Pressing Concerns: The Cowboys, Sonny & the Sunsets, Prewn, Ruth Garbus

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Welcome to a Thursday Pressing Concerns! This is a really cool and good one! New albums from The Cowboys, Sonny & the Sunsets, Prewn, and Ruth Garbus are here on these digital pages! All of these come out tomorrow!

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 Cowboys – Sultan of Squat

Release date: August 25th
Record label: Feel It
Genre: Power pop, garage rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Sour Grapes

Bloomington, Indiana garage punk stalwarts The Cowboys put out five albums between 2015 and 2020, gracing the rosters of garage punk stalwarts Lumpy, HoZac, and Feel It Records, before taking a “brief hiatus” for a couple of years. Although I’d heard some of their past material, I actually fully entered the world of The Cowboys earlier this year through Confirmed Bachelor, the debut album from frontman Keith Harman’s other band, Good Looking Son. As it turns out, Confirmed Bachelor’s jaunty piano-led pop rock is an excellent primer for the sixth Cowboys album and first in three years, Sultan of Squat. Hartman and the band’s reunited original lineup (guitarist Mark McWhirter, bassist Zackery Worcel, and drummer Jordan Tarantino) dive further into polished, gleaming power pop on these thirteen songs, although they do it with an exuberance and energy that reflects their garage rock roots.

The record’s opening title track is a power pop classic, a vintage ode to losing and emptyhandedness (hence the titular “squat”) that lobs baseball organs, “bah bah bah”s, and even a bit of the Star-Spangled Banner at the listener in under two minutes. “Raining Sour Grapes” arguably bests it in the number two slot–it’s a rock and roll rave-up of a song brought over the finish line by a particularly showy performance from Harman. These two are a high bar with which to start the record, but The Cowboys don’t rest on their laurels–the band play on, swinging on chandeliers and twirling microphones all the way through. “Sick High Heels” and “Johnny Drives a Beater” most reflect the garage rock side of the group, but they also offer up everything from the Clean-esque Kiwi pop of “McClure” to the slide guitar-featuring “She’s Not Your Baby Anymore” to the bizarre cavernous cabaret of “Phoebe from HR”. There’s not a dud in Sultan of Squat’s baker’s dozen–nothing but a band launching themselves forward, full steam ahead. (Bandcamp link)

Sonny & the Sunsets – Self Awareness Through Macrame

Release date: August 25th
Record label: Rocks in Your Head
Genre: Folk rock, guitar pop, singer-songwriter
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Shadow

Sonny Smith has been putting out music for over two decades now, with the San Francisco-based musician amassing a fairly large discography under his own name and as the leader of Sonny & the Sunsets. Smith is also the founder of Rocks in Your Head Records (Fake Fruit, Ryan Wong, Galore), under which the newest Sonny & the Sunsets album, Self Awareness Through Macrame, is being released. On his latest album, Smith sounds like somebody who’s been honing his craft for a long time–it’s one thing to be inspired by 60s pop and folk music, Jonathan Richman, and Michael Hurley, but it’s another thing entirely to cut through pastiche and window dressing to deliver music that says and does so much so succinctly in the same way as those sources of inspiration. Yet, this is what Self Awareness Through Macrame’s ten songs achieve.

Self Awareness Through Macrame is staunchly breezy and enjoyable, a West Coast guitar pop record if I’ve ever heard one. Songs like “Waiting” and “Shadow” are just fun-sounding, no matter how one slices it, captivating both in the charming music and Smith’s storytelling. The songs where Smith takes an unambiguous central role give the album a fair bit of personality, from the acoustic slice-of-“City Life” and the amusing attempted meditation of “How to Make a Ceramic Dog” (both of these songs mention fascism–it’s not surprising that a songwriter as observant as Smith wouldn’t have his head in the clouds). Everything on Self Awareness Through Macrame feels layered, despite how casually it’s presented–everything from Smith’s voice rising while singing “It’s alright!” in “Androids” to the arm-swinging reminiscing title line of “Memory Lane” feels like the culmination of something meaningful. As light-sounding as Self Awareness Through Macrame comes off, it has plenty of weight to it. (Bandcamp link)

Prewn – Through the Window

Release date: August 25th
Record label: Exploding in Sound
Genre: Experimental indie rock, slowcore, indie folk
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Sheila

The newest edition to Exploding in Sound Records is Prewn, a Northampton-based four-piece group led by singer and multi-instrumentalist Izzy Hagerup and also featuring bassist Mia Huggs, guitarist Calvin Parent, and drummer Karl Helander. However, Prewn existed as a solo project several years before the current full-band line-up solidified, and everything you hear on Through the Window, Prewn’s debut album, is played by Hagerup herself. These eight songs were recorded in isolation during the pandemic at Kevin McMahon’s Marcata Studio, and the album does sound like Hagerup took advantage of being alone in the studio to flesh these songs out and stretch them to odd places even as they more or less maintain a rock band structure.

The album opens with “Machine”, a sparse acoustic song featuring just Hagerup’s guitar and vocals. It’s a familiar but solid sound, perhaps priming the listener to settle in for a nice, peaceful indie folk singer-songwriter record. The five-minute country rock dirge of “But I Want More” ups the ante but it isn’t until its noisy final section that Through the Window’s true ambitions begin to come into focus. The album only gets odder and rockier from there, with Hagerup building these songs across rickety foundations that wobble but never break. “Alive” probes similar territory to “But I Want More”, although the casualness of the previous track gets replaced with steely determinedness. The record’s second half feels like an even sharper blade, between the thumping, lo-fi post-punk slouch of “Sheila”, the hypnotic “I’m Gonna Fry All the Fish in the Sea”, and closing track “Burning Up”, which mixes the rawness of Hagerup’s primary style with synthetic elements in an intriguing way. It’s a great collection of songs delivered in a package indicating their songwriter already has developed a distinct style. (Bandcamp link)

Ruth Garbus – Alive People

Release date: August 25th
Record label: Orindal
Genre: Folk, singer-songwriter
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Mono No Aware

Brattleboro, Vermont’s Ruth Garbus has released a half-dozen or so albums and EPs since their 2006 debut album, Ruthie’s Requests. Their newest record, Alive People, is their first since 2019’s Kleinmeister, and (reflectent of its title) was record live last year at 10 Forward in Greenfield, Massachusetts. With help from bassist/synth player elie mcafee-hahn, guitarist Julie Bodian, and vocalist Julia Tadlock, Garbus performs a set of slow-moving, synth-and-guitar-led songs containing elements of folk and pop but without cleanly falling into either category. Interspersed between nine “proper” songs, improvisational pieces of music and a brief spoken word piece from Tadlock round out Alive People by particularly capturing the live and public nature of its initial recording.

The first voice heard on Alive People is Tadlock, offering up a six-second quote before Garbus begins the record with a couple of mountains of songs. “Mono No Aware” and “Healthy Gamer” both come out at around the six-minute mark, and each of them contains plenty in which to get lost, even as the music is carried entirely by Garbus’ guitar in the former and mcafee-hahn’s synths in the latter. Garbus and their collaborators float through the rest of the record in a similar manner–the songs become actually a little bit less imposing after those two, but they’re still quite interesting. “Reenchantment of the World” and “Whisper in Steel” aren’t exactly rock songs, but they do show that letting a little more instrumentation through the door doesn’t dampen Garbus’ voice, and the vocal expressivism in “Rubber Tree” is a nice contrast to the subtle delivery of “Mono No Aware”. Still, the album ends with something that doesn’t sound like anything else on the record–the frantic strums and wordless vocals of “Jessie Farms Nothing”. Garbus’ guitar scurries across the stage and their singing, seemingly manipulated by mcafee-hahn, comes to a head before stopping suddenly, ending this document of a performance built to last beyond one night. (Bandcamp link)

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