Pressing Concerns: Dave Scanlon, Ging Nang Boyz, Disaster Kid, Theydevil

For the second Pressing Concerns of the week, we have a new album from Dave Scanlon, a new EP from Disaster Kid, a retrospective compilation from Ging Nang Boyz, and a reissue of Theydevil‘s debut record. This is a nice and varied one! Also, if you missed yesterday’s post (featuring Dick Texas, Private Lives, George Children, and Film Studies), check it out here.

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.

Dave Scanlon – Greenland Shark

Release date: February 25^th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Experimental folk, post-rock, ambient
Formats: Digital (streaming)
Pull Track: Reproduction

I’ve written about a couple of albums from Dave Scanlon in Pressing Concerns before–loosely speaking, 2021’s Pink in each, bright blue, bright green and 2023’s Taste Like Labor are “folk” albums, although they both contain traces of ambient, experimental, and electronic music (which Scanlon also explores in a full band setting as part of the quartet JOBS). Scanlon’s latest album is intriguing both in its subject matter and its release format–for the former, Greenland Shark is about the titular North Atlantic/Arctic animal “and [his] obsession with it”, and for the latter, the album is only available to listen to via greenlandshark.tv, a website designed specifically for it (as far as I can tell, you can’t download it, but there are lyrics, credits, and a bibliography up there in addition to the music). Shannon Fields, who produced and contributed instruments to the last Scanlon album, reprises his role on Greenland Shark (although his musical contributions are limited to “signal processing” on one song here), and Erica Eso’s Weston Minissali recorded the LP, but this is largely the work of Scanlon on his own. Greenland Shark is perhaps a bit more “experimental” than Scanlon’s previous solo work, but the hallmarks of the singer-songwriter–pensive, Phil Elverum-esque talk-singing over subtle but often unpredictable music–remain intact in this journey to a thousand meters below the Arctic surface.

“If I were to age at one-sixth the rate / If I were to move at a slow rate / Would my relationship to this objective unit of time change proportionally?” Scanlon asks in “Slow Tapes”, a question that gets to the heart of why the Greenland shark, Somniosus microcephalus, is fascinating both to him and many others. Estimated to be the longest-lived vertebrate on Earth, the shark can live up to age 600 (“There will be roughly five generations of my family before you are pregnant,” Scanlon observes in “Thoughts”), dwelling far away from humanity scavenging and hunting for a lifespan that is difficult for us to conceptualize. Studying other forms of life on this planet does lead us to the questions like the one Scanlon poses in “Slow Tapes”–perhaps a less extreme example, but I’ve found that people are fascinated by the idea that snakes (like the Greenland shark) can go months without eating at all and stay perfectly healthy, and it does make us think about our relationships to food, to time, to rest. I’ve found myself thinking of Greenland Shark as a radical work as of late–on a literal level, fascism seeks to destroy the Indigenous knowledge, research funding, academic institutions, and scientific principles that provide us with all we know about this animal (and that’s not even getting into what’s going on with the island that gives the shark its name at present). But, even more so, Greenland Shark is anti-fascist in its fascination with the unknown, of a world where us humans are far from centered, and in its openness to the idea that we, as a species, are far from “solved”–that the richness of these last (relatively) untouched reaches of our planet and their inhabitants resides not in extraction-capitalism, but in meeting what’s there on its own terms and learning from it. (Greenlandshark.tv)

Ging Nang Boyz – Blew Blue

Release date: March 14^th
Record label: Lauren
Genre: Punk rock, art punk, art rock, prog-pop
Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Juventus

Tokyo musician Mineta Kazunobu formed Ging Nang Boyz in the early 2000s, and while they’re not exactly the most well-known East Asian punk rock band in North America or Europe, they’ve remained quite popular in their home country of Japan over the years. They’ve put out a half-dozen albums and countless singles in the past two decades, but their output has almost entirely been exclusive to Japan–until this year, their only American release had been an EP in 2007 via San Jose label Phat ‘n’ Phunky (Dogbreth, Diners, Shinobu). Their first Stateside record in eighteen years is a compilation album that continues the Ging Nang Boyz’s Bay Area associations–this time, they’ve teamed up with Lauren Records to release Blew Blue, and the LP is accompanied by a West Coast tour with Shinobu. Ging Nang Boyz are pretty consistently referred to as a “punk band”, but it’s apparent from Blew Blue that the California definition of “punk” isn’t sufficient here–for one, this album spans seven songs in forty-four minutes, which we just don’t do over here in the U.S. of A. Kazunobu is certainly a compelling punk frontperson when the moment calls for it, but Ging Nang Boyz are just as likely to dip into the realms of heady, fuzzy art rock, psychedelia, pop balladry, and noise rock over songs that stretch past the seven-minute mark on several occasions. 

It’s strange to refer to a seven-minute song as “clearly the most punk rock moment on the album”, but that’s exactly what opening track “Juventus” is–Ging Nang Boyz don’t match the track’s intense, all-in energy pound for pound anywhere else on Blew Blue, although there are individual moments (such as the finale of the ten-minute “The Shining” and parts of the dramatic pop punk of “Boi Meets Girrrl”, which, perhaps unsurprisingly, was used as an anime theme song) that get there. For the most part, Ging Nang Boyz use their “best-of” record as a chance to showcase the band’s range–like via the aforementioned “The Shining”, a piano-led pop song for its first five minutes and a blistering, shrieking rock breakdown for its second five. “Amen, Semen and Mary Chain” doesn’t quite sound like the band that its title (puzzlingly) evokes, but it does reach back towards that era of “alternative music”, with bits of guitar-led dream pop, shoegaze, and Paisley Underground in its gorgeous instrumental. There’s one new song on Blew Blue, and it’s a five-minute track called “Nikaisen” that merges soft rock and synthpop with extensive guitar soloing and ragged vocals from Kazunobu. Ging Nang Boyz stick “Nikaisen” at the midpoint of Blew Blue, dropping it right in the middle of their twenty-plus-year music career–and it makes as much sense as anything else on this album. (Bandcamp link)

Disaster Kid – Rare Bird

Release date: March 21^st
Record label: Semicircle
Genre: Alt-country, power pop, folk rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Interstate Runner

Disaster Kid is a very “Chicago” project–the band’s frontperson, Seamus Kreitzer, works at the Windy City’s Old Town School of Folk Music, and the quartet (also made up of bassist Mason Stahl, drummer Connor Criswell, and guitarist/pedal steel player Max Berg) have a sound that fits in well with Chicago’s modern folk rock/alt-country scene alongside groups like Dogs at Large, Flamingo Rodeo, and Orillia. They’re new to me, but Disaster Kid have been around for a while now–Kreitzer put out an album on his own as Disaster Kid in 2018, and the band released the LP Gutterball in 2020. Aside from a few non-album singles, the six-song Rare Bird EP is the group’s first record since then, and the first one featuring Berg, who seems to have replaced original guitarist Andrew Tereick. There must not be any bad blood, though, as Tereick recorded and produced Rare Bird at a “mutual friend’s” cabin in northern Wisconsin, and it certainly sounds great. All those previously-mentioned Chicago alt-country groups come to mind (as well as their godfather, Wilco), but there’s a delicate side to Kreitzer’s writing that gives the EP a unique spin–I hear bits of John K. Samson, Noah Roth, and Buddie, plus a good deal of not only Kreitzer’s stated influence of Slaughter Beach, Dog but other Lame-O power pop groups like Hurry and Big Nothing, too.

Let it not be said that Kreitzer doesn’t put himself out there as a writer. Rare Bird is clearly a record in which its frontperson put a lot of thought into the lyrics and isn’t afraid to show it–any EP prominently featuring the line “Don’t apologize so much for nurturing an unknown beauty,” has to fall into this category to some degree. That lyric is from the title track, a head-spinning sung-spoken folk-country-pop song where Kreitzer sounds like Jake Ewald trying to be Dan Wriggins–and though he sort of lampshades himself in the following line, the rest of “Rare Birds” is just as ambitious. It wouldn’t really work if Disaster Kid didn’t nail the “polished but not stiff, rocking but not distracting” vibe of the instrumental, and Rare Bird as a whole is as good as it is because of the strong reading the group give to Kreitzer’s words and melodies. Opening track “Interstate Runner” is a beautiful power pop/roots rock heart-on-sleeve first statement, and Disaster Kid nearly best it not long afterward with “Temples”; while on the other hand, “Don’t Wait Up for Me” and “Wine/Weapon” explore sprawling, intimate folk-country balladry with just as much style. Disaster Kid do everything in their power to make Rare Bird a treat to listen to, and Kreitzer takes it from there. (Bandcamp link)

Theydevil – Maybe You’ll Find Me (Reissue)

Release date: March 5^th
Record label: Devil Town Tapes
Genre: Bedroom pop, synthpop, lo-fi pop, singer-songwriter
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Get Embarrassed!

A little under two years ago, a West Philadelphia musician named Hughes Bonilla released their debut album under the name Theydevil, a twenty-minute collection called Maybe You’ll Find Me. Bonilla recorded the album alone at home from 2019 to 2022, developing an intimate “bedroom pop” sound entirely based around minimal electronic pop (“It’s just me, my keyboard and my laptop until the day I die”, they write regarding the record); per Bonilla, this avenue of exploration was partially due to feeling removed from their city’s notorious indie rock scene. Regardless of how Bonilla arrived at Maybe You’ll Find Me, there’s something to their songwriting and craft here, enough so that British cassette label Devil Town Tapes (Greg Mendez, Conor Lynch, Bedtime Khal) picked it up to give it its first-ever physical release (a cassette featuring a physical-only bonus track). Though these dozen songs did initially come about a few years after the 2010s “bedroom pop” boom, Bonilla captures the highs of the genre on Maybe You’ll Find Me, a record made of brief, streamlined snippets of synthpop combined with its creator’s earnest, personal lyrics (it’s something of “a coming of age album”, Bonilla notes).

Pretty much everything on Maybe You’ll Find Me hovers around the two-minute mark, and a couple of tracks don’t even really reach that. The individual songs on the tape bleed into each other–some might be brighter and more synth-polished than others, some lean more heavy into the drum machine beats, but the whole thing comes off as one half-remembered late-night oversharing session (or maybe just “sharing” session–Bonilla still sounds like they’re keeping a few things close to the vest at various points here). The moments on Maybe You’ll Find Me that end up sticking out among Bonilla’s delicate vocals and computer-spun pop instrumentals are the ones where the lyrics jump out and grab me–I’m not sure if the line about the northeast being “where folks would rather die than say excuse me,” is even a good one or not, but it’s certainly memorable, and “I guess fuck your opinion / I am my own boyfriend” in “Missed Connections” lands with a thud (complimentary). Things start to get clearer after a while, with more such moments eventually revealing themselves–Bonilla starts “Get Embarrassed!” by singing “I wanna feel the way a Blue Nile song sounds” and injecting just a bit of soft sophisti-pop into the track, and the confused still life of “Creature of Habit” is really beautiful if you take in all the imagery at once. That’s the best way to approach Maybe You’ll Find Me as a whole, too. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

• Pale Lights – Pale Lights
• Dumbells – Up Late With
• Dead Bars – All Dead Bars Go to Heaven
• EGGY – From Time to Time
• Water Margin – Gleaming Cursed
• T.A.C.K. – Tackle
• Jeremy Bradley Earl – Four Songs EP
• ELLiS·D – Spill EP
• Glazyhaze – SONIC
• Melin Melyn – Mill on the Hill
• Kinky Friedman – Poet of Motel 6
• YHWH Nailgun – 45 Pounds
• Franco Rossino – Franco Rossino #1
• The Taxpayers – Circle Breaker
• Archer Oh – The Internal Theater
• PUÑAL – Buscando La Muerte
• Divorce – Drive to Goldenhammer
• XIXA – Xolo
• Wrekmeister Harmonies – Flowers in the Spring
• The Kind Hills – A Simple Life EP
• Phil Cook – Appalachia Borealis
• Gregory Uhlmann, Josh Johnson, Sam Wilkes – Uhlmann Johnson Wilkes
• Fake Dad – Holly Wholesome and the Slut Machine
• Old Amica / Aiko Takahashi – Vikande blå / Nuages
• More Ease & Claire Rousay – No Floor