Pressing Concerns: Tomato Flower, Powerwasher, Torrey, So Pitted

Posted byrosyoverdrivePosted inPressing ConcernsTags:, , , , , , , ,

Happy Thursday! The third and final Pressing Concerns of the week looks at four great albums that are coming out tomorrow, March 8th: new LPs from Tomato Flower, Powerwasher, Torrey, and So Pitted. Check them out below, get excited for their release, and while you wait, catch up on Monday (Sonny Falls, Daniel Romano, Grass Jaw, Nervous Twitch) and Tuesday’s (Prefect Records, Flowertown, Robert Poss, Fur Trader) blog posts if you missed them.

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.

Tomato Flower – No

Release date: March 8th
Record label: Ramp Local
Genre: Psychedelic pop, space pop experimental pop, noise pop, dream pop, prog-pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Saint

Baltimore quartet Tomato Flower made their debut in two increments in 2022 with the dual Gold Arc and Construction EPs. Their initial releases were staggered by a couple of months, but they were recorded simultaneously and were of a piece, both offering up colorful psychedelic pop music with a bit of space-y lounge pop thrown in for good measure. Still, Construction hinted at something darker and direct and it made sense as a separate statement from Gold Arc–and it appears that Tomato Flower have continued to follow this thread on their first-ever full-length album, simply titled No. The band are still drawing from roughly the same sources (Stereolab, Elephant 6, Animal Collective), but they sound different here–less like a floating, untouchable collection of noises and interjections and more like a full band with all their feet on the ground. This cohesion is somewhat ironic given that the band’s two singer/guitarists, Austyn Wohlers and Jamison Murphy, broke up during the early stages of putting No together. That being said, it certainly explains some of the album’s darker moments, and the quartet (also featuring bassist Ruby Mars and drummer Mike Alfieri) don’t let that get in the way of taking a step forward together.

No stumbles chaotically out of the gate with the discordant percussion that opens “Saint”, although the song eventually shambles towards a loose but satisfying dream pop chorus. The more I listen to No, the more I realize how different Tomato Flower sound on it, but Murphy’s ragged, screeching vocals on “Destroyer”, the second song on the record, immediately dispense with the notion of a “subtle” shift in tone. The instrumental to “Destroyer” tries to use twisting pop melodies to counter its darkness, although the music throughout No roams through post-punk, math-y pop rock, and a bit of avant-prog–you could crop out the brighter parts of the title track and “Do It” and have something fairly upsetting on your hands, or you could snip away the darker sections and, viola, you’re at the beach again. The pop side of No feels fairly incidental–it’s not Tomato Flower’s main aim, but they’re still good enough at it that songs like “Magdalene” are much more fun than they should be on paper. There’s a reason why “Sally & Me”, which effectively turns into a drone in its second half, is the most difficult song on the album–Tomato Flower are on the move throughout No, and the only way to stop every facet of the band from exerting itself is to grind everything to a halt. (Bandcamp link)

Powerwasher – Everyone Laughs

Release date: March 8th
Record label: Strange View
Genre: Post-punk, noise rock, post-hardcore
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Same Time / Same Channel

Baltimore quartet Powerwasher first arrived on my radar back in 2020 with their debut record, the Sad Cactus-released The Power of Positive Washing EP. I quite enjoyed the garage-y post-punk of that record and the way it hinted at some darker corners but without subtracting from its high-flying, rocking main mission. The band had been relatively quiet since (other than a split EP with similarly-minded Baltimore group Consumer Culture last year), but nearly four years after their debut we’ve finally received a debut Powerwasher LP. Everyone Laughs is not so much an evolution of Powerwasher’s sound as an expansion of it–with the extra runtime, the band has the space to retain their original post-punk leanings while at the same time diving into noisier post-hardcore territory, and even exploring some weirder climes. That being said, there is a slight shift in the baseline “Powerwasher sound”–it’s still catchy rock and roll, but it’s a little less “garage punk” and a little more indebted to chaotic and noisy 90s indie rock, evoking newer acts like Pardoner and Stuck.

Everyone Laughs kicks off with an excellent guitar riff that shambles into “Landscape Abstract”, an adventurous indie rock song with traces of math rock and Exploding in Sound-esque fuzz rock. The garage punk beginning to “1-900-POWERWASHER” hints at the looser earlier era of the band, but the way the track ends up devolving into a colossal piece of no wave debris is exciting new territory for the band. The relatively straightforward alt-rock of “Crossing the Street” and the sung-spoken, rhythmic post-punk of “Same Time / Same Channel” represent Powerwasher at their hookiest–although for some, the surging refrain of “Catalog” that follows its rambling, 90s indie rock-esque opening might be the moment that sticks in their head the most. Everyone Laughs feels on the brink of burning down or swerving off a cliff at every moment–“TM 31-210” is one of the more striking examples, lurching into sprinting post-punk, ambient interludes, and a thrashing noise rock conclusion. Not every song on Everyone Laughs is so disparate, but even the windmilling noise punk of “Gussied Up” features some weird turns, and the band save their least chaotic moments for some of the biggest outliers on the record. “Stoned” features pedal steel from Xandy Chelmis of Wednesday and MJ Lenderman’s band (against all odds, it sounds kind of like of Lenderman as played by a indie punk band), while “Entrails” closes the album on an incredibly sparse note. For such an explosive but unpredictable album, Everyone Laugh‘s final moment of diffusion is a fitting cap. (Bandcamp link)

Torrey – Torrey

Release date: March 8th
Record label: Slumberland
Genre: Dream pop, shoegaze
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Really AM

It seems like Ryann Gonsalves is everywhere these days. I first discovered the Bay Area musician as the co-frontperson of San Francisco noise pop group Aluminum, whose 2022 debut record Windowpane ended up being one of my favorites of that year. 2024 is shaping up to be Gonsalves’ biggest year yet–last month they put out a solo album, and March marks the second full-length and Slumberland debut from Torrey, a group that actually predates their other projects. Ryann formed Torrey with their sibling, Kelly Gonsalves, back in 2018, and the band put out an EP in 2019 and an LP in 2021. The Gonsalveses (Ryann on vocals and bass, Kelly on guitar) still represent the creative core of the band, but they get help on Torrey–namely, from lead guitarist Adam Honingford (who’s been with the band since their first album), drummer Keith Ival, and multi-instrumentalist Matthew Ferrara (of The Umbrellas, and who also produced the album). Although there’s some overlap between Ryann’s other bands, Torrey isn’t the Stereolab-influenced pop of Aluminum nor the crisp bedroom pop of their solo work–it’s loud, fuzzy, guitar-forward dream pop, and a remarkably solid exercise in it.

Throughout their self-titled album, Torrey let Ryann’s vocals sit up front in a discernible way, but they aren’t afraid to play around with a shoegaze-level noisiness in the instrumentals as well. What Torrey end up with is a collection of a dozen indie pop/dream pop songs that get even more loud and distorted around their edges. The band have pushed forward from the more straightforward jangle pop sound of their earlier releases–the contributing instrumentalists certainly help, but Torrey works as well as it does because the pop songwriting bond between the Gonsavleses remains intact in the midst of all the noise. Torrey are consistent regardless of which end of the sound they’re exploring–the first half of the record features some four-minute, sprawling guitar pop tunes in “No Matter How” and “Bounce” in addition to brief, fuzzy alt-rock of “Hawaii” and the pure dream pop of “Rain”, which barely features any percussion–and they all feel like equally essential parts of the record. I hear a bit of Aluminum in the second half of the LP with the soaring noise pop of (the appropriately-titled) “Pop Song” and the lo-fi, floating “July (And I’m)”, but Torrey prove that these turns are perfectly in their wheelhouse, too. Torrey is already a strong step forward, but moments like those ensure that the album stay equally rewarding all the way through. (Bandcamp link)

So Pitted – Cloned

Release date: March 8th
Record label: Youth Riot
Genre: Noise rock, fuzz rock, noise punk, metal
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Everything Sucks

You can listen to all the Amphetamine Reptile and downtune your guitars all you want, but the key to making good noise rock is still by being a bunch of weirdos. Seattle quartet So Pitted seems to understand this, or, at least, they adhere to it whether they understand it or not. Back in 2016, the band put out their first album, neo, on Sub Pop, a collection of frequently heavy but still live and limber-feeling noise rock which, for a long time, was also the only So Pitted album. Cloned arrives eight years later via Youth Riot, and it’s a full-sounding, wide-ranging sophomore statement produced by none other than Tad Doyle. So Pitted certainly owe a debt to their lumbering, heavy Pacific Northwest grunge-rock forebears but, Tad frontman involvement or no, it’s hardly a carbon copy of Seattle circa 1990. Cloned merges an almost metal heaviness with the Midwestern post-punk oddness of Devo and Brainiac, resulting in an intense but otherworldly experience–it’s music for an alien encounter in the dense forests of Washington State.

Lead singer Nathan Rodriguez is a decidedly dynamic frontperson–over the course of Cloned’s dozen songs, he sounds like everything from a robot to an extraterrestrial to a lumberjack to somebody being tortured in a basement. The noise that the rest of So Pitted (Liam Downey, Jagger Beato, and Lauren Rodriguez) whip up is enough to go toe-to-toe with Nathan’s performances–some odd, space-y sound effects bubble to the surface of opening track “Muse”, and “Everything Sucks” makes them sound like Brainiac going through a trash compactor. On some of the record’s briefer tracks, such as “Autobiography” and “Parasite”, So Pitted let loose enough to be mistaken for a punk band, but the group that put “Tool”, “Vodka Cran”, and “Today” to tape seem more into alt-metal. Deep in the second half of Cloned, “Interpol” features some of Rodriguez’s most clear-sounding lyrics. It’s a Devo-ish screed against capitalism, corporate greed, and controlling technology, with Rodriguez ruminating on “The stuff normal people do to survive” in one of the refrains–and then every song after “Interpol” on Cloned is a mess of distortion and noise. While I wouldn’t say that So Pitted are “normal people”, it’s clear that they’ve found their own way to survive: through mutation. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Leave a comment