Pressing Concerns: Fred Thomas, Naked Giants, Tony Vaz, Mr. Husband

rosyoverdriveOctober 3, 2024October 2, 2024Pressing ConcernsFred Thomas, Idle Ray, Mr. Husband, Naked Giants, Pretty Side of the Ugly Life, Shine Away, Tony Vaz, Wildflower, Window in the Rhythm

Hello, loyal and appreciated Rosy Overdrive readers! Today’s Thursday Pressing Concerns looks at four albums coming out tomorrow, October 4th: new LPs from Fred Thomas, Naked Giants, Tony Vaz, and Mr. Husband. Some real underground indie rock/pop royalty in this one, if I do say so myself! It’s been a busy week; it’d be understandable if you missed Monday’s post (featuring Upstairs, Snakeskin, Best Bets, and Feeling Figures), Tuesday’s post (on Styrofoam Winos, Dom Sensitive, Wavers, and The Collect Pond), or Wednesday’s post (on Spirit Night’s Time Won’t Well), so be sure to check those ones out, too.

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.

Fred Thomas – Window in the Rhythm

Release date: October 4^th
Record label: Polyvinyl
Genre: Folk rock, experimental rock, ambient rock, singer-songwriter
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Wasn’t

There’s too much to say about Fred Thomas–such it is with any musician who’s been releasing music at a prolific clip for nearly three decades now. The back half of his 2010s were defined by a trio of experimental, brilliant, and deeply-felt pop albums released under his own name, and the early 2020s by his new band Idle Ray, which put out an excellent debut album in 2021 amidst other smaller but worthwhile releases. Window in the Rhythm is the Ann Arbor-based musician’s first song-based solo album since 2018’s Aftering, and while it’s not in the same realm as the ambient music Thomas has been known to partake in, it’s not the lo-fi power pop of Idle Ray or the sonic busyness of his previous solo albums, either. Spanning seven songs in sixty minutes, Window in the Rhythm is a spacious album, Thomas and his guitar building a spindly but firm foundation. As the tracks unspool, some of them get louder and more ornate, but Window in the Rhythm uses vastness and absence as a weapon for a good chunk of the hour it takes. It’s a very natural-sounding record, and it still sounds like a Fred Thomas record–his voice and writing guide us through the double album, still recognizably the ace sing-speaking pop musician even as we enter a world of ten-minute songs with no choruses.

Thomas’ writing throughout Window in the Rhythm is backward-glancing but transient–memories drift in and out of these instrumentals, images from the brain of somebody who probably feels like a completely different person than the initial witness. A lot of artists would obscure or distort their vocals in some way to demonstrate this, but Thomas’ voice is, as always, crystal-clear and eminently discernible. It’s almost more disorienting this way, like when you wake up from a vivid dream and you still haven’t sorted out which residual anxieties you can let go of yet. In some ways, opening track “Embankment” feels even longer than its eight minutes–putting this blog post together, I was surprised that the song where Thomas sings alongside a droning chorus of himself, the song where Geoff dies, and the song with the mixtape with “the same Squarepusher song on it four times, but not in a row” are all the same one. There are just as many striking moments in the other two longest songs on the album–the ten-minute progressive folk of “Coughed Up a Cufflink” finds Thomas hungry after “everything’s closed” before being hit with a whammy of a memory that’s maybe the strongest thing on the entire album, and the fourteen-minute closing track “Wasn’t” fearlessly flies right into a classic “Fred Thomas indie rock” attitude that Window in the Rhythm had eschewed up until that point–and, of course, ends up nowhere near this familiar signpost.

“Living in fiction is rough / The doors are never locked enough / And your heart beats in retrospect,” Thomas sings in “Electric Guitar Left Out in the Street”, which at seven-and-a-half minutes is one of the shorter songs on the album. “Electric Guitar Left Out in the Street” and the majority of the song that follows it, “Season of Carelessness”, comprise the bleakest stretch of Window in the Rhythm. The former song is particularly bare, with nowhere for the subject of the song to hide as they try futilely to create and communicate something–Mary Lattimore’s harp provides just a small bit of cover as the song drifts away. “Season of Carelessness” is more scattershot but no less harsh–for three minutes, it’s Thomas and a delicately-played acoustic guitar, and this has to end before Window in the Rhythm can find more territory to explore in its second half. Thomas’ voice drops out, but the guitar carries on, joined by an insistent crowd of synths and drum machines that grow louder and more overwhelming. It is, of course, a natural transition. (Bandcamp link)

Naked Giants – Shine Away

Release date: October 4^th
Record label: DevilDuck
Genre: Power pop, garage rock, 90s indie rock, fuzz rock, alt-rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Apartment 3

Seattle trio Naked Giants started playing together a decade ago as teenagers, and they had a bit of a moment at the end of the 2010s, putting out two albums on New West Records (2018’s SLUFF and 2020’s The Shadow) and touring and collaborating with artists like Car Seat Headrest and Ron Gallo. The time in between their last album and Shine Away feels like the first real “breather” for vocalist/guitarist Grant Mullen, bassist/vocalist Gianni Aiello, and drummer Henry LaVallee–the band that recorded the third Naked Giants LP is made up of people with day jobs and are at a significantly different stage in their lives than they were when the project began. I’m not sure if Shine Away is a “mature” album, but it’s a refined and experienced one–the version of alternative rock music practiced by Naked Giants on this record is a well-worn, lived-in mixture of the poppier side of 90s indie rock a la Pavement/Archers of Loaf, garage rock, and power pop. Sometimes the songs on Shine Away turn into anthems in spite of themselves, while other times it’s clearly what Naked Giants are gunning for–but one way or another, the band get to where they’re going.

I’m not entirely sure why, but I get a fair amount of disorientation and whiplash listening to Shine Away–while streaming this album during my day job, I’ve had the thought “maybe the album sequence got messed up when I downloaded it”, and I’ve incorrectly identified when the album ends and the next one in the queue begins on multiple occasions. The band that sings “Put me in that television like I’m Tom Verlaine” and then plays a Marquee Moon guitar lick in the slacker-pop candy of “Apartment 3” doesn’t seem like the same one that executes the dour, chilly indie rock of “Missed Out” one song later; the all-out, pounding endless chorus of “Did I Just Die” really seems like it should be the album’s grand finale, but the high-flying guitars of “Case of the Bastards” come swooping in to give Shine Away yet another wind in the penultimate slot. I don’t really mean all this as criticism–it ends up accentuating things that aren’t particularly all that upfront in albums like this. Naked Giants are fairly long-winded on Shine Away, and a lot of the record seems like scheming up the best way to present it all–the crumbling society that shows up in songs like “Bad Guys Win” and “Dissolve” is hardly a rare subject these days (yes, yes, we’re living in a declining empire, we know), but Naked Giants use their most exciting, catchiest power pop tricks to move through them–and the most intriguing story told in the album, found in “Oh Michael”, gets a more subtle but still quite hooky guitar pop skin. Just about everything on Shine Away is given the right tweaks and turns to make it stick. (Bandcamp link)

Tony Vaz – Pretty Side of the Ugly Life

Release date: October 4^th
Record label: Jubilee Gang
Genre: Lo-fi indie rock, alt-country, bedroom pop, folk rock, psych pop
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Your Purse or Your Life

New York musician Trevor Antonio “Tony” Vaz has been around for a bit–if you were paying attention to Brooklyn art rock circa the mid-2010s, maybe you came across his group Dances, and he’s also done a bit of production work over the years. Around the beginning of this decade, Vaz added “solo artist” to the list, releasing a few singles that have eventually culminated with the release of his first full-length album, Pretty Side of the Ugly Life, on Jubilee Gang (a label he co-runs). The first Tony Vaz LP is a constantly surprising pop album–self-recorded in Vaz’s home studio, Pretty Side of the Ugly Life is rooted in mid-2010s “bedroom pop”/and “lo-fi indie rock”, with regular detours into everything from orchestral pop to folk and alt-country to electronic music. The thirty-minute record has an independent attitude, but at the same time, Vaz is far from “alone” here–contributors Levon Henry (saxophone/clarinet), Zachary O’Brien (guitar), Cal Fish (flute), Chris Corsico (drums), and Alena Spanger (vocals), among others, make their marks on these songs, and a few are even credited as co-writers for their additions to the tracks. Vaz is holding all of it together at the middle, making sure Pretty Side of the Ugly Life is always “loose and freewheeling” in a coherent way.

