Pressing Concerns: Curling, Hurry, Sargasso, Kolb

It’s a Thursday, which means that tomorrow is Friday, which means that these four records in this edition of Pressing Concerns will be out in one day! This is a good one, too, even graded on our high curve. Today, we’re looking at new albums from Curling, Hurry, and Sargasso, and a new EP from Kolb. If you missed Monday’s post (featuring Annie Hart, Maple Stave, Podcasts, and Shredded Sun), check that one out too.

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.

Curling – No Guitar

Release date: August 11^th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Prog-pop, power pop, math rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Shamble

I first discovered Berkeley/Tokyo’s Curling through their 2018 sophomore album, Definitely Band, a fairly unclassifiable “math rock” album featuring plenty of intriguing, fractured pop songs from the songwriting duo of Jojo Brandel and Bernie Gelman. Listening to it now, Definitely Band still sounds just as fresh as it when it was brand new–which is a good thing, since we didn’t get any new music from Curling for the next half-decade. However, Curling have now returned with No Guitar, an incredibly strong third album that takes a confident leap forward in a way suggesting that Brandel and Gelman took full advantage of the relatively long gap between records. No Guitar was assembled “bit by bit” over the past five years, as the Pacific Ocean-separated Brandel and Gelman slowly but surely built an album that reflects their love of vintage 60s-esque, heavily-tinkered-with studio pop rock, without straying too far from the sound of their previous music. What Curling end up with is a unique combination of Game Theory, XTC, Jon Brion, progressive pop, power pop, and math rock (with, yes, a little bit of emo in there too).

Not only does No Guitar corral a disparate collection of influences enthusiastically and cleanly, it does so in an orchestrated manner that causes the album to ebb and flow in the same way their multi-part pop songs do. At the beginning, Brandel, Gelman and drummer Kynwyn Sterling all co-anchor a somewhat offbeat but still incredibly catchy power pop group–once “Shamble” kicks in, everyone is working in lockstep to land hooks, while the appropriately-titled “Pastoral” is just as deft at it while doing so in a laid-back fashion. Although “Pop Song” eventually blooms into what its title describes, its acoustic-based first half foreshadows the Curling of the center of No Guitar–a haunted, empty-space-embracing emo-folk-math band. The stretch from “Reflector Mage” to “Majesty” reflects this sudden but skilled turn–with the string-aided melody of the latter of the three, the connective tissue between this and the previous stretch of songs shows itself. The second half of the record rides a similar wave, with the jangly “Hi Elixir” and the heavy “Patience” building No Guitar up before drifting off into the ether with “Husk”, “Hotel”, and the title track. Although Brandel and Gelman’s influences are apparent in their work, they’ve put together a record that transcends any one genre movement and stands completely alone in 2023 with No Guitar. (Bandcamp link)

Hurry – Don’t Look Back

Release date: August 11^th
Record label: Lame-O
Genre: Jangle pop, indie pop, power pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Didn’t Have to Try

Over the past decade, Hurry’s Matt Scottoline has established himself as one of the best modern power pop songwriters. It started in 2012’s self-titled Hurry debut, when “power pop” was far off indie rock’s radar, and as the genre began experiencing its recent revival, Scottoline was putting out consistently great records like 2018’s Every Little Thought and 2021’s Fake Ideas that landed him squarely in the middle of a new old movement. Don’t Look Back is the fifth Hurry album, and it contains plenty of what one has come to expect from Scottoline–heart-on-sleeve, bittersweet melodies, gorgeous guitar work, middling tempos and four-minute runtimes galore, and, of course, undeniable hooks. Perhaps appropriate given the record’s contradictory title (which violates its own command by being a Teenage Fanclub reference), Don’t Look Back is both a subtle record and an immediate one. Scottoline doesn’t favor the louder, more distorted end of the power pop spectrum, instead trending towards intricate, deliberate song structure–but never at the expense of passing up an excellent chorus (it reminds me more than a little bit of Steve Marino’s recent Too Late to Start Again, another record with a notable Teenage Fanclub bent).

To some bands, the “power” in power pop is perhaps the deployment of Blue Album-esque guitar fuzz to punch up the “pop” part–to Hurry, the “power” of power pop is, I think, a doubling down on the strength of the “pop” aspect. The ten songs of Don’t Look Back don’t go out of their way to differentiate themselves from one another, but they all reveal themselves distinct creatures in their own way. Some of the record embraces the electric guitar a little more than the rest of the album, from mid-record highlight “Something More” to the bouncy “No Patience”, although not in a way that distracts from Scottoline’s vocal melodies. The slow-moving, slow-revealing brilliance of “Beggin’ for You” and the horn-aided “Parallel Haunting” contain most of the same ingredients as the two aforementioned songs, but shift the emphasis just a little bit to come off as more big picture-embracing creations. Don’t Look Back is marked by a belief in pop music on its own–the relative lack of bells and whistles means that something different from the record will bubble to the surface for me on each listen. Whether it’s the gorgeous earnestness of the chorus of “Little Brain” or the tension-release final song “The Punchline”, Don’t Look Back is full of tracks built to last for the long haul. (Bandcamp link)

Sargasso – Further Away

Release date: August 11^th
Record label: Dead Definition
Genre: Folk rock, indie folk
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Emily

Sargasso are a four-piece band made up of Maria Campos Saadi, Noah Goodman, Thomas Hagen and Soledad Tejada, who all came together in New Haven in 2017. The band has been steadily putting out music since their inception, even after the members have become split between New York, Philadelphia, and Connecticut, with their debut full-length As It Surfaces to Meet Me coming out in 2021. Further Away, released by Dead Definition (Ther, The Human Fly, Sadurn) is the second Sargasso album–and quite possibly the final one, as three of the band’s members plan to move out of the United States not long after its release. Although I hadn’t heard of Sargasso before Further Away, I can say after spending some time with the album that something very real would be lost with the demise of this band–they’re a truly collaborative group, with all four members singing and contributing songwriting in a particularly balanced-feeling way.

With its acoustic, folk-inspired instrumentation, hints of bossa nova, and pop structures, Further Away is a gentle-sounding record, but it’s never boring–it contains far too many ideas and too much energy across its thirteen tracks to fall into any potential “easy listening” pitfalls. The extraordinarily friendly, almost campfire-ready folk rock of “Emily” kicks off the album, a mode that Sargasso continue to excel at (see “How to Reach Me”). “Teardrops in the Ocean” incorporates synths and electronic elements into their sound seamlessly, while quieter songs like “Witty Future Diss” and “Sleep/Fallacy” show the band stretching out and letting the songs take their time. The synth-driven future pop of “Embers” and the dreamy jangle of “If I Could” mark the highlights of Further Away’s second half, but Sargasso also take take the record’s homestretch as a chance to strip things down with the back-to-back “Sun So Low” and “Beauty Is Free”. Sargasso close things out with the ambient improvisation of “Narrows”, disappearing quietly in a haze of piano flourishes–but not before making one last mark. (Bandcamp link)

Kolb – Power of Thought

Release date: August 11^th
Record label: Ramp Local
Genre: Indie pop, jazz-pop
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Power of Thought

Water from Your Eyes touring member Mike Kolb has been releasing music under his last name for a while now, a prolific streak that culminated with last year’s Tyrannical Vibes, an album that saw Kolb embracing collaboration in service of his welcoming but smart pop music. Kolb is back less than a year after Tyrannical Vibes with the six-song Power of Thought EP, and while Kolb sings lead vocals on every song here (unlike on his last album), in some ways his newest record is his most collaborative yet. While Kolb recorded most of the instrumentation on Tyrannical Vibes himself, Power of Thought was taped reel-to-reel with a live band, giving these half dozen songs a loose energy that counterbalances Kolb’s tight melodies and composition.

The Kolb of Tyrannical Vibes hopped around quite a bit genre-wise–on Power of Thought, he and his band (featuring Palm’s Hugo Stanley on drums, among others) zero in on a breezy jazz-pop sound. The contributions of clarinetist Hillai Govreen (felt from instrumental opening track “The Key” on forward) certainly aid this feeling, although everything from Kolb and Eamonn Wilcox’s guitar chords to the keyboards and microkorg of Kolb and Jack Sanders works towards it. Kolb’s expressive falsetto is on full display here and he acquits himself nicely, selling the jazz-rock of the title track, the synth blast of “Mighty Fine”, and the slick ballad “Dark and Light” in equal measure. Still, the opening and closing instrumental tracks (prominently featuring Govreen’s clarinet, but not in a way that completely overshadows the rest of the players) serve as reminders that “Kolb” is more than just its namesake figure on Power of Thought. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

• Sarah Shannon – Demo 98 EP
• Half Human – Intelligent Design
• Dippers – Clastic Rock
• The Reds, Pinks & Purples – Inner Richmond
• Poindexter – Treats
• Spiral Dub – Spiral Dub
• Abel – Leave You Hanging EP
• No Lonesome – Flowers Recomposing
• Treasure Fleet – American Sunshine
• Jer – Jer
• Stolen Jars – Stolen Jars
• Weltraumrauschen – Unreleased Uncertainty
• Brian Lopez – Tidal
• Jordi – Sorry I’m Late
• dreamTX – Living in Memory of Something Sweet
• We. – Blursed. EP
• Geoff Berner – 7 Plague Songs
• Combo Move – Combo Move
• Dustin Wong – Perpetual Morphosis
• Least – Sitting in the Best Light EP
• I Am a Rocketship – La Cruella
• Small Paul – Come Alive & Live Again
• The Shivas – Covers Vol. 2 EP
• Girl Ray – Prestige
• Holy Wave – Five of Cups