Pressing Concerns: Colin Miller, The Tisburys, Jerry David DeCicca, Johnny Maraca & The Marockers

It’s Thursday! We have four exciting albums that are coming out tomorrow, April 25th, in this edition of Pressing Concerns: new LPs from Colin Miller, The Tisburys, Jerry David DeCicca, and Johnny Maraca & The Marockers. If you missed either of this week’s earlier posts (on Monday, we looked at Perennial, Dauber, Why Bother?, and Mythical Motors, and on Tuesday, we were dropping in on My Wife’s an Angel, Fluung, Shuyler Jansen, and Sunflecks), 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.

Colin Miller – Losin’

Release date: April 25th
Record label: Mtn Laurel Recording Co.
Genre: Folk rock, alt-country, singer-songwriter
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Cadillac

There’s a lovely, understated song on Wednesday’s 2021 breakout album Twin Plagues called “Gary’s”–it might be my favorite Wednesday song, if I’m being honest–in which we get a glimpse of the titular character parking a car, “taking out his teeth”, and smoking a cigarette while on an oxygen tank. I never thought too deeply about Gary, but he’s a central figure in Losin’, the latest album from Asheville, North Carolina singer-songwriter Colin Miller. The same year that Twin Plagues came out, Miller quietly released an EP called Hook that was my introduction to him–and a lot has happened since then. Both Wednesday and their now-partial member MJ Lenderman (who also released a couple of records in 2021 to relatively little fanfare) have both grown substantially in stature, with Miller serving as the drummer for Lenderman’s band The Wind. Miller put out a solo album called Haw Creek in 2023. Miller’s hometown and the surrounding region were ravaged by catastrophic flooding last year. And in 2022, Gary King, the former long-haul trucker and “father figure” to Miller (whose property Miller lived on, took care of, and made music on for many years), passed away. With help from Lenderman on guitar and drums as well as Wednesday members Xandy Chelmis (pedal steel) and Ethan Baechtold (bass, keys), Losin’ is Miller’s attempt to write about what was both the loss of an effective family member and a life-upending event.

As one might expect from a record made entirely by Wednesday and/or Lenderman band members (even the record’s co-producer, Alex Farrar of Drop of Sun Studios, has worked with both of them), Losin’ is solidly in the realm of folky country-rock music. Very little of Wednesday’s shoegaze-indebted sound is on this record, and even Lenderman’s solo records aren’t quite analogous–perhaps if Lenderman got even more insular and quieter after Ghost of Your Guitar Solo instead of leaning into the “rock” of country rock music, we’d have something like Losin’, a friendly, polished, but personable-above-all-else folk rock record. Miller gives us a lot of Gary throughout the record, offering up images of Pall Malls, Mustangs and Cadillacs, NASCAR on the TV, and burner phones. Miller is pretty open about himself and what he’s going through throughout Losin’, too: “I lost it at a Wendy’s,” he sings in “Hasbeen”, and “Excuse me for lookin’ like I lost my best friend,” in “Lost Again” (the emphasis on “friend” feels very intentional, as Miller expounds on it throughout “I Need a Friend” and shows us more in closing song “Thunder Road”). Losin’ is a genuinely comforting listen–as personal and direct as it is, Miller has seen fit to memorialize both King and an era of his life by leaning on friends and collaborators to make something built to reverberate well beyond them. (Bandcamp link)

The Tisburys – A Still Life Revisited

Release date: April 25th
Record label: Double Helix/SofaBurn
Genre: Power pop, Americana, heartland rock, college rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Forever

I first heard about The Tisburys via their third album, 2022’s Exile on Main Street; I called it a mix of “power pop, jangle pop, 90s radio-pop-rock, and [Philadelphia] heartland rock”, and while I liked it a fair amount when I wrote about it, it only grew on me throughout the rest of that year. The band are back a little under three years later with a new one called A Still Life Revisited, and the quintet (which basically began as a solo project from singer-songwriter Tyler Asay) consider it their “most collaborative effort to date”. The Tisburys (Asay, guitarist John Domenico, keyboardist Jason McGovern, bassist Ben Cardine, and drummer Dan Nazario) consciously sought to expand their sound beyond the power pop of their last album, name-dropping ambitious indie rock groups like Frightened Rabbit and The Hold Steady as their targets. This is a bold (and, for most bands in the same boat, would be an ill-advised) decision, but there was a Springsteenian largesse to Exile on Main Street, and A Still Life Revisited subsequently comes off as more of a continuous journey down a familiar road for them. It helps that Asay and crew still know their way around a nice, big guitar pop hook too, of course.

As scholars of classic rock and pop music, it’s not exactly surprising to me that The Tisburys identified the two biggest “hits” to release as the album’s first two singles–the lethal power pop direct strike of “Forever” is A Still Life Revisited’s most single effective pop moment, but the more traditionally jangly power pop indulgence of “The Anniversaries” is arguably the most comforting one. The rest of A Still Life Revisited is more than capable of hanging with these early tastes of it, but the album tracks (and later singles, as there were four of ‘em) are where The Tisburys hint at their aims beyond them. “A Still Life Without You” name-drops Spoon, but the twangy country-power-pop tune looks to a figure closer to home (Philadelphia pedal steel wizard Mike “Slo-mo” Brenner) to complete itself, while opening track “By a Landslide” punches up its waterfalling maximalist indie rock with horns (and “Water in the Clouds” subsequently retains a darkness by opting for keys instead). “Wildfire” is perhaps the most interesting addition to The Tisburys’ toolkit–bubbling synths, guitar heroics, and a danceable beat have all shown up in the band’s music before, but this specific combination of them is the band at their most “new wave Tom Petty” yet. The stop-start guitar journey of “Lost in Electricity” and the six-minute synth-rock finale of “Here Comes the Lonesome Dove” ensure that A Still Life Revisited ends on a mountaintop somewhere, but what came before it did indeed prepare us for the climb. (Bandcamp link)

Jerry David DeCicca – Cardiac Country

Release date: April 25th
Record label: Sophomore Lounge
Genre: Country, folk rock, singer-songwriter
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Frozen Hearts

I first heard of Jerry David DeCicca thanks to his 2023 solo album New Shadows, which at the time was the latest record in a long string of them from the Texas-via-Ohio musician. New Shadows was a sneakily uncategorizable album that owed as much to soft rock and sophisti-pop as folk and country music, but it reflected the work of a lifer still exploring new terrain. DeCicca seems like somebody who’ll keep making music until his heart gives out–an outcome that he came frighteningly close to in 2023, when a leaky aortic valve led to DeCicca receiving open heart surgery. Cardiac Country was (mostly) written and recorded before DeCicca’s diagnosis, but DeCicca clearly feels that his burgeoning heart problems influenced his writing, to the point of nodding to them in the album’s title. DeCicca and his players (including legendary pedal steel guitarist BJ Cole, who recorded his parts remotely from England) make a much more streamlined and even traditional-sounding country record compared to his last solo album–DeCicca himself may not have known what was tying these songs together until after the fact, but Cardiac Country sounds like a record that knows something is up, and glances towards some well-worn terrain to try and make sense of it.

DeCicca is on Sophomore Lounge now, and he begins his debut on the imprint with a folk-country song that reminds me of labelmates Styrofoam Winos and their various projects in “Long Distance Runner”. There’s a bit of “easy listening” on Cardiac Country between the gentle “Good Ghosts” and the smartly saccharine “Frozen Hearts”, brushing up against death and the heart by revisiting records from musicians who’ve since departed from this Earth and by trying to recenter the more productive parts of human nature in the former and latter, respectively. These sit alongside darker fare like “Knives”, “My Friend”, and “Dripping Man” (which is literally about crying all the time), and somewhere in between them is the six-minute album centerpiece “Where Does My Empathy Go”. It’s about, of all things, feeling conflicted about eating meat while loving animals, a question without an answer delivered with the plainspoken directness of the rest of Cardiac Country.  And speaking of “directness”, there’s nothing more direct than “Old Hat”, the final song on the album and the only one to be written and recorded after DeCicca found out what was ailing him. It’s a bleak solo recording, one man staring down his own mortality using the same tools he’s been using to do so in a much more abstract manner for decades. Thankfully it was only a brush with the inevitable this time, and DeCicca will get to put on that hat for a while longer. (Bandcamp link)

Johnny Maraca & The Marockers – Little Heart

Release date: April 25th
Record label: K/Perennial
Genre: Garage rock, punk rock, power pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: And These Tears

Who here likes rock and roll music? Well, Johnny Maraca & The Marockers sure do. Johnny Maraca (and the Marockers, seemingly) is Ian McDonnell, an Oakland punk figure who’s been in bands like False Figure and Big Rat over the years. McDonnell wrote, played, and recorded everything himself on the debut Johnny Maraca & The Marackers album, 2022’s Last Call for Lovin’ (according to KALX, at least), but McDonnell decided to get just a little help for the sophomore Marockers LP, Little Heart–Perennial Records labelhead Hayes Waring recorded and produced the album (and co-released it with K Records), and Violeta Terroba of Rata Negra sings some backing vocals. Still, Johnny Maraca & The Marockers remains mostly a one-man-band on Little Heart (there’s a photo of a quartet on K’s website, so maybe there is a real Marocker band these days). Little Heart is nothing less than a dozen pop songs drawn from the early days of rock and roll and interpreted by somebody shaped by first-wave punk and garage rock. It’s “power pop”, to be sure. It’s romantic. It’s music by somebody who maybe put in a lot of effort trying to look, sound, and be “cool”, but the minute that the tape started rolling, he said “fuck it” and laid it all out there with maximum earnestness.

There’s never a dull moment on Little Heart. Johnny Maraca’s tears are like rain upon his face in “And These Tears”; he wants to be a hot boy on the dancefloor with his hot boy friends in “Hot Boy”; he’s hopelessly in love with a Bad Girl in “Bad Girl”. Almost everything on Little Heart is under three minutes long–the longest track on the album, “Nobody Else”, is positively epic at three minutes and thirteen seconds (it’s about masturbation, of course). I briefly entertained not writing about this album because some of the lyrics are kind of dumb, but fuck that–it’s not an issue. In fact, it’s probably an asset–you’re never going to get moments like McDonnell howling “The only thing I’d never steal is your love, sweet baby” (“Never Steal Your Love”) or “I am the love police, girl / You’re above to get served” (“Sunflower Kisses”) over triumphant garage rock power pop unless the artist is completely, utterly uninhibited. “I’m gonna be honest, maybe share too much,” McDonnell admits in the aforementioned “Nobody Else”, right before he makes it clear what he’s actually singing about. Between the surging power chords, Terroba’s perfectly-placed backing vocals, and the swooning keyboard hook, I’m growing to like the sound of Johnny Maraca oversharing. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: My Wife’s an Angel, Fluung, Shuyler Jansen, Sunflecks

It’s another Pressing Concerns! This one has new albums from My Wife’s an Angel, Fluung, and Sunflecks, plus a “deluxe” reissue of an album from Shuyler Jansen. You’re bound to find something you enjoy in here, so take a look! And if you missed yesterday’s blog post (featuring Perennial, Dauber, Why Bother?, and Mythical Motors), check that out here.

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.

My Wife’s an Angel – Yeah, I Bet

Release date: April 18th
Record label: Knife Hits/GRIMGRIMGRIM/Broken Cycle
Genre: Noise rock, post-hardcore
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Not Me

I know Rosy Overdrive has a certain reputation for jangly power pop and the like, but I have to confess that I’ve been more drawn to stuff like this as of late. Stuff like a chaotic, piss-taking noise rock band called My Wife’s an Angel, I mean. They’re a quartet from Philadelphia, although my intelligence suggests that they may have roots in the expansive wasteland known as “the rest of Pennsylvania”. Vocalist G, guitarist Boone, bassist Fancy, and drummer Ivy released their first album as My Wife’s an Angel, Don’t Fall Asleep, back in 2023, and for their second album they’ve linked up with Philadelphia heavy label Knife Hits Records (Leopard Print Taser, Thousandaire, Eyecandy) and enlisted a new drummer named Jagwah. Yeah, I Bet is positively a mess–it’s ugly, heavy noise-punk that sometimes doesn’t sound like any of those descriptors at all. The closest thing I can think to compare My Wife’s an Angel is, like, a more millennial and Appalachian version of Killdozer (if you understand what I mean by this, you’re probably going to hell, by the way)–the Midwestern classic rock devil worship subbed out for a big, wide, empty hollering against rock music simply played wrong.

The first track on Yeah, I Bet is a six-minute sneering noise rock journey called “Not Me” (first lyrics: “I don’t care how tough you think you are / You sing songs all alone in your car / … / Not me!”)–and I hope you enjoyed it, because it’s probably the most accessible thing on the entire album. We are eventually treated to a Butthole Surfers-worthy trash fire called “Ol’ Man Shleep” and “Good Advice”, in which G moans and croaks out lines attempting to live up to the song’s title (“Run red lights / Commit crime”). A confused and surreal cover of Willie Nelson’s “Funny How Time Slips Away” follows, but shit really gets real in the album’s second half. If you’re stuck in a room with the people who could come up with things like “Funny How That Works” and “Above It All”, I imagine you’ve got one eye on any exit within reach at all times. By the time we get to “EJABFJ” (which stands for “Everything’s Just a Big Fuckin’ Joke”) you may be wondering if you’ve trapped yourself in the palms of a bunch of nihilists (or worse), but there are some hints in G’s rambling about Isaac Brock and The Office and various uncles that the simmering rage is coming from somewhere more understandable (“Motherfuckers can’t go to space / But there ain’t no homes”), and the metamorphosis that My Wife’s an Angel make into a righteous, violent, anti-police sledgehammer in “Hey Jimmy” is beautiful, in a way (Bet you’ve never heard a song with the line “Shoot yourself in the dick until you fucking die” described like that before). Makes sense, right? Yeah, I Bet. (Bandcamp link)

Fluung – Fluung

Release date: April 7th
Record label: Setterwind/Den Tapes
Genre: 90s indie rock, punk rock, fuzz rock
Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Starvin Heart

Seattle trio Fluung have been keeping Pacific Northwest indie rock loud, electric, and catchy since the mid-2010s. From 2017 to 2022, the band put out two albums and two EPs–their sophomore album, 2022’s The Vine, is the one that got me, balancing blistering guitars with clear-eyed melodies excellently. The band (founding vocalist/guitarist Donald Wymer and drummer Drew Davis, as well as bassist Joe Holcomb, who recently replaced Brad Blasini) remastered and reissued their first album, Satellite Weather, in 2023, and this year brings the third proper Fluung LP, a self-titled one this time. I did quite enjoy The Vine (“Decades” was probably one of my favorite songs of 2022), but Fluung is pretty clearly the band’s best work yet–an ambitious rock record that nearly doubles The Vine in length, the third Fluung album has enough time to spit out a handful of blissful, hook-laden lost 90s alt-rock classics and push further into feedback-heavy, exploratory, lumbering fuzz rock terrain, too. Like the region’s best rock bands–Built to Spill, Modest Mouse, and Silkworm a few decades ago, Sioux Falls and Milk Music and Mope Grooves more recently–Fluung is a record that’s about the journey as much as anything else, and the band make sure to leave us with a memorable and complete one.

Fluung sets off early on a distorted, cloudy morning–the first song is a four-minute collection of feedback and noise called “Tuning”, and, while “Puzzle Piece” is a “proper” song, it’s a dour one, the full might of the trio trained directly at staring at the ground. Just like that, though, Fluung are off into the cosmos with massive, fuzzed out pop rock: “Tear It Down” grabs us by the collar collectively, and while “Starvin Heart” is a little less directly forceful, the Dinosaur Jr.-inspired feet-sweeper-offer might actually be the more lethal of the early duo. “The Whistleblower” rivals these tracks in terms of catchiness, but it does so in a different way–it’s six minutes long and effectively the album’s centerpiece, merging an understated Archers of Loaf-style noise pop with PNW creepy psychedelia and even a punk rock attitude (it’s a masterpiece, clearly). Fluung were so excited about the massive guitar hook they discovered in “Riff 4” that they forgot to give the song a proper title, and the J. Mascis worship of “How Was It Out There?” is given a Dinosaur Jr.-evoking title (coincidence? I dunno, ask them). Fluung gets a little less friendly in the closing stretch but the energy is certainly still there in “Spirit Well (Joes Version)” and “Creeper”, and then it’s time to wrap it up with “Tuning Out” (reduced to ninety seconds on streaming services, but be sure to check out the full nine-minute version on Bandcamp). Fluung aren’t the first group to stumble onto something as fulfilling as this album, but it never gets old hearing a band figure it out like this. (Bandcamp link)

Shuyler Jansen – DIM=SUM (Deluxe)

Release date: April 4th
Record label: Pseudo Sound
Genre: Folk rock, country rock, post-rock, slowcore
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: The Stones Have All Been Turned

I spent a lot of time in church as a kid. I heard both kinds of music that you can typically expect to hear in a white American Protestant one–the organ-led hymns and the neutered-guitar-led “worship and praise/Contemporary Christian Music” songs. Even though I’ve always loved music, neither one of them really spoke to me. I guess what I’m saying is I would’ve been more interested in church music if it were devoted to spreading the gospel of Neil Young and Crazy Horse instead. This is where Shuyler Jansen and DIM=SUM come into play–true disciples of the Ditch Trilogy and the even more expansive, sprawling Crazy Horse-backed records that would come in the years and decades afterward. Jansen is based in Vancouver and has been making records of varying stripes since the 1990s–as of late, he’s been re-releasing some of his past work in “deluxe” format, like 2011’s Voice from the Lake, which was remastered and remixed last year. Next up is DIM=SUM, originally released in 2017 as the self-titled debut of a band led by Jansen and featuring some of his regular collaborators in bassist Chris Mason (Deep Dark Woods), drummer Mike Silverman (Kacy & Clayton), and acoustic guitarist/synth player Dave Carswell (Destroyer).

The original DIM=SUM is already an overwhelming beast of a double LP–seven songs in eighty minutes–and now there’s even more material in the form of demos and radio edits of some of the headier tracks. DIM=SUM as a whole is an expertly-curated journey, a reflective mix of long, simple rhythm section bedrock (I don’t know if the leisurely, steady drumbeat from Silverman or Mason’s always-pacing basslines are more impressive) with just enough ideas delivered in the form of guitar explorations by Jansen to keep these giant obelisks fresh-sounding. Mason’s backing vocals are another essential ingredient in the DIM=SUM cosmology–much higher-pitched and directly Neil-invoking, they come and go, seemingly encased in a “break in case of emotional emergency” glass whenever they’re absent. The shortest song on DIM=SUM is a nice, brief seven minutes, and the majority of these tracks are dragged out past the twelve-minute mark–this isn’t a record from which to select a couple of playlist highlights (though the radio edits might work), it’s something best taken in as a giant whole. Similarly, the lo-fi, acoustic demos have a haunted bedroom-folk charm to them (the prominent usage of synths rather than rock band instrumentation adds to this), but it’s even more impressive to me that Jansen’s band were able to use them as roadmaps to get to DIM=SUM. I hope you don’t mind the scenic route, though. (Bandcamp link)

Sunflecks – Fools Errand

Release date: March 28th
Record label: Bud Tapes
Genre: Folk rock, alt-country, singer-songwriter
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Sunburst

Forrest Meyer is a Bellingham, Washington-based musician who’s been active for a while now, playing guitar on the most recent Jack Habegger’s Celebrity Telethon album and releasing a few odds and ends on Bandcamp under the name Sunflecks. 2025 is the year that Meyer formally debuts Sunflecks to a wider audience, however–he gathered up a band of a bunch of Bellingham-based musicians, went over to Anacortes-based studio The Unknown, recorded an album with Nicholas Wilbur of New Issue, and then linked up with Portland, Oregon cassette label Bud Tapes to release the final product, entitled Fools Errand. Bud Tapes’ releases run the gamut from traditionalist folk recreations to lengthy ambient/drone passages and everything in between, so I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect from Fools Errand, but I quite enjoyed what Meyer, drummer Amanda Glover, keyboardist Aiden Fay, violinist Harlow Isham, pedal steel player Logan Day, and bassist Augie Ballew (offspring of The Presidents of the United States of America’s Chris Ballew, fun fact) put together here. Fools Errand is a warm and slow collection of full-band but subdued folk rock and country music, led by a gifted songwriter who reminds me of greats like Friendship’s Dan Wriggins, State Champion’s Ryan Davis, and Simon Joyner.

A patient and unhurried listen, Fools Errand is of fairly “reasonable” length for this kind of music (nine songs, thirty-seven minutes), but it’s hard to figure out just how expansive it is once you’re inside of it. Meyer is always the center of these songs, and he sets the pace by drawing out his words and letting them reverberate in the midst of deftly-played but rarely showy instrumentation from the rest of Sunflecks. Early tracks like “Sunburst”, “Proximity”, and “Facet” are fully-developed but hardly aggressive–Sunflecks set the tone immediately, inviting us to slow down and take in their world alongside them, assuming you’ve got the capacity for pursuing such rewards. The second half of Fools Errand continues Sunflecks’ delicate folk rock composition-building–there’s nothing flagging about stuff like “Take Space” and “What’s Left”, I’ll tell you that much. The acoustic “Toss a Coin”, falling smack-dab in the middle of Fools Errand, is the only really “stripped-down” moment on Fools Errand–there’s a little bit of piano accompanying Meyer in the chorus, but otherwise it’s just pleasant folk guitars and kindly rambling vocals. It fits with the rest of Fools Errand because it’s in the same vein of Sunflecks following the songs down to where they lead–we could get lost in here if we wanted to. I don’t think anything bad would happen to us. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Perennial, Dauber, Why Bother?, Mythical Motors

Welcome to the first Pressing Concerns of the week! New EPs from Perennial and Why Bother?, as well as new albums from Dauber and Mythical Motors, appear below. Three of these acts have appeared in Pressing Concerns before, and the other one is the debut from a project connected to some Rosy Overdrive-adjacent acts. 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.

Perennial – Perennial ‘65

Release date: April 4th
Record label: Ernest Jenning Record Co.
Genre: Art punk, garage rock, post-hardcore, experimental
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Perennial ‘65

I’ve already written about both of the Perennial albums that have come out during the lifespan of Rosy Overdrive, as well as their EP of reimagined versions of songs from their first album (the only one to come out before I started blogging). Do I really need to cover this brief, five-song stopgap release from New England’s favorite “modernist punk” trio? Yes, I think so. Perennial ‘65 comes hot on the trail of last year’s Art History, which I suppose was the trio’s “breakout album” (although to me they’ll always be huge rockstars, and to the general public they’ll–well, I haven’t heard them on my local alt-rock station yet). Perennial ‘65 (named as a nod to the mid-career Beatles ‘65 compilation) gives the trio a chance to try some things that they perhaps didn’t have time for in the tight, twenty-one minute Art History while still sounding very much like the Perennial we’ve all come to know and love. We get one brand-new original Perennial rock and roll song, a cover of The Kinks’ “All Day and All of the Night”, two remixes from Cody Votolato and Chris Walla, and a track that continues the band’s exploration into experimental noise and electronic terrain. It also apparently marks the debut of the band’s new drummer, Ceej Dioguardi, who joins founding members Chad Jewett (guitar/vocals) and Chelsey Hahn (electric organ/vocals) (I had listed Dioguardi as being on Art History, but this presumably means that Perennial recorded their last album with former drummer Wil Mulhern, so a belated correction is in order there).

The opening title track is the “hit”–it’s as good as anything else the band have done, the now-classic combination of 60s garage rock/pop and furious post-hardcore dance punk hitting no less strongly than on their proper albums. “All Day and All of the Night” is perhaps an obvious choice for Perennial to cover, and it does indeed sound like Perennial covering The Kinks, but what’s most remarkable to me is that it actually doesn’t sound like a “Perennial song”. It’s a great garage rock recording, don’t get me wrong, but it just goes to show how unique and hard-to-replicate the band’s original material sounds. The rest of the EP doesn’t quite “rock” in the same way, but don’t tune out just yet–the remixes (both of songs from Art History) take Perennial in opposite directions, with Votolato (The Blood Brothers) turning “Tiger Technique” into a slick, slippery, but still slightly dangerous dance track, while Walla (Death Cab for Cutie) stretches out and slows down “Up-Tight”, keying in on the psychedelic and even dub elements of Perennial’s sound. “C Is for Cubism” continues an experimental series begun last year with “A Is for Abstract” and “B Is for Brutalism”–like those tracks, it’s also a relatively brief snippet, but it’s also the busiest one of these songs yet, indicating a real path here beyond interstitial material for Perennial to pursue should they feel inclined. Not that being constrained has ever been a real problem for Perennial, of course. (Bandcamp link)

Dauber – Falling Down

Release date: April 4th
Record label: Recess/Dromedary/State Champion
Genre: Garage rock, power pop, punk
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Falling Down

The beloved underground rock trio Screaming Females sadly broke up in 2023–and while they didn’t point to a single reason as to why they hung it up, the members’ various other projects probably helped contribute to the decision. Former frontperson Marissa Paternoster has stayed busy with her project Noun, and now former bassist Mike Abbate’s band Dauber has released their debut LP, Falling Down. The trio didn’t exactly come out of nowhere–they put out a couple of demos over a year ago, and all three of them (Abbate on guitar and vocals, drummer Jenna Fairey, and bassist Quinn Murphy) also play together in The Straps and possibly Abbate’s quasi-solo project KMES (Fairey for sure drummed on their album, at least). While Paternoster’s recent singles with Noun have explored the heavier and more classic rock-indebted side of Screaming Females’ music, Dauber chart a different path on Falling Down. Recorded with legendary Cincinnati producer John Hoffman, Dauber embrace the more off-the-cuff, looser side of Screaming Females, ripping through a baker’s dozen tracks that triangulate melodic punk, garage rock, and power pop like Hoffman’s own band Vacation, Midwest punk lifers ADD/C, or their new labelmates Night Court.

Descriptors like “no-frills” and “barebones” come to mind while listening to Falling Down, which does its business in under a half hour and features very little in terms of contributions outside of its power trio setup (the entirety of which is “additional synth and vocals” from Rebecca Borrer, who’s previously played with Fairey in something called “Chicken Run the Musical”). While Dauber claim Hudson, New York as their home, some of Hoffman’s Ohio charm must’ve rubbed off on the three of them when recording Falling Down, as there’s a real “hammering out massive pop songs in a Midwestern basement with garage rock as the medium” vibe throughout the record. Dauber renew their punk credentials with the self-explanatory “No Use for a Pig”, a song that’s as righteous as it is fun and catchy as hell–and “fun and catchy as hell” is the theme of Falling Down that wins out over and over again. Early highlights “Falling Down” and “Metal Rectangle” are huge balls of melodic punk-pop energy, and “Screaming at Orion” takes the tempo down just a little bit to nail a fuzzy college rock/power pop excursion. Maybe there are a little more obvious hits in the record’s first half, but it’s not entirely frontloaded–in particular, the closing trio of stop-start garage rock banger “Just Wanna”, slacker rock puncher “Sweet Tooth”, and fuzz-pop-punk finale “Memory Lane” are as good as anything else on the album. Dauber have come running right out of the gate–as they should. (Bandcamp link)

Why Bother? – You Are Part of the Experiment

Release date: April 18th
Record label: Feel It
Genre: Garage punk, garage rock, horror punk, art punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: I Got Your Number

New music from Why Bother?? That’s always welcome. Mason City, Iowa’s premiere basement-garage-horror-punk-rockers have been regularly dropping solid collections of their stuff since 2021, but last October’s Hey, At Least You’re Not Me was a particularly strong one, and the quartet’s hot streak has continued with You Are Part of the Experiment. Terry (vocals/synths), Speck (guitar/vocals), Pamela (bass), and Paul (drums) sound like they’re auditioning for the current political administration’s Department of Health and Human Services with this EP’s description (“Why are young and old people getting sicker and weaker in the mind and body every year? What if we have all been lied to by governments, religious leaders, science and industry about our biology and the history of human kind?”), but I did say they were horror-inspired, and You Are Part of the Experiment is a dark, troubling trip into underground noise rock, art punk, and fuzzed-out rock and roll that seemingly allows Why Bother? to get even weirder and unhinged than their “proper” (if anything about this band can be called that) records. These five songs are all pretty distinct from each other, but Why Bother? have stitched them together with the skill of history’s most unethical surgeons nonetheless.

Let’s start with “Listen”, a track that begins with a commercial for corn flakes before launching into a classically Why Bother?-type garage rock ripper. It’s great! And it’s the second-catchiest moment on the EP, even though the dietary diatribe at the heart of the song is hardly pop music fodder. The first-most catchiest thing on You Are Part of the Experiment is the record’s biggest outlier, an exuberant and surprisingly faithful cover of Cock Sparrer’s “I Got Your Number” that proves that Why Bother?’s basement scuzz translates very well into power pop and first-wave punk rock hooks. The rest of the EP is a real freak show, though–“Inside the Medium” starts out recognizable enough, a Crampsian crawling thing that quickly folds in on itself and mutates into a cacophony of noise. “Speck’s Lament” does rock, but the instrumental does so in a heavy, explosive manner, combining lumbering hard rock riffs with a few simpler post-punk moments in between. And then there’s the closing song, “The Older Witness”, a true departure from the world of “rock music” for all of its three minutes except for a couple of seconds in the middle where (accidentally, it feels like) the band bleeds into the post-industrial sound collage. I suspect that the experiment isn’t yet over and that I’m still a part of it, although I’ve enjoyed taking part in Why Bother?’s clinical trial. (Bandcamp link)

Mythical Motors – Travelogues and Movie Stills

Release date: April 18th
Record label: Repeating Cloud
Genre: Lo-fi power pop
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: The Luck of Saints

It’s 2021, and I’m writing about the new Mythical Motors record. It’s 2022, and I’m writing about the new Mythical Motors record. It’s 2024, and I’m writing about the first Mythical Motors album of the year, and then the second one. As long as Chattanooga, Tennessee’s Matt Addison keeps making rock-solid, unimpeachable one-man lo-fi power pop and putting it out either on his own or via any record label that’ll have him, then I’ll keep writing about them. Travelogues and Movie Stills is the first Mythical Motors album of this year, and it reunites Addison with RO favorite Repeating Cloud Records, who put out last year’s Upside Down World (arguably the best Mythical Motors record of the last couple of years). Addison is unflaggingly devoted to Robert Pollard/Tobin Sprout-inspired guitar pop that’s surreal in its lyrics and cotton candy in its execution, and all his records have the same surface-level sound. Some of them are more electric, some a little more saccharine, some weirder, but it’s all coming from the same wellspring. Travelogues and Movie Stills feels a little more stripped-down–sometimes that means “more rocking”, but even the quieter moments are more streamlined on this LP.

Travelogues and Movie Stills skates through fifteen tracks in under half an hour–certainly well within Addison’s range, but it is pared down compared to his previous album’s twenty songs and thirty-seven minutes. “The Red Bank Balloon Race” is an instant classic Addison composition, a triumphant power pop ride much like the niche sport its title references–and one that’s over in a mere forty-five seconds. The mid-tempo, jangly “Finer Thrills” and the acoustic “Wild Souls Companion” showcase what I mean by stripped-down–neither of them are “bangers”, but both of them do exactly what they set out to do with virtually no frills. If you want upbeat power pop anthems, though, “The Luck of Saints”, “On New Wings”, and “The Chasing Fairground” will have you covered, but the songs in between them–like the jangly duo of “This Proud Moment” and “Hamilton’s Eyes”, both pulling their tricks off with different tempos–are more than just bridges between them. “Anne Eternally”, the final track on Travelogues and Movie Stills, is perhaps the record’s most “epic” track–one of the few moments where Addison gets a bit more exploratory structure-wise, the song stops and starts a bit in between the declaration in its title. After the prog-folk midsection detour, though, Addison finishes things off by returning to what this album does best. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Lunchbox, The Convenience, Gentle Leader XIV, Avery Friedman

Welcome to the Thursday Pressing Concerns, featuring four records that shall be released tomorrow, April 18th. We’ve got a deluxe reissue of Lunchbox‘s “lost” album Evolver as well as brand-new albums from The Convenience, Gentle Leader XIV, and Avery Friedman below. If you missed Monday’s Pressing Concerns (featuring B. Hamilton, Truth or Consequences New Mexico, Rhymies, and Gamma Ray) or Tuesday’s (featuring Léna Bartels & Nico Hedley, Impulsive Hearts, Entres Vouz, and hairpin), 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.

Lunchbox – Evolver (Reissue)

Release date: April 18th
Record label: Slumberland
Genre: Indie pop, psychedelic pop, art rock, power pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Satellite

If your first experience with the band Lunchbox was last year’s bright, fresh-sounding indie pop collection Pop and Circumstance, it’d be understandable if you surmised that the Oakland group was part of the current wave of new Bay Area guitar pop groups. Closer inspection to that LP reveals a time-honed skill, however, and indeed the band’s founding duo of Donna McKean and Tim Brown have been making music together for over three decades. Evolver came near the end of the band’s initial run–after putting out music fairly regularly in the second half of the 1990s, Evolver and the mini-album Summer’s Over (both initially released in 2002) were the group’s last releases before a silence of over a decade. Evolver, inspired by Brown’s time in Berlin a few years earlier, general dissatisfaction with the uniformity of the then-current Bay Area indie pop scene, and the technology found in the basement studio in which they were living, was something of Lunchbox’s swan song, a difficult-to-replicate statement that stood as the band’s final one until they were ready to re-emerge years later. Referred to by the band as a “lost album”, their current label Slumberland has not only made Evolver available again, but they’ve also “raided the band’s vaults” to add three bonus tracks to all editions of the album, as well as a vinyl-only fourth side of “beats, loops, interludes and puzzling aural ephemera” on the double LP version.

There’s a certain reverence for Lunchbox from modern pop bands like Perennial, and listening to Evolver makes it all the more clear that they’ve had an impact in a way that goes beyond surface-level measurements of their popularity. If you’ve only heard Pop and Circumstance, there are moments on Evolver that are genuinely shocking, but not in an unfamiliar way–I can think of plenty of newer bands, from Dummy to Outer World to Tomato Flower, that are tapping into this unique mix of 60s pop music and uninhibited experimental electronic music. Elephant 6 and Stereolab are some contemporaries that come to mind, although they’re so wide-ranging that they’re not particularly useful descriptors of this album on their own–the bright, trumpet-laden opening title track is very Apples in Stereo, the gliding “Letter from Overend” is the sort of bossa nova-flecked indie rock that reminds me of Stereolab or Yo La Tengo, and the hissing lo-fi guitar pop of “Temperature Is a Constant” and “Satellite” capture a Guided by Voices kind of thing. Aside from the fourth side of the physical 2LP, Evolver is still almost entirely a pop album, although it’s not really one for indie pop purists–sticking the six-minute backmasked psychedelic trip of “Particle Wave” second in the running order will see to that, and everything from the electronic touches of “Tone Poem” to the ambient instrumental choices of “.09”, “.12”, and “Sleeping Is Not Dreaming” (a post-new-wave epic in its own right) back this up. The strong pop statements and the subversions are both incredibly inspired, not sounding like polar opposites but as different stops on the Evolver road. (Bandcamp link)

The Convenience – Like Cartoon Vampires

Release date: April 18th
Record label: Winspear
Genre: Post-punk, art rock, art punk, psychedelic pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Dub Vultures

Few people know this, but you can actually make post-punk in the year 2025 without trying to be as anxious as Kele Okereke or as spiteful as Mark E. Smith. You can actually sound cool while doing it! This is the less-traveled path–the Spoon path, more recently the Cola path, and now we can add the New Orleans duo The Convenience to this list, too. Nick Corson and Duncan Troast have been The Convenience for a while now–their first EP came out back in 2018, and they put out their debut album, the 80s-inspired synthpop/art pop collection Accelerator, in 2021. Like Cartoon Vampires, the second Convenience LP, is a pretty big departure–the duo have spent the last few years playing in indie pop group Video Age, and perhaps they no longer need their “main” band to be an outlet for their lighter side, too. Like Cartoon Vampires is a headfirst dive into the world of “art rock”–snappy rhythms, splattered guitars, and strange psychedelic detours characterize the album. Like Cartoon Vampires is grey in comparison to Troast and Corson’s other recent output, but for a post-punk album it’s bright, shiny, and colorful. The Convenience consider Like Cartoon Vampires a “return to their roots”, an album reflecting the music that Corson and Troast initially bonded over, but it sounds to me like they’ve been able to take parts of Accelerator and Video Age (at the very least, a certain attitude) and apply it here, too.

“I Got Exactly What I Wanted” is a bold opening track–The Convenience decided to go for “chugging” and “moody” in atmosphere, as if the shift to feedback-aided post-punk wasn’t a clear enough indication of where Like Cartoon Vampires is headed. The Convenience deliver it with an ice-cold precision, though, and when they let some more light poke through in the garage rock-indebted “Target Offer” and the clattering, groovy art punk of “Dub Vultures”, it’s a clean a transition as possible (these songs remind me of another great Southern post-punk band, Balkans). There are moments on Like Cartoon Vampires that sound like a soft rock-conscious band wrote them, although The Convenience largely restrict these to the shorter songs and interludes like “Opportunity” and “Rats”. For the most part, though, The Convenience just want to rock–and they give us track after track of it, from the underground speed-racing “That’s Why I Never Became a Dancer” to the rubber-band-jangle-punk of “2022” (fans of NE-HI and Dehd, take note) to the rockabilly rave-up of “Western Pepsi Cola Town” (alright, so there’s one song that sounds like The Fall on here). The Convenience wrap it all up neatly with a ten-minute noise/drone-rock track called “Fake the Feeling”, beginning as a slightly warped post-punk song before letting the feedback overtake everything. What’s more fun than that? (Bandcamp link)

Gentle Leader XIV – Joke in the Shadow

Release date: April 18th
Record label: Feel It
Genre: Post-punk, art rock, industrial, dream pop, synthpunk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Pig Dream

The latest signee to the vaunted garage rock label Feel It Records is a band that’s new to me, but one whose members have been at it for a while now. Maria Jenkins (vocals/synth), Jeffrey Tucholski (guitar), and Matt Hallaran (vocals/bass/synth) split their time between Cincinnati and Cleveland now, but they originated in Chicago in the early 2010s, playing in bands like Hollows, Running, and Glass Traps. Gentle Leader XIV’s first album, Channels (featuring original bass player Lisa McDuffie) came out in 2018 on Windy City imprint Moniker Records (Dan Melchior, ONO, The Hecks), and they hadn’t released anything in the seven years since, so you’d be forgiven if you thought Gentle Leader XIV had petered out at some point, but they’re back in a new state with a new, Ohio-based label to put out a sophomore album entitled Joke in the Shadow. A post-punk record with prominent synthesizer, Joke in the Shadow doesn’t really fall under the purview of garage-y, Feel It-core “synthpunk”, nor is it polished new wave-y synthpop–it’s an interesting, difficult-to-grasp rock record made by a group of musicians who’ve probably heard it all and need to push things a little further to be truly excited about their craft.

The ten songs of Joke in the Shadow stretch past the forty minute mark, and each one takes exactly as much time as it needs to build the world that Gentle Leader XIV want it to house. Opening track “Pig Dream” is a beautiful but slow-moving ballad, a showcase for Jenkins’ vocals even as it feels like an unlikely choice to open an album like this one. Things get a bit busier with “Fawning” and “Serve the End”–still somewhat difficult, these statues are shaped by synthpop, new wave, industrial, and gothic rock music. The six-minute centerpiece “The Door” trudges along across a minimal synth beat and drum machines, a pop song that hardly feels like pop at all, and the second half of Joke in the Shadow features plenty of songs matching this description as well (like the minimal, floating dreamy synthpop of the title track, or the icy electronica of “Reverser”). The two final songs on Joke in the Shadow are both overloaded in their own way–“Bomb Pop” rides a marching drum machine beat and squealing guitars into oblivion, while “Consequences” dribbles its own mechanical percussion into a finale that becomes a wall of distorted noise. Joke in the Shadow isn’t going to be for everyone, sure, but it’s for Gentle Leader XIV and the people who think like them. (Bandcamp link)

Avery Friedman – New Thing

Release date: April 18th
Record label: Audio Antihero
Genre: Singer-songwriter, folk rock, slowcore, emo-y indie rock
Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Photo Booth

We’ve got some more folky indie rock from Brooklyn on our hands! I get records that match this description emailed to me every day, so you can rest assured that I wouldn’t be writing about this one if it wasn’t a clear standout from that pack. New Thing, the debut album from Brooklyn singer-songwriter Avery Friedman, is indeed a strong and promising collection of music that’s a little emo, a little folky, and a little “arty” from someone who’s openly calling acts like Big Thief and Squirrel Flower influences and who’s played shows with the likes of Dead Gowns and h. pruz. I think that New Thing works so well because of how direct and electric it sounds–music like this often falls into the realm of “bedroom folk”, but Friedman and her collaborators give it a strong, confident, full band delivery. These collaborators–James Chrisman of Sister. and Ciao Malz on guitar and engineering, Felix Walworth of the sorely-missed Told Slant on drums, Ryan Cox on bass–deserve credit for how this album ended up, but, importantly, Friedman’s singing and playing at the center of it all are forceful enough not to get buried beneath them.

New Thing isn’t full-on “slowcore” and it’s certainly not “post-rock”, but fans of that kind of music will appreciate Friedman’s patient take on indie rock here. At eight tracks and under a half hour in length, New Thing doesn’t overstay its welcome, but in its brief time with us it stretches itself out and explores the edges a bit. Opening track “Into” is two minutes of slow-moving electric guitar and mumbled vocals, bleeding seamlessly into the deliberate, emo-y rock of the title track. “Flowers Fell” is subdued but highly charged between the lines, a quality shared by much of New Thing, particularly the slow-building “Finger Painting” and the quiet distortion of “Somewhere to Go”. Single “Photo Booth” is a surprise, incorporating synths and coming off a bit more openly “pop” than the rest of the record (although Friedman does quietly seethe and pine in the vocals in a way that connects it to the more…elemental rest of the album). New Thing starts to fade with “Biking Standing” and continues into the acoustic-led closing track “Nervous”–Friedman finally lets some air out after winding through the majority of the album, breathing a little more after turning down the tension from “suffocating” to merely “ambient”. There’s still a lot going on in these final two songs, to be clear–they’ll be there for us once we’ve gotten a handle on what came before them. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Léna Bartels & Nico Hedley, Impulsive Hearts, Entrez Vous, hairpin

It’s the second Pressing Concerns of the week, featuring a delightfully wide-ranging lineup! We’ve got a new LP from Entrez Vous, a split/collaborative EP between Léna Bartels and Nico Hedley, a remastered version of Impulsive Hearts‘ debut album, and an EP from hairpin. If you missed yesterday’s blog post, featuring B. Hamilton, Truth or Consequences New Mexico, Rhymies, and Gamma Ray, check it out here.

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.

Léna Bartels & Nico Hedley – It’s Gonna Be a Wonderful New Year

Release date: February 28th
Record label: Rock for Sale
Genre: Experimental folk, lo-fi folk, singer-songwriter
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: New Year Song

Nico Hedley has been hovering around the periphery of Rosy Overdrive for a while now. He’s involved with the “artist-run collective/label” Whatever’s Clever (Flat Mary Road, Dave Scanlon, Keen Dreams) and, either as a producer or instrumentalist, has contributed to albums from Ben Seretan, The Bird Calls, and Charlie Kaplan (as well as playing with many more acts that have appeared on this blog before at some point). Despite all this, I’d yet to write about Hedley’s solo work in Pressing Concerns until now–well, sort of. It’s Gonna Be a Wonderful New Year is a split/collaborative EP between Hedley and another New York-based singer-songwriter, Léna Bartels, who may not have quite as many Rosy Overdrive-adjacent credits as Hedley but has still been busy in her own right between guesting on Izzy Oram Brown’s latest record, playing shows with acts like Will Stratton, Trace Mountains, and Field Guides, and releasing a solo album. Hedley gets two songs on It’s Gonna Be a Wonderful New Year, Bartels gets another two, and they take on the final song on the EP together. As one might expect from Hedley’s associates, the EP is more or less “folk” music, shaded by both delicate, piano-heavy pop music and an experimental streak–the two co-leaders have different takes on this kind of music, but they’re operating in similar areas and are able to share space quite effortlessly. 

Bartel’s songs are a bit more outwardly “intimate” than the rest of It’s Gonna Be a Wonderful New Year–the biography for the record, written by Office Culture’s Winston Cook-Wilson, references early Cat Power, and I think this is an accurate comparison. “January Is the Loneliest Month” is a bedroom folk song with a bit of woodwind accompaniment and “Nothing Can Stop You” is an uncertain but quite capable piano ballad, but both kind of feel like a peek into somebody working on their art alone. Hedley’s “New Year Song” is, instrumentally speaking, even simpler than either of Bartel’s songs, but it has a bright, acoustic friendliness that makes it the warmest and most intentional-feeling thing on the EP. Most of the experimentation on It’s Gonna Be a Wonderful New Year is bundled up in “Equations of Motion”, a droning post-rock track from Hedley aided by the only outside contributor on the EP, Carmen Quill on double bass. The closing title track does float off into ambient nothingness, but that’s after five minutes of a very charming lo-fi drum machine-led pop song song by the both of them together. “Don’t be afraid of the future when / What we’re doing doesn’t seem to be working out,” sing Hedley and Bartels as one–while the lyrics to “It’s Gonna Be a Wonderful New Year” aren’t as rosy as the music suggests, the forward glance of the title (and final) line sounds like a mantra with legs.  (Bandcamp link)

Impulsive Hearts – Sorry in the Summer (Remastered)

Release date: March 28th
Record label: Cavity Search
Genre: Power pop, dream pop, fuzz rock, indie pop
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Sve Yrself

Chicago indie rock quartet Impulsive Hearts have been around for a decade now, although they’ve largely flown under the radar–since 2014, they’ve released three albums (averaging about one every four years) and a handful of EPs, most recently linking up with Portland, Oregon label Cavity Search Records for their third album, last year’s Fit 4 the Apocalypse. Cavity Search is also helping out the band (led by singer-songwriter Danielle Sines and also featuring Max Cohen, Rachael Farinella, and Adele Nicholas) with their latest release, a remastered version of their 2016 debut album, Sorry in the Summer. Over the past ten years, the Windy City has seen Beach Bunny blow up to unthinkable levels, Ratboys and Dehd become reliable critical darlings, and Friko recently ascend from the underground circuit to notoriety. This shined-up revisitation of older material from a lesser-known Chicago artist seems to ask the question: why not Impulsive Hearts? Sorry in the Summer is certainly compelling enough in 2025–nine years later, it comes off as the missing link between the early 2010s buzzy, fuzzy indie-surf-pop wave and the earnest, “confessional/bedroom pop” era of indie rock that would dominate the latter half of the decade. Even more importantly, though, the songs are there–Impulsive Hearts don’t beat you over the head with them, but this is an excellent pop record upon a closer look.

Sines and her backing band are probably too Midwestern to make a straight-ahead surf-rock-and-roll record–it seems like Chicago bands always are. Sines’ vocals are frequently buried in this remastered version of Sorry in the Summer, but they don’t fade into the background so much as take their place as an equal partner with the fuzzy guitar-led instrumentation. It’s actually quite impressive how big Impulsive Hearts are able to make themselves sound on “I Wannabe Gone” and “MDB”, both of which are maximal pop songs with what sounds like everything from horns to woodwinds mixed into the walls of sound (and despite this, the bass guitar–of all the possibilities–is the most prominent instrument a fair amount of the time). I know I already mentioned Friko, but Sorry in the Summer really does have this sort of “guitar pop via controlled-intensity” attitude that reminds me of the Friko album from last year; “Sve Yrself” might start off with Beach Boys-esque “woo-ooh”ing, but it’s way too desperate to see the pastiche through without going off the deep end. As Impulsive Hearts move into the second half of Sorry in the Summer, some of the obvious hooks fade (some of them; “Wasp” and “DWM” are still on this side of the record, mind you) but the intensity remains, right up to the five-minute frantic dream pop finale of “YKILY”. One last subtle epic for anyone who’s still hanging with Impulsive Hearts. (Bandcamp link)

Entrez Vous – Antenna Legs Hear Everything

Release date: March 21st
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Power pop, garage rock, indie pop
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Too Vague

Kelly Reidy is a physics professor, podcast host, and singer-songwriter currently based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Clark Blomquist is a Tobacco State musical gun-for-hire, having lent his talents to everyone from Spider Bags to the Dan Melcior Band to The Kingsbury Manx over the years. Together, they are Entrez Vous, a guitar pop duo who debuted with a self-titled album in 2023. The collaboration has remained fruitful, as Entrez Vous are back a little under two years later with Antenna Legs Hear Everything, fourteen tracks of garage rock-mussed-up power pop (or, if you prefer, garage rock with power pop hidden in the center) in twenty-seven minutes. Reidy sings and plays guitar, Blomquist handles the other instrumentation, and they’re both credited as writing these songs–like I said, this is a strong partnership already, as Reidy is more than capable of stepping into the garage-y underground indie rock world that Blomquist has been inhabiting for two decades and helming an entire collection of this material. Antenna Legs Hear Everything kind of reminds me of Shredded Sun, another newish band from longtime rockers who put garage rock, weird psych pop, and power pop in a blender to make something equally confusing and friendly (but always exciting).

Most of the songs on Antenna Legs Hear Everything are quite short, and it’s a credit to Entrez Vous that they rarely feel this way since there’s so much going on in each of them. That’s Blomquist’s touch, I suppose, but Reidy is just as impressive in how she cuts through the (occasionally) noisy bluster and keeps these songs’ eyes on the pop prizes. The kind-of-fuzzy opening “Too Vague” is just a little psychedelic, just a little Southern, just a little Elephant 6, and much more than just a little compelling–all in under two minutes. A lot of the most immediate songs on Antenna Legs Hear Everything are right up front, like the exuberant power pop of “Dream City, 1963”, the alt-country shuffle of “Troublesome Love”, and the mid-tempo slacker pop of “I Had This Vision”. There’s still a lot of fun to be had later on in the album, though–the post-punk/garage rock sprint of “Palm Springs”, the glam-jangle-stomp of “Art of Canova”, and the muddled noir-pop of “Lbs. of Roses” are under ninety seconds apiece and together make one of the most enjoyable stretches of the entire record. Buried among the rubble that Entrez Vous knock down is stuff like the waltzing ballad “Trap Door”, the gothic, synth-touched “Silky”, and the psychedelic folk closing track “Get Out of the Sauna”. It’s probably unnecessary for them to put so much into these songs, but it’s all very generous, too–everybody say “thank you, Entrez Vous”. (Bandcamp link)

hairpin – Modern Day Living

Release date: April 3rd
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Punk rock, power pop, pop punk, fuzz rock, post-punk
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Okay Thru There

Hairpin are a band from the South Coast of England, started by frontperson Adam Edwards and eventually growing to a four-piece encompassing Perry Sears, Sam Marsh and Callan Milward. The first hairpin release is a five-song EP called Modern Day Living that offers the first glimpse of what the band mean when they call their music “post-hardcore through a power pop lens”; as it turns out, it means loud, noisy, and catchy rock and roll music for the most part. Modern Day Living (which was recorded at Community Noise Recording Co. and features guest musicians Jack Kenny on drums and Roberto Cappellina on backing vocals) has moments that feel in line with the American-centered wave of “hardcore guys making power pop” like Militarie Gun and Public Opinion, although there’s also a British garage-y punk side to it that recalls both the Mclusky expanded universe and the ever-present threat of the Kingdom’s “post-punk revival”. Hairpin sound great here, their instrumentals dynamic and with plenty of low-end, and Edwards’ vocals are just emotional enough to sit atop the grey walls of noise and sound like they belong there.

Opening track “Okay Thru There” kicks down the door with the most overtly “punk” moment on the EP–hairpin really do find the midpoint between antisocial basement indie rock and power pop here, as there’s an incredibly huge chorus with “woo-ooh” backing vocals and giant guitar chords, but it’s also just a bit of distortion removed from being a Pardoner fuzz-punk anthem. There’s no rest for the hairpin, though–“Curtain Call” starts with a prowling, bass-led instrumental that reminds me a bit of Meat Wave and launches into a garage-y post-punk workout of a track, and “Wiped” is the atmospheric guitar-splatter mid-record exploration. Punk rock returns for “Shake It”, the song that gets the closest to really earning that “RIYL Hot Snakes” tag–it’s the quick-out-of-the-gate beginning combined with a nice, big riff in the chorus that does it. Edwards is always hovering on the edge as a vocalist, but “Shake It” features the most “unleashed” singing on the album; at the same time, though, hairpin are able to rein both the vocals and music in for a carefully-orchestrated finale in “Self Portrait”. It’s the one song that rivals “Okay Thru There” in pure catchiness, but it’s a lot less straightforward of a journey to get there–there’s some big wall-of-fuzz guitars at the beginning, and a restraint-heavy first half leads to guitar heroics and one last fiery Edwards performance before the EP comes to a close. So, you’re in, right?  (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: B. Hamilton, Truth or Consequences New Mexico, Rhymies, Gamma Ray

This week kicks off with a Pressing Concerns containing four brand-new records! New albums from B. Hamilton and Gamma Ray, plus new EPs from Truth or Consequences New Mexico and Rhymies! Great! Music!

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.

B. Hamilton – B. Hamilton

Release date: March 21st
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Art rock, garage rock, psychedelic rock, post-punk, AOR
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Back in the Line

You know that it’s serious when a band breaks out the self-titled album well into their career. And Oakland, California’s B. Hamilton have had ample opportunity to title a record B. Hamilton before now–they first came onto my radar last year when they released an EP called The Freest Speech Ever Attempted Without Disintegrating and frontperson Ryan Christopher Parks released a solo EP called Billy Goat Acres and Other Words I Know How to Spell that he admits “sounds like a B. Hamilton record”. These were just the latest in a long string of B. Hamilton and related releases, though–three EPs in 2023, an album in 2021, records on Bandcamp dating all the way back to 2009. The band–at that point, Parks, drummer Raj Kumar Ojha (Once and Future Band), and founding bassist Andrew Macy–began working on B. Hamilton a few years ago, only for Macy to exit the band in 2022 and leaving the others to soldier on as a duo. The resultant record was completed with the help of keyboardist Joel Robinow, Nelson Ny-Devereaux on woodwinds, and vocalist Grace Coleman, and it doesn’t sound like anything else I’ve heard as of late. A strange, meandering forty-eight minute experience, B. Hamilton is sometimes floating, unmoored post-rock, sometimes groovy, swinging classic rock–it’s something in between those two. Departure rock music?

That’s perhaps an appropriate term for B. Hamilton, a record that Parks openly states is about grief–he mentions his father’s death from brain cancer, his city’s fatal Ghost Ship warehouse fire, and the general pallor that COVID-19 was casting on everything at the time as inspiration. It’s a “difficult” record–it’s too scattered to really be “stubborn”, but there’s a standoffishness that comes with opening an album with snippets like “I’ve Been Outside, It’s Alright” and “Something We Can Start Up and Shutdown” and the muddled electronica of “On a Different Day”. “Back in the Line” is the first “rock song” on B. Hamilton, and it’s a smooth 70s-style AOR rock and roller that comes completely out of nowhere–this becomes a theme of this record as it progresses. B. Hamilton meander through stuff like “Sunny Day” and “Leningrad on Merritt”, abruptly congealing for rockers like “Good Foot” and “Release the Hounds” before falling apart again. The blues-tinted groove of “Good Foot” in particular is an effective addition to the album–there are bands who make their entire career out of music like this, undoubtedly losing some of its power through overutilization, but it’s more honest (and, subsequently, more in touch with the genre’s roots) coming as something more than a cheap shortcut here. Things start to blur more than ever in the back end of B. Hamilton–the reason this album is so long is because of the lengthy rock explorations of “Byzantine and Hemlock” and “Downey”–but closing track “Wherever I Go” is the clearest thing on the entire album. It’s a celebration commemorating the end of B. Hamilton and the continuation of something else entirely. (Bandcamp link)

Truth or Consequences New Mexico – This Time of Year

Release date: April 11th
Record label: Worry
Genre: Alt-country, power pop, fuzzy indie rock
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Between GA

Truth or Consequences New Mexico are not, to be clear, from New Mexico; presumably, the Windy City quartet took their name after the memorably-christened Southwestern town because “Chicago” was already taken. The band originated at Northwestern University in nearby Evanston (actually, I don’t think anyone’s claimed that one as a band name), where the band’s co-leaders Cora Pancoast and Jack Parker co-DJed at the college’s station, WNUR. Bassist Ben Goldenberg and drummer Carys Uribe have since rounded out the band, and they self-released a self-titled debut EP in early 2023. For their second EP, they’ve linked up with Chicago tape label Worry Records (Snow Ellet, Rust Ring, Stimmerman), and the five songs of This Time of Year are worthy of a larger spotlight. Following in the long-standing tradition of Chicago groups equally indebted to roots rock and alt-country as they are to indie rock and emo, Truth or Consequences New Mexico sound loud but crystal-clear on This Time of Year. It’s an electric record, but neither Pancoast nor Parker hide their vocals behind fuzz, evoking both often-twangy bands from the actual South (Downhaul, Cicala, Real Companion) and Chicago peers like Ratboys and Disaster Kid.

The big, earnest-to-the-point-of-emo opening track “Between GA” is probably a good litmus test as to whether or not Truth or Consequences New Mexico are going to be up your alley. Parker is on vocals here, and the delivery is the “twangiest” thing on This Time of Year–they’re really straining their voice to live up to the surging country rock instrumental, and I will go ahead and say that they land it. “Honey, We’re in Hell” might not be quite as hollerable as the song it has to follow, but the thorny, fuzzy indie-country-rock instrumental more than makes up for it (and Parker is still doing quite a lot through the static anyway). “Standing Still” is Pancoast’s first lead vocal turn on the EP, and it’s the “restrained” one–instrumentally, it’s still sharp as a tack, just slowed ever-so-slightly to a mid-tempo alt-country march that nonetheless hits. Pancoast gets her own rocker with “Seed of Doubt”–slightly more “in-control”-sounding than her counterpart, Truth or Consequences New Mexico still work their way up to “runaway train” territory by the end of the emotional-outburst rock and roll anthem. Every song on This Time of Year is really teased-out and polished, so it feels appropriate that “The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics” closes the EP. Pancoast leads Truth or Consequences New Mexico through an intricate mix of laid-back but skilled guitarwork, tender balladry, and soaring, swooning crescendos. The four of them stick the landing like an alien landing a spaceship in…somewhere, I’m not sure where. (Bandcamp link)

Rhymies – I Dream Watching

Release date: April 11th
Record label: Dandy Boy
Genre: Synthpop, dream pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Crashing Lead

Perhaps you’ve heard Bay Area musician Lauren Matsui through her work as the vocalist and guitarist of San Francisco shoegaze band Seablite (both of whose albums have appeared on this blog), or, more recently, as the bassist in jangle pop group Neutrals. She should have a solo project, right? Well, the good news is that that’s what Rhymies is–Matsui debuted it last year by contributing a cover of “Gamma Ray Blue” to Dandy Boy Records’ star-studded tribute to The Cleaners from Venus, and the project’s first collection of original music has now arrived (also via Dandy Boy) in the form of a four-song EP called I Dream Watching. Taking a break from the world of loud and/or guitar-led pop music, Rhymies instead finds Matsui pursuing indie pop with the help of “an assortment of Korgs, Rolands and Yamahas”. This tribute to early 80s synthpop and the electronic side of dream pop was written, arranged, and recorded entirely by Matsui herself “on her living room floor”; mixing from Rick Altieri (Blue Ocean, Above Me) and mastering from Mikey Young are the only outside hands to touch the record.

A lot of four-song debut EPs feel like teasers for something larger and more ambitious coming down the line, and while I certainly wouldn’t put it past Rhymies to eclipse I Dream Watching in the near future, these songs make a strong and self-contained record entirely on their own. Spanning thirteen minutes, every track on I Dream Watching is a landscape of synths and melodic sounds built with the intensity of a shoegaze musician. Even though it doesn’t have the same overwhelming wall-of-tuneful-sound quality that Seablite has, I can nevertheless can imagine Matsui hard at work on the living room floor layering and subbing out various analog synth options as she built these songs up. As polished as the synth-led instrumental beds are on I Dream Watching, Rhymies also affords Matsui the opportunity to emphasize her vocals more clearly than with Seablite–they’re full of whispery, subtle melodies, qualities that help her blend in with shoegaze songs just as she’s able to stick out in Rhymies’ more spacious material like the title track and “Bal Masque”. “Crashing Lead” is probably the most overt 80s homage on the EP, arpeggiated synths prominently sitting in the middle of a song that sounds right out a collection of vintage synthpop hits (even as her vocals are much more “dream pop”). All of I Dream Watching is similarly refreshing and inspired, though, the work of somebody grabbing tools from the past to open new doors for herself. (Bandcamp link)

Gamma Ray – Gamma Ray

Release date: April 6th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Garage rock, fuzz rock, power pop, post-punk
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Deep End

A Midwestern garage punk band called Gamma Ray, eh? This’ll probably be good. This self-described “snot rock” group has members based in both Columbus and Chicago, and Gamma Ray is Gamma Ray’s debut full-length album following a cassette EP called Bury Me First in 2023. I get the sense that Gamma Ray are marching to the beat of their own drum, although they’re also happy to take part in the Ohio music scene, enlisting the prolific Cincinnati engineer John Hoffman (Vacation, ADD/C, Charm School) to record their debut album and opening for acts like John Spencer and Poison Ruïn when they roll through the Buckeye State. I don’t know much if anything about the members of Gamma Ray, but I don’t feel like I need to have too much background to get Gamma Ray, a twenty-four minute fuzz rock record self-released by the band on a Sunday. They’re a tuneful bunch on their first LP–their ramshackle indie rock pretty much always lands on a winning hook in these ten songs, placing themselves in the lineage of loud but catchy groups from Dinosaur Jr. to Pardoner to Ex Pilots. There are punk songs here that “rip” and songs that find a nice guitar hammock to lie in, but pop music is the common denominator here.

Opening track “Deep End” is lo-fi fuzz rock party music–somewhere alongside the “power pop/slacker rock” axis, Gamma Ray’s first statement is that of a band who isn’t afraid to pull out all the stops underneath the distorted guitars. The tuneful noisiness of “Stalling” and “Teethin’” give way to the post-punk rumbling of “Don’t Wait”, the first real indication of just how far Gamma Ray’s range can extend–and while the sprawling guitars threaten to let the punchiness of Gamma Ray slip out of our grasp, the power-pop-punk “Don’t Know What to Do” yanks us right back in with a Ramones-Husker-Du loud pop song. As short as Gamma Ray is for a full album, Gamma Ray don’t come off like they’re short-changing us–there are ten songs here and they’re all fully-developed rockers, with the second-half 90s indie rock-bait tunes (“Inside Out”, “Just Like You”, “Crawling Down”) continuing the group’s hot streak and the other tracks (the crunchy garage rock of “Used to It” and the just-a-little-bit delicate fuzz pop closing track “See”) providing just-as-worthwhile respites. Provided that you like stuff that rocks, Gamma Ray makes it pretty easy to get on board with Gamma Ray. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Gum Parker, Fantasy of a Broken Heart, Sunny Intervals, Bedridden

In the Thursday Pressing Concerns, we have the good fortune of looking at four exciting records that you’ll be able to hear tomorrow, April 11th: new albums from Gum Parker, Sunny Intervals, and Bedridden, plus a new EP from Fantasy of a Broken Heart. Should you need to catch up with what the blog covered earlier this week, here are links to Monday’s blog post (featuring Cootie Catcher, Penny Loafer, Takuro Okada, and Mantarochen) and Tuesday’s post (featuring Pat’s Alternative Bus Tour, Bliss?, Marshy, and Seances).

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.

Gum Parker – The Brakes

Release date: April 11th
Record label: Repeating Cloud
Genre: 90s indie rock, power pop, garage rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Not Breaking Rocks

The Portland, Maine indie rock supergroup Lemon Pitch only lasted for two albums, but that’s not getting Galen Richmond down. Richmond (who also plays in Teenage Tom Petties and runs one of the labels most frequently appearing in Pressing Concerns, Repeating Cloud Records) quickly enlisted Lemon Pitch drummer Jeff Hamm as well as newcomers Kate Sullivan-Jones on bass and co-lead vocals and Jason Unterreiner on lead guitar, and Gum Parker was formed. Richmond no longer has to share songwriting duties with Brock Ginther and Alex Merrill, but I still hear a bit of the former’s manic punk-pop and the latter’s sickly-sweet guitar pop smile in The Brakes, the debut Gum Parker album. If you already know Lemon Pitch and/or Midwestern Medicine, Ginther’s other band, then that’s roughly what Gum Parker sound like, but if you don’t then they’re sneakily difficult to define. Richmond’s a 90s indie rock devotee with (presumably) plenty of Archers of Loaf, Guided by Voices, and Silkworm albums in his collection, but with Gum Parker he comes off as much more interested in simply making loud pop music than trying to directly emulate his influences. It’s “power pop” without that genre’s defining reverence, “pop punk” without a trace of what that term traditionally evokes, “slacker rock” made by someone with the perpetual nervousness.

The biography for The Brakes notes that Gum Parker is Richmond’s first band in his twenty-five year music career where he’s the sole primary songwriter, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t benefit from quite a bit of help. Bradford Krieger recorded the LP and contributed keyboard to it and deserves credit for how good it sounds–always emphasizing the vocals but without obscuring the raucous band behind them. All of the band helped in “shaping the final…arrangements” of these tracks, and I know that Sullivan-Jones at least contributed some lyrics (not to mention her lead vocals, which add a touch of variety to the record while still being in line with Richmond’s enough to fit his writing). A speedy album, The Brakes zips through a few classic pop songs in its first half–the Archers-nodding, Superchunk-evoking opening anthem “Two Subarus” and the catty guitar pop drama of “Not Breaking Rocks” are my favorites, but “Only Boxes” has some of the best lyrics (“For a fortnight and a half / I stood right in the forklift’s path / And when I finally let it pass it was only boxes”). Gum Parker do not slow down in the second half of The Brakes (obviously), but we get some development–between Sullivan-Jones’ operatic vocals and the fuzzed-out guitars in overdrive, “Crocodile” feels like the most ambitious rocker on the album (still a great pop hook in that one), while the diss-ballad “Silver Medalist” is a nice surprise and penultimate track “Thumbtacks” is some sneaky brilliance. It all ends with one last (relatively) blistering rave-up called “Bird in the Furnace”, in which Richmond boisterously proclaims “I wanna walk out of the movie / Throw my keys down in a grate” in the chorus. Gum Parker muster up some real defiance here, but probably only because it seems like the most fun thing for them to be. (Bandcamp link)

Fantasy of a Broken Heart – Chaos Practitioner

Release date: April 11th
Record label: Dots Per Inch
Genre: Prog-pop, art pop, experimental rock, indie pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Passion Clouds

It can be hard for some people (not me) to keep all these various Water from Your Eyes-associated bands straight, but I’m here to tell you that Fantasy of a Broken Heart is well worth your time. Bailey Wollowitz and Al Nardo have been touring members in Water from Your Eyes for a while now, and they’ve recently completed the full live band version of Nate Amos’ project This Is Lorelei. 2024’s Feats of Engineering, the first Fantasy of a Broken Heart album, was pieced together over a few years by Wollowitz and Nardo while on tour and in between other musical duties, and it’s an exciting and chaotic collection of inventive proggy pop music. The next Fantasy of a Broken Heart release didn’t take nearly as long to materialize–the six-song, nineteen-minute Chaos Practitioner EP arrives only a few months later. Chaos Practitioner is also a patchwork record, partially recorded by Nick Noneman in Los Angeles, partially made in Brooklyn and Mexico City, and featuring a few guests. The collaborative nature is probably the biggest difference between this EP and Feats of Engineering (which was recorded mostly by the main duo)–there are some prominent outside contributions on Chaos Practitioner, but additional hands don’t end up tipping Fantasy of a Broken Heart any further towards either “weird” or “pop”.

“Passion Clouds” is Fantasy of a Broken Heart at their most accessible–somehow, Nardo and Wollowitz make the song sound both incredibly streamlined (in a way that reminds me of bedroom-era This Is Lorelei) and like it’s indebted to post-prog 80s synth-rock stuff. “Have a Nice Time Life” is another hefty pop song, a dizzy and fuzzy piece of indie pop that also features the first obvious cameo on the EP, a rap-like guest verse from Jackson Katz of Brutus VIII (it kind of reminds me of Landowner–it’s probably the least congruent part of Chaos Practitioner, but I like it). Nick Rattigan of Current Joys’ vocals on “Road Song” are less attention-grabbing, but it’s not like he derails the smooth folky synthpop ride at all, and it’s a nice breather after “Star Inside the Earth”, which is Fantasy of a Broken Heart bouncing off the walls in a deconstructed sugar rush. “We Confront the Demon in Mysterious Ways” is the big finale, and it’s built like it, both in terms of the instrumental (which stretches the EP’s suave prog-pop across five minutes, pulling a bit from all the songs before it) and lyrically (Fantasy of a Broken Heart are rarely the clearest messengers, so it’s notable that the dissolving romance portrayed in the song is unavoidable from the writing). “We confront the demon in mysterious ways / I’m at a loss right now, I’m gonna push you away,” sings Wollowitz, and later “At the end of the day, you’re a chode / You’re a shadow on the side of the road”. Mysterious ways indeed. (Bandcamp link)

Sunny Intervals – Swept Away

Release date: April 11th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Indie pop, soft rock, psychedelic pop, jangle pop, folk rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: I’ve Been Looking Over My Shoulder for Too Long

The artist behind Sunny Intervals may be a bit under the radar, but that doesn’t mean that he hasn’t been at this whole “indie pop” thing for a while now. In the mid-2000s up until 2012, Andy Hudson was the songwriter and co-leader of the London quintet Pocketbooks, who seemingly were right in the middle of the era’s British indie pop scene (Wikipedia claims that they played shows with The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, Art Brut, and Camera Obscura, among others). Hudson started Sunny Intervals, a solo project, sometime around Pocketbooks’ dissolution, and for a while they were releasing records fairly frequently–Rooftops in 2012, Step into Spring in 2014, Sunrise in 2016. After the latter of those three came an eight-year gap, however–I don’t know where Hudson went in that time, nor do I know why he decided to come back this year, but Swept Away is welcome all the same. The Sunny Intervals comeback record is a delicately beautiful LP of quiet indie folk, soft rock, chamber pop, and good old-fashioned indie pop. Swept Away is friendly and familiar-sounding, evoking modern Belle & Sebastian-influenced acts like Grand Drifter, Peel Dream Magazine, and Trevor Sloan as well as the more “mature”-sounding indie pop veterans on Skep Wax Records.

Sunny Intervals pull a neat trick on Swept Away–these ten songs sound relaxed, unhurried, and content, but, at almost exactly half an hour in length, there’s not a wasted moment among the tasteful acoustic guitars and minimal but brisk percussion. Between the uptempo but laid-back opening track “Waiting for Sunshine” (featuring a couple of motor-mouth-delivery moments from Hudson that don’t harsh the vibe at all) and the gorgeous 60s-style piano pop blossoming of “I’ve Been Looking Over My Shoulder for Too Long”, Swept Away is about as forward as this kind of music can be–and while the pensive ballad of “In the Blink of an Eye” slows down the high-flying momentum just a little bit, Hudson doesn’t ever stop trying to impress with heavy-duty fluffy pop songs (see “Lost and Found” and “One Last Day of the Holidays”, which pick up the pace as Swept Away forges into its second half). There’s an electronic/synthpop undercurrent to the entire album, but “Synchronised” is the moment where it really comes to forefront–it’s an interesting creation, a chamber folk tune with a dance beat lurching over top of it sleepily. The record wraps things up with a full-on piano sendoff in “Draw the Curtains”, and its simplicity reflects not a lack of ideas from its creator but a brief respite after a full exploration of them. (Bandcamp link)

Bedridden – Moths Strapped to Eachother’s Backs

Release date: April 11th
Record label: Julia’s War
Genre: Shoegaze, alt-rock, space rock, grunge, fuzz rock
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Chainsaw

New Orleans-originating, Brooklyn-based band Bedridden first got onto my radar at the beginning of 2023 with their Julia’s War debut EP, Amateur Heartthrob, which was also the group’s first proper record after a 2022 demo tape. Vocalist/guitarist Jack Riley started the band in NOLA with a different lineup, but before he moved to New York he enlisted a couple of other Louisiana residents, drummer Nick Pedroza and bassist Sebastian Duzian, to make the journey with him. Amateur Heartthrob was a compelling mix of space rock, the heavier side of 90s alternative rock, and a bit of shoegaze, all of which are still very apparent on the first full-length album from the group (who recently added guitarist Wesley Wolffe after recording their latest record). Moths Strapped to Eachother’s [sic] Backs has plenty of nice and large Hum-inspired guitar riffs and Pumpkins-level pummeling alt-rock rhythms, but there’s just enough of an expansion in Bedridden’s sound to encompass some interesting melodic guitarwork and other pop instincts beyond the outward assault. Like the band’s debut EP, it was recorded by Momma’s Aron Kobayashi Ritch, who does an admirable job at honing in on some of Bedridden’s more unique impulses without taking away from their sheer might.

Moths Strapped to Eachother’s Backs opens with some really strong Hum-worship with “Gummy”, but there’s also some transfixing guitars happening in the song’s second half that set the tone for what to listen intently for throughout the record. The stop-start alt-rock of “Etch” accomplishes something similar, while “Chainsaw” bursts the “Bedridden sound” right open with a ripping noise-punk melodic explosion–the band say it’s inspired by The Lemonheads, and while I don’t really hear that, it does kind of remind me of bands like Gaadge and Ex Pilots who are plumbing the more pop-friendly depths of shoegaze and fuzz rock. The midsection of Moths Strapped to Eachother’s Backs walks a similar tightrope, but it’s the ending of the LP where Bedridden’s less-obvious influences begin truly winning out. In particular, “Uno” and “Ring Size” are really where the band indulge in post-punk, college rock, and new wave excursions–the former is wistful, jangly 1980s indie rock punched up with heavy guitars, while the latter is more of a straight-up Frankensteined combination of punchy alt-rock and jangle pop. It seems fitting that Moths Strapped to Eachother’s Backs ends with a jerky, grungy instrumental trying to break bread with a ringing, jangling guitar line–it’s the cleanest example of what Bedridden are trying to do on this album, but hardly the only successful one. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Pat’s Alternative Bus Tour, Bliss?, Marshy, Seances

The second Pressing Concerns of the week brings us four excellent under-the-radar selections: new albums from Pat’s Alternative Bus Tour, Bliss?, and Seances, and a new EP from Marshy. If you missed yesterday’s post (featuring Cootie Catcher, Penny Loafer, Takuro Okada, and Mantarochen), check that one out here.

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.

Pat’s Alternative Bus Tour – World to Rights

Release date: March 1st
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Indie pop, singer-songwriter, twee, folk rock, soft rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Pat’s Uninteresting Tours

Glasgow singer-songwriter Andrew Paterson returned to making music after a fairly long absence last year with Virtual Virgins, the debut album from his new solo project Pat’s Alternative Bus Tour. Paterson established himself as an indie pop storyteller with Virtual Virgins–armed with a British sense of humor, jangly and folky guitar pop foundations, and “conversational, heavily-Scottish-accented vocals” (as I called them then), I found a lot to enjoy in his rambling, character-driven stories. Paterson’s second act continues at a steady clip with World to Rights, the second Pat’s Alternative Bus Tour album in as many years. Befitting the dramatic title, World to Rights sets its aim a bit higher, a more conscious attempt to weave the interpersonal, political, and ecological together with breezy folk rock and C86-inspired pop music. The bright, memorable narratives of Virtual Virgins are still here, don’t get me wrong; there’s just more clear connecting threads. The question that World to Rights suggests–at first in its opening title track, and again and again in later material–is that, now that we all know the world is all wrong in innumerable ways, how do we then proceed with that in mind?

Paterson says that World to Rights contains “perhaps has more raw and honest” writing than his last record, although that doesn’t mean we should take him literally in these songs. The spiel of the overzealous leftist narrator of the opening track is supposed to be ribbing, although it’s an affectionate (and, I think, sympathetic) portrait, and I’m sure there’s a good deal of Paterson in the staunch union-man father figure of “Please Don’t Vote Conservative”. Climate change is a surprisingly frequent topic on World to Rights–in addition to “World to Rights”, Paterson tackles it with various degrees of irony and sardonicism in “Breaking the Ice” (a waltz in which the narrator sadly lists off various weather-related cliches and aphorisms that won’t work anymore in the near future) and “Join the Dots” (whose narrator takes a break from moaning about the struggles of being wealthy to declare of his gigantic footprint: “Don’t just look at me / Because everybody else was doing it”). The politics of World to Rights aren’t particularly subtle (not that that makes something like, say, the wistful ballad “Cost of Living” any less effective); the part that requires a bit of the thinking muscle is connecting it to songs like “The Other Side of Love”, “Pat’s Uninteresting Tours”, and “The Act of Levitating”, which explore pursuits other than raging at the state of the world. I don’t think Paterson is talking about escapism here–in fact, these songs are about how everything from disintegrating romantic relationships to cellar-dwelling football teams can elicit real hurt and emotion. It’s more about diversifying one’s life, keeping in one’s back pocket the ability to make connections with other human beings as well as between capitalism, colonialism, and global warming (Who knows? They might even be related). (Bandcamp link)

Bliss? – Pass Yr Pain Along

Release date: March 21st
Record label: Psychic Spice
Genre: Lo-fi power pop, garage rock, jangle punk, mod revival
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Living Well

A bunch of punk musicians making power pop? Well, that’s one way to get my attention. Today we have a brand new band from Baton Rouge, Louisiana called Bliss? and their debut album called Pass Yr Pain Along. Guitarist/vocalist Josh Higdon, bassist Hunter Kiser, and drummer Robert DeMouy formed Bliss? last year after playing in a bunch of local punk groups (Self-Checkout Renaissance, Not My Real Job, Meadowhead) due to a mutual appreciation for “REM, power pop, and all varieties of jangly 80s college rock”. Released via a new Baton Rouge imprint called Psychic Spice Tapes, Pass Yr Pain Along is indeed a full exploration of the strains of guitar pop formative to the band–Higdon’s vocals are incredibly Elvis Costello-reminiscent, while the band’s somewhat jangly post-Replacements pop rock and roll sounds like the Gin Blossoms as interpreted by basement punk musicians. It’s not a “punk” record per se, but it absolutely benefits from a little roughness–Higdon isn’t at all shy about putting the vocals up front, and the band are loose but clear in a way that puts the spotlight on a collection of songs that really could’ve been shipped straight from Homestead Records to your local college radio station circa 1989.

Ten songs. Thirty-five minutes. Most tracks landing between three and four minutes. This may be their first rodeo together, but Bliss? already have this kind of thing down pat on Pass Yr Pain Along. Everything is just right in the opening track, “Raft Song”, which captivates us with a tough rock and roll backbone cradling a basket of melodies, and “Living Well” is the classic short, punchy, giant-hook-featuring single in slot number two. “Murmurs” has more than a bit of Costello new wave in its DNA (with the stop-start power chords and basslines, it also reminds me of another point of comparison for Pass Yr Pain Along, Chisel and Ted Leo). At their zippiest (like on, say, “Bulwark”), Bliss? come off as a more openly jangle pop/college rock-indebted version of 90s melodic punk groups like Jawbreaker, although they’re not too streamlined to let “Leave the Lamp On” sprawl or to take “Heard v Hurt” into a stranger, more post-punk direction. The biggest oddball on Pass Yr Pain Along is probably penultimate track “Serotonin Syndrome” (there’s a bit of Paisley here, as the band turn their jangle into a five-minute piece of psychedelic guitar pop), but there are excellent rockers on either side of it to keep us grounded. There’s a lot of great guitar music still being put to tape, and one of this year’s best examples thus far comes straight from a Louisiana basement. (Bandcamp link)

Marshy – Light Business

Release date: February 28th
Record label: Marsh Slope
Genre: Dreamy indie rock, emo-y indie rock, indie pop
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Line of Best Fit

The world needs small indie rock bands making EPs of catchy, electric indie rock. I get the feeling that something very bad would happen to the universe if we ever ran out of them. Say what you will about New York City, but the Big Apple is at the very least helping us out on the supply side with these bands. Marshy is the latest one–I can’t tell you a whole lot about them, but I can say that they put out two singles last year before graduating to a full-on EP this year, that they appear to be made up of Gab Grieco, Max Steinbach, Emma Todd, and James Vees, and that they’ve spent the year or so since they formed playing shows with bands like Still Submarine, Dagwood, and Dogwood Gap that would also qualify for the description I gave in the opening paragraph of this review. All of this brings us to Light Business, the first-ever Marshy EP, self-released by the band digitally and featuring four songs and thirteen-minutes of pure, uncut Marshy–making it the band’s biggest (and only, singles excepted) statement yet. There’s bits of power pop, dreamy/jangly indie pop, shoegaze-adjacent fuzz rock, and maybe just the smallest bit of emo on Light Business–most importantly, though, it’s a collection of songs displaying that Marshy’s collaborative take on writing and playing just seems to work.

“Line of Best Fit” opens the EP and is my favorite on the record by a fair amount–I thought of just highlighting it on a playlist and calling it a day, but the other songs kept growing on me too, so here we are. Still, “Line of Best Fit” is clearly Light Business’ “hit”–ascending, triumphant power pop chords, sweeping, expertly-wielded distortion, and unbothered vocals melodies will all do that. “2 Birds” is the one that comes closest–it’s not quite as “all-in” as “Line of Best Fit”, but it’s Marshy’s cleanest, most polished foray into jangly guitar-led indie pop, and the quartet pulls it off with a no-nonsense skill which makes them sound developed beyond their relative infancy. The other half of Light Business is the heavier and less-immediate half, but Marshy have something going in these tracks, too–“Lemon Verbena / Breathe” is more downcast, fuzzed-out dreamy indie rock for the majority of its length, and the end of that song is the closest the band gets to actual shoegaze on the EP. “Lucked Out” is the finale, sending the EP off with chugging, gas-pedal-floored alternative rock that alternates between “fast and intense” and “slowed-down just enough to get a couple of hits in”. The planet is safe for just a little bit longer. (Bandcamp link)

Seances – Power Is a Phantom

Release date: February 28th
Record label: Triple Eye Industries
Genre: New wave, post-punk, synthpop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Crimes

Seances are a new project from a longtime Milwaukee indie rock and punk veteran, Eric Arsnow. Over the years, he’s played in bands like garage rockers Devils Teeth and “Dungeons & Dragons-inspired” stoner rock supergroup Fight Dice, but in the back of his mind he had a desire to make an album in line with the post-punk and new wave that he grew up on (and continued to love as an adult). Seeing The Chameleons live in 2023 finally spurred him on, and Arsnow quickly began writing New Order/The Cure-esque gothic/new wave pop songs on his bass guitar. These ideas congealed into a full-on nine-song debut LP called Power Is a Phantom, largely played and recorded by Arsnow himself (Jason Kartz contributes guitar to about half of these songs, and a couple of guest vocalists receive the only other outside credits). Power Is a Phantom does sound like the work of somebody who’s cut their teeth in garage and punk bands, but it is very much “new wave”, edge or no. Arsnow’s melodic, Peter Hook-inspired bass playing and deep, gothic vocals are the defining features of Power Is a Phantom, although the euphoric guitars, synth accents, and propulsive programmed drums all help Seances achieve the sound for which they’re reaching as well.

Arsnow nods a bit towards “Melt with You” in opening track “Crimes”, and while the song as a whole is a bit more synth/goth-pop than Modern English’s guitar pop sole hit, it’s a good reference point for understanding Power Is a Phantom’s pop aims. “Forgiveness” ups the speed and the post-punk influence, but there’s still a brightness in between the choppy guitars and soaring solos, while “Fade” is Seances’ clearest foray into darkwave. “Armour” is perhaps the most openly bright song on Power Is a Phantom–Arsnow finds a little more melody in his vocals than he had previously, and the bass guitar is afforded space to really reach New Order heights (the swooning synths help, too). On the other end of the spectrum, “Fathom” descends into loud, angry basement post-punk/garage rock, and “Hours” investigates the dark and dubby corners of early post-punk with its frantic, frightened guitar-led sound. Seances end their first statement by finding more transcendence in synths and bright new wave signifiers, though–between the dramatic synthpop odyssey of “Surface” and the subdued dream pop of closing track “Fire”, Power Is a Phantom strains to escape the basement rock from which it spawned. A bold step in Arsnow’s music career, it’s nonetheless an incredibly successful one. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Cootie Catcher, Penny Loafer, Takuro Okada, Mantarochen

On this Monday in April, Pressing Concerns has returned to bring you the latest in indie pop, post-rock, ambient jazz, post-punk, and twee music: new albums from Cootie Catcher, Takuro Okada, and Mantarochen, and a new EP from Penny Loafer, featured below.

If you’re looking for more new music, you can visit the site directory to see what else we’ve written about lately. If you’d like to support Rosy Overdrive, you can share this (or another) post, or donate here.

Cootie Catcher – Shy at First

Release date: March 14th
Record label: Cooked Raw
Genre: Indie pop, twee, electronica, bedroom pop, experimental pop
Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Friend of a Friend

Vocalist/bassist Anita Fowl and vocalist/guitarist Nolan Jakupovski started the Toronto band Cootie Catcher earlier this decade, soon welcoming in vocalist/synth player/“DJ Scratches” contributor Sophia Chavez and releasing a couple of EPs, an LP, and a “remixes +b sides” album. The band’s sophomore album, Shy at First, seems like a step up for the group in a couple of different ways–for one, it’s the first with drummer Joseph Shemoun, and it’s also the first one recorded by an outside engineer (Rob McLay of Squiggly Lines and Westelaken, partially at his Sun Bear studio). I first heard the quartet last year via “Friend of a Friend”, Shy at First’s lead single, and was immediately hooked; the band call it “power pop”, I used descriptors like “twee-pop” and “fluffy indie pop” when describing it. As one might expect from a band with a “DJ scratcher” enlisted, “Friend of a Friend” has a foot in the world of electronic music, largely due to the wobbly, wavering synths that Chavez injects over top of the more traditional (albeit keyboard-led) indie pop instrumental. This balancing act is continued on the rest of Shy at First–sometimes Cootie Catcher lean more into guitar pop, sometimes into the stranger electronic impulses, and sometimes both flare up notably in the same song.

I still think “Friend of a Friend” is my favorite Cootie Catcher song, but fans of that song’s indie pop smarts will still find plenty of music on Shy at First that earns its place at the table. The title track is even more “twee” than “Friend of a Friend” is–it’s a brilliant piece of bashful, uncertain pop music (both in instrumental construction and subject matter) with some really pleasing vocal trade-offs (I don’t know who’s singing what; everyone but Shemoun is credited with vocals on the album). Some of the other Rosy Overdrive-certified hit singles on Shy at First include “Words Mean Less” (with its boisterous slacker rock vocals and bubbling synths, it sounds like a rough Kiwi Jr. song), “If It’s in Vogue” (a bright, lazy lo-fi jangly pop tune), and “Diary” (perhaps the most rocking song on the album, albeit in an exuberant Sharp Pins/Friko kind of way). “Do Forever” is also quite catchy, and its shuffling beat is helpful in bridging the gap between these kinds of songs and the electronica moments. It’s very “late 90s alt-pop” in how there’s that kind of post-pop electronic psychedelia but also a genuine guitar solo (I swear I saw somebody compare this band to Beck and it’s driving me crazy not being able to figure out who it was, please reach out if that was you so I can credit you). To be clear, stuff like “Musical Chairs” and “Acrostic Poem” and “Galleria” are all still “pop songs”, they just go about it in hazier fashion. I still feel like I understand Cootie Catcher, at least. (Bandcamp link)

Penny Loafer – Daily Deal

Release date: March 28th
Record label: Indecent Artistry
Genre: 90s indie rock, fuzz rock, lo-fi indie rock, fuzz pop
Formats: CD, digital
Pull Track: Fridge

Penny Loafer is a new indie rock band formed by two Athens, Georgia grocery store co-workers, vocalist/guitarist/keyboardist Emma Barnes and drummer Seth Parker. They started making music after they discovered they had a “shared affinity” for 90s indie rock, and shortly after releasing their first song (“Lynx”) in late 2024, they enlisted multi-instrumentalist Iain Cooke and went to record their debut EP at Athens’ The Eye with producer Adam Wayton. Wayton is putting out Daily Deal on his own label, Indecent Artistry, and he also plays on the record–I’d previously been familiar with Wayton thanks to his work fronting the scuzzy, fuzzy indie rockers Telemarket and contributing to twee pop group Honeypuppy, and it turns out that Penny Loafer are right in the multi-hyphenate’s wheelhouse. The five songs of Daily Deal are crawling, mid-tempo 90s alternative rock in the vein of Penny Loafer’s heroes, The Breeders–not quite as chaotic as Telemarket or as polished as Honeypuppy, Barnes and Parker instead display an aptitude for unflappable, chugging, fuzzed-out (and, oddly enough, largely grocery-themed) pop music on their first EP. The guitars are ambush predators, Barnes’ voice is stoic but hardly wallflower-esque, and the songs are catchy in an incidental, shrugging 90s kind of way.

Daily Deal floats into focus with “Backyard”; an alien synth and a lazy guitar riff are the first things we hear, and Barnes’ first words are “Rice Crispy cereal brains / Started a serious fire”. The lyrics to “Backyard” are glimpses into a dark American South in between moments of shambolic indie rock (“Someone’s in the backyard / I am gonna shoot their head off / Don’t know who your neighbors are / They’re probably dumb and ugly”). “Fridge” is a little more upbeat (I guess that’s the word for it); it starts with a live-wire guitar part that’d make the Deal Sisters proud, and, like many great Deal songs, it never fully punctures the tension that’s present from the first second. “Orange Peel” is yet another part of Penny Loafer’s completely unsettling breakfast (“I hate the orange / I eat the peel,” begins Barnes), and the hook is built from some actually pretty pleasing guitar soloing. The sneaky “Nothing at All” has some of the best melodic vocal work on Daily Deal, but closing track “Ugly” is Penny Loafer at their most cryptic. The music floats along uncertainly while Barnes sings “I want you, I” over and over again–the only other words to the song are “I want you to myself” and “Wanting you to be my ugly”, the latter of which is obscured under fuzz. Daily Deal is a curious debut–you can trace the influences, but there’s still plenty of mystery to Penny Loafer. (Bandcamp link)

Takuro Okada – The Near End, The Dark Night, The County Line

Release date: March 7th
Record label: Temporal Drift
Genre: Ambient, post-rock, jazz
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Shadow

This isn’t the first time in recent memory that I’ve written about a U.S.-released compilation album from a Japanese musician who’d mostly had their music released solely in their home country up until that point. Compared to the explosive punk/art rock of Ging Nang Boyz, however, the music of Tokyo’s Takuro Okada is in a completely different universe. Okada got his start in the 2010s indie rock group Mori Wa Ikiteiru, but he’s been pursuing a solo career over the better part of the last decade that’s dabbled in jazz, ambient, and experimental electronic music. The Near End, The Dark Night, The County Line is Okada’s first album with Temporal Drift (Les Rallizes Dénudés, Hiroshi Yoshimura, Coffin Prick), a Los Angeles-based label who’s been working to make a lot of Japanese records available in the United States in recent years. The goal of The Near End, The Dark Night, The County Line is to showcase Okada himself–though he’s collaborated with notable names like Carlos Niño, Nels Cline, and Jim O’Rourke in the past, these recordings are almost entirely by Okada alone. Some of these tracks appear to have been released in earlier forms on Bandcamp, while others may have only recently been unearthed from Okada’s “expansive archive of recorded material”.

The Near End, The Dark Night, The County Line may not have been initially conceived as a standalone album, and the different styles Okada tries on throughout the 48-minute album reflect this, but it’s an engrossing collection nonetheless. It begins on a minimal but friendly note between the sparse ambient opening track “Following Morning” and the barebones jazz construction of “The Room”. “Shadow” is the first song with vocals on the album, and it’s a genuine pop song–sure, it’s stretched out to six minutes and its folkiness is undercut with jazz instrumentation, but that’s not enough to dampen its shine. Things get more challenging as The Near End, The Dark Night, The County Line goes on–the electronic clattering or “Mizu” and the sustained, gentle drone of “Mirror” are brief detours, but the sound collage of “Reflections / Entering #2” is a nice six minutes in length. Starting with “Evening Song”, jazz-pop begins to creep back into Okada’s compositions, although in bits and pieces–the guitar in “Evening Song”, the woozy horns of “Taco Beach”, the string-laden sigh of “Ohme”, and the upright bass in the blues-inspired “Howlin’ Dog”. The title track sends The Near End, The Dark Night, The County Line out with a complete instrumental jazz guitar song–it’s more immediate than a lot of the songs before it, but it’s all part and parcel of getting a grip on Takuro Okada. (Bandcamp link)

Mantarochen – Cut My Brainhair

Release date: February 15th
Record label: It’s Eleven
Genre: Post-punk, synthpunk, darkwave
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Steamy Nights

Leipzig post-punk trio Mantarcohen first appeared in Pressing Concerns last year when I wrote about their six-song mini-album/EP In the Badgers Cave, their debut for It’s Eleven Records (Ambulanz, Fotokiller, Distant Relatives) and second record overall. A brief and promising collection of lo-fi drum machine-led darkwave, post-punk, and synth-punk, In the Badgers Cave got the group (Diana, Sebi and Tom) on my radar, and Mantarochen are back less than a year later with a new cassette called Cut My Brainhair that picks up where their last record left off. Featuring eight songs (well, seven and an intro track) in eighteen minutes, it’s barely longer than In the Badgers Cave–and while I wouldn’t really call it an EP, it functions nicely as a sequel to the band’s previous one. Dark and gothic but minimal and catchy, Mantarcohen’s take on post-punk remains quite compelling throughout Cut My Brainhair. The bass is front-and-center, the guitar lines frantic but satisfying, the synths intermittent but always welcome, and the vocals understated but plenty capable for what the rest of the band are doing here. Mantarochen are skilled at tension and dread–they only rarely release the darkness they bottle up throughout Cut My Brainhair, but it’s fascinating no matter what they’re doing with it.

The introduction to Cut My Brainhair, “Delta”, is a bit of echoing piano drone that segues quite cleanly into “Not a Rabbit”, which has a brisk drum machine beat but is otherwise a restrained, atmospheric mood-setter of a first statement. “Steamy Nights” is just a little busier but keeps the thickening tension coming, as does the particularly gothic “Shadow” (although the vocals are the most inventive that they have been on the record up until this point). “Count the Dust” is probably the most “garage rock” moment on Cut My Brainhair–the dour vocals and prominent bassline keep it squarely in Mantarochen’s wheelhouse, but that guitar is Feel It Records-worthy. “Count the Dust” doesn’t turn out to be a harbinger of a louder, more rocking second half, however–“Pull Me” is one of the oddest things on Cut My Brainhair, synths and jangly guitars colliding in an almost psychedelic, dubby haze, while the minimal synthpop “Sometimes” is Mantarochen at their most streamlined. Things pick up just a bit for the album’s final track, “Desert”, but the steadily-rolling post-punk instrumental is content to stay in its lane right up until its conclusion, landing the smooth ride that is Cut My Brainhair. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: (T-T)b, Infinity Knives & Brian Ennals, Coffin Prick, Kicking Bird

We’ve rounded the bend to April, and the first Friday of the new month is upon us. Out tomorrow, April 4th, the albums of today’s Pressing Concerns (from (T-T)b, Infinity Knives & Brian Ennals, Coffin Prick, and Kicking Bird) bring to us the promise of spring. Or something like that. In other news, the March 2025 Playlist/Round-Up went up on Tuesday, and there was a Monday Pressing Concerns (featuring Miscellaneous Owl, Dr. Kevin Holm-Hudson & The Adjuncts, Yuasa-Exide, and Shapes Like People) to check out if you haven’t yet, 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.

EDIT/NOTE: The Coffin Prick album got pushed back to May and nobody told me! Sorry! Check back in a month!

(T-T)b – Beautiful Extension Cord

Release date: April 4th
Record label: Disposable America
Genre: Fuzz rock, synthpop, power pop, chiptune, slacker rock, 90s indie rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Semantics of Yet

Way back in 2021, I heard an EP called Suporma by a band from Boston that called themselves (T-T)b. It’s a great slacker rock record, despite the fact that the group (bandleader JM Dussault, drummer Nick Dussault, and bassist Jake Cardinal, the latter two of which also play in Really Great) prominently incorporated chiptune and video game soundtrack instrumentation into the record’s five songs. It’s hard to dabble in that kind of stuff without it overtaking the rest of your music, but (T-T)b utilized it as an accent, the way one might use synths or horns. I’ve been patiently awaiting a follow-up to Suporma ever since, and it’s finally here in the form of Beautiful Extension Cord, the band’s second album and first new music of any kind in four years. (T-T)b have evolved in the meantime, I’d say. It seems impossible for chiptune to ever be “subtly” incorporated into one’s music, but if it is, it probably sounds like this–still quite visible, but integrated more seamlessly than ever into the group’s slacker rock, 90s alt-rock, and bedroom indie rock-evoking sound. Between the big old guitars, the chirping 8-bit sounds, and Dussault’s plain but capable vocals, there’s somehow a cosmic element to (T-T)b’s indie rock; it reminds me a bit of LVL UP, or even their labelmates Bedbug.

The first thing we hear on Beautiful Extension Cord is a sparkling 8-bit introduction, but the guitars kick in and overpower opening song “Julian” at about the ten second mark. These guitars are a key feature of Beautiful Extension Cord’s opening salvo, but even the six-strings have their spotlight stolen from them by Dussault’s opening lyrics to early highlight “Dither”: “I met God / And he was a little dog / A horror film professor / Cradled in his arms”. The whole first section is unstoppable: by “Bug on the Ceiling”, (T-T)b have almost fully been converted into a vintage fuzz rock band (but the chiptune sound stubbornly refuses to fade entirely). Beautiful Extension Cord opens up a bit in the midsection, having gotten the great big first act out of the way–the dream-chiptune-pop interlude “Sophie” and the laid-back bummer pop of “The Kick” are the closest thing we get to a “breather”. Album centerpiece “Semantics of Yet” starts out in much the same way, but it rises to a huge alt-rock refrain, Speedy Oritz’s Sadie Dupuis joining Dussault to meditate on the wavering evoked by the adverb in the title. Beautiful Extension Cord as a whole is a sweeping but uncertain-sounding album, right up until closing track “I’m Always Holding You Back”. (T-T)b toy with bringing the chiptune more prominently into the mix, and Dussault sings the chilly title line against a propulsive, light-feeling instrumental. I’m not sure if the Beautiful Extension Cord of the album title is supposed to evoke “power” or “connectivity”, but (T-T)b imbue their latest album with the right combination of it to keep the lights on. (Bandcamp link)

Infinity Knives & Brian Ennals – A City Drowned in God’s Black Tears

Release date: April 4th
Record label: Phantom Limb
Genre: Experimental rap, noise rap, folk, art rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Everyone I Love Is Depressed

Infinity Knives and Brian Ennals are a pair of Baltimore rappers who’ve been active in their city’s music scene since the beginning of this decade–the former I’d previously encountered on Jacober’s album from a few years ago (albeit as a bassist and guitarist rather than rapper), while the latter is new to me. Ennals and Infinity Knives (AKA Tariq Ravelomanana) have also been making records as a duo pretty much the entire time they’ve been around–first came Rhino XXL in 2020, King Cobra followed in 2022, and now there’s a third Knives/Ennals collaboration called A City Drowned in God’s Black Tears. Apparently the duo have gained a reputation for experimental and political rap over their first couple of records, and A City Drowned in God’s Black Tears isn’t going to disabuse anybody of these notions. On every account, though, Infinity Knives and Ennals spend time out of these boxes–not everything reads as explicitly political, for one, and there’s also moments that sound genuinely fun and pop-friendly (and even “rap” is too small of a box to constrain the duo on this record, as there are two straight-up folk songs on A City Drowned in God’s Black Tears, among other excursions).

Oh, right, “experimental” and “political”. Starting your record with a song like “The Iron Wall” will get you labeled as such. For the latter, Infinity Knives and Brian Ennals go absolutely scorched-Earth on both American fascism and Israeli genocide (as they point out in the provocative but true opening bars, though, they’re only returning fire), and for the former, the track has a really compelling, up-close sound to it that the duo credit co-engineer Frances “FRANKI3” Malvaiz (who also sings on a few songs) for helping them achieve. The casual “Live at the Chinese Buffet” is admittedly weird too, but the seven-minute title track is where things really go off the rails–the majority of the song is straight-up traditionalist, hymn-like folk music, and then it finishes with a massive Swans-like noise rock drone (and they do something similar to the first part again later on the record, except they let the Sparklehorse/Neutral Milk Hotel/folk John Dwyer-esque “Two Headed Buffalo” exit quietly after seven minutes). A City Drowned in God’s Black Tears was initially supposed to be an EP, and I do wonder if it began as a chance for Infinity Knives and Brian Ennals to try out a bunch of ideas–like having Vladneva Volodkevich sing a vintage, crackling R&B/jazz crooner in Russian (that’d be “Trevoga”) or interpolating one of Ravelomanana’s favorite songs for an intense, dire-sounding rap number (“Sometimes, Papi Chulo”, which uses a bit of a song from cult folk musician Dan Hanrahan), or rolling out an awesome groove of a funk-hop track about, of course, suicide (“Everyone I Love Is Depressed”). It’s an album because there are too many ideas and too much to say on A City Drowned in God’s Black Tears, though–if there’s anything readily apparent about this album, it’s that. (Bandcamp link)

Coffin Prick – Loose Enchantment

Release date: May 16th
Record label: Temporal Drift
Genre: Post-punk, art rock, dance punk, electronic, dub
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Follow You Where You’re Talking

Ryan Weinstein has been playing in bands for nearly three decades now, spending time in groups like The Heatseekers, Cavity, and The Cairo Gang as he moved across the United States from Florida to Chicago to Los Angeles, where he lives today. One of his many bands was a short-lived garage punk group called Coffin Pricks–they may have broken up in 2012 without releasing more than a three song single, but Weinstein revived the name (now singular) when he started up a solo(ish) career a couple of years ago. Coffin Prick has been putting out records at a steady clip as of late–an full-length and EP in 2023, a remix LP in 2024, and, now, eleven brand-new Coffin Prick songs in the form of an album called Loose Enchantment. Far from the punk rock of the Pricks, Weinstein has pushed beyond the boundaries of “rock music” entirely as Coffin Prick–and while Loose Enchantment is no different, I’d dare say that it’s the project’s most accessible record yet. Receiving help from members of Tuxedomoon, Tortoise, and LA Takedown (among others), Weinstein’s latest release is a slinky, wobbly, dubby collection of Los Angeles art rock and post-punk. Often danceable but rarely forthright about it, Loose Enchantment is a record that believes that having fun should be complicated.

From the brightly-colored guitars that start off the album, it’s hard to tell where, exactly, Coffin Prick is going with all of this, but “Follow You Where You’re Talking” resolves this noise into a minimal post-punk bass riff and welcomes us to the Loose Enchantment show with a propulsive, low-end-led dance-punk introduction. Weinstein then gives us woozy, chattering synth-rock in “Shortly Forgotten Pleasure” and the dreamy, minimal, electronic gliding of the title track. We’ve only just begun the Loose Enchantment journey, however–buttressed by two brief interlude-like tracks, the six-minute “Work” is something of the record’s centerpiece, taking Weinstein’s noise rock/garage rock past and shading a prowling no wave/post-punk piece of aural dread with it. It’s tempting to say that Loose Enchantment gets stranger as it goes along, but who’s to say that the second-half dance numbers (“Soap” and “Spy vs Spy”) are any less woozy and bizarre than the first-half ones? There’s a beautiful ballad somewhere in “Window in Your Eye”, although Coffin Prick are completely unmoored by this point in the record, and six-minute closing track “Western Folly: Floating Love – Drying Off In The Rain – How Seconds Work” follows this to its logical conclusion of straight-up noise/sound collage. There’s plenty to grab onto immediately in Loose Enchantment, but the record also sees to it that we get the complete Coffin Prick experience before it’s all said and done. (Bandcamp link)

Kicking Bird – 11 Short Fictions

Release date: April 4th
Record label: Fort Lowell
Genre: Power pop, fuzz pop, indie pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: What Did You Expect (With Such a Beautiful Wife)

I first heard of Kicking Bird, Wilmington, North Carolina’s premiere surf-pop quintet, thanks to their debut album, 2023’s Original Motion Picture Soundtrack. That’s a really fun album, a nice collection of Pixies-inspired fuzz-power pop (and it also put their label, Fort Lowell, on my radar–and I’ve written about a bunch of good records that they’ve put out since then). Almost exactly two years later, Kicking Bird are back with a sophomore LP, and 11 Short Fictions largely picks up where the band (vocalist/guitarist Shaun Paul, vocalist/keyboardist Shaylah Paul, guitarist Robin Cooksley, drummer Greg Blair, and bassist Tom Michels) left off. The pop music of 11 Short Fictions feels perhaps more ambitious than its predecessor–at this point, Kicking Bird are starting to remind me of power pop bands who give off a bit of “collective” energy like The New Pornographers or even the poppier side of The Apples in Stereo. The occasional Black Francis bite to Shaun Paul’s vocals and moments of kicked up fuzz rock are still here, part of a vivid tapestry also including a bit of twee, glam rock, and southern college rock, among other detours.

“We drove down to the boathouse / In a car she took from her uncle / She swore she’d never been there before / But she found that key like she had been there before,” Shaun sings in single “Cinnamon”, a wild garage rock and roll song that Kicking Bird pull off without invalidating their friendlier moments. I have no idea how these songs relate to themselves (“Facts and false memories. Hypocrisies, admissions and denials. Stories,” the band says about the record; “She kinda tasted like cinnamon / I probably tasted like Indica,” goes another memorable line in “Cinnamon”). The pop songs are huge and just as desperate-sounding as the loudest rockers–“Where’d You Get Those Pants” rips, “Verdun” struts–and while Shaylah Paul’s vocals are a lot less “unhinged” than Shaun’s, songs like “What Did You Expect (With Such a Beautiful Wife)” and “Good Lighting” certainly don’t bring the party to a halt merely by being just a bit more even-keeled (the explosive guitar work in the latter song doesn’t hurt, either). Shaylah’s “Too Much Talking” is the one true “ballad” on the album–it’s a waltz, and even here Kicking Bird can’t help but slipping a little feedback into the song before they return to sum up 11 Short Fictions with three more guitar-showcase rockers. Here’s hoping Kicking Bird can keep this high level of energy up for just a little bit longer–impressively, 11 Short Fictions shows no signs of slowing down. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable: