Unending Bliss

May 27th, 2024

Afternoon, y’all. How was your weekend? I jumped in a really cold pool yesterday, and very much enjoyed the activity. On the weekend, there was a major garage sale event going on one street over from us and I picked up a binder of old YO! MTV RAPS and various band-related trading cards for a couple bucks. There’s some metal ones as well with bands like Testament and Megadeth. Not bad.

Also, y’all ever sat in a hammock in your backyard? Highly recommend.

Anyway, I got a bunch of music thoughts for you… and there’s less metal/thrash focus here than last week’s post, promise.

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Icon legend:

• ⛏️ denotes picks of the week.

• 🌱 seedling denotes albums I liked, but may grow on me.

• ✨ means worth a look, if you like the genres listed in particular.

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As always, please reach out on the hellsite if you’d like or better yet join the Rosy Overdrive Discord server where I can be found now and again. You can also find me in the corners of Rate Your Music scrounging for obscure emo, hardcore, indie-rock and pop-punk.

Don’t forget: if you’re reading this in your email it will be cut off. Read on the web for the full list of reviews!

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⛏️ Middle-Out - Middle-Out (2024)

Genres: Pop Punk

Orgcore for fans of: Hold Tight!, The Dopamines etc. There's a pinch of the emo-pop dueling vocalist stuff in here that some orgcore/pop punk bands often dip into, which is nice, but it never strays too far from the beer soaked, pop-laced punk rock road.

I'm an easy mark for this kind of thing, but to my ear the hooks are above average and the sing-along moments were really effective. A couple shrug lyrical moments ("401k") but mostly this is very good for the genre. I'll return to this for sure.

⛏️ mui zyu - Nothing or Something to Die For (2024)

Genre: Art Pop, Indietronica, Bedroom Pop, Alt-Pop, Trip Hop, Synthpop, Shoegaze, Dream Pop

A beautiful, gorgeous album. This is definitely not as immediately satisfying as Rotten Bun for an Eggless Century because it leans a lot further away from a focus on "songs" as building blocks and more into tones and textures with short interludes and certainly feels more influenced by stuff like classical or library music. And it's all great but it does feel like an album I appreciate a little more than I may want to come back to again and again like I did their previous record. That said, it's an ambitious and stunning record through and through and I really loved it. I’ve spun it a couple more times and it already has started to grow on me, which is a good sign.

Extra Arms - Radar (2024)

Genre: Power Pop

Came across this on the Faster and Louder Blog and then realized it was Ryan Allen of Thunderbirds Are Now! and Friendly Foes (which I revisited recently.)

Sonically this shares a lot with that Friendly Foes album, in that it's a kind of power-pop foundation with some indie/pop-punk-ish elements. Taking a peek at their other album covers and I'm pretty sure I checked in with Headacher and Up From Here in their respective years but I my memory is hazy about whether or not I liked them. I feel like they were a bit more buzzy and upbeat in general than this one though?

This is alright though, but nothing all that special. It doesn't grab me and was mostly in one ear, out the other. If you're really scrounging for some new power-pop in 2024 you could do worse than this, but it just made me wish I was listening to Thunderbirds Are Now! or Friendly Foes to be honest.

Mortal Wound - The Anus of the World (2024)

Genre: Death Metal, Brutal Death Metal

This doesn't pass my death metal test of having vocals that are adding some modicum of variety beyond vague texture to the music but it does pass the instrumental test.

Lots of heavy ass riffs interspersed with slightly less interesting, expected tremoloing and some melodic death lead solos. But the riffs, when they hit are good enough for me to overlook the monotonous vocalist. Really good churning, heavy moments in here. The sampling adds a goofily evil power violence tone to the album that is welcome.

I understand that I just want something different than what death metal offers up but there's enough in death metal that I often love that I'm still trying stuff that piques my interest here and there (how could I not with the name The Anus of the World?)

There's much to like in here but at 40 minutes my interest wavered around throughout.

Boundless Chaos - Sinister Upheaval (2024)

Genre: Death Metal, Thrash Metal

Solid but a little unremarkable (non-derogatory) mix of thrash metal with some death metal and blackened edges. Definitely feels like this sits pretty firmly in the thrash side of the coin for the most part, but they get into other stuff around the corners. Some good heavier, churning riffs and flashier thrash soloing pops up in songs like "Guillotine" help when things are threatening to become too repetitive.

Not bad at all but not sure it stands out of the pack of 2024's heavy releases for me.

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✨ The Capitol City Dusters - Simplicity (1998)

Genre: Post-Hardcore, Pop Punk, Emo

Neat underrated release from a Dischord Records (well, it came out on the band's own Superbad label... but in conjunction with Dischord) act I had never heard of.

