Rosy Overdrive

Pressing Concerns: Mother of Earl, Big’n, Radio Free ABQ, Miners

Hey there, everyone! Welcome to the final month of the year. Within the next few weeks, you’ll find out what Rosy Overdrive’s favorite records of 2024 are, but I plan to have plenty of new-new music up on the blog, too. It continues today, with a Pressing Concerns featuring new albums from Mother of Earl, Big’n, Radio Free ABQ, and Miners. Oh, and we did have a Pressing Concerns go up on Thanksgiving (featuring OCS, The Moment of Nightfall and Tony Jay, The Innocence Mission, and Hamburger); if you were busy with family matters or other holiday business and missed it, check it out here.

Oh, and one more thing: the Rosy Overdrive 2024 Reader’s Poll is now open for voting! Head over here to learn more about it and submit a ballot by December 27th.

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

Mother of Earl – Extinction Burst

Release date: November 15^th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Indie pop, alt-country, folk rock, power pop
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Departure Street

I first became familiar with the music of Ross Weidman last year via his homespun bedroom folk rock project Promiseland BBQ, which debuted with an inspired full-length called Murder in the Friendly City. Weidman lives in Pasadena but grew up in and until very recently lived in West Virginia–it’s where Murder in the Friendly City was recorded, and it was also where he co-founded the band Mother of Earl in 2019 with Alex Nanni. After putting out an EP and an LP in 2020 and 2021, respectively, Mother of Earl’s pace slowed–Weidman and Nanni, no longer students at West Virginia University, both moved out of state (Nanni is now in Pittsburgh). They continued to work on music together when they could, though, eventually resulting in the second Mother of Earl album, Extinction Burst. Mother of Earl is (understandably, given the full-band setup) more upbeat and full-sounding than Promiseland BBQ, but it’s not hard to see the similarities in the well-worn pop rock music the duo make together–with bits of 60s pop, roots rock, Americana, and college rock floating around in there–with Weidman’s solo material. Weidman handles the drums and Nanni sings and plays most of the guitars, but there’s a regular cast of contributors beyond them (bassists Kaleb Asmussen and Holly Foster, guitarists Tristan Miller, Liam McClelland, and John Kolar, percussionist Kris Sampson)–the revolving musical doors help Extinction Burst hold a casual feel, but the songwriting is strong enough to let us take the album seriously regardless of formality.

Extinction Burst draws plentifully from the well of “pretty pop music, depressing lyricism”–Nanni and Weidman are clearly fluent in it. The opening title track is a meandering, heartbroken lullaby of a first statement that reminds me of another great West Virginia-originating folk-pop-psych songsmith, Mr. Husband. After that, Mother of Earl give us “Life After Death”, a perky song about mortality that enthusiastically declares “Let’s live a lie!” and “Venomous Snake” (which I choose to believe is just a nice song about being a venomous snake with no metaphor attached). Mother of Earl seem to get bolder with their song construction as Extinction Burst advances–the final four tracks on the album all feel like “epics” in some sense of the word. The technicolor “I Saw Stars” finds Nanni doing a pretty solid Brandon Flowers impression for a sweeping, glockenspiel-aided piece of heartland pop, “Just When Things Were Looking Up” is Mother of Earl trying jammy, off-the-cuff retro-rock on for size, “Circus” is a precariously-stacked multi-part prog-pop denouement, and “Everything’s Gonna Turn Out Alright” is the final cooldown. “Ignore the sound above our heads / Just act like everything is fine,” Nanni sings in the verses of the final song, and the title line is qualified with an “I’m still pretty sure”. Their frontperson might sound a bit shaky in this particular moment, but Mother of Earl bring more than enough confidence to Extinction Burst. (Bandcamp link)

Big’n – End Comes Too Soon

Release date: November 15^th
Record label: Computer Students
Genre: Noise rock, post-hardcore, post-punk, math rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: South of Lonesome

The Joliet, Illinois-originating, Chicago-based band Big’n are a key part of Windy City noise rock history. During their initial run from 1990 to 1997, they put out a bunch of singles, splits, and EPs as well as two LPs, both recorded by Steve Albini–1994’s Cutthroat and 1996’s Discipline Through Sound (which came out on legendary underground label Skin Graft). The quartet (vocalist William Akins, guitarist Todd Johnson, bassist Michael Chartrand, and drummer Brian Wnukowski) quietly returned in 2011 with an EP called Spare the Horses, and they’ve been intermittently active since then–at some point, Fred Popolo replaced Chartrand on bass, and the group struck up a relationship with the label Computer Students, who put out their 2018 EP Knife of Sin and reissued Discipline Through Sound in 2022. It all has led up to the third Big’n album and first in twenty-eight years, End Comes Too Soon, recorded by Shane Hochstetler at Electrical Audio in two sessions in 2023 and 2024. Big’n’s return to the big screen is both “bombastic” and “lean” at the same time–the music is sharp and cutting, the most mechanically pulverizing rock music this side of Shellac, while Akins is an unhinged, prowling noise rock frontperson in the vein of David Yow or even Michael Gerald. Big’n (and Akins’ voice in particular) have aged like a fine wine or moldy cheese–they’ve grown into the unflappable, unhurried rock-blacksmiths this kind of music aspires to evoke.

Big’n plow through fifteen songs in thirty-five minutes like a combine harvester–efficiently and all-consumingly. Six of End Comes Too Soon’s tracks are under a minute long and don’t even have proper titles (labeled “XMSN-17”, “XMSN-24”, etc.), but the band put just as much effort and energy into them than the “real” songs–it’s actually kind of disconcerting that Big’n fit full-on noise rock song ideas in forty seconds and it doesn’t feel any less complete than their three-to-four minute tracks. Still, I’m glad we get Big’n in larger increments too, because it allows them to really show off how well they’ve got this whole “pounding, rhythmic” thing down. “South of Lonesome” and “Them Wolves” are immutable, unmoving anchors of rock songs, and Akins is the prowling Sisyphus trying to make something dynamic out of the stone and going insane in the process. You’re not going to get any big surprises after Big’n effectively define themselves by the first few tracks, but there’s enough–the spoken-word, metallic “XMSN-40” and “XMSN-44”, the fiery, drum-led “Arkansas Death Cult”, the eternal damnation of “Capsized”–to make it feel like Big’n are pushing at their edges rather than just going through the motions. And that must be hard for them, given how great they are at going through those motions. (Computer Students link)

Radio Free ABQ – Destination

Release date: November 1^st
Record label: Hamlet Street
Genre: Alt-country, folk rock, roots rock, college rock, psychedelic rock
Formats: CD, digital
Pull Track: Before It’s Gone

Dave Purcell is a thirty-some-year veteran of indie rock, playing in bands like Pike 27 and Ghost Man on Second in Cincinnati and Chicago before relocating to Albuquerque a few years ago and starting up his most recent project, Radio Free ABQ. On their debut record, Destination, Purcell and his new bandmates (bassist Scott Brewer, keyboardist Ryan Goodhue, and trombone player/guitarist Travis Rourk) fully embrace the bandleader’s new southwestern habitat, turning in a desert-set roots rock/Americana album that contains bits of regional legends like Calexico, Alejandro Escovedo, Giant Sand, and Dave Alvin. Just because Radio Free ABQ’s peers aren’t hard to point to doesn’t mean that Destination isn’t a unique record, though–apparently, Purcell had been making primarily instrumental music before returning to rock with this new band, and his latest project enthusiastically throws together mid-period R.E.M.-like college rock, Los Lobos-esque Chicano-inspired rock and roll, and, most surprisingly, synthesizer/space pop-influenced “noir pop” moments in the instrumentals, too. It all amounts to a forty-six minute statement that’s a strong reintroduction to a musician who’s been around for quite a bit but still has plenty of ideas and things to say.

One of the most striking moments on Destination is the opening track “Tito (Far Away, Not Lonely)”, which combines Escovedo-style Tex-Mex rock with swooning, spacey synths to create a New Mexico “Space Odyssey”. Rourk’s horns and Goodhue’s accordion are welcome additions to “Before It’s Gone”, a five-minute parade of a track that’s the record’s strongest moment as a catchy college rock group. In between the swinging choruses, though, Purcell adds a bit of strangeness and chilliness–“I’m not reminiscing about something that never happened like Norman Rockwell / When you carve it all in ones and zeroes, don’t forget my name,” he sings in the final stanza. This exploratory, unsatisfied guiding light takes us through the rest of the record’s more “traditional” first half (marked by a couple more should’ve-been-hits in “Figure It Out” and “Far Away from Everything”) and into a more experimental, spacey second half, populated by more instrumentals (three) than songs with vocals (two). The instrumentals aren’t mere interludes, and are key to the final journey of Destination–the wandering throughout the desert with a synthesizer in “Chapala, Quizas” gives way to “Run Past Temptation”, “End of the World” (the last song with words), and “Mojave Phone Booth”, which close the record by throwing bits of blues, jazz, funk, ska, dub, and even zydeco into Radio Free ABQ’s sound. Purcell and his crew are still picking up a strong signal out in the middle of the desert. (Bandcamp link)

Miners – A Healthy Future on Earth

Release date: October 18^th
Record label: Flesh & Bone/Kitty
Genre: Shoegaze, noise pop, fuzz pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Game Theory

Wollongong, Australia trio Miners have been flying under the radar since the mid-2010s, with a debut EP in 2015 followed by a split 7” with the similarly-named Wollongongers Chimers and a self-titled debut cassette LP in 2021. Guitarist/vocalist Blake Clee, bassist Nick Johnson (who also plays in Mope City), and drummer Wilson Harris have gotten some help from Chicago underground label Flesh & Bone (Greet Death, Doused, Gentle Heat) to get more ears on their sophomore album, A Healthy Future on Earth, and the trio’s fuzzed-out, echoing version of pop music is more than ready for primetime on their latest record. Miners do call themselves a “shoegaze” band, but they seem to be interested in the hallmarks of that particular genre as a way of beefing up their 90s-style indie rock sound (they mention Swervedriver as an influence, which I think helps explain from where the trio are coming here). Miners differ from their main sources of inspiration and a lot of their present-day noisy Australian counterparts due to their love of a good pop hook–if you (like me) find yourself drawn to the Guided by Voices-y, heavy-melodic version of shoegaze-pop practiced by American bands like Gaadge and Ex Pilots, Miners are the Aussie indie rock group for you.

A Healthy Future on Earth, like the best records in this vein, fervently believes that beauty and noise can and should go hand in hand, leading to a ton of truly remarkable moments in the album’s ten tracks. “Sapphire” doesn’t open the album with Miners’ most blatantly accessible side, but there’s still a lot of smart melodies baked into the adventurous multi-part indie rock journey. “Why Can’t I” is Miners’ burnt-out dream pop, taking a minute to get to the full-on fuzz roaring and keeping the delicate core of the track intact when they finally reach it. “Game Theory” is the kind of steady, droning underground pop song that one might pull together after listening to a lot of Sonic Youth and/or Bailter Space–plenty of bands hang their hat on this kind of music entirely, but on A Healthy Future on Earth it sits alongside noise-punk wall-of-sound excursions like “Dead Malls”, slacker rock bursts like “Fade”, and restrained, almost slowcore basement rock exercises like “Caution Horses”. A Healthy Future on Earth isn’t going to turn Miners into international stars (probably), but it’s the kind of album that suggests its creators could have a very long and fruitful partnership together making this kind of music. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: OCS, The Moment of Nightfall & Tony Jay, The Innocence Mission, Hamburger

Happy Thanksgiving! Thank you for reading this blog on an American holiday (or if you’re reading it at a later date, I hope you had a nice holiday/normal week if you aren’t from the States). New music is still coming out this week, and there’s enough I wanted to cover to have a Thursday Pressing Concerns: today’s post looks at a live record from OCS, a collaborative LP between The Moment of Nightfall & Tony Jay, the newest album from The Innocence Mission, and a new EP from Hamburger. It’s been a busy week here: on Tuesday, we published the 2024 Rosy Overdrive Label Watch, featuring a drop-in on a dozen or so of the blog’s favorite record labels, and we had a Monday Pressing Concerns (featuring The Old Ceremony, Big Nobody, EggS, and a Count Your Lucky Stars Records split 7″), so there’s some more music and words about it for you to check out during this (potentially) long weekend.

OCS – Live at Permanent Records

Release date: November 29^th
Record label: Rock Is Hell
Genre: Folk, lo-fi pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: If I Had a Reason

I have a confession: a couple of years ago, I made the decision to try to listen to every album by John Dwyer’s Thee Oh Sees (aka Osees, aka The Ohsees, aka OCS) in order–but I bailed out long before I finished the project. I did nonetheless gain an appreciation for the group’s earliest works, much of which was released under the name “OCS” in the early-to-mid-2000s. In recent years, Dwyer has dusted off the “OCS” name for music that recalls the early, quiet lo-fi psychedelic folk songs of those particular records, and it also generally involves collaborations with early (but post-original-OCS) member Brigid Dawson. Dwyer and Dawson returned to this well in 2017 with Memory of a Cut Off Head, and they also reunited last year for a handful of acoustic “holiday” shows; these 2023 performances at the Lodge Room and Permanent Records Roadhouse in Los Angeles form the source material for the latest OCS album. Live at Permanent Records is being released by Rock Is Hell in a six-7” box set format (or a boring old double LP for people who hate constantly standing up), and the bulk of it is Dwyer and Dawson strumming and singing acoustic songs from across the OCS discography (“some new, some very old that I’ve never played live ever” per Dwyer).

I’m sure it’d be a shock for those who know Dwyer’s band as ferocious garage-punk warriors, but for those of us who know and appreciate this side of OCS, it’s a welcome revisitation. Live at Permanent Records sounds great–the stripped-down setup ensures that Dwyer’s guitar and the duo’s vocals shine through clearly (and, as Dwyer more or less alludes to in some of the banter, it sounds “better” than a lot of those early OCS records anyway). Dwyer is pretty chatty on the record, and plenty of between-song banter is left in the album–I’ve heard him speak before, so I was prepared, but it is a bit surprising how the guy who makes goblin-mode psychedelic garage-prog consistently sounds pretty approachable (albeit foul-mouthed, yes). A lot of Dwyer’s stories involve reminiscing about the various drugs he was taking during the making of those OCS albums and the questionable artistic decisions spurred on by them–and then it’s time for another excellent two-minute folk song from the duo.

There are some great folk-pop tunes here, like “Dreadful Heart”, “If I Had a Reason”, and “I Am Slow”, but OCS are also able to reach the fringes of folk and psychedelic music on Live at Permanent Records, too (according to the notes, there are at least seven different guitar tunings to be found here, which I’m sure contributes to that feeling). After the lengthy drone of “Highland Wife’s Lament”, OCS decide to play “one rock song”, which happens to be an eighteen-minute version of “Block of Ice” with Tom Dolas on piano and Nick Murray on drums. It sounds just like Thee Oh Sees–even though we literally hear the setup happen as the band rearranges instruments and calls up the extra players to the stage, it’s still quite hard to fathom how we got from the humble beginnings of the band to where they are now. I guess I need to listen to all of their records in order to figure it out. (Bandcamp link)

The Moment of Nightfall & Tony Jay – Winter Dream

Release date: November 29^th
Record label: KiliKiliVilla
Genre: Slowcore, dream pop, jangle pop
Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Cutting Marble From a Mountain

Pretty much every time I write about Michael Ramos on this blog I have to acknowledge how prolific he is–every time I turn around, there’s a new record from his solo project Tony Jay, or his duo Flowertown is back, or he’s popping up on a compilation or on new music from another San Francisco Bay-area band. So when Ramos took Tony Jay on a tour of Japan this August, it shouldn’t be a surprise that he saw it as an opportunity to collaborate with musicians from across the Pacific Ocean. Specifically, he linked up with Tokyo sextet The Moment of Nightfall, and the seven of them (Ramos, Masato Saito, Yoko Satori, Yuji Usui, Tomomi Usui, Miki Hirose, and Masayuki Takahashi) recorded six songs over two days together, which are now being released as a 10” vinyl record called Winter Dream. As it turns out, the two acts are quite complimentary–Ramos brings his slow, dreamy indie pop instincts to Winter Dream, and The Moment of Nightfall are more than capable of playing to this familiar sound. Tony Jay’s solo material often sounds so ghostly and fragile that it’s on the brink of disappearing, but with The Moment of Nightfall at his side, there’s a more robust, grounded feeling to Winter Dream–but it’s still delicate in its construction.

Winter Dream may have been recorded in the middle of Japan’s “sweltering [August] heat”, but this twenty-one minute mini-album lives up to the snowy chilliness evoked by its title. The record’s opening track, “kori no mori (Ice Forest)” is classic Ramos, leaning on little more than a clean, plain electric guitar, occasional bass, and a beautiful duet between Ramos and one of The Moment of Nightfall’s members (a few of them have vocal credits here). “Angel” is similarly restrained, but “Cutting Marble From a Mountain” and “Tell Me Why” really start opening up the possibilities of this particular collaboration; the former is a fully-realized, confident jangle pop success, deliberate and measured but nonetheless triumphant-sounding, and the latter gets creative with backing vocals as a foundational song element, handclaps, and droning organ like a layer of white snow across the nearly five-minute creation. “She Came from a Colder Place” is, appropriately, the most “wintry” moment on Winter Dream, with the cavernous percussion echoing in the song’s cold, damp, expansive body, but all hands return on deck for closing track “Time Goes By”, organs and guitars and rhythms all moving in slow but orchestrated lockstep to end a brief but fruitful link-up whose results we’re fortunate to be able to hear. (Bandcamp lnk)

The Innocence Mission – Midwinter Swimmers

Release date: November 29^th
Record label: Thérèse/Bella Union/P-Vine
Genre: Folk-pop, chamber pop, folk rock, twee
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Midwinter Swimmers

Lancaster, Pennsylvania’s The Innocence Mission and their distinct folk-pop sound have been a cult success since they formed in the mid-1980s–over the course of nearly forty years, the trio of lead vocalist/songwriter/guitarist Karen Peris, guitarist Don Peris, and bassist Mike Bitts have consistently soldiered on through a career comprised of a dozen albums, brushes with college rock success, and stints on both major labels and notable independent ones (the departure of founding drummer Steve Brown around the end of the 90s being the band’s only lineup change). Here The Innocence Mission are in 2024 with their thirteenth full-length album called Midwinter Swimmers, which gets us ready for the cold weather with a collection of 1960s-esque folk-pop music, chamber pop, and the indie pop that characterized what “alternative rock” was in the pre-grunge era from where the band initially rose. Midwinter Swimmers is both timeless and locationless–everything from Peris’ unique voice to her understandable but hard-to-categorize writing to the band’s paradoxically rich yet stripped-down sound makes this record sound particularly unmoored from any kind of geographical or temporal context.

Midwinter Swimmers is, at its core, a collection of great pop music. Like another longrunning indie pop band that returned this year, The Softies, The Innocence Mission haven’t lost their clear skill at turning skeletal acoustic folk songs into full-on indie pop. It’s not as stark as The Softies’ music is, at least not always–there are some relatively unadorned moments on the album, but the band layer pianos and strings (not to mention Bitts’ upright bass) to create subtle but unmistakably vivid chamber pop throughout the record. A good majority of the album clearly sounds like it was built over top of fully-formed acoustic skeletons–everything from the low-key opening duo of “This Thread Is a Green Street” and the title track to late-record highlights “Cloud to Cloud” and “A Hundred Flowers” all start in this iteration, with some (like “A Hundred Flowers”) being content to more or less stay there and others (“Cloud to Cloud”) ending up somewhere else entirely. It seems like the theme of this blog post is winter, and Midwinter Swimmers is an excellent exercise in conjuring it up in the form of an album–it’s hazy and somewhat easy to get lost in, but its psychedelia is a much starker, colder, and blanketing type than the overstuffed deliriousness of “summer” albums. We’ve got The Innocence Mission with us as we navigate the toughest season change of the year. (Bandcamp link)

Hamburger – Beat Back the Ghouls

Release date: November 29^th
Record label: Specialist Subject
Genre: Lo-fi indie rock, fuzz pop, power pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Toothless

Bristol, England’s Hamburger was co-founded by Fearghall Kilkenny and Tom Kelly in 2018, and while they’ve only put out one EP in the ensuing six years (2020’s Teenage Terrified), they’ve also grown into a six-piece band (also featuring Doug Hayman, Katie Stentiford, Liv Pilkington, and Mike Baker), played shows with Martha and Trust Fund, and linked up with Specialist Subject Records (Witching Waves, Supermilk, Long Neck). The Hamburger sextet is now ready to double their recorded output thus far with their second EP, a six-song collection called Beat Back the Ghouls. The twenty-two minute record has an intriguing sound; it’s not really the indie punk sound I associate with Specialist Subject and their ilk, opting for fuzzy, sometimes meandering bedroom rock instead. It’s perhaps a more delicate version of the inventive shoegaze-adjacent fuzz pop going on over in the States, adding a more overt British indie pop/twee sound to the distortion and post-bedroom pop “lo-fi indie rock”. Sometimes Hamburger sound like an anonymous project uploaded to Bandcamp circa 2014, other times like aspiring stadium rockers, but they wear both outfits well on Beat Back the Ghouls.

“Buffalo” introduces Beat Back the Ghouls at its own pace, offering up roaring Weezer-y alt-rock guitars and switched-off lead vocals–but delivered slowly and deliberately rather than rushing out to greet us. Nonetheless, “Buffalo” rises to the occasion with a purposeful attitude, and it’s the next song, “Toothless”, where Hamburger really start wandering. It’s catchy, too, with some inspired synths and jangly guitars delivered in the sound’s sonic gumbo–all of which dress up the simple central melody of the track, which is again unhurried. The majority of the second half of Beat Back the Ghouls is taken up by the longest song on the EP, the nearly six-minute “Frankenstein” (and that’s not even counting “Shelley”, which basically serves as an instrumental introduction to it). It’s a brilliant power ballad in its own way, a slow dance for the balls and galas of the warped world of Hamburger. It’s such a winner that it almost overshadows the sub-ninety-second closing track, “Rip”, but that one’s not to be missed either, as it quickly launches from hammered-out acoustic bedroom folk song to sweeping synth-aided power pop anthem at a moment’s notice and closes the EP out in grand fashion. If well-written, impeccably-orchestrated indie rock is a ghoul’s kryptonite, we can consider them beaten back. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Rosy Overdrive Label Watch 2024

Welcome to the third annual Rosy Overdrive Label Watch! In what I guess is a yearly tradition now, I check in on what a dozen (give or take) of my favorite modern labels have been up to the past few months, and pull a couple of highlights from each one. Rosy Overdrive is fully in the corner of small record labels and, as a blog, sees a kinship with them as a fellow human-based, passion-driven resource for discovering new music. The past two years I did this in early November, but this year I didn’t get to it by then, and so I figure why not run it during the week of Thanksgiving? I sure am thankful for these labels and the music they release!

As I always reiterate, this is not a “best record labels of 2024” list (although there would, of course, be some overlap). These are the labels that I’ve grown to love over the past decade or so, some of which were quite active this year, while others were less so. Still, everyone on this list put out enough music for me to choose both a favorite record and a worthy “honorable mention” (which can be either my second favorite, something I thought didn’t get as much attention as it should’ve, or something I didn’t have time to review in Pressing Concerns but still merits a closer look).

There are a bunch of great record labels doing great work that I don’t have time to highlight here, but, since the last Label Watch, the blog now has a “browse by label” section which lists every record label whose releases I’ve covered at least three times on the blog. Pretty cool, huh?

Two-time veteran Mt. St. Mtn. drops off this list as they only put out one release this year (System Exclusive’s Click; it’s a good one); here’s hoping we hear more from them next year. And, last but not least: continuing my goal to add a new label every year, we now welcome Meritorio Records to the club!

Candlepin

RO Pick: Alexei Shishkin, Open Door Policy

The prolific Alexei Shishkin, upon linking up with Candlepin Records, actually cleans and polishes up his lo-fi bedroom rock sound on Open Door Policy. The studio-recorded album ends up sounding like the more refined, pop-friendly sides of Shishkin’s 90s indie rock influences (Malkmus, Berman, Linkous, Martsch, and Lytle) or like a lost underground “best of” compilation, and there’s also a newly-pronounced rootsy streak. (Read more)

Honorable Mention: Glaring Orchid, I Hope You’re Okay

Like pretty much everything co-released by Julia’s War and Candlepin, Glaring Orchid’s I Hope You’re Okay falls somewhere on the 90s-style lo-fi indie rock, shoegaze, and slowcore continuum. Bandleader Quinn Mulvihill is nonetheless a rising talent to keep tabs on in this crowded and noisy field, as there’s a ton of brilliance to be found in between their debut record’s walls of fuzz and requisite sonic left-turns.

(Also reviewed on Rosy Overdrive: Abel, Dizzy Spell / Chaepter, Naked Era / The Collect Pond, Lightbreaker / Saturnalias, Bugfest)

Exploding in Sound

RO Pick: Kal Marks, Wasteland Baby

Kal Marks describe their sixth LP, Wasteland Baby, as a “borderline-concept album”, and the Boston trio spend it wandering around a dystopian, post-apocalyptic world that looks pretty similar to our own. As much as or even more than the lyrics, it’s the band’s playing that turns the record into something like a story; there’s Kal Marks’ signature noise rock, yes, but the group use rhythms and sweeping art rock to embark on a journey removed from their dingy basements of origin. (Read more)

Honorable Mention: Mandy, Lawn Girl

Melkbelly’s Miranda Winters doesn’t abandon the Breeders/Veruca Salt-indebted 90s alt-rock sound of her main band on Lawn Girl, her first record as Mandy, but it does still sound like a “solo” album underneath its fuzzed-out guitars. Winters doesn’t have to shout over her band, as they shape their sound so that her voice can be quietly intense and still command full attention. It’s something of a patchwork record, but Lawn Girl’s disparate moments all hang together. (Read more)

(Also reviewed on Rosy Overdrive: Babe Report, Did You Get Better / Pile, Hot Air Balloon)

Feel It

RO Pick: VACATION, Rare Earth

Rare Earth is an Ohio rock and roll record made with the belief that pop music should be played loud and fast; the Cincinnati-based VACATION combine together Midwestern, blue-collar pop punk with meaty, mid-period Guided by Voices might. All in all, Rare Earth is one of the most inspired-sounding rock records I’ve heard in quite a bit–huge-sounding, catchy, with the edges anything but sanded off. (Read more)

Honorable Mention: Marcel Wave, Something Looming

London’s Marcel Wave put out a demo EP back in 2019, so their debut album Something Looming has presumably been in the works for a while. It’s a confident, polished, and accessible first statement that follows in the grand tradition of British “post-punk”/“indie pop” records, balanced on both sides of the spectrum by vocalist Maike Hale-Jones’s delivery and a well-seasoned cast of instrumentalists. (Read more)

(Also reviewed on Rosy Overdrive: The Ar-Kaics, See the World on Fire / The Drin, Elude the Torch / Why Bother?, Hey, At Least You’re Not Me)

12XU

RO Pick: Mope Grooves, Box of Dark Roses

Box of Dark Roses is Mope Grooves’ posthumously-released final album, and it’s a double LP full of ramshackle pop music drawn from clanging keyboards and buzzing beats and vocals that regularly surprise. Box of Dark Roses is so easy to follow despite everything about it because its leader, the late Stevie Pohlman, is unfailingly consistent in her worldview as a writer and doesn’t shy away from following these core tenets to wherever they take her. (Read more)

Honorable Mention: Love Child, Peel Session

12XU has single-handedly spearheaded the Love Child revival this year, putting out a double LP compilation of work from the 80s/90s indie rock group as well as making their albums Witchcraft and Okay? available digitally. I’m going with their (unaired) 1992 Peel Session for this list though, as the four-song, fifteen minute release is a brief but excellent introduction into the New York group’s noisy power trio version of Big Apple indie rock.

(Also reviewed on Rosy Overdrive: Chimers, Through Today / Lupo Citta, Lupo Cittá / Weak Signal, Fine)

Slumberland

RO Pick: Humdrum, Every Heaven

Chicago guitar pop veteran Loren Vanderbilt has a keen grasp on a very specific time and place in the history of indie rock on the debut record from his new solo project, Humdrum–specifically, vintage jangle pop, new wave, college rock, and dream pop. Every Heaven is largely the work of a singular pop-minded visionary, with everything from its prominent, pounding mechanical drumbeats to its New Order-y synth washes to sprinkled guitar arpeggios all working in tandem to service the melodies and hooks. (Read more)

Honorable Mention: Lunchbox, Pop and Circumstance

Lunchbox’s Donna McKean and Tim Brown are Bay Area indie pop godparents–it took the rest of the region a couple of decades to catch up to the 90s-originating group, but when their moment came, Lunchbox was ready. The dozen pop songs on Pop and Circumstance come from people who live and breathe vintage pop rock of the 1960s and 70s–bubblegum pop, mod, psychedelic pop, and soul, delivered with ample experience and honed knowledge. (Read more)

(Also reviewed on Rosy Overdrive: Birdie, Some Dusty / Chime School, The Boy Who Ran the Paisley Hotel / Lightheaded, Combustible Gems / Neutrals, New Town Dream / The Reds, Pinks & Purples, Unwishing Well / Tony Jay, Knife Is But a Dream / Torrey, Torrey / The Umbrellas, Fairweather Friend)

Post Present Medium

RO Pick: The Spatulas, Beehive Mind

The Spatulas will probably always be an under-the-radar band (even I kind of forgot about this album until it came time to put this list together), but it suits them just fine. Cambridge, Massachusetts singer-songwriter Miranda Soileau-Pratt is a sneakily beautiful pop writer on Beehive Mind, which has one foot in the worlds of Pacific Northwest/Bay Area indie pop and twee but with diversions into more Post Present Medium-esque experimental psych pop and even some New England folk touches.

