Pressing Concerns: Guitar, Westall 66, Dead Bandit, Pinkhouse

It’s the start of yet another busy week in February in terms of Pressing Concerns! Today, we’re looked at two records that came out last week–a new album from Dead Bandit and a new EP from Guitar–plus catching up on two January EPs I missed earlier in the year from Westall 66 and Pinkhouse.

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.

Guitar – Casting Spells on Turtlehead

Release date: February 7^th
Record label: Spared Flesh/Julia’s War
Genre: Shoegaze, experimental rock, noise pop, fuzz rock, garage rock, lo-fi indie rock
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Baying of Dogs

Back in August 2022, I wrote an EP called Guitar by a band called Guitar (at that point, basically just Portland’s Saia Kuli), which I thought was one of the more intriguing debuts from that year. Perhaps predestined by the name of the project, the seven-song cassette flew under the radar, but its weird, transfixing lo-fi post-punk sound stuck with me. Guitar has linked up with Julia’s War Recordings for its second EP–the Philadelphia label who’s right at the center of modern experimental shoegaze is co-releasing Casting Spells on Turtlehead with the band’s previous home of Spared Flesh. Based off of Guitar, it’s kind of an odd pairing, but after listening to Casting Spells on Turtlehead, it starts to make a lot of sense. Kuli brings a louder, noisier sound to the project’s latest release, and he gets a little more help this time around (his partner Jonny, the only other person to contribute to Guitar, appears on this EP as well, but Kuli also enlists drummer Nikhil Wadhwa, vocalist Zoe Tricoche, and harmonica player Lukas Hanson for the record). As it turns out, a more fleshed-out Guitar sounds surprisingly like it fits right in with the current wave of omnivorous noise pop/shoegaze acts.

Although Casting Spells on Turtlehead doesn’t sound quite like the Guitar I enjoyed at first, it’s not a huge departure, and I can’t fault Kuli for changing up his sound a bit when the results are this good. This EP kind of reminds me of Guided by Voices–there are shoegaze bands like Gaadge and Ex Pilots who invoke GBV by sneaking Robert Pollard-like melodies underneath their distortion, but Guitar do it in a different way, by reflecting that band’s grab-bag, collage-inspired nature. Like an early Guided by Voices EP, Casting Spells on Turtlehead feels like a collection of disparate but connected moments–the beautiful, melodic guitar riff that runs through “Baying of Dogs”, the basement-acoustic immediacy of the title track, the lumbering but somehow fun fuzz rock of “Kiss Me You Idiot”, Jonny’s turn on lead vocals on the even-more-of-a-left-turn-than-usual, trippy dream pop of “Twin Orbits”. Not that Guitar was the most predictable record, but Guitar are truly all over the place on Casting Spells on Turtlehead, even straight-up rocking harder than they ever have before on the Ovlov-ish opening track “My City My Rules” and the wall-of-sound garage-gaze of closing track “Unleashed”. Even these songs are unpredictable, with Hanson’s harmonica turning up on the former and Tricoche’s screaming on the latter. Guitar have stepped things up a bit on their newest release, and hopefully some more people take notice accordingly. (Bandcamp link)

Westall 66 – Staring at the Sun

Release date: January 19^th
Record label: Slippery Slope
Genre: Power pop, pop punk, alt-rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Leaving Me Behind

I’ve covered plenty of Australian rock music in Pressing Concerns before, but Melbourne’s Westall 66 is in a bit of uncharted territory. Neither the sardonic “Devo-core” garage punk of bands like Delivery, Vintage Crop, and CLAMM nor the minimalist indie pop of Spice World, Soft Covers, and Pretty in Pink, Westall 66 trades in the business of big, hooky, polished pop punk. The quartet cite The Menzingers as an influence, and while that doesn’t exactly describe their debut EP, Staring at the Sun, it’s a decent starting point–in their opening statement, the band offer up five songs incorporating widescreen heartland rock, loud and boisterous power pop, perennially out-of-style “orgcore”, and a pop punk earnestness. Although the members of Westall 66 aren’t musical neophytes (they’re “all aged over 35”, per their Spotify bio), they sound as energetic and enthusiastic as a brand new band should throughout Staring at the Sun.

The choppy, slicing power chords and torrential guitar leads of “The Weekend” open Staring at the Sun in a familiar but welcome way, the lead singer’s slight but noticeable Aussie accent the only real hint that Westall 66 aren’t straight out of Philadelphia circa 2016. As strong as the chorus is, the guitars that roar up in between the verses compete directly with it for the catchiest moment of “The Weekend”, a great little competition to have going on throughout your record. Just about every chorus on Staring at the Sun is power pop excellence–“Leaving Me Behind” one song later just might have my favorite refrain, with the lead singer riding the titular line out for all it’s worth after the enjoyable building-up the verses provide. The title track keeps the momentum rolling just as powerfully–the thundering, swaggering refrain reminds me almost of a pop punk version of Upper Wilds’ gigantic space rock. The grand, universal scale of these five songs is quite impressive for a pop punk EP (hell, for any EP)–“Nothing Left to Give” is probably the most insular song on the record given its slight emo tinge, but it’s no less committed to carving out an impressively large mark than the rest of Staring at the Sun. Similarly, the EP closes with “Slam!”, its heaviest moment, featuring shades of hard rock and a tougher version of punk rock than the rest of the EP, but it’s still a catchy cap to the rest of the songs. “Slam!” somehow finds another gear, which is pretty impressive for a record that never takes its foot off the gas. (Bandcamp link)

Dead Bandit – Memory Thirteen

Release date: February 9^th
Record label: Quindi
Genre: Post-rock, ambient, experimental folk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Memory Thirteen

Dead Bandit is an instrumental duo made up of a couple of musicians originally from Canada, although one of them (Ellis Swan) has been living in Chicago for some time now. Swan also makes experimental folk music under his own name, an attitude he does bring to Dead Bandit, a collaboration with multi-instrumentalist James Schimpl. Swan and Schimpl released their first album as Dead Bandit, From the Basement, back in 2021 on Quindi Records (Monde UFO, Fortunato Durutti Marinetti, American Cream Band), with Memory Thirteen (also on Quindi) following both that LP and Swan’s 2022 solo album 3am. Together, the duo make wide-open, guitar-led post-rock, delivered in (yes) thirteen different 3-4 minute intervals but also running together as a single piece. The sparse nature of Memory Thirteen tilts the record towards rock-band-played ambient music in a way reminiscent of a lot of acts from Swan’s current city of residence, but it’s of a different strain–rather than the glitchy, jazz-influenced, art-school kind of post-rock frequently found in the Windy City in the 90s, Dead Bandit hew towards a deserted, post-folk kind of emptiness (perhaps more reflecting of their desolate homeland). 

Folk and guitar-based influences aside, Dead Bandit aren’t Luddites–opening track “Two Clocks” introduces the record with some gentle, organ-toned synths before an even gentler-sounding guitar and steady percussion take over in the second half. The fuzzed-out introduction of the title track begins the most immediate section of the record–both “Memory Thirteen” and “Blackbird” have melodic guitar lines at their center, sounding like stripped and slightly corrupted pieces of folk rock or indie rock–and while “Circus” introduces prominent atmospherics again, they’re accompanied by some gorgeous acoustic guitar picking as well. Around the middle of Memory Thirteen, “Peel Me an Orange” shows that Dead Bandit can put together glistening, crescendoing guitar-led post-rock when the moment calls for it–and it’s best to enjoy it while it lasts, as the B-side of the record is even more insular and downtrodden than the first half. Starting with the ambient country of “Somewhere to Wait”, Dead Bandit keep Memory Thirteen in suspense through the aural halo of “Revelstoke” and the late-night plodding of “Wabansia”. “Blowing Kisses” is one last moment of beauty before “Across the Road” ends the album with a fuzzy drone–I can make out some shapes as Dead Bandit ride off into the desert, but it might be a mirage. (Bandcamp link)

Pinkhouse – Vanity Project

Release date: January 19^th
Record label: Long Island Sounds
Genre: Pop punk, indie pop, power pop
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Oh Well

On the Bandcamp page for Washington, D.C.’s Pinkhouse, the quartet refer to themselves as “punk lite”, and in an email to me, the band’s frontperson Max Fillion qualified the group as “punk-adjacent”. This approach to describing Pinkhouse might come off as an exercise in lowering expectations, but after listening to the group’s debut EP, Vanity Project, I get what Fillion was getting at by presenting the band’s music this way. Their first record (after a couple of singles in 2019 and 2022) is much closer to bright, sparkly indie pop than any kind of sharp-edged, Dischord-influenced post-hardcore punk group, but Pinkhouse (also featuring guitarist Steven Hacker, drummer, Brandon Breazeale, and bassist Nick Cervone) play these pop songs with a full-band enthusiasm featuring glimpses of power pop and pop punk. Vanity Project feels bigger than its five songs and twenty minutes; it’s a bit all over the place and too excited to settle on one clear defined “style”, but thankfully, Pinkhouse are pretty good at everything they try their hand at on the record.

The two catchy pieces of pop rock that open Vanity Project, “13th Street” and “Dumb Expression”, fit well together but are different enough from one another to fully prevent us from getting a handle on this EP or this band easily. The former is a pretty ambitious-sounding opener, a multi-part piece of guitar pop that contains plenty of immediate melodies while at the same time building its way to a well-deserved, big, noise pop finish. “Dumb Expression” is the band zipping through more straightforward indie pop-punk, aided in no small part by a striking lead vocal performance from Fillion. Just as it seems like they’ve settled into a toe-tapping tempo, however, they bust out the acoustic guitar and strings for mid-record ballad “Mr. Jack”, and the EP’s closing track, the möbius strip-like “Brand New Day”, turns a slow-moving alt-rock chugger into a woozy, mid-tempo farewell. The best “rocker” on the album is probably the slightly mussed-up and paranoid-sounding “Oh Well”–I know this is kind of a deep pull, but it reminds me of 90s Barsuk band MK Ultra. “Back to being stupid / Oh well, ignorance is bliss,” Fillion memorably sings in the chorus of that one, sounding not particularly blissful or ignorant–but even in the darkest moment on Vanity Project, it’s still delivered in a fun package. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

• Mop – Secrets
• Poorly Drawn House – Two Songs EP
• Wagging – My Own Private Rodeo
• Pylon Reenactment Society – Magnet Factory
• MKVULTURE – Terminal Freakout EP
• Pouty – Forgot About Me
• Hollow Suns – Free Fall EP
• Dog Day – Almost
• Sorry Monks – Girlfriend EP
• The Sleevens – s/t
• Regal Cheer – Big Man Little Man Strike Partnership EP
• Middle Sattre – Tendencies
• Johnny Mafia – 2024: Année du Dragon
• Oddy Knocky – On a Spit
• Meltheads – Decent Sex
• Smalltown Tigers – Crush on You
• PROJECTOR – Now When We Talk It’s Violence
• Alfahanne – Vår tid är nu
• Joshua Crumbly – P.S. EP
• Astral Bakers – The Whole Story
• Joel Ross – nublues
• Planet B – Fiction Prediction
• Helado Negro – PHASOR
• Tom Snowdon – Lonely Tree
• Various – Stay Tuned: Season 3