Pressing Concerns: Bacchae, The Dreaded Laramie, Wild Powwers, Mark Sims

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Hey, it’s the Fourth of July! I don’t think I’ve ever done a post on the fourth (that’s the United States’ Independence Day, for people blissfully unaware) before, but I had four albums coming out this week I wanted to write about, and so we’re celebrating America with four LPs from American bands and artists: Bacchae, The Dreaded Laramie, Wild Powwers, and Mark Sims. For those with a long weekend, we also had a Monday Pressing Concerns (featuring Growing Stone, Lame Drivers, Polkadot, and Abel) and the June 2024 playlist on Tuesday, which has plenty of music to get you through the holidays.

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.

Bacchae – Next Time

Release date: July 5th
Record label: Get Better
Genre: Punk rock, post-punk
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Evening Drive

One of my favorite albums from 2020 was Pleasure Vision by Bacchae, the Washington, D.C.-based quartet’s sophomore record. Recorded with J. Robbins, it was a potent D.C. rock record that lobbed bits of furious punk rock, spiky post-punk, and polished pop rock out in equal measure. I’ve been anticipating the next Bacchae (pronounced “Bock-eye”, per their Bandcamp page) album for a while now, and so I’m thrilled that Next Time has finally arrived four years later. Once again recorded with Robbins, the band (vocalist/keyboardist Katie McD, bassist Rena Hagins, drummer Eileen O’Grady, and guitarist Andrew Breiner) pick up where they left off on Next Time–up to a point, at least. On their latest album, Bacchae incorporate their sides a bit more seamlessly–its ten tracks aren’t as easy to sort into “punk song”, “post-punk song”, “pop song”, et cetera. Although the disjointedness of Pleasure Vision was part of its charm for me, this level of evolution feels like a good move for Bacchae. At the very least, it works very well for Next Time, a record that’s nervous, fiery, and spirited–the band use a steady but forceful hand to guide us through these songs in a unified way.

“Everything’s busy, it’s overwhelming / Everything’s big and loud,” mumbles McD in the verses of opening track “Try”, a dour-sounding sludge-punk song that introduces the darkness (in how it captures futility and even despair) and lightness (the way McD jumps out of the gutter in the chorus to remind us how strong of a vocalist we have on hand here) of Bacchae. McD’s writing in the twitching title track (a speedy, agitated garage punk song) and “Drop Dead Gorgeous” (Bacchae at their pop punk brattiest) responds to the overloading assaults of information firehoses and unattainable idealized lifestyles with a steam-letting, while the corporate world/“work culture”-based songs on Next Time treat the subject the way it deserves–pure rage (“Cooler Talk”) and detached contempt (“Dead Man”). Some of my favorite moments on Next Time are the less bombastic ones–specifically, album tracks like “New Jersey”, “Feeling the Same”, and “Evening Drive” showcase just how strong Bacchae is operating at the moment. With “New Jersey”, the band nail a complicated but cathartic break-up anthem like it’s no big deal, while “Feeling the Same” reaches back to early, barebones post-punk to capture the scariness of something a lot less certain than an ending–a beginning. “Evening Drive” is Bacchae’s version of a car song–a propulsive beat and exciting guitar soloing, yes, but McD is still throwing out harrowing descriptions of sharks in the water and other isolation-evoking images. “Hey, maybe /  We’ll wait and see / Delay the end / We’ll bide our time,” sings McD in the chorus. Combined with the backing music, the whole ordeal feels great–but then again, so does hitting the slots one more time. (Bandcamp link)

The Dreaded Laramie – Princess Feedback

Release date: July 5th
Record label: Smartpunk
Genre: Pop punk, power pop, alt-rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Life Is Funny

In the first lyrics you hear on Princess Feedback, the debut album from Nashville’s The Dreaded Laramie, lead singer M.C. Cunningham prays for the painful death of an ex–and in the very next line, Cunningham sings “I don’t need you to tell me I’m pathetic / I understand what I’m doing”. The title of this song is “Mess”–taking all of this together, one can start to get a sense of just what The Dreaded Laramie have in store for us with their first full-length. After releasing The Dreaded LaramiE.P. in 2019 and Everything a Girl Could Ask in 2022, the quartet (Cunningham on vocals and guitar, guitarist Zach Anderson, drummer, Andrew Mankin, and bassist Drew Swisher) have chosen to put together a first album that’s as huge and polished-sounding as its inner contents are messy and uncomfortable. Musically, The Dreaded Laramie are power pop/pop punk mercenaries, zeroing in on the mainstream side of 90s alt-rock revival and blowing it up to eleven. Bands like Guppy-era Charly Bliss, PONY, and Smol Data come to mind, although the group are more devoted to unabashed classic rock/Weezer-y guitar solos than those ones (former collaborator Adam Meisterhans co-wrote a song on this record, and his main band, Rozwell Kid, is one of the relatively few modern acts that match The Dreaded Laramie in this department).

With the grandiosity of The Dreaded Laramie established in their instruments, it’s time for Cunningham to deliver gut-spiller after gut-spiller in her lyrics. Princess Feedback isn’t entirely a break-up album, but that’s certainly one of the topics floating throughout the record, from the aforementioned “Mess” (I didn’t even mention the part about being blackout drunk in that one) to the bouncy depressive anthem “Breakup Songs” (“I should call and ask you whether / We could write breakup songs together,” is the line that gets to the heart of the matter here) to the hesitant skipping of “I Should Go” (“…unless there’s anything else you wanna share”) to the downer ending of “Where’s My Crystal Ball?” Even the songs on Princess Feedback that don’t seem to be about a break-up are still quite personal–as fun as “Life Is Funny” is to listen to, it’s a wildly unhealthy quasi-relationship described therein, and there’s also a song containing the lyric “I wanna take you like communion” in its chorus. The Dreaded Laramie are hardly the first band to discover that bombastic music combined with intimate lyrics can be a potent combination–but, of course, the reason it’s been established as such is because of the wonders writers like Cunningham and the rest of her band can do with it. A nice, big giant explosion obliterates everything in its vicinity, so why not toss your least favorite parts of yourself right in its epicenter? (Bandcamp link)

Wild Powwers – Pop Hits & Total Bummers Vol. 5

Release date: July 2nd
Record label: Nadine/Den Tapes
Genre: Alt-rock, dream pop, fuzz rock
Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Gossamer

Seattle trio Wild Powwers have been around for a bit–their debut album came out back in 2014, and, as the title of Pop Hits & Total Bummers Vol. 5 implies, it is indeed the group’s fifth full-length. Their earlier releases might’ve been a little rougher around the edges, but vocalist/guitarist Lara Hilgemann, bassist Jordan Gomes, and drummer Lupe Flores have maintained a pretty consistent sound across their first decade of existence. Pop Hits & Total Bummers Vol. 5 has two tentpoles–heavy, garage-y psychedelic rock is one of them, and a lighter, more polished, almost dream pop sound is the other one. Both ends of Wild Powwers show up in pretty much all of Pop Hits & Total Bummers Vol. 5’s nine songs, the louder peaks tempered by moments of shimmery, reverb-y guitars and Hilgemann’s clear vocals, while the quieter ones occasionally rear up into distorted, tangled instrumentals. Hilgemann is a strong a guitarist as she is a vocalist, with her trailblazing playing forging a path for her singing to construct powerful, gripping rock music in its aftermath, and the rhythm section (and occasional backing vocals from Flores) moves in lockstep with her as well.

Pop Hits & Total Bummers Vol. 5 opens with a flex–the first song on the record, “Looper”, begins with simmering, droning guitar playing for nearly ninety seconds before the rest of the band kick in and Hilgemann launches her opening diatribe. The guitar never relents in its pounding and drilling–it’s up to the steady march of Flores and Gomes and Hilgemann’s just-as-even-attitude on the mic to turn “Looper” into an unlikely anthem. The reverb-y dream pop guitar intro to “Wild Reprise” eventually gives way into a song that’s just as huge in its own way, with the jangly six-string chorus tempering an incredibly strong vocal performance from Hilgemann. The smoldering “Spider Legs” and the retro-tinged “Far Wave” both lean on the rhythm section more than what came before them, but “Sam’s Song” (a clear-eyed, polished ballad) and “Gossamer” (led by a slicing guitar riff and soaring vocals) are distinct from one another as well. There’s hardly a breath to be had in Pop Hits & Total Bummers Vol. 5 until the gut-check that is the first minute of “Guided”–but, as it turns out, it’s necessary for the wrecking ball that the song eventually becomes. It’s a trick that Wild Powwers pull again in the record’s final track, “Baby Teeth”–it floats around for two minutes, and then steadily begins building up for the incinerating finale. At this point, I wouldn’t expect any less from Wild Powwers. (Bandcamp link)

Mark Sims – Take Me Faster

Release date: July 5th
Record label: Carousel Horse
Genre: Folk, folk rock, country-folk
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Take Me Faster

Mark Sims is a bricklayer and folk singer from Columbus, Ohio (currently based out of Sylvania, a suburb of Toledo) who’s played in countless Buckeye State bands over the years (The Tough and Lovely, The Southern Diplomats, The Wells, and Miller Kelton, among others). His solo work of late has come out via his own Carousel Horse Records, part of the Old 3C Label Group run by Paul Nini of Closet Mix and Great Plains–Sims released an album called The Luddite in 2022 via Carousel House, and its follow-up, Take Me Faster, also arrives via the imprint. A fingerstyle guitar player, Sims cites blues artists like Mississippi John Hurt as influences on his playing, although this is more “honest about where the kind of folk music he performs originated” than Take Me Faster is a “blues album”. Traditional folk, country, and blues certainly shade Sims’ writing and playing, true (it’s hard to get songs like the dour “It Never Ends” and the pastoral “Hold on to Me” otherwise), but despite his previous work, he’s not exactly a Luddite, either, as it’s not far off from the worlds of indie folk and rock in parts as well.

Even though it offers up a fairly traditional-sounding title, opening track “Small Town Blues” punches up its acoustic skeleton with electric guitar accents, sounding closer to Jeff Tweedy than Merle Travis. Of course, one does need to have a certain tolerance of unadorned “acoustic guitar music” in order to really appreciate Take Me Faster–the aforementioned “It Never Ends” and “Hold on to Me” follow not longer after, yes, and it’s not like the songs succeeding them (“Sometimes I Feel”, a suspended-feeling nature-folk ballad, and the dark fingerpicking of “Oh That I Could”) are much less sparse. It all lends Take Me Faster an “active listening” quality, although Sims does offer up some folk songs with recognizable pop moments later on in the form of “The Blue Dube” and “Sitting on the Porch” (which does indeed sound like it’d sound great in its titular location). Penultimate track “I’m Always By Your Side” finds Sims pushing himself as a vocalist more than previously, a simply effective piece of balladry that’d be a strong closing statement–but instead, we’re played out with the psychedelic country haze of the title track. The steady drumbeat and electric echoes are unlike anything else on Take Me Faster, but Mark Sims sounds just as home here as he does with the acoustic in his lap. (Bandcamp link)

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