New Playlist: July 2021

We’re back! The latest edition of the Rosy Overdrive monthly playlist covers the songs I enjoyed listening to in July. Plenty of new music here, but also a higher proportion of “archival” selections than the last couple of months—I’ve finished my 1991 deep dive and I’ve moved onto 1996, so there are several selections from 25 years ago within. I’m a little busier than normal at the moment, but I’m still hoping to have a couple of other posts go up in August.

Snakeskin, 2nd Grade, Matthew Milia, and Fountains of Wayne all have two songs on the list this time around. Chisel gets three! Chisel’s first album is very good!

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

“Heart Orb Bone”, Snakeskin
From Heart Orb Bone (2021, State Champion)

The title track to Snakeskin’s Heart Orb Bone EP is an irresistible, unabashed piece of wide-open, grand scale indie rock—it’s the kind of thing New Jersey does very well. The picture disc EP’s three tracks are the band’s first original new music since 2018’s Hangnail, and Snakeskin sound as polished and clear-eyed as ever in their return. Lead singer Shanna Polley injects plenty of drama into the song’s nostalgic lyrics, as if the instrumental’s chopper-takeoff power chords and sparkly melodic guitar leads weren’t enough on their own. When everything clicks together for the going-for-broke chorus, all bets are off. The song’s music video, which is inspired by Warner Herzog and Baby Einstein and heavily features children’s toys, definitely adds something to the entire experience, although I’m not sure exactly what.

“8 A.M. All Day”, Chisel
From 8 A.M. All Day (1996, Gern Blandsten)

This is not The Chisel, the British Oi! punk band that has shown up in these playlists before. This Chisel was the mod-influenced melodic punk band that was fronted by a pre-Pharmacists Ted Leo and lasted for the majority of the 1990s. Despite being a huge Leo fan, I’d never checked out this band before—the roughness of Leo’s first record under his own name, 1999’s tej leo(?) Rx / pharamacists, didn’t really inspire me to find out what he’d been up to before that. But I’ve finally gotten around to it, and 8 A.M. All Day is a really strong album. The title track could, other than Leo’s voice sounding noticeably younger, easily pass for something off of Hearts of Oak or Shake the Sheets—it bursts right out of the gate with its barebones but gripping punk instrumentation and Leo’s insistent bundle of impressive vocal hooks.

“Odoby”, Drinking Boys and Girls Choir
From Marriage License (2021, Damnably)

Daegu City, Korea’s Drinking Boys and Girls Choir are a skate-punk trio that list NOFX and Sum 41 among their musical influences, as well as the social politics of their home country. Their latest record’s title, Marriage License, is a direct reference to a privilege that only heterosexual couples in South Korea are allowed to obtain. “Odoby” is another critique, but a deeply personal one—it’s a reference to a traumatic experience suffered by drummer and singer Myeong-jin (MJ) when she was hit by a taxi while riding a small scooter (an “odoby”) and was subsequently bedridden for months. MJ draws comparisons between the taxi driver attempting to place the blame for the incident on a small, injured woman riding a light scooter and the Korean government and society’s treatment of anyone who doesn’t “fit” into their culture. All of this is hard to grab onto during “Odoby”’s speedy tempo, but the brief snippet of tires squealing midway through the song is a reminder that it’s just not a fun gang-vocals punk track.

“Mirrorball”, The Catenary Wires
From Birling Gap (2021, Shelflife)

Twee lives! Well, sort of. The Catenary Wires’ co-founders, Amelia Fletcher and Rob Pursey, were most famously part of the line-up of the iconic K/Sarah Records band Heavenly for the group’s run in the 90s—between that band, Talulah Gosh, Marine Research, and most recently Tender Trap, Fletcher and Pursey have been playing together for over thirty years. “Mirrorball”, the lead single and best song from Birling Gap, is a world away from, say, “C Is the Heavenly Option”, but they’ve kept plenty of aspects from their most well-known work intact over the decades. It’s a slick pop rock instrumental with a welcome synth horn (??) hook, and Fletcher and Pursey trade lead vocals to accommodate the lyric about a love story that begins at a disco. “We were far too young then, far too cool,” they sing in tandem, lived experience causing them to appreciate the records being spun in crowded clubs. The accompanying music from The Catenary Wires bears them out.

“Wish You Were Here Tour”, 2nd Grade
From Wish You Were Here Tour Revisited (2021, Double Double Whammy)

I missed Hit to Hit, 2nd Grade’s 2020 breakout album that’s full of short, hooky guitar pop that falls squarely within the Rosy Overdrive purview. I’ll get to it eventually. Right now I’m enjoying Wish You Were Here Tour Revisited, which is a reissued version of 2nd Grade’s 2018 album Wish You Were Here Tour with a few of the songs re-recorded with a full band (the 2018 version of 2nd Grade was essentially just bandleader Peter Gill).  The difference between the new version of the title track and the “demo” version is especially stark—the tender quietness of the latter is now essentially a power pop stomper. It still works, mainly because none of the emotion is lost with the amps turned up. “After so many years swimmin’ around, one of us got flushed down” and the titular line actually seem to pack more of a punch this time around.

