Pressing Concerns: R.E. Seraphin, Healing & Peace, Sweet Reaper, Hello Whirled

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

The first Pressing Concerns of the week gives us a reissue of R.E. Seraphin‘s first two records, plus new albums from Healing & Peace, Sweet Reaper, and Hello Whirled. Check them out below!

The blog will next update this Thursday (three posts a week will be returning soon, I think, but we’re not quite there yet).

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.

R.E. Seraphin – Tiny Shapes / A Room Forever

Release date: January 23rd
Record label: Take a Turn
Genre: Jangle pop, power pop, indie pop, college rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Exploding Head

We here at Rosy Overdrive have enjoyed the work of Vallejo, California power pop musician Ray Seraphin and his quasi-solo project, R.E. Seraphin, shining a spotlight on his 2022 EP Swingshift and the 2024 LP Fool’s Mate (not to mention The Pennys, his recent duo with Tony Jay’s Michael Ramos). Those two records represent the second half of the R.E. Seraphin catalog thus far, and today we’re looking back at the first half: the twin 2020 releases of Tiny Shapes and A Room Forever, now together on one vinyl record for the first time ever. Both records were originally released by Bay Area stalwart labels Paisley Shirt and Mt.St.Mtn., and both deal in the college rock-guitar pop sound that Seraphin has continued to hone over the past half-decade. 

Coming not long after the dissolution of Seraphin’s Texas-originating, garage rock-leaning group Talkies, Tiny Shapes is a transitional debut that nonetheless hits the ground running. “Today Will Be Kind” is exactly the kind of power pop-college rock anthem Seraphin’s always been good for on his records, and while the stretch from “Exploding Head” to “I’d Rather Be Your Enemy” (which is a Lee Hazelwood cover, yes) might be a bit more “rock and roll” than where R.E. Seraphin is at these days, it’s not like it’s less catchy (particularly “Exploding Head”, which is on the shortlist for Seraphin’s finest chorus). Later on the Tiny Shapes side of things, “Hear Me Out” hits the “sad jangle” spot pleasingly, but even that relatively brief diversion is scuttled when A Room Forever announces itself with “Clock Without Hands” (which would later be re-recorded for Fool’s Mate) and “Leave Me in the Tide”. Perhaps it’s a touch more subdued than the debut, but “Pillar of Shame” is the only real “slow song”; the album’s other cover, Luna’s “Lost in Space”, is kind of weird, too, but–and this shouldn’t be surprising at this point–these are all solid pop songs. It’s a worthwhile trip back, and we don’t even have to travel far from where Seraphin’s living these days, too. (Bandcamp link)

Healing & Peace – A Treatise

Release date: January 16th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Lo-fi indie rock/folk/pop
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: The Shopkeeper

Columbus musician Alex Mussawir started a garage-y post-punk band called Kneeling in Piss in 2019, and after an album and a handful of EPs, switched gears in 2023 and released an EP of more casual, lo-fi folky indie rock under the name Healing & Peace. A Treatise is the first “Healing & Peace album”, and if you read the loose history of the project that Mussawir wrote to accompany its release, you’ll see names from Ohio bands you might know like The Drin, Winston Hightower, and Goners; some of them played on A Treatise, I think, but I couldn’t tell you who’s doing what. A couple of songs from the self-titled Healing & Peace EP show up again here, as well as the non-album single “Mezzanine Man”, but most of A Treatise is new to us. Mussawir has ended up in a comfortable, intriguing place after all these years of doing the “indie musician” thing; the acoustic-based, winking-to-shrugging A Treatise rides a warmly familiar line between lo-fi, 90s-style “slacker” rock and Flying Nun-esuqe folk-pop.

The lo-fi pop vignette “The Shopkeeper” became perhaps my favorite Kneeling/Healing in/and Piss/Peace song when I heard it two years ago, and it’s still a standout here, a tad more accessible than the cow-post-punk of “Unite Foodland”, the Mark E. Smith/Chris Knox-like talk-sung wisdom of “Into a Hole”, and the droning psych-folky undercurrent of “Horrible Sanctuary”. Elsewhere, Mussawir pleads with Sofia Coppola for a role in one of her movies in the harmonica-aided “Sofia, Baby Please” (“I’d like to leave Ohio / Your camera lights look soothing”), and the title track closes the album with a bit of folk-beat poetry: “I return now to my post / Middling, tedious / But honest,” Mussawir signs off. That’s how we get A Treatise. (Bandcamp link)

Sweet Reaper – Still Nothing

Release date: January 16th
Record label: Alien Snatch/Naked Time Tapes
Genre: Garage rock, power pop, pop punk
Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Sacrifice

There’s nothing wrong with starting off 2026 with some incredibly catchy, poppy garage rock. Introducing Sweet Reaper, a trio from Ventura, California who are new to me but apparently have been kicking out albums of this stuff since 2017: this is their fourth LP by my count, all either issued or reissued by German label Alien Snatch (Freak Genes, Slander Tongue, Eerie Family). The band (vocalist/guitarist Seth Pettersen, bassist/vocalist Danny Gomez, and drummer Sasha Green) may be from the West Coast, but the clean, sugar-rush, power-pop-garage-rock sound of Still Nothing reminds me more of what goes on over in Texas, with names like A Giant Dog, Flesh Lights, and Radioactivity (whose Jeff Burke mastered this record, which I didn’t know when I came up with the comparison initially) coming to mind.

Name and aesthetics aside, Sweet Reaper are less a full-on horror-punk group and more of a vaguely spooky/spooked, unnerved/unnerving one in terms of lyrical content. Musically speaking–well, we’re all mortal, and, for Sweet Reaper, that means there’s no time to waste in between churning out garage-punk pop hits. We’re barely five minutes into Still Nothing and we’ve already skated through “Clean”, “Sacrifice”, and “Motion”, all three of which are torrential two-minute tracks strong enough to be the centerpiece of this album on their own. If “Thought Police” and “Zero Candles” represent the introduction of ever-so-slightly darker post-punk elements to Sweet Reaper’s sound, they don’t herald a major shift, as rippers like “Hideaway” and “Meemees” continue to be on the table into the album’s home stretch. Sweet Reaper sound like they’re on the run for all of Still Nothing’s twenty-six minutes, and they’ve made a great rock and roll album in the process. (Bandcamp link)

Hello Whirled – The Other Need

Release date: January 1st
Record label: Sherilyn Fender
Genre: Lo-fi indie rock, post-punk, GBV-fi
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Bubble Up

Another year has begun with a Hello Whirled album near the starting gate. In 2025, the ever-prolific Fern Spizuco (now Philadelphia-based after getting her start in New Jersey) released Gives Up and Plays the Hits on January 8th, and a host of striking titles followed over the next twelve months: Sex with God, Distance Fighter, Ours Is a Blank Map, In This House We Are Cold. Will 2026 be as busy for Spizuco’s home-recorded lo-fi indie rock enterprise? Only she knows, but at the very least I can observe that Hello Whirled have gotten an even earlier start this year, dropping The Other Need right on New Year’s Day.

Gives Up and Plays the Hits was, by design, an accessible place to try to get into Spizuco’s fifty-plus-album discography, and, while The Other Need has some “pop” moments, it’s a more holistic overview of the Hello Whirled experience, a marriage of the basement-arena-prog of the less popular albums from Spizuco’s north star of Robert Pollard with tortured angst and noisy, lo-fi clattering. Nobody else is doing jerky, striking, post-punk, anti-rock-and-roll anthems like “Ambition Wall”, “No More Eras”, and “Big Moan” like this, let alone doing so in a way that somehow sneaks real hooks into exercises like “Competitions”, “Emotional Support Notepad”, “Pink Deer”, and “Blood on the Page”. Mark “Bubble Up”, with its steady-building structure and exuberant power pop chorus, for the next “best of Hello Whirled” snapshot record, but you’re missing out on the experience by waiting until Spizuco puts out another one of those to take a peek into Hello Whirled. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Leave a comment