Pressing Concerns: Noah Roth, Sir Bobby Jukebox, UAY, TEKE::TEKE

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Welcome to Pressing Concerns! This is the first week in recent memory that’s only featured one of these, but today should be more than enough for you: we’ve got new albums from Noah Roth, Sir Bobby Jukebox, UAY, and TEKE::TEKE to talk about. If you missed the Rosy Overdrive May 2023 playlist, that went up on Monday, and I’d recommend checking that one out (it’s very good!).

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.

Noah Roth – Don’t Forget to Remember

Release date: June 9th
Record label: Devil Town Tapes
Genre: Lo-fi indie rock, folk rock, alt-country, experimental rock
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Carl St Bernard, Pt 1

Last year, I wrote about Breakfast of Champions, an excellent record from the Philadelphia-based musician Noah Roth. Labored over for several years, Breakfast of Champions balanced more “traditional” folk rock with an experimentalist streak, making for an intriguing final product. For their follow-up, Don’t Forget to Remember, Roth took a different path–it was written and largely recorded during a three-week stay in their childhood home in the Chicago suburbs. Roth fully embraces their experimental, noisy, “fuck-up sounding” side on this one–being away from the studios, instruments, and musicians that helped record their last album necessitated this, to a degree, but I also suspect that Roth had already decided that the frayed edges at the ends of Breakfast of Champions were where they wanted to explore next.

This isn’t to say that Noah Roth isn’t still the songwriter they were on their last album–there are pop songs throughout Don’t Forget to Remember as well.  Roth marries songs and noise in a way that reminds me of producer-songwriter John Vanderslice, what they’ve done recently with their other band, Mt. Worry, and the work of their recent tourmate Leor Miller.  “C U Tomorrow” features melodic guitars and synths that battle against a wall of fuzz, “Perfect Detail” is based around some Vanderslice-esque acoustic distortion, and the surprising, bass-led “Carl St Bernard, Part 1” might actually be the catchiest song I’ve heard from Roth. “Needs” is, in a way, Don’t Forget to Remember summed up neatly–Roth takes an acoustic guitar-based song and contorts it, speeding it up and slowing it down in a way few people would think to do with this kind of music.

It feels like Don’t Forget to Remember stretches out a bit as it goes on, with songs like “Paris, Texas”, “Upside Down Photographs”, and “Carl St Bernard, Part 2” taking a bit more time to get where they’re going. There’s a breakup (“watching someone you loved become a stranger” as Roth puts it) at the heart of this album, and I hear it in these tracks: “When I see you again, I know we won’t be friends / But I promise you that I’m listening,” in “Paris, Texas”, in the entire outro of “Paper Tigers”, in the corrupted ballad of “Carl St Bernard, Pt 2”.  I also hear it in closing track “Anymore”, a song that’s openly haunted and wounded–but there’s something else there, too. Maybe it’s the fuzz. (Bandcamp link)

Sir Bobby Jukebox – In the Organ Loft at Midnight

Release date: June 9th
Record label: Popical Island
Genre: Indie pop
Formats: Digital*
Pull Track: You Lit a Candle Wrong…

Since the 2000s, Dublin’s Sir Bobby Jukebox has released twenty-something albums as a bandleader or solo artist. Many of those records have been with his indie pop group No Monster Club, whose Deadbeat Effervescent I wrote about last year–In the Organ Loft at Midnight is the second full-length to come out under the Sir Bobby Jukebox name. While it might be a tad more insular than Deadbeat Effervescent, Jukebox hasn’t taken a big step away from No Monster Club’s sound with this solo album–if you liked the previous album’s bright, shiny, Unicorns-esque tropical-feeling indie pop, you’ll find plenty to enjoy on In the Organ Loft at Midnight.

Sir Bobby Jukebox brings the energy necessary to make a strong pop album throughout In the Organ Loft at Midnight, from the humble conga line of “Don’t Say Goodbye” to the bouncy piano pop of “Tropical Bird Lingo” early on to the synthpop epic of “Radio Tumbleweed” and woozy singalong “In the Nettles” in the album’s second half. Although Jukebox is pretty much always offering up bright, shiny island pop, he doesn’t restrict his emotions to one-note cheerfulness in doing so–“Totally Out of Sync” laments in between its hooks, and “No Fly Zone” has a surprising amount of bile in it. The big pop jaunt of “Nudity” is Sir Bobby Jukebox at his most straightforward and memorable, although my favorite version of him is the one on “You Lit a Candle Wrong…”: exuberant, twisting, tossing out melodies..speaking in French? Anyway, it’s just another solid pop tune on In the Organ Loft at Midnight, available now via bubblegum card. (Bandcamp link)

UAY – Kukulkan

Release date: June 6th
Record label: Half Shell
Genre: Psychedelic rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Oye

UAY is a Guadalajara, Mexico-based psychedelic rock band who released their first record, Mexicadelia, back in 2015 (under the name Fauno). Kukulkan is the quartet’s third full-length album and second as UAY, following 2020’s La Selva. UAY have a few connections to the country to their immediate north–they’ve toured the United States a few times, have played with Thee Oh Sees, and are releasing their newest album on Seattle experimental rock label Halfshell Records. They’ve certainly heard their fair share of U.S. and European psychedelic and indie music, I’m sure, but UAY also cite bands from their home country (Caifanes) and the rest of Latin American (Os Mutantes) as ingredients in their sound.

Kukulkan leans heavy on the psychedelic end of psychedelic rock–listeners should expect to hear swirling guitars, hypnotic percussion, and bursts of noise all taking place in the context of songs that could very well be described as “odysseys”. The soulful, emotive vocals of guitarist Francisco Lopez and bassist Rodrigo Torres are what keep the album grounded as much as anything else–while these seven songs contain plenty of lengthy instrumental breaks, when the singers do show up, they unlock an extra dimension to songs like opening track “Oye” and “No sale el sol”. Both the shorter and longer songs on Kukulkan are exploratory–the three-minute, jazz-influenced “La Llorona” is just as intriguing as the eight-minute, percussive “Inexplicable”–and they all work together. (Bandcamp link)

TEKE::TEKE – Hagata

Release date: June 9th
Record label: Kill Rock Stars
Genre: Experimental rock, psych rock, post-punk, art pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Doppelganger

TEKE::TEKE are a freewheeling seven-piece rock band with an omnivorous sound that touches on everything from Japanese pop and traditional music, psychedelic and surf rock, American post-hardcore/noise rock, and film soundtracks. The Montreal-based group is gearing up to release their second album on Kill Rock Stars, Hagata, and it’s an adventurous record that feels accessible despite (because of?) its wide-ranging nature. The band’s members bring a lot to dress up these ten songs–for example, Yuki Isami plays flute, shinobue, taisho koto, and synths, Etienne Lebel plays trombone, gaida, and percussion, and four different members (Sei Nakauchi Pelletier, Hidetaka Yoneyama, Mishka Stein, and lead singer Maya Kuroki) all have guitar credits.

TEKE::TEKE sound like a big tent at the start of Hagata–opening track “Garakuta” is a maximal march that goes heavy on the flute and horns, and the mid-tempo strut of “Gotoku Lemon” and the rocking “Hoppe” keep the energy going. TEKE::TEKE get a little pensive in the record’s midsection–“Onaji Heya” is a bit loose but resolves to pleasing indie pop, “Me No Heya” is a peaceful-sounding instrumental, and “Doppelganger” synthesizes the band’s “indie rock” and “otherworldly psychedelic” sides quite nicely. The seven-minute “Kaikijyu” is relatively sparse for most of its length, with the band drawing back a little bit to let the song build up organically. They’re still there and ready to make a racket, though–which they do as the song draws to a close. (Bandcamp link)

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