Pressing Concerns: The Blackburns, Doug Gillard, My Wife’s an Angel, The Chop

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In what should go down as an all-time classic edition of Pressing Concerns, we have new albums from The Blackburns, Doug Gillard, and My Wife’s an Angel, plus a mini-album from The Chop, for you below. Check them out, and if you missed Monday’s blog post (featuring Winston Hightower, Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death, The Clearwater Swimmers, and FakeYou), check that 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 Blackburns – Alternative Rock

Release date: April 24th
Record label: Sell the Heart
Genre: Power pop, college rock, Alternative Rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Video Den

The Blackburns are a 90s power pop revival band from Philadelphia co-led by the songwriting duo of Nick Palmer (vocals/guitar/drums) and Joel Tannenbaum (vocals/bass) and rounded out by vocalist/keyboardist Lynna Stancato and vocalist/guitarist Abe Koffenberger. After a couple of singles, The Blackburns’ self-titled debut album came out back in 2024, a promising collection that paid tribute to the Angus soundtrack and other mid-90s Buzz Bin ephemera. A couple of very good singles last year indicated that The Blackburns were ready to level up, and their sophomore album delivers on that promise. It’s called Alternative Rock, and that’s what we get: post-Paul Westerberg guitar pop hooks with Weezer guitars, Rentals keyboards (or The Cars keyboards, if you want to look in other decades), and a Fountains of Wayne outlook on life. Everything on Alternative Rock is written like it could be the focal point of the entire album, and The Blackburns are rewarded for their ambition with a transcendent record that juggles nostalgia and pastiche and develops its own style in defiance of all of that.

“I wanna hear new music / Come on, I’m trying to do this,” goes the chorus of “New Music”, the opening track to Alternative Rock, a surging power pop song that takes its grappling with losing touch with the present and makes sharp, catchy art with it (the vocal trade-offs are a really nice touch). I loved “Video Den” when The Blackburns released it last year, and I am fully convinced that it’s a modern masterpiece at this point–I’m not sure there’s another “power pop” song quite like it. The other singles live up to that status–the title of “ASM KoP” stands for “Assistant Store Manager, King of Prussia” and the song contained therein is some of the best Fountains of Wayne worship I’ve heard in a while, and “Two People Running in the Rain” is a Springsteen-level heartland rock revival piece that hurtles headlong into its anticlimactic finale (the lampshade here–how could it live up to the buildup?–is a recurring theme of Alternative Rock).

Speaking of Fountains of Wayne, the Stancato-sung “Ceteris Paribus” evokes a different kind of 90s alternative music by floating more in the direction of Adam Schlesinger’s other band, Ivy–it’s a nice break from the chunky power chords, but I get the sense that The Blackburns could bash out plenty of songs like “A Reunion Show” without getting stale. “A Reunion Show” can’t help being self-effacing (it hits close to home, as Tannenbaum’s old band, Plow United, does indeed have a reunion show on the books for later this year); like a lot of Alternative Rock, it could’ve stopped once it made its “point”, but “A Reunion Show” is way too well-written and -executed to be constrained by that. “They say you can’t duplicate the magic from back in the day / They say there’s something that’s mildly tragic about trying to anyway,” The Blackburns observe as “A Reunion Show” catches a breath, only to plow forward anyway. “Mild” or not, tragedy has been one of the most enduring forms of art throughout civilization for a reason. If we’re lucky, “alternative rock” as The Blackburns practice it will join the pantheon too one day. (Bandcamp link)

Doug Gillard – Parallel Stride

Release date: April 24th
Record label: Dromedary
Genre: Power pop, college rock, psychedelic pop, Guided by Voices
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Saving My Life Every Day

It’s been too long since we’ve heard new music from Doug Gillard, the solo artist. Of course, the Cleveland-originating guitarist has been quite busy over the past decade playing in Guided by Voices, the group he initially played in from 1997 to 2004 and then rejoined in 2016. He’d previously put out three solo albums, the most recent of which, Parade On, came out in 2014, right before he signed up again for a band famous for releasing several albums’ worth of music a year (if you’ve heard August by Cake, the 2017 Guided by Voices album featuring two Gillard-penned songs, you know that he still had some good material floating around). With Guided by Voices’ touring schedule finally slowing down, Gillard apparently had time to return to solo act mode–aside from Danny Lipsitz’s saxophone and a parade of guest drummers (including Guided by Voices engineer Travis Harrison), Parallel Stride is written, sung, and played by Gillard himself. The fourth Gillard solo album is unmistakably him, a strong collection of songs that emphasize his pop songwriting, art rock fluency, and, of course, renowned guitar playing.

Gillard is a much more low-key vocalist than his longtime collaborator Robert Pollard; maybe he sounds like somebody who’s more used to the sideman role than the spotlight, but it’s the right tone for the subtle, workmanlike beauty of Parallel Stride. “Face of Smiles” opens the album with an irresistible guitar riff, setting the stage for an automatic power pop hit that, along with the slightly-garage-rock-tinged title track, is just rousing enough for a one-two punch. Parallel Stride doesn’t falter, but it settles in nicely into a groove of Gillard songs with unusual but engrossing melodies, guitar flourishes, and subtle twists by somebody who knows his way around progressive rock but isn’t trying to work out those muscles directly. The anxious “My Friends” and the taut “Saving My Life Every Day” are standouts in the second half; both of them feel “heavier” than most of Parallel Stride, but they’re also both some of the best pop songs on the album (particularly the latter, which has a propulsion and tension to it that very few people who haven’t been in Guided by Voices can pull off). Hard to believe it’s been a dozen years since Gillard has made one of these; he sounds great here. Parallel Stride is an instant high point in an illustrious career. (Bandcamp link)

My Wife’s an Angel – Keep Honking I’m About to Fucking Kill Myself

Release date: April 24th
Record label: Knife Hits/GRIMGRIMGRIM/Broken Cycle
Genre: Noise rock, post-hardcore, noise punk
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Goz Chile

My Wife’s an Angel get it. Last year I wrote about Yeah, I Bet, the Philadelphia quartet’s second album, using phrases like “ugly, heavy noise-punk” and “big, wide, empty hollering against rock music simply played wrong” (and bands like “Butthole Surfers” and “Killdozer”) to describe it. Like the best of their predecessors, My Wife’s an Angel (vocalist G, guitarist Boone, bassist Fancy, drummer JAGWAH) wield shock value imagery, assaulting music, and straight-up funny shit in a tasteless but hardly pointless manner; they don’t beat us over the head with it, exactly, but it’s understood that Yeah, I Bet is fucked up for plenty of good reasons. All that applies once again for the third My Wife’s an Angel album, Keep Honking I’m About to Fucking Kill Myself (Jesus Christ, lmao–I can’t even explain what I felt when I got sent that album title).

I cannot imagine listening to songs like “Goz Chile” and “Karaoke” without feeling insane to some degree, and those are the “rockers” on Keep Honking I’m About to Fucking Kill Myself–elsewhere, “Bowser’s” more or less sneers at the idea of “music” and “PAUSE!” and “Help the Homeless” dissolve into noise. Keep Honking I’m About to Fucking Kill Myself is such that the noisy, industrial post-punk piece “Doom Scroll” starts to sound like a reprieve–at least its subject and point is fairly straightforward, no? My Wife’s an Angel can pull something like that off, but the closing track, “American Dream”, is their real bread and butter. Apparently, most of the lyrics to “American Dream” are taken “verbatim” from billboards seen by the band on tour–with them, My Wife’s an Angel make a terrifying, noisy hell of lawyers, sports gambling, questionable medical advice, and other such American topics. I’m not sure if there’s any other way for “Americana” to sound in this present moment. (Bandcamp link)

The Chop – Third Window

Release date: April 24th
Record label: Lost Sound Tapes
Genre: Post-punk, indie pop, minimalism
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Urban Myth

Third Window is yet another record by Gemma Fleet and Andrew Doig to add to the pile they’ve amassed over the past few years: a couple albums and a couple EPs as one-half of the Glasgow indie pop/post-punk quartet Dancer, the debut album from their duo together The Chop last year, not to mention other acts in which they’ve been involved like Nightshift and Current Affairs. It’s the Chop found Fleet and Doig exploring a more minimal and quieter sound than they’ve done in Dancer; the obvious Young Marble Giants comparison isn’t inaccurate, for instance. Third Window, a six-song “mini-album” coming less than a year after their debut, continues the duo’s journey into more subdued indie pop; combine the brief length, sparse arrangements, and ever-expanding discography, and you’ve got a recipe for a record destined to be “unfairly overlooked”. 

Aside from the typical Moxham brothers, Life without Buildings, and Raincoats influences, Third Window was inspired by the “brutal Glasgow winter of 2025/2026” and Doig’s diagnosis of SCDS (a “rare hearing and balance disorder” originating from the inner ear). Personal disorientation and an underlying uncertainty regarding a future in music at all shade these half dozen-songs, although this doesn’t mean that Fleet hasn’t remained an engrossing yarn-spinner (see “Urban Myth”, “Deserter 1940”, and “First Contact”, all of which satisfyingly elaborate on their titles). The slide whistle-like sound in the otherwise very delicate “Ok Kid” is a headscratching addition, which I suppose is the point (the dolphin-synths in “The Auditor”, while still being decidedly odd, do sound a little more in line with the uneasy rest of the track). Whatever the future holds for Fleet and Doig’s music, Third Window is a particularly strong document of the present. (Bandcamp link)

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