit more traditionalism into the mix, but the fluttering, synth-led dream pop of “Dark Pleasure of Endless Doing” comes out of nowhere to completely rearrange the whole Little Mazarn sound in a couple of sweet, bright minutes. There’s nothing else quite like “Dark Pleasure of Endless Doing” on Mustang Island, but that hardly means the rest of the record doesn’t keep expanding–“Remember the Night Rainbow” is some more nice, strange banjo-led art folk, the title track is a flute-heavy psychedelic odyssey, “The Gate” takes synthpop to minimalist, ambient places, and so on. The last couple of songs on Mustang Island are two of the most “folk” moments on the record, but closing track “The Golden Hour” quietly bows out with only a cello to accompany Verrill. Making transportive music with just singing saw and banjo is an impressive achievement, yes, but so is being able to return once again to these inaccessible heights from a different path. (Bandcamp link)
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