The latest edition of Pressing Concerns highlights new albums from Upper Wilds, Psychic Flowers, Hello Whirled, and Nat Baldwin. Plenty of familiar faces this time around! The next post on Rosy Overdrive should be the end-of-July wrap-up playlist, so look for that either next week or the week after, depending on time. Meanwhile, you can go back to previous editions of Pressing Concerns or June’s end-of-month post for plenty of new music.
Upper Wilds – Venus
Release date: July 23th Record label: Thrill Jockey Genre: Space rock, noise rock, noise pop Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull track: Love Song #5
New York’s Upper Wilds have slowly morphed into a band with an ambition that matches their galactic fixation. Formed by guitarist/vocalist Dan Friel because he missed being in a rock band after the breakup of the eternally underrated Parts & Labor, the project began rather unassumingly with the short but promising Guitar Module 2017. Merely a year later, however, Upper Wilds unveiled the science-fiction-interplanetary-colonialism concept album Mars with a muscular power-trio bombastic sound to match. Three years later, delayed by the forces that delay everything these days, Venus arrives with a similar title, album artwork, and sonic assault (bassist Zach Lehrhoff has been replaced by touring member Jason Binnick, but Friel and drummer Jeff Ottenbacher with still anchor things) that all position the record as a sequel of sorts to Mars. The second entry in Upper Wilds’ solar system series (which Friel has talked about as an ongoing project) doesn’t have a similar corkboard-inducing loose through-line, but Venus does find inspiration in the planet’s namesake: all ten of the LP’s tracks are designated a “love song”, and merely numbered to differentiate them.
Only the album’s opening track seems to actually take place on the titular planet (“They came and tried to see life at 800 degrees / But the cameras melt, the god of love cheers”)—if one is searching for similarities, the love song aspect is the more fertile soil on Venus. But what does a “love song” mean to Friel? Upper Wilds find inspiration both in the cosmos (“Love Song #7”, about the secret marriage of two astronauts before a mission together, and “Love Song #6”, about two surviving members of the Heaven’s Gate “UFO religion” cult who continue to tend to the group’s website) and close to home (“Love Song #2”, about Friel’s long-haul trucker cousin Amy who also co-stars in its music video, and “Love Song #3”, where the “new constellations” described therein are the freckles on Friel’s son). Centerpiece “Love Song #5” surveys all of this and lays out what might be the record’s thesis statement: two people who love each other remain mortal and are not, in a technical sense, stronger than the sun and the void of space—but that sure doesn’t seem to matter to them, no?
Musically, Venus is perhaps the most straightforward Upper Wilds have come across since their inception—there aren’t really any behemoths of noise like Mars’ “Ex-Frontiers” or Guitar Module’s “Black Holes”. Friel has always been an ace pop songwriter, but Venus is almost entirely in-the-red melodies: the album rollout’s six advance singles (seven if you count the bridge track “Love Song #4” which debuted alongside #5) seem a little bonkers, but all of these songs really could be the “single”. In the brief amount of time these songs have been in my life, I’ve already had “We know how to be alone now, we know how to be alone no-ow” from “Love Song #6” or the guitar riff from “Love Song #7” lodged in my head on countless occasions. The record’s left-field moments are basically restricted to the backwards-played verse tucked at the end of the lightly-psychedelic “Love Song #8” and the wordlessness of closing track “Love Song #10”, which centers a guitar solo the same way in which Friel’s solo albums do synths, and also sort of functions as the album’s “Alright”. Both of these come along at the exactly the right time and help Venus feel like 225 days around the sun in just over a half-hour. Looking forward to Mercury! (Bandcamp link)
Psychic Flowers – For the Undertow
Release date: July 30th Record label: Living Lost Genre: Garage rock, lo-fi rock Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull track: Coming to Collect
Any avid reader of Rosy Overdrive (if such a person does exist) should be familiar with the work of David Settle. His various projects have appeared in Pressing Concerns, on playlists, and our most recent year-end list. Settle seems to adhere to the Robert Pollard school of needing multiple bands to bear the brunt of his recorded output—Psychic Flowers are a little more ramshackle than the relatively measured psychedelia of The Fragiles, and both are hookier than the scuzzy post-punk of Big Heet, but the lines are a little blurry to my ears, and For the Undertow further muddies the waters by actually clearing up some of the muddiness. For the fourth record under the Psychic Flowers name, Settle has taken what had been his “loosest” project and turned in what feels like his cleanest, shiniest album yet. The fuzz is still there, but the assistance of real-live drummer Leo Suarez on the majority of these songs and a cleaner sound is unmistakable. Lo-fi pop bands like The Cleaners from Venus and Guided by Voices have always figured into Settle’s sound, but the percussion plus a heavier guitar sound make this more or less a straight garage rock record i.e. something off of Goner or In the Red Records.
For the Undertow barrels out of the gate with two absolute rippers in the whoa-oh-ing “Coming to Collect” and the punchy “Animated Songs from a Lonely Planet” (which manages to cram that mouthful of a title into an excellent hook), after which the astronomy-focused “Spaceboy” and the slick, glam-riff-led “Undoing” turn the dial down from “very loud” to merely “loud”. Most of the record then ping-pongs between these two moods (the curious, bouncy fuzzy acoustic “For the Record” is followed up by the grungy power chord workout of “Ten Sided”), although the penultimate track, “Gloves to Grand Air” (which is not on the album that shares its title) is a pensive number that recalls the most recent record by The Fragiles and presents the listener with a moment of introspective clarity before soaring in its second half. That song’s grand finale would be a great final send-off, but For the Undertow ends with the stream-of-consciousness epilogue “Wondering” that befits a musician that seems to always be moving forward. The song begins (on a relatable note) with Settle musing about Robert Pollard before moving onto his art (whether or not he will just be a “flicker” if no one hears his songs) and his interpersonal relationships (“When you need it, will I be able / To stay stable, and soothe your burn?”). No moment, it seems, is too large or too small to be captured in a song for Settle. (Bandcamp link)
Hello Whirled – History Worth Repeating
Release date: July 30th Record label: Sherilyn Fender Genre: Lo-fi, power pop Formats: Digital Pull track: Egregore
Release three good-to-great albums in seven months, kids, and you too can be a member of the Pressing Concerns three-timers club. At the moment, however, Hello Whirled is the only earner of such a distinction. Compared to the impressive scope of January’s Down on Sex and Romance covers album or the apocalyptic grandiosity of the “100th Hello Whirled release” No Victories, the (mostly) “short songs” of History Worth Repeating might seem slight, but this set of tracks is every bit as deliberate and cohesive as those two are. History Worth Repeating is a remarkably tired-sounding album—No Victories wasn’t really any less dark than this record, but while that album found Hello Whirled architect Ben Spizuco doing his best to burn along with the world around him, History Worth Repeating is resigned to its more insular fate of merely fading away. The beginning of the record finds Spicuzo at his most animated—album opener “Witness” is an uncharacteristic post-hardcore thrasher that finds Spicuzo shouting “You don’t have to look at me! You don’t have to look at me!” over an increasingly anxiety-inducing cacophony.
History Worth Repeating’s equally-uncharacteristic other bookend is the fourteen-minute closing track “Thousand”, which finds Spicuzo probing his deepest fears, anxieties, and desires over a slow-burning indie rock instrumental that stretches but never feels like it needs to showboat to make it across the finish line (it sounds like if Doug Martsch had started to fuck with long song lengths when Built to Spill was still a K Records band). “Thousand” emphasizes with a silent video game protagonist and ends with Spicuzo asking the listener to forget his name—it’s a bit of a, as the kids say, “downer ending”, and if there’s something positive to be found here in a sort of cathartic exorcism kind of way, Hello Whirled certainly aren’t handing it to us on a silver platter. However towering “Thousand” may be, it certainly doesn’t negate the rest of History Worth Repeating, which contains several lo-fi pop highlights: the agitated “Acquiesce” chugs along to its titular demand, the 60-second pop-punk rave-up of “Datura” distills that genre’s ennui better than entire bands’ careers, and the melancholy thesaurus-core of “Quaintrelle” is Hello Whirled at their Pollard-esque best. Perhaps most impressive is “Egregore”, in which History Worth Repeating’s themes of (im)mortality, the mundanity of eternity, and isolation all (literally!) manifest themselves in the form of Spicuzo quipping to a perhaps-imagined spiritual entity that “believing you is not the problem, but it’s a grief to believe in me,” in the middle of a classic bummer pop song. History Worth Repeating is certainly an album worth…listening to multiple times. (Bandcamp link)
Nat Baldwin – Common Currents
Release date: July 10th Record label: Dear Life Genre: Orchestral folk Formats: Cassette, CD, digital Pull track: All We Want Is Everything
Common Currents is the tenth record by double bassist Nat Baldwin under his own name, the latest in a nearly two-decade career. If you haven’t heard any of his solo material, Baldwin’s fingerprints are also all over the era of indie rock where it made sense for the biggest bands to employ a double bassist—his credits include Vampire Weekend, Deer Tick, and Grizzly Bear, and he was a full-time Dirty Projector for virtually their entire peak of relevance. A few of his solo albums have augmented Baldwin’s double bass and earnest vocals with percussion and more strings, putting it not in an entirely different world than the orchestral pop of Andrew Bird, while others find him piloting his main instrument into experimental noise range. Common Currents (which, at five songs and 24 minutes, is either a full-length or EP depending on one’s personal religious beliefs) splits the difference: these are traditionally-structured songs, to be sure, but they’re also very sparse, carried entirely by Baldwin’s voice and bass.
The gently-humming “All We Want Is Everything” starts off Common Currents as friendly as possible, and while “Communal Luxury” is a little darker with the rustling and squeaking of the bass on top of Baldwin’s bowing and crooning, it’s still a forward-pushing track that’s carried by a beautiful vocal melody. Between the two songs, however, is the most “difficult” song on the record—the 8 minute, glacially-paced “Abundance”. The song’s first half features a lot of sonic emptiness between the stabs of bass and Baldwin’s relatively sparse singing, before slowly building and giving way to two minutes of drone as the song fades away. There’s nothing else quite like it on Common Currents, but the closing track, a cover of Sibylle Baier’s “I Lost Something in the Hills” comes close with its cinematic feel and plodding tempo. All five of these songs come off as unique despite being created from the same toolbox, and I don’t think one has to have any particular fondness for upright bass to appreciate Common Currents. (Bandcamp link)
Welcome back to the first Pressing Concerns in a while! Today we’re covering new albums from Matthew Milia, Gnawing, John Murry, and o’summer vacation. Be sure to check out previous editions of Pressing Concerns for more recent albums and EPs that are worth your time.
Matthew Milia – Keego Harbor
Release date: July 16th Record label: Sitcom Universe Genre: Alt-country, singer-songwriter Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital Pull track: Autumn America
Detroit’s Matthew Milia has played in the band Frontier Ruckus for nearly two decades and a half dozen releases, and has simultaneously built up a couple albums’ worth of a solo career. Keego Harbor is either Milia’s second or third record (depending on whether one counts his 2015 “mixtape” Even Fuckboys Get the Blues), but I didn’t need any context to appreciate its ten songs. The album is a exploration of suburban Michigan, specifically the titular small town where Milia grew up. Keego Harbor is a parade of hyper-specific images and relics which, of course, have their mirror images beyond the outskirts of the Detroit metropolitan area. The pedal steel-heavy “Me and My Sweetheart” embellishes its tender chorus with references to Dairy Queen and Baskin Robbins’ 31 flavors, in addition to Ford Tauruses and Detroit Lions game-day traffic, “With the Taste of Metal on Its Tongue” features cars that “jump the gun” at stoplights and vibrate with cranked stereo systems, and “Home Improvement” references I-75, Franklin Cider Mill, and of course, the Tim Allen vehicle that looms large over the Mitten State.
Milia lets things stretch out in his album-length tribute to the site of his upbringing—songs frequently reach past the six-minute mark, but Keego Harbor is never a drag. Some of the aides towards this end are Milia’s melodic vocals (even when bemoaning his “Midwest nasality” in “Home Improvement”), frankly compelling lyrics, and a keen sense of sequencing—after the relatively sparse “With the Taste of Metal on Its Tongue” comes the toe-tapping piano rocker “Autumn America”, for instance. Keego Harbor is more than a simple collection of images from Milia’s past—they’re just one feature of this album’s charms. If one has a hard time picking up on how the Keego Harbor of which Milia sings is more than just “the third-smallest town in Michigan by area”, the closing and title track should make it clear. Milia describes a mid-thirties life adrift (“So you just re-sign the lease in perpetuity / You can do your grocery shopping in a blindfold with acuity”), admitting that “keeping alive’s hard” but not lapsing into total despair. Milia has “kept the sacred place safe inside of me” (“Like the robin’s nest nestled in the letter C / In the mini-mall sign for Nail City”, to quote one of the record’s best similes) in a way to keep the past and present in conversation.
I recently visited my hometown for the first time since the world got all shook up by a global pandemic. For the first time, I felt the pull that, when I tore out of there with my few possessions in tow to start the Brand New Next Phase of my life, I swore I would never feel. And that’s what Keego Harbor is about. (Bandcamp link)
Gnawing – You Freak Me Out
Release date: July 9th Record label: Refresh Genre: Alt-rock, grunge revival, fuzz rock Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull track: Blue Moon New
You Freak Me Out, the debut album from Richmond’s Gnawing, announces its intentions from the opening sound of an amplifier buzzing followed by a distorted guitar riff in all its ragged glory. The trio take influences from everything 90s-alt-rock-related, from kingpins like Pavement to relative obscurities like Australia’s Smudge to fellow Alternative Nation revivalists like Milk Music and their geographical neighbors Late Bloomer. Towering over all these contemporaries and forbearers, however, is Dinosaur Jr., who are evoked from the moment bandleader John Russel’s J. Mascis drawl is unleashed in “Contract”. Gnawing, which originated in North Carolina, clearly find kinship with J.’s love of the twangier side of alternative rock, with Russell shining on the strummy “Blue Moon New” and the downbeat “Crenshaw Ave.”, which are apparently about the same period of Russel’s life from different perspectives. More than just a vocal similarity, Russel also appears to take influence from Mascis’ pop songwriting style, which (despite his larger reputation as a guitar noodle-hero) centers around simple, rhyming melodic couplets that provide the foundation for everything else on You Freak Me Out.
Tracks like the aforementioned two give You Freak Me Out some shading, hint at future avenues for Russell’s writing and the band’s playing to wander down eventually, and provide the listener with a nice reprieve. A reprieve from what, you might ask? The Fuzz. Gnawing have a grunge anthem for every occasion: the joyous lead single “So Glad”, the towering, mid-tempo “Summer Heat”, and the aggrieved, accusatory “Happy for You” all rise to the occasion. The album’s two most aggressive moments actually follow the loping country-rockers: “Crenshaw Ave.” bleeds into the 90-second feedback assault of “F.A.B. – 1”, and as if refusing to let You Freak Me Out end on a cheery, hopeful note, Gnawing bang out the lacerating “Worst Person I Know” (as in, John Russel is the worst person he himself knows) to close things out after “Blue Moon New”. “Worst Person I Know” is the record’s “punk rock” moment–it’s as heavy as Gnawing get on You Freak Me Out, even before giving way to a torrent of noise in its final minute. Gnawing’s version of a freak-out apparently includes an LP’s worth of satisfying, hooky rock and roll music, but the band’s final message seems to be: it’s still a freak-out. (Bandcamp link)
John Murry – The Stars Are God’s Bullet Holes
Release date: June 25th Record label: Submarine Cat Genre: Folk rock, alt-rock, singer-songwriter Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital Pull track: I Refuse to Believe – You Could Love Me
You do not need to know John Murry’s backstory to enjoy The Stars Are God’s Bullet Holes. It doesn’t hurt, and in spots it can add some weight to the words of the Mississippi-raised, Ireland-based musician (content warning for sexual assault and drug abuse), but you don’t need to know John Murry. I didn’t know anything about Murry when I discovered his second album, 2017’s A Short History of Decay, but I knew he could write a hell of a song after listening, and his proper follow-up record is no different in that regard. The Stars Are God’s Bullet Holes is a big rougher around the edges than A Short History of Decay, and it finds some freedom in that roughness. It’s still recognizably Murry, but songs like the fuzz-heavy title track, the urgent “Time & a Rifle”, and the chugging “You Don’t Miss Me – So Long” have almost a tossed-off, garage-rocking feel to them. Legendary producer John Parish (PJ Harvey, Giant Sand, 16 Horsepower) probably had some influence on this part of The Stars Are God’s Bullet Holes, but it’s more “finding a sound that suits this edition of Murry’s writing” than “imposing one’s style on an already-established musician”.
The looseness befits a record of songs that are some of Murry’s most upbeat and least bleak yet. This isn’t to say the clouds have lifted and the heaviness is gone, however. Things are not “okay”, but there is hope—or at least a desire to move forward to a place where hope is possible. “I will prune this family tree, because there’s nothing left but greed,” sings Murry in “Di Kreuster Sonata”, resolving to leave behind an abusive childhood in the final verse of a delicate ballad that’s arguably the album’s emotional center. In terms of cover songs, the determination with which Murry imbues his version of Duran Duran’s “Ordinary World” makes it practically “Walking on Sunshine” compared to A Short History of Decay’s dire take on The Afghan Whigs’ “What Jail Is Like”. “Time heals nothing,” Murry states one song earlier in “Time & a Rifle” (and alludes to again in “You Don’t Miss Me – So Long”), but through the words of Simon Le Bon, Murry affirms that he doesn’t interpret this as a personal dead end: “I will learn to survive”. (Official link)
o’summer vacation – Wicked Heart
Release date: June 23rd Record label: Damnably Genre: Noise rock, math rock Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull track: 扁桃腺のモニーク
“There are no deep messages to read into in the lyrics. Google translate or Babbel will not help you. It is to be felt, rather than to be understood,” reads a warning in the press release for Wicked Heart, the debut album from Kobe, Japan’s o’summer vacation. It then goes on to quote the band’s lead singer, Ami, citing as examples the vocals of bands like Cocteau Twins and Ponytail (the latter of which is a pretty good reference point for the band’s sound as a whole). Perhaps that’s for the best, as the 19-minute record has more than enough going on without introducing punk poetry into the fray. o’summer vacation barrel through Double Nickels on the Dime-length mathy post-punk fragments with a couple of “normal-sized” songs peppered in (“DxOxN/Eight” is effectively a 90-second ripper with a just-as-long extended instrumental outro).
Bassist Mikiiii plays their four-string like a regular old guitar, which is good because the trio (Ami, Mikiiii, drummer Manu) don’t actually have a guitarist. It wouldn’t be inaccurate to compare them to Melt-Banana, one of the bands from their home country whom o’summer vacation reference, but Wicked Heart feels like a more pointedly Spartan affair—they allow themselves few luxuries other than mikiiii’s “arsenal” of bass pedals (they’re jamming econo, if you will). The record is also incredibly catchy in its own way, aided by both mikiiii and Ami’s ability to wring melody out of their chosen noisemakers. The bass proves it can carry a song early on with “Oilman” and Nuts”, while Ami is more than game to step up to the plate in songs like “Hommage” where mikiiii is more interested in kicking up some noise with Manu. (Bandcamp link)
The Rosy Overdrive Monthly Revue is back, with a (somewhat belated) rundown of songs old and (mostly) new that I thoroughly enjoyed in June! Even by the standards of these typically-unwieldy monthly playlist posts, this one feels extra long-winded to me. I took a week off to enjoy life and whatnot, and I had all sorts of things to say about these songs by the time I got back to the grind. So: bookmark it, leave the tab open, save the link in your Notes app…whatever people do these days.
The Glow, Options, and We Are the Union get two songs this time around. ME REX get four, sort of—it’ll make sense when I get to their entry.
“Love Only”, The Glow From Love Only b/w Heavy Glow (2021, Double Double Whammy)
This should’ve been on the May playlist, but somehow I missed it, which is odd because I was a huge LVL UP fan and had up until now done a fairly good job of keeping tabs on the members’ post-breakup endeavors (still eagerly awaiting that Spirit Was album). Of the three LVL UP songwriters, Dave Benton and his Trace Mountains project have created the most (and best) records thus far, but the latest single by Mike Caridi’s The Glow threatens to do something else entirely: create a whole new band that equals the power of his last one. The contributions of his surrounding cast of musicians (guitarist/vocalist Kate Meizner, bassist Nicola Leel, original LVL UP drummer Greg Rutkin) may be more noticeable on B-side “Heavy Glow” (which we will get to later on in the playlist), but “Love Only” is an achievement in its own right. It’s an earnest pop rock song that nearly goes off the rails and in theory sounds like Caridi’s old band, but is too meaty to have been on Hoodwink’d and too sparkly for Return to Love. It’s The Glow, and I’m looking forward to hearing more from them.
“Love Song #7”, Upper Wilds From Venus (2021, Thrill Jockey)
The hits keep coming from Upper Wilds. I’ve alreadyhighlighted a few of the tracks from their upcoming third record, Venus, and the album’s seventh love song (and fifth single) is yet another keeper. “Love Song #7” only slightly cracks the two-minute barrier, and it’s not quite as theatrical as, say Love Songs #2 or #5—it’s perhaps the album’s most straightforward pop offering so far. Bandleader Dan Friel wastes no time in grabbing the listener with the song’s twin hooks: an absolutely joyful opening guitar riff and Friel’s equally-infectious melodic vocal. The energy is appropriate for the song’s subject matter—the wedding between astronauts Jan Davis and Mark C. Lee, done covertly due to NASA’s “camp-counselor-ass” rules against married couples going on space missions together. “Down there they fight like animals, they fight like old friends … / Up here’s above it, and way beyond them” sings Friel, imagining a moment of ecstasy floating above the Earth in the middle of a story that seems tailor-made for Upper Wilds’ space rock tribute to the planet of Love. Read more about Venus here.
“Bitch Store”, Smol Data From Inconvenience Store (2021, Open Door)
Whenever I’m listening to it, I’m convinced that “Bitch Store” is the greatest song in the world (when I’m not, I just think it might be). Inconvenience Store as a whole is a fascinating album, and while part of that is because of how giddy it is musically, Karah Goldstein’s writing style is a good a reason to return to it as any. 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. It’s much closer to my experience of “diary entries” than that of most lyrics that get hit with that description—not a neatly generous outpouring of secrets and confessions, but truths and experiences cathartically jotted down in a way that can only be really understood by their creator, but the emotion and meaning therein can readily be grasped by any. “Bitch Store” has this in spades (it starts with an extended metaphor that begins “I am not a piggy bank, however pink, round, and shiny”). Oh, and it’ll also kick your ass. The lyrics contain several (non-transparent, of course) allusions to the internet and Being Online, and musically “Bitch Store” similarly sucks up a bit of everything—dream pop, pop punk, show tunes, ska all wrest for control of the song’s mainframe over three minutes and help make “I won’t play house in a white van, or your sedan, or the police station” some of the hardest-hitting lines of the year.
“Morbid Obsessions”, We Are the Union From Ordinary Life (2021, Bad Time)
The announcement of ska-punks We Are The Union’s fifth album dovetailed as vocalist Reade Wolcott’s public coming-out as a trans woman, and lead single “Morbid Obsessions” was the song the band chose to soundtrack both. Like most of Ordinary Life, it’s a celebration of a song that flaunts its determination but doesn’t try to pave over Wolcott’s rough path to get to where she is now. Over Brandon Benson’s positively bouncy bass and insistent trombone from Jeremy Hunter (of Skatune Network), Wolcott recounts experiences with self-medication, self-harm, and a transphobic world (“She wanted a dress like all the other girls, a head full of curls / They said ‘Son, you can’t always get what you want in this world’”) before the simple vow of the chorus towers over everything else: “If I get one life, I’m gonna do what I want”.
“Hoper”, Options From On the Draw (2021)
Options is the solo project of Chicago’s Seth Engel, who has probably engineered a record by your favorite Windy City band, and has somehow found time to build a robust discography of his own at the same time. Last year Options released two records of chilly, slowcore and emo-shaded indie rock (one of which made the Rosy Overdrive Best of 2020 list), but On the Draw is a pretty sharp departure from the sound of Window’s Open and Wind’s Gonna Blow. The project’s eighth (I think?) record was quickly written and recorded at Engel’s home instead of Engel’s recording studio domain, and it embraces a lo-fi pop sound that reminds me of recent work by fellow engineer-songwriter Nate Amos of This Is Lorelei. The songs are short, too—On the Draw speeds through nine songs in under eighteen minutes, and “Hoper” doesn’t cross the 90-second mark. It doesn’t need much more—it’s all zippy power chords and melody, with Engel offering up either a vocal hook or guitar hook for the entire runtime.
“I Get a Strange Kind of Pleasure from Just Holding On”, John Vanderslice From John, I can’t believe civilization is still going here in 2021! Congratulations to all of us, Love, DCB (2021, Tiny Telephone)
John Vanderslice has been paying tribute to his friend and peer David Berman for over a decade now. His 2004 remix album was titled MGM Endings, a nod to a lyric in “Like Like the the the Death” by the Silver Jews, and Vanderslice sang to him directly in “Song for David Berman” from 2013’s haunting Dagger Beach. The poet and songwriter’s death in 2019 understandably hit Vanderslice hard, and his upcoming EP is his most explicit homage to Berman yet. The EP’s lengthy title is the entirety of a postcard that Berman sent to JV in 2008 with the year changed, and the title of its lead single is a nod to a Berman drawing. Although “I Get a Strange Kind of Pleasure from Just Holding On” isn’t about Berman, it takes what Vanderslice has gathered from him and repurposes it as a survival mantra for the early days of the COVID-19 shutdown. “Just go and walk around the park / And don’t ask me why or where, just do it, just do it until dark” is just one of the many commands Vanderslice gives himself, just to try to keep hanging on to something, anything. Musically, “I Get a Strange Kind of Pleasure from Just Holding On” is another success from Vanderslice’s unexpected second act that began with 2019’s The Cedars, when he returned from an indefinite hiatus with an updated sound that embraced glitchy electronics and experimental hip-hop beats over his formerly relatively austere indie rock. Vanderslice has promised the rest of the upcoming EP to be a “relentless synth assault”, but “I Get a Strange Kind of Pleasure from Just Holding On” is universal indie pop.
“Paladin”, Corvair From Corvair (2021, Paper Walls/wiaiwya)
Corvair’s self-titled album from February is a relatively recent discovery of mine that snuck its way onto the Rosy Overdrive mid-year best-of list. The Portland husband-and-wife duo of Brian Naubert and Heather Larimer have played in many Pacific Northwest bands over the years, but Corvair is their first album together, and it’s a superb tribute to big hooky guitar-and-synth pop-rock like Electric Light Orchestra and The New Pornographers. Album highlight “Paladin” is unabashedly classic-rock in the way it takes its time cycling through different movements over five and a half minutes—bouncy yet economical pop-rock, guitar heroics, and a long dream-psych outro all give it a memorable progressive pop sheen. It’s also distinctively collaborative, with Larimer taking lead vocals on the verses and bridge, but Naubert’s six-string and chorus vocals fighting for attention prominently throughout the song as well.
“White Lightning”, nasimiYu From P O T I O N S (2021, Figureight)
New York/New Orleans’ nasimiYu has played in bands you may have heard of if you read this blog, such as Sharkmuffin and Kalbells, and she also releases music under her own name. P O T I O N S, her second full-length and first in seven years, is a warm and bright pop record recorded entirely by nasimiYu herself during lockdown. To a lo-fi Luddite like myself it sounds like an international art pop overthrow, and the record is worth repeat listening to pick up on its various flourishes. The main part of the Wurlitzer-driven “White Lightning” was played directly into laptop speakers, which causes the keys to sound fuzzy and crackly when nasimiYu pounds them at their hardest. The song is titled after hard liquor, and it is about addiction, but in an interpersonal relationship sense (all that dopamine!). “How could I ever go without / If I know how to go within?” is, I think, a fairly universal chemical dependency lyric, whether it’s ingested or originating from chemical reactions in the brain.
“Where You Go, I Go”, Hurry From Fake Ideas (2021, Lame-O)
I want to talk about Tommy Keene a little bit here. I’ve been thinking about the late singer-songwriter in the context of Hurry’s latest album ever since Hurry bandleader Matt Scottoline mentioned him as an influence on Fake Ideas. Keene was a power pop artist who released his most well-known music in the 80s (but continued to make new material until his death in 2017), and if he’s ever mentioned at all these days it’s usually about how he “should’ve been bigger”. Few talk about the emotion and thematic throughlines that course through Keene’s music—songs like “Places That Are Gone” and “Run Now” grapple with isolation, feeling out of place against the backdrop of rock and roll bombast that exposed Bryan Adams, Rick Springfield, and all those other 80s pop rock hitmakers as two-dimensional in comparison. Those songs believed that if you ran long enough, if you burned bright enough, all your problems could be defeated. I say all this to posit Hurry’s Fake Ideas as an internal counterpoint to all of this. The record is more or less a concept album about Scottoline understanding the effects of mental illness and its accompanying “fake ideas” on his life and health. “Where You Go, I Go” is a wistfully melancholic pop song that plays right in the middle of this particular playground. Its verses almost obscure what’s on Scottoline’s mind with royal we’s and impersonal you’s (“We’ve all been there, life knocking at your door / And we’re not getting up for anyone”), and the wrecking ball of a refrain’s final line (“Where you go, I go / Completely miserable”) could get mistaken for a simple love song sentiment if one is only half-paying attention.
“Jupiter”, “Lead”, “Opus”, and “The Party Eating Its Own Tail”, ME REX From Megabear (2021, Big Scary Monsters)
So the thing about Megabear is it’s a fifty-two track, thirty-two minute album that’s made up of 30-60 second mini-songs that are designed to all bleed into each other and be listened to in any order. The best place to do this is the website specifically made to do this, but I’ve went and recreated about two-and-a-half minutes’ worth of the Megabear experience in the middle of this playlist (a Minibear, if you will), because Megabear rules and I’m now fully on the ME REX train after hearing but not really retaining a couple of their earlier releases. “Jupiter” introduces the lyrical motif that lead singer Myles McCabe returns to again and again on the album: “I want a river to run through me / Carve out a valley, deep, deep, deep / Make me shallow, make me empty, make me clean,” McCabe sings over simple piano chords, before “Lead” expounds on this personal geographic message over a busier arrangement and a twice-as-long runtime. “Opus” and “The Party Eating Its Own Tail” are also a solo-piano song into indie-pop-banger twosome. “These songs are never really ending / Even when it’s silent they will hang thick in the air,” McCabe sings in the latter, a nice wink at the camera before yet another offering from the deck emerges.
“Love Intervene”, Lou Barlow From Reason to Live (2021, Joyful Noise)
“Love Intervene” has been around for a while now—Lou Barlow has apparently been playing it live for years, and he released a full-band version of the song as a non-album single in 2018. The recording from May’s Reason to Live is stripped-down, mostly Barlow and his guitar with some backing vocals and quiet strings in the background, and though Lou’s called it the “definitive recording” of the song, he talks about it like he’s still not quite happy with it (“The sentiment seems almost out of my range sometimes”). I understand why Barlow would be so serious about getting this song right; it’s a really potent lyric and melody that builds up to its titular plea. But in this case, he shouldn’t be too hard on himself. His delivery is incredible, and a part of why this take of “Love Intervene” is so powerful. While Barlow spends a good deal of the vocal in his stately-indie-folk-singer modern comfort zone, he sounds reverent for its entirety and even pushes himself in the track’s second half. Between this and his contributions to the excellent new Dinosaur Jr. album, it’s been a banner year for Barlow.
“Savage Good Boy”, Japanese Breakfast From Jubilee (2021, Dead Oceans)
I know everybody has been waiting with bated breath for my Jubilee take, so without further ado: it’s good! 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’ve been (virtually) spinning Jubilee since it came out. I am not sure if “Savage Good Boy” is my favorite song on the record, exactly, but for the purposes of playlist punching-up, Michelle Zauner couldn’t have given us anything more appropriate. It hits you immediately with that gleefully absurd opening distorted vocal right into one of the most strategically-deployed piano chords I’ve heard this year, if not ever. Zauner’s lyrics about the titular “good boy”, a billionaire cockroach who’s cheerily explaining how he and his beloved will survive the climate apocalypse together with his capital, do not exactly form the most subtle, nuanced character study—but they don’t need to. Zauner rightly zeroes in on the nihilistic fun of it all, the reason why characters like this populate society both real and imagined, and then lets the paint peel off on its own accord.
“Teenage Situation”, Rodeola From Arlene (2021)
Rodeola is the folk rock project of Bloomington, Indiana’s Kate Long, whose latest album Arlene features like-minded neighbors like Nathan Salsburg and Joan Shelley (to me, there is little difference between southern Indiana and Kentucky). “Teenage Situation”, the record’s best song, does feature Elephant Micah’s Joseph O’Connell, but it’s Long’s lyrics and vocals that are carrying this track as much as its complementary country-rock background. “Teenage Situation” grabs you from its simple-but-effective ascending chord progression introduction and then offers up Long’s lyrics, which are about just what the song’s title suggests. The song begins by setting up its two characters, Long’s narrator and an unnamed “you” that “anoint[s her] with some kind of queendom”. Long proceeds to swing wildly throughout the remainder of the song—“I feel reckless / I wanna live in this place” in one verse, “You ask me how I’m doing / Now I’m ruined” in the next, but what exactly has happened during and in between these extremes isn’t explained. It’s just a teenage situation.
“Coming to Collect”, Psychic Flowers From For the Undertow (2021, Living Lost)
Good news, everyone: David Settle is back! Mere months after the release of On and On by another of his bands, The Fragiles (which appeared on Rosy Overdrive’s Mid-Year best-of list) and a year removed from releasing two albums under the Psychic Flowers name (which appeared on the Rosy Overdrive Best of 2020 year-end list), the fourth Psychic Flowers album is slated to drop at the end of this month. For the Undertow is the most polished set of Psychic Flowers songs yet, with drummer Leo Suarez giving these basement recordings a full-band punch. I will have more to say about For the Undertow closer to its release, but for now I’ll leave you with opening track and lead single “Coming to Collect”, a fizzy lo-fi pop punk song that finds Settle in full-on “whoa-oh” vocal hook territory. The song needs to pull out all the stops to distract from the garage rock grim reaper vibe of some of the lyrics: “I am coming to collect / On debts unowed … / Smoke clouds suffocate the West / At best, we’ll cope”. Read more about For the Undertow here.
“Find a Home”, Status / Non Status From 1, 2, 3, 4, 500 Years (2021, You’ve Changed)
Anishinaabe musician Adam Sturgeon and his backing band made a name for themselves across Canada over the past few years as Whoop-Szo, before changing their name to Status / Non Status for their most recent record, May’s 1, 2, 3, 4, 500 Years EP. Sturgeon chose the new moniker to draw attention to the Canadian government’s absurd “Status” and “Non-Status Indian” designations—when most bands change their names, it’s either because a Grateful Dead tribute act with a similar moniker sends them a cease and desist, or because their original name was, uh, insensitive in some capacity, so this is already a remarkable decision. The EP itself is all over the place, from the Fucked Up psychedelic hardcore of “Genocidio” to the spoken-word closer “500 Years”, but the warm and meditative album opener “Find a Home” is the strongest moment yet in Status / Non Status’ brief career. Over a rhythm-heavy instrumental that’s not distorted enough to be “shoegaze” but too meaty for “dream pop”, Sturgeon sings a wistful, bittersweet lyric about traveling on a long road and feeling someone “in the stars” that’s “calling [him] home”.
“The Kind of Band That Wears Hats”, Lemon Pitch From Flat Black Sea (2020, Repeating Cloud)
Here’s what I know about Portland, Maine’s Lemon Pitch: the musicians behind the band really believe in what’s they’ve created thus far. When they couldn’t find a label to release their debut album, last year’s Flat Black Sea, the band’s Galen Richmond started his own important: Repeating Cloud Records, who have put out an impressive amount of music over their relatively short lifespan (Rosy Overdrive wrote about another Repeating Cloud release, That Hideous Sound’s “How Many Times” single, in our April wrap-up entry). When a global pandemic overshadowed the record’s arrival (release date: March 27th, 2020), Lemon Pitch has kept its spirit alive by planning much-belated release shows and submitting it to obscure music bloggers over a year from its release date. The band keeps a stable of three songwriters (Richmond, Brock Ginther, and Alex Merrill) so I’m not sure which of them is responsible for “The Kind of Band That Wears Hats”, but it’s an absolutely unhinged ripper of a song whose lyrics (the ones I can make out, at least) seem to get to the heart of being a completely unknown indie rock band in 2021. I suspect that at least one member of Lemon Pitch was taking heavy notes on the scene-politics diatribes that the likes of Eric Bachmann and Stephen Malkmus would lapse into in the nineties, but the song’s deranged maximalist instrumental is anything but “slacker”.
“Teenage Eyes”, St. Lenox From Ten Songs of Worship and Praise for Our Tumultuous Times (2021, Don Giovanni/Anyway)
The fourth and final single from St. Lenox’s fourth record finds Andrew Choi in his motor-mouth comfort zone, setting up shop at an open mic night to begin a series of semi-fictional, semi-autobiographic sketches of its patrons. Choi has spent the better part of the past decade balancing his music career as St. Lenox with his day job as an attorney, and “Teenage Eyes” seems to acknowledge those who gave up their youthful pursuits to “grow up”—as well as allowing Choi to imagine if he’d chosen the same path. “Tom laments with a strange expression, says he always wanted to be a rock star,” Choi sings before switching back into the first person, where he’s the one with a journal, a Fender, and dreams of being a writer. The song’s music video is the missing link between the song and the themes on the rest of Ten Songs of Worship and Praise for Our Tumultuous Times, expertly using Dungeons & Dragons to ruminate on death, reincarnation, and the afterlife. Read more about Ten Songs of Worship and Praise for Our Tumultuous Times here.
“Jackie”, Yves Tumor From The Asymptotical World (2021, Warp)
Usually when I get into a band or artist, they’re “in my wheelhouse” genre-wise and then sometimes I follow them out of my comfort zone with their subsequent releases (see: Low, later on in this post). Yves Tumor seems intent on taking the opposite route—my (and most’s) introduction to them, 2018’s Safe in the Hands of Love, was an intimidating mashup of industrial, noise, melody, electronics and more that nonetheless intrigued me, but then last year’s Heaven to a Tortured Mind (one of Rosy Overdrive’s favorite albums of 2020) surprisingly offered up slinky rock songs like “Kerosene!” and “Gospel for a New Century”. “Jackie”, Yves Tumor’s latest single, goes even further down their guitar-hero rabbit hole, with that fearless opening riff fighting with the synths and drum machine beat for control of the song. The track’s real heart is Tumor’s voice, which is as sweeping and confident as the rest of the project’s best songs, but never to the point of emotionlessness.
“Blue Moon New”, Gnawing From You Freak Me Out (2021, Refresh)
“Blue Moon New” is both a bit of an outlier on Gnawing’s debut album and also completely in line with their sound. This Richmond-based group of 90s-alt-rock enthusiasts describe themselves as a “loud rock and roll band that wishes they were a country band”, and lead singer John Russell’s J. Mascis drawl lets Gnawing fly close to that particular sun. Nowhere on You Freak Me Out is this more pronounced than on “Blue Moon New”, a jangly country-rock number that breaks out the pedal steel, troubadour acoustic strumming, and the comforting narrative lyrics. Read more about You Freak Me Out here.
“Lost and Found”, Leisure Sport From Title Card (2021)
Baltimore’s Leisure Sport are helmed by the two singer-songwriters Dana DiGennaro and Kyle Balkin, whose interplay as well as their own distinct voices help the band’s debut EP feel fresh throughout its five-song runtime. “Lost and Found” is a DiGennaro-led number, but the twinkly stately-emo guitar riff that runs throughout the entire song ends up being just as much of a player on the scene as her vocals. The first half of the track is a nice buildup, some uncomfortable power chords soundtracking DiGennaro’s journey to her confident vocal peak in the song’s mid-section. Then there’s the catharsis of the last minute of “Lost and Found”: DiGennaro asserting “You only bring me down!” as the previously-circling instrumental zeroes in on the kill and some Anniversary-esque carnival synths sneak into the fray.
“Only You and Your Ghost Will Know”, Mekons From Oooh! (2002, Quarterstick)
I’ve been slowly working my way through the Mekons’ vast discography over the past few years, and I’ve finally gotten to the pissed-off folk-post-punk of 2002’s Oooh! (apparently an acronym for “Out of Our Heads”, an apt description for the world at that time). I actually quite like the “elder statesmen” Mekons albums between which Oooh! is sandwiched, so I wouldn’t have minded at all if these songs were kin to the wearily urban melancholy of Journey to the End of the Night or the post-apocalyptic reggae-folk of Natural, and “Only You and Your Ghost Will Know” is not a big a departure from either as one might think. The track’s violin-led instrumental is one of the more anthemic 2000s Mekons moments I’ve heard, which brushes up against the lonely, solitary subject of the song’s lyrics (“The company you’re keeping’s / The same as when you’re sleeping”). “Only You and Your Ghost Will Know”’s refrain quotes one of the few Emily Dickinson poems I know, which seems like an appropriate touchstone for the type of isolation described therein.
“Concrete Jungle”, ODDLY From Odd Man Out (2021, Damnably)
Kyoto’s ODDLY (a “3 piece rock band with no bassist”) make heavy and dreamy indie rock that recalls 90s shoegaze-adjacent bands like Seam as well as modern acts like Singapore’s Subsonic Eye. Singer Naoko Yutani cites Fazerdaze as an influence, and while Odd Man Out’s six songs are louder than anything on Morningside, Amelia Murray’s knack for unfussy melody shines through in Yutani’s vocals, particularly the highlight “Concrete Jungle”. It’s a propulsive, jangly instrumental, and I love how the two main guitar parts—the woozy, high-on-the-neck main riff and those unpolished power chords that surface underneath the distortion several times throughout the song—compliment each other. If their 90s-influence bona fides weren’t strong enough already, “Concrete Jungle” is apparently a local-music-scene-critique lyric, flipping the song’s title (an allusion to giant urban apartment buildings) into a comment on the homogeneity they see in their hometown’s music.
“Gretchen Took a Ride”, Jack Habegger’s Celebrity Telethon (2021, Lung)
The latest song from the “quasi-solo” project of Olympia’s Jack Habegger travels somewhere between alt-country and dreamy folk, and also comes off as a full-band, widescreen expansion of the Celebrity Telethon’s debut EP, Oy Vey!. “Gretchen took a ride, she explained upon return with a smile in her eye / She had to clear her mind” begins Habegger’s lyrics, and the breezy instrumental that then kicks in invites the listener to do the same. Both lyrically and musically, “Gretchen Took a Ride” seems to walk the line between familiar intimacy and West Coast cosmic psychedelia. Read more about “Gretchen Took a Ride” here.
“Second That”, Pom Pom Squad From Death of a Cheerleader (2021, City Slang)
Pom Pom Squad deserve more than lazy Mitski comparisons—Mia Berrin, the artist behind the project, has spent the three years of Pom Pom Squad’s existence building 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. Better writers than I have talked about this. I say all this because the song I’ve chosen from Death of a Cheerleader, the tension-hoarding acoustic-strumming “Second That”, would sound right at home on Bury Me at Makeout Creek-era Mitski. This is a huge compliment from Rosy Overdrive—I mean, that’s the best Mitski album by far (we’re all on the same page with that, right?)! Berrin gives the titular line a perfect amount of weight, but don’t sleep on the refrain’s initial setup-lyric (“She said ‘I can’t have this conversation’” / And now I know exactly what she meant”) because of what that’s able to capture.
“Tugboat”, Meat Wave From Volcano Park (2021, Many Hats/Big Scary Monsters)
Volcano Park is Meat Wave’s first record in over four years, and the Chicago trio just might be in the best musical shape of their career over the EP’s six songs. As an opening track, “Tugboat” more than does its part of setting the scene for a fiery rock band that’s pressing on through a fog of weariness and paranoia to make something vital. “You wanted it new / You wanted it back / It couldn’t be had / You’re used to it now,” roars vocalist Chris Sutter over a sharp, punchy post-punk instrumental. Read more about Volcano Park here.
“Palace of Oranges”, Supreme Joy From Joy (2021)
Supreme Joy’s Ryan Wong makes 60’s Nuggets-influenced garage rock with San Francisco’s Cool Ghouls, and the debut record from his new project Supreme Joy comes off as a casual, basement-recorded extended variation on his signature sound. Although the album starts off with some John Dwyer-esque psych-garage rockers, “Palace of Oranges” is part of Joy’s pleasantly-unexpected acoustic middle section. The languid stroll of “Palace of Oranges” plays in a few of Joy’s most prominent themes—the gardening devoutly practiced by Wong’s late grandmother, and the Japanese homeland from which her family is descended. A country shuffle, “Oranges” features inspired lap steel guitar from Wong and a Beatles-y lively melodic feel. Read more about Joy here.
“Days Like These”, Low From HEY WHAT (2021, Sub Pop)
I suppose I’m in the right demographic to long for the slowcore Low of the 90s and the lush orchestral Low of the turn of the century, and to bellyache about how they lost me when they started using “loops and shit”. But that hasn’t happened; I was totally down with Double Negative like all the cool kids, and I’m more than happy to keep following the Duluthians if they’re going to throw songs like “Days Like These” at me for my troubles (see the Yves Tumor section of this post for more ruminations on this aspect of my music listening). The lead single from the band’s upcoming 13th album starts off as the two-person Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker Gospel Choir in the first verse before the band and producer BJ Burton unleash their new favorite modes of glitch and distortion over the second go-around. Unlike a lot of Double Negative, though, the digital storm doesn’t deconstruct “Days Like These” so much as obscure it—the full power of the first verse is still there, just mutated. The entire second half of the song is an ambient outro, by the way—some time to reflect and get excited to hear the rest of HEY WHAT.
“Running Back”, Thin Lizzy From Jailbreak (1976, Vertigo/Mercury)
When Zach Zollo and I were planning the collaborative feature on Osmosis Tones where we talked about bands we thought were underrated, one of his suggestions was Thin Lizzy. I had a strong feeling that Mr. Zollo was onto something, but since I was only really familiar with the “hits” at the time, I demurred on them. And after spending the past month delving into some lesser-appreciated Thin Lizzy material, I can say definitively: yep, they rule. This isn’t to say that “Running Back” is a Thin Lizzy obscurity, exactly. It’s on their most popular album, after all. But it is a Thin Lizzy song I never really appreciated until now. I’d heard Jailbreak before, but that album to me was the title track (the song that best captures the “Thin Lizzy sound” as I understand it), “The Boys Are Back in Town” (a colossus that is completely unmoored from a band, album, era, etc for me), and “Cowboy Song” (secretly the best one). “Running Back” is as good as, if not better, than the singles, however. It’s not exactly a “rocker” in the same way as their signature songs, although it does rock. It’s about the finger-snapping piano motif, the joyous saxophone, and above all, Phil Lynott’s self-effacing, shit-eating grin of a lyric and delivery. It’s the Thin Lizzy song that Bright Eyes can cover and not sound absurd for doing so (well, okay, they sound a little absurd). It’s destined to never bring the house down the same way that the song about the boys being back in down does, but I can imagine it.
“Pasadena”, We Are the Union From Ordinary Life (2021, Bad Time)
“Pasadena”, the opening track from Ordinary Life, is not the explicit coming-out anthem that lead single “Morbid Obsessions” (discussed earlier) is, but it is an anthem of a sort. What it does is properly kick off We Are the Union’s fifth LP, which details Reade Wolcott’s experience of realizing and coming to terms with being a trans woman, but also deals with romantic uncertainty and doesn’t always follow a direct autobiographical path. Wolcott’s lyrics hop from first- to second- to third- person throughout the record, making it not clear whether or not “Pasadena” is a trans allegory, a romantic breakup, or somewhere in between (which would be where I’d place my money). Lines like “Underwater / You can’t breathe without her” and “It’s a shame, your secret smokes in the alleyway” could be read either way. It also functions as one bookend to the linear narrative that Ordinary Life does follow—to get to the confident, perfunctory resolution of “December” (the “killing” of Wolcott’s old self, the realization that “we are everything but ordinary”), we have to begin with the anxiety, confusion, and “everyday mundane” of “Pasadena”. Oh, and also this song rocks.
“Run Wild”, Options From On the Draw (2021)
The closing track from On the Draw is yet another short, catchy pop rock burst—not the kind of song I’d peg for a closer on its surface. Options’ Seth Engel might agree with me—on the record’s Bandcamp page, he makes sure to mention that the songs are “sequenced in the order they were made” and refers to the 18-minute collection of songs as a “mixtape”, so I’m not sure if I was accurate earlier when I called it the band’s “eighth album”. Still, it’s at the end of On the Draw, and the song seems to be (at least partially) about the act of songwriting itself (“Not tryna write nothing / Not tryna not sing in a key … / It’s bad attention now / Have fun just makin’ the track”) which leaves us on a curtain-pulled-back, meta note. More importantly, though, is that “Run Wild” slaps—Engel really runs wild with the auto-tuned vocal harmonies that make it even more susceptible to getting stuck in my head, and despite the mixtape’s overall brevity, Options still finds time for a nice instrumental outro.
“Sometimes”, Flour From Machinery Hill (1991, Touch and Go)
Flour’s Machinery Hill was a fun recent virtual-crate digging find for me. I mean, it came out on Touch and Go, so it’s not like I was doing some deep-diving excavation job here. But I’d never heard of Flour before, and I like this kind of shit. Anyway, Flour was (is?) Minneapolis’ Pete Conway, who played bass for notable weird underground 80s bands Rifle Sport and Breaking Circus, and Flour was his solo project. Machinery Hill, the only Flour album I’ve heard in full, is a dark industrial-noise rock-punk-drum machine mess of a record that falls somewhere between late 80s-Swans and Big Black (whose Steve Albini played in the live version of Flour along with Shellac’s Todd Trainer). Not exactly the warmest welcome, to be sure, but there’s a pop song buried underneath “Sometimes”. I can’t really make out what Conway is alternatively muttering and singing throughout the track, but I hear the final line of the refrain loud and clear: “She doesn’t listen anymore / Not gonna be somebody’s whore”. Not the worst use of this seething instrumental. The last Flour album came out in 1994; I have no idea what Pete Conway is up to now. I found a forum post from 2004 that claimed he was a carpenter and a chef in Minneapolis (which, I should point out, are two separate jobs with zero overlap) and I’ve heard someone else say he lives in Australia now, but I couldn’t find anything to verify this.
“Way Back to the World”, The Mountain Movers From World What World (2021, Trouble in Mind)
World What World is a shambling psychedelic guitar-fuzz-rock experience—The Mountain Movers have clearly listened to a lot of Neil Young and Crazy Horse, but perhaps more notably is that they seem to view Weld and Arc on equal footing with one another. Thorny workouts like “Final Sunset” sit on the same shelf as the cosmic rest-stop-Americana of “Haunted Eyes”. And rising above it all is “Way Back to the World”, a gloriously ragged country-rock anthem that’s as inviting as it is world-weary. Kryssi Battalene’s beast of a lead guitar eventually wrests control of the song in its second half, but not before vocalist Dan Greene gets in plenty of airtime for that sing-along of a titular refrain. The whole thing is undergirded by surprisingly melodic bass playing from Rick Omonte, which only adds to the charm of a song that manages to be both understated and in-your-face at the same time.
“Let Me Bathe in Demonic Light”, The Mountain Goats From Dark in Here (2021, Merge)
Last year’s Songs for Pierre Chuvin cassette notwithstanding, the Mountain Goats don’t really make the kind of albums that end up being my favorites of the year any more. And that’s totally fine. I can listen to Full Force Galesburg and Isopanisad Radio Hour whenever I want. I can appreciate the post-Beat the Champ albums for what they are, and be happy that they still resonate with a lot of people. Also, like I discussed with Okkervil River last month, I still spin every new release because I know there’s a good chance something on there will knock my socks off. Enter “Let Me Bathe in Demonic Light”, the superb closing track from last month’s Dark in Here. John Darnielle’s vocals are as front-and-center and showy as ever, with none of the restraint that plagued 2019’s In League with Dragons. The plodding instrumentals that made 2020’s Getting Into Knives a difficult personal listen are kept to a tasteful flute outro. If I wanted to, I could take my favorite tracks from the recorded-back-to-back Knives and Dark in Here and make a pretty good single album, or take my favorite half of Dark in Here (“Parisian Enclave”, “The Destruction of the Kola Superdeep Borehole Tower”, “The New Hydra Collection”, “The Slow Parts on Death Metal Albums, the long-titled one about David Berman, and this one, for those keeping track) and make a pretty good Mountain Goats EP. But I could also keep listening in full to see if, say, “When a Powerful Animal Comes” ever does anything for me.
“Heavy Glow”, The Glow From Love Only b/w Heavy Glow (2021, Double Double Whammy)
The song is called “Heavy Glow” by the band The Glow—and that’s exactly what it is. The seven-minute B-side to the band’s excellent new single feels sort of like an extension of the drawn-out, fuzz meditations that guitarist/vocalist Mike Caridi’s previous band, LVL UP, explored on their final album together, Return to Love (the Caridi-written “Pain” is the most obvious touchstone, but Nick Corbo’s “Naked in the River with the Creator” also feels relevant). Of course, one of the biggest departures from LVL UP and from previous output by The Glow is the vocals: instead of Caridi, Kate Meizer takes the lead for the first time in the band’s short history. Meizer’s voice is confident and clear, but she’s not any more of the “star” of the song than Caridi would be if it were him at the helm: “Heavy Glow”, the band’s “first entirely collaborative song”, is about the band’s four members gelling together as an equal-footing unit. This is exemplified best in the song’s back half, where Meizer’s singing drops out entirely and is replaced with what is apparently four different guitar solos contributed by everyone in the band. To me, it just sounds like one beautiful, continuous squall of noise.
“Eyesight”, Downhaul From PROOF (2021, Refresh)
Although “Dried” was a late addition to the May 2021 Rosy Overdrive playlist, I had a feeling that I wasn’t yet done with PROOF, and here “Eyesight” is to keep Downhaul on all of our minds over a month after the album’s release. The beginning of “Eyesight” eschews the heady emo-rock sound that characterizes most of PROOF, instead building up with some airy synths and a drum machine over which lead singer Gordon Phillips transcends the song. “Maybe all this means is we gave a little more / During the years we fought the sea, just to wash up on the shore,” muses Phillips at the song’s denouement, the message of futility brushing up against the closest the song gets to the summer storms alluded to earlier in the lyrics. Even so, however, “there’s not a second I would change”, says Phillips: “I would love you all the same”. “Eyesight” was originally going to be the closing track of PROOF, and it does have a finality to it, to the point where actual final track “About Leaving” might best be thought of as an epilogue. Something similar happened with its place in this playlist. Read more about PROOF here.
“Henry Needs a New Pair of Shoes”, Lowest of the Low From Shakespeare My Butt… (1991, Page)
Of all the songs on this playlist, “Henry Needs a New Pair of Shoes” is, by far, the one I’ve listened to the most over the past month. I became obsessed with it over the course of a road trip. My partner and I even came up with a Malcolm in the Middle-esque sitcom intro theme for the song, because it so clearly deserves one (I think it ended with Henry’s shoes somehow being launched into space). So what is this, exactly? Well, Lowest of the Low are a band that has a modest amount of notoriety in their native Canada, and 1991’s hour-long Shakespeare My Butt… seems to have amassed something of a cult following in the thirty years following its release. It’s got a user-friendly folk/college/jangle rock sound that could be described as in the same ballpark as the Spin Doctors (if you wanted to be a snobby music critic), R.E.M. (if you wanted to be respectable), or the Gin Blossoms (because the Gin Blossoms are a good band). Vocalist Ron Hawkins kind of reminds me of Bruce Cockburn, and although I couldn’t find a primary source on this, John K. Samson of The Weakerthans has apparently written about this album’s importance to his writing style. Canadians of a feather, etc etc. “Henry Needs a New Pair of Shoes” is the seventeenth track on an album that stretches over sixty minutes, and it’s the goofy, cathartic, extremely catchy big finish that Shakespeare My Butt… more than earns. And we’ve earned it too! Maybe just one more listen…
Pressing Concerns is back, today looking at new records from Spud Cannon and Olivia Kaplan, the new Meat Wave EP, and the newly-issued-on-vinyl album from The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, which originally came out late last year. I should be on vacation by the time this goes live—I’m not planning on doing any writing this week, so it might be awhile before anything else goes up here! I have a few things for July I’m excited to write about, though, so—patience is a virtue. In the meantime, you can browse previous editions of Pressing Concerns for a lot more great new music.
Spud Cannon – Good Kids Make Bad Apples
Release date: June 25th Record label: Good Eye Genre: Pop rock, garage rock, power pop Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull track: Supersonic
To quote the poet laureate Jake Ewald: “Hey man, I went to college too”. During my time in school I remember seeing a few bands that remind me of Poughkeepsie, New York’s Spud Cannon—a fun, musically-talented group of people who livened up the few parties I attended. The lifespan of these bands is generally no longer than the members’ shared years at their college of origin, and Spud Cannon seemed like it could meet the same fate when the band found itself at a crossroads in 2019. With no resources to record or release a follow-up 2018’s Squeeze, members on the verge of graduating, and everyone dealing with the exhaustion of finishing school while being in a touring band, they stared everything down and decided they wanted to make Good Kids Make Bad Apples instead. Regardless of how many of them currently attend it, this record will be forever linked to their old stomping grounds of Vassar College—I imagine most of the album’s scenes and settings take place on its campus, and Good Kids Make Bad Apples was recorded surreptitiously one of Vassar’s squash courts over a few late-night live sessions.
Spud Cannon sound great on Good Kids Make Bad Apples, and only so much of that can be written off as squash court acoustics. It really does come off as a document of a group that had just toured heavily together—the band’s rhythm section of bassist Lucy Horgan and drummer Ben Scharf is incredibly tight, with Scharf grounding lead single “Juno” with some basketball-dribbling percussion and Horgan letting songs like “Out!” pop as much as possible. Good Kids Make Bad Apples is such a full-sounding record that I was actually surprised that they only have one guitar player, but Jackson Walker Lewis’ Andy Gill dance-rock playing style is more than enough to make these songs work. And above it all is the singular vocals of Meg Matthews, who aurally jukes and jives all over the record—her range includes the motor-mouth opening scene of “Juno”, the pop punk Kate Bush high notes of “You Got It All (NOT)”, and the fittingly dreamy croon of “Sleeper”.
Spud Cannon are committed to having a good time—while that’s clear from the opening notes of Good Kids Make Bad Apples, delving deeper into the record only reaffirms their position. Sometimes this means straight-up party anthems like “Juno”, or outright goofing off, like the bizarrely catchy minute-and-change glam punk track “P.O.T.A.T.O.”. Other times it’s marrying sadder lyrics to more upbeat music, like the bittersweet “we had some good times” breakup song “Lovely”, or “Sleeper”, which seems to be about trying to reach someone who stubbornly refuses to be. Good Kids Make Bad Apples ends with two songs that both find Matthews’ narrator cajoling a friend to leave a bad relationship—with the message that life is too short to entrust yours to an unreliable caretaker. “Don’t waste everything you might be / There’s no way you see him clearly,” notes Matthews in “Na Na Na”, and “Easy” is perhaps even stronger in its resolve to help its addressee see that they’ve outgrown their emotionally unavailable partner. “You’re only young once / Wake up, embrace your luck /Now, girl you gotta get out” is some tough medicine to swallow but Spud Cannon, as always, help it go down easier. (Bandcamp link)
The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick – Ways of Hearing (Vinyl release)
Release date: June 11th Record label: Count Your Lucky Stars Genre: Slowcore, emo Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital Pull track: God’s Country
Ways of Hearing was something of a late 2020 sleeper hit, at least to the degree that a string-heavy slowcore album released on cassette by a band with a classically-laborious emo band name can be a “hit”. The debut record from The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick came to my attention after earning a vinyl pressing mere months after its initial release last October, and it’s not hard to see why the Philadelphia-based band has picked up some steam off the back of this record. Ways of Hearing is a delicately-crafted album that’s made up of plenty of interesting quirks and flourishes that lodge its songs into my brain—the vocal interplay between the band’s two singers, keyboardist Becky Hanno and guitarist Ben Curttright, is an essential part of their sound, as is the prominent bell accents from drummer Alyssa Resh and the winding, meandering pace of several of these tracks. Some of Ways of Hearing’s tracks, like the opening two songs “An Olive Coat” and “We Love You So Much”, start off relatively unassuming before gradually swelling into a crescendo of violin, percussion, and Curttright and Hanno’s vocals, which help The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick reach toward post-rock gravitas without losing the record’s underdog charm.
The band doesn’t rely too much on their ability to go all-out to the point where it might become exhausting, however—some of Ways of Hearing’s best moments are its sparsest. Album closer “Everyone Around Us” sends everyone off with little more than a simple keyboard riff and hushed vocals from Curttright, and “The Best of All Possible Worlds” and “Joseph Stalin” are acoustic numbers that end on more or less the same foot as they begin but don’t lose any weight for this steadiness. “Joseph Stalin” in particular is an example of the best of this record, a wistful indie folk song that’s a showcase for Hanno’s vocals and some historical lockbox lyrics. Ways of Hearing is marked by similarly confusing, occasionally contextless reaches for specificity—“They’re killing all the cattle and breaking all their ribs / While I’m mulling over calendars for six” mutters Curttright over a moody instrumental in “The Cat Stands on My Arm”, and muses “I hope your robberies went well, I read about them in the Times” in “The Best of All Possible Worlds” (the song’s Bandcamp page gives a jumping off point: “for Ulrike Meinhof”). Ways of Hearing is a record that invites the listener to get lost within its contents, and its from-a-distance position only enhances this aspect of it. (Bandcamp link)
Meat Wave – Volcano Park
Release date: June 11th Record label: Many Hats/Big Scary Monsters Genre: Post-hardcore, noise rock, punk rock Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull track: Tugboat
Chicago’s Meat Wave had a bit of a moment in 2017 with the release of their third album, The Incessant, a sharp noise punk record that’s only grown in my esteem with time (frankly, I don’t think I was entirely ready for it four years ago). They’d been mostly silent in the interim, and while I imagine there’s a fewreasons for that, this month’s Volcano Park EP is a heartening sign that Meat Wave are alive, well, and making some of the best music of their career. The Incessant was a royally pissed-off album that sounded like Hot Snakes at their most agitated, and while Volcano Park still rages, the record comes off like that particular mask is slipping to reveal a frantic, even more existential core underneath. Volcano Park is surprisingly musically dynamic while at the same time being an incredibly thematically-cohesive set of songs. In a larger-picture sense I would consider the EP to be fairly opaque in its subject matter, but Meat Wave make it clear that it’s all connected.
Threads of individual commodification and wear and tear, perhaps befitting of a band barreling towards its second decade of existence with a relatively unknown future, run through Volcano Park. “You wanted it new / You wanted it back / It couldn’t be had / You’re used to it now,” puts forth vocalist Chris Sutter in the opening “Tugboat”, and he roars “I am for sale / Buy me” one song later in “For Sale”. “Yell at the Moon” finds him musing “Slow ride, high tide, truth died,” before moving into the next song called, indeed, “Truth Died”—and the entire bridge of “Tugboat” later gets repurposed as a mantra repeated in “Nursing”. While some of Sutter’s lyrics push up against the classic Meat Wave post-hardcore sound, Volcano Park gets a bit “out there” in its second half, particularly in “Truth Died”, which flirts with synth-colored psychedelic pop rock, and in “Nursing”, which deconstructs both “Tugboat” before it and “Fire Dreams” immediately after it via feedback and callback. The final song on the EP, “Fire Dreams” is entirely devoted to vividly describing the image of flames its title suggests, and fully illuminates the Meat Wave of Volcano Park: equal parts blazing inferno and controlled slow-burn. (Bandcamp link)
Olivia Kaplan – Tonight Turns to Nothing
Release date: June 25th Record label: Topshelf Genre: Indie folk, folk rock Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital Pull track: Still Strangers
The debut album from Los Angeles’ Olivia Kaplan is an incredible-sounding record; this is confirmed from the moment halfway through opening track “Spill” where Kaplan’s voice and its lone picked-guitar accompaniment give way to a full-band sweeping mid-section. Part of why Tonight Turns to Nothing sounds like it does likely has to do with the cast with which Kaplan has surrounded herself. Bassist/producer Adam Gunther’s fingerprints may be the most obvious—his slinky bass playing pops out throughout the album, and it positively drives songs like “Wrong”. Gunther’s most recent notable credit is working with Sharon Van Etten—one of the more musically adept leaders in this strain of modern folk rock—and more sonic touchstones can be found in the “main” bands of collaborators Buck Meek (Big Thief) and Alex Fischel (Spoon). But Kaplan is still very much the star of Tonight Turns to Nothing, and it never really feels like she’s in danger of being outshined by her backing musicians.
It is a bit surprising that Tonight Turns to Nothing is Kaplan’s debut full-length record, as she already seems to have developed a distinct songwriting voice, one that shows remarkable restraint and control despite dealing with some messy and uncontrollable topics. “I’m casual, it’s cool / And this conversation’s just a tool / To get you where you wanna go,” she quips in “Spill”, a song that also finds her bent over drunk on the side of a highway. This “cool” serves her well and makes Tonight Turns to Nothing a bit of a wild card lyrically; you’re just as likely to get musings such as “In the age of forgetting, we’re excessively evading / The facts and the physics of what’s becoming nonexistent” in “Talking to the Dead” as you are to get hit with a blunt object like “I’m not asking you to love me / I’m just talking about some company / I know I’m not alone in wanting” in “Still Strangers”. The latter track is the songwriting peak of Tonight Turns to Nothing, and it’s also the record’s most musically stripped-down moment. As great as some of the album’s busier moments sound, “Still Strangers” suggests multiple paths forward for Olivia Kaplan, all of which sound promising based off what she’s put together with Tonight Turns to Nothing. (Bandcamp link)
It’s been awhile since Rosy Overdrive just had a good old-fashioned album roundup post. In the time between that last one and now, RO premiered a new single from Jack Habegger’s Celebrity Telethon, went long on the newest St. Lenox album, and gathered up the forty best albums to come out in 2021 thus far. Today, I’m writing about new albums from The Cocker Spaniels, Williamson Brothers, Supreme Joy, and Parting. I’m hoping to have another one of these up a week from now; I’m going on vacation soon, so things may be a bit erratic until mid-July. In the meantime, browse previous editions of Pressing Concerns for a lot more good new music.
The Cocker Spaniels – The Cocker Spaniels Are Still Alive, and So Are You
Release date: June 4th Record label: Self-released Genre: Indie rock, psychedelic pop, power pop Formats: Digital (cassette/vinyl pending) Pull track: Racism Priest
Although The Cocker Spaniels Are Still Alive, and So Are You is the project’s first full-length album in over a decade, I doubt Cocker Spaniels bandleader Sean Padilla views the interstitial years as “lost time”. Padilla begins the album’s Bandcamp description by deeming the record “a tribute to my spouse, our children, and our cats”, and many of …Are Still Alive’s twenty songs are directly about Padilla’s family life. This includes more lighthearted tracks like the cat-versus-cat turf war of “Eternal Grudge” or the extended-family-interrogation of “Family Narc”, the latter of which finds Padilla threatening to “do more than just unfriend” to whoever told his mother that he’s “started getting high and stopped going to church”. …Are Still Alive also features songs like “No Steps or Halves”, a soaring ode to the part of Padilla’s family that’s bonded by “by the law and by our love”, and “I Sleep Well at Night”, a bouncy track that details Padilla’s determination to be a different kind of “man of the household” than those who came and went from his childhood (“My home is where the family curses end”). And those who know me shouldn’t be surprised that “A New Hello”—which is instantly one of the best non-John K. Samson-penned songs about a cat—is the one that hit me the hardest.
Despite its familial focus, The Cocker Spaniels Are Still Alive refuses to be an album that doesn’t interact with the outside world. I doubt Padilla would recognize a dichotomy, anyway—the analysis and rejection of toxic masculinity in “I Sleep Well at Night” shows he’s more than aware of how they’re connected. Moreover, given the events of the past year, …Are Still Alive doesn’t have much of a choice. “Cousin Chat Room” is about staying connected to family during a global pandemic, and also directly addresses what COVID-19 has taken away from Padilla and his anger at those who refuse to take it seriously. Coming in the wake of a summer of widespread protests against anti-black police violence, several more of…Are Still Alive’s songs directly speak to Padilla’s experience as a black man in America. As someone who once sang about being “The Only Black Guy at the Indie-Rock Show”, his attempts to address these peers lead to some strong songwriting—the furious “Snuff Film”, about not wanting to have to become a headline for them to stick up for his right to exist (“Are you gonna wait for Shaun King to tweet the snuff film before you march for me?”), and the humorous but pointed “Racism Priest”, in which Padilla politely declines to take on all of his acquaintances’ white guilt at their past misdeeds or silence (“I’m gonna give it back to you to do what thou wilt”). “Cops Don’t Care About the Drip” is addressed to a different audience, but its point about not being able to use “respectability” to skip the effects of white supremacy is just as sharp (nearly every line is quotable; I’ll go with “You’ll die watching the goalposts shift”).
The Cocker Spaniels Are Still Alive covers a lot of sonic ground over its considerable breadth, but its most frequent mode is a psychedelic-pop-rock sound that successfully hybridizes Padilla’s twin influences of Robert Pollard and Prince (and if you think the Prince influence is entirely musical, “Biker Shorts” would like a word). It might seem a bit odd to describe Are Still Alive… as one of the most “fun” albums of 2021 after everything I went into earlier in this review, but Padilla takes the musical joyfulness of his “two P’s” as much as anything else from them, and the record’s further genre diversions (including a dub outro on one song and a surprise hardcore track near its conclusion) continue the excitement. It feels like I’ve only really scratched the surface of The Cocker Spaniels Are Still Alive here—this is one long-in-the-tooth record that sounds like it took full advantage of its gestation period. (Bandcamp link)
Williamson Brothers – Williamson Brothers
Release date: June 18th Record label: Dial Back Sound Genre: Southern rock, alt-country Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital Pull track: This War
Birmingham, Alabama’s Williamson Brothers are Adam and Blake, who have played in the bands Vespre and Black Willis, and currently make up the rhythm section for the scorching southern rock band Lee Bains III & The Glory Fires. Although much of their self-titled debut album falls under the same umbrella of “political southern punk rock” that also characterizes the Glory Fires, the Williamsons carve out a style distinct from their other band over the record’s course. Bains’ songwriting is lyrically dense and nearly always delivered with the passion of a fire-and-brimstone preacher—the kind of music that comes with a list of reading suggestions. Adam and Blake, meanwhile, come off as two regular guys from Alabama who just happen to be passionate and politically active, particularly in songs like “I Hate It Here”, a classic “fuck this town” anthem that runs through both systemic issues and minor annoyances. “God for Government” reminds me (not musically, but topically) of XTC’s “Dear God”—it’s more of an angry release of frustration against organized religion and its nefarious social influence than a rational, principled argument against Christianity, because sometimes that’s all one can muster up. This sort of “everyman” songwriting evokes another clear sonic touchstone for the Williamsons, the Drive-By Truckers, whose Jay Gonzales plays keyboard on the record.
The Williamson Brothers’ strongest political moments are what feel like their most personal ones, as well. “This War” is a protest anthem that’s both a declaration of solidarity for the Black Lives Matter protests that have reverberated not just in their native Deep South but across the United States, and also a plea for other white folks to join them. “You shouldn’t need any more proof,” sings Adam, before reminding passive onlookers that “this is the time to pick your side, climb down off of the fence”. Another strength of Williamson Brothers is that it’s not afraid to deviate from its southern country-rock and throw in some sonic left-turns. “Avenue H” is oddly atmospheric in its verses, before exploding into a garage-rock-power-pop chorus that recalls Teenage Fanclub at their most ragged. “Pass the Blame” is even more surprising: a synth-and-keys pop song that imagines what it would sound like if Fountains of Wayne’s suburban satire originated in Alabama instead of New Jersey. Even the more conventional songs like “Kick and Scream” gain an extra dimension due to Gonzales doing his best Franz Nicolay impression over the track’s garage-rocking skeleton. There’s plenty of meat on this record’s bones, and for as strong as they are in The Glory Fires, I would certainly welcome it if the Williamson Brothers were to step further into the spotlight in the future. (Bandcamp link)
Supreme Joy – Joy
Release date: May 28th Record label: Self-released Genre: Garage rock, lo-fi rock, psych-rock Formats: Cassette, digital Pull track: Palace of Oranges
Ryan Wong is probably most renowned for his work with the San Franciscan band Cool Ghouls, who have made a name for themselves mining 60s psychedelia over their past decade of recorded output. Joy, the first album from the now-Denver-based Wong’s new solo project, doesn’t abandon the influences of his “main” band, but comes off as a much looser amalgamation of them compared to Cool Ghouls’ more rigid devotion. After the spacey intro of “Peace Curls”, Joy barrels out of the gate with the shambling garage rocker “Body Contact” and the midtempo groove of “Doldrums”, which evoke both its Troggs/Nuggets source material and fellow West Coast revivalists like John Dwyer and Ty Segall. With Joy running under twenty minutes, I might expect Wong to run through a few more like-minded numbers and call it a day, but the album takes a nicely unexpected turn with “She Plants a Garden” and “Palace of Oranges” in its midsection. The minute-long “She Plants a Garden” is a tribute to Wong’s late grandmother and her gardening led by acoustic guitar and some psychedelic flourishes, and the languid stroll of “Palace of Oranges” might be Joy’s strongest moment. A country shuffle, “Oranges” features inspired lap steel guitar from Wong and a Beatles-y playfully melodic feel—it’s the longest song on the album by a good amount, but never drags.
Though Supreme Joy do crank up the amps again in Joy’s second half, songs like “EastWest” and “Yūrei” have as much going on below the surface as the quieter ones. The former is a dizzy but determined reflection on growing up as a mixed-race person in a “white culture”; Wong has referred to it as “the mission statement of the band”. “EastWest” and the album’s cover art (taken from a World War II-era Japanese internment camp) find Wong connecting a “personal identity crisis” to unavoidable cultural and historical touchstones, as does “Yūrei” (literally translating to “ghost”), a rhythm-heavy track inspired by the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The acoustic closer “Rain” can’t neatly resolve Joy over its short runtime, but it does feel ever so slightly cleansing. “Take your time and wait for a chance, it’ll find you” are the last words Wong imparts on the listener as Joy closes out; I, for one, am glad these songs found their way from a Denver basement to me. (Bandcamp link)
Parting – Unmake Me
Release date: June 4th Record label: Count Your Lucky Stars Genre: Emo Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital Pull track: After the Fact
Michigan’s Parting has been either blessed or cursed with the “emo supergroup” designation—the band’s four members come from notable fourth-wave bands including Empire! Empire! (I Was a Lonely Estate), Dowsing, and Annabel. My familiarity with these acts is surface-level at best, so for me Unmake Me is just another solid release from Count Your Lucky Stars, who’ve put out quality material from both newer and older bands this year. The band’s debut 10” EP is an inviting collection of songs that emphasizes the melodic aspects of the band’s contributors, such as singer Keith Latinen’s clear, ageless vocals. Parting cite bands who flirted with a friendly pop-punk sound like The Promise Ring and The Get-Up kids as their influences—but like those acts’ best work, there’s no mistaking Unmake Me for anything other than an emo record.
