Pressing Concerns: IMustBe Leonardo, Minor Conflict, Krystian Quint & The Quitters, Blood Lemon

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Hello! January’s nearly over (believe it or not), but I’ve still got plenty of good music from this month to talk about here on the blog. This Pressing Concerns rounds up new albums from IMustBe Leonardo and Krystian Quint & The Quitters as well as new EPs from Minor Conflict and Blood Lemon, all of which came out these first few weeks of 2025. There’ll be a non-Pressing Concerns post tomorrow (Tuesday, January 28th), as well as the typical Thursday Pressing Concerns.

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.

IMustBe Leonardo – Berlin, Ohio

Release date: January 6th
Record label: Self-released
Genre:  Folk, lo-fi folk, singer-songwriter, slowcore
Formats: CD, digital
Pull Track: It Wasn’t Love

The artist known as IMustBe Leonardo was born and grew up in southern Italy, but he has called Berlin, Germany home since the early 2010s. Leonardo played in bands when he lived in Italy, but his solo project seems to have begun in Germany; he’s self-recorded and self-released five albums since 2016, most recently last year’s Not to Be Scared of Weekend (which I didn’t end up writing about, but was probably one of my favorite album titles of 2024). The newest IMustBe Leonardo album actually predates Not to Be Scared of Weekend; it was recorded in March of 2023 by Howard Bilerman at his Hotel2Tango studio in Montreal (aside from two songs recorded by Peter Deimel in France). Bilerman has a ton of notable recording credits (Leonard Cohen, Arcade Fire, Godspeed You! Black Emperor), but Leonardo specifically mentioned his work with the late Vic Chesnutt as to why he wanted to make an album with him–to the point of flying to a different continent to make it happen. 

Even though it’s his first studio album, Berlin, Ohio is a much quieter, starker, and intimate record than Leonardo’s last LP–it’s just the singer’s hushed vocals and some fairly straightforward guitar accompaniment for the most part. Vic Chesnutt always needed so little to captivate us on his albums, and I can tell from what part of his music Leonardo finds so much inspiration–even if the two are pretty distinct songwriters. Rather than a college town in the American South, Leonardo’s quiet writing comes from the middle of one of the largest urban centers in the word. It is perhaps easier to get lost in a sprawling city filled with millions of people with their own stories, lives, and goals, and Berlin, Ohio (a real place, and also a nod to Paris, Texas) finds Leonardo meditating on this. These are curious folk songs about people departing and arriving, finding themselves unexpectedly in places they never planned on visiting. 

There’s the tortured man sitting on the bench in “The Champion”, or the fleeing narrator of “Project for an Airport Chair”. “My Favorite Knife” is about an object that links one’s self to a vanished past (it reminds me of that Guided By Voices lyric, “I want to start a new life / With my valuable hunting knife”), while it’s the title of “It Wasn’t Love” that explains what happens to the song’s protagonist (“When you ask the almost dream to grow up / And keep asking every day in silence / It doesn’t work”). I have no idea what Leonardo means exactly by “It didn’t finish when I abandoned the black coat / Or when two lovers mocked my pain into a car,” in “Tired Blood”, but between the bittersweet, slow-waltzing tempo and the very next lines (“What we will leave behind this time? / Never occurred to us that me and you, we both are going to die”), I think I understand the song. Similarly, the last song is called “You Finally No One”, and while the exercising of the right to be forgotten contained in the track is presented neutrally by Leonardo, it is, in more ways than one, what everything about Berlin, Ohio was always leading up towards. (Bandcamp link)

Minor Conflict – Parallels

Release date: January 24th
Record label: PRAH
Genre: Post-rock, experimental rock, art rock, post-punk
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Parallels II

It seems like there’s a lot of interesting music that could loosely be described as “art rock” that came out last week (much of which appeared in last Thursday’s blog post), but even so, nothing else on the docket quite sounds like Minor Conflict’s Parallels. They’re a British trio, from Bristol; Natalie Whiteland plays the harp and sings, Josh Smyth plays bass and sings, and Robbie Warin contributes trumpet, synth, and percussion. They debuted in 2023 with a four-song EP called Bright Lights, Dead City, and while Parallels is also an EP, the seven-track, twenty-four minute collection feels like a pretty hefty statement of a sophomore record. There are times on Parallels when Minor Conflict are comfortably playing “rock music” and fit neatly alongside the current wave of British post-punk bands–Smyth plays a large role in these moments, both in terms of the grounded, propulsive bass guitar (aided by guest musician Marcus Jeffery’s drumming) as well as their vocals, which more frequently veer into deadpan speak-singing. Whiteland has her moments in this department, too, but she also spends a lot of Parallels as Smyth’s high-pitched foil, and helps usher in the EP’s less rock-focused impulses.

These other sides of Minor Conflict include ambient and droning instrumental interludes like “Cube” and “Parallels I”, and they also include the moments that prominently incorporate Whiteland’s harp and Warin’s trumpet. The first “proper” track on Parallels, “Margate Sands”, is an impressive synthesis–the harp winds around both of the vocalists (who sing together, and then speak together), all the while a tough drumbeat pounds away beneath them. It’s a vibrant piece of jazz-influenced rock music, and this shows up again in the record’s centerpiece, the three-track “Parallels” suite. The six-minute “Parallels II” also features a strong, unfailing rhythm section (perhaps even stronger than in “Margate Sands”), and the two vocalists’ interplay (this time, they play the part of a couple navigating some kind of visa and immigration system in hopes of being reunited, a process presumably as complicated and emotional as jazz) is at the heart of the track. Parallels recedes after this climax a bit–“Parallels III” clatters to a finish, and the string-heavy “In the Summer” never rises from its quiet beginnings. “Glue” finds Minor Conflict showing up for one last big finish, if a somewhat delayed one–it goes from mumbling emptiness to steady orchestral rock to the loudest, fiercest, most “post-punk” moment on the entire EP as it draws to a close. Minor Conflict make us wait for moments like these on Parallel, and it’s an effective choice; the catharsis is earned, and it makes the spaces in between feel even greater. (Bandcamp link)

Krystian Quint & The Quitters – Something Like That

Release date: January 3rd
Record label: Quality Time
Genre: Garage rock, power pop
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Water

Back in 2023, I wrote about R U Saved?, the debut album from Detroit garage punk trio The Stools. There’s a lot of competition, of course, but the band’s combination of mussed-up Motor City rock and roll with blues punk and hardcore might be the wildest thing Feel It Records has put out in recent memory. One of the three Stools, bassist/vocalist Krystian Quint, has released a solo record under the name Krystian Quint & The Quitters, and it’s wild too, in a completely different way. It turns out that Quint has a more pop-friendly side, and Something Like That is an inspired 27-minute foray into catchy guitar pop. On closer inspection, it’s not a total reinvention for Quint–there’s a looseness and even occasional gruffness to these songs that recall Detroit garage rock and first-wave punk rock, but there’s just as much (if not more) devotion to power pop and the more tuneful side of lo-fi 90s indie rock groups in these nine tracks. Perhaps the most impressive feature of Something Like That is how Quint explores this new terrain–sometimes with maximally-enthusiastic, bursting rock and roll, and other times with a more subtle study of melody, suggesting a deep appreciation of this kind of music.

If you’re looking for power pop/garage rock rave-ups, Something Like That has you covered–between the giant chilliness of “Outer Drive”, the egg punk-catchy guitar lines of “Water”, and the wrecking ball of a penultimate track in “Conspiracy”, there’s plenty here that hits immediately. Interestingly enough, a lot of the less full-throttle moments on Something Like That are actually a bit heavier–I’m thinking about somewhat “difficult” second track “Blind Your Eyes”, the mid-tempo fuzz crawler “Propaganda”, and late-record ballad “Cherry Stems”. These remind me somewhat of modern Dinosaur Jr. disciples like Gnawing, or the slower rockers from Ty Segall where there’s still a bit of his heavier influences sticking out. The longest song on the record, “Sweat”, has a plethora of melodic guitar leads bundled into it even though it doesn’t really sound like anything else on Something Like That (it reminds me more than anything else of the “quiet” Archers of Loaf songs that’d be in between their loud rockers); the all-chorus, power chord-heavy closing track “All 4 U” is similarly a black sheep, but in its case it’s because Quint pulls out all the stops to turn in a big, catchy finish. Of course I’m hoping to hear from The Stools again soon, but Krystian Quint & The Quitters already has the potential to be much more than a side project. (Bandcamp link)

Blood Lemon – Petite Deaths

Release date: January 17th
Record label: Moon Ruins
Genre: Psychedelic rock, fuzz rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: High Tide

Boise power trio Blood Lemon will probably be most notable to a lot of readers of this blog due to their connection to ultimate alternative wavers Built to Spill–Blood Lemon bassist/vocalist Melanie Radford is the current bass player for Doug Martsch’s band and has held that position since 2019 (although she isn’t on the most recent Built to Spill album, which was recorded with the previous lineup that featured half of Brazilian band Oruã). Although Radford recently moved to Seattle, the Idaho-originating Blood Lemon (also featuring guitarist/vocalist Lisa Simpson and drummer Lindsey Lloyd) is still going strong, and they’ve just followed up their 2021 self-titled debut album with an EP called Petite Deaths. Blood Lemon traveled to Joshua Tree, California to record Petite Deaths with stoner rock legend Dave Catching (Queens of the Stone Age, Desert Sessions, Mark Lanegan), and the locale seems to have unlocked the group’s inner lumbering, riff-focused psychedelic rock heroics. Petite Deaths may be a five-song “EP”, but it’s hardly small-scale–Blood Lemon stretch the record out to a half-hour in length, riding slow, crawling psych rock fuzz and more pensive “indie rock”-indebted moments to a towering statement.

Blood Lemon kick off Petite Deaths with what I’d call the hit (kind of by default, but it is pretty catchy), “High Tide”. The shortest song on the EP at a clean four minutes, Blood Lemon are at their punchiest here, the sweet vocal harmonies and fuzzed-out guitars meeting us halfway in terms of “pop” moments. The six-minute “Her Shadow” shows off a more cavernous and expansive side of Blood Lemon, but the EP only gets heavier as it reaches the second half–there’s an inspired desert-psych cover of Jessica Pratt’s “Mountain’r Lower” that the trio repurpose for a captivating centerpiece, and half of the record is made up of the gigantic final two tracks, “Perfect Too” and “Mudlark”. The former song is a nearly eight-minute serving of catnip for stoner rock fans, leaning heavily on a low-flying guitar riff and just as low, damning vocals. “Perfect Too” eventually launches into a massive rock and roll conclusion, but Petite Deaths’ final statement, “Mudlark”, doesn’t offer easy catharsis. The heavy guitars are still there, but they’ve taken a step back to give almost a droning quality to this lengthy dirge of a track. Petite Deaths has a good deal of comfort food rock music on it, but it works because Blood Lemon only ever come off as making the choices they themselves find intriguing to follow. (Bandcamp link)

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