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:

Pressing Concerns: Slake/Thirst, Old Amica, The Narcotix, Porcine

It’s a brand-new week! It’ll be something of an odds-and-ends collection today and tomorrow in Pressing Concerns: today’s looks at three records from early March and mid-February, including new EPs from Slake/Thirst and Old Amica and new LPs from The Narcotix and Porcine.

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.

Slake/Thirst – Hunting Dust

Release date: March 2nd
Record label: Self-released
Genre: 90s indie rock, slowcore, lo-fi indie rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Cut It.

The past few weeks, I’ve found myself quite impressed with Hunting Dust, the debut EP from Brooklyn trio Slake/Thirst. Aside from appearing on a benefit compilation for Palestine organized by Gunk last year, the six songs from Hunting Dust are the first taste of the band, made up of “old friends” Bobby Cardos (guitar/vocals/drums), Kaitlyn Flanagan (bass/vocals), and Ian Donohue (guitar). Flanagan made a joke about “beat[ing] the ‘sounds like Pavement’ allegations” upon sending this record to me, and while that band is definitely an ingredient in Hunting Dust (Cardos does sound a bit like Stephen Malkmus, yes) as well as several of their contemporaries, it impresses me just how confident Slake/Thirst are in their explorations of 90s-inspired indie rock. The trio microgenre-hop across the 22-minute EP, stretching their sound into the cosmos and truncating it for quick hitting, but they find melody in just about everything they do. Slake/Thirst really sound like they’ve hit on something already–I even wish the long songs went on a bit longer here.

Hunting Dust starts with something I don’t even think I can call a “fake-out”; yes, “Ditty” is a 45-second piece of indie pop that doesn’t end up sounding like the rest of the EP, but the song’s title is very forthright about what the song is (and forget Malkmus, “Step into the silence how we cherish the refrain / Stumble down the sidewalk with the wasted and the vain” is some Doug Martsch-level beautiful nonsense). As successful as “Ditty” is at being what it describes, “Cut It.” might be the catchier song, a simple but effective piece of fuzzy noise pop that has just a bit of chilliness in its grin. At this point, you’re probably thinking “alright, where’s the slowcore?”–and that’s where “High Strung” comes in. Everything gets quiet, harmonics start echoing in the distance, and Flanagan and Cardos whisper along with the five-minute instrumental. The six-minute “Future Tense” mines similar territory, although that one at least has a rhythm section (slow as it is, it at the very least feels like it’s crawling somewhere rather than being suspended in amber). Hunting Dust ends where it began in the form of a brief guitar pop tune–sort of. “Different Fr.” is tired where “Ditty” was caffeinated, bemoaning having to get out of bed where the opening track was raring to get out of the house. “If you need to, you can communicate truly,” sings Cardos in the record’s final moments; “You need to,” replies Flanagan. It’s the sound of a band that’s mastering walking and talking simultaneously, and I wonder where Slake/Thirst will go next. (Bandcamp link)

Old Amica – Debris Sides

Release date: February 16th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Indie folk, chamber folk
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: The Nightmare

Old Amica are a Swedish duo who have been around for over a decade now, with their debut album, Debris, coming out back in 2011. The Old Amica of Debris and their other early releases had an expansive but delicate folk rock sound that was nevertheless marked by a studio-pop experimentalist side. The band, helmed by Stockholm’s Johan Kisro and Umeå’s Linus Johansson, weren’t content to stay where they started, however–they continued to turn the sound of Old Amica in on itself, to the point where last year’s Fyr was closer to ambient and post-rock than anything else. Interestingly, Old Amica’s latest release is a rare look backwards from the band–with Debris turning twelve years old, Kisro and Johansson decided to revisit the songs that were recorded around this time but ended up “slowly disintegrating on forgotten harddrives”. A dozen years later, the five songs of Debris Sides finally see the light of day as a standalone EP. Unsurprisingly, the skeletal folk music of Debris Sides doesn’t have a whole lot in common with Fyr on the surface, but what’s more notable is that this EP also doesn’t quite have the polished, electronic-curious attitude that Debris had either. 

The songs on Debris Sides are more sparse, more insular–whether or not Old Amica knew it at the time, they had created a completely separate second record alongside their debut full-length, one that fits together just as easily as Debris did. Even as Debris Sides is relatively muted, Kisro and Johansson still create beautiful, harmony-laden pop music in this context–when their vocals are accompanied by relatively little else, as they are in opening track “Everyone We Know”, it just enhances their power. The acoustic strumming of “The Place to Be” and “The Nightmare” are both simple at their core, but not too simple–Old Amica find more than enough to develop within each of their contexts. The instrumental, noise-snippet-featuring “Lillsand” is Debris Sides at its most “ambient”, but the guitar line that runs through it is a strong a melody as any of the vocal tracks, while “Until I Move On” subtly shapes the band into nostalgic Flotation Toy Warning-esque chamber-y, drone-y indie pop to close the EP. Old Amica have spent their entire time together moving forward–even though these songs aren’t “new”, advancing far enough to be able to release these early recordings feels like another example of that. (Bandcamp link)

