What a turnaround! Just yesterday, you were reading the Monday edition of Pressing Concerns and enjoying new music from Seablite, Means and Ways, Sandy Pylos, and No Drama. You only had to wait one more day for the next edition, and it’s another all-timer, featuring new albums from Ryan Davis & the Roadhouse Band, Maria Elena Silva, Rory Strong, and Fortunato Durutti Marinetti.
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.
Ryan Davis & the Roadhouse Band – Dancing on the Edge
Release date: October 27th Record label: Sophomore Lounge/ever/never/Tough Love Genre: Alt-country, folk rock, country rock, singer-songwriter Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital Pull Track: Junk Drawer Heart
Those who are curious to see where the exciting current wave of alt-country bands and artists might end up once the initial rush of their first records dies down might want to cast their gaze towards Ryan Davis. Since the late 2000s, the singer-songwriter has led the Louisville/Jeffersonville, IN country-rambler-rockers State Champion, making music that combined punk rock energy with Crazy Horse long-windedness, traditional country instrumentation, and writing inspired by indie folk rockers like Smog and Silver Jews–the leaders of which are/were both fans of Davis’ writing–long before it was en vogue like it is now. Not that there isn’t steep competition, but State Champion’s consistently excellent four LPs in the 2010s should put them on the shortlist for “band of that particular decade” easily.
Choosing a “best” State Champion album would be like choosing a favorite child if I had four equally great ones, but 2018’s Send Flowers is, at the very least, their most refined moment. Perhaps unsure where to go from there, State Champion has seemingly been on ice since, although Davis has kept busy playing with noise rockers Tropical Trash and experimentalists Equipment Pointed Ankh, as well as running his record label, Sophomore Lounge (Ace of Spit, Footings, Styrofoam Winos). Ryan Davis the songwriter could not be vanquished entirely, however, and this has led us to Dancing on the Edge, his debut solo album (well, with “The Roadhouse Band”, a wide-ranging group featuring members of his various other bands, Louisville-area musicians, and other Sophomore Lounge-associated artists). Send Flowers was seven songs in 41 minutes, and Davis one-ups his band’s last album by delivering the same amount of tracks in over 50 here, his first genuine double album as a bandleader.
Necessarily, the songs here are even longer than the sprawling late-era State Champion records–the sort-of-reprise “Bluebirds Revisited” is the only track under six minutes on Dancing on the Edge, and three of them are over eight. Even though Davis’ primary musical outlet over the past few years has been in the experimental field, Dancing on the Edge doesn’t get to be so expansive by embracing post-rock–Davis is as much a country musician as ever here, just continuing to stretch out his writing even more than I thought possible. This album actually might be a bit more upbeat than the more recent State Champion releases–when you remove yourself from the constraints of time, you’ll find the space to do that, I suppose. Dancing on the Edge reminds me a bit of early Okkervil River, although Davis is in some ways the inverse of Will Sheff–Sheff is the nervy New England transplant trying to disguise his emotion with traditionalism, Davis is the laid-back-seeming Appalachian who acts like he’s asleep underneath his baseball cap but is just waiting for the right moment to deliver a cutting remark.
And in that aspect, the lyrics to Dancing on the Edge certainly deliver. Part of me says “Well, just about anything would sound brilliant delivered with Davis’ unbothered Kentucky tones and soundtracked by the post-post-country möbius strip of the Roadhouse Band”, but there are, I think, very few songwriters in any genre with the capability of writing something like “Junk Drawer Heart” (“Maybe there’s something of use deep down in the matchbox bottom of my junk drawer heart / Maybe there’s nothing there but joker cards and keychains,” is obviously a headliner, but the lines about chewing on an apple in an archery range and the “Sultans of Swing”-stuck jukebox should be up there as well), and even the least substantial song on the record (big fucking “by default” on that one) “Bluebirds Revisited” offers up “An angel gains its associate’s wings and moves back in with God”. Another one is “I never asked to be born / I was only wondering where the door went to / Now here I am at the kitchen table,” from “A Suitable Exit”. An album as preoccupied with the randomness of it all as Dancing on the Edge is is surely aware of the improbability of its own existence–chance might have gotten Ryan Davis and the Roadhouse Band to the door, but anyone who listens to their album attentively will be equally conscious of just how deliberately they’ve moved to open it. (Bandcamp link)
Maria Elena Silva – Dulce
Release date: September 29th Record label: Astral Spirits/Big Ego Genre: Post-rock, jazz-rock, psychedelic rock Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Love, If It Is So
Maria Elena Silva got her start making flamenco- and jazz-influenced rock music in her hometown of Wichita, Kansas, although it was her third solo album, 2021’s Eros, that both garnered her some renown and represented a shift in her sound, embracing a sparser, quieter, more post-rock-y style of music with help from Big Ego Studio’s Chris Schlarb and Tortoise’s Jeff Parker, among others. Schlarb is once again producing Dulce, the follow-up record to Eros, which finds Silva and her collaborators (here, legendary guitarist Marc Ribot, organist Carey Frank, and percussionists Danny Frankel, Stephen Hodges, and Scott Dean Taylor) diving headfirst into the realm of experimental rock and jazz. The empty space from Eros is still here, although a surprising amount of Dulce is quiet yet probing pop music at its core.
The slow-burning, blistering psychedelic rock of “Love, If It Is So” opens Dulce in particularly striking fashion–in under three minutes, Silva and her band go from delicately building its precarious structure to burning it down in an excitingly PJ Harvey-esque fashion. The album steps back a bit after that calamitous opening salvo–“Envolverlo I” and “Mujer” are both brief, guitar-ambient deep sighs of songs that are barely there but still very much there, and “Ruido Blanco” is a laid-back pop-folk song that features especially enjoyable use of Frank’s Hammond. This isn’t to say that this side of Silva is slighter than the louder version–in its own way, the heaviest part of the album might be its incredibly sprawling, stretched-out midsection, where the seven-minute “Jasper” and “Silver Linings” explore these depths, expanding the quiet without ever abandoning it. Of course, if you find yourself missing the guitar workouts, they return with a vengeance in the record’s second half in the form of “Narrowed” and “Sugar Water”, the latter of which closes out the album by spiraling into some organ-heavy rock and roll. That is Dulce–but so is the low-key percussive outro that actually ends the record. (Bandcamp link)
Rory Strong – Catholic Guilt
Release date: October 20th Record label: Oliver Glenn Genre: Singer-songwriter, alt-country, post-folk-punk Formats: CD, digital Pull Track: Catholic Guilt
I’ve been avoiding writing about this one because I know I’m not going to do it adequate justice. This time of year things are pretty busy both in terms of this blog and in real life, so I know that I’m not going to get as in-depth here as Catholic Guilt deserves. Nevertheless, the purpose of Rosy Overdrive is to share music I find worthwhile and stirring with other people, not to “save music journalism” or whatever, so we’re going to take a look at the latest record from Maine-originating, California-based singer-songwriter Rory Strong. Strong has been at it for a while–leading the project Holy Shadow for most of the 2010s, then eventually making music both as Rory Strong and the Standard Candles and completely under their own name. Catholic Guilt, a fifty-minute full-length being put out on CD through Oliver Glenn Records (Soft Idiot, Jordaan Mason) falls under the latter category. Much like the titular feeling, Catholic Guilt is impossible to ignore–it commands full attention all the way through.
Catholic Guilt is a fully sketched-out record, with a musical vocabulary hovering between electric indie rock and multi-layered folk rock/alt-country (featuring, among others, pedal steel from Mike “Slo-mo” Brenner). The contours are different, but Strong does have a bit in common with the previously-mentioned Mason as a songwriter. I would consider this album neither “emo” nor “folk punk”, but it feels informed by the same stuff that a lot of bands that hew towards the “singer-songwriter” side of the emo-y punk-y world also are, namely The Mountain Goats, The Weakerthans, and Dear Nora. “Johnsong” in particular is a dead-ringer for Little Pictures-era John K. Samson, and anyone sufficiently familiar with John Darnielle will feel the connection that the record’s title draws to his oeuvre (in addition to the title track, I also hear Darniellian echos in the writing found in “Shelly Duvall”, “Heretic Like You”, and “The Witch Is Alive”). Meanwhile, songs like “Desert Cottontails” and “The Dogs and the Dunes” take some fairly vast concepts and imagery and pull them down to Earth, which feels like a good encapsulation of Strong’s perspective on Catholic Guilt. You can still see the sun and the moon and the stars from down here, though. (Bandcamp link)
Fortunato Durutti Marinetti – Eight Waves in Search of an Ocean
Release date: November 3rd Record label: Quindi/Soft Abuse Genre: Sophisti-pop, jazz pop, soft rock, art rock, synthpop Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Misfit Streams
I’ve written about a fewrecords released by Florence, Italy’s Quindi Records before, but Eight Waves in Search of an Ocean is the first one with a connection to the label’s home country. Fortunato Durutti Marinetti is the project of Daniel Colussi, and while he’s been living in Toronto for some time now (playing in bands like The Shilohs and The Pinc Lincolns), he’s originally from Turin. Colussi debuted Fortunato Durutti Marinetti in 2020 with the self-released Desire, and put out Memory’s Fool last year on Soft Abuse and Bobo Integral (Tough Age, Fixtures, Daily Worker). The third Fortunato Durutti Marinetti album comes merely a year and change later, and with Eight Waves in Search of an Ocean, Colussi has put together a leisurely enjoyable singer-songwriter “studio pop” album. The record’s eight songs move ever so slowly, trying on a low-key but impressive array of Destroyer-ish sophisti-pop and Office Culture-ish soft jazz rock while Colussi’s casually talk-sung vocals lead the music along amiably.
Opening track “Lightning on a Sunny Day” stretches out to six minutes, beginning the album with an endless skyline of minimal, Kaputt-style synthpop that feels like an “anything can happen” kind of introduction to Eight Waves in Search of an Ocean. Colussi is openly inspired by Lou Reed, whose influence I absolutely hear in his voice as he delicately rambles his way through “The Movie of Your Life” and “Misfit Streams”, but the lush-but-not-overblown orchestral pop arrangements of these songs also feel informed by Reed’s solo career. The widescreen nature of Eight Waves in Search of an Ocean also kind of reminds me of Kurt Vile’s Bottle It In and (Watch My Moves)–if you’d like, Fortunato Durutti Marinetti is to synth-jazz-pop what Vile is to folk rock. Eight Waves in Search of an Ocean is nothing if not well-rounded: the second half of the album features its single most rousing moment in “Smashing Your Head Against the Wall”–the guitars and strings actually inject a bit of urgency into the instrumental, even though I couldn’t tell you just what Colussi’s going on about in this one–and “I Need You More” rides some prominent flute to a minimalist, (relatively) straightforward conclusion. It’s a smooth ride, but it’s still a journey. (Bandcamp link)
Welcome to the working week (I’ve probably used that one before, but I’ve done so many of these at this point, I think I’m allowed to)! Anyway, this is a good and varied edition of Pressing Concerns, featuring new albums from Means and Ways and Sandy Pylos, a new EP from No Drama, and a remastered reissue of Seablite‘s debut album. Which one’s your favorite? No wrong answers 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.
Seablite – Grass Stains and Novocaine (Reissue)
Release date: November 3rd Record label: Dandy Boy Genre: Shoegaze, jangle pop, indie pop, dream pop Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Pillbox
It’s a great year to be Seablite. The San Francisco noise pop quartet released their second album and Mt.St.Mtn. debut Lemon Lights back in September (according to Rosy Overdrive and many others: it’s a hit), and barely over a month later, their 2019 debut album Grass Stains and Novocaine, originally released through Emotional Response, has seen a remastered vinyl reissue through Dandy Boy Records. If you liked the follow-up record, you’ll find plenty to enjoy on their first full-length, even as the band (guitarist/vocalist Lauren Matsui, bassist/vocalist Galine Tumasyan, guitarist Jen Mundy, and drummer Andy Pastalaniec aka Chime School) definitely have developed their sound in the four years that passed between the two. On Lemon Lights, Seablite emphasized the louder end of their shoegaze-indebted sound and even explored some of the psychedelia that colored a lot of the band’s early 90s touchstone/reference-point records–and even though Grass Stains and Novocaine is plenty fuzzy in parts, its more straightforward indie pop/power pop sound recalls the subtler moments on that record, like “Monochrome Rainbow”, “Smudge Was a Fly”, and “Faded”.
Of course, there’s still plenty of shoegaze textures throughout Grass Stains and Novocaine–for one, “Won’t You” comes right out of the gate with an exciting and blistering wall of sound, and the vocals are plenty “ethereal” here. It’s far from the only such moment on the album, but Seablite also establish early on that they weren’t just that, with songs like “Pillbox” and “Time Is Weird” coming off more than anything else as louder versions of vintage indie pop in the vein of K, Slumberland, and Sarah Records. The slow-moving, atmospheric album centerpiece “(He’s a) Vacuum Chamber” uses some fuzz and reverb to make an intriguing piece of art rock that is nonetheless quite catchy, while the second half of the record reveals that Seablite can still rock out with almost no distortion in their sound with the surprisingly clean-sounding indie pop of “House of Papercuts”. Of course, some of the best moments on Grass Stains and Novocaine also come on the noisiest tracks–“Haggard” is classic retro pop run through a woodchipper, and the chilly “Polygraph” (“I’m starting over, because of you” is a pretty powerful, simple refrain line) also buries an excellent hook in fuzz. With Lemon Lights indicating that Seablite has no intention of attempting to recreate their debut faithfully over and over again, it’s worth appreciating Grass Stains and Novocaine as a singular entry into what one hopes will grow to be a large discography. (Bandcamp link)
Means and Ways – Fear Filter
Release date: November 3rd Record label: Self-released Genre: Alt-country, singer-songwriter, folk rock, soft rock Formats: Digital Pull Track: September Sun
New York-based singer-songwriter Quinn Mongeon makes music as Means and Ways, which is, per their Bandcamp page, “sometimes a band, sometimes one man”. Previous Means and Ways singles have featured a full band (Mongeon on guitar and vocals, plus pianist/organist Peter DeBartolo, bassist Brendan Finn, and Victor Lum); on the other end of the spectrum would be the two-hour Locked Down in New York, an album comprised of demos that Mongeon recorded alone during the pandemic (and subsequently decided to let them stay frozen in that time period). Fear Filter, which seems to be the first proper Means and Ways album, is somewhere in between–it does feature some contributions from his collaborators, but was “largely written, performed, and produced” by Mongeon himself. Some solitude is perhaps apt for an album fairly personal in nature, but it’s not overly lo-fi–either alone or with others, the Means and Ways of Fear Filter are practitioners of lush folk rock and guitar pop.
Fear Filter isn’t afraid to be subtle–opening track “New Voice in a Room” does feature some striking lead guitar work, but it’s far from “showy”, and this only sets the stage for what Mongeon delivers throughout the record. A good portion of the album–the somewhat dark but still fairly “pop” acoustic folk of “World Remains the Same”, mid-record ballad “Stardust”, the five-minute soft-country shuffle of “Time to Go”–are songs that’d drive a person to shush anyone who’d dare to try to talk over them when they’re being played at a show. There are more upbeat moments (“Another Year”, “Hollow”, “A Lot Like That”), but they’re not exactly hard-charging rockers–nor should they be, really. The lyrics of Fear Filter are drawn from Mongeon’s experience living with a debilitating panic attack disorder for several years; while he doesn’t say so directly in the album, most of its narratives–a combination of aurally-pacing inner monologues and brief, blurry glimpses into the outside world–make quite a bit of sense in this context. Closing track “September Sun” makes sense as a final statement with this in mind, as well–the city-life observations are vivid and complete in a way they hadn’t previously been, and the chorus (“Oh now that day is done / When I was alone, I was alone”) announces the beginning of a new chapter with clarity. (Bandcamp link)
Sandy Pylos – Notas de Voz
Release date: November 3rd Record label: Self-released Genre: Indie pop, synthpop, experimental pop Formats: Cassette, digital Pull Track: La Modelo de Mis Fantasias
Ana Diaz is a musician from Asunción, Paraguay, where they co-founded the psychedelic power pop band EEEKS in 2012. EEEKS put out a couple of albums in the late 2010s, but since Diaz moved to Portland, Oregon in 2018, they have started a new project, Sandy Pylos. Diaz has released singles as Sandy Pylos as early as 2020, but Notas de Voz is their debut album under the name, and it finds Diaz separating themselves from their work with EEEKS by embracing an atmospheric synthpop sound. Although they no longer live in Paraguay, Diaz’s place of origin is clearly still on their mind–these ten tracks are full of field recordings that Diaz makes every time they revisit their home country as a way of remembering it, and the subjects of the songs (which are bilingual, in both English and Spanish) deal with the idea of home, thoughts of family, and the intersection between the two of them.
New horizons aside, the first minute of Notas de Vozdoes sound pretty similar to an EEEKS song– “La Modelo de Mis Fantasias” gets off to a sprinting start with its bouncy power pop. However, almost as if to assert that this is Sandy Pylos, the song then deconstructs itself, shifting into a more low-key but still catchy pop rock tune in its midsection, and ending with a sound collage of hushed music from the song, bird sounds, and ambient noises. “Cerca Mio” and “Bellas Chollas” are the other “pop” songs found towards the front of the record, although they’re fairly distinct from one another–the former opts for guitar-driven, laid-back but still quite full-sounding bedroom-psych-pop, and the latter goes for prim, strutting synthpop. Diaz cautiously leads the album into a controlled unraveling with the entirely field-recording-based “1437” and the experimental pop of “Like a House” before ending Notas de Voz with a trio of heartfelt pop ballads. All of them feature synths in the foreground–“A Weekend” in particular would be hard to imagine without those soaring tones–although “synthpop” doesn’t quite get at where Diaz is coming from here. The pop music of Sandy Pylos pulls from several different corners, but Notas de Voz is built from a solid, sturdy, coherent structure. (Bandcamp link)
No Drama – No Drama
Release date: November 3rd Record label: Hidden Bay/Seitan’s Hell Bike Punks Genre: Lo-fi indie rock, fuzz rock, slowcore, shoegaze Formats: Cassette, digital Pull Track: Born to Clap
No Drama are a new Toulouse, France-based indie rock band made up of Hidden Bay labelhead Manon Raupp on guitar and vocals, as well as bassist Amandine Rué, guitarist/vocalist Daniel Selig, and drummer Iso Couderd. Raupp’s label is co-releasing their debut EP with Seitan’s Hell Bike Punks, and the members have played in various other Hidden Bay bands (Radical Kitten, Docks, Walk Home Drunk, Comité, balnéaire, and Chien pourri), although No Drama presents a group already developing a distinct sound. The five-track cassette EP is a dour-sounding piece of 90s-inspired indie rock, with No Drama pulling in a bit of slowcore, shoegaze, and emo into their downcast but quite striking music. For a debut record, No Drama is fairly fleshed-out–the quartet present both concise, chilly bummer pop and sprawling, four-to-five minute guitar-exploration-heavy rock songs in a sub-twenty minute package.
Opening track “Better Off” strikes an opening balance between the melodic, almost triumphant-sounding indie rock instrumental and the emotional, somewhat pained-feeling lead vocals, declining to settle into either “slacker rock” or “chill dream pop” easy listening modes. Although “Better Off” is a short tune, it primes the listener for the back-to-back punches of “Happy Dog” (which stretches to nearly six minutes) and the stop-start cavernous indie rock epic of “Exit”, both of which present grand-scale visions from the still-young-yet band. Those who make it through the EP’s rather harrowing midsection get rewarded with “MFNM” (that stands for “making friends, not money”), which steadily paces its way to a big, electric finish, and closing track “Born to Clap”, a bright, vocal-trade-off-heavy piece of fuzz pop that’s easily the most accessible track on the record. The song promises handclaps, and it delivers–with about three seconds left on the EP. If that seems a bit backwards to you–well, to me it seems like No Drama know exactly what they’re doing. (Bandcamp link)
It’s been a whirlwind week yet again here at Rosy Overdrive. Today’s post caps off the week by looking at four albums that are coming out tomorrow: new ones from Teenage Tom Petties, The Smashing Times, TIFFY, and Citric Dummies. The October 2023 playlist/round-up went up on Tuesday, and we looked at albums from Aux Caroling, Bungler, The Wind-Ups, and Miracle Sweepstakes on Monday; check those posts 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.
Teenage Tom Petties – Hotbox Daydreams
Release date: November 3rd Record label: Repeating Cloud/Safe Suburban Home Genre: Lo-fi power pop Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Dipshit
I first became aware of Wiltshire, England’s Tom Brown as one half of the lo-fi power pop duo Rural France, but Brown’s Teenage Tom Petties project (named after a song from the most recent Rural France album) has taken center stage as of late. The self-titled debut Teenage Tom Petties album came out last year, and it was a jolting 14-minute, 9-song proof of concept that was recorded entirely by Brown himself at home. I’m not the kind of person that listens to lo-fi, clanging, tuneful pop rock and thinks “I just wish this was recorded in a studio with a full band”, but playing these songs live necessitated the development of one, and, wouldn’t you know it, the Teenage Tom Petties are now a five-piece, three-guitar group that spans both Old and New England. In what I think is a first for Pressing Concerns, the Teenage Tom Petties Quintet features two different label heads–Galen Richmond of Portland, Maine’s Repeating Cloud (and the band Lemon Pitch) on guitar, and Jim Quinn of York’s Safe Suburban Home on bass, in addition to lead guitarist James Brown and drummer Jeff Hamm.
The group decamped to Providence, Rhode Island’s Big Nice Studio to record Hotbox Daydreams, the sophomore Teenage Tom Petties record, with Bradford Krieger of Courtney and Brad, and they ended up with an album that doubles the length of the debut (28 minutes) despite only having one more song. And in terms of fidelity, it’s obviously an exponential leap forward (regular readers of the blog are aware that Krieger knows what he’s doing). Great pop songwriters shine through the most rudimentary of recording setups, yes, but they also don’t need to lean heavily on amp distortion and off-the-cuff energy to make something worthwhile–with that in mind, I’m pleased to say that not only does Hotbox Daydreams retain the spark of Teenage Tom Petties, it’s a leap forward for Brown and his collaborators in every way. It’s deeper, more energetic, more consistent, and it sounds better (and mind you, I liked that debut quite a bit).
Every song on Hotbox Daydreams could’ve been a single. I can’t really argue with the two choices–particularly “Stoner”, a high-octane piece of loud melancholy that solidifies the album’s excellence in the track two slot–but what about the excellent, sprinting, scene-setting opening track “Trigger’s Broom”? Or the crunchy power chords, giant chorus, and “slacker rock anthem” vibes of “This One’s on You”? What about the instantly memorable lo-fi showtune “Dipshit” (well, unless they were going all out for radioplay, in which case that one answers itself)? Brown’s choruses feel more developed, maybe more “mature”–not in the sense that they’re any less immediate, but songs like “I Got It from Here” and “Find Me” feel precarious in how they shoot for the pop-song moon while balancing some more complex emotions. It’s rare that I think “ah, I wish I had a lyric sheet for this slacker rock album,” but Brown’s writing, which already had a bit more going on under the surface than normal on the last album, feels like it’s moving even further to the front of the pack here, both on the quieter moments–closing track “Death Trap” and…well, basically just that one–and in the crevices of the rockers. Welcome to the next generation of Teenage Tom Petties, bigger and better than ever. (Bandcamp link)
The Smashing Times – This Sporting Life
Release date: November 3rd Record label: K/Perennial Genre: Jangle pop, psychedelic pop Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Dandy
The Smashing Times are effectively the platonic ideal of a certain version of guitar pop. The Baltimore five-piece are lead by the duo of vocalists Thee Jasmine Monk (also on guitar) and Zelda-Anais (also on drums) and are rounded out by bassist Britta Leijonflycht (also of Galore, Rays, and Almond Joy), drummer Paul Krolian (also of Expert Alterations), and guitarist Blake Douglas (also of Gloop). This Sporting Life is the band’s fourth album since 2019–the first one I heard was last year’s Meritorio-released Bloom, which was presented as a “psychedelic twee freakbeat” album and lived up to that description, a warped wonderland where vintage jangle pop and folk rock take strange and unknowable twists and turns all over. Merely a year later they’ve jumped to K and Perennial (Daisies, Ribbon Stage, Milk Music) for This Sporting Life, which might be the most fully-realized The Smashing Times have sounded yet–it’s the most pop-forward they’ve sounded, even as they haven’t abandoned the exploratory streak that made them stick out in the first place.
The Smashing Times roll through fourteen songs (sixteen if you count bonus 7” single “Monday in a Small Town” and its B-side) in forty minutes here–if you want to get lost in This Sporting Life, it’s encouraged, but there are also several memorable signposts in the form of sneakily brilliant pop singles here. The roaring “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning” is the obvious single from the A-side–the band sound like a slightly more scatterbrained version of The Jam on that one–but the jangle pop overload of “Let’s Be Nice with Johnny” and the 60s folk rock sweetness of opening track “Glorious Tales of Wes” are both just as catchy without being quite as dramatic about the whole thing. Two of the best pop moments on the album come towards the end–the forty-second instrumental ball of melody that is “Petey” and the sparkling “Dandy”–even as the album ends by stretching their sound in classic Smashing Time fashion. “Where Is Rowan Morrison” is some vintage psych-folk-pop-rock, and the nearly eight-minute “Peppermint Girl” (which closes the album proper) just keeps going, declining to run out of ideas and territories in which to steer the song. “Peppermint Girl” could’ve gone on even longer as far as I’m concerned–but when it’s finished, I can just start This Sporting Life over again. (Bandcamp link)
TIFFY – So Serious
Release date: November 3rd Record label: Totally Real/Dollhouse Lightning Genre: Dream pop, indie punk, 90s indie rock, power pop Formats: Cassette, digital Pull Track: In Jest
So Serious is the debut album from TIFFY (aka Tiffany Sammy), but the Boston-based singer-songwriter has been around for a bit. I first heard her self-titled EP back in 2021, which was her second, following her 2019 debut Fire Sale. So Serious is being put out through the team of Dollhouse Lightning (with whom she’s been since her 2020 “Double Feature” cassette single) and Totally Real Records (Onesie, Pacing, Snake Lips), who’ve been on a real tear lately. Sammy describes her sound as “soft punk”, and the TIFFY EP reflected this by mixing quiet, dreamy indie pop with some louder fuzz-pop moments (the “pop” being the main throughline here). So Serious feels like the culmination of Sammy’s last few years of output–some of these songs have existed as demos or alternate recordings for a while now, but everything on the record locks into place and fits together as an inspired marriage of jagged alt-rock and more polished pop.
“I’m Not Equipped for This”, which kicks off So Serious, originally appeared on the TIFFY EP–this re-recorded version feels more dynamic, the Weezer-y wall-of-sound guitar flareups sounding more towering compared to the restraint shown in the verses. Sammy’s commitment to rock music is as strong as ever here–just on the first half, the blistering “In Jest”, the melodic lead guitar workout of “Don’t Take It Personally”, and the slow-but-steadily-building “Vying” all feature enjoyable guitar-forward music. Although the dance-pop groove of “Lost in the Shuffle” is an early outlier, you might have to stick around a bit to hear the “soft” side of TIFFY become the dominant strain–even the dreamy “Can’t Stand It (Don’t Wanna Talk)” develops into a full-blown rocker by its end. The muddled synthpop of “Ingest (With a G)” closes the album on a curious note, with Sammy, whose vocals had largely been front and center, fading into the background and wondering “what did I take all these years?” It’s a true breather in a record that doesn’t feature too many of them–but with one full-length finally under her built, TIFFY’s earned that much. (Bandcamp link)
Citric Dummies – Zen and the Arcade of Beating Your Ass
Release date: November 3rd Record label: Feel It Genre: Garage punk, hardcore punk, fuzz punk Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: I Don’t Wanna Be with No One But Myself (Tonight)
I shoulda never smoked that shit, now I’m getting my ass beaten on the Zen Arcade cover. That album artwork and title is certainly the first thing I noticed about the fourth album from the Minneapolis trio Citric Dummies, who have apparently been skulking around releasing music on punk labels like Erste Theke Tonträger (Public Interest, Supercrush, Needles//Pins) since 2016. Yes, they’re probably just goofing around about an album they’re supposed to treat as a holy grail as a Minnesotan garage punk band, but at the same time, early-to-middle Hüsker Dü is not at all a bad starting point for Citric Dummies’ breakneck, land-speed-record hardcore-ish punk rock. While vocalist/bassist Drew Ailes (“Egg Norton”), vocalist/guitarist Patrick Dillon (“Blob Mould”), and Travis Minnick (“Brandt Shardt”) are not exactly trying to create punk rock opera, the twenty-three minute Zen and the Arcade of Beating Your Ass similarly takes its pop and pulverization in equal measure.
Maybe this is what happens when you take an early Dü ethic and devotion and combine it with a Replacements goofiness–you get songs like “I’m Gonna Punch Larry Bird” and “Doing Dope at Chucky Cheese” that are as serious about laying you out as their titles are absurd. Citric Dummies do have a hardcore speed to them, but the majority of Zen and the Arcade of Beating Your Ass is pop music delivered with plenty of fuzz and punk yelps. Sims Hardin of Mesh compares them to the Ramones on the album’s Bandcamp page, and while I’m not going to sit here and claim that these are just 60s girl-group pop songs sped up like Johnny, Joey, Dee Dee, and Tommy made, it’s not just pure aggression that makes “I’m Gonna Kill Myself (At the Co-op)” and “I Don’t Wanna Be with No One But Myself (Tonight)” into pretty timeless-sounding punk anthems. Really, the best thing I can say about this album is that it lives up to what you’d hope something called “Zen and the Arcade of Beating Your Ass” would sound like. It’s not Zen Arcade, but it stands on its own. (Bandcamp link)
Happy Halloween to all you ghouls, zombies, ghosts and whatnot. I’d say that this is a “spooky” edition of the monthly round-up or something, but really, this is just a normal one. It’s only scary if you’re afraid of good music. Or sentient mouths (we’ll get to that in a minute). Oh, and there is a Teenage Halloween song on here, so that counts for something too, I think.
The World Famous, Norm Archer, and The Bug Club have multiple songs on this playlist (two each).
Here is where you can listen to the playlist on various streaming services: Spotify, Tidal (missing one song), BNDCMPR (also missing one song). Be sure to check out previous playlist posts if you’ve enjoyed this one, or visit the site directory. If you’d like to support Rosy Overdrive, you can share this (or another) post, or donate here.
“Making Noise for the Ones You Love”, Ratboys From The Window (2023, Topshelf)
Turns out that what I had to do to really get into the new Ratboys album was listen to it while driving. Not that I’d disliked The Window before, but after a spin or two it hadn’t really grabbed me like their last couple of albums–but listening to the opening notes of “Making Noise for the Ones You Love” going down the highway? Hearing the band crank things up gear after gear after gear like they do here? This is classic rock, to me. This should be blanketing the airwaves so we can all get stoned with Julia Steiner on the way home.
“Samuel Was Beautiful Tonight”, The Bug Club From Rare Birds: Hour of Song (2023, We Are Busy Bodies)
Back in April, I summarized what Welsh trio The Bug Club had done so far and made it clear that I was curious where they’d end up next. Well, I didn’t expect an hour-plus double album to show up mere months later, but that’s what we’ve got with Rare Birds: Hour of Song. The first non-spoken word track on Rare Birds is “Samuel Was Beautiful Tonight”, an absolute monster of a garage-y power pop song that reminds us all instantly of the knack for hooks that Sam Willmett, Tilly Harris, and Dan Matthew possess as a trio. I hear some Jonathan Richman in this one–but mostly I hear just another entry in The Bug Club’s collection of classic songs.
“Rainbow Trout”, The Croaks From Croakus Pokus (2023)
The Croaks are a Boston-based prog-folk-rock that take their sound into baroque and medieval directions on their debut record–but they aren’t afraid of the “rock” end of folk rock either. Take “Rainbow Trout”, my favorite song on Croakus Pokus–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. Read more about Croakus Pokus here.
“Mouth of the Century”, Fox Japan From Cannibals (2023)
The 60-second post-punk-pop thrashing of “Mouth of the Century” is Fox Japan’s most recent excursion back to the nervous new wave that characterized their earlier, late-2000s-era work, and it’s certainly a highlight of their five-song Cannibals EP. The lyrics are Charlie Wilmoth at his disturbing and perturbed best, breathlessly describing an actual all-consuming, pretty dickish sentient mouth (“I’ve got the mouth of the century chewing on me / Says I taste like manicotti,” not gonna forget that one). Would also recommend checking out an animated depiction of said mouth in the song’s music video, created by Ryan Hizer of Spirit Night, Librarians, and Good Sport. Read more about Cannibals here.
“Shell”, Medejin From The Garden (2023, Icy Cold/Den Tapes)
“Shell”, the opening track of Medejin’s The Garden, is one hell of a first impression. 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. Under the wide umbrella that encompasses modern dream pop, the Seattle band decidedly fall towards the “pop” side of the spectrum–this is about one step removed from a lost Cranberries or Sundays single. The more layered rest of the album shows they don’t have just one mode, but when they do dial this kind of music up, they nail it. Read more about The Garden here.
“Lipstick Trick”, The World Famous From Totally Famous (2023, Lauren)
Side two of The World Famous’ Totally Famous might be my single favorite side of a record this year. Definitely hard to choose a favorite one from it, but I’m settling more and more on “Lipstick Trick”, a perfect power pop song. The song’s verses 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. Bandleader Will Harris has a delicately melodic voice that I’d put up there Matt Scottoline of Hurry and Peter Gill of 2nd Grade, and the band bring the “power” with an instrumental that’s as bright-sounding as possible. Read more about Totally Famous here.
“On the Tyne”, Norm Archer From Splitting the Bill (2023, Panda Koala)
Unlike the previous Norm Archer album, 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 bandleader Will Pearce’s kinetic energy. Splitting the Bill is still a pop record, but the edges of Norm Archer are as sharp as ever, merging power pop with Archers of Loaf-style 90s indie rock. Opening track “On the Tyne” is a Robert Pollardesque piece of multi-movement prog-pop that also rocks heavily and would kill in a stadium, I just know it. Read more about Splitting the Bill here.
“Seamless”, Stoner Control (2023)
Uh oh, Stoner Control discovered alt-country music. Maybe it’s just the Wilco A.M. vibes that I’m getting from the cover art to their latest one-off single, “Seamless”, but the Portland trio add a distinct twanginess to the song’s verses. That being said, they’re still the same power pop/alt rockers who put out stuff like 2021’s Sparkle Endlessly and this year’s Glad You Made It EP, so you can expect them to come at it with plenty of hooks, and the track’s chorus somehow reverts into a Built to Spill-ish indie rock hammering without seeming incongruous with the rest of the song. One might say that the band integrated these new elements into their sound seamlessly!
“Live Laugh Love”, Pacing From 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 (2023, Totally Real)
“Live Laugh Love” is such a good song. The musical and lyrical adventurousness of Pacing is on full display here, a highlight among 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’s highlights. Katie McTigue walks the tightrope (or rides 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?”). These headline-worthy lines 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”. Read more about 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 here.
“Giant Giant Giant”, ME REX From Giant Elk (2023, Big Scary Monsters)
I really like ME REX. I never think of them as one of my favorite bands, but just look at where they’ve been lately–2021’s Megabear cracking the top 25 of my favorite albums from that year, last year’s Plesiosaur being my third favorite EP of 2022–maybe I need to start putting them up there. Part of my overlooking them might be that Giant Elk is their first “normal” album–up until now, they’d been all EPs and the 52-song (successful) experiment of Megabear. Myles McCabe, Phoebe Cross, and Rich Mandell, surprising no one, can absolutely hold their own in an eleven-song, 40-minute format, with the band sounding as loud and confident as ever as the poppy alt-rock foundation of “Giant Giant Giant” only serves to accent McCabe’s lyrics further.
“Best Supporting Actress”, Vesuvian From More Treble (2023)
This song rules so much. I first heard it on the 106-song Bee Side Beats 2: For Gaza compilation (which you should buy, because it’s good and it’s for a very very good cause) and it hit me immediately. Vesuvian (not the Seattle metal band) is Philadelphia’s Joey DeGrado, with help from drummer Will Kennedy and vocalist Tracy Feldman on More Treble, their debut album that came out in April. “Best Supporting Actress” is an excellent piece of alt-country-rock–do you like State Champion? Parister? MJ Lenderman? DeGrado’s operating in the same sphere–that is an inspired tribute to Lee Grant (“Best Supporting Actress ‘75”).
“Pest Control”, Big Cry Country From Living Conditions (2023)
“I’ve seen the afterlife, and you are wearing my old sweater,” now there’s a hell of a chorus hook. Big Cry Country are a Washington D.C.-originating power-pop-indie-punk quartet who’ve just put out their debut EP, Living Conditions. The whole thing is a solid, polished but not-overthought collection of spirited indie rock, but the opening track, “Pest Control”, is the one that I keep coming back to. Lead vocalist Roxanne Bublitz certainly can deliver a melody and convey a lot with just that aforementioned line, and the rest of the band (Jill Miller, JP Salussolia, and Jarrod Brennet) are certainly no slouches when it comes to fleshing out the music as much as possible.
“Vice Grip”, Noah Roth From Florida (2023, Rocket to Heaven)
Noah Roth recorded Florida–their third solo album in about a year–almost entirely alone with just an acoustic guitar in its titular state. Although their past releases were nowhere near this stark, Roth’s songwriting translates well to the world of early Mountain Goats-esque spartan structures. My favorite track on Florida, “Vice Grip”, particularly strains against its “folk rock” foundation in the perfect Darnielleian way, the simple but huge chords trying to launch themselves into space. “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 this one. As for that… Read more about Florida here.
“Guard Stick”, Golden Apples From Bananasugarfire (2023, Lame-O)
Bananasugarfire is the most ambitious Golden Apples have sounded yet–the third record from Russell Edling and his band in as many years gobbles up shoegaze, psychedelia, and power pop heedlessly to kickstart what feels like a new era for the newly-solidified quartet. Early on in the record, “Guard Stick” feels like Golden Apples developing the sound of Bananasugarfire in real time, it that takes a vintage Golden Apples-ish slacker-indie-rock chord progression and adorns it with more bells and whistles than, say, “Let Me Do My Thing” or “Slime” from their last album, but without losing any of the catchy core of those tracks. Read more about Bananasugarfire here.
“Caroline”, Strawberry Story From Clamming for It (1993, Vinyl Japan)
I’ll have more to say about Clamming for It when I do the next edition of my 1993 listening log, but I’ll leave you with “Caroline” for now. It’s a song from Strawberry Story, a British indie pop band who released a lot of singles–Clamming for It is actually a compilation–including this perfect one. Sometimes I need a jolt to remind myself how much I love music, and, well, this song absolutely shook me out of a stupor on a certain shitty morning. “Finally I’ve got a weakness that doesn’t take a toll on my smile,” what a beautiful chorus. What a wonderful sentiment. Music is magic!
“Doctor”, Teenage Halloween From Till You Return (2023, Don Giovanni)
It took Teenage Halloween three years to follow up their excellent self-titled debut album (one of my favorites from 2020), but I’m happy to report that Till You Return is every bit that album’s equal in terms of massive power pop hooks and electric punk rock energy. I could’ve put just about any song off of this damn album on the playlist and it would be one of the catchiest things here, but for now I’ve been particularly enjoying “Doctor”, which strains hard in its chorus to help it stand out in a murderer’s row of Teenage Halloween anthems.
“My Heart Is Breaking Over You”, Sick Thoughts From Born to Blitzkrieg (2023, Rokk)
jesus fucking christ
“Only One Way”, the Mountain Goats From Jenny from Thebes (2023, Merge)
I’m always having opinions on the new Mountain Goats album. Bleed Out won me back after a few years in the wilderness, and while Jenny from Thebes is probably not going to top that one for me, it does feel like John Darnielle and the rest of the band are back to making music I’m predisposed to like again. Of course, keeping the length down to a single LP’s length helps a lot–this is the first Mountain Goats studio album under 45 minutes since Transcendental Youth, which is probably not coincidentally the last one I really loved. Still, they’re pretty far away even from that album–the power chords, keyboard chimes, horn section, and handclaps of “Only One Way” lead up to a “I’m not sure if the Mountain Goats have ever sounded exactly like this” moment for me. If Darnielle is on, though, it doesn’t much matter what’s backing him.
“As If It’d Even the Score”, CLASS From If You’ve Got Nothing (2023, Feel It)
On If You’ve Got Nothing, Tucson quartet CLASS zeroes in on their glam-influenced power pop side, bashing out a dozen such tunes in half an hour. There’s plenty of hits on If You’ve Got Nothing, but my favorite song from their second full-length in as many years just might be penultimate track “As If It’d Even the Score”. It’s a glam rock/AOR-flavored strut that is as catchy as anything else on the record (it’s even got a bit of a jangle to it, which is a nice touch for CLASS). It’s also just a little bit off in an interesting way–the verses are probably catchier than the refrain here. Read more about If You’ve Got Nothing Here.
“Water Tower”, Combat Naps From Tap In (2023, ABC Postman)
The latest release from Madison’s Combat Naps, the 25-minute “mini album” Tap In, is a dozen tracks of brief, friendly dispatches of lo-fi guitar pop that pulls together early Tony Molina and early of Montreal eagerly. The record opens with a certified hit in the perfect bouncy power pop of “Water Tower”, a piece of post-LVL UP weird shininess–it’s as catchy as it is just about as stuffed with as many ideas as bandleader Neal Jochmann could possibly fit into two minutes. Read more about Tap In here.
“Time”, Aux Caroling From Hydrogen Bonds (2023, Half a Person)
Hydrogen Bonds, the debut album from North Carolina’s Aux Caroling, contains a preoccupation with the passing of time and what that means for its narrators that slowly but surely reveals itself. Singer-songwriter Scott Deaver and multi-instrumentalist Mike Albanese give album highlight “Time” a dressing that pushes against the subtlety of Deaver’s writing, however–it’s got a very pleasing piano-pop-rock feel, accentuating lines like “It’d be nice to get the answer before the ice caps melt / Or at least shortly after that”. Read more about Hydrogen Bonds here.
“Dusk”, Dusk From Glass Pastures (2023, Don Giovanni)
You’ve got to love when a band records a song with their name as the title. Of course, considering that Appleton, Wisconsin’s Dusk is a very good country rock band, it was only a matter of time before they wrote a song about that particular time of day. Glass Pastures is the first proper Dusk album in a half-decade, although they were R Boyd’s backing band for his 2020 album High Country Skyway and Amos Pitch and Julia Blair both put out solo albums in the interstitial time. Blair sings lead on “Dusk” and she absolutely kills it, confidently piloting a timeless-sounding pop song to its country classic-worthy refrain–“It’s not that I got nobody / Just that I got nobody right now”.
“Delete Me Everywhere”, Dear Vandal From You Were There (2023, Reginald Hill)
Earlier this year I wrote about Melancolony’s Qualia Problems, an overstuffed collection of pop music that borrowed a lot from vintage college rock and post-punk. Dear Vandal’s You Were There gives me the same feeling–over 46 minutes and 13 tracks, Geoff Turner goes digging through indie and early “alternative” rock’s past to dredge up lost-sounding pop music. That being said, my favorite track, opening number “Delete Me Everywhere”, obviously contains a couple of references that’d preclude it from being mistaken from a forgotten 1987 classic. That jaunty drumbeat and dusted-up but still “in it” chorus–those are timeless, though.
“Friends of Joey”, Joey Nebulous From Joey Spumoni Creamy Dreamy Party All the Time (2023, Dear Life)
Joey Spumoni Creamy Dreamy Party All the Time is a whirlwind queer pop record–Joey Nebulous bandleader Joey Farago’s falsetto is just one of the many striking features of the album’s eighteen songs. Farago and friends end the album on perhaps its highest note with “Friends of Joey”, a polished send-off in which Farago declares “I’m always there for you when you want it” and sounding exactly like he means it (and when his bandmates join in, it feels especially infectious). Read more about Joey Spumoni Creamy Dreamy Party All the Time here.
I feel like there are several bands in this edition of the playlist who finally released new albums after being away for several years. You can add Oakland’s Half Stack to that list–they’d been quiet since 2020’s Wings of Love (one of my favorite albums from that year), but Sitting Pretty continues their winning streak of solid desert-touched fuzzy, psych-y alt-country rock. Opening track “I Might Try” is a steady, low-key introduction– I believe that’s Marley Lix Jones, who has a larger presence on the new album than the last one, on vocals here, and the interplay between the lead guitar and the singing in the chorus is a really exciting moment on a record with no shortage of them.
“Shaken”, Upchuck From Bite the Hand That Feeds (2023, Famous Class)
Another band that’s returned with another full length in a year’s time is Atlanta quintet Upchuck, whose first album, Sense Yourself, was one of my favorite albums of 2022. That album balanced the extremes of garage punk, combining a hardcore punk ferocity with plenty of undeniably “pop” moments. The Ty Segall-produced Bite the Hand That Feeds finds the band honing their skills and songs down to short but sweet daggers, of which “Shaken” is maybe my favorite. This one gets it done in 90 seconds, with lead singer KT’s vocals grabbing one’s attention from the beginning, offering plenty of hook-y moments but declining to sugarcoat things.
“A Taste for Shame”, Norm Archer From Splitting the Bill (2023, Panda Koala)
Splitting the Bill is such an adventurous, unpredictable indie “power pop” rock album that “A Taste for Shame” is something of a black sheep just by playing things mostly straight. The track is pitch-perfect jangly college rock–it’s almost shocking how doggedly Will Pearce and Ben Whyntie stick to the slickly-unfurling pop rock that kicks off the song, but it’s absolutely what the track calls for. Like the rest of Splitting the Bill, Pearce’s songwriting acumen and the shot-in-the-arm Whyntie’s drumming gives it are more than enough for “A Taste for Shame” to succeed. Read more about Splitting the Bill here.
“Horse Riding”, The Small Intestines From Hide in Time (2023, Meritorio/Lost and Lonesome)
Melbourne’s 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 (Matt Liveriadis, Rob Remedios, and Tristan Peachare) are making low-key, timeless-sounding indie rock on a constant basis regardless of whether we’re listening. Remedios’ bass work is really sharp throughout Hide in Time–you can hear it prominently on opening track “Horse Riding”, a pastoral scene-setter that is subtle but brilliant on a focused listen. Read more about Hide in Time here.
“Can Ya Change a Thing Like This?”, The Bug Club From Rare Birds: Hour of Song (2023, We Are Busy Bodies)
There’s a lot to choose from on Rare Birds: Hour of Song (I mean, did you hear them? It’s an hour of song), but I knew pretty much instantly that “Can Ya Change a Thing Like This?” was going to end up on here. It’s another high-flying piece of high-energy, high-octane power pop, just like most of Rare Birds… What makes this one stand out among these standouts? Well, the vocal tradeoffs between Sam Willmett and Tilly Harris are absolutely ace, there’s some nice liberal f-bombs thrown around gleefully, and there’s a couple noisy rave-up moments here, in the biggest pop moment on the biggest pop album of the year.
“Basement Spaceman”, Mike Adams at His Honest Weight From Guess for Thrills (2023, Joyful Noise)
Releasing albums in back-to-back years is bold, yes, but even bolder is–as Mike Adams at His Honest Weight have done–designating one of them as the immediate, pop-friendly one. Like, what does that make the other one? The “pop” one, 2022’s Graphic Blandishment, was one of my favorites from last year, but now we have Guess for Thrills, built from “synthesizer experimentations” and “mellow singer-songwriter tunes” that’s Mike Adams at his most nebulous but still stubbornly hook-filled. I almost went with one of those synthesizer experimentations (the bizarre, fascinating “Golden Rule Breakdown”) but in the end “Basement Spaceman” is one of the best “singer-songwriter mode” Adams moments I’ve heard yet. Adams takes his time getting to the chorus, but he makes it more than worth your wait.
“Cordon Bleu”, Dancer From As Well (2023, GoldMold)
As Well is Dancer’s version of a “difficult second record”; they’re a bit moodier, noisier, and post-punk-ier. That being said, the Glasgow quartet still open the EP with “Cordon Bleu”, a jangly guitar pop number that falls somewhere in the Motorists realm of marrying pop with post-punk touches. It’s got a bit of that lean, economical guitar pop charm that marked their self-titled debut EP, even as the rhythm section of bassist Andrew Doig and drummer Gavin Murdoch hit just a bit harder here. Read more about As Well here.
“Losing Your Touch”, Alejandro Escovedo From Thirteen Years (1993, Watermelon/New West)
I don’t love Thirteen Years as much as the previous year’s Gravity–one of the great underheralded alt-country/singer-songwriter/roots rock whatever albums of the 90s–but upon relistening I rediscovered “Losing Your Touch”, which definitely stands as one of Alejandro Escovedo’s finest moments as a solo artist. It’s a swaggering piece of country rock–Escovedo can really probe with his ballads, yes, but my favorite songs of his are generally the ones that can light a fire under you–and “Losing Your Touch” is quite hot to the touch.
“Game Over”, Al Murb From BRD SHT (2023, Small Shot)
Pocatello, Idaho’s Al Murb is definitely making music for the true lo-fi indie rock scum amongst us on his latest record, BRD SHT. Pulling from the low-key adventurousness of The Jicks, the sloppiness of early Pavement, and some of the Silver Jews’ twang, Murb takes BRD SHT on some pretty weird detours, but decides to throw the pop heads a bone in album highlight “Game Over”. It’s a laid back and hypnotically catchy guitar pop tune in which Murb puts on his best J. Mascis/Kurt Vile face to pull it off. Read more about BRD SHT here.
“Bailed Out”, The Auteurs From New Wave (1993, Hut)
I really liked this Auteurs album. Again, more on it when I publish the next 1993 listening log, but “Bailed Out” made the cut pretty easily. There’s a lot of excessive British music from around this time period–New Wave, and “Bailed Out” especially, feels like a breath of fresh air in its (relative) minimalism. Its slightly eerie, ornate presentation is really unique and transfixing, and the understated chorus has really stuck with me.
“Oh I Know”, The Wind-Ups From Happy Like This (2023, Mt.St.Mtn.)
The latest album from California lo-fi-garage-power-poppers The Wind-Ups (aka Smokescreens’ Jake Sprecher) is weirdly backloaded. The flipside of Happy Like This isn’t any less in-the-red sonically than what precedes it, but the majority of the biggest “hits” on the album can be found here. “Oh I Know” is The Wind-Ups at their Ramones-iest, and it also finds them peeking into the world of Upper Wilds-y massive fuzz-power-pop sounds. Oh, and they bash the entire thing out in seventy-seven seconds, as well. Read more about Happy Like This here.
“Tinker’s Darn”, Upper Narrows From While We’re Warm (2023, Repeating Cloud)
Tyler Jackson is new to me, but he’s been kicking around for a while, playing in Portland, Maine bands like Foam Castles and Golden Rules the Thumb since the late 2000s. Upper Narrows is Jackson’s latest project–its debut record, While We’re Warm, is indeed a warm-sounding record of sleepily beautiful synthpop and dream pop. Opening track “Tinker’s Darn” is my favorite–Jackson’s earnest vocals float alongside a brightly-strummed acoustic guitar and slow, steady synth washes as plenty of memorable melodies rise to the surface.
“Candy Clouds”, The World Famous From Totally Famous (2023, Lauren)
I compared The World Famous frontman Will Harris to a couple of different vocalists when I wrote about “Lipstick Trick” earlier; “Candy Clouds” is the song where he really adds Grandaddy’s Jason Lytle to the list. Harris especially sounds Lytle-ish in the verses, which are chugging but delicate Grandaddy-like indie rock–and it’s worth noting that these verses are catchy enough to be chorus hooks on their own. Instead, they’re one of three such “hook-worthy” sections on “Candy Clouds”, along with the “When I look into your weary eyes…” pre-chorus and the actual chorus. Read more about Totally Famous here.
“Ask New York”, JOBS From Soft Sounds (2023, Ramp Local)
New York’s JOBS are an experimental/art rock four-piece made up of Max Jaffe, Ro(b) Lundberg, Jessica Pavone, and Dave Scanlon. Scanlon’s solo work has made appearances on the blog before (he released a really good album earlier this year), and JOBS’ latest album, Soft Sounds, feels like a grander-scale version of Scanlon’s relatively intimate but still “experimental” folk music. Scanlon sings lead on “Ask New York”, a suspended-in-amber piece of minimalist synthpop that I find quite hypnotic.
“Cool Fool”, Look at the Bones From Home Sweet Home (2023)
I feel like I’ve been slacking in the emo department lately. I’m a little pickier when it comes to this kind of music, so I really need to dig to find the stuff that really resonates with me. “Cool Fool” found me, however. I’ll tell you exactly what got to me–when Look at the Bones shift into “popping bass guitar and crackly vocals” about forty seconds into this song. These kinds of bands never have bass that sounds like this in their music, but this group make it sound natural. It’s a highlight from the Seattle trio’s first release, the five-song Home Sweet Home EP, and they seem like a new group worth keeping an eye on.
“Forced Perspective”, Dazy (2023, Lame-O)
New Dazy? Don’t mind if I….doozy. This is the first new music from the James Goodson-led power pop fuzz rock project since the Otherbody EP back in March, itself comprised of songs that didn’t make the cut from last year’s OUTOFBODY. Apparently there were a lot of outtakes from those sessions, but I have reason to believe that “Forced Perspective” is newer–for one, its late 90s alt-pop leanings are decidedly more teased-out here than in Goodson’s preview output. Tina Lou Vines from Negative Glow said the song has “Sugar Ray energy” and I can’t unhear that. If it’s all gonna be as good as “Forced Perspective”, though, I say: bring that revival on.
“Kentucky Kingdom”, Mister Goblin (2023, Exploding in Sound)
An alarming number of Mister Goblin’s best songs are about theme parks. “Six Flags America” from Four People in an Elevator and One of Them Is the Devil, “Holiday World” from Bunny…highlights of their respective records, both. Although the Indiana/Florida-based Sam Goblin has spent some time in the Bluegrass State as part of Louisville’s Deady, he admits he’s never been to the titular amusement park. No matter–this song is still Mister Goblin at their best. It’s just about the polar opposite of the last one-off Goblin single (the fiery post-hardcore of “Left Before Your Set”), showing off Sam Goblin’s indie folk singer-songwriter side. He’s really good at writing these…blurry, unfocused pain-based lyrics; “Kentucky Kingdom” reminds me of a more insular version of the personal micro-dramas that Fox Japan’s Charlie Wilmoth writes. “We’ll be standing in the line for the Lightning Run when Kentucky Kingdom comes / And collapses all at once,” indeed.
Welcome to a Monday Pressing Concerns! We’re staring down the barrel of November, but the new music has just not stopped coming; this issue looks at four great albums that came out last week. New records from Aux Caroling, Bungler, The Wind-Ups, and Miracle Sweepstakes grace this edition.
If you’re looking for more new music, you can visit the site directory to see what else we’ve written about lately. If you’d like to support Rosy Overdrive, you can share this (or another) post, or donate here.
Aux Caroling – Hydrogen Bonds
Release date: October 27th Record label: Half a Person Genre: Singer-songwriter,folk rock Formats: CD, digital Pull Track: Time
Aux Caroling is Scott Deaver, a North Carolina-based singer-songwriter who had a couple of singles and a Christmas album to his name until the release of Hydrogen Bonds, the first (as far as I can tell) non-holiday themed Aux Caroling album. Hydrogen Bonds has been kicking around for a while–two of its songs were initially released as a single back in 2020, and Deaver admits that it had sat gathering digital dust in a Dropbox folder until COVID-inflicted hearing loss spurred him to release it “while [he] can still sort of hear it”. Deaver comes off as a somewhat reluctant artist, at least in terms of being public-facing; like the release of Hydrogen Bonds, its recording was also the product of circumstance (in this case, recognizing that the upcoming birth of his daughter would make the completion of an album considerably more difficult going forward). This album (along with, apparently, a couple of more as-of-yet-unreleased records) was made in Athens, Georgia with help from Deaver’s friend and collaborator Mike Albanese (who also has played in Maserati and Cinemechanica). Albanese helps give these thirteen songs a polished indie rock sheen, but he doesn’t get in the way of Deaver’s compelling songwriting.
Hydrogen Bonds reminds me of last year’s Silent Reply by Kevin Dorff, another under-the-radar pop rock album with seemingly endless depths to it. While that record was explicitly and conceptually about death and mortality, Hydrogen Bonds’ preoccupation with the passing of time and what that means for its narrators is a bit subtler and reveals more gradually. That being said, the very first line on the record is “DNA”’s “You’ve been waiting around / I’ve been out there too,” and “Married Young” (“As if not to say I love you, but you’re turning me on”) and “Time” (“It’d be nice to get the answer before the ice caps melt / Or at least shortly after that”) both carry that torch forward in one way or another. “Time” has a really pleasing piano-rock sound, which is one of the wrinkles Deaver and Albanese give the album, along with the noise-into-big-rock-and-roll finish of “Boston, Baltimore, Dallas, Detroit”, the workmanlike power pop of “Fine” and “Face”, and the weary retro pop rock of “Company”. When the moment calls for it, though, Hydrogen Bonds is quiet and reserved, ruminating on “Whiskey”, “What You’d Pay, What You Bid”, and “Ready to Go”. “Nobody listening but the crickets and the melted ice,” Deaver sings in closing track “Friend”; it took a while, but Aux Caroling has finally contradicted that line. (Bandcamp link)
Bungler – Light in the Corner
Release date: October 24th Record label: Strange Mono Genre: Lo-fi indie rock, singer-songwriter, indie folk Formats: Cassette, digital Pull Track: Melancholia Will Get You in the End
Paul Hewes is a Philadelphia musician who’s played in the bands Snoozer and Idiot Forever, but he’s also been putting out music on his own as Bungler since the mid-2010s. Hewes seems to have a steady stream of music coming out via this project–last year saw the release of two EPs and a cassette tape via Super Wimpy Punch (High Pony, Buddie, Birthday Ass). This year, Hewes has prepared Light in the Corner, a ten-song, 23-minute record that’s being put out on tape via local label Strange Mono. In what seems to be Hewes’ primary mode of operation, these songs are a mix of completely self-recorded material and full-band collaborations (for this record, the latter features Dan Angel of Nyxy Nyx, Sam Kassel of Sand Castle, and his Snoozer bandmate Kieran Ferris, who also plays in Joy Again). Light in the Corner feels like a vintage lo-fi pop album–Hewes’ distinct and catchy writing shines through the occasionally minimal, occasionally chaotic arrangements.
Light in the Corner’s opening track, “Melancholia Will Get You in the End”, is a chilly but friendly piece of folk rock, with Hewes’ melodies being the main draw over top of the laid-back instrumental. One gets the feeling that Hewes can easily write an album’s worth of songs in this mode (see: the just-as-good “Run”), but I will give him credit for pushing his solo compositions into some odd places throughout the record, from the 60s baroque pop of “Panic Pending” to the minimal experimentalism of “Sympathy Symphony” to the sub-one-minute lo-fi rock and roll of “Lazy Dazy”. The latter of the three is the closest to the Bungler tracks which feature a full lineup–the grungy “Knot”, the downer fuzz of “Calm”, and the appropriately unhinged-sounding “Rant” set themselves apart from the rest of the album, adding even more variety to a record already excelling on that front. One version of Bungler doesn’t sound any more “complete” than the other–the extraordinarily sparse closing two songs on Light in the Corner are as fully-fleshed-out as the noisiest full-band numbers. (Bandcamp link)
The Wind-Ups – Happy Like This
Release date: October 27th Record label: Mt. St. Mtn. Genre: Lo-fi indie rock, power pop, garage punk Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Oh I Know
California’s The Wind-Ups appeared on Pressing Concerns not that long ago–back in August, in fact, with the release of the four-song Jonathan Says EP. However, the project of Jake Sprecher (Smokescreens, Terry Malts, Jonathan Richman) had more than just that up their sleeves–Happy Like This, the second proper Wind-Ups record, follows less than three months later. The title track to Jonathan Says turns up on this one, but otherwise it’s all new material that, in typical Wind-Ups fashion, was written and recorded almost entirely by Sprecher himself. Also typical of The Wind-Ups is the short, distorted, lo-fi pop-punk hit singles that make up the bulk of Happy Like This. The 20-minute album is only about twice as long as Jonathan Says, but it spans eleven songs, all of which have hooks–even if they only repeat them just enough for them to stick more often than not.
The majority of Happy Like This’ tracks are under two minutes in length, and only one of them crests the three-minute mark–zone out for a second and The Wind-Ups are already wrapping up side one. Honing in on the album, however, reveals a musician unafraid to present his hooks in a pleasingly garbled manner–the first half of Happy Like This is the less accessible on to my ears. Sprecher gets things warmed up with the mostly-instrumental noise-punk opening track “Petri Dish” (a co-write with Wind-Ups live band members Nick Justice and Jason Wuestefeld), the garage-y glam-trash of “Starting to Lose”, and the sub-60-second “Dumb”, the biggest pop song on Side A. The flipside of Happy Like This doesn’t turn down the fuzz, but the majority of the biggest “hits” on the album can be found here by my reckoning. “Oh I Know” is The Wind-Ups at their Ramones-iest, and it also finds them peeking into the world of Upper Wilds-y massive fuzz-power-pop sounds. “Tell Me Again (How Pretty I Am)” follows one song later, almost besting the prior song at its own game, and “My Rene” somehow achieves a not-insignificant amount of subtlety in its 60s-pop-influenced sound. “Jonathan Says” closes the EP, and its gleeful, noisy, celebratory tone is the perfect final statement. (Bandcamp link)
Miracle Sweepstakes – Last Licks
Release date: October 27th Record label: One Weird Trick Genre: Psychedelia, prog-pop, experimental rock, dream pop Formats: CD, digital Pull Track: Ooh Ahh
New York’s Miracle Sweepstakes have been around for longer than I realized. Half of the band (vocalist/lyricist/multi-instrumentalist Craig Heed and guitarist Justin Mayfield) also play in the un-Googleable band Hit, which I wrote a little bit about last year. Hit has only put out a couple of singles since their inception at the beginning of the decade, but Miracle Sweepstakes (Heed, Mayfield, bassist Doug Bleek, and drummer Ian Miniero) have been around for ten years; Last Licks is their third full-length record, and first in four years. The first two Miracle Sweepstakes albums are both electric jangle/power pop records with some vintage studio pop undertones; perhaps now with Hit existing to exorcise some of the band’s noisy post-punk energy, Last Licks further refines the quartet’s sound into something even more polished and layered across its eleven tracks.
Last Licks creeps past the 45-minute mark as Miracle Sweepstakes try to get the absolute most of every one of these eleven songs. The title track is a statement of an opener–the song journeys through several iterations of itself recalling 60s progressive pop in its adventurousness and catchiness. “O-Pine” and “Ooh Ahh” start as clanging indie rock and straightforward guitar pop, respectively, but the Miracle Sweepstakes of Last Licks aren’t interested in stopping there, adding several layers to each of the songs. The middle of the record contains its noisiest moment in “Bad Bee”, suggesting that the group can still make a hell of a racket when they want to, but the second half of Last Licks only serves to further deconstruct their sound. The ethereal “Let Something Happen” moves into the underwater-sounding “How True” into the mostly-wordless “Aah Ooh” into the seven-minute “Nor’easter”. In something of a meta moment, closing track “All This Way to Come Back Now” ends things by returning to Miracle Sweepstakes’ poppier side, although its extended outro indicates that they learned something on their round trip. (Bandcamp link)
Wowee Zowee! What a week (as viewed through the lens of Pressing Concerns). We had a Monday Edition (Fox Japan, Hard Copy, Sexores, and Fig by Four), a Tuesday Edition (Promiseland BBQ, Noah Roth, Gold Dime, and Victory Peach), and a Wednesday feature on Bee Side Cassettes’ For Gaza benefit compilation. Thanks for sticking with us, and here’s your reward: today we’re talking about great new albums from Golden Apples, Spllit, Red Pants, and Mint Field. All of these 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.
Golden Apples – Bananasugarfire
Release date: October 27th Record label: Lame-O Genre: Noise pop, shoegaze, 90s indie rock, power pop Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Guard Stick
Russell Edling released a couple of EPs and an album as Cherry in the second half of the 2010s, but after changing the name of his project to Golden Apples, he’s found another gear in terms of putting out new music. Bananasugarfire is the third Golden Apples album in as many years, following 2021’s Shadowland and 2022’s Golden Apples. Last year’s self-titled Golden Apples album was my introduction to Edling’s music–it’s an intriguing indie rock record that revealed its primary architect as a solid pop songwriter playing in the sandbox of 90s indie rock (you could get away with calling that one a “slacker rock” record). Golden Apples was recorded by Edling and a “revolving door” of collaborators, but with Bananasugarfire the musical chairs have stopped and a solid four-piece lineup (drummer Melissa Brain of Amanda X and Cave People, bassist Matthew Scheuermann of Lowercase Roses, and guitarist Mimi Gallagher, also of Cave People) has emerged. Edling immediately takes advantage of having a full band behind him on Bananasugarfire–its loud, fuzzy sound is the most ambitious Golden Apples have sounded yet, gobbling up shoegaze, psychedelia, and power pop heedlessly to kickstart what feels like a new era for the band.
Bananasugarfire is sequenced to where it almost feels like Golden Apples are developing their sound in real-time, with opening track “Anti-Ant Car” starting with just Edling singing over a simple, clear(ish) electric guitar before the rest of the band slowly join in on the song. They then launch into “Guard Stick”, a song that takes a vintage Golden Apples-ish slacker-indie-rock chord progression and starts to adorn it with more bells and whistles than, say, “Let Me Do My Thing” or “Slime” from their last album, and then by “Little Bronco” and “Waiting for a Cloud”, they’ve blossomed into a full-on noise pop group. Bananasugarfire doesn’t stop there, though–it then kicks things into overdrive with a pair of five-plus minute tracks in “Sugarfire” and “Materia”, both of which are maximalist alt-rock expressions that pull together shoegaze, Madchester, psychedelic rock, and Yo La Tengo-ish refined-storm-rock. The album finishes things out by doing it all over again in a speed-run, in which the psych-fuzz-pop “Park (Rye)” and the downcast but catchy “Stuck” give way to six-minute closing track “Green”, which starts in the same vicinity as the song preceding it, shifts into a huge, burn-it-down distorted midsection, then fades away–but not before delivering one more burn scar to punctuate Bananasugarfire. (Bandcamp link)
Spllit – Infinite Hatch
Release date: October 27th Record label: Feel It/Tough Gum/Chrusimusi Genre: Post-punk, art punk, experimental rock Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital Pull Track: Growth Hacking
Anyone who’s been following this blog is aware that Feel It Records has put out some of the best rock music of 2023. A lot of that falls under the garage-y power pop banner, a well-worn territory for Pressing Concerns, but the Cincinnati label has also facilitated the release of more experimental, wide-ranging fare from groups like The Drin, Hard Copy, and Advertisement. Their latest release, Infinite Hatch by Baton Rouge’s Spllit, decidedly falls into this latter camp. Spllit’s 2021 debut, Spllit Sides, was a post-punk album with an avant-garde undercurrent, but their follow-up album dives headfirst into the stranger corners of their sound. The band’s core duo of Matthew Urquhart and Ronni Bourgeois recorded all of Infinite Hatch themselves, and the final product toggles between the kinetic art punk that marks their live shows as a quartet and a curious studio-lab product that’s been disassembled and reassembled by the duo–sometimes with a surgeon-like punctuality, other times like a child dissecting a frog.
Infinite Hatch is one of those albums that seem to exist out of time–it’s 27 minutes and twelve songs long, but you could’ve told me those figures were doubled or halved and I wouldn’t have been sure. “Canned Air” opens the album by managing to sound like Thee Oh Sees and Animal Collective in different parts while somehow also being under 90 seconds in length, while “Growth Hacking” is a spiky glam-punk number that eats itself alive in a Circus Devils-esque frenzy in its final thirty seconds. “Fast Acting Gel” jerks itself around with such whiplash that one starts to wonder if we’re in “math rock” territory; regardless, it make sense to me as the sharper turns in the singular, winding trail that Infinite Hatch blazes. “Cloaking” and “Curtain Lift” are art rock mini-epics in the record’s second half, while the two longest songs that make up the album’s mid-section expand the territory with some psychedelic anti-pop (“Bevy Slew”) and live-wire synthpunk (“Gemini Moods (Return)”). There’s some impressive melding going on between Bourgeois and Urquhart here–both in terms of their voices, frequently intertwined above the stretched-thin instrumentals, and in Infinite Hatch as a whole, which sprints out to no man’s land but never feels lost. (Bandcamp link)
Red Pants – Not Quite There Yet
Release date: October 27th Record label: Meritorio Genre: Shoegaze, noise pop, lo-fi indie rock Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Watch the Sky
Red Pants are the sturdy duo of Jason Lambeth and Elsa Nekola, a Madison-based pair that have been making music since 2018. To be a fan of Red Pants is to be subjected to a steady stream of albums and EPs of fuzzy, lo-fi, deceptively-tuneful indie rock–in the time that Pressing Concerns has existed, this has included the twin 2022 releases of When We Were Dancing, which came out on Paisley Shirt (Whitney’s Playland, Galore, Flowertown) and Gentle Centuries, on Lambeth’s own imprint Painted Blonde. For Not Quite There Yet, the third Red Pants full-length, they’ve jumped to Meritorio (Jim Nothing, The Small Intestines, Sumos), and they reintroduce themselves yet again with a smart and driven collection of songs that feel like the most focused record yet from the band. Red Pants have always garnered Yo La Tengo comparisons due to their fuzzy, layered take on underground music–this time around, they’re honing in on the “rock” side of their New Jersey forebearers, and even trend into “mellower side of Sonic Youth” territory here as well.
Red Pants showcase a lot of their ingredients in the first three songs of Not Quite There Yet–one doesn’t need to be familiar with all of them in order to enjoy this record, but if you are, then this one is especially for you. The confident, sleek “Witching Hour” finds Lambeth and Nekola cruising in Sonic Youth mode, the lo-fi, jangly “Watch the Sky” is their Flying Nun/Robert Pollard moment, and opening track “Crimson Words” recalls a bit of the Stereolab-ish drone pop that they explored more thoroughly on Gentle Centuries. The organ-aided “Forever” and “See You at the Turnstile” also fall into the latter of those three camps, but for the most part, Not Quite There Yet is a finely-stirred blend rather than a band operating in discrete “modes”. Side two highlights “On a Wire” and “Quiet Eyes” are both noisy and catchy, with even the sweetest moments on the record (the Nekola-sung “Rockwell Kent” and the penultimate “Visions of Gloria”) featuring weirder turns. I suspect that we’ll hear from Red Pants again before too long–but not so soon that their next record isn’t as developed and fulfilling as Not Quite There Yet is. (Bandcamp link)
Mint Field – Aprender a Ser
Release date: October 27th Record label: Felte Genre: Dream pop, shoegaze, psychedelic pop Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Respiro Profundo
Mexico City’s Mint Field have been making their version of shoegaze, dream pop, and psychedelia for a half-decade now, debuting with 2018’s Pasar de Las Luces and jumping to Felte (Vulture Feather, Ganser, Gold Class) for 2020’s Sentimiento Mundial. The third Mint Field album, Aprender a Ser (that’s “learning to be” in English) also follows Figura de Cristal, a solo album from the band’s Estrella del Sol (who comprises the core duo along with Sebastian Neyra) that came out in June. On her own, del Sol explored an unmoored dreaminess that veered into ambient-pop, and while Aprender a Ser doesn’t exactly follow this pathway, it shares with del Sol’s solo work an embrace of the experimental and adventurous. What Mint Field end up with is something entirely new for them–less straightforward “rock” than Sentimiento Mundial, but keeping one foot in that world thanks to both the grounding drum contributions of Ulrika Spacek’s Callum Brown and the guitars, which are the record’s main focus only sometimes but still assert themselves even when in a supporting role.
Aprender a Ser casts a pretty wide net at the extremes of their sound–closing track “Antes De Que Se Acabe El Año” is five-minute piece of synth-led psychedelic pop that makes a pretty strong final statement, while “Respiro Profundo” breaks out the distorted guitars almost as a reassurance to fans of shoegaze-y Mint Field. Most of Aprender a Ser rests in the middle of these two tentpoles, but that isn’t to say that they don’t match them in quality–the carefully-stepping dream pop of “Nuevo Sol” and the rhythm-section-led “Puerta Abierta” are more subtle, yes, but del Sol, Neyra, and Brown put no less thought and effort into their compositions. Brown’s shuffling drumbeats give parts of Aprender a Ser almost a trip hop feeling, especially in more electronic-based songs like “Moronas” and “Sueño Despierto” (although it shows up in the dream pop-y “Cinco Días” too). Aprender a Ser can feel like an otherworldly experience at times–but the moments where the seams show and it becomes “merely” a recording of a three-piece rock band playing together aren’t any less strong. (Bandcamp link)
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 favoritealbums 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.)
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 VictoryPeach, 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 VictoryPeach 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)
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)
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)
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