Pressing Concerns: Closet Mix, Non La, Sunglaciers, With Patience

It’s the second day of April, and it’s also time for the month’s second edition of Pressing Concerns. It’s a really good one this time, featuring new albums from Closet Mix, Non La, and Sunglaciers, plus a new EP from With Patience. If you missed yesterday’s blog post (featuring Hello Emerson, Fanclubwallet, The Church, and Magana), check that 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.

Closet Mix – 04 CD

Release date: March 29th
Record label: Old 3C
Genre: Post-college rock, 90s indie rock, keyboard rock
Formats: CD, digital
Pull Track: My Appeal to Heaven

One of my favorite kinds of releases to cover in Pressing Concerns is “debut album by a group of musicians who have been making music in some form for decades”–and that’s exactly what we’ve got with the first full-length from Columbus’ Closet Mix, given the very utilitarian title of 04 CD. The quartet is made up of vocalist/bassist Paul Nini, guitarist/vocalist Keith Novicki, keyboardist Chris Nini, and drummer Dan Della Flora–between the four of them, they’ve played in plenty of Ohio bands over the years, including Log, Peck of Snide, Househearts, Vena Cava, Van Echo, and the legendary Great Plains. Closet Mix (named after Lou Reed’s version of the 1969 Velvet Underground album, of course) came together in the mid-2010s, with their debut 01 EP arriving in 2016 and introducing their laid-back, keyboard-driven meandering rock stylings. Work on the Closet Mix debut album began shortly after–a few singles trickled out while completion was delayed by the pandemic, and 04 CD triumphantly arrives a little eight years after that first EP. Closet Mix’s slow pace yields plenty of rewards on their first album–it’s a dozen songs pushing fifty minutes, but still, just about every moment feels like the right step for the individual track and the record to which it belongs.

04 CD is a difficult-to-categorize album–it’s not an overly loud or noisy indie rock record, but Novicki does get to show off on guitar frequently, sometimes playing jangly melodies that might fall under vintage “college rock” and other times straight-up ripping classic rock solos. It’s reminiscent of recent records from Eleventh Dream Day, Royal Ottawa, and Mint Mile, all bands made up of musicians who’ve been at it for so long they’ve created their own languages. The main difference here is Chris Nini’s keyboards, which feature prominently throughout 04 CD and provide a nice, steady counterweight to the more showy guitar work. Paul Nini’s vocals are also an essential component to 04 CD–when he opens the record on “Hey World” with “Sorry about the mess we made / Sorry about the CIA … / Sorry about the Everglades” he sounds clear but distant, like a 20th century ghost coming in and out of focus. Songs like “My Appeal to Heaven” (with its early-R.E.M. instrumental and quick tempo) and “Contact Buzz” (with a handful of particularly evocative metaphors from Paul) feel like timeless pop rock songs unearthed from another era, and the darkly minimal “The Bastards Won Again” sounds beamed in from a cyclical future. As disparate as Closet Mix can feel, they’ll also stake their flag squarely in the present when they want to, as well—layered, attention-grabbing indie rock tracks like “Rabbit Hole” and “Sanctuary City” both sound like the band still have a fire lit under them. As long as there’s a spark, Closet Mix can work with that–04 CD is a record taking place in ashes and embers, but they’re still glowing. (Bandcamp link)

Non La – Like Before

Release date: March 29th
Record label: Mint
Genre: Fuzz rock, lo-fi indie rock, singer-songwriter
Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Hold Me Down

Coming out the same week as Sunglaciers’ Regular Nature (which appears directly below) is a different ambitious indie rock record originating from Western Canada, although Non La’s Like Before earns this distinction by working in a few different arenas than their neighbors to the northeast. DJ On grew up in Vancouver and played in a few local bands (including Megamall), but they began their Non La project after living in Taiwan for a period and subsequently returning to Canada. They debuted Non La in 2020 with Not in Love via Lost Sound Tapes (Olivia’s World, Zowy, The Ashenden Papers) and Kingfisher Bluez (Janelane, Robert Sotelo, Allison Crutchfield) but they’ve jumped to Mint (Kamikaze Nurse, Tough Age, Dumb) for their sophomore full-length, Like Before. Compared to Regular Nature’s sprawling art rock, Like Before is much more insular–On plays everything on the record themself and recorded it at Dumb’s Choms studio, all of which gives the record a downbeat but loud, lo-fi, fuzzed-out indie rock sound. Stoic on the surface but with plenty going on underneath, Like Before is an apt vehicle for On’s lyrics which reflect extensively on queer love and navigating the relationships sprung from it.

The sixty-second acoustic bedroom pop opening track “Dark Room” is one of the most immediately captivating moments on Like Before, and On deftly segues from its skeletal structure to the full-on mid-tempo fuzz rock of “Hold Me Down” and its surging, desperate chorus that sets up the emotions and desire that trigger the rest of the record’s subject matter. Just glancing at the song titles that follow–“Every Lie”, “Hurtful”, “I Don’t Wanna Know”, “Forget”–is enough to know that Like Before is headed into choppy waters, but On doesn’t shy away from the harder stuff, from the bleak frankness of “Every Lie” (“And now I’m so embarrassed / Cause I let you sleep in my room / And you made a mess of it”) to the gorgeously desperate plea of “Forget” (“I need you / You need me,” is what it all boils down to). The title track is the loudest moment on the record, thundering, distorted alt-rock/power pop soundtracking uncertain lyrics about the changing nature of a relationship and the sheer impossibility of understanding what it could mean. The tenderest moments on Like Before (like the zen-like “Take Care”) are well-earned, as are its ugliest ones: On chooses to end the record with “Matter”, an audibly pained song where its rough lyrics (“I’ve bit my tongue so much it hurts / Because you matter to me / And you won’t do the same for me / Do I not matter to you”) are buried underneath the guitars, perhaps in an attempt to blunt the hurt a bit. Non La ask a bunch of questions on Like Before, even the ones where the mere fact that they must be verbalized answers them. (Bandcamp link)

Sunglaciers – Regular Nature

Release date: March 29th
Record label: Mothland
Genre: Post-punk, art rock, psychedelic rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Right Time

I’m fairly certain I’ve never written about any band that’s even close to being from Alberta in Pressing Concerns before, but we begin our foray into Canada’s Prairie Provinces with a doozy. Calgary’s Sunglaciers are a quartet who put out two EPs and two albums between 2017 and 2021; their third full-length, Regular Nature, is the first I’d heard of them, but it immediately got my attention. This record is an expansive collection of all-over-the-place art rock, with shades of punchy Devo-y new wave/post-punk as well as layered, rhythmic psychedelic rock, synthpop, and even a bit of an ambient odyssey hidden in here as well. Over fifteen songs and forty-one minutes, the group (vocalist/guitarist/synth players Evan Resnik and Nyssa Brown, drummer Mathieu Blanchard, and bassist Kyle Crough) rarely sound satisfied to stay in one place for long, and their ambitions are aided by a cadre of guest musicians including Calgary psych pop legend Chad VanGaalen on several instruments throughout the majority of these songs, and Daniel Monkman of Zoon and OMBIIGIZI’s guitar on lead single “Cursed”.

Sunglaciers open things up with the energetic egg-punk “Fakes”, yelping “All style, not a lot of substance!” as they rush into the chorus–the song’s title ends up being somewhat appropriate, though, as we’ve only really touched the tip of the iceberg that is Regular Nature. The first half of the record also features a few more revved-up rockers in the form of the frantic garage rock of “Kafka” and the fuzzed-out post-punk-glam “I Remember the Days”, but we also get the slick, almost krautrock-y chugging “Right Time”, the psychedelic synthpop of “Undermine”, and “Cursed”, an exciting collision of electronica and rock music. After the instrumental interludes “Interlude” and “Frog Mask”, lesser bands would start wrapping things up, but Sunglaciers are only halfway through with Regular Nature, with several side two highlights remaining (including the three-song run of “A.I.”, “Reef”, and “Not Ready”, a cacophonous and loud stretch that might be the best section of the entire album). Regular Nature is indeed a lot to take in at once, but I admire the commitment that Sunglaciers display–if they’d tried to trim the record down to a more “digestible” dozen songs, we probably would’ve lost some late-record curiosities like the VanGaalen-y synth-rock of “Gov Shut” or the relatively brief but spirited “One Time or Another”, which would’ve been a shame. One of Regular Nature’s best qualities is how much it sounds like a band aiming high and coming away with something rewarding for doing so. (Bandcamp link)

With Patience – Three of Swords

Release date: February 13th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Post-hardcore, noise rock
Formats: CD, digital
Pull Track: Reasons

Chicago trio With Patience debuted last year with a two-song digital single, but the band’s members have been playing in various Windy City bands for some time now–bassist/vocalist Lance Curran in Careful, drummer/vocalist Lee Diamond in Douglass Kings and Alkaloid, and guitarist/vocalist Chris Wade in hose.got.cable. Just a couple months after their debut single, With Patience have released their first EP, Three of Swords (which is available on a CD combining it with their debut single). Mixed by J. Robbins of Jawbox and mastered by Bob Weston of Shellac, one might imagine that With Patience make music indebted to the noisier side of 90s indie rock–and indeed, that’d get you in the ballpark of what Three of Swords sounds like. The record’s three songs have a fair bit of 90s Dischord in them with their lean, post-punk/post-hardcore attitude, but there’s also a hint of Drive Like Jehu and Hot Snakes in the tracks’ electricity, pounding tempos, and frequently shredded-sounding vocals. 

Three of Swords is quite brief–its three songs only just cross the eight-minute mark in total (to put it in Yank Crime terms, it’s longer than “Super Unison” but shorter than “Luau”). With Patience don’t have time to beat around the bush, and they jump right into things with the fiery post-punk of “Reasons” to open up the record. “Do you, do you, do you need instructions?” Wade barks in the chorus, the offbeat Devo-ism given a performance more akin to Ian MacKaye and Rick Froberg. The Diamond-sung “Obsolete at Production” is the oddest track on the record, alternating between choppy Dischord muscle and a bit of West Coast garage/psychedelia in both the vocal delivery and the speedy instrumental passages. Curran takes the lead for closing track “FOMO”, the record’s biggest “punk” moment–ferocious bass and crashing guitar mark the verses, and there’s a nice Fugazi-ish gang vocal thing going on in the chorus. With Patience do find a few different angles within their well-worn genre of choice, and the vocal trade-offs also add some variety, but Three of Swords works more than anything else because of its energy–the trio sound as excited about noisy rock and roll music as a group of brand-new musicians. You don’t get a debut record like Three of Swords otherwise. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Hello Emerson, Fanclubwallet, The Church, Magana

It is the beginning of April! We’re still enjoying the final week of March in Pressing Concerns, however, as this edition looks at four records that came out last week: new LPs from Hello Emerson, The Church, and Magana, plus a new EP from Fanclubwallet. The March 2024 playlist won’t be ready until next week (due to me being on vacation last week), but you can expect two more Pressing Concerns this week as per usual.

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.

Hello Emerson – To Keep Him Here

Release date: March 29th
Record label: Anyway/Hometown Caravan/K&F
Genre: Singer-songwriter, folk rock, alt-country
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Church

Hello Emerson is the project of Columbus-based folk musician Sam Emerson Bodary, who put out his debut album back in 2017 and linked up with Ohio stalwart imprint Anyway Records (St. Lenox, Smug Brothers, Joe Peppercorn) for 2020’s How to Cook Everything. The third full-length from the band (also featuring percussionist Daniel Seibert and keyboardist Jack Doran) and their first in four years is a concept record about an accident in 2017 that landed Bodary’s father, David, in the hospital, and the subsequent nine days of hazy uncertainty while the younger Bodary and the rest of his family waited to see if David would make it through to the other side–and what state, physically and mentally, he would be in. He eventually recovered, and To Keep Him Here stands as a chronicle of everything that such an event brings to the surface, from the inevitability of death to the mundane-seeming things that are forever changed by the loss of a loved one to whether or not a near-death experience could (or should) necessitate major life changes once one returns to “the living world”. 

Bodary’s version of “indie folk” is crystal-clear-sounding, “confessional”-feeling, and relatively polished, which has garnered Hello Emerson comparisons to The Mountain Goats and Bright Eyes (the latter feels more accurate, although he might actually be closer to David Dondero, Conor Oberst’s mentor from which he, ah, borrowed a lot). Neither of them quite feel like apt touchpoints for To Keep Him Here, an album that veers between direct and existential lyrically while musically incorporating some rootsiness and “alt-country” without being overtly wedded to either (I hear more than a little bit of a more Midwestern Jason Isbell in Bodary’s delivery and writing). The songs on To Keep Him Here are actually interspersed with snippets of an interview that David did about the accident–these quotes aren’t long enough to fully explain and contextualize what happened to him, which fits with the somewhat scattered theme of the record, but they certainly echo the sentiments Bodary writes about in his songs. 

“Tupperware for Glass” flits between a stark remembrance of the phone call informing Bodary of the accident and a meditation on the uselessness of living “healthy” when everything can end so suddenly–a sentiment echoed by the nevertheless upbeat-feeling “Church”. Bodary bounces between subjects, but every song on the record fits in with the album and says quite a lot–even the one-minute “Dinners I” is a key illustration of where the mind goes in this situation (“If we lose Dad, then how will we make dinner?”) while “Couch Song” functions to give meaning to the years before it and the time spent, regardless of how it “ends”. The album closes with the cheery-sounding “Tough Luck”–the quip about the ordeal being “Just a dress rehearsal for your hospice years” is a little “dark humor”, but it’s substantial enough to be thought of as more than “ironic”. In the next line, Bodary sings “Now we’ll know how to help you go,” in all sincerity–To Keep Him Here is too complex to boil everything in it down to one conclusion, but Bodary finds the way forward by taking whatever he can from the experience. (Bandcamp link)

Fanclubwallet – Our Bodies Paint Traffic Lines

Release date: March 29th
Record label: Cool Online
Genre: Dream pop, bedroom pop, indie pop, twee, synthpop
Formats: CD, digital
Pull Track: Complex Weather

Ottawa, Ontario’s Hannah Judge started releasing music as Fanclubwallet in 2020, putting out a steady stream of singles and eventually larger-scale records–2021’s Hurt Is Being EP, 2022’s You Have Got to Be Kidding Me, last year’s Small Songs, Vol. 1 EP. As a solo bedroom pop act, Fanclubwallet have achieved an impressive degree of success–“Car Crash in G Major” has been streamed 13 million times, which I think makes it a “hit”–but Judge has remained actively involved in her local scene in a way not necessarily characteristic of “out of nowhere”. Judge recently co-founded Club Records, which appears focused on fellow Ottawa acts (they’ve put out music from Dart Trees, among others), and has now assembled a full-time Fanclubwallet band out of “close friends” in the Ottawa music scene–bassist Nat Reid, guitarist Eric Graham, and drummer Michael Watson (who co-founded Club with Judge). The five-song Our Bodies Paint Traffic Lines EP is the debut of full-band Fanclubwallet–not only do Reid, Graham, and Watson play on the EP, they’re also credited with composition and writing. The dream-y bedroom pop sound of Fanclubwallet is still intact on Our Bodies Paint Traffic Lines, but there’s definitely a hefty backbone to these songs that helps this EP stand out in a crowded scene.

Another commendable aspect of Our Bodies Paint Traffic Lines is that it plays like a full record rather than a collection of songs (not always a given for this kind of music)–the way that Fanclubwallet slowly roll out the carpet in the slow-moving synth-dream-pop title track only to launch into the starry-eyed, big-chorused indie rock of “Complex Weather” is quite deft, as is the self-evident manifestation contained in the exclamation mark of a closing track, “Band Like That”. “Picture of Her” and “Easy” are hardly “album tracks” (I mean, the latter was literally a single), with the dueling vocals in the forming helping the mid-tempo song develop a distinct identity and the quick, skipping-speed and buzzing synths of the latter setting its own course. “Complex Weather” and “Band Like That” are both massive pop songs, although the former immediately locks into place by dropping us all in the middle of a pivotal moment while the latter is a little more comfortable taking its time in crafting its narrative. “Band Like That” is a song about hearing a band on the radio, seeing them live, and feeling a strong desire to do just that. The final lyrics are a question (“You could see it, right? / Me in a band like that”)–Judge leans on the rest of her band to provide the answer. (Bandcamp link)

The Church – Eros Zeta and the Perfumed Guitars

Release date: March 29th
Record label: Communicating Vessels
Genre: Psychedelic rock, college rock, post-punk, folk rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Amanita

Every rock band should strive to be as inventive, as active, and as weird in their fifth decade of existence as legendary college rockers The Church have turned out to be. In recent years, the Sydney-based group have leaned fully into the psychedelic rock that, in their early days, hovered around the edge of their post-punk/jangle-rock sound, creating dense soundscapes like those of last year’s thirteen-song, hour-long The Hypnogogue. The band (led by founding and sole consistent member Steve Kilbey on vocals and bass, alongside drummer Tim Powles and guitarists Ian Haug, Ashley Naylor, and Jeffrey Cain) didn’t wait long to follow up The Hypnogogue–the twenty-seventh Church LP, Eros Zeta and the Perfumed Guitars, is a “continuation” of the previous record’s storyline, following “a failed rockstar (‘Eros Zeta’) trying to reclaim his faded glory through the use of a dream extractor (‘The Hypnogogue’)”. Kilbey has apparently written an eBook elaborating on this story as well. Do I follow the two records’ shared concept? Not really–but Kilbey is pretty clearly inspired by it, as he’s used it as a jumping-off point to put together two different late-career highlights now.

Some of these songs initially appeared on the deluxe edition of The Hypnogogue, and the entire record was apparently available for purchase as a live show exclusive when they were touring its predecessor, but The Church made the right decision in releasing Eros Zeta and the Perfumed Guitars properly as a standalone album. If it’s possible for a 70-minute, 15-song double LP to be “streamlined”, Eros Zeta and the Perfumed Guitars is, relatively speaking–there are less lengthy instrumental passages and wall-of-sound psychedelic rock on this one as compared to The Hypnogogue, with Kilbey’s songwriting feeling a bit more grounded this time around. The first few songs on the album are fairly accessible pieces of post-college rock, with jangle pop, folk rock, psychedelia, post-punk, and orchestral rock all adding shades to the likes of “Realm of Minor Angels” and “Amanita” but without any one aspect overtaking the others. There are a few “spacier” songs in the first half of the record–“2054” and “The Immediate Future” come to mind–but they’re the exception rather than the rule, with songs like “Manifesto” and “Song 18” always coming in with a more pop-friendly version of The Church’s sound. The one truly “out there” moment on Eros Zeta and the Perfumed Guitars is the nine-minute space-prog-psych odyssey of “A Strange Past”, but it fits quite well alongside the record’s smaller-scale desert rock. After all, at this point, the Hynogogue era of The Church is as key a part of their history as Starfish is. (Streaming link)

Magana – Teeth

Release date: March 25th
Record label: Audio Antihero/Colored Pencils
Genre: Indie folk, art rock, singer-songwriter, indie pop
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: In My Body

I didn’t recognize the name of Los Angeles’ Jeni Magaña when I first heard Teeth, the singer-songwriter’s second full-length album, but that doesn’t mean she hasn’t been busy over the past decade or so, serving as the touring bassist for Mitski and Lady Lamb as well as making indie pop as one half of Pen Pin. At the same time, Magaña has steadily been releasing music on her own as Magana, with records ranging from ambient to folk rock. Her first “rock” album, 2020’s You Are Not a Morning Person, was a spirited batch of modern indie folk and rock with some orchestral touches. Given her other musical activities, it’s not surprising that it took a few years for a proper follow-up to emerge, but Teeth is a fully-realized sophomore effort–fourteen songs and forty minutes that recall her previous work, but as a whole it’s a distinct record that takes a different tack than her last one. The orchestral moments are more prominent, and the electric indie rock–while still being present–recedes a bit as Magana creates something that utilizes a wide array of musical styles.

Magana has a dramatic, floating vocal style that puts her in line with a lot of the big “indie folk” acts of today, but it’s her embrace of more adventurous instrumentation that sets Teeth apart from the crowd more than anything else. The uneven strums that open the record on “Garden” are simple yet somewhat strange, especially in combination with the eerie synths and sung-spoken lyrics, and the two songs that immediately follow it (the minimal, handclap-aided indie pop of “Beside You” and the delicate but giant-sounding synth-rock of “Matter”) are a bit friendlier but without receding into anonymity. The bigger-sounding songs like “Break Free” and (especially) “Afraid of Everybody” are well-done, but Teeth really shines in the margins, with quiet numbers like “Paul” (a touching orchestral folk ode to a friend who passed away) and “In My Body” (an upright bass-led piece whose silence only enhances the determination at the song’s heart) being some of the record’s most memorable moments. Magana takes on “Mary Anne” with just an acoustic guitar, her voice, and some white noise in tow, and comes out to an instrumental “Clarinet Jam” once she’s made it through. Both sides of Teeth are equally important to its foundation as a whole. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Silo’s Choice, Casual Technicians, A Country Western, Conor Lynch

This Friday (March 29th) is a great week for new releases! Four of them are featured below (new albums from Silo’s Choice, Casual Technicians, A Country Western, and Conor Lynch), and you can expect some more of them to show up on the blog in the coming weeks, too. In the meantime, these should be more than enough to keep everyone occupied, and if you missed Monday’s blog post (featuring Villagerrr, Gibson & Toutant, Sucker, and Andrew Collberg) or Tuesday’s (Coffin Pricks, Steve Drizos, Soft Screams, and dreamTX), 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.

Silo’s Choice – Languid Swords

Release date: March 29th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Folk rock, prog-folk, art folk, new age
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Last Days of Gaddafi

Silo’s Choice is a guy named Jon Massey, who for the past dozen years or so has been putting out records under this name, beginning in Cincinnati and continuing through his move to Chicago a few years ago. I first heard Massey’s music via 2022’s Priorities USA, an intriguing blend of folk music, electronica, and swooping indie rock, but the first record of his that truly blew me away was last year’s Our Lady of Perpetual Health, which was a collaboration between Massey and Mike Fox (Arthhur, Flesh of the Stars) released under the name Coventry. That album’s experimental yet accessible take on Chicago indie folk rock a la Drag City ended up being one of my favorite LPs of the year, and so I’m pleased to see that Massey is back with another Silo’s Choice album a few months later. Priorities USA and Our Lady of Perpetual Health both showcased the more bite-sized, pop-friendly side of Massey’s songwriting–Languid Swords takes a different approach, but to no less impressive ends. 

Built largely around meandering acoustic guitar playing and upright bass, the seven-song, 40-minute album backs up the John Fahey influence that Massey cited when he emailed me about Languid Swords–this music takes its time and isn’t overly concerned with offering up pop hooks immediately (and that’s not even taking into account the bonus hour of new age music that comes with a digital purchase of the album). Massey’s lyric-writing–which often finds him writing about thorny geopolitics with a frightening lucidity, as well as featuring a noticeable interest in public transportation–has gotten him compared to Emperor X, but the music, which embraces the Thrill Jockey-curious side of Coventry, makes it pretty clear that Massey is moving to his own, unique beat. That being said, Massey’s vocals and lyrics are the clearest link to his past work on Languid Swords, and when the album does indulge in pop music, it’s on Massey’s own terms, as it’s always been. I don’t want to overstate how inaccessible Languid Swords is–for instance, the six-minute opening track “Last Days of Gaddafi” is actually a quite gripping opener, a surging piece of folk rock where the mundanity of Massey’s writing is actually the ballast, fighting against the soaring instrumental and the context of the song’s title. 

The middle of the record is where Massey offers up a couple of “normal-length” songs, but that doesn’t mean that they’re any less developed than the opening track or the seven-minute “The Moon Is Always Out in Rio Nido” that follows it–the three minute pop balladry of “Window of Confusion” in particular is a highlight (“I was selling arms to both sides, was giving their guys high fives / I was coming out on top of it, I was on my State Department shit”), but the deceptively-slight-feeling “Patriotic Bookstores” merits a closer look of its own, too. The record comes to a head with the lengthy semi-title track that closes the album proper–like the opening song, however, “The Ballad of the Languid Sword” also contains some of the record’s most memorable “pop” moments. Over a sparkling yet traditional-leaning indie pop instrumental, Massey sings “When I drink wine, the king must drink rainwater / When I eat caviar, the tsar must eat horse butter,” and this comes after a line about mummifying Silicon Valley “tech guys” alive. This is but one small section of a world-containing song that burns and smolders for over nine minutes, but to me it’s a key one–it’s emblematic of the power of the arsenal of Languid Swords that Massey has amassed. (Bandcamp link)

Casual Technicians – Casual Technicians

Release date: March 29th
Record label: Repeating Cloud
Genre: Lo-fi pop, bedroom pop, psychedelic pop, prog-pop
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Four Corners

I’ve written about Log Across the Washer–the solo project of Portland, Oregon-originating, New Jersey-based Tyler Keene–a few times on this blog before, because Log Across the Washer are very good. Keene’s take on lo-fi bedroom pop is one that hides pop songs in unexpected corners, making him one of the more interesting modern makers of the genre. Before moving across the country, Keene co-led a band called And And And with Nathan Baumgartner–Baumgartner soldiered on without Keene for a bit, but ended the project a few years ago. Casual Technicians marks the reunion of the two, along with a third creative force–Boone Howard, another Portland expat who once led The We Shared Milk and now lives on a farm in upstate New York. Recorded on said farm, the self-titled Casual Technicians debut album is a perfectly imperfect melding of three distinct pop weirdos.

You can tell the Casual Technicians apart by their voices (the press info helpfully states that Baumgartner is the higher voice, Howard the lower one, and Keene the one in between); they switch the lead quite frequently, which for them seems to be just one more way for them to veer and swerve through these nineteen songs. I don’t know if Casual Technicians is more accessible than Log Across the Washer, but its weirdness feels more approachable and communal–instead of one person veering into strange waters alone in his basement, the Technicians are never not building something together as a unit. Musically, it’s in the same ballpark–lo-fi, a little psychedelic, plenty of pop. Beach Boys and Elephant 6 comparisons are warranted, and I also hear the delicate oddness of Sparklehorse and Grandaddy–hell, the barn even brings out a little Neil Young in “Fake Farmer Blues” and “Heartfelt Sentiments”. The stitched-together feeling reminds me of a more off-the-wall version of one of my favorite albums from last year, Coventry’s Our Lady of Perpetual Health [Note: I wrote this before I found out this album would be sharing a blog post with a Coventry-related release. Nice!]. 

Although the record has an incredibly strong start (in addition to the previously-mentioned two songs, “Lucy in the Dark” is one of the best pop tunes I’ve heard this year quite easily), the second half of Casual Technicians is its secret weapon. If you’re not attuned to the Technicians’ frequencies, I could see someone getting lost in a 47-minute, 19-track album where every song has about three songs’ worth of ideas in them, but if you stick around, you’re rewarded with the band at their gear-switching, prog-pop energetic best in “Four Corners”, and the effortless, sunny “Dingman’s Ferry” takes its time to get to its final sum. The group also hides some subtler gems towards the end with “On a Trip to Nowhere” and “Eggshells”, which find the band a lot more “pensive” than “rowdy”. Then again, “Main Street” is also one of the quieter songs on the album, but that doesn’t stop Casual Technicians from delivering perhaps the record’s most memorable one-liner (“Main Street was not open before the war / It opened in 1780, or 1860-something”). So it goes with the Casual Technicians, a band and album that lives up to its name. (Bandcamp link)

A Country Western – Life on the Lawn

Release date: March 29th
Record label: Crafted Sounds
Genre: Shoegaze, fuzz rock, alt-rock, lo-fi indie rock, noise pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: The Dreamer

I first encountered A Country Western when they released a split EP with They Are Gutting a Body of Water in 2022, and their contributions to that record served as a pretty good summation of what the Philadelphia shoegaze band had been doing up until that point, merging the experimental, non-rock influences that have been emblematic of the recent Philly shoegaze scene with lo-fi but catchy fuzzed-out noise pop. That being said, Life on the Lawn, their third album and first release since the An Insult to the Sport split, surprised me quite a bit. The album feels different from the very first track, but I distinctly remember driving and getting to the third song, “The Dreamer”, and being blown away by how well it worked as music to listen to with the sun out and the windows rolled down. Life on the Lawn is A Country Western at their biggest–the guitars are louder, the songs embrace rock music with hardly a shred of self-consciousness, and more than a few big hooks abound. It might be the closest we get to a Gen Z version of Mezcal Head. The genre of music named after people staring at their feet isn’t supposed to sound like this, but don’t tell that to A Country Western, who’ve just put together an incredibly confident and cool-sounding record.

It’s not quite as radio-friendly as “The Dreamer”, but opening track “Great Is the Grip of the Hawk” certainly rivals that one in terms of pure fireworks. In under two minutes, it defines Life on the Lawn with a giant instrumental hook, power chord-featuring alt-rock verses, and a big adrenaline-fuzz-rock finish. The four-minute “Sidewalk” isn’t quite as antsy, but it still has plenty of excellent riffs and guitarwork to bridge the gap between the two previously-mentioned songs, and guest vocals from Samira Winter of Winter add a chilly heavy dream pop feel to “How Far” in the middle of the record. Life on the Lawn isn’t all punchy noise-punk stuff, but every time it veers away from this side of the band, A Country Western come roaring back–the six-minute downtempo “The Spine” gets followed by “How Far”, the lo-fi bedroom rock “Ridgeline” starts off minimal but finishes loudly, and the acoustic sparseness of “Hiding Out” is a prelude for the mid-tempo but plugged-in closing track “Wasting the Weekends”. Like a good deal of Life on the Lawn, there’s a bleak undercurrent running through that final song (just look at its title, for one), but A Country Western choose to send the song and the album off with a lifting lead guitar solo, throwing a rope towards the top of the ditch rather than just wallowing in it. (Bandcamp link)

Conor Lynch – Slow Country

Release date: March 29th
Record label: Devil Town Tapes
Genre: Country rock, folk rock, singer-songwriter
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Cockaigne

Conor Lynch’s fourth full-length album is titled Slow Country, and it’s a shining example of truth in advertising. Lynch is a Michigan-based folk/country artist who started self-releasing music in the mid-2010s and eventually linked up with British cassette label Devil Town Tapes, releasing three albums between 2017 and 2021. It’s tempting to compare Lynch to the other notable American folk singer on Devil Town, Greg Mendez, but Lynch’s music has a more Midwestern openness to it compared to Mendez’s intricate acoustic guitar pop–Slow Country feels more like a subdued version of Michigan folk rockers Frontier Ruckus’ latest album. Lynch does indeed embrace both “slow” and “country” on his latest album–for one, he took his time developing this record’s dozen songs, which reflected in the fully-realized nature of the album (featuring all sorts of guest musicians on strings, horns, banjo, mandolin, accordion, and more), and tempo-wise, it’s indeed on the “requires patience” side, sounding like a warmer, friendlier version of Grass Jaw’s lonesome slowcore-country. Lynch still has a bit of an “unassuming bedroom pop” delivery, but it’s counterbalanced by the deliberate folk and expansive country music he creates with it.

Slow Country begins with a six-minute country-folk song called “Psithurism” (which means “the rustling of leaves”, apparently), a plodding tune that makes ample use of Kaysen Chown’s violin and Ryan McDonald’s pedal steel. It does feature percussion, but the drums (played by Lynch himself) certainly aren’t there to usher the song forward, happily and amicably hanging out with the rest of the instrumentation. If that’s a bit intimidating, you might be more drawn to the brisker, more succinct country-rock grooves of “Cockaigne” and “Tworailsmeet”, although you’re going to get significantly more out of Slow Country if you embrace the rambling nature of songs like “Hill” (featuring Lynch stepping up to the piano in the instrumental sections) and “Creator” (a lonesome, pedal-steel heavy folk-country ballad). Lynch keeps things simple on “Everything’s Beautiful”, which needs little more than its acoustic finger-picking to drive its point home, but the record still has plenty of terrain to traverse in its second half–for one, “Long Ways from Home” takes the idea behind “Everything’s Beautiful” and contorts it, distorting Lynch’s voice in a surprising but oddly fitting way. “Bank 2 Bank” and “There Is a Road” are some of the most sketched-out songs on the entire record hidden away in the final third, although the closing title track is a spare one. Taking one last long look at the country surrounding him, Lynch lets the expanse speak for itself. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Coffin Pricks, Steve Drizos, Soft Screams, dreamTX

The second Pressing Concerns of the week is a nice and eclectic one: here, we’ve got a couple of albums that came out last month (from Steve Drizos and Soft Screams), a vinyl re-release of last year’s dreamTX album, and a compilation collecting the entire recorded output (plus some live material) of the short-lived Coffin Pricks. If you missed yesterday’s blog post (featuring Villagerrr, Gibson & Toutant, Sucker, and Andrew Collberg), 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.

Coffin Pricks – Semi-Perfect Crimes

Release date: March 1st
Record label: Council
Genre: Garage rock, punk rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Group Home Haircut

For a short time in Chicago in the early 2010s, there was a loud, noisy garage punk group named Coffin Pricks on the prowl. The group (guitarist/bassist Ryan Weinstein, vocalist Chris Thomson, drummer Jeff Rice, and bassist Chay Lawrence) was built up from a bunch of punk veterans, having been in Circus Lupus, Ottawa, Calvary, Red Eyed Legends, Monochord, and Bob Tilton between the four of them. For whatever reason, Coffin Pricks ended not long after conception–they put out their only release, a three song single for Stationary Heart Records, in May of 2012, and they’d played their last show before that year was over. Although half of its members are still fairly active musicians–Weinstein moved to Los Angeles, rechristened himself Coffin Prick, and released an album and EP of experimental rock music last year, while Rice currently drums for Chicago hardcore punk group Consensus Madness–Coffin Pricks never got back together, leaving behind seven songs recorded by the initial trio of Weinstein, Thomson, and Rice in 2011 and a handful of tracks that never even made it that far. After much cajoling, Council Records finally got Weinstein to help piece together a Coffin Pricks full-length out of their output, featuring all seven of their studio recordings (newly remixed and remastered) and augmented by a 2012 live session from Saki Recordings featuring six un-recorded tracks, finally released this year as a vinyl LP called Semi-Perfect Crimes. 

The studio tracks on Semi-Perfect Crimes are half of a perfect rock and roll album, as far as I’m concerned. These songs are all exciting, smoking-hot garage punk rippers with a bit of a post-punk tinge to them–yet at the same time, they’re weird recordings, too. Not self-consciously offbeat like a “Devo-core”/”egg punk” group might be, exactly, but in a subtler, more difficult-to-diagnose way– songs like “Group Home Haircut” and “Only Flesh Wound” sound simple and streamlined, but they go on for nearly four minutes and have a surprisingly large arsenal of ideas and bits and pieces strewn about them. The garage rock-y post-punk of the former song reminds me of The Fall, a band that feels relevant to Coffin Pricks, but Thomson’s strained post-hardcore frontperson act is way too all-over-the-place to get bogged down in Mark E. Smith cosplay. The second half of Semi-Perfect Crimes is the Saki Session (all six un-recorded songs plus another version of album opener “TV Detention” make the LP, while the remaining five tracks are digital-only bonuses)–by this point, they’d added Lawrence on bass and, unsurprisingly, sound even louder and chaotic live than in the studio. That being said, Coffin Pricks hadn’t abandoned their “artier”/post-punk side–in fact, “Banana Boat” and “Extinct Language Discussion” are significantly stranger than anything the band had recorded up to that point. It does make one wonder what a band that was capable of making those kinds of songs while still busting out things like the Fall-shuffle of “Hit Kids” and heavy punk like “Worn Out Thunder” might’ve done had they continued–but on the other hand, it does seem right that a band like this is only being preserved via Semi-Perfect Crimes. (Bandcamp link)

Steve Drizos – I Love You Now Leave Me Alone

Release date: February 16th
Record label: Cavity Search
Genre: College rock, power pop, singer-songwriter, roots rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Boomerang

Steve Drizos is new to me, but he seems like an important figure in the Portland, Oregon music scene. He owns a recording studio called The Panther, where he’s recorded, engineered, or otherwise worked with everyone from Scott McCaughey to Patterson Hood to Debbi Peterson. In addition, he’s also the drummer for longtime Portland group Jerry Joseph and The Jackmormons and is married to The Decemberists’ Jenny Conlee, with whom he has collaborated as well. Despite all this, Drizos’ first proper solo album, Axiom, didn’t appear until 2021–he had the recording studio to himself during the pandemic and came out of it with a record full of occasionally dreamy-and-delicate sounding folk rock. Axiom did have some more “rocking” moments, and it’s in these where Drizos’ follow-up album, I Love You Now Leave Me Alone, finds itself taking up the thread. For this one, he assembled a proper band (guitarist Todd Wright, bassist Tim Murphy, drummer ​​Joe Mengis, and Conlee on piano) who punch up Drizos’ songwriting throughout these eight tracks. There’s still some folk and roots rock touches on I Love You Now Leave Me Alone, but Drizos also expands into classic college rock, early “alternative rock”, and power pop territory as well.

Opening track “Boomerang” has more hooks than it knows what to do with, as both the pre-chorus and chorus are strong enough to carry an entire track–and at the same time, Drizos and his band still find time to offer up some darker-sounding alt-rock in the verses. “Kick into Touch” is the other big power pop song on I Love You Now Leave Me Alone, although it starts off in rather unassuming fashion, taking its time before Conlee’s piano takes off and guides the song to its refrain (which gives the album its title). The laid-back catchiness of songs like “Troubled Heart”, “Brooklyn 97202”, and “Katie” is of a slightly different vein, trending towards roots-y college rock territory (Miracle Legion/Polaris, The Silos, Los Lobos) and finding the band taking their time to sketch out the whole picture. “Beautiful Nothing” is a big left turn in the album’s penultimate slot, a cavernous-sounding, dramatic piece of art-rock that rises and falls multiple times before its six minutes are up. The quiet, contemplative closing track “Inside Outside”, featuring little more than Drizos and an acoustic guitar, has an extra weight given what preceded it–there’s a finality and exhaling quality to it, reflecting earnest bluntness of I Love You Now Leave Me Alone’s title. (Bandcamp link)

Soft Screams – Life’s Labours Won

Release date: February 16th
Record label: Corrupted TV
Genre: Lo-fi power pop
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: RUN

As long as Connor Mac continues to put out good lo-fi power pop albums, I’ll continue to write about them. Mac is part of New York duo Galactic Static, and the first album of theirs that I heard, 2021’s Friendly Universe, might still be my favorite thing the singer-songwriter has been a part of, but that’s not to discount what they’ve accomplished on their own with their Soft Screams solo project, especially last year’s Life’s Labours Lost. On that record, Mac used lo-fi pop and fuzz rock to ruminate on capitalism and work culture in more cohesive and heavy way than Soft Screams had done in the past–clearly this was fertile ground for them, as Mac immediately began putting together a companion EP. Named after a lost Shakespeare play that was a possible sequel to the play from which Life’s Labours Lost took its name, Life’s Labours Won ended up as a full-length that actually eclipses its predecessor in length by a minute. A bit looser-feeling and less “directly staring down The Horrors” than the previous Soft Screams album, Life’s Labours Won stands on its own without any kind of “lesser work” asterisk.

The more offbeat nature of Life’s Labours Won is apparent from opening track “Common Catastrophe”, a post-punk-y anti-anthem that finds Mac repeating “Work won’t set us free” in the chorus. The buzzing “RUN” is probably the best “Soft Screams in power-pop-punk mode” song on the record, the verses cruising into a positively bouncy refrain, although as a whole the album feels a little punchier and less immediate. Not that songs like “Enemy v Enemy”, “Murder Screen”, and “Deathwish Friends” aren’t also catchy, but Mac feels guided by something a little less tangible throughout the album, like they’re just hammering out what they feel, and what they feel is a harder-edged lo-fi rock sound this time around. No one is going to mistake Life’s Labours Won for a noise rock album, but the sturdiness of closing track “Collective Capacity” and the pounding of “Burning Bonds” do feel like Soft Screams looking to craft a sequel that doesn’t just repeat the same beats as the original, and the end result more than justifies Mac’s return to this particular well. (Bandcamp link)

dreamTX – Living in Memory of Something Sweet (Reissue) 

Release date: March 1st
Record label: Memorials of Distinction/Hit the North/Neon Bloodbath
Genre: Art pop, experimental rock, shoegaze, psychedelic pop, dream pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Get Around

Nick Das is a musician who’s originally from Texas, lived in New York for a while, and currently lives in southern California. Das has flown under the radar, but he’s been pretty active over the past half decade–he’s collaborated with alt-pop star Maggie Rogers, plays guitar in the shoegaze band Kraus, and has released at least one lo-fi rock record under the name Half Breed. A few years ago, Das started a new project called dreamTX, inspired by post-rock, bedroom pop, and shoegaze (among other genres); the debut record from the project, Living in Memory of Something Sweet, came out on CD through Memorials of Distinction last year. I missed Living in Memory of Something Sweet when it came out, but thankfully others did not–it was successful enough for Das to team up with Hit the North and Neon Bloodbath to put the album out on LP this month. It’s earned the second look–Living in Memory of Something Sweet is an impressively large-scope pop album that contains shades of everything Das has done thus far.

The album’s various potential genre tags–shoegaze, post-rock, dream pop–don’t really capture the feeling of listening to opening track “Get Around”, a fluttering, euphoric pop song that splits the difference between Young Fathers, Modest Mouse, and Andorra-era Caribou. It’s a massive opening track, and Living in Memory of Something Sweet wisely doesn’t try to top it but rather expand itself from that point onward. Songs like “Elated” and “In Too Deep” are just as catchy as “Get Around”, although the slow-building bedroom pop of the former and the (relatively) minimal synthpop of the latter are distinct creatures. Shades of Das’ shoegaze side show up in “Live Without” and “I Could Face It”, but the fuzzed-out guitars are just another ingredient in dreamTX’s kaleidoscopic symphonies, dropping in and out of the spotlight like the bird noises in the latter and Das’ particularly emotional vocals in the former. Living in Memory of Something Sweet is a record that’s clearly been labored over, but it works because it does so with a clear goal in mind–adding as much to these songs as possible without taking anything away from them. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Villagerrr, Gibson & Toutant, Sucker, Andrew Collberg

I’m on vacation this week, but thankfully I’ve heard a bunch of great music over the past month and have plenty already written about it, so you can expect another full week here at Rosy Overdrive. The first Pressing Concerns of the week looks at three albums that came out last Friday (LPs from Villagerrr, Gibson & Toutant, and Andrew Collberg), plus an EP from Sucker than came out last month.

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.

Villagerrr – Tear Your Heart Out

Release date: March 22nd
Record label: Darling
Genre: Lo-fi indie rock, folk rock, bedroom rock
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: River Ain’t Safe

Mark Allen Scott is from Chillicothe, Ohio, and his music sounds like it. Starting in 2021, Scott began steadily putting up music on Bandcamp as Villagerrr, mostly recorded by himself deep in his remote area of the southern Midwest. The Bandcamp page for Tear Your Heart Out refers to it as the fourth Villagerrr album, although this seems to be a conservative figure, as there are several more LPs’ worth of material available under the name. Now based in Columbus, Scott has a proper band (bassist Cam Garshon, drummer Zayn Dweik, and guitarists Ben Malicoat and Colton Hamilton), label (Darling Records), and is even part of a wider scene (having played and collaborated with Vermont folk rockers Lily Seabird and Greg Freeman, as well as Pittsburgh’s Merce Lemon). Although he may now live in the 46th-largest metropolitan area in North America, Tear Your Heart Out still evokes the rolling farmland of his place of origin–roughly speaking, Scott trades in the sort of mid-2010s bedroom-y folk rock sound recalling landmark releases from everyone from Alex G and Hovvdy to Spencer Radcliffe and Elvis Depressedly. It’s not as easy as it sounds to make this kind of music sound fresh in 2024, but these eleven songs are sturdy and eminently relistenable. 

Like the best of this genre, Tear Your Heart Out has plenty going on underneath its unassuming surface construction and plain-spoken/sung vocals. Part of that is assuredly due to Scott’s willingness to collaborate–for instance, guest musician Boone Patrello’s pedal slide/slide guitar work on “Runnin’ Round” and “See” is integral to both of those songs. Villagerrr is still Scott’s project, though, and he’s credited with a lot of instrumentation, and the way he chooses different tacks to take Tear Your Heart Out’s sound (warm folk rock with bright lead guitar melodies in “Neverrr Everrr”, early Alex G-ish pianos and distortion in “See”, the instant-gratification acoustic guitar and vocal hook that kicks off closing track “River Ain’t Safe”) is the primary reason why the album feels as full and vibrant as it does. Although Tear Your Heart Out is more laid-back and pensive than the drama of Lily Seabird’s latest album, I do hear a bit of her fuzzed-out folk/country sound in “Low” and “Car Heart”, even as both of those songs fit perfectly well alongside the clearer folk rock of “Barn Burnerrr” (a song that isn’t quite as intense as its title suggests but whose guitar lines are more than enough to carry the song regardless) and the banjo-featuring “Come Right Back”. Villagerrr begin “River Ain’t Safe” with the most urgency they’d mustered up to that point, but Scott and Dweik (who’s credited with “arrangement” as well as drums on the song) subsequently let the track and the record float away, seemingly accepting the tough truth at the track’s heart. (Bandcamp link)

Gibson & Toutant – On the Green

Release date: March 22nd
Record label: Sleepy Cat
Genre: Indie pop, art rock, noise pop, post-punk, psychedelia, folk rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Quoth My Baby

Gibson & Toutant are an indie pop duo based out of Durham, North Carolina whose members are originally from Australia (Josephine McRobbie) and Texas (Joe O’Connell), and together they have a sound that merges the retro simplicity of Fakebook-era Yo La Tengo, the minimalist post-punk of Young Marble Giants, a rogue experimental streak, and the folk/Americana of their adopted home. The duo put out a couple of EPs on Flannelgraph Records in 2019 and 2020, but On the Green (released via Sleepy Cat) is their debut full-length album. Their neighbors in Appalachia and the South chip in throughout the record’s seven songs and 33 minutes–notable folk musicians like Jake Xerxes Fussell (guitar/vocals), Joseph Decosimo (fiddle), and Nathan Bowles (keyboard) contribute to the album, and fellow Durham transplant Andy Stack (Wye Oak) recorded it. Although On the Green isn’t exactly “folk” music, these various contributors (also including pedal steel player Nathan Golub and O’Connell’s brother, Matthew, on bongos) are essential to pulling this record off, as every song on the album sounds like it’s from a different group despite McRobbie and O’Connell doing everything they can to hold it together.

On the Green starts off simply enough between the minimalist, floating synthpop of “Carolina Shred” (whose sound collage undertones don’t corrupt McRobbie and O’Connell’s cheery vocals) and the bouncy, bass-led pop rock of “Quoth My Baby”. The first moment on On the Green where the weirdness is able to take the reins for an extended period of time is “Norm’s Oranges”, which starts off as a spoken-word piece and then slips into groovy, lightly-fuzzed psychedelic rock. Gibson & Toutant are quite adept at this kind of music, and one song later, when they’re playing bright, orchestral, almost twee indie pop in “The Click”, they’re excelling at that one, too (McRobbie gets so much more out of “I ride on my bike, I stop at the tollbooth,” than should be possible). Of course, it’s the second side of On the Green where things really start to get out of hand–the twin seven-minute songs “Little Rider” and “Vicky’s Chimes” don’t sound all that similar to each other but both pull from everything at Gibson & Toutant’s disposal. The former is impressively restrained, McRobbie walking out on a joyful but sparse instrumental and only really ever being rivaled by a little bit of distortion, while the Bill Callahan-ish latter track finds all sorts of bells and whistles to throw at its slow-moving folk rock center. The synths, pedal steel, drum machines, and fiddle all float around in the ether of closing track “The Fairway”, feeling only like Gibson & Toutant at that point. (Bandcamp link)

Sucker – Seein’ God

Release date: February 14th
Record label: Cherub Dream
Genre: Shoegaze, noise pop, fuzz rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Pretty

Sucker are a new fuzz-pop quartet hailing from Oakland, California, made up of guitarist/vocalist Lauren R. Melton (most notable for playing in Blue Zero along with Chris Natividad of Marbled Eye and Public Interest) along with guitarist Chichi Castillo, bassist/vocalist Allie M. Pollak, and drummer Semaj Peltier (a trio I’m not familiar with, although Castillo and Peltier seem to be active in the Bay Area filmmaking scene). Following a demo cassette EP last year, the four-song, eleven-minute Seein’ God EP (recorded at High Command Studio in Olympia, Washington) is the group’s first release for Cherub Dream Records. Far from the most accessible record to come out of the Bay Area in recent years, Sucker drench their pop music in layers of distortion and feedback, and the vocals (regardless of which member of the band is providing them) don’t go out of their way to be heard amongst the noise and subsequently are always on the brink of being swallowed up. Jagged hooks eventually come into focus with a closer look at Seein’ God, however–Sucker clearly have put a good deal of effort into shaping how this brief EP sounds, and reward people who approach it the same way.

It takes a while for it to really sink in, but opening track “Pretty” is probably the catchiest moment in Seein’ God, with the guitars offering up plenty of sweetness in addition to the tempest they eventually become. Melton is also a sneakily melodic vocalist–it’s apparent in moments in the first track, but the other song they sing, the swirling closing ballad “Going Home”, is a slightly clearer example. Seein’ God’s middle two tracks have their charms as well–Pollak sings “Drop”, which has a fuzzed-out, lo-fi-shoegaze sound to it that’s actually working hard to sound as listless as it does. The Peltier-sung “Lackluster” is another moment where the West Coast indie pop influence peaks in through the storm clouds–the band float through a simple pop core even as they continue to crank out the noise, and Peltier’s vocals are fragile-sounding but strong enough to make the impression they need to. Perhaps destined to fly under the radar, it’s worth sussing out the contours of Seein’ God, and when Sucker have their breakout moment in a couple of years, you’ll be more than ready. (Bandcamp link)

Andrew Collberg – Popcorn Graveyard

Release date: March 22nd
Record label: Papercup
Genre: Baroque pop, chamber pop, folk rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Spiritual Cult Love Story

Andrew Collberg is a singer-songwriter originally from Tucson, Arizona but currently based in Cologne, Germany. In the past, he’s collaborated with acts from his home state like Golden Boots and Howe Gelb (in addition to England’s Modern Nature), but he’s maintained a steady stream of solo albums since the mid-2000s as well. Collberg has experienced an uptick in productivity this decade–since linking up with Papercup Records in 2020, he’s put out three full-lengths. Popcorn Graveyard, the sixth Andrew Collberg LP, follows 2022’s 1986, and it finds the southwesterner in Germany exploring a polished studio pop and orchestral folk rock sound. Aside from some extra help on “Goodbye Troubles”, the instrumentals on Popcorn Graveyard are handled entirely by Collberg and pedal steel/electric guitarist Connor Gallaher, although–in a credit to the both of them as well as producer Miccel Mohr–it sounds like the work of a much larger group. Popcorn Graveyard is as pretty as any “chamber pop” album, but its baroque pop has a Wilco-esque country-rock rootsiness to it as well.

I’m not just making the Wilco comparison because Popcorn Graveyard also has a song with “Germany” in the title, but opening track “Grey Grey Germany” has an “inland Beach Boys” feeling that reminds me a bit of Joe Kenkel of Styrofoam Winos and, yes, Jeff Tweedy’s band. The slick orchestrations of “Temporary Cruise” and “Sympathy” feels like Papercuts territory, although the synth grooves of “Where Do the Hardtimes Go?” and the airy pop of “Young Blood, Fresh Leather” keep the record’s surprises coming. On “Goodbye Troubles”, Collberg enlists upright bassist David Helm and drummer Jan Philipp, but the song’s timeless murky country-pop actually sounds a bit less busy than the rest of the album–in fact, it’s the song after it, the jaunty but offbeat country rock “Spiritual Cult Love Story”, that sounds the most like the work of a full band (and is also the moment on Popcorn Graveyard where Collberg really establishes himself as a desert weirdo in the vein of Giant Sand and Golden Boots). “Old Navigator” then sends the record off with chiming synths and Gallaher’s pedal steel playing against each other, the refined European and vast American sides of Popcorn Graveyard both getting one last say. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Rosie Tucker, Outer World, R.E. Seraphin, Marbled Eye

I’m just gonna come right out and say it: this is one of the strongest editions of Pressing Concerns ever, bar none. These are four Tier-A1 indie rock albums. Any of them could be leading off the blog post any other week. New albums from Rosie Tucker, Outer World, R.E. Seraphin, and Marbled Eye are the winners this time around, all of which come out tomorrow (March 22nd, 2024). And yet, we’ve covered even more great music this week, so if you missed Monday’s post (Hill View #73, Kora Puckett, Buddy Junior, Kind Skies) or Tuesday’s (Miscellaneous Owl, Ten Things I Hate About You, Chimes of Bayonets, Alexei Shishkin), you oughta check them 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.

Rosie Tucker – UTOPIA NOW!

Release date: March 22nd
Record label: Sentimental
Genre: Art rock, power pop, pop punk, alt-rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: All My Exes Live in Vortexes

Plenty of people whose music taste I respect have been on the Rosie Tucker train for a while now–I’m a late adopter, but it took approximately one-and-a-half listens to UTOPIA NOW! for me to climb fully aboard. Tucker has been putting out fairly-acclaimed records for a few years now; UTOPIA NOW! is either their fourth or fifth album (depending on how you count last year’s 12-song, 10-minute Tiny Songs Volume 1) and their first full-length since being “unceremoniously” dropped from Epitaph Records (those Mannequin Pussy AI music videos ain’t cheap, you know). The snippets of Tucker’s discography I’d heard before definitely did not prepare me for the adventurous, overstuffed, and punchy rock record that is UTOPIA NOW!, an album seemingly engineered to appeal specifically to me. As a songwriter, Tucker is lethally sharp, pulling out massive power pop/pop punk hooks out of nowhere, oftentimes completely at odds with where the track had been leading up to beforehand, but never in a way that feels overly shoehorned. UTOPIA NOW!’s sound is just as commendable–like the majority of Tucker’s output, it was produced by themself and their longtime collaborator Wolfy, and they gleefully veer between chilly bedroom pop/folk/rock, slick alt-rock, and limber, jerky art rock/new wave across the record’s thirteen tracks.

It’s tempting to call the buzzy synthpop of opening track “Lightbulb” a red herring, but from its multi-part structure to its lyrical content (which touches on everything from planned obsolescence to personal pettiness to music industry detritus), it actually ends up being a quite fitting prelude for UTOPIA NOW!. That being said, it’s the fiery alt-rock of “All My Exes Live in Vortexas” (which quite literally stitches together some unimpeachable art out of capitalist waste products, from piss bottles to giant piles of plastic) and the careening power pop of “Gil Scott Albatross” (the title goes a long way of contextualizing that one’s themes) that are a little more representative of just what this album is holding. Along with the sparkling math-pop of “Paperclip Maximizer” (I’ve seen that one compared to XTC, which is accurate), that’s an incredibly strong three-track run–but this is UTOPIA NOW! we’re talking about, and the highlights are only just getting started. The best three song stretch on the record might actually be the sandwich of “Big Fish No Fun”, “Suffer! Like You Mean It”, and “Unending Bliss”, with the two songs on the ends making up the “multi-part songs with big finishes” contingent buttressing the white-hot center track, which sounds like mall punk from an alternate universe where Silent Alarm sold more records than anything by Avril Lavigne.

Stick it out to the home stretch of UTOPIA NOW! and you’re rewarded with a sixty-second track about “the pot calling the kettle bitch-ass” that I assume was just too perfectly petty to consign to Tiny Songs Volume 1, and then a bunch of songs that showcase the softer side of Tucker’s writing. The gorgeous power ballad “Obscura” and the minimalist synthpop earnestness of “Me Minus One Atom” both earn their places on this record through Tucker’s writing–the cellophane-wrapped chorus of the former and the memorably touching relationship-of-Theseus vibes of the latter both echo what they explore with a bit more chaos earlier in the record. And of course, leave it to Rosie Tucker to make the most stripped-down song on the album (the title track) the most frenetic, as they wring everything they can out of an acoustic guitar for “Utopia Now!”’s sub-two-minute runtime. “I can’t relax, but I’m good for other things,” they belt on repeat in the middle of this song–it’s a rare moment where UTOPIA NOW! just comes out and states the obvious. (Bandcamp link)

Outer World – Who Does the Music Love?

Release date: March 22nd
Record label: HHBTM
Genre: Psychedelic rock, psychedelic pop, post-punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: The Drum the Beat

Outer World is a new duo from Richmond, Virginia’s Tracy Wilson and Kenneth Close, who previously played together in the 2010s as part of “post-punk pop” quartet Positive No. Readers of the blog may also be familiar with Wilson’s earlier work as the vocalist of mid-90s emo group Dahlia Seed, or her more recent work promoting a ton of new music as Courtesy Desk (which is an online record shop, a radio show, and a newsletter). After their 2020 record Kyanite, Positive No was quite literally ground to a halt by the pandemic, as long Covid prevented Wilson from singing in the way she’d done in her previous bands. Clearly not one to give up on making music that easily, however, Wilson and her partner, Close, spent the last couple years developing a new sound, one that dives completely into their music historian side, and christened the new act Outer World. On their seven-song debut Who Does the Music Love?, Wilson and Close sometimes sound like they’re right in the thick of first-wave psychedelic rock, and other times they’re refracting it through a decades-long lens in the way bands like Stereolab and Broadcast have done. This kind of thing is sometimes derisively referred to as “record collector rock” (oddly enough, usually by other record collectors); the idea that music like this can’t be imaginative and deeply felt was a flimsy one in no need of refutation, but it was kind of Wilson and Close to provide one anyway.

I do find myself wishing Who Does the Music Love? was longer (at seven songs and 24 minutes, the “mini-LP” is effectively an unruly EP that got out of hand), but it’s hard not to feel like it’s perfectly self-contained and complete where it ended up. I appreciate how the band ground the record in strong, tangible rhythms–the drums come strong out of the gate in opening track “The Drum the Beat” (unsurprisingly, given the name), but Outer World hang onto this attitude for nearly the entire record (and, when they don’t, their general devotion to it makes the rug being pulled out from under us even more exciting). As Who Does the Music Love? surges through its first three songs, the work of Spacemoth’s Maryam Qudus comes to mind–the Bay Area musician (who, perhaps not coincidentally, mixed this record) similarly knows how to wrangle otherworldly sounds into something solid. I get the sense Outer World could rip through more spirited psych-rock, but they do explore other climes between the (mostly) minimal noise pop of “Have”, the zero-gravity funk of the title track, and the final release of closing track “Loteria”. The record ends with Wilson singing to herself, different versions of her bouncing around the song as the last guitar line of the album staggers to the finish line. Outer World travels an impressive amount throughout Who Does the Music Love?, but it still sticks the final landing. (Bandcamp link)

R.E. Seraphin – Fool’s Mate

Release date: March 22nd
Record label: Safe Suburban Home/Take a Turn
Genre: Power pop, indie pop, college rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Virtue of Being Wrong

We last heard from Ray Seraphin and his namesake project, R.E. Seraphin, back in 2022, when he released the seven-song Swingshift EP with the help of several modern indie pop heavyweight labels (including Mt. St. Mtn., Dandy Boy, and Safe Suburban Home). Swingshift established Seraphin as an interesting figure in the Bay Area jangle pop/power pop scene, with the EP balancing the somewhat sensitive and restrained nature of its singer-songwriter with undertones of louder, full-band power pop (and even a bit of punk). Back on Safe Suburban Home for his second full-length record, Fool’s Mate features contributions from a bunch of Bay Area ringers–guitarist Joel Cusumano (Sob Stories), drummer Daniel Pearce (The Reds, Pinks, & Purples), bassist Josh Miller (Chime School), and keyboardist Luke Robbins are Seraphin’s backing band, and Papercuts’ Jason Quever is on board as producer. What ensues in the form of Fool’s Mate is a fully-realized, dozen song record of vintage college rock–it’s enticing on the surface, but Seraphin displays a confidence that whoever’s listening is going to be attentive to what’s going on underneath as well.

Seraphin’s voice has always sounded like that of the frontperson of a slow, dreamy indie-jangle pop group like Cindy or Flowertown, but he’s refused to limit himself to that subgenre, and Fool’s Mate is as far away from that sound as ever. The R.E. Seraphin band are ready to embrace full-on power pop from the get-go of the record–“End of the Star” is a Peter Holsapple-worthy anthem in every aspect, from its pounding drumbeat to its guitar heroics to the way the bass and keyboards both get their moments in the sun before the song is through. Fool’s Mate feels like a vintage LP in that there are clear “album tracks” and “single candidates”–not that the entire record isn’t comprised of pop songs, but I.R.S. in 1985 would’ve been bookmarking the opening track, the equally exuberant “Clock Without Hands”, the polished indie pop of “Bound”, and the crouching Costelloian “Expendable Man” to push for airplay (although the power pop strut of “Fall” and the particularly Game Theory-like “Virtue of Being Wrong” offer up some intriguing dark horses). On the other hand, Seraphin’s version of pop music can also sprawl out in a lounger in “Argument Stand”, and towards the end of the record, “Contraband” and “Somnia” mix in just a bit of psychedelia. Seraphin has razor-sharp pop skills, but Fool’s Mate still feels like a bit of an outsider record–which makes his choice to close the record with a cover of Sinead O’Connor’s “Jump in the River” surprisingly fitting. Remarkably, the band doesn’t change up the track too much, but it sounds exactly like a “R.E. Seraphin song”. Whatever the original “Jump in the River” had, Fool’s Mate is tapping right into it. (Bandcamp link)

Marbled Eye – Read the Air

Release date: March 22nd
Record label: Summer Shade/Digital Regress
Genre: Garage punk, post-punk, noise rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: See It Too

While Marbled Eye’s 2018 debut album, Leisure, didn’t turn the Oakland quartet into indie darlings overnight, it’s not hard to hear why it struck a chord among modern post-punk and garage rock fans and remains beloved in those circles to this day. It merged the seriousness of British post-punk with the scrappiness of Australian garage punk while still feeling in line with American garage-y imprints like Feel It and Future Shock. It’s surprising that it took the group a half-decade to follow it up, but it’s not like they haven’t been busy in the meantime–in particular, vocalist/guitarist Chris Natividad started up Public Interest (featuring original Marbled Eye bassist Andrew Oswald) and also plays in Aluminum and Blue Zero. Public Interest’s most recent record, 2023’s Spiritual Pollution, particularly felt in line with the Marbled Eye ethos, and Read the Air finds Natividad and the rest of the band (vocalist/guitarist Michael Lucero, drummer Alex Shen, and new bassist Ronnie Portugal, replacing the departing Oswald) in as sharp a form as ever. The dozen songs are a constant attack, and Marbled Eye’s weaponry is never dull.

Read the Air opens with its pounding title track–it’s still garage rock, but Marbled Eye somehow make it feel like Swans-y noise rock for a good minute there. It’s probably the most openly intense moment on the record, but it’s hardly the only memorable one–between the runaway guitar dueling with the stop-start structure in “In the Static”, the sleazy mid-tempo “Tonight”, and the careening death-punk of “Starting Over”, Read the Air really starts off with a bang. That being said, the dead center of the record is where its two strongest moments are–“All the Pieces”, a revved-up piece of garage punk that’s the band at their best as rockers, and “See It Too”, which segues into a hooky chorus that I can only describe as “power pop” (and really, seeing Marbled Eye contort themselves so effortlessly in this way is actually a bit more unnerving than their typical dead-eyed stare). The more I listen to Read the Air, the more of a consistent journey it feels like, especially in the final two tracks, “Wear Me Down” and “Spring Exit”. It’s apparent immediately that the band still has plenty of energy in the wrap-up portion of Read the Air, but they tangle these songs up in a way that takes some effort to unwind, doing anything but running out of steam. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Miscellaneous Owl, Ten Things I Hate About You, Chimes of Bayonets, Alexei Shishkin

The second Pressing Concerns of the week has arrived, and we’re continuing to look at a few records that might’ve slipped through the cracks from the first couple months of the year. New albums from Miscellaneous Owl, Chimes of Bayonets, and Alexei Shishkin appear below, as well as a reissue of the debut album from Ten Things I Hate About You. If you missed Monday’s post, featuring records from Hill View #73, Kora Puckett, Buddy Junior, and Kind Skies, 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.

Miscellaneous Owl – You Are the Light That Casts a Shadow

Release date: March 1st
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Indie folk, indie pop, bedroom pop, singer-songwriter
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Streaks

Did you know that February is “Album Writing Month”? I’ve never successfully completed an album, so I did not, but this problem doesn’t seem to plague Madison, Wisconsin’s Huan-Hua Chye, aka Miscellaneous Owl. It appears that several albums on her Bandcamp page initially showed up around early March as a result of the challenge, comprising a discography that Chye has built alongside playing in Madison bands like Gentle Brontosaurus, Red Tape Diaries, and TL;DR (as well as in trans-Atlantic duo Vowl Sounds with England’s Tom Morton). Chye’s latest as Miscellaneous Owl is You Are the Light That Casts a Shadow, a dozen-song record she wrote, recorded, and played entirely on her own over the course of February. Given its method of incubation, it’s not surprising that You Are the Light That Casts a Shadow could loosely be described as a “bedroom pop/folk” record, although that doesn’t quite do justice to the music contained herein. Veering between jangly, almost twee indie pop and indie folk, I do hear the offbeat pop songsmiths like Robyn Hitchcock and Stephin Merritt–who Chye namedrops as influences–in these songs, as well as everything from the wordy folk rock of The Paranoid Style, the bookish but at times bluntly personal music of Christine Fellows, and the playfully ambitious acoustic-based pop music of Pacing.

After a self-conscious jazzy introduction, “Streaks” opens You Are the Light That Casts a Shadow with nothing short of one of the finest pieces of pop music of the year so far–after shaking off its meta-narrative, everything locks into place: Chye’s powerful Natalie Merchant-esque folk/college rock voice, the guitar arpeggio, the detail-specific but universally-landing subject matter, the sharp synths, and even some “whoa-oh” backing vocals. At various times, You Are the Light That Casts a Shadow will either show traces of its “writing-prompt” beginnings or make it hard to believe that it was put together as quickly as it was–really, it just seems like Chye is very good at this “songwriting” thing regardless of from where any given track’s inspiration came. Take two of the best songs on the album, the bouncy power pop of “Closing the Capsule Door” and the sparse, acoustic folk of “Chicago Rat Hole”. Both songs’ lyrics seem sprung from a single, tangible idea that I can imagine Chye happening upon while scrolling social media or watching television–Laika the Soviet space dog for the former, and the piece of deformed concrete that was a brief viral sensation for the latter.  

A lesser writer might pen a straightforward song about either of those topics, but Chye merely uses them as jumping off points–“Closing the Capsule Door” in particular is a huge success, the sugary-sweet instrumental unfolding over an excellent meditation on love, death, and irony (and until Pacing writes a song about feeding a rat to a snake, the verse about leaving a mouse in a plastic box for an owl to swoop in and take is the closest we’re going to get). Likewise, the emptiness and loss at the heart of “Chicago Rat Hole” conjure up the image of the world’s most delicate anvil nevertheless crushing us all in cartoon-like fashion. Speaking of impossible-to-forget images, Chye closes You Are the Light That Casts a Shadow with something called “Honey-Eater”, a long spoken-word, synth-haunted train of thought type thing that’s one of the most striking pieces of music I’ve heard on a pop album in quite a while. As Chye weaves threads connecting bears, salmon, fear, death, infinity, The Beatles, and gas station bathroom towel dispensers, she never once loses me–she’s perfectly coherent up to the looping final statement of the record. “Honey-Eater” is more obvious about it, but just about everything on You Are the Light That Casts a Shadow merits this level of thought and engagement. Several long shadows feel cast over this album indeed, and Miscellaneous Owl illuminate what’s behind them with great care. (Bandcamp link)

Ten Things I Hate About You – Ten Things I Hate About You (Reissue)

Release date: January 30th
Record label: We’re Trying
Genre: Emo, punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Red

I am admittedly not too familiar (read: not at all familiar) with the DIY emo scene of Honolulu, Hawaii, but Ten Things I Hate About You seem to be right at the center of it–between the four of them, the quartet’s members have played in the bands Earl Grey, Søøn, TV Microwave, Feeble, and Aswang. The band (guitarist/vocalist Erik, guitarist Will, bassist Skayu, and drummer/vocalist Seth) put out EPs in 2020 and 2021, culminating in a self-titled debut album in January 2022 that they self-released on cassette. Two years later, Austin emo/punk label We’re Trying Records has reissued Ten Things I Hate About You, giving it its first-ever vinyl release and putting a spotlight on an underheard record from a part of the world not known for its underground rock music. Ten Things I Hate About You is either emo-indebted punk rock or punk-indebted emo, short on math-y riffs but heavy on shout-along choruses and amped-up fuzz rock. It’s a bit too loose to pass as “pop punk”, but for those of us who like their loud pop music lo-fi and interspersed with less immediate moments, it’s a successful debut album.

Ten Things I Hate About You both opens and closes by turning the dial away from cathartic rock music–opening track “Gold Turns Grey” is chilly, slow-emo for two minutes before finally introducing the electric side of the band in its final third, while the band close the album with the ten-minute “Killing Time”, which alternates between lumbering, all-in alt-rock and quiet post-rock several times before it’s all said and done. In between these two pillars, Ten Things I Hate About You put together a full emo-punk experience–they’ve got “Giant Camera”, “Red”, and “Alone”, which are the band at their catchiest, punching through pop songs at full blast, they’ve got the mid-record, slow-building centerpiece “Chamberlain Field”, the punk ripper “Costco”, and the token acoustic track “Gasoline”. It’s easy to take Ten Things I Hate About You for granted; everything I’ve described is archetypal emo music to some degree, but to do all of it on one album, and all of it equally well, feels remarkable to me. I’m interested in hearing more from Ten Things I Hate About You (or, at the very least, one of the half-dozen other bands in which its members play). (Bandcamp link)

Chimes of Bayonets – Replicator

Release date: February 29th
Record label: Peterwalkee
Genre: Noise rock, post-hardcore, math rock, post-punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Human Mascot

Chimes of Bayonets are a noise rock trio from Ithaca, New York who’ve been around for a few years–their first EP came out back in 2018–but have only now just released their debut full-length. Replicator was mastered by Bob Weston of Shellac, and their most recent EP by J. Robbins of Jawbox, which should help give you a starting point for the band’s sound–the group has clearly spent a lot of time with anything noisy, math-y, and/or post-hardcore-indebted from the 1990s, with the scenes in Washington, D.C., Louisville, and Chicago all coming to mind. There’s also a weary Rust Belt punk sound to Replicator that can also be found in fellow Ithaca act (and onetime Habitforming Records labelmate) Grass Jaw, even as Chimes of Bayonets spent the majority of their record displaying their identity as a tightly-coiled, lean post-punk group. Replicator is a balanced record–the unpredictable guitar, sharp rhythm section, and plainspoken vocals are all essential to the record’s sound, but none towers over the other for more than a moment.

Chimes of Bayonets kick off their debut with “Attacking in Twos”, the only song on Replicator that’s under four minutes in length. It’s a noisy piece of post-punk/alt-rock with a burgeoning bass that does its best to make itself known over the song’s anthemic qualities. “Reactor Eye” feels a little more directly related to sloganeering D.C. post-hardcore, with the slashing guitars failing to flag as the song crosses the five-minute barrier. “Human Mascot” balances a fiery, almost garage rock riff with a stop-start structure reminiscent of Unwound, while “Channel Marker” tries to play sinewy, straightforward post-punk but gets swallowed up by noise. The weird stitched-together art punk of “Who Wants to Die for Art?” is perhaps the most interesting left turn for the band, cycling through swirling noise, bass-driven aggression, and a closing sprint before it’s all said and done. Closing track “Index” finds Chimes of Bayonets spreading out in a different way–the majority of the song is instrumental, probing math rock that feels very Quarterstick-esque, but then they begin to bring things together for a swooning post-hardcore finish. Even so, “Index” trails off more than burns out, with the band displaying they’ve picked up something more than an ability to make loud rock and roll music from their influences. (Bandcamp link)

Alexei Shishkin – Dagger

Release date: February 2nd
Record label: Rue Defense
Genre: Lo-fi indie rock, dream pop, bedroom rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Ladder

Alexei Shishkin is a Queens-based singer-songwriter who’s been putting out music steadily for the past decade, although he describes himself as “a label’s worst nightmare” due to his aversion to playing live. From 2014 to 2021, Shishkin put out nine records on Forged Artifacts (Sonny Falls, Greg Mendez, First Rodeo); since then, a half-dozen Shishkin releases have shown up through Houston imprint Rue Defense. Dagger is Shishkin’s first album of 2024 (expect at least one other record later in the year), and it’s an enjoyably hazy collection of lo-fi bedroom rock that feels descended from the kind of reverb-y, psychedelic pop music that labels like Forged Artifacts specialized in around a decade ago. Shishkin home-recorded everything on the record himself other than the drums, and says these ten songs began as “‘stream–of-consciousness’ style experiments” to which he continued to add extra layers. The result is an album that’s hardly straightforward or intuitive, but despite its subversive nature, Dagger is a pop album at its core; sometimes recalcitrantly, other times more openly.

Even if the rest of Dagger was forgettable, I’d certainly remember opening track “Tappin Out”, a muddy and bizarre piece of bedroom pop that effectively merges a Sparklehorse/Grandaddy-ish chorus with verses that are closer to something by the Butthole Surfers. Shishkin doesn’t quite attempt “Tappin Out” again but thankfully Dagger has plenty more to offer, with the rolling “Wind Picks Up Again” (sounding like Dinosaur Jr. trying to do a Stereolab song), the relaxed, pensive lo-fi pop of “Ladder”, and the mutated soft rock of “Languid Waterfalls” all being highlights. Although the second side of Dagger might be a little less immediate, it also features what I’d consider to be the album’s biggest “no-strings-attached” pop song, the effortless-sounding “Rain Beat Down”, which builds something quite sturdy around some nice piano chords and handclaps. Dagger feels like it’s deliberately steering clear of big, consequential moments–the titular object in “Ladder” is leaning up against a wall, leading to nowhere, and in closing track “Digits Change” Shishkin is literally watching the clock. Dagger ends up asserting that, for someone like Shishkin, there aren’t “down moments”, though. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Hill View #73, Kora Puckett, Buddy Junior, Kind Skies

It’s a brand new week, and with it brings new music featured in Pressing Concerns. Today’s edition features two new albums (from Hill View #73 and Buddy Junior) and just as many new EPs (from Kora Puckett and Kind Skies).

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.

Hill View #73 – Night Time Is the Grace Period

Release date: March 15th
Record label: Trash Tape/9733
Genre: Lo-fi indie rock, experimental rock, fuzz rock, noise pop
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: All the Time

Hill View #73 is the project of Atlanta, Georgia’s Awsaf Halim, who’s been releasing music for a couple years now (including a demo collection in 2021 and an EP in 2022). Night Time Is the Grace Period is the debut Hill View #73 full-length, and while I hadn’t heard of Halim before being sent this album, they’ve amassed some notable guests on their first LP. Night Time Is the Grace Period is being put out through Trash Tape Records, which was founded by some teenagers in Chapel Hill, North Carolina a few years ago and seems like something of a southeastern analogue to Chicago’s Hallogallo scene–and indeed, several Hallogallo musicians pop up on Night Time Is the Grace Period (including Will Huffman, Desi Kaercher, and Charlie Johnston, who’ve played in Dwaal Troupe, Deerest Friend, and Post Office Winter between the three of them). Still, Hill View #73 is pretty clearly Halim’s project–they wrote all ten of these songs and play most of what you’ll hear on the record. Night Time Is the Grace Period has a familiar yet distinct sound, with Halim proving quite capable of switching between noisy fuzz rock, Alex G/Jeff Mangum-ish bedroom folk, and bright, vibrant synth-colored pop–sometimes within the same song.

Hill View #73 certainly make a splash by opening Night Time Is the Grace Period with “This Is What Makes Me”, a nearly six-minute pop song that starts off as a sparse, piano-and-vocals track in the vein of Sparklehorse or even Daniel Johnston before blooming into a rich tapestry of synths, drum machines, guitars, and a chorus of vocals. “All the Time” feels like it might wind up being more indebted to low-key 90s indie rock, but it still explodes into a giant, blown-out finish before it’s all said and done. “Catch Me” keeps the energy up, but instead of building to something big-sounding it actually starts off loud and then ducks out with a Mangum-y acoustic conclusion. Although “I Wanna Know” is maybe a bit more fuzzed out than Dwaal Troupe, the whistling-featuring song captures Hill View #73’s whimsical indie pop side, a nice moment of respite before the second half of Night Time Is the Grace Period picks up where the opening of the record left off. The earnest bedroom rock of “Missed Call” just might be the album’s finest moment, a thrilling marriage of some quiet confessions and cranked-up guitars. Night Time Is the Grace Period ends with the dramatic, death-staring “Car Accident”–after an incredibly full-sounding record, Halim pulls together noise and pop music together one last time to deliver a resounding parting message: “I’ve still got so much left to say”. (Bandcamp link)

Kora Puckett – 3 Songs

Release date: February 23rd
Record label: Let’s Pretend
Genre: Country rock, alt-country, singer-songwriter, roots rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Far As I Can Tell

You might not recognize Kora Puckett’s name, but the Goshen, Indiana-originating musician has been all over the indie rock landscape of the past few years. He leads 90s alt-rock revivalists Bugg and hardcore punk group Laffing Gas, plays guitar in Narrow Head, and has been a touring guitarist for Sheer Mag, Angel Du$t, and The Berries. His busyness as a musician explains the presence of some notable faces on Puckett’s debut solo record, 3 Songs–Steve Marino (of Jacky Boy) and Matt Berry (of The Berries, Happy Diving, and Big Bite) both play guitar, and these songs were partially recorded by Amos Pitsch of the great Dusk (who also drums and plays bass on the record). Out of that whole impressive list, the crisp and polished country rock of Dusk is the closest to what Puckett sounds like on 3 Songs (surprisingly enough, despite his alt-rock background, it’s not the fuzzy alt-country of The Berries), although there’s a bit of Marino’s college rock/guitar pop hook-crafting in there too. Released on vinyl through Let’s Pretend (Negative Glow, Posmic, Graham Hunt), 3 Songs is barely over ten minutes long, but that’s more than enough time to hear that Puckett’s got a real aptitude for making this kind of music.

A three-song record better not have any weak spots, and all three of these songs are impeccable exercises in country-influenced rock music (or rock-influenced country music, depending on one’s vantage point). That being said, “Far As I Can Tell” might stand a little higher than the other two, with its laid-back but quite catchy guitar playing being the perfect introduction to both 3 Songs and Puckett’s solo career. Just as important are Alex Drossart’s (Shaker and the Egg, The Priggs) wurlitzer contributions, which help push the song into Dusk-ian retro rock-and-roll territory. An enjoyable acoustic guitar part introduces “Forever or Just Then”, a song that balances its relatively rigid structure with the casual nature of Puckett’s writing and vocal delivery (and you’d better believe there’s still wurlitzer, this time provided by onetime R.E.M. collaborator Jamie Candiloro). “Work All Week” is Puckett’s version of a big country rock finish–it’s still relatively polite-sounding, but that doesn’t make the song’s finish, where we’re played out by Candiloro’s piano, Berry’s “honky tonk guitar”, and Mickey Raphael’s harmonica any less satisfying. Hopefully Puckett can find some time in his busy schedule to expand his discography beyond three songs sometime soon, but I can keep replaying these ones in the meantime. (Bandcamp link)

Buddy Junior – Rust

Release date: February 22nd
Record label: Cherub Dream
Genre: Shoegaze, noise pop, lo-fi indie rock, experimental rock
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: DIZZY

Buddy Junior is a bedroom rock project out of San Francisco led by multi-instrumentalist JB Lenar, the one consistent member of the band. Rust is the project’s second full-length album, following 2020’s Portal, and while Buddy Junior does now have a stable lineup (guitarist/vocalist Kiana Endres and bassist/vocalist Christina Busler), Lenar largely pieced together this record alone over the pandemic. They get some help with guest vocalists, but Lenar plays every instrument you hear on Rust, an impressive feat given how full-sounding and forceful these songs come off. Loosely-speaking, it’s a nü-shoegaze/noise pop record, although Buddy Junior has a hypnotic, unique sound throughout Rust that features undertones of cold industrial rock, grab-bag basement lo-fi rock, post-punk, and hazy psychedelia. The eleven-track, forty-minute album feels very labored-over, with every song expanded and developed beyond its initial burst of energy–a lot of the songs on Rust would be the climax of a different album, but Lenar offers them at a steady clip.

The pounding full-band heavy-shoegaze sound of the opening title track is a welcome start, declining to lose any bit of momentum over four minutes, but Rust really starts to distinguish itself with the five-minute left-turn of “Track 2” one song later. The track is a fascinating piece of dark, distorted pop music, the steady drumbeat anchoring a swirling cloud of distortion and a repetitive but emotional vocal performance from Lenar’s longtime collaborator Harvey Forgets. “Possession”, “Fever Baby”, and “Holy” all continue Rust’s omnivorous streak, the first merging staggering percussion with an eerie pop core, the second crawling through some minimalist industrial rock (with guest vocals from Feedbag), and the latter of the three sounding like a darker and more lo-fi version of early-90s Madchester. “Spaces You Keep” proves that Buddy Junior can pull together more straightforward fuzz rock in the record’s second half, and “DIZZY”, a surprisingly clear piece of lo-fi pop that devolves into controlled chaos, might just be the best thing on the album. Rust ends with “Metal Heart 2”, which similarly starts as a fuzzed-out shoegaze-y anthem before morphing into something else as it bows out, wrapping up a record that continuously gets the most out of its ingredients. (Bandcamp link)

Kind Skies – Tower

Release date: February 2nd
Record label: Self-released
Genre: 90s indie rock, post-punk, lo-fi indie rock, noise rock
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Tall Grass

There’s just something about this four-song cassette EP from Lexington, Kentucky’s Kind Skies. This band has been around for a while–a lineup featuring vocalist/guitarist/songwriter Chris Boss and bassist Stephen Boss put out an EP in 2019 and several singles in the years following, while drummer Austin Adkins and guitarist Mitch make their debut on Tower, the group’s second record and first release of any kind since 2021. The four songs on their latest EP are very plain-dressed indie rock of the 90s-inspired variety, although these songs are deceptively complex, with a few of them stitching together multiple movements. Not quite as heavy and “noise rock” as the scene in nearby Louisville was in the golden age of Touch & Go/Quarterstick records, Kind Skies pull together a bit of Sebadoh/early Pavement-y shambolic, basement rock with an unadorned, Electrical Audio-esque recording style and a bit of post-punk propulsion, too (they’ve played a show with Louisville’s Charm School, which seems right).

I enjoy a band that opens their record with their most difficult song, and “Tall Grass” fits the bill, as it’s neither as brief nor as upbeat as the tracks that follow it. It takes a while to really get going, eventually slipping into a bass-led post-punk-ish performance that reminds me a bit of the subtler side of early Silkworm. After about three minutes, Kind Skies feign a fadeout before capping the song off with a louder, brisker piece of lightly-distorted, hooky indie rock in the final minute or so. “Notebooks” is probably the biggest straight-up “rocker” on Tower, with the machine-gun electric guitar intro eventually giving way to an anxious-sounding garage-post-punk tune that’s rhythmic and thorny. The way I see it, “Country Songs” and “ILITMF” are both ballads, although the latter goes about it a lot more noisily than the former. “Country Songs” echoes, sounding like one of the other Kind Skies songs played in a cavern, while “ILITMF” (“I love it too, motherfucker”) is some kind of messed up, Kentucky version of dream pop–somehow, it feels like floating despite doing nothing on its surface to really alter Kind Skies’ sound. Like I said, there’s just something about Tower. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Dancer, Bedbug, Chaepter, Fast Eddy

The third and final Pressing Concerns of the week looks at four records coming out tomorrow, March 15th: brand new full-lengths from Dancer, Bedbug, Chaepter, and Fast Eddy make appearances below. It’s an impressive lineup, and if you missed Monday’s post (featuring Slake/Thirst, Old Amica, The Narcotix, and Porcine) and/or Tuesday’s (featuring Big Hug, Verity Den, Rope Trick, and Opinion), I’d dare say that those are just as great.

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.

Dancer – 10 Songs I Hate About You

Release date: March 15th
Record label: Meritorio
Genre: Post-punk, indie pop, art rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Passionate Sunday

This is going to be the third Dancer record I’ve written about in almost exactly one year, which makes me feel very lucky. The Glasgow quartet introduced themselves last year in the form of two EPs–their self-titled debut’s compelling mixture of bright indie pop and sharp post-punk made it one of my favorite EPs of 2023, and October’s As Well expanded on their sound ever so slightly. The band (vocalist Gemma Fleet, guitarist/keytarist Chris Taylor, bassist Andrew Doig, and drummer Gavin Murdoch) have played in Nightshift, Order of the Toad, and Current Affairs, but Dancer have gotten a bit of buzz independent of those acts, and Meritorio (Whitney’s Playland, Wurld Series, Jim Nothing) has stepped up to release their debut album, 10 Songs I Hate About You. It’s remarkably comforting just how stubbornly Dancer show up in the same clothes on their first full-length–the album was recorded live to tape at Green Door studio with Ronan Fay just like their EPs were, Fleet is still announcing every song’s title before it begins, Doig’s bass is all over the place and a treat to observe, and so on. Dancer had already covered quite a bit of ground on their first two EPs–all the ingredients for an excellent first album were lined up, and 10 Songs I Hate About You knocks it out of the park.

Given how Fleet opens their recordings, 10 Songs I Hate About You can’t really start in media res, but opening track “Bluetooth Hell” feels pretty close to it, as the band launch into an unassuming-at-first but evidently quite brilliant opening track. Between that and “Change”, Dancer zip through two vintage “Dancer-sounding” songs before you know it, and “Troi” (as in Deanna, yes) gets weird but still catchy (in fact, maybe even more so) with its appropriately-spacey synths and a very memorable delivery from Fleet. It’s not like 10 Songs I Hate About You is that much more massive than what they’d done before–it’s a little over 30 minutes long, while Dancer was twenty and As Well fifteen–but if you’re looking for signs that the band is still moving forward, I don’t think they’ve done anything quite like the noise-drama of “A Diagnosis” yet, and the slightly wilder side of Taylor’s guitar playing also scorches penultimate song “Turns Out”. These songs sit side-by-side with tracks like “Rein It In” and “When I Was a Teenage Horse”, which are rock-solid, gripping reminders of why Dancer are one of the most exciting new bands going, and why Fleet is such a huge part of that (the frothing “remember the nineties” aural montage complete with absurd interjections in the former could only be rivaled by a song about how she used to be a horse). My favorite thing on 10 Songs I Hate About You is probably the closing track, however–“Passionate Sunday” is a buzzing indie-noise-pop tune that merges garish, whirring synths with gorgeous melodies in a way that reminds me of The Tenement Year-era Pere Ubu. “Passionate Sunday” features a minute of clattering noise before the band launch into the proper song, and the album version of the track ends with another two minutes of some bare guitar and piano with ambient studio noise in the background. Unfortunately, it has to end eventually. (Bandcamp link)

Bedbug – Pack Your Bags the Sun Is Growing

Release date: March 15th
Record label: Disposable America
Genre: Lo-fi indie rock, emo, bedroom pop, 90s indie rock, indie folk
Formats: CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: the city lights

The Boston-originating, Los Angeles-based indie rock group Bedbug garnered a following in the second half of the 2010s with a string of three albums (2016’s if i got smaller grew wings and flew away for good, 2018’s i’ll count to heaven in years without seasons, and 2020’s life like moving pictures) released through notable “bedroom pop” imprints Z Tapes and Joy Void while at the same time growing from a Dylan Gamez Citron solo project to a full band (currently featuring bassist Owen Harrelson of Really Great, drummer Minerva Rodriguez, guitarist/vocalist Meilyn Huq, and cellist Drew Cunningham). Citron hasn’t been idle the past few years–they released a collaborative record with Sami Martasian of Puppy Problems as Rose, Water, Fountain in 2021 and self-titled Bedbug EP on Disposable America in 2022–but the gap between life like moving pictures and pack your bags the sun is growing is still the largest between Bedbug LPs. The fourth Bedbug album is also the first one recorded somewhere other than at home–Bradford Krieger’s Big Nice Studio–and while it’s careful not to stray too far from Citron’s roots, the record clearly gains something in its manner of creation.

pack your bags the sun is growing has a familiar sound but it’s still somewhat hard to pin down. The earnest bedroom pop of acts like Pickle Darling (and earlier Bedbug albums) is still there, but there’s also a sprawling Pacific Northwest indie rock side to the band now reminiscent of early Strange Ranger/Sioux Falls (not to mention Modest Mouse, likely a huge influence on both groups) and even a bit of Microphones-y indie folk thrown in for good measure. It’s not “emo” in a strict application of the term, but the more I listen to pack your bags…, the more I experience songs like the seven-minute “leave your things, the stars are returning” (which is like their version of a The World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die song) and the gentle, communally-sung “seasons on the new coast”, the more I feel like “emo” is right (hell, it’s even got a “voicemail set to music” song in “mount moon”). pack your bags… exhales in its second half after climbing to some impressive heights earlier on, with the band backing off to give “new kinds of stars”, “postcard”, and “sunset (finale)” some space. Nevertheless, the other instruments sneak back in towards the final of three songs and also show up a bit in closing (non-bonus) song “pack your bags, it’s time to go home”. Bedbug is still very much Citron’s project, but it’s now big enough to fit everyone else in frame. (Bandcamp link)

Chaepter – Naked Era

Release date: March 15th
Record label: Candlepin
Genre: Post-punk, fuzz rock, art rock
Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Post Touch

For whatever reason, I’ve been finding Naked Era by Chaepter to be one of the most difficult albums I’ve tried to describe in Pressing Concerns. There are times when the album resembles “post-punk”, but it’s hardly interested in adhering to that genre’s ideas of rhythm and punctuality. There’s a haze of noise and layered instruments throughout the record, too, but it’s not either “psychedelic rock” or “shoegaze” (and despite its cover art, Naked Era isn’t very “punk rock” either). Maybe a bit of context will make it make more sense–Chaepter Negro (aka Chaepter) is initially from central Illinois and, like most Midwestern weirdos who make music, eventually ended up in Chicago, where he’s lived since 2019. His first full-length as Chaepter, 2022’s Kicking the Cat, is a strange, experimental R&B album, while last year’s The Moon Is an Emotional Island was a lo-fi folk EP. Naked Era is therefore a complete departure for the musician, which makes sense to me; this album is rock music made by somebody coming at it from an unusual angle, somebody who’s not getting too caught up in hitting the right beats and instead just playing what he feels.

Chaepter has a full-time band (drummer John Golden, guitarist Ryan Donlin, and bassist Ayethaw Tun) who play on parts of Naked Era, but even the sections where everything but the percussion is being played by Chaepter feel very full-sounding. Opening track “Post Touch” is Chaepter at their most recognizable, rolling out a speeding post-punk first statement, even as Chaepter’s vocals, confused and somewhat unpredictable, don’t really “fit” this kind of music (I’d like to thank another good Chicago band, Friko, for calling it “krautrock-y”, because they’re right). The six-minute “New Era” and the upbeat “The Noise!” continue to show off this side of Chaepter, although Naked Era declines to follow this formula lest it overstay its welcome. Particularly in the second half of the record, Chaepter and his collaborators set their sights on making something noisy and opaque–the synths that open “I Feel It All Too” might make you think that he’s diving back into R&B, but the instrumental that follows is murky, lo-fi fuzz rock, while “Nobody’s Cool Anymore” starts off unassuming before whipping itself into a frenzy, too. Perhaps Chaepter’s next album will be as big of a left-turn as this record was from his previous ones–if that’s the case, I’ll remember his Naked Era as a particularly strong one. (Bandcamp link)

Fast Eddy – To the Stars

Release date: March 15th
Record label: Beluga/Spaghetty Town/Boulevard Trash
Genre: Garage rock, power pop, punk rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Spirit Commander

Fast Eddy are a Denver-based garage rock quartet who are new to me but have been around for awhile–their first album came out back in 2017, and they seem to have played with just about every garage or punk band out there over the past few years. To the Stars is their third full-length, and the group (drummer Arj Narayan, vocalist/guitarist Micah Morris, guitarist Lisandro Gutierrez, and bassist Devon Kane) clearly have a knack for the catchier end of punk rock and garage rock based off these eight songs. To the Stars is a brief record–around 27 minutes–but Fast Eddy still find the time to bust out all-in garage punk rippers and some more thoughtful, melodic mid-tempo rock and roll as well. For a garage punk group, Fast Eddy punch above their weight in terms of thematic ambition on To the Stars, which they describe as a concept album about “the destructive mess we’ve made out of the madness”–to me, that sounds like a good excuse to break out some good-old-fashioned punk rock nihilism.

To the Stars comes out of the gate raring to go with “Steppin Stone”, a polished piece of power pop that nevertheless is pretty pessimistic (lyrically, Fast Eddy is concerned with humanity attempting to flee Earth once we’ve used up all its resources, with the chorus landing with “We’re not gonna take this / To the stars”). Fast Eddy enjoyably hit plenty of “punk rock” beats throughout To the Stars–the exhilarating punk of “Lucky Strike” is explicitly pro-crime, while they also have time for a critique of religion (“Rapture”), technology (“No More Neon Lights”) and, um, well, I’m not sure if “Spirit Commander” is a critique of anything, but it’s one of the best garage punk songs I’ve heard this year regardless. Although the earnest pop rock of “In Too Deep” and “Lost Child” suggest there is indeed a heart at the core of Fast Eddy, it’s not until the closing track, “Grey Day”, that the band’s philosophy truly crystallizes: they only want to burn everything down so the seeds in the soil can germinate. They only want us to unplug all the flashing lights so we can stare at the stars again. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Big Hug, Verity Den, Rope Trick, Opinion

A strong Tuesday Pressing Concerns looks at four records that might not’ve been on your radar: new EPs from Big Hug and Rope Trick plus new albums from Verity Den and Opinion. British emo-punk, New England heavy psych, North Carolina post-rock, and French fuzz rock–this edition has it all. If you missed yesterday’s post (featuring new music from Slake/Thirst, Old Amica, The Narcotix, and Porcine), 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.

Big Hug – A Living You’ll Never Know

Release date: March 1st
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Emo, punk, math rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Cruellemonde de la Hi Fi

An emo-punk trio from London, Big Hug burst onto the scene last year with Don’t Threaten Me With a Good Time, their debut EP. On that record’s five songs, the band (guitarist/vocalist Tom Watkins, bassist/vocalist Henry Langston, and drummer Owain Mumford) teased out a sound indebted to alt-rock and pop punk, although with a slightly heavier backbone that belied their love of second-wave emo and 90s indie punk. Anthemic and promising, Don’t Threaten Me With a Good Time got a bit of a buzz, and Big Hug haven’t sat on their laurels since–almost exactly one year after their first EP, they’re back with another one called A Living You’ll Never Know. It’s a brief dispatch from the world of Big Hug–it’s only four songs long, including one instrumental, and comes in at under a dozen minutes in length–but it’s not without new developments. Big Hug still like a big chorus hook, but A Living You’ll Never Know is a little more slippery, filling the space in between them with math-y riffs and more interesting structural choices.

That instrumental I mentioned earlier actually kicks off A Living You’ll Never Know–“Pyrrhic Opposites” is a one-minute introduction to the EP, with Watkins’ guitar and Henry Langston’ bass locking in and orbiting around each other while some ambient synths float in the background. Big Hug seem intent on making a second impression that’s as far away from their first one as possible–and while “Cruellemonde de la Hi Fi” brings us back into the world of emo-rock one song later, it does so with a jagged guitarline that veers into frame memorably before Watkins’ refrain eventually takes the reins from it. “Nothing Changes” is even more dodgy; it stops and starts, still a pop song but one broken into bits and pieces and seemingly reluctant to ever put it all together (by the time all three instruments start locking into a groove, Watkins’ voice has become an overshadowed bellow in the background). With A Living You’ll Never Know being as short as it is, Big Hug don’t have room for filler, and they pull off their consistent streak by landing closing track “Gary on Earth”. The song starts off as a straight-up anthem, veers all over the place, then comes together for a louder version of where it started, summing up the journey of Big Hug quite well, incidentally. (Bandcamp link)

Verity Den – Verity Den

Release date: March 1st
Record label: Amish
Genre: Shoegaze, post-rock, experimental rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Priest Boss

Verity Den was formed in 2023 by three North Carolina-based musicians who’ve played in a variety of indie rock bands separately and who came together via a tape loop, strings, and electronics-based improv ensemble (which is where Casey Proctor and Trevor Reece met each other). After a cassette-only release last year, the trio of Reece, Proctor, and Mike Wallace have linked up with Amish Records for their self-titled debut album, which does indeed sound like the work of a rock band with roots in the avant-garde. Citing groups like Swirlies as inspiration, Verity Den have made a sprawling album that sometimes offers up layered but relatively straightforward shoegaze and indie rock, but is just as likely to drift into wandering post-rock, ambient, and even noisy droning. The seven-track, 37-minute Verity Den is an enticing portrait of a new band who are already melding together–the three members trade off vocal and instrumental duties, and their ability to create both harmony and discord together is key in balancing the record’s prettier and more chaotic moments.

This is all very loosely-fitting, but Verity Den follows the “more accessible A-side, weirder B-side” format to a degree. At the very least, “Priest Boss” shows up in the record’s first half, and–even though the track spreads out for five minutes–it’s Verity Den at their most upbeat and generous with melodies; the noise only really takes over towards the end of the track. Meanwhile, opening track “Washer Dryer” is vintage shoegaze, balancing a strong pop core with copious distortion and layered instruments, and “Prudence” is a six-minute down-tempo indie rock ballad that the band pull off with the requisite subtlety. The eight-minute “Other Friends” that opens the record’s second half is still a “rock” song for most of its length, although the reverb-drenched instrumental and rhythmic, mechanical drumbeat turn it into something decidedly more esoteric than we’d been dealing with on the album previously (and there is, indeed, a couple minutes of loose, floating guitar lines and whatnot to close the song). Although nothing else on Verity Den is quite as long as that song, the final two tracks are even harder to get a handle on–“Everyone Thought You Were Dead” is a swirling piece of rock music absolutely drowning in distortion, while “Crush Meds” ends the album with a straight-up piece of sound collage noise. Even left stranded in the junkyard that is Verity Den’s endpoint, I still find myself glad for the journey. (Bandcamp link)

Rope Trick – Red Tide

Release date: February 1st
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Psychedelic rock, heavy psych, garage-psych
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Crescent

You know you’re in for a good time when the psychedelic rock EP is two songs and twenty-one minutes long. That’s exactly what you get with Red Tide, the second record from “experimental heavy psych rock duo” Rope Trick. The band formed in Providence and have actually been around for a while–their debut, Red Tape, came out in 2017–but guitarist/vocalist Indy Shome and drummer Nate Totushek took their time before returning to Rope Trick. Some six years later and now based in Philadelphia, Shome and Notushek are back with two songs of ambitious, exciting heavy psychedelic rock: the twelve-minute “Crescent” on side one, and the nine-minute “Neptune” following. Unsurprisingly, Red Tide has more than a bit of long instrumental sections, but Shome’s vocals are present for a surprising amount of the EP and are hardly an afterthought, holding their own against the chugging guitars and rolling drums.

“Crescent” opens Red Tide by taking us all on a wide-ranging journey in several parts. Shome and Totushek aren’t in any hurry to come out of the gate swinging, rather letting the track slowly congeal into a recognizable piece of heavy rock and roll a couple minutes into its trip. By three to four minutes in, Rope Trick are plowing forward with their propulsive, hard hitting music, and by the fifth one, Shome finally steps up to the mic, sounding like a riff-haunting ghost. The smooth, smoky journey slows down just a bit in the song’s second half, concurrent with Shome once again stepping away from signing and letting the guitar do the talking, but all aspects of Rope Trick are back in the saddle for the song’s punctual conclusion. “Neptune” takes less time to reach its full form–it’s a swaggering piece of Soundgarden-esque heavy blues pretty much from the get-go. Shome begins intoning lyrics about tsunamis and explosions about a minute into this one, sounding particularly dramatic over the stretchy, downtuned guitar riffs being hammered out at the same time. Like in the previous song, Rope Trick slow down a bit only to roar back before the song comes to an end, although “Neptune” feels like it’s starting and stopping right up until the finale of the track. Red Tide is certainly an expansive work of rock music, but Rope Trick don’t neglect the details that make it truly come together. (Bandcamp link)

Opinion – Horrible

Release date: February 23rd
Record label: Flippin’ Freaks/Nothing Is Mine/Les Disques du Paradis
Genre: Fuzz rock, garage punk, noise rock, lo-fi indie rock, grunge
Formats: CD, digital
Pull Track: Hyperglam

Like a lot of young indie rockers these days, Bordeaux, France’s Hugo Carmouze takes a lot of inspiration from distorted and fuzzy genres of music like shoegaze and garage rock, citing everything from Ty Segall to They Are Gutting a Body of Water to Hotline TNT. While some people might enjoy the songs of these aforementioned bands in spite of the distortion, however, it’s pretty clear from Opinion’s Horrible that the fuzz is perhaps the most important part for Carmouze. The latest album from the prolific lo-fi rocker (it’s a one-person home-recording project, although he does have a dedicated live band) is compressed and distorted to ear-splitting levels, with Carmouze veering his garage rock into in-the-red territory plenty of times on the LP. The entire thing was recorded over New Year’s night (2022/2023) with “no amps and/or effect pedals”, and it does have a one-shot deliriousness to it–it’s hard to imagine anyone pouring over these recordings for months of second guessing. This one’s gonna be a hard one for anyone who isn’t down with the recording style to listen to, but there is a charm to Horrible and how it veers between wanting to just make catchy rock and roll and going for maximum noisiness. 

Carmouze sets up both ends of the spectrum early on with the catchy surf-punk opening track “Hyperglam” melting into the seven-minute piece of towering fuzz that is “Talking About Yourself”, which keeps finding new levels of cacophony in which to descend. Having steered the record into the ditch this early on (and not exactly wrenching itself out of it with the briefer but still pummeling “Missing Something That Never Happened”), Opinion find a middle ground in the retro garage rock of “This Generation” and the heavier but still catchy alt-rock of “Smashing Pumpkins” (not an inaccurate title there). If there’s one song that best melds the extremes of Horrible, it’s probably “Bats”, which is a particularly Segall-esque psych-noise-punk track that’s hooky in spite of itself. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Horrible descends into madness towards its end with the drenched-in-fuzz “It Hurts Sometimes” and the ten-minute closing track “Dusthorses”, which is actually pretty crystal clear up until the last couple minutes. The latter song’s meditative slowcore eventually becomes distorted and corrupted into noise, too–it wouldn’t make sense for Horrible to end any other way. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable: