Pressing Concerns: The Umbrellas, Radical Kitten, Honeypuppy, Yama Uba

Posted byrosyoverdrivePosted inPressing ConcernsTags:, , , , , , , ,

Welcome! The final full week of January is upon us, and this edition of Pressing Concerns looks at four records that either have already come out this week or will come out on Friday. New albums from The Umbrellas, Radical Kitten, and Yama Uba, as well as a new EP from Honeypuppy, appear in this blog post. If you missed Monday’s Pressing Concerns (featuring Be Safe, Loto, Zowy, and Capsuna), check that one out here. Also this week, I explored the world of various-artist Neil Young cover compilations on Bandcamp, which is hopefully as fun for you to read as it was for me to put together.

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.

The Umbrellas – Fairweather Friend

Release date: January 26th
Record label: Slumberland/Tough Love
Genre: Jangle pop, indie pop, power pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: When You Find Out

When I think of “modern jangle pop”, the song that comes to mind almost immediately is “She Buys Herself Flowers” by San Francisco quartet The Umbrellas, off of their 2021 self-titled debut album. It’s just such a well-crafted, instantly-memorable piece of guitar pop in the middle of a record that, in some ways, feels like the platonic ideal of C86-inspired indie pop. Just about the only knock one could have on The Umbrellas is that it’s so laser-focused on recreating a previous era of pop music that it might not exactly have a distinct personality of its own, but this is the arena the band have turned to conquer next with their sophomore album, Fairweather Friend. Vocalist/guitarists Matt Ferrara and Morgan Stanley feel more intertwined than ever across these songs, and rhythm section Nick Oka (bass) and Keith Frerichs (drums) are sharper, too. One interesting footnote is that The Umbrellas toured with both Fucked Up and Ceremony–two bands rooted in hardcore punk but make music that expands beyond that genre–in between their two albums, and while I’m not going to say I heard any hardcore in Fairweather Friend, it rocks, on average, more than The Umbrellas did.

Fairweather Friend kicks off with “Three Cheers”, a song that’s not as fast-paced as other moments on the record but, thanks to the band’s performance, is a Heavenly example of indie pop played deftly by a full-on rock band. When they want to make a fuzzy, downhill-sledding punk-pop song, they set their mind to it with “Toe the Line”, a surprisingly noisy rocker, and while The Umbrellas don’t put all that together in the exact same way again on the record, there are pieces of that side of them throughout Fairweather Friend–the distortion in “Say What You Mean”, the bursting energy of “When You Find Out”, and the giddy bassline and guitar soloing in “Gone” and “Games”. Even something like “Goodbye”, which has all the makings of wistful autumnal indie pop, starts off as a power pop single and gets punched up by a brisk drumbeat throughout its entire runtime. When The Umbrellas have a song on their hands that’d be best served by the quartet holding back a bit–like the penultimate “Blue”–they still do so, grinding the high-flying side of the band to a halt for nearly four and a half minutes to let the acoustic folk-pop track do everything it’s capable of doing. It’d be a strong, stark closer, but The Umbrellas instead cap off Fairweather Friend with the triumphant power pop of “PM”, a song that keeps finding another gear in which to shift to push against its quite melancholic core. It’s both a nod to the classic indie pop from which they arose and a demonstration of just what the band can do with it. (Bandcamp link)

Radical Kitten – Uppercat

Release date: January 26th
Record label: Araki/Attila Tralala/Contraszt/Coolax/Domination Queer/Dushtu/Gurdulu/Hidden Bay/La Loutre par les cornes/Cartelle/Seitan’s Hell Bike Punks/Stonehenge/Tomaturj/Uppercat
Genre: Post-punk, noise rock, punk
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Never on Time

A week after looking at Petit Bureau’s Bear’s Brain, we’re back again this time with yet another French band who are releasing a record on a comically large number of record labels. Like Petit Bureau, Radical Kitten are from Toulouse, and are putting out their second album, Uppercat, through Hidden Bay–as well as a dozen other imprints. Radical Kitten are a “rrriot postpunk meow” trio made up of bassist/vocalist Marin, guitarist/vocalist Iso, and drummer Lambert (although the drums on these recordings are by founding member Marion, who departed the band soon thereafter). Compared to their debut, 2020’s Silence Is Violence, Uppercat is shorter (seven songs, twenty minutes and available as a 12” max single, compared to the twelve-track, 35-minute debut LP), but Radical Kitten manage to pack plenty of energy and fury in the form of noisy punk and post-punk within these confines. It’s easy to cite Sonic Youth as an influence, but Radical Kitten incorporate elements of that band in an intriguing way–they take Sonic Youth’s penchant for ear-splitting guitar feedback and apply it to turn-of-the-century garage-y post-punk in a manner that can be both heavy and fun-sounding.

Opening track “Never on Time” distills Radical Kitten down to their base elements pleasingly–a runaway post-punk bass girds the low-end of the track, marked by the rise and fall of generous levels of distorted guitar. The vocals on that one veer between post-punk restraint and riot grrrl belting, and on the punkier “Mouse Trap”, the vocalist leans into the latter to go with the instrumental’s noisy, new wave-y stutter. Radical Kitten don’t separate out their playful side and their heavy-duty noise rock side throughout all of Uppercat–closing track “Worst Friend”, for instance, opens with a colorful splatter of a guitar riff and closes with a cathartic, noisy chewing-out of the titular ex-friend. The middle of the record is where Radical Kitten come off the most as straight-up “riot grrrl punks”, with “No Means No” and “Fake As Fuck” selling their relatively simple punk rock foundations with an energy to match the (just as present) noisy guitar assault. That being said, my favorite moment on the record just might be penultimate track “Afraid to Die”, a song where Radical Kitten take their energy and focus it on blowing out a post-punk chant into something harrowing. True to their name to the end, Radical Kitten sound friendly and dangerous in equal measure throughout Uppercat. (Bandcamp link)

Honeypuppy – Nymphet

Release date: January 24th
Record label: Indecent Artistry
Genre: Indie pop, twee, fuzz rock, power pop
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Kerosene

Last year, I wrote about Ad Nauseum by Athens, Georgia’s Telemarket, a warped collection of 90s-inspired indie rock that fit in well with the quintet’s hometown. This year sees the introduction of Honeypuppy, a new group featuring four-fifths of the Telemarket lineup. While guitarist/bassist Adam Wayton was the lead songwriter of Telemarket, Honeypuppy is the project of Telemarket keyboardist Josie Callahan–for the new band, Callahan is the lead vocalist, songwriter, and rhythm guitarist, Wayton is on bass, and Telemarket’s Will Wise and Jack Colclough round out the band on lead guitar and drums, respectively. The five-song (seven if you count two bonus demos) Nymphet EP is our first glimpse of Honeypuppy, and they seem more like straight shooters than Telemarket–Callahan is an excellent pop songwriter, as all of these songs boast big hooks. And yet, Honeypuppy still find time to break out some noisy, speedy, guitar-freakout indie rock in their opening statement, almost certainly benefiting from the quartet’s previous experience playing together.

“Penny Press” opens Nymphet with a fluffy, retro-sounding twee/indie pop song that’s about midway between C86 and Elephant 6 and featuring a winking chorus (“When she was good, she was very very very good / When she was bad, she was horrid”) that does a great job of establishing Callahan’s voice as a songwriter. The one thing “Penny Press” doesn’t prepare the listener for is the louder side of Honeypuppy, which rears up in every subsequent song on the EP, albeit some (the punk-pop attitude-heavy sprint of “Suck Up” and fiery garage rock closer “Kerosene”) more than others (the title track and “Thrum a Thread”, both of which start off as low-key pop rock before building to big conclusions). Nymphet is always a pop record, whether it’s via the girl-group-on-Kill Rock Stars vibes of “Suck Up”, the subtly toe-tapping title track, or the laid-back sunny flower-garden pop of “Thrum a Thread”. This feeling extends into the two “bonus tracks” at the end of the EP, demo versions of “Penny Press” and “Nymphet”. The former sounds pretty damn close to the final product, but the early version of the title track is a surprising piece of dreamy folk that sounds pretty far removed from anything else on Nymphet. It’s a testament to what the collaboration of the members of Honeypuppy can accomplish but also evidence of an interesting core. (Bandcamp link)

Yama Uba – Silhouettes

Release date: January 24th
Record label: Ratskin/Psychic Eye
Genre: Darkwave, synthpop, post-punk, goth
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Disappear

Yama Uba is an Oakland-based darkwave/goth rock duo made up of vocalist/bassist/synth player Akiko Sampson and vocalist/guitarist/saxophonist Winter Zora. Sampson and Zora play together in post-punk quartet Ötzi; Zora also plays in Mystic Princess, while Sampson is the founder of Psychic Eye Records. Psychic Eye is co-releasing Yama Uba’s debut album along with Ratskin Records–after a string of singles and compilation appearances dating back to 2018, Silhouettes is the culmination of a half-decade of the band, collecting a few of their previously-released tracks and pairing them with plenty of new material. On Silhouettes, Zora and Sampson do their best to transport us all back to the early 1980s, marrying a Siouxsie and the Banshees-esque “dark, but pop” attitude with an early synthpop or even industrial-pop reliance on drum machines to hammer out their tunes.

It becomes very clear from the opening moments of “Disappear”, a dark new wave pop song with a pounding drum machine backbeat, that Yama Uba aren’t dealing in half-measures–Silhouettes is all-in on this kind of music. The synthpop of “Shapes” is punched up by some dramatic vocals and Zora’s saxophone, and “Shatter” moves sleekly and slowly before, ahem, shattering in the chorus.  Yama Uba pull out a cover right in the middle of the record–The Passions’ “I’m in Love with a German Film Star” is a classic of the genre, but it’s also not the most obvious choice, and the band’s increasingly-busy-sounding synth-rock take on it fits in well with the rest of Silhouettes. I wouldn’t say that there are many big surprises throughout the record–you’re going to get plenty of full-sounding, confident goth-pop anthems, from “Facade” to “Laura”–although it does get a little frayed at the end between the somewhat-psychedelic “Claustrophobia” and closing track “Angel”. The latter track was the first song Yama Uba ever released, and this recording of it sounds looser and more lo-fi than the rest of the record, almost industrial in its noisiness. Even so, Zora and Sampson hold the song together until the end. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Leave a comment