Pressing Concerns: Cheekface, The Men, Andy Bell, Kristin Daelyn

What a great Pressing Concerns we’ve got below! It’s got the brand-new Cheekface album that came out earlier this week in it, as well as new albums from The Men, Andy Bell, and Kristin Daelyn that come out tomorrow, February 28th. Check it out, and be sure to dial up the blog posts from Monday (featuring David Ivan Neil, Gaytheist, Winter & Hooky, and Joshua Wayne Hensley) and Tuesday (featuring Moon Orchids, Midwestern Medicine, Publicity Department, and Smalltalk) if you haven’t yet.

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.

Cheekface – Middle Spoon

Release date: February 25^th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Power pop, indie pop, post-punk, Cheekface
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Art House

Why do you like Cheekface? Well, there are several legitimate answers from my vantage point. For the better part of a decade now, the Los Angeles trio have been making an incredibly specific type of music, a proprietary blend of power pop, dance-punk, and Television combined with Greg Katz’s everyman talk-singing vocals mixed up in a way scientifically guaranteed to garner Cake comparisons. The orations of Katz, a state-of-the-union collection of one-liners and fake-outs from somebody who has incomplete knowledge of every subject, have always been the immediate draw, but recent Cheekface material has emphasized “chops”, in particular last year’s It’s Sorted, which leaned heavily on rhythm section Amanda Tannen (bass) and Mark Echo Edwards (drums) to lock into a more dance-friendly groove. This growth (ironically, given that one of these songs is titled “Growth Sux”) is present on the fifth Cheekface LP, Middle Spoon, but rather than continue speeding down that path, the trio reach back to some of their other cornerstone influences this time around. Cheekface the big-chorus power pop slingers are back in a big way on Middle Spoon, as much as they were on 2022’s Too Much to Ask (the high watermark of this side of the band), if not more so. You can still dance to it (always people pleasers, Cheekface), but somehow it’s a more cathartic hip-swaying.

A lot of these aforementioned power pop bangers are found on Middle Spoon’s second half, but maybe the LP had to be kind of backloaded because the opening track, “Living Lo-Fi”, is positively unstoppable. It’s a giant tune–no wonder the song spends a whole stanza sympathizing with Goliath (“Now David was a murderer / Who had a problem with the tall / And as somebody who’s tall / You find the whole thing quite offensive”). The next in our gallery of rogues is mid-LP highlight “Art House”, which might be a roundabout way of acknowledging that Cheekface, “cool” influences aside, are never going to be thought of as an “art house” band. Katz actually sings really well in the chorus, emoting like an emo-pop frontperson on the “sticky arthouse floor”, and if the central metaphor of the song is a little convoluted (“You are a grey and grainy scene / You are not big on dialogue / And I can only turn you on / If I want to get confused”), well, that fits with the theme. “Don’t Dream” also deserves a mention here, even if I don’t have much to say about it other than that it’s an incredible move to open a Cheekface song with “Are you sick of my shit yet?”. “Content Baby”, though–I feel like I could write a whole essay just on that one. I have to keep things reined in here, but where does one even begin with a song with lyrics like “You like the good type of drone / I like the bad type of drone / We are two cute little perverts / With a heart made of gold” and a chorus that goes “Treat me like your content baby / You have my consent to share me”. 

“Content Baby” is also where Middle Spoon gets its title, and I think it zeroes in on what this record is all about–to me, at least. These songs are about comfort–sickly sweet, suffocating, grotesque comfort. It takes the discomfort one gets in the back of one’s head while in mindless dopamine pursuit mode and eliminates it, chasing down the comfort until it’s wolfed down every morsel of it and we’re all so comfortable that now we’re completely uncomfortable about it all over again. Middle Spoon is beautiful ruins, Katz running around the wreckage of society yelling about how “growth sux” and about how he loves reruns because he “know[s] what’s gonna happen” and about how he doesn’t get foreign cinema. Speaking of the wreckage of society, there’s a rap-funk-metal song on here called “Military Gum” where Cheekface let McKinley Dixon run wild and it sounds way better than it should. It sounds great, like if Rage finally cut out all that political BS. Just don’t think too hard about it. (Bandcamp link)

The Men – Buyer Beware

Release date: February 28^th
Record label: Fuzz Club
Genre: Garage punk, garage rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Fire Sermon

