Pressing Concerns: Constant Greetings, Pelted, Baby Grand, Blood Cannery

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I said yesterday that I had a big week planned for Rosy Overdrive, and I was not kidding around! Today, we’ve got new albums from Constant Greetings, Baby Grand, and Blood Cannery, plus a new EP from Pelted. Oh, and if you missed yesterday’s post (featuring Izzy Oram Brown & The Bird Calls, Humbug, Capsuna, and Super Pattern), check that out too. And guess what: we’ll be back tomorrow, 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.

Constant Greetings – Good Sports

Release date: December 19th
Record label: Retriever
Genre: 90s indie rock, garage rock, alt-country
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Friendly Competition

I first heard the Rothesay, New Brunswick indie rock band Constant Greetings in early 2024, when they’d just released their sophomore album Showpony. I called that record an “intriguing collection of somewhat hazy, somewhat dark, yet fairly catchy 90s-indebted indie rock” at the time, and I’m pleased to report that Good Sports, the third Constant Greetings LP, lives up to and even expands upon that record’s foundation. It really came down to the wire, but Constant Greetings completed the “three albums in three years” benchmark with Good Sports; they’ve “pared down” from a sextet to quintet for this one, with vocalist/guitarist JP Lewis backed by guitarist/lap steel player Stephen Robinson, bassist Jeff Melanson, keyboardist/guitarist James Lea, and drummer Peter Wallace now, and, like all their records so far, Good Sports was recorded and produced by Corey Bonnevie.

Good Sports has an excellent sound–it’s not cleanly “college rock” or “noise rock”, just guitar-driven indie rock with an understanding of everything from the Paisley Underground to Eleventh Dream Day to Silkworm and the Touch & Go Records catalog (it fits in well with modern bands drawing from similar sources like Stomatopod, Outro, and Deep Tunnel Project). Constant Greetings favor a relatively unadorned setup but their songs are sneakily quite layered, and there’s a throughline from garage-y indie-punk-rock stuff like opening track “Little R&R” to hook-y, melodic, punched-up pop rock (“Company Line”, the title track, “Friendly Competition”) to more sprawling, atmospheric pieces (“False Spring”, “Shining Waters”). It’s easy to miss new albums that drop in the “dead zone” of late December, but if any of the abovementioned acts are up your alley (and if you’re reading Rosy Overdrive, they probably are), then this is one to find some time for in between holiday festivities and the year-end-list deluge. (Bandcamp link)

Pelted – Effort

Release date: December 5th
Record label: Broken Cycle
Genre: Fuzzy indie rock, dream pop, shoegaze
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Sydd

Do you have any idea how many bands in Philadelphia are currently making music that features some degree of shoegaze and alt-country influence? Well, me neither, but it’s probably a lot. One of these bands is called Pelted, a quartet co-led by guitarist/vocalists Dan Hanna and Katie Hanford and rounded out by drummer Jimmy McKenney and bassist Roya Weidman. They’ve even got their own name for this recognizable kind of music they make: they call it “horse rock”. They’ve just put out their debut EP, Effort, on cassette via Broken Cycle Records (My Wife’s an Angel, Tlooth, Pale Fang), and there’s just something to these five songs that keeps me returning to them as 2025 winds to a close.

I like the two greyscale, slowcore-y indie rock songs that open the EP (“Dog”, which starts with a delicate f-bomb, and “Hash”, which slowly but surely lets the fuzz take over), but I think the third track, “Sydd”, is my favorite. It’s (I believe) the only song that Hanna sings; the vocals remind me a lot of Lambchop’s Kurt Wagner, and the lyrics–an offbeat character study of the titular unsavory figure–enhance the comparison in my mind. Effort wraps up with two more really solid ones–the recursive “Sulk” is the band at their spaciest and subtlest, and roaring closing track “Apology Tour” lets the guitars speak in a way they hadn’t done up until that point. Everything on Effort is good, and it’s just odd enough that I can see Pelted getting even better and more interesting from here. (Bandcamp link)

Baby Grand – Check’er Lee

Release date: December 13th
Record label: PorchDog
Genre: Country-folk, folk-country, folky country, country-y folk, honky-tonk
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Thank God for Keepin’ Me Sane

The Virginia-originating sibling folk duo Baby Grand released their first album, 50¢ Songs All About Death and Other Life Lessons, back in 2018; seven years later, they’re on their fourth one, Check’er Lee. For this LP, co-leaders Haley Ellis (keys, banjo, and bass) and Colby Ellis (guitar, lap steel, and keys) welcome drummer Cody Wade to the group, and the three of them have put together a charming fourteen-song collection of laid-back but clever banjo-led folk-country music (I’m not really an expert on this kind of music, but it reminds me of Kym Register’s old band Midtown Dickens, if anyone remembers them). Haley, who wrote and sings the majority of Check’er Lee, gives us two folk-y whirlwinds to start the album between “Thank God for Keepin’ Me Sane” (first lines: “I bought a coffee for an arm and a leg / And now I’m alright because I don’t have the left”) and “Lapse of Luxury” (an old-timey tour through Baby Grand’s interpretation of “high society”). In the second half of the album, the barroom piano of “Lower Management” is an equal match for the opening duo, as is Colby’s most impressive moment in “The Fisherman’s Wife” (who doesn’t love a good fishing metaphor delivered via honky tonk piano?). There are ample surprising and funny moments strewn about Check’er Lee, and just about all of it is a treat to listen to. (Bandcamp link)

Blood Cannery – Olympic Blood

Release date: October 4th
Record label: Knuckles on Stun
Genre: Garage punk, noise rock
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Virginia

Here’s some batshit noisy garage-punk out of Idaho for you. Blood Cannery is the project of an Idaho Falls-based musician named Cole Foster, who appears to have been feverishly making records under this name since the beginning of the decade. The first Blood Cannery album I heard was this April’s Cannery Not Canary, a chaotic, distorted hardcore-verging-on-grindcore assault; it was fascinating but maybe not my thing, so I’m really enjoying Olympic Blood, where Blood Cannery have “turned things down” to “merely” Lightning Bolt-esque pummeling noise-punk. Foster and MVP drummer Eli Andersen tackle a dozen songs in a gargantuan thirty-two minutes on this one; after thirty seconds of feedback, Anderson crashes into focus in opening track “Virginia” and we don’t get a reprieve until another feedback break four songs later in “Blackout”. Heavy distortion and distantly-shouted vocals color all of Olympic Blood, although there are layers underneath the torrent, like the post-punk rhythms holding together “Get In” or the metallic rumble of “Stir Your Spurs”. I suspect Blood Cannery will keep moving, and the next album is unlikely to sound much like Olympic Blood (in fact, as of this writing, Foster has already followed it up with a twenty-minute ambient-guitar post-rock piece called “China Blue”). Thankfully, Blood Canary were able to capture this craziness for a half-hour on tape. (Bandcamp link)

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