Welcome to Thursday’s Pressing Concerns. Today, we have new albums from Rob I. Miller and Autoescuela, a new EP from Downhaul, and a pair of new EPs from Dogwood Tales. If you missed Monday’s post (featuring Michael Cormier-O’Leary, Gueersh, BIKE, and Alien Eyelid), I suggest checking that 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.
Rob I. Miller – Companion Piece
Release date: May 12th Record label: Vacant Stare Genre: Lo-fi indie rock, jangle pop, singer-songwriter, power pop Formats: Cassette, digital Pull Track: Wedge
One of the best records of the year so far by my estimation is Blues Lawyer’s All in Good Time, an incredibly sharp, catchy, and weighty album from the Bay Area power pop quartet that came out in February. Little did I know at the time that one of the band’s two principal songwriters, Rob I. Miller, had an entire solo album in the works as well–Companion Piece, out this Friday on cassette via his own label, Vacant Stare. It was a little surprising to me that Miller had a solo album ready to go concurrently despite having a (very good) full band outlet for his songwriting, but one listen to Companion Piece makes one hear why it’s a “Rob I. Miller” album and not a Blues Lawyer one. For one, it’s a full-on breakup album, with the album’s eleven songs focusing intently on a disintegrating (and subsequently disintegrated) relationship. And, befitting of the solo nature, Companion Piece is a lot more humble-sounding than All in Good Time’s relative polish, mostly recorded at home by Miller himself (with drums from Marbled Eye/Public Interest’s Andrew Oswald and a couple guitar contributions from Blues Lawyer’s Ellen Matthews).
But in a formal studio or at home, alone or with others, Miller is still the same songwriter, and his pop instincts are no less potent on Companion Piece. Miller starts the record on a subtle note with “Clean”, an understated song whose chorus (“We couldn’t clean, we could only move the dirt around,”–Miller says a lot with a little here) nevertheless sticks with you. A lot of these songs fall on the sparser end, like the ruminative “Capacity”, or are otherwise less friendly, like the cold noise pop/shoegaze of “Bloodlust”. Miller still exercises his power pop muscles throughout Companion Piece, however, and the sweetness sharpens some of the tougher lyrics–“In Circles” stomps around a relationship that’s clearly doomed but still chugging along, “Hide” sends “I wish I didn’t have a clue” into the stratosphere, and “Wedge” is a massive piece of Teenage Fanclub fuzz-pop that glazes over some lyrics that…well, they sound like what I imagine a San Francisco-area breakup sounds like. Companion Piece ends with a pretty brutal moment of clarity in “Wrong for Us” and the curious “The One”, which is as catchy as it is uncertain. “The One” decidedly doesn’t wrap up the album cleanly, although Miller makes the ending sound great. (Bandcamp link)
Downhaul – Squall
Release date: May 10th Record label: Self-released Genre: Alt-rock, emo Formats: Cassette, digital Pull Track: Fracture
Back in 2021, I wrote about Downhaul’s PROOF on this blog–a massive, towering record of emo, alt-rock, and post-rock from the Richmond band, it ended up being one of my favorite albums of that year. Since then, Downhaul’s singer Gordon M. Phillips has kept himself busy with a solo album, a collaborative EP, and some one-off singles, while the band themselves roared back into the picture in February with their standalone song “The Riverboat”. Yesterday, Downhaul surprise-released their most substantial offering since PROOF, a four-song EP called Squall. Released all at once, these four tracks are all in the same key, bleed into each other, and can be thought of as “one 12-minute song with four suites”, according to the band. I personally think the tracks are distinct enough to be considered on their own, but either way, it’s a dozen minutes of Downhaul doing what they do best without sounding complacent at all.
The Downhaul of the past few years has such a recognizable sound–rising and falling emo-tinged alt-rock (or alt-rock tinged emo) guided by Phillips’ distinct vocals–that it takes a second to realize just how weird they get on Squall. The EP opens with “Fracture”, the song on the record that makes the biggest bid for “big-chorus anthem” status, but by the time that blistering guitar solo kicks in at the end of the song, the band have already moved on towards trying some other things. “Sink” is, for most of its runtime, Downhaul at their most restrained–they can’t resist ending it with a really triumphant-sounding dueling vocal, however. “Autumn” might be the weirdest one here–it starts in a vintage Phillips-esque way (when the music drops out and he sings “You want something beautiful and all I want is quiet”–nobody else does it quite like him) before basically deconstructing itself in its second half. The minimal “Up” is a closing sigh in comparison. At four songs, it feels all too brief, but Downhaul make the most of Squall’s dozen minutes. (Bandcamp link)
Dogwood Tales – 13 Summers 13 Falls / Rodeo
Release date: November 18th / May 12th Record label: WarHen Genre: Alt-country, country rock, folk rock Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital Pull Track: 13 Summers 13 Falls / Rodeo
Dogwood Tales is a five-piece group that hails from Harrisonburg, Virginia, and they make an intriguing blend of folk and country music that’s befitting of their scenic, relatively isolated home. The band has grown from the founding duo of singer-songwriters Kyle Grim and Ben Ryan to also include bassist Danny Gibney, drummer Jake Golibart, and pedal steel player Stephen Kuester, which is the lineup that contributed to the most two recent Dogwood Tales releases: last November’s 13 Summers 13 Falls and this week’s Rodeo EPs. Coinciding with the release of Rodeo, Charlottesville’s WarHen Records is also putting out an LP and CD featuring both of the EPs. Both EPs are excellent country-folk; 13 Summer 13 Falls might place a bit more emphasis on dreamy, reverb-y folk rock and Rodeo is more of a country-rocker, but there’s overlap between the two and they work well together.
13 Summers 13 Falls captivated me immediately with its lost-in-time folk rock sound, captured excellently by the blurry Ferris wheel on the record cover. “Hard to Be Anywhere” is a weary but rousing opener with a big chorus, and the EP also offers up emotional ballads (“25”) and the band’s clearest foray into dream pop (“Since Yesterday”). The title track’s casual alt-country is both a great sendoff to the first EP and a solid transition to Rodeo, which opens with the instrumental twang of “GRVANGL”. Songs like “Stranger” and “Only Want Out” have an Anywhere, USA Americana feel to them that reminds me of Matthew Milia’s Keego Harbor, and the breathtaking title track and “Paul’s Valley” find Dogwood Tales practicing their restraint and letting these songs fully develop from their pin-drop quiet beginnings. Whether you take in 13 Summers 13 Falls and Rodeo as two separate EPs or one album, there’s a lot to appreciate here. (Bandcamp link)
Autoescuela – Mal
Release date: March 31st Record label: Humo Internacional Genre: Lo-fi indie rock, lo-fi pop Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Bien Ho
Autoescuela are an indie rock duo from northwestern Spain who have been at it since the mid-2010s. The band (“David y Santi”, per their Bandcamp page) have put out a lot of music–their latest album, Mal, is being released through Humo Internacional, a label I hadn’t heard of but seems to put out a lot of Spanish indie/alternative/punk music (I’ll have to keep an eye on them in the future). Although it doesn’t come from any of the areas I’m used to it coming from, Autoescuela make a familiar kind of music to me on Mal–barreling through fourteen songs in twenty-five minutes, David and Santi are clear aficionados of Guided by Voices-esque lo-fi pop, and they’re also definitely inspired by a sort of early Wire-esque guitar-forward, post-punk informed pop music (which also brings to mind Guided by Voices, notably big Wire fans).
Mal is sort of a choose your own adventure–though brief and relatively simple, these songs all “hit”, it’s just which version of Autoescuela’s minimal, drum machine-riding pop rock feels better to you at any given time. The album opens with a couple of weirder tunes in the atmospheric “Vs.” and the crunchy “Muay Thai”; “Arthur” is a no-nonsense, mid-tempo earworm that works almost perfectly. Mal really shines in its mid-section–the fuzz rocker “Colloto Dax” into the acoustic, lo-fi Pollardesque “Mos Eisley” into the big alt-rock anthem “Bien Ho” is an incredible streak. Mal ends where it begins–with the weirder, more experimental side of the band rearing its head, even more so than before: “7up” is a woozy, swaggering piece of psych-fuzz, and “Radiotaxi” closes the record with a noise piece. (Bandcamp link)
It’s a Monday, and we’ve got four more great new albums to talk about on Pressing Concerns. Today deals with new records from Michael Cormier-O’Leary, Gueersh, BIKE, and Alien Eyelid.
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.
Michael Cormier-O’Leary – Anything Can Be Left Behind
Release date: May 5th Record label: Dear Life Genre: Folk rock Formats: CD, cassette, digital Pull Track: Letter from Alan
Michael Cormier-O’Leary has appeared on this website quite a bit as the drummer for Philadelphia’s Friendship, not to mention as a guest contributor to a ton of Philly-area bands and artists as well. He is also a very good singer-songwriter in his own right, as his latest solo album, Anything Can Be Left Behind, demonstrates. Like his three albums before this one, it’s out on the record label he co-founded (Dear Life Records), and the dreamy folk-rock that marked his last record, 2021’s More Light!!, is present here as well. Anything Can Be Left Behind takes an interesting step forward for O’Leary, however, in its embrace of full-sounding, studio-intensive-feeling pop rock. O’Leary assembled an impressive crew (Bradford Krieger and Courtney Swain of Courtney and Brad, fellow Dear Life co-founder Frank Meadows, prolific engineer Lucas Knapp, and longtime collaborators Erika Nininger and Sam Sonnega) to record Anything Can Be Left Behind in one three-day session in southern Massachusetts, and this combination really works for realizing these songs.
Anything Can Be Left Behind opens with two immaculately-executed pieces of music, the wide-eyed quiet wonder of “Here Comes Spring” and “The Tyranny of Our Beating Hearts”, a song that intriguingly melds Cormier-O’Leary’s folk-country side with 80s sophisti-pop. Even the simple-on-its-surface “Impossible as a Postcard” is polished well with plenty of musical bells and whistles–it’s not until “Letter from Alan”, in which Cormier-O’Leary takes a page from his Friendship bandmate Peter Gill’s band, 2nd Grade, that the album loosens up a little. Anything Can Be Left Behind‘s second half follows the record’s sound to some surprising and new places–“Obtain” and “Newest Oldest Punk” are genuine rockers, the former teetering and the latter swaggering. Cormier-O’Leary hides one more excellent keys-and-country track toward the end of the record (“The Door”), but he closes the album with “Old Mike”, a song whose relative sparseness aptly makes it feel the most his previous solo material. Like the rest of the album, however, it’s about capturing one specific moment in a lifetime in motion (“For one minute, and then it’s gone / Our lives keep ending up redrawn”). (Bandcamp link)
Gueersh – Tempo Elástico
Release date: March 30th Record label: Feitio/Transfusão Noise Genre: Psychedelic rock Formats: Digital Pull Track: A Curtinha
Gueersh are a Brazilian quintet hailing from the states of Rio de Janeiro and Minas Gerais, and currently based in Campos de Goytacazes. The band (singer/guitarist Lívia Gomes, guitarist David Dinucci, singer/guitarist Guilherme Paz, bassist Thomaz Alves, and drummer Phill Fernandes) released their debut EP, Fogo Amigo, last year, although I believe some members of Gueersh have been playing together in some form for a while now. Tempo Elástico, the band’s debut full-length, came out at the end of March, and it’s an excellent and dynamic psychedelic rock album. A lot of this album was recorded by the band live, and its seven tracks vary pleasingly from towering, extended psych jams to friendly and brief indie rock songs, always sounding alive and fresh.
