Pressing Concerns: Abe Savas, Ella Hanshaw, City Planners, The Whimbrels

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Hey there! It may be a holiday week, but I’m planning on making it a full one nonetheless, and we’re beginning with a Pressing Concerns featuring new albums from Abe Savas, City Planners, and The Whimbrels, plus an archival collection from Ella Hanshaw. Check it out!

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Abe Savas – 99 Songs (Plus One)

Release date: June 20th
Record label: Badgering the Witless
Genre: Power pop, bedroom pop, folk-pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: (He’s Been) Phoning It in Again

The album is called 99 Songs (Plus One), and that’s exactly what it offers us. This ambitious project is the brainchild of one Abe Savas, a Kalamazoo, Michigan-based musician who made a record in 2023 with a backing band called “The New Standards of Beauty”. 99 Songs (Plus One) has (perhaps unsurprisingly) been in the works for longer than that; the bulk of the material was recorded between “2021 and 2025”, but some of its ideas and recordings have been bouncing around since the late 1990s. 99 Songs (Plus One) fits its ninety-nine tracks in seventy-eight minutes (enough for one CD)–you can do the math, but this means a lot of these songs are snippets a few seconds long, and even the more fully-developed tracks are almost all under two minutes in length. The songs range from incredibly goofy to surprisingly poignant, genre-wise hopping from power pop to acoustic folk to more side-excursions than I can count. There’s a lot of Elvis Costello in Savas’ pop music instincts, and this chaotic collection will likely also appeal to fans of Tony Molina, They Might Be Giants, and maybe even Fountains of Wayne. There’s a ton of brilliant moments on 99 Songs (Plus One), and for the less-memorable ones, one only needs to wait a couple of seconds for them to pass.

The first stone-cold classic on  99 Songs (Plus One) comes in the first five tracks with the cinematic complaint of a Costelloian punk-power-pop anthem in “(He’s Been) Phoning It in Again”, and the thirty-second NDA paean “Severance Package” is another great early rocker. Other perfect moments of power pop on 99 Songs (Plus One) include the surprisingly edgy garage rock of “The Lost Footage of The Magnificent Ambersons”, the euphoric bounce of “Melodyne”, and “Jingle Work”, which might as well be the theme song for the entire album. On the more acoustic side of the spectrum, “Rise to the Occasion” is a short Elliott Smith-like song about solitude that’s as good as anything else on the album, and there’s a really brilliant self-pitying song hidden near the end of the record called “Boring Dracula”. A few songs on 99 Songs (Plus One) are effectively just punchlines–they’re not my favorite songs on the album, of course, but I’ll admit that “Rock & Roll Taco” made me laugh and “In My Electric Car” is pretty great too. The songs that aren’t jokes maybe aren’t as immediately memorable as stuff like “Theme from MimeCop” (“He has the right to remain silent”), but stuff like “Freeze” and “Pay Phone” and “I’ll Wash, You Dry” (Jesus Christ, regarding the latter of those three) stick out in a raw emotional way. But maybe 99 Songs (Plus One) is at its best when it combines a bit of everything, like in the bizarre sixty-second new wave storytelling of “Radar”. You can choose whichever parts of 99 Songs (Plus One) work the best for you; there’s no shortage of pieces to pick up. (Bandcamp link)

Ella Hanshaw – Ella Hanshaw’s Black Book

Release date: June 13th
Record label: Spinster
Genre: Gospel folk, country
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Reaching for Heaven/Reaching for You

The first-ever archival release from Appalachian folk record label Spinster Sounds is a remarkable unearthing: an entire album of recordings from Ella Hanshaw (1934-2020), a West Virginia gospel and country musician who devoted much of her life to writing and performing music for Baptist (and later Pentecostal) churches in Clay County (as well as across the state with the Hallelujah Hill Quartet, featuring her husband Tracy and Maxine and Chester Spencer). Ella Hanshaw’s Black Book was compiled by her granddaughter from “home and church recordings”, and it’s actually two collections in one–Side A, the Big Black Book, is made up of Hanshaw’s original gospel songs, largely recorded with the quartet, and Side B, the Little Black Book, features Hanshaw’s earliest, secular country material she recorded on her own before her faith and music became completely intertwined. The Big Black Book is the second gospel album I’ve written about this month, but while Drunken Prayer’s Thy Burdens was made with a (nonetheless very reverent) remove by a few alt-country musicians, Hanshaw and her quartet were quite literally an arm of the Church, and Hanshaw saw her work as an extension of God himself, who she credited with “giving” her these songs.

The sequencing of Ella Hanshaw’s Black Book is wonderful, and it’s probably the only way it would’ve made sense to arrange it. The gospel side is what Hanshaw considers her life’s work, and it’s not hard to hear and understand why a devoted servant of God would and should be proud of these songs. Hanshaw sings about laboring joyfully for the Lord and spiting the Devil, another frequent character in her songs. It seems appropriate that the Big Black Book ends with “Will My Lord Be Proud”, a question by which Hanshaw seemed to live her life. This bridges the gap to the Little Black Book, a set of home-recorded folk-country songs that humanize the divinely-inspired bandleader of the record’s first side. The lo-fi recordings only enhance the sharp country sadness in ballads like “I’ll Cry Tomorrow”, “Reaching for Heaven/Reaching for You”, and “Back in Your Heart”, and “Mr. B’s” and (especially) “Nobody’s Fool” are really fun country songs that shine through the barebones get-up. The Little Black Book is closer to the type of music I’m more likely to listen to for pleasure in the year 2025, but I appreciate that we get to see both sides of Ella Hanshaw the artist in one document. Most musicians end up projecting one image over another regardless of their true journey; Spinster and the Hanshaw family paint a truer portrait with Ella Hanshaw’s Black Book. (Bandcamp link)

City Planners – Plastic and Metal

Release date: March 20th
Record label: The Off Allen Recording Company
Genre: Indie pop, power pop, synthpop, new wave
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Angles Are Everywhere

It seems like jangly indie pop is positively thriving up there in Portland, Maine. It’s the headquarters of Rosy Overdrive favorite Repeating Cloud Records, but the scene extends beyond just one label, and City Planners is the latest to join the party with their debut album, Plastic and Metal. They’ve played some shows with Field Studies, and their relaxed, vintage-sounding pop rock sound also evokes Maine groups like Crystal Canyon and Little Oso–but even though they’re only just now putting out their first LP, City Planners actually seems to predate most of those bands. They released a demo EP in 2019, and the quintet (vocalist/synth player Becky Brosnan, guitarist/vocalist Katie Gallegos, guitarist Steve Soloway, bassist Dave Ragsdale, and drummer Zac Hansen) took six years to arrive with an album featuring polished versions of those five songs plus seven new ones. Long wait time aside, there’s no arguing with the “pop”-forward version of indie pop that City Planners have unveiled with Plastic and Metal–between the front-and-center vocals, the bright, bubbly guitars, and the prominent swooning synths, the band (as well as producer Todd Hutchisen) deserve credit for pursuing hooks on just about every frontier that’s open to them. 

“The Moon” opens up Plastic and Metal with some perfectly-executed synth-forward indie pop–between the starry electronic touches, the steady pulse of the drums, and the triumphant vocal duet, it’s the grandeur of 1980s pop music perfectly scaled to City Planners’ size. The Pixies-esque guitar riff and scurrying verses of “Doing Fine” keep the pop hooks coming via a different angle, and the retro girl-group inspired pop-rock of “Gone” is another fun example of City Planners’ range. Plastic and Metal crawls near the forty-five minute mark (it’s been a long time in the making, and I certainly can’t say that City Planners short-changed us); the midsection of the record is brightened up by the jangly “Rachel Carson” and the zippy “Pendulum”, while the Game Theory-esque new wave of “Angles Are Everywhere” keeps things curious and vibrant as Plastic and Metal begins to draw to a close. There are hints of a band with aims beyond sculpting pop pieces, particularly in the six-minute slow-burn “Blue Jacket”, but even that song is built on recognizable pop motifs that happened to be slowed down and stretched out until they become something entirely different. That just seems like how they do things up there in Maine. (Bandcamp link)

The Whimbrels – The Whimbrels

Release date: June 27th
Record label: Dromedary
Genre: Art rock, post-punk, garage rock, post-rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: She Is the Leader

The Whimbrels certainly have the pedigree. Primary songwriter and guitarist/vocalist Arad Evans was a longtime member of Glenn Branca’s ensemble, from the 1980s up until the New York composer’s death in 2018. Secondary songwriter and bassist/vocalist Matt Hunter co-founded cult 90s indie rock group New Radiant Storm King, played with Silver Jews and J. Mascis, and has been spending time in SAVAK as of late. Guitarist Norman Westberg has performed the same role in Swans for forty years, playing on most of the singular art rock/post-rock group’s albums. Drummer Steve DiBenedetto has played with Jad Fair and Phantom Tollbooth’s Dave Rick, in addition to being a renowned painter. Third guitarist Luke Schwartz is another Branca alum, and–okay, I need to talk about The Whimbrels and their self-titled debut album now. The Whimbrels is an art rock album that really, actually rocks–there’s plenty of New York no wave and noise in their sound, to be sure, but just about any underground band that knows how to combine “experimental” sounds with rock and roll–Sonic Youth, Yo La Tengo, Eleventh Dream Day, Oneida–are apt points of comparison for the quintet’s first album together.

The Whimbrels is seven songs long–a few of these songs are pretty lengthy jams, and while no one track is completely “out there”, the LP certainly has its moments. The album’s first track, “She Is the Leader”, has all of this–it slowly but surely comes into focus with clean, droning guitars, eventually adding in rambling sing-speaking vocals, and then the final two minutes (of a total of six) are devoted to a more serious style of noise exploration. Hunter’s “Monarchs” kicks out some sweeping but somewhat murky New York indie rock, and The Whimbrels continue to rock in both the shortest (the two-minute noise punk “That’s How It Was”) and longest (eight-minute sprawling closing track “Four Moons of Galileo”) moments on the album. “Scream for Me” is basically New York punk rock stretched and contorted into a six-minute electric journey, and “Eclipse Eye” (Hunter’s other contribution) brings a bit of lightly-psychedelic Lee Ranaldo vibe to its tension and empty space. The Whimbrels has plenty of flare-ups that you can tell were sculpted by people who’ve tested the outer limits of the guitar as an instrument, but it’s entirely a “rock” record and it’s entirely a joy to listen to. (Bandcamp link)

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