“She Cannot Know”, Cub Scout Bowling Pins
From Clang Clang Ho (2021, GBV Inc.)

Although Clang Clang Ho is the first Robert Pollard release to not get the Pressing Concerns treatment and isn’t a lock for the year-end list the way Earth Man Blues is, the record has definitely grown on me. I was a little disappointed that it wasn’t the loose but hook-centric jolt that the first Cub Scout Bowling Pins release, January’s Heaven Beats Iowa EP, was, but there’s something about it that keeps me going back to it in a way that, say, no Cash Rivers and the Sinners album ever has. The largely straightforward-ornamental music provided by the current Guided by Voices lineup combined with some of Pollard’s most bizarre vocal deliveries and lyrics make it one of the most oddly compelling Pollard albums since at least the final Circus Devils record. “She Cannot Know”, hidden midway through Clang Clang Ho’s B-side, has the pretty psych-pop instrumental, but Pollard’s understated delivery separates it from the rest of these songs. Why can’t she know that Pollard has blood and feels pain? Is it “cannot” in the “is not allowed to” sense or the “is not able to” sense? I cannot know.

“Stay Away Still”, My Idea
From That’s My Idea (2021, Hardly Art)

My Idea is a new duo formed by Brooklyn’s Lily Konigsberg and Nate Amos. Both of them have popped up on Rosy Overdrive several times since its inception, Konigsberg through her band Palberta and solo, Amos through his prolific This Is Lorelei project. It’s no surprise, then, that something from their debut EP, That’s My Idea, ended up here. “Stay Away Still”, sung by Konigsberg, is a romp—it’s got This Is Lorelei-esque bouncy power chords and it’s pure pop like the more guitar-based tracks from Konigsberg’s recent collection, The Best of Lily Konigsberg Right Now. The chorus is as unfriendly as the music is welcoming—Konigsberg flatly intoning the title phrase and “leave me alone” over and over again while a different Konigsberg voice sort of argues with herself simultaneously. Some dizzy pop rock!

“Radiation Vibe”, Fountains of Wayne
From Fountains of Wayne (1996, Atlantic)

You want the song of the summer? I will give you the song of the summer: it’s “Radiation Vibe” by Fountains of Wayne, for the 25th year in a row. If I ever get to the March and April 2020 playlists on Rosy Overdrive, there’s a lot of Fountains of Wayne to talk about there—this is the first time I’ve really gone back to them since Adam Schlesinger passed. While I still think Welcome Interstate Managers is their best album, the first half of Fountains of Wayne is absurdly stacked and set the bar high for this band from the get-go. So many Fountains of Wayne hallmarks are established in the first song off of their first record: the girl in a bad relationship (“Did you lose the monkey? He gave you backaches, and now you slouch”), the generically downtrodden American guy (“…Joined a pro team / Talk about a bad dream / I broke a knee”), and of course an all-time sunshine-y chorus with just the right amount of harmony. The random Pittsburgh shout-out is just a bonus.

“Love Song #6”, Upper Wilds
From Venus (2021, Thrill Jockey)

Seven of Venus’ ten songs were released in advance of the full album, so it shouldn’t be too surprising that one of them slipped through the cracks for me. After taking in the excellent Venus as a whole, though, I don’t know how I couldn’t have thought “Love Song #6” was a pivotal song—to me, Upper Wilds bandleader Dan Friel’s simple shout-along refrain of “We know how to be alone now / We know how to be alone now” is as defining a moment as any other on the album. Oh, and also this song is about a married couple who are one of the few surviving adherents to the Heaven’s Gate “UFO cult” and to this day maintain the group’s website (“In the age of posts / You haunt the content of the ghosts”). Read more about Venus here.

“Keeling Curve”, Behavior and Mayako XO
From Free World (2021, Post Present Medium)

I first became aware of Mayako XO (aka Los Angeles’ Sara Gernsbacher) through her 2020 album XO, which came out on the underrated Post Present Medium imprint. Released less than a year later, her collaboration with Behavior (another L.A. band about which I don’t know very much) caught my attention thanks to its casual, low-stakes feeling. Not every song on Free World “hits” to my ears, but Mayako XO and Behavior are clearly onto something as evidenced by the record’s best songs, such as “Keeling Curve”. It starts off with an almost-bluesy garage rock guitar intro before shambling together unhurriedly, and Gernsbacher doesn’t even start singing until over a minute into the track. “Keeling Curve” then morphs into a loose (very loose) pop song, with Gernsbacher turning “God damn it’s water, water / God damn it’s piss” into a legitimate song of the summer candidate.