The five-minute title track opens the album by displaying both sides of Gueersh in an enticing way–it’s unhurried and contains plenty of lengthy instrumental passages, but it’s clearly a stretched-out pop song led by Gomes’ vocals for plenty of its runtime. “A Curtinha” features melancholic vocals and guitar lines–it wouldn’t sound out of place on several landmark 90s indie rock albums, a trick they pull again in “Praião”, a shimmering pop rock instrumental that could pass as vintage slowcore if it was, you know, a little slower. On the other end of Tempo Elástico’s spectrum, of course, we have the eleven-minute centerpiece of “Luz Guia” and the eight-minute closing track “Corta/Quebra”. The former is a lumbering psych-noise-rock jam that still finds plenty of beautiful moments to present in its inundation, while the latter starts as a more “typical” Gueersh-sounding song that goes off-road and drifts from our sight to end the record on a expertly-piloted note. (Bandcamp link)
BIKE – Arte Bruta
Release date: May 5th Record label: Before Sunrise/Quadrado Mágico Genre: Psychedelic rock Formats: Digital Pull Track: Santa Cabeça
Arte Bruta is BIKE’s fifth album since 2015, and the São Paulo-based band (vocalist/guitarists Julito Cavalcante and Diego Xavier, drummer Daniel Fumega, and bassist/synth player João Gôuvea) are seasoned veterans at making psychedelic music at this point. BIKE are not as prone to lengthy jam sessions as the other psychedelic band in this blog post, Gueersh, preferring to deal out their songs in two-to-three minute intervals for the most part–but that doesn’t necessarily make them more “pop” friendly. Arte Bruta’s thirteen songs still find plenty of room for swirling guitar riffs, prog-like synth odysseys, and hypnotic percussion that demonstrate that the band’s traditional Brazilian influences (“post-Tropicalia”, they refer to themselves) are as prominent as ever.
Arte Bruta’s psychedelia feels more of a subtle, Brazilian variety than your traditional American hard rock style–not that it’s not a “rock” album, as there is plenty of fuzziness, noisiness, and remarkable guitarplay throughout the record. On the record, though, BIKE are most notably concerned with crafting a widescreen, expansive vibe throughout. Sometimes that’s accomplished by letting the percussion run wild, like in “Além-Ambiente”, or laying down a killer bass groove (“O Torto Santo”). The second half of the record is where the band really jettison themselves from “normal” song structures, with the six-minute, krautrock-inspired “Santa Cabeça” surprisingly coming off as the most accessible side-B moment. Unlike the retro fetishism that (ironically) timestamps a lot of modern psych bands, BIKE’s multi-layered but comparatively simple setup makes their music feel fairly unmoored from any era. (Bandcamp link)
Alien Eyelid – Bronze Star
Release date: May 5th Record label: Tall Texan Genre: Alt-country, folk rock, country rock Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: $9 Dollars
Alien Eyelid is a new band from Houston, with some members who have played with Lower Dens (guitarist Will Adams) and Buxton (drummer Justin Terrell). The band–led by vocalist/guitarist Tyler Morris and also featuring bassist/guitarist Brett Taylor and saxophonist/vocalist Mlee Marie–put together a casual but full-sounding collection of Texas alt-country on Bronze Star, their debut full-length. The record’s eight songs incorporate more traditional country songwriting, breezy, Woodsist-esque folk rock, and a few genuinely weirder turns as well. Pedal steel (provided by Will Van Horn) shades most of these tracks, whether Alien Eyelid are putting together a three-minute ballad or a six-minute psych-Americana journey.
Bronze Star eases us into the Alien Eyelid experience with “Easy Times”, an understated, mid-tempo country rock opener in which Morris sings along with lifting pedal steel, keyboards, and a chorus behind him. “Where Elgin Bends” finds Alien Eyelid winding through a five-minute, bass-heavy piece of folk rock, a mode that the band also use to slowly build up “Bull in a Ring”, the six-minute centerpiece of the record’s second side. Alien Eyelid pull off relatively straightforward country/roots rock in tracks like “$9 Dollars” and “Lemons”, which are both sharply-written tunes that hold their own against the album’s more exploratory fare (like the saxophone-and-bass number “Wicked Mind”, which is held down by a typically excellent vocal performance from Morris). No matter where Alien Eyelid end up on Bronze Star, the end result is an enjoyable listen. (Bandcamp link)
If you like good music, tomorrow is pretty big Friday. Today we’re looking at four records that come out tomorrow: albums from Poppy Patica, Greg Mendez, Soft Walls, and Bluest. Also out tomorrow is the Lynx reissue (with a newly-recorded bonus EP), which I wrote about along with Mister Data, Unlettered, and The National Honor Society earlier this week. Also, the Rosy Overdrive April 2023 playlist went up earlier this week, too. Definitely check that one out.
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.
Poppy Patica – Black Cat Back Stage
Release date: May 5th Record label: House of Joy Genre: Power pop, 90s indie rock, indie pop Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Awful Sound
Peter Hartmann currently lives in Oakland, and spent some time in Ohio and New York as well, but the latest record from his band Poppy Patica deals with his original home of Washington, D.C. Hartmann has been making music as Poppy Patica for about a decade, but the current iteration of the band (also including drummer/synth player Nikhil Rao, organist/vocalist Chloe M, and bassist Jeremy Ray) took shape over the past five years. Black Cat Back Stage (which, as any longtime D.C. music fan will probably be able to recognize, is named for a now-defunct local venue), coming after a string of self-recorded and -released records, takes advantage of full band backing. Although these recordings place Hartmann’s songwriting front and center, the songs are dressed up with a style that combines Hartmann’s 90s indie rock musical style with deep, layered synths and organs brought forward by the other members.
Black Cat Back Stage opens with a perfect indie-pop-rock tune in “Awful Sound”, a track that excellently synthesizes the ramshackle poppiness of Stephen Malkmus at his most accessible with some sparkling new wave-y synths. The rest of the record is no less catchy, but it pulls this off in a less straightforward manner. Poppy Patica seem to take influence from D.C.-area bands like Dismemberment Plan and Q and Not U who would twist their pop songs into multiple movements–it also reminds me of Personal Space’s math-pop-rock touches. Even the briefer songs like “Top” and “Mystery Meat” zip from one part to another (the one non-Harmann-penned song, the excellent M-led “Band Aid”, is one of the more immediate songs, but it also stops and starts in a way that makes it fit in with the others).
“Sweetest Song” rides some wrinkly fuzz rock for Hartmann to deliver a sprawling lyric over which the national’s capitol (and, yes, the capital that flows through it) hovers. D.C. pops up again and again throughout Black Cat Back Stage, although it’s the climax of “Demolition Order” that finds Poppy Patica really locking into it. The bio for this record refers to it as a “mini-opera”; in this case, in “Demolition Order”, Hartmann wanders the city, staring down its buildings while following a long train of thought about what it’s becoming (“Displacement’s not development….It’s just a new colony / Bulldozing through the city”). Poppy Patica excel at stretching the track out, which they do again well in closing track “Kiwi”, a song that starts out in a weird new wave-y place and somewhat morphs into a golden pop chorus. It’s complex in form, but not to take in. (Bandcamp link)
Greg Mendez – Greg Mendez
Release date: May 5th Record label: Forged Artifacts/Devil Town Tapes Genre: Indie folk, slowcore Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital Pull Track: Best Behavior
I’ve never written about a Greg Mendez album before on Rosy Overdrive, but the Philadelphia singer-songwriter has appeared on this website before as a member of Snowhore and as a contributor to Welcome To…, a various-artists compilation from Devil Town Tapes. Devil Town Tapes is co-releasing Greg Mendez, the artist’s third full-length record (although Mendez’s Bandcamp illustrates that he’s made a lot more music beyond his “proper” albums). Greg Mendez has been getting some really organic-feeling hype recently, and part of why it feels like that is because it doesn’t sound like a traditional hype-getting record–it’s a lot subtler, quieter, and less openly concerned with being immediately liked. Greg Mendez is, loosely, an indie folk record with some classical pop touches and some moments (like the organ-and-vocals “Sweetie”) that sound a little Jeff Mangum-influenced–but mainly, the album sounds like whatever Greg Mendez thinks serves the song best.
“Rev. John / Friend” opens the record by building into something befitting its bittersweet refrain, and “Maria” and “Goodbye / Trouble” shuffle into pleasing lo-fi indie rock. Greg Mendez hides a shocking amount of its best moments towards the end–the final three songs are my favorites. “Clearer Picture (Of You)”, “Best Behavior”, and “Hoping You’re Doing Okay” are all really raw, close-cutting songs that very bluntly deal with the hurt that can only arise from being intimate (in some form another) with someone. It’s not exactly similar songcraft-wise, but “Clearer Picture (Of You)” hits on Exile on Guyville-level subject matter, and “Hoping You’re Doing Okay” genuinely does sound like Elliott Smith. The pin-drop quiet of “Best Behavior” is the best of the bunch–hearing Mendez sing “I’m on my best behavior, do you like it?” feels chilling in a too-personal way. There are a lot of good songs about sad subject matter, but Greg Mendez is a truly masterful example of spinning ugliness into prettiness. (Bandcamp link)
Soft Walls – True Love
Release date: May 5th Record label: Self-released Genre: Psych rock, post-punk, shoegaze, garage rock Formats: Cassette, digital Pull Track: Waking
Dan Reeves was in the Brighton post-punk group Cold Pumas, and he has more recently made music on his own as Soft Walls. With Soft Walls, Reeves is a deft practitioner of a recognizable strain of indie rock–fuzzy and warm-sounding, lightly psychedelic, folk- and shoegaze-sounding without falling cleanly into any of those genres, informed by krautrock and post-punk but still pop-friendly at its core (an earlier Soft Walls album was released by Trouble in Mind, which feels like a good a reference point as any for Reeves’ music). True Love is the fourth Soft Walls full-length, and it’s fully committed to mining this fertile niche of music Reeves has carved for himself. Tracks flow into one another cleanly–I’m as likely to come away with a favorite guitar or harmonic “moment” than I am with a favorite song on any given listen to the record.
True Love opens with “A Whisper in Your Ear”, a mid-tempo, distorted rocker that’s kind of Soft Walls’ version of garage rock (a mode that Reeves returns to later in the just-as-good “Calling Out Your Name”). “How Long Am I Waiting” kicks off side two with the biggest krautrock-influenced moment, barreling through an alt-rock instrumental that rises and falls along with Reeves’ relatively quiet vocals. True Love’s forays into lazy-sounding but substantial folk rock are equally rewarding– “It’s Not Complicated” and the title track nail this sound early on, and “Goodbye Harmony” also climbs into this mode before descending into pure psychedelia. The psychedelic feeling shades pretty much all of True Love (I’m particularly partial to the Meat Puppets-y riff that colors “Waking”), and it’s a nice companion to Reeves’ more grounded, steady-tempoed influences. (Bandcamp link)
Bluest – Cold Sweat
Release date: May 5th Record label: Anything Bagel Genre: Folk rock Formats: Cassette, digital Pull Track: Talk Soon
Anything Bagel is a pretty neat cassette label based out of Missoula, Montana–they’ve already put out one of my favorite albums of the year so far (Oregon III by Portland’s Vista House), and their latest record is a solid offering that also originates from the Garden City. Bluest is a Missoula band led by Noelle Huser, a sharp pop singer-songwriter who makes music incorporating 90s alt-rock, indie pop, alt-country, and “adult alternative”–they cite Sheryl Crow, whose influence I do hear on Cold Sweat, their debut record. The album’s eight songs are melancholic pop rockers–fully-developed, but never too busy to detract from Huser’s words and voice.
Cold Sweat has dreamy pop rock tunes in spades–it opens with the bright and shiny “Sagittarius”, and Husey really throws everything they’ve got into the earworm of “Anemic”. The first half of Cold Sweat goes does easy in this fashion, although I have to commend Bluest for mixing it up a bit on the second side. “Ghosts” and the title track find the band getting louder, trending towards distorted fuzz rock (especially in the latter) while still being pretty poppy, and “Practical Magic” closes the album on a really surprising turn towards synthpop/sophisti-pop. My favorite song on Cold Sweat is the sparsest one, musically–penultimate track “Talk Soon” is a mostly-acoustic piece of folk-country that hits the specific area that usually only Waxahatchee can reach for me. Overall, it’s an eminently likable record from an artist with a lot of promise. (Bandcamp link)
Well, well, well. If it isn’t the Rosy Overdrive April 2023 Playlist. And would you look at that, it features a ton of great songs from this year, a handful of tracks from 2022 that I am just now discovering, and a couple of songs from 1981 (more on what I’m doing back in 1981 in a future blog post).
Buddie, Mt. Worry, and Bell and the Ringers all get multiple songs on the playlist this time.
Here is where you can listen to the playlist on various streaming services: Spotify, Tidal (missing a song), and BNDCMPR (missing a couple songs). 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.
“Gazer”, Negative Glow From VOLUME 1 (2023, Let’s Pretend/RTR Tapes)
Bloomington, Indiana’s Negative Glow have an excellent debut record on their hands with the five-song VOLUME 1 cassette EP. It takes me back a bit to the mid-2010s era of punk-y indie rock revivalists, but with a tougher alt-rock (and even shoegaze-sounding at some point) edge. “Gazer” is a hell of a first song, a big distorted fuzzfest with crystal-clear vocals and legitimate guitar heroics. Read more about VOLUME 1 here.
“Rocket”, Mt. Worry From A Mountain of Fucking Worry (2023)
Mt. Worry is a Philadelphia four-piece band featuring some recognizable names to Rosy Overdrive readers–I’m familiar with Noah Roth and John Galm as songwriters (the former with their solo work, the latter as Bad Heaven Ltd.), and Nick Holdorf plays drums with No Thank You. I don’t recognize the singer of “Rocket” (perhaps it’s the only member I didn’t previously know, Rowan Horton), but whoever it is, they helm an excellent noise-fuzz-pop song that only gets better the more I listen to it. The first few seconds of the track, in which an acoustic guitar gives way to a thundering full-band arrangement, is just indie rock perfection.
“Never to Be Seen Again”, Bell and the Ringers From Bell and the Ringers (2023)
Bell and the Ringers is the work of Melbourne’s Lucas Bell and Toronto’s Brent Vipond, a duo who make a certain brand of earnest but energetic indie-pop-punk that triangulates Death Cab for Cutie, The Thermals, and Relient K. Bell and the Ringers really sell their songs–opening track “Never to Be Seen Again” is massively infectious with its power pop keyboard hook, Blue Album guitars in the chorus, and Vipond’s self-call-and-response vocals. Read more about Bell and the Ringers here.
“Backwards, Behind”, Buddie From Agitator (2023, Crafted Sounds)
“Backwards, Behind” was the song from Agitator that immediately hit me, and it’s not hard to hear why. On this track, Buddie keep it relatively simple, with the punchiness of the chorus really landing its sentiment (“When you’re backwards, a little behind / You couldn’t be wrong”). Musically, it reminds me in a weird and good way of “The Middle” by Jimmy Eat World, but there’s some troubling stuff going on beneath the positive surface of “Backwards, Behind” (“Isn’t it ironic we’d evolve to behave like this / Now we’ll be our own end”). Read more about Agitator here.
“Death of an Empire”, Washer From Improved Means to Deteriorated Ends (2023, Exploding in Sound)
I’ve said a lot about Improved Means to Deteriorated Ends on this website already, so let me just summarize: Washer’s third album was worth the wait. “Death of an Empire” sticks out in particular, a jaunty but deeply-felt song. In it, Mike Quigley cheerfully suggests that “maybe we should be lighting things on fire,” and points out the irony that “all the wrong people love themselves” (in the context that, in this dying empire, the ones holding onto and believing they’re deserving of the waning power are the ones making the rest of us miserable). Read more about Improved Means to Deteriorated Ends here.
“Fired, Walk with Me”, The Collect Pond From Underwater Features (2023, Candlepin)
The latest record from Boston’s The Collect Pond, Underwater Features, splits the different between dark-post punk and catchy 90s indie rock jams, all presented with a lo-fi basement rock sheen. Single “Fired, Walk with Me” is in the latter camp–Danny Moffat and his new band bash out pure, giddy pop rock for two sharp minutes on the track. That opening guitar lead ends up doing the most in terms of hooks, but Moffat’s understated but melodic vocals do their job quite well too. Read more about Underwater Features here.
“Love Beyond the Grave”, Crocodiles From Upside Down in Heaven (2023, Lolipop)
It seems like Crocodiles were one of those bands that showed up towards the end of the 2000s as part of that surf rock/lo-fi indie rock/reverb-y garage rock revival thing, but I’d never checked them out. “Love Beyond the Grave” caught my attention, though, and I can report that their latest album, Upside Down in Heaven, is a pretty fun pop rock record. The opening track is my favorite one, zipping through a slick garage-pop-punk instrumental with understated but still hooky vocals.
“New Age Love Song”, Living Dream From Living Dream (2023, Long Gone Sound System)
I don’t know too much about Living Dream–they’re a four-piece group from Indianapolis whose debut self-titled record is an intriguing album that presents a bunch of lo-fi, hazy, but frequently accessible indie rock and also features a surprising amount of flute. “New Age Love Song” is the biggest highlight–it starts out at full force, with a chiming, lo-fi psych guitar part that twists into something weirder and almost proggy towards its end–but it never stops being catchy and fascinating.
“You Turned Off the Light”, Sharp Pins From Turtle Rock (2023, Hallogallo)
Sharp Pins is the solo project of Chicago’s Kai Slater, who also plays in good bands like Dwaal Troupe and Lifeguard. Sharp Pins’ latest album, Turtle Rock, hews closer to Dwaal Troupe’s lo-fi, poppy indie rock than Lifeguard’s post-hardcore sound, especially on “You Turned Off the Light”, a hell of a song. Slater puts together a bouncy, fluffy-sounding track that still has a bit of meat on it–every lo-fi pop song will get Guided by Voices comparisons, but Slater really does evoke Robert Pollard’s songwriting here.
“Won’t Be Coming Back”, Black Thumb From The Flying Propeller Group (2023, Dandy Boy)
Black Thumb’s The Flying Propeller Group is an intriguing, adventurous indie rock album that probes spacey, psychedelic, and dreamy territory. Even with that, however, the album doesn’t quite prepare you for “Won’t Be Coming Back”, a massive sounding, frenetic, noise-pop-rock song that comes out of nowhere midway through the record. San Francisco’s Colin Wilde (who, fun fact, used to live in Appleton, Wisconsin and played with the underrated country-rock group Dusk) throws everything he’s got into this song–a gas-floored rhythm section, frantic piano playing, organs, and, of course, loud guitars.
“For You to Sing”, Mo Troper From MTVI (2023, Lame-O)
“For You to Sing” is the first song from Mo Troper’s MTVI (the follow-up to last year’s excellent MTV)–there’s no release date or official announcement for the album yet, but the lead single is more than enough to get everyone excited about where Troper is headed. Apparently Troper labored over this song extensively, spending months and recording tracks upon tracks for it–the end result is something that feels “cleaner” than the majority of his recent output, but still retaining a lot of the Dilettante/MTV-era’s home-recorded, commercially-agnostic charm.
“Twin Flame”, Amanda X From Keepsake (2023, Self Aware)
The five-song Keepsake EP is Amanda X’s first record in a half-decade, but it contains everything you’d want the Philadelphia 90s indie rock revivalists to offer up: a few single-ready alt-rock bangers, a couple less immediate, mid-tempo tunes, and “Twin Flame”, the big-finish closing track. The song starts off unassumingly, but the trio work their way up to an eternal-sounding, massive pop rock chorus. “Wild horses run the path to pasture / If I told you that I loved you, would it even matter?”, now there’s a lyric. Read more about Keepsake here.
“Beneath the Screen”, Street Fruit From Beneath the Screen (2022, Waste Management)
Street Fruit are a new Los Angeles-based punk group (although half of the band played together in the nineties band Dura-Delinquent, so they’re hardly neophytes) who released their debut album, Beneath the Screen, last November via Waste Management Music. The title track is my favorite song off the record–an excellent slice of casual, West Coast indie-punk-rock that’s got a bit of slacker DNA in it. “There’s no room for expertise here,” offers vocalist Hans Dobbratz toward the end of the song–Street Fruit are quite good at what they do, regardless.
“Buried Alive (Too Tired)”, Brian Mietz From Wow! (2023, Sludge People)
The song is called “Buried Alive (Too Tired)”, and it sounds like it. Brian Mietz is an excellent penner of downcast power pop tunes, and “Buried Alive (Too Tired)” is three minutes of pure, weary pop rock. Mietz packs a lot of fun and interesting songs in his latest album, Wow!, but he keeps it pretty simple here–the chorus is colored by some synths and its catchiness almost gains power from being underplayed (in a way that reminds me of my favorite Mietz song, “Hollyweed”). Read more about Wow! here.
“Big Papi Lassos the Moon”, Ther From A Horrid Whisper Echoes in a Palace of Endless Joy (2023, Dead Definition)
Ther open up their second album, A Horrid Whisper Echoes in a Palace of Endless Joy,with a brief introduction track and follow it immediately with the arresting “Big Papi Lassos the Moon”, a soaring folk tune that builds, speeds up, and crescendos in an unexpected but very welcome way. Heather Jones puts on an excellent vocal performance, rising and falling to meet the musical waves accompanying them. Read more about A Horrid Whisper Echoes in a Palace of Endless Joy here.
“Hot Seat”, Empire From Expensive Sound (1981, Dinosaur Discs/Munster)
Empire were a solid recent discovery of mine. Apparently they were related to Generation X somehow, although Expensive Sound, their only album, doesn’t sound that much like them. This entire record is great and accessible, but in a skewed way–it jumps around from dark post-punk to straight power pop. The second song on the record, “Hot Seat”, has a big pop chorus, although it grooves on some darker material in between different hits of it.
“Belts and Braces”, Smaller Hearts From Rock and Roll Was Here to Stay (2023, Noyes)
Smaller Hearts are a synthpop duo from Nova Scotia, and their latest record, Rock and Roll Was Here to Stay, follows 2021’s solid Attention. Kristina Parlee and Ron Bates offer up something of a surprise on “Belts and Braces”, one of the advance singles from Rock and Roll Was Here to Stay–it’s still a synth-heavy tune, but the band let it take more of a guitar rock shape. It’s all too brief (80 seconds), but that’s enough time to get the job done here.
“The Storm”, Interbellum From Our House Is Very Beautiful at Night (2023)
Our House Is Very Beautiful at Night is a deftly-crafted indie folk-rock record from Beirut’s Karl Mattar. Mattar effectively and frequently uses the Microphones-esque tool of mixing shiny pop songs with noisy, fuzzy material on the record, and one of the best examples of it is when the interlude track “The Storm (Detail)” parts to reveal the sunshine of “The Storm”, the brightest pop song on the record. Of course, this song works on its own (which is why it’s on the playlist), but it gains even more in context. Read more about Our House Is Very Beautiful at Night here.
“Virtue”, Tucker Riggleman & the Cheap Dates (2023, WarHen)
The debut full-length from Tucker Riggleman & the Cheap Dates, 2021’s Alive and Dying Fast, was one of my favorite albums of that year, so I’m happy to hear that Riggleman is back with the first taste of the group’s upcoming follow-up record. “Virtue” continues the strengths of Alive and Dying Fast, with The Cheap Dates offering up a spirited but relatively measured country rock backbone, and Riggleman offering up a lyric that’s honest and fairly unsparing on a personal level. “I’m just practicing my sorrow / Like it’s another virtue that I’ve earned,” he remarks in the chorus (and if that’s a bit too abstract for you, he also offers up “I’m just working on my downfall / Like it’s another tractor in my barn”).
“Coming to Your Town”, Chime School From Coming to Your Town (2023, Slumberland/Meritorio/FastCut)
Chime School’s self-titled debut album was one of my favorite records of 2021, so it’s a pleasure to welcome Andy Pastalaniec’s San Francisco-based project back with a new single. The A-side, “Coming to Your Town”, is another jangle pop classic, with Pastalaniec’s peppy and hook-stuffed songwriting out in full force here. “Coming to Your Town” is darker than most of the Chime School album, though–at least lyrically, where Pastalaniec grapples with the darker forces at work in the Bay Area. The chorus, in which Pastalaniec rhymes “monetize” with “terrorize”, makes it clear just who the source of all this is.
“How Much More”, The Go-Go’s From Beauty and the Beat (1981, Capitol)
I like The Bangles and Blondie and stuff like that, so I’m not sure why I’d never really been keen to check out The Go-Go’s until now. Well, that’s past me’s loss and present me’s gain, because Beauty and the Beat is a really solid 80s big pop rock album. “How Much More” is hardly the only “hit” on the album, but I’ll go with this one, with the chiming guitar play and the every-note-is-catchy vocals.
“Give Me Therapy”, Bell and the Ringers From Bell and the Ringers (2023)
The bouncy “Give Me Therapy” keeps the runaway train, catchy pop energy of the first half of Bell and the Ringers going. Singer Brent Vipond does some interesting sing-song vocal work while the guitars both take the form of choppy power chords and melodic leads. The (admittedly at times hard to hear) big-picture-sketching that Vipond is doing with the lyrics here feels particularly Ben Gibbard-esque (perhaps a bit more profane, but that’s hardly a bad thing). Read more about Bell and the Ringers here.
“Small Talk”, Sumos From Surfacing (2023, Meritorio/Safe Suburban Home)
Hey! Here’s a new jangle pop band for you to get into. They’re called Sumos, they’re from Manchester, and their first full-length album, Surfacing, comes out in May on a couple of labels that are stalwarts of the genre (Meritorio and Safe Suburban Home). Single “Small Talk” is note-perfect indie pop, jangling and gliding its way through three minutes of easy-to-take-in hooks. Looking forward to hearing more from them.
“Aviatrix”, The 3 Clubmen From The 3 Clubmen (2023, Burning Shed/Lighterthief)
This is an unexpected but very welcome treat. Andy Partridge of XTC (perhaps unsurprisingly, a foundational band for me) has not been completely quiet as of late, but he’s busied himself with smaller-scale projects that have flown under the radar in recent years. Perhaps his new band, The 3 Clubmen, will end up in the same way, but judging from their debut single, this could be Partridge’s most promising new music in quite some time. “Aviatrix” is a beautiful pastoral piece of folky-pop that evokes his old band’s Mummer era, and the other members of the band (Jen Olive and Stu Rowe) feel very much in tune with Partridge’s writing style.
“Your Head’s a Cathedral”, Glow in the Dark Flowers From Glow in the Dark Flowers (2023, Born Yesterday)
Glow in the Dark Flowers is the duo of Jessee Rose Crane and Philip Lesicko, who gained notoriety over the past decade for their work in Chicago group The Funs. The self-titled Glow in the Dark Flowers album is some very good sleepy, fuzzy late-night indie rock, with elements of slowcore, post-rock, fuzz rock, and dream pop, but without slotting neatly into any of those. The two-minute-or-so “Your Head’s a Cathedral” is one of the more immediate songs on the album, hitting with a big, fuzzy, lifting chorus.
“You’re the One”, Odd Duck From You’re the One (2023, Cruisin’)
I think that this playlist might have the highest concentration of Indiana bands that I’ve ever put together for this website. Anyway, Odd Duck are a DIY indie pop punk band from Bloomington, and their debut EP You’re the One (out on Cruisin’ Records, co-run by Nana Grizol’s Theo Hilton) is a really fun and hooky collection of songs. The title track is my favorite, I think–it pulls off sounding wistful, giddy, noisy, and incredibly catchy all at once.
“Dejected”, Provide From For Me (2023, Lame-O)
Provide’s debut record, For Me, is a snappy and brief record of punk-y power pop that nails a particular niche of this kind of music very well. Evan Bernard has been playing in Philly-area bands for quite a while now (including being in No Thank You along with Nick Holdorf of the also-appearing-on-this-playlist Mt. Worry); he’s more than capable of making hits on his own, clearly, as well. “Dejected” is my favorite song on the album–it hits the ground running, and also offers up some big synth hooks despite being still relatively ramshackle-sounding.
“Walk Away from You”, The Age of Colored Lizards From Hang On (2023, Sotron)
Oslo’s Christian Dam has been consistently putting out music as The Age of Colored Lizards for a while now–last year saw an EP and LP released under the name, and another Age of Colored Lizards full-length, Hang On, came out last month. Dam (with his band, bassist Anders Bøe and drummer Cato Holmen) makes beautiful guitar pop that reminds me in places of a more rough-around-the-edges Teenage Fanclub. “Walk Away from You” is on the sparse end, carried almost entirely by a jangly electric guitar and Dam’s melancholy voice.
“Hate to Run”, Shoes From Tongue Twister (1981, Elektra)
Tongue Twister is a good album, and makes me want to go back to those other Shoes albums that never quite resonated with me when I gave them a shot a while back. “Hate to Run” closes the record out on a simple but very effective pop rock note, with the Zion, Illinois power pop band probing some classic power pop lyrical themes (confusion in love, you know) over a brief, two-minute instrumental which features some nice power chords and vocal harmonies.
“The Way You Set Me Straight”, Amos Pitsch From Acid Rain (2022, Crutch of Memory)
Last year, I wrote a bit about Better Out Than In, a solo album from Julia Blair of Wisconsin country band Dusk. Somehow, though, I missed that another member of Dusk also released a solo album last year–vocalist/bassist Amos Pitsch. His Acid Rain is a casual but full collection of music that will be very much up the alley of anyone into Dusk–my favorite track is the brief roots rock of “The Way You Set Me Straight”, featuring a very memorable vocal delivery from Pitsch.
“A Part of It”, Piner From A Netherworld (2023)
Piner is the country rock project of Claya Way Brackenbury, who originated in Kingston, Ontario and currently lives in Nova Scotia. As her latest album, A Netherworld shows, she’s adept at writing plenty of songs under the widely-defined “folk/Americana” umbrella, such as the excellent “A Part of It”. It’s a soaring, keyboard-aided anthem in which Brackenbury sings with a lot of emotion and energy, really making the track come alive.
“City at Eleven”, The Hold Steady From The Price of Progress (2023, Positive Jams/Thirty Tigers)
The Price of Progress hasn’t hit for me in the same way that the last couple of Hold Steady albums have, as a whole. Musically, it reminds me more and more of Craig Finn’s recent solo material, which is fine, but not exactly what I want from them. “City at Eleven”, however–this song reminds me of Finn’s underrated and all-but-disavowed debut solo album, Clear Heart Full Eyes, and I’ll happily take more of that. It’s more than the Hawaii setting (which calls to mind Finn’s “Honolulu Blues”), it’s the surprising roots rock swagger, too.
“Neil & Joni”, K. Campbell From Heart Shaped / K. Campbell Split (2023, Poison Moon)
I just wrote about a K. Campbell single in the February playlist, but the Houston-based power pop artist is already back with another one, and it’s very good, too. “Neil & Joni” is part of a split single with Heart Shaped (who I’ve also written before on this blog, and whose contribution to the single is also quite good), but I want to highlight “Neil & Joni”, an ace example of Campbell’s penchant for big-sounding choruses. Campbell duets in the refrain with Mandy Kim Clinton, which is a nice touch in the context of the song’s title.
“Knucklen’”, Country Westerns From Forgive the City (2023, Fat Possum)
Country Westerns’ self-titled 2020 record was one of my favorites from that year, and it’s nice to hear that they’ve still got it on Forgive the City, their sophomore album. It feels like it picks up the thread the Nashville band left off on with their last album–it might be a little more southern rock-influenced, but as a whole it’s still an excellent collection of weary roots rock/country punk. Opening track “Knucklen’” is some excellent and gruff stuff, with Joseph Plunket’s vocals breaking a bit in a Two Cow Garage way in the chorus.
“Seven Year Curse”, Shasta Esprit Gilmore From l’esprit de l’escalier (2023, Kiwi Bear)
Shasta Esprit Gilmore has been making music in bands around San Diego and Los Angeles for several years now, but l’esprit de l’escalier, recorded by Gilmore herself on 4-track while studying Russian Studies at UC Irvine, is her debut solo album. l’esprit de l’escalier is an intriguing record of lo-fi pop of several stripes–my favorite track on it, “Seven Year Curse”, is a downcast and melancholic but incredibly catchy piece of pop rock in which Gilmore declares “I’ve got a problem with you / Yeah, I mean you,” and lays out some very specific-seeming but universal-feeling lyrics from there.
