Pressing Concerns: Hill View #73, Kora Puckett, Buddy Junior, Kind Skies

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It’s a brand new week, and with it brings new music featured in Pressing Concerns. Today’s edition features two new albums (from Hill View #73 and Buddy Junior) and just as many new EPs (from Kora Puckett and Kind Skies).

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.

Hill View #73 – Night Time Is the Grace Period

Release date: March 15th
Record label: Trash Tape/9733
Genre: Lo-fi indie rock, experimental rock, fuzz rock, noise pop
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: All the Time

Hill View #73 is the project of Atlanta, Georgia’s Awsaf Halim, who’s been releasing music for a couple years now (including a demo collection in 2021 and an EP in 2022). Night Time Is the Grace Period is the debut Hill View #73 full-length, and while I hadn’t heard of Halim before being sent this album, they’ve amassed some notable guests on their first LP. Night Time Is the Grace Period is being put out through Trash Tape Records, which was founded by some teenagers in Chapel Hill, North Carolina a few years ago and seems like something of a southeastern analogue to Chicago’s Hallogallo scene–and indeed, several Hallogallo musicians pop up on Night Time Is the Grace Period (including Will Huffman, Desi Kaercher, and Charlie Johnston, who’ve played in Dwaal Troupe, Deerest Friend, and Post Office Winter between the three of them). Still, Hill View #73 is pretty clearly Halim’s project–they wrote all ten of these songs and play most of what you’ll hear on the record. Night Time Is the Grace Period has a familiar yet distinct sound, with Halim proving quite capable of switching between noisy fuzz rock, Alex G/Jeff Mangum-ish bedroom folk, and bright, vibrant synth-colored pop–sometimes within the same song.

Hill View #73 certainly make a splash by opening Night Time Is the Grace Period with “This Is What Makes Me”, a nearly six-minute pop song that starts off as a sparse, piano-and-vocals track in the vein of Sparklehorse or even Daniel Johnston before blooming into a rich tapestry of synths, drum machines, guitars, and a chorus of vocals. “All the Time” feels like it might wind up being more indebted to low-key 90s indie rock, but it still explodes into a giant, blown-out finish before it’s all said and done. “Catch Me” keeps the energy up, but instead of building to something big-sounding it actually starts off loud and then ducks out with a Mangum-y acoustic conclusion. Although “I Wanna Know” is maybe a bit more fuzzed out than Dwaal Troupe, the whistling-featuring song captures Hill View #73’s whimsical indie pop side, a nice moment of respite before the second half of Night Time Is the Grace Period picks up where the opening of the record left off. The earnest bedroom rock of “Missed Call” just might be the album’s finest moment, a thrilling marriage of some quiet confessions and cranked-up guitars. Night Time Is the Grace Period ends with the dramatic, death-staring “Car Accident”–after an incredibly full-sounding record, Halim pulls together noise and pop music together one last time to deliver a resounding parting message: “I’ve still got so much left to say”. (Bandcamp link)

Kora Puckett – 3 Songs

Release date: February 23rd
Record label: Let’s Pretend
Genre: Country rock, alt-country, singer-songwriter, roots rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Far As I Can Tell

You might not recognize Kora Puckett’s name, but the Goshen, Indiana-originating musician has been all over the indie rock landscape of the past few years. He leads 90s alt-rock revivalists Bugg and hardcore punk group Laffing Gas, plays guitar in Narrow Head, and has been a touring guitarist for Sheer Mag, Angel Du$t, and The Berries. His busyness as a musician explains the presence of some notable faces on Puckett’s debut solo record, 3 Songs–Steve Marino (of Jacky Boy) and Matt Berry (of The Berries, Happy Diving, and Big Bite) both play guitar, and these songs were partially recorded by Amos Pitsch of the great Dusk (who also drums and plays bass on the record). Out of that whole impressive list, the crisp and polished country rock of Dusk is the closest to what Puckett sounds like on 3 Songs (surprisingly enough, despite his alt-rock background, it’s not the fuzzy alt-country of The Berries), although there’s a bit of Marino’s college rock/guitar pop hook-crafting in there too. Released on vinyl through Let’s Pretend (Negative Glow, Posmic, Graham Hunt), 3 Songs is barely over ten minutes long, but that’s more than enough time to hear that Puckett’s got a real aptitude for making this kind of music.

A three-song record better not have any weak spots, and all three of these songs are impeccable exercises in country-influenced rock music (or rock-influenced country music, depending on one’s vantage point). That being said, “Far As I Can Tell” might stand a little higher than the other two, with its laid-back but quite catchy guitar playing being the perfect introduction to both 3 Songs and Puckett’s solo career. Just as important are Alex Drossart’s (Shaker and the Egg, The Priggs) wurlitzer contributions, which help push the song into Dusk-ian retro rock-and-roll territory. An enjoyable acoustic guitar part introduces “Forever or Just Then”, a song that balances its relatively rigid structure with the casual nature of Puckett’s writing and vocal delivery (and you’d better believe there’s still wurlitzer, this time provided by onetime R.E.M. collaborator Jamie Candiloro). “Work All Week” is Puckett’s version of a big country rock finish–it’s still relatively polite-sounding, but that doesn’t make the song’s finish, where we’re played out by Candiloro’s piano, Berry’s “honky tonk guitar”, and Mickey Raphael’s harmonica any less satisfying. Hopefully Puckett can find some time in his busy schedule to expand his discography beyond three songs sometime soon, but I can keep replaying these ones in the meantime. (Bandcamp link)

Buddy Junior – Rust

Release date: February 22nd
Record label: Cherub Dream
Genre: Shoegaze, noise pop, lo-fi indie rock, experimental rock
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: DIZZY

Buddy Junior is a bedroom rock project out of San Francisco led by multi-instrumentalist JB Lenar, the one consistent member of the band. Rust is the project’s second full-length album, following 2020’s Portal, and while Buddy Junior does now have a stable lineup (guitarist/vocalist Kiana Endres and bassist/vocalist Christina Busler), Lenar largely pieced together this record alone over the pandemic. They get some help with guest vocalists, but Lenar plays every instrument you hear on Rust, an impressive feat given how full-sounding and forceful these songs come off. Loosely-speaking, it’s a nü-shoegaze/noise pop record, although Buddy Junior has a hypnotic, unique sound throughout Rust that features undertones of cold industrial rock, grab-bag basement lo-fi rock, post-punk, and hazy psychedelia. The eleven-track, forty-minute album feels very labored-over, with every song expanded and developed beyond its initial burst of energy–a lot of the songs on Rust would be the climax of a different album, but Lenar offers them at a steady clip.

The pounding full-band heavy-shoegaze sound of the opening title track is a welcome start, declining to lose any bit of momentum over four minutes, but Rust really starts to distinguish itself with the five-minute left-turn of “Track 2” one song later. The track is a fascinating piece of dark, distorted pop music, the steady drumbeat anchoring a swirling cloud of distortion and a repetitive but emotional vocal performance from Lenar’s longtime collaborator Harvey Forgets. “Possession”, “Fever Baby”, and “Holy” all continue Rust’s omnivorous streak, the first merging staggering percussion with an eerie pop core, the second crawling through some minimalist industrial rock (with guest vocals from Feedbag), and the latter of the three sounding like a darker and more lo-fi version of early-90s Madchester. “Spaces You Keep” proves that Buddy Junior can pull together more straightforward fuzz rock in the record’s second half, and “DIZZY”, a surprisingly clear piece of lo-fi pop that devolves into controlled chaos, might just be the best thing on the album. Rust ends with “Metal Heart 2”, which similarly starts as a fuzzed-out shoegaze-y anthem before morphing into something else as it bows out, wrapping up a record that continuously gets the most out of its ingredients. (Bandcamp link)

Kind Skies – Tower

Release date: February 2nd
Record label: Self-released
Genre: 90s indie rock, post-punk, lo-fi indie rock, noise rock
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Tall Grass

There’s just something about this four-song cassette EP from Lexington, Kentucky’s Kind Skies. This band has been around for a while–a lineup featuring vocalist/guitarist/songwriter Chris Boss and bassist Stephen Boss put out an EP in 2019 and several singles in the years following, while drummer Austin Adkins and guitarist Mitch make their debut on Tower, the group’s second record and first release of any kind since 2021. The four songs on their latest EP are very plain-dressed indie rock of the 90s-inspired variety, although these songs are deceptively complex, with a few of them stitching together multiple movements. Not quite as heavy and “noise rock” as the scene in nearby Louisville was in the golden age of Touch & Go/Quarterstick records, Kind Skies pull together a bit of Sebadoh/early Pavement-y shambolic, basement rock with an unadorned, Electrical Audio-esque recording style and a bit of post-punk propulsion, too (they’ve played a show with Louisville’s Charm School, which seems right).

I enjoy a band that opens their record with their most difficult song, and “Tall Grass” fits the bill, as it’s neither as brief nor as upbeat as the tracks that follow it. It takes a while to really get going, eventually slipping into a bass-led post-punk-ish performance that reminds me a bit of the subtler side of early Silkworm. After about three minutes, Kind Skies feign a fadeout before capping the song off with a louder, brisker piece of lightly-distorted, hooky indie rock in the final minute or so. “Notebooks” is probably the biggest straight-up “rocker” on Tower, with the machine-gun electric guitar intro eventually giving way to an anxious-sounding garage-post-punk tune that’s rhythmic and thorny. The way I see it, “Country Songs” and “ILITMF” are both ballads, although the latter goes about it a lot more noisily than the former. “Country Songs” echoes, sounding like one of the other Kind Skies songs played in a cavern, while “ILITMF” (“I love it too, motherfucker”) is some kind of messed up, Kentucky version of dream pop–somehow, it feels like floating despite doing nothing on its surface to really alter Kind Skies’ sound. Like I said, there’s just something about Tower. (Bandcamp link)

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