Pressing Concerns: Poem Rocket, Loose Koozies, Daydream Three, Dead Senses

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Hey there, everyone! It’s a Thursday Pressing Concerns; usually, I’d be looking at new albums coming out tomorrow in this column, but because there isn’t anything coming out this Friday that I want to write about (that I’ve heard yet, at least), we’re instead looking at some records from November and earlier this month I’ve been meaning to get to: a “lost EP” from Poem Rocket, and new albums from Loose Koozies, Daydream Three, and Dead Senses. It’s been a busy week, so if you missed either Monday’s Pressing Concerns (featuring Mystery Fix, Yussa-Exide, Possum in My Room, and Schande) or Rosy Overdrive’s Top 25 EPs of 2024 (which went up Tuesday), check those 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. And last but not least: don’t forget to vote in the 2024 Rosy Overdrive Reader’s Poll!

Poem Rocket – Lend-Lease

Release date: November 15th
Record label: Silver Girl
Genre: Art rock, post-rock, post-punk, noise rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Depth Charge

Poem Rocket are a New York indie rock band that formed in the 1990s, and they do indeed sound like a New York indie rock band from the 1990s. Husband and wife duo Michael Peters (vocals/guitar) and Sandra Gardner (vocals/bass) co-founded the band in 1992, eventually adding guitarist Mike Knowlton (who has recently started making music as Unlettered) and drummer Peter Gordon, both previously of the band Gapeseed, in the late 90s. The bulk of the band’s output (two albums and two EPs) came out between 1995 and 2000, with 2007’s double album Invasion! being the only new Poem Rocket material since that point. This year brought an unexpected Poem Rocket resurgence, however–new live shows, talk of new material in 2025, and the unearthing of Lend-Lease, the band’s “lost EP”. These four songs were recorded in 1999 but shelved until last month, when Silver Girl Records (Dewey Defeats Truman, The Summer Hits, Spare Snare) put the record out on vinyl. Lend-Lease is a portrait of a band tapping into a long line of New York art rock groups from Sonic Youth to Live Skull to Blonde Redhead, but it’s also a document of a group in its own prime and speaking a unique, self-cultivated language.

Lend-Lease is a sprawling record–it takes twenty-six minutes to wind its way through these four songs. The music of Poem Rocket is a bit hard to describe; it’s almost easier to say what they don’t sound like on Lend-Lease. They aren’t low-end-worshipping Unsane-ish cavemen noise rock, nor are they clear-cut Sonic Youth distortion/fuzz architects–and they’re not comparable to any of the main “post-rock” bands either. Poem Rocket’s version of rock music is deliberately moving, fully-sketched out but not overwhelming, and lengthy without being “jammy” or drone-y. Lend-Lease is a marvel of well-orchestrated indie rock made with a utilitarian toolkit–every surprising acoustic bit, every piano accent, every confident step taken forward by the electric guitars feels like the result of much deliberation and mapping. The first half of the EP is Poem Rocket at their purest, with “Depth Charge” and “Vera Shore” both largely digging into the soil of post-punk and experimental rock steadily and skillfully. On the flipside of Lend-Lease, it’s time for some relative extremes: the acoustic guitar that grounds “Black Freighter Contraband” helps Poem Rocket hold back just enough to pull off the folk and blues phantoms injected into the track, while eight-minute closing track “A.R.P. (Air Raid Protection)” is Poem Rocket at their most urgent, indeed sounding like an air raid siren for parts of the song. This only applies to parts of “A.R.P.”, though, not all of it–like the rest of Lend-Lease, Poem Rocket are running a marathon, not a sprint. (Bandcamp link)

Loose Koozies – Passing Through You

Release date: December 6th
Record label: Tall Texan
Genre: Country rock, alt-country
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: The Butterfly

California label Tall Texan’s underappreciated discography as of late has included everything from Houston alt-country to Bay Area jangle pop to Pittsburgh post-punk; the imprint got its foot in the door in the world of Michigan indie rock by releasing a 7” from Idle Ray last year, and they’ve reaffirmed their commitment to the Mitten this year by putting out Passing Through You, the second LP from Detroit quintet Loose Koozies. Guitarist/vocalist/songwriter E.M. Allen, pedal steel guitarist Pete Ballard, bassist Erin Davis, drummer Nick German, and guitarist Audrey Moran are a group of Michigan ringers (German’s played in the band Don’t with Interior Geometry’s Jared Sparkes, Davis in Failed Flowers with Fred Thomas and Anna Burch) who came together to make rollicking country rock in the late 2010s, with a string of singles culminating in their debut, 2020’s Feel a Bit Free. Passing Through You might’ve taken four more years to materialize, but Loose Koozies’ follow-up statement is a solid and thorough one; these fourteen songs are impeccably written and presented, sounding polished but loose and automatic but thoughtful. There are a few surprises to be found across the forty-odd minute LP, but for the most part the five Koozies lock in and play their parts to their best abilities, turning in a very smooth journey.

Even on Passing Through You’s quietest moments, the songs still bear the mark of a five-piece band–and, by the same token, even Loose Koozies at their most “rock” is a bit more reserved and clever than your Replacements-level alt-country group. “Haworthia” opens the curtains on the record with the platonic ideal of mid-tempo country-infused rock music, while the bass-forward rock and roll of “Stuntman” (“I’m a stuntman / Give me something stupid to do and I’ll do it for you”) gets the train rolling and the charming duet between Allen and Kelly Jean Caldwell in “I Won’t Be Leaving Here (Unless It’s With You)” is accented by Moran’s guitar leads. A record as substantial as Passing Through You can be broken up into several distinct sections–there’s a laid-back stretch after the opening gunshot, followed by a resurgence in the run from “Highways Gone” to “Wobbly Wheel”. This time around, though, the rousing country rock of the band flirts with new ideas in the former track’s almost psychedelic embrace of kraut-y rhythms and with the surprising synth accents found in the song immediately after it, “The Butterfly”. There’s plenty more to absorb and dissect throughout Passing Through You; thankfully Loose Koozies have built up the record in a way that welcomes us back to the well as many times as we need to do so. (Bandcamp link)

Daydream Three – Stop Making Noise

Release date: November 8th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Fuzz rock, noise rock, garage rock, 90s indie rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Death Makes Fun of Us

Sicilian musician Enzo Pepi has played in local groups Twig Infection, The Pepiband, and Carmelo Amenta’s band, and at the end of last decade he started a solo project called Daydream Three. Stop Making Noise is the third Daydream Three album (following 2019’s Daydream and 2021’s The Lazy Revolution), and it was recorded live by Carlo Barbagallo at the Arsonica concert hall in Syracuse, with the goal being to capture the sound of the Daydream Three live band (Pepi, bassist Alessandro Formica, and drummer Vincenzo Arisco) as accurately as possible. Both the ironic album title and the (presumably less ironic) name of the band paint an accurate picture of what Daydream Three sound like at their most plugged-in–a loud, fuzzed-out indie rock group in the vain of the more straightforward side of Sonic Youth, Crazy Horse, and other groups who favor blunt, stoic, and noisy rock music. Even with the setup favoring maximum rock and roll, however, Stop Making Noise has plenty of subtler moments, and Pepi’s performance as a frontperson (a particularly European mix of blasé, nostalgic, sarcastic, and nihilistic) is as key to the feel of the album as the buzzing six-strings.

Stop Making Noise opens with “Death Makes Fun of Us”, which is a quite fitting introduction to Daydream Three–it’s loud, it’s catchy, Pepi sounds like he’s shrugging in his vocals, and the lyrics will probably make you feel bad. It’s hardly the only real rocker on the record–Stop Making Noise is full of lumbering walls of sound, from the twitching “We Are Not Guilty” to the windswept “Flow” to the almost-glam “Mad Dog” to the big riff of “You Can’t Deceive Me Anymore”. Daydream Three are so committed to seeing out this side of their music that the exceptions stick out even more strongly; for one, the decision to put the half-asleep, acoustic guitar-led “Meat Sauce” second in the album’s sequence is a bold one (ah, a Sicilian band with a song called “Meat Sauce”; can’t make this stuff up). There’s a bit of fuzz in mid-record highlight “Only Sweet Words”, but it’s in the service of a cavernous, subdued mid-tempo slowcore-influenced song that shows a lot more restraint than Daydream Three bother with elsewhere on the album. And then of course there’s “You Have No Control”, the album’s closing dirge, which ends Stop Making Noise with that cheery message about life. Let’s, uh, turn the amplifiers back up rather than dwell on that for too long, shall we? (Bandcamp link)

Dead Senses – DREAMLESS

Release date: November 1st
Record label: Record Heads
Genre: Noise rock, post-hardcore, post-punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: That’s Amoré

There’s no mistaking it; Dead Senses are a noise rock band. Bassist/vocalist Michael Siciliano, guitarist Sal Lorenzana, and drummer Scott Werren have all played in “punk, hardcore, metal, noise rock, and power violence bands in LA, Chicago, and Pittsburgh” before meeting in the former of those three cities to form Dead Senses in 2022 and getting to work by putting out two demo EPs and a full-length (via Already Dead Tapes) over the next year and a half. Their second album is called DREAMLESS, and while the trio may have wide-ranging musical backgrounds, they’re locked in on that classic noise rock sound for the entirety of the nineteen-minute LP. Sure, they mention all the right names in their biography–Chat Pile, The Jesus Lizard, Pissed Jeans–but it takes more than that to make something vital-sounding in this subgenre. DREAMLESS is pulverizing, angry, and hopeless–Siciliano, Lorenzana, and Werren all seem to be on the same dismal page with regards to this sound. Siciliano is a classic rant-yeller, and the rhythm section is just as rock-solid as one could possibly want in a noise rock record–there’s nothing fancy to be found on DREAMLESS, of course.

Dead Senses make the inspired decision to open up DREAMLESS by beating us all into submission with “Writhe”–Siciliano wields the titular word like a giant club, both commanding us to do what it suggests and describing what the band themselves do throughout the song. The drain-circling gives way to the unhinged “Fake”, a more limber rocker featuring a particularly wild Siciliano vocal (“So wipe those tears away / We’re fake / And no one cares!” is Dead Senses’ positive message this time around). The electric, hot-to-the-touch garage punk instrumental of “That’s Amoré” is oddly catchy, but rest assured that Siciliano’s “That’s love!” is delivered with the bluntest sarcasm. The gray fireworks simply don’t stop as DREAMLESS roars into its second half–the noisy flare-ups in the title track are a nice touch, and Dead Senses practically sum up their entire record with the pointed noise-punk of “It Just Gets Worse” (Siciliano oscillating between raging against the titular fact and dejectedly accepting it). I wouldn’t call Dead Senses a “neat” band, but they wrap up their business in clean fashion–all eight songs on the record are between a minute and a half and three minutes, and the LP itself is done in under twenty. Dead Senses respect the mercy rule, even if the world they depict in their music decidedly doesn’t. (Bandcamp link)

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