The Narcotix – Dying

Release date: March 1st
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Art pop, folk rock, psych-folk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: The Lamb

The Narcotix are a Brooklyn-based art-folk group led by singer/composer/multi-instrumentalists Esther Quansah and Becky Foinchas, two children of West African immigrants who met as elementary schoolers in northern Virginia. The Narcotix took shape at the University of Virginia, where the duo met guitarist Adam Turay, and their debut record, 2021’s Mommy Issues EP, showed up about four years after the trio moved to Brooklyn. Mommy Issues, which combined Quansah, Foinchas, and Turay’s West African heritage with influences like Western/European folk music and even a bit of math rock, got the group some attention, but they didn’t rush the follow up, taking a couple of years to put together Dying, their first full-length. With the addition of drummer Matt Bent and bassist Jesse Heasly, The Narcotix are now a five-piece, and they bring in plenty of outside help throughout the record as well (trumpet from Geraldo Marshall, George Winstone’s piano and saxophone, Ledah Finck’s violin, Murphy Aucamp’s percussion, Ross Mayfield on piano).

Although it’s only nine minutes longer than Mommy Issues, Dying is a deep record that more than earns “LP” status. For a start, opening track “The Mother” is a swirling art-pop song, built off the intricate rhythms, Quansah and Foinchas’s intertwining vocals, and some surprising but still quite fitting piano work. Dealing in polyrhythms and a wide cast of instrumentation, The Narcotix have quite a bit of space in which to move around–the skipping drumbeat and rippling guitar lines of “The Sun”, jerky psych-funk movement of “The Lamb”, and the (relatively) clear-sounding math-pop of “The Lovers” all take the ingredients of Dying to different endpoints. Dying is both a folk album and a rock album (and more than that, yes)–listening to second half highlight “The Child”, I hear a complex but still thundering drumbeat, intricate guitar work that nevertheless fits perfectly into the context of the song, and lyrics and vocals that are drawn from the faded but still palpable past despite Quansah and Foinchas sounding like they’re right here in the present tense, too. Aided by piano and saxophone, closing track “The Magician” begins to drift off in a jazz-y epilogue–but then the drums kick in in the song’s second half, giving Dying one last rousing moment before drawing to a close. (Bandcamp link)

Porcine – Porcine

Release date: March 1st
Record label: Safe Suburban Home
Genre: Indie pop, dream pop, jangle pop
Formats: CD, digital
Pull Track: Stop the World

After a strong 2023 featuring highlights from Teenage Tom Petties, Sumos, and Dignan Porch, among others, Safe Suburban Home Records is set to continue their streak into 2024 with their first full-length of the year, Porcine by Porcine. Unsurprisingly (in a welcome way), it’s yet another solid collection of British guitar pop from the imprint–this trio are from Barnsley, and Porcine is their third album, but the first one to come out under their new name (until last year, they were known as Regional Creeps). Perhaps befitting of the name change, it’s also Porcine’s first album without one of the two bandleaders in Zach Duvall–they’re now a trio, with longtime guitarist/vocalist Giannis Kipreos and bassist Sam Horton being joined by new member Georgia Murphy. Porcine is made up of melodic, slightly distorted guitars and melodic, slightly distorted vocals–it’s a dream pop record with a strong foundation both in its songwriting and in the band backing these songs up.

The dreamy opening track “Stop the World” opens Porcine on an incredibly friendly note, sounding like a lost college rock hit in the way it takes vintage dream pop and blows it up into something gigantic-sounding. The songs following “Stop the World” in the first half are a little more laid-back, but that doesn’t mean that the aching pop-ballad verses of “Layaway”, the shoegaze-y noisy rave-ups in “Eject”, and the C86-ish reverb-y jangle of “5am” aren’t strong, too. Although Porcine is a brief record, coming in at under 25 minutes, it makes the most of its limited time, with the trio stretching out into sharp, quick post-punk (“Work It Out for Yourself”) and acoustic-led swirling psychedelic folk pop (“Time Never Moves”) in the album’s second half. Although Porcine are clearly a shoegaze-inspired band, Kipreos’ vocals are always high in the mix (at least, high enough to be heard over the music), and while the guitars might get cranked up here and there, they are, for the most part, as bright and poppy as the songs they’re interpreting. The result is an album that isn’t overly showy or assertive, but with plenty to recommend in its own little world. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Tomato Flower, Powerwasher, Torrey, So Pitted

Happy Thursday! The third and final Pressing Concerns of the week looks at four great albums that are coming out tomorrow, March 8th: new LPs from Tomato Flower, Powerwasher, Torrey, and So Pitted. Check them out below, get excited for their release, and while you wait, catch up on Monday (Sonny Falls, Daniel Romano, Grass Jaw, Nervous Twitch) and Tuesday’s (Prefect Records, Flowertown, Robert Poss, Fur Trader) blog posts if you missed them.

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.

Tomato Flower – No

Release date: March 8th
Record label: Ramp Local
Genre: Psychedelic pop, space pop, experimental pop, noise pop, dream pop, prog-pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Saint

Baltimore quartet Tomato Flower made their debut in two increments in 2022 with the dual Gold Arc and Construction EPs. Their initial releases were staggered by a couple of months, but they were recorded simultaneously and were of a piece, both offering up colorful psychedelic pop music with a bit of space-y lounge pop thrown in for good measure. Still, Construction hinted at something darker and direct and it made sense as a separate statement from Gold Arc–and it appears that Tomato Flower have continued to follow this thread on their first-ever full-length album, simply titled No. The band are still drawing from roughly the same sources (Stereolab, Elephant 6, Animal Collective), but they sound different here–less like a floating, untouchable collection of noises and interjections and more like a full band with all their feet on the ground. This cohesion is somewhat ironic given that the band’s two singer/guitarists, Austyn Wohlers and Jamison Murphy, broke up during the early stages of putting No together. That being said, it certainly explains some of the album’s darker moments, and the quartet (also featuring bassist Ruby Mars and drummer Mike Alfieri) don’t let that get in the way of taking a step forward together.

No stumbles chaotically out of the gate with the discordant percussion that opens “Saint”, although the song eventually shambles towards a loose but satisfying dream pop chorus. The more I listen to No, the more I realize how different Tomato Flower sound on it, but Murphy’s ragged, screeching vocals on “Destroyer”, the second song on the record, immediately dispense with the notion of a “subtle” shift in tone. The instrumental to “Destroyer” tries to use twisting pop melodies to counter its darkness, although the music throughout No roams through post-punk, math-y pop rock, and a bit of avant-prog–you could crop out the brighter parts of the title track and “Do It” and have something fairly upsetting on your hands, or you could snip away the darker sections and, viola, you’re at the beach again. The pop side of No feels fairly incidental–it’s not Tomato Flower’s main aim, but they’re still good enough at it that songs like “Magdalene” are much more fun than they should be on paper. There’s a reason why “Sally & Me”, which effectively turns into a drone in its second half, is the most difficult song on the album–Tomato Flower are on the move throughout No, and the only way to stop every facet of the band from exerting itself is to grind everything to a halt. (Bandcamp link)

Powerwasher – Everyone Laughs

Release date: March 8th
Record label: Strange View
Genre: Post-punk, noise rock, post-hardcore
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Same Time / Same Channel

Baltimore quartet Powerwasher first arrived on my radar back in 2020 with their debut record, the Sad Cactus-released The Power of Positive Washing EP. I quite enjoyed the garage-y post-punk of that record and the way it hinted at some darker corners but without subtracting from its high-flying, rocking main mission. The band had been relatively quiet since (other than a split EP with similarly-minded Baltimore group Consumer Culture last year), but nearly four years after their debut we’ve finally received a debut Powerwasher LP. Everyone Laughs is not so much an evolution of Powerwasher’s sound as an expansion of it–with the extra runtime, the band has the space to retain their original post-punk leanings while at the same time diving into noisier post-hardcore territory, and even exploring some weirder climes. That being said, there is a slight shift in the baseline “Powerwasher sound”–it’s still catchy rock and roll, but it’s a little less “garage punk” and a little more indebted to chaotic and noisy 90s indie rock, evoking newer acts like Pardoner and Stuck.

Everyone Laughs kicks off with an excellent guitar riff that shambles into “Landscape Abstract”, an adventurous indie rock song with traces of math rock and Exploding in Sound-esque fuzz rock. The garage punk beginning to “1-900-POWERWASHER” hints at the looser earlier era of the band, but the way the track ends up devolving into a colossal piece of no wave debris is exciting new territory for the band. The relatively straightforward alt-rock of “Crossing the Street” and the sung-spoken, rhythmic post-punk of “Same Time / Same Channel” represent Powerwasher at their hookiest–although for some, the surging refrain of “Catalog” that follows its rambling, 90s indie rock-esque opening might be the moment that sticks in their head the most. Everyone Laughs feels on the brink of burning down or swerving off a cliff at every moment–“TM 31-210” is one of the more striking examples, lurching into sprinting post-punk, ambient interludes, and a thrashing noise rock conclusion. Not every song on Everyone Laughs is so disparate, but even the windmilling noise punk of “Gussied Up” features some weird turns, and the band save their least chaotic moments for some of the biggest outliers on the record. “Stoned” features pedal steel from Xandy Chelmis of Wednesday and MJ Lenderman’s band (against all odds, it sounds kind of like of Lenderman as played by a indie punk band), while “Entrails” closes the album on an incredibly sparse note. For such an explosive but unpredictable album, Everyone Laugh‘s final moment of diffusion is a fitting cap. (Bandcamp link)

Torrey – Torrey

Release date: March 8th
Record label: Slumberland
Genre: Dream pop, shoegaze
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Really AM

It seems like Ryann Gonsalves is everywhere these days. I first discovered the Bay Area musician as the co-frontperson of San Francisco noise pop group Aluminum, whose 2022 debut record Windowpane ended up being one of my favorites of that year. 2024 is shaping up to be Gonsalves’ biggest year yet–last month they put out a solo album, and March marks the second full-length and Slumberland debut from Torrey, a group that actually predates their other projects. Ryann formed Torrey with their sibling, Kelly Gonsalves, back in 2018, and the band put out an EP in 2019 and an LP in 2021. The Gonsalveses (Ryann on vocals and bass, Kelly on guitar) still represent the creative core of the band, but they get help on Torrey–namely, from lead guitarist Adam Honingford (who’s been with the band since their first album), drummer Keith Ival, and multi-instrumentalist Matthew Ferrara (of The Umbrellas, and who also produced the album). Although there’s some overlap between Ryann’s other bands, Torrey isn’t the Stereolab-influenced pop of Aluminum nor the crisp bedroom pop of their solo work–it’s loud, fuzzy, guitar-forward dream pop, and a remarkably solid exercise in it.

Throughout their self-titled album, Torrey let Ryann’s vocals sit up front in a discernible way, but they aren’t afraid to play around with a shoegaze-level noisiness in the instrumentals as well. What Torrey end up with is a collection of a dozen indie pop/dream pop songs that get even more loud and distorted around their edges. The band have pushed forward from the more straightforward jangle pop sound of their earlier releases–the contributing instrumentalists certainly help, but Torrey works as well as it does because the pop songwriting bond between the Gonsavleses remains intact in the midst of all the noise. Torrey are consistent regardless of which end of the sound they’re exploring–the first half of the record features some four-minute, sprawling guitar pop tunes in “No Matter How” and “Bounce” in addition to brief, fuzzy alt-rock of “Hawaii” and the pure dream pop of “Rain”, which barely features any percussion–and they all feel like equally essential parts of the record. I hear a bit of Aluminum in the second half of the LP with the soaring noise pop of (the appropriately-titled) “Pop Song” and the lo-fi, floating “July (And I’m)”, but Torrey prove that these turns are perfectly in their wheelhouse, too. Torrey is already a strong step forward, but moments like those ensure that the album stay equally rewarding all the way through. (Bandcamp link)

So Pitted – Cloned

Release date: March 8th
Record label: Youth Riot
Genre: Noise rock, fuzz rock, noise punk, metal
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Everything Sucks

You can listen to all the Amphetamine Reptile and downtune your guitars all you want, but the key to making good noise rock is still by being a bunch of weirdos. Seattle quartet So Pitted seems to understand this, or, at least, they adhere to it whether they understand it or not. Back in 2016, the band put out their first album, neo, on Sub Pop, a collection of frequently heavy but still live and limber-feeling noise rock which, for a long time, was also the only So Pitted album. Cloned arrives eight years later via Youth Riot, and it’s a full-sounding, wide-ranging sophomore statement produced by none other than Tad Doyle. So Pitted certainly owe a debt to their lumbering, heavy Pacific Northwest grunge-rock forebears but, Tad frontman involvement or no, it’s hardly a carbon copy of Seattle circa 1990. Cloned merges an almost metal heaviness with the Midwestern post-punk oddness of Devo and Brainiac, resulting in an intense but otherworldly experience–it’s music for an alien encounter in the dense forests of Washington State.

Lead singer Nathan Rodriguez is a decidedly dynamic frontperson–over the course of Cloned’s dozen songs, he sounds like everything from a robot to an extraterrestrial to a lumberjack to somebody being tortured in a basement. The noise that the rest of So Pitted (Liam Downey, Jagger Beato, and Lauren Rodriguez) whip up is enough to go toe-to-toe with Nathan’s performances–some odd, space-y sound effects bubble to the surface of opening track “Muse”, and “Everything Sucks” makes them sound like Brainiac going through a trash compactor. On some of the record’s briefer tracks, such as “Autobiography” and “Parasite”, So Pitted let loose enough to be mistaken for a punk band, but the group that put “Tool”, “Vodka Cran”, and “Today” to tape seem more into alt-metal. Deep in the second half of Cloned, “Interpol” features some of Rodriguez’s most clear-sounding lyrics. It’s a Devo-ish screed against capitalism, corporate greed, and controlling technology, with Rodriguez ruminating on “The stuff normal people do to survive” in one of the refrains–and then every song after “Interpol” on Cloned is a mess of distortion and noise. While I wouldn’t say that So Pitted are “normal people”, it’s clear that they’ve found their own way to survive: through mutation. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Two Two Seven, Flowertown, Robert Poss, Fur Trader

Welcome to a Tuesday Pressing Concerns! The blog’s quest to cover the ridiculous amount of new music that came out last week continues, as today we’re looking at brand new albums from Flowertown and Fur Trader plus a new compilation from Prefect Records, all of which came out last week (and for good measure, we’ve got a new album from Robert Poss that came out back in January). If you missed yesterday’s post, featuring Sonny Falls, Daniel Romano’s Outfit, Grass Jaw, and Nervous Twitch, 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.

Various Artists – Two Two Seven

Release date: March 1st
Record label: Prefect
Genre: Indie pop, jangle pop, C86, dream pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: The Fall of Sweet Pea

Last year I wrote about a compilation from Prefect Records called 14, which featured contributions from fourteen different modern indie pop groups–some of which I’d heard of before, some of them were new to me, but both camps contributed excellent jangle pop, power pop, twee, and/or dream pop to the record. If I’d made something that successful, I’d certainly consider putting together a sequel, and that’s what Prefect have done a year later with Two Two Seven, a new fifteen-song vinyl compilation. Featuring almost an entirely different roster than 14 (the only repeat contributor is longtime Prefect band Mt. Misery), Two Two Seven functions as a “snapshot” of 2023 in the indie pop world. All of these songs are making their debut on vinyl–some had previously been released on cassette, some are demos of songs expected to be included on future records, and some were recorded exclusively for this compilation. A couple of these tracks (from Wandering Summer and Sweet Nobody) I’ve already covered during their initial release, but considering there’s an even greater amount of new material from bands I like and new-to-me acts, I don’t mind a couple of repeats on the blog here.

A few of the bands that have made some of the best pop music of the past couple years debut new songs here–Whitney’s Playland come roaring in with the rainy fuzz pop of “Scheme”, recorded specifically for Two Two Seven, The Laughing Chimes’ “He Never Finished the Thought” (a demo for their next full-length) continues the band’s recent exploration of more dream poppy material while still keeping a foot in jangly college rock, and The Smashing Times and Special Friend also submit previews of records slated to follow up albums I previously enjoyed. There’s a bit of personnel overlap among some of the familiar faces on the record, especially when it comes to Bay Area pop scene–Mike Ramos’ Tony Jay and Katiana Mashikian’s Mister Baby both contribute exclusive songs, but there’s also a previously-released song from the band they’re in together, April Magazine. The new-to-me acts hold their own against the heavyweights, but the two that stick out the most are “The Fall of Sweet Pea” by Tossing Seed and “Ridicule” by The Wendy Darlings. The latter is a bouncy, Boyracer-ish indie-pop-punk tune sung in French (it’ll be out on a record later this year), and the former is a wistful piece of slightly fuzzy pop rock out of Indonesia that reminds me a little bit of the only other indie pop band I know from that region, Singapore’s Subsonic Eye (note to self: do some research on south Pacific indie rock sometime this year). Two Two Seven certainly did its job as a vehicle to get me excited about some new bands and new releases, and it’s a solid collection of songs to have on its own in the meantime. (Bandcamp link)

Flowertown – Tourist Language

Release date: February 29th
Record label: Paisley Shirt
Genre: Indie pop, dream pop, slowcore, jangle pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Tourist Language

Flowertown are at the dead center of a certain kind of guitar pop music. Michael Ramos and Karina Gill have both been covered on this blog before for their Tony Jay and Cindy projects, respectively, and I also wrote about Flowertown’s last record, 2022’s Half Yesterday (and, if you scroll up just a bit, you’ll see that Tony Jay appeared on the Prefect Records compilation, too). Ramos and Gill both fall on the quieter side of the Bay Area indie pop scene, but they’ve got distinct styles–Cindy is more grounded and slowcore-based, Tony Jay a bit more dreamy and floating. The molasses-slow, dreamy jangle pop of Half Yesterday fell somewhere in the middle of the two, with Gill and Ramos’ writing melting together in a way where it isn’t so simple to pick out the more “Cindy” moments or “Tony Jay” ones. I’m not sure which Flowertown album we’re on (do we count the Flowertown EP compilation as a full-length? Is the eight-song, 21-minute Half Yesterday an EP or LP?), but there’s a lot of it already–Ramos and Gill have clearly found something in their collaborations. Given how active Cindy and Tony Jay have been of late, it’s no surprise that it took them a couple of years to follow up Half Yesterday, but Tourist Language finds the duo picking up where they left off and putting together some of the strongest material either of them have made yet.

Typical of Flowertown, Tourist Language doesn’t hold your hand as it jumps into “00”, a delicate guitar pop song that isn’t quite as spaced-out as some Tony Jay openers but is still pretty ramshackle. There are plenty of charms to be found here, namely in Gill and Ramos’ shared vocals, and the crackling “Bye Bye Barry” continues the record’s low-key beginning. The upbeat jangle pop of the title track feels like a jolt of energy compared to what preceded it, the duo hammering out something that keeps the center of Flowertown intact while still delivering an instrumental that works with the (for them, at least) brisk drumbeat. Flowertown go full-tilt pop rock again in “The Ring”, while “No Good Trying” is a kind of hypnotically disjointed lo-fi pop that feels like an intriguing detour for the band. There may be a slightly higher percentage of the more immediate side of the band on Tourist Language, but they close the record by returning to their roots and putting together the beautiful, minimal pop of “Bitter Orange”–you have to really listen to it to hear just how brilliant it is, but if you’ve been following Flowertown, you know by now to hand them your full attention. (Bandcamp link)

Robert Poss – Drones, Songs and Fairy Dust

Release date: January 25th
Record label: Trace Elements
Genre: Shoegaze, post-rock, ambient, drone, fuzz rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Secrets, Chapter and Verse

Robert Poss is notable to a certain subset of indie rock fans as the vocalist and guitarist of New York group Band of Susans, who put out five records of loud, fuzzed-out music between 1986 and 1996–admittedly I’m not the most familiar with them, but I suspect that, with shoegaze being as popular as it is right now, their discography deserves a closer look. Of course, Poss never went away, and he’s put out a decent amount of solo records since Band of Susans broke up on his own label, Trace Elements (in addition to working with composers Nicolas Collins and Phill Niblock and Bruce Gilbert of Wire, among others). Poss has remained busy, but Drones, Songs and Fairy Dust appears to be the musician’s first proper solo album since 2018 Frozen Flowers Curse the Day, and its title is an apt one. It’s a sprawling collection of music dedicated to the recently-deceased Niblock, and it indeed finds Poss balancing the blown-out rock and roll of his most well-known work with the more experimental, droning music that he’s explored in recent years.

At sixteen songs and 54 minutes, Drones, Songs and Fairy Dust has plenty of time for all three such things–and it opens with a particularly exciting display of the second one. “Secrets, Chapter and Verse” kicks off the album with chugging power chords and a triumphant melody, transforming into a winning piece of fuzz-rock that’s shockingly immediate. The next few tracks on the record are perhaps either “drones” or “fairy dust”, but they’re different strains–“More Snow Is Falling” deals in pleasingly rolling post-rock guitars and ambient soundscapes, “Out of the Fairy Dust” is half lost organs and half jaunty instrumental psychedelic pop rock, and “Foghorn Lullaby” is exactly what it sounds like based on its title. Given my own personal taste, it’s not surprising that I’m drawn to the moments on the record where Poss proves he’s still an excellent rock musician (like the blaring “Your Adversary”, the rumbling “Skibbereen Drive”, the shredding “Hagstrom Fragment”, and the hazy but catchy “It’s Always Further Than It Seems”), although the less “rock” moments on Drones, Songs and Fairy Dust eventually start to feel like more than just interludes in between them. “Trem 23” and “Memory Reposed” are both engrossing instrumentals, for instance, and they do a good job of wrapping up a record made by someone who still has a lot to say. (Bandcamp link)

Fur Trader – Executionland

Release date: March 1st
Record label: Against All Odds
Genre: Folk rock, psychedelic pop, chamber pop
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Exit Signs

I first heard Los Angeles’ Fur Trader last year, when the project (led by singer-songwriter Andrew Pelletier) put out the five-song Stuck in the Aching Again EP, a brief collection of Sufjan Stevens-ish lightly orchestral indie folk. To be perfectly honest, that record didn’t stick with me at all, but the description for Pelletier’s follow-up, the Executionland LP, sounded interesting enough that I gave Fur Trader another try–and I’m glad that I did, because this album feels like a step forward in every way for the musician. On Executionland, Fur Trader is still taking inspiration from Sufjan, but it’s an expansion of the project’s sound as well–Pelletier ups both the “psych” and “pop” sides of his sound, creating a rich baroque pop album that conjures up everything from the more refined side of Elephant 6 groups like Beulah, Olivia Tremor Control, and of Montreal to Elliott Smith to Sparklehorse to chamber pop bands like Flotation Toy Warning. Executionland’s songwriting is undeniable, and its performances are humble but still quite commanding.

Executionland starts off perfectly with “Exit Signs”, a gorgeous piece of piano pop that could’ve come from any time between the mid-1960s and now and lets us know that we’re in for something catchy and curious beyond its indie folk foundation. The brief “HBD Clover” is a throwback to Fur Trader’s more sparse, acoustic sound, but in this context it functions as a bridge between more fleshed-out tracks like the sunny, deceptively-busy “Witching Hour” and the sleepy psych-country of “I Bought You a Bird”. Executionland is a brief record (around 24 minutes long), but it feels like a full statement, rising and falling between stripped-down but tightly-written folk (like second half highlight “Little Green”) and jaunty psychedelic pop (the two-minute, Jon Brion-y “Steppin’ on Mines”). “St. Katherine of the Angels” is something of the record’s climax, a piano ballad that swoons into a big, orchestral finish before the organ-led “Four Days Dead” ends Executionland with a benediction or epilogue of sorts. As low-key as Fur Trader come off, Executionland does everything you’d want a record like this to do–it grabs your attention immediately and never loses it. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Sonny Falls, Daniel Romano’s Outfit, Grass Jaw, Nervous Twitch

As I’m sure a lot of you are aware, last Friday was a huge one for new releases. I covered quite a bit of them on the blog in the lead-up to March 1st, but there’s also a lot of really good new music I’m going to be tackling in the coming weeks. Today, we’re looking at four albums that came out a couple of days ago: brand new full-lengths from Sonny Falls, Daniel Romano’s Outfit, and Grass Jaw, plus a compilation from Nervous Twitch.

I think this is interesting: I could be wrong, but I believe that this is the first-ever Pressing Concerns where all four acts have previously appeared in an earlier edition.

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.

Sonny Falls – Sonny Falls

Release date: March 1st
Record label: Earth Libraries
Genre: Fuzz rock, garage rock, alt-country
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: You Were Hoping

Ryan Ensley aka Hoagie Wesley aka Sonny Falls is not a household name, but I get the sense that those of us who are “in the know” about the Chicago singer-songwriter are all fully in the tank for him. Since 2018, Wesley has been hopping from indie label to label (Sooper, Plastic Miracles, Forged Artifacts), putting out fiery, unique records that are loose-feeling but incredibly deep underneath their garage rock/fuzz-country exteriors. The sixteen-song double album All That Has Come Apart/Once Did Not Exist (the second Sonny Falls album and the one that led me to Ensley) is easily one of my favorite albums of 2020, and 2022’s brief twenty-minute Stoned, Beethoven Blasting was an especially frenetic but worthy follow-up. The fourth Sonny Falls album is a self-titled one, out through Earth Libraries, and it feels like an attempt to pack all the ambition of All That Has Come Apart/Once Did Not Exist into ten tracks and thirty-five minutes. The songs on Sonny Falls don’t sound like anything but Sonny Falls songs, but every track on the album feels stretched and teased out in a new way, Ensley spending a bit more time composing and arranging his sprawling writing instead of fully leaning into his street-raving side.

When Sonny Falls wants to pull out one of the all-gas, no-brakes garage-y fuzz rock anthems that have marked the project’s past, Ensley still very much “has it”; look no further than single “Going Nowhere” (“I wonder if I’m going nowhere / I heard that place is kinda cool”) or the album’s second song, “Dystopian Dracula”. However, the song that starts Sonny Falls is “Cemeteries”, a more subdued track with ample piano that feels like a clear signal that this album is going to be something more (even as it roars towards classic Sonny Falls status towards its end). Even the biggest-sounding songs on the album aren’t always so straightforward–the shortest track on Sonny Falls, the rave-up “Gold Coast”, features a blistering barroom piano solo, and “You Were Hoping” merges a pounding, industrial beat to Ensley’s songwriting to create what is, shockingly, the biggest pop moment on the album. The first half of Sonny Falls (also including another highlight, the slickly dark-sounding “Night Scene”) is just about perfect, but the B-side holds up gamely–“Kids on Mars” is Ensley at his blown-out best, and there’s also the closing track, “Apocalypse-Lite”. It’s Ensley in his enjoyable “rambling mode”, juking and diving through a twisting internal monologue (this time it’s frantic, darting observations brought on by the pandemic, understandably so). At this point, Ryan Ensley has a very strong baseline as a songwriter, but it’s quite exciting to watch him figure out how to add to it. (Bandcamp link)

Daniel Romano’s Outfit – Too Hot to Sleep

Release date: March 1st
Record label: You’ve Changed
Genre: Power pop, punk rock, garage rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Where’s Paradise

If you’re only passingly familiar with the music of Daniel Romano, you’d be forgiven for placing him on the more polished end of the retro rock spectrum–even discounting the one-song suite of La Luna, the more “song-based” recent albums like 2021’s Cobra Poems and 2020’s How Ill Thy World Is Ordered come off more as “studio rats” than “garage punks”. However, anyone who’s seen the Outfit (Daniel Romano, Ian Romano, Carson McHone, Julianna Riolino, and Roddy Rossetti) play live knows that they’ve got a legendary energy and ferocity in that setting (further evidence of this side of Romano includes his Ancient Shapes side project and several of his less-”official” pandemic-era releases). That being said, I’ve been waiting for something like Too Hot to Sleep from The Outfit for a while now–a genuine live-in-studio sounding garage rock scorcher of a record. Ironically, it took the notoriously prolific Romano two years (an eternity for him) to put together something as loose-sounding as this, but he and his crew really honed in on something potent with this ten-song, twenty-seven minute collection.

Romano is still a smooth operator as a pop songwriter, and the backing vocals of McHone and Riolino are still essential in chorus construction–which creates an interesting one-two punch to open Too Hot to Sleep, with “You Can Steal My Kiss” and “Where’s Paradise” vacillating between Ty Segall/Thee Oh Sees garage rock and sugary power pop. Aside from the loose but not overly crazy “State of Nature”, The Outfit go from one blistering rocker to another in the first half of Too Hot to Sleep, with the giddy, speeding “All of Thee Above” going toe-to-toe with the opening two tracks in terms of catchy energy, while “That’s Too Rich” and “Chatter” are the closest the record gets to straight-up punk rock (the early Replacements brashness of the former has a certain charm, but the bass-led, zippy latter is my favorite of the two). Having proved its mettle, the second half of Too Hot to Sleep doesn’t lose steam so much as let the songs spread out a bit and bring the garage-y energy to more typical Romano psych-power-pop fare. “Field of Ruins” is the one track where they rock out for nearly four minutes, but “You Saw Me in Sunshine” and the title track slow down just enough to build to something–the prog-punk big finish in the latter of the two songs is the nice payoff. Even if you think you know Daniel Romano’s deal by now, I’d recommend Too Hot to Sleep to any power pop and/or garage rock fan–it’s one of his strongest albums yet. (Bandcamp link)

Grass Jaw – I Don’t Want to Believe

Release date: February 29th
Record label: Dad, Do You Want to Hear This?
Genre: Alt-country, folk rock, slowcore, fuzz rock, country rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Tic Tac

I believe that Grass Jaw is now the first-ever artist to appear in Pressing Concerns for four years in a row, and I couldn’t be happier about this being the band and album to do it. Rosy Overdrive has been checking in on the expanding catalog of the project (made up primarily of Ithaca, New York’s Brendan Kuntz, with various guest contributors) since 2021, and I’ve certainly enjoyed getting regular, unfailingly consistent records full of Kuntz’s unique combination of weary, almost gothic alt-country, slowcore, and Exploding in Sound-core fuzz/slacker rock. Although I don’t think I’ve ever thought “I wonder what this guy thinks about aliens and UFOs” while listening to previous Grass Jaw records, one benefit to making approximately an album a year is that they can become sort of snapshots and dispatches from where one is currently at in one’s life. I Don’t Want to Believe, the seventh Grass Jaw full-length, is sourced from a recent “borderline unhealthy obsession with UFOs and related phenomena” that Kuntz has developed–and as it turns out, Grass Jaw’s frequently haunted-feeling music is a pretty effective vehicle in which to explore this kind of thing.

Regardless of what Kuntz is writing about, he’s still got a dour and pessimistic side, as illustrated quite memorably by the opening lines of the title track (“It’s embarrassing, they’ve been watching us this whole time behave like children / Or worse–children have empathy”). Just because Kuntz is obsessed with aliens doesn’t mean his narrators can’t have refreshingly varied perspectives on the matter, from the cringing singer of “I Don’t Want to Believe” to “Signs”, in which a potential alien invasion merely serves as the backdrop for the protagonist’s more insular and personally painful concerns (colored smartly by Tom Yagielski’s saxophone), or “Tic Tac”, a charmingly rickety country rocker which seems to lament the earthbound concerns that prevent us all from full embracing the exciting possibilities of other worlds. As Grass Jaw lumbers into the closing stretches of I Don’t Want to Believe, the title of “Cause of Death: Explosion” (about chemist and occultist Jack Parsons) explicitly nods to falling down Wikipedia wormholes, while “Disclosure” is a dark, towering piece of Crazy Horse-esque country rock. Closing track “Watching, Waiting” is perhaps the most overt “country” moment on the album, between its harmonica and pedal steel. The song ends with Kuntz looking at the stars and intoning “Hard to believe, hard to believe we’re all alone”. If somebody as lonesome-sounding as Kuntz can sing that, it’s hard to argue with it. (Bandcamp link)

Nervous Twitch – Odd Socks

Release date: March 1st
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Indie pop, power pop, jangle pop, twee
Formats: CD, digital
Pull Track: I’d Like to Think You Know Me Better Than That

Back in 2022, I wrote about Some People Never Change from Leeds’ Nervous Twitch, an enjoyably spirited collection of classic indie pop delivered with power pop enthusiasm. Although the trio (vocalist/bassist/keyboardist Erin Hyde, guitarist/keyboardist Jamie Churchley, and drummer Ashley Goodall) were new to me then, it was actually the band’s fifth album, with releases dating back to 2015. In fact, Nervous Twitch have been at it for so long that they’ve amassed an entire album’s worth of B-sides, compilation appearance tracks, and outtakes–which is exactly what the sixteen-song Odd Socks CD collects. These songs (whose recordings originate from 2014 to 2022) range from ones that never made it past the home recording stage to studio tracks that didn’t make the final cut from their respective sessions, almost all of which were written by the band’s songwriting duo of Churchley and Hyde and had only previously appeared on various-artist compilations or as single B-sides (if they’d been released at all). 

Indie pop “home recordings” conjure up images of lo-fi, distorted basement demos, and although “I’m Bored with You” sort of fits this description, by and large Nervous Twitch’s previously-unheard non-studio material sounds just as complete and developed as the more professionally-recorded ones–“I’d Like to Think You Know Me Better Than That” is an incredibly strong C86/jangle pop opener, while the garage-pop “No Good” and the ironically cheery organ-led “This Song About Ya” are easily highlights as well. There’s no shortage of excellent original indie pop songs on Odd Socks, but it wouldn’t be “odd socks” without a few oddities, which come in the form of the (mostly) instrumental “The Birdman Stomp” and “Persistent Itch”, an acoustic version of the previously-released “Tarrantino Hangover”, and a live cover of The Flatmates’ “I Could Be in Heaven”. These moments are enjoyable on their own (especially the Flatmates cover, which makes me want to see them live), but they’re also true to the grab-bag nature of indie rock compilations and the 60s pop records from which Nervous Twitch have taken a good deal of inspiration. It’s appropriate, then, that Odd Socks caps off the first decade of Nervous Twitch with a bit of everything. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable: