A busy week for Rosy Overdrive winds down by looking at four albums that either have come out or will come out this week: new ones from SAVAK, NAYAN, Stay Inside, and Gulfer. It’s a great post, as are the ones from earlier this week; if you missed any between Monday’s post (on new records from Mt. Worry, Medicine, Ryann Gonsalves, and Safari Room), Tuesday’s post (the February 2024 playlist/round-up), and Wednesday’s post (on Late Bloomer’s Another One Again), hit those up, 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.
SAVAK – Flavors of Paradise
Release date: March 1st Record label: Peculiar Works/Ernest Jenning Record Co. Genre: Post-punk, garage rock, college rock, 90s indie rock Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Up with the Sun
It’s rare that a band made up of thirty-plus-year indie rock veterans is as active in putting out new music as SAVAK have been–Flavors of Paradise is the Brooklyn trio’s sixth album since 2016 (seven if you count 2022’s Error / Delight remix album). Drummer Matt Schulz and vocalist/guitarist/bassists Sohrab Habibion and Michael Jaworski have previously played in bands like Obits, Holy Fuck, Edsel, and Enon, but as the SAVAK discography grows ever larger, one starts to wonder if or when their recent work will overtake their impressive backgrounds in stature. Maybe it happened with their last proper album, Human Error / Human Delight–I was thoroughly impressed by how that record harnessed Wire, Sonic Youth, and Mission of Burma into something accessible but while still doing justice to the trailblazing nature of those bands. A little under two years later, Flavors of Paradise adds to the language SAVAK have been developing, contracting it in some places and expanding it in others. The trio recorded the album at Electrical Audio last year, and while they’ve always been a “no nonsense” group, Flavors of Paradise finds the band plowing through twelve songs triangulating garage rock, post-punk, and college rock with a fresh, live sound.
It’s easy to take for granted just how well SAVAK click together, but Flavors of Paradise is built around moments like the just-a-bit-more-aggressive-than-necessary drumming punching up the R.E.M.-by-way-of-Burma opening track “Up With the Sun”, the bass in the psych-post-punk “Let the Sunlight In” (which kind of sounds like if Lungfish picked up the tempo a little bit), and the stop-start guitars in the Dischord-y post-punk revival “Paid Disappearance”. Another key factor in why Flavors of Paradise works so well is that the trio put the same level of energy into every song on the record, whether it’s the jangly power pop of the opening track and “It Happens to You”, the garage rock rumble of “The New New Age”, or the oddities like “Two Lamps” (another slick post-punk song that always feels just out of reach) and “Jump into the Night” (in which everybody sounds like they’re playing a different song but somehow still lock into place when it counts the most). As streamlined as Flavors of Paradise feels (most records struggle hit the bullseye as effortlessly as SAVAK do on “What Is It Worth”, and I didn’t even really get to talk about that one), it’s nowhere near as lean as it looks on the surface. The band doesn’t really take it down a notch until the floating closing track “Attribution”, a Wiley Coyote-looking-down-at-the-cliff moment where it hits you just how much SAVAK were flooring it up until that point. They make it sound easy, but they earned that final breather. (Bandcamp link)
NAYAN – Rock N Roll Ruined My Life
Release date: February 29th Record label: Red Stapler Genre: Power pop, heartland rock, pop rock Formats: Digital Pull Track: Invincible
Washington, D.C.’s NAYAN may be a new band, but its frontperson and namesake Nayan Bhula is hardly a rookie. Bhula first showed up in the late 90s as part of the post-punk group GIST, and spent the 2010s leading eight-piece orchestral indie rock group The NRIs, both largely releasing music on Bhula’s own Red Stapler Records. Within the past couple of years, Bhula has retooled The NRIs and rechristened them NAYAN–they’re now “merely” a quintet (also featuring Gabriel Fry, Mike Nilsson, Eddie Fuentes, and Andrew Gabor) and, while they might be “stripped down” compared to his past work, NAYAN are still making bombastic, wide-scale indie rock befitting of their first album’s title. NAYAN’s Bandcamp page suggests that they’re a “21st century” Bruce Springsteen–and as bold a pronouncement as that is, it’s hard to disagree that Bhula is making his own version of The Boss’ most well-known works. Although Bhula lives in the city of Dischord Records and has played shows with many of the imprint’s bands, there’s not a ton of punk or post-punk leanness to be found on Rock N Roll Ruined My Life–just ten pieces of maximalist, all-in rock and roll music.
It becomes apparent early on in Rock N Roll Ruined My Life that Bhula is a seasoned indie rock frontperson–whether he’s helming the record’s foot-on-the-gas pop rock side or more introspective mid-tempo saxophone explorations, his performances are undeniable. More than anything else, Bhula sounds like American Music Club’s Mark Eitzel trying to make a power pop album throughout Rock N Roll Ruined My Life–he’s got that level of gravitas. Songs like the high-flying opening track “Invincible” and the looser but still punchy “Your Time” don’t need a dynamic vocalist to make them work, but Bhula certainly adds something to these songs–and when the band slows down on the title track and “Waiting for a Spark”, his delivery and presence is essential in making these songs shine just as brightly. Rosy Overdrive favorite Laura Stevenson pops up on vocals in the five-minute Springsteenian “Alone” in the middle of the record, and then NAYAN launch into a second half that’s a bit weirder but never distractingly so. “Hindsight Is 20/20” and “Destiny” are both exercises in multi-part song structure (all of which are still quite poppy), and Bhula pulls off the “just him and an acoustic guitar” moment with the brief but still quite affecting “I’ll Be Smiling”. However big you think closing track “Blinded” should be, Bhula and the rest of his band make it even grander than that–NAYAN may have had their lives ruined by rock and roll, but they’ve come away with an intimate understanding of how their enemy works. (Bandcamp link)
Stay Inside – Ferried Away
Release date: February 28th Record label: Self-released Genre: Emo, alt-rock, post-hardcore Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: A Backyard
It’s been four years since the release of Viewing, the debut album from Brooklyn emo quartet Stay Inside. That record had an icy, dramatic post-hardcore sound that effectively sat at one extreme end of the kind of music I enjoy (it was on my 2020 year-end list, if you want to see a much less polished version of Rosy Overdrive). The band (guitarist/vocalist Chris Johns, bassist Bryn Nieboer, guitarist Chris Lawless, and drummer Vishnu Anantha) put out an EP called Blight in 2022 that I somehow missed, but thankfully Ferried Away, the second Stay Inside album, didn’t pass me by. The record represents a surprising evolution for the band, who have polished up their sound and positioned themselves in a completely different emo subgenre–that of slick alt-rock. The mewithoutYou influence isn’t totally gone, but Ferried Away is just as close to Oso Oso as it is to that band, and the transformation is reminiscent of similar ones undergone by Awakebutstillinbed and The World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die, two groups with which Stay Inside have toured (they also enlist former Really From trumpet player Matt Hull, whose old band also feels relevant throughout Ferried Away).
The new Stay Inside of Ferried Away asserts itself more strongly in some moments than others. For instance, the big, hooky emo-rock of “A Backyard” and the breezy, acoustic-led “My Fault” are completely new territory for the band, but the band pull both of them off, and they don’t sound like they’re dumbing anything down to get to there, either (particularly in the former song, whose bright, mathy guitars and vocals only enhance the messy uncertainty of the lapsed relationship detailed in the lyrics). Really, as a whole, Ferried Away is as rich as anything Stay Inside have done thus far, as the band wield their music to explore death and all the interpersonal relationships that it freezes in amber time and time again. The heaviest moments on Ferried Away aren’t marked by screaming (although it does show up in “An Invitation”), but by Johns frantically trying to describe lifetimes of emotions and connections in three-minute increments while the band swirls around these diatribes (particularly in “When’s the Last Time?” and “An Invitation”). Or maybe it’s the acceptance that’s earned in closing track “Steeplechase”. It begins as a hard-edged mewithoutYou-esque tension-rocker, but Hull’s trumpet feels out of place–until the end of the song, where it ushers in the final catharsis as Johns is ferried away (“Leave a light on on the shore for me / Stand in the light at the show for me”). (Bandcamp link)
Gulfer – Third Wind
Release date: February 28th Record label: Topshelf Genre: Emo, alt-rock, math rock, fuzz rock Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital Pull Track: Prove
At this point, Gulfer are unambiguously indie rock veterans. Founding members Vincent Ford (vocals/guitar) and David Mitchell (bass) have been at it since 2011, and even the “new” faces Joe Therriault (guitar/vocals) and Julien Daoust (drums) have been in the band for eight years now. The Montreal group’s maximalist, math-y sound (as well as a propensity for sticking the bulk of their material on split releases rather than proper albums) helped them fit right in with “fourth-wave emo”, although they slowly but surely incorporated a polished alt-rock sound into records like 2018’s Dog Bless and 2020’s self-titled album. Even so, Third Wind is their first album in four years, and it also finds Therriault contributing the majority of the songwriting (rather than Ford and Mitchell) for the first time ever. It didn’t exactly come out of nowhere (Therriault has played a songwriting role in the band since he joined), but it’s still a tricky baton-passing to pull off successfully–Ford (who also makes music under the name Stevenson) definitely has a reputation as an excellent songwriter.
It’s fair to say that Gulfer are a different band than they were ten or even five years ago (even the title of Third Wind reflects this), but that doesn’t mean that this version of Gulfer is A) less vital or B) completely divorced from its roots. The math rock-inspired guitar playing is not as front and center but it still shades these ten songs, and Gulfer still feel “emo” in their overall ambition and scope even if the specific signifiers aren’t exactly the same. The slick-feeling but somewhat distorted alt-rock Gulfer found in “Clean” and “Cherry Seed” feels just as inspired as if they were ripping through something more fractured (and, conversely, “Drainer” still indicates they can incorporate that kind of thing into their sound and still have it hold up both with and against their other material). Something like second-half highlight “Prove” is a very distinct combination of sounds (fourth-wave guitars, earnest vocals, pop rock that’s clear but not sanded-down) that feels unique to Third Wind–Gulfer haven’t quite ever sounded like this before, but they’ve been building up to it for longer than we (and, perhaps, even the band themselves) realized. (Bandcamp link)
Release date: March 1st Record label: Self Aware/Dead Broke/Tor Johnson Genre: Punk rock, 90s indie rock, fuzz rock, college rock Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital
There’s this whole cottage industry around the question of “why didn’t The Replacements make it big?” that’s sprung up over the years, with those both around them and affected by them pontificating on the various missteps that prevented the band from “breaking through”–to the point where we’re actively remixing and revamping their forty-year-old albums in 2024. While I’m sure Late Bloomer wouldn’t mind a bit of major-label money thrown their way, part of me is glad that this kind of music-nerd circus can’t reasonably be applied to modern indie rock bands, and I can just enjoy the Charlotte trio’s excellent, garishly outdated pop music without any strings attached. As far as I’m concerned, guitarist Neil Mauney, bassist Josh Robbins, and drummer Scott Wishart are trailblazers–as far back as 2013, they were melding 90s indie rock, punk, and pop hooks together on records being put out on Robbins’ own label, Self Aware. Fast forward a decade and 90s indie/punk revivalism is as big as ever, with groups like Liquid Mike and Taking Meds blowing up, and Self Aware has grown into an institution that’s put out great music from Amanda X, Faye, and Pretty Matty, among others.
Somewhere along the way, Late Bloomer faded a bit from the limelight. They never truly went away after their 2018 masterpiece Waiting, but we received Late Bloomer in smaller doses, and the most substantial of those, the three-song Where Are the Bones EP in 2022, was a complete departure for the group in its contemplative, acoustic folk rock. So it happens that Another One Again, the fourth Late Bloomer full-length album, is also their first in six years and first in their second decade of existence. Not that I expected them to go full indie folk on their next LP (last year’s “Barely a Sound” single proved that they do indeed still know how to rock), but it’s quite pleasing to hear Late Bloomer plug in their electric guitars and continue to tap into the sort of ragged-but-catchy Dinosaur Jr.-indebted indie rock they’ve done so well in the past (and it’s also pleasing to see familiar faces like Oceanator‘s Elise Okusami and Gold Dust‘s Stephen Pierce pop up–on vocals and dulcimer, respectively–this time around). At the same time, though, I wouldn’t expect the trio to be the same guys they were the better part of a decade ago, and Another One Again reflects the passing of time in a way that makes it distinct from the rest of the band’s discography.
There’s an enjoyable irony at the start of Another One Again, in which Mauney sings “I don’t have the self-control” as part of an opening track that deals in restraint and slow-building in a way that feels like a new avenue for Late Bloomer. Another new wrinkle apparent early on is the country twang that shows up in “Self-Control”, putting them in line with other southeastern US bands like Gnawing and Downhaul that aren’t “country” but still incorporate the sounds of their region into their indie rock. As impressive as “Self-Control” is, instant gratification Late Bloomer shows up right after in “Birthday” (the way that the band cycle through a jangly, triumphant college rock chord progression and choppy power chords in the first half minute of the song is a real “Wait, they’re allowed to do that?” moment). Another One Again is off to the races from then on out, eagerly exploring climes both familiar and new to the band, from the five-minute slow-burn “Mother Mary” to the rousing indie-punk shout-along chorus of “Behind Your Ear” to the emotional country rock of “Hope for Rain”.
“Video Days” kicks off the second half of Another One Again with another big chorus and verses about punk rock and skateboarding–but it’s in the past tense, sung from a perspective that’s long past youthful innocence, and that catchy refrain finds Mauney asking for forgiveness for what presumably fractured it. I still maintain that Waiting is perhaps the pinnacle of this kind of rock music–its most memorable chorus asked “If I make it to heaven, does it really matter?” and its closing message (“Life is weird”) is a pure shrug. It’s really hard to advance from that position while still holding it all together–if Another One Again isn’t exactly answering all the questions of the universe, it’s at least acknowledging that they aren’t just rhetorical things to ponder while stoned. “One day you’ll have to face yourself,” Robbins intones in penultimate track “No One Was There”–the question is no longer “if”, but “when”.
It is time to wrap up February, and the shortest month of the year ended up more than delivering the goods (read: good music) this time around. Plenty of brand new music from 2024 graces the two-hour playlist below, some from bands I’ve covered previously, some not, and we’ve also still got a few 2023 stragglers that made it across the date line. Read on!
Mt. Worry, Mint Mile, Liquid Mike, and True Green have two songs on the playlist this time.
Here is where you can listen to the playlist on various streaming services: Spotify, Tidal (missing one song), BNDCMPR. Be sure to check out previous playlist posts if you’ve enjoyed this one, or visit the site directory. If you’d like to support Rosy Overdrive, you can share this (or another) post, or donate here.
“Marigold”, Wagging From My Own Private Rodeo (2024, Wagging)
Who knew there was great indie pop in Asheville, North Carolina? That’s where Wagging (guitarist/vocalist Alison Antaramian, bassist Mark Capon, and drummer/vocalist Newt Pal) hail from, and their debut album, My Own Private Rodeo, is an incredibly fun listen. If nothing else, it’s got “Marigold” on it, which has to be one of my favorite songs of the year so far. Harmonies are important for Wagging, and the ones found in the chorus of this song are second to none–of course, it helps that both Antaramian’s melodic guitar playing and hook-writing are both on point as well. Knowing that they’re capable of putting together songs like this, Wagging have been filed under “band to watch” for me now.
“Mouse Trap”, Liquid Mike From Paul Bunyan’s Slingshot (2024)
“Given what you know, the American Dream is a Michigan hoax”–it sure is, Liquid Mike, it sure is. I’m not the only person to sing the praises of Paul Bunyan’s Slingshot, the fifth album from Marquette, Michigan’s Liquid Mike, but does it ever live up to the hype. There are songs on here that power pop bands would kill to write that Liquid Mike didn’t even release as singles, and the songs that were singles sound even better in context. The alt-rock wrecking ball “Mouse Trap” falls into the latter category; it’s a towering piece of guitar power that flexes even harder amongst the record’s poppier fare. It’s a transfixing combination of dead-serious cartoon violence imagery and dramatic pauses that rarely leaves my head quickly once it shows up there. Read more about Paul Bunyan’s Slingshot here.
“Going Nowhere”, Sonny Falls From Sonny Falls (2024, Earth Libraries)
The upcoming fourth Sonny Falls album feels like an attempt to pack all the ambition of 2020 double LP 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 song on the album feels stretched and teased out in a new way, with bandleader Ryan Ensley spending a bit more time composing and arranging his sprawling writing instead of fully leaning into his street-raving side. That being said, when he wants to pull out one of the all-gas, no-brakes garage-y fuzz rock anthems that have marked his 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,” he muses in the chorus). I’ll have more to say about Sonny Falls soon.
“Empty Island”, Mint Mile From Roughrider (2024, Comedy Minus One)
On their second record, Chicago’s Mint Mile finally have their “tight”, forty-minute single long-player album, a different beast than their sprawling hourlong 2020 debut, Ambertron. Mint Mile inject Roughrider with plenty of energy, perhaps nowhere more noticeably than “Empty Island”, the band’s finest moment as “rockers” yet. They do justice to a song that has already established itself as an excellent fixture in the Mint Mile live experience (I’d been calling it “Reverse Vampire”, after its most immediately memorable lyric), with Corvair’s Heather Larimer sneaking in some vocals in the song’s second half, answering Tim Midyett as he confidently helms a piece of barnburning country rock. Read more about Roughrider here.
“My Pecadilloes”, True Green From My Lost Decade (2024, Spacecase)
As True Green, singer-songwriter Dan Hornsby and multi-instrumentalist Tailer Ransom develop a distinct musical style, a busy, kitchen-sink pop attitude that reflects their confidence that Hornsby’s striking songwriting will shine even if they whip up an instrumental storm around it. And it does–the first half of My Lost Decade is one “statement song” after another, different stories in different genres held together by the writing of Hornsby (who is, by the way, also a novelist). The boisterous, cape-twirling pop rock of “My Pecadilloes” is a coming-in-hot tale of greed and throat-cutting that feels like a kid brother to Malkmus, Bejar, and Berman (the way that Hornsby sings “my advisor” is perhaps my single favorite musical moment of the year thus far). Read more about My Lost Decade here.
“Loud in Here”, Mt. Worry From Die Happy (2024, Mountain of Worry)
A second Mt. Worry EP has arrived almost exactly a year after their first one, A Mountain of Fucking Worry. Die Happy is less than half the length of their last record, but it’s incredibly strong nonetheless, retaining the loose, “anything goes” energy of the Philadelphia/Chicago supergroup’s debut but while also feeling like the work of a more cohesive unit. Every song on Die Happy is a hit, but “Loud in Here” might be the biggest “hit” on here. It was my first favorite on the record, and it’s not hard to hear why–the song’s lead vocalist, Noah Roth, has been an excellent deliverer of pop melodies over several solo records now, and the bouncy but explosive power pop of this song is one of their strongest ones yet. Read more about Die Happy here.
“Sorry Darling”, Sorry Darling From See This Through (2024)
One of my favorite albums of 2022 was Bigger Than Before by Ex-Vöid. It’s a mess of big hooks, harmonies, exuberance, and noisiness–I wish more indie rock tried to sound like it. “Sorry Darling” by Brooklyn’s Sorry Darling is the first song I’ve heard in a bit that really reminds me of that album–for one, guitarist/vocalist/songwriters Stephen Bailey and Liz Wagner Biro sing so well together that they do it for the entire song, and the instrumental is sprinting to keep up with them all the time as well. It’s choppy pop-punk power chords at first, but the classic rock-n-roll flares in the chorus are a welcome development, as is the ridiculous guitar soloing in between. They pulled it off, indeed.
“Addlepated”, Fake Canadian From Fleeting Moments (2022, Daylight Headlight Section)
“Addlepated” is some excellent vocabulary rock (it means “confused or stupid; befuddled”, by the way). Fake Canadian are an “angular power pop” trio from Sacramento whose most recent release is a five-song EP from 2022 called Fleeting Moments. The band recorded it with Scott Evans of Kowloon Walled City, but it’s not exactly straight-up noise rock–they certainly have the clean, Albini-influenced “PRF-core” sound, but the record hews more toward Devo-y nerve-y post-punk/new wave or even a Thermals-ish power-pop-punk. It’s one of the more unique-sounding things I’ve heard in recent memory–to me, “Addlepated” is what a perfect pop song sounds like.
“Lake Pontchartrain”, Tim McNally From On the Way to Pompeii (2024)
Philadelphia-based folk rock musician Tim McNally may be a somewhat under-the-radar singer-songwriter, but he writes with a confidence and a faith that whoever is paying attention will give these songs the close looks they deserve. Although sometimes dressed as an acoustic folk troubadour, McNally carries himself through On the Way to Pompeii with a rock and roll swagger, whether that means Springsteen-esque bombast or an interconnected intricacy reflecting of the more esoteric moments of Cooley and Hood. The record’s best song is “Lake Pontchartrain”, an absolutely gorgeous piece of orchestral guitar pop in which McNally’s protagonist’s entire journey unspools itself in a seedy ecstasy. It ends abruptly, an entire world snuffed out just as suddenly as it was alighted. Read more about On the Way to Pompeii here.
“Passionate Sunday”, Dancer From 10 Songs I Hate About You (2024, Meritorio)
My favorite thing on Dancer’s debut full-length, 10 Songs I Hate About You, is probably the closing track. “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. I’ll have more to say about 10 Songs I Hate About You soon.
“Leaving Me Behind”, Westall 66 From Staring at the Sun (2024, Slippery Slope)
Melbourne’s Westall 66 trades in the business of big, hooky, polished pop punk on their debut EP, Staring at the Sun–their opening statement offers up five songs incorporating widescreen heartland rock, loud and boisterous power pop, perennially out-of-style “orgcore”, and a pop punk earnestness. Just about every chorus on Staring at the Sun is power pop excellence, but “Leaving Me Behind” just might have my favorite refrain, with the lead singer riding the titular line out for all it’s worth after the enjoyable building-up the verses provide. Read more about Staring at the Sun here.
“Stick n Poke”, Mealworm From Mealworm (2024, Mealworm)
Oh, man. I’ve heard a decent amount of Portland-based singer-songwriter Colleen Dow’s solo material and was quite into the most recent album from their band, Thank You, I’m Sorry–but the debut EP from their latest project, Mealworm, is the best thing front-to-back that I’ve heard from them yet. The self-titled Mealworm EP is brief–three songs, less than nine minutes–but it’s a heavy listen as Dow immerses themself fully in writing about people formerly in their life who’ve since passed away. “Stick n Poke” is my favorite song from mealworm; I love how the steady rhythm section (provided by drummer Abe Anderson and bassist Alex Heubel) sounds almost jaunty–as brisk as it is on its own, in context it adds a haziness to Dow’s lucid remembrances of someone who’s been dead for a year at this point.
“On the Northline”, Frontier Ruckus From On the Northline (2024, Sitcom Universe)
I first came to the work of Michigan singer-songwriter Matthew Milia via his excellent 2021 solo album Keego Harbor, but he’s probably most well-known for fronting the long-running folk rock band Frontier Ruckus. On the Northline is the first Frontier Ruckus full-length I’ve heard (for longtime fans, it’s a triumphant return–their last one was in 2017) but I can tell you that it’s great–it sounds like Milia’s solo work, but folkier! That’s in no small part due to David W. Jones’ banjo, which duets nicely with Milia’s contemplative lyrics and delicate but confident melodies on my favorite song on the record, the title track. Of course, that opening acoustic guitar riff that Milia plays before beginning the song with his best Jason Lytle impression is also key, as is his mandolin playing, as Zachary Nichols’ trumpet shades. There’s a lot of good on On the Northline, but this is the one where it really all comes together.
“Baying of Dogs”, Guitar From Casting Spells on Turtlehead (2024, Spared Flesh/Julia’s War)
Guitar (aka Portland, Oregon’s Saia Kuli) brings a louder, noisier sound to the project’s latest release, Casting Spells on Turtlehead, expanding on the lo-fi garage punk of its self titled debut EP. As it turns out, a more fleshed-out Guitar surprisingly fits right in with the current wave of omnivorous noise pop/shoegaze acts (like those also on his new label, Julia’s War). Casting Spells on Turtlehead has kind of a grab-bag feel–my personal favorite moment on the brief but packed EP is “Baying of Dogs”, which builds around a beautiful, melodic guitar riff that’s pure lo-fi basement pop, and it’s only towards the very end of the song that Kuli and his collaborators start to let the loud noises creep in. Read more about Casting Spells on Turtlehead here.
“Polycarp”, True Green From My Lost Decade (2024, Spacecase)
On his debut album as True Green, Minneapolis’ Dan Hornsby quickly establishes himself as one of the most exciting singer-songwriters to debut this year. And yet, Hornsby doesn’t even sing my favorite song on My Lost Decade. Towards the end of the record, Alice Bolin, Hornsby’s wife, sings a song called “Polycarp”–it’s a beautiful piece of dream-y pop/folk rock, a song where every single lyric is deserving of an entire analysis of its own. After a record full of songs where Hornsby excels at situating us right in the middle of a certain character’s life, True Green just as effectively depict a complete unmooring (“You make me feel like a fishbowl in the ocean / I can’t tell the water from the glass” is the key lyric, although the line about the narrator’s split being like “breaking up the Beatles” is my favorite one). Read more about My Lost Decade here.
“Body Hate”, Mt. Worry From Die Happy (2024, Mountain of Worry)
I wrote about the instant-gratification fest that is “Loud in Here” earlier in this blog post, but when it comes to Mt. Worry’s Die Happy, “Body Hate” is the one that I’ve grown to appreciate more and more every time I listen to the EP. I’m not even sure who’s singing on this one–I think it’s Rowan Roth (of Hell Trash) and Noah Roth together–but their dead-serious intonation of the line that gives the EP its title (“I will die happy or not at all”) works so well that it took me a while to really appreciate just how much the lumbering fuzz rock instrumental adds to it. Between that line as well as the song’s blunt force title, “Body Hate” is pretty clearly a heavy track–I’m not sure if calling something “cathartic” is a cliche by now, but this song earns the release it eventually provides. Read more about Die Happy here.
“Get Numb to It!”, Friko From Where We’ve Been, Where We Go from Here (2024, ATO)
Chicago’s Friko are incredibly energetic and excited-sounding throughout Where We’ve Been, Where We Go from Here, their full-length debut, with Niko Kapetan and Bailey Minzenberger layering guitars, pianos, cellos, and violins in an overwhelming but never-not-tuneful way. My favorite song on the album, “Get Numb to It!”, comes in the record’s second half, and it’s an exhilarating rocker that signifies that the group have hardly run out of gas on the flipside. The inspired noise pop rave-up is a (still catchy on its own) build-up for its first half, and then Friko beat the title line down for all its worth in the second half (more than earning the quiet outro tacked on at the end). Read more about Where We’ve Been, Where We Go from Here here.
“Life in a Bag”, Cheekface From It’s Sorted (2024)
This probably should’ve been on the January playlist, but time is an illusion and whatnot. Anyway, It’s Sorted is Cheekface at their grooviest–their fourth album still sounds very much like the same band that loves Talking Heads, Elvis Costello, and Television yet continues to be dogged by Cake comparisons, but there’s a more rhythmic and dancefloor-ready vibe that adds a new dimension to the Cheekface-isms of “Life in a Bag”. Vocalist Greg Katz still sounds likes Greg Katz, of course, but he’s also shifting his approach to meet the band’s new sound, juking, dodging, and stuttering his way through his lyrics (“I contain multitudes! I contain multiple dudes!”) like a millennial Max Headroom as necessary for the song to stay in the zone. Read more about It’s Sorted here.
“Observational Eros”, Beeef (2024)
There’s a good band from Allston, Massachusetts called Beeef. It’s made up of guitarist/vocalist Perry Eaton, guitarist Josh Bolduc, bassist Daniel Schiffer, and Neil Patch, and their last album came out in 2019, predating this blog, so I’ve never written about them before. However, Beeef quietly released a single back in November that they said would be on their “upcoming third album”, and a second single from the as-of-yet unnamed, release date-less Beeef LP3 dropped last week. “Observational Eros” is five minutes of unimpeachable, unqualified guitar pop success–this kind of rolling, part jangle pop, part power pop, part ‘heartland’ rock type thing is incredible when done right, and Beeef make it feel like the breezy successes of Bull in the Shade were just yesterday with this one. It makes me very eager to hear what else the band have been cooking up these last five years.
“Magical Lies”, En Attendant Ana From Magical Lies (2024, Sub Pop)
En Attendant Ana’s third album, Principia, was one of my favorite records of last year, and cemented the Parisian band in my mind as a reliable source of good indie rock in perpetuity. Their first new release since then is Magical Lies, a three-song (well, two songs and an interlude) release for Sub Pop’s long-running Singles Club series. Both proper songs are quite good, but the title track is my favorite of the two–over four minutes, the band run through everything that makes them great, from the driver’s-seat exploratory bass guitar playing to the orchestral touches to, as always, frontperson Margaux Bouchaudon’s sublime delivery. If En Attendant Ana want to put out (at least) a single every year to remind us of how good they are, I wouldn’t object.
“Goodnight Sun”, Mister Goblin From Frog Poems (2024, Spartan)
Okay, there’s a new Mister Goblin out today (the day I started writing this), let’s see if I want to put it on the playlist. [three minutes pass] Okay, we’re good here. “Goodnight Sun” is the first selection from Frog Poems, the upcoming fourth Mister Goblin full-length (and, I believe, the first Sam Goblin-led album to be put out by something other than Exploding in Sound). Not as immediate as “Holiday World” nor as sparse as “Six Flags America”, “Goodnight Sun” is an uneasy lullaby that makes me excited to hear where the project (which is now based in Florida) has gone next. Goblin’s exploration of melody and subtler climes continues on this song–the bright instrumental that kicks off the song is borderline jangly college rock, the verses are Mister Goblin at his “melancholic pop rock” best, and while the chorus still bursts out of the wall, everything about it (up to those stop-start J. Robbins moves in the final go-round) just feels a little more subdued.
“Always-Life Crisis”, Worse Off From Over, Thinking (2024, All We Got!)
Over, Thinking, the debut album from New York duo Worse Off, is a sturdy and energetic collection of vintage, 90s-style pop punk. Over eleven songs and twenty-eight minutes, the band’s core duo of Jac Falk and Colin Jay range from catchy power pop to Worriers/Chumped-esque scrappy “indie punk” to speeding skate-punk, but the connecting threads are also Over, Thinking’s strongest assets–big hooks, melodic but punk-y vocals, and, uh, plenty of power chords. “Always-Life Crisis” is an excellent piece of radio-ready alt-rock with a massive chorus and verses that are stealthily just as catchy, with Falk living up to the grandiosity of the title in the all-over-the-map lyrics. Read more about Over, Thinking here.
“Untame the Tiger”, Mary Timony From Untame the Tiger (2024, Merge)
Any rock musician who’s taken influence (directly or otherwise) from the multitude of great indie rock Mary Timony has created over the years should get out their pen and paper for her first solo album in fifteen years. Untame the Tiger is a record that shows that Timony is still better than most at creating something intricate, immediate, and shockingly deep, retaining the fun and catchiness of her power pop group Ex Hex but also allowing the prog undertones of Helium and her previous solo work plenty of free reign. Timony’s prog instincts are definitely intact in the way she’s constructed Untame the Tiger–the first third of the title track is an instrumental, atmospheric piece of prog-folk, but she then unleashes the biggest pop moment on the album in the rest of the song. This track (and the album as a whole) was colored by the dissolution of a long-term relationship, and lyrics like “What did I get for loving you? Nothing but pain” seem to reflect this, but the tone of the song, even down to its title, isn’t mournful. Read more about Untame the Tiger here.
“Automaticity”, J. Robbins From Basilisk (2024, Dischord)
On his second solo album and first in five years, Jawbox frontperson J. Robbins sounds familiar in a most welcome way. Basilisk picks up about where his last one, Un-Becoming, left off, with Robbins writing art-punk anthems with both “maturity” and “edge” and a fearless awareness of the present. Robbins kicks off Basilisk with some hammering synths to begin “Automaticity”, but he does it in a way that makes it sound exactly like a vintage Robbins-led song, and when the band kick into gear, it’s a natural transition, slipping into a vintage Jawbox/90s Dischord sound–muscular, noisy post-punk/post-hardcore anchored by Robbins’ dynamic but smooth vocals–with ease. Read more about Basilisk here.
“Bite Back”, The Raccoons From Someday (2024, Self Aware)
Sarah Blumenthal and Josh Robbins sure do love a standalone two-song release. Blumenthal’s band Alright and Robbins’ group Late Bloomer have both put them out in the past couple of years, both via the label they co-own, Self Aware Records. And now we have a new Self Aware band called The Raccoons–which, after a Scooby-Doo-style unmasking, I have discovered are just Robbins and Blumenthal again, but dressed as the Ramones this time. The Raccoons’ sharp, under-two-minutes pop punk is a little different from the duo’s looser work elsewhere, but it turns out that they’re naturals at it. “Bite Back”, my favorite of the two tracks, manages to be incredibly catchy but also very tired-sounding–although when Blumenthal joins Robbins in the chorus, I believe that they’re about to do what the song suggests.
“Slinky”, J. McFarlane’s Reality Guest From Whoopee (2024, Night School/Felt Sense)
J. McFarlane’s Reality Guest are a Melbourne-based duo who are new to me–founding member Julia McFarlane put out a full-length back in 2019, and Whoopee is the project’s sophomore album and first with new contributor Thomas Kernot. It’s a good and enthralling pop record, and “Slinky” captures just about everything great that the Reality Guest do on it. Taking us back to the world of semi-electronic, omnivorous late-90s indie pop music, “Slinky” lives up to its name, taking a trip hop beat, dream pop vocals, and all sorts of surprising but well-fitting interjections and making a fascinating piece of psychedelia with them.
“Poison”, MOP From Secrets (2024, Smoking Room)
Smoking Room’s been putting out some quality music as of late between Graham Hunt, Still Ruins, and now Secrets, the third record from Oaklan’s MOP (Moira Brown, Erik Haight, Mikey Rivera, and Samuelito Cruz). A record of screeching but quite hooky fuzz-power-pop-punk where every song bleeds into the next one, Secrets is really easy to put on and have a great time, and final track “Poison” is the payoff that the album didn’t need but is certainly welcome nonetheless. Brown practically spits out the opening line before the band launch into a whirlwind garage rock tune that self-deconstructs excitingly in under two minutes.
“Train Full of Gasoline”, Ducks Ltd. From Harm’s Way (2024, Carpark/Royal Mountain)
The second album from Toronto duo Ducks Ltd. feels very much in line with the more “pure pop” end of classic Flying Nun bands, always seeming to be chasing the perfect hook, although Harm’s Way sets itself apart with its caffeinated peppiness. Ducks Ltd. (singer/guitarist Tom McGreevy and guitarist Evan Lewis) are at their most immediately enjoyable when they just put the foot fully on the gas–I’m not sure if I’ve heard something more invigorating than “Train Full of Gasoline” yet this year (other than a couple of other candidates from Harm’s Way, of course). Read more about Harm’s Way here.
“Pacer”, Liquid Mike From Paul Bunyan’s Slingshot (2024)
Whenever I listen to “Pacer” by Liquid Mike, I’m convinced that it’s their best song. There are plenty of songs on Paul Bunyan’s Slingshot that make me feel this way, mind you–but when it came time to choose which songs from the record made this playlist, I just couldn’t get “Pacer” out of my head. Its intro is instantly memorable, a bright and shiny jangly riff that then explodes into six-string-fireworks–especially in the chorus, in which the band pull off a little bit of call-and-response to push the song over the line. Is “Pacer” better than “Town Ease”? “AM”? “Drug Dealer”? This is a good conundrum that Liquid Mike have set up for us. Read more about Paul Bunyan’s Slingshot here.
“Geosmin”, White Orchid From Pith (2024, Archibald)
Pith appears to be the second EP from Chicago trio White Orchid, following last year’s The Bedrot Tapes, and this record is on the adventurous side of punk rock–there’s a bit of fuzzed-up garage punk, sharp post-punk, and there’s even a straight-up screamo track on there. My favorite song on Pith is the opening track, “Geosmin”, which is a surging piece of anthemic rock music featuring vocals (provided by Noreen Buscher) than range between low sung-spoken post-punk and the soaring chorus. The band excel at pushing this song along–Buscher’s bass also shines, but guitarist Bodhi Lopez and drummer Niko Palomo are also working hard.
“Publicidad”, Poster Fantasi From Persona (2024)
Poster Fantasi are a Ramones-y garage punk group out of Bahía Blanca, Argentina; the four-song Persona EP appears to be their second release, following a 2023 self-titled EP. I believe the members are Gera on guitar and vocals, Trini on bass and vocals, and Ariel Giramondo on drums–whomever’s behind “Publicidad”, though, they know how to write a hell of a power pop hook. Power chords and dueling vocals introduce the song–my Spanish isn’t really good enough to make sense of the lyrics, but they sound cool as hell, especially when the “hoo hoo hoo” backing vocals kick in in the song’s second half.
“Lady Sam”, Mavis the Dog From White Plastic Chairs (2024, Mavis the Dog)
Am I more predisposed to like trebly, lo-fi, basement-recorded guitar pop than most? Yes. That doesn’t mean any such album I come across is a lock to get on this blog, though–you have to write a song as good as “Lady Sam” to do that. Mavis the Dog is a Philadelphia musician named Scott Olsen–looking at their Bandcamp page, it looks like they played a show with Tobin Sprout in in 2021, which seems about right. I was actually shocked to see that “Lady Sam” is three minutes long when putting this playlist together, as it feels like such a snippet of a song, a brief dispatch from a world of amazing melodies and previously unseen colors and balloons that don’t pollute the environment when you release them and whatnot.
“Hole in My Head”, Laura Jane Grace From Hole in My Head (2024, Polyvinyl)
I don’t really go into Laura Jane Grace records with much expectations these days–not because Grace’s work has been bad as of late (in fact, I’ve liked most of it), but more because I really haven’t been sure what to expect from her since Against Me! sort-of-quietly-broke-up during the pandemic. Hole in My Head is a brief record, and while not every song has immediately stuck with me, the majority of it feels worthwhile–I’d tentatively put it above Stay Alive but below Bought to Rot. Grace has always been good for an almost-disturbingly-driven-sounding punk ripper, and the title track of Hole in My Head is one of the several moments on the record where she obliges. There’s a little bit more going on in this one than the chorus, but that “head head head head head” part is what I’m going to remember most.
“Milk”, Itasca From Imitation of War (2024, Paradise of Bachelors)
On their first album in five years, Los Angeles’ Itasca color their sprawling folk rock with ample use of psychedelic electric guitars. “Milk”, the opening track on Imitation of War, goes a long way towards defining and establishing Itasca’s version of psychedelic rock. The song’s spindly, rippling electric guitar lines sound like they’re being played from up high on some nearby bluff or cliff. The main guitar riff sounds like molasses-slow Meat Puppets, and the song also recalls desert rockers The Gun Outfit (in which Itasca bandleader Kayla Cohen currently plays bass, and the band’s Daniel Swire drums on Imitation of War, as well). Read more about Imitation of War here.
“Interpretive Overlook”, Mint Mile From Roughrider (2024, Comedy Minus One)
“Interpretive Overlook” first showed up as a non-album single a few years ago; I believe it was in 2020, not long after the release of the first Mint Mile album, Ambertron. It definitely felt like it could stand on its own at the time, but I’m glad it found a proper home on Roughrider–it’s one of my favorite songs on that album, and one of my favorites by Mint Mile, period. “Interpretive Outlook” is shockingly bare-feeling in a way that takes us all the way back to “Mountain Lion”, the first Mint Mile song on the first Mint Mile EP, but it’s recorded with a confidence that lacks any of the “feeling out” of that era of the band. The song’s musical clarity is contrasted with an inconclusive dwelling on differing perspectives and vantage points in the lyrics, its final line (“This place so old…it needs something new”) as certain as it is vague. Read more about Roughrider here.
“Cheap”, Grazia From In Poor Taste (2024, Feel It)
I wrote about an absurd number of records from Cincinnati garage rock imprint Feel It Records last year–after (mercifully) not releasing any albums or EPs in December and January, the first 2024 record from Feel It is here, and it’s a brief but mighty one. Heather Dunlop and Lindsay Corstorphine are Grazia, a London-based garage/post-punk duo whose debut record, the four-song In Poor Taste EP, shows a lot of promise. “Cheap”, my favorite song from the EP, marries stoic, dry post-punk vocals with an excited, punchy garage rock instrumental–I hear some new wave-y synths and even some cowbell in here. “God, it pays to look this cheap,” is a hell of an opening statement, too.
“Work Out Right”, Otherworldly Things From Heavy Dream Cycle (2024, Magic Door)
Otherworldly Things is a New York band led by songwriter, guitarist, and vocalist Jim Browne; it also features Guided by Voices’ in-house producer and unofficial sixth member Travis Harrison on drums, and current GBV drummer Kevin March released Heavy Dream Cycle on his Magic Door imprint. If you were to guess that it’s a record full of power pop and psychedelic pop–two classic Guided by Voices-core genres–you’d be right, although it reminds me a bit more of pure lo-fi power pop acts like Daily Worker. The 90-second singalong “Work Out Right” is my favorite track on the EP, and it actually reminds me most of bands like Connections, Smug Brothers, and other such undersung creators of jangly but hefty guitar pop. Read more about Heavy Dream Cycle here.
“Dicen Dicen”, Comparto Info. From Carlos (2023, Dame Chance)
I think this Comparto Info. album is really good. Carlos actually came out last year, but I’m only just hearing it now, and the whole thing is a superb collection of lo-fi 90s style Spanish-language indie rock (and definitely deserves a wider release, if anybody with the means to do so is reading this). Bandleader Gabriel Benavente Benítez is originally from Mexico City but currently lives in Portland, Oregon, and this record shows that the musician is equally at home in the Pacific Northwest. I’m not sure what the best song on Carlos is, but lately I’ve found myself drawn to one of the quieter tracks on the record, the acoustic-based “Dicen Dicen”. For most of the song it’s just Benítez and a spirited six-string, although it does sound like there are some snippets of electric guitar running through it as well.
“Laverne”, Rick Rude From Laverne (2024, Midnight Werewolf/Best Brother)
Despite six years passing since their last record, 2018’s Verb for Dreaming, New Hampshire’s Rick Rude sound as great as ever on Laverne, their third full-length album. The group are still balancing the poppy and noisy sides of 90s indie rock in a pleasingly Built to Spill-esque way–they’re approaching catchy power pop one minute and whipping up a barrage of guitars the next. Jordan Holtz sings lead on the record’s title track, and she more than holds her own against the rest of the band’s noise to deliver four minutes of frequently messy but on-the-whole hooky fuzz-pop. It starts off with a ton of energy, slows down into something more reminiscent of Holtz’s solo work, and then roars to a big finish. Read more about Laverne here.
“Me and Meander”, Kowtow Popof From A Punk’s Garden of Versus (2023, Wampus)
One of the albums I listened to for my 1993 listening project was Songs from the Pointless Forest, the debut record from long-running college rock/power pop act Kowtow Popof. As it turns out, the D.C.-based Popof is not only still active, but actually released an entire album last year, which I went and investigated some time after I wound down my “older” listening. Leaping forward in time, Popof has a weathered sound on A Punk’s Garden of Versus–the 60s and Costello influences are still there, but have clearly been honed into something new. “Me and Meander” is properly titled, a meandering piece of psychedelic folk rock that one could quite easily get lost in. Kowtow Popof likely knows the benefits of doing just that.
The final week of February (which is also the first week of March) is upon us, and with it brings yet another Pressing Concerns. Today, we’re looking at new albums from Medicine, Ryann Gonsalves, and Safari Room (the first of which “officially” comes out on Friday but is already available on Bandcmap) as well as a new EP from Mt. Worry. A great start to what is going to be a big week for the blog.
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.
Mt. Worry – Die Happy
Release date: February 2nd Record label: Mountain of Worry Genre: Shoegaze, fuzz rock, lo-fi indie rock, noise pop Formats: Digital Pull Track: Loud in Here
One of my favorite EPs of 2023 was A Mountain of Fucking Worry, the debut release from Philadelphia fuzz rock supergroup Mt. Worry. It’s no surprise that A Mountain of Fucking Worry is a great record, given that its three vocalists all have successful solo(ish) projects–John Galm with Bad Heaven Ltd., Noah Roth with their solo career, and Rowan Roth with Hell Trash. Still, the band (also featuring drummer Nick Holdorf of No Thank You) developed a sound distinct from the members’ various other records, one that fits in well with their city of origin’s shoegaze/noise pop scene (albeit a bit more “song”-based than a lot of those bands). Now with its members evenly split between Philly and Chicago, Mt. Worry is thankfully still going strong, as a second EP has arrived almost exactly a year after their first one. Die Happy is brief–it’s ten-minutes long, less than half that of A Mountain of Fucking Worry, and features only four songs–but it’s incredibly strong nonetheless, retaining the loose, “anything goes” energy of the debut but while also feeling like the work of a more cohesive unit.
Oh, and it also helps that every song on Die Happy is a hit. They all sound pretty different from each other, too; Rowan Roth takes the lead on “Repeating Dream” to open the EP with a swirling, almost psychedelic shoegaze-slow builder, while the middle two tracks on the EP are sharp pop rock songs that hit immediately. “Loud in Here”, featuring lead vocals from Noah Roth, was my first favorite, and it’s not hard to hear why–Roth has been an excellent deliverer of pop melodies as a vocalist over severaldifferent records now, and the bouncy but explosive power pop of this song is one of their strongest ones yet. “Body Hate”, meanwhile, is the one that I’ve grown to appreciate more and more every time I listen to Die Happy. I’m not even sure who’s singing on this one–I think it’s Rowan and Noah together–but their dead-serious intonation of the line that gives the EP its title (“I will die happy or not at all”) works so well that it took me a while to really appreciate just how much the lumbering fuzz rock instrumental adds to it. And then there’s “Pocket”, a piece of mutant, heavily distorted bedroom pop that doesn’t sound like anything else on Die Happy and ends the EP on a confused, somewhat unfinished note–or at least until its ballooning final instrumental wrings everything it can out of the song as time runs out. I’m not sure if that qualifies as “dying happy” or “not at all”, but it’s gotta be one of the two. (Bandcamp link)
Medicine – On the Bed
Release date: February 2nd (Bandcamp)/March 1st (Elsewhere) Record label: Laner Archival Service Genre: Shoegaze, fuzz rock, experimental rock, noise pop Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Tell Me Why
The long-running shoegaze/noise pop group Medicine released their most well-known records in the early 1990s, but they’ve been active on and off since their first breakup in 1995, with four different Medicine full-lengths in the past half-decade marking a recent flurry of activity. The band’s lineup has shifted over the years around bandleader Brad Laner–currently, they’re a trio featuring Laner, founding drummer Jim Goodall, and relative newcomer Julia Monreal on vocals (who, I believe, was not yet born the first time Medicine broke up). This trio put out an album called Silences last year, a highly experimental and noisy rock record that’d be remarkable coming from anyone, let alone a thirty-plus-year-old group. It’d be a good record to feature in Pressing Concerns, but I’m going to go with the Beatles cover album they just released instead. Of course, after Silences I wouldn’t expect Medicine to go full mod-revival, and On the Bed is delightfully offbeat, both in its song choices (I say “Beatles cover album”, but several songs here–including the title track–are pulled from Harrison, McCartney, and Starr’s solo careers) and its ramshackle, blown-out recordings.
That being said, the material that Medicine are working with on On the Bed is more accessible than their recent output, and the album (well, most of it, at least) reflects this. On the first half of the LP, Medicine do a speedrun of the history of The Beatles, blasting through fuzz-pop versions of the early years (“Some Other Guy” and “Tell Me Why”), middle era (“The Night Before” and “She Said She Said”) and psychedelic era (represented by a six-minute drone-psych version of “Blue Jay Way”). The second half of On the Bed is where things really diverge from expectations–their version of “On the Bed” (from the instrumental George Harrison album Wonderwall Music) feels like an extension of the noisy but familiar clanging of “Blue Jay Way”, and their take on McCartney’s “Junk”–very sparse, with Monreal on lead vocals–is disarming in its clarity and simplicity. The bulk of the second half, however, is taken up by “The Beatles Story”, a ten-minute sound collage/spoken word piece that’s confusing, amusing, and even kind of chilling. This kind of avant-garde, deliberately-difficult thing is, indeed, part of The Beatles’ story as well–it’s not my favorite moment on On the Bed, no, but it fits, and it makes their return to pop music in their fuzzed-out, sunny version of Ringo Starr’s “Photograph” (sounding like something that came out on Elephant 6 in 1997) that much sweeter. (Bandcamp link)
Ryann Gonsalves – Ouch!
Release date: February 14th Record label: Dandy Boy Genre: Bedroom pop, indie pop, singer-songwriter, indie folk Formats: Cassette, digital Pull Track: Feeder Fish
Get ready to learn Ryann Gonsalves, buddy. The Oakland-based musician is the vocalist and bassist of Torrey (a band who’s putting out their second album next month, more on that in a few weeks) and Aluminum (who released one of the best EPs of 2022 and I’m expecting to hear from again this year), and is also a member of the still somewhat-mysterious Reality TV (who released their debut EP last year). Even with all this going on, they’ve still had time to begin a solo career with a 2022 self-titled EP, and now we’ve got a 12-song, 18-minute cassette under their name called Ouch! on our hands. Gonsalves’ bands have distinct personalities (Torrey is more dream pop/shoegaze, Aluminum is Stereolab-y drone pop, and Reality TV more jangle/power pop), but they all fall under the umbrella of lightly distorted, fuzzy indie pop. For their latest solo release, Gonsalves is still writing pop music, but they’ve chosen to present these songs as crystal-clearly as possible.
Ouch! is a straight-up bedroom pop album with even some hints of indie folk in it–it’s new terrain for Gonsalves (who plays everything you hear on the record aside from some “synth pads and pedals” added by Rick Altieri of Blue Ocean, who recorded, mixed, and mastered it). The jaunty handclap folk-pop intro of “Big Gulp” is positively jarring when jumping from Gonsalves’ other work–the Adult Mom/Thanks for Coming-ish bedroom guitar pop of “Burrowing” that follows is more representative of the record, but it’s still a bit of an adjustment. Gonsalves’ voice shines in this more sparse context, either meeting the (often deceptively) cheery instrumentals of songs like “Builder’s Diary” and “Feeder Fish” or livening up some of the record’s more downcast material like “Bitter Host”. Gonsalves has clearly taken advantage of the direct nature of Ouch!’s music (by “Feeling It All” and “Ouch Otro”, it’s just them and an acoustic guitar) to match it in their lyrics–when the titular interjection is delivered in the title track, it feels like a wince at some of the rougher moments of self-assessment throughout the record. Ouch! isn’t a tortured-sounding album, however–it’s an honest one, and Gonsalves comes off as nothing but proud of that fact. (Bandcamp link)
Safari Room – Time Devours All Things
Release date: February 23rd Record label: Self-released Genre: 2000s indie rock, indie rock, emo-rock Formats: CD, digital Pull Track: The Great Outdoors
I’ve been aware of Nashville’s Safari Room for a while now, having heard several singles from them as well as their sophomore album, 2022’s Complex House Plants, a record that combined the earnest, buttoned-up indie rock of mid-period The National with the energy of the polished side of emo-rock. On its surface, the band’s third album, Time Devours All Things, finds itself in the same territory as their previous material, but it also feels like a step forward for the group–everything they’ve done before, they do better, more confidently, and more distinctly here. Bandleader Alec Koukol is an Omaha native who sings like he’s wearing a suit, although one hopes that it isn’t a rental because I’m sure he’s pretty disheveled by the end of Time Devours All Things. Koukol’s bandmates (drummer Austin Drewry and guitarist Chris Collier) are, like their lead singer, polished but not lifeless, presenting these ten songs in a utilitarian but sharp alt-rock package.
“The Great Outdoors” opens Time Devours All Things with a vow and then kicks into a spirited piece of indie rock without Koukol tipping his hand too much. The band proceed to get a bit more exploratory in the next few songs, with “Broken Things” starting as electronic-tinged indie rock and blooming into a full-on piece of studio-pop-rock, “You Are a Ghost” transforming from minimal indie pop to roaring alt-rock, and “Blunderbuss” repurposing a 2010s radio-ready “indie” sheen into something nervous-sounding. The biggest “rocker” on Time Devours All Things is the politely-pissed-off post-grunge of “The King”, which I was on the fence about until its weird gear-shifting closing instrumental, which I thoroughly enjoyed. Safari Room are at their best when putting together big-chorused indie rock, however, with “A Promise to No One” and “Strength to Stand” highlighting the record’s second half. Safari Room are locking their pieces into place with Time Devours All Things, and I’ll be watching what they do with them from here on out. (Bandcamp link)
In the final Pressing Concerns of the week, we’re looking at three records that come out tomorrow (February 23rd): new albums from Mary Timony and Little Kid, and a new EP from Careen. In addition, I’ve also got some words below on the Geotic album that came out yesterday. If you missed Monday’s blog post (featuring Tucker Riggleman & The Cheap Dates, States of Nature, The Special Pillow, and Shadow Show) or Tuesday’s (on the Mint Mile album that also comes out tomorrow), check both of those out, too.
If you’re looking for more new music, you can visit the site directory to see what else we’ve written about lately. If you’d like to support Rosy Overdrive, you can share this (or another) post, or donate here.
Mary Timony – Untame the Tiger
Release date: February 23rd Record label: Merge Genre: Folk rock, progressive rock, power pop Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital Pull Track: Untame the Tiger
Last year, I wrote about a posthumously-released live album from Sonic Youth. Part of the reason why I covered it on the blog was that it rules, but the second bird that stone killed was that I was able to acknowledge the work of living indie rock legends who immeasurably shaped and touched a ton of the music I write about on Rosy Overdrive. I feel the same way writing about Mary Timony on this blog–but unlike Sonic Youth, I actually get to talk about brand new music this time around. Between her work in Autoclave, Helium, and Ex Hex, Timony has been a key member of three bands who did definitive work in three different genres–not to mention her several solid solo records and participating in the rare actually good supergroup Wild Flag. She’s been active enough that I can’t be the only one to not realize it’s been fifteen years since a Mary Timony solo album (the last Ex Hex record came out in 2019, and she’s been playing bass along with several other longtime Washington D.C. musicians in Hammered Hulls as of late). Any rock musician who’s taken influence (directly or otherwise) from the math-y punk of Autoclave, the deceptively-styled “slacker” rock of Helium, or Ex Hex’s meaty power pop should get out their pen and paper for Untame the Tiger, a record that shows that Timony is still better than most at creating something intricate, immediate, and shockingly deep.
Mary Timony has no peers. The two most prominent musicians other than Timony herself on Untame the Tiger are Chad Molter of the Dischord groups Farquet and Medications on bass and Dave Mattacks of Fairport Convention on drums, and Timony is equally at home in either world. Untame the Tiger is a rich rock record that positions some of Timony’s odder impulses (like the progressive rock that grew increasingly less hidden in Helium’s music and is also quite prominent in her recently-reissued solo record Mountains, as well as a favoring of the acoustic guitar) front and center, but somehow retains the fun and catchiness of Ex Hex. Nowhere is this more apparent than in opening track “No Third”, a six-minute rolling folk rock tune that still feels like pop music (yes, even when the prog synths kick in). “Summer” and “Looking for the Sun” are in some ways mirror images–the former being smooth rock and roll with stranger touches, the latter straight-up hippy psych-folk shit with hooks baked right into it. As pleasing as it is to hear Timony roll out something as classic-sounding as “Don’t Disappear”, it’s even more exciting to stumble into “Dominoes”, which turns its stop-start “Dischord but acoustic” riff into something just as cathartic and catchy.
Timony’s prog instincts are definitely intact in the way she’s constructed Untame the Tiger, gaining speed before gearing up to take us up the mountain in the form of “The Dream”, a psychedelic classic rock song that’s the record’s most insular moment, and the first third of the title track, which is an instrumental, atmospheric piece of prog-folk. It’s only then that Timony unleashes the biggest pop moment on the album in the rest of “Untame the Tiger”. This song (and the album as a whole) was colored by the dissolution of a long-term relationship, and lyrics like “What did I get for loving you? Nothing but pain” seem to reflect this, but the tone of the song, even down to its title, isn’t mournful. More than anything else, Timony sounds surprised to be here–free, untamed, still pressing ahead in the form of inventive, unique rock music released under her own name. And Untame the Tiger is a surprising album, somehow both basking in the sun in plain sight and sneaking up on you at the same time. Given Timony’s background, it’s not surprising that it’s a good record, but that hardly prepares us for the contents of it. (Bandcamp link)
Careen – Cycle 3
Release date: February 23rd Record label: Death Metal, Florida Genre: Noise rock, 90s indie rock, post-punk, shoegaze, post-hardcore Formats: Digital Pull Track: Last Winter
Back in 2022, I wrote about Careen Love Health, the fourth EP from Bellingham, Washington quartet Careen. I liked it when it came out, but that record has only continued to grow on me with time. I really enjoy spotlighting this kind of Pacific Northwest indie rock–noisy but insular, inspired by bands like Unwound and Polvo–on the blog, and Careen Love Health is a particularly strong modern example of it. At some point last year, I noticed they’d uploaded a retrospective compilation on Bandcamp, which made me worried that the band (guitarist/vocalist Desi Valdez, bassist Bryan Foster, drummer Neto Alvarado, and guitarist Aiden Blau) had hung it up, but that’s thankfully not the case, as they’re back with yet another EP in 2024. Perhaps the compilation signaled the dawning of a new era of Careen, as there is a subtle but noticeable shift between Careen Love Health and Cycle 3. Less sprawling and post-hardcore-influenced than their most recent EP, Cycle 3 finds the band taking a turn towards a more concise format, with a little more punk and post-punk shining through. The EP isn’t as accessible as some of their more pop-focused 90s indie rock revivalist peers like Late Bloomer and Pardoner, but it’s beginning to look in that direction.
Plenty of what makes Careen great is still present on Cycle 3–explosive guitars and a pummeling rhythm section shine throughout, although the wide-ranging guitar work in opening track “Last Winter” is just as likely to key in on a twisted melody as kick up pure noise. Valdez sounds pretty restrained as a vocalist this time around, although he does let loose a little bit in “Irreverent”, a dramatic fuzz rocker that’s the band at their most Unwound. “Neto” starts off like a more shoegaze-y version of Dinosaur Jr., blaring guitars sounding cool as hell, and while the band lurch to a stop in the middle of the track, they fire it back up again for a blistering alt-rock finish. “Slice” also finds Careen being open to something more crowd-pleasing, as they focus their energy into making a punk/post-punk-indebted piece of fuzzed-out indie rock that could almost pass for a Pardoner song. Similarly, “Model Kit” ends the record with a multi-part song featuring a pretty catchy moment of heavy shoegaze before swirling into a feedback-laden closing. You still need to be willing to follow the band into choppy waters on Cycle 3, but Careen are more prone than ever to rewarding you for doing so. (Bandcamp link)
Geotic – The Anchorite
Release date: February 21st Record label: Basement’s Basement Genre: Folk,ambient, post-rock Formats: Cassette, digital Pull Track: The Going
Chances are a lot of you are more familiar with the music of Will Wiesenfeld than I am. Over the past decade and a half, he’s made a name for himself making electronic pop music under the name Baths, and has concurrently released a ton of music as Geotic, which seems to be his alias for his more experimental and disparate fare. Neither one of those projects has ever really seemed like “my thing”, but the description for the latest Geotic album, The Anchorite, sounded interesting to me, and I’ve found myself enjoying it quite a bit over the past few weeks. Depending on how one measures it, The Anchorite seems to be either the thirteenth or fourteenth Geotic album, and this one is an instrumental record that Wiesenfeld primarily built up from guitar and piano. Over the twelve-song, fifty-minute cassette release, Wiesenfeld shapes these basic elements into interconnected but distinct shapes, with the guitars rising to the surface in the form of folk or even lo-fi bedroom guitar pop in various places, and melting with the piano to create swirling pieces of ambient music in others.
The main guitar line hurries through opening track “The Quarrel” as if chased by the static that surrounds it, creating an instantly transfixing first statement for The Anchorite. Eventually the six-string tires out and Geotic transitions into “The Going” and “The Wood of Corridors”, two songs that are perhaps a little more representative of the album as a whole–the instrumental, folk-inspired playing of the former peacefully traverses along, and the echoing, swirling intertwined instruments of the latter begin to start truly blurring The Anchorite’s various ingredients together. The middle of the record is where Geotic’s various streams seem to meet up and form one big body of water–while “The Monastic Quiet” recalls the tranquil guitar-led “The Going”, the next three songs take the sound of Geotic to deeper and murkier territory than that which Wiesenfeld began the album. For those who stick with Geotic beyond The Anchorite’s continental shelf, the title track sounds a friendly note to welcome them to the record’s home stretch, and while the six-minute “The Lime of Stars” isn’t the most accessible moment on the record, the distorted, almost shoegaze-y post-rock textures are a fine late-album moment nonetheless. I can’t speak for those who’ve been following Baths and Geotic for years now, but as someone who’s new to the world of Will Wiesenfeld, The Anchorite feels like a major work. (Bandcamp link)
Little Kid – A Million Easy Payments
Release date: February 23rd Record label: Orindal/Gold Day Genre: Folk rock, singer-songwriter Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital Pull Track: Bad Energy
Little Kid are a Toronto folk band led by singer, lyricist, and multi-instrumentalist Kenny Boothby and also featuring drummer/guitarist Brodie Germain, bassist Paul Vroom, and drummer Liam Cole. A Million Easy Payments is the group’s debut for Orindal Records, and Boothby’s delicate but weighty writing is such a natural fit for the label that I was surprised to learn that they’d been releasing music independently since the early 2010s and weren’t just scooped up by the home of Dan Wriggins and Owen Ashworth and Ruth Garbus the minute they formed. Then again, A Million Easy Payments does feel like the work of a band that’s been at it for a while, both in its glove-like renditions of Boothby’s writing and in its impressively-amassed list of guest contributors (Aaron Powell of Fog Lake on vocals, Seth Engel of Options on percussion, Peter Gill of 2nd Grade on pedal steel, Eliza Niemi’s cello). The record’s eight songs range from swirling, multi-layered orchestral folk rock to breezy alt-country to quiet near-slowcore, with contributor Megan Dunn’s banjo, Niemi’s cello, and Boothby’s voice holding it together at the seams.
On the record’s opening track, “Something to Say”, everything and everyone sounds so friendly and fresh that it’s not hard to imagine Little Kid claiming a spot among the realm of modern big-ticket indie folk/country bands, although A Million Easy Payments has grander aims than that. As fun as the opening track is, “Bad Energy” takes the record to the next level one song later–the seven-minute piano-dreamy-folk-rock epic spreads out steadily, the band charting out a simple but shockingly effective path with which to deliver Boothby’s lyrics. A Million Easy Payments forges its own way forward from there, excitedly offering up songs like the giddy-feeling “Beside Myself” and the mountaintop-summit energy of “Somewhere in Between” while at the same time pulling inward in the acoustic “Eggshell” (featuring just Boothby and an acoustic guitar), the slow-moving piano-country “Nothing at All”, and putting everything together in ten-minute closing number “What Qualifies As Silence”. Compared to the hazy half-remembered dream of “Bad Energy”, the record’s other lengthy song is much more lucid–it’s still not awake, but it’s aware of everything around it and taking it all in. (Bandcamp link)
(Note: an edited and shortened version of this blog post was used as the press bio for this album. To mark the release of Roughrider, I’m presenting its original, long-winded form below.)
Release date: February 23rd Record label: Comedy Minus One Genre: Alt-country, 90s indie rock, folk rock, Crazy Horse stuff Formats: Vinyl, digital
It’s hard to believe that Mint Mile–Tim Midyett’s “new” band–is nearing a decade of its existence, but then, the group has always had an interesting relationship with the passing of time, both inside and outside of its records. Their first few years together were documented in a trio of EPs that showed the band congealing in (give or take) real time, from the casual, “is this a solo project?” debut In Season & Ripe in 2015 to the well-oiled, casual-in-a-different-way quartet captured on 2018’s Heartroller. After haunting the Chicago area (and a few other, disparate locations) as a band of indie rock veterans ripping through their growing songbook with little regard to whether or not a song was out there in the recorded world yet, Midyett, Jeff Panall, Justin Brown, and Matthew Barnhart (give or take the contributions of Howard Draper and Greg Norman) kicked off the current decade with Ambertron, a massive double album of sprawling music whose thinly-papered-over, presciently grim and sweeping undercurrents ended up allowing it to own its March 20th, 2020 release date (which was, needless to say, a death sentence for many lesser records).
Mint Mile has accomplished quite a bit over its inaugural decade of life, but the most obvious absence from its holster is the very thing that formed that backbone of the half-century-old rock music that has, in some way, shaped their current form–the “tight”, forty-minute single long-player album. This is what Mint Mile have turned in with Roughrider, their long-awaited second full-length and first to wrap its business up entirely on two sides of one vinyl record. Anyone fortunate enough to catch Midyett live either on his own or with Mint Mile knows that he’s always got new material that he’s working on, some of which one may have to wait several years before hearing in a recorded setting. Roughrider doesn’t feel like he threw a dart at eight such songs until he had enough to fill the space, but it does have a “snapshot” and “wide-ranging” feel that–while not absent from Ambertron–becomes more pronounced here due to the shorter timespan.
The tracklist of Roughrider pulls from all the rest stops Mint Mile have traversed to get here. Midyett has been building his own unique style as a baritone guitarist for decades now–beginning when he picked up the thing in Silkworm, solidifying in Bottomless Pit in the late 2000s, and blossoming in Mint Mile. It’s on full display in “Sunbreaking”, which opens the album with a pretty timeless pop chord progression but nevertheless is instantly recognizable as Mint Mile due to everything Midyett and the rest of the band do to sketch hidden melodies all throughout the song’s margins–not leaving a second underdeveloped. “Interpretive Outlook” is shockingly bare-feeling in a way that takes us all the way back to “Mountain Lion”, the first Mint Mile song on the first Mint Mile EP, but recorded with a confidence that lacks any of the “feeling out” of that era of the band.
Songs like “Halocline” have become the heart of Mint Mile, meandering Crazy Horse-fluent pieces of country rock that let Brown’s pedal steel do plenty of the heavy lifting–at least until the precariously-stacked finale where every instrument pours all it can into the song’s last minute. Nevertheless, the kinetic energy the band brings to it–aided in no small part by some excellent alto saxophone, which, hold onto that thought for a second–indicate that they’re far from out of new ways to immerse themselves in this world. Speaking of energy, Mint Mile inject Roughrider with plenty of it via “Empty Island”, the band’s finest moment as “rockers” yet as they do justice to a song that has already established itself as an excellent fixture in the Mint Mile live experience (I’d been calling it “Reverse Vampire”, after its most immediately memorable lyric). And while there’s no room for something like Ambertron’s fifteen-minute closing track “Amberline”, Mint Mile pull from this side of the band by driving the record straight into the ditch with the “merely” seven-minute “Brigadier” in the track number two slot, the song completely losing itself in its main metaphor and unmooring Roughrider from just about any frame of reference almost immediately.
One of the most admirable aspects of Mint Mile is just how in-the-present they’ve always felt; especially with their label, Comedy Minus One, concurrently running an extensive reissue campaign of Midyett’s most well-known band, Silkworm, for the new group’s entire existence, it would not be difficult for the band’s leader to lean on work he completed decades ago. So when I say that Roughrider reaches back beyond Mint Mile for help in completing the record in a way that previous Mint Mile releases haven’t, it’s no surprise that the group do it in a way that continues keeping their compass pointing due north. Contributions from cellist Alison Chelsey and Corvair’s Heather Larimer, both of whom have long been in Midyett’s orbit, are welcome, although nothing prepared me for hearing none other than Nina Nastasia–whom Silkworm covered on an EP over twenty years ago, first alerting me to her existence–sing “I Hope It’s Different”, Roughrider’s aching yet close-to-the-vest closing track.
And that saxophone I mentioned on “Halocline” earlier? That’s provided by founding Silkworm guitarist and vocalist Joel R.L. Phelps, a truly momentous occasion for those of us who still listen to In the West on a regular basis. His contributions are a fascinating coda to “Halocline”; on “Sc ent”, the other song on which he appears, he’s very possibly the backbone of the entire song. To further contrast the band’s “old school” surface sound with the decidedly different undercurrent that Mint Mile give Roughrider, change and “the new” hover all over the record’s lyrics and subjects, from the sunrise (described as “breaking”, which I don’t think is an accident) in the opening track to Nastasia’s fervent hope echoed by the title of the album’s closing track (in that sense, it’s not too surprising that the song that most prominently features Phelps is the one that sounds the least like anything he or Midyett have ever done, together or separately).
The more I listen to Roughrider, the more muddled this prospective dichotomy becomes, however–the most musically clear song on the album, “Interpretive Overlook”, is an inconclusive dwelling on differing perspectives and vantage points, its final line (“This place so old…it needs something new”) as certain as it is vague. Nastasia gets handed some of the album’s darkest lyrics to sing (unsurprisingly to anyone familiar with her work, she excels at it); “I Hope It’s Different” sounds as beautiful as its last stanza (“Scrub off your history / Don’t learn / Don’t remember anything”) is uncomfortable. Every trip through Roughrider supports a different conclusion drawn from these points–indeed, it does start to feel like Nastasia (and, subsequently, Roughrider) is saying something different every time.
It’s the start of the new week, and the first Pressing Concerns of it is taking a look at four records that came out over the last couple days: new albums from Tucker Riggleman & The Cheap Dates, States of Nature, and Shadow Show, and a new EP from The Special Pillow.
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.
Tucker Riggleman & the Cheap Dates – Restless Spirit
Release date: February 17th Record label: WarHen Genre: Alt-country, country rock Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Shotgun
One of the first albums I ever wrote about in Pressing Concerns was Alive and Dying Fast, the debut full-length from West Virginia country rockers Tucker Riggleman & The Cheap Dates. After serving time in bands like The Demon Beat (featuring Rozwell Kid’s Jordan Hudkins), Prison Book Club (with William Matheny and John R. Miller), and Bishops, Riggleman’s first quasi-solo effort was a sharp collection of tracks that emphasizes his strengths as a singer-songwriter, with The Cheap Dates playing to accentuate Riggleman’s sometimes heavy but always friendly writing. A follow-up to Alive and Dying Fast has been in the works for a while now–lead single “Virtue” showed up last April, and “Queen of Diamonds” (which was formally released last August) also appeared on last March’s Live at Clientele. Restless Spirit, the second Cheap Dates album, largely rounds up the contributors from last time–full-time Cheap Dates member Mason Fanning is a new addition, joining the familiar faces of drummer M. Tivis Clark, contributing vocalist Jason Brown, keyboardist/producer Duane Lundy, masterer Justin Perkins–Hudkins even contributes album artwork again for this record.
If Alive and Dying Fast was the sound of Riggleman & The Cheap Dates slowing down and displaying enough confidence in Riggleman’s writing to let it take the unquestioned center stage, Restless Spirit is where the band show that they can maintain the captivating quality of that record’s songs while also injecting just a bit more rock and roll into things. No one’s going to mistake Restless Spirit for a garage punk record, but it is very clearly an album where Riggleman’s formative alt-country and power pop influences peak through with regularity (and while Riggleman’s love of 80s post-punk/goth rock like The Cure and Echo & the Bunnymen isn’t exactly reflected in the music, it certainly informs his belief that sadness can sound big and beautiful). It all comes together in the subtly brilliant opening track “Educated”, with a chiming, jangly college rock lead guitar, a vintage alt-country-ish jaunty tempo, and Riggleman’s reminiscing but anything-but-rosy-nostalgia lyrical concerns–setting the stage for chilly country rocker “Virtue” to come barreling into the empty space.
The Cheap Dates sell Restless Spirit’s rockers impressively, and they also find a few different ways to present this side of the band. “Shotgun” is one of the most complete-sounding songs from Riggleman yet, glomming onto a polished, swaggering country-rock-power-pop tune and letting Riggleman’s self-effacing side battle it out with a less-frequently-seen confidence (for a lifer like Riggleman, it’s fitting that the key line in the chorus is “I let the music bring me back around”). Taking a different approach, the title track gets its edges across with a dark, blues-tinged, garage-y crawl–replete with organ work from Lee Carroll, it’s the closest Riggleman has come to repurposing The Cramps into something less campy and more sinister. The sung-spoken bitterness and disillusionment of “Paradise” is the Cheap Dates’ most ironclad-serious moment, but Riggleman hasn’t lost the playfulness in his writing, being just as likely to drape misfortune in a shrug and a shit-eating country grin (see “Familiar Bridge” and “Queen of Diamonds”). While the oddly harmonious synth-country closing track “Silver Tongue” feels largely like a cypher thematically, its final line rings loud and clear: “I don’t know how I’m supposed to make it / If I can’t raise a little hell”. Riggleman has more than enough experience to know that the chaos and darkness will always be hovering around–faced with this reality, why not try to take control of just a bit of it and make it into something of your own? (Bandcamp link)
States of Nature – Brighter Than Before
Release date: February 16th Record label: Sell the Heart/Little Rocket/Epidemic Genre: Post-punk, dance punk, post-hardcore, punk rock Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Brighter Than Before
States of Nature may be from Oakland, California, but they sound right out of Washington, D.C. at the turn of the century. The quartet of E. Urbach (guitar/vocals/lyrics), L. Anne (bass/vocals), D. Orason (guitar/vocals), and I. Knife (drums) introduced themselves with three EPs from 2018 and 2020, which were collected via the Songs to Sway compilation in 2021. Brighter Than Before is States of Nature’s first LP of new material, and the group do indeed spend the entirety of the record backing up their Bandcamp page’s claim that they make “a danceable hybrid of Post-Hardcore and Rock N’Roll”. It’s a record with a ton of energy, announcing from the get-go that they’ve spent time with both the fiery garage punk side of Dischord Records (a la Nation of Ulysses and The Delta 72), the sharp post-punk of Jawbox, and the danceable loudness of Q and Not U. States of Nature can be thought of as part of a small but notable wave of bands attempting to revive this sound–like Perennial and Feefawfum–although Brighter Than Before sounds a bit less “new-wave” and more “heavier punk” than either of those bands (Urbach seems to have a hardcore background, which may partially explain that).
That being said, the opening title track is both a sucker-punch piece of fuzz-punk and a dynamic piece of dance-rock in its execution. It’s a high bar of a first statement, but Brighter Than Before doesn’t flag in the rest of its opening salvo, with the propulsive post-punk-garage of “Wicked World” immediately picking up where the previous song left off, and the glam-ish stomp of “Papered News” offering up a nice (slight) change of pace right after that one. The party slows down just a bit in the record’s midsection with “Undone”, a start-stop piece of jittery indie rock with crossed-wires guitars taking influence from a subtler side of Dischord’s discography–but it resolves into a big finish, and “New Foundations” gets things back into garage rock barnstorming mode to kick off side two. The flipside of Brighter Than Before also features States of Nature at their most combustible–perhaps unsurprisingly, the song called “American Drone” is their angriest, a white-hot burner and the one song where the band lets a little bit of straight-up hardcore creep into the mix. States of Nature pull back one final time in closing track “Oh the Light”, which, if it doesn’t quite approach Lungfish-level zen-rock, still finds space for the band to be a little more deliberate than one might expect. There are plenty of surprises in Brighter Than Before, and even when States of Nature are just “playing the hits”, they still sound fresh. (Bandcamp link)
The Special Pillow – The Special Pillow Meets the Space Monster
Release date: February 16th Record label: Self-released Genre: Psychedelic pop, psychedelic rock, college rock, indie pop Formats: CD, digital Pull Track: A Certain Level of Uncertainty
Hoboken’s The Special Pillow first appeared on this blog in 2022 when I wrote about their MindWipe EP, but the quartet have been at it for over two decades at this point, and bandleader/bassist Dan Cuddy has an even longer history as a member of the very underappreciated early 90s indie rock group Hypnolovewheel. When I wrote about Mind Wipe, I compared The Special Pillow to the Mekons and Yo La Tengo (the latter of which, should be noted, are contemporaries of Cuddy rather than precursors), and I stand by that, although The Special Pillow clearly have their own unique sound. The Special Pillow Meets the Space Monster, a brand new six-song EP from the band, only confirms this. Cuddy and the rest of the group (violinist/vocalist Katie Gentile, guitarist/vocalist Peter Stuart, and drummer/vocalist Eric Marc Cohen) have a sound that’s as pop-forward as it is rich and deep–breezy indie pop and folk music go hand in hand with all-in, noisy psychedelic rock, and the band’s orchestral side (aided by guest musicians Cheryl Kingan on the baritone sax and Steven Levi on the corner and valve trombone) enhances both sides of their music.
Opening track “Three on a Sundial” is the sound of The Special Pillow synthesizing their two halves to make full-sounding and hooky power pop–there are psychedelic and “chamber pop” flourishes, all in the service of something big-feeling and friendly. When The Special Pillow gear up to show off their “rock” side, the results are quite spirited, with the cruising drone-rock of “A Certain Level of Uncertainty” and the violin-aided psych-rock noir of “That’s the Way It’s Got to Be” both coming off as instant highlights. On the other end of the spectrum, Kingan’s saxophone and excellent guest vocals from Debby Schwartz help turn “Fond and Foggy” into a sharp piece of retro-feeling indie pop, while “Give Up the Ghost” digs into vintage psych-touched folk rock to create a Special Pillow version of college rock whose wistful melodies float along with plenty of patience and deliberate pacing. These days, it seems like The Special Pillow are primarily an “EP band”–their last full-length was in 2018, and this is the third EP that they’ve put out since then–but when they’re able to make pop music this adventurous and complete in twenty-minute, six-song packages like this one, why mess with a winning formula? (Bandcamp link)
Shadow Show – Fantasy Now!
Release date: February 16th Record label: Little Cloud/Stolen Body Genre: Garage rock, psychedelic pop, power pop Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Your Fantasy
Detroit’s Shadow Show have been around for a bit now, releasing their debut album, Silhouettes, back in 2020. Motor City garage rock groups aren’t exactly known for taking several years between releases, but that’s what the trio did–Fantasy Now!, the sophomore Shadow Show full-length, arrives almost exactly four years after their first LP. The new album feels like time well spent nonetheless–Fantasy Now! is inspired by immediate genres of music like 60s pop and garage rock, sure, but it’s also a multi-layered, surprisingly busy album which took me a few listens to wrap my head around. The band (guitarist Ava East, bassist Kate Derringer, and drummer Kerrigan Pearce) are not the first to slip some vintage psychedelia into this kind of music, but Shadow Show let the stranger aspects of their sound take the reins fairly frequently throughout the record’s dozen tracks and 40 minutes. All the while though, they keep Fantasy Now! within the confines of pop rock, creating an interesting push and pull dynamic that rewards repeat listening.
For Shadow Show’s dexterity, look no further than the record’s opening two tracks: “Your Fantasy”, a jangly piece of psych pop and rock and roll and “The Madrigal”, an acapella, harmonic song that actually lives up to its title and sounds closer to a fantasy novel than the “fantasy” described in the song preceding it. Although nothing else on Fantasy Now! is quite as stark as “The Madrigal”, tracks like “Illusions”, “Clown Song”, and “Wizard’s Harp” keeping the psychedelic and “fantasy” elements in the foreground throughout the record. On the other hand, Shadow Show still find plenty of time to lean into the “rock” part of garage rock, as “Vertigo”, “Fell into a Spell”, and “Still a Day” assert, and the “pop” end of psychedelic pop is on full display in the Beatles-y “Aunt Maizy” and jaunty closing track “On a Cloud”. Of course, not everything is so cleanly divided as this might make it sound–regardless of the dominant strain in any particular song, one should expect to find some proportion of psychedelia, pop, and rock and roll throughout Fantasy Now!. You might miss something if you just let it run together, sure, but you can always just listen again to catch it. (Bandcamp link)
In the third and final Pressing Concerns of the week, we’ve got an absurd level of new music for you: new albums from Lazy Sunday, Frances Chang, and Prize Horse (all out tomorrow, February 16th), as well as the new Pelvis Wrestley album (which came out yesterday). If you missed Monday’s post (featuring Guitar, Westall 66, Dead Bandit, and Pinkhouse) or Tuesday’s post (featuring Friko, Tim McNally, Otherworldly Things, and Loveblaster), I’d heartily recommend adding those to your list as well.
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.
Pelvis Wrestley – ANDY, or: The Four Horsegirls of the Apocalypse
Release date: February 14th Record label: Earth Libraries Genre: Synthpop, glam rock, indie pop, chamber pop, baroque pop Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: The World Is a Bucking Horse
One of my favorite albums of 2020 was something called Vortexas Vorever by Pelvis Wrestley, which is a project led by Austin, Texas musician Benjamin Violet. That album was a unique combination of synthpop and “glam country” that worked very well and was made up of some of the best pop music of this decade. Pelvis Wrestley had been quiet since their debut album, but last year they signed to Earth Libraries (Bory, Seriously, Cash Langdon) and reissued Vortexas Vorever (which had initially been put out by ATHRecords), as well as signaling new Pelvis music on the horizon. ANDY, or: The Four Horsegirls of the Apocalypse took four years after the debut album to appear, but its roots go even further back than that–the first part of the title refers to a synthpop band in which Violet played in Seattle before they moved back to their home state. Given the gap in releases, it’s understandable that Pelvis Wrestley sounds a bit different on ANDY; if Vortexas Vorever was Violet merging the synthpop of their past with the country music of the Lone Star State, this album merges the sound of the first Pelvis Wrestley record with a more polished, orchestral indie pop. The country moves of their last album are less obvious–not absent, but subsumed into a distinct “Pelvis Wrestley sound”.
Vortexas Vorever wasn’t “lo-fi”, but it was fairly barebones compared to ANDY, which isn’t afraid to add layer upon layer to its already gigantic-seeming pop music. Five-minute opening track “Found a Friend” is a scene-setter, kicking off this new era of Pelvis Wrestley with peak dramatic, building indie rock before cruising into the “hits” of the synth-glam “No One You Know” and “Act2ualize”. Even as catchy as they are, they’ve got full-band, cruising undercurrents to them, and it’s not until the soaring violins of “Holy Host” that Pelvis Wrestley openly embrace the sound of their previous record. Violet has plenty of other territory that they want to get to before the sun sets on ANDY–in one particularly memorable stretch, Pelvis Wrestley strut through the regal pop rock of “Open Letter”, dance through the busy of Montreal-esque bubblegum-synths of “Revenge”, and slink along to the tune of the slow-burning “Lily”. If you’re looking for the rootsy side of Pelvis Wrestley, I’d recommend following the horses–while “Horse Dreams” isn’t a country song, its beautiful chamber pop chorus evokes wide open spaces, and the band closes ANDY with its most energetic rocker in “The World Is a Bucking Horse”. Pedal steel dances through the country-dance-rock tune, Violet frantically describing life as a potential projectile “barely hanging on”. “I know people always come and go, I thought I should let you know / You were always on my mind, I can’t let go,” they sing, ending an album partially named after their past by trying to grab onto a piece of it before it fades away. (Bandcamp link)
Lazy Sunday – Another Summer
Release date: February 16th Record label: Salinas Genre: Pop punk, power pop,punk Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Ego Trip
For a certain strain of indie pop punk, Salinas Records is a pivotal institution. When it was at its most active, it was releasing landmark records from Martha, Swearin’, Big Nothing, Radiator Hospital, Delay, and Joyride! (among many others), music that would go on to shape the scrappy, back-to-basics era of indie rock that marked the second half of the 2010s. Salinas is still around, mostly releasing new music from older bands still on their roster (including the three of those six bands listed above in the past couple years), but their latest release is from a brand new group. It’s hard to say that Portland, Oregon quartet Lazy Sunday don’t fit on their roster, however. Barring a 2020 demo cassette, Another Summer is the band’s debut release, and it’s full of excellent Pacific Northwest indie rock–some of it is speedy pop-punk, some of the tracks hew towards rainy, mid-tempo fare, and both ends of Lazy Sunday’s sound are delivered with plenty of amplifier fuzz and hooks of one form or another.
I’m not sure if an album like Another Summer can be “subtle”, exactly, but if one can, this would be what it sounds like. Bandleaders Rani Gupta and B Okabe (who both play guitar and trade off vocals) sing a bit lower in the mix against the tuneful racket of their band (aided by bassist KT Austin and drummer Jeremy Dunlap). Generally speaking, I can make out their voices, but they’re not always the focal point of these eleven tracks. Even when the guitars are roaring, however, Gupta and Okabe’s voices are delivering sharp melodies, holding the kinetic rock and roll of the record’s first few songs (the zippy, riffy “Everything You Wanted”, the blaring, fuzzed-out indie pop of “Differentiation”, the…wistful pop punk of “Long Con”) together nicely. The ability of “Long Con” to be noisy and hooky while still coming off as quite insular is a core tenant of Another Summer, and it gives extra oomph to songs like “You Said” and “Ego Trip”. Of course, Lazy Sunday never abandon the full-on rocker, and they shine as a unit when they hit the gas–Austin’s bass anchors “Peaches” as the rest of the band stomp through the anthem, while Dunlap hammers “Flutter” home in particular. Another Summer ends with “Closer”, a song in which Gupta and Okabe sing “Ooh, I wanna get closer to you,” in harmony while the band play loud, distorted rock music around them. It might seem contradictory, but Lazy Sunday make it sound congruous. (Bandcamp link)
Frances Chang – Psychedelic Anxiety
Release date: February 16th Record label: Ramp Local Genre: Experimental rock, art pop, folk rock, prog-pop Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Eye Land
Back in 2022, I wrote about Support Your Local Nihilist, the solo debut album from Brooklyn’s Frances Chang. One of the more intriguing first statements from that year, I was impressed with how Chang–already a veteran of experimental soundscapes and musique concrète with her work in several other bands–used indie rock as a jumping point to make unpredictable mazes of guitars, synths, and percussion that nevertheless all hung together as a pop (or, at the very least, pop-adjacent) statement. That album came out on Chang’s own Destiny Is a Dog imprint, but she’s jumped to Ramp Local (a natural fit) for her sophomore album, Psychedelic Anxiety. The album’s title in addition to Chang’s own description of her solo records (deeming them “slacker prog”) are both incredibly accurate, succinct summations of what she’s accomplished on her latest record, but I’ll do my best to elaborate on them. When Psychedelic Anxiety rocks, it rocks harder than Chang had previously, but she doesn’t lose track of her stranger, more insular side as well on these eight songs.
The way Psychedelic Anxiety centers Chang while surrounding her with busy but not-too-obtrusive music feels very “bedroom pop”, but it has a full-band might to it (aided by several guest musicians, including Liza Winter of Birthing Hips, the now-defunct rock band which also featured Wendy Eisenberg and perhaps pioneered a more “explosive rock” version of what Chang is pursuing here). If one isn’t prepared for it, the frayed-at-the-edges folk rock of opening track “Spiral in Houston” and the stop-start, woozy rock of “Eye Land” are going to sound off, but if you come in with a wider definition of pop music, then they’ll both positively sound like aural candy. Chang and her collaborators glide from there into the more challenging midsection of Psychedelic Anxiety–from “Sci Fi Soap Opera” to “Body of the Lightning”, Chang is more likely to surround herself with synths and/or other strange effects, and in the former of those songs, she becomes a spoken-word narrator. Still, even in this part of the record, the sparse woodwinds-featuring ballad “First I Was Afraid” and the slowcore art pop “Darkside” are both friendlier moments. The five-minute closing track “Rate My Aura” wraps up “psychedelic anxiety” quite nicely, Chang pouring out line after line against a rhythmic instrumental–“We don’t have control over what we don’t yet have control over,” is one such offering. (Bandcamp link)
Prize Horse – Under Sound
Release date: February 16th Record label: New Morality Zine Genre: Fuzz rock, alt-rock, space rock, shoegaze, post-hardcore Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital Pull Track: Dark Options
After kicking around for a few years, Minneapolis heavy shoegaze/grunge-revivalists Prize Horse made their debut in the beginning of 2022 with their Welder EP. Their downcast, blown-out sound recalled serious, focused 90s alt-rockers like Hum and Failure and was a key part of what felt like a great time for this kind of music (just in the first half of 2022, Clear Capsule, Downward, and ASkySoBlack also released EPs in a similar vein, with Prize Horse’s label New Morality Zine being responsible for the bulk of them). The band (singer/guitarist Jake Beitel, drummer Jon Brenner, and bassist Olivia Johnson) didn’t rush a follow-up to Welder, instead taking two more years to deliver Under Sound, their debut full-length. Once again out via New Morality Zine and once again produced by Gleemer’s Corey Coffman, it’d be easy for Prize Horse to merely run back the sound of Welder for a half-hour and change, but signs of development abound throughout these ten songs.
The band seem to have given real consideration to what a longer-form Prize Horse release should look like, and they’ve come up with something more expansive and dynamic than their previous work. Welder was impressive with how just about every moment seemed like it could’ve been pulled from a lost heavy 90s alt-rock single; Under Sound is just as impressive with how it fills in the gaps with something less immediate but still sharp and hard-hitting. One such valley is nearly the entirety of first track “Dark Options”, which is a restrained, mid-tempo, five-minute opener that has more in common with chilly emo and even slowcore than anything even remotely “grunge” aside from a (surprisingly brief) loud moment towards the end. “Your Time” and “Further From My Start” are a little heavier, although they still deal in the uncertain climes of “Dark Options”, and by the title track and “Leave It”, Prize Horse are even more resistant to straightforward rock music. It’s easy to get lost among the band’s stone-faced riffs and Beitel’s just-as-stony vocals, although the second half of Under Sound actually contains more fire on average than the first (everything from “Reload” to “Know Better” has at least a few moments of heaviness). “Awake for It” closes the record by veering even further away, almost into dream pop territory, appropriately summing up a record that does plenty of fascinating work at the margins. (Bandcamp link)
Welcome to the second Pressing Concerns of the week! This Friday (February 16th) is such a big release week that I’m going ahead and starting early by looking at two records coming out then: a new album from Friko and a new EP from Otherworldly Things (although the latter is already up on Bandcamp if you just can’t wait). In addition, two records from January that flew under the radar appear here as well, in the form of new albums from Tim McNally and Loveblaster. If you missed yesterday’s post, featuring Guitar, Westall 66, Dead Bandit, and Pinkhouse, check it 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.
Friko – Where We’ve Been, Where We Go From Here
Release date: February 16th Record label: ATO Genre: Indie pop, college rock, fuzz rock, 90s indie rock Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital Pull Track: Get Numb to It!
One of my favorite albums last year was Turtle Rock by Sharp Pins, and one of my favorite reissues was Dwaal Troupe’s Lucky Dog. Both of those records were either wholly or partially the work of singer-songwriter and zine-maker Kai Slater, but more generally, both acts are also part of an exciting Chicago indie rock scene that also features the acclaimed Horsegirl, another one of Slater’s bands in Lifeguard, and Friko. Friko was founded by Niko Kapetan, Luke Stamos, and drummer Bailey Minzenberger in Evanston (where Kapetan and Stamos had previously played together in a group called Thee Marquees), but became associated with Chicago’s “Hallogallo” scene (named after a Neu! song, which is the name of Slater’s zine as well) early in the band’s lifespan when they played a show with Horsegirl in 2020. Many shows with other Hallogallo bands, several singles, and one EP later, the debut Friko album is finally here–Where We’ve Been, Where We Go From Here is a communal effort, largely made by the band’s core trio with producers Scott Tallarida and Jack Henry but with vocal and instrumental contributions from musicians around the Windy City (such as Free Range’s Sofia Jensen and Finom’s Macie Stewart).
The “Hallogallo” bands range from blistering post-hardcore to dreamy, reverb-y indie rock, but Friko come the closest to the playful guitar pop of Sharp Pins and Dwaal Troupe–albeit with a bit more “rock” in tow. Kapetan is a compelling vocalist, sounding in command but close to breaking while delivering sharp melodies (the writing is credited to him and Minzenberger) over top of instrumentals that veer into noisy indie rock freak-outs and then back to gorgeous chamber pop with ease. Friko are incredibly energetic and excited-sounding about these songs, with Kapetan and Minzenberger layering guitars, pianos, cellos, and violins in an overwhelming but never-not-tuneful way. Although Stamos departed the band after recording, the bassist’s playing leaves a mark on Where We’ve Been, Where We Go From Here–the record’s first three tracks, “Where We’ve Been”, “Crimson to Chrome”, and “Crashing Through” are all (at least partially) noise pop rave-ups, but the low-end still finds moments to stick out impressively. Friko have more than a bit of range throughout the record, as they began to intersperse the still-very-exhilarating rockers (“Chemical”, “Get Numb to It!”) with the dreamy piano-and-strings “For Ella”, the refined, gentle pop of “Until I’m With You Again”, and the spare acoustic closing track “Cardinal”. Where We’ve Been, Where We Go From Here swings drama and intensity around, but the projectiles are enjoyably well-crafted, going a long way towards defining Friko as standouts in a crowded and talented scene. (Bandcamp link)
Tim McNally – On the Way to Pompeii
Release date: January 11th Record label: Self-released Genre: Folk rock, alt-country, roots rock, singer-songwriter Formats: Digital Pull Track: Lake Pontchartrain
Tim McNally is a name I’ve only just now heard of, but that doesn’t mean that the New Jersey-originating, Philadelphia-based singer-songwriter hasn’t been busy before now. In fact, McNally’s been a pretty hard-working musician over the past few years–he released three different albums in 2021 and another one in 2022. McNally’s fifth solo album, On the Way to Pompeii, is the first one I’ve heard (he took a little under two years to follow up his previous record, Sundown–an eternity compared to his previous pace), and I was pretty immediately taken by his fresh take on Jersey/Philly folk and roots rock. McNally may be a somewhat under-the-radar musician, but he writes with a confidence and a faith that whoever is paying attention will give these songs the close looks they deserve. Although sometimes dressed as an acoustic folk troubadour, McNally carries himself through On the Way to Pompeii with a rock and roll swagger, whether that means Springsteen-esque bombast or an interconnected intricacy reflecting of the more esoteric moments of Cooley and Hood.
“Volcano”, the acoustic folk-pop song that opens On the Way to Pompeii, finds McNally headed toward Vesuvius armed with little more than a guitar and a harmonica and his mind decidedly elsewhere. The album offers up a couple of fuzz-rockers in its first half–most notably “Deafening Silence”, but “Lonesome Adventures” works its way up to it as well–both of which capture the restlessness of McNally’s writing just as effectively as his folk songs. McNally pushes forward, expanding what he’s developed in the second half of the album, ripping through the almost psychedelic alt-rock of “AM Radio” or sounding in motion yet completely lost on “Roam”. The final stretch of On the Way to Pompeii is its strongest section–“Different Reasons” is a curious-sounding epiphany, the peace and equilibrium it seeks to establish sounding fairly uneasy. The record’s best song is “Lake Pontchartrain”, an absolutely gorgeous piece of orchestral guitar pop in which McNally’s protagonist’s entire journey unspools itself in a seedy ecstasy, before a sudden shift happens and the record ends with the plodding country-folk “Vampires” instead. The aural shrug mirrors the record’s opening track and offers little concrete answers to the fear and displacement running through On the Way to Pompeii, a record that sounds completely at home wandering. (Bandcamp link)
Otherworldly Things – Heavy Dream Cycle
Release date: February 16th Record label: Magic Door Genre: Power pop, jangle pop, psychedelic pop Formats: Digital Pull Track: Work Out Right
Otherworldly Things is a New York band led by songwriter, guitarist, and vocalist Jim Browne–they’ve been around for a decade and put out their debut album, Beeline to the “A” List, back in 2017. I hadn’t heard of Otherworldly Things or Browne before the announcement of their long-awaited second record, the five-song Heavy Dream Cycle EP, but there are plenty of familiar faces involved with this band–the current lineup features bassist Jason Binnick of Upper Wilds and drummer Travis Harrison (Guided by Voices’ in-house producer and unofficial sixth member), and it’s being released by Magic Door, the label co-owned by current Guided by Voices drummer Kevin March. The quartet (also featuring guitarist/keyboardist Matt Revie of Clouder) recorded Heavy Dream Cycle at Harrison’s Serious Business Studios, and if you were to guess that it’s a record full of power pop and psychedelic pop–two classic Guided by Voices-core genres–you’d be right. It’s more of a case of drawing from similar influences, I think–Browne’s songwriting is too straight-up power poppy and not quite prog enough to feel like a direct descendant of Robert Pollard.
More than anything, the EP reminds me of recent material from Daily Worker, the power pop project of Cotton Mather’s Harold Whit Williams. The five songs on Heavy Dream Cycle similarly aim for big-idea psychedelic power pop despite their relatively barebones garage rock band foundations, and Otherworldly Things succeed at pulling this trick off. Opening track “I’m Tired of Monsters” is completely infectious, with the lo-fi-sounding but still quite discernible guitar and bass melding with Harrison’s pounding percussion to make a straight-up anthemic rock and roll song, and “No Use” cranks up the 60s influences in the form of a skewed but incredibly catchy piece of psych-garage-pop. The 90-second singalong “Work Out Right” reminds me of bands like Connections and other such undersung creators of jangly but hefty guitar pop, while the keyboard touches on “Time Turns to Memories” push its chugging psychedelia over the top. The one song on Heavy Dream Cycle that truly strikes me as “Pollard-esque” is “Escape”, a shockingly sparse, acoustic-guitar-and-vocals closing track that could’ve been pulled from one of the Suitcases the way it sounds both off-the-cuff and fully-formed, eerie, and transfixing. Even though it’s the EP’s starkest moment, the extra shade feels like the final piece in cementing Heavy Dream Cycle as something substantial beyond its meager fifteen-minute runtime. (Bandcamp link)
Loveblaster – The Way Things Work
Release date: January 5th Record label: Pounds of Love Genre: Slowcore, folk Formats: CD, digital Pull Track: Wings Over Madison
There are a lot of bands these days making the Duster version of slowcore–electric guitar-based, mumbling, and fuzzy. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy plenty of it, but it’s reassuring to hear bands still making my personal favorite kind of slowcore, the kind with clear vocals, a debt to folk music, and, above all, a love of vast empty space. That’s the kind of territory in which we find Madison, Wisconsin’s Loveblaster–think early Low, Ida, and Idaho–on their first album, The Way Things Work. The trio (vocalist/guitarist Marley Van Raalte, vocalist/drummer/pianist Abby Self, bassist/vocalist Neal Jochmann) deliver eight songs at the pace of molasses–the percussion is spaced widely (when it’s even there at all) but steady, the pianos are quite pretty but not attention-grabbing. The band members’ voices intertwine over top of the sparse instrumentals, making them (to me) the clear star of the record–what’s there is more than enough to carry us through the moments of (near) silence where no one is singing.
The Way Things Work’s opening track, “Halfway”, is (graded on the slowcore curve, to be clear) one of the more lively songs on the record, the occasional drum kicks sounding dramatic against the vocal tradeoffs that sit comfortably but somewhat coldly at its center. “Without Work” is the genre at its “can’t-look-away” best, with the vocalists wringing something absolutely vital out of little more than a steady beat, their shared singing, and Self’s piano. “(More Than) Bad Luck” feels particularly minimalist, floating through the clouds before we get to the polished, slow folk of “Wings Over Madison”, probably the most beautiful song I’ve ever heard that steals its name from a local chicken wing restaurant. It’s a great first half, but plenty of the most interesting moments on The Way Things Work come on the second side, particularly the four-minute-long sigh of “Watching You Change” and the aching “The Need to Fail”. Closing track “The Low Hum” starts off as a piano ballad before trailing off into noise–but it’s only after Loveblaster finish what they set out to achieve on The Way Things Work that they allow the static and distance to take over. (Bandcamp link)
It’s the start of yet another busy week in February in terms of Pressing Concerns! Today, we’re looked at two records that came out last week–a new album from Dead Bandit and a new EP from Guitar–plus catching up on two January EPs I missed earlier in the year from Westall 66 and Pinkhouse.
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.
Guitar – Casting Spells on Turtlehead
Release date: February 7th Record label: Spared Flesh/Julia’s War Genre: Shoegaze, experimental rock, noise pop, fuzz rock, garage rock, lo-fi indie rock Formats: Cassette, digital Pull Track: Baying of Dogs
Back in August 2022, I wrote an EP called Guitar by a band called Guitar (at that point, basically just Portland’s Saia Kuli), which I thought was one of the more intriguing debuts from that year. Perhaps predestined by the name of the project, the seven-song cassette flew under the radar, but its weird, transfixing lo-fi post-punk sound stuck with me. Guitar has linked up with Julia’s War Recordings for its second EP–the Philadelphia label who’s right at the center of modern experimental shoegaze is co-releasing Casting Spells on Turtlehead with the band’s previous home of Spared Flesh. Based off of Guitar, it’s kind of an odd pairing, but after listening to Casting Spells on Turtlehead, it starts to make a lot of sense. Kuli brings a louder, noisier sound to the project’s latest release, and he gets a little more help this time around (his partner Jonny, the only other person to contribute to Guitar, appears on this EP as well, but Kuli also enlists drummer Nikhil Wadhwa, vocalist Zoe Tricoche, and harmonica player Lukas Hanson for the record). As it turns out, a more fleshed-out Guitar sounds surprisingly like it fits right in with the current wave of omnivorous noise pop/shoegaze acts.
Although Casting Spells on Turtlehead doesn’t sound quite like the Guitar I enjoyed at first, it’s not a huge departure, and I can’t fault Kuli for changing up his sound a bit when the results are this good. This EP kind of reminds me of Guided by Voices–there are shoegaze bands like Gaadge and Ex Pilots who invoke GBV by sneaking Robert Pollard-like melodies underneath their distortion, but Guitar do it in a different way, by reflecting that band’s grab-bag, collage-inspired nature. Like an early Guided by Voices EP, Casting Spells on Turtlehead feels like a collection of disparate but connected moments–the beautiful, melodic guitar riff that runs through “Baying of Dogs”, the basement-acoustic immediacy of the title track, the lumbering but somehow fun fuzz rock of “Kiss Me You Idiot”, Jonny’s turn on lead vocals on the even-more-of-a-left-turn-than-usual, trippy dream pop of “Twin Orbits”. Not that Guitar was the most predictable record, but Guitar are truly all over the place on Casting Spells on Turtlehead, even straight-up rocking harder than they ever have before on the Ovlov-ish opening track “My City My Rules” and the wall-of-sound garage-gaze of closing track “Unleashed”. Even these songs are unpredictable, with Hanson’s harmonica turning up on the former and Tricoche’s screaming on the latter. Guitar have stepped things up a bit on their newest release, and hopefully some more people take notice accordingly. (Bandcamp link)
Westall 66 – Staring at the Sun
Release date: January 19th Record label: Slippery Slope Genre: Power pop, pop punk, alt-rock Formats: Digital Pull Track: Leaving Me Behind
I’ve covered plenty of Australian rock music in Pressing Concerns before, but Melbourne’s Westall 66 is in a bit of uncharted territory. Neither the sardonic “Devo-core” garage punk of bands like Delivery, Vintage Crop, and CLAMM nor the minimalist indie pop of Spice World, Soft Covers, and Pretty in Pink, Westall 66 trades in the business of big, hooky, polished pop punk. The quartet cite The Menzingers as an influence, and while that doesn’t exactly describe their debut EP, Staring at the Sun, it’s a decent starting point–in their opening statement, the band offer up five songs incorporating widescreen heartland rock, loud and boisterous power pop, perennially out-of-style “orgcore”, and a pop punk earnestness. Although the members of Westall 66 aren’t musical neophytes (they’re “all aged over 35”, per their Spotify bio), they sound as energetic and enthusiastic as a brand new band should throughout Staring at the Sun.
The choppy, slicing power chords and torrential guitar leads of “The Weekend” open Staring at the Sun in a familiar but welcome way, the lead singer’s slight but noticeable Aussie accent the only real hint that Westall 66 aren’t straight out of Philadelphia circa 2016. As strong as the chorus is, the guitars that roar up in between the verses compete directly with it for the catchiest moment of “The Weekend”, a great little competition to have going on throughout your record. Just about every chorus on Staring at the Sun is power pop excellence–“Leaving Me Behind” one song later just might have my favorite refrain, with the lead singer riding the titular line out for all it’s worth after the enjoyable building-up the verses provide. The title track keeps the momentum rolling just as powerfully–the thundering, swaggering refrain reminds me almost of a pop punk version of Upper Wilds’ gigantic space rock. The grand, universal scale of these five songs is quite impressive for a pop punk EP (hell, for any EP)–“Nothing Left to Give” is probably the most insular song on the record given its slight emo tinge, but it’s no less committed to carving out an impressively large mark than the rest of Staring at the Sun. Similarly, the EP closes with “Slam!”, its heaviest moment, featuring shades of hard rock and a tougher version of punk rock than the rest of the EP, but it’s still a catchy cap to the rest of the songs. “Slam!” somehow finds another gear, which is pretty impressive for a record that never takes its foot off the gas. (Bandcamp link)
Dead Bandit – Memory Thirteen
Release date: February 9th Record label: Quindi Genre: Post-rock, ambient, experimental folk Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Memory Thirteen
Dead Bandit is an instrumental duo made up of a couple of musicians originally from Canada, although one of them (Ellis Swan) has been living in Chicago for some time now. Swan also makes experimental folk music under his own name, an attitude he does bring to Dead Bandit, a collaboration with multi-instrumentalist James Schimpl. Swan and Schimpl released their first album as Dead Bandit, From the Basement, back in 2021 on Quindi Records (Monde UFO, Fortunato Durutti Marinetti, American Cream Band), with Memory Thirteen (also on Quindi) following both that LP and Swan’s 2022 solo album 3am. Together, the duo make wide-open, guitar-led post-rock, delivered in (yes) thirteen different 3-4 minute intervals but also running together as a single piece. The sparse nature of Memory Thirteen tilts the record towards rock-band-played ambient music in a way reminiscent of a lot of acts from Swan’s current city of residence, but it’s of a different strain–rather than the glitchy, jazz-influenced, art-school kind of post-rock frequently found in the Windy City in the 90s, Dead Bandit hew towards a deserted, post-folk kind of emptiness (perhaps more reflecting of their desolate homeland).
Folk and guitar-based influences aside, Dead Bandit aren’t Luddites–opening track “Two Clocks” introduces the record with some gentle, organ-toned synths before an even gentler-sounding guitar and steady percussion take over in the second half. The fuzzed-out introduction of the title track begins the most immediate section of the record–both “Memory Thirteen” and “Blackbird” have melodic guitar lines at their center, sounding like stripped and slightly corrupted pieces of folk rock or indie rock–and while “Circus” introduces prominent atmospherics again, they’re accompanied by some gorgeous acoustic guitar picking as well. Around the middle of Memory Thirteen, “Peel Me an Orange” shows that Dead Bandit can put together glistening, crescendoing guitar-led post-rock when the moment calls for it–and it’s best to enjoy it while it lasts, as the B-side of the record is even more insular and downtrodden than the first half. Starting with the ambient country of “Somewhere to Wait”, Dead Bandit keep Memory Thirteen in suspense through the aural halo of “Revelstoke” and the late-night plodding of “Wabansia”. “Blowing Kisses” is one last moment of beauty before “Across the Road” ends the album with a fuzzy drone–I can make out some shapes as Dead Bandit ride off into the desert, but it might be a mirage. (Bandcamp link)
Pinkhouse – Vanity Project
Release date: January 19th Record label: Long Island Sounds Genre: Pop punk, indie pop, power pop Formats: Digital Pull Track: Oh Well
On the Bandcamp page for Washington, D.C.’s Pinkhouse, the quartet refer to themselves as “punk lite”, and in an email to me, the band’s frontperson Max Fillion qualified the group as “punk-adjacent”. This approach to describing Pinkhouse might come off as an exercise in lowering expectations, but after listening to the group’s debut EP, Vanity Project, I get what Fillion was getting at by presenting the band’s music this way. Their first record (after a couple of singles in 2019 and 2022) is much closer to bright, sparkly indie pop than any kind of sharp-edged, Dischord-influenced post-hardcore punk group, but Pinkhouse (also featuring guitarist Steven Hacker, drummer, Brandon Breazeale, and bassist Nick Cervone) play these pop songs with a full-band enthusiasm featuring glimpses of power pop and pop punk. Vanity Project feels bigger than its five songs and twenty minutes; it’s a bit all over the place and too excited to settle on one clear defined “style”, but thankfully, Pinkhouse are pretty good at everything they try their hand at on the record.
The two catchy pieces of pop rock that open Vanity Project, “13th Street” and “Dumb Expression”, fit well together but are different enough from one another to fully prevent us from getting a handle on this EP or this band easily. The former is a pretty ambitious-sounding opener, a multi-part piece of guitar pop that contains plenty of immediate melodies while at the same time building its way to a well-deserved, big, noise pop finish. “Dumb Expression” is the band zipping through more straightforward indie pop-punk, aided in no small part by a striking lead vocal performance from Fillion. Just as it seems like they’ve settled into a toe-tapping tempo, however, they bust out the acoustic guitar and strings for mid-record ballad “Mr. Jack”, and the EP’s closing track, the möbius strip-like “Brand New Day”, turns a slow-moving alt-rock chugger into a woozy, mid-tempo farewell. The best “rocker” on the album is probably the slightly mussed-up and paranoid-sounding “Oh Well”–I know this is kind of a deep pull, but it reminds me of 90s Barsuk band MK Ultra. “Back to being stupid / Oh well, ignorance is bliss,” Fillion memorably sings in the chorus of that one, sounding not particularly blissful or ignorant–but even in the darkest moment on Vanity Project, it’s still delivered in a fun package. (Bandcamp link)
Rosy Overdrive 