Pressing Concerns: Coffin Pricks, Steve Drizos, Soft Screams, dreamTX

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The second Pressing Concerns of the week is a nice and eclectic one: here, we’ve got a couple of albums that came out last month (from Steve Drizos and Soft Screams), a vinyl re-release of last year’s dreamTX album, and a compilation collecting the entire recorded output (plus some live material) of the short-lived Coffin Pricks. If you missed yesterday’s blog post (featuring Villagerrr, Gibson & Toutant, Sucker, and Andrew Collberg), check that one out here.

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Coffin Pricks – Semi-Perfect Crimes

Release date: March 1st
Record label: Council
Genre: Garage rock, punk rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Group Home Haircut

For a short time in Chicago in the early 2010s, there was a loud, noisy garage punk group named Coffin Pricks on the prowl. The group (guitarist/bassist Ryan Weinstein, vocalist Chris Thomson, drummer Jeff Rice, and bassist Chay Lawrence) was built up from a bunch of punk veterans, having been in Circus Lupus, Ottawa, Calvary, Red Eyed Legends, Monochord, and Bob Tilton between the four of them. For whatever reason, Coffin Pricks ended not long after conception–they put out their only release, a three song single for Stationary Heart Records, in May of 2012, and they’d played their last show before that year was over. Although half of its members are still fairly active musicians–Weinstein moved to Los Angeles, rechristened himself Coffin Prick, and released an album and EP of experimental rock music last year, while Rice currently drums for Chicago hardcore punk group Consensus Madness–Coffin Pricks never got back together, leaving behind seven songs recorded by the initial trio of Weinstein, Thomson, and Rice in 2011 and a handful of tracks that never even made it that far. After much cajoling, Council Records finally got Weinstein to help piece together a Coffin Pricks full-length out of their output, featuring all seven of their studio recordings (newly remixed and remastered) and augmented by a 2012 live session from Saki Recordings featuring six un-recorded tracks, finally released this year as a vinyl LP called Semi-Perfect Crimes. 

The studio tracks on Semi-Perfect Crimes are half of a perfect rock and roll album, as far as I’m concerned. These songs are all exciting, smoking-hot garage punk rippers with a bit of a post-punk tinge to them–yet at the same time, they’re weird recordings, too. Not self-consciously offbeat like a “Devo-core”/”egg punk” group might be, exactly, but in a subtler, more difficult-to-diagnose way– songs like “Group Home Haircut” and “Only Flesh Wound” sound simple and streamlined, but they go on for nearly four minutes and have a surprisingly large arsenal of ideas and bits and pieces strewn about them. The garage rock-y post-punk of the former song reminds me of The Fall, a band that feels relevant to Coffin Pricks, but Thomson’s strained post-hardcore frontperson act is way too all-over-the-place to get bogged down in Mark E. Smith cosplay. The second half of Semi-Perfect Crimes is the Saki Session (all six un-recorded songs plus another version of album opener “TV Detention” make the LP, while the remaining five tracks are digital-only bonuses)–by this point, they’d added Lawrence on bass and, unsurprisingly, sound even louder and chaotic live than in the studio. That being said, Coffin Pricks hadn’t abandoned their “artier”/post-punk side–in fact, “Banana Boat” and “Extinct Language Discussion” are significantly stranger than anything the band had recorded up to that point. It does make one wonder what a band that was capable of making those kinds of songs while still busting out things like the Fall-shuffle of “Hit Kids” and heavy punk like “Worn Out Thunder” might’ve done had they continued–but on the other hand, it does seem right that a band like this is only being preserved via Semi-Perfect Crimes. (Bandcamp link)

Steve Drizos – I Love You Now Leave Me Alone

Release date: February 16th
Record label: Cavity Search
Genre: College rock, power pop, singer-songwriter, roots rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Boomerang

Steve Drizos is new to me, but he seems like an important figure in the Portland, Oregon music scene. He owns a recording studio called The Panther, where he’s recorded, engineered, or otherwise worked with everyone from Scott McCaughey to Patterson Hood to Debbi Peterson. In addition, he’s also the drummer for longtime Portland group Jerry Joseph and The Jackmormons and is married to The Decemberists’ Jenny Conlee, with whom he has collaborated as well. Despite all this, Drizos’ first proper solo album, Axiom, didn’t appear until 2021–he had the recording studio to himself during the pandemic and came out of it with a record full of occasionally dreamy-and-delicate sounding folk rock. Axiom did have some more “rocking” moments, and it’s in these where Drizos’ follow-up album, I Love You Now Leave Me Alone, finds itself taking up the thread. For this one, he assembled a proper band (guitarist Todd Wright, bassist Tim Murphy, drummer ​​Joe Mengis, and Conlee on piano) who punch up Drizos’ songwriting throughout these eight tracks. There’s still some folk and roots rock touches on I Love You Now Leave Me Alone, but Drizos also expands into classic college rock, early “alternative rock”, and power pop territory as well.

Opening track “Boomerang” has more hooks than it knows what to do with, as both the pre-chorus and chorus are strong enough to carry an entire track–and at the same time, Drizos and his band still find time to offer up some darker-sounding alt-rock in the verses. “Kick into Touch” is the other big power pop song on I Love You Now Leave Me Alone, although it starts off in rather unassuming fashion, taking its time before Conlee’s piano takes off and guides the song to its refrain (which gives the album its title). The laid-back catchiness of songs like “Troubled Heart”, “Brooklyn 97202”, and “Katie” is of a slightly different vein, trending towards roots-y college rock territory (Miracle Legion/Polaris, The Silos, Los Lobos) and finding the band taking their time to sketch out the whole picture. “Beautiful Nothing” is a big left turn in the album’s penultimate slot, a cavernous-sounding, dramatic piece of art-rock that rises and falls multiple times before its six minutes are up. The quiet, contemplative closing track “Inside Outside”, featuring little more than Drizos and an acoustic guitar, has an extra weight given what preceded it–there’s a finality and exhaling quality to it, reflecting earnest bluntness of I Love You Now Leave Me Alone’s title. (Bandcamp link)

Soft Screams – Life’s Labours Won

Release date: February 16th
Record label: Corrupted TV
Genre: Lo-fi power pop
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: RUN

As long as Connor Mac continues to put out good lo-fi power pop albums, I’ll continue to write about them. Mac is part of New York duo Galactic Static, and the first album of theirs that I heard, 2021’s Friendly Universe, might still be my favorite thing the singer-songwriter has been a part of, but that’s not to discount what they’ve accomplished on their own with their Soft Screams solo project, especially last year’s Life’s Labours Lost. On that record, Mac used lo-fi pop and fuzz rock to ruminate on capitalism and work culture in more cohesive and heavy way than Soft Screams had done in the past–clearly this was fertile ground for them, as Mac immediately began putting together a companion EP. Named after a lost Shakespeare play that was a possible sequel to the play from which Life’s Labours Lost took its name, Life’s Labours Won ended up as a full-length that actually eclipses its predecessor in length by a minute. A bit looser-feeling and less “directly staring down The Horrors” than the previous Soft Screams album, Life’s Labours Won stands on its own without any kind of “lesser work” asterisk.

The more offbeat nature of Life’s Labours Won is apparent from opening track “Common Catastrophe”, a post-punk-y anti-anthem that finds Mac repeating “Work won’t set us free” in the chorus. The buzzing “RUN” is probably the best “Soft Screams in power-pop-punk mode” song on the record, the verses cruising into a positively bouncy refrain, although as a whole the album feels a little punchier and less immediate. Not that songs like “Enemy v Enemy”, “Murder Screen”, and “Deathwish Friends” aren’t also catchy, but Mac feels guided by something a little less tangible throughout the album, like they’re just hammering out what they feel, and what they feel is a harder-edged lo-fi rock sound this time around. No one is going to mistake Life’s Labours Won for a noise rock album, but the sturdiness of closing track “Collective Capacity” and the pounding of “Burning Bonds” do feel like Soft Screams looking to craft a sequel that doesn’t just repeat the same beats as the original, and the end result more than justifies Mac’s return to this particular well. (Bandcamp link)

dreamTX – Living in Memory of Something Sweet (Reissue) 

Release date: March 1st
Record label: Memorials of Distinction/Hit the North/Neon Bloodbath
Genre: Art pop, experimental rock, shoegaze, psychedelic pop, dream pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Get Around

Nick Das is a musician who’s originally from Texas, lived in New York for a while, and currently lives in southern California. Das has flown under the radar, but he’s been pretty active over the past half decade–he’s collaborated with alt-pop star Maggie Rogers, plays guitar in the shoegaze band Kraus, and has released at least one lo-fi rock record under the name Half Breed. A few years ago, Das started a new project called dreamTX, inspired by post-rock, bedroom pop, and shoegaze (among other genres); the debut record from the project, Living in Memory of Something Sweet, came out on CD through Memorials of Distinction last year. I missed Living in Memory of Something Sweet when it came out, but thankfully others did not–it was successful enough for Das to team up with Hit the North and Neon Bloodbath to put the album out on LP this month. It’s earned the second look–Living in Memory of Something Sweet is an impressively large-scope pop album that contains shades of everything Das has done thus far.

The album’s various potential genre tags–shoegaze, post-rock, dream pop–don’t really capture the feeling of listening to opening track “Get Around”, a fluttering, euphoric pop song that splits the difference between Young Fathers, Modest Mouse, and Andorra-era Caribou. It’s a massive opening track, and Living in Memory of Something Sweet wisely doesn’t try to top it but rather expand itself from that point onward. Songs like “Elated” and “In Too Deep” are just as catchy as “Get Around”, although the slow-building bedroom pop of the former and the (relatively) minimal synthpop of the latter are distinct creatures. Shades of Das’ shoegaze side show up in “Live Without” and “I Could Face It”, but the fuzzed-out guitars are just another ingredient in dreamTX’s kaleidoscopic symphonies, dropping in and out of the spotlight like the bird noises in the latter and Das’ particularly emotional vocals in the former. Living in Memory of Something Sweet is a record that’s clearly been labored over, but it works because it does so with a clear goal in mind–adding as much to these songs as possible without taking anything away from them. (Bandcamp link)

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