Pressing Concerns: Bedtime Khal, Dennis Bovell, Sunnsetter, Mud Whale

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This is a classic Thursday Pressing Concerns here, looking at three albums that will be coming out tomorrow, November 15th, plus one LP that came out yesterday. Brand-new full-lengths from Bedtime Khal, Sunnsetter, and Mud Whale are featured below, as well as an archival compilation featuring the work of legendary producer Dennis Bovell. Be sure to peek this week’s earlier blog posts too if you missed them; Monday’s post featured Sassyhiya, p:ano, Smoker Dad, and Blank Banker, and Tuesday’s featured Ylayali, Good Energy Crystal, Gentleman Speaker, and Megan from Work.

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.

Bedtime Khal – Eraser

Release date: November 15th
Record label: Devil Town Tapes
Genre: Lo-fi indie rock, bedroom pop, fuzz rock
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Dumb Stuff

East Lansing bedroom rock musician Khal Malik, aka Bedtime Khal, was one of the first artists to release a record on Leeds’ Devil Town Tapes–they put out Malik’s Fog EP in 2020, reissued the Hard to Find and Wake Up EPs as a single cassette in 2021, and he appeared on a compilation celebrating five years of the tape imprint in 2022. Despite all this, Bedtime Khal had still never released an album until now with Eraser, his first full-length record and first new record of any kind in four years. Those Bedtime Khal EPs might be fairly obscure, but they’re quite good, and fairly unique-sounding, too–Malik has an interesting take on “bedroom pop” on those releases, sounding more indebted to the 2000s post-punk revival than your Alex Gs and Sebadohs. It worked very well in short bursts, so I was naturally curious to hear what Malik would do with a larger canvas–in this case, one that’s nine songs and twenty-six minutes in size. It shouldn’t be surprising but it’s still remarkable that Eraser sounds like nothing else Bedtime Khal has done before–it reminds me of other bedroom pop projects, like Portland’s Guitar, that start to sound larger and louder when they get the means to do so. Guitar went full-on shoegaze on their most recent album, but Bedtime Khal’s evolution isn’t so linear–there’s bits of fuzzed-out basement indie rock, slowcore, emo, and bright pop music throughout the album. Eraser isn’t “more of” any one thing so much as it’s just “more”.

Like his previous records, Malik sings and plays most of what you’ll hear on Eraser aside from some guitar and vocals from Noah Kim (who plays with Malik in the emo duo Sideria) and a couple of guest vocalists. Whether or not Malik is on his own doesn’t seem to correlate with how “fully-developed” a song sounds–the huge opening track “Dumb Stuff” and its roaring wall-of-fuzz chorus is all Malik, while I don’t know if I would’ve pegged the relatively chilly, downbeat mid-tempo bedroom rock of “Blood Bucket” as one of the ones featuring Kim. The tougher, more ambitious version of Bedtime Khal is out in full force with “Dumb Stuff”, and while the rest of the cassette’s first half doesn’t quite go all-in like the opening track, there’s still plenty of hefty moments to be found in tracks like “Halo”, “Something Like That”, and “Fruit Snacks” (the latter of which is a noisy basement-punk instrumental). Another nice surprise from Bedtime Khal is that they take advantage of a full-length album runtime by shifting the vibe noticeably in the record’s second half. The final four tracks on Eraser are all significantly subtler and more contemplative, the heaviness more frequently coming from what Malik and Kim let hang in the air rather than loud guitars. Nonetheless, some of Malik’s strongest writing is back here–“Blood Bucket” and the (previously heard as a demo on the aforementioned Welcome to… compilation) “4 Wheels (Don’t Cry)” are both hushed but substantial pop songs, and “I’ll Let You Ask Me a Question” indulges in the tinny, reverb-touched side of “bedroom pop” to deliver some nice bittersweet hooks. The talent and promise of Bedtime Khal were apparent before Eraser, and the LP confidently takes a step beyond that firm foundation. (Bandcamp link)

Dennis Bovell – Sufferer Sounds

Release date: November 15th
Record label: Disciples
Genre: Dub, reggae
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Dub Land

