Pressing Concerns: SAVAK, NAYAN, Stay Inside, Gulfer

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A busy week for Rosy Overdrive winds down by looking at four albums that either have come out or will come out this week: new ones from SAVAK, NAYAN, Stay Inside, and Gulfer. It’s a great post, as are the ones from earlier this week; if you missed any between Monday’s post (on new records from Mt. Worry, Medicine, Ryann Gonsalves, and Safari Room), Tuesday’s post (the February 2024 playlist/round-up), and Wednesday’s post (on Late Bloomer’s Another One Again), hit those up, too.

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.

SAVAK – Flavors of Paradise

Release date: March 1st
Record label: Peculiar Works/Ernest Jenning Record Co.
Genre: Post-punk, garage rock, college rock, 90s indie rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Up with the Sun

It’s rare that a band made up of thirty-plus-year indie rock veterans is as active in putting out new music as SAVAK have been–Flavors of Paradise is the Brooklyn trio’s sixth album since 2016 (seven if you count 2022’s Error / Delight remix album). Drummer Matt Schulz and vocalist/guitarist/bassists Sohrab Habibion and Michael Jaworski have previously played in bands like Obits, Holy Fuck, Edsel, and Enon, but as the SAVAK discography grows ever larger, one starts to wonder if or when their recent work will overtake their impressive backgrounds in stature. Maybe it happened with their last proper album, Human Error / Human Delight–I was thoroughly impressed by how that record harnessed Wire, Sonic Youth, and Mission of Burma into something accessible but while still doing justice to the trailblazing nature of those bands. A little under two years later, Flavors of Paradise adds to the language SAVAK have been developing, contracting it in some places and expanding it in others. The trio recorded the album at Electrical Audio last year, and while they’ve always been a “no nonsense” group, Flavors of Paradise finds the band plowing through twelve songs triangulating garage rock, post-punk, and college rock with a fresh, live sound.

It’s easy to take for granted just how well SAVAK click together, but Flavors of Paradise is built around moments like the just-a-bit-more-aggressive-than-necessary drumming punching up the R.E.M.-by-way-of-Burma opening track “Up With the Sun”, the bass in the psych-post-punk “Let the Sunlight In” (which kind of sounds like if Lungfish picked up the tempo a little bit), and the stop-start guitars in the Dischord-y post-punk revival “Paid Disappearance”. Another key factor in why Flavors of Paradise works so well is that the trio put the same level of energy into every song on the record, whether it’s the jangly power pop of the opening track and “It Happens to You”, the garage rock rumble of “The New New Age”, or the oddities like “Two Lamps” (another slick post-punk song that always feels just out of reach) and “Jump into the Night” (in which everybody sounds like they’re playing a different song but somehow still lock into place when it counts the most). As streamlined as Flavors of Paradise feels (most records struggle hit the bullseye as effortlessly as SAVAK do on “What Is It Worth”, and I didn’t even really get to talk about that one), it’s nowhere near as lean as it looks on the surface. The band doesn’t really take it down a notch until the floating closing track “Attribution”, a Wiley Coyote-looking-down-at-the-cliff moment where it hits you just how much SAVAK were flooring it up until that point. They make it sound easy, but they earned that final breather. (Bandcamp link)

NAYAN – Rock N Roll Ruined My Life

Release date: February 29th
Record label: Red Stapler
Genre: Power pop, heartland rock, pop rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Invincible

Washington, D.C.’s NAYAN may be a new band, but its frontperson and namesake Nayan Bhula is hardly a rookie. Bhula first showed up in the late 90s as part of the post-punk group GIST, and spent the 2010s leading eight-piece orchestral indie rock group The NRIs, both largely releasing music on Bhula’s own Red Stapler Records. Within the past couple of years, Bhula has retooled The NRIs and rechristened them NAYAN–they’re now “merely” a quintet (also featuring Gabriel Fry, Mike Nilsson, Eddie Fuentes, and Andrew Gabor) and, while they might be “stripped down” compared to his past work, NAYAN are still making bombastic, wide-scale indie rock befitting of their first album’s title. NAYAN’s Bandcamp page suggests that they’re a “21st century” Bruce Springsteen–and as bold a pronouncement as that is, it’s hard to disagree that Bhula is making his own version of The Boss’ most well-known works. Although Bhula lives in the city of Dischord Records and has played shows with many of the imprint’s bands, there’s not a ton of punk or post-punk leanness to be found on Rock N Roll Ruined My Life–just ten pieces of maximalist, all-in rock and roll music.

It becomes apparent early on in Rock N Roll Ruined My Life that Bhula is a seasoned indie rock frontperson–whether he’s helming the record’s foot-on-the-gas pop rock side or more introspective mid-tempo saxophone explorations, his performances are undeniable. More than anything else, Bhula sounds like American Music Club’s Mark Eitzel trying to make a power pop album throughout Rock N Roll Ruined My Life–he’s got that level of gravitas. Songs like the high-flying opening track “Invincible” and the looser but still punchy “Your Time” don’t need a dynamic vocalist to make them work, but Bhula certainly adds something to these songs–and when the band slows down on the title track and “Waiting for a Spark”, his delivery and presence is essential in making these songs shine just as brightly. Rosy Overdrive favorite Laura Stevenson pops up on vocals in the five-minute Springsteenian “Alone” in the middle of the record, and then NAYAN launch into a second half that’s a bit weirder but never distractingly so. “Hindsight Is 20/20” and “Destiny” are both exercises in multi-part song structure (all of which are still quite poppy), and Bhula pulls off the “just him and an acoustic guitar” moment with the brief but still quite affecting “I’ll Be Smiling”. However big you think closing track “Blinded” should be, Bhula and the rest of his band make it even grander than that–NAYAN may have had their lives ruined by rock and roll, but they’ve come away with an intimate understanding of how their enemy works. (Bandcamp link)

Stay Inside – Ferried Away

Release date: February 28th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Emo, alt-rock, post-hardcore
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: A Backyard

It’s been four years since the release of Viewing, the debut album from Brooklyn emo quartet Stay Inside. That record had an icy, dramatic post-hardcore sound that effectively sat at one extreme end of the kind of music I enjoy (it was on my 2020 year-end list, if you want to see a much less polished version of Rosy Overdrive). The band (guitarist/vocalist Chris Johns, bassist Bryn Nieboer, guitarist Chris Lawless, and drummer Vishnu Anantha) put out an EP called Blight in 2022 that I somehow missed, but thankfully Ferried Away, the second Stay Inside album, didn’t pass me by. The record represents a surprising evolution for the band, who have polished up their sound and positioned themselves in a completely different emo subgenre–that of slick alt-rock. The mewithoutYou influence isn’t totally gone, but Ferried Away is just as close to Oso Oso as it is to that band, and the transformation is reminiscent of similar ones undergone by Awakebutstillinbed and The World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die, two groups with which Stay Inside have toured (they also enlist former Really From trumpet player Matt Hull, whose old band also feels relevant throughout Ferried Away). 

The new Stay Inside of Ferried Away asserts itself more strongly in some moments than others. For instance, the big, hooky emo-rock of “A Backyard” and the breezy, acoustic-led “My Fault” are completely new territory for the band, but the band pull both of them off, and they don’t sound like they’re dumbing anything down to get to there, either (particularly in the former song, whose bright, mathy guitars and vocals only enhance the messy uncertainty of the lapsed relationship detailed in the lyrics). Really, as a whole, Ferried Away is as rich as anything Stay Inside have done thus far, as the band wield their music to explore death and all the interpersonal relationships that it freezes in amber time and time again. The heaviest moments on Ferried Away aren’t marked by screaming (although it does show up in “An Invitation”), but by Johns frantically trying to describe lifetimes of emotions and connections in three-minute increments while the band swirls around these diatribes (particularly in “When’s the Last Time?” and “An Invitation”). Or maybe it’s the acceptance that’s earned in closing track “Steeplechase”. It begins as a hard-edged mewithoutYou-esque tension-rocker, but Hull’s trumpet feels out of place–until the end of the song, where it ushers in the final catharsis as Johns is ferried away (“Leave a light on on the shore for me / Stand in the light at the show for me”). (Bandcamp link)

Gulfer – Third Wind

Release date: February 28th
Record label: Topshelf
Genre: Emo, alt-rock, math rock, fuzz rock
Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Prove

At this point, Gulfer are unambiguously indie rock veterans. Founding members Vincent Ford (vocals/guitar) and David Mitchell (bass) have been at it since 2011, and even the “new” faces Joe Therriault (guitar/vocals) and Julien Daoust (drums) have been in the band for eight years now. The Montreal group’s maximalist, math-y sound (as well as a propensity for sticking the bulk of their material on split releases rather than proper albums) helped them fit right in with “fourth-wave emo”, although they slowly but surely incorporated a polished alt-rock sound into records like 2018’s Dog Bless and 2020’s self-titled album. Even so, Third Wind is their first album in four years, and it also finds Therriault contributing the majority of the songwriting (rather than Ford and Mitchell) for the first time ever. It didn’t exactly come out of nowhere (Therriault has played a songwriting role in the band since he joined), but it’s still a tricky baton-passing to pull off successfully–Ford (who also makes music under the name Stevenson) definitely has a reputation as an excellent songwriter.

It’s fair to say that Gulfer are a different band than they were ten or even five years ago (even the title of Third Wind reflects this), but that doesn’t mean that this version of Gulfer is A) less vital or B) completely divorced from its roots. The math rock-inspired guitar playing is not as front and center but it still shades these ten songs, and Gulfer still feel “emo” in their overall ambition and scope even if the specific signifiers aren’t exactly the same. The slick-feeling but somewhat distorted alt-rock Gulfer found in “Clean” and “Cherry Seed” feels just as inspired as if they were ripping through something more fractured (and, conversely, “Drainer” still indicates they can incorporate that kind of thing into their sound and still have it hold up both with and against their other material). Something like second-half highlight “Prove” is a very distinct combination of sounds (fourth-wave guitars, earnest vocals, pop rock that’s clear but not sanded-down) that feels unique to Third Wind–Gulfer haven’t quite ever sounded like this before, but they’ve been building up to it for longer than we (and, perhaps, even the band themselves) realized. (Bandcamp link)

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