Pressing Concerns: Jetstream Pony, Stuart Pearce, Bagdad, Niis

The third and final Pressing Concerns of this week is full of great new music coming out this Friday (March 28th); specifically, we’ve got new albums from Jetstream Pony, Stuart Pearce, and Niis. And, if that’s not enough, we also have an EP from Bagdad that’s coming out today (March 27th). Get excited, and be sure to check out earlier Pressing Concerns from Monday (featuring Dick Texas, Private Lives, George Children, and Film Studies) and Tuesday (featuring Dave Scanlon, Ging Nang Boyz, Disaster Kid, and Theydevil) if you’ve yet to do so.

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.

Jetstream Pony – Bowerbirds and Blue Things

Release date: March 28st
Record label: Shelflife/Spinout Nuggets
Genre: Indie pop, power pop, twee, folk rock, 90s indie rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Captain Palisade

Oh, I finally get to talk about a Jetstream Pony album in Pressing Concerns! Specifically, an album entirely by Jetstream Pony, as they’ve twice appeared on compilations I’ve covered in this column–the 2022 Skep Wax collection Under the Bridge and its sequel two years later. Those albums collected new music from veterans of the 90s twee/indie pop scene who were associated with the legendary Sarah Records, and this Brighton-based group does indeed have this type of lineage: vocalist/percussionist Beth Arzy was in Aberdeen and Trembling Blue Stars, guitarist/vocalist Shaun Charman played in The Wedding Present, Turbocat and The Popguns, bassist Kerry Boettcher also played in Turbocat, and guitarist Mark Matthews was in The Dentists. Since the late 2010s, Jetstream Pony (rounded out by Tom Levesley on drums) have put out two EPs and a full-length in 2020–Bowerbirds and Blue Things is their first new record in four years, discounting their Under the Bridge appearances. Although their latest album is clearly the work of longtime indie musicians, it’s a bit rougher-around-the-edges than a lot of their peers at this stage–not quite Boyracer-level pop punk, Bowerbirds and Blue Things nonetheless has a loose, basement indie rock feel to its approach to guitar pop music (that, to be clear, doesn’t stop it from being wildly catchy over and over again).

Bowerbirds and Blue Things opens with the bright jangly power pop of “Sit and Wonder”, in which Jetstream Pony manages to sound laid-back and like they’re pulling out all the stops to make a pop anthem at the same time. It’s an automatic kind of pop music–between Arzy’s unflagging vocals and the steady, propulsive instrumentation it kind of reminds me of The High Water Marks or even the more overtly-Hilarie Sidney-influenced moments of The Apples in Stereo. “The Relativity of Wrong” in the record’s fourth slot taps the brakes on the sugary guitar pop by beginning with a dark bass riff and Arzy shifting to a “spoken-word” approach–it’s a bit of an outlier, but it underscores that there’s a very strong and well-oiled band underneath the hood of all of these songs. The rest of the record loses not a bit of steam whether Jetstream Pony seem to be going all-out in power pop form (like the huge late-record gem “Captain Palisade” or the Charman-sung “Only If You Want To”) or if they’re delving into dream pop, new wave, and even a bit of psychedelia (check out “3am” and especially “Bad Common Earth Connection”–hell, even the melodic bundle that is “Bonanza 2 Tango Sierra” starts with a lengthy New Order-style instrumental introduction). It’s not exactly surprising that Jetstream Pony are quite good at what they do at this point, but that’s no reason to take them for granted–especially when they’ve got something as strong as Bowerbirds and Blue Things on their hands. (Bandcamp link)

Stuart Pearce – All This Vast Overproduction

Release date: March 28th
Record label: Safe Suburban Home
Genre: Garage rock, post-punk, art punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Fuck No; I Jangle

I wrote about Red Sport International, the debut album from Nottingham post-punk band Stuart Pearce, back when it came out in 2023. I noted the hot streak that their record label (Safe Suburban Home) was on at the time, compared them to The Fall a couple of times, and acknowledged the football and left-wing political references–all in a day’s work. After a stopgap EP called Nuclear Football last year, the second Stuart Pearce album is upon us; it’s called All This Vast Overproduction, and it was heralded by a single called “The Bosses Are Stealing Your Days!” whose album art featured a group of men playing the game that we call “soccer” over in the States for whatever reason. Stuart Pearce are back, alright. The Bandcamp page for this album boasts that it features “the introduction of new sonic textures in the form of acoustic and twelve-string guitars, pianos and vocal harmonies” (presumably the album title is a necessary ego check), and while I won’t deny the presence of these elements, All This Vast Overproduction is still a spittle-radiating British noise rock record that will be quite enjoyable for fans of Mclusky and, yes, the Mark E. Smith/Granny Bongo Band. 

In some ways, All This Vast Overproduction is a heavier album than Red Sport International–of the fifteen tracks on the album, a good portion of them are all-in, full-gas rock and roll explosions, whirlwinds of garage rock and punk that are sure to scare anyone who picked up the album based off the strength of Safe Suburban Home’s indie pop-laden roster. All This Vast Overproduction rolls out the blood-red carpet with a cadre of songs that can either be categorized as a “sprint” (like the admittedly-quite-sparkling but still furious opening track “Easy Now” and revolutionary single “Rope”) or a “stomp” (the post-punk scrapping of “Rule O’Threes” and “Ex-IRA Voice-Actor”, plus the glammy death march of “Würmhole”). At some point in the second half All This Vast Overproduction, Stuart Pearce seem to all of a sudden remember that whole “artistic growth” thing they mentioned earlier and quickly bash out “Fuck No; I Jangle”–Teenage Fanclub they are not, but the weird sleaziness that takes over the track after their initial attempt to write jangle pop is pretty enjoyable on its own terms. The weird prog-garage excursion of “This Infinite Hotel” is less catchy but more fully-developed, and I don’t even mind that they nicked the verse melody from Guided by Voices’ “Not Behind the Fighter Jet” for closing track “Dances w/ Starships” because it seems fitting to go out on a boozy pop high note. Not bad for an overproduced sophomore album. (Bandcamp link)

Bagdad – They Don’t Know

Release date: March 27th
Record label: Rite Field
Genre: 90s indie rock, slowcore, fuzz rock, lo-fi indie rock
Formats: CD, digital
Pull Track: Somewhere, Nowhere

There are a ton of new bands out there these days who make a dark version of indie rock pulling from the worlds of slowcore and grunge (with or without the increasingly meaningless descriptor “shoegaze” attached). Learning of the debut EP from another one might not move the needle for some, but I suspect the fact that Bagdad hail from Poland is a key part of why their first record already puts them above much of their competition in terms of quality. Started in Wrocław in 2023 by “school friends” Franciszek Drobiński (guitar, vocals) and Wojciech Stach (bass) and rounded out by drummer Jakub Gadamski, they’ve linked up with similarly-new Texan imprint Rite Field Records (Some Fear, Shunkan, The Walls You’ve Built) for their first record, a five-song CD EP called They Don’t Know. A world away from wall-of-sound shoegaze textures, They Don’t Know is an open-air collection of sprawling, electric indie rock that, at twenty-six minutes, flirts with “full-length” status. Electric guitar-based slowcore bands like Duster and Idaho are mentioned as influences, although it’s hard to narrow things down any cleaner than “any electric 90s indie rock band that’s far enough away from punk rock” as to what Bagdad sound like here.

“Grunge” is also a fairly useless descriptor for They Don’t Know–don’t get me wrong, I’m sure the influence goes into these five songs, but it mostly manifests itself in the dour, Kurt Cobain-like vocals of opening track “Valley of Dry Bones” and some scattered downtuned guitar riffs. “Valley of Dry Bones” is probably the darkest moment of They Don’t Know–after putting the bleakness up front, Bagdad take a bit of weight off their shoulders and sound a bit lighter on the record’s most upbeat moment, “Somewhere, Nowhere”, a gorgeous fuzz-pop song that kind of sounds like the midpoint between Idaho and Dinosaur Jr. “Knight Errant Block” adds a Bedhead-like “waiting, anticipating” vibe to the instrumental, although Bagdad do actually release the tension towards the end of the song, and “Ash Pan Nocturne” marries a languid melodic lead guitar to a noirish, probing rhythm section. Nearly a third of the EP is taken up by the closing track, the seven-minute finale of “Heartland”, but Bagdad’s grand send-off hardly feels excessive. It takes the trio a couple of minutes of tuneful but subtle indie rock to work up to the soaring, buzzing electric guitars that peek out of the clouds, but even this extra dimension of guitarwork swirls and floats casually after its initial dramatic arrival on the scene. It’s just indie rock, I guess, and Poland’s got some great new practitioners of it. (Bandcamp link)

Niis – Niis World

Release date: March 28th
Record label: Get Better
Genre: Punk rock, noise rock, post-hardore, grunge
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Low Life

Sometimes, what we all need is a noisy and angry punk rock band from southern California. Enter Niis, the latest signee to queer-centric label Get Better Records (Cowboy Boy, Old City, Bacchae) and whose latest record, Niis World, certainly does the trick. After steadily releasing singles since 2020 and putting out an EP called Must Be… in 2022, Niis World is the band’s first full-length album, and the quartet (vocalist Emily “Mimi” Sando-Brown, guitarist Ryan McGuffin, bassist Isabella de Vroede, and drummer Jonathan Salvo) make the most of the larger platform with a collection of ten tracks of punch-packing rock music. Presentation-wise, it’d be tempting to label them as descendants of the riot grrrl movement that began further up the West Coast (early single “Fuck You Boy”, an anti-misogyny anthem, helps with that), but Niis World is a heavier and grungier version of punk music, one that reminds me of modern alt-rock-influenced bands like Rid of Me and Low Dose and one that also carries a palpable hardcore energy with it (Sando-Brown’s vocals are key in this regard). Early punk rock, Discord Records post-hardcore, and good old fashioned hard rock all feature in Niis World, channeled into a dynamic but blunt-force twenty-six-minute assault.

Niis (who pronounce their name like “nice”, by the way) may have refined their sound a bit from those early singles, but that certainly doesn’t mean “toned things down”. Niis World is a more disciplined explosion, but it’s still an explosion–take opening track “Low Life”, which balances cold, calculating shredding on the guitars with Sando-Brown’s vocals, which lie in wait for the perfect moment to go from “on-edge” to “scorched Earth”. A good portion of Niis World is made up of two-minutes-and-change rippers that dart between smooth, almost post-punk propulsion and noisy punk freak-outs. More often than not, Sando-Brown will veer from being the friendliest aspect of a given song to being the wildest, with the rest of Niis serving as the fiery, unflagging counterbalance to her dynamism. The instrumentalists of Niis get their moments in the limelight too, though, don’t worry–the opening guitar riff to “Tyrant” is classic punk rock that sticks out to me, and they pull off “tougher” and “more durable” in late-record workouts like “Driveaway” (Niis at their swerving post-punk best) and “New Pig” (a scorching one about…well, you can figure that out). It’s comforting to catch glimpses of the targets of Niis’ ire and know that there’s good reason behind them, but mostly I’m just enjoying the white-hot rage of Niis World. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Dave Scanlon, Ging Nang Boyz, Disaster Kid, Theydevil

For the second Pressing Concerns of the week, we have a new album from Dave Scanlon, a new EP from Disaster Kid, a retrospective compilation from Ging Nang Boyz, and a reissue of Theydevil‘s debut record. This is a nice and varied one! Also, if you missed yesterday’s post (featuring Dick Texas, Private Lives, George Children, and Film Studies), check it out here.

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

Dave Scanlon – Greenland Shark

Release date: February 25th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Experimental folk, post-rock, ambient
Formats: Digital (streaming)
Pull Track: Reproduction

I’ve written about a couple of albums from Dave Scanlon in Pressing Concerns before–loosely speaking, 2021’s Pink in each, bright blue, bright green and 2023’s Taste Like Labor are “folk” albums, although they both contain traces of ambient, experimental, and electronic music (which Scanlon also explores in a full band setting as part of the quartet JOBS). Scanlon’s latest album is intriguing both in its subject matter and its release format–for the former, Greenland Shark is about the titular North Atlantic/Arctic animal “and [his] obsession with it”, and for the latter, the album is only available to listen to via greenlandshark.tv, a website designed specifically for it (as far as I can tell, you can’t download it, but there are lyrics, credits, and a bibliography up there in addition to the music). Shannon Fields, who produced and contributed instruments to the last Scanlon album, reprises his role on Greenland Shark (although his musical contributions are limited to “signal processing” on one song here), and Erica Eso’s Weston Minissali recorded the LP, but this is largely the work of Scanlon on his own. Greenland Shark is perhaps a bit more “experimental” than Scanlon’s previous solo work, but the hallmarks of the singer-songwriter–pensive, Phil Elverum-esque talk-singing over subtle but often unpredictable music–remain intact in this journey to a thousand meters below the Arctic surface.

