Rosy Overdrive

Rosy Overdrive’s Top 100 Albums of 2021 (75-51)

Part two of the Rosy Overdrive year-end list! All the pertinent info (not that there is much, I mean, it’s a year-end list from a music blog) is in part one.

75. Mope City – Within the Walls

Release date: April 30^th
Record label: Tenth Court
Genre: Slowcore
Formats: Vinyl, digital

The third album from the Sydney, Australia-based Mope City is a record of subtly beautiful electric slowcore. Vocalists Matthew Neville and Amaya Lang frequently trade off between each other or harmonize together in ways that recalls Low at Within the Walls’ most gorgeous moments, or Unwound at its thorniest ones. Shimmering bursts of melody abound, particularly in lead single “Don’t Understand the Shorthand”, but they also explore claustrophobic acoustic textures in “Trapped as a Child” and late-night jazz in “A Mannequin Head Smiled (A Mannequin Smile)”, and a few songs towards the record’s end trend toward Bedhead-esque post-rock slowcore. Mope City aren’t afraid to evoke some of the genre’s greats, but Within the Walls backs up the band’s ambitions with a memorable collection of songs. (Read more)

74. The Fragiles – On and On

Release date: February 12^th
Record label: Living Lost
Genre: Fuzz rock, lo-fi rock
Formats: Cassette, digital

David Settle continues to keep busy. Last year he released two albums as Psychic Flowers as well as another solid record from his longer-running band Big Heet, and 2021 matched his output in volume and quality. This time Settle kicked off the year with The Fragiles, whose second record On and On continues the pop songwriting Psychic Flowers explored but also allows itself to stretch out a bit more than that project’s ramshackle nature. The album is still fairly lo-fi and fuzzy, but Settle wrings twists and turns out of these tools, like opening On and On with the slow-burning title track only to then let loose with the fuzzy power pop of “Kaleidoscope”. That song’s title evokes The Chills and the Dunedin sound in general, and “Garden of Cleaners” nods to another influence, Martin Newell—but songs like the lumbering “Success Is…” confirm that On and On is more than just hero worship. Whatever the moniker, it’s another worthy effort from Settle and his collaborators. (Read more)

73. Jodi – Blue Heron

Release date: July 16^th
Record label: Sooper
Genre: Indie folk, slowcore, alt-country
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital

The debut full-length from Jodi, aka ex-Pinegrove guitarist and wading bird appreciator Nick Levine, is a beautifully sparse indie folk record that’s a pretty convincing argument for a songwriter to watch in the genre moving forward. Even coming in at under a half-hour in length, Blue Heron has plenty of transcendent moments—there are certainly shades of Levine’s former band throughout, but the deployment of empty space in these songs reminds me a lot more of Songs: Ohia’s shades-of-grey alt-country, or even slowcore bands like Idaho or Red House Painters at times. In Blue Heron’s more upbeat numbers, like “Hawks” or “Get Back”, Levine’s suitably weary voice sings over music evoking a twangier take on the new Americana of Trace Mountains or Told Slant, but even these songs have a delicate barebones feel.

72. Angel Du$t – YAK: A Collection of Truck Songs

Release date: October 22^nd
Record label: Roadrunner
Genre: Power pop, indie rock, indie pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital

I’ve been intrigued by indie rock/power pop side projects of hardcore dudes lately, so I was drawn to Angel Du$t, and subsequently hooked after one song. The band is fronted by Justice Tripp, the vocalist of hardcore group Trapped Under Ice, and he’s backed up by the majority of hardcore/jock jam revival act Turnstile on YAK: A Collection of Truck Songs. The album, which Tripp refers to as more of a “playlist” than a thematically-grouped collection of songs, is very good, and it has no hardcore in it whatsoever. And other than a cameo from Rancid’s Tim Armstrong, there isn’t much punk either. This is pure Rob Schnapf-produced guitar pop rock—they cite the Lemonheads as an influence and they aren’t fucking with you there at all. One bite of “Big Bite” or “Cool Faith” and these songs will be in your head all day.

71. The Dead Space – Chlorine Sleep

Release date: May 7^th
Record label: 12XU
Genre: Noise rock, post-punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital

The second record from Austin’s The Dead Space is a lean effort from the power trio that’s either on the angular side of noise rock or the tougher side of post-punk, depending on one’s perspective. Chlorine Sleep, coming a full seven years after the band’s debut album, is carried by a beefy rhythm section made up of bassist/vocalist Quin Galavis and drummer Jenny Arthur. Galavis’ vocals, which can go from “unassuming” to “anxious and angry”, are not quite as immediately noticeable, but they add a dimension to these songs. In some places, like the title track and “Animal”, The Dead Space are content to build a foundation in which to let Galavis and guitarist Garrett Hadden mess around. The one outlier on Chlorine Sleep is album closer “True Shame”, which adds a violin and sounds almost like a slowcore song. It’s still crushing, just from a different angle.

70. Needles//Pins – Needles//Pins

Release date: May 28^th
Record label: Dirt Cult
Genre: Punk rock, pop punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital

Needles//Pins’ third album, 2017’s Goodnight, Tomorrow, was one of the most underrated records of that year, a heart-on-sleeve gruff melodic punk album full of singalong choruses that should’ve launched the Vancouver band to the top of its genre. Four years later, the band’s new self-titled fourth album has picked up right where Needles//Pins left off, its only demerit being that, at 23 minutes, it feels all too short. One can’t say they don’t make the most of their limited time with us, though—several songs barely cross the one minute mark, but tracks like “Stumble” and “Baleful” are fully-formed and quite memorable. On the few songs that the band allow to stretch out a bit, like the ragged single “A Rather Strained Apologetic”, one can best glimpse the band’s signature mix of the pretty (the tasteful backing vocals and a clean arpeggiated guitar line) and the rough (singer Adam Solomonian’s, ahem, rather strained emotional vocals).

69. Pom Pom Squad – Death of a Cheerleader

Release date: June 25^th
Record label: City Slang
Genre: Pop punk, alt-rock, dream pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital

I’ve believed in the potential of Pom Pom Squad since their 2019 EP Ow, and Death of a Cheerleader feels like a realization of something that Mia Berrin has been working toward her entire relatively brief music career. Berrin, the artist behind the Pom Pom Squad project, has created a specific kind of inter-and intra-music world that omnivorously gobbles up David Lynch, John Waters, pre-rock-and-roll pop music, cheerleading and all the cultural baggage inherent therein into a unique presentation that is all well and good, but the songs on Death of a Cheerleader are more than strong enough to back all that up. Berrin rips through pop-punk heaters like “Head Cheerleader” and “Lux” with the same aplomb as acoustic tension-builder “Second That” and the gut-spilling “Drunk Voicemail”. It’s the birth of Pom Pom Squad!

68. The Telephone Numbers – The Ballad of Doug

Release date: June 25^th
Record label: Meritorio/Paisley Shirt
Genre: Power pop, jangle pop
Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital

San Francisco jangle pop dean and auxiliary Telephone Numbers member Glenn Donaldson says that The Ballad of Doug “may or may not be a concept album about the rise and fall of the Gin Blossoms”. The record’s title track is pretty clearly about the events right up to and right after the tragic death of Gin Blossoms songwriter Doug Hopkins (hence, “The Ballad of Doug”), but I’m not quite sure how the rest of these songs figure into the greater picture. What the album definitely is, however, is a collection of songs that boast an instrumentally soft, vocally clear and emotional take on guitar pop that sounds closer to the late Tommy Keene than anything I’ve heard in awhile, primarily courtesy of vocalist and songwriter Thomas Rubenstein, but the contributions from the rest of the players (such as Donaldson and keyboardist Morgan Stanley) are key as well.

67. Pays P. – Ça v aller

Release date: September 10^th
Record label: Peculiar Works
Genre: Noise rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital

Paris noise rock band Pays P. have built up a following primarily through their live act that includes Big Thief’s Buck Meek (who invited them to open for his main band’s European tour) and Brooklyn’s SAVAK (who ended up recording Ça v aller and releasing it on their own label, Peculiar Works), and if nothing else, their sophomore record suggests they’re a force of nature on the stage. The band’s dramatic sound, built around (amp)le distortion, pounding percussion, and a muttering-to-wailing vocal from lead singer Laura Boullic, certainly justify the mid-period Sonic Youth comparisons that I’m sure Pays P. have gotten. Ça v aller may be noisy, but it isn’t “chaotic”—the trio of Boullic and brothers Lucas and Pablo Valero are laser-focused throughout the record’s seven songs, and they know exactly what they’re doing.

66. Cub Scout Bowling Pins – Clang Clang Ho

Release date: July 2^nd
Record label: GBV, Inc.
Genre: Psychedelic pop, jangle pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital

Clang Clang Ho is Robert Pollard’s most intriguing full-length record since 2016’s Please Be Honest. I was a little disappointed that it wasn’t as murkily hook-centric as Cub Scout Bowling Pins’ debut EP, January’s Heaven Beats Iowa, but there’s something oddly hypnotic about these songs. The largely straightforward-ornamental music (provided by the other members of the current Guided by Voices lineup) combined with some of Pollard’s most bizarre vocal deliveries and lyrics ever is fascinating. These songs were built around a cappella vocal demos, and songs like “Ride My Earthmobile” and “Strange Walk Home” are delightfully unmoored from typical Pollard song structure. Still, the Cub Scout Bowling Pins manage some more typical Guided by Voices-esque gold, with hidden gems like “She Cannot Know” and “Roll Up Your Nose” hiding out in Clang Clang Ho’s second half.

65. EEP – Winter Skin

Release date: November 5^th
Record label: Hogar
Genre: Shoegaze, dream pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital

Rosie Varela may be the founder and, more often than not, the singer of El Paso’s EEP, but collaborators Sebastian Estrada, Serge Carrasco, Lawrence Brown III, and Ross Ingram have made their mark on the shoegaze band’s second album in the last year and a half as well. Winter Skin feels like the work of a band working together in lockstep—which is important, because EEP’s sophomore album finds the band probing beyond their shoegaze roots in several directions. Winter Skin incorporates funk (“Stubblefield”), electronica (“Stargazer”, “Slow Down”), psychedelia (“Today I Woke Up”), and traditional Mexican love ballads (“Ángeles”) into its sound, and they pull it off in a way that slots nicely along with more straightforward shoegaze and noise pop (“A Message to You”, “Hanging on a Wire”). Nothing is out of place on Winter Skin. (Read more)

64. Corvair – Corvair

Release date: February 19^th
Record label: Paper Walls/wiaiwya
Genre: Power pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital

Portland husband-and-wife duo Brian Naubert and Heather Larimer have been involved separately in various Pacific Northwest bands for the past two decades or so, but they’ve only just now gotten around to recording something together. Born out of COVID-19 quarantine, the project’s self-titled debut is an impressive, ambitious work of indie pop that’s both immediate and multi-layered. They cite Electrical Light Orchestra as an influence, and this is borne out by Corvair’s big hooks that come via both guitar and synthesizer. These songs also remind me of The New Pornographers—another ELO-indebted band—particularly in moments like Larimer’s melodic verse vocal for “Green (Mean Time)”. Moments like the travelogue “Focus Puller”’s relatively sparse first half let the album’s thematic undercurrents peek through, but the song’s groovy second half remind us that Corvair are going to have fun with all this, no matter what.

63. The Cocker Spaniels – The Cocker Spaniels Are Still Alive, and So Are You

Release date: June 4^th
Record label: Self-released/Evil Island Fortress
Genre: Indie rock, psychedelic pop, power pop
Formats: Cassette, digital

Sean Padilla has deemed his first full-length record as The Cocker Spaniels in over a decade “a tribute to my spouse, our children, and our cats”, and many of The Cocker Spaniels Are Still Alive, and So Are You’s strongest moments reflect that directly. Padilla finds inspiration in more lighthearted family moments, like the cat-versus-cat turf war of “Eternal Grudge” or the self-explanatory “Family Narc”, but isn’t afraid to evoke deeper emotions with “No Steps or Halves” and “A New Hello” (which is, yes, also about a cat). Despite its familial focus, …Are Still Alive refuses to be an album that doesn’t interact with the outside world. Padilla would probably say he doesn’t have much choice: as a Black father of three in 2021, toxic masculinity, racist police violence, and white guilt all swirl around his domestic life. …Are Still Alive tackles it all head-on over nearly an hour, and has a blast while doing so, with Padilla’s twin influences of Robert Pollard and Prince leading the songs on their psychedelic-pop-rock journey through a long-in-the-tooth record that sounds like it took full advantage of its gestation period. (Read more)

62. Charlie Martin – Imaginary People

Release date: April 30^th
Record label: Grand Jury
Genre: Indie folk, folk pop, dream folk
Formats: Digital

At the end of April, Austin’s Charlie Martin quietly released his first solo album, Imaginary People—a record that slowly grew on me for months until it became a lock for this list. Imaginary People doesn’t stray too far from Martin’s work with his main band, Hovvdy, but the songwriting that’s made the Texas duo a beloved lo-fi indie folk band is no less potent when Martin is on his own. The album’s thirteen songs leisurely flow in and out of one another, creating a calming listening experience aided by Martin’s reassuring vocals, subtle but confident piano accents, and the familiar acoustic guitar backbone. Imaginary People floats various characters, places, and times across its surface—we hear about “Madison”, “Deborah”, and “Sadie” among others, and are transported to “September”, “June”, and “9 a.m.”.

61. Hello Whirled – No Victories

Release date: May 14^th
Record label: Sherilyn Fender
Genre: Lo-fi power pop
Formats: Digital

The absurdly prolific Hello Whirled, the project of Mount Laurel Township, New Jersey’s Ben Spizuco, celebrated its 100^th release this year with the lo-fi power pop epic No Victories, and Spizuco clearly brought his A-game to mark the milestone. Even without the long tribute album and collage cover art as evidence, Robert Pollard is a clear influence on No Victories, but Spizuco is just as likely to pull from the freak-psych Circus Devils (“Heroes Are the Best Villains”) as he is mid-fi Matador Guided by Voices (“Mrs. Matter”). Elsewhere, Spizuco (whose voice reminds me of Nothing Painted Blue’s Franklin Bruno) is in a dire mood, from the apocalyptic, “Baba O’Reilly”-esque opening title track to the cheerfully nihilistic pop of “Money Is the Death of Art”. With No Victories, Hello Whirled has put forth an album brimming with ideas and strong songwriting, and if we’re here already, I look forward to seeing where Spizuco’s music ends up over its next hundred albums. (Read more)

60. Subsonic Eye – Nature of Things

Release date: January 15^th
Record label: Middle Class Cigars
Genre: Indie/dream/jangle pop
Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital

Singaporean indie rock band Subsonic Eye pull away from the noisier elements of their sound to hone into something more sublime with Nature of Things, somewhere between Sonic Youth’s last couple of albums and The Sundays. They can do pure guitar pop (such as in “Fruitcake” and half of “Further”), but they’ve also got a melancholy streak to them (the heartstring-tugging “Kaka the Cat” and the other half of “Further”). The album cover is perfect—the map with the record’s song titles as fake landmarks is admittedly corny, but by making it look real enough to use for navigation and combining it with the “field guide” motif and the strange image to its left, it strikes the balance between “sweet and comforting” and “venturing into the unknown”. (Read more)

59. Refrigerator – So Long to Farewell

Release date: May 14^th
Record label: Shrimper
Genre: Lo-fi indie rock
Formats: Vinyl

There’s nothing Rosy Overdrive appreciates more than a long-running, consistently strong indie rock band—let me introduce Refrigerator to you all. So Long to Farewell is the twelfth album from the Inland Empire-based band, but it functions just as well as a worthy introduction to the group’s brand of lo-fi rock. Both sides of Refrigerator are out in full force here: slow-moving, deliberate and delicate atmospheric pop rock (opening track “Broken Glass Shore”) and shambolic, guitar-distorted, classic-rock-in-the-basement (“Drink Ourselves to Death” immediately after), and most of So Long to Farewell lands somewhere along this spectrum. “David Jove the Acid King” and “Jealousy Is Gone, Grief Always Lingers” are pop songs with rowdy electric guitar nipping at their heels, partially due to the addition of Wckr Spgt’s Mark Givens as second guitarist after thirty years with just one. It’s an extra dimension to be sure, but it’s also the same old Refrigerator. (Read more)

58. FACS – Present Tense

Release date: May 21^st
Record label: Trouble in Mind
Genre: Noise rock, post-punk, dub
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital

The fourth album from the experimental Chicago band FACS in as many years just might be their most complete effort to date. Present Tense offers up seven songs from the trio (drummer Noah Leger, bassist Alianna Kalaba, guitarist/vocalist Brian Case) that continue to probe sonic depths but still very much leave the footprint of a rock band. Most of Present Tense is grounded in Kalaba and Leger’s sonic assault, like the increasingly disorienting opener “XOUT” and the prowling industrial of “General Public”. “Strawberry Cough” is positively catchy, the FACS version of a psychedelic pop anthem with a shouted chorus featuring triumphant usage of the word “hauntology”. Of course, they follow it up with the nine-minute “Alone Without”, the one song where the band truly unmoors itself. It’s a worthwhile endeavor, following FACS there and back again.

57. Motorists – Surrounded

Release date: September 3^rd
Record label: Bobo Integral/We Are Time/Debt Offensive
Genre: Jangle pop, post-punk, power pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital

This list is something of a document of the Bay Area’s thriving jangle pop scene, but Toronto gave it a run for its money this year, especially among the “post-punk/college rock-influenced” variety of guitar pop. Surrounded is Motorist’s first album, but the members have played in a few notable local bands like Tough Age and the reunited Simply Saucer, so they’ve been around a bit. The album presents garage-y motorik post-punk (the droll title track, the stomping “New Day”), pure pop (the unabashed singalong of “Through to You”, the especially Peter Buck-esque “Go Back”) and songs that incorporate both (“Vainglorious”, which like the majority of Surrounded is jangly but also bass-heavy) in a way that justifies “Through to You”’s Sloan and R.E.M. namedrops.

56. Trace Mountains – House of Confusion

Release date: October 22^nd
Record label: Lame-O
Genre: Indie folk, Americana
Formats: Vinyl, digital

We’re living in the golden age of ex-LVL UP music, and Trace Mountains’ Dave Benton has been the most generous so far of his former bandmates. Starting with his old band and blossoming with his current project, Benton’s songs have always felt like they’ve inhabited their own world, and House of Confusion is no different. The third proper Trace Mountains record continues to embrace the Americana of last year’s Lost in the Country (which also featured on the Rosy Overdrive year-end list). Songs like “The Moon” and opener “See It Coming” sound like they could’ve come from any point in Benton’s career, but with a mark of maturity and subtlety that suggest the songwriter isn’t done growing yet. Some of the best moments on House of Confusion are the biggest departures, like the propulsive electronica-rock of “Eyes on the Road”. Again, golden age.

55. Gaadge – Yeah?

Release date: March 19^th
Record label: Crafted Sounds
Genre: Shoegaze, noise pop
Formats: Cassette, CD, digital

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania’s Gaadge are a swirly rock band that started as the project of Mitch DeLong, but has since evolved into a full-band effort. The reverb-heavy sound of their debut full-length nods to, among others, the revved-up hard-shoegaze of Ovlov and Swervedriver, the chaotic noise pop of The Spirit of the Beehive, and the tender lo-fi melodies of Guided by Voices and Alex G—not to mention their heroes, My Bloody Valentine. The six-minute psychedelic rock odyssey of “Thrill” is the peak of their deeply-layered, sensory-overload streak, but Gaadge also shine on the relatively straightforward alt-rock of “Flipping Shit” and “Holy Formers”. They’ve already got a particular sound down pat, and frequently hint at a duality they could explore in the future. (Read more)

54. Smoke Bellow – Open for Business

Release date: September 17^th
Record label: Trouble in Mind
Genre: Post-punk
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital

The Australia-formed, Baltimore-based Smoke Bellow has consciously shaped their experimental rock into something a bit more welcoming on their first record for Trouble in Mind. Open for Business is a minimalist, almost no wave-influenced post-punk album, but a warm layer of keyboard and synthesizer blanketing helps the record come off not quite so chilly as a lot of that genre of music does. Open for Business’ front-and-center keyboard drone and frequently plain-spoken vocals take influence from the more economical side of Stereolab for a streamlined, rhythm-heavy pop album. Open for Business is a deliberate, carefully-constructed record overall, and that it’s a joyful listening experience is the direct result of Smoke Bellows’ meticulousness. (Read more)

53. Cheekface – Empathically No.

Release date: January 11^th
Record label: New Professor Music
Genre: Garage rock, post-punk, pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital

The lyrical and vocal stylings of Greg Katz are the unmistakable hallmark of any Cheekface song, and on Emphatically No., he’s out in full force. Like some of Cheekface’s biggest influences (The Modern Lovers, Pavement, Lou Reed), Katz and crew aim to make catchy and re-listenable pop rock music despite talking over the music as frequently as singing over it. Cheekface (also featuring bassist Amanda Tannen and drummer Mark Echo Edwards) succeed on two fronts: their knack for great hooks (“Emotional Rent Control” is the best example right now, but I could really choose any of these songs) and Katz’s put-it-all-out-there, swing-for-the-fences lyrics (“Boyfriend with a soul patch, I know, I know, it’s serious”, “I am eating like it’s Thanksgiving, but without the gratitude”, “I come from a long line of people, a long line of people who procreated”, and many more one-liners). Resistance is easy—listen to Empathically No. (Read more)

52. Alex Orange Drink – Everything Is Broken, Maybe That’s O.K.

Release date: September 17^th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Punk rock, folk punk
Formats: Digital

The latest album from Brooklyn’s Alex Orange Drink, the solo project of the So So Glos’ Alex Zarou Levine, is about two things. One of them should be familiar to most—that of love, heartbreak, and a general frustration with the fact that humans are controlled by and addicted to chemicals created by their own bodies. The other theme is homocystinuria, a serious, life-threatening, long-term metabolic genetic disorder from which Levine suffers. Levine doesn’t shy away from getting into the specifics of how homocystinuria impacts his life—album opener “Brooklyn, Central Booking” dives right into it, and two songs titled after it look at his childhood through its lens. Everything is chemical in Everything Is Broken, Maybe That’s O.K, everyone at the mercy of reactions in our own brains. Although at one point Levin mourns that he’s subsequently become isolated to the point where he’s the only one “who’s ever felt this uniquely lonely”, maybe if Everything Is Broken, then no one truly can be that alone. As he says in “Teenage Angst Forever”: “I think there’s an army marching behind me”. (Read more)

51. Hurry – Fake Ideas

Release date: June 25^th
Record label: Lame-O
Genre: Power pop, jangle pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital

Philadelphia’s Hurry have been responsible for some of the best power pop of the past few years, and their fourth record is every bit the equal of their past work, if not better. Lead singer and songwriter Matt Scottoline’s unabashedly melodic vocals are as unabashedly melodic as ever, and the music continues to evoke the likes of Teenage Fanclub, Tommy Keene, and Eyelids. Despite creating the perfect backdrop for a starry-eyed record full of bittersweet love songs, Fake Ideas looks internally more often that your typical power pop album. From the head-on confrontation of troubled and skewed thoughts brought about by mental illness in the title track to the repressive twist at the heart of the sun-soaked “Slogging Through Summer” through to the gorgeously reflective cores of “(Sometimes I’m About It, and) Sometimes I’m Not There” and “Where You Go, I Go”, Fake Ideas has plenty of meat to go along with its cotton candy exterior.

Click here for:

Part One (100-76)
Part Three (50-26)
Part Four (25-1)

Rosy Overdrive’s Top 100 Albums of 2021 (100-76)

I don’t want to do a big preamble to the year-end list this time around. It’s long enough as it is. This year, it is 100 albums, ranked. 51 through 100 go up today (Monday, December 6th), and 1 through 50 will be posted the day after (Tuesday, 12/7). Thanks for reading.

…Okay, fine. Rosy Overdrive started a year ago as a place for me to post my favorite records of last year somewhere where people might read and care about them, and it quickly became a lot more than that. Rosy Overdrive wrote about 147 different albums and EPs in 2021 (who’s to say there won’t be a few more before December’s over), and via the playlists highlighted and talked about over 24 hours’ worth of songs as well. 100 albums is a lot–but I had to leave out several good records to get there. I don’t know what will happen in 2022 with Rosy Overdrive, but it will continue to exist and cover new music in some form or another. Separate lists for EPs and reissues/compilations will go up later this month, or maybe early January. Thanks for reading, again. Seriously. Oh, and here’s a Spotify playlist of the 98 of these albums available on streaming services, if that is useful to you.

100. Wake Up – Tigers Can’t Be Choosers

Release date: February 14^th
Record label: Maggot Chic/Figbox
Genre: 90s indie rock, power pop
Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital

We’re kicking off the 2021 year-end list with a record that’s actually several years old. Tigers Can’t Be Choosers came out in February, but Wake Up recorded these songs in 2012-2013 before they were shelved for several years as the band, led by Los Angeles’ Evan Mui, focused on new material. The pandemic caused Mui and crew to look back, and I’m grateful they did—Tigers Can’t Be Choosers is an inspired collection of 90’s indie rock-influenced music that deserved to see the light of day. Mui’s melodic vocals conjure up Stephen Malkmus’ solo career at its most melodic, and there’s also a There’s Nothing Wrong with Love guileless pop sensibility to the record, particularly in opening track “I Gotta Gettaway”, one of the best songs of 2021 easily.

99. John R. Miller – Depreciated

Release date: July 16^th
Record label: Rounder
Genre: Country, folk rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital

Eastern West Virginia’s John R. Miller is new to most, but he’s not new—he’s been making music since the 2000s either leading, co-leading, or playing behind the scenes in bands like The Fox Hunt, Goodwolf, and Prison Book Club, as well as building a solo career as “John R. Miller & the Engine Lights”. Depreciated, his solo debut for historic Rounder Records, seems to be Miller’s moment: featuring a handful of re-recorded songs from his earlier days and plenty of new ones, Depreciated is a more-than-fine introduction to Miller’s lonesome country-folk. The country groove of opening track “Lookin’ Over My Shoulder” and the rambling “Faustina” are the starkest examples of Miller’s talent, while more subtle songs like the Craigslist ad “Half Ton Van” are growers.

98. Gold Dust – Gold Dust

Release date: October 15^th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Folk rock
Formats: Cassette, CD, digital

After putting in some time in the underappreciated Massachusetts shoegaze group Kindling, Gold Dust is the first solo material to come from Easthampton’s Stephen Pierce, and it finds him moving towards a warm folk rock sound. Gold Dust embraces a Neil Young-ish hybridization of folk songs and rock band instrumentation, where lazy acoustic guitar picking, strumming, and beautiful vocal melodies sit alongside meandering, soaring electric guitars and a blanket of distortion. The classic 60s and 70s folk influence is most obvious on the “clear” tracks like “Cat Song”, but Pierce buries strong writing underneath the fuzzy exterior of songs like “Anywhereing” as well. (Read more)

97. Gabriel Bernini – You Got Me

Release date: October 22^nd
Record label: Dadstache/Requested
Genre: Folk rock, country rock
Formats: Cassette, digital

You Got Me came together on both coasts of the United States—Gabriel Bernini wrote the album in his Los Angeles apartment while also apparently trying to make it as a comedian, and he went to his native Massachusetts to record the record with a cast of New England friends and collaborators. The end result is an infinitely comfortable folk rock album that doesn’t exactly hide its Bob Dylan and Lou Reed influences, but You Got Me never sacrifices Bernini’s songwriting for cosplay’s sake. The leisurely title track eases us all into Bernini’s friendly universe, and Bernini only continues to impress with songs like “Under All Summer” (featuring an excellent falsetto from the singer) and the equally-casual “Honeybee”. If this truly is the last new album to be released by Rochester, New York’s Dadstache Records, then they’ve gone out on a high note.

96. Grace Vonderkuhn – Pleasure Pain

Release date: August 13^th
Record label: Sheer Luck
Genre: Garage rock, psych-rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital

The second album from Wilmington, Delaware group Grace Vonderkuhn is a godsend for anyone looking for loud rock music that can command one’s attention with just a no-frills, power trio setup. Lead singer Grace Koon is one of indie rock’s more compelling vocalists, on display both in straight-up garage-y rippers (lead single “Put it on Me”, the amusingly-titled “Rock & Roll Gary”) and slow-burners (the title track, “Outside Girl”). Although Grace Vonderkuhn remain serious about rocking out, Pleasure Pain is a fun listen as well, thanks in part to the bouncy pop hooks of “Deep Ends” and “Things Are Changing” in the middle of the album. With these, along with the glowing lyrics from the closing ballad, “Illuminated”, Pleasure Pain makes the case for pleasure winning out in the end. (Read more)

95. Herzog – Fiction Writer

Release date: March 19^th
Record label: Exit Stencil
Genre: Power pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital

Herzog has been making their fuzzy garage rock out of Cleveland, Ohio for a decade now, and an entire year of that decade was spent slowly rolling out Fiction Writer—one song released a month, until the 12-track record was fully available in March. Despite the delayed release, these songs are all very much of a piece with each other and form something greater than the sum of their parts. Fiction Writer is a multi-layered collection of meta-rock anthems that find Herzog both playing with and taking literally the album’s title and how it relates to themselves as a band. And Herzog has a blast playing along with it, too—they still indulge in the garage rock numbers that garnered them semi-accurate Cloud Nothings and Weezer comparisons back in the day, but an aging musician/songwriter narrator connects Fiction Writer and gives it extra weight. Not that you need to feel said weight to enjoy the record, though. (Read more)

94. Birthday Ass – Head of the Household

Release date: April 23^rd
Record label: Ramp Local
Genre: Post-punk, no wave, jazz-rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital

Head of the Household is marked by the wild horn-section-led, adventurous jazzy rock of the Birthday Ass Players, and by the equally wild vocals of lead singer Priya Carlberg. The record is a kinetic and chaotic affair that’s certainly informed by their New England Conservatory background, but it comes off quite playful and pop-tuneful thanks to ample twists and turns through its nine songs. Opening track “Blah” starts, stops, and writhes around, and features a motor-mouth vocal from Carlberg that’s compellingly Pere Ubu-esque. All of Carlberg’s interjections and the music’s seemingly-unpredictable path are working very much in tandem with each other; as much as they might sound “tossed off” or “random”, I’m sure a lot of work went into making these songs cohere in such a way. There isn’t a dull moment on Head of the Household. (Read more)

93. Really From – Really From

Release date: March 12^th
Record label: Topshelf
Genre: Emo-jazz, post-rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital

With their self-titled third album, Boston’s Really From take a musical turn towards the expansive, opening up their unique blend of jazz, emo, and math rock in new ways but never letting this get in the way of their most cutting and focused lyrics to date. The down-stroked alt-rock verses of “Yellow Fever” and the ambient floating of “Apartment Song” are a bit curious back-to-back, but the mood-setting of the former and the punchiness of the latter both make sense in context. A band putting together something this musically adventurous always runs the risk of getting lost in the weeds, but the depth at the heart of Really From (the grappling with trying to learn a parent’s native language in “Try Lingual”, or the unflinching portrayal of household racial dynamics in “The House”) come through loud and clear. (Read more)

92. Katy Kirby – Cool Dry Place

Release date: February 19^th
Record label: Keeled Scales
Genre: Indie folk, folk pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital

The debut record from Texas-born, Nashville-based Katy Kirby is a classic singer-songwriter album that uses “folk rock” as a starting point for wherever its creator wants to take it. Cool Dry Place includes Auto-Tuned pop rock (“Traffic!”), balladry (the Leonard Cohen-quoting “Secret Language” and the gorgeous title track), and sparse folk (“Eyelids” and “Portals”). Songs like “Juniper” and “Fireman” feel timeless already, and I can tell that Kirby’s popularity is only going to grow by how much Cool Dry Place has already resonated with people. For instance: my mother does not get a vote on the Rosy Overdrive year-end list, but I know for a fact that Cool Dry Place would top her ballot (“I love her” – her full review).

91. Footings – Annihilation

Release date: July 30^th
Record label: Sophomore Lounge/Feeding Tube/Don’t Live Like Me/Trailing Twelve
Genre: Folk rock, alt-country
Formats: Vinyl, digital

The New Hampshire band Footings is led by Eric Gagne, with a backing cast that’s made up of musicians that have played in other New England bands such as Pile and Rick Rude. Like most of the acts that have graced Sophomore Lounge’s roster, Footings plays an expansive, inclusive brand of Americana/folk rock that’s as likely to lapse into ambient acoustic guitar plucking as it is to build to a post-rock crescendo—sometimes within the same song, like the mini-epic opening track “Tornado” or the ambitious “Heading West”. Suffice it to say, Annihilation packs a lot into under 30 minutes; weary folk/country reprieves like “Sometimes” and “Lottery” allow us a moment on the ground before Annihilation takes off yet again.

90. Lily Konigsberg – Lily We Need to Talk Now

Release date: October 29^th
Record label: Wharf Cat
Genre: Indie pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital

Lily Konigsberg may have done the most in 2021. Her band Palberta helped kick off the year back in January with their third album, she released a compilation of previously-released solo singles and EPs in May, released an EP as My Idea with Nate Amos two months later, and appeared on several releases by Amos’ This Is Lorelei project throughout 2021. To top it all off, we get Lily We Need to Talk Now, which is somehow only Konigsberg’s debut full-length, and it features everything I’d come to expect from Konigsberg. Lily We Need to Talk Now hops around fearlessly from the ambient haze of “Don’t Be Lazy with Me” to the minimalist Auto-Tuned pop of “Hark” to the classic giddy Konigsberg guitar pop of “That’s the Way I Like It”. I do wish it was a little longer than 24 minutes, sure, but it’s plenty substantial even at short-LP length.

89. Fortitude Valley – Fortitude Valley

Release date: October 29^th
Record label: Fika
Genre: Pop rock, power pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital

Fortitude Valley is a new band founded by the Brisbane, Australia-originating, Durham, England-living Laura Kovic, and she’s recruited some Durham-area indie rock royalty to fill out the four-piece. Half of Rosy Overdrive favorites Martha play in Fortitude Valley (guitarist Daniel Ellis and drummer Nathan Stephens Griffin), in addition to bass from Greg Ullyart of Night School. Fortitude Valley isn’t a far cry from Martha’s catchy, energetic power pop/pop-punk hybrid sound, but Kovic has a vocal and writing style distinct from her bandmates’ other group: it’s a little more unassuming and laid-back than Martha’s constant exuberance, perhaps befitting the Australian suburb from which the band and album take their names. Kovic’s a compelling songwriter, and I look forward to hearing more from Fortitude Valley.

88. Spirit Was – Heaven’s Just a Cloud

Release date: October 22^nd
Record label: Danger Collective
Genre: Fuzz rock, drone rock, doom metal
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital

Of the three singer-songwriters in the legendary (to me) cult indie rock band LVL UP, we’ve had to wait the longest for Spirit Was’ Nick Corbo to deliver a post-breakup full-length record. Heaven’s Just a Cloud comes three and a half years after LVL UP split, and the album is anything but slight. I had expected Corbo would indulge some of his heavier influences more now that he was on his own, but it’s still absolutely shocking when opening track “I Saw the Wheel” ends with a black metal breakdown. The rest of Heaven’s Just a Cloud isn’t quite as intense, but it still traverses new territory for Corbo. Down-tuned guitar riffs, glacial-paced fuzz rock, droning vocals that drift in and out of the songs—this isn’t “LVL UP but just the Nick songs”, and it’s not even in the same world as what his former bandmates Dave Benton and Michael Caridi are doing now. It’s Spirit Was.

87. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson – Theory of Ice

Release date: March 12^th
Record label: You’ve Changed
Genre: Folk rock, spoken word
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital

Theory of Ice, the latest album from Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg author and singer Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, is a strong collection of writing that draws inspiration from water and its forms, as well as her experiences as an indigenous North American. She and an all-star group of Canadian musicians steer the album deftly from forceful full-band folk rock (like their update of Willie Dunn’s withering “I Pity the County”, or the last half of the slow-building “Surface Tension”) to spare acoustic-led songs like “Failure of Melting” and “The Wake”. The louder moments are powerful on their own, but the quiet tracks let Simpson’s environmentally- and historically-aware but just as frequently poetic and in-the-moment lyrics come through clearly. “July 15^th, thirty cubic meters / Just like the Gwich’in always said,” she intones in “Failure of Melting”, before an equally important announcement: “I bring you coffee, a blanket, moonlight”.

86. Mac McCaughan – The Sound of Yourself

Release date: September 24^th
Record label: Merge
Genre: New wave, post-punk, ambient pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital

After making a pair of more experimental collaborative records with Mary Lattimore, The Sound of Yourself is closer to a “normal” Mac McCaughan solo album—but still a far cry from the indie punk of his main act. The Sound of Yourself feels like a low-key but sturdy affair from the Superchunk frontman and Merge Records co-owner, in which dreamy instrumental tracks sit alongside New Order-esque synthpop experiments and more “classic” McCaughan-sounding faire. Songs like the title track and “I Hear a Radio” are the most “post-punk” McCaughan has ever sounded, and vocal-less tracks like the ambient “36 and Rain” take some getting used to, to be sure. But it’s commendable that he’s pushing himself at this stage in his career, and that so much of the “weirder” tracks on The Sound of Yourself are successful is just as impressive as when he busts out a Portastatic-sounding pop tune (see “Dawn Bends”).

85. Japanese Breakfast – Jubilee

Release date: June 4^th
Record label: Dead Oceans
Genre: Indie pop, pop rock, dream pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital

As any reader of Rosy Overdrive can probably guess, I don’t have much of a handle on what’s “relevant” in the current “indie” “music” “landscape”. Among the inarguably Big Indie releases, however, Jubilee would have to get my vote for the best one of the year. It’s probably my favorite Japanese Breakfast album so far—Soft Sounds from Another Planet was impressive and all, but I never found myself eager to just throw it on and listen to it with the frequency with which I do with this one. The unabashed pop songs like “Be Sweet” and “Savage Good Boy” are fun and more than substantial enough to hold up with repeated listens, and the “studio tracks” are basically built for that kind of experience. Oh, and any record with “In Hell” on it is going to end up on this list.

84. Nervous Dater – Call in the Mess

Release date: February 26^th
Record label: Counter Intuitive
Genre: Indie punk, emo, pop punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital

Call in the Mess is Nervous Dater’s second album, following 2017’s solid Don’t Be a Stranger, and it sounds a lot like a band growing and taking a step forward together. The New York band can be broadly described as “emo/pop punk”, but Call in the Mess mostly seems to go with “whatever fits the song best”. “The Dirt” sports classic power pop synth hooks over a gruff punk vocal from drummer Andrew Goetz, and if “Farm Song” isn’t exactly “country rock”, the Lorenzo Wolff-played slide guitar is very real (and surprisingly fitting). Lead singer Rachel Lightner’s songs are as sharp as ever, essential for delivering the apocalyptic “Violent Haiku” and the mid-tempo doom-march of “Turn Them Ourselves in the Grave”.

83. Mdou Moctar – Afrique Victime

Release date: May 21^st
Record label: Matador
Genre: Psychedelic rock, blues rock, Tuareg guitar
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital

I was a little let-down by Afrique Victime at first—it felt less inspired to me compared to their excellent 2019 record, Illana (The Creator), which was a breakout moment for both Mdou Moctar and their then-label, the Sahara-specializing Sahel Sounds. It turns out that I just needed more time for The Riffs to work their magic on me. And Mdou Moctar’s Matador debut and first album as a four-piece (previously it had been the solo project of Tchintabaraden, Niger’s Mahamadou Souleymane) certainly has riffs—the swirling electric guitar at the center of opening two tracks “Chismiten” and “Taliat” are hypnotically pleasing, and later on in Afrique Victime, “Layla” does it all just as effectively built around an acoustic. Afrique Victime isn’t a step down—the Tuareg guitarist and his band might actually be at their peak.