“Salt the Sea”, Lowercase Roses From Ordinary Terror (2022, Slush Unlimited)
Ordinary Terror, the latest record from Philadelphia’s Lowercase Roses, is a delicate album of fuzzy, dreamy indie folk music with a bit of electronic elements as well. “Salt the Sea” is something of an outlier, but I can’t shake this one. Over a steady pounding drumbeat, Matt Scheuermann lays down a mid-tempo noisy pop/fuzz rock song with some chanting vocals. It’s transfixing even before Scheuermann pushes his vocals and adds some harmonies in the bridge.
“キュー”, Yellow Magic Orchestra From BGM (1981, Alfa)
“キュー” (“Cue”) is the obvious big pop song/”hit” from BGM, the first Yellow Magic Orchestra album I’d ever listened to in full. The whole record is an interesting foray into some genres I don’t know too well (early electronic rock/synthpop), but “Cue” is pretty immediate and I don’t think you have to be into this kind of music to be taken with it. The lyrics are in English and beg for the titular sign to end a personal rut, but it’s the soaring synths that really stick out on this song.
“Centerpiece”, Mt. Worry From A Mountain of Fucking Worry (2023)
I’m going to do a second Mt. Worry song because it’s as good as “Rocket” and I hate having to choose between the two. Noah Roth is definitely singing lead on this one, and the song as a whole evokes their last solo album, Breakfast of Champions, in its balance of accessible pop rock and weird studio-creation touches (albeit in a more shoegaze-y/fuzz rock way, reflectant of Mt. Worry’s style). I keep coming back to the noise clearing up just in time for Roth to deliver “I’ve never been my first choice, either” (same, Noah, same).
“I Want to Live There with You”, Your Mom’s Car From I Want to Live There with You (2022)
Your Mom’s Car is the San Diego-based project of Seb Oliva, and their latest album, December’s I Want to Live There with You, follows in the grand tradition of massive, noisy, personal, lo-fi bedroom indie rock records that spans 90s basement recorded-bands, 2000s wide-eyed fuzz-folk, and 2010s Bandcamp-core. Some of the record is fairly abrasive and experimental, but the title track is pure, accessible, earnest fuzz rock, Oliva’s emotional lyrics and vocal delivery matching the roaring music.
“I See You There”, The Sprouts From Eat Your Greens (2023, Tenth Court)
The Sprouts are the latest Australian guitar pop band to come across my radar, and the Melbourne-based four-piece fall on the loose, casual end of the spectrum, a la Perth’s Spice World. Their debut album, Eat Your Greens, is a thoroughly enjoyable effort, and it’s the quiet, subtle “I See You There” that’s my favorite one off of it. It’s based almost entirely on a gently-played electric guitar and a pair of vocalists (one of which is guest Vivienne Remedios).
“Restive Summer”, Buddie From Agitator (2023, Crafted Sounds)
Buddie’s latest record, Agitator, closes with a gigantic song in “Restive Summer”. It starts as a solo electric guitar number whose first section culminates with singer Dan Forrest singing “We worked ourselves up to the point where we broke”. The rest of the track covers a wide swath of Agitator’s feelings in one song, from Forrest’s determined “We’ll have to work like twice as hard” to the closing wonderment of “And I wonder how we’ll go to sleep?” Buddie know that there’s work to be done, but they are cognizant of the tolls of it. Read more about Agitator here.
It’s the first Pressing Concerns of May! Today, we’re looking at new albums from Mister Data and The National Honor Society, an upcoming reissue from Lynx, and a new EP from Unlettered.
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.
Lynx – Lynx (Reissue) / Human Speech
Release date: May 5th Record label: Computer Students Genre: Math rock, experimental rock Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Mrs. Lynx/ Human Speech
Lynx were an instrumental rock band from Boston who initially lasted for one self-titled album, originally released on CD in 2000. The band was comprised of guitarists Mike Hutchins and Dave Konopka, bassist Paul Joyce, and drummer Dale Connolly–Konopka later went on to play in beloved math rockers Battles for fifteen years as Lynx went dormant. Computer Students reissued a similarly overlooked record in French math rockers Cheval de Frise’s self-titled album last year, and they’ve now given the same treatment to Lynx. With this one, however, there’s an added bonus–the (first ever time on vinyl) reissue of Lynx comes with Human Speech, a three-track, fifteen-minute EP of songs written by the band during their initial run but recorded just two years ago, with the members of Lynx reuniting for the first time in over twenty years to capture these previously-unrecorded songs.
Twenty-three years from its outset, Lynx stills sounds like an excellent rock record, jagged around the edges but with all four members sounding in sync with each other. The record kicks off with “Look at That Table and Make It Spin in Your Head”, a thundering opening statement, and the punchy, spiked “Mrs. Lynx” one song later continues the record’s strong beginning. The record’s first side ends with two linked songs, the percussion-less, hovering “In Snow” which flows into “In Sand”, a dramatic-sounding tune that takes a while to develop into its galloping final form. The second half of Lynx is where the band stretch out a bit–see multi-part tracks like “Aries”, “Prynx”, and “Raisins”, which speeds its way to a big finish. The best thing I can say about Human Speech is that it sounds like an extension of the album, and doesn’t show any of the signs of dust one might fear based on the long gap. It sounds like it was recorded a little differently (a more…cavernous sound), but all three of these songs writhe and twist and explode like the best of Lynx. (Computer Students link)
Mister Data – Pleasure in a Fast Void
Release date: April 19th Record label: Self-released Genre: Pop rock, power pop Formats: Digital Pull Track: I’m a Sensation
Hailing from Houston Texas, Mister Data is a five-piece guitar pop band that makes music that’s on the more laid-back side of the genre, but their debut full-length album, Pleasure in a Fast Void, is still full of both attention-grabbing hooks and musical surprises. The band is led by vocalists Austin Sepulvado (who also plays guitar) and Ellen Story (also a pianist), and is rounded out by Marshall Graves on guitar, drummer Gus Alvarado, and bassist Jack Gordon. I’ve seen a couple of New Pornographers comparisons for Mister Data, and while I think that their style is more casual and patient than that band’s frequently more hurried, chaotic attitude, I won’t deny that the vocal interplay between Sepulvado and Story in songs like “Bad Actors” give off just a bit of Neko Case/A.C. Newman energy.
“I’m a Sensation” opens Pleasure in a Fast Void with a pop classic that sets the tone for the record–it starts as standard, unassuming (but very good) indie rock, before veering into an out-of-nowhere big chorus. “Bad Actors” continues Pleasure in a Fast Void’s momentum with some churning, slick power pop, and the mid-tempo title track works its way up deliberately and rewardingly to its soaring chorus. Mister Data surprisingly reveal themselves as skilled in stretching their pop songs out a bit after the first few hits–the minimalist “The Measure of a Man”, the Lambchop-esque cavern country of “Odd Feelings”, and the layered “Bird in Hand” all stretch beyond five minutes and feel at home doing so. “Life Ordinary” pleasingly sniffs a little bit at 90s radio-ready alt-pop-rock, but by and large the eight shining guitar pop songs in Pleasure in a Fast Void feel unhooked from any specific time or place. (Bandcamp link)
Unlettered – New Egypt
Release date: April 18th Record label: Self-released Genre: Post-punk, noise rock Formats: Vinyl*, digital Pull Track: Group of Compilers
If Mike Knowlton sounds particularly inspired by a specific strain of underground 90s indie rock, that’s probably because he’s from right in the thick of it. The Bandcamp page for his latest project, Unlettered, lists groups like Unwound, Sonic Youth, and Polvo as inspiration for his sound, but he also had his own 90s band–Gapeseed, a New York group that released two albums on Silver Girl Records in 1994 and 1997. Knowlton began making music as Unlettered in 2021, and New Egypt is the project’s third EP since its inception. On the latest EP, Knowlton explores a dark post-punk sound, with the record’s five songs trudging through some low-end-heavy explorations in a hypnotic and captivating way.
“Malfroid Archives” opens New Egypt with a slow, measured Unwound-esque echoing guitar line and downcast vocals, and it never quite shakes its eerie, crawling feeling. “Too Good to Be True” and “D>B>H” pick up the pace just a little bit, with the former’s bell-tolling-guitar-riff being accompanied by a more brisk drumbeat, and the latter cranking up the distortion over top of the song’s body. “Group of Compilers” (which, along with “Malfroid Archives”, makes up the 7” single that is the only physical release related to this EP) is something of a drain-circling singalong with its clearly-defined chorus. The shady “Sin Sip” closes New Egypt with a lyric “inspired by a recent trip to Atlantic City” per Bandcamp, and its grotesque, decaying Americana imagery proves Unlettered’s noise rock bona fides if nothing else had already. (Bandcamp link)
The National Honor Society – To All the Distance Between Us
Release date: April 21st Record label: Subjangle/Discos de Kirlian/Shelflife Genre: Jangle pop, indie pop, power pop Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital Pull Track: When the Lights Go Down
The National Honor Society are an indie pop four-piece from Seattle, Washington who take influence from 80s post-punk, new wave, and college rock groups, but don’t come off as merely trying to recreate a decade long past. Instead, the quartet (vocalist/guitarist Coulter Leslie, guitarist Jerry Peerson, bassist Andrew Gaskin, and drummer Will Hallauer) absorb lessons from these bands and incorporate them merely as one element of their shiny, wide-ranging power pop. Their second album, To All the Distance Between Us, features ten well-crafted guitar pop tunes that vary from wistful to peppy, from slow-building to immediate, and from straightforward to multifaceted.
To All the Distance Between Us’ first three songs all have massive hooks, but present them in different skins–opening track “As She Slips Away” is the tightly-constructed, almost baroque-classical pop tune, “Control” is the brisk, blooming “rocker”, “In Your Eyes” is the melancholic, jangly-college radio-esque one. The National Honor Society’s devotion to mining this area of pop music recalls The New Pornographers–most obviously on “Jacqueline”, which nails that band’s sound shockingly well, but A.C. Newman’s songwriting is evoked prominently on “Remember the Good Times” and “The Following”, among others. To All the Distance Between Us saves a few surprises towards the end–the Sloan-esque swaggering power pop of “The Trigger” and the light Andy Partridge touches of closing track “When the Lights Go Down”–but both of them are well in line with the overall world of The National Honor Society. (Bandcamp link)
We’ve almost made it to the end of the week, and what a week it was! Today, Rosy Overdrive is looking at new records from Negative Glow, Morwan, John Andrews & the Yawns, and Miscomings. Yesterday, I wrote about Improved Means to Deteriorated Ends, the new record from Washer that’s out tomorrow, and on Monday I covered new records from Patches, Amanda X, Monde UFO, and Triple Fast Action. That’s a lot of music, but it is all worth checking out!
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.
Negative Glow – Volume 1
Release date: April 20th (digital) Record label: Let’s Pretend/RTR Tapes Genre: Fuzz rock, punk rock, 90s indie rock Formats: Cassette (forthcoming), digital Pull Track: Gazer
Bloomington, Indiana has a legitimate case for being one of the best Midwestern music towns–it’s the home of bands like Mister Goblin, Mike Adams at His Honest Weight, and Jacky Boy, in addition to Let’s Pretend Records, which has put out great records by Posmic, Meat Wave, and Tetnis, among others. Let’s Pretend is also co-releasing (along with RTR Tapes) the debut cassette EP from an exciting new Bloomington band, Negative Glow. Negative Glow is a four-piece group led by singer-songwriter-guitarists Tina Lou Vines and Tommy Beresky, and also featuring the rhythm section of Noah Ketchem (drums) and Cyan Carey (bass), and their first record together is an incredibly strong opening statement. Volume 1 is five songs and 13 minutes of incredibly catchy fuzz rock that’s a mix of 90s indie rock, power pop, and pop punk with zero fat.
Volume 1 takes me back a bit to the mid-2010s era of punk-y indie rock revivalists–bands like Swearin’, Chumped, and Screaming Females–but with a bit of a tougher alt-rock edge (less “scrappy”, with a layered-enough sound that the “shoegaze” tag on their Bandcamp makes some sense). “Gazer” is a hell of a first song, a big distorted fuzzfest with crystal-clear vocals and legitimate guitar heroics. “Hover” is more mid-tempo and features co-lead vocals from Vines and Beresky, trending into Samuel S.C.-esque emo-punk territory. All five of these songs land incredible hooks–the sprint-to-strut “F.S.” pulls off its trick slickly, “Lite-Brite” roars behind a pummeling drumbeat, and closing track “Dissolve” sends us all off with a big slacker rock finish. As new as they are, Negative Glow already sound great on Volume 1–urgent but cool, loud but catchy as anything, aware of the past but very much alive in the present tense. The physical edition of Volume 1 isn’t even out yet, but it’s never too early to start thinking about Volume 2. (Bandcamp link)
Morwan – Svitaye, Palaye
Release date: April 28th Record label: Feel It Genre: Post-punk Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital Pull Track: Сяєш
Ukrainian post-punk band Morwan have been around for a half-decade or so–Svitaye, Palaye is their third full-length album, and their second for Cincinnati garage rock imprint Feel It Records, following 2020’s Zola-Zemlya. The Kyiv band had planned on attempting to make a “lighter” and “somewhat danceable” follow-up record to their previous work, but, as I would imagine is obvious and understandable to all reading this blog, Russia’s invasion of their home country impacted both the development of and the content within Svitaye, Palaye. Eastern Europe has long had a reputation for offering up the gloomiest and darkest sides of post-punk, and Morwan certainly find themselves in the realm of this territory with their latest album. Svitaye, Palaye is not, however, a listless and formless dark cloud of a record –Morwan sound driven, animated, and purposeful as they move through these seven living rock songs.
There are traces of Morwan’s original concept for Svitaye, Palaye on opening track “Журба”–atmospheric interludes eventually give way to a bit of New Order flexibility and a drumbeat that, yes, could conceivably be danced to. Although this ends up being the brightest moment on Svitaye, Palaye, the band’s rhythm section continues to operate at full force as the record advances. “Сяєш” stomps through both minimalist, skeletal post-punk and some noisy sections, while the awestruck-sounding “Полетіли” takes a few minutes to build to its determined conclusion. Songs on Svitaye, Palaye stretch out to six minutes or so, Morwan hammering every bit of emotion and catharsis out of them until they move on. The record’s closing two tracks both feature characteristic pounding percussion, but to different ends–“Відчуваєш” is built almost entirely around the drums for the majority of its runtime, sounding primal before morphing into an intense rock conclusion, while “Земля палає” introduces some synths as warning sirens, letting their resonances close out the record on a frantic but beautiful-sounding note. (Bandcamp link)
John Andrews & the Yawns – Love for the Underdog
Release date: April 28th Record label: Woodsist Genre: Folk rock, orchestral pop Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Walking Under My Love’s Ladder
Singer-songwriter John Andrews has been active in the northeastern American folk rock scene for several years at this point–he’s played in the band Quilt, contributed to records from the likes of Woods and Kevin Morby, and his band The Yawns contains members of Cut Worms, to list a few connections. Andrews has been slowly but steadily building a following over the course of three full-length records for stalwart label Woodsist, and the fourth album from the New Hampshire-originating, New York-based musician continues his mission of crafting subtle but friendly music. On Love for the Underdog, Andrews reaches into the past to grasp some tried-and-true methods for dressing up his songwriting. The eight-song album offers up gentle vocal melodies, lush string arrangements, and some Woods-y light-psych bass grooves, all conjuring up pop rock auteurs of the 1970s and even earlier.
Love for the Underdog eases us into things with the slow-building baroque pop of “Checks in the Mail”, a song that takes over a minute to truly bloom into its bright chorus. Even if it’s not the most immediately attention-grabbing way to start off the album, it’s representative of the record as a whole in how it rewards patience. The mid-tempo trot of “Never Go Away” and the multi-part folk rock of closing track “I Want to Believe” might pick up the pace a little bit, but the album as a whole doesn’t go out of its way to grab the listener by the collar. That being said, after having spun this album a few times, it’s hard not to hear the multitude of great moments that Love for the Underdog has to offer, like the seven-minute soft rock suite of “Fourth Wall”, or the organ-led humble pop of “”Walking Under My Love’s Ladder”. Once Love for the Underdog comes into focus, there’s no shaking John Andrews’ charms. (Bandcamp link)
Miscomings – Hat
Release date: April 14th Record label: Sixwix Genre: Post-punk, egg punk, no wave, punk rock, noise rock Formats: Cassette, digital Pull Track: Sativa
Seattle’s Miscomings are new to me, but they’re not exactly new at this whole music thing–their latest, Hat, is their fourth full-length record since their debut in 2016. Still, the four-piece band is kind of starting anew on their new album–it represents a line-up change (according to Bandcamp, the band is now comprised of Crow, Chani, Ziam, and Sid), and their sound has evolved to match. Based on my sampling of their previous material, Miscomings have morphed from an experimental synthpunk/new wave band to a much tougher, louder, and more frantic-sounding noise-punk group on Hat. They rip through a dozen songs in twenty minutes, with a full-powered rhythm section, coiled and chaotic guitars, and in-your-face vocals all grabbing the listener practically the entire way through.
Miscomings stomp through opening track “Anxiety” (featuring some lasers of guitar lines), and offering up an excellent post-punk/egg punk bassline on “Sativa”. The vocals are certainly memorable throughout Hat–the musicians of Miscomings deserve credit for cooking up instrumental firestorms in noise-punk tracks like “Dilly Bar” and “Saviour Self”, but whichever member of the band is singing does everything possible to match the musical intensity (to say nothing of that delivery of “Beverly wants…to kill someone!” in “Beverly”). Songs like “3R” and “Stoned Soup Self” are fascinating, rubbery-sounding egg punk, showing that while Miscomings never let up on the intensity, they’re frequently declined to deliver it in a skewed fashion. That, in a nutshell, is who Hat is for–those of us who like our punk rock to always have its foot on its gas, but never to travel in a straight line. (Bandcamp link)
Release date: April 28th Record label: Exploding in Sound Genre: Garage rock, post-punk, punk Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: King Insignificant
I’ve never talked about Washer on Rosy Overdrive before, but then, the Brooklyn/Philadelphia-based duo of Kieran McShane and Mike Quigley had been pretty quiet for the duration of this blog’s existence up until quite recently. A few years prior, they’d established themselves as one of the key bands on Exploding in Sound Records’ roster with their superb debut album, 2016’s Here Comes Washer, and they followed it up a year later with All Aboard, a record that kept the great parts of their last one and expanded on them, making it one of the best albums of the decade. The third Washer album has been one of my most anticipated records for some time now, even before it became apparent that it was (partially due to the pandemic, as well as the realities of its members being split between two cities) going to take over a half-decade to be released.
Six years later, though, we have Improved Means to Deteriorated Ends, and the first seconds of opening track “King Insignificant” immediately hit on the feeling of listening to a Washer album in a way that instantly bridges the gap. Washer have always been a duo, and they’ve always sounded like it–they certainly fit in well with their labelmates like Pile, Kal Marks, and Rick Rude, but they’ve always been more stripped-down than any of those acts. They’ve made up for it with an intense energy and strong songwriting; All Aboard experimented just a bit with opening things up and letting their music hang out, going out on a limb to snag another dimension to their sound. Improved Means to Deteriorated Ends is not a radical departure for Washer–the instruments were still entirely played by McShane (drums) and Quigley (guitar), with a few guest vocalists (from Rebecca Ryskalczyk of Bethlehem Steel and Dana Murphy) being the only outside contributions.
On Improved Means to Deteriorated Ends, they’re still an indie rock band that takes influence from punk, post-punk, post-hardcore, and noise rock but with an undeniable pop aspect to most of their songs. So, Washer haven’t abandoned their core sound–what they’ve been working on, it seems like, is packing it with as much as possible. Lyrically, Improved Means to Deteriorated Ends puts Washer in step with some more of their big-picture indie rocker peers–what Bad History Month does with sprawling post-rock and Knot has done with jittery math rock, Washer roll out in bite-sized, two-minute indie punk songs. Tons of songs on the album–“The Waning Moon”, “Threadbare”, “The Itch”, “Blammo”, and “Grift on Repeat” are perhaps the more obvious ones–grapple with thoughts on the passage of time, difficulties in holding on to motivation, and failing to meet one’s own expectations and live up to one’s self-image. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Improved Means to Deteriorated Ends is an album about making an album, but I have to imagine these themes were on the band’s mind in the interstitial time between records.
Quigley can still work himself up to a holler over the course of a song, and Washer are adept as ever at creating a runway for this, from the slow-building opening track “King Insignificant” to the wheels-off “Not Like You” to the out-of-nowhere final refrain of “False Prize”. Washer combine their jaunty pop side with some of the record’s deeper concerns throughout Improved Means to DeterioratedEnds, with “Death of an Empire” sticking out in particular. In this tune, Quigley cheerfully suggests that “maybe we should be lighting things on fire,” and points out the irony that “all the wrong people love themselves” (in the context that, in this dying empire, the ones holding onto and believing they’re deserving of the waning power are the ones making the rest of us miserable).
Washer save their most musically dour moment for “Answer to Hell”, which is a harsh look inward of a song (“I’m alive, I’m alive / I’m a decomposing shell,” Quigley sings soberly). Even ugly reminders that one is still alive count–Quigley hits on this again in “Blammo”, where he’s an old man watching time “slither, shake and writhe past [his] eye”. “It’s how I ease the doubt that I’m alive,” he remarks upon this sight. The parts of Improved Means to Deteriorated Ends that aren’t dedicated to fumbling toward this realization are dedicated to fumbling forward armed with it, and figuring out what that means. Maybe it means that you embrace failure because it can’t wink out your existence (“Fail Big”). Maybe it means that you try to reach out to other living beings even though you know you’re not so good at it (“Cheap Therapy”). Maybe you write a record about all of this, showcasing exactly what its title describes. (Bandcamp link)
It’s a Monday Pressing Concerns! This one looks at new albums from Patches and Monde UFO, a new EP from Amanda X, and a compilation from Triple Fast Action.
