Pressing Concerns: Emery / The Western Expanse, Nape Neck, W. Cullen Hart and Andrew Rieger, Frizbee

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For the second Pressing Concerns of the week, we’re looking at a full-discography reissue of the intertwined bands Emery and The Western Expanse, an archival collaborative EP from Will Cullen Hart and Andrew Rieger, and new albums from Nape Neck and Frizbee. There’s something in here for you! Yesterday, the blog looked at new music from Hallelujah the Hills, Idiot Mambo, and Drunken Prayer, plus a compilation from Chapter Music; check that post out if you missed it.

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Emery / The Western Expanse – 94-96 / The Western Expanse EP / The Western Expanse LP

Release date: June 6th
Record label: Dimensional Projects
Genre: 90s indie rock, post-hardcore, post-rock, math rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Miracles / Featherweight Crown / Recolor

In the mid-90s in California’s Inland Empire, four teenage musicians, inspired by punk, hardcore, and underground rock music in general, began making noisy post-hardcore under the name Emery. Two years after Emery broke up–in the year 1998–the members reformed as The Western Expanse, and continued recording together for at least another year or so. Almost none of these recordings saw an official release during the bands’ lifespan–Emery’s only releases were a debut 7” and a split single with another obscure, long-forgotten band called Jimmy Eat World (both in 1995), and The Western Expanse only got one 7” out themselves (1999’s Hollywood Nights). As far as I know, the members of these bands (Aaron Wimberley, Chris Smith, Jae Rodriguez, and Kevin Adamson for Emery, and some combination of the four of them plus Eric Feezell, Richard Jones, and Scott Goldberg at various points for The Western Expanse) then went silent for a quarter-century, but Rodriguez recently started up a record label called Dimensional Projects for the purpose of finally getting these recordings to see the light of day (one LP’s worth from Emery, and an LP and EP from The Western Expanse). 

Listening to the collected works of Emery and The Western Expanse is an incredibly rewarding experience–all three records are great, and we can follow along their trajectory from Dischord-worshipping punk kids to experimental, almost post-rock artists (one that parallels several other bands that existed more publicly at the same time as them). If those 90s Dischord Records records, early Unwound, or that Lync album are your bag, then the Emery LP (94-96) is exactly what you’re looking for–it’s an album of noisy, fiery, actively-disintegrating punk rock music. There are certainly hints that the members of Emery could make music beyond this kind of thing hidden in this album (there’s some weird, tinny ambience to stuff like “Miracles” and “Casino”, and the emo-y/Superchunk-y “K’s Joint / Cats” sticks out like a sore thumb), but if you just want to hear some great antisocial rock music, 94-96 more than has us covered in this department. 

The two Western Expanse releases have different lineups–the EP features all of Emery plus Eric Feezell, but the LP features only two members of the original band (Wimberley and Smith) plus two new faces (Richard Jones and Scott Goldberg). I don’t know which of the two was recorded first (or if they’re even grouped in that way); the lineup similarities would suggest the EP came first, but it also feels like the culmination of everything else the band(s) recorded. Made up of the 1999 single plus two songs from “a 1998 practice recording”, the EP is probably the most “difficult” (or, for those who can’t deal with post-hardcore, the most “out-there”) of these records, the band’s indie rock foundation becoming cracked with post-rock synthesizers, math rock guitars, and wandering, meandering song structures. That being said, “Featherweight Crown” is quite catchy, and The Western Expanse turns a little more towards the concise with their self-titled LP. Combining the rock-band precision of Emery with the patient, measured outlook of the EP, The Western Expanse’s LP is the best, fullest collection that the band’s members would make. The Western Expanse lands on a sound that doesn’t sound unlike a lot of the “big name” 90s indie rock bands with which you’re likely already familiar, but since we get to hear the music that led up to it, it’s easier to understand this as a case of convergent evolution rather than a simple homework-copying. In fact, I think these albums are a great listen for anyone who wants to “understand” this era of indie rock. (Bandcamp link)

Nape Neck – Nape Neck

Release date: March 20th
Record label: Dot Dash Sounds
Genre: Post-punk, art punk, noise rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Aim Slow

A new art punk/“neo-no wave” trio from Leeds, huh? One whose Bandcamp biography uses phrases like “clang and clamor” and “jabbing and scrabbling”? A band who not only has garnered comparisons to The Ex and Dog Faced Hermans, but actually got Arnold de Boer of the former band to master their most recent record? Okay, I’m listening. Nape Neck are bassist Claire Adams, guitarist Bobby Glew, and drummer Kathy Grey (“everyone sings”), who’ve played in a bunch of local bands like Objections, The Web of Lies, and Beards between the three of them; they debuted in 2020 with a self-titled eight-song cassette tape, and followed it up two years later with an EP called Look Alive. Earlier this year, Nape Neck linked up with a relatively new label from New York called Dot Dash Sounds (Leopardo, The Sheaves, C.A.D & The Peacetime Consumers) to put out their first-ever vinyl release, a self-titled compilation of all thirteen Nape Neck songs that were released in their first four years of activity. Nape Neck certainly does the trick as an introduction to the trio’s music–it’s loud, abrasive punk rock that’s both limber and heavy at the same time. These songs are all sledgehammers that hit the listener with their full force, and the way they do it is so mind-bendingly simple–a never-flagging power trio setup with regular vocal trade-offs.

Nape Neck combines the fire and collective feel of The Ex with the neat, tidy instrumental compartmentalization of another band of Ex acolytes, Shellac. The first track on the album, “You Stand, You Sit”, begins with a minute of tinkering and noise, but when Nape Neck begin, it’s a nonstop collision of bursting-out-of-the-recording bass guitars, repetitive vocals, metallic guitars, and a fair amount of math-y tempo shifts and lurches. “You Stand, You Sit” is a pretty good summation of what to expect on the rest of Nape Neck–“Job Club” is a little more noisy and strange, “No Platforming” a little more clear in its messaging, “Don’t Know” a little more obviously punk-indebted, but it’s all playing the same game. The songs from Nape Neck’s two records are mixed together here–the tight post-punk window from “Aim Slow” to “Demonstrations” is so of-a-piece that I was surprised to learn that they weren’t all on the same record, but that’s all the more reason to sum this entire period of Nape Neck up in a single compilation LP, I suppose. Less than two months after Nape Neck, the trio put out a live cassette called Live at Sonic Protest Festival 2023 which features nine of these thirteen songs (plus one new one). The quality of that one is pretty good, so I think either of these albums would be a reasonable starting point for Nape Neck. No need to overthink it, just dive in there. (Bandcamp link)

W. Cullen Hart and Andrew Rieger – Leap Through Poisoned Air

Release date: May 30th
Record label: Orange Twin
Genre: Psychedelic pop, lo-fi indie rock, experimental rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Treasures in the Magic Hole

Will Cullen Hart and Andrew Rieger have both appeared on this blog several times, as both of them led or co-led a band that looms large over the modern guitar pop music I write about on Rosy Overdrive (Hart alongside Bill Doss in The Olivia Tremor Control, Rieger as the founder and lead vocalist of Elf Power). Twenty-five years ago, the two key figures in the Elephant 6 movement/Athens, Georgia indie rock were roommates, and both were charting the history of their primary projects–Hart was in the process of developing his new band Circulatory System after the demise of Olivia Tremor Control, and Elf Power had effectively completed a metamorphosis from a lo-fi noise pop project to a vibrant psychedelic power pop rock band. Somewhere in this time period (“1999-2000”, per Orange Twin Records), Hart and Rieger made a bit of music together–short, curious, dark pop pieces largely made up of music from the former and lyrics and vocal melodies from the latter. The timeline is a little hazy to me, but I believe that Hart was involved in preparing to finally release these recordings before his sudden death last November; at the very least, the artwork on the 10” vinyl record is his, and he co-mixed the EP alongside Rieger and Jason Nesmith (Is/Ought Gap, of Montreal).

These four songs come in at under six minutes total in length–nothing here crosses the two-minute mark. The first three songs on Leap Through Poisoned Air all feature strange, minimalist instrumentals from Hart–they’re probably closer to the more abyss-facing material of Circulatory System than the dense pop music of The Olivia Tremor Control, but neither of them are totally accurate for what he did here. “Treasures in the Magic Hole” is a collision of Hart’s electronic tinkering and the darker side of 60s pop music, and Rieger is just the right person to helm it. “Through Poisoned Air” and “Three Seeds” are both distorted and slowed-down guitar pop songs, Dusk at Cubist Castle-style pieces stripped for parts and left to deteriorate. The biggest outlier on Leap Through Poisoned Air is the closing track, “The Breathing Universe”, which seems to be a complete Will Cullen Hart song featuring additions from Rieger. After a brief but fairly intense trip to a brutalist pop dungeon, “The Breathing Universe” features bright acoustic guitars and ascending melodies and harmonies, a brief and sudden exposure to blinding light, relatively speaking. It’s unfair to burden something this small with the legacy of Will Cullen Hart, even though it is the first “new” music of his we’ve heard since his passing. It certainly does add to it, though, and both transcends and gains power from its casual origins. (Bandcamp link)

Frizbee – Sour Kisses

Release date: May 9th
Record label: Painters Tapes/Noise Merchant
Genre: Garage punk, punk rock
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Queen of the Hill

It’s punk rock from Indiana time! It it now the time for all of us to become intimately familiar with Frizbee, a quartet from Indianapolis who’ve just put out their first non-split release, a nine-song cassette called Sour Kisses on the cult Detroit label Painters Tapes and the new-to-me British imprint Noise Merchant Records. The all-female band is led by Maude Atlas on lyrics and vocals, joined by June Smith on guitar, Jacki Walburn on bass and occasional guitar, and Susie Slaughter on drums–as a unit, they are Frizbee, expert practitioners of fast-paced, furious (almost hardcore) Midwestern garage punk. On Sour Kisses, we get seven brand-new Frizbee tracks as well as fresh-sounding versions of a couple tracks from Splat, their debut split EP with Cleveland’s PAL. I’ve heard plenty of great music along these lines coming out of Detroit and Chicago in recent memory, and it kind of feels like Frizbee synthesizes the infinitely-cool, fuzz-rock-and-roll-reverent vibes of the former with the sarcastic punk-y irreverence of the latter. Look, regardless of where Sour Kisses falls on your imagined egg/chain punk spectrum-graphics, it’s a really cool seventeen-minute rock record from a new band that’s already operating at a high and lethal level.

“I’m in my bitch era / I’m in my selfish era,” is how Atlas kicks off Sour Kisses’ first track, “Me Time”. It’s a great establishing moment, a compelling performance that has me fully believing and going along with every word she says until the (barely longer than sixty-seconds) song goes off the rails and intentionally loses the plot. You’re probably wondering if Sour Kisses has any more ripping, pulverizing, fuzzed-out rock songs with a runtime of somewhere between one and two minutes, and I’ve got some good news for you on that front. That describes about 78 percent of these songs, actually. Cathartic, funny, actually kind of catchy–all of this and more describes my favorite songs on Sour Kisses, from the stomping, bouncing “Glitz & Glamour” (great, appropriate title) to the garage punk tornado of “Tiny Jumping Spider” (a subject I’d love to see more bands tackle in 2025) to “Queen of the Hill” (the fuzz-pop excoriation we didn’t know that we all needed). The riveting “Off My Collar” is a little longer than two minutes, but the real black sheep is the closing track, “Clue”, which stretches to nearly five minutes. Look out, we’re in My War Side Two territory here–this is the sound of Frizbee getting into fuzzed-out, drain-circling sludge punk. And why not? They’re pretty good at that, too. And, besides, Sour Kisses already gave us everything we wanted and then some. (Bandcamp link)

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