“Autumn America”, Matthew Milia
From Keego Harbor (2021, Sitcom Universe)

The toe-tapping piano rocker “Autumn America” is the perfectly-deployed mid-record pick-me-up track midway through Matthew Milia’s suburban Detroit concept album Keego Harbor. The present-tense relationship balancing beam depicted in the lyrics would seem to put it in a different vein than the reminiscences that make up the majority of the Frontier Ruckus frontman’s latest solo record, but the second verse threads both together. Milia takes a detour into an imagined future that imagines himself at “thirty-two” absentmindedly “flirting at the bar-and-grill” in his hometown and feeling sorry that the subject of “Autumn America” is nowhere to be found. Read more about Keego Harbor here.

“Animated Songs from a Lonely Planet”, Psychic Flowers
From For the Undertow (2021, Living Lost)

“Animated Songs from a Lonely Planet” is part of For the Undertow’s opening one-two punch and, along with previous-playlist-appearer “Coming to Collect”, helps introduce the record as Psychic Flowers bandleader David Settle’s head-first foray into fuzzy, energetic garage rock, aided by the extra oomph from drummer Leo Suarez. It’s certainly an anthem—the way Settle turns that mouthful of a title to a killer hook in its entirety is remarkable on its own—but it might be a bit of a meta-anthem in its own way. Settle seems to be the one crafting these “animated songs”, perhaps as a way of making sense of the lonely planet: “I need to bring the fight to the damage eraser”. Read more about For the Undertow here.

“Hawks”, Jodi
From Blue Heron (2021, Sooper)

The debut full-length from Jodi, aka ex-Pinegrove guitarist and wading bird appreciator Nick Levine, is a beautifully sparse indie folk record that’s a pretty convincing argument for a songwriter to watch in the genre moving forward. Blue Heron has plenty of moments on its own—although there are certainly shades of Levine’s former band throughout, the deployment of empty space in these songs reminds me a lot more of Songs: Ohia, or even slowcore bands like Idaho or Red House Painters at times. “Hawks” is one of Blue Heron’s more upbeat numbers, the music nearly resembling something of a “strut” over which Levine’s voice (the real star here) delivers a pastoral lyric that sends the song somewhere into “twangier Trace Mountains or Told Slant” territory, or even a less busy version of fellow Windy City songwriter Sonny Falls.

“Egregore”, Hello Whirled
From History Worth Repeating (2021, Sherilyn Fender)

Hidden in the middle of History Worth Repeating, a place where pop songs zip by and dare you to grab onto them before they’re gone, “Egregore” sums up the best of the latest Hello Whirled album in the form of a downer two-minute lo-fi indie rock banger. “Egregore” (Wiktionary is free, folks) is the confluence of History Worth Repeating’s thoughts on mortality, the mundanity of eternity, and suffocating anxiety. It all comes to a head with Hello Whirled leader Ben Spicuzo quipping to a perhaps-imagined spiritual entity that “believing you is not the problem, but it’s a grief to believe in me,” but not before remarking that the titular apparition isn’t the least explainable thing he’s ever encountered. Read more about History Worth Repeating here.

“Good Medicine”, Stevie Weinstein-Foner
From Wondering (2021, Wild Kindness)

Boston-originating folk singer Stevie Weinstein-Foner has described his latest record, Wondering, as a collection of “campfire rock songs”, inspired by his experience and upbringing in labor circles and camping sing-alongs. The understated, sublime album opener “Good Medicine” starts Wondering off by making a strong bid for timelessness on its own. The music around Weinstein-Foner’s acoustic guitar grows thicker and thicker throughout the song—some keyboard accents, Jared Samuel’s busy bassline, and triumphant saxophone courtesy of Blythe Gruda—but Weinstein-Foner is always front and center. “Our souls grow like square watermelon / Deprived of space and cut off from light,” memorably begins his plea for a reprieve from the toil of our lives.

“Systems Crash”, Guided by Voices
From Plantations of Pale Pink (1996, Matador)

The Plantations of Pale Pink EP is, from my understanding, a collection of six songs that were in the running to be included in various versions of the famously belabored Under the Bushes Under the Stars. It’s hard to believe that any of these songs, as unfriendly and distant as they are, were ever thought by Robert Pollard to fit alongside the nearly all-hits that comprise UTBUTS, but the fact that these tracks all hang together well here suggests he might’ve been onto something. I’d never thought much of this release until I read someone make a strong case for it (thanks, The Constant Bleeder), but after giving it some time I’m glad I did. “Systems Crash” is the closest thing to a “hit” on the 12-minute record, with Pollard singing his heart out over 90 seconds and mixing in some vocal echoes that aren’t quite harmonies but aren’t quite discordant either. It reminds me of other classic Guided by Voices EP openers “Matter Eater Lad” and “My Impression Now”, but somehow both sloppier and more deliberate.

“Brick”, Snow Ellet
From Suburban Indie Rock Star (2021, self-released/Wax Bodega)

I’m a little late to the whole “Snow Ellet” deal but I finally got around to the Suburban Indie Rock Star EP and am happy to report that the hype is justified. Although the Oso-Oso-via-Madchester “To Some I’m Genius” or the starry-eyed “Wine on the Carpet” might seem more like “Rosy Overdrive” picks (maybe next month RE: the latter), there’s something about the uneasily melodic “Brick” that keeps me coming back to it. It’s a modern blender pop punk anthem if I’ve ever heard one, all bedroom-recorded and getting as much mileage from frontperson Eric Reyes’ autotune vocals and synths as it does from the laser gun guitar riff that pops up again and again. Reyes has admitted that lyrics are less important to them than vocal melody and instrumental tracks, but the words to self-described “new wave inspired angst” of “Brick” are at the very least fitting to what’s going on around them, and the part where Reyes breaks a window with the titular object as neighbors look on horrified is very “suburban indie rock star” of them.

“Taverns of the Neo Subcortex”, John Vanderslice
From John, I Can’t Believe Civilizations Is Still Going Here in 2021! Congratulations to All of Us. Love DCB (2021, Tiny Telephone)

“I Get a Strange Kind of Pleasure from Just Hanging On” from last month’s playlist might be the poppiest song on John Vanderslice’s latest EP, but “Taverns of the Neo Subcortex” is the song from John, I Can’t Believe Civilizations Is Still Going Here in 2021! Congratulations to All of Us. Love DCB that probably has the most appeal to fans of Vanderslice’s “classic” sound. “Taverns of the Neo Cubcortex” has the digital footprint that marks JV’s post-Dagger Beach output, but it also features Vanderslice harmonizing with himself in a tender way that recalls his 2000s solo records. Vanderslice has described his new EP as “an anti-suicide pact with myself” in addition to being a tribute to his late friend David Berman, and even without this context, this song’s refrain would still hit extremely hard: “Don’t leave a death a nice clean shot / ‘Cause he’s gonna give it all he’s got.” Even more dire is the song’s opening line: “When we met you were at the end of your rope / So I tied the other end around my throat”. As musically adventurous as he’s ever been and refusing to shy away from incredibly tough subjects, John Vanderslice is one of the most vital indie rock musicians to me at the moment.

“Still Flat”, Built to Spill
From The Normal Years (1996, K)

Built to Spill is an easy band to take for granted, and sometimes it takes an uneven listen like The Normal Years to remind me of that. Not that it’s necessarily lacking quality-wise, it just occasionally slips my mind that the BtS that made Perfect from Now On was also the scrappy, crude-humorists that got their start on K Records (“Joyride”’s “I screwed her and she screwed me, but we never once had sex” is up there with “Fling”’s “And it takes me a long time to come…to the memory of us”). But hidden behind lo-fi pop anthems “Joyride” and “Girl” are a handful of forward-pointing, stratosphere-shooting Doug Martsch guitar adventure tracks; “Still Flat” is the best of these. Everything clicks here: the 90s-style bass-heavy verses, the triumphant horn that tries to outdo the distorted guitar on the chorus, an all-time vocal melody from Martsch, the restraint that forces the instrumental to wait until the three-minute mark to really let loose. References to a “Marxist celebration” and the titular line (“No matter how round it feels, it’s still flat”) make it one of the most accidentally-online Built to Spill songs, oddly enough.

“In the Stone”, The Goon Sax
From Mirror II (2021, Matador)

Between The Catenary Wires, Ida later on, and this song, the July playlist has a solid collection of male/female vocal duet songs. Mirror II is the third record from the second-generation indie pop group, their debut for Matador, and their first since 2018’s We’re Not Talking (which garnered a mention in the early days of Rosy Overdrive). Mirror II finds The Goon Sax, which had previously been a relatively straightforward jangle pop concern, delving headfirst into 80s darker post-punk dressings and even synthpop, but the record’s best moments retain the hookiness that’s always permeated their songs. “In the Stone” is part of an excellent one-two punch (along with “Psychic”, which nearly made the cut here), opening the record with wobbily pensive power chords and a fairly dire emotional situation. Timeless gothic wallowing and turmoil gets sliced open by the jarring opening line of the chorus: “Didn’t have to sound so disappointed when I called / If you had ever saved my number in your phone”.

“What About Blighty?”, Chisel
From 8 A.M. All Day (1996, Gern Blandsten)

How to write a perfect sub-two minute pop punk song, by Chisel and Theodore F. Leo:

  1. Exactly thirty seconds of feedback noise to open. No more, no less. It builds tension (and character).
  2. Once you start, grab ahold of the best melody you’ve got and don’t let go.
  3. The titular phrase needs to be something that could mean anything, and it helps if it sounds vaguely British. Has to sound good shouted, a question is a smart bet.
  4. Power chord and chant breakdown exactly one minute in. Don’t overdo it but especially don’t underdo it.
  5. Four words: ascending wordless backing vocals.
  6. Let everything ring out for an extra ten or so seconds at the end. Really, it just comes down to about a minute of actual music, any more’d be overkill.

“Racism Priest”, The Cocker Spaniels
From The Cocker Spaniels Are Still Alive, and So Are You (2021, Evil Island Fortress)

The Cocker Spaniels Are Still Alive, and So Are You is getting a proper release (cassette via Evil Island Fortress) in August after Cocker Spaniels bandleader Sean Padilla self-released it earlier this summer, and the lead single is easily one of the record’s best moments. “Racism Priest” is one of a couple songs on The Cocker Spaniels Are Still Alive that finds Padilla addressing his white acquaintances—in this case, he’s politely declining to take on their white guilt at their past misdeeds or silence (“I’m gonna give it back to you to do what thou wilt”). Although he gets plenty of mileage out of explaining what, exactly, isn’t his obligation, Padilla does relent a bit and give a few suggestions for repentance toward the song’s end: attend some protests, call out bigoted family during holiday get-togethers, re-examine everything in life through new lenses. Also, even though Padilla seemingly has the keyboard set to “church organ” setting, that bass is positively sinful. Read more about The Cocker Spaniels Are Still Alive, and So Are You here.

 “Contradicción”, Las Hiedras
From Contradicciones (2021)

A punk song that comes barreling out of the gate with brass and cowbell—that’s what we like to hear! Las Hiedras are a five-piece Buenos Aires-based “sax punk” band that was a Bandcamp find for me. The sort-of title track to Contradicciones does prominently feature member Christian’s saxophone, particularly in a ripping solo midway through the song, but everyone else’s contributions to “Contradicción” are sharp as a tack, too: the low end from bassist Lau never lets up, the guitar riff is classic 70s punk, and whoever is singing (Lau, Mar, and Maru all have voice credits) does their best to hold the torrent above them together. My Spanish is not very good, but the song’s few lyrics seem to be about wanting more in life than their home city (“Buenos Aires no me alcanza”).

“Little Things”, Ida
From I Know About You (1996, Simple Machines)

The reductive way to frame Ida would be that they’re a poppier Low. They have those male-female vocal harmonies, glacial paces, and notes that just kinda hang there for awhile, but “Little Things” is strummier than anything Low were making around the time, not to mention the cathartic crescendo that the song reaches in its second half. This is maybe useful as a rough description of this song’s sound, but considering how annoyed I get whenever someone describes one of my favorite 90s indie rock bands as “like Pavement, but more [fill in the blank]” I would like to emphasize that they’re a contemporary and it just shook out that that Low is more well-known today than Ida (the fact that they haven’t released any new music since 2008, despite their Facebook page emphatically declaring that they’re “THE BAND THAT’S STILL A BAND”, may have something to do with that). I Know About You is the album I’m most familiar with, and it’s a great place to start if you like the idea of slowcore but can’t tell Ida and Idaho apart (I’ve gotta get an Idaho song on here sometime).

“Survival Car”, Fountains of Wayne
From Fountains of Wayne (1996, Atlantic)

With apologies to the perfectly fine “’92 Subaru”, “Survival Car” is Fountains of Wayne’s real “car song” (also not to be mistaken with their “Cars song”, which is clearly “Stacy’s Mom”). The make and model don’t matter for the purposes of the story—its key feature is “being able to be driven”. The music is perfect, classic propulsive pop-rock, and the moment the surf-rock backing vocals kick in when Chris Collingwood sings “doing like the young folks do in West Coast towns” is a rock and roll nerd’s wet dream. As timeless as it is, it had the misfortune to appear in 1996, just about the only moment in history when Billy Corgan’s “Hello, human resources?” growl of “Wanna go for a ride?” was a more commercially viable prospect than Fountains of Wayne cruising up with “Don’t you wanna ride, ride, ride, ride?”

“Degradation”, Michael Cormier-O’Leary
From More Light!! (2021, Oof/Dear Life)

Michael Cormier-O’Leary isn’t the only member of Friendship to appear on this playlist, but the sound of his latest solo album is a little closer to his other band’s alt-country than Peter Gill as 2nd Grade’s power pop. Be that as it may, “Friendship-esque” is not entirely an accurate descriptor of More Light!! either—more than anything else, it’s in the same ballpark as delicate indie folk like Trace Mountains or Hovvdy, or even the Jodi album that showed up earlier on here. Album opener “Degradation” slowly layers various instruments from the record’s laundry list of collaborators over the initial simple acoustic guitar picking, creating a dreamy vibe for a song about waking up. “I am small and craven when faced with anything,” Cormier-O’Leary sings quietly early on in the song, but “Degradation” eventually pulls free of the mental and physical static of existing—Cormier-O’Leary then resolves to live to 188 years old and finds himself “singing ‘oh, elation’ in the face of degradation”.

“The Bear Song”, Signal Valley
From Good Morning (2021)

I recently went on a camping trip, and I was promised bears in the vicinity, but sadly no bears were to be seen. In that, I can—up to a point—empathize with “The Bear Song” by Signal Valley, an over-the-top pop rock anthem about the lead singer’s insistent desire to be mauled to death by a bear. It begins understandably enough, with Signal Valley head Dan Spicuzo feeling overwhelmed by the world and fantasizing about escaping into the woods, only to take a less romantic and more, ahem, grisly direction from there on. Like “The World of Tomorrow”, the last Signal Valley (then known as Syntax Valley) song covered on Rosy Overdrive, “The Bear Song” is a classic upbeat music/dark lyrics number, but the subtle dread of the former song is replaced with delirious, glorious, petty self-destruction (“All my enemies will have nothing left to mock”). Although they have to mess around with the word order a bit to get everything to fit in the context of a simple pop song, I must give major props to Signal Valley for ending the song with the word “ursine”.

“Hot & Heavy”, Lucy Dacus
From Home Video (2021, Matador)

“Album where singer-songwriter looks back at moments from their childhood and young adulthood with the benefit of their earned sage wisdom and, damn, don’t they make all these vignettes seem so poignant with their musicality” is not a particularly beloved subgenre of record for me, so I suppose it’s a testament to Lucy Dacus that I actually quite enjoyed Home Video. In fact, it’s probably my favorite of her albums—I already like it more than Historian (of which I struggle to remember anything beyond the first two songs) or No Burden (…beyond the first song). Still, the vagueness of “Hot & Heavy” might be why I gravitated towards this one for the playlist over some of the others. It’s apparently about feeling uncomfortable for the first time in her hometown (sort of the opposite of Keego Harbor, I suppose) and it taps into a strong “I don’t belong here” sentiment that works very well here.

“Every Kind of Music But Country”, Robbie Fulks
From Country Love Songs (1996, Bloodshot)

I want to talk about Robbie Fulks again on this blog relatively soon, so I’m not going to dwell too much on this song here. I will say, first of all, that Country Love Songs is a hell of a debut album. It’s alternatively funny and sad, sometimes in the same song, gets a lot of mileage out of the chip on its shoulder, and above all it’s aggressively tuneful: that is to say, it’s everything a country album should be. Even though it came from the famously “insurgent” Bloodshot Records, there’s actually not very much “alt-“ about it, at least on its surface—explain to me how “The Buck Starts Here” incorporates punk rock, I’m waiting. “Every Kind of Music But Country” is pure country fantasy at its cleverest, in which Fulks takes its cliché of a title and turns it into a demonstration of the genre’s power (and of Fulks’ performing acumen, which, as someone who’s seen him live, I can confirm he’s not blowing any hot air there).

“T.V.”, Snakeskin
From Heart Orb Bone (2021, State Champion)

If “Heart Orb Bone”’s widescreen sensibilities and music video hinted at a nostalgic period piece, “T.V.” is all of that on steroids. The song begins by placing us in 1983, and “Ceremony”, Big Star, and “Candy Says” are all namedropped by Snakeskin’s Shanna Polley.  “Don’t turn off the TV / Listen to the white noise leaking,” is a strong of a chorus as “Heart Orb Bone”’s kicking rocks in a parking lot, but the song’s sweeping verses do just as much of the work here. Also like “Heart Orb Bone”, “T.V.” gets a music video—it’s heavily Star Trek inspired, tacks on an extra two minutes of exposition to the song’s length, and, to quote a line from it: “it could be a representation of our entire journey”.

“Stuck in a Spin”, Militarie Gun
From All Roads Lead to the Gun (2021, Alternatives)

Militarie Gun vocalist (and noted Robert Pollard fan) Ian Shelton first came to my attention as the leader of the powerviolence band Regional Justice Center which, as should be obvious, is not generally the kind of music that Rosy Overdrive covers. When I heard that Shelton had another band that allegedly delved more into the RO-friendly indie rock side of his influences, I was intrigued and gave All Roads Lead to the Gun a spin. Although I did choose the song with the most Guided by Voices-esque instrumental in “Stuck in a Spin”, that’s not exactly what’s going on with All Roads Lead to the Gun—it’s more of the incredibly potent “hardcore pop” subgenre that’s the purview of Husker Du and, more recently, Drug Church (whose Nick Cogan is also in Militarie Gun). Shelton wrapping his hardcore growl around some actual legitimate vocal hooks reminds me of Hot Snakes, or maybe if Ben Cook got his Fucked Up bandmate Damian Abraham to sing on a Yung Guv song.

“Sunburnt Landscapers”, Matthew Milia
From Keego Harbor (2021, Sitcom Universe)

Between Fountains of Wayne, Snow Ellet, and these Matthew Milia songs, I’ve really got the “paean to Suburbia” pop songwriting bases covered this month. “Sunburnt Landscapers” is anchored by a lilting country instrumental, with a tasteful amount of harmonica and pedal steel provided by Pete Ballard, setting the table for Milia’s on-the-scene observations: “dumb” vanity plates, tanning salons, McMansions, and “sad corporate climbers” all cross Milia’s mind as he travels to and from seeing a loved one in a hospital bed. “Sunburnt Landscapers” is a peaceful song, even when Milia is crying alone in a diner. Read more about Keego Harbor here.

“Suffer”, New You
(2021)

The latest one-off single from Massachusetts’ New You is only the fourth track the project has ever released, but it’s already a bit of a stylistic shift. The self-titled debut EP from the band, which actually just one guy named Blake Turner, is fairly straightforward grungy fuzz rock (and also features a song that has the same name as a Rozwell Kid song, and sounds like Rozwell Kid, but is not a cover, which fascinates me). “Suffer” is both sunnier and also a little heavier than any of those songs, diving head-first into reverb and dreamy vocals that evoke shoegaze and, in an acknowledged influence, The Smashing Pumpkins. It reminds me a little bit of another one-man band I’ve covered on Rosy Overdrive, Dazy, and one could even draw a parallel to Velvet Crush’s In the Presence of Greatness, which similarly sits in the sweet spot between power pop and shoegaze.

“San Cristobal de Las Casas”, Swirlies
From They Spent Their Wild Youthful Days in the Glittering World of the Salons (1996, Taang!)

Speaking of shoegaze-influenced rock music, here’s something for one of the heavy hitters of the genre. I’m not a huge Swirlies fan by any means (I know how some people get with them), but I thoroughly enjoyed They Spent Their Wild Youthful Days…. I think it’s more my speed than Blonder Tongue Audio Baton—I’ll have to give that album another shot at some point, but the (relatively) more straightforward Wild Youthful Days… has my attention at the moment. “San Cristobal de Las Casas” starts off with an awesome chugging heavy guitar riff before veering off into dreamy and noise pop territory, although it never loses the rock band fury that kicks off the track. It’s a little more chaotic than the Stereolab-y “Sounds of Sebring” or “Two Girls Kissing”, but all its detours are worth taking.

“Favorite Song”, 2nd Grade
From Wish You Were Here Tour Revisited (2021, Double Double Whammy)

I didn’t get around to talking about the 2nd Grade band in the “Wish You Were Here Tour” entry, so I’ll shout them out here: guitarist Catherine Dwyer and bassist Jack Washburn also play in Remember Sports, who released one of the best albums of 2021, and guitarist Jon Samuels plays in the excellent alt-country band Friendship, as well as bandleader Peter Gill himself (only drummer Will Kennedy was unfamiliar to me beforehand). All of them play a hand in punching up “Favorite Song” from Gill’s guitar-and-vocals original take into shiny pop rock. Like “Wish You Were Here Tour”, “Favorite Song” plays with rock and roll artifacts to express something more personal, here using the conceit of “favorite songs” as a kind of mood ring (sample line: “Up in my room, I hid all June / My favorite song was ‘Sixteen Blue’”). It’s all relatively simple and straightforward, and it works because of how hard Gill sells it: he’s hitting high notes and dropping “uh huh”s and “okay”s to match his band by the end of the track.

“Kickboxer Lightning”, Robert Pollard and His Soft Rock Renegades
From Choreographed Man of War (2001, Fading Captain)

We’ve had a couple playlists of little-to-no Robert Pollard—it was only a matter of time before I had one of my “only Guided by Voices-related albums” listening phases, and this month’s roundup reflects that (next month’s probably will too, honestly). Choreographed Man of War, which turned twenty last month, falls into the category of “Guided by Voices album in all but name”—it’s one of the few solo records that finds Pollard backed by an actual band (bassist Greg Demos and drummer Jim Macpherson), and also one of the few albums where Pollard plays all (or at the very least, most) of the guitar himself. It adds up to a nice, muscular garage rock feel, and album highlight “Kickboxer Lightning” wouldn’t be out of place on Isolation Drills or Universal Truths and Cycles. It’s incredibly poppy, but it doesn’t assault you with it like “Glad Girls” does—there’s no memorable chorus, but the entire song is one long beautiful vocal from Pollard, and the guitar playing is incredibly melodic as well. No, I don’t know what the title means.

“Your Star Is Killing Me”, Chisel
From 8 A.M. All Day (1996, Gern Blandsten)

“Your Star Is Killing Me” isn’t quite as “flooring the gas pedal” as the two previous Chisel songs here, but it still “kicks”. In this case, it’s the stomping verses and the mini-tornados that form and dissipate in the instrumental breaks, but the band shows just a little bit of restraint in order to let the titular line hang in the air for a second. The lyrics seem to be about a parasocial relationship of some kind with a musician or band, beginning with “Here it hits home, even when I’m alone / With you in my headphones,” before the narrator goes on to lament that “You keep me out that much, ‘cause you don’t give me anything to hold on to,” and troublingly concluding that “If I die unfulfilled, I want you to know that it’s your star that’s killing me.”

“Let’s Get Lost”, Elliott Smith
From From a Basement on the Hill  (2004, ANTI-/Domino/Kill Rock Stars)

I almost put “Coast to Coast” here instead. I really love that song and how it opens From a Basement on the Hill, and it makes me all the more sad that we won’t ever hear Elliott Smith go further down that particular sonic avenue. But “Let’s Get Lost” is classic Elliott Smith, and it’s really hard to beat. Honestly, there’s not much to say about “Let’s Get Lost” except that everything that Smith did best is here: the intricate, melodic acoustic guitar that always works to only accent the song, a hauntingly beautiful vocal, and lyrics that made every depressed kid that could play three open chords believe that they, too, would create something transcendent by dressing up their inter- and intrapersonal woes as prettily and poetically as possible (and some of them did!).

“Promise Ring”, Midwife
From Luminol (2021, The Flenser)

Props to Midwife’s Madeline Johnston for putting out two solid records in back-to-back years (three if you count her ambient split album with Amulets, Mark Trecka, and Susan Alcorn). Luminol is yet another showcase for Johnston’s self-described “heaven metal”, and that’s exactly what “Promise Ring” sounds like. The song begins as a minimalist piano track, only featuring spaced-out chords paired with Johnston’s singing-from-another-room reverby vocals, but then begins to ascend in its second half and positively takes off into a propulsive shoegaze-rocker in the final two minutes. Even as the guitars roar and the drums hit, “Promise Ring” retains a “behind glass” feeling, sounding like Johnston and her collaborators are playing somewhere just out of reach (like, oh, I don’t know, the cosmos?).

“NYC – 25”, The Olivia Tremor Control
From Dusk at Cubist Castle (1996, Flydaddy)

And…roll credits. On this playlist, and on Music from the Unrealized Film Script: Dusk at Cubist Castle, which turns twenty-five on the exact day of this writing. I’ve listened to the first and best Olivia Tremor Control album tons of times, but for whatever reason, this song never stuck out to me until my most recent pass-through. Part of me wants to attribute that to just general fatigue after traversing through seventy minutes and ten “Green Typewriters” to get to it, but then that should make one even more receptive to the pure psych-pop of “NYC -25”. The Beatles harmonies that feature in the chorus are one of the greatest details from a record that’s full of great ones, not mention the way the lead vocalist (I don’t know if it’s Hart or Doss, any Elephant Six superfans out there?) shifts ever so slightly from disembodied psychedelic verse vocals to that little sliver of emotion in “Don’t sleep too long, ‘cause everything you need is right here”.

Pressing Concerns: Upper Wilds, Psychic Flowers, Hello Whirled, Nat Baldwin

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)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Matthew Milia, Gnawing, John Murry, o’summer vacation

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)

Also notable:

New Playlist: June 2021

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.

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

“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 already highlighted 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: Spud Cannon, The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, Meat Wave, Olivia Kaplan

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 few reasons 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)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: The Cocker Spaniels, Williamson Brothers, Supreme Joy, Parting

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)

Also notable:

Premiere: Jack Habegger’s Celebrity Telethon, “Gretchen Took a Ride”

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.

Rosy Overdrive’s Top 40 Albums of 2021 So Far (Part 2 of 2)

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!

View part one of the list here.

Listen to/follow a playlist of these albums here.

Kiwi Jr. – Cooler Returns

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)

Rosy Overdrive’s Top 40 Albums of 2021 So Far (Part 1 of 2)

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.

Thanks for reading, and here is a streaming playlist of my choices.

View part two here!

Writhing Squares – Chart for the Solution

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)

Continue to part two!

Pressing Concerns: 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
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.