Pressing Concerns: Katsy Pline, The Problem with Kids Today, Sub/Shop, Joel vs Joel

Posted byrosyoverdrivePosted inPressing ConcernsTags:, , , , , , , ,

First Pressing Concerns of the week! It’s new albums from Katsy Pline, The Problem with Kids Today, and Joel vs Joel, and a new EP from Sub/Shop.

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.

Katsy Pline – Live at the Three Teardrops

Release date: June 13th
Record label: Paisley Shirt
Genre: Ambient country, experimental country
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: I Can’t Find the Time

I’ve been waiting for a good chance to write about the Berkley, California country musician Katsy Pline (aka Evie Brown) for a bit now. Although Pline’s music isn’t exactly the “Bay Area sound” I most frequently write about on this blog, she’s been active in the indie pop scene nonetheless, playing on the most recent Tony Jay album and releasing her third LP, 2023’s Incandescent Fire, on Ray Seraphin’s Take a Turn Records. Pline’s latest album is a Paisley Shirt Records-released cassette called Live at the Three Teardrops, a ten-song collection of “ambient instrumentals and reharmonized versions of classic country songs”. Pline plays most everything herself on Live at the Three Teardrops–she’s credited with “guitar, synthesizer, bass, B-bender talkbox, and electronics”, and pedal steel player Phill Hermans is the only other person on the recordings. I’ve heard a few albums that have been called “ambient country” recently, but Live at the Three Teardrops is perhaps the one most devoted to truly reaching both ends of the spectrum: some tracks on the album are slower and spacier but otherwise fairly traditionally-played versions of songs written by the likes of Willie Nelson, Buck Owens, and Skeeter Davis, and others are straight-up instrumental, pedal-steel-heavy ambient soundscapes.

The majority of Live at the Three Teardrops is made up of (to some degree) reimagined old songs–the molasses-slow lonesome stargazing of opening track “Cowboy’s Heaven (Tgirl’s Lament)” is one of them (that one’s originally by yodeler Slim Whitman, although I don’t think his version had the parenthetical). “I Can’t Find the Time” (Nelson), “Tired of Living” (Owens), and “Green Eyes Lullaby” (Rex Griffin) are perhaps the purest distillations of Katsy Pline’s “country music”–slow, aching yodeling in the vocals, minimal plodding guitars, and plenty of Hermans’ pedal steel. The original instrumental songs that stitch the rest of Live at the Three Teardrops together feel just as vital as the “country songs” when it comes to giving us a full picture of Katsy Pline–we have “Spring Snow”, an electronic, almost new age-ish track that’s almost jarring (if it weren’t so peaceful), the more cosmic-folk touches of “Miramir Beach”, the quiet landscape of “No Present, No Past, No Future”, and “The Moon Is Hidden from View (Without You)”, which is effectively just an instrumental country song. They’re all part of the Katsy Pline sound, as are the moments where the country tracks space themselves out to the point where they start to sound like something beyond that (“Forever”, parts of “Where No One Knows Me”). Katsy Pline knows country music inside and out, and Live at the Three Teardrops puts that knowledge to infinitely great use. (Bandcamp link)

The Problem with Kids Today – Take It!

Release date: August 22nd
Record label: In the Shed
Genre: Garage punk, garage rock, punk rock
Formats: CD, digital
Pull Track: Secret-Keeper

I wrote about The Problem with Kids Today early last year; the New Haven, Connecticut-based trio (guitarist/vocalist Tate Brooks, bassist/vocalist/keyboardist Silas Lourenco Lang, and drummer Reena Yu) had just released their second album, Born to Rock. That album lived up to its title, ripping through classic punk, garage rock, and power pop with a fun but sharp-pointed enthusiasm, so it’s certainly good news that the Kids have already followed it up with a third album a year and a half later. After making an album in a world-renowned studio (Q Division) with an impressively-credentialed producer (Adam Lasus), The Problem with Kids Today decided against following this trajectory with Take It!: they recorded it in a shed in Tate’s backyard, and the producer they enlisted was their local friend Joe LeMieux (of the band Litvar). Stripping everything down doesn’t seem to have changed The Problem with Kids Today all that much, however–it turns out that their sound is entirely the product of the interplay between the three of them. If anything, The Problem with Kids Today sound more natural on Take It!; they’ve settled into an early punk rock-inspired garage rock groove in these fifteen songs.

Take It! is a good ten minutes longer than Born to Rock, but with the Kids at the wheel, none of these brief bursts of rock and roll overstay their welcomes. For most of the album, it really does feel more or less like a band ripping through three-chord rockers in a shed: the opening duo of “Anymore” and “Feelin’ Alright” sets the right tone, and the second half of the record is arguably even more stuffed with garage-punk nuggets between the likes of “The Stranger”, “Bad Hair Day”, and “Secret-Keeper” (which are all back to back to back and under four minutes all in total, by the way). There’s punk energy infused throughout this whole album–it’s in the kooky surf rock opening to “Hillsborough Disaster 1989”, a sloppy zoomer-fied “TV Party”-esque song called “Spongebob Squarepants and Patrick Star”, and the 70s power pop melodic tricks of “The Beginning of the End of the World”. If there’s anything on Take It! that isn’t a punk song, it’s “Don’t Lose Yourself”, which might be the trio’s stab at a mid-tempo ballad. Between the power trio setup, the off-the-cuff energy, and the typically-shouted vocals, though, it’s done The Problem with Kids Today’s way–like the rest of Take It!, of course. (Bandcamp link)

Sub/Shop – Democatessen 

Release date: June 26th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Garage rock, post-hardcore, punk rock, post-punk
Formats: CD, digital
Pull Track: 1987

Alright, okay. Here we go. A new punk rock band from Richmond, Virginia. This is Sub/Shop, a quintet made up of a bunch of RVA scene veterans (their bio lists sixteen different bands in which the members have previously played, none of which I’ve heard of before) and who have just released their first record, a CD EP called Democatessen. The band (drummer James O’Neill, bassist Kyler O’Brien, guitarists Robert Stubbs and Brendan Trache, and vocalist Chip Vermillion) seem to have backgrounds in hardcore and emo music, so it shouldn’t surprise you that they seem fairly indebted to the underground rock music of nearby Washington, D.C. associated with Dischord Records and the like. Democatessen is not a hardcore or emo record, but it brings both genres with it to its ferocious, live-wire version of punk music (there’s a helpful term called “post-hardcore” that I believe applies here). There’s plenty of “D.C. 1987” (as the band themselves describe their sound) on the EP, and the John Reis-Rick Froberg partnership is in here too. The members of Sub/Shop have been toiling away in a second-tier market city for (at least in some cases) more than two decades; people like this aren’t likely to “lose it”, and Democatessen sounds like a band that very much has it.

Sub/Shop call Democatessen an EP; it’s seven songs and twenty-seven minutes long, and to me it basically feels like an album. Democatessen probably seems larger-than-life because Sub/Shop pretty much always have their foot on the gas–four-minute punk songs that hardly let up for a second will do that. We start in “1987”, an opening track that sets the tone with scowling vocals and aggressive but deftly-played guitars; if that sounds intriguing to you, then the rest of the EP continues to deliver these particular goods. “Cloud City” is just as spiky as its predecessor, and the post-punk wire-traps of “Imposter” and “Catch as Catch Can” only pretend like they aren’t as fierce. “Navel Gazer” starts by threatening to live up to its title, feigning a quieter turn before kicking the guitars up into a storm yet again, and Sub/Shop (of course) don’t settle down in the home stretch of the record. Democatessen is a pretty strong starting point, and if nothing else, Sub/Shop have given us seven good new post-hardcore songs in 2025, with no such concern as to timeliness. (Bandcamp link)

Joel vs Joel – Smile in the Mirror

Release date: August 19th
Record label: Enigmatic Brunch
Genre: Folk rock, soft rock, singer-songwriter, art rock
Formats: CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Smile in the Mirror

What’s going on in Kansas City these days? I’m not really qualified to give a detailed answer to that question, but I can tell everyone that there’s apparently a brand-new record label based out of there called Enigmatic Brunch Records, and their debut release is a promising one. Joel vs Joel is Joel Stratton, a Kansas City-based multi-instrumentalist who plays keyboards in one of the only other Kansas City bands I know about (Eggs on Mars) as well as in a couple of other groups (Eggs on Mars actually has a few more connections to Joel vs Joel–the band’s Doug Bybee contributes synth to their debut album, and the Eggs’ lead vocalist Brad Smith is the brains behind Enigmatic Brunch). It’s a bit hard to categorize Joel vs Joel’s debut album, Smile in the Mirror, but loosely speaking, it’s a Midwestern folk rock/art rock/chamber pop record–Stratton lists Andy Shauf, Wilco, and (of course) Elliott Smith as inspirations, which makes sense for a collection drawing from a disparate set of rock and pop-based touchstones and being held together by an unassuming but wide-ranging craftsmanship.

The mesmerizing psychedelic folk rock of opening track “Enantiodromia” is far from the catchiest track on Smile in the Mirror, but its dark, smooth energy sets us up for a record that, without making a big deal of it, frequently deals in the unexpected. With bits of soft rock and even sophisti-pop in its folk rock, “Ad Hominem” is one of the biggest “hits” on the album, and comparisons to esoteric pop acts like Silo’s Choice and Nature’s Neighbor only continue to be warranted as we arrive at the kaleidoscopic “Central Park Towers”. Pop music is the core of everything on Smile in the Mirror, but the bright acoustic-folk-power-pop of the title track embraces it like little else, and the rootsy indie pop of “Boogaloo” continues the album’s mid-record winning streak. The delicate folk-pop of “stratton.joel@gmail.com”, the uncharacteristically heavy, slightly distorted rock music of “God’s Celestial Shore”, and the leisurely closing track “Joel Hold On” ensure that the album stays just as interesting (if not more so) in its final stretch, and then just like that, Joel vs Joel’s first statement is neatly wrapped up in a haze of odd synths and acoustic guitars. It all makes sense if you just think on it for a bit. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Leave a comment