The urgent backing vocals from Ben Hendricks provide a nice counterbalance to Latinen’s dulcet tones, and Unmake Me tackles big emotions from the get-go with “Jesse Eisenbird”, a second-person account of someone’s mother dying of cancer, and “Ratt Michards”, a song about working all day at a terrible job that begins with “I wanted to sleep all day / I was miserable, and I knew it”. “Stapler’s Monster” has some great imagery about being kept awake in the middle of night by good old-fashioned existential worry (“I am buried under covers and I feel so heavy / Like my legs are a mountain range and I am anchored to the sheets”). Still, Parting allow some lyrical light to peek into Unmake Me to match the music: “Ratt Michards” ends with Latinen vowing not to be defined by his employer (“I am not a sunk cost, I will not bend, I am better off without this”) and the cathartic group vocals on closing track “Living Proof” feel more than earned. “Living Proof” finds an undercurrent throughout Unmake Me coming to the surface—the fear of being broken and wasting life by giving into dull routine. “Today will be different, today will be the same / The same can be different, in some weird kinda way” Latinen sings, committing to doing something harder than making a huge, drastic change—taking control of what’s already there and making it work for you. (Bandcamp link)
Jack Habegger has played in the Olympia, Washington bands Pigtails and Foreign Powers, but 2021 has seen the rise of his new “quasi-solo” project, Jack Habegger’s Celebrity Telethon. The Telethon’s first release, January’s Oy Vey! EP, came out on limited cassette and vinyl from Portland’s Bud Tapes (Helens, Balloon Club, Wyatt Smith). Just a few months later, Habegger and crew are back with the (for now, at least) one-off single “Gretchen Took a Ride”, premiering today on Rosy Overdrive.
“Gretchen Took a Ride” is largely a collaboration between Habegger and Jordan Krimston (Weatherbox, The Obsessives, a solo career), who mixed the song and played “most of the instruments”, and also features cello from Addison Clark (who also appeared on Oy Vey!). Habegger has a warm voice that reminds me of fellow indie-country bands like Friendship, Half Stack, and State Champion, but the Celebrity Telethon brings these bands’ “dreamy folk” undercurrents to the forefront. “Gretchen Took a Ride” ends up sounding like a full-band, widescreen expansion of the more insular Oy Vey!’s five songs. “Gretchen took a ride, she explained upon return with a smile in her eye / She had to clear her mind” begins Habegger’s lyrics, and the breezy instrumental that then kicks in invites the listener to do the same. Both lyrically and musically, “Gretchen Took a Ride” seems to walk the line between familiar intimacy and West Coast cosmic psychedelia.
The newly-solidified lineup of Jack Habegger’s Celebrity Telethon plans to spend the rest of the summer playing out and recording more new material. Habegger is also a comics artist, and you can catch his work in the Honky Tonk Times starting next month.
If you’re only just now joining us: this is part two of my list of my favorite forty albums of 2021 thus far, presented in reverse alphabetical order. Thanks for reading!
Release date: January 22nd Record label: Sub Pop Genre: Jangle pop, 90s indie rock Formats: Vinyl, cassette, CD, digital
It’s a pleasant surprise that Kiwi Jr. is back already with their sophomore LP after the blast that was Football Money (one of my favorite albums of 2020). They feel ever-so-slightly less eager to please on Cooler Returns—they don’t slow down the tempo too much or abandon hooky choruses, but mellowing out just a bit is a subtle but nonetheless bold move for the Canadian band. An emphasis on bass and more acoustic parts leads to a surprising point of comparison for me—early Spoon, before they ended up as the unflappable groovers they would end up becoming. It’d be far too dramatic to say that Kiwi Jr. have strangled the jangle pop band of Football Money with Cooler Returns, but what they have made is a distinct and rewarding follow-up to a debut that merited one. (Read full review)
Ross Ingram – Sell the Tape Machine
Release date: May 3rd Record label: Hogar Genre: Folk-tronica Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Ross Ingram is a producer and engineer at his own Brainville Recording Studio, where he partially recorded his first solo full-length, Sell the Tape Machine. It’s therefore hard not to pick up on subtle sonic flourishes throughout the album and attribute it to his studio background. However, Sell the Tape Machine has a surprisingly songwriting-forward approach, with Ingram’s vocals and lyrics coming through crystal-clear at center stage. Lyrically, Sell the Tape Machine is all over the place, as Ingram maps his own internal ups and downs. Sometimes, the highs and lows come in the same track—Ingram’s moments of confidence often feel fragile and tenuous, and his moments of despair are offset by tenderness a few lines later. What’s impressive about Sell the Tape Machine isn’t just that it’s “confessional” songwriting, but that Ingram builds something around this foundation that enhances the initiating emotions. (Read full review)
Idle Ray – Idle Ray
Release date: May 7th Record label: Life Like Tapes/Half-Broken Music Genre: Power pop Formats: Vinyl, digital
After a very good trilogy of albums released under his own name throughout the back half of the 2010s, Michigan’s Fred Thomas has been quietly releasing singles and demos as Idle Ray over the past two years. The payoff, the project’s self-titled debut, is a cohesive dozen songs that stand up against any of his past work. Even though Idle Ray comes under what’s ostensibly a band name, these songs were mostly recorded by Thomas alone on 4-track, and finds the songwriter embracing lo-fi pop rock that shades lyrics about isolation, fractured and fading friendships, and interpersonal interaction-trigged anxiety. Songs like “Polaroid” and “Coat of Many Colors” work out feelings perhaps exacerbated by the pandemic but coming from somewhere deeper within Thomas over some of the most straightforward, catchy pop music I’ve enjoyed this year, and against all odds it leads to Idle Ray being a perfect summer record. (Read full review)
The Hold Steady – Open Door Policy
Release date: February 19th Record label: Positive Jams/Thirty Tigers Genre: The Hold Steady Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
On the heels of the success of their half-album, half-singles-comp Thrashing Thru the Passion in 2019, Open Door Policy is The Hold Steady’s first attempt to create an entire LP’s worth of songs that work together in seven years. The band’s eighth record noticeably contains a lower ratio of unapologetic sing-along choruses than their mid-2000s work and Passion, but with Craig Finn and company sounding as sharp as ever, Open Door Policy comes off as a welcome convergence of Finn’s most recent and best solo album (2019’s I Need a New War) with the Hold Steady’s full band power. The run from “Lanyards” to “Heavy Covenant” rivals any stretch from the band’s “golden” period, and they do it by nailing left turns (“Unpleasant Breakfast”), very clear callbacks (“Family Farm”), and in-betweeners (“Heavy Covenant”) alike. Nearing two decades together, they’re still working with a similar roadmap, but aren’t afraid to annotate it and try some new routes. (Read full review)
Harmony Woods – Graceful Rage
Release date: March 12th Record label: Skeletal Lightning Genre: Emo, alt-rock, folk rock Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
The third album from Harmony Woods, the project of Philadelphia’s Sofia Verbilla, is an incredible-sounding record that takes a long, unflinching look at the aftermath of a traumatic relationship throughout its eight songs. Produced by Bartees Strange, Graceful Rage adorns Verbilla’s complicated, contemplative lyrics with flourishes of Kate Rears’ cello, Brian Turnmire’s horns, and a shiny exterior that alternatively builds everything up (like in the scene-setting opener “Good Luck Rd.”) or burns it all down (the pop-punk scorcher “God’s Gift to Women”, which is Verbilla’s hardest lean into the rage portion of Graceful Rage). After tackling difficult emotions for the entirety of Graceful Rage, Verbilla saves her most definitive statements for the album closer “I Can’t”; namely, “You will never hurt me again” and “I can’t forgive you”. Too well-polished to deny but too emotionally hard-hitting to take in casually—every pop songwriter wants to make an album like Graceful Rage, but very few have the courage to even try, much less put enough of themselves into it to make it stand as tall as this.
Guided by Voices – Earth Man Blues
Release date: April 30th Record label: GBV, Inc. Genre: Power pop, post-punk Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Guided by Voices have presented Earth Man Blues as a cohesive rock opera of sorts, which would seem to contradict the album’s initial description as a “collage of rejected songs”— but with an end result that hangs together this well, I don’t feel particularly inclined to question Robert Pollard and company. There are stretches on the album like the back-to-back 70-second sugar rush of “Margaret Middle School” and one of the band’s best ever Tommy moments in “I Bet Hippy” where Pollard is clearly reaching for an overarching story, and it works as a catalyst for an exciting run of songs if nothing else. The album has a looseness to it that reminds me of my favorite of the recent Guided by Voices albums, August by Cake, but while that record’s grab-bag quality was a matter of its transitional circumstances, Earth Man Blues earns its dexterity by being the product of a band that’s only grown more comfortable and in tune with each other—disparate tracks like “Lights Out in Memphis (Egypt)” and “How Can a Plumb Be Perfected?” stand proudly side-by-side. (Read full review)
Gaadge – Yeah?
Release date: March 19th 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 full review)
Fust – Evil Joy
Release date: May 28th Record label: Dear Life Genre: Country-folk Formats: Cassette, CD, digital
The debut album from Durham, North Carolina’s Fust is a record of gentle, deliberate, and clear Americana/folk rock that evokes the work of troubadours like Richard Buckner and Bill Callahan. Fust bandleader Aaron Dowdy spins memorable songs out of little more than a wearily melodic vocal and relatively sparse instrumentation, which follow the album’s narrative tracing the emotional ups and downs of a deteriorating relationship. Song titles like “The Last Days”, “The Day That You Went Away”, and “When the Trial Ends” all nod to the album’s main throughline, and though Evil Joy is mostly in the past tense, Dowdy’s narrator is still reckoning with matters that don’t seem wholly resolved throughout the album. It’s not until Fust ride off into the wild blue yonder on album closer “Wyoming County” that Evil Joy finally gives us a hint of finality. (Read full review)
The Fragiles – On and On
Release date: February 12th 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 (which ended up on my best of 2020 list) as well as another solid record from his longer-running band Big Heet. This time around it’s 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 (mostly recorded by Settle, with a couple drum credits and a lead guitar credit) 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”. The latter 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 full review)
Fishboy – Waitsgiving
Release date: April 2nd Record label: Lauren Genre: Power pop, twee pop, folk rock Formats: Vinyl, digital
Waitsgiving, the latest album from Denton, Texas’ Fishboy, is an intricate, detailed work of indie rock storytelling that weaves a cohesive and unique narrative across ten songs, forty years, and three generations of characters. Bandleader Eric Michener and the band gleefully marry their instrumentals (which sit somewhere between Elephant Six orchestral pop and folk punk) to a record-long narrative whose complexity and grandiosity is normally reserved for progressive rock operas. Taking all of Waitsgiving in at once, it’s refreshing to hear a band just go for it like Fishboy have done here—and it works both because Waitsgiving has the songs to back up their conceptual moon-shot, and because the album’s message of art for art’s sake rings true coming from the long-running band. If there’s anything to take from Waitsgiving, it’s that these songs would be just as valuable if we weren’t hearing them. (Read full review)
FACS – Present Tense
Release date: May 21st 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 music 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.
Eleventh Dream Day – Since Grazed
Release date: April 2nd (digital), August 7th (physical) Record label: Comedy Minus One Genre: Indie goddamn rock Formats: Vinyl, digital
Eleventh Dream Day have carried on through more than three decades of lineup shifts, major label drama, and relocating from Louisville to their current home of Chicago. The band’s most recent records had suggested that they had finally settled into a lane of Crazy Horse-inspired guitar freakout rock and roll—but Since Grazed is a late-career left-turn. It’s a double album, clocking in at around an hour in length, making it the band’s longest record to date. It’s filled not with extended guitar soloing and garage rock jams, but with expansive, skyscraping, deliberately-sculpted songs like the sweeping title track and the immortal ballad “Just Got Home (In Time to Say Goodbye)”. It shouldn’t be a surprise that Eleventh Dream Day have turned in something as strong as Since Grazed after thirty years of musical vitality, but that they did it by expanding and reshaping their sound is remarkable in its own right. (Read full review)
Editrix – Tell Me I’m Bad
Release date: February 5th Record label: Exploding in Sound Genre: Math rock, post-punk, “avant-rock” Formats: Vinyl, digital
Editrix are a power trio of sorts, voiced and guitared by Wendy Eisenberg and further enhanced by drummer Josh Daniel and bassist Steve Cameron. Tell Me I’m Bad deals in chaotic yet catchy guitar squalls and a kinetic rhythm section that does not get in the way of Eisenberg’s strong vocal hooks and memorable lyrics. There are moments—such as the one-liner drop and subsequent instrumental rave-up of “Instant”—that remind me of a zippier Grifters, and turns like when “Sinner” morphs into a bizzaro marching number in its second half that back up the band’s stated prog influence. Tell Me I’m Bad is like a 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle—full of jagged edges, rewarding in the long run, and greater than the sum of its parts. (Read full review)
Downhaul – PROOF
Release date: May 21st Record label: Refresh Genre: Emo, alt-rock Formats: Vinyl, digital
Downhaul’s PROOF is an album carefully crafted to give off a serious, smoldering listening experience for the entirety of its ten tracks. Lead vocalist Gordon Phillips’ baritone guitar leads an instrumental controlled-burn that’s grounded by his own stoic drawl. The fifth overall release and second full-length from the Richmond band probes thematic depths from the harrowing seven-minute opening track “Bury”, and PROOF continues to decline pulling its punches from there. The specter of collapsed relationships, both romantic and otherwise, hovers over PROOF, like when Phillips laments his failures in holding onto friendships in “Circulation”. Closing track “About Leaving” is more clear-eyed, and the song’s music is the lone callback to the band’s earlier alt-country days, right up to its cathartic twangy guitar solo. It’s a suitable way to end a record that examines the power of personal baggage and the equally powerful pulling force of time. (Read full review)
Dinosaur Jr. – Sweep It into Space
Release date: April 23rd Record label: Jagjaguwar Genre: Indie rock, alt-rock Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
The new Dinosaur Jr. album sounds like the band decided to make a whole record out of the hooky alt-rock singles from their “reunion” albums (You know: “Over It”, “Tiny”, “Almost Ready” etc.), and while I’ve enjoyed some of the more “out there” moments from those recent albums, just throwing out a dozen classic Dinosaur Jr. pop songs elevates Sweep It into Space above most of their considerable discography. Five albums into what could’ve just been a nostalgia-fest, the second J. Mascis-Lou Barlow Dino Jr. run should be taken seriously as a force rivaling their initial time together. Although Mascis makes it sound like he could do songs like the acoustic-rocking “I Ran Away” and the bouncy “Hide Another Round” in his sleep, I don’t want to take his consistency for granted. Nor should Mascis’ songwriting distract from Barlow’s “Garden”, which might be the best song he’s ever contributed to his most famous band.
The Dead Space – Chlorine Sleep
Release date: May 7th 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, which comes 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, especially numbers like the pummeling, paranoid opener “La La Man”. In other 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 is album closer “True Shame”, that adds a violin and sounds almost like a slowcore song. It’s still crushing, just from a different angle.
Corvair – Corvair
Release date: February 19th 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.
Cloud Nothings – The Shadow I Remember
Release date: February 26th Record label: Carpark Genre: Alt-rock, noise rock, power pop Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
Cloud Nothings’ Dylan Baldi has been keeping busy with a subscriber-based steady stream of quarantine releases—in the time between The Shadow I Remember’s recording and its release, Baldi has come out with two Bandcamp-exclusive Cloud Nothings albums. Even though it actually predates 2020’s The Black Hole Understands, The Shadow I Remember has as much in common with that record’s shiny power pop than it does with that of the band’s last “proper” release, 2018’s pummeling Last Building Burning. Singles “Am I Something” and “Nothing Without You” may be a little rough around the edges, but they’re pop songs first and foremost, and “Nara” is downright gentle. Still, The Shadow I Remember never comes off as “easy listening”, and moments like the frantic verses of “Only Light” and the 90-second sprint of “It’s Love” lean into the “recorded by Steve Albini” of it all. After ten years and nearly as many great records, it’s heartening that Cloud Nothings show no signs of slowing down—in terms of album quality, at least.
Cicala – Cicala
Release date: January 8th Record label: Acrobat Unstable Genre: Alt-country, “post-country” Formats: Digital
South Carolina’s Cicala make sharp alt-country-tinged indie rock that’s very up my alley, something I ascertained about eight seconds into the rootsy earnestness of opening track “Truck Stop”. Bandleader Quinn Cicala’s characters and narrators frequently find themselves alternating between driving somewhere and stopping at some kind of liminal space, making grand proclamations and life decisions somewhere in the turns, only to eventually come back to Earth, resolving that their denouement will come in the next few miles, or at the next rest stop. Cicala proves they can write a winning song in several guises—whether it’s the careening garage rock of “Red Rocks”, the mid-tempo farm emo of “Intervention”, or the world-weary “Will”. They label themselves as “post-country”—a movement I can get behind. (Read full review)
The Boys with the Perpetual Nervousness – Songs from Another Life
Release date: February 5th Record label: Bobo Integral Genre: Jangle pop Formats: Vinyl, digital
Songs from Another Life’s all-too-short runtime is stuffed to the brim with jangling guitars, beautiful vocal melodies, and bright, shiny numbers with titles like “Waking Up in the Sunshine” and “Summer” that still somehow have a melancholy cloud hanging over them. The Teenage Fanclub comparisons are unavoidable, right down to the Scottish accent of Andrew Taylor, one half of the duo behind TBWTPN. But Taylor and his counterpart, Gonzalo Marcos, do draw from elsewhere in the jangle pop lineage—and regardless, these songs are simply too well-crafted to dismiss. TBWTPN work very hard to wring genuinely affecting emotional material from these well-worn tools, and Songs from Another Life’s best moments (like the contemplative “Rose Tinted Glass”, the pleading “Can’t You See”) are completely transcendent. Perhaps the highest praise I can give this record is that I like it more than the actual Teenage Fanclub album that also came out this year. (Read full review)
Well: the year is nearly halfway over, so I shall now commemorate it by sharing my forty favorite records from it thus far with you, the Rosy Overdrive reader. I could have done more than forty albums. I have heard significantly more than forty good albums so far this year, many of which you can read about in the site’s archives. But I’m also hearing new good music every day, and I would like to write about some of it instead of spending too much time effectively recapping what I’ve already covered (although there are a few albums here I hadn’t touched on yet). Plus, I’d like my big year-end list to be majority stuff-that-isn’t-here.
Since my 2020 year-end list was in alphabetical order, I thought it was only fair to go in reverse alphabetical order this time around. Sorry if you’re upset about this. I’ve made this a two-part list, with the second part going up the day after the first. This is sort of a test; if people would prefer everything to hit at once, then I’ll take that into account for next time. While a couple of EPs did sneak onto the list, I mostly stuck to full-lengths. I’ve heard many great EPs in 2021 and I promise they will get their due before the year is out.
Release date: March 26th Record label: Trouble in Mind Genre: Space rock, psychedelic prog rock Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
If phrases like “space rock odyssey”, “modern prog rock double LP”, and “psychedelic saxophone” pique your interest, then Writhing Squares’ Chart for the Solution is for you. The Philadelphia duo earn all these descriptors, and more, over the album’s 71-minute sprint. Some of the more “out there” moments include the motorik opener “Rogue Moon” and the cosmic horror spoken word piece “The Library”, but Writhing Squares also trade in mirror-universe skewed pop songs like “Geisterwaltz” and “Ganymede”. The album’s brass instrumentation, post-punk aggression, cosmic aural assault, and unabashed recalling of King Crimson and other classic progressive rock bands all help to put Chart for the Solution on its own planet. (Read full review)
Dan Wriggins – Mr. Chill
Release date: March 12th Record label: Orindal Genre: Alt-country Formats: Cassette, digital
Dan Wriggins has gained modest notoriety as the lead singer for the Philadelphia “ambient country” group Friendship, but 2021 has been the year he struck out on his own. If the inclusion of an EP on this list bothers you, just mash all three of Wriggins’ solo releases—this one, the “Dent / The Diner” single, and his Utah Phillips covers EP—together, but Mr. Chill is strong enough on its own to stand among the full-lengths. These five musically sparse songs feature only Wriggins’ acoustic guitar, occasional organ and piano stabs, and fellow Friendship member Michael Cormier’s steady drumming, which all help Wriggins’ distinctive warble and strong songwriting to shine. The title track and “Lucinda on June Bug” are some of Wriggins’ sharpest lyrics to date, and “Season” is able to tread darker waters just by slightly altering Mr. Chill’s core sound. (Read full review)
Yasmin Williams – Urban Driftwood
Release date: January 29th Record label: SPINSTER Genre: Fingerstyle acoustic guitar Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Despite being the only entirely instrumental album on this list, Yasmin Williams’ sophomore record is full of songs that communicate their ideas, themes, and throughlines just as well as any of the other records here do, if not better. Urban Driftwood is full of memorable moments—the quiet picking on opening track “Sunshowers” that gives way to a giddy riff, the arresting tap-heavy main motif of “Swift Breeze”, Taryn Wood’s cello accompaniment in “Adrift”. Almost the entire album solely features Williams’ guitar playing; the few collaborations (Wood’s cello, Amadou Kouyate’s djembe and cadjembe on the title track) are wisely chosen and only serve to enhance Williams, who plays like she knows she can carry the entire album herself. Whatever the ceiling is for fingerstyle acoustic guitar music in 2021, Urban Driftwood makes it feel like the stratosphere. (Read full review)
Subsonic Eye – Nature of Things
Release date: January 15th 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 guitar-first dreaminess of 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 full review)
Stoner Control – Sparkle Endlessly
Release date: March 19th Record label: Sound Judgement Genre: Power pop, pop punk Formats: CD, digital
Portland’s Stoner Control are a real power trio. Guitarist Charley Williams, bassist Sam Greenspan, and drummer Michael Cathcart all contribute vocals and songwriting to the hooky, shiny, and appropriately-titled Sparkle Endlessly, which sees the band confidently plows through ten remarkably well-written guitar pop songs in thirty minutes and change. No matter who’s on vocals or credited as penning the song, Sparkle Endlessly is stubbornly consistent—Greenspan’s carefree, aurally sunglasses-clad talk-singing in “Learning to Swim” is the record’s first “wow” moment, while Williams guides the title track through four minutes of power-pop-punk perfection. Stoner Control has the smart pop sensibilities of album co-producer Mo Troper and the musical chops to flesh these songs out and find new ways to impress along the way. (Read full review)
St. Lenox – Ten Songs of Worship and Praise for Our Tumultuous Times
Release date: June 11th Record label: Don Giovanni/Anyway Genre: Indie pop Formats: Vinyl, digital
St. Lenox’s fourth album, Ten Songs of Worship and Praise for Our Tumultuous Times, is a self-described “progressive, queer, spiritual record” made by a man who admits he is not particularly religious in several of its songs. Andrew Choi, the man behind St. Lenox, ends up creating an honest portrayal of religion and how we interact with it because of his questioning, uncertain perspective. Album opener “Deliverance” finds Choi confronting mortality in his middle age and admitting that he now may be open to these discussions—and the rest of the record is a headfirst dive into it all. Choi sympathizes with his Korean immigrant parents’ views on religion in “The Gospel of Hope”, traces his experience back to his childhood Lutheran church with “Bethesda”, and turns to both the galactic and molecular with “Superkamiokande”. An individual’s relationship with religion is never as static as some pretend; it’s influenced and altered by the people around them, society, and their own personal growth. Ten Songs of Worship and Praise… is a singular album that reflects this from Choi’s perspective. (Read full review)
John Sharkey III – Shoot Out the Cameras
Release date: March 5th Record label: 12XU/Mistletone Genre: Gothic country folk Formats: Vinyl, digital
If you’re familiar with the icy post-punk bombast of John Sharkey III’s current band Dark Blue, then you might be surprised to hear that his solo debut is a sparse, largely acoustic folk record. Sharkey’s voice, however, is as unmistakable and affecting as ever on Shoot Out the Cameras. Recorded after Sharkey relocated to Australia from his native Philadelphia, his rich baritone anchors an album inspired by the wildfires visible ambiently in the distance, discord in both his adopted home and birth nation, and the country music passed down to him at a young age from his mother and grandmother. The record takes the listener to morbid and harrowing extremes in songs like “Death Is All Around” and “Pain Dance”, but there’s a defiant hopefulness that rears its head throughout Shoot Out the Cameras. It’s a traditional, universal, elemental album that strikes new ground for Sharkey by unearthing the old. (Read full review)
Russel the Leaf – Then You’re Gunna Wanna
Release date: February 26th Record label: Self-released Genre: Psychedelic pop, power pop Formats: Cassette,Digital
Russel the Leaf’s sole member Evan M. Marré is a Philadelphia-based producer who’s amassed an impressive list of credits, including Remember Sports, Friendship, and Another Michael. On his own, Marré trades in the type of busily beautiful baroque pop that’s frequently associated with producer-musician studio rats. He invites Beach Boys comparisons right from the start with the nautical croon of “Sailin’ Away”, and the strings and vocal theatrics of “Skipping School” giddily continue them. Then You’re Gunna Wanna does anything but lose steam from then on, trotting out perfect pop songs like “Classic Like King Kong” and “Hey! (It’s Alright)” and indulging in full-on studio-bag-of-tricks mode with “California”. It’s an album that reveals even more of its charms with each listen. (Read full review)
Jeff Rosenstock – SKA DREAM
Release date: April 20th Record label: Polyvinyl Genre: Ska punk, punk rock Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
So, we’re in the fourth wave of ska now? If so, cheers to Jeff Rosenstock for toiling away and bridging pretty much the entire gap between the third one and now—he never fully abandoned ska-punk, just toned it down enough to get the nerds in the door (or to, perhaps, get the nerds who listened to Bomb the Music Industry! back in high school but foolishly thought we’d “outgrown” that kind of music to return to the fold). Call SKA DREAM a celebration of a genre that only now seems to be getting taken seriously, further evidence of the greatness of NO DREAM (one of my favorite albums of last year), a well-earned victory lap for Rosenstock, or a celebration of the scene he and the like-minded individuals who make up the considerable guest-credits have cultivated—either way, this “oops, all ska” reimagining of his most recent solo album is a blast in its own right.
Rosali – No Medium
Release date: May 7th Record label: SPINSTER Genre: Folk rock, country rock Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
The third album from Philadelphia’s Rosali Middleman is a folk rock record—in that it genuinely sounds like a rock band playing these songs, rather than a “roots” music group that just happens to utilize traditional rock instrumentation. The David Nance Group, her backing band for No Medium, ends up being a spirited choice, as they help turn the record into her sharpest yet. The album contains its share of rock and roll fireworks, such as the careening riff in “Bones” and Middleman’s lead guitar in “Pour Over Ice”, but the slower moments on No Medium are just as impactful—“Tender Heart” and “All This Lightning” capture very different moments in interpersonal relationships, but land their punches with equal weight. With No Medium, Middleman has made an album that grapples with some fairly universal themes in a confident and affirming way but, instead of giving into the shallow and cliché, works precisely because of how personally evocative she makes these songs. (Read full review)
Tucker Riggleman & The Cheap Dates – Alive and Dying Fast
Release date: January 29th Record label: WarHen Records Genre: Alt-country, roots rock Formats: Vinyl, digital
Tucker Riggleman has been working the Appalachian DIY circuit for the past decade or so, playing in bands such as the fuzz-rockers Bishops and The Demon Beat, as well as making music under his own name. Alive and Dying Fast is the debut full-length of his new band The Cheap Dates, and they aren’t afraid to slow things down a bit in order to accentuate and compliment some of Riggleman’s strongest songwriting to date. Despite his evolved writing and under-the-belt experience, Riggelman paints himself as a man very much still in the middle of it all throughout the record. Over the course of Alive and Dying Fast, Riggleman chases his vitamins with beer, clings to his music idols (Paul Westerberg in “Void”, the obvious in “Robert Smith Tattoo”), swears to unnamed skeptics that he’s really an artist, and shouts into the void— all we can do is experience it with him in the moment (Read full review)
Remember Sports – Like a Stone
Release date: April 23rd Record label: Father/Daughter Genre: Pop punk, indie punk, “emo-adjacent” Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
Like a Stone is a big leap forward from a band that was already good enough to not even need one to keep me interested. In one sense, it’s a world away from the sloppy indie punk that put them on my (and most of their fans’) radar, but on the other hand the traces are still there, whether they’re sharpening that sound to give it a stronger bite (“Pinky Ring”) or refining it into a slick, multi-part two minute pop song (“Like a Stone”). The songs that land the furthest from the band’s previous work are no less potent: “Materialistic” finds Remember Sports showing up all the Philly emo bands at their own game, the seven-minute indie pop shuffle of “Out Loud” is like nothing the band has done before but doesn’t feel out of place at all, and closing the record with a country-rock singalong (“Odds Are”) somehow works even better. Lead singer Carmen Perry’s songwriting is as hard-hitting as ever, but this time the music behind her is more than game to take Like a Stone to the next level.
Anika Pyle – Wild River
Release date: February 12th Record label: June/Quote Unquote Genre: Indie folk, synthpop, spoken word Formats: Vinyl, digital
Anika Pyle spent the majority of the 2010s fronting emo-tinged DIY punk bands Chumped and Katie Ellen. Her first record on her own, however, is not the “Anika Pyle solo album” that a casual fan of either of those groups might conjure up in their head. It’s a sparse album, built from minimal synths, quiet acoustic guitar, and Pyle’s words—which are as likely to be spoken as they are to be sung. Although it didn’t totally come out of nowhere, Wild River confronts the listener head-on with this dimension of Pyle’s songwriting, and she uses her new music vocabulary to command your full attention. Poetry pieces, heavy recurring themes, and an unflinching account of a very real loss make Wild River nothing short of active listening. This is not to say that individual songs from the album could never stand on their own, but the heft of tracks like “Orange Flowers” is sharply enhanced by Pyle’s contextualizing spoken words. (Read full review)
Proper Nouns – Feel Free
Release date: April 23rd Record label: Self-released Genre: Power pop Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital
The first album from Baltimore’s Proper Nouns is an espresso shot of a record, featuring fourteen jaunty rock songs informed by classic guitar pop bands like Ted Leo and the Pharmacists and Game Theory as well as bandleader Spencer Compton’s left-wing political pontifications. Compton leads the rest of the power trio (bassist Jon Birkholz and drummer Joe Martin) both through motor-mouth rave-ups like “Terror by the Book” and dangerously catchy mid-tempo pop-rock cruisers like “Redeeming Qualities”. Compton has a lot to say, and isn’t exactly waiting for the listener to catch up, but I’ve picked up bits and pieces by osmosis—the microscope turned towards academic leftism on “Emma”, the reflection on the changing cloud of information on “Y2k”. It bears repeating that Proper Nouns remain devoted to pure pop throughout it all, even on stranger numbers like the mathy “Nowhereland”, and their execution of it is what makes Feel Free a strong and promising debut.
Personal Space – A Lifetime of Leisure
Release date: March 19th Record label: Good Eye Genre: Indie pop, chill math rock Formats: Digital
Brooklyn’s Personal Space ask more of the listener than your average chill indie guitar rock band. A Lifetime of Leisure’s ten tracks are populated with character sketches that look at various archetypes through the band’s leftist activist lens. “Ethical” media consumption, choices of wine, biting a Greek philosopher’s style—there’s nothing Personal Space can’t and won’t put under their analytical microscope. You don’t need to always be on the same ideological page as the band to enjoy A Lifetime of Leisure, however—the lyrics are just another ingredient in their languid guitar pop songs that triangulate the likes of XTC, Pinback, and the Dismemberment Plan. Despite its firm political convictions, A Lifetime of Leisure is less “exhausting” and more “commiseration and comfort for the exhausted”. As they say on one of the record’s best tracks: “It’s chill, man. I’m supine.” (Read full review)
Palberta – Palberta5000
Release date: January 22nd Record label: Wharf Cat Records Genre: Post-punk, experimental punk Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
After trading in deconstructed rock music for the majority of their relatively brief career, Palberta are ready to step into the spotlight with their most inviting collection of songs to date. Palberta5000 is a positively accessible album that doesn’t lose the base components of a Palberta—hearing the band spin their scrappy post-punk into winning hooks and pop gold is like watching Sully land on the Hudson a dozen times in a row. Palberta5000 is still a fairly topsy-turvey album, though—“Big Bad Want” rides a single line and riff for four minutes in some sort of bizarre endurance test, and they even flirt with some multi-suite prog-pop a la Guided by Voices in the last couple of songs on the record. Whether it’s those outer reaches or the more straightforward moments (like the 90-second “Summer Sun”), the songs on Palberta5000 aren’t easy to forget. (Read full review)
Olivia’s World – Tuff 2B Tender
Release date: April 23rd Record label: Lost Sound Tapes Genre: Twee pop Formats: Cassette, digital
Olivia’s World has geography-, label-, and personnel-based connections to K Records, but the second release by the now-Queensland-based band doesn’t just stick to the guileless indie pop to which many modern twee-indebted acts hew. Bandleader Alice Rezende’s songwriting is bursting with big ideas, and the group goes big musically to back them up. Now a four-piece, Olivia’s World paints Tuff 2B Tender with a layered, full-band sound that does justice to both ends of the EP’s title. Opening track “Debutante” gradually turns into a wall of sound featuring ringing piano and cascading guitars, “Hell-Bent” is a romp that features Rezende’s best stream-of-consciousness lyrics, and the pastoral fantasy of “Grassland” ends Tuff 2B Tender by finding comfort and strength in discovering and inventing new worlds. “Grassland” features a restless lyric from Rezende, who has traversed two continents and made several sonic strides with her band over its relatively short life. (Read full review)
Nightshift – Zöe
Release date: February 26th Record label: Trouble in Mind Genre: Post-punk, no wave indie pop Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
For their second album, Glasgow’s Nightshift have fashioned together an inviting collection of minimalist indie rock songs by taking a No New York-esque attitude to the melodic, utilitarian pop structures that recall Young Marble Giants or Marine Girls. Zöe is an album where many instrumental and vocal parts come unadorned, placed front and center for the listener to take in, and Nightshift offer up hypnotically catchy guitar riffs and repetitive vocals hooks from opener “Piece Together” on out. Despite the amount of empty space on Zöe, there are plenty of inspired instrumental choices—the liberal clarinet that first appears on early highlight “Spray Paint the Bridge” for example, and later helps accent the spoken-word musings of “Make Kin”. The record ends up feeling both ethereal and grounded; it’s not afraid to unapologetically present itself as “art”, but it doesn’t hide what makes it worth appreciating either. (Read full review)
Mister Goblin – Four People in an Elevator and One of Them Is the Devil
Release date: February 19th Record label: Exploding in Sound Genre: Post-hardcore, indie folk pop Formats: Cassette, digital
Mister Goblin—both on his own and as part of the cult post-hardcore band Two Inch Astronaut— has honed in on a recognizable sound, led by his golden, effortlessly melodic voice combined with thorny guitar that, as a music writer, I am required to describe as “Dischord-esque”. The first two Mister Goblin releases (2018’s Final Boy EP and 2019’s Is Path Warm?) found the act probing depths beyond punk rock, and the excellent Four People in an Elevator and One of Them Is the Devil feels like the Goblin’s fullest realization yet of these new components. Lead single “Six Flags America” takes its trip to the amusement park acoustically, accompanied by tasteful cello playing, and “Cardboard Box” features a mortally wounded bird that ends its life on its own terms in the parking lot of a wildlife rescue over a mid-tempo drum machine beat. At 29 minutes, Four People in an Elevator… is a no-filler record by a songwriter who’s quietly becoming one of the most dependable in indie rock. (Read full review)
MJ Lenderman – Ghost of Your Guitar Solo
Release date: March 26th Record label: Dear Life Genre: Alt-country Formats: CD, cassette, digital
Asheville singer-songwriter Jake Lenderman plays in the dreamy indie rock band Wednesday, but under his own name he’s made an album of lo-fi, offbeat country-punk that falls somewhere between David Berman (a noted lyrical influence) and early Simon Joyner (particularly in the voice cracking of “Catholic Priest” and the singsong melody of “Gentleman’s Jack”). Lenderman is an intriguing songwriter, finding fertile ground in the sight of Jack Nicholson sitting courtside at a Lakers game or the bizarre feeling of shame caused by seeing a friend or lover’s mother sleeping. Ghost of Your Guitar Solo is a short album (clocking in at around 25 minutes) and is anchored by two mostly-instrumental title tracks and a live version of one of the songs, which end up only enhancing the record’s ramshackle charm. The quality of these songs leaves me hoping we hear more from Lenderman soon. (Read full review)
Release date: June 11th Record label: Don Giovanni/Anyway Genre: Indie pop Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull track: Kroger Twilight
Despite catering to a portion of American culture that is more prone than others to vent about “political correctness” and “cancel culture”, the contemporary Christian music industry certainly has very strict rules about what can be marketed as “Christian music” and how musicians labeled as such should behave. One should be unwavering in one’s faith, and questioning it is off-limits. Swearing is off the table. All of one’s music should be about the glory of God and Jesus; singing about worldly concerns is, to say the least, frowned upon. Politics (unless they’re, you know, the right kind) are out of the question. Oh, and you probably shouldn’t be gay. Which brings us to St. Lenox’s fourth album, Ten Songs of Worship and Praise for Our Tumultuous Times, his self-described “progressive, queer, spiritual record” made by a man who admits he is not particularly religious in several of its songs. It is a more honest portrayal of religion and how we interact with it because of this freedom.
Album opener “Deliverance” finds Andrew Choi, the man behind St. Lenox, driven to consider the questions surrounding religion and the afterlife by both his own mortality and that of those around him. Admitting that the catalyst for his curiosity in religion is something other than an inextinguishable love for God is not the idealized version of American Christian passion, but is a more accurate depiction of those who begin to consider religion later in life after drifting away from it. When Choi sings “I’m ready to believe in something these days / Maybe I can believe in deliverance now,” he’s after the same thing that animates the most devout: hope in something greater. “Bethesda” is about Choi’s religious upbringing, growing up going to a Lutheran church in Ames, Iowa. Although the song doesn’t directly connect the scenes from his childhood to his present-day queries, I do find the potential seeds for deliverance hidden within them. Choi describes boredly scribbling on and counting spelling errors in church programs and mouthing the words to hymns because he hated singing in front of others. It is not lost on anyone paying attention that Choi, decades removed from Bethesda Lutheran, is now a musician singing a religious-themed album featuring songs that approach scripture from an intrigued perspective (like “The Great Blue Heron (Song of Solomon)”). After finding himself receptive to things later in life that his younger self probably couldn’t imagine, perhaps the door is only opening for Choi.
Of course, not all of Ten Songs of Worship and Praise… is about Choi’s relationship with religion, at least not directly. “What Is It Like to Have Children”, in the middle of the album, is a direct rumination on the question its title poses, and a good deal of the song touches on Choi’s relationship with his parents in a way that hearkens back to his 2016 album Ten Hymns from My American Gothic. That album detailed Choi’s experience being the son of Korean immigrants, and as “Gospel of Hope” from his new album makes explicit, much of Choi’s experience with religion is derived from how it shaped his parents’ lives as they uprooted themselves into an unfamiliar country. It follows that any meditation on religion by Choi would lead to his parents, which in turn informs his own goals and fears when thinking of his potential children (“Could I be a great and mighty fortress never failing / And could I do better than my father did before me?”). It’s also perhaps relevant in that having children, raising something that one hopes lives beyond one’s own life and passes on some part of them, is its own form of finding something greater in this world, and could also be seen response to the theme of mortality that pops up throughout the album.
Choi has received comparisons to John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats and Craig Finn of The Hold Steady, and thematically Ten Songs of Worship and Praise… is certainly in the same realm as those writers’ Biblically-informed verbosity, but the influence that I can’t stop thinking about ever since I noticed it is Michael Stipe, whose band Choi has cited as a formative influence. Choi’s writing may be the Midwestern-direct mirror image to Stipe’s Southern Gothic-opaque lyrics for the most part, but one can draw a direct line from the themes on “Nightswimming” and “Gardening at Night” to this album’s “Kroger Twilight”. In addition, musically, Ten Songs of Worship and Praise… kind of sounds like if R.E.M. had made Up at the peak of their confidence as a band, rather than at their nadir.
St. Lenox is one of the most “lyrics-forward” projects around, but I do not want to overlook Choi’s musical and vocal choices, as they undoubtedly shape how one hears Ten Songs of Worship and Praise for Our Tumultuous Times. In several places, Choi’s backing music feels like a step forward for the project, like the way the sleepy synths in “Kroger Twilight” help create the late-night grocery shopping experience contained within the song, or the buzzing in “Deliverance” helps kick off a record that traverses a lot of ground over its ten tracks. There are no solo acoustic songs on Ten Songs of Worship and Praise… like Choi has brought out in the past (like “The Public School System” and “Don’t Ever Change Me New York City”) and the structures feel looser than St. Lenox has been in the past, letting Choi’s vocals sprawl out over the music—there’s nothing as tightly-constructed as, say, “Korea” here. Whether these slight but notable changes are due to an increased confidence by Choi in his “beats” or just more fitting of the material covered on the record I’m not certain, but it does help make Ten Songs of Worship and Praise… a distinct entry in the St. Lenox discography.
This confidence and Choi’s freewheeling style can be a lot to take in all at once; I haven’t decided if Ten Songs of Worship and Praise… is the best St. Lenox album, it already feels like the most St. Lenox album. At times Ten Songs of Worship and Praise… seems to nearly careen off the rails, straining under the weight of everything the album seeks to encapsulate. Choi has moments where he sounds like an over-excited professor whose mind is traveling even faster than his mouth: the speedy “Teenage Eyes” zips along, with Choi’s tale of holding on to one’s frequently stamped-out youthful passions undergirded by a Dwight Eisenhower speech whose significance in respect to the song’s lyrics I haven’t yet ascertained. Album closer “Superkamiokande” is similarly curious, using the titular Japanese neutrino detector to turn Choi’s religious musings to both the galactic and molecular, but Choi isn’t forthright in how these pieces all fit together for him, if at all. And yet, “Teenage Eyes” and “Superkamiokande” are two of my favorite songs on Ten Songs of Worship and Praise for Our Tumultuous Times. The concerns Choi spends the bulk of this album singing about don’t come with easy explanations or neat resolutions. As much as we’d like to view religion as a pure or absolute force, it’s not—it’s complicated, influenced and altered for each individual by the people around them, society, and their own personal growth. And Ten Songs of Worship and Praise… is informed by this: it’s a singular album that could have only been made by Andrew Choi. Much work on religion caters to either the extremely devout or extremely un-devout—groups who may not enjoy the indefinite nature of this album. For all of us who fall somewhere in between—and for those in those two extremes who still keep an open mind— Ten Songs of Worship and Praise… is a rewarding album that deftly navigates questions as old as humanity itself with fresh eyes.
Another month in the books, another round-up of the best songs I heard over its contents. Mostly containing songs from the last couple of months, but there are a few older selections whose identities you’ll have to continue reading to find out. Rosali and The Bevis Frond are the only ones to land multiple songs on the list this time around. Be sure to check out previous playlist posts if you’ve enjoyed this one.
“7 Smile”, Lily Konigsberg From The Best of Lily Konigsberg Right Now (2021, Wharf Cat)
Originally released on her 2018 EP 4 Picture Tear, “7 Smile” is one of a handful of Lily Konigsberg songs rounded up by Wharf Cat Records for their The Best of Lily Konigsberg Right Now compilation. I’ve covered the fractured post-punk of her band, Palberta, before, but “7 Smile” is Rosy Overdrive’s first foray into the material released under her own name so far. The Konigsberg of The Best Of… is one of freewheeling, anything-goes pop music, much like a band with which she’s recently collaborated, This Is Lorelei. The songs on the compilation range from danceable synthpop to acoustic folk-pop to a moving instrumental called “Lily’s National Anthem”. “7 Smile” is a sneakily-catchy piece of lo-fi pop marked by drum machine and Palberta bandmate Ani Ivry-Block’s guitar. Lyrically, the song finds Konigsberg preoccupied with the passing of time and the changes inherent therein, repeating “The point is not exactly where I am, the point is what I’m not” like a mantra as the seasons cycle and years pass in front of her.
“Bones”, Rosali From No Medium (2021, SPINSTER)
The third album from Philadelphia’s Rosali Middleman was recorded with Midwestern lo-fi garage rock band David Nance Group, and the two converge early on in No Medium to make fireworks with “Bones”. The song’s forceful, careening opening riff is an instant attention-grabber, and Middleman doesn’t let up from there as she sings of extricating herself from an unpleasant relationship over top of the instrumental blast. “I’ll gather my bones and go back home / And be alone, be alone” anchors an anthem about the power in just existing on one’s own. Read more about No Medium here.
“A Fake Idea”, Hurry From Fake Ideas (2021, Lame-O)
Philadelphia’s Hurry have been responsible for some of the best power pop of the past few years, and their most recent album, 2018’s Every Little Thought, ranks among my favorite records from that year. Now the band is gearing up to release their fourth LP, Fake Ideas, next month, and if this almost-title track is any indication, we can expect a group of songs that at the very least should stand up to Hurry’s previous work. 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 or Hurry’s like-minded contemporaries such as Portland’s Eyelids. Despite creating the perfect backdrop for a starry-eyed song about girls, the summertime, or girls in the summertime, however, Scottoline’s thoughts lie elsewhere on “A Fake Idea”. While there may be a relationship in the song, it’s discussed in the context of anxiety and mental illness—all of Scottoline’s troubled thoughts on himself and skewed views of relationships were “just created by my mind, and twisted over time / to make a fake idea start feeling true”. The song finds Scottoline being very open about the dangers of believing all of one’s overwrought conceptions of one’s self and loved ones. It’s not the most common sentiment for this kind of music, but given that it exists in a genre known for sincerity and earnestness, it’s not at all out of place.
“Hey Annabelle!”, Fightmilk From Contender (2021, Reckless Yes)
London’s Fightmilk (yes, I’m pretty sure their name is an Always Sunny reference) make big, go-for-it pop punk for people who have a hard time choosing their favorite Letters to Cleo or that dog. songs. They’ve garnered some Martha comparisons—that band’s Blisters in the Pit of My Heart was one of the greatest punk albums of the last decade, and considering that Martha themselves haven’t even reached those heights since, I don’t think it’s a slight to Contender to say it doesn’t quite either. The album does, however, have “Hey Annabelle!”, which has the same infectious, completely undeniable charm that marks Martha’s best moments, and functions well as a “pay attention to this band from now on” song. “Hey Annabelle!” finds lead singer Lily Rae, post-breakup, oh-so-casually trying to ascertain just how her former girlfriend is taking the separation. The titular addressee of the song is the sister of Rae’s ex, who she’s now soliciting to check in on her former lover, but “please don’t make it obvious, because I definitely don’t care”. That last bit seems odd, because indifference is rarely the driver of a song that packs this much of a punch.
“I Wanna Get High to the Music”, Pardoner From Came Down Different (2021, Bar/None)
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. Still, it’s the one-minute simple pop of “I Wanna Get High to the Music” that allows Pardoner to shine brightest. Are there meatier songs on Came Down Different? Sure, but the way that “I Wanna Get High to the Music” erupts from a breezy jangle rock tune to full-on alt-rock in its last few seconds is exhilarating, merging the two in a way that few others than, say, Grant Hart would’ve even thought to attempt.
“The Great Blue Heron (Song of Solomon)”, St. Lenox From Ten Songs of Worship and Praise for Our Tumultuous Times (2021, Don Giovanni/Anyway)
If you haven’t been following the press cycle for St. Lenox’s upcoming fourth album, you’ve been missing out. The rollout for Ten Songs of Worship and Praise for Our Tumultuous Times has found Andrew Choi (who, uh, is St. Lenox) doing everything from writing about the drift of America away from organized religion to sharing his favorite quarantine recipe discovery. “The Great Blue Heron (Song of Solomon)” may be the best moment yet—the song itself, with its keyboard-on-organ-setting and a characteristically strong Choi vocal, is great, but half the reason it’s here on this list is so I can point you in the direction of its accompanying music video. The video ties everything the song touches on together—Biblical interpretation, queer love, and, of course, the titular heron. It’s above all else a love song to Choi’s husband, who stars in the video literally alongside the heron, and also goes into detail about Choi’s personal interpretation of Song of Solomon and its position in the Bible, which—oh, just watch the video, you’ll get it. Read more about Ten Songs of Worship and Praise for Our Tumultuous Times here.
“Prudence”, Sieve From Prudence b/w Around (2021, Ramp Local)
As Mick Jagger once said, “It’s a bittersweet symphony, that’s life”. Such wisdom is applicable in the case of Philadelphia’s Sieve, who I learned about through the release of their two-song “farewell single”, Prudence b/w Around. The A-side is a spiky two-minute post-punk/no-wavey track that doesn’t take itself too seriously or overstay its welcome. The four-piece band (lead singer/guitarist Em Boltz, drummer Madeline Rafter, bassist Rachie Weisberg, and synth player Emily Bliss Lyon) all sound great together, and it makes one wish they’d been able to stick it out for more than just a single and EP. Of course, the members of Sieve are still active in other places—singer Em Boltz plays guitar in Corey Flood and is one half of Enchanted Forest, drummer Madeline Rafter plays in Snake Boy Gang and The Original Crooks and Nannies, and so forth. We should all take a moment to appreciate “Prudence” before everyone moves on to bigger and better things, however.
“Love Song #5”, Upper Wilds From Venus (2021, Thrill Jockey)
Here I was thinking “Oh, Upper Wilds are back!” after “Love Song #2” came out last month with the announcement of the power trio’s upcoming third record, Venus. That song is still quite good, and it serves as a solid introduction to Dan Friel and company’s unique brand of sonically assaulting, anthemic noise pop, but the album’s fifth love song is the advance track that feels like the transcendent one—something like “The Gold We’re Digging”, or “Roy Sullivan”. For one, it starts with a similar “lit fuse burning down on a cartoon block of TNT” guitar intro to the one that begins “Roy Sullivan”, and Friel’s lyrics go toe-to-toe with the squealing instrumental that follows in terms of sheer power. “The sun won’t care if you fall in love / And the void still stares if you fall in love” begins the verse, before it further enumerates all the reasons why the connection between two people pales in comparison to the infinity of space and time. The chorus, as a rejoinder, is merely “But you know you will, you know you will, you know you will, you know you will tonight”—the most defiant “So what?” ever. Read more about Venus here.
“Disappearing”, Benjamin Belinska From Lost Illusions (2020, Hidden Bay/Kocliko)
The Newcastle-based songwriter Benjamin Belinska makes a breezy style of folk rock that falls somewhere in between his two most prominent stated influences, Tom Petty and The Feelies. Lost Illusions, his first solo album, is full of these sweet jangly-pastoral songs, flying by in under thirty minutes, and “Disappearing” is the record’s best-executed version of this sound. Perhaps it is due to my own biases, but despite Britain’s own strong tradition of folk music, Lost Illusions feels more in line with the version that recalls the American heartland. Belinska holds onto his words when he’s singing like Petty or Bob Dylan, and the songs place as much emphasis on evoking a specific feeling musically as what Belinska’s literally saying in his lyrics (not that there’s nothing going on lyrically with “Disappearing”). Lost Illusions was self-released by Belinska last year and has just received CD and cassette pressings through Kocliko and Hidden Bay Records, respectively. Listening to Belinska make his sincere professions of love throughout “Disappearing”, it’s easy to understand why one might be moved to make his music exist in the physical world.
“Daisy”, (T-T)b From Suporma (2021, Acrobat Unstable)
I won’t pretend to be an expert in the genre, but when I think about bands that incorporate vintage video game soundtrack instrumentation into their sound, I think of—and I say this with no judgment attached to this at all—tryhard music. You know: high-energy, sensory-overload, sugar-rush, aggressive Nintendocore stuff. So when I became aware of (T-T)b, a chiptune “bitpunk” band named after an emoji on emo label Acrobat Unstable, I wasn’t necessarily expecting…slacker rock? And yet, that’s exactly where “Daisy” and the rest of the Suporma EP end up, and it rules. The song is a fairly straightforward 90’s emo-pop-rocker that just happens to have some 8-bit accents between the chugging, “When I Come Around”-esque guitar chords. (T-T)b utilize their bleeps the way another band might use a horn section or, hell, a melodica, and it works just as well as any of those more “traditional” musical embellishments might. Also: “Daisy” seems to be about a possum, which the song’s music video helpfully illustrates.
“New River Head”, The Bevis Frond From New River Head (1991, Reckless/Fire)
The Bevis Frond seem tailor-made to be a cult band. They have a very specific, defined sound—J. Mascis-level guitar hero inferno rock combined with 60’s psychedelia and power pop hooks—that for a small subsection of music fans is probably exactly what they’ve been looking for their whole lives. Just as importantly, there’s a lot to take in with the Frond, on every level—from song length (tracks regularly stretch into eight-minute and beyond range) to album length (the “restored as originally intended” tracklist of New River Head nears two hours, and that’s not even counting bonus tracks) to career output (do you really think they’ve made less than twenty records?). But one doesn’t need to commit fully to the school of Nick Saloman and his collaborators to appreciate the title track to the band’s 1991 landmark album. “New River Head” has it all—soaring guitar solos, a gorgeous, melancholic vocal melody from Saloman, gleeful usage of classic pop song chords—and gets its point across in a relatively manageable five and a half minutes.
“Control”, Mannequin Pussy From Perfect (2021, Epitaph)
I saw a tweet recently that said something to the effect of “There are no casual Mannequin Pussy fans”. Well: hello, it is I, the casual Mannequin Pussy fan, here to casually enjoy the songs of the Mare of Eastown-famous band. At least, that was my relationship with Thee MPs before their new Perfect EP, which I think is very good and is more or less exactly what I wanted from this band since they showed up on my radar. It’s a nearly 50/50 mix of exciting hardcore-influenced tracks and stately, capital E-emotional indie rock, both of which are executed about as well as one could hope. I even considered one of the more confrontational songs for the playlist –“Pigs Is Pigs”, sung by bassist Colins “Bear” Regisford, is worth an honorable mention. But there’s no getting past “Control”. Marisa Dabice sells the hell out of the anxious lyrics, the music gives her space but still has more bite than your average modern rock-crit approved indie rock instrumental, and that bridge (“Something’s in your eyes something’s in your eyes something’s in your…) lodged itself firmly in my head from the moment I heard it.
“High / Low”, Oblivion Orchestra From Scene to Scene (2021)
The debut album from New York’s Oblivion Orchestra is a unique record of cello-heavy indie folk. While I did compare the “head” of the Orchestra, Josh Allen, to Arthur Russell, the way Scene to Scene layers and distorts its chosen string instrument makes it a distinct entity rather than a modern-day version of the same sound. The album’s gorgeous opener, “High / Low”, is Allen’s strongest vocal turn as he floats over the ebbing and flowing of instrumental build-up beneath him that mirrors the “highs” and “lows” alluded to in the song’s title. Read more about Scene to Scene here.
“Cents”, Enumclaw From Jimbo Demo (2021, Suite A/Youth Riot)
Tacoma, Washington’s Enumclaw only have one release to their name so far, but that one—April’s Jimbo Demo EP—is a captivating record of ever-so-slightly-crooked Pacific Northwest indie rock that both hints at the band’s full potential and works quite well on its own. I could’ve chosen any of the EP’s five songs for this playlist and been happy with them, but there’s something about the short, driving opener “Cents” that keeps me coming back to it. As catchy as it is (an attribute aided amply by Nathan Cornell’s prominent bass playing), lead singer Aramis Johnson injects the song with a darkness caused by longing for a more innocent time. “Remember when we were kids / How did it end up like this?” he wonders in the verse, and his plea of “Can you make it last? / Can you bring it back?” in the chorus is left unanswered.
“Resist the Urge”, Matt Sweeney and Bonnie “Prince” Billy From Superwolves (2021, Drag City)
I am not a Will Oldham superfan. I like I See a Darkness, sure, (I mean, who doesn’t?) and I’ve written favorably about Palace Music here before, but I’ve only ever scratched the surface of the Kentuckian’s prodigious output. It wasn’t a guarantee that I was even going to get around to Superwolves, but I’m glad I did, for “Resist the Urge” if nothing else. I did find Superwolves—an Oldham collaboration with Matt Sweeney (Chavez, Zwan, Guided by Voices- adjacent) and a sequel to 2005’s Superwolf—to be a worthwhile listen, but “Resist the Urge” is something else. It’s an extremely potent folk song that wastes not a single moment or word in getting to its message. It takes the perspective of a parent reassuring a child not to mourn their death, because in one form or another they will live on (“You’re not without that much of me / I wasn’t just a body”) and it’s one of the more affecting songs about death (or, as the narrator of the song might say, the end of one’s physical existence) I’ve heard…this year? Ever?
“Dried”, Downhaul From PROOF (2021, Refresh)
Calling Downhaul’s PROOF a record akin to a “car crash in slow motion” seems like an undersell—perhaps a more accurate pull would be “the sinking of the Titanic”. “Dried” is one of the more spirited moments found in the album’s cold, dark majesty. Lead singer Gordon Phillips spends much of PROOF reflecting on dissolving relationships, and here he turns the album’s damaged undercurrents towards himself explicitly: “Gordon, get it together / You’re supposed to be better/…/So tell me right now if I’m wasting my time here”, he rages against himself in one of PROOF’s most dramatic moments, lifting his voice above the churning waters of the six-minute song to remind you that, no, things are not okay in case you were wondering. Read more about PROOF here.
“Chaos Magic”, Death Hags From Big Grey Sun #3 (2021, Big Grey Sun)
I’m always here for ambition, and the Los Angeles-based Death Hags can’t be accused of wanting for it. The “interstellar psychedelic noise pop” led by one Lola G. is in the middle of slowly rolling out a seven-album project called Big Grey Sun that began in late 2019 and crested its third volume earlier this month. Big Grey Sun #3 was co-released with an ambient record that is not part of the Big Grey Sun series, and is also available in VHS form. None of this would be all that interesting if the music wasn’t good as well, so I’m happy to report that I found Big Grey Sun #3 to be an entertaining listen. It splits the difference between spacious, synth-driven darkwave and more straightforward, guitar-grounded dream pop, the latter of which is where “Chaos Magic” falls. The first half of the song, led by Lola G.’s melodic verses and bass-heavy instrumentation, is satisfying enough, but then the song finds another gear as the second-half chorus kicks “Chaos Magic” into overdrive.
“Flyin’ the Flannel”, fIREHOSE From Flyin’ the Flannel (1991, Columbia)
Add fIREHOSE to the list of bands I’ve finally listened to after years of thinking “you know, I really should…” The fourth album and major label debut from notorious flannel-wearer Mike Watt and drummer George Hurley’s post-Minutemen band is…alright. It’s no Double Nickels on the Dime, but I knew that going into it. If you do like the Minutemen, I would recommend giving it a spin for the more memorable tracks, like the roaring opener “Down with the Bass” and the title track, which we have here. Ed Crawford’s guitar playing—which alternates between a spindly riff that’s kind of the main hook and some fuzzy power chords—puts this pretty far away from a typical Minutemen song, and I like that fIREHOSE seemed to be plumbing their own sonic territory around this time. Watt’s lyrics are the strongest link to his and Hurley’s pasts, with lines like “I use deduction to reveal / New assumptions from old spiel” making “Flyin’ the Flannel” sound like a reaffirmation of a long-held mission statement.
“I’ll Hold the Mirror”, Hello Whirled From No Victories (2021)
“I’ll Hold the Mirror” is probably the friendliest song on No Victories, a warped and frequently intense but nevertheless transfixing record. This track finds Hello Whirled in full jangle pop mode, cruising through a three-minute pop song that’s effortlessly catchy. Lead singer and sole member Ben Spizuco’s vocals sound like Franklin Bruno here again, although the instrumental is more Guided by Voices or even something more straightforward, like a peppier Teenage Fanclub song. The lyrics have been described by Spizuco as “nonsensical”, but lines like “Paint the rocks with beautiful hearts out of sync” don’t really need to make sense to work in the context of “I’ll Hold the Mirror”. Read more about No Victories here.
“Baleful”, Needles//Pins From Needles//Pins (2021, Dirt Cult)
I try not to get hung up on the discrepancy between the bands I think should be big and the bands that actually become so, but that being said, when I heard Vancouver punk band Needles//Pins’ 2017 album Goodnight, Tomorrow, I remember thinking that they’d be rocking festivals if there was any justice in this world. Adam Solomonian’s gruff vocals may be an acquired taste, sure, but once one has acclimated themselves to them, they become a feature instead of a bug. Four years later, their new self-titled album has picked up right where the band left off, its only demerit being that, at 23 minutes, it feels all too short. Depending on time, I may have more to say about Needles//Pins in the coming weeks, but for now I’ll leave you with the one-minute “Baleful”, a full-throated pop punk declaration that features surprising but welcome backing vocals from (I think?) drummer Macey Budgell.
“Don’t Understand the Shorthand”, Mope City From Within the Walls (2021, Tenth Court)
Within the Walls is an electric slowcore album that’s equal parts thorny and nervy and subtly beautiful. “Don’t Understand the Shorthand”, an early highlight from the Australian band’s third record, starts off as the former with a winding guitar riff that turns into a squall. Then, however, the track gives into shimmering bursts of melody in the verses and especially in its chorus, where Mope City’s two vocalists Matthew Neville and Amaya Lang sing over top of each other to complement the song’s tale of communication woes over languidly-picked guitar. Read more about Within the Walls here.
“I Refuse to Believe (You Could Love Me)”, John Murry From The Stars Are God’s Bullet Holes (2021, Submarine Cat)
“I Refuse to Believe (You Could Love Me)” is John Murry’s attempt to write a song that sounds like Ric Ocasek fused with UK Surf-era Pixies (he said this himself; I’m not that good of a musical analyst). From a purely musical perspective, Murry has succeeded in his stated goal—the precision in the song’s arrangement and instrumentation is Ocasek through and through, and the roaring guitar and controlled uncontrollability does remind me of Frank Black and company’s more refined moments. “I Refuse to Believe” is just as obviously a quintessential Murry creation as well, though. This isn’t the first time he’s taken advantage of power chords and whoa-ohs to soften (or perhaps sharpen) the blows of his lyrics, which—well, I can’t say the song’s title didn’t warn me about the level of self-laceration enclosed therein. No embed, but there’s a fun music video.
“I’ll Make It Up to You”, Sunny Jain From Phoenix Rise (2021, Sinj)
Right in the middle of Sunny Jain’s Phoenix Rise—a collaborative, celebrative album that features contributions from over fifty musicians and artists and incorporates nearly as many genres of music—is the record’s one straight-up rock song that also grapples with some of the heaviest themes on the LP. The strongest sonic feature of “I’ll Make It Up to You” is the blistering guitar solo from Black Pumas’ Adrian Quesada, while Darius Christian’s trombone takes its turn in the limelight too. Both of these instruments add an extra punch to vocalist Kushal Gaya’s lyrics about the horror of American gun violence. Like much of Phoenix Rise, however, the song ends in a vow to fight for a better future, with Gaya promising the song’s titular phrase to those whose lives have been affected or cut short due to one country’s firearm obsession. Read more about Phoenix Rise here.
“Broken Glass Shore”, Refrigerator From So Long to Farewell (2021, Shrimper)
So Long to Farewell is lo-fi pop band Refrigerator’s twelfth album since the early nineties, and little of their charm has been lost in their three decades as a group. Right out of the gate, the band greets us with the warmly familiar album opener “Broken Glass Shore”, which exemplifies the slow-moving, deliberate and delicate atmospheric pop rock at which Refrigerator excels, with lead singer Allen Callaci’s half-sung vocals gliding over the live-in-studio instrumental. Their toolkit hasn’t changed much since the days of How You Continue Dreaming, but they make what’s there count: the steady drumbeat pulls the song along amiably, soul singer Claudia Lennear’s guest vocals provide a nice touch but aren’t overused, and new member Mark Givens (Wckr Spgt) weaves in and out of the instrumental but never gets too showy either. Read more about So Long to Farewell here, and watch the music video for “Broken Glass Shore” here.
“Unsubscribe”, Keen Dreams From The Second Body (2021, Whatever’s Clever/Strange Daisy)
The Second Body, the debut record from New Orleans’ Keen Dreams, is an expansive, widescreen pop album that treads in the same water as everything from The War on Drugs to Talk Talk to Destroyer. Songs stretch out to 6-7 minutes, instrumental interludes and horns abound, but the album remains warm and inviting. “Unsubscribe”, which manages to condense the maximalism of The Second Body into a digestible three minutes, just might be the record’s biggest triumph, and it’s certainly Keen Dreams’ most welcoming moment. Read more about The Second Body here.
“It Hasn’t Happened Yet”, Okkervil River From In a Light b/w It Hasn’t Happened Yet (2021, ATO)
Okkervil River might be my favorite band I hadn’t yet covered here directly—part of which has to do with Rosy Overdrive’s relative infancy, and also because in recent years Will Sheff and his crew of increasingly-changing backing musicians have moved away from the sound of those first five records, which are all “pry from my cold, dead hands” level for me. That’s fine, we all change, and even the Okkervil River album that’s the furthest from my cup of tea still has at least one breathtaking song. All that said, “It Hasn’t Happened Yet” is a smart, well-crafted song that rolls together most of what I like about their later-period work, like the nostalgic brassy pop of The Silver Gymnasium, or the surprisingly earnest meta-ness of “Okkervil River R.I.P.” “It Hasn’t Happened Yet” has a pretty straightforward message: Sheff has missed playing music for other people and he can’t wait to get back out there (“Meet again, meet again, I can swear that we will / Meet again, meet again, at the closest of range”) but of course being an Okkervil River song it meanders and wanders into all sorts of asides in between its thesis: listing all the old standards that Sheff’s eager to cover, recognizing a fan in a crowd, buying “a couple loose joints” in Amsterdam. And you gotta love that swinging instrumental outro.
“Small World”, Cheer-Accident From Dumb Ask (1991, Complacency/Pravda)
Cheer-Accident are a long-running Chicago “avant-prog” band that are not well-known at all, but if they are known, it’s for their wilder, more experimental later work that seems to have started in the late 90s and peaked in the 2000s with Introducing Lemon. I’m not sure how many people, even among the small subset of folks who know about Cheer-Accident, have heard 1991’s Dumb Ask, but I do know that it’s nowhere near enough. Dumb Ask, recorded in late 1989 by Steve Albini, is a fascinating, dynamic noise rock record that hints at their future genre experimentation just enough to make this album stand out. What little discussion of it I’ve read has compared it to two other landmark 1991 albums: Slint’s Spiderland and The Jesus Lizard’s Goat, and while Dumb Ask can’t really be reduced to “sounding like” either of them, there’s no reason it shouldn’t be held up as a similar underground rock achievement. Just listen to “Small World”, which bounces and grooves through six minutes of sludge without dragging in the slightest, the vocals switching from an aggrieved scream to a credulous, Devo-esque croon as the music shifts.
“Ye Old Man”, Mia Joy From Spirit Tamer (2021, Fire Talk)
The debut album from Chicago’s Mia Joy Rocha is a dream pop record that’s even less tethered to the ground than anything by the Cocteau Twins (a stated influence on Spirit Tamer), but still maintains a foot in the pop corner despite the floating atmosphere (her Spotify bio refers to her as “Chicago’s melodic dove”). The driving, full-rock-band sound of “Ye Old Man” makes it one of the more Rosy Overdrive-core songs on Spirit Tamer, but it’s far from the only one—“Across Water” and “See Us” utilize the same setup in a more subdued fashion. “Ye Old Man”, however, is the instant-classic modern dream pop single. Everything’s in its right place here: the prominent bass, the heavy reverb on the simple but effective guitar, the breathy melodic vocals from Rocha that pack a lot into relatively few words, such as the role reversal in the titular line (“Sometimes you’re the baby and I’m the old man”) or Rocha’s reaction to it (“It doesn’t get me down”).
“Mouth Breather”, Antonioni From Antonioni (2021, Lauren)
Seattle band Antonioni have been releasing singles and EPs on small labels like Den Tapes for the last couple of years, and their self-titled debut that came out earlier this year on Lauren Records sounds like a group that’s already found their sea legs together, so to speak. They do recall the sound of their geographical neighbors and former tourmates Great Grandpa, except Antonioni skipped the scrappy first album and went straight to the “mature follow-up LP”. “Mouth Breather” isn’t nearly as cheeky as its title might suggest—one might expect a pop punk anthem, but the seeds of such are overpowered by a surprising reverb-y, jangly dream pop sheen. The titular mouth-breather is none other than Antonioni bandleader Sarah Pasillas herself—and she’s also a “backwards-walking, shit-talking bitch with such bad timing”, and the curious refrain at the end (“Are we a dying breed?”) makes “Mouth Breather” fairly thorny for a three-minute pop song.
“Waving”, The Bevis Frond From New River Head (1991, Reckless/Fire)
As I established when I talked about the title track to The Bevis Frond’s New River Head earlier: there is a lot going on in that sprawling album. On the one hand, that leaves plenty of space for psychedelic guitar freakouts, but on the other hand it might overpower something like the acoustic baroque pop of “Waving” on first blush. This song gives me Renaissance fair vibes, and I will not apologize for saying so (it’s probably the Britishness of it all). Of course, just because it takes me to that particular universe and because of its instrumental choices (violin and acoustic guitar are, I believe, the only players) doesn’t mean Nick Saloman’s writing isn’t squarely in modern day. “Waving” is populated with city buses, Q.P.R. supporters, and the alleyways and debris of London. It doesn’t sound like he’s particularly pumped about it, though (“Are you cash inside a cylinder in Mother London’s shop / To be popped around the system ‘til the air is all used up?”). The entire last verse reads like a full-on rejection, though what exactly that entails to Saloman’s second-person narrator eludes me.
“This One Is Your One”, Palms From Intensity Sunshine (2021, Ivy League/Mushroom)
Sydney’s Palms are something of garage rock revival veterans—they rose from the ashes of the Red Riders, who played with Franz Ferdinand and Jet and contained one of The Vines at one point. Some twenty years removed from that genre’s cultural peak, Palm’s Intensity Sunshine EP isn’t going to be mistaken for a Kid A-esque turn away from their roots, but that they still play their sunny power pop with such enthusiasm more than makes up for any garage rock fatigue. What it all comes down to is that “This One Is Your One” is just too infectious too deny. It’s got a bouncy energy that only an unabashed love song can truly inhabit (the song’s “about how rad my boyfriend is”, according to frontman Al Grigg), and it’s hard to argue with that Ramones-y “never gonna let you go-oh” in the chorus.
“The World of Tomorrow”, Signal Valley From Music for People (2021)
The latest album from New Jersey artist Signal Valley is an ambitious, stuffed-to-the-brim collection of psychedelic synthpop helmed by the project’s leader, Dan Spizuco. Dan is the sibling of Hello Whirled’s Ben Spizuco, and they share an affinity for pop wizardry, but while Hello Whirled evoke underground 90s indie rock, Signal Valley feels more descended from older influences—XTC, Todd Rundgren, progressive rock. The opening track from Music for People, “The World of Tomorrow”, exemplifies this lineage in the way it marries the aggressive cheeriness of XTC’s “Garden of Earthly Delights” with the dystopian pomp of the latest Hello Whirled release. Spizuco’s voice reminds me of Okkervil River’s Will Sheff’s, but grafted onto a sterile, chrome-laced synthetic environment. “Working machines, dance in moonbeams / Everything’s clean in the world of tomorrow,” Spizuco sings as if to drown out the darkness underneath the world they’re describing—“Where can we run, where can we hide / Unsafe in the world of tomorrow,” warns a vocoder-cloaked voice to send the song into full-on science fiction mode.
“Montreal – Live”, The Tragically Hip From Saskadelphia (2021, Universal Canada)
“We’d like to do a song now about the identification process. It’s called ‘Montreal’.” So begins Gord Downie’s introduction to “Montreal”, a “lost” Tragically Hip song circa 1991 that finally saw release this month as part of the Saskadelphia EP. Even after the surviving members of the Hip rediscovered the Road Apples studio outtakes that make up the EP, “Montreal” wasn’t among them, so it’s represented in the form of a live version recorded in its titular city in 2000. The song is in the lineage of Gord Downie’s spinning scenes from Canada’s dark past into rock anthems—in this case, it’s the École Polytechnique massacre (major content warning for gun- and gender-based violence for those unfamiliar). Downie does his job almost too well—hearing the Montreal crowd cheer the name-check of their city in the midst of a song about horrible, unspeakable violence is disorienting, and honestly makes me kind of glad that the band held this one back lest its powerful simplicity become cheapened via the ever-dulling effects of Canadian rock radio and bar playlists. Even if that had happened, however, I believe that “Montreal” would still be potent in 2021.
“When Will When Come?”, Cozy Slippers From When Will When Come? (2021)
Seattle’s Cozy Slippers only have a handful of songs to their name so far, but they’ve already established themselves as gifted students of classic guitar pop with “When Will When Come?”. The A-side of their latest single, “When Will When Come?” is a breezy three-minute song that starts off with a bass-driven, almost Breeders-esque opening bit only to explode into a joyous jangle pop chorus that sets the tone for the rest of the track. “When Will When Come?” evokes bands from their own part of the country, such as Tiger Trap (among other K Records alumni) and The Spinanes, but also reminds me of some “across the pond” acts like The Sundays and Heavenly. “When Will When Come?” is a “don’t be afraid to live your life” anthem, the titular phrase nodding to the excuses of “whens” the people make to prolong pursuing whatever it is that they dream of pursuing. When bassist Sarah Engel and drummer Barbara Barrilleaux join together to harmonize in the chorus, it becomes a convincing argument.
“I Feel So Good”, Richard Thompson From Rumor and Sigh (1991, Capitol)
I am always very aware of whenever I put a song on one of these playlists that also appears in Scott Miller’s Music: What Happened?, the book from which these blog posts are pretty much a straight rip-off. I haven’t read the 1991 section of M: WH? recently, however, so any similarities between this and Miller’s thoughts on “I Feel So Good” are either from the subconscious or pure coincidence. Anyway, here we have Richard Thompson’s paean to debauchery, illegal activity, and resistance to reformation. The narrator is a genuinely disturbed individual who’s “old enough to sin but too young to vote” and is planning to celebrate his release from prison (“two years, seven months, and sixteen days”) with a briefcase full of questionably-obtained money and by “break[ing] somebody’s heart tonight”. It was Thompson’s best-known song in America until getting overtaken by some song about a motorcycle over the past few years. I’m sure there’s someone out there who could deftly analyze “I Feel So Good” in the context of the war on drugs, the “tough on crime” era, and 80s moral hysteria, but that sure isn’t me.
“How Can a Plumb Be Perfected?”, Guided by Voices From Earth Man Blues (2021, GBV, Inc.)
Hidden near the end of Earth Man Blues, the half-demo quality of the chill-inducing “How Can a Plumb Be Perfected?” captures the magic of Robert Pollard’s sparse poetic side. The song is reminiscent of classic understated Guided by Voices songs such as “Learning to Hunt” and “Kiss Only the Important Ones”, but it’s updated musically with tasteful flourishes from the band. The song’s lyrics seem weightier than your typical late-era GBV song—typically opaque, but the central question it’s asking (“How can a plumb be perfected, and how would you know?”) definitely seems to be getting at universal questions about subjectivity, art, and work, all of which figure heavily into approaching Pollard’s music. Read more about Earth Man Blues here.
“All This Lightning”, Rosali From No Medium (2021, SPINSTER)
“All This Lightning” is the centerpiece of No Medium, the acoustic eye of the record’s folk rock storm. It’s a smoldering song about staring down the blossoming of an interpersonal relationship and taking joy in giving into wherever it goes without fear. Rosali Middleman declares “I wanna wrap my legs around your neck, finding pleasure in our recklessness” in the middle of the track, and it’s just one of the many bold statements that comes pouring out in the heat of the moment. The capturing of this radical honesty and openness of “All This Lightning” that comes from a rush of euphoria is an impressive songwriting feat from Middleman, and is only one of the moods explored in No Medium. Read more about No Medium here.
“Wyoming County”, Fust From Evil Joy (2021, Dear Life)
“Wyoming County” ends Fust’s Evil Joy with the final realization that the relationship that had been central to the entire album’s narrative has now run its course (“I looked and you and I thought / How I could live without you / Even though we had a good day”). It’s Evil Joy’s most upbeat number, beginning with Fust bandleader Aaron Dowdy literally singing about driving down the highway as a way to cope with the physical and emotional departure of a partner, and against all odds it works as a windows-down car song. “It was almost like we were still in love in Wyoming County,” sings Dowdy in the chorus, and it sounds like he’s okay with “almost”. The track ends with an instrumental outro marked by a triumphant mid-tempo guitar solo that serves as the album’s punctuation mark. Read more about Evil Joy here.
Rosy Overdrive 
