Pressing Concerns: Negative Glow, Morwan, John Andrews & the Yawns, Miscomings

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We’ve almost made it to the end of the week, and what a week it was! Today, Rosy Overdrive is looking at new records from Negative Glow, Morwan, John Andrews & the Yawns, and Miscomings. Yesterday, I wrote about Improved Means to Deteriorated Ends, the new record from Washer that’s out tomorrow, and on Monday I covered new records from Patches, Amanda X, Monde UFO, and Triple Fast Action. That’s a lot of music, but it is all worth checking out!

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.

Negative Glow – Volume 1

Release date: April 20th (digital)
Record label: Let’s Pretend/RTR Tapes
Genre: Fuzz rock, punk rock, 90s indie rock
Formats: Cassette (forthcoming), digital
Pull Track: Gazer

Bloomington, Indiana has a legitimate case for being one of the best Midwestern music towns–it’s the home of bands like Mister Goblin, Mike Adams at His Honest Weight, and Jacky Boy, in addition to Let’s Pretend Records, which has put out great records by Posmic, Meat Wave, and Tetnis, among others. Let’s Pretend is also co-releasing (along with RTR Tapes) the debut cassette EP from an exciting new Bloomington band, Negative Glow. Negative Glow is a four-piece group led by singer-songwriter-guitarists Tina Lou Vines and Tommy Beresky, and also featuring the rhythm section of Noah Ketchem (drums) and Cyan Carey (bass), and their first record together is an incredibly strong opening statement. Volume 1 is five songs and 13 minutes of incredibly catchy fuzz rock that’s a mix of 90s indie rock, power pop, and pop punk with zero fat.

Volume 1 takes me back a bit to the mid-2010s era of punk-y indie rock revivalists–bands like Swearin’, Chumped, and Screaming Females–but with a bit of a tougher alt-rock edge (less “scrappy”, with a layered-enough sound that the “shoegaze” tag on their Bandcamp makes some sense). “Gazer” is a hell of a first song, a big distorted fuzzfest with crystal-clear vocals and legitimate guitar heroics. “Hover” is more mid-tempo and features co-lead vocals from Vines and Beresky, trending into Samuel S.C.-esque emo-punk territory. All five of these songs land incredible hooks–the sprint-to-strut “F.S.” pulls off its trick slickly, “Lite-Brite” roars behind a pummeling drumbeat, and closing track “Dissolve” sends us all off with a big slacker rock finish. As new as they are, Negative Glow already sound great on Volume 1–urgent but cool, loud but catchy as anything, aware of the past but very much alive in the present tense. The physical edition of Volume 1 isn’t even out yet, but it’s never too early to start thinking about Volume 2. (Bandcamp link)

Morwan – Svitaye, Palaye

Release date: April 28th
Record label: Feel It
Genre: Post-punk
Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Сяєш

Ukrainian post-punk band Morwan have been around for a half-decade or so–Svitaye, Palaye is their third full-length album, and their second for Cincinnati garage rock imprint Feel It Records, following 2020’s Zola-Zemlya. The Kyiv band had planned on attempting to make a “lighter” and “somewhat danceable” follow-up record to their previous work, but, as I would imagine is obvious and understandable to all reading this blog, Russia’s invasion of their home country impacted both the development of and the content within Svitaye, Palaye. Eastern Europe has long had a reputation for offering up the gloomiest and darkest sides of post-punk, and Morwan certainly find themselves in the realm of this territory with their latest album. Svitaye, Palaye is not, however, a listless and formless dark cloud of a record –Morwan sound driven, animated, and purposeful as they move through these seven living rock songs.

There are traces of Morwan’s original concept for Svitaye, Palaye on opening track “Журба”–atmospheric interludes eventually give way to a bit of New Order flexibility and a drumbeat that, yes, could conceivably be danced to. Although this ends up being the brightest moment on Svitaye, Palaye, the band’s rhythm section continues to operate at full force as the record advances. “Сяєш” stomps through both minimalist, skeletal post-punk and some noisy sections, while the awestruck-sounding “Полетіли” takes a few minutes to build to its determined conclusion. Songs on Svitaye, Palaye stretch out to six minutes or so, Morwan hammering every bit of emotion and catharsis out of them until they move on. The record’s closing two tracks both feature characteristic pounding percussion, but to different ends–“Відчуваєш” is built almost entirely around the drums for the majority of its runtime, sounding primal before morphing into an intense rock conclusion, while “Земля палає” introduces some synths as warning sirens, letting their resonances close out the record on a frantic but beautiful-sounding note. (Bandcamp link)

John Andrews & the Yawns – Love for the Underdog

Release date: April 28th
Record label: Woodsist
Genre: Folk rock, orchestral pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Walking Under My Love’s Ladder

Singer-songwriter John Andrews has been active in the northeastern American folk rock scene for several years at this point–he’s played in the band Quilt, contributed to records from the likes of Woods and Kevin Morby, and his band The Yawns contains members of Cut Worms, to list a few connections. Andrews has been slowly but steadily building a following over the course of three full-length records for stalwart label Woodsist, and the fourth album from the New Hampshire-originating, New York-based musician continues his mission of crafting subtle but friendly music. On Love for the Underdog, Andrews reaches into the past to grasp some tried-and-true methods for dressing up his songwriting. The eight-song album offers up gentle vocal melodies, lush string arrangements, and some Woods-y light-psych bass grooves, all conjuring up pop rock auteurs of the 1970s and even earlier.

Love for the Underdog eases us into things with the slow-building baroque pop of “Checks in the Mail”, a song that takes over a minute to truly bloom into its bright chorus. Even if it’s not the most immediately attention-grabbing way to start off the album, it’s representative of the record as a whole in how it rewards patience. The mid-tempo trot of “Never Go Away” and the multi-part folk rock of closing track “I Want to Believe” might pick up the pace a little bit, but the album as a whole doesn’t go out of its way to grab the listener by the collar. That being said, after having spun this album a few times, it’s hard not to hear the multitude of great moments that Love for the Underdog has to offer, like the seven-minute soft rock suite of “Fourth Wall”, or the organ-led humble pop of “”Walking Under My Love’s Ladder”. Once Love for the Underdog comes into focus, there’s no shaking John Andrews’ charms. (Bandcamp link)

Miscomings – Hat

Release date: April 14th
Record label: Sixwix
Genre: Post-punk, egg punk, no wave, punk rock, noise rock
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Sativa

Seattle’s Miscomings are new to me, but they’re not exactly new at this whole music thing–their latest, Hat, is their fourth full-length record since their debut in 2016. Still, the four-piece band is kind of starting anew on their new album–it represents a line-up change (according to Bandcamp, the band is now comprised of Crow, Chani, Ziam, and Sid), and their sound has evolved to match. Based on my sampling of their previous material, Miscomings have morphed from an experimental synthpunk/new wave band to a much tougher, louder, and more frantic-sounding noise-punk group on Hat. They rip through a dozen songs in twenty minutes, with a full-powered rhythm section, coiled and chaotic guitars, and in-your-face vocals all grabbing the listener practically the entire way through.

Miscomings stomp through opening track “Anxiety” (featuring some lasers of guitar lines), and offering up an excellent post-punk/egg punk bassline on “Sativa”. The vocals are certainly memorable throughout Hat–the musicians of Miscomings deserve credit for cooking up instrumental firestorms in noise-punk tracks like “Dilly Bar” and “Saviour Self”, but whichever member of the band is singing does everything possible to match the musical intensity (to say nothing of that delivery of “Beverly wants…to kill someone!” in “Beverly”). Songs like “3R” and “Stoned Soup Self” are fascinating, rubbery-sounding egg punk, showing that while Miscomings never let up on the intensity, they’re frequently declined to deliver it in a skewed fashion. That, in a nutshell, is who Hat is for–those of us who like our punk rock to always have its foot on its gas, but never to travel in a straight line. (Bandcamp link)

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