The first Pressing Concerns of the new week looks at three records that came out last Friday, August 9th (new LPs from Real Companion and Cowgirl, and an EP from Fast Execution), as well as an album from Brown Dog that came out back in May. A bunch of great music below!
If you’re looking for more new music, you can visit the site directory to see what else we’ve written about lately. If you’d like to support Rosy Overdrive, you can share this (or another) post, or donate here.
Fast Execution – Menses Music
Release date: August 8th Record label: Dandy Boy Genre: Punk rock, pop punk, fuzz rock, riot grrl Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: All You See Is Weather
Oakland’s Fast Execution are a new punk rock group led by guitarist/vocalist Alex Velasquez (also of Smile Too Much) and featuring her husband, cinematographer Paul Abueg-Igaz, on drums. Their debut record is a six-song 10” vinyl EP out through Bay Area stalwarts Dandy Boy Records called Menses Music, recorded with Dylan Plisken on bass (The 1981’s Alex Halatsis has since joined the band on the four-string, permanently filling the slot). From the title on down, it’s not hard to gather that Velasquez (the band’s main songwriter) is drawing from classic riot grrl on Fast Execution’s first record, although it’s firmly on the more polished and tuneful side of the subgenre–the trio make their brief but memorable first impression to the tune of garage rock, power pop, and West Coast pop punk on Menses Music. As a frontperson, Velasquez does indeed pull off riot-punk sloganeering, but for a record whose press bio says it was inspired by “ire” (at the male-dominated nature of rock music) and “hatred” (of “patriarchal machinations in rock music/modern society at large”), she displays range beyond the anger one would expect across the sub-fifteen minute EP.
Menses Music opens with a song called “Don’t Give Up (Pt. 2)”, which could also be called “the Fast Execution mission statement”. After an audio clip discussing the “hostility” of rock music towards women, the punk guitars launch in a most satisfying manner and Velasquez begins with “I’ve got a message to say, but it’ll probably go unheard / Who’s ever listened to a woman when she’s in rock and roll?”. “Don’t Give Up (Pt. 2)” pulls out all the “punk anthem” stops, but Fast Execution don’t just repeat themselves on Menses Music. The next song on the record, “All You See Is Weather”, is just as catchy but in a more casual way–its hook is a distorted but quite pleasing guitar riff, suggesting a lighter version of the grunge-soaked surf punk of one of their biggest stated influences, Wipers. “What’s Wrong with Me?” is even more of a departure from the opening statement, with the Weezer-esque fuzzy power chords soundtracking a song where Velasquez sounds much more understated, possibly even shy (“Is there something wrong with me? / Why can’t I let it be? / I think I annoyed you once again”). The other sweeping punk anthem on the EP is “Examine Yourself”, which kicks off the record’s second side and revitalizes the acid-tongued punk side of the band. Songs like this one and “Don’t Give Up (Pt. 2)” are clearly the “headlines” of Menses Music (and considering how Velasquez begins the record by speculating she won’t be heard, it makes sense that Fast Execution throw all they’ve got into songs like these)–but what the band are doing below them is almost more compelling. (Bandcamp link)
Real Companion – Nü-metal Heroes
Release date: August 9th Record label: Primordial Void Genre: Country rock, folk rock, alt-country Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital Pull Track: Painted Hammer
Seth Sullivan is “a sober dad who owns a cheeseburger restaurant”, and he’s also the lead singer and songwriter of Boone, North Carolina group Real Companion. After a demo EP last year, the project properly debuts this year with their first album, Nü-metal Heroes. Along with the other member of Real Companion, multi-instrumentalist/producer Derek Wycoff, the duo create a rich record of alt-country and folk-tinged rock music that’s an inspired choice to dress up Sullivan’s writing. Sullivan grew up in nearby Burke County, and much of Nü-metal Heroes is drawn from recollections and stories from earlier in his life, when he was still traversing down the path that would eventually lead to sobriety, child-rearing, and sliders. Recorded at Wycoff’s “backyard studio”, Nü-metal Heroes feels off-the-cuff but fully developed–whether the duo are trying their hand at spirited country-rockers or more streamlined, almost dreamy folk-pop, their instrumental contributions are pleasing but never taking away from the yarns Sullivan spins at the center of the songs. It all amounts to a palpably Appalachian rock record–one that isn’t constrained by its roots, but that bears the marks of them nonetheless.
Opening track “Painted Hammer” is a keyboard-aided alt-country triumph, its laconic lyrics living up to the music (“My boss was an asshole when I was 21 / I’m almost 40 now and I ain’t got one”), but Nü-metal Heroes doesn’t wait too long to display its other side with the contemplative small town reminiscing of “Amy Lynn” (“Wet swimsuits in an empty grocery bag / Six grandkids all squeezed into the back”). The record’s “rockers” are some of Real Companion’s most immediately impactful moments–the breezy, traditional southern rock of “Great Valley” is a blast, while the psych-tinged “Liberty Dreams” (with poignant lyrics about rural North Carolina teenage goths) and the six-minute “Piedmont Reason” (which is perhaps the western Carolinian version of krautrock) both register as highlights. On the other end of the spectrum, the drum machines and synths placed prominently in tracks like “Weekend Ritual” and “Wild Oak Love Song” give these tracks a more casual, almost bedroom pop feeling (even as the extra instrumental touches the duo give them ensure that there’s a bit more going on under their surfaces). Somewhere between these two ends is “Hometown Snakes”, a slow-moving country-folk shuffle in which Sullivan’s sung-spoken observations conjure up the work of Bill Callahan. “Optimism is at an all time low / But Oxycodone keeps the living slow,” sings Sullivan at the beginning of the track, and while I wouldn’t reductively call the song’s one-word refrain (“Hosanna”) “ironic”, it’s clearly shaped by the lines before it (“A decade of rope / A decade of chains / It’s all the same”). (Bandcamp link)
Cowgirl – Cut Offs
Release date: August 9th Record label: Safe Suburban Home Genre: Power pop, fuzz rock Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Fading Lights
After a handful of singles and EPs, York quartet Cowgirl made their full-length debut back in 2021 with a seven-song, nineteen-minute self-titled record. Short and sweet, Cowgirl put the band in line with a secretly strong York guitar pop scene also populated by Sewage Farm, The Illness, and their own record label, Safe Suburban Home. For their second album, the band (co-led by singer/guitarists Danny Trew Barton and Sam Coates and rounded out by bassist Jack Jewers and drummer Jack Holdstock) have decided not to fix what isn’t broken–Cut Offs once again spans seven tracks and finishes in slightly under twenty minutes. Nonetheless, Cut Offs (recorded by Euan Hinshelwood at London’s Vacant TV Studios, same as Cowgirl) has plenty of time to impart several albums’ worth of fuzzed-out power pop hooks before it’s all said and done. The record veers from messy garage rock to (relatively) polished college rock throwbacks, but just about everything on Cut Offs is a pop success that ensures the short runtime doesn’t leave anyone feeling shortchanged. With multiple songwriters in the group, it’s perhaps not surprising that the record ranges from “basement Weezer/Velvet Crush ambitions” and “leisurely following pop melodies wherever it takes them”, but Cowgirl ensure that this becomes one of their most endearing qualities.
Cowgirl hit the ground running–the insistent drumbeat of “Against the Night” and the aural coolness of the verses of “Wake Up” start Cut Offs with the quartet at their zippiest. The energy is already there, but the middle of the record is where the band really launch themselves into the power pop stratosphere–between “Fading Lights” (a genuine slacker-pop anthem that pulls together the best of Evan Dando and Gerard Love in its jangly college rock construction and go-for-broke chorus) and “Adeline” (an easy entry into the “power pop songs whose titles are just a girl’s name” hall of fame), some of the best guitar pop music I’ve heard this year is right in the center of this little album. The Flying Nun-tinged guitar-hook excellence of “Out of Place” would be a clear highlight in most places, but here it merely keeps the massive momentum Cowgirl have conjured up rolling steady. With no space for “weak spots”, the stop-start, distortion-laden “Nobody Cares” is probably the closest thing Cut Offs has to an “album track”, but there’s still plenty of catchiness strewn about that one, and “Wasting Time” indulges just a bit in dramatics to create a memorable final rock and roll sendoff. It’s a strong final statement–but once again, it’s just Cowgirl keeping things consistent. (Bandcamp link)
Brown Dog – Lucky Star Creek
Release date: May 28th Record label: River House Genre: Alt-country, folk rock Formats: CD, digital Pull Track: Auditorium
Back in 2021, Berkeley’s Brown Dog released See You Soon, the act’s first record. At the time, the band was a duo made up of singer-songwriter Milo Jimenez and multi-instrumentalist Haniel Roland-Holst, but in the past few years a live lineup has congealed featuring bassist Stew Homans, pedal steel player Jeff Phunmongkol, and drummer Elihu Knowles, all of whom (along with backing vocalist Sayler McBean) contribute to Lucky Star Creek, the second Brown Dog LP. As the presence of pedal steel suggests, Lucky Star Creek does indeed fit comfortably into the worlds of alt-country and twangy folk rock, but what the expanded lineup does not portend is loud, electric country rockin’. There are a few noisier moments on the album, sure, but on the whole Lucky Star Creek is a restrained and pensive listen, the extra instruments being more likely to dress up a song indebted to bedroom folk and even slowcore than they are to launch a rambling rocker. Jimenez sounds weary as a writer and vocalist throughout Lucky Star Creek, and the rest of Brown Dog manage to sound full and clear while still matching (or, at the very least, not contradicting) their frontperson.
Brown Dog move through a dozen songs in 34 minutes in Lucky Star Creek–a lot of these songs are on the brief side, and along with their laid-back delivery, require a couple of listens to really reveal themselves. One such song is “Red Teeth”, the minimal, pin-drop quiet opening track, a Sparklehorse-esque piece of rural creek folk music that never gets louder than the mandolin, banjo, and harmonica-led introduction of the song. If that doesn’t hook you immediately, there’s a good chance you’ll perk up with the advent of the record’s next couple of tracks, the pedal steel-heavy alt-country of “Auditorium” and the deliberate but fully-developed country rock of “No Answers”. The majority of Lucky Star Creek falls somewhere between these two tentpoles–the chilly “Estuary Sara” and (especially) the downcast drama of “Shoulders” bring the electric side of Brown Dog to the forefront later on in the record, but they still sit nicely alongside quieter fare like “Apartment 12” and “Four Miles”. Lucky Star Creek departs just as quietly as it came into frame–the instrumental, ambient-country “Leaving Words” gives way to one last acoustic folk song, in this case the title track. “Lucky Star Creek” ends with a little bit of post-song noise–maybe it’s the band shutting off the recording and leaving the room to let you sit with the album alone. (Bandcamp link)
It’s time for the Thursday Pressing Concerns, and today we’ve got a bunch of great albums that are coming out tomorrow, August 9th, to look at below. New LPs from Quivers, Jr. Juggernaut, Energy Slime, and Share grace this edition, so check them out and get excited for ’em below. This is a great finale to a great week on the blog, which also featured a Monday Pressing Concerns (looking at records from Biz Turkey, Friendship Commanders, TIFFY, and Smokers) and the July 2024 playlist on Tuesday, so 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.
Quivers – Oyster Cuts
Release date: August 9th Record label: Merge Genre: Indie pop, power pop, college rock, jangle pop Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital Pull Track: Pink Smoke
I’ve written about a fairamountofAustralian indie pop bands on this blog before, but, believe it or not, I’ve only really scratched the surface of everything going on down there. For instance: before now, I’d never written about Quivers, a Hobart-originating, Melbourne-based quartet who were last seen in 2020 releasing an album-length cover of R.E.M.’s Out of Time and then an original album (Golden Doubt) on Bobo Integral and Ba Da Bing! the following year. Quivers actually have roots going back even further than that–half of the band (vocalist/guitarist Sam Nicholson and guitarist Michael Panton) appeared on the first Quivers record, 2018’s We’ll Go Riding on the Hearses, but Golden Doubt added bassist/vocalist Bella Quinlan and drummer Holly Thomas, and this is also the lineup that appears on Oyster Cuts, their debut for Merge Records. On their third album of original material, Quivers are dogged pursuers of perfect guitar pop–their mix of college rock, C86, power pop, and new wave is as shined up and sparkly in its presentation as Nicholson and Quinlan’s vocals are intimate and distinct. For all its ambition, Oyster Cuts stubbornly declines to embrace anonymity–it doesn’t hide the fact that it was made by Australian lifers who love The Chills and Pavement, nor does it stop at that surface-level descriptor.
I don’t want to get too hung up on the first track, because all of Oyster Cuts is worth dissecting, but “Never Be Lonely” is such an incredible proof-of-concept song for the entire idea of “indie pop”. It’s just as effective in its laser-precision as “real” pop music with its chugging power chords and flourishes of guitars and synths, and Quinlan touches something palpably emotional as a vocalist. But at the same time, Quivers have the freedom to sing something like “All I ever wanted was a true friend / All I wanted was a friend with benefits / All I ever wanted was transcendence,” let it linger with the power of the greatest 80s pop songs you could name–and then move onto something completely different with “Pink Smoke”. “Pink Smoke” recalls the more low-key, laid-back side of Aussie guitar pop, but when Quivers sing “People go together ‘til they’re intertwined” as a unit, it sounds just as huge as the song that preceded it. The “Shady Lane” nod in “Apparition” is pretty undeniable, both in how good Quivers make it sound and its ability to commune with the rest of the track (another key lyric: “I can hear you loud and clear, but I don’t know what you’re saying”). Oyster Cuts indulges in three different five minute power ballads, but that’s hardly an issue given their quality (the smooth soft rock of “Grief Has Feathers” is my favorite, but I won’t hear a bad word about the swooning “Screensaver” or the smoky “Reckless”, either). This side of Quivers is quite impressive–but then, so is their ability to seemingly put everything they’ve got into something like that and then turn around and rip through a two-minute power pop tune like “Fake Flowers”. (Bandcamp link)
Jr. Juggernaut – Another Big Explosion
Release date: August 9th Record label: Mindpower/Nickel Eye Genre: Alt-rock, power pop, grunge pop, fuzz rock Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Come Break My Heart
Who doesn’t love Sugar’s Copper Blue? I’ll tell you who certainly loves Sugar’s Copper Blue–Jr. Juggernaut, a Los Angeles-based alt-rock/power-punk trio who’ve just put together an album honing in on the sound Bob Mould’s band achieved on their 1992 classic. Jr. Juggernaut have actually been around for quite a while–since 2005, they’ve put out three full-length albums and a handful of EPs and singles (including a split release with the great Two Cow Garage in 2009). Singer/guitarist Mike Williamson and drummer Wal Rashidi have been in the band since the early days, but they welcome bassist Noah Green to the fold on Another Big Explosion, their fourth LP and first in eight years. Green’s main band, The Pretty Flowers, makes more laid-back, Replacements-indebted pop punk, but Jr. Juggernaut embraces a louder, more dramatic sound pulled from the moment “underground rock” bubbled to the surface. There’s nothing on Another Big Explosion that could be described as “slacker” or halfhearted, from Williamson’s 110% all-the-time vocals to the Modern Rock Radio-ready hooks to the cranked-up, heavy-duty alt-rock sheen of the music (Washidi and Williamson co-produced the record, and were clearly on the same page as to how huge it should sound).
