Pressing Concerns: Heavenly, Cheekface, Girls Know, Fantastic Purple Spots

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Welcome to the last Pressing Concerns of January, and the first of the week! We’ve got a big couple of days ahead of us, starting off with today’s post, which looks at the new Cheekface album, new EPs from Girls Know and Fantastic Purple Spots, and a reissue of Heavenly‘s third album (which also includes that “Atta Girl” and “P.U.N.K. Girl” singles/EPs).

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Heavenly – The Decline and Fall of Heavenly (Reissue)

Release date: February 2nd
Record label: Skep Wax
Genre: Indie pop, twee, jangle pop, power pop, pop punk
Formats: Vinyl
Pull Track: Me and My Madness

The year is 2024, and I have to say that I like the band Heavenly more right now than I ever have before. To be clear, I’ve always enjoyed and appreciated the music of the British indie pop legends, but the recent entire-discography reissue campaign from Skep Wax (run by the band’s Amelia Fletcher and Robert Pursey, who also use it to release music from their current projects) has caused me to look closer at their short but hefty discography and realize just how well it holds up under scrutiny. After their first two records, 1991’s Vs. Satan and 1992’s Le Jardin de Heavenly, saw vinyl re-pressings in 2022 and 2023, respectively, Skep Wax has moved onto 1994’s The Decline and Fall of Heavenly this year. Although all the vinyl reissues have featured bonus tracks drawn from non-album singles released concurrently, this reissue’s extra material is particularly notable–1993’s “P.U.N.K. Girl” and “Atta Girl” singles and their B-sides (also released together as an EP in 1995) both appear on side two of The Decline and Fall of Heavenly, ensuring that those five songs–regarded as some of the best the band ever put to tape–aren’t left out of this reissue series.

Even for a Heavenly album, the proper The Decline and Fall of Heavenly is a short one (about twenty-five minutes), but the band’s momentum hadn’t slowed down a bit on the original eight songs. The band continued to get more polished and impressive in their song construction–songs like “Me and My Madness” and “Skipjack” in the first half of the album are giant-sounding, fully teased-out pop songs, and there are plenty of moments–the strings in the former of the two mentioned tracks, the horns punching up “Modestic”, the guitar solo in “Itchy Chin”–that show just how hard the band were trying to pack every song with just about everything they could. The vocal interplay between Fletcher and guitarist Cathy Rogers is a more important part of the band than ever here, both in the rockers (the chaotic pop chorus of “Me and My Madness”, answering each other in the retro romp of “Sperm Meets Egg, So What?”) and even on the relatively subtler songs (like “Three Star Compartment”, where they drift into and out of each other).

Fletcher and Rodgers singing over each other is also a key component of the “P.U.N.K Girl” / “Atta Girl” songs, particularly the A-side of the latter. These five songs are clearly of a piece, loosely and deftly weaving a narrative around some pretty heady topics together. The assault at the center of the EP is explicitly described in “Hearts and Crosses”, but the rest of the EP doesn’t shy away from it–with “Atta Girl”, the way Fletcher and Rodgers sing completely different lyrics is a compelling portrait of conflicting emotions, while on the other hand, the a cappella “So?” delivers its final verdict with pure certainty. What strikes me about these songs is that Heavenly neither tone down their “twee” indie pop side while writing about “serious” subjects, nor do they “play it up” in some sort of twisted, ironic way. They approach it the same way they would anything else, which shouldn’t be surprising when looking at “Atta Girl” and “P.U.N.K. Girl” in the context of Heavenly’s body of work (and, hell, the various other bands the members have formed after this one’s dissolution). Heavenly were true believers in the power of this kind of music–indie pop, twee, whatever you’d like to call it–and its ability to tackle anything head-on, and they left behind four albums that only proved them right. (Bandcamp link)

Cheekface – It’s Sorted

Release date: January 22nd
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Dance-punk, post-punk, art punk, Cheekface
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Life in a Bag

We know the drill with Cheekface by now, right? The Los Angeles trio release strong one-off singles whenever they feel like it, and then around once a year, with no pre-release or fanfare, an album shows up containing a few of those singles as well as some new material. That was the case with 2021’s Emphatically No. (the lead-off album of the first-ever issue of Pressing Concerns), that was how it went with 2022’s Too Much to Ask (their first self-released album and one of my favorites from that year), and now we’re back again in early 2024 with It’s Sorted, the fourth Cheekface LP. All four original songs they put out as singles last year make the cut (I’m not counting their cover of “(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding”), plus six new ones. The band still largely sound like Talking Heads, Elvis Costello, and Television devotees, and frontman Greg Katz is still sing-speaking and delivering line after quotable line to a degree that makes it difficult not to turn this writeup into a recounting of my favorite ones. 

And yet, It’s Sorted is something different than anything Cheekface has done up to this point. I went into the album blind, and, after a couple of listens, became struck with just how groovy it is. I dug around for the press release, and I found Katz talking about how the band decided not to worry about how they were going to play the album live while putting it together in the studio (apparently a departure for them). For Cheekface, this new approach resulted in something a little less “rock” and more rhythmic and dancefloor-ready. When they flirted with this kind of thing in previous songs (“Featured Singer”, “Vegan Water”) it was something of a novelty for them–this time around, it’s songs like the zippy punk of “Trophy Hunting at the Zoo” and the power poppy “Popular 2” that are the outliers. Call it Cheekface’s Berlin era, or say It’s Sorted is their Wide Awake!–either way, the trio are quite good at it.

Bassist Amanda Tannen and drummer Mark Echo Edwards can lock in with the dance-punkiest of them, transforming songs like “Grad School” and “Largest Muscle” into a completely new kind of Cheekface anthem, and adding a new dimension to more recognizably-Cheekface tracks like “I Am Continuing to Do My Thing” and “Life in a Bag”. Katz still sounds likes Katz, of course, but he’s also shifting his approach to meet the band’s new sound, juking, dodging, and stuttering his way through his lyrics (“I contain multitudes! I contain multiple dudes!”) like a millennial Max Headroom as necessary. It’s Sorted’s biggest surprise might be penultimate track “Don’t Stop Believing”, a guitar ballad unlike anything else in the band’s catalog. Katz actually sings in a way he doesn’t typically do on this one, and even though the lyrics aren’t exactly a departure from typical Cheekface fare, the change in delivery seems to unlock something the band hadn’t yet offered. Sure, Katz nicks one of the most iconic song titles of all-time to make his statement, but to paraphrase the song’s most memorable lyric–who can blame him? He lives in a society. (Bandcamp link)

Girls Know – All This Love Could Kill Me!

Release date: January 26th
Record label: Friend’s House
Genre: Fuzz rock, noise pop, lo-fi indie rock, garage rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Stranger

Girls Know are a Bellingham, Washington-based indie rock band started in 2022 by main songwriter Paul Sawicki, and they released their debut single “Some Words” the same year. They’ve since grown into a full band and have played a good deal of live shows in northern Washington, and have kicked off 2024 with the release of All This Love Could Kill Me!, their debut EP. Listening to the EP’s distorted, fuzzy rock music with a few electronic elements thrown in, it’s tempting to lump Girls Know in with the current wave of experimental shoegaze/dream pop groups, although they’re coming at it from a different angle than a lot of those bands. Underneath the waves of fuzz, Sawicki’s songwriting hews towards post-Strokes poppy garage rock more often than not, and there’s also a bit of early Car Seat Headrest-era lo-fi Bandcamp rock coming through on All This Love Could Kill Me! and even some emo-punk (notably, it also reminds me of fellow Washingtonians Enumclaw, another omnivorous rock group that uses copious distortion to color their guitar pop).

Girls Know take their time getting to their hooky side–“What a Horrible Night to Have a Curse…” is a bizarre introduction, found-sound spoken-word vocals over top of a synth-heavy soundscape, and “Stranger” glitches out before the curtain is finally pulled back and the band launch into a catchy fuzz-pop anthem. The “noise” and “pop” continue to stand side by side in “Ruin” (which starts off as the EP’s clearest moment before distorting itself just so) and “Lovesick” (whose reverb and special effects can’t obscure the mid-tempo ballad at the center of the song). The most urgent-sounding, quickest-paced moment on All This Love Could Kill Me! comes with “All That I Do”, a foot-on-the-gas rocker that steers itself into post-punk revival territory with its hard-hitting nervousness. Girls Know close the EP right where they started–“Girls3xxx”, All This Love Could Kill Me!’s closing track, is another sound collage-esque piece of experimental pop that bookends the record’s more familiar-sounding middle section. It gives the sense that Sawicki is working with an overarching vision in mind, making me intrigued for future Girls Know material–but, more importantly, All This Love Could Kill Me! is a blast to listen to. (Bandcamp link)

Fantastic Purple Spots – Vibrations Now

Release date: January 26th
Record label: ATHRecords
Genre: Indie pop, fuzz pop, twee, psychedelic pop, psychedelic rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Vibrations Now

Fantastic Purple Spots are an Austin-based psychedelic pop group co-led by Barrett Jones and Dave Junker. They debuted with a self-titled album in 2022, which was impressive enough to shake local indie rock chronicler ATHRecords (Flesh Lights, Pelvis Wrestley, Swansea Sound) out of a semi-hiatus to put out their follow-up record, the five-song Vibrations Now EP. Judging by this EP, Jones and Junker are fans of vintage indie rock and indie pop–they bring a Yo La Tengo-esque noise-pop dichotomy, a Guided by Voices-ish sense of melodic guitar playing, and a Flying Nun/K Records-y looseness and irreverence to their songwriting. All of this is shot through across Vibrations Now with psychedelic sensibilities that are, indeed, right out of the 1960s, whether it’s achieved through the instrumental textures, lyrics, or both.

Vibrations Now starts off with the hypnotizing, catchy, and melodic guitar riff that introduces opening track “Wondering, Wandering”, a piece of echo-y chamber pop that’s a fittingly low-key beginning for the EP. Second track “All Beings Happy and Free” ups both the band’s “psychedelic” and “pop” dials–the friendly acoustic strumming that anchors the track feels right out of Dunedin, while the mantra-like repetition of the titular line and the fractured guitar solo break that happens in the song’s second half both turn the song into something that floats cheerily above its simple pop structure. “Flyways of the Purple Spotted Tern” goes even further, a spoken-word piece of bright indie pop about the titular (fictional) bird and “the swift, imminent collapse of human civilizations”. The two more electric-sounding songs on Vibrations Now are the title track and closing number “You Can Always Come Down”–the former is a gently chugging tune that’s dripping with both fuzz and pop, and the latter is an indie pop skeleton that echoes via the cavernous-seeming recording and sails into backmasking drone-pop oblivion. It’s an enjoyably confusing punctuation mark to an enjoyably confusing record. (Bandcamp link)

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