Pressing Concerns: Sonny Falls, Daniel Romano’s Outfit, Grass Jaw, Nervous Twitch

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As I’m sure a lot of you are aware, last Friday was a huge one for new releases. I covered quite a bit of them on the blog in the lead-up to March 1st, but there’s also a lot of really good new music I’m going to be tackling in the coming weeks. Today, we’re looking at four albums that came out a couple of days ago: brand new full-lengths from Sonny Falls, Daniel Romano’s Outfit, and Grass Jaw, plus a compilation from Nervous Twitch.

I think this is interesting: I could be wrong, but I believe that this is the first-ever Pressing Concerns where all four acts have previously appeared in an earlier edition.

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.

Sonny Falls – Sonny Falls

Release date: March 1st
Record label: Earth Libraries
Genre: Fuzz rock, garage rock, alt-country
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: You Were Hoping

Ryan Ensley aka Hoagie Wesley aka Sonny Falls is not a household name, but I get the sense that those of us who are “in the know” about the Chicago singer-songwriter are all fully in the tank for him. Since 2018, Wesley has been hopping from indie label to label (Sooper, Plastic Miracles, Forged Artifacts), putting out fiery, unique records that are loose-feeling but incredibly deep underneath their garage rock/fuzz-country exteriors. The sixteen-song double album All That Has Come Apart/Once Did Not Exist (the second Sonny Falls album and the one that led me to Ensley) is easily one of my favorite albums of 2020, and 2022’s brief twenty-minute Stoned, Beethoven Blasting was an especially frenetic but worthy follow-up. The fourth Sonny Falls album is a self-titled one, out through Earth Libraries, and it feels like an attempt to pack all the ambition of All That Has Come Apart/Once Did Not Exist into ten tracks and thirty-five minutes. The songs on Sonny Falls don’t sound like anything but Sonny Falls songs, but every track on the album feels stretched and teased out in a new way, Ensley spending a bit more time composing and arranging his sprawling writing instead of fully leaning into his street-raving side.

When Sonny Falls wants to pull out one of the all-gas, no-brakes garage-y fuzz rock anthems that have marked the project’s past, Ensley still very much “has it”; look no further than single “Going Nowhere” (“I wonder if I’m going nowhere / I heard that place is kinda cool”) or the album’s second song, “Dystopian Dracula”. However, the song that starts Sonny Falls is “Cemeteries”, a more subdued track with ample piano that feels like a clear signal that this album is going to be something more (even as it roars towards classic Sonny Falls status towards its end). Even the biggest-sounding songs on the album aren’t always so straightforward–the shortest track on Sonny Falls, the rave-up “Gold Coast”, features a blistering barroom piano solo, and “You Were Hoping” merges a pounding, industrial beat to Ensley’s songwriting to create what is, shockingly, the biggest pop moment on the album. The first half of Sonny Falls (also including another highlight, the slickly dark-sounding “Night Scene”) is just about perfect, but the B-side holds up gamely–“Kids on Mars” is Ensley at his blown-out best, and there’s also the closing track, “Apocalypse-Lite”. It’s Ensley in his enjoyable “rambling mode”, juking and diving through a twisting internal monologue (this time it’s frantic, darting observations brought on by the pandemic, understandably so). At this point, Ryan Ensley a very strong baseline as a songwriter, but it’s quite exciting to watch him figure out how to add to it. (Bandcamp link)

Daniel Romano’s Outfit – Too Hot to Sleep

Release date: March 1st
Record label: You’ve Changed
Genre: Power pop, punk rock, garage rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Where’s Paradise

If you’re only passingly familiar with the music of Daniel Romano, you’d be forgiven for placing him on the more polished end of the retro rock spectrum–even discounting the one-song suite of La Luna, the more “song-based” recent albums like 2021’s Cobra Poems and 2020’s How Ill Thy World Is Ordered come off more as “studio rats” than “garage punks”. However, anyone who’s seen the Outfit (Daniel Romano, Ian Romano, Carson McHone, Julianna Riolino, and Roddy Rossetti) play live knows that they’ve got a legendary energy and ferocity in that setting (further evidence of this side of Romano includes his Ancient Shapes side project and several of his less-”official” pandemic-era releases). That being said, I’ve been waiting for something like Too Hot to Sleep from The Outfit for a while now–a genuine live-in-studio sounding garage rock scorcher of a record. Ironically, it took the notoriously prolific Romano two years (an eternity for him) to put together something as loose-sounding as this, but he and his crew really honed in on something potent with this ten-song, twenty-seven minute collection.

Romano is still a smooth operator as a pop songwriter, and the backing vocals of McHone and Riolino are still essential in chorus construction–which creates an interesting one-two punch to open Too Hot to Sleep, with “You Can Steal My Kiss” and “Where’s Paradise” vacillating between Ty Segall/Thee Oh Sees garage rock and sugary power pop. Aside from the loose but not overly crazy “State of Nature”, The Outfit go from one blistering rocker to another in the first half of Too Hot to Sleep, with the giddy, speeding “All of Thee Above” going toe-to-toe with the opening two tracks in terms of catchy energy, while “That’s Too Rich” and “Chatter” are the closest the record gets to straight-up punk rock (the early Replacements brashness of the former has a certain charm, but the bass-led, zippy latter is my favorite of the two). Having proved its mettle, the second half of Too Hot to Sleep doesn’t lose steam so much as let the songs spread out a bit and bring the garage-y energy to more typical Romano psych-power-pop fare. “Field of Ruins” is the one track where they rock out for nearly four minutes, but “You Saw Me in Sunshine” and the title track slow down just enough to build to something–the prog-punk big finish in the latter of the two songs is the nice payoff. Even if you think you know Daniel Romano’s deal by now, I’d recommend Too Hot to Sleep to any power pop and/or garage rock fan–it’s one of his strongest albums yet. (Bandcamp link)

Grass Jaw – I Don’t Want to Believe

Release date: February 29th
Record label: Dad, Do You Want to Hear This?
Genre: Alt-country, folk rock, slowcore, fuzz rock, country rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Tic Tac

I believe that Grass Jaw is now the first-ever artist to appear in Pressing Concerns for four years in a row, and I couldn’t be happier about this being the band and album to do it. Rosy Overdrive has been checking in on the expanding catalog of the project (made up primarily of Ithaca, New York’s Brendan Kuntz, with various guest contributors) since 2021, and I’ve certainly enjoyed getting regular, unfailingly consistent records full of Kuntz’s unique combination of weary, almost gothic alt-country, slowcore, and Exploding in Sound-core fuzz/slacker rock. Although I don’t think I’ve ever thought “I wonder what this guy thinks about aliens and UFOs” while listening to previous Grass Jaw records, one benefit to making approximately an album a year is that they can become sort of snapshots and dispatches from where one is currently at in one’s life. I Don’t Want to Believe, the seventh Grass Jaw full-length, is sourced from a recent “borderline unhealthy obsession with UFOs and related phenomena” that Kuntz has developed–and as it turns out, Grass Jaw’s frequently haunted-feeling music is a pretty effective vehicle in which to explore this kind of thing.

Regardless of what Kuntz is writing about, he’s still got a dour and pessimistic side, as illustrated quite memorably by the opening lines of the title track (“It’s embarrassing, they’ve been watching us this whole time behave like children / Or worse–children have empathy”). Just because Kuntz is obsessed with aliens doesn’t mean his narrators can’t have refreshingly varied perspectives on the matter, from the cringing singer of “I Don’t Want to Believe” to “Signs”, in which a potential alien invasion merely serves as the backdrop for the protagonist’s more insular and personally painful concerns (colored smartly by Tom Yagielski’s saxophone), or “Tic Tac”, a charmingly rickety country rocker which seems to lament the earthbound concerns that prevent us all from full embracing the exciting possibilities of other worlds. As Grass Jaw lumbers into the closing stretches of I Don’t Want to Believe, the title of “Cause of Death: Explosion” (about chemist and occultist Jack Parsons) explicitly nods to falling down Wikipedia wormholes, while “Disclosure” is a dark, towering piece of Crazy Horse-esque country rock. Closing track “Watching, Waiting” is perhaps the most overt “country” moment on the album, between its harmonica and pedal steel. The song ends with Kuntz looking at the stars and intoning “Hard to believe, hard to believe we’re all alone”. If somebody as lonesome-sounding as Kuntz can sing that, it’s hard to argue with it. (Bandcamp link)

Nervous Twitch – Odd Socks

Release date: March 1st
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Indie pop, power pop, jangle pop, twee
Formats: CD, digital
Pull Track: I’d Like to Think You Know Me Better Than That

Back in 2022, I wrote about Some People Never Change from Leeds’ Nervous Twitch, an enjoyably spirited collection of classic indie pop delivered with power pop enthusiasm. Although the trio (vocalist/bassist/keyboardist Erin Hyde, guitarist/keyboardist Jamie Churchley, and drummer Ashley Goodall) were new to me then, it was actually the band’s fifth album, with releases dating back to 2015. In fact, Nervous Twitch have been at it for so long that they’ve amassed an entire album’s worth of B-sides, compilation appearance tracks, and outtakes–which is exactly what the sixteen-song Odd Socks CD collects. These songs (whose recordings originate from 2014 to 2022) range from ones that never made it past the home recording stage to studio tracks that didn’t make the final cut from their respective sessions, almost all of which were written by the band’s songwriting duo of Churchley and Hyde and had only previously appeared on various-artist compilations or as single B-sides (if they’d been released at all). 

Indie pop “home recordings” conjure up images of lo-fi, distorted basement demos, and although “I’m Bored with You” sort of fits this description, by and large Nervous Twitch’s previously-unheard non-studio material sounds just as complete and developed as the more professionally-recorded ones–“I’d Like to Think You Know Me Better Than That” is an incredibly strong C86/jangle pop opener, while the garage-pop “No Good” and the ironically cheery organ-led “This Song About Ya” are easily highlights as well. There’s no shortage of excellent original indie pop songs on Odd Socks, but it wouldn’t be “odd socks” without a few oddities, which come in the form of the (mostly) instrumental “The Birdman Stomp” and “Persistent Itch”, an acoustic version of the previously-released “Tarrantino Hangover”, and a live cover of The Flatmates’ “I Could Be in Heaven”. These moments are enjoyable on their own (especially the Flatmates cover, which makes me want to see them live), but they’re also true to the grab-bag nature of indie rock compilations and the 60s pop records from which Nervous Twitch have taken a good deal of inspiration. It’s appropriate, then, that Odd Socks caps off the first decade of Nervous Twitch with a bit of everything. (Bandcamp link)

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