Pressing Concerns: Mal Blum, Allo Darlin’, The Queen & I, The Wind-Ups

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July 11th (which is tomorrow) is shaping up to be a big release week, and Pressing Concerns is on the scene documenting four of these imminent releases: new albums from Mal Blum, Allo Darlin’, The Queen & I, and The Wind-Ups. If you missed either of this week’s earlier blog posts (Monday’s featured Hannah Marcus, Abel, Jacob Freddy, and The Pond, and Tuesday’s featured Gauri Paighan, KD Surreal, Lain Fallow, and Mob Wife), check those out 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.

Mal Blum – The Villain

Release date: July 11th
Record label: Get Better
Genre: Alt-rock, fuzz rock, pop punk, slacker rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Must Get Lonely

The New York-originating, Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter Mal Blum has been kicking around as a solo artist since the late 2000s. At first, they made charming, early Mountain Goats-inspired folk punk-adjacent pop music, and while I still like those records (2013’s Tempest in a Teacup in particular holds up), we all must grow up, and Blum eventually graduated to more electric indie rock with bits of pop punk and grunge-pop. The Villain continues this trend, but it’s also Blum’s first album in quite a while–their last LP, Pity Boy, was in 2019, with 2022’s Ain’t It Nice EP bridging the gap, so to speak. Blum’s always displayed flashes of brilliance, but The Villain is, for me, where they’ve finally “put it all together” and made a cohesive, potent, front-to-back classic album. It’s Blum’s first album made entirely with their “lower register after several years on testosterone”, and they’ve embraced their new voice’s ability to sell a specific kind of low-key, muttering darkness. The press release implies that The Villain isn’t entirely a break-up album, but there’s a lot of relationship ugliness in here, and the character that Blum adopts throughout the album–passively, sardonically observing one royal mess after another as if they aren’t even there at all–ends up being a very fascinating byproduct of a major personal transition. 

“I killed the previous tenant in my head, or so they said / I think that’s pretty reductive, but I’m tired, so whatever,” Blum memorably sings in “Killer”, perhaps the clearest moment of realization in a record full of them. As the rest of The Villain makes abundantly clear, though, awareness can only get one so far–there’s an inevitability, even a fatalism to stuff like “I’m So Bored” and “Gemini v. Cancer”, both of which shrug and continue down the pothole-filled paths they’ve been down before and will go down again. As understated as Blum’s direness comes off from their perspective, the Mal Blum band and producer Jessica Boudreaux don’t lay down with them–the opening track “A Small Request” builds from a simple, classic Blum beginning to a full on alt-rock cathartic finish, “Must Get Lonely” is as breezy as it is uncomfortable, and “Gemini v. Cancer” is basically a dance song (one that few people other than Blum could get away with, I think). The Villain is an incredibly rich text about perception and agency hidden in a messy queer breakup album featuring songs with choruses like “The truth is out there–what if I wanna lie instead?” (“Truth Is Out There”) and “If I don’t ever see you again, it’d be too soon” (“Too Soon”). I was drawn in by Mal Blum the cigarette-wielding, quick-witted trans-masculine non-binary bad boy, yes, but when they drop both the act and their voice to a whisper in the title track, The Villain finally locks into place as something more than a (quite compelling) clarity-weaponizing persona. (Bandcamp link)

Allo Darlin’ – Bright Nights

Release date: July 11th
Record label: Slumberland/Fika Recordings
Genre: Folk-pop, indie pop, jangle pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Tricky Questions

From 2008 to 2016, Allo Darlin’ was a quartet made up of two Australians (vocalist/guitarist/ukulele player Elizabeth Morris Innset and bassist/vocalist Bill Botting) and two Brits (drummer Michael Collins and guitarist Paul Rains) who met up in London and made twee-ish, folk-ish indie pop music together. After releasing three records that received just about as much attention and adoration that vintage-style indie pop music was capable of receiving in the early 2010s, Allo Darlin’ decided to hang it up, a decision that lasted for a few years until some reunion shows in 2023 led to the group fully reuniting and making another album together. Bright Nights arrives via their old home of Slumberland Records (given the label’s recent hot streak, it feels like the perfect time for a new Allo Darlin’ album) and via a new partnership with Fika Recordings (replacing their former British label, the now-defunct Fortuna Pop!). On their first album in more than a decade, Allo Darlin’ do indeed sound like an indie pop band who’ve allowed themselves to age–somewhere between the stalwart folk rock of The Innocence Mission and the elder-statespeople twee pop of The Catenary Wires, Bright Nights is the record that the four of them needed to take some time off to make.

Morris, who sings lead vocals on all but one of Bright Nights’ ten songs, retakes her place as frontperson with a kind of understated, fervent confidence that’s certainly the mark of somebody with a wealth of experience both inside and beyond “indie music”. The person who’s singing thoughtful, vibrant, slow-moving folk-pop songs like spare album opener “In the Spring” and the meandering “Northern Waters” is the same person who’s able to put on a show to the tune of busier but still unhurried indie pop hits like “My Love Will Bring Your Home” and “Tricky Questions”; it just takes time to develop this kind of subtle range. The rest of Allo Darlin’, of course, do exactly what Morris’ writing needs them to do, and guest musicians like mandolin player Michael Donovan, violinist Dan Mayfield, and vocalists Heather Larimer (Corvair), Hannah Winter, and Laura Kovic (Fortitude Valley) all make noticeable contributions to Bright Nights’ sound as well. One of the best songs on Bright Nights is the title track, which closes the record; Morris signs off with a poetic, devoted array of images, at one point sighing “Thank God summer is on its way,” in the chorus. Allo Darlin’ have a wealth of history to draw from now, but Bright Nights still has a lot it’s looking forward to as well. (Bandcamp link)

The Queen & I – At Peace

Release date: July 11th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Psychedelia, noise pop, fuzz rock, post-Britpop, power pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Still I Wonder

At this point, it seems pretty rare for me to hear about a new band from the Bay Area and not recognize the various members from a half-dozen other projects. The Queen & I are a trio from Oakland who are, nonetheless, entirely new to me–the primary songwriter Andrew Ledford and Austin Gibbons have played in bands I don’t know called Tet Holiday (both of them) and The Pleasure Routine (just Ledford), while I can’t really tell you anything about the third member (or even who they are, exactly–on-record I believe it’s Brandon Farmer, who seems to have since been replaced by Greg Oertel). And yet, here we have At Peace, the project’s first album as a full band (Ledford apparently re-released a 2010s solo album called Statues under The Queen & I’s name last year), which is as strong a collection of guitar pop as any that I’ve heard from the Bay Area’s more familiar faces in recent memory. The Queen & I’s version of pop music is distorted and electric but immaculate and polished, with bits of psychedelic pop, shoegaze, and Britpop sneaking into material that could’ve just as easily been read as more traditional jangle pop and/or power pop.

At Peace feels like a classic rock album, in a way. It’s eight songs long and only a little over a half-hour, and bloated six-minute rockers sit right next to concise pop rock pieces because “rock music” can and should take us anywhere. “Everything Hurts” kicks things off on the more high-concept side of things–we get a nice, strong neo-psychedelia/alt-dance drumbeat and a wall of fuzzed-out guitars, and The Queen & I are able to smoothly move into a Brit-power-pop bliss-out in “Bitter” and a jangly fuzz-pop rave-up in “Still I Wonder” with little sweat. At The Queen & I’s punchier moments, they feel like a more overtly-psychedelic-indebted version of the Guided by Voices-influenced shoegaze-pop of Ex Pilots and Gaadge–hell, the exuberant penultimate track “We’re Still Here” is effectively a Mythical Motors song with more of a punk background. The more expansive songs on At Peace don’t sound like departures from this version of pop music so much as, well, expansions of it–the title track, the album’s centerpiece, doesn’t feel like a conscious attempt at making a six-minute song so much as “The Queen & I were able to get six great pop minutes out of it, so they did”. The Queen & I may be new to me, but they’ve already muscled their way near to the top of my “Oakland bands you ought to be keeping up with” list. (Bandcamp link)

The Wind-Ups – Confection

Release date: July 11th
Record label: Dandy Boy
Genre: Lo-fi punk, garage punk, fuzz rock, power pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: (That’s Just My) Dream Girl

The Wind-Ups are back! In a live setting, the Chico, California-based group is actually a full-on garage rock/power pop/punk rock band, but their records have effectively been the self-recorded domain of the project’s bandleader, Jake Sprecher. We last checked in with The Wind-Ups in 2023, dropping a 7” EP (Jonathan Says) and a full-length (Happy Like This) in quick succession; last year, they linked up with Dandy Boy Records to release a live album, and The Wind-Ups are back with the Oakland label for their latest LP, Confection. If you’ve enjoyed the incredibly lo-fi/fuzzed out sound, one-man-garage-band energy, and big hooks of previous Wind-Ups records, I’ve got good news with regards to what you’ll find on Confection. Sprecher hasn’t abandoned the world of self-recording, but he gets more help on this twenty-five-minute, eleven-track album than he had previously–vocalist/guitarist Connor Finnigan, vocalist Jason Wuestefeld, vocalist/lyricist Kerra Jessen, and cellist Jaed Garibaldi all make appearances here (not to mention a guitar part from Jonathan Richman, in whose band Sprecher plays, on “Little Boy Blue”, which initially appeared on the Jonathan Says EP). Confection still sounds as crunchy and clanging as ever, though, of course.

The pop songs start coming and they don’t stop landing blows. “A Fine Pink Mist” and “I Love Her” open up Confection with two Wind-Ups classics, mixes of no-fi scuzz, Ramones-y “oh-ohs”, and shambling power pop hooks. The garage punk side of The Wind-Ups never quite goes away on Confection, but single “(That’s Just My) Dream Girl” moves things closer to the world of straight-up jangle pop (through a hazy lens, of course), and then there’s “Cheer Up”, the song that features Jessen “narrating” the verses. Jessen’s stream-of-consciousness, nervous speaking is a departure from Sprecher’s typical fuzz pop, but he grafts one of those signature Wind-Ups choruses to it and it fits comfortably next to the rest of the record. There are a lot of little fun moments like the “Cheer Up” deviation on Confection–not quite as obvious, true, but the punk chanting of “Pain in Your Heart”, the noisy pummeling of “Flag Pin Theater”, and the steady, drum-beating march of “Ants on the Table” all ensure that Confections stays interesting in its second half, too. Not that The Wind-Ups’ primary means of communication was ever in all that much danger of becoming stale, but Confections goes the extra mile to put some more treats in the mix. (Bandcamp link)

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