Pressing Concerns: Pile, Fire Man, Kingbird, Yungatita

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Welcome to the first Pressing Concerns of 2024! This is not the first blog post of the new year (the December 2023 playlist/round-up went up on Tuesday), but it’s the first one to (primarily) focus on music from the new year. In previous years, I’ve waited a couple weeks to re-start this column, but there was no reason to wait this time. Less than a week into 2024, we’ve already got three records to talk about (a new album from Yungatita and new EPs from Pile and Fire Man) plus one record that came out last week after Christmas that I didn’t want to leave behind in 2023 (a new album from Kingbird).

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.

Pile – Hot Air Balloon

Release date: January 5th
Record label: Exploding in Sound
Genre: Experimental rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Scaling Walls

Pile make music that can take a bit of time to wrap one’s head around. That’s part of why, if pressed to choose a favorite band of the 2010s, their name always pops into my head. When I first heard 2017’s A Hairshirt of Purpose, I didn’t get anything out of it–now it just might be my favorite record from them. Last year saw the release of the eighth Pile album and the first in four years, All Fiction–the trio of Rick Maguire, Kris Kuss, and Alex Molini had never sounded further from the band’s early kinetic post-hardcore days as they did there, but even as they’ve pushed the limits of a “Pile sound”, they still have a recognizable one. Coming less than a year after All Fiction, the five-song Hot Air Balloon EP is drawn from the same sessions that produced their last album, but it’s not a collection of outtakes from the LP so much as a second (similar but distinct) record made concurrently with it. The post-rock experimentation and atmospheric explorations that marked All Fiction are here too, but in miniature, condensing it into a concise, eighteen-minute package that might actually be a more impressive feat than the sprawling tendencies of Pile’s most recent full-length.

Hot Air Balloon kicks off with “Scaling Walls”, a song that’s both fairly unclassifiable and recognizably Pile–laser-precise drumming, Maguire’s weary, haunting vocals, eerie, dramatic synths, and a weird, distorted, almost country-ish guitar line come together in a way that only would ever make sense for this band. Although Maguire isn’t yelling like on earlier Pile records, he’s still a dynamic vocalist–as “Scaling Walls” builds to a chaotic crescendo, he’s more than able to deliver a performance matching it. The middle of the EP is where the band let the music stray the most–“The Birds Attacked My Hot Air Balloon” is a compelling Pile ballad with some odd flourishes, and the synth-heavy “Only for a Reminder” is the most out-there moment on Hot Air Balloon (although the band do bring it back into more recognizable territory for its conclusion).  The prowling, rhythmic “Exits Blocked” is maybe the most All Fiction-reminiscent track on the EP–it has the rock band instrumentation that should be more in line with Pile’s previous work, but it just feels slightly off–before the band offer up one final “Pile classic”-sounding song with “You Get to Decide”. Of course, there are more than a few surprising turns in that song, too–it wouldn’t be Pile if there weren’t. (Bandcamp link)

Fire Man – Territorial Conquest 2024

Release date: January 1st
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Post-hardcore, noise rock, metal
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Territorial Conquest 2024

Look, I didn’t want to start off 2024 this way, either. Unfortunately, Fire Man’s Caio Brentar is cursed with the gift of prophecy. When Brentar set out the create a record about “the anxiety, confusion, and hatred the fog of war instills in us all”, he’d been inspired by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine–only for an even deadlier colonialist conflict to take center stage in the leadup to the release of the band’s latest EP, Territorial Conquest 2024. The previous Fire Man record, last year’s Yerself Is Fire, impressed me with how the band (Brentar and drummer Kiyoshi Chinzei) balanced vintage post-hardcore and noise rock (inspired by the best of Touch and Go, SST, and Alternative Tentacles) with a bit of fun and even some catchiness. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Territorial Conquest 2024 is more serious and heavy-sounding–if you’ve ever wondered how the seedy-underbelly-reflecting noise rock underground of the 1980s would have approached the unique horrors of the 21st century (admittedly an oddly specific thing to wonder), Fire Man off up an approximation of it, and they pull absolutely zero punches while doing so.

There are plenty of palpable differences between the last Fire Man record and this one, although it can be distilled down to two key aspects–the heavy, assaulting storm that Brentar and Chinzei whip up with their instruments, one that crosses over into heavy metal territory at times, and Brentar’s vocals, which he contorts and pushes from its natural Alice Donut-ish timbre to growls, barks, hardcore yelps, and dramatic intonations. The opening torrent of the title track goes from fairly standard punk rock into something hotter to the touch, and “Great Power Conflict (I Am a Spy)” is a compelling marriage of Brentar’s unique lyrics (“How could any group of anyone get anything so wrong?” goes the chorus) with a more inflammatory noise-punk, one that can burn for six minutes without going out. The eight-minute “Hamburger Hill” is a tough listen, but one that is key to Territorial Conquest 2024 in how it links previous wars (in this case, Vietnam) with the not-so-different reality of 2024–and if you make it through it, you get rewarded with “World Peace Eventually”, a brief but earned piece of punk rock sloganeering that, even after everything Fire Man elucidate earlier on Territorial Conquest 2024, doesn’t let the EP end on a note of defeatism. (Bandcamp link)

Kingbird – Kingbird

Release date: December 27th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Alt-country, folk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Only When the Sun Shines Through

I don’t have very much to go on with Kingbird, a mystery of a new band that showed up in my inbox recently. Their Bandcamp page says they’re from Brooklyn, and what appears to be a self-titled debut record was quietly uploaded there on December 27th, while the rest of the music world (other than Rosy Overdrive, of course) lay dormant for the holidays. Befitting of its pseudonymous, under-the-radar nature, Kingbird deals in frequently quiet-sounding folk and alt-country–although it doesn’t exactly have the lo-fi, creaky, derelict vibes possessed by similar haunted-seeming folk albums I’ve written about from Spencer Dobbs and Jason Allen Millard. Kingbird have more of a full-band sound on their first album (again, I don’t know if “Kingbird” is the name for a one-person project or an actual group); sometimes they’re playing straight-ahead folk music, but they flesh out their compositions with vocal harmonies, keyboards, and multiple guitar parts in a way that’s traditionally-informed but also reminiscent of delicate country rockers like Jeff Tweedy and Styrofoam Winos (or that band’s members’ various solo projects).

The bouncy acoustic guitar-led “Little Rose” is a warm welcome to Kingbird, with piano accents and a harmony-laced chorus ensuring that we’ve got all we need to make ourselves comfortable. The unhurried “One Drink at a Time” and the hushed “Healed Already” are even more subtle, even as they both have plenty going on beyond its surface–and while “Orphans” doesn’t represent a major shift in the makeup of Kingbird’s music, they rearrange themselves just enough to signal a shift into something darker, almost “gothic country”, to match the song’s dour lyrics and vocals. Kingbird doesn’t strike me as a “dark” album as a whole, but rather a pensive one–songs like “Won’t Pass for Flowers” and “There Were Things That Needed Forgiven” reveal more complexity beyond their stark exteriors, and while “Hi Di Hos” ends the album with pin-drop quiet, they’re also not opposed to filling the empty space with compelling, swelling strings like they do in “Only When the Sun Shines Through”. Though it might be “simple” in some ways, Kingbird is a well-rounded and wide-ranging take on folk music. (Bandcamp link)

Yungatita – Shoelace & a Knot

Release date: January 3rd
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Power pop, pop rock, fuzz rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Armchair

Yungatita are a Los Angeles-based quintet that have amassed a bit of buzz ahead of the release of their debut album–they’re set to embark on an extensive tour with Rosy Overdrive favorites Cheekface later this year, and they’ve already had a song blow up (“7 Weeks & Three Days” from their 2020 debut EP). The band began in the 2010s as a solo project for keyboardist/vocalist Valentina Zapata, but has since rounded out to include guitarists Gil Simo and Ernie Gutierrez, bassist David Lopez, and drummer Christian Gurrola, reflected in Shoelace & a Knot, the first Yungatita full-length. Zapata’s songwriting is reminiscent of that found in bands like The Beths–they’re an ace creator of pop hooks, and indie rock is just the form in which they’ve chosen to deliver them. That being said, Yungatita are also pretty good at rocking on Shoelace & a Knot, a record that’s messy, energetic, noisy, and, above all, entertaining.

Shoelace & a Knot surprisingly chooses to introduces itself in a relatively low-key manner–the two-minute, synth-y “Poppy” is basically just an extended intro track, and while “Reckless” is attention-grabbing, the distorted, shoegaze-influenced instrumental doesn’t offer up some of the big choruses that show up later on the album. The bright slacker pop of “Other” and the nervous power pop of “Armchair” blow the record open not long after that, however, and then the middle of the album contains “Descenda” and “Pick at Your Face”, a pair of garage-y, noise-y indie rock anthems showing that Zapata is just as much at home as a thorny indie rock frontperson as they are helming catchy slacker pop. Shoelace & a Knot doesn’t really lose steam as it rolls to its conclusion–the chugging fuzz rock of “Whiplash” is one of the best songs on the record, and although “Pack It Up” feigns at a subdued conclusion, it rips into a piece of punk-y indie rock to send the record off on a characteristically ornery note–capping off a debut with plenty to offer. (Bandcamp link)

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