Pressing Concerns: Ryan Davis & the Roadhouse Band, Maria Elena Silva, Rory Strong, Fortunato Durutti Marinetti

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What a turnaround! Just yesterday, you were reading the Monday edition of Pressing Concerns and enjoying new music from Seablite, Means and Ways, Sandy Pylos, and No Drama. You only had to wait one more day for the next edition, and it’s another all-timer, featuring new albums from Ryan Davis & the Roadhouse Band, Maria Elena Silva, Rory Strong, and Fortunato Durutti Marinetti.

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.

Ryan Davis & the Roadhouse Band – Dancing on the Edge

Release date: October 27th
Record label: Sophomore Lounge/ever/never/Tough Love
Genre: Alt-country, folk rock, country rock, singer-songwriter
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Junk Drawer Heart

Those who are curious to see where the exciting current wave of alt-country bands and artists might end up once the initial rush of their first records dies down might want to cast their gaze towards Ryan Davis. Since the late 2000s, the singer-songwriter has led the Louisville/Jeffersonville, IN country-rambler-rockers State Champion, making music that combined punk rock energy with Crazy Horse long-windedness, traditional country instrumentation, and writing inspired by indie folk rockers like Smog and Silver Jews–the leaders of which are/were both fans of Davis’ writing–long before it was en vogue like it is now. Not that there isn’t steep competition, but State Champion’s consistently excellent four LPs in the 2010s should put them on the shortlist for “band of that particular decade” easily. 

Choosing a “best” State Champion album would be like choosing a favorite child if I had four equally great ones, but 2018’s Send Flowers is, at the very least, their most refined moment. Perhaps unsure where to go from there, State Champion has seemingly been on ice since, although Davis has kept busy playing with noise rockers Tropical Trash and experimentalists Equipment Pointed Ankh, as well as running his record label, Sophomore Lounge (Ace of Spit, Footings, Styrofoam Winos). Ryan Davis the songwriter could not be vanquished entirely, however, and this has led us to Dancing on the Edge, his debut solo album (well, with “The Roadhouse Band”, a wide-ranging group featuring members of his various other bands, Louisville-area musicians, and other Sophomore Lounge-associated artists). Send Flowers was seven songs in 41 minutes, and Davis one-ups his band’s last album by delivering the same amount of tracks in over 50 here, his first genuine double album as a bandleader. 

Necessarily, the songs here are even longer than the sprawling late-era State Champion records–the sort-of-reprise “Bluebirds Revisited” is the only track under six minutes on Dancing on the Edge, and three of them are over eight. Even though Davis’ primary musical outlet over the past few years has been in the experimental field, Dancing on the Edge doesn’t get to be so expansive by embracing post-rock–Davis is as much a country musician as ever here, just continuing to stretch out his writing even more than I thought possible. This album actually might be a bit more upbeat than the more recent State Champion releases–when you remove yourself from the constraints of time, you’ll find the space to do that, I suppose. Dancing on the Edge reminds me a bit of early Okkervil River, although Davis is in some ways the inverse of Will Sheff–Sheff is the nervy New England transplant trying to disguise his emotion with traditionalism, Davis is the laid-back-seeming Appalachian who acts like he’s asleep underneath his baseball cap but is just waiting for the right moment to deliver a cutting remark.

And in that aspect, the lyrics to Dancing on the Edge certainly deliver. Part of me says “Well, just about anything would sound brilliant delivered with Davis’ unbothered Kentucky tones and soundtracked by the post-post-country möbius strip of the Roadhouse Band”, but there are, I think, very few songwriters in any genre with the capability of writing something like “Junk Drawer Heart” (“Maybe there’s something of use deep down in the matchbox bottom of my junk drawer heart / Maybe there’s nothing there but joker cards and keychains,” is obviously a headliner, but the lines about chewing on an apple in an archery range and the “Sultans of Swing”-stuck jukebox should be up there as well), and even the least substantial song on the record (big fucking “by default” on that one) “Bluebirds Revisited” offers up “An angel gains its associate’s wings and moves back in with God”. Another one is “I never asked to be born / I was only wondering where the door went to / Now here I am at the kitchen table,” from “A Suitable Exit”. An album as preoccupied with the randomness of it all as Dancing on the Edge is is surely aware of the improbability of its own existence–chance might have gotten Ryan Davis and the Roadhouse Band to the door, but anyone who listens to their album attentively will be equally conscious of just how deliberately they’ve moved to open it. (Bandcamp link)

Maria Elena Silva – Dulce

Release date: September 29th
Record label: Astral Spirits/Big Ego
Genre: Post-rock, jazz-rock, psychedelic rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Love, If It Is So

Maria Elena Silva got her start making flamenco- and jazz-influenced rock music in her hometown of Wichita, Kansas, although it was her third solo album, 2021’s Eros, that both garnered her some renown and represented a shift in her sound, embracing a sparser, quieter, more post-rock-y style of music with help from Big Ego Studio’s Chris Schlarb and Tortoise’s Jeff Parker, among others. Schlarb is once again producing Dulce, the follow-up record to Eros, which finds Silva and her collaborators (here, legendary guitarist Marc Ribot, organist Carey Frank, and percussionists Danny Frankel, Stephen Hodges, and Scott Dean Taylor) diving headfirst into the realm of experimental rock and jazz. The empty space from Eros is still here, although a surprising amount of Dulce is quiet yet probing pop music at its core.

The slow-burning, blistering psychedelic rock of “Love, If It Is So” opens Dulce in particularly striking fashion–in under three minutes, Silva and her band go from delicately building its precarious structure to burning it down in an excitingly PJ Harvey-esque fashion. The album steps back a bit after that calamitous opening salvo–“Envolverlo I” and “Mujer” are both brief, guitar-ambient deep sighs of songs that are barely there but still very much there, and “Ruido Blanco” is a laid-back pop-folk song that features especially enjoyable use of Frank’s Hammond. This isn’t to say that this side of Silva is slighter than the louder version–in its own way, the heaviest part of the album might be its incredibly sprawling, stretched-out midsection, where the seven-minute “Jasper” and “Silver Linings” explore these depths, expanding the quiet without ever abandoning it. Of course, if you find yourself missing the guitar workouts, they return with a vengeance in the record’s second half in the form of “Narrowed” and “Sugar Water”, the latter of which closes out the album by spiraling into some organ-heavy rock and roll. That is Dulce–but so is the low-key percussive outro that actually ends the record. (Bandcamp link)

Rory Strong – Catholic Guilt

Release date: October 20th
Record label: Oliver Glenn
Genre: Singer-songwriter, alt-country, post-folk-punk
Formats: CD, digital
Pull Track: Catholic Guilt

I’ve been avoiding writing about this one because I know I’m not going to do it adequate justice. This time of year things are pretty busy both in terms of this blog and in real life, so I know that I’m not going to get as in-depth here as Catholic Guilt deserves. Nevertheless, the purpose of Rosy Overdrive is to share music I find worthwhile and stirring with other people, not to “save music journalism” or whatever, so we’re going to take a look at the latest record from Maine-originating, California-based singer-songwriter Rory Strong. Strong has been at it for a while–leading the project Holy Shadow for most of the 2010s, then eventually making music both as Rory Strong and the Standard Candles and completely under their own name. Catholic Guilt, a fifty-minute full-length being put out on CD through Oliver Glenn Records (Soft Idiot, Jordaan Mason) falls under the latter category. Much like the titular feeling, Catholic Guilt is impossible to ignore–it commands full attention all the way through.

Catholic Guilt is a fully sketched-out record, with a musical vocabulary hovering between electric indie rock and multi-layered folk rock/alt-country (featuring, among others, pedal steel from Mike “Slo-mo” Brenner). The contours are different, but Strong does have a bit in common with the previously-mentioned Mason as a songwriter. I would consider this album neither “emo” nor “folk punk”, but it feels informed by the same stuff that a lot of bands that hew towards the “singer-songwriter” side of the emo-y punk-y world also are, namely The Mountain Goats, The Weakerthans, and Dear Nora. “Johnsong” in particular is a dead-ringer for Little Pictures-era John K. Samson, and anyone sufficiently familiar with John Darnielle will feel the connection that the record’s title draws to his oeuvre (in addition to the title track, I also hear Darniellian echos in the writing found in “Shelly Duvall”, “Heretic Like You”, and “The Witch Is Alive”). Meanwhile, songs like “Desert Cottontails” and “The Dogs and the Dunes” take some fairly vast concepts and imagery and pull them down to Earth, which feels like a good encapsulation of Strong’s perspective on Catholic Guilt. You can still see the sun and the moon and the stars from down here, though. (Bandcamp link)

Fortunato Durutti Marinetti – Eight Waves in Search of an Ocean

Release date: November 3rd
Record label: Quindi/Soft Abuse
Genre: Sophisti-pop, jazz pop, soft rock, art rock, synthpop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Misfit Streams

I’ve written about a few records released by Florence, Italy’s Quindi Records before, but Eight Waves in Search of an Ocean is the first one with a connection to the label’s home country. Fortunato Durutti Marinetti is the project of Daniel Colussi, and while he’s been living in Toronto for some time now (playing in bands like The Shilohs and The Pinc Lincolns), he’s originally from Turin. Colussi debuted Fortunato Durutti Marinetti in 2020 with the self-released Desire, and put out Memory’s Fool last year on Soft Abuse and Bobo Integral (Tough Age, Fixtures, Daily Worker). The third Fortunato Durutti Marinetti album comes merely a year and change later, and with Eight Waves in Search of an Ocean, Colussi has put together a leisurely enjoyable singer-songwriter “studio pop” album. The record’s eight songs move ever so slowly, trying on a low-key but impressive array of Destroyer-ish sophisti-pop and Office Culture-ish soft jazz rock while Colussi’s casually talk-sung vocals lead the music along amiably.

Opening track “Lightning on a Sunny Day” stretches out to six minutes, beginning the album with an endless skyline of minimal, Kaputt-style synthpop that feels like an “anything can happen” kind of introduction to Eight Waves in Search of an Ocean. Colussi is openly inspired by Lou Reed, whose influence I absolutely hear in his voice as he delicately rambles his way through “The Movie of Your Life” and “Misfit Streams”, but the lush-but-not-overblown orchestral pop arrangements of these songs also feel informed by Reed’s solo career. The widescreen nature of Eight Waves in Search of an Ocean also kind of reminds me of Kurt Vile’s Bottle It In and (Watch My Moves)–if you’d like, Fortunato Durutti Marinetti is to synth-jazz-pop what Vile is to folk rock. Eight Waves in Search of an Ocean is nothing if not well-rounded: the second half of the album features its single most rousing moment in “Smashing Your Head Against the Wall”–the guitars and strings actually inject a bit of urgency into the instrumental, even though I couldn’t tell you just what Colussi’s going on about in this one–and “I Need You More” rides some prominent flute to a minimalist, (relatively) straightforward conclusion. It’s a smooth ride, but it’s still a journey. (Bandcamp link)

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