You may not know Dennis Bovell’s name, but there’s a good chance you’ve heard something the man’s been involved with if you like the kind of music Rosy Overdrive covers. Not only is he a prolific reggae and dub musician (on his own, with the band Matumbi, and with Linton Kwesi Johnson), he also wrote the U.K. lovers rock/disco hit “Silly Games” and worked with several legendary British post-punk groups (Orange Juice, The Slits, The Pop Group). His biography is both impressive and beyond the scope of this blog post–most of it I was unfamiliar with before the Sufferer Sounds compilation caught my ear. Sufferer Sounds is a new double LP/CD out via Disciples (Charlène Darling, Phew, Special Interest) that zeroes in on a specific era of Bovell’s career, largely drawing from recordings he made from 1976 to 1980. It took the better part of a decade for Disciples and Bovell to track down the original recordings, remaster them, and properly present the compilation in what would become its final form, but it’s hard to argue with what we hear on Sufferer Sounds. Comprised of fifteen songs from various Bovell projects and collaborations (but with everything other than a dub version of “Take Five” written or co-written by Bovell himself), Sufferer Sounds is nonetheless a cohesive, transportive hour-long dub and reggae journey that spotlights a talent that more often than not operated away from the center of attention.

We’re thrown right into dub land at the beginning of Sufferer Sounds–literally, the first song is a seven-minute track credited to The Dub Band called “Dub Land”. It rules–it’s still recognizably dub, but it’s busy, sprawling, and surprising, streaming through locked-in rhythms, crisp echoes, and bursts of melodies. “Blood Dem” (credited to Dennis Matumbi) is a more minimalist version of dub, but there’s still a bite around the edges of the track, and the smooth, horn-laden “Suffrah Dub” presents yet another distinct version of Bovell’s sound. The towering dub selections are the bread and butter of Sufferer Sounds, with more focused reggae moments peppered in here and there for variety’s sake (“Come With Me” is the most obvious example of this, while Africa Stone’s “Run Rasta Run” and Errol Campbell’s “Jah Man” tilt in this direction, too). There’s a ton to take in on Sufferer Sounds–I’ve already alluded to “Take Dub”, but there’s also “Game of Dubs”, an alternate version of the song that Janet Kay took all the way to Top of the Pops in 1979, and the record’s closing duo of “Cry” (by Angelique) and “Crying” (a different version of the song by “DB at the Controls”). A quick “ctrl + F” tells me I’ve never covered anything I’ve labeled as “reggae” in Pressing Concerns before, but my ears tell me one doesn’t need to be an expert to appreciate Sufferer Sounds. (Bandcamp link)

Sunnsetter – Heaven Hang Over Me

Release date: November 15th
Record label: Paper Bag
Genre: Noise pop, shoegaze, fuzz rock, art rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Fear It Comes in Waves

I’ve written a bit on this blog about OMBIIGIZI, Status / Non Status, and Zoon, a group of interconnected Canadian indie rock bands featuring a lot of shared personnel (Adam Sturgeon and Daniel Monkman being the two most prominent creative heads) but whose records cover everything from fuzzed-out, experimental 90s-style indie rock, folk, psychedelia, and electronica. One musician who’s been a key part of this cluster of bands is Andrew McLeod, who plays in both OMBIIGIZI and Zoon as well as making music on their own as Sunnsetter. As Sunsetter, McLeod is a prolific self-recorder/self-producer, steadily putting out music on Bandcamp since at least the late 2010s. McLeod has expressed a desire to make “heavier” music, and the latest Sunnsetter album, Heaven Hang Over Me, represents a step in that direction in multiple ways. For one, it features the debut of a new Sunnsetter live band (guitarist Cole Sefton, bassist Hannah Edgerton, drummer Trevor Cook, and keyboardist Kyle Gottschalk), who play on a re-recorded version of an old Sunnsetter song, “I ACTUALLY DON’T WANT TO DIE”. And for another, Heaven Hang Over Me is indeed a heavy record in its own way–while the album (whose title comes from a misheard lyric from Nirvana’s “Dumb”) doesn’t deviate too far from the folk and psych-influenced indie rock of McLeod’s other bands, they use an intense devotion to noise to push and stretch this sound into something new.

The core tenets of Heaven Hang Over Me are all sturdy, welcome pillars of rock music–between an emotional, uninhibited lead vocal performance from McLeod and the roaring, shoegaze-influenced alt-rock guitars, this is a record that shoots for stadiums without trying to smooth down or sand off the edges of its creative head. Sunnsetter sound just as at home pulling off these sweeping, go-for-broke anthems like “Fear It Comes In Waves” as they do in the more low-key, folk/pop-indebted tracks (“Try Again”, “Bittersweet”). Heaven Hang Over Me weaves deftly through the midsection–featuring the first really challenging moment on the record, the eight-minute post-hardcore scream/noise-fest of “I Want to Live (The Body Is a Place of Rest)” and the relatively restrained but still quite-a-lot-to-take in, six-minute “Never Forget”–and comes out the other side even stronger with the crunchy fuzz-pop “Take a Shot” and the gorgeous Modest Mouse-indebted Big Sky indie rock of “I Feel Everything”. Heaven Hang Over Me feels even grander than its overstuffed fifty minute runtime (the dreamy folk of “Nothing to Fear” is cut from the vinyl edition); it makes perfect sense that Sunnsetter need a six minute instrumental called “The Moon, and in the Water” in order to cool down and bring the album to a final halt. This all certainly bodes well for McLeod’s ambitions. (Bandcamp link)

Mud Whale – Humans Pretending to Be Human

Release date: November 13th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Post-hardcore, emo-punk, alt-rock, pop punk
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Checking In

Mud Whale are a Cleveland-based “emo grunge” quartet who showed up in 2021 with a debut album called Everything in Moderation. Since then, the band (vocalist/guitarist Michael Morris, guitarist Justin Cheuvront, bassist Joe Hanson, and drummer Avery Sylvaine) have been riding the Midwestern emo circuit, playing Fauxchella and touring around the region, and have now released their sophomore full-length, Humans Pretending to Be Human. Mud Whale’s second album is an inventive and overeager punk rock record–the group can and frequently do smoothly transition between blistering, raging post-hardcore and slick emo-y alt-rock, sometimes within the same song. Morris’ evocative screaming often serves as the more harrowing end of Mud Whale’s sound, and the rest of the band temper him with catchy, almost pop punk guitars sprinting alongside. Of course, Morris’ voice can also take a shape more conducive to polished emo-pop, and the instrumentalists can be tough, meaty noise-punk merchants, too. Throw in a couple of additional genuine genre-lurches liberally sprinkled throughout Humans Pretending to Be Human, and you’ve got yourself a strong second statement of an LP. 

The first two songs on Humans Pretending to Be Human, “Checking In” and “Smoke Signals”, don’t cover the entire ground that Mud Whale traverse on the album, but they’re a pretty good litmus test for if you see the same vision that the band does. “Checking In” marries a triumphant emo-power-pop instrumental with an unhinged vocal delivery from Morris, bounding around excitedly as it blows Humans Pretending to Be Human right open. “Smoke Signals” brings the “grunge” part of “emo grunge” with a choppy, heavy-feeling alt-rock instrumental that Morris takes some time to really match (but he gets there, don’t worry). The similarly-minded emo-punk of “Figure Out” and “Sacrifice” might lull us into a false sense of…discomfort? (I guess?) but then Mud Whale decide to throw some bossa nova-influenced emo-pop at us with “Little Place” (it feels very natural!) and a random trap outro to the dream-punk-emo sprint of “Fluorescent” (it feels…less natural, but not necessarily in a bad way!). These detours are nice (and probably helped draw me, who doesn’t really write about this kind of music all that much, in to the album), but Mud Whale find their way back to dynamic, dramatic, emo/post-hardcore/punk rock to finish Humans Pretending to Be Human off with “Part of Me”. Mud Whale sound great when they’re sketching out the song in its first half, and when Morris and the band both roar as the song and album draw to a close, everything that’s gone into Humans Pretending to Be Human seems right at home with each other. (Bandcamp link)

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