Pressing Concerns: Moon Orchids, Midwestern Medicine, Publicity Department, Smalltalk

In the second Pressing Concerns of the week, Rosy Overdrive takes a look at new albums from Moon Orchids and Publicity Department, as well as new EPs from Midwestern Medicine and Smalltalk. You may not have heard of these bands before, but I think you’ll find something to enjoy below! Oh, and check out yesterday’s Pressing Concerns (featuring David Ivan Neil, Gaytheist, Hooky & Winter, and Joshua Wayne Hensley) if you haven’t done so yet.

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.

Moon Orchids – Moon Orchids

Release date: February 3rd
Record label: Positively 4th Street
Genre: Folk rock, alt-country
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: November

Moon Orchids are a folk rock group from Kalamazoo, Michigan led by singer-songwriter and guitarist Jacob Simons, who co-founded the band with guitarist Bailey Miller and vocalist/trumpet player Morgan Keltie in 2021. The addition of a bassist (Jeremy Cronk) and drummer (Brendon Infante) soon followed, as well as a debut EP (2023’s Skin/Skein) and, now, a proper self-titled debut album. Simons caught my attention by referencing names like Magnolia Electric Co. and Silkworm as points of influence for Moon Orchids, but the one I’d lean the most on in describing the sound of Moon Orchids is the same act from which those bands took a good deal of inspiration–Neil Young and Crazy Horse. Moon Orchids (which also features contributions from multi-instrumentalist Mark Andrew Morris and saxophonist Isaac Bagley) is a “folk/rock” record like classic Young LPs, with mandolin and acoustic guitar-led folk songs sitting right next to blustery, meandering Crazy Horse-style rock explosions. Unlike a lot of modern Neil Young-influenced alt-country groups that hide their vocals under a layer of distortion, Simons stays up front–in the acoustic songs, sure, but in the rockers, too, a decision that helps Moon Orchids step out of time and put together an unplaceable and distinct journey of a full listen.

In a classic Neil Young move (or, if you prefer, something of an Andrew Cohen & Light Coma-esque one), Moon Orchids begins and ends with two versions of the same song–“The Gospel Tree II” (which opens the record with some acoustic guitar/mandolin folk) and “The Gospel Tree” (a swinging but unhurried country rock tune that finishes it). Simon’s matter-of-fact, leisurely vocals don’t sound like Neil (they kind of remind me of Jon Massey of Silo’s Choice/Upstairs/Coventry, actually), but I’ll admit that the sincere bizarreness of it all (“The angels playing upstairs just sound like castrati to these ears / They’ve got monkeys in their gospel tree; they’ve told me”) is an effective tribute. In between are six tracks neatly split down the middle genre-wise–if you’re looking for the Crazy Horse rockers, you’ll find them with the cavernous “Universe Blues”, the six-minute noir-rock of “Taciturn”, and the sweeping, Keltie-sung “November”. These are the songs on Moon Orchids that grabbed me immediately, but that’s not to say that the quieter half of the record is the weaker one–in particular, I should single out penultimate track “Shab Bekheir”, which features Simons alone on 12-string acoustic guitar and reminds me a bit of those early Mint Mile recordings. Apparently Simons has since moved to Colorado, which leaves the future of Moon Orchids in limbo, and while it’d certainly be a shame if this group of people weren’t able to make more music together at some point again, Moon Orchids is an ample legacy if it has to be. (Bandcamp link)

Midwestern Medicine – Ripped Headline

Release date: February 21st
Record label: Website
Genre: Garage rock, garage punk, 90s indie rock, post-punk
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Next Door Hell

Brock Ginther has been a consistent fixture in New England indie rock since the early 2010s, when he was in the Boston band King Pedestrian. As of late, Ginther’s been based out of Portland, Maine, but that hasn’t slowed his musical output down–in fact, during this decade he was a co-leader of Vacationland supergroup Lemon Pitch and continues to front the bands Divorce Cop and Midwestern Medicine. There are differences in the various acts (Divorce Cop is for no-fi, no-wave basement punk experiments, Midwestern Medicine is more melodic indie rock), but Ginther’s honed a distinct style over the years, marked by an ability to veer between polished, humble sounding poppy 90s indie rock evoking Jason Lytle, Mark Linkous, and Stephen Malkmus to off-the-wall careening rockabilly rave-ups at the drop of a pin (when I wrote about the final Lemon Pitch album, I called him “the most unhinged” of the three singer-songwriters). On the latest Midwestern Medicine record, a five-song EP called Ripped Headlines, Ginther and the rest of the band (bassist McCrae Hathway and Brian Saxton, plus keys on one track by engineer Bradford Krieger) hew toward the more slapdash side of the Ginther spectrum–it’s a noisy, garage-y indie rock EP, but one that unmistakably bears the mark of its frontperson.

If you’re looking for the motormouth-featuring, galloping-percussion-led side of Midwestern Medicine, you’ll get it throughout Ripped Headline, most prominently in the sprint of “Foolstuff” and the warbly rock and roll of “Credit Line”. However, the entirety of this EP is made up of two-to-three minute “rockers”, so don’t expect stuff like the opening title track (which, for most of its length, drowns out Ginther’s vocals with a noisy post-punk attack) and “Next Door Hell” (which Ginther says would be the single “if [he] was doing that kind of thing”) to be breathers. The stitched-together garage rock pop journey of “Next Door Hell” does deserve a special mention in this regard–there’s a bunch of really cool sections mashed together here, from the post-punk-garage verses to the lurching-upwards pre-chorus to the sneering refrain that gives the song its title to the…post-chorus? (Whatever you call the part that goes “They’ve got a draft of my unauthorized biography / It’s big enough that I’ll get crushed if it gets dropped on me”) which is actually probably the best part. The only thing on Ripped Headline that could be described as “subtle” is the first half of closing track “Down by the Drain”–Ginther surprisingly mumbles along to the mid-tempo, downcast instrumental before Midwestern Medicine switch gears and remember how to sound loud and a little unnerving to finish things off. Krieger’s keys and a bit of restraint can hold Midwestern Medicine together for a minute, but it’s a temporary adhesive. (Bandcamp link)

Publicity Department – Old Master

Release date: February 7th
Record label: Safe Suburban Home
Genre: Lo-fi power pop, slacker pop
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: (There’s No Stopping Me and My Friends from Achieving) Happiness Again

A lo-fi guitar pop solo project from a London indie rocker released via Safe Suburban Home Records, eh? I’ve got a good feeling about this one. Sean Brook is Publicity Department–he’s also the vocalist and guitarist in a difficult-to-Google quartet called Brunch, and the first few Publicity Department releases (an EP in 2015, an album in 2018) were intermittent and reflected the work of somebody who has other irons in the fire. Brunch are still kicking (after a COVID-induced hiatus, they returned with a three-song EP last year), but Publicity Department has taken a few steps forward recently, releasing a full-band-recorded sophomore album in 2023 and returning quickly (albeit back to mostly Brook on his own again) with a third LP, Old Master, early this year. Joshua Belcher (who drummed on the last Publicity Department album) plays drums on one track, and Brunch bandmate Adrian McCusker receives a co-writing credit on one song, but otherwise Old Master is all Brook, recorded in a “shed” in the singer-songwriter’s garden. There are some upbeat rockers here, but Old Master generally follows a winding, meandering slacker rock path, British pessimism and irony fighting against the melodies and hooks to come to a convincing draw.

Brook writes that Old Master is partially written from the “perspective of old men raging at a world they have all but destroyed but no longer understand”, and it follows from there to imagine the glaring elderly gentlemen peeking out of his safe suburban home on the album cover muttering refrains like “You want some advice from someone? / Don’t try, don’t try, don’t try,” in the spirited anti-anthem “Don’t Try”, “I have lived a sheltered life / Nothing too much just out of sight,” in the almost self-reflective “Sheltered Life”, and, of course, “Get a Haircut, Hippie”. The latter two of those songs help shape the core sound of Old Master, an unhurried gait of one way too long in the tooth to worry about overly impressing anyone (an attitude helped out by the synth accents in more anchor-tracks like “Two Little Birds” and “No Clown”), although when Publicity Department up the tempo a little bit, there’s a nice fuzz-pop variety added to the LP. There’s a yet-to-be extinguished defiance in songs like “(There’s No Stopping Me and My Friends from Achieving) Happiness Again” and the brief sprint of “It’s a Pain”, and the toe-tapping “Prime” is less clear but bursts out of its haze for the refrain, at least. Whether Brook’s narrators actually do have any hope of breaking out of Old Master’s fog (or whether they even ought to seek to) isn’t really answered, but it makes for a nice trip to the garden shed. (Bandcamp link)

Smalltalk – As If

Release date: January 18th
Record label: Candlepin/Pleasure Tapes
Genre: Fuzz pop, jangle pop, dream pop
Formats: CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Sweet Want

As always, Boston cassette label Candlepin Records has continued to be the premier home for modern shoegaze, slowcore, lo-fi “Numero Group”-inspired indie rock groups in 2025. Worthwhile releases from Marathon Runner, Lacing, and Ian Huschle have already surfaced this year, but I’m still stuck on the label’s first release of 2025, an EP from a dreamy, shoegaze-y fuzz pop group from Savannah, Georgia called Smalltalk. There’s not too much information about this band out there–at one point, it was the solo project of Andrew Keith, but they’re clearly a quartet now, and although there’s a trail of Bandcamp releases going all the way back to 2017, it seems like As If (co-released with similarly-minded Portland, Oregon imprint Pleasure Tapes) is Smalltalk’s first release as a full band. Although Smalltalk do have that “from a basement somewhere in America” attitude, As If eschews the more experimental and abrasive sides of this kind of music and instead portrays the band as polished, hook-chasing devotees of the jangly, new wave/college rock version of 80s post-punk and dream pop. Although it’s only a six-song EP, As If is more than enough in its twenty-four minutes for us to get a full sense of how locked-in Smalltalk is in its pursuit of this noble goal.

Not only are Smalltalk a sneakily excellent pop band, they also want you to know about it–they load up As If with a pair of no-holds-barred guitar pop anthems to kick things off. Fans of wistful but still very electric modern dream pop groups like Subsonic Eye will find themselves well-taken-care-of in opening track “Sweet Want”–the guitars shimmer, the vocals are way more melodic and dramatic than they seem on the surface, and even the bass gets in on the melodic action, too. “Talk Is Cheap” follows it, its predecessor’s equal in every way (but, by adding a bit more distortion to the colorful tapestry, avoids repeating itself too much). As If kind of follows the trajectory of a big, sweeping wave–the middle of the EP is the loudest, heaviest, most directly shoegaze-indebted section, between the wall-of-guitars mid-tempo lumbering of “Snaggletooth” and “Remembrance”, which balances spindly, hooky guitar parts with bouts of noise. The latter song ushers back in Smaltalk’s unvarnished “pop” side, as “Wrapped in Blues” and “Falling Down” close out As If with a pair of tracks that rival the EP’s opening duo. There’s a bit of a punchiness to them, though, like Smalltalk picked up something new in the sea of “Snaggletooth” and its distortion. All in the service of giving us a smooth ride through their world. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: David Ivan Neil, Gaytheist, Hooky & Winter, Joshua Wayne Hensley

We’ll be starting a really great week on Rosy Overdrive with a Pressing Concerns featuring new albums from David Ivan Neil and Gaytheist, a new EP from Joshua Wayne Hensley, and a collaborative EP between Hooky and Winter. Folk rock, noise-punk, jangle-dream pop, lo-fi bedroom rock; we’ve got a bit of everything in this one!

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.

David Ivan Neil – I Hope Yer OK

Release date: February 21st
Record label: Kingfisher Bluez/Perpetual Doom
Genre: Alt-country, folk rock, singer-songwriter
Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Drums

Who doesn’t love a good outsider folk weirdo? Cult alt-country label Perpetual Doom certainly does, and their latest edition to their stable of anti-stars (alongside the likes of Austin Leonard Jones, Lee Baggett, and Bill Baird) certainly fits the bill. David Ivan Neil hails from the far-inland British Columbia town of Enderby (five hours from Vancouver, where Kingfisher Bluez, who’s co-releasing his latest album with Perpetual Doom, is located), and I can’t even begin to imagine how somebody ends up in a place like that. Neil has been putting out music for over a decade now per his Bandcamp, including a pair of albums on Kingfisher Bluez in 2019 and 2020. So, even though Neil has remained pretty active (putting out an EP with Normal Horse in 2023, for instance), I Hope Yer OK is the singer-songwriter’s first “proper” album in a bit. What he and a revolving door of collaborators (deemed the “A OK Players”) have put together is a pretty fascinating portrait of an off-the-dome rambling troubadour, one who sounds like he grabbed a guitar, played the first three chords he could think of, and then just started emptying his thoughts for the majority of the LP.  I Hope Yer OK gets up close and personal with its creator, and sometimes it’s ugly, but Neil shrugs off the dramatic and the sensational and keeps playing.

The first track on I Hope Yer OK, “Drums”, is a wobbly mid-tempo folk-country-rock opening prayer: “I wanna play the drums / I wanna play ‘em loud,” accompanied by some “na na na”s, “ooh”s, and, of course, the instrument in question. In the aftermath of this surprisingly sweeping declaration, Neil remembers a few people who have passed on from this life (in “Song for an Old Friend” and “Little Bird”), gives himself a haircut to avoid doing yardwork, describes a bidet in amusing bumpkin fashion, and covers “K-Hole” by the Silver Jews (turning the chaotic original version into a dark country death march), among other adventures. The A OK Players do an admirable job of cleaning up their eccentric leader–you’ll hear keyboards, woodwinds, accordion, strings, and more across I Hope Yer OK, a level of intricacy that reaches beyond the plodding, simple basslines and cowboy chords that form the foundations of these songs. “Feelin’ a little hungover, but I’m happy to be alive,” Neil somewhat mumbles in “Haircut”, and then gets into the shower feeling “sad” that a friend of his won’t take a phone call but “happy” to have received confirmation he’s alive. And then, in “Learnin’ to Swim”, he observes “A dream with no plan is masturbation at best,” only to follow it with “But making love to your hand [will] help you build the right muscles / The ones that’ll help you draw the map”. It’s impressive just how easily I Hope Yer OK makes it feel like we’re right in the middle of Neil’s mind. I don’t think that the album is entirely pulled from his unfiltered trains of thought; he’s a lot more brilliant than he’s letting on if so. (Bandcamp link)

Gaytheist – The Mustache Stays

Release date: February 21st
Record label: Hex
Genre: Noise rock, noise punk, hardcore punk, metallic hardcore
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Break Me In

If you go all the way back to the very early days of Rosy Overdrive, you’ll find Gaytheist’s How Long Have I Been on Fire? on the blog’s best of 2020 list, where a more annoying version of myself called the Portland, Oregon trio “a glam-hardcore-punk band” and the album itself “really fucking catchy”. A band squarely in the middle of the “noise rock” landscape with punk energy, metal chops, and a sense of humor, Gaytheist were a breath of fresh air at the time, and guitarist/vocalist Jason Rivera, bassist Tim Hoff, and drummer Nikolas Parks have been sorely missed in the five years since How Long Have I Been on Fire?. The wait is over, however–once again via heavy music institution Hex Records, Gaytheist have unveiled The Mustache Stays, which I believe is their fifth proper album and first in a half decade. If it’s not as immediately catchy and, well, funny as How Long Have I Been on Fire?, it makes up for it in terms of pure cannonball-like energy–Gaytheist sequence the album in the most dangerous way possible, throwing a bunch of brief, explosive noise-punk blasts at us in a row before sneaking in a few surprises in the back half of the LP.

“Shelved”, “Break Me In”, and “Omnimpotent” are all sub-two-minute ragers to get The Mustache Stays’ party started–at their most high-flying, like on the former of those three, they sound like goofy heavy metal/hardcore hybrid Mutoid Man, but with a more obvious noise rock background–“Break Me In”, meanwhile, is clearly the work of hardcore punks even if they’re shooting for something beyond the pit in which the track spends a good deal of its time. “Lift with Back” needs only sixty seconds to wreck everything in its path, but when Gaytheist finally relent and make a song that’s longer than three minutes with “Pyrohydra”, they make good use of every moment of that one, too. Oh, and also there’s a surprisingly faithful eight-minute cover of The Smashing Pumpkins’ “Silverfuck” on this album (I mean, faithful aside from making a few of the lyrics more gay, but this is Gaytheist we’re talking about). It really comes out of nowhere, but Gaytheist absorb Billy Corgan’s prog-thrash-grunge-metal-punk anthem with the strength that can only come from rocking out to some of your most formative guitar records with your friends (I assume). Really, it’s an appropriate choice, because The Mustache Stays kind of sounds like Gaytheist tried to make an album entirely out of the climax of “Silverfuck”, where all the guitars and pummeling drums come flooding back in after Corgan’s dreamy aside. Gaytheist are just crazy enough to make it work for them. (Bandcamp link)

Hooky & Winter – Water Season

Release date: February 14th
Record label: Julia’s War
Genre: Dream pop, lo-fi pop, jangle pop, shoegaze, psychedelia
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Horseshoe

Today we have a brief but solid collaborative EP between two notable modern shoegaze/noise pop/dream pop acts that have yet to appear on this blog. Two birds, one stone! One half of the four-song Water Season EP is Winter, the Brazil-originating, New York-based artist Samira Winter who has been making music for over a decade (most recently via indie institution Bar None Records) but I think can safely be grandfathered into the current wave of shoegaze-pop bands presently hitting the States. The other act on the bill for Water Season is Hooky, a newer band, but the Philadelphia duo of Scott Turner and Sam Silbert have been busy–apparently they’ve released four albums since 2021, and the two most recent LPs have come via Julia’s War, the label at the center of the the modern experimental shoegaze movement. The two acts became fans of one another, eventually leading to Winter traveling to Philadelphia to write and record music with Hooky, and Water Season is the result. Out via Julia’s War, the eight-minute cassette tape is barely more than a tease, but there’s more than enough on this EP to suggest that the creative forces behind it do indeed have a sturdy connection.

I won’t pretend to be an expert on what either of these bands’ music pre-Water Season sounds like; my sense is that the more experimental electronic side of this EP comes from Hooky and the more melodic dream pop is from Winter, but also that there’s a fair amount of overlap in these two acts’ styles anyway. I don’t really make a distinction between “single” and “EP” for records with more than two songs these days, but if we’re doing that, Water Season (though billed as the latter) has a strong case for the former, too–there’s one obvious “hit” in the first slot, and three stranger experiments following it. “Horseshoe”, the hypothetical A-side, is worth the price of admission alone–it’s two minutes of jangly dream pop bubblegum, warped guitar lines, and sneakily huge vocals that all make it sound like a mussed-up, more electronic-influenced version of the best Sundays and Cranberries singles. Nothing else on Water Season will grab you immediately like “Horseshoe” does, but “In Your Pocket” and “Lost Tears” are both “pop music” in their own ways; the former is a two-minute tangle of psychedelia, dream pop, and trip-hop, the latter an electroacoustic, AutoTuned experiment that still has melodies buried in it nonetheless. “I Like You” helps the “single” comparison by ending the EP by basically turning bits of “Horseshoe” into a dubby dance track–calling back to the biggest pop moment on Water Season in the weirdest one, Hooky and Winter make the record’s small circle a full one nonetheless. (Bandcamp link)

Joshua Wayne Hensley – I’m Proud of You, Kid

Release date: February 7th
Record label: Patsy Presents
Genre: Lo-fi pop, bedroom folk, post-punk
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: All Get Better

For over twenty years, northern Indiana singer-songwriter Joshua Wayne Hensley has led South Bend PRF-core indie rock group The Rutabega, and he also has an indie folk side project called Forestlike that put out an album a couple of years ago. This decade, Hensley has seemed to treat his solo output as a clearing house for some miscellaneous ideas and concepts, including a seven-song collection called Stationing, a Fountains of Wayne covers EP, and a twelve-minute, one-track tribute to the late Steve Albini called Get the Lights. The latest Hensley solo release is a brief EP called I’m Proud of You, Kid, and it sees the musician slide into the world of low-key, lo-fi pop music. For the most part, these five songs are the result of Hensley tinkering around alone (Matt Sparling contributes “buckets of drums” to the title track, and “Jimmy Nardello Stole My Heart” utilizes one of Spencer Tweedy’s “Drumprints” drum samples), and aside from the final track, these feel like brief, off-the-cuff basement moments. Sometimes goofy, sometimes quite earnest (sometimes both), I’m Proud of You, Kid has a hand-made, patchwork quality to it that holds it together even as Hensley hops from one idea to the next.

The songs with percussion on I’m Proud of You, Kid lean heavily on the rhythm for structure, albeit to different ends–the opening title track is woozy, kitchen-sink marching band pop music that bobs and bounds along with Hensley as he delivers the titular message as many times as he thinks he needs to. “Bouncing Baby Bunnies” is an absurdist minimal post-punk/dance-punk song, Hensley getting to practice his speak-singing skills as he rattles off lines like “Bounce around / have a bite / Bounce around / Don’t forget your dessert”. “Jimmy Nardello Stole My Heart” is the “skronkiest” track here, a few lines about the pepper that gives the track its title interspersed with a clatter of drum samples and synths. These are fun excursions, but it’s the two departures that form the real heart of I’m Proud of You, Kid–the two-minute acoustic lo-fi singalong “All Get Better” reminds me of a more stripped version of turn-of-the-century twee folk, right down to the lazily-paced guitar chords and thematic uncertainty (“Will we all get better? / We’ll all get better or not”), and then there’s the five minute instrumental “Dream Suite” which closes out the EP. It’s more in line with some of Hensley’s non-“pop” material, but by putting it as a cap to I’m Proud of You, Kid, the empty space and deliberate electric guitar hiking start to sound like a conversation with the more chaotic moments of the record. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Califone, Baths, Rapt, The Rishis

It’s the Thursday Pressing Concerns! It’s an avalanche of new music that comes out tomorrow, February 21st! It’s new albums from Califone, Baths, Rapt, and The Rishis! Oh, and also be sure to check out Monday’s Pressing Concerns (featuring Minorcan, Outro, Above Me, and Nobody’s Dad) or Tuesday’s (featuring Patches, …or Does It Explode?, Future Living, and Hour) if you haven’t yet. And–of course–you want to read 1,700 words on Silkworm’s reissued 1997 masterpiece Developer, which went up yesterday.

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.

Califone – The Villager’s Companion

Release date: February 21st
Record label: Jealous Butcher
Genre: Folk rock, post-rock, art rock, blues rock, 90s indie rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: The Bullet B4 the Sound

One of my favorite lesser-remembered 90s indie rock bands is Chicago blues-influenced group Red Red Meat, who were on Sub Pop and released four increasingly experimental LPs before disintegrating at the end of the decade. Frontperson Tim Rutili has went on to have an impressive second act as the leader of Califone, which I haven’t kept up with as much as I should but who more or less have continued to make music in the vein of Red Red Meat for over twenty years. Califone came back from something of a hiatus at the beginning of this decade by partnering with Jealous Butcher Records and starting to put out regular records again (2020’s Echo Mine, 2023’s The Villagers), and it’s apparent that the band (featuring contributions from a couple other Red Red Meat alumni in producer Brian Deck and percussionist Ben Massarella, as well as ex-Decemberists drummer Rachel Blumberg and guitarist Michael Krassner, a journeyman who’s played with everyone from Simon Joyner to The Moles) are fully active again, as they’re back just two years after their most recent album with another LP.

As the name implies, The Villager’s Companion is linked to the record before it, recorded around the same time and augmented by a couple of covers that have been previously released over the past few years. Rutili referred to these songs as “misfit toys” when the album was announced, but The Villager’s Companion is just further confirmation that Califone thrives in a less formal environment. It gives Rutili and company a chance to both spin some simple blues-folk numbers and to journey beyond them right next to each other, to interpret other people’s songs and incorporate them into the Califone songbook like they’ve always belonged there. After spending more time with them, Califone feel to me like old Chicago-blues version of what Lambchop do with bygone Nashville country-pop–both bands have a distinct but shifting style that can’t be summed up by a pair of “canonical” albums, and they’ve both clearly got a way with a cover song.

The Califone originals are too strong to be dinged with “castoff” status, even as they’re all disparate and probably tricky to slot into a “normal” LP–we’ve got “Gas Station Roller Doggs” and “Jaco Pastorius”, songs that the band were correct to let marinate in their skeletal folky forms, then there’s opening track “Every Amnesia Movie”, which thrives with a spacious Windy City post-rock reading, and “Burn the Sheets, Bleach the Books”, which becomes the full-throated Yo La Tengo-esque noisy indie rocker it was born to be. My favorite of these songs is “The Bullet B4 the Sound”, which is a bit of everything–Califone float purposefully but languidly in the ether on the verses, but come together all of a sudden to pull off a beautifully damaged chorus that’s on the level of career highs like Red Red Meat’s “Gauze”. The covers are the final two songs, and while that might feel like a relegation in some context, they’re an extension of Califone and The Villager’s Companion in attitude, too. “Family Swan” is a later-record song from Mecca Normal (a nineties indie rock band probably even less-remembered than Red Red Meat) and “Crazy As a Loon” comes from a 21st-century John Prine album I’ve never heard. There’s room for these “misfits” on The Villager’s Companion, too, enough so that the term ceases to apply. (Bandcamp link)

Baths – Gut

Release date: February 21st
Record label: Basement’s Basement
Genre: Art pop, post-punk, art punk, psych pop, synthpop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Eyewall

I came to the music of Will Wiesenfeld in a fairly roundabout way–after missing the boat on his most well-known project, Baths, I found myself being surprisingly drawn to the instrumental ambient/folk of The Anchorite, the most recent record from his more experimental and disparate alias Geotic. This year, Wiesenfeld has brought back Baths for its first proper album since 2017 (not counting B-side compilations and soundtrack work), a double LP called Gut. Accompanied by quotes from Wiesenfeld about seeking to incorporate noise rock and post-punk (Gilla Band and Protomartyr are some of the names being thrown around) into Baths’ electronic indie pop sound, my interest was certainly piqued. Gut is a lot to take in, unsurprisingly–featuring live drums on six of its eleven tracks (from Casey Dietz and Sam KS), there are a few genuinely gripping moments of real live indie rock and noise rock/post-hardcore catharsis in Wiesenfeld’s vocals, while the fifty-two minute album still has plenty of room for atmospheric electronica and even a few moments of synthetic dance-friendly electronic pop music as well. Wiesenfeld sought to hold “no regard to personal embarrassment or relatability” in his writing on Gut, exploring “men, and sex” (an “actual honest effort” to elucidate what’s on his mind on a regular basis) with all the freedom the instrumental side of Baths allows.

