Pressing Concerns: Fig Dish, Hail Maria, Crash Outfit, Red Star Sky

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In this Monday Pressing Concerns, we’ve gathered up new albums from Hail Maria and Crash Outfit, a new EP from Red Star Sky, and a reissue of Fig Dish‘s second album. Check them out below!

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Fig Dish – When Shove Goes Back to Push (Vinyl Release)

Release date: June 26th
Record label: Forge Again
Genre: Alternative rock, power pop, post-grunge
Formats: Vinyl
Pull Track: Pretty Never Hurts

I’ve been enjoying the recent Fig Dish revival perpetrated by Forge Again Records over the past couple of years. The Chicago power pop/alt-rockers broke up in 1998 after two major label albums that went nowhere and a shelved third, but 2024 saw the first Fig Dish shows in nearly three decades and a belated release of the shelved album as Feels Like the Very First Two Times, and last year brought a thirty-year-anniversary release of their debut album That’s What Love Songs Often Do on vinyl for the first time. To complete this revisitation, Forge Again Records have now prepped a double-LP release of the second and (for a long time, at least) final Fig Dish album, When Shove Goes Back to Push. Founding members Blake Smith, Rick Ness (both guitar/vocals), and Mike Willison (bass/vocals) welcomed new drummer Bill Swartz into the band, released When Shove Goes Back to Push in 1997 to commercial and record label indifference, and were defunct by the following year.

A fresh listen to When Shove Goes Back to Push reveals a capable swan song for a quality Midwestern rock band, a group who seemed to be perfectly able to fit into the concurrent power pop and post-grunge movements but with a strong core guaranteed to allow this music to reverberate beyond the era’s expiration date. There are plenty of “hits” on When Shove Goes Back to Push to my ears; the chopper-flight opening track “Come On (Don’t Come On)”, the mid-tempo grunge-power-pop flop of a lead single “When Shirts Get Tight”, the fascinating anthem “Pretty Never Hurts”, and the surging pop punk “Sleep Startles” are all as good a pop song as any you’ll hear on the radio when the 90s block comes rolling around. A “CD era” album like this gives Fig Dish space to try oddities like “Wheel Holders”, the kind of thing that’d probably get cut if they were trying to make a thirty-five minute LP; it’s interesting and unique to have a double-vinyl version of this collection thirty years later. It’s almost like, whichever era’s lens you view them through, Fig Dish are always a little bit out of step. (Bandcamp link)

Hail Maria – What Kind of World Is This?

Release date: June 27th
Record label: Digital Hotdogs
Genre: Post-punk, garage rock, art rock
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: City So Loud

Hail Maria are a Memphis, Tennessee underground supergroup; the four members (vocalist/“nylon” player Michael Peery, George Williford on “Hofner”, Keith Cooper on “Telecaster”, and Ben Bauermeister on “rhythm”) have played in notable bands like Ibex Clone, Optic Sink, Hash Redactor, and Ex-Cult, among other local acts. The quartet’s other projects run the gamut from wild, all-out garage rock to icy post-punk, but the debut album from Hail Maria, What Kind of World Is This?, is a journey into the weird, unclassifiable corners of Memphis underground rock. One minute, Hail Maria will be digging into a nice groove that reminds one of their city of origin, the next they’re throwing a bit of a bossa nova touch into the mix, and then after that they’re getting a little psychedelic with it. What Kind of World Is This? was made by four people who clearly know “how to rock”, and while it certainly does that at times (just listen to “City So Loud”, which kicks off the album’s B-side), Hail Maria also feels like an outlet for a bunch of punks/garage rockers to explore the realms beyond their bread and butter (I mean, it’s a forty-five minute tape; that alone is a bold choice for these guys). The connective tissue for me when it comes to What Kind of World Is This? is how consistently fun of a listen it is, no matter where Hail Maria end up on the map. That’s more than enough for a solid foundation for a promising new act. (Bandcamp link)

Crash Outfit – Crash Outfit

Release date: March 17th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Post-punk, 90s indie rock, noise rock, post-hardcore, garage punk
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Soft Hands

Wow, time really does fly. Crash Outfit are a trio from Santa Rosa who put out their self-titled debut album back in mid-March of this year, and I heard it shortly after its release; after over three months in “I’m going to write about it eventually” purgatory, I’m finally getting around to telling you about a strong new band operating in the realms of post-punk, post-hardcore, and noise rock. If the trio (guitarist/vocalist Paul Warner, bassist Rebecca Davenport, and drummer Braden McGraw) don’t precisely sound like a brand-new band, it’s likely because all of them have been doing the “indie rock” thing for a while now; the members’ previous bands have supposedly shared stages with groups like Archers of Loaf, Mission of Burma, and Future of the Left, though I don’t know who played in what band and when. What I do know is that Crash Outfit is a lean, razor-sharp collection of punk rock made by people intimately familiar with the 1990s Dischord Records discography and the Rick Froberg/John Reis oeuvre. The music is “post-punk power trio”, anchored in rhythm and repetition, and Warner’s vocal performance sounds a bit possessed (that’s a good thing). There are more than a few survivors still making this kind of music out there (see Stomatopod, Blank Banker, and Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death, to name a few), and Crash Outfit have done more than enough to keep the torch alight. (Bandcamp link)

Red Star Sky – Debt

Release date: April 30th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Folk, acoustic, singer-songwriter, country
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Debt

Corey Layman is a longtime Pittsburgh indie rock veteran; most notably, he played bass in the final incarnation of the legendary Karl Hendricks Trio (appearing on their last two LPs), but he’s also led the projects Hovland, Developer, and Line Forms from the 1990s to the 2010s. Red Star Sky began as a pandemic-era solo project that evolved into Layman’s chance to explore his Appalachian roots with more alt-country and folk influences than the indie rocker’s typical fare; after a debut CD in 2021 and a couple of miscellaneous singles, the project’s latest release is a four-song digital EP called Debt. This acoustic collection is “folk music” in concept and execution, particularly in its first half with the title track (a stark, spare meditation on the titular subject) and “Fascist Blues” (a pedal-steel aided folk-country protest song, clean and straightforward in a way you wish present-day Neil Young was still able to write). The most spirited moment on Debt is the vaguely Appalachian condemnation “Oh Commodified Humans”, while the most ethereal one is the closing track “That’s Fine” (apparently written immediately after seeing Silkworm live in 2025, a show I also attended). “That’s Fine” fades away as Debt quietly bows out; Layman doesn’t aggressively seek our attention on this EP, but we’d do well to give it to him. (Bandcamp link)

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