Pressing Concerns: Birdie, Miserable chillers, Rated Eye, Lowmoon

In a classically eclectic Tuesday Pressing Concerns, we’ve got two new albums (from Rated Eye and Lowmoon), a new “mixtape” from Miserable chillers, and a reissue of a 90s indie pop classic from Birdie below. There’s definitely something here for you, the reader! If you missed yesterday’s post, featuring Nightshift, Sylvia Sawyer James, Goodbye Wudaokou, and Manners Manners, check that one out here.

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

Birdie – Some Dusty (Reissue)

Release date: July 26th
Record label: Slumberland
Genre: Indie pop, twee, baroque pop, chamber pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: One Two Five

The most recent reissues from longtime indie pop label Slumberland have included the sole full-length from Rose Melberg’s 90s San Francisco supergroup Go Sailor and a compilation from pre-Velvet Crush band The Springfields–two records qualifying as “legendary guitar pop” and setting the bar incredibly high for the imprint’s continuing crate-digging activities. At the very least, British band Birdie has the pedigree to match these high expectations–they were formed in the mid-nineties by Debsey Wykes (of essential indie pop/post-punk group Dolly Mixture) and Paul Kelly (of the underappreciated East Village, who also received a Slumberland reissue a few years ago) while they were both playing in Saint Etienne’s live band. Some Dusty, the first of the band’s two albums, came out in 1999 and featured string arrangements from The High Llamas’ Sean O’Hagan. The record’s sound really does place it at the end of the twentieth century, although that certainly doesn’t mean that its ten songs don’t sound just as fresh now, a quarter-century later. 

As “indie pop” and “twee” moved away from its relatively slapdash beginnings and into a more ornate, baroque period in the mid-to-late 90s, Wykes and Kelly’s backgrounds had more than prepared them to rise to the occasion. It’s not hard to see Birdie in the context of bands like O’Hagan’s High Llamas, but while other indie pop veterans (Everything But the Girl, Ivy, Stereolab) were embracing electronics to gesture towards a “post-genre” utopia, Birdie explored a more subtle and cautious version of this movement on Some Dusty.  Wykes and Kelly zero in on the precision and studiousness of their beloved 1960s pop, and Some Dusty makes the most sense as an attempt to update and interpret it using the streamlining found in “indie” guitar pop and the lushness afforded to the group via (then-) modern technology.

The word that comes to mind over and over listening to Some Dusty is “impressive”. Not in a “technically proficient but boring” kind of way–Birdie get around that trap by embracing some of the most warm and welcoming moments in pop music history–but in how the record’s accents and choices all take Some Dusty down the freshest possible paths. Wykes’ vocals can’t go unremarked upon–almost always somehow summoning up the approachability of twee pop, even when she’s matching the most professional moments of the music, while the instrumental choices (pianos set to “jaunty” on “Laugh”, horns laid-back on “Dusty Morning” and just a little on-edge when they surface in “Let Her Go”) are just as confoundingly natural. It’s tempting to call some of the more outwardly distinct moments on Some Dusty (“One Two Five”, whose rhythms accomplish the same thing as a lot of the more electronic-curious indie pop bands of the time without the bells and whistles, and the effortless college rock/C86 studies of “Port Sunlight” and “Folk Singer”) “boasts”, but that’s not really in the nature of Birdie. Even when Some Dusty was brand new, I have to imagine those listening to it recognized that Wykes and Kelly were making something built to last for the long haul. (Bandcamp link)

Miserable chillers – Great American Turn Off

Release date: June 21st
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Art pop, pop rock, soft rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Done Dancing

Who are Miserable chillers? Well, it’s a project let by one person–Miguel Gallego, a New Jersey-originating, Brooklyn-based musician who’s been making music under the name for at least a decade. The Miserable chillers discography seems to be rather sprawling and varied–there are “proper” albums released on a “real” label, self-released Bandcamp-only records, music made alone and with collaborators. The latest Miserable chillers release has been given the “mixtape” designation by Gallego, and while it’s “new” to us, some of the material here has been gestating for up to six years. Great American Turn Off is an exercise of sorts–Gallego gave himself the task of completing a bunch of long-unfinished songs, and the fourteen-song mixtape (initially released only on YouTube and via Gallego’s website, both as a tribute to Cindy Lee and as a way of distinguishing it from more cohesive, “official” Miserable chillers records) is what he ended up with as a result. Unsurprisingly, Great American Turn Off is an eclectic listen, but Gallego is more or less operating in the world of vintage “studio pop” here, pulling together soft rock, sophisti-pop, psych pop, and yacht rock of yore to make rich-sounding pop compositions.

If you’re thinking, “well, that kind of sounds like the 80s-influenced art pop revival currently being spearheaded by folks like Sun Kin’s Kabir Kumar”, you wouldn’t be far off–the two have collaborated together, and Kumar is one of the many featured vocalists on Great American Turn Off (Kumar sings “After the Show”, and Silent Light’s Alex Robertson, Spirit Night’s Dylan Balliet, and Kate Ehrenberg are among the others who contribute vocals to the mixtape). Of course, Gallego is the sole writer of thirteen of these fourteen songs, and Great American Turn Off is able to make something quite strong out of its stable of stars due to his guiding hand. Miserable chillers flit between dutifully-engineered polished pop throwbacks and more offbeat fare that pushes against these boundaries, with both styles being rich avenues of exploration for Gallego and his collaborators. The roots-tinged “The Shaft” and Ehrenberg’s simple guitar pop-led “Journeying with Julian” set up the house of cards only for alien funk rock and Robertson’s manipulated vocals to knock them down in “Pastime”. Great American Turn Off skips through tons of ideas in forty minutes, but it’s worth taking it in actively to key in on some later highlights, like the low-key, slightly-dangerous-sounding “Get the World Off My Ass”, the Beach Boys-y slow burn of “Done Dancing”, and the easy-listening soft-country of closing track “Go West Boys”. Great American Turn Off doesn’t have to be an “album”; it’s got more than enough going on on its own. (Bandcamp link)

Rated Eye – Rated Eye

Release date: May 10th
Record label: Wax Donut
Genre: Noise rock, art punk, no wave, punk blues
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Pig’s Eye

Here’s something that I know will interest a small subset of blog readers–a new obscure, avant-garden noise rock band from an American Rust Belt city. Rated Eye are a Pittsburgh-based quartet featuring musicians who’ve played in several other local bands (Microwaves, Night Vapor, Brown Angel, The 1985), but their self-titled debut album (released on vinyl via upstart Wax Donut Records) is their first release together. Vocalist Albert C. Hall, guitarist Anthony Ambroso, bassist Dan Tomko, and drummer John Roman make a distinctly American blend of ugly underground rock music, drawing from both “highbrow” (no wave, jazz) and “vulgar” (hard rock, sludge) influences to create a virtuosic assault that would’ve been right at home between the Butthole Surfers and Killdozer during their shared time on Touch & Go Records. Like many great noise rock records, the eight-song, twenty-seven-minute Rated Eye is marked by four disparate musicians forming some kind of twisted harmony on equal footing–Ambroso’s showy, fiery classic rock guitar soloing, Tomko’s caveman-level low-end, Roman’s reliable time-keeping, and Hall’s just-as-primal delivery, liable to jump from a mutter to a howl to a growl at any given moment.

“Burn Barrel” is Rated Eye’s version of an “atmospheric” opener, an eerie utilization of empty space and light math rock touches before it eventually smolders in its second half. “Mia Demon II” is the moment where Rated Eye really starts to eat away at itself, with the guitar flaring up like a skin condition and the rhythm section locking into something hypnotic and dangerous-sounding, and then all hell breaks loose in “Pig’s Eye”, a piece of punchy-but-sludgy Americana punk-blues. In that song, we hear Ambroso running towards AOR guitarplay while Hall starts sounding more and more like a hardcore frontperson, creating a massive cord of tension between them. The second half of Rated Eye (obviously) offers no relief–the drums and the guitars seem to be trying to outdo each other throughout “The Crying Man”, “Economy Boro” lurches through a particularly robust rhythm section workout while Hall rumbles about “a deer running full speed into the plate glass of a bank”.  There is nothing particularly “accessible” on Rated Eye, but “Miss Bliss” is a neat sub-three-minute summation of the band’s sound, ticking off guitar heroics, ironclad rhythms, and a relatively dynamic vocal performance from Hall before it bows out. Still, one probably will have a sense of whether Rated Eye is “for them” by the midpoint of “Burn Barrel”, where the post-rock guitars give way to Hall grunting about self-immolation amongst garbage and cultural detritus. This album is for those who arrive there and say, “well, let’s hear them out”. (Bandcamp link)

Lowmoon – Monochrome

Release date: June 28th
Record label: Safe Suburban Home
Genre: Lo-fi pop, post-punk, dream pop
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Closer

Mikey Wilson is a British musician who put out a record on Safe Suburban Home back in 2022 as one-half of York duo Kimber. His latest project, Lowmoon, is an entirely DIY affair–Wilson wrote, performed, produced, mixed, and mastered Monochrome, his debut under the name, all on his own. As Lowmoon, Wilson gravitates toward a recognizable sub-genre of lo-fi guitar pop music–a reverb-y, melancholic version that pulls heavily from the “indie” and “alternative” music of the 1980s. Monochrome chews up and spits out post-punk, jangle pop, and dream pop, leaning on a distinct combination of melodic New Order-esque chorused basslines, reverb-drenched guitar lines, utilitarian drum machines, and breathy vocals. Wilson is hardly the only person out there making such music in 2024–I’ve written about bands like The Death of Pop, Old Moon, and Lost Film that also run in these circles, and you can find plenty of playlists out there full of modern bands reared on The Cleaners from Venus and the best of the Captured Tracks catalog. Do we really need another eight-song, twenty-minute cassette of this kind of music? Well, no, in the same way we don’t “need” electricity or reliable internet access–but I’d rather live in a world with it.

Monochrome doesn’t waste any time establishing just what Mikey Wilson has in store for us with the debut Lowmoon record–the sparkling guitars are present from the get-go of opening track “Closer”, within fifteen seconds the Roland TR-505 is rolling along and Wilson’s already doing Peter Hook heroics, and the vocals (clearly not Wilson’s focal point, but not quite “afterthought” either) finally show up at about thirty seconds. From that moment forward, the core sound of Monochrome is effectively set–don’t expect any major detours. Nevertheless, Wilson tinkers with the “post-punk” and “new romantic” dials and knobs throughout “Photograph” and “Decay”, and the title track lets the shining guitars take the center stage even more so than normal. “1997” and “Monday Night” might be a little more low-key, “Summers Gone” a little more peppy, but the second half of Monochrome mirrors the first half nicely, even to the point where the final track on the tape (“Book Club”) is just an effective distillation of Lowmoon’s sound as “Closer” is. There’ll be more bedroom pop singer-songwriters with chorus pedals coming down the line, I’m sure (some of them might even name their solo project a phrase that uses the word “moon”), but the light from Monochrome is illuminating on its own for the moment. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Nightshift, Sylvia Sawyer James, Goodbye Wudaokou, Manners Manners

Taking us into the homestretch of July in style, the Monday Pressing Concerns for this week looks at three albums that came out last week (LPs from Nightshift, Sylvia Sawyer James, and Manners Manners) and a record from last month (an album from Goodbye Wudaokou). A classic blog post!

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

Nightshift – Homosapien

Release date: July 26th
Record label: Trouble in Mind
Genre: Post-punk, indie pop, art punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Y.T. Tutorial

I’ve been charting the course of Glasgow post-punk/art rock group Nightshift since the early days of this blog–we joined them at the beginning of 2021 with the release of Zöe, their second LP and first for Trouble in Mind, then checked in on them with Made of the Earth, a tape of “outtakes and unreleased tunes”, later the next year. At the time, a third proper Nightshift album was said to be imminent, but Homosapien didn’t arrive until the middle of 2024–delays happen, of course, and I wouldn’t have bothered remarking on it if the band hadn’t singled out significant lineup changes as the reason the record took so long to complete. Band co-founder David Campbell has left the group, as has multi-instrumentalist Georgia Harris–the trio of Eothen Stearn, Andrew Doig (also of Dancer), and Chris White are still present, but the latter of the three has switched from drums to guitar, making room for new member Rob Alexander to pick it up on percussion. With all of that in mind (not to mention the passing of three years), it’s not surprising that Homosapien brings some changes for the band–they’re hardly unrecognizable, but there’s a palpable shift from an emphasis on Young Marble Giants/Marine Girls-esque minimal rhythmic guitar pop to a clearer embrace of a fuller, busier, and electric (but still quite catchy) experimental/art rock sound.

“Crystal Ball”, Homosapien’s introductory track, is a post-punk-pop mission statement, a song that begins with a simple, satisfying guitar riff–but rather than merely meditating on it, Nightshift add all kinds of sonic interjections across its three minutes, and even break out some cathartic guitar soloing in the song’s second half. Plenty of songs on Homosapien give off reminders of the old Nightshift–the hypnotic post-punk of “Sure Look”, the synth-led mid-tempo wanderings of “S.U.V.”, the psychedelic folk soundscape of “Cut”–but the quartet find electricity in them that helps them slot in nicely with Nightshift’s newer, louder sound (found in the deconstructed 60s garage rock of “Together We Roll” and the noise pop explosion of “Your Good Self”, among others). Some of the most energetic moments on Homosapien come towards its end–like “Y.T. Tutorial”, a weird but incredibly inspired piece of prog-pop that stitches together a few different sections of muddled, dangerous-sounding rock and roll, a soaring, Screaming Females-esque refrain, and a breezy, pastoral bridge, or the record’s closing anthem, “Crush”. Alexander gets a workout (relatively speaking) on the latter song–Nightshift are as “brisk” as they’ve ever been on the track, but just when it seems like the song is going to burst into something really wild, it descends into synths and accordions. The quartet pull together for one last big swing, however–before this LP, I wouldn’t have thought Nightshift to be the kind of band to end a record like that, but it makes perfect sense for Homosapien. (Bandcamp link)

Sylvia Sawyer James – Sylvia Sawyer James

Release date: July 26th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Bedroom folk, psychedelic folk, lo-fi
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Anonymous

Sylvia Sawyer James is a bedroom folk singer-songwriter who grew up in Portland, Oregon and is currently based out of Chicago, where she seems to have recorded and released the bulk of her solo material. She put out an album called SON in 2020 and an EP called Haiku the year afterwards, and songs that would eventually end up on her next album have been trickling out over the past couple of years. Self-titled and clocking in at 74 minutes in length, Sylvia Sawyer James is a massive introduction to an as-of-yet unknown talent, one that comes clearly into focus by the time its eighteen tracks have made their marks. James is a “Pacific Northwest folk singer” in the expansive, cavernous Phil Elverum tradition, recalling more recent acts like Ther, Leor Miller’s Fear of Her Own Desire, and Jordaan Mason at various points on her latest record. Although James does have an experimental/noise music background, Sylvia Sawyer James is actually on the starker end of the spectrum, largely built from acoustic guitars with occasional violin and banjo accompaniments.

Sylvia Sawyer James is at least partially about James’ gender transition, and digging through the tome of her lyrics turns up several excellent crystallizations of the subject (most explicitly in “Home (Eli)”, where she sings “I was a son / And now I’m your sister,” to her titular sibling, but lines like “Falling awake at the hospital / I fucked up my body’s a vehicle,” in “Anonymous” and “I lost my job because I couldn’t write my name,” in “Connectome” invite such readings as well). These moments are best experienced in the midst of sitting down and taking in Sylvia Sawyer James as a whole, I think–although there are certainly embellishments throughout the album, the foundation of it is “folk-y” enough that it almost feels like witnessing someone giving everything they’ve got (with a bit of help) in a single live performance. The first proper song on the record, “Barrier”, is less of an open ball of emotion than the song that follows it, “Prayers to a Turning Page”, but both are completely engrossing folk songs–and even when “Beads (A Bound)” steers the album into hushed tones, James hardly goes quietly. This is one of the records where my typical 400-odd word capsules aren’t equipped to fully capture everything that’s going on in it–more words than that could easily be devoted to delving into second-half highlight “The Psychlops Song”, or on the eight-minute, reverberating “Germs”–but it’s worth snagging a piece of it to present to you here, just as Sylvia Sawyer James feels like an excerpt from something even larger. Of course, it’s plenty substantial on its own. (Bandcamp link)

Goodbye Wudaokou – Mirror Skies

Release date: June 14th
Record label: YaoYiZhen
Genre: Indie pop, dream pop, new wave, college rock, post-punk
Formats: CD, digital
Pull Track: Autumn Feelings

Manchester’s Mat Mills is a lifelong musician–he played in a post-rock band as a teenager, and continued writing and playing music as a solo artist after he moved to China in the 2000s. Despite all this, Mills’ musical activity never quite translated towards making records–making it so that, after an extended hiatus from music, Mirror Skies is actually his debut album. The first album from Goodbye Wudaokou was written, played, and recorded entirely by Mills from 2021 to 2024 at his home, and though he describes it as “very lofi”, it’s about as clean and polished as it could be. Once again living in Manchester with a partner and two children, the Mills of Mirror Skies is someone aware of the passing of time (perhaps developing a keener sense of it through the writing of this album), and these ten songs reflect this. This certainly goes for Mills’ lyrics (and even the cover of the record), but I’m also thinking of the sound of Mirror Skies–while plenty of “bedroom rock” albums opt for “streamlined” and “sparse”, Mills isn’t afraid of lengthy instrumental passages and relatively ornate arrangements as he pursues a stately guitar pop sound, one that incorporates new wave, post-punk, dream pop, and vintage 1980s indie pop.

Released via CD, Mirror Skies’ ten songs balloon to fifty minutes in length, with Mills trusting the listener to hang on while he expands each track to its fullest extent. Not that Goodbye Wudaokou ever pursue a “difficult listen”–both Mills’ even-keeled vocals and the bright instrumentals remain incredibly friendly, both in the record’s more languid moments (like the later-period New Order-y “oasis pop” of opening track “Never Let Me Go”) or the more upbeat ones (the post-punk-jangle-pop “New Century Regrets” and the ever-so-slightly-distorted “Icy Black”). Glancing at the songs’ titles, one can already start piecing together some of Mirror Skies’ overarching threads (“New Century Regrets”, “Beautiful Nostalgia”, “Wasted Years”), but this overview doesn’t exactly do justice to what Mills is doing on a micro level for each song, from the fearless embrace of electronic elements in “Dark Wave / In Your Arms” to the closing trio of songs, which all surprisingly embrace inventive minimalism in different ways. The lush synth/dream pop of “Autumn Feelings”, the hushed slowcore of “Sun into Sky”, and the plainspoken seven-minute final track “Wasted Years” ensure that Mirror Skies trails off in completely different territory than in which it began. I wouldn’t expect less from a debut record this long in the making. (Bandcamp link)

Manners Manners – I Held Their Eyes, I Kissed Them All

Release date: July 26th
Record label: 20/20
Genre: 90s indie rock, noise pop, post-punk
Formats: CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Yr Well

Vocalist/guitarist J. Pinder, vocalist/drummer H.S. Sweet, and bassist Jes Welter debuted as Manners Manners back in 2016 with a three-song demo; their output since that point has included Guided by Voices and Squeeze covers, as well as 2018’s First in Line EP, recorded by J. Robbins in the trio’s hometown of Baltimore. Robbins is once again at the helm for I Held Their Eyes, I Kissed Them All, a seven-song LP that’s the group’s most substantial release yet. Although it’s a short debut album, I Held Their Eyes… is an ambitious one–for one, it sounds huge, and the band conjure up everything from post-punk to 90s-style indie rock to garage rock to indie pop to folk rock across the record. Self-described “queer adults of power pop”, Manners Manners assert themselves as both wide-eyed pop believers and indie rock veterans on I Held Their Eyes…, an album that sparkles and shines but rejects superficiality entirely, encouraging those listening to listen to and sift through everything below the gleaming surface.

After the loose-feeling, dreamy alt-country introduction of “Big Outdoor Party”, “Cinemattachine” finds Manners Manners announcing themselves loudly and aggressively with a sleek piece of post-Sleater-Kinney-punk-pop that also contains more than a bit of “I see why they feel a kinship with J. Robbins” energy, too. The more outwardly pop-bonafide-proving tracks are coming up soon afterwards–“Wallpaper” is a new take on an old classic (straightforward pop melodies colliding with big electric guitars), the breezy “Aperture” reaches back towards vintage guitar-based indie pop in both its instrumental and vocals, and “Straight Cost of Living” is bouncy and snappy from the wink of its title on down. On all of these songs, Pinder and Sweet are at the center of the recordings–both of them are expertly conversational frontpeople. The vocals on single “Yr Well” similarly stay on top of the backing music, but the roaring, dramatic indie rock of that song is the closest that Manners Manners come to crashing onshore–aided by three members of the band $100 Girlfriend on guitar, synthesizer, and vocals, the band thunders through an overwhelming instrumental that only grows and grows. Nonetheless, the chorus comes through clearly: “I have been to your well, and it only flows backwards, upside-down, and to itself”. With the gale force winds of the music behind it, the song’s central rebuke is made all the more strong by its intangibility and opacity. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Ben Seretan, Robber Robber, Immortal Nightbody, Little Mystery

Hey there everyone, welcome to the Thursday Pressing Concerns! We’ve got an eclectic group of albums that are coming out tomorrow, June 26th, below for you to check out: new LPs from Ben Seretan, Robber Robber, and Little Mystery, and a new EP from Immortal Nightbody. It’s been a full week, so if you missed Monday’s post (featuring La Bonte, Sad Eyed Beatniks, Friends of the Road, and In-Sides) or Tuesday’s (featuring Brother of Monday, Wes Tirey, Exedo, and Taxidermy), be sure to check those out, too.

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

Ben Seretan – Allora

Release date: July 26th
Record label: Tiny Engines
Genre: Art rock, psychedelic rock, noise pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: New Air

Upstate New York musician Ben Seretan has released a lot of music, much in the realms of ambient, drone, and improvisational (such as 2018’s My Life’s Work and 2022’s Cicada Waves). Nevertheless, it’s been four years since Seretan’s last “rock” record, 2020’s Youth Pastoral, an excellent collection of folk-tinged, wide-eyed indie rock (back when I was still able to sum up albums in two sentences, it made my favorite records of the year list). Allora returns Seretan to the world of “normal” indie rock, although it actually has roots from before Youth Pastoral even came out–it was recorded by Seretan, bassist Nico Hedley, and drummer Dan Knishkowy (of Adeline Hotel) in Italy over three days in 2019 after the collapse of a European tour the trio had booked. Allora is an energetic and forceful return–compared to the relatively delicate Youth Pastoral, Seretan and his band sound much more immediate here, with the rockers aiming louder and higher and the quieter moments displaying visible seams. Even though the embrace of electric rock music is the most immediately noticeable feature of Allora, it’s just as impressive that Seretan, Hedley, and Knishkowy still find ways to inject the singer-songwriter’s spacey, experimental side into their “power trio album”.

The gauntlet is thrown down instantly as Allora opens with the eight-minute behemoth “New Air”, a massive piece of experimental, rhythmic rock and roll that bursts out of the first sixty seconds of static and doesn’t let go. I compared Seretan’s last album to Pedro the Lion; “New Air” sounds more like Oneida than anything by David Bazan. The guitars are swung about like lethal weapons, the rhythm section is in a krautrock-like groove, and Seretan himself is the confident, calm center of the storm. “Climb the Ladder” almost sounds like the song’s aftermath at first–rather than trying to top “New Air”, Seretan takes the track the other direction, sketching a nebulous, floating song that doesn’t congeal until the grand psych-rock finale. Every one of Allora’s seven tracks feels essential–the haze of “Small Times” is a dust cloud of beauty, eventually parting to reveal the stark, guitar-led “Jubilation Blues”, and closing track “Every Morning Is a” repurposes the frantic repetition found at the end of “Climb the Ladder” for a peaceful hymn. There’s even a second eight-minute towering rock and roll anthem in the form of “Free”, a blistering collection of guitar solos and ragged glory that reminded me that Seretan absolutely bodied Neil Young & Crazy Horse’s “Fuckin’ Up” for a benefit compilation a few years ago. Halfway through “Free”, its reign of blows momentarily ceases and a squealing, free-jazz saxophone begins to fight for control of the song with Seretan (who continues to sing amidst the squall). Eventually, “Free” begins its ascent to the cosmos again, but cautiously at first. Seretan, Hedley, and  Knishkowy aren’t trying to pretend that intermission never happened; they’re carrying it with them. (Bandcamp link)

Robber Robber – Wild Guess

Release date: July 26th
Record label: Strange View
Genre: Post-punk, art rock, noise rock, no wave
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: How We Ball

Wild Guess, the debut album from Robber Robber, is unpredictable and kinetic in a familiar-feeling way. The quartet aim high on their first LP and come away with a mix of driven post-punk, arty experimental rock, and even a bit of garage rock energy that feels very “New York indie rock”. Of course, Robber Robber are actually from Burlington, Vermont (a city that’s actually been doing quite well for itself music-wise as of late between Lily Seabird, Dari Bay, and Greg Freeman), but that doesn’t stop Wild Guess from feeling like a vintage metropolitan rock record (maybe it’s the proximity to Montreal, actually). Robber Robber trace their roots back to 2017, when they began as a collaboration between drummer/vocalist Zack James and guitarist/vocalist Nina Cates, the band’s two songwriters. After a couple of EPs in 2019 and 2021, guitarist Will Krulak and bassist Carney Hemler joined up for Wild Guess, a massive (loosely) post-punk statement of an album suggesting that Cates and James have both a wealth of ideas and ample ways to realize them. Co-engineered by Urian Hackney and Benny Yurco, Wild Guess certainly sounds like a well-disciplined rock band–the four move in lockstep, covering plenty of ground but remaining tightly controlled.

The opening of Wild Guess isn’t unfriendly per se, but Robber Robber do ask you to hang onto your hat as they take themselves on a wild test drive. “Intro (Letter from the Other Side of the Operation)” is brief but still a full song, a boring (the tunneling version of the word, not the other one) ninety-second post-punk eardrum buzz, while “Seven Houses” is a straight-up pummeling wall of sound, hammering drums trying their best to be heard over the shoegaze-punk instrumental, and “Mouth” is so cool and collected that it doesn’t need anything as basic as “conventional song structure”. If Robber Robber are attempting to prove their Sonic Youth and Blonde Redhead bona fides, they do it sounding anything but tedious–and the energy only expands from the opening stretch. Although “Backup Plan” leans heavily on rhythms, it’s the most accessible song on the record yet–and we’re off to the races from then on between the giddy garage rock of “How We Ball”, the kitchen-sink pop rock of “Dial Tone”, and the psychedelic but sturdy “Sea or War”. Wild Guess’ six-minute closing track “Machine Wall” appropriately leans into the industrial and mechanical to end things, but at the same time, as the assembly line drums march towards their finish, dramatic pianos and guitars accompany them. Robber Robber know how to build a strong foundation, but they can’t stand to leave it relatively bare for long. (Bandcamp link)

Immortal Nightbody – Passion Scale

Release date: July 26th
Record label: RRNR/DEATHDREAM
Genre: Lo-fi indie rock, bedroom rock, experimental rap, post-punk, psych-rap
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Break My Own Heart

Sim Jackson was born in Mississippi and grew up in southern California, where they still live today. At some point earlier this century, Jackson began playing in punk bands, including playing guitar and singing in The Vivids (they put out some singles in the early 2010s and an LP in 2018). During the pandemic, Jackson debuted a new solo project called Immortal Nightbody, a conscious attempt by the musician to merge several personal sonic touchstones: post-punk, hip-hop, shoegaze, and house/techno music. That sounds ambitious, but Jackson has set to work realizing it, amassing an impressive number of EPs, singles, and cassettes on their Bandcamp page since 2020. The most recent Immortal Nightbody record is a nine-song, twenty-six minute EP called Passion Scale, and it manages to cram a whole lot into that timeframe while still sounding natural and straightforward. An experimental rap record made with the attitude of a lo-fi indie rocker (or vice versa), Passion Scale balances a loose, casual feeling with undeniably tight pop songwriting. It’s certainly a unique-sounding record, jumping from one genre to another with just enough connecting thread to pull together a distinct “Immortal Nightbody sound”.

Opening track “Break My Own Heart” is a strong entrant into the “experimental rap” side of Immortal Nightbody–Jackson comes out of the gate with a militant delivery as drum machines pound alongside them. Synth accents attempt to distort the crystal-clear foundation of the song, and by the end of the track things are much more muddled (in a pleasing way). Hopefully you weren’t expecting Passion Scale to repeat itself, though, because the next song–“Was Yours Now Mine”–veers hard into a full-scale embrace of post-punk, dance-punk, and light funk that’s much closer to the world of Talking Heads and A Certain Ratio. “Throwing Shade”, “Radio Darkside”, and “Can’t Swat a Storm” all find Immortal Nightbody back in the world of rap and even R&B, but of varying stripes– “Throwing Shade” is relatively bright, synth-shaded pop rap, “Radio Darkside” is (appropriately) darker but still danceable, while “Can’t Swat a Storm” is an intriguing psychedelic ballad. Hardly running out of steam, the record’s second half is marked by “Universe 25” (a thumping piece of retro-rap that surprisingly fits right in), “Slide or Die” (which finds the unlikely midpoint between rap and lo-fi guitar pop), and “If I Ever Loved You Once” (a pretty, reverberating lo-fi ballad that plays the record out enjoyably). You’ll find something to enjoy on Passion Scale regardless, but the best move is to hand the wheel over to Immortal Nightbody and ride along. (Bandcamp link)

Little Mystery – Little Mystery

Release date: July 26th
Record label: Ruination
Genre: Folk rock, indie pop, folk pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Shame

Little Mystery is Ivy Meissner, a Bay Area-originating, New York-based singer-songwriter who’s been making music in her adopted home for a while now (she put out an album under her own name in 2016). Earlier this year, she debuted Little Mystery and linked up with Ruination Record Co., a label that’s home to plenty of folk and indie rock of both the “experimental” and “pop-friendly” varieties (and everything in between). As Little Mystery, Meissner hews towards the latter of the two categories, playing a rich, polished version of rock music that recalls the singer-songwriters of the 1970s and vintage folk rock with a confident voice separating it from a lot of the “retro”-tinged indie folk of the present day. Meissner worked with a long list of collaborators to fully realize the sound of Little Mystery (more than a half-dozen different musicians contributed strings or brass to the record), but the core Little Mystery band is Meissner, guitarist Adam Brisbin, drummer Connor Parks, bassist Ian Davis, and multi-instrumentalist Julian Cubillos (a longtime Meissner collaborator who also co-produced the album).

So much of the chemistry and writing that marks Little Mystery is crystallized by the album’s first two songs, an undeniably captivating first impression. We have “Eye of the Storm”, the appropriately low-key opening track, a smart pop ballad that’s a clear showcase for Meissner’s vocals but also isn’t afraid to let the guitars and even percussion have their moments in the sun as well. “Shame” follows with an upbeat folk rock tune, once again carried by Meisnner as a vocalist (who rises to the occasion and displays a much more dynamic singing style than the instrumental asked of her in “Eye of the Storm”) and a backing band performance that actually lets loose a bit as the song expands before our ears. Little Mystery the rock and roll band is deployed strategically from then on out, but always welcomely–on “I’m So Tired”, which adopts a strut contrasting with the titular message from Meisnner, and “Orbit”, erected on both ends of the song to give it just a bit more drama and gravitas. Elsewhere on Little Mystery, we’re treated to a more delicate but still rich sound, whether that’s the strings and horns shining up soft rockers like “As It Seems” and “Easy” or the percussionless mid-record centerpiece “Burning Blue”. Meisnner has referred to Little Mystery as her “proper debut”, a designation that almost feels like cheating, as the evenness and craft of this music betray an experienced touch. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Brother of Monday, Wes Tirey, Exedo, Taxidermy

This Tuesday, Pressing Concerns is offering up four great records from the past month or so: new LPs from Brother of Monday, Wes Tirey, and Exedo, and a new EP from Taxidermy. If you like lo-fi power pop, even lower-fi folk, goth-tinged post-punk, and math-y noise rock, I encourage you to keep reading. And if you missed yesterday’s blog post, featuring La Bonte, Sad Eyed Beatniks, Friends of the Road, and In-Sides, check that one out here.

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

Brother of Monday – Humdinger

Release date: June 28th
Record label: Wilbur & Moore
Genre: Lo-fi indie rock, power pop, jangle pop
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Humdinger

It’s a special thing to hear an album that actually sounds like early Guided by Voices. It’s not hard to make an album “inspired by” Guided by Voices, of course–lo-fi recordings, sugary vocal melodies, some moments of real rock and roll beamed through the four-tracks–but Newark, Delaware’s Peter Bothum, aka Brother of Monday, doesn’t just stop at these cosmetic and superficial similarities. Bothum’s mostly-solo project debuted last year with a self-titled record (eventually released on CD by his current label, Wilbur & Moore) that doled out noisy, lo-fi power pop with a calm in the center of the chaos in the form of Bothum’s melodic, trebly vocals. Humdinger, the second Brother of Monday record, arrives eleven months later, and while it cleans up some of the material at the writing level (more earnestly embracing pop at the center and pushing the noise to the periphery), these dozen songs are just as lo-fi in their attitude. Mastered by longtime Robert Pollard collaborator Todd Tobias, Humdinger captures the basement melancholy of pre-Propeller Guided by Voices in Bothum’s songwriting, and the guitars push against their lo-fi recording but never in a way that makes it feel anything but the appropriate vehicle for the material.

I was going to say that Brother of Monday reminds me of fellow lo-fi GBV-evoking acolyte Graham Repulski, and it turns out I was onto something here–Repulski and Bothum actually play together in the band Von Hayes. It can’t be overstated just how potent the melodies on every song on Humdinger feel, like they were unearthed from an old Pollard demo tape (or, perhaps, one of his 60s pop influences). Opening track “Bro Inn” begins with the winning hook and makes the inspired choice to push it with a delirious acoustic-folk-pounding instrumental, while “Hunting Redemption” and “Kitteridge Farms” reaffirm Bothum’s ability to nail more “traditional”-sounding basement college rock. “Book of Buck” leans heavily on letting the guitar do the talking (as it should–it’s incredibly animated and welcoming), while the just guitar-and-vocals recording of the title track captures the pastoral urgency of some of Pollard’s most intimate Suitcase offerings. If you wanted to be bothered that “Better Done Than Good” nicks a bit of the vocal melody from “The Official Ironmen Rally Song”, I suppose you could, but the track is hardly a carbon copy, and one could just as easily choose to focus on the unique, spirited lo-fi pop thrashing the album explores in the second half (“Every Circle Can Have Two Centers”, “Buddy Crunch”) or its bizarre drum-machine closing in “Web”. “Web” is the one song on the album that doesn’t sound even really close to Self-Inflicted Aerial Nostalgia–but it does sound like Brother of Monday. (Bandcamp link)

Wes Tirey – Sings Selected Works of Billy the Kid

Release date: July 19th
Record label: Sun Cru
Genre: Folk, spoken word
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Work 2

Singer-songwriter Wes Tirey was born and raised near Dayton, Ohio, where he began his music career before he moved to his current home of Asheville, North Carolina. Over the past decade or so, Tirey has made a space for himself as a prolific member of the wider world of experimental/“cosmic” folk and country music, releasing records on labels like Dear Life, Orange Milk, and Scissor Tail and playing shows and/or collaborating with Shane Parish, Daniel Bachman, and Steve Gunn. Tirey’s latest record is a typically inspired endeavor–an album-length folk interpretation of selections from The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, the 1970 “experimental novel” about the titular figure from Canadian/Sri Lanken writer and poet Michael Ondaatje. Much like the varied nature of the material in the original novel, Wes Tirey Sings Selected Works of Billy the Kid presents itself from a few different angles, featuring a spoken word piece, timeless-sounding “traditional” folk songs, and a pair of instrumentals. Tirey sings and plays everything one hears on Sings Selected Works of Billy the Kid–his delicate guitar playing and haunting vocals have a somewhat muffled, “found” or “resurfaced” quality to them, appropriate for a collection explicitly placing itself in the lineage of an American story that’s been retold and mythologized to the point of being unrecognizable from its source.

This isn’t to say that Sings Selected Works of Billy the Kid is too obscure or garbled to interpret, however–far from it, in fact. From the opening spoken-word description of “the killed, by me”, Tirey-as-Ondaatje-as-Billy the Kid is crystal clear and engrossing. Tirey taps into the centuries-old “folk music as storytelling” well here–like with similar-minded contemporaries Spencer Dobbs and Jason Allen Millard (as well as the most renowned poet-musician the collection recalls, Leonard Cohen), any attic-accumulated dust on these recordings is outshone by what’s contained therein. Tirey gives all the songs incorporating Ondaatje’s writing the utilitarian titles of “Work 1”, “Work 2”, et cetera, which, combined with his simple acoustic guitar accompaniment, serves to mimic the original’s resistance of a clean linear narrative or structure. Tales of murder and fleeing from the law lose the immediate drama that’s kept them at the forefront of American culture for so long, replaced by a lonesome man recounting stories dispassionately, without tipping his hand as to whether it’s for posterity or for atonement. Like any good work of art about a towering piece of culture, Sings Selected Works of Billy the Kid dispels the navel-gazing “why this?” questions immediately upon engagement–and just as quickly begins offering up new, more worthwhile ones. (Bandcamp link)

Exedo – The Body Remembers

Release date: June 28th
Record label: Dirt Cult
Genre: Post-punk, garage rock, goth
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: The Longest Night

San Antonio imprint Dirt Cult Records has had a hand in some of the most vital garage rock and punk records of the past few years (releasing material from Schedule 1, The Pretty Flowers, and Weird Numbers, among others), and one of their most intriguing new additions is a quartet from Chicago called Exedo. Per their Bandcamp page, the quartet is made up of ringers from various other Windy City punk bands (vocalist/keyboardist/guitarist Christine Wolf and guitarist David Wolf both played in Daytime Robbery, with Christine also playing in Primitive Teeth, David also playing in Endless Column, bassist Milo Mendoza in Melanin and Staring Problem, and drummer Vince Miller in Permanent Residue), and The Body Remembers is their first album together, following a 2020 demo EP. The Body Remembers is an electric first statement, finding the band taking a trip to post-punk/goth rock ground zero using their sharp, hefty garage punk as their DeLorean (Christine’s keyboard is used sparingly, meaning that, for a lot of the LP, Exedo forge ahead as a power trio instrumentally). The group’s not-to-secret weapon is Christine’s vocals, one showstopping performance after another that hangs with some of the best throughout “alt-rock” history (Siouxsie Sioux, Dolores O’Riordan, hell, even Bjork at some points–they’re all there).

After an icy, keyboard-touched introduction, opening track “Dead Room” transforms into a power chord-led, goth-tinged garage rock anthem, setting the tone down which much of The Body Remembers is all too happy (well, in a dark and moody way) to continue. Everything on the record’s first half is a discrete and essential moment on The Body Remembers’ journey–“The Longest Night” and its embrace of guitar-forward post-punk, the thrashing punk rock drama of “Collide”, the heavier alt-rock smokiness of “Signs of You”,  the burnt-rubber garage-punk of the title track, and the triumphant return of the keyboards in “Damage Up Ahead”. The Body Remembers is a confident and substantial debut LP–eleven songs in thirty-six minutes–and while the second half settles into what might be considered Exedo’s “comfort zone” (dramatic, post-punk/goth-tinged guitar-forward rockers), it hardly runs out of steam, and even offers up one of its clearest highlights in “Victims of Convenience”, its closing track. “Victims of Convenience” is a mid-tempo ballad, meeting in between haunting goth-rock and new wave pop-rock. It’s a fresh take on the tightrope that Exedo have been walking for the entirety of The Body Remembers, one last pleasing digression to sum up a success of a first statement. (Bandcamp link)

Taxidermy – Coin

Release date: June 14th
Record label: Pink Cotton Candy
Genre: Noise rock, post-hardcore, experimental rock, math rock, post-punk
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Today

Fans of the skronkier and thornier ends of noise rock would be well-advised to cast their eyes upon Denmark. A five-piece band from Copenhagen called Taxidermy has just released their four-song debut EP, Coin, on Pink Cotton Candy Records (the premier Danish indie rock record label–and by that, I mean the only one I’m aware of), and the quintet have certainly hit the ground running. Vocalist/guitarist Osvald Reinhold and guitarist Toke Brejning Frederiksen are the band’s songwriting duo, and they’re rounded out by third guitarist Malthe Junge, bassist Joachim Lorck-Schierning, and drummer Johan Knutz Haavik on their first release. Taxidermy are adventurous art rockers on Coin–hunkering down in pummeling noise rock/post-hardcore position, the group drag these four songs out with bits of post-punk propulsion, math rock unpredictability, and pieces of Slint-like basement claustrophobia (the biography that lists their modern peers as Sprain and Black Midi isn’t wrong, but I’d also take “Sonic Youth if they weren’t concerned with sounding ‘cool’”).

Coin opens with “Today”, the one song on the EP that’s shorter than five minutes long and the record’s “hit” by default. A spiky, unfriendly piece of mid-period Unwound post-punk/hardcore, “Today” undoubtedly has something of a hook to it–the cyclic, blunt guitar riff that kicks off the song is hypnotic, and Reinhold’s droll continental European vocals eventually soar into a cantankerous but sweeping chorus. The next two songs on Coin are both over six minutes long, and they both find Taxidermy stretching out and sculpting something more intricate and slow-building. “Rot” takes the late-era Sonic Youth scenic route, spending nearly two minutes puttering around before a blaring guitar wakes the track out of its stupor–and then Taxidermy perform the whole routine again, but with a fiery post-hardcore conclusion the second time around. “Echoes” is both similar to the song that preceded it and not like it at all–like “Rot”, it takes the majority of the track’s length before Taxidermy reveal their full might, but unlike “Rot”, “Echoes” sounds dangerous and doomed from the get-go. The roaring final third of the song is less a transformation than the heart of the track finally snapping into focus. The closing title track might just be the greatest trick on Coin–it takes the sharper noise rock tools of “Today” and applies the gravitas of the middle of the EP to them, ensuring that Taxidermy’s first record is just about as full of a statement as a four-song underground rock record can be. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: La Bonte, Sad Eyed Beatniks, Friends of the Road, In-Sides

Hello, hello! The first Pressing Concerns of the week is a good one, with new albums from Sad Eyed Beatniks and Friends of the Road and new EPs from La Bonte and In-Sides appearing below. It feels like Rosy Overdrive has been focused on the West Coast of the United States as of late, and this edition is no exception, with Los Angeles, Seattle, San Francisco, and Oakland being the homes of these bands. Step up your game, Great Lakes/East Coast/Deep South!

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

La Bonte – Economy Play

Release date: July 19th
Record label: Anxiety Blanket
Genre: Folk rock, alt-rock, post-rock, slowcore
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Singing to Steel

Back in 2022, I wrote about Grist for the Mill, a five-song EP from Los Angeles slowcore group La Bonte. Led by namesake Garrett La Bonte, the band’s folky, quiet take on the genre was deeply felt inits three originals and two covers, helping the EP end up as one of my favorites from that year. La Bonte released a one-off single called “Keepin’ On” at the beginning of this year, but the four-song Economy Play EP is the group’s first proper record since Grist for the Mill, and it’s a bit of a departure from that previous release. Although Grist for the Mill had showcased the more glacial aspects of La Bonte’s writing and playing, previous releases from the band had contained a more electric side, and Economy Play embraces this louder, dramatic end of La Bonte’s sound. Part of this can be explained by the fact that La Bonte has a completely different group of backing musicians this time, namely drummer Matt Sturgis, violinist Natasha Janfaza, and vocalists Brooke Dickson and Bridey Hicks. Hicks and Dickson even have a co-writing credit on one song apiece, furthering their contributions to the record, but the person most responsible for the shift in sound is La Bonte himself (who plays every other instrument on the record and at least co-wrote three of the four tracks).

Of the three original songs on Economy Play, none of them could even remotely be described as “slight”. Two of them are seven- (“How Did These Hearts Get So Blue”) and eight- (“Singing to Steel”) minute behemoths, and the one that’s a “reasonable” four-and-a-half (opening track “Marching in a Field of Wheat”) is a dark, organ-touched, intense electric indie rocker that roars to a cathartic finish. “Singing to Steel” (co-written with Dickson) is a lengthy meditation recalling underground 90s post-rock–it skips right past Songs: Ohia and dives right into Slint territory. The second half of Economy Play returns La Bonte’s folk rock/alt-country influences to the fold to a degree–if there’s a “breather” on the record, it’s their vintage slowcore cover of Arthur Russell’s “I Couldn’t Say It to Your Face” (a song that I’ve enjoyed seeing get some traction in the world of modern indie rock lately; Ex-Vöid also did a great version of it on their last album), while closing track “How Did These Hearts Get So Blue” ends the record with a lengthy, drawn-out piece of acoustic-based folk-country. It’s the song on the EP that most reminds me of Grist for the Mill, but considering how La Bonte and Hicks’ lonesome, intertwined vocals in the song conjure up a lot of the same emotions that the searing alt-rock in “Marching in a Field of Wheat” does, there’s perhaps less distance between the two EPs than it seems on the surface. (Bandcamp link)

Sad Eyed Beatniks – Ten Brocades

Release date: July 12th
Record label: Meritorio
Genre: Psychedelic pop, lo-fi indie rock, folk rock, jangle pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: The Broken Playwright Waits

I’ve been wanting to write about the music of San Francisco’s Kevin Linn for a while now, as he’s a key part of the Bay Area indie pop scene that I’ve documented fairly extensively on this blog. Linn is the founder of cassette label Paisley Shirt Records (Galore, Red Pants, Whitney’s Playland) and, as a musician, has led or co-led projects like Sad Eyed Beatniks, Present Electric, and Hospital. The latter of those three bands also features Mike Ramos (of Tony Jay and Flowertown) and Karina Gill (of Cindy, and the other half of Flowertown), two frequent collaborators who also appear on the latest album from Linn’s long-running solo project, Sad Eyed Beatniks. The previous Linn material I’ve heard (from both Sad Eyed Beatniks and Present Electric) falls towards the ramshackle and psychedelic ends of the guitar pop spectrum–there are hooks, but they’re not given the restraint and polish that Gill and Ramos’ main bands typically have. Ten Brocades, the latest Sad Eyed Beatniks record, doesn’t reinvent Linn’s sound, but it does feel just a bit more deliberate in its presentation and execution across its ten tracks. Per Linn, the record draws from childhood memories of hearing the shamisen- & koto-based music his father liked to listen to and reading translated, graphic-novel versions of classic Chinese novels–the foggy recollections evoked by these touchstones seem like a natural fit for Ten Brocades’ hazy, folk-based psychedelic pop sound.

Ten Brocades opens with “Barong Mask”, a steady, straightforward first track whose crystal clarity (aided by Ramos and Gill) only becomes more pronounced after listening to the rest of the album and circling back to it. The next few tracks (the fuzzed-out ominous cloud of “It’s Who Makes the Scene”, the rainy, melodica-haunted “Monumental Ensemble”, the slightly more upbeat but still equally melodica-haunted “Harlequin with Guitar”) are all Linn solo compositions and sound like the “classic” Sad Eyed Beatniks sound, although “Nail in the Coffin” is even more lo-fi despite the return of Ramos and Gill. Linn uses his collaborators well on the second half of Ten Brocades (particularly in the fiery, hypnotic “The Broken Playwright Waits”), but the record’s centerpiece is the seven-minute, Linn-solo title track. As the song slowly sweeps across the record, Linn somehow goes from lumbering to levitating and achieves something quite striking in doing so. Right after “Ten Brocades” finally relents, Sad Eyed Beatniks launch into the two-minute folk pop of “You Belong With Us”–it’s a reminder of the range of feeling this kind of music can evoke, and it’s delivered with the ease of someone who speaks it naturally. (Bandcamp link)

Friends of the Road – Sunseekin’ Blues

Release date: July 19th
Record label: Bud Tapes/Drongo Tapes
Genre: Folk, country, drone, experimental
Formats: CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Peg and Awl

Who doesn’t love a good experimental folk collective? To those open to this kind of music, I’ll have you turn your attention to Friends of the Road, a “drone-tinged Old Time” group from Seattle who reference longrunning experimental folk act Pelt as an inspiration. The group made their debut in 2023 with a record called Now You Know Something Right Here and I’ll Tell You for a Fact, and the Friends are back a year and a half later with Sunseekin’ Blues, six songs in thirty-eight minutes on CD (via Bud Tapes) and cassette (via Drongo Tapes). Everything you hear on Sunseekin’ Blues was delivered by the Friends’ core quartet of multi-instrumentalist Sadie Siskin, fiddle player Julian James, cellist/guitarist Elliott Hansen, and harmonium player Cameron Molyneux, and the collective split the record evenly between original songs and interpretations of traditional/old-time folk numbers. Although there are certainly moments on Sunseekin’ Blues that fully embrace the group’s experimental instincts, more than anything I came away from the record impressed by how deeply traditional folk music runs through Friends of the Road’s veins nonetheless.

Nearly half of Sunseekin’ Blues is taken up by the fifteen-minute opening track “Wagner Creek Suite”, and it’s also where Friends of the Road earn their “drone” designation. The Siskin-penned song begins very welcomely, pulling together its friendliest banjo, fiddle, and guitar playing for nearly four minutes…and then the droning starts. Siskin is credited as playing “sruti box” and “cigar box” on the record, and I suspect that the sustained music and occasional sharp twangs that make up the rest of the recording utilize them. The first song with vocals, “Peg and Awl”, follows, and the way the collective let the fiddle threaten to drown out the traditional folk song underneath merges the different sides of Friends of the Road pleasingly and beautifully. None of the other instrumentals on Sunseekin’ Blues are as otherworldly as “Wagner Creek Suite”, but the joyous festival-folk of “Bonnie and the Garden” (credited to the full band), the seven-minute, trudging banjo workout of “Blessed Be the Day I See Him Again” (another Siskin composition), and their closing rendition of Ernie Carpenter’s “Elk River Blues” (a peaceful and serene benediction that sounds like how I wish the Elk River still looked) all find different ways of approaching and thriving in the world of folk music. Friends of the Road are free to ramble and explore on Sunseekin’ Blues, with the full knowledge that the music they’ve tapped into will hold everything together no matter how far they roam. (Bandcamp link)

In-Sides – Salvo

Release date: June 12th
Record label: Acumen Productions
Genre: Lo-fi indie rock, shoegaze, fuzz rock, 90s indie rock, slowcore
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Mud

Yet another indie rock band from the Bay Area, Oakland’s In-Sides are a quartet led by vocalist/guitarist Stephen Fong and rounded out by vocalist/guitarist Krista Kleczewski, bassist Ryan Schaeffer, and drummer Brandon Paluzzi. They debuted with a three-song EP called Echo Chamber in 2016, and a few one-off singles trickled out before last month’s release of Salvo, the band’s biggest release yet at six songs and twenty-six minutes. As I’ve mentioned many times before (even earlier in this blog post), I’ve heard more than my share of new guitar pop bands from this part of the country, but the tuneful wasteland sound that In-Sides sculpt throughout their latest EP caught my attention. It’s difficult to categorize among the vast Bay Area indie pop/rock scene–not bright and jangly like Blues Lawyer or Chime School, somewhat distorted but not as fully devoted to foggy shoegaze as bands like Sucker, and too uneasy to recall the leisurely folk-y rock of groups like Evening Glass. Recorded by Spacemoth’s Maryam Qudus and mastered by Greg Obis of Stuck, Salvo is somewhat standoffish but quite striking when given a real look–there are bits of psychedelia, dream pop, shoegaze, slowcore, and maybe even emo in these half-dozen tracks, but clearly not made with the intention of overtly appealing to any of these subgroups.

In-Sides are at their most accessible at the start of Salvo, with “Mud” and “Step” standing as superb examples of the band’s version of pop music. Both start out with enjoyably simple pop chord progressions and build up from there–“Mud” balances Fong’s low-key vocals with an increasingly confident noise-pop instrumental roaring alongside him, while the bits and pieces of melodic guitars floating around “Step” ensure that it remains quite pleasant to listen to even as it never “takes off” like the song before it. At the delicate end of Salvo’s spectrum, we’ve got mid-EP highlight “Old Soul”, which develops from a minimalist start to an intriguing combination of downcast power chords and slow, deliberate Low-worthy vocal harmonies, and “Taking It In”, a chilly, earnest slowcore ballad. As deft as In-Sides prove to be at subtlety, it’s just as impressive that they pull these moments off in the middle of songs like “TV Brain” (the one song that really embraces pop-shoegaze hookiness) and “Divine” (the eerie closing track, which eventually builds to a wall of oblique sound to close the EP out). It might take a minute to adjust your ears to In-Sides’ vision, but Salvo has plenty of rewards. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Orcas, Jessica Boudreaux, Oneida, Mourning [A] BLKstar

Welcome to the Thursday Pressing Concerns! On the eve of a strong new music Friday, we’re looking at four records that come out tomorrow, July 19th: specifically, new albums from Orcas, Jessica Boudreaux, Oneida, and Mourning [A] BLKstar. If you missed Monday’s post (featuring Macseal, West of Roan, Other Half, and Tension Pets) or Tuesday’s (featuring Christina’s Trip, Donald Beaman, Lithobrake, and Dogbear), check those out, too.

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

Orcas – How to Color a Thousand Mistakes

Release date: July 19th
Record label: Morr Music
Genre: Dream pop, art rock, psychedelia, college rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Wrong Way to Fall

Sometimes, a well-selected cover version can explain the whole world of a band better than written biographies and reviews can. The first recording I heard from New York duo Orcas was their take on “Under the Milky Way” by longtime Australian college-psych rockers The Church, and that particular touchpoint goes a long way towards understanding Orcas’ sound–expansive, experimental, but grounded to some degree in the tangible world of rock music (even as it embraces sophisti-pop, electronica, and even ambient pop to a greater degree than the original version of the song). Their “Under the Milky Way” was a one-off single that came out this April and was actually the group’s first new recording in a decade–Rafael Anton Irisarri and Benoit Pioulard began making music together in the Seattle in the early 2010s, releasing Orcas (2012) and Yearling (2014) before going on a ten-year hiatus. How to Color a Thousand Mistakes is the duo’s third album, released on their longtime home of Morr Music (The Notwist, Dntel, Múm), and it has a deliberately-crafted, layered sound that (even if it wasn’t the actual case) feels like it took ten years to realize. The duo’s various backgrounds in rock, pop, and experimental music all factor into How to Color a Thousand Mistakes, an inventive, icy, but nevertheless frequently inviting record.

How to Color a Thousand Mistakes doesn’t pull any punches, throwing us back into the world of Orcas with an ambitious opening suite comprised of a one-minute ambient introduction (“Sidereal”) and the back-to-back expansiveness of “Wrong Way to Fall” and “Riptide” (taken together, spanning nearly a dozen minutes). The six-minute “Wrong Way to Fall” is Orcas’ version of a rocker–guitar-forward for nearly its entire length, occasionally leaping out of its refined backbone to deliver a wall-of-sound jolt, but still sounding powerful even in its relative lulls. “Riptide” showcases a more tender side of Orcas, embracing dream pop and even new wave to create something a little more “polished”, even as it’s comprised of the same basic ingredients as the song before it. The middle of How to Color a Thousand Mistakes feels like the most openly “pop” part, with “Next Life”, “Swells”, and “Fare” all delivering Orcas’ sound in relatively bite-sized, hazy psychedelic pop portions (although without abandoning or dumbing down the other parts of the band). The final left turn on the record is a finale that leans hard into the more ambient and electronic elements of Orcas–although “Bruise” eventually congeals into a pop rock song, “Without Learning” and closing track “Umbra” offer no such clarity. The latter song closes the book on How to Color a Thousand Mistakes with echoing vocals floating in a sea of sustained pianos and synths–even though Orcas don’t spend the majority of the album in this abyss, they’ve earned the right to sign off in the midst of it. (Bandcamp link)

Jessica Boudreaux – The Faster I Run

Release date: July 19th
Record label: Pet Club
Genre: Power pop, alt-rock, indie pop, singer-songwriter
Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Suffering

Jessica Boudreaux was the lead vocalist for Portland indie rock group Summer Cannibals for ten years and four albums, releasing records on Kill Rock Stars and Tiny Engines before they formally disbanded last year. When Summer Cannibals broke up, Boudreaux was focusing on writing music for film and television and on her work as a producer in her new studio, Pet Club, but she soon had written enough material for a solo record, leading to The Faster I Run taking shape later that year and coming out through her own imprint this month. Boudreaux’s writing reflects the turmoil she experienced towards the end of Summer Cannibals’ run–a temporary separation from her current partner at the beginning of 2020, a breast cancer diagnosis and subsequent navigation of treatment during the pandemic a few months later. Musically, The Faster I Run is distinct from Summer Cannibals’ pop punk but still should be appealing to fans of that band–rather than a complete reinventing, the self-recorded and self-produced LP is a more subtle slowing down and polishing up of Boudreaux’s songwriting to better reflect the personal nature of her writing.

Boudreaux talks about The Faster I Run like she made it almost accidentally, but once she decided to make a solo record, she really committed to it–at a dozen tracks and forty-five minutes, there’s nothing about the album that feels like anything but a full investment. The songs themselves are incredibly spirited and substantial, reflecting the emotional clarity of somebody who’s stared down some hard alleyways and come out the other side. The chugging alt-rock of opening track “Back Then” explores a “before all of this happened” train of thought, while “Main Character” and “Suffering” pull offbeat but memorable perspectives from the heap (“The main character can’t die / So thank God that’s me,” she smirks in the former, and she straight-up just says “There’s something kinda funny about suffering,” in the latter). The spotlight on Boudreaux the writer is a good call by Boudreaux the producer–the smooth pop rock of late highlight “Smoke Weed” is a shining example of the push and pull at the heart of the record, a relaxed instrumental with a lyric about how the calmness required to do the titular activity remains out of reach for her (“I can’t wait to be that chill–it’ll happen, just you wait”). The Faster I Run ends with a great car song in “You’ll Say It Was Fun”, in which Boudreaux sings “I guess nobody’s winning when we both try to run,” over some of the most exciting music on the record. The reward comes with time, with care taken to sift through the depths from a higher vantage point. (Bandcamp link)

Oneida – Expensive Air

Release date: July 19th
Record label: Joyful Noise
Genre: Garage rock, noise rock, psychedelic rock, krautrock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Here It Comes

Brooklyn’s Oneida are experimental rock legends at this point, steadily and consistently building a formidable back catalog of records dashed with krautrock, psychedelic rock, post-rock, and whatever other strange avenues the group (Bobby Matador, Kid Millions, Hanoi Jane, Shahin Motia and Barry London) can find to wander down. The previous Oneida album, 2022’s Success, came after a longer-than-usual four-year pause, and it felt like a rebirth of sorts–as rich as their previous albums had been, I found myself pleasantly surprised by just how well the band could set their sights on straight-ahead, pop-fluent garage rock (I mean, all graded on the scale of Oneida, but still an impressive achievement regardless). Not a band to stay stagnant, I wouldn’t expect Success, Part Two as a follow-up, but Expensive Air feels like the best-case scenario for the band–it starts at the point of accessibility the quintet had landed on with their last record, and then starts eroding, expanding, and mutating it to create a tangibly distinct beast of an album. And “beast” feels like the right term for Expensive Air–one thing that Oneida retain and hone in on throughout the record is their loud, unhinged-sounding rock and roll side.

Doing my work for me, Millions describes Expensive Air as a “darker, looser, louder, counterpart” to Success in the bio for the new record, and I certainly won’t dispute this, especially not with the seven-minute “Reason to Hide” on tap to kick things off. Oneida open the record with a chugging, devastating piece of krautrock that does sneak a precise, effective garage rock hook into the refrain nonetheless. The majority of Expensive Air comes in two to three minute bursts, but just because they’re pop-song shaped doesn’t mean these tracks are automatically accessible. Parts of the songs are, almost like they’re fighting against the tide–pop music wins out in the Success-esque single “Here It Comes”, and it has a foothold amongst the soaring drama of “Stranger”. The towering psych-rock sweater of “Spill” and the trash-punk “La Plage” are less conclusive (and entertainingly so), while the damaged atmospherics of the title track feel beamed in from a different world entirely. Oneida shore up Expensive Air with one last eight-minute sign-off, an inspired version of Swell Maps’ “Gunboats”, but while “Reason to Hide” was a dangerous runaway train, “Gunboats” represents a different kind of terror–that of a self-assured, slow-moving, sauntering war machine. “Gunboats” is confident and measured in its first half, and when Oneida guide it into chaos as the record ends, it feels like a controlled assault. (Bandcamp link)

Mourning [A] BLKstar – Ancient//Future

Release date: July 19th
Record label: Don Giovanni
Genre: Soul, gospel, art rock, experimental, R&B
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Along The Red Rim, The Sun Settles

Mourning [A] BLKstar was formed in Cleveland in 2015 by RA Washington (bass/samples), and over the next nine years it has become a seven-piece “Afrofuturist collective” also comprised of vocalists James Longs and LaToya Kent, drummer Dante Foley, guitarist/bassist/percussionist Jah Nada, trumpeter Theresa May, and guitarist/keyboardist Pete Saudek, and sporting an eclectic, omnivorous sound containing pieces of soul, rock, hip-hop, gospel, blues, and jazz. Mourning [A] BLKstar consider Ancient//Future to be their first proper record since 2020’s The Cycle–they released Celestial Bodies, featuring collaborations with the Cleveland Museum of Art, dance company Christoph Winkler, and Adult Swim back in 2022, and a live album earlier this year, but Ancient//Future puts the focus back on the band’s core with a brief but substantial seven-song, twenty-five minute studio record. The six proper songs on the record are all fully-realized and immediate, with May’s trumpet, the rhythm section, and its pair of striking vocalists all bringing a polished, accessible attitude to the band’s ambition.

Aside from a thirty-second interlude later in the record, Ancient//Future opens with its shortest track, the two-and-a-half minute, fiery lead single “Literary Witches”. Thundering percussion and piercing horns introduce Mourning [A] BLKstar via an explosive piece of soul-rock, and its lyrics are just as confrontational as the song’s title suggests. The triumphant horns and hammering drums that open “Along The Red Rim, The Sun Settles” end up launching a seven-minute, multi-part epic that finds space for just about every aspect of Mourning [A] BLKstar to shine before it wraps things up. The collective settles down just a bit after this opening duo, although that certainly doesn’t mean what follows isn’t substantial–“Just Can’t Be” is a smooth-crawling funk-soul ballad that’s instantly memorable, while the group enlist violinist Caitlin Edwards (the one credited guest performer) in “Her Song”, a track that embraces its “throwback” feel both in its string-horn combination and the unabashed musical activism in its subject matter. Although the relatively low-key “Santi Murder” is perhaps the most subdued moment on the record, the simple, trawling rhythms undergirding the song are quite hypnotic, and Ancient//Future finishes with one last triumph in the form of “Junee”. Mourning [A] BLKstar guide the record to a smooth conclusion with just horns, drums, and the choir–it’s all they need. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Christina’s Trip, Donald Beaman, Lithobrake, Dogbear

The second Pressing Concerns of the week is a nice and varied assortment of great records from the past couple of months for you to explore–we’ve got new LPs from Christina’s Trip, Donald Beaman, Lithobrake, and Dogbear all featured below. If you missed yesterday’s post, featuring new records from Macseal, West of Roan, Other Half, and Tension Pets, check that one out here.

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

Christina’s Trip – Forever After

Release date: July 5th
Record label: Cherub Dream
Genre: Indie pop, dream pop, noise pop, twee, 90s indie rock
Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital
Pull Track: I’ll Take It

Earlier this year, I wrote about a couple of different releases from San Francisco-based Cherub Dream Records. Both records–an EP from Sucker and an LP from Buddy Junior–reflected the distorted, insular, and experimental side of the Bay Area’s thriving guitar pop scene, although both contained a fair amount of pop hooks amongst the noise. The latest Cherub Dream release is the debut record from Oakland’s Christina’s Trip, an indie pop quartet led by its namesake, Christina Busler (vocals/guitar), and also featuring Buddy Junior’s JB Lenar on guitar, Nick Bruder (ex-Culture Abuse) on bass, and drummer Alec Moore. Despite the nods to noisemakers Sonic Youth and Eric’s Trip in the band and album names, Forever After is the most pop-forward record I’ve heard from Cherub Dream yet–led by Busler’s clear vocals, the record’s eight songs float pop melodies towards the listener wistfully but confidently. The guitars are loud but not overly distorted or blanketing, recalling undersung 90s indie rock groups like The Spinanes and Velocity Girl and even early guitar-based dream pop, while the band’s lo-fi, off-the-cuff attitude evokes prime K Records.

Every song on Forever After begins with the same metallic cowbell countoff from Moore, the first unique stamp that Christina’s Trip give their take on the genre. Opening track “Swim” is just about a perfect introduction to the group, with everything from the soaring guitar leads, Busler’s Cocteau Twins-esque breathing-as-instrument, and the understated but nevertheless undeniable central vocal melody all ensuring that it’s a pop classic (“If I were to die today, it would’ve been worth it / Just to swim in the ocean” is also a hell of a first lyric). The rest of Forever After’s first half offers up distorted (“My Friend”), dark (“Depresso”), and nostalgic (“Companion”) versions of Christina’s Trip’s sound, but the second half actually outpaces the first half both in terms of pop music and inventiveness. After the jangly dream pop of “Can’t Hurt Me Now”, “I’ll Take It” is a searing four-chord ballad that’s breathtaking in its blunt discomfort. The only way to follow something like that up is to change tack completely, and Christina’s Trip subsequently launch into another one of my favorites on the record, “Playthings”, immediately afterwards, embracing lo-fi indie punk and American twee in ways they hadn’t previously (“Are we born to be our parent’s playthings? / To be bought and sold and fucked,” absolutely blistering delivery here) and “Burning” closes the record out with a steady flame. I’ve gone through the whole record at this point, but the overall consistency is key in just how strong a debut Forever After is. I’m excited to hear more from Christina’s Trip. (Bandcamp link)

Donald Beaman – Fog on Mirror Glass

Release date: June 14th
Record label: Royal Oakie
Genre: Folk rock, singer-songwriter
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Glass Bottom Boat

A neat thing about having a music blog is that I regularly find out about people who’ve been making good music for decades that I wouldn’t have come across otherwise. Not that there haven’t been opportunities for me to discover Donald Beaman before now–either via his previous life as a member of buzzy New York 2000s indie band The Double (they put out an album on Matador and everything!) or his current run as an Oakland-based solo artist, releasing five solo albums since 2015 and sharing bills with everyone from Jonathan Richman to Mdou Moctar. We join Beaman with the release of Fog on Mirror Glass, his fifth solo album and first for Royal Oakie (Curling, Sugar Candy Mountain, Sea Dramas), and while watching an artist grow and mature in real time is exciting, there’s also something to be said for just dropping in on someone’s career to find them in the midst of making confident and relaxed music like a veteran singer-songwriter. Fog on Mirror Glass is folk rock at the opposite end of the spectrum from labelmates Sea Dramas’ dreamy, layered sound–Beaman’s songs sit fairly unadorned throughout the record, with his singing and guitar playing only intermittently accompanied by bassist Kirt Lind and drummer Michael Nalin.

It’s difficult to describe just how serenely Beaman opens Fog on Mirror Glass–“Glass Bottom Boat” is an almost impossibly-tranquil sounding song, gently rolling guitar and simple vocals tugging each other along ever so slowly. It’s a subtle throwing down of the gauntlet, declaring with pin-drop quiet that Beaman needs very little to make an impact. Although Fog on Mirror Glass doesn’t quite embrace pure zen in the same way as the opening track (with the arguable exception of closing track “Bamboo”), Beaman offers up plenty of other highlights featuring just his voice and guitar, from the daydreaming reminiscences of “Awhile” to the (relatively) rough-around-the-edges folk of “Makeshift Room” to the skeletal balladry of “Usual Phantom”. When Beaman is joined by Lind and Nalin, there’s a difference, but not a disjointed one–rather than the bass and drums transforming his songs, it feels like Beaman’s shifting them, taking them on wandering, floating odysseys across the sweeping “Valley Floor” and the tiptoeing “Paper Screen”. “Old Universe” is probably the most upbeat song on the record, with the trio morphing into a slow but sturdy country groove (you can add the “cosmic” modifier to that, it fits). If I was more familiar with Beaman’s previous work, I’d probably be tempted to view Fog on Mirror Glass as some kind of culmination, but instead I’m either cursed or blessed to see the album as a rewarding record on its own. (Bandcamp link)

Lithobrake – Lithobrake

Release date: May 31st
Record label: Cassowary
Genre: 90s indie rock, garage rock, post-punk
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Props

Last year, I wrote about the debut EP from a new Washington, D.C.-based band called Lithobrake. The trio, comprised of vocalist/guitarist Craig Grande, bassist Kyle Nicholson, and drummer Al Shipley (who I was already familiar with due to his solo project, Western Blot, as well as his work as a music writer), debuted a familiar but compelling sound on EP1, one that delivered 90s-style “slacker” indie rock with a rough (but not really “lo-fi”) punk edge to it. If you missed the Lithobrake EP, not to worry, as its five songs are all included in their self-titled debut album, which arrives a year and change later (but if you’ve already listened to it quite a bit, as I have, the songs are helpfully tacked onto the end of the album behind eleven brand new, previously-unreleased recordings). It makes sense to include the EP’s songs on Lithobrake, as the band’s first full-length statement is very much in line with their first release, with no huge departures or “polishing up” of their sound to be found (they might’ve all been recorded at the same time, I’m not sure). If anything, Lithobrake sound like they’re embracing the looser, more ramshackle aspects of their sound here, viewing it as a feature rather than a bug.

Just about every song on Lithobrake sounds like the trio have stumbled onto the perfect take of the track, although if anyone follows the recording diaries of Shipley (who also produced and mixed the album), you’re aware that real work went into making this album sound “incidental”. The crashing guitars and shouting refrain of “The Decays” make it a perfect indie punk kickoff song, and while the next few songs on the record (the speedy “Fascinated”, the messy post-punk-pop of “Props”, the slightly Dischord-tinged “Sad Moon”) aren’t quite as immediately cathartic, they’ve all got a clear energy to them that’s coming into focus as one of Lithobrake’s clearest strengths. As the record progresses, you’ll get Lithobrake in short bursts (“Melting Down” and “Tablecloth”, two sub-two-minute tracks that are exactly as long as they need to be) and in the five-minute “Salvia”, a slow-burner that really shows the band locking in together as a “power trio”.  I still think the low-key guitar pop of EP1’s “Bats” is my favorite Lithobrake song overall, but I’ll happy take it as a hidden gem in the midst of a fully-loaded forty-five minute LP in addition to its original position as the leadoff to a tight, five-song EP. (Bandcamp link)

Dogbear – Herd Your Horses

Release date: May 8th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Art rock, experimental rock, prog-pop
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Further

Dogbear are a mysterious “studio-based duo” from Los Angeles, and the project’s two anonymous architects have been making music together since at least the beginning of this decade. They released a seven-song, twenty-five minute record called Un Petit Déjeuner back in 2020, but they consider Herd Your Horses their “debut album”, and given that it’s twice as long as Un Petit Déjeuner, this seems like a reasonable delineation. Pretty much all the context I have for Herd Your Horses is this lengthy Spotify playlist of inspirations for the album, and while I can’t say that I hear all of it in this record, it’s sufficient to take note on how Dogbear is pulling from experimental, ambitious rock music from across several decades (The Beach Boys, King Crimson, Melvins, Deerhoof, Animal Collective, Grizzly Bear). In particular, Animal Collective is worth highlighting, as Herd Your Horses shares with them a mutated, contorted vision of classic pop rock (a trait also found in the modern band Dogbear reminds me the most of, Curling). Psychedelic, jazz, electronic, and even a bit of punk shades the record’s eleven tracks, in service of a stuffed, saturated debut album whose strengths stretch far beyond its humble anonymous origins.

Dogbear’s opening shot is the sensory overload of “Further”, which manages to pack an entire microcosm of Herd Your Horses into its futuristic, blaring kitchen-sink pop four minutes. The somewhat frazzled yacht rock of “So We’re Not Talking” is a little more laid-back, although it’s still relatively busy, and the frantic freak folk strumming that introduces the next song, the six-minute “Scattershot”, kicks off a song that lives up to its title. “Bird’s Nest” shifts the “Dogbear sound” into something more streamlined and fast-paced, a hard-charging number that seems like their version of “punk rock”, but this doesn’t signal a sea change, as some of the hardest songs to grasp on Herd Your Horses (“Doap”, “Don’t Fuck with Lorna Doom”) follow shortly afterward. The headiest section of Herd Your Horses is arguably its final third–“Windows Down” is Dogbear’s version of a Crimson-esque prog-rock steamroller, and then the penultimate “Systems Theory/Ryanomics” is an uncompromising detour into post-rock, jazz, electronics, and ambient music. “Beachside” closes Herd Your Horses with a grand send-off, but it’s once again on Dogbear’s terms–acoustic guitars and chimes offer an olive branch in the midst of frantic percussion and opaque lyricism, a spirited and unique punctuation mark on a record worth digging into. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Macseal, West of Roan, Other Half, Tension Pets

Welcome to mid-July! It’s a Monday, and today Pressing Concerns is going to be looking at three great records that came out last week (albums from Macseal and West of Roan, and an EP from Tension Pets), plus an LP from Other Half that came out last month. Everyone from folkies to post-hardcore fans to synth punks to emo-pop-punk heads will find something to like here.

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

Macseal – Permanent Repeat

Release date: July 12th
Record label: Counter Intuitive
Genre: Power pop, pop punk, emo-pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Permanent Repeat

I’ve always thought of Farmingdale, New York’s Macseal as a clear-cut fourth-wave emo group, and the quartet’s most popular release, 2017’s Yeah, No, I Know, bears the mathy, twinkly hallmarks of that era. A closer examination of their 2019 debut full-length, Super Enthusiast, however, reveals a band with big pop ambitions beyond their starting point–they garnered Oso Oso comparisons, a link that goes beyond their shared Long Island homes. After a productive 2010s, Macseal took their time on a follow-up, and the quartet (vocalist/guitarists Ryan Bartlett and Cole Szilagyi, bassist Justin Canavaciol, and drummer Frankie Impastato) have returned with a record that fully and completely embraces what Super Enthusiast hinted at. Although the press release for Permanent Repeat mentioned quite a bit of music I like, what caught my attention was what it didn’t say–the word “emo” didn’t appear there once. And, look, Bartlett and Szilagyi still sound like “emo vocalists”, but it’s more than fair to say that Macseal has straight-up transformed at this point–Permanent Repeat immerses itself in the worlds of power pop, polished pop punk, and even widescreen “heartland” indie rock across its eleven tracks.

Permanent Repeat is chock full of instant hits, but opening track “A+B” isn’t one of them, a delicate song built around light-feeling vocals and acoustic guitar that does eventually get “huge”, but only at its finale. As immediate and natural as the “pop” side of Permanent Repeat feels, moments like “A+B” are reminders that Macseal have charted this new course for themselves deliberately and expertly. We also see them at work with “October”, an intro to the title track that plays the following song’s chorus acoustically, and then with how they barrel through “Permanent Repeat” for nearly three minutes before tacking the full version of the refrain (the catchiest single moment on the album) on at the end, upending any sort of traditional pop structure. In between the more inspired detours of Permanent Repeat are impeccable emo-tinged pop punk/power pop anthems, like the speedy “Golden Harbor”, the Fountains of Wayne-like harmonies of “Four Legs”, and “Easily Undone” and “Beach Vacation”, two gorgeous mid-tempo songs that confirm Macseal hasn’t lost any emotional impact by leaving behind their more Midwest emo-indebted sound. Permanent Repeat is so strong in its first half that one feels like it could go on forever, and while the final stretch has less clear highlights, I can’t in good conscience call a record that closes with “Hide Out” (which adds just a dash of Superdrag-esque wall of guitars to their distinct guitar pop brew) and the bittersweet “Afloat” “frontloaded”. Macseal deserve a great deal of credit for growing and forging themselves into a band that can pull off something like Permanent Repeat so smoothly. (Bandcamp link)

West of Roan – Queen of Eyes

Release date: July 12th
Record label: Spinster
Genre: Folk
Formats: CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Bread of Life

Washington State’s Annie Schermer and Channing Showalter are half of the “freak folk collective” Doran, but before that group released their self-titled debut in 2021, the two of them made folk music as a duo under the name West of Roan. Queen of Eyes is the second West of Roan album, coming six years after their self-titled debut, comprised of a dozen original folk songs and one interpretation of a traditional one. West of Roan do indeed bring a traditionalist attitude towards their original compositions–there’s less of the occasional deconstructive instinct found in Doran here. Part of that likely has to do with the making of the album–the duo self-recorded it in a “small one-room, off-grid cabin on Waldron Island” off the coast of Washington, with just one condenser microphone connected to solar power to capture their songs. As a result, Queen of Eyes is a clear and intimate-sounding record, with absolutely nothing to get in the way of Schermer and Showalter’s voices aside from their just-as-bare acoustic guitar and violin playing.

Just because Queen of Eyes is a barebones record doesn’t mean it’s in any way a “simple” one–that’s far from an accurate description of what’s contained in this album. Writing original folk music that sounds like it could and should belong in this ancient musical lineage seems like a fairly tricky task to take on, but West of Roan come off as students well-versed enough in their field to understand where to begin. The duo refer to Queen of Eyes as a “collection of myths”, and from the titular character on down (whose vision-based aura is as a good a way to understand the rest of the depictions in these songs as any), Schermer and Showalter deliberately build worlds such that the beauty of these songs comes from their appearance as imperfect but deeply-felt reflections of things much larger. Maybe “The Bell” and “The Mountain” are songs drawn from the duo’s Pacific Northwest home to some degree, but there’s no way of telling how close it is to the one that we’re able to access in our own reality. Songs like “Bread of Life”, “Gentian”, and “Bright” feel both foreign and universal at the same time, sounding equally like relics from a lost era and in touch with the present (particularly the vivid scene depicted in the beginning of the later of the three). The link might be as thin as an extension cord running to a solar panel at times, but it’s there. (Bandcamp link)

Other Half – Dark Ageism

Release date: June 21st
Record label: Big Scary Monsters
Genre: Post-hardcore, noise rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Farm Games

Although Norwich post-hardcore trio Other Half have been kicking around since at least 2014, the band emerged in earnest at the beginning of this decade, releasing their debut full-length, Big Twenty, in 2020, followed by Soft Action (their first for Big Scary Monsters) in 2022 and now their third LP, Dark Ageism, this June. The group (guitarist/vocalist Cal Hudson, bassist/vocalist Sophie “Soapy” Porter, and drummer Alfie Adams) have developed something of a following in recent years, although this new album is the first time I’d really listened to them. Dark Ageism has an intriguing sound, prowling about on the noisier edges of indie rock–your typical modern post-hardcore touchstones (Dischord Records, Electrical Audio-core, the Drive Like Jehu expanded universe) abound, yes, but between Hudson’s emphatic talk-singing, the high-concept writing throughout the record, and the grandiosity of the band, there’s something else here as well. Rather than trying to revive the danceability of noise-punk as bands like Perennial and Feefawum are doing, Dark Ageism is almost a post-hardcore version of The Hold Steady and their “literary punk” attitude.

It all adds up to a gripping and unique listen from the start of Dark Ageism onwards. Opening track “Lifted Fingers” glides into focus ominously, a Lungfish-esque hymn that’s one of the less explosive tracks on the record, even as Nada Surf’s Matthew Caws appears to deliver a spoken word section that slips from bitterness into a kind of hopeful hopelessness. After that, the fireworks really start, as Other Half burn through “Strange Loop”, “Sucked It Sore”, and “Lowlifes & Lower”–one might want to keep a lyric book handy to follow Hudson’s screamed diatribes. Porter helms the spoken-word based basement post-rock of “Feeling for Yourself”; it’s Other Half’s version of a breather, before they launch into one of my favorite moments on the record, the spiky, almost glam-punk steamroller that is “Farm Games”. I hope you’re keeping up, because the second half of Dark Ageism isn’t letting up–look out, the sneering noise-punk  of “Dollar Sign Eyes” is turning the titles of the band’s preview records into characters and movements, and the record’s closing trio put everything into overdrive. We get a straight noise-rock blazer in “A Little Less Than Evil”, a death-throes ode to hanging it up in “Pastoral Existence”, and “Other Half Vs. the End of Everything” looms over it all in its burn-it-all-down death rattle. This isn’t exactly easy work; I appreciate Other Half and going and laying everything out there for us. (Bandcamp link)

Tension Pets – Cubey

Release date: July 11th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: New wave, synthpunk, egg punk, garage punk
Formats: CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Man of Opinion

I’ve got some good news, everyone–another Chicago egg punk band has just released their debut EP. Tension Pets formed just last year, but all four of its members have played in notable groups before–per Post-Trash, drummer Wendy Zeldin also drums in Mandy, synth player Jeff Graupner is in The Hecks, guitarist Davey Hart has played with The Christmas Bride and Wishgift, and bassist Brian Weza has done time with Richard Album and the Singles and Jessica Risker. Cubey is a “synthpunk” record, to be sure, but that doesn’t really capture everything that’s going on in these six songs. That description often just means “post-punk/garage rock with synths”, and while there’s plenty of that on Cubey, the quartet aim beyond that and end up creating huge, synth-driven anthemic rock and roll music in addition to their more lean, punk-y moments. Cubey is a debut that feels off-the-rails (or as close to it without actually being so)–all the members sing, and the frequent vocal handoffs go a long way towards giving the EP its “orchestrated chaos” aura.

Tension Pets’ opening statement, “Man of Opinion”, has a bit of everything in it–it’s got cruising, drilling garage rock guitars in the verses, an inspired, offbeat vocal performance, and a huge, new-wave-y chorus. The “slacker rock Devo” vibes of “Man of Opinion” work very well and would probably be enough to hang a record on on their own, but Tension Pets aren’t content to park Cubey in that particular cul-de-sac–for one, the careening “On the Outside” one song later is the closest the group get to ferocious “classic synthpunk”, and then the EP’s two middle tracks take Cubey to somewhere else entirely. “Mansion” recalls turn-of-the-century D.C. post-hardcore and dance-punk (stuff that bands like Perennial are trying to revive), a fiery, cocky, and deceptively dark piece of maximalist rock music that the band sound just as equipped to pull off. Then, in “Magnolia (She’s Back)”, the band’s synth-punk instincts fight against a swooning, widescreen indie rock side that surfaces not long into the track as well. The synths are at their busiest, the vocals feel almost classic rock, and it all creates maybe the most captivating two minutes on the EP. Every song on Cubey has something brilliant in it (even “Ticket to the Basement”, a forty-second thing that I can only describe as “twee Brainiac”), and taken together, it’s evidence of a band hitting the ground running. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Adam Finchler, Lonnie Walker, Armlock, Fold Paper

The third and final Pressing Concerns of the week looks at four records coming out tomorrow–specifically, new LPs from Adam Finchler, Lonnie Walker, and Armlock, and a new EP from Fold Paper. It’s a great cap to what’s been a great week on the blog; if you missed Monday’s post (featuring TJ Douglas, The Drin, Percy, and Big Fat Head) or Tuesday’s (featuring Laika Songs, Broken Hearts Are Blue, Pat’s Alternative Bus Tour, and Mantarochen), be sure to check those out, too.

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

Adam Finchler – The Room

Release date: July 12th
Record label: Window Sill
Genre: Indie pop, soft rock, anti-anti-folk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: The President’s Colonoscopy

The Room is the debut album from New York singer-songwriter Adam Finchler, but he’s hardly a new face in the world of music in the greater New York area–he’s played in bands like Rubber Molding, AquaCloset, and Sea Urchin, made music videos for Ought and Charlotte Cornfield, and released a solo EP, Hair Gimmicks of Apathy, back in 2012. The bio for The Room includes a warm quote from Don Giovanni Records co-founder Joe Steinhardt, which makes sense to me, as the lo-fi anti-folk of Finchler’s solo EP reminds me of early Don Giovanni. The Room has been a long time in the making, and the LP–recorded in Montreal by Danji Buck-Moore–is a world away from Finchler’s previous music sonically. These ten songs are given polished pop readings, clear but streamlined, placing Finchler’s songwriting front and center. As a writer, Finchler is vaguely in line with what one might expect from an anti-folker–irreverent, wide-ranging, and fairly unpredictable. The short stories, snapshots, and character sketches of The Room can be genuinely funny and just-as-strongly gripping–combined with the serious, straightforward guitar pop dressing that Finchler and Buck-Moore pursue, it ends up being one of the most striking and unique-sounding albums I’ve heard this year.

The frantic “Eye Massage” opens The Room with a demonstration of musical might–as Finchler and guest vocalist Amelia Schonbek repeat the only two lines of the song over and over again, the instrumental rumbles from a wobbly bass-led indie rocker into a chaotic finale marked by electronics provided by Gen Ken Montgomery. If “Eye Message” is a declaration of how open Finchler intends to be musically on The Room, the rest of the first half of the record showcases his strengths as a pop songwriter. “Summer Flower”, “Patrick”, and “Reason to Cry” are all incredibly potent guitar pop songs, delving into lilting pastoral vibes, peppy indie pop, and jangly guitars with a slight undercurrent of tension (respectively). Lyrically, these songs are all cyphers, another key aspect of The Room that might be overshadowed at first by the more literal side of Finchler’s lyricism. 

The more narrative-based storytelling of the title track (a breezy folk instrumental) and “Freedom Tower Window Watchers” (with just a hint of skyscraping indie rock drama) are successes, and while there’s nothing “traditional” about “Try to Love Toronto” (probably the closest thing to Finchler’s previous solo work) and “The President’s Colonoscopy” (which might be the best thing here, god dammit), it’s not exactly hard to figure out what’s going on in either of those songs. At this point, I’ve mentioned every song on The Room that has vocals except for “Melinda Wagner”, so I might as well throw that one a shout-out, too–one of the most fully-developed songs on the record, the combination of the hooky, jangly instrumental, the economical lyrics, and the sense of never-quite-illuminated dread all make it a highlight, too. Finchler sings of “a tiny world of pain,” in “Melinda Wagner”, and in “Patrick”, the titular character creates “a universe” with “every little movement”. Take any song on The Room, and you’ll find something just as large. (Bandcamp link)

Lonnie Walker – Easy Easy Easy Easy

Release date: July 12th
Record label: Sleepy Cat
Genre: Garage rock, country punk
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Busy Bold Sounds

Lonnie Walker isn’t a person–rather, it’s a southern garage rock group led by singer-songwriter Brian Corum. Corum formed Lonnie Walker at East Carolina University in 2006, and the band released These Times Old Times in 2010 and a follow-up, Earth Canals, in 2015. At this point, Lonnie Walker’s lineup had solidified into the quartet of Corum, guitarist Eric Hill, bassist Michael Robinson, and drummer Raymond Finn, but the band and Corum’s life as a whole were both derailed not long after as he developed an opioid addiction that progressed to heroin. Some of the material on Easy Easy Easy Easy was written in a homeless shelter in Raleigh where Corum was “working through” an addiction program, and now, almost a decade after Earth Canals, the band is back together, their lead singer is “clean and stable”, and they’ve put together an album at least partially drawn from what Corum experienced in the time between records. The North Carolinians follow in the the tradition of the more sprawling side of southern garage rock on Easy Easy Easy Easy, taking scenic routes and augmenting their barebones rock and roll setup with extended jams and hot, humid psychedelia to match the frantic energy of Corum’s writing and performance.

Lonnie Walker begin Easy Easy Easy Easy with a groove, allowing opening track “The Making of the Man” to stroll along leisurely for five peaceful minutes before “Funny Feelin’” blows it all open one song later. Corum rants and raves almost nonstop over a high-speed garage-punk instrumental, throwing out a bunch of images of pain, discomfort, and spiraling that make a lot more sense after one finds out that it’s about opiate withdrawal. The album’s centerpiece is a steady piece of psychedelic rock called “Cool Sparkling Water”–the band’s rumbling desert energy is quite appealing, and it’s not hard to see how Corum’s single-minded lyrics relate to the greater picture of the record as a whole. Like most of the songs on Easy Easy Easy Easy, “Cool Sparkling Water” crosses the five-minute barrier–even some of the album’s obvious “hits”, like the triumphant “Busy Bold Sounds”, ride themselves out for a similar length. Easy Easy Easy Easy is a jam-packed record from the get-go, but it’s impressive just how much Lonnie Walker do with the final two songs with lyrics on the record, the wandering sort-of-ballad “Softly in the Morning” and the rolling finality of “All Form Will Fade”. The images, questions, and pointed observations in those two songs are a lot to take in, but it all makes sense–considering how long it took to put together Easy Easy Easy Easy, why wouldn’t Lonnie Walker lay everything out before it’s all said and done? (Bandcamp link)

Armlock – Seashell Angel Lucky Charm

Release date: July 12th
Record label: Run for Cover
Genre: Lo-fi indie rock, lo-fi folk, bedroom pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Guardian

Vocalist/guitarist Simon Lam and guitarist/keyboardist Hamish Mitchell are a duo from Melbourne who released their first album under the name Armlock, Trust, back in 2021 before linking up with Run for Cover Records for their sophomore LP. A cursory listen to their second album, Seashell Angel Lucky Charm, puts Armlock in the world of lo-fi, downcast bedroom indie rock (I am far from the first person to say it reminds them of Alex G), but Lam and Mitchell have a shared background that I imagine is fairly different than most practitioners of this kind of music. They met studying jazz in school, and they’ve collaborated over the following fourteen years in various electronic and dance-based acts–Armlock is actually the first guitar-based project from the duo. That’s all well and good–there are certainly electronic elements incorporated into Seashell Angel Lucky Charm–but that doesn’t mean their talents will necessarily translate into the world of steady, slowcore-ish guitars and mumbled vocals. Their Run for Cover debut is a seven-song, eighteen-minute success nonetheless, though, primarily because the writing at the core of Seashell Angel Lucky Charm stands against some of the best of modern lo-fi indie pop.

Opening track “Ice Cold” doesn’t beat around the bush (at least, to the degree that this kind of music–which sounds like the aural equivalent of someone allergic to eye contact–can “not beat around the bush”), deploying a simple melodic guitar part and just as simple and melodic vocals from Lam to begin the song. The embellishments mostly come in the form of subtle vocal manipulations and some distortion, production choices that continue into the slightly-more-upbeat “Fear” and mark more or less the rest of Seashell Angel Lucky Charm, too–time and time again, Armlock seem first preoccupied with setting up the sturdy skeleton of the song, and then they add to and warp it a bit. Other than the sub-one minute instrumental title track and closing song “Fair”, Armlock adhere to this formula, but that hardly means that they’re repeating themselves, with the fluttering dream pop of “Guardian” and the relatively hurried “El Oh Vee Ee” both expanding on the duo’s sound. Depending on which strain of lo-fi indie rock one prefers, it’s easy to imagine any of these songs (as well as the low-key sturdiness of “Godsend”) being one’s favorite song on the album, but if one is a sucker for guitar-and-vocals simplicity, closing track “Fair” is the one song that tamps down on the additional instrumentation and lets the backbone stand on its own. Even though it’s the most subdued moment on Seashell Angel Lucky Charm, Armlock have already proved they can carry something this bare anyway. (Bandcamp link)

Fold Paper – 4TO

Release date: July 12th
Record label: Royal Mountain
Genre: Math rock, post-punk, noise rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Idle Idle

Chell Osuntade was born in Nigeria, raised in Michigan, and eventually settled in Winnipeg, where he began showing up in local post-punk and indie rock bands like Julien’s Daughter, JayWood, and Super Duty Tough Work. Osuntade decided he wanted to lead his own group, which led to the formation of Fold Paper with guitarist Brendyn Funk, drummer Rob Gardiner, and bassist Mitchell Trainor–their first release, the non-album single “Medical Jargon”, surfaced last March. Fold Paper began playing shows with like-minded bands such as Pile, Cola, and Stuck before they even had an EP to their name, but the quartet are now ready to take the step forward with the four-song 4TO, released via Royal Mountain (Ducks Ltd., Gulfer, Cuffed Up). Recorded by Electrical Audio’s Greg Norman and mastered by Stuck’s Greg Obis, 4TO finds Fold Paper declaring themselves to be part of the burgeoning scene of noisy North American post-punk and math rock made up of bands like their tourmates and Pardoner. Although 4TO only has four tracks, each of them stretches past four minutes, and they all contain intriguing and kinetic moments of inspired experimental rock music, ensuring that it’s a memorable and substantial first statement from Fold Paper.

Fold Paper take their time in introducing themselves to us all–4TO opens with a song called “End Zone” that spends nearly two minutes as hypnotic instrumental math rock before shifting gears with a slowed-down, swirling guitar riff, and when the vocals kick in, they’re buried but oddly captivating. “Idle Idle” is what passes for a “hit” in Fold Paper’s world–a sneering, prowling piece of noise rock/post-punk marked by Osuntade shouting over workmanlike, forceful rock music for as long as the quartet can keep the steamroller rolling and steaming. “Nothing to Report” introduces a fiery garage rock element to Fold Paper’s sound, even as Funk’s punchy riffs and Trainor’s prominent bass keep it in the world of post-punk as well. “Nothing to Report” also features Osuntade’s most impressive vocal performance yet, wresting control of the track from the instrumental with a prominent-in-the-mix, self-assured take. 4TO is completed by “Come Down Awkward”, one last statement song from the band, a slice of potent underground, blunt-object post-punk that, unlike a lot of the rest of the EP, maintains something of a steady structure and energy level, resisting the urge to spill into noise and chaos. It all amounts to a debut EP that does a lot in its brief runtime, hinting at several exciting directions in which Fold Paper could expand themselves from here. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Laika Songs, Broken Hearts Are Blue, Pat’s Alternative Bus Tour, Mantarochen

It is, once again, a Tuesday Pressing Concerns! I’m writing this a few days in advance, so hopefully I have a working computer again by the time this goes up, but either way I’ve finished this one up on my partner’s computer to ensure that you aren’t deprived of these great records. This edition features an album from last month from Laika Songs, an LP from way back in February from Pat’s Alternative Bus Tour, a remastered cassette reissue of Broken Hearts Are Blue’s first album, and an EP from Mantarochen. If you missed yesterday’s post, featuring TJ Douglas, The Drin, Percy, and Big Fat Head, you should check that out, too.

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

Laika Songs – Slowly Spiraling Towards the Light

Release date: June 14th
Record label: Galaxy Train/Two Worlds
Genre: Folk rock, Americana, heartland rock, dream pop
Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital
Pull Track: SPF Infinity

Last year, I wrote about Infinity Is Whatever, the debut EP from Brooklyn indie rock quartet Neil Jung. A laid-back but sharp collection of fuzzy guitar pop, it was a strong introduction to the work of its lead singer and primary songwriter, Evan Brock. For the second straight year, Brock is debuting a new project, but this time it’s a solo endeavor called Laika Songs, and its opening statement is a nearly forty-five minute long-player. Eschewing the relative concision of Neil Jung, Slowly Spiraling Towards the Light is a sprawling, meandering album–Brock, a lifelong musician and former Fueled by Ramen staffer, came out the other side of an industry-fueled disillusion with making music with a new appreciation for it after attending writing workshops from Dave Benton (Trace Mountains) and Phil Elverum. Benton ended up mixing Slowly Spiraling Towards the Light and contributed “loops” and “drone”, joining a long list of musicians guesting on the album (drummer Ian Romano of Daniel Romano’s Outfit, pedal steel player Zena Kay, and trumpet player Danny T. Levin, among others). Brock’s 90s indie rock and classic guitar pop influences are still here, but Laika Songs embraces a wide-eyed indie-Americana sensibility not unlike Brock’s two most recent inspirations.

Brock’s vision for Laika Songs is pretty effectively sketched out in the first three songs of Slowly Spiraling Towards the Light–if those don’t do it for you, then chances are Laika Songs isn’t your thing. Brock doesn’t rush into his first-ever solo album–“Are we gettin’ there?” is a slow-moving, quiet opener, containing mostly empty space before breaking free with a guitar solo in its final minute. “In the Trees” and “SPF Infinity” follow with the record’s “hits”–both singles, they’re a pair of sweeping heartland rockers that earn their impressiveness with layered, vibrant instrumentals, surging into a plainly beautiful chorus in the former and moving more subtly between sections in the latter. The slight country tinge of “The Glow” is Slowly Spiraling Towards the Light’s first real flirtation with that kind of music (thank Kay’s pedal steel), but the bounding “Living Room” (the shortest song on the record at a clean two minutes) and the starry ballad of “So Many Ways” make it a key characteristic of Laika Songs. In the latter of those songs, Brock sings, “Here comes your man,” in the refrain, a weary reading that’s one of his most memorable as a vocalist. “Field of Vision” one song later offers up another such moment, Brock declaring “I keep trying to tell you / I like your haircut,” with help from Far/Onelinedrawing’s Jonah Matranga on backing vocals. “Field of Vision” is a grand-feeling song that’s on par with some of the record’s first tracks–and like those songs, part of their strength is Brock staying calm and real at the center of it all. (Bandcamp link)

Broken Hearts Are Blue – The Truth About Love (Remastered)

Release date: June 28th
Record label: Poptek/Sweet Cheetah/Council/Summer Darling
Genre: Midwest emo, 90s indie punk
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Because I Am

Like many emo bands who formed around the same time, Broken Hearts Are Blue’s initial run was brief but eventful. The story’s a not-unfamiliar one–a group forms in the mid-90s in a mid-sized college town (Kalamazoo, Michigan), records one album (1997’s The Truth About Love), and is already broken up by the time it gets formally released. Their album came out on emo artifact Caulfield Records, which put out music from Mineral, Christie Front Drive, and Giants Chair before (like many emo labels who formed around the same time) shuttering in the early 2000s. Vocalist/lyricist Ryan Gage, guitarist Charles Wood, bassist Daniel Buettner, and drummer Derek Brosch scattered across the United States but reformed as a long-distance collaboration in the mid-2010s–they’ve actually put out three new albums since 2018, including last March’s Meeting Themselves. Although it might not have the full-on cult classic designation of some of their contemporaries, there definitely seems to still be an affection for the record that started it all–The Truth About Love got a limited vinyl reissue shortly after Broken Hearts Are Blue reformed in 2018, and it’s recently been remastered and is seeing its first-ever cassette release in 2024.

90s or “second-wave” emo is a lot more varied and unpredictable than its reputation suggests, so when I say that The Truth About Love sounds right out of that scene, that certainly doesn’t mean it’s interchangeable with any given Braid or Texas Is the Reason LP. Broken Hearts Are Blue are energetic on The Truth About Love and they’re frequently messy, but they’re not exactly “punk” and nowhere close to “hardcore” whatsoever. The louder songs on the record feel like marathons, pushing their way across amped-up, frantic, but weirdly sturdy foundations, while the quieter ones feel like mazes, the quartet soundtracking Gage’s vocals with a measured dirge that feels lost but hardly aimless. The Truth About Love is gripping from “Because I Am”, a song that doesn’t burn everything down so much as leave a nice scorch mark on the album, and “Get’n Over My Sassy Self” (whose title sounds like one of those emo in-jokes that doesn’t actually get sung, but you’d better believe Gage actually does utter that phrase multiple times) continues forward by plodding purposefully. The workmanlike rocker “And Then” feels a bit out of place, almost like it’s the band’s apology for closing the record with two six-minute slow-burners and a two-minute acoustic epilogue. Of course, one doesn’t need to apologize for making a record with enough quirks and contours that we’re still here talking about it over a quarter-century later. (Bandcamp link)

Pat’s Alternative Bus Tour – Virtual Virgins

Release date: February 1st
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Indie pop, jangle pop, folk rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Down at the Casino

Around a decade ago, Glasgow’s Andrew Paterson played in a Scottish indie pop group called The Felt Tips–their last album, Symbolic Violence, came out back in 2013, but Paterson has recently resurfaced with a brand new solo endeavor called Pat’s Alternative Bus Tour. A decade removed from his last band, Paterson now has a family and full-time job, but he’s finding time for his new project–the debut Pat’s Alternative Bus Tour album, Virtual Virgins, came out earlier this year, and he’s promised a second one by the end of 2024. Virtual Virgins is anything but a soft-launch–a dozen songs and forty-five minutes long, the record immerses the listener completely into the world of Paterson’s writing. With its creator a guitar pop veteran, Virtual Virgins hardly disappoints on this front–the songs are based around breezy, acoustic, C86-influenced indie pop foundations, and Paterson’s conversational, heavily-Scottish-accented vocals always find their way back to the right melodies. Where Virtual Virgins distinguishes itself is via Paterson’s knack for storytelling and character-building–these songs stretch out for longer than your typical “indie pop”, but Paterson is an engrossing narrator throughout. 

Paterson has helpfully included fairly utilitarian descriptions of each song on its respective Bandcamp page (“Hypnotic guitar-driven classic-sounding indiepop about someone going out for the first time during a wildfire-induced curfew,” reads the one on “Cinders”), but one would be equally well-served to sit back and see where Pat’s Alternative Bus Tour takes us on any given track. Virtual Virgins rolls through an ambivalent, psychedelic tale of a sci-fi future (“Looking Through a Telescope Backwards”), watches the downfall of a wunderkind politician (“Snakes & Ladders”), and falls down the rabbit hole of “online financial gurus” (“Freaky Finance”). One of the most polished pop moments on Virtual Virgins is mid-record highlight “Down at the Casino”, a song as deceptively bright and cheery as the machinery about which Paterson sings (“If it makes you feel better, we’re no longer enjoying ourselves”, as the characters populating the song relinquish their savings to slots and online gambling apps), and another one (“Bouley Bashers”) takes a simple overheard interaction and finds a world of profundity in it. While nothing on the album is quite as overt as Paterson’s recent single “Please Don’t Vote Conservative”, the album closes with “Dorian” and its plain suggestion that perhaps we should treat the people who the right-wing faction of his country have spent the past few years relentlessly demonizing as human beings. Virtual Virgins can be long-winded at times, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a point. (Bandcamp link)

Mantarochen – In the Badgers Cave

Release date: May 31st
Record label: It’s Eleven
Genre: Post-punk, darkwave, synthpunk
Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Im Sand

Over the past six months or so, I’ve been keeping an eye on It’s Eleven Records, an intriguing underground east German post-punk label that’s put out some of the most rewarding rock music I’ve heard out of continental Europe as of late. The wild, synth-tinged garage punk of Leipzig’s Ambulanz caught my attention last December, and the dark basement noise rock/post-punk of L’appel Du Vide (hailing from It’s Eleven’s home of Chemnitz) continued a winning streak. The label’s newest release is from another Leipzig-based band, although the second record from Mantarochen (following a self-titled debut last year) is in a different realm than Ambulanz’s frenetic garage rock. The self-recorded and self-mixed In the Badgers Cave EP fits squarely into the world of lo-fi darkwave, post-punk, and synth-punk. The band (“Diana, Sebi and Tom”, per It’s Eleven) build their songs off of quick, simple drum machines and striking, melodic, but still dark-feeling basslines, and augment them with intermittent guitar parts, synth interjections, and lead vocals that feel “cool” without being “expressionless”.

The fifteen-minute In the Badgers Cave spends its first five zipping through two excellent examples of Mantarochen’s sound at full force. “Reflection” and “Im Sand” are both heavily rhythmic songs, with the minimal, chugging backbone of the first song never losing ground to the synths, guitar, and vocals that eventually come into frame along with it. The latter continues Mantarochen’s stoic sprint, its theatrics limited to the drum machine briefly dropping out in the second half before it picks up again as if nothing happened. The clanging “Jaguar” is perhaps the biggest deviation from In the Badgers Cave’s core sound, although that’s not saying a whole bunch (mainly that the guitars are louder and the vocals are a little more freaked-out sounding), while the bass set to maximum “throb” and the vocals set to full-on “goth” in “Grey” keep us on our toes, as well. “Blue Heads” might be a tinge more “upbeat” and “Still Black” a tinge more “ethereal”,  but In the Badgers Cave is primarily an underground rock music record for those of us who like taking them in as a single, ominous monolith of sound. That’s the biggest success of In the Badgers Cave–it’s fairly intangible, but I know it when I hear it. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable: