Pressing Concerns: Perennial, Ironic Hill, Corker, The Natvral

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Hello, readers! Today is the Thursday edition of Pressing Concerns, and this one’s got four records that come out tomorrow for you to get extremely excited about–we’re talking about new albums from Ironic Hill, Corker, and The Natvral, and a new EP from Perennial. If you missed the Monday edition of Pressing Concerns, which covered new records from Helpful People, Ovef Ow, Wandering Years, and Dabda, 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.

Perennial – The Leaves of Autumn Symmetry

Release date: September 1st
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Post-hardcore, art punk, dance punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Hippolyta!

Like many (but not nearly enough) others, my introduction to Perennial was last year’s In the Midnight Hour, an excellent art punk album that ended up being one of my favorites of 2022. It’s an “a-ha moment” record, zeroing in on a relatively forgotten time in indie rock history two decades ago when bands were tossing fiery garage rock, thrashing post-hardcore, and sassy dance punk together and making aural fireworks. In the Midnight Hour balanced the raw kinetic energy of the trio (vocalist/multi-instrumentalists Chelsey Hahn and Chad Jewett plus drummer Wil Mulhern) with a full, clear recording produced by The World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die’s Chris Teti–a combination so successful that Perennial decided to revisit some of their earlier material with the same setup. The Leaves of Autumn Symmetry is a five-song EP containing “reworkings” of select songs from their 2017 self-recorded debut, The Symmetry of Autumn Leaves.

Since I came to Perennial before its time, I wasn’t familiar with the original versions of these songs beforehand, but listening back to them, I can say that the band keep their initial structures fairly intact on the new recordings. The Leaves of Autumn Symmetry, then, seems to exist to both give the band a chance to redo these songs after growing as a group, and to shine a light on their lesser-known material with the help of Teti’s production. It succeeds on both counts–Perennial have clearly taken leaps forward since 2017, and it comes through on these spirited, full-steam-ahead readings (a revolution that is again aided by the record’s clear sound). The band leaves a trail of destruction in under ten minutes–several songs on here, most notably the no-fat chant-punk of “Hippolyta!” and the scorching “Dissolver”, would’ve been right at home on In the Midnight Hour. The post-hardcore screaming of “Fauves” is perhaps more reflective of the early Perennial, but rather than drop it in the re-recording, the band embrace it and make it work–and even though they’ve only got a short amount of time to work with, they still start off the one-minute “The Leaves of Autumn Symmetry” with an intro that ends up taking about half the song. Perennial continues to impress me with the amount of stuff they jam into their relatively short records–as a stopgap between In the Midnight Hour and their in-progress third album, it more than provides enough. (Bandcamp link)

Ironic Hill – Ironic Hill

Release date: September 1st
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Lo-fi indie pop, singer-songwriter
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Wish

Ironic Hill is an anonymous United Kingdom-based singer-songwriter who’s been steadily releasing singles for the majority of 2023. This has culminated in the first collection of Ironic Hill’s music, a self-titled cassette featuring ten examples of the songwriter’s humble, no-frills, but nevertheless quite compelling take on guitar pop music. The songs on Ironic Hill are recorded about as barebones as something that could conceivably be described as “pop music” can be, the titles are all one-word, and both the lyrics and their vocal delivery feel stream-of-consciousness, like (to use an actually fitting cliche) diary entries set to music. Ironic Hill sounds like the result of someone working things out in real time, and the person behind it is a compelling enough writer to let this process lead an entire record and have it be a success. 

Uncertainty is a theme throughout Ironic Hill, from the various “maybe”s in closing track “Fine” to the thought of “Maybe it’s okay to guess” in “Easy” to the final couplet of “Wish”, in which the singer reflects on his dreams without being able to decide if he should let them go or not. Embracing the wavering in a climate that increasingly demands certainty and confidence in everything one says and does is exciting in its own way–Ironic Hill offers up the contradictions inherent to a wandering mind and declines to neatly wrap them up for the listener. Ironic Hill is a personal writer (not just of music) who sings a song about how “maybe it’s better to repress” (“Easy”), and of the instrumental track “None”, he writes “sometimes I just don’t want to say anything”. The observations of Ironic Hill aren’t “behind the curtain” so much as the result of an absence of one–when the narrator sings “I don’t know why I feel this way / So don’t ask me to explain,” in “Nothing”, we don’t learn what’s going on, just that he’s thinking about what’s going on. This continues all the way to the end of Ironic Hill. The last line in “Easy” is “Maybe I need to end what I’ve begun”–it has the shape of a “normal” closing line, but nothing has actually ended–it’s just a thought drifting through Ironic Hill’s mind. (Bandcamp link)

Corker – Falser Truths

Release date: September 1st
Record label: Feel It/Future Shock/Urticaria
Genre: Noise rock, post-punk
Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital
Pull Track: The Cold Air

Another week, another exciting new garage punk group from Cincinnati. This one, Corker, is not a completely new face–they debuted on Future Shock (the label at the epicenter of the city’s burgeoning scene) with 2021’s A Bell That Seems to Mourn EP, and they partnered with Feel It (the label who’s recently taken to shining a larger spotlight on said scene since relocating there) for last year’s “Lice” single. The quartet of vocalist/guitarist Luke Corvette, guitarist/synth player Cole Gilfilen, bassist/synth player Ryan Sennett, and drummer Alex Easterday have thus been building up to their full-length debut for a couple years now, and with Falser Truths, they deliver an excellent document of underground rock and roll music. While there are certainly traces of fellow Cincy bands like the dubby, deconstructed post-punk of The Drin or the basement-rock coldwave of Crime of Passing, Falser Truths owes just as much to blunt noise rock as the art punk of their peers.

Corker come out swinging with the pummeling “The Cold Air”, with a frantic drumbeat anchoring a just-as-frantic performance from the rest of the band that builds to a controlled chaotic conclusion, while “Anomie” and “Edge of Teeth” both contain plenty of bite as well in the form of jagged guitar lines and distorted, prominent basslines. Starting with “Seeking, Marching”, Corker start to populate their version of punk rock with a bit more nuance–both it and the two songs immediately after it show a hint of restraint, rocking out but not just rushing to the finish line. Closing Falser Truths with the seven-minute “Sour Candy” is their boldest choice, but one that pays off, because that song–a post-punk garage tune that works itself up into a squall of pounding, hailing noise as it draws to a close in its final minute or so–is a capstone track if I’ve ever heard one. (Bandcamp link)

The Natvral – Summer of No Light

Release date: September 1st
Record label: Dirty Bingo
Genre: Folk rock, alt-country, country rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Carolina

Kip Berman is and probably always will be most famous for fronting The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, the New York fuzz-dream-pop group that put out four records from 2009 to 2017 before calling it quits. Over the past couple of years, however, Berman has reinvented himself as The Natvral, a project that leans into roots rock, folk rock, and Americana. The Natvral’s first album, 2021’s Tethers, was a perfectly fine record, but their sophomore album, Summer of No Light, feels like a step forward for Berman. It’s the sound of Berman finding his footing and settling in comfortably in his new sound–one that’s in the realm of “alt-country” and is plenty folky, sure, but also one cognizant of rock and roll and guitar pop in a way reminiscent of troubadours like Daniel Romano and Hiss Golden Messenger. 

Although it was written under the shadow of the pandemic and the album title references the 1816 “year without a summer”, Summer of No Light is the most spirited and freewheeling that The Natvral have sounded yet. “Lucifer’s Glory” and “Carolina” come storming right out of the gate, electric-sounding pieces of power-pop-country-folk that announce that Berman’s really “hit on” something with this combination. The handclap-aided “Summer of Hell” is maybe a little more subtle, but it’s just as catchy (if not more so), and the swinging “A Glass of Laughter”, the cruising “Your Temperate Ways”, and the smooth “Wait for Me” keep the record’s energy up throughout its middle and back half. Even the slower songs on Summer of No Light are boosted by the band’s energy–“The Stillness” and “Wintergreen” both creep past five minutes, but contain plenty of exciting rock moments as they expand from their relatively quiet beginnings. The takeaway from Summer of No Light seems to be that if something does blot out the sun, The Natvral will go dancing in the dark. (Bandcamp link)

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