Pressing Concerns: PONY, Parister, Good Looking Son, Kicking Bird

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Welcome to a rare Tuesday Pressing Concerns! Today, we’re rounding up new albums from PONY, Parister, Good Looking Son, and Kicking Bird. Also, if the website has looked weird for you lately, I’m sorry–Wordpress seems to have been having some major issues, and their support system has been quite unhelpful. I’ve done my best to at least make the front page navigable, but let me know if things still look too broken to use the website.

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.

PONY – Velveteen

Release date: May 19th
Record label: Take This to Heart
Genre: Power pop, pop punk, 90s alt-rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Sick

There have been a lot of bands over the past decade or so that have used the more poppy, radio-friendly edge of alt-rock as a jumping off point for their music. It’s been arguably the dominant strain of “indie rock” since the excesses of blog rock died off in the early 2010s. One of those bands has been PONY, whose 2017 EP Do You I heard way back when and thought was pretty good, but whom I’d lost track of since then (Velveteen is their second album for Take This to Heart Records, actually). Honestly, I thought I got burnt out on this kind of music in recent years. Turns out that most people just aren’t stuffing it with enough hooks. Velveteen is a beast of a pop album, with PONY (singer/guitarist Sam Bielanski and multi-instrumentalist Matty Morand) wringing everything they can out of these ten songs, leaving nothing on the table.

Velveteen has an energy to it that I must compare to the pinnacle of the recent era of this genre, Charly Bliss’ Guppy. Bielanski is an excellent pop frontperson–they sound confident in every one of these songs, while still being able to sell the wide range of (frequently kind of rough) emotions these songs explore. The braintrust of Bielanski and Morand are a successful pair, as the duo (who play everything other than drums, handled by Josh Cassidy) give the tracks precisely what they need. Songs like “Peach” and “Sick” feel eternal–Bielanski takes a step back in the former to emphasize the aside nature of the lyrics, and they grab the mic aggressively in the latter to vividly try and wrest control of something (“Break my spine just to prove I have one,” that’ll stick with me). There are some other songs that deserve a specific mention (the churning grunge-pop of “Haunted House”, one last triumphant shit-kicking in closing track “Haircut”) but there’s not a dud on this one. (Bandcamp link)

Parister – Here’s What You Wonder

Release date: May 11th
Record label: Candlepin
Genre: Lo-fi indie rock, alt-country
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Nutrition Facts

Parister is a three-piece band from Louisville, led by guitarist/vocalist Jake Tapley and rounded out by Matt Filip on bass and drummer Adam Dickison. Here’s What You Wonder is the band’s second album following 2021’s Please Take Back Your Seat, and their first for Candlepin Records. The humble presentation of Here’s What You Wonder’s songs, in addition to Parister’s not-infrequent use of 90s indie rock distortion, helps them fit in with other bands on their label, but there’s an obvious twang to Tapley’s songwriting that puts it more in line with the likes of MJ Lenderman and fellow Louisville band State Champion than anything else (this isn’t quite “country-gaze”, but if that term intrigues you, you’d probably like this album).

Here’s What You Wonder is a generous album, with its thirteen songs all feeling full and complete, unfolding with Tapley’s unassuming but steady vocals guiding them, and the band sounding as polished or as loud as any one track requires. Parister pull off twinkling, jangly power pop in “Nutrition Facts”, downcast but uptempo country rock in “Opening Day”, fuzzy garage-barn rockers with “Bookmark” and “Pullover”, and restraint in “You Are the Paywall” and the two-minute epic “Crutch”. As a writer, Tapley practices less-is-more in the relatively straightforward lyrics to “Pet Sounds II” and “Bookmark”, but also can’t resist a Lenderman-esque odd metaphor here and there (the PEZ dispenser in “E-Z-P-E-Z”, the bag of chips in “Nutrition Facts”, “You are the paywall I deserve”). At the end of this strong collection of songs, Tapley sings about “slicing up a sizzle reel” over blaring guitars, inadvertently summing up Here’s What You Wonder quite nicely. (Bandcamp link)

Good Looking Son – Confirmed Bachelor

Release date: May 26th
Record label: Feel It
Genre: Piano rock, power pop, singer-songwriter
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Glitter Everywhere

As the lead singer of Bloomington, Indiana garage-rock-power-poppers The Cowboys, Keith Harman helms one of Feel It Records’ flagship bands. Harman’s piano playing and classic pop sensibilities helped shade The Cowboys’ intriguing flavor of rock and roll, and now he’s made an album as Good Looking Son that embraces these parts of his songwriting. Confirmed Bachelor follows 2021’s Fantasy Weekend EP, and this LP is a positively jaunty-sounding collection of spirited piano-led pop rock that still shows a bit of Harman’s other band (but without going out of the way to pay lip service to garage rock). Good Looking Son is a four-piece band (also featuring Jerome Westerkamp and John Clooney of Vacation, and Andrew Jody of Barrence Whitfield & the Savages), and the group of musicians punch up these pop songs without overwhelming them.

Confirmed Bachelor opens with something of a hybrid in the mid-tempo guitar pop of “Lovely Land of Massacre”, but Good Looking Son don’t hide their baroque sixties piano-pop side early on: “Forty Night Stand” and (especially) “*Glasses Clink, Men Laugh*” and “The Soft Open for the Cabaret” mark the album’s first half. While the latter features a mesmerizing guitar solo, it’s a piano-led song and no worse the wear for it. Good Looking Son show off their pop skills in the second half with the sugary circus-tent energy of “Glitter Everywhere” and the bouncy “The Unicorn”, refusing to run out of steam. The more garage rock-based songs on the album (“Lord Demon’s Delight”, “Long Form Girlfriend”, a sharp cover of the Bee Gees’ “I Don’t Think It’s Funny”) don’t feel out of place because they’re hook-fests as well. The Good Looking Son of Confirmed Bachelor follows Harman wherever he goes, and it’s all the better for it. (Bandcamp link)

Kicking Bird – Original Motion Picture Soundtrack

Release date: May 19th
Record label: Fort Lowell
Genre: Pop rock, power pop, indie pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Talking to Girls (On the Internet)

While I’ve written about plenty of East Coast bands in Pressing Concerns before, Wilmington, North Carolina’s Kicking Bird hail from a part of the Atlantic shoreline I believe I’ve yet to touch on. Released on local label Fort Lowell, Original Motion Picture Soundtrack is the five-piece band’s full-length debut, following a handful of singles and an EP in 2021. The first Kicking Bird album is a big old guitar pop record, an overstuffed collection of songs that feature three different vocalists (guitarist/bassists Shaun Paul and Tom Michels and keyboardist Shaylah Paul) and makes itself home in the world of vintage college rock, jangle pop, power pop, and wide-eyed indie rock.

Original Motion Picture Soundtrack knows how to make a good first impression–the roaring “Names Are Changing”, the smooth and persistent “Lauren”, and breezy surf-garage-pop of “Talking to Girls (On the Internet)” are all Pixies-as-straight-power-popper classics. The opening trio is hard to beat, but Kicking Bird toss out more rock-solid pop rock throughout the rest of the album– “Stuck” anchors the midsection of Original Motion Picture Soundtrack quite gamely, “238” chugs and handclaps its way into the heads of anyone who would hear it, and the fluffy “Rip Off” closes things out with a track that really underlines Kicking Bird’s 60s girl-group influences. It’s a commendable, hot-out-of-the-gate debut from a quite likable band. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

2 thoughts on “Pressing Concerns: PONY, Parister, Good Looking Son, Kicking Bird”

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  2. Pingback: Pressing Concerns: (T-T)b, Infinity Knives & Brian Ennals, Coffin Prick, Kicking Bird – Rosy Overdrive

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