Pressing Concerns: William Matheny, Perfect Angel at Heaven, Jason Allen Millard, Sundays & Cybele

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Welcome, friends, to a Monday Pressing Concerns. It’s a good one! We’ve got new albums from William Matheny and Jason Allen Millard, a new EP from Perfect Angel at Heaven, and a cassette reissue of a decade-old Sundays & Cybele album to discuss today.

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William Matheny – That Grand, Old Feeling

Release date: August 4th
Record label: Hickman Holler
Genre: Alt-country, singer-songwriter
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Stranger’s Voice

The church of William Matheny is made up of drifters, prodigal sons, and people who will have the money next week, they swear. It meets every day at truck stops and roadside crosses, reading scripture scrawled on motel notepads and pens. Lent is a cross-country road trip on an empty stomach, while hazy Biblical cities float by the tour van’s passenger window. Six years after his last full-length album, West Virginia’s William Matheny has returned with a collection of songs that drip with these images and hallmarks as much as ever. Matheny has not reinvented his sound on That Grand, Old Feeling; if you liked the sharp alt-country tunes of his last album, 2017’s, Strange Constellation, you won’t be disappointed in these nine songs. Even so, there’s a difference in the two albums–Strange Constellations jumped around excitedly in its storytelling and music, while That Grand, Old Feeling feels like one long exhale. It takes a step back from the action and the movement–not to abandon it, to be clear, but to get a good look at where it has led its various narrators.

The traveling of That Grand, Old Feeling is not aimless, although it might look that way to one who doesn’t understand Matheny’s goal–he’s bent on capturing the feeling that the record’s title describes, and upon which its title track expands. That Grand, Old Feeling begins with Matheny on the cusp of something in “Late Blooming Forever” (“I think it’s gonna happen any day”)–with self-transformation within arm’s reach. Maybe he reaches it with the aid of “bossa nova and Bud Light lime” in “Bird of Youth”. But even if he’s able to grab onto it, there’s still the problem of holding onto it, trying to fight against the tide of “Heartless People” (a song aided greatly by its go-all-the-way heartland rock instrumental). 

Matheny and his band certainly have range, but That Grand, Old Feeling is particularly sharp at making everything sound like part of the whole–technically, the earnest country of “If You Could Only See Me Now”, the adderall-addled sin-rocker “Christian Name”, and the piano hymn “Down at the Hotel Canfield” are all pretty different, but there’s no bumps on the connector roads between them. The sharp, energetic music to closing track “Stranger’s Voice” almost obscures the weariness that Matheny displays throughout the song– “A man can only stay so strong so long,” he sings. Matheny and his band hold it all together for a whole album; maybe there’ll be some time to rest before the next hole-in-the-wall. (Bandcamp link)

Perfect Angel at Heaven – Imploder

Release date: August 11th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: 90s indie rock, noise rock, no wave
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Imploder

Back in January, in the first Pressing Concerns of 2023, I wrote about Perfect Angel at Heaven’s self-titled debut EP. With Perfect Angel at Heaven, the Indianapolis trio of vocalist/guitarist Casey Noonan, bassist Alex Grove, and drummer Daniel Thacker honed in on a sound that balanced clarity and noisiness, pulling from no wave, thorny indie rock, and post-punk to make guitar music with a distinct perspective. Striking while the iron is hot, Perfect Angel at Heaven’s second EP adds five original songs and a cover to the band’s repertoire. Imploder continues to explore similar sonic territory as their first record, although there is a slight but noticeable turn towards cleaning up some of the extended noisiness and focusing a little more intently on melody in these half-dozen songs.

Noonan’s vocals, quite expressive and crystal-clear throughout the EP, continue to be a key aspect of Perfect Angel at Heaven’s sound. Noonan’s voice is the defining feature of “Pastoral” and “Desire’s Opening”, although the increasing importance of the band’s rhythm section shouldn’t be overlooked in these songs, either. On “Whiter Than a Bathtub”, the trio indulge in anti-rock experimentation, but then immediately follow it up with the title track, a curiously captivating Noonan/Grove duet that is the band’s hardest turn into pop-friendly territory thus far. However, they can still conduct a noisy rock-and-roll rave-up when the moment calls for it, as the EP’s closing, fairly faithful cover of Sonic Youth’s “Catholic Block” demonstrates (although the trio flirt with flying too close to the sun by choosing their most obvious influence to cover, their take on the song gets by on pure enthusiasm). Imploder continues to develop the world of Perfect Angel at Heaven, and it’s a promising and intriguing one. (Bandcamp link)

Jason Allen Millard – The Truth Is Always Changing

Release date: July 19th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Folk, country, lo-fi, singer-songwriter
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Way Out and Down the Road

I hadn’t heard of Jason Allen Millard until recently, but the Minneapolis musician has apparently been playing in bands around the Twin Cities for quite a while now. Away from rock-and-roll, however, Millard has concurrently built up a solo discography of experimental folk music, releasing a few records where he’d take acoustic songs and add to or just flat-out deconstruct them with synths and other editing tricks. Millard’s latest solo album, The Truth Is Always Changing, however, is just about entirely comprised of the singer-songwriter’s voice, guitar, and some background white noise–originally intended as demos, Millard decided that what he’d recorded stood well on its own.

Millard’s assessment is correct–The Truth Is Always Changing has a compelling haunted and dug-up quality to it, pleasingly mirroring his stated influence of Folkways’ Anthology of American Folk Music (it also reminds me of the scorched blues of Spencer Dobbs’ If the Moon Don’t Turn Its Back on You). The album opens slowly and deliberately with “Strung Up Like a Deer”, the fuzzy quality of Millard’s voice and guitar only enhancing the recording. “Way Out and Down the Road” takes The Truth Is Always Changing to a dark place early on with its harrowing take on the “childhood friend who’s slowly faded from one’s life” story. The album finds Millard tilting towards “enjoyable folk troubadour” with “Don’t Look into the Sky” and a cover of “Wasn’t Born to Follow”, although other moments on the record (the echoing title track, the discordant “Evening Raag for Steel and Amp Hum”, and the corrupted “Shake Loose”) display Millard’s experimentalist streak, alive and well. With The Truth Is Always Changing, Millard has put together an album intimate-sounding enough that one wonders if other people were meant to hear it, but fascinating enough to make one glad it’s out there in the world nonetheless. (Bandcamp link)

Sundays & Cybele – Tsubouchi (Reissue)

Release date: August 1st
Record label: Eye Vybe
Genre: Psychedelic rock, psychedelic folk, baroque pop
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Medicine Man (Cybernetic Animism)

Chicago’s Eye Vybe Records is an under-the-radar but prolific imprint that has put out over a hundred records over the past thirteen years. For the second half of its existence, Eye Vybe’s focus has shifted towards Japanese experimental and psychedelic music, and over the past month they’ve crossed the hundred-releases threshold with a trio of such albums–Mitsuru Tabata’s Musica Non Grata, Acid Mothers Guru Guru’s Three Islands, and this one, a reissue of Sundays & Cybele’s Tsubouchi. Sundays & Cybele (led by Kazuo Tsubouchi, the band’s only consistent member) have been putting out records at a steady clip for most of this century; Tsubouchi originally came out on CD in 2014 and is now available on cassette through Eye Vybe.

On Tsubouchi, Sundays & Cybele are a psychedelic band of several stripes–heavy but melodic, overwhelming but friendly. Although the album opens with the particularly busy sensory overload of “Medicine Man (Cybernetic Animism)”, the bells and whistles are kept in relative check, and as a whole, Tsubouchi keeps the front half of the record pretty accessible. Tsubouchi offers up the fluttering baroque pop of “R.U.I.N.” and the bass-driven, slightly offbeat “Marginal Man” immediately afterward, and the gorgeous pastoral 60s folk-pop of “Working Days” and its dreamy counterpart “Sleeping Days” take up the album’s midsection. Sundays & Cybele save their wild psychedelic rock for the second side, which is bookended by the twin seven-minute journeys of “Seven Mornings” and “Paradise Lost (Inside O = Outside 0)”–the freewheeling former track has its charms, but I’m more drawn to the laser-focused latter one. It’s chaotic, but, like the rest of Tsubouchi, it’s an orchestrated chaos. (Bandcamp link)

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