Pressing Concerns: The Reds, Pinks & Purples, Negative Passengers, Schedule 1, Janelane

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The last blog post of yet another busy week on Rosy Overdrive is a Thursday Pressing Concerns looking at four great records coming out this week: new albums from The Reds, Pinks & Purples, Negative Passengers, Schedule 1, and Janelane are all here. All of them come out tomorrow (April 12th) except for the Schedule 1 album which came out yesterday! The March 2024 playlist/round-up went on Tuesday, so be sure to check that post out for a ton more new music, and also check out Monday’s Pressing Concerns (featuring Is/Ought Gap, Rave Ami, Vulture Feather, and Oort Clod) if you missed that one, 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.

The Reds, Pinks & Purples – Unwishing Well

Release date: April 12th
Record label: Slumberland/Tough Love/World of Echo
Genre: Indie pop, jangle pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: We Only Hear the Bad Things People Say

The influences and micro-genres are all wrong, but the way that Glenn Donaldson releases music as The Reds, Pinks & Purples is starting to remind me of early Mountain Goats–a steady stream of full-length albums, EPs, singles, and compilation appearances, with excellent guitar pop gems hidden in every format. If Donaldson isn’t saving all the obvious “hits” for his albums, the songs on recent Reds, Pinks & Purples LPs seem to be chosen via thematic links–perhaps most clearly illustrated on last year’s career highlight The Town That Cursed Your Name, a spirited meditation on fledgling bands and musicians. Donaldson’s bittersweet songwriting style suited such material, and he was game to make things a little bigger and more electric as a sort of tribute to his subject matter. Unwishing Well feels much more insular and subtler by comparison, even as Donaldson spends the record stretching his music-scene chronicling towards bigger aims in music, art, and culture. Donaldson (who plays everything on the record except for a couple of guitar parts from frequent collaborators Lewis Gallardo and Thomas Rubenstein) sounds worn out by the world throughout Unwishing Well but hardly spent, snagging some all-time great Reds, Pinks & Purples moments out of the mess we’re all in.

Although it’s a little more subdued than their last LP, The Reds, Pinks & Purples slide some inarguable indie pop songs towards the listener in Unwishing Well’s first half, between opening track “What’s Going on With Ordinary People” (musically-speaking, the most upbeat song on the record), the sliding strum of “Learning to Love a Band”, and single “Your Worst Song Is Your Greatest Hit”. It’s the other two tracks on the first side of Unwishing Well that set the tone in my view, though–the title track, whose acoustic chords are as simple as its lyrics are tough, and the sprawled-out minimalism of “Faith in Daydreaming Youth”, which does sound like something of a daydream-born train of thought. The flipside of Unwishing Well is my favorite half–entering the homestretch, Donaldson throws ugliness, grief, and sadness together with sparkling indie pop music with really affecting results. Between “Dead Stars in Your Eyes” (and the meaning Donaldson gives its title by his marked emphasizing of it in the chorus), “Nothing Between the Lines at All” (which gazes at the stars from the gutter), and “We Only Hear the Bad Things People Say” (a truly remarkable song that’ll stick with me for a long time), The Reds, Pinks & Purples balance lightness and heaviness in a way that–even as it becomes something of Donaldson’s signature style–is still fresh and impressive. It’s the kind of album that earns its six-minute instrumental closing track, “Goodbye Bobby”–with one last trick, Donaldson ends Unwishing Well on an emotional note despite saying nothing at all. (Bandcamp link)

Negative Passengers – Bills and Problems

Release date: April 12th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Punk rock, post-punk, 90s indie rock
Formats: CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Funeral at Whole Foods

Negative Passengers are a new quartet out of Seattle, Washington that originated from a Craigslist ad in 2022. The band (who can be referred to as “Negative Passengers” or “The NP’s” but not “The Negative Passengers”) are made up of vocalist Riley, guitarist James, bassist Mike, and drummer Pete–I believe at least some of them have been playing in other bands in the area for some time now, but I don’t know too much about their various clandestine pasts. Bills and Problems is the group’s debut record, and it’s a hefty opening statement–ten songs and twenty-nine minutes of furious but lean punk rock. The group proudly refer to themselves as “punk-adjacent”, which to them seems to mean rock music in the vein of barebones but powerful American post-punk, both of Kill Rock Stars/K Records scenes in their home state and the Dischord variety on the other coast. The music rules, but the final piece in Bills and Problems is Riley, who’s quite possibly the most “punk” aspect of the record. They’re an instantly compelling punk frontperson, balancing melody and rage deftly, and their lyrics are always engrossing, very direct and almost stream-of-consciousness but fascinating due to the clear, focused worldview of the person delivering them.

Bills and Problems is a political album–I mean, in the sense that all of our lives are shaped by politics, and writing about one’s life in a direct and sober way (as Riley does) will necessarily reflect this. Good political writing can take a small-scale, intimate look at the various actors in one individual’s life and struggles without losing sight of the bigger picture–these two vantage points should contextualize each other. Negative Passengers do this throughout Bills and Problems, even right up to the pairing in the album’s title–Riley’s vocals and the rest of the band’s razor-sharp post-punk are a constant pressure cooker, underscoring the huge, systemic burdens pressing down on Riley as they deal with interpersonal drama in “Please Don’t Ever Ask Me For A Kidney” (an empathetic put-down whose title completes its story) and “Nostalgia”. In both tracks, Riley makes or leans towards decisions that reject how things are “supposed to be”, socially–in a way, these songs make just a strong a statement as the more “recognizably” political material like the never-ending poverty cycle depicted in “Early Retirement” and the creeping time-theft of capitalism found in “16 Hours”. One of the best songs on the record is late-album highlight “Funeral at Whole Foods”, a song that enthusiastically campaigns for agitation and unrest “at the slightest inconvenience”. “I don’t really need a reason, we can all just look around,” Riley sings in the refrain of that one; Bills and Problems is a masterclass in doing just that. (Bandcamp link)

Schedule 1 – Crucible

Release date: April 10th
Record label: Council/Mendeku Diskak
Genre: Post-punk, punk rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Nothing at All

Vancouver punk quartet Schedule 1 debuted back in 2022 with a self-titled EP on Dirt Cult Records, and now the group (vocalist Grant, guitarist Rob, bassist Alex, and drummer Mitch) have put a full-length album together–Crucible, out via Council Records and Mendeku Diskak. They remind me more than a bit of Edmonton’s Home Front, whose album Games of Power got some attention last year for how it combined The Cure/Echo & The Bunnymen-esque goth-y post-punk with a harder-edged, almost hardcore-indebted punk rock sound. Considering that Schedule 1 have played with Home Front, that they’ve been releasing records concurrently, and the two bands’ geographic proximity (Edmonton and Vancouver are less than 12 hours apart, which qualifies as “close” in western Canada), the two are probably best thought of as contemporaries, and while it took Schedule 1 a little longer to deliver an entire LP’s worth of this kind of music, their take on it sounds incredibly spirited and fresh. Grant’s vocals throughout the record are more traditionally post-punk than “hardcore grunt”, but Crucible is still a hard-hitting record–a good a reminder as any that, while The Cure and Joy Division have reputations as mopey sad-boys (and, in the former’s case, occasional guitar pop hitmakers), those bands still could deliver intense and heavy rock music.

Crucible is a record that seems to understand that the best 80s post-punk records balanced real beauty with the ugliness and darkness with which they’ve become synonymous, and Schedule 1 open the album with two songs that are transfixing, propulsive, catchy, and multi-layered in “Drifting” (the refrain on this one, “We’re only drifting through a wasteland,” delivered with as much as drama as Grant can muster, is an instant classic) and the title track (which is just a bit more cacophonous, but not distractingly so). The smoking punk rock guitar riff that slams into the listener at the beginning of “Nothing at All” is particularly exhilarating, but the geared-up, gritty roaring post-punk song that follows fits right in with the record–it’s a tool that Schedule 1 utilize, just like the gigantic low-end of “No Grace” or the pounding percussion of “Forgotten Ones”. It’s not that surprising that Crucible doesn’t run out of steam, but Schedule 1 do deserve credit for not flagging one bit, to the point where the record’s closing stretch–“Your Way”, which finds room for some pretty and melodic guitar work in between the catchy dark pop choruses, “Filles du Roi”, one last breakneck post-punk tune, and “Rat Maze”, a positively barnburning final track–might be the strongest one. Several decades past its initial explosion, this kind of music will remain in good hands as long as bands as potent as Schedule 1 are around. (Bandcamp link)

Janelane – Love Letters

Release date: April 12th
Record label: Kingfisher Bluez
Genre: Dream pop, indie pop, jangle pop, power pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Think I’d Be Fine Without You

Back in 2022 I wrote about Okay with Dancing Alone, a brief but promising four-song indie pop EP from Janelane, the project of Los Angeles’ Sophie Negrini. Even though Negrini hadn’t released a full-length at that point, she wasn’t exactly a neophyte–she’s been playing in various bands for a decade or so now, and the first Janelane EP came out back in 2015. Recently, the Janelane band has expanded to a quintet featuring members of Mo Dotti, Catwalk, and Dear Boy, setting the stage for the long-awaited first Janelane LP, Love Letters, out via Vancouver’s Kingfisher Bluez (Non La, Robert Sotelo, Xiu Xiu). Love Letters delivers on the potential Janelane had flashed on previous releases, as Negrini proves herself more than strong enough as a pop songwriter to carry an entire ten-song, thirty-five minute album. The record (co-produced by Joey Oaxaca and Nic Hessler) sounds great, too–it has a slight fuzziness to it while Negrini channels The Sundays and other bands on the pop end of the dreamy/jangle pop continuum, while also throwing in a good deal of 60s pop/girl group bittersweet songwriting touches and even a bit of Mazzy Star-ish dreamy-alt-country.

Opening track “Band Aid” launches Love Letters into pop excellence immediately, from its power pop ramping up to the soaring, charmingly overdressed chorus. The twinkling, 80s-recalling “Dance Floor” is (ironically) not quite as much of a party as the previous song, instead focusing on sounding polished, regal, and even a bit stately as Negrini sings about the titular location as if what’s happening there is the most important thing on Earth. The smooth-moving “Useless” is another pitch-perfect track that features some of the most exciting guitar work on the record, and when Love Letters takes a breather towards the end of the first half with the floating-in-the-ether country guitars of “One Way Streets” and the well-crafted but still earnest-feeling heartbreak of the title track, it doesn’t lose any momentum. When Negrini leans into her classic pop instincts in “Love Letters” and the penultimate highlight “Your Own Ride Home”, Janelane sounds like a more dream pop-indebted version of Heavenly, and when she chooses to ramp up the tempo a bit in the fizzy indie-pop-punk “Think I’d Be Fine Without You” (a two-minute late-record gem that might be my favorite song on the whole thing), she nails power pop too. If you enjoy this kind of music–and if you’re reading this, you probably do–there’s quite a lot to like on Love Letters. (Bandcamp link)

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2 thoughts on “Pressing Concerns: The Reds, Pinks & Purples, Negative Passengers, Schedule 1, Janelane”

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