They play a mix of indie rock and post hardcore with emo-adjacent melodic tendencies. They never dip into being post-hardcore in that egghead, angular for the sense of angularity kind of thing. The vocals almost place it near geek rock levels of melody in moments. Basically it's just a chunk of solid guitar rock that has enough melody to make their sound stick. They almost remind me of The dB's if they were big fans of Fugazi and Gaunt (maybe less garage rock though than the latter.)

Anyway, hard to really pin down but I enjoyed my time with this.

✨ Friendly Foes - Born Radical (2008)

Genre: Indie Rock, Power Pop

Short-lived outfit from Ryan Allen of Thunderbirds Are Now!, Lizzie Wittman of Kiddo and Brad Elliott of The Satin Peaches.

Basically a song cycle focused around the topic of starting a band, touring, etc. backed by fizzy power-pop indie rock. Songs like "My Body (Is a Strange Place to Live)" skew towards lightly psych-pop cand churning classic rock chord progressions, where otherwise they don't stray too far from the angular slashing of Thunderbirds Are Now! (just with an even heavier foot on the pop-hook pedal while Lizzie offers up a lot of ba ba ba's and ooh lahh lahh's and backing vocal melodies.)

I really enjoyed this at the time of its release, partly due to the fact that I felt (and still do) like Justamustache was one of the best albums of that over-stuffed dance-rock era of indie and so I was craving more in that line. It's certainly top-heavy with the first half of the album being stronger than the second half, hinting at a record that is even shorter and maybe stronger.

Still, this is a solid album of power pop that does satisfy hook cravings and it takes off after 35 minutes, which is always good if you can get past some small lyrical quibbles or song titles like "Epic Jamb."

🌱 Algebra - Chiroptera (2022)

Genre: Thrash Metal, Progressive Metal, Technical Thrash Metal

In my never ending quest to find more thrash that hits my brain and my guts in the exact same way that Time Does Not Heal does, I came across someone recommending Algebra on Reddit. This definitely hits the spot when it comes to density, intensity and technicality. Just majorly pummeling avalanches of riffs.

They do this thing with a little two-note guitar riff ringing under their breakdown-ish passages (they end "Resuscitation" and "Kleptomaniac" the exact same way with that) which kind of makes you think like they don't have a lot of tricks up their sleeves. But then they throw a weird shuffle-y melodic stretch (derogatory) in "Constricted" before getting straight back to the thrashing. I think in general when they get really melodic - "Eternal Sleep" they start to lose me. The non-thrashy moments of "Eternal Sleep" sound almost like a particularly heavy Good Riddance song or something. Which hey, I like Good Riddance but that's not what I'm here for, haha.

Moments like this make me unsure where I land on them as a whole, but overall the general tone of the album hit the spot. This definitely makes me want to check out their earlier work and see how they grew into where they're at as of 2022.

Killing Time - Brightside (1989)

Genre: New York Hardcore, Crossover Thrash

Going to see Killing Time perform this in its entirety at Tied Down this year so figured I should finally get around to hearing this, since it's a certified classic of the genre.

Can see why this hits people hard as it has a good mix of classic NYC hardcore songwriting with a bit of metallic edge. Feels like the sub-genre tag of crossover thrash is a bit more in attitude and ethos than it is purely sound, but there's some undeniable thrash influences in here. There's even some melodic metal riffs like the opening of "What I Want" that sounds like something from a classic arena-metal kind of act to me.

All of that said... I dunno, today this just felt good not great. Maybe I'm not in a hardcore mood right now, maybe I should have heard this album back when I was first getting into hardcore bands, but by the halfway point of an already short album I felt like I had heard what it had to offer. Another contender for being a MP not a YP.

Have Heart - Songs to Scream at the Sun (2008)

Genre: Hardcore Punk, Melodic Hardcore, Emocore, Post-Hardcore

Another certified classic of the genre that I'm only getting around to now that I'm going to see the band live at Tied Down. When this came out, I avoided listening to it based exclusively on the album cover because I assumed it was some nu-grunge alt-rock band or something.

This is definitely more my sound - hardcore, melodic hardcore and emocore - so on a purely ear-level this stuff is pleasing and familiar to me. I do feel like this is one of those situations where I'm late to the game; it's hard not to think that this is a little overrated even if I can admit that two-thirds of all modern bands that sound exactly like this had their heads cracked open by it in 2008. You can also trace a line pretty clearly from We're Down Til We're Underground to this kind of thing so it's not like the overall blend here is world-shakingly groundbreaking. Effectively executed? Absolutely.

Can absolutely tell that the crowd is going to go nuts to this material and that experiencing that might even knock my score up a bit in hindsight, but today it's just sounding on the higher end of above average to me.

Seagulls - The Rapture and Resurgens (2023)

Genre: Skate Punk

Gotta be four out of five on the The Brokedowns scale, haha. This is pretty good, nothing too memorable but if you're jonesing for orgcore punk with some skate punk vibes and some poppy-ish hooks (but nothing that will stick too hard) then you can do much worse.

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That’s it, that’s all. Be excellent to one other.

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