Pressing Concerns: Bambara, Lone Striker, Olivia’s World, Dead Bandit

We’ve got four great albums coming out tomorrow, March 14th, in the Thursday Pressing Concerns: new LPs from Bambara, Lone Striker, Olivia’s World, and Dead Bandit. Check them out below, and if you missed this week’s earlier blog posts (Monday’s Pressing Concerns featured Silo’s Choice, Kinski, Humilitarian, and Spinnen, and Tuesday’s featured ODDLY, The Sprouts, Celebrity, and Mirrored Daughters), check those out too.

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.

Bambara – Birthmarks

Release date: March 14^th
Record label: Bella Union/Wharf Cat
Genre: Post-punk, art rock, noise rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Letters from Sing Sing

I don’t even really know where to begin with this one, but it’s good enough to be on the blog, so I have to start somewhere. I’ve always been vaguely aware of Bambara as one of those modern “dark post-punk” revival bands for a while now, but I’ve received a crash course on them thanks to Birthmarks, the group’s fifth album. It turns out that the New York-based trio have been around for longer than I realized (2007, but playing together under different names for even longer) and are originally from Athens, Georgia. Two-thirds of the band are brothers (vocalist/guitarist Reid and drummer Blaze Bateh, with William Brookshire rounding out the trio), and their sound is gothic, “arty”, and influenced by Nick Cave and Swans–putting them closer to Iceage and Protomartyr than, say, IDLES and Viagra Boys. Another key part of Bambara is Reid Bateh’s high-concept, “literary” writing, storytelling delivered in a croaking, hypnotic baritone, a feature that’s only gotten more pronounced as Bambara has gotten longer in the tooth. This brings us to their first album in five years and first for Bella Union, Birthmarks, partially recorded by Bark Psychosis’ Graham Sutton in England and then further developed by the band in Brooklyn. Birthmarks is an ambitious album in more ways than one, the trio augmenting their post-punk sound with atmospheric electronica, psychedelia, even a bit of hip hop production to keep up with Reid’s convoluted writing. 

I don’t exactly have a handle on the story of Birthmarks at the moment, but that’s not a problem. These songs aren’t chronological (of course they aren’t), but there are recurring characters and motifs, allusions to murder and evil and recurring references to photography, snakes, Christianity, and rural America, among other signposts. I want to be clear that Bambara do not sound like The Hold Steady, but if you read that description and thought of a more post-punk Hold Steady (which is Lifter Puller, I guess), then you’re not alone. Birthmarks is always intimate, but it sort of starts out at its most uncomfortably close–Bambara put all their blood, sweat, and semen into stuff like opening track “Hiss”, Afghan Whigs style, and the fruits of their expanded musical palette (I do, in fact, hear the dream pop and trip hop influences in that one and another early one, “Face of Love”) help Bambara land these tracks, too. Bambara zoom out a bit thematically as Birthmarks goes on, but the music doesn’t follow any clear trajectory; post-punk seethers like “Letters from Sing Sing” and “Pray to Me” sit alongside cavernous art rock material like “Because You Asked” and “Smoke”. It all feels very precarious; Bambara are holding up something almost too big for any indie rock band here, and there are moments when the cracks in the grandiosity show–like guest vocalist Madeline Johnston (of Midwife) making an aside as the character Elena about someone’s jacket left at her house at the end of the spoken-word voicemail “Elena’s Dream”. These wobbles and glimpses don’t make the inferno of closing track “Loretta” any less all-consuming, though. (Bandcamp link)

Lone Striker – Lone Striker

Release date: March 14^th
Record label: Safe Suburban Home/Repeating Cloud/Hidden Bay
Genre: Lo-fi pop, bedroom pop, power pop, folk pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Funny Way of Showing It

We talk about Tom Brown a lot on Rosy Overdrive. His sometimes-solo-project, sometime-five-piece band Teenage Tom Petties has become a fixture of Pressing Concerns in recent years, and Rural France, his slightly longer-in-the-tooth duo with Rob Fawkes, has made some appearances on the blog as well. And now there’s Lone Striker, which begs the question: what could Brown possibly need a third alias for? Well, while Teenage Tom Petties and Rural France both worship at the altars of lo-fi power pop, college rock, and jangly indie pop, Lone Striker is an attempt by Brown to do something markedly different. The self-titled debut Lone Striker album is apparently five years in the making, recorded almost entirely by Brown at home utilizing “wobbly doo-wop samples, off-kilter soul drum loops and found sounds” as well as his typical indie rock instrumentation. It sounds like a huge departure, right? Well, yes and no. There are no boxroom bangers on Lone Striker, no, but there’s still plenty of excellent guitar-driven (or, at least, co-driven) pop music here. Brown may be primarily drawing from psychedelic and atmospheric-pop 90s indie groups like Sparklehorse and Mercury Rev, but Lone Striker works because he’s able to speak the same fuzzy, half-remembered, mid-century Americana language that those bands also spoke (somehow, despite being British), and actually elucidates a core tenet of his other projects in doing so.

A good deal of the songs on Lone Striker I could imagine as Teenage Tom Petties tracks if they were sped up and given a lot less of a…tired reading. The hook to “Blip One” may be a sample of a blue-moon croon, but the rest of the song is vintage Tom Brown, the perky “Cursed Like Roy” is a little bit of a mid-record pick-me-up, and “Funny Way of Showing It” is as sugary and theatrical as anything off of Hotbox Daydreams (even if, slowed down and relying on chimes and pianos, it also kind of sounds like Christmas music). Meditating on the lilting pop music of Lone Striker has only reaffirmed my belief that the strength of the Teenage Tom Petties comes from Brown’s uncanny knack for bridging the gap between British folk-pop music and the Americana canon, and Lone Striker is merely a continuation of the project from a different angle. Thematically, stuff like “Never Blown a Kiss”, “Cling”, and “Hurry Up, You’re Taking Forever” are universal-language type things, the kind of lovelorn, heart-on-sleeve lyrics that evoke vocal jazz, early country music, or ancient folk songs–depending on whichever was most formative to the listener. Still, though, there are plenty of moments exclusive to Lone Striker that we just wouldn’t have gotten with Brown’s other projects–the little country flourishes of “Hurry Up, You’re Taking Forever”, that sample in “Never Blown a Kiss”, pretty much the entirety of the self-immolation acoustic brush-pile of “Pinocchio”. Lone Striker is just as much a great pop album as any of Tom Brown’s others, even if it does at times have a funny way of showing it. (Bandcamp link)

Olivia’s World – Greedy & Gorgeous

Release date: March 14^th
Record label: Little Lunch/Lost Sound Tapes
Genre: Noise pop, twee, fuzz rock, indie punk
Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Sourgum

Greedy & Gorgeous has been a long time coming. Olivia’s World’s Tuff 2B Tender was a favorite in the early days of the blog–it was one of my favorite EPs of 2021, serving as an incredibly strong introduction to the fuzzed-out twee-punk of the Australian (and, for a while, Canadian) group. Now based in Sydney, bandleader Alice Rezende and longtime bassist Joe Saxby recruited guitarist Jordan Rodger and drummer Daan Steffens to help put together the first Olivia’s World album (and first new music of any kind in four years), Greedy & Gorgeous. I wouldn’t expect anything less than indie pop with an instrumental heft and a clear personality from Olivia’s World, and Greedy & Gorgeous delivers–Rezende remains a striking frontperson, thoughtful and occasionally less-than-clear but never guarded in her writing. The band are tougher and more unified than ever before; the pop hooks of Tuff 2B Tender are still here, but the Pacific Northwestern looseness is augmented by a hard-charging, Dinosaur Jr. fuzz rock streak that remains constant throughout the album. Sometimes Olivia’s World will come out swinging, other times they’ll turn on a dime from bouncy, offbeat guitar pop to the big finish, but Greedy & Gorgeous keeps finding its way back there.

Greedy & Gorgeous is a weird record, but Alice Rezende is probably weird, and the way that Olivia’s World make some odd choices while still holding onto “pop music” feels pretty authentic. “Porcupine Girl” is a modern twee classic–it has a childlike, dreamlike quality to it, sort of like a nursery rhyme set to wobbly electric guitar, and it serves as an extended introduction to the world of Greedy & Gorgeous. It’s time to grow up in “Baby Bathwater”–but it’s not the pop rock blooming that we’d expect, instead settling into a somewhat angry mid-tempo track that does indeed get pretty loud in the refrain. The K Records/Raincoats pop of “Healthy & Wealthy” is probably the catchiest thing on the album up to that point, kicking off Greedy & Gorgeous’ golden era that continues with the wonky, post-punk twee pop journey of “Empresário”, the slacker rock-new wave hybrid “Chemlab”, and “Sourgum”, the most full-on eighteen-wheeler rock and roller on the album (it rules, of course). Rezende is all over the place on Greedy & Gorgeous; for every explosion like “Weird Guy” (in which she asks “Can you stop / being a weird guy?”) there’s something less cathartic, like the pacing of “Healthy & Wealthy” (“Are you TV-ready? / I’m not TV-ready”) or the only “soft” song on the record, closing track “Beauty Bar”. In the latter, Rezende asks “Am I just a peasant here?” and mutters about giving off some “awkward vibes”. We’re in Olivia’s World, though, where such scattered thoughts make for excellent fodder for gorgeous, sparkling indie pop. (Bandcamp link)

Dead Bandit – Dead Bandit

Release date: March 14^th
Record label: Quindi
Genre: Post-rock, ambient
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Half Smoked Cigarette

The instrumental duo of Ellis Swan and James Schimpl have been making music together as Dead Bandit since the dawn of this decade–their debut, From the Basement, came out back in 2021, and I first heard them thanks to their sophomore album, 2024’s Memory Thirteen. Memory Thirteen was a satisfying collection of wide-open, guitar-led post-rock that evoked the vastness of Canada (the band’s homeland, and where Schimpl is still based) while incorporating just a bit of the ambient rock of Swan’s adopted city of Chicago. The third Dead Bandit album, self-titled this time around, doesn’t mess with Swan and Schimpl’s winning formula, although there are differences between this one and Memory Thirteen that I’ve picked up on. Dead Bandit sound a little busier, buzzier, and more electronic this time around–there’s still a lot of empty space on Dead Bandit, of course, but there’s a greater interest in letting prominent beats plod across the landscape. An LP with sixteen songs, Dead Bandit ends up offering a surprisingly large amount of variations on post-rock, ambient, post-punk, electronic, and dub–these short, discrete songs still evoke something greater than their parts when taken as a whole, though.

Early highlights like “Weeds” and “Half Smoked Cigarette” are essentially instrumental indie rock songs, but Dead Bandit isn’t content to stay in this space–more dubby (“Glass”) and ambient (“Milk”) songs coexist right next to them. Dead Bandit find themselves somewhere in between for a lot of this album–take “Pink”, for example, which starts out with a typical rock band set up but doesn’t stay overly committed to it, dipping in and out of focus for three minutes. The folkier side of Dead Bandit isn’t as prevalent on this record, but “Up to Your Waist” is an excellent acoustic-driven exploration that captures this version of post-rock strongly enough for the entirety of the album. Late-record moments like “Spidery Ways” and “Koyo” continue to push Dead Bandit forward–the former is made up of showy (for Dead Bandit, at least) guitars, sounding a bit jazzy and a smidge more overtly Chicago, while the latter embraces the mechanical nature of the drum machine at its core to offer up a grey, rhythmic march. Whether it’s with synthesizers, basslines, guitar lines, or just some kind of strange rumbling sensation whose origins I’m not sure of, Dead Bandit spend their third album practicing different ways to say the same grey story. It’s one worth paying attention to. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

• Downward – Downward
• Tobacco City – Horses
• All Hallowed – III EP
• Throwing Muses – Moonlight Concessions
• Riggings – The Subject Was Faggots: A Mixtape
• Weaving – Webs
• Hearts Apart – Summer Bummer EP
• Courting – Lust for Life, Or: ‘How to Thread the Needle and Come Out the Other Side to Tell the Story’
• Strawberry Moon – Smoon EP
• So Cow – Rebel Bishop
• Silver Synthetic – Rosalie
• Hachiku – The Joys of Being Pure at Heart
• The Limiñanas – Faded
• The Ocean Greys – Blue to Black EP
• The Flying Bones – Who Are the Flying Bones?
• Night Ritualz – Night Ritualz
• The Burning Hell – Ghost Palace
• Siyahkal – Days of Smoke and Ash / روزای دود و خاکستر
• Hello Whirled – Hello Whirled Is Here to Stay
• Brad Marino – On the Brink: Rarities, Remixes & Unreleased
• Restless Mosaic – Quality Mirrors
• Gender Amplified – In Bloom EP
• Neil Young – Oceanside Countryside
• The Devil Makes Three – Spirits
• Victor V. Gurbo – Outrun the Invisible Man (Home Recordings)