Pressing Concerns: Rip Van Winkle, Pat Hatt, Uniflora, West Coast Music Club

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It’s a Tuesday Pressing Concerns! This issue features a lot of music that will probably appeal to people who enjoy the kind of music that typically shows up on Rosy Overdrive (I need a short, catchy term for this type of thing); read about albums from Rip Van Winkle, Uniflora, and West Coast Music Club and an EP from Pat Hatt below. If you missed yesterday’s blog post (featuring Aunt Katrina, The Fruit Trees, Autocamper, and Wenches), 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.

Rip Van Winkle – Blasphemy

Release date: July 11th
Record label: Splendid Research
Genre: Lo-fi indie rock, experimental rock, post-punk, art rock, Guided by Voices
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Quiver and Quill

The past few years, Robert Pollard has been singularly focusing on Guided by Voices to a previously-unseen degree–two-to-three albums of muscular, prog-tinged rock music from his “main” project a year, and increasingly fewer side projects and oddities. I can tell that this other side of the legendary artist is still there and needs a workout every once in a while, though–there was an EP and LP from Cub Scout Bowling Pins in 2021, who made bubblegum pop in a murky haze, and Pollard even revived his infamously difficult Circus Devils project in 2023 for an album. Now we have Rip Van Winkle, made up of Pollard and members of the band Joseph Airport, who are the latest “weird” Guided by Voices offshoot. The lo-fi, clanging experimental EP The Grand Rapids introduced us to Rip Van Winkle last year with a brief but tantalizing offbeat teaser, and now the project’s first album, Blasphemy, is here to deliver on the promise. On the surface, Blasphemy has the same sloppy, surprising qualities of Pollard’s albums where he himself plays (nearly) everything–Vampire on Titus, Please Be Honest, Teenage Guitar–but despite this, there’s a secret polish to the playing of the rest of Rip Van Winkle that provides a link to Pollard’s more obviously pop-forward material. 

There are inspired lo-fi rockers and pop melodies throughout Blasphemy, just as there’s equally-as-inspired strangeness. Singles “Shitheel Man” and “By the Water” prove that Rip Van Winkle can be just as much of a “rock band” as GBV when they want to be, whether it’s by the snaking, smoldering freakout of the former or the post-punk/garage rock tightness of the latter. “Six Black Horses” builds to a classic rock conclusion from a spare acoustic foundation, and “Quiver and Quill” hides the best pop song on the record–a timeless jangle pop warbler–behind a psychedelic spoken-word introduction. The rest of Blasphemy is invariably quite freaky–sometimes (like with the harmonica-aided psych rock of “Pool Hall Tactics” or the basement post-rock of “St. George”) it’s not too far removed from the more friendly side of Rip Van Winkle, but others (from the chipmunk voice in “Union” to the album’s climax, a four minute multi-part suite called “This Is My Thriller”) are pretty off the rails. And the “off the rails” aspect of Blasphemy is what makes Rip Van Winkle an exciting project–not only do I have no idea where a song like “A Discussion Amongst Toads” is going to end up, but one gets the sense that Pollard and Joseph Airport aren’t so sure either. The pilot has to stay alert to land the plane, and he certainly does so. (Bandcamp link)

Pat Hatt – Pat Hatt

Release date: July 11th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Alt-country, heartland rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Drunk on Leaving

Does the world need another longtime underground musician resurfacing with a solo career inspired by Americana, alt-country, and “heartland rock”? Probably not, but I’m going to allow it in the case of one Pat Hatt. Hatt originally hails from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and apparently spent the early 2000s being quite active in the city’s music scene before taking a “a ten-year hiatus” pursuing a career as a professional barber. It was a cross-country move to California that spurred Hatt to pick up the guitar again–singles started showing up again, like 2023’s “High Is Gone” and this April’s “Catch a Serpent” (recorded by Spacemoth’s Maryam Qudus at Tiny Telephone Oakland), leading to a self-titled five-track Pat Hatt EP of all-new songs. Hatt reached back to Lancaster to recruit a full band for his latest record, enlisting guitarist Andrew Burton and drummer Nick Lowry of the Pennsylvania alt-rock band Super Vehicle to back him on these songs, and he went down to Joshua Tree to record them with Alex Newport. Pat Hatt ends up landing in the rootsy, earnest, post-Replacements no-man’s land between punk and classic rock in which fellow Pennsylvanians The Menzingers also live, but there’s a jovial, focused aspect to it reflecting somebody who’s been newly reinspired. 

I don’t really know what Pat Hatt’s music sounded like before the barber/West Coast eras began, but he’s clearly a natural at this kind of thing. It’s certainly a team effort, as Burton and Lowry and Newport all help Pat Hatt sound like perfect summer windows-down guitar music, allowing their frontperson to indulge in some classic imagery of bars and deserts and nomadic behavior. The opening track is called “Drunk on Leaving”, and its huge sound does everything you’d want a song combining these motifs to do. The somewhat-desperate-sounding “Turn the Dial” perfectly continues the sublime roots rock hot streak of Pat Hatt, and the requisite slow number “Lyin’ to Yourself” right in the middle of the EP hardly does anything to stall the momentum. The back half of the EP kicks up the energy once again–“I’m Gonna Ride” is probably Hatt’s clearest foray into Menzingers/Japandroids-style bar rock, and its driven desire to advance forward helps it land among the best of this type of music (that guitar solo doesn’t hurt, either). “Whiskey Lens” closes out the EP with a tricky one; there’s a positivity to this EP, but Hatt doesn’t overdo it, and isn’t afraid to range into darker territory. It’s his first statement of a record in a while, so I suppose it isn’t surprising he has a lot to say. (Bandcamp link)

Uniflora – More Gums Than Teeth

Release date: June 20th
Record label: Charm Co-Op/Shuga
Genre: 90s indie rock, post-punk, slacker rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: To My Zombie

Would you believe me if I told you that there’s a new experimental, noisy post-punk band from Chicago on this blog today? It’s true! Today I’m talking about Uniflora, a Windy City trio who are made up of vocalist/guitarist Quinn Dugan, drummer Ruby O’Brien, and bassist Theo Williams and who’ve played shows with Sharp Pins, Karate, and Sunshine Convention leading up to and surrounding the release of their debut album, More Gums Than Teeth. Uniflora’s first LP is crisp-sounding, guitar-forward Chicago indie rock through and through–if I didn’t know better, I’d think it was recorded by a group of unfashionable music lifers at Electrical Audio two decades or so ago. More Gums Than Teeth is a record made by people who’ve spent plenty of time with the spacier, jammier side of 90s indie rock as well as the “art rock”/punk groups who inspired them (Wire, Mission of Burma, The Fall). There are moments when the guitars or the vocals sound like Guided by Voices or Unwound or Sonic Youth or Silkworm, but these moments come in bits and pieces–these songs, which are dead-serious, laser-focused, ever-so-jazz/“math rock”-y post-punk dispatches, don’t really sound like a band trying to imitate their influences (in fact, I’m not sure what Uniflora are trying to do, exactly, which makes More Gums Than Teeth such an interesting listen).

Uniflora kick things off with the low-key, chugging indie rock of “To My Zombie”, a song that stubbornly refuses to tip its hand and sounds great while doing so. “Two or More” at the very least gives us a toe-tapping tempo to work with, and then we get “Fence”, a weird Dischord-y dubby concoction that cements Williams’ bass playing as perhaps the secret weapon of the entire album. As More Gums Than Teeth advances, Uniflora steadily unveil more sides to themselves, from the jittery grooves of “Dance” (they mention the band Cola as an influence on their music, and I heard it in this one) to the surprisingly stripped-down guitar ballad of “From the City Circle” to the clanging, motormouth garage-y post-punk of “I Was Made to Freeze”. The closest thing to a moment of excess on this highly streamlined collection is “Elongated Cat Fist”, a nearly six-minute recursive collection of melancholic guitar riffs and inconsistent tempos. More Gums Than Teeth, by its nature, doesn’t exactly ooze enthusiasm–but a closer listen to every carefully arranged guitar part, bass interjection, and structural shift tells another story. (Bandcamp link)

West Coast Music Club – Poppelganger

Release date: June 27th
Record label: 72rpm
Genre: Lo-fi indie rock, fuzz rock, power pop, garage rock, psychedelic pop
Formats: CD, digital
Pull Track: Still It’s News to Me

It’s been a busy 2025 for the West Kirby, England quartet West Coast Music Club. From January to May, the band (vocalist/guitarist Martin Adams, guitarist/bassist/vocalist Peter Madden, drummer/vocalist Iain Morton, and “multi-instrumentalist” Marc Joy) released four EPs, all of which were conceived as teasers for an eventual full-length LP. Poppelganger is that album, featuring four “A-sides” of the EPs and six new recordings, and it’s available as a double CD with the second disc comprised of all the songs from the EPs that didn’t make the proper album. If you’ve been keeping up with the West Coast Music Club EPs as I have, it won’t come as a surprise that Poppelganger is made up of enjoyably fuzzed-out, crunchy, quite British guitar pop music. What is a bit surprising is that Poppelganger isn’t necessarily the best of the recent West Coast Music Club material (my favorite song from the EPs, “Blue Seersucker”, didn’t make the cut, for instance), but the group put together a collection of meandering but electric fuzz-pop that hangs together very well as an album. Poppelganger runs the gamut from simple and straightforward to muddy and distorted, but the pop side of West Coast Music Club comes through crystal clear even at their muddiest.

West Coast Music Club make the inspired decision to kick off Poppelganger with arguably its least accessible song, the strange lo-fi Guided by Voices-esque deconstruction of “Lonely Boy”. It takes a minute to fully adjust to this skewed world, but once we’ve got our full attention trained on Poppelganger, we’re rewarded with a parade of hits like the classic garage-pop “I’ll Be Alright”, the 60s pop, distorted vibes of “You’re Not Fooling Me”, and the sugar-blast indie pop refrain of “Still It’s News to Me”. Like “Lonely Boy”, “1989” and “Crazy” are selections from the earlier EPs, but unlike the opening track, they’re two of the most immediate pop songs on Poppelganger–and they’re different examples of them, too, with the former settling on nostalgic jangly indie pop bliss and the latter cranking up the organs and surf-y vibes for a lo-fi, retro trip. Even without the bonus tracks, Poppelganger is an impressively full record, with the ten fully-developed songs reaching around forty minutes without overstaying any welcome at any point. If I were you I’d pick up that second CD just to be safe, but it’s hard to be disappointed with the final version of Poppelganger. (Bandcamp link)

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