Pressing Concerns: Sharp Pins, Exploding Flowers, Motorbike, Ed Kuepper & Jim White

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Third Pressing Concerns of the week! The “albums coming out tomorrow” edition! It’s the expanded vinyl release of the Sharp Pins album from last year, new LPs from Exploding Flowers and Motorbike, and a collaborative record from Ed Kuepper and Jim White. In addition, check out the Pressing Concerns from Monday (featuring Telethon, The Unfit, Quinine, and LP Gavin) and the one from Tuesday (Party’z, Earth Ball, Inland Years, and Fotokiller).

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.

Sharp Pins – Radio DDR (Vinyl Release)

Release date: March 21st
Record label: K/Perennial/Hallogallo
Genre: Power pop, jangle pop, college rock, mod
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: When You Know

So here I am, writing about an album that was on Rosy Overdrive’s 2024 best-of list here in 2025. Seems kind of like yesterday’s news, right? Well, Sharp Pins and Kai Slater aren’t household names yet, so there’s still plenty of reason to talk about their music–and I’ll personally take any excuse to talk about Sharp Pins in Pressing Concerns (which I surprisingly hadn’t gotten to do before now). Aside from his work in noise rock group Lifeguard, lo-fi pop group Dwaal Troupe, and releasing zines and cassettes under the Hallogallo banner, Slater has made two excellent jangle pop records as Sharp Pins in as many years. Both have received staggered releases–first as self-released tapes, then later pressed to vinyl with the help of another label. Tall Texan took 2023’s Turtle Rock, and late last year K and Perennial Records announced a partnership with Sharp Pins beginning with a vinyl release of last year’s Radio DDR featuring three bonus tracks. Although I certainly enjoyed Radio DDR (again, year-end list placement and everything) when it first came out, I’ve found myself appreciating it even more after revisiting it for the vinyl release. At the time, I noted that it refined and polished the noisier sides of Turtle Rock, but looking closer reveals a ton of sharp songwriting under the sheen as well.

On the whole, Radio DDR is more jangly and power pop-py than Slater’s debut as Sharp Pins, the work of somebody who’s been deep in the mod revival mines in recent years. “Classic” Guided by Voices-era tuneful blasts of noise and Slater’s timeless, always-melodic vocals are two key features of the album, and while it may be Sharp Pins’ most “traditional” work yet, it’s much too enthusiastic and earnest to become tiring. Any record that features power pop gold like “Every Time I Hear”, “Lorelei”, and “If I Ever Was Lonely” clearly has something special going on in it, and though I’d certainly enjoy it if Radio DDR bashed out a dozen similarly-minded rockers, Slater also shows a genuine interest in exploring the quieter, folkier side of bedroom pop here, too. Slater’s vision is wide enough to encompass stuff like “You Don’t Live Here Anymore”, “Sycophant”, and “Chasing Stars”, in which Slater displays enough confidence in their acoustic, pensive power to tap the breaks on the jangly electric guitars (and is right to do so). On the other end of the spectrum, “When You Know” and “Is It Better” are Sharp Pins at their most fuzzed-out (although still just as tuneful), and they’re no less at home on Radio DDR than anything else. The record’s bonus tracks do feel like “bonus tracks”–not the most immediate or interconnected group of songs, but welcome nonetheless. “I Can’t Stop” is a just-so-slightly off-center take on psychedelic guitar pop and is probably the “hit” of the trio if there is one, but “With a Girl Like Mine” adds a Byrds-y folksiness to the quiet side of Sharp Pins admirably. Alright, I’ve done all I can to get Radio DDR on your radar–where to next, Sharp Pins? (Bandcamp link)

Exploding Flowers – Watermelon/Peacock

Release date: March 21st
Record label: Meritorio/Leather Jacket
Genre: Jangle pop, power pop, psychedelic pop, Paisley Underground
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Across a Sea

At first glance, Los Angeles quartet Exploding Flowers seem to fit in with the current robust wave of new West Coast jangle pop/power pop bands, but the group’s story is a lot longer and more complex than this. The band’s frontperson, Sharif Dumani, has been involved in the Los Angeles punk/post-punk scene since the 1990s, and he’s played with everyone from Alice Bag to Silver Apples to Nikki Sudden. The first Exploding Flowers album came out in 2011, although it took the group (also featuring Josh Mancell, Happy Tsugawa-Banta, and Mark Sogomian) nearly a decade to follow it up with 2020’s Stumbling Blocks (Dumani seems to remain busy three decades into his career as a musician). Another half-decade later, labels like Meritorio have been spending the last few years chronicling a bunch of new bands drawing from the same sources as the Exploding Flowers, so it’s natural that the two would hook up for the third Exploding Flowers album, Watermelon/Peacock. Hailing from ground zero of the 1980s “Paisley Underground” movement, Exploding Flowers do evoke the loose, psychedelic side of this strain of American jangly college rock. Sometimes hazy, sometimes bright and vibrant, Watermelon/Peacock is a compelling and generous Americana record arising from one of the country’s largest population centers.

Watermelon/Peacock offers up everything from hook-fest power pop to pure psychedelia to throwback San Francisco garage rock to 60s-style keys and organs throughout its fourteen tracks and forty-odd minutes. The “hits” are as good as anything from the “vintage” power pop cellar, with peppy opening track “Crowded Streets”, the tambourine-bait “Life of a Timeline”, and the overgrown jangle of “(No Arms Around) the Isolationist” all qualifying. Somewhere just a bit removed from this side of Exploding Flowers are tracks like “We’re Flying Half as High”, “Across a Sea”, and “The Grass Grows On”, which take the compelling pop mastery to subtler (and, in the case of the latter of the three, more rhythmic and post-punky) places. This kind of music doesn’t always place a large emphasis on the lyrics, but there are threads to follow throughout Watermelon/Peacock–the record’s somewhat moody centerpiece is called “American Strife, American Life”, and closing track “Across a Sea” is explicitly about Dumani’s family history as immigrants (from Lebanon to Costa Rica and eventually the United States). There’s a darkness and (as Dumani acknowledges) cruelty in the story of “Across a Sea”–but, importantly, it’s a story that also encompasses the makeup of Exploding Flowers themselves and the vibrant music they’ve been able to make together for more than a decade. “Across a Sea” closing out Watermelon/Peacock is an inspired sequencing decision, but even without the context it’s an excellent summation of the pop music Exploding Flowers explore for the entirety of their latest LP. (Bandcamp link)

Motorbike – Kick It Over

Release date: March 21st
Record label: Feel It
Genre: Garage punk, punk rock, fuzz rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Scrap Heap

Oh, we’ve got some nice and loud Cincinnati garage rock for you today. Something of a supergroup of Feel It Records-associated artists, the quintet Motorbike is led by Welsh expat Jamie Morrison on vocals and rounded out by two members of The Drin (Dylan McCartney on drums and Dakota Carlyle, also of Corker, on guitar), bassist Jerome Westerkamp (Vacation, Good Looking Son), and guitarist Philip Valois. Motorbike arrived in 2023 with a self-titled debut album that was twenty-six ferocious minutes of fuzzed-out rock and roll, and they’re back two years later with an LP that won’t disappoint anyone who enjoyed Motorbike (or the garage-punk side of Feel It Records’ roster in general, for that matter). Kick It Over was recorded “between busy schedules over a six month period”, but while the band may have had to build it piecemeal as they kept up with their various other projects, Motorbike LP2 picks up the thread of their debut quite easily. It’s a little heavier and less pop-forward than Motorbike, but it’s a natural, gradual progression–they’re still operating in the same worlds of Motor City garage rock, riff-centric classic rock, and basement punk.

Helping the vintage feel of Kick It Over is the fact that Motorbike line up their alternate-universe hit singles at the beginning of the LP’s tracklist. “Scrap Heap” is just about a perfect opening statement–machine-gun power chords introduce a scuzzy, sleazy 70s-style hard rock ripper that does everything it has to do (and more, really) in under two minutes. “Currency” is the other half of this opening statement, a slightly different beast but still a beast–it’s got a little bit of Dead Moon graveyard-garage in it, and it’s also just about one Farfisa organ away from 60s garage rock/proto-punk. If you’re looking for Motorbike pushing against their bite-sized fuzz-rock constraints, this does exist on Kick It Over–after a few more automatic rock-and-rollers, I’d say this side of them starts around “Western Front” (a kind of glammy mid-LP stomper) and continues into the weirdest song on the record, centerpiece “Gears Never Dry” (in which Motorbike turn their full strength towards making loud but hazy psychedelic distortion). “Quite Nice” comes out the other side of that cyclone (ahem) quite nicely, but the cowpunk garage rocker does extended to nearly four minutes, and Motorbike does have to take one final strange detour (the–I think–Polish fuzz punk of “Nie Wrócimy”) before landing beautifully with two final crowd-pleasing garage rock attacks. Maybe Motorbike plays with their food a little bit on this record, but there’s no question that they do, in fact, kick it over. (Bandcamp link)

Ed Kuepper & Jim White – After the Flood

Release date: March 21st
Record label: 12XU/Remote Control
Genre: Folk rock, art rock, post-punk, noise rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Swing for the Crime

Ed Kueper and Jim White are a pair of Australian alternative/indie rock music giants–the former was the co-founding songwriter and guitarist of legendary punk band The Saints and has put out over fifty albums between his various groups and solo work, while the latter is one of the Dirty Three (Melbourne’s premiere instrumental post-rock group) and has drummed for everyone from Nina Nastasia to Simon Joyner to Bonnie “Prince” Billy (and, as of late, he’s been globetrotting as part of supergroup The Hard Quartet). Despite both musicians’ productivity and a mutual respect dating back to a bill they shared in the “mid-90s”, the duo had never collaborated before the pandemic stranded White (who’d moved to the United States some time before) in Australia. The duo started playing together–first in private, then in concert when lockdowns eased up, and in 2023 they went to Melbourne’s Sound Park Studio to make an album representative of these performances. After the Flood (named after the deadly Australian floods that occurred a year before the album was recorded) pulls material from all across Kuepper’s career–there’s one Saints song, three from his next band, The Laughing Clowns, and four are from his solo LPs.

As Kuepper’s rather larger oeuvre is mostly a personal blind spot, After the Flood is all new material to me, but even people familiar with his most acclaimed records will probably find plenty of new-to-them songs between the selections from his 21st century solo albums and the songs from the mostly-out-of-print Laughing Clowns. These tracks aren’t in any chronological order–the newest one, 2015’s “The Ruins”, is first, followed by two mid-80s Laughing Clowns tracks–underscoring the new terrain Kuepper has unlocked with White in tow. If I had to describe this album (and I do), I’d refer to it as “long, winding, electric desert folk rock”–Kuepper wanders both in his guitar playing and his vocals, letting the songs build and sprawl with White’s drums as a grounding force. For his part, White maintains his communicative, distinct style of drumming while still form-fitting to Kuepper’s compositions–he rumbles and thunders in blunt-force rockers like “Swing for the Crime” and “The Crying Dance”, adds a (mostly) subtler touch to quieter journeys like “Year of the Bloated Goat” and “Demolition”, and gets in line behind the relatively “pop” reading of “The 16 Days”. It took a long time for the songs, musicians, and circumstances to all come together on After the Flood, but it sounds like it all happened at the right time and pace. (Bandcamp link)

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