Buyer beware, Brooklyn garage rock merchants The Men are back once again. Of course, this isn’t all that surprising–if there’s one thing that’s predictable about their music, it’s that there’s always more of it, and the quartet (guitarist/vocalists Nick Chiericozzi and Mark Perro, bassist Kevin Faulkner, and drummer Rich Samis) have kept their foot on the gas this decade after linking up with producer Travis Harrison (Guided by Voices) and new label Fuzz Club Records for 2023’s New York City and a couple of “bonus”-type LPs in Fuzz Club Sessions and Manhattan Fire. New York City found the band returning to their garage rock roots after a couple of more eclectic and experimental releases, and with Buyer Beware, The Men have torn even further into this vein. A straight-up punk rock album, Buyer Beware is a baker’s dozen tracks’ worth of fiery rock and roll from the garage in the vein of Rocket from the Tombs, the first wave of New York punk, and even a bit of early/proto-Sub Pop in its heavier moments. Moments of squealing saxophones are banged-out piano throughout the album help The Men retain their metropolitan undercurrent, but these extra moments don’t take the place of white-hot guitars; instead, they surge right alongside of them, doing their best to keep up.

No one can accuse Buyer Beware of starting out too slowly–pretty much everything on the album’s first half either begins with piercing amplifier feedback or immediately lurches into foot-on-gas garage punk rock. We have to grade things on a curve to differentiate these songs: “Pony” and the title track are “merely” satisfying, crunchy rock songs, while “Fire Sermon” and “PO Box 96” are straight-up insanity. The first song on Buyer Beware that could reasonably described as “pretty” is “Charm”, which has excellent melodies and harmonies underneath the fuzz, but the violent chain-punk excursion of “Black Heart Blue” (featuring the memorable couplet “Jesus in the manger / I’d fuck up a stranger to get next to you”) rises up almost in direct reaction to it. The bottled-up explosion of “Nothing Wrong” (they wait almost an entire minute before the full might of The Men kicks in!) signals…something, but it’s not until the home stretch of Buyer Beware where things truly get palpably heavier, sludgier, grungier. The chugging chords of “The Path” are positively drenched in psychedelics, and while the Dead Moon-esque graveyard rock of “Tombstone” is a little more “normal Men”, they stretch this scorcher out to nearly four minutes. The metallic psych-punk returns on “Get My Soul”, the finale that finds The Men howling “you’re never gonna get my soul” over the musical fireworks. Jesus in the manger, I couldn’t imagine being wild enough to try. (Bandcamp link)

Andy Bell – Pinball Wanderer

Release date: February 28^th
Record label: Sonic Cathedral
Genre: Psychedelia, krautrock, post-punk, art rock, space rock, dream pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Panic Attack

For someone who’s been making music for nearly forty years, Andy Bell’s had a pretty impressive decade in the 2020s thus far. The Ride guitarist and vocalist (and onetime Oasis bassist) began a partnership with Sonic Cathedral (Lorelle Meets the Obsolete, Dummy, Whitelands) at the beginning of this decade, and it’s sparked a wildly prolific period for the musician–I swear, for a while there it seemed like every time I turned around he had something new coming out, whether it was a proper solo album (like 2020’s The View from Halfway Down or 2022’s Flicker), a release from his side project GLOK, an EP of remixes or reimaginations of older recordings, or collaborations with labelmates like Masal (oh, and Ride is still going strong, too). Bell’s latest record is another long-player, an eight-song record called Pinball Wanderer, and we find the shoegaze legend waist-deep in a vibrant world of warped psychedelia, krautrock/post-punk/space rock grooves, and electronic/synth-led dream pop. Pinball Wanderer is one of those albums that sounds like the work of an eternal tinkerer, but he (presumably with help from producer Gem Archer, another ex-Oasis member) has shaped and edited these explorations into something incredibly varied but just as rewarding.

On one end of the spectrum, we have songs like the opening track “Panic Attack”, which reflect Ride’s greatest secret weapon–great pop songs. This steady-moving psychedelic pop track may be the single most accessible moment on Pinball Wanderer, but there’s also an excellent dream pop cover of The Passions’ “I’m in Love with a German Film Star” (featuring another labelmate, Dot Allison, on lead vocals, and none other than Michael Rother of Neu! on guitar), the pastoral instrumental title track (which has a bit of a 70s psychedelic folk vibe to it with a few more modern tricks), and the two-minute synthpop rest stop of “The Notes You Never Hear”, all of which I’d call “pop music” in their own specific ways. And then, on the other hand, we have the grooves. The most successful exploration in this vein is the longest one, the eight-minute “Apple Green UFO”, a wild extraterrestrial odyssey that never lets the rhythms at its core float into the atmosphere. Of course, we do “gotta hand it” to the garish electro-funk whispers of “Music Concrete” and the Stereolab-Dummy-core drone pop finale of “Space Station Mantra”, too. Andy Bell will probably get back to cooking up something new pretty soon, and while his next record might sound pretty different than Pinball Wanderer, I won’t be mistaking his wanderlust for a lack of commitment to whatever project he’s throwing himself into at the moment. (Bandcamp link)

Kristin Daelyn – Beyond the Break

Release date: February 28^th
Record label: Orindal
Genre: Folk, singer-songwriter
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: An Opening

The Philadelphia singer-songwriter Kristin Daelyn debuted in 2021 with an album called Gardens & Plantings, a quiet folk record recorded and played almost entirely by Daelyn herself. Daelyn’s music is a natural fit for Orindal Records, and the cult Chicago folk/indie pop/ambient label has picked her up four years later as she gears up to release her sophomore album, Beyond the Break. Once again largely a Daelyn solo work, she nonetheless gets help from prolific co-producer Jason Cupp (Low Praise, Ratboys, American Football) and musicians Dan Knishkowy (Office Culture, Ben Seretan, Adeline Hotel) on guitar, Danny Black of Good Old War on steel guitar, baritone guitar, and bass, and Patrick Riley on strings on a couple of tracks apiece. Regardless of whether or not extra instrumentation was later added, the acoustic guitar-and-vocals cores of these songs were recorded by Daelyn at home live, and there’s subsequently a very direct and clear quality to Beyond the Break that’s befitting of Daelyn the writer. Beyond the Break is a brief album–its eight songs total less than 24 minutes altogether–but (aside from the sixty-second intro track) none of these songs feel abbreviated; Daelyn and her collaborators get just about everything they can out of them, in fact.

The presentation of Beyond the Break naturally places an emphasis on Daelyn’s lyrics and guitar playing–for the latter, she’s inspired by solo fingerstyle guitarists like John Fahey and Leo Kottke, but the name that she first references for the former is poet Mary Oliver. These are pretty hallowed influences, but the interplay between these two pillars is Beyond the Break’s greatest strength to my ears; the guitar is the anchor, the immediately satisfying part of her writing that’s always doing something compelling but never showy, while her lyrics are more insular, stories told in sanded-down short statements interspersed with the guitars and other instruments. For the most part, Daelyn’s songs hover in the midst of imagery of dreams, nature, dreams of nature, and nature that feels like dreams–worlds that can be comforting or dark, even as Daelyn’s writing doesn’t tip her hand. There will be occasional snatches of something more concrete in these songs–like the redwood tree and Massachusetts in “White Lilies”–but Beyond the Break is largely too insular to offer up even these semi-solid mile markers. The person who’s penning songs like “Wanted”, “Longing”, and “An Opening” is deep in herself–and no amount of fresh-air guitar fingerpicking can make these compositions simple. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

• The Chills – Spring Board: The Early Unrecorded Songs
• A. Lee Edwards – Interpreting Heart Sounds, Vol. 1 
• Anxious – Bambi
• Never Any Ordinary – Life Everlasting
• Allsalt – Ritual Abstract
• Chest. – All Good Things End EP
• Demora – Torpor EP
• Pretty Lightning – Night Wobble
• Mean Magic – II
• Modern Silent Cinema – Passages XXII-XXXII (for Solo Piano) 
• Yves Jarvis – All Cylinders
• Yo La Tengo – Old Joy (Official Soundtrack)
• Trupa Trupa – Mourners EP
• Marc McLaughlin – All I Can Say EP
• Mandrake Handshake – Earth-Sized Worlds
• Taste Testors – Taste Testors
• Camille Cabbabe – K2
• Laurie Torres – Après coup
• See Night – Just Another Life
• Maruja – Tir na nÓg EP
• John R. Miller – Fireside Sessions Vol. 2 EP
• Basia Bulat – Basia’s Palace
• dadá Joãozinho – 1997 EP
• Being Jane Lane – We’re Doing Fine
• Ray Bull – Little Acts of Violence EP