Pressing Concerns: Planet 81, The Bird Calls, Gramercy Arms, Night Court / The Dumpies

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It’s going to be a big week here on Rosy Overdrive, bigger than normal even! We’re kicking off the week with a Pressing Concerns that’s an odds-and-ends one of sorts, covering several solid records that have come out in the last month or so: new albums from Planet 81, The Bird Calls, and Gramercy Arms, plus a split EP between Night Court and The Dumpies.

Oh, and by the way: after three-plus years of consistently writing about new records via this blog, we’ve reached a fairly notable milestone. We’ve now covered over 1,000 albums/EPs in Pressing Concerns! If we’re being technical, this edition contains numbers 999 through 1,002, with The Bird Calls getting the prestigious designation. So, congrats to Sam Sodomsky and company–I wish I had a prize or something to give you.

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.

Planet 81 – Escape!! to…Planet 81

Release date: April 29th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Synthpop, sophisti-pop, new wave, power pop, synth-funk
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: In My Japanese Compact

Justin Cohn is a California musician who’s released a few albums as co-leader of Oakland’s Telegenic and more recently has been playing in the live band for Kabir Kumar’s Sun Kin. Currently based in Los Angeles, Cohn now has a brand-new solo project to their name called Planet 81, and has kicked off this new era with a bang entitled Escape!! to…Planet 81. Escape!! indeed sounds like the work of somebody associated with Sun Kin–and given that their Sunset World is one of the best albums of the year so far, that’s a good place to be. Like Sun Kin, Cohn is interested in the different feel that pop music of a few decades ago had–the “81” in the project’s title refers to the year Cohn is hoping to evoke, and Escape!! as a whole embraces that era’s prog-pop, sophisti-pop, funk, R&B, disco, and power pop/new wave even more enthusiastically than Sunset World did. XTC, Rundgren, and Scritti Politti are influences, of course, but for my money that most accurate comparison is a more recent band that Cohn mentioned in their email to me–Phoenix. Escape!! captures the same energy that marks the best of the 2000s French pop group–balancing a “rock band” feel with all-in pop music, making music with a backbone that one can still dance to.

Escape!! has plenty of irons in its aural fire, merely one of which is a desire to make vintage 80s pop in a way that sounds huge and current. The chart-toppers in the world of Planet 81 would have to include “Roses at My Feet”, a gorgeous synthpop mission statement that throws down the gauntlet to open the record, as well as the Prince-wave of “In My Japanese Compact”, a zippy, cool-as-hell 80s “car song” if I’ve ever heard one, “Silver Bullet” and its sophisti-pop sheen that gives way to a massive chorus, and “Space Invader!”, a peppy curiosity that opens the record’s second half with the moment where it feels like there’s a distinct “Planet 81 sound” developing from the influences perched on Cohn’s sleeve. Throw a dart at any of these aforementioned pop hits, they’ll hook you–but stick around for everything else that Escape!! has to offer, from the glitzy funk-tinged “Moneymaker”, so-earnest-it-hurts mid-record ballad “Let Love Be the Guide”, and the groove that Planet 81 lock into towards the end of the record in the disco-y “Heaven”, steady synthpop “Royal Counsel”, and “Hesitater”, which lets the big guitars and buzzing synths duke it out. Justin Cohn didn’t need to dig deep one last time to pull out one last polished power pop anthem in “Ever After…” to close the record, but to Escape!! to…Planet 81, doing anything less than the absolute maximum at any given moment is just plain unthinkable. (Bandcamp link)

The Bird Calls – Old Faithful

Release date: May 31st
Record label: Ruination
Genre: Folk, singer-songwriter
Formats: CD, digital
Pull Track: Footprints

I’ve been familiar with Sam Sodomsky as a writer for a long time now, and there’s a good chance that you are to some degree, as well–he’s written about music in a bunch of different places, most notably as being one of the most consistently readable reviewers for Pitchfork for several years. At the same time, the New York-based Sodomsky’s been making music of his own as The Bird Calls–prolifically and independently up until 2021, when he linked up with Ruination Record Co. (Carmen Quill, Frank Meadows, Blue Ranger) and “slowed” his output to a mere one album a year. I’d heard bits and pieces of The Bird Calls’ recent records, but Old Faithful is the first one I’ve really dove into, and I’m glad I did. It’s a compelling listen, one that lets its humbly charismatic frontperson stand front and center but also doesn’t mistake “vocal/lyric-first presentation” with “instrumentals as afterthoughts”. Apparently, Old Faithful is Sodomsky’s first album recorded with a drummer (Jason Burger of Big Thief, Scree, and Twain), who joins his gang of fellow music writer/musicians (keyboardist Winston Cook-Wilson of Office Culture and bassist Andy Cush of Garcia Peoples) and other ringers (vocalist Shaughnessy Jones and guitarist Katie Battistoni).

Almost aggressively lackadaisical at its outset, Old Faithful opens with a pair of deliberately-paced acoustic songs in the title track and “Old Folks” that places Sodomsky somewhere between the early recordings of Dan Bejar and the later ones of Bill Callahan. The drums kick in with the rambling country-folk of “I Haven’t Been This Happy in a Long Time” (“I was scanning the bookshelf, looking for a spine / She said she lost her will to live and so I kindly lent her mine” is the couplet that opens the song, assuring us that it still fits with the rest of the record), although the pensive “Going Insane” uses percussion more subtly (which is the tack that the rest of the album takes). In the second half of Old Faithful, “Footprints” and “I Wish That We Could Fall in Love Again” are the outwardly emotional highs and some of my instant favorites, although Sodomsky’s writing–dispatches and snippets of routines and trains of thought–wanders even more than the music does. The relatively frequent references to God and faith caught my attention upon repeated listening, although songs like “Pleasing Myself” and “Faith People” are less grand cosmic statements and more jumping-off points to just-as-deeply-felt ruminations on those of us down here on Earth. “If I ever lied to you, it’s not something I tried to do / I mean, it’s not like something I rehearsed,” sings Sodomsky memorably on the breezy “Worst Trip”, and later, “these delicate emotions are the messiest ones”. They’re nice moments, but neither the acoustic guitar nor Sodomsky’s parade of lyrical images lingers too long on them. (Bandcamp link)

Gramercy Arms – The Making of the Making of

Release date: April 26th
Record label: Magic Door
Genre: College rock, folk rock, indie pop, singer-songwriter
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Pilot Light

Gramercy Arms are a New York-based band led by singer-songwriter Dave Derby, who in a different life was the bassist and vocalist in 1990s Boston alt-rock group The Dambuilders. Derby started Gramercy Arms in the mid-2000s, releasing a couple of records before disappearing for a bit, only to return with last year’s Deleted Scenes. A far cry from where he began, the album featured Derby along with a wide cast of guests making smartly-written guitar pop music with shades of college rock, folk rock, and vintage indie pop. Thankfully, we didn’t have to wait another decade for a follow-up to Deleted Scenes, as the fourth Gramercy Arms full-length, The Making of the Making of, has arrived just slightly over a year later. Like on the previous record, Derby gets plenty of help here, with Kevin March and Doug Gillard of Guided by Voices, John Leon of The Royal Arctic Institute, and Ray Ketchem of Elk City (who also produced the record) contributing music to the album, among others.

Featuring a cover song as well as an alternate version of a song on Deleted Scenes, The Making of the Making of might have more of an “odds-and-ends” feel than the previous Gramercy Arms album–but what’s here is more than enough to ensure that this record stands on its own. The first two songs on the album, “After the After Party” and “Pilot Light”, are Gramercy Arms at their post-college rock best, barreling through two catchy pieces of Gin Blossoms-y/Buffalo Tom-esque “polite alt-rock” that have just enough energy to them. The leisurely title track and the mid-tempo acoustic stomp of “Alaska” are a bit less immediate, but they both keep the momentum strong in the record’s first half. And I mentioned a cover earlier–it’s a version of “Don’t Respond, She Can Tell” by The Loud Family, a great song from one of the greatest and least appreciated albums of all time, Interbabe Concern. Derby makes the decision to play the song fairly straight–given how strong and not worn out the original is, that’s a valid choice–with the one major change (bringing in Jules Verdone and singing it as a duet) being a creative way to acknowledge the complexity Scott Miller breathed into the original. As breezy and laid-back as The Making of the Making of sounds at times, the way the Gramercy Arms rise to tackle something as thorny as that cover is a good reminder as any of the intent and strength behind the sunny exterior. (Bandcamp link)

Night Court / The Dumpies – Shit Split Part Duh

Release date: May 3rd
Record label: Hovercraft/Green Noise
Genre: Punk rock, power pop, lo-fi indie rock, garage rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: 1000000th Song

Night Court are a Vancouver-based trio who first came to my attention at the end of last year, when I saw their 2023 album HUMANS! on a year-end list, thought the description sounded interesting, and ended up quite enjoying the band’s combination of garage rock, power pop, and melodic punk, delivered in bite-sized (sixteen songs in twenty-six minutes) packages. With a handful of releases since their inception, the band (Jiffy Marx, Dave-O, and Emilor) have effectively presented themselves as Guided by Voices for people who know who J Church are. The latest Night Court release is a split 7” with Oregon’s The Dumpies–who I hadn’t heard of before, but appear to be like-minded punk-poppers–released on the latter band’s longtime home of Hovercraft Records. The two bands cram nine songs onto the record (four on the Night Court side, five on the Dumpies’), and as it turns out, they’re built for constraints like this–plenty of hooks mark the sub-ten-minute release, and there’s even enough time for the two groups to differentiate themselves from each other a bit.

Of the two sides, the Night Court is probably the less “punk” one, as the Canadians use their allotted time to run through a couple of brief but laser-focused power pop anthems. First song “Not an Act(or)” even pulls out a bizarre egg punk introduction before zooming directly into the fuzzed-out catchiness that marks the entire 90-second track. “1000000th Song” actually does the opening track one better–it’s a punk-pop anthem that makes its mark in under a minute, with the flagging, spirited pessimism at its core giving it another dimension regardless. The Dumpies’ half is a bit more chaotic–they choose to introduce themselves with the frantic, foot-on-the-gas garage punk of “Big”, and the hardcore-indebted “HATS” doesn’t have any equivalent on the other side of the record. That being said, “Bisexual Hedge Fund Manager” and “Gobbler’s Knob” show that The Dumpies can aim their noisiness in the direction of “pop music” just as effectively as Night Court when they want to, and their side of the record also has the jangly college rock of “Egg Timer”, the most subtle song on the entire split (not that there’s much competition). The wobbly punk balladeering of “Egg Timer” is the most noticeable one, but there’s plenty more to entertain on Shit Split Part Duh once the initial jolt of energy wears off. (Bandcamp link – Night Court) (Bandcamp link – The Dumpies)

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