Pressing Concerns: Various Artists, ‘Bee Side Beats 2: For Gaza’

​​Release date: October 19th
Record label: Bee Side Cassettes
Genre: Lo-fi indie rock, experimental rock, electronic, ambient, shoegaze, indie folk, hyperpop, R&B, post-rock, hip hop, punk, screamo, singer-songwriter…
Formats: Digital

This is going to be a bit different than my typical standalone Pressing Concerns entries. I don’t intend this to be a longform album review as such, but due to both the overwhelming size of this compilation and its mission, I see no other way to touch on it on the blog without giving it a post to itself. Anyway, today I am talking about Bee Side Beats 2: For Gaza, a 106-song compilation (referencing the 106 years that have passed since the Balfour Declaration) assembled by Albany’s Bee Side Cassettes (DJ Silky Smooth, Bruiser & Bicycle, Russel the Leaf), which is only available via digital download and from which all the proceeds go towards The Palestine Children’s Relief Fund. Like (I would imagine) many other readers of this blog, I’ve felt especially horrified and despondent at what has been happening in the Gaza Strip as of late, and I’m not under the illusion that “posting on the Internet about how this is bad to what amounts to an echo chamber” has done anything to change this terrible reality. However, here is one material way that you can help those most in need (unless you are a literal genocide supporter, we can all hopefully agree that children do not need to suffer the consequences of a conflict that, as the title to this compilation points out, predates their arrival into the world by a long, long time).

Even if you don’t particularly care about any of this, you should still donate, because then you get to listen to Bee Side Beats 2: For Gaza, which is a collection of a lot of good music. In addition to the quality music that Bee Side has released under their own umbrella, they’ve teamed up with a few other good labels to put together this compilation. This list includes one of the best current imprints going in Candlepin Records, two other quality labels whose music I’ve written about before in Really Rad and Julia’s War, and Beautiful Rat Records (who I’ve never touched on the blog directly before, but they’re named after an underappreciated Mountain Goats EP and once put together a Mountain Goats cover compilation featuring Man Random, Iffin, and Nova Robotics Initiative, among others, so I’m going to go ahead and call them cool as well). The songs on For Gaza subsequently cover a wide variety of ground–I’ve heard screamo, J Dilla-esque instrumental hip hop, dub, ambient, video game music, and every kind of experimental subgenre one could imagine on here. Since Rosy Overdrive is a primarily indie rock-based blog, those are the kinds of tracks I’m going to highlight here, but rest assured if any of those other types of music speak to you, you can find them on For Gaza as well.

If one scans the tracklist of For Gaza, one will see about eight artists who have appeared on this blog before, and, unsurprisingly, their contributions are some of the songs I most immediately loved on this compilation. Greg Mendez and Ther have been responsible for two of my favorite albums of 2023, and this compilation gives us all the first taste of new music from them since Greg Mendez and A Horrid Whisper Echoes in a Palace of Endless Joy, respectively. Both of their submissions to For Gaza live up to the high bar of their last releases, Mendez by offering up a track that feels like a dry run at the kind of intricate pop-structured folk music of his last release in “Everybody Wants to Be Your Friend”, and Ther by cranking up the amps and distortion to kick open a new era beyond their last record’s skeletal slowcore in “A Pale Horse, Ha Ha Ha Ha”. Not to be outdone, two artists who released great records last year also show up–Husbands’ “I Hate That” is a “slow-gaze” anthem that might be the best song on this whole damn thing, and Joan Kelsey offers up an alternate version of the excellent “Horses” from their 2020 album House of Mercy. Other familiar faces include Bad History Month (with “To Be Free”, a demo I don’t recognize but sounds of a piece with 2017’s Dead and Loving It, my favorite record of theirs), Tuxis Giant (with a demo version of “Cub Scout” from last month’s The Old House) and Swim Camp (with “For My Kid”, which I also think is exclusive to this release).

That being said, my favorite aspect of Bee Side Beats 2: For Gaza is also what any various-artist compilation worth its salt does: it introduces me to a ton of new-to-me artists who contributed great songs to this album. The meat of this compilation is the kind of music in which Candlepin and Julia’s War trade–lo-fi indie rock, bedroom pop-rock, folk rock, shoegaze, indie punk, and slowcore–and there’s shining examples of all of these genres here. There’s so much here that I’m still digesting it, but after hearing everything on For Gaza at least once, here is an incomplete list of new bands who I either hadn’t heard of or hadn’t given enough time to that are now fully on my radar after hearing their contributions to the compilation: Vesuvian, All Seas, Noah Kesey, deadharrie, Bummer Camp, Discotelle, Candy Ambulance, Family Vision, Miss Bones, No Good With Secrets, Floral Print, Flying Golden Vee, Good Queen Susan, GBMystical, Joetaurone, Service Industry, Georgie, Griff, Landfill Band, Headless Relatives, kitchen, Nara’s Room, Ringing, Shunkan, Ruth in the Bardo, Soupy, Watercoat, Broken Record, Zach Malett, and Senior Living. These are all bands I’m going to be paying attention to going forward–and plus, as a bonus, I already know that they don’t support genocide, war crimes, and whatnot.

There is something to be said about how the kind of basement/bedroom lo-fi indie rock that populates Bee Side Beats 2: For Gaza is hardly thought of as a “political” genre of music, and so those immersed in that world have two possibilities laid in front of them in times like this. They can either use this perception of their music as a shield to block it out of their orbits, or they can, at a time in which big-ticket “punk” and “indie” bands decline to say anything about what’s happening in Gaza because it would hurt their (or, perhaps more accurately, their label and management’s) bottom line, recognize that the true independence of their self-built scenes and spaces is a statement in itself, and that, furthermore, it is a sword to be wielded in the face of the cold, inevitable-feeling march of colonialism, putting to the lie those who insist that there just isn’t any other way.

Social media is just the latest tool used to dissipate and dissolve a very real and justified anger and horror into nothingness. Anyone who’s thought about this at length has run into the wall of “nothing I can say or do matters” regarding this. That means it’s working. I’m not an expert in this matter by any means, but I do know that some things are more effective than posting–contacting anyone and everyone with any kind of political power and making it known that pursuit of a ceasefire is the only way forward, attending protests that advocate for the humanity of a people that have been dehumanized again and again by these institutions, talking to people in real-life who you know well enough to understand that they’d be perceptive to understanding what’s going on if they were given a less one-sided account than what these institutions provide and, if you can, donating to organizations like the PCRF. And now you can listen to a ton of good music just by giving any amount of money to them and letting Bee Side Cassettes know about it via email or direct message. (Bandcamp link)

(Postscript: Bee Side Cassettes is currently organizing a second benefit compilation, so if you’re a musician reading this and want to contribute, get in touch with them by Friday at midnight Eastern Time.)

Pressing Concerns: Promiseland BBQ, Noah Roth, Gold Dime, Victory Peach

Welcome to another Tuesday Pressing Concerns! There’s some really great under-the-radar stuff in this one (but isn’t there always?). Today looks at new albums from Promiseland BBQ, Noah Roth, and Gold Dime, and a new EP from Victory Peach. If you missed yesterday’s post, featuring records from Fox Japan, Hard Copy, Sexores, and Fig by Four, check that one 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.

Promiseland BBQ – Murder in the Friendly City

Release date: October 6th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Singer-songwriter, folk rock, alt-country
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Murder in the Friendly City

Promiseland BBQ is the solo project of Ross Weidman, a singer-songwriter who splits time between Morgantown, West Virginia (his hometown, as well as where he went to college and where he drummed in the band Mother of Earl) and Pasadena, California (where he currently works as an engineer for NASA and plays drums for hire). The debut Promiseland BBQ album, Murder in the Friendly City, took shape in late 2021 and early 2022–Weidman was home for a two month period, spending time with his family as his mother passed away after a yearslong battle with breast and brain cancer. For the most part, Murder in the Friendly City is not directly about the death of Weidman’s mother, but rather, it’s a perceptive, multi-faceted, and deep exploration of both her and Weidman’s upbringings and places of origin that feels like it was written by someone in a state of heightened sensitivity. The final product is a record that takes inspiration from decades of bedroom-recorded rock music (from the storytelling of Springsteen’s Nebraska to Mac Demarco’s production values) in order to make an entirely unique statement.

Wheeling, West Virginia, the original home of both of Weidman’s parents, is nicknamed the “Friendly City”. It is located in the state’s northern panhandle, along the Ohio River, a hair’s breadth from both the Buckeye State and Pennsylvania. Like a lot of places in the greater Rust Belt, it was at its largest in the first half of the twentieth century–it was a transportation and manufacturing hub, and with that came a thriving organized crime scene. The album’s title comes from a recollection of a book Weidman’s father was reading (Murder Never Dies: Crime and Corruption in the Friendly City by George Sidiropolis). This eye-popping aspect of Wheeling serves well as the title of the record, but it’s just one of many from which Weidman pulls for the sketches that appear in these twelve songs. Mob boss “Big Bill” Lias leers over the opening, shambling retro-rock of the title track and the hushed “The Flood”, but Weidman explores a more honest working class (of varying stripes) in “Steel Mill” and “Linda in the Cathouse”, and the run-down ennui of songs like “Wheeling Feeling” and “The Romantic Way” perhaps cut a little close to the bone. The final song on Murder in the Friendly City is the sparse acoustic folk of “I Remember Your Name”, the one song that explicitly addresses Weidman’s late mother. “No words I can say, no song I can sing to even carry your name / The beautiful melody ain’t half as sweet as the memory,” Weidman confesses, even as the rest of the album makes clear that the two are forever linked. (Bandcamp link)

Noah Roth – Florida

Release date: October 6th
Record label: Rocket to Heaven
Genre: Singer-songwriter, folk
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Vice Grip

This is the third Noah Roth solo album I’ve written about in the span of twelve months. Last September’s Breakfast of Champions was the product of several years of recording and studio finessing that reflected Roth’s love of Wilco-esque probing folk rock; this June, they put out the Don’t Forget to Remember cassette, a collection of songs embracing Roth’s lo-fi, noisy, and experimental sides that was largely put together over a three-week period. And then we have Florida, quietly self-released on a Bandcamp Friday in October with no advance singles. Similarly to Don’t Forget to Remember, Florida was recorded almost entirely by Roth alone over a short period of time in a location other than their current home (between July 12th and July 18th of this year in Hollywood, Florida), but (perhaps out of necessity of equipment) this one is almost entirely drawn from Roth’s vocals and an acoustic guitar (other than a little bit of guitar overdub and couple of guest vocals from their Mt. Worry/Hell Trash bandmate Rowan Horton).

Writing about These Kinds of albums invites all sorts of cliches, so let’s get a few of them out of the way now: yes, it’s personal, it’s intimate, it’s honest, it’s a diary entry, it’s Bruce Springsteen Nebraska. Really, what it is more than anything else is ten more great songs from a great songwriter presented in a form that does nothing to dampen their strengths. Lyrically, the in-the-thick-of-it spirit of Florida is only served by the acoustic treatments–“When I make it out alive, there will be hell to pay,” goes the chorus of opening track “Brass Knuckled Kiss”, and “Tommy” paints a vivid picture of the lonesome and dreary paradise in which the album was created (“Pelicans in the parking lot / Don’t wanna be what I am not”). Musically, Florida translates well, too–the utilitarian nature of the acoustic chords and Roth’s ornate sense of pop songwriting and melody collide in a way that makes the record not quite either (maybe halfway between the quiet intricacy of Greg Mendez and the “first chords, best chords” of early Mountain Goats). Songs like “Otie” and “Can’t Find the Door” can’t hide their pop cores, and “Vice Grip” in particular strains against the format in the perfect Darnielleian way. “I thank my lucky stars that I’m alive today / Though I’m still not sure it’s better off this way,” goes the chorus of that one. For all the world, it feels like one song in a collection that just had to get out; that Roth had to take us to Florida. (Bandcamp link)

Gold Dime – No More Blue Skies

Release date: October 20th
Record label: No-Gold
Genre: Art rock, psychedelic rock, post-punk, experimental rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Denise

Andrya Ambro has been a fixture in the world of New York art rock for a while now. In the late 2000s and early 2010s, she was one-half of the duo Talk Normal along with Sarah Register; she began her solo project Gold Dime not too long after, releasing full-lengths under the name via Fire Talk (Patio, Mia Joy, Strange Ranger) in 2017 and 2019. The third Gold Dime album, No More Blue Skies, only further enmeshes Ambro in her geographic scene–it was released by No-Gold, a new label founded by Angus Andrew of Liars, and it features contributions from local players like composer Jessica Pavone and Jeff Tobias of Modern Nature. Like another New York art rock album from earlier this year, Feast of the Epiphany’s Significance, Ambro and her collaborators merge pop music with more experimental fare, but while that record explored Talk Talk-ish delicate beauty, Ambro (a drummer by background) turns in something louder and heavier, pulling from psychedelic rock and krautrock, among many others.

