Pressing Concerns: Fred Thomas, Naked Giants, Tony Vaz, Mr. Husband

Hello, loyal and appreciated Rosy Overdrive readers! Today’s Thursday Pressing Concerns looks at four albums coming out tomorrow, October 4th: new LPs from Fred Thomas, Naked Giants, Tony Vaz, and Mr. Husband. Some real underground indie rock/pop royalty in this one, if I do say so myself! It’s been a busy week; it’d be understandable if you missed Monday’s post (featuring Upstairs, Snakeskin, Best Bets, and Feeling Figures), Tuesday’s post (on Styrofoam Winos, Dom Sensitive, Wavers, and The Collect Pond), or Wednesday’s post (on Spirit Night’s Time Won’t Well), so be sure to check those ones 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.

Fred Thomas – Window in the Rhythm

Release date: October 4th
Record label: Polyvinyl
Genre: Folk rock, experimental rock, ambient rock, singer-songwriter
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Wasn’t

There’s too much to say about Fred Thomas–such it is with any musician who’s been releasing music at a prolific clip for nearly three decades now. The back half of his 2010s were defined by a trio of experimental, brilliant, and deeply-felt pop albums released under his own name, and the early 2020s by his new band Idle Ray, which put out an excellent debut album in 2021 amidst other smaller but worthwhile releases. Window in the Rhythm is the Ann Arbor-based musician’s first song-based solo album since 2018’s Aftering, and while it’s not in the same realm as the ambient music Thomas has been known to partake in, it’s not the lo-fi power pop of Idle Ray or the sonic busyness of his previous solo albums, either. Spanning seven songs in sixty minutes, Window in the Rhythm is a spacious album, Thomas and his guitar building a spindly but firm foundation. As the tracks unspool, some of them get louder and more ornate, but Window in the Rhythm uses vastness and absence as a weapon for a good chunk of the hour it takes. It’s a very natural-sounding record, and it still sounds like a Fred Thomas record–his voice and writing guide us through the double album, still recognizably the ace sing-speaking pop musician even as we enter a world of ten-minute songs with no choruses.

Thomas’ writing throughout Window in the Rhythm is backward-glancing but transient–memories drift in and out of these instrumentals, images from the brain of somebody who probably feels like a completely different person than the initial witness. A lot of artists would obscure or distort their vocals in some way to demonstrate this, but Thomas’ voice is, as always, crystal-clear and eminently discernible. It’s almost more disorienting this way, like when you wake up from a vivid dream and you still haven’t sorted out which residual anxieties you can let go of yet. In some ways, opening track “Embankment” feels even longer than its eight minutes–putting this blog post together, I was surprised that the song where Thomas sings alongside a droning chorus of himself, the song where Geoff dies, and the song with the mixtape with “the same Squarepusher song on it four times, but not in a row” are all the same one. There are just as many striking moments in the other two longest songs on the album–the ten-minute progressive folk of “Coughed Up a Cufflink” finds Thomas hungry after “everything’s closed” before being hit with a whammy of a memory that’s maybe the strongest thing on the entire album, and the fourteen-minute closing track “Wasn’t” fearlessly flies right into a classic “Fred Thomas indie rock” attitude that Window in the Rhythm had eschewed up until that point–and, of course, ends up nowhere near this familiar signpost.

“Living in fiction is rough / The doors are never locked enough / And your heart beats in retrospect,” Thomas sings in “Electric Guitar Left Out in the Street”, which at seven-and-a-half minutes is one of the shorter songs on the album. “Electric Guitar Left Out in the Street” and the majority of the song that follows it, “Season of Carelessness”, comprise the bleakest stretch of Window in the Rhythm. The former song is particularly bare, with nowhere for the subject of the song to hide as they try futilely to create and communicate something–Mary Lattimore’s harp provides just a small bit of cover as the song drifts away. “Season of Carelessness” is more scattershot but no less harsh–for three minutes, it’s Thomas and a delicately-played acoustic guitar, and this has to end before Window in the Rhythm can find more territory to explore in its second half. Thomas’ voice drops out, but the guitar carries on, joined by an insistent crowd of synths and drum machines that grow louder and more overwhelming. It is, of course, a natural transition. (Bandcamp link)

Naked Giants – Shine Away

Release date: October 4th
Record label: DevilDuck
Genre: Power pop, garage rock, 90s indie rock, fuzz rock, alt-rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Apartment 3

Seattle trio Naked Giants started playing together a decade ago as teenagers, and they had a bit of a moment at the end of the 2010s, putting out two albums on New West Records (2018’s SLUFF and 2020’s The Shadow) and touring and collaborating with artists like Car Seat Headrest and Ron Gallo. The time in between their last album and Shine Away feels like the first real “breather” for vocalist/guitarist Grant Mullen, bassist/vocalist Gianni Aiello, and drummer Henry LaVallee–the band that recorded the third Naked Giants LP is made up of people with day jobs and are at a significantly different stage in their lives than they were when the project began. I’m not sure if Shine Away is a “mature” album, but it’s a refined and experienced one–the version of alternative rock music practiced by Naked Giants on this record is a well-worn, lived-in mixture of the poppier side of 90s indie rock a la Pavement/Archers of Loaf, garage rock, and power pop. Sometimes the songs on Shine Away turn into anthems in spite of themselves, while other times it’s clearly what Naked Giants are gunning for–but one way or another, the band get to where they’re going.

I’m not entirely sure why, but I get a fair amount of disorientation and whiplash listening to Shine Away–while streaming this album during my day job, I’ve had the thought “maybe the album sequence got messed up when I downloaded it”, and I’ve incorrectly identified when the album ends and the next one in the queue begins on multiple occasions. The band that sings “Put me in that television like I’m Tom Verlaine” and then plays a Marquee Moon guitar lick in the slacker-pop candy of “Apartment 3” doesn’t seem like the same one that executes the dour, chilly indie rock of “Missed Out” one song later; the all-out, pounding endless chorus of “Did I Just Die” really seems like it should be the album’s grand finale, but the high-flying guitars of “Case of the Bastards” come swooping in to give Shine Away yet another wind in the penultimate slot. I don’t really mean all this as criticism–it ends up accentuating things that aren’t particularly all that upfront in albums like this. Naked Giants are fairly long-winded on Shine Away, and a lot of the record seems like scheming up the best way to present it all–the crumbling society that shows up in songs like “Bad Guys Win” and “Dissolve” is hardly a rare subject these days (yes, yes, we’re living in a declining empire, we know), but Naked Giants use their most exciting, catchiest power pop tricks to move through them–and the most intriguing story told in the album, found in “Oh Michael”, gets a more subtle but still quite hooky guitar pop skin. Just about everything on Shine Away is given the right tweaks and turns to make it stick. (Bandcamp link)

Tony Vaz – Pretty Side of the Ugly Life

Release date: October 4th
Record label: Jubilee Gang
Genre: Lo-fi indie rock, alt-country, bedroom pop, folk rock, psych pop
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Your Purse or Your Life

New York musician Trevor Antonio “Tony” Vaz has been around for a bit–if you were paying attention to Brooklyn art rock circa the mid-2010s, maybe you came across his group Dances, and he’s also done a bit of production work over the years. Around the beginning of this decade, Vaz added “solo artist” to the list, releasing a few singles that have eventually culminated with the release of his first full-length album, Pretty Side of the Ugly Life, on Jubilee Gang (a label he co-runs). 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. The thirty-minute record has an independent attitude, but at the same time, Vaz is far from “alone” here–contributors Levon Henry (saxophone/clarinet), Zachary O’Brien (guitar), Cal Fish (flute), Chris Corsico (drums), and Alena Spanger (vocals), among others, make their marks on these songs, and a few are even credited as co-writers for their additions to the tracks. Vaz is holding all of it together at the middle, making sure Pretty Side of the Ugly Life is always “loose and freewheeling” in a coherent way.

Pretty Side of the Ugly Life starts in indie rock territory and gets more adventurous as it progresses–although that doesn’t mean there aren’t inspired, offbeat 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 Spanger’s backing vocals–it’s a somewhat confusing combination, but it works, and it opens up a bunch of possibilities that Vaz and his collaborators proceed to explore in the subsequent highlights “9 Lives” (a folk-pop tune with a beat, featuring co-lead vocals from Spanger) and “Spin” (fuzzed-out indie rock with just a bit of twang). Like I alluded to, the second half of Pretty Side of the Ugly Life features some of Vaz’s most experimental moments–adding violin to a pretty acoustic guitar instrumental in “Pretty Life” is one thing, but the blunt-force dance pop of “Servants” (with lyrics unmistakably about Vaz’s childhood growing up Indian in “mostly white communities”) and the experimental, hazy, R&B-tinged sophisti-pop of “Street Rips” really test the waters. The record’s closing track, “24 Hour Gang”, is another one of these moments, at least on paper. Vaz closes Pretty Side of the Ugly Life with a five-minute lo-fi pop banger that tries to cram the ambition of 80s new wave/synthpop into something sleek and streamlined. Pretty Side of the Ugly Life is the work of someone who doesn’t stop swinging, less worried about nailing a specific influence than landing somewhere interesting and unique. (Bandcamp link)

Mr. Husband – Wildflower

Release date: October 4th
Record label: Good Soil/PIAPTK
Genre: Folk rock, psychedelic pop, jangle pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Believer

Kenny Tompkins is a prolific singer-songwriter from Appalachia who makes gorgeous 60s-influenced pop music as Mr. Husband, pulling together psychedelic pop, folk rock, and other strains of indie pop across a vast discography. In short, he’s right at home on Rosy Overdrive. In fact, Tompkins has appeared on the blog before, via the long-awaited second album from his power pop band The Trend (one of my favorite LPs of 2022). However, Mr. Husband has long been the main output for Tompkins’ songwriting–the one-sheet refers to Wildflower as the seventh Mr. Husband full-length, but you can get to an even higher number depending on what you’re counting as an “album” (does 2020’s Hey Sufjan, You Took Too Long So I Went Ahead and Made West Virginia count? I say yes). These days, Mr. Husband is a Frederick, Maryland-based quartet featuring drummer Chris Morris, guitarist Adam Laye, and bassist Curt Tompkins (the brother of Kenny); working as a unit, the four of them took an unusually long two years to assemble Wildflower. Despite the extra work, Mr. Husband haven’t abandoned the carefree, streamlined version of guitar pop music they’ve nailed in the past–these nine songs are built around acoustic guitars, jangly folk rock, and earnest balladry as much as any of their others.

If there’s anything on Wildflower that sounds lab-grown, it’s “Believer”, an instant Mr. Husband classic jangle pop/folk rock cross-pollinated tune that goes down quite easily. Even in “Believer”, Tompkins sounds a little more reflective and contemplative, setting the stage for a record that has plenty on its shined-up mind. In its own way, “Tatezata (LED Frisbee)” is as catchy as the opening track, Mr. Husband turning in a calculated breeziness with bits of Graceland, soft rock, and jazz chords on tap. Aside from the indecisive power pop of “Waiting”, the rest of Wildflower is a bit more subdued–we’ve got the nearly six-minute record centerpiece “Lovefool” and penultimate power ballad “It Was You”, which balance dreamy psych-pop with eternal, almost pre-rock-and-roll torch songs and longing. The slow-burning full band performances in those songs shouldn’t go unnoticed, but the Mr. Husband band also know when to bow out–both “Red Light Green Light” and closing track “Songs Anyway” are simple acoustic constructions. The latter of the two might as well be called “The Ballad of Kenny ‘Husband’ Tompkins”; it begins “The world has so many songs / But I think it might be okay / If I wrote my songs anyway”. Over a pin-drop quiet guitar, Tompkins’ voice rises as he reaffirms this over the course of “Songs Anyway”; singing about writing, singing, and playing songs, he sounds as passionate as anywhere else on the record. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Spirit Night, ‘Time Won’t Tell’

Release date: October 4th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Jangle pop, indie pop, synthpop, post-punk, dream pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital

One of my favorite albums of last year was Bury the Dead by Spirit Night, the long-awaited fourth album from the band of former The World Is a Beautiful Place and I Am No Longer Afraid to Die guitarist Dylan Balliett. Bury the Dead is a career-landmark album–the New York-based Balliett returned to his hometown in West Virginia’s Eastern Panhandle to record it with Rozwell Kid’s Jordan Hudkins and Good Sport’s Ryan Hizer, and it felt like the culmination of the emo-shaded indie rock that was formative in both his youth and in his own music up until that point. After nailing that sound so strongly, why not try something different? Enter Time Won’t Tell, the fifth Spirit Night LP and the second in as many years. For one, it’s a quick turnaround after Bury the Dead’s long gestation time, and for another, it embraces a less-seen side of Balliett’s songwriting, exploring jangly Flying Nun-esque guitar pop, synthpop, and even a bit of post-punk and new wave. Time Won’t Tell is neither a logical extension from previous Spirit Night records nor is it a clean break from the past–Hudkins is still on the drums, and Hizer shows up on occasion too, but newcomer Miguel Gallego (Miserable chillers) makes his mark with his bass rhythms and synth additions, and while Balliett’s writing contains plenty of the years-past spelunking found in Bury the Dead, it’s more built from memories passively floating in and out than the former record’s vivid desperation.

I’m not sure if I’d call Time Won’t Tell a pure “bedroom pop” album, but it sits well alongside the classics of the genre. Spirit Night really let the synths shade the bulk of the record, forming a core tenet of songs like “Out of Hand” and “26” and even making an impact on some of the more “guitar-forward” tracks, while Hudkins (whose main band has spent their career making the equivalent of jock rock for some of the least jock-like people on Earth) proves more than up to the task of handling more delicate material with his percussion. The Dunedin-based tones of lead single “Darker Now” lose no power in the context of the album, and if that song’s melancholic take on power pop isn’t “Spirit Night” enough, “Another War”, the loudest song on the album, is an exasperated power-pop-punk sprint through a messy relationship. Balliett takes Spirit Night even further down the rabbit hole in some of the album’s other highlights–“A.M.” is impossibly tender except for when it isn’t, a classic Spirit Night song swallowed up by echoes and mirrors. “We talk plans / Even though none of us has one,” yells Balliett from somewhere deep within the song; on Bury the Dead, that’d be the focal point of the track, but here, the contemplation is secondary to the plea to which the track eventually builds–it’s like bells going off, equal parts celebratory and alarming.

There’s a two-minute synth instrumental at the middle of Time Won’t Tell called “Bertie” (named, of course, after one of Balliett’s dogs) that’s the most obvious indication that we’ve somehow landed in a millennial emo version of a Cleaners from Venus album, although there are less subtle hints, like the ninety-second heartfelt acoustic-based bedroom pop ballad “Wendy” (named, of course, after another one of Balliett’s dogs) and penultimate track “Memory Park” (which begins much the same way as “Wendy” before the synths truly run amok as the song draws to a close). The one song on Time Won’t Tell that reaches back towards Bury the Dead thematically is, enjoyably, the biggest musical departure. Second-half highlight “26” is a fully-developed synthpop exploration about being the titular age, Hizer’s bass and full-on 80s synth halos digging in alongside Balliett’s meditative lyrics. “You’ll never be this young again, and you’ve never been so old,” he sings in the chorus, hovering right beside his younger self on the train to work. And this moment is where the dividing line between the in-the-moment Bury the Dead and Time Won’t Tell takes shape to me: all the musical time machines and “nostalgic” keyboard presets in the world can’t make “26” sound like it was sung by the person depicted in the track itself. He’s still in there, of course, but he’s sharing space with the “elder emo” (who’d give you a death glare if you called him that, I’m sure) who’s no longer clinging to youth, intentionally or otherwise.

The truce is negotiated in the campfire-acoustic closing track, “Somebody’s Going to Love You for Who You Already Are”.  “So if you’re still waiting for the right moment to strike / I think you might be better off to live your life just how you like,” Balliett sings, breezily but craftily threading the needle between static and change on a personal level. The song is about letting go of the urge to constantly tweak and shape one’s self chasing validation for others–but, of course, becoming someone who can brush these urges off (or, at least, become more discerning in what to tune out) is personal development in itself. “That’s not to say it was in vain to set a higher bar / Just that they’re going to love you for who you already are,” Balliett sings to sum things up. It reminds me of a line from my favorite band, Silkworm, from “The Operative” off of It’ll Be Cool: “Don’t ever change / Unless you change for the better”. I’ve always thought it was a beautiful and pure sentiment in the context of a love song–whittled down so sharply that it could be mistaken for something pettier in a different setting, but clear enough to me here. That’s what “Somebody’s Going to Love You for Who You Already Are”–and, I suppose Time Won’t Tell as a whole–crystallizes to me. (Bandcamp link)

Pressing Concerns: Styrofoam Winos, Dom Sensitive, Wavers, The Collect Pond

Hey, all! The second Pressing Concerns of the week is here, and it’s a great one, looking at brand new albums from Styrofoam Winos, Dom Sensitive, and The Collect Pond, as well as an EP from Wavers that came out a few months ago. These records rule, and if you missed yesterday’s post (featuring Upstairs, Snakeskin, Best Bets, and Feeling Figures), 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.

Styrofoam Winos – Real Time

Release date: September 27th
Record label: Sophomore Lounge
Genre: Folk rock, alt-country, singer-songwriter, country rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Master of Time

Nashville’s premier alt-country supergroup Styrofoam Winos were one of the first bands to appear in Pressing Concerns when I started this blog up at the beginning of 2021, on the occasion of their self-titled debut album. In the three years since then, all three of the Winos–Lou Turner, Trevor Nikrant, and Joe Kenkel–have put out excellent solo albums, and the Winos as a trio have released a Michael Hurley covers album and toured with MJ Lenderman & The Wind. Still, we’d been missing a new album of original Styrofoam Winos tunes, which Real Time, once again released by the great Sophomore Lounge, finally rectifies. It’s quite satisfying to listen to Real Time and be able to hear the growth that the band has made together almost immediately–part of Styrofoam Winos’ appeal was its range, displaying the work of a group with three distinct songwriters adding their own touch to the songs. Real Time is a different story–the Winos meld together here more than ever before, creating a cohesive album that sounds relaxed and comfortable as a whole. It’s not like “laid-back country rock” is new territory for Styrofoam Winos, but the way that they do it here–effortlessly passing the torch between the three of them, creating a singular vibe across these ten songs–is a palpable leap.

The serene sophisti-pop of Kenkel, the more traditional folk and country of Turner, and the expansive dreaminess of Nikrant all go into Real Time’s sound–it’s an album that isn’t shy about evoking their hometown but doesn’t sound tied to any particular time, movement, or genre. Any album that starts off with something as stark as “Angel Flies Over”–a timeless country specimen that the Winos sing like they were born to do so–isn’t a particularly hurried one, a reality that also shades one of the best songs on the album, “Master of Time”, not long afterwards. Nikrant’s delicate but deft talk-singing is perhaps the most “Lambchop-esque” moment on the record, although 1990s Kurt Wagner didn’t have two more of him backing himself up like Nikrant does with Turner and Kenkel. The Styrofoam Winos eventually get around to the “rock” part of country rock, in a way-“Rollin’ with You” and “Don’t Mind Me” are a little more electric than the songs before them, although it feels like those just happened to be the instruments nearest Styrofoam Winos when it came time to put these tracks to tape (the latter of the two, which breaks into a steady cruise-control jam in its second half, is hard to imagine any other way, however). Real Time is a pretty mellow album when it’s all said and done, and the Winos take pains to give songs like “Dial Tone” and “Don’t Know What” the space they need. I can still hear all three of the band’s individuals on Real Time, but what I hear above anything else is a trio of musicians working as part of something distinct from (and larger than) themselves. (Bandcamp link)

Dom Sensitive – Leather Trim

Release date: September 27th
Record label: Dinosaur City/Chrüsimüsi
Genre: Art rock, post-punk, psychedelia
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Critical Energy

Leather Trim by Dom Sensitive is a “how did we get here?” kind of album. By that, I mean that musicians don’t really ever start out by making music that sounds like this, but rather it’s something that one arrives at after exhausting more traditional avenues. Port Adelaide, Australia’s Dom Trimboli spent the early part of his musical career exploring garage rock, post-punk, and weirdo country rock fronting the bands Wireheads and Dom & The Wizards, largely putting out music via Melbourne imprint Tenth Court (Spice World, Joe Ziffer, Mope City). Wireheads is still going strong (the sextet’s most recent album came out last year), but Trimboli clearly had an itch to make something different than the Aussie rock and roll of that group–enter Dom Sensitive. The project’s name implies a solo endeavor of some kind, but plenty of frequent Trimboli collaborators contribute to its debut album, Leather Trim–bandmates Vic Conrad, David John Wilke, Liam Kenny, Daniel Heath, and Tom Spall all receive either writing or performing credits on the record. Leather Trim spans six songs in over a half-hour, and it’s about as far from a “traditional punk” album as a bunch of punk-reared musicians could possibly make–there are traces of the more rambling, exploratory sides of The Fall and Tropical Fuck Storm here, sure, as well as the ghosts of many a burned-out bar piano player.

It’s not lost on me that the first half of Leather Trim is the more confrontational and “out there” of the two. Dom Sensitive wants to introduce himself via the five-minute staggering-drunk opening track “Digital Random Hat” (Trimboli claims to be inspired by “patchwork hip-hop production”, which explains how they ended up with that as the song’s percussion) and an eleven-minute thing called “The Second Day of Spring”. It’s worth looking at that latter song in a bit more detail–there’s Trimboli’s bizarre sober-psychedelic lyrics, true, but the rest of the song is just as wacky, from the extended part where the guest vocalist sings “Nothing but remorse, nothing but remorse” over and over again in a memorable cadence from the rinky-dink piano to the nearly-two minute-outro that leans on little more than the drumbeat and a simple bass riff pounded into the ground. Blowing everything to smithereens with “The Second Day of Spring” that early on is an inspired choice; after leaving it all out there like that, songs like the somewhat corroded garage-y post-punk of “R&D” and the drum machine/horn-heavy punk-hop rager “Critical Energy” start looking like pop music. Although Leather Trim is clearly a heavily-labored-over album, the personalities and players leading it ensure that it stays interesting and attentive, and it only ups the catharsis of the extended guitar solo that marks the end of closing track “Weather Maps”. So, we’ve traced how we arrived at Leather Trim, and now it’s in Dom Sensitive’s hands to figure out where it goes next. (Bandcamp link)

Wavers – Wavers

Release date: May 21st
Record label: Musical Fanzine
Genre: 90s indie rock, fuzz rock, lo-fi indie rock, lo-fi pop
Formats: CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Voyeur/Liverwalk

I’ll give some behind-the-scenes information about how this EP got here, because everyone loves meta-writing. Back in March of this year, I got an email from Joshua Hoey, an Olympia, Washington-based musician who’s played in the bands Pigeon Pit, Fastener, and Parasol, but was now the guitarist in a new quartet called Wavers. Wavers was going to release their debut EP on Musical Fanzine later this year, Hoag told me, and wondered if I wanted to write about it. I really liked the Wavers EP, said I would write about it when it came out, and promptly forgot about it for several months until I saw it on my computer, checked to see if it had been released, and saw that it indeed had back in May. So here I am writing about the debut EP from Wavers, a Pacific Northwest quartet (also featuring vocalist Rosie, bassist Jake, and drummer Charlie) who proudly declare their love of Discount, J Church, and Versus on their Bandcamp page (with “any of the emo stuff that NUMERO GROUP has reissued” helpfully added on for those of you who aren’t familiar with those could’ve-been-canonical-indie-rock groups). In under ten minutes, Wavers sketch out their sound–a little bit of emo, some 90s indie rock, lo-fi indie pop, and even a bit of punk attitude in between the cracks.

It’s all too brief, but Wavers is more than enough to give the new band an incredibly strong and personable debut. In about ninety-seconds, “Parking Lot” builds a world of emotion based on interactions in the titular location and burns it down with Rosie’s voice and buzzing, soaring guitarplay. The EP’s lead single, “Voyeur/Liverwalk”, is a little longer (it crosses the two-minute mark), and Wavers find an unlikely Pacific Northwest guitar pop anthem in its aimless, late-night wandering. The most upbeat song on Wavers is the fuzz-punk of “Work Don’t Work”–there’s some bite to it, but the guitars drown out the vocals just enough to prevent it from fully taking shape as an angry rocker and it becomes something a little fuzzier. There’s no cover or shelter of any kind on such a short release–every moment of the EP counts, and Wavers continue to nail their hyper-specific sound in the EP’s final two tracks, “Orange to Blue” and “Birthday”. The former is the longest song on the record and arguably Rosie’s best vocal performance–there’s a bit of rootsiness to the blurry emo-tinged ballad, the vocals flying above the instrumental rather than being shaded by it. “Birthday”, meanwhile, ends Wavers on a bittersweet note, a song about loss that doesn’t wallow but rather injects the band’s last bit of energy to close the track out. Rosy Overdrive exists to spotlight bands like this, I think. I’m on the Wavers train, and I think you’ll want to be, too. (Bandcamp link)

The Collect Pond – Lightbreaker

Release date: September 27th
Record label: Candlepin
Genre: Lo-fi indie rock, lo-fi pop, psych pop, post-punk
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Disassociating

I was introduced to Boston quartet The Collect Pond last year via their second album and Candlepin Records debut, Underwater Features. It also marked the on-record debut of The Collect Pond as a full band, evolving from a solo project from bandleader Danny Moffat–and the contributions of Roger Maranan, Rob Carrington, and Ben Bonadies helped turn the brief (18-minute) cassette into an impressive mix of lo-fi indie pop and darker, more post-punk-indebted material. When people compare modern bands to Flying Nun/classic Dunedin Sound groups, they’re usually referring to ramshackle guitar pop, but The Collect Pond are a more complete modern version of that era–there’s pop music, sure, but there’s also the less immediate sides of those acts in their forays into hazy psychedelia and greyscale art punk. Their newest record, Lightbreaker, picks up where Underwater Features left off–if anything, it’s an even darker experience than the last cassette, with Moffat and crew seemingly trusting the listeners to be able to pick up on subtler hooks and longer gaps in between moments of jangly guitars and timeless-sounding refrains. The Collect Pond aren’t reinventing themselves so much as seeing how far the rope goes on Lightbreaker.

Lightbreaker starts off fairly accessible with the fuzz-rock title track and first-half highlight “Disassociating”, which gets a lot of mileage out of simple keyboard hooks, backing vocals, and melodic guitar flourishes. Even so, “Disassociating” has a listless mid-tempo feel to it reflecting its title that’s prevalent even in the album’s brightest moments. “Which Part?” is almost an extension of “Disassociating”’s vibe, but “Sympathetic Hero” is catchy in a different way, embracing the jangly lo-fi post-punk sound of groups like The Laughing Chimes. The second half of Lightbreaker is where The Collect Pond really start trying new ideas, knocking off a woozy, tipsy Kiwi-esque lo-fi singalong (“Love on Hold”), sharp, slicing garage rock (“Revolution”), and acoustic psychedelic pop (“Whispers”). Like Underwater Features, Lightbreaker is on the shorter side (around 21 minutes), and after “Whispers” the tape kind of fades away with the twin brief instrumentals of “Flight Cancelled” and “Bloomsday”. It’s enough to stand on its own, though, and in context it’s a welcome dispatch from a band that has a clear “sound” they’re going for but are hardly spinning their wheels in their approach to it. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Upstairs, Snakeskin, Best Bets, Feeling Figures

Hey there everyone! The first Pressing Concerns of what’s going to be a stacked week is an incredibly strong one, looking at new albums from Upstairs, Snakeskin, Best Bets, and Feeling Figures. Read on! Also, a quick programming note: due to the end of September sneaking up on me, the monthly playlist won’t be ready until next week. There’ll still be a ton of new music in the meantime, though!

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.

Upstairs – Be Seeing You

Release date: September 27th
Record label: Obscure Pharaoh
Genre: Art rock, post-punk, experimental rock, indie pop
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: College Jeopardy

Sometime around 2018, a musical quintet associated with the cities of Cincinnati and Chicago and made up of Kyle Stone, Audrey Alger, Geoff Daniels, Paul Vine, and Jon Massey named Upstairs released their first record, an EP called Our Ass Is in the Jackpot Now. Fast forward a half-dozen years, and Upstairs have put out a couple more EPs, released an album called I Could Die Whenever, and Stone has been replaced with Nico (presumably not the famous one). We join the Upstairs band as they gear up to release their sophomore album, Be Seeing You, which happens to be an incredible art rock LP. Regular readers of this blog will be familiar with the work of Massey (who also recorded this album) via his projects Coventry (which is yacht rock for the Drag City/Thrill Jockey crowd) and Silo’s Choice (which introduces an even-more-progressive folk rock into the mix); Be Seeing You contains shades of both, to be sure, but Upstairs is a distinct and more varied group (“group” perhaps being the key word). It alternatively embraces electronics, strings, and “rock” instrumentation across its dozen tracks, veering into several ditches but also using “pop music” as a jumpscare tactic (in the form of swooning, swelling indie folk rock or relatively humble piano-pop).

Speaking of swooning and swelling, “Our Mutual Friend” is certainly a way to snag everyone’s attention with an opening track–it’s plenty offbeat in its own way, but that doesn’t stop it from transcending to “anthem” status fairly easily. Believe it or not, though, Be Seeing You has even more upfront pop moments to come–“College Jeopardy” is the one with the monster jangly/power pop chorus and vocal theatrics to match, while “Dig Out” adds a bit of melancholy and nuance to the hooks and the “just-can’t-take-it-anymore” cheery inferno of “Die By Bus” is a true triumph. The noise pop of “Tommy (Mescaline Version)” is a mess but makes sure to get its point across amidst the tangle of synths, violins, and insistent guitars. One of the weirdest songs on Be Seeing You is “Real Estate”, but Upstairs clearly believe in it, as they made it one of the album’s two singles–showy bass, jittery percussion, weeping violin, and mumbled vocals all go together to create an art rock exploration of private urban development (the title ends up being a nice double-entendre, too). Another memorable moment comes during “Elevator Shaft Fall-Downer”, in which the singer murmurs “You could never be strong / Who the fuck could be free?” over a borderline-krautrock groove. That bastardization of the canonical Guided by Voices lyric is, I think, helpful in contextualizing Upstairs in the grand scheme of things. We need the hopelessly earnest romantics, the jocks, in music, yes–but we also need the people tinkering away in the dorms or muttering on the sidelines in the picture. That’s Upstairs–preoccupied with something bigger and less obvious, but also not above looking out the window, seeing something promising happening, saying “Why not?” and joining in on occasion, too. (Bandcamp link)

Snakeskin – Summoning Suit

Release date: August 23rd
Record label: Substitute Scene
Genre: Art rock, psychedelic rock, dream pop, folk rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Skull Kid 

New York musician Shanna Polley has been making music as Snakeskin for over a decade now, first via solo home recordings and then eventually with a more fully-developed sound in the realm of guitar-heavy indie rock and arty/experimental pop music. I first became aware of Snakeskin via their output on New Jersey imprint State Champion Records–they put out two LPs in the late 2010s and an EP earlier this decade, as well as contributing to a couple different releases by onetime Screaming Females bandleader Marissa Paternoster. The first full-band Snakeskin album, 2018’s Hangnail, positioned Polley and her band as absolutely wild guitar heroes, throwing out massive guitarwork across the six-song, thirty-minute album in line with the nearby world of Exploding in Sound Records and, yes, Screaming Females; 2021’s three-song Heart Orb Bone, however, reinvented Snakeskin as massive pop artists, pulling out big 80s-esque, synth-aided heartland rock in the title track and “T.V.”. Snakeskin’s first record in three years is their first for Substitute Scene Records, and Summoning Suit doesn’t really sound like either previously-mentioned record from Polley’s project. On their latest album, Snakeskin embraces a complex, sweeping progressive pop sound–it’s got the long song lengths of Hangnail, but this time these worlds are populated by atmospheric synths, acoustic guitars, and relatively hushed vocals.

Summoning Suit is a visual album, with the entire record receiving video treatment via frequent collaborator William Bottini–these videos are clearly an important part of Polley’s art, but as someone who’s primarily listened to Summoning Suit as an audio-only affair, I can assure everyone that the music stands just fine on its own, too. The latest post-shed version of Snakeskin seems to land somewhere in the realm of the headier projects helmed by Mary Timony (the ones it took some time for people to warm up to); plenty of this feeling has to do with the band’s choice to put some of its more difficult material right up front. Not that there isn’t pop music to be found in the seven-minute dream-folk odyssey of “Skull Kid”, the wobbly, swelling overture of “Spinning Heart”, and the eight-minute collage-like “Wasabi” (okay, so maybe there’s not a whole lot of “pop” in the latter of those three). There’s just enough accessible moments to get us to the “hit”, “Big Wave” (although even that one’s climax is a surprising, smooth talk-singing diversion that sounds a bit like power pop Laurie Anderson, and it also indulges in some classic prog lyrical callbacks). Perhaps the clearest example of the pop heart of Summoning Suit is “Cross Country”, another seven-minute song that floats and meanders but, when it’s time for the refrain, there’s no mistaking it (“Whatever way you want me, you got me / I’d move across the whole fucking country”). Yep, hard to beat that. (Bandcamp link)

Best Bets – The Hollow Husk of Feeling

Release date: September 27th
Record label: Meritorio/Melted Ice Cream
Genre: Power pop, garage rock, pop punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Pillory Parade

Rangiora, New Zealand power pop quartet Best Bets made their opening statement in 2022 with On an Unhistoric Night, with Meritorio and Melted Ice Cream Records introducing the wider world to the songwriting duo of drummer Olly Crawford Ellis and guitarist James Harding as well as their bandmates Joe Sampson (bass, also of Salad Boys and T54) and Matthew Phimmavanh (guitar). On their sophomore album, Sampson (who also recorded the LP) steps up for songwriting duty, too, and The Hollow Husk of Feeling feels like a record that’s full to the brim of smart pop craft and energy. Eschewing the hazier, less tangible sides of their home country’s guitar pop scene, The Hollow Husk of Feeling is a grounded, unsubtle collection of power pop, garage rock, and even glam rock that’s closer to American pop rabble rousers like Guided by Voices, The Replacements, and maybe even Green Day than their fellow Kiwi bands. The album as a whole is a cathartic listen–there’s an edge to Best Bets’ jangly, fuzzed-out tunes, and its vocalists are more likely to sound pensive or even aggravated than clearly blissful. The “feeling” may be a hollowed-out husk at this point, but Best Bets are going to squeeze every last spark out of it before their latest album is all said and done.

On most indie rock albums, “Heaven” would be the unquestioned best track–Best Bets are college rock carpenters here, hammering out every pop detail for four minutes (if you insist on a Flying Nun comparison, it kind of reminds me of The 3D’s at their most “anthemic”). The Hollow Husk of Feeling’s party is now in full swing, as “Sylvania Waters”, “Monster”, “Hairshirt”, and “Spooky Signals” find the band zipping through jangle pop melodic-bombs. I did mention “glam” earlier, and “The Last Grand Prix” has you covered there, Best Bets tearing amiably through one of their most infectious instrumentals (it still has a bit of bite to it, though). Now in the record’s second half, the quartet continue to keep things fresh with “Pensacola”, featuring a tight rhythm section and more or less functioning as the band’s (winning) entry into the “jangle pop/post-punk” sweepstakes. The final stretch of The Hollow Husk of Feeling also brings Best Bets’ best Teenage Fanclub impression (“When You Walk Out”) and my actual favorite song on the album, “Pillory Parade”. It all comes to a head here–huge power pop hooks, withering lyrical invective, post-ironic showmanship, pop punk snottiness, garage rock fuzz. “Pillory Parade” hits the sweet spot that maybe only the Teenage Tom Petties are also achieving in 2024. If the exhilaration of The Hollow Husk of Feeling feels drawn from frantically attempting to outrun something, the wind at its back for forty minutes blows all the same. (Bandcamp link)

Feeling Figures – Everything Around You

Release date: September 27th
Record label: K/Perennial
Genre: Post-punk, garage rock, 90s indie rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Doors Wide Open

Last November, I wrote about Migration Magic, the debut album from Montreal indie rockers Feeling Figures. I was charmed by the band’s concoction of rock and roll, controlled chaos, and pop, and I wasn’t the only one, as its adventurous journey through several decades’ worth of underground rock music garnered the quartet (guitarist/vocalists Zakary Slax and Kay Moon, bassist Joe Chamandy, and drummer Thomas Molander) a bit of buzz. Determined to strike while the iron was hot, Feeling Figures went right back to work crafting a second album and–hang on a second. It actually says here that Everything Around You, the sophomore Feeling Figures LP, was actually recorded before Migration Magic was. Rather than Migration Magic’s quick, spur-of-the-moment coming together, Everything Around You captures a portion of the members’ pandemic output, recorded in early 2022 after gestating for a while. Like Migration Magic, it’s a pretty varied listen, but it’s a deeper and more deliberate version of Feeling Figures here–the jams are heavier and jammier, the pop songs more polished and poppy, and the garage punk moments come with a bit more of an audible snarl. I hear similar influences in both albums (Sonic Youth, Eric’s Trip, Sebadoh, The Velvets, a bunch of bands from their label K Records), but Feeling Figures made two different beasts out of them.

The scuffed-up, fuzzed-out garage rock of “Co-operator” opens Everything Around You on a catchy but still somewhat standoffish note, but “Doors Wide Open” one song later brings vamping indie-pop-punk bounding right through that unobstructed barn gate, the band breathing incredible life into a song that feels like it contains much more than its sub-two-minute runtime ought to allow. The middle of Everything Around You is where Feeling Figures get incredibly slippery, coming off as electric garage rockers (of the laconic kind in “The Falcon” and of the more spread-out variety in “Space Burial”), experimental, almost-prog-folk adventurers (“Skin I’m In”), and even a bit dreamy-noise-pop-curious (“Swimming”). The two songs that rival “Doors Wide Open” in terms of pure pop success both come towards the end of Everything Around You–the title track comes out of nowhere with its slightly jangly, slightly psychedelic, slightly twee take on go-ahead guitar pop, and where “We Not the You” has a little bit of mid-tempo weary wooziness, its core is just as strong. Speaking of “strong”, Feeling Figures close out Everything Around You with what is by far their longest song to date, the seven-minute Velvet-y garage groove of “Social Anatomy”. It’s pretty different from anything else Feeling Figures have released so far, but the band spent the entirety of Everything Around You getting us prepared to expect moments like this. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John Davis – JINX

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

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

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

Fantasy of a Broken Heart – Feats of Engineering

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

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

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

Being Dead – EELS

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

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

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

Also notable:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shredded Sun – Wilding

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

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

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

Addicus – Addicus

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

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

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

The Gabys – The Gabys

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

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

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

Also notable:

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

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

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

Beeef – Somebody’s Favorite

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

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

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

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

Mo Dotti – Opaque

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

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

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

40 Watt Sun – Little Weight

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

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

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

Tanukichan – Circles

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

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

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

Also notable:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nina Ryser – Water Giants

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

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

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

Weak Signal – Fine

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

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

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

Otis Shanty – Up on the Hill

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

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

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

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Pressing Concerns: Downhaul, ‘How to Begin’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ex Pilots – Motel Cable

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

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

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

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

Freddy Trujillo – I Never Threw a Shadow at It

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

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

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

Hey I’m Outside – Hey I’m Outside

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

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

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

Seawind of Battery – East Coast Cosmic Dreamscaper

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

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

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

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