Pressing Concerns: Teen Driver, Stuart Pearce, Iffin, Lost Ships

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Welcome to an especially fun Monday edition of Pressing Concerns! If you like weirdos making pop music (and if you read this blog, you probably do), then you’ll enjoy this entry. This time, new EPs from Teen Driver and Iffin and new albums from Stuart Pearce and Lost Ships are on the docket.

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.

Teen Driver – Learner’s Permit

Release date: July 14th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Post-punk, art punk
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Clang Clang

From the desolate, Mad Max wasteland (I assume, I’ve never been there) of western Massachusetts, an intriguing new post-punk group has emerged. Teen Driver are a quartet based out of Northampton, led by vocalist/lyricists Mark Gurarie (who also plays guitar) and Riley Hernandez (who also plays synths), and rounded out by bassist Kevin Sun and drummer Matthew Liebowitz. Teen Driver’s debut release, the aptly-titled Learner’s Permit EP, is five songs of energetic rock music that can be loosely filed under post-punk, although there’s plenty of new wave, 90s indie rock, dance punk, garage rock, and good old-fashioned punk rock in there as well. If the notion of the Minutemen trying to play songs by The Cars while also being huge krautrock fans is up your alley, I’d recommend giving Learner’s Permit a listen.

Learner’s Permit only runs about a dozen minutes in length–Teen Driver don’t waste any time getting started with “Neu! Driver 1”. The soaring mission-statement opening song features dueling synths and guitars, evoking the krautrock-loving driver the song imagines. The “hit” of the EP follows in “Clang Clang”, a power pop tune with a big-old-synth hook that feels like something off of the last Kiwi Jr. album with the “jittery” and “slacker” levels inverted. Learner’s Permit isn’t content to just coast from there, as the next two songs–the dance-friendly post-punk of “Sadvertising” and the electronic hardcore-influenced synthpunk tune “Range Rover”–both sound like nothing else on the album. Although “Neu! Driver 2” doesn’t exactly sound like a krautrock song, the four-minute track moves forward steadily in a way clearly influenced by the genre, giving Learner’s Permit one last twist before motoring off into the night. (Bandcamp link)

Stuart Pearce – Red Sport International

Release date: July 14th
Record label: Safe Suburban Home
Genre: Post-punk, punk, garage rock
Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Forza Garibaldi

York-based label Safe Suburban Home has been on a roll lately, putting out quality indie rock records from the likes of Dignan Porch, Wandering Summer, and Sewage Farm over the course of the past few months. Their latest release, Red Sport International by Stuart Pearce, may be something of a black sheep among their recent catalog in several ways, but in one aspect it fits right in: it’s an incredibly British-sounding album. Specifically, the Nottingham group have a sound that’s certainly indebted to the collar-grabbing post-punk of The Fall on their debut studio album. Being a modern post-punk group influenced by The Fall isn’t unique these days, but Stuart Pearce succeed more than most by (instead of parking themselves in the drab, one-note noise rock-y heaviness that most groups favor) emphasizing the more flexible end of the band, taking a well-worn toolkit and turning it into something dynamic while still maintaining a righteous fury. 

The frantic, motormouth spoken-word garage rock of “Forza Garibaldi” opens Red Sport International with a real scorcher, a synth–aided stomper that uses football as a catalyst to lambast right-wing anti-immigration rhetoric, among other topics. Tracks like the almost-bouncy “Naar de Stad” and the stomping “Failing Sovjet State” invoke Stuart Pearce’s rollicking, Mark E. Smith side, while the dramatic “Badd Hunterr” and breakneck “New Cod War” immediately following them emphasize the band’s high-flying garage rock tendencies. At fourteen tracks and nearly 45 minutes, Stuart Pearce make sure they put everything they’ve got into their opening statement of a record. Red Sport International might not land as many immediate punches in its second half, but more subtle tracks like “Future-Now” and “Red Harvest” are rewarding in their own right. And plus, Stuart Pearce certainly aren’t going out on a whimper–the glam racket of “Colonia” and red-hot bass-driven post-punk of “Union Man” send the album out with just as much force as it carried in its beginning. (Bandcamp link)

Iffin – Picaro 1: As the Crow Fights

Release date: July 11th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Post-punk, indie pop
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Julian Was Here

Seattle’s Mira Tsarina has played in the bands Day Sleeper, Boy Friends, and Cfcq + The Piss of Assurance, with the latter of the three eventually turning into Iffin, her current project. Iffin has steadily been putting out solid singles and EPs for the past couple of years; the most recent Iffin release is the four-song Picaro 1: As the Crow Fights. This EP continues the Iffin exploration of pleasing guitar pop of releases like earlier this year’s “Another Deepish” single. Shades of new wave, college rock, and lo-fi indie rock color Picaro 1–I hear everything from Guided by Voices to Game Theory to Nothing Painted Blue in these tracks (not coincidentally, Tsarina is particularly inspired by The Verlaines, and Flying Nun Records is a common touchpoint for all those aforementioned groups).

Picaro 1: As the Crow Fights opens with the nervous-sounding guitar-chiming of “Julian Was Here”, a classic Scott Miller/Bob Pollard-esque skewed pop tune that doesn’t lose anything as it makes a few left-turns and surprising chord changes. The light jangle of “Girls Like Us” also feels a little dark underneath its bright arpeggio, but if anything it’s more of a pop success than the song immediately preceding it. The second half of Picaro 1 is the more Flying Nun-indebted side, albeit in different ways–the acoustic-led “My Majesty” feels pastoral and about as peaceful as Iffin get, while “A Paean Away” closes the EP with Tsarina’s version of a cacophony–busy-sounding but still pretty tuneful. (Bandcamp link)

Lost Ships – Atoms Collide Forever

Release date: June 30th
Record label: Subjangle
Genre: Jangle pop, indie pop
Formats: CD, digital
Pull Track: Brittle Heart Foundation

Rare is it that a band releases their debut full-length album some thirty years after forming, but that’s what we have here with Lost Ships’ Atoms Collide Forever. The British indie pop band weren’t called Lost Ships when they formed in the late 1980s, however–during their initial run, they were known as The Kites, and they released a couple of EPs on the label Happy Accident before fading into obscurity, seemingly forever. However, the four members of the band reunited in the late 2010s, rechristened themselves to the slightly more Googleable Lost Ships, and set to work making new music, putting out three EPs between 2018 and 2021 on Subjangle (Cozy Slippers, The National Honor Society, The Ashenden Papers). Still without a long-player to their name, last month’s Atoms Collide Forever finally rectifies this.

Like the Stuart Pearce album, Atoms Collide Forever is fourteen songs and about forty-five minutes in length–they may have waited a while to make a full album, but they certainly didn’t hold back once they finally got there. Enjoyable, catchy, breezy and jangly guitar pop can be found throughout the record, although the opening two tracks set a high bar: the brisk, effortlessly melodic “The Brittle Heart Foundation” and the big-chorus heartache of “I’m in Love with Your Girlfriend” both are instantly memorable. Taken as a whole, the album feels like one long pop meditation, and different songs peek out from the lapping waves on each listen–the lilting showtune/road song “Highway 62”, the fizzy mid-record highlight “Derek from Domino’s”, the handclap-aided “Toaster Song”. As a long overdue debut, Atoms Collide Forever more than acquits itself. (Bandcamp link)

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