There’s a Mouldian “pop music as endurance test” element to Another Big Explosion–the ten songs are almost all in the four-to-five minute range, and they’re roaring at full blast pretty much the entire time. It’s a key ingredient in making the album feel like a towering mountain, but Jr. Juggernaut summit it nonetheless, from the triumphant yet chilly all-in opening of “Come Break My Heart” onwards. Lyrically, Williamson traverses well-trod pop music territory, with songs like “Hang On”(punched up by pop punk “woah-ohs”) and “Everything I Touch” (“…turns black and blue”) taking the shapes of their title sentiments. I don’t mean to make it sound like faint praise, but the simplicity works on Another Big Explosion–the most impressive and important part is that Williamson, after leading a punk band for two decades, can tap into something this primal to match the urgent, frantic, sweeping pop songs that Jr. Juggernaut are playing here. Williamson’s howls are all of that, but they’re also form-fitting, able to sell the moments of might and of shier power pop hooks in tracks like “Million Miles”, “I Believe”, and “Lonely Boy” (which bounce between a few different classic punk-pop tricks, keeping things just fresh and distinct enough). Another Big Explosion also separates itself from the pack by going just as hard in the clear “album tracks” (like mid-record pounder “Inclined” or closing barnburner “Total Darkness”) as in the obvious singles like “Everything I Touch” and “Come Break My Heart”. It would’ve been a record worth fishing out of the bargain bin thirty years ago, and it’s worth taking in as a whole now. (Bandcamp link)
Energy Slime – Planet Perfect
Release date: August 9th Record label: We Are Time Genre: New wave, synthpop, post-punk Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Clowning Around
As a producer and engineer, Vancouver’s Jay Arner has worked with bands like Tough Age, Apollo Ghosts, and Fortunato Durutti Marinetti, but he’s made his own music for just as long–he spent the 2000s playing in Western Canada groups International Falls and The Poison Dart, and he put out three solo albums in the 2010s. All of Arner’s solo material has featured instrumental and vocal contributions from his spouse, Jessica Delisle, and the couple also have a project they co-helm called Energy Slime. Energy Slime debuted back in 2014 with a lo-fi psych pop EP called New Dimensional–after a decade away, Planet Perfect is the group’s first full-length, and it finds the duo adapting their sound for the big screen. Arner and Delisle are still pretty offbeat–psychedelia, prog-rock, and synth-funk shade these ten songs–but on Planet Perfect, these odd detours are kept to the margins and only ever employed in the service of dressing up pop songs. Planet Perfect is a home-recorded synthpop album that isn’t at all constrained by the circumstances of its creation, both in the memorable vocal hooks (delivered by both Delisle and Arner) that would shine through no matter what and in the maximalist yet streamlined arrangements the duo give these tracks.
To some degree, Planet Perfect sounds like giving a couple of 80s pop wizards the keys to the recording studio and letting them cook–with the lack of excess or obviously dated production choices being the primary timestamp suggesting otherwise. The record is one lavishly-presented polished pop exercise after another, with “Throw Me a Bone” featuring soaring synths and a real-deal guitar solo right in the midst of its lackadaisical structure, while “Negative Attention” is a piece of garishly-bright pop balladry, and “Magic Wand” bubbles under the surface of Arner’s relatively subtle vocals. The synth-led power pop of “Clowning Around” combines that robotic main riff with propulsive verses and an almost prog-pop chorus–it shouldn’t be on paper, but it’s one of the most immediately accessible songs on Planet Perfect. The new wave-y “High Society” recaptures some of that energy in Side Two, but the album’s back end is also where Energy Slime let some of their more groove-based tendencies rise to the surface. Although this manifests in “Live or Die” mainly via a greater emphasis on rhythms, the title track is full-on electro-funk, spoken-word segment and everything, and “After Life” embarks on a five-minute steady synthpop trek to close out the album. Planet Perfect starts to feel like a real place after a while–after ten years away, Energy Slime are immersed in it enough to fully embody the feeling the phrase evokes. (Bandcamp link)
Share – Have One
Release date: August 9th Record label: Forged Artifacts Genre: Alt-country, garage rock, basement rock Formats: Cassette, digital Pull Track: County Lines
Share is a new band made up of three Bay Area indie rock veterans–singer/guitarist Jeff Day has played in post-hardcore groups Calculator and Never Young, Peter Kegler (also singer/guitarist) leads alt-country group Half Stack, and bassist/drummer Dylan Allard has been busy between Freak No Hitter, Fake Fruit, and Jay Som. Share arose during the pandemic–all three of them had songs they were working on, and this new project allowed them to bring all their ideas to the table as “creative equals”. Day moved to Los Angeles in 2021, delaying their on-record debut, but they continued to piece Have One together, finally finishing it last year and releasing it via Forged Artifacts (Greg Mendez, Ahem, Sonny Falls). The three-headed composition is perhaps why Have One is such an odd-sounding record–it’s certainly in the realms of “slacker rock” and “college rock”, putting it alongside new records from indie rock lifers like Dogbreth, Dusk, and their labelmates Ahem, but it’s not as cleanly devoted to power pop as those acts. That’s certainly a part of it, but Share is a repository for all sorts of rock and roll ideas, from garage rock to post-punk to psychedelic alt-country.
“Fallin Back on U” kicks off Have One with a pleasingly Frankensteined-together rock anthem–there are moments of Thin Lizzy-esque guitar soloing, country rock dust, jangle pop, and a lead vocal that’s way more aggressive and almost paranoid-sounding for this kind of song. It’s kind of an “anything goes” mission statement opener–which means that, even though the mid-tempo, Big Riff-led garage-y post-punk of “It Spins” that immediately follows it is a sharp left turn, it’s not exactly “out of nowhere”. The highest concentration of “Share as a pop band” is found right in the middle of Have One–“(Surfing to) My End” is some pleasing West Coast psychedelic country pop, “Memories” finds the trio polishing up their sound for a bit of smooth, propulsive alt-rock, and “County Lines” provides enough “power pop” for the entire record in its four-point-five-minute windows-down ecstasy. The back end of Have One does offer up one last slacker-rock singalong anthem (“Cruiser”), but the record bows out with a six-minute tune called “The Light, It Pulls You In” that spends the majority of its length meditating on a simple, slow-building instrumental before finally finding blown-out catharsis in its final minute. It’s a memorable cap for a record that doesn’t have a “central” leader but nonetheless never feels aimless or directionless. (Bandcamp link)
Hey there, readers and guests! The July 2024 playlist is here (I thought about trying to get it done last week, but I had a few things to wrap up around the end of the month and August 6th isn’t that late), and it’s an instant classic, I can tell. A ton of new music is down below–almost everything here is from this year, although there are a couple of exceptions for a recently-departed indie pop icon, an excellent undersung band I saw live recently, and a newly-reissued lost 90s shoegaze group. Read on to find out what I mean by those!
Teenage Tom Petties, Christina’s Trip, and Adam Finchler all have more than one song on this playlist (two apiece).
Here is where you can listen to the playlist on various streaming services: Spotify, Tidal (missing a song), BNDCMPR (missing three songs). Be sure to check out previous playlist posts if you’ve enjoyed this one, or visit the site directory. If you’d like to support Rosy Overdrive, you can share this (or another) post, or donate here.
“Hold on to the Dream, Dreamer”, Strange Magic From Slightest of Hands (2024, Mama Mañana)
An underappreciated member of the current power pop revival, one can’t say that Albuquerque, New Mexico’s Javier Romero hasn’t been busy as of late. Arising from a self-imposed mission to write, record, and mix one song a week for all of 2022, the following year saw the release of four different albums from his project Strange Magic. Admittedly, these slipped by me–but not to worry, as Romero put together a cassette of twenty-two highlights from these records called Slightest of Hands that came out in May. There’s a lot of good stuff on it, but “Hold on to the Dream, Dreamer” hits hard and immediately–it’s the perfect mix of distorted, darkly-clouded guitars and delicately melodic vocals. The instrumental surges in the song’s refrain, but we can hear Romero just well enough.
“Lucky”, The Dahlmanns From Lucky (2024, Snap)
Hey, check out this cool new guitar pop band I just stumbled upon! Well, “new” probably isn’t the right word for The Dahlmanns, as the Scandinavian group have been around since at least the beginning of the 2010s. They’ve put out a couple of albums, but the bulk of their releases have been singles and short EPs–which also describes the record that caused me to discover them, the three-song Lucky. The record contains two covers as B-sides (their take on Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ “A Thing About You” is excellent), but the original A-side and title track is my favorite. It’s just pitch perfect power pop/indie pop from the get-go, starting with choppy power chords, adding in an ascending jangle, and the chorus sounds weary but strong enough to stand up against the energy The Dahlmanns (a pseudonymous group; there’s supposedly five of them on this EP) give the rest of the track.
“I Got Previous”, Teenage Tom Petties From Teenage Tom Petties (2024, Repeating Cloud/Safe Suburban Home)
The third Teenage Tom Petties album in as many years (and second self-titled one) is almost entirely bedroom-recorded alone by Tom Brown, but it’s got the attitude to match last year’s full-band Hotbox Daydreams. Opening track “I Got Previous” is a massive-sounding power pop/slacker rock anthem (yes, it’s worth of the A-word) that balances instant mythmaking (the title phrase, which I suspect will enter my lexicon as soon as I figure out how to incorporate it), nods to the trailblazers (“I got a plan, though / I’m Evan Dando”, as well as The Blue Album just in the song’s whole vibe), and self-effacement (the humble delivery of “Hey Jeanine / Yeah, it’s me / Tom from ‘93”, as well as the use of “clusterfuck” and “liquid lunch” as personal descriptors)–all over a wobbly but effective wall of guitars. Read more about Teenage Tom Petties here.
“Patrick”, Adam Finchler From The Room (2024, Window Sill)
Musically, “Patrick” is one of the absolutely friendliest and most immediate moments on The Room–it’s an incredibly potent guitar pop song that finds Adam Finchler fully embracing peppy indie pop. Lyrically, “Patrick” is a cypher–Finchler studies the titular character with an obsessive voice, with every line almost revealing something (“Patrick, everybody loves you / Patrick, no one doesn’t like you … / Patrick, every little movement / Patrick, you create a universe / Patrick, you’re a cosmic dancer”), up until Finchler reaches the conclusion that sounds uneasily fantastic in light of all that’s come before it (“I wish I could be just like you / I could own your ugliness”). Read more about The Room here.
“My Toxic Friend”, The Reds, Pinks & Purples From My Toxic Friend (2024, Burundi Cloud)
You have to listen to all of it. All the “normal” LPs, all the Bandcamp-only albums, the covers EPs, the one-off singles, the self-recorded, self-released outtakes. Because with Glenn Donaldson, you just never know. In mid-July, Donaldson released a two-song single under his Reds Pinks & Purples alias, and the A-side of it might just be my favorite song he’s ever done. At the very least, it’s some of the best power pop-adjacent writing the San Francisco “sadcore” singer-songwriter has ever pulled off–Donaldson’s no stranger to soaring electric guitars, to be sure, but it’s still exhilarating and just a bit surprising when “My Toxic Friend” really just goes for it in the chorus. Maybe Donaldson has to make “My Toxic Friend” sound like this, as a way of exorcising the rough relationship alluded to in the song’s title. The lyrics are blunt, but you know what Donaldson means by them (if you don’t, I envy you).
“Any Good Thing”, Virginity From Bad Jazz (2024, Smartpunk)
Daytona Beach’s Virginity are the latest Florida band competing in the power pop-pop punk-emo sweepstakes to come to my attention, on the occasion of their third album, Bad Jazz. Their Bandcamp page says that they’re “just trying to be Superdrag”, and they also covered Superdrag’s “I’m Expanding My Mind” back in 2020, practically begging me to use that band instead of Weezer as their major 90s power pop sonic touchpoint. Well, I’m sidestepping that debate a bit, as the song I liked most from Bad Jazz, “Any Good Thing”, takes a step away from the alt-rock wall-of-sound guitars and steps into the world of jangly college rock. That guitar intro is incredibly blissful, and it’s a short but eventful walk from there to the chorus, where Virginity really embrace their power pop side–both in the construction of it, and in the refrain (“I could talk myself out of almost any good thing”, repeat ad nauseam).
“Scooter Blues”, Johnny Blue Skies From Passage Du Desir (2024, High Top Mountain)
Alright, Sturgill Simpson, you’ve won me back. Not that he’d ever “lost” me–his bluegrass albums and The Ballad of Dood & Juanita were perfectly fine with limited replay value in my book–but Passage Du Desir is pretty clearly his best work in this decade, if not his greatest front-to-back LP overall as of yet. Simpson–sorry, “Johnny Blue Skies”, which he’s calling himself to remind us that he’s a very special guy–sounds revitalized and relaxed throughout Passage Du Desir, and nowhere is that more apparent than “Scooter Blues”, the album’s lynchpin. From the opening lyrics (“I’ve been feeling like a piece of rice paper / Think I’ll move to an island and turn into vapor”) onward, it’s a powerful piece of smooth country-rock manifesting–Simpson doesn’t even need to state the obvious like he does in the refrain (“When people say, ‘Are you him?’ I’ll say, ‘Not anymore’”), but he sounds so great doing it that I don’t mind.
“I’ll Take It”, Christina’s Trip From Forever After (2024, Cherub Dream)
Forever After is the most pop-forward record I’ve heard from Cherub Dream Records yet–led by Christina Busler’s clear vocals, the album’s eight songs float pop melodies towards the listener wistfully but confidently. The guitars are loud but not overly distorted or blanketing, recalling underappreciated 90s indie rock groups like The Spinanes and Velocity Girl and even early guitar-based dream pop, while the band’s lo-fi, off-the-cuff attitude evokes prime K Records. The second half of the record might be the best half–at the very least, that’s where you’ll find “I’ll Take It”, the song that, despite being a bit of a departure from the rest of the album, was the one that hooked me initially. It’s a showstopper–a searing four-chord ballad that’s breathtaking in its blunt discomfort–and it will leave you with an emotional hangover of sorts. Read more about Forever After here.
“Cuttin’ My Hair”, Charlie Overman From Charlie Overman (2024)
Lately I’ve been finding myself impressed with the self-titled debut album from Charlie Overman, a country singer-songwriter from Lexington, Kentucky. Charlie Overman is pretty much exactly what I want in an Appalachian country record these days–in touch with tradition but not wedded to it, incredibly catchy, funny, and with plenty of fiddle and banjo. “Cuttin’ My Hair”, my favorite song on the album (closely followed by “Canada Thistle”, which just missed this playlist), is Overman’s best attempt at proving his bluegrass bona fides. Overman’s train of thought is gripping as always on this one, jumping from reminiscing about being stoned by the university to “doing tattoos after art school” to imagining a life as a “rock and roll star”. I believe this is the “longhair bluegrass” that Robbie Fulks sang about.
“Anton Lavey”, Awful Din From Sunday Gentlemen (2024, We’re Trying)
For whatever reason, I always get Anton Lavey and Timothy McVeigh confused–so I was definitely confused by the title of the lead-off song from Awful Din’s latest EP at first. I’m on the same page as them now, and I’m definitely on board with the Brooklyn quartet’s oddly catchy emo-punk ambivalent tribute to the founder of the Church of Satan. There are two equally potent hooks here, the grandeur of the first half of the hook (“Taming lions and Marilyn Monroe / You’re so apocryphal”) and the quiet-loud stopping and starting of the second half that gives the EP its name. “Anton Lavey” the song doesn’t hesitate to go in on the titular figure (“Are you worshipping power or worshipping Pan? / Can you innovate or just regurgitate Rand? / …. / There’s no conviction in what you’re about / There’s always a way out”), but is the rejection of Lavey just continuing the thread of what he championed? Eh, whatever, sounds great.
“Infinite Possibilities”, Happy Accidents From Edit Undo (2024, Alcopop!)
Musical duo (and real-life couple) Rich Mandell and Phoebe Cross have been known to me for a while as the rhythm section of ME REX, one of the best bands currently going “across the pond”, but the two of them have been making music together as Happy Accidents for a decade. I admit that I hadn’t checked out Happy Accidents before now, but the lead single from their most recent, upcoming record Edit Undo got my attention immediately. “Infinite Possibilities” is a slow-moving, snaking pop song that soaks up every second of its four-minute runtime. Mandell’s casual-sounding vocals surprisingly kick things up a notch for a “slacker” but still moving chorus (Cross, behind the drumkit, joins him briefly but memorably in the refrain), and the lyrics slowly but agreeably give into paranoia and dread when it comes to the titular limitlessness (“Infinitely catching colds / Infinitely breathing mold”).
Raleigh, North Carolina’s Lonnie Walker follow in the tradition of the more sprawling side of southern garage rock on Easy Easy Easy Easy, taking scenic routes and augmenting their barebones rock and roll setup with extended jams and hot, humid psychedelia to match the frantic energy of frontperson Brian Corum’s writing and performance. Several songs on Easy Easy Easy Easy cross the five-minute barrier–like “Busy Bold Sounds”, a triumphant piece of garage-y power pop that sounds effortless and doesn’t drag for a moment. The fist-pumping chorus and the jangly, shimmering guitars that immediately follow it are both so pleasing that Lonnie Walker can repeat them for as long as they want and I don’t think they’d ever lose their respective charms. Read more about Easy Easy Easy Easy here.
“Ya Don’t Think?”, Bryn Battani From Guest Room (2024)
“I don’t think your parents would like me much / They’re in the business of keeping their son / And I’m a distraction,” great stuff from Minneapolis’ Bryn Battani, here. There’s a lot that goes into the lead-off track of her latest EP, Guest Room–there’s a kind of whimsical 2000s alt-pop attitude to the construction and delivery, there’s some 2010s “indie folk” whistling and violin, while at other moments the song takes a rootsier/“Americana”-tinged shape. In the wrong hands, this combination would suck, but Battani has an excellent song on her hands with “Ya Don’t Think?”, a track that pulls off lightheaded and deep, oversharing but still keeping some things close to the vest, and dodging between the various genres without sounding contrived.
“Sinker”, Downhaul From How to Begin (2024, Self Aware/Landland)
Rosy Overdrive has been a booster of all things Downhaul ever since their last LP, 2021’s PROOF, so it’s no surprise that I’m heavily anticipating their upcoming third album, How to Begin (and their first for Self Aware Records, a Coastal South pairing that just makes too much sense). There are two songs from the album out already–my favorite of the two is lead single “Sinker”, which I knew was a classic pretty much from the moment I heard it. The notes for the album indicate that Downhaul attempted to make something more streamlined and accessible after the experimental emo/post-rock touches of PROOF and last year’s Squall EP, and “Sinker” is certainly a success in that regard. Singer Gordon Phillips sounds right at home on the song’s rambling alt-country instrumental, gliding across a sharp two-minute pop song that doesn’t lose any of Phillips’ keen, attention-grabbing writing regardless.
“Slow Shove”, Bird Language From Chasing Echos (2024)
Bird Language is a quintet from Boston made up of a few longtime local indie rockers; their first album, 625 Days, showed up in 2022, and the four-song Chasing Echos EP is their first record since then. The group’s Bandcamp page describes their sound as “ambient pop rock”, a descriptor that I imagine could mean a variety of different things to different people. To Bird Language, it apparently means “sounds like Matthew Sweet”–or, at least, that’s what the EP’s lead-off track, “Slow Shove”, recalls to me. It’s a great pop song regardless, mind you–it’s a mid-tempo, well-orchestrated power pop track with a bit of maximalist 1970s AOR energy to it, too. About two-thirds of the way through “Slow Shove”, it shifts entirely, picking up the tempo and drama for a big finish. It’s effectively two ideas grafted together, but Bird Language pull it off seamlessly.
“McRib”, Miss Bones From Grey Lady (2023)
“McRib” is the best song I’ve heard about being trans in a long time. Okay, okay, let’s back up for a second. Miss Bones is the project of June Isenhart, who plays in The Michael Character along with Lonesome Joan’s Amanda Lozada, and Miss Bones and Lonesome Joan recently did a string of shows together I was fortunate enough to catch. “McRib” blew me away when I saw it, both in Miss Bones’ incredibly electric, spirited version of the track at the show and in the lyrics (the refrain begins with “I’m breaking back into the garden / I’m taking back what I was promised”, and lands the titular metaphor from that starting point). The recorded version is a little slower and more like dreamy folk-pop (compared to a more power pop reading live), but either way it’s great and powerful stuff.
“Permanent Repeat”, Macseal From Permanent Repeat (2024, Counter Intuitive)
Back when Yeah, No, I Know came out in 2017, Farmingdale, New York’s Macseal was a clear-cut fourth-wave emo group, but they’d been hinting at a sonic expansion ever since 2019’s Super Enthusiast. While Ryan Bartlett and Cole Szilagyi still sound like “emo vocalists”, it’s more than fair to say that Macseal has straight-up transformed at this point–their latest record, Permanent Repeat,immerses itself in the worlds of power pop, polished pop punk, and even widescreen “heartland” indie rock across its eleven tracks. The title track is both a clear example of this and something of a subversion–the band barrels through “Permanent Repeat” for nearly three minutes before tacking the full version of the refrain (the catchiest single moment on the entire album) on at the end, upending any sort of traditional pop structure. Read more about Permanent Repeat here.
“Just Like Eddie”, Love Fiend From Handle with Care (2024, In the Red)
Hey, Love Fiend–Ric Ocasek called, he said “Let the good times roll”. It’s probably unfair to reduce Love Fiend to a modern-day Cars tribute act (not that that’s a bad thing to be), given that the delivery of the band’s lead singer makes them sound closer to that than they actually are, but their In the Red debut, Handle with Care, is some excellent 80s power pop regardless. My favorite song on the Los Angeles quintet’s latest is “Just Like Eddie”, a saxophone-powered rock and roll anthem that’s pretty undeniable to anybody who’s open to the kind of thing I’ve described in these past few sentences. As the band say in the chorus: “Don’t stop, let it rock”. That’s so true, Love Fiend!
“Life Is Funny”, The Dreaded Laramie From Princess Feedback (2024, Smartpunk)
On their first album, Princess Feedback, Nashville’s The Dreaded Laramie are power pop/pop punk mercenaries, zeroing in on the mainstream side of 90s alt-rock revival and blowing it up to eleven. As huge and polished-sounding as its inner contents are messy and uncomfortable, frontperson M.C. Cunningham delivers gut-spiller after gut-spiller throughout the album, largely focused around a breakup but leaping all over the place. As fun as “Life Is Funny” is to listen to, it’s a wildly unhealthy quasi-relationship described therein, the messaging and connecting continuing even after Cunningham’s been left feeling ego-bruised and “humiliated” by the person in question. Read more about Princess Feedback here.
“It’s Over”, Surrealistic Pillhead From Surrealistic Pillhead (2024, Future Shock)
I’ve had this song on the playlist for a while now, and it still confuses me a bit. Surrealistic Pillhead are a new band from Philadelphia featuring a few notable musicians (guitarist Ian Corrigan plays in Star Party, bassist Hart Seely in Sheer Mag), and their debut EP is out via legendary Cincinnati garage rock imprint Future Shock. That being said, I’m not quite sure how to describe “It’s Over”, my favorite song from the EP. Its instrumental is certainly poppy (from the opening melodic guitar line onward), while vocalist Greg Cordera is a rambling speak-singer in the verses and a psych-punker in the chorus. There’s a classic garage rock rousing aspect to the refrain–but the loitering that Surrealistic Pillhead do in the verses in between choruses is pretty entertaining, too.
“Darker Now”, Spirit Night From Time Won’t Tell (2024)
Almost exactly one year after the release of Bury the Dead(one of my favorite LPs of 2023), Spirit Night’s Dylan Balliett has announced his impending fifth album under the name, Time Won’t Tell. After tackling some heady subject matter about his roots in small town eastern panhandle West Virginia on Bury the Dead, Time Won’t Tell (recorded with Miserable chillers’ Miguel Gallego on bass and Rozwell Kid’s Jordan Hudkins on drums) seems like a chance for Balliett to make a breezier jangly power pop album. “Darker Now”, the record’s lead single, is compellingly playful, from its Flying Nun-esque keyboards to its guitar accents (“Jazzmaster noodles” is how Balliett describes them) to the classic handclaps. It’s also about depression, obviously–the lyrics do their best to fight off the seemingly insurmountable darkness at the edge of the hidden bay.
“Satin Doll”, The Chills From Kaleidoscope World (1986, Flying Nun/Creation)
What is there to say about Martin Phillipps? Unlike Chris Knox or (to a degree) David Kilgour, Phillipps’ genius was always front and center in his writing, the most clearly “pop” of the Dunedin greats. Phillipps’ personal struggles meant that there aren’t as many records of his compared to his contemporaries, but all of them from 1987’s Brave Words to 2021’s Scatterbrain are sharp indie pop albums anyone with a passing interest in the genre would do well to check out. I’m sure I’m not the only one whose favorite Chills release is the Kaleidoscope World compilation–obviously the title track and “Pink Frost” are classics, I’ve always been partial to “Doledrums”, but “Satin Doll” is the one that stuck out to me when I put it on the morning I learned of Phillipps’ passing. Its half-awake chamber pop sound was one of the Chills’ most beloved modes, and they excelled at it again and again–as messy as the song’s desk is, there’s never any doubt that it’s going to come up to the podium and nail the chorus.
“Dumb Enough”, Teenage Tom Petties From Teenage Tom Petties (2024, Repeating Cloud/Safe Suburban Home)
The latest Teenage Tom Petties album has enough bangers on it that it’s understandable to get overwhelmed by it all. Tom Brown has sequenced it pretty well, though–the first half balances lighter fare like “Tuff Top” and “This Autumn Body” with what might the record’s centerpiece, “Dumb Enough”. The electricity of this one is palpable pretty much from the get-go, and it wastes no time in establishing itself as a straight-up Superdrag/Rentals torpedo of a track that would easily be the best thing on the record if there wasn’t also a lot of other very good songs on it. It made this playlist over “Night Nurse” and “Handstands for You Love” and “Hawaiian Air”, true, but really that just means it sounded slightly better than those ones at the moment I had to decide between them. Hard to choose anything else when you get to that chorus, though. Read more about Teenage Tom Petties here.
“Playthings”, Christina’s Trip From Forever After (2024, Cherub Dream)
I’ve already touched on “I’ll Take It”, a breathtaking selection from Christina’s Trip’s Forever After that’s my personal favorite from the album. The only way to follow something like that up is to change tack completely, and Christina’s Trip launch into my second favorite song on the record, “Playthings”, immediately afterwards. The band embrace lo-fi indie punk and American twee in ways they hadn’t previously in the record’s more stately, restrained dream pop/noise pop beginnings on “Playthings”, to pretty undeniable results, and Christina Busler is really on one here (“Are we born to be our parent’s playthings? / To be bought and sold and fucked,” absolutely blistering delivery here). Read more about Forever After here.
“Seine”, Majesty Crush From Butterflies Don’t Go Away (2024, Numero Group)
Like (I’m guessing) many others, my first exposure to 90s shoegaze group Majesty Crush was via Third Man Records’ 2020 Southeast of Saturn compilation, a document of Detroit’s “buzzy, thriving space-rock scene”. Their song “No. 1 Fan” led off that album, and I’ve been waiting for Majesty Crush’s out-of-print discography to get reissued in full since then. Numero Group finally did it with Butterflies Don’t Go Away, pulling together their lone full length plus EPs and singles–my favorite song on it (other than “No. 1 Fan”, which is hard to beat) is one of their final recordings, “Seine”. Originally from 1994’s Sans Muscles EP, “Seine” is a beast, with Hobey Echlin’s bass absolutely slicing through the mix and nicely complimenting David Stroughter’s dark but compelling lyrics and delivery.
“Humdinger”, Brother of Monday From Humdinger (2024, Wilbur & Moore)
Mastered by longtime Robert Pollard collaborator Todd Tobias, Humdinger captures the basement melancholy of pre-Propeller Guided by Voices in the songwriting of Newark, Delaware’s Peter Bothum, aka Brother of Monday. On his second album under the name, his hooks and guitars push against their lo-fi recording but never in a way that makes it feel anything but the appropriate vehicle for the material. In particular, the just guitar-and-vocals recording of the title track captures the pastoral urgency of some of Pollard’s most intimate Suitcase offerings–it evokes the same feeling of something that, upon being “incomplete”, has actually stumbled onto an even more powerful piece of art. Read more about Humdinger here.
“Wanted”, Noun From Wanted/Consumed (2024, Muffler)
Screaming Females may be dead and disbanded (bowing out with last year’s excellent Desire Pathway and this spring’s companion EP Clover), but the good news is that their former frontperson, Marissa Paternoster, isn’t going anywhere. The last EP from her Noun project, In the Shade, was one of my favorites of 2021, and after a quieter solo album released under her own name, she’s picked up the Noun moniker to get back to heavy rock and rolling. Now joined by drummer Phillip Price, “Wanted” leads off a fiery two-song Noun single, an absolute wrecking ball that burns brighter than anything Screaming Females had done in the years before their break-up. It’s vintage Paternoster, recalling brute force rock music from the 70s with her own distinct stamp on it–loud, catchy, and angry.
“Sleepless”, Pack Rat From Life’s a Trap (2024, Hosehead/Drunken Sailor)
Vancouver’s Patrick McEachnie plays in the band Chain Whip, but in 2021 he released a solo album under the name Pack Rat called Glad to Be Forgotten. In the following years, Pack Rat has become a full-on quartet of its own featuring members of Bratboy and Corner Boys, and the evolution is quite apparent on their second LP, Life’s a Trap. Indebted to vintage garage and punk rock, Life’s a Trap is an easily digestible hook-fest; my favorite song is a zippy single going steady called “Sleepless” that’s sung by someone other than McEachnie (it could be anyone–guitarist Bella Bebe, bassist Ripley McEachnie, and drummer Tony Dallas all have vocal credits on the record). The vocals are game to skip along with the music, the motormouth delivery matching the theme of the song (“I don’t know what to do / I wanna go, I wanna be alone”).
“Glide”, Stay Mad From Buddy (2024, Candlepin)
Trying to keep abreast of the plethora of releases that have come out recently via Candlepin Records, one album that caught my ears was Buddy, the debut solo album from Mic Adams. Most notably the drummer for Cincinnati indie rock group The Ophelias, the first record from Stay Mad is a brief but impressive collection of lo-fi rock, bedroom pop, and indie fuzz that fits well on Candlepin’s roster. My favorite song on Buddy is probably mid-record ballad “Glide”, a starry, jangly tune whose lo-fi sheen doesn’t dampen its wistful beauty. It’s a highlight from a rewarding record that suggests Adams should step out from behind the kit more often.
“Happy Hour”, The Drolls From The Drolls/Gentlemen Rogues Split (2024, Snappy Little Numbers)
I’d heard of Austin’s Gentlemen Rogues before listening to their split single with Seattle’s The Drolls, but it was the new-to-me band who really impressed me with their two tracks on the record. A trio featuring Julie D from Guest Directors and Chinchilla and Denny Bartlett and Josh Rubin from Sicko, this split follows an LP in 2022 and a 7” in 2023. “Happy Hour” is a two-minute power-pop-punk anthem that’s over before one knows it, but not before bashing out a multitude of pop hooks and all-hopped-up energy along the way. Their other track, “Burned Out”, is a bit more of a traditional power pop tune (and it’s quite good at it, too), but the sugar rush/pogo-bait of “Happy Hour” is the one that really hooked me.
“The President’s Colonoscopy”, Adam Finchler From The Room (2024, Window Sill)
“You are the president, I’m your colonoscope / We show the people how to take good care / I am swimming in your bile, I’ll be here for awhile / Just looking for the polyp in the world”. Swear to god, this song is really, really good. The Room, the first solo record from Adam Finchler in a dozen years, is irreverent, wide-ranging, and fairly unpredictable–it’s one of the most striking and unique-sounding albums I’ve heard this year. I’ve come to accept that the penultimate song on the album, “The President’s Colonoscopy”, actually might be my favorite one on the record, somehow. The schmaltzy keyboard (both in terms of tone and playing style) fits the “public service announcement” nature of the track. I don’t really know why and how it all works, but somehow when the band joins Finchler as he reaches that final stanza, it’s oddly cathartic. Read more about The Room here.
“I Want a Life”, Mid-Range Jumper (2024)
Once again, Rosy Overdrive finds itself in the relatively rare position of writing about a band’s debut single. This time around, it’s Austin, Texas’ Mid-Range Jumper, a trio of singer-songwriters (Andrés Garcia, Jonah Brown, and Paulo Zambarano) who’ve previously played in bands like Quiet Light, sleep well., and Eli Josef. Although I’m not really familiar with any of their previous work, the first song from Mid-Range Jumper places the trio in the world of fuzzed-up alt-country. “I Want a Life” has a little bit of emo-adjacent earnestness to it, like if Conor Oberst was from Texas, and the song’s rich, mid-tempo verses are just dynamic enough that the chorus can get away with doing little more than repeating the title line longingly. It’s a good start!
“Tortilla Chip Bag Song”, Pacing (2024)
There’s that cliche that people say about singers: “I could listen to them sing the phone book”. I’d say that if this applies to anybody singing these days, it’d be Pacing’s Katie McTeague. When people say that, they mean that the vocalist in question has a really great singing voice, which is certainly true for McTeague, but when I say it, it’s more like “she’d somehow find the most interesting and compelling part of the phone book to sing and have us all on the edges of our seats while singing about various plumbers and electricians”. Anyway, this song is called “Tortilla Chip Bag Song”, and its lyrics are the back of a bag of Las Fortunitas Tortilla Chips. In Pacing’s hands, the bag’s spiel is turned into a peppy, minimal folk-pop hit single, McTeague gamely explaining to us how to microwave chips taken from the freezer (“where they maintain their freshness and flavor indefinitely”) and reminding us to reseal the bag “each time [we] enjoy the chips”. Maybe we’re not supposed to dissect writing like this, so I don’t know if the Las Fortunitas Tortilla Chips bag has an especially memorable essay attached to it, but “Tortilla Chip Bag Song” certainly makes it feel like it.
“Prove Me Wrong”, Jimrat From Jimrat (2024, Who Is)
I don’t know who Jimrat is. I heard about them through an incomprehensible email that sent me to an even more incomprehensible website (Are these photos of the band? No one can say for sure). They seem to be from Boston and have put out music through Denizen Records and Who Is Records (which might be their own label). Their latest record is a self-titled three-song EP with shades of lo-fi bedroom pop, nu-shoegaze, and various other experimental, noisy kinds of pop and rock music. My favorite track on Jimrat is “Prove Me Wrong”, an offbeat fuzz-pop song that sounds like it features either two lead vocalists or one doing a vocally-manipulated duet with themself. Either way, “Prove Me Wrong” is hypnotic and transfixing to me, so I’ll do my best to try to follow whatever Jimrat is.
“Yr Well”, Manners Manners From I Held Their Eyes, I Kissed Them All (2024, 20/20)
I Held Their Eyes, I Kissed Them All, the debut album from Baltimore’s Manners Manners, is the work of indie rock veterans who are still wide-eyed pop believers. The vocals on single and highlight “Yr Well” stay on top of the backing music, but the roaring, dramatic indie rock of that song is the closest that Manners Manners come to crashing onshore–aided by three members of the band $100 Girlfriend on guitar, synthesizer, and vocals, the band thunders through an overwhelming instrumental that only grows and grows. Nonetheless, the chorus comes through clearly: “I have been to your well, and it only flows backwards, upside-down, and to itself”. With the gale force winds of the music behind it, the song’s central rebuke is made all the more strong by its intangibility and opacity. Read more about I Held Their Eyes, I Kissed Them All here.
“Waiting for the Lizard”, Glass-Beagle From Spring Sword Chatter (2024, G-B, Inc.)
Spring Sword Chatter is the debut EP from Glass-Beagle, a Chicago group led by vocalist/multi-instrumentalist Nathan Zurawski and also featuring drummer Mark Burjek, pedal steel player Michael Conway, and guitarist Jack Tekiela. Judging from their first record, Glass-Beagle’s sound can concisely be described as “folk-y alt-country psychedelic fuzz rock”, or something to that effect. Mainly what I know is that my favorite song on the record, “Waiting for the Lizard”, sounds fantastic. The song kicks off with a nice, big electric guitar riff, but it’s not so overwhelming that Conway’s pedal steel and Zurawski’s understated vocals aren’t able to get their moments in the spotlight, too. Glass-Beagle shamble triumphantly through “Waiting for the Lizard”, the first great song from a band I hope to hear more from.
“Handlebars”, Fuvk From What Is the Purpose of Your Visit? (2024, Start-track)
It’s been a minute since I checked in on Austin’s Shirley Zhu and her project Fuvk, but she’s remained busy ever since I named Goodnight, Moon one of my favorite EPs of 2022. Just this year alone, she’s put out two EPs–the latter of which, What Is the Purpose of Your Visit?, is from where “Handlebars” comes. I would imagine that the title of the EP, its Bandcamp description (“corner taken quickly 2024”), and the opening lyrics of “Handlebars” ( “25’s off to a great start / Flipping over your handlebars / Sat with you in the ER”) are all related. At the very least, misfortune has led to another classic piece of folk-tinged indie pop/bedroom pop from Fuvk–Zhu hits a lot of her benchmarks (upfront, frank but melodic speak-singing, acoustic guitars melded seamlessly with electronic elements) in about eighty seconds, leading off another humble but welcome entry into the ever-expanding Fuvk discography.
“Evening Drive”, Bacchae From Next Time (2024, Get Better)
On their second LP, Washington, D.C. punk band Bacchae more smoothly mesh together their post-punk, punk, and pop instincts together for frequently cathartic results. “Evening Drive”, a highlight of the second half of Next Time, is Bacchae’s version of a car song–it’s pop-friendly, with a propulsive beat and exciting guitar soloing, yes, but vocalist Katie McD (who’s spent the majority of Next Time balancing on the edge of nervousness and droll disdain) is still throwing out harrowing descriptions of sharks in the water and other isolation-evoking images. “Hey, maybe / We’ll wait and see / Delay the end / We’ll bide our time,” sings McD in the chorus. Combined with the backing music, the whole ordeal feels great–but then again, so does hitting the slots one more time. Read more about Next Time here.
“Down at the Casino”, Pat’s Alternative Bus Tour From Virtual Virgins (2024)
Glasgow’s Andrew Paterson is a guitar pop veteran, and Virtual Virgins hardly disappoints on this front–the songs are based around breezy, acoustic, C86-influenced indie pop foundations and its leader’s conversational, heavily-Scottish-accented vocals. Paterson’s knack for storytelling and character-building helps the record stand out in a crowded scene, an aptitude that shines on “Down at the Casino”, one of the most polished pop moments on Virtual Virgins. The mid-record highlight is a song as deceptively bright and cheery as the machinery about which Paterson sings–“If it makes you feel better, we’re no longer enjoying ourselves”, he says, as the characters populating the song relinquish their savings to slots and online gambling apps. Read more about Virtual Virgins here.
“Heart Can’t Feel”, Castle Black From The Highway at Night (2024)
It’s a good idea to stick with a record from beginning to end even if it isn’t grabbing you. Castle Black’s The Highway at Night wasn’t doing much for me, but because I let it play through, I got to the record’s final track, “Heart Can’t Feel”, which distills the band’s sound into a sharp power pop-new wave-punk package that works very well. After trying on a few different costumes on The Highway at Night, the New York duo of Leigh Celent and Joey Russo pull off a sharp, energetic closing track that wastes not a second of its three-minute runtime (from the in-the-thick-of-it opening lyric to the sharp rein-pulling of its closing).
Hey there, and welcome to the first Pressing Concerns of the week! If you like the more “eclectic”/”grab bag” kinds of blog posts, this one’s for you: we’ve got new albums from Biz Turkey and Smokers, a new EP from TIFFY, and an alternate version of Friendship Commanders‘ sophomore album down below.
If you’re looking for more new music, you can visit the site directory to see what else we’ve written about lately. If you’d like to support Rosy Overdrive, you can share this (or another) post, or donate here.
Biz Turkey – Biz Turkey
Release date: May 31st Record label: Third Uncle Genre: 90s indie rock, lo-fi indie rock Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Dylan Goes Electric
Here are a few names I didn’t know about until very recently: Biz Turkey, Graham Wood, Third Uncle Records. The latter two of those have a history together going back to the mid-2000s, when Wood was making music regularly as Gray Home Music, playing with a wide assortment of musicians including Ian Stynes, Matt Retzer, and Josh Hunter (various combinations of the four of them have also played in several other groups together; refer to this Instagram post for details). A few years after the last Gray Home Music album (which came out in 2014), Retzer and Wood both found themselves in Maine and begin making music together as Biz Turkey, although their long-in-the-making self-titled debut record is an amorphous thing–befitting of an album made by a tight-knit group of musicians, Biz Turkey features remote and/or in-person contributions from various sessions featuring Stynes, Hunter, and Retzer dating back to 2016 (the fifth member of Biz Turkey, the mysterious guitarist Conrad Carpenter, is of unknown origins and whereabouts to me). As piecemeal as its origins are, Biz Turkey sounds like the work of a real, coherent band of collaborators (which it is, new project or no), with a clear handle on their specific style of pessimistic-feeling, pop-friendly electric indie rock.
If you like the less jammy side of Built to Spill and the more guitar-based music of Grandaddy, I’ve got great news for you with regards to what Biz Turkey sounds like (the group also recently played a show with fellow Portland, Maine musician Brock Ginther, and the more melancholic moments of his bands Midwestern Medicine and Lemon Pitch are something else of which Biz Turkey remind me). Biz Turkey captures the moment where the basement indie rock of the 90s started transforming into something larger and more aware of the concept of “the outdoors”. As a vocalist, Wood sounds lost but still alert in the midst of these wandering instrumentals–every musician on any given track sounds like they’re following something different, but they’re all so in tune with each other that the puzzle pieces fit nonetheless. “Dylan Goes Electric” is a compelling first song–it gives the feeling that we’ve just stepped aboard a sinking ship. Biz Turkey filters themselves into something resembling power pop in “Loudest Voice in the Room”, an upbeat song that they match a few songs later in the Dough Martsch-ian swirling march of “Well Done” (and then zag in the form of the Jason Lytle-esque “I’m Not Here to Make Friends” right after). Biz Turkey almost gets more of a spine as it progresses, with the last few songs ringing the loudest and clearest. It’s great to hear the full might the band conjure up in “Step Aside” and “What a Disaster”, yes–but that doesn’t take away from the equally-intriguing sound of Biz Turkey groping about in the darkness. (Bandcamp link)
Friendship Commanders – BILL (The Steve Albini Mixes)
Release date: July 22nd Record label: Trimming the Shield Genre: Noise rock, punk rock, alt-rock Formats: Digital Pull Track: Outlive You
In late 2017, Nashville duo Friendship Commanders traveled up to Chicago to record what would become their second album, 2018’s BILL, at Electrical Audio with Steve Albini. The band (singer/guitarist Buick Audra and bassist/drummer Jerry Roe) have always had an interesting sound–on their debut, 2016’s DAVE, they’re an energetic, heavy punk rock group, while they’d fully transformed into an even-heavier, sludgier stoner rock group by last year’s MASS. Charting their trajectory in hindsight, Albini is the perfect choice to aid in that transition, as he’d helped bands like Screaming Females and Cloud Nothings turn from punk-inspired indie rock groups into something more towering in landmark records. BILL was tracked live to tape by Albini and eventually mixed by Roe, but the band held onto Albini’s original mixes and planned to release them at some point–Albini’s sudden and unexpected death became the impetus for the mixes to finally see the light of day. Albini’s touch was already felt throughout BILL via his recording, of course–this new version of the album is less a spotlight on him as an engineer than as a welcome chance to revisit a record that still sounds powerful and tough over a half-decade later.
Plowing through thirteen songs in thirty-three minutes, BILL definitely feels like a punk album–at the very least, Friendship Commanders are making “heavy rock and roll” at this point in their music career. The songs rush by in a blur, whirlwinds of crushing rhythm sections, loud guitars, and Audra’s commanding, centered vocals. Fast punk-powered instrumentals like “Horrify”, “Saw and Heard”, and “Outlive You” stick around just long enough to sear an impression into one’s brain–there are pop sensibilities in their respective refrains, neither outshining nor being swallowed up by the instrumental might found elsewhere in the tracks. Signs of Friendship Commanders’ slower, heavier future are less frequent on BILL, but they’re there, and quite prominently so when they are. Opening track “Your Fear Is Showing”, closing number “Desperately Seeking”, and mid-record centerpiece “In the Afterthoughts” all qualify–one can tell by their positioning in the record and the weight Albini and the band give them that they were proud of being able to pull the likes of these songs off, and it’s not surprising they latched onto this side of their sound in the future. That being said, Friendship Commanders sound their best on BILL when they’re barreling through the last gasps of their punk rock past, which they continue to do as the record winds down in “The Choice”, “Resolution of the Wants”, and “Of the We”. Kind of remarkable how one engineer consistently found himself in the right place at the right time, no? (Bandcamp link)
TIFFY – 2
Release date: August 2nd Record label: Self-released Genre: Dream pop, indie punk, 90s indie rock, power pop Formats: Digital Pull Track: Surf Camp
After a couple of EPs, Somerville, Massachusetts singer-songwriter Tiffany Sammy made her full-length debut as TIFFY last year with So Serious. I referred to that album as an “inspired marriage of jagged alt-rock and more polished pop” at the time, and it felt like what her various smaller releases (also including a few singles and demos) had been leading up to for nearly a half-decade. I wasn’t expecting to hear another TIFFY record less than a year later, but she’s turned around and released a new EP called 2 (somewhat confusingly, her third EP and fourth record), containing three brand new songs and one reworking of a song from So Serious. Perhaps understandably, 2 feels looser and more “low-stakes” than the TIFFY LP–recorded by ringer Justin Pizzoferrato and featuring instrumental contributions from Tom Stevens and Ben “Cutty” Cuthbert, Sammy’s latest release is a pleasing coda to So Serious. While 2 doesn’t try to do everything that Sammy did on her last album, it offers up a bit of what worked on that LP and tries a couple of things beyond that “sound”, as well.
Sammy self-describes her music as “fuzz-tinged dream rock”, and nowhere is this more true than in 2’s opening track, “Mirror”. “Mirror” is also the song from the EP that sounds like it would’ve been the most at home on So Serious to my ears–Sammy and Stevens’ dual guitar attack is on point, offering up a buffet of memorable, catchy leads while Sammy slowly adds more and more drama to her performance as a vocalist as the song rolls forward. “Surf Camp” feels like the classic “B-side that’s secretly better than the A-side” to me–it’s a more laid-back version of TIFFY’s guitar pop, but it’s incredibly well-done, and it really does feel like it’s about to crash upon shore by the time it’s over. Redos of old songs are starting to become a TIFFY staple (both So Serious and the TIFFY EP had at least one)–this time around, she offers up a new version of “Lost in the Shuffle” from her last album. A minute longer than the 2023 recording, “Lost in the Shuffle (2024)” is an extended, more rock-based take on the original’s polished, danceable dream pop (it’s still danceable–I imagine that this louder version is closer to how it sounds in a live setting). “L.A. Fade” closes the record with a memorable, offbeat pop closer, going from bouncy, guitar-forward bummer pop to dreamy and floating and then back again. It’s a strong cap to a brief but welcome drop-in from TIFFY. (Bandcamp link)
Smokers – The Rat That Gnawed the Rope
Release date: June 14th Record label: Mouth Magazine Genre: Punk rock, garage rock, post-punk Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: The Irish Tenor
Oakland’s Smokers have been kicking around for about a decade at this point, and the band’s four members (vocalist/guitarist Andy Asp, bassist Cyrus Comiskey, guitarist Omen Starr, and drummer Jim Nastic) are all Bay Area punk veterans, but The Rat That Gnawed the Rope is the quartet’s first full-length as a group. Some of these tracks had previously shown up as singles and on demo tapes, but the band finally hammered out these fifteen tracks via sessions at San Francisco’s El Studio (with Phil Becker) and Oakland’s Tuff Bunker. The resultant LP is a compelling rock and roll record–calling themselves “pub punk”, Smokers have a somewhat seedy sound harkening back to the earliest days of punk rock. Blistering garage rock and pub rock certainly have footholds throughout The Rat That Gnawed the Rope, but this is straight-up “punk” if I’ve ever heard it, right out of the era before the darker and angrier edges of the genre had splintered into “post-punk” and “hardcore”–listening to The Rat That Gnawed the Rope is to take all of it in at once.
Roughly three decades removed from his work with Lookout! Records country-punk group Nuisance, Asp remains a sharp punk showman of a vocalist, a limited “technical” range supplemented with an impressive emotional one that can switch from conversational to smarmy to tortured easily. With fifteen songs to blast through, Smokers aren’t one to give into embellishments and overproduction on The Rat That Gnawed the Rope, but the occasional trick up their sleeve (like the Hammond organ found in the dark opening track “The Irish Tenor”, or the barroom piano and tambourine injecting just a bit of garage rock chaos into “Rum Ration”, or the acoustic guitar frantically trying to keep up with the rest of “The Strand”) hardly detracts from the band’s raw power. Smokers are certainly serious punk rockers–in some ways, this is a photo negative of the goofy West Coast pop punk that they’ll always be just a degree removed from–but the skill and energy of the group (who, again, have been playing with each other for a decade by now) ensure that stuff like “Cutting Class” and “East of Oakland” are anything but chores to listen to. One of the most spirited songs on the record is the penultimate track, “Deviant Career”–it’s got a spaghetti western outlaw bent to it, but one could apply it to the four-person gang playing these songs, as well. (Bandcamp link)
In a superb Thursday Pressing Concerns, we’re looking at four new records coming out tomorrow, August 2nd: new LPs from Teenage Tom Petties, Cowboy Boy, and True Optimist, as well as a “mini-album” from Footballhead. It’s been a great week on the blog, so if you missed Monday’s post (featuring Nightshift, Sylvia Sawyer James, Goodbye Wudaokou, and Manners Manners) or Tuesday’s (featuring Birdie, Miserable chillers, Rated Eye, and Lowmoon), be sure to 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.
Teenage Tom Petties – Teenage Tom Petties
Release date: August 2nd Record label: Safe Suburban Home/Repeating Cloud Genre: Lo-fi power pop Formats: Cassette, digital Pull Track: Handstands for Your Love
Three years, three Teenage Tom Petties albums–and oddly enough, two self-titled ones. The Teenage Tom Petties emerged in 2022 as the lo-fi power pop solo project of Bath, England’s Tom Brown, previously best known as one-half of Rural France (who are still going strong, having released an LP earlier this year, as well). The home-recorded first Teenage Tom Petties album was an entirely Brown affair, but the group ballooned to a three-guitar, five-piece rock and roll band for last year’sHotbox Daydreams, an impressive step forward in more ways than it being the act’s first “studio” album. Brown writes at too quick of a clip for his own band to keep up with him (the fact that two of them live in the United States seems like it’s also a hindrance), so, while there are “plans” for future full-band Teenage Tom Petties albums, the latest record under the name finds Brown back in his bedroom, recording (mostly) alone yet again (Safe Suburban Home’s Jim Quinn contributes some bass, and Repeating Cloud/Lemon Pitch’s Galen Richmond some backing vocals). In a very Weezer-esque move, Brown has declared the second Teenage Tom Petties to be a sequel to the first one by giving it the same title (what nickname will TTP-heads eventually give this record to differentiate it? “The one with the kid on the cover” doesn’t even work).
Brown’s been a sharp pop songwriter for as long as I’ve known of him, but Hotbox Daydreams was a real leveling-up moment for him–it’s just hit after hit. Maybe the band brought it out of him at first, but Teenage Tom Petties II is a worthy sequel not just to its homonymous predecessor, but to the group’s sophomore record, bedroom or no. Opening track “I Got Previous” is a massive-sounding power pop/slacker rock anthem (yes, it’s worth of the A-word) that balances instant mythmaking (the title phrase, which I suspect will enter my lexicon as soon as I figure out how to incorporate it), nods to the trailblazers (“I got a plan, though / I’m Evan Dando”, as well as The Blue Album just in the song’s whole vibe), and self-effacement (the humble delivery of “Hey Jeanine / Yeah, it’s me / Tom from ‘93”, as well as the use of “clusterfuck” and “liquid lunch” as personal descriptors)–all over a wobbly but effective wall of guitars. “Hawaiian Air” is the archetypal “second track” for this kind of music–a little weirder, a little “cooler”, sneakier but just as effective in its hooks (if we’re doing the sequel thing, it qualifies as a more subtle version of “Lambo” from the first album).
The breezier moments on the first half of the album do exactly what they need to do–in the case of “Tuff Top”, it’s to trail off while Brown sings a bit of Jackson 5 over the chords, and “This Autumn Body” has to tilt towards jangly college rock but without abandoning the swagger of the louder side of the Teenage Tom Petties. In both cases, they’re just light enough to compliment “Dumb Enough”, a straight-up Superdrag/Rentals torpedo of a track that would easily be the best thing on the record if there wasn’t also a lot of other very good songs on it. A lot of these rivals are found on the second half of Teenage Tom Petties, which could very well be the best half of the record–it’s a strong argument between “Night Nurse” (a sub-two-minute careening thing that has enough juice for a song that’s three or four times its size), “Handstands for Your Love” (a big-hearted, timeless-sounding thing that was my first favorite and will probably be yours, too), and “Ex Gf Day” (Brown landing an airplane that I didn’t even realize we were on, calling back to the opening track and ending the album on the phone with an ex). Once Teenage Tom Petties became a “real band”, they could’ve slowed down and started putting out increasingly polished and “developed” albums every couple of years or so, like a “normal” act. Luckily for us, Tom Brown isn’t following any trajectory but his own. (Bandcamp link)
Cowboy Boy – Lipstick on a Pig
Release date: August 2nd Record label: Get Better Genre: Pop punk, power pop, alt-rock Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Nice Girl
The latest album from Los Angeles duo Cowboy Boy begins with vocalist Olivia Maria singing “Somebody said on the internet, ‘You’ll never meet your soulmate at Great Scott’ / And it makes me laugh ‘cause I think it’s true in every single other case but ours”, and one of the last things on the record is a song called “Dume” in which Maria decides against saying “hey” or apologizing to an ex and declaring “That’s why I can’t love you anymore”. It’s been a long time since high school English, so I don’t think this fits the definition of “dramatic irony” (if you’re reading this, Mr. Adams, I’m sorry)–but it’s certainly dramatic and ironic. As is putting together a whirlwind messy breakup album in which the central relationship is intertwined with serious self-image issues and then titling said album Lipstick on a Pig. But such is the way of Cowboy Boy–Maria and Mike Nevin, who began making music in Boston in the mid-2010s, putting out a couple of EPs (2017’s Princess, 2021’s Good Girl) before emerging in southern California with their first proper full-length album. The band’s early recordings were intriguing combinations of alt-rock, pop punk, and even a bit of emo, but Lipstick on a Pig feels like a big step forward, Maria and Nevin moving in lockstep to make a tour de force power pop album that sounds big enough to capture Maria’s writing.
Maria truly runs the gamut throughout Lipstick on a Pig, appropriately for an album that charts her mental trajectory in incredibly frank terms. “Great Scott” uses the now-defunct Boston venue as a jumping-off point for a genuinely incredible love song; she’s dusting the wreckage off of herself in “Nice Girl”, she pulls off sheer desperation in “Dissolver Part 2”, and she just lays it all out there in mid-record power ballad “Perfectly”. The main theme of Lipstick on a Pig is expanded upon via songs like “Grown Up”, a reckoning with being failed and abandoned by some kind of parental/guardian figure, and “Clean Girl”, a classic despairing “endless scroll” anthem. The subject matter of “Clean Girl” is hardly an original one these days (in fact, their labelmates Bacchae had a good one about it on their new album last month); in context, though, it adds to the poisonous concoction ticking in Maria’s mind. The guitar solos help, too–Nevin’s ambitious, showy guitar playing puts the “power” in Cowboy Boy’s “power pop”; it’s a bit like another “break-up soundtracked by guitar heroics” album from recently, The Dreaded Laramie’s Princess Feedback. While that record had something of a self-aware remove to it, though, Lipstick on a Pig features much less clarity–Maria comes off as much more “in the thick of it” throughout the entire album, right up to the switching between “I wish I didn’t love you anymore” and “That’s why I can’t love you anymore,” in “Dume”. “Are we over, is this over yet?” she sings in the final track “Over”–there’s no answer, but the guitar that plays the song out sounds great. (Bandcamp link)
Footballhead – Before I Die
Release date: August 2nd Record label: Tiny Engines Genre: Alt-rock, pop punk, emo-punk, fuzz rock, grunge-gaze Formats: Digital Pull Track: Before I Die
Last year, I wrote about Overthinking Everything, the self-released debut album from Chicago’s Footballhead. Led by Ryan Nolen and aided by collaborators Adam Siska and Snow Ellet, Footballhead’s first LP offered plenty of catchy, 90s alt-rock-indebted power pop and and caught the ear of the newly-revived Tiny Engines, who re-released the record this March as one of their first post-hiatus records. Those of us who had heard Overthinking Everything beforehand didn’t have to wait long for Tiny Engines to put out brand-new Footballhead music, however–just a few months later, we’re greeted with Before I Die, a “mini-album” featuring seven new Footballhead songs. Engineered and mixed by Snow Ellet, the latest from Footballhead continues the band’s exploration of slick, polished alt-rock with pop punk hooks–they already sounded like a heavier and darker version of Snow Ellet’s own music, and Before I Die hones in on these traits. Guitar pop music at its most greyscale, Footballhead is dead serious about walls of guitars and supercharged hooks–no grinning, not even a smirk, just craft.
“It’s not all that bad for me / ‘Cause I find peace in apathy,” Nolen sings in Before I Die’s title track, one of the most vibrant moments on the mini-album. One part grunge-gaze and one part power pop, the great compromise of “Before I Die” arrives smack dab in the middle of a record that spends its first half diving into the depths of Footballhead’s sound. “My Direction” sprints with the energy of 90s punk rock, with Nolen’s skulking lead vocal performance not too laden with chains to soar in the chorus, while “Crushing Me” is the record’s first indication that Footballhead could have a very nice career appealing to the subset of alt-rocker who can’t go two sentences without mentioning Hum or Deftones, should they choose to pursue it. The title track and the similarly-minded “Stupefied” (whose scribbled alt-rock guitar hook almost sounds–dare I say it–fun) offer up something of an olive branch, but Footballhead still bring a jagged edge to the rest of the record– “Your Ghost” is a furnace of guitar riffs, and the otherwise-atmospheric “As for What?” has a genuine hardcore breakdown right in the middle of it. As mid-tempo closing track “In Motion” trails off towards its uncertain conclusion, Footballhead wrap up an intriguing record–something that feels fairly distinct from Overthinking Everything, and a record that in the future we’ll be able to categorize as either an interesting detour or the first indication of where the next Footballhead full-length would go. Right now, though, I’m just appreciating Before I Die as some enjoyably sharp and dour alt-rock. (Bandcamp link)
True Optimist – Mental Health
Release date: August 2nd Record label: Self Aware Genre: Post-punk, art rock, experimental rock, jazz-pop Formats: Digital Pull Track: One Way
Evan Plante is a punk veteran–since the late nineties, he’s played in several emo, screamo, hardcore, and post-hardcore groups from Massachusetts and Virginia (Light the Fuse and Run, Forcefedglass, Bastian) before eventually settling in Charlotte, North Carolina. Plante continued in playing in bands like Black Market and Hello Handshake up until at least the mid-2010s, but somewhere along the way became fairly disillusioned with “the same old music” and “didn’t touch an instrument” for four years. The void left by punk rock became filled with bossa nova, afrobeat, and pop music of several decades past, with Plante being drawn in by music emphasizing some of the furthest concerns from his previous output–namely, well-crafted, polished pop hooks and hypnotic, meditative rhythms. Eventually he found himself wanting to try a hand at making that kind of music and True Optimist, Plante’s first solo project, was born. Assisted mainly by his wife, Susan Plante, on keyboards and backing vocals (you may remember her as one-half of 90s alt-rock revivalists Faye), Mental Health is low-key but inspired, featuring snaking basslines and perfunctory percussion traversing the landscape alongside Plante’s low, in-command crooning.
We’re a long way from hardcore punk, but Mental Health’s opening track, “Do, Be”, is confrontational in a different way–it’s five minutes of minimal, mechanical percussion, circular keyboard and bass rhythms, and ambient piano, with fairly infrequent vocals popping up throughout the song. “One Way” is a little louder, but still feels captivatingly scattered–the bare post-punk rhythm section occasionally is accompanied by almost random-seeming moments of guitar (often sounding “too loud” in comparison to the rest of the song), while Plante’s falsetto is more coherent but almost out-of-place. “Almost” is a key word for True Optimist–after living in the world of the perfunctory, Plante gets to explore the offbeat and intangible throughout Mental Health, like how “What You Wear” never quite congeals into the brisk post-punk song it hints at, or how “People” almost points towards reggae and jazz but never clearly breaks through. That being said, when Plante really embraces the “pop” side of True Optimist, the wrinkles become less pronounced–the sunny, dreamy synthpop of “Stayin Alive”, the bedroom jazz-rock charm of “Race the Sun”, and the sturdy, warm keyboard tones of “The Argument” (which pleasingly evokes Smoke Bellow) give Mental Health some varied “hits” in its second half. By the time we reach closing track “Bloviator”, Plante sounds the most confident he’s been yet, adopting a smooth falsetto (and centering it in the mix) to sing nothing but the song’s title over and over again. Head-scratching, but there’s undeniably something there. (Bandcamp link)
In a classically eclectic Tuesday Pressing Concerns, we’ve got two new albums (from Rated Eye and Lowmoon), a new “mixtape” from Miserable chillers, and a reissue of a 90s indie pop classic from Birdie below. There’s definitely something here for you, the reader! If you missed yesterday’s post, featuring Nightshift, Sylvia Sawyer James, Goodbye Wudaokou, and Manners Manners, check that one out here.
If you’re looking for more new music, you can visit the site directory to see what else we’ve written about lately. If you’d like to support Rosy Overdrive, you can share this (or another) post, or donate here.
Birdie – Some Dusty (Reissue)
Release date: July 26th Record label: Slumberland Genre: Indie pop,twee, baroque pop, chamber pop Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: One Two Five
The most recent reissues from longtime indie pop label Slumberland have included the sole full-length from Rose Melberg’s 90s San Francisco supergroup Go Sailor and a compilation from pre-Velvet Crush band The Springfields–two records qualifying as “legendary guitar pop” and setting the bar incredibly high for the imprint’s continuing crate-digging activities. At the very least, British band Birdie has the pedigree to match these high expectations–they were formed in the mid-nineties by Debsey Wykes (of essential indie pop/post-punk group Dolly Mixture) and Paul Kelly (of the underappreciated East Village, who also received a Slumberland reissue a few years ago) while they were both playing in Saint Etienne’s live band. Some Dusty, the first of the band’s two albums, came out in 1999 and featured string arrangements from The High Llamas’ Sean O’Hagan. The record’s sound really does place it at the end of the twentieth century, although that certainly doesn’t mean that its ten songs don’t sound just as fresh now, a quarter-century later.
As “indie pop” and “twee” moved away from its relatively slapdash beginnings and into a more ornate, baroque period in the mid-to-late 90s, Wykes and Kelly’s backgrounds had more than prepared them to rise to the occasion. It’s not hard to see Birdie in the context of bands like O’Hagan’s High Llamas, but while other indie pop veterans (Everything But the Girl, Ivy, Stereolab) were embracing electronics to gesture towards a “post-genre” utopia, Birdie explored a more subtle and cautious version of this movement on Some Dusty. Wykes and Kelly zero in on the precision and studiousness of their beloved 1960s pop, and Some Dusty makes the most sense as an attempt to update and interpret it using the streamlining found in “indie” guitar pop and the lushness afforded to the group via (then-) modern technology.
The word that comes to mind over and over listening to Some Dusty is “impressive”. Not in a “technically proficient but boring” kind of way–Birdie get around that trap by embracing some of the most warm and welcoming moments in pop music history–but in how the record’s accents and choices all take Some Dusty down the freshest possible paths. Wykes’ vocals can’t go unremarked upon–almost always somehow summoning up the approachability of twee pop, even when she’s matching the most professional moments of the music, while the instrumental choices (pianos set to “jaunty” on “Laugh”, horns laid-back on “Dusty Morning” and just a little on-edge when they surface in “Let Her Go”) are just as confoundingly natural. It’s tempting to call some of the more outwardly distinct moments on Some Dusty (“One Two Five”, whose rhythms accomplish the same thing as a lot of the more electronic-curious indie pop bands of the time without the bells and whistles, and the effortless college rock/C86 studies of “Port Sunlight” and “Folk Singer”) “boasts”, but that’s not really in the nature of Birdie. Even when Some Dusty was brand new, I have to imagine those listening to it recognized that Wykes and Kelly were making something built to last for the long haul. (Bandcamp link)
Miserable chillers – Great American Turn Off
Release date: June 21st Record label: Self-released Genre: Art pop, pop rock, soft rock Formats: Digital Pull Track: Done Dancing
Who are Miserable chillers? Well, it’s a project let by one person–Miguel Gallego, a New Jersey-originating, Brooklyn-based musician who’s been making music under the name for at least a decade. The Miserable chillers discography seems to be rather sprawling and varied–there are “proper” albums released on a “real” label, self-released Bandcamp-only records, music made alone and with collaborators. The latest Miserable chillers release has been given the “mixtape” designation by Gallego, and while it’s “new” to us, some of the material here has been gestating for up to six years. Great American Turn Off is an exercise of sorts–Gallego gave himself the task of completing a bunch of long-unfinished songs, and the fourteen-song mixtape (initially released only on YouTube and via Gallego’s website, both as a tribute to Cindy Lee and as a way of distinguishing it from more cohesive, “official” Miserable chillers records) is what he ended up with as a result. Unsurprisingly, Great American Turn Off is an eclectic listen, but Gallego is more or less operating in the world of vintage “studio pop” here, pulling together soft rock, sophisti-pop, psych pop, and yacht rock of yore to make rich-sounding pop compositions.
If you’re thinking, “well, that kind of sounds like the 80s-influenced art pop revival currently being spearheaded by folks like Sun Kin’s Kabir Kumar”, you wouldn’t be far off–the two have collaborated together, and Kumar is one of the many featured vocalists on Great American Turn Off (Kumar sings “After the Show”, and Silent Light’s Alex Robertson, Spirit Night’s Dylan Balliet, and Kate Ehrenberg are among the others who contribute vocals to the mixtape). Of course, Gallego is the sole writer of thirteen of these fourteen songs, and Great American Turn Off is able to make something quite strong out of its stable of stars due to his guiding hand. Miserable chillers flit between dutifully-engineered polished pop throwbacks and more offbeat fare that pushes against these boundaries, with both styles being rich avenues of exploration for Gallego and his collaborators. The roots-tinged “The Shaft” and Ehrenberg’s simple guitar pop-led “Journeying with Julian” set up the house of cards only for alien funk rock and Robertson’s manipulated vocals to knock them down in “Pastime”. Great American Turn Off skips through tons of ideas in forty minutes, but it’s worth taking it in actively to key in on some later highlights, like the low-key, slightly-dangerous-sounding “Get the World Off My Ass”, the Beach Boys-y slow burn of “Done Dancing”, and the easy-listening soft-country of closing track “Go West Boys”. Great American Turn Off doesn’t have to be an “album”; it’s got more than enough going on on its own. (Bandcamp link)
Rated Eye – Rated Eye
Release date: May 10th Record label: Wax Donut Genre: Noise rock, art punk, no wave, punk blues Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Pig’s Eye
Here’s something that I know will interest a small subset of blog readers–a new obscure, avant-garden noise rock band from an American Rust Belt city. Rated Eye are a Pittsburgh-based quartet featuring musicians who’ve played in several other local bands (Microwaves, Night Vapor, Brown Angel, The 1985), but their self-titled debut album (released on vinyl via upstart Wax Donut Records) is their first release together. Vocalist Albert C. Hall, guitarist Anthony Ambroso, bassist Dan Tomko, and drummer John Roman make a distinctly American blend of ugly underground rock music, drawing from both “highbrow” (no wave, jazz) and “vulgar” (hard rock, sludge) influences to create a virtuosic assault that would’ve been right at home between the Butthole Surfers and Killdozer during their shared time on Touch & Go Records. Like many great noise rock records, the eight-song, twenty-seven-minute Rated Eye is marked by four disparate musicians forming some kind of twisted harmony on equal footing–Ambroso’s showy, fiery classic rock guitar soloing, Tomko’s caveman-level low-end, Roman’s reliable time-keeping, and Hall’s just-as-primal delivery, liable to jump from a mutter to a howl to a growl at any given moment.
“Burn Barrel” is Rated Eye’s version of an “atmospheric” opener, an eerie utilization of empty space and light math rock touches before it eventually smolders in its second half. “Mia Demon II” is the moment where Rated Eye really starts to eat away at itself, with the guitar flaring up like a skin condition and the rhythm section locking into something hypnotic and dangerous-sounding, and then all hell breaks loose in “Pig’s Eye”, a piece of punchy-but-sludgy Americana punk-blues. In that song, we hear Ambroso running towards AOR guitarplay while Hall starts sounding more and more like a hardcore frontperson, creating a massive cord of tension between them. The second half of Rated Eye (obviously) offers no relief–the drums and the guitars seem to be trying to outdo each other throughout “The Crying Man”, “Economy Boro” lurches through a particularly robust rhythm section workout while Hall rumbles about “a deer running full speed into the plate glass of a bank”. There is nothing particularly “accessible” on Rated Eye, but “Miss Bliss” is a neat sub-three-minute summation of the band’s sound, ticking off guitar heroics, ironclad rhythms, and a relatively dynamic vocal performance from Hall before it bows out. Still, one probably will have a sense of whether Rated Eye is “for them” by the midpoint of “Burn Barrel”, where the post-rock guitars give way to Hall grunting about self-immolation amongst garbage and cultural detritus. This album is for those who arrive there and say, “well, let’s hear them out”. (Bandcamp link)
Lowmoon – Monochrome
Release date: June 28th Record label: Safe Suburban Home Genre: Lo-fi pop, post-punk, dream pop Formats: Cassette, digital Pull Track: Closer
Mikey Wilson is a British musician who put out a record on Safe Suburban Home back in 2022 as one-half of York duo Kimber. His latest project, Lowmoon, is an entirely DIY affair–Wilson wrote, performed, produced, mixed, and mastered Monochrome, his debut under the name, all on his own. As Lowmoon, Wilson gravitates toward a recognizable sub-genre of lo-fi guitar pop music–a reverb-y, melancholic version that pulls heavily from the “indie” and “alternative” music of the 1980s. Monochrome chews up and spits out post-punk, jangle pop, and dream pop, leaning on a distinct combination of melodic New Order-esque chorused basslines, reverb-drenched guitar lines, utilitarian drum machines, and breathy vocals. Wilson is hardly the only person out there making such music in 2024–I’ve written about bands like The Death of Pop, Old Moon, and Lost Film that also run in these circles, and you can find plenty of playlists out there full of modern bands reared on The Cleaners from Venus and the best of the Captured Tracks catalog. Do we really need another eight-song, twenty-minute cassette of this kind of music? Well, no, in the same way we don’t “need” electricity or reliable internet access–but I’d rather live in a world with it.
Monochrome doesn’t waste any time establishing just what Mikey Wilson has in store for us with the debut Lowmoon record–the sparkling guitars are present from the get-go of opening track “Closer”, within fifteen seconds the Roland TR-505 is rolling along and Wilson’s already doing Peter Hook heroics, and the vocals (clearly not Wilson’s focal point, but not quite “afterthought” either) finally show up at about thirty seconds. From that moment forward, the core sound of Monochrome is effectively set–don’t expect any major detours. Nevertheless, Wilson tinkers with the “post-punk” and “new romantic” dials and knobs throughout “Photograph” and “Decay”, and the title track lets the shining guitars take the center stage even more so than normal. “1997” and “Monday Night” might be a little more low-key, “Summers Gone” a little more peppy, but the second half of Monochrome mirrors the first half nicely, even to the point where the final track on the tape (“Book Club”) is just an effective distillation of Lowmoon’s sound as “Closer” is. There’ll be more bedroom pop singer-songwriters with chorus pedals coming down the line, I’m sure (some of them might even name their solo project a phrase that uses the word “moon”), but the light from Monochrome is illuminating on its own for the moment. (Bandcamp link)
Taking us into the homestretch of July in style, the Monday Pressing Concerns for this week looks at three albums that came out last week (LPs from Nightshift, Sylvia Sawyer James, and Manners Manners) and a record from last month (an album from Goodbye Wudaokou). A classic blog post!
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.
Nightshift – Homosapien
Release date: July 26th Record label: Trouble in Mind Genre: Post-punk, indie pop, art punk Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Y.T. Tutorial
I’ve been charting the course of Glasgow post-punk/art rock group Nightshift since the early days of this blog–we joined them at the beginning of 2021 with the release of Zöe, their second LP and first for Trouble in Mind, then checked in on them with Made of the Earth, a tape of “outtakes and unreleased tunes”, later the next year. At the time, a third proper Nightshift album was said to be imminent, but Homosapien didn’t arrive until the middle of 2024–delays happen, of course, and I wouldn’t have bothered remarking on it if the band hadn’t singled out significant lineup changes as the reason the record took so long to complete. Band co-founder David Campbell has left the group, as has multi-instrumentalist Georgia Harris–the trio of Eothen Stearn, Andrew Doig (also of Dancer), and Chris White are still present, but the latter of the three has switched from drums to guitar, making room for new member Rob Alexander to pick it up on percussion. With all of that in mind (not to mention the passing of three years), it’s not surprising that Homosapien brings some changes for the band–they’re hardly unrecognizable, but there’s a palpable shift from an emphasis on Young Marble Giants/Marine Girls-esque minimal rhythmic guitar pop to a clearer embrace of a fuller, busier, and electric (but still quite catchy) experimental/art rock sound.
“Crystal Ball”, Homosapien’s introductory track, is a post-punk-pop mission statement, a song that begins with a simple, satisfying guitar riff–but rather than merely meditating on it, Nightshift add all kinds of sonic interjections across its three minutes, and even break out some cathartic guitar soloing in the song’s second half. Plenty of songs on Homosapien give off reminders of the old Nightshift–the hypnotic post-punk of “Sure Look”, the synth-led mid-tempo wanderings of “S.U.V.”, the psychedelic folk soundscape of “Cut”–but the quartet find electricity in them that helps them slot in nicely with Nightshift’s newer, louder sound (found in the deconstructed 60s garage rock of “Together We Roll” and the noise pop explosion of “Your Good Self”, among others). Some of the most energetic moments on Homosapien come towards its end–like “Y.T. Tutorial”, a weird but incredibly inspired piece of prog-pop that stitches together a few different sections of muddled, dangerous-sounding rock and roll, a soaring, Screaming Females-esque refrain, and a breezy, pastoral bridge, or the record’s closing anthem, “Crush”. Alexander gets a workout (relatively speaking) on the latter song–Nightshift are as “brisk” as they’ve ever been on the track, but just when it seems like the song is going to burst into something really wild, it descends into synths and accordions. The quartet pull together for one last big swing, however–before this LP, I wouldn’t have thought Nightshift to be the kind of band to end a record like that, but it makes perfect sense for Homosapien. (Bandcamp link)
Sylvia Sawyer James – Sylvia Sawyer James
Release date: July 26th Record label: Self-released Genre: Bedroom folk, psychedelic folk, lo-fi Formats: Cassette, digital Pull Track: Anonymous
Sylvia Sawyer James is a bedroom folk singer-songwriter who grew up in Portland, Oregon and is currently based out of Chicago, where she seems to have recorded and released the bulk of her solo material. She put out an album called SON in 2020 and an EP called Haiku the year afterwards, and songs that would eventually end up on her next album have been trickling out over the past couple of years. Self-titled and clocking in at 74 minutes in length, Sylvia SawyerJames is a massive introduction to an as-of-yet unknown talent, one that comes clearly into focus by the time its eighteen tracks have made their marks. James is a “Pacific Northwest folk singer” in the expansive, cavernous Phil Elverum tradition, recalling more recent acts like Ther, Leor Miller’s Fear of Her Own Desire, and Jordaan Mason at various points on her latest record. Although James does have an experimental/noise music background, Sylvia SawyerJames is actually on the starker end of the spectrum, largely built from acoustic guitars with occasional violin and banjo accompaniments.
Sylvia Sawyer James is at least partially about James’ gender transition, and digging through the tome of her lyrics turns up several excellent crystallizations of the subject (most explicitly in “Home (Eli)”, where she sings “I was a son / And now I’m your sister,” to her titular sibling, but lines like “Falling awake at the hospital / I fucked up my body’s a vehicle,” in “Anonymous” and “I lost my job because I couldn’t write my name,” in “Connectome” invite such readings as well). These moments are best experienced in the midst of sitting down and taking in Sylvia Sawyer James as a whole, I think–although there are certainly embellishments throughout the album, the foundation of it is “folk-y” enough that it almost feels like witnessing someone giving everything they’ve got (with a bit of help) in a single live performance. The first proper song on the record, “Barrier”, is less of an open ball of emotion than the song that follows it, “Prayers to a Turning Page”, but both are completely engrossing folk songs–and even when “Beads (A Bound)” steers the album into hushed tones, James hardly goes quietly. This is one of the records where my typical 400-odd word capsules aren’t equipped to fully capture everything that’s going on in it–more words than that could easily be devoted to delving into second-half highlight “The Psychlops Song”, or on the eight-minute, reverberating “Germs”–but it’s worth snagging a piece of it to present to you here, just as Sylvia Sawyer James feels like an excerpt from something even larger. Of course, it’s plenty substantial on its own. (Bandcamp link)
Goodbye Wudaokou – Mirror Skies
Release date: June 14th Record label: YaoYiZhen Genre: Indie pop, dream pop, new wave, college rock, post-punk Formats: CD, digital Pull Track: Autumn Feelings
Manchester’s Mat Mills is a lifelong musician–he played in a post-rock band as a teenager, and continued writing and playing music as a solo artist after he moved to China in the 2000s. Despite all this, Mills’ musical activity never quite translated towards making records–making it so that, after an extended hiatus from music, Mirror Skies is actually his debut album. The first album from Goodbye Wudaokou was written, played, and recorded entirely by Mills from 2021 to 2024 at his home, and though he describes it as “very lofi”, it’s about as clean and polished as it could be. Once again living in Manchester with a partner and two children, the Mills of Mirror Skies is someone aware of the passing of time (perhaps developing a keener sense of it through the writing of this album), and these ten songs reflect this. This certainly goes for Mills’ lyrics (and even the cover of the record), but I’m also thinking of the sound of Mirror Skies–while plenty of “bedroom rock” albums opt for “streamlined” and “sparse”, Mills isn’t afraid of lengthy instrumental passages and relatively ornate arrangements as he pursues a stately guitar pop sound, one that incorporates new wave, post-punk, dream pop, and vintage 1980s indie pop.
Released via CD, Mirror Skies’ ten songs balloon to fifty minutes in length, with Mills trusting the listener to hang on while he expands each track to its fullest extent. Not that Goodbye Wudaokou ever pursue a “difficult listen”–both Mills’ even-keeled vocals and the bright instrumentals remain incredibly friendly, both in the record’s more languid moments (like the later-period New Order-y “oasis pop” of opening track “Never Let Me Go”) or the more upbeat ones (the post-punk-jangle-pop “New Century Regrets” and the ever-so-slightly-distorted “Icy Black”). Glancing at the songs’ titles, one can already start piecing together some of Mirror Skies’ overarching threads (“New Century Regrets”, “Beautiful Nostalgia”, “Wasted Years”), but this overview doesn’t exactly do justice to what Mills is doing on a micro level for each song, from the fearless embrace of electronic elements in “Dark Wave / In Your Arms” to the closing trio of songs, which all surprisingly embrace inventive minimalism in different ways. The lush synth/dream pop of “Autumn Feelings”, the hushed slowcore of “Sun into Sky”, and the plainspoken seven-minute final track “Wasted Years” ensure that Mirror Skies trails off in completely different territory than in which it began. I wouldn’t expect less from a debut record this long in the making. (Bandcamp link)
Manners Manners – I Held Their Eyes, I Kissed Them All
Release date: July 26th Record label: 20/20 Genre: 90s indie rock, noise pop, post-punk Formats: CD, cassette, digital Pull Track: Yr Well
Vocalist/guitarist J. Pinder, vocalist/drummer H.S. Sweet, and bassist Jes Welter debuted as Manners Manners back in 2016 with a three-song demo; their output since that point has included Guided by Voices and Squeeze covers, as well as 2018’s First in Line EP, recorded by J. Robbins in the trio’s hometown of Baltimore. Robbins is once again at the helm for I Held Their Eyes, I Kissed Them All, a seven-song LP that’s the group’s most substantial release yet. Although it’s a short debut album, I Held Their Eyes… is an ambitious one–for one, it sounds huge, and the band conjure up everything from post-punk to 90s-style indie rock to garage rock to indie pop to folk rock across the record. Self-described “queer adults of power pop”, Manners Manners assert themselves as both wide-eyed pop believers and indie rock veterans on I Held Their Eyes…, an album that sparkles and shines but rejects superficiality entirely, encouraging those listening to listen to and sift through everything below the gleaming surface.
After the loose-feeling, dreamy alt-country introduction of “Big Outdoor Party”, “Cinemattachine” finds Manners Manners announcing themselves loudly and aggressively with a sleek piece of post-Sleater-Kinney-punk-pop that also contains more than a bit of “I see why they feel a kinship with J. Robbins” energy, too. The more outwardly pop-bonafide-proving tracks are coming up soon afterwards–“Wallpaper” is a new take on an old classic (straightforward pop melodies colliding with big electric guitars), the breezy “Aperture” reaches back towards vintage guitar-based indie pop in both its instrumental and vocals, and “Straight Cost of Living” is bouncy and snappy from the wink of its title on down. On all of these songs, Pinder and Sweet are at the center of the recordings–both of them are expertly conversational frontpeople. The vocals on single “Yr Well” similarly stay on top of the backing music, but the roaring, dramatic indie rock of that song is the closest that Manners Manners come to crashing onshore–aided by three members of the band $100 Girlfriend on guitar, synthesizer, and vocals, the band thunders through an overwhelming instrumental that only grows and grows. Nonetheless, the chorus comes through clearly: “I have been to your well, and it only flows backwards, upside-down, and to itself”. With the gale force winds of the music behind it, the song’s central rebuke is made all the more strong by its intangibility and opacity. (Bandcamp link)
Hey there everyone, welcome to the Thursday Pressing Concerns! We’ve got an eclectic group of albums that are coming out tomorrow, June 26th, below for you to check out: new LPs from Ben Seretan, Robber Robber, and Little Mystery, and a new EP from Immortal Nightbody. It’s been a full week, so if you missed Monday’s post (featuring La Bonte, Sad Eyed Beatniks, Friends of the Road, and In-Sides) or Tuesday’s (featuring Brother of Monday, Wes Tirey, Exedo, and Taxidermy), be sure to 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.
Ben Seretan – Allora
Release date: July 26th Record label: Tiny Engines Genre: Art rock, psychedelic rock, noise pop Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: New Air
Upstate New York musician Ben Seretan has released a lot of music, much in the realms of ambient, drone, and improvisational (such as 2018’s My Life’s Work and 2022’s Cicada Waves). Nevertheless, it’s been four years since Seretan’s last “rock” record, 2020’s Youth Pastoral, an excellent collection of folk-tinged, wide-eyed indie rock (back when I was still able to sum up albums in two sentences, it made my favorite records of the year list). Allora returns Seretan to the world of “normal” indie rock, although it actually has roots from before Youth Pastoral even came out–it was recorded by Seretan, bassist Nico Hedley, and drummer Dan Knishkowy (of Adeline Hotel) in Italy over three days in 2019 after the collapse of a European tour the trio had booked. Allora is an energetic and forceful return–compared to the relatively delicate Youth Pastoral, Seretan and his band sound much more immediate here, with the rockers aiming louder and higher and the quieter moments displaying visible seams. Even though the embrace of electric rock music is the most immediately noticeable feature of Allora, it’s just as impressive that Seretan, Hedley, and Knishkowy still find ways to inject the singer-songwriter’s spacey, experimental side into their “power trio album”.
The gauntlet is thrown down instantly as Allora opens with the eight-minute behemoth “New Air”, a massive piece of experimental, rhythmic rock and roll that bursts out of the first sixty seconds of static and doesn’t let go. I compared Seretan’s last album to Pedro the Lion; “New Air” sounds more like Oneida than anything by David Bazan. The guitars are swung about like lethal weapons, the rhythm section is in a krautrock-like groove, and Seretan himself is the confident, calm center of the storm. “Climb the Ladder” almost sounds like the song’s aftermath at first–rather than trying to top “New Air”, Seretan takes the track the other direction, sketching a nebulous, floating song that doesn’t congeal until the grand psych-rock finale. Every one of Allora’s seven tracks feels essential–the haze of “Small Times” is a dust cloud of beauty, eventually parting to reveal the stark, guitar-led “Jubilation Blues”, and closing track “Every Morning Is a” repurposes the frantic repetition found at the end of “Climb the Ladder” for a peaceful hymn. There’s even a second eight-minute towering rock and roll anthem in the form of “Free”, a blistering collection of guitar solos and ragged glory that reminded me that Seretan absolutely bodied Neil Young & Crazy Horse’s “Fuckin’ Up” for a benefit compilation a few years ago. Halfway through “Free”, its reign of blows momentarily ceases and a squealing, free-jazz saxophone begins to fight for control of the song with Seretan (who continues to sing amidst the squall). Eventually, “Free” begins its ascent to the cosmos again, but cautiously at first. Seretan, Hedley, and Knishkowy aren’t trying to pretend that intermission never happened; they’re carrying it with them. (Bandcamp link)
Robber Robber – Wild Guess
Release date: July 26th Record label: Strange View Genre: Post-punk, art rock, noise rock, no wave Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital Pull Track: How We Ball
Wild Guess, the debut album from Robber Robber, is unpredictable and kinetic in a familiar-feeling way. The quartet aim high on their first LP and come away with a mix of driven post-punk, arty experimental rock, and even a bit of garage rock energy that feels very “New York indie rock”. Of course, Robber Robber are actually from Burlington, Vermont (a city that’s actually been doing quite well for itself music-wise as of late between Lily Seabird, Dari Bay, and Greg Freeman), but that doesn’t stop Wild Guess from feeling like a vintage metropolitan rock record (maybe it’s the proximity to Montreal, actually). Robber Robber trace their roots back to 2017, when they began as a collaboration between drummer/vocalist Zack James and guitarist/vocalist Nina Cates, the band’s two songwriters. After a couple of EPs in 2019 and 2021, guitarist Will Krulak and bassist Carney Hemler joined up for Wild Guess, a massive (loosely) post-punk statement of an album suggesting that Cates and James have both a wealth of ideas and ample ways to realize them. Co-engineered by Urian Hackney and Benny Yurco, Wild Guess certainly sounds like a well-disciplined rock band–the four move in lockstep, covering plenty of ground but remaining tightly controlled.
The opening of Wild Guess isn’t unfriendly per se, but Robber Robber do ask you to hang onto your hat as they take themselves on a wild test drive. “Intro (Letter from the Other Side of the Operation)” is brief but still a full song, a boring (the tunneling version of the word, not the other one) ninety-second post-punk eardrum buzz, while “Seven Houses” is a straight-up pummeling wall of sound, hammering drums trying their best to be heard over the shoegaze-punk instrumental, and “Mouth” is so cool and collected that it doesn’t need anything as basic as “conventional song structure”. If Robber Robber are attempting to prove their Sonic Youth and Blonde Redhead bona fides, they do it sounding anything but tedious–and the energy only expands from the opening stretch. Although “Backup Plan” leans heavily on rhythms, it’s the most accessible song on the record yet–and we’re off to the races from then on between the giddy garage rock of “How We Ball”, the kitchen-sink pop rock of “Dial Tone”, and the psychedelic but sturdy “Sea or War”. Wild Guess’ six-minute closing track “Machine Wall” appropriately leans into the industrial and mechanical to end things, but at the same time, as the assembly line drums march towards their finish, dramatic pianos and guitars accompany them. Robber Robber know how to build a strong foundation, but they can’t stand to leave it relatively bare for long. (Bandcamp link)
Immortal Nightbody – Passion Scale
Release date: July 26th Record label: RRNR/DEATHDREAM Genre: Lo-fi indie rock, bedroom rock, experimental rap, post-punk, psych-rap Formats: Cassette, digital Pull Track: Break My Own Heart
Sim Jackson was born in Mississippi and grew up in southern California, where they still live today. At some point earlier this century, Jackson began playing in punk bands, including playing guitar and singing in The Vivids (they put out some singles in the early 2010s and an LP in 2018). During the pandemic, Jackson debuted a new solo project called Immortal Nightbody, a conscious attempt by the musician to merge several personal sonic touchstones: post-punk, hip-hop, shoegaze, and house/techno music. That sounds ambitious, but Jackson has set to work realizing it, amassing an impressive number of EPs, singles, and cassettes on their Bandcamp page since 2020. The most recent Immortal Nightbody record is a nine-song, twenty-six minute EP called Passion Scale, and it manages to cram a whole lot into that timeframe while still sounding natural and straightforward. An experimental rap record made with the attitude of a lo-fi indie rocker (or vice versa), Passion Scale balances a loose, casual feeling with undeniably tight pop songwriting. It’s certainly a unique-sounding record, jumping from one genre to another with just enough connecting thread to pull together a distinct “Immortal Nightbody sound”.
Opening track “Break My Own Heart” is a strong entrant into the “experimental rap” side of Immortal Nightbody–Jackson comes out of the gate with a militant delivery as drum machines pound alongside them. Synth accents attempt to distort the crystal-clear foundation of the song, and by the end of the track things are much more muddled (in a pleasing way). Hopefully you weren’t expecting Passion Scale to repeat itself, though, because the next song–“Was Yours Now Mine”–veers hard into a full-scale embrace of post-punk, dance-punk, and light funk that’s much closer to the world of Talking Heads and A Certain Ratio. “Throwing Shade”, “Radio Darkside”, and “Can’t Swat a Storm” all find Immortal Nightbody back in the world of rap and even R&B, but of varying stripes– “Throwing Shade” is relatively bright, synth-shaded pop rap, “Radio Darkside” is (appropriately) darker but still danceable, while “Can’t Swat a Storm” is an intriguing psychedelic ballad. Hardly running out of steam, the record’s second half is marked by “Universe 25” (a thumping piece of retro-rap that surprisingly fits right in), “Slide or Die” (which finds the unlikely midpoint between rap and lo-fi guitar pop), and “If I Ever Loved You Once” (a pretty, reverberating lo-fi ballad that plays the record out enjoyably). You’ll find something to enjoy on Passion Scale regardless, but the best move is to hand the wheel over to Immortal Nightbody and ride along. (Bandcamp link)
Little Mystery – Little Mystery
Release date: July 26th Record label: Ruination Genre: Folk rock, indie pop, folk pop Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Shame
Little Mystery is Ivy Meissner, a Bay Area-originating, New York-based singer-songwriter who’s been making music in her adopted home for a while now (she put out an album under her own name in 2016). Earlier this year, she debuted Little Mystery and linked up with Ruination Record Co., a label that’s home to plenty of folk and indie rock of both the “experimental” and “pop-friendly” varieties (and everything in between). As Little Mystery, Meissner hews towards the latter of the two categories, playing a rich, polished version of rock music that recalls the singer-songwriters of the 1970s and vintage folk rock with a confident voice separating it from a lot of the “retro”-tinged indie folk of the present day. Meissner worked with a long list of collaborators to fully realize the sound of Little Mystery (more than a half-dozen different musicians contributed strings or brass to the record), but the core Little Mystery band is Meissner, guitarist Adam Brisbin, drummer Connor Parks, bassist Ian Davis, and multi-instrumentalist Julian Cubillos (a longtime Meissner collaborator who also co-produced the album).
So much of the chemistry and writing that marks Little Mystery is crystallized by the album’s first two songs, an undeniably captivating first impression. We have “Eye of the Storm”, the appropriately low-key opening track, a smart pop ballad that’s a clear showcase for Meissner’s vocals but also isn’t afraid to let the guitars and even percussion have their moments in the sun as well. “Shame” follows with an upbeat folk rock tune, once again carried by Meisnner as a vocalist (who rises to the occasion and displays a much more dynamic singing style than the instrumental asked of her in “Eye of the Storm”) and a backing band performance that actually lets loose a bit as the song expands before our ears. Little Mystery the rock and roll band is deployed strategically from then on out, but always welcomely–on “I’m So Tired”, which adopts a strut contrasting with the titular message from Meisnner, and “Orbit”, erected on both ends of the song to give it just a bit more drama and gravitas. Elsewhere on Little Mystery, we’re treated to a more delicate but still rich sound, whether that’s the strings and horns shining up soft rockers like “As It Seems” and “Easy” or the percussionless mid-record centerpiece “Burning Blue”. Meisnner has referred to Little Mystery as her “proper debut”, a designation that almost feels like cheating, as the evenness and craft of this music betray an experienced touch. (Bandcamp link)
This Tuesday, Pressing Concerns is offering up four great records from the past month or so: new LPs from Brother of Monday, Wes Tirey, and Exedo, and a new EP from Taxidermy. If you like lo-fi power pop, even lower-fi folk, goth-tinged post-punk, and math-y noise rock, I encourage you to keep reading. And if you missed yesterday’s blog post, featuring La Bonte, Sad Eyed Beatniks, Friends of the Road, and In-Sides, check that one out here.
If you’re looking for more new music, you can visit the site directory to see what else we’ve written about lately. If you’d like to support Rosy Overdrive, you can share this (or another) post, or donate here.
Brother of Monday – Humdinger
Release date: June 28th Record label: Wilbur & Moore Genre: Lo-fi indie rock, power pop, jangle pop Formats: Cassette, digital Pull Track: Humdinger
It’s a special thing to hear an album that actually sounds like early Guided by Voices. It’s not hard to make an album “inspired by” Guided by Voices, of course–lo-fi recordings, sugary vocal melodies, some moments of real rock and roll beamed through the four-tracks–but Newark, Delaware’s Peter Bothum, aka Brother of Monday, doesn’t just stop at these cosmetic and superficial similarities. Bothum’s mostly-solo project debuted last year with a self-titled record (eventually released on CD by his current label, Wilbur & Moore) that doled out noisy, lo-fi power pop with a calm in the center of the chaos in the form of Bothum’s melodic, trebly vocals. Humdinger, the second Brother of Monday record, arrives eleven months later, and while it cleans up some of the material at the writing level (more earnestly embracing pop at the center and pushing the noise to the periphery), these dozen songs are just as lo-fi in their attitude. Mastered by longtime Robert Pollard collaborator Todd Tobias, Humdinger captures the basement melancholy of pre-Propeller Guided by Voices in Bothum’s songwriting, and the guitars push against their lo-fi recording but never in a way that makes it feel anything but the appropriate vehicle for the material.
I was going to say that Brother of Monday reminds me of fellow lo-fi GBV-evoking acolyte Graham Repulski, and it turns out I was onto something here–Repulski and Bothum actually play together in the band Von Hayes. It can’t be overstated just how potent the melodies on every song on Humdinger feel, like they were unearthed from an old Pollard demo tape (or, perhaps, one of his 60s pop influences). Opening track “Bro Inn” begins with the winning hook and makes the inspired choice to push it with a delirious acoustic-folk-pounding instrumental, while “Hunting Redemption” and “Kitteridge Farms” reaffirm Bothum’s ability to nail more “traditional”-sounding basement college rock. “Book of Buck” leans heavily on letting the guitar do the talking (as it should–it’s incredibly animated and welcoming), while the just guitar-and-vocals recording of the title track captures the pastoral urgency of some of Pollard’s most intimate Suitcase offerings. If you wanted to be bothered that “Better Done Than Good” nicks a bit of the vocal melody from “The Official Ironmen Rally Song”, I suppose you could, but the track is hardly a carbon copy, and one could just as easily choose to focus on the unique, spirited lo-fi pop thrashing the album explores in the second half (“Every Circle Can Have Two Centers”, “Buddy Crunch”) or its bizarre drum-machine closing in “Web”. “Web” is the one song on the album that doesn’t sound even really close to Self-Inflicted Aerial Nostalgia–but it does sound like Brother of Monday. (Bandcamp link)
Wes Tirey – Sings Selected Works of Billy the Kid
Release date: July 19th Record label: Sun Cru Genre: Folk, spoken word Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Work 2
Singer-songwriter Wes Tirey was born and raised near Dayton, Ohio, where he began his music career before he moved to his current home of Asheville, North Carolina. Over the past decade or so, Tirey has made a space for himself as a prolific member of the wider world of experimental/“cosmic” folk and country music, releasing records on labels like Dear Life, Orange Milk, and Scissor Tail and playing shows and/or collaborating with Shane Parish, Daniel Bachman, and Steve Gunn. Tirey’s latest record is a typically inspired endeavor–an album-length folk interpretation of selections from The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, the 1970 “experimental novel” about the titular figure from Canadian/Sri Lanken writer and poet Michael Ondaatje. Much like the varied nature of the material in the original novel, Wes Tirey Sings Selected Works of Billy the Kid presents itself from a few different angles, featuring a spoken word piece, timeless-sounding “traditional” folk songs, and a pair of instrumentals. Tirey sings and plays everything one hears on Sings Selected Works of Billy the Kid–his delicate guitar playing and haunting vocals have a somewhat muffled, “found” or “resurfaced” quality to them, appropriate for a collection explicitly placing itself in the lineage of an American story that’s been retold and mythologized to the point of being unrecognizable from its source.
This isn’t to say that Sings Selected Works of Billy the Kid is too obscure or garbled to interpret, however–far from it, in fact. From the opening spoken-word description of “the killed, by me”, Tirey-as-Ondaatje-as-Billy the Kid is crystal clear and engrossing. Tirey taps into the centuries-old “folk music as storytelling” well here–like with similar-minded contemporaries Spencer Dobbs and Jason Allen Millard (as well as the most renowned poet-musician the collection recalls, Leonard Cohen), any attic-accumulated dust on these recordings is outshone by what’s contained therein. Tirey gives all the songs incorporating Ondaatje’s writing the utilitarian titles of “Work 1”, “Work 2”, et cetera, which, combined with his simple acoustic guitar accompaniment, serves to mimic the original’s resistance of a clean linear narrative or structure. Tales of murder and fleeing from the law lose the immediate drama that’s kept them at the forefront of American culture for so long, replaced by a lonesome man recounting stories dispassionately, without tipping his hand as to whether it’s for posterity or for atonement. Like any good work of art about a towering piece of culture, Sings Selected Works of Billy the Kid dispels the navel-gazing “why this?” questions immediately upon engagement–and just as quickly begins offering up new, more worthwhile ones. (Bandcamp link)
Exedo – The Body Remembers
Release date: June 28th Record label: Dirt Cult Genre: Post-punk, garage rock, goth Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: The Longest Night
San Antonio imprint Dirt Cult Records has had a hand in some of the most vital garage rock and punk records of the past few years (releasing material from Schedule 1, The Pretty Flowers, and Weird Numbers, among others), and one of their most intriguing new additions is a quartet from Chicago called Exedo. Per their Bandcamp page, the quartet is made up of ringers from various other Windy City punk bands (vocalist/keyboardist/guitarist Christine Wolf and guitarist David Wolf both played in Daytime Robbery, with Christine also playing in Primitive Teeth, David also playing in Endless Column, bassist Milo Mendoza in Melanin and Staring Problem, and drummer Vince Miller in Permanent Residue), and The Body Remembers is their first album together, following a 2020 demo EP. The Body Remembers is an electric first statement, finding the band taking a trip to post-punk/goth rock ground zero using their sharp, hefty garage punk as their DeLorean (Christine’s keyboard is used sparingly, meaning that, for a lot of the LP, Exedo forge ahead as a power trio instrumentally). The group’s not-to-secret weapon is Christine’s vocals, one showstopping performance after another that hangs with some of the best throughout “alt-rock” history (Siouxsie Sioux, Dolores O’Riordan, hell, even Bjork at some points–they’re all there).
After an icy, keyboard-touched introduction, opening track “Dead Room” transforms into a power chord-led, goth-tinged garage rock anthem, setting the tone down which much of The Body Remembers is all too happy (well, in a dark and moody way) to continue. Everything on the record’s first half is a discrete and essential moment on The Body Remembers’ journey–“The Longest Night” and its embrace of guitar-forward post-punk, the thrashing punk rock drama of “Collide”, the heavier alt-rock smokiness of “Signs of You”, the burnt-rubber garage-punk of the title track, and the triumphant return of the keyboards in “Damage Up Ahead”. The Body Remembers is a confident and substantial debut LP–eleven songs in thirty-six minutes–and while the second half settles into what might be considered Exedo’s “comfort zone” (dramatic, post-punk/goth-tinged guitar-forward rockers), it hardly runs out of steam, and even offers up one of its clearest highlights in “Victims of Convenience”, its closing track. “Victims of Convenience” is a mid-tempo ballad, meeting in between haunting goth-rock and new wave pop-rock. It’s a fresh take on the tightrope that Exedo have been walking for the entirety of The Body Remembers, one last pleasing digression to sum up a success of a first statement. (Bandcamp link)
Taxidermy – Coin
Release date: June 14th Record label: Pink Cotton Candy Genre: Noise rock, post-hardcore, experimental rock, math rock, post-punk Formats: Digital Pull Track: Today
Fans of the skronkier and thornier ends of noise rock would be well-advised to cast their eyes upon Denmark. A five-piece band from Copenhagen called Taxidermy has just released their four-song debut EP, Coin, on Pink Cotton Candy Records (the premier Danish indie rock record label–and by that, I mean the only one I’m aware of), and the quintet have certainly hit the ground running. Vocalist/guitarist Osvald Reinhold and guitarist Toke Brejning Frederiksen are the band’s songwriting duo, and they’re rounded out by third guitarist Malthe Junge, bassist Joachim Lorck-Schierning, and drummer Johan Knutz Haavik on their first release. Taxidermy are adventurous art rockers on Coin–hunkering down in pummeling noise rock/post-hardcore position, the group drag these four songs out with bits of post-punk propulsion, math rock unpredictability, and pieces of Slint-like basement claustrophobia (the biography that lists their modern peers as Sprain and Black Midi isn’t wrong, but I’d also take “Sonic Youth if they weren’t concerned with sounding ‘cool’”).
Coin opens with “Today”, the one song on the EP that’s shorter than five minutes long and the record’s “hit” by default. A spiky, unfriendly piece of mid-period Unwound post-punk/hardcore, “Today” undoubtedly has something of a hook to it–the cyclic, blunt guitar riff that kicks off the song is hypnotic, and Reinhold’s droll continental European vocals eventually soar into a cantankerous but sweeping chorus. The next two songs on Coin are both over six minutes long, and they both find Taxidermy stretching out and sculpting something more intricate and slow-building. “Rot” takes the late-era Sonic Youth scenic route, spending nearly two minutes puttering around before a blaring guitar wakes the track out of its stupor–and then Taxidermy perform the whole routine again, but with a fiery post-hardcore conclusion the second time around. “Echoes” is both similar to the song that preceded it and not like it at all–like “Rot”, it takes the majority of the track’s length before Taxidermy reveal their full might, but unlike “Rot”, “Echoes” sounds dangerous and doomed from the get-go. The roaring final third of the song is less a transformation than the heart of the track finally snapping into focus. The closing title track might just be the greatest trick on Coin–it takes the sharper noise rock tools of “Today” and applies the gravitas of the middle of the EP to them, ensuring that Taxidermy’s first record is just about as full of a statement as a four-song underground rock record can be. (Bandcamp link)
Hello, hello! The first Pressing Concerns of the week is a good one, with new albums from Sad Eyed Beatniks and Friends of the Road and new EPs from La Bonte and In-Sides appearing below. It feels like Rosy Overdrive has been focused on the West Coast of the United States as of late, and this edition is no exception, with Los Angeles, Seattle, San Francisco, and Oakland being the homes of these bands. Step up your game, Great Lakes/East Coast/Deep South!
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.
La Bonte – Economy Play
Release date: July 19th Record label: Anxiety Blanket Genre: Folk rock, alt-rock, post-rock, slowcore Formats: Cassette, digital Pull Track: Singing to Steel
Back in 2022, I wrote about Grist for the Mill, a five-song EP from Los Angeles slowcore group La Bonte. Led by namesake Garrett La Bonte, the band’s folky, quiet take on the genre was deeply felt inits three originals and two covers, helping the EP end up as one of my favorites from that year. La Bonte released a one-off single called “Keepin’ On” at the beginning of this year, but the four-song Economy Play EP is the group’s first proper record since Grist for the Mill, and it’s a bit of a departure from that previous release. Although Grist for the Mill had showcased the more glacial aspects of La Bonte’s writing and playing, previous releases from the band had contained a more electric side, and Economy Play embraces this louder, dramatic end of La Bonte’s sound. Part of this can be explained by the fact that La Bonte has a completely different group of backing musicians this time, namely drummer Matt Sturgis, violinist Natasha Janfaza, and vocalists Brooke Dickson and Bridey Hicks. Hicks and Dickson even have a co-writing credit on one song apiece, furthering their contributions to the record, but the person most responsible for the shift in sound is La Bonte himself (who plays every other instrument on the record and at least co-wrote three of the four tracks).
Of the three original songs on Economy Play, none of them could even remotely be described as “slight”. Two of them are seven- (“How Did These Hearts Get So Blue”) and eight- (“Singing to Steel”) minute behemoths, and the one that’s a “reasonable” four-and-a-half (opening track “Marching in a Field of Wheat”) is a dark, organ-touched, intense electric indie rocker that roars to a cathartic finish. “Singing to Steel” (co-written with Dickson) is a lengthy meditation recalling underground 90s post-rock–it skips right past Songs: Ohia and dives right into Slint territory. The second half of Economy Play returns La Bonte’s folk rock/alt-country influences to the fold to a degree–if there’s a “breather” on the record, it’s their vintage slowcore cover of Arthur Russell’s “I Couldn’t Say It to Your Face” (a song that I’ve enjoyed seeing get some traction in the world of modern indie rock lately; Ex-Vöid also did a great version of it on their last album), while closing track “How Did These Hearts Get So Blue” ends the record with a lengthy, drawn-out piece of acoustic-based folk-country. It’s the song on the EP that most reminds me of Grist for the Mill, but considering how La Bonte and Hicks’ lonesome, intertwined vocals in the song conjure up a lot of the same emotions that the searing alt-rock in “Marching in a Field of Wheat” does, there’s perhaps less distance between the two EPs than it seems on the surface. (Bandcamp link)
Sad Eyed Beatniks – Ten Brocades
Release date: July 12th Record label: Meritorio Genre: Psychedelic pop, lo-fi indie rock, folk rock, jangle pop Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: The Broken Playwright Waits
I’ve been wanting to write about the music of San Francisco’s Kevin Linn for a while now, as he’s a key part of the Bay Area indie pop scene that I’ve documented fairly extensively on this blog. Linn is the founder of cassette label Paisley Shirt Records (Galore, Red Pants, Whitney’s Playland) and, as a musician, has led or co-led projects like Sad Eyed Beatniks, Present Electric, and Hospital. The latter of those three bands also features Mike Ramos (of Tony Jay and Flowertown) and Karina Gill (of Cindy, and the other half of Flowertown), two frequent collaborators who also appear on the latest album from Linn’s long-running solo project, Sad Eyed Beatniks. The previous Linn material I’ve heard (from both Sad Eyed Beatniks and Present Electric) falls towards the ramshackle and psychedelic ends of the guitar pop spectrum–there are hooks, but they’re not given the restraint and polish that Gill and Ramos’ main bands typically have. Ten Brocades, the latest Sad Eyed Beatniks record, doesn’t reinvent Linn’s sound, but it does feel just a bit more deliberate in its presentation and execution across its ten tracks. Per Linn, the record draws from childhood memories of hearing the shamisen- & koto-based music his father liked to listen to and reading translated, graphic-novel versions of classic Chinese novels–the foggy recollections evoked by these touchstones seem like a natural fit for Ten Brocades’ hazy, folk-based psychedelic pop sound.
Ten Brocades opens with “Barong Mask”, a steady, straightforward first track whose crystal clarity (aided by Ramos and Gill) only becomes more pronounced after listening to the rest of the album and circling back to it. The next few tracks (the fuzzed-out ominous cloud of “It’s Who Makes the Scene”, the rainy, melodica-haunted “Monumental Ensemble”, the slightly more upbeat but still equally melodica-haunted “Harlequin with Guitar”) are all Linn solo compositions and sound like the “classic” Sad Eyed Beatniks sound, although “Nail in the Coffin” is even more lo-fi despite the return of Ramos and Gill. Linn uses his collaborators well on the second half of Ten Brocades (particularly in the fiery, hypnotic “The Broken Playwright Waits”), but the record’s centerpiece is the seven-minute, Linn-solo title track. As the song slowly sweeps across the record, Linn somehow goes from lumbering to levitating and achieves something quite striking in doing so. Right after “Ten Brocades” finally relents, Sad Eyed Beatniks launch into the two-minute folk pop of “You Belong With Us”–it’s a reminder of the range of feeling this kind of music can evoke, and it’s delivered with the ease of someone who speaks it naturally. (Bandcamp link)
Friends of the Road – Sunseekin’ Blues
Release date: July 19th Record label: Bud Tapes/Drongo Tapes Genre: Folk, country, drone, experimental Formats: CD, cassette, digital Pull Track: Peg and Awl
Who doesn’t love a good experimental folk collective? To those open to this kind of music, I’ll have you turn your attention to Friends of the Road, a “drone-tinged Old Time” group from Seattle who reference longrunning experimental folk act Pelt as an inspiration. The group made their debut in 2023 with a record called Now You Know Something Right Here and I’ll Tell You for a Fact, and the Friends are back a year and a half later with Sunseekin’ Blues, six songs in thirty-eight minutes on CD (via Bud Tapes) and cassette (via Drongo Tapes). Everything you hear on Sunseekin’ Blues was delivered by the Friends’ core quartet of multi-instrumentalist Sadie Siskin, fiddle player Julian James, cellist/guitarist Elliott Hansen, and harmonium player Cameron Molyneux, and the collective split the record evenly between original songs and interpretations of traditional/old-time folk numbers. Although there are certainly moments on Sunseekin’ Blues that fully embrace the group’s experimental instincts, more than anything I came away from the record impressed by how deeply traditional folk music runs through Friends of the Road’s veins nonetheless.
Nearly half of Sunseekin’ Blues is taken up by the fifteen-minute opening track “Wagner Creek Suite”, and it’s also where Friends of the Road earn their “drone” designation. The Siskin-penned song begins very welcomely, pulling together its friendliest banjo, fiddle, and guitar playing for nearly four minutes…and then the droning starts. Siskin is credited as playing “sruti box” and “cigar box” on the record, and I suspect that the sustained music and occasional sharp twangs that make up the rest of the recording utilize them. The first song with vocals, “Peg and Awl”, follows, and the way the collective let the fiddle threaten to drown out the traditional folk song underneath merges the different sides of Friends of the Road pleasingly and beautifully. None of the other instrumentals on Sunseekin’ Blues are as otherworldly as “Wagner Creek Suite”, but the joyous festival-folk of “Bonnie and the Garden” (credited to the full band), the seven-minute, trudging banjo workout of “Blessed Be the Day I See Him Again” (another Siskin composition), and their closing rendition of Ernie Carpenter’s “Elk River Blues” (a peaceful and serene benediction that sounds like how I wish the Elk River still looked) all find different ways of approaching and thriving in the world of folk music. Friends of the Road are free to ramble and explore on Sunseekin’ Blues, with the full knowledge that the music they’ve tapped into will hold everything together no matter how far they roam. (Bandcamp link)
In-Sides – Salvo
Release date: June 12th Record label: Acumen Productions Genre: Lo-fi indie rock, shoegaze, fuzz rock, 90s indie rock, slowcore Formats: Cassette, digital Pull Track: Mud
Yet another indie rock band from the Bay Area, Oakland’s In-Sides are a quartet led by vocalist/guitarist Stephen Fong and rounded out by vocalist/guitarist Krista Kleczewski, bassist Ryan Schaeffer, and drummer Brandon Paluzzi. They debuted with a three-song EP called Echo Chamber in 2016, and a few one-off singles trickled out before last month’s release of Salvo, the band’s biggest release yet at six songs and twenty-six minutes. As I’ve mentioned many times before (even earlier in this blog post), I’ve heard more than my share of new guitar pop bands from this part of the country, but the tuneful wasteland sound that In-Sides sculpt throughout their latest EP caught my attention. It’s difficult to categorize among the vast Bay Area indie pop/rock scene–not bright and jangly like Blues Lawyer or Chime School, somewhat distorted but not as fully devoted to foggy shoegaze as bands like Sucker, and too uneasy to recall the leisurely folk-y rock of groups like Evening Glass. Recorded by Spacemoth’s Maryam Qudus and mastered by Greg Obis of Stuck, Salvo is somewhat standoffish but quite striking when given a real look–there are bits of psychedelia, dream pop, shoegaze, slowcore, and maybe even emo in these half-dozen tracks, but clearly not made with the intention of overtly appealing to any of these subgroups.
In-Sides are at their most accessible at the start of Salvo, with “Mud” and “Step” standing as superb examples of the band’s version of pop music. Both start out with enjoyably simple pop chord progressions and build up from there–“Mud” balances Fong’s low-key vocals with an increasingly confident noise-pop instrumental roaring alongside him, while the bits and pieces of melodic guitars floating around “Step” ensure that it remains quite pleasant to listen to even as it never “takes off” like the song before it. At the delicate end of Salvo’s spectrum, we’ve got mid-EP highlight “Old Soul”, which develops from a minimalist start to an intriguing combination of downcast power chords and slow, deliberate Low-worthy vocal harmonies, and “Taking It In”, a chilly, earnest slowcore ballad. As deft as In-Sides prove to be at subtlety, it’s just as impressive that they pull these moments off in the middle of songs like “TV Brain” (the one song that really embraces pop-shoegaze hookiness) and “Divine” (the eerie closing track, which eventually builds to a wall of oblique sound to close the EP out). It might take a minute to adjust your ears to In-Sides’ vision, but Salvo has plenty of rewards. (Bandcamp link)
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