Pressing Concerns: Top Jimmy and the Rhythm Pigs, Fuzzy Feelings, Storm Boy, Ace of Spit

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The blog was inactive yesterday in observance of Martin Luther King Jr. Day in the States, but we’re back today with a brand-new Pressing Concerns featuring new albums from Fuzzy Feelings, Storm Boy, and Ace of Spit, plus a reissue of Top Jimmy and the Rhythm Pigs‘ sole LP. Check ’em out below!

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.

Top Jimmy and the Rhythm Pigs – Pigus Drunkus Maximus

Release date: January 16th
Record label: Blind Owl/East of Lincoln
Genre: Rock and roll, blues rock, R&B, bar rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Dance with Your Baby

It’s not hyperbole in the slightest to refer to Top Jimmy and the Rhythm Pigs as legends of the Los Angeles punk underground. The rock and roll/R&B group were led by the late “Top Jimmy” Koncek, a Kentucky transplant who has a song on a Van Halen album named after him, and the equally memorable Carlos Guitarlos featured on lead guitar. They associated with everyone from X to The Doors to Tom Waits in their heyday, and Steve Wynn of The Dream Syndicate released the band’s only recorded output, Pigus Drunkus Maximus, in 1987. The LP–which was actually recorded in 1981–has been out of print for decades, leading to Blind Owl Records and East Of Lincoln Productions partnering for its first ever reissue nearly forty years after it initially came out. Pigus Drunkus Maximus is a one-way ticket back to the Los Angeles chronicled by John Doe and Exene Cervenka in their contemporaneous records, although Koncek and his band preferred to survey the landscape via a collection of electric blues rock versions of songs collected from across rock and roll’s history. We start at 150% with the saxophone-heavy bar rock of “Dance with Your Baby” (one of the relatively few originals on the album), and the party continues through numbers like the garage rock strut of “Homework”, the blues-punk of “Obviously Five Believers”, and the soulful fire of “Hole in My Pocket”. Pigus Drunkus Maximus bears the burden of being the only recorded document of something that almost certainly couldn’t have been defined by one album, but thankfully the attempt to do so still sounds very good today. (Bandcamp link)

Fuzzy Feelings – Under the Pit

Release date: January 13th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Lo-fi pop, power pop, fuzz pop
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: 50 Takes

“Fuzzy Feelings” is a fairly apt band name for the latest project of Joseph Weber, a London-based musician who previously played in the early-2010s Brooklyn fuzz-pop group Gross Relations. After putting out an EP under the name Joey Relations in 2024, Weber began rolling out this latest band with a string of singles late last year (initially under the name Funny Feelings; wonder what’s up with the name change) leading up to Under the Pit, a twelve-song, twenty-one-minute exercise in lo-fi power pop that is indeed of both the “fuzzy” and “feelings” variety. Imagine a “slacker”, more bummed-out version of Mythical Motors’ bite-sized one-man-electric-power-pop records, and that’ll get you in the ballpark of Under the Pit. Fuzzy Feelings chug indifferently through amplified-to-rock hooks in “Powerline” and “Down & Sideways”, and an intense streak of lo-fi, minimal, drum-machine-aided garage-rock-guitar-pop remains essentially unbroken from there on: maybe “Hey” and “Soul Seeker” are a little softer, but they don’t cause the middle to drag. Aside from the twin thirty-second experiences of “Sludge Mains” and “Pink Sun”, the “outliers” are probably “50 Takes” (a two-minute song that starts with a keyboard hook so great that Weber waits until the song is half over to even start singing) and “Campaign” (okay, so here’s the ballad, right in the penultimate slot where it belongs). It’s everything you could want in one of these kinds of albums, in the least amount of time necessary to do it. (Bandcamp link)

Storm Boy – Beast Machine Theory

Release date: January 15th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Punk rock, post-hardcore
Formats: CD, digital
Pull Track: Tiny Fists

The Olympia-based “post-hardcore rock n roll” group Storm Boy was formed by guitarist/vocalist Chas Roberts and drummer Jeremy Anderson (who’d played together previously in the band Voycheck), and they quickly added guitarist/vocalist Charli Beaumont and bassist/vocalist Kuba Bednarek before their first EP, Superposition!, came out in late 2024. We’re joining the quartet on the occasion of their debut full-length, Beast Machine Theory, which is indeed a trip directly into the gruff, garage-y worlds of post-hardcore, punk rock, and even “orgcore”. They may be from the West Coast, but Storm Boy have clearly listened to a good deal of the Dischord Records discography, as first-half post-hardcore punk rock cuts like “Tiny Fists”  and “Always Bet on Black (and Pink)” make clear. The beer-soaked anthem “From Your Mouth” lands closer to Hot Water Music, and Storm Boy indeed inject the necessary melodic punk energy and catchiness into that one to make it work. Unlike a lot of bands in this mold, Storm Boy really develop and tease these songs out; there’s only eight songs on this thirty-plus minute LP, meaning they’ve got the time to start “…And Then Four” with a spare, noir-ish opening minute and turn closing track “The Minute We’re Born” into a six-minute endurance-test finale. There’s a lot on Beast Machine Theory, and a lot to like on it, an encouraging sign for a band on their debut album. (Bandcamp link)

Ace of Spit – Ace of Spit II

Release date: January 3rd
Record label: Sinkhole/Wombat Cock
Genre: Garage rock, punk rock, surf rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Weapons Down

I first heard about St. Louis garage rockers Ace of Spit in 2022 thanks to their Sophomore Lounge-released self-titled debut album, a wild punk rock LP that sucked up and spat out surf rock, proto-punk, and even a bit of power pop on us all (it snuck onto my year-end list and everything). Four years later, Ace of Spit kicked off 2026 by releasing their sophomore album Ace of Spit II, this time co-released by legendary St. Louis music venue The Sinkhole’s record label and something called “Wombat Cock”. If anything, Ace of Spit II is an even greater commitment to the twin tornados of freewheeling garage punk and “spaghetti western” vibes; with one major exception, the quartet (Brett, Scott, Steve, and Gabe) spend all of this LP’s twenty-seven minutes prowling the fabled “Cramps to MC5” spectrum. The album’s first three songs are all “rippers”, to be sure, but the ever-so-subtle desert-rockabilly sound is already there, and it only gets more obvious in “Diaspora Rock”, “Road to Reno”, and the genuinely-Western-evoking “Past Continuous”. That one “major exception” I mentioned earlier is “Parts List”, a bizarre excursion into fuzzed-out, fried electronica (with Link Wray riffs over top of it, of course) for three minutes; no idea why that’s smack dab in the middle of the record, but I don’t mind it–and besides, everything else rocks, so who cares? (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

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