Pressing Concerns: (T-T)b, Infinity Knives & Brian Ennals, Coffin Prick, Kicking Bird

We’ve rounded the bend to April, and the first Friday of the new month is upon us. Out tomorrow, April 4th, the albums of today’s Pressing Concerns (from (T-T)b, Infinity Knives & Brian Ennals, Coffin Prick, and Kicking Bird) bring to us the promise of spring. Or something like that. In other news, the March 2025 Playlist/Round-Up went up on Tuesday, and there was a Monday Pressing Concerns (featuring Miscellaneous Owl, Dr. Kevin Holm-Hudson & The Adjuncts, Yuasa-Exide, and Shapes Like People) to check out if you haven’t yet, 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.

EDIT/NOTE: The Coffin Prick album got pushed back to May and nobody told me! Sorry! Check back in a month!

(T-T)b – Beautiful Extension Cord

Release date: April 4^th
Record label: Disposable America
Genre: Fuzz rock, synthpop, power pop, chiptune, slacker rock, 90s indie rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Semantics of Yet

Way back in 2021, I heard an EP called Suporma by a band from Boston that called themselves (T-T)b. It’s a great slacker rock record, despite the fact that the group (bandleader JM Dussault, drummer Nick Dussault, and bassist Jake Cardinal, the latter two of which also play in Really Great) prominently incorporated chiptune and video game soundtrack instrumentation into the record’s five songs. It’s hard to dabble in that kind of stuff without it overtaking the rest of your music, but (T-T)b utilized it as an accent, the way one might use synths or horns. I’ve been patiently awaiting a follow-up to Suporma ever since, and it’s finally here in the form of Beautiful Extension Cord, the band’s second album and first new music of any kind in four years. (T-T)b have evolved in the meantime, I’d say. It seems impossible for chiptune to ever be “subtly” incorporated into one’s music, but if it is, it probably sounds like this–still quite visible, but integrated more seamlessly than ever into the group’s slacker rock, 90s alt-rock, and bedroom indie rock-evoking sound. Between the big old guitars, the chirping 8-bit sounds, and Dussault’s plain but capable vocals, there’s somehow a cosmic element to (T-T)b’s indie rock; it reminds me a bit of LVL UP, or even their labelmates Bedbug.

The first thing we hear on Beautiful Extension Cord is a sparkling 8-bit introduction, but the guitars kick in and overpower opening song “Julian” at about the ten second mark. These guitars are a key feature of Beautiful Extension Cord’s opening salvo, but even the six-strings have their spotlight stolen from them by Dussault’s opening lyrics to early highlight “Dither”: “I met God / And he was a little dog / A horror film professor / Cradled in his arms”. The whole first section is unstoppable: by “Bug on the Ceiling”, (T-T)b have almost fully been converted into a vintage fuzz rock band (but the chiptune sound stubbornly refuses to fade entirely). Beautiful Extension Cord opens up a bit in the midsection, having gotten the great big first act out of the way–the dream-chiptune-pop interlude “Sophie” and the laid-back bummer pop of “The Kick” are the closest thing we get to a “breather”. Album centerpiece “Semantics of Yet” starts out in much the same way, but it rises to a huge alt-rock refrain, Speedy Oritz’s Sadie Dupuis joining Dussault to meditate on the wavering evoked by the adverb in the title. Beautiful Extension Cord as a whole is a sweeping but uncertain-sounding album, right up until closing track “I’m Always Holding You Back”. (T-T)b toy with bringing the chiptune more prominently into the mix, and Dussault sings the chilly title line against a propulsive, light-feeling instrumental. I’m not sure if the Beautiful Extension Cord of the album title is supposed to evoke “power” or “connectivity”, but (T-T)b imbue their latest album with the right combination of it to keep the lights on. (Bandcamp link)

Infinity Knives & Brian Ennals – A City Drowned in God’s Black Tears

Release date: April 4^th
Record label: Phantom Limb
Genre: Experimental rap, noise rap, folk, art rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Everyone I Love Is Depressed

Infinity Knives and Brian Ennals are a pair of Baltimore rappers who’ve been active in their city’s music scene since the beginning of this decade–the former I’d previously encountered on Jacober’s album from a few years ago (albeit as a bassist and guitarist rather than rapper), while the latter is new to me. Ennals and Infinity Knives (AKA Tariq Ravelomanana) have also been making records as a duo pretty much the entire time they’ve been around–first came Rhino XXL in 2020, King Cobra followed in 2022, and now there’s a third Knives/Ennals collaboration called A City Drowned in God’s Black Tears. Apparently the duo have gained a reputation for experimental and political rap over their first couple of records, and A City Drowned in God’s Black Tears isn’t going to disabuse anybody of these notions. On every account, though, Infinity Knives and Ennals spend time out of these boxes–not everything reads as explicitly political, for one, and there’s also moments that sound genuinely fun and pop-friendly (and even “rap” is too small of a box to constrain the duo on this record, as there are two straight-up folk songs on A City Drowned in God’s Black Tears, among other excursions).

Oh, right, “experimental” and “political”. Starting your record with a song like “The Iron Wall” will get you labeled as such. For the latter, Infinity Knives and Brian Ennals go absolutely scorched-Earth on both American fascism and Israeli genocide (as they point out in the provocative but true opening bars, though, they’re only returning fire), and for the former, the track has a really compelling, up-close sound to it that the duo credit co-engineer Frances “FRANKI3” Malvaiz (who also sings on a few songs) for helping them achieve. The casual “Live at the Chinese Buffet” is admittedly weird too, but the seven-minute title track is where things really go off the rails–the majority of the song is straight-up traditionalist, hymn-like folk music, and then it finishes with a massive Swans-like noise rock drone (and they do something similar to the first part again later on the record, except they let the Sparklehorse/Neutral Milk Hotel/folk John Dwyer-esque “Two Headed Buffalo” exit quietly after seven minutes). A City Drowned in God’s Black Tears was initially supposed to be an EP, and I do wonder if it began as a chance for Infinity Knives and Brian Ennals to try out a bunch of ideas–like having Vladneva Volodkevich sing a vintage, crackling R&B/jazz crooner in Russian (that’d be “Trevoga”) or interpolating one of Ravelomanana’s favorite songs for an intense, dire-sounding rap number (“Sometimes, Papi Chulo”, which uses a bit of a song from cult folk musician Dan Hanrahan), or rolling out an awesome groove of a funk-hop track about, of course, suicide (“Everyone I Love Is Depressed”). It’s an album because there are too many ideas and too much to say on A City Drowned in God’s Black Tears, though–if there’s anything readily apparent about this album, it’s that. (Bandcamp link)

Coffin Prick – Loose Enchantment

Release date: May 16^th
Record label: Temporal Drift
Genre: Post-punk, art rock, dance punk, electronic, dub
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Follow You Where You’re Talking

Ryan Weinstein has been playing in bands for nearly three decades now, spending time in groups like The Heatseekers, Cavity, and The Cairo Gang as he moved across the United States from Florida to Chicago to Los Angeles, where he lives today. One of his many bands was a short-lived garage punk group called Coffin Pricks–they may have broken up in 2012 without releasing more than a three song single, but Weinstein revived the name (now singular) when he started up a solo(ish) career a couple of years ago. Coffin Prick has been putting out records at a steady clip as of late–an full-length and EP in 2023, a remix LP in 2024, and, now, eleven brand-new Coffin Prick songs in the form of an album called Loose Enchantment. Far from the punk rock of the Pricks, Weinstein has pushed beyond the boundaries of “rock music” entirely as Coffin Prick–and while Loose Enchantment is no different, I’d dare say that it’s the project’s most accessible record yet. Receiving help from members of Tuxedomoon, Tortoise, and LA Takedown (among others), Weinstein’s latest release is a slinky, wobbly, dubby collection of Los Angeles art rock and post-punk. Often danceable but rarely forthright about it, Loose Enchantment is a record that believes that having fun should be complicated.

From the brightly-colored guitars that start off the album, it’s hard to tell where, exactly, Coffin Prick is going with all of this, but “Follow You Where You’re Talking” resolves this noise into a minimal post-punk bass riff and welcomes us to the Loose Enchantment show with a propulsive, low-end-led dance-punk introduction. Weinstein then gives us woozy, chattering synth-rock in “Shortly Forgotten Pleasure” and the dreamy, minimal, electronic gliding of the title track. We’ve only just begun the Loose Enchantment journey, however–buttressed by two brief interlude-like tracks, the six-minute “Work” is something of the record’s centerpiece, taking Weinstein’s noise rock/garage rock past and shading a prowling no wave/post-punk piece of aural dread with it. It’s tempting to say that Loose Enchantment gets stranger as it goes along, but who’s to say that the second-half dance numbers (“Soap” and “Spy vs Spy”) are any less woozy and bizarre than the first-half ones? There’s a beautiful ballad somewhere in “Window in Your Eye”, although Coffin Prick are completely unmoored by this point in the record, and six-minute closing track “Western Folly: Floating Love – Drying Off In The Rain – How Seconds Work” follows this to its logical conclusion of straight-up noise/sound collage. There’s plenty to grab onto immediately in Loose Enchantment, but the record also sees to it that we get the complete Coffin Prick experience before it’s all said and done. (Bandcamp link)

Kicking Bird – 11 Short Fictions

Release date: April 4^th
Record label: Fort Lowell
Genre: Power pop, fuzz pop, indie pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: What Did You Expect (With Such a Beautiful Wife)

I first heard of Kicking Bird, Wilmington, North Carolina’s premiere surf-pop quintet, thanks to their debut album, 2023’s Original Motion Picture Soundtrack. That’s a really fun album, a nice collection of Pixies-inspired fuzz-power pop (and it also put their label, Fort Lowell, on my radar–and I’ve written about a bunch of good records that they’ve put out since then). Almost exactly two years later, Kicking Bird are back with a sophomore LP, and 11 Short Fictions largely picks up where the band (vocalist/guitarist Shaun Paul, vocalist/keyboardist Shaylah Paul, guitarist Robin Cooksley, drummer Greg Blair, and bassist Tom Michels) left off. The pop music of 11 Short Fictions feels perhaps more ambitious than its predecessor–at this point, Kicking Bird are starting to remind me of power pop bands who give off a bit of “collective” energy like The New Pornographers or even the poppier side of The Apples in Stereo. The occasional Black Francis bite to Shaun Paul’s vocals and moments of kicked up fuzz rock are still here, part of a vivid tapestry also including a bit of twee, glam rock, and southern college rock, among other detours.

“We drove down to the boathouse / In a car she took from her uncle / She swore she’d never been there before / But she found that key like she had been there before,” Shaun sings in single “Cinnamon”, a wild garage rock and roll song that Kicking Bird pull off without invalidating their friendlier moments. I have no idea how these songs relate to themselves (“Facts and false memories. Hypocrisies, admissions and denials. Stories,” the band says about the record; “She kinda tasted like cinnamon / I probably tasted like Indica,” goes another memorable line in “Cinnamon”). The pop songs are huge and just as desperate-sounding as the loudest rockers–“Where’d You Get Those Pants” rips, “Verdun” struts–and while Shaylah Paul’s vocals are a lot less “unhinged” than Shaun’s, songs like “What Did You Expect (With Such a Beautiful Wife)” and “Good Lighting” certainly don’t bring the party to a halt merely by being just a bit more even-keeled (the explosive guitar work in the latter song doesn’t hurt, either). Shaylah’s “Too Much Talking” is the one true “ballad” on the album–it’s a waltz, and even here Kicking Bird can’t help but slipping a little feedback into the song before they return to sum up 11 Short Fictions with three more guitar-showcase rockers. Here’s hoping Kicking Bird can keep this high level of energy up for just a little bit longer–impressively, 11 Short Fictions shows no signs of slowing down. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

• Craig Finn – Always Been
• Postcards – Ripe
• Jay Alan Kay – Put Me Over EP
• Pond 1000 – daffodiL
• Westall 66 – Good Bad News EP
• Quinine – First Ever Whippet on Acid
• Sister Ray – Believer
• Miki Berenyi Trio – Tripla
• Population II – Maintenant Jamais 
• Shadow Monster – DOG
• Buffet Lunch – Perfect Hit!
• Masters of Reality – The Archer
• Free Zorba the Hooligan – Burner EP
• Elazy – Elazy Does It! EP
• Lilo – Blood Ties
• Gloin – All of your anger is actually shame (and I bet that makes you angry)
• Anika – Abyss
• Neev – How Things Tie in Knots
• Celeste Madden – Is It Really Goodnight?
• August – Flesh and the Devil
• Guy Capecelatro III & Mike Effenberger – Gods
• Cameron Knowler – CRK
• Shit and Shine – MANNHEIM HBF 
• Mess Esque – Jay Marie, Comfort Me
• Butler, Blake and Grant – Butler, Blake and Grant