A decade down the line, That Do Now See is getting a new lease of life thanks to the good folks at Antiquated Future. The EP is the first in a new series of reissues with which the label seek to highlight self-released and tape-label albums from the recent past which have since gone out of print. Fred Thomas stepped in to remaster the release to ensure the songs are presented in their best light, and each of the tapes comes with a reflective essay in which Olivia Rose considers each song in turn.

Opener and single ‘Prom’ is a great place to start for anyone new to Oh, Rose. A song typical of the band’s spirit, where sincere emotion is stretched across a sound which ebbs and flows, its reflective rhythm interspersed by squally peaks and always gathering towards some crescendo. “I never went to prom,” Rose explains in an Instagram post. “Highschool was painful and more than anything I wanted to be left alone until I was finally free.” The song pulls us back into the experience with a heightened intensity, condensing years of discomfort into a cathartic momentum. As Rose continues:

In a way this song is the embodiment of that time, the excruciating feeling of being forced to attend with a storm breaking at home, the loneliness and isolation that comes with having to show up to a seemingly pointless routine. My senior year I was accepted into Chamber Choir and would sleep through class, only waking up when it was time to sing. I think this song is a little like that. My first official “prom” was in 2014, almost four years after graduating, in the basement of The Guest House in Olympia, WA where this song was recorded and then filmed. It was beautiful.

As if that wasn’t enough, Oh, Rose have also shared a brand single, ‘The Call’. With a soulful, spirited sound, the track pivots from the overtly poppy sensibilities of most recent single ‘Back 2 U’ to suggest a new direction for the next stage of the project’s life. A song which looks to both cling to what has made Oh, Rose so special over the last decade, but also broaden its horizons, if only to assert its belief in the future. As Rose puts it, ‘The Call’ is a song “For anyone who has forgotten their calling, given up on their dreams, or wanted to give up. Don’t give up.” Because ‘The Call’ originated in an inflection point, one where Rose was made to consciously decide to continue her pursuit of her artistic energies when life seemed intent on strangling them. “At the start of Covid I got stuck working at a weed grow,” as she explains:

We were considered essential workers and I ended up working there for three years. I didn’t see the rest of the band for almost a year. My days were spent covered in kief dust in a fluorescent room and finishing my degree in the evenings, so music had pretty much stopped. I think this song became my mantra to remember that it wouldn’t last forever.

Watch the video shot and edited by the band themselves with visual lyric effects by Sean Clark below:

That Do Now See is out now via Antiquated Future. ‘The Call’ is available from the Oh, Rose Bandcamp page.

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So treasured, in fact, that Antiquated Future decided the collaboration between Thomas and Barnes would be the perfect focus for the latest in their Selected Songs series. In recent years, these releases have preserved, celebrated and reintroduced some of the finest indie releases, offering compilations of singles, rarities and demos and live takes to give the fullest picture of the acts on show. You Can Tell Everyone Under the Sun (Selected Songs, 2004​-​2013) collects the very best tracks from across the Mighty Clouds discography, as well as those Saturday Looks Good To Me songs to which Barnes lent her vocals. “The concept for this volume arrived several years ago, making iPod playlists of all the SLGTM songs she sang on,” the label explain:

Live recordings where Betty is singing some classic songs she hadn’t originally recorded with the group, lost Mighty Clouds tracks—the material was all so strong, yet difficult to arrange cohesively. But it had to be done! This sort of compiling—bringing together tracks from all over to tell a story that is important to us is what the Selected Songs series is all about.

But as if that wasn’t enough, Antiquated Future are also releasing a two brand new songs recorded by Mighty Clouds as a standalone 7″ single. Excitingly described as the “beginning of a new chapter,” A-side ‘Anagram’ signals an evolution of the Mighty Clouds style, maintaining some of the sincerity and retro wistfulness for which the project is known but adding new layers of atmosphere. The track’s gauzy depth nods towards noise or almost shoegaze sensibilities, while the ambiguity of the lyrics only plays into the complicated mood—where a bright energy is stalked by an unshakeably foreboding shadow.

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The collection includes songs from a variety of Thomas’s projects. Saturday Looks Good to Me, City Center, Failed Flowers and Idle Ray are all represented, as well the impressive Fred Thomas solo oeuvre. And in combining proper recordings with radio sessions, it portrays both ends of the spectrum. Detailed electronic soundscapes and lush retro pop tones sit alongside the jagged, imperfect urgency of live performances.

The release also gives a picture of how his work fits into the indie landscape that developed alongside him, a view that shows just how versatile Fred Thomas has been. There’s something of early Emperor X in the scrappy, urgency of ‘Cookies’, a clear link to the sincere alt-folk of Nana Grizol and co. in ‘Susceptible to Ghosts’, while the lo-fi pop electronics of ‘It Sounds Like They’re In Love With You’ sits adjacent to the work of Stephen Merritt. The folk-inflected ‘Summer of OMD’ owes as much to emo as acoustic, the playful ‘Can’t Ever Sleep’ a close cousin of Owen Ashworth‘s Casiotone For the Painfully Alone, but what is most striking is how he cycles through these genres without ever losing his own individuality. Fred Thomas has no clear position within the web of indie music, and makes no promises beyond the fact that his work could not be by anyone else. The songs might sound wildly different, but they all sound exactly like Fred Thomas.

Another Song About Riding the Bus is out now via Antiquated Future and you can get it from Bandcamp. The release is the first in Antiquated Future’s Selected Songs series, created in collaboration with Two Plum Press, which will see these back catalogue deep-dives curated on golden ticket cassette tapes and packaged in letterpress and offset-print boxes and accompanied with a risograph-printed booklet of liner notes and essays.

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