Pressing Concerns: The Tammy Shine, Kerrin Connolly, Abronia, Charm School

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Welcome to the Thursday Pressing Concerns! We’ve got new albums from The Tammy Shine, Kerrin Connolly, and Abronia, plus a new EP from Charm School. Check ’em out below, and if you missed either of this week’s earlier blog posts (on Monday, we had a Pressing Concerns featuring Flat Mary Road, Rocket Bureau, Annabelle Chairlegs, and Tacoblaster, and on Tuesday we went deep into the year 1998), 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.

The Tammy Shine – Ok Shine Ok

Release date: February 20th
Record label: HHBTM
Genre: Power pop, indie pop, glam, twee
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Junk Mail

I listen to a lot of music for this blog. I throw a bunch of stuff on my phone and go through the playlists, and I often won’t remember anything about the artist in question by the time I get to them. I eventually made it to “Junk Mail”, the fourth song on Ok Shine Ok. That one caught my attention immediately. It’s a bonkers pop song–it’s bratty, campy, euphoric, fiery, whatever; it sounds like mall-pop-punk at one point, like a Guided by Voices track at another point, like turn-of-the-century alt-pop another. It was enough for me to ask: who the fuck is The Tammy Shine?

The Tammy Shine is Tammy Eaton, who you may know as the frontperson of Dressy Bessy. Arising from Denver, Colorado in the mid-90s, the Elephant 6-associated group are the only band that can say they appeared on soundtracks for both But I’m a Cheerleader and The Powerpuff Girls, carving out their own place in a vibrant scene. The most recent Dressy Bessy album, Fast Faster Disaster, came out in 2019; they’re still going (currently as a trio featuring The Apples in Stereo’s John Hill on drums and Craig Gilbert on bass), but The Tammy Shine is Eaton’s “solo project”. How Ok Shine Ok specifically differs from Dressy Bessy I’m not sure, but if Eaton devised The Tammy Shine to give her personality a place to (ahem) shine, then: mission accomplished, and then some. 

“Shaky Shaky” is one hell of an opening statement; the music is an instant reminder that we’re dealing with indie pop royalty here, and Eaton’s conversational but melodic voice instantly puts a unique stamp on Ok Shine Ok too. “Baby, I’ll B There”, “Love Letter”, and “Speed Date” could all be more or less called “garage rock”, but that doesn’t do justice to an album encompassing everything from the blazing showtune “So Very Little” to the minimal nursery rhyme indie pop of “Tic Tac” to the ascendent synth-rock anthem “Auto Pilot”. And then there’s “Junk Mail”, which has at least five hooks you could build a song out of, slammed together like a can of Fanta crushed by a cartoon anvil. I think that’s what Ok Shine Ok is about. It’s how it feels, at least. (Bandcamp link)

Kerrin Connolly – Simpleton

Release date: February 20th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Indie pop, synthpop, power pop
Formats: CD, digital
Pull Track: Big Amygdala

Over the past decade, Boston’s Kerrin Connolly has gone from a musician with a YouTube following to an artist with multiple records to their name, releasing the LP Almost in 2020 and an EP called Don’t Be Afraid in 2022. 2024’s mini-album Transitions was the first Connolly release I heard, but it was their latest album, Simpleton, that really caught my attention. Self-describing it as a “12-song concept album detailing the modern hero’s journey”, Connolly has written, produced, and performed (with help from Ellis Piper on strings) a massive, imminently attention-grabbing pop-rock album. It’s a shiny mess of power pop, orchestral pop, musical theater, and 80s-evoking synthpop, often all in short succession.

Early hits “Big Amygdala” and “Mind the Gap” are two of the catchiest power pop songs I’ve heard this year, and they both showcase Connolly’s ability to shoehorn whip-smart writing into big hooks; they remind me of recent material from the likes of Pacing, Rosie Tucker, and Career Woman, which is no small feat. Meanwhile, stuff like “Flowers Pt. 1” and “Pt. 2”, “How Easy It Is”, and “Avalanche” are (relatively speaking, I mean) not as “in-your-face”, but that just gives Connolly an even clearer stage to seize. And besides, “He Doesn’t Die in The End” and “The End” ensure that there are bangers as Simpleton draws to a close. Even if I didn’t necessarily follow the aforementioned hero’s journey from plot point to plot point, the ordeal more than earns the guitar-soloing power ballad finale in “Simple”. (Bandcamp link)

Abronia – Shapes Unravel

Release date: February 20th
Record label: Cardinal Fuzz/Feeding Tube
Genre: Psychedelic rock, garage rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: New Imposition

The six-piece Portland, Oregon psychedelic rock band Abronia showed up in 2017 with a five-song album called Obsidian Visions/Shadowed Lands, and ever since then the group (currently vocalist/saxophonist Keelin Mayer, pedal steel player Rick Pedrosa, drummer Robert Grubaugh, bassist Danny Metcalfe, and guitarists James Shaver and Eric Crespo) have been reliably dropping LPs on their twin homes of Cardinal Fuzz and Feeding Tube Records. Shapes Unravel is the group’s fifth, and while it represents some changes for Abronia (Metcalfe and Grubaugh are new, and Shaver has switched instruments), it nonetheless sounds like a band completely immersed in their own psychedelic world. 

Featuring a generous seven songs this time, Shapes Unravel finds Abronia smoothly and casually injecting enough personality into their music that it never feels like we’re merely wading through another “modern psych-rock album”. Just as likely to put swirling saxophones in the spotlight as gentle pedal steel, Shapes Unravel isn’t full-on “desert rock” or “jazz rock”, but it’s been out west and to the big city. Another point in Abronia’s favor is that they do genuinely “rock”; opening track “New Imposition” in particular is a tour de force, but there’s also a heftiness backing stuff like the intense “Walker’s Dead Birds” or the tight rhythms of “Weapons Against Progress”. Abronia’s version of psychedelia is one in which they retain control of the momentum; it’s a testament to their sense of direction that Shapes Unravel gets us to exactly where you want a record like this to go. (Bandcamp link)

Charm School – Schadenfreude Ploy

Release date: February 20th
Record label: Surprise Mind/Karmic Tie
Genre: Noise rock, post-punk, garage rock, post-hardcore
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Prime Mover Unmoved

Last year, Louisville noise rock quartet Charm School released their debut album, Debt Forever, a snarling, furious post-punk record about financial anxiety and other American topics (it was one of my favorite LPs of last year). A little over a year after Debt Forever, Charm School have returned with a brief endeavour, a four-song EP called Schadenfreude Ploy; they are apparently based in Los Angeles now, and the lineup for this one is bandleader/guitarist/vocalist Andrew Charm, bassist Brian Eduardo Vega, and two new faces (Toby Van Kleeck and Chase Palmer) sharing drum duty.

Different players aside, Schadenfreude Ploy is still Charm School at their 90s underground rock-evoking best; the opening title track immediately sets up shop with an overwhelming sense of dread, iron-grey rhythms, and no wave skronkiness over top of it all. “Scene Queen”, with its quick garage-y tempo, is the the “hit” of the EP and the clearest link to the groovier side of Debt Forever; don’t get too comfortable, though, as “Disgrace” is a full reimmersion in the murky waters of bleak noise rock (that song seems to be about AI in some way, which may explain that). “Prime Mover Unmoved” is one of Charm School’s most adventurous songs yet, a mess of post-rock/math rock, an odd psychedelic pop interlude, and an ascendant garage rock part that Charm School stubbornly refuse to turn into the song’s centerpiece. Charm School wield the hammer and scalpel as deftly as ever throughout Schadenfreude Ploy. (Bandcamp link)

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