Pressing Concerns: CLASS, Truth Club, Bewilder, Joey Nebulous

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Welcome to the Thursday Pressing Concerns! Today, I’ve written about four albums that come out tomorrow: new ones from CLASS, Truth Club, Bewilder, and Joey Nebulous. Four great albums from four of the best labels in recent history! Rosy Overdrive has been on a tear lately; if you missed Monday’s look at records from Deady, Jerry David DeCicca, SIZ, and Thank You, I’m Sorry, or Tuesday’s September Playlist/Round-Up, then those are two more blog posts for you to check 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.

CLASS – If You’ve Got Nothing

Release date: October 6th
Record label: Feel It
Genre: Garage rock, punk rock, power pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: As If It’d Even the Score

We can’t say that the last year and a half hasn’t had CLASS. The Tucson quartet have put out four records since June 2022 saw the release of their self-titled debut EP; last October’s Epoca de Los Vaqueros ended up being one of my favorite albums of last year, and February’s But Who’s Reading Me? EP continued CLASS’ hot streak into 2023. All of this has led up to If You’ve Got Nothing, their second full-length album and the most complete that CLASS have sounded yet. While Epoca de Los Vaqueros sounded like a talented group of musicians (guitarist/vocalists Andy Puig and Eric Meyer, bassist/vocalist Jim Colby, and drummer Ryan Chavira) trying on a few different strains of noisy garage rock, egg punk, and power pop, If You’ve Got Nothing is the result of the quartet zeroing in on the latter, bashing out a dozen ace pieces of glam-influenced power pop in half an hour, breaking out songs with plenty of hooks but still enough of the signature CLASS bite.

“Public Void” is a somewhat casual opening track, letting Colby’s bass do a lot of the talking as CLASS wind up to lob several power pop fastballs across the record’s first side–the ripped-from-the-70s smoothness of “Behind the Ball”, the toe-tapping “Coward’s Disaster”, the runaway train of “Between the Lines”, and the belt-along “Two-Way Track”. Three of the songs on the album are reused from But Who’s Reading Me? (and one from CLASS), but I can’t be too mad at hearing them again, particularly “Inspect the Receipt”, a hurricane of melodic guitars and bouncing hooks that fits perfectly on If You’ve Got Nothing. Another repeat, “Burning Cash”, stakes out a position in the record’s midsection along with “Just Another Number”, the twin sneering garage rockers letting us know CLASS still has a bit of that in them before once again accelerating to maximum punk-pop levels in the record’s home stretch. My favorite song might actually be the penultimate “As If It’d Even the Score”, a glam rock/AOR-flavored strut that is as catchy as anything else on the record, just a little weirder. It’s a good a sign as any that, while CLASS might be locked into a groove on If You’ve Got Nothing, they’re not on autopilot. (Bandcamp link)

Truth Club – Running from the Chase

Release date: October 6th
Record label: Double Double Whammy
Genre: Post-punk, noise rock, 90s indie rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Is This Working?

Raleigh’s Truth Club arrived on the scene in 2019 with Not an Exit, a confident debut album that contained shades of post-punk, noise rock, and slowcore-y bedroom rock without being constrained by the limitations frequently inherent in any of those individual genres. It was a great fit for their then-label Tiny Engines, and looking back on it now it feels related more than anything else to similarly adventurous indie rock groups like Pile and former labelmates Peaer. Now on Double Double Whammy (2nd Grade, The Goodbye Party, Charlotte Cornfield), the original trio of Travis Harrington, Elise Jaffe, and Kameron Vann have been joined by multi-instrumentalist Yvonne Chazal for Running from the Chase, their long-awaited sophomore album. On first blush, the new album feels like a louder, beefed-up version of their debut–Truth Club certainly haven’t abandoned nuance and subtlety, but some of the lighter moments of Not an Exit have been replaced by a four-piece rock band confidently locking into place with each other and moving forward together.

Running from the Chase finds solid ground in unpredictability; it opens with a handful of “rockers”, but of different strains–the winding “Suffer Debt” and the steady advance of “Uh Oh” are both slow builders, reaching their noisy conclusions after a good deal of work to get there, while the fuzz-punk-ish “Blue Eternal” unleashes itself right out of the gate. The chugging “Clover” a couple songs later might be the heaviest Running from the Chase gets, taking a surprising turn into Hum-ish, downtuned power chord-heavy alt-metal territory. Even in that song, however, Truth Club explore moments of atmospherics and acoustic guitar to give us all some breathing room, and there’s a lot of liminal moments like this throughout the record as a whole. “77x” and “Exit Cycle” function as this end of the Truth Club spectrum in the album’s first half, while the second half looks behind the curtain in “Dancing Around My Tongue”, “The Chase”, and the first part of “Break the Stones”. The latter song explodes into yet another kinetic, noisy finish, although the album’s big crescendo–the ending of the six-minute “Is This Working?”–is a more controlled piece of earth-boring. It’s one final impressive statement from the band, slowly taking the form of their finest moment. (Bandcamp link)

Bewilder – From the Eyrie

Release date: October 6th
Record label: Tiny Engines
Genre: Midwest emo, folk rock, slowcore, post-rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Cooperative 

Never thought I’d be writing about a new album from Tiny Engines in Pressing Concerns, no. Rosy Overdrive was founded after the label went under in late 2019, but their influence has been evident via so many bands who once released music on the label showing up on the blog over the past few years. It seems appropriate to me that the first release on the rebooted version of the label isn’t one of their flagship acts, but the debut album from an under-the-radar, previously unsigned group that gets the label back to its emo-ish indie rock roots. Bewilder is the British duo of vocalist/guitarist George Brooks and multi-instrumentalist Thom Wilkinson; somewhat amazingly, they’ve been around since at least 2011, although their most recent release had been 2018’s Everything Up to Now EP. Brooks and Wilkinson are true emo fans, citing Mineral and American Football as influences, but From the Eyrie, their debut album, doesn’t feel like an attempt to recreate a late 90s second-wave record.

Rather, it’s the duo’s non-“traditional” emo influences (Carissa’s Wierd, Pinback) that give one the truest grasp on what From the Eyrie’s deliberate, ornate, delicate version of indie rock sounds like. I’d even go as far as to say that there are moments on the record that sound more like Modest Mouse or even The National than anything that came out on Jade Tree. Brooks’ vocals are an understated element in walking this balance–he’s more emotive than your typical slowcore singer, but he holds back more than your normal emo frontperson. They end up with something like opening track “Heavy Sweater”, which is downcast but still huge-sounding at the same time. The string deployment and crescendoing of “By the River” showcases Bewilder’s strengths, and they return to this basic structure several more times over From the Eyrie even as they add small but real wrinkles to it (the surprisingly-percussion-led “Breaking”, the two-minute, streamlined closing track “Cooperative”). It’s no small thing, being the record that bears the burden of reintroducing an imprint that was once quite important to me and many others, but From the Eyrie is sure of itself and up to the task of standing on its own. (Bandcamp link)

Joey Nebulous – Joey Spumoni Creamy Dreamy Party All the Time

Release date: October 6th
Record label: Dear Life
Genre: Indie pop, bedroom pop, synthpop, twee
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track:  Friends of Joy

Joey Nebulous has been around for a while. I remember the Chicago indie pop band touring a decent amount in the second half of the 2010s; around this time, Joey Nebulous was releasing a handful of cassette EPs on Sleeper Records (Puppy Problems, 2nd Grade,  Ylayali) and solidifying into a quartet (founding singer-songwriter Joseph Farago, keyboardist Margaret McCarthy, bassist/guitarist Wilson Brehmer, and drummer Logan Novak). All this has led up to Joey Spumoni Creamy Dreamy Party All the Time, Joey Nebulous’ long-awaited debut full-length album, which was pieced together over the pandemic by the band and a handful of familiar faces providing instrumental and technical support as well (Options/Mister Goblin’s Seth Engel, Jodi’s Nico Levine, Ther’s Heather Jones, Lucas Knapp). 

Joey Spumoni is a whirlwind queer pop record–Farago’s falsetto is the first striking thing about these eighteen songs, followed very closely by his lyrics, in which the singer-songwriter covers boys, love (and where these two things intersect), Hollywood, food (and, on multiple occasions, where this intersects with boys as well), and Bob’s Burgers, among many other subjects. Joey Spumoni kind of reminds me of the bedroom pop side of Shamir’s discography, although Farago spends plenty of the album establishing his own personality on highlight after highlight from the power pop rock of “Joey’s Tour” (“I got to go / Take the gay-mobile as far as I can go”) to the bursting “You’re Straight” (“…But I’m gonna be honest / If you were gay I’d be more excited”) to “Honeys in Hell”, somewhat of a mission statement (“God has sent them all down there / So I might as well follow them”). Joey Spumoni ends with a pair of reassurances: “Joey is always there for me / Joey is always on my time,” Levine sings on the stripped-down “Joey’s There”, and the band end with the polished pop of “Friends of Joey” and Farago’s declaration of “I’m always there for you when you want it”. Both of these final two songs are excellent in their own right, and they’re a fitting cap to an album that comes off as friendly and inviting throughout. (Bandcamp link)

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