82. Dave Scanlon – Pink in Each, Bright Blue, Bright Green

Release date: January 15^th
Record label: Whatever’s Clever
Genre: Indie folk, ambient folk
Formats: Vinyl, digital

Pink in Each, Bright Blue, Bright Green is a minimal folk album, one that trades the experimental rock of Dave Scanlon’s band JOBS for fingerpicking, speak-singing, and pastoral lyrics. Its sparse instrumentation and gentle vocals remind me more of Phil Elverum’s recent work over anything else, but there isn’t any one Dave Scanlon “style” over the course of the record. “Water’s No Crop” and “She Is the Girl Behind Your Money” grab one’s attention through vivid lyrics and busy picking, while the rest of the album plumbs various depths—“Everybody Knows” floats along through ambience and harmonics, “Indoors” is a near-spoken spoken word rumination on what its title suggests, and “We’ll Ride in Your Car” is a beautifully straightforward slowcore ballad. Pink in Each, Bright Blue, Bright Green—a good an argument as any for “less is more” in 2021. (Read more)

81. Pile – Songs Known Together, Alone

Release date: August 20^th
Record label: Exploding in Sound
Genre: Slowcore, ambient rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital

Songs Known Together, Alone, a sparse reinterpretation of selections from the Pile songbook, is merely the latest example of why “noise rock/post-hardcore” remains an unsatisfactory genre description for the Boston band. Essentially a pandemic-induced Rick Maguire solo album, half of it was recorded using synthesizer and (mostly in the form of accents and flourishes) electric guitar, and the second half Maguire plays alone on piano. For the most part, Maguire pulls from the moody and atmospheric side of his band, like “Hair” and “Keep the Last Light On”, but he isn’t afraid to tackle louder Pile tracks like “Afraid of Home” and “Mam’s Lipstick”. And I don’t know how exactly to categorize what he did in interpolating “Rope’s Length” and “My Employer” into a single nine-minute experience, but it sounds like nothing else in 2021. (Read more)

80. Styrofoam Winos – Styrofoam Winos

Release date: February 12^th
Record label: Sophomore Lounge
Genre: Alt-country, indie folk
Formats: Vinyl, digital

A supergroup of sorts, Nashville’s Styrofoam Winos feature three songwriters with notable discographies of their own—Lou Turner, Joe Kenkel, and Trevor Nikrant, and all three of them contribute their own styles to the band’s stuffed 40-minute self-titled record. Just in the first three songs, they rip through the country-fried egg punk of “Stuck in a Museum”, the charming southern folk duet of “In Your Room”, and the plaintive, Tweedy-esque “Once”. The final half or so of Styrofoam Winos floats away as if exhausted from the more raucous numbers earlier, but the lightly-strummed, caught-in-a-moment reflections of “Maybe More” and the string-aided mundane observations of “Wrong Season’s Length” are no less deftly-executed. (Read more)

79. Mythical Motors – A Rare Look Ahead

Release date: October 29^th
Record label: Lo-Fi City
Genre: Power pop, lo-fi pop
Formats: Cassette, digital

Mythical Motors bandleader Matt Addison shares much with his clear main influence, Robert Pollard: his penchant for collage-based album art, his lo-fi guitar pop, and even his choice of collaborators (A Rare Look Ahead was mastered by frequent Pollard producer Todd Tobias), even if his exuberant, ageless voice sounds more like Tobin Sprout’s. A Rare Look Ahead is Mythical Motors’ only record of 2021, and it picks up where their second album of 2020 (October’s Sleepwalking on Main Street) left off, with chiming lo-fi pop rock. In true Mythical Motors fashion, A Rare Look Ahead chugs through psych-tinged pop bites, tossing out 4-tracked power chords and vocal melodies at a clip of about two minutes per song. Even though the record does find Addison stretching out a bit with some (gasp) longer than two-minute songs and a handful of acoustic moments, A Rare Look Ahead never lets go of its pop convictions. (Read more)

78. Dummy – Mandatory Enjoyment

Release date: October 22^nd
Record label: Trouble in Mind
Genre: Noise pop, shoegaze, neo-psychedelia
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital

The sensory overlord, crate-digging noise pop of Los Angeles’ Dummy is a glove-like fit for Trouble in Mind Records, the home of their debut full-length album. Mandatory Enjoyment grabs one’s attention early on with its blend of shoegaze reverb/buried vocals with a krautrock rhythm section and droning keyboards, and the album only expands Dummy’s sound from that point. They explore delicate dream pop (“Cloud Pleaser”), a five-minute psychedelic journey (“H.V.A.C.”), restrained post-punk (“X-Static Blanket”), and spare lounge pop (“Aluminum in Retrograde”) before the curious but hypnotic closing track, “Atonal Poem”, sends us all on our way. Mandatory Enjoyment is an exciting debut that does what any “record collector” band seeks to do—synthesize sounds from the past into something new and vibrant. (Read more)

77. Pardoner – Came Down Different

Release date: May 14^th
Record label: Bar None
Genre: 90s indie rock, post-punk
Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital

Pardoner’s third album is some nice comfort music, for me at least. Came Down Different splits the difference between the hooky 90s indie rock revival of 2018’s Playin’ on a Cloud and the fuzzed-out, Polvo-inspired noise rock of 2017’s Uncontrollable Salvation. The last track on the new album, “Fuck You!”, even shouts out Polvo’s Ash Bowie, in addition to a bunch of other “dumb old guys” from which the Bay Area band have taken notes. Songs like “Totally Evil Powers” and the title track put them in the same sphere as the recent strain of garage-y post-punk revival bands, but extraordinarily loud and noisy pop songs populate the majority of Came Down Different (even the poppiest track, “I Wanna Get High to the Music”, turns into an alt-rock rave-up in the last part of its 70-second runtime).

76. Smol Data – Inconvenience Store

Release date: May 14^th
Record label: Open Door/Broken Camera
Genre: Pop punk, indie punk
Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital

Inconvenience Store is another scrappy under-the-radar indie punk, emo-adjacent rock record—at least on first blush. Musically, its unabashed, almost theatrical giddiness is a remarkable achievement, and the writing style of Smol Data’s Karah Goldstein is fascinating to me as well. Goldstein’s prose is not exactly purple or flowery—each individual line is fairly straightforward and makes sense on its own, but the songs on Inconvenience Store resist being easily strung together to make a linear story. That being said, there’s clearly a semi-autobiographic throughline of some sort across Inconvenience Store, but one doesn’t need to trace everything to appreciate the sharpness of tracks like the mini rock opera of “Bitch Store” and “Cartoon Str8 People”, which somehow sounds both tightly-controlled and right on the edge of falling off into something.

Click here for:

Part Two (75-51)
Part Three (50-26)
Part Four (25-1)

New Playlist: November 2021

The music world is winding things down for year-end list season (Rosy Overdrive will join them soon enough), but we are not done with November just yet. The latest edition of the Rosy Overdrive Monthly Playlist is the most “let’s cram a bunch of new music together while it’s all still fresh” edition thus far, I think—almost everything here is from 2021. I’ve been catching up with a lot of albums I missed recently, and also here is where I’m highlighting a lot of releases that I wanted to cover as a whole album but just didn’t have the time to do so.

Artists with multiple tracks this time around: Chime School, Angel Du$t, and Charlotte Cornfield all get two apiece.

You can hear the entire thing on Spotify here, and most of it on Tidal and BNDCMPR, and be sure to check out previous playlist posts if you’ve enjoyed this one.

“You Got Me”, Gabriel Bernini
From You Got Me (2021, Dadstache)

The latest record from former New Englander, current Los Angeles resident Gabriel Bernini is an infinitely comfortable folk rock album that doesn’t exactly hide its Dylan and Lou Reed influences, but never sacrifices Bernini’s songwriting for cosplay’s sake. You Got Me’s opening title track begins with a vintage-sounding, organ-keyboard riff (Bernini is a former touring keyboardist for roots rockers Deer Tick) that welcomes leisurely-strummed guitar and ringing piano accents all before Bernini confidently takes the mic. If this truly is the last new album to be released by Rochester, New York’s Dadstache Records, then at least we got You Got Me.

“Blame Myself”, Charlotte Cornfield
From Highs in the Minuses (2021, Double Double Whammy/Polyvinyl)

One of the most upbeat songs on Charlotte Cornfield’s very good new album Highs in the Minuses comes with a mantra for those of us who relive every moment of their pasts in bed each night before falling asleep: “I try not to blame myself / For anything I did / When I was just a kid”. Cornfield puts forward some of the best storytelling in music this year throughout the new record’s eleven songs, and the scenes in “Blame Myself” are no different. Cornfield lies to and is forgiven by her friend Amelia, writes extensively to herself, and drinks wine on a trampoline at some point in her past. “Part of me is still 17 in my mind,” she admits in the song’s closing line, but whether it’s a rejoinder to the song’s chorus or a reaffirmation of it I couldn’t say.

“Flashover”, Barlow
From Walls of Future (2021)

Barlow is something of a sibling band to Gaadge, who released the very good Yeah? earlier this year. The Pittsburgh groups feature common members (Ethan Oliva fronts Barlow and plays guitar in Gaadge, while Andy Yadeski drums for both), and they both play reverb-heavy, shoegaze-adjacent indie rock. While they’re equally My Bloody Valentine disciples, Barlow is the more punk/pop of the two: Walls of Future has plenty of hooks buried underneath the noise, as much Vampire on Titus as it is Loveless. Opening track “Flashover” is a forward-charging fuzz-rock attention-getter, although Oliva’s vocals are clear enough in the gaps between the walls of sound.

“Truck Songs”, Angel Du$t
From YAK: A Collection of Truck Songs (2021, Roadrunner)

Yeah, I dunno. Angel Du$t is fronted by Justice Tripp, the vocalist of hardcore band Trapped Under Ice, and he’s backed up by the majority of hardcore/jock jam revival act Turnstile here. I’m a little intrigued by indie rock/power pop side projects of hardcore dudes at the moment, so I gave YAK: A Collection of Truck Songs a listen, and, well…it’s very good. And it also has no hardcore in it whatsoever. And other than a cameo from Rancid’s Tim Armstrong, there isn’t much punk either. This is pure Rob Schnapf-produced guitar pop rock—they cite the Lemonheads as an influence and they aren’t fucking with you there at all. “Truck Songs”, which is I guess kind of a title track, starts with this awesome surf rock-type riff before veering into fuzz rock and then a hell of a chorus hook from Tripp. And then they repeat it a bunch. They could’ve gone on for another five minutes, I wouldn’t have minded.

“Dead Saturdays”, Chime School
From Chime School (2021, Slumberland)

“Dead Saturdays” is jangle pop at its brisk, sugary beverage-drunk best. Andy Pastalaniec, the San Francisco musician and long-time drummer making his solo debut as Chime School, stuffs the song with melodic guitar leads, tasteful background synths, and a driving drumbeat that helps “Dead Saturdays”—and for that matter, the rest of Chime School—run as smoothly as possible. And that’s not even accounting for Pastalaniec’s vocals, emotional but not showy, singing about a classic day-of-the-week yearning pop lyric. Read more about Chime School here.

“All Hail the Great Destroyer”, Fortitude Valley
From Fortitude Valley (2021, Fika)

Fortitude Valley is a new band founded by the Brisbane, Australia-originating, Durham, England-living Laura Kovic, and she’s recruited some Durham-area indie rock royalty to fill out the four-piece. Half of Rosy Overdrive favorites Martha play in Fortitude Valley (guitarist Daniel Ellis and drummer Nathan Stephens Griffin), in addition to bass from Greg Ullyart of Night School. Fortitude Valley isn’t a far cry from Martha’s catchy, energetic power pop/pop-punk hybrid sound, but Kovic has a vocal and writing style distinct from her bandmates’ other group: it’s a little more unassuming and laid-back than Martha’s constant exuberance, perhaps befitting the Australian suburb from which the band and album take their names. Kovic can still rock and command attention, though, mind you: “All Hail the Great Destroyer” finds her delivering “Won’t you please come and rescue me? Spent too many years in this black hole, baby,” with matter-of-fact confidence.

“Dear Resident”, Robert Sotelo
From Celebrant (2021, Upset the Rhythm)

Andrew Doig has already had an accomplished 2021—back in February, the band in which he plays bass, Nightshift, released a very good album on Trouble in Mind Records. Nightshift make a very distinct, minimalist, no-wave-influenced kind of post-punk, but under his Robert Sotelo alias, Doig explores psychedelic synthpop. Celebrant is Sotelo’s fourth record, and it shares at least one thing with his other band: there’s plenty of pop to go around. Nowhere is this more on display than opening track “Dear Resident”, featuring a delicate melodic vocal from Sotelo that could’ve been pulled from any number of decades of British alt-pop—just that, instead of jangly guitars, it’s pulled along by lilting synths and a mid-tempo drum machine beat. The showy synth-instrumental breaks in between Sotelo’s voice feel very Oranges & Lemons-era XTC as filtered through digital translation.

“Cannonball”, Snow Ellet and Quarter-Life Crisis
(2021, Wax Bodega)

I must say, I’m getting more and more impressed with these Snow Ellet songs. Ellet, aka Eric Reyes, received some deserved hype for their Suburban Indie Rock Star EP in the first half of 2021 (which will be forever linked in my mind to the debut EP of Camp Trash, another act who recently released a leveling-up single that appears on this playlist), and their standalone “Wine on the Carpet” single nailed a specific kind of clear-eyed bummer pop of which I’d be happy to hear more. “Cannonball”, recorded with Ryan Hemsworth, aka Quarter-Life Crisis, is something else entirely, but still recognizably Snow Ellet. I don’t know if the fuzz-rock undertone of the song is Hemsworth’s doing, but it rocks in a way that Snow Ellet hadn’t quite rocked before, and Reyes still contributes as ace of a pop-punk vocal melody as any of their other tracks thus far.

“Illusion”, The Tubs
From Names (2021, Trouble in Mind)

Owen Williams and George Nicholls put themselves on the map playing in Cardiff’s unforgettably-titled Joanna Gruesome, but the now-London-based duo also form the basis of the five-piece band The Tubs—a band which inhabits the world of classic British jangle pop, from The Cleaners from Venus to Felt, from C86 to Slumberland. Their debut EP (and sophomore release, after a two-song single in early 2020) is four songs of positively triumphant guitar pop, and Names’ opening track is an instant classic. “Illusion” places Williams’ heart-on-sleeve vocals front and center—the bouncy instrumental is more than capable of captivating as well, only enhancing Williams’ pensive lyrics that seem to touch on dysphoria and individual presentation (“Sometimes I can’t see myself when I look into the mirror…Is it just an illusion staring back at me?”).

“Drunk”, Frogpond
From Time Thief (2021, Black-Site)

Just last month, I highlighted a song from Frogpond’s 1996 debut album, Count to Ten, and promised that if any song from their upcoming reunion record rose to the same heights, we’d be right back to them. Well, here we are again with the Kansas City band already, which bodes well for their 20-plus-years-in-the-making third album, Time Thief. “Drunk” is a classic mid-tempo 90s alt-rock track that could’ve easily come from the band’s heyday: the rhythm-section-heavy verses and the roaring power chords that mark the instrumental chorus are the “Pixies-esque” signifiers that Frogpond have always dabbled in, but the weary vocals of Heidi Phillips are all her own.

“Anything”, Elly Kace
From Nothing I Say Means Anything (2021, Dragonbreath)

Brooklyn’s Elly Kace is both a fresh face and an old hat—she’s been singing virtually her whole life, a journey that took her from children’s choirs all the way to becoming an award-winning opera singer. Nothing I Say Means Anything, however, is Kace’s first recorded foray outside of the music world in which she grew up, instead embracing the indie and art pop that she has long admired. Kace cites Kate Bush and Bjork as influences, and I also hear a lot of Laurie Anderson in Nothing I Say Means Anything. “Anything” falls in the middle of the album, and it’s a bit of an oasis after Kace fully embraces pop bombast in the record’s first few songs. Although it might be one of the more “subtle” songs on Nothing I Say Means Anything, it’s far from half-hearted—Kace reminds us all of her musical background with an inspired vocal take, and the song’s acoustic, pastoral instrumental is the perfect backdrop.

“Weed Song”, Double Grave
From Echinacea (2021, Suntanman)

The second and best song on Double Grave’s latest EP, Echinacea, is a sub-two-minute track that synthesizes the band’s slowcore and 90s lo-fi indie rock influences into an unassuming but brilliant pop song. “Weed Song” is effectively just one looping monster of a molasses guitar riff and Jeremy Warden’s weary, melodic vocal that matches the guitar in both categories. “One more hit, don’t wanna think for a while,” Warden murmurs in the song’s opening line, but the rest of “Weed Song”’s lyrics suggest that he’s not quite successful in this resolution. The Minneapolis band also adds some tasteful synths near the end of the track, but it enhances rather than detracts from the song’s percussion-less reflective beauty. And then it just ends, real suddenly—like everything else, I guess.

“SIN”, Alcopops
From Devil (2021, Kangals Krall)

The latest from Portland, Oregon’s Alcopops is a four-song EP that liberally pulls from power pop, shoegaze, pop punk, post-grunge, and 90s indie rock all in under fifteen minutes. The group—singer/guitarist Leland Brehl, bassist Simon Miller, and drummer Ben Burwell—pretty clearly know their way around a pop song, and they kick the DEVIL EP off with their best foot forward. “SIN” boasts a classic slacker-rock riff, chugging yet melodic verses, and a chorus from Brehl that strains against Alcopops’ Portland punk trio set-up but not, like, in a way that ruins the song’s vibe. This is giddy noise pop done up in its most basic rock elements, except for—wait, what’s up with those floating synths at the end of the track? That’s pretty cool too.

“My Street”, Russel the Leaf
From Re Mix “My Street” (2021, Records from Russ)

As best as I can tell, the four-song Re Mix “My Street” EP is not a “remix album” in the traditional sense—I believe all of the songs are new tracks from Russel the Leaf. Evan M. Marre, who is Russel the Leaf, released what he called his “punk departure record” back in September, but because he self-releases all his albums and doesn’t use social media other than Instagram, I only just now discovered it. Despite Marre’s (presumably) half-joking description, Re Mix “My Street” isn’t a world away from February’s Then You’re Gunna Wanna—a little fuzzier and faster, sure, but still the same studio-crafted power pop Russ. “My Street”, the semi-title track, is a jaunty pop-rocker that seems to excitedly barrel down its namesake roadway.

“Quality”, Bedtime Khal
From Wake Up (2019, Dr. Esophagus/Devil Town)

Bedtime Khal, specifically with his Wake Up EP, and specifically on the song “Quality” on that Wake Up EP, is something of a curiosity. Khal Malik is a lo-fi bedroom pop musician from Michigan, but he doesn’t make indie folk that sounds like a heavily-sedated Lou Barlow, nor does he trade in sanitized pop punk. More than anything else, Wake Up sounds like a lower-budget (but not lower quality) version of the British 2000s post-punk revival, down to the showy bass guitar parts and Malik’s occasionally yelp-shouty vocals. I discovered Bedtime Khal through Leeds’ Devil Town Tapes reissuing his Wake Up and Hard to Find EPs on cassette, which made me just assume he was British at first. The jittery, early-morning briskness of “Quality”, however, sounds great on any continent.

“Go Away from My Window”, Myriam Gendron
From Ma délire – Songs of Love, Lost & Found (2021, Feeding Tube)

The latest album from Montreal, Quebec folk singer Myriam Gendron is a long journey that justifies its hyphenated title. Her fist album in seven years, Ma délire – Songs of Love, Lost & Found stretches Gendron’s bilingual, expansive mix of traditional acoustic folk and towering rock music across fifteen songs and seventy-five minutes. With Ma délire, Gendron takes on folk music from the United States, Canada, and France—opening track “Go Away from My Window” is one of the two songs on the record credited to American folk songwriter and archivist John Jacob Niles. In Ma délire, it’s one of the more straightforward songs: Gendron’s matter-of-fact vocals emphasize the song’s ageless lyrics, and the only accompaniment is a double-tracked, lightly-picked acoustic guitar that eventually reaches towards melody but doesn’t detract from Gendron.

“Weird Florida”, Camp Trash
(2021, Count Your Lucky Stars)

Ah, memories. Oh, no, I’m not talking about the specific era of turn-of-the-century big-Pop-little-punk pop-punk that Camp Trash have excelled at evoking throughout their brief career. I’m talking about how their debut EP Downtiming was one of the first records Rosy Overdrive ever wrote about, way back in January. Those four tracks still hold up well—a sneaky collection of songs that were content to let their catchiness slowly reveal themselves than beat you over the head with it. “Weird Florida”, their first new song since Downtiming, didn’t need to grab you by the shirt collar either—but Camp Trash went the extra mile for us anyway, and put together an instant classic as a result. That gleeful pop-song chord progression isn’t messing around, and the backing vocals in the chorus are pure precision.

“Arizona”, Log Across the Washer
From It’s Funny How the Colors (2021, Crash Symbols)

It’s Funny How the Colors spends time probing both ends of “experimental pop”, but “Arizona” falls squarely into the “pop” portion of Log Across the Washer’s latest album. Of the handful of lo-fi jangle pop songs scattered throughout the record, “Arizona”, despite being hidden away in the middle of It’s Funny How the Colors’ second half, might the most straightforwardly pleasing of them all. Tyler Keene’s vocals are delicate, Mark Linkous-evoking, and almost twee, and the steady, leisurely instrumental never veers from its guitar-pop grounding. Read more about It’s Funny How the Colors here.

“Residential Military”, OMBIIGIZI
From Sewn Back Together (2022, Arts & Crafts)

The upcoming debut album from OMBIIGIZI is a collaboration between Anishnaabe artists Daniel Monkman and Adam Sturgeon, the latter of whom leads the Status / Non-Status project that I’ve highlighted on Rosy Overdrive before. The Status / Non-Status EP from earlier this year was a bit all over the map, featuring warm reverby psych-rock sitting side by side with angry post-hardcore, and indications are that Sewn Back Together may be similarly restless. Lead single “Residential Military” is both poppy and noisy indie rock that cites late-era Sonic Youth as an inspiration, and Sturgeon’s stoic vocals also remind me of Beauty Pill’s Chad Clark. One doesn’t title a song “Residential Military” if one doesn’t have anything to say, but OMBIIGIZI are content to speak in images (“Birch bark canoe merges onto the freeway / No turn signal, how to switch lanes?”) for now. Read more about Sewn Back Together here.

“Little Love Songs”, Wendy Eisenberg
From Bent Ring (2021, Dear Life)

“Little Love Songs” is a hidden gem that’s buried in the second half of Bent Ring, and there are plenty of lyrical clues as to why Wendy Eisenberg might have done that intentionally. Even on a record predicated on risk taking (Eisenberg, an accomplished guitarist, recorded Bent Ring with no guitar, substituting in “a strange, salvaged, nameless banjo”), “Little Love Songs” is the result of Eisenberg straying even further from their comfort zone. “I told myself not to write sentimental / This dare I took seemed to have other plans,” Eisenberg explains at the beginning of the song, before plowing ahead anyway. “This is a very advanced form of torture,” they sing pleasantly over a bouncy banjo strum. “Writing this way is much too forward, much too upbeat,” they sing upbeat-ly and forwardly. Read more about Bent Ring here.

“Plain Sight”, The Goodbye Party
From Stray Sparks (2021, Double Double Whammy)

In praise of the low-key follow-up. The Goodbye Party’s second album, Beautiful Motors, surfaced on Double Double Whammy last year after a five-year gap, and its deft take on bedroom power-pop practically guaranteed it a spot on Rosy Overdrive’s Best Albums of 2020 list. Fans of Michael Cantor, the person behind The Goodbye Party, did not have to wait nearly as long for new music this time around. Barely a year later, the surprise-released Stray Sparks is “part album, part mixtape, part soundtrack, part tape collage” in which piano instrumentals, songs that utilize Cantor’s recent interest in sampling, and more “traditional” Goodbye Party songs all sit side-by-side. “Plain Sight” is closest to the latter, albeit more sparse than most of Beautiful Motors. Over a quiet acoustic guitar and some background noise, Cantor sings a vocal that’s as strong as anything he’s done.

“Get a Bike”, Chime School
From Chime School (2021, Slumberland)

“Get a Bike” boasts arguably the best vocal melody in Chime School, a record brimming with them—but even Andy Pastalaniec’s voice is outshone by that positively exuberant, ecstatic opening guitar riff. In the song’s lyrics, Pastalaniec instructs the listener to “ride a motorbike around in the country, if you want to understand”, while also referencing “1960s cars” and a “little Honda”. This transportation motif seems important—it isn’t the only song on Chime School with a motorcycle allusion in the title (see: “Fixing Motorcycles”), and with how zippy Chime School is, I doubt it’s unintentional. Read more about Chime School here.

“Boy/Moon”, Doran
From Doran (2021, Spinster)

The North Carolina/West Virginia-based Spinster Records ruled the first half of 2021, going two for two with the roaring country rock of Rosali’s No Medium and the delicate but determined fingerstyle acoustic guitar of Yasmin Williams’ Urban Driftwood. The label’s follow-up release is something that both makes total sense among this company, yet is completely different than either. Doran is a “four person freak folk collective” featuring the talents of Elizabeth LaPrelle, Channing Showalter, Annie Schermer, and Brian Dolphin, and despite being clearly a folk record, feels like all four bring a breadth of influences to the table. “Boy/Moon” is one of Schermer’s, and she apparently improvised it completely on the harmonium. Over a droning tone, Schermer’s steady voice guides the song through both “eerie” and “gorgeous” (often both).

“Sometimes”, Footings
From Annihilation (2021, Sophomore Lounge/Feeding Tube/Don’t Live Like Me/Trailing Twelve)

The New Hampshire band Footings is led by Eric Gagne, with a backing cast that’s made up of musicians that have played in other New England bands such as Pile and Rick Rude. Like most of Sophomore Lounge’s roster, Footings plays an expansive, inclusive brand of Americana/folk rock that’s as likely to lapse into ambient acoustic guitar plucking as it is to build to a post-rock crescendo. Suffice it to say, Annihilation packs a lot into under 30 minutes. “Sometimes” is one of the record’s quieter, “breather track” moments, featuring warm vocals from Gagne over top of harmonies from the rest of the band and Elisabeth Fuchsia’s string accents.

“Sunset Town”, The Telephone Numbers
From The Ballad of Doug (2021, Meritorio)

I’m late to The Telephone Numbers’ The Ballad of Doug—it came out in June—but it’s as sturdy a jangle pop record as any other that’s been released in 2021, and I may yet try to write about it beyond “Sunset Town” if time permits. The Ballad of Doug has a familiar yet distinct sound, an instrumentally soft, vocally clear and emotional take on guitar pop that sounds closer to the late Tommy Keene than anything I’ve heard in awhile. The band (featuring vocalist Thomas Rubenstein of The Love-Birds and Bay Area jangle pop dean Glenn Donaldson) are at their sweetest on “Sunset Town”, a song that features a classically bittersweet chorus in which Rubenstein and (I think) keyboardist Morgan Stanley give it their all.

“Kennedy”, Feeble Little Horse
From Hayday (2021, Julia’s War)

I have to love any song that starts with a Clone High sample. As best as I can tell, “Kennedy” has little to actually do with the 2000s MTV cartoon, and if it’s about John F. Kennedy himself I’m not sure either, but it’s still a fun highlight from Hayday, the debut record from Pittsburgh’s Feeble Little Horse. On the surface, Hayday bears some similarity to fellow Pittsburgh shoegaze-influenced reverb rockers Barlow and Gaadge, but this brief, 21-minute LP fully embraces noisy, crackly guitar pop over subtle texture-building. Especially on “Kennedy”, a track that sounds like it’s about to burst right through my speakers as Ryan Walchonski, Sebastian Kinsler, and Jake Kelley bash out their respective instruments over Lydia Slocum’s insistent vocals.

“Remember”, The Ocean Greys
From Next Station (2021)

The austere dream pop of The Ocean Greys is the project of Pete Pagonis, who’s written the songs and played virtually every instrument on the three EPs the band has released in the past year and a half. However, the one non-Pagonis contribution is an essential one: lead singer Kora Goodman, whose icy voice effectively completes The Ocean Greys’ dark, chilly vibe. This is Goodman’s first release with Pagonis (about why former singer Carlee Jackson is no longer involved, Pagonis simply says “it wasn’t meant to be”), but Next Station’s mix of Mazzy Star ambience, Portishead electronic-rock, and slowcore empty-space utilization feels like a natural collaboration between the two artists. Opening track “Remember” is particularly sparse, with Goodman’s stoic vocals holding court against Pagonis’ slow-building synths and steady drumbeat.

“Line Going Out the Door”, High Pony
From All We Did Was Dream (2021, Super Wimpy Punch)

You’re probably looking for some 90s indie rock-inspired new music, yes? I know I always am. Well, Brooklyn’s High Pony are more than worth your time in that case. The latest record from what’s now a trio (singer/guitarist/bassist Seth Goldman, guitarist Jay Fox, drummer Pete Stanton) has shades of Pavement, Built to Spill, and even some 90s emo, but I hear Modest Mouse in Goldman’s voice and backing band above anything else. “Line Going Out the Door” is the “hit” from All We Did Was Dream—it’s able to shuttle the energy of High Pony’s garage-band squall and Goldman’s muttering and yelling into a darkly anthemic chorus.

“Drunk for You”, Charlotte Cornfield
From Highs in the Minuses (2021, Double Double Whammy/Polyvinyl)

It can be a chore sometimes determining which of all these indie singer-songwriter albums are actually deserving of the music writer hyperbole, but all of this can be subverted with one “Drunk for You”. As an advance single, it hooked me instantly, and while the rest of Highs in the Minuses lived up to its promise, this song is still just something else. It’s a beautiful piano-and-vocals composition, a sparse musical background for a set of lyrics that are nowhere near so simple. The relationship Charlotte Cornfield describes is bleak and doomed (“I was caught up in our sad ballet / Of fighting ‘til we fell asleep” would be tough even if it wasn’t followed up by “You don’t even like my songs, you don’t even like me”), but Cornfield describes the mess with a sad dignity. The song’s music video, in which she sings while standing waist-deep in the waves of Lake Ontario, seems apt.

“Nothin’ to Say”, Snake Lips
From Melt the Sun (2021, Repeating Cloud/Totally Real)

Portland, Maine’s Repeating Cloud Records haven’t exactly pigeonholed themselves. 2021 has seen the label release music from shoegazers Crystal Canyon, scrappy pop-punk group Crunchcoat, and the dark post-hardcore of Mouth Washington. Still, if they wanted to become “Maine’s number one garage rock label”, they certainly could: after the debut EP from similarly-minded That Hideous Sound, the four-piece Snake Lips have offered up a half-dozen tracks of vintage Wavves-esque fuzzy garage rock revival. My favorite track from Melt the Sun (co-released with Totally Real Records, whose signee We Are Joiners guests on another song), “Nothin’ to Say”, is one of the breezier numbers on the EP, almost a jangle-rock tune but with a harder edge—oh, and of course, it’s only a minute and a half long.

“Africa Iyo”, Jean-Pierre Djeukam
From Cameroon Garage Funk (2021, Analog Africa)

Analog Africa’s most recent compilation is presented as a document of the vibrant 1970s music scene around the city of Yaoundé, the capital of the central-Atlantic African country of Cameroon. Most of Cameroon Garage Funk was supposedly recorded by one engineer using one microphone in a local church—however it was made, it sounds great for a fifty-year-old archival release from any country. The whole compilation is worth a listen, but the record’s opening track sets a particularly high bar for the rest of it: “Africa Iyo”, performed by Jean-Pierre Djeukam, is a nonstop energy jolt that perfectly exemplifies “garage funk” music. A beast of a rhythm section and horns lead the song in a way that certainly recalls American funk and rock music but doesn’t mirror it.

“Over My Head”, Megan Siebe
From Swaying Steady (2021, Shrimper/Grapefruit)

Shrimper and Grapefruit Records are co-releasing Swaying Steady as the debut full-length record for Megan Siebe, but it sounds like the Omaha singer-songwriter has accrued plenty of behind-the-scenes experience for both of those labels beforehand. She’s played in the band of Grapefruit Records founder Simon Joyner, and arranged strings for Shrimper mainstays Refrigerator and John Davis, among others. “Over My Head”, which opens Swaying Steady, is a confident piece of mid-American alt-country, and Siebe sounds perfectly at home as the main attraction of a record. Far from the lo-fi that put Shrimper Records on the map, tasteful piano and twangy guitar dress up “Over My Head”, the star of which is still unambiguously Siebe’s voice.

“Cool Faith”, Angel Du$t
From YAK: A Collection of Truck Songs (2021, Roadrunner)

Oh, this is nearly as good as “Truck Songs”! “Cool Faith” isn’t trying to impress with its dynamics quite as much as that one, but it more than makes up for it in sheer exuberance. It doesn’t have any vehicles in its title or lyrics, but its just as driving as YAK’s semi-title track. This is, like, slam-dunk commercial music. Beer, cars, vacation destinations…it’s not “garage rock revival”, but it’s got the same unpretentious excitement that the best of that genre did (does, I guess) well. Also, because of the song’s title, it’s extremely hard to Google without being inundated with results for Faith No More’s 1992 album Angel Dust. Justice Tripp and crew aren’t yet Mike Patton big, but, well, let’s give them a couple more years.

“Hecky Skelters”, Godcaster
From Saltergasp (2021, Ramp Local)

The chaotic six-piece rock band Godcaster rips through four songs in under ten minutes in their latest EP, Saltergasp. Most of the record is an instrumental free-for-all, with experimental guitar lines and crashing percussion fighting for control over the songs and the listener’s attention. Opening track and lead single “Hecky Skelters” is no different, but singer David McFaul’s deep monotone vocals are equally important for this one. When he sings (backed by the vocals of, maybe, flautist Von Kolk, it’s hard to tell), the song takes rough shape as a sloppy garage rock number, only to lapse back into anarchy once Godcaster’s singer looks the other way.

“My Friend”, Cindy
From 1:2 (2021, Mt.St.Mtn.)

Yet another San Francisco indie pop band, Cindy hews towards the slow and dreamy end of the guitar pop spectrum. The group is the project of Karina Gill, who began making music “only recently” but has clearly made up for lost time, releasing three albums as Cindy over the past three years. 1:2 is a cohesive listen; album track “My Friend” is representative of the record as a whole in its leisurely paced instrumental and melodic vocals from Gill. It’s not quite Paisley Underground psychedelic, but we are veering into Mazzy Star Velvet Underground-interpreting territory here with the clearly-recorded slowcore pop song chords and Gill’s matter-of-fact voice.

“Stolen Beer”, Rural France
From RF (2021, Meritorio)

West Wiltshire, England’s Rural France are lo-fi indie rock true believers, plowing through Guided by Voices-inspired hooky power pop through a layer of distortion as well as across the pond groups such as Mythical Motors and Galactic Static. Their second album, the garage-recorded RF, fits eleven songs in at about 26 minutes, and while “Stolen Beer” isn’t the only home-run pop anthem on the record (“Teenage Tom Petty” also comes to mind), its bittersweet chorus hook and pushing-three-minute runtime helps distinguish the track as “lead single material” as much as a band like this can have a “lead single”. The band’s core duo of Tom Brown and Rob Frawkes put together a two-pronged guitar attack, allowing chugging power chords and triumphant leads to both stick out of the song’s garage-rock veneer—“’Stolen Beer’ tastes much sweeter”, indeed.

“Oreo”, Pass Away
From Thirty Nine (2021, Suburbia)

Thirty Nine by Pass Away is professional punk rock music. The Brooklyn band is made up of members of long-hauling acts I Am the Avalanche and Crime in Stereo, and as a cohesive trio they aren’t spring chickens either, putting together a couple of EPs and a debut record in the 2010s before taking three years to release a proper follow-up to the latter. Not quite as hard as but still in the same realm as their “other” bands, Thirty Nine is full of rugged but determined pop-punk (orgcore), among which is the highlight “Oreo”. The song rocks both the pop-pleasing side (the power chord-heavy verse, the sing-along chorus) and the Serious Punk side (the stone-faced instrumental intro that also separates the verses).

“Oh the Night”, Courtney Barnett
From Things Take Time, Take Time (2021, Mom+Pop)

Remember when Courtney Barnett was supposed to single-handedly save rock and roll or whatever? Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit was a perfectly decent debut record that was burdened was overhype and unreasonable expectations, and if you approach her music without that baggage she’s done just fine since. 2018’s Tell Me How You Really Feel has actually become underrated, and while Things Take Time, Take Time definitely feels disappointingly slight at first after a three-year wait, there’s a lot to like on the record, especially among the album’s back half. Album closer “Oh the Night” is one of Barnett’s finest songs yet, one last fumble towards clarity on a record that seems to constantly circle around it but never latches on completely.

“We Need You for Our Plan”, Trevor Nikrant
From Tall Ladders (2021, Dear Life)

The latest record from Nashville indie folk singer (and Styrofoam Wino member) Trevor Nikrant is a composed, refined take on underground alt-country that’s refreshing in its neatness. A mid-album highlight, the gently-picked “We Need You for Our Plan” almost remind me of Dagger Beach-era John Vanderslice, featuring studio flourishes colliding with more austere indie folk-rock songwriting. Nikrant tenderly sings the title line over an acoustic guitar that’s steadily marching forward, and the song builds by adding a matching drumbeat that ramps things up until Nikrant raises his singing voice ever-so-slightly toward the end. Read more about Tall Ladders here.

“Judy and the Dream of Horses”, Belle & Sebastian
From If You’re Feeling Sinister (1996, Jeepster)

I believe that “Judy and the Dream of Horses” is the only 1996 song to make the playlist this time around, but what a song—the closing track to Belle & Sebastian’s second and possibly most beloved record, If You’re Feeling Sinister, is a perfect indie pop track. I’ve never been a huge Belle & Sebastian fan—listening to a full album of theirs front-to-back isn’t easy for me, but I’ve picked out songs here and there that have stood out, and this might be the strongest one I’ve come across yet. Stuart Murdoch is going on about some girl named Judy who dreams about horses and then writes songs about said dreams about horses (I imagine there are like six other Belle & Sebastian songs that have basically the same plot as this), but for whatever reason he sounds more poignant here than usual. I’ll just enjoy it.

Pressing Concerns: The Antelopes, Trevor Nikrant, Big Heet, Hans Condor

In this eclectic edition of Pressing Concerns, Rosy Overdrives discusses new records from Trevor Nikrant (of Styrofoam Winos), Big Heet, and Hans Condor, as well as Floating Mill Records’ reissue of London post-punk band The Antelopes’ discography.

If you’re looking for more new music, you can browse previous editions of Pressing Concerns or visit the sit e directory.

The Antelopes – Breaking News

Release date: November 5^th
Record label: Floating Mill
Genre: Post-punk, dance punk
Formats: Cassette, CD, vinyl (single only), digital
Pull track: How Can We Dance (With Our Backs Up to the Wall)

Right on the heels of their reissue of Tampa band The Stick Figures’ late 70s/early 80s recordings, Pittsburgh’s Floating Mill Records have unearthed another lost post-punk band, this time from across the pond. Formed by three braille translators (guitarist/vocalist Glenn Dallender, bassist Martin O’Keefe-Liddard, and guitarist Steve Empson) and a pub worker (vocalist Tilly Vosburgh) and later adding a drummer (Vince Brown), The Antelopes originally lasted long enough to make a single six-song recording session in 1981. Their only release was a 7” single comprised of two of those recordings, and although the London band self-reissued some of their material last year, Breaking News seems to be a comprehensive physical document of all the band’s output as well as a few bonus tracks from an Antelopes offshoot called The Class of ‘76.

The two tracks that made up The Antelopes’ lone single (which Floating Mill has also reissued) paint the band as practitioners of the dark, moody post-punk that was typical of British bands around this time. This isn’t to say that they aren’t great—the “epic scream” that Vosburgh unleashes near the end of the claustrophobic “Hour of Light” alone is worth the price of admission—but it’s the previously unreleased tracks that are the most intriguing aspect of The Antelopes to me. These songs find the group dabbling in everything from psychedelia (“10,000 Flies Can’t be Wrong”) to groove-rock (“Keys to the Kingdom”) to country-rock (“Mississippi Line”), suggesting a band capable of a wide range of sounds that merely chose the two songs most in-line with what was going on around them to release.

The rhythm section of “Keys to the Kingdom” is perhaps the most obvious path to the final three songs on Breaking News: a group of previously-unreleased recordings from Dallender and Brown’s post-Antelopes band, The Class of ’76 (which also featured bassist Martin Grant and a host of rotating vocalists and/or guitarists including Rupert Sweeney, Chris Homewood, and Mark and Paul Brandon). Like The Stick Figures across the Atlantic, The Class of ’76—an excellent name for a post-punk band, by the way—also cited Parliament/Funkadelic as an inspiration for their groovy funk rock, and songs like “Going Nowhere (My Hands Are Tied)” have more in common with Chic than The Cure. Listen to Breaking News all the way through and it feels like a natural progression, but it would be shocking to hear the slap bass agitprop of “Uprising” and the mopey Joy Division plod of “Prisoners” back-to-back. Even more impressive than this range, however, is that both ends of Breaking News are compelling. (Bandcamp link)

Trevor Nikrant – Tall Ladders

Release date: November 19^th
Record label: Dear Life
Genre: Folk rock, dream folk
Formats: Cassette, CD, digital
Pull track: We Need You for Our Plan

True Rosy Overdrive heads will recall Trevor Nikrant as one-third of the Nashville group Styrofoam Winos, who appeared in Pressing Concerns way back in February of this year. All three Winos have had solo careers beyond their band, and Nikrant is the latest to step out on his own. Tall Ladders is Nikrant’s first proper solo album in nearly four years, and he’s deemed it a “sonic and thematic sequel” to that last one, 2018’s Living in the Kingdom. As hinted at by that record and his contributions to Styrofoam Winos, Tall Ladders is an abstract folk/country album that sounds very David Berman-influenced in several spots. Nikrant is not the only member of the modern Americana movement to find inspiration in the Silver Jews; traces of Berman can be found on both his own label’s roster and among the acts on Styrofam Winos’ label. Unlike a lot of his peers, however, it’s not a “lo-fi” or “punked-up” version of this sound—in fact, Nikrant runs all the way to the other side of the spectrum with Tall Ladders.

Outside of opening track “Panic @ the Café”, which comes off as a slightly more subdued version of Styrofoam Winos’ “Stuck in a Museum”, Tall Ladders is a languid, meandering take on dreamy indie folk-rock. The rougher edges of Living in the Kingdom and Styrofoam Winos have been largely sanded down here, giving way to an expanded instrumental pallet and some eyebrow-raising song lengths. Tracks like the gently-picked “We Need You for Our Plan” almost remind me of Dagger Beach-era John Vanderslice, featuring studio flourishes colliding with more austere indie folk-rock songwriting. “Dead Skin”, something of the album’s centerpiece, floats into eight-minute territory aided by slow-marching piano and a smartly-harnessed wall of sound, while “Slow Notion” introduces sad horns into the fray in one of the moments that most recalls 2000s maximalist indie folk It’s all done in Nikrant’s own subtle way, however—he always sounds in control of everything around him on Tall Ladders. (Bandcamp link)

Big Heet – Playing the Bug

Release date: November 19^th
Record label: Living Lost
Genre: Post-punk, noise rock
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull track: Body of Noise

It’s been a nice and balanced year for David Settle. Although the Philadelphia-based musician also released three records in 2020, this year’s trio are evenly split among Settle’s current bands: February saw the lo-fi psych-pop of The Fragiles’ On and On, the garage-rock fuzzy power pop of Psychic Flowers’ For the Undertow followed in July, and for this month he’s returned to the longest-running of the three acts, Big Heet, for that project’s third album (oh, and he also released a cassette compilation of recording sessions culled from his Under the First Floor podcast). Although Settle’s other two bands are different from one another in their own ways, Big Heet is increasingly the odd one out among the three. It’s the one that isn’t primarily “pop”, instead inspired by underground noise rock and post-punk: everything from Blonde Redhead to Devo to Wire runs through Playing the Bug.

As anyone familiar with the previously-mentioned bands knows, these reference points should give Settle a lot of different sounds and styles with which to work. Album opener “Body of Noise” (featuring lead guitar from Jon Samuels of 2^nd Grade and Friendship) is a motorik, somewhat restrained beginning that doesn’t quite sound like any Settle project, while “Life Is Limitless” is modern meaty post-punk at its crunchy, fidgety best. If there’s such a thing as a “classic Big Heet” sound, it’s exemplified by the rhythm-section-heavy garage-y egg punk of Playing the Bug’s midgut—songs like the needs-no-further-explanation mumbling of “American Reichstag” or the treadmill bark of “Octogenarians”. Closing track “Gilded Hand” reminds me of the recent strain of indie rock/hardcore hybrid bands like Mili t arie Gun, even though it’s still recognizably Big Heet. At eight songs and 18 minutes, Playing the Bug is the slightest of Settle’s 2021 releases, but Playing the Bug gives us plenty on which to chew. (Bandcamp link)

Hans Condor – Breaking & Entering

Release date: November 16^th
Record label: Dial Back Sound
Genre: Garage rock, garage punk
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull track: Breaking & Entering

The Nashville garage punk trio Hans Condor recorded Breaking & Entering several years ago, half at RCA’s historical Grand Victor Sound and half in something called “The Shed”, which is presumably not quite as renowned. Soong afterword, however,, “a series of managerial and personal snags” that were punctuated by the tragic death of bassist Erik Holcombe led to Hans Condor taking an indefinite hiatus and these songs gathering dust at Mississippi’s Dial Back Sound studio and label. The reuniting of the remaining members of the band last year has inspired Hans Condor and Dial Back Sound to finally let these songs loose into the light of day, consequences be damned. Breaking & Entering is for those who like their garage rock at its most unhinged and threatening: even disregarding its felonious title, glancing at its tracklist also reveals gems such as “Blood on the Rug”, “Hardwired for Death”, and “Pent-Up Aggression”.

Lead singer Charles Kaster barks and howls his way through the pure chaos of opener “Rock n Roll Animal” and screams appropriately along to “All Messed Up on Death Metal and Shit” among others, but the (admittedly only by comparison) restraint of the title track and “Pent-Up Aggression” suggest that Hans Condor can hold themselves together long enough to bust out a killer punk rock tune whenever they’ve got one to deliver. And that’s not even taking into account “Hannah Van Condor”, the acoustic closing track that seems to have been directly lifted from a ten-year-old video session, in which the band sing a elegy to their recently deceased tour van through the static of something on a completely different planet than “professional audio quality”. It’s somehow both completely different than and extremely appropriate for Hans Condor. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Wendy Eisenberg, Grass Jaw, Thalmus, Log Across the Washer

Pressing Concerns returns! New albums from Wendy Eisenberg, Grass Jaw, Thalmus, and Log Across the Washer are featured this week. If you’re a fan of alt-country, broadly-defined folk music, and “weird Americana”, whatever that means to you, then this edition is for you. If you’re not, then it’s still for you, because these albums are all just plain good.

If you’re looking for more new music, you can browse previous editions of Pressing Concerns or visit the site directory.

Wendy Eisenberg – Bent Ring

Release date: November 5^th
Record label: Dear Life
Genre: B A N J O
Formats: Cassette, CD, digital
Pull track: Little Love Songs

Wendy Eisenberg is building something. Eisenberg first came on my radar with 2020’s Auto, a genuinely exciting album that suggested its creator was capable of making many more quality records. I didn’t necessarily expect that to happen over the next 12 months, however—Eisenberg kicked off this year with Tell Me I’m Bad, the debut full-length from their math-jazz-noise rock band Editrix, and a couple of limited-release solo albums (particularly March’s Cellini’s Halo) probed the edges of Eisenberg’s output thus far. Which brings us to Bent Ring, an album made “on a dare”—the accomplished guitar player has made a record without any guitar. While Eisenberg is far from the first to challenge themselves in this fashion, Bent Ring is notable in that, rather than trying to distract from this absence using a hodgepodge of other instruments, Eisenberg fully embraces their chosen replacement: a “strange, salvaged, nameless banjo”.

While Bent Ring is not 100% banjo-made audio—Eisenberg plays bass and enlists Michael Cormier on percussion, not to mention their strong-as-ever vocals—nobody is going to mistake this record for anything other than capital-B Banjo music. It’s a singer-songwriter album that has a stubborn pop side like Tell Me I’m Bad does, but by necessity it’s a quieter affair (and this is even without factoring in the two renditions of the hymn “Abide with Me” that nearly bookend the album). While Editrix traded in organized chaos, Bent Ring almost feels like a musical purgatory over which Eisenberg sings and speaks contradictions—mid-tempo songs like “Mental Image” embody the concept of pacing back and forth very well, and the whispered “Amends” is a leveling-up moment of subtlety. Eisenberg is still pushing, however—“Analogies” and “Don’t Move” are about as driving and nervy as Eisenberg’s version of banjo-vocal music could be. Very rarely does Bent Ring musically resemble a typical-sounding banjo/folk record, but when it does (“Evening Song” and “Little Love Songs” in the album’s second half), it does that well too. Even in what is in theory their most restrictive record thus far, Eisenberg succeeds on several levels with Bent Ring. (Bandcamp link)

Grass Jaw – Anticipation

Release date: November 5^th
Record label: Habitforming
Genre: Alt-country, folk rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull track: Siblings

Brendan Kuntz is a longtime punk drummer who’s recently veered hard into a solo career as Grass Jaw—Anticipation is Kuntz’s fourth record in two and a half years under the name. Although at first glance one might slot Grass Jaw as another adherent to (or causality of, depending on your perspective) the punk-to-country pipeline, Anticipation is as much an alt-rock record with rootsy influences as the other way around. Album opener “Dark Months” slowly creeps into view as a doom-y piece of gothic alt-country that reminds me of The Handsome Family, and the title track boasts pedal steel (courtesy of Sam Norris) that embellishes the song’s slowcore-indebted twang. Kuntz’s deep voice helps Anticipation acquire a dark feeling, but the instrumentation and subject matter that the upstate New York-based musician pursues on the record service this overarching vibe just as well.

On some of the album’s louder songs, Kuntz sounds like a less scream-y Rick Maguire of Pile, another band that reaches into country territory without ever constraining themselves to it. Perhaps this is best exemplified by the winding, multi-part “Weight/Chemicals”, a ragged noise rock song that twists from haunted chamber country to a mid-tempo descending-chord stomper to a frightened garage rock belter. The narcotic meditation of that track is a glimpse into the anxious, nervous center of Anticipation. Despite being one of the calmer songs on Anticipation, the aptly-titled “Juggling” reflects this as well as anything else, featuring Kuntz lamenting “On days like these when I’m not at my best / Days like these, I hope you forget” with a lonesome vocal. The other song on Anticipation that employs the quiet, time-out backing music is album closer “Siblings”—Kuntz sings a steady, cautiously optimistic message that suggests that “tired” doesn’t necessarily mean “hopeless”. (Bandcamp link)

Thalmus – Midnight Country

Release date: October 1^st
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Alt-country, country rock, dream folk
Formats: Digital
Pull track: Schizophrenia

While Midnight Country is the first release by Atlanta’s Jonathan Merenivitch that I had heard, the artist currently known as Thalmus hasn’t been waiting for my attention to put together a body of work. He’s been making music in the compelling post-punk group Shepherds for a while now, and his Thalmus project finds him taking on roots and country music. If you’d assume a post-punk musician would have an “abnormal” take on country, well, you’re right and you’re wrong—before Midnight Country, the last Thalmus project was Low Country, a country re-imagining of side one of David Bowie’s Low, and this latest release also features a selection of covers. Midnight Country’s eight songs are four (mostly) Thalmus originals interspersed with an equal amount of covers that run the gamut from Sonic Youth to Anita Baker.

Other than the opening title track, which has a bit of Shepherds’ post-punk stomp (and incorporates elements of Thundercat’s “Them Changes”, covered in full later in the album), however, Merenivitch embraces a country music structure wholeheartedly. His takes on Anita Baker’s “Rapture” and Rae Stremmurd’s “Swang” both loosely end up translated into dreamy, R&B-adjacent folk, but Merenivitch doesn’t try too hard to bridge the time gap between the two songs—his torch song vocal distinguishes the former, while the latter uses an acoustic guitar to approximate the song’s rhythm and applies some modern vocal effects. Among the Thalmus originals, “Pharaoh Sings the Blues” is a simple acoustic strummer that’s as tastefully traditionalist musically as it is fiery lyrically.

With “Pharaoh”, Merenivitch continues the tradition of great political southern rock by drawing on the still-strong vestiges of the Civil War (“Mourning your brother who died in a traitorous war / While glossing over the atrocities that he died fighting for”) and Old Testament metaphor (“When a little bit of equality begins to creep in / That’s when the Pharaoh cries out that he’s being oppressed”) all over a rollicking country-rock backdrop. Meanwhile, the “death isn’t nothing to make a fuss over” gospel undertones of “Bury Me Loose” might feel a little lighter, but even it is laced with economic realism (“You said caskets are how much?”). “House of God” might be Thalmus’ best overall performance, a confident, twangy number that bridges the gap between some of the other songs’ straightforward country-folk and the more exploratory cover selections. If this is what Midnight Country means, then I’m all for it. (Bandcamp link)

Log Across the Washer – It’s Funny How the Colors

Release date: November 12^th
Record label: Crash Symbols
Genre: Psychedelic pop, experimental pop
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull track: Listen to Xasthur

Around a decade ago, Tyler Keene began releasing music under the name Log Across the Washer, and was also contributing to Portland post-punk group And And And. However, Keene left that band after two years, and the steady stream of Log Across the Washer releases seemed to dry up as well. Several years, a hiatus from recording music, and one relocation to South Orange, New Jersey later, West Virginia experimental label Crash Symbols is releasing It’s Funny How the Colors, a sixteen-song cassette that’s culled from what sounds like a creative rebirth for Keene. Self-recorded and self-produced at home and in a rented practice space, It’s Funny How the Colors is as intimate as any modern bedroom pop release—and despite Keene’s experimental inclinations and interest in jazz, the record certainly puts itself squarely into the “pop” end of that genre too.

Single “Listen to Xasthur” works itself up into a piece of Martin Newell-esque reverb-y jangle pop, while Keene’s tinkering doesn’t take away the gorgeous ballad at the heart of “Over My Head” or the sincere groove of “Oregon”. The leisurely, almost-twee “Arizona” is a grin-inducer, and even opener “Plates of Grass” presents a bouncy acoustic welcome before an odd left turn in its last few seconds. It’s Funny How the Colors does have some off-color moments like the end of “Plates of Grass”, but they’re subservient to the album’s songwriting and most of them (like the amusing spoken word of “Ok Dorks” and the jazz piano in the first half of “Arguably Never Recovered from the Season”) are overall enhancements. It’s Funny How the Colors is a record that asks the listener to hand over the reins and trust Log Across the Washer, and Tyler Keene is, at this stage in his music career, working at a level that justifies this request. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

New Playlist: October 2021

The Rosy Overdrive monthly playlist is back! It’s the October edition this time! This one is very good, in my opinion! You will find plenty of new music here, as well as a few discoveries from my 1996 deep dive, and a couple of miscellaneous tracks.

Artists with multiple tracks this time around: Mo Troper (4), Lilly Hiatt (2), Superdrag (2). Not very many this time, huh. Casting a wide net this month, I suppose.

You can hear the entire thing on Spotify here, and be sure to check out previous playlist posts if you’ve enjoyed this one. Thanks for reading.

“Southern Mark Smith (Big Return)”, The Jazz Butcher
From A Scandal in Bohemia (1984, Glass/Fire)

Even though I was never a huge Jazz Butcher fan, I still was outraged on behalf of the late Pat Fish that his death seemed to garner little to no acknowledgement from the current indie rock landscape. Wouldn’t have happened if I’d won the primaries, not under my watch. Like I said, not particularly qualified to write the man an elegy, but I do know that “Southern Mark Smith (Big Return)” is one of the great guitar pop songs of history. Seemingly the closest thing to a signature Jazz Butcher song, it’s a charmer that’s actually distinguished by its appropriately-opaque nod to Mark E. Smith, who is one of the most defiantly northern people that I as a non-Brit know of, and whose music has maybe never been described as “charming”. I’d imagine Fish had a hand in solidifying the strummy British version of jangle pop, and “If I find out nothing else, I’m gonna find out what makes your heart sing” probably wouldn’t fly on the other side of the pond. I’m glad it all came together here.

“The Expendables Ride Again”, Mo Troper
From Dilettante (2021)

“The Expendables Ride Again” is the lead single and first (non-intro) track on Dilettante AKA Mo Troper IV, and it introduces the new incarnation of a looser, fuzzier, but still firing-on-all-cylinders Troper perfectly. Vocally, it’s a non-stop hook-fest from Troper, and the crunchy guitar stomp underneath him is nearly as captivating. Lyrically, it’s some of Dilettante’s most classic Troper writing—I don’t know exactly what “I woke up a bitter pill / In a clown car en route to the loser’s circle” means, but it wouldn’t be out of place on Exposure & Response, and there’s a part where he offers this song to another songwriter who, presumably, doesn’t have a 28-track just-released record to their name. But it closes with the carefully-balanced ambivalence of Troper musing “What’s the name of your new band? / The one with you and my old friends? / I can’t lie, I’m a fan,” before hanging onto the titular line for just long enough. Read more about Dilettante here.

“Face”, Lilly Hiatt
From Lately (2021, New West)

Speaking of Mo Troper—here is another artist that released a record at the beginning of pandemic times and has just now returned with a follow-up palpably shaped by the ensuing year and a half. For Lilly Hiatt, it was last March’s Walking Proof (one of my favorite records of 2020), which hinted at worlds beyond her (very solid) brand of alt-country, and now it’s October’s Lately, a stripped-down, mid-tempo-heavy roots rock collection that finds Hiatt embracing an earned subtlety. “Face” is a classic simple double entendre, of which the mostly single-word titles on Lately make ample use—“Your face is saying what your words would never let you” for the noun, and “It hurts to look at you anymore” for the verb.

“Be”, Frogpond
From Count to Ten (1996, Columbia)

Alright, so Frogpond was and is a band from the Kansas City area who knocked out two records of Breeders/Pixies-influenced, unabashedly 90s power pop in the latter half of the relevant decade. I’d already heard their 1999 sophomore album, Safe Ride Home (“I Did” is an all-timer), but I’ve just gotten to their 1996 debut, and it holds up pretty well too. The “hit” is probably “Be”, a pop-song-power-chord anthem that would’ve sat nicely on a radio playlist in between “Not Too Soon” and one of those Veruca Salt songs in a more just world. Frogpond are gearing up to release their third record—their first in over 20 years—in mid-November, which is a complete coincidence with regards to their appearance here. But if there’s another “Be” on that one, we’ll be hearing from Frogpond again soon.

“A Message to You”, EEP
From Winter Skin (2021, Hogar)

The second record from El Paso shoegaze five-piece EEP finds the group stepping out of their comfort zone with some electronic, funk, and even Mexican balladry-influenced material, but “A Message to You” shows that they can still nail their primary genre just as easily. The message that singer Rosie Varela is attempting to convey was inspired by trying to comfort a clearly distraught woman in the chaos of a loud rock show, and the heavy but warm layers of fuzz that adorn a beautiful pop melody are just as consoling as the lyrical comfort that Varela imparts (“It’s okay to cry”). Read more about Winter Skin here.

“Head on the Ground”, Bulletin
From Hiding to Nothing (2021)

The difficult-to-Google band Bulletin have been kicking around the Boston (and possibly Providence) area for the last few years, and they sound to my ears very much in line with the strong undercurrent of 90s alternative/indie rock-inspired bands that have been pouring out of New England in recent memory. Their latest record and debut full-length album Hiding to Nothing actually does a fair bit of genre-hopping, but single “Head on the Ground” is a distinct blend of grunge and power pop that’s as warmly familiar as it is immaculately executed. Landing somewhere between a harder-charging Superdrag and a more tuneful Foo Fighters song, singer David Khoshtinat stoically intones the titular lines for an instant eerie hook, before letting “Head on the Ground” loose as it should be.

“Big Sky”, Alexa Rose
From Headwaters (2021, Big Legal Mess)

This single from Headwaters, the second album from Asheville, North Carolina’s Alexa Rose, features a clear, clean chugging power-chord foundation, a timeless roots-pop chorus, and awestruck lyrics about leaving the South and finding out just how damn big the Western United States is—it couldn’t have been called anything else but “Big Sky”. What I keep coming back to about it is how it’s such a big, wide, open song about what is ultimately an insular feeling—“It takes a big sky to feel small”, as Rose says in the found chorus, as well as feeling “both alone in the company of a friend”. Rose is a very good singer—but then, so are plenty of other people who have exactly zero “Big Sky”s to their names, with nothing that can actually transport a listener to “somewhere on the 113, playing ‘California Stars’, three-quarter tank of gasoline”.

“End of the World”, Gulfer
(2021, Topshelf)

The second stand-alone single from Montreal’s Gulfer in 2021 is an alt-rock heater of a track that doesn’t really waste any of its three and a half minutes of runtime. In “End of the World”, math-y riffs from guitarists Joseph Therriault and Vincent Ford dance around the edges of the song’s loud fuzz-rock foundation, and the vocals of Ford (who released a solid solo album as Stevenson earlier this year) are just distant-sounding enough to add a layer of intrigue to the song’s lyrics. “End of the World” is still unmistakably melodic in spite of everything going on, nevertheless—both in terms of the guitarists’ inspired playing and in Ford’s singing, the song stacks up against the hookiness any single by one of your more pop punk-indebted emo revival bands.

“The Moon”, Trace Mountains
From House of Confusion (2021, Lame-O)

The best Dave Benton songs always sound so easy. Not necessarily easy to write—in fact, it’s probably harder to write songs like this and make them good, deep, and memorable—but easy to get, easy to understand, and easy to feel like they’ve always existed in the air somehow. Starting with LVL UP and blossoming with Trace Mountains, Benton’s songs have always felt like they’ve inhabited their own world, and now it makes sense to hang “The Moon” over it. House of Confusion embraces the Americana of last year’s Lost in the Country (“Late June, I took a ride in the country with you” is one of this song’s lyrics), and maybe Benton couldn’t have penned these lyrics a half-decade ago (“I’m at the point of my life when all these kind of things come rushing through”), but “The Moon” feels like a foundational Trace Mountains song, even years after the foundation has been laid.

“Destination Ursa Major”, Superdrag
From Regretfully Yours (1996, Elektra)

I knew I would like Regretfully Yours. There are plenty of 1990s major-label money-losing power pop records that I already like (some of which, unfortunately, made by absolute monsters of human beings), and I have already heard and liked Superdrag’s 1998 cult classic Head Trip in Every Key. That brings us today to Regretfully Yours, which is the big one, the one with the only ever actual hit single (which we will get to). It’s definitely more slick and zeitgeisty than Head Trip (or, apparently, their pre-major label EPs, which I haven’t heard), sure—“Destination Ursa Major” here is a good old-fashioned roaring alt-rock pop song. I would imagine that John Davis’ vocals being buried might be a deal-breaker for more traditionalists, but this isn’t exactly a shoegaze song. I can make him out well enough. He’s going to Ursa Major. Superdrag is taking us all up there, I think. It sounds like a blast.

“September”, The Stick Figures
From Archeology (2021, Floating Mill)

The Stick Figures, who formed at Tampa’s University of South Florida, released one four-song EP in 1981 that was a shining example of American post-punk before disbanding. An archival campaign from Pittsburgh’s Floating Mill Records, however, (aptly titled Archeology) has unearthed quite a bit more than that. “September” was one of those original four, but it still stands out even among reissue’s baker’s dozen of solid tracks. It’s one of the poppiest of Archeology’s songs—the dance-punk influence from the likes of Pylon and Gang of Four is felt in the bassline and in Rachel Maready Evergreen’s commanding vocals, but it also has a jangly undercurrent that wouldn’t be out of place on Captured Tracks’ Strum and Thrum college rock compilation from last year. Read more about Archeology here.

“Better Than That”, Mo Troper
From Dilettante (2021)

“You said you wanted somebody normal / But you know I’m better than that”: Mo Troper chooses to come out swinging in the 75-second “Better Than That”, a song that’s more or less all hook. It’s lo-fi power pop at its best, and Troper even finds the time and space to sneak a little call-and-response vocal somewhere in the middle of the song. Is this a sequel to “Somebody Special” from 2016’s Beloved? Unlikely, but at least Troper sticks up for himself a little more in this one, if so. Read more about Dilettante here.

“Never Graduate”, ME REX
From Pterodactyl (2022, Big Scary Monsters)

Well, it looks like it’s time for what I’m pretty sure is Rosy Overdrive’s first foray into upcoming 2022 releases. You may remember London’s ME REX from their ambitious 52-song experiment Megabear that I wrote a bit about back in June, which will (spoilers) probably claim a spot on the Rosy Overdrive year-end list whenever I get around to that. But the group is already prepping a follow-up, an EP called Pterodactyl that’ll come out on Big Scary Monsters on February 4^th. It sounds like the band is to a degree returning to the dinosaur*-titled EPs that gained ME REX notoriety in the first place, back when it was effectively a Myles McCabe solo project. Still, the leveling-up that happened with Megabear hasn’t been lost with “Never Graduate”, which features what may eventually come to be known as a “classic McCabe” lyric over a sharp but unobtrusive synth-pop-rock instrumental.

*no paleontology or taxonomy on my post please

“That’s the Way I Like It”, Lily Konigsberg
From Lily We Need to Talk Now (2021, Wharf Cat)

What, you thought we’d get another month without a Lily Konigsberg song? Her “main” band, Palberta, helped kick off the year back in January, released a compilation of her solo material in May, released an EP as My Idea with Nate Amos two months later, and appeared on several releases by Amos’ This Is Lorelei project throughout 2021. Amos produced Lily We Need to Talk Now, which is somehow only Konigsberg’s debut full-length, and there is definitely some of This Is Lorelei’s bouncy pop-rock in songs like “That’s the Way I Like It”. Or, maybe This Is Lorelei sounds like “That’s the Way I Like It”. Konigsberg hops around genres quite a bit on Lily We Need to Talk Now (check the ambient haze of “Don’t Be Lazy with Me” or the minimalist pop of “Hark”), but they work and hang together alongside the stream-of-consciousness power pop of “That’s the Way I Like It” because when it comes down to it, it’s all distinctively Lily Konigsberg.

“Fresh Cut & Bessie”, Galactic Static
From Friendly Universe (2021, Corrupted TV)

If you haven’t experienced Galactic Static’s transmissions from a Friendly Universe, then “Fresh Cut & Bessie” might be the Rosetta Stone that interprets their interplanetary pop rock for our human senses. Lo-fi, fuzzy, and above all else catchy as hell, it’s a captivating lead single that even has some lyrics that could be seen as relatable to (some of) us Earth dwellers. Sure, the title feels like it was translated to a different language and back, but the bummer pop message hits home in the final verse (“Some say to look on the bright side, but when I go outside it just burns my eyes / Forever doomed to a sedentary life”). Read more about Friendly Universe here.

“The Bastard Overture”, Superconductor
From Bastardsong (1996, Boner)

I listened to Superconductor for the first time this month. I was, uh, unprepared for it. I knew that they were/are different from A.C. Newman’s other bands, of course, in theory, but I didn’t know Carl was effectively making Fucked Up albums in the mid-90s. Bastardsong is a chaotic trip, and it seems like it’s not their most beloved release, but it’s definitely an album that I’ve heard in full now. Is it good? Do I like it? Well, something kept me going back to it. Maybe just the novelty of Newman screaming his way through a prog-post-hardcore double album but still being recognizably A.C. Newman. “The Bastard Overture” is great—the first half could be a New Pornographers song if it was cleaned up and had less screaming, before it devolves into the frantic noise piece that attempts to justify the “overture” title. Even if I’d rather listen to Electric Version (or, for that matter, Look What the Rookie Did) nine times out of ten, I wouldn’t mind Newman revisiting this well at some point.

“Cat Song”, Gold Dust
From Gold Dust (2021)

“Can I really be that bad if the cat follows me around?” is one of the best opening lyrics of the year. Stephen Pierce ponders this age old question, as well as the follow-up “Is it ’cause she needs a friend and I’m the only one around, or does she see something in me I can’t see?” in “Cat Song”, one of the musically lightest and brightest moments on Gold Dust. Pierce notably plays in a couple of heavier bands (Kindling and Ampere) that could be described as “definitely not what Gold Dust is doing”; the delicate folk of “Cat Song” is one of the furthest moments away from Pierce’s past work, lacking even the distorted rock of some of the record’s other tracks that would put it in the same ballpark as Kindling’s shoegaze. But “I’ll try to be the good you see in me” wouldn’t quite have the same impact buried under a couple layers of reverb. Read more about Gold Dust here.

“3h et des personnes”, Pays P.
From Ça v aller (2021, Peculiar Works)

Paris noise rock band Pays P. have built up a following primarily through their live act that includes Big Thief’s Buck Meek (who invited them to open for his main band’s European tour) and Brooklyn’s SAVAK (who ended up recording Ça v aller and releasing it on their own label, Peculiar Works), and judging by “3h et des personnes”, I’d bet that they’re a force on the stage. Pays P. choose to open Ça v aller in confrontational fashion, with this dramatic six-minute crawler of distortion, pounding percussion, and a vocal that swings between muttering and wailing from lead singer Laura Boullic. The trio (also made up of brothers Lucas Valero on guitar and Pablo Valero on drums) are “on” all throughout Ça v aller, but ““3h et des personnes” in particular feels like a relentless showcase of their full force.

“Demolished”, Strange Ranger
From No Light in Heaven (2021)

I do remember Sioux Falls, the Bozeman, Montana duo that made the colossally underrated indie rock worship double album Rot Forever back in 2016 (and appeared in one of the first posts on Rosy Overdrive). It’s only been a half decade, but the band that would become Strange Ranger has kept moving forward. There have been pop classics, dreamy growers, a move to the West Coast (Portland) followed by the East (Philadelphia), and now No Light in Heaven, a highly experimental pop “mixtape” that’s assuredly caused at least one emo kid to have a meltdown. The synthed-up Remembering the Rockets-esque “Needing You” and the modern soft rock of “Pass Me By” are both successful left-turns, but fear not: I’ve chosen “Demolished”, the under-two-minute lo-fi pop-punk banger that’s the closest to vintage Strange Ranger. Oh wait, that’s not what “vintage Strange Ranger” sounds like either? Shit, what do they sound like?

“Miserable Ways”, Boyracer
From Assuaged (2021, Emotional Response)

Stewart Anderson’s band Boyracer has been around since the early 1990s and fourteen albums, but vocalist and lead guitarist Christina Ridley has only been with the band for two years and as many records. Despite this, Ridley leaves her distinct mark on Assuaged, and there’s no better example than her lead vocal on “Miserable Ways”, a kiss-off anthem to what sounds like a truly unpleasant person. At least, one would assume—for me, it would take a lot to get “You should hate yourself, not everyone else,” out of me, which Ridley gleefully sings over the song’s bridge. The bridge is also where the song breaks out its crowd-pleasing handclaps—this is Buzzcocks-esque pop-punk at its best. Read more about Assuaged here.

“Take It Back”, Salt
From Salt (2021, Sleeper Records)

The most recent release from Philadelphia’s Sleeper Records (2^nd Grade, Friendship, Russel the Leaf) is the debut from Salt, the new project from Erased! Tapes’ Jon Hankof, who has also released music as Sundog in the past. The self-titled Salt album is, on the surface, the kind of low-key slowcore-influenced folk rock that has been chased by a lot of East Coast bands in the past few years, but Hankof offers a spirited take on it. This kind of music can easily fall into the “all the songs blend together” trap, but Salt has plenty of sneakily memorable melodies, and “Take It Back” is a steady highlight. Hankof’s voice is very matter-of-fact over top of gently chugging guitar chords and the simplest drumbeat, so much so that the ramp-up in the song’s final minute, featuring Salt turning “break it down and take it back, break it down” into some sort of mantra, just kind of arrives out of nowhere.

“Queen Sophie for President”, The World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die
From Illusory Walls (2021, Epitaph)

Now, here’s a The World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die song that I could dance to. That’s what we’ve all been waiting on TWIABP to do, right? No? Well, “Queen Sophie for President” is a pretty incredibly pop rock single that just happens to be by one of the premiere emo-post-rock-maybe-prog-metal-now bands out there. Keyboard player Katie Dvorak takes lead vocals on this song, and her synth playing is a pretty good counterpart to the driving rhythm section (which is also a feature of most of Illusory Walls). Apparently the title of “Queen Sophie for President” references a nickname earned by Dvorak’s late grandmother, but the dire lyrics seem to deal with a more realistic and subsequently more horrifying look at politics. But at least for three and a half minutes, “Never get better and never do anything” is head-bob-worthy.

“Breaking Glass”, K. Campbell
From Breaking Glass b/w More Than a Memory (2021, Poison Moon)

The very Rosy Overdrive-friendly fuzzy power pop of K. Campbell’s latest single, “Breaking Glass”, finds catharsis in the form of a big, grin-inducing chorus. The Houston-based Campbell trains his ire at one specific asshole who has negatively impacted the life of a friend (“This town’s a railroad track and he’s a bottle, so take aim and throw / Let’s hear some breaking glass”), but the song’s smashing solution can’t quite drown out the chorus’s starry-eyed declaration of “This is how it feels to be alone”. Although, maybe being alone isn’t that bad if it sounds like how “Breaking Glass” sounds. The frustration in the song seems only to be exacerbated by the ramshackle condition of the building in which it takes place (“Paint is peeling, collapsing ceiling…You can hear the red bricks screaming”), which adds a personal touch to Campbell’s decision to donate all proceeds from the physical single to Houston Tenants Union.

“Cry”, Thornetta Davis
From Sunday Morning Music (1996, Sub Pop)

Sunday Morning Music came out on Sub Pop, oddly enough, but I like the pairing after thinking about it for a bit. Considering how much grunge (I mean like real, actual grunge) at least attempted to incorporate the spirit of early rock and roll, why not just release a blues rock record from Detroit? I’ve seen Sunday Morning Music called a soul or gospel album (the latter most likely due to its title track), and those genres are certainly there, but the record has too many rippers for me not to think of it as rock music first. Album opener “Cry”, for instance, starts with a mid-tempo atmosphere-builder instrumental before ramping up in the chorus in a way that’s very mid-90s. Only, most people singing over those instrumentals couldn’t sing like Thornetta Davis.

“Sucked Out”, Superdrag
From Regretfully Yours (1996, Elektra)

Oh, here it is. The hit. Twenty-five years ago, “Sucked Out” shot all the way up to #17 on Billboard’s Modern Rock chart, which—okay, well, that’s higher than anything else on this playlist. While if I was trying to formulate a rock radio hit for 1996, it wouldn’t necessarily look like “Sucked Out”, that’s mainly because nobody seemed to know what a rock hit in 1996 looked like (#1 hits around the time of “Sucked Out” included “Ironic” by Alanis Morissette, “Pepper” by the Butthole Surfers, and a mediocre Cranberries song that no one remembers). But with the sing-song verses, surprisingly strained John Davis chorus vocal, and general Gen X jadedness—I get it. But even though it technically worked, “Sucked Out” still sounds like a single that forever gets referred to as one that “should’ve been a hit”—it’s not self-consciously stupid enough to be a “Buddy Holly” or a “Stacy’s Mom” and lodge itself into the culture.

“Sugar and Cream”, Mo Troper
From Dilettante (2021)

“Sugar and Cream” is Dilettante’s “fake musical theater song”, and even among that record’s grab-bag attitude, it sticks out like a sore thumb. Mo Troper slips into falsetto for the entire ninety-second track, and sings about the very pair of ingredients (“With berries or coffee, and everything else in between”) over a spare acoustic guitar instrumental. The most obvious musical theater nods (at least to a philistine like myself) are when Troper lists off other classic pairings (“Mac and cheese”, “Bert and Ernie”, “Woodstock and Snoopy”) as well as the “my favorite devices” line. Looking forward to the moment in the Mo Toper musical where he steps away from confusing emails and scrolling through his mentions to reflect on the finer things and sing “Sugar and Cream”. Read more about Dilettante here.

“People Die”, Travis Morrison
From Travistan (2004, Barsuk)

So, I had the idea to see if I wanted to talk about anything from the Dismemberment Plan’s Change since it just turned twenty this month, but I ended up falling down a rabbit hole, and long story short, we’re revisiting Travistan this time. “People Die” is a pretty clear highlight from the record, an electronic-based, mortality-observing pop song that blooms into a classic Morrison steamroller midway through. The mid-00s were an interesting and underrated time for the indie rock circles in which Morrison was steeped. Barsuk labelmate and Travistan guest John Vanderslice was forging his own brand of balancing a singer-songwriter outlook with his increasing interest in production, while former collaborator Chad Clark was challenging the D.C./Dischord crowd with his band Beauty Pill in a way that was both similar and different to how Ian MacKaye and Guy Picciotto’s band did the same a decade previously. It still pisses me off we didn’t get to see what would have happened if Morrison had been able to fully embrace the promise of songs like “People Die”.

“We Are”, Gates
From Here and Now (2021, Wax Bodega)

New Jersey’s Gates make a shimmery, atmospheric kind of post-rock-heavy emo—they’re currently on tour with The World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die, which feels like a correct pairing. Here and Now is the band’s first record in five years, and the EP (which, at 25 minutes, is longer than plenty of fifth-wave emo “LPs”) is full of darkly dramatic rock music that’s accessible despite not being rigidly structured. “We Are”, with its anthem of a refrain, feels like Gates at their most front-facing—singer Kevin Dye’s voice is compelling throughout, but like any good post-rock-emo, you have to wait until the second half of the song for things to really take off. Also like good emo, Dye’s lyrics that ruminate on futility and shame are hardly “uplifting”, but do tap into something potent.

“Shirley Don’t”, April Magazine
From If the Ceiling Were a Kite: Vol. 1 (2021, Tough Love)

San Francisco’s April Magazine released a new record, Sunday Music for an Overpass, on Paisley Shirt Records in September. “Shirley Don’t” is a little older, however—first released in 2018, the song got a formal home last month on If the Ceiling Were a Kite: Vol. 1, a compilation of various bedroom four-track recordings that the band made over their first couple years of existence. The lo-fi medium suits “Shirley Don’t” just fine—it’s a sleepy, lazy pop song whose brilliance one might miss if they aren’t paying close enough attention (are you?). Singer Katiana Mashikian has also played in other Bay Area bands like The Reds, Pinks, & Purples, Flowertown, and her solo project Mister Baby—in a scene that’s rife with new music, I’d say she’s done plenty to make herself stand out.

“Psychocastle”, Taraka
From Welcome to Paradise Lost (2021, Rage Peace)

Taraka Larson made a name for herself as one-half of the psych-dance-new age duo Prince Rama—Welcome to Paradise Lost is the first music she’s made on her own since the group’s breakup. The whole album is a bit of everything—maybe it could be described as “a lo-fi garage punk record with several, uh, detours from that sound”. Lead single “Psychocastle”, however, is a straightforward psych rock ripper that boasts a classic pop hook of a chorus. In said chorus, huge fuzzy chords meet a compelling, dance-friendly call-and-response vocal performance from Taraka to herself—repeated as many times as necessary.

“Johnny on the Spot”, Texas Is the Reason
From Do You Know Who You Are? (1996, Revelation)

Texas Is the Reason (who were, unsurprisingly, not actually from Texas) are the latest untouchable 90s emo band that I can now say I understand well enough. Their sole album, 1996’s Do You Know Who You Are?, is a polished, punk-indebted album that, as the story goes, could certainly have broken out if the New York band could’ve stayed together (imagine if Dear You had less distinct vocals but better songs). “Johnny on the Spot”, which opens both the proper album and the CD-length compilation of everything Texas Is the Reason ever recorded, is a driving pop song that doesn’t noodle any more than the hooky opening guitar riff allows. It comes out of the gate strong but also does the classic emo thing of slowing itself down for a dramatic finish.

“Knapsack”, Amy Rigby
From Diary of a Mod Housewife (1996, Koch)

Oh, this is good. Amy Rigby has had a memoir-worthy career—she’s lived in Pittsburgh, Nashville, New York, played in The Shams, had a song of hers recorded by Ronnie Spector, and has recently made several records with her husband, power pop legend Wreckless Eric. Diary of a Mod Housewife, the first album she released under her own name, has several songs that could’ve been easily highlighted here, but “Knapsack” is streaming, so I’ll go with this one. “Knapsack” is just Rigby and her acoustic guitar: just three minutes of Rigby absolutely nailing the bullseye of a vivid, torrential world of imagined interaction and real infatuation with a stranger—in this case, the man who takes Rigby’s bag at the entrance to a bookstore. “I want to tell him I’m not just some soulless jerk / Hey—I got a band, I understand what life is for,” she insists to nobody, like a normal person.

“Lately”, Lilly Hiatt
From Lately (2021, New West)

“One day this will all be a distant memory / But right now it’s living inside of me,” is how Lilly Hiatt opens the title track to Lately, and it might as well be the thesis statement of the record. Hiatt doesn’t make it a secret that this record is a byproduct of the chaos of 2020, to the point where this collection of songs began “as a means of keeping sane”. Like the album art suggests, Lately ended up being a snapshot of a tumultuous time—although I don’t think the title track’s sentiment of confusion and an isolated imagination running wild (“You have no idea what this has done to me lately”) will end up dating it. Nor will the jarring keyboard that opens the song and dances between the verses—that’s just another distinct touch from a record that has a lot more of them if you look close enough.

“Still in Love”, Cat Power
From Myra Lee (1996, Smells Like)

I’m not really a Cat Power person—at least, I haven’t been. I’ve heard Moon Pix, and it didn’t leave much of an impression on me. But there’s something about “Still in Love”, a shambling, mid-tempo Hank Williams cover from her relatively unheralded debut record, 1996’s Myra Lee. Since I’m not really a Cat Power person, I have no idea how this record is viewed today by Chan Marshall stans, but What Would the Community Think came out on Matador mere months later and that’s probably where the Cat Power story begins for most. Steve Shelley of Sonic Youth is who’s on the steady drumbeat, but it’s the surprisingly faithful country guitar flourishes and Marshall’s restrained vocals that hint at passion behind the resignation that make the tune.

“My Master’s Voice”, Mo Troper
From Dilettante (2021)

Here is a fourth Mo Troper song! You’d think with all of this practice, I’d be able to spell Dilettante by now without looking, but nope—still want to add two “l”s and remove one “t”. “My Master’s Voice” is as good as anything else on that record, starting relatively restrained and exploding into a cascading guitar wall in about a minute and a half. All just in a day’s work for Troper. Is “My Master’s Voice” from the perspective of the dog on the cover, hearing the sound of its owner yelling? Is it a metaphor for domestic ennui? I don’t know! But it’s good! Read more about Dillletttante here.

“Never Getting Older”, Zaq Baker
(2021)

Minnesota’s Zaq Baker has been making “theatre-influenced pop punk” with his grand piano as lead instrument for a few years now, and his latest single leans hard into his orchestral side without abandoning pop song structure. “Never Getting Older” begins with Baker whispering over quiet piano chords, before both he and the keys swell to deliver the message the song’s title hints at: “I’m terrified of whatever comes next”. You can take the power chords out of the aging pop-punker, but you can never fully alleviate the confusion and anxiety that comes with everyone around them growing older, getting married, and doing general adult things. Oh, and is that a string quartet? Yes, it is.

“Freezing Rain”, Signal Valley featuring Sydney Atkinson
From Fire, Lightning, and Rain (2021)

The second Signal Valley album of 2021 feels like an ambitious step forward for Daniel Spizuco, the mind behind the project. While it might not be as straightforwardly accessible as April’s aptly-titled Music for People, Fire, Lightning, and Rain charts a path that nods to decades of art-pop music to traverse its hour-long, literally elemental journey. It all leads to album closer “Freezing Rain”, a duet with Sydney Atkinson that unsurprisingly falls under the “Rain” subsection of the album (I mentioned classic prog rock as a structural Signal Valley influence when I talked about Music for People, and I wasn’t kidding around). Although Spizuco throws a lot at the listener, they know when to hold back, and most of “Freezing Rain” is built up of piano and minimal synths that allow Spizuco and Atkinson’s chilly back-and-forth to shine. “I’m still here, still here for you,” Spiuzco bellows. “You’re still here because you can’t admit it—what else can you do?” Atkinson replies.

Pressing Concerns: Chime School, EEP, Gold Dust, Galactic Static

The November era of Pressing Concerns has begun! Today we’re looking at two records that come out this Friday—the debut from San Francisco’s Chime School, and the sophomore album from El Paso’s EEP—as well as two October highlights from Gold Dust and Galactic Static.

If you’re looking for more new music, you can browse previous editions of Pressing Concerns or visit the site directory.

Chime School – Chime School

Release date: November 5^th
Record label: Slumberland
Genre: Jangle pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull track: Dead Saturdays

Chime School, the solo project of San Francisco’s Andy Pastalaniec, is certainly aptly named—the chiming sounds of classic jangle rock are all over his self-titled debut record. Chime School is also further evidence of the fertile jangle pop soil that has taken hold in the San Francisco Bay area, and of Slumberland Records’ recent attempt to shine a light on it (which it has also done with The Umbrellas and The Reds, Pinks, and Purples). Pastalaniec’s first record evokes the delicate balance of nostalgia and bittersweet emotions in which the best of the genre trades, but it does so while keeping its foot almost entirely on the gas. Pastalaniec, who’d mostly been notable as a drummer up until this point, gives most of Chime School a driving tempo that puts it much closer to the “peppy” than “melancholic” end of the jangle pop spectrum. Even the slower tracks on Chime School still feel upbeat, like the mid-tempo opener “Wait Your Turn”, or the early R.E.M.-chime of “Gone Too Fast”.

After “Wait Your Turn”, really Chime School takes off by tearing through toe-tapping, jangly pop anthems—brisk guitar arpeggios and drumbeats in “Taking Time to Tell You” and “Dead Saturdays” are counterbalanced by Pastalaniec’s melodies, while mid-record songs like “Anywhere But Here” and “Radical Leisure” are pulled along by the bass guitar as much as anything else. Another great vocal melody, the one in “Get a Bike”, ends up being outshone (out-chimed?) by an exuberant opening guitar riff. In “Get a Bike”, Pastalaniec instructs the listener to “ride a motorbike out in the country, if you want to understand”, while also referencing “1960s cars” and a “little Honda”. The transportation motif seems important—it isn’t the only song on the record with a motorcycle allusion in the title, and with how zippy Chime School is, I doubt it’s unintentional. I don’t think that one necessarily needs to call in sick, drive out to the country, and feel the wind in one’s hair in order to “get” Chime School, though—these songs can take you there on their own. (Bandcamp link)

EEP – Winter Skin

Release date: November 5^th
Record label: Hogar
Genre: Shoegaze, dream pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull track: A Message to You

Rosie Varela had been playing in cover bands since the early 90s and witnessed firsthand the initial wave of shoegaze acts like My Bloody Valentine, Lush, and Slowdive, but her decision to combine two of her passions came much later, and unintentionally. One song recorded with friends in 2018 quickly became EEP, a five-person band that, in addition to Varela, features El Paso music scene veterans Sebastian Estrada, Serge Carrasco, Lawrence Brown III, and Ross Ingram (who released an excellent solo album earlier this year). Their debut album Death of a Very Good Machine came out last July, and EEP (whose name comes from a mutated version of the Folk Implosion’s E.Z.L.A. that also incorporates their hometown of El Paso) are back less than a year and a half later with Winter Skin. Although Varela sings the majority of the songs, Winter Skin feels like the work of collaborators working together in lockstep. EEP have never fully come off as a dogmatic shoegaze band, and Winter Skin sees the band reach further out in several directions.

That isn’t to say that Winter Skin’s not a shoegaze record, and the album’s first three songs—the urgent “Hanging on a Wire”, the driving “No Inbetween”, and the heavy pure pop of “A Message to You”—are all robust, reverb-heavy rockers that can go toe-to-toe with any recent nü shoegaze revival LP. Winter Skin is only just getting started, however. The title of “Stubblefield” is a nod to James Brown’s drummer Clyde Stubblefield, and the song is based around a classic funk drum riff, something I can’t think of any other shoegaze band even somewhat approximating. In addition, EEP bust out the psychedelia of “Today I Woke Up” and the dream pop “Ángeles”, the latter of which is entirely sung in Spanish and is inspired by “traditional Mexican love ballads”. “Stargazer” and “Slow Down” (the latter of which, apparently, grew out of a version of the former) are electronic-influenced songs that seem the most strongly influenced by Ingram’s solo career and production background (he owns Brainville, the El Paso recording studio in which Winter Skin was recorded). The latter song’s ambient pop lullaby benediction in particular would not have been out of place on Ingram’s Sell the Tape Machine. Even when they’re a world away from the shoegaze of the first couple of tracks, however, nothing is out of place on Winter Skin. (Bandcamp link)

Gold Dust – Gold Dust

Release date: October 15^th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Folk rock
Formats: Cassette, CD, digital
Pull track: Oh Well

Easthampton, Massachusetts’ Stephen Pierce first became known to me through his work in Kindling, the underrated western-Mass shoegaze band who appeared in one of Rosy Overdrive’s first ever posts. The solo moniker Gold Dust is Pierce’s first step out on his own, and it finds him embracing a warm folk rock sound. After the dreamy instrumental intro “Water Street, 2am”, “Oh Well” exemplifies Gold Dust’s Neil Young-ish hybridization of folk songs and rock band instrumentation, marrying lazy acoustic guitar picking and strumming and a beautiful vocal melody from Pierce with a meandering, soaring electric guitar solo in the song’s second half. The fuzziness from Pierce’s other recorded output still guests frequently, particularly in songs like “All’s Well That Ends” and “Brookside Cemetery Blues”, which earn the Crazy Horse comparison that Gold Dust’s Bandcamp page cites, but the distortion even colors around the edges of the quieter songs, in a way that reminds me of the Torment & Glory album from earlier this year.

In a way, these heavier moments give an extra sense of clarity to when the light shines through on Gold Dust. “The Shortest Path” is a nice, sincerely subtle song about people finding ways back to each other, while the seemingly straightforward “Cat Song” asks a question that I’ve more or less asked myself before (“Can I really be that bad if the cat follows me around?”) in the service of a resolution-spurred-by feline ending that’d make John K. Samson proud. While “Cat Song” is perhaps the clearest example of Pierce’s songwriting acumen, his passion for classic 60s and 70s folk is all over Gold Dust if one cares to look. Buried beneath a swirling instrumental, “Anywhereing” features some excellent nomadic lyrics from Pierce. “These are songs you thought you’d never sing”, he remarks in a song about isolation and a lack of fulfillment. “But I’m still thinking there’s a chance for me to finally get it right,” he affirms at the end of “Anywhereing”, a thread that hangs in the air until the end of album closer “Small Song”: “If you sing that song ‘til you believe it, pretty sure you’re okay. You’re okay”. (Bandcamp link)

Galactic Static – Friendly Universe

Release date: October 22^nd
Record label: Corrupted TV
Genre: Lo-fi power pop, indie punk
Formats: CD, digital
Pull track: Fresh Cut & Bessie

Galactic Static is an “intergalactic friendship-core” band that hails from “the edge of the universe”. Or maybe they’re a couple of guys from Brooklyn who are committed to unabashed, hooky lo-fi power pop. Whoever or whatever they are, they bring tidings of a “Friendly Universe”, which to them seems to mean garbled but catchy positive guitar pop that reminds me of bands like Ohio’s Connections or even Mythical Motors. It wouldn’t surprise me too much if Galactic Static are extraterrestrials, as Friendly Universe definitely feels a bit off at times. “Friendship Rd.” is perhaps the record’s upbeat theme music, attempting to beam out a message of camaraderie through bouncy pop punk, until a Mark Linkous-esque self-sabotaging interruption grinds the song to a halt (then it starts right back up again).

Album opener “Dark Night of the Soul” is, befitting the title, dark and urgent-sounding, an intriguing red herring of a beginner track. Even the most complete power pop tune on Friendly Universe, “Fresh Cut & Bessie”, has something of a non-sequitur right there in the title. Still, there must’ve been some warm blood involved in a record that contains a mid-tempo Zippo lighter-holder like “Choose Your Own Adventure”. And the big finish closing track, “Time Enough (Don’t Let’s Give Up)”, burns through chunky power chords, basement-scale “Baba O’Riley” grandeur, and one last rally-around-the-flag effort for over five minutes, declaring not to give up even when “the world’s just not enough”. When you have a Friendly Universe, maybe you don’t need just one silly planet. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Mo Troper, Mythical Motors, Molly O’Malley, Boyracer

The Last Pressing Concerns of October is upon us! This incredibly spooky, hook-heavy edition looks at the latest full-lengths from pop song machines Mo Troper, Mythical Motors, and Boyracer, as well as a new EP from an up-and-comer, Louisville’s Molly O’Malley.

If you’re looking for more new music, you can browse previous editions of Pressing Concerns or visit the site directory.

Mo Troper – Dilettante

Release date: October 15^th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Power pop
Formats: CD, digital
Pull track: The Expendables Ride Again

Even though it eventually became one of my favorite albums of last decade, Mo Troper’s 2017 record Exposure & Response threw me for a loop at first. That album’s tightly-controlled, polished venom wasn’t how I conceptualized an “underground power pop album” at the time. I suppose I was expecting something more like Dilettante. With his newest record (also known, apparently, as Mo Troper IV), Troper has put together a 28-track, 50-minute marathon of an album that somehow feels like both the record that hews closest to Teenage Fanclub-inspired guitar pop and his most adventurous yet. It’s been quite a ride to get to this point—Troper got his last album, Natural Beauty, in right before everything shut down last February, and spent his months of quarantine making a reverent song-by-song cover album of The Beatles’ Revolver.

Like Mo Troper’s Revolver, Dilettante’s songs are almost entirely played and sung by Troper himself, and it’s a little fuzzier compared to his last couple of proper records (but not in a garage rock way, mind you). Still, Troper is a pop star above everything else, and Dilettante finds his songwriting as sharp as ever. Literally nothing could stop the runaway hooks in blissful rockers like “The Expendables Ride Again”, “Better Than That”, and “Winged Commander”. The music seems to be attempting to rise to the level of the inspiration of Troper’s lyrics on some of these tracks—“Can’t talk about how I feel inside / Without alienating everyone in my life,” he confesses in the love song “Tears on My Dockers”, and “The Perfect Song” is about something perhaps equally important for Troper. Other times, Troper’s penchant for sardonic scene observations surfaces again, but not quite as frequently, and “The Expendables Ride Again”, “All My Friends Are Venmo”, and “Camelot” all seem to greet it all with a bemused shrug more than with a smirk or scowl.

As mentioned earlier, Troper has packed Dilettante full of songs, and the smaller, in-the-cracks tracks have plenty to recommend as well. The falsetto, spare “Sugar and Cream” is breathtaking, as is (for completely different reasons) the disturbingly-spot on Elvis Costello pastiche of “Wet T-Shirt Contest”. To refer to a different 28-track album, there are plenty of “Motor Away”s on Dilettante, but the “Pimple Zoo”s are pretty good too. The acoustic, Andy Partridge-esque “My Canary Was Sure to Run” is another hidden gem almost unfairly tucked away at the penultimate track slot, and it might not even be the best song on the record about a bird. And the much-better-than-its-title-suggests “Armpit” is—you know what? Maybe they’re all hits. (Bandcamp link)

Mythical Motors – A Rare Look Ahead

Release date: October 29^th
Record label: Lo-Fi City
Genre: Power pop, lo-fi pop
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull track: Years of June

At about two minutes into “Drag Days”, a jangly album track from Guided by Voices’ 1996 record Under the Bushes Under the Stars, Robert Pollard kicks his voice up an octave to give the song a triumphant, power pop finish. It is, I think, somewhere in the midst of this moment that Chattanooga, Tennessee’s Mythical Motors were born. Mythical Motors bandleader Matt Addison shares Pollard’s penchant for collage-based album art, lo-fi guitar pop, and even choice of collaborators (A Rare Look Ahead was mastered by frequent Pollard producer Todd Tobias)—even if Addison’s exuberant, ageless voice sounds more like Tobin Sprout. A Rare Look Ahead is Mythical Motors’ only record of 2021 so far, and it picks up where their second album of 2020 (October’s Sleepwalking on Main Street) left off, with a chiming title track that continues to carry their torch for lo-fi pop rock.

In true Mythical Motors fashion, A Rare Look Ahead chugs through some psych-tinged, fantastical pop concerns (song titles include “Vivian of the Unseen Sun”, “Carnival Machine Man”, and “That’s Why I Conjured You”), tossing out 4-tracked power chords and vocal melodies at a clip of about two minutes per song. Early on in the album, “Years of June” sports what might be Addison’s finest hook yet, and “Crashing Waves of Fascination” roars to give the song a bit of a full-band bite, but A Rare Look Ahead is surprisingly backloaded. Side two of the record kicks off with the effortless “Fix the Circulation” and the fuzz-rock “The Flower Disappears Without You”, neither of which last much longer than a minute. The composed closing track “The No Name Followers” is as catchy as any of the earlier tracks, but also goes on for three-and-a-half minutes, just to show that Mythical Motors could stretch these songs out if they wanted to. Even with these longer tracks, or acoustic numbers like “Holy Midnight”, A Rare Look Ahead never lets go of its pop convictions. (Bandcamp link)

Molly O’Malley – Goodwill Toy

Release date: October 21^st
Record label: Mollywhop Record Shop
Genre: Synthpop, dream pop
Formats: Digital
Pull track: Language!

“It doesn’t take much now to get me going,” Molly O’Malley announces in the chorus of “Princess Mia (Ybsntcht)”, the opening track to her new Goodwill Toy EP. In the song’s dizzying music video, it may or may not be implied that Fabio is the subject of this declaration. Although sonically “Princess Mia” is a little bit of an outlier compared to the rest of Goodwill Toy, it’s a good “you’re in or you’re out” moment as any. Either you’re into O’Malley’s specific blend of synthpop production and reverb-guitar tones, journal entry-evoking lyrics delivered in a wistful voice, and an ambitious presentation that goes far beyond what one might expect for a four-song EP (i.e., every single track has its own music video)—or you’re not very fun, are you?

Although O’Malley clearly is a fan of and incorporates the guitar flourishes of dream pop into her music, her confident, emotional, front-and-center voice ensures that Goodwill Toy won’t be mistaken for sleepy-time music any time soon, and hews closer to emo-tinged indie rock like Death Cab for Cutie or Petal. It’s a voice that sounds equally at home helming an all-out pop banger like “Princess Mia (Ybsntcht)” or a bittersweet, dramatic lyric like closing track “Tangible”. Even on the dreamiest song, the reverb-drenched “You Look So Good”, O’Malley’s voice won’t be denied while delivering the titular line. Other than the strong presence of O’Malley herself, Goodwill Toy hangs together thematically as well: The EP starts with “You know how to paint my cheeks a new shade of pink” among its first lines, and the following two songs offer up “I wanna know what’s going on in your mind / I wanna know what thoughts run wild at night” and “You look so good wearing my future,” respectively. This “liberated feeling of fearlessly falling into another person,” as O’Malley describes it, takes a thoughtful turn inward before Goodwill Toy ends. It’s short, but it’s complete. (Bandcamp link)

Boyracer – Assuaged

Release date: August 6^th
Record label: Emotional Response
Genre: Indie pop, pop punk, power pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull track: Miserable Ways

Assuaged is Boyracer’s fourteenth full-length record since 1990. Over the band’s thirty years or so of existence, they’ve released music on notable indie pop labels like Slumberland and Sarah, all the while hewing towards the rougher, punkier end of that particular spectrum, and at some point bandleader and sole original member Stewart Anderson relocated from England to central Arizona (no, I had no idea anyone lived there, either). Even though they’re no longer the band that recorded 1994’s More Songs About Frustration and Self-Hate, Assuaged doesn’t feel like “Stewart Anderson solo album”—multi-instrumentalist Matty Green has been with the band for over twenty years and plenty of records’ worth of music, and while vocalist and lead guitarist Christina Riley (of Artsick) has only been in Boyracer for two years and one previous album, her presence on Assuaged is as strongly-felt as anyone else.

The theme to this edition of Pressing Concerns seems to be “musicians tearing through a bunch of pop songs”, and Boyracer certainly bash out Assuage’s fourteen tracks with no small amount of bite. The trio come roaring out of the gate with punk-pop rave-ups “Stuck with You” and “Tommy McNeil”; the bite-sized glam of “Scapegoats and Martyrs” is really only a breather in comparison to the previous two, and then the rollicking “Spoils” picks right up where Boyracer left off. The musical and songwriting flourishes that make these songs pop out from one another are aplenty, particularly in the second half: the busy, bouncy bass underneath “Bulletproof”, the razor-sharp guitar work on “Drinks with the Girls”, the trumpet in the fuck-this-job anthem “40 Hours”. Boyracer also save some of the biggest successes for late in the album, like the absolutely brutally catchy diss track “Miserable Ways”, sung by Ridley (“You should hate yourself, not everyone else,” she proclaims drolly over one of the record’s many handclap backbeats), and the exuberant duet-chant “1 Am”—there isn’t a dull moment on Assuage. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Dummy, The Stick Figures, ZOO, Cuffed Up

This week, a very special episode of Pressing Concerns discusses debut albums from Dummy and ZOO, an archival release from The Stick Figures, and the latest EP from Cuffed Up.

If you’re looking for more new music, you can browse previous editions of Pressing Concerns or visit the site directory.

Dummy – Mandatory Enjoyment

Release date: October 22^nd
Record label: Trouble in Mind
Genre: Noise pop, shoegaze, neo-psychedelia
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
Pull track: Daffodils

The Los Angeles-based Dummy arrived in 2020 with a pair of EPs on the quality indie labels Pop Wig (Big Bite, Angel Du$t) and Born Yesterday (Stuck, Café Racer), and have since landed with Chicago’s Trouble in Mind for their debut full-length. Broadly speaking, Mandatory Enjoyment is the kind of crate-digging guitar pop music that fits well among their new label’s roster, but instead of the minimalist post-punk kind (like Nightshift or Smoke Bellow) or breezy jangle pop (The Tubs, Salad Boys), it is of the sensory overload, noise-pop variety. “Fissured Ceramics” and “Final Weapon”, the first two non-instrumental tracks that open the record, marry the buried vocals and heavy reverb of My Bloody Valentine with a krautrock rhythm section and droning keyboards, grabbing one’s attention fully and setting the stage for the rest of Mandatory Enjoyment to expand on the set-up.

The delicate dream pop of “Cloud Pleaser” and “Tapestry Distortion”, as well as the five-plus minute mid-album psychedelic journey of “H.V.A.C.”, fit with the opening salvo of Mandatory Enjoyment like a glove but avoid merely retreading it. Although “Cloud Pleaser” and “Tapestry Distortion” slow things down a bit, they’re still relatively busy tracks. When Dummy do turn it down a notch, it’s for justified reasons: the restrained post-punk of “X-Static Blanket” and the spare lounge pop of “Aluminum in Retrograde” are both welcome late-half left-turns. The last turn on Mandatory Enjoyment is a bit of everything—the closer, “Atonal Poem”, is effectively four minutes of pure synth experimentation before ending everything with an understated, brief noise pop outro.

At the bottom of Mandatory Enjoyment’s Bandcamp page, Dummy list a huge group of modern similarly-minded bands to listen to, many of which I’ve covered or wanted to cover on Rosy Overdrive. Krautrock/psychedelic noise pop isn’t known for inspiring the kind of scene-unifying devotion that, say, punk rock or emo seems to, and many that are truly hardcore about the genre are more often than not stuck in the past instead of looking for new bands. This is to say that seeing a list of a bunch of acts making this kind of music is inspiring to me—and that it’s attached to something as strong as Mandatory Enjoyment certainly gives it more weight. (Bandcamp link)

The Stick Figures – Archeology

Release date: September 3^rd
Record label: Floating Mill
Genre: Post-punk
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
Pull track: September

One of my favorite “no, I’m serious” things to say to a certain kind of person is that American post-punk is better than British post-punk. If you stop being a stick in the mud and widen the idea of the genre to something greater than “a band that sounds like a band that sounds like Joy Division” (as well as discarding that pesky stipulation that it has to be entirely “post” the initial wave of punk rock), it doesn’t seem like such a crazy idea. Pere Ubu, Devo, Mission of Burma, The Feelies, The Wipers, The Minutemen, plenty of other SST bands that didn’t fit neatly into “hardcore”, everything coming out of Athens, Georgia…The Brits just had better press, is all. Which brings us to Tampa, Florida’s The Stick Figures, which formed in the late 70s at the University of South Florida and could’ve ended up just as revered as any of those bands listed previously in a different life. The aptly-titled Archeology is an expanded reissue of the band’s only official release, a four-song 1981 EP, that adds a full record’s length of unreleased studio and live recordings.

Of the bands and scenes mentioned above, Athens, Georgia is the closest to The Stick Figures geographically, and it lands not too far off to how they sound as well. Songs like “N-Light”, “Energy”, and “Green” are Pylon/B-52’s-esque dance-punk that also proudly display a funk rock influence. At their cleanest and most straightforward (the slinky “Yesterday” and the two poppiest songs, “September” and “Make a Fire”), they’re as immediate as any crowd-pleasing post-punk revival group. At their most inscrutable (the two scuzzy noise-punk live tracks, particularly “Screaming”, and the experimental “Ellis Otivator Dub” and an even wilder 2021 remix of said dub), they’re more adventurous than most of this brand of music. The Stick Figures broke up less than a year after the release of their only EP, but apparently they amassed another record’s worth of unreleased recordings that Pittsburgh’s Floating Mill Records is planning for a 2022 release. I imagine there are plenty of inspired post-punk bands from moderately-sized U.S. cities that continue to languish in obscurity worth revisiting. I doubt any of them sound exactly like The Stick Figures, though. (Bandcamp link)

ZOO – No Man’s Land

Release date: October 22^nd
Record label: Good Eye
Genre: Psychedelic folk
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull track: Sleeping Dogs

Cincinnati’s Cody Pavlinac has been making music under the name ZOO for the better part of a decade, so the project’s full-length debut, No Man’s Land, is some time in the making. The record’s ten songs are full of laid-back, unhurried instrumentals that befit the self-described introverted Pavlinac, who recently became a father. Although he hails from the same city as famous ‘sad dad’ group The National, Pavlinac’s airy vocals and the lightly psychedelic-tinged Americana of the music puts ZOO closer to the new strand of retro folk rock practiced by the likes of Hiss Golden Messenger, Cut Worms, and Daniel Romano. Some Byrdsian jangle-rock is audible in No Man’s Land, but Pavlinac hews closer to the psychedelic subsection of the 1960s. In addition, No Man’s Land’s intimacy and relatively humble presentation reminds me of the Mike Uva album I reviewed earlier this year.

No Man’s Land eases us into ZOO’s sound with the understated, pastoral “Go with Me”, where Pavlinac builds a delicate, subtly intricate soundscape that isn’t too busy and still leaves a lot of open space. The especially vulnerable side of Pavlinac rears up again in the tender “What’s There to Lose” and the pin-drop sparseness of side-one closer “Worry”, which has a cavernous quality that really lends weight to Pavlinac’s confession of “I’ve got worry on my mind”. Thematically and musically, No Man’s Land isn’t all so dark; lead single “Sleeping Dogs” masks up lyrics about political anxiety and isolation with a bouncy, upbeat instrumental track, and “Honeybug” doesn’t need to disguise anything about its contentedness. Like several of the tracks on No Man’s Land, “Honeybug” casually pushes the four-to-five minute mark and evolves from a grounded folk-rock song to trippy psychedelia. “What can I say now that’s already been said?” Pavlinac sings over a wash of synths in album closer “Trash Night”, a beauty-in-the-mundane epilogue, before following it up with “turn off the TV and get ready for bed”. It’s just another vivid dispatch from No Man’s Land. (Bandcamp link)

Cuffed Up – Asymmetry

Release date: October 22^nd
Record label: Royal Mountain
Genre: Post-punk
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull track: Bonnie

Cuffed Up is a Los Angeles-based post-punk band led by the alternating vocals of guitarists Ralph Torrefranca and Sapphire Jewell and backed by the rhythm section of drummer Joe Liptock and bassist Victor Ordonez. Jewell in particular is having a notable 2021; she is also a member of the shimmery post-rock band Gypsum, who just released their debut album, as well as currently playing in a band you may have heard of, “tenderpunk” group Illuminati Hotties. Cuffed Up explores a different genre of music than either of those concerns: dark, dramatic post-punk. The four-song Asymmetry is the band’s second EP since their debut in 2019 and comes in at under 15 minutes, but it’s a shiny, polished affair that succeeds at maximizing its limited time.

Asymmetry was produced by the prolific Brad Wood, who’s had his hands on everything from 90s radio-ready alt-rock (Veruca Salt/that dog.) to thorny post-hardcore (mewithoutYou/Touche Amore). Even though Asymmetry clearly has one foot in the world of the largely-U.K.-based current wave of reverent post-punk revival, these songs have a massive sound that isn’t particularly constrained to that arena (look at this video of the band citing Foals and Deftones, among others, as beloved music, for instance). Take the track that’s one of the most clearly post-punk influenced: “Bonnie”, which has that classic sense of propulsion (like “Canaries”, the other obvious one), but also manages to get an icily intense alt-rock chorus shoehorned in there. The cinematic, noir-ish “Terminal”, meanwhile, is practically all chorus, without dithering on the way there. Cuffed Up has yet to make a full-length album, and though they describe themselves as a “full time band”, it’s fair to wonder how much Jewell and Torrefranca’s other pursuits might impact the group going forward. Nevertheless, Asymmetry is quite a firm foundation. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Antietam, Weak Signal, Mt. Oriander, Gypsum

Another week, another edition of Pressing Concerns. This week, we look at a tribute record inspired by Wink O’Bannon featuring Antietam plus a wide cast of guests, the re-released Weak Signal sophomore album, the debut EP from Mt. Oriander (Keith Latinen from Empire! Empire! I Was a Lonely Estate and Parting) and the first Gypsum album.

If you’re looking for more new music, you can browse previous editions of Pressing Concerns or visit the site directory. The September end-of-month playlist also went up last week, and that’s highly recommended as well.

Antietam Plus – His Majesty’s Request: A Wink O’Bannon Select

Release date: October 15^th
Record label: Motorific
Genre: Indie rock, punk rock, post-rock, jazz, post-punk, folk rock
Formats: Digital
Pull track: Beware of Darkness

Matthew “Wink” O’Bannon was a longtime fixture of the Louisville, Kentucky music scene, from the late 70s until his death in June of last year. I was familiar with him as a member of indie rock behemoths Eleventh Dream Day; though he was only in the band for a couple of years, he helped record perhaps their two best records, 1993’s El Moodio and 1994’s Ursa Major. He also played in the roots rock band Bodeco and released a solo album, but there may be no greater measure of his impact on the music world than seeing just how many great musicians have lined up to help make His Majesty’s Request: A Wink O’Bannon Select happen. The album is helmed by Antietam, themselves a long-running Louisville institution, and also features, among others, several members of Eleventh Dream Day, Will Oldham, Todd Brashear of Slint, Tara Jane O’Neil of Rodan, and all three members of Yo La Tengo (who, having covered an Antietam song way back in 1989, are honorary Louisvillians).

His Majesty’s Request is a covers album—the idea being that it’s fourteen of O’Bannon’s favorite songs performed by his friends and collaborators, plus one of his originals covered at the end of the record. One can chart O’Bannon’s favorite music along the rock history timeline, with British Invasion and psychedelic/baroque pop of the 1960s giving way to the punk rock and post-punk of the following decades. His Majesty’s Request subsequently (intentionally or otherwise) makes a case for the dark Americana, post-rock, and post-hardcore misfits that arose disproportionately from Kentucky in the 1990s as an inheritor of this lineage. 60s pop songs like The Beatles’ “The Night Before” (sung by Georgia Hubley) and Donovan’s “Hurdy Gurdy Man” (sung by a chorus of voices, many of whom appear elsewhere on the record) are in capable hands, and Will Oldham singing George Harrison’s “Beware of Darkness” is such an obvious pairing that I’m surprised it had never (to my knowledge) happened until now.

The core trio of Antietam make their presence most known on the punk numbers—they rip through the Ramones’ “Commando”, the New York Dolls’ “Vietnamese Baby”, and The Clash’s “English Civil War” either on their own or with guest vocalists, and they assist Rick Rizzo ably in capturing the moodiness of Joy Division’s “Shadowplay”. But O’Bannon and those around him were never merely narrow-scope garage/punk rock revivalists, so it’s telling that both the earliest (Wolf Knapp’s take on Charles Mingus’ “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat”) and latest (Tortoise and Eleventh Dream Day’s Douglas McCombs’ faithful rendition of Sonny Sharrock’s “Who Does She Hope to Be?”) songs chosen for the album are jazz compositions, and at least one punk number (Gang of Four’s “To Hell with Poverty”) gets gloriously deconstructed by experimentalist Jaime Fennelly and Eleventh Dream Day’s Janet Bean. The album ends with an extended Antietam jam on O’Bannon’s own “Hundred” from his sole release under his own name, featuring actual recording of O’Bannon himself playing as the song fades out. Wink O’Bannon is no longer with us, but His Majesty’s Request is just one reminder that he isn’t gone.

Proceeds from His Majesty’s Request: A Wink O’Bannon Select will be donated to Girls Rock Louisville and AMPED. (Bandcamp link)

Weak Signal – Bianca

Release date: October 15^th
Record label: Colonel
Genre: Garage rock, fuzz rock, psychedelic rock
Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital
Pull track: I’m a Fire

An unmastered version of Weak Signal’s second album, Bianca, appeared on Bandcamp with no lead-up in May of last year; after making a few waves as word spread, the New York band is seeing the record’s physical and formal release over a year later thanks to Colonel Records. It seems appropriate that I talk about Eleventh Dream Day elsewhere in this post, because Bianca deals in the same brand of fuzzy, guitar-heavy indie rock that the marked the early records of the former band. Singer and guitarist Mike Bones has played as a hired gun with everyone from Cass McCombs to Run the Jewels, but Weak Signal is where he gets to take center stage. The rhythm section of bassist Sasha Vine and drummer Tran are more than bit players, however—they’re certainly up to the task of building a foundation for Bones’ six-string.

When Vine and Bones sing together (as they often do), it reminds me of a harder-psych version of another band that feels like a reference point for the group—Yo La Tengo (this is particularly pronounced in slower songs like “Come Back” and “I’ll Stay”). It’s not all so quiet as the two previously-mentioned tracks, of course— the Vine-led opening track “I’m a Fire” and the lumbering paranoia trip “Drugs in My System” light things up early in Bianca, in addition to the chugging power chords of “Voice Inside My Head”. In “Don’t Turn Around”, Weak Signal let loose with their own version of southwestern desert rock a la Giant Sand or Thin White Rope, and the galloping “Sorry” is pretty much the band’s turn at pop punk. Bones always seems interested, either during the rockers or the space-out songs, in the interaction between his instrument and the others’—less-immediate tracks like “Zones” seem to exist almost entirely for the moment when the trio come together musically in its second half. It’s always compelling when Weak Signal does this. (Bandcamp link)

Mt. Oriander – This Is Not the Way I Wanted You to Find Out

Release date: October 8^th
Record label: Count Your Lucky Stars
Genre: Midwest emo
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull track: Nothing After Nothing Came Bursting Out

The title of the surprise-released This Is Not the Way I Wanted You to Find Out is a little piece of self-deprecation on the record’s part. Keith Latinen (former frontman of emo group Empire! Empire! (I Was a Lonely Estate) and head of Count Your Lucky Stars Records) has spent the last few years writing and recording the debut album for his new solo project, which presumably has been delayed due to the current state of things, leaving this quickly-recorded five song EP to introduce Mt. Oriander to the world instead. While the record’s name might be an attempt to lower stakes and expectations, This Is Not the Way I Wanted You to Find Out needs no such shunting. Latinen already returned to making new music earlier this year as co-leader of the band Parting, and here he picks up where that band’s debut record left off, albeit in a more subtle fashion.

The most distinct aspect of Latinen’s music is his voice: clean and melodic, and capable of portraying a palpable heaviness. These five songs, in which Latinen plays every instrument and sings every word himself, place him even more front-and-center than normal. I’ve been listening to a lot of slowcore lately, and Mt. Oriander contains a similar gravitas to the likes of full-band Idaho and early Pedro the Lion, but with the Michigan-based Latinen providing his typical Midwestern emo spin. For one, look at the verbose media references of song titles—I get “It’s Always Been Wankershim” and “I’m Never Going to Say My Lines Faster Than Jamie Taco”, but had to look up “Dream Ruby Glitch”. The Jamie Taco song in particular, despite all of those words in its title, is a bummer of a song whose sting is enhanced by its vagueness. Although Parting dispensed with something of a positive, cathartic ending on Unmake Me, Latinen gives us no such relief on his own, with the especially rough “Nothing After Nothing Came Bursting Out” offering up only numbness and the marching of time. Can’t wait for that LP. (Bandcamp link)

Gypsum – Gypsum

Release date: October 12^th
Record label: Sonic Ritual
Genre: Indie rock, post-rock, psych rock, dream pop
Formats: Digital
Pull track: Follow Me

The debut album from Los Angeles’ Gypsum reminds me a bit of the reissued Supernowhere album from earlier this year—similarly to that group, they’re a trio that manages to craft a “big” sound and hop across structures and genre signifiers with the relatively simple guitar-bass-drums setup. They do claim the post-rock mantle, and the spindly opening to first track “Follow Me” inhabits that world—until they reach the chorus, where a showy bassline and a smart backbeat (from drummer Jessy Reed) steers the song into directly into dance-rock territory. Such is the way of Gypsum; a sonically intriguing record that’s characterized by a high, soaring, reverb-heavy lead guitar that tugs against a grounded, sturdy rhythm section, all while the voices of singers Sapphire Jewell and Anna Arboles stand firmly in the center of it all.

These ingredients help give a trippy, skewed edge to some of Gypsum’s more “pop” songs, like “Give It” and “Kaleidoscope”, which combine rhythmic experimentation with strong melody, and in the case of the latter, a loud, spirited psychedelic rock stomp that takes over the track’s second half. The less immediate songs, like the steady, motorik “Gull Lake” and the firm, restrained album centerpiece “Snow White”, make up for less obvious hooks with extended compelling spacey-psych instrumentals. Appearing in the middle of Gypsum’s second side, the stop-and-start of “Satisfied” might sneakily feature the strongest vocal turn of the album, but lest they show off too much, they follow it up with the spoken-word “Margaret”. Album closer “Disappear” has a foot in both ends of the Gypsum spectrum—even though it pushes boldly past the six-minute mark and takes awhile to develop, it still boasts a solidly melancholic chorus to cap off a successful first outing. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable: