Pressing Concerns: Deady, Jerry David DeCicca, SIZ, Thank You, I’m Sorry

It’s a Monday! Even though I’m writing this over the weekend, odds are I’m feeling pretty shitty and lethargic this morning and there’s a good chance you are too. Well: these records will wake you up. New albums from Jerry David DeCicca, SIZ, and Thank You, I’m Sorry, along with the debut EP from Deady, await the reader below.

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.

Deady – Deady

Release date: September 29^th
Record label: Never Nervous
Genre: Post-punk, math rock, post-hardcore
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Have a Bad Time

“Do you wanna go out with me tonight / Drink Vodka Sprite, have a bad time?” That’s the question that Mandy Keathley poses in the chorus of “Have a Bad Time”, the fiery piece of garage-punk that opens Deady’s self-titled debut EP (if Miller Lite is your drink of choice, she subs that one in the refrain too). The chaotic, taunting guitar-carnival instrumental fits Keathley’s vocals so well that it’s surprising to learn that she was actually the last member to join the five-piece, Louisville-centered Deady; guitarists Sam Goblin (of Mister Goblin and Two Inch Astronaut) and Chyppe Crosby recruited rhythm section Clayton Ray (bass) and KJ Bechtloff (drums) before roping her in as a vocalist. Thanks to my undying affection for all things Mister Goblin, I’ve been on the Deady train for a few months now; in their previous appearances on Rosy Overdrive, I’ve described their music as weirdo, blaring, catchy egg punk, a potent Brainiac-ian mix of post-punk and post-hardcore noisiness. The Deady cassette, which collects their three singles and three previously-unheard songs, is the best-case scenario for a brief debut–it captures what the band do best and hints at where more long-form Deady material might go.  

Deady had already shown a bit of range on the EP’s three advance singles–“Eat Sleep”, my favorite of the three, is the immediate piece of twisted new-wave-punk, debut single “Knock” is a little more D.C.-cruising, marked by a sharp, repetitive guitar riff, and “Uneeda”, which I covered pretty extensively when I premiered it last month, is the band at their noise rock heaviest. The new material more than holds its own against these singles, with “Have a Bad Time” in particular being a perfect opening track and perhaps even beating “Eat Sleep” at its own topsy-turvy game. What the other two tracks lack in collar-grabbing they make up for in uniqueness; the slick alt-rock of “End of the World” is Deady at their most polished, and “Sad Sack” is the biggest surprise on the EP, finding the band floating into a minimalist, percussionless piece of slowcore-y indie rock. When it’s all said and done, the fifteen minutes of Deady are comprised of one of the most exciting and fully-formed debuts of the year. (Bandcamp link)

Jerry David DeCicca – New Shadows

Release date: September 29^th
Record label: Bwatue
Genre: Singer-songwriter, experimental rock, folk, synthpop, soft rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Walking Stick

From somewhere outside of San Antonio comes New Shadows, the fifth solo album from lifer Jerry David DeCicca. In the 2000s and early 2010s, DeCicca co-led the Columbus folk rock group The Black Swans, releasing five full-lengths as part of that band. At some point in the past decade, DeCicca moved to Bulverde, Texas and began a solo career that has become just as substantial as the previous chapter in his music career. Perhaps reflecting this long-term experience in indie music, he’s been able to put together an all-star cast of musicians on his newest album, which features contributions from (among many others) David Hidalgo and Steve Berlin of Los Lobos, Tortoise’s Jeff Parker, and Rosali Middleman. One might go into a singer-songwriter record from Texas featuring several folk and roots rock musicians with a certain preconceived notion of how it might sound, but New Shadows declines to be so straightforward. The album utilizes a prominent horn section, synthesizers, and programmed drums in a genre-resistant way that owes as much to soft rock, orchestral pop, and sophisti-pop as it does to folk and country music.

The opening title track deploys Berlin’s baritone saxophone, Parker’s 80s-indebted guitar parts, Don Cento’s festering synths, and some Electric Light Orchestra-esque vocoder treatment to DeCicca’s voice–it’s a dark piece of unclassifiable rock music that indicates that just about anything can happen on this album. The first half of New Shadows brings us the polished indie pop of “Manzanita Bay” (featuring excellent backing vocals from Middleman) and a pair of dreamy ballads that form the album’s core in “Angelina” and “These Blues”. As adventurous as this record can be, DiCicca is at the center of things when it’s the most important–the straightforward lyrics to “When You Needed My Help” (“…I wasn’t around”) and “Walking Stick” (“You’ve got suction cups on your feet / You reproduce parthenogenetically”) are emphasized, rather than obscured, by the clarinet in the former and the reverb-y piano of the latter. New Shadows is a skilled record–subtle but pop-friendly, varied but coherent. (Bandcamp link)

SIZ – Blind

Release date: September 29^th
Record label: Flippin’ Freaks/Howlin’ Banana
Genre: Fuzz rock, garage rock, grunge, psychedelic rock, shoegaze
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Strange Loop

Bordeaux, France fuzz rockers SIZ are led by Sylvain Palis, a member of “the Flippin’ Freaks collective” and contributor to music from labelmates TH Da Freak, among others. As a resident of a country that perhaps doesn’t have the largest history of guitar-based indie rock, Palis has the interesting perspective of taking in several distinct genres as one unit. An indie rocker growing up in the United States or the United Kingdom might view shoegaze, grunge, garage rock, and psychedelic rock as distinct, separate units, but Palis seems to have devoured them all equally (an incomplete list of bands who appear in SIZ’s bio: Osees, Nirvana, What Moon Things, Hotline TNT, My Bloody Valentine, Ovlov, Jagwar Ma). The second SIZ album, Blind, ends up sounding like a huge fuzz rock album with shoegaze wall-of-sound guitars and a bleak, depressive streak that pulls equally from 90s underground indie rock and more well-known grunge bands.

Although SIZ are reaching all across rock music’s history, they put together a nicely-blended stew of heavy rock music on Blind. The smoking riff that opens “It’s Over” gives way to a biting garage punk core, the band do their best shoegaze Alice in Chains impression on “Eyes Don’t Lie”, and Palis delivers a surprisingly emotional vocal performance over the fuzzy mid-tempo “Illuminated”. All these songs nevertheless fit together, as do the rest of the tracks–the zippy Ovlov fuzz-punk of “Ooook” gives way to the Ty Segall glam-stomp of “These Questions”, and the garage-y noise punk of “100% Toxic Waste” segues nicely into the hypnotic psych-fuzz of “Strange Loop”. The band (Palis, his brother Thoineau on guitar, Quentin Plantier on drums, and Rémi Lemoine on bass) deserve some recognition for pounding away as uniformly fiercely as they do throughout Blind; their unflagging energy is as much a reason for the record’s success as anything else. (Bandcamp link)

Thank You, I’m Sorry – Growing in Strange Places

Release date: September 29^th
Record label: Count Your Lucky Stars
Genre: Emo-pop, pop punk, synthpop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Autonomy Shop

Thank You, I’m Sorry began as the solo acoustic emo-folk project of singer-songwriter Lleen Dow, but transformed into a sturdy emo-pop-punk group with the release of 2020’s I’m Glad We’re Friends. Dow spent the three years in between the second and third Thank You, I’m Sorry albums releasing music under their own name, putting out an EP and a few singles that were more indebted to synthpop than any of their band’s past music. Now reunited with the band (bassist Bee Schreiner, drummer Sage Livergood, and guitarist Abe Anderson), Thank You, I’m Sorry has leveled up as a whole, as evidenced by what they’ve put into Growing in Strange Places. It’s not a rejection of the sound of I’m Glad We’re Friends so much as an expansion of it–the relatively barebones nature of that record gives way to a polished and busy feeling here, with the band incorporating synths, pop music, and mid-tempo indie rock while keeping one foot firmly placed in punk and emo.

Growing in Strange Places is eager to show off its new stripes from the get-go–opening track “Your Backyard” fakes an acoustic, lo-fi start before blooming into wide-eyed, crescendoing emo-indie-rock, single “Autonomy Shop” flings thundering pop punk guitar riffs and a brisk rhythm section at the listener after its synth-hinting intro, and “Brain Empty” dives head-first into synth-y electro-pop, pulling from a completely different bag of tricks. Thank You, I’m Sorry break out their synthpop side of them a few more times on the record (most notably on bummer-pop highlight “Lleeny Hut Jr.”), but lest you’re worried the synths have softened them up, the dramatic “Mirror”, the seething “Head Climbing”, and the wall-of-fuzz that ends the slowcore-ish “Traincar” demonstrate that the band are still very much a rock group (and besides, the “soft”est song on the album, “Parking Lots”, is a primarily acoustic guitar-based piece of folk-pop. And I’m nowhere near jaded enough to dislike that one). The amount of stuff that Thank You, I’m Sorry throw at the wall over the course of Growing in Strange Places is what helps this record stand out, and how enjoyable it is to listen to them do it is what keeps me going back to it. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

• Sarah Coolidge – Call Me When You Get There
• Single Bullet Theory – c. ‘79 EP
• Connie Lovatt – Coconut Mirror
• Maria Elena Silva – Dulce
• Alexalone – Alexalone Technical Research
• Quitter – Monument Road
• Blue Dolphin – Robert’s Lafitte
• Perfume USA – Kiss It Goodbye EP
• The Atom Age – The Atom Age
• Friendship Commanders – MASS
• How I Became Invisible – Better, or the Next Best Thing
• As a Sketch Pad – As a Sketch Pad
• The Subjunctives – Let’s Try This Again
• The Happy Somethings – Unhinged EP
• Pulses. – It Wasn’t Supposed to Be Like This
• Fearing – Destroyer
• Human Colonies – Kintsukuroi
• The Downstrokes – This Close to Vertigo
• Bombino – Sahel
• Lorelle Meets the Obsolete – Remezcla EP
• Oliver Beardmore – Tailspin EP
• Grails – Anches En Maat
• CHAI – CHAI
• Broken Cloud Machine – No Parachute
• The Vaughns – Egg Everything