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.
Patches – Scenic Route
Release date: April 14th Record label: Self-released Genre: Post-punk, jangle pop, college rock Formats: Digital Pull Track: Ask Me Again
Last year, Patches released their debut album, Tales We Heard from the Fields, which ended up being one of my favorites of 2022. The record was a remote collaboration between the trio of lead singer/guitarist Evan Seurkamp, drummer/guitarist Aaron Griffin, and bassist RKC, with the three of them indulging in a shared love of both clanging, dark post-punk and bright, poppy college rock. Given that Seurkamp has another full-time band going on with The Laughing Chimes (who released an excellent EP just a few months ago), I wasn’t expecting Patches to return so soon, but Scenic Route is certainly a welcome surprise. The sophomore Patches album picks up where their debut left off, but represents a sonic evolution as well–instead of splitting the difference between darker and lighter material on a track-by-track basis, the songs on Scenic Route combine them individually, with each one containing a mix of both jangle pop and post-punk.
There’s nothing quite as openly bright and poppy as “Parallel Mind” off of their last album, but, underneath a layer of lo-fi, almost dream pop distortion, there is no shortage of hooks on Scenic Route. The opening duo of “Do You Remember Me in the Summer?” and “Prisoners of the Parthenon” kick off the record with a pair of hazy, jangly indie rock anthems, and the band breaks out the acoustic guitars for the vintage college radio could’ve-been-a-hit “Ask Me Again”. The second half of Scenic Route offers up the incredibly tight-sounding, laser-precise “Dead Air”, but it’s also where Patches deliver “Whales and Constellations”, an underwater-sounding, dreamy tune that’s the band at their mistiest. Seurkamp’s vocals still have that tinge of nostalgia that reminds me of early Guided by Voices, and nowhere is it more apparent on Scenic Route than on closing track “Ursorichville”, a song that threatens to evaporate but, like the rest of the album, stays on its feet and sees the pop tune through. (Bandcamp link)
Amanda X – Keepsake
Release date: April 21st Record label: Self Aware Genre: Alt-rock, indie punk Formats: Digital Pull Track: Twin Flame
Philadelphia’s Amanda X were one of the more underappreciated practitioners of the punky, 90s-influenced indie rock that populated the second half of the 2010s, but they’d been fairly silent since 2017’s solid Giant. That’s finally changed with the release of the five-song Keepsake EP, a record that shows that the group hasn’t lost any momentum and still have plenty of hooky rock songs left in them. The band–guitarist Cat Park, drummer Melissa Brain, and bassist Kat Bean–sounds like a real power trio on Keepsake, with all of these tracks utilizing a tough rhythm section and pleasing guitar play to sound fully-developed.
“Carousel” opens Keepside with a pure blast of 90s alt-rock enthusiasm, sounding earnest but playful, deploying some crunchy, anthemic guitars and low-key but commanding vocals. “Crave” is almost glam-punk, with a chanting chorus and cocky guitar leads similarly balancing their fun and serious rocker sides. The mid-section of the EP is where the band show off the most– “Eight Ball” and “Slight” are not quite as single-ready as the first few songs (or as the big-finish closing track “Twin Flame”), but the steady workout-tempo of the former and the chugging, noisy alt-rock of the latter are both excellent entries into the Amanda X discography. Having Amanda X back in general is worth celebrating, let alone that they’ve returned with a release as strong as Keepsake. (Bandcamp link)
Monde UFO – Vandalized Statue to Be Replaced with Shrine
Release date: April 21st Record label: Quindi Genre: Ambient pop, dream pop, jazz pop, lounge pop Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Rectory
Los Angeles’ Monde UFO makes music that falls on the warm and friendly side of the indie rock spectrum, but that hardly means that the trio of Kris Chau, Kern Haug, and Brian Bartus aren’t adventurous. That’s anything but the case on their second proper album, the excellently-titled Vandalized Statue to Be Replaced with Shrine. The album’s ten songs float through keyboard and synth washes, shuffling percussion, and downcast lo-fi indie rock esque vocals and percussion to create a transportive listening experience. Jazz and bossa nova horns color the record–like with a lot of genre-omnivorous indie rock, the likes of Stereolab and Yo La Tengo come to mind, but Vandalized Statue to Be Replaced with Shrine is a lot lighter and more delicate than most of those bands’ work–there’s not really the threat of noise rock rave-ups, just of getting deeply lost in the vibes.
Album opener “Rectory” starts with some percussion echoes that give way to dripping, psychedelic jazz pop. “Government Employee” and “The Woods Behind St. Marthas” build off of minimalist bossa nova guitar play that gets shaded by some horns, while “Air Quality” stuffs some orchestral indie pop into its swirling, lo-fi base. This hazy, jazzy indie rock is the dominant style on Vandalized Statue to Be Replaced with Shrine, but Monde UFO don’t settle into a rut, with “Cement and Reasoning” being one of the best-executed and busiest examples of this sound towards the end of the album, and then the whole record closes with a very Monde UFO-style cover of Fugazi’s “I’m So Tired”. “I’m So Tired” originally appeared on a four-song Fugazi covers EP they released last year–while I might not go so far as to call Monde UFO “punk”, I will say that it’s not surprising they found kinship with a band who similarly loved to break and subvert the expectations and “rules” placed onto them by their genre. (Bandcamp link)
Triple Fast Action – Triple Fast Action
Release date: April 21st Record label: Forge Again Genre: Alt-rock, post-grunge, power pop Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital Pull Track: Small Amount
Triple Fast Action is a recognizable name for indie-alt-rock fans of a certain age, particularly those from the Midwest. The Chicago group lasted for two albums in the late 1990s before disbanding (one of which you can hear easily now because it was released on an indie label, and another that you can’t because it wasn’t), and they slot alongside fellow Windy City groups like one-hit-wonders Local H (which drummer Brian St. Clair would later join) and never-weres Fig Dish. Triple Fast Action had a more power-pop-punk edge to them, updating the sound of nearby Rockford’s Cheap Trick for the post-grunge era. Although Triple Fast Action are not “back”, a massive self-titled compilation from the band offers up plenty of new-to-us material that perhaps illustrates their strengths even better than their proper albums did. The bulk of Triple Fast Action are demos recorded by the band in their practice space in 1994 before the recording of their debut album, 1996’s Broadcaster–some of these appeared on the final album in some form, others did not.
The first disc of the 2-CD (or 3LP) collection is entirely from those 1994 sessions or earlier, and it’s the sound of a young rock group throwing it all into their songs. Highlights include opening track “Small Amount”, in which the band show just enough restraint where they need to, the bittersweet heartland punk of “I Am”, the thrashing “Tommy”, the exhaustive “Mattering”, and the show-stopping “Poppin’ Wheelies”. The compilation closes with a few covers that are instructive in hearing what ingredients went into making Triple Fast Action’s songs (Thin Lizzy! Electric Light Orchestra! The Beach Boys!) but only an acoustic, bashed-out cover of Sparklehorse’s “Someday I Will Treat You Good” truly steps out of the original’s shadow to make something memorably transformative. For the most part, it’s the Triple Fast Action originals that have stayed with me, and, thankfully there are plenty of them. Something new sticks out every time–maybe on this listen it’ll be the hazy, almost space rock of “Satellite”, or the frantic “Tag Along”. (Bandcamp link)
Once again it is Thursday, and it’s time to talk about new music. Today’s post looks at four great records coming out tomorrow: albums from Buddie, Brian Mietz, and The Collect Pond, and an EP from System Exclusive.
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.
Buddie – Agitator
Release date: April 21st Record label: Crafted Sounds Genre: 90s indie rock, fuzz rock, power pop Formats: Cassette, digital Pull Track: Restive Summer
Toward the end of last year, I wrote about Transplant, a four-song EP from Vancouver’s Buddie. That excellent record marked the beginning of a new phase for the band–lead singer/songwriter Dan Forrest had moved to Canada from Philadelphia and formed a new group. Although Buddie’s Philadelphia lineup largely recorded Transplant’s songs, tracks like “Indecision” made it clear that the record was made with the upcoming fork in the road clearly in view. A few months later, Agitator, the EP’s full-length follow-up, makes good on the earlier release’s promise, delivering eleven deep, fulfilling, and sharply-realized indie rock songs. Forrest remains a towering but approachable songwriter, always thinking in big-picture terms but never losing sight of the day-to-day and direct interpersonal minutia of his grand topics. The band puts together a pristine but friendly-sounding album–Forrest’s gentle vocals are juxtaposed by the sweeping music that accompanies them, encompassing Built to Spill-esque 90s indie rock, fuzz rock, and power pop–delivered with an earnestness that matches their frontperson.
Agitator begins by scaling the “Break of the Sun”, a slow-building, thunderous song that has a determination that sets the tone for the album (and also is perhaps the moment where Buddie most earn the not-infrequent LVL UP comparisons they’ve gotten). The brisk, almost-garage rock of “Class Warfare” and the deliberate “Global Consequence” are vintage Buddie, Forrest delivering lyrical diatribes that are nevertheless rewarding and even pleasant to listen to thanks to his delivery and the band’s potent fuzz rock (“They know it’s a game, but they’re in love with it / Hoarding resources for generations,” he excoriates in the latter song, in a tone sounding like A.C. Newman). Almost in answer to the previous few songs, the following “We’ll Never Break” and “Worried” look inward towards Forrest’s self and those close to him, affirming that these “smaller-scale” bonds are important to maintain while dealing with the wider screens present before.
The first half of the record is unimpeachably solid, but some of the album’s best single moments come on the B-side. On “Backwards, Behind”, Buddie keep it relatively simple, with the punchiness of the chorus really landing its sentiment (in a weird and good way, it kind of reminds me of “The Middle” by Jimmy Eat World). The way that “Labyrinth” speeds up and slows down in the chorus to evoke “find[ing] our way again” by getting lost is so satisfying that it balances out the corny pun that comes in the next line. Agitator closes with a gigantic song in “Restive Summer”–it starts as a solo electric guitar number whose first section culminates with Forrest singing “We worked ourselves up to the point where we broke”. The rest of the track covers a wide swath of Agitator’s feelings in one song, from Forrest’s determined “We’ll have to work like twice as hard” to the closing wonderment of “And I wonder how we’ll go to sleep?” (Bandcamp link)
Brian Mietz – Wow!
Release date: April 21st Record label: Sludge People Genre: Power pop, indie pop, lo-fi pop Formats: Cassette, digital Pull Track: Buried Alive (Too Tired)
New Jersey’s Brian Mietz has previously played in the bands It’s a King Thing and Cabana Wear, and in 2020 he released Panzarotti, the first album under his own name. Panzarotti was a great under-the-radar album that ended up being one of my favorites of that year, so I was thrilled to see the announcement of Wow!, a full-length cassette follow-up record coming out on Sludge People Records. I was charmed by Mietz’s style on Panzarotti–it’s a humble work of pop rock that evokes some “bummer” power pop artists like Fountains of Wayne, Elliott Smith, Mo Troper, and even a bit of Weezer in places. With Wow!, Mietz remains an ace pop songwriter–these ten songs sound laid-back but emotional, and Mietz keeps the melodies simple, but he isn’t opposed to building around them a little bit.
“Capture the Flag” opens Wow! with what I’m beginning to recognize as a vintage Mietz sound–jaunty but subtle, with an effortless melody that could’ve been grafted onto any kind of guitar pop in the last half-century. A good deal of the first half of the album is surprisingly busy–while no less immediately catchy, the stretch from “Cranefly” to “Steal Some Time” is denser than a lot of Mietz’s previous work. Another surprise is “Call in My Car” towards the end of the record, a straight-up synthpop tune with a shining chorus. These new layers are interesting and rewarding, but Mietz succeeds when he presents his songs more plainly, as well–the weary pop rock of “Caller” and “Buried Alive (Too Tired)” might be the best part of the entire record, and the just-fuzzy-enough alt-rock of the title track closes Wow! on a particularly satisfying note. (Bandcamp link)
The Collect Pond – Underwater Features
Release date: April 21st Record label: Candlepin Genre: Lo-fi indie rock, post-punk, lo-fi power pop Formats: Cassette, digital Pull Track: Fired, Walk with Me
The latest edition to the ever-expanding and always worthwhile Candlepin Records roster is The Collect Pond, a Boston group led by Bellingham, Washington native Danny Moffat. Underwater Features is the second Collect Pond album, but the first Moffat has made with a full-time band (bassist/keyboardist Roger Maranan, drummer Rob Carrington, and guitarist/keyboardist Ben Bonadies). Moffat, who also lived in New Zealand for a while, is a clear aficionado of underground and lo-fi indie rock of many eras: Underwater Features is clearly influenced by 90s indie underdog popsters like Guided by Voices and Sebadoh (putting them in line with modern groups like Connections, Mythical Motors, and Smug Brothers), while also retaining a post-punk edge in places and a haziness evoking a few Flying Nun and Xpressway group.
The first half of Underwater Features’ tracklist runs the Collect Pond gamut–opening track “Cardigan” and “On Track” are on the more post-punk, darker side of their sound, even as there are some new wave-y guitar lines that bubble up now and again, while with “Fired, Walk With Me” they bash out pure, giddy pop rock, and the muscular “Influential Consequential” is 90s-clad power pop. “Subtle with a Joke” has a sprinting sound that’s immediately enjoyable, even as its multiple sections actually make it one of the weirder songs on the record. The Collect Pond are deft at piecing together the post-punk and pop sides of their sound on Underwater Features even without the closing duo of “On Track II” and “Subdued Excitement”, both of which are an extended, acoustic-based reimagining of the earlier version of “On Track”. They didn’t need to turn the most brooding rocker on the cassette into a pretty acoustic ballad to make the record into a success, but it adds to an already enjoyable set of songs. (Bandcamp link)
System Exclusive – Party All the Time
Release date: April 21st Record label: Mt.St.Mtn./Six Tonnes de Chair Genre: Synthpunk, post-punk, synthpop Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Part Time Pierre
Pasadena’s System Exclusive established themselves as West Coast synth-punk players on last year’s self-titled debut album, released by Castle Face. The duo of Ari Blaisdell and Matt Jones (who, between the two of them, have played in Male Gaze, The Beat-Offs, Blasted Canyons, and Lower Self) are back a year later with a follow-up in the Party All the Time EP. While these three songs, running nine minutes total, are on a smaller scale than their forty-minute, eleven-song debut full-length, System Exclusive sound confident and controlled here, suggesting they’ve got a lot of great work to come and also crafting a record that’s plenty enjoyable on its own terms, brevity aside.
Party All the Time is made up of two brand-new System Exclusive exclusives and the title track, which is, indeed, a cover of the Eddie Murphy number two hit single. Both of the original System Exclusive songs are strong ones, and they end up sounding fairly different from each other–opening track “Part Time Pierre” is the more immediate one to my ears, a slinking piece of synth-glam-punk whose instrumentation saunters along with Blaisdell’s intensely casual vocals. “Paint the Town” is some busier-sounding vintage, wide-eyed synthpop, executed with tangible excitement. And then there’s “Party All the Time”–System Exclusive certainly turn it into one of their own songs, but they keep its structure largely intact in doing so. Its edges are sharpened down to the System Exclusive style, but it’s still very much a party. (Bandcamp link)
It’s a Monday Pressing Concerns yet again, and we’ve got some good under-the-radar music to talk about today. In this edition, we’re looking at the physical release of The Rishis‘ debut album, new full-lengths from Sudden Voices and Worms in Dirt, and a new EP from Melancolony.
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 Rishis – August Moon (Vinyl Release)
Release date: April 21st Record label: Cloud Recordings/Elephant 6 Genre: Folk rock Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Holi
The Rishis quietly self-released August Moon digitally last year, but the upcoming physical edition of their debut album is being put out by a pair of labels that carry a lot of weight for a certain kind of indie rock fan: Cloud Recordings and Elephant 6. While the core duo of Athens’ Ranjan Avasthi and Sofie Lute are (at least publicly) new faces to the Elephant 6 world, plenty of familiar names from the famous collective went into this album’s creation: John Kiran Fernandes, Scott Spillane, Andrew Rieger, James Huggins III, and Andy Gonzales, to make an incomplete list. Despite the large number of collaborators, August Moon doesn’t slot into the dense, Olivia Tremor Control-esque multi-layered psych-pop side of Elephant 6, instead coming off as a quite friendly and straightforward folk rock album, with tinges of 60s pop as well.
August Moon opens with the gently rolling “Holiday”, a country-folk tune in which pedal steel and Avasthi’s warm vocals welcome everyone into the album. Scott Spillane’s horn contributions are unmistakable, adding a new layer of emotion to songs like the mid-tempo indie rocker “Oh So Young” and the dreamy “Migrations”. Lute sings lead on only one song on the record, but she makes the most of it, absolutely belting out centerpiece ballad “Make Me Love You”. Although the second half of August Moon features one folk rock classic in “Jetstream”, it also offers up the album’s busiest number (the cavernous “Just Between You and Me”), its most 90s indie rock moment (the quite catchy “Holi”), and closing track “Uttar Pradesh”, a gorgeous instrumental that takes its name from an Indian state as a way of nodding to Avasthi’s family history. (Bandcamp link)
Sudden Voices – Sudden Voices
Release date: April 14th Record label: Self-released Genre: Art rock, post-punk, post-rock, psych rock Formats: Digital Pull Track: Milk and Honey
London’s Ben Morris is hardly a new face in music, even though he has just released his first record as Sudden Voices this month. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Morris led Union Wireless, a post-rock/krautrock band that achieved some notoriety before dissipating after two albums. Morris stepped away from making records for a decade and a half, but stayed interested in music–Sudden Voices, an improvisation-based record that’s informed by fifteen years of making music just for himself, is the result. Morris and his collaborators cite a lot of the “elder statesman indie rocker” favorites as inspiration for their new album, and, impressively, quite a bit of it (CAN, Talk Talk, Bitches Brew) shines through here. Sudden Voices has a foot in multiple musical camps, keeping a sturdy indie rock foundation when it suits it, but veering into post-rock and playing with less “traditional” song structures just as naturally.
“Milk and Honey” opens Sudden Voices in a way that mirrors the entire record–starting with a steady, almost post-punk rhythm section before drifting into a psychedelic haze of synths and choral chants (for Morris, who sang in choirs regularly during his break from recorded music, this addition is more than an aesthetic one). “Happenstance” and “Way of the World” marry some interesting and prominent percussion (both analog and digital) with some of the album’s more casual-sounding instrumentals. Balance is key on Sudden Voices: “Sunrise” in the middle of the album sounds frantic; “Fixed Orbit” one song later re-steadies everything. Similarly, the post-punk energy of “That’s All We Have” later on fades into the piano-led “This Room”. (Bandcamp link)
Melancolony – Dreaming Backwards
Release date: March 25th Record label: Self-released Genre: Dream pop, jangle pop Formats: Digital Pull Track: Midnight Eyes
Georgia-originating, Santa Cruz-based Justin Loudermilk makes music under the appropriate name Melancolony, a project that has been around for the majority of a decade and has resulted in a few singles and two full-length albums. The latest Melancolony release is the Dreaming Backwards EP, which came out late last month. Dreaming Backwards’ five songs showcase Loudermilk’s skills at crafting a certain nostalgic brand of indie pop–over the course of the record, Loudermilk puts together an intriguing sound that combines dream pop, sophisti-pop, college/jangle rock, and synth-based psych pop while all sounding of a piece. Melancolony’s songs are brief on Dreaming Backwards–the entire EP is over in ten minutes, and you’ll miss a good deal of it if you blink, but it’s worth tuning in actively.
The wistful “Colorless” opens Dreaming Backwards with swirling synths, earnest vocals, and extra reverb-y guitar lines. Prominent 80s drum machines kick off the more purely synthpop title track, although Loudermilk guides it to a similarly melancholic place as the EP’s first song. “Midnight Eyes” is perhaps the most overtly “indie rock” of the songs here, with the bass and acoustic guitar gliding along across a track that feels particularly inspired by guitar bands of yore (mainly of the jangly college rock and C86 variety). “Reunion 2023” is the other song that leans on prominent guitars, starting with a folky, R.E.M.-esque skeleton and building to a humble but well-crafted dream pop conclusion. (Bandcamp link)
Worms in Dirt – Some Version of a Portal
Release date: April 7th Record label: Self-released Genre: Indie punk, folk punk, alt-rock Formats: Digital Pull Track: Eucalyptus Trees
Worms in Dirt is the project of Seattle-based singer-songwriter Sam Hendricks, and her latest record under the name is a loose, spirited collection of songs that certainly has a folk punk energy, even as Hendricks gives them a full electric rock band presentation. Some Version of a Portal is the first Worms in Dirt full-length album, and the bulk of it was recorded by Hendricks herself (drums were handled by Sheldon Kreger, and there are a few random vocal, synth, and keyboard features). Some Version of a Portal has an indie punk world-consciousness (even, perhaps especially, when Hendricks steers the songs into quite personal territory) mixed with some Pacific Northwest-appropriate roaring indie rock.
The minimal electric guitar-led “Violence” opens Some Version of a Portal with the feeling of being on a swaying ship, Hendricks pacing back and forth in the lyrics before we get a final minute of guitar heroics. The pop punk of “Outhouses” features a particularly animated Hendricks in response to the music, and the heavy “Wind Slows” mixes lumbering indie rock with some odd vocal effects. Some Version of a Portal rolls out some more memorable songs from there, like the hopefully apocalyptic “Eucalyptus Trees” (“Just try to embrace the possibility / That the entire system collapses by 2050,” Hendricks imagines), the unmoored and (trying to be) unbothered “Gameboy SP”, and the decomposing “Death Poems”. (Bandcamp link)
Rosy Overdrive 