This is a classic Thursday Pressing Concerns here, looking at three albums that will be coming out tomorrow, November 15th, plus one LP that came out yesterday. Brand-new full-lengths from Bedtime Khal, Sunnsetter, and Mud Whale are featured below, as well as an archival compilation featuring the work of legendary producer Dennis Bovell. Be sure to peek this week’s earlier blog posts too if you missed them; Monday’s post featured Sassyhiya, p:ano, Smoker Dad, and Blank Banker, and Tuesday’s featured Ylayali, Good Energy Crystal, Gentleman Speaker, and Megan from Work.
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.
Bedtime Khal – Eraser
Release date: November 15th Record label: Devil Town Tapes Genre: Lo-fi indie rock, bedroom pop, fuzz rock Formats: Cassette, digital Pull Track: Dumb Stuff
East Lansing bedroom rock musician Khal Malik, aka Bedtime Khal, was one of the first artists to release a record on Leeds’ Devil Town Tapes–they put out Malik’s Fog EP in 2020, reissued the Hard to Find and Wake Up EPs as a single cassette in 2021, and he appeared on a compilation celebrating five years of the tape imprint in 2022. Despite all this, Bedtime Khal had still never released an album until now with Eraser, his first full-length record and first new record of any kind in four years. Those Bedtime Khal EPs might be fairly obscure, but they’re quite good, and fairly unique-sounding, too–Malik has an interesting take on “bedroom pop” on those releases, sounding more indebted to the 2000s post-punk revival than your Alex Gs and Sebadohs. It worked very well in short bursts, so I was naturally curious to hear what Malik would do with a larger canvas–in this case, one that’s nine songs and twenty-six minutes in size. It shouldn’t be surprising but it’s still remarkable that Eraser sounds like nothing else Bedtime Khal has done before–it reminds me of other bedroom pop projects, like Portland’s Guitar, that start to sound larger and louder when they get the means to do so. Guitar went full-on shoegaze on their most recent album, but Bedtime Khal’s evolution isn’t so linear–there’s bits of fuzzed-out basement indie rock, slowcore, emo, and bright pop music throughout the album. Eraser isn’t “more of” any one thing so much as it’s just “more”.
Like his previous records, Malik sings and plays most of what you’ll hear on Eraser aside from some guitar and vocals from Noah Kim (who plays with Malik in the emo duo Sideria) and a couple of guest vocalists. Whether or not Malik is on his own doesn’t seem to correlate with how “fully-developed” a song sounds–the huge opening track “Dumb Stuff” and its roaring wall-of-fuzz chorus is all Malik, while I don’t know if I would’ve pegged the relatively chilly, downbeat mid-tempo bedroom rock of “Blood Bucket” as one of the ones featuring Kim. The tougher, more ambitious version of Bedtime Khal is out in full force with “Dumb Stuff”, and while the rest of the cassette’s first half doesn’t quite go all-in like the opening track, there’s still plenty of hefty moments to be found in tracks like “Halo”, “Something Like That”, and “Fruit Snacks” (the latter of which is a noisy basement-punk instrumental). Another nice surprise from Bedtime Khal is that they take advantage of a full-length album runtime by shifting the vibe noticeably in the record’s second half. The final four tracks on Eraser are all significantly subtler and more contemplative, the heaviness more frequently coming from what Malik and Kim let hang in the air rather than loud guitars. Nonetheless, some of Malik’s strongest writing is back here–“Blood Bucket” and the (previously heard as a demo on the aforementioned Welcome to… compilation) “4 Wheels (Don’t Cry)” are both hushed but substantial pop songs, and “I’ll Let You Ask Me a Question” indulges in the tinny, reverb-touched side of “bedroom pop” to deliver some nice bittersweet hooks. The talent and promise of Bedtime Khal were apparent before Eraser, and the LP confidently takes a step beyond that firm foundation. (Bandcamp link)
Dennis Bovell – Sufferer Sounds
Release date: November 15th Record label: Disciples Genre: Dub, reggae Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital Pull Track: Dub Land
You may not know Dennis Bovell’s name, but there’s a good chance you’ve heard something the man’s been involved with if you like the kind of music Rosy Overdrive covers. Not only is he a prolific reggae and dub musician (on his own, with the band Matumbi, and with Linton Kwesi Johnson), he also wrote the U.K. lovers rock/disco hit “Silly Games” and worked with several legendary British post-punk groups (Orange Juice, The Slits, The Pop Group). His biography is both impressive and beyond the scope of this blog post–most of it I was unfamiliar with before the Sufferer Sounds compilation caught my ear. Sufferer Sounds is a new double LP/CD out via Disciples (Charlène Darling, Phew, Special Interest) that zeroes in on a specific era of Bovell’s career, largely drawing from recordings he made from 1976 to 1980. It took the better part of a decade for Disciples and Bovell to track down the original recordings, remaster them, and properly present the compilation in what would become its final form, but it’s hard to argue with what we hear on Sufferer Sounds. Comprised of fifteen songs from various Bovell projects and collaborations (but with everything other than a dub version of “Take Five” written or co-written by Bovell himself), Sufferer Sounds is nonetheless a cohesive, transportive hour-long dub and reggae journey that spotlights a talent that more often than not operated away from the center of attention.
We’re thrown right into dub land at the beginning of Sufferer Sounds–literally, the first song is a seven-minute track credited to The Dub Band called “Dub Land”. It rules–it’s still recognizably dub, but it’s busy, sprawling, and surprising, streaming through locked-in rhythms, crisp echoes, and bursts of melodies. “Blood Dem” (credited to Dennis Matumbi) is a more minimalist version of dub, but there’s still a bite around the edges of the track, and the smooth, horn-laden “Suffrah Dub” presents yet another distinct version of Bovell’s sound. The towering dub selections are the bread and butter of Sufferer Sounds, with more focused reggae moments peppered in here and there for variety’s sake (“Come With Me” is the most obvious example of this, while Africa Stone’s “Run Rasta Run” and Errol Campbell’s “Jah Man” tilt in this direction, too). There’s a ton to take in on Sufferer Sounds–I’ve already alluded to “Take Dub”, but there’s also “Game of Dubs”, an alternate version of the song that Janet Kay took all the way to Top of the Pops in 1979, and the record’s closing duo of “Cry” (by Angelique) and “Crying” (a different version of the song by “DB at the Controls”). A quick “ctrl + F” tells me I’ve never covered anything I’ve labeled as “reggae” in Pressing Concerns before, but my ears tell me one doesn’t need to be an expert to appreciate Sufferer Sounds. (Bandcamp link)
Sunnsetter – Heaven Hang Over Me
Release date: November 15th Record label: Paper Bag Genre: Noise pop, shoegaze, fuzz rock, art rock Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital Pull Track: Fear It Comes in Waves
I’ve written a bit on this blog about OMBIIGIZI, Status / Non Status, and Zoon, a group of interconnected Canadian indie rock bands featuring a lot of shared personnel (Adam Sturgeon and Daniel Monkman being the two most prominent creative heads) but whose records cover everything from fuzzed-out, experimental 90s-style indie rock, folk, psychedelia, and electronica. One musician who’s been a key part of this cluster of bands is Andrew McLeod, who plays in both OMBIIGIZI and Zoon as well as making music on their own as Sunnsetter. As Sunsetter, McLeod is a prolific self-recorder/self-producer, steadily putting out music on Bandcamp since at least the late 2010s. McLeod has expressed a desire to make “heavier” music, and the latest Sunnsetter album, Heaven Hang Over Me, represents a step in that direction in multiple ways. For one, it features the debut of a new Sunnsetter live band (guitarist Cole Sefton, bassist Hannah Edgerton, drummer Trevor Cook, and keyboardist Kyle Gottschalk), who play on a re-recorded version of an old Sunnsetter song, “I ACTUALLY DON’T WANT TO DIE”. And for another, Heaven Hang Over Me is indeed a heavy record in its own way–while the album (whose title comes from a misheard lyric from Nirvana’s “Dumb”) doesn’t deviate too far from the folk and psych-influenced indie rock of McLeod’s other bands, they use an intense devotion to noise to push and stretch this sound into something new.
The core tenets of Heaven Hang Over Me are all sturdy, welcome pillars of rock music–between an emotional, uninhibited lead vocal performance from McLeod and the roaring, shoegaze-influenced alt-rock guitars, this is a record that shoots for stadiums without trying to smooth down or sand off the edges of its creative head. Sunnsetter sound just as at home pulling off these sweeping, go-for-broke anthems like “Fear It Comes In Waves” as they do in the more low-key, folk/pop-indebted tracks (“Try Again”, “Bittersweet”). Heaven Hang Over Me weaves deftly through the midsection–featuring the first really challenging moment on the record, the eight-minute post-hardcore scream/noise-fest of “I Want to Live (The Body Is a Place of Rest)” and the relatively restrained but still quite-a-lot-to-take in, six-minute “Never Forget”–and comes out the other side even stronger with the crunchy fuzz-pop “Take a Shot” and the gorgeous Modest Mouse-indebted Big Sky indie rock of “I Feel Everything”. Heaven Hang Over Me feels even grander than its overstuffed fifty minute runtime (the dreamy folk of “Nothing to Fear” is cut from the vinyl edition); it makes perfect sense that Sunnsetter need a six minute instrumental called “The Moon, and in the Water” in order to cool down and bring the album to a final halt. This all certainly bodes well for McLeod’s ambitions. (Bandcamp link)
Mud Whale – Humans Pretending to Be Human
Release date: November 13th Record label: Self-released Genre: Post-hardcore, emo-punk, alt-rock, pop punk Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital Pull Track: Checking In
Mud Whale are a Cleveland-based “emo grunge” quartet who showed up in 2021 with a debut album called Everything in Moderation. Since then, the band (vocalist/guitarist Michael Morris, guitarist Justin Cheuvront, bassist Joe Hanson, and drummer Avery Sylvaine) have been riding the Midwestern emo circuit, playing Fauxchella and touring around the region, and have now released their sophomore full-length, Humans Pretending to Be Human. Mud Whale’s second album is an inventive and overeager punk rock record–the group can and frequently do smoothly transition between blistering, raging post-hardcore and slick emo-y alt-rock, sometimes within the same song. Morris’ evocative screaming often serves as the more harrowing end of Mud Whale’s sound, and the rest of the band temper him with catchy, almost pop punk guitars sprinting alongside. Of course, Morris’ voice can also take a shape more conducive to polished emo-pop, and the instrumentalists can be tough, meaty noise-punk merchants, too. Throw in a couple of additional genuine genre-lurches liberally sprinkled throughout Humans Pretending to Be Human, and you’ve got yourself a strong second statement of an LP.
The first two songs on Humans Pretending to Be Human, “Checking In” and “Smoke Signals”, don’t cover the entire ground that Mud Whale traverse on the album, but they’re a pretty good litmus test for if you see the same vision that the band does. “Checking In” marries a triumphant emo-power-pop instrumental with an unhinged vocal delivery from Morris, bounding around excitedly as it blows Humans Pretending to Be Human right open. “Smoke Signals” brings the “grunge” part of “emo grunge” with a choppy, heavy-feeling alt-rock instrumental that Morris takes some time to really match (but he gets there, don’t worry). The similarly-minded emo-punk of “Figure Out” and “Sacrifice” might lull us into a false sense of…discomfort? (I guess?) but then Mud Whale decide to throw some bossa nova-influenced emo-pop at us with “Little Place” (it feels very natural!) and a random trap outro to the dream-punk-emo sprint of “Fluorescent” (it feels…less natural, but not necessarily in a bad way!). These detours are nice (and probably helped draw me, who doesn’t really write about this kind of music all that much, in to the album), but Mud Whale find their way back to dynamic, dramatic, emo/post-hardcore/punk rock to finish Humans Pretending to Be Human off with “Part of Me”. Mud Whale sound great when they’re sketching out the song in its first half, and when Morris and the band both roar as the song and album draw to a close, everything that’s gone into Humans Pretending to Be Human seems right at home with each other. (Bandcamp link)
The second Pressing Concerns of the week gathers up four quality under-the-radar LPs from the past month or so–specifically, new albums from Ylayali, Good Energy Crystal, Gentleman Speaker, and Megan from Work. And it’s the second great blog post in as many days, too; if you missed the Monday Pressing Concerns (featuring Sassyhiya, p:ano, Smoker Dad, and Blank Banker), check that one out as well.
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.
Ylayali – Birdhouse in Conduit
Release date: October 16th Record label: Circle Change Genre: Fuzz rock, experimental, lo-fi indie rock, lo-fi pop Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Birdhouse
When he’s not drumming in power pop group 2nd Grade, Philadelphia’s Francis Lyons makes music on his own as Ylayali, a prolific solo-ish project with an impressive back catalog of fuzzed-out, lo-fi indie rock. I wrote about the last Ylayali album, Separation, which came out on Dear Life Records back in 2022 and is probably a fairly accessible entry point into Lyons’ dreamy, layered music. Birdhouse in Conduit is Lyons’ newest album as Ylayali; it was quietly self-released by his own Circle Change imprint in October and does…something different than Separation. Lyons pieced this album together from 2022 to 2024 at home, mostly on his own but with a few regular collaborators popping up (Katie Bennett of Free Cake for Every Creature on vocals, Will Kennedy of 22° Halo on guitar/drum machine, Jack Washburn of Remember Sports on guitar, Ben Lovell and Jason Calhoun with some more esoteric contributions), and it’s Ylayali at their most exploratory. There’s still pop music to be found in Birdhouse in Conduit, but it sits alongside ambient and droning fuzz passages, experimental electronic instrumentation, and blasts of noise. None of this gets in the way of the “core” sound of Birdhouse in Conduit and is in fact a key part of it–distortion and static have always been important to Ylayali, and this record is no different in shaping these elements into something just as emotional-sounding as the indie and folk rock hidden intermittently between them.
Keep everything I just said in mind when embarking on the journey that is Birdhouse in Conduit’s first track, “Francis Funeral Home”. The majority of the nearly ten-minute song is a wall of distortion, and it’s only after the seven-minute mark that Lyons’ voice appears and whispers some lyrics as the track takes the form of a low-key but buzzing pop song. “Francis Funeral Home” is probably the most “difficult” part of Birdhouse in Conduit, but it’s hardly the only time Ylayali challenges us–even the more recognizably-structured songs that immediately follow it, “Devil Dog” and “Birdhouse”, both find some surprising moments in their five-minute allotted timeslots. The relatively clean “Birdhouse” is jarring in its own right, and between it, in “Joy” and (ironically) “Fuzz”, Lyons is just as successful at shaping quieter sounds. I’m not sure what I’d call the most “accessible” moment on Birdhouse in Conduit, although Lyons surprisingly saves some contenders for the album’s second half between “Shadow Play” (a gorgeous gliding synth-pop instrumental, albeit with very buried vocals from Lyons) and “Spacebar” (led by a hypnotic drumbeat and some subtle, uplifting instrumentalism). I can’t emphasize enough how rewarding it is to meet Birdhouse in Conduit where it’s at–Lyons is probably one of the most trustworthy people to make a record like this deserving of one’s full attention and patience, but it’s still surprising to hear this album take shape over time. (Bandcamp link)
Good Energy Crystal – Good Energy Crystal
Release date: November 8th Record label: Self-released Genre: Art punk, post-punk, no wave, egg punk, jazz-punk, lo-fi punk Formats: Cassette, digital Pull Track: Welcome the Feeling
Evan Asher may be known to some readers of this blog as the drummer in Kalamazoo experimental/math rock group Memory Cell, but they’ve got a pretty impressive back catalog on their Bandcamp page, a pile-up of records from projects with names like A Really Big Horse, MILK KEG, and Evan11111. Their latest moniker is called Good Energy Crystal, which Asher has debuted with an eight-song self-titled album available via cassette. It appears that Asher plays everything we hear on Good Energy Crystal–the only outside contribution is vocals from Shady Bug’s Hannah Rainey on two songs. The stately, spindly indie rock of Memory Cell is nowhere to be found on Good Energy Crystal, which is some kind of weirdo lo-fi basement art punk record or something. It reminds me of weird jazz-inspired SST groups like Saccharine Trust–Asher’s flat, somewhat agitated-sounding monotone vocals are accompanied by messy, confrontational music (both Asher and their instruments sound just a bit too close for comfort)–it should be a fairly typical Midwestern post-punk/egg punk album, but there’s just something off about everything on Good Energy Crystal.
The off-kilter, slapdash jazz-punk sound marking Good Energy Crystal introduces itself in the record’s opening track, “The Swing of Things”–like in most of the album, the bass is way too prominent in the mix, the instrumentation swerves in and out of jazzy ditches, and Asher sounds rambling and angry about it. The song does in fact have something of a refrain though, and the guitar part in it is actually kind of catchy. Rainey shows up on the deconstructed, stop-start ballad “Good Energy Crystal”, duetting with Asher to sing inspirational lines like “I’m no good / I’ll never learn”, and she sticks around for the incorrect-sounding dance-funk corpse of “Me2You”. Good Energy Crystal is just getting started, though–things really get out there with the psychedelic ambient electro-pop vibes of “Head”, and the second half of the album even brings the closest thing Good Energy Crystal have to a punk song in “Days Grow Longer”. In the latter, Asher speeds up the music until it sounds like a facsimile of all those new-fangled post-punk/garage rock groups, all the while grousing “This new arrangement / Seems to be killing me” over the speedy, mechanical track. Good Energy Crystal is only about twenty-two minutes long, with the lackadaisical post-punk skittering of “Welcome the Feeling” closing the curtains of Good Energy Crystal’s first act. This kind of thing doesn’t have, let’s say, “universal” appeal, but Asher has a pretty interesting and unique take on it, and Good Energy Crystal is a worthwhile adventure for those of us who’re open to it. (Bandcamp link)
Gentleman Speaker – Hell and Somewhere Else
Release date: October 18th Record label: Self-released Genre: Indie pop,post-punk revival, power pop, emo-pop Formats: Digital Pull Track: Rise of the Hens
I’m not sure if Saint Paul, Minnesota’s Gentleman Speaker are huge Dismemberment Plan fans or if the similarities I hear between the two bands primarily have to do with the similar tone of lead singer Tim Brecht’s vocals to the unmistakable voice of Travis Morrison on those canonical indie rock LPs. Compared to the D-Plan’s bizarre new wave/post-hardcore sound, Gentleman Speaker are more clearly indebted to guitar pop and even power pop, but I think the acts share a nervousness and occasional impishness in their songs. Hell and Somewhere Else is the band’s third LP since debuting with a self-titled record in 2019 and following it up with 2021’s The Well Between Continents, and the quartet (Brecht on vocals and guitar, Adam Fekete on guitar, Jim DeYoung on bass, and Brian Dendy on drums) infuse this one with stop-start alt-rock and post-punk catchiness, equal parts offbeat new wave and sprawling guitar-centric 90s indie rock in its sensibilities. Hell and Somewhere Else comes from a group of musicians with a clear vision of “pop music” on their minds, although Gentleman Speaker’s version of it seems to come from the worlds of emo-y catharsis and pop punk steam-letting-off (even as it’s not cleanly “part” of either of those genres).
It took me a little longer to get into Hell and Somewhere Else than one would normally expect because I think opening track “Anemic Alaska” threw me a little bit. Not that its minimal “showtune opening” sheen isn’t without its charms, but it didn’t exactly prepare me for what Gentleman Speaker proceeded to put together in the tracks immediately following it–specifically the emo-y power pop of “Rise of the Hens” (featuring a surprisingly strong bassline) and the strangely catchy “dark polka” vibes of “Scratch the Surface” (again, Dismemberment Plan shades in this one). Hell and Somewhere Else is a sneakily consistent album, with nearly every song making a case for the standout on any given listen–in the more “showy” department, we’ve got “Tire Worth Kicking”, which marries its lean verses with a huge group chorus, and “Solar System”, a toe-tapping anthem that’s Gentleman Speaker at their most “indie pop”. The chilly balladry of “Epiphany” is the closest thing that Hell and Somewhere Else gets to a “subtle” moment, and the tangled-up emo guitars of “Cat Like Me” falls somewhere in between this and the more aggressive numbers. Hard-working until the end, Gentleman Speaker close things out with a big finish in “Wait for Autumn”, a song featuring a go-for-broke, all-in refrain that only grows in size–it’s maybe the most memorable moment on Hell and Somewhere Else, though it certainly has competition. It’s not “too much”, but it is much. (Bandcamp link)
Megan from Work – Girl Suit
Release date: October 4th Record label: Self-released Genre: Pop punk, power pop Formats: Digital Pull Track: City Streets and Highways
A brand new pop punk band from New England with high-energy hooky songs reminiscent of early Charly Bliss, Chumped, and All Dogs–this is the good stuff. I’m talking about Megan from Work, a quartet from Manchester, New Hampshire led by vocalist/guitarist Megan Simon and rounded out by guitarist Luis Hernandez, bassist Joey Martin, and drummer Steve Aliperta. Aside from an acoustic demo EP last year, Girl Suit is the debut release from Megan from Work, and the group have put together a confident ten-song, twenty-five minute first statement. Simon called their band “soft punk” when they emailed me this album, a descriptor that Boston’s TIFFY also uses–it’s accurate, but Megan from Work favor a more robust power pop sound, with more power chords than dreamy pop rock to be found on Girl Suit. Simon’s vocals are urgent, piercing and almost emo–they’ve got pop punk showmanship down on their first record, and the rest of Megan from Work chug along with the strength to counterbalance their ringleader. Between the band name, album title, and their entire presentation, there’s an interesting overarching examination of identity and perception permeating the entire project–but most importantly, Girl Suit rocks.
Girl Suit has more than its fair share of jolts–there’s the desperate all-on assault of opening track “WAISTD”, the slightly more restrained but even more anxious “The PIMS” (that’s “pit in my stomach”), and the crunchy, power chord-heavy the title track (which climaxes with Simon memorably declaring “I’d rather be honest than consistent”). Girl Suit is just as strong in its second half, with “City Streets and Highways” and “Mouth Breathing” being just as strong power pop singles as anything else on the record (and the latter even features a wild, show-stopping finale to close the record out). The skill of the Megan from Work band is arguably more present on some of the record’s subtler numbers–a more solo-based project might turn “I’m in I Am” and “Real Life” into quieter ballads, but with Simon’s band punching up these tracks, they end up being just as impactful as the more straightforward pop punk anthems. Of course, Megan from Work also pull off the extra-showiness of “Mouth Breathing” just as impressively–really, just about all of the brief whirlwind that is Girl Suit is a strong argument for keeping an eye on Megan from Work from here on out. (Bandcamp link)
There’s still a bunch of great new music to discuss here in mid-November. Today we’ve got new albums from Sassyhiya, p:ano, Smoker Dad, and Blank Banker to look at below; there’s something for everyone in these records, I’d say!
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.
Sassyhiya – Take You Somewhere
Release date: November 8th Record label: Skep Wax Genre: Post-punk, indie pop, twee, power pop, art punk Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital Pull Track: On Our Way
Over the past few years, Helen Skinner has played in the bands Basic Plumbing, Boys Forever, and Barry, with the latter of the three also featuring her real-life partner Kathy Wright. The two of them started making music together as Sassyhiya around the end of last decade, with a live EP and a demo EP (both released in 2022) eventually culminating in the addition of guitarist Neiloy Mookherjee and drummer Pablo Paganotto and the release of their debut album, Take You Somewhere. The first Sassyhiya album affirms that they’re right at home on their new label Skep Wax (Heavenly, Crumbs, Swansea Sound)–it’s just about everything one could want in a new British guitar pop band. It’s incredibly, unashamedly twee (how else could one possibly describe an album featuring odes to puppets, gardening, and the co-bandleaders’ pet cat?) that, at the same time, is a record made by a legitimate rock band that has an equal appreciation for arty, rhythmic post-punk. There’s even bits of dream pop, jangle pop, and psychedelia in Sassyhiya’s first dozen songs, and Wright and Skinner’s writing is equal parts immediately emotional and thoughtfully reserved.
It’s not a perfect division, but Take You Somewhere falls roughly into the “catchy, single-ready pop music first half, more laid-back second half” archetype. If you’re a fan of “indie pop” at all, odds are something in the first half-dozen tracks will hook you–and at the very least, you’re going to remember their perky queer-post-punk-pop tribute to “Kristen Stewart”, their handclap-featuring, lethally catchy tribute to Wright and Skinner’s cat “Crayon Potato” (“She doesn’t like you / She doesn’t like me / She only likes ocean fish”), or their outing at the “Puppet Museum” (“They’ve got Kermit and I want you to meet him”). Nonetheless, there’s a less cheery, more post-punk-friendly sound hinted at in the escape-from-society opening track “Boat Called Predator” and the wobbly “I Had a Thought”, and Sassyhiya really try their hand at stretching out their songs in the second half. The stop-start psychedelic pop of “Perennial” is a pretty big departure, and the hypnotizing guitar leads and locked-in rhythm section in “On Our Way” is another exciting new moment for Take You Somewhere. By the time we get to “Try Try Try”, the “Raincoats-esque” undercurrent isn’t really “under” anymore, with the song’s minimal, deconstructed indie pop/post-punk skeleton hitting just all the right notes. After floating through the B-side, Sassyihya rally for one last upbeat song in “You Can Give It (But You Can’t Take It)”–big guitars and a sharp drumbeat greet us for the grand finale. It’s Sassyhiya at their most “punk”, sneering “When you try to dish it out / You’re gonna get some right back,” right before the title line. But Sassyhiya do it their way–rather than transforming into a vehicle of raw aggression, they still sound limber, smart, and fun. (Bandcamp link)
p:ano – ba ba ba
Release date: September 17th Record label: C.O.Q. Genre: Indie pop, soft rock, chamber pop, fuzz pop Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Mariko
Vancouver singer-songwriter Nicholas Krgovich has been busy pretty much this entire century–there’s his ever-expanding solo career, there’s his time in bands like No Kids and Gigi, and he’s also played with everyone from Dear Nora to Rose Melberg to Mount Eerie. Before any of that, though, there was p:ano, the band Krgovich formed with Larissa Loyva in 1999, when the two of them were still in high school. Eventually joined by Julia Chirka and Justin Kellam, the four of them made four albums from 2001 to 2008 before Loyva left and p:ano was retired (the remaining three members put out an EP and an album as No Kids). Zum Records, who put out the first two p:ano records, asked Krgovich if he’d contribute a song to an anniversary compilation last year, and this led to a p:ano reunion–first just for their Zum Audio Vol. 5 appearance, but eventually leading to an entirely new p:ano LP. The writing and instrumentation on ba ba ba is inspired by the members’ roots–they specifically mention formative indie pop/rock bands like Yo La Tengo, Belle & Sebastian, and The Magnetic Fields that were key in bonding the group together twenty years ago, and much of Krgovich’s writing is drawn from his experiences growing up in the Vancouver suburb of Coquitlam, where p:ano originally formed (I would have to guess that “C.O.Q. Records”, a new label seemingly launched to release ba ba ba, is similarly a nod to their hometown).
ba ba ba is a warmly familiar-sounding indie pop record, reaching ten songs and forty-five minutes in length by gliding along humbly but purposefully. The soft-touch guitar pop of Belle & Sebastian is probably the closest of those canonical influences to what p:ano sound like on this album, but Krgovich and Loyva’s lyrics (for the former) and vocals (for the both of them) have a grounded, suburban realism to them that feels pretty distinct from their influences (that’s the Coquitlam touch, I suppose). For a group of musicians who haven’t played together in quite some time, ba ba ba is impressively coherent–it’s best taken in as an entire record in my opinion, but there are some immediately obvious standouts. The fluttering, conversational indie pop of “Mariko” is an attention-grabber, while the Stereolab-evoking drone-pop of “Mikey’s New House” and the slightly fuzzed-out “Old Shoe” emphasize that p:ano is a fully-developed band, not just another Krgovich solo project. p:ano’s minimal, time-warp version of indie pop isn’t totally out of line with the rest of their Pacific Northwest peers, but it’s a fairly unique one in the midst of this scene, and it’s certainly strong enough to shine in 2024. (Bandcamp link)
Smoker Dad – Hotdog Highway
Release date: October 24th Record label: Self-released Genre: Country rock, alt-country, garage rock Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Part 2
Oh boy, we get to talk about a six-piece country rock band from Seattle called Smoker Dad today. After a few singles, the sextet (vocalist/guitarist Trevor Conway, vocalist/keyboardist Chris King, guitarist Teagen Conway, pedal steel guitarist Chris Costalupes, bassist Derek Luther, and drummer Adam Knowles) burst onto the scene with a self-titled album in 2022, and they’re back two years later with a sophomore LP entitled Hotdog Highway. Like many classic second albums, Hotdog Highway is greatly informed and shaped by Smoker Dad touring their first album on the road–even the title is a reference to the feeling evoked by seven or eight people crammed into a tour van rolling its way across the western United States. That’s all well and good, but it wouldn’t amount to much if Hotdog Highway didn’t rock–which it does, enthusiastically and expertly. This is hard-charging country rock-and-roll, road-tested and successfully captured by Garrett Reynolds at Seattle’s Electrokitty Sound Studio. In ten songs and forty minutes, Hotdog Highway never flags–every time Smoker Dad bust out a boozy country ballad, there’s a revved-up rocker coming just around the bend.
If you aren’t charmed by the alt-country party anthem “Part 2” that kicks off Hotdog Highway, then there’s no way Smoker Dad are the band for you. If it hits, though, there’s plenty more where that came from–for one, there’s the western garage rock speediness of “Armadillo” one track later, there’s the rambling rock and roll of “Rollin’ On”, and there’s the unhinged “Thinkin’ Bout Drinkin’” (if only the recent Japandroids song on the same subject was half as spirited as this). Like Smoker Dad on their last record, they dredge up one old blues song and turn it into a psychobilly freakout (this time it’s Kokomo Arnold’s “Milk Cow Blues”, which is excellently…well, I already used “unhinged”, but Smoker Dad are no less hinged on this one). In between these fiery bursts are the thinking person’s Smoker Dad songs, like “On My Mind” and “Tonight”, both of which push past four minutes, and “Smoke When I’m Drinkin’” (“I’m only happy when I’m stoned / And I only smoke when I’m drinkin’”, sounding like the world’s saddest logic puzzle). The final stretch of Hotdog Highway is the closest thing to a “breather”–“Smoke When I’m Drinkin’” and “Back Around” pull back just a bit, and the whole record closes with the title track, which has a bit of everything. There’s some bits of polished piano balladry, some smooth-ride country rock, and, of course, wild guitar meltdowns before “Hotdog Highway” comes to a close. Send Smoker Dad out on another cross country van trip; I want to see what they come back with next. (Bandcamp link)
Blank Banker – Intervallic Travails
Release date: September 17th Record label: Silent Co-op Genre: 90s indie rock, noise rock, math rock Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Tollund Blues
Blank Banker are a band from Chicago made up of five noisy indie rock veterans–guitarist/vocalist Orion Layton, guitarist Andrew Rench, bassist Jon Strasheim, drummer Neal Markowski, and vocalist Ellen Layton, who’ve played in groups like Daddy’s Boy, Rectangle, Burn Permits, and Ancient Greeks between them. As it turns out, I’ve actually covered Blank Banker on this blog before, but I didn’t remember until Markowski reminded me in the email alerting me to this album (I called their version of “Don’t Let It Bring You Down” “lumbering” when I reviewed every single Neil Young cover compilation on Bandcamp). Blank Banker’s most recent album is also their first release since 2016, and Intervallic Travails certainly sounds like a group of 90s indie rock refugees that have washed up on the shores of Electrical Audio (where the LP was recorded by Jon San Paolo last September). The biography for the album helpfully references Polvo and Sonic Youth, and fans of those bands will indeed find plenty to appreciate in the controlled-chaos basement rock of Intervallic Travails. Blank Banker are all over the place, but they never don’t sound like they have a vision in their head–they never go full Beefheart, but they’re never a straight-up Crazy Horse tribute act, either.
Blank Banker is split between Chicago and Montana these days, but the geographical and temporal gap doesn’t keep Intervallic Travails from sounding like a symphonic wave of underground rock music for its entire thirty-one minutes. If you’re curious, Blank Banker tack on a brief description of what every song on the album is about at the end of their Bandcamp page (the blustering noise-punk of “Ientaculum” is “Cthulhu’s attitude toward climate change”, the quick-footed “Tollund Blues” covers “laying in a peat bog on purpose”), although what Intervallic Travails is really about to me is hearing a bunch of musicians swerve and careen through indie rock-as-a-second-language, ripping through PRF-core unadorned-rock-fests like “Theme from BB” and “Ientaculum”, turning up the math rock dials on “School” and “Can’t Even”, and even showing off a bit of tenderness in “Anna’s Laminate” (in between the hurricane-force guitar freakouts) and “Tomcats” (a quiet song that doesn’t even have a single tinnitus-inducing moment in it). As tranquil as “Tomcats” sounds, Blank Banker are a band that doesn’t need to use their inside voices as a shorthand for deepness and sentimentality–as closing track “Cairn” demonstrates, the group are just as easily able to take hold of rumbling, yes, lumbering noisy rock to pay tribute to a lost loved one. Intervallic Travails goes out with torrents of guitars lapsing into fuzz, as it should. (Bandcamp link)
Wrapping up the first full week of November, we’ve got four releases coming out tomorrow, November 8th, for the Thursday Pressing Concerns. It’s a reissue-heavy edition, as we look at an expanded version of The Ladybug Transistor‘s 1999 third album and an entire-discography-spanning box set from Tsunami. We’ve got new-new music covered, too, with new albums from Chimers and Tófa detailed below as well. Earlier this week, we looked at new records from The Triceratops, wilder Thing, EEP, and Tess Parks on Monday, and Tuesday brought the October 2024 playlist/round-up, so check those out too if you haven’t already.
If you’re looking for more new music, you can visit the site directory to see what else we’ve written about lately. If you’d like to support Rosy Overdrive, you can share this (or another) post, or donate here.
The Ladybug Transistor – The Albemarle Sound (25th Anniversary Expanded Edition)
Release date: November 8th Record label: HHBTM/Merge Genre: Psychedelic pop, chamber pop, orchestral pop, indie pop Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital Pull Track: Meadowport Arch
Trumpet player and singer Gary Olson founded The Ladybug Transistor in Brooklyn in 1995, and by the time their third album, The Albemarle Sound, came around in 1999, the band was made up of six people living together at Olson’s Flatbush home studio (known as “Marlborough Farms”)–The Essex Green’s Jeff Baron and Sasha Bell on guitar and keyboards/flute, respectively, Baron’s sister Jennifer on bass, San Fadyl on drums, and Julia Rydholm on violin. Both The Essex Green and The Ladybug Transistor are perhaps (unfairly) more well-known for their notable associations (Merge Records, who’ve put out the majority of both band’s outputs, and Elephant 6, who put out an Essex Green EP and whose Derek Almstead recently joined The Ladybug Transistor on tour) than their own music, but if there’s a canonical record between the two of them, it’s probably The Albemarle Sound. The heavily 1960s-inspired baroque pop music of The Ladybug Transistor fully blossoms on this LP–it’s easy to see why they got along with the Elephant 6 crew, but the group’s approach is notably different than their peers in Athens upon a closer look at the album. And it’s a good time to take a close look at The Albemarle Sound, as HHBTM Records (who also put out the most recent album by Jennifer Baron’s current band, The Garment District) has reissued it on vinyl and CD with a dozen bonus tracks of demos, B-sides, and rough takes (physically on the latter format, digitally on the former).
Like a bunch of those Elephant 6 albums, The Albemarle Sound bears the mark of an album made in a “live-in studio”, but while, say, The Olivia Tremor Control’s records sounded like the work of mad pop scientists tinkering away in their laboratory, The Ladybug Transistor’s version of layered, psychedelic pop music is much more relaxed and serene-sounding. Who knows whether or not it was actually the case, but The Albemarle Sound makes it feel like Marlborough Farms was some kind of lovingly-tended Eden-esque garden for music that sounds like Brian Wilson at his most stately, occupied by a group of like-minded and cheerful musicians. Most of these songs are built on the foundation of pianos and horns rather than guitar–it’s not precisely a “sleepy” album, but if it’s any kind of “rock” music, then it’s soft rock. The original dozen songs of The Albemarle Sound still stand as a polished and strong door-shutting of 21st century pop music, keenly and carefully excavating the past to make transportive psychedelic pop like “Six Times”. The particularly jaunty “Meadowport Arch” is still my favorite song, but its energy is hardly an outlier, and when the band do let the guitars sit a bit more prominently (like the Byrds-y folk-pop of “Like a Summer Rain”) it’s a welcome addition.
The crown jewel of the bonus material is “Massachusetts”, a cover of a Bee Gees song that was originally the B-side to the 1998 “Today Knows” single. It fits The Ladybug Transistor like a glove, with more straightforward (and more overall) lyrics being the only really noticeable difference between it and their original material. The various instrumentals and rough mixes are interesting additions, although the four 4-track demos tacked on at the end sound the best to me (particular the version of “Today Knows”, which has a molasses-slow indie pop feel to it that almost sounds like modern slow-pop groups like Cindy and April Magazine). Between the original, the “full length” version, and the demo version, there’s three different full takes of “Six Times” on here, but it’s hard to fault that because each version brings out something new in the song. What more could you want from an anniversary reissue of an already-great album? (Bandcamp link)
Tsunami – Loud Is As
Release date: November 8th Record label: Numero Group Genre: 90s indie rock, noise pop, fuzz rock Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Unbridled
The appeal of Tsunami is a bit more difficult to explain than a lot of their more renowned 1990s indie rock peers (unfortunately for me, though, I have an agreement with myself that “it’s too hard” is never a legitimate reason to pass on writing about a band). Jenny Toomey and Kristin Thomson formed the band at the beginning of the 90s, first with drummer John Pamer and bassist Andrew Webster and eventually adding Luther Gray, Amy Domingues, and Bob Massey and putting out three albums (and one compilation) before they ceased being a full-time band in 1998. Like some of their more comparable peers–Scrawl, Barbara Manning, Helium–they were undeniably a key fixture in the underground rock scene of their time without being defined by it sonically. They put out all their music on their own label, Simple Machines, they associated with indie pop from both coasts of the United States, and they made music that doesn’t fit neatly into categories like “punk”, “twee”, “riot grrrl”, “grunge”, et cetera. I first knew of Toomey through her collaborations with Franklin Bruno (who’s playing in the current iteration of Tsunami that reformed last year), who similarly spent the 1990s trying to make timeless pop music out of the “basement indie rock” stone. Tsunami went on their own journey of cleaning and teasing out their own sound, but it’s not super obvious from a glance–like everything about them, you have to actually pay attention.
So, maybe they’re a hard sell, is what I’m saying. They’re indie rock music for adults, is how I would put it personally. Either way, the Numero Group is giving you all the chance to give Tsunami a chance with Loud Is As, a five-LP, sixty-one-song collection of the band’s entire output from the 1991 Cow Arcade demos to their 1997 final record, A Brilliant Mistake. The compilation puts their three studio albums back to back to back, suggesting we chart the evolution of Tsunami through their biggest statements–and it really is a clean and strong story when presented thusly. 1993’s Deep End is the messy, noisy torrent of a rock record made by a band that nonetheless was hardly “punk” in the way people mean the word, 1994’s The Heart’s Tremolo is the transitional second album that really stretches towards something, and A Brilliant Mistake is the patient, labored-over realization of Toomey and Thomson’s furthest ambitions–a success that they took as a cue to close up shop. A Brilliant Mistake particularly sounds even stronger in this context, as we can hear how Tsunami kept their bright-burning core but stripped away just about everything else from their earlier music on those thirteen songs. Loud Is As is necessarily a lot to take in at once, especially given the grab-bag nature of the final two LPs (largely comprised of World Tour & Other Destinations, a B-sides/rarities compilation originally released in 1995)–but Tsunami make it tricky to dismiss the World Tour tracks, given that they’re comparable (if not stronger) than the two proper albums released contemporaneously with them. Start with A Brilliant Mistake and work backward if this is all intimidating to you, but if you’re open to it, you’ll get something more out of letting Loud Is As reveal itself as is. (Bandcamp link)
Chimers – Through Today
Release date: November 8th Record label: 12XU/Poison City Genre: Noise rock, post-punk, garage rock Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital Pull Track: Timber
Chimers are the husband-and-wife duo of Padraic Skehan and Binx based out of Wollongong, Australia (although Skehan is originally from Ireland). Between the two of them, they’ve both drummed for a bunch of local garage rock bands (The Pink Fits, The Drop Offs, Evol), but Chimers finds Skehan playing guitar and singing (and joined by Binx in the latter of the two activities). Chimers arose during the pandemic, with the two of them stuck at home together, and they put out a self-titled album in 2021. For their second LP, Through Today, Chimers wanted to capture the “energy and intensity” that they bring live on the album, enlisting Jono Boulet of Party Dozen to record the album and linking up with American underground rock stalwart 12XU (John Sharkey III, Lupo Citta, Mope Grooves) to release it outside of Australia and New Zealand (where Poison City are handling things). I’ve seen Chimers described as “garage rock”, but that doesn’t quite do justice to the pummeling and pounding you’ll hear on Through Today. It’s a record that does indeed sound like it was made by two musicians who are drummers by trade–the unflagging high-wire-act pulled off by the band rhythmically (led by Binx’s drums, of course, but Skehan’s guitar does it too) gives it a post-punk feel, while the duo and Boulet also give it the blunt edge of classic noise rock.
Through Today sounds exquisite–Binx’s drums and Skehan’s six-string feel like they’ve lost no potency from Boulet’s home studio to tape, rumbling and slicing merrily (well, stonily) along for virtually the entire album. Skehan’s vocals aren’t an afterthought, exactly, but they’re lower down in the mix, a ghost haunting Chimers’ mechanical, rusted-out rock and roll. Songs like “Timber”, “Everything’s Green”, and “Gossip” are Through Today’s bread and butter–Binx is cold water to the face behind the kit but also provides a firm anchor, giving plenty of cover for Skehan to slice and dice and drone. Still there are a few surprises on the album–guest saxophone player Kirsty Tickle (Party Dozen) shows up in “People Listen (To the Radio)”, the oddest of the record’s first few songs in no small part due to the squall that the brass instrument spearheads. Violinist Jordan Ireland shows up in “An Echo”, Through Today’s penultimate track and the one true black sheep on the LP. Binx quietly sing-speaks on this one, and the duo dial back their instruments to make something more reminiscent of 90s Quarterstick Records-style post-rock (again, the violin helps by swelling and dispersing along with the core duo). For us, it’s a bit of a rest before the band launches into one last rocker in “Common”, but it almost feels like it takes more effort for Chimers to pull back like they do in “An Echo” than to just follow the rhythm downstream. (Bandcamp link)
Tófa – Mauled
Release date: November 8th Record label: Damnably Genre: Post-punk, noise rock, punk rock, garage rock Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Hot Tears
Icelandic noise punk group Tófa dropped a couple of albums and a split EP in the mid-2010s, but the quartet had been quiet as of late up until this year. Now linked up with Damnably Records (Say Sue Me, Hazy Sour Cherry, o’summer vacation), the quartet (vocalist Allie Doersch, bassist Andri Freyr Þorgeirsson, baritone guitarist Árni Þór Árnason, and drummer Jóhannes Ólafsson) have finally returned to release a third album, christened Mauled. Despite hailing from a country most people in the West consider to be idyllic and peaceful, it turns out that Tófa can make angry, pummeling, low-end-heavy rock music as well as the bands from burned-out American cities. Doersch is an intense punk frontperson, dynamically swerving from a yell to a bitter sing-speaking tone (and even a couple of poetry readings), and the down-tuned, rumbling music accompanying her is cold and harsh. Like a lot of great noise rock, Mauled is about helplessness and evil, and feeling the former in the face of the latter (one imagines that in some ways this feeling is amplified, not dampened, by living in a remote country with little global power, even as one gets a front seat to climate catastrophe and Western genocide).
So Tófa have plenty to rage for, against, and about, and Mauled does so. Careening into focus, the album starts off with the noisy, driven post-punk of opening track “Hot Tears”, the sixty-second clamoring garage punk explosion of “Clogging”, and the heavy, chugging noise rock of “Revenge”. The album features two spoken-word passages, memorably titled “Fancy Poetry I” and “Fancy Poetry II”; the only one that I can understand, the former (I think the latter is in Icelandic), has to do with the mundane repetitiveness of world destruction no one can fully opt out of even as disaster hovers over all of our heads. The fire of Mauled only burns brighter as it inches forward–“Power” and “Letter Home” towards the end of the album are two of the angriest tracks on the album, Doersch practically spitting out her lyrics as the band spirals down and out. Tófa bring everything into focus on the album’s closing track, “It Happens Again”–like the “Fancy Poetry” recordings, Doersch is basically just speaking for the majority of the song, but rather than minimal ambient instrumentation, the rest of Tófa take the form of sturdy, tough post-punk. “What’s a black smear to the endless night?” Doersch actually sings in the chorus, painting a picture of endless, repeating insignificance. What did you expect, a fairytale ending? (Bandcamp link)
Come with us as we wrap up October! This monthly playlist has a bunch of great new music on it, featuring a bunch of bands that I’m probably going to be thinking about as I try to put together my favorite albums of 2024 in list form in the coming month. Plenty of good choices below, that’s for sure.
2nd Grade, Toby the Tiger, and Humdrum have multiple songs on this playlist (two apiece).
Here is where you can listen to the playlist on various streaming services: Spotify, Tidal, BNDCMPR (missing two songs). Be sure to check out previous playlist posts if you’ve enjoyed this one, or visit the site directory. If you’d like to support Rosy Overdrive, you can share this (or another) post, or donate here.
“Limbo Land”, Dancer From Split (2024, HHBTM)
Dancer and Whisper Hiss are both post-punk bands that know their way around a pop hook, but they’re fairly distinct to me–the former are the irreverent, offbeat Brits who mix new wave-y art punk with fluffy indie pop, and the latter are the heavier, more serious Americans who certainly have listened to their fair share of Dischord and Kill Rock Stars records. Both bands bring their A-game to their recent split LP on HHBTM Records, but it’s the Glasgowians (whose entire discography I’ve written about on this blog at this point) who win the day for me with “Limbo Land”. “Limbo Land” closes Dancer’s half of the album with some tightrope-walking power chords and eventually builds to a fuzzed-out power pop conclusion–it’s a bit heavier and blunter, almost like they’re trying to meet Whisper Hiss halfway. Read more about Split here.
“Big End”, Dazy From IT’S ONLY A SECRET (If You Repeat It) (2024, Lame-O)
Opening track “Big End” is the most obvious “hit” to me on IT’S ONLY A SECRET (If You Repeat It), the latest three-song EP from James Goodson’s one-man power pop project Dazy. It’s the one “vintage Dazy” classic song on the EP–it’s got a bit of alt-dance energy to it, but it’s primarily a power pop guitar assault that just happens to have a beat. Goodson’s unflagging, almost robotic high energy is so strong here that his performance alone is ample reassurance that Dazy’s still “got it”–“it” being the ability to write a scorching anthem for staring directly at the sun and sounding incredibly cool while doing it. Dazy’s release rate has slowed down over the past year or so, but Goodson’s been clear that he’s still working (and reworking) on new music all the time. Open the vault, James. It’s time. Read more about IT’S ONLY A SECRET (If You Repeat It) here.
“Out of the Hive”, 2nd Grade From Scheduled Explosions (2024, Double Double Whammy)
Like any power pop band with a penchant for shorter songs, 2nd Grade have been blessed or cursed with Guided by Voices comparisons pretty much since their inception as a Peter Gill solo project, but Scheduled Explosions is the first 2nd Grade album that actually sounds like Guided by Voices does to my ears. A lot of this record was recorded by Gill alone, stitched together with full band recordings to create an exciting patchwork. Even on the homespun recordings, though, 2nd Grade don’t abandon the “power” side of power pop–take early highlight “Out of the Hive”, for example, a blustering piece of GBV-esque revved-up, fuzzed-out guitar pop. Gill–on everything here–stumbles through the track, speeding up and slowing down as he does everything in his power to get this winner out of his mind and onto tape as soon as possible. Read more about Scheduled Explosions here.
“We Will Shatter”, The Triceratops From Charge! (2024, Learning Curve)
Brooklyn’s The Triceratops deliberately and intentionally walk the line between “pop” and “heavy” rock music on their debut album Charge!’s fifteen songs. It reminds me of, more than any other band, the Archers of Loaf–huge and catchy without being dogmatically “punk” or “noise rock”. Charge! is an urgent-sounding album–it does feel like the work of a couple of people who haven’t gotten to make a full-length statement of an LP in a while and maybe don’t know when or if they’re going to get to again, so they’ve put as much as they can into it. It’s no wonder that the most rousing moments on Charge! are the most destructive–single “We Will Shatter” is maybe the catchiest song I’ve heard this year, jumping from the slick verses to an exorcism of a refrain (that’s just the title line). Read more about Charge! here.
“Ballad of Two Stubborn Men”, The Dumpies From Gay Boredom (2024, Dirt Cult)
There’s this great song called “The Ballad of Two Stubborn Men” by the underrated Bay Area garage/punk group The Younger Lovers (Brontez Purnell’s band since the early 2000s, haven’t released much lately but hopefully still active). Like a lot of Purnell’s greatest songs, it could be described as “queer slacker guitar pop”, and it’s probably my personal favorite Younger Lovers track. There’s also this really fun band from Oregon called The Dumpies–seen earlier this year releasing a split 7” with Night Court and more recently putting out an entire album called Gay Boredom. Nineteen songs in nineteen minutes, Gay Boredom hops from lo-fi garage pop to hardcore punk, and their seventy-eight second version of “Ballad of Two Stubborn Men” is my favorite thing on it. The Dumpies speed the track up, finding a hair-pulling, foaming pop punk anthem in the original version somehow. It rules! It sounds like Green Day!
“Come and Get Me”, Humdrum From Every Heaven (2024, Slumberland)
Chicago’s Loren Vanderbilt has a keen grasp on a very specific time and place in the history of indie rock as Humdrum, carefully and devotedly pulling together jangle pop, new wave, college rock, and dream pop from the 1980s and early 90s to make Every Heaven’s warmly familiar sound. Although it does feature some guitar contributions from Vanderbilt’s former Star Tropics bandmate Scott Hibbitts, Every Heaven is largely the work of a singular pop-minded visionary, with everything from its prominent, pounding mechanical drumbeats to its New Order-y synth washes to sprinkled guitar arpeggios all working in tandem to service the melodies and hooks, all unfailingly upbeat but also unafraid to turn up the “wistful” dial. On late highlight “Come and Get Me”, the emotional cracks and visible wear and tear only enhance the great New Romantic performance given by Vanderbilt and guest vocalist Melissa Buckley. The titular plea sounds desperate and time-sensitive–but still hopeful!–in the hands of these two. Read more about Every Heaven here.
“New Years Day Blues”, The Great Dying From A Constant Goodbye (2024, Dial Back Sound)
Loosely speaking, A Constant Goodbye is a “country-punk” album, although The Great Dying frontperson and songwriter Will Griffith stamps his writing with a pronounced dour streak compared to peers like Drive-By Truckers (with whom they share a sometimes-member in Matt Patton) and Lee Bains III & The Glory Fires. The songs on A Constant Goodbye generally hew towards the darker end of the spectrum, but it’s a pleasingly varied-sounding album nonetheless, with outliers like “New Years Day Blues” almost being the norm rather than exceptions. “New Years Day Blues” closes A Constant Goodbye with a perfect starry-eyed ballad, a lost college rock anthem unlike anything else on the record. Except in the sense that it’s incredibly lonely-sounding–in that way, it’s right at home. Read more about A Constant Goodbye here.
“Apartment 3”, Naked Giants From Shine Away (2024, DevilDuck)
Naked Giants decide to start their third album, Shine Away, in media res: “As I was saying, it was 1964 / They put a color television on the second floor / Didn’t that change everything?” It’s an offbeat but welcoming introduction to the band’s familiar-sounding, well-worn, lived-in mixture of the poppier side of 90s indie rock a la Pavement/Archers of Loaf, garage rock, and power pop. There’s a bit of whiplash throughout Shine Away as Naked Giants dart from different ideas, but “Apartment 3”–a piece of slacker-pop ear candy that features the line “Put me in that television like I’m Tom Verlaine” immediately followed by a Marquee Moon guitar lick–is the band at their easiest to grasp and appreciate. Read more about Shine Away here.
“Brand New TV”, Porcine From Something’s Dawning (2024, ART TNEET)
Barnsley trio Porcine released a really solid self-titled record of indie pop earlier this year via Safe Suburban Home, and last month they quietly followed it up with a five-song EP called Something’s Dawning (the only reason I even know about is because Jim Quinn of Safe Suburban Home sent it to me, wanting to make sure I heard it even though he didn’t have space on his label to release it). Something’s Dawning is some more excellent jangly/dreamy guitar pop from the group, and “Brand New TV” (a song about buying a brand new TV) might be my favorite Porcine song yet. Giannis Kipreos’ vocals, the cheerily-strummed acoustic, the laser-precise lead guitar melodies–they’re all in the right place on this one.
“Never Been a Problem”, Podcasts From Supreme Auctions (2024, Omegn Plateproduksjon)
The latest release from Oslo indie pop quartet Podcasts is a “3.5 song” EP called Supreme Auctions. The “0.5” is the brief “Intro (For Supreme Auctions)”, which blends seamlessly into “Never Been a Problem”, not allowing us to take much of a breath before Supreme Auctions is already halfway over. “Never Been a Problem” is a polished, sugary piece of power pop that grinds to a complete halt halfway through, only to jam the keys back in the ignition and soar yet again (and then pull a slightly smaller version of the same trick one more time before the song ends)–there’s a bit of the tricky guitar pop that was found all over Podcasts’ 2023 self-titled debut album, but “Never Been a Problem” keeps the hooks even closer to the forefront than the band have ever done before. Read more about Supreme Auctions here.
“It Wasn’t Me”, Russel the Leaf From Thought to an End (2024, Records from Russ)
Thought to an End, the first Russel the Leaf album of 2024, is Evan Marré’s return to pop music after spending last year dabbling in the realms of experimental, jazz, and improvisational, and it’s a triumphant one. Spanning twenty-one songs and seventy-five minutes, we’re quite possibly dealing with Russel the Leaf’s magnum opus here; it has the feel of a classic double LP, with everything from streamlined, breezy pop rock to layered orchestral and psychedelic passages to heady art rock to, indeed, the experimental/jazz moments of the last couple of Russel the Leaf records featuring on the album. Coming about a third of the way through Thought to an End, the joyous-sounding tinker-pop of “It Wasn’t Me” might be the single greatest triumphant on the album, with Marré sounding locked in with a stop-start instrumental–but thankfully, there’s a lot of competition on this album. Read more about Thought to an End here.
“Detour”, La Sécurité (2024, Bella Union/Mothland)
Things are looking bright for Montreal art punk/post-punk group La Sécurité. They put out their debut album, Stay Safe!, last year on local label Mothland, and they’ve been picked up by Bella Union for their next album (as of yet unannounced). The first new music from the five-piece (six if you count Emmanuel Éthier, credited for “hand claps”) is the one-off “Detour” single, and it’s as good as La Sécurité have sounded yet. They keep hewing towards the “danceable” side of post-punk music, with everything from the rhythm section’s prominent groove to the blaring synths to the skipping and flashing guitars all working towards the beat. Not that I’d forgotten about La Sécurité, but “Detour” will keep the band squarely on my radar.
“Your Local Neighborhood Bar”, St. Lenox From Ten Modern American Work Songs (2024, Don Giovanni/Anyway)
Penultimate track “Your Local Neighborhood Bar” is one of the most upbeat, jubilant songs on St. Lenox’s Ten Modern American Work Songs, finding singer-songwriter Andrew Choi stepping back into the world of Joe Peppercorn’s open mic nights at Andyman’s Treehouse in Columbus, Ohio, where he lived before moving to New York for work (“Last week, down at your neighborhood bar / I heard that it was some kind of legendary / … / I gotta go there and sing you a song”). As the modern-day Choi sits on the subway and reminisces, however, he goes beyond the rose-tinted, Cheers-evoking glasses with which he begins (“Seven years ago stuck on the ivories / It reveals explicit themes / Seven years yeah, stuck in the brain”). All the while, Choi’s huge voice–the one that first got him noticed at by Anyway Records at those open mics a decade ago–is just as incredible as ever. Read more about Ten Modern American Work Songs here.
“Someone Else’s Enemies”, Stomatopod From DrizzleFizzle (2024, Pirate Alley)
Streamlined but expansive, unmistakably Midwestern, punk-y and garage-y, dark but “pop music”–this is rock and roll according to Chicago trio Stomatopod. DrizzleFizzle is their fourth album, and it’s a doozy, nearly twice as long as their last one and made up of ten enormous songs–the snapshot of brilliance that was their last album, Competing with Hindsight,is blown up onto the big screen here, and Stomatopod are ready for primetime. “Someone Else’s Enemies” was instantly my favorite song on the record; it’s a big, angry Andy Cohen-type beast that benefits from its players’ experience (Stomatopod know they’re onto something here, and they’ve got the clarity to embrace it seriously and without any self-consciousness). “You should never go to war with someone else’s enemies,” frontperson John Huston ominously thunders–a piece of obvious advice that nonetheless ends up unheeded all around us. Read more about DrizzleFizzle here.
“Bones”, Toby the Tiger From Demapper (2024, Peligroso es Mi Nombre Medio)
Brock Ross and his solo project, Toby the Tiger, are squarely in the realm of “emo-adjacent” indie rock; the Boise-based musician is adept at writing delicate pop melodies, but there’s an electric side to Demapper as well. The first Toby the Tiger album takes great pains to reveal itself in the sturdiest, most arresting fashion possible; “Bones” is one of the best album openers I’ve heard this year, starting off simple with just electric guitar and Ross’s vocals. However, given the literal Biblical torrent of emotion and violence he eventually gets around to depicting, it can hardly be described as a low-key or “soft” launch. Read more about Demapper here.
“If I Could Take It Back”, Cast of Thousands From Third House (2024)
On their first full-length, Austin’s Cast of Thousands pick up the thread they started with First Six Songs, although Third House continues to add dimensions to the group’s sound–in particular, new member Ali Ditto’s organ-toned keys add a The Clean-esque indie pop element to the band’s college rock, power pop, and jangle pop (delivered with just the right amount of Lone Star garage rock energy). Max Vandever remains a sneakily stellar rock and roll frontperson in his ability to sound believably conversational even when I have no idea what he’s talking about; “If I could, I’d buy you every star in the sky / Well, what are the stars worth / And what do they even do,” he rambles in the excellent “If I Could Take It Back”, which opens the LP. “If I Could Take It Back” is so catchy and enthusiastic it makes me want to grab the nearest tambourine and keep time myself. Read more about Third House here.
“Your Purse or Your Life”, Tony Vaz From Pretty Side of the Ugly Life (2024, Jubilee Gang)
The first Tony Vaz LP is a constantly surprising pop album–self-recorded in Vaz’s home studio, Pretty Side of the Ugly Life is rooted in mid-2010s “bedroom pop” and “lo-fi indie rock”, with regular detours into everything from orchestral pop to folk and alt-country to electronic music. Pretty Side of the Ugly Life starts in indie rock territory and gets more adventurous as it progresses, but there are inspired, intriguing choices right up front on the album, too. “Your Purse or Your Life” opens the record with some strong country-rock guitar-play merged with a greyscale 90s indie rock foundation, soaring violin from Camellia Hartman, and Alena Spanger’s backing vocals–it’s a somewhat confusing combination, but it works, and it opens up a bunch of possibilities that the rest of Pretty Side of the Ugly Life continues to probe. Read more about Pretty Side of the Ugly Life here.
“Got U (Reprise)”, Drinking.Bleach From Arrive Alive (2024, Pill Mill)
Drinking.Bleach are a “slacker-folk” trio from Portland, Oregon who’ve been kicking around since the mid-2010s, and the latest release from the group (guitarist/vocalist James VonUrchin, upright bassist Ross Fish, and percussionist Pepper Smithereenz) is a five-song EP called Arrive Alive. The trio mention being inspired by Beat Happening–the Violent Femmes are another obvious point of comparison, and I’d even list the lo-fi folk side of Beck, too. My favorite song on Arrive Alive is pretty easily “Got U (Reprise)”, a weird but incredibly catchy piece of hypnotic alt-folk. The upright bass and the “found” percussion (“things like sheet metal, crates and chains”) create a strong rhythm, and VonUrchin’s strong, droning vocals are striking in their own right.
“We Used to Build Things”, Office Culture From Enough (2024, Ruination)
For the fourth Office Culture album, Winston Cook-Wilson decided to try something different–he decided to make a CD. The seventy-three minute, sixteen-song Enough was deliberately inspired by “the CD era”, when artists blew their work up to previously-unmatched proportions without any heed as to how they were going to pare it down to some forty-odd minutes. Enough sees just how many directions Office Culture can stretch Cook-Wilson’s distinct sophisti-pop songwriting at once, with the help of twenty-something collaborators and a buffet of pop, jazz, and electronic ideas. The five-minute jazz-funk-groove of “We Used to Build Things” is much more showy than anything on Office Culture’s last record, the soft rock/jazz-pop Big Time Things, and it might just be the most satisfying thing on the entire album. Read more about Enough here.
“Sunday”, Cinéma Lumière From Wishing It Was Sunday (2024, Subjangle/Catshelf)
I haven’t gotten to write about it as much as I’d like, but there’s a burgeoning guitar pop scene going on in East Asia, and a lot of it is headquartered in none other than Manila, the capital of the Philippines. The five-piece dream/jangle pop group Cinéma Lumière put out their debut EP in 2020, and their first album, Wishing It Was Sunday, arrived earlier this year (initially given a digital release via Catshelf in August and picked up by international guitar pop label Subjangle for an “extended” CD release two months later). Cinéma Lumière’s two co-lead vocalists, Jon and Mary, duet on my personal favorite track on the record, “Sunday”, which is a classic twee-pop celebration of having no obligations other than lazing around and enjoying the world on the titular day.
“Foot in the Grave”, Blue Zero From Colder Shade Blue (2024, Lower Grand Tapes)
Oakland, California indie rock busybody Chris Natividad fronts two bands already–so why does he need Blue Zero, his latest quasi-solo project? Well, I’m not sure exactly, but Blue Zero’s debut LP Colder Shade Blue is pretty distinct from his other groups–while Public Interest and Marbled Eye both trade in the worlds of sharp, tough, and rhythmic post-punk and garage rock, Blue Zero is more at home in the world of shoegaze-adjacent, fuzzed-out pop. The album is somewhat torn between jangly guitar pop and basement-evoking noisy indie rock, and “Foot in the Grave” is the clearest example of the former on the record. Natividad’s opening guitar line packs enough “jangle” for the entirety of Colder Shade Blue, and while the following song has plenty of psychedelia and dreaminess baked into it, it never lets go of the sharp pop writing that’s apparent from the get-go. Read more about Colder Shade Blue here.
“Rattrapez-moi”, Coeur à l’Index From Adieu Minette (2024, La Vida Es un Mus)
Coeur à l’Index put out their first demo at the beginning of last year, and renowned European punk label La Vida Es Un Mus (Straw Man Army, The Chisel, Home Front) have scooped the Brussels/Marseille-based band up for Adieu Minette, their debut album. Adieu Minette is a lot more pop-friendly than a lot of La Vida Es Un Mus’ output–guitarist/vocalist Julia Stravato, bassist Charlotte Lobert, and drummer Pogy clearly have listened to their share of classic C86, power pop, and, as their bio says “French Chanson from the 60’s onwards”. Coeur à l’Index’s confident, high-flying energy helps them fit in with their louder, more aggressive peers, though–for example, take “Rattrapez-moi”, a bouncy, brilliant power pop anthem that opens Adieu Minette with a whirlwind of hooks.
“The Shimmering”, Jim Nothing From Grey Eyes, Grey Lynn (2024, Meritorio/Melted Ice Cream)
Grey Eyes, Grey Lynn continues to mine the rich veins of classic Flying Nun-inspired jangle pop, psychedelic pop, and noise pop that Jim Nothing so effectively explored on 2022’s In the Marigolds, but this one feels like a more wide-ranging take on this kind of music. Sometimes, the Jim Nothing of Grey Eyes, Grey Lynn feels like a sturdier, louder rock band than ever before, other times like the home-recorded solo project of bandleader Jim Sullivan. Sullivan’s songwriting is still sublime, though, and more than capable of weathering a more involved journey. “The Shimmering” is a classic late-album hidden gem–it’s absolutely brimming with melody in every aspect of the recording, the one track that truly rivals album opener “Hourglass” for the album’s immortal heavenly pop hit throne. It feels much greater than its relatively brief two-minute lifespan. Read more about Grey Eyes, Grey Lynn here.
“Based on the Comedy of Ray Romano”, Recalculating From Do You Like to Laugh? (2024, Band Dinner)
Recalculating make skittering, talk-singing punk rock and garage rock that can go from minimal to noisy at the drop of a hat in the vein of classic alt-rock groups like the Minutemen, Mission of Burma, and Nomeansno, and their songs will appeal to the contingent of post-punk revivalists that don’t take themselves too seriously. Do You Like to Laugh? opens with one hell of a mission statement in “Based on the Comedy of Ray Romano”, an absolutely wild punk rock exploration of comedy and fiction and the performance of life (“Ladies and gentlemen, be gentle with comedians / For while they are blessed with prodigious download metrics / They endure life defenseless / Unarmed with guitars!” roars whichever one of them is on the mic as the song comes to a head–it’s hard not to imagine the album’s engineer, Steve Albini, enjoying that part). Read more about Do You Like to Laugh? here.
“Bent”, Black Ends From Psychotic Spew (2024, Youth Riot)
Black Ends are a new trio from Seattle who refer to the music they make as “gunk pop”, and the core of their debut album Psychotic Spew’s sound is the stripped-down, heavy-duty punk rock that Black Ends hone across the record’s ten tracks. Bits of grunge, psych-rock, and even blues rock shade Psychotic Spew, as Black Ends grab onto any and every corner of rock and roll they can get their hands on to further their self-proclaimed gunk-pop mission. Sitting in the album’s second slot, “Bent” takes the spark that opening track “She Speaks of Love” provides and creates a garage-punk wildfire with it. Black Ends only need two minutes and change to charge through “Bent”, whose choppy, showy guitar playing never feels too distracting from the lockstep feeling that vocalist/guitarist Nicolle Swims, bassist Ben Swanson, and drummer Billie Jessica Paine evoke together. Read more about Psychotic Spew here.
“Ridley and Me After the Apocalypse”, The Armoires From Octoberland (2024, Big Stir)
Burbank, California’s The Armoires are the flagship act of Big Stir Records, and their fourth album, Octoberland, showcases the quintet’s penchant for vintage college rock, jangle pop and power pop–while Larysa Bulbenko’s string playingadds some psychedelia and perhaps even a bit of Eastern European folk traditionalism to the mix. Octoberland is an incredibly rich collection of music both from a lyrical and instrumental perspective, all of which is on display in my favorite song on the album, “Ridley and Me After the Apocalypse”. Musically, it’s a truly infectious piece of jangly power pop–The Armoires can basically do whatever they want after that opening guitar line and it’d still sound great. Band co-leaders Christina Bulbenko and Rex Broome choose a sprawling, high-concept post-apocalyptic story to sketch, imagining themselves as artists providing “Copium for trying times / Just to mitigate the rancid vibes” in this dystopian setting. Read more about Octoberland here.
“Alone”, Greg Mendez From First Time / Alone (2024, Dead Oceans)
Sometimes the world is just. Greg Mendez broke out in a major way with last year’s self-titled album, and now he’s a household name and playing stadiums (I think). Unlike most people that this kind of thing happens to, Mendez’s last album was very good, and his first widely-released new music since then is a very strong follow-up, too. Mendez quietly moves through four folk-pop ideas in seven minutes on First Time / Alone–the organ-led “First Time” is great, but I had to go with Mendez’s strongest six-string moment here with “Alone”. It sounds just about how one would expect a just-acoustic-guitar Greg Mendez song called “Alone” to sound, although it’s one of the singer-songwriter’s more spirited (speaking very relatively here!) moments. “I’m a lonely winter away from punishment,” he sings amidst the cold–he sounds alive enough to know something isn’t right.
“Co-Stars”, Anna McClellan From Electric Bouquet (2024, Father/Daughter)
For nearly a decade now, Anna McClellan has been a key part of the Omaha, Nebraska indie rock, folk, and alt-country scenes, both in her solo output and via her contributions to fellow Nebraskans’ records–most notably, the work of Ryan McKeever of Staffers and Workers Comp. McKeever, in turn, contributes heavily to McClellan’s latest album, Electric Bouquet, and even duets with her on “Co-Stars”, my favorite track on the record. “Co-Stars” is a bit more jaunty and (dare I say) twee than the rest of Electric Bouquet’s more standard folk rock, but it’s a lovely change of pace, with the organ (also provided by McKeever) turning the song into a lo-fi, off-the-cuff version of what feels like a timeless pop song (McClellan even sticks a “shoo bop shoo wah” in towards the end of the song, and it totally fits).
“Set My Sights”, Hilken Mancini Band From Hilken Mancini Band (2024, Girlsville)
In the mid-90s, Hilken Mancini co-led the Boston alt-rock/pop group Fuzzy, who toured with Buffalo Tom and Velocity Girl and released two albums for Atlantic before fizzling out before landing a “proper” radio hit at the end of the decade. I admittedly haven’t kept up with all of Mancini’s output since the dissolution of her most well-known band, but the self-titled debut album from the Hilken Mancini Band arrives with a bang, embracing sugary, hooky, fuzzy guitar pop music like 1994 never fully left us. The ten songs of Hilken Mancini Band practically helicopter in with their loud, unmistakable catchiness front and center. Album opener “Set My Sights” would already be a classic just based on the strength of the verses and instrumental alone, but Mancini somehow finds a classic 90s alt-pop-rock chorus that nobody’d thought to use yet to really push the song over the top. Read more about Hilken Mancini Band here.
“Airplane”, Color Temperature From Here for It (2024, Developer)
Based on who I’d seen extolling the virtues of Color Temperature and its mastermind, Brooklyn’s Ross Page, I’d assumed that the project fell somewhere on the “emo-punk” spectrum. Nothing wrong with that, but I was pleasantly surprised to listen to Here for It and hear something else entirely–it’s a low-key, vaguely dark mix of psychedelic pop and folk music, with some classic indie rock thrown in, too. My favorite song is called “Airplane”, which I would consider a “banger”–it’s an inspired concoction from Page, who merges a mid-period of Montreal-esque vocal with a vintage Spoon rhythm section/beat. Like a lot of Here for It, it manages to be toe-tapping and propulsive without sounding too “upbeat”–there’s something shady going on here, somehow, but that only enhances the experience.
“Bureau of Autumn Sorrows”, 2nd Grade From Scheduled Explosions (2024, Double Double Whammy)
Scheduled Explosions is such a good album that I didn’t even find the time to talk about one of my favorite songs on the record when I wrote about it. That would be “Bureau of Autumn Sorrows”, a weird electric-guitar-and-vocals-only composition buried in the middle of the second half of the record. Unlike “Out of the Hive”, it wasn’t recorded by Gill alone–it’s a studio track also featuring Jon Samuels (Gill’s bandmate in Friendship, and recently a part of MJ Lenderman & The Wind) on guitar, too. Gill delicately weaves his way through a tender guitar pop song, with Samuels interjecting some strange, arresting moments of guitar noise at the end of each refrain. I couldn’t really tell you what “Bureau of Autumn Sorrows” is about between its incredibly Robert Pollard-esque title and Gill’s simple and opaque lyrics (“All my friends are on the moon now / The news nearly killed me / But then I put on my ten-gallon hat / And I I got over it”). Great stuff, though. Read more about Scheduled Explosions here.
“Demande spéciale”, Bon Enfant From Demande spéciale (2024, Duprince)
Montreal’s Bon Enfant apparently simply refer to their sound as “Québécois rock”, which is a good a term as any to describe what I hear on their third album, Demande spéciale. It’s an incredibly fun-sounding rock album, with bits of psychedelic pop, power pop, post-punk, dream pop, and plenty more influences sparkling around the record’s dozen tracks. The group are pretty much always putting something hooky to tape, but Bon Enfant aren’t afraid to take different routes to get there–sometimes they’re groovy, suave, and rhythmic, other times they go all-in with the “big” guitars and vocals. Mélissa Fortin’s synths get their moment in the sun with the album’s new wave-y title track, but the guitars remain huge, too–this is probably what “French-Canadian power pop” is, and it’s an excellent argument in favor of Montreal getting a little more into Shoes (or at least Blondie). Read more about Demande spéciale here.
“Pump Fake”, Jake McKelvie From A New Kind of Hat (2024)
Ah, there’s some great folk rock songwriting on A New Kind of Hat, the latest album from longtime troubadour Jake McKelvie. Wish I had the space to do the full record, but I’ll settle for highlighting “Pump Fake”, my favorite track on the album. A New Kind of Hat is McKelvie’s first record in eight years, and the songs all sound impeccable, like they’ve been honed over the long gap between releases, and “Pump Fake” is no exception. McKelvie’s writing is more classic country than his music would suggest, a collection of quips and one-liners that add up to greater than the sum of its parts (“When there’s a fire that burns in your belly / It’s not like others can gather around it and feel the warmth” … “And if you’re learning the world’s smallest fiddle / You’ve gotta practice it in your spare time” … and so forth).
“T.B.W.T.P.N.”, The Boys With the Perpetual Nervousness From Dead Calm (2019, Pretty Olivia/Bobo Integral)
One simply must respect a band with a theme song. That’s what the first song on the debut album from Spanish/Scottish duo The Boys With the Perpetual Nervousness is–the initials of “T.B.W.T.P.N.” spell out the band’s admittedly wordy moniker, and song itself immediately gets to work in displaying Andrew Taylor and Gonzalo Marcos’s incredibly strong knack for achieving the platonic ideal of jangle pop. Dead Calm came out in 2019 on Pretty Olivia Records, and we have their current home of Bobo Integral to thank for reissuing it in “deluxe” format (featuring a bonus track and a bunch of demos). The Boys With the Perpetual Nervousness have a reputation as one of the most consistently great modern jangle pop bands, and a revisitation of Dead Calm does little to dispute this–especially when Taylor and Marcos need only the first few seconds of “T.B.W.T.P.N.” to deliver a killer hook.
“Colonial Lanes”, American Motors From Content (2024, Expert Work/The Ghost Is Clear)
Lancaster, Philadelphia noise rock group American Motors understand that the monster you can’t see is even scarier, and their debut album Content utilizes a huge amount of empty space to hover around the edges of its songs. Engineer J. Robbins helped the trio zero in on a Rust Belt-inspired post-punk/noise rock/post-rock sound, keenly sharpened and hammered out much more finely than a lot of bands in their shoes would dare to even attempt. Content’s opening track, “Colonial Lanes”, is a shapeless, formless post-noise rock soundscape, the narration getting overtaken by moments of atmospheric instrumentals and a few genuine “rock” sections. Read more about Content here.
“Wave Goodbye”, Humdrum From Every Heaven (2024, Slumberland)
I view Loren Vanderbilt’s Humdrum project as somewhere between a more melancholic version of bands like Chime School and Ducks Ltd. and a more peppy Lost Film or Old Moon–but Vanderbilt’s writing is fresh and features a unique feeling of yearning, so it doesn’t feel like a retread of other jangle pop hitmakers. Every Heaven is a steady stream of rock-solid, fully-teased-out jangly/dreamy guitar pop anthems, although some moments stand out as being especially immediate and sugary. “Wave Goodbye” is a modern jangle pop classic, with legitimate rushes of melodies and propulsion with hooks in every crevice. Read more about Every Heaven here.
“In a Dream”, Trace Mountains From Into the Burning Blue (2024, Lame-O)
There are days where I lament that Dave Benton left LVL UP, arguably the best band of the 2010s, to make Steve Hyden-core heartland indie rock as Trace Mountains. But god damn, Trace Mountains is very good Hyden-core heartland rock at its best. Who else but Benton could pull off something like “In a Dream”, the opening track from the latest Trace Mountains album Into the Burning Blue? The seven-minute mutant heartland-pop-folk-electronic-rock creation merges just a bit of the Americana/alt-country of the past couple of Trace Mountains records with the synthpop-curious nature of early Trace Mountains, and it doesn’t really sound like anything else going on right now. Into the Burning Blue isn’t my favorite Dave Benton record, but I’ll probably think it’s brilliant in a year or two. I still have plenty of faith in Trace Mountains. And at the very least, “In a Dream” is an instant classic.
“Letter to Screwtape”, Toby the Tiger From Demapper (2024, Peligroso es Mi Nombre Medio)
Brock Ross enlists his brother Mitch to play trumpet on “Letter to Screwtape”, and the orchestral-folk touches help make the acoustic guitar-led track a highlight of Demapper, Toby the Tiger’s debut album. “Letter to Screwtape” sits right in the middle of Toby the Tiger’s “emo/pop/folk” Venn diagram, sure to please fans of the likes of Death Cab for Cutie, Bright Eyes, and/or Pedro the Lion. It’s Biblical from the song’s C.S. Lewis-referencing title on down–between that, the song’s enthusiastic acoustic guitar flourishes, the horns, and Ross’ thoughtfully petulant delivery, it’s got just about everything one could want in this kind of music. Read more about Demapper here.
“Tired All the Time”, Mope Grooves From Box of Dark Roses (2024, 12XU/Night School)
I wrote a lot about Box of Dark Roses, the final album from Portland lo-fi pop project Mope Grooves, and I’m not going to try to rehash everything about it here. Suffice it to say there’s a lot of heaviness surrounding and permeating the 90-minute double LP–but there’s also a lot of beauty on Box of Dark Roses, probably more than anything else. Sometimes, the darkness of Box of Dark Roses is softened by the music; that’s the case with “Tired All the Time”, the record’s penultimate track. A couple of Mope Grooves contributors–Cap and Lee–sing lead vocals aided by Ray Aggs on violin and plenty of instrumental touches provided by the band’s ringleader stevie. The violins make the song seem like a folk lullaby, the duo singing “I’m tired all the time and I don’t know why / Someone take this memory from my mind,” coming at the end of a taxing album that answers this question for them. Read more about Box of Dark Roses here.
It’s November already, which is hard to believe. In fact, three of the albums in this Monday Pressing Concerns came out last Friday, the 1st of the month: new LPs from The Triceratops, wilder Thing, and EEP (plus an album from Tess Parks from late October). This is a nice and weird one!
If you’re looking for more new music, you can visit the site directory to see what else we’ve written about lately. If you’d like to support Rosy Overdrive, you can share this (or another) post, or donate here.
The Triceratops – Charge!
Release date: November 1st Record label: Learning Curve Genre: Punk rock, noise rock, power pop, alt-rock, fuzz rock, grunge Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: We Will Shatter
The Triceratops are a new Brooklyn-based duo formed by two indie rockers who go way back together–vocalist/guitarist John Van Atta and drummer/vocalist Melvin Monroe met as stagehands working at CBGB in the 1990s, and after falling out of touch for a few years, reconnected at a recent Future of the Left show and decided to make music together. The first record called The Triceratops is called Charge!, and it feels like a special one to me. The Triceratops deliberately and intentionally walk the line between “pop” and “heavy” rock music on Charge!’s fifteen songs–it was recorded by a producer (Andrew Schneider) who’s worked with noise rock bands like Unsane and KEN Mode and was made by a band who has recently played noise/punk rock festival Caterwaul, but Van Atta also has history playing in a Beatles cover band and Charge! is a strong argument for more hooks in this confrontational indie rock subgenre. It reminds me of, more than any other band, the Archers of Loaf–this kind of music, which is huge and catchy without being dogmatically “punk” or “noise rock”, is kind of a lost art, largely the domain of Electrical Audio-core lifers like The Rutabega and These Estates, but the potency that The Triceratops are able to get out of it suggests that there’s a lot to dig into for those that find their way to it.
Charge! is an urgent-sounding album–it does feel like the work of a couple of people who haven’t gotten to make a full-length statement of an LP in a while and maybe don’t know when or if they’re going to get to again, so they’ve put as much as they can into it. Van Atta and Monroe sound gritty as they fly through these songs, which are intended to reflect “the struggles and joys of working-class life in 21st-century America”. The highs on Charge! are euphoric, led by the trio of lethally-catchy alt-rock songs that lead off the record between the pumped-up introduction of “Can’t Take You”, the mid-tempo ripper “The Saddest Story in Science”, and the soaring “I’ll Go If You Go”. “Efficiency Expert” introduces some New York City post-hardcore into the mix, fiery and heavy but still with a “rock and roll” sheen–it’s the acoustic “Neoliberal Bedtime Routine” (which is given an electric reprise later in the album) that really blows the record open, though. The one-minute gut check ends with “Sorry kid / I know how much you hate / That your family leaves you,” a brief but cutting reminder of the never-ending toll of what The Triceratops rage against. It’s no wonder that the most rousing moments on Charge! are the most destructive–single “We Will Shatter” is maybe the catchiest song I’ve heard this year, jumping from the slick verses to an exorcism of a refrain (that’s just the title line). And then there’s penultimate track “Something Done Right”, a primordial mess of caveman noise rock, mythology, evolution, and revolution. “So–monkeys ready on three, throw your wrench in the gears,” yells Van Atta at the song’s climax. A cornered creature will strike, especially if it’s got something like Charge! to hype it up for that moment. (Bandcamp link)
wilder Thing – I Have My Mother’s Eyes and I’m Not Giving Them Back
Release date: November 1st Record label: Repeating Cloud Genre: Lo-fi pop, experimental folk, psychedelic pop Formats: Cassette, digital Pull Track: I’m Done Falling Over You
Who likes when a punk musician has a weird lo-fi psychedelic side project? I sure do, and I suspect that Repeating Cloud Records does, as well. That’s who’s putting out I Have My Mother’s Eyes and I’m Not Giving Them Back, the latest from wilder Thing, aka Wes Sterrs. Sterrs is the drummer for Portland, Maine post-punk trio FonFon Ru, but before that band even formed, he self-released four records as wilder Thing from 2013 to 2015. I Have My Mother’s Eyes and I’m Not Giving Them Back is the first wilder Thing release in nearly a decade, and it’s also the most substantial one yet, spanning seventeen songs and forty minutes of fractured but melodic bedroom psychedelic pop. There’s folk music, hooks, dreaminess, and pure psych throughout I Have My Mother’s Eyes and I’m Not Giving Them Back, reminding me a bit of labelmates Log Across the Washer or a more ramshackle version of The Olivia Tremor Control and other song-forward Elephant 6 groups (Repeating Cloud’s Galen Richmond mentioned Chad VanGaalen in his email about this record, which I’m tacking on here because I think it’s pretty accurate, too). We’re left with something that balances intimacy with adventurousness, an album that invites you in to watch it go to work.
The catch is that you’ll have to do a bit of work yourself–for instance, are you willing to navigate the swirling, layered soundscapes of opening track “He Used to Be Beautiful” to get to its moments of eerie but potent beauty? Are you able to accept that Sterrs takes some of the best melodies on the entire record and sticks them in brief transitional songs like “Sorry I Missed You, Happy Birthday” and “It’s Too Cold for the Roof”? Are you down with a singing-saw-heavy instrumental track (skip “Luno” if not)? If you’ve made it this far, I’d imagine that the answer to all of these questions (whether you know it or not) is “yes”, and I Have My Mother’s Eyes and I’m Not Giving Them Back has plenty of gems for you to peruse. The gorgeous minimalist psych pop of “The Gardener” and “The Flower” break open the infinite possibility machine early on in the record, and if you decide to embark on the journey after that, you’re rewarded with a nearly-perfect fuzzy lo-fi pop song called “I’m Done Falling Over You”. wilder Thing invites you to handle them at their trippiest (“Technicolor Psychoscapes”) and noisiest (“Big Twitch”) as I Have My Mother’s Eyes and I’m Not Giving Them Back advances, but the pop never stops, both hidden in songs like those and slightly more out-in-the-open with tracks like (the still pretty psychedelic) “Horn of the Moon”. The presentation of I Have My Mother’s Eyes and I’m Not Giving Them Back might feel like it caps how many people it can reach, but it’s also a key part of its charm, I think; after all, I’m sure In the Aeroplane Over the Sea felt destined to be bound for obscurity at some point too. (Bandcamp link)
EEP – You Don’t Have to Be Prepared
Release date: November 1st Record label: Hogar Genre: Dream pop, art pop, synthpop, psych pop Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital Pull Track: Ghost
The beginning of this decade was a very fertile time for the El Paso, Texas group EEP and its members–they put out two full-lengths (2020’s Death of a Very Good Machine and 2021’s Winter Skin), while members Rosie Varela and Ross Ingram also released solo albums. The EEP albums used the band’s robust quintet lineup to create distorted, layered, shoegaze-influenced indie rock, while Ingram and Varela experimented with electronica, art pop, and psychedelic pop on their own records, although there was an understandable amount of overlap between the various projects. Things have been relatively quiet on the EEP front for the past couple of years–as it turns out, two-fifths of the band departed after Winter Skin, and Varela, Ingram, and Sebastian Estrada had to retool themselves as a trio. You Don’t Have to Be Prepared, the third EEP album, is a concept record–by chance, the band found a voicemail from about forty years ago taped via a “dictaphone, reel-to-reel tape recorder” in an organ at the band’s home studio, and the story of a woman moving across the country for a romantic partner hinted at by the recording served as the inspiration for the album. Intentionally or otherwise, this record themed around departure and major life changes is soundtracked by a band that’s reinvented themselves musically, debuting a new sound on their latest collection of music.
The differences are apparent with even just a cursory listen to You Don’t Have to Be Prepared–instead of being almost entirely led by Varela, she and Ingram are now effectively co-lead vocalists on these songs, and there’s almost none of the shoegaze influence that permeated EEP’s last album. It’s been replaced by a much more open, subtler, more electronic-tinged dream pop sound–creep from Ingram and Varela’s solo music, perhaps, but more like a band that’s playing to different strengths with a different lineup. The band no longer has a permanent drummer, and You Don’t Have to Be Prepared is given a certain freedom by this fact–sometimes, one of the trio will step behind the kit for the more “rock”-based songs that need a proper drumbeat (the lilting opening pop of “Ghost”, the jazz-influenced art rock of “Here’s What I Want You to Forget”), but songs like “14 Days” and “Clay Center” are free to explore new terrain for the band via floating, drum machine-paced synthpop tunes. “On Tenterhooks” is a post-rock/jazz-rock instrumental song that might be my favorite recording on the entire album, pushing the band into Thrill Jockey/Quarterstick territory effortlessly–it’s up there with “Always”, a driving piece of dreamy indie rock that’s maybe the closest thing to “classic-sounding” EEP on You Don’t Have to Be Prepared. Still, the song has a sparkly 80s synthpop/new wave sheen to it that’s not exactly in the same ballpark as Winter Skin–like the album’s main source of inspiration, it uses parts of the past as a way to focus on what’s as of yet unwritten. (Bandcamp link)
Tess Parks – Pomegranate
Release date: October 25th Record label: Fuzz Club/Hand Drawn Dracula Genre: Psychedelic pop, dream pop, psych rock, psych folk Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital Pull Track: Surround
Toronto psychedelic pop singer Tess Parks has had an interesting career. Her debut solo album, Blood Hot, came out back in 2013, but she became more well-known in the following years after releasing two collaborative albums with The Brian Jonestown Massacre’s Anton Newcombe in 2015 and 2018. Parks never stopped working on a proper follow-up to Blood Hot, although health problems and eventually a pandemic slowed progress before And Those Who Were Seen Dancing came out in 2022 on Fuzz Club (The Men, DAIISTAR, The Jesus and Mary Chain) and Hand Drawn Dracula. Thankfully, we didn’t have to wait another nine years for the third Tess Parks album, as Pomegranate follows just two years removed from her last one. Although it’s a “solo” LP in name, Pomegranate wouldn’t be what it is without Parks’ longtime collaborator Ruari Meehan, who produced the album and co-wrote every song. The psychedelic music that Parks and Meehan create on Pomegranate (with assistance from organist/bassist Francesco Perini, drummer Marco Ninni, and flutist Kira Krempova, among others) is subdued but adventurous, sounding like the work of collaborators who know how to get the most out of each other without abandoning the album’s singular groove.
Ninni’s hypnotic, almost trip-hop drumbeat, the grooving bass, and Krempova’s flute all ensure that “Bagpipe Blues” opens Pomegranate with a low-key but wild psychedelic experience, and Parks doesn’t slow things down as “California’s Dreaming” embraces more straightforward 60s pop and “Koalas” goes down the road of psychedelic folk. There’s some Paisley Underground psychedelia a la Mazzy Star–or even offbeat lo-fi folk musicians like Lisa Germano–in stuff like “Lemon Poppy” and “Sunnyside”, which gives Pomegranate a nice extra layer to go along with the more traditional psychedelic pop. At the album’s most exploratory, we get the six-minute “Charlie Potato” and “Running Home to Sing”, both of which aren’t afraid to try everything from spoken word passages to electronic touches. Pomegranate only have nine songs, so every one of them has to bring something substantial to the table for the album to work, and indeed the LP is a consistent listen; even as it stretches from one side of Parks’ sound to the other, everything’s working together to get the record across the finish line. The closing track is called “Surround”, and it almost feels like a victory lap–there’s a sunny groove to it that isn’t too prevalent elsewhere in the album, perhaps hinting at Newcombe’s influence. It sounds like Tess Parks, though, the same as the rest of Pomegranate. (Bandcamp link)
It is Thursday, and we’re here to look at some great new music that’s coming out tomorrow, November 1st. New LPs from The Declining Winter, Charlie Kaplan, The Smashing Times, and Market get the spotlight this time around. Check them out, and be sure to check out all of this week’s earlier blog posts (Monday’s featured 2nd Grade, THEMM!, Dazy, and Podcasts, Tuesday’s was Hell Trash, Recalculating, Testbild!, and Grapes of Grain, and Wednesday was on Mope Grooves’ Box of Dark Roses) if you haven’t yet.
If you’re looking for more new music, you can visit the site directory to see what else we’ve written about lately. If you’d like to support Rosy Overdrive, you can share this (or another) post, or donate here.
The Declining Winter – Last April
Release date: November 1st Record label: Second Language Music Genre: Folk, singer-songwriter, slowcore, orchestral folk Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital Pull Track: Last April
Richard Adams established himself in the realms of slowcore and post-rock by co-leading the cult Leeds group Hood throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, and he’s continued to follow this path via his long-running solo project The Declining Winter. Last year’s offering from The Declining Winter, Really Early, Really Late, was a breathtaking and ornate confirmation that Adams’ music has, if anything, benefited from the experience and age of its creator, and the months following its release have reassured us of the continuation of another key aspect of Adams–his prolific nature. Since Really Early, Really Late’s release last March, he’s put out an album as one half of Great Panoptique Winter (his electronic-ambient duo with Jason Sweeney) and a collection of recent castoff material called Buried Songs 2018-2021. This all brings us to Last April, which is I believe the ninth Declining Winter album, and one that immediately stands out in the midst of a vast body of work. The six (non-bonus) songs of Last April were written on the same night, in a period of “shock, grief and trauma” brought upon by the loss of Adams’ mother (Last April refers to the month of her passing). Musically, it’s a stark departure from the skillfully orchestrated Really Early, Really Late, as Adams’ voice is accompanied only by his acoustic guitar and Sarah Kemp’s violin, and Adams’ writing is unmistakably, entirely drawn from a place of mourning.
Discounting the two Bandcamp-only bonus tracks, Last April spans only a half-dozen songs and barely over a half-hour in length, but there’s no mistaking it for a minor entry in Adams’ oeuvre. Adams and his guitar step lightly through the opening track, “Eyes on Mine”–he almost sounds like he’s learning to walk, talk, and play music again as the minimal guitar playing gets a much-welcome boost from Kemp’s sweeping violin. About a minute into the song, Adams finally begins singing, and he steps into his mother’s shoes with a mixture of pain, reference, and disbelief. “All I want is to hear your voice,” Adams urgently whispers in the nearly eight-minute title track, which continues the bare, plodding pace of the record, the aural equivalent of an extraordinarily heavy walk alone through the chilly British autumn. Those familiar with The Declining Winter shouldn’t be surprised that Last April finds particular feelings and lingers on them at length, but the ones that Adams and Kemp find on this record are singularly stinging. “Mother’s Son” is a reworking of sorts of Purple Mountains’ “I Loved Being My Mother’s Son”; the music is pretty different, and so are some of the lyrics, but the inspiration is clearly there, and the solace is felt in the link to the former song, if not in this particular recording itself. The guitars and strings in “My Greatest Friend” feel just a little more hopeful, the relatively brief track reminding me a bit of a “slowcore-folk” version of Martin Phillipps’ writing, and the record leaves us with another song with just a bit of brightness peeking through, “August Blue”. The last words Adams sings on the song, however, are “You’re not here, and I’m to blame”; Last April absolutely sounds like an album that came tumbling out of its creator at once, but its recording–with even the bare minimum of accompaniment–adds another shade to that painful, fruitful evening. (Bandcamp link)
Charlie Kaplan – Eternal Repeater
Release date: November 1st Record label: Glamour Gowns Genre: Folk rock, psychedelic rock, art rock, singer-songwriter Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Everyone Calling Your Name
I actually wrote about Charlie Kaplan not that long ago, due to his work as the bassist in New York art pop/soft rock trio Office Culture, who released their fourth album mere weeks ago. As it turns out, Kaplan is also a solo artist who’s put out just as much music on his own–since 2020, there have been three Charlie Kaplan LPs and two EPs, all via the Glamour Gowns imprint. Although Office Culture bandleader Winston Cook-Wilson contributes piano to Eternal Repeater, Kaplan’s latest solo album is pretty distinct from his other band–it’s much more based in the realm of folk rock, ranging from the “ornate and beautiful” to the “swirling and psychedelic” ends of the genre. It’s the work of a well-seasoned group of collaborators who’ve all played on each other’s records–Kaplan, Cook-Wilson, lead guitarist Andrew Daly Frank, bassist Frank Meadows, drummer Ben Wagner, and producer Nico Hedley. Together, they give Eternal Repeater a joyfully comfortable feeling–on the record’s quieter moments, Kaplan’s subtly attention-commanding vocals help the group sound like a dead ringer for vintage Red House Painters (a comparison that, understandably, Andy Cush’s well-written essay accompanying the album leaves out) and the more busy moments collide psychedelia, indie rock, and folk like the best Wilco albums (a comparison Cush is more than happy to make, as he should).
The first proper song on Eternal Repeater is one of its best, the gorgeous “Everybody Calling Your Name”, which is more than content to leave empty space up until Daly Frank starts shredding as the song draws to a close. Things get a bit more cosmic with “Mescarole”, a rhythmic track in which Kaplan intones “Asshole / asshole / You spilled my drink, spilled my drink, yeah,” over top of the band’s smooth, smoky delivery (it’s a song about a bad experience at a concert, yes, although the Charlie Kaplan band doesn’t really do “bad vibes”). The middle of Eternal Repeater is where Kaplan and his collaborators sound the most “focused”–not that “Feelin Alright” doesn’t have a loose, jammy undercurrent to it, but the band commit just enough to seeing the song’s ragged country rock core through, and the euphoric “Edie Got Away” is the record’s version of breezy, rambling rock and roll. The momentum is strong enough to lead us into two seven-minute songs back to back in the record’s second half–one could get lost in “Idiot” and “Now That I’m Older” if they aren’t careful. Not that that would be a bad thing–the latter one in particular features Kaplan and the band really giving it their all. On the other side of the mountain is “In a Little Bit of Time”, an out-of-nowhere garage-fuzz-rock closing song. “In a little bit of time, I will be waiting at your door / In a little bit of time, you’ll see that justice has been served,” Kaplan sings quietly but confidently. Oh, shit. You know that folk band in the back of the bar that you thought were just playing merrily along and not paying attention? They’re looking right at you. (Bandcamp link)
The Smashing Times – Mrs Ladyships and the Cleanerhouse Boys
Release date: November 1st Record label: K/Perennial Genre: Jangle pop, psychedelic pop, psychedelic folk, twee Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Wednesday, on a Hummingbird’s Wing
Mrs Ladyships and the Cleanerhouse Boys is the fifth album from The Smashing Times, and it’s the fourth in as many years. The calendar flips, summer turns to fall, and Baltimore’s premier mod revival quintet return with another collection of gloriously fractured and free-ranging guitar pop. 2022’s Bloom got the group on my radar, vocalists Thee Jasmine Monk and Zelda-Anais trading off on scattershot, scrambled 60s melodies while bassist Britta Leijonflycht, drummer Paul Krolian, and guitarist Blake Douglas amble along gamely. Last year’s This Sporting Life took a step forward, congealing just enough into something a little more solid and song-focused, resulting in their best record yet. Mrs Ladyships and the Cleanerhouse Boys doesn’t reverse this step, per se–but it is a bit more offbeat than The Smashing Times’ last album. All the blissful psychedelic jangle-beat melodies are still here, yes, but (as one might gather from its title, which verges on self-parody) Mrs Ladyships and the Cleanerhouse Boys leans into the eccentricities of British pop of the past across its fourteen tracks. It’s more obvious in some places (the dry intro and outro of “I Paint the Pictures”, the children’s-show goofiness hijacking “Rupert Tingle”) than others, but the whole record is clearly indebted to the weirdest detours from some of the most classic rock albums.
I wouldn’t expect anything other than pop music on The Smashing Times’ terms with Mrs Ladyships and the Cleanerhouse Boys, but the band’s latest album really does introduce itself by emphasizing the unhurried, leisurely snaking version of their jangle-folk-rock. The opening title track and “Rabbit of June” right after it both qualify, although in different ways–the former by locking onto a classic pop song structure and giving it a classically shambling reading, the latter by waiting until the song is nearly done to get itself together and deliver a big finish. There are always moments on Smashing Times records that go a little “out there”, but between the backmasking “Can I Have Some Tea” and the ambient glow of “Moon Viewing Party” (both full-length songs), there seems to be more real estate given to these than in the rest of their recent output. On the other end of the spectrum, the aforementioned “Rupert Tingle” is The Smashing Times at their most pure pop, but it’s hardly the only winner in that department. I don’t know if “Wednesday, on a Hummingbird’s Wing” is The Smashing Times’ best song yet, but it’s certainly on the short list for the most straight-up gorgeous thing the band have put to tape–it’s five-and-a-half minutes of wobbly but perfect pastoral guitar pop. Plenty of other tracks rise to the occasion, but “Tarts and Vicars” is the one that comes the closest to “Wednesday…” for me personally. I enjoy the nicking from “You Won’t See Me” at the beginning of the lyrics, but I enjoy the bumpy but propulsive, familiar but original pop song that follows even more. (Bandcamp link)
Market – Well I Asked You a Question
Release date: November 1st Record label: Western Vinyl Genre: Soft rock, folk rock, chamber pop Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Sertraline
As a producer and multi-instrumentalist, Brooklyn musician Nate Mendelsohn has contributed to records from a bunch of notable indie rock acts, including Office Culture, Wendy Eisenberg, and Max Blansjaar, among others (he even mixed the Charlie Kaplan LP that appears earlier in this blog post!). All the while, he’s been making music as Market with a cast of frequent collaborators like Stephen Becker and Katie Von Schleicher, both of whom appear on the latest Market record, Well I Asked You a Question (and the former of which even plays in the “core” Market band alongside Natasha Bergman and Duncan Standish). In 2022 Mendelsohn linked up with Western Vinyl (Young Moon, Wilder Maker, Nat Baldwin) to put out The Consistent Brutal Bullshit Gong, and despite seemingly working with increasingly more high-profile acts in recent years (Frankie Cosmos, Yaeji, Sam Evian), Market is still going strong, back two years later with another full-length LP. Well I Asked You a Question is a relaxed but intricate art pop album, with Mendelsohn and his collaborators consistently meeting each other in just the right places to best serve these tracks. Mendelsohn is a low-key vocalist but never too small for Well I Asked You a Question, whose keys and strings ensure a rich but form-fitting tapestry over which the bandleader sings amiably.
Well I Asked You a Question never feels overloaded, but there’s a lot going on in it–the record’s baseline sound of soft rock and indie folk can feel like a gently-rocking lullaby, but Market slowly, steadily take the record to unexpected places before it’s all said and done. The chamber pop opening title track and the psychedelic, seam-bursting “Apple” have their own interesting charms, but the six-minute almost ambient-pop excursion of “Around” really turns Well I Asked You a Question into something more, and the dark, relatively zippy folk rock of “Sertraline” seizes on the opportunity to find even more surprises. There’s a liveliness to songs like “Rachel Getting Married” and “Bigger Problem” that keep the strong pop rock moments coming well into Well I Asked You a Question’s second half and even gives Mendelsohn some cover to pull the band into quieter corners with the spare folk of “On the Barn” and the slow-moving drone-pop of “Fantasy”. Market confidently, humbly roll all the way up to closing track “Reason to Shout”, whose foundational strings and drums are, again, just right in the mix. Like any good producer-by-trade-made record, Well I Asked You a Question bears the mark of its creator’s comfort in the studio but doesn’t forget to take this advantage and do something with it. (Bandcamp link)
Release date: October 25th Record label: 12XU/Night School Genre: Lo-fi pop, art pop, post-punk, experimental punk, twee Formats: Vinyl, digital
I don’t really want to talk about this record. There’s too much to say about it, and also nothing to say about it. Box of Dark Roses is the fifth and final album from Mope Grooves, a Portland, Oregon-based project led by Stevie Pohlman (or just stevie, “lowercase, no last name”, as she’s credited on this record) and realized with the help of a long list of collaborators and friends. The four albums that Mope Grooves released on stevie’s on label, See My Friends, from 2017 to 2019, garnered them a fair amount of attention with the project’s distinctly Pacific Northwestern mix of art-y post-punk and “indie pop”–the long-awaited Box of Dark Roses was put together over the first few years of the pandemic and is being co-released by 12XU and Night School posthumously, as stevie died earlier this year.
In her extensive liner notes for Box of Dark Roses (in which, among many other subjects, she discusses the physical toll that making enough money just to survive and finish this album took on her), stevie discusses the album as something that was created practically from its inception as a single unit–a twenty-seven-song, ninety-minute double LP conceived at once and built with this vision in mind. It’s ramshackle pop music, drawn from clanging keyboards and buzzing beats and vocals that regularly surprise. Stevie (who shares lead vocal duties with several others on this album) is a captivating writer–she’s a poet, yes, that’s part of it, but Box of Dark Roses is so easy to follow despite everything about it because its leader is unfailingly consistent in her worldview, and doesn’t shy away from following these core tenets to wherever they take her.
And Box of Dark Roses, it bears emphasizing, is right. Sure, there are some specifics we can hash out in some imaginary world where it matters, but every “slogan” and excerpt and point on this record is hard-earned, drawn from the reality of the life of a transgender woman and radical activist from the Pacific Northwest who isn’t naive or self-centered enough to believe she’s the first to be in her position. It’s a “difficult” piece of queer art, not because its message or themes are hard to tease out, but because they’re horrifically easy to. Box of Dark Roses is…I’m not sure if it’s right to call it an “angry” album, but it’s, at the very least, an album about anger. The revenge and militarism and intersectional class warfare that populate the album are bound to be alarming to anyone unfamiliar with or intentionally tuned-out to the structural violence that is perhaps even more baked into the creation of Box of Dark Roses (and, as stevie seeks to point out, one’s “queer identity” is not inherently a magic bullet that illuminates all these struggles). “They’ll tell you you’re a criminal for paying them back in kind / But in the dark, in the wild, in the heart of the night, it is right to fight,” is a key lyric in “Aileen”–those lines are about Aileen Wuornos, but I thought of something else when I heard them, and perhaps you will, too. In elucidating one of those all-important “themes”, Mope Grooves stare down the cognitive dissonance and open contradictions one is required to accept in order to be a “respectable” member of society, and rejects them.
So, there’s some rough stuff on Box of Dark Roses. Sometimes it’s softened by the music, like in “Isn’t It” (“Now that you know this is the game / Isn’t it hard to play? Isn’t it?”), but there’s also “Dora”, which, again, coldly dispatches with any of the false comforts the empire provides to us that we might be tempted to cling to rather than do the harder and more correct thing. But do not mistake any of this as a lack of beauty, because that’s what Box of Dark Roses has above anything else. There are so many incredible, inventive pop and “art rock” songs on this album that I’m grateful exist, and they’re all pretty distinct from each other, too–the shrill, droning “Forever Is a Long Time”, the folk-crumpled “Here Comes the Moon”, the meandering “Cap Hits the Button”, the violin-aided lullaby “Tired All the Time”, any of these could be the one to suck you into Box of Dark Roses’ world, inviting you to readjust yourself to keep meeting Mope Grooves’ ever-changing definition of pop music where it’s at.
So, there’s a lot more I could say about Box of Dark Roses. About the album itself, about the circumstances leading up to its creation and release, about how correct it is. I hope other writers eventually help me out on covering all that (really, I can’t imagine listening to this record and not wanting to find some way to do it justice). I do kind of fear that I’ve just ended up talking around the album, though, focusing on my own personal mini-soapboxes and hyper-specific interests because I can’t explain and interpret Box of Dark Roses better than it does of itself. These are the kinds of things I think about when I think about Box of Dark Roses. Maybe you’ll think about them, too. Maybe you’ll be angry, like I also am when I listen to this record sometimes. It is, as Mope Grooves emphasize, a decentralized, collective anger, not about one’s self except in the sense that one is a part of a whole–I hear, in stevie’s art, a real fury and fervor with regards to the unjust precariousness of the people around her, collaborators, friends, and comrades. It is, for many reasons, contagious. (Bandcamp link)
It’s Tuesday! It’s time for more new music! Today, we’re looking at new albums from Recalculating, Testbild!, and Grapes of Grain, plus a compilation of demos and early material from Hell Trash. If you missed yesterday’s blog post, featuring 2nd Grade, THEMM!, Dazy, and Podcasts, be sure to 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.
Hell Trash – SMASH HITS! Early Tracks 2021-2024
Release date: October 4th Record label: Self-released Genre: Experimental rock, art pop, psych pop, folktronica, synthpop, lo-fi pop Formats: CD, digital Pull Track: Brand New Self Portrait (Chadwick Demo)
The rollout of Philadelphia-originating, Chicago-based group Hell Trash has been decidedly unorthodox. The first-ever release from the founding duo of Rowan Roth and Noah Roth was a live EP in June of last year, which painted them as a fairly stripped-down folk act, and the “Surprises / Gold Little Things” single that followed that August was an intriguing piece of jangly alt-country-rock. Both of these releases were quite good, but as it turns out, neither was an especially accurate reflection of the music Hell Trash were making together around this time, which we now learn via SMASH HITS! Early Tracks 2021-2024, the most complete picture of Hell Trash thus far. If you’re still waiting for a “formal” Hell Trash debut, then keep waiting, because SMASH HITS! is more of a release borne out of necessity (wanting to have a CD out for an impending tour) and a desire to clean house (having since added two new members, Nick and Sarah, the Roths have decided to close the door on the “duo era”). The Hell Trash found here contains bits of the folkiness of their previous releases, but this isn’t even the primary mode of SMASH HITS! (and similarly, the experimental folk-pop of Noah Roth’s solo career and the fuzz rock of their other band, Mt. Worry, aren’t really all that close to these songs, either). It reminds me of a more “folk”-based version of late 90s indie pop, incorporating electronic and psychedelic touches and even some trip hop-esque beats into Rowan’s songwriting.
SMASH HITS! doesn’t really ease us into these odder and more surprising corners of Hell Trash’s sound–the opening duo of “Brand New Self Portrait” and “Before There Was Life” really throws us to the wolves, so to speak. The former song is particularly confrontational in its stiff, serious alternative pop (Noah mentions the initial goal of the project being to sound between “Fiona Apple and 12 Rods”, and there’s definitely some of the former in this one), and the latter is a dirge sung by the duo in unison and ending with a transcendent guitar solo from Steph Davies, the one guest musician on this compilation. After this opening, there’s a bit of familiarity for us Hell Trash-heads–the aforementioned “Surprises” still sounds great here, and a demo of “Violence” (which appeared on the live EP) is just as skeletal and breathtaking in this form. In the context of SMASH HITS!, though, these are the odd songs out, as the duo get right back to it with the hazy, electronic pop odyssey of “Ghost Dogs (The Way of the Samurai)” and the six-minute, swirling “Encyclopedia Song”. The one cover is a version of Arthur Russell’s “I Couldn’t Say It to Your Face” (which is becoming an indie rock standard, it seems, as everyone from Ex-Vöid to La Bonte has done a version of it recently), while “Brush” (which also appeared on Live at Home) gets two different versions here. The “Spruce Demo” is a hypnotic “folktronica” recording in the vein of Flotation Toy Warning or Sparklehorse, while the “Exit Slip Demo” turns it into a polished indie folk rock duet. Eventually, Hell Trash will presumably be normal and put out a “debut album”, but it’s worth getting hip to their SMASH HITS! in the meantime. (Bandcamp link)
Recalculating – Do You Like to Laugh?
Release date: September 13th Record label: Band Dinner Genre: Punk rock, garage punk, noise rock, post-punk Formats: Digital Pull Track: Based on the Comedy of Ray Romano
What were you doing on New Years’ Eve last year? Apparently, New York trio Recalculating were putting the finishing touches on their latest album, Do You Like to Laugh?, which they recorded at Electrical Audio with Steve Albini from December 28th through 31st of 2023. Guitarist Scott Sendrow, drummer Michael Sendrow, and bassist Sean Wiederkehr appear to share vocal and writing duties, although it doesn’t feel like a three-headed monster as the band (made up of two brothers and one friend who “stays late for dinner when possible”) are clearly in-tune with one another. Not counting a demo album and a live record, Do You Like to Laugh? is Recalculating’s third LP, and it’s probably not a shock to learn that a trio that went halfway across the United States to record at Electrical Audio have a sound recalling underground punk, alternative, and indie rock bands of the pre-grunge era. Much more limber than the “blunt noise rock” side of those genres, Recalculating make a skittering, talk-singing punk rock and garage rock that can go from minimal to noisy at the drop of a hat in the vein of classic alt-rock groups like the Minutemen, Mission of Burma, and Nomeansno, and their songs will appeal to the contingent of post-punk revivalists that don’t take themselves too seriously.
Do You Like to Laugh? opens with one hell of a mission statement in “Based on the Comedy of Ray Romano”, an absolutely wild punk rock exploration of comedy and fiction and the performance of life (“Ladies and gentlemen, be gentle with comedians / For while they are blessed with prodigious download metrics / They endure life defenseless / Unarmed with guitars!” roars whichever one of them is on the mic as the song comes to a head–it’s hard not to imagine Albini enjoying that part). Not everything is so high-concept, although the yelping punk of “All the Rage”, the dark post-punk of “Bargain Bin”, and the electric PRF-core rock and roll of “Candide Says” have plenty to chew on nonetheless. “How Do You Get a Distressed Guitar?” is Recalculating’s version of a ballad, amusingly meditating on the titular concept and eventually rounding their way to a point (“Faded blue jeans, prepaid holes in the knees, facial stubble two millimeters wise”), although it’s not until the end of Do You Like to Laugh? that the band really get lost in the Recalculating of it all again. The stream-of-conscious “Sometimes the Chicken Wins at Tic Tac Toe” is a five-minute ramble that covers about everything, delivering plenty of good one-liners (“Which one of you dummies tried to rely on the wisdom of crowds?”) but always making its way back to the title line. Recalculating keep repeating that line over and over again, slightly changing the inflection each time–they’re a band that knows that delivery is essential for good comedy. (Bandcamp link)
Testbild! – Bed Stilt
Release date: September 27th Record label: Quindi Genre: Soft rock, indie pop, bossa nova, jazz pop, chamber pop Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: And Her Eyes Are Red
Testbild! are new to me, but the Malmö, Sweden-based art pop project has been around since more or less the beginning of the twenty-first century. In fact, Bed Stilt is the group’s twelfth full-length album, following 2022’s Mörka stjärnan Jorden with their debut for upstart Italian imprint Quindi Records (Monde UFO, Fortunato Durutti Marinetti, Dead Bandit). Throughout Testbild!’s entire history it’s been led by Petter Herbertsson, although the supporting cast has come and gone–on Bed Stilt, Herbertsson gets help from a core of multi-instrumentalist Douglas Holmquist, vocalist Siri af Burén, and synth player Mattias Nihlén, as well as “guest” synth performances from Peter Jackson and Tomas Bodén. Interestingly enough, work on these songs began in 2005 and 2006–but it wasn’t until last year that Herbertsson revived them, added some overdubs, and turned it into a brief (twenty-three-minute) but fully-realized collection of airy, transfixing pop music. On Bed Stilt, Testbild! alreadysound at-home on their new label, as the bossa nova and jazz-pop of Monde UFO and the soft rock of Fortunato Durutti Marinetti both figure into the sound of these half-dozen tracks. Some of Bed Stilt is more grounded than others, but all of it is quite pop-forward, resulting in a strong (re)introduction for the longrunning project.
The soft, chiming keys and jazz influences built into “The First New Years Eve” ensure that Bed Stilt receives a smooth and relaxed introduction–which, as it turns out, is exactly the kind of opening that the record needs. Testbild! find a lot of ground to cover in this particular comfort zone–one song later, the lengthy instrumental passages of “Streams” find a pleasing middle ground between “soundscape” and “pop song”, while “And Her Eyes Are Red” is a more straightforward pop tune that’s the first thing on the record that could be called “energetic”. As it rounds the corner from its bated-breath introduction, “And Her Eyes Are Red” sounds like a cross between bossa nova-era Stereolab and the more fluttery side of Elephant 6 (not unlike a modern band they remind me of, Tomato Flower). The catchiest moments of “And Here Eyes Are Red” come in flashes, but the interstitial instrumental parts don’t diminish it–just like how the ambient outro to “Cardamom Song” doesn’t take anything away from the rhythmic sophisti-pop that comprises the track’s first three minutes, nor does the simple piano-and-banjo tapestry of “Soft Winged and Frail” prevent it from standing up against some of the record’s more layered compositions. As “Water on the Moon” fades into a delicate chamber pop conclusion, Bed Stilt comes to a rather abrupt conclusion–one gets the sense that Testbild! can (and have) create something more large-scale and complex than these songs, but training their full energy on making polished, streamlined pop music has led to some strong results. (Bandcamp link)
Grapes of Grain – Painted Windows
Release date: October 4th Record label: Drag Days Genre: Folk rock, jangle pop, college rock, soft rock Formats: CD, digital Pull Track: Fatal Flower
It’s commendable when a band begins a second act that eventually turns out to be more substantial than their original one. This certainly applies to Utrecht folk/college rock group Grapes of Grain, who initially released two EPs and an LP from 2006 to 2009 before seemingly fading into obscurity. However, ever since vocalist/guitarist Alexis Vos and multi-instrumentalist Berend Jan Ike returned at the beginning of last year, they’ve been on a tear, releasing two more EPs (last year’s Getaways and this year’s Serving Water) and their first full-length in a decade and a half (last November’s Unaware). With the third Grapes of Grain LP, Painted Windows, Vos and Jan have officially eclipsed the band’s pre-hiatus output in under two years–and they’ve done it with some of their strongest material yet. The twelve-song, thirty-six minute album certainly doesn’t feel like their fourth record in two years–it’s a patient-sounding, carefully-sculpted LP, with enjoyably teased-out instrumentation largely provided by the band’s core duo, but former full-time members Stefan Breuer and Arno Breuer also contribute, as well as guest musicians Harm van Sleen (pedal steel, dobro, violin), Niels van Heumen (trumpet, synthesizer), and David Decraene (saxophone).
Grapes of Grain have a distinct sound that falls in between the worlds of folk rock/alt-country and college rock/jangle pop–Vos and Jan have almost certainly spent a lot of time with, at the very least, Out of Time and Automatic for the People (if not the records before those, too). The expanse of Painted Windows lets the band find more ways to present their songs than ever before, adding up to their most wide-ranging record that I’ve heard yet. As we move through Painted Windows, we’re greeted with immediately-hitting glockenspiel-flavored indie pop (“Martin Luther”), sophisti-pop-like empty-space art pop (“Stranded”), an upbeat pop rock tribute to Jonathan Richman (“Hey There, Jonathan”), and a surprising detour into electric, kind of messy indie rock and roll (“Darker Days”). There are a handful of songs on here that easily slot into “could’ve-been college rock anthems” territory, from the uber-catchy handclap-pop of “Sensation” (featuring excellent guest vocals from Amber Sawyer) to “Fatal Flower” (which imagines a cross between Paul Westerberg and Fables of the Reconstruction-era R.E.M. with a prominent synth hook), but Grapes of Grain have always been a little more pensive than their peers that like to focus solely on the big choruses, and their songs in this vein (hymn-like closing track “Lifeline”, the minimal dreamlike memories of “Photograph Girl”) live up to their past material, too. Painted Windows reflects the strong work that Grapes of Grain have done recently, and adds just a bit more to their ever-expanding legacy, too. (Bandcamp link)
You know how last week was a great week on the blog? Well, guess what: this one is going to be just as good, if not better. We’re getting started with a mostly EPs edition (I didn’t plan it that way, it’s just how things shook out!): new ones from THEMM!, Dazy, and Podcasts, plus the hot new 2nd Grade full-length, are detailed below.
If you’re looking for more new music, you can visit the site directory to see what else we’ve written about lately. If you’d like to support Rosy Overdrive, you can share this (or another) post, or donate here.
2nd Grade – Scheduled Explosions
Release date: October 25th Record label: Double Double Whammy Genre: Power pop, lo-fi pop Formats: Cassette, digital Pull Track: Out of the Hive
Every indie rock band wants to be Guided by Voices. And why wouldn’t they? They’re critically acclaimed, they’re successful enough to make it their job, they’ve got a devout cult following, their live shows are renowned parties, they’ve put out a ton of music–and they’ve done it all while being fiercely independent. 2nd Grade are assuredly one of these bands–frontperson Peter Gill has even gone so far as to not play guitar live as inspired by Robert Pollard’s stage presence. Like any power pop band with a penchant for shorter songs, 2nd Grade have been blessed or cursed with Guided by Voices comparisons pretty much since their inception as a Gill solo project, even if I thought that their earlier work (which I did enjoy a fair deal, by the way) didn’t have much in common with classic Pollard fare aside from runtime. It’s actually way harder to sound like Guided by Voices than the RIYLers of the world make it seem. You can’t just slap tape hiss on a Romantics B-side and call it a day; there’s a mix of uninhibited rock and roll and self-conscious basement pop, a balance between wonderment and darker, sadder feelings. On Scheduled Explosions, the fourth and best album from the Philadelphia power pop group, Peter Gill and company, for the first time in 2nd Grade’s relatively brief but fruitful career, unambiguously shoot for and subsequently nail this balance.
Scheduled Explosions is actually a step back in terms of fidelity from their last album, 2022’s Easy Listening–the rest of the band (Remember Sports’ Catherine Dwyer on guitar, MJ Lenderman & The Wind/Friendship’s Jon Samuels also on guitar, Psychic Flowers/Big Heet’s David Settle on bass, and Ylayali’s Francis Lyons on drums) drift in and out of these twenty-three songs, never once appearing on the same track together. Gill is the only constant. It lends a patchwork–dare I say collage-like–quality to the record, correctly trusting Gill’s writing and vision to hold these songs together. At this point, Gill’s ability to produce a bucket of winning hooks is well-established, and this, of course, goes a long way towards making Scheduled Explosions the instant classic that it is, as does Gill’s inability to be anything other than a big pop music fan, as the references to everything from Dougie Poole to Otis Redding to “Wild Thing” to “I Want to Tell You” keep reminding us. Also key is 2nd Grade’s refusal to abandon the “power” side of power pop even as it’s not really a record made by five musicians playing a room together–from “Live from Missile Command” to “Out of the Hive” to “Fashion Disease” to “Like a Wild Thing” to “American Rhythm”, there’s always a moment of, ahem, explosive rock and roll lurking just around the corner of the record.
Now that I’ve referenced the title, we might as well nod to the reality that we’re talking about an album called Scheduled Explosions with songs with titles like “Live from Missile Command” and “Jingle Jangle Nuclear Meltdown” and featuring multiple references to the price of gas being too high to “take you for a ride”. If it were the kind of 1980s unearthed basement pop that those early GBV records are often romanticized as, we’d call it “Cold War-informed”; the fact that it came out in 2024 confronts us with facts about this current day and age that your average power pop fan would rather not face. One of the final songs on the album is “68 Comeback”, one of the record’s most overtly Guided by Voices-esque songs about the titular Elvis Presley video concert special that’s distorted and blown-out to all hell. Gill’s alone on this one, and the words spill out of his mouth: “Right here right now is a child / Skipping dreamstones / On the surface of the retroverse / In the midst of a nuclear meltdown / Crying for help in the Sunset Sound echo chamber”. There’s a fire here, too, just as white-hot as it’s ever been. (Bandcamp link)
THEMM! – El Pastor
Release date: September 13th Record label: Self-released Genre: Punk rock, garage rock, Texas rock and roll Formats: Digital Pull Track: Hot Death
For almost the entire twenty-first century, Austin, Texas quintet The Midgetmen roamed the Lone Star State, playing gigs and putting out albums (usually on their own) of their self-described “slop-punk”. A couple of years ago, The Midgetmen (bassist/vocalist Marc Perlman, guitarists Alex Victoria, Jon Loyens, and Scotty Loewen, and drummer Justin Petro) rechristened themselves as THEMM!, but as far as I can tell, the vibe has largely remained the same (one of their first releases as THEMM! was a three-song single called THEMM! Try Crack, if you’re worried about them becoming too buttoned-up). 2024 has been THEMM!’s formal launch year–February brought Mmm, an EP in which the quintet re-recorded some of their earliest songs released under their old band name, while September sees the launch of El Pastor, THEMM!’s first record of all-new, all-original material. Recorded on the Mexican border near El Paso at Sonic Ranch with Ross Ingram of EEP, the five-song EP is THEMM! doing what they do best–cranking out hooky, unbothered punk rock that flirts with massive anthem-slinging but never takes itself too seriously.
Somewhat surprisingly, THEMM! open El Pastor with a State of the Republic in “Live Laugh Love”, a dispatch from the crumbling empire of their home state that touches on abortion rights, transphobia, fascism, and name-checks Ken Paxton over a flag-waving punk anthem. Lest you worry about where THEMM! stand, they not only reject the dark cloud hanging over their state but the excuses for falling in line, too–“I’m from a small town, I won’t go back / Go it alone when you can’t trust the pack”. “Hot Death” is the other song on El Pastor that rivals “Live Laugh Love” in “mega-punk-anthem” status, the guitars flying high as the band melt into the sand in the midst of dusty trails, cacti, and cicadas.
There’s a messiness and even darkness that runs deeper than the sloppy, cathartic take on pop punk that THEMM! practice on El Pastor, particularly present in the garage rock venter “Red Fangers” (“I’m in the tent because your mom and dad fight”) and the southern punk of “Steaks and Snakes”, whose narrator works a “contract job in the panhandle” while watching their domestic life circle the drain. After juggling phone calls from lawyers, THEMM! finish “Steaks and Snakes” by looking to the one constant in their life–the music, dude (“Hope we get cash tonight or we sleep in the practice space / Who can think of an ex-wife when you’re opening for Lee Bains”). Those may be the final lyrics of El Pastor, but the actual final statement is the uncharacteristically long instrumental the band launch into right afterwards. It’s the sound of getting up off one’s ass and moving somewhere. Maybe Texas is too big to escape, but it’s large enough that there’s always a new corner. (Bandcamp link)
Dazy – IT’S ONLY A SECRET (If You Repeat It)
Release date: October 25th Record label: Lame-O Genre: Power pop, fuzz rock, fuzz pop, pop punk, alt-dance, Madchester Formats: Digital Pull Track: Big End
It’s short, and it’s very sweet. One of the first releases from James Goodson’s Dazy project that got any kind of attention was a three-song EP called Revolving Doorback in 2021, so why shouldn’t the one-man fuzzy-power-pop band return to the well a few years later? Of course, a lot has happened in the world of Dazy between Revolving Door and now–an all-timer of a compilation cassette called MAXIMUMBLASTSUPERLOUD, a blockbuster signing to Lame-O Records, a debut LP called OUTOFBODY and a companion EP called OTHERBODY. Dazy has been uncharacteristically quiet as of late, as it’s been a year since the last new music from Goodson, the one-off “Forced Perspective” single (not counting an appearance on a song from the dance group Bodysync). Nevertheless, IT’S ONLY A SECRET (If You Repeat It) picks up the thread right where Goodson left off, with his instantly recognizable huge hooks that are equal parts pop punk and Madchester losing no potency over time. The dance-pop and electronic elements from the Bodysync collaboration and “Forced Perspective” are very present in these three tracks too, but there’s also plenty of punk energy and huge guitars, too–Goodson even lists Deedee from wild art punk group MSPAINT on the title track.
“It’s Only a Secret” was the EP’s lead single, but opening track “Big End” is the most obvious “hit” on IT’S ONLY A SECRET (If You Repeat It) to my ears. It’s the one “vintage Dazy” classic song on the EP–it’s got a bit of alt-dance energy to it, but it’s primarily a power pop guitar assault that just happens to have a beat. Goodson’s unflagging, almost robotic high energy is so strong here that even if the rest of the EP was inessential, “Big End” alone would be ample reassurance that Dazy’s still “got it”–“it” being the ability to write a scorching anthem for staring directly at the sun and sounding incredibly cool while doing it. The rest of the EP isn’t inessential, by the way, just different. “Weigh Down on Me” is a nice sideroad for Goodson to go down–the sun-drenched psychedelic pop of this song never explodes like the track before it, but its tightly controlled alt-pop sheen ends up being the glue that hold the two kinetic tracks bordering it together. Which leads us to “It’s Only a Secret”, in which a classic Dazy refrain (the one that gives the EP its title) has to battle an insurgent hardcore-punk vocal from Deedee and Goodson’s own electronic impulses. As one might imagine based on that description, “It’s Only a Secret” is a fairly unique-sounding song–it risks being more “interesting” than good, but the hooks win out–when Goodson, Deedee, and an acoustic guitar lock into place before the song’s big finish, every chaotic flourish feels justified. (Bandcamp link)
Podcasts – Supreme Auctions
Release date: September 13th Record label: Omegn Plateproduksjon Genre: Jangle pop, post-punk, power pop Formats: Digital Pull Track: Never Been a Problem
The self-titled debut album from Oslo quartet Podcasts was one of the biggest “growers” for me in 2023. I thought it was interesting when I heard it, pretty good when I wrote about it, and firmly enough in its camp by the end of last year to put it on my year-end list. The band (Ellis Jones aka Trust Fund, Kyle Devine, Tore Størvold, and Emil Kraugerud) practiced guitar-based indie pop with a bit of trickiness on Podcasts, favoring unexpected twists and turns over making the obvious move time and time again. The first Podcasts release since their debut LP is a brief but welcome EP called Supreme Auctions, which zips through “3.5 songs” in about eight minutes. It’s Podcasts at their most laconic yet–nothing on this EP is longer than three minutes, and the first song (an instrumental introduction that I’ll assume is the “.5” track) comes in at under a minute. More than just the song lengths, though, Supreme Auctions contains some of the band’s most unvarnished pop songwriting yet–the odd detours in Podcasts’ jangly power pop haven’t vanished exactly, but with little time to spare, they’re kept more towards the margins, giving these tracks a bit more runway with which to take off.
The EP kicks off with “Intro (For Supreme Auctions)”, which blends seamlessly into “Never Been a Problem”, not allowing us to take much of a breath before Supreme Auctions is already halfway over. The sprinting instrumental of “Intro (For Supreme Auctions)” eventually coils into something that resembles “math rock”, but only for a couple of seconds–likewise, “Never Been a Problem” is a polished, sugary piece of power pop that grinds to a complete halt halfway through, only to jam the keys back in the ignition and soar yet again (and then pull a slightly smaller version of the same trick one more time before the song ends). “Down to Melbourne” is the most rhythm-forward track on the EP, and it’s also a masterclass in restraint–it feels like Podcasts are holding back just a little bit throughout the song, to the point where the final refrain becomes a climax without radically altering much of anything. By closing track “Holiday”, Podcasts have become a blissful, carefree mid-tempo guitar pop band, strumming and breezing their way through a song that resists any sort of mid-track lurch or really anything more than a brief between-verses instrumental. Podcasts have more than earned the day off that’s daydreamt in the final track. (Bandcamp link)
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