“If I were to age at one-sixth the rate / If I were to move at a slow rate / Would my relationship to this objective unit of time change proportionally?” Scanlon asks in “Slow Tapes”, a question that gets to the heart of why the Greenland shark, Somniosus microcephalus, is fascinating both to him and many others. Estimated to be the longest-lived vertebrate on Earth, the shark can live up to age 600 (“There will be roughly five generations of my family before you are pregnant,” Scanlon observes in “Thoughts”), dwelling far away from humanity scavenging and hunting for a lifespan that is difficult for us to conceptualize. Studying other forms of life on this planet does lead us to the questions like the one Scanlon poses in “Slow Tapes”–perhaps a less extreme example, but I’ve found that people are fascinated by the idea that snakes (like the Greenland shark) can go months without eating at all and stay perfectly healthy, and it does make us think about our relationships to food, to time, to rest. I’ve found myself thinking of Greenland Shark as a radical work as of late–on a literal level, fascism seeks to destroy the Indigenous knowledge, research funding, academic institutions, and scientific principles that provide us with all we know about this animal (and that’s not even getting into what’s going on with the island that gives the shark its name at present). But, even more so, Greenland Shark is anti-fascist in its fascination with the unknown, of a world where us humans are far from centered, and in its openness to the idea that we, as a species, are far from “solved”–that the richness of these last (relatively) untouched reaches of our planet and their inhabitants resides not in extraction-capitalism, but in meeting what’s there on its own terms and learning from it. (Greenlandshark.tv)

Ging Nang Boyz – Blew Blue

Release date: March 14th
Record label: Lauren
Genre: Punk rock, art punk, art rock, prog-pop
Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Juventus

Tokyo musician Mineta Kazunobu formed Ging Nang Boyz in the early 2000s, and while they’re not exactly the most well-known East Asian punk rock band in North America or Europe, they’ve remained quite popular in their home country of Japan over the years. They’ve put out a half-dozen albums and countless singles in the past two decades, but their output has almost entirely been exclusive to Japan–until this year, their only American release had been an EP in 2007 via San Jose label Phat ‘n’ Phunky (Dogbreth, Diners, Shinobu). Their first Stateside record in eighteen years is a compilation album that continues the Ging Nang Boyz’s Bay Area associations–this time, they’ve teamed up with Lauren Records to release Blew Blue, and the LP is accompanied by a West Coast tour with Shinobu. Ging Nang Boyz are pretty consistently referred to as a “punk band”, but it’s apparent from Blew Blue that the California definition of “punk” isn’t sufficient here–for one, this album spans seven songs in forty-four minutes, which we just don’t do over here in the U.S. of A. Kazunobu is certainly a compelling punk frontperson when the moment calls for it, but Ging Nang Boyz are just as likely to dip into the realms of heady, fuzzy art rock, psychedelia, pop balladry, and noise rock over songs that stretch past the seven-minute mark on several occasions. 

It’s strange to refer to a seven-minute song as “clearly the most punk rock moment on the album”, but that’s exactly what opening track “Juventus” is–Ging Nang Boyz don’t match the track’s intense, all-in energy pound for pound anywhere else on Blew Blue, although there are individual moments (such as the finale of the ten-minute “The Shining” and parts of the dramatic pop punk of “Boi Meets Girrrl”, which, perhaps unsurprisingly, was used as an anime theme song) that get there. For the most part, Ging Nang Boyz use their “best-of” record as a chance to showcase the band’s range–like via the aforementioned “The Shining”, a piano-led pop song for its first five minutes and a blistering, shrieking rock breakdown for its second five. “Amen, Semen and Mary Chain” doesn’t quite sound like the band that its title (puzzlingly) evokes, but it does reach back towards that era of “alternative music”, with bits of guitar-led dream pop, shoegaze, and Paisley Underground in its gorgeous instrumental. There’s one new song on Blew Blue, and it’s a five-minute track called “Nikaisen” that merges soft rock and synthpop with extensive guitar soloing and ragged vocals from Kazunobu. Ging Nang Boyz stick “Nikaisen” at the midpoint of Blew Blue, dropping it right in the middle of their twenty-plus-year music career–and it makes as much sense as anything else on this album. (Bandcamp link)

Disaster Kid – Rare Bird

Release date: March 21st
Record label: Semicircle
Genre: Alt-country, power pop, folk rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Interstate Runner

Disaster Kid is a very “Chicago” project–the band’s frontperson, Seamus Kreitzer, works at the Windy City’s Old Town School of Folk Music, and the quartet (also made up of bassist Mason Stahl, drummer Connor Criswell, and guitarist/pedal steel player Max Berg) have a sound that fits in well with Chicago’s modern folk rock/alt-country scene alongside groups like Dogs at Large, Flamingo Rodeo, and Orillia. They’re new to me, but Disaster Kid have been around for a while now–Kreitzer put out an album on his own as Disaster Kid in 2018, and the band released the LP Gutterball in 2020. Aside from a few non-album singles, the six-song Rare Bird EP is the group’s first record since then, and the first one featuring Berg, who seems to have replaced original guitarist Andrew Tereick. There must not be any bad blood, though, as Tereick recorded and produced Rare Bird at a “mutual friend’s” cabin in northern Wisconsin, and it certainly sounds great. All those previously-mentioned Chicago alt-country groups come to mind (as well as their godfather, Wilco), but there’s a delicate side to Kreitzer’s writing that gives the EP a unique spin–I hear bits of John K. Samson, Noah Roth, and Buddie, plus a good deal of not only Kreitzer’s stated influence of Slaughter Beach, Dog but other Lame-O power pop groups like Hurry and Big Nothing, too.

Let it not be said that Kreitzer doesn’t put himself out there as a writer. Rare Bird is clearly a record in which its frontperson put a lot of thought into the lyrics and isn’t afraid to show it–any EP prominently featuring the line “Don’t apologize so much for nurturing an unknown beauty,” has to fall into this category to some degree. That lyric is from the title track, a head-spinning sung-spoken folk-country-pop song where Kreitzer sounds like Jake Ewald trying to be Dan Wriggins–and though he sort of lampshades himself in the following line, the rest of “Rare Birds” is just as ambitious. It wouldn’t really work if Disaster Kid didn’t nail the “polished but not stiff, rocking but not distracting” vibe of the instrumental, and Rare Bird as a whole is as good as it is because of the strong reading the group give to Kreitzer’s words and melodies. Opening track “Interstate Runner” is a beautiful power pop/roots rock heart-on-sleeve first statement, and Disaster Kid nearly best it not long afterward with “Temples”; while on the other hand, “Don’t Wait Up for Me” and “Wine/Weapon” explore sprawling, intimate folk-country balladry with just as much style. Disaster Kid do everything in their power to make Rare Bird a treat to listen to, and Kreitzer takes it from there. (Bandcamp link)

Theydevil – Maybe You’ll Find Me (Reissue)

Release date: March 5th
Record label: Devil Town Tapes
Genre: Bedroom pop, synthpop, lo-fi pop, singer-songwriter
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Get Embarrassed!

A little under two years ago, a West Philadelphia musician named Hughes Bonilla released their debut album under the name Theydevil, a twenty-minute collection called Maybe You’ll Find Me. Bonilla recorded the album alone at home from 2019 to 2022, developing an intimate “bedroom pop” sound entirely based around minimal electronic pop (“It’s just me, my keyboard and my laptop until the day I die”, they write regarding the record); per Bonilla, this avenue of exploration was partially due to feeling removed from their city’s notorious indie rock scene. Regardless of how Bonilla arrived at Maybe You’ll Find Me, there’s something to their songwriting and craft here, enough so that British cassette label Devil Town Tapes (Greg Mendez, Conor Lynch, Bedtime Khal) picked it up to give it its first-ever physical release (a cassette featuring a physical-only bonus track). Though these dozen songs did initially come about a few years after the 2010s “bedroom pop” boom, Bonilla captures the highs of the genre on Maybe You’ll Find Me, a record made of brief, streamlined snippets of synthpop combined with its creator’s earnest, personal lyrics (it’s something of “a coming of age album”, Bonilla notes).

Pretty much everything on Maybe You’ll Find Me hovers around the two-minute mark, and a couple of tracks don’t even really reach that. The individual songs on the tape bleed into each other–some might be brighter and more synth-polished than others, some lean more heavy into the drum machine beats, but the whole thing comes off as one half-remembered late-night oversharing session (or maybe just “sharing” session–Bonilla still sounds like they’re keeping a few things close to the vest at various points here). The moments on Maybe You’ll Find Me that end up sticking out among Bonilla’s delicate vocals and computer-spun pop instrumentals are the ones where the lyrics jump out and grab me–I’m not sure if the line about the northeast being “where folks would rather die than say excuse me,” is even a good one or not, but it’s certainly memorable, and “I guess fuck your opinion / I am my own boyfriend” in “Missed Connections” lands with a thud (complimentary). Things start to get clearer after a while, with more such moments eventually revealing themselves–Bonilla starts “Get Embarrassed!” by singing “I wanna feel the way a Blue Nile song sounds” and injecting just a bit of soft sophisti-pop into the track, and the confused still life of “Creature of Habit” is really beautiful if you take in all the imagery at once. That’s the best way to approach Maybe You’ll Find Me as a whole, too. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Dick Texas, Private Lives, George Children, Film Studies

Hello everyone! For the first Pressing Concerns of the week, we’ve got new albums from Dick Texas, Private Lives, and Film Studies, and a new EP from George Children. You’re gonna love these! I can tell!

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.

Dick Texas – All That Fall

Release date: March 7th
Record label: Life Like/Tortilla Flat
Genre: Alt-country, country rock, post-rock, slowcore, art rock, folk rock, psychedelia
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Flies

Valerie Salerno has been a fixture in the realm of Michigan indie rock for a while now–in the late 2010s, she played in the Grand Rapids noise rock/post-punk group Sojii, and she began Dick Texas as a solo project around the end of last decade. In between 2019 and now, Salerno moved to Detroit, released a couple of songs as Dick Texas, and eventually formed a full band (drummer Willy Kipps, bassist Adis Kaltak, and guitarist Jack McKay) to play the songs live. All That Fall, the first Dick Texas album, has been over a half-decade in the making, but it’s pretty believable that letting this music marinate for as long as it did helped make the album as special as it turned out to be. A lot of Mitten State hands were on deck for its release–in addition to the players, Shadow Show’s Kate Derringer and Ape Not Kill Ape’s Cam Frank co-engineered it, and Fred Thomas’ Life Like Tapes co-released it. Loosely speaking, All That Fall is a country rock record–and “loose” is the right word to use here, as Dick Texas’ lost, woozy, incredibly slow playing style really does sound on the verge of falling apart more often than not. The songs–all seven of ‘em, that’s all we need–sprawl out in their self-contained desert worlds, and Salerno is the steady center with vocals that murmur along with the music’s psychedelic haze, declining to hog the spotlight but still leaving a distinct mark on Dick Texas’ landscapes.

All That Fall starts on an incredibly high note with “Long Dirt Driveway”, a six-minute dispatch of slowcore and post-rock from the American Midwest. The languid opening instrumental becomes a swirling dust storm over the song’s first two minutes, but once it’s died down we’re left to continue along the winding path with Salerno and Dick Texas to the tune of slightly psychedelic folk rock. All That Fall kind of sounds like reversed-engineered country music, like if you tried to gather up all the second/third-hand country influences on psych/Paisley Underground/alt-rock groups like Mazzy Star, The Breeders, and Spacemen 3 and tried to recreate the original thing out of them. Sometimes, Salerno’s post-punk background peeks through a little more, like in “Slow Down Friend”–it’s her most standout vocal performance, and there’s just a little bit of desert-goth in the music, too. “I Wanna Be Like Jesus” and “Last January” might be the clearest proof that Dick Texas can do straight-up country and folk (respectively), but neither track is without its quirks, and the grainy “Mars” (featuring Indira Edwards’ viola) once again takes the roots to the cosmos. Even so, none of this quite compares us to the out-of-nowhere closing track “Flies”, an electronic-fried krautrock/psych rock creation that ends All That Fall on just as high of a note as it begins. The fog that surrounds All That Fall doesn’t clear on “Flies”, exactly, but the shapes we can just barely make out are clearly moving faster. (Bandcamp link)

Private Lives – Salt of the Earth

Release date: March 21st
Record label: Feel It
Genre: Power pop, garage rock, post-punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: On My Own

Garage rock quartet Private Lives formed at the beginning of the decade from a handful of other Montreal groups, and the band has snugly fit on Feel It Records’ roster via their 2022 self-titled debut EP and 2023’s Hit Record. Vocalist Jackie Blenkarn, guitarist Chance Hutchison, bassist Josh Herlihey, and drummer Drew Demers are back a little under two years later with Salt of the Earth, Private Lives’ sophomore album (and, given that a lot of Hit Record was made up of songs from their first EP, their first full-length collection of all-new material). Private Lives make it all sound so easy on Salt of the Earth; in under thirty minutes, the quartet bowl strike after strike down the lanes of power pop, garage rock, proto-punk, and indie pop. These ten songs sound ramshackle but precise at the same time, stubbornly insisting that they need no more than a power trio rock-and-roll setup and a powerhouse vocalist to work–and they’re right! It’s not like Private Lives are the first band to make sugary, loud power pop-garage rock (they’re in good company on Feel It between CLASS, The Cowboys, and Romero, for three), but Blenkarn is the group’s secret weapon, consistently delivering a strong, possessed performance evoking everything from riot grrrl to twee-pop to 60s pop rock over the band’s tuneful racket.

We join Private Lives as they kick the record off with “Dealer’s Choice”, a song that rides a post-punk-worthy bassline into a sunset of garage rock-pop harmonies and surging guitars. “Feel Like Anything” and “Disconnected” are timeless-sounding rockers, leaving us behind in their wakes to ponder how they accomplish so much with such recognizable tools–it’s not until album centerpiece “Time” that it feels like Private Lives let up on the immediate assault just a bit. For three minutes, “Time” finds Private Lives shifting gears just slightly to pull off plodding, offbeat British Invasion and 60s psychedelic pop (“Time is a merry-go-round” indeed, Private Lives), but the roaring, ripping, rock-and-rollers kick back up immediately with “I Get Around”. In fact, the second half of Salt of the Earth leans even harder on the gas pedal than the A-side does–“Psychic Beat” has a tough, pounding, and prominent backbone, “On My Own” is a revved-up girl group power popper, “Be Your Girl” takes on an early punk attitude with a Private Lives-level hook pursuit, and the closing title track makes up for a slightly less brisk tempo with a slightly blues-punk-tinged heaviness. There’s even a complete changeup in “Salt of the Earth”, with Private Lives surprising us all with an acoustic-guitar-led folk-pop-rock finale–for the most part, Private Lives aren’t trying to shock us, but they certainly don’t sound complacent on Salt of the Earth either. (Bandcamp link)

George Children – Kitchen Sink Drama

Release date: February 20th
Record label: Dandy Boy
Genre: Lo-fi folk, lo-fi pop, bedroom pop
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Beautiful Stranger

Raise your hand if your favorite Guided by Voices album is Tonics & Twisted Chasers. It’s not the prolific band’s most famous record–in fact, of their 1990s albums, it’s their least-known by a sizeable margin–but I bet there’s an outsized number of people who live and die by it due to its unique sound. Originally a fanclub-only release, Tonics & Twisted Chasers is the sound of just two people–Robert Pollard and Tobin Sprout–making lo-fi, casual, frequently acoustic guitar pop together, resulting in a singularly off-the-cuff looseness. I have reason to suspect that Inland Empire band George Children are quite fond of Tonics & Twisted Chasers. Jordan Chipman is the leader of George Children, and while there are other members of the band (they appear to be a quartet in the photo on their Bandcamp page, and Manny Trujillo and Ely Martinez are credited on bass and drums respectively on their past releases), it wouldn’t surprise me if Kitchen Sink Drama, the project’s latest EP, is all Chipman. Featuring just a plainly-strummed acoustic guitar and Chipman’s vocals for the most part, George Children’s latest cassette EP moves through five songs (four originals and a cover) in nine minutes. Melancholic but still quite pop-friendly, Kitchen Sink Drama makes for an all-around strong stop-gap release (they’re planning on putting out an LP on Dandy Boy Records later this year or early next).

The secret weapon on Kitchen Sink Drama’s first two tracks, “Beautiful Stranger” and “Lucille”, appears to be tambourine (and by “secret weapon”, I mean “just about the only other instrument on the tracks”). The former of those two songs is the record’s “hit” to my ears–not that the rest of the EP isn’t also catchy, but Chipman stumbles onto a timeless pop song for ninety seconds in “Beautiful Stranger”, synthesizing acoustic Dunedin sound pop, lo-fi LVL UP/early Trace Mountains, and Chipman favorite Bill Fox superbly. “Paranoid Sweetness” is the first downcast song on Kitchen Sink Drama–armed with a nice little melodic guitar line overdub, this one reminds me the most of Tobin Sprout, specifically his “Awful Bliss” in its gorgeous but vaguely sad balladry. “Today Is Empty” continues George Children’s downer streak, another minor-key, acoustic, depressing ode that nonetheless has something to it. Chipman ties it all together with the last song on the EP, a pretty faithful cover of none other than Guided by Voices and their “Key Losers”, maybe the best song from Tonics & Twisted Chasers (and if you ever hear me say the same thing about “Ha Ha Man” or “Dayton, Ohio – 19 Something and 5”–no, you didn’t). It’s a triumphant bummer, which pretty much sums up Kitchen Sink Drama’s whole deal. (Bandcamp link)

Film Studies – Lo Fi Indie Pop Rocks

Release date: March 21st
Record label: Bear Claw & Bug Spray
Genre: Lo-fi indie rock, bedroom pop, slowcore
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Sick Trick

Film Studies (not to be confused with the California shoegaze band Film School, or the Maine dream pop band Field Studies, or the British chamber pop band Modern Studies) is the solo project of a Connecticut musician named Thomas Higgins. The first Film Studies album, Everything Is Right in Its Place, came out last year, and Higgins has kept full steam ahead with a new LP called Lo Fi Indie Pop Rocks less than twelve months later. Higgins says that “about half” of his newest album originated from Dave Benton of Trace Mountains’ songwriting workshop (regular readers will remember that Film Studies isn’t the first record to appear on the blog with the same genesis), and the album’s tongue-in-cheek title comes from Higgins’ attempt to the describe the sound of his music to other people–both of these facts are helpful in understanding from where Lo Fi Indie Pop Rocks is coming. Greyscale but undeniably “pop rocks”, Film Studies’ latest album evokes 2010s Bandcamp-core bedroom pop like early Trace Mountains and another band Higgins mentions as an inspiration, Hovvdy–much of the record sounds a little lost in a drum machine-aided haze, although it remains devoted to the kind of music conjured up by its title in brief, pop-sized bursts.

At its most animated, Lo Fi Indie Pop Rocks is more electric and just straight-up louder than the depressedelic folk of his closest-sounding influences; opening track “Sick Trick” is the clearest and best example, not quite on the level of LVL UP but “indie rock” first and foremost. “Take Your Time” and “Sweet Time” are a couple more electric-forward highlights, although the latter one starts to delve into the acoustic/folk-y sound that describes the majority of the rest of Lo Fi Indie Pop Rocks. “Doom”, which comes right after the (relatively) triumphant opening track, is one end of the spectrum, a tired-sounding, aimless thing that captures the uncertainty and confusion Higgins hints at in the lyrics. It’s not always so stark–Film Studies’ bread and butter is somewhere in between, with songs like “Cold Brew” and “Undone” landing somewhere in the lo-fi pop comfort zone between the warm vocals, simple guitar melodies, and steady drum machine backdrops. Although there are a few straight-up acoustic tracks (“Yer a Wizard” and “Days”), the subtle touches Higgins lays onto the more fully-developed songs do add to them (like the nice little guitar lines on “Undone”, which make all the difference), suggesting there’s more to Film Studies than meets the eye (not that Higgins sounds like one to maintain eye contact on Lo Fi Indie Pop Rocks). (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Sharp Pins, Exploding Flowers, Motorbike, Ed Kuepper & Jim White

Third Pressing Concerns of the week! The “albums coming out tomorrow” edition! It’s the expanded vinyl release of the Sharp Pins album from last year, new LPs from Exploding Flowers and Motorbike, and a collaborative record from Ed Kuepper and Jim White. In addition, check out the Pressing Concerns from Monday (featuring Telethon, The Unfit, Quinine, and LP Gavin) and the one from Tuesday (Party’z, Earth Ball, Inland Years, and Fotokiller).

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.

Sharp Pins – Radio DDR (Vinyl Release)

Release date: March 21st
Record label: K/Perennial/Hallogallo
Genre: Power pop, jangle pop, college rock, mod
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: When You Know

So here I am, writing about an album that was on Rosy Overdrive’s 2024 best-of list here in 2025. Seems kind of like yesterday’s news, right? Well, Sharp Pins and Kai Slater aren’t household names yet, so there’s still plenty of reason to talk about their music–and I’ll personally take any excuse to talk about Sharp Pins in Pressing Concerns (which I surprisingly hadn’t gotten to do before now). Aside from his work in noise rock group Lifeguard, lo-fi pop group Dwaal Troupe, and releasing zines and cassettes under the Hallogallo banner, Slater has made two excellent jangle pop records as Sharp Pins in as many years. Both have received staggered releases–first as self-released tapes, then later pressed to vinyl with the help of another label. Tall Texan took 2023’s Turtle Rock, and late last year K and Perennial Records announced a partnership with Sharp Pins beginning with a vinyl release of last year’s Radio DDR featuring three bonus tracks. Although I certainly enjoyed Radio DDR (again, year-end list placement and everything) when it first came out, I’ve found myself appreciating it even more after revisiting it for the vinyl release. At the time, I noted that it refined and polished the noisier sides of Turtle Rock, but looking closer reveals a ton of sharp songwriting under the sheen as well.

On the whole, Radio DDR is more jangly and power pop-py than Slater’s debut as Sharp Pins, the work of somebody who’s been deep in the mod revival mines in recent years. “Classic” Guided by Voices-era tuneful blasts of noise and Slater’s timeless, always-melodic vocals are two key features of the album, and while it may be Sharp Pins’ most “traditional” work yet, it’s much too enthusiastic and earnest to become tiring. Any record that features power pop gold like “Every Time I Hear”, “Lorelei”, and “If I Ever Was Lonely” clearly has something special going on in it, and though I’d certainly enjoy it if Radio DDR bashed out a dozen similarly-minded rockers, Slater also shows a genuine interest in exploring the quieter, folkier side of bedroom pop here, too. Slater’s vision is wide enough to encompass stuff like “You Don’t Live Here Anymore”, “Sycophant”, and “Chasing Stars”, in which Slater displays enough confidence in their acoustic, pensive power to tap the breaks on the jangly electric guitars (and is right to do so). On the other end of the spectrum, “When You Know” and “Is It Better” are Sharp Pins at their most fuzzed-out (although still just as tuneful), and they’re no less at home on Radio DDR than anything else. The record’s bonus tracks do feel like “bonus tracks”–not the most immediate or interconnected group of songs, but welcome nonetheless. “I Can’t Stop” is a just-so-slightly off-center take on psychedelic guitar pop and is probably the “hit” of the trio if there is one, but “With a Girl Like Mine” adds a Byrds-y folksiness to the quiet side of Sharp Pins admirably. Alright, I’ve done all I can to get Radio DDR on your radar–where to next, Sharp Pins? (Bandcamp link)

Exploding Flowers – Watermelon/Peacock

Release date: March 21st
Record label: Meritorio/Leather Jacket
Genre: Jangle pop, power pop, psychedelic pop, Paisley Underground
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Across a Sea

At first glance, Los Angeles quartet Exploding Flowers seem to fit in with the current robust wave of new West Coast jangle pop/power pop bands, but the group’s story is a lot longer and more complex than this. The band’s frontperson, Sharif Dumani, has been involved in the Los Angeles punk/post-punk scene since the 1990s, and he’s played with everyone from Alice Bag to Silver Apples to Nikki Sudden. The first Exploding Flowers album came out in 2011, although it took the group (also featuring Josh Mancell, Happy Tsugawa-Banta, and Mark Sogomian) nearly a decade to follow it up with 2020’s Stumbling Blocks (Dumani seems to remain busy three decades into his career as a musician). Another half-decade later, labels like Meritorio have been spending the last few years chronicling a bunch of new bands drawing from the same sources as the Exploding Flowers, so it’s natural that the two would hook up for the third Exploding Flowers album, Watermelon/Peacock. Hailing from ground zero of the 1980s “Paisley Underground” movement, Exploding Flowers do evoke the loose, psychedelic side of this strain of American jangly college rock. Sometimes hazy, sometimes bright and vibrant, Watermelon/Peacock is a compelling and generous Americana record arising from one of the country’s largest population centers.

Watermelon/Peacock offers up everything from hook-fest power pop to pure psychedelia to throwback San Francisco garage rock to 60s-style keys and organs throughout its fourteen tracks and forty-odd minutes. The “hits” are as good as anything from the “vintage” power pop cellar, with peppy opening track “Crowded Streets”, the tambourine-bait “Life of a Timeline”, and the overgrown jangle of “(No Arms Around) the Isolationist” all qualifying. Somewhere just a bit removed from this side of Exploding Flowers are tracks like “We’re Flying Half as High”, “Across a Sea”, and “The Grass Grows On”, which take the compelling pop mastery to subtler (and, in the case of the latter of the three, more rhythmic and post-punky) places. This kind of music doesn’t always place a large emphasis on the lyrics, but there are threads to follow throughout Watermelon/Peacock–the record’s somewhat moody centerpiece is called “American Strife, American Life”, and closing track “Across a Sea” is explicitly about Dumani’s family history as immigrants (from Lebanon to Costa Rica and eventually the United States). There’s a darkness and (as Dumani acknowledges) cruelty in the story of “Across a Sea”–but, importantly, it’s a story that also encompasses the makeup of Exploding Flowers themselves and the vibrant music they’ve been able to make together for more than a decade. “Across a Sea” closing out Watermelon/Peacock is an inspired sequencing decision, but even without the context it’s an excellent summation of the pop music Exploding Flowers explore for the entirety of their latest LP. (Bandcamp link)

Motorbike – Kick It Over

Release date: March 21st
Record label: Feel It
Genre: Garage punk, punk rock, fuzz rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Scrap Heap

Oh, we’ve got some nice and loud Cincinnati garage rock for you today. Something of a supergroup of Feel It Records-associated artists, the quintet Motorbike is led by Welsh expat Jamie Morrison on vocals and rounded out by two members of The Drin (Dylan McCartney on drums and Dakota Carlyle, also of Corker, on guitar), bassist Jerome Westerkamp (Vacation, Good Looking Son), and guitarist Philip Valois. Motorbike arrived in 2023 with a self-titled debut album that was twenty-six ferocious minutes of fuzzed-out rock and roll, and they’re back two years later with an LP that won’t disappoint anyone who enjoyed Motorbike (or the garage-punk side of Feel It Records’ roster in general, for that matter). Kick It Over was recorded “between busy schedules over a six month period”, but while the band may have had to build it piecemeal as they kept up with their various other projects, Motorbike LP2 picks up the thread of their debut quite easily. It’s a little heavier and less pop-forward than Motorbike, but it’s a natural, gradual progression–they’re still operating in the same worlds of Motor City garage rock, riff-centric classic rock, and basement punk.

Helping the vintage feel of Kick It Over is the fact that Motorbike line up their alternate-universe hit singles at the beginning of the LP’s tracklist. “Scrap Heap” is just about a perfect opening statement–machine-gun power chords introduce a scuzzy, sleazy 70s-style hard rock ripper that does everything it has to do (and more, really) in under two minutes. “Currency” is the other half of this opening statement, a slightly different beast but still a beast–it’s got a little bit of Dead Moon graveyard-garage in it, and it’s also just about one Farfisa organ away from 60s garage rock/proto-punk. If you’re looking for Motorbike pushing against their bite-sized fuzz-rock constraints, this does exist on Kick It Over–after a few more automatic rock-and-rollers, I’d say this side of them starts around “Western Front” (a kind of glammy mid-LP stomper) and continues into the weirdest song on the record, centerpiece “Gears Never Dry” (in which Motorbike turn their full strength towards making loud but hazy psychedelic distortion). “Quite Nice” comes out the other side of that cyclone (ahem) quite nicely, but the cowpunk garage rocker does extended to nearly four minutes, and Motorbike does have to take one final strange detour (the–I think–Polish fuzz punk of “Nie Wrócimy”) before landing beautifully with two final crowd-pleasing garage rock attacks. Maybe Motorbike plays with their food a little bit on this record, but there’s no question that they do, in fact, kick it over. (Bandcamp link)

Ed Kuepper & Jim White – After the Flood

Release date: March 21st
Record label: 12XU/Remote Control
Genre: Folk rock, art rock, post-punk, noise rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Swing for the Crime

Ed Kueper and Jim White are a pair of Australian alternative/indie rock music giants–the former was the co-founding songwriter and guitarist of legendary punk band The Saints and has put out over fifty albums between his various groups and solo work, while the latter is one of the Dirty Three (Melbourne’s premiere instrumental post-rock group) and has drummed for everyone from Nina Nastasia to Simon Joyner to Bonnie “Prince” Billy (and, as of late, he’s been globetrotting as part of supergroup The Hard Quartet). Despite both musicians’ productivity and a mutual respect dating back to a bill they shared in the “mid-90s”, the duo had never collaborated before the pandemic stranded White (who’d moved to the United States some time before) in Australia. The duo started playing together–first in private, then in concert when lockdowns eased up, and in 2023 they went to Melbourne’s Sound Park Studio to make an album representative of these performances. After the Flood (named after the deadly Australian floods that occurred a year before the album was recorded) pulls material from all across Kuepper’s career–there’s one Saints song, three from his next band, The Laughing Clowns, and four are from his solo LPs.

As Kuepper’s rather larger oeuvre is mostly a personal blind spot, After the Flood is all new material to me, but even people familiar with his most acclaimed records will probably find plenty of new-to-them songs between the selections from his 21st century solo albums and the songs from the mostly-out-of-print Laughing Clowns. These tracks aren’t in any chronological order–the newest one, 2015’s “The Ruins”, is first, followed by two mid-80s Laughing Clowns tracks–underscoring the new terrain Kuepper has unlocked with White in tow. If I had to describe this album (and I do), I’d refer to it as “long, winding, electric desert folk rock”–Kuepper wanders both in his guitar playing and his vocals, letting the songs build and sprawl with White’s drums as a grounding force. For his part, White maintains his communicative, distinct style of drumming while still form-fitting to Kuepper’s compositions–he rumbles and thunders in blunt-force rockers like “Swing for the Crime” and “The Crying Dance”, adds a (mostly) subtler touch to quieter journeys like “Year of the Bloated Goat” and “Demolition”, and gets in line behind the relatively “pop” reading of “The 16 Days”. It took a long time for the songs, musicians, and circumstances to all come together on After the Flood, but it sounds like it all happened at the right time and pace. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Party’z, Earth Ball, Inland Years, Fotokiller

Second Pressing Concerns of the week! A new album from Party’z, a tape from Inland Years, a live record from Earth Ball, and a reissue of an album from Fotokiller. Also, there was a Pressing Concerns yesterday featuring Telethon, The Unfit, Quinine, and LP Gavin.

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.

Party’z – Afterparties

Release date: March 7th
Record label: Storm Chasers LTD/Friend Club
Genre: Fuzz rock, punk, alt-rock, garage rock, emo-rock
Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Night Ride

Back near the beginning of 2022, a new band from Chicago called Party’z made their debut with a four-song self-titled EP. At the time, Party’z was a quartet led by Kittyhawk/Joie De Vivre’s Mark Jaeschke and also featuring bassist Clare Teeling, keyboardist Delia Hornik, and drummer Andy Hendricks, and despite Jaeschke’s (and the other members’) background in notable fourth-wave emo bands, the Party’z EP was a full-bodied embrace of lo-fi, amp-cranked, fuzzy power pop. Party’z eventually received a vinyl release through Storm Chasers LTD, who are also co-issuing Afterparties, the band’s debut album. Three years later, the band have added two new guitarists in Danny Radovanovic and Johnny Fabrizio–but despite the extra six-string firepower, Party’z actually backs off of the noisy distortion-fest of their debut EP and shoot for something more layered and (relatively) mellow. Mentioning names like The Cure and The Pains of Being Pure of Heart as inspirations, Jaeschke is still making loud garage-y indie rock on Afterparties, but it’s shot through with classic indie pop and even a bit of new wave melancholy–the result isn’t unlike a certain other Chicago band who famously (or infamously, depending on your point of view) attempted to merge these disparate worlds (I’m talking about The Smashing Pumpkins, if that wasn’t clear).

The fuzzed-out basement rock of “Titled” opens Afterparties by consciously calling back to their previous release, but it’s the full-band might and the clear Jaeschke vocals that the song offers up as it reaches its climax that most prepare us for what Party’z has planned for the rest of their debut LP. “The Last Garage on Planet Earth” also looks toward the past (it’s supposedly about defunct venue Gnarnia and 2010s Chicago DIY music more broadly), but the huge-sounding, anthemic rock and roll sound that Party’z embrace on the song is totally new territory for them. Afterparties contains at least one other straight-up rocker with the strength to rival “The Last Garage on Planet Earth” in the pissed-off, Siamese Dream-esque “Dust Settles Grey”, but some of the best moments on the record are the more subtle ones. “Night Ride” and “All Old Songs” are both first half-highlights and they’re the best of both worlds for Party’z– sweeping alt-rock undeniably in their DNA, but with sincere, almost shy indie pop cores that actually aren’t all that removed from what modern Slumberland bands like The Laughing Chimes are doing. Both of those songs eventually balloon to thundering conclusions, but “Save Grace” and “The Only One” in the record’s second half hold just a bit back (and the latter, with its bold synth touches, is a unique late-album highlight). Party’z last foray into something new is five-minute closing track “Only When We Speak”, which injects some weary, Keith Latinen-y emo-rock into the persevering instrumental. One imagines that it’s refreshing for the members of Party’z to try their hand it something different, and Afterparties feels stronger for it. (Bandcamp link)

Earth Ball – Actual Earth Music – Volumes 1 & 2

Release date: March 7th
Record label: Upset the Rhythm
Genre: Free jazz, noise, experimental rock, noise rock, improvisational
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Live at the Fox Cabaret

Hailing from the forgotten city of Nanaimo, British Columbia, the experimental/improvisational band Earth Ball was formed by John Brennan, Isabel Ford and Jeremy Van Wyck sometime around the beginning of this decade, and they later added Kellan McLaughlin and Liam Murphy to make a clean quartet. Earth Ball releases have come at a steady clip since 2021, and they linked up with London label Upset the Rhythm last year for the LP It’s Yours–and, all the while, gaining a reputation for wild live shows where the band attacks noise rock and free jazz with their improvised chops. Their newest release for Upset the Rhythm is called Actual Earth Music – Volumes 1 & 2, and it brings all this together–it’s a full-on live album, with each side of vinyl capturing an Earth Ball set from the past two years. Side A is from The Fox Cabaret in Vancouver on August 4, 2023 (the band were opening for noise legends Wolf Eyes), and the flipside is a show the following year at London’s famed Café OTO with two renowned experimental musicians (Chris Corsano on drums and Steve Beresford on piano) sitting in. The first two volumes of Actual Earth Music are distinct beasts, but they both capture a group that manages to hang together despite being fully set loose on stage.

Admittedly, I’m not as well-versed in music that’s as far out there as this–it reminds me of noise/jazz-rock bands like Sunwatchers and Writhing Squares, but blown up and stretched-out into two twenty-minute, towering blocks. The Fox Cabaret side is the more “rock” side to my ears–not that we’re listening to Boston or anything, but for the most part Earth Ball take the form of a thundering, booming noise rock band on this first volume. There are a few stretches with vocals–they’re a real curiosity, and far from an afterthought, but they’re also not exactly the main draw here. Perhaps the squealing horns are the main character of Volume 1–at the very least, they’re the most consistent noisemaker on top of the rhythms. The Café OTO is even more “out there”–we can thank Beresford for that, as his unbridled piano playing (the bio for the album mentions a moment where he was “scraping children’s toys along the strings”) takes this recording to strange and uncharted territory almost immediately. Volume 2 never becomes the full-on squall of noise that Volume 1 consistently is–scurrying pianos, jabbing strings, piercing horns, robotic vocals, and limping percussion all drop in and out for twenty minutes in an unsettling, unsatisfying orchestra. It seems like it’d be even harder to coordinate something like this second volume, but I doubt Earth Ball think of it in those terms. (Bandcamp link)

Inland Years – Keep Your Eyes on the Road

Release date: February 14th
Record label: BSDJ
Genre: Lo-fi pop, bedroom pop, lo-fi indie folk
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Make You Feel Better

Ryan Daniels is a musician who played in a few hardcore/screamo/metalcore groups in Massachusetts in the late 1990s and early 2000s (Hassan I Sabbah, The Fall of Leningrad, The Red Chord), but the now-Brooklyn-based artist has made lo-fi indie rock/pop on his own under various aliases (his own name, Double Entendre, Inland Years) for a while now. The oldest Daniels release on Bandcamp is from 2004, but Inland Years really came into focus in 2023–Keep Your Eyes on the Road is the fourth Inland Years record since the beginning of that year. Released on cassette via Tokyo label BSDJ and recorded and played entirely by Daniels himself, Keep Your Eyes on the Road is thirteen songs of hissing, lo-fi, folk-ish guitar pop music delivered in seventeen minutes. It seems like Inland Years has garnered comparisons to Guided by Voices and The Cleaners from Venus in recent years, and those (particularly the former) aren’t wrong, but between Daniels’ low-key but emotional vocals and the acoustic skeletons from which most of the songs are built, it reminds me more than anything of Lou Barlow’s Sebadoh (and honestly there’s a little bit of J. Mascis in here, too). Daniels is a hazy frontperson, the songs come in and out of focus, and the tape is over before you know it but not without nailing a lot of excellent lo-fi pop.

According to Daniels, Inland Years’ home-recording setup is “cassette 4-tracks, a digital capture and one microphone setup”–it’s certainly lo-fi, and parts of it are a headache to try to listen to on a car stereo, but Keep Your Eyes on the Road still delivers pop music unencumbered. At its catchiest, Keep Your Eyes on the Road really does feel like a power pop album, if a somewhat bashful one–“Better Off on My Own” kicks things off with a gorgeous melody that sees itself out in under sixty seconds, “Alone” is a somewhat noisy, somewhat folky, somewhat 60s-pop bedroom creation, and “Make You Better”, “What I Always Said”, and “Put Me Down” are a surprising second-half trio of unvarnished jangle pop. Inland Years really earns the “90s basement indie rock” comparison when Daniels deviates from this script, though–either by getting a little more intimate with quiet strummers like “When Is the Right Time” and “What Can You Do” or upping the noise with messiness like “Fools Paradise”. These diversions help situate us in the realm of a lo-fi indie rock alchemist, although they (like the rest of the record) are brief–Inland Years does indeed keep its eyes on the road. (Bandcamp link)

Fotokiller – Eerie Nostalgia (Reissue)

Release date: February 7th
Record label: It’s Eleven
Genre: Post-punk, college rock, new wave, goth, garage rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Control

Eerie Nostalgia, the debut album from Berlin post-punk trio Fotokiller, is less than two years old–but it already has an extensive release history. Following a demo cassette in 2021, Eerie Nostalgia was originally released on vinyl and digitally by order05records in 2023, then on cassette via Colossus Tapes the next year. This year, Fotokiller linked up with It’s Eleven Records (Ambulanz, Mantarochen, Distant Relatives), and the first order of business for the new partnership was getting Eerie Nostalgia back in print on vinyl (the “limited-edition” order05 run had been sold out for a while now), and now that I’ve heard the album I can see why. Like all the It’s Eleven-associated bands I’ve heard, Fotokiller make music where “post-punk” and “garage rock” intersect, but they’re a lot less dark and noisy than most of their roster. The trio (made up of guitarist/vocalist Sofy, drummer Kitty, and bassist/synth player Damon) are a good reminder that The Cure and Siouxsie and the Banshees could write killer pop songs in addition to their canonical goth-rock work, and though they cite Joy Division explicitly as an influence, there’s plenty of New Order in Eerie Nostalgia, too. 

Like a good post-punk band, pretty much everything on Eerie Nostalgia is being led by Damon’s bass, but it’s also very likely to be the melodic centerpiece on any given song here, as well. Fotokiller sound fairly laid-back overall on their first album, so it’s probably not hard for the low-end to take the reins away from these songs, anyway–Sofy’s vocals are confident but not overbearing, content to let these songs speak for themselves without the drama-queen overselling you’ll get with this kind of music on occasion. “Control” and “Stop the World” open Eerie Nostalgia by being just about as “casual” as post-punk/garage rock could possibly be, all driving bass and unhurried melodic guitar accents that bleed into each other. “Confidence Killed” is a bit more heavy-duty in its execution, and there’s darker hues in the distant-sounding “Sea of Thoughts” and the fairly tense closing track “Echoes”, but these aren’t huge departures, and they come among tracks like “Isolation” and “Asleep” that continue Fotokiller’s propensity for hook-first post-punk and new wave at full speed. It’s really a seamless first statement for a punk rock band, and now that Fotokiller have linked up with a label that’ll keep it in stock, hopefully we’ll hear where they’ll go from here soon. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Telethon, The Unfit, Quinine, LP Gavin

First Pressing Concerns of the week! New albums from Telethon and LP Gavin, a compilation album of singles and EPs from The Unfit, and a new EP from Quinine.

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.

Telethon – Suburban Electric

Release date: March 6th
Record label: Halloween
Genre: Power pop, pop punk
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Middleman (Theme to Suburban Electric)

Telethon are from Wisconsin. They describe their music as “powerpoppunkrock for the modern kids”, and their latest album as “11 different character studies delivered via rock & roll”. Their last album was named after an Everclear lyric and was my favorite album of 2021 (and, between you and me, my second favorite of the decade so far). They have a keyboardist who goes by the name “Gene Jacket”. Nobody else is doing it like Telethon. Ever since Swim Out the Breakers, the sixth Telethon LP has been at the top of my “most anticipated albums” lists, and after a few years of being in the works, they just went ahead and surprise-released Suburban Electric earlier this month. It certainly sounds like a Telethon album, even though it also sounds like a conscious attempt not to repeat the sprawling, overstuffed, guest musician-heavy Swim Out Past the Breakers. There are still a few auxiliary performers here (Justin Mullens on trumpet and French horn, Rima Fand on violin and viola, Peter Hess on saxophone and clarinet), but Telethon proper (Jacket, lead vocalist Kevin Tulley, bassist Alex “DeepSoundz” Meylink, drummer Erik “Drum” Atwell, and guitarist Jack “Psycho J” Sibilski) are the unambiguous vocal point of Suburban Electric. If it’s possible for Telethon’s blend of maximalist power pop, Midwestern workhorse pop punk, and dashes of ska and emo to ever be “streamlined”, Suburban Electric is it.

Suburban Electric is still a rich and stuffed-to-the-gills record in its own way, though. As Telethon cut out the brief “snippet”-type tracks of Swim Out Past the Breakers, every song on this album becomes a wild self-contained narrative (the lyrics are presented as paragraphs on the album’s Bandcamp page, which seems right to me). Suburban Electric could be Tulley’s bid for “best lyricist in indie punk rock whatever currently going”, not in a “heartache-inducing one-liners to write on your spiral-ring notebook” way but in a “how the hell does he fully step into the worlds of his characters in an opaque but charismatic way over and over again like that?” way. Telethon surprise musically on Suburban Electric, too–with the “hook-a-second” record set by Swim Out Past the Breakers unlikely to be bested any time soon, Telethon instead set their punk rock theater energy towards building lengthy, almost prog-pop Jenga towers like “I Believe in Slime” and “Lloyd” and genre excursions like the cabaret/ska-pop “The Pen” and the disco-pop-touched “I Think I’ve Seen Enough”. Of course, the power-pop-punk rush of “Tumbleweeding” and the frantic final track “Middleman (Theme to Suburban Electric)” are both as catchy as anything on Swim Out Past the Breakers (putting your catchiest and most crowd-pleasing song dead last on the album? Again, nobody’s doing it like Telethon), and while “Checker Drive Revisited” is necessarily more subdued than the song from the previous LP to which it nods, it lives up to the lofty connection. I suspect I’ll be coming back to Suburban Electric quite a bit this year–Telethon took a different route this time, but no corners were cut here. (Bandcamp link)

The Unfit – Disconnected

Release date: February 28th
Record label: Share It Music
Genre: Noise rock, post-punk, garage punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Bad Guys

Who doesn’t love a good noise punk band from the Pacific Northwest? Let me introduce you to a Seattle-originating quartet called The Unfit if you’ve yet to make their acquaintance. The band was formed back in 2012 by four Emerald City rock veterans–vocalist/bassist Jake Knuth, guitarists Michael Lee and T.J. Johnson, and drummer Tyler Johnson–and their roots go back even further, as half of them played in the group Subminute: Radio in the late 1990s and three-fourths of them were in Lila in the early 2000s. Apparently spread thin geographically these days, The Unfit has a fairly irregular release schedule–it took until 2020 for a self-titled debut to show up, and their second LP, Disconnected, isn’t even a proper “album”, instead serving as a collection of the two EPs, one single, and one compilation track they’ve released this decade thus far. Disconnected is fiery and alive nonetheless, following in a grand lineage of Seattle punk bands wielding a combination of wild, sardonic vocals and huge guitars to explosive ends. Too limber (and, let’s be real, not nearly self-serious enough) for the blunt-object post-punk/noise rock revival, but too heavy and hardcore-indebted for “egg punk”, Disconnected is ten songs and twenty-five minutes of The Unfit beating their own personal sweet spot to a pulp.

They might sound like it initially, but listening to Disconnected reveals that The Unfit are anything but nihilists. The first song on the compilation, “Bad Guys”, is a dispatch from a dark reality of heartily encouraged violence and warfare (“I smell blood / I kinda want blood / A little bit of blood never hurt anyone”), but the very next song, “Gatekeepers”, is an explicit rejecting of fighting for fighting’s sake when we’ve got bigger fish to fry (“I know you like to fight / I know you think you’re right / But when you point at your neighbor / The gatekeepers are laughing”). The Unfit are more than just hardcore sloganeers, though–the ballistic “Who’s in Charge?” and (especially) the jokingly self-serious “Condemned” (“You may sleep like a baby / You may die like a king / But I’ll know where I stood / And that counts for something, right? / …Right?”) keep their heaviness light. The Unfit may not be Devo-core, but they share a distaste and healthy fear of the technocratic future–the title track to Disconnected is a searing centerpiece, repeating its mantra (“I think there was a time / Before everyone everywhere / Had to know about everything / Everything all the time”) like a prisoner of war trying to remember their past life (in a way, it makes a twisted sense that their most popular song is their Cyberpunk 2077 soundtrack contribution, “To the Fullest”). If “Disconnected” wasn’t enough, “The Big Machine” drives the point home: “It’s broken / So throw that shit out, right?”. (Bandcamp link)

Quinine – World Tattoo

Release date: February 11th
Record label: Cherub Dream
Genre: Shoegaze, alt-rock, fuzz rock, space rock, grunge
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: He’s Fine

“The world is pretty messed up. These songs are all kind of just about that.” So says the Bandcamp page for World Tattoo, the latest release from a quintet from Sacramento called Quinine. It may be the group’s first EP for Bay Area shoegaze/fuzz pop imprint Cherub Dream Records, but they’ve already strongly entangled themselves with the label–they released a split single with Welcome Strawberry on it last year, and two of the band’s members (guitarist Cole Apperson and bassist Jacob Waite) are in Cherub Dream band Blous3. Aside from a 2023 demo tape and the aforementioned split single, World Tattoo is the first Quinine record, and the band (also made up of guitarist/vocalist Taylor Kohl, guitarist Zack Bissell, and drummer Wyatt Cermak) showcase an aptitude for Hum-like space rock, grungey, shoegaze-informed alt-rock, and even bits of pieces of noise rock and post-hardcore in these four songs. There are some clear hallmarks to Quinine’s sound–Kohl’s monotone, slightly-buried vocals, fuzzed-out guitars, just general greyscale vibes–but these four tracks are all pretty different from one another when you look beyond the band’s stubborn devotion to basement indie rock anonymity.

“He’s Fine”, the opening track, is the rhythm section workout–Waite and Cermak are on fire throughout this one, doing their best to provide a platform for the band’s three guitarists to play around in Sonic Youth land. The title track follows, and it’s the one with “the riffs”; there’s a nice, squealing truckstop guitar part right in the center of it, making it the one song that really does evoke Hum and the heavier side of the alt-rock/grunge/shoegaze revival thing of which Quinine are on the periphery. The biggest “what the?” moment on World Tattoo has to be the eerie synths (I assume?) that open up “Waste of Time”, which Quinine then follow up with pounding drums and hypnotized vocals in a move straight out of the gothic-era Swans playbook. “Waste of Time” gets more recognizably “fuzzed-out basement rock” as it goes on, but it never totally abandons its haunted undercurrent, buzzing right along until Quinine bow out with the shortest song on the album (and, unless they changed any song titles, the one repeat from their demo tape), “Why Even”. Kohl is finally buried under an avalanche of guitars in this one; not all of the song is pure shoegaze, but when the squall kicks in, it’s a category 5. Similarly, not everyone necessarily is looking for another band like Quinine in their lives, but if you’re open to them, they’re doing as much as they can on World Tattoo. (Bandcamp link)

LP Gavin – Trials, Tribulations, Deliberations, Pratfalls, Reprieves, Etc.

Release date: February 28th
Record label: Safe Suburban Home/Repeating Cloud
Genre: Lo-fi pop, slacker pop, fuzz pop
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: DTMWTD

A month or so ago, Safe Suburban Home Records released Old Master, an album by Publicity Department, a semi-solo slacker rock project from a London lo-fi pop musician named Sean Brook. The similarities between Old Master and the Safe Suburban Home record that immediately followed it–the debut album from a musician known only as LP Gavin–were apparent to me even before I found out that Brook is actually Gavin’s primary (and, I think, sole) collaborator on Trials, Tribulations, Deliberations, Pratfalls, Repreievers, Etc.. Like Publicity Department, LP Gavin is a London-based artist who combines the off-the-cuff pop brilliance of 90s American basement indie rock with classic British guitar pop songwriting, although the differences between Gavin’s music and that of his associate become pretty apparent when we get beyond the surface level. Compared to Brook’s lethargic, almost folk-rock leanings, Gavin is much more electric and wide-ranging (perhaps because, unlike Brook with his group Brunch, Gavin doesn’t have a “band” to explore louder material), actually living up to an album biography that cites both Ovlov and Robert Wyatt as influences. Beyond the moments of actual “fuzz rock”, though, Trials, Tribulations… is marked by a psychedelic, distorted haze that hovers over even the album’s more gentle moments; Gavin’s low-key British vocals mumble and stumble through these bright and inventive instrumentals, only sometimes the main character in his own show.

Opening track “Launderette Euphoria” is a warm addition to a time-worn indie rock tradition–pop music from New Zealand as interpreted by noisy American bands, kind-of-loopy vocals on the soft end of the spectrum and the guitars (both soaring, revved-up melodic leads and steady, chunky, fuzzy power chords) creating a gradient all their own, too. “DTMWTD” (that’s “Don’t Tell Me What to Do”) does the opening track one better with some straight-up, satisfying fuzzy rock and roll, but Trials, Tribulations… only gets weirder and weirder as it goes on. The midsection of the album is very easy to get lost in–between the plodding-along “Yes Yes”, the mid-tempo fuzzed-out “Man with the Keys”, and the late-night folky haze of “Casino”, Trials, Tribulations… becomes an indie rock train derailing. LP Gavin has a couple more strong pop songs up his sleeve towards the end of the album with the bar-piano mutation of “No Inferno” and the fuzz-pop singalong “(Excluded from) The Banquet of Life”, but both tracks maintain Gavin’s buried wooziness nonetheless. When LP Gavin close Trials, Tribulations… with the whisper-quiet acoustic song “Drawing Board”, it feels less like a stylistic choice and more like the necessary exhausted conclusion to an exhaustive debut record. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Bambara, Lone Striker, Olivia’s World, Dead Bandit

We’ve got four great albums coming out tomorrow, March 14th, in the Thursday Pressing Concerns: new LPs from Bambara, Lone Striker, Olivia’s World, and Dead Bandit. Check them out below, and if you missed this week’s earlier blog posts (Monday’s Pressing Concerns featured Silo’s Choice, Kinski, Humilitarian, and Spinnen, and Tuesday’s featured ODDLY, The Sprouts, Celebrity, and Mirrored Daughters), 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.

Bambara – Birthmarks

Release date: March 14th
Record label: Bella Union/Wharf Cat
Genre: Post-punk, art rock, noise rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Letters from Sing Sing

I don’t even really know where to begin with this one, but it’s good enough to be on the blog, so I have to start somewhere. I’ve always been vaguely aware of Bambara as one of those modern “dark post-punk” revival bands for a while now, but I’ve received a crash course on them thanks to Birthmarks, the group’s fifth album. It turns out that the New York-based trio have been around for longer than I realized (2007, but playing together under different names for even longer) and are originally from Athens, Georgia. Two-thirds of the band are brothers (vocalist/guitarist Reid and drummer Blaze Bateh, with William Brookshire rounding out the trio), and their sound is gothic, “arty”, and influenced by Nick Cave and Swans–putting them closer to Iceage and Protomartyr than, say, IDLES and Viagra Boys. Another key part of Bambara is Reid Bateh’s high-concept, “literary” writing, storytelling delivered in a croaking, hypnotic baritone, a feature that’s only gotten more pronounced as Bambara has gotten longer in the tooth. This brings us to their first album in five years and first for Bella Union, Birthmarks, partially recorded by Bark Psychosis’ Graham Sutton in England and then further developed by the band in Brooklyn. Birthmarks is an ambitious album in more ways than one, the trio augmenting their post-punk sound with atmospheric electronica, psychedelia, even a bit of hip hop production to keep up with Reid’s convoluted writing. 

I don’t exactly have a handle on the story of Birthmarks at the moment, but that’s not a problem. These songs aren’t chronological (of course they aren’t), but there are recurring characters and motifs, allusions to murder and evil and recurring references to photography, snakes, Christianity, and rural America, among other signposts. I want to be clear that Bambara do not sound like The Hold Steady, but if you read that description and thought of a more post-punk Hold Steady (which is Lifter Puller, I guess), then you’re not alone. Birthmarks is always intimate, but it sort of starts out at its most uncomfortably close–Bambara put all their blood, sweat, and semen into stuff like opening track “Hiss”, Afghan Whigs style, and the fruits of their expanded musical palette (I do, in fact, hear the dream pop and trip hop influences in that one and another early one, “Face of Love”) help Bambara land these tracks, too. Bambara zoom out a bit thematically as Birthmarks goes on, but the music doesn’t follow any clear trajectory; post-punk seethers like “Letters from Sing Sing” and “Pray to Me” sit alongside cavernous art rock material like “Because You Asked” and “Smoke”. It all feels very precarious; Bambara are holding up something almost too big for any indie rock band here, and there are moments when the cracks in the grandiosity show–like guest vocalist Madeline Johnston (of Midwife) making an aside as the character Elena about someone’s jacket left at her house at the end of the spoken-word voicemail “Elena’s Dream”. These wobbles and glimpses don’t make the inferno of closing track “Loretta” any less all-consuming, though. (Bandcamp link)

Lone Striker – Lone Striker

Release date: March 14th
Record label: Safe Suburban Home/Repeating Cloud/Hidden Bay
Genre: Lo-fi pop, bedroom pop, power pop, folk pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Funny Way of Showing It

We talk about Tom Brown a lot on Rosy Overdrive. His sometimes-solo-project, sometime-five-piece band Teenage Tom Petties has become a fixture of Pressing Concerns in recent years, and Rural France, his slightly longer-in-the-tooth duo with Rob Fawkes, has made some appearances on the blog as well. And now there’s Lone Striker, which begs the question: what could Brown possibly need a third alias for? Well, while Teenage Tom Petties and Rural France both worship at the altars of lo-fi power pop, college rock, and jangly indie pop, Lone Striker is an attempt by Brown to do something markedly different. The self-titled debut Lone Striker album is apparently five years in the making, recorded almost entirely by Brown at home utilizing “wobbly doo-wop samples, off-kilter soul drum loops and found sounds” as well as his typical indie rock instrumentation. It sounds like a huge departure, right? Well, yes and no. There are no boxroom bangers on Lone Striker, no, but there’s still plenty of excellent guitar-driven (or, at least, co-driven) pop music here. Brown may be primarily drawing from psychedelic and atmospheric-pop 90s indie groups like Sparklehorse and Mercury Rev, but Lone Striker works because he’s able to speak the same fuzzy, half-remembered, mid-century Americana language that those bands also spoke (somehow, despite being British), and actually elucidates a core tenet of his other projects in doing so.

A good deal of the songs on Lone Striker I could imagine as Teenage Tom Petties tracks if they were sped up and given a lot less of a…tired reading. The hook to “Blip One” may be a sample of a blue-moon croon, but the rest of the song is vintage Tom Brown, the perky “Cursed Like Roy” is a little bit of a mid-record pick-me-up, and “Funny Way of Showing It” is as sugary and theatrical as anything off of Hotbox Daydreams (even if, slowed down and relying on chimes and pianos, it also kind of sounds like Christmas music). Meditating on the lilting pop music of Lone Striker has only reaffirmed my belief that the strength of the Teenage Tom Petties comes from Brown’s uncanny knack for bridging the gap between British folk-pop music and the Americana canon, and Lone Striker is merely a continuation of the project from a different angle. Thematically, stuff like “Never Blown a Kiss”, “Cling”, and “Hurry Up, You’re Taking Forever” are universal-language type things, the kind of lovelorn, heart-on-sleeve lyrics that evoke vocal jazz, early country music, or ancient folk songs–depending on whichever was most formative to the listener. Still, though, there are plenty of moments exclusive to Lone Striker that we just wouldn’t have gotten with Brown’s other projects–the little country flourishes of “Hurry Up, You’re Taking Forever”, that sample in “Never Blown a Kiss”, pretty much the entirety of the self-immolation acoustic brush-pile of “Pinocchio”. Lone Striker is just as much a great pop album as any of Tom Brown’s others, even if it does at times have a funny way of showing it. (Bandcamp link)

Olivia’s World – Greedy & Gorgeous

Release date: March 14th
Record label: Little Lunch/Lost Sound Tapes
Genre: Noise pop, twee, fuzz rock, indie punk
Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Sourgum

Greedy & Gorgeous has been a long time coming. Olivia’s World’s Tuff 2B Tender was a favorite in the early days of the blog–it was one of my favorite EPs of 2021, serving as an incredibly strong introduction to the fuzzed-out twee-punk of the Australian (and, for a while, Canadian) group. Now based in Sydney, bandleader Alice Rezende and longtime bassist Joe Saxby recruited guitarist Jordan Rodger and drummer Daan Steffens to help put together the first Olivia’s World album (and first new music of any kind in four years), Greedy & Gorgeous. I wouldn’t expect anything less than indie pop with an instrumental heft and a clear personality from Olivia’s World, and Greedy & Gorgeous delivers–Rezende remains a striking frontperson, thoughtful and occasionally less-than-clear but never guarded in her writing. The band are tougher and more unified than ever before; the pop hooks of Tuff 2B Tender are still here, but the Pacific Northwestern looseness is augmented by a hard-charging, Dinosaur Jr. fuzz rock streak that remains constant throughout the album. Sometimes Olivia’s World will come out swinging, other times they’ll turn on a dime from bouncy, offbeat guitar pop to the big finish, but Greedy & Gorgeous keeps finding its way back there.

Greedy & Gorgeous is a weird record, but Alice Rezende is probably weird, and the way that Olivia’s World make some odd choices while still holding onto “pop music” feels pretty authentic. “Porcupine Girl” is a modern twee classic–it has a childlike, dreamlike quality to it, sort of like a nursery rhyme set to wobbly electric guitar, and it serves as an extended introduction to the world of Greedy & Gorgeous. It’s time to grow up in “Baby Bathwater”–but it’s not the pop rock blooming that we’d expect, instead settling into a somewhat angry mid-tempo track that does indeed get pretty loud in the refrain. The K Records/Raincoats pop of “Healthy & Wealthy” is probably the catchiest thing on the album up to that point, kicking off Greedy & Gorgeous’ golden era that continues with the wonky, post-punk twee pop journey of “Empresário”, the slacker rock-new wave hybrid “Chemlab”, and “Sourgum”, the most full-on eighteen-wheeler rock and roller on the album (it rules, of course). Rezende is all over the place on Greedy & Gorgeous; for every explosion like “Weird Guy” (in which she asks “Can you stop / being a weird guy?”) there’s something less cathartic, like the pacing of “Healthy & Wealthy” (“Are you TV-ready? / I’m not TV-ready”) or the only “soft” song on the record, closing track “Beauty Bar”. In the latter, Rezende asks “Am I just a peasant here?” and mutters about giving off some “awkward vibes”. We’re in Olivia’s World, though, where such scattered thoughts make for excellent fodder for gorgeous, sparkling indie pop. (Bandcamp link)

Dead Bandit – Dead Bandit

Release date: March 14th
Record label: Quindi
Genre: Post-rock, ambient
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Half Smoked Cigarette

The instrumental duo of Ellis Swan and James Schimpl have been making music together as Dead Bandit since the dawn of this decade–their debut, From the Basement, came out back in 2021, and I first heard them thanks to their sophomore album, 2024’s Memory Thirteen. Memory Thirteen was a satisfying collection of wide-open, guitar-led post-rock that evoked the vastness of Canada (the band’s homeland, and where Schimpl is still based) while incorporating just a bit of the ambient rock of Swan’s adopted city of Chicago. The third Dead Bandit album, self-titled this time around, doesn’t mess with Swan and Schimpl’s winning formula, although there are differences between this one and Memory Thirteen that I’ve picked up on. Dead Bandit sound a little busier, buzzier, and more electronic this time around–there’s still a lot of empty space on Dead Bandit, of course, but there’s a greater interest in letting prominent beats plod across the landscape. An LP with sixteen songs, Dead Bandit ends up offering a surprisingly large amount of variations on post-rock, ambient, post-punk, electronic, and dub–these short, discrete songs still evoke something greater than their parts when taken as a whole, though.

Early highlights like “Weeds” and “Half Smoked Cigarette” are essentially instrumental indie rock songs, but Dead Bandit isn’t content to stay in this space–more dubby (“Glass”) and ambient (“Milk”) songs coexist right next to them. Dead Bandit find themselves somewhere in between for a lot of this album–take “Pink”, for example, which starts out with a typical rock band set up but doesn’t stay overly committed to it, dipping in and out of focus for three minutes. The folkier side of Dead Bandit isn’t as prevalent on this record, but “Up to Your Waist” is an excellent acoustic-driven exploration that captures this version of post-rock strongly enough for the entirety of the album. Late-record moments like “Spidery Ways” and “Koyo” continue to push Dead Bandit forward–the former is made up of showy (for Dead Bandit, at least) guitars, sounding a bit jazzy and a smidge more overtly Chicago, while the latter embraces the mechanical nature of the drum machine at its core to offer up a grey, rhythmic march. Whether it’s with synthesizers, basslines, guitar lines, or just some kind of strange rumbling sensation whose origins I’m not sure of, Dead Bandit spend their third album practicing different ways to say the same grey story. It’s one worth paying attention to. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: ODDLY, The Sprouts, Celebrity, Mirrored Daughters

Welcome to the Tuesday Pressing Concerns, which is a bit of an odds-and-ends post collecting some records from January and February I’d been meaning to get to for a while now. We’ve got new albums from ODDLY and Mirrored Daughters and new EPs from The Sprouts and Celebrity! Also, if you missed yesterday’s post (featuring Silo’s Choice, Kinski, Humilitarian, and Spinnen), check that one out, too.

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

ODDLY – Swerve

Release date: February 12th
Record label: Damnably
Genre: 90s indie rock, noise rock, garage rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Nautilus

I first heard Kyoto indie rock group ODDLY via their 2021 record Odd Man Out–technically it was the trio’s second EP, but given that it was largely made up of the same songs of their first one, 2019’s Loaded, it was basically an expanded version of their debut release. My favorite song on Odd Man Out was “Concrete Jungle”, a really cool jangly dream pop rocker, but other moments on Odd Man Out hinted at a darker and noisier sound; Naoko Yutani (vocals/guitar), Tomoyuki Watanabe (vocals/guitar), and Keita Kishimoto (vocals/drums) have taken their first real chance to show how they’ve evolved since their first recordings to further explore this end of their music. Once again released via East Asian indie rock chronicler Damnably (o’summer vacation, Say Sue Me, Hazy Sour Cherry), Swerve is ODDLY’s long-awaited first LP, and it’s a leveling-up moment for the trio (plus guest musicians Kentaro Kikuchi on bass and Takanori Ito on guitar). The trio pursue a tangled indie rock sound on this record’s busiest moments, a torrent that will likely please fans of Sonic Youth (Damnably, associated with plenty of lesser-heralded corners of 1990s American indie rock, makes a Seam comparison instead).

As for ODDLY themselves, they say they’re influenced by everything from the bedroom pop of Fazerdaze to the modern alt-rock of Wolf Alice–and Swerve does sound like the work of a band who love noisy indie rock and pop hooks in equal measure. It’s all pulled together in this LP–you get both sides of ODDLY from the very beginning, and while one end of their sound wins out in some of these songs, the other side of the coin is never far. “Nautilus” is a friendly-enough opener, a bit of noisy, catchy rock and roll that then plows into the harsher post-punk pummeling of “Alligator”. “Lozenges” is the first song on Swerve that dips back into the catchy dream pop energy of “Concrete Jungle”, and “Zero” impressively takes that attitude and musses it up a bit with some distorted alt-rock. Whichever member(s) of ODDLY that are singing lead vocals in “Easy Mark”, “Artificial”, and “Ride” help these tracks come out on the dirtier (or Dirty-er) end of the record, although the latter song in particular has a sleazy, classic rock/almost power pop catchiness to it. ODDLY re-record one of their old songs towards the end of the record (“Ruh Ruh”) and ramp up the post-punk noisiness, but dream pop ODDLY returns in full force in the record’s last two tracks, “(In) Mates” and “Rent for Mark”. The former song at least has a driving indie rock rhythm section for most of its length, but the last song veers into acoustic “Fade into You” territory for most of its five minutes. Of course, “Rent for Mark” ends with a blistering, cacophonous guitar solo–one last Swerve. (Bandcamp link)

The Sprouts – One Room to Another

Release date: January 31st
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Lo-fi pop, bedroom pop, folk pop, jangle pop
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Sometimes

I know it’s probably hard to keep all of these Australian indie pop bands straight these days, but The Sprouts are a name you ought to make a note of in your spiral ring. They’re the project of Rob Remedios, who also plays in The Small Intestines, and they’re rounded out by Innez Tulloch, Tom Marinelli, and Matthew Ford. Their debut release was a 2023 cassette called Eat Your Greens on Ford’s record label, Tenth Court, and it’s a nice collection of vibed-out guitar pop music, sometimes folkier and more casual than the full-band excursions of The Small Intestines, sometimes with a garage-y edge to it, but always catchy. I didn’t get around to writing about Eat Your Greens in Pressing Concerns, but there’s a new Sprouts record out, a self-released five-song EP called One Room to Another which promises “15 minutes of music. On 15 tapes. 15 dollars each” (which have already sold out by the time I’ve gotten to writing about this. Sorry for failing you, readers!). Unlike Eat Your Greens, One Room to Another is more or less a Remedios solo release–Marinelli plays on one song, The Small Intestines’ Matthew Liveriadis is on a track, and Remedios’ parents sing on a song, but that’s it.

Even compared to the comfortable soft launch of Eat Your Greens, One Room to Another is an incredibly laid-back piece of Aussie lo-fi pop rock. The arrangements are simple, the instrumentation is utilitarian, the fidelity “good enough”. “Sometimes” being in the EP’s first slot has a lot to do with that feeling–it’s the longest song on the record at a mean three minutes, and it’s largely made up of Remedios stumbling through some simple acoustic chords with a nice little guitar lead overdubbed upon it. It’s a brilliant song, maybe my favorite on the record, but it’s also far from the snappiest piece of lo-fi pop rock. You’ll get that soon enough, though, if you’re patient–“Black Leather Jacket” (the Marinelli one) is shambling but purposeful, “Up There for Thinking” has a little bit of Chris Knox opaque franticness to it, and the electric guitar-led “Demons” (hello, Liveriadis) is…well, it’s got an electric guitar in it! Just as soon as it began, One Room to Another is wrapping up with “Pash” (which confused me until I learned that it’s a cover of a 90s Aussie pop hit by Kate Ceberano–oh, those Australians!) and “I’m Feeling Good”.  That latter song is the one with the Remedios Family Singers–classic pop style, they answer their son’s lead vocals (“I’m feeling good (He’s feeling good!) / When we’re together (When you’re together!)”). I take back what I said earlier–it’s not really a solo record at all. (Bandcamp link)

Celebrity – Automatic Changer

Release date: February 5th
Record label: Mach Nine
Genre: Garage rock, post-punk, punk rock, alt-rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Wildflower

Celebrity appear to be something of an under-the-radar punk supergroup. Vocalist/guitarist Kevin Kiley plays in the bands Militarie Gun and LURK, and the quartet is rounded out by Knuckle Puck’s Kevin Maida (who’s also Kiley’s LURK bandmate) on guitar, Chris Mills of Harms Way and Inclination on bass, and Drew Brown of Weekend Nachos and Hate Force on drums. These bands form an extreme spectrum, ranging from hardcore punk to powerviolence to metal, but Celebrity is pretty far removed from that kind of music (as you can probably surmise by the fact that they’re on Rosy Overdrive). Following a self-titled three-song EP in 2022, the four songs of Automatic Changer dropped unannounced and with little fanfare at the beginning of February, showcasing the work of an exciting, polished, and pretty catchy post-punk band. Kiley’s vocals, while impressive in their own right, aren’t the primary hook-drivers of Automatic Changer–it’s an always-pressing-forward rhythm section and guitars that do their best to fill in the gaps. The album bio references Sonic Youth and Television, although it’s more greyscale and quietly intense than those bands; likewise, it’s somewhat close to the realm of new wave and even goth-indebted punk bands like Home Front and Schedule 1, but without much more than a hint of those acts’ melodrama.

All four songs on Automatic Changer are winners, but “Wildflower” is pretty clearly the (should’ve-been) single; it’s a hard-charging rock-and-roll epic marked by waterfalling guitars, that always-on rhythm section, and Kiley’s most emotive vocals on the entire EP (although it should be telling that they don’t even kick in until over a minute into the track and it’s hardly even noticeable with what the six-strings are doing up until that point). The post-punk party continues on with “New Touch”, the shortest song on Automatic Changer (the rhythm section even drops out for a second at the bridge; this is Celebrity at their “punchiest”). By the second half of Automatic Changer, Kiley isn’t even really singing anymore, instead becoming a rhythmically-speaking rambler as Celebrity move into the dark, bass-led (like, even more bass-led than before) “DSY” (it’s louder and more “rock band”, but it kind of reminds me of R.J.F., Ross Farrar from Ceremony’s post-punk solo project). Celebrity actually indulge in a bit of atmospherics in the final song on the record–“Heads on Fire” starts with a minute of ambient noise, but when the trumpet-blast guitars kick in, the quartet get back to business as usual for four more minutes. The members of Celebrity clearly have a knack for this kind of music, so hopefully they’ll find some more time in their busy schedules to continue this train of thought. (Bandcamp link)

Mirrored Daughters – Mirrored Daughters

Release date: February 21st
Record label: Fika Recordings
Genre: Chamber folk, folk rock, ambient
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: The New Design

Mirrored Daughters are a collaboration between members of three notable British acts: vocalist Marlody (who released a solo album on Skep Wax in 2023), The Leaf Library (whose drummer Lewis Young initially kickstarted the project and later brought in bandmate Matt Ashton), and Firestations (whose guitarist/vocalist Mike Cranny also contributes). Together with cellist Hannah Reeves, the five of them have combined to create an album of “lo-fi folk-pop and explorative woodland meditations” that is their self-titled debut LP. The members of Mirrored Daughters have backgrounds in various shades of indie folk, pop, and electronic music, but their first record flows together with remarkable ease. Inspired by Greater London’s Epping Forest (where it was partially recorded), Mirrored Daughters is delicately ornate, with strings, horns, and woodwinds (in addition to Reeves’ cello, Young plays violin and Cranny plays saxophone and clarinet) sprawling out slowly but confidently. Bright acoustic guitars and Marlody’s voice ensure that it isn’t wrong to call Mirrored Daughters a pop album, but neither do Mirrored Daughters shortchange the more experimental side of their music; the instrumental, ambient, nature-sound pieces are integrated smoothly alongside the folk songs.

The sounds of bells, birds, and analog synths greet us in opening instrumental “Mirror Descend”, and not even Cranny’s smooth saxophone contributions detract from the ancient, natural feeling that the track evokes. Mirrored Daughters don’t stay there, though–the next song is called “City Song”, and it begins the band’s journey to the tune of string-laden folk music (“Leave the sound / And your heavy head behind,” sings Marlody). “The New Design” and its warm clarinet accents drag Mirrored Daughters into full-on chamber folk territory (well, maybe “drag” is the wrong word; it’s more like “gently float”). Much of the rest of Mirrored Daughters is in the instrumental vein of “Mirror Descend”, although the meditations of “The Ambresbury Daughter”, “Something Hollow”, and “Decrowned” are given olive branches via some of the proper “folk” songs, such as the slightly haunted, wintry dream-folk of “Unreturning Sun”. That song meets the eerier parts of Mirrored Daughters halfway, and while the soft, Belle & Sebastian-like chamber pop of “An Open Door” and “Waiting at the Water” don’t do so quite as much, the band still give them readings that are subdued enough that it doesn’t feel like it would disturb the forest. Right up until the opener’s mirror-image closing track “Mirror Ascend”, Mirrored Daughters sound like they’re drifting and stepping carefully through something much larger than them. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Silo’s Choice, Kinski, Humilitarian, Spinnen

Hey there, everyone! We’re back with a fun Monday Pressing Concerns, featuring new albums from Silo’s Choice, Kinski, Humilitarian, and Spinnen. Some really good stuff down below! Let’s get to 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.

Silo’s Choice – Liberals

Release date: March 7th
Record label: Obscure Pharaoh
Genre: Indie pop, sophisti-pop, jazz pop, soft rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: 2005

It’s a great time to be a fan of the music of Jon Massey. The Cincinnati-originating, Chicago-based art rock/indie pop/soft rock/folk musician has been making music as Silo’s Choice since the beginning of the 2010s, but his various projects have found him on a hot streak as of late–his duo with Mike Fox, Coventry, released an excellent LP in 2023, and last year brought a superb album from his long-running Cincinnati band Upstairs and a choice Silo’s Choice record, too. Massey plans to release “several more” Silo’s Choice records this year, but he’s started 2025 off with a bang in the form of Liberals. Liberals is a pretty clear departure from the meandering, John Fahey-influenced acoustic guitars and upright bass explorations of 2024’s Languid Swords–Massey mentions The Left Banke, early Destroyer, and Belle & Sebastian as touchpoints for this one, and he’s kind of right. At its most animated, Liberals has the same kind of jazzy, whip-smart pop rock that I heard a good deal in the Coventry album, and even the slower numbers on this album display a renewal of vows with concise pop music. Massey is evasive about the “political” implications of the album’s admittedly provocative title, and if he’s trying to say that he’s merely up to his typical Silo’s Choice shenanigans here with that, then I’d agree. It’s there in bits and pieces, sometimes all at once in a rush and sometimes glimpsed through a reflection in the melted Chicago snow and salt.

There are so many good songs on Liberals. The piano-led baroque pop of “The Acceptance World” is a refined Massey classic, an opening statement fueled by coffee and lodging borrowed from acquaintances (“They ask if I don’t want the Ottoman instead / And I say ‘no’, that empire’s long gone”), and I don’t think there’s anybody else out there who could write a song like the whirlwind neoconservative bildungsroman of “2005” (“It’s 2005 / And we’ve only been in Iraq for a year in a half,” Massey situates us). If that’s too heady–well, “City of First Dates” doesn’t totally solve that problem, but it’s something new, Massey putting on his best game show host face and pulling together maximal pop rock and even a bit of disco moves as he sketches out a song that does indeed live up to its title (“Is this fun? Do you like me?” Massey asks us over and over and over again in the refrain). Liberals’ default mode of polished piano pop doesn’t come even close to getting stale, sailing us through the quiet “Please Please Please Do Not Refuse Me Service”, the fretting “Laughter Through Headphones”, and a cheerfully-skipping, war-torn piece of cotton candy called “Comfortable Kid” (“Back when we still got a shock even seeing a gun / Now we see them a lot”). The one true indulgence of Massey’s folk side is “Pick Me Up #2”, which might be the best moment on the entire thing. Massey turns everything over in his head in the Starbucks inside the Target on Halsted, waiting out inclement weather: “I’m never far from walking out between the cars / With a snowball in my hand, spinning, spinning,” he remarks over confidently but delicately-picked acoustic guitars in the refrain of this one. The music conveys the general sense of what Massey is on about here–as for the specifics, we’ll have to file that away to come back to. (Bandcamp link)

Kinski – Stumbledown Terrace

Release date: March 7th
Record label: Comedy Minus One
Genre: Post-rock, 90s indie rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Experimental Hugs

Kinski are an experimental post-rock band from Seattle, forming at the tail end of the 1990s and spending this century steadily releasing albums on storied indie rock labels like Sub Pop and Kill Rock Stars. Stumbledown Terrace is the group’s tenth album, their first in nearly seven years, and their first for Comedy Minus One, the New Jersey imprint that’s been something of a haven for longtime indie rock veterans in recent years (Silkworm, Eleventh Dream Day, Deep Tunnel Project). Stumbledown Terrace is also the first Kinski album since the departure of Matthew Reid Schwartz, the multi-instrumentalist who joined the band shortly after they formed in 1999, paring them down to a power trio (guitarist Chris Martin, bassist Lucy Atkinson, and drummer Barrett Wilke). Clearly this hasn’t slowed Kinski down, though–their latest LP, recorded by Tim Green at Louder Studios in Grass Valley, California, is a nice, electric jolt of a reminder of how cool guitar music is. On Stumbledown Terrace, Kinski walk the tightrope between instrumental, sprawling post-rock and punchy rock and roll like the best of their influences and peers like Sonic Youth, Trans Am, and Oneida (with whom they’re currently touring). It has a live feel to it, certainly–and this applies to the moments in between the most kinetic ones, too.

Stumbledown Terrace is made up of seven songs of varying lengths, volumes, and adherence to “rock” music structure–Kinski’s task is to make all of these puzzle pieces fit, and they do so in the most automatic manner possible. The first impression we get of Stumbledown Terrace is “Do You Like Long Hair”, a steadily-unfurling eight-minute instrumental centerpiece that sets a wildly high bar, and “Gang of 3”, while also being an instrumental, prefers to prowl about rather than try to leap even higher. It’s more than fifteen minutes into the LP before the vocals show up–whoever’s singing in the title track is barely holding their own against the dark torrent of noisy indie rock, a relatively small but still very welcome wrinkle to the album. “Stumbledown Terrace” is, of course, followed by “Experimental Hugs”, which is (ironically) the most conventional track on the album by far, a catchy two-minute hook-y rock and roller that kind of sounds like the Foo Fighters (but, you know, better). And, of course, we have another eight-minute epic coming up in the second half of Stumbledown Terrace with “Slovenian Fighting Jacket”–but, rather than work its way up to the crescendo like “Do You Like Long Hair” does, it meanders for six minutes before blasting off out of nowhere in the final two. The four-minute acoustic-led “Her Absence Feels Like a Presence” is the closing comedown–perhaps it would have been impressive to keep up the fiery rockers all the way to the finish line, but who do Kinski have to impress? (Bandcamp link)

Humilitarian – Intra

Release date: February 21st
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Emo-y indie rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: 3206

Last year, I heard an album called Please Stay Off the Statue by a Philadelphia band called Comprador; it’s a really adventurous and omnivorous rock record, bits of glam and prog-pop and power pop and grunge thrown in a very well-executed blender. Charlie D’Ardenne, Comprador’s bandleader, has apparently taken to playing guitar in a different band, Humilitarian–they’re a quintet, with D’Ardenne joining original members Kira Cappello (vocals/lyrics), Brendan Clarke (guitar), Eli Glovas-Kurtz (drums), and Tucker Pendleton (bass) when their previous second guitarist, Noah Ward, moved to Texas. Although Humilitarian has been around since 2019, D’Ardenne’s on-record debut for them is also the band’s first full-length album–Intra has been in the works for a while now. Although Humiltarian are pretty different from Comprador, one key similarity is that Intra matches D’Ardenne’s project in terms of sheer ambitious energy. They’re somewhat hard to categorize–I think “emo-y indie rock” is more or less acceptable, “Big Rock Music” more confusing but also more accurate. Every song on Intra sounds warehouse-vast; Cappello’s voice is the biggest and most dangerous weapon, while the guitars perform a just-as-essential function by zigzagging around to fill the cavernous space around their frontperson.

Intra is a sprawling record–its nine tracks come in at over forty-five minutes in total, meaning that Humilitarian really take their time moving through them. Not every song is quite as obvious about it at as opening track “Your Arms Again”, which spends a minute on a boulder-rolling guitar introduction before ramping up into the explosive alt-rocker that’s a bit more in line with what we can expect from the rest of Intra. With Cappello at the helm, Humiltarian do their best to sculpt a new, dynamic-indie-rock type of torch song–they do kind of end up living up to their band name in this department, if more in a “humbling” than “embarrassing” way. The work that Clarke and D’Ardenne do is impressive to me, too–they take their Midwest-emo-inspired shimmery leads and more classic rock hero moments and make U2-like heart-wringing “anthemic rock” music out of them, although the band change things up when the moment calls for it, too. Around the mid-section of Intra, “I’m Not Dreaming”, “Steal”, and “3206” start mixing in a bit more post-punk/art punk stopping and starting and syncopation–in particular, the relatively brief, harmonic-heavy “3206” is maybe the most exciting two minutes on the album. Intra feels very labored-over, like the work of a bunch of talented musicians taking their time to fully sketch out the various paths these songs take. There are a lot of ideas in Intra, but the pieces blend together as part of the hard-hitting whole of Humilitarian.  (Bandcamp link)

Spinnen – Warmes Licht

Release date: March 7th
Record label: Alien Transistor
Genre: Post-punk, art punk, garage punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Träume

Taking their name from the German word for spider, Spinnen are a Munich-based bass and drums duo made up of a couple of veterans of the “muggy, experimental” side of their home city’s music scene in Sophie Neudecker and Veronica “Katta” Burnuthian. After playing in a bunch of bands separately over the years (Soft Violet, Friends of Gas, Bombo, The Living Object), Warmes Licht (“warm light”) is their first record together, brought to us by The Notwist’s label Alien Transistor. The twenty-six minute LP manages to be both “experimental” and “rock”–we get noisy, clanging art-punk bass/drum ragers right next to soft, almost ambient organs and synth pieces, as well as moments that don’t fit neatly onto either end of that spectrum. I’m not sure who’s singing (I’m guessing both, but I can’t tell them apart), but the vocals are key in keeping Warmes Licht fun and (yes) light amidst the chaos. I can hear the riot grrrl influence on the duo in the vocals, which are shouted and chanted with just as much enthusiasm as Spinnen have for making a racket. Burnuthian’s bass provides a lot of the melodic heft, too–although she never neglects low-end duty, either.

Warmes Licht’s opening track, “Träume”, works way better as an awesome opening pop statement than it has any right to–between the reaching-for-the-sky bass chords and the just-as-enthusiastic vocals, Spinnen pull off the perfect mix of skronky post-punk and power pop. “Wirken” comes right after “Träume”, and it rocks too–but instead of trying to repeat themselves, Spinnen go a different route on this instrumental and follow an exciting groove where it leads them for two minutes. If there were any rails at any point on Warmes Licht, Spinnen start to go off of them around the five-minute percussion-led “Moment”, which stacks organ and intermittent bass riffs over top of Burnuthian’s kit before descending into an icy, haunting synth-shaded finale–and then this derailing enters “straight-up confusing” territory with a three-minute meandering carnival organ-type piece called “Warm”. Those looking for clarity in Warmes Licht’s second half (first of all, have you tried looking anywhere else?) won’t get it–“Geister” is the cheerleader-punk-noise-pop tack a la “Träume”, except even more abrasive this time, and the two-minute “Ermüdend” would be Spinnen’s entry into the angry post-punk sweepstakes if they cared to add some more instruments to it. “Mäuse” ends the album with a big old trash pile of noise rock–setting everything on fire is one way to make a bunch of warm light, I suppose. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Star 99, Will Stratton, Frog Eyes, Taxidermists

Hello, all! We’re putting a cap on this week by looking at four albums coming out tomorrow, March 7th: new LPs from Star 99, Will Stratton, Frog Eyes, and Taxidermists. We also had a Monday Pressing Concerns this week (featuring Sorrows, Saoirse Dream, Samuel Aaron and Noah Roth, and The Illness), and the February 2025 playlist/round-up went up on Tuesday, so check those 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.

Star 99 – Gaman

Release date: March 7th
Record label: Lauren
Genre: Power pop, pop punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: IWLYG

A couple years ago, I heard Bitch Unlimited, the debut album from a San Jose quartet called Star 99. “Just about every second of it is crammed with hooks,” I said a month after its release, and those hooks only sounded better and better throughout the rest of 2023 until, all of a sudden, it was my second-favorite album of that entire year. Needless to say, I was keen to hear more from the band (vocalist/guitarist Saoirse Alesandro, vocalist/guitarist Thomas Calvo, bassist Chris Gough, and drummer Jeremy Romero), and a year and a half after Bitch Unlimited, we’ve gotten a sophomore Star 99 album called Gaman, bringing with it a fifth bandmember (guitarist/keyboardist Aidan Delaney) and a more wide-ranging sound. I’d be despondent if Star 99 completely abandoned the sugary power-pop-punk (evoking bands like golden-era Charly Bliss, Remember Sports, and Chumped) that they’d mastered on their last album, and thankfully Gaman is not a reinvention so much as an expansion. Star 99 has once again put together a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it (twenty-five minutes, actually shorter this time around) collection of sock-knocking-off pop songs, with Calvo and Alesandro both getting to deliver knockout punches. They’ve merely diversified the way that they go about landing these blows, is all.

Gaman starts with a flex or two–“Kill”, the opening track, is a fizzy power pop avalanche that does everything the best songs on Bitch Unlimited did in two whirlwind minutes, and the strategically-deployed power chords of “Simulator” make the Calvo-led track just as catchy in a sneaky way. A subtle middle ground opens up on Gaman as the record goes on, exemplified by songs like “IWLYG” and “Emails”; the energy and hooks are still there, but Star 99 take a page from the books of slightly-older bands like Big Nothing and Dogbreth and add a jangly, Teenage Fanclub-esque wrinkle to their songwriting. These songs aren’t going to be a bridge too far to anyone (I’d think)–but Star 99 have a few more obvious departures to offer up on Gaman, too. “Brother”, stuck right in the middle of the first half of the record, is unavoidable, and the way that it turns Star 99’s power pop on its head to make something this delicate-sounding is remarkable (the lyrics, which take a trip into the past to sketch a family portrait of sorts, may have something to do with that). The beat-driven bedroom pop of “Gray Wall” is even weirder, but the sweet, intertwining vocals of Alesandro and Calvo ensure that it’s more than just a curious experiment. “Brother” seems to connect with the final two songs on the record, “Esta” and the title track–the heavier, emo-tinged anger of the former song is completely new territory for Star 99, but Calvo and the band pull it off, and “Gaman” is completely acoustic and ends with a link back to “Kill”. The sort of exhausted, overflowing acoustic finality with which Alesandro ends the album isn’t necessarily what I expected the final statement from Star 99’s second record to be, but that’s a good thing. (Bandcamp link)

Will Stratton – Points of Origin

Release date: March 7th
Record label: Ruination/Bella Union
Genre: Folk, alt-country, singer-songwriter
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Higher and Drier

I can’t imagine what it’s like to be from California. Singer-songwriter Will Stratton has called Beacon, New York home for over a decade and grew up “all over the greater Pacific Northwest and mid-Atlantic”, but he was born in a town outside of Sacramento, and his eighth album is a journey back to his state of origin. I was surprised to learn that Points of Origin is actually Stratton’s first album for Ruination Record Co., as I already associate him with the New York (city and upstate) folk rock world of Ruination acts like Blue Ranger and Adeline Hotel (as well as adjacent acts like Jodi, Wild Pink, and Ben Seretan). Members of several of these acts contribute to Points of Origin (as well as longtime contemporary Christian music guitarist Phil Keaggy, interestingly enough, among many others), but this album is entirely owned by Stratton and his storytelling. Like an underappreciated LP from last year, Distant Reader’s Place of Words Now Gone, Points of Origin is a record that attempts to grapple with the climate change-induced “natural” disasters for which the Golden State has become ground zero, although Stratton’s take on it is a character-led one. “Dense” and “novelistic”, the aforementioned Seretan calls it in his biography for the album, but while the storylines may require some lyrical analysis to follow, the shifting and disintegration happening ambiently (or, in some cases, quite actively) in the background is quite clear through the smoke.

Points of Origin is a very rich text, and there are a few different threads I could choose to tug at here, but one thing I found appreciating about the record is the central role that inmates and prisons play in it. It makes a lot of sense–“criminals” are frequently the ones blamed for the raging California wildfires as a way of obscuring larger trends (which, as “Centinela” drives home, remains insufficient even when “correct” in a sense) but they’re also on the front lines of fighting these infernos (like in “Jesusita”, whose narrator “separat[es] fire from fuel” with chainsaws and axes), and these jails are where many victims of fires and mudslides inevitably end up. My favorite song on Points of Origin is the self-contained tapestry of “Higher and Drier”–several of Stratton’s collaborators are credited on it, but they stay on the periphery, letting the singer-songwriter unspool his story of an ex-artist turned real estate salesman selling beautiful, doomed mountain/beachfront houses (a different kind of criminal breaking-bad balladry than what I discussed previously, I suppose). In addition to being engrossing as a story, “Higher and Drier” is an excellent showcase of Stratton’s musical gifts–he snakes his way through delicate 2000s “indie folk”-style verses and surprisingly grafts a campfire-song chorus to it. Staring down the barrel of a California-sized sample of the ecosystem collapse that awaits many more of us, Stratton instead looks closer and offers a way to meet an overwhelming certainty: one story at a time. (Bandcamp link)

Frog Eyes – The Open Up

Release date: March 7th
Record label: Paper Bag
Genre: Art rock, garage rock, psychedelic rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: E-E-Y-O-R-E (That’s Me!)

Who here remembers Frog Eyes? I remember them a little bit. They didn’t end up as the biggest band of the Canadian 2000s indie rock explosion, but they’ve done alright for themselves, as the band (always featuring guitarist/vocalist Carey Mercer and drummer Melanie Campbell, along with a rotating cast that as of lately has included keyboardist Shyla Seller and bassist Ryan Beattie) are now on their tenth LP since 2002. The Vancouver Island-originating band had a sound more or less in line with the weirder end of their Canadian peers–Mercer was in a supergroup called Swan Lake with Dan Bejar and Spencer Krug, and both Krug and former Wolf Parade guitarist Dante DeCaro played in Frog Eyes at one point, to give you a sense of what I mean–but this kind of big-picture indie rock is hard to reduce down in such a way. With that in mind, it’s best to just take in The Open Up (their second album since they reformed in 2022 after breaking up for a whole four years) as its own thing. Twenty years into their career, Frog Eyes sound surprisingly upbeat and energetic on their latest album, which offers up a bunch of offbeat but hooky garage rock/pop tunes with a handful of more drawn-out Frog Eyes moments hidden in the B-side. 

Mercer is still a classically bizarre indie rock vocalist and lyricist, but Frog Eyes have no issue shaping themselves sleekly and naturally around their frontperson. In The Open Up’s opening track, “Television, a Ghost in My Head”, Frog Eyes channel classic garage rock, post-punk, and the brighter side of Oneida for a whirlwind of a first statement, even though Mercer still finds a way to work the phrase “I shan’t be long” into the lyrics. “E-E-Y-O-R-E (That’s Me!)” is a positively bouncy song that’s much more in line with the exclamation point than the titular children’s character, and there are a few more quick-tempoed pop-rock tracks that find Mercer chewing on the titular phrase in “I’m a Little at a Loss” and “Put a Little Light on the Wretch That Is Me”. The final five songs on The Open Up almost feel like they’re from a different album–Frog Eyes transition hard into five-minute song lengths, wandering instrumentals, and much fewer obvious “hooks”. Stick with them, though, and you’ll see the same group within the more mystical second half–the wobbly, almost Crazy Horse-like “I See the Same Things”, the dramatic, brisk-drumbeat-featuring “Chin Up”, and the seven-minute progressive pop epic “Trash Crab” all end up being album highlights. Frog Eyes sound like a group that still knows how to excite themselves on The Open Up, and that’s good news for all of us. (Bandcamp link)

Taxidermists – 20247

Release date: March 7th
Record label: Danger Collective
Genre: Lo-fi indie rock, garage rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Grow Up

You may not know Taxidermists, but the Massachusetts-based duo has been part of the New England indie rock scene since the late 2000s. Guitarist/vocalist Cooper B. Handy and drummer Salvadore McNamara started putting out music at the beginning of the 2010s together, self-released, self-recorded, and at a prolific pace, but the duo slowed in the latter half of that decade and came to a halt entirely after 2019’s Feeding Tube-released TAX (although Handy has been busy with his solo project, LUCY). Last year, however, the duo signed with Danger Collective and released an EP called KO, and the first Taxidermists LP in a half-decade has followed less than a year later in 20247. Recorded entirely in McNamara’s garage last winter (with most songs coming together in a “single night”), 20247 is a humble but strong reminder of the power of home-recorded indie rock. Both the informal quality of the recordings and the simple duo set-up (guitarist Avery W S appears on two songs, the only outside contribution) keep 20247 squarely in the realm of “lo-fi” music; the draw is Taxidermists enthusiastically ripping through a dozen superb Handy-penned pop songs in under half an hour.

Taxidermists are stripped-down enough to be a blank page; I can imagine the turn-of-the-2010s “shitgaze” movement, 2010s Bandcamp “bedroom pop”, and the current wave of “GBV-gaze” bands all claiming them–and who wouldn’t want to have 20247 as part of their scene? The dexterity of Taxidermists is key to making something with 20247’s limited palette remain interesting and captivating nonetheless–the stumbling folky exploration of “Sweet Guilt” is a surprising opening track, but they barrel into the garage-y pop punk of “Grow Up” with ease, and they just as easily wander back into the wilderness with “2099”. The full-on basement rockers (“Grow Up”, “Gone Away”, “Does the Wind Know”) are no-nonsense bangers, almost like a 90s indie rock-influenced basement version of the Ramones, but they’re only a piece of 20247’s brief but substantial tapestry. On the more “complicated” end of the spectrum, songs like “Service Disservice”, “Needles to Say”, and “Good Job Done” all try to cram a bunch of sonic surprises and left-turns in their 2-and-change-minute runtimes; those of us who appreciate Robert Pollard’s ability to write a pop song that seems just a bit out of reach will enjoy these mini-epics. The last “proper” song on 20247 is maybe the fluffiest guitar pop song on the record, “Let the Music Save Them”. Like the more streamlined moments of Ethan Oliva (Ex Pilots, Gaadge), “Let the Music Save Them” is a pop success armed with little more than a winning melody and attitude, both attributes that Taxidermists have in spades on 20247. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable: