Pressing Concerns: Onyon, Al Murb, Combat Naps, Zero Bars

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October is more than halfway over now, and Pressing Concerns continues to roll on with more great new music for you, the reader, to enjoy. This is a nice “under the radar” edition (even more than normal, yes), featuring new albums from Onyon, Al Murb, and Combat Naps, and a new EP from Zero Bars.

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.

Onyon – Last Days on Earth

Release date: October 13th
Record label: Trouble in Mind
Genre: Post-punk, punk, no wave, garage punk
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Egg Machine

Last year was a relatively quiet one for Trouble in Mind Records, but one intriguing release they did put out was a reissue of Onyon, the self-titled debut EP from the Leipzig, Germany-based quartet. That record’s sharp garage-y post-punk indeed sounded promising to me, and I didn’t have to wait too long to hear more from Onyon, as their debut full-length album has landed about a year and a half later. Last Days on Earth feels like a more fleshed-out version of their debut’s sound, both on a surface level (it only has three more songs than Onyon, but it’s twice as long) and inside the individual songs, in which the band (guitarist/vocalist Ilka Kellner, keyboardist/vocalist Maria Untheim, bassist Florian Schmidt, and drummer Mario Pongratz) take advantage of the album’s extra space to get just a bit weirder, without losing any of their garage-y fire.

Last Days on Earth introduces itself with the dizzy guitar riff and taut rhythm section of “Alien Alien”, a layered but lean piece of post-punk that requires a bit of restraint to pull off–and while the band turn up the amps on the following “Talking Worms” and “Egg Machine”, they’re still leaning just as heavily on rhythm and timing as they are on punk aggression. Untheim’s keyboard is a sneakily important ingredient in Onyon’s sound throughout the record–the in-one’s-face post-punk vocals and careening guitar are so prominent that it takes a second to realize just how much that, say, the whooshing, eerie synths on “Two Faces” or the chaotic chirping in “Dogman” are integral to these songs’ sounds. Thirty-seven minutes is actually on the longer end for this kind of record these days, but it’s hard to see what “fat” could’ve been trimmed here–two of the longest songs on the record (“I Would Like To Eat The Newspaper” and “Mower”) pad out the end of the album, but they’re both hypnotic and successful pieces of garage punk that earn their places on Last Days on Earth. I’d go as far as to say that the stretched-out nature of these songs is instrumental in making Onyon’s debut album feel like a substantial forward step for the band. (Bandcamp link)

Al Murb – BRD SHT

Release date: October 13th
Record label: Small Shot
Genre: Lo-fi pop, psychedelic pop, experimental rock, 90s indie rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Game Over

Al Murb is a Pocatello, Idaho-based basement rocker–his Bandcamp page features a steady stream of albums and singles dating back to 2017. Murb appears to be recording the bulk of his material himself, with a smattering of pseudonymous guest contributions on each record (BRD SHT features backing vocals from “Apples Over Oysters”, which appears to be a Scottish bedroom folk project, and “Beastmaster”, which could be a number of different things). BRD SHT is the sixth Al Murb album, following last year’s ACNE SCARS & BASKETBALL SHORTS, and on this one Murb is definitely making music for the true lo-fi indie rock scum amongst us. Although Murb certainly uses a few modern “bedroom pop” tricks, BRD SHT is more 90s indie rock-influenced than anything else. It reminds me of the latest album by Minneapolis’ Shrimp Olympics, but while that album’s guiding star is Martin Newell, Murb is more Malkmus/Berman (it has the low-key adventurousness of The Jicks, the sloppiness of early Pavement, and some of the Silver Jews’ twang).

Of course, having good influences is one thing, but none of that means much if Al Murb doesn’t have the songwriting skills to do something with them–thankfully, BRD SHT is a more than engaging enough listen. After the noisy intro track, “Mr. Huggable” opens the album on a weirdly fascinating note–it just sounds wrong, with Murb murmuring over an instrumental with a bizarrely forward drumbeat and a laid-back guitar groove. It takes until “Game Over” for BRD SHT to deliver something relatively straightforward, a guitar pop tune in which Murb puts on his best J. Mascis/Kurt Vile face to pull it off. This is how BRD SHT continues, Murb offering up psychedelic noisiness, multi-part prog-pop, and moments of clarity as he trips through these fourteen songs with a Dan Bejar-esque irreverence. On the one hand, Murb offers up overstuffed songs like “We’re Never Going Back to the Foam Pit” and six-minute closing track “The Moose’s Bitch”, and on the other hand, there’s stuff like the lo-fi drum machine jangle pop “Pumpkin Bowling” and the messy ballad of “Grief Jerky”. BRD SHT is a record that’s completely at home being all over the map. (Bandcamp link)

Combat Naps – Tap In

Release date: October 14th
Record label: ABC Postman
Genre: Power pop, indie pop, lo-fi pop, twee
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Water Tower

Neal Jochmann started Combat Naps as a solo project while living in Chicago in the mid-2010s; in 2018, he moved to Madison and started amassing a stable of collaborators–Tim Anderson, Marley Van Raalte, Ivette Colón, Ilych Meza. Although I’ve not seen Combat Naps live, Jochmann describes a dichotomy between the lo-fi, offbeat pop of the band’s recorded output (frequently played entirely by Jochmann himself) and the loud, punk-y confidence of the five-piece’s live shows (a duality shared by several of my favorite bands, from Guided by Voices to Pere Ubu). The twelve-song, 25-minute “mini album” Tap In is the second Combat Naps release of 2023, following January’s White Page EP, and it once again finds Jochmann and his collaborators in pure pop mode. These dozen tracks are brief, friendly dispatches of lo-fi guitar pop; I hear early Of Montreal here, as well as the more mellow moments of Tony Molina’s pre-solo career band Ovens, although there are plenty of moments where Jochmann dodges the obvious move to give the record a personal spin and capture some of the same intangible charm of his influences.

If Combat Naps want to call Tap In a mini-album, then it’s a mini-album, but there’s more than enough here to qualify it as a proper full-length in my book. The record opens with the perfect bouncy power pop of “Water Tower”, a piece of post-LVL UP weird shininess, and “Shuffling Letters” adds a bit of Midwestern rootsiness to the record’s sound in a way that makes perfect sense. The next few songs on the record are breezy and relatively simple, lulling the listener into a false sense of security before “Always Asking” brings the off-center side of Combat Naps back into the open with a deconstructed piece of bass-driven, almost proggy indie dance pop that suggests that Jochmann has listened to plenty of Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?-era Of Montreal as well. Tap In doesn’t run out of steam, continuing to dart towards their acoustic pop bread and butter (“Ready to Fall”, “Had It All to Say”) and some more surprises (like “Up to the Task”, which injects a bit of electric power pop into its tightly-constructed writing). Especially for people who enjoy the kind of music I cover regularly on Pressing Concerns, I can’t imagine not liking at least some aspects of Tap In. (Bandcamp link)

Zero Bars – Demo 2023

Release date: September 29th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Punk rock, hardcore punk, garage punk
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Pinhead Dust

Zero Bars’ Bandcamp bio contains two words: “No filler”–and considering that their debut cassette EP clocks in at under six minutes, it’s pretty essential that the Toronto trio live up to that ethos. The information that the group have online is pretty minimal, as well–their four-song debut, Demo 2023, was recorded by the group’s three members, Alex, Chris, and Josh, this past summer, and it’s available via cassette or free download on Bandcamp. No context is really needed to enjoy this brief statement of purpose from Zero Bars, however. The band are already excellent practitioners of vintage punk rock of Demo 2023–their laconic approach to songwriting and the sung-spoken vocals reach back to early hardcore, even as the band’s stealthily lean and limber music owes more to post-punk, garage rock, and “egg punk”. 

Demo 2023 feels like Zero Bars trying to distill their sound in real time–opening track “Vulgar Econo” is a gargantuan two minutes in length; by closing track “Goon”, they’ve gotten it down to forty-five seconds. Even though it’s the longest song on the record, “Vulgar Econo” also feels like one of the more straight-up punk-indebted songs on Demo 2023, with the lead singer’s bark of a vocal prowling across a slicing instrumental (the lyrics to Demo 2023 aren’t the focal point for me, but I will warmly nod to “Old Freddy Hayek can rest in piss” on this one). “Pinhead Dust” is perhaps the most esoteric moment on the EP; it’s a post-punk tune from the music, which emphasizes the plodding bass guitar and shuffling guitar parts, while the fuzzed-up “Heist” is the most garage punk that Zero Bars get. By the time that the trio have gotten to “Goon”, they’ve got this down to a science–a clean guitar riff opens the track, the rest of the band kick in, and the vocalist takes the mic to launch the song off with a propulsive momentum in under ten seconds. Zero Bars are absolutely ready to go. (Bandcamp link)

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