Gut starts off like an honest-to-God arty indie rock record in its opening trio of songs. “Eyewall” sets the stage for the album with an interesting mix of a post-punk bass undergirding and a vocal performance from Wiesenfeld that goes from “urgent pop music” to “spoken word” to a lacerating post-hardcore yell. “Sea of Men” couches its psychedelic indie pop in a mid-tempo indie rock sheen, Wiesenfeld singing about “fucking all the men in droves” against a vibrant, propulsive background; “Peacocking” isn’t as upbeat, but the electric guitar gets a prominent spot in the ever-so-slightly-darker art rocker. Gut’s strongest electro-pop moments come after this–there’s a bright euphoria to the bubbling “Eden”, while “American Mythos” is a synthpop wringer that leaves everything all out in the open and the of Montreal-like tinker-dance-pop of “Chaos” is wild in more ways than one. As much of a whirlwind as Gut is, Wiesenfeld does indeed bare much of himself in between the grooves–stuff like the psych-wobbling gut-check of “Homosexuals” finally comes to a head in “Governed”, a pretty unflinching self-assessment that stops the dizzying party right in its tracks. “Governed” isn’t the end of Gut, however–that would be “The Sound of a Blooming Flower”, a seven-minute epic that begins in delicate, almost ambient piano realms and finishes as a careening, explosive, noisy indie rock barnburner. The lyrical honesty of Gut might be the most obvious throughline, but “The Sound of a Blooming Flower” is the right final statement because it captures a larger one–the musical growth and exploration of Baths to the point where it can, yes, comfortably hold these musings of its frontperson. (Bandcamp link)

Rapt – Until the Light Takes Us

Release date: February 21st
Record label: Start-track
Genre: Folk, chamber folk, singer-songwriter, slowcore
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Making Maps

Jacob Ware is a folk musician from London, although he (and by extension, his solo project Rapt) isn’t just a folk musician. He started out playing bass in the “brutal death metal” band Enslavement, and, while his musical career as Rapt hasn’t encompassed that, he’s been dabbling in ambient, post-rock, and even techno over the course of four LPs since 2019. Until the Light Takes Us, the fifth Rapt album, is definitely, inarguably “folk music”, though: it’s just Ware and his gently-plucked guitar for the most part, with intermittent percussion, bass, strings, and pianos fading into and out of frame and, all the while, Ware singing about death and dreams and love (and the disintegration thereof) in a winding pastoral, British conversational cadence. Until the Light Takes Us places Ware in a storied lineage of “heavy” musicians (or at least those associated with heaviness) abandoning the musical intensity of their past for something more stark but nonetheless imbuing their acoustic pursuits with a kind of darkness and a different kind of intensity–names like 40 Watt Sun’s Patrick Walker (whose sprawling, ornate slowcore feels like what Rapt would be in a less stripped-down environment), Clockcleaner’s John Sharkey III, and Phil Elverum come to mind.

A lot of “slowcore”-associated music is centered around minimalism–think Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker wringing worlds out of just a couple of sentences and just as many chords–but Until the Light Takes Us takes a different path, choosing to build itself around Ware’s lengthy, always-centered diatribes and purposefully-meandering trains of high thought. “Tolkienesque prose”, his bio calls it, an unavoidable reminder that, by going from black metal to folk music, Ware has merely traded in one fantasy-nerd music genre for another. Ware doesn’t hide his vocals under any studio trickery; there’s a buttoned-up, formal quality to Until the Light Takes Us that underlines his writing instead. The guitar is plucked in a perfunctory manner, intricate little swirls of melodies, and when the strings appear, they’re always tastefully draped around the core of the track. It’s the same kind of craftsmanship that turned 2000s “indie folkers” like Sufjan Stevens and Andrew Bird into unlikely stars, but Ware resists the pop touches or heart-clutching relatability that could’ve ever put him in on such a trajectory. This isn’t to say Until the Light Takes Us is impenetrable or even unwelcoming–I’ve loved the most upbeat song on the record, “Making Maps”, from the moment I heard it, and “Attar of Roses” and “Fields of Juniper” both tap into the combination of instrumentation and imagery that reminds us why and how “folk music” endures and reverberates. After intently listening to Until the Light Takes Us, I couldn’t imagine not getting anything out of, say, the life-encompassing dream sequence of the title track–but “intent” is what it takes to get there, from both Rapt and us. (Bandcamp link)

The Rishis – The Rishis

Release date: February 21st
Record label: Cloud Recordings/Primordial Void
Genre: Psychedelic pop, folk rock, chamber pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Criminal Activities

Athens, Georgia band The Rishis debuted in 2022 with the full-length record August Moon, introducing us to the 60s pop-tinged folk rock of core duo Ranjan Avasthi and Sofie Lute and their many collaborators, including notable Elephant 6 Collective members John Kiran Fernandes, Scott Spillane, and Andrew Rieger, among others (Elephant 6 co-released August Moon on vinyl the following year, along with Fernandes’ Cloud Recordings). A second Rishis album, self-titled this time around, arrives a few years later, co-released by Cloud and another Athens stalwart label, Primordial Void (Real Companion, Banned 37, Limbo District), and Avasthi and Lute retain the relatively streamlined charms of August Moon once again. Despite a credits section again filled with indie rock royalty (Robert Schneider of The Apples in Stereo! Mac McCaughan from Superchunk!), The Rishis resist the urge to turn their sophomore album into an overstuffed affair and continue to lock their gaze on creating perfect pop tunes in their chosen folky, slightly psychedelic realms. The Rishis is perhaps more electric than their debut, but (with a couple of exceptions) it’s not exactly a “rock and roll” record; it’s just a means to keep their sound rolling forward. 

The Rishis opens with a pair of reassurances in the toe-tapping pop rock of “Coloring” and the note-perfect indie balladry of “Miles”, both of which are as good as anything on their debut LP. The folk side of The Rishis takes a minute to fully resurface, but the banjo-marked “Buffalo” and the pedal steel that opens the horn-laden “Ride” make sure that this part of the band is represented here, as well. For the most part, the Rishis’ guests are integrated seamlessly, but when McCaughan steps in on guitar on “Criminal Activities”, The Rishis are all of a sudden riding Superchunk-like electricity for a two-minute surprising album highlight. The slacker pop-tinged “Robot Factory” is less openly a departure, but the spirited mid-tempo bummer pop of that song is, upon closer inspection, exciting new territory for the band as well. August Moon contained at least one track (“Uttar Pradesh”) that openly nodded to Avasthi’s Indian ancestry; here, we get “Dharamsala” (a psychedelic pop song about the Dalai Lama fleeing Tibet for the titular Indian city) and closing instrumental “Rishikesh”. These two tracks are separated by a “normal” indie-psych-folk-pop song called “Stratosphere”, which ties the tracks surrounding it to the rest of The Rishis, much like the album as a whole pulls in disparate movements, faces, and histories together to make a neatly-tied singular sound. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Silkworm, ‘Developer’ (Reissue)

Release date: February 21st
Record label: Comedy Minus One
Genre: 90s indie rock, Silkworm
Formats: Vinyl, CD (included with LP)

I’ve written about Silkworm more than I’ve written about any other band, but it’s not every day that Developer gets reissued, so here we go again. I have, in fact, written at least a paragraph about every Silkworm-related record ever, so I’ll probably be repeating myself a little bit here, but on the off-chance that any of you haven’t yet heard Silkworm’s 1997 masterpiece Developer, then it’ll be worth it. Every Silkworm album is a “cult favorite”, but the background on Developer makes it perhaps the über “cult” Silkworm album–it was their second and final album for Matador Records, the Chicago-via-Missoula-and-Seattle band’s final chance to do what their then-labelmates Pavement and Guided by Voices had done and parlay critical/indie rock underground buzz into larger platforms, sizeable followings, and (in the case of the former) an actual minor hit single. They made Developer instead. This insular and cold album predictably went nowhere–Matador dropped them, Andrew Cohen, Tim Midyett, and Michael Dahlquist returned to the world of day jobs, and quietly went about their business making masterpieces on their own time until their unfortunate end in 2005.

“We loved Developer once we whittled it down to what happened to be the weirdest stuff and removed the more conventional things,” writes Midyett on the occasion of the album’s first-ever reissue (a two-LP set with a handful of bonus tracks). If you squinted at the band’s previous album, Firewater, you could kind of see some Alternative Nation anti-stars in the midst of its depressing, alcoholic bluster. Firewater wasn’t exactly a commercial record, either, but between Cohen’s post-grunge fire in “Nerves” and Midyett’s indie rock-via-classic rock penmanship, you could say to yourself, “now, if they cleaned things up, the next one…” And Developer is a clean album–cleaned out of those aforementioned flashes contained in Firewater. There are less rockers, and the ones that are here are all weird. Midyett in particular abandons his AOR side–the guy who ripped through “Wet Firecracker” and “The Lure of Beauty” is first heard in the glacial “Give Me Some Skin”, the opening track that’s “confrontational” in that it’s the closest Silkworm ever got to slowcore. “The City Glows”, Midyett’s next song, picks up the pace just a little bit, but he makes up for this excess by delivering an even more understated vocal performance. “Waiting on a Train”, a second-half Midyett track, aurally captures the feeling of waiting better than just about anything else I can think of; the steady instrumentation sounds like pacing, and Midyett himself pushes his vocals and then walks them back just for fun.

If there’s a key to unlocking Developer, it’s probably in Andy Cohen’s songs. Cohen doesn’t abandon electric rock and roll to the degree that Midyett does here (in fact, I don’t think he could if he wanted to), and so, while there’s no “Nerves” or even “A Cockfight of Feelings” on here, these are the tracks that are more likely to have “hooks” and “licks”. The “single” and the one that I’ve anecdotally heard people praise the most is his “Never Met a Man I Didn’t Like”, the rare 90s indie rock song that embraces Neil Young more so in its lyrics and temperament than in a “messy, plodding Crazy Horse guitars” way (there’s a version by Silkworm side project The Crust Brothers featuring Stephen Malkmus on lead vocals, which certainly helps). However, I distinctly remember that it was “Ice Station Zebra” that was my entrypoint into loving Developer.  I assume that the lyrics are more or less a retelling of the 1968 Rock Hudson/Ernest Borgnine Arctic thriller, which means that Cohen’s narrator isn’t as fascinating as, say, the one in “Goodnight Mr. Maugham” or even the wannabe tycoon in the title track, but he imbues the in-over-his-head soldier with his classic historical-drama flair, muttering about “chasing skirts” and “closet case[s]” over the sickest riff on the entire album.

“The Devil Is Beating His Wife” is a pretty weird song, no? It’s slotted in between Cohen’s two biggest rockers (“Developer” and “Ice Station Zebra”), and it’s significantly more electric than any of the other Midyett-sung tracks before it, but it doesn’t sound like anything else on this album, really. There is a refrain of sorts, and Midyett (sort of) sings the title, but the actual hook is the instrumental bit right after it, a simple guitar flourish and some intense bass playing. It’s psychedelic–maybe the most “psychedelic” Silkworm ever got?–but in a Stones-y way, I think. In the previous song, Cohen’s developer narrator brags about his downtown apartment, moans about his ex-wife, and sings about “feel[ing] the love in a piece of cold steel”–but compared to the relatively colorful figures of Cohen’s songs, the Midyett-sung tracks feel more typical of “cold steel”. It’s not until the final song on the original version of Developer, “It’s Too Bad…”, that the touchstones of what constituted “Silkworm rock music” up until that point–wailing Midyett vocals, increasingly squealing guitar from Cohen, huge, clattering drums from Dahlquist–come together even somewhat. As Midyett sings in that one, though, “it’s too late”.

I doubt (in fact, I know) Silkworm weren’t thinking about it at the time, but by sticking “It’s Too Bad…” at the end of Developer, they ended up creating a nice transition into the Comedy Minus One double LP’s bonus tracks, almost entirely built from outtakes that appeared on the original Japanese CD version of the album. These bonus tracks are part of Developer’s mythology–they left loud rock songs on the table to make space for all the weird tracks!–but few people have actually heard these recordings, given that they were only available in Japan, with not even an intrepid YouTube account stepping in to bridge the Pacific (this doesn’t include me, though; I know what Soulseek is). Three of these songs never appeared anywhere else, while two were re-recorded (in very different forms) for Lifestyle in 2000; I’ve always grouped them into these two camps when I think about them. The exclusive songs are definitely the meat of the Developer bonus tracks–they’re all swinging, roaring Midyett rockers, all catchy and/or loud enough to live up to their fairy-tale status. They, too, are hard to place within the Silkworm oeuvre–“Stray Bullets” is the heaviest one, a hard rock pistol that images an alternate universe where the band actually leaned into the classic rock trappings of Firewater rather than running away from them (which, it should be noted, probably wouldn’t have made them any more commercially well-off in 1997).

If “Stray Bullets” looked backward, “Ogilvie” looked forward–of the three Japanese Developer exclusives, it’s the most polished, a combination of tasteful classic rock indulgences, a rock-solid rhythm section groove, and some catchy pop hooks that marked Silkworm’s final three-and-a-half (shout out to the Chokes! EP) brilliant albums. Yes, it was actually insane to leave this one off of a proper album, but 1) they were right, it didn’t fit Developer, and 2) they had a lot more great songs where “Ogilvie” came from coming down the pipe, so instead we get the delayed gratification of enjoying it nearly thirty years later (and by “we”, I mean you–again, I downloaded these songs off of the file-sharing app Soulseek many years ago). Funnily enough, though, “Ogilvie” might be the most “complete” Silkworm song among these bonus tracks, but it’s not even the most openly catchy one. That’s “Numbered”, a sloppy but brilliant piece of almost power pop (I mean, Silkworm’s version of it) that’s just so much fun. No way in hell this should’ve been on Developer; in fact, it even feels kind of wrong having this on the LP of bonus material (maybe they could’ve done an extra 7” or something? With the random Crust Brothers “You Ain’t Going Nowhere” cover that’s also included here on the B-side?).

So, I’ve conquered the “difficult” Developer proper, and the previously-discussed bonus tracks are all a hoot–the final boss of this beautiful reissue from Comedy Minus One is “Dead Hair” and “Bones”, two songs that later appeared on Lifestyle as “Dead Air” and “The Bones” three years later. The reason I never got into these recordings as much as the others is because of how much I love the Lifestyle versions–if you’ve read that Silkworm piece I linked at the beginning of this review, you know that it’s my favorite album of all-time, and if you pressed me to choose my two favorite songs from that album, I’d likely be going with those two. I don’t know how they came up with turning the mid-tempo, blaring “Dead Hair” into a speedy, delirious post-punk rocker, or how “Bones” became a modern-day folk standard (in my eyes) by ditching the electric dirge for an acoustic guitar and a piano–but those were the right moves. “Dead Hair” I have always appreciated because it features Cohen and Midyett trading off lead vocals; the former (who sings the entirety of the Lifestyle version) still sings the majority of the track, but Cohen gets a good deal to work with, and it makes me wish the duo had tag-teamed more often when they were in Silkworm. It sounds very fun! (which, again, does not belong on Developer).

I can appreciate “Bones”, too. Midyett has said that the song is about founding Silkworm member Joel R.L. Phelps–whose split from the band was messy and a large part of why the first album they made without him, Firewater, dwelt heavily on substance abuse–and it’s interesting to consider that this song had been floating around not so long after Phelps’ initial departure. Silkworm whittled this one down quite a bit–they removed the full-band set-up, yes, and a few lines disappeared. Although the general feeling of “The Bones” has never been all that difficult for me to surmise, the context of it has always been a bit of a cypher, and hearing some of the struck/changed lyrics (“I’m a weak one and I know it”, “Your lack of histrionics pulled me through”) make things a little clearer. “The Bones” is a perfect song, and Silkworm made a perfect album by sticking it in the cellar for a few years. (Bandcamp link)

Pressing Concerns: Patches, …or Does It Explode?, Future Living, Hour

Wow, there’s a bunch of good records in this Tuesday Pressing Concerns. The (unfortunately) final EP from Patches, a live album from Hour, and new studio albums from …or Does It Explode? and Future Living are present in this one. It’s a great one, as was yesterday’s (featuring Minorcan, Outro, Above Me, and Nobody’s Dad), so check that one out too 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.

Patches – A Three Legged Chair

Release date: February 3rd
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Dream pop, post-punk, jangle pop, college rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Music for a Silent Film

I’ve got good news and I’ve got bad news. The good news is there’s a new EP from Patches, the college rock/post-punk/jangle pop group formed by three remote collaborators (Evan Seurkamp, Aaron Griffin, and Robin KC) in 2021. The bad news is that A Three Legged Chair also marks the end of Patches, a brief coda after two undersung but very good full-length albums (2022’s Tales We Heard from the Fields and 2023’s Scenic Route). In hindsight, it’s not all that shocking–I remember being surprised that Seurkamp had time for a second band in addition to his main one, The Laughing Chimes, and with the Chimes back with their long-awaited sophomore album, the juggling probably became a bit too much. A Three Legged Chair is a clearinghouse release–these five songs were “scrapped, passed over, or shared elsewhere”, and the band openly state on their Bandcamp page that it “isn’t as good” as their albums (I guess not being a band anymore means not having to promote every release like it’s your creative pinnacle). There’s a Guided by Voices cover that appeared on a compilation I wrote about in 2023, an alternate version of a track from Tales We Heard from the Fields, and three previously-unheard tracks, two of which feature Robin’s sister (credited as “KRMT”) on lead vocals (“without her, this probably wouldn’t have been released,” the band write). 

If you’re only familiar with Suerkamp’s other, more well-known band, you might be surprised by Patches’ darker streak (although at their most “pop” they were as bright as anything by The Laughing Chimes); A Three Legged Chair unearths a couple more highlights in this vein with the two Seurkamp-sung originals, “A Tree” and the alternate version of “A Nice Day to Orbit Saturn”. Patches are a muddy, moody, confused-sounding post-punk band on these recordings, particularly the eerie, almost-gothic “A Tree” (it’s a good song, though I see why it didn’t end up on either album). I touched on their fairly faithful version of “The Best of Jill Hives” when it was first released, but I don’t mind it resurfacing here and hearing Seurkamp sing it is still a fully enjoyable experience. Patches weren’t being self-deprecating when they highlighted the KRMT-sung songs as the best moments on A Three Legged Chair, though; they really do make the EP worthwhile on their own. “Music for a Silent Film” is my favorite of the two; the buzzing, sensory-overload dream pop sound is different than anything else on the EP and probably from anything Patches ever put out, period; “Crossbow” is a more recognizably Patches post-punk/jangle pop combination track, but it closes A Three Legged Chair by asserting that while Patches may be ending, it wasn’t for a lack of new ideas in their signature vein of songwriting. Maybe I just wanted to be able to say I wrote about everything Patches ever released, but A Three Legged Chair does hold its own against a couple of underrated but brilliant albums. (Bandcamp link)

…or Does It Explode? – Tales to Needed Outcomes

Release date: February 1st
Record label: Snmyhymns
Genre: Midwest emo, post-rock, slowcore, 90s indie rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: What Is Tough to See

…or Does It Explode? is an emo band hailing from Madison, Wisconsin that have been around since the beginning of the decade, more or less. The quintet (made up of guitarist/vocalist Shawn Bass, guitarist Brandon Boggess, bassist J Granberg, drummer Erik Rasmuson, and vocalist Katya Pierce) put out two albums in 2022 and 2023 that mixed Dischord Records-influenced post-hardcore with more cavernous and exploratory Midwest emo sounds. Even in their more “punk” earlier work, this more intimate side of …or Does It Explode? is discernible among the noise, and it’s this aspect of their sound that they’ve chosen to explore much more fully on their third album, Tales to Needed Outcomes. Interestingly, Bass initially conceived this record as a solo side project, but the rest of the band were fully on board with taking their sound into this direction, and not only do they all play on Tales to Needed Outcomes (recorded by Nick Tveitbakk at Pachyderm Studios in Cannon Falls, Minnesota), but …or Does It Explode? also bring in a host of guest musicians (Rin Ribble on violin, Logan Lamers on cello, Becky Lipsitz on trumpet, and Amy Wiegand on flute) to fully flesh this record out.

Spanning a dozen tracks in about fifty minutes, Tales to Needed Outcomes is an ambitious record that seems dead-set on getting the most out of the circumstances of its creation–a stable of talented musicians and a week at a world-famous recording studio. It’s a lot to take in, but it’s all very well-thought-out and just-as-well-executed, so take your time if you find …or Does It Explode? challenging your attention span at first. Tales to Needed Outcomes is operating in the world of horn/string-laden Midwest emo, orchestral slowcore and post-rock, and good old-fashioned 90s basement indie rock–it has the core of the bedroom project it began as, but it benefits greatly from the full punk-trained band backing it up at all times. It’s hard for me to single out specific tracks on Tales to Needed Outcomes because it’s such a cohesive experience–the post-hardcore backing vocals on “Cyclic Living” stick out like a sore thumb, but that’s in large part because the rest of the song is entirely in line with the rest of the record. When …or Does It Explode? “rock” on Tales to Needed Outcomes, it’s generally in a dramatic, slowcore-influenced indie rock kind of way that reminds me of 90s bands like American Music Club and Idaho (as well as more recent acts in this vein like 40 Watt Sun). There aren’t a ton of current groups making music like this, but maybe by mixing it with more traditional horns-and-guitar-noodling Midwest emo, …or Does It Explode? have found a way to get it to the masses. Maybe not, but it works for Rosy Overdrive. (Bandcamp link)

Future Living – Get Vasectomy

Release date: February 14th
Record label: Silent Co-op
Genre: Garage rock, psychedelic rock, post-punk, 90s indie rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Diver

Last year, I wrote about the Chicago/Montana five-piece band Blank Banker, a bunch of noisy indie rock veterans who recorded their most recent album, Intervallic Travails, at Electrical Audio with Jon San Paolo and released it on drummer Neal Markowski’s label Silent Co-op. As it turns out, Markowski is also the drummer in another noisy indie rock band who recently recorded an album at Electrical Audio with Jon San Paolo that is seeing a vinyl release via Silent Co-op–this time, it’s the Kalamazoo/Chicago quartet Future Living, who’ve just released their sophomore album, Get Vasectomy. Future Living are co-led by vocalist/guitarist Anne Hensley (of Petrillo) and vocalist/guitarist Chafe Hensley (of OUT, Minutes, and Wowza in Kalamazoo), joined by guitarist John Patterson and Markowski behind the kit. Compared to the scuzzy, math-influenced basement rock of Blank Banker, Future Living are more regal–their sound is heavy, laser-precise, pummeling, almost psychedelic in its intense lumbering (the Bandcamp page for the album is tagged “space rock” and the biography mentions “shoegaze, post-punk, hard rock, and ’90s D.C. hardcore” as influences, all adding up to a somewhat hard-to-categorize but clearly heavy-on-the-rock indie rock album).

Made up of three interstitial snippets and nine “full-length” songs, Get Vasectomy walks the tightrope between smoking noise-indie-garage-rock and something a bit more high-concept and ambitious from the beginning. Opening track “Diver” begins with a guitar hero-type solo and then transforms into a lost indie rock classic, with Anne Hensley (who appears to sing lead vocals on the majority of these songs) giving an all-in performance as a frontperson. “Jury” starts with a synth sting (it could be from Patterson, who’s credited with “Moog”, or Markowski on “Korg”) which sticks around to help give the track that little “space rock” extra touch. I hear the Dischord and post-punk influence in the guitars on “Hawk”, which is just a little bit more lean than the blunt-force indie-hard rock of much of Get Vasectomy. Things start to get really heady in the back end of the record with “All Around”, an instrumental whose probing, wandering attitude bleeds into the next track, the slow-building jungle of “Duckie”. Future Living decide to end Get Vasectomy by bringing the energy back up to a boil, though, between the Chafe Hensley-sung “Grinning Time” (which, thanks in part to Chafe’s vocals, sounds like a more blunt-object version of Hot Snakes/Meat Wave-style garage-noise-punk) and closing track “Thrusters”. Once again kicking things off with an urgent-sounding guitar riff, “Thrusters” closes the book on Get Vasectomy with a levitating rocker that lives up to its title. After hearing Future Living roar through some serious rock music for an entire LP, you’ll want to Get Vasectomy too. (Bandcamp link)

Hour – Subminiature

Release date: February 14th
Record label: Dear Life
Genre: Post-rock, contemporary classical, orchestral, chamber music
Formats: CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: I Fall to Pieces

Hour, the Philadelphia-based instrumental ensemble led by Dear Life Records co-founder and Friendship drummer Michael Cormier-O’Leary, debuted in 2018 with two albums of their “chamber folk”/contemporary classical music sound, featuring a cast of contributors including 2nd Grade’s Peter Gill, Dear Life recording artist Jason Calhoun, and viola player Matt Fox. Hour took its time before recording a third album, but they returned in a big way last year, releasing Ease the Work (as well as a single featuring a couple of outtakes) and touring around the eastern United States in support of it. Subminiature is Hour’s first live album (well, aside from an “official bootleg” that’s been unavailable for several years now), a CD and cassette with some seventy-odd minutes of recordings from shows leading up to and following the release of Ease the Work, featuring selections from all three Hour LPs. Hour encompassed more than a dozen “players” over these shows, per the Bandcamp page’s credits, with more recognizable names in Philadelphia DIY–Cormier-O’Leary, Gill, prolific producer Lucas Knapp–appearing alongside skilled musicians that round out the ensemble like cellist Evan McGonagill, violinist Em Downing, and organist/pianist Erika Nininger. Music like this doesn’t conjure up the “DIY circuit”, but Hour pulled it off (playing “machine shops and parking garages, crowded bars and living rooms, churches and theaters”), and Subminiature is the proof of concept.

Different locales, a shuffling lineup, and the “live” recordings don’t take anything away from Cormier-O’Leary’s compositions, and, given that the songs are culled pretty evenly from the three Hour LPs, Subminiature actually functions very well as an introduction to Hour (provided you’re the kind of person that isn’t turned off by the idea of listening to over an hour of mostly-instrumental chamber music). Trying to pick “standouts” from Subminiature kind of misses the point, but the second-half stretch featuring the somewhat-eerie “Dying of Laughter”, the quiet, floating “Tiny House”, and the steady shimmering “The Most Gorgeous Day in History” might be the strongest section of the album. Oh, and I did say “mostly instrumental” earlier, because, towards the end of Subminiature, Hour hide a cover of Patsy Cline’s “I Fall to Pieces” featuring Philadelphia singer-songwriter Jacob Augustine (like Cormier-O’Leary, a Maine expat) on vocals. “I Fall to Pieces” is the moment on Subminiature that feels the most like a traditional “live album” recording–a deviation from a band’s normal fare, a curious moment in time fortunately captured by somebody pressing “record”. The rest of Subminiature? Well, that’s the sound of Hour doing what they do best, no matter who, when, and where they are. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Minorcan, Outro, Above Me, Nobody’s Dad

Good morning! Monday Pressing Concerns time! Two records from last week (an LP from Minorcan and an EP from Outro), plus two EPs from January I don’t want to leave behind from Above Me and Nobody’s Dad. Bunch of good records in this one that I don’t think I’ve been seeing anyone talk about online; let’s be conversation-starters today.

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.

