Pressing Concerns: John’s Black Dirt, Distant Reader, Jose Israel, Hunger Anthem

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Hey there, readers! It’s a big holiday week, but Rosy Overdrive is sending you to your various family gatherings and festivities with four more good records in tow. We have a vinyl release of a shelved mid-90s album from John’s Black Dirt, plus new albums from Distant Reader, Jose Israel, and Hunger Anthem for you to check out below. There won’t be a post tomorrow, but there should be something up on the day after Christmas (if I get the reissues/compilations list done by then, it’ll be that; it’ll be a Pressing Concerns if not).

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 (deadline is this Friday, 12/27)!

John’s Black Dirt – Horrible Moments of Upness (Vinyl Release)

Release date: November 25th
Record label: Belligerent/Sullen Teen
Genre: 90s indie rock, fuzz rock, garage rock, noise rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Bushwacker

If you’re tuned in enough to what’s left of “the indie music press”, you might’ve seen a story from earlier this month about how Conor Oberst told his record label at the time, Wind-Up, not to release the debut album from post-grunge detritus Creed. It’s bad enough that Grass Records (as they were known then, pre-rebrand) inflicted My Own Prison on us in their successful bid for a mainstream rock breakthrough, but it also came at the expense of smaller (and actually good) bands like John’s Black Dirt, who were lost in the shuffle. After releasing Perpetual Optimism Is A Force Multiplier on Grass in 1994, the Minneapolis trio met up with Mercury Rev’s Dave Fridmann the following year to record a second album called Horrible Moments of Upness, but due to the aforementioned record label shenanigans, it never saw the light of day until a quarter-century after its completion. With help from Steve Albini and Taylor Hales (Paper Mice), John’s Black Dirt transferred the recordings from DAT to digital in 2017, made it available to stream in 2020 and, finally, released it on vinyl last month via Belligerent Records. So, what does what turned out to be the final album from bassist Brett Mizelle (who played in Unrest), drummer Mike Huber (who drums on Mercury Rev’s Yerself Is Steam), and guitarist Seth Mindel (apparently the only one of the three who played in another notable Minneapolis band–Mother’s Day) sound like?

Well, to put it reductively–it sounds like the mid-90s indie rock record that its bargain-bin-friendly album artwork (provided by Matt Franzen) hints at. It’s not as angry as the Archers of Loaf, not as heavy as Arcwelder, not as deconstructed as The Grifters, not as poppy as (later) Unrest–but these are the bands I think of when listening to Horrible Moments of Upness. It’s pure blustery Midwestern basement rock music–even in the wild, wild west of mid-90s alternative rock radio, there wasn’t really room for something as earnestly sloppy as “Bushwacker”, the record’s scene-setting opening track. And that’s probably the most accessible thing on Horrible Moments of Upness! John’s Black Dirt aren’t an outwardly abrasive band on this record, but that just means that Horrible Moments of Upness’ inherent oddness is of a more subtle variety. I’m way too deep down the rabbit hole to engage with an album like this normally; to me, the post-grunge Minutemen punk of “In a Dark Room” and the Quarterstick Records-like “My Heart & the Real World” are potential hit singles. The explosive, ugly “How to Destroy Art” is the fiery rock and roll mission statement, the burnt-out slow swayers “Gimme Some Time” and “Carl C. Reep” gorgeous power ballads. That’s what Horrible Moments of Upness sounds like to me–and who are you going to trust, Rosy Overdrive or Alan and Diana Meltzer? (Bandcamp link)

Distant Reader – Place of Words Now Gone

Release date: November 8th
Record label: Lily Tapes & Discs
Genre: Folk, slowcore, singer-songwriter
Formats: CD, digital
Pull Track: Emergency

Emmerich Anklam is a singer-songwriter from northern California–born in Santa Rosa, currently based in Berkeley–who has been making music as Distant Reader since 2017. Sometimes Distant Reader treads into the worlds of ambient and drone music, other times towards a more song-based slowcore and folk sound, but there appear to be threads connecting Anklam’s work–like the intersection of nature, man-made climate change, and the mythological nature of “California”, which Anklam has explored in albums like Six Fires in Northern California, Sea Level, and Home Power. The latter of those three was released on Rochester experimental folk imprint Lily Tapes & Discs (Ylayali, Hour, Michael Cormier-O’Leary), and after a period of self-released records, Place of Words Now Gone marks Distant Reader’s return to their roster. Anklam’s latest is a gorgeous slow-folk record–even though his writing is still linked to California, Place of Words Now Gone does remind me of the quieter side of upstate New York folk rock acts like Another Michael, Ben Seretan, and Blue Ranger, so Lily Tapes & Discs feels like a natural place for this record. Anklam recorded Place of Words Now Gone with multi-instrumentalist Andrew Weathers last year at Wind Tide in Littlefield, Texas, and the two of them balance the intimate, quiet nature of Anklam’s writing with a full sound including pedal steel, saxophone, and field recordings from Weathers.

Lily Tapes & Discs describes Place of Words Now Gone as a “fully-realized narrative suite” that “describes an eerie spell of silence that spreads through a remote community”. In this way, it’s in the same vein as Advance Base’s recent album Horrible Occurrences, which also uses silence and hushed tones to mirror the unspoken darkness of small-town America. Anklam doesn’t clearly unspool an obvious story throughout Place of Words Now Gone; the physical CD comes with a lyric booklet so you can try to piece the events together if you’re so inclined, landing on key lines and depictions like the “suffocating smoke” in “Outpost”, or the ten houses “drifting on planks so close to the shore…where one could feel at home once, but never more” in “Ten Houses” (with the striking sound of seagulls present in the background). Weathers and Anklam do dress these seven songs up with the aforementioned instrumentation, but Place of Words Now Gone is unmistakably a folk album at its core; every track centers Anklam’s voice and lyrics, the ambient instrumental side of Distant Reader used as a (nonetheless potent) way to connect these central pieces. It feels right that I’m writing about this album in the no-man’s-land of late December; this is the kind of album that should be stumbled onto unsuspectingly, only to stick with you long after this initial moment. (Bandcamp link)

Jose Israel – To Live in Brief Wonder

Release date: October 31st
Record label: 7Songs
Genre: Experimental rock, post-punk, art rock, math rock, lo-fi indie rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Bring Me Back 2 Life

At the beginning of this year, I heard an EP called Fragments by Chicago quartet Rotundos. The four-song EP (as seen on Rosy Overdrive’s Top 25 EPs of 2024) covered everything from garage rock to post-punk to post-hardcore to pop punk in its brief runtime, and it was more than enough for me to be interested in any future records from the band. The new Rotundos album isn’t out yet (sources tell me it may appear early next year), but in the meantime I was happy to find out that one of the band’s members, Jose Israel, has put together a solo album called To Live in Brief Wonder. The record (whose tracklist appears to be different on streaming services than it is on Bandcamp) reflects the adventurousness seen in Israel’s band–To Live in Brief Wonder is a brief but electric collection of everything from polished-up indie rock to lo-fi garage punk to experimental, math-y guitar pop, among several other genres. Israel clearly has enough talent to pull off this kind of jumping around–there are moments in To Live in Brief Wonder so disparate as to be nearly aurally whiplash-inducing, but it’s not like there’s one “truer” part of Israel’s sound than another. Israel’s decided to put it all out there for us to take in on To Live in Brief Wonder, and it’s a good enough album to command the attention it requires.

To Live in Brief Wonder may traverse a lot of ground in a short amount of time, but Jose Israel still takes pains to roll out the red carpet with the attention-grabbing, shined-up indie rock of “Bring Me Back 2 Life” at the start of the record (at least, the version I’ve been listening to). Not that the next few tracks aren’t catchy in their own ways, too, but they’re more muddied, with “Make Me” exploring a distorted, punk-tinged sound in under two minutes and “Yo Voy Con Ti” tempering its bounciness with some moments of rage. To Live in Brief Wonder really goes off the beaten path towards the middle of the record–“Stars in My Eyes” is part mid-tempo indie rock ballad, part jazz-pop, and “Waiting in the Sitting Room” similarly combines fine-edged rock music with outside influences to intriguing ends. If you’re expecting To Live in Brief Wonder to clear things up as it draws to a close, you’ll be left disappointed, as the album finishes with a sixty-second garage punk ripper (the appropriately-titled “Corto!”), a wild post-hardcore track (“Permanent”), and a brief, quiet jazzy benediction called “I Can’t Tell”. This is To Live in Brief Wonder, and we have to either take it or leave it as is. I’ll take it. (Bandcamp link)

Hunger Anthem – Lift

Release date: December 6th
Record label: Cornelius Chapel
Genre: Power pop, pop punk, college rock, punk rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Lift

Hunger Anthem began in the early 2010s as a solo project for singer/guitarist Brendan Vaganek in Buffalo, New York; Vaganek eventually relocated to Athens, Georgia and added drummer Cameron Kelly and drummer Margo for a tight power trio lineup. Hunger Anthem’s output has been pretty sporadic–a self-titled album in 2011, an EP in 2015, a few scattered singles–but their long-in-the-making second LP, Lift, sounds like the band attempting to make up for lost time. Released via notable southern punk rock label Cornelius Chapel, Lift zips through a dozen tracks that range between a snotty, garage-y flag-waving pop punk sound and the catchy college rock in which Hunger Anthem’s hometown is steeped. Pretty much every ingredient for a classic pop punk record is here–a bunch of hooks, Vaganek’s anthemic bleat of a lead vocal, a firing-on-all-cylinders instrumental trio, Margo’s sparingly-used but expertly-deployed backing vocals. It’s all over in a little over a half-hour, but there’s more than enough on Lift for us to sit with for however long it takes Hunger Anthem to make some more tunes.

Lift starts with nothing less than the “Sun”, a song that begins with a clean electric guitar and eventually congeals into a utilitarian but still potent mid-tempo power pop introduction. Hunger Anthem’s punk side first shows up in the slightly mussed up southern punk of “Remedy” (and then again not long afterwards in the vaguely threatening “Ways”), while the bright, jangly “Patron” warps Hunger Anthem’s sound into a slightly more on-edge sounding version of classic college rock (rivaled only by excellent penultimate track “Pattern” in this regard). I think my favorite version of Hunger Anthem’s sound is when the trio stretch things out and get a bit more ambitious–the first indication of this on Lift is on “Soul of Clay”, which is a far-reaching power-punk-ballad that’s nearly twice as long as anything else on the record up until that point. My overall favorite moment on Lift is the title track, though–it doesn’t quite sound like anything else on the record, and the refrain is slowly pieced together rather than mercilessly flogged. “Lift” is a desperate-sounding track, with the guitar chords frantically bashed out; the bass does the melodic heavy lifting, which is the most “pop punk” thing about it. Or maybe it’s the vocal trade-off between Margo and Vaganek that slowly takes shape over the course of the track, which only adds to the eventual catharsis. Most records like this don’t have something like “Lift” on them, but thankfully Hunger Anthem either don’t know that or don’t care. (Bandcamp link)

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