Pressing Concerns: Wishes on a Plane, Endless Mike and the Beagle Club, Tongue Scraper, Rocket Bureau

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

It’s been a surprisingly busy week in mid-to-late December here on Rosy Overdrive, and we’re capping it off with a new Pressing Concerns featuring a compilation from Wishes on a Plane, a new album from Endless Mike and the Beagle Club, and new EPs from Tongue Scraper and Rocket Bureau. Rosy Overdrive’s Top 25 EPs of 2025 went up earlier this week, and we also had a Monday Pressing Concerns (featuring The Kyle Sowashes, Daddy Fell Through, Tercel, and Silk Daisys), so 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. And last but not least: don’t forget to vote in the 2025 Rosy Overdrive Reader’s Poll!

Wishes on a Plane – Lost Songs

Release date: November 7th
Record label: Time As a Color
Genre: Emo, 90s indie rock, acoustic
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: What’s Left of What Is…

Daniel Becker is a musician from Munich, Germany, and he currently makes music under the name Amid the Old Wounds (recently seen releasing a split record with Michigan emo act Mt. Oriander last year). Before that, however, Becker led a band called Wishes on a Plane from 2002 to 2009; it’s been quite a while since Wishes on a Plane have been an active band, but Becker has kept the spotlight on them thanks to a few posthumous releases on his own label, Time As a Color. Lost Songs follows a 2021 LP called Unreleased; while the earlier archival Wishes on a Plane release was centered around recordings made by the band’s initial (pre-2006) lineup, Lost Songs seems to be more of a grab bag. The seven tracks are made up of three songs that initially appeared on “local compilations that are mostly unknown”, an alternate recording of a song from their self-titled EP, and three acoustic demos. 

The context doesn’t mean all that much to me, because Lost Songs is the first Wishes on a Plane record I’ve ever heard, but it’s a very good, chilly emo album in its own right. All three of the compilation songs deserved rescuing from obscurity–the soaring “Untitled” and the punchy, punk-influenced “Tide” show two intriguing sides to Wishes on a Plane, and “What’s Left of What Is…” tries its hardest to fuse the two. The torch-bearing mid-tempo emo power ballad of “Anywhere (Goldfish Version)” closes out the electric part of Lost Songs with one last bang, and we’re left to sit with the three acoustic emo-folk songs that close the LP out. These recordings weren’t made with the thought they’d be on an album together, and it’s kind of an odd experience, but my taste in “emo music” is fairly odd anyway, so I don’t think it’s all that strange I enjoy Lost Songs as much as I do. (Bandcamp link)

Endless Mike and the Beagle Club – The Forest Is the Trees

Release date: October 17th
Record label: Sidewalk Chalk
Genre: Alt-country, country punk, country rock, Americana, roots rock, folk rock, you get the point
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Days of the Atom Bomb

Endless Mike and the Beagle Club are new to me, but I feel like I immediately understood the Johnstown, Pennsylvania act’s whole deal after just one listen to their latest album, The Forest Is the Trees. A Rust Belt troubadour (Endless Mike, aka Mike Miller) making alt-country, cowpunk, folk rock, “Americana”, “heartland rock” (whatever you want to call it), touring the underground circuit for two decades, shaken but ultimately undeterred by their homeland’s rightward political lurch–Two Cow Garage and Micah Schnabel come to mind, as well as everyone from Mike Adams at His Honest Weight (a couple of states over) to Fishboy (down in Texas). The Forest Is the Trees boldly starts with its best song, a bottle rocket cowpunk/country punk rocker called “Days of the Atomic Bomb” that burns brighter than anything on the LP (with the possible exception of the fiddle-aided maximalist mid-record highlight “Flight Behavior”). It’d be easy enough to stop there, but then you’d miss Endless Mike and the Beagle Club’s continued attempts to leave it all out there time and time again. “The Pearly Gates of Grandview Cemetery”, “Flight Behavior”, and “Mr. Miller’s Dream” are all centerpiece-worthy in their own ways; every one of these eleven tracks swings for the fences, and if there are a couple of lines here and there that don’t land quite as strongly, it’s easy to forgive when The Forest Is the Trees does so much right. (Bandcamp link)

Tongue Scraper – Tongue Scraper

Release date: December 5th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Noise rock, post-hardcore, noise punk, metal
Formats: CD, digital
Pull Track: Burning Up

What’s that? A new noise rock-infused punk band from the DMV? And they recorded their debut EP at J. Robbins’ recording studio? Alright, let’s hear this Tongue Scraper. This five-song EP was indeed produced by Matt Redenbo (Two Inch Astronaut, War on Women, Jawbox) at Magpie Cage, and we’re introduced to this Baltimore quartet with a collection of heavy, seething post-hardcore riffs and fury. Vocalist Zo Ubaldo brings to the table a time-honored tradition of lyrics about “the alienation of hating a job”, and the rest of Tongue Scraper–guitarist Graham Twibell, bassist Jarrod Brennet (also of Big Cry Country), and drummer Andrew Barnes–back them up with music that really does sound like Sisyphus rolling a big old bowling ball-shaped skull up a hill (shout-out to Glenn Kelly for that very evocative cover art). In both the disgust of “One or None” and the resignation of “Scam Humanity”, Tongue Scraper confront head-on the fact that everything is kind of, like, bullshit, you know? Of course, a band like this is going to be good for an old-fashioned hardcore punk callout song, and that’s what we get with “Virtue Signals”, but this is also a band that can pull off real-deal heaviness–see “Burning Up”. In that one, Ubaldo proclaims “Individualism is actually Hell, and we’re burning up”; they’ve done a very good diagnostic job, but that’s small comfort when it’s just you and the boulder. (Bandcamp link)

Rocket Bureau – Party Armz

Release date: October 1st
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Power pop
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Take It to the Night

Rocket Bureau is a band from Madison, Wisconsin, although the recorded version of Rocket Bureau is the one-man project of one Kyle Urban. The latest Rocket Bureau record is a five-song EP recorded entirely on an “analog tape machine from the early 1970s” called Party Armz. Urban has been at this with Rocket Bureau for over a decade now, and Party Armz is a seasoned, expertly-wielded collection of classic power pop touched with bits of early punk rock, garage rock, and straight-up rock and roll. I know for a fact that it’s pretty dreary in Wisconsin at the time I’m writing this, but Party Armz is a portal straight to the heat of summer; EP bookends “Hotlips” and “Take It to the Night” are surging, windows-down retro power pop that hits the same highs of bands like Romero and Sheer Mag (quite impressive for a solo project!). The middle of Party Armz has plenty to recommend as well, as there’s no filler between the Tony Molina-esque wall-of-guitars/classic pop melding of the title track, the breezy “Louise”, and the two-minute jolt of “I Don’t Wanna Go Back Home”. Some of the best power pop has come out of basements deep in the American Midwest, and it’s heartening to hear the lineage continue like this. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Leave a comment