Pretty Side of the Ugly Life starts in indie rock territory and gets more adventurous as it progresses–although that doesn’t mean there aren’t inspired, offbeat choices right up front on the album, too. “Your Purse or Your Life” opens the record with some strong country-rock guitar-play merged with a greyscale 90s indie rock foundation, soaring violin from Camellia Hartman, and Spanger’s backing vocals–it’s a somewhat confusing combination, but it works, and it opens up a bunch of possibilities that Vaz and his collaborators proceed to explore in the subsequent highlights “9 Lives” (a folk-pop tune with a beat, featuring co-lead vocals from Spanger) and “Spin” (fuzzed-out indie rock with just a bit of twang). Like I alluded to, the second half of Pretty Side of the Ugly Life features some of Vaz’s most experimental moments–adding violin to a pretty acoustic guitar instrumental in “Pretty Life” is one thing, but the blunt-force dance pop of “Servants” (with lyrics unmistakably about Vaz’s childhood growing up Indian in “mostly white communities”) and the experimental, hazy, R&B-tinged sophisti-pop of “Street Rips” really test the waters. The record’s closing track, “24 Hour Gang”, is another one of these moments, at least on paper. Vaz closes Pretty Side of the Ugly Life with a five-minute lo-fi pop banger that tries to cram the ambition of 80s new wave/synthpop into something sleek and streamlined. Pretty Side of the Ugly Life is the work of someone who doesn’t stop swinging, less worried about nailing a specific influence than landing somewhere interesting and unique. (Bandcamp link)

Mr. Husband – Wildflower

Release date: October 4^th
Record label: Good Soil/PIAPTK
Genre: Folk rock, psychedelic pop, jangle pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Believer

Kenny Tompkins is a prolific singer-songwriter from Appalachia who makes gorgeous 60s-influenced pop music as Mr. Husband, pulling together psychedelic pop, folk rock, and other strains of indie pop across a vast discography. In short, he’s right at home on Rosy Overdrive. In fact, Tompkins has appeared on the blog before, via the long-awaited second album from his power pop band The Trend (one of my favorite LPs of 2022). However, Mr. Husband has long been the main output for Tompkins’ songwriting–the one-sheet refers to Wildflower as the seventh Mr. Husband full-length, but you can get to an even higher number depending on what you’re counting as an “album” (does 2020’s Hey Sufjan, You Took Too Long So I Went Ahead and Made West Virginia count? I say yes). These days, Mr. Husband is a Frederick, Maryland-based quartet featuring drummer Chris Morris, guitarist Adam Laye, and bassist Curt Tompkins (the brother of Kenny); working as a unit, the four of them took an unusually long two years to assemble Wildflower. Despite the extra work, Mr. Husband haven’t abandoned the carefree, streamlined version of guitar pop music they’ve nailed in the past–these nine songs are built around acoustic guitars, jangly folk rock, and earnest balladry as much as any of their others.

If there’s anything on Wildflower that sounds lab-grown, it’s “Believer”, an instant Mr. Husband classic jangle pop/folk rock cross-pollinated tune that goes down quite easily. Even in “Believer”, Tompkins sounds a little more reflective and contemplative, setting the stage for a record that has plenty on its shined-up mind. In its own way, “Tatezata (LED Frisbee)” is as catchy as the opening track, Mr. Husband turning in a calculated breeziness with bits of Graceland, soft rock, and jazz chords on tap. Aside from the indecisive power pop of “Waiting”, the rest of Wildflower is a bit more subdued–we’ve got the nearly six-minute record centerpiece “Lovefool” and penultimate power ballad “It Was You”, which balance dreamy psych-pop with eternal, almost pre-rock-and-roll torch songs and longing. The slow-burning full band performances in those songs shouldn’t go unnoticed, but the Mr. Husband band also know when to bow out–both “Red Light Green Light” and closing track “Songs Anyway” are simple acoustic constructions. The latter of the two might as well be called “The Ballad of Kenny ‘Husband’ Tompkins”; it begins “The world has so many songs / But I think it might be okay / If I wrote my songs anyway”. Over a pin-drop quiet guitar, Tompkins’ voice rises as he reaffirms this over the course of “Songs Anyway”; singing about writing, singing, and playing songs, he sounds as passionate as anywhere else on the record. (Bandcamp link)

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