Pressing Concerns: Dagwood, Soda Gumball, Blimps, Plum

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This Monday Pressing Concerns features new albums from Dagwood, Soda Gumball, and Plum, and a new EP/cassette from Blimps. Check ’em below.

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Dagwood – So What / So What Else

Release date: September 8th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Power pop, pop punk, alt-rock, fuzz rock, garage rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Change Your Mind

The New Haven, Connecticut power-pop-punk group Dagwood have been around since the beginning of the 2010s, but the quartet (guitarist/vocalist Grady Hearn, guitarist Mike Nagy, bassist Tim Casey, and drummer Kilian Appleby) really hit their stride earlier this decade with a pair of strong EPs: 2023’s Everything Turned Out Alright and 2024’s Pollyanna Visions. The latter of those EPs was recorded by the acclaimed Western Massachusetts producer Justin Pizzoferrato, and that’s who Dagwood turned to to help make So What, the band’s fourth full-length album and first in four years. The twelve-song proper LP also comes with six bonus tracks, christened the So What Else EP by Dagwood, making the entire package a behemoth eighteen-song collection of 90s-style fuzzed-out power pop, alt-rock, and garage rock revival that stands as Dagwood’s most impressive statement yet–in terms of sheer magnitude, if nothing else.

Dagwood’s influences are a transatlantic game of telephone: both 90s power pop bands with a bit of British invasion influence like Weezer and Superdrag collide with British pop bands with a bit of American indie rock and pop in their DNA like Ride and late-90s Blur. Garage rock hits like “Nowhere New”, “Group Dynamic”, and “Talk You Do” are Dagwood at their most effortless, and they sit alongside more restrained pop numbers like the steadily-building opening track “Easier to Trust”, the dreamy “Walls of My Bedroom”, the power ballad “Change Your Mind”, and the acoustic “I Forget”. The So What Else EP doesn’t feature any drop in quality–the first half in particular (the heavy, dread-tinged “Paranoid”, the turn-of-the-century pop rock “Reason to Believe”, and the breezy garage-pop of “Right Outside”) is one of the strongest stretches in this entire bundle. At the very least, So What and So What Else are proof that Dagwood are still on a hot streak, and sustaining that fire for forty-five minutes over two records is a new milestone for them. (Bandcamp link)

Soda Gumball – Super Honey Teaspoon!

Release date: July 24th
Record label: Den Tapes
Genre: Indie pop, 90s indie rock, twee
Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Malt Shop Gizmo

Another new indie pop band from the Pacific Northwest is an intriguing proposition, and that’s before I even realized the Rosy Overdrive-related background of Seattle’s Soda Gumball. See, Soda Gumball is the project of one Benjamin Rea, a music instructor who has been making chaotic freak-punk on his own as Jealous Yellow since the pandemic and who also plays in the post-hardcore group Laminate. Soda Gumball in particular stems from Rea’s time as an instructor, and some of these comparatively simple pop songs even originated from collaborations with the musician’s students. Super Honey Teaspoon!, the first Soda Gumball album, displays a laid-back comfort with K Records-style indie pop; Rea’s low-key vocals, while more outwardly sorted for the kind of greyscale, noisy post-punk of his other projects, lend a slacker, almost Elephant 6 psychedelic vibe to these compositions. At fifteen songs and forty-five minutes, we get a full dose of Rea’s vision of pop music, which gets as animated as the chirping synth-twee-pop of “Malt Shop Gizmo”, the horn-laden pop rock “Mango Hiccup”, and the fuzzy “Twirly Whirl”. The whole thing ends with a faithful and reverent cover of Beat Happening’s “Cast a Shadow”, and the ease with which Soda Gumball add it to their repertoire is just proof of Super Honey Teaspoon!’s charming success. (Bandcamp link)

Blimps – Over the Moon

Release date: May 8th
Record label: Terminal Releases
Genre: Power pop, alt-rock
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Over the Moon

Blimps is Rocky Mercer and Colin Musolf, a lo-fi power pop duo from Charleston, South Carolina who put out their debut record, a seven-song cassette called Over the Moon, back in May. Over the Moon was released by Terminal Releases, a label run by the members of Blimps that has also, in the months since the tape came out, put out a slow of records by various projects appearing to feature different combinations of Blimps members and other local musicians (band names include Miltons, Silky Demands, and ESP Disco). As a prolific group of underground pop musicians from a C-class American city whose band is named after a Guided by Voices song, it seems like Blimps have their heads screwed on right, and Over the Moon is as strong as one would hope it to be. While songs like “Pitfall Traps” and closer “Landed” are certainly Robert Pollard-esque, that doesn’t necessarily define all of Over the Moon–stuff like crunchy opening track “Over the Moon” is more indebted to Weezer and 90s fuzzed-out power pop (it’s very nearly a Rozwell Kid song), and distorted pop rock journeys like “Kung-Fu” sit nicely next to the clean jangle of “Goodbye, Goodbye”. Some promising things are going on down in South Carolina. (Bandcamp link)

Plum – Bodies in Motion

Release date: August 21st
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Post-punk, dance-punk, egg punk
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Can Jam

It’s been a pretty good couple of weeks for Chicago post-punk, particularly of the “dance-punk” variety. The beloved Feel It group Spread Joy returned at the beginning of September with their third LP, noise-punks Model Living just put out their debut full-length last week, and Windy City trio Plum just dropped their second album late last month, too. On Bodies in Motion, Plum (guitarist/vocalist Jeff Kelley, bassist Heather Perry, and drummer Eric Ridder) continue to carry the flame of Midwestern “egg punk”, channeling Devo and The B-52’s into a rubbery, rhythm-section-forward collection of vibrant rock music. Like any good Devo-core group, there’s plenty of nervousness inBodies in Motion, but Plum also understand that “fun” post-punk has always borrowed liberally from other locations, and the funk and grooves found in “Born Anew”, “Too Much Sunlight”, and (especially) “Can Jam” showcase a band with real skill when it comes to realizing the music they love effectively. Elsewhere on the album, songs like “Not Out of Mind” and “Club Scum” display a more spaghetti-western approach to post-punk, splattering guitar lines over top of the sleek rhythm section. The common thread in this eleven track, thirty-one-minute album is a very animated and colorful approach to rock music, an absolutely necessary attitude to have when making a record like Bodies in Motion. (Bandcamp link)

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