Pressing Concerns: The Pretty Flowers, Fake Canadian, Eggs on Mars, Shop Talk

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It’s the return of the Tuesday blog post! In this edition of Pressing Concerns, we’re looking at new albums from The Pretty Flowers, Fake Canadian, Eggs on Mars, and Shop Talk. It’s a great set; check them out below, and, if you missed Monday’s blog post (featuring Stuck, Miscellaneous Owl, The Disassociation, and Louisa Bénâtre & Barbara Bessac), check that one 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 Pretty Flowers – Never Felt Bitter

Release date: March 27th
Record label: Forge Again
Genre: Power pop, college rock, heartland rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Came Back Kicking

Longtime blog readers may recognize Los Angeles-based quartet The Pretty Flowers from their 2023 sophomore album A Company Sleeve (or, perhaps, the 2024 non-album single “Police Me”). I called that LP a “very strong collection of earnest guitar rock that incorporates bits of slacker rock, jangle pop, college rock, power pop, pop punk, and heartland rock all led charismatically by [frontperson Noah] Green’s clear, everyman vocals”; I enjoyed it at the time and, frankly, it sounded even better than I remembered when I put together my year-end list six months later. Never Felt Bitter, their third full-length and first for Forge Again Records, finds the group (Green on vocals and guitar, bassist Sam Tiger, guitarist Jake Gideon, and drummer Sean Christopher Johnson) back in their Paul Westberg- and Lemonheads-influenced element; Green writes that he was inspired by moving out of Los Angeles to the more spacious and quiet town of Sierra Madre, but Never Felt Bitter doesn’t abandon what The Pretty Flowers started in the city–it’s just more.

The sprawling, fifty-minute Never Felt Bitter is “larger” for The Pretty Flowers in a strictly literal sense (that’s a dangerous runtime for a power pop band), but the rockers really do feel like they are able to take up more space and stretch out more than the band had done so previously. Gideon, who produced and engineered the album, probably deserves a fair amount of credit for that, but everyone aboard The Pretty Flowers sounds game to fill in this extra space from the overwhelming big-sky opening track “Thief of Time” to the ripping garage-power-pop-rock “To Be So Cool”. I count at least four power pop could’ve-been-hits in “Convent Walls”, “Came Back Kicking”, “Ocean Swimming”, and “Tough Love”; they could’ve bashed out another four almost-as-good-but-not-quite cuts and called it a day, but The Pretty Flowers instead spend their time loitering in the realms of darker (but still poppy) rock and roll with “Never Felt Bitter (We Burn)” and “Big Dummy”, rolling around the six-minute Western punk landscape of “Big Dummy”, and fading away with the somewhat-ironically titled “Not Dissolve”. Maybe this is just what moving out of the city in California does to you; The Pretty Flowers wear it well, regardless. (Bandcamp link)

Fake Canadian – Fellow Traveler

Release date: March 6th
Record label: Daylight Headlight Section
Genre: Pop punk, power pop, post-punk, new wave, 90s indie rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Please Stop Moving to Philadelphia

Fake Canadian began in San Jose late last decade as the solo project of one Christopher Casuga, who released a single, EP, and album under the name before relocating to Sacramento in 2021 and recruiting bassist Howard Ingerman and drummer Jordan Solomon to turn Fake Canadian into a power trio. The full-band era of Fake Canadian began in 2022 with an EP called Fleeting Moments; when I heard it belatedly in 2024, I called it “one of the more unique-sounding things I’ve heard in recent memory” and put them somewhere on a three-dimensional axis of “clean, Steve Albini/Silkworm-influenced ‘PRF-core’ indie rock”, bratty, nasally power-pop-punk, and “Devo-y nerve-y post-punk/new wave”.  The second Fake Canadian album and first as a full-on band is called Fellow Traveler, recorded by Cameron Karren at Sacramento’s renowned Pus Cavern studio, and it’s large enough to contain several more hits from the self-described “angular power pop” band as well as push some of their (already fairly loose) boundaries.

Whip-smart, wordy (read: “nerdy”), punched-up by the rhythm section, and quite catchy: if opening track “What Will Rational Actors Do?” doesn’t grab you, then Fake Canadian is hopelessly out of your reach. The nervous pop-punk cautionary tale of “Timothy Is in Danger” and the surging power pop “Please Stop Moving to Philadelphia” (ah, somebody’s listened to Silkworm’s Lifestyle a fair amount judging by that guitar-lead spatter) are every bit as strong pop tracks; it’s not until the groggy, hungover six-minute alt-country-tinged “Wednesday” that Fake Canadian tap the brakes just a little bit. “Wednesday” and the instrumental surf-punk “The Ballad of Justin Queso” serve to separate the opening pop trio from another pop-punk undercard threesome (“Comet, Come Back to Me” is positively jangly!); oh, and Fake Canadian end Fellow Traveler with one last curveball in the eight-minute, slouching-towards-heaviness finale of “Midnight Giants”. “Midnight Giants” and “Wednesday” don’t end up derailing any of the runaway-train momentum of the rest of Fellow Traveler; the bite that Casuga, Ingerman, and Solomon give even the record’s weirdest moments ensures that Fake Canadian remain on the more ornery side of whatever they’re doing. (Bandcamp link)

Eggs on Mars – Good Morning, I Love You

Release date: March 3rd
Record label: Enigmatic Brunch
Genre: Indie pop, dream pop, jangle pop, psychedelic pop
Formats: CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Takes Time

I first heard the Kansas City indie pop quartet Eggs on Mars back in 2023 when they released Warm Breakfast, but the band (currently vocalist/guitarist Brad Smith, bassist/keyboardist/vocalist Doug Bybee, guitarist/keyboardist Joel Stratton, and drummer Mason Potter) have been putting out albums since at least 2014. Three years (and one Stratton solo album) later, western Missouri’s preeminent guitar pop group are back again with a ten-song, twenty-seven minute collection called Good Morning (I Love You), which is by my count their seventh album. The group’s self-described “Midwestern soft psych” is intact here, as Eggs on Mars have once again pulled together a bunch of confident-yet-delicate, straightforward-but-full-sounding pop rock.

As I’m beginning to understand, Eggs on Mars albums are unhurried, relaxed affairs–there’s a lot to like in the jangly indie pop of opening track “Inconsistent Cowpoke” and the slightly psychedelic soft rock of the title track, but Eggs on Mars don’t sound anxious to land a memorable, collar-grabbing first impression with them. Bybee sings lead on two songs, but only one of them–the Apples in Stereo-lite power pop diversion of “Takes Time” (featuring lyrics written by Justin Longmeyer, the band’s founding bassist who now lives in Japan)–even suggests that the undercard vocalist isn’t on the same page as Smith (of course, it’s good enough that this mid-record wake-up call is a welcome one). Good Morning (I Love You) remains a gentle, deliberate ride; the songs generally hover a little over the two-minute mark, but they (and, subsequently, the sub-thirty-minute LP) feel complete nonetheless. The exception to the rule is the five-minute closing track “I Came Home 2 Find Nothing Had Changed Except Me”, which pushes the lackadaisical, plodding tendencies of Eggs on Mars to extremes (the title line is, in fact, the only one). As different as it is on the surface, though, “I Came Home 2 Find Nothing Had Changed Except Me” is right in line with the rest of Good Morning (I Love You). (Bandcamp link)

Shop Talk – Shop Talk

Release date: March 13th
Record label: One Track Mind/Revolver USA
Genre: Garage punk, punk rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: SOS

After a couple of singles and an EP, we now join Brooklyn punk trio Shop Talk (vocalist/guitarist Jon Garcia, bassist Tristan Griffin, and drummer Alexander Perrelli) as they release their self-titled debut album. Recorded in Nashville with The Sleeveens’ James Mechan and released via a new New York label called One Track Mind, Shop Talk is fiery, muscular, yet slapdash garage-punk-rock-and-roll at its finest. Garcia’s glammy one-man-show Ty Segall-esque vocals collide with a well-oiled power trio sound that owes plenty to the realms of first-wave punk rock and decades of garage rock underground that followed it. These ten songs wrap up in under thirty minutes, so Shop Talk waste no time in tossing out quick-moving punk rockers (“Ramona”, “Peddlers of Hope”) and dark-undercurrent garage rock tunes (“Black Friar”, “SOS”). The second of Shop Talk brings the gothic undertones of “Saltillo”, the three-minute punk workout “Golden Afternoon” (that’s long for Shop Talk!), and the absolutely frenetic “Mirage of Life”. For a modern garage punk album featuring little to no overlap with modern power pop, Shop Talk has an impressive number of quite memorable moments. Shop Talk can hang their proverbial hats on that accomplishment. (Bandcamp link)

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