Minorcan – Rock Alone

Release date: February 14th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Indie pop, lo-fi pop, power pop, Americana
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Nightmare Rider

Ryan Anderson was born in northern Florida and spent time in Georgia and Austin, but he’s called Asheville, North Carolina home for more than a decade now. Somewhere in there he started Minorcan, a “basement arena rock experience” that appears to basically be an Anderson solo project. The title of Minorcan’s most recent album, Rock Alone, seems to acknowledge this–Anderson wrote, played, recorded, and recorded everything on this record on his own, and he’s self-releasing it, too (albeit with distribution help from HHBTM Records, who released some of his solo albums in the 2000s). Anderson reminds me of vintage southern college rock/power pop/alt-country troubadours; he’s someone who came up on Elvis Costello and indie rock but doesn’t try to erase his region of origin (and as a frontperson, he’s somewhere between William Matheny and Hiss Golden Messenger, if either of them ditches the backing band for simple beats). The old aphorism “alone, not lonely” comes to mind listening to Rock Alone; it may just be Anderson and a drum machine on the tape, but the writing reflects somebody plugged into community, family, and other fulfilling relationships and urgently but happily wanting to underscore their importance (to him, to us as a species).

So, Rock Alone isn’t shy about the positivity at its core, but if that reads to you as too corny or “cringe” or whatever, at least hear Minorcan out. There’s a clear logic undergirding all the moves that Anderson is making alone in his basement–see the first song on side B, “Here on Out”, which rejects norms on both an artistic and societal level. Anderson sings a song that’s defiantly content in its domesticity, because, as he says, “They’re telling us to be ashamed / Screamin’ loud, sayin’ we can’t make art unless we’re suffering” (and, plus, consider the fact that his line about “abolish[ing] gender” would be subject to state censorship under this current regime–can your favorite art punk band say that?). It’s not that there isn’t darkness on Rock Alone, to be clear, but Anderson has fun with that, too–see “Burial Insurance”, a country-rock tune about a failed songwriter writing one last “Hail Mary” to “pay for [his] funeral”. It’s funny and playful, but when Anderson sings “I’ve worked all my life, but I can’t afford to die,” it’s very real, too. The best political music to me is the incidental kind–it seems accidental, and it probably is sometimes, but it intersects in all the right ways. Minorcan wrap everything up neatly and nicely in the final and best track on the record, “Nightmare Rider”, a song that’s anything but naive in its continued pursuit of its ideals. “To live without you, ooh, that’s my nightmare / To live without you, ooh, that’s my worst fear,” Anderson sings in the refrain–the lingering on the fear in this, the biggest moment on Rock Alone, is telling. “I say it all with gritted teeth / They want us to stay lonely,” goes the next line, and I shouldn’t have to tell you what the one after that entails. (Bandcamp link)

Outro – Broken Promise

Release date: February 14th
Record label: Repeating Cloud
Genre: Art rock, post-punk, garage rock, psychedelic rock, Paisley Underground, 90s indie rock
Formats: Vinyl (“Villages” and “New Home” only), digital
Pull Track: Fool

Despite their SEO-hostile band name, I somehow stumbled onto the Northampton, Massachusetts quartet Outro back in 2023, when they released their debut album, The Current. At the time I didn’t know much about them, but I enjoyed their Paisley Underground-reminiscent indie rock/college rock sound (I threw out names like The Dream Syndicate and Eleventh Dream Day), and I’m thrilled that they got picked up by Repeating Cloud Records for their newest release, a five-song EP called Broken Promise. I now know a little more about the band–for instance, they’re made up of vocalist/guitarist Josh Levy, guitarist Adam Zucker, bassist Peter Sax, and drummer Noam Schatz, they rehearse in a practice space at Justin Pizzoferato’s Sonelab studio (which is also where they recorded Broken Promise), and the band members have played in a bunch of groups like Mobius Band, The Capitulators, the Lucky Shots, and Bring It to Bear. Outro don’t break from The Current too much on their newest record (whose release is accompanied by a 7” single featuring two of the tracks), but that’s hardly a bad thing–in addition to the aforementioned artists, the band mentions Steve Albini as a recording influence, and while Broken Promise isn’t precisely a “noise rock” record, it does capture the same energy of Electrical Audio-associated bands who make or made unflappable, unbothered indie rock from Silkworm to Stomatopod.

Broken Promise is worth checking out for its opening track, “Fool”, alone–it’s one of the best things I’ve heard this year so far, easily. It’s impossibly cool-sounding, sometimes like a chill explosion and other times like running water. Everything is positioned perfectly, from the roaring opening guitar riff to the rat-a-tat drums to the split-second bass spotlight to the rolling melodic guitars that eventually take over the track to Levy and Zucker’s harmonies in the brief refrain. It’s a high bar, but Outro round out Broken Promise with songs that hold their own–after “Fool”, they immediately launch into the lead single and biggest “rocker” on the EP, “Gila”, which definitely helps the record’s momentum. “Villages”, which leads off the physical 7”, is the other rocker, but instead of “Gila”’s careening post-punk, Outro achieve their goal on this one by turning the guitars (and bass) way up to make some almost peaceful-feeling, Sonic Youth-style electricity. The “psychedelia” in Outro’s sound is always on the more “implied” side, but I do hear plenty of paisley in “New Home” and its shimmering guitarplay, while the closing title track dabbles in this arena by alternating between swirling walls of guitars and more withdrawn instrumental moments that feel like the band is fading away before our very ears. They never do, though; Broken Promise ends on an abrupt, perfunctory note, with Outro seeing us through to the very last moment. (Bandcamp link)

Above Me – Above Me

Release date: January 31st
Record label: Dandy Boy
Genre: Shoegaze, noise pop, dream pop, psychedelia
Formats: CD, digital
Pull Track: Out of Body Out of Mind

Among the staggering amount of new albums that Slumberland Records has released over the past couple of years, Blue Ocean’s Fertile State is probably one of the least accessible, but the San Francisco band’s noisy, experimental post-rock-influenced take on shoegaze won it praise in certain circles. Apparently Blue Ocean’s Slumberland debut will also be their final record, as they quietly broke up sometime between Fertile State and now–but this bad news is tempered by the announcement and debut release from co-founder Rick Altieri’s new solo project, Above Me. Above Me’s self-titled debut EP (which is eight songs and twenty-seven minute long, making the “EP” designation more of a stylistic choice than a necessary one) was mostly created by Altieri alone, with vocals from Kati Mashikian (Mister Baby, Cindy, Tony Jay) being the only outside contribution. Still certainly operating in the wider worlds of “shoegaze” and “noise pop”, Altieri (who also has an impressive Bay Area pedigree beyond Blue Ocean, playing with acts like Ryann Gonsalves and Blue Zero in recent years, among others) doesn’t try to recreate the sensory overload sensation of his previous band on Above Me, instead taking advantage of the self-recorded, drum-machine-heavy pallet to make some heavily fuzzed-out, psychedelic pop music.

Above Me is in the same vein as recent records from Dummy and Aluminum, but because it’s functionally impossible to recreate those albums with what Altieri’s working with, Above Me ends up being something else entirely anyway. Much of the first half of the EP (I would say first “side”, but it’s only on CD) is the more openly pop-forward side–the blossoming fuzz-dream-pop of opening track “Out of Body Out of Mind”, the lifting grooves of “New Pains”, and the psych pop new wave-gaze of “Grass Mouth” are all probably immediately catchier than anything off of Fertile State. Those worrying that Altieri might’ve lost his experimental streak need not worry, though–at first it’s just restricted to the slowed-down thirty second snippet “Weather”, but the second half of Above Me sports the soundscape of “Shine Thru” and the psychedelia-drenched “Place and a Day”, both of which dabble in atmospherics over instant pop gratification. Low in the mix, Altieri’s vocals keep Above Me grounded in the realm of classic shoegaze; not even Mashikian can lift the singing to more than a mumble over the walls of guitars. The trick that Above Me pulls is making the basement feel gigantic when it’s time to fly–like in closing song “Stone Mossy Lime”, which, after a glitchy opening, proceeds to make the drum machines and fuzz sound stadium-huge. (Bandcamp link)

Nobody’s Dad – Mixtape

Release date: January 18th
Record label: Sketch Book
Genre: 90s indie rock, lo-fi indie rock, fuzz pop
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: You Don’t Communicate

Simon Smith works at Trowbridge, Wiltshire music venue The Village Pump, and as of late the promoter and booker has started a cassette label out of a desire to release music from upcoming local acts. Sketch Book Records debuted last year with a promising demo cassette from Steatopygous, a teen riot grrrl-inspired punk trio who’ve recently played shows with Perennial and Other Half, and the imprint continues their early winning streak into 2025 with another debut cassette, this time from Bath quartet Nobody’s Dad. Noticeably different from the Steatopygous record, the four-song Mixtape EP recalls a different side of 90s rock music–grungey but tuneful, Nobody’s Dad recalls bands on the fringes of the early 90s alt-rock “mainstream” like The Breeders and Throwing Muses, with a bit of the noisy-pop wistfulness of bands like The Spinanes and Velocity Girl (and even a bit of classic twee/indie pop) thrown in for good measure, too. Perhaps a cassette EP dubbed “Mixtape” is intended as a soft launch, but the band (Juliet Allarton, Max Earl, Phoebe Stokes, and Rahul Hasler, per their Bandcamp) already sound polished and like they’ve got their sound down pat.

Mixtape comes out swinging with “Angel” (which was Nobody’s Dad’s debut single, originally released last summer), starting with some Deal-Sisters-worthy alt-rock vamping and droll but accusatory vocals, and then unexpectedly taking flight in a near power pop-level chorus. There’s just a bit of “emo” baked into the sound of “Angel”, which serves Nobody’s Dad well as they move into “Margo”, the “ballad” of the EP. It’s a huge departure from the high-flying “Angel”, and the four-minute slow-builder could’ve wrecked Mixtape’s entire momentum if the band didn’t know how to utilize just the right combination of acoustic folk and fuzzed-out, 90s basement indie rock to usher the track along. The second half of the EP might be better than the first–the quick-tempo sadness and confusion of “You Don’t Communicate” is a tour-de-force of winning melodies from its inception and is the best song on the EP in terms of pure pop music, and “You’re All I Ever Wanna Be” is a big, sweeping closing statement with nice, big alt-rock guitars and a ghostly catchy chorus. The more I listen to Mixtape, the more impressive it sounds as a debut release–we should be keeping our eyes on Nobody’s Dad in the future, yes, but these specific four songs also deserve a bit more attention that they’ve received thus far. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Frog, Vulture Feather, Cathedrale, Night Collectors

Happy Valentine’s Day’s Eve! Tomorrow (February 14th) is shaping up to be a pretty big day for new music, and Rosy Overdrive is looking at a few of these upcoming records today: new albums from Frog, Vulture Feather, Cathedrale, and Night Collectors. Be sure to check out the previous posts from this week (Monday’s Pressing Concerns featured The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, Iffin, Brown Dog, and Paul Bergmann, while Tuesday’s featured Hello Whirled, The Winter Journey, Jac Aranda, and Grant Pavol) if you didn’t catch them the first time, 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.

Frog – 1000 Variations on the Same Song

Release date: February 14th
Record label: Tapewormies/Audio Antihero
Genre: Indie pop, folk rock, psychedelic pop, piano pop, alt-country, Frog
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: DOOMSCROLLING VAR. II

The cult New York act Frog returned after a four-year hiatus in 2023 with an album called Grog, a perfect reintroduction (or, for me at least, a formal introduction) to an exciting world of folk rock/country-influenced indie pop music dreamed up by Daniel Bateman with assistance from his brother, Steve, on drums. I called Grog an “alternate-universe oldies station” and mentioned Mercury Rev, The Flaming Lips, and Grandaddy, among others, as artists evoking a similar feeling to that record. 1000 Variations on the Same Song, the sixth Frog album, is a departure from the more technicolored, eager-to-please pop sensibilities of their previous LP, even though it still sounds like a Frog record. As the title implies, 1000 Variations on the Same Song arose from Bateman realizing he was working on “a bunch of stuff that all sounds alike” and deciding to embrace the similarities rather than try to vary things up some more; on this record, Frog sound more subdued and thoughtful, making their way through simple yet disorienting piano-led instrumentals at a leisurely pace. Bateman’s singular-sounding high-pitched vocals prevent 1000 Variations on the Same Song from truly being “laid-back”; I was helpfully given a lyrics sheet for this record, but it almost feels like cheating to pull too much from it in this review, as I think the proper way to take it in is to catch snatches of phrases in moments of clarity between Bateman jumping between soul-influenced croons and Isaac Brock-like yelps.

I like that Frog (who’ve recently welcomed back founding drummer Thomas White into the live band on bass) followed up an immediately-satisfying comeback record with something that took me a few listens to really get a handle on. It’s good world-building! After spending a good deal of time in 1000 Variations on the Same Song, it’s now hard to imagine it sounding any other way–Bateman sounds almost divinely inspired in the most memorable parts of the record, giving a chant or even hymn-like quality to the refrains of “DOOMSCROLLING VAR. II” (yes, he is saying “Damn, baby, what is you talking ‘bout” there), “HOUSEBROKEN VAR. IV” (“It sounded clever to regale her ‘front of all her friends,” no idea why this sounds so profound), and “MIXTAPE LINER NOTES VAR. VII” (which rhymes “broken Casios” with “The National”). The other Bateman makes a stronger impression on the drums than I would’ve expected on first listen, but Steve’s contributions are really sticking out to me now–Daniel leaned pretty heavily on non-rock influences for this record, and it’s his brother that keeps things grounded with stuff like the sharp marching beat to “DOOMSCROLLING”, the melancholic shuffle of “WHERE DO I SIGN VAR. III”, and the slow plodding to “HOUSEBROKEN VAR. IV”. In fact, it becomes pretty noticeable when the percussion is sidelined in the final two tracks, the ringing piano carol “DID SANTA COME VAR. IX” (Bateman mentions listening to “a lot of Mozart” while making this record, by the way) and the campfire folk closing track “ARTHUR MCBRIDE VAR. X”. Not to belabor the point, but by making a album with its own wrinkles and bumps that still sits nicely with the rest of their records, Bateman and company have created a welcome variation on the same Frog. (Bandcamp link)

Vulture Feather – It Will Be Like Now

Release date: February 14th
Record label: Felte
Genre: Post-punk, art rock, art punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Let It Through

When I wrote about Liminal Fields, the 2023 debut album from northern California trio Vulture Feather, I didn’t expect to be writing about two more Vulture Feather records in less than two years. It’s not that Liminal Fields wasn’t a great debut, it’s just that when artists return to making music after a long time away, they don’t typically start putting out records prolifically. But vocalist/guitarist Colin McCann and bassist Brian Gossman have apparently found a fertile third act after playing together in Florida emo group Don Martin Three in the 1990s and Baltimore art rock group Wilderness in the 2000s. Now based in Hayfork, California (about sixty miles west of Redding), the duo have linked up with new drummer Eric Fiscus and have gotten to work hammering out slow, deliberate, Lungfish-esque guitar-heavy post-punk (as I called Liminal Fields at the time). We got a three-song EP called Merge Now in Friendship last year, and 2025 has brought the second Vulture Feather LP, It Will Be Like Now, recorded after a year of touring by ex-Nation of Ulysses guitarist Tim Green (another former mid-Atlantic resident who’s since relocated to northern California; he plays baritone guitar on one track on the record, too) at his Louder Studios in Grass Valley.

Vulture Feather have such a distinct sound–McCann’s otherworldly yowling vocals and chiming guitar, the steady, glacial movement, a rapturous devotion to minimalism and repetition–that they really only sound like themselves at this point. Like Merge Now in Friendship and Liminal Fields before it, It Will Be Like Now is a powerful-sounding record, but I didn’t come away from it thinking “Vulture Feather just made the same album again”.  The fact that they recorded the album after a bunch of touring might explain the subtle difference I hear–“looser” isn’t exactly the right descriptor…maybe “more alive”? Liminal Fields sounded like it just came into being one day, but I can actually imagine Vulture Feather playing the songs of It Will Be Like Now live, in person, in-studio. This is their punk album, maybe. It’s hard to single out specific Vulture Feather songs because everything they ever do feels like one big single movement, but It Will Be Like Now has some notable mile markers–for one, “Let It Through” (the one with Green on baritone guitar) is really indescribable, just four minutes of one three-chord guitar progression and McCann giving it everything in the vocals. “Into Space” starts off with some excellent guitarplay that underscores how close McCann’s playing is to “jangle pop” when you listen to it intently, and “Like Now” makes up for being mostly instrumental by letting the guitar show off in a way they hadn’t really before. As always, though, Vulture Feather is even more so about the moments in between these ones, about the eternal balancing act that they make feel frighteningly vital and easy at the same time. (Bandcamp link)

Cathedrale – Poison

Release date: February 14th
Record label: Howlin’ Banana/Regarts
Genre: Garage rock, punk rock, post-punk
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Cravings

I’ve written a fair amount about France’s surprisingly robust garage rock scene in recent years between TH Da Freak, Opinion, and SIZ, but Toulouse’s Cathedrale seem to be an institution of their own. Starting in 2017, the quartet have put out four albums of energetic, power pop-informed garage rock, all the while honing their skills touring across Europe (apparently with Osees at one point, too). Perhaps their time on the road has hardened and darkened Cathedrale’s sound–there were hints of this on their most recent album, 2023’s Words/Silence, and their fifth LP, Poison, continues down this path. Recorded live by Almost Lovers’ Mathieu Versini in Brussels at Chez Nini, Poison is a fiery punk album, with the darker and noisier edges of post-punk and garage rock poking through these thirteen tracks. The former genre is present in a sort of greyscale stoicism in both the music and singer/guitarist Jules Maison’s vocals, while Cathedrale remind us again and again of their garage rock roots by launching into one torrent of guitars after another before Poison is all said and done. I shouldn’t overstate how inaccessible Cathedrale sound here; there’s still plenty of catchy songwriting going on in Poison, the band just sound a bit more…pissed off about it.

“Monuments & Bricks” functions excellently as a table setter for Poison–it’s a four-minute chugging opener, never fully releasing the tension it builds up and filling in empty spaces with whirring, Pere Ubu-like synths. It feels a lot like underground American garage punk, like Devo but with any bright colors intentionally leached out of it. The cruising “South Life” brings more rock and roll to said table, and it’s served with a helping of white-hot anger (I love hearing Maison’s French-accented voice shouting “You fucking loser!” in the refrain). There are a few more stabs at genuinely freewheeling garage rock on Poison, like in single “The Setting Sun”, the almost bouncy “Cravings”, and the dark but quick-moving “Enchantress”. Poison corrodes in real-time, though, starting around the one-two punch of “Radium” (a disintegrating-sounding piece of art punk) and “Polonium” (which is more or less a sound collage). Cathedrale come out the other side of this collapse damaged but still intact, resulting in spirited late-record numbers like the synthpunk-tinged “Wave Goodbye” and the anticipatory “Horsemen”–not to mention “New Light”, in which Cathedrale sign off with an uncharacteristic hymn-like snippet of a final track. You can listen to an unhealthy amount of albums with similar origin stories as Poison (as I have), but as long as you don’t lose the ability to appreciate these little defining moments and what must’ve gone into them, I don’t see how you could ever reach capacity.  (Bandcamp link)

Night Collectors – Heat and Fury

Release date: February 14th
Record label: Aagoo/Cardinal Fuzz
Genre: Psychedelic rock, fuzz rock, acid rock, garage rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Transmission

Night Collectors are a quartet made up of a bunch of San Francisco indie rock, psychedelic, and experimental music veterans–guitarist/vocalists John Krausbauer and Blaine Todd, drummer Kaori Suzuki, and bassist Brian Wakefield (who’s since been replaced with Kevin Guzman) started playing shows together and rehearsing before the pandemic, eventually recording two songs at Tiny Telephone in Oakland before COVID interrupted work on a planned full-length record. Those songs, “One Thousand Years” and “Transmissions”, came out on a 7” single for Debacle Records in 2022, and around that time Night Collectors reconvened to finish their first LP, Heat and Fury. The first Night Collectors album is a brief but incredibly potent blast of psychedelic rock from beginning to end–neither in line with the garage-punk of the late 2000s-2010s Bay Area nor the dreamy guitar pop of the current scene, Heat and Fury instead opts for a challenging, droning, but very much rocking take on the genre. Only five songs and twenty-five minutes long, Heat and Fury makes every overloaded second count, making sure to cover everything up with a blanket of ringing, roaring guitar fuzz whether Night Collectors are surging alongside it or staggering within its mist.

The two previously-released Night Collectors tracks open and close Heat and Fury, and they’re two of the most intense moments on the album. “One Thousand Years” is tasked with introducing us to the band, and it indeed sounds like the awakening of something ancient–Krausbauer and Todd draw up a full-on assault of distorted guitars, while Suzuki’s simple, steady percussion marches the song forward, obscured but not dampened by the noise surrounding it. “Transmission” is the slow burn, sounding almost lazy in its meandering psych rock at first but soon launching into another drone-psych-fuzz piece that only gets larger and larger as everything draws to a heady conclusion. In between these twin towers is one song that meets the extremes of the record’s bookends (the title track, another pounder that’s probably the closest thing to “garage-y rock and roll” on the LP), and two songs where Night Collectors dig deeper into the trenches of their psychedelic sound. “Take Me Higher” and “What Would I Do” are still pretty distinct from each other–the former sounds like a slowed-down and warped version of the louder tracks on Heat and Fury, the latter like Night Collectors have fully set this record adrift into murky waters–but both songs (which feature contributions from a mysterious “T. Gevondyan”) help the band’s first album feel like a complete journey. It’s not always a smooth one, but that’s the point with Night Collectors. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Hello Whirled, The Winter Journey, Jac Aranda, Grant Pavol

Second Pressing Concerns in as many days! We’ve got an album of new recordings of old songs from Hello Whirled, the first new LP from The Winter Journey in over fifteen years, and new EPs from Jac Aranda and Grant Pavol. It’s a good one, as was yesterday’s (featuring The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, Iffin, Brown Dog, and Paul Bergmann), so check that one out too if you haven’t yet.

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.

Hello Whirled – Gives Up and Plays the Hits

Release date: January 8th
Record label: Sherilyn Fender
Genre: Lo-fi indie rock, lo-fi pop, 90s indie rock, fuzz rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Rusty Engagements

I’ve written about many Hello Whirled records over the years (I believe the count is at nine), but it’s been a while since I’ve formally checked in on Ben Spizuco’s eternally prolific New Jersey lo-fi indie rock project. The dead zone of early-to-mid January (where I’m beginning to write this) seems a good time to pop in, and we’re in luck, as Hello Whirled have just put out an album called Gives Up and Plays the Hits. Coming less than a month after the last “proper” Hello Whirled album (last December’s Momentum, which appears to have been the third Hello Whirled album of 2024 after March’s Fractions of Worlds and August’s correctly-titled 50 Songs), Spizuco has recorded new versions of eighteen songs from the early years (2016-2018) of Hello Whirled. As these songs predate my discovery of Hello Whirled, they’re all basically new to me, so if the goal was to give a spotlight to some highlights of Spizuco’s earlier work, it’s already a success. Since Gives Up and Plays the Hits is almost entirely the work of Spizuco himself (his sibling Dan plays drums on a couple of tracks), it’s also a showcase for his growth as a home-recorder over the past seven to nine years, and the album does indeed reflect the work of somebody who’s honed their ability to make utilitarian rock songs that nonetheless sound warm and “pop”.

By and large, the eighteen songs of Gives Up and Plays the Hits are simpler structurally than what you’ll typically find on the Hello Whirled albums I’ve previously written about, which could either reflect a younger, more limited-as-a-writer Spizuco or a conscious decision to pull more straightforward and catchier songs (“hits”) from the archives (probably both to a degree). The Robert Pollard influence is maybe a little clearer here than on some of Spizuco’s late work, but that’s hardly a bad thing, and since Spizuco’s pulling from the “mid-tempo melancholic pop rock” side (“20 Wolves on the Plot”, “Rusty Engagements”), “the choppy arena rock” side (“Night Parade”), and the “fractured psychedelia” side (“Head Balloons”), there’s some nice variety in the mix. It’s not quite on the level of Spizuco’s friends in Ex Pilots, but there’s a nice embrace of fuzz-rock in early highlights “Fall of Mantis” and “Puzzle Piece”. These are the first two songs, but just when it seems like Spizuco is going to “nu-gaze” up his old material, the rest of Gives Up and Plays the Hits comes along to mix things up some more–we’ve got lazy, meandering guitar pop in “Melodramatic Bullet” and “A Collection of X’s & Y’s”, the floating balladry of “Her Flaming Absence”, punchy sixty-second songs in “Life Is Shit” and “Indigo Crystal Asshole”, and “Positively James McNew”, a late-record highlight that’s Hello Whirled at their most tender. Whatever the song calls for, I guess Hello Whirled have learned to “give up” and follow its lead. (Bandcamp link)

The Winter Journey – Graceful Consolations

Release date: January 31st
Record label: Turning Circle
Genre: 60s pop, folk rock, psychedelic pop, soft rock, indie pop
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Downhill

Anthony Braithwaite and Suzy Mangion are a married couple from Manchester who played together in a band called George in the early 2000s. The Winter Journey began not long after that, with their 2008 debut record This Is the Sound of The Winter Journey As I Remember It featuring the both of them harmonizing to the tune of 60s-inspired folk pop songs penned by Braithwaite. This Is the Sound proved to be the only Winter Journey album for over fifteen years, but a Mangion solo album in 2023 (featuring songs recorded in the interstitial decade and a half) turned out to be a prelude for a Winter Journey revival. Graceful Consolations does remind me a bit of the duo’s era of origin–a precocious and deliberate period of “indie music”, where everyone from Sufjan Stevens to Belle & Sebastian was suggesting that maybe there was something new to be gained from the old guard of 70s folk rock, Brian Wilson, and soft rock after all. This kind of music is a double-edged sword, to be sure, but The Winter Journey wield it like experts–this dozen-track comeback album sounds delightful and captivating all the way through.

“Downhill”, which opens Graceful Consolations, starts with Braithwaite singing a gorgeously wistful melody alongside folk-y guitar playing; halfway through the brief track, Mangion arrives as a second voice, and the piano and bass begin to fill the song out. This is Graceful Consolations in a nutshell–deceptively simple, but complete and containing so much. Whether The Winter Journey commit to exploring breathtaking, pin-drop quiet folk (like in “English Estuaries”) or pursue a more vibrant version of pop music from long ago (like in “The Way That You Are”, which sounds right out of the Nixon era) or even adding in pedal steel like they do in “Late Night Line”, all of it sounds equally natural. Just as fresh-sounding is the duo’s ever-so-slightly more experimental attitude on the second half of Graceful Consolations–not everything is so obvious as “Little Consolation”, a crackling ninety-second piece apparently recorded on an Edison wax cylinder phonograph, but there are a few more surprises before the album’s all said and done. The homes stretch of Graceful Consolations features the most nervous-sounding song on the album (“Family Line”, a song about endings thereof), a percussionless piece of electric folk music in “Bedford Falls”, the one true “rock” song on the album with “The Years”, and a bemusing closing track called “Friday Night for Sure”. “Pop music is never art / Please don’t ever be confused / Just as there’s never been a poem on the news / Dignity is only something that you lose,” imparts Braithwaite at the beginning of the song, leaving us to question whether or not everything about Graceful Consolations proves this point or refutes it. (Bandcamp link)

Jac Aranda – Ultraviolet

Release date: February 7th
Record label: Anxiety Blanket
Genre: Power pop, 60s pop, indie pop
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Ultraviolet

James “Jac” Aranda is a fairly busy Los Angeles-based musician–most notably, he’s the guitarist in longtime Fire Talk group Media Jeweler, but he’s also played with La Bonte, Megan Siebe, and Anna McClellan, among others. His associates’ music ranges from art rock to alt-country, but on his own, Aranda (not to be confused with Bay Area folk singer and Speakeasy Studios SF signee Jacob Aranda) apparently makes 1960s-influenced guitar pop records. After a prolific period of self-releasing music as Jac Aranda in the back half of the 2010s, the six-song Ultraviolet EP is Aranda’s first proper new music since his Anxiety Blanket Records debut, 2020’s No One. Although Ultraviolet is a fairly humble-sounding record, Aranda got plenty of help realizing it–a bunch of Southern California musicians contributed, including drummer Miles Wintner (Tara Jane O’Neil, GracieHorse), bassist Tara Milch (The Lentils, iji), guitarist Sam Farzin (Media Jeweler), pianist Dylan Marx (Gigi), and violinists Matt Maruskin (Gigi, Windowsill) and Pauline Lay. Aranda rounds up these musicians and creates something streamlined, taking lofty pop influences like Elliott Smith and the more explicitly Brian Wilson-indebted side of Elephant 6 and turning them into brief, digestible power pop/orchestral pop bursts in a way that reminds me of fellow Los Angeles artist Fur Trader.

Ultraviolet (which is being released as a cassette with instrumental versions of these six tracks on the B-side) knows how to kick things off with the “hits”; the opening title track is as catchy as can be, imagining a lost Beach Boys track being played through enthusiastically by a lo-fi basement power pop band. The first three songs on Ultraviolet seem to be the “rock” half–we get a real treat in the electric guitar/piano angst of “Nobody Knows”, imagining a world where Heatmiser stayed together and kept evolving alongside its co-frontperson, and the jaunty Beatles-y arm-swinging of “Out for a Stroll in the Rain”, which is a bit sloppy in parts but never goes off the rails. The second half of Ultraviolet is the quieter side, led by two earnest, show-stopping ballads in “J’accuse Moi” and “Just One More”. The former is the chilly, wintry tinker-pop studio creation, and the latter is the one where Aranda gets to wring his heart out in the vocals over little more than sparse acoustic guitars. Even in “Just One More”, though, Aranda has a bit of trickery up his sleeve, as the song takes a hard left turn into swirling noise as his vocals strain, unbothered. The full band is back for closing track “Honeymoon”, but they’re deployed in a slowly ambling folk-country manner that’s actually a bit of a palette-cleanser after the intensity that ends “Just One More”; for a low-key power pop EP, Ultraviolet is quite generous. (Purchase link) (Bandcamp link)

Grant Pavol – College

Release date: January 17th
Record label: Accidental Popstar
Genre: Folk, singer-songwriter, alt-country
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: College

Singer-songwriter, Shamir collaborator, and professional person who sends me emails (sorry, “publicist”) Grant Pavol was most active as a solo artist around the turn of the last decade, releasing an EP and two albums on Shamir’s Accidental Popstar Records from 2019 to 2021. Pavol’s been a bit quiet since then, but his plan is to return to making music in a big way this year–he intends to release four EPs in 2025, each with “a different production palate”. College, the first of these EPs, is Pavol’s foray into stripped-down, quiet folk, and even country music, with viola from Sloppy Jane’s Isabella Bustanoby being the only non-Pavol accompaniment. Although the traditionalist approach to instrumentation on College recalls classic folk-country artists, Pavol’s primary inspirations for this simple, string-aided sound are “non-traditional” art rock acts like John Cale and Lambchop. Whether he’s singing about getting stoned during a break from his university courses, his aging family dog, or his own eventual death, the plain-spoken clarity of Pavol’s singing and writing is almost confrontational, reflecting a very deliberate decision to place himself front and center that pays off quickly and uniquely.

Maybe it’d be easier to take the four-song, ten-minute College as part of a larger statement along with the other three yet-to-be-released EPs slated for later this year, but Pavol is still able to wrap up this record neatly and satisfyingly despite (or perhaps because of) its streamlined brevity. The opening title track crystallizes Pavol’s approach the best of any song on here, I think–the beauty conjured up by Pavol’s ringing acoustic guitar, self-harmonized vocals, and Bustanoby’s strings contrasts with lyrics like “I stayed in bed and played on my phone” and “I stayed up late so I could get high”. This successful exercise in gravitas blows College right open–when Pavol continues this thread by upping the tenderness and warmth in “Late Night with the Old Girl” (his “beloved dog Ripley” being the old girl) and by shifting ever so slightly into a low-key country shuffle for the bar report of “No One Talks the Way They Should at Night”, things only make more and more sense. Perhaps the most overtly “traditional”-sounding track on College is the closing track, “Twin Sized Bed”, almost hymn-like in its acceptance of the finality of death. Pavol’s vocals almost duet with Bustanoby’s viola (and later on, a bit of slide guitar); after carrying College as far as he can take it with his voice, Pavol’s closing statement lets the instruments do a bit of summing up for him. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, Iffin, Brown Dog, Paul Bergmann

I will cut to the chase here–we’re starting this week off with an excellent edition of Pressing Concerns. If you want to read about a new B-sides/non-album-songs compilation from The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, new albums from Iffin and Brown Dog, and a new EP from Paul Bergmann, they’re all down below. And you should want to read about them.

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

The Pains of Being Pure at Heart – Perfect Right Now: A Slumberland Collection 2008-2010

Release date: February 7th
Record label: Slumberland
Genre: Noise pop, power pop, jangle pop, fuzz pop, twee
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Side Ponytail

The Pains of Being Pure at Heart effectively defined an entire era of indie pop. They were incredibly catchy and just as incredibly noisy, they released music on San Francisco’s Slumberland Records while being right in the middle of an exploding late-2000s Brooklyn indie rock movement–vocalist/guitarist Kip Berman, keyboardist Peggy Wang, drummer Kurt Feldman, and bassist Alex Naidus bridged together a bunch of scenes and genres with an enthusiastic credibility that nobody else really had the right ingredients to do. The quartet petered out at the end of the 2010s after four albums (five if you count their full-length cover of Tom Petty’s Full Moon Fever), but they reunited for some live shows recently, and Slumberland has taken this golden opportunity to put together Perfect Right Now, a compilation of early singles, EPs, and compilation tracks from the band’s first three years. Almost all of these ten songs initially came about either before or concurrently with The Pains of Being Pure at Heart’s most beloved album (their 2009 self-titled debut), and, as it turns out, there was an incredibly strong companion LP out there this whole time, just waiting for Slumberland to compile it. As much as the name “The Pains of Being Pure at Heart” evokes a specific time and place for indie rock fans of a certain age, they were making timeless music at their peak, and this helping of noise pop, power pop, jangle pop, twee, and fuzz rock blended together only reaffirms this. 

If you enjoy perfect guitar pop songs, you’re going to be drawn in immediately by “Kurt Cobain’s Cardigan”, a ringing, chiming piece of power pop that reminds me of a 2nd Grade song with more distortion (or like Kids on a Crime Spree, one of their initial peers who stuck around into the 2020s). About half of Perfect Right Now’s songs qualify as “rippers”, and none of them disappoint; the “Searching for the Now” version of “Come Saturday” (also from The Pains of Being Pure at Heart) keeps the foot on the gas as the second song on the record, and “103” and “Twins” add a bit of wistfulness to the fuzz-pop in the record’s second half. My favorite song from this side of The Pains of Being Pure at Heart on here is “Side Ponytail”, which is two minutes of nonstop hooks, fuzzed out to perfection. It’s a twee song on steroids; it’s 2009, and it’s forever. Elsewhere, The Pains of Being Pure at Heart decline to dial down the distortion on the less “zippy” songs, but that doesn’t stop “Ramona”, “Higher Than the Stars”, and “Falling Over” from successfully incorporating post-punk, new wave, and even a bit of sophisti-pop in their sound (it’s kind of like “incidental dream pop”). The record ends with the most recent recording on the album, the 2010 song “Say No to Love” that’s a bit more polished-up and nearly four minutes long. It’s effectively the closing of the curtain for this era of The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, but this exit sounds great and graceful, too. (Bandcamp link)

Iffin – Get Hung, Fascist

Release date: February 6th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Jangle pop, power pop, psych pop, chamber pop
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Shouting

What would you expect an album called Get Hung, Fascist to sound like? If you said “somewhat jangly, somewhat convoluted guitar pop music with shades of classic college and folk rock, inspired by lo-fi indie rock band from New Zealand and American basements”…well, then you’ve probably already read either of my reviews of Iffin’s first two EPs, Picaro 1: As the Crow Fights and Homage to Catatonia (Picaro Two). That’s the specific niche that Mira Tsarina has been carving out for herself this decade as Iffin, causing me to pull out some points of comparison I don’t typically get to use (The Waterboys! The Verlaines! Scott Miller, this blog’s very namesake!). I’ve written about bands that have couched revolutionary rhetoric with jangly guitars (see Proper Nouns, and Chime School have their moments, too), but, like in the writing of those acts, things are rarely as straightforward as the title of Get Hung, Fascist suggests. One must listen a little closer and more intently to follow what Tsarina is going on about on your typical Get Hung, Fascist track, but Iffin (here, just Tsarina and “horns and samples” from one Henry F.) meet us halfway with an album that both sounds welcoming enough and is sufficiently thorny and tangled to suggest relistening.

Tsarina draws upon a good deal of earlier Iffin material for the act’s big full-length debut–all four songs from As the Crow Fights show up here, as well as one track from Homage to Catatonia and the 2022 “Shout” single, meaning that over half the album was previously released and I’ve written about almost as much of it (but since these songs are still quite good, and you probably haven’t heard all of them anyway, there’s no harm in double dipping). Either way, it’s a rewarding journey in repackaging (if you’d like to look at it that way), and the new songs hold their own against shined-up (shout out to Henry F.’s horn playing) highlights from Iffin’s previous output. The opening stretch is a full-on arrival announcement for Iffin, sparkling versions of “Shouting” and “Girls Like Us” buttressing the perfect pop music of the new, excellent “Birds Are Gone”. The wild Elvis Costello/mid-career Guided By Voices-esque “Bigger Star” feels like new territory for Iffin, while a lot of the back half of the record gives some of the weirdest pop moments from the EPs (the bad-vibes post-punk-pop of “Julian Was Here”, the psychedelic dance-friendly “Cost of Floss”, the pastoral folk-pop of “My Majesty”) the B-side home they’ve always deserved. There’s a six-minute prog-pop song called “Our Nation’s Straightest Dad” hidden away in the penultimate slot, and even that one’s got a nice jangle-horn-pop sound to it. Good thing too, because Tsarina sounds like the Riddler or something with these lyrics (“The thought of bruises / Your father chooses … Our father grew into a man of taste / He takes salt with his water”) and it’s gonna take me a bit to figure that one out. (Bandcamp link)

Brown Dog – I Thought I Was Gonna Dance

Release date: January 23rd
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Folk rock, alt-country, cosmic country, slowcore
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Sweet Exits

I first heard Berkeley, California alt-country band Brown Dog last year, when they released their sophomore album, Lucky Star Creek. Lucky Star Creek represented a step forward for the band–they’d grown from the founding duo of singer-songwriter Milo Jimenez and multi-instrumentalist Haniel Roland-Holst (the lineup that recorded their first album, 2021’s See You Soon) to a five-piece band also featuring bassist Stew Homans, pedal steel player Jeff Phunmongkol, and drummer Elihu Knowles. Despite the expansion, I called Lucky Star Creek a “restrained and pensive listen”, much closer to bedroom folk and even slowcore than electric country-rock. Clearly, though, Brown Dog have hit on something with their current lineup, as they’ve returned less than a year later with their third LP, I Thought I Was Gonna Dance. This time around, they’ve added Gabriel Bennet on flute and bass clarinet, and, if anything, Brown Dog have gotten even more subtle and quiet on this album. The rock moments are even fewer and far between, increasingly replaced with a sprawling, pastoral folk-dream-country sound that’s nearly psychedelic in its expansiveness. Lucky Star Creek may have been meandering, but you’re practically guaranteed to get lost somewhere in I Thought I Was Gonna Dance. 

And that “somewhere” just might be at the very onset of I Thought I Was Gonna Dance, as Brown Dog choose to kick off the record with a nearly six-minute track called “Just a Little Changed”. The song’s slow, deliberate dream-folk, marked by leisurely acoustic strumming, Jimenez’s raspy vocals, and moments of big sky daydreaming, falls somewhere between the spacier side of Giant Sand and Wilco, and it should prepare you more or less for what to expect with I Thought I Was Gonna Dance. “Again” may be shorter, but it’s no more direct in its presentation, and “Lights” strips things down even further to delicate fingerpicking. The closest thing to a “rock song” on the album is the mid-tempo, mid-record highlight “Sweet Exits”, but it’s something of a red herring, as the flipside of I Thought I Was Gonna Dance delves even more extensively into folky psychedelia. The seven-minute “Corners”, the half-awake cloudiness of “Little Spring”, and the train-station folk music of “Under My Shoes” are the sound of wandering somewhere in the northern California wilderness, with no discernible markers to speak of in sight. I don’t even know how a group of musicians get into the headspace to pull off an entire record of music like that of I Thought I Was Gonna Dance, but Brown Dog clearly were right to pursue this train of thought to its conclusion. (Bandcamp link)

Paul Bergmann – Long Island Sounds

Release date: January 17th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Singer-songwriter, post-punk, folk rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Sunlight in Your Hair

I wasn’t really familiar with the music of Paul Bergmann before hearing his latest EP, Long Island Sounds, but the New Haven-based singer-songwriter actually has a fairly impressive history between playing shows with Angel Olsen and Lou Barlow and amassing a large discography of full-lengths, EPs, and one-off singles since 2013. As of late, Paul Bergmann has been playing with a full band (a trio rounded out by Scott Lawrence on bass and Cameron Brown on drums), and this is the lineup that went up to Easthampton, Massachusetts to record Long Island Sounds live with prolific producer Justin Pizzoferrato at his Sonelab Studio last year. Pizzoferrato is sort of the go-to producer for garage rock and punk bands of the American Northeast (and the records he works on are typically strong enough that I downloaded Long Island Sounds to my phone upon reading about his involvement despite having not heard any of it), but Bergmann and his band have a sound subtler and distinct from Pizzoferrato’s typical clients. Bergmann’s folk-inspired writing collides with his band’s polished, regal, almost post-punk indie rock sound in these five songs, reminding me somewhat of a mid-career, still-hungry The National.

The Paul Bergmann trio choose to start Long Island Sounds with a slow burn–it takes a half-minute for opening track “Sunlight in Your Hair” to actually start, and even after that, it’s not until a minute into the track that the song really comes alive in the chorus. “Sunlight in Your Hair” floats away just as it arrived, leading to a couple of songs that are apparently re-recordings from Bergmann’s previous works (but since I don’t know them, they might as well be brand new). Perhaps Bergmann wanted to get versions of “Lover of the Good Times” and “White Burning Lace” with his new band on tape, and that’s understandable, as the dark post-punk-pop bittersweetness of the former and the slow-building propulsion of the latter (probably the most “The National” moment on the EP) are both highlights. As the Bergmann band reaches the end of the Long Island Sounds sessions, they reach their most sprawled-out and restrained (the five-minute “Old Motel”) as well as their loosest (“Untitled”, which starts off not unlike the EP’s earlier highlights, only for Bergmann to unleash a tortured howl of a vocal unlike anything else on the record as it comes to a close). Long Island Sounds isn’t precisely what I expected, but I came away impressed with what Bergmann, Lawrence, and Brown did on it nonetheless. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: FACS, The Moles, The Bird Calls, May Leitz

This lovely first week of February concludes with a Thursday Pressing Concerns, featuring four LPs that’ll be coming out tomorrow (February 7th). New albums from FACS, The Moles, The Bird Calls, and May Leitz are featured below, in a blog post that already feels like an instant classic. If you missed Monday’s Pressing Concerns (featuring Really Great, Magana, Power Pants, and Distant Relatives) or the January 2025 playlist/round-up (which went up on Tuesday), be sure to 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.

FACS – Wish Defense

Release date: February 7th
Record label: Trouble in Mind
Genre: Noise rock, experimental rock, post-punk
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Talking Haunted

In some ways, FACS are the platonic ideal of the “overlooked indie rock band”. Since the Chicago trio rose from the ashes of Kranky band Disappearers in 2017, they’ve released an impressive six albums for Trouble in Mind Records, all with the same basic ingredients (Windy City noise rock, Dischord-esque art rock, dub, industrial, no wave, post-rock, and the like) but always fresh-sounding and distinct when you sit down and listen to them. Every FACS album that’s come out during the lifespan of this blog has either been on my year-end list or an honorable mention for that year, yet they’ve never been in Pressing Concerns and their consistency has probably been overlooked by me. They’re an obvious match for Steve Albini, whose productivity as an engineer was also taken for granted in his lifetime; every single FACS album has been recorded at Electrical Audio, but, somewhat surprisingly, Wish Defense was the first to be engineered by Albini. It would also tragically prove to be the last record of anyone’s engineered by Albini, who passed away the evening after the second day of recording (Sanford Parker, who recorded the two previous FACS records, stepped in to record the final touches to Wish Defense).

The circumstances undeniably shade Wish Defense for me, but they do not obscure the fact that this LP is actually a rebirth and revitalization of FACS. They welcome back original guitarist Jonathan Van Herik for the first time since their 2018 debut Negative Houses, now playing bass after founding bassist Brian Case moved over to guitar to replace him. 2023’s Still Life in Decay and even 2021’s relatively accessible Present Tense found FACS pushing and probing their sound to the outer margins of “rock music”, a direction seemingly necessary for the band to continue to sound inspired and forward-glancing. The reintroduction of Van Herik seems to have changed this calculus, allowing FACS to find heretofore undiscovered life in the realms of (relatively) brief bursts of power trio post-punk and noise rock.

They’re still the haunted-sounding, negative-space experimentalists we’ve all come to know and love (check out the empty-warehouse vibes of opening track “Talking Haunted” if you don’t believe me–even if there’s an interesting instrumental bridge that I can only describe as “FACS new wave” contained therein as well). It’s not like “Ordinary Voices”, “Wish Defense”, “A Room”, and “Desire Path” are uncharted territory for FACS, but the trio’s comfort in rattling off these tracks one after another, shifting slightly enough to accommodate the Dischord-dub touches of the latter two tracks after the sleeker post-punk of the former two, is wildly refreshing. The six-minute overstimulating ball of nerves of “Sometimes Only” is the exception rather than the rule, although I also do hear a bit of it in closing track “You Future”, which adds just a bit of the squall to its iron-tough skeleton. FACS aren’t “feel-good music”, but they’ve continued to feel their way to good music without flagging for a bit. (Bandcamp link)

The Moles – Composition Book

Release date: February 7th
Record label: Splendid Research
Genre: Folk rock, jangle pop, indie pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Alvin Hollis

Richard Davies is a longtime pop believer. The Australian musician never fit in geographically with the plethora of indie pop “scenes” that have sprung up concurrently to his music career, but he’s pushed forward for over thirty years nonetheless, first in Sydney (where he first led the band The Moles in the late 80s and early 90s) and later in Boston, Massachusetts (where he formed the duo Cardinal with Eric Matthews and began releasing solo albums). As of late, “The Moles” has been more or less interchangeable with Davies’ solo output–around a decade ago, he revived the name with a rotating cast of musicians for 2016’s Tonight’s Music and 2018’s Code Word. These Moles revival records have featured members of Sebadoh, Sugar, and Califone, among others, reflecting Davies’ reach over the years–another notable admirer is Guided by Voices’ Robert Pollard, who made a record with Davies under the name Cosmos in 2009 and has selected The Moles as one of the first acts to put out new music on his newest record label, Splendid Research.

Composition Book is Davies’ first new music of any kind in the better part of a decade, and the record is appropriately grizzled-sounding; between the unhurried tempos and unbothered vocals, Davies sounds like an indie rock veteran on these eleven tracks. That being said, Davies and his current band of collaborators (Malcom Travis of Sugar and Kustomized on drums, High Risk Group’s Sue Metro on pedal steel, David Gould on bass, and vocalists Caroline Shutz and Katherine Poindexter) still spend the bulk of Composition Book showing they know how to navigate their way around a good pop song. The acoustic guitar-led folk-y pop music of opening duo “Feel Like a Dollar” and “Chimes” is positively disarming; apparently, this album was recorded on an iPad, and it sounds like the device captured a bunch of musicians happily, casually, and intimately making music together.

Still, when the jaunty piano and handclaps introduce excellent highlight “Alvin Hollis”, it’s as deft as anything from the golden era of 60s pop revivalists like The Minders and The Ladybug Transistor, and there are moments throughout the LP (like the languid group chorus of “Since I Don’t Know When”, the brisk Flying Nun guitar pop of “Rattlesnakes, Vampires, Horse Tribes and Rocket Science”, and the suave Velvet Underground nod in “Blow Yer Mind”) that remind us of the expertise of this ship’s captain. It’s these moments that allow us to follow The Moles down some of the odder and less outwardly “indie pop” moments on Composition Book with an open mind–the clattering of “Lost Generation” and lullaby-like closing track “Promised Land” reveal themselves over time, and their cover of The Bats’ “Had to Be You” seems like a key link to the past (in addition to, you know, sounding very good, too). Composition Book really is the kind of album that could only be made well into an artist’s career, and I’m grateful Richard Davies got around to making it. (Bandcamp link)

The Bird Calls – Melody Trail

Release date: February 7th
Record label: Ruination
Genre: Folk rock, soft rock, singer-songwriter, synthpop, sophisti-pop
Formats: CD, digital
Pull Track: I Don’t Wanna Be a Cowboy Anymore

Longtime music writer and singer-songwriter Sam Sodomsky seems to have reached a productive balance with his solo project The Bird Calls as of late; since linking up with New York label Ruination Record Co. at the beginning of this decade, he’s put out one album a year, sometimes more or less on his own, sometimes with musical assistance from collaborators like Charlie Kaplan and Office Culture’s Winston Cook-Wilson. Last year’s Old Faithful was my formal entry point into The Bird Calls, and I found myself quite enjoying the casual country-folk ruminations from which Sodomsky built that record. 2025’s Bird Calls album has arrived early, and I’m pleased that Sodomsky has put together something a bit different with Melody Trail. The album was assembled entirely by Sodomsky and producer Ryan Weiner (of the band Tiny Hazard), and while these songs certainly sound like they were written and sung by the same artist who made Old Faithful, the duo give Melody Trail a more polished pop reading. It’s a path down which many of Sodomsky’s influences–Dan Bejar, Elvis Costello, Bruce Springsteen–have wandered to rewarding ends, but Melody Trail retains the greatest strength of Sodomsky’s previous work: namely, that he’s able to evoke the art of such idiosyncratic, larger-than-life figures while coming off more or less as a regular guy.

Sometimes Sodomsky and Weiner embrace full-on 80s synthpop trappings on Melody Trail, while other times they settle on a more subtle “sophisti-pop”-indebted style, but the entirety of this record–even when it could be reasonably described as “folk rock”–distinguishes itself with its presentation. It’s a more focused record than Old Faithful in that way, even though Sodomsky the writer isn’t restrained by any of this. I could imagine Sodomsky playing songs like early highlight “Makeover Scene” on an acoustic guitar on his own, but the tasteful inchworm electric guitars, drum machines, and full-sounding bass guitar pave the way for Sodomsky’s self-conversation as clearly as open chords could’ve done. The advantages of Weiner’s production only get more and more pronounced–it helps Sodomsky get away with the lovely Kaputt-indebted ballad “Critic Meets Artist”, and it’s also hard to imagine The Bird Calls reaching the surprising pop heights that they do on this record without it. Specifically, I’m talking about the twin punches of “Butterfly Strokes Home” and “I Don’t Wanna Be a Cowboy Anymore”, either one of which would be the pinnacle of most “indie pop” records. The two songs achieve their aims by decidedly different means–“Butterfly Strokes Home” is a more traditional “Bird Calls”-sounding track dressed up all nicely, while “I Don’t Wanna Be a Cowboy Anymore” sounds like Sodomsky and Weiner tried to rebuild The Bird Calls from the ground-up with new wave and synthpop. The production launches these two songs into the clouds, but it still comes down to the singer-songwriter at their centers to holds them–and Melody Trail as a whole–together. (Bandcamp link)

May Leitz – A Touch of Grace

Release date: February 7th
Record label: Lonely Ghost
Genre: Noise pop, hyperpop, pop punk
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Kill Yourself

There’s a whole world of bedroom musicians making some kind of “hyperpop”, by which I mean AutoTuned, abrasive pop music with varying degrees of allegiance to digital hardcore, pop punk/emo, electronica, and hip hop (and varying degrees of listenability). It’s not my scene (if you’re interested in it, there are definitely better blogs to be following than mine), but the latest album from a Colorado Springs artist named May Leitz caught my attention. Leitz is a prolific self-releaser–apparently she’s put out fifteen albums since 2017, and I believe that A Touch of Grace is the first one released via an outside label (Lonely Ghost Records). Look, it’s going to be a polarizing listen for those of you who like the typical stuff I cover on this blog, but I’m quite impressed with what Leitz is doing, consistently and expertly, underneath this record’s initial bratty provocation (and I like the bratty provocation at times, too). A Touch of Grace is a trip, but not unnecessarily so–the core of each of these tracks is undeniably effective pop hooks, and when Leitz throws either 80s synthpop dressings or an assault of pop punk guitars at them (maybe even in the same song), it’s a complimentary balancing act.

For somebody who releases music at a steady clip, it’s impressive how much A Touch of Grace feels intentionally bound together as a single statement. Between the early run-ragged, country-infused “Grindset Blues” (which works way better than you think) to late-record statements “$$$” (a lethally simple tune about money, money, money) and “Radio Killed the Radio Star” (which ends the record with an off-the-rails narrative story), there’s a clear rumination on the costs of fame and success (as a pursuit and as a lifestyle, as well). Kind of an odd thing for a bedroom pop musician from the second-biggest city in Colorado to focus on, but it goes to show that Leitz is thinking widescreen and big-picture on A Touch of Grace. This means maximum maximalism sometimes, like in the opening hyperpop-punk sneering anthem “Kill Yourself” (daring today, aren’t we?), but there are some stranger, surprising odysseys in this vein, too. The absolute restraint of the tropicalia soft pop of “Copium” is positively jarring coming after the opening three songs, while “Wack” (which starts as an excellent 80s pop homage before veering into 70s classic rock guitars all of a sudden) and “You Don’t Know the Difference” (an industrial-grade pop song with its eyes on the prize for its entirety) end up as some of A Touch of Grace’s biggest successes, too. What more could you want from May Leitz? She’s doing everything she can here. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable: