Premiere: Tucker Riggleman & the Cheap Dates, “Queen of Diamonds”

One of the first records I wrote about on this blog was Alive and Dying Fast, the debut full-length album from West Virginia’s Tucker Riggleman & The Cheap Dates, which ended up being one of my favorite albums of 2021. Riggleman has been playing in bands around Appalachia for over a decade now–he led the grunge-rock power trio Bishops, as well as playing in Prison Book Club along with John R. Miller and William Matheny, and The Demon Beat along with Rozwell Kid’s Jordan Hudkins. Alive and Dying Fast was Tucker Riggleman’s first major solo statement, and it’s an excellent, fully-realized display of his experience-gained skill as a songwriter.

The Cheap Dates (Riggleman, along with bassist Mason Fanning and drummer M Tivis Clark) have been putting the finishing touches on their sophomore album, due out in early 2024 on WarHen Records (Dogwood Tales, Phil Cook, The Dexateens). We’ve already heard one song slated to appear on the as-of-yet untitled new album, “Virtue”, a great tune that I wrote about back in April. Riggleman and his band are now back with the second single from their next record, “Queen of Diamonds”, a song that expands the upcoming album’s scope beyond the country-rocking “Virtue” but hangs together with the previous single thanks to Riggleman’s lyrics.

The Cheap Dates are no strangers to rootsy rock music, but “Queen of Diamonds” hews closer to straight-up country than their typical fare, both in its instrumental and in Riggleman’s writing. The song’s music heavily features organ by guest player Lee Carroll (longtime keyboard player for The Judds), while Fanning and Clark’s rhythm section settles into a simple trot across the song’s three minutes, allowing for Carroll’s showy playing and Riggleman’s singing to take the main stage.

The lyrics of “Queen of Diamonds” are country music at its best as well, conveying deep longing economically with some well-put metaphors. “She’s the queen of diamonds, and I’m just another broken heart,” begins Riggleman, and later, “She’s a blooming lily, and I’m just an old sticker bush”. Although Riggleman’s closing conclusion is “I guess I was barking up the wrong tree,” with an audible shrug, that doesn’t take any of the sting out of the questions Riggleman asks in the refrain. Maybe he’s being rhetorical when he asks “How do you find something so pure?”, but I’m sure he’d listen if you had any leads.

The Cheap Dates’ M Tivis Clark created the single’s artwork, and he’s also behind the song’s video, which you can view below. The visuals are quite striking, as it takes the song’s title as literally as possible (if playing card-featuring content is your thing, the “Queen of Diamonds” video has it in spades. They’re all decked out in red, white, and black. They aced it.)

The Cheap Dates celebrate their new single with a couple of shows in the Upland South–catch them on September 2nd in Lexington, and on the 3rd in Nashville. They’re playing Clientele Art Studio in Wheeling, West Virginia on October 13th as well.

Pressing Concerns: Perennial, Ironic Hill, Corker, The Natvral

Hello, readers! Today is the Thursday edition of Pressing Concerns, and this one’s got four records that come out tomorrow for you to get extremely excited about–we’re talking about new albums from Ironic Hill, Corker, and The Natvral, and a new EP from Perennial. If you missed the Monday edition of Pressing Concerns, which covered new records from Helpful People, Ovef Ow, Wandering Years, and Dabda, 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.

Perennial – The Leaves of Autumn Symmetry

Release date: September 1st
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Post-hardcore, art punk, dance punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Hippolyta!

Like many (but not nearly enough) others, my introduction to Perennial was last year’s In the Midnight Hour, an excellent art punk album that ended up being one of my favorites of 2022. It’s an “a-ha moment” record, zeroing in on a relatively forgotten time in indie rock history two decades ago when bands were tossing fiery garage rock, thrashing post-hardcore, and sassy dance punk together and making aural fireworks. In the Midnight Hour balanced the raw kinetic energy of the trio (vocalist/multi-instrumentalists Chelsey Hahn and Chad Jewett plus drummer Wil Mulhern) with a full, clear recording produced by The World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die’s Chris Teti–a combination so successful that Perennial decided to revisit some of their earlier material with the same setup. The Leaves of Autumn Symmetry is a five-song EP containing “reworkings” of select songs from their 2017 self-recorded debut, The Symmetry of Autumn Leaves.

Since I came to Perennial before its time, I wasn’t familiar with the original versions of these songs beforehand, but listening back to them, I can say that the band keep their initial structures fairly intact on the new recordings. The Leaves of Autumn Symmetry, then, seems to exist to both give the band a chance to redo these songs after growing as a group, and to shine a light on their lesser-known material with the help of Teti’s production. It succeeds on both counts–Perennial have clearly taken leaps forward since 2017, and it comes through on these spirited, full-steam-ahead readings (a revolution that is again aided by the record’s clear sound). The band leaves a trail of destruction in under ten minutes–several songs on here, most notably the no-fat chant-punk of “Hippolyta!” and the scorching “Dissolver”, would’ve been right at home on In the Midnight Hour. The post-hardcore screaming of “Fauves” is perhaps more reflective of the early Perennial, but rather than drop it in the re-recording, the band embrace it and make it work–and even though they’ve only got a short amount of time to work with, they still start off the one-minute “The Leaves of Autumn Symmetry” with an intro that ends up taking about half the song. Perennial continues to impress me with the amount of stuff they jam into their relatively short records–as a stopgap between In the Midnight Hour and their in-progress third album, it more than provides enough. (Bandcamp link)

Ironic Hill – Ironic Hill

Release date: September 1st
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Lo-fi indie pop, singer-songwriter
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Wish

Ironic Hill is an anonymous United Kingdom-based singer-songwriter who’s been steadily releasing singles for the majority of 2023. This has culminated in the first collection of Ironic Hill’s music, a self-titled cassette featuring ten examples of the songwriter’s humble, no-frills, but nevertheless quite compelling take on guitar pop music. The songs on Ironic Hill are recorded about as barebones as something that could conceivably be described as “pop music” can be, the titles are all one-word, and both the lyrics and their vocal delivery feel stream-of-consciousness, like (to use an actually fitting cliche) diary entries set to music. Ironic Hill sounds like the result of someone working things out in real time, and the person behind it is a compelling enough writer to let this process lead an entire record and have it be a success. 

Uncertainty is a theme throughout Ironic Hill, from the various “maybe”s in closing track “Fine” to the thought of “Maybe it’s okay to guess” in “Easy” to the final couplet of “Wish”, in which the singer reflects on his dreams without being able to decide if he should let them go or not. Embracing the wavering in a climate that increasingly demands certainty and confidence in everything one says and does is exciting in its own way–Ironic Hill offers up the contradictions inherent to a wandering mind and declines to neatly wrap them up for the listener. Ironic Hill is a personal writer (not just of music) who sings a song about how “maybe it’s better to repress” (“Easy”), and of the instrumental track “None”, he writes “sometimes I just don’t want to say anything”. The observations of Ironic Hill aren’t “behind the curtain” so much as the result of an absence of one–when the narrator sings “I don’t know why I feel this way / So don’t ask me to explain,” in “Nothing”, we don’t learn what’s going on, just that he’s thinking about what’s going on. This continues all the way to the end of Ironic Hill. The last line in “Easy” is “Maybe I need to end what I’ve begun”–it has the shape of a “normal” closing line, but nothing has actually ended–it’s just a thought drifting through Ironic Hill’s mind. (Bandcamp link)

Corker – Falser Truths

Release date: September 1st
Record label: Feel It/Future Shock/Urticaria
Genre: Noise rock, post-punk
Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital
Pull Track: The Cold Air

Another week, another exciting new garage punk group from Cincinnati. This one, Corker, is not a completely new face–they debuted on Future Shock (the label at the epicenter of the city’s burgeoning scene) with 2021’s A Bell That Seems to Mourn EP, and they partnered with Feel It (the label who’s recently taken to shining a larger spotlight on said scene since relocating there) for last year’s “Lice” single. The quartet of vocalist/guitarist Luke Corvette, guitarist/synth player Cole Gilfilen, bassist/synth player Ryan Sennett, and drummer Alex Easterday have thus been building up to their full-length debut for a couple years now, and with Falser Truths, they deliver an excellent document of underground rock and roll music. While there are certainly traces of fellow Cincy bands like the dubby, deconstructed post-punk of The Drin or the basement-rock coldwave of Crime of Passing, Falser Truths owes just as much to blunt noise rock as the art punk of their peers.

Corker come out swinging with the pummeling “The Cold Air”, with a frantic drumbeat anchoring a just-as-frantic performance from the rest of the band that builds to a controlled chaotic conclusion, while “Anomie” and “Edge of Teeth” both contain plenty of bite as well in the form of jagged guitar lines and distorted, prominent basslines. Starting with “Seeking, Marching”, Corker start to populate their version of punk rock with a bit more nuance–both it and the two songs immediately after it show a hint of restraint, rocking out but not just rushing to the finish line. Closing Falser Truths with the seven-minute “Sour Candy” is their boldest choice, but one that pays off, because that song–a post-punk garage tune that works itself up into a squall of pounding, hailing noise as it draws to a close in its final minute or so–is a capstone track if I’ve ever heard one. (Bandcamp link)

The Natvral – Summer of No Light

Release date: September 1st
Record label: Dirty Bingo
Genre: Folk rock, alt-country, country rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Carolina

Kip Berman is and probably always will be most famous for fronting The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, the New York fuzz-dream-pop group that put out four records from 2009 to 2017 before calling it quits. Over the past couple of years, however, Berman has reinvented himself as The Natvral, a project that leans into roots rock, folk rock, and Americana. The Natvral’s first album, 2021’s Tethers, was a perfectly fine record, but their sophomore album, Summer of No Light, feels like a step forward for Berman. It’s the sound of Berman finding his footing and settling in comfortably in his new sound–one that’s in the realm of “alt-country” and is plenty folky, sure, but also one cognizant of rock and roll and guitar pop in a way reminiscent of troubadours like Daniel Romano and Hiss Golden Messenger. 

Although it was written under the shadow of the pandemic and the album title references the 1816 “year without a summer”, Summer of No Light is the most spirited and freewheeling that The Natvral have sounded yet. “Lucifer’s Glory” and “Carolina” come storming right out of the gate, electric-sounding pieces of power-pop-country-folk that announce that Berman’s really “hit on” something with this combination. The handclap-aided “Summer of Hell” is maybe a little more subtle, but it’s just as catchy (if not more so), and the swinging “A Glass of Laughter”, the cruising “Your Temperate Ways”, and the smooth “Wait for Me” keep the record’s energy up throughout its middle and back half. Even the slower songs on Summer of No Light are boosted by the band’s energy–“The Stillness” and “Wintergreen” both creep past five minutes, but contain plenty of exciting rock moments as they expand from their relatively quiet beginnings. The takeaway from Summer of No Light seems to be that if something does blot out the sun, The Natvral will go dancing in the dark. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Helpful People, Ovef Ow, Wandering Years, Dabda

On this Monday in August, we have once again gathered here to discuss, consider, and listen to new music. Specifically, new albums from Helpful People, Ovef Ow, and Wandering Years, and a new EP from Dabda. Those are the ones for today. If you don’t like them–well, first of all, you’ve probably got bad taste, but just wait a few days and we’ll have four other ones instead.

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.

Helpful People – Brokenblossom Threats

Release date: August 27th
Record label: Tall Texan/Burundi Cloud
Genre: Jangle pop, indie pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: You Don’t Have to Know Where to Go

As if Glenn Donaldson didn’t have enough going on with the near-continuous stream of new music he’s releasing as The Reds, Pinks & Purples (which just this year has included the excellent The Town That Cursed Your Name and a handful of EPs), the San Francisco jangle pop artist has also been known to take part in other, more collaborative projects from time to time. The most recent one had been Painted Shrines, a 2021 project with Jeremy Earl of Woods, but this month sees the debut full-length album from Helpful People, the duo of Donaldson and Carly Putnam (The Ollies, The Mantles, Art Museum). Five of the dozen songs from their first album, Brokenblossom Threats, had been released digitally by Burundi Cloud last year–2023 sees the record get a vinyl release via Tall Texan (Alien Eyelid, Idle Ray, David Nance), complete with seven new songs to turn it into a well-rounded full-length album.

Putnam sings lead vocals throughout Brokenblossom Threats but the two split music and lyric writing, something that is immediately apparent as the record kicks off with “You Don’t Have to Know Where to Go”. The track begins with a fuzzy melodic electric guitar line riding alongside a gentle acoustic strum–it has Glenn Donaldson written all over it, and indeed it hits the same mark as some of the more “electric” material on The Town That Cursed Your Name. What follows are eleven more songs that fully embrace guitar pop, sometimes also in a very Reds, Pinks & Purples way (particularly in the low-key “Bugs from Below” and “To Live with Yourself”, although the chorus to closing track “Wrong Way Rainbow” is also quite Donaldson-esque). Whether it’s Putnam’s influence or Donaldson probing new territory, however, Helpful People also explore some louder areas–the power chords of “Empty Heads” is the most obvious one, but several songs on the album punctuate their indie pop foundations with amplifier fuzz. Putnam’s vocals are less wistful than Donaldson’s and a bit more matter-of-fact, which fits this looser style. As a whole, Brokenblossom Threats is a seamless and effortless-sounding pop album, a successful collaboration between two artists in sync with each other. (Bandcamp link)

Ovef Ow – Vs. the Worm

Release date: August 25th
Record label: What’s for Breakfast?/Oort Cloud
Genre: Post-punk, dance punk, garage punk
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Fauxtography

Chicago’s Ovef Ow has been kicking around since 2015, and they put out three EPs in the second half of the last decade, but Vs. the Worm is the quartet’s first full-length album. The band (bassist/vocalist Marites Velasquez, drummer/vocalist Sarah Braunstein, synth player Kyla Denham, and guitarist Nick Barnett appear to fall on the new wave-y end of the modern post-punk spectrum, sporting a fun, synth-colored sound that reflects their stated love of The B-52’s. At the same time, though, there’s a garage-y edge to their sound that puts them not too far from fellow Windy City punk bands like Cel Ray and Abi Ooze–as well as Sweeping Promises, at whose home studio Ovef Ow recorded their debut album. Beneath Vs. the Worm’s shiny surface lurks a tough art punk group, one that finds room for experimentation in their sound but also delivers it with a full band might.

After the future-synth sounds of the 30-second “Moonbeams”, Ovef Ow kick off their first album with a few tunes that work best played loud. “MAD” is a synthpunk prowler, letting its instrumental rise and fall excitingly, before the surf-punk of “Fauxtography” finds the band hitting the gas pedal even harder. Ovef Ow excel in the world of distorted, scorching post-punk tunes–the slow-burn “First Day”, the murky but still sharp “Daylight”, and the big riff of “Anatomy” all find the band cruising through a genre of music that seems to come naturally to them. The offbeat dance-punk of “Big Black and the Preacher” kicks off side two of Vs. the Worm with a welcome curveball, and while neither “Time Zones” nor “Makibaka” are huge departures from the record, the drama of the former and subtlety of the latter lend further variety to the album’s back end. Still, Ovef Ow wrap up their opening statement with “Do the Wurm!”, a meaty piece of “Devo-core” punk that finds Ovef Ow fully in their element. (Bandcamp link)

Wandering Years – Mountain Laughed

Release date: August 25th
Record label: Candlepin
Genre: Slowcore, 90s indie rock
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Two Days

Brooklyn’s Wandering Years have put out a couple of home-recorded releases since their debut in 2021–the first I’d heard of them was last year’s Wandering Years Retirement Community EP, their first release on Candlepin Records. Mountain Laughed is the first full-length studio album from Wandering Years, and its slowcore, fuzzy indie rock, and space-y folk rock-influenced sound is right at home on Candlepin’s roster. Wandering Years remains the project of Gene Stroman, but both the recording of the album (made with Bradford Krieger of Courtney and Brad at his Big Nice Studio) and the participation of other musicians (a half-dozen other people are credited with instrumental contributions on the album) push Mountain Laughed beyond the modern lo-fi, downcast bedroom indie rock boilerplate album. 

Stroman and the rest of the album’s contributors aim high on Mountain Laughed’s thirteen songs and fifty minutes, and they end up with an album that summits these peaks and then some. The album is a lot to take in, but the range that Wandering Years displays helps one grab ahold of it–there are great, big displays of electric indie rock in songs like the twin-six-minute pair of “New Year Song” and “House Party”, but these are complimented by shorter and quieter valleys of tracks that connect them. The sub-two minute acoustic “Rained Today” buffers the upbeat, fuzzy “Morning” and the curious spoken-word atmospheres of “Satori”. In Mountain Laughed’s second half, the lightly-twangy rock of “News from Outside” peeks out in between “Tabebuia” and the title track, while the pedal-steel-featuring “Nashville, Etc” rises and falls all on its own.  Wandering Years use whatever they have to create this feeling–one of the best songs on the album, the wide-eyed heartland rock of “Two Days”, gets so much mileage out of getting two days off work in September. The mountain is made up of small things like that. (Bandcamp link)

Dabda – Yonder

Release date: August 25th
Record label: Electric Muse
Genre: Math rock
Formats: CD, digital
Pull Track: Playing with Fire

Dabda are an explosive math-y indie rock band from Seoul, South Korea who have an album and an EP under their belt since they began in the mid-2010s. The quartet (vocalist/guitarist Jiae Kim, drummer Seunghyun Lee, bassist Keohyun Noh, and guitarist Joseph Lee) sound sharp and in tune with one another on their third record, the five song Yonder EP. Released on Seoul’s Electric Muse (who have also put out music from Say Sue Me and Drinking Boys and Girls Choir, among others), Yonder finds the band stretching out and exploring subtlety while also putting together an excellent rock band performance, frequently within the same song.

Yonder kicks off with “Playing with Fire”, a true math rock barnburner of a track if I’ve ever heard one. The guitars rage and spiral, the percussion hits with full force, and the band break it down in the song’s second half only to let loose even more intently as the song comes to a close. Although Dabda prove they can rock again on the EP (closing two tracks “Cloud City” and “One, World, Wound” both have their moments, they take the rest of Yonder to push outwards in a couple directions. “Flower Tail” is Dabda’s version of a pop song–there’s some guitar heroics and odd chord changes here and there, but also one hell of a melody. The languid “Origin” is Dabda at their most unhurried, letting the song reveal itself on its own timeline, while “One, World, Wound” unexpectedly builds to a big, wide-eyed conclusion to wrap Yonder up. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: The Cowboys, Sonny & the Sunsets, Prewn, Ruth Garbus

Welcome to a Thursday Pressing Concerns! This is a really cool and good one! New albums from The Cowboys, Sonny & the Sunsets, Prewn, and Ruth Garbus are here on these digital pages! 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.

The Cowboys – Sultan of Squat

Release date: August 25th
Record label: Feel It
Genre: Power pop, garage rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Sour Grapes

Bloomington, Indiana garage punk stalwarts The Cowboys put out five albums between 2015 and 2020, gracing the rosters of garage punk stalwarts Lumpy, HoZac, and Feel It Records, before taking a “brief hiatus” for a couple of years. Although I’d heard some of their past material, I actually fully entered the world of The Cowboys earlier this year through Confirmed Bachelor, the debut album from frontman Keith Harman’s other band, Good Looking Son. As it turns out, Confirmed Bachelor’s jaunty piano-led pop rock is an excellent primer for the sixth Cowboys album and first in three years, Sultan of Squat. Hartman and the band’s reunited original lineup (guitarist Mark McWhirter, bassist Zackery Worcel, and drummer Jordan Tarantino) dive further into polished, gleaming power pop on these thirteen songs, although they do it with an exuberance and energy that reflects their garage rock roots.

The record’s opening title track is a power pop classic, a vintage ode to losing and emptyhandedness (hence the titular “squat”) that lobs baseball organs, “bah bah bah”s, and even a bit of the Star-Spangled Banner at the listener in under two minutes. “Raining Sour Grapes” arguably bests it in the number two slot–it’s a rock and roll rave-up of a song brought over the finish line by a particularly showy performance from Harman. These two are a high bar with which to start the record, but The Cowboys don’t rest on their laurels–the band play on, swinging on chandeliers and twirling microphones all the way through. “Sick High Heels” and “Johnny Drives a Beater” most reflect the garage rock side of the group, but they also offer up everything from the Clean-esque Kiwi pop of “McClure” to the slide guitar-featuring “She’s Not Your Baby Anymore” to the bizarre cavernous cabaret of “Phoebe from HR”. There’s not a dud in Sultan of Squat’s baker’s dozen–nothing but a band launching themselves forward, full steam ahead. (Bandcamp link)

Sonny & the Sunsets – Self Awareness Through Macrame

Release date: August 25th
Record label: Rocks in Your Head
Genre: Folk rock, guitar pop, singer-songwriter
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Shadow

Sonny Smith has been putting out music for over two decades now, with the San Francisco-based musician amassing a fairly large discography under his own name and as the leader of Sonny & the Sunsets. Smith is also the founder of Rocks in Your Head Records (Fake Fruit, Ryan Wong, Galore), under which the newest Sonny & the Sunsets album, Self Awareness Through Macrame, is being released. On his latest album, Smith sounds like somebody who’s been honing his craft for a long time–it’s one thing to be inspired by 60s pop and folk music, Jonathan Richman, and Michael Hurley, but it’s another thing entirely to cut through pastiche and window dressing to deliver music that says and does so much so succinctly in the same way as those sources of inspiration. Yet, this is what Self Awareness Through Macrame’s ten songs achieve.

Self Awareness Through Macrame is staunchly breezy and enjoyable, a West Coast guitar pop record if I’ve ever heard one. Songs like “Waiting” and “Shadow” are just fun-sounding, no matter how one slices it, captivating both in the charming music and Smith’s storytelling. The songs where Smith takes an unambiguous central role give the album a fair bit of personality, from the acoustic slice-of-“City Life” and the amusing attempted meditation of “How to Make a Ceramic Dog” (both of these songs mention fascism–it’s not surprising that a songwriter as observant as Smith wouldn’t have his head in the clouds). Everything on Self Awareness Through Macrame feels layered, despite how casually it’s presented–everything from Smith’s voice rising while singing “It’s alright!” in “Androids” to the arm-swinging reminiscing title line of “Memory Lane” feels like the culmination of something meaningful. As light-sounding as Self Awareness Through Macrame comes off, it has plenty of weight to it. (Bandcamp link)

Prewn – Through the Window

Release date: August 25th
Record label: Exploding in Sound
Genre: Experimental indie rock, slowcore, indie folk
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Sheila

The newest edition to Exploding in Sound Records is Prewn, a Northampton-based four-piece group led by singer and multi-instrumentalist Izzy Hagerup and also featuring bassist Mia Huggs, guitarist Calvin Parent, and drummer Karl Helander. However, Prewn existed as a solo project several years before the current full-band line-up solidified, and everything you hear on Through the Window, Prewn’s debut album, is played by Hagerup herself. These eight songs were recorded in isolation during the pandemic at Kevin McMahon’s Marcata Studio, and the album does sound like Hagerup took advantage of being alone in the studio to flesh these songs out and stretch them to odd places even as they more or less maintain a rock band structure.

The album opens with “Machine”, a sparse acoustic song featuring just Hagerup’s guitar and vocals. It’s a familiar but solid sound, perhaps priming the listener to settle in for a nice, peaceful indie folk singer-songwriter record. The five-minute country rock dirge of “But I Want More” ups the ante but it isn’t until its noisy final section that Through the Window’s true ambitions begin to come into focus. The album only gets odder and rockier from there, with Hagerup building these songs across rickety foundations that wobble but never break. “Alive” probes similar territory to “But I Want More”, although the casualness of the previous track gets replaced with steely determinedness. The record’s second half feels like an even sharper blade, between the thumping, lo-fi post-punk slouch of “Sheila”, the hypnotic “I’m Gonna Fry All the Fish in the Sea”, and closing track “Burning Up”, which mixes the rawness of Hagerup’s primary style with synthetic elements in an intriguing way. It’s a great collection of songs delivered in a package indicating their songwriter already has developed a distinct style. (Bandcamp link)

Ruth Garbus – Alive People

Release date: August 25th
Record label: Orindal
Genre: Folk, singer-songwriter
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Mono No Aware

Brattleboro, Vermont’s Ruth Garbus has released a half-dozen or so albums and EPs since their 2006 debut album, Ruthie’s Requests. Their newest record, Alive People, is their first since 2019’s Kleinmeister, and (reflectent of its title) was record live last year at 10 Forward in Greenfield, Massachusetts. With help from bassist/synth player elie mcafee-hahn, guitarist Julie Bodian, and vocalist Julia Tadlock, Garbus performs a set of slow-moving, synth-and-guitar-led songs containing elements of folk and pop but without cleanly falling into either category. Interspersed between nine “proper” songs, improvisational pieces of music and a brief spoken word piece from Tadlock round out Alive People by particularly capturing the live and public nature of its initial recording.

The first voice heard on Alive People is Tadlock, offering up a six-second quote before Garbus begins the record with a couple of mountains of songs. “Mono No Aware” and “Healthy Gamer” both come out at around the six-minute mark, and each of them contains plenty in which to get lost, even as the music is carried entirely by Garbus’ guitar in the former and mcafee-hahn’s synths in the latter. Garbus and their collaborators float through the rest of the record in a similar manner–the songs become actually a little bit less imposing after those two, but they’re still quite interesting. “Reenchantment of the World” and “Whisper in Steel” aren’t exactly rock songs, but they do show that letting a little more instrumentation through the door doesn’t dampen Garbus’ voice, and the vocal expressivism in “Rubber Tree” is a nice contrast to the subtle delivery of “Mono No Aware”. Still, the album ends with something that doesn’t sound like anything else on the record–the frantic strums and wordless vocals of “Jessie Farms Nothing”. Garbus’ guitar scurries across the stage and their singing, seemingly manipulated by mcafee-hahn, comes to a head before stopping suddenly, ending this document of a performance built to last beyond one night. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: The 1981, Cime, House & Hawk, Knife the Symphony

Happy Monday! In a particularly eclectic edition of Pressing Concerns, today’s post looks at new albums from The 1981, House & Hawk, and Knife the Symphony, and a new EP from Cime. There’s something for everyone here–even you!

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.

The 1981 – Move On

Release date: August 18th
Record label: Dandy Boy
Genre: Jangle pop, indie pop, post-punk, dream pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Capture My Condition

The 1981, who are probably the best band going that’s named after a year, are the Oakland-based duo of Adam Widener–who released a solid album earlier this year as Pure Material–and Bobby Martinez–who runs Dandy Boy Records (Weird Numbers, Forest Bees, R.E. Seraphin). The hazy bedroom pop of Pure Material’s Orange Whip Licorice is a good starting point for how Widener’s other project sounds, although The 1981 (who have been slowly trickling out music since 2018, including two COVID-era covers EPs) offers more of a robust, full-band take on this sound. The 1981 sport a distinct sound throughout their debut full-length record, with Widener and Martinez pulling from several areas of alternative music history to make up the instrumentals of Move On–C86 indie pop, Flying Nun lo-fi, dream pop, 80s new wave and post-punk all feel incorporated here.

Move On has been a while in the making. Three songs from the record previously appeared on last year’s Polaroids EP, and the oldest of these, “Easy (It’s Not)”, dates all the way back to 2019 (“Nelson’s Camera” sounds pretty different from its earlier version, although the others are, I believe, the original recordings). Widener’s calm-sounding vocals help Move On feel like it’s on the quieter and more pensive side of guitar pop, although he and Martinez sneakily make a lot of noise on a few of these songs–the opening trio of the stomping “Capture My Condition”, the melodic-guitar-stuffed “Easy (It’s Not)”, and the post-punky “Mona Lisa” sound particularly spirited. The 1981 have effectively deemed Move On a breakup album, and while for the most part the music feels more emphasized than the lyrics, there are moments when the themes become more visible (like the slippery “I Love You”, which follows up its titular line with “…but I kinda hate you, too”). Changes throughout Move On are small, but noticeable–as the record progresses, side two highlights like “Expiration Date”, “Empty Eyes”, and “Moving On” feel a little looser, perhaps mirroring the unraveling at the heart of the album. Either way, The 1981 find a way to present a full picture over the course of Move On. (Bandcamp link)

Cime – Laurels of the End of History

Release date: August 18th
Record label: Syzygy/BSDJ
Genre: Art punk, post-punk, noise rock, experimental rock
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: The Lost Last Man

One of the most unique-sounding records I’ve heard this year has to be Laurels of the End of History, the latest EP from Cime. Cime is the project of one Monty Cime, a southern California-based Honduran trans woman who released her debut album, The Independence of Central America Remains an Unfinished Experiment, last year. Cime’s one-sentence description of their latest release is “a 20-minute Latin megamix cassette you found unlabelled in a garage sale being performed by a noise rock band”, and while I’m not sure that’s entirely an accurate pitch, it’s also not wrong, and it does get at the fact that the EP sounds like nothing else I’ve heard in recent memory. Laurels of the End of History throws a lot at the listener both thematically and instrumentally–Cime plays no less than seventeen instruments on the EP, and there’s about a dozen guest musicians credited here in addition to her. 

Cime embraces the “mixtape” aspect of the record by rolling together a half-dozen songs that are all pretty different from each other in a way that locks them into one piece. In particular, the way the EP’s middle four songs bleed into each other is satisfying–the bass-driven “La Granadera”, the corrupted-sounding “City on a Hill”, the one-minute gallop of “Yoro”, and the horn-heavy “Spectres of Che” end up sounding like one giant beast of a song. Even as the instrumentals dart from style to style, the tracks are held together by Cime’s folk music-esque lyrics that call for casting off the baggage and exploitation of the past in order to build a better and brighter future. And while the album’s final track certainly continues this thread, the eight-minute “The Lost Last Man” demands to be taken on its own. Cime builds tension and releases it–the first five minutes are noisy, cacophonous free-jazz punk, as Cime paints a dire picture before erupting into a searing cowpunk conclusion: “The cowboys died alone and divided / The natives died alone and divided / Our spirit dies alone when divided”. It’s a warning, but Laurels of the End of History and its array of musical ideas is also a declaration that these aforementioned groups are, in some way, still very much alive and with us. (Bandcamp link)

House & Hawk – 4

Release date: July 13th
Record label: Heavy River
Genre: Synthpop, sophisti-pop, new wave, indie pop
Formats: CD, digital
Pull Track: I Need a Friend

I hadn’t heard of them before now, but the Pittsburgh duo of Alexander Strung and Steve Ninehouser have been making music together as House & Hawk for a decade. House & Hawk has been putting out a steady drip of singles and records since 2013; the aptly-titled 4 is their fourth full-length album, which makes sense, because I doubt many bands start out sounding like the band do here. 4 is a fascinating pop album–everything from 80s sophisti-pop, turn-of-the-century indie rock, synthpop, psychedelia, and prog color these eleven songs. Ninehouser cites Pinback, New Order, and Steely Dan (among others) as points of reference, a grouping that kind of feels like a “random influence generator”, and yet the album does sound like all of these in various parts. I’d throw in Peter Gabriel (and Genesis in general) in there as well–in no small part due to Strung’s voice, but also in House & Hawk’s ability to hit the pop bullseye in the midst of the grandiose.

The steady drumbeat of “Awestruck” gives way to a kaleidoscopic environment of synths with plenty of melodies contained therein–although none are as captivating as the one delivered by Strung’s voice. This sets the stage for much of 4–musically ambitious, but with Strung’s vocals always leading the way from the center. The brisk percussion and circular keyboards that compose “Resistance (Tribute)” continue the record in the same vein, but then “I Need a Friend” sends the band surprisingly into chugging mid-tempo indie rock territory (without sounding out of place). The golden chorus of “Forever Hot” rises up from the minimalist electronica of its verses, while the slow-moving “Private Elevator” shows off some of the band’s “studio pop” influences. The one song that really leans into the loose, fuzzy guitar-rock of House & Hawk’s past comes on the record’s second side–“That’s Rich” nevertheless has a darker undercurrent that lets it fit in with the rest of 4. Still, the record ends with the duo of “Let’s Make a Movie” and “Just a Million Miles”, two songs that reflect what House & Hawk do best on 4: combining expressive vocals and the sound of machines to make something emotionally resonant and real-sounding. (Bandcamp link)

Knife the Symphony – All the Wrong Turns Taken to Get Here

Release date: June 30th
Record label: Phratry
Genre: Noise rock, post-hardcore
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Wildling I / Islands

There’s some very good rock music coming out of Cincinnati these days, and it’s time to add noise rock trio Knife the Symphony to the list. Not that they’re a new band–their first album came out all the way back in 2008, and although they put out a handful of split releases in the 2010s, All the Wrong Turns Taken to Get Here actually appears to be the first new music from the group in six years. Still, their new album has the energy and fire of a young and hungry group–one that’s still invigorated by 80s underground rock and punk (if you like all things Touch & Go, Amphetamine Reptile, and Dischord–well, Knife the Symphony do, too). It’s risky business comparing an album to Yank Crime, but between the shredded-but-focused vocals and the propulsive power-trio format that guitarist Jeff Albers, bassist Seth Longland, and drummer Jerry Dirr frequently assume throughout All the Wrong Turns Taken to Get Here, I’m going to go ahead and say I’m allowed to do it here.

All the Wrong Turns Taken to Get Here opens with Knife the Symphony in full “pummel” mode with “Wildling I / Islands”, an excellent little piece of some Unwound-esque circling the drain. The band then step on the gas with the garage-punk/post-hardcore showdown of “Boulevard Inn”, a mode that they lock into several more times on All the Wrong Turns Taken to Get Here to great effect (particularly in “Gouge” and “Causation”). Don’t get too comfortable with Knife the Symphony’s tinnitus-baiting main gear, however; the first sonic surprise is the winding, nearly-two minute post-rock intro to “Sequestered”, and then “Mile Marker” does it one better by being an entirely acoustic-based song. This range shades the rest of the album–the six-minute “A Light Withheld / Thermo-Man” similarly wanders the depths before exploding into a fiery noise rock conclusion, and the album ends with “Wildling II”, a banjo-led instrumental that veers even further into folky ambience–an unorthodox conclusion for this kind of album, but perfectly in line with Knife the Symphony. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Diners, Sonic Youth, Leopard Print Taser, Big Bliss

Welcome to Thursday’s Pressing Concerns! Today, we’ve got four albums that come out tomorrow, August 18th: new full-lengths from Diners, Leopard Print Taser, and Big Bliss, and a live album from Sonic Youth. If you missed Monday’s post, featuring William Matheny, Perfect Angel at Heaven, Jason Allen Millard, and Sundays & Cybele, 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.

Diners – Domino

Release date: August 18th
Record label: Bar None
Genre: Power pop, indie pop
Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Someday I’ll Go Surfing

For over a decade, Diners’ Blue Broderick has been putting out her version of pop music, one that pulled from 60s studio pop rock but in a way that reflected Diners’ lo-fi, casual roots. Domino is the prolific Broderick’s seventh full-length album, and the first since she moved from Phoenix to Los Angeles. The album represents another first for Diners–working closely with producer, multi-instrumentalist, and power pop scholar Mo Troper, Broderick takes a turn for the louder, rockier, and full-band-embracing on her latest record. Although pulling a more pronounced influence from 70s power pop was Troper’s idea (and his forceful drumming certainly aids it as well), Broderick describes Domino as “the rock record that [she] always wanted to make”. Indeed, the Diners of Domino (Broderick, Troper, and guitarist Brenden Ramirez) consistently put together songs that don’t abandon the project’s previous sound so much as punch it up.

Domino opens with a song that displays this clearly in “Working on My Dreams”, a track that sports both a simply yet effective catchy melody from Broderick and a slick rock band backing that excitedly ushers the song forward. Domino might not get mistaken for a punk record, exactly, but it’s certainly in a higher gear–the breezy “Someday I’ll Go Surfing” and the cruising title track are power pop in its purest form, hooky and sturdy, while the Troper-esque “The Power” and the almost-new-wave-y “So What” further expand the scope of Diners. Like a lot of the 60s music that forms the starting point for Broderick’s sound, Domino feels like it has a clearly-defined Side A and Side B. The second half of the record is subtler and quieter–but that doesn’t mean that Broderick isn’t still taking advantage of the full band. The lazy-sounding but deft guitar work on “Painted Pictures” and the meandering tempo of “I Don’t Think About You” are just as invigorated as the louder tracks (and the flip side’s one real rocker, “From My Pillow”, is as strong as anything in the first five). Broderick had apparently considered changing the name of the project from Diners to something else for the album’s release, and while I do think Domino makes sense as a Diners album, it’s exciting that she sees it as the beginning of something new as well. (Bandcamp link)

Sonic Youth – Live in Brooklyn 2011

Release date: August 18th
Record label: Silver Current
Genre: Noise rock, experimental rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Death Valley ‘69

One classic enrichment activity for music writers, musicians, and music nerds in general is the endless debate over “the greatest rock band of all-time”, or “the greatest American band of all-time”. It’s not about your “favorite” band, you see–you’re supposed to find the band that most meets some nebulous objective criteria that earns them this prestigious award. Listening to the Sonic Youth of Live in Brooklyn 2011, however, makes these arguments feel like the hollow time-killers that they are. On this recording of the quartet’s last-ever North American show, you get to hear a band ripping through seventeen songs and 90 minutes’ worth of a thirty-year career with a confident energy that, if anything, had gotten stronger with time, and in a way that bridges the gap between the Sonic Youth of 1983 and 2009 seamlessly–what more could you possibly want?

Although Sonic Youth followed through and played five November 2011 festival shows in South America that had been scheduled before Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon’s separation the previous month, the August 12th show at Brooklyn’s Williamsburg Waterfront is sort of viewed by the band as the last “true” Sonic Youth show. The Steve Shelley-developed setlist is a brilliant showcase, beginning with several old Sonic Youth “classics” that sound absolutely vital here (“Brave Men Run (In My Family)” and “Death Valley ‘69” in particular), and the songs from 2009’s The Eternal (“Sacred Trickster”, “Calming the Snake”) get incorporated in a way that makes me realize I’ve never appreciated that record enough. The band pull heavily from their canonical 1980s years here, although the DGC-era cuts (a sprawling, eight-minute “Sugar Kane”, an inspired noisy deep pull in “Starfield Road”, and a sharp version of the title track from Moore’s Psychic Hearts solo album) sound like the band holds just as much fondness for them. There are bursts of noise throughout the recording, but Live in Brooklyn 2011 underscores just how tuned-in they were as a rock and roll band, a force of nature that was almost (but unfortunately, not entirely) unstoppable for their three-decade reign. (Bandcamp link)

Leopard Print Taser – Existential Bathroom Graffiti

Release date: August 18th
Record label: Knife Hits
Genre: Noise rock, post-punk
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Esta Festa Me Molesta

Boston’s Leopard Print Taser have been around since 2017, touring heavily and releasing two EPs, but the Existential Bathroom Graffiti cassette is the quartet’s first-ever full-length album. The record certainly shows a band (made up of Leila Bower, Reid Calkin, Shannon Donahue, and Nicholas Wolf) that’s locked in together over the past half-decade of their existence. The group don’t put too much stock in bells and whistles, preferring to use a two-guitar rock band attack on each song, as they swerve between Sonic Youth-esque noise rock, meaty post-punk, fast-paced garage rock, and even a bit of snotty hardcore influence here and there. The band’s sound is indebted to 90s indie rock in a way that puts them in line with fellow Knife Hits bands like Thousandaire and Rid of Me, though Bower’s vocals certainly help the band stand out among this pack.

Leopard Print Taser hit the ground running with “One Inch Gut Punch”, a pounding indie-noise-rock tune with the band firing on all cylinders. Songs like “Esta Festa Me Molesta” and “Otherside” showcase the band’s poppier side, even though the former’s lyrics are quite blistering and the latter features a nice, deep low-end. On the other end of the spectrum, the band delve into dirty punk rock with the accusatory “Y U Lie” and the lean “Big Shot”. Most of Existential Bathroom Graffiti falls between these two extremes, including highlights like the chugging “India Ink”, which marries a light-sounding vocal with a pulverizing instrumental, the prowling post-punk of “Deep Dive”, and the propulsive garage rock of “Lead the Charge”. The album ends with the blistering “Family LLC”, a song that lambasts the manipulative power of small businesses who claim to treat their employees “like family”, as well as actual family members who use blood relation as a weapon. Rejecting these false structures as a four-piece band that sounds completely in sync with one another is a sharp closing statement. (Bandcamp link)

Big Bliss – Vital Return

Release date: August 18th
Record label: Good Eye
Genre: Post-punk, alt-rock, college rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Tether

Brooklyn group Big Bliss formed in the mid-2010s, and the trio of Cory Race, Tim Race, and Wallace May put out an EP and album on Exit Stencil Recordings in 2016 and 2018, respectively. The five-year gap between their first album and their aptly-titled sophomore record, Vital Return, seems to have been an eventful one for the band. Tim and Cory (who are brothers) dealt with the loss of their father, at least one member of the band began the long road to sobriety, original attempts to record the record were scuttled by the pandemic, and May eventually moved across the country to California, leaving the band (but not before contributing to the recording of Vital Return). The record finally emerges on Good Eye (Personal Space, Scarves, Zoo), and the Races have recruited bassist Rose Blanshei and guitarist Dan Peskin to round out the live band and keep Big Bliss active in their new era.

Vital Return is a post-punk album, although it’s neither of the dance-y Gang of Four variety nor the noisy Fall-esque kind that dominate the modern post-punk landscape. The band is inspired by the slow-moving, anthemic beauty of bands like Echo & the Bunnymen, early U2, and the parts of Joy Division that don’t get ripped off as much to make a sound that pulls from the sweeping, serious end of college rock. “A Seat at the Table” opens the record by building its chanting vocals to an emphatic chorus, while “Sleep Paralysis” mixes darkness and light in a big-picture-thinking way. Tim’s writing matches the grandiosity of the band, particularly in the addiction struggle of “Tether” and in “Sediment”, a song about the Races’ late father’s struggle with PTSD after his time in Vietnam. Vital Return is an album with plenty of ambition, but Tim’s lyrics ensure that these songs connect on a reachable level as well. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Premiere: Deady, “Uneeda”

Regular readers of Rosy Overdrive know of the blog’s appreciation of Mister Goblin, whose 2022 album Bunny was my favorite album of last year. In addition to his work with Mister Goblin, however, bandleader Sam Goblin has joined a new band, with the Bloomington, Indiana-based musician swinging down to Louisville to play guitar in the five-piece group Deady (also comprised of vocalist Mandy Keathley, guitarist Chyppe Crosby, bassist Clayton Ray, and drummer KJ Bechtloff—pictured in the above photo by Mat Schladen).

The first half of 2023 saw the release of two Deady songs, “Eat Sleep” and “Knock” (the former of which I wrote about in June). I’m pleased to report that Deady shares Mister Goblin’s love of 1990s post-hardcore, noise rock, and indie rock, although the quintet have a bit of a Midwestern/Rust Belt edge compared to the Maryland-originating Mister Goblin’s D.C. vibes–a little less Jawbox, a little more Brainiac.

Today, Rosy Overdrive is premiering “Uneeda”, the third-ever Deady song, and the band’s hot start continues with this one. Although the track isn’t a world away from their last two songs, it feels a little different–instead of fully embracing the new wave-y playfulness of the other singles, “Uneeda” gets a little heavier and blunter. The sub-two minute track is a math-y squall of shredding guitars and pummeling percussion, taking a slight breather before ending in a big noisy conclusion.

Over top of all the chaos, Mandy Keathley is, of course, singing about zombies. According to Keathley, her lyrics here are inspired by The Return of the Living Dead, the 1985 horror-comedy film that’s apparently set in Louisville (a fact of which I imagine Deady are quite proud). Her vocals are just as impressive as the rest of the band’s contributions, managing to shout along loudly with the musical storm while at the same time incorporating a hint of post-punk/death-rock-singer gravitas that feels appropriate for the track (yes, I’m hearing lines about bones and brains throughout the lyrics of “Uneeda”).

“Uneeda”, along with “Knock” and “Eat Sleep”, will appear on Deady’s debut EP, which comes out at the end of next month via Never Nervous Records. Both Deady and Mister Goblin will be playing in Chicago this Friday, August 18th, with the also-great Sonny Falls, and those in Indianapolis and Louisville will have a chance to see Deady this Thursday and Saturday respectively, as well. Furthermore, Louisvillians can also catch Deady at Never Nervous’ Plunder Over Louisville music fest on the EP’s release date, September 30th. Listen to “Uneeda” below:

Pressing Concerns: William Matheny, Perfect Angel at Heaven, Jason Allen Millard, Sundays & Cybele

Welcome, friends, to a Monday Pressing Concerns. It’s a good one! We’ve got new albums from William Matheny and Jason Allen Millard, a new EP from Perfect Angel at Heaven, and a cassette reissue of a decade-old Sundays & Cybele album to discuss today.

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.

William Matheny – That Grand, Old Feeling

Release date: August 4th
Record label: Hickman Holler
Genre: Alt-country, singer-songwriter
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Stranger’s Voice

The church of William Matheny is made up of drifters, prodigal sons, and people who will have the money next week, they swear. It meets every day at truck stops and roadside crosses, reading scripture scrawled on motel notepads and pens. Lent is a cross-country road trip on an empty stomach, while hazy Biblical cities float by the tour van’s passenger window. Six years after his last full-length album, West Virginia’s William Matheny has returned with a collection of songs that drip with these images and hallmarks as much as ever. Matheny has not reinvented his sound on That Grand, Old Feeling; if you liked the sharp alt-country tunes of his last album, 2017’s, Strange Constellation, you won’t be disappointed in these nine songs. Even so, there’s a difference in the two albums–Strange Constellations jumped around excitedly in its storytelling and music, while That Grand, Old Feeling feels like one long exhale. It takes a step back from the action and the movement–not to abandon it, to be clear, but to get a good look at where it has led its various narrators.

The traveling of That Grand, Old Feeling is not aimless, although it might look that way to one who doesn’t understand Matheny’s goal–he’s bent on capturing the feeling that the record’s title describes, and upon which its title track expands. That Grand, Old Feeling begins with Matheny on the cusp of something in “Late Blooming Forever” (“I think it’s gonna happen any day”)–with self-transformation within arm’s reach. Maybe he reaches it with the aid of “bossa nova and Bud Light lime” in “Bird of Youth”. But even if he’s able to grab onto it, there’s still the problem of holding onto it, trying to fight against the tide of “Heartless People” (a song aided greatly by its go-all-the-way heartland rock instrumental). 

Matheny and his band certainly have range, but That Grand, Old Feeling is particularly sharp at making everything sound like part of the whole–technically, the earnest country of “If You Could Only See Me Now”, the adderall-addled sin-rocker “Christian Name”, and the piano hymn “Down at the Hotel Canfield” are all pretty different, but there’s no bumps on the connector roads between them. The sharp, energetic music to closing track “Stranger’s Voice” almost obscures the weariness that Matheny displays throughout the song– “A man can only stay so strong so long,” he sings. Matheny and his band hold it all together for a whole album; maybe there’ll be some time to rest before the next hole-in-the-wall. (Bandcamp link)

Perfect Angel at Heaven – Imploder

Release date: August 11th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: 90s indie rock, noise rock, no wave
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Imploder

Back in January, in the first Pressing Concerns of 2023, I wrote about Perfect Angel at Heaven’s self-titled debut EP. With Perfect Angel at Heaven, the Indianapolis trio of vocalist/guitarist Casey Noonan, bassist Alex Grove, and drummer Daniel Thacker honed in on a sound that balanced clarity and noisiness, pulling from no wave, thorny indie rock, and post-punk to make guitar music with a distinct perspective. Striking while the iron is hot, Perfect Angel at Heaven’s second EP adds five original songs and a cover to the band’s repertoire. Imploder continues to explore similar sonic territory as their first record, although there is a slight but noticeable turn towards cleaning up some of the extended noisiness and focusing a little more intently on melody in these half-dozen songs.

Noonan’s vocals, quite expressive and crystal-clear throughout the EP, continue to be a key aspect of Perfect Angel at Heaven’s sound. Noonan’s voice is the defining feature of “Pastoral” and “Desire’s Opening”, although the increasing importance of the band’s rhythm section shouldn’t be overlooked in these songs, either. On “Whiter Than a Bathtub”, the trio indulge in anti-rock experimentation, but then immediately follow it up with the title track, a curiously captivating Noonan/Grove duet that is the band’s hardest turn into pop-friendly territory thus far. However, they can still conduct a noisy rock-and-roll rave-up when the moment calls for it, as the EP’s closing, fairly faithful cover of Sonic Youth’s “Catholic Block” demonstrates (although the trio flirt with flying too close to the sun by choosing their most obvious influence to cover, their take on the song gets by on pure enthusiasm). Imploder continues to develop the world of Perfect Angel at Heaven, and it’s a promising and intriguing one. (Bandcamp link)

Jason Allen Millard – The Truth Is Always Changing

Release date: July 19th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Folk, country, lo-fi, singer-songwriter
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Way Out and Down the Road

I hadn’t heard of Jason Allen Millard until recently, but the Minneapolis musician has apparently been playing in bands around the Twin Cities for quite a while now. Away from rock-and-roll, however, Millard has concurrently built up a solo discography of experimental folk music, releasing a few records where he’d take acoustic songs and add to or just flat-out deconstruct them with synths and other editing tricks. Millard’s latest solo album, The Truth Is Always Changing, however, is just about entirely comprised of the singer-songwriter’s voice, guitar, and some background white noise–originally intended as demos, Millard decided that what he’d recorded stood well on its own.

Millard’s assessment is correct–The Truth Is Always Changing has a compelling haunted and dug-up quality to it, pleasingly mirroring his stated influence of Folkways’ Anthology of American Folk Music (it also reminds me of the scorched blues of Spencer Dobbs’ If the Moon Don’t Turn Its Back on You). The album opens slowly and deliberately with “Strung Up Like a Deer”, the fuzzy quality of Millard’s voice and guitar only enhancing the recording. “Way Out and Down the Road” takes The Truth Is Always Changing to a dark place early on with its harrowing take on the “childhood friend who’s slowly faded from one’s life” story. The album finds Millard tilting towards “enjoyable folk troubadour” with “Don’t Look into the Sky” and a cover of “Wasn’t Born to Follow”, although other moments on the record (the echoing title track, the discordant “Evening Raag for Steel and Amp Hum”, and the corrupted “Shake Loose”) display Millard’s experimentalist streak, alive and well. With The Truth Is Always Changing, Millard has put together an album intimate-sounding enough that one wonders if other people were meant to hear it, but fascinating enough to make one glad it’s out there in the world nonetheless. (Bandcamp link)

Sundays & Cybele – Tsubouchi (Reissue)

Release date: August 1st
Record label: Eye Vybe
Genre: Psychedelic rock, psychedelic folk, baroque pop
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Medicine Man (Cybernetic Animism)

Chicago’s Eye Vybe Records is an under-the-radar but prolific imprint that has put out over a hundred records over the past thirteen years. For the second half of its existence, Eye Vybe’s focus has shifted towards Japanese experimental and psychedelic music, and over the past month they’ve crossed the hundred-releases threshold with a trio of such albums–Mitsuru Tabata’s Musica Non Grata, Acid Mothers Guru Guru’s Three Islands, and this one, a reissue of Sundays & Cybele’s Tsubouchi. Sundays & Cybele (led by Kazuo Tsubouchi, the band’s only consistent member) have been putting out records at a steady clip for most of this century; Tsubouchi originally came out on CD in 2014 and is now available on cassette through Eye Vybe.

On Tsubouchi, Sundays & Cybele are a psychedelic band of several stripes–heavy but melodic, overwhelming but friendly. Although the album opens with the particularly busy sensory overload of “Medicine Man (Cybernetic Animism)”, the bells and whistles are kept in relative check, and as a whole, Tsubouchi keeps the front half of the record pretty accessible. Tsubouchi offers up the fluttering baroque pop of “R.U.I.N.” and the bass-driven, slightly offbeat “Marginal Man” immediately afterward, and the gorgeous pastoral 60s folk-pop of “Working Days” and its dreamy counterpart “Sleeping Days” take up the album’s midsection. Sundays & Cybele save their wild psychedelic rock for the second side, which is bookended by the twin seven-minute journeys of “Seven Mornings” and “Paradise Lost (Inside O = Outside 0)”–the freewheeling former track has its charms, but I’m more drawn to the laser-focused latter one. It’s chaotic, but, like the rest of Tsubouchi, it’s an orchestrated chaos. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Curling, Hurry, Sargasso, Kolb

It’s a Thursday, which means that tomorrow is Friday, which means that these four records in this edition of Pressing Concerns will be out in one day! This is a good one, too, even graded on our high curve. Today, we’re looking at new albums from Curling, Hurry, and Sargasso, and a new EP from Kolb. If you missed Monday’s post (featuring Annie Hart, Maple Stave, Podcasts, and Shredded Sun), 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.

Curling – No Guitar

Release date: August 11th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Prog-pop, power pop, math rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Shamble

I first discovered Berkeley/Tokyo’s Curling through their 2018 sophomore album, Definitely Band, a fairly unclassifiable “math rock” album featuring plenty of intriguing, fractured pop songs from the songwriting duo of Jojo Brandel and Bernie Gelman. Listening to it now, Definitely Band still sounds just as fresh as it when it was brand new–which is a good thing, since we didn’t get any new music from Curling for the next half-decade. However, Curling have now returned with No Guitar, an incredibly strong third album that takes a confident leap forward in a way suggesting that Brandel and Gelman took full advantage of the relatively long gap between records. No Guitar was assembled “bit by bit” over the past five years, as the Pacific Ocean-separated Brandel and Gelman slowly but surely built an album that reflects their love of vintage 60s-esque, heavily-tinkered-with studio pop rock, without straying too far from the sound of their previous music. What Curling end up with is a unique combination of Game Theory, XTC, Jon Brion, progressive pop, power pop, and math rock (with, yes, a little bit of emo in there too).

Not only does No Guitar corral a disparate collection of influences enthusiastically and cleanly, it does so in an orchestrated manner that causes the album to ebb and flow in the same way their multi-part pop songs do. At the beginning, Brandel, Gelman and drummer Kynwyn Sterling all co-anchor a somewhat offbeat but still incredibly catchy power pop group–once “Shamble” kicks in, everyone is working in lockstep to land hooks, while the appropriately-titled “Pastoral” is just as deft at it while doing so in a laid-back fashion. Although “Pop Song” eventually blooms into what its title describes, its acoustic-based first half foreshadows the Curling of the center of No Guitar–a haunted, empty-space-embracing emo-folk-math band. The stretch from “Reflector Mage” to “Majesty” reflects this sudden but skilled turn–with the string-aided melody of the latter of the three, the connective tissue between this and the previous stretch of songs shows itself. The second half of the record rides a similar wave, with the jangly “Hi Elixir” and the heavy “Patience” building No Guitar up before drifting off into the ether with “Husk”, “Hotel”, and the title track. Although Brandel and Gelman’s influences are apparent in their work, they’ve put together a record that transcends any one genre movement and stands completely alone in 2023 with No Guitar. (Bandcamp link)

Hurry – Don’t Look Back

Release date: August 11th
Record label: Lame-O
Genre: Jangle pop, indie pop, power pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Didn’t Have to Try

Over the past decade, Hurry’s Matt Scottoline has established himself as one of the best modern power pop songwriters. It started in 2012’s self-titled Hurry debut, when “power pop” was far off indie rock’s radar, and as the genre began experiencing its recent revival, Scottoline was putting out consistently great records like 2018’s Every Little Thought and 2021’s Fake Ideas that landed him squarely in the middle of a new old movement. Don’t Look Back is the fifth Hurry album, and it contains plenty of what one has come to expect from Scottoline–heart-on-sleeve, bittersweet melodies, gorgeous guitar work, middling tempos and four-minute runtimes galore, and, of course, undeniable hooks. Perhaps appropriate given the record’s contradictory title (which violates its own command by being a Teenage Fanclub reference), Don’t Look Back is both a subtle record and an immediate one. Scottoline doesn’t favor the louder, more distorted end of the power pop spectrum, instead trending towards intricate, deliberate song structure–but never at the expense of passing up an excellent chorus (it reminds me more than a little bit of Steve Marino’s recent Too Late to Start Again, another record with a notable Teenage Fanclub bent).

To some bands, the “power” in power pop is perhaps the deployment of Blue Album-esque guitar fuzz to punch up the “pop” part–to Hurry, the “power” of power pop is, I think, a doubling down on the strength of the “pop” aspect. The ten songs of Don’t Look Back don’t go out of their way to differentiate themselves from one another, but they all reveal themselves distinct creatures in their own way. Some of the record embraces the electric guitar a little more than the rest of the album, from mid-record highlight “Something More” to the bouncy “No Patience”, although not in a way that distracts from Scottoline’s vocal melodies. The slow-moving, slow-revealing brilliance of “Beggin’ for You” and the horn-aided “Parallel Haunting” contain most of the same ingredients as the two aforementioned songs, but shift the emphasis just a little bit to come off as more big picture-embracing creations. Don’t Look Back is marked by a belief in pop music on its own–the relative lack of bells and whistles means that something different from the record will bubble to the surface for me on each listen. Whether it’s the gorgeous earnestness of the chorus of “Little Brain” or the tension-release final song “The Punchline”, Don’t Look Back is full of tracks built to last for the long haul. (Bandcamp link)

Sargasso – Further Away

Release date: August 11th
Record label: Dead Definition
Genre: Folk rock, indie folk
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Emily

Sargasso are a four-piece band made up of Maria Campos Saadi, Noah Goodman, Thomas Hagen and Soledad Tejada, who all came together in New Haven in 2017. The band has been steadily putting out music since their inception, even after the members have become split between New York, Philadelphia, and Connecticut, with their debut full-length As It Surfaces to Meet Me coming out in 2021. Further Away, released by Dead Definition (Ther, The Human Fly, Sadurn) is the second Sargasso album–and quite possibly the final one, as three of the band’s members plan to move out of the United States not long after its release. Although I hadn’t heard of Sargasso before Further Away, I can say after spending some time with the album that something very real would be lost with the demise of this band–they’re a truly collaborative group, with all four members singing and contributing songwriting in a particularly balanced-feeling way.

With its acoustic, folk-inspired instrumentation, hints of bossa nova, and pop structures, Further Away is a gentle-sounding record, but it’s never boring–it contains far too many ideas and too much energy across its thirteen tracks to fall into any potential “easy listening” pitfalls. The extraordinarily friendly, almost campfire-ready folk rock of “Emily” kicks off the album, a mode that Sargasso continue to excel at (see “How to Reach Me”). “Teardrops in the Ocean” incorporates synths and electronic elements into their sound seamlessly, while quieter songs like “Witty Future Diss” and “Sleep/Fallacy” show the band stretching out and letting the songs take their time. The synth-driven future pop of “Embers” and the dreamy jangle of “If I Could” mark the highlights of Further Away’s second half, but Sargasso also take take the record’s homestretch as a chance to strip things down with the back-to-back “Sun So Low” and “Beauty Is Free”. Sargasso close things out with the ambient improvisation of “Narrows”, disappearing quietly in a haze of piano flourishes–but not before making one last mark. (Bandcamp link)

Kolb – Power of Thought

Release date: August 11th
Record label: Ramp Local
Genre: Indie pop, jazz-pop
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Power of Thought

Water from Your Eyes touring member Mike Kolb has been releasing music under his last name for a while now, a prolific streak that culminated with last year’s Tyrannical Vibes, an album that saw Kolb embracing collaboration in service of his welcoming but smart pop music. Kolb is back less than a year after Tyrannical Vibes with the six-song Power of Thought EP, and while Kolb sings lead vocals on every song here (unlike on his last album), in some ways his newest record is his most collaborative yet. While Kolb recorded most of the instrumentation on Tyrannical Vibes himself, Power of Thought was taped reel-to-reel with a live band, giving these half dozen songs a loose energy that counterbalances Kolb’s tight melodies and composition.

The Kolb of Tyrannical Vibes hopped around quite a bit genre-wise–on Power of Thought, he and his band (featuring Palm’s Hugo Stanley on drums, among others) zero in on a breezy jazz-pop sound. The contributions of clarinetist Hillai Govreen (felt from instrumental opening track “The Key” on forward) certainly aid this feeling, although everything from Kolb and Eamonn Wilcox’s guitar chords to the keyboards and microkorg of Kolb and Jack Sanders works towards it. Kolb’s expressive falsetto is on full display here and he acquits himself nicely, selling the jazz-rock of the title track, the synth blast of “Mighty Fine”, and the slick ballad “Dark and Light” in equal measure. Still, the opening and closing instrumental tracks (prominently featuring Govreen’s clarinet, but not in a way that completely overshadows the rest of the players) serve as reminders that “Kolb” is more than just its namesake figure on Power of Thought. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Annie Hart, Maple Stave, Podcasts, Shredded Sun

Welcome to Pressing Concerns Monday! Last Friday was such a big release day that even though I’ve already written about five albums that came out last week, today we’ve got four more records from the first week of August to discuss: new albums from Annie Hart, Maple Stave, and Podcasts, and a new EP from Shredded Sun.

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.

Annie Hart – The Weight of a Wave

Release date: August 4th
Record label: Uninhabitable Mansions
Genre: Synthpop, indie pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Boy You Got Me Good

New York’s Annie Hart has had a busy and full music career over the past twenty years. From 2005 to 2013, she put out four albums as part of synthpop trio Au Revoir Simone, and she’s also released a solo album every other year since 2017. At the same time, Hart has developed a parallel career scoring films that led to her entering the world of modern music composition, working with the likes of the Atlantic Center for the Arts. With all this going on, Hart’s fourth album, The Weight of a Wave, makes it clear that the singer-songwriter is still in touch with her synthpop roots. These ten indie pop tunes sound sharply-written and -recorded but not overly labored-on or too busy-sounding–Hart cites krautrock as an influence, and the minimal presentation of these pieces of synthesizer-driven songs bear this out.

The Weight of a Wave opens with a golden pop tune in “Boy You Got Me Good”, a beautiful, bass-driven display of 80s new wave/synthpop with a killer but still somewhat understated hook from Hart. The zippy tempo and distorted guitar of “A Crowded Cloud” isn’t exactly “punk rock”, but it adds some extra “oomph” to Hart’s disorienting power pop. The mid-tempo chant of “A Lot of Thought” dives head-first into big old pure synthpop, once again offering up a key melodic hook to push this one over the line. The Weight of a Wave might sneakily have a stronger side two than side one–at least three of Hart’s best pop songs come in the second half. The chiming, wide-open pop of “What Makes Me Me” polishes a lyric that, perhaps intentionally, adds an extra shade of depth to the entirety of the album’s embrace of brightness and catchiness, while the sharp and peppy “Stop Staring at You” is undeniable in its own right and the disembodied, floating, analog synth-led dream pop of “Nothing Makes Me Happy Anymore” makes a strong statement with its bare structure. The similarly simple-but-heavy “While Without” closes the album with a sense of finality and survival, capping what ends up as a full-realized pop record. (Bandcamp link)

Maple Stave – Arguments

Release date: August 1st
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Noise rock, post-hardcore
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Indian Ocean, Present Day

Vocalist/baritone guitarist Chris Williams, baritone guitarist Andy Hull, and drummer Evan Rowe formed Maple Stave in Durham, North Carolina in 2003. Throughout the 2000s and early 2010s, the trio put out two albums and four EPs of 90s Touch and Go-inspired noise rock, but they’d been quiet since 2016’s V. In the seven years between records, Maple Stave added a new member for the first time–bassist Chris Rasmussen (of Racetrack) joined in 2019, and while the Seattle-based fourth member doesn’t join them for all live shows, his presence is felt on Arguments, the long-awaited third Maple Stave album. Recorded at Electrical Audio, their new album is nine songs and thirty-three minutes of low-end heavy, downtuned, but still limber noise rock/post-hardcore, the darkness of the music countered by Williams’ high, clear, and dramatic vocals.

Arguments kicks off with “Indian Ocean, Present Day”, a song with an icy, pounding, Swans-esque opening that morphs into a sharp, bass-driven post-punk/alt-rock anthem with a soaring chorus. This dynamic continues in the first half of the record with “The French Song”, another song that balances catchiness, heaviness, and pure drama. Of the album’s three instrumental tracks, two of them are among the first four songs on the record–a bold move, but the tough fuzz of “Good Luck in Green Bay” and the math-y “Downtown Julie Brown” are both quality additions to the record. In the middle of Arguments, the post-hardcore tension of “Cincinnati Hairpiece” is the band’s most Dischord-y moment, while the second half of the album plows on full steam ahead with “Thunderkiss ‘85” and “I’m Not Tied to Pretty”, two of the biggest-sounding songs on the record. Twenty years into their career, Maple Stave are still on the offensive. (Bandcamp link)

Podcasts – Podcasts

Release date: August 4th
Record label: Prefect
Genre: Indie pop, post-punk, jangle pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Summerland, 1992

The annoyingly-named Podcasts are an Oslo-originating four-piece band made up of Ellis Jones, Kyle Devine, Tore Størvold and Emil Kraugerud, who all apparently met as co-workers in 2018 (Jones is perhaps most well-known for leading the Bristol band Trust Fund, a group I know a lot of people love but with whom I’m mostly unfamiliar). Work on their self-titled debut album began in late 2019 following the release of their first single–delayed by COVID-19, Podcasts finally arrives this month via Prefect Records (The Telephone Numbers, Ex-Vöid, EggS). Loosely speaking, Podcasts fit well on Prefect’s roster of British (and British-inspired) guitar-based indie pop groups, although there’s a trickiness to their debut album as well, displaying the band’s fondness for unexpected twists and turns in their pop songs.

Although it’s only their first album, Podcasts clearly shows the band has gelled as a four-piece with the way they pull off some of the more complex turns on the record with confidence. Opening track “Stor lordags kveld / No Singing in the Gym” displays this from the get-go, darting from the first to the second half of the title by completely changing up the song. Tracks like “Summerland, 1992” and “Cockatoos” have a bit of jangle pop in them, with the former also exploring the fractured pop world of 90s American indie rock and the latter delivering its guitar melodies as straightforwardly as Podcasts can allow. Podcasts moves forward as the album goes on, with the second half of the album feeling more post-punk-indebted, from the garage-y new wave of “Dragging the Lake” to the repetition of the title track to the fuzzy sing-speaking of “The Unbearable Lightness of Being Drunk”.  One of the more intriguing new(ish) bands I’ve heard lately, I guess what I’m saying is: listen to Podcasts. (Bandcamp link)

Shredded Sun – Translucent Eyes

Release date: August 4th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Garage rock, psychedelic pop
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: The Dark at the Top of the Stairs

Back in February, Chicago’s Shredded Sun released Each Dot and Each Line, an incredibly enjoyable mix of fuzz rock, garage-punk, psych pop, and power pop that ended up being one of my favorite albums of the year so far. The trio of bassist/vocalist Sarah Ammerman, guitarist/vocalist Nick Ammerman, and drummer Ben Bilow have played together a long time (in Fake Fiction in the 2000s, in this band for the better part of the past decade), a chemistry that’s apparent both on Each Dot and Each Line and its follow-up, the surprise-release four song Translucent Eyes EP. Nick Ammerman has described the record as “one psychedelic summer ballad, three trashy stompers”, and the EP does indeed continue to reflect the dexterity of Shredded Sun in this fashion.

The opening title track is the longest song on the EP by a good measure, stretching nearly to five minutes–I believe this would be Translucent Eyes’ “psychedelic summer ballad”. It’s a gorgeous and restrained song, with Nick’s vocals and the guitar accents giving it something of a “looser Yo La Tengo” feeling. Sarah takes the lead for the EP’s two middle songs, the snotty surf-punk of “Tough Love” and the sneering garage-punk swagger of “Sick Inside”, both of which back up their energy with inspired performances from the band. Shredded Suns save the best pop moment on Translucent Eyes for last with “The Dark at the Top of the Stairs”, with Sarah joining Nick in the chorus to cap an exciting three-minute carousel ride of bashed-out chord progressions, a sing-song melody, and a weirdly captivating keyboard hook. It’s nice to have new music from Shredded Sun again so quickly, especially when Translucent Eyes lives up to the highs of their last release. (Bandcamp link)

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