Pressing Concerns: Tales of a Kitchen Porter, John Davis, Fantasy of a Broken Heart, Being Dead

Welcome to the Thursday Pressing Concerns! This one has four great albums coming out tomorrow, September 27th: new LPs from John Davis (of Superdrag), Fantasy of a Broken Heart (featuring members of Water from Your Eyes), and Being Dead (featuring members of Zero Percent APR), as well as a brand-new Martin Newell/Cleaners from Venus tribute album put together by Dandy Boy Records. This is the third Pressing Concerns of the week; if you missed Monday’s post (featuring Beeef, Mo Dotti, 40 Watt Sun, and Tanukichan) or Tuesday’s (featuring Rose Melberg, Shredded Sun, Addicus, and The Gabys), 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.

Various Artists – Tales of a Kitchen Porter: A Tribute to Cleaners from Venus

Release date: September 27th
Record label: Dandy Boy
Genre: Jangle pop, lo-fi pop, power pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Mercury Girl

Something has been cosmically wrong for the last few years. We’re living in a golden era of homespun, jangly guitar pop, much of it coming out of the San Francisco Bay area, and yet somehow nobody had thought to gather a bunch of these bands up and have them cover a bunch of songs from the godfather of this entire movement–Martin Newell, aka the mind behind The Cleaners from Venus. It appears that there was one Newell tribute album (appropriately titled ReNewell) that came out back in 2000 and featured Stuart Moxham of Young Marble Giants, Dave Gregory of XTC, and R. Stevie Moore, but it’s long since been time to let the kids have a crack at these songs. That’s where Tales from a Kitchen Porter comes in, assembled by Oakland’s Dandy Boy Records and featuring fifteen bands’ takes on songs from the Cleaners from Venus discography stretched across two sides of a vinyl record and a “special edition” extra 7″. I’ve written about around half of these bands on this blog before now (and several of the ones I haven’t written about feature members of bands I have covered), so it’s not exactly a huge surprise that I enjoy Tales from a Kitchen Porter front-to-back. It’s also not shocking that, given the amount of Newell in these bands’ DNA, that these covers are largely fairly faithful. That doesn’t mean that the acts don’t put their own unique stamps on them, however–some are dreamier, some are noisier, some are more polished, some are more ramshackle-sounding.

There’s plenty to spotlight on Tales from a Kitchen Porter. Regular readers of the blog will recognize Yea-Ming Chen (albeit with a different backing band, The Gloomers) bringing her Yo La Tengo-esque folk/dream pop to “Night Starvation” to open the compilation, as well as Baltimore’s The Smashing Times adding a bit of their disorganized psychedelic mod-pop to personal favorite “Drowning Butterflies” while keeping the desperate gloominess of the original intact to close the proper LP. The familiar faces are responsible for some of the most surprising moments on Tales from a Kitchen Porter (Whitney’s Playland turning the offbeat “Corridor of Dreams” into a straight-up gorgeous dream-jangle ballad) and some of the most upbeat ones (Chime School’s “Mercury Girl”, which is better than sex). I’ve never written about The Dates on Rosy Overdrive before, but I was pleased to see their name on this album as they put out one of the greatest and most obscure jangle pop albums of the past few years in 2019’s Ask Again Later–their take on “Felicity” is louder and more power pop-friendly, but predictably excellent.

The 7” offers a couples of debuts–Inflatable Men (supposedly featuring members of The 1981 and The Goods) make a great first impression with a cheery jangly power pop reading of “He’s Going Out With Marilyn”, and Lauren Matsui of Seablite launches her new synthpop solo project Rhymies with a take on “Gamma Ray Blue”. Also showing up on the extra record is Sleepworld, a band I hadn’t heard of (one of their members plays in Fast Execution, apparently), whose cover of “I Can’t Stop Holding On” is shot through with a sort of wistful but purposeful jangle and might just capture the feeling of those ’80s Cleaners albums more than anything else on Tales from a Kitchen Porter. There’s a piece of that in every song on Tales from a Kitchen Porter, of course–but it’s still really enjoyable to hear who picks up which pieces, and how. (Bandcamp link)

John Davis – JINX

Release date: September 27th
Record label: Lost in Ohio
Genre: Power pop, alt-rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Please Be My Love

Given the kind of music I generally cover on Rosy Overdrive, it can’t be a huge surprise that I’m a fan of Knoxville’s Superdrag, who took power pop merged with 90s alt-rock straight to #17 on the Billboard’s Modern Rock Tracks before disbanding in the early 2000s. I came to the band a little later than some people who had their minds blown by them in real time, but Regretfully Yours and Head Trip in Every Key are clearly brilliant records, and though they did reunite briefly for the album Industry Giants in 2009, it was still a welcome surprise to find out the band were working on their first LP in a decade and a half back in 2022. In the end, things didn’t work out, leading to Superdrag frontperson John Davis to rescue the songs from these sessions and put them out as a solo record called JINX, which is what the Superdrag album was tentatively going to be called, too (thankfully, it seems there hasn’t been a huge rift with the rest of the band over it, as they announced and played a few shows together just earlier this year). Regardless of who’s playing on JINX (in this case, it’s Davis, producer/bassist/father Stewart Pack, and engineer/drummer/son Henry Pack), Davis was right to ensure these songs saw the light of day after the previous false start.

Between Davis’ solo career and newer bands like The Lees of Memory, Epic Ditch, and The Rectangle Shades, there’s been no shortage of new music from the singer-songwriter over the past decade, and no lack of exploration in it, too. The songs of JINX, however, certainly bear the “earmarked for a Superdrag album” stamp, even as it doesn’t quite sound like Superdrag’s most beloved works. JINX is comparatively more stripped-down and laid-back–Davis and the Packs embrace being a power trio on these ten songs rather than attempting to layer themselves to a bigger sound. It works, in no small part because the trio are more than able to conjure up a Superdrag-esque “loud, fuzzed-out take on power pop” vibe by merely ripping through these songs as if they were live. Davis has spent plenty of time in this world, and he knows how to connect the relatively heavy, almost Failure-esque downer-rock of opening track “The Future” with the immediate guitar pop hits (“Please Be My Love” and “Take My Brains Out” brightening the corners on the first side, “Indifferent Stars” and “In Between the Waves” giving a healthy kick to Side B). It’s a fairly short (almost exactly a half-hour) album that doesn’t feel that way–all of these songs are full-scale rockers that merely pare down any and all excess. There’s still just enough time for Davis to remind us of his six-string melody skills in “Cold Advice”–much of the record, like this song, feels pretty thematically dark, but the John Davis trio doesn’t sound bogged down by it in their performance. (Bandcamp link)

Fantasy of a Broken Heart – Feats of Engineering

Release date: September 27th
Record label: Dots Per Inch
Genre: Art pop, experimental rock, psych pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Loss

I think it’s a good bit that all of Water from Your Eyes’ solo and side projects are more accessible than the members’ “main” and most popular band. There’s the straightforward bedroom pop of Rachel Brown’s Thanks for Coming, Nate Amos’ ever-expanding folk-power-pop This Is Lorelei, the cheery-sounding indie pop of Amos’ My Idea, and now we can enjoy the ambitious, “artistic”, but quite hooky pop music of Fantasy of a Broken Heart and their debut album, Feats of Engineering. Al Nardo and Bailey Wollowitz round out the Water from Your Eyes touring quartet, but the duo are much more than just hired guns, having played in a bunch of other bands over the years, frequently together (most notably in Sloppy Jane). Fantasy of a Broken Heart has been kicking around for a while–Nardo and Wollowitz seem like they were destined to co-lead a band together, and the pandemic kicked off a project that began to take shape amid their time touring the world in other groups (the title of their first album is at least partially a nod to the patchwork nature of the record). The duo are remarkably in sync on Feats of Engineering, allowing them to add an impressive amount of interesting ideas to their songs but without losing each other in the fog.

Feats of Engineering is a pop album that takes its lumps, getting hit with bullets from prog rock, “art rock”, and experimental synth-based music and coming out the other side all the stronger for it. It isn’t being released by Ramp Local, but it feels very much in line with Ramp Local bands like Tomato Flower, Kolb, and Turbo World–pop rock for people who just can’t be normal about it for too long (Wollowitz’s Spencer Krug-esque deep-sounding but emotional talk-singing vocals also go a long way in having Fantasy of a Broken Heart remind me of the Wolf Parade/Moonface/Sunset Rubdown-iverse, too). The first proper song on the album, “AFV”, has moments that feel like sweeping, grandiose indie rock and moments that feel allergic to any of that kind of polish, and “Loss” opens with saccharine piano pop only for Wollowitz to ramble somewhat troublingly over the instrumental and Nardo’s vocal hooks. Feats of Engineering has no shortage of simple beauty and just as many moments of pure chaos–highlights like “Mega” and the title track happily steer their way through both ends of the spectrum. Feats of Engineering doesn’t run out of steam–far from it, was “Tapdance 1” and “Tapdance 2” are some of the most inspired compositions on the album, and closing track “Catharsis” ends the LP by giving us more than enough to take in. There’s a strong partnership at the center of Feats of Engineering, and I look forward to seeing where its architects go from here. (Bandcamp link)

Being Dead – EELS

Release date: September 27th
Record label: Bayonet
Genre: Indie pop, power pop, twee, psych pop, garage rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Godzilla Rises

Austin’s Being Dead weren’t really on my radar before I noticed their 2023 debut LP, When Horses Would Run, popping up on some quality best-of-year lists, but the duo didn’t come out of nowhere. Their debut EP, Fame Money Death By Drive By, came out on Austin Town Hall Records in 2019, and while the follow-up LP took some time to come together, Juli Keller and Cody Dosier busied themselves in the meantime by releasing a few albums under the name Zero Percent APR (who I had heard of and enjoyed before knowing of the connection). Actually, sorry–Keller and Dosier are in Zero Percent APR, but the core duo of Being Dead is “Falcon Bitch” and “Smoofy”, names more than appropriate for the bonkers, trippy indie rock/indie pop/jazz-pop extravaganza that is When Horses Would Run. Being Dead kind of remind me of a more Americana version of The Bug Club, with the latter’s British sophisti-twee dialed back in favor of a classic Texas freak-rock energy. The group (now featuring bassist Nicole Roman-Johnston, too) wanted a quick turnaround rather than a long-drawn-out process for their sophomore album–apparently, they were writing new material right up until the time they’d booked with legendary producer John Congleton to make what would become EELS. 

I thought that When Horses Would Run sounded lively enough as it was, but whatever goals Being Dead had for EELS, the result is something that manages to feel both unpredictable and laser-focused on pop music at the same time. The trio zip through sixteen tracks in under forty minutes, but the majority of the album is made up of robust, smart, hooky indie rock songs that are complete thoughts on their own. The Being Dead of EELS are constantly in motion, setting the stage with the 60s-infused power pop of “Godzilla Rises” and the dizzying catchiness of “Van Goes”, getting a bit more melancholic in “Problems”, heavier in “Firefighters”, shoegazier in “Gazing at Footwear” (which, despite the gimmicky name, is a intriguing piece of weirdo art rock that’s as good as some of the more “proper” songs). Being Dead pace themselves nicely on EELS–there are mid-record highlights like “Nightvision” and “Big Bovine” that could’ve come from a more traditional indie/jangle pop band, the trio not overdoing their “Being Dead”ness in songs that don’t call for that and saving their stop-start, turn-on-a-dime energetic operatic pop rock for things like “Ballerina” and “Love Machine” that really benefit from it. Hidden behind the band that cracks themselves up while singing “rock and roll will hurt your soul” is one that decided to bet on themselves following up a noteworthy first album–and EELS is vindication. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Rose Melberg, Shredded Sun, Addicus, The Gabys

Hey there, all! Welcome to the second Pressing Concerns of the week, which is looking at a new career-spanning compilation from the legendary Rose Melberg, new albums from Shredded Sun and Addicus, and a new EP from The Gabys. If you missed yesterday’s post, featuring Beeef, Mo Dotti, 40 Watt Sun, and Tanukichan, check that one out, too.

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

Rose Melberg – Things We Tried to Hide (Selected Songs, 1993-2023)

Release date: August 2nd
Record label: Antiquated Future/Two Plum Press
Genre: Twee, indie pop, indie punk, lo-fi indie folk
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Creaking Gates

Not so long ago, I wrote about The Bed I Made, the long-awaited return from Pacific Northwest indie pop duo The Softies after a twenty-four year gap. I was far from the only one, as plenty of people celebrated a new record that proved Rose Melberg and Jen Sbragia still “had it” all this time later. What a lot of you might not know, however, is that The Bed I Made isn’t the only album featuring Melberg’s music to come out this year. Portland-based Antiquated Future Records has a series of cassettes called “Selected Songs” where they compile music from across an artist’s career in one cassette tape; Fred Thomas, Bonnie “Prince” Billy, and Chris Sutton (Dub Narcotic Sound System) have been among the musicians who’ve gotten this treatment over the past few years. Melberg, who has a sprawling discography stretched across several projects of varying notoriety, is a great choice for this kind of compilation–it’s all laid out in one place as Things We Tried to Hide (Selected Songs, 1993-2023). Per the Bandcamp page, the twenty-five-song cassette comes from ten different projects, twenty different records, and a dozen different labels, ranging from Melberg’s most well-known 1990s acts (Tiger Trap, The Softies, Go Sailor) to perhaps more overlooked bands from the 2010s (Knife Pleats, PUPS, Imaginary Pants).

I’m mostly only familiar with Melberg’s more well-known work, so I’m not really qualified to tell you which underappreciated gems were left off of Things We Tried to Hide. I can only say that the ones that made it onto the compilation are great, both material with which I was already familiar and the new-to-me songs. The Tiger Trap tracks are always welcome–some of the most well-known ones from their sole album are left off in favor of compilation and 7” appearances, leaving songs like “Hiding” and “Sour Grass” to shine bright in this new context. The highest compliment I can give Melberg’s newer material and groups is that they sound right at home next to some of the best indie pop and twee music of all-time–“Creaking Gates” from Imaginary Pants is maybe the best power pop moment on the entire tape, while Brave Irene, PUPS, and her collaboration with Dustin Reske all contribute clear highlights with “Bank Holiday”, “PEI”, and “The Love We Could Have Had”, respectively (and I didn’t know I needed to hear Melberg cover “Mystery” by the Wipers, but her solo version on here is one of my favorites, too). 

It all comes back to The Softies, even here–their signature percussionless, dual-vocal indie pop sticks out among the more upbeat faire, cementing just how special that band is in its ability to do so much with so little. There’s nothing from The Bed I Made here, but the most recent song on Things We Tried to Hide (a cover of Tony Molina’s “Walk Away” from a limited-edition split cassette featuring Molina covering The Softies’ songs and vice versa) is a Softies recording from last year, which also demonstrates the gravity the duo are still able to command. There’s more to Rose Melberg than Things We Tried to Hide, true, but if you’re unsure where to start with one of the greatest indie pop artists of all-time, it’s pretty perfect. (Bandcamp link)

Shredded Sun – Wilding

Release date: September 6th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Garage rock, power pop, psych pop
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: LA Vibes

I wrote a fair amount about Chicago power trio Shredded Sun last year–between their incredibly strong sophomore album Each Dot and Each Line and the brief but substantial Translucent Eyes EP, they received the prestigious honor of having an entry on both my top LPs and top EPs of 2023 lists (The Reds, Pinks & Purples and Blues Lawyer were the only other ones, if you’re curious). 2023’s Shredded Sun releases depicted a group of underground rock and roll veterans (guitarist/vocalist Nick Ammerman, bassist/vocalist Sarah Ammerman, and drummer Ben Bilow, who have played together since the 2000s, initially in the band Fake Fictions) honing in on a winning combination of fuzz rock, garage-punk, psych pop, and power pop and hitting a creative stride. Even so, I wasn’t expecting another Shredded Sun album in 2024 (this is a band that took seven years in between its first and second full-lengths, after all), but here we are a year and change later with Wilding, thirteen more songs and nearly fifty minutes of brand new Shredded Sun material. If you enjoyed Each Dot and Each Line and Translucent Eyes, the trio pick up right where they left off, but (perhaps ironically given the quick turnaround) some of the tossed-off psych-garage energy of their last two records gives way to something just a little more deliberate and measured.

It’s not a huge departure, of course, and the opening salvo of Wilding in particular recaptures a lot of what makes Shredded Sun’s recent records so great–“Cowboy Skull” scoops up a bit of surf and western energy to create a memorable garage rock drama of an opener, while Nick gets to do his best “Yo La Tengo but cool-sounding” loiter-drone-pop impression on the sun-drenched “LA Vibes”. There’s something to be said for Nick’s relative subtlety as a vocalist, but when Sarah comes bursting through the wall Kool-Aid Man-style with “Breaking Out” and sets her expectations sky-high in “Shake the Clouds” (“If you wanna write me a love song, don’t do it sitting down / Make it loud”), the energy level jumps just as palpably. Shredded Sun stretch out into a more expansive, psych-tinged rock group with “Both Your Houses” and “Serpentine”, but they’re still both pop songs, and the second half of Wilding certainly doesn’t abandon the catchier impulses of Shredded Sun (peek the guitar-showcase “Blood in the Water” the fuzzed-out power pop of “Little Only”). There aren’t many moments as sparse as the quiet, almost-slowcore “In the Worst Way” in the middle of the album, but there’s plenty of restraint to be found on Wilding if you really look–not the least of which is “(Another Song Called) Mirror Ball”, which closes the album with a knowing wink and a sincere, thoughtful look back (and forward, too). The tongue-in-cheek attitude only extends to the song’s title, though, as Shredded Sun deliver an earnest, unapologetically emotional final statement–it’s more than earned. (Bandcamp link)

Addicus – Addicus

Release date: July 24th
Record label: Acid Punk/Leave It at That
Genre: Pop punk, power pop, emo
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Oh No! I Forgot My Chill Pill

For most of recorded history, it was thought that there could be no rock music on Michigan’s upper peninsula. This conventional wisdom was disproved last year thanks to Marquette’s Liquid Mike (who, remarkably, had been surviving the region’s climate for several years, putting out three records before their self-titled fourth one got some attention in 2023). It was only a matter of time before more musical life on the UP was discovered–and here we have it with another Marquette-based band, a new power trio called Addicus. They’re a relatively new band, but the group (vocalist/guitarist Lex, drummer/guitarist Josh, bassist Eric) have put out a steady stream of EPs and singles since late 2022–one recording, non-album single “Trolls in My Closet”, even features Liquid Mike’s Mike Maple on lead guitar. Addicus and Liquid Mike are, in a larger sense, both power pop bands, but the muscular alt-rock and heavier punk vibes of the latter aren’t in line with Addicus’ pension for 2010s scrappy indie pop punk and even a bit of emo mixed in, too. Their debut album is a self-titled one, featuring about half new material and half selections from their earlier releases; Addicus is a strong introduction to the band, evoking groups like Remember Sports, Chumped, and Camp Cope but with their own nervous, melancholic stamp on the songwriting.

The best song on Addicus is the first one–“Oh No! I Forgot My Chill Pill” is just about perfect, an unhinged, sugary pop punk tune that would’ve been right at home on Sunchokes or All of Something; although that song’s a tough one to beat, Addicus find plenty more worthwhile material in the same vein across the record’s runtime (almost exactly thirty minutes long). The opening track’s anthemic emo-power pop is mirrored in songs like “Claustrophobia”, and “Can It Get Any Better Than This!”, although the first half of the record works because it intersperses them with interesting left turns like the toe-tapping rhythms of “Useless” and the slightly-less-grand bummer pop of “Backseat” (the guitar lead is that song’s real hook to my ears). Not that anything on Addicus is a huge surprise–they’re just adventurous enough, an attitude that extends to the record’s late highlights like “You’re Not You” (the chilly ballad, which eventually takes off but without abandoning its dour core), “Brb, Getting More Highlander Grogg” (in which Lex says the quiet part out loud by straight-up singing about caffeine) and “Sensitive”, a dynamic meditation on the titular word that closes the album with an impressive performance from everyone from Lex to guest guitarist Andrew Blanchard. Clearly we’ve been ignoring the south shores of Lake Superior for far too long. (Bandcamp link)

The Gabys – The Gabys

Release date: September 6th
Record label: Fruits & Flowers
Genre: Dream pop, indie pop, lo-fi pop, slowcore
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Ode

Little is known about The Gabys, an anonymous British guitar pop duo who are “too shy yet to set foot on stage”, per their record label. I can tell you that they most likely enjoy the music of The Velvet Underground, K Records, and Flying Nun Records–as well as making self-titled records. The first The Gabys was a six-song cassette on Detroit’s All Gone Records in 2021, and four more songs appeared on a self-titled seven-inch via Fruits & Flowers in 2022. We join The Gabys on the occasion of their third release called The Gabys, and their second one on vinyl (which is presumably why it’s designated The Gabys II on streaming services); it’s the best the duo have sounded yet, with hardly a wasted moment among the wistful-sounding indie pop EP’s four songs and ten minutes. Though they may be across the globe, The Gabys fit very well among the quieter side of the current guitar pop revival happening in the San Francisco Bay Area–those who appreciate the molasses-slow, deliberate pop music of Flowertown (and of its two members’ other projects) and April Magazine will find The Gabys’ ability to make timeless-sounding pop songs from the most basic of ingredients quite impressive as well.

The Gabys has a few hallmarks–simple chord progressions delivered with as much feeling as possible, wispy, gazing-out-the-window dream pop-style vocals, unobtrusive drum machines, classic rock and roll slowed to a crawl. “Ode” opens the EP with The Gabys at their best, plugging away at a sub-two-minute song that features all the previously-mentioned aspects for their version of a pop hit–after which, The Gabys say “let’s take it down a notch” and offer up the incredibly-fragile-sounding frozen-in-time 60s pop feeling of “Cursed”. The loudest song on The Gabys is pretty easily “Familiar Dreams”, which will please those of us who like their indie pop with a bit of guitar fuzz–there’s more than a bit of Pacific Northwest twee pop and C86 charm in this one, suggesting that The Gabys’ insular, quieter attitude elsewhere is a conscious choice rather than a necessity. The all-too-brief record comes to an end with “Colour Me Out”, which floats along to its simple percussion and lighter-than-air guitar strumming for three-and-a-half minutes. Dream pop at its most base elements, “Colour Me Out” could’ve gone on for plenty longer and still gotten something out of the track’s core, but The Gabys have gotten the art of giving us exactly what’s needed and nothing more down pat. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Beeef, Mo Dotti, 40 Watt Sun, Tanukichan

Welcome to another week of new music here on the Rosy Overdrive music blog. Our first post of the week is the Monday Pressing Concerns, containing new LPs from Beeef, Mo Dotti, and 40 Watt Sun, plus a new EP from Tanukichan. Read on!

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

Beeef – Somebody’s Favorite

Release date: September 6th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Power pop, indie pop, jangle pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Observational Eros

For those in the know, there was hardly anybody making guitar pop music as consistently strong as Boston’s Beeef were in the late 2010s. That’s when the quartet (guitarist/vocalist Perry Eaton, guitarist Josh Bolduc, bassist Daniel Schiffer, and drummer Neil Patch) put out two excellent records of jangly college rock, more laid-back than Vundabar but maybe not quite as reclined as Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever (I’m partial to 2019’s Bull in the Shade, but their 2017 self-titled LP has plenty of fans, too). As the distance from Bull in the Shade increased, I did wonder if Beeef had quietly broken up, but singles began showing up at the end of last year, culminating in a full-on third Beeef LP. Somebody’s Favorite (intentionally or not, a nod to their cult status in the record title) is just about everything one could want in a New England guitar pop record–immediately catchy, smart, and friendly, with plenty of depth below the sparkle and shine that feels like it will age incredibly well. Somebody’s Favorite even existing at all feels like a victory, but it’s an even greater treat to hear that Beeef sound, more than ever, quite sturdy and built to last.

The advance singles from Somebody’s Favorite reaffirmed Beeef’s status as one of the greatest modern pop bands whenever they feel like being one, and these hits don’t lose anything in the context of the album. “Observational Eros” was my favorite of the three; in context, it’s the record’s five-minute, deceptively simple centerpiece, marrying slacker rock, twee, and undergrad-pop-rock together to create something that’s just about impossible to ignore–even as the song takes a few too many turns to hum/tap along to without a bit of practice. “Nice Clean Shirt” opens the album with an equally patient and peppy anthem, with the verses showing admirable restraint before the soda pop explosion of the refrain (nothing is ever going to fill the Bent Shapes-sized hole in my heart, but Beeef are doing the best they–or, probably, anyone–can here). “Narragansett Bay” wasn’t a single but certainly could’ve been, a surf rock nostalgia trip to the beaches of sunny Rhode Island with some salt-air imagery I can almost taste.

Somebody’s Favorite isn’t a “singles” record, thankfully, with album tracks like the giddy classic rock-friendly “Street Signs”, the smooth, slick danceable pop rock of “Primrose Path”, and wrecking ball-style power pop anthem “Something in the River” sounding as good as anything else on the album (with its earnest, fervent “ode to the city” lyrics, “Something in the River” needed to be a real winner to work, and it does–if anyone gets to write the millennial indie rock version of “Roadrunner”, that’s clearly Beeef). Somebody’s Favorite stretches to forty-five minutes pretty much entirely due to two songs–the six-minute guitar-pop-as-meditation “Hummingbird” in its first half and the eight-minute closing track “Guess I Shouldn’t Wait”. On the latter track, the bayside sunsets and seagulls of the rest of the record are still present, but just outside the reach of the victim of time narrating the song. “Guess I shouldn’t wait for it / To fall into my hands,” is the last thing Eaton sings in “Guess I Shouldn’t Wait”, but the real final statement of Somebody’s Favorite is the five-minute instrumental interlocking piece of music that Beeef launch into right after that. (Bandcamp link)

Mo Dotti – Opaque

Release date: September 20th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Shoegaze, dream pop, indie pop, fuzz rock, noise pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Pale Blue Afternoon

When I wrote about Los Angeles quartet Mo Dotti back in 2022, I described their genre as “loud pop music”–two years later, Mo Dotti have returned with a record that certainly merits that tag as well. The record I wrote about was Guided Imagery, the second EP from the band (made up of founding members Gina Negrini on guitar and vocals and guitarist Guy Valdez, now joined by drummer Andrew Mackelvie, and bassist Greg Shilton), and after releasing a compilation of both of their EPs last year, Mo Dotti have unveiled their first full-length album, the self-released Opaque. On their debut LP, Mo Dotti plant their flag right in the middle of “indie pop” and “shoegaze”, feeling the pull of both sides nearly equally; they’re noisier and louder than their (literal) sibling band Janelane, but certainly more indebted to jangly indie pop than the pummeling version of the genre practiced by Mutation Records acts like Shaki Tavi and Clear Capsule. As it turns out, the center is a great place for Mo Dotti to be, as Opaque delights in keeping us on our toes–will the band tease out a song with extra layers and experimentation like their friends in Dummy and Aluminum? Or will they rip into an amped-up, fuzzed-out pop song like their onetime labelmates Ex Pilots are wont to do?

Sometimes, it’s a bit of this, a bit of that in the same song–take first track “Pale Blue Afternoon” for instance, which opens Opaque armed with melodic guitar lines and dream pop (with emphasis on the “pop”) vocals from Negrini, but they’re taken for a ride in the guise of a sturdy four-minute loud rocker. “Lucky Boy” adds a bit of psychedelic and dance elements to Mo Dotti’s sound to create another expansive pop tune, but “Really Wish” nails the other end of the spectrum by offering up straightforward, vintage melancholic jangly guitar pop. Opaque is a deceptively substantial album–the pop elements are still right in plain view, which does a bit to obscure just how drawn out and (relatively) lengthy these songs are. This is more prevalent in the record’s second half, where Mo Dotti lean on their new rhythm section to pull off pop-shoegaze daggers (“Whirling Sad”) and five-minute, noise-infused rock odysseys (“For Anyone and You”, “Wasted Delay”) in a way that embraces heft and heaviness without dropping Mo Dotti’s formative pop music. The final track (on the album proper, there are some digital download-only bonus tracks if these ten songs didn’t sate you) is a nearly seven-minute one called “Dead to Me”, which functions as one last showcase for the Mo Dotti of Opaque. The swirling shoegaze is still there, but so are Negrini’s strong vocals peeking out from the storm and more bright guitar lines–and there’s some impressive locking-in full-band moments, too. There’s enough to Mo Dotti to fill a seven-minute song completely–and enough to carry a debut LP, too. (Bandcamp link)

40 Watt Sun – Little Weight

Release date: September 6th
Record label: Cappio/Fisher’s Folly
Genre: Slowcore, post-metal, shoegaze
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Pour Your Love

Patrick Walker has been making interesting and heavy rock music for some time now. The British musician founded doom metal band Warning in Essex in 1994–the group only released two proper albums before disbanding in 2009, but they’re still two highly-regarded and fondly-remembered records within the genre today. After Warning broke up, Walker began making music as 40 Watt Sun, releasing three albums from 2011 to 2022 under the project name. The most recent of those three, 2022’s Perfect Light, caught my attention–it’s an absolutely gorgeous record of sprawling, orchestral slowcore in the vein of American Music Club that ended up being one of my favorite albums of that year. Walker has always seemed to work at the pace of five years (at least) between records, so it was a surprise when 40 Watt Sun’s fourth album, Little Weight, arrived only two years and change after Perfect Light. That was an intentional choice by Walker, who, after spending years laboring on Perfect Light, gave himself and his collaborators (longtime collaborator Andrew Prestige on drums and relative newcomer Roland Scriver on bass) strict deadlines to write and record its follow-up, wanting to capture “rawness and spontaneity”. The resultant record picks up Perfect Light’s thread and adds more electricity, injecting just a bit more of Walker’s past to make something “heavy” in a different way.

Little Weight spans six songs and forty-five minutes (practically an exercise in brevity after Perfect Light’s eight songs in sixty-seven), and indeed leans on the core trio of Walker, Prestige, and Scriver to sketch songs largely falling in the six-to-eight minute range. Walker’s distinct, regal voice sits perched atop these tracks just like in previous 40 Watt Sun releases, but here they’re just as likely as ever to be accompanied by swooning, droning electric guitars. His singing has always been a major draw, but Walker’s performances in songs like “Half a World Away” are striking even considering that qualifier. With the “tighter” setup, it makes sense that Little Weight would be (comparatively) streamlined–these songs feel driven and in motion despite their long lengths, and 40 Watt Sun bow out after giving all they’ve got to the album’s one ten-minute track, “The Undivided Truth”. 40 Watt Sun seem to be fairly popular and acclaimed in doom metal circles but I rarely see them mentioned outside of those, which is a shame because these records are beautiful and hardly pure (or even primarily) “metal” albums. These days, “slowcore” is more likely to mean “bands that sound like Duster” than anything all that close to 40 Watt Sun–but anybody who’s unaware of or has forgotten just how powerful this side of the genre can be need only to throw on Little Weight. (Bandcamp link)

Tanukichan – Circles

Release date: September 20th
Record label: Carpark
Genre: Dream pop, indie pop, shoegaze
Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital
Pull Track: City Bus

Oakland’s Hannah van Loon has been making music as Tanukichan since at least 2016, making a name for herself with a handful of records made with Chaz Bear of Toro y Moi. The most recent of those collaborations was an LP released last year called GIZMO, on which, frankly, I missed the boat. I kind of dismissed it as part of a corner of indie pop that wasn’t all that interesting to me without giving it a fair shake, but after a few people whose tastes I respect said some positive things about the album I went back to it and found myself enjoying its welcoming mix of fuzzy indie pop, dream pop, and shoegaze. Thankfully, Tanukichan is releasing a new five-song EP just a year and a half later that’s also quite good so I can finally talk about the project in Pressing Concerns for a bit. Not only is it another strong collection of songs–Circles is also an important record in van Loon’s discography as the first one to be produced by someone other than Bear (this time, it’s Franco Reid). Circles is also Tanukichan’s debut for indie rock stalwart imprint Carpark Records, and (probably coincidentally) it feels more rock-focused than GIZMO–the “ethereal vibes” dream pop is still here, but there’s also a heavier shoegaze undercurrent that’s just prevalent enough to give the EP a kick.

The EP opens with an instant dream pop classic in “City Bus”, a sharp piece of indie pop that melds hard-hitting rhythms with a vapory performance from van Loon–it’s actually not all that indicative of where Circles ends up going, but it’s good enough that this hardly matters. The revved-up shoegaze guitars introduce themselves not long afterward in the EP’s title track, the wall of sound rising up to meet van Loon’s vocals but never fully engulfing them. “It Gets Easier” notably features a cameo from TikTok-famous nu-shoegaze act Wisp, aka Natalie Lu–again, it feels like an area of pop music that I’m not all that interested in, but Lu acquits herself quite nicely on the burgeoning noise pop song. The best moment on the EP, however, might be “Low”, which injects a danceable groove into Tanukichan’s sound but (wisely) keeps the louder, electric side Circles has explored intact, too. If I had to choose one “sound” on the relatively varied EP that I think would be most fruitful for Tanukichan to explore in the future, it’d be the one found on “Low”, but there’s no wrong answers on Circles–not even closing track “In a Dream”, the token pin-drop-quiet acoustic one. Something tells me “In a Dream” wouldn’t make the cut on a “proper” album, but that’s one of the strengths of grab-bag, stopgap EPs that sometimes can upstage the “main” acts. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Big Ups, Nina Ryser, Weak Signal, Otis Shanty

Another wrecking ball of a week here at Rosy Overdrive comes to a close with the Thursday Pressing Concerns, featuring four records coming out tomorrow, September 20th. We’ve got new albums from Nina Ryser, Weak Signal, and Otis Shanty, plus a tenth anniversary reissue and remix album from the great Big Ups. While you’re here, I’ll run down everything else that’s graced the blog this week: Monday’s blog post featured Mister Data, Pallas Wept, Big Bend, and The Knickerbocker5, Tuesday’s post featured Ex Pilots, Freddy Trujillo, Hey I’m Outside, and Seawind of Battery, and on Wednesday we looked at How to Begin by Downhaul. 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.

Big Ups – Eighteen Hours of Static / Eighteen Hours of Static (Hxπ Decoded)

Release date: September 20th
Record label: Dead Labour
Genre: Post-hardcore, noise rock, punk rock, garage rock, experimental
Formats: Vinyl (original album), cassette (Hxπ Decoded), digital
Pull Track: Goes Black

“What happens when it all goes black?” That’s the question that Big Ups memorably asked ten years ago in the most popular song off of their debut album, Eighteen Hours of Static. To the degree that a mid-2010s post-hardcore/garage rock song can be a “hit”, that’s what “Goes Black” ought to be considered–that fiery chorus more or less functions as shorthand for a specific era of East Coast DIY indie rock/punk, an era of which Big Ups were indisputably a key part. Drummer Brendan Finn, vocalist Joe Galarraga, guitarist Amar Lal, and bassist Carlos Salguero Jr. were already a whirlwind of a band on the twenty-eight minute original version of Eighteen Hours of Static, a live-wire record that slams together meaty noise rock, sinewy, claustrophobic 90s post-hardcore/post-rock, and Black Flag-like self-combusting punk rock. The liner notes for the tenth anniversary reissue, written by Dayna Evans, do (knowingly) contain the phrase “man, you just had to be there”, but even those who came to Big Ups later (like me, who subsequently harbors a heightened appreciation for their final album, 2018’s Two Parts Together) don’t have to close our eyes and imagine that we’re in Shea Stadium to get rocked by Eighteen Hours of Static.

I consider Big Ups such a key part of the entire Exploding in Sound Records “thing” that I don’t think I realized that their first album wasn’t even put out by them–Eighteen Hours of Static came via Tough Love in the U.K. and Dead Labour in the U.S., the latter of which is reissuing it for its tenth anniversary and has also put together a supplemental remix album called Eighteen Hours of Static (Hxπ Decoded), featuring a bunch of artists who were a part of the same movement, including Maneka, This Is Lorelei, Rebecca Ryskalczyk (Bethlehem Steel), and Sad13 (Speedy Ortiz). The original album, as I’ve alluded to, still sounds monumentally fresh, the work of a quartet made up of exactly the right players at the right time. “Goes Black” is a towering presence, to be sure, but it’s hardly the only incredible song on the album–in another world, the blistering, warped punk of “Justice” is Big Ups’ signature song, and tracks like the writhing opening track “Body Parts” and four-minute centerpiece “Wool” capture the band’s kinetic energy and harness it for something different but no less powerful. 

Big Ups went on “indefinite hiatus” in early 2019, and while they did contribute a Fugazi cover to a compilation in 2021, the sole live show they’re playing to commemorate the anniversary of Eighteen Hours of Static is their first one in a half-decade (I don’t know what the entire band has been up to in the meantime, but I can tell you that Lal has been busy, at least–he’s put out a few ambient albums and mastered several records I’ve written about on this website, too). While the band are looking back, Eighteen Hours of Static (Hxπ Decoded) is a neat way to make something new while doing so, inviting “old friends and collaborators” to remix these songs. Full disclosure–I’d already decided to write about the Eighteen Hours of Static reissue before I’d heard the remix album, so this would be here even if it was completely inessential. Of course I prefer the original album, but Hxπ Decoded is a pretty fun and enlightening listen–one thing I really appreciate about it is how pretty much everybody keeps the original’s aggression in the mix in some form or another, whether the original song is still fairly intact (like This Is Lorelei’s “Goes Black”) or deconstructed fully (like Rebecca Ryskalczyk’s “Justice”). Big Ups and their peers are free to mess around with Eighteen Hours of Static as much as they want–it’s not losing any power. (Bandcamp link/Bandcamp link)

Nina Ryser – Water Giants

Release date: September 20th
Record label: Dear Life
Genre: Indie pop, art pop, experimental rock, ambient pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Things I Claim

One of the first albums I ever wrote about in Pressing Concerns was Palberta’s Palberta5000, a wild experimental pop/rock record that was one of my favorites of 2021. Palberta hasn’t released anything since Palberta5000, but the band’s members have been busy–Lily Konigsberg has been adding to a fruitful solo career and co-leading My Idea with This Is Lorelei’s Nate Amos, while Ani Ivry-Block has shown up on records from Kolb and Climax Landers. The third member of Palberta, Nina Ryser, has recently joined the touring lineup of experimental duo @ and quietly released her first solo material since 2020, an EP called I Miss My Dog, late last year. I Miss My Dog was a quickly-written and recorded collection of songs about the death of Ryser’s dog, home-recorded like all her solo material at that point–Water Giants, her first album for Dear Life and fifth overall, is the one that breaks this streak. Co-produced by Lucas Knapp and featuring contributions from her @ bandmates (among others), Water Giants is a dizzying studio pop album that takes full advantage of the extra tools at its disposal. Ryser’s lo-fi pop attitude is still there, but it sits alongside material that takes it and blows it up into something larger and more expansive–as well as material that eschews “pop” entirely.

There are a lot of great pop songs on Water Giants, but none of them are in the album’s opening slot–that would be a two-minute, aptly-titled experimental piece called “Swirl”, introducing a just-as-important side of the record that’s also carried by the handclap-aided noise collage “Piggy Boys” and the ambient stillness of “Dust Girls”. In between these compositions, a pop album happens–right after “Swirl” is “Cuz You”, a steady piece of synth-colored pop rock that sounds like a more Stereolab-ified version of Palberta, and single “Things I Claim”, which is more-or-less a bedroom folk song displaying a different kind of accessibility. The mid-section of Water Giants is the heaviest part–“Why Do I Ask” and “Underestimate” spruce things up by marrying Ryser’s pop writing with layered indie rock that speeds (in the former) and lumbers (in the latter) in new ways. Climbing down the other side of the mountain, “Mercury Soda” and “Lessen Your Load” encounter a hazy fog that overwhelms Water Giants until a couple more golden pop songs emerge towards the record’s end. Eli Kleinsmith’s violin helps turn “You Are What You Eat” into an unlikely chamber pop winner, but “Beauty in Grime” might be my favorite moment on the album. Ryser’s muse is a literal heap of garbage, as she reflects on its contents (“Accumulated years filled with joy and tears / … / Former objects of desire growing higher and higher”) in nothing less than awe. Ryser needs little more than simple piano to deliver “Beauty in Grime”, but its plain-spoken beauty is enhanced by the glistening piles around it. (Bandcamp link)

Weak Signal – Fine

Release date: September 20th
Record label: 12XU
Genre: Psychedelic rock, garage rock, 90s indie rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Disappearing

I’m not one to often quote other music writers in my own writing, but Andy Cush (of The Bird Calls and the website “Pitchfork”) referred to Weak Signal as “Yo La Tengo, if Yo La Tengo gave you the vague sense that they might mug you with a butterfly knife after the show” last year, and there’s no sense trying to come up with a more succinct descriptor as that. The New York trio (Tran Huynh, Sasha Vine, and Mike Bones) have rode a distinct mix of chugging psychedelic rock, precise, fuzzed-out garage-y indie rock, and post-punk rhythmic excellence through four albums now–their sophomore album, Bianca, caught my attention in 2021, and 2022’s War&War subtly ironed out some wrinkles in a just-as-good way. War&War also began their affiliation with 12XU Records (Lupo Citta, John Sharkey III, Florry), who issued it on vinyl last year and are also releasing Fine, the fourth Weak Signal LP. The ten song’s on the trio’s latest album continue Weak Signal’s ability to feel streamlined but unhurried, forming an effortless-sounding mix of seediness and transcendence that is musical comfort food to a certain subset of indie rock sickos. Even the moments on Fine that don’t adhere to Weak Signal’s signature propulsive, electric rock and roll feel perfunctory, like well-curated detours before hopping back on the highway.

Fine starts with over a minute of guitar feedback and drumrolls before the opening track, “Out on a Wire”, cranks it into gear–I view it as a sort of throat-clearing and stretching ritual before Weak Signal launch into their familiar, sweaty workout. The first half of Fine doesn’t have a whole lot of breathing room, after all–sure, the somewhat downcast, mid-tempo college rock of “Wannabe” isn’t as fast as, say, the revved-up “Disappearing”, but there isn’t a moment on Side A that doesn’t feel driven and purposeful (Bones does dream of lounging about aimlessly on “Rich Junkie”, but it’s telling that this lifestyle feels out of reach). “Everything is cool, everything is chill,” Bones sings in the chorus of “Chill”, almost reassuring us before Weak Signal launch into the record’s first big left turn in the six-minute soft balladry of “Baby”. Bones has played in Cass McCombs’ band before, and the folk rocker appears on “Baby” to play acoustic guitar–it’s some of the most explicit connecting threads between the two of them yet, and though McCombs doesn’t appear on the two-minute acoustic “Terá Tera”, the similarities continue through that one, too. Fine gets back on the track with the trucking “ILF” and the rumbling “Barking at the Moon”, but “A Little Hum”, finally, finds the midpoint because acoustic strumming and fuzzed out, rhythmic indie rock to close the record. It’s a peaceful conclusion; surely my wallet is safe with these folks, right? (Bandcamp link)

Otis Shanty – Up on the Hill

Release date: September 20th
Record label: Relief Map
Genre: Jangle pop, dream pop, folk rock
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Why Do I Care?

I first heard upstate New York-originating, Massachusetts-based quartet Otis Shanty late last year, when I wrote about a four-song EP of theirs called Early Birds. I was quite impressed with the sound that the band (vocalist/multi-instrumentalist Sadye Bobbette, guitarist Ryan DiLello, bassist Julian Snyder, and drummer Jono Quinn) proffered on Early Birds–laid-back and sprawling, studiously hewing towards the hazy and dreamier sides of jangle pop and folk rock aside from a couple of brief Yo La Tengo-esque noisy flare-ups and reliably strong vocals from Bobbette that prevent the record from fading into the background. The EP got the attention of Relief Map Records (the premiere label for New England bands that could be described as “jangly” and/or “dreamy”), who are putting out Otis Shanty’s sophomore album, Up on the Hill (recorded by Chaimes Parker at Bradford Krieger’s Big Nice Studio in Rhode Island). The nine-song record may only be eight minutes longer than Early Birds, but it feels like more of a “full-length”–there are moments where the band recreate the singular wandering feeling of their previous record, yes, but there are just as many moments where Otis Shanty look beyond and expand upon this sound.

If the shimmering, Real Estate-esque take on guitar pop music of Early Birds spoke to you, you’ll love “Nobody’s Party”, which starts Up on the Hill by picking up seemingly right where Otis Shanty left off–DiLello’s guitar gently but deftly rolls across the song, while Synder’s bass plods along and Bobbette delivers a conversationally dynamic performance as a singer. From there, though, Up on the Hill displays its range–“Tree Queen” is sweeping and surf-tinged, an upbeat and brief track that lets us all know that Otis Shanty can do shoegaze-y indie rock, too, and still deliver solid hooks. “Why Do I Care?” might be less dramatic of a departure, but it still sounds like new territory to my ears–the rhythms of the song, particularly in the bass-and-guitar interplay, are tighter than I’d grown to expect from Otis Shanty, coming together to form a gorgeously blossoming chorus. “Seasonal Apprehension” is another left turn from the band in its embrace of relatively straightforward 90s indie rock/slacker pop in its construction–and that’s even before the vocals kick in and it’s DeLillo who starts singing with a classic half-spoken lilt (you can hear Bobbette in the background, though). DeLillo even rips a giddy guitar solo as the song comes to a close (although the band follow it up with a one-minute ambient piece, perhaps as penance). Otis Shanty are still making comfortable-feeling music with Up on the Hill, but they don’t use that as an excuse to be complacent. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Downhaul, ‘How to Begin’

Release date: September 20th
Record label: Self Aware/Landland Colportage
Genre: Alt-country, emo-indie rock, power pop, roots rock, folk rock
Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital

My favorite moment on How to Begin, the third album from Richmond rock band Downhaul, comes about a minute into the song “YCBTT”. The entire song is impressive, of course–Andrew Seymour’s skipping drumbeat and Robbie Ludvigsen’s classic rock opening riff are perfect out of the gate, singer Gordon Phillips’ distinctive long-steady-gut-punch is in vintage form, and when he trades off lead vocals with Seymour for a few lines (which they do elsewhere on the record, too), it’s an inspired, unorthodox decision. The moment I’m thinking of happens after that, though, in what I guess is the pre-chorus–Phillips grinds the song to a halt with a whammy of a realization (“Well I guess I just thought / About you more than you thought about me”) and Seymour answers by beginning a bright, almost cartoon-like percussive roll. Phillips rattles off hyper-specific, esoteric lines that are nonetheless quite evocative (“But the branch cracked like rock candy / And the devil is left-handed / Came down in a panic to / To the place we both were planted”), sidestepping the music without breaking eye contact. I called their last album, 2021’s PROOF, “cinematic”, which in my mind meant evoking serious, gritty, greyscale prestige-action-thrillers–on this emblematic moment of How to Begin, Downhaul are instead producing a slick movie-musical. 

Three years after their last album, the quartet return with a new LP mastering an entirely different skill set; the funny thing is, though, Downhaul didn’t exactly disappear in between PROOF and How to Begin. Last year, they put out an EP called Squall as well as two-non album singles–in terms of runtime, that’s nearly as much music as there is on How to Begin (oh, and Phillips put out an entire solo album the year before that, too). In hindsight, the trail from the massive-sounding, post-rock-indebted emo-alt-rock of PROOF to the laconic, polished-up, alt-country/power pop-infused How to Begin comes into clearer focus with these interstitial releases. It’s superficially counterintuitive in the case of Squall–the four-song EP is actually “one movement”, recalling the excesses of prog and “art rock”, but there’s actually a bunch of smart pop moments built into it, and it’s really a lot more streamlined than it seems on the surface. “The Riverboat” and “Welcome”, while still being a bit hesitant to fully embrace the rootsier sound of early Downhaul that finally resurfaces on How to Begin, also serve as a dry run for an album in which the quartet consciously decided to go into the studio with the attitude of honing the songs into sharp points rather than “adding onto” them (one where Phillips specifically brings up “the campfire test” as an inspiration–or aspiration–for the record).

The band went to Go West Recording and recorded How to Begin with Mitch Clem, and they came away with a twenty-five minute, ten-song album that does indeed make just about every effort possible to present Downhaul as a band with a keen sense of guitar pop music. Not that this was some huge stretch, mind you–Downhaul have always been underrated hook merchants, and Phillips’ work both with the band on his own is full of proof (Seasonal, his solo album, is pretty much just him and an acoustic guitar, meaning that it passes the campfire test by default). Downhaul just have never been a conventional pop band–and How to Begin isn’t a conventional pop album, either. Songs end almost at the exact moment when they feel they’ve made their point where other bands would stretch another verse or chorus out of them, Phillips’ lyrics are just as thorny and gripping as ever (no watering-down to be found here, no), and Downhaul as a whole still feel like a band that exists in their own little world. That is to say, it’s still a Downhaul album, even as the band have shifted around their angles of attack in executing it.

Opening track “Blue Flame” also has a moment about a minute into the song that blows me away–it’s when the band slips into power chords and steady percussion to launch Phillips’ most memorable line of the song (“California funeral – it oughta be raining, shouldn’t it?”) streaming through the air. The trick of “Blue Flame” is that it eats its cake and has it too–it leans into automatically-pleasing moments like that, but it’s so much more than them, with Phillips’ elemental writing doing the less-obvious but arguably even more important moment of shading the song and situating us for Downhaul’s latest show. It’s a performance with acrobatics–single “Sinker” balances the immediate rootsy instrumental with lyrics that begins with “That shit takes time”, and the powerful mid-tempo “Solstice” takes the pop vehicle into choppy waters regarding uncertainty (“If I never know / If I never know can I live with that?”) and even futility (“Half of the leaves won’t grow back / In the coming spring, and you know that / But you plant in the fall like we can win ‘em all”).

Downhaul populate How to Begin with songs that do the right thing at the right time. “Off and On” is the musical-theater version of PROOF, condensing that album’s serious alt-rock into a quick, digestible two minutes, where “Tired of Trying” is a reminder that so much great art out there is frazzled and dramatic about it (there’s a moment in that one where Phillips rhymes “enzymes” with “slant rhymes”, which would be the most memorable line on any record that wasn’t How to Begin by Downhaul) and “Sleep in the Sunroom” is pure, unfiltered desperation in power pop form. It’s the world of Downhaul, which jars us all “out of it” just when said world starts to seem all-consuming. I’ve been noticing Phillips’ allusions to gardening and plant care in his writing for some time now, but How to Begin is where this really (sigh) blossoms–these moments sometimes read like counterbalances to the chaotic interpersonal nature of some of Phillips’ lyrics, other times like unmistakable metaphors. 

Either way, when Phillips sings about trees and root rot and branches breaking in the wind, it feels like Downhaul’s strongest connections to the outside world. It’s integral to “Rootbound”, the one song on How to Begin that truly has the stamp of finality to it (“I know that it’s over,” Phillips declares, at the very least sounding stronger on this record than when the song initially appeared as a stark acoustic song on Seasonal). It also sets the stage for “Branch”, the final song on the record, which begins with a tree limb falling and splitting “like chopsticks on the lawn”. “It’s windy as hell in Richmond,” Phillips sings, the record’s lone reminder that all of this is taking place in a real mid-sized American city, and then just second later: “There’s comfort in routine / And easing off your dreams will make space for new ones”. The juxtaposition of known (“comfort in routine”) and unknown (finding “new” dreams) could seem contradictory, I suppose, but I think I get it. Jettison the branches that are giving you too much trouble, drop the leaves when it’s time to go dormant. Wait for the right conditions, and then bolt. Grow as much as you can, bloom if you can this year but hold out if it’s not in the cards. Make a bunch of records from different vines that all kind of sound the same. Make something that seems beautifully effortless, colorful and natural. Let them take the fruit thinking that it really was as simple as the final product looks–you’ll always know the rest. (Bandcamp link)

Pressing Concerns: Ex Pilots, Freddy Trujillo, Hey I’m Outside, Seawind of Battery

Welcome back to Pressing Concerns! This Tuesday, we’re looking at new albums from Ex Pilots, Freddy Trujillo, Hey I’m Outside, and Seawind of Battery. Alt-country! Instrumental cosmic Americana! Shoegaze! GBV-core! And more! And there’s also yesterday’s blog post, featuring Mister Data, Pallas Wept, Big Bend, and The Knickerbocker5, to check out if you missed it.

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

Ex Pilots – Motel Cable

Release date: August 23rd
Record label: Smoking Room
Genre: Noise pop, alt-rock, shoegaze, power pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Silver Sword

For those of you who aren’t staying up-to-date on the Pittsburgh shoegaze/noise pop/Guided by Voices-core scene, here’s a rundown: I’ve written a fair amount about Gaadge, which began as the solo project of Mitch Delong but has since evolved to feature songwriting contributions from the rest of the quartet, Nick Boston, Ethan Oliva, and Andy Yadeski. Yadeski and Oliva also play in the power trio Barlow with bassist Jake “JD” Nowoczynski, and all four members of Gaadge play in Ex Pilots alongside Mary Komondy and Ralph Dilullo (the latter of which has also contributed to Barlow), making them a sextet. Ex Pilots more or less seems to be to Oliva what Gaadge is for Delong–he’s the lead vocalist and (at least initially) the main songwriter, but they’ve pretty clearly been a full-on band for a while now. As Pittsburgh’s indie rock scene has gotten more attention thanks to bands like Feeble Little Horse, Bay Area imprint Smoking Room picked up Ex Pilots last year and reissued their 2019 self-titled LP, a strong collection of shoegaze-y noisy guitar pop–in the same world as Gaadge, yes, but Oliva has always been less interested in the experimental “zoomer My Bloody Valentine” layered texture side of Delong’s projects and more inclined to deliver huge Guided by Voices-indebted rock anthems (a band they’ve opened for, by the way) with distortion on tap.

Depending on whether one counts the lengthy 2015 collection Findlay, Motel Cable is either the second or third Ex Pilots full-length, and the first to initially come out on a label (once again, Smoking Room). On what will likely be an introduction to Ex Pilots for a lot of people, the sextet do what they do best–kick out fifteen songs and thirty-seven minutes of hook-laden, shoegaze-informed indie rock shot through with a sense of Robert Pollard-esque propulsive melancholy that’s equally present on the loud, punk-y rave-ups and the record’s more pensive moments. Ex Pilots have a few different modes–there’s the fidgety, punchy version of the band, in which it seems like the group can’t help from throwing moments of noise and aggression in the middle of perfect guitar pop (this version of the band pops up in dynamic opening track “Downdraft” and “Silver Sword”, a song that makes me want to go crazy and hurt myself and others). 

Ex Pilots aren’t quite “mellow” yet, but there’s a surprising amount of acoustic guitar on Motel Cable between “Glory Thread”, “Not Yet”, and “Starry”, among others–while sometimes it’s just an atmospheric springboard to the louder moments on the album, the latter of the three is content to aspire to be nothing more than a contemplative, quietly beautiful early GBV-style ballad. Hello Whirled’s Ben Spizuco pops up on guitar on “Mystery Ship”, a hazy song that falls somewhere in between the group’s two sides–like early highlight “Hannah” and its restrained, mid-tempo steady-hand guitar pop, it helps Motel Cable feel more like a gradient than something oscillating between “all-hands-on deck rock music” and “dreamy basement vibes”. Whether or not Motel Cable is the strongest front-to-back record that its members have put together between their various projects remains to be seen, but it bodes well for both it and the future of all of their bands that it’s a strong contender. (Bandcamp link)

Freddy Trujillo – I Never Threw a Shadow at It

Release date: May 24th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Alt-country, roots rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Corpus Christi

For over twenty years, Freddy Trujillo played bass for long-running Portland, Oregon alt-country-rockers Richmond Fontaine, and since they broke up in 2016, he’s played the same role (along with some of his former bandmates) in soul-influenced country group The Delines. Trujillo, originally from Simi Valley, California, has dabbled in a solo career over the years–he put out an album under his own name in 2002, and again in 2014–but he’s really focused on it in recent years, with Sketch of a Man showing up in 2022 and I Never Threw a Shadow at It, his fourth solo album, arriving merely two years later. I Never Threw a Shadow at It pulls from across Trujillo’s music career and life in general–it’s a deft collection of Chicano rock with alt-country, roots rock, and college rock influences recalling greats like Alejandro Escovedo and The Silos. It’s clearly a “solo” album–almost all of Trujillo’s writing is about his own upbringing and experiences as a Chicano in southern California–but one that welcomes collaboration, as all members of The Delines contribute to it, and the band’s Willy Vlautin even penned the opening track, “Corpus Christi” (a Delines outtake that Trujillo didn’t want to see fade into obscurity).

The rootsy country-rock of “Corpus Christi” is a classic of the genre, an odd-seeming choice to open a record as personal as I Never Threw a Shadow at It, but the circumstances behind its creation serve to connect the Trujillo of the past (who appears in almost every song on the record) with the rock music veteran in the present. The western guitar riff that floats through “I Didn’t Cross the Border, the Border Crossed Me” shades a song about Trujillo’s ancestry that is remarkably restrained and patient in its explanation of the titular line, and the mid-tempo ballad “World There Haunting Me” laments possibility hovering just out of reach. As much of Trujillo is contained within all of these songs, the record’s centerpiece is clearly the title track, a nearly-spoken-word song recounting the blatant racial profiling and harassment he experienced at the hands of the LAPD in a single incident ( “April 17th, 1991: that was the night my car was almost stolen,” he situates us at the beginning of the song). Trujillo follows it with the positive, vibrant sketch of “Mexican Hearts”, although I Never Threw a Shadow at It ends somewhere in between the two with the contemplative “Many Years of Minding”. Trujillo closes the album by ruminating on a lifetime of observation (and even further back, as he acknowledges the “generational” scars of institutional racism on his lineage). The core message of the song–things are never as black and white as we’d like to make them out to be–is simple, but living it as Trujillo does on I Never Threw a Shadow at It is another story entirely.

Hey I’m Outside – Hey I’m Outside

Release date: August 23rd
Record label: Archival Workshop
Genre: Folk rock, alt-country
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Crash

Medford, Massachusetts alt-country duo Hey I’m Outside made their triumphant debut last year with a pair of EPs–the second of them, May’s Smile, caught my attention with its mix of lo-fi bedroom rock and 90s-style rootsy pop rock. 2023 was also when Hey I’m Outside released the first song that would end up on their self-titled debut album (“Racecar”), and at some point the band became a trio with founding members Patrick McPherson (vocals/guitar) and Hannah Fletcher (bass) welcoming drummer Noah Wisch to the fold. The band’s early EPs were solid and flashed potential, but Hey I’m Outside is pretty easily the group’s best work to date–although it’s still home-recorded, the thirty-minute record is the band’s most polished work yet, and the meandering country rock sound hinted at in their earlier releases blossoms and takes full control on the LP. Both McPherson as a vocalist and the band as players sound like relaxed storytellers throughout Hey I’m Outside, an earnest but not overly-sentimental mix of folk, country, and rock in the vein of undersung underground acts like State Champion and Parister (as well as the nowadays-properly-sung MJ Lenderman).

Hey I’m Outside’s opening track “Frontyard” is a strong first statement that also taps the brakes a little bit, taking a moment to celebrate the beautiful things in life that words can’t adequately describe (and so instead the band lean on a more pure form of expression–Crazy Horse-esque guitar knots). The upbeat country-folk of “Crash” may start with a literal accident, but it shrugs off the mess to run away gleefully to the tune of what I believe is guest musician Timothy McPherson’s dobro. The fleshed-out electric country rock of “Racecar”, “Instincts”, and “Lived in Maze” gives Hey I’m Outside a robust midsection–this is all musical comfort food, and while Hey I’m Outside could’ve easily ridden this thread out for the rest of the album, there are some intriguing moments towards the end of the album that push the record over the line. There’s “Insects”, an acoustic-led song about hibernating, hunkering down, and “waiting for something better, I guess”, their ambivalent ode to the band’s homestate, “Massachusetts” (“Now the cool kids moved away / Down to Philadelphia, PA / And some went down to Richmond town / Where does that leave you now?”), and “Goner”, the band’s jangly tribute to Jay Reatard (“Did it hurt? / Sure sounds like it in the verse, in the hook / Of most of your songs / Yeah, damn near ‘em all”). There’s no shortage of this kind of music out there at the moment, but by the end of Hey I’m Outside, its architects have made their case as clear standouts. (Bandcamp link)

Seawind of Battery – East Coast Cosmic Dreamscaper

Release date: August 2nd
Record label: WarHen
Genre: Folk, psychedelia, ambient, post-rock, cosmic country
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: New Moon

New York musician Mike Horn made his debut as Seawind of Battery in 2022 with Clockwatching, an album full of instrumental, guitar-led ambient “cosmic country” soundscapes that got a bit of attention among those who like their lap steel to be on the psychedelic and post-rock side. Horn has kept a steady stream of Seawind of Battery live releases coming on the project’s Bandcamp page, but East Coast Cosmic Dreamscaper is the second formal full-length from the act. Since Clockwatching, Seawind of Battery have joined WarHen Records (Dogwood Tales, Tucker Riggleman & The Cheap Dates, Mike Frazier) and even grown to a duo, with lap steel player Jarrod Annis jumping from live member to full-timer. Those who enjoyed the singular, peaceful journey that Horn (who played everything on the first Seawind of Battery record) took us on with Clockwatching will find plenty of similar terrain covered on the six songs (seven on the CD) of East Coast Cosmic Dreamscaper, but there are also a handful of moments where Horn and Annis push against their languid roots politely but noticeably. East Coast Cosmic Dreamscaper is a more varied-sounding record than Seawind of Battery’s debut, but the LP is clearly stronger for it.

East Coast Cosmic Dreamscaper opens with “Blood Moon”, the only song on the album entirely recorded by Horn, and it enters the cosmos with gentle guitar melodies and lap steel shading in a comforting and familiar manner. The eight-minute “New Moon” which follows it, however, takes a different (and, indeed, new) turn–the guitar part Horn chooses to begin the song with is smooth and quite nearly peppy, and when the percussion kicks in sometime after the two-minute mark, it keeps up the rhythmic hypnosis. By the song’s midpoint, it’s Seawind of Battery’s version of dance pop, Horn shimmering and sketching over top of the steady hand of the drum machine. The duo pull a similar trick in the second half of the record with “Dreamscaper”, a song that balances earthbound, toe-tapping percussion with guitars played with an eye to the cosmos. These moments are perhaps East Coast Cosmic Dreamscaper’s most striking ones, but they’re richer for coming in the midst of songs like “Maze of Roses” (a brief foray into the world of psychedelic dream-folk that’s perhaps Seawind of Battery at their most “traditional”) and “Stay” (in which Horn and Annis unmoor themselves from the world entirely to float in a twinkling, ambient world of polite guitars). Seawind of Battery are growing, guided forward cautiously but openly. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Mister Data, Pallas Wept, Big Bend, The Knickerbocker5

Last week was such a great week on Rosy Overdrive–and I’ll think you’ll be pleased to hear that what we’ve got in store this week is just as great. We’re starting off with a Monday Pressing Concerns featuring new albums from Pallas Wept, Big Bend, and The Knickerbocker5, as well as a new EP from Mister Data. I suspect that most of you have not heard of the majority of these bands before (if you have, congratulations–they’ve done it again!), but I believe you’ll find something in these records that you’ll love.

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.

Mister Data – Missing the Metaphor

Release date: September 13th
Record label: Little Lifeforms
Genre: Folk rock, power pop, indie pop
Formats: CD, digital
Pull Track: Transporter Room 3

I cover a lot of music in Pressing Concerns (I know, it’s true), so you’d be forgiven for not remembering Mister Data’s Pleasure in a Fast Void, which I wrote about in May of last year. A brief refresher–it’s an intriguing, exploratory yet laid-back guitar pop/power pop record from a Houston quintet that’s co-led by vocalists Austin Sepulvado (guitar) and Ellen Story (piano). Now that you remember, feel free to throw all that out the window–Mister Data’s follow-up, a five-song EP called Missing the Metaphor, is a pretty big departure for the band. Not that they suddenly started making ska or post-hardcore or anything like that–they’re still making relatively catchy pop rock, it just feels different. Much of that can be chalked up to some major lineup changes–Story and drummer Gus Alvarado have departed the band, Jack Gordon moved from bass to drums, and Marshall Graves from guitar to bass. Missing the Metaphor is the sound of a band soldiering forward nonetheless, finding a new sound that emphasizes the songwriting and lyricism–and in the process, creating their strongest work yet. Intentionally or otherwise, Missing the Metaphor’s writing touches on stumbling forward uncertainly but bravely, dealing with the agony and ecstasy in trying to live for something–anything–bigger than one’s self.

Missing the Metaphor is remarkable in its unflinching, cohesive cosmic ugliness–I liked Pleasure in a Fast Void, but there was nothing on that album suggesting that Mister Data had something like opening track “No. I Don’t Think So” in them. “Every day feels like the start of something new / Every day that I’m married to you,” Sepulvado sings as the sun rises at the beginning of the track, and the track (and the relationship therein) descends into a skin-crawlingly public disintegration, one that feels like it spills over into the EP’s second track, “Headcanon in G Minor” (these things never wrap themselves up as neatly and timely as we’d like, no). If the first two songs on Missing the Metaphor reflect the pratfalls of trusting another person with a hefty portion of one’s happiness and meaning, “Transporter Room 3”, the heart of the EP, is the antidote. Mister Data keep it simple here, as Sepulvado’s guitar and vocals sit largely unadorned while unspooling a genuinely affecting modern folk song about organized labor, ancestral pride, and belief in a shared humanity that extends beyond one’s own lifespan. Oh, and it’s about Star Trek, too–the whole thing is based on a minor plot point from an episode of Deep Space Nine (look, the band is called Mister Data, there’s no getting around it). “Transporter Room 3” bleeds into the title track, a rude awakening after the previous song’s interstellar utopianism. Probably the catchiest song on the EP, “Missing the Metaphor” is a just-as-beautiful portrait of the indignity of it all–scraping by in a dreadful job in order to pay the bills and “keep [one’s] dog alive”. It’s probably the best song ever to include the phrase “ecclesiastical evermore”.

We all want “Missing the Metaphor” to be an uplifting “quit your shitty job” anthem, but it doesn’t exactly lend itself just to that reading. Those looking for storybook closure aren’t going to really get it with the EP’s final track, “The Galaxy Song”, either. For one, it’s a Monty Python cover, which should clue you in on what’s coming–but nonetheless, the final verse (“So remember, when you’re feeling very small and insecure / How amazingly unlikely is your birth / And pray that there’s intelligent life somewhere up in space / ‘Cause it’s bugger all down here on Earth”) is still one hell of a lurch–taking us light-years away from the tiny planet where Mister Data’s characters are licking their wounds after a break-up, looking to the stars for hope, gritting their teeth and getting through the worst days, and actively fighting to make the world a better place. Time marches forward, but it’s also a social construct–that means you can make whatever trajectory you want out of Missing the Metaphor. At least, that’s probably what Mister Data believes–true Trekkies, these Texans. (Bandcamp link)

Pallas Wept – Nothing But Water

Release date: September 10th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Psychedelic pop, 90s indie rock, art rock, math rock, prog-pop
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Seasick

Pallas Wept is a new indie rock band out of Houston, comprised of vocalist/guitarist Ethan Adkison, guitarist Gavin Kenyon, bassist Zach Sutton-Fountain, and percussionist Ruairi O’Brien (who lives an hour away in Huntsville–a short jaunt by Texas standards). They’ve been playing live shows around the Lone Star State for over a year now without any music out, but they’re starting with a grand first statement in Nothing But Water, their debut album. For those of you who love when bands make proper, thirty-plus minute albums with only six songs on them, you’ll find exactly what you’re looking for on Nothing But Water, a record that isn’t shy about letting its songs creep past the five minute mark. Probably the simplest way to boil down Nothing But Water is the classic-rock-band-setup guitar heroic version of indie rock practiced by Built to Spill crossed with the progressive pop jamming attitude of Animal Collective (I didn’t just come up with that; both bands are prominently mentioned in the email O’Brien sent to me about this album). What sticks with me longer than the RIYL list, though, is just how even-keeled Nothing But Water sounds–Ruairi O’Brien’s drumming, Kenyon’s mesmerizing guitar leads and harmonics, Sutton-Fountain’s hidden-in-plain sight bass melodies, and Adkison’s earnest indie pop vocals all have their moments, working hard to tease out the best in these songs without hogging the spotlight for too long.

Being one of the two songs on the album under five minutes long, “Fuzzy” is almost Nothing But Water’s “single” by default–it’s certainly brimming with enough melodic hooks to function as that, although the majority of the track’s stately, restrained emo-y indie rock sound doesn’t quite tell the listener everything that Pallas Wept have in store for them. Of course, that was never going to be really all that doable in just one song–even when “Fuzzy” roars to life for a half-minute towards the end of the track, it’s nothing like the stomping first movement of “Seasick” that follows it, nor is it like the quiet, post-rock wave-lapping that leads the song to its Modest Mouse-esque big finish. The second half of Nothing But Water is Pallas Wept growing stronger and bolder in real-time, topping themselves with one more ambitious song after another. The guitar work in “Mountain” is key to the song’s journey, repetitive and sturdy yet excitedly reflecting the upward climb. “How Cruel” starts its life as a downcast slacker rocker and it advances without too many bells and whistles, Pallas Wept believing in the smoldering heart of the track completely. If you liked that, you’ll be thrilled to see the band bust out the acoustic guitar and “atmospheric” production choices to get seven-minute closing track “Shimmer” started. Three minutes of hazy, dreamy aimlessness, two more of burgeoning, building post-rock–and then one last big indie rock anthem to cap it all off. Everything’s just right. (Bandcamp link)

Big Bend – Last Circle in a Slowdown

Release date: September 13th
Record label: Shimmy-Disc
Genre: Post-rock, art rock, experimental, jazz rock, chamber pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Wheeling

Big Bend is the project of Nathan Phillips, a Mansfield, Ohio-based musician whose work lives in the experimental realms of folk, rock, and electronic music. His breakthrough album, 2019’s Radish, was culled from “improvised recording sessions” at New York’s Figure 8 studio, but it nonetheless added a clear pop side to Big Bend that was missing on the group’s free-form debut, Hunched (this is largely due to Phillips stepping up as a vocalist on Radish after leaving the first Big Bend album instrumental). The third Big Bend album (and first for Shimmy-Disc), Last Circle in a Slowdown, emerged in much the same way Radish did–this time, via “ensemble jam sessions” from an Australian residency featuring producer Shahzad Ismaily, hammered dulcimer player Jen Powers (Powers / Rolin Duo), violinist Anna Roberts-Gevalt (Shane Parish), and drummer Sarah Pedinotti (Lip Talk), among others. Last Circle in a Slowdown also picks up the thread Phillips began exploring on Hunched, sounding more confident in its marriage of delicate pop music with the power of an ensemble of brilliant musicians. It’s almost like Phillips did Talk Talk in reverse, pulling jazz and classical influences together and coming away with a pop-fluent version of post-rock and folk music that uses empty space just as deftly as it uses percussion, piano, and guitars.

The last album I remember enjoying this much that also evoked late-era Talk Talk was Modern Nature’s No Fixed Point in Space, but Last Circle in a Slowdown builds an identity for itself early on by being more percussive and propulsive. The piano and drums of opening track “Wheeling” feel just a little restless; when Phillips finds a desperate twinge in his vocals after trying to keep things to a croon for most of the track, it fits the song’s atmosphere. While there’s a slow and still beauty throughout Last Circle in a Slowdown, Big Bend don’t rest at the cool pond of their sound entirely–“The Exit” and the title track both pleasingly puncture their ornate cores with Phillips’ emotive voice, and “Fast Moon” makes a pact with noise early on in its runtime. Last Circle in a Slowdown continues its rustling with second half highlights “Cistern” and “At the Door”, while penultimate song “Rolling Chair” might be the most complete-sounding composition on the entire album. Phillips leads his collaborators in a more or less straightforward chamber pop song for most of “Rolling Chair”; it doesn’t sound all that different from the more exploratory moments of Last Circle in a Slowdown, and when the song gets wobbly and shaky as it comes to a close, it’s right in line with the record too. (Bandcamp link)

The Knickerbocker5 – Disco Princess (Where We Are Now)

Release date: September 10th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Funk rock, dance-punk, post-punk, jazz-rock, art rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Sugargaze

The Knickerbocker5 are a relatively new group, formed by three Japanese musicians (two from Osaka, one from Tokyo) living in Brooklyn during the pandemic and named for the location of their first practice sessions together in person (on a rooftop on Knickerbocker Avenue). After debuting with a couple of singles last year, the trio (bassist Yoko, guitarist Arii, and drummer Ayako) have put together a seven-song, twenty-seven-minute cassette called Disco Princess (Where We Are Now) as their first full-length. The first Knickberbocker5 album puts the band members’ skills (between them, they’ve played in the bands Hard Nips, First President of Japan, Juice, and Invisible College) to good use, as the group make a version of rock music with shades of funk, jazz, and post-punk in a way that calls to mind both The Knickerbocker5’s home country and their current city of residence. Although there are plenty of extra touches on Disco Princess (Where We Are Now) (the core members are credited with everything from flute to guiro to vibraslap, not to mention guest musicians Pearie Sol on keyboard and Katya on saxophone), it has a pleasing live-jam feel to it–I can imagine all of this (well, most of it) happening on a rooftop somewhere in Brooklyn.

“Ligero (a.k.a. Karokaya or Step Lightly)” is a pleasingly straightforward start to Disco Princess (Where We Are Now), a relatively minimal dance-funk-rock tune carried by the rhythm section and beginner Spanish vocals (“Quiero hablar español pero no sé como hacerlo” is the first line) and augmented by Ayako tinkering on the cajon and guiro and Katya’s saxophone. Although the title track does indeed include a few stabs of disco guitar, on the whole it’s actually more deconstructed and post-punk-ish than the song before it–but even that doesn’t prepare us for the eight-minute psych-funk-prog-disco-kraut odyssey of “Sugargaze” that ends the first half of the tape. The core of “Sugargaze” is a pretty catchy dance-punk idea, but The Knickerbocker5 throw everything they’ve got at it, keeping it exciting for its entire runtime. If that doesn’t sound like a blast to you, I don’t know what to tell you, but maybe you’ll enjoy the closest thing the album has to a “hit” in the groovy, synth-y post-punk of “Spangle”, or the dub-like saxophone-heavy “Showa”. If “Sugargaze” is too much for you, you’re definitely going to want to skip closing track “Silver”, too–for those of us who are completely down with New York psychedelic rock that contains a troubling amount of flute playing, however, it’s a perfectly acceptable way to close out Princess (Where We Are Now). (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Kal Marks, Pulsars, Old City, Yon Loader

The conclusion of an absolutely wonderful week on Rosy Overdrive arrives with the Thursday Pressing Concerns. We’re looking at four records coming out tomorrow, September 13th: new albums from Kal Marks, Old City, and Yon Loader, plus a reissue of Pulsars‘ sole album. To recap this week’s posts: on Monday, we looked at records from Public Opinion, Webb Chapel, Young Scum, and Trevor Sloan, Tuesday’s post featured Guidon Bear, Mythical Motors, WUT, and Alejandro, and Wednesday brought an in-depth look at Bad Moves’ Wearing Out the Refrain. 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.

Kal Marks – Wasteland Baby

Release date: September 13th
Record label: Exploding in Sound
Genre: Noise rock, post-punk, art punk
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Wasteland Baby

I’ve had nothing but respect for Boston noise rock act Kal Marks for a while now (the last song from 2018’s Universal Care, the one with the long title, is one of my favorites), but the album that truly won me over was their fifth full-length, 2022’s My Name Is Hell. Perhaps not coincidentally, that was the album where vocalist/guitarist Carl Shane debuted a new line-up, featuring guitarist/vocalist Christina Puerto (of Bethlehem Steel and Mulva) and bassist John Russell, and the group took the band’s sound away from blistering post-hardcore and more towards straightforward, meaty noise rock (not a huge transition, but noticeable enough for people who like this kind of music). The sixth Kal Marks LP is called Wasteland Baby, and although it features another lineup change (Adam Berkowitz, who’s also played with Alexander, Big Heet, and Mulva, steps in for Dylan Teggart on the drums), it continues the evolution tentatively advanced with My Name Is Hell. Described as a “borderline-concept album”, Wasteland Baby wanders 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 noise rock, but Kal Marks use rhythms and sweeping art rock to embark on a journey, not unlike labelmates Pile’s recent work.

Kal Marks are far from a “folk” band, but Wasteland Baby’s songwriting and narrative asks why noise rock can’t have some of the gravitas awarded to two of Shane’s favorite musicians, Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan (and, plus, there’s an intriguing burned-out balladeer lurking in the vocal takes for “Hard Work Will Get You Nowhere” and “You Are Found”). In a way, Wasteland Baby mirrors Kal Marks’ journey in miniature, as darkness and chaos build into something more cohesive and maybe even a little less dim as the album progresses. The first proper song on the album, “Insects”, scurries along with its pessimistic, pestilential view of humanity in tow (it goes down easy with a danceable post-punk rhythm section), and “Hard Work Will Get You Nowhere” is even more pummeling than the title might suggest. Kal Marks sound uneasy on “A Functional Earth” and “You Are Found”, but that doesn’t stop the songs forming something towering and grand, and “Whatever the News” injects an actual groove (and Puerto’s excellent backing vocals) into the equation. “Whatever the News” kicks off Wasteland Baby’s incredibly strong home stretch, also featuring the surprisingly bright “Motherfuckers” (a curiously enjoyable number that paraphrases Cohen and maintains the band’s bite through mid-tempo alt-rock), the especially-modern-Pile-like drama of “Midnight”, and the closing title track. “Wasteland Baby” is an incredible final statement–I knew that Kal Marks could be explosive, but not like this. It’s a Bruce Springsteen song–I mean, about as close as anyone could get. There’s entire bands that’ve based their identity on ripping off Bruce Springsteen that have never made anything like “Wasteland Baby”. “There’s only one thing in this world I don’t despise / Oh, it’s her eyes,” howls Shane, right before the chorus throws a match into a fireworks warehouse. Needless to say, “Wasteland Baby” ends with its gaze straight ahead. (Bandcamp link)

Pulsars – Pulsars (Reissue)

Release date: September 13th
Record label: Tiny Global Productions/Damaged Disco
Genre: Power pop, new wave, alt-rock, synthpop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Tunnel Song

There is no shortage of different ways for me to introduce Dave Trumfio. As a producer, engineer, and runner of Kingsize SoundLabs, he most famously helped record Wilco’s Summerteeth, and has worked with everyone from OK Go to Franklin Bruno to Built to Spill as well. As of late, he’s been a member of longrunning British/Chicago alt-country group the Mekons, and he’s also started the record label Damaged Disco (which received something of a formal launch early last year with the release of Grey Factor’s 1979-1980 A.D. – Complete Studio Recordings compilation). As a frontperson and songwriter, however, his most beloved work is with The Pulsars, the 1990s technologically-minded new wave revival duo he led with only his brother Harry on drums. Chewed up and spat out by the post-grunge major label industry, The Pulsars managed to released one album in 1997 before their upstart label (Almo, from the minds that brought you A&M) folded and Trumfio understandably decided to refocus on his production career rather than live in that particular purgatory. However, Pulsars have resurfaced in recent years, with a compilation of rare and unreleased material showing up in 2021 and this year bringing both a vinyl reissue of Pulsars (which had up until now only been available as a CD) and the announcement of the duo’s first live shows in 25 years.

A quarter-century later, Pulsars is a singular album. It doesn’t sound like the late 1990s, but it’s undoubtedly a product of its time in an odd way. The Cars-y new wave/synthpop homage baked into the record’s sound is more devoted than peers The Rentals or future Trumfio associates OK Go’s versions of it, but there’s still some irreverent Chicago 90s power pop/alt-rock a la Fig Dish and Triple Fast Action in the mix, too. Trumfio sings about robots, technology, and aliens in a way that updates the original 80s paranoia for the era of both slacker and geek rock. The computers and androids in Pulsars vindicate the tinkering hobbyist (“Technology”) and serve as a faithful companion for someone who probably wouldn’t get out much otherwise (“My Pet Robot”), and the extraterrestrials deliver a memorable, spirited kiss-off to all of humanity in one of the record’s most propulsive tracks (“Runway”). Pulsars is really obviously a great lost pop album, both in the more thematically-relevant songs and in Pulsars’ other concerns (like “Tunnel Song”, a buzzing, absurdly catchy synthpop tune about various tunnels in the United States, and “Suffocation”, which is of course about love). Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but it does feel like there’s some commentary on the exploding alt-rock world around them in songs like “Owed to a Devil” (the classic soul-selling story delivered in a way that practically invents Kiwi Jr.’s sound two decades before they showed up) and “Save You” (starring an under-the-microscope character that could be a stand-in for plenty of people around this time period). Buried under an end-of-history avalanche for entirely too long, Pulsars feels shockingly vibrant right now. (Bandcamp link)

Old City – Old City

Release date: September 13th
Record label: Get Better
Genre: Hip hop, punk rock, experimental rap, sampledelia
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Jump Off

Philadelphia’s Old City (not to be confused with the anarcho-punks from Portland of the same name) are a “punk hip-hop group” largely made up of producer Justin Mayer and emcee Tr38cho and who made their debut for indie punk label Get Better Records (Bacchae, Cowboy Boy, Empty Country) back in 2021 with a five-song self-titled EP. All five songs on the Old City EP are present on the group’s debut LP, also titled Old City, which spans sixteen songs and nearly an hour in length. The bio for this album gleefully compares Old City to Paul’s Boutique, and the album (built from “hundreds” of punk rock samples, in addition to contributions from a handful of real-live punk bands) does indeed combine the adventurous spirit from that era of hip-hop with an even clearer focus on rock in the construction of these songs. While Old City’s tracks may be collages of punk rock distortion, melodic bass, and meaty riffs, Tr38cho is more than capable of handling the “rap” portion of Old City’s sound on his own, as he’s just as likely to sound fiery, furious, or contemplative while leaving the production and guest spots (including Milo Aukerman, War On Women, and Olmec musically, and J. Robbins and Jonah Falco from a production standpoint) to supply the rest.

Old City has a lot of ground to cover, and it sets the scene with a handful of hard-hitting punk-rap scorchers one after another in the record’s opening salvo. “Jump Off” does just that, snagging a dirty-sounding surf-punk guitar riff to pair with the rest of the song’s punches (from the percussion to Tr38cho’s moments on the mic), while “Anthem” pulls a snaking, tension-filled instrumental into something just as catchy in a hypnotic way (featuring a memorable cameo from The Ramonas, living up to their name), and “Get Sued” borrows one of the most recognizable sounds from post-grunge rock radio for a three-minute drain-circling number. It’s hard enough to keep up with Old City on their own, but things get even wilder when War on Women commandeer “Class Act” and turn it into an actual paint-peeling punk anthem (built from one of my favorite subjects for songwriting, too, which is “song about a woman who’s really cool”). On something as all-encompassing as Old City, we’ve got time for the rhythm section showcase “Apollo Kids”, the blistering hardcore rap of “Crossfire”, and eight-minute album centerpiece “Prey”. “Prey” has everything you could want–deeply driven rapping from Tr38cho about organized religion, industrial freakouts, a swelling orchestra, and plenty of noise. “Prey” might be the grandest moment on Old City, but it’s an album way too sturdy to let one moment tower over the rest of it for too long. (Bandcamp link)

Yon Loader – Yon Loader

Release date: September 13th
Record label: Tiny Engines
Genre: Emo-y indie rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Locked and Left Behind

Earlier this year, I heard an album called Take Time by a band from New Zealand called Carb on Carb. It was the first album in nearly a decade from the duo (Nicole Gaffney and James Stutely), and the songs showcased an emo-tinged power pop sound that kind of sounded like a more electric version of fellow Kiwi group The Beths, delivered with the skill of experts. As it turns out, we don’t have to wait several years for new music from Carb on Carb’s members–in fact, only a few months after Take Time, Stutley has debuted a new project titled Yon Loader. Although Stutley is the creative head of Yon Loader, a “cast of rotating collaborators” (including members of the bands Recitals, Welcomer, For Everest, Model Home, Fouler, First Move, and Bad Friend) help give the project’s self-titled debut record a full-sounding, chilly emo-y indie rock sheen. Released on Tiny Engines, Yon Loader is in line with a lot of the label’s discography, particularly the wistful journal entry-rock of Norway’s Flight Mode (it also reminds me of Flight Mode associates Neighboring Sounds–perhaps Yon Loader is simply a Scandinavian emo-rock band that’s been accidentally placed in the wrong hemisphere).

I don’t have the credits for Yon Loader, but it’s clear that there are multiple lead singers on the record. The vocals on opening track “Locked and Left Behind” are key to setting the stage–matter-of-fact and melancholic, they sound strong enough to carry the polished, mid-tempo sad-rock instrumental up to the next level. A lot of records like this fall victim to becoming too sonically boilerplate, but Yon Loader mixes it up more than just with the vocals–the five-minute Midwestern emo journey of “Tied Up In” is an early-record endurance test, while the two tracks immediately following it (“Two Good Things” and “Another Month”) are both brief guitar-and-vocals-only recordings. Yon Loader walk this balance beam for the entirety of the record, the band’s knack for punchy, tight emo-alt-rock (“Another Year”, “The Doubt”, “Waiting Up”) burning bright alongside a just-as-deeply-felt interest in quieter, sparser moments (“In the Way”, “In the Glow”, “Leaving Now”). The final song on Yon Loader is another entry into the latter category called “Dust Settles Down”, spending most of its length guided by a guitar being played so as to not wake someone in the next room and accompanied by plain-spoken vocals. “Cut through the talk like a highway through a cemetery,” sings Stutley emphatically, and not long afterwards the song finds a soaring emo chorus. Like Yon Loader as a whole, its reflective moments are linked with its flares of passion. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Bad Moves, ‘Wearing Out the Refrain’

Release date: September 13th
Record label: Don Giovanni
Genre: Power pop, pop punk
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital

Washington D.C. power quartet Bad Moves made one memorable first impression back in 2018 with Tell No One, which still stands as one of the best punk rock debut LPs in recent memory a half-dozen years later. Their sophomore album, Untenable, followed less than two years later and kept things fresh with a palpably darker sound but without letting up on the the most important aspects of Bad Moves–massive, catchy power pop carried evenly by all four members of the band (guitarists Katie Park and David Combs, bassist Emma Cleveland, drummer Daoud Tyler-Ameen). Even though the gap between records was twice as long this time, the third Bad Moves LP hasn’t wavered as one of my most anticipated albums of the year. Part of that might be because Combs’ Dim Wizard solo project, whose two one-off singles last year served as a reminder of the brilliance he’s been a part of in the past, but there’s also just something unique about Bad Moves’ take on boisterous, rambunctious guitar pop music. In the intervening years, there have been several quite good records by bands using more or less the same formula (Martha, Teenage Halloween, Jeff Rosenstock), but nobody can quite match their ability to take on two separate ambitious muses (heady, whip-smart political and cultural observations and even analysis for one, and firecracker, all-in, hook-laden power pop for the other) and smash them together so effortlessly.

At their best, 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. Part of the thrill of Untenable is hearing Bad Moves swim upstream and still create something distinctly “them”–on their latest, the quartet make the opposite choice, leaning in and capturing the moment the rollercoaster starts gaining downhill momentum. That’s “A Drowning Confession”’s music you hear, an opening track that takes a page from the book of “Change Your Mind” from Tell No One but ups the ante with dramatic synths and ticking-time-bomb vibes. Wearing Out the Refrain lives up to its name as the hits keep coming and the group steamrolls forward–I’ve already written about “Hallelujah” when it was released as a single, but I want to reiterate that every time I’m listening to it, I’m convinced that it’s the best song of the year, and then some. It’s the catchiest thing they’ve ever done, and while the subject matter would’ve gotten an “I don’t know, man” from me in a vacuum, it sounds stronger and stronger every time I take it in (this is why I’m not in the band Bad Moves, I suppose). We (or, maybe, just me) take the hypocrisy of the American conservative movement for a given these days, but the moment that one realizes that not only are they completely devoid of virtue and hungry only for power, but that they do and are so murderously, and that you may indeed be a target, is a powerful and fucked moment indeed. “Hallelujah” captures that moment, and finds joyous rock and roll at the other side.

There are two songs on Wearing Out the Refrain that clock in at under two minutes, and they’re two of the best songs on the album. The first one is “I Know I Know”, which has the unenviable task of following up “Hallelujah” and takes the “just don’t look down” route straight ahead by speeding through one long, continuous hook that doesn’t allow for a moment’s peace before crossing the finish line. The other one is “Sorry That I’m Not Better”, which follows up “New Year’s Reprieve” (another one I’ve already written about, another one worth underscoring that it’s still really good) and takes a bit of a different route. The opening to the track, with just the guitar and vocals, underscores the harsh self-reflection that’s started by the title and only continues in the song’s lyrics. “Sorry That I’m Not Better” kicks into gear eventually because we’re still in the middle of the Bad Moves album, a whirlwind instrumental soundtracking “It’s always unsatisfying / But you know that I’m trying, I’m trying”; its triumphant uncertainty mirrors the blunt end-of-year reflections of the song before it. 

If you liked the darker, heavier undertones of Untenable, I’d direct your attention to the final three tracks of Wearing Out the Refrain–I don’t think the refrains are properly “worn out” by this point, but that doesn’t stop Bad Moves from adding to the mix with a pair of five-plus minute songs and a “rocking out” dial that’s been conspicuously turned up. “The Undertow” is Bad Moves’ own personal wall of sound, threatening to sweep us all under but never losing the power pop at the core of the wave, while “A Lapse in the Emptiness” is one of the most dynamic songs on the record, mixing delicacy with some inspired guitarwork. And it all comes to a head with “Days Don’t Quit”, in which Bad Moves turn into something else entirely: a measured, inching-forward alt-rock group. I’ve been sitting with this one for a bit–to me, it sounds like a ghost, like a chilling out-of-body experience from a band that’s used to situating themselves right in the middle of the moment. There’s something about Bad Moves sounding unmoored that’s very affecting–even the inevitable big-rock-music finish to the track only serves to further obscure what to make of the song.

One can’t fault any of the choices for singles for this record–I didn’t even mention the Sugar-esque hit-by-a-truck power pop of “Outta My Head”, but that’s a great one, too–but if I’d have to choose one song to best capture Wearing Out the Refrain, it’d be the superb album track “Eviction Party”. “I’m not gonna lie, it socked me right between the eyes,” the band sing in the first verse, a relatively restrained piece of theatrical post-punk-pop compared to the twin galloping tunes that came before it. Like a lot of Wearing Out the Refrain, it’s unflinching in its engagement with the world around it (this is a song called “Eviction Party”), and like a lot of the album, it’s ambivalent about what it all means–it doesn’t give into the darkness, but nor does it provide you, the listener, with a clear way out. “Press your face up to the 8-track and breathe one precious breath at a time,” is how Bad Moves ramp up to the chorus, and then: “I close my eyes and chase the dread with something saccharine and sweet / Jack and coke ice in my head / A cool and carbonated heat”. It is, once again, the sound of a band right in the middle of things. One could note how the climax of “Eviction Party” is explicit escapism, surrounded on all sides by a much harsher reality. Or you could see the explosion of sensations in the refrain as proof that this “escape” is just as much reality as the eviction, if not more so–the compilation of perceptions that “reality” is, anyway. As the band says, it’s a two-part story. (Bandcamp link)

Pressing Concerns: Guidon Bear, Mythical Motors, WUT, Alejandro

On this fine Tuesday, we’ve got an eclectic assortment of new records to look at in Pressing Concerns: new albums from Guidon Bear, Mythical Motors, and WUT, and the debut EP from Alejandro. An instant classic! If you missed yesterday’s post, featuring Public Opinion, Webb Chapel, Young Scum, and Trevor Sloan, check that one out here.

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

Guidon Bear – Internal Systems

Release date: July 31st
Record label: Antiquated Future/YoYo
Genre: Indie pop, synthpop, folk
Formats: CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: TV Screen

It seems like I should be familiar with Guidon Bear, but I hadn’t heard of them until quite recently. It’s a duo made up of two Olympia indie pop veterans, Mary Water and Pat Maley, who originally played together in Little Red Car Wreck in the late 1990s. Maley has also been a frequent collaborator with fellow Olympia musician Lois Maffeo, playing in her bands Lois and Courtney Love, as well as running Yoyo Recordings (the Mountain Goats, The Microphones, Mirah) and its associated recording studio. At the end of last decade, the two reunited as Guidon Bear, releasing albums in 2019 and 2022; Internal Systems is the project’s third full-length. While their first two albums, Downwardly Mobile: Steel Accelerator and Unravel, are offbeat collections of music primarily in the realms of indie folk and guitar-based pop, the latter started to incorporate a bit more synth/electronic elements, and this side of the band blossoms fully on Internal Systems. Remarkably, the buzzing and chiming synths added by Maley to these songs fit perfectly alongside their guitar-based indie rock sound–it doesn’t reduce Guidon Bear’s “old” style so much as add to it, and it’s no less devoted to enhancing Water’s incredible songwriting.

Internal Systems is a winding, rich listen–counting an alternate acoustic version of one song, it’s a dozen tracks and nearly fifty minutes long, and Water’s lyrics are just as engrossing and vivid as the music they accompany, if not more so. Internal Systems jumps between indie folk, indie pop, and electronic music in a way that reminds me quite pleasingly of the great Emperor X, and the incredibly human writing at the center of it (in the vein of Dear Nora, John K. Samson, and Christine Fellows) goes a long way towards that, too. The six-minute opening track “TV Screen” is a half-asleep jumble of images glimpsed on the titular object (as well as one’s phone), fiction and reality blurring much like watching videos on Instagram tends to do, the simple synth backgrounds soundtracking Waters’ train of thought and guitars only showing up on the sparingly-used chorus–it’s maybe the best song I’ve heard all year. As hard as it should be to live up to the strength of “TV Screen”, Guidon Bear press on with highlights like “Animal Child”, which pulls acoustic guitars and piano tones together as Water paints a tender portrait that’s just as compelling.

In a just world, I (or someone better at this that me) would devote entire articles to individual songs on this record; there’s just so much going on musically, thematically, and vocally in tracks like “Wheels” (containing a very pleasing couplet that rhymes “cars” with “amplifiers”), “Family Shadow Trance” (a hard-hitting piece of folk rock that contains some of the most animated moments on the album), and “Death Ray” (a truly breathtaking, painfully open portrait of a complex familial relationship) for me to capture in this brief review. The last proper song on Internal Systems, “Grizzles or Sharks?”, is hard-earned–the peace and companionship explicitly laid out in the song comes out of the thorny stories that came before it on the record (not to mention the first verse of “Grizzles or Sharks?” itself, dealing with suicidal ideation that’s kept at bay but doesn’t disappear entirely). When Water sings “living’s hard work”, though, she’s doing it. (Bandcamp link)

Mythical Motors – Seven Is Circular

Release date: September 6th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Lo-fi power pop, psych pop
Formats: CD, digital
Pull Track: Impossible Symmetry

Regular readers of Rosy Overdrive will be well-acquainted with Chattanooga, Tennessee’s Matt Addison and his solo project Mythical Motors by this point. Since the advent of Pressing Concerns, I’ve written about four different Mythical Motors records, all of which have kept Addison’s prolific streak of bite-sized lo-fi power pop alive and strong. Seven Is Circular is the second Mythical Motors album of 2024, following April’s Upside Down World, which saw a cassette release via Repeating Cloud Records (Teenage Tom Petties, Dignan Porch, Log Across the Washer). At this point, one has a good idea of what one will get in a Mythical Motors record–electric guitar pop instrumentals and synth/MIDI-string-aided ballads with Addison’s distinctive, Tobin Sprout-esque eternally youthful voice delivering ace melodies atop them. That being said, after having listened to both of this year’s Mythical Motors records a fair amount, they do have distinct personalities. Upside Down World felt a bit like Addison leaning into the upbeat, rockier side of Mythical Motors, almost like he was trying to meet potential new listeners via the proper label with his most immediate side. Seven Is Circular, meanwhile, is the one for us already on board–it’s Mythical Motors unfettered, zipping through twenty songs in thirty-seven minutes and running the gamut of their sound.

Addison might not be keeping things as tight as on his previous record here, but he still knows how to string together a bunch of power pop hits to kick Seven Is Circular into gear. Opening track “A Stolen Echo” (Halloween organ aside), “When We All Come Alive”, and “Queen Domino” all get the job done; while the bittersweet guitar meandering of “Dream Us In” flirts with tapping the brakes, it’s not until the acoustic “Slow March to Clown City” that Mythical Motors announce that they’re going to stretch out for a bit. And stretch out they do–the middle of the record is marked by the three-minute “The Tunnel Keeps Moving” and the arena rock turn of “Ignominious Glome”, indicating that Addison is paying just as much attention to the heavier, prog-indebted moments on later Guided by Voices records as he is to the bubblegum sections. Songs like “Spinning Tops Over Silver Sets” and “Tune Your Sun Dial” find Mythical Motors exploring sun-drenched psychedelia, quietly in the former and quite loudly in the latter, but both display a willingness by Addison to let his writing and his guitar playing meander just a bit. Mythical Motors are never going to be a “dark” or “heavy” band, but songs like “Curse of the Fallen Rainbow” ensure that Seven Is Circular feels like one of the colder entries into the band’s discography. Of course, that might just be because Addison allows himself time to explore these reaches on the record–we still end up at the bright-shining guitar pop of “Impossible Symmetry” at the end. (Bandcamp link)

WUT – Mingling with the Thorns

Release date: August 23rd
Record label: HHBTM
Genre: Twee, indie pop, jangle pop, C86
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Beuys Oh Beuys

Drummer Lauren Smith plays bass in the excellent Tough Age, while guitarist Kaity McWhinney and bassist Tracey Vath have a history together in the bands Knife Pleats and Love Cuts (alongside Rose Melberg in the former). Since 2018, the Vancouver-based trio have been playing together as WUT, releasing their debut album, Now, independently in 2020. The group has linked up with HHBTM Records (Outer World, The Garment District, My Favorite) for their sophomore album, Mingling with the Thorns, which solidifies their status as a valuable member of the West Coast jangle pop/twee/guitar pop scene. With all three members contributing vocals and songwriting to the record, Mingling with the Thorns is a deceptively breezy listen that’s nonetheless overflowing with ideas, hooks, and things to say. It’s not just their grasp of simply-brilliant Pacific Northwest guitar pop that recalls the region’s indie rock history; their label refers to them as “riot-twee”, and all three members of WUT connect with each other via writing worthy of such a description. The eleven songs of Mingling with the Thorns largely navigate relationships–romantic, familial, whatever–both with a conscious and stalwart understanding of patriarchy (riot!) and by still largely hewing to people-first, emotional explorations of such situations (twee!). 

It’s not an exaggeration to say that Mingling with the Thorns is overflowing with personality befitting a band with multiple strong songwriters, particularly in its opening salvo. “Powering Through” is nothing short of timeless indie pop–WUT are zipping through a clear winner of a pop tune, and they know it. The skipping twee-pop “Here for You”, the jangly storytelling of “Quiet Quiet”, and the rainy Cascadia guitar pop of the title track all have just as much to offer, but the writing is where the world of WUT really breaks open. The complete relationship subordination of “Here for You” is the flipside of the absolute scorn directed at a detestable patriarchal figure in “Quiet Quiet” (the vocal trade-offs in the latter are to die for, by the way), and the weak but sincere smile of “Mingling with the Thorns” is disarming in the face of what came before it. WUT’s ability to smoothly examine plenty of different perspective continues into the second half of Mingling with the Thorns–“Your Feelings” is a palpably frustrated song about trying to read somebody and failing, and then “Beuys Oh Beuys” is a satisfyingly sugary sneering song about a specific type of asshole (“You’re not a shaman, just a powerful man / A man in control–what’s so radical about that?”). When WUT bow out with “When I’m Gone”, we’re left with one last catchy indie pop song and the question of how sincerely we’re supposed to take the lyrics. That’s a lot of the appeal of Mingling with the Thorns–it’s eager to continuously give us more than it has to. (Bandcamp link)

Alejandro – Anaheim

Release date: August 16th
Record label: Good Eye
Genre: Indie pop, folk rock, soft rock, art rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Anahiem

One of the most underappreciated new-to-me acts of the first couple years of this blog was Brooklyn’s Personal Space. The quartet put out an album on Tiny Engines in 2016, and after a while of silence returned at the beginning of this decade with two great records (2021’s A Lifetime of Leisure and 2022’s Still Life EP) that put together a unique mix of shining indie pop, languid soft rock, and relaxed but still sharp math rock. Personal Space quietly went on hiatus last year (very quietly–I don’t think they announced it publicly), but guitarist/vocalist Alex Silva was already working on new material, and he teamed up with Personal Space drummer Jesse Chevan and newcomers Charlie Hack (bass) and Justin Gonçalves (guitar) to form Alejandro. The Alejandro quartet debuted only slightly-less-quietly in mid-August of this year with a three-song digital EP called Anaheim, offering the first taste of a life post-Personal Space for Silva and Chevan. As it turns out, Alejandro shares plenty of superficial similarities with Personal Space, but a closer look reveals a group of musicians clearly not trying to just emulate their predecessor band. So much of Personal Space’s music relied on subtle interplay and subsequent meandering structures–Alejandro comes out of the gate with seemingly little interest in beating around the bush.

Anaheim does indeed sound like the work of musicians who had been constrained by the pandemic and are now eager to get back at making music together, the three songs bursting with an immediacy and core simplicity that Personal Space was more likely than not to eschew. It’s hard to think of a better introduction to Alejandro than the EP’s opening title track, a gorgeous piece of guitar pop that eagerly serves the whirlwind, confusing story that Silva delivers in the song’s lyrics. Silva sounds surprisingly messy on “Anaheim”, and while the rest of Alejandro can’t quite be called that, they’re dynamic enough to soundtrack this side of Silva appropriately. The travelogue continues in the tropical depression of “Rio”, in which the narrator, in passages described enthusiastically and grandly by Silva, thinks “I just want to be home in my room alone,” as they crawl across South America. The EP closes with “Folly Tree”, in which Alejandro’s acoustic, folk rock undertones bubble to the surface, and the story of visiting a “friend’s arboretum” is classically Personal Space in its mixture of ritzy cultural signifiers, personal uncertainty/uneasiness, and hyperspecificity in isolation. There’s a wine glass on the table; in several senses, no one knows how it got there. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable: