Pressing Concerns: Sharp Pins, The Brokedowns, S.C.A.B., The King Canutes

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It’s Thursday! The Pressing Concerns for today contains four albums that are out tomorrow (November 21st): new ones from Sharp Pins, The Brokedowns, S.C.A.B., and The King Canutes. Read on, and if you missed either of this week’s earlier blog posts (Monday’s featured Dogwood Gap, Via, Gazed and Bemused, and Blue Zero, and Tuesday’s featured Ugly Stick, The Terminal Buildings, Pressure Wheel, and Pohgoh / Samuel S.C.), 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.

Sharp Pins – Balloon Balloon Balloon

Release date: November 21st
Record label: K/Perennial
Genre: Power pop, jangle pop, psychedelic pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Fall in Love Again

What’s the end goal here? Making as many jangly guitar pop songs that sound right out of the late 1960s as possible? Aggressively drag Byrds worship into the next generation by performing a tribute so enthusiastic as to make it irresistible? Making a “Rosy Overdrive-core” album so great that it wins over the other music blog that is studiously unaware of such records 99 percent of the time? Whatever drives Sharp Pins’ Kai Slater, it’s a strong motivator, as we’ve now gotten a superb Sharp Pins LP three years in a row. Slater first became known to me in late 2021 thanks to a single from his noise rock group Lifeguard; the first Lifeguard album only came out earlier this year, and Slater’s recorded nearly fifty Sharp Pins songs in the interim (and, if you count last year’s Mod Mayday 23 covers album, even more than that). Slater partnered with K and Perennial records to release an expanded version of his second album, Radio DDR, earlier this year, and Balloon Balloon Balloon keeps the yearly Sharp Pins streak alive with Slater’s first album of new material for his new labels.

I’d hesitate to call Balloon Balloon Balloon the best Sharp Pins album yet, but it’s the most impressive one: twenty-one pitch-perfect mod revival tunes in under forty-five minutes, one after the other begging the question of “how is this not an unearthed garage-band wonder from sixty years ago?” (or, at least, “an unearthed early Guided by Voices recording from forty years ago?”). It’s actually quite hard to make great music while remaining this devoted to time-machine-level construction–even at the peak of his guitar pop prowess, Robert Pollard still had to build in some weird-detour escape hatches for himself (in Balloon Balloon Balloon’s case, it’s restricted virtually entirely to the three semi-title interludes), and the bands that prioritize aesthetics over anything else never really have the tunes to back it up (not for an entire album, at least). But here’s Balloon Balloon Balloon coming through with a real murderer’s row–those first five songs are relentless in advancing Sharp Pins’ sole pursuit, and it’s not like the rest of the LP fails to live up to the high bar (for the incredibly impatient, bookmark “Talking in Your Sleep”, “Fall in Love Again”, and “Takes So Long”). I expect to hear more excellent jangle pop material from Sharp Pins in the coming years, but Balloon Balloon Balloon also does feel like a perfect cap for this era of the project. What’s next? (Bandcamp link)

The Brokedowns – Let’s Tip the Landlord

Release date: November 21st
Record label: Red Scare Industries
Genre: Punk rock, pop punk, garage punk, post-hardcore
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Date Night in the Hague

The Brokedowns have been at this thing for more than twenty years now–the quartet (bassist Jon Balun, drummer Mustafa Daka, guitarists Eric Grossman and Kris Megyery) have this whole “Chicagoland punk rock thing” down pat, cranking out records on Windy City stalwart Red Scare Industries (Laura Jane Grace, The Menzingers, The Sidekicks) and, if their latest LP is any indication, specializing in loud, catchy, and unfashionable punk music. Let’s Tip the Landlord was recorded with Meat Wave’s Joe Gac, and like that band, The Brokedowns have a mean Hot Snakes streak in them. However, the dead-eyed intensity of the best Meat Wave material is nowhere to be found in these Midwestern pranksters: if the album title wasn’t enough of an indication (“He’s already postponed his fifth vacation,” they plead in the title track), songs like “Date Night in the Hague”, “Sirhan Lohan”, and “Live Laugh Love Death Cult” reveal a band who revels in the profane. Of course, it helps that the band’s tongue-in-cheek tributes to the Qanon moms, passive income leeches, and delusional war criminals among us are catchy and energetic–the aforementioned “Date Night in the Hague” has no business being such a pop-punk rug-cutter, and we can all jump around to the euphoria of “The Power of Love” (it’s a love song to a gun, of course). I wouldn’t recommend wading into this kind of filth for just any band looking for inspiration, but The Brokedowns’ mix of blunt-force caveman hammer-swinging and unflagging energy is how you have to do it if you do. (Bandcamp link)

S.C.A.B. – Somebody in New York Loves You!

Release date: November 21st
Record label: Grind Select
Genre: Indie pop, art rock, dream pop, post-punk, alt-rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Never Comes Around

Queens, New York quartet S.C.A.B. has been around for a few years now; they put out an album called Beauty & Balance on Spirit Goth in 2020, and I first heard them thanks to their 2022 self-titled album. S.C.A.B. was an interesting listen, suggesting an archetypal New York post-punk revival group that nonetheless had designs beyond that, and last year’s Rose Colored Glasses EP kept exploring these asides. It all comes to a head on Somebody in New York Loves You!, the group’s best record yet. Bassist Alec Alabado’s low-end is still important to S.C.A.B.’s sound, but the rest of the band (guitarist/vocalist Sean Camargo, guitarist Cory Best, and drummer Evan Eubanks) reorient themselves towards different influences. Bits of jangly indie pop, shoegaze, and even glitzy Killers-ish “stadium rock” shade Somebody in New York Loves You!; it reminds me a bit of Enumclaw, another omnivorous new rock band who are probably too young to feel like they need to take a side in the “Britpop versus shoegaze” debate. The “alternative music” purist in me appreciates the jangly undercurrents to “I Hate Expectations”, “LOVE”, and “Never Comes Around”, but the “point” of these choices are consistently to serve Camargo’s emotionally volatile, oversharing performance as a frontperson. It’s a big and fairly risky swing of a record to make, but it’s also the one S.C.A.B. have been working towards. (Bandcamp link)

The King Canutes – Eastern Seaboard, Perfect Summer

Release date: November 21st
Record label: Magic Door
Genre: Folk rock, indie pop, college rock, soft rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Eastern Seaboard

Eastern Seaboard, Perfect Summer is The King Canutes’ debut album, but they aren’t a new band. The act’s two members, Keir Woods and Richard Alwyn Fisher, formed the group in Brooklyn in the 2000s, and they released an EP called Last Callers and Losers in 2008. Why it took nearly twenty years for the next King Canutes release to appear I couldn’t say, but the duo are now split between New York and London, which probably contributes to that. Eastern Seaboard, Perfect Summer includes plenty of notable contributors–Guided by Voices’ Kevin March on drums, Gramercy Arms’ Dave Derby on bass, Elk City’s Renée LoBue on backing vocals–but the focus is the timeless guitar pop songwriting found in these nine songs. The contrast in the band’s co-leaders is perhaps Eastern Seaboard, Perfect Summer’s most intriguing wrinkle–Woods’ “sonorous true folk voice” is something right out of slowcore or soft rock (names like Mark Eitzel, Rapt, and 40 Watt Sun come to mind), while Fisher’s “scrappy Replacements-style Midwesterner” act is more suited for the intersection of punk and college rock. Eastern Seaboard, Perfect Summer meets somewhere in between, with catchy folk rock, jangle pop, and vintage indie pop that’s spirited but unhurried. Fisher’s easy-strumming “Eastern Seaboard” and Woods’ “Be My Baby”-built “Man from Hawaii” are equally patient, indicating that the right pair of singer-songwriters met up to take seventeen years to make an album. (Bandcamp link)

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