Pressing Concerns: The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, Iffin, Brown Dog, Paul Bergmann

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I will cut to the chase here–we’re starting this week off with an excellent edition of Pressing Concerns. If you want to read about a new B-sides/non-album-songs compilation from The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, new albums from Iffin and Brown Dog, and a new EP from Paul Bergmann, they’re all down below. And you should want to read about them.

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 Pains of Being Pure at Heart – Perfect Right Now: A Slumberland Collection 2008-2010

Release date: February 7th
Record label: Slumberland
Genre: Noise pop, power pop, jangle pop, fuzz pop, twee
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Side Ponytail

The Pains of Being Pure at Heart effectively defined an entire era of indie pop. They were incredibly catchy and just as incredibly noisy, they released music on San Francisco’s Slumberland Records while being right in the middle of an exploding late-2000s Brooklyn indie rock movement–vocalist/guitarist Kip Berman, keyboardist Peggy Wang, drummer Kurt Feldman, and bassist Alex Naidus bridged together a bunch of scenes and genres with an enthusiastic credibility that nobody else really had the right ingredients to do. The quartet petered out at the end of the 2010s after four albums (five if you count their full-length cover of Tom Petty’s Full Moon Fever), but they reunited for some live shows recently, and Slumberland has taken this golden opportunity to put together Perfect Right Now, a compilation of early singles, EPs, and compilation tracks from the band’s first three years. Almost all of these ten songs initially came about either before or concurrently with The Pains of Being Pure at Heart’s most beloved album (their 2009 self-titled debut), and, as it turns out, there was an incredibly strong companion LP out there this whole time, just waiting for Slumberland to compile it. As much as the name “The Pains of Being Pure at Heart” evokes a specific time and place for indie rock fans of a certain age, they were making timeless music at their peak, and this helping of noise pop, power pop, jangle pop, twee, and fuzz rock blended together only reaffirms this. 

If you enjoy perfect guitar pop songs, you’re going to be drawn in immediately by “Kurt Cobain’s Cardigan”, a ringing, chiming piece of power pop that reminds me of a 2nd Grade song with more distortion (or like Kids on a Crime Spree, one of their initial peers who stuck around into the 2020s). About half of Perfect Right Now’s songs qualify as “rippers”, and none of them disappoint; the “Searching for the Now” version of “Come Saturday” (also from The Pains of Being Pure at Heart) keeps the foot on the gas as the second song on the record, and “103” and “Twins” add a bit of wistfulness to the fuzz-pop in the record’s second half. My favorite song from this side of The Pains of Being Pure at Heart on here is “Side Ponytail”, which is two minutes of nonstop hooks, fuzzed out to perfection. It’s a twee song on steroids; it’s 2009, and it’s forever. Elsewhere, The Pains of Being Pure at Heart decline to dial down the distortion on the less “zippy” songs, but that doesn’t stop “Ramona”, “Higher Than the Stars”, and “Falling Over” from successfully incorporating post-punk, new wave, and even a bit of sophisti-pop in their sound (it’s kind of like “incidental dream pop”). The record ends with the most recent recording on the album, the 2010 song “Say No to Love” that’s a bit more polished-up and nearly four minutes long. It’s effectively the closing of the curtain for this era of The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, but this exit sounds great and graceful, too. (Bandcamp link)

Iffin – Get Hung, Fascist

Release date: February 6th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Jangle pop, power pop, psych pop, chamber pop
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Shouting

What would you expect an album called Get Hung, Fascist to sound like? If you said “somewhat jangly, somewhat convoluted guitar pop music with shades of classic college and folk rock, inspired by lo-fi indie rock band from New Zealand and American basements”…well, then you’ve probably already read either of my reviews of Iffin’s first two EPs, Picaro 1: As the Crow Fights and Homage to Catatonia (Picaro Two). That’s the specific niche that Mira Tsarina has been carving out for herself this decade as Iffin, causing me to pull out some points of comparison I don’t typically get to use (The Waterboys! The Verlaines! Scott Miller, this blog’s very namesake!). I’ve written about bands that have couched revolutionary rhetoric with jangly guitars (see Proper Nouns, and Chime School have their moments, too), but, like in the writing of those acts, things are rarely as straightforward as the title of Get Hung, Fascist suggests. One must listen a little closer and more intently to follow what Tsarina is going on about on your typical Get Hung, Fascist track, but Iffin (here, just Tsarina and “horns and samples” from one Henry F.) meet us halfway with an album that both sounds welcoming enough and is sufficiently thorny and tangled to suggest relistening.

Tsarina draws upon a good deal of earlier Iffin material for the act’s big full-length debut–all four songs from As the Crow Fights show up here, as well as one track from Homage to Catatonia and the 2022 “Shout” single, meaning that over half the album was previously released and I’ve written about almost as much of it (but since these songs are still quite good, and you probably haven’t heard all of them anyway, there’s no harm in double dipping). Either way, it’s a rewarding journey in repackaging (if you’d like to look at it that way), and the new songs hold their own against shined-up (shout out to Henry F.’s horn playing) highlights from Iffin’s previous output. The opening stretch is a full-on arrival announcement for Iffin, sparkling versions of “Shouting” and “Girls Like Us” buttressing the perfect pop music of the new, excellent “Birds Are Gone”. The wild Elvis Costello/mid-career Guided By Voices-esque “Bigger Star” feels like new territory for Iffin, while a lot of the back half of the record gives some of the weirdest pop moments from the EPs (the bad-vibes post-punk-pop of “Julian Was Here”, the psychedelic dance-friendly “Cost of Floss”, the pastoral folk-pop of “My Majesty”) the B-side home they’ve always deserved. There’s a six-minute prog-pop song called “Our Nation’s Straightest Dad” hidden away in the penultimate slot, and even that one’s got a nice jangle-horn-pop sound to it. Good thing too, because Tsarina sounds like the Riddler or something with these lyrics (“The thought of bruises / Your father chooses … Our father grew into a man of taste / He takes salt with his water”) and it’s gonna take me a bit to figure that one out. (Bandcamp link)

Brown Dog – I Thought I Was Gonna Dance

Release date: January 23rd
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Folk rock, alt-country, cosmic country, slowcore
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Sweet Exits

I first heard Berkeley, California alt-country band Brown Dog last year, when they released their sophomore album, Lucky Star Creek. Lucky Star Creek represented a step forward for the band–they’d grown from the founding duo of singer-songwriter Milo Jimenez and multi-instrumentalist Haniel Roland-Holst (the lineup that recorded their first album, 2021’s See You Soon) to a five-piece band also featuring bassist Stew Homans, pedal steel player Jeff Phunmongkol, and drummer Elihu Knowles. Despite the expansion, I called Lucky Star Creek a “restrained and pensive listen”, much closer to bedroom folk and even slowcore than electric country-rock. Clearly, though, Brown Dog have hit on something with their current lineup, as they’ve returned less than a year later with their third LP, I Thought I Was Gonna Dance. This time around, they’ve added Gabriel Bennet on flute and bass clarinet, and, if anything, Brown Dog have gotten even more subtle and quiet on this album. The rock moments are even fewer and far between, increasingly replaced with a sprawling, pastoral folk-dream-country sound that’s nearly psychedelic in its expansiveness. Lucky Star Creek may have been meandering, but you’re practically guaranteed to get lost somewhere in I Thought I Was Gonna Dance. 

And that “somewhere” just might be at the very onset of I Thought I Was Gonna Dance, as Brown Dog choose to kick off the record with a nearly six-minute track called “Just a Little Changed”. The song’s slow, deliberate dream-folk, marked by leisurely acoustic strumming, Jimenez’s raspy vocals, and moments of big sky daydreaming, falls somewhere between the spacier side of Giant Sand and Wilco, and it should prepare you more or less for what to expect with I Thought I Was Gonna Dance. “Again” may be shorter, but it’s no more direct in its presentation, and “Lights” strips things down even further to delicate fingerpicking. The closest thing to a “rock song” on the album is the mid-tempo, mid-record highlight “Sweet Exits”, but it’s something of a red herring, as the flipside of I Thought I Was Gonna Dance delves even more extensively into folky psychedelia. The seven-minute “Corners”, the half-awake cloudiness of “Little Spring”, and the train-station folk music of “Under My Shoes” are the sound of wandering somewhere in the northern California wilderness, with no discernible markers to speak of in sight. I don’t even know how a group of musicians get into the headspace to pull off an entire record of music like that of I Thought I Was Gonna Dance, but Brown Dog clearly were right to pursue this train of thought to its conclusion. (Bandcamp link)

Paul Bergmann – Long Island Sounds

Release date: January 17th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Singer-songwriter, post-punk, folk rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Sunlight in Your Hair

I wasn’t really familiar with the music of Paul Bergmann before hearing his latest EP, Long Island Sounds, but the New Haven-based singer-songwriter actually has a fairly impressive history between playing shows with Angel Olsen and Lou Barlow and amassing a large discography of full-lengths, EPs, and one-off singles since 2013. As of late, Paul Bergmann has been playing with a full band (a trio rounded out by Scott Lawrence on bass and Cameron Brown on drums), and this is the lineup that went up to Easthampton, Massachusetts to record Long Island Sounds live with prolific producer Justin Pizzoferrato at his Sonelab Studio last year. Pizzoferrato is sort of the go-to producer for garage rock and punk bands of the American Northeast (and the records he works on are typically strong enough that I downloaded Long Island Sounds to my phone upon reading about his involvement despite having not heard any of it), but Bergmann and his band have a sound subtler and distinct from Pizzoferrato’s typical clients. Bergmann’s folk-inspired writing collides with his band’s polished, regal, almost post-punk indie rock sound in these five songs, reminding me somewhat of a mid-career, still-hungry The National.

The Paul Bergmann trio choose to start Long Island Sounds with a slow burn–it takes a half-minute for opening track “Sunlight in Your Hair” to actually start, and even after that, it’s not until a minute into the track that the song really comes alive in the chorus. “Sunlight in Your Hair” floats away just as it arrived, leading to a couple of songs that are apparently re-recordings from Bergmann’s previous works (but since I don’t know them, they might as well be brand new). Perhaps Bergmann wanted to get versions of “Lover of the Good Times” and “White Burning Lace” with his new band on tape, and that’s understandable, as the dark post-punk-pop bittersweetness of the former and the slow-building propulsion of the latter (probably the most “The National” moment on the EP) are both highlights. As the Bergmann band reaches the end of the Long Island Sounds sessions, they reach their most sprawled-out and restrained (the five-minute “Old Motel”) as well as their loosest (“Untitled”, which starts off not unlike the EP’s earlier highlights, only for Bergmann to unleash a tortured howl of a vocal unlike anything else on the record as it comes to a close). Long Island Sounds isn’t precisely what I expected, but I came away impressed with what Bergmann, Lawrence, and Brown did on it nonetheless. (Bandcamp link)

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