Pressing Concerns: The Noisy, Alice Kat, Drug Country, Dog Park

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I asked some readers of the blog whether or not they wanted a post on Memorial Day, and the answer seemed to be mostly “yes”, so here we are on a federal holiday (in the United States, at least), looking at four new records. We’ve got new albums from The Noisy, Alice Kat (of fine.), and Dog Park, plus a new EP from Drug Country (John Russell of Gnawing) all ready for you below. Listen to these records at your cookout, or for non-Americans, whatever your normal Monday routine looks like.

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 Noisy – The Secret Ingredient Is More Meat

Release date: May 24th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Dream pop, indie pop, pop rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Grenadine

Here’s a fun game: take a drink every time singer Sara Mae mentions a different type of alcohol on their debut album as The Noisy, The Secret Ingredient Is More Meat. We get our start with the vermouth in “Ballerino” and the “two glasses of sweating white” in “Twos”, barrel through the “fire escape beer” and “rooftop champagne” in “Grenadine” and the Tom Collins in “Violent Lozenge”, and the “whisky background noise” in “Morricone” has us on the floor (get up, though, we’ve got a dirty martini coming up in “Glass of Olives”). Believe it or not, the high ABV is actually only one of the several memorable aspects to Mae’s writing through The Secret Ingredient Is More Meat, which they describe as a record about “queer metabolism”. Mae, who is also a poet, began making music as The Noisy in Knoxville a few years ago, releasing an EP in 2021 and recording what would become their debut album there before moving to Philadelphia last year (and enlisting Heather Jones of Ther to master the record). Mae’s voice and lyrics are clearly the star of The Secret Ingredient Is More Meat, although the music is hardly an afterthought, as they and their collaborators (Josh Sorrells, Ash Baker, and Nyleen Perez) give the record a rich, polished pop-rock sound with pieces of dream/chamber pop, synth pop, and even a bit of electric alt-rock thrown in.

The Secret Ingredient Is More Meat is an ear-catching record, one that’s hard for me to listen to anything but actively. Opening track “Little Grill” is a stage-setter, skipping delicately in its first half (“Drank propane and swilled / Grease stains, spent hours / At the waists of fathers”) before bursting with Mae’s declaration (“Tell me you want something more / than American cheese”) as the music rises. “Ballerino” is a huge pop song that sets up The Noisy’s perspective fascinatingly (“Frivolity, ephemerality, femininity, hot pants pretty”), and the chugging grunge-pop of “Twos” thoroughly explores its aforementioned sweating white duo. If there’s a breather in the record it’s the lo-fi dream pop of “Tony Soprano”, an open-ended moment before The Noisy take on two of the thorniest and best songs on the album, the horn-laden, back-glancing “Grenadine” and the retro, refined-sounding clueless dizziness of “Violet Lozenge”. The messiness of the situations and relationships described by Mae over and over again is clearly contrasted with the expertly-crafted music and fine dining contained within The Secret Ingredient Is More Meat; Mae answers their question about American cheese in “Little Grill” with “If it were up to me / I’d cut my teeth on brie”. In this way, The Secret Ingredient Is More Meat is an aspirational record, but it’s also a present-tense evaluation, an assertion of the vitality and richness of the world Mae and anyone who can relate to these experiences inhabit. (Bandcamp link)

Alice Kat – Around the World & Back to You

Release date: March 10th
Record label: Subjangle
Genre: Power pop, indie pop, alt-rock
Formats: CD, digital
Pull Track: Pretty Blue 108

Alice Katugampola is a Boston, England-based singer-songwriter who I first became aware of via fine., the jangle/indie pop duo that she started with Kid Chameleon’s Liam James Marsh. Fine. had a big 2022, releasing a massive double album called Love, Death, Dreams, and the Sleep Between as well as a just-as-large self-titled compilation of previously-released material. However, Katugampola has been making music as Alice Kat for significantly longer than fine. have been around, releasing three different solo albums from 2016 to 2020. Fine. are still going strong (they put out a Bandcamp-only EP in May), but Katugampola has returned to the Alice Kat moniker for Around the World & Back to You, her fourth solo LP. After making some sprawling guitar pop music the past couple of years, it’s nice to hear Katugampola knock out a twelve-song, 30-minute single album–and “knock out” feels like the right term for what she does on Around the World & Back to You, which has a punchier alt-rock sound than I was expecting (not quite “pop punk”, but closer to that than fine.’s ever come).

That’s not to say that Around the World & Back to You isn’t an ambitious record. I’ve written about plenty of concept albums on this blog, but I can’t recall another one that actually takes an entire song (the sixty-second “That Was Day Time, This Is Night Time”) to explain what the concept is supposed to be, and how the two sides of the record and even the album title relate to it. The conceit is simple enough–the album is split into “day time”, which hews closer to huge-sounding power pop, and the chillier alt-rock of “night time”–although there’s plenty of overlap. There’s a palpable melancholic streak to even some of the catchiest songs on the album (the soaring “Get High Feel Alive” and “Sun Goes Down”, which mixes icy post-punk with jangly indie rock as the sunlight fades), while Katugampola never abandons high-flying power chords (“Younger Life”), rumbling riffs and choruses (“Fear”) and synth-power pop hooks (“Rush”) in the record’s second half, either. Katugampola is an excellent lead singer, and Around the World & Back to You feels as cohesive as it does because she has complete faith in her vocals, placing them front and center and letting the emotion and melody come naturally. With that in mind, Katugampola can’t resist putting a cap to it all in the form of “Seasons”, the one song that embraces sunny, strummed jangly indie pop–seeing Around the World & Back to You to its complete conclusion. (Bandcamp link)

Drug Country – How to Keep a Band

Release date: May 24th
Record label: Hilltop Recordings
Genre: Fuzz rock, lo-fi indie rock, garage rock
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Wellbutrin Blues

I’ve written a few times about Richmond rock band Gnawing on the blog before, and both of their albums (2021’s You Freak Me Out and 2023’s Modern Survival Techniques) are solid collections of Dinosaur Jr./early Nirvana-inspired fuzz rock. Gnawing frontperson John Russell let just a bit more of his sharp songwriting stick out among the distortion of his band’s most recent album, although it was a subtle change between two fairly similar-sounding records. This latest batch of songs that Russell has written, however, ended up far enough away from Gnawing that he decided they were a different thing entirely, and thus his Drug Country solo project was born. Russell’s first record as Drug Country is a six-song self-recorded and self-released cassette tape called How to Keep a Band, and it’s a strong lo-fi rock opening statement–sometimes it sounds like a more ramshackle and subdued version of Gnawing, but elsewhere Russell’s writing and recording wander into new territory entirely.

How to Keep a Band kicks off with Russell doing what he does best in “Wellbutrin Blues”, hammering out fuzzy, punchy, and loud pop music. Between the lo-fi sheen and the lengthy intro, Drug Country finds itself taking a bit more influence from their Virginia forbearers in Sparklehorse, although Russell’s pop sledgehammer writing style still is more in line with Cobain and Mascis. The other unqualified rocker on How to Keep a Band, “Karma Laundering”, is just a bit more restrained, with Russell’s drive-thru-speaker vocals steadily helming a mid-tempo alt-rock barge of an instrumental. The rest of the EP is where Russell lets Drug Country wander a bit in various directions–single and second track “Bird Patterns” (featuring harmonies from a fellow Russell, Russell Edling of Golden Apples) is a clear success story, merging his signature alt-rock with a dreamy, almost psychedelic sensibility that thrives in this lo-fi environment. The two quietest songs on the EP are the final two–“Foolish Acrobatics” is the full-band one, molasses-slow folk rock that echoes like a cave (I believe this is Drug Country’s take on “slowcore”), and “Orange Trees and Pipe Tobacco” closes out How to Keep a Band with a straight-up acoustic ballad. Russell is no stranger to the acoustic guitar (my favorite song from the first Gnawing album, “Blue Moon New”, embraced their alt-country side), but this is his clearest foray into haunted-sounding, desolate southern folk music–we’re way out in the Drug Country now. (Bandcamp link)

Dog Park – Festina Lente

Release date: April 19th
Record label: Géographie
Genre: Dream pop, psych pop, indie pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Sunny Decadence

Dog Park are a quartet from Paris with a sound that evokes dreamy, jangly guitar pop bands of several different decades (they specifically namecheck “early 2010s Captured Tracks” as an influence on them) throughout their debut album, Festina Lente. The band (Erica Ashleson, Isabella Cantani, Sarah Pitet and Jean Duffour) released their first single in 2022, a year after the geographically disparate members (Pitet and Duffour are originally from Paris, while Ashleson is from the United States and Cantani is Brazilian) first started playing together. The ten songs of Festina Lente collect the handful of songs the band had already released plus some new material, and the group (whose members trade songwriting and instrumental duties) meld together excellently on their first extended outing together, creating a record that incorporates psychedelic pop, British C86 indie pop, rainy Pacific Northwest guitar pop, and synth-shaded dream pop in a way suggesting that Dog Park are operating in unison with a singular shared goal in mind.

It’s hard to think of a better way for a band like Dog Park to introduce themselves than with “Sunny Decadence”, a song that’s relatively subtle but at the same time lives up to its name by offering up bright, jangly, warm hooks and a passionately catchy chorus. The song flirts with wandering off as it adds some hazy synths in its second half, but Festina Lente waits until the next track, “Time”, to get a little looser with, well, time. “Lalala” and “Stimulation” are still pop songs, but they sound particularly unhurried, and it’s a mode that suits Dog Park well–although “Goldfish” and “Trial and Error” have busier rhythm sections than the tracks before them, they still find time to meander and let the band’s pop moments show up along the way. By the time we’ve gotten to “Kaleidoscope” and especially the strange penultimate track “Head in the Clouds”, Dog Park are just as interested in layering their sound with guitar and synth textures as they are with melodies (but they never abandon the latter, and the vocals are never buried by the instrumentals). “Mirror” caps off the album with one last guitar-based dream pop anthem–perhaps a little bit more focused than some of the other selections on Festina Lente, but it’s still one strong pop moment of many. (Bandcamp link)

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