Pressing Concerns: Bliss?, Jacob T. Simons, The Knickerbocker5, Sea Scouts

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It’s a Monday Pressing Concerns! We’ve got new albums from Bliss?, Jacob T. Simons, and The Knickerbocker5, plus a reissue from Sea Scouts. Check ’em out below.

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Bliss? – The Freezing Light

Release date: October 16th
Record label: Psychic Spice
Genre: Power pop, art rock, college rock, post-punk, Americana
Formats: CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: God Hates Cops

Emerging from Baton Rouge, Louisiana in early 2025, Bliss? are a college rock/power pop/reformed punk group who’ve been on an incredible run ever since: their debut LP, Pass Yr Pain Along, was one of my favorite albums of last year, and last November’s compendium EP Keep Your Joy to Yourself was just as strong. Pass Yr Pain Along was recorded with the lineup of guitarist/vocalist Josh Higdon, bassist Hunter Kiser, and drummer Robert DeMouy; Kiser left soon afterwards, and Keep Your Joy to Yourself was recorded by Higdon and DeMouy as a duo. Even though their most recent EP was recorded with the duo lineup, those songs were written at the same time as their debut album, meaning that Bliss? LP2, The Freezing Light, is the first to entirely originate from the two-piece version of the band. I will miss the tight power trio that recorded Pass Yr Pain Along and made it a true diamond-in-the-rough punk-informed Costellian power pop revival album, but Kiser and DeMouy have reinvented themselves as a more expansive, risk-taking, and just-as-exciting underground rock duo on this double LP.

Described by DeMouy as “a song cycle about growing up in South Louisiana’s schools, kitchens, and chemical plants, told by a narrator attempting to escape the state’s oppressive institutions and cycles of poverty and addiction,” the sixteen-song, sixty-eight-minute The Freezing Light is an overwhelming Americana album delivered out of nowhere from a couple of red state punks. In classic rock terms, they’ve graduated from My Generation to Tommy, although the sound of Bliss? is still somewhere between Elvis Costello and early 1980s Los Angeles punk rock, with a bit of stuff like The Silos and Alejandro Escovedo’s solo work in there now too. The first dozen minutes of the album are comprised of a two-part suite called “Suddenly (The Joy Pt.1)” and “For Rozz Williams (The Joy Pt. 2)”, the vibrant jangly pop rock of the former giving way to the chilly slowness of the latter. Bliss? still give us plenty of great rock songs on The Freezing Light, but arguably its best moment is completely new terrain for them in the six-minute jawdropping acoustic (mainly) folk ballad “God Hates Cops”. In the span of less than two years, Bliss? have made two masterpieces of incredibly different stripes; I’d be one of many lauding them if the world was a just place, but part of the reason The Freezing Light exists is because that isn’t the case. (Bandcamp link)

Jacob T. Simons – Shadow Creek

Release date: September 4th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Folk rock, country rock, singer-songwriter
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Cadillac Horses

Last February, I wrote about the debut album from a Kalamazoo-originating project called Moon Orchids led by the singer-songwriter Jacob Simons, a Michigan indie rock veteran who’d been playing in bands like Dori over the past decade. Moon Orchids was a lovely folk rock record, inspired by the cleaner and less “proto-grunge” sides of Neil Young & Crazy Horse that new bands seem less apt to try to rip off; however, by the time the album was released, Simons had relocated to Denver, and Moon Orchids was dissolved shortly thereafter. Unsurprisingly, Simons continued writing songs, and last year linked up with Mark Anderson, a producer and multi-instrumentalist who runs the Cowboy Cowabunga in Evergreen, Colorado. Shadow Creek is made up of those Anderson sessions alongside some home-recorded ones, ten tracks (nine songs “plus one brief recording of a rainstorm from our balcony”) also featuring contributions from violinist Olivia Shaw and keyboardist Paul Robert Fake.

As one might expect, Shadow Creek sounds like Moon Orchids, only more stripped down; I would chalk that up to a combination of the record’s relatively short gestation time, Simons’ self-imposed restrictions he outlines on the album’s Bandcamp page (ranging from “no doubling of vocals” to “no slide or steel guitar”), and sheer necessity. Some of the songs on Shadow Creek have drums and some are little more than Simons and an acoustic guitar; the relatively electric vibes of the noirish/“Revolution Blues”-style “Black Elephant” and the power chord-featuring heartland rock of “Cadillac Horses” are the exceptions but hardly sound out of place. The stripped-down acoustic country-folk (in attitude if not always in instrumentation) of “Turtledoves”, “The Wanderer”, and “Seasons of a Lifetime” is the heart of Shadow Creek to my ears, lovely, slow-moving recordings marked by occasional bouts of harmonica or fiddle. Shadow Creek may have heralded a pretty quick start to Jacob T. Simons’ Colorado era, but it’s a success that hardly sounds hurried. (Bandcamp link)

The Knickerbocker5 – Snore Loud

Release date: September 26th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Dance-punk, post-punk, funk rock, jazz-pop
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: How Do You Still Love Me

About two years ago I introduced the readers of Rosy Overdrive to The Knickerbocker5, a trio (not quintet) of Japanese musicians living in Brooklyn who’d just put out their first album, Disco Princess (Where We Are Now). The group (bassist Yoko, guitarist Arii, and drummer Ayako) have played in a bunch of New York groups (Hard Nips, First President of Japan, Juice, and Invisible College, among others, between the three of them), but The Knickerbocker5 seems to be the musicians’ chance to make “funky- groovy little bit jazzy rock’n roll” as they themselves call their sophomore album, Snore Loud. Like Disco Princess (Where We Are Now), Snore Loud is also a seven-track affair, but this one is even shorter, paring down the trio’s dance-post-punk explorations to a quick twenty minutes. It’s subsequently a more pop-focused record, ditching some of Disco Princess (Where We Are Now)‘s wilder moments and extended jam sessions for brief bursts of fun new wave/jazz-marked pop songs. It’s still relatively wide-ranging, of course–“Panic Mania” has fuzzy garage punk in its bones, “Limitación de la Vida” moves towards jazz and even dub, “How Do You Still Love Me” brings the funk grooves, the saxophone-featuring “Zammer kan kan girl” is very nearly ska, et cetera–but, again, this is all in the context of quick power-trio-pop bursts. The Knickerbocker5 are one of the more exciting and intriguing bands of the Brooklyn underground, and Snore Loud only cements this. (Bandcamp link)

Sea Scouts – Beacon of Hope (Remastered)

Release date: September 18th
Record label: Zum
Genre: Noise rock, post-hardcore, 90s indie rock, post-punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Song for Ché

Record label: Zum

Genre: Noise rock, post-hardcore, 90s indie rock, post-punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Song for Che

Sea Scouts were a noise rock band who came out of Hobart, the capital city of the Australian island-state Tasmania–a place I don’t believe Rosy Overdrive had ever covered before now. They were active from 1994 to 2000, co-founded by vocalist/guitarist Tim Evans and coming to feature bassist Alex Pope and drummer Monika Fikerle by the time they recorded their second and final album, 1998’s Beacon of Hope. Co-released on CD by Unstable Ape (Evans’ own label) and Patsy Records (the label run by onetime Sleater-Kinney drummer Laura MacFarlane), Beacon of Hope is an intense Australian post-hardcore album capturing a power trio less than two years away from dissolving. The album shares plenty of overlap with contemporaneous underground American rock music–the murky, standoffish attitude reminds me of a less obviously punk-influenced Unwound, while Fikerle’s unique drumming (she would play standing apparently, and her style is largely a furious pounding on toms with occasional cymbal crashes) gives Beacon of Hope some Swans-like characteristics, too. The marriage of earsplitting guitar feedback, tortured vocals, and incessant rhythms is extremely late 1990s, although they’re also proudly from the same continent as The Birthday Party. It’s a tough album in more ways than one, and it’s very deserving of this remastered reissue (and first-ever vinyl release) all these years later. (Bandcamp link)

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