Pressing Concerns: Pespi, Cime, Joe Ziffer, Otis Shanty

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It’s a Monday in December, and we’re kicking the week off with a good, old-fashioned classic edition of Pressing Concerns. New albums from Pespi and Joe Ziffer, a live album from Cime, and an EP from Otis Shanty are featured in this edition. This is the last Pressing Concerns before Rosy Overdrive’s Year-End List season begins, but far from the last Pressing Concerns of 2023, so stay tuned for both of those in the coming days and weeks.

And, of course, this is your regular reminder to vote in the Rosy Overdrive Reader’s Poll by Christmas.

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.

Pespi – Salt Pepper Catshit

Release date: December 1st
Record label: Chemical Plant
Genre: Emo, punk
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Rats Don’t Dance

The memorably-named Pespi are a new New York-based emo-rock trio, although their roots stretch back to Connecticut a decade ago. The band’s lead singer and guitarist Harrison Watters has been releasing solo material for the past ten years, and brothers Rob and Matt Falcone have played bass and drums (respectively) in the band Blonde Otter since 2017. However, before that, the three played together in a high school band, and after reuniting to play a Modest Mouse cover set for Halloween last year, they found that a spark was still there, and Pespi was born. Salt Pepper Catshit, the debut Pespi release, is an odd record earning its curious name–Watters is clearly a striking and driven emo frontperson, and while his compositions form the backbone of the record, the Falcones’ rhythm section turns them into something else entirely, interspersing Watters’ ruminations and soul-pourings with lengthy instrumental passages that owe more to noisy, kinetic post-punk than the expected Midwest emo.

The inaugural Pespi album comes in at under a half-hour and only seven songs in length, a couple of which don’t seem to have actual titles–Salt Pepper Catshit sounds anything but incomplete or half-assed, though. Although the Falcones are largely responsible for blowing these songs wide open, Watters’ guitar playing is more than game to rise to what they lay in front of him, either chugging alongside the bass and drums when necessary or adding strange, memorable moments of melodies to the instrumentals (I mentioned that Pespi started by playing Modest Mouse covers, right?). Pespi holds out for over a minute in opening track “Rats Don’t Dance” before letting the vocals step onto the instrumental treadmill they created, while “Woes” finds time for both Dischord-y post-punk and emo-rock textures in about ninety seconds. With “Pespi_10”, it feels like Pespi is finally going to bust out a no-strings-attached emo anthem (“Overthinking everything / Underfeeling nothing,” Watters roars over a soaring instrumental), but they spend the second half of the song circling back and deconstructing it. This combination by and large works–listening to something like “Cereal”, it’s remarkable how Pespi toggles from Watters’ earnest indie-emo to sleek, instrumental math rock like it’s completely normal. (Bandcamp link)

Cime – Frida and the Filibusters Bid Farewell and Fall Asunder

Release date: December 1st
Record label: Syzygy/Skyline Tapes/BSDJ/Reasonable
Genre: Art punk, jazz punk, post-hardcore, noise rock
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Compay (Independencia)

Back in August, I wrote about the latest EP from Honduras-originating, California-based musician Monty Cime. Laurels of the End of History is a torrent of Latin music-influenced noise rock and art punk which I called “one of the most unique-sounding records I’ve heard this year”. Although the project bears Cime’s name, the credits of her latest EP reveal that it’s far from a “solo” endeavor–and several of those collaborators are responsible for Cime’s whirlwind live show, as well. Frida and the Filibusters Bid Farewell and Fall Asunder was recorded live at the FTG Warehouse in Santa Ana, CA on Laurels’ release date (August 18th), and features a seven-piece Monty Cime band tearing through songs from the new EP as well as last year’s The Independence of Central America Remains an Unfinished Experiment. 

Frida and the Filibusters… serves to introduce a new player to the band (alto saxophonist Sean Hoss), wave goodbye to a few older members (drummer Aron Farkas and guitarist Diego Gonzalez, as well as Jack von Bloeker V, who couldn’t appear on the record), and capture the energy of all of them together (bassist Jay Ingram, guitarist Rowan Collins, and multi-instrumentalist Ian Dennis round out the live band here). The band truly is a unique experience that merits this recording–it’s a pummeling, horn-laden, unique punk-noise-jazz-Latin-rock-experimental-hardcore experience led by Cime haranguing the audience both in her full-throated performances of the songs and in the space between them (memorably, she threatens to kill anyone who leaves before the next band’s set multiple times).

The interludes and between-song banter (particularly Cime’s discussion of Honduran music legend Guillermo Anderson before covering his “Por Esa Negra” and discussing how she and Farkas met through “a very silly and dumb website called Rate Your Music”) don’t derail any of the band’s momentum–they’re contextual strengtheners that sharpen the subsequent performances of older tunes and new ones (one can tell that they’ve been playing the year-old songs together for a while, although new ones “Yoro” and “City Upon a Hill” are integrated seamlessly into the set). The big conclusion is a frantic, hurricane-like version of Laurels… closing track “The Lost Last Man”, a song that feels destined to be a set-capper. It’s certainly a fitting curtain-drawing for this era of Cime, but I think we’d better to stick around to see the next band–or else. (Bandcamp link)

Joe Ziffer – Long Shadows

Release date: November 24th
Record label: Tenth Court
Genre: Lo-fi indie rock, folk rock, psychedelia, indie pop
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Master of Ceremonies

I’ve covered plenty of Australian rock music this year on Pressing Concerns, although I do believe that Joe Ziffer has facilitated Rosy Overdrive’s first foray into what’s going on in Adelaide. There’s been a lot of music from the continent as of late that combines guitar pop (in some form) with a lo-fi indie rock sensibility, but the debut Joe Ziffer album stakes out a uniquely memorable position in the field. Out on Tenth Court (Spice World, Mope City, The Sprouts), Long Shadows moves at a snail’s pace through ten deliberate pieces of unmarked pop music, with our guide creating a lovingly-crafted if not wobbly world of twilight rock music as he plays nearly everything on the record himself. The core tenet of Ziffer and his guitar is never toppled throughout Long Shadows–he’s clearly inspired by lost-sounding 1960s psychedelic folk, but while organs and keyboards add tallies to the psychedelic side of the equation, Ziffer stubbornly remains a molasses-moving troubadour throughout the album.

Joe Ziffer buries a good deal of pop melodies throughout Long Shadows–you’ll have to go digging for some of them, but that’s part of the appeal of Ziffer’s writing to me. The slow-breaking waves of opening track “Seaside” recall some of the lighter moments from labelmates Mope City, and the flute-aided “Master of Ceremonies” is a Flying Nun pop tune carefully traversing a gravel road. If one makes it through the sparsely hypnotic “Wishing Well”, Long Shadows rewards the listener with its version of “rock-and roll” in the form of “Waves”, “Mayday”, and “Ouroboros”, which lean on full band arrangements to take the record in some surprising directions (particularly the latter of the three, which rises to the level of “fluttering psychedelic pop” quite gamely). Along with Lucy May’s flute and vocals on “Mayday”, Elusive Radar’s bass on “Ouroboros” is one of the few outside contributions to Long Shadows–another one from Radar, organ on “Jet Streams”, is scarcely different from Ziffer’s own key-playing. Something like Long Shadows evokes an incidental, random air, but its pieces don’t fit together this well by accident. (Bandcamp link)

Otis Shanty – Early Birds

Release date: October 6th
Record label: Boston Street
Genre: Indie pop, jangle pop, folk rock, dream pop
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Parting Ways

Otis Shanty are an intriguing quartet who formed in upstate New York in the late 2010s and are currently based in Somerville. They appear to be named for the town in western Massachusetts where they rented a cabin to record their debut EP, Space for Good Things, which came out in 2019; the Suite 33 full-length followed two years later. The band’s second EP and third overall record, Early Birds, is a four-song record that portrays the confidence and skill of a band who’s making something special together. The group (vocalist/multi-instrumentalist Sadye Bobbette, guitarist Ryan DiLello, bassist Julian Snyder, and drummer Jono Quinn) take their time letting these sparkling pieces of indie rock develop–the EP reaches nearly twenty minutes in length, and no individual song is under four. DiLello’s guitar playing is incredibly laid-back, sketching plenty of hazy, Real Estate-esque dreamy, jangly melodies as the rest of the band wander through sprawling, timeless-sounding folk and indie rock.

The opening title track to Early Birds is a workmanlike piece of guitar pop, with hooks baked into the song’s structure but not coming off as overly showy (in the same way that Bobbette’s vocals, which hover between conversational and wistful, are sneakily very impressive). “Early Birds” eventually builds to an impressive conclusion, while “Inch Away” takes much of the same ingredients and shows a bit more restraint in its more subdued finale. “Daylight Savings” lets Snyder’s bass dominate the opening half of the song, crawling along slowly but steadily before the big, horn-featuring conclusion that perhaps functions as the climax of the EP takes shape. “Parting Ways” closes Early Birds out with another slow-build, although it’s DiLello’s shimmering guitar that both comprises the bulk of the foundation and becomes the instrument of its Yo La Tengo-esque torching in the last minute. It’s a lot of space to traverse, but Otis Shanty are locked-in enough that it feels like a breeze. (Bandcamp link)

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