It’s another Pressing Concerns! This one has new albums from My Wife’s an Angel, Fluung, and Sunflecks, plus a “deluxe” reissue of an album from Shuyler Jansen. You’re bound to find something you enjoy in here, so take a look! And if you missed yesterday’s blog post (featuring Perennial, Dauber, Why Bother?, and Mythical Motors), check that 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.
My Wife’s an Angel – Yeah, I Bet
Release date: April 18th
Record label: Knife Hits/GRIMGRIMGRIM/Broken Cycle
Genre: Noise rock, post-hardcore
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Not Me
I know Rosy Overdrive has a certain reputation for jangly power pop and the like, but I have to confess that I’ve been more drawn to stuff like this as of late. Stuff like a chaotic, piss-taking noise rock band called My Wife’s an Angel, I mean. They’re a quartet from Philadelphia, although my intelligence suggests that they may have roots in the expansive wasteland known as “the rest of Pennsylvania”. Vocalist G, guitarist Boone, bassist Fancy, and drummer Ivy released their first album as My Wife’s an Angel, Don’t Fall Asleep, back in 2023, and for their second album they’ve linked up with Philadelphia heavy label Knife Hits Records (Leopard Print Taser, Thousandaire, Eyecandy) and enlisted a new drummer named Jagwah. Yeah, I Bet is positively a mess–it’s ugly, heavy noise-punk that sometimes doesn’t sound like any of those descriptors at all. The closest thing I can think to compare My Wife’s an Angel is, like, a more millennial and Appalachian version of Killdozer (if you understand what I mean by this, you’re probably going to hell, by the way)–the Midwestern classic rock devil worship subbed out for a big, wide, empty hollering against rock music simply played wrong.
The first track on Yeah, I Bet is a six-minute sneering noise rock journey called “Not Me” (first lyrics: “I don’t care how tough you think you are / You sing songs all alone in your car / … / Not me!”)–and I hope you enjoyed it, because it’s probably the most accessible thing on the entire album. We are eventually treated to a Butthole Surfers-worthy trash fire called “Ol’ Man Shleep” and “Good Advice”, in which G moans and croaks out lines attempting to live up to the song’s title (“Run red lights / Commit crime”). A confused and surreal cover of Willie Nelson’s “Funny How Time Slips Away” follows, but shit really gets real in the album’s second half. If you’re stuck in a room with the people who could come up with things like “Funny How That Works” and “Above It All”, I imagine you’ve got one eye on any exit within reach at all times. By the time we get to “EJABFJ” (which stands for “Everything’s Just a Big Fuckin’ Joke”) you may be wondering if you’ve trapped yourself in the palms of a bunch of nihilists (or worse), but there are some hints in G’s rambling about Isaac Brock and The Office and various uncles that the simmering rage is coming from somewhere more understandable (“Motherfuckers can’t go to space / But there ain’t no homes”), and the metamorphosis that My Wife’s an Angel make into a righteous, violent, anti-police sledgehammer in “Hey Jimmy” is beautiful, in a way (Bet you’ve never heard a song with the line “Shoot yourself in the dick until you fucking die” described like that before). Makes sense, right? Yeah, I Bet. (Bandcamp link)
Fluung – Fluung
Release date: April 7th
Record label: Setterwind/Den Tapes
Genre: 90s indie rock, punk rock, fuzz rock
Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Starvin Heart
Seattle trio Fluung have been keeping Pacific Northwest indie rock loud, electric, and catchy since the mid-2010s. From 2017 to 2022, the band put out two albums and two EPs–their sophomore album, 2022’s The Vine, is the one that got me, balancing blistering guitars with clear-eyed melodies excellently. The band (founding vocalist/guitarist Donald Wymer and drummer Drew Davis, as well as bassist Joe Holcomb, who recently replaced Brad Blasini) remastered and reissued their first album, Satellite Weather, in 2023, and this year brings the third proper Fluung LP, a self-titled one this time. I did quite enjoy The Vine (“Decades” was probably one of my favorite songs of 2022), but Fluung is pretty clearly the band’s best work yet–an ambitious rock record that nearly doubles The Vine in length, the third Fluung album has enough time to spit out a handful of blissful, hook-laden lost 90s alt-rock classics and push further into feedback-heavy, exploratory, lumbering fuzz rock terrain, too. Like the region’s best rock bands–Built to Spill, Modest Mouse, and Silkworm a few decades ago, Sioux Falls and Milk Music and Mope Grooves more recently–Fluung is a record that’s about the journey as much as anything else, and the band make sure to leave us with a memorable and complete one.
Fluung sets off early on a distorted, cloudy morning–the first song is a four-minute collection of feedback and noise called “Tuning”, and, while “Puzzle Piece” is a “proper” song, it’s a dour one, the full might of the trio trained directly at staring at the ground. Just like that, though, Fluung are off into the cosmos with massive, fuzzed out pop rock: “Tear It Down” grabs us by the collar collectively, and while “Starvin Heart” is a little less directly forceful, the Dinosaur Jr.-inspired feet-sweeper-offer might actually be the more lethal of the early duo. “The Whistleblower” rivals these tracks in terms of catchiness, but it does so in a different way–it’s six minutes long and effectively the album’s centerpiece, merging an understated Archers of Loaf-style noise pop with PNW creepy psychedelia and even a punk rock attitude (it’s a masterpiece, clearly). Fluung were so excited about the massive guitar hook they discovered in “Riff 4” that they forgot to give the song a proper title, and the J. Mascis worship of “How Was It Out There?” is given a Dinosaur Jr.-evoking title (coincidence? I dunno, ask them). Fluung gets a little less friendly in the closing stretch but the energy is certainly still there in “Spirit Well (Joes Version)” and “Creeper”, and then it’s time to wrap it up with “Tuning Out” (reduced to ninety seconds on streaming services, but be sure to check out the full nine-minute version on Bandcamp). Fluung aren’t the first group to stumble onto something as fulfilling as this album, but it never gets old hearing a band figure it out like this. (Bandcamp link)
Shuyler Jansen – DIM=SUM (Deluxe)
Release date: April 4th
Record label: Pseudo Sound
Genre: Folk rock, country rock, post-rock, slowcore
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: The Stones Have All Been Turned
I spent a lot of time in church as a kid. I heard both kinds of music that you can typically expect to hear in a white American Protestant one–the organ-led hymns and the neutered-guitar-led “worship and praise/Contemporary Christian Music” songs. Even though I’ve always loved music, neither one of them really spoke to me. I guess what I’m saying is I would’ve been more interested in church music if it were devoted to spreading the gospel of Neil Young and Crazy Horse instead. This is where Shuyler Jansen and DIM=SUM come into play–true disciples of the Ditch Trilogy and the even more expansive, sprawling Crazy Horse-backed records that would come in the years and decades afterward. Jansen is based in Vancouver and has been making records of varying stripes since the 1990s–as of late, he’s been re-releasing some of his past work in “deluxe” format, like 2011’s Voice from the Lake, which was remastered and remixed last year. Next up is DIM=SUM, originally released in 2017 as the self-titled debut of a band led by Jansen and featuring some of his regular collaborators in bassist Chris Mason (Deep Dark Woods), drummer Mike Silverman (Kacy & Clayton), and acoustic guitarist/synth player Dave Carswell (Destroyer).
The original DIM=SUM is already an overwhelming beast of a double LP–seven songs in eighty minutes–and now there’s even more material in the form of demos and radio edits of some of the headier tracks. DIM=SUM as a whole is an expertly-curated journey, a reflective mix of long, simple rhythm section bedrock (I don’t know if the leisurely, steady drumbeat from Silverman or Mason’s always-pacing basslines are more impressive) with just enough ideas delivered in the form of guitar explorations by Jansen to keep these giant obelisks fresh-sounding. Mason’s backing vocals are another essential ingredient in the DIM=SUM cosmology–much higher-pitched and directly Neil-invoking, they come and go, seemingly encased in a “break in case of emotional emergency” glass whenever they’re absent. The shortest song on DIM=SUM is a nice, brief seven minutes, and the majority of these tracks are dragged out past the twelve-minute mark–this isn’t a record from which to select a couple of playlist highlights (though the radio edits might work), it’s something best taken in as a giant whole. Similarly, the lo-fi, acoustic demos have a haunted bedroom-folk charm to them (the prominent usage of synths rather than rock band instrumentation adds to this), but it’s even more impressive to me that Jansen’s band were able to use them as roadmaps to get to DIM=SUM. I hope you don’t mind the scenic route, though. (Bandcamp link)
Sunflecks – Fools Errand
Release date: March 28th
Record label: Bud Tapes
Genre: Folk rock, alt-country, singer-songwriter
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Sunburst
Forrest Meyer is a Bellingham, Washington-based musician who’s been active for a while now, playing guitar on the most recent Jack Habegger’s Celebrity Telethon album and releasing a few odds and ends on Bandcamp under the name Sunflecks. 2025 is the year that Meyer formally debuts Sunflecks to a wider audience, however–he gathered up a band of a bunch of Bellingham-based musicians, went over to Anacortes-based studio The Unknown, recorded an album with Nicholas Wilbur of New Issue, and then linked up with Portland, Oregon cassette label Bud Tapes to release the final product, entitled Fools Errand. Bud Tapes’ releases run the gamut from traditionalist folk recreations to lengthy ambient/drone passages and everything in between, so I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect from Fools Errand, but I quite enjoyed what Meyer, drummer Amanda Glover, keyboardist Aiden Fay, violinist Harlow Isham, pedal steel player Logan Day, and bassist Augie Ballew (offspring of The Presidents of the United States of America’s Chris Ballew, fun fact) put together here. Fools Errand is a warm and slow collection of full-band but subdued folk rock and country music, led by a gifted songwriter who reminds me of greats like Friendship’s Dan Wriggins, State Champion’s Ryan Davis, and Simon Joyner.
A patient and unhurried listen, Fools Errand is of fairly “reasonable” length for this kind of music (nine songs, thirty-seven minutes), but it’s hard to figure out just how expansive it is once you’re inside of it. Meyer is always the center of these songs, and he sets the pace by drawing out his words and letting them reverberate in the midst of deftly-played but rarely showy instrumentation from the rest of Sunflecks. Early tracks like “Sunburst”, “Proximity”, and “Facet” are fully-developed but hardly aggressive–Sunflecks set the tone immediately, inviting us to slow down and take in their world alongside them, assuming you’ve got the capacity for pursuing such rewards. The second half of Fools Errand continues Sunflecks’ delicate folk rock composition-building–there’s nothing flagging about stuff like “Take Space” and “What’s Left”, I’ll tell you that much. The acoustic “Toss a Coin”, falling smack-dab in the middle of Fools Errand, is the only really “stripped-down” moment on Fools Errand–there’s a little bit of piano accompanying Meyer in the chorus, but otherwise it’s just pleasant folk guitars and kindly rambling vocals. It fits with the rest of Fools Errand because it’s in the same vein of Sunflecks following the songs down to where they lead–we could get lost in here if we wanted to. I don’t think anything bad would happen to us. (Bandcamp link)
Also notable:
- Friends of Cesar Romero – Spider Dreamer Sweet Tooth
- Chime Oblivion – Chime Oblivion
- MIEN – MIIEN
- Cumulus – We’ve Got It All
- Ekko Astral – Pink Balloons: Popped EP
- Los Pepes – Out of the Void…
- Divide and Dissolve – Insatiable
- Makin’ Out – Living in a Glass House
- Haunted Images – Haunted Images
- Julien Baker & Torres – Send a Prayer My Way
- Funeral Commercial – Dead Before I Die
- Peter Holsapple – The Face of 68
- Conan Neutron & The Secret Friends – The Way of the Neutron
- Freschard – The Best
- Perverts Again – The New Man
- Scrounge – Almost Like You Could
- Ronnie Martin – Consume Like a Moth What Is Dear
- Hiding Places, trust blinks., & Tombstone Poetry – Split x3 EP
- Tunde Adebimpe – Thee Black Boltz
- Milk & Bone, Ruth Radelet, & Nora Kelly Band – Lost Records: Bloom & Rage (Original Game Soundtrack) (Tape 1 & 2)
- Superheaven – Superheaven
- Heavy Lungs – Caviar
- Iron Lung – Adapting // Crawling
- Have a Nice Day! – Dystopia Romance 5.0
- Beirut – A Study of Losses
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