Pressing Concerns: Promiseland BBQ, Noah Roth, Gold Dime, Victory Peach

Welcome to another Tuesday Pressing Concerns! There’s some really great under-the-radar stuff in this one (but isn’t there always?). Today looks at new albums from Promiseland BBQ, Noah Roth, and Gold Dime, and a new EP from Victory Peach. If you missed yesterday’s post, featuring records from Fox Japan, Hard Copy, Sexores, and Fig by Four, 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.

Promiseland BBQ – Murder in the Friendly City

Release date: October 6^th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Singer-songwriter, folk rock, alt-country
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Murder in the Friendly City

Promiseland BBQ is the solo project of Ross Weidman, a singer-songwriter who splits time between Morgantown, West Virginia (his hometown, as well as where he went to college and where he drummed in the band Mother of Earl) and Pasadena, California (where he currently works as an engineer for NASA and plays drums for hire). The debut Promiseland BBQ album, Murder in the Friendly City, took shape in late 2021 and early 2022–Weidman was home for a two month period, spending time with his family as his mother passed away after a yearslong battle with breast and brain cancer. For the most part, Murder in the Friendly City is not directly about the death of Weidman’s mother, but rather, it’s a perceptive, multi-faceted, and deep exploration of both her and Weidman’s upbringings and places of origin that feels like it was written by someone in a state of heightened sensitivity. The final product is a record that takes inspiration from decades of bedroom-recorded rock music (from the storytelling of Springsteen’s Nebraska to Mac Demarco’s production values) in order to make an entirely unique statement.

Wheeling, West Virginia, the original home of both of Weidman’s parents, is nicknamed the “Friendly City”. It is located in the state’s northern panhandle, along the Ohio River, a hair’s breadth from both the Buckeye State and Pennsylvania. Like a lot of places in the greater Rust Belt, it was at its largest in the first half of the twentieth century–it was a transportation and manufacturing hub, and with that came a thriving organized crime scene. The album’s title comes from a recollection of a book Weidman’s father was reading (Murder Never Dies: Crime and Corruption in the Friendly City by George Sidiropolis). This eye-popping aspect of Wheeling serves well as the title of the record, but it’s just one of many from which Weidman pulls for the sketches that appear in these twelve songs. Mob boss “Big Bill” Lias leers over the opening, shambling retro-rock of the title track and the hushed “The Flood”, but Weidman explores a more honest working class (of varying stripes) in “Steel Mill” and “Linda in the Cathouse”, and the run-down ennui of songs like “Wheeling Feeling” and “The Romantic Way” perhaps cut a little close to the bone. The final song on Murder in the Friendly City is the sparse acoustic folk of “I Remember Your Name”, the one song that explicitly addresses Weidman’s late mother. “No words I can say, no song I can sing to even carry your name / The beautiful melody ain’t half as sweet as the memory,” Weidman confesses, even as the rest of the album makes clear that the two are forever linked. (Bandcamp link)

Noah Roth – Florida

Release date: October 6^th
Record label: Rocket to Heaven
Genre: Singer-songwriter, folk
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Vice Grip

This is the third Noah Roth solo album I’ve written about in the span of twelve months. Last September’s Breakfast of Champions was the product of several years of recording and studio finessing that reflected Roth’s love of Wilco-esque probing folk rock; this June, they put out the Don’t Forget to Remember cassette, a collection of songs embracing Roth’s lo-fi, noisy, and experimental sides that was largely put together over a three-week period. And then we have Florida, quietly self-released on a Bandcamp Friday in October with no advance singles. Similarly to Don’t Forget to Remember, Florida was recorded almost entirely by Roth alone over a short period of time in a location other than their current home (between July 12th and July 18th of this year in Hollywood, Florida), but (perhaps out of necessity of equipment) this one is almost entirely drawn from Roth’s vocals and an acoustic guitar (other than a little bit of guitar overdub and couple of guest vocals from their Mt. Worry/Hell Trash bandmate Rowan Horton).

Writing about These Kinds of albums invites all sorts of cliches, so let’s get a few of them out of the way now: yes, it’s personal, it’s intimate, it’s honest, it’s a diary entry, it’s Bruce Springsteen Nebraska. Really, what it is more than anything else is ten more great songs from a great songwriter presented in a form that does nothing to dampen their strengths. Lyrically, the in-the-thick-of-it spirit of Florida is only served by the acoustic treatments–“When I make it out alive, there will be hell to pay,” goes the chorus of opening track “Brass Knuckled Kiss”, and “Tommy” paints a vivid picture of the lonesome and dreary paradise in which the album was created (“Pelicans in the parking lot / Don’t wanna be what I am not”). Musically, Florida translates well, too–the utilitarian nature of the acoustic chords and Roth’s ornate sense of pop songwriting and melody collide in a way that makes the record not quite either (maybe halfway between the quiet intricacy of Greg Mendez and the “first chords, best chords” of early Mountain Goats). Songs like “Otie” and “Can’t Find the Door” can’t hide their pop cores, and “Vice Grip” in particular strains against the format in the perfect Darnielleian way. “I thank my lucky stars that I’m alive today / Though I’m still not sure it’s better off this way,” goes the chorus of that one. For all the world, it feels like one song in a collection that just had to get out; that Roth had to take us to Florida. (Bandcamp link)

Gold Dime – No More Blue Skies

Release date: October 20^th
Record label: No-Gold
Genre: Art rock, psychedelic rock, post-punk, experimental rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Denise

Andrya Ambro has been a fixture in the world of New York art rock for a while now. In the late 2000s and early 2010s, she was one-half of the duo Talk Normal along with Sarah Register; she began her solo project Gold Dime not too long after, releasing full-lengths under the name via Fire Talk (Patio, Mia Joy, Strange Ranger) in 2017 and 2019. The third Gold Dime album, No More Blue Skies, only further enmeshes Ambro in her geographic scene–it was released by No-Gold, a new label founded by Angus Andrew of Liars, and it features contributions from local players like composer Jessica Pavone and Jeff Tobias of Modern Nature. Like another New York art rock album from earlier this year, Feast of the Epiphany’s Significance, Ambro and her collaborators merge pop music with more experimental fare, but while that record explored Talk Talk-ish delicate beauty, Ambro (a drummer by background) turns in something louder and heavier, pulling from psychedelic rock and krautrock, among many others.

No More Blue Skies only needs seven songs to reach full-length status–Gold Dime put everything they have into each one of them. The percussion is the first sound one hears on the record, and it becomes the central feature early on–it leads the thundering, horn-laden opening jazz rock of “Denise” and the swaggering, noisy “Wasted Wanted”. Although “Please Not Today” is the first one to start off a little quieter, a hypnotic drumbeat rises to the forefront in the song’s second half, aided by a sharp guitar riff and Pavone’s strings. I’ve gotten this far without mentioning Laurie Anderson, but her influence is certainly felt in Ambro’s vocals–there’s probably a bit of her in each song on No More Blue Skies, but I hear it the most in “Beneath Below” and “Interpretations”. It works well for Ambro here–as the songs start to stretch into six-minute post-rock mini-symphonies in the record’s second half, the ringleader needs a Laurie Anderson-sized personality to stay on top of it all. Or, maybe, an Andrya Ambro-sized one. (Bandcamp link)

Victory Peach – Victory Peach

Release date: September 29^th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Folk rock, bedroom pop, dream pop
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Violence

Philadelphia’s Victory Peach have been kicking around for a bit–the band’s two members, Dan Jordan and Sydney Cox, began collaborating in 2017, and released their debut single the following year. The first Victory Peach record took substantially longer to appear, but their six-song self-titled debut EP is a rich and deep first step that I enjoy more every time I listen to it. The 25 minutes of Victory Peach are deceptively simple at first–Jordan and Cox hover somewhere between a slightly rootsy folk rock sound and mid-tempo, dream pop-influenced indie rock, with the duo’s harmonies being arguably their most “showy” facet.  The key is probably the lead vocals of Cox, who manages to be an incredibly engaging and expressive frontperson while still keeping things on the casual and conversational side, delivery-wise. It’s a voice that encourages active listening, and once one does, one begins to notice how everything on Victory Peach is placed just right.

The folky “Cooking” opens the EP on an especially striking note–the first half of the song is maybe the sparsest moment on Victory Peach, musically, but Cox’s vivid lyrics about the titular activity make for a memorable first impression. The electric/acoustic hybrids of “Instar” and “Violence” are probably the closest that Victory Peach have to a “typical sound”, although the bass-led pop rock of the former and the melodic jangle of the latter are pretty distinct from one another. Toward the end of “Violence”, the band elevate their sound a just little bit to deliver one last hook, although the one true “rocker” on Victory Peach is penultimate track “Landlocked”, in which the duo throw some prominent lead guitar and distortion into their sound to underscore the loneliness at the song’s heart. It’s an effective touch, but the more stripped-down folk-pop of “Growing Pains” (harkening back to the EP’s opening track) is maybe the record’s most potent moment. “If I told you what it felt like, you wouldn’t believe me,” Cox sings in the song’s beautiful refrain, sounding as convincing as could be. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

• Teenage Halloween – Till You Return
• The Bug Club – Rare Birds: Hour of Song
• Uni Boys – Buy This Now!
• Black Surfboards – Black Surfboards
• Lê Almeida – I Feel in the Sky
• Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 – These Things Remain Unassigned (Singles, Compilation Tracks, Rarities & Unreleased Recordings)
• Radar Peak – Radar Peak
• Wimps – City Lights
• The Photocopies – Unprofessional Conduct
• Futuro Terror – Presente
• Sulka – Distractions
• A. Savage – Several Songs About Fire
• Reverend Kristin Michael Hayter – SAVED!
• Unborn Ghost – Airs of Contempt and Derision
• Titanic – Vidrio
• Index for Working Musik – Indexe’e
• Tommy Oeffling – Secret Knowledge of Backroads / Misc. Demos
• Kacey Johansing – Year Away
• Pip Blom – Bobbie
• Restos – Ain’t Dead Yet
• Survival Guide – Deathdreams
• Tex Crick – Sweet Dreamin’
• Richard Evans – Dream of the World EP
• Katie Von Schleicher – A Little Touch of Schleicher in the Night
• Duster – Remote Echoes