No More Blue Skies only needs seven songs to reach full-length status–Gold Dime put everything they have into each one of them. The percussion is the first sound one hears on the record, and it becomes the central feature early on–it leads the thundering, horn-laden opening jazz rock of “Denise” and the swaggering, noisy “Wasted Wanted”. Although “Please Not Today” is the first one to start off a little quieter, a hypnotic drumbeat rises to the forefront in the song’s second half, aided by a sharp guitar riff and Pavone’s strings. I’ve gotten this far without mentioning Laurie Anderson, but her influence is certainly felt in Ambro’s vocals–there’s probably a bit of her in each song on No More Blue Skies, but I hear it the most in “Beneath Below” and “Interpretations”. It works well for Ambro here–as the songs start to stretch into six-minute post-rock mini-symphonies in the record’s second half, the ringleader needs a Laurie Anderson-sized personality to stay on top of it all. Or, maybe, an Andrya Ambro-sized one. (Bandcamp link)

Victory Peach – Victory Peach

Release date: September 29th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Folk rock, bedroom pop, dream pop
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Violence

Philadelphia’s Victory Peach have been kicking around for a bit–the band’s two members, Dan Jordan and Sydney Cox, began collaborating in 2017, and released their debut single the following year. The first Victory Peach record took substantially longer to appear, but their six-song self-titled debut EP is a rich and deep first step that I enjoy more every time I listen to it. The 25 minutes of Victory Peach are deceptively simple at first–Jordan and Cox hover somewhere between a slightly rootsy folk rock sound and mid-tempo, dream pop-influenced indie rock, with the duo’s harmonies being arguably their most “showy” facet.  The key is probably the lead vocals of Cox, who manages to be an incredibly engaging and expressive frontperson while still keeping things on the casual and conversational side, delivery-wise. It’s a voice that encourages active listening, and once one does, one begins to notice how everything on Victory Peach is placed just right.

The folky “Cooking” opens the EP on an especially striking note–the first half of the song is maybe the sparsest moment on Victory Peach, musically, but Cox’s vivid lyrics about the titular activity make for a memorable first impression. The electric/acoustic hybrids of “Instar” and “Violence” are probably the closest that Victory Peach have to a “typical sound”, although the bass-led pop rock of the former and the melodic jangle of the latter are pretty distinct from one another. Toward the end of “Violence”, the band elevate their sound a just little bit to deliver one last hook, although the one true “rocker” on Victory Peach is penultimate track “Landlocked”, in which the duo throw some prominent lead guitar and distortion into their sound to underscore the loneliness at the song’s heart. It’s an effective touch, but the more stripped-down folk-pop of “Growing Pains” (harkening back to the EP’s opening track) is maybe the record’s most potent moment. “If I told you what it felt like, you wouldn’t believe me,” Cox sings in the song’s beautiful refrain, sounding as convincing as could be. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Fox Japan, Hard Copy, Sexores, Fig by Four

We’ve got another excellent and full week ahead of us on Rosy Overdrive in terms of new music, and we’re starting out with an absolute blast of a round-up. This issue of Pressing Concerns looks at new albums from Hard Copy, Sexores, and Fig by Four, and a new EP from Fox Japan.

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.

Fox Japan – Cannibals

Release date: October 16th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Power pop, post-punk
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: The Performer

Fox Japan emerged from Morgantown, West Virginia in the late 2000s, around the tail end of the golden age of “blog rock”. The four-piece band of brothers Charlie Wilmoth, Sam Wilmoth, and Pete Wilmoth plus Andrew Slater initially made sharp, nervous-sounding post-punk revival-ish music, the kinetic energy of the band bouncing off of Charlie Wilmoth’s grandiosely sardonic lyrics (I still think of their grotesque ode to Glenn Beck whenever that man is in the news), but they’ve certainly mellowed in recent years. They’ve aged gracefully into a guitar pop sound closer to Teenage Fanclub or The Chills, although Charlie’s writing never lost its bite–their most recent album, 2020’s What We’re Not, was probably my favorite album of that year due to this uniquely compelling combination.

The members of Fox Japan have moved to different locales in recent years–Pittsburgh, Bloomington, Los Angeles, Fairmont–and Charlie has spent the past few years exploring side projects that have gotten increasingly further from the guitar-based sound of his past (his duo Oblivz with Slater balanced guitars with prominent synths, and his solo project Charles the Obtuse dispensed with the six-strings entirely). With all this in mind, it wouldn’t have been a shock to see Fox Japan fade into the rearview mirror. And yet, here we are with Cannibals, a five-song Fox Japan EP that picks up where the quartet left off those three or so years ago–sort of. If anything, Fox Japan sound looser here than they have of late–almost like, after a couple years wandering away from indie rock, Charlie (and subsequently the rest of the band) are enthused to be inhabiting this skin yet again. Charlie’s writing matches the energy of the band by being less “buttoned up” and more “mask off” than normal; while his recent writing has examined the rot and pain at the heart of “official”-seeming institutions, he’s tapping into something a bit more primal in these five songs.

The EP opens with a couple different sides of Fox Japan–we’ve got the orchestral indie rock of “The Performer” and the 60-second post-punk-pop thrashing of “Mouth of the Century”–but the connection is in the characters here, from the vampiric entity in the former who destroys lives while flourishing his cape and the all-consuming, pretty dickish sentient mouth in the latter (depicted in an unsettling video from Spirit Night/Librarians/Good Sport’s Ryan Hizer). The rest of Cannibals may not be quite as stark, but it fills itself out quite nicely–the detritus rattled off over a mid-tempo, layered instrumental in “Pity Party” feels like the most Oblivz-y moment here, and while “Good Morning” and closing track “Who Are You” feature more “traditional” Fox Japan lyrical moments, the gargantuan and deliberate alt-rock in the latter and equally intentional pop rock in the former give them shapes as distinct as anything else on the EP. In that final track, Wilmoth asks version after version of the titular pointed question–do you belong in Fox Japan’s cadre of cannibals, too? (Bandcamp link)

Hard Copy – 12 Shots of Nature

Release date: October 20th
Record label: Feel It
Genre: Post-punk, garage punk, art punk, experimental rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Torpedo

The latest release from Feel It Records takes the label back to its roots–it’s putting out the debut album of a band hailing from their original hometown of Richmond, Virginia. The quartet of Hard Copy sound ahead of schedule on 12 Shots of Nature, their second release following 2021’s Hidden Beat EP. The band (Michael McBean, Ben Harsel, Ian McQuary, and Louis Henninger) sound like they’ve been playing together for a long time on this record, ripping through a dozen songs that flow together beautifully and wear their influences openly without biting too much from any one band. There’s an undeniable Mark E. Smith influence in the lead vocals, there’s an experimental/rock dichotomy recalling Pere Ubu and Wire, and there’s a Talking Heads/krautrock-esque sense of rhythm going on throughout the album as well. I do want to emphasize that 12 Shots of Nature has a lot of its own personality; there’s nothing rote or uninspired about Hard Copy’s moves on it.

Hard Copy hit the gas on opening track “Chew”, a brisk piece of art punk that actually offers up a garage-y anthem in its chorus. The impact of that chorus is only emphasized by the rest of 12 Shots of Nature–Hard Copy aren’t looking to write that kind of music merely for the sake of it; it just happened to serve the song well. Likewise, the inclusion of decidedly not-“rock” instrumentals like “100,000 Negatives on Glass Plates” and “Wheel Route” only serves to normalize songs like “Stray Dog” and “Torpedo”, which are certainly “weird” but have a transfixing post-punk quality to them. The former zigzags from spoken word impressions to impenetrable noise rock, and the latter contains some lines (“I’ll never live down the fact that my parents made torpedoes for a living / More man than machine, I’m capable of one hundred feelings,” to open) indicating that these lyrical diatribes are more than just space-fillers for the band. “Airlines” and “Paradise” in 12 Shots of Nature’s second half are probably the friendliest moments on the record outside of its opening track, fitting alongside the jagged edges nicely. Post-punk hitmakers Hard Copy are dramatic art rockers Hard Copy (“Pile of Rocks”) are the noise-slinging Hard Copy of “Slapstick”–it’s all one copy. (Bandcamp link)

Sexores – Mar del Sur

Release date: October 20th
Record label: Buh
Genre: Dream pop, synthpop
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Las Aguas en Los Bordes de Fuego

For almost two decades now, Lima, Peru’s Buh Records has been chronicling the experimental and underground sides of Latin American music, both of its past (in the form of archival releases) and present (in its promotion of new bands and musicians). One of these current groups is Quito, Ecuador’s Sexores–since 2010, the band (which has also existed for stints in Barcelona and Mexico) have released four full-length records and an EP before returning with their fifth album, Mar del Sur, this month. The pseudonymous duo (“2046” is on vocals and guitar, “606” on drums) have a dream pop-indebted sound that’s similar to the last Buh Records band I wrote about, Lima’s Thank You Lord for Satan, but while the latter band favored an eclectic, psychedelic take on the genre, Sexores are more comfortable zeroing in on a synthpop, 1980s electronica-influenced version of it. Not that the six songs of Mar del Sur aren’t adventurous, but they make their homes within the warm confines of dreamy, reverby pop music.

With only a half-dozen songs, Sexores have to make every entry on Mar del Sur count, and indeed, all of these tracks feel fully-realized and completely fleshed-out. Opening track “Magallanes” runs about five minutes in length (half of the record does the same, and the other three songs aren’t far behind), with the steady drumbeat anchoring the array of distorted guitars and synths that float alongside 2046’s vocals. “Aequorea” strikes a similar balance, even throwing a bit of 1990s-esque kitchen-sink electronic “alternative” pop into the mix, while songs like “Las Aguas en Los Bordes de Fuego” and “Legos de Lirios” have more than enough fuzzy guitars in their structures to indicate that their stated shoegaze influence is informing these songs as well. There’s a surprising guest rap verse (done in Kichwa, a native Andean language) from rapper DRK on “Biolumínica” that also feels particularly 90s, even as the synthpop/darkwave instrumental is still very much 80s-originating. Mar del Sur closes things out with the steady backbeat of “Albatros”, gliding the record to a fittingly satisfying finish. (Bandcamp link)

Fig by Four – Capture Reveal

Release date: October 20th
Record label: Bomb the Twist
Genre: Alt-rock, dream pop, singer-songwriter, art pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Mea Culpa

Capture Reveal is the debut full-length solo album from Sarah Statham, but she’s hardly a new face in indie rock. She’s been playing music in her hometown of Leeds for fifteen years, serving as a bassist for the band Crake and a drummer for Living Body along with a good deal of session work, guest appearances, and engineering. As Fig by Four, Statham’s version of indie rock is a confident one–both layered and accessible, the ten songs of Capture Reveal reflect the skills she’s been honing for a long time as a musician (she wrote and performed everything you hear on the record), but this long-in-the-gestation-period debut allows for a less-familiar side of Statham (the songwriter) to take center stage without too much window dressing. Capture Reveal is a pop album–her playing and singing seal this, even as it doesn’t feel like Statham goes out of her way to emphasize the friendliness of these songs (letting them speak for themselves).

Taking Capture Reveal in at once, I remain impressed by the ground that Fig by Four cover over its forty minutes. “Otherwirldly” is a perfect slow-building opening track, its melded dream-y pop and rising alt-rock introducing several of the album’s strengths (make your way towards “All Seeing A” if you’re seeking the latter genre, “Cut” for the former). Capture Reveal doesn’t stop moving, offering up the acoustic-based, quietly pretty “3539” in is midsection, then transitioning to synth-colored, exploratory art pop with “It Is, Is It” and “Ferrules” (Statham spent some time in Brooklyn working in youth music education, and, interestingly, she groups the latter two songs together as “Brooklyn” songs). Two of the biggest pop moments on Capture Reveal come near the end: the steadily-moving dream pop of “Lifejackal” and the crunchy electric pop-rock of “Mea Culpa”. An artist only sticks songs like that towards the end of an album if they’re confident and satisfied with the overall statement they’ve made–which Statham should be with Capture Reveal. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Lync, Awakebutstillinbed, Medejin, Screensaver

Another busy week on Rosy Overdrive ends with thoughts on three new albums that come out tomorrow (from Awakebutstillinbed, Medejin, and Screensaver), plus some writing about the Lync reissue that is also out tomorrow. If you missed Monday’s post (featuring new music from Onyon, Al Murb, Combat Naps, and Zero Bars) or Tuesday’s post (the beginning of my deep dive into new-to-me music from 1993), 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.

Lync – These Are Not Fall Colors (Reissue)

Release date: October 20th
Record label: Suicide Squeeze
Genre: Post-hardcore, 90s indie rock, noise rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Perfect Shot

I’m not exactly breaking any new ground by declaring the Pacific Northwest in the 1990s a fertile ground for indie rock. There are plenty that remain in the public consciousness of the music world today, either due to exploding onto the mainstream (Modest Mouse, Death Cab for Cutie), steadily building and maintaining their cult hero status (Sleater-Kinney, Built to Spill), or being yanked from the past via caring, painstakingly-assembled reissues (Unwound and, most recently, Heatmiser). These barely scratch the surface of a wide-ranging and fertile scene, however–an environment perfect for creating one-album wonders like Lync, who released These Are Not Fall Colors and a handful of singles in their two years of activity in the early 90s. The trio of vocalist/guitarist Sam Jayne (who would later go on to front Love As Laughter), bassist James Bertram (who also played in 764-HERO and co-founded Red Stars Theory), and drummer Dave Schneider briefly aligned to make a sharp record that stands as a testament to the raw power of independent rock music.

These Are Not Fall Colors has been given an overdue vinyl reissue by Suicide Squeeze after being out of print for over a decade, and it sounds about as fresh as you could imagine something like this could. It exists in the middle of an underground music crossroads–if you liked Dischord Records’ agitated post-punk, the punky-post-hardcore of Drive Like Jehu, and the still-congealing sound of “emo”, you can find something to enjoy on this one. Although its original home of K Records feels a little off, there’s even a little bit of an early Built to Spill lo-fi pop in “Perfect Shot” and “Cue Cards” (and even the louder, noisier songs have a dogged catchiness to them). Highlights like opening track “B” and side two’s “Turtle” both kick off as loose basement rock that feels like it could’ve come from anywhere at any time, and they both eventually roar into noise rock songs that create a sound that’s only ever been achieved by the combination of the three of them playing. “Can’t Tie Yet” is the one bonus track included on this reissue, and its chaotic energy makes me wonder just what a follow-up album to this would’ve sounded like.

Casting a shadow over this reissue is the fact that Jayne isn’t alive to witness it–he passed away in late 2020 due to “undiagnosed health conditions” in the midst of financial hardship–and my uncomfortable belief that it took his death to get These Are Not Fall Colors a proper reissue. I remember it languishing on Lync’s Bandcamp page in years past for anyone to listen to, but there appeared to be no one with the will to give it a proper push back to streaming services and/or a physical re-release. Although These Are Not Fall Colors is a unique record in its structure and energy, to me, it also represents the fact that there are a sea of records as good as this one, in their own distinct ways, out there, for those of us who dig deep enough to reach them. This will certainly not be the last time I write about a reissued 1990s indie rock record, and my message to those who have any kind of control over the overseeing of such projects is this: next time, I’d love to be doing it about an album whose principal architects are still very much alive. (Bandcamp link)

Awakebutstillinbed – Chaos Takes the Wheel and I Am a Passenger

Release date: October 20th
Record label: Tiny Engines
Genre: Emo, emo-punk, screamo
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Road

Tiny Engines returned to the realm of active labels with a solid but low-key reintroduction earlier this month in Bewilder’s From the Eyrie, a new (to most of us) band that didn’t have any prior history with the imprint. Two weeks later, the soft launch is over–they’re releasing the long-awaited follow-up to one of the most beloved Tiny Engines albums of all-time. San Jose’s Awakebutstillinbed quietly self-released What People Call Low Self​-Esteem Is Really Just Seeing Yourself The Way That Other People See You at the beginning of 2018; as it slowly but surely grew through word of mouth, Tiny Engines gave it a proper release a couple of months later. This is where I get a bit less objective and admit that, while several Tiny Engines records were and are very important to me, the debut Awakebutstillinbed album was never one of them. I can certainly see why its ragged, screamo-shot-through sound resonated in the realms that it did, but I viewed it solidly in the “not for me” camp. Thus, I wasn’t sure what to expect when putting on Chaos Takes the Wheel and I Am a Passenger, the five-years-in-the-making sophomore Awakebutstillinbed album, but suffice it to say that this thing won me over.

Aided by the prolific Joe Reinhart’s production, it becomes apparent from the get-go that Awakebutstillinbed have polished up their sound but without really “toning it down”. The band (guitarist/vocalist/songwriter Shannon Taylor, guitarist/keyboardist Brendan Gibson, bassist Alex Botkin, and drummer Erik Lobo) hone in on a big, wrecking ball of an emo-rock sound throughout Chaos Takes the Wheel…, although the expansive, hourlong double album still leaves plenty of room for the band to wander and kick against the shinier parts of the record. As great as they sound, I’d still have trouble calling an emo album that opens with back-to-back six and eight minute songs “accessible”, for one. Meanwhile, while shorter tracks like “Far” and “Airport” begin as slick emo-punk anthems, they don’t stay there forever, as they both end up featuring some of the most intense vocal performances on the album from Taylor, whose voice maybe sounds cleaner on average but certainly hasn’t abandoned her roots. That being said, I’m still somewhat of an emo outsider, and so I find myself transfixed by the quieter moments on the album’s second half–the acoustic “Savior”, the seven-minute exhale of “Enough”, and closing track “Passenger”. The latter two tracks eventually wind their way to loud emo-rock by their conclusions, with the semi-title track in particular juxtaposing the expansive sound with the resignation described in the record’s name. In that one, Taylor exorcises some particularly rough thoughts and ends with a triumphant-sounding “I want to be alone”; if that’s not the mark of a classic emo album, I’m not sure what is. (Bandcamp link)

Medejin – The Garden

Release date: October 20th
Record label: Den Tapes/Icy Cold
Genre: Dream pop, synthpop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Shell

The term “dream pop” covers a pretty wide range of styles of music these days–I can tell you that Seattle’s Medejin are practitioners of it, sure, but for those wishing to get a more detailed explanation than that, I’d point no further than the sweeping chorus of opening track “Shell”, in which lead singer Jenn Taranto’s vocals are full, right up front, and melodic, and the instrumental feels like it’s serving her singing rather than the other way around. That is to say, The Garden is definitely on the pop side of dream pop. Although this is the quartet’s debut album, it’s hardly the work of fresh faces–Medejin has been releasing singles and EPs since at least 2017, and Taranto has solo material dating all the way back to 2006, before she met up with guitarist Rebecca Gutterman, bassist Ramsey Troxel, and drummer Matthew Cooke. Taranto has been doing this a while; it feels like she’s gotten the art of writing pop songs for her band to expand and explore down pat at this point.

Although I’m impressed with the pop side of The Garden, I don’t want to understate what the band does on its eleven songs, either; they refer to it as both a dream pop and a post-rock album, and the textures that Medejin explore both underneath and in between Taranto’s vocal melodicism bear this out in a pleasing and interesting way. Although the band open the album with the most conventional-sounding song (“Shell” is about one step removed from a Cranberries or Sundays single), the pop on the rest of the record is a bit more layered and offbeat (while still being very much present), from the fuzz rock of “Our Apartment” to the stretched textures of “January” to the stops and starts that piece together “Sea Stacking”, slowly but surely. Taranto’s synth playing is an interesting recurrent feature throughout the album; typically she keeps it lower in the mix, but she earns the chance to let the keyboard run free on the title track. Still, Medejin as just as likely to lean on the rhythm section (“World’s Fair”) or step back to let Taranto deliver a ballad accompanied by little more than her guitar (the majority of “Everything’s Out of Tune”). Creating a pop album in this realm requires more than a bit of cooperation and synchronicity, and that’s exactly where Medejin excel. (Bandcamp link)

Screensaver – Decent Shapes

Release date: October 20th
Record label: Poison City/Upset the Rhythm
Genre: Post-punk, synthpunk, new wave
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Direct Debit

Melbourne’s Screensaver began in the mid-2010s as a collaboration between vocalist/synth player Krystal Manyard and guitarist Christopher Stephenson (who also plays with Spray Paint and EXEK, two underappreciated art punk/post-punk groups). In this decade, they’ve expanded to a five piece (featuring drummer James Beck, bassist Dorian Vary, and second synth player Jonnine Nokes), put out their debut album Expressions of Interest in 2021, and now are back almost exactly two years later with their sophomore record. As one might expect from a band with two synth players, the instrument takes on a prominent role on Decent Shapes, but the guitars and rhythm section certainly do everything in their power to make this a synth-rock record rather than a “synthpop” one. Although there’s no shortage of Australian bands making post-punk music at the moment, Screensaver’s is of a mostly different strain–it’s less of the garage-y Devo-core of groups like Delivery and Vintage Crop and more of a tougher, beefier variety that owes more to Stephenson’s noise rock background and (as emphasized by Manyard’s vocals) even a bit of goth-rock.

Decent Shapes has an inarguable setup–ten songs, none of which pull any punches. The classic post-punk-driven “Red Lines” opens things on a particularly balanced note, where every instrument feels like it contributes about an equal share to the song’s structure. The equilibrium continues throughout the record’s first half, even as the band traverse into busier territory with the rave-up of “The Guilt” and the dark dance-punk of “Party Interest”. The album’s midsection feels like its hardest-hitting part–the soaring synths trumpet the doom felt in the quick-tempoed “Drainer”, “Severance Pay” kicks up a garage-y storm, and “Direct Debit” clangs along into a post-punk anthem. Screensaver don’t let up on the gas; while closing track “Signals” is the only thing that more or less resembles a synthpop song on the record, it gets there by simply pushing the synths a little more forward rather than dialing back on the rest of the record’s energy.  It’s a slightly different way to telegraph darkness, but, like on the rest of Decent Shapes, Screensaver get their point across. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

My 1993 Listening Log (Part 1)

I’ve published a few of these on Rosy Overdrive by now, but for those who are unfamiliar and don’t know the drill, here’s what you’re reading: In September, I listened to one new-to-me album from 1993 every day, wrote down a little bit of what I thought about it, and posted this in the Rosy Overdrive Discord (which I encourage you to join; it’s a lot less toxic than Twitter, for one). At the beginning of the year, I did this for 1997, and in the middle of the year I tackled 1981 (which had to be split up in two parts). 

I went into this exercise having heard about a hundred albums from 1993, substantially more than either 1997 or 1981 (if you’re wondering why you aren’t seeing Icky Mettle or Last Splash or Exile in Guyville or Star or any number of albums I already know and love on here, well; I’ve spent plenty of time in this year before). I was a bit skeptical that I’d be able to put together a list I’d be excited about for an entire month–I’m happy to say that this skepticism was ill-founded. There will be a part two of this (edit: you can read it here).

Bandamp embeds are included when available.

September 1st: Bjork – Debut (One Little Indian/Elektra)

Well, we have to start with “debut”, right? The last 90s Bjork album left for me to hear, and the most immediate one to “hit”. I love Homogenic but it took me a while—this one sounds great out the gate. Of course, it helps if you have a three-song run like the first three here to launch your solo career. I think that part of why I like this one is that there’s still traces of The Sugarcubes’ party pop rock, even as she’s pretty clearly “Bjork” now (“Big Time Sensuality” could’ve been a Sugarcubes song, but it works perfectly fine as a “Bjork song” too).

September 2nd: Redd Kross – Phaseshifter (This Way Up/Mercury)

Been told for a while that I’d be into Redd Kross, and turns out: I am! This album rocks! It’s a really big power pop thing, to me—the way that the band really embraces big hooks, big guitars, and rockstar moves feels a lot like modern power pop revivalists, even as the 70s hard rock/glam is a lot more clear here than most modern bands would dare. The music is no-nonsense, lyrics are…not the main draw here but other than on “Saragon” they don’t get in the way of the Tunes. Probably a song or two too long but today’s bands cutting 24-minute records could learn from the swagger.

September 3rd: Robyn Hitchcock & the Egyptians – Respect (A&M)

There are more solid Robyn Hitchcock albums than we as a society deserve. He’ll always be most associated with the 80s but he had an underappreciated 90s and Respect is no exception. Not here to tell you it’s his crowning achievement, am here to say that this solid and laid-back (“The Yip Song” excepted) collection coinciding with the end of his time as a college radio hitmaker is another piece of a rewarding puzzle. And that nobody other than Hitchcock could’ve written something like “Serpent at the Gates of Wisdom” and then stashed it on a mid-career album’s B-side.

September 4th: Vic Chesnutt – Drunk (Texas Hotel)

Been looking forward to this one. Love some of Vic’s other albums (Little, Is the Actor Happy?) but I’d missed this one until now. It starts off alright, but it really takes off in the middle—starting with “When I Ran Off and Left Her” and continuing through “Naughty Fatalist” is just one near-perfect Vic song after another. And they’re pretty varied too; some of them are spare acoustic Vic and others are cranked electric Vic—he’s giving the best of his unmistakable and unique performance on all of them, though. I don’t know if this would knock Little off as my favorite Vic but my initial impressions suggest it’s possible (not sure I needed two versions of “Sleeping Man”, though).

September 5th: Aimee Mann – Whatever (Imago)

I’d apologize for starting this exercise with a bunch of layups, but I’m having too much fun. Anyway: Aimee Mann is great. Jon Brion is great. This album has plenty of what I enjoy most about both of them (I’m shocked that “Mr. Harris” isn’t one of the Brion co-writes, but that just goes to show how the two of them have a sound that’s inseparable to me at this point). All of these songs sound great; some of them “hit” for me immediately, others are okay but I could see them revealing something with time, which has been a characteristic of pretty much every Mann album I’ve heard before (it’s nice to hear how fully-formed this all was on her solo debut).

September 6th: Bratmobile – Pottymouth (Kill Rock Stars)

Yeah, I can get down with this. Going into this, I wasn’t really sure what differentiated Bratmobile from the other prominent riot grrl bands—the cover of “Cherry Bomb” is a good indication of where Bratmobile are coming from here. There’s some rage on this album but it’s not really the dominant mode here—Bratmobile are a bit more interested in filtering older pop music through their setup. It’s a very fun-sounding album, and one that seems aware of what was going on around them in the PNW, with moments recalling a bit of Beat Happening (“Polaroid Baby”) and Dead Moon (“No You Don’t”). Even their more fiery moments (like “Bitch Theme”) are pretty pop-informed. Holds up pretty well, enjoyed this more than I thought I would.

September 7th: Hum – Electra 2000 (12 Inch/Cargo)

Hum! Been a fan of Hum for several years now; I think I passed over this one because I was confusing it with their disavowed, Hum-in-name-only debut Fillet Show. This one definitely belongs under the Hum name—the band sound great already. Still, their combination of alt-metal, post-hardcore, grunge, and stoner-y rock, while intriguing, maybe hasn’t progressed to “greater than the sum of its parts” territory here. Fewer instantly memorable songs/moments/riffs. Worth a listen but this band was only going up from here.

September 8th: Dog Faced Hermans – Hum of Life (Konkurrel/Project A Bomb)

Gotta think of something to say about this one other than “it rocks!” Excellent vocalist, really smooth and thrilling low-end, ace deployment of string and horns at various points, clean sound—it’s just an excellent post-punk/art punk/noise rock whatever album. If this came out today, it’d sound like the freshest thing. Been into their ‘91 album for a bit now and happy to report this one is every bit as good (and more accessible probably, so maybe a better starting place). DFH seem like one or those bands that not that many people know but those who do are really into them—would recommend joining the club.

September 9th: Superconductor – Hit Songs for Girls (Boner)

Oh, yes. This is absolutely the back-of-the-rack indie rock kind of stuff I’m looking to hit in this project. This is AC Newman’s pre-New Pornographers (at this point, pre-Zumpano also) band, and it sounds like post-hardcore and fuzz pop fighting for control with each other. This is pretty fucked up (as in they kinda sound like the band Fucked Up); or if you prefer they sound like Sonic Youth if they weren’t cool and favored guttural vocals. Is it “good”? I’m not really sure, but I do think there’s some pockets that are worthwhile even if I can’t sign off on the full thing at this time. “Thorsen’s Eleven”, “There Goes Helen”…not sure where else you’re gonna get stuff like this. Ends with a thirty-minute track of feedback because of course.

September 10th: MK Ultra – s/t (Artichoke)

This is another “early release by someone whose later work I like a lot” pick. MK Ultra was John Vanderslice’s pre-solo career band; this was their first album of three. It’s definitely a rougher, less polished version of the sound that he’d nail around the turn of the century (and subsequently move on from)—vaguely edgy, scrappy but deceptively slick barebones indie rock. JV was already establishing himself as a resident of the outer edges of acceptable society with songs like “Death’s Superstar” (a tribute to the Zodiac Killer) and “Post Office Bomb” (use your imagination on this one). Definitely loses some momentum in the second half (a bit too many boilerplate midtempo rockers), but stuff like “Twenty Seconds” is a nice “in progress” snapshot of a soon to be great songwriter.

September 11th: Quicksand – Slip (Polydor)

Even though it’s heavier than most of the 90s indie rock I like, it does feel like a glaring omission that I’d never checked Quicksand out til now. I always just kind of assumed they were a DC band (they’re NY); listening to Slip, an album that doesn’t contain that much reverence for hardcore, I get how they differ (not an expert on this, but I’d guess this is a key album on the journey of how “post-hardcore” became something completely divorced from its roots). Even if I’d still say this is on the whole “not my bag”, I can tell that it’s good at what it does—rocking out enough for the punks while remaining grounded enough for the indie rock crowd. Unsurprisingly I like the moments where their post-punk side (rather than their metal side) peeks through. It’s intriguing enough I could see myself returning to it, if more for a still-unsatiated curiosity than being blown away by it.

September 12th: Lovesliescrushing – bloweyelashwish (Lullaby)

There are a lot of canonical shoegaze albums from this year. I wanna listen to a lot of them, but I’m going to have to spread them out because I get burnt out on this kind of music pretty quickly. Anyway, this one was a bit of a slog for me to get through. Bloweyelashwish—great album title, great band name, just not for me. Solidly on the post-rock/ambient side of the shoegaze spectrum, the album kind of just feels like an hour of unmoored, slightly directed guitar feedback. I will say that it’s quite interesting this came out in ‘93, and I certainly get why it has something of a cult following, but it’s just not what I come to guitar music for.

September 13th: Cub – Betti-Cola (Mint)

Ooh yes, I’m really into this one. Pop-twee-punk from British Columbia, just one hit after another. I think Betti-Cola is half compilation, half new material—either way, it goes through two dozen great pop songs in 45 minutes or so. Their cover of Beat Happening’s “Cast a Shadow” rules so hard and helped me realize that Calvin Johnson might be my Bob Dylan (love the songwriting, can’t get past the voice), although they knock plenty of their originals out of the park, too. I’ll single out the simple effectiveness of “Pretty Pictures”, the decidedly less clear but no less potent “Electric Chair”…oh, “My Assassin”, that one rules too. Really, you can hit something great no matter where you are on Betti Cola. Pop music!

September 14th: Robert Earl Keen – A Bigger Piece of Sky (Sugar Hill)

Goodness. The first half of this album is hands-down the best thing I’ve heard for this so far. Elevator pitch would be: what if Richard Thompson was from Texas? Mr. Keen has had his songs recorded by several notable country artists, but this album isn’t hamstrung by tradition—it comes barreling out of the gate with its hybrid electric country-rock-and-roll. Any of the first five songs would be the highlight of most songwriters’ careers, there’s so much going on in all of them (shockingly, the cover of the legendary Terry Allen is the least interesting of the five-but it’s still great). The rest of the album is more laid-back, less immediate, and more ballad-heavy. Was disappointed in that half at first but I’m on the second listen and appreciating some of these more—“Here in Arkansas” especially is just about as good as any of the earlier highlights. (Note: I listened to the 2004 “resequenced” version, which apparently reflects Keen’s original intended track order. The 1993 version spread the “rockers” out more, while Keen’s version grouped them together at the beginning. Surprised that the label apparently didn’t want that!)

September 15th: The Boo Radleys – Giant Steps (Creation)

I don’t think The Boo Radleys really ever made it to the States, but they were (are?) pretty big over “across the pond”. I had this in my head as a shoegaze album, but turns out that’s not quite accurate. What it is is a very British album—there are some distorted guitar heavy moments, but there’s also (perhaps even more) a lot of Britpop, Beatles-y psychedelic pop, and even a bit of Madchester sound. Plenty of hooks here, importantly—a 60+ minute 90s Brit-rock album feels like a recipe for bloat but it appears pretty consistent all the way through, even though it’s a lot to take in and I’m still figuring it out. There’s probably a more utopian alternate future where this blew up over here instead of that one Oasis album.

September 16th: Matt Keating – Tell It to Yourself (Alias)

Alias Records singer-songwriter; got on my radar due to Scott Miller writing about “Sanity in the Asylum” in Music: What Happened. That song leads off this album and it’s as I remember it—an excellent piece of post-college rock power pop. Was trying to think of who the chorus to “‘92” reminded me of and I realized it was Tommy Keene, and Miracle Legion/Mark Mulcahy is another big point of comparison throughout the record (Keating is from Boston; this album feels very “New England”). The rest of the album is more mellow than “Sanity” and not as immediately brilliant, although there’s definitely some very good songs here (“When You Don’t Have to Work” , “‘92”, “Nostalgia”). A little on the longer side but if this description sounds up your alley it’s worth checking out.

September 17th: Madder Rose – Bring It Down (Seed/Big Beat)

Not sure if I’m gonna have much insightful to say about this one. In a good way, I mean. It’s just…really solid, sharp 90s rock music. I listened to Madder Rose’s 2023 album, thought it was quite good, went back to what seems like their most popular one, turns out this was good too. Thought they were more of a slowcore, dream-folk band but turns out they’re a lot closer to Belly-ish fuzz pop (still somewhat dreamy) here, or like if Mazzy Star were trying to be more power pop. Again, great pop songs, not sure if I’ve got much more to add.

September 18th: Hypnolovewheel – Altered States (Alias)

Another Alias Records act (this was unintentional!). This is some really great classic American indie rock. Their main mode on this one is fuzzy rock—definitely a band that heard what was going on in New Zealand and was influenced by it, and I hear Dino Jr. and Sonic Youth in here too. They arose from the same relative location and time period as Yo La Tengo—they’re sort of a punkier version of earlier YLT. The separation factor between them and most of the other basement rock bands is that this is a big big pop album—Hypnolovewheel had the tunes. First two songs are fuzz pop classics, plus “Turn You Off”, “Dysfunctional Friend”…jeez.

September 19th: Even As We Speak – Feral Pop Frenzy (Sarah)

First of all, what an album title. Feral Pop Frenzy is what this thing is, after all. Even As We Speak are still around (they actually had a song on that Skep Wax comp I wrote about last year); until 2020, this was their only full-length, though. It’s an incredibly fun listen, nearly twenty songs that veer between perfect guitar pop (“Straight As an Arrow”, “Falling Down the Stairs”, “Love Is the Answer”, “Swimming Song”, “One Step Forward”) and shorter, occasionally weirder “snippet”/interlude kind of songs. Obviously I prefer the “hits” but I can appreciate the journey…I understand this kinda thing. Alien Lanes for the Sarah Records scene, maybe.

September 20th: The Jean-Paul Sartre Experience – Bleeding Star (Matador/Flying Nun/Mushroom)

First of what’ll probably be several New Zealand entries on this list. JPS Experience were from Christchurch and put out music on Flying Nun (this one also came out on Matador), but their sound was more shoegaze-y and heavier than most of the Dunedin bands (although it’s also 60s psychedelic influenced, so it’s more like a fuzzier cousin to the rest of those bands). Bleeding Star was their final album, and it has one perfect fuzz pop tune in “Into You” that kicks things off. Subsequently it peaks very early; the rest of the album is fine but it doesn’t reach those heights again. “Still Can’t Be Seen” is pretty good though, as is the title track. The spaciness in the last couple tracks is enjoyable too—look, it’s a solid album overall.

September 21st: Digable Planets – Reachin’ (A New Refutation of Time and Space) (Pendulum/Elektra)

Oh yes. I like a 90s hip hop single here and there but generally don’t enjoy getting through the full-lengths (gun to my head, The Low End Theory is my favorite). This one though is definitely my speed. People who view music differently than I do would say it “aged well” (thematically as well as musically). The snappy jazz rap is cool and interesting-sounding enough to me to build an hour-long album off of, and the smooth flows are really fun to listen to as well. Other than the single “Rebirth of Slick (Cool Like Dat)” the songs kinda still blend into each other for me at this point, but that’s less of a complaint and more of a “well, it’s all solid-sounding” observation from me. And, unfortunately, the content about pro-lifers and the Supreme Court is, if anything, even more relevant today than it was 30 years ago. Earmarking this one to come back to.

September 22nd: The Harvest Ministers – Little Dark Mansion (Sarah)

This one wasn’t on my radar initially (h/t @trisarahtops in the Discord). This is a long-running Irish group that still appear to be going. On the surface, this album has a lot in common with a bunch of 80s C86 guitar pop stuff, albeit on the slower/folkier side and with string touches. There’s a really big heaviness that hovers over these songs, however—it’s there for the entire record, but it really overtakes things starting with “When You Have a Faint Heart” and it does not let up from there. It’s pretty serious and haunting-sounding stuff. It’s not my favorite album I’ve heard through this but it’s a unique application of some musical tools I like a lot and I’m glad to have heard it.

September 23rd: Flying Saucer Attack – s/t (FSA/VHF)

We’re back in the shoegaze realm again today. Like the Lovesliescrushing album from earlier, Flying Saucer Machine land on the spacey/atmospheric/experimental/ambient whatever end of the spectrum, although there’s more “rock” for me to hold onto with this one. Effectively it’s some heavy reverb rockers mixed in with odder fare, with the first couple songs and “Wish” being highlights of the former (and the barren martian closing track being a nice final left turn). Nevertheless it’s still a bit far away from what I typically enjoy, so it’s probably not something I’d come back to very much. I’ve liked a few FSM influenced bands in my day though and it’s nice to hear more clearly what they’re drawing from.

September 24th: Lisa Germano – Happiness (Capital/4AD)

I’m feeling pretty conflicted about this one. Like—I like it, I think that this is a “good” record, but I still can’t but help feeling like I don’t quite grasp/vibe with Lisa Germano’s whole sound. The songs on this album that I gravitate the most towards are the simpler ones—”Energy”, “Cowboy”, “The Dresses Song”. These huge-sounding, layered orchestral dream-folk pieces like “Puppet” and “Sycophant”? I mean, I see the appeal of them, and they’re impressive, but they’re less my thing. Also, there’s some “multiple versions with different tracklists” fuckery going on here—the widely available version is from the 1994 4AD reissue, and one of my favorite songs (“Destroy the Flower”) wasn’t even on the 1993 Capitol version (and a couple songs on the original version aren’t streaming and I didn’t go out of my way to seek them out—any Germano-heads can let me know if her version of “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’” is an absolute must-listen).

September 25th: Urge Overkill – Saturation (Geffen)

There was a time in my life where I cared too much about what Steve Albini said thirty years ago to listen to this album. Anyway, this is a perfectly fine, inoffensive, if not particularly memorable power pop record. Gets off to quite the hot start with “Sister Havana” and “Positive Bleeding” but it definitely loses some steam from there on out. It mostly just kinda feels like attempts to recreate those earlier successes but in a not as interesting way. The only song that really stuck out to me in the second half was “Dropout”. Probably would’ve been cool to hear most of this on the radio in ‘93 though.

September 26th: Stephen – Radar of Small Dogs (Flying Nun/Festival)

David Kilgour started a band called Stephen after The Clean broke up for the first time; they made an EP in the late 80s and demoed another before, I guess, The Clean got back together. Radar of Small Dogs is technically a compilation—it’s the first EP, the second EP demos, and a couple live recordings. If you like The Clean, I’ve got good news—this band also sounds like them! The first EP is a great translation of Kilgour’s poppy side—the second is too, but (probably partially due to the demo nature of it) these ones are a bit fuzzier/spacier. Great listen, recommended if you like any of the NZ stuff and haven’t heard it. The 2020 reissue has two songs (“Splash Yre Jewels” and “Kills All My Fun”) that weren’t on the original, and also, shout out to Grouper for reissuing it on her label.

September 27th: Moss Icon – Lyburnum Wits End Liberation Fly (Vermiform)

The music here is great, although I think I might not be able to get past the vocals. It’s funny—on the surface, these vocals should be more my thing than the skramz stuff that was coming down the pipeline, but the guy reminds me of Black Flag and I have the same problem with Rollins, namely that angsty-aggro guy speak-singing frantically isn’t something I enjoy in more than small doses. Again, though, I really do like the music on this one—really good, adventurous punk stuff that sounds pretty timeless. It wouldn’t be a landmark historical emo album if you weren’t thinking, “these vocals man, I don’t know” at some point in the album, though.

September 28th: Nanci Griffith – Other Voices, Other Rooms (Elektra)

The country-folk singer plays an hour’s worth of her favorite songs—Dylan, Guthrie, Prine, Van Zandt, and some people you haven’t heard of, too. The quality here is undeniable; these are pretty much all great songs, and Griffith largely does them justice. Definitely a CD-era runtime, although I can’t fault Griffith for running up the tracklist for something like this. A bunch of guest stars here, too—Prine himself sings on a version of his “Speed of the Sound of Loneliness”, which I hadn’t heard before but I think is one of his finest songs after hearing it. One needs a pretty high tolerance of folk-pop to enjoy it as a whole (which I do have), but it’s worth a listen if this description sounds intriguing.

September 29th: Adickdid – Dismantle (G)

Eugene, Oregon riot grrrl group. Probably most notable for being Kaia Wilson’s pre-Team Dresch band. It’s a lot more…subtle? than I’d expect from “starting teenage band from somebody who would eventually become a queercore/punk icon”. This album has a slower heaviness to it—it’s some dark, dreary, probably grunge-influenced Pacific Northwest punk/indie rock. There’s a couple scorchers (namely “Ask Nicely”) but mostly they seethe in a less open way. Really interesting/intriguing sound, even as the songs themselves are mostly just okay—maybe not the most memorable on their own. Solid listen regardless, though.

September 30th: Smog – Julius Caesar (Drag City)

Bill Callahan did how many push-ups? He was how drunk at your wedding? Why is he singing about looting? And what does Star Wars have to do with any of this? Haha. Anyway, early, lo-fi clang-folk Smog is pretty hit-or-miss for me, but this might be the most consistent pre-Red Apple Falls album by him that I’ve heard (and actually, I think I’ve heard all of them now after this). Maybe the highs aren’t as high as some of those other ones, but it’s intriguing and gripping throughout I’d say. “What Kind of Angel” is creepy as hell but that’s maybe the point. Not a Callahan diehard by any means but glad he’s got so much weirdo music just sitting back here.

Pressing Concerns: Onyon, Al Murb, Combat Naps, Zero Bars

October is more than halfway over now, and Pressing Concerns continues to roll on with more great new music for you, the reader, to enjoy. This is a nice “under the radar” edition (even more than normal, yes), featuring new albums from Onyon, Al Murb, and Combat Naps, and a new EP from Zero Bars.

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.

Onyon – Last Days on Earth

Release date: October 13th
Record label: Trouble in Mind
Genre: Post-punk, punk, no wave, garage punk
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Egg Machine

Last year was a relatively quiet one for Trouble in Mind Records, but one intriguing release they did put out was a reissue of Onyon, the self-titled debut EP from the Leipzig, Germany-based quartet. That record’s sharp garage-y post-punk indeed sounded promising to me, and I didn’t have to wait too long to hear more from Onyon, as their debut full-length album has landed about a year and a half later. Last Days on Earth feels like a more fleshed-out version of their debut’s sound, both on a surface level (it only has three more songs than Onyon, but it’s twice as long) and inside the individual songs, in which the band (guitarist/vocalist Ilka Kellner, keyboardist/vocalist Maria Untheim, bassist Florian Schmidt, and drummer Mario Pongratz) take advantage of the album’s extra space to get just a bit weirder, without losing any of their garage-y fire.

Last Days on Earth introduces itself with the dizzy guitar riff and taut rhythm section of “Alien Alien”, a layered but lean piece of post-punk that requires a bit of restraint to pull off–and while the band turn up the amps on the following “Talking Worms” and “Egg Machine”, they’re still leaning just as heavily on rhythm and timing as they are on punk aggression. Untheim’s keyboard is a sneakily important ingredient in Onyon’s sound throughout the record–the in-one’s-face post-punk vocals and careening guitar are so prominent that it takes a second to realize just how much that, say, the whooshing, eerie synths on “Two Faces” or the chaotic chirping in “Dogman” are integral to these songs’ sounds. Thirty-seven minutes is actually on the longer end for this kind of record these days, but it’s hard to see what “fat” could’ve been trimmed here–two of the longest songs on the record (“I Would Like To Eat The Newspaper” and “Mower”) pad out the end of the album, but they’re both hypnotic and successful pieces of garage punk that earn their places on Last Days on Earth. I’d go as far as to say that the stretched-out nature of these songs is instrumental in making Onyon’s debut album feel like a substantial forward step for the band. (Bandcamp link)

Al Murb – BRD SHT

Release date: October 13th
Record label: Small Shot
Genre: Lo-fi pop, psychedelic pop, experimental rock, 90s indie rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Game Over

Al Murb is a Pocatello, Idaho-based basement rocker–his Bandcamp page features a steady stream of albums and singles dating back to 2017. Murb appears to be recording the bulk of his material himself, with a smattering of pseudonymous guest contributions on each record (BRD SHT features backing vocals from “Apples Over Oysters”, which appears to be a Scottish bedroom folk project, and “Beastmaster”, which could be a number of different things). BRD SHT is the sixth Al Murb album, following last year’s ACNE SCARS & BASKETBALL SHORTS, and on this one Murb is definitely making music for the true lo-fi indie rock scum amongst us. Although Murb certainly uses a few modern “bedroom pop” tricks, BRD SHT is more 90s indie rock-influenced than anything else. It reminds me of the latest album by Minneapolis’ Shrimp Olympics, but while that album’s guiding star is Martin Newell, Murb is more Malkmus/Berman (it has the low-key adventurousness of The Jicks, the sloppiness of early Pavement, and some of the Silver Jews’ twang).

Of course, having good influences is one thing, but none of that means much if Al Murb doesn’t have the songwriting skills to do something with them–thankfully, BRD SHT is a more than engaging enough listen. After the noisy intro track, “Mr. Huggable” opens the album on a weirdly fascinating note–it just sounds wrong, with Murb murmuring over an instrumental with a bizarrely forward drumbeat and a laid-back guitar groove. It takes until “Game Over” for BRD SHT to deliver something relatively straightforward, a guitar pop tune in which Murb puts on his best J. Mascis/Kurt Vile face to pull it off. This is how BRD SHT continues, Murb offering up psychedelic noisiness, multi-part prog-pop, and moments of clarity as he trips through these fourteen songs with a Dan Bejar-esque irreverence. On the one hand, Murb offers up overstuffed songs like “We’re Never Going Back to the Foam Pit” and six-minute closing track “The Moose’s Bitch”, and on the other hand, there’s stuff like the lo-fi drum machine jangle pop “Pumpkin Bowling” and the messy ballad of “Grief Jerky”. BRD SHT is a record that’s completely at home being all over the map. (Bandcamp link)

Combat Naps – Tap In

Release date: October 14th
Record label: ABC Postman
Genre: Power pop, indie pop, lo-fi pop, twee
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Water Tower

Neal Jochmann started Combat Naps as a solo project while living in Chicago in the mid-2010s; in 2018, he moved to Madison and started amassing a stable of collaborators–Tim Anderson, Marley Van Raalte, Ivette Colón, Ilych Meza. Although I’ve not seen Combat Naps live, Jochmann describes a dichotomy between the lo-fi, offbeat pop of the band’s recorded output (frequently played entirely by Jochmann himself) and the loud, punk-y confidence of the five-piece’s live shows (a duality shared by several of my favorite bands, from Guided by Voices to Pere Ubu). The twelve-song, 25-minute “mini album” Tap In is the second Combat Naps release of 2023, following January’s White Page EP, and it once again finds Jochmann and his collaborators in pure pop mode. These dozen tracks are brief, friendly dispatches of lo-fi guitar pop; I hear early Of Montreal here, as well as the more mellow moments of Tony Molina’s pre-solo career band Ovens, although there are plenty of moments where Jochmann dodges the obvious move to give the record a personal spin and capture some of the same intangible charm of his influences.

If Combat Naps want to call Tap In a mini-album, then it’s a mini-album, but there’s more than enough here to qualify it as a proper full-length in my book. The record opens with the perfect bouncy power pop of “Water Tower”, a piece of post-LVL UP weird shininess, and “Shuffling Letters” adds a bit of Midwestern rootsiness to the record’s sound in a way that makes perfect sense. The next few songs on the record are breezy and relatively simple, lulling the listener into a false sense of security before “Always Asking” brings the off-center side of Combat Naps back into the open with a deconstructed piece of bass-driven, almost proggy indie dance pop that suggests that Jochmann has listened to plenty of Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?-era Of Montreal as well. Tap In doesn’t run out of steam, continuing to dart towards their acoustic pop bread and butter (“Ready to Fall”, “Had It All to Say”) and some more surprises (like “Up to the Task”, which injects a bit of electric power pop into its tightly-constructed writing). Especially for people who enjoy the kind of music I cover regularly on Pressing Concerns, I can’t imagine not liking at least some aspects of Tap In. (Bandcamp link)

Zero Bars – Demo 2023

Release date: September 29th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Punk rock, hardcore punk, garage punk
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Pinhead Dust

Zero Bars’ Bandcamp bio contains two words: “No filler”–and considering that their debut cassette EP clocks in at under six minutes, it’s pretty essential that the Toronto trio live up to that ethos. The information that the group have online is pretty minimal, as well–their four-song debut, Demo 2023, was recorded by the group’s three members, Alex, Chris, and Josh, this past summer, and it’s available via cassette or free download on Bandcamp. No context is really needed to enjoy this brief statement of purpose from Zero Bars, however. The band are already excellent practitioners of vintage punk rock of Demo 2023–their laconic approach to songwriting and the sung-spoken vocals reach back to early hardcore, even as the band’s stealthily lean and limber music owes more to post-punk, garage rock, and “egg punk”. 

Demo 2023 feels like Zero Bars trying to distill their sound in real time–opening track “Vulgar Econo” is a gargantuan two minutes in length; by closing track “Goon”, they’ve gotten it down to forty-five seconds. Even though it’s the longest song on the record, “Vulgar Econo” also feels like one of the more straight-up punk-indebted songs on Demo 2023, with the lead singer’s bark of a vocal prowling across a slicing instrumental (the lyrics to Demo 2023 aren’t the focal point for me, but I will warmly nod to “Old Freddy Hayek can rest in piss” on this one). “Pinhead Dust” is perhaps the most esoteric moment on the EP; it’s a post-punk tune from the music, which emphasizes the plodding bass guitar and shuffling guitar parts, while the fuzzed-up “Heist” is the most garage punk that Zero Bars get. By the time that the trio have gotten to “Goon”, they’ve got this down to a science–a clean guitar riff opens the track, the rest of the band kick in, and the vocalist takes the mic to launch the song off with a propulsive momentum in under ten seconds. Zero Bars are absolutely ready to go. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Dancer, A Day Without Love, The World Famous, Lightheaded

It’s been a historically busy week over here on Rosy Overdrive. The blog has seen four posts in four days–on Monday, we looked at albums from Soft on Crime, Hello June, Soft Covers, and The Small Intestines, Tuesday’s post featured Norm Archer, The Croaks, Luggage, and Blues Lawyer, and on Wednesday, we took a deeper look at the upcoming Pacing album. To cap it all off is the traditional Thursday Pressing Concerns, this time looking at new albums from A Day Without Love and The World Famous and new EPs from Dancer and Lightheaded. All four of them come out tomorrow!

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

Dancer – As Well

Release date: October 13th
Record label: GoldMold
Genre: Indie pop, post-punk
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Cordon Bleu

Good news, everyone–Glasgow’s Dancer are back already with their second EP (overall, and of 2023). The self-titled Dancer EP was such a compelling mixture of bright indie pop and sharp post-punk that it broke the implicit “no EPs” rule to show up on Rosy Overdrive’s Favorite Albums of 2023 So Far. The quartet of vocalist Gemma Fleet, guitarist/keytarist Chris Taylor, bassist Andrew Doig, and drummer Gavin Murdoch have plenty of notable musical background between them (Fleet, Taylor, and Doig play together in Order of the Toad, Fleet is also in Current Affairs, Doig is also in Robert Sotelo and Nightshift), but Dancer immediately established themselves as a promising “more than a sum of its parts” situation, which their sophomore record, As Well, only solidifies. The pop touches of Dancer are still here, but these five songs find the band sounding a little less fluffy, jumping fully into the pool of post-punk experimentation rather than just dipping a toe in the water.

That being said, Dancer still open As Well with “Cordon Bleu”, a jangly guitar pop number that falls somewhere in the Motorists realm of marrying pop with post-punk touches. “Chill Pill” one song later introduces a heavier Dancer while nevertheless being catchy in its own weird way–almost industrial in its deployment of fuzzy, drill-like guitars, the song clangs along with a still-pretty-melodic vocal from Fleet. The meditative indie pop of “Love” contains some math-y guitars (the press release for this EP mentions Slint and I can’t not hear it in the main riff), even as it’s probably the one song that can rival “Cordon Bleu” in terms of friendliness. Dancer ended itself with the darker “Telemark” and As Well isn’t to be outdone in this field–with “Pulp Thriller”, the band once again get to drilling, jerking, stopping, and starting as they make something standoffish but nonetheless intriguing, and “And Jesus Wept” throws together chunks of fuzzy guitar playing, a loping rhythm section, some blaring synths, and an all-over-the-place performance from Fleet to create a most interesting concoction of a sendoff. Maybe As Well is Dancer’s version of a “difficult second record”; luckily for us, they’re the kind of band where even that is quite enjoyable to listen to. (Bandcamp link)

A Day Without Love – A Stranger That You Met Before

Release date: October 13th
Record label: Ur Mom
Genre: Lo-fi indie rock, bedroom pop, emo, folk punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Show Friends

Like a basement show where you can tell something memorable is about to happen, A Day Without Love’s Brian Walker attempts to clear out those who aren’t “all in” early on in his latest album, A Stranger That You Met Before. “I sing in houses, and you sing for corporate / I know one of us sucks,” is how Walker begins “DIY or Die”,  the second song on the record, and he follows this with more lyrics making it clear how important maintaining artistic independence is for him. It’s a bold pronouncement, and it’s going to be a turn-off for those who don’t see the vitality in building something outside of the structures that rule our day-to-day lives, but Walker spends all of A Day Without Love making clear that he’s not all bluster, and he’s just as (if not more) devoted to the positive aspects of community-building. It’s an album coming from someone who’s completely immersed himself in the world of underground punk, emo, folk, and indie rock, and who chooses every day to look at the beautiful art of that world, be thankful for the people he’s met while in the pursuit of it, and channel all this into excellent music of his own.

Even though the genres don’t quite match up, the iconoclastic, deep-thinking, conversational nature of Walker’s writing (and his refusal to be intimidated by being “too much”) reminds me a bit of St. Lenox, and while he’s clearly a folk punk veteran, on A Strange That You Met Before he veers more towards an offbeat bedroom folk sound (see “How Did We?” and “Rise”) or electric indie-emo-punk (“Day By Day” and “Caffeine”, a mode reminiscent of Proper., a band Walker mentions as one of the “friends” he’s talking about in highlight “Good Friends Are Hard to Find”). More than anything, Walker emphasizes the importance, the necessity, of real-life relationships at the base of any community from opening track “House” (“Let’s pretend that we’re friends / So I don’t have to be alone”) to the slick pied-piper rock of “Show Friends” to the couple of charming spoken-word dialogue-interludes between Walker and some acquaintances. The substantial number of guest musicians and vocalists on the album also reflects this, and this turns out to be another strength of A Stranger That You Met Before–it’s a wide-ranging and eclectic record led by a charismatic tour guide, to be sure, but it’s a journey that’s far from being taken alone as well. (Bandcamp link)

The World Famous – Totally Famous

Release date: October 13th
Record label: Lauren
Genre: Power pop, pop punk
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Lipstick Trick

Back in August, Lauren Records released Bitch Unlimited by Star 99, which is hands-down one of the best West Coast power-pop-punk records in recent memory. Well, the label is back once again two months later with a record to rival that one in Totally Famous, the debut album from Los Angeles’ The World Famous. The five-piece band is led by singer Will Harris, who (along with the majority of the rest of the band) is originally from Massachusetts. The quintet cites two bands as cornerstones for their guitar pop sound, one from their place of origin and one from their adopted home–Weezer and The Lemonheads. They aren’t inaccurate starting points, but I’d also point to a surf-pop song construction, the suburban wandering pop of Fountains of Wayne, and the wide-eyed California inhabited by Jason Lytle as further bicoastal anchors for the sound of Totally Famous, an incredibly inviting and promising power pop debut.

The first half of Totally Famous gets off to a memorable start with the opening punch of the sparkling guitar pop of “Everyday Fear” and the punched-up classic 60s pop of “Nobody in LA”, and the Scarves-esque “Love Song for a Long Lost Friend” is certainly another early highlight. That being said, the B-side of Totally Famous is very close to perfect. The verses of “Lipstick Trick” are so catchy that it doesn’t even really compute to me when the chorus comes through and kicks its ass at its own game, and then the Teenage Fanclub-indebted “Danvers Opening” waves the “pure power pop” flag high. “O.C. Psychic” is a smart zippy song that’s only “minor” in comparison to what it has to compete with, like the multi-chorus, Grandaddy-ish deliberate fuzz-pop beast of “Candy Clouds” and the laid-back send-off of “Heartburst”. Band name aside, I’m aware that putting together a perfect power pop album isn’t enough to turn The World Famous into the next big stars–but they’re more than ready to be the next Big Star. (Bandcamp link)

Lightheaded – Good Good Great!

Release date: October 13th
Record label: Slumberland
Genre: Jangle pop, dream pop, indie pop, lo-fi pop
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Mercury Girl

New Jersey’s Lightheaded are an indie pop group who put out a self-released album back in 2019 but are introducing themselves to the world (or, at least, the corner of it in which Rosy Overdrive lives) with their Slumberland debut, the five-song Good Good Great! EP. The band’s “core” (which I assume means “primary songwriters”) is Stephen Stec and singer Cynthia Rittenbach, and Sara Abdelbarry and Justin Lombardo round out the ensemble. On Good Good Great! Lightheaded come off as musicians who are first and foremost big fans of the kind of C86, jangle pop, and dream pop that fits well on their home label (both in terms of legacy bands and their modern peers; the group has posted an excellent playlist on streaming services featuring a ton of great current guitar pop groups, many of which have appeared on this blog in some form).

One of the strongest aspects of Good Good Great! is that it establishes in a relatively short amount of time the range of Lightheaded’s songwriting. Opening track “Mercury Girl” combines a reverb-y Cleaners from Venus-esque jangle (is it a coincidence that it shares a title with one of my favorite Martin Newell songs?) with a confident, polished vocal take, while the prominent bass and steady drumbeat on “Orange Creamsicle Head” is a more pastoral version of their sound (something that marks the breezy, folky “The Garden” as well). The electric guitar riff that’s at the foundation of “Patti Girl” is pure college rock, perhaps even in Guided by Voices territory, even as Rittenbach steers it into a more refined, Heavenly version of indie pop. Lightheaded close out the EP on an appropriately weightless note with the 60s pop of “Love Is Overrated”; the band cobble together something perhaps a bit more minimal than the classic “wall of sound”, but no less effective. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Pacing, ‘Real poetry is always about plants and birds and trees and the animals and milk and honey breathing in the pink but real life is behind a screen’

Release date: October 13th
Record label: Totally Real
Genre: Anti-folk, bedroom pop, singer-songwriter, indie folk
Formats: CD, cassette, digital

There are a number of different ways to pander directly to the person who runs Rosy Overdrive, but one of the most unique ways I’ve encountered would have to be making a three-song EP called Snake Facts where every song title is, indeed, a fact about a snake and the subject matter uses snakes as a jumping-off point for some particularly poignant writing (sample lyric: “Mostly I just want to be left alone / Crawl around in your attic, just waiting to die”). That’s what Katie McTigue, AKA Pacing, did earlier this year, which did indeed get the San Jose-based, Florida-originating singer-songwriter on my radar. Snake Facts also began Tigue’s collaboration with Totally Real Records (Onesie, TIFFY, Snake Lips), the label who is putting out the next Pacing release just a few months later. Real poetry is always about plants and birds and trees and the animals and milk and honey breathing in the pink but real life is behind a screen is the second Pacing full-length, following the 20-minute, 8 song Hatemail “mixtape” last year (and at a dozen songs and nearly reaching the half-hour mark, I don’t think it’d be too out of line to call it a “debut album”).

Real Poetry… is an album well-served by its title, as McTigue’s writing wriggles back and forth between stubbornly conversational and surprisingly poetic throughout its twelve tracks. Musically, McTigue is saddled with the “anti-folk” label, which she’s declined to shake off and embraced to some degree. I certainly would not be surprised to learn that Kimya Dawson was a formative influence on Pacing, but the record’s indie pop structures (while acoustic guitar-based, yes) range from sketched sparsely to keenly orchestrated; I hear the twee-folk of Sidney Gish, the country-rock asides of The Paranoid Style, the DIY showtunes of Smol Data, and the kitchen-sink folk experimentation of Noah Roth throughout Real Poetry… As anyone who’s bought physical Pacing media can attest, McTigue is a multi-disciplinary artist, so to say that her latest album is a “personal” record is to say that questions and musings about art, legitimacy, and presentation of concepts (“real poetry”) float through these songs as much as the typical emotional, interpersonal relationship-based content that gets this tag more frequently.

The way I interpret the album title (which is also the first line of opening track “Bite Me”) is not necessarily a rejection, but a true, open interrogation of the idea it posits about “real poetry” being the domain of “plants and birds and trees” (McTigue references the poem “You Can’t Have It All” by Barbara Ras as inspiration for this on Bandcamp. “I liked the poem, but something about how flowery it is put me into defiance mode,” she writes. “Why are Real Poets [so] obsessed with nature?”). The themes that come up again and again in Real Poetry…–self-referential, recursive, and fourth-wall-agnostic writing, almost ritualistic self-deprecation, emotional and musical whiplash–reflect just how thoroughly Pacing are committed to exploring the reality-curious titular phrase and other, similar questions.

“I Want to Go Outside” and “Live Laugh Love” are, for one thing, two early examples of the musical adventurousness of Pacing, but they’re also populated with lyrics that strike at the heart of the album. “I Want to Go Outside” is a personal look at a reversion to not just nature but the “outside world” more generally (“I might get in a wreck and I’d be paralyzed for the rest of my life, so I’d be stuck in side / Well, I guess that’d be alright,” this is one of the more memorable roadblocks–but hardly the only one–that McTigue discusses here). “Live Laugh Love” is even more of a bullseye, walking the tightrope (or riding the seesaw) between defeatist self-flagellation (“Everything I do is dumb”, “This part of the song is a placeholder / To save myself from saying something stupid”, “This song is dumb”) and defiant defensiveness (“But if you don’t like this song / Why don’t you just rip out my heart?”). The headline-worthy lines in “Live Laugh Love” are all good and I like them, but the most key one to me (and the one that relates a little more directly to the song’s title, I think) is a more subtle one: “It’s too late to be anything but ordinary”.

McTigue follows up “Live Laugh Love” with “Stupid”, a thirty-second acoustic outro reinforcing its title in a way that is definitely overkill (but this is also the point), and when Pacing revisit this seed in the very-real three-minute penultimate track “So Stupid”, there’s a lot of weight added to the title line after McTigue takes a winding highway to get to it. There are plenty of puzzle-piece moments strewn throughout Real Poetry… (I’ll throw some of these out here: “Plastic flowers never fade, but I’m not gonna die in Orangeville,” from “Orangeville”, the various cracks throughout the facade of “Annoying Email”, “None of this counts / In a couple of years, I’m gonna start my life for real,” in “unReal / forReal”) but it’s the title of “So Stupid”, combined with the hanging question at the end of the song, that cements it as the album’s central enigma. It’s a blanket, being “so stupid”–it’s equal parts comforting and obscuring. Kids are stupid, in the same way that fake plastic trees are stupid, talking to yourself is stupid, poetry is stupid, it’s stupid that it’s a hundred and three degrees outside, the infinite, divergent possibilities of the universe are stupid, and the fact that any of us are alive or not alive is stupid. That’s the easy part. But even as Real Poetry… is a record featuring several dispatches from inside this blanket, McTigue’s writing doesn’t stop there. After all, to paraphrase Syndrome from The Incredibles–when everything is stupid, then nothing is.

Pressing Concerns: Norm Archer, The Croaks, Luggage, Blues Lawyer

You just know that it’s going to be a good week when I’m able to put a Tuesday Pressing Concerns together. Hot on the heels of Monday’s post (which looked at new ones from Soft on Crime, Hello June, Soft Covers, and The Small Intestines), we’re back with a round-up every bit as good, featuring albums from Norm Archer and Luggage and EPs from The Croaks and Blues Lawyer. Without getting too much into it, there are some real short-listers in 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.

Norm Archer – Splitting the Bill

Release date: September 28th
Record label: Panda Koala
Genre: Power pop, 90s indie rock, pop punk, psych pop
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: On the Tyne

Norm Archer is Will Pearce, a Portsmouth-based “home recording enthusiast” who flew onto my radar with his debut album under the name, Flying Cloud Terrace. Though I was completely unfamiliar with Pearce beforehand, I recognized Flying Cloud Terrace as an instant classic in the field of lo-fi guitar pop music, a record that clearly displayed the tricks and hooks it had learned from bands like Guided by Voices, The Cleaners from Venus, and The Bevis Frond while also putting a bit of an underdog pop punk spin on the material. Although it took several years for Flying Cloud Terrace to come together, Pearce needed barely more than one to deliver a follow-up album that is every bit as rewarding as its predecessor. Unlike Flying Cloud Terrace, Splitting the Bill was recorded with all live drums (courtesy of Ben Whyntie, who played on a couple of the previous record’s tracks), allowing the music of Norm Archer to catch up just a little bit to Pearce’s kinetic energy. Splitting the Bill is still a pop record, but the edges of Norm Archer are as sharp as ever–if you enjoyed the way that, say, the most recent Taking Meds album merged power pop with Archers of Loaf-style 90s indie rock, Splitting the Bill is operating in the same area.

I truly cannot emphasize enough how skilled of a pop songwriter Will Pearce is; that much was evident on Flying Cloud Terrace, but every facet of it is on full display on Splitting the Bill. Norm Archer have never sounded more ready or able to deliver Pollard-esque tricky, overstuffed prog-pop anthems, nor have they been more prone to explode into blistering indie rock with a J. Mascis or Nick Saloman level of skill. As grandiose as Pearce makes the fourteen songs of Splitting the Bill sound, at his heart he’s got the spirit of a post-Westerbeg power-pop-punk. It irks me that Norm Archer aren’t big enough (yet) to give opening track “On the Tyne” the stadium-level treatment it deserves on a cross-continent tour, but I bet that Pearce could find a way to whip up a wall of sound to do justice to “Brain Today” in a basement.

“A Taste for Shame” is pitch-perfect jangly college rock–it’s almost shocking how straight Pearce and Whyntie play it, but it’s absolutely what the track calls for. Meanwhile, if Eric Bachmann had been able to write a post-grunge radio hit, it probably would’ve sounded something like the title track (does “it sounds like Fig Dish” mean anything to anyone?). “The Din Drifted In” towards the center of the record is a particularly wild flex, making an aggressive turn towards garage-y noise rock/post-punk and sounding very good at it, too, while the power chord choppiness of “Laramie” is no-funny-business, airtight pop punk. One of the ways Pearce pays tribute to his proggier/psychier sides is by breaking out the acoustic on the starry, spare “Dragging” and the aural daydream of “Saloon Mouse”. These function as quieter wrinkles in a larger tapestry, but because Pearce is the songwriter he is, they’re also no less potent pop songs than the electric cuts. Splitting the Bill is an ornate work, one in which a closer inspection of even its less showy moments reveals exquisite detail. (Bandcamp link)

The Croaks – Croakus Pokus

Release date: July 28th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Folk rock, progressive folk, baroque folk
Formats: CD, digital
Pull Track: Rainbow Trout

The Croaks are a Boston-based prog-folk-rock band led by the duo of Anna Reidister and Haley Wood, who have been making music together since 2017 (previously in the band Ratslap, as The Croaks since about three years ago). Following the “The Court Jester” single in 2020, Croakus Pokus is the first Croaks record (their Bandcamp calls it an EP; the nine-song, thirty-minute collection feels like an album to me), and it’s one of the more fascinating-sounding releases I’ve heard so far this year. On the one hand, The Croaks are quite serious about incorporating the baroque and medieval into their music (instruments that can be found on Croakus Pokus include dulcimer, harp, flute, and violin), but on the other hand, the band (on this record, Reidister and Wood are joined by bassist Jasper Fleming and drummer Sammy DeSantos) are just as likely to emphasize the rock end of folk rock, with some guitar soloing, feedback, and a sharp rhythm section characterizing more than a bit of this record.

The Croaks’ version of “progressive folk” takes shape in the record’s first three songs. “The Court Jester” opens up with a Mekons-y piece of violin-aided folk rock that then zigs into a skipping mid-section and then finally zags into a pounding, dramatic finish. “Cuttyhunk Isle” finds the band creating similar music in a slightly more static mode, but their cover of Comus’ “Diana” gets us right back into the louder folk-rock storm. Once they’ve gotten a sketch of their sound down, however, Croakus Pokus immediately starts playing with it. The fuzzy “Big Bog” (which thematically reminds me of the Mountain Goats’ “Tollund Man”) throws some alt-country into the mix, the heavy “Lochness Lady” is some old-school stoner-prog-wizard shit, and there’s also “Rainbow Trout”, my favorite song on the record. Especially coming after “Diana”, it’s a shocking teleportation back into the (relatively) modern era, an incredibly bright, sweeping piece of indie folk rock with triumphant electric guitars, at least two separate hooks worthy of building a song around on their own, and lyrics that reveal just enough context to land the punch in the chorus most effectively. Croakus Pokus is a deep record in more ways than one–it feels like the work of two talented, in-sync collaborators who bring an adventurous energy to every aspect of their music. (Bandcamp link)

Luggage – Hand Is Bad

Release date: September 29th
Record label: Amish
Genre: Noise rock, experimental rock, post-punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Hand Is Bad

Chicago noise rock trio Luggage have been trudging along for the better part of a decade at this point, making a certain unflappable, minimalist style of music that certainly sounds akin to plenty of indie rock that’s come out of the Windy City in the past. Unsurprisingly recorded at Electrical Audio, Hand Is Bad is the fourth Luggage full-length and fifth record (it follows 2021’s substantial Happiness EP). On their latest album, drummer Luca Cimarusti, bassist Michael John Grant, and guitarist/vocalist Michael Vallera sound like they’ve been playing together long enough to stretch out a little bit and push some limits. Hand Is Bad is relatively subtle about it, mind you–unlike, say, the latest from their neighbors in FACS, pretty much all of the album can be adequately described as a “rock record”, but the trio are locking in in a way that’s hypnotic and exploratory in its own right, echoing some of the more meditative post-hardcore albums that came out of the 90s underground.

On the Touch & Go frontperson spectrum, Michael Vallera is a lot closer to Brian McMahan than David Yow on Hand Is Bad. I’d say that Vallera’s stoic talk-singing lets the band do the emotional communication, but whatever message Luggage is trying to send here (beyond “vague unease”) is pretty enigmatic from the instrumentals as well. Hand Is Bad’s songs typically start as stark post-punk instrumentals leaning heavy on the rhythm section– sometimes competing with Vallera’s guitar, other times effectively on their own. Listening to Hand Is Bad’s ten tracks beyond their starts is kind of like playing Russian roulette–they’re equally likely to continue the instrumentals more or less as they started, declining to crack the tension, or to lapse into noisy conclusions led by Vallera’s guitar. “River” floats along and “The Poison” crawls in the record’s second half, while the band’s noisier side gets front page treatment with the opening title track and “Circled”. The weirdest moments on Hand Is Bad come near the end, with “Ends” and (especially) “Deep North” streamlining things down to near-ambient levels. It says something about the record’s cohesion that the band are then able to jump from the latter of those two songs to the full-speed rocking “Nowhere” like it’s nothing. (Bandcamp link)

Blues Lawyer – Sight Gags on the Radio

Release date: September 29th
Record label: Dark Entries
Genre: Noise pop, power pop, indie pop, fuzz pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Have Nots

2023 is the year of Blues Lawyer. The Oakland four-piece band released their third album, All in Good Time, back in February, debuting a new, revved-up power pop sound that represented quite the step forward for the band and made it one of my favorite albums of the first half of the year. Co-lead singer/songwriter Rob I. Miller put out an incredible solo album (featuring contributions from Blues Lawyer guitarist Ellen Matthews) in May to keep the momentum going, and last month found Miller and Matthew reuniting with drummer/vocalist Elyse Schrock on the second Blues Lawyer record of 2023, the four-song Sight Gags on the Radio seven-inch EP.  On Sight Gags on the Radio, Blues Lawyer are as catchy as ever, but they’re also louder than ever–the band embrace distortion and fuzz in their pop songs in a way that even the more rock-based All in Good Time hadn’t quite suggested.

Opening track “Have Nots” is nothing less than one of the greatest pop songs I’ve heard in recent memory. Each element–the opening guitars (featuring a shoegaze level of reverb), Miller’s melodic bass, Schrock’s steady drumbeat, Miller’s calm-in-the-center-of-the-storm lead vocals, Schrock’s subtly pleasing backing vocals–introduces itself one by one, taking its place to form a full, complete masterwork. The rest of Sight Gags on the Radio doesn’t drop the ball after such a strong opening–in terms of energy and sheer force, “Our Divide” is right up there with “Have Nots”, and it even introduces some actually quite scorching lead guitar into the fray. “True Love’s Only Name” is the song on the EP that most recalls the band’s jangle pop roots, but it’s also yet another step forward for the band in being a true collaboration between the trio of Miller (who wrote the lyrics), Matthews (who wrote the music), and Shrock (who sings lead vocals on it). “Every Once in a While” closes things out with a song that sounds like a classic piece of twee-ish indie pop run through a healthy level of amplifier fuzz and overlaid with a hard-hitting rhythm section. Assuming Blues Lawyer don’t have anything up their sleeve for the next two months, they’ve closed out their 2023 on just a strong of a note as they began it. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Soft on Crime, Hello June, Soft Covers, The Small Intestines

Believe it or not, it’s Monday again, and today’s extra-soft edition of Pressing Concerns is here in your inbox and/or browser. We’re looking at new albums from Soft on Crime, Hello June, Soft Covers, and The Small Intestines below this introduction. This is a great entry if guitar pop is your thing, and we also get to visit some exotic locales (Australia! Ireland! West Virginia!) with these records.

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.

Soft on Crime – Rarities Vol. 1

Release date: October 6th
Record label: Eats It
Genre: Power pop, indie pop, jangle pop, lo-fi pop
Formats: Cassette, CD, digital
Pull Track: Bored Harder

Back in February, Soft on Crime released their debut full-length, New Suite–it’s an immediate collection of vintage power pop, college rock, new wave, and psychedelia that quickly became one of my favorite records of 2023. Although their first album is less than a year old, the Dublin-based trio of Padraig O’Reilly, Lee Casey, and Dylan Phillips have been making music together for a few years now–they put out an EP in 2019 and a single in 2020. Interestingly, Soft on Crime have decided to follow up their instant classic of a first LP by reaching back into their vault, giving us Rarities Volume 1. The recordings on this album span from before any Soft on Crime material had been released to songs recorded concurrently with New Suite to even a handful of tracks recorded earlier this year, after their first album came out.

Soft on Crime are more relaxed on Rarities Volume 1 than on New Suite; while their proper album was sequenced to reel the listener in with a stacked A-side, the trio offer up a couple of older (circa December 2017), mid-tempo cuts to begin this compilation in “Show’s Over” and “Two Sides”. It’s low-key pop music, but the two actually wind up being some of the most “normal” sounding of the early Soft on Crime songs–the band chooses to bookend the album with their first recordings, and the three tracks that end Rarities Volume 1 are the three oddest. The stripped-down, Phillips-led “I’m Starving” is so casual that it captures someone chatting with one of the band member’s dads at the end of the recording; the claustrophobic, jazz-influenced “Cranky Family Holiday” and the slow-building “Jack the Fatalist” are less bare, but they’re still the band on the outskirts of their own sound.

The newer songs on Rarities Volume 1 are the ones that feel like Soft on Crime in “pop hitmaker” mode, and they’re also from where the bulk of my personal favorites come (always a good sign for an active band). Mind you, this still isn’t exactly the Soft on Crime of New Suite–the psychedelic country rock of “(Try Not to Piss In) The River of Time” is a new look for the band, but one they wear quite well. “Fibbers Observation Deck” was recorded in May alongside “The River of Time”, and its simple conceit might’ve sounded off in the middle of New Suite, but its huge garage-y power pop punk chorus shines in this context. Maybe my favorite of all of them is “Bored Harder”, an especially laid-back 2021 piece of lo-fi power pop that sounds like a lost Connections song. Even though it’s a different stripe than most of New Suite, it’s hard to believe Soft on Crime would leave it off of their debut album–but then, I suppose, that’s what Rarities Volume 1 is for. (Bandcamp link)

Hello June – Artifacts

Release date: October 6th
Record label: 31 Tigers
Genre: Alt-country, singer-songwriter, roots rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Sometimes

Hello June’s self-titled debut album came out all the way back in 2018. Hello June was a solid collection of dream pop-fluent indie rock, with lightly fuzzy guitars dressing up singer-songwriter Sarah Rudy’s compositions, which also featured just a touch of alt-country that recalled the band’s home of West Virginia. The sophomore Hello June album, Artifacts, comes a half-decade later, and with it comes a pretty distinct reinvention of the band’s sound. Rudy challenged herself to write songs with more “straightforward” lyrics than the enigmatic nature of her writing on Hello June, and she and the band have given their music a similar streamlining. Artifacts is all crystal-clear, bare-sounding country rock, zeroing in on the “rootsiest” parts of the band’s past sound and embracing it in a way that Hello June, frankly, didn’t even really hint at. Perhaps the aspect of Hello June the band holds onto the most is its pensiveness–there’s a quiet intensity to Artifacts, recalling the more introspective, introverted material from troubadours like Sarah Shook, Lydia Loveless, and Lilly Hiatt.

Listening to Hello June, it’s clear that Rudy was already destined for something behind the relative anonymity of “dream pop singer”–she was peeking out in those songs, but her personality is completely out in the open from the desert-sparse instrumental of “Sometimes”, Artifacts’ opening track. Some of the album’s songs are more “rock” than others–“Honey I Promise” and “Faded Blue” find the band playing louder than they typically do on the record–but Hello June never quite “let loose” here. It’s an incredibly focused album, with Rudy taking us on immersive rides everywhere from the since-faded relationship on the “Interstate” to the sense of finality that she experiences under the night sky in “The Moon”. On an album about sorting through pieces of what’s left of a once-whole past (the Artifacts to which the title refers), it’s fitting that it closes with a cover of “Take Me Home, Country Roads”. Back when I wrote about Spirit Night, I covered how that song and the state it’s come to represent are always looming over those who hail from it, regardless of where they go or what they do. I imagine, when choosing to end the album with it, Rudy had to weigh the fact that she and the people she knows have doubtless heard countless covers of the song–but Artifacts is, above anything else, an honest album. (Bandcamp link)

Soft Covers – Soft Serve

Release date: October 6th
Record label: Hidden Bay/Little Lunch
Genre: Indie pop, jangle pop
Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Point of View

Our first selection of Australian indie pop in this edition of Pressing Concerns comes to us via Soft Covers, a three-piece who formed in Brisbane and currently reside in Melbourne. The band’s three members, Laura, James, and Dean, linked up after playing in several bands separately over the years (Dumb Things, People Mover, Future Haunts) and put out the Permanent Part Time cassette EP as a debut in 2020. Soft Covers’ first full-length, Soft Serve, is being co-released by Hidden Bay and Little Lunch, two labels who also teamed up to put out the last Australian album I wrote about, Pretty in Pink’s Pillows. If you were into Pretty in Pink’s minimalist guitar pop, Soft Covers may be up your alley, although Soft Serve is a more uptempo and sunny record than Pillows, and the songwriting is more conversational and lyrically wide-ranging.

There’s plenty to like immediately on Soft Serve with opening track “Every Week”, which deploys a cheerily-strummed acoustic guitar, a duet in the chorus, and some nice Flying Nun-ish keyboard parts. Soft Covers aren’t afraid to keep things simple, hanging onto a single chord or two in a Clean-ish way–the organ-featuring, steadily-moving-forward “Coming and Going” in particular reminds me of that band, and it’s certainly baked into the DNA of the pure sugar of “Shampoo” as well. Some other nice touches throughout Soft Serve includes what sounds like a marimba on the wandering nostalgia of “Nth Qld, Late 80s”, some hovering-in-place synths on “Big Jack”, and the melodica that plays off the excellent jangle pop closing track “Point of View”. The bright sound of the band fits the brief but memorable characters and scenes that show up in these songs, from the getting-older-but-not-dead-yet “Big Jack”,  or their takes on Muriel’s Wedding and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy with “The Real Housewives of Porpoise Spit” and “The Ballad of Ricki Tarr”, respectively. Soft Serve feels like listening to a friend tell you about a movie they saw, or an eccentric acquaintance, comforting in its casualness. (Bandcamp link)

The Small Intestines – Hide in Time

Release date: September 29th
Record label: Meritorio/Lost and Lonesome
Genre: Jangle pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Horse Riding

It’s a two-for-one deal on Melbourne indie pop in this post! Like Soft Covers discussed previously, The Small Intestines are an Australian trio inspired by jangly guitar pop whose members come from other local bands (drummer/vocalist Matt Liveriadis and bassist/vocalist Rob Remedios played in Chook Race, guitarist/vocalist Tristan Peach had his Peach Happening solo project). The Small Intestines have apparently been together since 2016, but Hide in Time is their debut release, coming to us via Lost and Lonesome and Meritorio (the latter of which also put out another excellent Australian guitar pop album earlier this year–There’s No I in Spice World by Spice World). It’s a smooth journey, the “debut” tag seemingly out of place on an album made by a group of musicians who’ve been playing (with each other and otherwise) for quite some time now.

Not quite as peppy as Soft Covers nor as sparse as Spice World, The Small Intestines make distant-outpost rock music on Hide in Time. It feels like a thirty-minute excerpt from an infinitely-rolling tape, like these guys are making low-key, timeless-sounding indie rock on a constant basis regardless of whether we’re listening. This kind of music always exists in the shadow of Flying Nun Records, and I’m not going to tell you that The Small Intestines don’t sound like The Bats in places on Hide in Time, but they filter it through a power trio, almost classic rock-indebted lens. Remedios’ bass work in particular I want to single out–he’s really going to town under the radar in songs like “Chimes of Love” and “L.O.V.E. Love”. The psychedelic jangle of “Under the Weather”, the giddy pop rock of “Stripped Away”, and the melody-laden “Old Town” are some of the record’s more Kiwi moments, but there’s also a coolness throughout the record that skips past the New Zealand scene entirely and goes straight to the source, The Velvet Underground. In that way, The Small Intestines’ peers are as much American groups like Advertisement, Weak Signal, and Glyders as C86/Dunedin-indebted southern hemisphere groups–they’re a pop band that also doesn’t shy away from a groove. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable: