Pressing Concerns: Club Night, The Pennys, Eli Winter, Milkweed

We’ve got a nice and weird Thursday Pressing Concerns up at bat, featuring three albums coming out tomorrow, May 2nd: new LPs from Club Night, Eli Winter, and Milkweed. Plus, we get an EP from The Pennys (a new band featuring some familiar faces) which is out today! We also had posts go up Monday (featuring Mike Frazier, JPW & Dad Weed, Chris Brokaw, and Blue Cactus) and Tuesday (featuring Erik Woods, Percy Higgins, Emma Munger, and Lily Seabird); 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.

Club Night – Joy Coming Down

Release date: May 2nd
Record label: Tiny Engines
Genre: Art rock, math rock, emo
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Lake

I’m not sure why I like Wolf Parade so much more than all of those other big-tent 2000s indie rock bands. Maybe I just heard them at the right time and I could just as easily have fallen similarly into Arcade Fire or Broken Social Scene, but I’d like to think that there’s just a certain fire in those records, a post-punk chaotic anthem-writing ability that’s just not there in their peers. I find myself thinking about Wolf Parade and this question while listening to Joy Coming Down, the long-awaited sophomore album from the Oakland band Club Night. There were plenty of groups in the late 2010s making music that could be described as some combination of “math rock”, “indie rock”, and “emo”, but the way that Club Night do it–an overall hugeness, jittery art-punk instrumentation, strange but welcome synth-centric additions–just works better than the others. It was enough to keep the band regularly on my mind in the six-year gap between their first album, What Life, and this one–a gap that was enough time for their label, Tiny Engines, to shutter and relaunch, not to mention countless bands sharing space with them both geographically in the Bay Area and sonically. Joy Coming Down (which is named after a Fred Thomas lyric) picks up right where Club Night left off–not that a band like this can ever really be predictable, but their second album packs as much of what makes this group special as it can in its forty-two minutes.

Guitarist/vocalist Josh Bertram, bassist Devin Trainer, guitarist Ian Tatum, and drummer/synth player Nicholas Cowman alternate between sounding like a real, rumbling live rock band and a bunch of artists frantically sculpting something in a gigantic studio throughout the album. Like a good math rock record, a lot of these change-ups in Joy Coming Down happen in the same song–this is the case right from opening track “Expo”, which takes a minute before coming into focus and then really steps on the gas pedal. Club Night sound like they’re trying to traverse over hot coals in “Lake”, an emo-rock song with an inability to stay in any one place for more than a moment. If you can ignore the AutoTuned intro and occasional harmonics, “Palace” almost sounds like a normal post-punk song, but there aren’t any “normal” bands that have the ability to put stuff like “Dream” and “Judah” (the latter of which features guest vocals from somebody named Brijit Spencer) to tape. Everything on Joy Coming Down is a mountain, but if there’s a single summit, to me it’s “Station”–it’s probably the song that initially made me bring up Wolf Parade, but the six-minute journey sounds like a lot more than just that one band. Maybe it’s a more caffeinated Vulture Feather, or an emo band that knows how to show just a little fucking bit of restraint. I’ve enjoyed plenty of music that can be called “difficult” over the years, but nobody else can make it sound as exciting, feverish, and (yes) joyful as Club Night. (Bandcamp link)

The Pennys – The Pennys

Release date: May 1st
Record label: Mt.St.Mtn.
Genre: Jangle pop, indie pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: No More Tears

The Pennys are the indie pop team-up that we didn’t know we needed. The band came together as a creative partnership between two San Francisco Bay Area titans in Michael Ramos and Ray Seraphin, later adding Yea-Ming Chen (Yea-Ming and the Rumors) on vocals, keyboards, and organ, Owen Adair Kelley (Sleepy Sun, R.E. Seraphin) on slide guitar, and Luke Robbins (R.E. Seraphin, Ryli, Yea-Ming and the Rumors) on vocals. Ramos and Seraphin have perhaps two of the most distinct styles of all the Bay Area pop revivalists–via his solo project Tony Jay (and to a lesser degree, his work as one half of Flowertown), Ramos embraces a slow-moving, unmoored, dreamy indie pop sound, while Seraphin’s quasi-solo project R.E. Seraphin embraces more full and grounded power pop/college rock (albeit tempered by his relatively gentle vocals). They’re clearly removed from one another, but compatible enough that it doesn’t surprise me that they blend well together on The Pennys, their new project’s debut 12-inch EP. Busier than Tony Jay but more subdued than R.E. Seraphin, The Pennys hit the jangle pop sweet spot for six songs and sixteen minutes on their first record (out via Mt.St.Mtn., which would be an indication of quality even if the co-bandleaders didn’t have plenty of work that speaks for itself).

Apparently The Pennys began with Seraphin asking Ramos to record an upcoming solo album of his, but their debut EP opens with a track that has Ramos’ creative input all over it in “Say Something”. It’s relatively lively for Ramos, yes, but that dream pop, Velvets-y ramshackleness and slowed-down pop charm all feel very Tony Jay-adjacent. “One Million Things” might as well be The Pennys’ “hit” (as if they’re not all hits); it’s very upfront with its jangly hooks and never falters from its strong start. The Pennys delve a little more into desert rootsiness with “Trilobytes” and 60s jangle-psych with “My World” while holding onto their direct pop instincts, while “Long in the Teeth”–an electric power pop tune destabilized and distorted by the recording and production–could be the most successful synthesis of the two bandleaders’ various styles on the EP. “No More Tears”, the song that closes The Pennys, might have something to say about that, though–the chorus (“Every time I tell myself ‘no more tears’ / The clouds above begin to unleash all my fears”, accompanied by sparkling guitars) is probably the single most gorgeous moment on the entire EP, its perfect guitar pop containing both shades of Seraphin’s lost-in-time power pop and Ramos’ “prehistorical pop music slowed down and reverb-ed all up”. They can’t keep getting away with this. (Bandcamp link)

Eli Winter – A Trick of the Light

Release date: May 2nd
Record label: Three Lobed
Genre: Jazz-rock, post-rock, experimental folk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: For a Fallen Rocket

The Houston-originating, Chicago-based guitarist Eli Winter has certainly accomplished quite a bit since the beginning of the decade. His 2020 debut solo album Unbecoming kicked off a productive period that’s included collaborative LPs with Jordan Reyes and Cameron Knowler, a steadily-growing collection of live records, and an acclaimed 2022 self-titled album that featured everyone from Yasmin Williams to jaimie branch to Ryley Walker. Winter’s latest album, once again released on Three Lobed Recordings (who put out Eli Winter), is an exciting six-song collection that weaves together rock, jazz, and folk music in an active and interconnected manner. Like Winter’s last “proper” album, A Trick of the Light features a variety of notable experimental and indie rock musicians–Mike Watt, David Grubbs (Gastr del Sol), and Kiran Leonard are some of the names appearing in the credits on this one. Some of these contributions were recorded remotely, added to the core of the album that was engineered by Cooper Crain at Electrical Audio, and Winter (as a songwriter, as a guitarist, as an arranger) does a satisfying job of making these instrumentals sound of a piece. 

It’s a precarious setup for a record: six songs, two of which are covers, and the album opener (which is one of those covers) is sixteen minutes long. Eli Winter knows what he’s doing, though, and that includes the incredibly bold maneuver of beginning A Trick of the Light with a take on Don Cherry and Ed Blackwell’s “Arabian Nightingale”. It starts with some fearless electric guitar playing from Winter, but it’s Gerrit Hatcher’s tenor saxophone and Andrew Scott Young’s upright bass that turn the track (which takes up almost the entire first side of the record) into the most overtly “jazz” recording on A Trick of the Light. The comedown is the only other song on Side A of the album, “For a Fallen Rocket”, which explores a bit of the fabled “cosmic country” sound between Winter’s acoustic picking, Sam Wagster’s pedal steel, and Eli Schmitt’s harmonium. The second half of A Trick of the Light kicks off with what’s probably the most compact jazz-infused rocker on the album, “Cracking the Jaw”, and “Ida Lupino” (a Carla Bley cover) and the title track both lead Winter and his band into stranger, emptier, and more restrained climes before all hands return on deck for the swirling seven-minute post-rock, post-country finale of “Black Iris on a Burning Quilt”. Winter lets some explosive, squealing guitar solos fly in the second half of the closing track, but it all ends with two minutes of near-silence. It’s an expertly wild trip. (Bandcamp link)

Milkweed – Remscéla

Release date: May 2nd
Record label: Broadside Hacks
Genre: Experimental folk, traditional folk, sound collage, electronic, post-rock
Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Exile of the Sons of Uisliu

London’s Milkweed are an experimental folk/“slacker trad” duo who’ve been doing their own thing since earlier this decade. The band (whose members seem to remain anonymous) put out their debut album, Myths and Legends of Wales, on Devil Town Tapes in 2022, and every year since then they’ve made an LP of crackling, warped, chopped-up folk and electronic music. The lyrics of every Milkweed album are drawn from historical source texts–their debut album comes from the 1984 book of the same name, last year’s Folklore 1979 comes from the ninetieth edition of The Folklore Society’s journal, and so on–and Remscéla is no different. Milkweed initially wanted to adapt the entirety of the 400-page Irish epic Táin Bó Cúailnge, but they were able to make an entire album just out of the “Remscéla”, a collection of backstories typically included alongside the epic’s main narrative but considered separate from it. Remscéla sounds like nothing else I’ve heard recently–the base of the record is traditional-sounding folk music, which Milkweed sometimes leave intact, sometimes distort slightly, and sometimes revamp entirely with industrial electronic and nearly trip-hop sounds. Banjos, beats, and dreamy vocals all float in Remscéla’s bizarre, intriguing atmosphere. 

No part of Remscéla is all that “friendly”, but the beginning is particularly strange and difficult to grasp–“How the Táin Bó Cuailnge Was Found Again” is a spoken word intro obscured and shrunken, while “How Conchobor Was Begotten” (which is, I guess, the first “proper” song) adds a cavernous dread to the already-pretty-cavernous-and-dreadful base folk song (structurally, it’s largely left intact). Remscéla is a pretty brief listen–most of these tracks are fairly short, but all of the sub-two-minute songs feels pretty complete nonetheless. The trip-hop Irish folk of “Téte Brec, the Twinkling Hoard”, the eerie creep of “Drinking in the House of Fedlimid”, and the noisy folk cloud of “Imbas Forasnai, the Light of Foresight” are as potent as anything else on Remscéla–in fact, it’s the longer songs where Milkweed truly let the ambient and collage tendencies to take over, between “Noisiu’s Voice a Wave Roar, a Sweet Sound to Hear Forever” and (parts of) “The Pangs of Ulster”. “Exile of the Sons of Uisliu” is probably the closest thing to a “hit” on Remscéla–it’s almost like a lo-fi Portishead by way of “I Am Stretched on Your Grave”-era Sinead O’Connor, but also with a part that sounds like a multi-banjo pile-up. Irish folklore never sounded so good. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Erik Woods, Percy Higgins, Emma Munger, Lily Seabird

The second Pressing Concerns of the week is here, and we’re popping in on new(ish) EPs from Erik Woods and Percy Higgins and new albums from Emma Munger and Lily Seabird here. Good! There’s also a Pressing Concerns from yesterday (featuring Mike Frazier, JPW & Dad Weed, Chris Brokaw, Blue Cactus), so check that one out if you missed it.

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.

Erik Woods – Visibly Psychotic

Release date: March 23rd
Record label: 21st Century Lo Fi
Genre: Folk rock, sadcore, lo-fi indie rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Do You Ever?

I used to listen to a podcast by a guy named John Roderick (of the band The Long Winters). There was one episode where (and this was many years ago that I heard this, so forgive me if I’m misremembering any specifics) he talked about growing up in Alaska and the isolation that comes with that, a type of isolation incomparable to anywhere else in the United States…“except maybe, like, West Virginia,” he allowed. I’ve written about Mountain State acts who incorporate a fair amount of darkness in their songs before (like Tucker Riggleman and The Long Lost Somethins), but never more has that particular quote resurfaced in my mind than while listening to an EP from a Huntington-based singer-songwriter named Erik Woods. Woods has been putting out folk/lo-fi indie rock-type music on 21st Century Lo Fi, a label he appears to co-run, for a while now–his latest record is four songs recorded in Charleston over a period of six months with a handful of other West Virginians in guitarist Sean Knisely, bassist David Gravely, and drummer Seth Hughes. Visibly Psychotic is an aurally strange experience–these songs have a dramatic, almost gothic darkness to them, but Woods’ band play them with no inkling of that level of pretension. It ends up sounding like a more Appalachian version of song-forward electric-ish slowcore acts like American Music Club and Idaho.

Between the slow pace of these songs and repeated religious/divine references, Visibly Psychotic kind of feels like a collection of hymns–but certainly not like a trip to church. “Liberated” ought to be the catchiest song on the EP, a mid-tempo, acoustic guitar-led lilting thing with a clear refrain, but Woods’ uncomfortably-up-close vocals forcefully reject any kind of easy listening folk rock experience. The actual “catchiest” song on Visibly Psychotic is probably the closing track, “Do You Ever?”–Emmy Davis and Hank Berlin’s guest vocals help the song come off just a little friendlier than the rest of the record, like it’s drawn from a more recognizably human kind of sadness. On the other end of the spectrum, “My Turtle” is the most memorable track on Visibly Psychotic in its singular strangeness. Gravely’s bass inches along and the guitar floats around in almost a “dream pop” manner, but once Woods takes the mic, it’s hard to focus on anything other than what he’s singing. “Got a mental illness / Made my own mother cry / I’ve got a mental illness / Sometimes I’d rather just die,” Woods sings with frightening simplicity, and in the chorus he simply says “My turtle will live longer than me” (known to live longer than a hundred years in some cases, turtles are discouraged as pets by most animal welfare experts for this reason, a trait they share with certain frequently-caged birds). It’s not a feel-good listen, but I’m not sure why you’d expect that from an EP called Visibly Psychotic–and it’s good for us to get confronted with this kind of thing from time to time, I think. (Bandcamp link)

Percy Higgins – Art Machine

Release date: April 16th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Lo-fi indie rock, experimental rock, noise rock, rap-rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Sombre Phones of the Past

Percy Higgins is the alter ego of a musician from London named Adam Kingsley, who plays bass and/or drums for a few different noise rock, punk, and metal bands (Muscle Vest, Ishtar Terra, Cannabis Man). Percy Higgins arrived on the scene in 2023 with an EP called Don’t Rag on the Spider, and we’re fortunate enough to join Kingsley for his follow-up record under the name, another EP called Art Machine. Kingsley listed four influences when he sent me this record: Beck, The Birthday Party, Captain Beefheart’s Magic Band, and MF Doom. These are all artists who–full disclosure–I find myself “respecting” more than “liking”. I’m not even sure if Art Machine really sounds like a synthesis of them, but there’s something about the noisy, dissonant, pounding take on hip-hop and fuzz rock music found herein that has drawn me in for whatever reason. Aside from mastering (provided by Muscle Vest bandmate Charlie Webb), Kingsley played and recorded everything on Art Machine, and he sounds like a nervous, irritated mad scientist behind the controls. Maybe Percy Higgins is kind of like Beck, but with all the fun and “coolness” replaced by good old-fashioned British noise rock bile.

Art Machine is a brief jolt to the senses–Percy Higgins only gives us five songs, and only one of those five is over three minutes long (opening track “Creature Feature” comes in at a clean 3:12). It’s a clanging, busy cacophony pretty much from moment one–after a brief warm-up, Kingsley drops into “Creature Feature”, rattling off rattled lyrics (“Uncanny valley, image source: Getty / Wading through knee deep existential confetti”) alongside a rowdy bassline, bullying drums, and occasional blasts of megaphone-aping guitars. “Sombre Phones of the Past” is a snaking post-punk song that revs itself up into just as much chaos as the track before it; “Don’t Think So, Tim” is the closest thing that Art Machine gets to a dial-back, leaning on a nervous bassline for the majority of its length and never fully letting loose. It’s right back to the brittle and banging with “Big Splash in the Almanac”, though, and “Full Weird” lives up to its name (not that it’s any “weirder” than the rest of Art Machine, but the swinging, dizzy finale is the one song where Kingsley’s psychedelic side really comes through). I’m still not entirely sure what to make of Art Machine, but I do think it’s the work of somebody with a keen grasp on “groove, counterpoint, and energy” (as Kingsley puts it so well himself), and it’s quite gripping to hear these used towards these unusual ends. (Bandcamp link)

Emma Munger – Pattern

Release date: January 17th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Folk, singer-songwriter
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Glow

January’s Pattern may be Emma Munger’s first “solo” album, but the Brooklyn-based musician has a lot of experience in a part of the music industry that I interacted with a lot less frequently–music for podcasts. Munger worked at Gimlet Media composing and mixing music for their shows for seven years, and has done plenty of work outside that banner as well (“production, teaching, audio restoration, and sound design”, per their website) . The first Emma Munger album is decidedly song-based and “indie folk”, and it features a couple of established singer-songwriters in Fenne Lily (harmonies) and Margaux Bouchegnies (bass, harmonies). Pattern is rounded out by some more ringers in drummer Theo Munger (Sinai Vessel), producer/multi-instrumentalist Sam Skinner (Pinegrove) and another podcast musician in Bobby Lord (who also played with Milked at one point) on guitar; all hands work towards sharpening Emma Munger’s folk songwriting into bits of soft rock, chamber pop, and even a bit of electric indie rock territory. The music is soft and polished, but Pattern works for me because Munger declines to fade into the background–perhaps after making music designed not to take attention away from podcast hosts, the musician is relishing the chance to let their voice take center stage for an entire album.

Pattern has a pretty unified indie folk sound, although it allows itself a nice range within it–sometimes it’s quieter, sometimes it’s a bit twangy, sometimes it’s a little more electric. The opening title track is the kind of chilly, breathy folk/indie rock/pop music that Phoebe Bridgers has been known to do well on occasion, and “Listening” and “Thread” pick up on this thread while leaning a little more into sparse folk and piano-based pop, respectively. The choppy electric guitars and mid-tempo indie rock of “Glow” make it probably my favorite moment on Pattern–it’s the only song on the record that fully embraces having the might of a rock band behind its vocalist (although the second-half of the slow-burn “Change” also qualifies) and it’s something I think I’d like to see Munger explore more in the future. Pattern is a pretty brief album overall–only twenty-six minutes–but it’s hard to find fault in this, as there’s a relatively unadorned charm to second-half songs like “Heart Rate”, “Chemistry”, and “Nervous Driver” that probably would’ve been diminished by padding for the sake of padding. What Munger gives us on Pattern is sufficient for the album to stand on its own as an LP–and enough for me to mark them as somebody who could have a rewarding career making music outside of the kind that got them established, should they desire to do so. (Bandcamp link)

Lily Seabird – Trash Mountain

Release date: April 4th
Record label: Lame-O
Genre: Folk rock, alt-country
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Arrow

Lily Seabird’s 2024 sophomore album Alas, was an exciting and promising statement of “folk rock/alt-country-influenced indie rock” (as I called it at the time); it was great in its own right and suggested that Seabird might have a case to be seen new alongside fuzzed-out country rock royalty like Wednesday and their various associates. It’s no surprise that Lame-O scooped up Seabird and re-released Alas, later last year, but I wasn’t exactly expecting a full-on follow-up album just a year and change later in Trash Mountain. Trash Mountain does feature some of the same faces as Alas, (namely the acclaimed singer-songwriter Greg Freeman and Robber Robber/Dari Bay’s Zack James), but it was written and recorded much more quickly than Seabird’s previous two albums, and I found myself pretty surprised at where the Vermont singer-songwriter decided to go on her third LP. The explosive bursts of noisy country rock of Alas, are decentered for a quieter, more deliberate, and intimate record, but this pull-back (if anything) only makes Seabird’s writing and singing even more immediate. Trash Mountain is a gorgeously ragged collection of folk rock that finds avenues of contentment rather than searching feverishly for moments of catharsis.

“Harmonia” begins the record with Seabird pouring so much out with just an electric guitar and her voice, and while the band eventually does kick in, it’s not like a sudden jerk forward like on Alas, highlights like “Grace” but more a subtle building-up. “Trash Mountain (1pm)” is harmonica-heavy, strung-out alt-country/folk music–it and the album are both named after a real place, an artist-filled house on a “decommissioned landfill” site where Seabird lived while writing the album. It’s not hard to imagine the run-down but creatively-charged environment informing the framing of songs like the two “Trash Mountain”s, the string-aided acoustic folk of “Sweepstake”, the probing electric alt-country rock of “Arrow”, and the After the Gold Rush-ish piano ballad “How Far Away”. The biggest moment on the second side of Trash Mountain is the sprawling “Trash Mountain (1am)”, but its late-night triumph is only bolstered by the quieter “Albany” and “The Fight” surrounding it. Stripping away a layer of guitars and distortion doesn’t always equal “maturity”, but Seabird has responded to her new circumstances with what feels like her strongest writing yet–all of these nine songs, from the sparsest recordings to the most fully-realized rock songs, stand on their own even without the benefit of the towering, friendly, dilapidated vantage point from which they rest on Trash Mountain. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Mike Frazier, JPW & Dad Weed, Chris Brokaw, Blue Cactus

New blog post! New albums from Mike Frazier, JPW & Dad Weed, Chris Brokaw, and Blue Cactus! They’re good! You should know this by now!

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.

Mike Frazier – April Days

Release date: April 25th
Record label: Geneva/Den Tapes
Genre: Alt-country, country rock, Americana, singer-songwriter, folk rock
Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Pyramids in the Sky

Almost exactly a year ago, Mike Frazier put out an album called Secrets of Atlantis, a beautiful psychedelic pop LP that the singer-songwriter had recorded from 2020 to 2022 in his hometown of Winchester, Virginia, moving to Seattle shortly after its completion. Unbeknownst to me at the time I wrote about it, however, Frazier was also dealing with the debilitating effects of long-undiagnosed temporal lobe epilepsy, and in fact spent the day before Secrets of Atlantis‘ release getting brain surgery (a “right temporal craniotomy”, to be specific). Thankfully, Frazier’s surgery was a success, and was soon feeling well enough to begin working on his seventh album. Frazier’s writing in April Days is clearly informed by his health journey (“a record made out of necessity”, the Bandcamp page calls it), although this goes beyond the more obvious lyrical references to illness and recovery. There’s a refreshing directness to April Days–recorded live, it’s a departure from the layered psychedelia of Secrets of Atlantis and a return to Frazier’s Appalachian folk-country roots even as he sets up shop in the Pacific Northwest. It’s just as much of a “PNW album” as a “brain surgery album”, although perhaps it’s just an album about appreciating the most important things–nature, health, and peace. 

“I’ve been feeling like something is wrong / The voice in my head has been here for too long / One day I will get / To live life again,” Frazier sings in the opening title track, a gorgeous Neil Youngian folk piano ballad, and he pleads for “a break in the pain” in the next track, “What’s Wrong with Me?”. Frazier also is a dead ringer for Young in Side Two’s “Humboldt County” (I’m not special for noticing this; there’s an amusing anecdote Frazier tells about his brain surgeon listening to his music and telling the singer-songwriter that it reminds him of Young), but the influence goes beyond the musical. Between the plea for peace in “April Days”, the fervent hope for a “World Without Empires” in a second half highlight, and the held-at-bay-for-now spectre of greed hovering over the beautiful green mountains of Cascadia in “Oregon Stars”, there’s a clear-eyed idealism in Frazier’s writing that only feels sharper after what he’s been through. My favorite moment on April Days is “Pyramids in the Sky”, though, a raucous country rock tune about–what else?–aliens and their spaceships of choice. I could sit here and draw parallels between the extraterrestrial narrative of “Pyramids in the Sky” and the topographical, neurological, and pacifist themes of April Days, but, really, more than anything, I think it rules that Mike Frazier went from somebody who held up a copy of his last LP from his hospital bed because he was too unwell to do any other kind of promotion to somebody jamming out with a bunch of country musicians in a basement via a song about UFOs, all in a few months. (Bandcamp link)

JPW & Dad Weed – Amassed Like a Rat King

Release date: April 22nd
Record label: Fort Lowell
Genre: Power pop, psychedelic pop, college rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Everybody’s Talking (Again)

Some of you may already be familiar with Jason P. Woodbury due to his work as a writer and interviewer for the great blog Aquarium Drunkard (among other places). Like many other music writers (i.e. Sam Sodomsky with The Bird Calls, Winston Cook-Wilson with Office Culture), Woodbury also makes music himself–he released an album called Something Happening / Always Happening in 2022 via Fort Lowell Records. Last year, the Phoenix-based Woodbury linked up with another Arizonian musician, Zach Toporek, who makes music under the name Dad Weed, and the two released a collaborative EP called Two Against Nurture. That record turned out to just be the start, as the duo have made an entire album together called Amassed Like a Rat King (credited to JPW & Dad Weed–who needs to come up with fancy side project names, anyway?). That album title is honestly pretty metal, but that couldn’t be further away from the music the two of them make here–recalling power pop, jangle pop, and college rock of the 1960s through the 1980s and lightly baked by the southwestern sun, JPW & Dad Weed’s first album together is a comfortable but undeniably hooky guitar pop LP.

Woodbury and Toporek couldn’t ease us more smoothly into the world of Amassed Like a Rat King if they tried–the opening title track is almost impossibly laid-back, an excellent chugging bass guitar setting the stage for a hazy, lazy desert pop introduction. “It’s Happening” is a little more lively and even a little bit nervous (in a Lowe/Crenshaw/Costello sense) at times, but the duo don’t forget to nail the power pop chorus. The no-bullshit, all-business jangle-power pop of “Everybody’s Talking (Again)” crosses the economy of Dazy with the southwestern vibes of Dust Star and the most recent Young Guv album. The quiet, lo-fi “Far Off Road” indulges the stranger sides of JPW and Dad Weed, and though they get back to power pop soon enough (check the floppy rock and roll of “Frightening” right afterwards), they return to the odd well for the alleyway country of “Not Sure What I’m Looking At” and the Segall-ish psychedelia of “Figure of Speech”–not to mention the record’s final two songs, both of which opt for minimalist instrumentation and simple drum machine beats. By the second half of Amassed Like a Rat King, the gap between songs like this and stuff like “Straight Lines” (a more obvious but nonetheless meandering pop song) starts to blur together, and the album starts to feel more and more like a friendly drive through the desert with some friends. It’s a party on the road, and oblivion on both sides of you. (Bandcamp link)

Chris Brokaw – Ghost Ship

Release date: April 25th
Record label: 12XU
Genre: Post-rock, slowcore, ambient
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Palatine Light

I could spend all the space I’ve allotted myself here going over everything that Chris Brokaw has done in his illustrious indie rock career–I won’t, but an introduction of some sort is in order for the Massachusetts-based guitarist. Brokaw formed part of two key 1990s indie rock groups–first Codeine in New York City, then Come in Boston–and continues to play intermittently with them today. The decade after that, he became the drummer for slowcore greats The New Year, and more recently he’s been playing in Lupo Citta and The Martha’s Vineyard Ferries as well as appearing on records by everyone from Hilken Mancini to Gramercy Arms to his Come bandmate Thalia Zedek. Oh, and he’s kept up with a prolific solo career for all of this century, too–his label 12XU says he’s put out “over two dozen solo albums”, as well as doing a fair amount of soundtrack work for films. So, while it’s been four years since the last Brokaw solo album, 2021’s Puritan, he’s hardly been idle in the intermittent time. Brokaw’s music really runs the gamut, so it’s not surprising that his latest LP, Ghost Ship, is a pretty stark departure from the electric, shambling Crazy Horse-reminiscent indie rock and roll of Puritan. 

Comprised entirely of Brokaw and his electric guitar, Ghost Ship is a slow, quiet, and atmospheric (but nonetheless still mostly song-based) “landscape meditation (at sea)” across nine tracks. It’s a floating record, unbothered, unhurried, and unoccupied by anything other than trying to sculpt the image that Brokaw has in mind. And what is this image? The grey sea, clouds, and land formations on the album cover are probably a good start; Brokaw envisioned the record as an “8 song statement” that turned into nine and somewhat apologetically refers to it as “Twin Peaks-ish”. It’s three songs and nine minutes into Ghost Ship before we hit the only real choppy waters–the peaceful “Over My Body” and the mystical vibes of the title track give way to two minutes of turbulence in “Anything Anymore”, but “Palatine Light” and “Vampire of Rathmines” steady the ship (leaving us with an eeriness that might even be more unnerving than the chaos before it). The only other song on Ghost Ship that comes close to rousing us from our land-lost stupor is “8 or 9 Things”–there’s a nervousness in this somewhat-buried song, like a darker Yo La Tengo demo adrift without the collaborative aspect of the band to tether it. Brokaw will undoubtedly step off the Ghost Ship and onto something completely different soon, but his journey on it is one worth mapping. (Bandcamp link)

Blue Cactus – Believer

Release date: April 25th
Record label: Sleepy Cat
Genre: Country rock, folk rock, alt-country, Americana
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: This Kind of Rain

Vocalist/lyricist Steph Stewart and multi-instrumentalist Mario Arnez are a pair of Research Triangle ringers–the latter has played on records from H.C. McEntire and Chatham Rabbits, the former had a quasi-solo project called Steph Stewart & The Boyfriends (and also handles PR for her label, Sleepy Cat Records, so I’d received many emails from her before hearing her own music). They started making alt-country music as Blue Cactus in the mid-2010s, and they put out two records (2017’s self-titled album and 2020’s Stranger Again) before going quiet for a few years while Stewart dealt with chronic health issues. Blue Cactus are ready to return now, though, with a delicate but confident Americana album called Believer. The duo reference classic folk-country singer-songwriters like Gillian Welch and Emmylou Harris as inspiration for their co-written material, and Believer does its best to balance the simple intimacy of the former with the polish of the latter. Plenty of experienced Nashville-associated hands touched this record (singer-songwriter Erin Rae, Third Man jazz artist Rich Ruth, keyboardist Ryan Connors), but Blue Cactus’ writing is sufficiently far removed from the bright lights of the city on Believer.

The country rockers on Believer all hit immediately–opening track “This Kind of Rain” is an alt-country classic, laid-back but electric in a way that’s in the same universe as the best of Lilly Hiatt and recent Waxahatchee, among others. “Bite My Tongue” is a mid-tempo country rock showcase for Stewart’s talents as a vocalist and lyricist–the chorus finds her pleading “When you gonna really hear me?” in a voice that should be unignorable. The title track is an electric ballad as well; it starts out fairly restrained, but the soaring guitar soloing to which the song builds up might be the most exhilarating thing on all of the album. The quieter, more acoustic songs on Believer aren’t any less well-executed, from the folk-pop of “Resolution” in the album’s first half to the quieter material that ends up closing out the album. “Kings” is patient, meandering cosmic folk rock that eventually (via the interlude “Counting the Days”) bleeds into the pindrop quiet “Paper Cup”. Classic country and pop music from long ago merge with something a little more dreamy and freer in the album’s final track, “Gone”; like most of Believer, it’s low-key and intuitive, the sound of two musicians traversing down a well-worn path they know quite well but never find themselves tired of traveling. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

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: