Pressing Concerns: The Pretty Flowers, Private Lives, Josaleigh Pollett, The Fruit Trees

Posted byrosyoverdrivePosted inPressing ConcernsTags:, , , , , , , ,

Hi, how are you? Today’s blog post looks at three albums that are coming out this Friday (new ones from The Pretty Flowers, Private Lives, and Josaleigh Pollett) plus an album from The Fruit Trees that came out last month. Flowers? Trees? Gardens? Weeds? Indeed.

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 Pretty Flowers – A Company Sleeve

Release date: July 14th
Record label: Double Helix
Genre: Power pop, alt-rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Baby Food

The Pretty Flowers are a Los Angeles-based quartet led by singer/guitarist/lyricist Noah Green and also featuring multi-instrumentalist Jake Gideon, drummer Sean Christopher Johnson, and bassist Sam Tiger. The band’s debut album, Why Trains Crash, came out back in 2018, followed shortly by the covers collection Golden Beat Sessions a year later. Although it took a half-decade for their second full-length, A Company Sleeve, to finally materialize, songs from the record had slowly been trickling out over the past three years (one of them “Bucket Beach”, appeared in an early post on this blog). The album is more than worth this wait–it’s a very strong collection of earnest guitar rock that incorporates bits of slacker rock, jangle pop, college rock, power pop, pop punk, and heartland rock all led charismatically by Green’s clear, everyman vocals.

The Pretty Flowers kick off A Company Sleeve by offering up a couple of tunes in their most frequent mode–that of later Replacements-indebted, big-chorus-featuring power-pop-punk. “Young Gray Enemies” takes a second to fire up, but it certainly does so, and the band rip through songs like “Another Way to Lose” and “Baby Food” in the first half of the record with speed and catchiness. The album’s A-side is stuffed with hits–it also features two successful deviations from the Pretty Flowers sound, the floating jangle pop of “Bucket Beach” and the breathtaking synth-aided centerpiece “Agendaless”. “Wildflowers” and “Doughboy Pool” keep the energy up into the back end of A Company Sleeve–although most of my immediate favorites came from early on in the record, a closer inspection reveals the quality doesn’t really decline. The giddy power pop of “Sit Right With You” lies in wait as track number ten, ready to become your favorite song on any given repeat listen–and A Company Sleeve is a record that invites such wearing out. (Bandcamp link)

Private Lives – Hit Record

Release date: July 14th
Record label: Feel It
Genre: Post-punk, garage punk
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Anything for Love

Montreal’s Private Lives debuted in late 2022 with a self-titled EP that introduced the band (comprised of members of groups like Pale Lips, Priors, and Lonely Parade) with five songs of energetic, punk-y and post-punky garage rock– the group hit the ground running. All five of the tracks from Private Lives reappear on Hit Record, the band’s full-length debut, in addition to an equal number of brand new tunes that live up to their first EP’s promise. The new songs on Hit Record lock into place quite nicely with the older ones, although one does detect some movement from Private Lives between the two releases. Private Lives balanced both ripping garage rock and sharp post-punk, while Hit Record’s newer offerings find the quartet embracing their power pop undercurrent.

Hit Record opens up with two new incredibly catchy offerings–the clap-along glam-punk of “Trust in Me” and the bouncy “Anything for Love”–both of which hold their own against some of the darker material that immediately succeeds them. The brisk drumbeat of the title track guides it to the buzzsaw guitars that excitedly punch up its chorus, and the flying rhythm section of “Dead Hand” is the one new track that embraces Private Lives’ post-punk tendencies. The one new song that truly bucks the trend is closing track “Dark Spots”, which starts in typical Private Lives fashion only to build to a pounding, frantic conclusion. Although the repurposed Private Lives songs largely offer up the heavier end of the spectrum here, “Dark Spots” shows that Private Lives certainly haven’t lost that dexterity–they remain an exciting new band in their year two. (Bandcamp link)

Josaleigh Pollett – In the Garden, By the Weeds

Release date: July 14th
Record label: Lavender Vinyl
Genre: Experimental pop, indie folk, indie pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Empty Things

Josaleigh Pollett is a Salt Lake City-based singer-songwriter who’s been making and/or playing music in some form for the past decade and a half. For the past four years, they’ve been doing it with collaborator Jordan Watko, a partnership that began with 2020’s No Woman Is the Sea and continues onto their newest record, In the Garden, By the Weeds. Although Pollett’s new album is, in a literal sense, a bedroom pop record (recorded by the duo in a bedroom over the course of two years), it’s worth defining the fractured melodies of In the Garden, By the Weeds more clearly. What Low (a band Pollett cites as an influence) did to slowcore and 90s indie rock in their last few albums feels analogous to what Pollett and Watko seek to do with the indie folk and more modern kinds of indie rock on their newest album.

That is to say, In the Garden, By the Weeds starts from the foundation of familiar and recognizable genres and takes some sharp turns from this point. The first three songs on the album are all as catchy as they are intricate–“YKWIM” starts off as unassuming folk-pop before launching into the stratosphere, while “The Nothing Answered Back” wisely refuses to crack the tension that it hoards over its four-and-a-half minutes. “Empty Things” takes it a step farther–a massive piece of synth-aided pop married to stark singer-songwriter vocals and lyrics, it sounds like a Julien Baker song disintegrating upon reentry. Pollett is a force of a vocalist, this is very much apparent–whether they’re presenting the worry in “Jawbreaker” or the determination of “Earthquake Song”, the strength of their voice regularly pushes these songs over the edge. It’s a key ingredient to In the Garden, By the Weeds, but equally important are Pollett and Watko’s adventurous arrangements and the strong cores of the tracks themselves. (Bandcamp link)

The Fruit Trees – Weather

Release date: June 23th
Record label: Flower Sounds
Genre: Lo-fi indie rock, folk rock, slowcore
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Sophie (Sludge)

The Fruit Trees is the southern California-based project of singer-songwriter Johnny Rafter, who released his debut album under the name last month via cassette label Flower Sounds (The Lentils, Wendy Eisenberg). Although Rafter plays over a dozen instruments throughout Weather’s fourteen songs and forty-six minutes, the album is far from a completely solo affair, also featuring vocal and/or instrumental contributions from eight others. One would guess that the expanded cast and stuffed runtime reflects a debut album pieced together over several years finally seeing the light of day. In that way, Weather is a grand statement, albeit a subtle one, in which Rafter keeps the songs spare enough to give off an impressively hushed tone.

Weather is both lo-fi and beautiful; it’s reminiscent of the fuzzy folk rock of groups like The Microphones in how Rafter straddles the line between rock band and solo project. Early on in the album, “Sophie (Sludge)” is a fully-realized version of the maximalist end of The Fruit Trees, blooming into a wide-ranging chamber folk sound. Although many more songs on Weather build like “Sophie (Sludge)” does, plenty of the album moves in a quieter way. These numbers, like the banjo-aided “Table”, the psychedelic “A Rainbow”, and the mostly-instrumental “Moth”, embrace an acoustic, slowcore-esque sound that reminds me of Dave Scanlon, and the pretty duet “Blue Eve” is almost in Belle & Sebastian territory. Weather is an album to get lost in, and before you know it, “Spoken (Spring)” is drifting off to put a cap on the record. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Leave a comment