Pressing Concerns: Jetstream Pony, Stuart Pearce, Bagdad, Niis

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The third and final Pressing Concerns of this week is full of great new music coming out this Friday (March 28th); specifically, we’ve got new albums from Jetstream Pony, Stuart Pearce, and Niis. And, if that’s not enough, we also have an EP from Bagdad that’s coming out today (March 27th). Get excited, and be sure to check out earlier Pressing Concerns from Monday (featuring Dick Texas, Private Lives, George Children, and Film Studies) and Tuesday (featuring Dave Scanlon, Ging Nang Boyz, Disaster Kid, and Theydevil) if you’ve yet to do so.

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.

Jetstream Pony – Bowerbirds and Blue Things

Release date: March 28st
Record label: Shelflife/Spinout Nuggets
Genre: Indie pop, power pop, twee, folk rock, 90s indie rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Captain Palisade

Oh, I finally get to talk about a Jetstream Pony album in Pressing Concerns! Specifically, an album entirely by Jetstream Pony, as they’ve twice appeared on compilations I’ve covered in this column–the 2022 Skep Wax collection Under the Bridge and its sequel two years later. Those albums collected new music from veterans of the 90s twee/indie pop scene who were associated with the legendary Sarah Records, and this Brighton-based group does indeed have this type of lineage: vocalist/percussionist Beth Arzy was in Aberdeen and Trembling Blue Stars, guitarist/vocalist Shaun Charman played in The Wedding Present, Turbocat and The Popguns, bassist Kerry Boettcher also played in Turbocat, and guitarist Mark Matthews was in The Dentists. Since the late 2010s, Jetstream Pony (rounded out by Tom Levesley on drums) have put out two EPs and a full-length in 2020–Bowerbirds and Blue Things is their first new record in four years, discounting their Under the Bridge appearances. Although their latest album is clearly the work of longtime indie musicians, it’s a bit rougher-around-the-edges than a lot of their peers at this stage–not quite Boyracer-level pop punk, Bowerbirds and Blue Things nonetheless has a loose, basement indie rock feel to its approach to guitar pop music (that, to be clear, doesn’t stop it from being wildly catchy over and over again).

Bowerbirds and Blue Things opens with the bright jangly power pop of “Sit and Wonder”, in which Jetstream Pony manages to sound laid-back and like they’re pulling out all the stops to make a pop anthem at the same time. It’s an automatic kind of pop music–between Arzy’s unflagging vocals and the steady, propulsive instrumentation it kind of reminds me of The High Water Marks or even the more overtly-Hilarie Sidney-influenced moments of The Apples in Stereo. “The Relativity of Wrong” in the record’s fourth slot taps the brakes on the sugary guitar pop by beginning with a dark bass riff and Arzy shifting to a “spoken-word” approach–it’s a bit of an outlier, but it underscores that there’s a very strong and well-oiled band underneath the hood of all of these songs. The rest of the record loses not a bit of steam whether Jetstream Pony seem to be going all-out in power pop form (like the huge late-record gem “Captain Palisade” or the Charman-sung “Only If You Want To”) or if they’re delving into dream pop, new wave, and even a bit of psychedelia (check out “3am” and especially “Bad Common Earth Connection”–hell, even the melodic bundle that is “Bonanza 2 Tango Sierra” starts with a lengthy New Order-style instrumental introduction). It’s not exactly surprising that Jetstream Pony are quite good at what they do at this point, but that’s no reason to take them for granted–especially when they’ve got something as strong as Bowerbirds and Blue Things on their hands. (Bandcamp link)

Stuart Pearce – All This Vast Overproduction

Release date: March 28th
Record label: Safe Suburban Home
Genre: Garage rock, post-punk, art punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Fuck No; I Jangle

I wrote about Red Sport International, the debut album from Nottingham post-punk band Stuart Pearce, back when it came out in 2023. I noted the hot streak that their record label (Safe Suburban Home) was on at the time, compared them to The Fall a couple of times, and acknowledged the football and left-wing political references–all in a day’s work. After a stopgap EP called Nuclear Football last year, the second Stuart Pearce album is upon us; it’s called All This Vast Overproduction, and it was heralded by a single called “The Bosses Are Stealing Your Days!” whose album art featured a group of men playing the game that we call “soccer” over in the States for whatever reason. Stuart Pearce are back, alright. The Bandcamp page for this album boasts that it features “the introduction of new sonic textures in the form of acoustic and twelve-string guitars, pianos and vocal harmonies” (presumably the album title is a necessary ego check), and while I won’t deny the presence of these elements, All This Vast Overproduction is still a spittle-radiating British noise rock record that will be quite enjoyable for fans of Mclusky and, yes, the Mark E. Smith/Granny Bongo Band. 

In some ways, All This Vast Overproduction is a heavier album than Red Sport International–of the fifteen tracks on the album, a good portion of them are all-in, full-gas rock and roll explosions, whirlwinds of garage rock and punk that are sure to scare anyone who picked up the album based off the strength of Safe Suburban Home’s indie pop-laden roster. All This Vast Overproduction rolls out the blood-red carpet with a cadre of songs that can either be categorized as a “sprint” (like the admittedly-quite-sparkling but still furious opening track “Easy Now” and revolutionary single “Rope”) or a “stomp” (the post-punk scrapping of “Rule O’Threes” and “Ex-IRA Voice-Actor”, plus the glammy death march of “Würmhole”). At some point in the second half All This Vast Overproduction, Stuart Pearce seem to all of a sudden remember that whole “artistic growth” thing they mentioned earlier and quickly bash out “Fuck No; I Jangle”–Teenage Fanclub they are not, but the weird sleaziness that takes over the track after their initial attempt to write jangle pop is pretty enjoyable on its own terms. The weird prog-garage excursion of “This Infinite Hotel” is less catchy but more fully-developed, and I don’t even mind that they nicked the verse melody from Guided by Voices’ “Not Behind the Fighter Jet” for closing track “Dances w/ Starships” because it seems fitting to go out on a boozy pop high note. Not bad for an overproduced sophomore album. (Bandcamp link)

Bagdad – They Don’t Know

Release date: March 27th
Record label: Rite Field
Genre: 90s indie rock, slowcore, fuzz rock, lo-fi indie rock
Formats: CD, digital
Pull Track: Somewhere, Nowhere

There are a ton of new bands out there these days who make a dark version of indie rock pulling from the worlds of slowcore and grunge (with or without the increasingly meaningless descriptor “shoegaze” attached). Learning of the debut EP from another one might not move the needle for some, but I suspect the fact that Bagdad hail from Poland is a key part of why their first record already puts them above much of their competition in terms of quality. Started in Wrocław in 2023 by “school friends” Franciszek Drobiński (guitar, vocals) and Wojciech Stach (bass) and rounded out by drummer Jakub Gadamski, they’ve linked up with similarly-new Texan imprint Rite Field Records (Some Fear, Shunkan, The Walls You’ve Built) for their first record, a five-song CD EP called They Don’t Know. A world away from wall-of-sound shoegaze textures, They Don’t Know is an open-air collection of sprawling, electric indie rock that, at twenty-six minutes, flirts with “full-length” status. Electric guitar-based slowcore bands like Duster and Idaho are mentioned as influences, although it’s hard to narrow things down any cleaner than “any electric 90s indie rock band that’s far enough away from punk rock” as to what Bagdad sound like here.

“Grunge” is also a fairly useless descriptor for They Don’t Know–don’t get me wrong, I’m sure the influence goes into these five songs, but it mostly manifests itself in the dour, Kurt Cobain-like vocals of opening track “Valley of Dry Bones” and some scattered downtuned guitar riffs. “Valley of Dry Bones” is probably the darkest moment of They Don’t Know–after putting the bleakness up front, Bagdad take a bit of weight off their shoulders and sound a bit lighter on the record’s most upbeat moment, “Somewhere, Nowhere”, a gorgeous fuzz-pop song that kind of sounds like the midpoint between Idaho and Dinosaur Jr. “Knight Errant Block” adds a Bedhead-like “waiting, anticipating” vibe to the instrumental, although Bagdad do actually release the tension towards the end of the song, and “Ash Pan Nocturne” marries a languid melodic lead guitar to a noirish, probing rhythm section. Nearly a third of the EP is taken up by the closing track, the seven-minute finale of “Heartland”, but Bagdad’s grand send-off hardly feels excessive. It takes the trio a couple of minutes of tuneful but subtle indie rock to work up to the soaring, buzzing electric guitars that peek out of the clouds, but even this extra dimension of guitarwork swirls and floats casually after its initial dramatic arrival on the scene. It’s just indie rock, I guess, and Poland’s got some great new practitioners of it. (Bandcamp link)

Niis – Niis World

Release date: March 28th
Record label: Get Better
Genre: Punk rock, noise rock, post-hardore, grunge
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Low Life

Sometimes, what we all need is a noisy and angry punk rock band from southern California. Enter Niis, the latest signee to queer-centric label Get Better Records (Cowboy Boy, Old City, Bacchae) and whose latest record, Niis World, certainly does the trick. After steadily releasing singles since 2020 and putting out an EP called Must Be… in 2022, Niis World is the band’s first full-length album, and the quartet (vocalist Emily “Mimi” Sando-Brown, guitarist Ryan McGuffin, bassist Isabella de Vroede, and drummer Jonathan Salvo) make the most of the larger platform with a collection of ten tracks of punch-packing rock music. Presentation-wise, it’d be tempting to label them as descendants of the riot grrrl movement that began further up the West Coast (early single “Fuck You Boy”, an anti-misogyny anthem, helps with that), but Niis World is a heavier and grungier version of punk music, one that reminds me of modern alt-rock-influenced bands like Rid of Me and Low Dose and one that also carries a palpable hardcore energy with it (Sando-Brown’s vocals are key in this regard). Early punk rock, Discord Records post-hardcore, and good old fashioned hard rock all feature in Niis World, channeled into a dynamic but blunt-force twenty-six-minute assault.

Niis (who pronounce their name like “nice”, by the way) may have refined their sound a bit from those early singles, but that certainly doesn’t mean “toned things down”. Niis World is a more disciplined explosion, but it’s still an explosion–take opening track “Low Life”, which balances cold, calculating shredding on the guitars with Sando-Brown’s vocals, which lie in wait for the perfect moment to go from “on-edge” to “scorched Earth”. A good portion of Niis World is made up of two-minutes-and-change rippers that dart between smooth, almost post-punk propulsion and noisy punk freak-outs. More often than not, Sando-Brown will veer from being the friendliest aspect of a given song to being the wildest, with the rest of Niis serving as the fiery, unflagging counterbalance to her dynamism. The instrumentalists of Niis get their moments in the limelight too, though, don’t worry–the opening guitar riff to “Tyrant” is classic punk rock that sticks out to me, and they pull off “tougher” and “more durable” in late-record workouts like “Driveaway” (Niis at their swerving post-punk best) and “New Pig” (a scorching one about…well, you can figure that out). It’s comforting to catch glimpses of the targets of Niis’ ire and know that there’s good reason behind them, but mostly I’m just enjoying the white-hot rage of Niis World. (Bandcamp link)

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