Pressing Concerns: Graham Hunt, Wishy, Aunt Katrina, Phantom Signals

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It’s time to wrap up yet another busy week in December. This edition of Pressing Concerns features two records that come out tomorrow (a new album from Graham Hunt and a new EP from Wishy), and two EPs from the past couple of weeks in Aunt Katrina and Phantom Signals. Rosy Overdrive’s Top 25 EPs of 2023 went up earlier this week, and I implore you to check out the selections there, and you should also dig into Monday’s Pressing Concerns (featuring The Human Hearts, Dan Darrah & The Rain, The Age of Colored Reptiles, and Bounaly) if you haven’t yet.

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. And last but not least: don’t forget to vote in the 2023 Rosy Overdrive Reader’s Poll!

Graham Hunt – Try Not to Laugh

Release date: December 15th
Record label: Smoking Room
Genre: Power pop, alt-rock, pop rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Emergency Contact

Madison’s Graham Hunt has been playing in various Wisconsin bands for a while now, but he’s been a prolific solo artist as of late, putting out Painting Over Mold in 2021 and If You Knew Would You Believe It last year. I first heard about Hunt because he was playing a show with Dazy, a band that’s a good starting point for what his solo material sounds like. Although, whereas James Goodson would cut his power pop, pop punk, and alt-rock with “classically cool” genres of music like Jesus and Mary Chain-esque noise pop, Hunt dares to ask the question: what if you did this, but only with the historically lame stuff? As it turns out, you can pull it off, but you’d better be able to write a damn good hook. On his third album in as many years, Try Not to Laugh, Hunt pulls together the unserious attitude of pop punk with the energy of late 90s “alt-pop” groups like Third Eye Blind and even Sugar Ray, creates something undeniably new and weird, and wipes the floor with “respectability”.

Try Not to Laugh is presented in a pretty dangerous format–eight songs in about a half-hour, meaning that Hunt rides several of these songs out for over four minutes. The opening title track is one of the shorter ones, although it’s a highlight, with its wobbly chorus still standing on its own two legs. Hunt sounds practically frantic on “Taste”, trying to get absolutely everything he can out of the title line, although the biggest moments on the album come in the center, between “Emergency Contact” and “Zoomed Out”. The former is a brilliant lost-pop-hit single just about packed with hooks in every aspect, and the latter nearly matches it by the strength of its title line alone (“I’m not dumb, baby / I’m just zoomed out,” a slacker rock motto if I’ve ever heard one). The second half of Try Not to Laugh doesn’t quite beat the listener over the head quite as much–“Tasmere Anthill” carefully seeds its hooks evenly across the song’s four minute runtime, while the rough-around-the-edges “Seein’ the World” and the acoustic “Options in Community Living 23” present a couple different sides of Graham Hunt. That being said, it’s no less robust than Try Not to Laugh’s ironclad A-Side; Hunt got one more great album in before the buzzer in 2023. (Bandcamp link)

Wishy – Paradise

Release date: December 15th
Record label: Winspear
Genre: Dream pop, shoegaze, indie pop, noise pop
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Donut

Wishy are new dream poppy, shoegaze-y indie rock group from Indianapolis who’ve received a fair amount of buzz ahead of the release of Paradise, their five-song debut EP. Bands with this kind of profile admittedly have a solid track record of failing to impress me much, but Paradise is a promising first record that lives up to the hype accompanying it, thanks in large part to the pair of singer-songwriters at the helm of Wishy. It should be noted that this band didn’t exactly come out of nowhere–for fans of hazy, dreamy indie rock, co-leader Kevin Krauter is perhaps a familiar name between his solo career and his work in Hoops. Although the other half of Wishy’s songwriting duo, Nina Pitchkites, may not have the same pedigree, her contributions to Paradise (Krauter penned three of these songs, Pitchkites the remaining two) are no less impressive pieces of laid-back distorted guitar pop.

The title track (written by Krauter, primarily sung by Pitchkites) opens Paradise on a high note, with a sleepy but still driven mid-tempo piece of deliberate indie pop. Having eased us into the EP, Wishy then rip into the most straight-up shoegaze moment on the record with Pitchkites’ “Donut”, with its wall-of-sound and revved-up guitars declining to drown out the track’s soaring chorus. “Spinning”, which immediately follows it, showcases the other side of Pitchkites as a songwriter, riding a 90s alt-poppy drumbeat into a transfixing piece of vintage, smooth dream pop–it pairs nicely with Krauter’s “Blank Time”, which fights hard to be the most low-key song on the EP. This rock-solid introduction to an intriguing new band ends with “Too True”, a track that does a good job of summing up Wishy to date–it’s got the full band energy of “Donut”, but it’s a bit more casual and freewheeling like the EP’s midsection (and excellent lead guitar from Jacky Boy’s Steve Marino doesn’t hurt, too). Wishy has grown to a quintet since the recording of Paradise, and I will be interested to see what the next step for this band will look like. (Bandcamp link)

Aunt Katrina – Hot

Release date: December 8th
Record label: Crafted Sounds
Genre: Noise pop, experimental pop, bedroom pop, lo-fi indie rock
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Optimistically

A couple of years ago in Pittsburgh, Ryan Walchonski co-founded a good shoegaze-noise-pop band you may have heard of called Feeble Little Horse. Feeble Little Horse is still going strong–you probably have seen their Saddle Creek debut, Girl With Fish, on some best-of lists this year–but Walchonski now lives in Washington D.C., and a desire to keep playing locally despite being separated from his main band has led to the creation of Aunt Katrina. Aunt Katrina began as a Walchonski solo project, and most of what you’ll hear on Hot, their debut EP, was recorded by Walchonski himself, aside from drums provided by Snail Mail’s Ray Brown and guest vocals from Laney Ackley on “Let Me Go” (Brown and Ackley have since become a part of the Aunt Katrina live lineup alongside Eric Zidar, Emma Banks, and Connor Peters).

For those of us who enjoyed the off-the-cuff, surprising, noisy bedroom pop of Feeble Little Horse’s earliest recordings, Walchonski is operating in this vicinity throughout Hot. Although there are moments of fuzzed-out guitars at various points on Aunt Katrina’s debut release, it’d be somewhat of a stretch to label the EP as “shoegaze”. That being said, it’s a primary ingredient in the opening punch of “Sunday” and “Obsessed”, two songs that flit between soaring, electric guitar-forward rock music and stranger, more insular bedroom experiments. The weirder side of Aunt Katrina appears to win out in “Choir”, which takes its titular sound and musses it up, but the guitars come screaming back to life in “When I Go Away”. The back half of Hot is less immediate, but sneakily contains some of the most intriguing material–“Optimistically” takes a minute before fully committing to its chilly lo-fi pop sound, the post-punk mumble of “Get Me Out of Bed” is an interesting outlier, and “Let Me Go” quietly sends Hot out in a haze of pianos and buzzing guitars. Hot is the sound of Ryan Walchonski working out something familiar but new, and the process’ results are compelling in their own right. (Bandcamp link)

Phantom Signals – Phantom Signals

Release date: December 1st
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Emo-y indie rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Basement

Phantom Signals are a Brooklyn-based quartet that have been putting out singles throughout 2023, culminating in their self-titled debut EP that came out at the beginning of December. Phantom Signals’ opening statement is a half-dozen songs and twenty-one minutes of incredibly spirited, earnest indie rock with an alt-rock crunch to some parts of it and an emo-ish energy to others. There’s no obvious interesting “narrative hook” accompanying Phantom Signals–they aren’t from some far-flung outpost of the world, the members aren’t part of more famous, well-known bands, and if there’s some exciting backstory to how this band formed or how these songs were written, Phantom Signals aren’t telling. Sometimes, a band is just four people who are, together, very good at what they do, and that’s exactly what vocalist/lyricist Melody Henry, guitarist Joey Russo, bassist Mike Petzinger, and drummer John Morris are on Phantom Signals.

The first impression we get of Phantom Signals is “Basement”, a piece of well-crafted but humble-sounding indie rock song that is immediately lovable. It works both as an introduction–building slowly but confidently across its two-and-a-half-minutes–and also as a subdued but potent pop song in its own right. From that moment on, Phantom Signals are off and rolling,  with “Full Stop” and “Swimming” presenting themselves as multi-faceted, dynamic rock songs–in particular, the former song stops and starts alongside Henry’s impressive lead vocal performance. Henry’s voice, confident and arresting, is the most striking piece of Phantom Signals, but the rest of the band’s performance in presenting it–rushing up to meet her in “Play Out”, punching alongside her in “Breakdown”–shouldn’t be overlooked. Phantom Signals doesn’t need a big-finish, slow-burn closing track in order to be a successful first entry, but nevertheless, the quartet set their sights on putting together the five-minute, crescendoing (aptly-titled) “Slow Burn” to send off their debut statement with one last impressive gasp. (Bandcamp link)

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