Honorable Mention: Muscle Beach, Muscle Beach

Oh, boy! Do you like rock music that sounds like it’s been warped and stretched and deconstructed to all hell? Does Trout Mask Replica make sense to you? Do you hate hooks? If any of this describes you, you’d probably be into the self-titled debut album from Muscle Beach, a Los Angeles band about whom I know almost nothing. There’s two guitarists, a drummer, and Jane on “vocals/effects”–and you never know just where any of them are headed on Muscle Beach.

Dear Life

RO Pick: Fust, Songs of the Rail

Aaron Dowdy put out seven EPs in 2017 and 2018 as Fust, years before the North Carolina project became a full-fledged country rock band with a couple of excellent full-lengths. Dowdy’s intimate, lo-fi bedroom pop take on alt-country in these twenty-eight songs, compiled digitally by Dear Life as Songs of the Rail, paints a blurry homespun picture, with songs running into each other as Fust moves from one sleepy-sounding idea to the next. (Read more)

Honorable Mention: Lindsay Reamer, Natural Science

The debut album from Philadelphia alt-country/folk rock singer-songwriter Lindsay Reamer is an impressively-orchestrated, polished record that’s never not breezy and pop-forward. It’s one of the most “instant-gratification” records to come out of Dear Life in a while–but Reamer isn’t put into a box by that at all, gleefully hopping from upbeat country rock to dreamy, layered folk music throughout Natural Science. (Read more)

(Also reviewed on Rosy Overdrive: Hour, Ease the Work / Nina Ryser, Water Giants)

Don Giovanni

RO Pick: Bad Moves, Wearing Out the Refrain

At their best, D.C. power-pop-punk quartet Bad Moves are a walking, talking, harmonizing example of how pop music can be jam-packed with meaning and intent without losing any other part of itself in the process–and Wearing Out the Refrain is Bad Moves at their best. The group’s third full-length lives up to its name; the hits keep coming, and while Bad Moves have always been some of the best hook merchants in broadly-speaking punk music, Wearing Out the Refrain is the sound of them leaning fully in. (Read more)

Honorable Mention: The Ergs, dorkrockcorkrod (Steve Albini Remix)

This is pop punk! This is dorkrockcorkrod! For its twentieth birthday, the debut album from New Jersey power trio The Ergs–the one that propelled Mikey Erg to one of the most interesting careers in punk over the next two decades–was given a shined-up new remix by Steve Albini and a good old-fashioned repressing from Don Giovanni. Sixteen songs, thirty-two minutes, and no shortage of high-flying, wildly catchy writing that is even better than you remember it being (unless you’ve listened lately, in which case you know that it holds up).

(Also reviewed on Rosy Overdrive: Mourning [A] BLKstar, Ancient//Future / St. Lenox, Ten Modern American Work Songs)

Trouble in Mind

RO Pick: Dummy, Free Energy

Los Angeles noise pop group Dummy approached their sophomore album, Free Energy, with the clear intention of making something different than their 2021 sensory overload debut Mandatory Enjoyment, and the band indeed have grown into something new. The resultant album is something that’s sleek, slick, and smooth–rather than come at you at full force, Dummy dart around us and leap over top of us, marrying fuzzy, distorted shoegaze-pop with alternative-dance elements in a way that’s frequently surprising but always coherent. (Read more)

Honorable Mention: Nightshift, Homosapien

Glasgow’s Nightshift have experienced significant lineup changes since 2021’s Zöe, so it’s not surprising that their third album, Homosapien, brings some changes for the band. The quartet are hardly unrecognizable, but there’s a palpable shift from an emphasis on Young Marble Giants/Marine Girls-esque minimal rhythmic guitar pop to a clearer embrace of a fuller, busier, and electric (but still quite catchy) experimental/art rock sound. (Read more)

(Also reviewed on Rosy Overdrive: Writhing Squares, Mythology)

Lame-O

RO Pick: Lily Seabird, Alas,

Burlington, Vermont’s Lily Seabird throws down the gauntlet in the realm of “folk rock/alt-country-influenced indie rock” with Alas, her second album. It’s a bold statement by someone making a case to be thought of as one of the most exciting and intriguing voices currently doing it, to get mentioned in the same breath as Wednesday and Big Thief one of these days. Bud Tapes put this out on cassette at the beginning of the year, and Lame-O rightfully took notice, adding Seabird to their stable and issuing Alas, on vinyl this November. (Read more)

Honorable Mention: Dazy, IT’S ONLY A SECRET (If You Repeat It)

It’s short, and it’s very sweet. IT’S ONLY A SECRET (If You Repeat It) is Dazy’s first new music in a year, and the three-track EP picks up the thread right where James Goodson left off, with his instantly recognizable huge hooks that are equal parts pop punk and Madchester losing no potency over time. Dance-pop and electronica, punk energy and huge guitars–all in under ten minutes. (Read more)

Sophomore Lounge

RO Pick: Styrofoam Winos, Real Time

It’s not like “laid-back country rock” is new territory for Nashville supergroup Styrofoam Winos, but the way that they do it Real Time–effortlessly passing the torch between the band’s three co-leaders, creating a singular vibe across these ten songs–is a palpable leap. Joe Kenkel, Lou Turner, and Trevor Nikrant meld together here more than ever before, creating a cohesive album that sounds relaxed and comfortable as a whole. (Read more)

Honorable Mention: Animal Piss, It’s Everywhere, Grace

What a name, eh? Well, there’s nothing foul about the smooth, irreverent version of country music practiced by western Massachusetts’ Animal Piss, It’s Everywhere (featuring Animal, Surrender!‘s Rob Smith on drums, among others). On Grace, the Pissers sing about vacations, beaches, and cocktails, sometimes as though they’re in the midst of enjoying them and other times like they could really use ’em.

Comedy Minus One

RO Pick: Mint Mile, Roughrider

Roughrider, the long-awaited second album from Chicago’s Mint Mile, has a “snapshot” and “wide-ranging” feel that becomes more pronounced here due to it being significantly shorter than their double-LP debut, Ambertron. Silkworm/Bottomless Pit’s Tim Midyett guides Mint Mile through meandering country-rock, sunny pop rock, and moments of surprising bareness throughout their latest triumph. (Read more)

Honorable Mention: Deep Tunnel Project, Deep Tunnel Project

The debut album from a Windy City indie rock supergroup featuring the aforementioned Midyett as well as John Mohr and Michael Greenlees (both of Tar) and Jeff Dean (Her Head’s on Fire, The Story So Far, The Bomb). Deep Tunnel Project is all Chicago, from the lyrics to the band and album name to the music, which is a garage and punk-influenced take on workmanlike Second City underground rock music. (Read more)

Meritorio

RO Pick: Dancer, 10 Songs I Hate About You

After two stellar EPs introduced the Glasgow band last year, 10 Songs I Hate About You is Dancer’s first full-length, and their potent indie pop/post-punk sound hasn’t missed a step. Vocalist Gemma Fleet is still announcing every song’s title before it begins, Andrew Doig’s bass is all over the place and a treat to observe, and so on. All the ingredients for an excellent first album were lined up, and 10 Songs I Hate About You knocks it out of the park. (Read more)

Honorable Mention: Best Bets, The Hollow Husk of Feeling

The Hollow Husk of Feeling is a record full to the brim of smart pop craft and energy. On the New Zealand band’s sophomore album, Best Bets put together a grounded, unsubtle collection of power pop, garage rock, and even glam rock that eschews the hazier and subtler sides of their home country’s guitar pop scene. The Hollow Husk of Feeling is a cathartic listen, as there’s a palpable edge to Best Bets’ jangly, fuzzed-out tunes. (Read more)

(Also reviewed on Rosy Overdrive: Jim Nothing, Grey Eyes, Grey Lynn / The Maureens, Everyone Smiles / Rural France, Exactamondo! / Sad Eyed Beatniks, Ten Brocades)

Pressing Concerns: CYLS Split Series, The Old Ceremony, Big Nobody, EggS

Hello, everyone! It’s a holiday week in the United States, but Rosy Overdrive is pressing forward with a full slate of new music (and more! stay tuned) nonetheless. This Monday’s Pressing Concerns brings us the fifth edition of Count Your Lucky Stars Records‘ split series (featuring Camp Trash, Expert Timing, Mt. Oriander, and Thank You, I’m Sorry), as well as new albums from The Old Ceremony, Big Nobody, and EggS.

Various – CYLS Split Series #5

Release date: November 22^nd
Record label: Count Your Lucky Stars
Genre: Power pop, pop punk, emo, alt-rock, indie pop, slowcore
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Snow Window

From 2011 to 2015, key fourth-wave emo label Count Your Lucky Stars put out four split 7” records, all featuring four different selections from four different bands in the realms of emo, punk, and indie rock. Featuring notable acts like Empire! Empire! (I Was a Lonely Estate), Annabel, Dowsing, Two Knights, and Sinai Vessel, these records were a significant part of an exciting era of emo music. Nearly a decade after the fourth entry in the series, Count Your Lucky Stars is experiencing a renaissance of its own, with both new bands and familiar faces releasing great music on the label over the past few years. It seemed like a perfect time to renew the CYLS Split Series, and label head Keith Latinen didn’t have to look far to find worthy contributors. The four bands on CYLS Split Series #5 have all released great albums on Count Your Lucky Stars within the past two years and change, and the exclusive tracks they bring to this EP are all just-as-strong entries into these acts’ relative discographies. Given that I’ve written about all four of these bands in Pressing Concerns before (and on multiple occasions for three of them), it’s not exactly surprising that I’m high on these songs, but regardless of one’s previous relationship (or lack thereof) with Camp Trash, Expert Timing, Mt. Oriander, and Thank You, I’m Sorry, this is a great place to begin familiarizing one’s self with them.

The first half of CYLS Split Series #5 could be called the “Florida half”, with two Sunshine State bands delivering tracks that bring the energy and hooks. Bradenton’s Camp Trash offer up “Friendship America”, a high-flying but limber piece of power-pop-punk that says the quiet part out loud by explicitly namechecking “Hyper Enough” and “Driveway to Driveway” (the former is the one that applies to “Friendship America”, and, even though this song isn’t slated to be on their upcoming sophomore album, it’s still a reminder of why they’re already on my radar). Orlando’s Expert Timing announced a hiatus of sorts earlier this year, but thankfully we’re getting at least one more song out of them with the fizzy but somewhat unnerved-sounding “Sudden Glow”, a reminder of why I’ve been so high on them even as they aren’t household names (yet). Kicking off the second half, Latinen’s own current emo/slowcore/sadcore project Mt. Oriander contributes a song called “Everything Is Connected, but Nothing Is Working”, and I remain in awe of how many songs like this Latinen seems to have in him. Sure, most bands can probably pull together a few of these soul-baring, stunning, stop-in-one’s-tracks pieces of eternal winter emo chilliness, but to make an entire discography out of songs like this is wild to me. Oh, and Thank You, I’m Sorry ends the EP with my favorite song on the whole thing, a two-minute piece of bummer pop called “Snow Window” that just flat-out rules. The state of Count Your Lucky Stars in 2024 is as strong as it’s ever been, and the label feels like it’s in good hands. (Bandcamp link)

The Old Ceremony – Earthbound

Release date: October 17^th
Record label: Robust
Genre: Singer-songwriter, folk rock, college rock, indie pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Valerie Solanas

Django Haskins is a veteran in the worlds of guitar pop, folk rock, and what I’d call “college rock”–the Chapel Hill-based musician started putting out solo material in the 1990s, made a record with The Jayhawks’ Gary Louris, and has toured as part of a long-running Big Star tribute ensemble alongside the likes of R.E.M.’s Mike Mills and Peter Buck, The Posies’ Jon Auer, and Big Star drummer Jody Stephens. In 2004, Haskins founded the self-described “noir-pop” group The Old Ceremony, and the band (which apparently began as an eleven-piece “mini-orchestra” before settling on a quintet of Haskins, vibraphone/organist Mark Simonsen, bassist Shane Hartman, violinist Gabriel Pelli, and drummer Nate Stalfa) put out six albums from 2005 to 2015. It’s been nearly a decade since an Old Ceremony record, but as the band celebrates twenty years of existence, they’ve released their seventh LP, Earthbound, via local label Robust Records. The album sounds like how you’d hope a band named after a Leonard Cohen album might sound–Haskins, thankfully, isn’t attempting to emulate the inimitable, but these eleven songs have both a tenderness and an edge to them, always keeping us on our toes as the band move through folk, orchestral pop, soft rock, and jazz-influenced pop rock expertly.

