Rosy Overdrive

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

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

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

Frog – 1000 Variations on the Same Song

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

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

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

Vulture Feather – It Will Be Like Now

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

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

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

Cathedrale – Poison

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

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

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

Night Collectors – Heat and Fury

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

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

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

Also notable:

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

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

Hello Whirled – Gives Up and Plays the Hits

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

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

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

The Winter Journey – Graceful Consolations

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

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

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

Jac Aranda – Ultraviolet

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

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

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

Grant Pavol – College

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

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

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

Also notable:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Iffin – Get Hung, Fascist

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

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

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

Brown Dog – I Thought I Was Gonna Dance

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

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

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

Paul Bergmann – Long Island Sounds

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

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

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

Also notable:

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

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

FACS – Wish Defense

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

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

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

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

The Moles – Composition Book

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

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

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

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

The Bird Calls – Melody Trail

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

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

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

May Leitz – A Touch of Grace

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

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

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

Also notable:

New Playlist: January 2025

Hey there! It’s time for the January 2025 Rosy Overdrive playlist and round-up. There was a lot of good music that came out last month, and this playlist corrals much of it in addition to some songs from albums from 2024 that I missed initially and a few selections from my journey into the year 1994 that I undertook over late December and early January. You simply won’t get all of this anywhere else out there, but it’s all here on Rosy Overdrive.

Pigeon Pit and Pacing have multiple songs on this playlist (two apiece).

Here is where you can listen to the playlist on various streaming services: Spotify (missing a song), Tidal (missing two songs), BNDCMPR (missing six songs). Be sure to check out previous playlist posts if you’ve enjoyed this one, or visit the site directory. If you’d like to support Rosy Overdrive, you can share this (or another) post, or donate here.

“Swansea”, Ex-Vöid
From In Love Again (2025, Tapete)

Lovely, lovely, song. I’m not sure why Ex-Vöid’s sibling band, The Tubs, seems to get more attention in North America–maybe Trouble in Mind Records really has that level of pull over here in the States, or maybe it’s intentional on the part of co-frontperson Lan McArdle, who stepped down from their previous band, Joanna Gruesome, for mental health reasons. This is all to say that Ex-Vöid have done it again with their latest album, In Love Again, and that its opening track, “Swansea”, is one of the loveliest things in which any of its members have been involved. McArdle and Owen Williams singing together is one of the greatest sounds one can hear in all of indie pop/power pop/jangle pop/et cetera, and “Swansea” blows the band’s second album right open with an excellent helping of it.

“Heads or Tails”, Cast of Thousands
From Useful People (2025)

Whoa, damn, what’s this? Austin power pop/college rock insurgents Cast of Thousands have been busy as of late between their debut EP at the end of 2023 and their first album, Third House, last year, so I wasn’t expecting a new release from the band to welcome us into 2025. Here we are, though, with a rock-solid four-song EP called Useful People, featuring what might be the band’s best song yet, “Heads or Tails”. It’s a chugging alt-rock/power pop/“heartland” rock anthem marked by the odd choice to heavily AutoTune bandleader Max Vandever’s vocals. The gambit works, though–in fact, it’s an inspired way to hammer home the lyrics, a confused plea for a life that makes just a little bit more sense (“I would like to think I have a strong foundation, but I was fed too much information”).

“Spangled”, Fust
From Big Ugly (2025, Dear Life)

“Spangled” is one of those songs that sounds like the greatest thing ever recorded when you’re listening to it. I haven’t felt this way since–well, shit, since the lead single of the last Fust album, “Trouble”, from Genevieve. If there’s any justice in the world, “Spangled” and Big Ugly will launch Aaron Dowdy and his collaborators (a septet these days) to the heights recently achieved by labelmate MJ Lenderman. Or maybe Fust will continue to be one of the best-kept secrets in North Carolina country-rock, if it’s possible to keep something as grand-sounding as “Spangled” like a secret. Dowdy’s performance is one of the most peaceful and gentle-sounding rants I’ve heard in a while–the band give him plenty of runway, and Dowdy uses it to spin a grounded whirlwind about hospitals, Shenandoah, “Precinct 305”, and “feeling pretty spangled”.

“Youthquaker”, Charm School
From Debt Forever (2025, Surprise Mind)

Compared to the tightly-controlled bursts of energy of their previous record, Finite Jest, Charm School’s Debt Forever somehow both looser and angrier; there’s still plenty of that modern Fall-influenced post-punk sound here, but there’s also some San Diego-style post-hardcore/garage rock and turn-of-the-century Washington, D.C. art punk in the mix, too. Debt Forever spends a good deal of time focusing on financial anxiety and insecurity, and it’s baked into several of the record’s best tracks; for one, there’s “Youthquaker”, a song about the American working class (in a way) that somehow shifts Charm School’s sound into a dancefloor-friendly, impossibly-cool kind of punk rock (it kind of reminds me of Perennial, even if it doesn’t exactly sound like Perennial). Read more about Debt Forever here.

“You’re Not Singing Anymore”, Mekons
From Horror (2025, Fire)

The Mekons are forty-nine years old this year, and judging by the lead single from their upcoming album (I’m not even going to try to figure out what number LP they’re on) Horror, they’ve still got a lot of great music left in the tank. The Mekons are not always a “this hits immediately” band, but I’ve loved “You’re Not Singing Anymore” from the moment I heard it; it’s the country-folk-rock-and-roll-punk troubadours at their catchiest, singing a sturdy bar anthem that’s hard to believe didn’t exist before now. “You’re Not Singing Anymore” is more or less one giant chorus, and I’m interested to hear it in the context of Horror, which “looks at history and the legacies of British imperialism with mashed up lyrics”, per its Bandcamp page. It’s a very animated tune about “songs from the past” that feels very much alive in the present, catchy but weighty. Still got it!

“Bronco”, Pigeon Pit
From Crazy Arms (2025, Ernest Jenning Record Co.)

On their latest album, Pigeon Pit has solidified into a six-piece “country/punk maximalist” group led by Lomes Oleander and featuring a bunch of Olympia-area ringers. Crazy Arms is both a culmination of “Pigeon Pit the Band” and a statement of their current power; Oleander is still a “folk punk” frontperson, yes, but her vocals and writing have evolved to also encapsulate the kind of world-reverent folk-y indie rock practiced by heroes like the Mountain Goats, The Weakerthans, and certain eras of Against Me!–and, of course, the band is key in helping her realize a more expansive sound for these songs, too. There’s a lot to love on Crazy Arms, including more than one transcendental anthem with the staying power to match their previous best song, “Milk Crates”; rambling, sneakily suave single “Bronco” is maybe the pinnacle of this side of Pigeon Pit, but there are several contenders. Read more about Crazy Arms here.

“Every Summer”, All My Friends Are Cats
From Picking Up on the Pattern (2025, Grey Cat Studios)

Pittsburgh act All My Friends Are Cats still offers a comforting, well-worn feeling that reminds me of a more casual, mostly bygone era of slacker-y pop punk/power pop on their latest EP, Picking Up on the Pattern. All My Friends Are Cats appears to have morphed into a solo project recently, but the new EP contains some of bandleader Dave Maupin’s strongest songwriting yet–like the construction on the EP’s cover, Picking Up on the Pattern feels like a transitional work, but there’s a lot of fertile ground in this in-between. The mid-tempo pop rock targeted strike of “Every Summer” is the record’s best moment–the chorus is an excellent loaded gun, but it’s the shit-eating-grin-delivered verses (“This place is just a ghost town, but the views they aren’t as vast / The buildings are much bigger and the tumbleweeds are trash”) that really make the track transcend. Read more about Picking Up on the Pattern here.

“Parking Ticket Song”, Pacing
From Songs (2025, Asian Man)

A high-flying song about never remembering to do anything about a parking ticket on one’s car “except for when I’m driving”, “Parking Ticket Song” is the “hit” of Pacing’s latest mini-album, Songs. “Parking Ticket Song” to me is about the benefits and drawbacks of being somebody who lets their “instincts” take the reins, either as a coping mechanism for avoiding harder decisions or as a way to maintain some kind of artistic “purity”. It might lead you to sit in the car looking at your phone for a long time after arriving home even if you could go look at your phone in your house with just a bit of focused effort, or write a song with lyrics like “I’m staring at the parking ticket / I don’t remember getting it / So it’s not my fault”, or turning an anti-folk song into a pop punk track at the drop of a hat (which is what happens all of a sudden halfway through “Parking Ticket Song”, springing into action to meet Asian Man Records’ contractual pop punk requirements). Read more about Songs here.

“Chutes and Ladders”, Crayon
From Brick Factory (1994, Harriet/HHBTM)

Pop music! Crayon were a trio from Bellingham, WA and were associated with Washington’s twee/indie pop movement; two-thirds of them went on to co-found the more well-known Tullycraft, and Crayon only ever made one proper album. This is “noise pop”, I believe—loud 90s guitars in bursts and flares and then twee-ish pop music in between them. “Chutes and Ladders” is probably my favorite song on Brick Factory; just incredibly catchy bursts of noise, with some petulant twee-pop in the cracks. I talked about this in the 1994 listening log, but there’s a self-aware skeeviness to a lot of this album, and the refrain of this song (“I do good things, for where good things they give me”) isn’t beating those particular allegations. It really works here, though.

“Lucky You”, Flora Hibberd
From Swirl (2025, 22TWENTY)

Flora Hibberd is a singer-songwriter from Britain who currently lives in Paris and who traveled to Eau Claire, Wisconsin to record her second album, Swirl. The resultant LP is a rich-sounding record of pop music from decades past, with bits of folk and psychedelia and Lou Reed lazily floating around in the ether. The best pop moment on Swirl is probably “Lucky You”, which manages to sound casually off-the-cuff and purely giddy at the same time in a way that reminds me of a more folky version of Parisian guitar pop groups like En Attendant Ana (honestly, this specific combination might just be a “French” thing, native Parisian or no). Read more about Swirl here.

“Feel Like Going Home”, Zuzu’s Petals
From The Music of Your Life (1994, Roadrunner/Twin/Town)

Zuzu’s Petals were a short-lived Minneapolis band led by Laurie Lindeen, an author and professor (and ex-wife of Paul Westerberg) who passed away last year. They lasted for two LPs and I listened to the second one, The Music of Your Life, for my 1994 listening log. I listed Throwing Muses, Tsunami, and Scrawl as points of comparison, although there’s a push and pull between wanting to be a more serious, mature rock band and embracing full-on guitar pop. My favorite song on the record, “Feel Like Going Home”, is in the latter camp, although the bashed-out power pop of this song is hardly “too” simple. This is one of those “could’ve been a hit” type lost college rock-adjacent songs; let’s all close our eyes and imagine hearing this on the radio in between Soul Asylum and Belly (it’s hard to imagine a better world some days; this might be the best I can do today).

“Blue Seersucker”, West Coast Music Club
From 1989 (2025, 72rpm)

West Coast Music Club–generic-sounding band name, but good tunes! They’re Brits actually, from West Kirby (“about as far west as you can go in the UK without getting wet”), which makes their name a bit more forgivable than if they were Californians, but regardless, their most recent record is a solid but brief collection of jangle/power pop. West Coast Music Club are planning to release an album later this year (considering they’ve apparently put one out every year this decade so far, that’s not so surprising), and they’ve started off 2025 with a three-song preview EP called 1989. When I talked to the band about this record, I learned that “Blue Seersucker” isn’t even planned to be on the digital version of the album (but will show up on the physical double LP), and it must be very good if West Coast Music Club can relegate a song as strong as this one to semi-B-side status. “Blue Seersucker” (named after the suit, I presume) captures the moment that post-punk and new wave became “college rock” and “indie pop”, melodies and a strong rock backbone springing forward effortlessly and all of it being held up by a massive chorus.

“Color of My Blade”, Ex Pilots
From Watch Out for Joker Bob: A Birthday Tribute to Robert Pollard (2024, Unmarketed Products)

Ex Pilots covering Guided by Voices is almost too on the nose, but I can’t pretend that their version of “Color of My Blade” doesn’t completely rock and/or get me completely hyped up nonetheless. Originally released on a vinyl-only tribute to Robert Pollard last year (alongside contributions from bands like Kiwi Jr., The Gotobeds, and, um, Michael Shannon and Jason Narducy), the Pittsburgh noise pop group put out their Guided by Voices cover (of a song that was originally the B-side to “Motor Away”) digitally this year, and it sounds a lot like an Ex Pilots song. That is to say, it sounds kind of like a Guided by Voices song polished up and with a bit more shoegaze heaviness around the edges. I have to give Ex Pilots credit for choosing a GBV song that hasn’t been flogged to death, too–not that I would expect any less from this group, who are true Pollard sickos who’ve been known to pull out Suitcase and side project tunes to play live.

“ifonly”, T a F F Y
From lull (2025, Club AC30)

There’s a really strong guitar pop movement going on in Japan right now, it seems–hardly early adapters, Tokyo’s T a F F Y have been around since 2011, even though I’ve only just now heard of them. Lull is the band’s sixth album and first since 2019, and it’s a really fun indie rock record–there’s dream pop, jangle pop, and even Britpop in the sound of this album, which features guitar lines that remind me of early Radiohead and a psych-dream cover of R.E.M.’s “Hairshirt”. “Ifonly” is probably the catchiest song on Lull, but it’s still a bit odd–the rhythm section is almost locked into a post-punk groove, the vocals are pure dream pop, and the guitars, as I alluded to earlier, are very “No Surprises”/“Let Down”. It’s all an interesting combination from an interesting new-to-me band.

“A Little Bit of Bad”, NRBQ
From Message for the Mess Age (1994, Forward)

“I Want You Bad”, off of NRBQ’s beloved 1978 album At Yankee Stadium, is maybe my favorite power pop song of all-time. Nothing that the (brilliant) band has done since quite reaches that, but I was pleased to discover during my 1994 odyssey that “A Little Bit of Bad” is about the closest they’ve gotten, at least among the NRBQ albums I’ve heard thus far. It sounds like a classic John Hiatt song, but without the John Hiatt-ness that’s a turnoff for some people (not me, though, I like John Hiatt). Message for the Mess Age really does seem like a hidden gem in NRBQ’s catalog of hidden gems–don’t go into it expecting a bunch of songs like “A Little Bit of Bad”, but considering that they pretty much nailed it with this one, it was probably the right choice to leave it at that anyway.

“Walking Down the Road”, Henrik Appel
From Shadows (2024, PNKSLM)

Straight out of Stockholm, Sweden is a rock and roller named Henrik Appel; since 2018, the singer-songwriter has made three albums inspired by everything from The Velvet Underground and Bob Dylan to post-punk and jazz. Shadows is probably one of my favorite post-2024 discoveries from last year–it falls somewhere between the smooth, Velvets-influenced garage-psychedelia of Weak Signal and the European party-college rock of EggS, which is pretty much a direct bullseye for me. “Walking Down the Road” has it all–a simple, chugging post-post-punk guitar riff, saxophone squalls, electric Dylan-esque vocals from Appel, and a bizarre descent into throat-thrashing vocal screaming towards the end of the song. It’s just incredibly catchy rock music that cribs from the past without being obvious or predictable about it, which is probably harder than it sounds.

“Obsession”, Des Demonas
From Apocalyptic Boom! Boom! (2024, In the Red)

Oh, yes. This rocks. Des Demonas are a garage rock band from Washington, D.C., which I probably could’ve told you within seconds of hearing the absolutely massive Farfisa organ hook that opens “Obsession”, the first song on their newest record Apocalyptic Boom! Boom!. The band–led by Jacky Cougar Abok and backed up by musicians who’ve played with The Make-Up, Kid Congo Powers, Medications, and fucking Two Inch Astronaut–are a tour de force throughout Apocalyptic Boom! Boom!, but to me there’s no beating the opening fireball of “Obsession”. It’s their first record in four years and features some lineup shifts, but Des Demonas sound right at home on this one, the band grooving along to Abok listing off a bunch of “new obsessions” (including “white collar crime”, “communication”, and “parental supervision”).

“Boy Wonder”, The Michael Character
From My Cow! (2024)

People would probably have a lot more sympathy for “gifted kid syndrome” if everyone made songs as good as “Boy Wonder” about it. But then again, we can’t all be The Michael Character’s James Ikeda. “Boy Wonder” is a striking piece of wondrous Emperor X-style folk rock that is apparently a decade old, having first appeared on a Michael Character album in 2016. There’s something indescribable about hearing these childhood snapshots (“I was the sage of cabin B12 / The summer I turned 13 years old / The kids all thought I was a genius / I talked about white dwarfs and black holes”) run through again all these years later (with help from an all-star band featuring members of Miss Bones and Lonesome Joan), and Ikeda updating the final stanza’s “Now I’m turning 25 in New England” to “35”.

“Crasseux”, Rosa Bordallo
From Isidro (2025, Bad Auntie)

Rosa Bordallo’s Isidro recalls “indie music” of that band’s late 2000s/early 2010s heyday, a mishmash of forward-thinking synths, “art rock”, and bright, vibrant guitar/indie/psychedelic pop music. Isidro sews Bordallo’s different lives and influences together expertly–there’s the stately coastal psych-folk artiste in her presentation (reflecting her current home of New York), her post-punk past (in the band Cholo) in the record’s more lively moments, her island of origin (the Pacific U.S. territory of Guam) in her writing, and the sun-baked psychedelia previously chronicled by producer Ben Etter (who’s worked extensively with Deerhunter) in Georgia, where the album was recorded. “Crasseux” is one of the brightest pop moments on the record, utilizing jangly psychedelic pop sound to captivating and dynamic ends. Read more about Isidro here.

“Getaway Girl”, Molly Tuttle & Golden Highway
From Into the Wild (2024, Nonesuch)

I’m glad I checked in on what Molly Tuttle & Golden Highway have been up to lately during the new music lull of December/January, because I wouldn’t have heard “Getaway Girl” otherwise. 2022’s Crooked Tree is one of my favorite bluegrass albums in recent memory, and while 2023’s City of Gold didn’t connect with me, the grab-bag Into the Wild EP is a nice reassurance that Tuttle can still pen an excellent tune. The EP is hit-or-miss, especially the covers (I’m sorry, “Good 4 U” just does not work as a bluegrass song), but the originals are all very strong, especially “Getaway Girl”. Golden Highway are note-perfect on this one–banjo, fiddle, upright bass all deployed excellently–and Tuttle is a large-than-life personality, smoothly and suavely delivering the sweet rebuke that gives the track its title.

“Grow High”, Motherhood
From Thunder Perfect Mind (2025, Forward Music Group)

Everyone’s favorite Maritime Province art punks Motherhood are back, following up their excellent fourth album (2022’s Winded) with a little something called Thunder Perfect Mind. I tagged it “RIYL Tropical Fuck Storm” in a tweet–er, Bluesky post–last month, and I’ll stand by that: it’s not as accessible as the weirdly catchy punk energy of Winded was, but it’s strange and hypnotizing and I look forward to giving it some more time. “Grow High” is a pretty immediate highlight from the LP, regardless–the vocals have that Motherhood trippy hip-hop-influenced (but not trip-hop) hollering to them reminiscent of Australian acts like TFS and Dom Sensitive, and the post-punk instrumental is well-oiled and fiery but still somewhat hard to pin down.

“Waded for You”, Uzumaki
From Waded (2024, Everything Sucks)

Hey there–do you like Sugar, the Pixies, and 90s pop punk? You might want to check out the most recent release from London quartet Uzumaki, Waded, if so. I’m not sure if this is what “bubble-grunge” is, but the opening semi-title track “Waded for You” utilizes 90s alt-rock tropes to incredibly catchy ends for the entirety of its 2.5-minute runtime (if the very “remember the nineties?” album artwork didn’t already give it away). There’s the Kim Deal bass, the SoCal punk rock vocals, the Copper Blue guitars–all of this and “Waded for You” still manages to sound pretty laid-back and even “slacker”-y. I don’t know too much about this band–this appears to be their first album, and their label, Everything Sucks, has put out good stuff from Good Grief and Schande in the past–but judging by Waded, they’re one of the better upstart British bands at the moment.

“Rocks Hit My Window”, Answering Machines
From Star Charms (2025, Inscrutable)

When I wrote about Good Flying Birds’ Talulah Tape I shouted out “Rocks Hit My Window” by Answering Machines as maybe my favorite song of 2025 so far, so I have to include it in this playlist even though it’s not on any of the major streaming services. Inscrutable Records’ Star Charms compilation features three new tracks apiece from Good Flying Birds, St. Louis indie poppers Soup Activists, and Answering Machines, a no-fi power pop group from Chicago. “Rocks Hit My Window” got my attention immediately and it’s only grown on me since–there’s garage rock, classic punk rock, and straight-up rock and roll in its DNA, all covered in a borderline-irritating level of scuzz and fuzz. All this is well and good, but it’s the simple yet deadly effective refrain that launches “Rocks Hit My Window” to the next level–there’s something about proclaiming “I wanna hear rocks hit my window!” over dirty rock and roll guitars that captures the spirit of this whole damn music thing better than just about anything.

“Rollercoaster”, Everything But the Girl
From Amplified Heart (1994, Blanco y Negro/Atlantic)

I heard Everything But the Girl’s Amplified Heart for the 1994 listening log, and I’m glad I did, because I really enjoyed it! Even though (perhaps because) it wasn’t quite what I was expecting; between Tracey Thorn’s somewhat soulful voice, the tasteful acoustic guitar, upright bass, and overall jazz sensibilities, this is pretty close to stuff that gets derided as “coffeehouse folk” music. I think people are too dismissive of a lot of this kind of music! And the fact that this album is apparently quite acclaimed is heartening. “Rollercoaster” is the opening track to the album, and it’s more emblematic of its sound than “Missing”, the song that formed the basis for their fluke dance/club hit. Jazzy and even a bit spacey indie folk pop/soft rock stuff. Look, it’s very good, and you should check it out if (like me, until recently) you haven’t.

“If I Had to Go I Would Leave the Door Closed Halfway”, zzzahara
From Spiral Your Way Out (2025, Lex)

It seems like the first couple of zzzahara releases were more low-key, pulling from the 2010s style of Captured Tracks-esque dreamy indie rock and adding some California sunniness to the music; Spiral Your Way Out is the big, shiny, polished coming-out, enlisting a bunch of notable Los Angeles indie rock/pop musicians to bring the record to fruition. The jangly guitar pop of previous zzzahara releases is still present in Spiral Your Way Out, but there’s also…more, as Zahara Jaime and their collaborators hammer out an ambitious LP of huge-sounding but moody pop rock songs. Spiral Your Way Out is a break-up album, which may help explain the title of “If I Had to Go I Would Leave the Door Closed Halfway”; regardless, it’s an excellent, inspired-sounding pop song, sporting a gorgeous melody in the verses and soaring power pop guitars. Read more about Spiral Your Way Out here.

“Hourglass”, Celebrity Sighting
From …They’re Just Like Us (2024, NightBell)

It’s just a nice garage-y power pop/pop punk song by a band I didn’t know about at all until this month. In fact, I still don’t know too much about the band Celebrity Sighting–they appear to be from Madison, Wisconsin, are a duo made up of “Doons & Ty”, and put out their first record (a full-length cassette called …They’re Just Like Us) on a new local label called NightBell Records. The whole album is a nice jolt of energy, but I’m going with “Hourglass” for the playlist–we’ve got what I assume are both band members shouting out the lyrics for basically the entire song length, and they’re accompanied by a sick, simple fuzzed-up garage rock-pop instrumental. Kind of reminiscent of the more tuneful side of that late 2000s/early 2010s “shitgaze” scene. Either way, it rocks.

“Metaphorical Ohio”, Little Oso
From How Lucky to Be Somebody (2025, Safe Suburban Home/Repeating Cloud)

Maine quartet Little Oso’s guitar-driven dream pop sound is in full bloom on their debut album, How Lucky to Be Somebody. Every aspect of the record (from the chorused guitar chords to the floating leads to Jeannette Berman’s confident and anchoring vocals to guest musician Eddie Holmes’ synth contributions to even the bass at various points) is shedding great melodies all over the place, resulting in fully-developed guitar pop anthems that keep the entire record fresh. Single “Metaphorical Ohio” is just about perfect in its dreamy jangle pop synthesis–I love when bands that aren’t from the Midwest mythologize Ohio, by the way, and it makes so much sense that this track features probably the most beautiful incorporation of the phrase “four-piece chicken” into a song’s lyrics ever put to tape. Read more about How Lucky to Be Somebody here.

“Some Days”, Benny P
From No Place (2024)

Ben “Benny P” Polito may not be at the center of the Philadelphia power pop revival, but the latest Benny P album, No Place, is a good argument for, at the very least, a mention of them alongside the Hurrys and 2nd Grades of the city. Polito recorded No Place with Eric Lichter (who also contributes slide guitar and keys/organ) at Dirt Floor in Haddam, Connecticut, and the two of them put together an expansive forty-five minute collection of jangly power pop and college rock with plenty of highlights. “Some Days” is probably my favorite song on No Place–it’s a pretty no-nonsense track, jumping pretty much immediately into robust jangle pop hooks and not letting go for its roughly three-minute runtime. If Benny P sounds anything like they’re for you, then they probably are!

“Sex Thoughts”, Really Great
From Be the Light On (2025, Disposable America)

It’s been a bit since we’ve heard from Boston emo-power-pop-punks Really Great, and Be the Light On is a record that reflects a band that’s taken the interstitial time to grow. Don’t get me wrong, they’re still pop punk underdogs, but the scrappiness of their first album, So Far, No Good, has been augmented by some polished Rozwell Kid-esque guitar heroics, a couple of sprawling song lengths, and just a pinch of instrumental self-control and restraint in the right places. Owen Harrelson as a frontperson and songwriter has always been Really Great’s key attraction, and the instrumental growth of Be the Light On doesn’t detract from this–just check out “Sex Thoughts”, a two-minute perfect pop song about loneliness and lost innocence. Classic Really Great! Read more about Be the Light On here.

“Tide Pools”, Pigeon Pit
From Crazy Arms (2025, Ernest Jenning Record Co.)

Crazy Arms begins with three polished (for Pigeon Pit, at least) folk-rock-punk tracks that roll out the red carpet in a way that feels new but one that hardly abandons the “Pigeon Pit” sound; “Tide Pools”, which follows immediately after those, takes us back to the project’s beginning with a recording that’s made up entirely of bandleader Lomes Oleander and a warped-sounding acoustic guitar. Nevertheless, it’s exactly the right choice for the “contemplative but also moving at a hundred miles an hour mentally” track and hardly wrecks Crazy Arms’ momentum (quite the contrary, in fact!). Oleander really keys on tide pools as a powerful metaphor in this song; I’ll let her do the explaining herself: “Each one needs the others to stay trapped there to survive”. Read more about Crazy Arms here.

“Regulator Watts”, Hoover
From The Lurid Traversal of Route 7 (1994, Dischord)

Finally listening to the sole album from Dischord Records cult group Hoover was definitely one of the highlights of my 1994 listening journey. I’ve seen Hoover compared to Fugazi, and while I hear it in some places, I actually think I like this more than any of the Fugazi albums. They do the spitting punk thing very well, but things get weirder and more my speed as the album goes on; Hoover get more jazzy, less aggressive (except in short bursts), and a little more Touch & Go-y on later record highlights like “Regulator Watts”. It’s a five-minute deconstructed post-punk atmospheric thing; there’s aggression in all parts of the song, but somehow it’s all kept to the periphery of this huge track nonetheless.

“Slowly, Slowly”, Magnapop
From Hot Boxing (1994, Play It Again Sam/Priority)

This Athens, Georgia band has a bunch of legit early college/alt-rock connections—Bob Mould produced this album, Michael Stipe produced some of their others, and the lead vocalist previously was in a band with Matthew Sweet. That being said, this album fits in very well with mid-90s power pop—loud guitars, aggressive power chords, and a 90s drollness are all key features of Hot Boxing. It sounds excellent (thanks, Mr. Mould!), and while not every song lives up to its impressive ingredients, when Magnapop hit on something, they really hit on it. “Slowly, Slowly” opens up Hot Boxing with some smooth-moves alt-rock/power pop, doing some cool stop-start Pixies song construction but not really enough “stop” to live up to “slowly, slowly”. That’s a good thing, though.

“Afternoon Tea”, Linda Smith
From I So Liked Spring (1996, Shrimper/Captured Tracks)

Cult Baltimore lo-fi pop musician Linda Smith has seen a bit of a resurgence in recent years thanks to a reissue campaign from Captured Tracks, who famously (at least to me) helped usher in a Martin Newell/The Cleaners from Venus revival a decade ago. Last year, Captured Tracks dredged up a couple of mid-90s Smith releases, including I So Liked Spring (originally released by Shrimper in 1996), in which the singer-songwriter adapts the poetry of Charlotte Mew to her lo-fi bedroom/indie pop style. If that sounds too “high concept” to you, then I encourage you to listen to “Afternoon Tea”, a handclap-heavy guitar/folk pop tune that would’ve fit perfectly with the “twee” and “C86” bands across the Atlantic at the time.

“Like a Million Bucks”, Delivery
From Force Majeure (2025, Heavenly)

Oh, Delivery are back! How nice! 2022’s Forever Giving Handshakes by the Melbourne group is probably one of my favorite LPs from the current crop of Aussie garage punk groups, and they earned the call-up to Heavenly Recordings for their sophomore album, Force Majeure. I’m not sure if Force Majeure lives up to the insane promise of Forever Giving Handshakes on the whole, but it starts off excellently–the first four tracks are all instant classics, and I could’ve put any of ‘em on here. I went with “Like a Million Bucks”, which is speedy but not the most intense moment from Delivery thus far–it’s a nice mix of droll vocals, intermittent garage rock electricity, and odd moments of acoustic guitars, too. One of Delivery’s main strengths is being able to pull together a few different “Feel It Records”-core sounds together deftly, and it’s on full display on “Like a Million Bucks”.

“No More Songs!”, Pacing
From Songs (2025, Asian Man)

The more I think about it, everything on Pacing’s Songs mini-album has some kind of surprising twist or addition to it that I don’t think I would’ve predicted before giving it a spin. Mid-record track “No more songs!” is the familiar folk-pop Pacing of previous records, but, for one, it’s possibly the most meta track on the whole album (“I want crazy chords and times / Like ones that I read about,” goes the refrain), and it’s surprisingly polished both from a vocal perspective (I didn’t know Katie McTigue could sing like that! Or, probably more accurately, I didn’t know that she wanted to!) and a musical one (I don’t know who Noah Sanchez de Tagle is, but those are some nice bass contributions). It’s tempting to just throw all of Songs on this playlist because it’s so short (go listen to it right now if you haven’t yet), but if I’m choosing songs to highlight, I don’t think I can leave off “No More Songs!”. Read more about Songs here.

“Aurora”, 12 Valentines
From Secret Infinity (12V.1) (2024)

12 Valentines describe their music as “pop songs with comic book/superhero tropes, intended to be karaoke-able” and their makeup as “generally Californian”–they seem to be something of a collective, and I first heard of them because of their association with Huan-Hua Chye of excellent Madison, Wisconsin bedroom pop project Miscellaneous Owl. To be perfectly honest with you, Secret Infinity is probably some of the nerdiest shit to ever grace the digital pages of Rosy Overdrive, but at its best it lives up to its lofty indie pop goals, and then some. So, I don’t really know all that much about Northstar and Aurora and the X-Men and Alpha Flight and whatnot, but I enjoy this synthpop song that seems to be about them (the music and lyrics are credited to Dominic Mah, and the vocals to Vic Ess).

“Francesca D”, The Bedbugs
From 6 PACK Series, Vol. 8 (2025, Bed Go Boom)

Rochester, New York’s Tim Sheehan and his project The Bedbugs are true believers in lo-fi basement indie rock/pop–since the mid-90s, he’s been plugging away with his brand of Paul Westerberg-influenced “bedroom power pop”, and much of his music is only available on CD (and I think you have to email him at bedbugs.contact@gmail.com to actually get these CDs as I don’t they’re “for sale” anywhere). The Bedbugs started off 2025 with six songs that you can hear digitally, however, and the 6 PACK Series, Vol. 8 EP opens with a real winner in “Francesca D”. Described by Sheehan as “a plaintive little song about Francesca da Rimini as totally roasted by Dante in his Inferno”, it’s a jaunty but, yes, plaintive acoustic folk-pop tune with a little bit of synths shading the edges. Wherever Sheehan came up with this source of inspiration, it’s working for him.

“Costume Party”, Jake Mann
From Sidewalk Runways (Orbits & Oscillations Vol. 2) – Demos / Outtakes 2018-2023 (2024, Mannik Frequencies)

Jake Mann is a Santa Cruz-based indie rocker making music inspired by the Paisley Underground, Neil Young, and–to my ears, at least–Paul Westerberg’s solo material. My first brush with Mann’s music is through an “outtakes” collection; Sidewalk Runways features demos and recordings that didn’t make the cut for his most recent proper album, 2023’s Outta Mind a While. “B-side” nature aside, there’s some very strong material on Sidewalk Runways, including my personal favorite track, “Costume Party”. This one really leans into the aforementioned Westerberg influence–maybe I’m just thinking about “Swingin’ Party”, but I think it’s deeper than that, as the song’s laid-back but navel-gazing narrator is a dead-ringer for the Midwesterner even as the instrumental is a bit more SoCal desert folk rock.

“Consider the Priesthood”, True Green
From Consider the Priesthood/Falconry (2025, Spacecase)

True Green–what a band! Last year’s My Lost Decade was one of my favorite albums of 2024, and established Twin Cities-based novelist Dan Hornsby as an up-and-coming songwriter for all of us to watch eagerly. Hornsby’s first new music since My Lost Decade is a two-song 7” single through Spacecase Records that emphasizes the quieter, subtler, almost psychedelic folk side of True Green. Compared to stuff like “Polycarp” and “Hopeless Diamond”, “Consider the Priesthood” and “Falconry” are much more thorny and insular, but Hornsby’s writing is so on point here (aided by the excellent touches from multi-instrumentalist Tailer Ransom on banjo and synths) that I don’t think there’s any harm with starting here vis a vis My Lost Decade if you’re unfamiliar with True Green. Give these songs a couple listens to really stand out, though–you’ll be sucked in sooner or later.

“Rain Delay”, Souled American
From Frozen (1994, Moll Tonträger/Scissor Tail)

I’ve heard some say not to start with Souled American’s later albums (Frozen is the second-to-last-one) because they only got weirder and weirder, but I’m happy to disagree with this take because I loved this record from the cult Chicago alt-country act. Not to say it isn’t weird—I can imagine Frozen not being everyone’s cup of tea. But this specific combination of molasses-slow playing, traditional folk and country experimentation, and an ambient Chicago experimental nature to the material creates something that just…works. “Rain Delay” is an eight-minute slow-moving ballad stuck right in the middle of the album; for a lot of bands, this would be a pure momentum-killer, but Souled American prepares us for strange detours from the very beginning.

Pressing Concerns: Really Great, Magana, Power Pants, Distant Relatives

We’ve now entered February, but before we get to new music from the second month of 2025 (stay tuned for later this week), the first Pressing Concerns of the week looks at four records from January: new LPs from Really Great and Power Pants, and new EPs from Distant Relatives and Magana (although one of these “LPs” is sixteen minutes long and one of the EPs is over twenty; call them what you’d like).

Really Great – Be the Light On

Release date: January 31^st
Record label: Disposable America
Genre: Pop punk, power pop, emo-punk, slacker rock
Formats: CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Sex Thoughts

Three years ago, back in the relatively early days of the blog, I wrote about So Far, No Good, the debut album from Boston band Really Great. Though I’d heard about them because they shared members with chiptune-rock group (T-T)b (another band I wrote about long ago on the blog who are gearing up to return), So Far, No Good had a more distinct emo-power-pop-punk feel to it–I called it a “theatrical rock record” at the time, singling out bandleader Owen Harrelson’s vocals and comparing the album to Jeff Rosenstock’s solo material. Although you may have heard Harrelson playing bass on last year’s Bedbug album, it’s been a bit since we’ve heard from Really Great–and Be the Light On is a record that reflects a band that’s taken the interstitial time to grow. Don’t get me wrong, the band (Harrelson on guitar and vox, joined by (T-T)b’s Jake Cardinal and Nick Dussault on guitar and drums respectively, plus Fenn Macon on bass) are still pop punk underdogs, but the scrappiness of So Far, No Good has been augmented by some polished Rozwell Kid-esque guitar heroics, a couple of sprawling song lengths, and just a pinch of instrumental self-control and restraint in the right places.

Owen Harrelson the frontperson and songwriter was probably the most remarkable part of So Far, No Good, and Really Great don’t water these strengths down even as they push forward. Apparently, Be the Light On is something of a concept album about Harrelson quitting a bad job, and it seems to have really animated him here. It’s a whirlwind from the get-go, from the anticipatory excitement of opening track “Story” to the tossing, turning pop-punk scene-setter “Streetlight” to a couple more contemplative moments in singles “Skateboard Amp” (a Strange Ranger-inspired moment of zen) and “Way Out” (a reminder that sometimes all you need is blunt lines like “I gotta find a way out”). Really Great have their theater-kid pop punk game locked down as well as they’ve ever had it in Be the Light On’s opening stretch, but the band bring forward a few more tricks as they move into the back half. After a two-minute song called “Sex Thoughts” that might be the best pop song that Harrelson’s ever penned (classic Really Great!), we get a foray into more melancholic emo melodies with “If We Talked”, the six-minute surprisingly smooth groove of “Rescue from Without”, and the fairly hushed “Morning”. All of these songs still fit well within the Really Great modus operandi, so by the time we get to the closing track, “The Champion of Things Becoming”, it’s not surprising that the triumphant, soaring pop punk guitars that kick off the track bring us full circle. And the lengthy finale really is triumphant–it’s the victory lap at the end of our hero’s journey. Harrelson does take some time to peek over the rose-tinted glasses (“It’s not like everything’s easy / God knows, days drag on” … “Still a work in progress, but I’ve changed my ways”), but it doesn’t harsh the celebration. When you’re able to pull off eight-minute rock and roll album cappers like Really Great, you’re just able to say a lot more. (Bandcamp link)

Magana – Bad News

Release date: January 24^th
Record label: Audio Antihero
Genre: Synthpop, indie folk, indie pop, singer-songwriter
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Shower Song

I first wrote about Jeni Magaña’s solo project Magana last year, when she released her second “proper” studio album, Teeth. At the time, I mentioned that the Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter and touring musician for hire is a busy person with a bunch of varied projects to her name, and she’s spent the time after Teeth’s release proving my point–she abandoned the orchestral folk sound of Teeth for an ambient collection called Dreams a few months later, and she’s back again in 2025 with a four-song EP that doesn’t really sound like either of them. Bad News is a return to “song-based” music, yes, but compared to Teeth’s expansive musical palette, these songs are about as stripped-down and streamlined as “pop” music can be. Magaña has been Mitski’s touring bassist for a few years now, but Bad News is the first release of hers I’ve heard that actually reminds me of Mitski’s music–with little more than subtle acoustic guitars and simple synth parts accompanying her vocals, this is Magana’s foray into a more, well, popular version of “indie pop” and “indie folk”. Not only is Magaña’s voice centered more prominently than ever before, but the short length of the EP (four tracks, fifteen minutes) also gives her nowhere to hide.

Magaña calls Bad News a “winter” record, and says it’s about “the period of time right before a transition”; parts of it sound like a break-up album, although we can play it safe and say that the EP is about an ending of some kind or another. The EP’s opening track, “Half to Death”, is maybe the starkest thing on the entire record–for most of the song, Magaña sings alongside a suspended synth and little else, eventually punctuating her own vocals with harmonies when she reaches the most important line of the song (“But I won’t play a game that no one wins”). Magaña’s grand proclamation in “Half to Death” doesn’t seem to take effect immediately, however, as the rest of Bad News reveals. “So here I am, standing in the shower again / Thinking about things I can’t change,” she sings in “Shower Song”, frozen in place and spinning her wheels in a way that continues into the record’s final track, “I’m Not Doing Anything”. The nagging “I don’t want to do this anymore” realization of “Shower Song” becomes the titular refrain of “I’m Not Doing Anything”, a situation leading to people “calling, asking about [her]”, as Magaña says. “Not doing anything” can be cause for concern, sure, but Bad News offers a different perspective, about reestablishing baselines and recentering one’s gravity before the spring returns. (Bandcamp link)

Power Pants – PP7

Release date: January 13^th
Record label: Punk Valley/Knuckles on Stun/Idiotape
Genre: Garage punk, power pop, synthpunk
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: 30 Years

I first heard Winchester, Virginia’s Power Pants at the beginning of last year, when they’d just released their fifth album since 2023 (PP5). Fast forward about twelve months, and the group has just put out their seventh full-length cassette in under two years, creatively titled PP7 (this number doesn’t reflect a bunch of random singles and live recordings the group has also put out in between these releases, also). As per usual with Power Pants, PP7 is a cassette release put out via I guess whichever labels were free this time (Punk Valley and Knuckles on Stun in the U.S., Idiotape in Europe), and it once again houses a brief (ten songs, sixteen minutes) collection of incredibly catchy and lo-fi garage punk music (I called PP5 “right in the center of ‘egg punk’, ‘power pop’, and ‘synthpunk’” last year, and PP7 doesn’t mess with Power Pants’ winning formula). There’s not a moment of respite to be found on PP7; only one song reaches the two-minute mark (“Where I Live Now”, which is 2:00 on the dot) and all of them are a delirious assault of train-speed punk guitars, blaring synth hooks, and gruff but somewhat anxious-sounding vocals.

Within ten seconds, PP7 has already cranked out a barrage of Power Pants’ typical tricks. Opening track “30 Years” positively roars out of the gate with a garishly catchy synth part and guitars streaming out of control, and the garage punk vocals kick in not long afterwards and hold their own against the instrumental torrent. To some degree, this description can be applied to the other nine songs on PP7 as well, but that’s hardly a knock on the album–just because Power Pants make playing this kind of music sound easy doesn’t make it any less impressive. At the very least, it doesn’t make the songs that immediately follow (“May I Rest”, which doesn’t display any of the tiredness implied by the lyrics, and “I’m Grateful for You”, which might be just a little bouncier) less successful. Power Pants’ devotion to power pop hooks and big synths puts them on the nerdier (yes, “egg”) side of punk rock, and even when they’re trying to sound tough, they’re not beating the allegations either: the most aggressive moment on PP7 is a song called “Don’t Touch My Gear” (“If you touch my shit, I’ll pull your hair”). Somewhere deep in the Shenandoah Valley, some person or group of people continues to hammer out synth-garage-power-pop excellence, and as long as we keep our hands off their gear, there’s no reason to suspect Power Pants won’t keep grinding. (Bandcamp link)

Distant Relatives – Distant Relatives

Release date: January 10^th
Record label: It’s Eleven
Genre: Post-punk, garage rock, goth
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Malfunction

Chemnitz imprint It’s Eleven Records has spent the last year and change establishing itself as the premier label for noisy, dark east German post-punk (and one of the most consistent modern post-punk labels anywhere), and it looks like we can expect them to continue their run well into 2025 between a reissue of the debut album from Berlin’s Fotokiller (slated for next month) and their first release of the new year, the self-titled debut cassette from a quartet from Leipzig called Distant Relatives. On Distant Relatives, the band (vocalist Marleen, guitarist Max, bassist Albrecht, and drummer Alex) hammer out a distinct sound for themselves using the well-worn tools of garage rock and post-punk; needless to say, they fit well within It’s Eleven’s hyper-specific niche, but their peers beyond their home country are bands like Home Front, Schedule 1, and Crime of Passing, who inject a bit of gothic urgency into their version of punk rock. Perhaps not as indebted to hardcore as those bands, Distant Relatives nonetheless expertly utilize their dual devotion to high emotional Cure/Bauhaus-esque angst and a punchy, angry punk attitude. Marleen’s vocals leap from a Siouxie-esque wail to “grounded and conversational”, able to shift with the changing tides of Distant Relatives’ instrumentals.

Although It’s Eleven refers to Distant Relatives as an EP, the seven-song, twenty-one minute cassette is substantial enough that I wouldn’t have had any issue with it being christened an “album”. Distant Relatives’ opening track, “On My Own”, is the longest song on the record and possibly the most overwhelming moment on it, too. Distant Relatives slowly but surely let the dark wave of the track wash over everything, letting night fall before they’re ready to rip through some dark garage rockers like “Malfunction” and “Desert Rose” not long afterwards. Gothic inclinations aside, it’s remarkable how catchy Distant Relatives is on a regular basis, whether it’s in the laser-precise garage rock tracks or more mid-tempo ones like “Sunburned Teeth” (with a massive hook hiding in the squall of guitars) or “Eyes & Lies” (which is almost danceable at points). Marleen is on point throughout the entire record, but as the band loosen up towards the end of the cassette, she shines even brighter, sounding like a goth Chrissie Hynde on “Mei Nue” and leading the final march of destruction of “Done” just as eagerly. Distant Relatives have discovered some kind of release in the bleakness of their sound; it’s dark, yes, but it’s an incredibly fun listen without a hint of difficulty. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

The Bulletin Board: February 2025

Hey there everyone! This isn’t a typical blog post (there’ve been plenty this week if you’re looking for them), but I thought I’d try out something new and calling it a “bulletin board”. What’s going on for you in terms of music next month? Are you planning on going to any shows? Playing one? Going on tour? Where? I’m inviting people to share this in the comment section.

I spent some time trawling Instagram and emails to get us started: here’s a bunch of bands previously featured on Rosy Overdrive that are playing shows next month, listed by region below. This is in no way comprehensive, so please, if you know of (or are) an act I’ve written about with a show coming up, drop that in the comments too!

To be clear, you’re invited and encouraged to promote something in the comments regardless of whether the blog has ever featured your music before, but if I haven’t, then maybe it’d be good to give a little description of your music so we can all get a sense of what’s up.

This is a work in progress, suggestions are welcome (the list could use some organizing/formatting help, yes) and I’ll make it a recurring thing if there’s interest in it.

Northeastern U.S. and Canada:

Motherhood in Truro (NS), Halifax (NS), Montreal, Saint-Hyacinthe (QC), and Gatineau (QC), January 31st to February 8th

Little Oso and Snake Lips at Space in Portland, ME (with Greasy Grass and Spirit Ghost), February 8th

Rick Rude at Stone Church Music Club in Newmarket, NH (with The Sheila Devine, Replaced by Robots, and Seana Carmody), February 8th

Convinced Friend at Lost Bag in Providence (with Prior Panic, Ben Levin, and Older Brother), February 7th

Beeef and Hey I’m Outside at The Rockwell in Somerville, MA (with Clifford), February 8th

Hey I’m Outside at Crunch House in West Haven, CT (with Juicer, Declaw, and Wurley), February 21st

Macseal and Guppy in Hamden (CT) and Washington DC, February 21st to February 22nd

Charm School at Purgatory in Brooklyn (with Consumables, Qirl, and Yuvees), February 1st

Birthday Ass and Market at The Broadway in Brooklyn (with Chris Morrissey), February 2nd

Perennial at Hart Bar in Brooklyn (With Ultra Deluxe, Better Living, Crimehaven, and Necto), February 8th

The Bird Calls at Tradesman in Brooklyn (with Mr. California), February 10th

Oceanator and Katy Kirby at Night Club 101 in Manhattan (with Low Healer and “Secret Special Guest”), February 12th

Miracle Sweepstakes at the Windjammer in Queens (with Membra and Good Realm), February 20th

TJ Douglas at the Avalon in Catskill, New York (with Will Stratton and Katy Pinke), February 27th

Lightheaded and Dark Surfers at Asbury Park Brewery in Asbury Park, NJ (with Garage Sale and Polaroid Fade), February 15th

The Tisburys at Sherman Showcase in Stroudsburg, PA (with James Barrett and Water Street), February 1st

Grocer and Humilitarian (mem. Comprador) at Johnny Brenda’s in Philadelphia, February 27th

ASkySoBlack in Queens (NY), Baltimore, and Philadelphia, February 18th, March 5th and March 7th

Jeanines and Lightheaded at Comet Ping Pong in Washington DC (with Lorelei), February 1st

Spring Silver at Comet Ping Pong in Washington DC (with Newgrounds Death Rugby and Bummer Hill), February 6th

Tobin Sprout and The Moles at Songbyrd Music Hall in Washington DC, February 14th

Power Pants at Rhizome in Washington DC (with Baghed, Safeway, and Evil Weevil), February 27th

Southern U.S.:

William Matheny at 123 Pleasant Street in Morgantown (WV) (with The Phantom Six and Nathan El), February 21st

Tucker Riggleman & The Cheap Dates and Dead Billionaires in Winchester (VA), Richmond, and Harrisonburg (VA), February 20th to February 22nd (with Dogwood Tales in Winchester and Drug Country in Richmond)

Mike Adams at His Honest Weight at The Brew Bridge in Owensboro (KY) (with Snake Brain), February 1st

Grocer in Richmond, Columbia (SC), Athens (GA), and Louisville, February 28th to March 3rd

Real Companion at Petra’s in Charlotte (with Curiosidades de Bombrile and Mandako), February 21st

Ryan Davis & The Roadhouse Band and Little Gold at Flicker Theatre in Athens (GA) (with Don Chambers and Neat Freak), February 14th

Elf Power and Honeypuppy at Flicker Theatre in Athens (GA) (with Elijah Johnston and Johnny Falloon), February 15th

Real Companion at Flicker Theatre in Athens (GA) (with David Barbe and Zach Ritter and the Eternal Soup), February 22nd

The Great Dying in Clarksdale (MS), Tupelo (MS), and Oxford (MS) (with Taylor Hollingsworth), February 19th to February 21st

ASkySoBlack in Nashville, Atlanta, Gainesville, Tampa, Pompano Beach, Orlando, and Richmond, February 25th to March 4th

Macseal and Guppy in Richmond, Atlanta, Nashville, Denton, and Austin, February 23rd to March 1st

Midwestern U.S.:

The Laughing Chimes and Abel at The Union Bar in Athens (OH) (with Dresser and The Houseguest), February 27th

Charm School and Six Flags Guy at Cafe Bourbon Street in Columbus (with Gunk and Befriend Strange Creatures), February 8th

Six Flags Guy at Dirty Dungaree’s in Columbus (with Melodic Canvas, Siphoner, and Vulning), February 20th

Two Cow Garage at Rumba Cafe in Columbus (with Call Me Rita and Shiloh Hawkins), February 21st

Micah Schnabel and Vanessa Jean Speckman at Mahall’s Apartment in Cleveland, February 28th

ASkySoBlack in Cleveland, Grand Rapids, Chicago, and Indianapolis, February 21st to February 24th

Growing Stone in Fort Wayne (IN) and Bloomington (IN), February 6th and February 8th

Hell Trash at Record Breakers in Chicago (with Big Chemical and Growing Boys), February 1st (free, afternoon show)

Babe Report at The Empty Bottle in Chicago (with Sprite and Daydream TV), February 3rd (free)

Telethon at Beat Kitchen in Chicago (with Dollar Signs, Tiny Stills, and Devon Kay & The Solutions), February 6th

Dogs at Large at Fitzgerald’s in Berwyn, IL (with Cass Cwik & The Small Gas Engines), February 7th

Cel Ray and Tension Pets at Archer Ballroom in Chicago (with Fruit LoOops and Body Shop), February 8th

Rotundos at Work 25 in Chicago (with Grow Blind, Shatterhand, Demo Division, Majesty, and Augment), February 8th

Conor Lynch at Borelli’s in Chicago (with Memory Card, Joe Glass, Donkey Basketball, Lund Surk, Girly Pants, and Deerest Friends), February 15th

Friko (solo) at The Empty Bottle in Chicago (with TV Buddha and Bungee Jumpers), February 17th (free)

Noah Roth and Samuel Aaron at The Hideout in Chicago (with Growing Boys and Astrachan), February 21st

Landowner at The Empty Bottle in Chicago (with The Egyptian Lover, BIB, Double Over, and Clickbait), February 22nd (free, afternoon)

Luggage at The Empty Bottle in Chicago (with Stuck and Edging), February 28th

Hell Trash at The Hideout in Chicago (with Brennan Wedl), February 28th

Writhing Squares in Youngstown (OH), Bloomington (IL), Chicago, Ypsilanti, and Pittsburgh (with Brainwaver and The Shape Of in Chicago), February 19th to February 23rd

Good Flying Birds and Sharp Pins in Detroit, Indianapolis, and Chicago (with Mod Lang), January 31st through February 2nd

Greg Mendez at The Bottleneck in Lawrence (KS), February 26th

West Coast/Western U.S.:

Buddie at KW Studios in Vancouver, BC (with Jo Passed, somesurprises, and Free Play Angel), February 1st

Shoplifter at Oaklands Community Centre in Victoria, BC (with Slugger and Love Life), February 14th

The Sylvia Platters in Nanaimo, Victoria, and Vancouver, February 14th to February 17th

So Pitted at Belltown Yacht Club in Seattle (with Stetson Heat Seeker and Deco Club) on Saturday, February 15th

Night Court and The Dumpies in Seattle, Portland, and Astoria, February 6th to February 8th (with Iffin in Seattle)

New Not Shameful at The Make Out Room in San Francisco (with Pocket Full of Crumbs and Jenny Haniver), February 6th

Curling at Bottom of the Hill in San Francisco (with Christian Francisco and Bobbing), February 11th

Brown Dog at Bottom of the Hill in San Francisco (with Secret Family and Catnip), February 16th

Expose and Feefawum at Peacock Lounge in San Francisco (with Jock and Golden Grease), February 22nd

Blue Zero in Reno, Sacramento, Los Angeles, Long Beach, and Oakland from February 19th to February 23rd (with Expose in Los Angeles and Oakland)

The Intelligence at Permanent Records Roadhouse in Los Angeles (with Babe Ruthless, The Other Dante, El Colm, Oog Bobo, Le Pain, and Ughh), February 1st

Fur Trader at The Pop-Hop Books in Los Angeles (with Small Shake and Taupe) on February 7th

Taleen Kali at The Love Song in Los Angeles, February 8th

Peel Dream Magazine and Sour Widows at Teragram Ballroom in Los Angeles, February 8th

Pile (supporting Cursive) in Denver, Salt Lake City, Boise, Spokane, Seattle, Portland, Sacramento, Felton, San Francisco, Morro Bay, Venture, Los Angeles, Pomona, San Diego, Las Vegas, Phoenix, El Paso, San Antonio, Austin, Houston, and Dallas, January 31st to February 23rd

Greg Mendez in Austin, Tucson, San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Boise, Salt Lake City, Denver, and Fort Collins (with Lomelda), February 9th to February 24th

Australia:

Screensaver at Tanswell’s Hotel in Beechworth, Victoria (with Kino Motel), February 1st (free)

Screensaver at Thornbury Bowls Club in Thornbury, Victoria (with Voice Imitator and Glass), February 14th

United Kingdom and Ireland:

Las Nubes in Brighton, London, Liverpool, Glasgow, and Leeds, February 19th to February 23rd

Soft on Crime in Belfast, Dublin, and Limerick (with The Sleevens and Battle Skies), February 27th to March 1st

Sassyhiya at Two Brewers in Clapham, London (with The Advantages), February 28th

Continental Europe:

Las Nubes in Spain, Germany, France, and Switzerland, February 12th to February 18th and February 25th to March 2nd

Pressing Concerns: The Laughing Chimes, Rosa Bordallo, New Not Shameful/Trust Blinks, ASkySoBlack

It’s been perhaps the busiest week of the year so far on Rosy Overdrive, and we’re closing it out with a rock-solid Thursday Pressing Concerns: we’ve got new albums from The Laughing Chimes, Rosa Bordallo, and ASkySoBlack that are coming out tomorrow (January 31st), plus a split EP between New Not Shameful and Trust Blinks that came out earlier this week. If you missed Monday’s Pressing Concerns (featuring IMustBe Leonardo, Minor Conflict, Krystian Quint & The Quitters, and Blood Lemon) or Tuesday’s blog post (featuring a deep dive into the year 1994), be sure to check those out, too.

The Laughing Chimes – Whispers in the Speech Machine

Release date: January 31^st
Record label: Slumberland
Genre: Jangle pop, post-punk, college rock, dream pop
Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital
Pull Track: A Promise to Keep

I’ve been waiting for a new album from The Laughing Chimes for a while now–specifically since November of 2022, when I heard their six-song Zoo Avenue EP, although this desire was reinforced the following month when I named said record my favorite EP of that year. Whispers in the Speech Machine–their second full-length and their first for their current home of Slumberland Records–has thus been a while in the making, and the Athens, Ohio-based jangle pop group has changed quite a bit in the meantime. For one, they’ve doubled in size: founding brothers Evan (vocals/guitar) and Quinn (drums) Seurkamp have welcomed in a permanent bassist (Avery Bookman, their cousin) and second guitarist (Ella Franks, who also contributes keys to their newest record). Accordingly, Whispers in the Speech Machine reflects a more expansive sound–Zoo Avenue may have couched Appalachian melancholy with a bright, early Guided by Voices-esque melodicism, but between-record singles like “Tomorrow’s 87” hinted at a moodier, more post-punk and even goth-pop-indebted sound, and Whispers in the Speech Machine (while still being very much a jangly indie rock record) makes good on this. Franks’ synth contributions, given a prominent place in these eight songs, are key to elevating The Laughing Chimes to this next chapter of their sound, but the Seurkamps’ performance indicates that they were ready for this moment when it did finally arrive as well.

Even though Whispers in the Speech Machine is a short album (coming in at under thirty minutes) and it does contain one previously-released song (a new take on “Cats Go Car Watching” from Zoo Avenue), it’s an album that radiates ideas and layers as many of them on top of each other as it can. Evan Seurkamp’s vocals have always been a highlight and anchoring force, and now that they’ve added a second potent one in the keyboards, The Laughing Chimes are free to wander from their typical jangle pop sound to New Order-like synth-post-punk-pop and dream pop while still having everything hold together. So many of these songs could be lost college rock anthems, still somewhat fuzzy from laying dormant and undiscovered in a radio station basement all these years–there’s the half-remembered melodies of opening track “Atrophy”, the all-hands-on-deck sweeping romanticism of “High Beams”, the buttoned-up giddiness of “A Promise to Keep”, the epic mopiness of “He Never Finished the Thought”. “Country Eidolism” is a curveball in the record’s first half, a surprisingly intimate piece of swirling, Flying Nun-reminiscent dream folk that works very well–on the other hand, penultimate track “Fluorescent Minds” finds The Laughing Chimes cranking up the amps higher than ever before, even if the resultant rocker stays a bit closer to their jangle pop core. This isn’t exactly the Laughing Chimes album I would’ve expected had it come right after Zoo Avenue, but there’s no question that Whispers in the Speech Machine is the one that they wanted to make, nor is it in any doubt that they were right to pursue these ideas to where it finally led them. (Bandcamp link)

Rosa Bordallo – Isidro

Release date: January 31^st
Record label: Bad Auntie
Genre: Psychedelic pop, jangle pop, indie pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Crasseux

Isidro may “only” be Rosa Bordallo’s second solo album, but the New York-based musician has taken a winding road to get to this point. The Chamorro singer-songwriter was born on the Pacific island (and U.S. territory) of Guam and moved to New York at nineteen, where she played in the post-punk/art-punk band Cholo in the late 2000s and early 2010s. After that, Bordallo put out a couple of EPs under the name Manett before finally graduating to using her proper name for her full-length debut, 2019’s Reef Walker. Isidro, then, actually represents something of a slowdown for Bordallo–she wrote these songs earlier this decade in New York before traveling down to Atlanta to record them at MAZE Studios with Ben Etter (Deerhunter, Cate Le Bon, Soccer Mommy). Etter’s previous credits are helpful in contextualizing the sound of this album, particularly Deerhunter–it recalls “indie music” of that band’s late 2000s/early 2010s heyday, a mishmash of forward-thinking synths, “art rock”, and bright, vibrant guitar/indie/psychedelic pop music. Isidro sews Bordallo’s different lives and influences together expertly–there’s the stately coastal psych-folk artiste in her presentation, her post-punk past in the record’s more lively moments, her island of origin in her writing, and the sun-baked psychedelia chronicled by Etter in Georgia.

The first non-intro track on Isidro, “Home”, begins with a familiar reverb-y, jangly psychedelic pop sound, but Bordallo’s writing packs a bite and a specificity (“The profit-driven war games / Menacing our land” … “All they’ve ever done for us / Wreak havoc and desecrate our dead”) that bears the mark of a land with a front-row seat to the malignant force of American imperialism. As stark as “Home” is, Bordallo doesn’t let the looming militant spectre overwhelm the whole of her writing. Perhaps tackling it at the onset frees Isidro to weave more complex and vivid storytelling, which Bordallo goes on to offer up in later highlights such as “Crasseux”, “Silk Moth’s Revenge”, and “I Feel Numb”. The sound of Isidro–aided by drummer Sean Zearfoss and multi-instrumentalist Keegan Krogh in addition to Etter–feels key to realizing the full potential of Bordallo’s writing. The record pulls together a lot, musically-speaking, but it’s an unflagging pop album at its core and the instrumentation exists to channel this. Both the offbeat synth-led instrumental track “Cycads of Micronesia” and the fluttering psych pop “Silk Moth’s Revenge” (which feels like a revolution to me, either labor-driven or decolonialist or perhaps both) draw from Bordallo’s home from thousands of miles away, a connecting force made explicit by her translation of the final verse of “I Feel Numb” into French, Russian, and Chamorro. “I Feel Numb” does not end in triumph and final victory, but it’s laying the groundwork for something greater. (Bandcamp link)

New Not Shameful / Trust Blinks – Split

Release date: January 28^st
Record label: Cherub Dream
Genre: Slowcore, lo-fi indie rock, emo, post-hardcore, shoegaze
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Grass Is Green

San Francisco label Cherub Dream Records has been around for a half-decade, but they really only got onto my radar last year, when I found several interesting new Bay Area bands (Sucker, Buddy Junior, Christina’s Trip) through their output. Eschewing the brighter indie pop that the region is currently known for, Cherub Dream highlights a greyer, more downcast side of the area’s indie music scene–one more indebted to slowcore, shoegaze, and lo-fi indie rock of the 1990s. The label’s latest release is a six-song, eighteen-minute split EP that accomplishes everything one could want in a Cherub Dream release and more–it both introduces an intriguing new Bay Area band in San Francisco’s New Not Shameful, and it expands the label’s horizons by bringing us new music from Los Angeles-originating, Asheville-based slowcore band Trust Blinks (who released an album on similarly-minded labels Julia’s War and Candlepin last year). Within this specific niche of indie rock, New Not Shameful and Trust Blinks are actually fairly distinct from one another, but this exchange of ideas only makes the split EP feel like a stronger collection.

I’m not an emo purist, so I have no issue with calling the New Not Shameful side of the split EP the “emo” side. I think that their three songs capture the mix of ugly and beauty that marks the best emo music, anyway–it’s half Cap’n Jazz and other 90s scream-friendly emo, half Modest Mouse/expansive northwestern American indie rock. “Only for a Second”, their first song, is the most substantial thing on the EP by far, with bandleader Finn Palamaro’s screaming vocals colliding with shimmery guitars in the first half and ascending to something unmoored from this beginning in its second half. The Trust Blinks half of the EP is the “slowgaze” side, although it’s not as predictable as most of that kind of music, thankfully. The Trust Blinks side starts with “Spider (Interlude)”, a slow-crawling instrumental that feels right out of the Duster-Helvetia school of wallflower-rock, but the two tracks that follow it, “Grass Is Green” and “Clean Plate Club” are more electric and dynamic. The former track in particular is a nice surprise, with its fuzzed-out guitars and heavy usage of organ forming a bizarre combination that nonetheless works very well (“Clean Plate Club” also has some nice organ; it makes a little more sense in that song’s lo-fi slowcore body, but it’s still not the most intuitive touch). The three songs apiece are more than enough for me to get a sense of where both New Not Shameful and Trust Blinks are coming from, but it’s brief enough to feel like a low-stakes drop-in with a couple new bands I expect to hear more from soon. (Bandcamp link)

ASkySoBlack – Touch Heaven

Release date: January 31^st
Record label: New Morality Zine/Pleasure Tapes
Genre: Grunge-gaze, fuzz rock, alt-rock, post-hardcore
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: On for No One

Philadelphia’s ASkySoBlack was part of New Morality Zine’s esteemed class of 2022 alongside bands like Prize Horse and Downward; their four-song Autumn in the Water EP established the band as slick, alt-rock-loving practitioners of “heavy shoegaze” like their labelmates. At the time, I seem to remember them not getting as much attention as Prize Horse or Downward, but perhaps the release of their debut full-length LP, Touch Heaven, will change that. Given a larger canvas, their peers Prize Horse responded by expanding their sound to something subtler and slowed down on their first LP last year; ASkySoBlack have taken a different course on Touch Heaven. The band’s Hum and Smashing Pumpkins-indebted sound is still present throughout the album; if there’s a change, it’s a shift towards the more streamlined, replacing the heavier, almost-alt-metal extremes of Autumn in the Water with a pared-down, almost-punk attitude towards this kind of music. Jordan Shteif’s vocals remain a secret weapon on Touch Heaven–the band might sound hurried and frantic, but Shteif is an anchor, gliding across these electric alt-rock tracks with a calm, patient composure (that’s only broken when the moment really calls for it).

Touch Heaven begins with an explosion–more specifically, opening track “On for No One”, an absolute tour-de-force of heavy rock music that’s one of ASkySoBlack’s most complete moments yet. The song they choose to follow it up with, “I Wish I Was Not”, is the harbinger–the quartet don’t take their foot off the gas, and in fact rip through the track in two white-hot minutes. ASkySoBlack have a pretty solid claim to the title of best hook-makers in their current scene, and that’s true whether they’re speeding through “I Wish I Was Not” or plowing across the post-grunge “Boy Like a Bruise” or the airborne Hum-worship of “You Sit Useless”. The downtuned riffs of “Carousel House” hint that maybe, just maybe, Touch Heaven is going to dive off the low end in its second half, but while this side of ASkySoBlack makes a couple more appearances (in the post-hardcore inferno at the end of “Did It All Wrong” and the more polished but still intense finale of “Hold Me Holy”), the record’s biggest B-side surprise is probably the relative restraint of penultimate track “Every Heart Needs Some Mileage”. Touch Heaven is probably at its best when ASkySoBlack is making a bit more noise, but they find a few different ways to get there–and, like closing track “Sore for You” hints at, they can stretch things out while still letting the guitars run free if they want to. I get the sense that ASkySoBlack isn’t done evolving, but where they’re at on Touch Heaven is a fine place to be for the moment. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

My 1994 Listening Log

Who else is tired of new music? Just kidding, I’m definitely not (if you read this blog, you’re aware of that), but I have brought back a semi-regular blog feature in which I listen to some non-new music on a daily basis. So here’s the deal with this listening log: during the new music lull of December and January, I listened to one new-to-me album from 1994 (almost) every day, wrote down a little bit of what I thought about it, and posted this in the Rosy Overdrive Discord (which, if you’re looking for a social media-type place that doesn’t openly promote fascism, it’s a nice one to join). I’ve done this a few times now, with the years 1981, 1993, and 1997, and 1994 didn’t disappoint!

Note that these are only albums I’d never listened to in full before; I’ve heard, by my count, around 150 albums from 1994 before I started this exercise, so if you’re wondering why something well-known/up Rosy Overdrive’s alley isn’t here, it’s probably because I’ve heard it already (I still haven’t heard the first Oasis album yet, though. I made it through 36 albums without biting the bullet on that one).

Bandcamp embeds are included when available.

12/14: The High Llamas – Gideon Gaye (Target)

Starting this exercise looking back at thirty years ago with an album that looks back thirty years before that. Wilco was still an alt-country band, The Flaming Lips and Mercury Rev were wild rock and rollers, Elephant 6 was still in the basement—but here are The High Llamas, leading the way with pristine, polished Brian Wilson keys and strings. I like my 60s worship a bit more mussed up, so perhaps I appreciate more than like this, but I “appreciate” it a good deal. They never fully unbutton, but looser stuff like “Checking In, Checking Out” is more my speed. Don’t know if “Track Goes By” needed to be thirteen minutes but the first half is so good it doesn’t really matter.

12/15: The Veldt – Afrodisiac (UMG)

Considering how much I enjoyed their early archival release from last year, it seems past time to give The Veldt’s most well-known record a shot. The soul/R&B influence was much more “implied” on Illumination 1989, which was a more straightforward dream pop-gaze album; here, it feels like a genuine attempt to synthesize the two genres. Not much sounds like this, maybe the Afghan Whigs would be the closest I can think of but that’s still not quite right. No one was ready for this in ‘94, and unfortunately the current shoegaze revival has emphasized more anonymous-feeling elements of the genre, so a Veldt revival feels unlikely. This is not an entirely successful album, and certainly could’ve used a bit of trimming, but there’s more than enough to justify the experiment and the Veldt get points for inventiveness in my book.

12/16 Fuzzy – s/t (Seed)

This is easily the most “nineties-sounding” album I’ve done yet—and, probably not coincidentally, it’s also my favorite one yet. These New England no-hit wonders slot very nicely right next to peers like Belly, Juliana Hatfield, even Dinosaur Jr. (do you like guitars?). Fuzzy do not overthink it; these songs are one big alt-rock pop hook after another after another. Even things like “Now I Know” where it seems like they’re going for something more subtle end up with fireworks. I’m not sure if the “where’s my knife?” call and response thing in (the excellent) “Lemon Rind” is supposed to be funny, but it is. I love how the drumbeat in “Sports” sounds like a basketball. This one doesn’t quit, huh. Bandleader Hilken Mancini released a good album [last] year, by the way.

12/17: Sinead O’Connor – Universal Mother (Ensign/Chrysalis)

I really gained something sitting down and taking this one in front-to-back. These songs are good, but as a whole statement it’s something else. Really was only familiar with I Do Not Want… before; this is more difficult, more thoughtful, less outward bloodletting. It’s still there, like in the finale of “Red Football”, or “Fire on Babylon” which is an excellent opening hook. Songs like “All Babies” make the most sense as Irish folk music that’s happened to be penned by O’Connor. The “All Apologies” cover is, again, haunting on its own but turns into something even harder in the album (she’s probably one of the few people who can sing that song and “get” it). The trip hop song about how the Irish “potato famine” is a colonialist myth is a huge musical sore thumb in a record of more subdued piano/folk, but it absolutely makes sense as part of O’Connor’s thesis. And it rules.

“An American army regulation / Says you mustn’t kill more than ten percent of a nation / Because to do so causes permanent psychological damage / It’s not permanent, but they didn’t know that”

12/18: aMiniature – Depth Five Rate Six (Restless)

Alright, alright, indie rock time. This album came out of San Diego the same year that Yank Crime did, and I’ve seen aMiniature called a “post-hardcore” band before, but they’re a lot more….normal-sounding than Drive Like Jehu. It’s one part West Coast indie punk, one part fuzzed-out indie rock; kind of like the midpoint between Jawbreaker and, say, Versus (who they apparently toured with). If you’re like me and have heard roughly 10,000 albums that sound like this to some degree, this isn’t going to blow you away immediately. Still, though, there’s something to this. There’s a tough backbone to the band that gets more pronounced when they get a little more punk sounding in the last few tracks (probably my favorite stretch). Not sure if I’ll personally return to it but worth checking if it sounds like your bag.

12/19 Digable Planets – Blowout Comb (Capitol)

I wanted to make sure to do this one because their debut album was one of my favorite discoveries of the 1993 edition of this exercise. From what I remember of Reachin’, this one isn’t an extension of that album so much as an expansion. Clearly the same jazz-rap group, but they’ve leaned a bit harder into chilled-out and esoteric. Not that the last one was some huge pop-rap thing but there’s less of that and more lengthy stretched-out jazzy journeys. Hard to follow everything they’re talking about just from the one and a half listens I’ve done so far, but certainly caught the parts against fascism and the line about studying Mao. Starting with Reachin’ worked for me, I’d recommend that to anyone else unfamiliar, but do continue to this one if it works for you.

12/20: Dog Faced Hermans – Those Deep Buds (Konkurrel/Alternative Tentacles)

The final album from the cult horn-punk group (who I’m pretty sure I’ve done in these exercises before). They’re a consistently great band, I always enjoy listening to their albums, and this was no exception. Compared to the previous two, this is maybe a little more jammy/experimental; not that they were ever an orthodox punk band but this is about as far away from it as they got (among the LPs I’ve heard). “Human Spark” probably starts the most punk-like and even that one lapses into noise/oddness. It’s not Leaves Turn Inside You-level post-post-hardcore (they still more or less sound like DFH did on their previous albums), but I get the sense that they would’ve gotten there if they kept going.

12/21: Butterglory – Crumble (Merge)

Finally getting around to checking out the music of one of the most frequent “fans also like” bands in my life. People talk about Butterglory like they were Pavement ripoffs but they only really remind me of Pavement on a surface level (and the guitar line in “Jinxed” is very Pavement, yes). It’s more pop-forward, less “band jams” and more like a couple of Flying Nun/college rock fans adding their own lo-fi Americana spin on it (I believe they were just a duo at this point). Actually, this sounds a lot more like all the modern bands that people complain are “just Pavement ripoffs” than Pavement do. Plenty of mixtape candidates here. Maybe if I’d heard this when I was first discovering Yo La Tengo and Archers of Loaf it’d be a core record for me, maybe not, but now it sounds like a solid and pretty indie rock record (more or less like I thought it’d be). I’m not sure if we’re far enough down the nostalgia-festival rabbit hole for a Vegas fest to offer Butterglory an absurd amount of money to reunite, but we can hold out hope.

12/22: Madder Rose – Panic On (Atlantic)

This is another band whose 1993 album I enjoyed so I’m going in for round two. My initial impression of this one was that it wasn’t as good as the previous year’s Bring It Down (or their most recent LP from 2023, for that matter), but I’m glad I waited until starting a second run through to write this entry because it’s sounding a lot better this time around. They’re still making moderately fuzzy, mostly poppy vintage-sounding 90s alt rock without much in terms of bells or whistles—this might actually be the most stripped-down/streamlined version of Madder Rose I’ve heard. It does start off kind of slow but goes on a hot streak beginning with the title track with every song having a really strong hook of some kind or another. I suspect it pairs nicely with Bring It Down back to back.

12/23 Peter Jefferies – Electricity (Ajax/Raffmond)

There’s no way I was getting through this exercise without checking out at least one of the New Zealand records I hadn’t yet gotten around to. Peter seems to be the more iconoclastic and stranger of the two Jefferies brothers; what I’ve heard from his solo career is less approachable than Graeme’s band The Cakekitchen, on average at least. This one feels like a proper album, Jefferies’ piano-centric playing anchoring stuff that can swing from cacophonous to harrowing to plain gorgeous. There’s nothing as immediately stunning as my favorite song of his, “On an Unknown Beach”, but there’s a lot of beauty on here. Pretty singular listen.

12/25 Sleepyhead – Starduster (Homestead)

I’ve written about Sleepyhead for the blog before but this is the first time they’ve shown up in one of these posts, I think. Great little semi-forgotten indie rock/indie pop group from Boston who put stuff out on Slumberland and Homestead (this one’s from the latter). Sleepyhead have a formula they typically stick to—energetic, slapdash, but relatively clean-sounding indie rock instrumentals with, uh, casual and off-the-cuff vocals singing throwback-style pop melodies. This one is kind of on the punk-y end of indie pop, if you’re into groups like Boyracer and the more rocking side of K Records they’re right in the mix there.

12/26 The Mavericks – What a Crying Shame (MCA Nashville/Geffen)

Hey, there’s no “alt” in this country! Not that I was expecting No Depression-era Uncle Tupelo or anything, but I don’t think I appreciated that The Mavericks are straight-up neo-traditionalists—or they are on this album, at least. They’ve supposedly made a career out of blending classic country music with Latin and Tex-Mex influences—but if they’re present on What a Crying Shame, they’re very faint indeed. This album’s got more in common with Dwight Yoakam or even early rockabilly (and not the Reverend Horton Heat/Bloodshot kind); not that that’s a bad thing, necessarily. Maybe not an “essential” album, but it’s hard to argue with fun stuff like “There Goes My Heart” and “The Things You Said to Me”. Side note: this album is how I found out that there’s a prolific country songwriter who was born in Greece and goes simply by “Kostas” (and I’d bet that part of the reason I was reminded of Yoakam is that Kostas has written for him, too).

12/27: Smoking Popes – Born to Quit (Johann’s Face/Capitol)

Pop punk is supposed to evoke feelings of youthfulness, right? Well, that’s not what we get from Smoking Popes, who already sound tired and middle-aged on their breakout album (which most people heard via the 1995 Capitol re-release but was first released in ‘94). The whole album doesn’t really sound like the band’s single hit, the bizarre Morrissey/pop punk hybrid “Need You Around”, but it still sounds like it would be a clear black sheep in the Chicago punk scene from which they arose*. Josh Caterer sings “I’d rather be too young than too old / To feel the way I do about you” over a very tasteful college rock instrumental in “Mrs. You and Me”; Smoking Popes let this desperation speak for itself rather than Blink-182 it up. Some really catchy stuff here (see the first two songs) although it does kind of lose some steam. As for “Need You Around”—well, nothing else really sounds like it, still.

(*note: Discord user Dan Gorman aka The Discover Tab pointed out to me that, between the Popes and bands like the Alkaline Trio and The Lawrence Arms, this darker, maybe more “mature” take on pop punk wasn’t so out of line with what was going on in the Windy City after all)

12/28 Laurie Anderson – Bright Red (Warner Bros.)

Well, this is a Laurie Anderson album. I like Laurie Anderson—I’ve heard Big Science and at least one of the other 80s albums—and I can get behind this, but I couldn’t imagine anybody who can’t get down with “O Superman” enjoying this. Not that it’s wildly inaccessible, even for her—the opening song, “Speechless” is dark but pop. Of course, the title track is pure darkness and creepiness right afterward, and there’s an uneasiness throughout this album that conflicts with its occasional attempts at catchiness (like “Beautiful Pea Green Boat”). The moments where Anderson cuts through the veil—like the line “When my father died it was like a whole library burned down” in “World Without End”—land with a thud. There’s an interesting fixation with former partners who’ve moved onto new lovers in this album, which, combined with some apocalyptic themes, feels like some Anderson-grade catastrophizing. It’s more or less—oh, shit, is that Lou Reed singing lead vocals on “In Our Sleep”?

12/29 Three Mile Pilot – The Chief Assassin to the Sinister (Headhunter/Geffen)

We’re going back to San Diego today! This is another one with multiple releases—Geffen put it out the following year with a couple of extra tracks. Members of this band would go on to play in The Black Heart Procession and Pinback, but neither of those bands really sound like The Chief Assassin to the Sinister. It’s actually pretty tricky to pinpoint this one—Wikipedia says noise rock and math rock, neither of which are totally right. There are noisy moments, there are some mathy ones, some Black Heart Procession-y noir detours, even a bit of emo. It’s like somewhere between the explosive garage-y post-hardcore stuff of their home city and sprawling indie rock from a few states north of them. It’s not as…immediately satisfying as a lot of their peers, but that’s not a bad thing. In fact I quite like this, I think—probably more than what I’ve heard from their successor bands.

12/30 The Figgs – Low-Fi at Society High (Imago/Stomper)

Low-Fi? At Society High? It’s more likely than you think! This is one of these “cult 90s power pop albums”, or at least that’s my impression going into it. Maybe it’s due to the very nineties-sounding lead vocals, but this feels a lot more “1994” than I was initially expecting; I think it slots solidly into the Fig Dish strain of post-grunge/alt-rock-flavored power pop. The Figgs add quick tempos, relative brevity, and plenty of guitar solos to the mix—this is more or less the Low-Fi at Society High formula, and I can report that it works. Apparently they played as Graham Parker’s band at one point which makes sense—parts of this album remind me of the 70s power pop/rock and roll troubadours but updated musically for the times. The ingredients are pretty simple so the songs kind of bleed into each other, but I feel pretty positive about this one initially.

12/31 Palace Brothers – Days in the Wake (Drag City)

My familiarity with Will Oldham and his various projects is admittedly pretty spotty (I See a Darkness? Great! The album he did with Matt Sweeney a couple years ago? Pretty good!), so this is a good opportunity to check out one of his earliest albums (as Palace Brothers, which would become Palace Music and eventually Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy). It’s under thirty minutes long and almost entirely just Oldham and his guitar (“Come a Little Dog” has bass and drums). There’s some very good songs on here—namely, “I Send My Love to You” and “No More Workhorse Blues” stick out—but this isn’t the album to make me a BPB evangelist. If I already was, I imagine I’d appreciate it more as a nice early album before the (presumable) masterpieces.

1/1 Magnapop – Hot Boxing (Play It Again Sam/Priority)

This Athens, GA band has a bunch of legit early college/alt-rock connections—Bob Mould produced this album, Michael Stipe produced some of their others, the lead vocalist previously was in a band with Matthew Sweet. That being said, this album fits in very well with the then-present state of power pop—loud guitars, aggressive power chords, and a 90s drollness are all key features of Hot Boxing (I’m sure Mould’s production helped this along to some degree). It’s one of the best-sounding albums I’ve done for this exercise, and it’s a fun listen (especially towards the end where they blow through a bunch of short songs quickly). Still, I didn’t like it quite as much as I wanted to. Something missing from a lot of the songs to make them extra memorable, I think? Worth a listen if any of this sounds good to you, though.

1/1 Ida – Tales of Brave Ida (Simple Machines)

I missed a day on Christmas Eve, so I’m doing two on New Years to make up for it. This is the long-running folk-slowcore duo’s first album, and it is, indeed, somewhere between a “folk” and “slowcore” album. It’s not “lo-fi” but there’s a nineties-ish simplicity to these songs—two guitars playing together (or off each other), two vocalists singing together (or off each other), usually that’s it. Not trying to lean into folk traditionalism, not trying to pad things out into a rock band. The acoustic moments are strummy and fit alongside the contemporary alt-folk scene, and the lyrics which are half poetic, half literal, remind me of that kind of thing, too. Often this side of Ida is right up against the sprawling, creeping electric slowcore side. An hour long but I don’t really mind.

1/2 Souled American – Frozen (Moll Tonträger)

Been meaning to get into this cult alt-country band for years, and now that there’s been a slew of reissues and everything’s available digitally, there’s no reason not to. I’ve heard some say not to start with their later albums (this is the second-to-last-one) because they only got weirder and weirder, but I’m happy to disagree with this take because I loved this record. Not to say it isn’t weird—I can imagine this not being everyone’s cup of tea. But this specific combination of molasses-slow playing, traditional folk and country experimentation, and an ambient Chicago experimental nature to the material creates something that just…works. Threatens to go full-on post-rock in a couple of places (instrumental “Two of You”, the relatively busy keys-heavy ending to either “Downblossom” or “Better Who”, I don’t remember which one) but it never fully jumps the rickety tracks. All the better.

1/3 NRBQ – Message for the Mess Age (Forward)

When I think of the 90s, I think of NRBQ. Well, not really, but the long-running bar band/ “your favorite band’s favorite band” did release one of their more well-regarded later-period albums this year, it seems. It’s a pretty solid collection of unclassifiable pop rock that does sound like the work of a band with several accomplished songwriters and musicians in it—some moments sound like they still think it’s the 80s, other moments like that decade never even happened. One of their earlier songs, “I Want You Bad”, is maybe my favorite power pop song of all-time—nothing they’ve done quite reaches that, but “A Little Bit of Bad” is about the closest they’ve gotten among the stuff I’ve heard (it sounds like a classic John Hiatt song without the John Hiatt-ness that’s a turnoff for some people). Elsewhere—the truly weird/out there stuff is kept to a minimum, but they make it count when they dip into it (the name-spelling lesson “Spampinato” is way better than it should be, the bizarre jazz rock of “Everyone’s Smokin’” is a weird and wonderful closer, and who doesn’t love “Girl Scout Cookies”?) and their commitment to not being so self-serious actually helps them pull off the sincerity of “A Better Word for Love” and “Advice for Teenagers”. “Designated Driver” is a little creepy, but I don’t think the boys mean anything nefarious by it. Good stuff.

1/4 Cake Like – Delicious (Avant/Diskunion)

Jesus, this rocks. I don’t really know anything about this band; they’re from New York, but I could’ve told you that by the way this record sounds. Apparently one of the members went on to become an actor in Reno 911, which I don’t think I could’ve told you based on the music. Anyway—do you like “no wave”? Do you like brief Sonic Youth noise bursts combined with sarcastic, droll, “slackery” Breeders indie rock/pop? Do you like albums that are under 30 minutes long? Do you like songs where the lyrics are mostly just a couple lines repeated several times but where pretty much all the lines are really good (and often actually funny)? Well, these are all features of the album Delicious by the band Cake Like. Here are some of my favorite lines from this album:

“Your dad works for my dad”

“I’d kiss a pirate if he’d cry”

“Mary Todd’s a politician, pushing woman”

“Jane brings me lots of things / But lots of things don’t matter”

“Bring some fruitcake, bring some fruitcake / La,la,la,la,la,la,la,la”

1/5 Boyracer – More Songs About Frustration and Self-Hate (Slumberland)

Well, I’ve enjoyed plenty of recent Boyracer material, so perhaps it’s now time to take a closer look at what the long-running British (at this point, at least) indie pop act was doing thirty years ago. Does this album (which, quite boldly, runs through two dozen songs in 62 minutes) really live up to the promise of its title? Well, I haven’t exactly been giving all the lyrics a close read, but what I’ve heard (plus the music) would suggest a certain degree of frustration and self-hate, yes. Compared to the more clear-sounding and upbeat power-pop-punk of modern Boyracer, this album is a lot more in line with the blown-out distortion of 90s indie rock, “lo-fi” and the like–plenty of basement guitar flare-ups and angst-pointing musical choices here. This is kind of an endurance test thing but I like a lot of the songs on here. It’s very 90s to hide the good pop melodies underneath these trappings and Boyracer eventually grew out of it but it’s a strong trope when done well. Want to spend more time with this one.

1/6 Everything But the Girl – Amplified Heart (Blanco y Negro/Atlantic)

First of all, this wasn’t really what I expected. I guess since I only really know the dance mix of “Missing” I was expecting this album to sound a bit more like that? Even though just a bit of critical thinking would’ve reminded me that it’s called a “remix” for a reason. Anyway, between Tracey Thorn’s somewhat soulful voice, the tasteful acoustic guitar, upright bass, and overall jazz sensibilities, this is pretty close to stuff that gets derided as “coffeehouse folk” music. In any case it’s much closer to Suzanne Vega and the Indigo Girls than Stereolab or Portishead or any other electronic-infused contemporary indie rock.

Second of all: this rules. It’s great. It’s simple and beautiful but also deep and unintuitive; the exact kind of thing you’d want indie pop veterans (which Thorn certainly was at this point; see the excellent 80s group Marine Girls) to be doing at this stage. I guess some of the songs have prominent drum machine beats, which is sort of “electronica”; I wouldn’t have connected the proper album with that kind of music on my own but I see how someone more attuned to that world (like, say, Todd Terry) would do so. Especially with “Missing”, which is pretty clearly the most dance-friendly track on the record even in its initial incarnation.

1/7 Hoover – The Lurid Traversal of Route 7 (Dischord)

This was the only LP that this cult Dischord band ever made. I’ve seen Hoover compared to Fugazi, and while I hear it in some places (the first few songs, and, throughout the album, the vocals), I actually think I like this more than any of the Fugazi albums (well, maybe not Repeater or The Argument but come on, I’ve only just now heard this). They do the spitting punk thing very well, and the seven-minute bass riff of “Electrolux” is an early highlight, but things get weirder and more my speed as the album goes on. Starting with the crawling instrumental “Route 7”, continuing to “Regulator Watts” and into the last couple of tracks, Hoover get more jazzy, less aggressive (except in short bursts), and a little more Touch & Go-y. Of course, there’s other Dischord/DC bands experimenting with similar things around this time, and the label would only get more into this stuff as it got closer to Y2K. Still, this feels like one of the strongest from this specific area that I’ve heard.

1/8 Idaho – This Way Out (Caroline/Quigley)

A week or so after Ida, we’re back with the other slowcore band whose name starts with those same three letters. Although this is exhibit A in how useless of a term “slowcore” is on its own, because Tales of Brave Ida sounds pretty much nothing like this album. Of the “known” slowcore bands, this probably sounds closest to American Music Club—it’s dramatic, big-sounding, and not really even “slow” a lot of the time. Although they don’t have that “unclassifiable time-wise” quality AMC did as much; this is much more clearly a 90s indie rock album with thorny guitars and little fancy extra instrumentation. The last Idaho album I heard (other than the newest one) was a later one (Alas) and I remember it being quieter and less electric. This is pretty much the exact kind of band that gets lost if you try to reduce “the nineties” down into a few buzzwords and categories (“lo-fi”, “slowcore”, “indie”). The flip side of this is I’m not so sure how much I like it after an initial listen—but I do like it.

1/9 Crayon – Brick Factory (Harriet/HHBTM)

Now it’s time for some pop music! At least, the kind of pop music I tend to gravitate towards. Crayon were a trio from Bellingham, WA and were associated with Washington’s twee/indie pop movement; two-thirds of them went on to co-found the more well-known Tullycraft, and Crayon only ever made one proper album. This is “noise pop”, I believe—loud 90s guitars in bursts and flares and then twee-ish pop music in between them. There’s two vocalists, neither destined for stardom—one sounds at least like they’re trying to pull off the indie rock frontperson heights and not quite getting there, and the other one leaning fully into the nasally nerdiness of the era. The latter’s songs are the more immediate highlights to me; I like when Crayon pair puffed-up, tough instrumentals with transgressive patheticness to really drive the point home. I’m fully on board with this album, even though not everything reaches the highs of the best (“Pedal”, “Schirm Loop”, “The Snap-Tight Wars”, “Chutes and Ladders”). Stuff like “Reason 2600” and “Knee-High Susan” emanate bad vibes; they’d probably get reductively tagged as “incel” today by people who don’t know how to sit with those vibes. This was never going to be anything more than a cult favorite (and from the looks of it, a small one at that), but that’s why it can do what it does.

1/10 Souls – Tjitchischtsiy (Sudêk) (Telegram)

Seems like every time I do one of these, I find at least one “completely unremembered underground rock album recorded by Steve Albini”. This album is the debut from a band called Souls from Sweden, and it’s definitely a little heavier than the “indie rock” I’d heard from the region previously—the rhythm section has a nice, tough stop-start feel to it that reminds me of Dischord, but there’s also a dynamic and dramatic side to the band that’s a bit more Rid of Me-era PJ Harvey. At the same time, though, it’s more “pop” than either of those points of comparison; I’d say there are moments in here for people who enjoy “indie pop” and/or “pop punk”. A lot of that is thanks to the vocalist, who is doing almost all of the melodic heavy lifting themself, but the rest of the band provide a nice, clean version of noisy-punk-indie that’s a good blank canvas (and then there’s “I Guess”, which sounds like a classic 90s pop punk song slowed down just a bit). Even though the vocals are in English it’s hard for me to tell what they’re singing about (a 90s Albini album with the vocals relatively low in the mix? Wow) , but the, uh, troubling self-hatred of “The Ass I Am” provides a clue.

1/11 Heatmiser – Cop and Speeder (Frontier)

This is my belated/long-overdue completion of the Heatmiser trilogy. I love Mic City Sons (more than a couple of the Elliott Smith solo albums, even!), but I remember being so disappointed in Dead Air that I never even bothered with the middle LP. The verdict? Well, it’s somewhere in between those extremes. They’re still the dime-a-dozen punk-influenced indie rock band they were on their debut, but they got a lot better at it in a short amount of time. These songs really pop for the most part—it’s nice to hear a bit of Smith peaking through in highlights like “Busted Lip” and “Collect to NYC”—there’s even one song, “Antonio Carlos Jobim”, that could’ve been a Smith solo track (although I like the extra push the full band gives it). Neil Gust’s songs are pretty good, too—maybe some would disagree, but the guy co-led a band with Elliott Smith and more or less held his own, that’s an impressive achievement. “Hitting on the Waiter” is one of my favorite things here, a messy, catchy indie-punk track with a ton of personality. Kind of loses steam by the end but I think this is a success.

Also, here’s a joke for all the basketball fans in here: “‘Heat Miser’ is what Jimmy Butler says when Miami doesn’t give him a new contract”. (Is this funny? I don’t know that much about the NBA).

1/12 The Cakekitchen – Stompin’ Thru the Boneyard (Raffmond/Merge)

Hell of an album title, first off. After checking out Peter Jefferies’ 1994 album earlier in this project, we see what his brother Graeme was doing the same year. While The Cakekitchen aren’t the most beloved New Zealand band, they seem to be one of the most consistent, and this album doesn’t alter my impression of them. They sound much more like a “band” than any of Peter’s material, although they’re similarly offbeat and lo-fi. They’re “pop” but not really “jangle”—there’s a very laid-back psychedelic folk sound to a lot of this album, though there are still plenty of electric, fuzzy moments too (like the enjoyably squealy “Mr. Adrian’s Lost in His Last Panic Attack”). This one’s probably less accessible than their earlier records that I’d previously heard, but that’s not really a bad thing. If you can make it through the eight-minute “Hole in My Shoe” early on in the records, then this is the Cakekitchen record for you. Oh, also this is the one with “The Mad Clarinet” on it, which I knew already because the Mountain Goats have covered it.

1/13 Autechre – Amber (Warp/Wax Trax!/TVT)

I said I was going to try to get to some electronic music in this exercise, so here we are. I didn’t want to listen to three hours of Aphex Twin, so an hour of Autechre it is. I think this is one of their more well-regarded albums, but they’re one of those acts where everything has positive reviews so somebody else will have to tell me if it was a good place to start or not. Apparently this is considered “ambient”, at least according to Wikipedia, but this certainly isn’t what comes to mind when I think of that genre. I mean, sure, it’s way too freeform and nonlinear to slot into anything resembling mainstream electronic music (almost like it’s too…intelligent? No, that’s stupid), but these songs are still very busy and active. Not really sure if I “like” this, but it’s interesting to me and didn’t scare me off trying out more of their albums sometime in the future. It’s probably too long for me but I’m too scared of getting crucified by RYM power users to say this confidently.

1/14: Antietam – Rope-a-Dope (Homestead)

Antietam! Louisville, Kentucky 1990s indie rock! This is one of the bands that not a lot of people know but those who do really love them. I already used the “your favorite band’s favorite band” cliche once in this exercise but it applies here too. Yo La Tengo covered them before they were even indie famous, and just look at the lineup they were able to pull together for their 2021 Wink O’Bannon tribute LP. I suspected I’d like this, arguably their most well-known album—and I do! It opens with this awesome keyboard-heavy 60s garage rock song called “Hands Down”, a side of them punctuated by a Dead Moon cover later on in the album (it still sounds great now, but I can only imagine what a breath of fresh air it felt like in ‘94). Like YLT or Eleventh Dream Day though, they aren’t defined by this side of them, as just-as-good highlights like the long, sprawling “Pine” also show. I will be honest, I read the article on the Neil Gaiman allegations halfway through this album and so I spent a good portion of this listen thinking about how much I despise that evil man. Even with that though, I could tell how great this is.

1/15 Strapping Fieldhands – Discus (Omphalos)

First album from the long-running Philly lo-fi cult band. Based on my limited knowledge of the Strapping Fieldhands I’ve kind of mentally lumped them in with Beefheart-influenced 90s indie rock bands like The Grifters and Thinking Fellers, but that doesn’t really describe Discus. It’s a lot…fluffier? And catchier. It’s very Flying Nun/New Zealand indie pop-reminiscent to me (particularly Tall Dwarfs), and even reminds me of Shrimper Records bands like Refrigerator. On some of the more outwardly catchy tracks—“Battle Down the 1/4 Mile”, “Now We Have Slipped”, “Mysterious Girl”, “Arrogant Flower”—it kind of feels like they’re doing with folk rock what Guided by Voices were doing with 60s proto-power pop/bubblegum. And there’s a lot of good pop songs on this album. I’m not entirely sure if it’s a great record on the whole but it’s one of the more interesting ones, and I’m certainly not done checking this band out after hearing this one.

1/16 Ride – Carnival of Light (Creation)

All four of the biggest Britpop bands put out albums in 1994, and half of them I haven’t heard. And yet, I’ve chosen to be difficult and listen to Ride’s “Britpop” (derogatory) album instead. What can I say? I like Ride, I like some Britpop sometimes, so maybe I’ll like this album even if it doesn’t have the best reputation. And…it’s pretty good, I think! I like this more than most of the big Britpop albums I’ve heard. At the same time, though, I see why this album failed to crossover into the Britpop mainstream and pissed off shoegaze fans at the same time. For one, it’s like 5% shoegaze at most—it’s a pretty hard pivot to psychedelic pop rock with reasonably-volumed guitars. On the other hand, Mark Gardener and Andy Bell….do not have Britpop personalities. They are not Jarvis Cocker or Liam Gallagher (although they did make this too long, like many classic Britpop albums). This wasn’t gonna cut it at the time, and its appeal is probably limited to the subset of Ride fans who like their shoegaze albums but not necessarily because they’re shoegaze albums (and that does describe me; and while I like this album i wouldn’t say it’s a masterpiece exactly).

1/17 Zuzu’s Petals – The Music of Your Life (Roadrunner/Twin/Tone)

The second and final album from the fairly short-lived Minneapolis band led by Laurie Lindeen, an author and professor (and, apparently, ex-wife of Paul Westerberg) who passed away last year. I hear a good deal of the thornier side of the pre-Nirvana “college rock” sound here (a lot of which came out of MPLS to some degree), in how the album combines folk rock with noisy underground indie rock/punk and intermittent pop moments. Throwing Muses is the band that it reminds me of the most; Scrawl and Tsunami come to mind, too. I had this on in the background and it did nothing for me; actively listening is the way to go for this one. It’s a well-made album and I enjoy it, even though part of me wishes there was more immediately catchy songs like “Feel Like Going Home”. There’s kind of a push and pull here between wanting to be a more challenging rock record and being a post-grunge pop album; maybe it would’ve been stronger if it had committed to one over the other but it’s still worthwhile as it is.

1/18 Kicking Giant – Alien I.D. (K)

Apparently this was a New York duo who eventually moved to Olympia and put out music on K Records; this was their K debut after some self-released cassettes and ended up being their last album. We kind of get the best of both world in terms of NY and PNW indie rock here—there’s Sonic Youth-style distorted no wave rock and some odd pop music in the rough as well. A lot of it reminds me of bits and pieces of more well-known bands, but it’s deep and intentional enough that I don’t think it’s “derivative”. There’s a song in the second half of the record called “The Town Idiot” that’s kind of annoying; I was getting ready to dismiss it as a pretentious SY ripoff but I can’t after listening closely. Kim Gordon would never debase herself like this, but here are Kicking Giant donning clown makeup and declaring themselves the town idiot. All the best pop songs are tacked onto the end of the album for some reason; I thought maybe they were singles included as bonus tracks but it seems like they’ve always been part of the album proper. An interesting one to (probably) end this chapter of this exercise.

Pressing Concerns: IMustBe Leonardo, Minor Conflict, Krystian Quint & The Quitters, Blood Lemon

Hello! January’s nearly over (believe it or not), but I’ve still got plenty of good music from this month to talk about here on the blog. This Pressing Concerns rounds up new albums from IMustBe Leonardo and Krystian Quint & The Quitters as well as new EPs from Minor Conflict and Blood Lemon, all of which came out these first few weeks of 2025. There’ll be a non-Pressing Concerns post tomorrow (Tuesday, January 28th), as well as the typical Thursday Pressing Concerns.

IMustBe Leonardo – Berlin, Ohio

Release date: January 6^th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Folk, lo-fi folk, singer-songwriter, slowcore
Formats: CD, digital
Pull Track: It Wasn’t Love

The artist known as IMustBe Leonardo was born and grew up in southern Italy, but he has called Berlin, Germany home since the early 2010s. Leonardo played in bands when he lived in Italy, but his solo project seems to have begun in Germany; he’s self-recorded and self-released five albums since 2016, most recently last year’s Not to Be Scared of Weekend (which I didn’t end up writing about, but was probably one of my favorite album titles of 2024). The newest IMustBe Leonardo album actually predates Not to Be Scared of Weekend; it was recorded in March of 2023 by Howard Bilerman at his Hotel2Tango studio in Montreal (aside from two songs recorded by Peter Deimel in France). Bilerman has a ton of notable recording credits (Leonard Cohen, Arcade Fire, Godspeed You! Black Emperor), but Leonardo specifically mentioned his work with the late Vic Chesnutt as to why he wanted to make an album with him–to the point of flying to a different continent to make it happen.

Even though it’s his first studio album, Berlin, Ohio is a much quieter, starker, and intimate record than Leonardo’s last LP–it’s just the singer’s hushed vocals and some fairly straightforward guitar accompaniment for the most part. Vic Chesnutt always needed so little to captivate us on his albums, and I can tell from what part of his music Leonardo finds so much inspiration–even if the two are pretty distinct songwriters. Rather than a college town in the American South, Leonardo’s quiet writing comes from the middle of one of the largest urban centers in the word. It is perhaps easier to get lost in a sprawling city filled with millions of people with their own stories, lives, and goals, and Berlin, Ohio (a real place, and also a nod to Paris, Texas) finds Leonardo meditating on this. These are curious folk songs about people departing and arriving, finding themselves unexpectedly in places they never planned on visiting.

There’s the tortured man sitting on the bench in “The Champion”, or the fleeing narrator of “Project for an Airport Chair”. “My Favorite Knife” is about an object that links one’s self to a vanished past (it reminds me of that Guided By Voices lyric, “I want to start a new life / With my valuable hunting knife”), while it’s the title of “It Wasn’t Love” that explains what happens to the song’s protagonist (“When you ask the almost dream to grow up / And keep asking every day in silence / It doesn’t work”). I have no idea what Leonardo means exactly by “It didn’t finish when I abandoned the black coat / Or when two lovers mocked my pain into a car,” in “Tired Blood”, but between the bittersweet, slow-waltzing tempo and the very next lines (“What we will leave behind this time? / Never occurred to us that me and you, we both are going to die”), I think I understand the song. Similarly, the last song is called “You Finally No One”, and while the exercising of the right to be forgotten contained in the track is presented neutrally by Leonardo, it is, in more ways than one, what everything about Berlin, Ohio was always leading up towards. (Bandcamp link)

Minor Conflict – Parallels

Release date: January 24^th
Record label: PRAH
Genre: Post-rock, experimental rock, art rock, post-punk
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Parallels II

It seems like there’s a lot of interesting music that could loosely be described as “art rock” that came out last week (much of which appeared in last Thursday’s blog post), but even so, nothing else on the docket quite sounds like Minor Conflict’s Parallels. They’re a British trio, from Bristol; Natalie Whiteland plays the harp and sings, Josh Smyth plays bass and sings, and Robbie Warin contributes trumpet, synth, and percussion. They debuted in 2023 with a four-song EP called Bright Lights, Dead City, and while Parallels is also an EP, the seven-track, twenty-four minute collection feels like a pretty hefty statement of a sophomore record. There are times on Parallels when Minor Conflict are comfortably playing “rock music” and fit neatly alongside the current wave of British post-punk bands–Smyth plays a large role in these moments, both in terms of the grounded, propulsive bass guitar (aided by guest musician Marcus Jeffery’s drumming) as well as their vocals, which more frequently veer into deadpan speak-singing. Whiteland has her moments in this department, too, but she also spends a lot of Parallels as Smyth’s high-pitched foil, and helps usher in the EP’s less rock-focused impulses.

These other sides of Minor Conflict include ambient and droning instrumental interludes like “Cube” and “Parallels I”, and they also include the moments that prominently incorporate Whiteland’s harp and Warin’s trumpet. The first “proper” track on Parallels, “Margate Sands”, is an impressive synthesis–the harp winds around both of the vocalists (who sing together, and then speak together), all the while a tough drumbeat pounds away beneath them. It’s a vibrant piece of jazz-influenced rock music, and this shows up again in the record’s centerpiece, the three-track “Parallels” suite. The six-minute “Parallels II” also features a strong, unfailing rhythm section (perhaps even stronger than in “Margate Sands”), and the two vocalists’ interplay (this time, they play the part of a couple navigating some kind of visa and immigration system in hopes of being reunited, a process presumably as complicated and emotional as jazz) is at the heart of the track. Parallels recedes after this climax a bit–“Parallels III” clatters to a finish, and the string-heavy “In the Summer” never rises from its quiet beginnings. “Glue” finds Minor Conflict showing up for one last big finish, if a somewhat delayed one–it goes from mumbling emptiness to steady orchestral rock to the loudest, fiercest, most “post-punk” moment on the entire EP as it draws to a close. Minor Conflict make us wait for moments like these on Parallel, and it’s an effective choice; the catharsis is earned, and it makes the spaces in between feel even greater. (Bandcamp link)

Krystian Quint & The Quitters – Something Like That

Release date: January 3^rd
Record label: Quality Time
Genre: Garage rock, power pop
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Water

Back in 2023, I wrote about R U Saved?, the debut album from Detroit garage punk trio The Stools. There’s a lot of competition, of course, but the band’s combination of mussed-up Motor City rock and roll with blues punk and hardcore might be the wildest thing Feel It Records has put out in recent memory. One of the three Stools, bassist/vocalist Krystian Quint, has released a solo record under the name Krystian Quint & The Quitters, and it’s wild too, in a completely different way. It turns out that Quint has a more pop-friendly side, and Something Like That is an inspired 27-minute foray into catchy guitar pop. On closer inspection, it’s not a total reinvention for Quint–there’s a looseness and even occasional gruffness to these songs that recall Detroit garage rock and first-wave punk rock, but there’s just as much (if not more) devotion to power pop and the more tuneful side of lo-fi 90s indie rock groups in these nine tracks. Perhaps the most impressive feature of Something Like That is how Quint explores this new terrain–sometimes with maximally-enthusiastic, bursting rock and roll, and other times with a more subtle study of melody, suggesting a deep appreciation of this kind of music.

If you’re looking for power pop/garage rock rave-ups, Something Like That has you covered–between the giant chilliness of “Outer Drive”, the egg punk-catchy guitar lines of “Water”, and the wrecking ball of a penultimate track in “Conspiracy”, there’s plenty here that hits immediately. Interestingly enough, a lot of the less full-throttle moments on Something Like That are actually a bit heavier–I’m thinking about somewhat “difficult” second track “Blind Your Eyes”, the mid-tempo fuzz crawler “Propaganda”, and late-record ballad “Cherry Stems”. These remind me somewhat of modern Dinosaur Jr. disciples like Gnawing, or the slower rockers from Ty Segall where there’s still a bit of his heavier influences sticking out. The longest song on the record, “Sweat”, has a plethora of melodic guitar leads bundled into it even though it doesn’t really sound like anything else on Something Like That (it reminds me more than anything else of the “quiet” Archers of Loaf songs that’d be in between their loud rockers); the all-chorus, power chord-heavy closing track “All 4 U” is similarly a black sheep, but in its case it’s because Quint pulls out all the stops to turn in a big, catchy finish. Of course I’m hoping to hear from The Stools again soon, but Krystian Quint & The Quitters already has the potential to be much more than a side project. (Bandcamp link)

Blood Lemon – Petite Deaths

Release date: January 17^th
Record label: Moon Ruins
Genre: Psychedelic rock, fuzz rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: High Tide

Boise power trio Blood Lemon will probably be most notable to a lot of readers of this blog due to their connection to ultimate alternative wavers Built to Spill–Blood Lemon bassist/vocalist Melanie Radford is the current bass player for Doug Martsch’s band and has held that position since 2019 (although she isn’t on the most recent Built to Spill album, which was recorded with the previous lineup that featured half of Brazilian band Oruã). Although Radford recently moved to Seattle, the Idaho-originating Blood Lemon (also featuring guitarist/vocalist Lisa Simpson and drummer Lindsey Lloyd) is still going strong, and they’ve just followed up their 2021 self-titled debut album with an EP called Petite Deaths. Blood Lemon traveled to Joshua Tree, California to record Petite Deaths with stoner rock legend Dave Catching (Queens of the Stone Age, Desert Sessions, Mark Lanegan), and the locale seems to have unlocked the group’s inner lumbering, riff-focused psychedelic rock heroics. Petite Deaths may be a five-song “EP”, but it’s hardly small-scale–Blood Lemon stretch the record out to a half-hour in length, riding slow, crawling psych rock fuzz and more pensive “indie rock”-indebted moments to a towering statement.

Blood Lemon kick off Petite Deaths with what I’d call the hit (kind of by default, but it is pretty catchy), “High Tide”. The shortest song on the EP at a clean four minutes, Blood Lemon are at their punchiest here, the sweet vocal harmonies and fuzzed-out guitars meeting us halfway in terms of “pop” moments. The six-minute “Her Shadow” shows off a more cavernous and expansive side of Blood Lemon, but the EP only gets heavier as it reaches the second half–there’s an inspired desert-psych cover of Jessica Pratt’s “Mountain’r Lower” that the trio repurpose for a captivating centerpiece, and half of the record is made up of the gigantic final two tracks, “Perfect Too” and “Mudlark”. The former song is a nearly eight-minute serving of catnip for stoner rock fans, leaning heavily on a low-flying guitar riff and just as low, damning vocals. “Perfect Too” eventually launches into a massive rock and roll conclusion, but Petite Deaths’ final statement, “Mudlark”, doesn’t offer easy catharsis. The heavy guitars are still there, but they’ve taken a step back to give almost a droning quality to this lengthy dirge of a track. Petite Deaths has a good deal of comfort food rock music on it, but it works because Blood Lemon only ever come off as making the choices they themselves find intriguing to follow. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable: