Hello, all! The first week of December has been a great one on Rosy Overdrive, and we’re wrapping it up with a Thursday Pressing Concerns featuring four albums coming out tomorrow, December 6th: new LPs from Advance Base, Soft on Crime, Low Harness, and Opinion. If you missed the Monday Pressing Concerns (featuring Mother of Earl, Big’n, Radio Free ABQ, and Miners) or the November 2024 playlist/round-up (which went up on Tuesday), check those out, too.
If you’re looking for more new music, you can visit the site directory to see what else we’ve written about lately. If you’d like to support Rosy Overdrive, you can share this (or another) post, or donate here. And last but not least: don’t forget to vote in the 2024 Rosy Overdrive Reader’s Poll!
Advance Base – Horrible Occurrences
Release date: December 6th Record label: Run for Cover/Orindal Genre: Singer-songwriter, synthpop, folk Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital Pull Track: The Year I Lived in Richmond
It’s hard to believe that I’m only passingly familiar with the music of Owen Ashworth, given how many people whose taste I respect love it (musicians, writers, all around solid people). Of course, I’m a big fan of the releases he’s curated as the head of Orindal Records (Dear Nora, Tara Jane O’Neil, Young Moon), and was aware that Ashworth’s cult solo projects Casiotone for the Painfully Alone and Advance Base–lo-fi, low-key minimal electronic pop soundtracking the artist’s deep talk-singing vocals–are in the same realm of many of those records. Horrible Occurrences, the fifth Advance Base album of original material and the project’s first in six years, is subsequently my entry point into the world of Ashworth–and “world” is a more than appropriate descriptor for what the singer-songwriter creates in these eleven songs. On Horrible Occurrences, Ashworth builds a set of characters and their stories, largely taking place in a fictional town called Richmond (I picture it as somewhere in the Midwest, in part due to references to Wisconsin, Lake Michigan, and Columbus, but I don’t believe it’s specified). As the title of the record hints at, Horrible Occurrences is dark more often than not–murder, grievous injury, abandonment, and the supernatural are among these “occurrences”. In the world of deep-voiced, occasionally synth-curious indie pop storytellers, though, Ashworth is more David Bazan than Stephin Merritt; these are vivid, delicate figures and tales, real-feeling people too complex to simply feel doomed.
Ashworth recorded all of Horrible Occurrences on his own in his Oak Park, Illinois basement, accompanied by “pianos, synthesizers, samplers, and drum machines”. Most of these songs are only built out of Ashworth’s voice and a simple piano or synth part–both ingredients are slow-moving but follow pop progressions and vocal melodies, acknowledging an important part of the power of “folk music”. “The Year I Lived in Richmond” and “Big Chris Electric” both come early on in the album, and subject matter-wise they’re two of Horrible Occurrences’ most dramatic moments, but Ashworth keeps things hushed and quiet in a way that reflects the stark, endlessly-reverberating qualities of major events in a small town. It’s not until the second half of Horrible Occurrences that Ashworth dials up an instrumental with a bit of flair–it’s still in slow motion, but the prominent drum machine beat of “Brian’s Golden Hour” helps paint the picture of the song’s teenage character falling off his roof, shattering his spine and leaving him paralyzed and “lucky to be alive”. Ashworth uses the beats for a decidedly different end in “Little Sable Point Lighthouse”–in it, a character disappears forever as the synths simulate a haze and the drum machines the distant clang of buoys and small craft. The way that the story of “Little Sable Point Lighthouse” spills into “Andrew & Meagan” is chilling, but I suppose that it shouldn’t be so jarring–throughout Horrible Occurrences, it’s apparent time after time that Ashworth’s narrators and subjects are eternally connected to the town at the center of the album, regardless of where they find themselves geographically. It’s not a curse, it’s just life. (Bandcamp link)
Soft on Crime – Street Hardware
Release date: December 6th Record label: Eats It Genre: Power pop, jangle pop, lo-fi pop Formats: Cassette, digital Pull Track: Villain
One of my favorite albums of last year was New Suite, the debut LP from Dublin trio Soft on Crime. New Suite was a guitar pop cornucopia, stuffed with hooks delivered to the tune of giddy college rock, jangle pop, power pop, psychedelic pop, and new wave. Not only did Dylan Philips, Padraig O’Reilly, and Lee Casey unleash New Suite on us last year, but they also took a rewarding victory lap with an entire second CD/cassette called Rarities Vol. 1a few months later. Although songs on that compilation dated all the way back to 2018, there were some (very good) brand-new recordings on it, too, and Soft on Crime continue their hot streak into 2024 by getting their sophomore album out right under the wire here in December. New Suite was already on the shorter side, and Street Hardware does it one better in terms of brevity, zipping through eight songs in a mere twenty-two minutes. Soft on Crime also sound looser and more streamlined on their newest album–aside from brass played by J Sousa on “No Story”, the core trio is all you’ll hear on Street Hardware. It all amounts to a relatively low-key follow-up, but the reduction in bells and whistles hasn’t weakened the power of Soft on Crime; in fact, with some of the group’s more offbeat tendencies largely sidelined, this might be the trio’s smoothest ride yet.
Do you want to hear a garage band hammering out lost power pop classics, seeming aloof with regards to the gold upon which their sitting? Well, Street Hardware has plenty of that in its brief runtime, not the least of which is the bouncy opening track “Way Facing”. “Tonight” surely belongs in this category as well, as does “Crackdown”. “No Story” is the one time on the album where Soft on Crime allow themselves any kind of excess, and they use it well–there’s the aforementioned brass accents, as well as flamboyant usage of what sounds like a harpsichord and some sky-high melodic power pop guitar leads straight out of New Suite, too. With a limited palette, everything Soft on Crime does to give extra power to these songs is subtle brilliance–the stopping and starting in the mid-tempo pop of “Villain”, and jovially strummed acoustic guitar underneath “Bread & Roses”, and so on. I did mention that the “offbeat” side of the band is a bit reduced on Street Hardware; it’s largely concentrated in two tracks, the weirdo psychedelic rumble of “Repo Man” in the second slot and “Favourite Band”, the strange lo-fi rock opera that closes the album. Soft on Crime had already proven that they can dip into these detours without losing any pop appeal, and both of these songs feel like the trio reminding us (and themselves) of a key part of their music that’s a bit less prevalent on Street Hardware. I don’t know what aspects of their sound Soft on Crime will emphasize on their next record, but they’ve earned my trust in whatever they choose to do. (Bandcamp link)
Low Harness – Salvo
Release date: December 6th Record label: Krautpop! Genre: Post-punk, art punk, 90s indie rock Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Redux
It’s a tale as old as time–a couple of British musicians bond over a shared love of arty European post-punk and underground American 90s indie rock/noise rock, polish up their influences together, and make a buzzy and inspired record together. In the case of Low Harness, it’s the story of four musicians from Falmouth who came together last year but have been playing locally in various bands for a while now, specifically vocalist/guitarist Hannah Gledhill (ex-H. Grimace), guitarist Martin Pease (ex-Hanterhir), drummer Ed Shellard (ex-Witching Waves), and bassist Alex Harmer. Frankly, the members of Low Harness have been at all of this for far too long to bother with demo cassettes and debut EPs–their first release together is a nice, full eleven-song long-player. Salvo is certainly an album made by a band who cut their teeth on Sonic Youth and Wire records, but it’s not that simple to get a handle on what this record sounds like. Aside from a couple of memorable moments, Low Harness eschew the more outwardly abrasive sides of their influences and pursue enlightenment through hypnotic, droning rhythmic rock music, non-intuitive pop songwriting, and a way of carrying themselves that does sound kind of “punk” from a certain viewpoint.
The opening salvo of Salvo, “Ready from the Start”, is a noisy indie rock masterpiece–sharp, pounding distortion and anthemic pop hooks sit side by side, delivered with equal weight. It’s a great introduction to Low Harness, even as it’s something of a red herring–the next few songs, from the sprawling “Exit Plan” to the foot-on-gas rocker “Too Long Together”, move between the extremes of the band’s sound much more subtly. A lot of Salvo’s strength comes from Low Harness continually setting up rock music in which it feels like anything can happen, even if it’s rarely outwardly shocking; they can sound like they’re willing to get their hair a little mussed up (on the title track), they’ll pull a stunningly beautiful pop melody out of absolutely nowhere (“Redux”), they can sound like they’re on edge for the entire track without falling off the tightrope (“Blood Play”). It’s a post-punk album that doesn’t scream “post-punk” in our faces, being content to reinvent this combination of fractured guitars, robust rhythms, and inspired atmospherics from scratch in their own way. I think this lends a hard-to-get-a-handle-on feeling to Salvo that drew me to it more than a lot of records that are similar to it on the surface–although the fact that it’s still a pretty powerful rock record certainly helped keep me around. (Bandcamp link)
Opinion – Troisième Opinion
Release date: December 6th Record label: Howlin’ Banana/Flippin’ Freaks/Les Disques Du Paradis/Nothing Is Mine Genre: Fuzz pop, lo-fi indie rock, bedroom pop, shoegaze Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Microrange
Congratulations to Bordeaux, France’s Opinion for joining the “two LPs in Pressing Concerns in one year” club (the Casual Technicians, Alexei Shishkin, and Mythical Motors also did it this year, and Tony Jay and Dancer both had one and a half). Hugo Carmouze, who writes, plays, and records everything on Opinion’s records on his own, is a prolific practitioner of what I’d call “lo-fi indie rock” or “fuzz rock”; the latest Opinion record, Troisième Opinion, is the twelfth album under the project name. The previous Opinion LP, February’s Horrible, caught my attention with its confrontational take on bedroom rock–it was recorded over a single evening and sounds like Carmouze intentionally pushing the limits of noise and distortion in the presentation of his shoegaze/garage rock-inspired songwriting. Troisième Opinion, conversely, was recorded by Carmouze over several years, and while there’s certainly still plenty of abrasive and noisy moments on the album, it’s much less all-consuming than on the previous Opinion album; with the songs given a little more room to breathe, Troisième Opinion is more recognizable to us as a vintage lo-fi pop, bedroom pop, and even power pop-inspired record.
The forty-five minute Troisième Opinion LP has plenty of pop music on it, but Carmouze clearly enjoys burying these hooks so that we have to work a little bit to land on them. Sometimes that entails the multi-layered walls of sound that marked Horrible, but Carmouze goes about this in other ways, too–like, for example, starting off this album with the six-minute lo-fi rock odyssey of “Neige Florale” and the strange psychedelia-tinged “Un Petit Chat Dans Mes Bras” before we get to the first single, the triumphant gaze-pop of “19”. When Opinion let the clouds part, Carmouze is more than capable of pulling off the increased visibility–there’s a delicate bedroom pop appeal to stuff like “Microrange” and “For Real”, both of which start off relatively low-key before roaring to fuzzed-out conclusions. That being said, it’s still a surprise when the band sneaks a genuine power pop song into the record’s second half–that’s “Cimetière”, which uses fuzz in a much more “Teenage Fanclub” than “Loveless” way. The surging, dreamy noise-pop of “Smile” makes a little more sense, but it’s still an impressive left turn, especially after a couple of late-record confrontational numbers in “Waking Up” and “Gemini”. Carmouze may be prolific, but he’s certainly not spread thin–right up until the Elliott Smith-baiting acoustic closing track “Pour La Nuit, Par La Fenêtre.”, Troisième Opinion sounds like the work of a musician giving it their all. (Bandcamp link)
Oh, man, it’s December! November’s over! I need to wrap this year up! But first, I have to wrap November up. So, here’s the Rosy Overdrive November 2024 playlist, featuring a bunch of brand new and exciting music, some of which has appeared in Pressing Concerns and some of which hasn’t. It’s another great one, if I do say so myself.
Mount Eerie, Two Inch Astronaut, and Vista House are the artists with two songs on this playlist.
Here is where you can listen to the playlist on various streaming services: Spotify, Tidal (missing a song), BNDCMPR. 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.
“Part 2”, Smoker Dad From Hotdog Highway (2024)
Like many classic second albums, Smoker Dad’s Hotdog Highway is greatly informed and shaped by the band touring their first album on the road. That’s all well and good, but it wouldn’t amount to much if Hotdog Highway didn’t rock–which it does, enthusiastically and expertly. This is hard-charging country rock-and-roll, road-tested and successfully captured by Garrett Reynolds at Seattle’s Electrokitty Sound Studio. If you aren’t charmed by the alt-country party anthem “Part 2” that kicks off Hotdog Highway, then there’s no way Smoker Dad are the band for you. There’s more Hotdog Highway for the rest of us, then. Read more about Hotdog Highway here.
“Check Please”, Two Inch Astronaut From Check Please / Humorist (2024, Exploding in Sound)
Hey, wait a minute! Yes, beloved Maryland post-hardcore-pop trio Two Inch Astronaut are still seemingly on indefinite hiatus, but here we are in 2024 with two new songs from the group. These tracks were written in 2018 and went unrecorded before the hiatus, but thankfully Sam Goblin, Matt Gatwood, and Andy Chervenak decided to get together and record them with J. Robbins to commemorate the tenth anniversary of their 2014 album Foulbrood. “Check Please” sounds just like vintage Two Inch Astronaut–Sam Goblin’s distinct vocals have helped his solo project Mister Goblin feel like an extension of his old band, but hearing the three of them together careening through an explosive, catchy rock song like “Check Please” is a reminder of just what this band was capable of. Oh, and also Sam Goblin says the words “two inch astronaut” in the song, which is pretty cool.
“A Very Pretty Song for a Very Special Young Lady Part 2”, The Ergs From dorkrockcorkrod (2004, Don Giovanni/Whoa Oh)
Good stuff. What else is there to say? I highlighted the 20th anniversary Steve Albini remix of The Ergs’ 2004 debut album, dorkrockcorkrod, in the 2024 Rosy Overdrive Label Watch; even as the original mixes sound perfectly fine to me and it’s not like this album was hard to hear before now, I’m happy to have any opportunity to revisit a pop punk album that hasn’t aged hardly a day in twenty years (an incredibly impressive feat!). I went with “A Very Pretty Song for a Very Special Young Lady Part 2” for the playlist, and this one distills the greatness of dorkrockcorkrod in an explosive, infectious, roughly two minute package; but then again, so does “Pray for Rain”, and “Vampire Party”, and “It’s Never Going to Be the Same Again”…
“Pontoon Boat”, Orillia From Orillia (2024, Magic Mothswarm)
Orillia, the solo project from Chicago alt-country singer-songwriter Andrew Marczak, is significantly more stripped down than his bands The Roof Dogs and Toadvine. Nonetheless, Orillia is a noticeably varied debut; it’s apparent from the transition between pin-drop quiet opening track “My Rifle, My Pony, and Me” and “Pontoon Boat”, which is in another world entirely. We’re greeted by Trevor Joellenbeck’s bright mandolin playing and some excitedly-strummed acoustic guitar to launch us into what’s just an excellent folk song (I’m torn between “There’s a cave in Kentucky where the snakes all know my name” and “Gonna get a big-girl job at the hotel bar, it’s gonna make my life so easy” for my favorite part of the track). Read more about Orillia here.
“Floodlights”, Capsuna From One Hit for Trainwreck (2024)
Belgium-based, Ohio-associated guitar pop group Capsuna put out a nice cassette at the beginning of this year, but they didn’t stop there–they put out a two-track single in September, and a four-song EP called One Hit for the Trainwreck at the end of October. “Floodlights” is from the latter, and it’s my favorite of this recent batch of Capsuna material–there’s more than a little bit of the American lo-fi pop music of guitarist David Enright’s home state (check out that wobbly descending guitar progression!), but vocalist Louise Crosby gives the track a polished feel despite some of the instrumental rickety-ness.
“Yearning and Pining”, Fightmilk From No Souvenirs (2024, Fika)
Last time London’s Fightmilk appeared on this blog, it was 2021, and I was highlighting my favorite track from their Martha-esque indie-power-pop-punk record Contender. The quartet are back with a new one called No Souvenirs, and they don’t mess with what made Contender so strong in parts. There’s several choices for a highlight on this one, but “Yearning and Pining” gets right to the heart of the matter in two minutes and change–vocalist Lily Rae is yearning. She’s pining. She’s wishing you were hers, and–and so on. “Yearning and Pining” is living in the moment, preferring to roll around in the euphoria of the titular action rather than concern itself with a more concrete interpersonal world. It costs exactly zero dollars to yearn!
“Big Smile”, DAR From Slightly Larger Head (2024, Sophomore Lounge)
I checked out Slightly Larger Head while putting together Rosy Overdrive’s 2024 Label Watch, and while it didn’t end up making the list (plenty of competition this year from Sophomore Lounge), I was decidedly charmed by DAR’s “Big Smile”, an excellent underground pop song if I’ve ever heard one. DAR is the project of Chicago’s Aaron Osbourne, but it’s Sophomore Lounge through and through with label mainstays Jim Marlowe, Jenny Rose, and Ryan Davis helping to realize the off-the-cuff country-rock sound of Slightly Larger Head. “Big Smile” is a triumph, a song that is more than happy to flog its simple chord progression for all it’s worth.
“Nothingland”, Casual Technicians From Deeply Unworthy (2024, Repeating Cloud)
Noticeably less zany than their first album of 2024, Deeply Unworthy is a little sleepier and subdued, although upon closer inspection, the Casual Technicians’ bursting, buzzing, psychedelic pop music is no less complex here. The fervent, dramatic “Nothingland” might be the most affecting thing that the Casual Technicians have put to tape yet, as the power trio steer the song from its strong pop core straight into a bizarre psychedelic finale. Read more about Deeply Unworthy here.
“City Streets and Highways”, Megan from Work From Girl Suit (2024)
Megan from Work is a brand new pop punk band from New England with high-energy hooky songs reminiscent of early Charly Bliss, Chumped, and All Dogs–their debut album Girl Suit is pure catnip for fans of those bands. Singer Megan Simon’s vocals are urgent, piercing and almost emo–they’ve got pop punk showmanship down on their first record, and the rest of Megan from Work chug along with the strength to counterbalance their ringleader. “City Streets and Highways” is my favorite track from the record; it’s a second half highlight that’s just as strong a power pop single as anything else on the record. Read more about Girl Suit here.
“A Lightning Bird Emerges”, Vista House From They’ll See Light (2024, Anything Bagel)
Vista House’s latest album ups the “focused and streamlined rock and roll” part of their alt-country sound, but my favorite song on They’ll See Light is actually the acoustic folk tune that bridges the middle and home stretch of the LP. In “A Lightning Bird Emerges”, songwriter Tim Howe hides some of his best writing yet; the lyrics are surreal depictions of death, fire, folklore, sunlight, soil, animals eating other animals, and cycles thereof, but the simple refrain (which first appeared earlier on in the album in “Intro to Heaven”) is all Howe needs to tie everything together: “I keep on coming back again / Yeah, but it’s not like the first time”. Read more about They’ll See Light here.
“I Saw Another Bird”, Mount Eerie From Night Palace (2024, P.W. Elverum & Sun)
Every music website that still exists has already extolled the virtues of Night Palace, the latest triumph from Phil Elverum’s Mount Eerie. I’m not going against the grain here–it’s very good, and drew me back into the world of an artist whose most beloved works I appreciate but haven’t been as devoted to in recent years. It’s a monster double album, but–like in Elverum’s other best albums–there are plenty of moments of clarity and even brightness to cling to in the midst. One such moment is “I Saw Another Bird”, which gets to Elverum’s roots as a Pacific Northwest singer-songwriter making fuzzy pop music, even as Elverum’s writing picks up the thread of his more recent (good but hard to listen to) material–still, he’s going somewhere now.
“Just Because”, Peaer (2024)
New York indie rock group Peaer (made up of founding vocalist/guitarist/songwriter Peter Katz, joined by bassist Thom Lombardi and drummer Jeremy Kinney) are beloved by a certain subset of underground music fans; their spindly, mathy, not quite emo sound landed them on Tiny Engines in their heyday and they were a nice parallel to what was going on with Exploding in Sound at the time too. They kind of disappeared after their best album, 2019’s A Healthy Earth, but their first new song in five years, “Just Because”, picks up right where the group left off. It’s both immediate and slow-revealing–Katz’s guitar playing is quite gratifying to hear, but it takes a few listens to fully get a grip on everywhere that the six-string goes throughout the four-minute single. There’s a couple of Two Inch Astronaut songs on the playlist, and every time this song’s opening riff starts I think it’s going to be one of them, but the sweeping, overwhelming rock song that follows is all Peaer.
“Head in Flames”, EggS From Crafted Achievement (2024, Howlin Banana/Prefect)
On their sophomore album, Crafted Achievement, Paris’ EggS maintain their boisterous, party-friendly, saxophone-heavy version of vintage 1980s college rock. Charles Daneau’s vocals reach melodic perfection through sheer force, shouting hooks among the tuneful maelstrom of the EggS band to complete the ingredients for a perfect hurricane of catchy indie rock. With a strong anchor provided by the band’s rhythm section, opening track “Head in Flames” is free to push for the stars for its entire three-minute runtime, providing a powerful launching pad for an album that simply doesn’t flag or wane across its brief but potent twenty-three minutes. Read more about Crafted Achievement here.
“Troll 3”, Sleeping Bag From Beam Me Up (2024, Earth Libraries)
I love the chorus on this one. “I’ve been hiding underneath the bridge like a troll,” ah, me too, Sleeping Bag. Dave Segedy’s project (now based in Seattle after a long stint in Bloomington, Indiana) is always good for at least one huge fuzzed-out power pop classic per album, and I think “Troll 3” is the clearest winner from their latest LP, Beam Me Up. Beam Me Up is more polished-up than last year’s more informal collection Pets 4: Obedience School Dropout, but between Segedy’s stony vocals and the blown-out guitars, there will always be a “slacker rock” characteristic that is especially helpful in selling stuff like “Troll 3” (“Ruined my life, no big deal / Maybe after ten years it will start to heal”).
“Wait for Autumn”, Gentleman Speaker From Hell and Somewhere Else (2024)
The third album from Minneapolis’ Gentleman Speaker is infused with stop-start alt-rock and post-punk catchiness, equal parts offbeat new wave and sprawling guitar-centric 90s indie rock in its sensibilities, but with a clear grasp on “pop” music, as well. Hard-working until the end, Gentleman Speaker close things out with a big finish in “Wait for Autumn”, a song featuring a go-for-broke, all-in refrain that only grows in size–it’s maybe the most memorable moment on Hell and Somewhere Else, though it certainly has competition. It’s not “too much”, but it is much. Read more about Hell and Somewhere Else here.
“Snow Window”, Thank You, I’m Sorry From CYLS Split Series #5 (2024, Count Your Lucky Stars)
The four bands on CYLS Split Series #5 have all released great albums on Count Your Lucky Stars Records within the past two years and change, and the exclusive tracks they bring to this EP are all just-as-strong entries into these acts’ relative discographies. I’ve actually written about Thank You, I’m Sorry a little less than the other bands on the 7” (Expert Timing, Camp Trash, and Mt. Oriander), but the Minneapolis-originating, Portland-based emo-pop project ends up stealing the entire show with “Snow Window”, my favorite track on the EP. Between the most recent Thank You, I’m Sorry EP and their new project Mealworm, much of songwriter Lleen Dow’s best work has come in short bursts, and the quick two-minute wintry bummer pop of “Snow Window” holds up against their other highlights. Read more about CYLS Split Series #5 here.
“Tro på spöken”, Dalaplan From Delad Vårdnad (2024, Beluga)
No idea what they’re saying, but it sounds great. Dalaplan are a long-running Malmö-based power pop/garage rock group, and their fifth album Delad Vårdnad (released on even-longer-running Swedish punk label Beluga) continues the band’s mission. “Tro på spöken” (which Google Translate tells me is Swedish for “too much to say”) comes at the end of a rousing, occasionally riotous album, and it’s a surprisingly polished and expertly-crafted pop rock finale. It’s nearly a power ballad, although Dalaplan take the restraint of the opening to more fully-developed places eventually. It almost makes me wish I knew what the band were saying, although I don’t need any help with the closing “Oh oh oh oh, oh oh oh oh” refrain.
“Dumb Stuff”, Bedtime Khal From Eraser (2024, Devil Town Tapes)
Michigan singer-songwriter Khal Malik has been making bedroom pop for a few years now, but Eraser is the musician’s long-awaited debut LP. It shouldn’t be surprising but it’s still remarkable that Eraser sounds like nothing else Bedtime Khal has done before; there’s bits of fuzzed-out basement indie rock, slowcore, emo, and bright pop music throughout the album. Eraser isn’t “more of” any one thing so much as it’s just “more”. A tougher, more ambitious version of Bedtime Khal is out in full force with “Dumb Stuff”, which is a huge opening track with a roaring wall-of-fuzz chorus; it’s entirely Malik on the track, which is hard to believe. Read more about Eraser here.
“High Beams”, The Laughing Chimes From Whispers in the Speech Machine (2025, Slumberland)
Who’s ready for 2025? Yeah, me neither. But, when we are, The Laughing Chimes will be there for us. The Athens, Ohio jangle pop quartet’s long-awaited second album (and first LP for Slumberland) is set to drop next January, and the record’s lead single is one of the band’s best tracks yet. “High Beams” cuts through the southeastern Ohio haze with a colorful mix of new wave-y keys and synths (provided by relative newcomer Ella Franks) and Evan Seurkamp’s lighthouse-like lead vocals. By the time the song’s over, The Laughing Chimes have taken everything up another gear, cementing it as yet another lost college rock anthem.
“Captain Caveperson”, Night Court From $hit Machine (2024, Recess)
Earlier this year, I wrote about a split EP from West Coast power-pop-punk groups The Dumpies and Night Court; last month, The Dumpies put out a full-length and I highlighted a song from it in a playlist, so now it’s the other side of the 7”’s turn. $hit Machine is true to Night Court’s ethos–seventeen songs in twenty-six minutes, brief dispatches of pop music delivered with underdog punk rock as the vessel. “Captain Caveperson” barely crosses the sixty-second mark, but I think it’s my favorite track on $hit Machine. The Vancouver band assume the mantle of “slacker rock self-help writers” on “Captain Caveperson”, with the titular prehistoric figure resolving to “get something done” today (“invent the wheel, clean up the cave”).
“I’m Done Falling Over You”, wilder Thing From I Have My Mother’s Eyes and I’m Not Giving Them Back (2024, Repeating Cloud)
I Have My Mother’s Eyes and I’m Not Giving Them Back spans seventeen songs and forty minutes of fractured but melodic bedroom psychedelic pop. There’s folk music, hooks, dreaminess, and pure psych throughout, and we’re left with something that balances intimacy with adventurousness, an album that invites you in to watch it go to work. Portland, Maine’s Wes Sterrs follows his muse down some incredibly odd corridors across I Have My Mother’s Eyes and I’m Not Giving Them Back, but there are plenty of pop rewards, and none are greater than “I’m Done Falling Over You”, a nearly-perfect fuzzy lo-fi pop song that recalls the more song-forward bands associated with the Elephant 6 Collective. Read more about I Have My Mother’s Eyes and I’m Not Giving Them Back here.
“Before It’s Gone”, Radio Free ABQ From Destination (2024, Hamlet Street)
Indie rock veteran Dave Purcell recently moved to Albuquerque and started up Radio Free ABQ, and he fully embraces his new southwestern home’s desert-set roots rock/Americana. Travis Rourk’s horns and Ryan Goodhue’s accordion are welcome additions to “Before It’s Gone”, a five-minute parade of a track that’s Destination’s strongest moment as a catchy college rock record. In between the swinging choruses, though, Purcell adds a bit of strangeness and chilliness–“I’m not reminiscing about something that never happened like Norman Rockwell / When you carve it all in ones and zeroes, don’t forget my name,” he sings in the final stanza, balancing “traditional” with “exploratory” and “unsatisfied”. Read more about Destination here.
“Fair”, Dog Eyes From Holy Friend (2024, Grand Jury)
This is nice. Oakland indie pop duo Dog Eyes recently hooked up with Grand Jury Music, a label I most associate with Hovvdy and their related projects, and Holy Friend, their latest album, is indeed a Hovvdy-reminiscent collection of sleepy lo-fi bedroom pop. “Fair” is my favorite track on the album; like a lot of Dog Eyes’ material, it’s a delicate folk-y pop song where Davis Leach and Haily Firstman balance low-key instrumentation and conversational talk-singing vocals with sneakily beautiful melodies and moments of real, deeply-hitting emotion. Seems like “bedroom pop” is in good hands with these two.
“Breath”, Orchestre Tout Puissant Marcel Duchamp From Ventre Unique (2024, Les Disques Bongo Joe)
Abundant Living’s Zachary Lipez said that this album sounds like Dog Faced Hermans, which got my attention squarely fixed on Geneva-originating art rock collective Orchestre Tout Puissant Marcel Duchamp. Those of us who appreciate post-punk music with ample usage of horns will find a lot of music in this vein on Ventre Unique, and while Orchestre Tout Puissant Marcel Duchamp get pretty into-the-weeds with it all over the course of the record, my favorite moment is the relatively straightforward horn-pop of “Breath”. The two-minute track has a couple of moments where things get pretty heavy, but for the most part it’s more than happy to lean on horns, rhythms, and vocals to get the job done.
“33s”, Commemorative Cup From For a Limited Time Only (2024)
Ben Husk and Kevin McGrath play together in Massachusetts emo-y indie pop group Sailor Down, and Husk also drums in post-punk/jangle pop band Lost Film. Their new duo together, Commemorative Cup, is I guess closer to the former of those two acts, but really it’s something different altogether–it’s their reverent love letter to 90s emo-punk groups like Samiam and Knapsack. For a Limited Time Only, their debut EP, is full of ambitious four-minute miles, but the first (non-intro) track on the record, “33s”, is the one that’s really stuck with me. Sensitive, catchy, noisy, giant-sounding–Commemorative Cup really have this kind of thing down pat already.
“Mariko”, p:ano From ba ba ba (2024, C.O.Q.)
ba ba ba is the first album from Vancouver indie pop quartet p:ano in nineteen years, and the writing and instrumentation on ba ba ba is inspired by the members’ roots. The band specifically mention formative indie pop/rock bands like Yo La Tengo, Belle & Sebastian, and The Magnetic Fields that were key in bonding the group together twenty years ago, and much of Nicholas Krgovich’s writing is drawn from his experiences growing up in the Vancouver suburb of Coquitlam, where p:ano originally formed. ba ba ba is impressively coherent, but the fluttering, conversational indie pop of “Mariko” is an attention-grabber in particular. Read more about ba ba ba here.
“Wednesday, on a Hummingbird’s Wings”, The Smashing Times From Mrs. Ladyships and the Cleanerhouse Boys (2024, K/Perennial)
All the blissful psychedelic jangle-beat melodies are still here, yes, but Mrs Ladyships and the Cleanerhouse Boys is a bit more offbeat than The Smashing Times’ last album,leaning into the eccentricities of British pop of the past across its fourteen tracks. There are some “out there” moments, but the pure pop songs of Mrs Ladyships and the Cleanerhouse Boys stand up with the Baltimore band’s best material. I don’t know if “Wednesday, on a Hummingbird’s Wing” is The Smashing Times’ best song yet, but it’s certainly on the short list for the most straight-up gorgeous thing the band have put to tape–it’s five-and-a-half minutes of wobbly but perfect pastoral guitar pop. Read more about Mrs Ladyships and the Cleanerhouse Boys here.
“Change the Framerate (Gloria)”, Vista House From They’ll See Light (2024, Anything Bagel)
Vista House’s previous album, Oregon III,had the feeling of a record that had been cobbled together and tinkered with for a while, allowing for some surprising choices, but They’ll See Light sounds like the work of a well-oiled rock band recording a bunch of great songs in short order because they know that they’re on a roll. After a relatively subtle and casual opening duo, though, “Change the Framerate (Gloria)” is the record’s first no-holds-barred barnburner. It’s the moment where Vista House fully lean into dizzying, bouncy country-power pop, generating more than enough momentum to propel the band through the rest of They’ll See Light. Read more about They’ll See Light here.
“Birdhouse”, Ylayali From Birdhouse in Conduit (2024, Circle Change)
Philadelphia musician Francis Lyons pieced Birdhouse in Conduit together from 2022 to 2024 at home, and it’s Ylayali at their most exploratory (especially compared to the last album from Lyons’ solo project, 2022’s relatively accessible Separation). There’s still pop music to be found in Birdhouse in Conduit, but it sits alongside ambient and droning fuzz passages, experimental electronic instrumentation, and blasts of noise. Almost-title track “Birdhouse” arrives fairly early on in the album, and after a couple of noise-filled songs, its relatively clean and hushed sound is jarring in its own right. If you’re in the right space to explore something like “Birdhouse”, though, it’s an incredibly beautiful and surprising five-minute lo-fi pop song. Read more about Birdhouse in Conduit here.
“I Fooled Me Too”, Colt Wave From Cruel Moons (2024, Too Deluxe)
Colby Mancasola and Ken Lovgren’s lo-fi guitar pop project Colt Wave first appeared on my radar via On Call (which came out around this time last year), but the California-based duo had put out several albums in the years before it, and they’ve continued their prolific streak with this year’s Cruel Moons. Fans of On Call (and of low-key, jangly pop music in general) will be pleased to hear that Colt Wave still know their way around a hook on Cruel Moons; my favorite song on the new one is a ninety-second sparkling jangle pop song called “I Fooled Me Too”. The refrain (“Sorry I fooled you / I fooled me too”) is simple but effective, although it’s the excellent guitar lead immediately following it that’s the catchiest part of the track.
“The Other Side”, Black Thumb featuring Inna Showalter (2024, Somber Sounds)
The most recent album from Black Thumb (the solo project of San Francisco musician and former Dusk member Colin Wilde) came out early last year, but we’ve still gotten some new music from Wilde this year in the form of a couple of singles. Back in September, Black Thumb put out a two-song single featuring lead vocals from Madeline Johnston of Midwife, and in November, Wilde linked up with Inna Showalter (Whitney’s Playland, Magic Fig) for the one-off “The Other Side”, which has particularly impressed me. It’s a really beautiful psychedelic folk rock tune that reaches toward Mazzy Star territory; the Paisley Underground appears to be alive and well in the Bay Area.
“Sunday Song”, Mt. Misery From Love in Mind (2024, Prefect)
Jangle pop bands will never stop writing pretty songs about how lovely Sunday mornings and/or afternoons are with you, nor should they. Hartlepool’s Mt. Misery are something of Prefect Records’ flagship act (they’ve appeared on multiplecompilations from the label, and released all their records on the imprint, too), and their platonic-ideal guitar pop is a strong mascot. Their latest album is called Love in Mind, and “Sunday Song” is a pretty good litmus test as to whether or not it’s for you–charmingly earnest, Teenage Fanclub-level tight construction, simple instrumentation but still with a surprising level of hooky electric guitars populating the track.
“Real Grandeza”, Oruã From PASSE (2024, Transfusão Noise/Gezellig/Den Tapes)
Like (I imagine) a lot of stateside indie rock fans, Brazil’s Oruã first got onto my radar due to their association with Built to Spill–one of the band’s many late-period lineups (the one that recorded 2022’s When the Wind Forgets Your Name, in fact) contained half the Rio de Janeiro-based quartet. Oruã’s latest album, PASSE, has a wild psychedelic sound that’s pretty far removed from any 90s Pacific Northwest indie rock group, but it’s right at home next to bands like labelmates Gueersh. “Real Grandeza” kicks the LP off with a four-minute excursion featuring everything from fiery face-melting guitars to dubby experimental passages–okay, yes, I see why Doug Martsch liked these folks’ style.
“I Think I Need You Around”, Ryli From I Think I Need You Around b/w When I Fall (2024, Dandy Boy)
We’re hopping on the Ryli train early, everyone! It’s not hard to do so when we see who’s in the new Bay Area band’s lineup: Yea-Ming Chen (of Yea-Ming and the Rumours) and Rob Good (of The Goods) are the quartet’s co-leaders, and the rest of the band (Luke Robbins of R.E. Seraphin on bass, Ian McBrayer, formerly of Sonny & the Sunsets, on drums) have a quality pedigree, too. Their two-song debut single wastes no time establishing Ryli as the latest jangle pop warriors to come from the Dandy Boy stable of stars–the A-side, “I Think I Need You Around”, is my favorite of the pair, with its toe-tapping beat and Chen’s subtly emotional vocals both doing a lot of heavy lifting.
“Eat Alone”, The Open Flames (2024)
The Open Flames are an intriguing new trio from London with only two songs to their name thus far. Frontperson Dave Eastman previously played in the band Say Yes, Do Nothing, while Evan Sult was the longtime drummer in immortal Seattle group Harvey Danger (and also played in Sleepy Kitty with The Open Flames’ third member, Paige Brubeck). “Eat Alone”, the band’s second and best song so far, is an interesting piece of fuzzy college rock, falling somewhere between Robyn Hitchcock and The Dream Syndicate (with a bit of Giant Sand in there, too). Eastman’s lyrics are pretty clearly about watching someone’s hospital-bound final moments, but it’s hardly mawkishly sentimental about it–sure, Eastman slips “No one has enough time to say their goodbyes” in during the bridge, but the crux of the song is the rather opaque quip from which the title comes.
“Humorist”, Two Inch Astronaut From Check Please / Humorist (2024, Exploding in Sound)
Yeah, I put both of the Two Inch Astronaut songs from the new single on here. So what? Maybe my coverage of “Humorist” will somehow set off a chain of events that leads to Two Inch Astronaut going viral on TikTok and exploding in popularity, forcing the erstwhile post-hardcore-math-EIS-core trio to fully reunite and start churning out new albums. A blog can dream. Either way, at least we get to enjoy “Humorist”, a song that’s a little weirder and slipperier than the relatively kinetic “Check Please” and thus presents itself as a classic “B-side that might be better than the A-side, but it’s not obvious about it”.
“Cutting Marble from a Mountain”, The Moment of Nightfall & Tony Jay From Winter Dream (2024, KiliKiliVilla)
On tour in Japan earlier this summer, Bay Area guitar popper Michael Ramos (aka Tony Jay) linked up with Tokyo sextet The Moment of Nightfall and recorded a 10” vinyl record called Winter Dream together. Ramos brings his slow, dreamy indie pop instincts to Winter Dream, and The Moment of Nightfall are more than capable of playing to this familiar sound and even adding a more robust, grounded (but still delicate) dimension to Ramos’ music. “Cutting Marble from a Mountain”, the third track on the record, is a fully-realized, confident jangle pop success, deliberate and measured but nonetheless triumphant-sounding; it’s the first moment on Winter Dream where the possibilities of the two acts collaborating truly start to unlock themselves. Read more about Winter Dream here.
“November Rain”, Mount Eerie From Night Palace (2024, P.W. Elverum & Sun)
I’m still not even entirely sure how much I like the new Mount Eerie album, but I’ve got two songs from Night Palace on here because the highs are really high. “November Rain” (an original song, not a Guns N’ Roses cover, if that isn’t obvious) is absolutely one of those highs–Phil Elverum spends most of the song speaking conversationally over a stumbling acoustic guitar strum, ruminating on the grotesque (and, as he observes, foolish) displays of wealth visible in his home of Anacortes, Washington, with some moments of fuzz ascension thrown in for good measure. That is to say, it’s a classic Phil Elverum song.
“Something Done Right”, The Triceratops From Charge! (2024, Learning Curve)
I already put single “We Will Shatter” in last month’s playlist, but Charge! has been reverberating in my mind long after I wrote about it. A good deal of that has to do with the record’s penultimate track “Something Done Right”, a primordial mess of caveman noise rock, mythology, evolution, and revolution. “So–monkeys ready on three, throw your wrench in the gears,” yells The Triceratops’ frontperson, John Van Atta, at the song’s climax. It’s a cathartic moment for a record that spends the bulk of its runtime either explicitly or implicitly lamenting the seeming helplessness of us monkeys in the face of grinding exploitation. Charge! has a lot of fight in it, though. Read more about Charge! here.
Hey, why not? I was revisiting the two early Yeah Yeah Yeahs EPs recently, and I really enjoyed this one, so it’s going on the playlist. Much has been written about the thing the Yeah Yeah Yeahs became a part of after these initial releases, and I’m not going to try to get into that–I just want to appreciate how cool “Our Time” still sounds in 2024. There’s not much out there that sounds like this as far as I’m concerned. It’s, like, midway between a Grifters song and a 2000s overly-earnest Big Indie anthem. Change was coming! I wish that it was a little more built around that fucked-up blues guitar and the excellent mission statement of “It’s the year to be hated,” but, nonetheless…
That’s right, folks: it’s back. Last year was the first time I conducted a Rosy Overdrive readership poll, and the results were so excellent and exciting that it was never a question as to whether or not I’d do it again. So, it is once again time for you to tell us what your favorite music of 2024 is.
The first question on the poll is simply: What are your ten favorite albums from 2024? This is the only question that you’re required to answer in order to submit (please, choose at least five), but I do highly encourage you to list your favorite songs, EP, and record label of 2024 in the rest of the poll, too.
Hey there, everyone! Welcome to the final month of the year. Within the next few weeks, you’ll find out what Rosy Overdrive’s favorite records of 2024 are, but I plan to have plenty of new-new music up on the blog, too. It continues today, with a Pressing Concerns featuring new albums from Mother of Earl, Big’n, Radio Free ABQ, and Miners. Oh, and we did have a Pressing Concerns go up on Thanksgiving (featuring OCS, The Moment of Nightfall and Tony Jay, The Innocence Mission, and Hamburger); if you were busy with family matters or other holiday business and missed it, check it out here.
Oh, and one more thing: the Rosy Overdrive 2024 Reader’s Poll is now open for voting! Head over here to learn more about it and submit a ballot by December 27th.
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.
Mother of Earl – Extinction Burst
Release date: November 15th Record label: Self-released Genre: Indie pop, alt-country, folk rock, power pop Formats: Digital Pull Track: Departure Street
I first became familiar with the music of Ross Weidman last year via his homespun bedroom folk rock project Promiseland BBQ, which debuted with an inspired full-length called Murder in the Friendly City. Weidman lives in Pasadena but grew up in and until very recently lived in West Virginia–it’s where Murder in the Friendly City was recorded, and it was also where he co-founded the band Mother of Earl in 2019 with Alex Nanni. After putting out an EP and an LP in 2020 and 2021, respectively, Mother of Earl’s pace slowed–Weidman and Nanni, no longer students at West Virginia University, both moved out of state (Nanni is now in Pittsburgh). They continued to work on music together when they could, though, eventually resulting in the second Mother of Earl album, Extinction Burst. Mother of Earl is (understandably, given the full-band setup) more upbeat and full-sounding than Promiseland BBQ, but it’s not hard to see the similarities in the well-worn pop rock music the duo make together–with bits of 60s pop, roots rock, Americana, and college rock floating around in there–with Weidman’s solo material. Weidman handles the drums and Nanni sings and plays most of the guitars, but there’s a regular cast of contributors beyond them (bassists Kaleb Asmussen and Holly Foster, guitarists Tristan Miller, Liam McClelland, and John Kolar, percussionist Kris Sampson)–the revolving musical doors help Extinction Burst hold a casual feel, but the songwriting is strong enough to let us take the album seriously regardless of formality.
Extinction Burst draws plentifully from the well of “pretty pop music, depressing lyricism”–Nanni and Weidman are clearly fluent in it. The opening title track is a meandering, heartbroken lullaby of a first statement that reminds me of another great West Virginia-originating folk-pop-psych songsmith, Mr. Husband. After that, Mother of Earl give us “Life After Death”, a perky song about mortality that enthusiastically declares “Let’s live a lie!” and “Venomous Snake” (which I choose to believe is just a nice song about being a venomous snake with no metaphor attached). Mother of Earl seem to get bolder with their song construction as Extinction Burst advances–the final four tracks on the album all feel like “epics” in some sense of the word. The technicolor “I Saw Stars” finds Nanni doing a pretty solid Brandon Flowers impression for a sweeping, glockenspiel-aided piece of heartland pop, “Just When Things Were Looking Up” is Mother of Earl trying jammy, off-the-cuff retro-rock on for size, “Circus” is a precariously-stacked multi-part prog-pop denouement, and “Everything’s Gonna Turn Out Alright” is the final cooldown. “Ignore the sound above our heads / Just act like everything is fine,” Nanni sings in the verses of the final song, and the title line is qualified with an “I’m still pretty sure”. Their frontperson might sound a bit shaky in this particular moment, but Mother of Earl bring more than enough confidence to Extinction Burst. (Bandcamp link)
Big’n – End Comes Too Soon
Release date: November 15th Record label: Computer Students Genre: Noise rock, post-hardcore, post-punk, math rock Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: South of Lonesome
The Joliet, Illinois-originating, Chicago-based band Big’n are a key part of Windy City noise rock history. During their initial run from 1990 to 1997, they put out a bunch of singles, splits, and EPs as well as two LPs, both recorded by Steve Albini–1994’s Cutthroat and 1996’s Discipline Through Sound (which came out on legendary underground label Skin Graft). The quartet (vocalist William Akins, guitarist Todd Johnson, bassist Michael Chartrand, and drummer Brian Wnukowski) quietly returned in 2011 with an EP called Spare the Horses, and they’ve been intermittently active since then–at some point, Fred Popolo replaced Chartrand on bass, and the group struck up a relationship with the label Computer Students, who put out their 2018 EP Knife ofSin and reissued Discipline Through Sound in 2022. It all has led up to the third Big’n album and first in twenty-eight years, End Comes Too Soon, recorded by Shane Hochstetler at Electrical Audio in two sessions in 2023 and 2024. Big’n’s return to the big screen is both “bombastic” and “lean” at the same time–the music is sharp and cutting, the most mechanically pulverizing rock music this side of Shellac, while Akins is an unhinged, prowling noise rock frontperson in the vein of David Yow or even Michael Gerald. Big’n (and Akins’ voice in particular) have aged like a fine wine or moldy cheese–they’ve grown into the unflappable, unhurried rock-blacksmiths this kind of music aspires to evoke.
Big’n plow through fifteen songs in thirty-five minutes like a combine harvester–efficiently and all-consumingly. Six of End Comes Too Soon’s tracks are under a minute long and don’t even have proper titles (labeled “XMSN-17”, “XMSN-24”, etc.), but the band put just as much effort and energy into them than the “real” songs–it’s actually kind of disconcerting that Big’n fit full-on noise rock song ideas in forty seconds and it doesn’t feel any less complete than their three-to-four minute tracks. Still, I’m glad we get Big’n in larger increments too, because it allows them to really show off how well they’ve got this whole “pounding, rhythmic” thing down. “South of Lonesome” and “Them Wolves” are immutable, unmoving anchors of rock songs, and Akins is the prowling Sisyphus trying to make something dynamic out of the stone and going insane in the process. You’re not going to get any big surprises after Big’n effectively define themselves by the first few tracks, but there’s enough–the spoken-word, metallic “XMSN-40” and “XMSN-44”, the fiery, drum-led “Arkansas Death Cult”, the eternal damnation of “Capsized”–to make it feel like Big’n are pushing at their edges rather than just going through the motions. And that must be hard for them, given how great they are at going through those motions. (Computer Students link)
Radio Free ABQ – Destination
Release date: November 1st Record label: Hamlet Street Genre: Alt-country, folk rock, roots rock, college rock, psychedelic rock Formats: CD, digital Pull Track: Before It’s Gone
Dave Purcell is a thirty-some-year veteran of indie rock, playing in bands like Pike 27 and Ghost Man on Second in Cincinnati and Chicago before relocating to Albuquerque a few years ago and starting up his most recent project, Radio Free ABQ. On their debut record, Destination, Purcell and his new bandmates (bassist Scott Brewer, keyboardist Ryan Goodhue, and trombone player/guitarist Travis Rourk) fully embrace the bandleader’s new southwestern habitat, turning in a desert-set roots rock/Americana album that contains bits of regional legends like Calexico, Alejandro Escovedo, Giant Sand, and Dave Alvin. Just because Radio Free ABQ’s peers aren’t hard to point to doesn’t mean that Destination isn’t a unique record, though–apparently, Purcell had been making primarily instrumental music before returning to rock with this new band, and his latest project enthusiastically throws together mid-period R.E.M.-like college rock, Los Lobos-esque Chicano-inspired rock and roll, and, most surprisingly, synthesizer/space pop-influenced “noir pop” moments in the instrumentals, too. It all amounts to a forty-six minute statement that’s a strong reintroduction to a musician who’s been around for quite a bit but still has plenty of ideas and things to say.
One of the most striking moments on Destination is the opening track “Tito (Far Away, Not Lonely)”, which combines Escovedo-style Tex-Mex rock with swooning, spacey synths to create a New Mexico “Space Odyssey”. Rourk’s horns and Goodhue’s accordion are welcome additions to “Before It’s Gone”, a five-minute parade of a track that’s the record’s strongest moment as a catchy college rock group. In between the swinging choruses, though, Purcell adds a bit of strangeness and chilliness–“I’m not reminiscing about something that never happened like Norman Rockwell / When you carve it all in ones and zeroes, don’t forget my name,” he sings in the final stanza. This exploratory, unsatisfied guiding light takes us through the rest of the record’s more “traditional” first half (marked by a couple more should’ve-been-hits in “Figure It Out” and “Far Away from Everything”) and into a more experimental, spacey second half, populated by more instrumentals (three) than songs with vocals (two). The instrumentals aren’t mere interludes, and are key to the final journey of Destination–the wandering throughout the desert with a synthesizer in “Chapala, Quizas” gives way to “Run Past Temptation”, “End of the World” (the last song with words), and “Mojave Phone Booth”, which close the record by throwing bits of blues, jazz, funk, ska, dub, and even zydeco into Radio Free ABQ’s sound. Purcell and his crew are still picking up a strong signal out in the middle of the desert. (Bandcamp link)
Miners – A Healthy Future on Earth
Release date: October 18th Record label: Flesh & Bone/Kitty Genre: Shoegaze, noise pop, fuzz pop Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Game Theory
Wollongong, Australia trio Miners have been flying under the radar since the mid-2010s, with a debut EP in 2015 followed by a split 7” with the similarly-named Wollongongers Chimers and a self-titled debut cassette LP in 2021. Guitarist/vocalist Blake Clee, bassist Nick Johnson (who also plays in Mope City), and drummer Wilson Harris have gotten some help from Chicago underground label Flesh & Bone (Greet Death, Doused, Gentle Heat) to get more ears on their sophomore album, A Healthy Future on Earth, and the trio’s fuzzed-out, echoing version of pop music is more than ready for primetime on their latest record. Miners do call themselves a “shoegaze” band, but they seem to be interested in the hallmarks of that particular genre as a way of beefing up their 90s-style indie rock sound (they mention Swervedriver as an influence, which I think helps explain from where the trio are coming here). Miners differ from their main sources of inspiration and a lot of their present-day noisy Australian counterparts due to their love of a good pop hook–if you (like me) find yourself drawn to the Guided by Voices-y, heavy-melodic version of shoegaze-pop practiced by American bands like Gaadge and Ex Pilots, Miners are the Aussie indie rock group for you.
A Healthy Future on Earth, like the best records in this vein, fervently believes that beauty and noise can and should go hand in hand, leading to a ton of truly remarkable moments in the album’s ten tracks. “Sapphire” doesn’t open the album with Miners’ most blatantly accessible side, but there’s still a lot of smart melodies baked into the adventurous multi-part indie rock journey. “Why Can’t I” is Miners’ burnt-out dream pop, taking a minute to get to the full-on fuzz roaring and keeping the delicate core of the track intact when they finally reach it. “Game Theory” is the kind of steady, droning underground pop song that one might pull together after listening to a lot of Sonic Youth and/or Bailter Space–plenty of bands hang their hat on this kind of music entirely, but on A Healthy Future on Earth it sits alongside noise-punk wall-of-sound excursions like “Dead Malls”, slacker rock bursts like “Fade”, and restrained, almost slowcore basement rock exercises like “Caution Horses”. A Healthy Future on Earth isn’t going to turn Miners into international stars (probably), but it’s the kind of album that suggests its creators could have a very long and fruitful partnership together making this kind of music. (Bandcamp link)
Happy Thanksgiving! Thank you for reading this blog on an American holiday (or if you’re reading it at a later date, I hope you had a nice holiday/normal week if you aren’t from the States). New music is still coming out this week, and there’s enough I wanted to cover to have a Thursday Pressing Concerns: today’s post looks at a live record from OCS, a collaborative LP between The Moment of Nightfall & Tony Jay, the newest album from The Innocence Mission, and a new EP from Hamburger. It’s been a busy week here: on Tuesday, we published the 2024 Rosy Overdrive Label Watch, featuring a drop-in on a dozen or so of the blog’s favorite record labels, and we had a Monday Pressing Concerns (featuring The Old Ceremony, Big Nobody, EggS, and a Count Your Lucky Stars Records split 7″), so there’s some more music and words about it for you to check out during this (potentially) long weekend.
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.
OCS – Live at Permanent Records
Release date: November 29th Record label: Rock Is Hell Genre: Folk, lo-fi pop Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: If I Had a Reason
I have a confession: a couple of years ago, I made the decision to try to listen to every album by John Dwyer’s Thee Oh Sees (aka Osees, aka The Ohsees, aka OCS) in order–but I bailed out long before I finished the project. I did nonetheless gain an appreciation for the group’s earliest works, much of which was released under the name “OCS” in the early-to-mid-2000s. In recent years, Dwyer has dusted off the “OCS” name for music that recalls the early, quiet lo-fi psychedelic folk songs of those particular records, and it also generally involves collaborations with early (but post-original-OCS) member Brigid Dawson. Dwyer and Dawson returned to this well in 2017 with Memory of a Cut Off Head, and they also reunited last year for a handful of acoustic “holiday” shows; these 2023 performances at the Lodge Room and Permanent Records Roadhouse in Los Angeles form the source material for the latest OCS album. Live at Permanent Records is being released by Rock Is Hell in a six-7” box set format (or a boring old double LP for people who hate constantly standing up), and the bulk of it is Dwyer and Dawson strumming and singing acoustic songs from across the OCS discography (“some new, some very old that I’ve never played live ever” per Dwyer).
I’m sure it’d be a shock for those who know Dwyer’s band as ferocious garage-punk warriors, but for those of us who know and appreciate this side of OCS, it’s a welcome revisitation. Live at Permanent Records sounds great–the stripped-down setup ensures that Dwyer’s guitar and the duo’s vocals shine through clearly (and, as Dwyer more or less alludes to in some of the banter, it sounds “better” than a lot of those early OCS records anyway). Dwyer is pretty chatty on the record, and plenty of between-song banter is left in the album–I’ve heard him speak before, so I was prepared, but it is a bit surprising how the guy who makes goblin-mode psychedelic garage-prog consistently sounds pretty approachable (albeit foul-mouthed, yes). A lot of Dwyer’s stories involve reminiscing about the various drugs he was taking during the making of those OCS albums and the questionable artistic decisions spurred on by them–and then it’s time for another excellent two-minute folk song from the duo.
There are some great folk-pop tunes here, like “Dreadful Heart”, “If I Had a Reason”, and “I Am Slow”, but OCS are also able to reach the fringes of folk and psychedelic music on Live at Permanent Records, too (according to the notes, there are at least seven different guitar tunings to be found here, which I’m sure contributes to that feeling). After the lengthy drone of “Highland Wife’s Lament”, OCS decide to play “one rock song”, which happens to be an eighteen-minute version of “Block of Ice” with Tom Dolas on piano and Nick Murray on drums. It sounds just like Thee Oh Sees–even though we literally hear the setup happen as the band rearranges instruments and calls up the extra players to the stage, it’s still quite hard to fathom how we got from the humble beginnings of the band to where they are now. I guess I need to listen to all of their records in order to figure it out. (Bandcamp link)
The Moment of Nightfall & Tony Jay – Winter Dream
Release date: November 29th Record label: KiliKiliVilla Genre: Slowcore, dream pop, jangle pop Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital Pull Track: Cutting Marble From a Mountain
Pretty much every time I write about Michael Ramos on this blog I have to acknowledge how prolific he is–every time I turn around, there’s a new record from his solo project Tony Jay, or his duo Flowertown is back, or he’s popping up on a compilation or on new music from another San Francisco Bay-area band. So when Ramos took Tony Jay on a tour of Japan this August, it shouldn’t be a surprise that he saw it as an opportunity to collaborate with musicians from across the Pacific Ocean. Specifically, he linked up with Tokyo sextet The Moment of Nightfall, and the seven of them (Ramos, Masato Saito, Yoko Satori, Yuji Usui, Tomomi Usui, Miki Hirose, and Masayuki Takahashi) recorded six songs over two days together, which are now being released as a 10” vinyl record called Winter Dream. As it turns out, the two acts are quite complimentary–Ramos brings his slow, dreamy indie pop instincts to Winter Dream, and The Moment of Nightfall are more than capable of playing to this familiar sound. Tony Jay’s solo material often sounds so ghostly and fragile that it’s on the brink of disappearing, but with The Moment of Nightfall at his side, there’s a more robust, grounded feeling to Winter Dream–but it’s still delicate in its construction.
Winter Dream may have been recorded in the middle of Japan’s “sweltering [August] heat”, but this twenty-one minute mini-album lives up to the snowy chilliness evoked by its title. The record’s opening track, “kori no mori (Ice Forest)” is classic Ramos, leaning on little more than a clean, plain electric guitar, occasional bass, and a beautiful duet between Ramos and one of The Moment of Nightfall’s members (a few of them have vocal credits here). “Angel” is similarly restrained, but “Cutting Marble From a Mountain” and “Tell Me Why” really start opening up the possibilities of this particular collaboration; the former is a fully-realized, confident jangle pop success, deliberate and measured but nonetheless triumphant-sounding, and the latter gets creative with backing vocals as a foundational song element, handclaps, and droning organ like a layer of white snow across the nearly five-minute creation. “She Came from a Colder Place” is, appropriately, the most “wintry” moment on Winter Dream, with the cavernous percussion echoing in the song’s cold, damp, expansive body, but all hands return on deck for closing track “Time Goes By”, organs and guitars and rhythms all moving in slow but orchestrated lockstep to end a brief but fruitful link-up whose results we’re fortunate to be able to hear. (Bandcamp lnk)
The Innocence Mission – Midwinter Swimmers
Release date: November 29th Record label: Thérèse/Bella Union/P-Vine Genre: Folk-pop, chamber pop, folk rock, twee Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital Pull Track: Midwinter Swimmers
Lancaster, Pennsylvania’s The Innocence Mission and their distinct folk-pop sound have been a cult success since they formed in the mid-1980s–over the course of nearly forty years, the trio of lead vocalist/songwriter/guitarist Karen Peris, guitarist Don Peris, and bassist Mike Bitts have consistently soldiered on through a career comprised of a dozen albums, brushes with college rock success, and stints on both major labels and notable independent ones (the departure of founding drummer Steve Brown around the end of the 90s being the band’s only lineup change). Here The Innocence Mission are in 2024 with their thirteenth full-length album called Midwinter Swimmers, which gets us ready for the cold weather with a collection of 1960s-esque folk-pop music, chamber pop, and the indie pop that characterized what “alternative rock” was in the pre-grunge era from where the band initially rose. Midwinter Swimmers is both timeless and locationless–everything from Peris’ unique voice to her understandable but hard-to-categorize writing to the band’s paradoxically rich yet stripped-down sound makes this record sound particularly unmoored from any kind of geographical or temporal context.
Midwinter Swimmers is, at its core, a collection of great pop music. Like another longrunning indie pop band that returned this year, The Softies, The Innocence Mission haven’t lost their clear skill at turning skeletal acoustic folk songs into full-on indie pop. It’s not as stark as The Softies’ music is, at least not always–there are some relatively unadorned moments on the album, but the band layer pianos and strings (not to mention Bitts’ upright bass) to create subtle but unmistakably vivid chamber pop throughout the record. A good majority of the album clearly sounds like it was built over top of fully-formed acoustic skeletons–everything from the low-key opening duo of “This Thread Is a Green Street” and the title track to late-record highlights “Cloud to Cloud” and “A Hundred Flowers” all start in this iteration, with some (like “A Hundred Flowers”) being content to more or less stay there and others (“Cloud to Cloud”) ending up somewhere else entirely. It seems like the theme of this blog post is winter, and Midwinter Swimmers is an excellent exercise in conjuring it up in the form of an album–it’s hazy and somewhat easy to get lost in, but its psychedelia is a much starker, colder, and blanketing type than the overstuffed deliriousness of “summer” albums. We’ve got The Innocence Mission with us as we navigate the toughest season change of the year. (Bandcamp link)
Hamburger – Beat Back the Ghouls
Release date: November 29th Record label: Specialist Subject Genre: Lo-fi indie rock, fuzz pop, power pop Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Toothless
Bristol, England’s Hamburger was co-founded by Fearghall Kilkenny and Tom Kelly in 2018, and while they’ve only put out one EP in the ensuing six years (2020’s Teenage Terrified), they’ve also grown into a six-piece band (also featuring Doug Hayman, Katie Stentiford, Liv Pilkington, and Mike Baker), played shows with Martha and Trust Fund, and linked up with Specialist Subject Records (Witching Waves, Supermilk, Long Neck). The Hamburger sextet is now ready to double their recorded output thus far with their second EP, a six-song collection called Beat Back the Ghouls. The twenty-two minute record has an intriguing sound; it’s not really the indie punk sound I associate with Specialist Subject and their ilk, opting for fuzzy, sometimes meandering bedroom rock instead. It’s perhaps a more delicate version of the inventive shoegaze-adjacent fuzz pop going on over in the States, adding a more overt British indie pop/twee sound to the distortion and post-bedroom pop “lo-fi indie rock”. Sometimes Hamburger sound like an anonymous project uploaded to Bandcamp circa 2014, other times like aspiring stadium rockers, but they wear both outfits well on Beat Back the Ghouls.
“Buffalo” introduces Beat Back the Ghouls at its own pace, offering up roaring Weezer-y alt-rock guitars and switched-off lead vocals–but delivered slowly and deliberately rather than rushing out to greet us. Nonetheless, “Buffalo” rises to the occasion with a purposeful attitude, and it’s the next song, “Toothless”, where Hamburger really start wandering. It’s catchy, too, with some inspired synths and jangly guitars delivered in the sound’s sonic gumbo–all of which dress up the simple central melody of the track, which is again unhurried. The majority of the second half of Beat Back the Ghouls is taken up by the longest song on the EP, the nearly six-minute “Frankenstein” (and that’s not even counting “Shelley”, which basically serves as an instrumental introduction to it). It’s a brilliant power ballad in its own way, a slow dance for the balls and galas of the warped world of Hamburger. It’s such a winner that it almost overshadows the sub-ninety-second closing track, “Rip”, but that one’s not to be missed either, as it quickly launches from hammered-out acoustic bedroom folk song to sweeping synth-aided power pop anthem at a moment’s notice and closes the EP out in grand fashion. If well-written, impeccably-orchestrated indie rock is a ghoul’s kryptonite, we can consider them beaten back. (Bandcamp link)
Welcome to the third annual Rosy Overdrive Label Watch! In what I guess is a yearly tradition now, I check in on what a dozen (give or take) of my favorite modern labels have been up to the past few months, and pull a couple of highlights from each one. Rosy Overdrive is fully in the corner of small record labels and, as a blog, sees a kinship with them as a fellow human-based, passion-driven resource for discovering new music. The past twoyears I did this in early November, but this year I didn’t get to it by then, and so I figure why not run it during the week of Thanksgiving? I sure am thankful for these labels and the music they release!
As I always reiterate, this is not a “best record labels of 2024” list (although there would, of course, be some overlap). These are the labels that I’ve grown to love over the past decade or so, some of which were quite active this year, while others were less so. Still, everyone on this list put out enough music for me to choose both a favorite record and a worthy “honorable mention” (which can be either my second favorite, something I thought didn’t get as much attention as it should’ve, or something I didn’t have time to review in Pressing Concerns but still merits a closer look).
There are a bunch of great record labels doing great work that I don’t have time to highlight here, but, since the last Label Watch, the blog now has a “browse by label” section which lists every record label whose releases I’ve covered at least three times on the blog. Pretty cool, huh?
Two-time veteran Mt. St. Mtn. drops off this list as they only put out one release this year (System Exclusive’s Click; it’s a good one); here’s hoping we hear more from them next year. And, last but not least: continuing my goal to add a new label every year, we now welcome Meritorio Records to the club!
The prolific Alexei Shishkin, upon linking up with Candlepin Records, actually cleans and polishes up his lo-fi bedroom rock sound on Open Door Policy. The studio-recorded album ends up sounding like the more refined, pop-friendly sides of Shishkin’s 90s indie rock influences (Malkmus, Berman, Linkous, Martsch, and Lytle) or like a lost underground “best of” compilation, and there’s also a newly-pronounced rootsy streak. (Read more)
Honorable Mention: Glaring Orchid, I Hope You’re Okay
Like pretty much everything co-released by Julia’s War and Candlepin, Glaring Orchid’s I Hope You’re Okay falls somewhere on the 90s-style lo-fi indie rock, shoegaze, and slowcore continuum. Bandleader Quinn Mulvihill is nonetheless a rising talent to keep tabs on in this crowded and noisy field, as there’s a ton of brilliance to be found in between their debut record’s walls of fuzz and requisite sonic left-turns.
Kal Marks describe their sixth LP, Wasteland Baby, as a “borderline-concept album”, and the Boston trio spend it wandering around a dystopian, post-apocalyptic world that looks pretty similar to our own. As much as or even more than the lyrics, it’s the band’s playing that turns the record into something like a story; there’s Kal Marks’ signature noise rock, yes, but the group use rhythms and sweeping art rock to embark on a journey removed from their dingy basements of origin. (Read more)
Honorable Mention: Mandy, Lawn Girl
Melkbelly’s Miranda Winters doesn’t abandon the Breeders/Veruca Salt-indebted 90s alt-rock sound of her main band on LawnGirl, her first record as Mandy, but it does still sound like a “solo” album underneath its fuzzed-out guitars. Winters doesn’t have to shout over her band, as they shape their sound so that her voice can be quietly intense and still command full attention. It’s something of a patchwork record, but Lawn Girl’s disparate moments all hang together. (Read more)
Rare Earth is an Ohio rock and roll record made with the belief that pop music should be played loud and fast; the Cincinnati-based VACATION combine together Midwestern, blue-collar pop punk with meaty, mid-period Guided by Voices might. All in all, Rare Earth is one of the most inspired-sounding rock records I’ve heard in quite a bit–huge-sounding, catchy, with the edges anything but sanded off. (Read more)
Honorable Mention: Marcel Wave, Something Looming
London’s Marcel Wave put out a demo EP back in 2019, so their debut album Something Looming has presumably been in the works for a while. It’s a confident, polished, and accessible first statement that follows in the grand tradition of British “post-punk”/“indie pop” records, balanced on both sides of the spectrum by vocalist Maike Hale-Jones’s delivery and a well-seasoned cast of instrumentalists. (Read more)
Box of Dark Roses is Mope Grooves’ posthumously-released final album, and it’s a double LP full of ramshackle pop music drawn from clanging keyboards and buzzing beats and vocals that regularly surprise. Box of Dark Roses is so easy to follow despite everything about it because its leader, the late Stevie Pohlman, is unfailingly consistent in her worldview as a writer and doesn’t shy away from following these core tenets to wherever they take her. (Read more)
Honorable Mention: Love Child, Peel Session
12XU has single-handedly spearheaded the Love Child revival this year, putting out a double LP compilation of work from the 80s/90s indie rock group as well as making their albums Witchcraft and Okay? available digitally. I’m going with their (unaired) 1992 Peel Session for this list though, as the four-song, fifteen minute release is a brief but excellent introduction into the New York group’s noisy power trio version of Big Apple indie rock.
Chicago guitar pop veteran Loren Vanderbilt has a keen grasp on a very specific time and place in the history of indie rock on the debut record from his new solo project, Humdrum–specifically, vintage jangle pop, new wave, college rock, and dream pop. Every Heaven is largely the work of a singular pop-minded visionary, with everything from its prominent, pounding mechanical drumbeats to its New Order-y synth washes to sprinkled guitar arpeggios all working in tandem to service the melodies and hooks. (Read more)
Honorable Mention: Lunchbox, Pop and Circumstance
Lunchbox’s Donna McKean and Tim Brown are Bay Area indie pop godparents–it took the rest of the region a couple of decades to catch up to the 90s-originating group, but when their moment came, Lunchbox was ready. The dozen pop songs on Pop and Circumstance come from people who live and breathe vintage pop rock of the 1960s and 70s–bubblegum pop, mod, psychedelic pop, and soul, delivered with ample experience and honed knowledge. (Read more)
The Spatulas will probably always be an under-the-radar band (even I kind of forgot about this album until it came time to put this list together), but it suits them just fine. Cambridge, Massachusetts singer-songwriter Miranda Soileau-Pratt is a sneakily beautiful pop writer on Beehive Mind, which has one foot in the worlds of Pacific Northwest/Bay Area indie pop and twee but with diversions into more Post Present Medium-esque experimental psych pop and even some New England folk touches.
Honorable Mention: Muscle Beach, Muscle Beach
Oh, boy! Do you like rock music that sounds like it’s been warped and stretched and deconstructed to all hell? Does Trout Mask Replica make sense to you? Do you hate hooks? If any of this describes you, you’d probably be into the self-titled debut album from Muscle Beach, a Los Angeles band about whom I know almost nothing. There’s two guitarists, a drummer, and Jane on “vocals/effects”–and you never know just where any of them are headed on Muscle Beach.
Aaron Dowdy put out seven EPs in 2017 and 2018 as Fust, years before the North Carolina project became a full-fledged country rock band with a couple of excellentfull-lengths. Dowdy’s intimate, lo-fi bedroom pop take on alt-country in these twenty-eight songs, compiled digitally by Dear Life as Songs of the Rail, paints a blurry homespun picture, with songs running into each other as Fust moves from one sleepy-sounding idea to the next. (Read more)
The debut album from Philadelphia alt-country/folk rock singer-songwriter Lindsay Reamer is an impressively-orchestrated, polished record that’s never not breezy and pop-forward. It’s one of the most “instant-gratification” records to come out of Dear Life in a while–but Reamer isn’t put into a box by that at all, gleefully hopping from upbeat country rock to dreamy, layered folk music throughout Natural Science. (Read more)
At their best, D.C. power-pop-punk quartet Bad Moves are a walking, talking, harmonizing example of how pop music can be jam-packed with meaning and intent without losing any other part of itself in the process–and Wearing Out the Refrain is Bad Moves at their best. The group’s third full-length lives up to its name; the hits keep coming, and while Bad Moves have always been some of the best hook merchants in broadly-speaking punk music, Wearing Out the Refrain is the sound of them leaning fully in. (Read more)
Honorable Mention: The Ergs, dorkrockcorkrod (Steve Albini Remix)
This is pop punk! This is dorkrockcorkrod! For its twentieth birthday, the debut album from New Jersey power trio The Ergs–the one that propelled Mikey Erg to one of the most interesting careers in punk over the next two decades–was given a shined-up new remix by Steve Albini and a good old-fashioned repressing from Don Giovanni. Sixteen songs, thirty-two minutes, and no shortage of high-flying, wildly catchy writing that is even better than you remember it being (unless you’ve listened lately, in which case you know that it holds up).
Los Angeles noise pop group Dummy approached their sophomore album, Free Energy, with the clear intention of making something different than their 2021 sensory overload debut Mandatory Enjoyment, and the band indeed have grown into something new. The resultant album is something that’s sleek, slick, and smooth–rather than come at you at full force, Dummy dart around us and leap over top of us, marrying fuzzy, distorted shoegaze-pop with alternative-dance elements in a way that’s frequently surprising but always coherent. (Read more)
Honorable Mention: Nightshift, Homosapien
Glasgow’s Nightshift have experienced significant lineup changes since 2021’s Zöe, so it’s not surprising that their third album, Homosapien, brings some changes for the band. The quartet are hardly unrecognizable, but there’s a palpable shift from an emphasis on Young Marble Giants/Marine Girls-esque minimal rhythmic guitar pop to a clearer embrace of a fuller, busier, and electric (but still quite catchy) experimental/art rock sound. (Read more)
Burlington, Vermont’s Lily Seabird throws down the gauntlet in the realm of “folk rock/alt-country-influenced indie rock” with Alas, her second album. It’s a bold statement by someone making a case to be thought of as one of the most exciting and intriguing voices currently doing it, to get mentioned in the same breath as Wednesday and Big Thief one of these days. Bud Tapes put this out on cassette at the beginning of the year, and Lame-O rightfully took notice, adding Seabird to their stable and issuing Alas, on vinyl this November. (Read more)
Honorable Mention: Dazy, IT’S ONLY A SECRET (If You Repeat It)
It’s short, and it’s very sweet. IT’S ONLY A SECRET (If You Repeat It) is Dazy’s first new music in a year, and the three-track EP picks up the thread right where James Goodson left off, with his instantly recognizable huge hooks that are equal parts pop punk and Madchester losing no potency over time. Dance-pop and electronica, punk energy and huge guitars–all in under ten minutes. (Read more)
It’s not like “laid-back country rock” is new territory for Nashville supergroup Styrofoam Winos, but the way that they do it Real Time–effortlessly passing the torch between the band’s three co-leaders, creating a singular vibe across these ten songs–is a palpable leap. Joe Kenkel, Lou Turner, and Trevor Nikrant meld together here more than ever before, creating a cohesive album that sounds relaxed and comfortable as a whole. (Read more)
What a name, eh? Well, there’s nothing foul about the smooth, irreverent version of country music practiced by western Massachusetts’ Animal Piss, It’s Everywhere (featuring Animal, Surrender!‘s Rob Smith on drums, among others). On Grace, the Pissers sing about vacations, beaches, and cocktails, sometimes as though they’re in the midst of enjoying them and other times like they could really use ’em.
Roughrider, the long-awaited second album from Chicago’s Mint Mile, has a “snapshot” and “wide-ranging” feel that becomes more pronounced here due to it being significantly shorter than their double-LP debut, Ambertron. Silkworm/Bottomless Pit’s Tim Midyett guides Mint Mile through meandering country-rock, sunny pop rock, and moments of surprising bareness throughout their latest triumph. (Read more)
Honorable Mention: Deep Tunnel Project, Deep Tunnel Project
The debut album from a Windy City indie rock supergroup featuring the aforementioned Midyett as well as John Mohr and Michael Greenlees (both of Tar) and Jeff Dean (Her Head’s on Fire, The Story So Far, The Bomb). Deep Tunnel Project is all Chicago, from the lyrics to the band and album name to the music, which is a garage and punk-influenced take on workmanlike Second City underground rock music. (Read more)
After two stellarEPs introduced the Glasgow band last year, 10 Songs I Hate About You is Dancer’s first full-length, and their potent indie pop/post-punk sound hasn’t missed a step. Vocalist Gemma Fleet is still announcing every song’s title before it begins, Andrew Doig’s bass is all over the place and a treat to observe, and so on. All the ingredients for an excellent first album were lined up, and 10 Songs I Hate About You knocks it out of the park. (Read more)
Honorable Mention: Best Bets, The Hollow Husk of Feeling
The Hollow Husk of Feeling is a record full to the brim of smart pop craft and energy. On the New Zealand band’s sophomore album, Best Bets put together a grounded, unsubtle collection of power pop, garage rock, and even glam rock that eschews the hazier and subtler sides of their home country’s guitar pop scene. The Hollow Husk of Feeling is a cathartic listen, as there’s a palpable edge to Best Bets’ jangly, fuzzed-out tunes. (Read more)
Hello, everyone! It’s a holiday week in the United States, but Rosy Overdrive is pressing forward with a full slate of new music (and more! stay tuned) nonetheless. This Monday’s Pressing Concerns brings us the fifth edition of Count Your Lucky Stars Records‘ split series (featuring Camp Trash, Expert Timing, Mt. Oriander, and Thank You, I’m Sorry), as well as new albums from The Old Ceremony, Big Nobody, and EggS.
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.
Various – CYLS Split Series #5
Release date: November 22nd Record label: Count Your Lucky Stars Genre: Power pop, pop punk, emo, alt-rock, indie pop, slowcore Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Snow Window
From 2011 to 2015, key fourth-wave emo label Count Your Lucky Stars put out four split 7” records, all featuring four different selections from four different bands in the realms of emo, punk, and indie rock. Featuring notable acts like Empire! Empire! (I Was a Lonely Estate), Annabel, Dowsing, Two Knights, and Sinai Vessel, these records were a significant part of an exciting era of emo music. Nearly a decade after the fourth entry in the series, Count Your Lucky Stars is experiencing a renaissance of its own, with both new bands and familiar faces releasing great music on the label over the past few years. It seemed like a perfect time to renew the CYLS Split Series, and label head Keith Latinen didn’t have to look far to find worthy contributors. The four bands on CYLS Split Series #5 have all released great albums on Count Your Lucky Stars within the past two years and change, and the exclusive tracks they bring to this EP are all just-as-strong entries into these acts’ relative discographies. Given that I’ve written about all four of these bands in Pressing Concerns before (and on multiple occasions for three of them), it’s not exactly surprising that I’m high on these songs, but regardless of one’s previous relationship (or lack thereof) with Camp Trash, Expert Timing, Mt. Oriander, and Thank You, I’m Sorry, this is a great place to begin familiarizing one’s self with them.
The first half of CYLS Split Series #5 could be called the “Florida half”, with two Sunshine State bands delivering tracks that bring the energy and hooks. Bradenton’s Camp Trash offer up “Friendship America”, a high-flying but limber piece of power-pop-punk that says the quiet part out loud by explicitly namechecking “Hyper Enough” and “Driveway to Driveway” (the former is the one that applies to “Friendship America”, and, even though this song isn’t slated to be on their upcoming sophomore album, it’s still a reminder of why they’re already on my radar). Orlando’s Expert Timing announced a hiatus of sorts earlier this year, but thankfully we’re getting at least one more song out of them with the fizzy but somewhat unnerved-sounding “Sudden Glow”, a reminder of why I’ve been so high on them even as they aren’t household names (yet). Kicking off the second half, Latinen’s own current emo/slowcore/sadcore project Mt. Oriander contributes a song called “Everything Is Connected, but Nothing Is Working”, and I remain in awe of how many songs like this Latinen seems to have in him. Sure, most bands can probably pull together a few of these soul-baring, stunning, stop-in-one’s-tracks pieces of eternal winter emo chilliness, but to make an entire discography out of songs like this is wild to me. Oh, and Thank You, I’m Sorry ends the EP with my favorite song on the whole thing, a two-minute piece of bummer pop called “Snow Window” that just flat-out rules. The state of Count Your Lucky Stars in 2024 is as strong as it’s ever been, and the label feels like it’s in good hands. (Bandcamp link)
The Old Ceremony – Earthbound
Release date: October 17th Record label: Robust Genre: Singer-songwriter, folk rock, college rock, indie pop Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital Pull Track: Valerie Solanas
Django Haskins is a veteran in the worlds of guitar pop, folk rock, and what I’d call “college rock”–the Chapel Hill-based musician started putting out solo material in the 1990s, made a record with The Jayhawks’ Gary Louris, and has toured as part of a long-running Big Star tribute ensemble alongside the likes of R.E.M.’s Mike Mills and Peter Buck, The Posies’ Jon Auer, and Big Star drummer Jody Stephens. In 2004, Haskins founded the self-described “noir-pop” group The Old Ceremony, and the band (which apparently began as an eleven-piece “mini-orchestra” before settling on a quintet of Haskins, vibraphone/organist Mark Simonsen, bassist Shane Hartman, violinist Gabriel Pelli, and drummer Nate Stalfa) put out six albums from 2005 to 2015. It’s been nearly a decade since an Old Ceremony record, but as the band celebrates twenty years of existence, they’ve released their seventh LP, Earthbound, via local label Robust Records. The album sounds like how you’d hope a band named after a Leonard Cohen album might sound–Haskins, thankfully, isn’t attempting to emulate the inimitable, but these eleven songs have both a tenderness and an edge to them, always keeping us on our toes as the band move through folk, orchestral pop, soft rock, and jazz-influenced pop rock expertly.
And, yes, there’s plenty of “noir” in Earthbound. It’s there in the opening title track, which leans on Simonsen’s vibraphone and Pelli’s violin to set the mood before the guitar and piano eventually meet them where they’re at. It’s also prevalent in the wandering, jazzy odyssey of “Lonely Mayor”, and in “Picking My Battles”, a string-charged pop tune that really does sound like something a twenty-year-old band might put to tape. Haskins’ “timeless pop songwriting” credentials have been well-established, and the band really put them to use with highlights like “Too Big to Fail” (which is one of those perfect-sounding guitar pop songs that you can’t believe someone hadn’t written yet) and the rueful laugh of “Easy to Believe” (some very nice organ on this one, the band upping their game just enough to match Haskins’ pen). And then there’s “Valerie Solanas”, the record’s one real rocker in which Haskins wildly and fully embodies the titular would-be assassin as the band conjure up some actual electric garage rock. Haskins sounds oddly comfortable on “Valerie Solanas”, threading the complicated narrative needle without tipping his hand too much about what he’s portraying. I saw that The Old Ceremony recently played a show with Rosy Overdrive favorite Franklin Bruno, and he and Haskins feel alike to me–genuine pop ringers and writers, working towards being able to jump from something like “Valerie Solanas” to the retro, soft-Ted Leo-y pop of “Hangman’s Party” or the gently rolling folk-country of “North American Grain” with ease. The returns are very positive on Earthbound. (Bandcamp link)
Big Nobody – Charlie’s Alive
Release date: October 31st Record label: Legacy Junk Genre: Power pop, pop punk, alt-rock Formats: Digital Pull Track: Peptide
Big Nobody is a new band from Rochester, New York, formed by four local indie rock/emo/punk veterans. Vocalist/guitarist/songwriter Jacob Walsh and bassist JT Fitzgerald had previously played together in the mid-2010s as part of the band Total Yuppies; earlier this decade, they teamed with drummer Connor Benincasa (from another good Rochester band, Comfy) and guitarist Kyle Waldron (who has played with Calicoco) to form Big Nobody. They debuted last year with Ripped from the Dream, and they’ve clearly hit on something as Charlie’s Alive is their second full-length album in as many years. Big Nobody (not to be confused with Philadelphia slacker rock group Big Nothing, although there’s actually a good deal of common ground between the two) seems to continue in the grand tradition of longtime underground rockers setting their sights towards big hooks and big guitars–bands like Rosy Overdrive favorites Dagwood, Rozwell Kid, Virginity, and Late Bloomer, to name a few. At the crossroads of power pop, pop punk, 90s-alt rock, and emo-grunge, Charlie’s Alive is a fun and rousing collection of sharp pop songs, “mature”-sounding but with a foot in youthful energy still. Charlie’s Alive rocks, yes, for the most part, but it’s not exactly a “punk” album–it’s more in the vein of bands like Dinosaur Jr. and The Lemonheads who can pull that kind of thing off but are marching to a different beat on the whole.
Charlie’s Alive is so catchy that I didn’t really realize how mellow it is until sitting down to right about it. “End” is an incredibly strong opening statement, but it’s one that takes a minute to really get going, having us wait for the (very worth it) payoff, while the creeping alt-rock of “Snake” and the shimmery jangle of “Source” ensure that there are several different layers of energy to be found in the record’s first half (and even the particularly J. Mascis-esque “Run” recalls the Dinosaur Jr. frontman’s later-period, even-more-laid-back work). Oddly enough, the second half of the record might be the louder, more upbeat half–between “My Name”, “Sunken”, and “Peptide”, Big Nobody rip through one fuzzed-out power pop anthem after another like they need to bank a few more before the album comes to a close. Charlie’s Alive ends with a two-minute careening thing called “Telethon”–it feels more streamlined and limber than the rest of the record’s more lumbering, grungy take on hooky power-pop-punk. Not that Big Nobody need to (or do) mix things up on Charlie’s Alive, but they do just fine on this little step off of their well-worn path, too. (Bandcamp link)
EggS – Crafted Achievement
Release date: November 1st Record label: Prefect/Howlin Banana Genre: Power pop, college rock Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Head in Flames
Who doesn’t love EggS? People who haven’t heard them, I suppose. That doesn’t describe me, as the Parisian collective first showed up on my radar with their excellent 2022 album A Glitter Year, which ended up being one of my favorite LPs of that year. The group (led by one Charles Daneau) has been around for a while, but A Glitter Year–their first full-length–was a triumphant announcement of intent, with Daneau and a long list of collaborators (including Camille Fréchou and Margaux Bouchaudon of En Attendant Ana) achieving a boisterous, party-friendly, saxophone-heavy version of vintage 1980s college rock (somewhere between Miracle Legion and Eleventh Dream Day, I called it). EggS’ follow up record, Crafted Achievement, doesn’t flag for a second–it’s only eight songs and twenty-three minutes long, but every moment of it is thrilling, and Daneau maintains strong ties with the local indie pop scene by bringing back Fréchou and Bouchaudon as well as enlisting Erica Ashleson of Special Friend and Dog Park, among others. Daneau’s vocals–in English and front-and-center throughout the album–reach melodic perfection through sheer force, shouting hooks among the tuneful maelstrom of the EggS band to complete the ingredients for a perfect hurricane of catchy indie rock.
With a strong anchor provided by the band’s rhythm section, opening track “Head in Flames” is free to push for the stars for its entire three-minute runtime, and while the title of “Bob Stinson’s Song” nods to the iconic Replacements guitarist, the song itself actually recalls the horn-laden, polished album that immediately followed Stinson’s departure from the band, Pleased to Meet Me. “Your Maze” introduces noisy, mid-tempo guitar tangles into the mix, which, combined with some excellent En Attendant Ana-loaned backing vocals, inject some variety into a record that moves so fast that one might think it wouldn’t have time for such things. Crafted Achievement on the whole is speeding at a breakneck pace, though–“At the End of the Road” is there at the end of “Your Maze” to snatch the hooks and floor the gas pedal with them for another three-point-five minutes, while the ninety-second mod-pop carousel of “Your Maze II” keeps things lean in the album’s second half. EggS close things out with “Angry Silence”; clocking in at a very un-EggS like four minutes in length, Daneau and crew eagerly use this expanded runway to build and build until the album is ready to jet off into the cosmos in a jumble of horns, propulsive guitars, sturdy rhythms, and intermittent but strong vocals. That’s how you do it! (Bandcamp link)
Hello again, readers! This Thursday Pressing Concerns looks at three albums that are coming out tomorrow, November 22nd, provided to us by Vista House, Unlettered, and Luna Honey. We also look at a new album from Orillia that came out earlier this week. Nice! If you missed either of this week’s earlier blog posts (on Monday, we looked at new records from Casual Technicians, Sexores, Dogwood Gap, and Morpho, and on Tuesday we examined new ones from Grey Factor, Red Pants, DUNUMS, and Bondo), check those out, too.
If you’re looking for more new music, you can visit the site directory to see what else we’ve written about lately. If you’d like to support Rosy Overdrive, you can share this (or another) post, or donate here.
Vista House – They’ll See Light
Release date: November 22nd Record label: Anything Bagel Genre: Country rock, alt-country Formats: Cassette, digital Pull Track: A Lightning Bird Emerges
Tim Howe has been responsible for some of the best alt-country rock of this decade between First Rodeo (his collaboration with Cool Original’s Nathan Tucker) and Vista House, his solo project (although the most recent Vista House photo includes three other people, so maybe there’s a full band behind Howe by now). In particular, last year’s Oregon III was an excellent and adventurous take on alt-country, Americana, indie rock, and power pop, among other diversions, and was in the blog’s top ten favorite LPs of 2023. I wasn’t expecting a full-length follow-up this year, but here we are in late November with They’ll See Light, which Vista House cut at New Issue’s The Unknown recording studio in Anacortes and released (like the last Vista House album) on cassette via Butte, Montana label Anything Bagel. They’ll See Light is far from a departure from Oregon III–once again, Howe is leading the band through loud, rambling country rockers and softer, still-rambling folk-indebted music, but there are differences between the two records. On their newest album, Vista House sound focused and streamlined–Oregon III had the feeling of a record that had been cobbled together and tinkered with for a while, allowing for some surprising choices, while They’ll See Light sounds like the work of a well-oiled rock band recording a bunch of great songs in short order because they know that they’re on a roll.
That being said, They’ll See Light isn’t a solely-barnburners affair; Howe and crew let the album come into focus subtly and casually with the brief “Intro To Heaven” and the mid-tempo “Amber Born Pheasant”, both of which hold back a bit of energy (but not in terms of hooks–they’re both nonetheless quite catchy). It makes “Change The Framerate (Gloria)”, the moment where Vista House fully lean into dizzying, bouncy country-power pop, all that more exciting, and the band has plenty of momentum as they charge into the middle of the record with the electric, rowdy “Appeal to Heaven”, the Crazy Horse-like bluster of “A Seat Behind the Wing”, and the sprawling folk rock of “Retribution Blues”. Vista House also end They’ll See Light in fiery and/or rambunctious mode–the five-minute slow-burn alt-country of “Outta Sight” eventually kicks up plenty of dirt, and “Straight Out the Box” adds horns to the grand power pop finale to make Vista House’s own “Can’t Hardly Wait”. But my favorite song on They’ll See Light is actually the acoustic folk tune that bridges the middle and home stretch of the LP–“A Lightning Bird Emerges”, in which Howe hides some of his best writing yet. The lyrics are surreal depictions of death, fire, folklore, sunlight, soil, animals eating other animals, and cycles thereof, but the simple refrain (which first appeared in “Intro to Heaven”) is all Howe needs to tie everything together: “I keep on coming back again / Yeah, but it’s not like the first time”. (Bandcamp link)
Unlettered – Five Mile Point
Release date: November 22nd Record label: Self-released Genre: Noise rock, post-punk Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Dither
I’m always happy to spotlight new projects by 90s indie rock veterans on Rosy Overdrive, and Mike Knowlton’s Unlettered certainly fits the bill. Although he’s currently based in Englewood, Florida, Knowlton is originally from New York, where he played in the noisy indie rock bands Gapeseed and Poem Rocket in the 90s and 2000s. After seemingly stepping back from music for a while, though, the 2020s have been a pretty busy one for Knowlton so far–he’s put out three EPs since 2021 as Unlettered, and Poem Rocket have recently reunited and in fact just released a shelved EP, Lend-Lease, that was recorded in 1999. Even with Poem Rocket now back on the docket, however, Unlettered isn’t slowing down, as they’re gearing up to release their first full-length album, Five Mile Point. The first Unlettered LP is also the formal introduction to Kelly Grimm, Knowlton’s wife and, now, Unlettered’s co-lyricist and co-lead vocalist. Not that Grimm changes the trajectory of Unlettered all that much–if you enjoyed the dark, low-end heavy, noisy post-punk of their last EP (last year’s New Egypt), then Five Mile Point offers a whole album of such things. No matter who’s singing on the album, they’re soundtracked by music that’s straight-up suffocating, threatening to consume and overwhelm either of the stoic bandleaders at any moment.
Unlettered gets right to the hazy, confusing noise rock with “Dither”, a song that feels lost in itself and thus makes it a bizarre (but appropriate) choice to open Five Mile Point. There’s a spirited, sharp rock song buried underneath the mechanical clanging in “Dither”, and that goes double for the second song and lead single “She Is Inside You”, which lumbers and collapses its way into a roaring Sonic Youth-esque final section (while still sounding somewhat buried, yes). Grimm’s spoken-word vocals on “Median Coverage” are given just enough breathing room by the guitars to be discernible, but this relative parting of the clouds doesn’t last–the fuzzed-out “The Great Dwindle” and the glacial post-punk “About Time” are up next, and by the time we get to “12:49”, Unlettered are more or less just lobbing a wall of noise at us with moments of indie rock audible through the cracks. I’m probably making Five Mile Point sound a little taxing (hey, we’re talking about noise rock here), but I remain captivated by Unlettered throughout the album, between the strong, tough sounds of Knowlton’s bass landing blow after blow, the disorienting but beautiful guitarplay, and, of course, the whirlwind of noise. It’s all there in the nearly seven-minute closing track, “Services Rendered”, which even finds some space for odd experimental undercurrents in between the song’s more “rock” sections. “Services Rendered” eventually draws to a stop via the final instrumental echoes and Grimm’s distorted, uncanny voice–but Five Mile Point will be reverberating for a while. (Bandcamp link)
Orillia – Orillia
Release date: November 19th Record label: Magic Mothswarm Genre: Folk, alt-country, singer-songwriter Formats: Digital Pull Track: Pontoon Boat
Ohio-originating singer-songwriter Andrew Marczak has only lived in Chicago since 2020, but he’s already fully immersed himself in the Windy City’s alt-country scene. He’s the co-frontperson of The Roof Dogs and the lead vocalist of Toadvine, two bands who’ve turned up on this blog in thepast; he’s more than earned a run at a solo album, which is where Orillia comes into the picture. Like the most recent Toadvine EP, Orillia’s self-titled debut album was recorded by Doug Malone at Jamdek, but it’s significantly more stripped down than Toadvine’s sextet lineup; a couple of Marczak’s bandmates contribute to these songs (Tristan Hugyen on vocals, guitar, and dobro, Trevor Joellenbeck on vocals, harmonica, mandolin, and piano), but nobody’s crowding anybody else on Orillia. Despite the relatively minimal arrangement, the songs of Orillia are noticeably varied–there’s some traditional folk music, some classic country-indebted songwriting, pin-drop quiet ballads, and sunny anthems in the brief (eight songs and twenty-five minutes, not counting an alternate take of “Cannery Row”) LP. Even though only five of the record’s songs are originals, Orillia nonetheless serves as a strong advertisement for Marczak’s songwriting, and the record feels like a small group of people eager to get a collection of songs they’re excited about down to tape.
The ambient sounds of rain and thunder roll underneath Orillia’s soft-launch opening track, a version of the song “My Rifle, My Pony, and Me” from the 1959 western Rio Bravo. As insular as “My Rifle, My Pony, and Me” is, the first original song “Pontoon Boat” is in another world entirely–we’re greeted by Joellenbeck’s bright mandolin playing and some excitedly-strummed acoustic guitar to launch us into what’s just an excellent song (I’m torn between “There’s a cave in Kentucky where the snakes all know my name” and “Gonna get a big-girl job at the hotel bar, it’s gonna make my life so easy” for my favorite part of the track). “Things” first appeared on Toadvine II, but that song’s dramatic folk-country balladry is still quite strong in a leaner package, and the two Marczak compositions in the second half (the hazy, dazy, but still dangerous “Shrimp Shack” and the beautiful, regal folk of “Tonight We Sleep Like Kings”) also benefit from this kind of reading. The latter in particular–which ends with “I saw you crawl underneath that truck / Looking for shelter”–is a new high for the quieter end of Marczak’s writing. Orillia isn’t the only Chicago alt-country band to use a pontoon boat as an effective vessel in their writing in recent memory, nor are they the only quasi-solo indie folk group to say the quiet part out loud and cover a Songs: Ohia song on their most recent release (in this case, it’s an excellent take on “Whip-poor-will”). This is country music–it’s about being in good company and finding new ways to walk down these well-trod avenues. (Bandcamp link)
Luna Honey – Bound
Release date: November 22nd Record label: Self-released Genre: Noise rock, art rock, post-punk, experimental, avant-prog Formats: CD, cassette, digital Pull Track: Kerosene
Luna Honey are a trio of Philadelphia-based weirdos who started making music together in 2017 in Washington, D.C., and have put out five full-lengths (plus a collaborative LP with longtime Swans guitarist Norman Westberg) since then. The band’s core is vocalist/tenor baritone guitarist Maura Pond, bassist Levi Flack, and guitarist Benjamin Schurr, although the three of them play all sorts of instruments on their sixth album, Bound. As one might expect from a band who made a record with a former member of Swans, Bound is a noisy, experimental, and dark art rock album, taking nearly an hour to get everything it can out of its ten tracks. Bound was partially recorded by prolific Philadelphia engineer Dan Angel (Bungler, Webb Chapel, Slaughter Beach, Dog) and it represents the first record Luna Honey has made since 2019 with all its members living in the same city (they’d been split between D.C., Philly, and Richmond until recently). It’s an intense listen; there’s a lot going on in Bound, with the band seemingly taking advantage of their close proximity to keep adding and expanding to their music (a good portion of the record was recorded in the band members’ various homes).
Luna Honey don’t make the same song twice–this is one of those “check to make sure I’m still listening to the same record” kinds of albums. I will also say that it’s incredibly bold to start off your record with a mechanical-sounding noise rock song called “Kerosene”–but it’s not like Luna Honey aren’t equipped to light the kind of fire necessary to pull that move off. Nothing on Bound is quite as fiery as “Kerosene”, but then, there’s nothing on the record that’s quite as catchy as the groovy, warped post-punk dance number “Barbie Cake”, and nothing embraces clanging industrial music as much as the title track does. The first half of Bound is the most immediately taxing side, I think–it’s also made up of a prog-folk slow-burner called “Lead” and “Vacuum Cleaner”, an eight-minute experimental, shrill Frankenstein’s monster that’s probably the most cursed-sounding thing on the record–but the second half doesn’t exactly offer up “relief”. “Snarge” and “Lemons” pull back the reins a bit but maintain at least some structure, which can’t really be said for the final three tracks on the record. By the end of the lengthy ambient studio piece “Gravity”, the amount of silence that’s crept into Bound is unnerving, given how much noise the group had been making just minutes previously. Luna Honey never return to it, though–the final song is called “Shore”, and it’s six minutes of minimal and droning but still somewhat “pop” music in there somewhere. At least, I think there’s a little bit of pop music in there–hard to say after listening to Bound for an hour. (Bandcamp link)
A good, old-fashioned Tuesday Pressing Concerns! It’s here! It features an archival live album from Grey Factor, a new EP from Red Pants, and brand new full-lengths from DUNUMS and Bondo. It’s a good one, and it pairs well with yesterday’s post (featuring Casual Technicians, Sexores, Dogwood Gap, and Morpho), which you should check out if you missed.
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.
Grey Factor – A Peak in the Signal: Live 1979-1980
Release date: October 23rd Record label: Tiny Global Productions/Damaged Disco Genre: Synthpunk, experimental, synthpop, post-punk Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Everything
At the beginning of last year, I wrote about1979-1980 A.D., an archival release from Los Angeles synthpop/post-punk group Grey Factor that collected the band’s entire recorded output, put together by Dave Trumfio (Pulsars, Mekons) and his new label Damaged Disco. By definition, all of Grey Factor’s studio recordings have been reissued already, but the band were able to find enough live recordings from their initial two-year run to make A Peak in the Signal: Live 1979-1980, an entire new full-length. Drawn from across the “around twenty live shows” that Grey Factor played in their initial incarnation, A Peak in the Signal features six tracks that I don’t believe ended up recorded on 1979-1980 A.D (if they were, they were significantly reworked). Their studio compilation hinted at the band’s range, but A Peak in the Signal blows it wide open–there are a couple of “pop songs” on here, but the majority of the LP’s thirty-seven minutes is significantly more experimental and out-there than almost everything that the band formally recorded. A Peak in the Signal almost sounds like it’s degrading and disintegrating in real time, as the more recognizable post-punk and synthpop moments of the first couple of tracks give way to pure electronic dadaism and lengthy ambient moments.
The most accessible moment on A Peak in the Signal belongs to “Everything”, a chirping, relatively crystal-clear synthpop track found in the third track slot. “No Time”, the five-minute synth-led post-punk song that precedes it, is the clear runner-up, as it’s the only other song on the LP I can imagine being enjoyed by people whose musical adventurousness doesn’t go far beyond, say, the Talking Heads. A Peak in the Signal’s opening track is a cutting darkwave song called “Why Me”–there’s a muddled darkness to it that obscures the pop song that’s struggling somewhere underneath, hinting at the chaos that’s to come later on in the album. Grey Factor really lean into it with the six-minute industrial electronic noise-pop collage of “Won’t Have to See You”; there’s a song barely contained within it, although Grey Factor aren’t overly committed to seeing it through (there’s a memorable moment where the synth just starts playing “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” for a bit as the rest of the instrumentation continues stumbling around). “Every Five Minutes”, the final song on the LP, returns to this head-spinning well; between the two of them, it reminds me of the more confrontational moments of Pere Ubu and Wire (and their side projects), drilling and piercing sounds obscuring everything else about the music. Ironically enough, the most peaceful moment of A Peak in the Signal is also probably the most “difficult” track on the record–the thirteen-minute ambient hard-stop of “Inja”. For most bands, I can’t imagine needing more than their entire recorded studio output, but A Peak in the Signal makes a strong case that there’s more to Grey Factor than what we’d previously heard. (Bandcamp link)
Red Pants – Pale Shadows
Release date: October 25th Record label: Painted Blonde Genre: Lo-fi indie rock, fuzz rock, lo-fi pop, 90s indie rock Formats: Digital Pull Track: To the Deep End
As long as the band Red Pants keeps putting out quality new music, I’ll keep writing about them on this blog. This is the fourth record from the Madison, Wisconsin duo of Jason Lambeth and Elsa Nekola that I’ve written about ever since I first heard of them in early 2022–for the two LPs they’ve put out in that timespan (2022’s When We Were Dancing and 2023’s Not Quite There Yet), they linked up with established indie labels Paisley Shirt and Meritorio, while both Red Pants EPs (2022’s Gentle Centuries and now the brand-new Pale Shadows) have come out via Lambeth’s own Painted Blonde imprint. Regardless of who’s putting out their music, Red Pants have retained their charmingly distinct brand of lo-fi Midwestern basement indie rock, which incorporates bits of Yo La Tengo-esque fuzzy noise pop, Sonic Youth-style drone-y rock, and even a touch of Stereolab-like dusty indie pop. Pale Shadows is no exception; comprised of five songs from the Not Quite There Yet sessions that were believed to be lost on “dead 2009 MacBook” only to be rediscovered and finished a few months ago, these tracks are good enough to stand up against any of their previous work. Unlike Gentle Centuries, which felt like a consistent, singular listen, Pale Shadows is more varied, but that’s hardly a complaint, as we get a brief but complete sampling of Red Pants in these five songs.
We join Red Pants in the middle of a four-minute instrumental basement jam called “Into the Deep End”, in which Nekola steadily marches along to Lambeth’s increasingly bold guitar playing–both of them are mostly restrained for the majority of the track, almost hypnotic-sounding, with Lambeth only kicking up some real fuzz-rock in the final few seconds. The sub-ninety-second “Proto Punk” doesn’t quite sound like the MC5, but it’s the most spirited and electric moment on the record, and the refrain does muster a bit of the garage-punk one might imagine based on the song’s title. Hopefully you’re ready for droning synthesizers after that one, because that’s what “Underneath the Sun” brings–the vocals are barely above a whisper, and a drum machine is the only other accompaniment to the track’s ghostly synthetic pop. The final two songs on the EP are, if anything, even more subtle than what came before them, but I also view “One More Ghost” and “Sunset Hill” as a culmination of sorts–the former track starts off as a wobbly lo-fi indie rock/slowcore tune that eventually adds louder guitars and synths as the track takes off, and the Nekola-sung latter is the dreamy organ-led benediction. It all adds up to a welcome dispatch from the world of Red Pants, and it leads one to wonder just what other gems they’ve got hidden away on old hard drives. (Bandcamp link)
DUNUMS – I Wasn’t That Thought
Release date: October 4th Record label: Sleepy Cat Genre: Psychedelia, noise pop, art folk, shoegaze Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital Pull Track: Mouthful of Pears
Sijal Nasralla most notably plays in Durham, North Carolina punk group The Muslims (they use aliases but I believe he’s Ba7Ba7, the drummer), but the Palestinian-American’s solo-ish project DUNUMS actually predates that band’s founding, with records dating back all the way to 2011. The music of DUNUMS (which they helpfully describe as “arty, noisey, post-rock, bedroom fake-jazz”) has been driven by the settler colonialism that has ravaged Nasralla’s home country for much longer than the year and change that many of his white indie rock music peers have been paying attention–the project’s name is Arabic for an “arbitrary unit of land measurement, approximately 1 Hectare, used differently to quantify space among villages throughout Palestine”–and it’s marked DUNUMS’ music through their 2015 self-titled album, 2022’s Where’s My Eidi?, and a few EPs and splits. It’s no surprise, then, that the third DUNUMS album, I Wasn’t That Thought, is shaded by Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, but do not expect this album to sound like the kinetic punk music of Nasralla’s other band. I Wasn’t That Thought is also inspired by the birth of Nasralla’s daughter, Tasneem, and Nasralla has written much of this album as though through her eyes–“Palestine-centric Toddler-core anthems”, is what he calls them.
I Wasn’t That Thought reminds me a bit of the band OMBIIGIZI–that group’s co-leaders also make 90s indie rock, folk rock, and noise pop/shoegaze with a different perspective than the majority of groups in those genres (for them, it’s an Anishnaabe-Canadian vantagepoint). There is a spoken word “story” from Tasneem and there are jazz-rock flare-ups in the record’s title track and “The Portal”, but I Wasn’t That Thought’s primary mode is adventurous, multi-layered, melodic indie rock. DUNUMS sound thoughtful and measured throughout songs like “Mouthful of Pears” (featuring vocals from Catherine Edgerton), they make noise sound regal on “Honeycomb Art on a Billion Twins”, there’s interesting dream pop, folk, and experimental touches across the middle of the album in “Butt Parade”, “When We Ate the World and Its Wars”, and “Holding the Cake Up to the Sky”. These moments are all strong, but I Wasn’t That Thought might be the most effective as it comes to a close and invents new ways to deliver its messages; Nasralla’s final lyrical statement is the quiet hope of “There Are Dreamlands”, which DUNUMS immediately follow with two jazz-flecked instrumentals (“USA Ain’t Shit” and “The Portal”), and the last thing we hear on the album is a lullaby sung by Nasralla’s “co-parent”, Rakhee Devasthali. I Wasn’t That Thought is a pointed album, even when (perhaps especially when) Nasralla expresses himself in a way that might make more sense to a child than us adults. (Bandcamp link)
Bondo – Harmonica
Release date: October 18th Record label: Day End Genre: Post-rock, 90s indie rock, slowcore, noise rock Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Enter Sand
Bondo are a quartet from Los Angeles who first came to my attention via their debut album, Print Selections, which came out last year on Quindi Records (Monde UFO, Dead Bandit, American Cream Band). The quartet (Cook Lee-Chobanian, Andrew “Gerry” Dykes, Brian Bartus, and Nikolas Escudero) played an intriguing, band-centric version of post-rock on that album, with a mostly-instrumental, downbeat sound that captured both the low-key and experimental sides of 90s “Numero Group-core” indie rock groups like Slint, Duster, and Unwound. The second Bondo full-length arrives a year and a half later via Day End Records–with the band in a self-proclaimed “creative stride”, they went ahead and recorded Harmonica live to tape even with Lee-Chobanian (the band’s drummer) nursing a torn ACL (“from playing basketball at LA Fitness”). Harmonica can feel like a more polished and even accessible version of Bondo, but only sometimes–there are more songs with vocals this time around, and we can recognize somewhat jagged but still structured “indie rock” compositions throughout the album, yes, but the careening punk-informed musicianship, the probing post-rock guitars, and the experimental track-jumping of their previous LP are all still characteristic of Harmonica, too.
The first two songs on Harmonica are wordless indie rockers, picking up the instrumental thread of Print Selections and shaving it down to mid-tempo, melodic Duster-esque slowgaze (“Enter Sand”) and a contained burst of post-punk circle-chasing (“Bibbendum”). It’s something of a feint; not that Bondo switch things up in any extreme way in terms of the music, but the plodding lo-fi indie rock “Sink” introduces vocals into the mix–mumbled and downcast-sounding, but still quite audible–and it’s far from the last time we hear them on Harmonica. After getting some more noisier instrumentals out of their system, Bondo start to hit a subdued stride between the title track, “Blinko”, and “Headcleaner”, which slow and tone the music down enough for the vocals to once again feel like a key part of the compositions. By the latter of those three songs, Bondo have found something of a second wind, with spindly post-rock guitars marking the song–the group finally strole a balance and let the six-strings and the singing share the limelight. Not that Bondo have ever been a particularly loud band, but the back half of Harmonica is really no-man’s land, with only “Porchetarian” really showing off Bondo’s tougher instincts. As they mumble and drift their way through “Paul Gross” and “Triple Double”, Bondo’s attitude on Harmonica crystallizes–exploratory, but cautiously and with one foot on solid ground. (Bandcamp link)
On this fine Monday morning in November, the acclaimed music blog Rosy Overdrive and its Pressing Concerns column is looking at three records that came out last Friday: the second Casual Technicians LP of 2024, as well as new EPs from Dogwood Gap and Morpho. We’re also looking at a reissue of an album from Sexores that originally came out a decade ago. A bunch of quality below!
If you’re looking for more new music, you can visit the site directory to see what else we’ve written about lately. If you’d like to support Rosy Overdrive, you can share this (or another) post, or donate here.
Casual Technicians – Deeply Unworthy
Release date: November 15th Record label: Repeating Cloud Genre: Lo-fi pop, psych pop, jazz-pop, psych folk Formats: Cassette, digital Pull Track: Nothingland
The Casual Technicians have been called up for an encore. Tyler Keene, Boone Howard, and Nathan Baumgartner are a trio of Portland, Oregon-originating musicians now (partially) based in New Jersey and upstate New York–the latter of those two locations is where the three of them gathered last year to record their self-titled debut album, which came out this March. I called Casual Technicians a “perfectly imperfect melding of three distinct pop weirdos”, like a more communal version of Keene’s lo-fi psych pop solo project Log Across the Washer, and I was far from the only one charmed by the group’s bursting, buzzing, catchy music. The people have demanded a second Casual Technicians album of 2024, and they’ve obliged, once again meeting at Howard’s farm in Chittenango to put together Deeply Unworthy. Noticeably less zany than their first album, Deeply Unworthy is a little sleepier and subdued, like a band that was ready to pack it in, genuinely not expecting the ensuing “one more song!” chant. The writing on this one is no less effective, though–and this helps ease us into this new era of Casual Technicians. It takes a few listens for it to become apparent just how much of a forward step it is for them–the songs, on closer inspection, are no less complex than the bells-and-whistles-fest of their debut, the increased prominence of Fraser A Campbell’s saxophone veers us into straight-up jazz-pop territory, and the Casual Technicians themselves sound as cohesive as they’ve ever been. It’s an impressive feat given everything about Deeply Unworthy.
I wouldn’t have called Casual Technicians “relaxing”, but Deeply Unworthy pulls it off, believe it or not. The Technicians set the tone right at the beginning by giving Campbell’s saxophone the lead-off prime slot in opening intro track “Lord’s Valley”, and we’re greeted with several songs in the vein of psych-folk-pop-jazz campfire soundtrackers from “You Carry Me Away” to “Overdrive” to “Everyone Is Lonely”. There are less out-of-nowhere moments of aggressive pop brilliance on Deeply Unworthy, but the Casual Technicians’ pursuit of a Vibe has resulted in a singularly smooth and even seventeen-song album. And it’s not like these songs aren’t immediately-hitting too in their own way–drum-circle vibes and prominent saxophone don’t stop “Locally Hated” from being an infectious early highlight, “Dark Matter Falling” injects a bit of the first album’s wobbly chaos into the mix, and the fervent, dramatic “Nothingland” might be the most affecting thing that the Casual Technicians have put to tape yet. “Nothingland” lapses into a psychedelic finale, and they follow it up with what’s probably the most bizarre song on the album, “Dunking”–but the trio clean up their act to close things out with the acoustic strummer “This Emotion”. If “This Emotion” seems a bit woozy at times, there’s no reason to worry–after flying off the handle right out of the gate on their first album, the Casual Technicians have learned to land on Deeply Unworthy. (Bandcamp link)
Sexores – Historias de frío (Reissue)
Release date: November 1st Record label: Buh Genre: Shoegaze, dream pop Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Historias de frío
Regular readers of the blog will remember Sexores, the Buh Records-associated dream pop/shoegaze band from Ecuador and currently based in Mexico City who put out their fifth LP, Mar del Sur, about a year ago. That was the first I’d heard of Sexores, but the group has had a notable history spanning four full-lengths, a dozen years, and three continents before that record, a significant part of which is Historias de frío, their sophomore album they originally self-released in 2014. Recorded while Sexores were in the process of relocating from Quito to Barcelona (where they’d reside until moving to Mexico City in 2018), Historias de frío was the band’s breakthrough of sorts, garnering some attention and leading to an eventual partnership with Peruvain label Buh Records, who’ve released all their albums since then and are also releasing Historias de frío on vinyl for the record’s tenth anniversary. Jumping back from Mar del Sur’s electronic, synthpop-shaded dream pop sound, Sexores sound more like a typical indie rock group here, earning the “shoegaze” label that’s been attached to them even as they’ve branched out more in recent years. Comprised of Historias de frío’s eight original songs and augmented by the 2013 non-album single “Titán”/ “Dopplegänger”, this new version of the album is a holistic picture of a pivotal time in the band’s history.
Plenty of Sexores’ polished dream pop side is visible on Historias de frío, but it sits alongside expansive, layered, guitar-heavy rock music for the majority of the album. The title track is an understated opener, taking its time to rattle through an odyssey of reverb, melodic but low-key vocals, and steady, stoic percussion. “Below the Rainbow” is a bit more upfront and upbeat, but given that it’s six minutes long, there’s plenty more to the track than its loudest and highest moments. The twin pillars of Historias de frío seem to be its prominent rock-forward rhythm section and the band’s more exploratory instincts–it’s hard to know where songs like “Dahmer” and “Eli” will end up just based off of their inceptions, but one thing we can count on is that the drums will ground the tracks as they move along. The finale of the original version of Historias de frío is a six-minute toe-tapping, swirling indie rock song called “Shinigami”, and that song still feels like a worthy cap, although the two “bonus” tracks aren’t exactly afterthoughts. “Titán” in particular is a seven-minute kaleidoscopic dream pop song that’s unlike anything on the album proper, even as it still has that cavernous, trusty drumbeat kicking along beside it. It may not sound exactly like the Sexores of 2024, but Historias de frío on its own still sounds fresh today. (Bandcamp link)
Dogwood Gap – House Sounds
Release date: November 15th Record label: Revelator Genre: Alt-country, folk rock, singer-songwriter Formats: CD, digital Pull Track: Mommy Knows Best
Patrick Murray is a singer-songwriter from Massachusetts who’s living in Brooklyn these days; a couple of years ago, he started making music as Dogwood Gap, releasing an EP (2022’s More from the Cellar), an album (last year’s Winesburg), and a two-song single (“Class Clown” b/w “Short Sheet”, also last year) in short order. The latest record from Dogwood Gap is a CD EP called House Sounds, which also serves as the debut release from Revelator Records, a new imprint started by Murray himself to release music from him and his New York peers. If you’re already decently familiar with the worlds of alt-country and indie folk rock, the first thing you’ll notice about Murray is that he’s a big Songs: Ohia fan–his project is named after a song from their debut album, and House Sounds features a pretty faithful cover of Jason Molina’s signature song, “Farewell Transmission”. So yes, Dogwood Gap sound a good deal like Songs: Ohia on House Sounds, but aside from their “Farewell Transmission”, Murray (who, aside from guest vocals on the cover by Carlie Houser, is the only musician on the EP) hews towards earlier Molina material–cavernous, almost slowcore-like folk music, technically delivered in “rock band” format but a particularly winding and snaking version of it.
Despite having only four tracks, House Sounds is nearly thirty minutes long–“Sicario” and “Farewell Transmission” both cross the seven minute mark, and there’s a hidden track after the latter. Dogwood Gap stretch out a lot over the course of the EP–opening track “Mommy Knows Best” is their version of country rock, shambling and rambling across four minutes of intermittently strong guitars and a plodding, leisurely beat. The lengthy “Sicario” is a bit quieter, but it’s not exactly a dirge–steady and patient, the song eventually reaches something that’s recognizably lively folk rock, too. Of the record’s proper songs, it’s “By Design” that has the most pronounced silence, but like “Sicario”, it builds to something more concrete–except “By Design” feels bleak the entire way through, and the (relatively brief) climax doesn’t shake the darkness so much as give a stronger voice to it. Covering “Farewell Transmission” is cheating, but Dogwood Gap don’t fuck it up and it doesn’t overshadow the rest of the EP too much, so that’s a success in my book. Murray’s “Farewell Transmission” might just be a way to bury the final hidden track, the actual sparsest, most ghostly thing on the record. House Sounds is a record made with close proximity to its architect’s heroes, but Murray ends it entirely on his own and sounds perfectly capable of doing so. (Bandcamp link)
Morpho – Morpho Season
Release date: November 15th Record label: Hit the North Genre: Folk rock, fuzz rock, singer-songwriter Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Half of Two
Kristyn Chapman has been making music in Chicago for a while now, most notably as the lead guitarist in the band Waltzer, who put out an album back in 2021 and were most recently seen releasing a split single with Tea Eater last year. In fact, three-fourths of Waltzer appears on Morpho Season, the debut EP from Chapman’s new project Morpho–Waltzer’s bassist Kelly Hannemann and drummer Sarah Weddle are Chapman’s backing band for the majority of the record. The five-song EP (which also features instrumental contributions from co-producers William Erickson and Joey Lemon) is a soft but strong launching pad for Morpho–Chapman’s songwriting gives these tracks a firm foundation, and Morpho have a familiar, warm, and pleasing sound that mixes classic indie rock with folk rock and a Crazy Horse-like relaxed fuzziness. It’s not quite Wednesday levels of country-gaze, but if you liked the last record from fellow Windy City post-alt-country-rockers Ratboys or what Lily Seabird has been up to in New England, Morpho Season might have just the right ingredients.
Throughout Morpho Season, Chapman and her band have the dynamics on lock–songs effortlessly go from breezy, airy folk-influenced tunes to roaring rockers so subtly that it always feels natural. Morpho sound comfortable on their first statement–opening track “Prism” is quite catchy, but not overly showy about it, and while it gets a little more rousing as it goes on, it’s hardly the EP’s “biggest” moment. Morpho’s strongest song in terms of pure electricity is “Half of Two”, which has some nice, chunky guitar to rest upon–to say nothing of the soaring, satisfying solo that Chapman unleashes in the second half of the track. Although Morpho don’t quite hit that high again, the meat of Morpho Season is clearly made by a band with that ability–“Morpho Friend” and “Blue Light” are both deliberately more low-key, steadily trekking and wobbling their ways to well-earned guitar theatrics as they draw to a close. The only track that doesn’t do this at all on Morpho Season is the EP’s closing track, “The End”, in which Chapman stubbornly resists adding anything more than minimal bass and keys to the song’s acoustic foundation. It’s a strong indie folk conclusion, but to me it sounds more poignant thanks to the heights that Morpho scale before they wind up there. (Bandcamp link)
Rosy Overdrive 