And, yes, there’s plenty of “noir” in Earthbound. It’s there in the opening title track, which leans on Simonsen’s vibraphone and Pelli’s violin to set the mood before the guitar and piano eventually meet them where they’re at. It’s also prevalent in the wandering, jazzy odyssey of “Lonely Mayor”, and in “Picking My Battles”, a string-charged pop tune that really does sound like something a twenty-year-old band might put to tape. Haskins’ “timeless pop songwriting” credentials have been well-established, and the band really put them to use with highlights like “Too Big to Fail” (which is one of those perfect-sounding guitar pop songs that you can’t believe someone hadn’t written yet) and the rueful laugh of “Easy to Believe” (some very nice organ on this one, the band upping their game just enough to match Haskins’ pen). And then there’s “Valerie Solanas”, the record’s one real rocker in which Haskins wildly and fully embodies the titular would-be assassin as the band conjure up some actual electric garage rock. Haskins sounds oddly comfortable on “Valerie Solanas”, threading the complicated narrative needle without tipping his hand too much about what he’s portraying. I saw that The Old Ceremony recently played a show with Rosy Overdrive favorite Franklin Bruno, and he and Haskins feel alike to me–genuine pop ringers and writers, working towards being able to jump from something like “Valerie Solanas” to the retro, soft-Ted Leo-y pop of “Hangman’s Party” or the gently rolling folk-country of “North American Grain” with ease. The returns are very positive on Earthbound. (Bandcamp link)

Big Nobody – Charlie’s Alive

Release date: October 31^st
Record label: Legacy Junk
Genre: Power pop, pop punk, alt-rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Peptide

Big Nobody is a new band from Rochester, New York, formed by four local indie rock/emo/punk veterans. Vocalist/guitarist/songwriter Jacob Walsh and bassist JT Fitzgerald had previously played together in the mid-2010s as part of the band Total Yuppies; earlier this decade, they teamed with drummer Connor Benincasa (from another good Rochester band, Comfy) and guitarist Kyle Waldron (who has played with Calicoco) to form Big Nobody. They debuted last year with Ripped from the Dream, and they’ve clearly hit on something as Charlie’s Alive is their second full-length album in as many years. Big Nobody (not to be confused with Philadelphia slacker rock group Big Nothing, although there’s actually a good deal of common ground between the two) seems to continue in the grand tradition of longtime underground rockers setting their sights towards big hooks and big guitars–bands like Rosy Overdrive favorites Dagwood, Rozwell Kid, Virginity, and Late Bloomer, to name a few. At the crossroads of power pop, pop punk, 90s-alt rock, and emo-grunge, Charlie’s Alive is a fun and rousing collection of sharp pop songs, “mature”-sounding but with a foot in youthful energy still. Charlie’s Alive rocks, yes, for the most part, but it’s not exactly a “punk” album–it’s more in the vein of bands like Dinosaur Jr. and The Lemonheads who can pull that kind of thing off but are marching to a different beat on the whole.

Charlie’s Alive is so catchy that I didn’t really realize how mellow it is until sitting down to right about it. “End” is an incredibly strong opening statement, but it’s one that takes a minute to really get going, having us wait for the (very worth it) payoff, while the creeping alt-rock of “Snake” and the shimmery jangle of “Source” ensure that there are several different layers of energy to be found in the record’s first half (and even the particularly J. Mascis-esque “Run” recalls the Dinosaur Jr. frontman’s later-period, even-more-laid-back work). Oddly enough, the second half of the record might be the louder, more upbeat half–between “My Name”, “Sunken”, and “Peptide”, Big Nobody rip through one fuzzed-out power pop anthem after another like they need to bank a few more before the album comes to a close. Charlie’s Alive ends with a two-minute careening thing called “Telethon”–it feels more streamlined and limber than the rest of the record’s more lumbering, grungy take on hooky power-pop-punk. Not that Big Nobody need to (or do) mix things up on Charlie’s Alive, but they do just fine on this little step off of their well-worn path, too. (Bandcamp link)

EggS – Crafted Achievement

Release date: November 1^st
Record label: Prefect/Howlin Banana
Genre: Power pop, college rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Head in Flames

Who doesn’t love EggS? People who haven’t heard them, I suppose. That doesn’t describe me, as the Parisian collective first showed up on my radar with their excellent 2022 album A Glitter Year, which ended up being one of my favorite LPs of that year. The group (led by one Charles Daneau) has been around for a while, but A Glitter Year–their first full-length–was a triumphant announcement of intent, with Daneau and a long list of collaborators (including Camille Fréchou and Margaux Bouchaudon of En Attendant Ana) achieving a boisterous, party-friendly, saxophone-heavy version of vintage 1980s college rock (somewhere between Miracle Legion and Eleventh Dream Day, I called it). EggS’ follow up record, Crafted Achievement, doesn’t flag for a second–it’s only eight songs and twenty-three minutes long, but every moment of it is thrilling, and Daneau maintains strong ties with the local indie pop scene by bringing back Fréchou and Bouchaudon as well as enlisting Erica Ashleson of Special Friend and Dog Park, among others. Daneau’s vocals–in English and front-and-center throughout the album–reach melodic perfection through sheer force, shouting hooks among the tuneful maelstrom of the EggS band to complete the ingredients for a perfect hurricane of catchy indie rock.

With a strong anchor provided by the band’s rhythm section, opening track “Head in Flames” is free to push for the stars for its entire three-minute runtime, and while the title of “Bob Stinson’s Song” nods to the iconic Replacements guitarist, the song itself actually recalls the horn-laden, polished album that immediately followed Stinson’s departure from the band, Pleased to Meet Me. “Your Maze” introduces noisy, mid-tempo guitar tangles into the mix, which, combined with some excellent En Attendant Ana-loaned backing vocals, inject some variety into a record that moves so fast that one might think it wouldn’t have time for such things. Crafted Achievement on the whole is speeding at a breakneck pace, though–“At the End of the Road” is there at the end of “Your Maze” to snatch the hooks and floor the gas pedal with them for another three-point-five minutes, while the ninety-second mod-pop carousel of “Your Maze II” keeps things lean in the album’s second half. EggS close things out with “Angry Silence”; clocking in at a very un-EggS like four minutes in length, Daneau and crew eagerly use this expanded runway to build and build until the album is ready to jet off into the cosmos in a jumble of horns, propulsive guitars, sturdy rhythms, and intermittent but strong vocals. That’s how you do it! (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Vista House, Unlettered, Orillia, Luna Honey

Hello again, readers! This Thursday Pressing Concerns looks at three albums that are coming out tomorrow, November 22nd, provided to us by Vista House, Unlettered, and Luna Honey. We also look at a new album from Orillia that came out earlier this week. Nice! If you missed either of this week’s earlier blog posts (on Monday, we looked at new records from Casual Technicians, Sexores, Dogwood Gap, and Morpho, and on Tuesday we examined new ones from Grey Factor, Red Pants, DUNUMS, and Bondo), check those out, too.

Vista House – They’ll See Light

Release date: November 22^nd
Record label: Anything Bagel
Genre: Country rock, alt-country
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: A Lightning Bird Emerges

Tim Howe has been responsible for some of the best alt-country rock of this decade between First Rodeo (his collaboration with Cool Original’s Nathan Tucker) and Vista House, his solo project (although the most recent Vista House photo includes three other people, so maybe there’s a full band behind Howe by now). In particular, last year’s Oregon III was an excellent and adventurous take on alt-country, Americana, indie rock, and power pop, among other diversions, and was in the blog’s top ten favorite LPs of 2023. I wasn’t expecting a full-length follow-up this year, but here we are in late November with They’ll See Light, which Vista House cut at New Issue’s The Unknown recording studio in Anacortes and released (like the last Vista House album) on cassette via Butte, Montana label Anything Bagel. They’ll See Light is far from a departure from Oregon III–once again, Howe is leading the band through loud, rambling country rockers and softer, still-rambling folk-indebted music, but there are differences between the two records. On their newest album, Vista House sound focused and streamlined–Oregon III had the feeling of a record that had been cobbled together and tinkered with for a while, allowing for some surprising choices, while They’ll See Light sounds like the work of a well-oiled rock band recording a bunch of great songs in short order because they know that they’re on a roll.

That being said, They’ll See Light isn’t a solely-barnburners affair; Howe and crew let the album come into focus subtly and casually with the brief “Intro To Heaven” and the mid-tempo “Amber Born Pheasant”, both of which hold back a bit of energy (but not in terms of hooks–they’re both nonetheless quite catchy). It makes “Change The Framerate (Gloria)”, the moment where Vista House fully lean into dizzying, bouncy country-power pop, all that more exciting, and the band has plenty of momentum as they charge into the middle of the record with the electric, rowdy “Appeal to Heaven”, the Crazy Horse-like bluster of “A Seat Behind the Wing”, and the sprawling folk rock of “Retribution Blues”. Vista House also end They’ll See Light in fiery and/or rambunctious mode–the five-minute slow-burn alt-country of “Outta Sight” eventually kicks up plenty of dirt, and “Straight Out the Box” adds horns to the grand power pop finale to make Vista House’s own “Can’t Hardly Wait”. But my favorite song on They’ll See Light is actually the acoustic folk tune that bridges the middle and home stretch of the LP–“A Lightning Bird Emerges”, in which Howe hides some of his best writing yet. The lyrics are surreal depictions of death, fire, folklore, sunlight, soil, animals eating other animals, and cycles thereof, but the simple refrain (which first appeared in “Intro to Heaven”) is all Howe needs to tie everything together: “I keep on coming back again / Yeah, but it’s not like the first time”. (Bandcamp link)

Unlettered – Five Mile Point

Release date: November 22^nd
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Noise rock, post-punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Dither

I’m always happy to spotlight new projects by 90s indie rock veterans on Rosy Overdrive, and Mike Knowlton’s Unlettered certainly fits the bill. Although he’s currently based in Englewood, Florida, Knowlton is originally from New York, where he played in the noisy indie rock bands Gapeseed and Poem Rocket in the 90s and 2000s. After seemingly stepping back from music for a while, though, the 2020s have been a pretty busy one for Knowlton so far–he’s put out three EPs since 2021 as Unlettered, and Poem Rocket have recently reunited and in fact just released a shelved EP, Lend-Lease, that was recorded in 1999. Even with Poem Rocket now back on the docket, however, Unlettered isn’t slowing down, as they’re gearing up to release their first full-length album, Five Mile Point. The first Unlettered LP is also the formal introduction to Kelly Grimm, Knowlton’s wife and, now, Unlettered’s co-lyricist and co-lead vocalist. Not that Grimm changes the trajectory of Unlettered all that much–if you enjoyed the dark, low-end heavy, noisy post-punk of their last EP (last year’s New Egypt), then Five Mile Point offers a whole album of such things. No matter who’s singing on the album, they’re soundtracked by music that’s straight-up suffocating, threatening to consume and overwhelm either of the stoic bandleaders at any moment.

Unlettered gets right to the hazy, confusing noise rock with “Dither”, a song that feels lost in itself and thus makes it a bizarre (but appropriate) choice to open Five Mile Point. There’s a spirited, sharp rock song buried underneath the mechanical clanging in “Dither”, and that goes double for the second song and lead single “She Is Inside You”, which lumbers and collapses its way into a roaring Sonic Youth-esque final section (while still sounding somewhat buried, yes). Grimm’s spoken-word vocals on “Median Coverage” are given just enough breathing room by the guitars to be discernible, but this relative parting of the clouds doesn’t last–the fuzzed-out “The Great Dwindle” and the glacial post-punk “About Time” are up next, and by the time we get to “12:49”, Unlettered are more or less just lobbing a wall of noise at us with moments of indie rock audible through the cracks. I’m probably making Five Mile Point sound a little taxing (hey, we’re talking about noise rock here), but I remain captivated by Unlettered throughout the album, between the strong, tough sounds of Knowlton’s bass landing blow after blow, the disorienting but beautiful guitarplay, and, of course, the whirlwind of noise. It’s all there in the nearly seven-minute closing track, “Services Rendered”, which even finds some space for odd experimental undercurrents in between the song’s more “rock” sections. “Services Rendered” eventually draws to a stop via the final instrumental echoes and Grimm’s distorted, uncanny voice–but Five Mile Point will be reverberating for a while. (Bandcamp link)

Orillia – Orillia

Release date: November 19^th
Record label: Magic Mothswarm
Genre: Folk, alt-country, singer-songwriter
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Pontoon Boat

Ohio-originating singer-songwriter Andrew Marczak has only lived in Chicago since 2020, but he’s already fully immersed himself in the Windy City’s alt-country scene. He’s the co-frontperson of The Roof Dogs and the lead vocalist of Toadvine, two bands who’ve turned up on this blog in the past; he’s more than earned a run at a solo album, which is where Orillia comes into the picture. Like the most recent Toadvine EP, Orillia’s self-titled debut album was recorded by Doug Malone at Jamdek, but it’s significantly more stripped down than Toadvine’s sextet lineup; a couple of Marczak’s bandmates contribute to these songs (Tristan Hugyen on vocals, guitar, and dobro, Trevor Joellenbeck on vocals, harmonica, mandolin, and piano), but nobody’s crowding anybody else on Orillia. Despite the relatively minimal arrangement, the songs of Orillia are noticeably varied–there’s some traditional folk music, some classic country-indebted songwriting, pin-drop quiet ballads, and sunny anthems in the brief (eight songs and twenty-five minutes, not counting an alternate take of “Cannery Row”) LP. Even though only five of the record’s songs are originals, Orillia nonetheless serves as a strong advertisement for Marczak’s songwriting, and the record feels like a small group of people eager to get a collection of songs they’re excited about down to tape.

The ambient sounds of rain and thunder roll underneath Orillia’s soft-launch opening track, a version of the song “My Rifle, My Pony, and Me” from the 1959 western Rio Bravo. As insular as “My Rifle, My Pony, and Me” is, the first original song “Pontoon Boat” is in another world entirely–we’re greeted by Joellenbeck’s bright mandolin playing and some excitedly-strummed acoustic guitar to launch us into what’s just an excellent song (I’m torn between “There’s a cave in Kentucky where the snakes all know my name” and “Gonna get a big-girl job at the hotel bar, it’s gonna make my life so easy” for my favorite part of the track). “Things” first appeared on Toadvine II, but that song’s dramatic folk-country balladry is still quite strong in a leaner package, and the two Marczak compositions in the second half (the hazy, dazy, but still dangerous “Shrimp Shack” and the beautiful, regal folk of “Tonight We Sleep Like Kings”) also benefit from this kind of reading. The latter in particular–which ends with “I saw you crawl underneath that truck / Looking for shelter”–is a new high for the quieter end of Marczak’s writing. Orillia isn’t the only Chicago alt-country band to use a pontoon boat as an effective vessel in their writing in recent memory, nor are they the only quasi-solo indie folk group to say the quiet part out loud and cover a Songs: Ohia song on their most recent release (in this case, it’s an excellent take on “Whip-poor-will”). This is country music–it’s about being in good company and finding new ways to walk down these well-trod avenues. (Bandcamp link)

Luna Honey – Bound

Release date: November 22^nd
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Noise rock, art rock, post-punk, experimental, avant-prog
Formats: CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Kerosene

Luna Honey are a trio of Philadelphia-based weirdos who started making music together in 2017 in Washington, D.C., and have put out five full-lengths (plus a collaborative LP with longtime Swans guitarist Norman Westberg) since then. The band’s core is vocalist/tenor baritone guitarist Maura Pond, bassist Levi Flack, and guitarist Benjamin Schurr, although the three of them play all sorts of instruments on their sixth album, Bound. As one might expect from a band who made a record with a former member of Swans, Bound is a noisy, experimental, and dark art rock album, taking nearly an hour to get everything it can out of its ten tracks. Bound was partially recorded by prolific Philadelphia engineer Dan Angel (Bungler, Webb Chapel, Slaughter Beach, Dog) and it represents the first record Luna Honey has made since 2019 with all its members living in the same city (they’d been split between D.C., Philly, and Richmond until recently). It’s an intense listen; there’s a lot going on in Bound, with the band seemingly taking advantage of their close proximity to keep adding and expanding to their music (a good portion of the record was recorded in the band members’ various homes).

Luna Honey don’t make the same song twice–this is one of those “check to make sure I’m still listening to the same record” kinds of albums. I will also say that it’s incredibly bold to start off your record with a mechanical-sounding noise rock song called “Kerosene”–but it’s not like Luna Honey aren’t equipped to light the kind of fire necessary to pull that move off. Nothing on Bound is quite as fiery as “Kerosene”, but then, there’s nothing on the record that’s quite as catchy as the groovy, warped post-punk dance number “Barbie Cake”, and nothing embraces clanging industrial music as much as the title track does. The first half of Bound is the most immediately taxing side, I think–it’s also made up of a prog-folk slow-burner called “Lead” and “Vacuum Cleaner”, an eight-minute experimental, shrill Frankenstein’s monster that’s probably the most cursed-sounding thing on the record–but the second half doesn’t exactly offer up “relief”. “Snarge” and “Lemons” pull back the reins a bit but maintain at least some structure, which can’t really be said for the final three tracks on the record. By the end of the lengthy ambient studio piece “Gravity”, the amount of silence that’s crept into Bound is unnerving, given how much noise the group had been making just minutes previously. Luna Honey never return to it, though–the final song is called “Shore”, and it’s six minutes of minimal and droning but still somewhat “pop” music in there somewhere. At least, I think there’s a little bit of pop music in there–hard to say after listening to Bound for an hour. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Grey Factor, Red Pants, DUNUMS, Bondo

A good, old-fashioned Tuesday Pressing Concerns! It’s here! It features an archival live album from Grey Factor, a new EP from Red Pants, and brand new full-lengths from DUNUMS and Bondo. It’s a good one, and it pairs well with yesterday’s post (featuring Casual Technicians, Sexores, Dogwood Gap, and Morpho), which you should check out if you missed.

Grey Factor – A Peak in the Signal: Live 1979-1980

Release date: October 23^rd
Record label: Tiny Global Productions/Damaged Disco
Genre: Synthpunk, experimental, synthpop, post-punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Everything

At the beginning of last year, I wrote about 1979-1980 A.D., an archival release from Los Angeles synthpop/post-punk group Grey Factor that collected the band’s entire recorded output, put together by Dave Trumfio (Pulsars, Mekons) and his new label Damaged Disco. By definition, all of Grey Factor’s studio recordings have been reissued already, but the band were able to find enough live recordings from their initial two-year run to make A Peak in the Signal: Live 1979-1980, an entire new full-length. Drawn from across the “around twenty live shows” that Grey Factor played in their initial incarnation, A Peak in the Signal features six tracks that I don’t believe ended up recorded on 1979-1980 A.D (if they were, they were significantly reworked). Their studio compilation hinted at the band’s range, but A Peak in the Signal blows it wide open–there are a couple of “pop songs” on here, but the majority of the LP’s thirty-seven minutes is significantly more experimental and out-there than almost everything that the band formally recorded. A Peak in the Signal almost sounds like it’s degrading and disintegrating in real time, as the more recognizable post-punk and synthpop moments of the first couple of tracks give way to pure electronic dadaism and lengthy ambient moments.

The most accessible moment on A Peak in the Signal belongs to “Everything”, a chirping, relatively crystal-clear synthpop track found in the third track slot. “No Time”, the five-minute synth-led post-punk song that precedes it, is the clear runner-up, as it’s the only other song on the LP I can imagine being enjoyed by people whose musical adventurousness doesn’t go far beyond, say, the Talking Heads. A Peak in the Signal’s opening track is a cutting darkwave song called “Why Me”–there’s a muddled darkness to it that obscures the pop song that’s struggling somewhere underneath, hinting at the chaos that’s to come later on in the album. Grey Factor really lean into it with the six-minute industrial electronic noise-pop collage of “Won’t Have to See You”; there’s a song barely contained within it, although Grey Factor aren’t overly committed to seeing it through (there’s a memorable moment where the synth just starts playing “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” for a bit as the rest of the instrumentation continues stumbling around). “Every Five Minutes”, the final song on the LP, returns to this head-spinning well; between the two of them, it reminds me of the more confrontational moments of Pere Ubu and Wire (and their side projects), drilling and piercing sounds obscuring everything else about the music. Ironically enough, the most peaceful moment of A Peak in the Signal is also probably the most “difficult” track on the record–the thirteen-minute ambient hard-stop of “Inja”. For most bands, I can’t imagine needing more than their entire recorded studio output, but A Peak in the Signal makes a strong case that there’s more to Grey Factor than what we’d previously heard. (Bandcamp link)

Red Pants – Pale Shadows

Release date: October 25^th
Record label: Painted Blonde
Genre: Lo-fi indie rock, fuzz rock, lo-fi pop, 90s indie rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: To the Deep End

As long as the band Red Pants keeps putting out quality new music, I’ll keep writing about them on this blog. This is the fourth record from the Madison, Wisconsin duo of Jason Lambeth and Elsa Nekola that I’ve written about ever since I first heard of them in early 2022–for the two LPs they’ve put out in that timespan (2022’s When We Were Dancing and 2023’s Not Quite There Yet), they linked up with established indie labels Paisley Shirt and Meritorio, while both Red Pants EPs (2022’s Gentle Centuries and now the brand-new Pale Shadows) have come out via Lambeth’s own Painted Blonde imprint. Regardless of who’s putting out their music, Red Pants have retained their charmingly distinct brand of lo-fi Midwestern basement indie rock, which incorporates bits of Yo La Tengo-esque fuzzy noise pop, Sonic Youth-style drone-y rock, and even a touch of Stereolab-like dusty indie pop. Pale Shadows is no exception; comprised of five songs from the Not Quite There Yet sessions that were believed to be lost on “dead 2009 MacBook” only to be rediscovered and finished a few months ago, these tracks are good enough to stand up against any of their previous work. Unlike Gentle Centuries, which felt like a consistent, singular listen, Pale Shadows is more varied, but that’s hardly a complaint, as we get a brief but complete sampling of Red Pants in these five songs.

We join Red Pants in the middle of a four-minute instrumental basement jam called “Into the Deep End”, in which Nekola steadily marches along to Lambeth’s increasingly bold guitar playing–both of them are mostly restrained for the majority of the track, almost hypnotic-sounding, with Lambeth only kicking up some real fuzz-rock in the final few seconds. The sub-ninety-second “Proto Punk” doesn’t quite sound like the MC5, but it’s the most spirited and electric moment on the record, and the refrain does muster a bit of the garage-punk one might imagine based on the song’s title. Hopefully you’re ready for droning synthesizers after that one, because that’s what “Underneath the Sun” brings–the vocals are barely above a whisper, and a drum machine is the only other accompaniment to the track’s ghostly synthetic pop. The final two songs on the EP are, if anything, even more subtle than what came before them, but I also view “One More Ghost” and “Sunset Hill” as a culmination of sorts–the former track starts off as a wobbly lo-fi indie rock/slowcore tune that eventually adds louder guitars and synths as the track takes off, and the Nekola-sung latter is the dreamy organ-led benediction. It all adds up to a welcome dispatch from the world of Red Pants, and it leads one to wonder just what other gems they’ve got hidden away on old hard drives. (Bandcamp link)

DUNUMS – I Wasn’t That Thought

Release date: October 4^th
Record label: Sleepy Cat
Genre: Psychedelia, noise pop, art folk, shoegaze
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Mouthful of Pears

Sijal Nasralla most notably plays in Durham, North Carolina punk group The Muslims (they use aliases but I believe he’s Ba7Ba7, the drummer), but the Palestinian-American’s solo-ish project DUNUMS actually predates that band’s founding, with records dating back all the way to 2011. The music of DUNUMS (which they helpfully describe as “arty, noisey, post-rock, bedroom fake-jazz”) has been driven by the settler colonialism that has ravaged Nasralla’s home country for much longer than the year and change that many of his white indie rock music peers have been paying attention–the project’s name is Arabic for an “arbitrary unit of land measurement, approximately 1 Hectare, used differently to quantify space among villages throughout Palestine”–and it’s marked DUNUMS’ music through their 2015 self-titled album, 2022’s Where’s My Eidi?, and a few EPs and splits. It’s no surprise, then, that the third DUNUMS album, I Wasn’t That Thought, is shaded by Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, but do not expect this album to sound like the kinetic punk music of Nasralla’s other band. I Wasn’t That Thought is also inspired by the birth of Nasralla’s daughter, Tasneem, and Nasralla has written much of this album as though through her eyes–“Palestine-centric Toddler-core anthems”, is what he calls them.

I Wasn’t That Thought reminds me a bit of the band OMBIIGIZI–that group’s co-leaders also make 90s indie rock, folk rock, and noise pop/shoegaze with a different perspective than the majority of groups in those genres (for them, it’s an Anishnaabe-Canadian vantagepoint). There is a spoken word “story” from Tasneem and there are jazz-rock flare-ups in the record’s title track and “The Portal”, but I Wasn’t That Thought’s primary mode is adventurous, multi-layered, melodic indie rock. DUNUMS sound thoughtful and measured throughout songs like “Mouthful of Pears” (featuring vocals from Catherine Edgerton), they make noise sound regal on “Honeycomb Art on a Billion Twins”, there’s interesting dream pop, folk, and experimental touches across the middle of the album in “Butt Parade”, “When We Ate the World and Its Wars”, and “Holding the Cake Up to the Sky”. These moments are all strong, but I Wasn’t That Thought might be the most effective as it comes to a close and invents new ways to deliver its messages; Nasralla’s final lyrical statement is the quiet hope of “There Are Dreamlands”, which DUNUMS immediately follow with two jazz-flecked instrumentals (“USA Ain’t Shit” and “The Portal”), and the last thing we hear on the album is a lullaby sung by Nasralla’s “co-parent”, Rakhee Devasthali. I Wasn’t That Thought is a pointed album, even when (perhaps especially when) Nasralla expresses himself in a way that might make more sense to a child than us adults. (Bandcamp link)

Bondo – Harmonica

Release date: October 18^th
Record label: Day End
Genre: Post-rock, 90s indie rock, slowcore, noise rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Enter Sand

Bondo are a quartet from Los Angeles who first came to my attention via their debut album, Print Selections, which came out last year on Quindi Records (Monde UFO, Dead Bandit, American Cream Band). The quartet (Cook Lee-Chobanian, Andrew “Gerry” Dykes, Brian Bartus, and Nikolas Escudero) played an intriguing, band-centric version of post-rock on that album, with a mostly-instrumental, downbeat sound that captured both the low-key and experimental sides of 90s “Numero Group-core” indie rock groups like Slint, Duster, and Unwound. The second Bondo full-length arrives a year and a half later via Day End Records–with the band in a self-proclaimed “creative stride”, they went ahead and recorded Harmonica live to tape even with Lee-Chobanian (the band’s drummer) nursing a torn ACL (“from playing basketball at LA Fitness”). Harmonica can feel like a more polished and even accessible version of Bondo, but only sometimes–there are more songs with vocals this time around, and we can recognize somewhat jagged but still structured “indie rock” compositions throughout the album, yes, but the careening punk-informed musicianship, the probing post-rock guitars, and the experimental track-jumping of their previous LP are all still characteristic of Harmonica, too.

The first two songs on Harmonica are wordless indie rockers, picking up the instrumental thread of Print Selections and shaving it down to mid-tempo, melodic Duster-esque slowgaze (“Enter Sand”) and a contained burst of post-punk circle-chasing (“Bibbendum”). It’s something of a feint; not that Bondo switch things up in any extreme way in terms of the music, but the plodding lo-fi indie rock “Sink” introduces vocals into the mix–mumbled and downcast-sounding, but still quite audible–and it’s far from the last time we hear them on Harmonica. After getting some more noisier instrumentals out of their system, Bondo start to hit a subdued stride between the title track, “Blinko”, and “Headcleaner”, which slow and tone the music down enough for the vocals to once again feel like a key part of the compositions. By the latter of those three songs, Bondo have found something of a second wind, with spindly post-rock guitars marking the song–the group finally strole a balance and let the six-strings and the singing share the limelight. Not that Bondo have ever been a particularly loud band, but the back half of Harmonica is really no-man’s land, with only “Porchetarian” really showing off Bondo’s tougher instincts. As they mumble and drift their way through “Paul Gross” and “Triple Double”, Bondo’s attitude on Harmonica crystallizes–exploratory, but cautiously and with one foot on solid ground. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Casual Technicians, Sexores, Dogwood Gap, Morpho

On this fine Monday morning in November, the acclaimed music blog Rosy Overdrive and its Pressing Concerns column is looking at three records that came out last Friday: the second Casual Technicians LP of 2024, as well as new EPs from Dogwood Gap and Morpho. We’re also looking at a reissue of an album from Sexores that originally came out a decade ago. A bunch of quality below!

Casual Technicians – Deeply Unworthy

Release date: November 15^th
Record label: Repeating Cloud
Genre: Lo-fi pop, psych pop, jazz-pop, psych folk
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Nothingland

The Casual Technicians have been called up for an encore. Tyler Keene, Boone Howard, and Nathan Baumgartner are a trio of Portland, Oregon-originating musicians now (partially) based in New Jersey and upstate New York–the latter of those two locations is where the three of them gathered last year to record their self-titled debut album, which came out this March. I called Casual Technicians a “perfectly imperfect melding of three distinct pop weirdos”, like a more communal version of Keene’s lo-fi psych pop solo project Log Across the Washer, and I was far from the only one charmed by the group’s bursting, buzzing, catchy music. The people have demanded a second Casual Technicians album of 2024, and they’ve obliged, once again meeting at Howard’s farm in Chittenango to put together Deeply Unworthy. Noticeably less zany than their first album, Deeply Unworthy is a little sleepier and subdued, like a band that was ready to pack it in, genuinely not expecting the ensuing “one more song!” chant. The writing on this one is no less effective, though–and this helps ease us into this new era of Casual Technicians. It takes a few listens for it to become apparent just how much of a forward step it is for them–the songs, on closer inspection, are no less complex than the bells-and-whistles-fest of their debut, the increased prominence of Fraser A Campbell’s saxophone veers us into straight-up jazz-pop territory, and the Casual Technicians themselves sound as cohesive as they’ve ever been. It’s an impressive feat given everything about Deeply Unworthy.

I wouldn’t have called Casual Technicians “relaxing”, but Deeply Unworthy pulls it off, believe it or not. The Technicians set the tone right at the beginning by giving Campbell’s saxophone the lead-off prime slot in opening intro track “Lord’s Valley”, and we’re greeted with several songs in the vein of psych-folk-pop-jazz campfire soundtrackers from “You Carry Me Away” to “Overdrive” to “Everyone Is Lonely”. There are less out-of-nowhere moments of aggressive pop brilliance on Deeply Unworthy, but the Casual Technicians’ pursuit of a Vibe has resulted in a singularly smooth and even seventeen-song album. And it’s not like these songs aren’t immediately-hitting too in their own way–drum-circle vibes and prominent saxophone don’t stop “Locally Hated” from being an infectious early highlight, “Dark Matter Falling” injects a bit of the first album’s wobbly chaos into the mix, and the fervent, dramatic “Nothingland” might be the most affecting thing that the Casual Technicians have put to tape yet. “Nothingland” lapses into a psychedelic finale, and they follow it up with what’s probably the most bizarre song on the album, “Dunking”–but the trio clean up their act to close things out with the acoustic strummer “This Emotion”. If “This Emotion” seems a bit woozy at times, there’s no reason to worry–after flying off the handle right out of the gate on their first album, the Casual Technicians have learned to land on Deeply Unworthy. (Bandcamp link)

Sexores – Historias de frío (Reissue)

Release date: November 1^st
Record label: Buh
Genre: Shoegaze, dream pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Historias de frío

Regular readers of the blog will remember Sexores, the Buh Records-associated dream pop/shoegaze band from Ecuador and currently based in Mexico City who put out their fifth LP, Mar del Sur, about a year ago. That was the first I’d heard of Sexores, but the group has had a notable history spanning four full-lengths, a dozen years, and three continents before that record, a significant part of which is Historias de frío, their sophomore album they originally self-released in 2014. Recorded while Sexores were in the process of relocating from Quito to Barcelona (where they’d reside until moving to Mexico City in 2018), Historias de frío was the band’s breakthrough of sorts, garnering some attention and leading to an eventual partnership with Peruvain label Buh Records, who’ve released all their albums since then and are also releasing Historias de frío on vinyl for the record’s tenth anniversary. Jumping back from Mar del Sur’s electronic, synthpop-shaded dream pop sound, Sexores sound more like a typical indie rock group here, earning the “shoegaze” label that’s been attached to them even as they’ve branched out more in recent years. Comprised of Historias de frío’s eight original songs and augmented by the 2013 non-album single “Titán”/ “Dopplegänger”, this new version of the album is a holistic picture of a pivotal time in the band’s history.

Plenty of Sexores’ polished dream pop side is visible on Historias de frío, but it sits alongside expansive, layered, guitar-heavy rock music for the majority of the album. The title track is an understated opener, taking its time to rattle through an odyssey of reverb, melodic but low-key vocals, and steady, stoic percussion. “Below the Rainbow” is a bit more upfront and upbeat, but given that it’s six minutes long, there’s plenty more to the track than its loudest and highest moments. The twin pillars of Historias de frío seem to be its prominent rock-forward rhythm section and the band’s more exploratory instincts–it’s hard to know where songs like “Dahmer” and “Eli” will end up just based off of their inceptions, but one thing we can count on is that the drums will ground the tracks as they move along. The finale of the original version of Historias de frío is a six-minute toe-tapping, swirling indie rock song called “Shinigami”, and that song still feels like a worthy cap, although the two “bonus” tracks aren’t exactly afterthoughts. “Titán” in particular is a seven-minute kaleidoscopic dream pop song that’s unlike anything on the album proper, even as it still has that cavernous, trusty drumbeat kicking along beside it. It may not sound exactly like the Sexores of 2024, but Historias de frío on its own still sounds fresh today. (Bandcamp link)

Dogwood Gap – House Sounds

Release date: November 15^th
Record label: Revelator
Genre: Alt-country, folk rock, singer-songwriter
Formats: CD, digital
Pull Track: Mommy Knows Best

Patrick Murray is a singer-songwriter from Massachusetts who’s living in Brooklyn these days; a couple of years ago, he started making music as Dogwood Gap, releasing an EP (2022’s More from the Cellar), an album (last year’s Winesburg), and a two-song single (“Class Clown” b/w “Short Sheet”, also last year) in short order. The latest record from Dogwood Gap is a CD EP called House Sounds, which also serves as the debut release from Revelator Records, a new imprint started by Murray himself to release music from him and his New York peers. If you’re already decently familiar with the worlds of alt-country and indie folk rock, the first thing you’ll notice about Murray is that he’s a big Songs: Ohia fan–his project is named after a song from their debut album, and House Sounds features a pretty faithful cover of Jason Molina’s signature song, “Farewell Transmission”. So yes, Dogwood Gap sound a good deal like Songs: Ohia on House Sounds, but aside from their “Farewell Transmission”, Murray (who, aside from guest vocals on the cover by Carlie Houser, is the only musician on the EP) hews towards earlier Molina material–cavernous, almost slowcore-like folk music, technically delivered in “rock band” format but a particularly winding and snaking version of it.

Despite having only four tracks, House Sounds is nearly thirty minutes long–“Sicario” and “Farewell Transmission” both cross the seven minute mark, and there’s a hidden track after the latter. Dogwood Gap stretch out a lot over the course of the EP–opening track “Mommy Knows Best” is their version of country rock, shambling and rambling across four minutes of intermittently strong guitars and a plodding, leisurely beat. The lengthy “Sicario” is a bit quieter, but it’s not exactly a dirge–steady and patient, the song eventually reaches something that’s recognizably lively folk rock, too. Of the record’s proper songs, it’s “By Design” that has the most pronounced silence, but like “Sicario”, it builds to something more concrete–except “By Design” feels bleak the entire way through, and the (relatively brief) climax doesn’t shake the darkness so much as give a stronger voice to it. Covering “Farewell Transmission” is cheating, but Dogwood Gap don’t fuck it up and it doesn’t overshadow the rest of the EP too much, so that’s a success in my book. Murray’s “Farewell Transmission” might just be a way to bury the final hidden track, the actual sparsest, most ghostly thing on the record. House Sounds is a record made with close proximity to its architect’s heroes, but Murray ends it entirely on his own and sounds perfectly capable of doing so. (Bandcamp link)

Morpho – Morpho Season

Release date: November 15^th
Record label: Hit the North
Genre: Folk rock, fuzz rock, singer-songwriter
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Half of Two

Kristyn Chapman has been making music in Chicago for a while now, most notably as the lead guitarist in the band Waltzer, who put out an album back in 2021 and were most recently seen releasing a split single with Tea Eater last year. In fact, three-fourths of Waltzer appears on Morpho Season, the debut EP from Chapman’s new project Morpho–Waltzer’s bassist Kelly Hannemann and drummer Sarah Weddle are Chapman’s backing band for the majority of the record. The five-song EP (which also features instrumental contributions from co-producers William Erickson and Joey Lemon) is a soft but strong launching pad for Morpho–Chapman’s songwriting gives these tracks a firm foundation, and Morpho have a familiar, warm, and pleasing sound that mixes classic indie rock with folk rock and a Crazy Horse-like relaxed fuzziness. It’s not quite Wednesday levels of country-gaze, but if you liked the last record from fellow Windy City post-alt-country-rockers Ratboys or what Lily Seabird has been up to in New England, Morpho Season might have just the right ingredients.

Throughout Morpho Season, Chapman and her band have the dynamics on lock–songs effortlessly go from breezy, airy folk-influenced tunes to roaring rockers so subtly that it always feels natural. Morpho sound comfortable on their first statement–opening track “Prism” is quite catchy, but not overly showy about it, and while it gets a little more rousing as it goes on, it’s hardly the EP’s “biggest” moment. Morpho’s strongest song in terms of pure electricity is “Half of Two”, which has some nice, chunky guitar to rest upon–to say nothing of the soaring, satisfying solo that Chapman unleashes in the second half of the track. Although Morpho don’t quite hit that high again, the meat of Morpho Season is clearly made by a band with that ability–“Morpho Friend” and “Blue Light” are both deliberately more low-key, steadily trekking and wobbling their ways to well-earned guitar theatrics as they draw to a close. The only track that doesn’t do this at all on Morpho Season is the EP’s closing track, “The End”, in which Chapman stubbornly resists adding anything more than minimal bass and keys to the song’s acoustic foundation. It’s a strong indie folk conclusion, but to me it sounds more poignant thanks to the heights that Morpho scale before they wind up there. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Bedtime Khal, Dennis Bovell, Sunnsetter, Mud Whale

This is a classic Thursday Pressing Concerns here, looking at three albums that will be coming out tomorrow, November 15th, plus one LP that came out yesterday. Brand-new full-lengths from Bedtime Khal, Sunnsetter, and Mud Whale are featured below, as well as an archival compilation featuring the work of legendary producer Dennis Bovell. Be sure to peek this week’s earlier blog posts too if you missed them; Monday’s post featured Sassyhiya, p:ano, Smoker Dad, and Blank Banker, and Tuesday’s featured Ylayali, Good Energy Crystal, Gentleman Speaker, and Megan from Work.

Bedtime Khal – Eraser

Release date: November 15^th
Record label: Devil Town Tapes
Genre: Lo-fi indie rock, bedroom pop, fuzz rock
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Dumb Stuff

East Lansing bedroom rock musician Khal Malik, aka Bedtime Khal, was one of the first artists to release a record on Leeds’ Devil Town Tapes–they put out Malik’s Fog EP in 2020, reissued the Hard to Find and Wake Up EPs as a single cassette in 2021, and he appeared on a compilation celebrating five years of the tape imprint in 2022. Despite all this, Bedtime Khal had still never released an album until now with Eraser, his first full-length record and first new record of any kind in four years. Those Bedtime Khal EPs might be fairly obscure, but they’re quite good, and fairly unique-sounding, too–Malik has an interesting take on “bedroom pop” on those releases, sounding more indebted to the 2000s post-punk revival than your Alex Gs and Sebadohs. It worked very well in short bursts, so I was naturally curious to hear what Malik would do with a larger canvas–in this case, one that’s nine songs and twenty-six minutes in size. It shouldn’t be surprising but it’s still remarkable that Eraser sounds like nothing else Bedtime Khal has done before–it reminds me of other bedroom pop projects, like Portland’s Guitar, that start to sound larger and louder when they get the means to do so. Guitar went full-on shoegaze on their most recent album, but Bedtime Khal’s evolution isn’t so linear–there’s bits of fuzzed-out basement indie rock, slowcore, emo, and bright pop music throughout the album. Eraser isn’t “more of” any one thing so much as it’s just “more”.

Like his previous records, Malik sings and plays most of what you’ll hear on Eraser aside from some guitar and vocals from Noah Kim (who plays with Malik in the emo duo Sideria) and a couple of guest vocalists. Whether or not Malik is on his own doesn’t seem to correlate with how “fully-developed” a song sounds–the huge opening track “Dumb Stuff” and its roaring wall-of-fuzz chorus is all Malik, while I don’t know if I would’ve pegged the relatively chilly, downbeat mid-tempo bedroom rock of “Blood Bucket” as one of the ones featuring Kim. The tougher, more ambitious version of Bedtime Khal is out in full force with “Dumb Stuff”, and while the rest of the cassette’s first half doesn’t quite go all-in like the opening track, there’s still plenty of hefty moments to be found in tracks like “Halo”, “Something Like That”, and “Fruit Snacks” (the latter of which is a noisy basement-punk instrumental). Another nice surprise from Bedtime Khal is that they take advantage of a full-length album runtime by shifting the vibe noticeably in the record’s second half. The final four tracks on Eraser are all significantly subtler and more contemplative, the heaviness more frequently coming from what Malik and Kim let hang in the air rather than loud guitars. Nonetheless, some of Malik’s strongest writing is back here–“Blood Bucket” and the (previously heard as a demo on the aforementioned Welcome to… compilation) “4 Wheels (Don’t Cry)” are both hushed but substantial pop songs, and “I’ll Let You Ask Me a Question” indulges in the tinny, reverb-touched side of “bedroom pop” to deliver some nice bittersweet hooks. The talent and promise of Bedtime Khal were apparent before Eraser, and the LP confidently takes a step beyond that firm foundation. (Bandcamp link)

Dennis Bovell – Sufferer Sounds

Release date: November 15^th
Record label: Disciples
Genre: Dub, reggae
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Dub Land

You may not know Dennis Bovell’s name, but there’s a good chance you’ve heard something the man’s been involved with if you like the kind of music Rosy Overdrive covers. Not only is he a prolific reggae and dub musician (on his own, with the band Matumbi, and with Linton Kwesi Johnson), he also wrote the U.K. lovers rock/disco hit “Silly Games” and worked with several legendary British post-punk groups (Orange Juice, The Slits, The Pop Group). His biography is both impressive and beyond the scope of this blog post–most of it I was unfamiliar with before the Sufferer Sounds compilation caught my ear. Sufferer Sounds is a new double LP/CD out via Disciples (Charlène Darling, Phew, Special Interest) that zeroes in on a specific era of Bovell’s career, largely drawing from recordings he made from 1976 to 1980. It took the better part of a decade for Disciples and Bovell to track down the original recordings, remaster them, and properly present the compilation in what would become its final form, but it’s hard to argue with what we hear on Sufferer Sounds. Comprised of fifteen songs from various Bovell projects and collaborations (but with everything other than a dub version of “Take Five” written or co-written by Bovell himself), Sufferer Sounds is nonetheless a cohesive, transportive hour-long dub and reggae journey that spotlights a talent that more often than not operated away from the center of attention.

We’re thrown right into dub land at the beginning of Sufferer Sounds–literally, the first song is a seven-minute track credited to The Dub Band called “Dub Land”. It rules–it’s still recognizably dub, but it’s busy, sprawling, and surprising, streaming through locked-in rhythms, crisp echoes, and bursts of melodies. “Blood Dem” (credited to Dennis Matumbi) is a more minimalist version of dub, but there’s still a bite around the edges of the track, and the smooth, horn-laden “Suffrah Dub” presents yet another distinct version of Bovell’s sound. The towering dub selections are the bread and butter of Sufferer Sounds, with more focused reggae moments peppered in here and there for variety’s sake (“Come With Me” is the most obvious example of this, while Africa Stone’s “Run Rasta Run” and Errol Campbell’s “Jah Man” tilt in this direction, too). There’s a ton to take in on Sufferer Sounds–I’ve already alluded to “Take Dub”, but there’s also “Game of Dubs”, an alternate version of the song that Janet Kay took all the way to Top of the Pops in 1979, and the record’s closing duo of “Cry” (by Angelique) and “Crying” (a different version of the song by “DB at the Controls”). A quick “ctrl + F” tells me I’ve never covered anything I’ve labeled as “reggae” in Pressing Concerns before, but my ears tell me one doesn’t need to be an expert to appreciate Sufferer Sounds. (Bandcamp link)

Sunnsetter – Heaven Hang Over Me

Release date: November 15^th
Record label: Paper Bag
Genre: Noise pop, shoegaze, fuzz rock, art rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Fear It Comes in Waves

I’ve written a bit on this blog about OMBIIGIZI, Status / Non Status, and Zoon, a group of interconnected Canadian indie rock bands featuring a lot of shared personnel (Adam Sturgeon and Daniel Monkman being the two most prominent creative heads) but whose records cover everything from fuzzed-out, experimental 90s-style indie rock, folk, psychedelia, and electronica. One musician who’s been a key part of this cluster of bands is Andrew McLeod, who plays in both OMBIIGIZI and Zoon as well as making music on their own as Sunnsetter. As Sunsetter, McLeod is a prolific self-recorder/self-producer, steadily putting out music on Bandcamp since at least the late 2010s. McLeod has expressed a desire to make “heavier” music, and the latest Sunnsetter album, Heaven Hang Over Me, represents a step in that direction in multiple ways. For one, it features the debut of a new Sunnsetter live band (guitarist Cole Sefton, bassist Hannah Edgerton, drummer Trevor Cook, and keyboardist Kyle Gottschalk), who play on a re-recorded version of an old Sunnsetter song, “I ACTUALLY DON’T WANT TO DIE”. And for another, Heaven Hang Over Me is indeed a heavy record in its own way–while the album (whose title comes from a misheard lyric from Nirvana’s “Dumb”) doesn’t deviate too far from the folk and psych-influenced indie rock of McLeod’s other bands, they use an intense devotion to noise to push and stretch this sound into something new.

The core tenets of Heaven Hang Over Me are all sturdy, welcome pillars of rock music–between an emotional, uninhibited lead vocal performance from McLeod and the roaring, shoegaze-influenced alt-rock guitars, this is a record that shoots for stadiums without trying to smooth down or sand off the edges of its creative head. Sunnsetter sound just as at home pulling off these sweeping, go-for-broke anthems like “Fear It Comes In Waves” as they do in the more low-key, folk/pop-indebted tracks (“Try Again”, “Bittersweet”). Heaven Hang Over Me weaves deftly through the midsection–featuring the first really challenging moment on the record, the eight-minute post-hardcore scream/noise-fest of “I Want to Live (The Body Is a Place of Rest)” and the relatively restrained but still quite-a-lot-to-take in, six-minute “Never Forget”–and comes out the other side even stronger with the crunchy fuzz-pop “Take a Shot” and the gorgeous Modest Mouse-indebted Big Sky indie rock of “I Feel Everything”. Heaven Hang Over Me feels even grander than its overstuffed fifty minute runtime (the dreamy folk of “Nothing to Fear” is cut from the vinyl edition); it makes perfect sense that Sunnsetter need a six minute instrumental called “The Moon, and in the Water” in order to cool down and bring the album to a final halt. This all certainly bodes well for McLeod’s ambitions. (Bandcamp link)

Mud Whale – Humans Pretending to Be Human

Release date: November 13^th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Post-hardcore, emo-punk, alt-rock, pop punk
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Checking In

Mud Whale are a Cleveland-based “emo grunge” quartet who showed up in 2021 with a debut album called Everything in Moderation. Since then, the band (vocalist/guitarist Michael Morris, guitarist Justin Cheuvront, bassist Joe Hanson, and drummer Avery Sylvaine) have been riding the Midwestern emo circuit, playing Fauxchella and touring around the region, and have now released their sophomore full-length, Humans Pretending to Be Human. Mud Whale’s second album is an inventive and overeager punk rock record–the group can and frequently do smoothly transition between blistering, raging post-hardcore and slick emo-y alt-rock, sometimes within the same song. Morris’ evocative screaming often serves as the more harrowing end of Mud Whale’s sound, and the rest of the band temper him with catchy, almost pop punk guitars sprinting alongside. Of course, Morris’ voice can also take a shape more conducive to polished emo-pop, and the instrumentalists can be tough, meaty noise-punk merchants, too. Throw in a couple of additional genuine genre-lurches liberally sprinkled throughout Humans Pretending to Be Human, and you’ve got yourself a strong second statement of an LP.

The first two songs on Humans Pretending to Be Human, “Checking In” and “Smoke Signals”, don’t cover the entire ground that Mud Whale traverse on the album, but they’re a pretty good litmus test for if you see the same vision that the band does. “Checking In” marries a triumphant emo-power-pop instrumental with an unhinged vocal delivery from Morris, bounding around excitedly as it blows Humans Pretending to Be Human right open. “Smoke Signals” brings the “grunge” part of “emo grunge” with a choppy, heavy-feeling alt-rock instrumental that Morris takes some time to really match (but he gets there, don’t worry). The similarly-minded emo-punk of “Figure Out” and “Sacrifice” might lull us into a false sense of…discomfort? (I guess?) but then Mud Whale decide to throw some bossa nova-influenced emo-pop at us with “Little Place” (it feels very natural!) and a random trap outro to the dream-punk-emo sprint of “Fluorescent” (it feels…less natural, but not necessarily in a bad way!). These detours are nice (and probably helped draw me, who doesn’t really write about this kind of music all that much, in to the album), but Mud Whale find their way back to dynamic, dramatic, emo/post-hardcore/punk rock to finish Humans Pretending to Be Human off with “Part of Me”. Mud Whale sound great when they’re sketching out the song in its first half, and when Morris and the band both roar as the song and album draw to a close, everything that’s gone into Humans Pretending to Be Human seems right at home with each other. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Ylayali, Good Energy Crystal, Gentleman Speaker, Megan from Work

The second Pressing Concerns of the week gathers up four quality under-the-radar LPs from the past month or so–specifically, new albums from Ylayali, Good Energy Crystal, Gentleman Speaker, and Megan from Work. And it’s the second great blog post in as many days, too; if you missed the Monday Pressing Concerns (featuring Sassyhiya, p:ano, Smoker Dad, and Blank Banker), check that one out as well.

Ylayali – Birdhouse in Conduit

Release date: October 16^th
Record label: Circle Change
Genre: Fuzz rock, experimental, lo-fi indie rock, lo-fi pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Birdhouse

When he’s not drumming in power pop group 2nd Grade, Philadelphia’s Francis Lyons makes music on his own as Ylayali, a prolific solo-ish project with an impressive back catalog of fuzzed-out, lo-fi indie rock. I wrote about the last Ylayali album, Separation, which came out on Dear Life Records back in 2022 and is probably a fairly accessible entry point into Lyons’ dreamy, layered music. Birdhouse in Conduit is Lyons’ newest album as Ylayali; it was quietly self-released by his own Circle Change imprint in October and does…something different than Separation. Lyons pieced this album together from 2022 to 2024 at home, mostly on his own but with a few regular collaborators popping up (Katie Bennett of Free Cake for Every Creature on vocals, Will Kennedy of 22° Halo on guitar/drum machine, Jack Washburn of Remember Sports on guitar, Ben Lovell and Jason Calhoun with some more esoteric contributions), and it’s Ylayali at their most exploratory. There’s still pop music to be found in Birdhouse in Conduit, but it sits alongside ambient and droning fuzz passages, experimental electronic instrumentation, and blasts of noise. None of this gets in the way of the “core” sound of Birdhouse in Conduit and is in fact a key part of it–distortion and static have always been important to Ylayali, and this record is no different in shaping these elements into something just as emotional-sounding as the indie and folk rock hidden intermittently between them.

Keep everything I just said in mind when embarking on the journey that is Birdhouse in Conduit’s first track, “Francis Funeral Home”. The majority of the nearly ten-minute song is a wall of distortion, and it’s only after the seven-minute mark that Lyons’ voice appears and whispers some lyrics as the track takes the form of a low-key but buzzing pop song. “Francis Funeral Home” is probably the most “difficult” part of Birdhouse in Conduit, but it’s hardly the only time Ylayali challenges us–even the more recognizably-structured songs that immediately follow it, “Devil Dog” and “Birdhouse”, both find some surprising moments in their five-minute allotted timeslots. The relatively clean “Birdhouse” is jarring in its own right, and between it, in “Joy” and (ironically) “Fuzz”, Lyons is just as successful at shaping quieter sounds. I’m not sure what I’d call the most “accessible” moment on Birdhouse in Conduit, although Lyons surprisingly saves some contenders for the album’s second half between “Shadow Play” (a gorgeous gliding synth-pop instrumental, albeit with very buried vocals from Lyons) and “Spacebar” (led by a hypnotic drumbeat and some subtle, uplifting instrumentalism). I can’t emphasize enough how rewarding it is to meet Birdhouse in Conduit where it’s at–Lyons is probably one of the most trustworthy people to make a record like this deserving of one’s full attention and patience, but it’s still surprising to hear this album take shape over time. (Bandcamp link)

Good Energy Crystal – Good Energy Crystal

Release date: November 8^th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Art punk, post-punk, no wave, egg punk, jazz-punk, lo-fi punk
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Welcome the Feeling

Evan Asher may be known to some readers of this blog as the drummer in Kalamazoo experimental/math rock group Memory Cell, but they’ve got a pretty impressive back catalog on their Bandcamp page, a pile-up of records from projects with names like A Really Big Horse, MILK KEG, and Evan11111. Their latest moniker is called Good Energy Crystal, which Asher has debuted with an eight-song self-titled album available via cassette. It appears that Asher plays everything we hear on Good Energy Crystal–the only outside contribution is vocals from Shady Bug’s Hannah Rainey on two songs. The stately, spindly indie rock of Memory Cell is nowhere to be found on Good Energy Crystal, which is some kind of weirdo lo-fi basement art punk record or something. It reminds me of weird jazz-inspired SST groups like Saccharine Trust–Asher’s flat, somewhat agitated-sounding monotone vocals are accompanied by messy, confrontational music (both Asher and their instruments sound just a bit too close for comfort)–it should be a fairly typical Midwestern post-punk/egg punk album, but there’s just something off about everything on Good Energy Crystal.

The off-kilter, slapdash jazz-punk sound marking Good Energy Crystal introduces itself in the record’s opening track, “The Swing of Things”–like in most of the album, the bass is way too prominent in the mix, the instrumentation swerves in and out of jazzy ditches, and Asher sounds rambling and angry about it. The song does in fact have something of a refrain though, and the guitar part in it is actually kind of catchy. Rainey shows up on the deconstructed, stop-start ballad “Good Energy Crystal”, duetting with Asher to sing inspirational lines like “I’m no good / I’ll never learn”, and she sticks around for the incorrect-sounding dance-funk corpse of “Me2You”. Good Energy Crystal is just getting started, though–things really get out there with the psychedelic ambient electro-pop vibes of “Head”, and the second half of the album even brings the closest thing Good Energy Crystal have to a punk song in “Days Grow Longer”. In the latter, Asher speeds up the music until it sounds like a facsimile of all those new-fangled post-punk/garage rock groups, all the while grousing “This new arrangement / Seems to be killing me” over the speedy, mechanical track. Good Energy Crystal is only about twenty-two minutes long, with the lackadaisical post-punk skittering of “Welcome the Feeling” closing the curtains of Good Energy Crystal’s first act. This kind of thing doesn’t have, let’s say, “universal” appeal, but Asher has a pretty interesting and unique take on it, and Good Energy Crystal is a worthwhile adventure for those of us who’re open to it. (Bandcamp link)

Gentleman Speaker – Hell and Somewhere Else

Release date: October 18^th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Indie pop, post-punk revival, power pop, emo-pop
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Rise of the Hens

I’m not sure if Saint Paul, Minnesota’s Gentleman Speaker are huge Dismemberment Plan fans or if the similarities I hear between the two bands primarily have to do with the similar tone of lead singer Tim Brecht’s vocals to the unmistakable voice of Travis Morrison on those canonical indie rock LPs. Compared to the D-Plan’s bizarre new wave/post-hardcore sound, Gentleman Speaker are more clearly indebted to guitar pop and even power pop, but I think the acts share a nervousness and occasional impishness in their songs. Hell and Somewhere Else is the band’s third LP since debuting with a self-titled record in 2019 and following it up with 2021’s The Well Between Continents, and the quartet (Brecht on vocals and guitar, Adam Fekete on guitar, Jim DeYoung on bass, and Brian Dendy on drums) infuse this one with stop-start alt-rock and post-punk catchiness, equal parts offbeat new wave and sprawling guitar-centric 90s indie rock in its sensibilities. Hell and Somewhere Else comes from a group of musicians with a clear vision of “pop music” on their minds, although Gentleman Speaker’s version of it seems to come from the worlds of emo-y catharsis and pop punk steam-letting-off (even as it’s not cleanly “part” of either of those genres).

It took me a little longer to get into Hell and Somewhere Else than one would normally expect because I think opening track “Anemic Alaska” threw me a little bit. Not that its minimal “showtune opening” sheen isn’t without its charms, but it didn’t exactly prepare me for what Gentleman Speaker proceeded to put together in the tracks immediately following it–specifically the emo-y power pop of “Rise of the Hens” (featuring a surprisingly strong bassline) and the strangely catchy “dark polka” vibes of “Scratch the Surface” (again, Dismemberment Plan shades in this one). Hell and Somewhere Else is a sneakily consistent album, with nearly every song making a case for the standout on any given listen–in the more “showy” department, we’ve got “Tire Worth Kicking”, which marries its lean verses with a huge group chorus, and “Solar System”, a toe-tapping anthem that’s Gentleman Speaker at their most “indie pop”. The chilly balladry of “Epiphany” is the closest thing that Hell and Somewhere Else gets to a “subtle” moment, and the tangled-up emo guitars of “Cat Like Me” falls somewhere in between this and the more aggressive numbers. Hard-working until the end, Gentleman Speaker close things out with a big finish in “Wait for Autumn”, a song featuring a go-for-broke, all-in refrain that only grows in size–it’s maybe the most memorable moment on Hell and Somewhere Else, though it certainly has competition. It’s not “too much”, but it is much. (Bandcamp link)

Megan from Work – Girl Suit

Release date: October 4^th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Pop punk, power pop
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: City Streets and Highways

A brand new pop punk band from New England with high-energy hooky songs reminiscent of early Charly Bliss, Chumped, and All Dogs–this is the good stuff. I’m talking about Megan from Work, a quartet from Manchester, New Hampshire led by vocalist/guitarist Megan Simon and rounded out by guitarist Luis Hernandez, bassist Joey Martin, and drummer Steve Aliperta. Aside from an acoustic demo EP last year, Girl Suit is the debut release from Megan from Work, and the group have put together a confident ten-song, twenty-five minute first statement. Simon called their band “soft punk” when they emailed me this album, a descriptor that Boston’s TIFFY also uses–it’s accurate, but Megan from Work favor a more robust power pop sound, with more power chords than dreamy pop rock to be found on Girl Suit. Simon’s vocals are urgent, piercing and almost emo–they’ve got pop punk showmanship down on their first record, and the rest of Megan from Work chug along with the strength to counterbalance their ringleader. Between the band name, album title, and their entire presentation, there’s an interesting overarching examination of identity and perception permeating the entire project–but most importantly, Girl Suit rocks.

Girl Suit has more than its fair share of jolts–there’s the desperate all-on assault of opening track “WAISTD”, the slightly more restrained but even more anxious “The PIMS” (that’s “pit in my stomach”), and the crunchy, power chord-heavy the title track (which climaxes with Simon memorably declaring “I’d rather be honest than consistent”). Girl Suit is just as strong in its second half, with “City Streets and Highways” and “Mouth Breathing” being just as strong power pop singles as anything else on the record (and the latter even features a wild, show-stopping finale to close the record out). The skill of the Megan from Work band is arguably more present on some of the record’s subtler numbers–a more solo-based project might turn “I’m in I Am” and “Real Life” into quieter ballads, but with Simon’s band punching up these tracks, they end up being just as impactful as the more straightforward pop punk anthems. Of course, Megan from Work also pull off the extra-showiness of “Mouth Breathing” just as impressively–really, just about all of the brief whirlwind that is Girl Suit is a strong argument for keeping an eye on Megan from Work from here on out. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Sassyhiya, p:ano, Smoker Dad, Blank Banker

There’s still a bunch of great new music to discuss here in mid-November. Today we’ve got new albums from Sassyhiya, p:ano, Smoker Dad, and Blank Banker to look at below; there’s something for everyone in these records, I’d say!

Sassyhiya – Take You Somewhere

Release date: November 8^th
Record label: Skep Wax
Genre: Post-punk, indie pop, twee, power pop, art punk
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: On Our Way

Over the past few years, Helen Skinner has played in the bands Basic Plumbing, Boys Forever, and Barry, with the latter of the three also featuring her real-life partner Kathy Wright. The two of them started making music together as Sassyhiya around the end of last decade, with a live EP and a demo EP (both released in 2022) eventually culminating in the addition of guitarist Neiloy Mookherjee and drummer Pablo Paganotto and the release of their debut album, Take You Somewhere. The first Sassyhiya album affirms that they’re right at home on their new label Skep Wax (Heavenly, Crumbs, Swansea Sound)–it’s just about everything one could want in a new British guitar pop band. It’s incredibly, unashamedly twee (how else could one possibly describe an album featuring odes to puppets, gardening, and the co-bandleaders’ pet cat?) that, at the same time, is a record made by a legitimate rock band that has an equal appreciation for arty, rhythmic post-punk. There’s even bits of dream pop, jangle pop, and psychedelia in Sassyhiya’s first dozen songs, and Wright and Skinner’s writing is equal parts immediately emotional and thoughtfully reserved.

It’s not a perfect division, but Take You Somewhere falls roughly into the “catchy, single-ready pop music first half, more laid-back second half” archetype. If you’re a fan of “indie pop” at all, odds are something in the first half-dozen tracks will hook you–and at the very least, you’re going to remember their perky queer-post-punk-pop tribute to “Kristen Stewart”, their handclap-featuring, lethally catchy tribute to Wright and Skinner’s cat “Crayon Potato” (“She doesn’t like you / She doesn’t like me / She only likes ocean fish”), or their outing at the “Puppet Museum” (“They’ve got Kermit and I want you to meet him”). Nonetheless, there’s a less cheery, more post-punk-friendly sound hinted at in the escape-from-society opening track “Boat Called Predator” and the wobbly “I Had a Thought”, and Sassyhiya really try their hand at stretching out their songs in the second half. The stop-start psychedelic pop of “Perennial” is a pretty big departure, and the hypnotizing guitar leads and locked-in rhythm section in “On Our Way” is another exciting new moment for Take You Somewhere. By the time we get to “Try Try Try”, the “Raincoats-esque” undercurrent isn’t really “under” anymore, with the song’s minimal, deconstructed indie pop/post-punk skeleton hitting just all the right notes. After floating through the B-side, Sassyihya rally for one last upbeat song in “You Can Give It (But You Can’t Take It)”–big guitars and a sharp drumbeat greet us for the grand finale. It’s Sassyhiya at their most “punk”, sneering “When you try to dish it out / You’re gonna get some right back,” right before the title line. But Sassyhiya do it their way–rather than transforming into a vehicle of raw aggression, they still sound limber, smart, and fun. (Bandcamp link)

p:ano – ba ba ba

Release date: September 17^th
Record label: C.O.Q.
Genre: Indie pop, soft rock, chamber pop, fuzz pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Mariko

Vancouver singer-songwriter Nicholas Krgovich has been busy pretty much this entire century–there’s his ever-expanding solo career, there’s his time in bands like No Kids and Gigi, and he’s also played with everyone from Dear Nora to Rose Melberg to Mount Eerie. Before any of that, though, there was p:ano, the band Krgovich formed with Larissa Loyva in 1999, when the two of them were still in high school. Eventually joined by Julia Chirka and Justin Kellam, the four of them made four albums from 2001 to 2008 before Loyva left and p:ano was retired (the remaining three members put out an EP and an album as No Kids). Zum Records, who put out the first two p:ano records, asked Krgovich if he’d contribute a song to an anniversary compilation last year, and this led to a p:ano reunion–first just for their Zum Audio Vol. 5 appearance, but eventually leading to an entirely new p:ano LP. The writing and instrumentation on ba ba ba is inspired by the members’ roots–they specifically mention formative indie pop/rock bands like Yo La Tengo, Belle & Sebastian, and The Magnetic Fields that were key in bonding the group together twenty years ago, and much of Krgovich’s writing is drawn from his experiences growing up in the Vancouver suburb of Coquitlam, where p:ano originally formed (I would have to guess that “C.O.Q. Records”, a new label seemingly launched to release ba ba ba, is similarly a nod to their hometown).

ba ba ba is a warmly familiar-sounding indie pop record, reaching ten songs and forty-five minutes in length by gliding along humbly but purposefully. The soft-touch guitar pop of Belle & Sebastian is probably the closest of those canonical influences to what p:ano sound like on this album, but Krgovich and Loyva’s lyrics (for the former) and vocals (for the both of them) have a grounded, suburban realism to them that feels pretty distinct from their influences (that’s the Coquitlam touch, I suppose). For a group of musicians who haven’t played together in quite some time, ba ba ba is impressively coherent–it’s best taken in as an entire record in my opinion, but there are some immediately obvious standouts. The fluttering, conversational indie pop of “Mariko” is an attention-grabber, while the Stereolab-evoking drone-pop of “Mikey’s New House” and the slightly fuzzed-out “Old Shoe” emphasize that p:ano is a fully-developed band, not just another Krgovich solo project. p:ano’s minimal, time-warp version of indie pop isn’t totally out of line with the rest of their Pacific Northwest peers, but it’s a fairly unique one in the midst of this scene, and it’s certainly strong enough to shine in 2024. (Bandcamp link)

Smoker Dad – Hotdog Highway

Release date: October 24^th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Country rock, alt-country, garage rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Part 2

Oh boy, we get to talk about a six-piece country rock band from Seattle called Smoker Dad today. After a few singles, the sextet (vocalist/guitarist Trevor Conway, vocalist/keyboardist Chris King, guitarist Teagen Conway, pedal steel guitarist Chris Costalupes, bassist Derek Luther, and drummer Adam Knowles) burst onto the scene with a self-titled album in 2022, and they’re back two years later with a sophomore LP entitled Hotdog Highway. Like many classic second albums, Hotdog Highway is greatly informed and shaped by Smoker Dad touring their first album on the road–even the title is a reference to the feeling evoked by seven or eight people crammed into a tour van rolling its way across the western United States. That’s all well and good, but it wouldn’t amount to much if Hotdog Highway didn’t rock–which it does, enthusiastically and expertly. This is hard-charging country rock-and-roll, road-tested and successfully captured by Garrett Reynolds at Seattle’s Electrokitty Sound Studio. In ten songs and forty minutes, Hotdog Highway never flags–every time Smoker Dad bust out a boozy country ballad, there’s a revved-up rocker coming just around the bend.

If you aren’t charmed by the alt-country party anthem “Part 2” that kicks off Hotdog Highway, then there’s no way Smoker Dad are the band for you. If it hits, though, there’s plenty more where that came from–for one, there’s the western garage rock speediness of “Armadillo” one track later, there’s the rambling rock and roll of “Rollin’ On”, and there’s the unhinged “Thinkin’ Bout Drinkin’” (if only the recent Japandroids song on the same subject was half as spirited as this). Like Smoker Dad on their last record, they dredge up one old blues song and turn it into a psychobilly freakout (this time it’s Kokomo Arnold’s “Milk Cow Blues”, which is excellently…well, I already used “unhinged”, but Smoker Dad are no less hinged on this one). In between these fiery bursts are the thinking person’s Smoker Dad songs, like “On My Mind” and “Tonight”, both of which push past four minutes, and “Smoke When I’m Drinkin’” (“I’m only happy when I’m stoned / And I only smoke when I’m drinkin’”, sounding like the world’s saddest logic puzzle). The final stretch of Hotdog Highway is the closest thing to a “breather”–“Smoke When I’m Drinkin’” and “Back Around” pull back just a bit, and the whole record closes with the title track, which has a bit of everything. There’s some bits of polished piano balladry, some smooth-ride country rock, and, of course, wild guitar meltdowns before “Hotdog Highway” comes to a close. Send Smoker Dad out on another cross country van trip; I want to see what they come back with next. (Bandcamp link)

Blank Banker – Intervallic Travails

Release date: September 17^th
Record label: Silent Co-op
Genre: 90s indie rock, noise rock, math rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Tollund Blues

Blank Banker are a band from Chicago made up of five noisy indie rock veterans–guitarist/vocalist Orion Layton, guitarist Andrew Rench, bassist Jon Strasheim, drummer Neal Markowski, and vocalist Ellen Layton, who’ve played in groups like Daddy’s Boy, Rectangle, Burn Permits, and Ancient Greeks between them. As it turns out, I’ve actually covered Blank Banker on this blog before, but I didn’t remember until Markowski reminded me in the email alerting me to this album (I called their version of “Don’t Let It Bring You Down” “lumbering” when I reviewed every single Neil Young cover compilation on Bandcamp). Blank Banker’s most recent album is also their first release since 2016, and Intervallic Travails certainly sounds like a group of 90s indie rock refugees that have washed up on the shores of Electrical Audio (where the LP was recorded by Jon San Paolo last September). The biography for the album helpfully references Polvo and Sonic Youth, and fans of those bands will indeed find plenty to appreciate in the controlled-chaos basement rock of Intervallic Travails. Blank Banker are all over the place, but they never don’t sound like they have a vision in their head–they never go full Beefheart, but they’re never a straight-up Crazy Horse tribute act, either.

Blank Banker is split between Chicago and Montana these days, but the geographical and temporal gap doesn’t keep Intervallic Travails from sounding like a symphonic wave of underground rock music for its entire thirty-one minutes. If you’re curious, Blank Banker tack on a brief description of what every song on the album is about at the end of their Bandcamp page (the blustering noise-punk of “Ientaculum” is “Cthulhu’s attitude toward climate change”, the quick-footed “Tollund Blues” covers “laying in a peat bog on purpose”), although what Intervallic Travails is really about to me is hearing a bunch of musicians swerve and careen through indie rock-as-a-second-language, ripping through PRF-core unadorned-rock-fests like “Theme from BB” and “Ientaculum”, turning up the math rock dials on “School” and “Can’t Even”, and even showing off a bit of tenderness in “Anna’s Laminate” (in between the hurricane-force guitar freakouts) and “Tomcats” (a quiet song that doesn’t even have a single tinnitus-inducing moment in it). As tranquil as “Tomcats” sounds, Blank Banker are a band that doesn’t need to use their inside voices as a shorthand for deepness and sentimentality–as closing track “Cairn” demonstrates, the group are just as easily able to take hold of rumbling, yes, lumbering noisy rock to pay tribute to a lost loved one. Intervallic Travails goes out with torrents of guitars lapsing into fuzz, as it should. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Mother of Earl – Extinction Burst

Big’n – End Comes Too Soon

Radio Free ABQ – Destination

Miners – A Healthy Future on Earth

OCS – Live at Permanent Records

The Moment of Nightfall & Tony Jay – Winter Dream

The Innocence Mission – Midwinter Swimmers

Hamburger – Beat Back the Ghouls

Various – CYLS Split Series #5

The Old Ceremony – Earthbound

Big Nobody – Charlie’s Alive

EggS – Crafted Achievement

Vista House – They’ll See Light

Unlettered – Five Mile Point

Orillia – Orillia

Luna Honey – Bound

Grey Factor – A Peak in the Signal: Live 1979-1980

Red Pants – Pale Shadows

DUNUMS – I Wasn’t That Thought

Bondo – Harmonica

Casual Technicians – Deeply Unworthy

Sexores – Historias de fr​í​o (Reissue)

Dogwood Gap – House Sounds

Morpho – Morpho Season

Bedtime Khal – Eraser

Dennis Bovell – Sufferer Sounds

Sunnsetter – Heaven Hang Over Me

Mud Whale – Humans Pretending to Be Human

Ylayali – Birdhouse in Conduit

Good Energy Crystal – Good Energy Crystal

Gentleman Speaker – Hell and Somewhere Else

Megan from Work – Girl Suit

Sassyhiya – Take You Somewhere

p:ano – ba ba ba

Smoker Dad – Hotdog Highway

Blank Banker – Intervallic Travails

Sexores – Historias de frío (Reissue)