Pressing Concerns: Swiftumz, Las Nubes, Cola, Russian Baths

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Welcome to a Thursday Pressing Concerns! Today’s post is a real “who’s who” of “bands releasing new albums tomorrow, June 14th, 2024”. New albums from Swiftumz, Las Nubes, Cola, and Russian Baths are featured below. If you missed Monday’s post (featuring Maggie Gently, Apples with Moya, Modern Silent Cinema, and D. Sablu) or Tuesday’s (featuring Grr Ant, The Long Lost Somethins, Floral Print, and Dark Surfers), check those 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.

Swiftumz – Simply the Best

Release date: June 14th
Record label: Empty Cellar
Genre: Power pop, jangle pop, lo-fi pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Simply the Best

I hadn’t heard of Swiftumz’s Christopher McVicker before the advent of his latest album, Simply the Best, and it’s fair to say the San Francisco-based power pop musician is a bit under the radar–he put albums out in 2011 and 2015, with only a two-song single in 2017 materializing between then and now. Still, I certainly noticed the excitement among the Bay Area underground pop masses when the third Swiftumz LP was announced, with plenty noting their love of McVicker’s music on social media and The Reds, Pinks & Purples’ Glenn Donaldson warmly referring to him as “a songwriter’s songwriter”. I’m happy to say that Simply the Best lives up to the hyper-specific hype, with the LP providing ten shining examples of McVicker’s ability to come up with and execute a sublime pop song. Simply the Best has the earnest intimacy of bedroom pop, but it’s not cleanly a lo-fi affair–Kelley Stoltz and members of The Aislers Set, among others, contribute to these songs (the album press release singles out lead guitarist Chris Guthridge’s additions to the record, and I’m passing it on because it’s certainly right to do so). Sometimes fuzzy and distorted, other times sweet and jangly, Simply the Best could pass for a 2010s “hypnagogic” pop record, but it’s more precisely-focused on hooks than that era, with humble lo-fi guitar pop music from the likes of early Grandaddy, Tony Molina, Lost Boy ?, and Brian Mietz being the closest brethren.

Swiftumz has no problem whatsoever with coming out of the gate strong, with the mid-tempo, electric power pop strut of the opening title track being an instant ‘hit’, and the chiming, jangly fuzz-sprint of “Unconditional” and the lighter-than-air indie pop feel of “Never Impress” continue to ensure that Simply the Best is rolling from the get-go. Interestingly enough, McVicker chose the closest thing to a true ballad (“Second Take”) to be the album’s lead single, but it’s hard to argue it’s not a success in its own way, recalling the most peaceful sections of Ty Segall and Alex G’s discographies. McVicker flirts with taking Simply the Best into the ditch with the six-minute bedroom pop Neil Young vibes of “Almost Through” and the deconstructed fuzz-rock of “For Bucher”, but Swiftumz come out the other side with a pair of excellent pop tracks in “Falling Down” and “Fall Apart” that have just as many hooks as the record’s opening salvo. Simply the Best has already done everything it needs to do by this point, but the sub-30 minute album adds a few more wrinkles by closing with the record’s weirdest track (the percussion-heavy fog of “Demoralized”) and its most traditional-sounding (the waltzing “Finally Through”, the record’s other moment of balladry). Simply the Best does its best to put a hidden gem out there in the open–it’s never been easier to be “in the know” about Swiftumz. (Bandcamp link)

Las Nubes – Tormentas Malsanas

Release date: June 14th
Record label: Spinda/Godless America/Sweat
Genre: Alt-rock, fuzz rock, grunge, psych rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Enredados

Miami rock band Las Nubes was formed in 2017 by guitarist/vocalist Ale Campos and drummer Emile Milgrim, eventually joined by guitarist Alumine Soto and bassist Cuci Amador. Their debut album, SMVT, came out in 2019, and since then they’ve put out a few one-off singles and gained some notable fans–the press email notes praise they’ve received from Iggy Pop and Calvin Johnson, and they put out a 7” on Thurston Moore’s Daydream Library label last year. Listening to their sophomore album, Tormentas Malsanas, it’s not hard to hear the appeal of the band (who sing in both Spanish and English)–this is loud and crunchy rock and roll music at its loudest and crunchiest. Las Nubes deal in the louder end of the 90s alt-rock spectrum, incorporating shoegaze and dream pop atmospherics with even a bit of punk energy–Breeders comparisons aren’t inaccurate, and one could put them alongside recent “Exploding in Sound-core” 90s revivalists like Melkbelly, Screaming Females, and Rick Rude. Still, there’s a grunge-y heaviness to their sound that puts them closer to The Smashing Pumpkins or even Hum, and while they’re not exactly “psychedelic”, Tormentas Malsanas packs a punch as strong as good psych-rock does.

Tormentas Malsanas offers up an excellently representative opening track in “Would Be”, which balances heavy-duty guitars and just-as-heavy-duty pop hooks in equal measure. The fuzzed-out riffs continue with “Pesada”, which turns in an alt-rock death march that sounds surprisingly fun, and “Silhouetted Man”, which parts the clouds just a little bit to really get themselves into Deal Sisters mode. The atmospheric opening of “Caricia” might feel like a breather until one glances at the song’s length and realizes that we’re only in the first stages of what eventually becomes the record’s towering ten-minute centerpiece. Las Nubes follow every excessive urge to blow “Caricia” up, capturing lightning in a bottle in the midst of the storm before picking up the thread with more “digestible” punky alt-rock in the form of “Enredados” and the shoegaze-pop “Caminar Sola”. There are other brief moments of reprieve–like the first minute or so of “The Weeks That Followed” before the guitar torpedoes kick in–but Tormentas Malsanas spends an impressive amount of its 40 minutes just rocking out as much as possible. It makes sense that it ends with two sub-three-minute songs in “Canse” and “Drop in, Ya Freaks” that pound away until the feedback takes over in the final thirty seconds of the latter track–they’ll circle around their point occasionally, but that’s what Las Nubes is all about on Tormentas Malsanas. (Bandcamp link)

Cola – The Gloss

Release date: June 14th
Record label: Fire Talk
Genre: Post-punk, art rock, 2000s indie rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Tracing Hallmarks

I’ve been vaguely aware of the trajectory of Montreal-originating indie rock trio Cola, but admittedly haven’t been following them closely. They’re a successor band of sorts to beloved post-punk quartet Ought, who broke up in 2021 after putting out three LPs, and half of the band (vocalist/guitarist Tim Darcy and bassist Ben Stidworthy) immediately began the newer band with Evan Cartwright of The Weather Station and U.S. Girls on drums. Cola put out their first album, Deep in View, back in 2022, but I must confess that the only thing that the band members had done that had really stuck with me thus far is “Still Waking Up”, an excellent single from Darcy’s only solo album that, for my money, does Morrissey better than anything Morrissey himself ever did. So it was that I found myself increasingly drawn to the sound of The Gloss, the trio’s second album together. The band reference the “right” names as inspiration for this album–David Berman in the lyrics, Flying Nun Records, Television–and while they’re all in there a bit, the latter of the three is the one whose shadow looms the largest over Cola’s sophomore record.

The invocation of Television brings me to what kind of music I actually think The Gloss sounds the most like–2000s indie rock in the vein of The Strokes and Spoon. I would call it a post-post-punk album; Cola end up capturing the tipping point where tight rhythm sections stop being a backdrop for pure nervousness and instead provide the foundation for a smooth, suave, impossibly cool-sounding attitude instead. Obviously, the post-punk of Darcy and Stidworthy’s past is still a large component of The Gloss’ sound–nobody with any other kind of background would make the instrumental choices that end up giving songs like “Tracing Hallmarks” and “Pallor Tricks” a bit of tension. It’s just a bit, though, balancing with a hypnotic, meditative guitar pop sound in the former (yes, they’ve listened to The Clean as well, clearly) and the Marquee Moon-ish melodic window dressing of the latter. Cola meter everything out evenly and deliberately throughout The Gloss, with the post-punk excursion of “Down to Size” getting played out with the blissed-out march of “Keys Down If You Stay”, and they kick up the tempo in “Bell Wheel” after tinkering around for four minutes in “Nice Try”. Tight until the end, even the six-minute closing track “Bitter Melon” feels like a controlled exercise in “let’s stretch things out a bit”, flirting with stuff like Wand and mid-period Radiohead but never quite committing to the detour. Their eyes are still on the road ahead of them. (Bandcamp link)

Russian Baths – Mirror

Release date: June 14th
Record label: Good Eye
Genre: Post-punk, art rock, dream pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Vision (Dexedrine)

Russian Baths a trio from New York that practically ooze Empire State grandiosity and seriousness. The group is co-led by guitarist/vocalists Luke Koz and Jess Rees (who also plays in the band Activity), and in the second half of the 2010s they progressed from releasing singles (2016’s Ambulance) to EPs (2018’s Penance) to finally putting out an LP (2019’s Deepfake). Their second album, Mirror, arrives a half-decade later, with the band now counting bassist Kyle Garvey (Frankie Rose) as a full member. It once again comes out via Good Eye Records, which seems to be establishing themselves as choice purveyors of ambitious underground New York post-punk records between this one and last year’s Vital Return by Big Bliss. There are certainly similarities between the two albums, but Vital Return’s muscular guitar-heavy sound isn’t as prominent on Mirror, which chooses a more balanced approach both musically (in creating their noisy/empty atmospheres, the guitar lines are often warped or used primarily as accents) and vocally (in the switching off between Koz and Rees). Even though it’s clearly rooted in 80s alt-rock and post-punk, Mirror ends up pulling at least a bit from art rock of all eras.

We start to see how Russian Baths sculpt their sound from a few angles early on in Mirror, from opening track “Vision (Dexedrine)”, which takes a traditional post-punk rhythmic skeleton and extrapolates a few different moments of cranked-up fuzzy rock music from there, to the next two tracks, “Split” and “Bind”, which zoom out just a bit to come at their icy rock music from a more cavernous, sweeping perspective (while still adhering to post-punk sensibilities). Russian Baths have a good thing going here, and they reach back into the bag on later tracks like “Chlorine” and “Secret Keys”, but I also appreciate that they augment their dark train-track-gliding rock music with a few sidesteps, like the echoing ballad of “Furnace”, the almost psychedelic rock riff that marks “Purgatory”, and B-side highlight “Pair”, a giant, chugging piece of obelisk-like alt-rock. Koz and Rees feel incredibly in tune with each other, and it’s easy to forget that Mirror is helmed by two different frontpeople at any given moment (even in songs like “Always Night”, where the two of them come together in chilly but beautiful harmony). Mirror ends with “Confess”, a drawn-out five minute song that goes from blaring, pounding rock music to pin-drop quiet–it’s a studious and polished record, but it doesn’t forget to be exciting, either. (Bandcamp link)

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