Pressing Concerns: Zero Bars, The Rabies, Strange Devotion, stef.in

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In the second Pressing Concerns of the week, we bring forth new albums from The Rabies and stef.in and new EPs from Zero Bars and Strange Devotion. Some odds and ends, but these are the best kinds of posts anyway! If you missed yesterday’s blog post (featuring Festiva, Andhi & the O’Neills, C’mon Tigre, and Monnone Alone), 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.

Zero Bars – Life and Hell

Release date: April 18th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Garage punk, hardcore punk
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Nervous Wire

Maybe my opinions on hardcore-infused garage punk (or garage-infused hardcore punk) don’t count for all that much, but if it means anything, I think that the band Zero Bars should be significantly bigger than they are. Of course, the Toronto trio of drummer Alex T., vocalist/guitarist Chris L., and bassist Josh E. haven’t really released all that much music yet–maybe once they add a full-length album to their discography they’ll start blowing up. For now, though, we have a four-song, five-minute demo cassette from 2023 (which I called a “stealthily lean and limber” version of punk and hardcore at the time) and Life and Hell, a brand-new six-song EP. Zero Bars mention No Trend and Wire as touchpoints for this new one, as well as “paranoia, dread, and misanthropy”, and that all sounds right to me. The guitars are in rare form on Life and Hell, a mix of fuzzed-out garage-ieness, hardcore muscle, and surf-infused early punk rock, and Chris L.’s vocals are an angsty, early hardcore-style sing-speaking ramble. At eleven minutes, it’s over twice as long as their debut release, and while most of the EP is a full-force punk assault, there’s just enough oddness and post-punk dalliances here (also hinted at by Demo 2023) to keep the Zero Bars party engaging.

The first half of Life and Hell is the no-holds-barred nonstop hardcore-garage-punk extravaganza side. “Nervous Wire”, “A.D.S.”, and “Pitch Black” all come in between a minute-fifty and two minutes in length, and all of them offer up similarly paranoid, blustery, and agitated takes on punk rock music. This alone would be enough to put Life and Hell on the level of their demo EP, but we’ve still got another side of Zero Bars music in store for us. “Prove It” is the shortest original song on the EP, and it opens the second side of the cassette with a garage-punk energy that nonetheless has a slightly noisy post-punk main riff that helps us transition into the most “difficult” song on the record, “House Arrest”. Sprawling to nearly three minutes and opening with a brief foray into harmonics, the longest Zero Bars song to date is a prowling, scowling post-punk seether about wanting to stay indoors (“Don’t want to go outside / Can’t whip up the desire”). Just to make sure that their hardcore bona fides don’t lapse in the time it takes them to get through “House Arrest”, Zero Bars close out Life and Hell with a minute-and-change Crucifucks cover–their version of “The Mountain Song” brings the spitted vocals and raging guitars back to the forefront for a moment, and then it’s all over. Again, you should be onto Zero Bars if this kind of music has any appeal to you at all. (Bandcamp link)

The Rabies – Dumb It Down

Release date: March 14th
Record label: Presidential/Bolt
Genre: Power pop, punk rock, new wave
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: (My Girl’s a) Hologram

Who are The Rabies? Well, they’re a power pop/punk quartet from the New York City suburbs, originally formed by vocalist George Faulkner, drummer John Gramaglia, bassist Kevin Alter, and guitarist Torin Alter in the year 1981. They put out two records (1982’s “(My Girl’s a) Hologram” single and the following year’s Labor Day EP) and played a few shows around the American Northeast before splitting up, seemingly for good. That changed a few years ago, when the band noticed that their early singles were still receiving a fair amount of attention on Discogs and the like, leading to a brand-new single called “Adderall Girl” in 2020, a re-release of “(My Girl’s a) Hologram” in 2022, and, now, the first-ever Rabies full-length album, some forty years in the making. About half of the songs on Dumb It Down are from 1981 and the other half were written when the band reunited and decided to make an album (which they recorded in Brooklyn and Westchester with Bryce Goggin and Peter Denenberg, respectively). Those early Rabies recordings had a nervous, Reagan-era new wave tinge to them (music made in the shadows of Devo and Elvis Costello, certainly); Dumb It Down doesn’t try to recreate these exact conditions, but plenty of that era still shades these fourteen fresh-sounding power pop songs.

A new recording of “(My Girl’s a) Hologram” opens the album, and it’s easy to hear how this one kickstarted the modern Rabies revival–it’s awesome Ramones-y surf-punk that plenty of new bands still love to make, and thematically it remains wildly relevant today (perhaps even more so, weirdly enough). Not that I would expect a band called The Rabies to be a bunch of gentlemen, but Dumb It Down has a sneering dark streak to it between the seething Devo-core “I Should Know” and the downright nihilistic “Jimmy”, and the title track, as catchy as it is, is an anthem about not meeting a partner’s needs on an intellectual (or really any) level (“Neuro-this, psycho-that / I don’t know what she’s driving at”). Like a bunch of early punk rockers, The Rabies seem to revel in being shitheads a little bit on Dumb It Down, but there’s more to the album than fun destruction. “Down” is very nearly a foil to “Dumb It Down”, almost like The Rabies tried to write something from the opposite perspective, and while “You’re the Glue” and “Zero-Sum” may not be Earth-shatterers, there’s a thoughtfulness and even tenderness to their version of guitar pop here that feels built to endure. Dumb It Down is a very…interesting debut album to wait forty years to make, but it’s certainly one worth finally putting to tape. (Bandcamp link)

Strange Devotion – A Demonstration of Devotion

Release date: March 21st
Record label: Fabulous Things
Genre: Post-punk, indie pop, 90s indie rock, psychedelia
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Grey to Green

I can’t get enough of these new, small bands revisiting classic underground indie rock and post-punk with a garage punk energy and excitement. Well, I probably can get enough of them eventually, but I’m certainly not getting off the train as it stops at Strange Devotion’s station. A new quintet out of London made up of musicians originally from northern England and Wales, Strange Devotion (bassist/vocalist Rhys, guitarists Jonny and Sean, drummer Charlie, and synth player/vocalist Lucy) first put out a two-song demo in 2023, and the four-song A Demonstration of Devotion EP is the band’s first physical release (a cassette via upstart Kent label Fabulous Things). The band (whose members also play in a bunch of other bands I’ve never heard of such as Fatberg, Moist Crevace, and Oyster) claim everything from “Wire and The Cure to Stereolab and The Stranglers” as influences, and while I can’t claim that their debut EP sounds like all of those bands, it’s certainly a well-informed and trickily-difficult-to-categorize record. There’s certainly a post-punk and even goth darkness hovering over these four songs (Lucy’s synths help see to that), but it’s still a guitar-led experience and the six-strings feel equally informed by jangle pop and C86-associated indie pop as by these greyer areas.

The plodding bass that opens the EP’s first track, “Dolls”, is like the tolling of a bell, and the guitars creep along like a spider. It’s a pretty good indication that A Demonstration of Devotion is going to have a bit of a dark and dramatic streak, even as Strange Devotion cling to signifiers of being your typical underground British punk group. The single most thrilling moment on the EP for me is the beginning of the second song, “Grey to Green”–out of nowhere, Strange Devotion begin to sound like a classic Flying Nun/Dunedin Sound guitar pop group, the guitars running in a melodic circle and the synths taking on a Clean-like organ quality. “Grey to Green” resolves back into synth-y post-punk eventually, but the jangly catchiness is still there, and it sticks around for a bit in “Mercy Is Real”, which balances the dour with the catchy in its confusing but entertaining version of melancholic, jangly pop. “Stage Clothes” is probably the furthest thing from “punk rock” on the EP, with Strange Devotion deciding to close their first record by setting the guitars and synths on a meandering, almost psychedelic journey to nowhere. Strange Devotion rise from their stupor to finish off “Stage Clothes” with an electric garage rock conclusion, but it’s too late–we already know that they’re much more than that. (Bandcamp link)

stef.in – Icterus II

Release date: April 4th
Record label: Barnyard
Genre: Jazz-rock, post-rock, art rock, math rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Three Wars

Stefan Hegerat seems to be a busy guy in the Toronto music scene. He’s a part of several local bands–prog-pop act Parade, folk rock group JJ and the Pillars, experimental project Triio–as well as being a drummer for hire (showing up on records like the most recent LP from Fortunato Durutti Marinetti) and working as a music educator. He’s a co-leader in some of those groups and a backing musician in others, but stef.in appears to be “his” band more than any of the other ones. His first name is (kind of) the name of the band, but stef.in is a quartet–Hegerat is the group’s drummer and composer, and they’re rounded out by guitarists Robyn Gray and Patrick O’Reilly and bassist Mark Godfrey. Together, they make kinetic, instrumental jazz-rock music–they’re using a simple rock band setup, but their music is clearly the work of artists clearly focused on expanding beyond what’s traditionally done with these instruments (“This project is very much a vessel for making music with my favourite artists,” enthuses Hegerat, explaining that his goal in composing these songs is giving his collaborators ample room to “blast off into outer space”). 

stef.in’s first album, Icterus, appeared in 2018, a mere one year after the band formed. Icterus II, on the other hand, took seven years to materialize (the overall busyness of Hegerat that I discussed earlier likely has something to do with that), but the quartet don’t stray too much from their debut. All four members trade their roles throughout Icterus II–generally speaking, the guitars have the wildest parts on the album, Godfrey plays the classic jazz bassist role of balancing melody and rhythm, and Hegerat’s drums are kinetic but firm, but stef.in never stay in one place for too long. This type of music gets the “math rock” tag quite frequently, and there are plenty of moments on Icterus II that remind me of that, but it’s more accurate to simply refer to it as a “jazz-rock record”. Much of that has to do with Godfrey, but the guitarists know how to shape their instruments into surprisingly familiar “jazz” fashion as well. At its loudest, Icterus II is an undeniably chaotic listen, but stef.in aren’t absentmindedly filling space–in fact, there are several songs on the record (“Here’s to Circle”, “Dosage”, and “Our Circle”) where the four of them let silence play a key role in the compositions. That’s as good an example of the trust and instinct that go into Icterus II as any. (Bandcamp link)

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2 thoughts on “Pressing Concerns: Zero Bars, The Rabies, Strange Devotion, stef.in”

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