I’m just gonna come right out and say it: this is one of the strongest editions of Pressing Concerns ever, bar none. These are four Tier-A1 indie rock albums. Any of them could be leading off the blog post any other week. New albums from Rosie Tucker, Outer World, R.E. Seraphin, and Marbled Eye are the winners this time around, all of which come out tomorrow (March 22nd, 2024). And yet, we’ve covered even more great music this week, so if you missed Monday’s post (Hill View #73, Kora Puckett, Buddy Junior, Kind Skies) or Tuesday’s (Miscellaneous Owl, Ten Things I Hate About You, Chimes of Bayonets, Alexei Shishkin), you oughta check them out, too.
If you’re looking for more new music, you can visit the site directory to see what else we’ve written about lately. If you’d like to support Rosy Overdrive, you can share this (or another) post, or donate here.
Rosie Tucker – UTOPIA NOW!
Release date: March 22nd
Record label: Sentimental
Genre: Art rock, power pop, pop punk, alt-rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: All My Exes Live in Vortexes
Plenty of people whose music taste I respect have been on the Rosie Tucker train for a while now–I’m a late adopter, but it took approximately one-and-a-half listens to UTOPIA NOW! for me to climb fully aboard. Tucker has been putting out fairly-acclaimed records for a few years now; UTOPIA NOW! is either their fourth or fifth album (depending on how you count last year’s 12-song, 10-minute Tiny Songs Volume 1) and their first full-length since being “unceremoniously” dropped from Epitaph Records (those Mannequin Pussy AI music videos ain’t cheap, you know). The snippets of Tucker’s discography I’d heard before definitely did not prepare me for the adventurous, overstuffed, and punchy rock record that is UTOPIA NOW!, an album seemingly engineered to appeal specifically to me. As a songwriter, Tucker is lethally sharp, pulling out massive power pop/pop punk hooks out of nowhere, oftentimes completely at odds with where the track had been leading up to beforehand, but never in a way that feels overly shoehorned. UTOPIA NOW!’s sound is just as commendable–like the majority of Tucker’s output, it was produced by themself and their longtime collaborator Wolfy, and they gleefully veer between chilly bedroom pop/folk/rock, slick alt-rock, and limber, jerky art rock/new wave across the record’s thirteen tracks.
It’s tempting to call the buzzy synthpop of opening track “Lightbulb” a red herring, but from its multi-part structure to its lyrical content (which touches on everything from planned obsolescence to personal pettiness to music industry detritus), it actually ends up being a quite fitting prelude for UTOPIA NOW!. That being said, it’s the fiery alt-rock of “All My Exes Live in Vortexas” (which quite literally stitches together some unimpeachable art out of capitalist waste products, from piss bottles to giant piles of plastic) and the careening power pop of “Gil Scott Albatross” (the title goes a long way of contextualizing that one’s themes) that are a little more representative of just what this album is holding. Along with the sparkling math-pop of “Paperclip Maximizer” (I’ve seen that one compared to XTC, which is accurate), that’s an incredibly strong three-track run–but this is UTOPIA NOW! we’re talking about, and the highlights are only just getting started. The best three song stretch on the record might actually be the sandwich of “Big Fish No Fun”, “Suffer! Like You Mean It”, and “Unending Bliss”, with the two songs on the ends making up the “multi-part songs with big finishes” contingent buttressing the white-hot center track, which sounds like mall punk from an alternate universe where Silent Alarm sold more records than anything by Avril Lavigne.
Stick it out to the home stretch of UTOPIA NOW! and you’re rewarded with a sixty-second track about “the pot calling the kettle bitch-ass” that I assume was just too perfectly petty to consign to Tiny Songs Volume 1, and then a bunch of songs that showcase the softer side of Tucker’s writing. The gorgeous power ballad “Obscura” and the minimalist synthpop earnestness of “Me Minus One Atom” both earn their places on this record through Tucker’s writing–the cellophane-wrapped chorus of the former and the memorably touching relationship-of-Theseus vibes of the latter both echo what they explore with a bit more chaos earlier in the record. And of course, leave it to Rosie Tucker to make the most stripped-down song on the album (the title track) the most frenetic, as they wring everything they can out of an acoustic guitar for “Utopia Now!”’s sub-two-minute runtime. “I can’t relax, but I’m good for other things,” they belt on repeat in the middle of this song–it’s a rare moment where UTOPIA NOW! just comes out and states the obvious. (Bandcamp link)
Outer World – Who Does the Music Love?
Release date: March 22nd
Record label: HHBTM
Genre: Psychedelic rock, psychedelic pop, post-punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: The Drum the Beat
Outer World is a new duo from Richmond, Virginia’s Tracy Wilson and Kenneth Close, who previously played together in the 2010s as part of “post-punk pop” quartet Positive No. Readers of the blog may also be familiar with Wilson’s earlier work as the vocalist of mid-90s emo group Dahlia Seed, or her more recent work promoting a ton of new music as Courtesy Desk (which is an online record shop, a radio show, and a newsletter). After their 2020 record Kyanite, Positive No was quite literally ground to a halt by the pandemic, as long Covid prevented Wilson from singing in the way she’d done in her previous bands. Clearly not one to give up on making music that easily, however, Wilson and her partner, Close, spent the last couple years developing a new sound, one that dives completely into their music historian side, and christened the new act Outer World. On their seven-song debut Who Does the Music Love?, Wilson and Close sometimes sound like they’re right in the thick of first-wave psychedelic rock, and other times they’re refracting it through a decades-long lens in the way bands like Stereolab and Broadcast have done. This kind of thing is sometimes derisively referred to as “record collector rock” (oddly enough, usually by other record collectors); the idea that music like this can’t be imaginative and deeply felt was a flimsy one in no need of refutation, but it was kind of Wilson and Close to provide one anyway.
I do find myself wishing Who Does the Music Love? was longer (at seven songs and 24 minutes, the “mini-LP” is effectively an unruly EP that got out of hand), but it’s hard not to feel like it’s perfectly self-contained and complete where it ended up. I appreciate how the band ground the record in strong, tangible rhythms–the drums come strong out of the gate in opening track “The Drum the Beat” (unsurprisingly, given the name), but Outer World hang onto this attitude for nearly the entire record (and, when they don’t, their general devotion to it makes the rug being pulled out from under us even more exciting). As Who Does the Music Love? surges through its first three songs, the work of Spacemoth’s Maryam Qudus comes to mind–the Bay Area musician (who, perhaps not coincidentally, mixed this record) similarly knows how to wrangle otherworldly sounds into something solid. I get the sense Outer World could rip through more spirited psych-rock, but they do explore other climes between the (mostly) minimal noise pop of “Have”, the zero-gravity funk of the title track, and the final release of closing track “Loteria”. The record ends with Wilson singing to herself, different versions of her bouncing around the song as the last guitar line of the album staggers to the finish line. Outer World travels an impressive amount throughout Who Does the Music Love?, but it still sticks the final landing. (Bandcamp link)
R.E. Seraphin – Fool’s Mate
Release date: March 22nd
Record label: Safe Suburban Home/Take a Turn
Genre: Power pop, indie pop, college rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Virtue of Being Wrong
We last heard from Ray Seraphin and his namesake project, R.E. Seraphin, back in 2022, when he released the seven-song Swingshift EP with the help of several modern indie pop heavyweight labels (including Mt. St. Mtn., Dandy Boy, and Safe Suburban Home). Swingshift established Seraphin as an interesting figure in the Bay Area jangle pop/power pop scene, with the EP balancing the somewhat sensitive and restrained nature of its singer-songwriter with undertones of louder, full-band power pop (and even a bit of punk). Back on Safe Suburban Home for his second full-length record, Fool’s Mate features contributions from a bunch of Bay Area ringers–guitarist Joel Cusumano (Sob Stories), drummer Daniel Pearce (The Reds, Pinks, & Purples), bassist Josh Miller (Chime School), and keyboardist Luke Robbins are Seraphin’s backing band, and Papercuts’ Jason Quever is on board as producer. What ensues in the form of Fool’s Mate is a fully-realized, dozen song record of vintage college rock–it’s enticing on the surface, but Seraphin displays a confidence that whoever’s listening is going to be attentive to what’s going on underneath as well.
Seraphin’s voice has always sounded like that of the frontperson of a slow, dreamy indie-jangle pop group like Cindy or Flowertown, but he’s refused to limit himself to that subgenre, and Fool’s Mate is as far away from that sound as ever. The R.E. Seraphin band are ready to embrace full-on power pop from the get-go of the record–“End of the Star” is a Peter Holsapple-worthy anthem in every aspect, from its pounding drumbeat to its guitar heroics to the way the bass and keyboards both get their moments in the sun before the song is through. Fool’s Mate feels like a vintage LP in that there are clear “album tracks” and “single candidates”–not that the entire record isn’t comprised of pop songs, but I.R.S. in 1985 would’ve been bookmarking the opening track, the equally exuberant “Clock Without Hands”, the polished indie pop of “Bound”, and the crouching Costelloian “Expendable Man” to push for airplay (although the power pop strut of “Fall” and the particularly Game Theory-like “Virtue of Being Wrong” offer up some intriguing dark horses). On the other hand, Seraphin’s version of pop music can also sprawl out in a lounger in “Argument Stand”, and towards the end of the record, “Contraband” and “Somnia” mix in just a bit of psychedelia. Seraphin has razor-sharp pop skills, but Fool’s Mate still feels like a bit of an outsider record–which makes his choice to close the record with a cover of Sinead O’Connor’s “Jump in the River” surprisingly fitting. Remarkably, the band doesn’t change up the track too much, but it sounds exactly like a “R.E. Seraphin song”. Whatever the original “Jump in the River” had, Fool’s Mate is tapping right into it. (Bandcamp link)
Marbled Eye – Read the Air
Release date: March 22nd
Record label: Summer Shade/Digital Regress
Genre: Garage punk, post-punk, noise rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: See It Too
While Marbled Eye’s 2018 debut album, Leisure, didn’t turn the Oakland quartet into indie darlings overnight, it’s not hard to hear why it struck a chord among modern post-punk and garage rock fans and remains beloved in those circles to this day. It merged the seriousness of British post-punk with the scrappiness of Australian garage punk while still feeling in line with American garage-y imprints like Feel It and Future Shock. It’s surprising that it took the group a half-decade to follow it up, but it’s not like they haven’t been busy in the meantime–in particular, vocalist/guitarist Chris Natividad started up Public Interest (featuring original Marbled Eye bassist Andrew Oswald) and also plays in Aluminum and Blue Zero. Public Interest’s most recent record, 2023’s Spiritual Pollution, particularly felt in line with the Marbled Eye ethos, and Read the Air finds Natividad and the rest of the band (vocalist/guitarist Michael Lucero, drummer Alex Shen, and new bassist Ronnie Portugal, replacing the departing Oswald) in as sharp a form as ever. The dozen songs are a constant attack, and Marbled Eye’s weaponry is never dull.
Read the Air opens with its pounding title track–it’s still garage rock, but Marbled Eye somehow make it feel like Swans-y noise rock for a good minute there. It’s probably the most openly intense moment on the record, but it’s hardly the only memorable one–between the runaway guitar dueling with the stop-start structure in “In the Static”, the sleazy mid-tempo “Tonight”, and the careening death-punk of “Starting Over”, Read the Air really starts off with a bang. That being said, the dead center of the record is where its two strongest moments are–“All the Pieces”, a revved-up piece of garage punk that’s the band at their best as rockers, and “See It Too”, which segues into a hooky chorus that I can only describe as “power pop” (and really, seeing Marbled Eye contort themselves so effortlessly in this way is actually a bit more unnerving than their typical dead-eyed stare). The more I listen to Read the Air, the more of a consistent journey it feels like, especially in the final two tracks, “Wear Me Down” and “Spring Exit”. It’s apparent immediately that the band still has plenty of energy in the wrap-up portion of Read the Air, but they tangle these songs up in a way that takes some effort to unwind, doing anything but running out of steam. (Bandcamp link)
Also notable:
- Waxahatchee – Tigers Blood
- Dru the Drifter and the Back Alley Hookers – Tape EP
- Horsebeach – Things to Keep Alive
- Broadcaster – Daylight EP
- The Jesus and Mary Chain – Glasgow Eyes
- Spencer Kilpatrick – Sitting
- Blossom – Florecer EP
- Shybaby – Is This Intimate
- Magon – The Writing’s on the Wall
- Camille Bénâtre – Dommage
- Wesley Fuller – All Fuller No Filler
- I Swallow Ghosts – Deluxe Kick Bike EP
- Kudaranai1nichi – どいつもこいつも
- Cereus Bright – Boys EP
- X-Nipples – Goodbye Boozy Tape EP
- STRFKR – Parallel Realms
- Devon Walsh – Come With Me If You Want to Live
- Blowfuse – The 4th Wall
- Chiyomi Yamada – Songs of My Land
- Foamboy – Eating Me Alive
- Public Circuit – Lamb
- Li Yilei – NONAGE
- Nick Hudson – Kanda Teenage Honey
- Kane Pour – The Last Wave
- Brittany Davis – Image Issues
