Pressing Concerns: Spacemoth, Sea Moss & Miscomings, Some Velvet Sidewalk, Unlettered

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It’s a Thursday Pressing Concerns! It features new albums from Spacemoth, Some Velvet Sidewalk, and Unlettered, plus a split LP from Sea Moss and Miscomings, all of which are out tomorrow (June 26th). If you missed either of this week’s earlier posts (Monday’s featured Sun Kin, National Photo Committee, Wade Easy, and Chorus Truly, and on Tuesday we looked at the upcoming Emperor X album), 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.

Spacemoth – Inward Eye

Release date: June 26th
Record label: Greenway
Genre: Indie pop, space pop, synthpop, psychedelic pop, post-punk, krautrock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Do We Exist?

Maryam Qudus spent several years working as a producer and engineer at Oakland’s Tiny Telephone Recording, producing records from Forest Bees, Sour Widows, and La Luz, among others. When it came time for her own project Spacemoth to debut, Qudus was more than ready–2022’s No Past No Future was an excellent-sounding album, a charming and exciting mixture of Stereolab-worshipping analog synths, hard-hitting percussion, and pop music of the “space”-y variety. Qudus has spent a lot of time since No Past No Future on tour–both with Spacemoth and as the keyboardist for La Luz–and it was on the road that the second Spacemoth album, Inward Eye, started to take shape. Still very much a pop album, Inward Eye feels like an accentuation of the layered and psychedelic sides of No Past No Future; it’s an album that feels very “tinkered with”, an area in which Spacemoth clearly thrive. 

Opening track “Do We Exist?” is an excellent and actually pretty streamlined take on Stereolab and krautrock via up-front pop music, and these rubbery hooks mark later-record highlights like “Telepathic Butterflies” and the propulsive “Cloud of Echoes”. While Spacemoth’s studio-experimentation yields vibrant, kaleidoscopic pop music in those instances, Qudus is just at home in the grainy, distorted sheen that covers up the just-as-strong pop song “Paper Cup”, or in the sensory overload final track “In the Garden”. More than about any other project I can think of, Qudus’ production background is a clear asset to everything about Spacemoth, and Inward Eye keeps things fresh and the momentum rolling. (Bandcamp link)

Sea Moss & Miscomings – Big Tube Scene

Release date: June 26th
Record label: Zum Audio
Genre: Noise rock, noise punk, no wave
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: First Greens

Sea Moss and Miscomings are two noise punk bands from the Pacific Northwest–the former is a voice/drums/electronics duo from Portland made up of Noa Ver and Zac Dag, and the latter a quartet from Seattle featuring vocalist Chani Murillo, guitarist Sam Hendricks, bassist Liam Downey, and drummer Crow Ross. Sea Moss have a ferocious, chaotic, “a lot with a little” sound reminiscent of Lightning Bolt and Melt-Banana; when I wrote about Miscomings’ most recent album, Hat, I describe basically an egg punk/synthpunk group who’d grown into something louder and noisier. The partnership makes a lot of sense, and after the two bands shared a bill in Portland, they hit it off and Big Tube Scene took form. 

Each band gets a side on this split album, and each half ends with a collaborative track featuring all six musicians playing together. The A-Side is Sea Moss doing what Sea Moss does best, absolutely pummeling us with electronic-driven noise punk for five torrential tracks, while Miscomings grind up six blasts of garage punk/post-punk with the pedal pushed just as much to the floor. Miscomings and Sea Moss are more than capable of matching each other’s energies, and their collaborative tracks are the sound of mutually assured destruction. Big Tube Scene nearly has me believing that the split LP is the ideal format for this kind of music. (Bandcamp link)

Some Velvet Sidewalk – Critters Encore

Release date: June 26th
Record label: K/Perennial
Genre: Noise rock, 90s indie rock, post-punk, lo-fi indie rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Velvet Rabbit Portal 

At the risk of stating something everyone who reads this blog already knows, there was a shockingly high number of great bands making “indie rock” in the decade known as “the nineties”, many of which have not received a just level of appreciation. I know and love many of these bands, and every year I find more that fit this bill through reissues or my own crate-digging. Some Velvet Sidewalk fell in the dreaded “heard of them, haven’t heard them” category for me before they reunited and returned with their first album in nearly three decades this year, but I’m quickly getting up to speed.

Initially active from 1987 to 1997, Eugene, Oregon’s Some Velvet Sidewalk were a K Records band who seemed to hew towards the noisier/punk-er side of that label. Their new album, Critters Encore, sounds right out of their original era in the best way: it sounds like 1980s underground punk and post-punk filtered through a heavy lo-fi Pacific Northwestern lens. It’s the same pressure cooker that made “grunge”, though Critters Encore is a specific kind of Cascadian noise rock that feels like a later part of a caveman evolution drawing also featuring the Wipers, Dead Moon, Mudhoney, and the U-Men (with Pere Ubu being honorary Oregonians here). Some things have gotten lost in that long game of telephone, but others have certainly been gained. The world needs weird rock and roll records that kind of don’t make sense, and Some Velvet Sidewalk have, after all these years, risen to the occasion. (Bandcamp link)

Unlettered – Devil’s Bowl

Release date: June 26th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Post-punk, noise rock, 90s indie rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Burn After Reading

After playing in the noisy New York indie rock bands Gapeseed and Poem Rocket in the 1990s and 2000s, Mike Knowlton resurfaced in Florida at the beginning of this decade with a brand-new project called Unlettered that finds him pursuing grimy, grey, Sonic Youth/Blonde Redhead-esque art-noise. Unlettered has been prolific since its inception, with three EPs from 2021 to 2023 and a debut album from 2024; after their first-ever year off, Unlettered are back with their sophomore album, Devil’s Bowl. Like he was on Five Mile Point, Knowlton is joined by co-vocalist and co-lyricist Kelly Grimm, while this time Peter Gordon (also from Poem Rocket and Gapeseed) joins on drums for two songs. Devil’s Bowl is noisy but mechanical in a post-punk way; the vocals are, as always, mixed very low, and names like Polvo, Mission of Burma, and Unwound continue to be conjured up at various points in Unlettered’s music. It’s an energetic and bleak album at the same time, which few genres other than this one are really able to hit this satisfyingly. If it wasn’t clear by now, Mike Knowlton is an expert at the art. (Bandcamp link)

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