Pressing Concerns: Perennial, Pedro the Lion, Kelley Stoltz, Blab School

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Today, we’re wrapping up the fabled “big week” on the blog by looking at four records out this week: new LPs from Perennial, Pedro the Lion, Kelley Stoltz, and Blab School. Here’s where I run through everything else that went up this week and suggest you check it out if you haven’t: Monday we looked at new music from Planet 81, The Bird Calls, Gramercy Arms, and a Night Court/The Dumpies split, Tuesday was the May 2024 playlist, and Wednesday was an in-depth look at Deep Tunnel Project’s self-titled album (I also talk a bit about Shellac in that one).

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.

Perennial – Art History

Release date: June 7th
Record label: Ernest Jenning Record Co./Safe Suburban Home/Totally Real
Genre: Art punk, garage rock, post-hardcore, dance punk
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: How the Ivy Crawls

Perennial: always different, always the same. Anyone who follows the New England trio (electric organist Chelsey Hahn, guitarist Chad Jewett, and drummer Ceej Dioguardi) on social media is aware of their love of experimental music of all stripes (rock, jazz, pop, electronic…) and of their desire to incorporate it into their music, which has been coming out at a steady clip these past few years. Over the course of 2022’s In the Midnight Hour and last year’s The Leaves of Autumn Symmetry reworkings EP (both recorded by The World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die’s Chris Teti), the band honed a unique sound that mixed Dischord Records post-hardore, turn-of-the-century dance punk, and retro garage rock together with just a hint of frayed experimentation around the edges–somehow, they’ve pulled off making genuinely unpredictable and inventive rock music while at the same time sounding kind of like a punk rock AC/DC, reliably churning out muscular, scorching rock and roll over and over again. After putting all of their music out independently for a half-decade, they’ve hooked up with three different great record labels (Ernest Jenning for vinyl, Totally Real for tapes, and Safe Suburban Home for U.K./E.U. distribution) for Art History, their third full-length and what (in a just world) should be their breakout album. Once again recorded by Teti, Art History finds Perennial doing exactly what they do best–making excellent rock music and pushing just a bit forward.

Like In the Midnight Hour, Art History sprints through a dozen songs in twenty-one minutes, with tornado-like guitars and danceable rhythms assaulting us just as strongly as do Jewett and Hahn’s vocals–expect to get yelled at about mouthfuls of bees, wolfmen at sock hops, and tiger techniques by the both of them, as well as plenty of “yeah, yeah!”s. If you’re looking for differences between Art History and their last LP, the experimentation continues to erode into the pop music–rather than just being confined to snippets in between songs, we get “A Is for Abstract” and “B Is for Brutalism”, which both let the ambient, electronic, and even dub sides of the band surface for entire song lengths. In other welcome news, the 60s pop rock influence feels less “implied” than ever, and more and more central to their sound. Hahn’s organ stabs have always been key to Perennial’s sound, but they’re bolder than ever on Art History, not afraid at all to lock into that sweet “Scooby-Doo chase scene music” sound on songs like “Action Painting” and “Up-tight”.  Another wrinkle that shouldn’t be ignored is how deft Perennial and Teti have gotten at wielding dynamics in service of this kind of music, whether it’s the bubbling-to-the-surface pre-chorus detour of “Tiger Technique” or the spooky, feedback-laden first refrain of “How the Ivy Crawls” and its subsequent explosion. I was already fully on board the Perennial train before this album, and I’m just as excited as ever to witness the band continue to build in real-time something entirely distinct, huge, and befitting of the title Art History. (Bandcamp link)

Pedro the Lion – Santa Cruz

Release date: June 7th
Record label: Polyvinyl/Big Scary Monsters
Genre: 90s indie rock, emo, singer-songwriter
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Tall Pines

I’ll just get this out of the way now: these relatively short capsules are not the optimal form to talk about Pedro the Lion’s latest album. Even minor David Bazan releases deserve a deep examination, and Santa Cruz is anything but “minor”. When Bazan revived the Pedro the Lion moniker after wandering through the world of solo records and side projects like Overseas and Lo Tom, it signaled the beginning of a vital stretch of the longtime indie rocker’s career. The stripped-down alt-rock of 2019’s Phoenix was an instant highlight, and 2022’s Havasu took a few subtle but noticeable steps forward from that starting point. After covering his childhood in Arizona, Santa Cruz is the third record in Bazan’s “musical memoir” anthology-in-progress (he’s planning to make five total), covering his teenage years up until he turned 21. Not that writing about young childhood is easy, but revisiting these hectic years presents its own set of challenges, and Bazan is up for them. Bazan’s life is more transient than in previous entries, as he splits time between the titular city, Modesto, and Seattle, and his world is expanding exponentially–it makes sense, then, that Santa Cruz is the most musically adventurous record from this version of Pedro the Lion yet.

Between solo albums like Blanco and Care and his Headphones side project, Bazan is no stranger to synth-led indie rock, but his choice to begin Santa Cruz with a full embrace of it with “It’ll All Work Out” (and to continue to lean on it in songs like “Don’t Cry Now”) feels like a deliberate mile marker. When I talk about the sonic success of Santa Cruz, I’m talking about songs like this, but I’m also talking about how Bazan explicitly addresses his own musical evolution with the instrumentals as well as the lyrics–in “Little Help”, which details Bazan discovering the Beatles with just a bit of fluttering psychedelia, and in “Modesto”, containing the most exciting individual moment of the record in which Bazan hears a “beautiful, hilarious, tragic mess” of a cassette from a local Modesto band (which, as far as I can tell, he hasn’t confirmed is Grandaddy, but that would make perfect sense) and resolves to “move back to Seattle [and] be the drummer in a band”. Santa Cruz is marked with moments of discomfort from Bazan, muttering about having the “stupidest backpack” in the title track and moving yet again in the beautifully weary-sounding “Tall Pines” (when Bazan’s father announces that they’re relocating again, one wants to shout “No!” like the most annoying person in the movie theater). Obviously, this aforementioned bolt of inspiration in “Modesto” isn’t a clean transformation–just one song later, Bazan is too ashamed to tell his cousins that he’s pursuing music full-time at Christmas dinner–but I imagine it felt that way at the time, and that’s exactly how it sounds on Santa Cruz. (Bandcamp link)

Kelley Stoltz – La Fleur

Release date: June 7th
Record label: Dandy Boy/Agitated
Genre: Indie pop, college rock, guitar pop, jangle pop, folk rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Reni’s Car

At this point in his career, Kelley Stoltz is a quarter-century veteran of guitar pop music. He’s put out at least fifteen different solo albums since 1999, and has contributed in some way to music from his contemporaries (Sonny & The Sunsets, Thee Oh Sees), his influences (Robyn Hitchcock, Echo & The Bunnymen), and newer bands (The Staches, RAYS). Much like how Lunchbox was ahead of the Bay Area indie pop curve for several decades before the scene caught up to them, Stoltz has similarly been making this kind of music in his adopted hometown of San Francisco long enough to be absorbed into the current jangle/dream-y pop movement overtaking it. His latest solo album, La Fleur, comes out via Oakland’s Dandy Boy Records, who have been chronicling new indie pop coming out via bands like Yea-Ming and the Rumors, Seablite, and The 1981, and are thus a natural fit for Stoltz’s relaxed, timeless-sounding songwriting. La Fleur was largely recorded by Stoltz himself, with a couple of outside contributors in Fred Barnes and Jason Falkner (Jellyfish, The Grays) showing up on a handful of tracks.

The dozen songs of La Fleur certainly sound like a “mature” statement, a record made by a ringer who’s cracked the code of how to incorporate the music that made him (the showmanship of Hitchcock, the smooth, gliding post-punk of The Bunnymen) in a distinct way. Stoltz has clearly been influenced by guitar/power pop greats in his craft, but he’s long past the point of needing to prove his bona fides–instead, he’s more interested in opening his latest record with “Human Events” and “Victorian Box”, two somewhat dour, post-punk-shaded songs that emphasize rhythm and steadily growing tuneful noise over instant gratification. Of course, assuming that Stoltz can’t still knock out one hell of a sharp pop tune would be a mistake–for one, you’d be liable to get bowled over merely one song later with the triumphant college rock of “Hide in a Song”, and again towards the middle of the record with the back-to-back punches of “Switch on Switch Off” (bouncy 60s proto-power pop at its finest) and “Reni’s Car” (an impossible-to-dislike slice of jangle pop apparently inspired by a real situation Stoltz found himself in with The Stone Roses’ drummer). Stoltz is a subtle frontperson, preferring to let the instrumentals (like the drama of “Awake in a Dream”, the creeping bass-led “The Butterflies”, the campfire singalong vibes of “Make Believer”) set the stage for the mood of La Fleur, but he’s is no slacker either, able to adopt an insistent tone to sell the message of “The Butterflies” or the wonder in “Reni’s Car”. Guitar pop aficionados across several generations clearly don’t take Kelley Stoltz for granted; let’s not, either. (Bandcamp link)

Blab School – Blab School

Release date: June 6th
Record label: Fort Lowell/Clearly
Genre: Punk rock, post-punk, noise rock, 90s indie rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Small Simple Ways

Blab School are a new band formed by four longtime North Carolina indie rockers in guitarist/vocalists Ryan Seagrist (Discount, The Kitchen) and Lizzie Killian (Glowing Stars, Teens in Trouble), drummer Dave Cantwell (Analogue, Cold Sides, In the Year of the Pig), and bassist Fikri Yucel (Veronique Diabolique). The band formed via a Craigslist ad in Durham, but Cantwell has since moved to Carolina Beach–however, rather than slowing things down, Blab School remain quite active, and their drummer’s relocation even led to their self-titled debut album coming out via Cantwell’s new neighbors, Wilmington’s Fort Lowell Records (Kicking Bird, Common Thread, James Sardone). Blab School’s members come from all sorts of musical backgrounds, but the eight-song Blab School (recorded in Yucel’s living room by Nick Petersen) has a meaty, tough, unified sound that straddles the line between “punk” and “post-punk”. Underground rock movements like Dischord-ish limber post-hardcore/post-punk and Albini-recorded noise rock/punk come to mind in places, while in others Blab School sounds straight out of the early 1980s.

Blab School kicks off in overdrive via the pounding, almost-emo punk rock of “Small Simple Ways” that reminds me a little bit of classic Jawbreaker, but the quartet then swerve into “Scrolls”, a dark, guitar-forward post-punk tune in the vein of Killing Joke or early Siouxsie & The Banshees. At twenty-two minutes, Blab School is a record with absolutely no room for excess or embellishment–the band sound driven and laser-focused for its entire length. Whether that’s the retro, almost garage-y punk of “Quit Yr Job”, the massive slab of alt-rock of “Never Enough”, or the Kill Rock Stars-y emotional spikiness of “Will I Ever?”, Blab School remains captivating into the middle of the record, and they even explore a bit of new territory towards the album’s end. The four-minute “Rhizome” and its hammering, wall-of-sound punk rock and final song “(Don’t Forget to) Give Up”, which incorporates a bit of Touch & Go noise-punk ugliness, are two of Blab School’s heaviest moments, both of which help the record start circling the drain as it begins to sign off. Judging by their opening statement, Blab School are the best kind of “new veteran band”–one that draws from the wealth of music its members have made in the past, but all in the service of a unified, coherent sound. (Bandcamp link)

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