Pressing Concerns: Hello Whirled, The Winter Journey, Jac Aranda, Grant Pavol

Second Pressing Concerns in as many days! We’ve got an album of new recordings of old songs from Hello Whirled, the first new LP from The Winter Journey in over fifteen years, and new EPs from Jac Aranda and Grant Pavol. It’s a good one, as was yesterday’s (featuring The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, Iffin, Brown Dog, and Paul Bergmann), so check that one out too if you haven’t yet.

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.

Hello Whirled – Gives Up and Plays the Hits

Release date: January 8^th
Record label: Sherilyn Fender
Genre: Lo-fi indie rock, lo-fi pop, 90s indie rock, fuzz rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Rusty Engagements

I’ve written about many Hello Whirled records over the years (I believe the count is at nine), but it’s been a while since I’ve formally checked in on Ben Spizuco’s eternally prolific New Jersey lo-fi indie rock project. The dead zone of early-to-mid January (where I’m beginning to write this) seems a good time to pop in, and we’re in luck, as Hello Whirled have just put out an album called Gives Up and Plays the Hits. Coming less than a month after the last “proper” Hello Whirled album (last December’s Momentum, which appears to have been the third Hello Whirled album of 2024 after March’s Fractions of Worlds and August’s correctly-titled 50 Songs), Spizuco has recorded new versions of eighteen songs from the early years (2016-2018) of Hello Whirled. As these songs predate my discovery of Hello Whirled, they’re all basically new to me, so if the goal was to give a spotlight to some highlights of Spizuco’s earlier work, it’s already a success. Since Gives Up and Plays the Hits is almost entirely the work of Spizuco himself (his sibling Dan plays drums on a couple of tracks), it’s also a showcase for his growth as a home-recorder over the past seven to nine years, and the album does indeed reflect the work of somebody who’s honed their ability to make utilitarian rock songs that nonetheless sound warm and “pop”.

By and large, the eighteen songs of Gives Up and Plays the Hits are simpler structurally than what you’ll typically find on the Hello Whirled albums I’ve previously written about, which could either reflect a younger, more limited-as-a-writer Spizuco or a conscious decision to pull more straightforward and catchier songs (“hits”) from the archives (probably both to a degree). The Robert Pollard influence is maybe a little clearer here than on some of Spizuco’s late work, but that’s hardly a bad thing, and since Spizuco’s pulling from the “mid-tempo melancholic pop rock” side (“20 Wolves on the Plot”, “Rusty Engagements”), “the choppy arena rock” side (“Night Parade”), and the “fractured psychedelia” side (“Head Balloons”), there’s some nice variety in the mix. It’s not quite on the level of Spizuco’s friends in Ex Pilots, but there’s a nice embrace of fuzz-rock in early highlights “Fall of Mantis” and “Puzzle Piece”. These are the first two songs, but just when it seems like Spizuco is going to “nu-gaze” up his old material, the rest of Gives Up and Plays the Hits comes along to mix things up some more–we’ve got lazy, meandering guitar pop in “Melodramatic Bullet” and “A Collection of X’s & Y’s”, the floating balladry of “Her Flaming Absence”, punchy sixty-second songs in “Life Is Shit” and “Indigo Crystal Asshole”, and “Positively James McNew”, a late-record highlight that’s Hello Whirled at their most tender. Whatever the song calls for, I guess Hello Whirled have learned to “give up” and follow its lead. (Bandcamp link)

The Winter Journey – Graceful Consolations

Release date: January 31^st
Record label: Turning Circle
Genre: 60s pop, folk rock, psychedelic pop, soft rock, indie pop
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Downhill

Anthony Braithwaite and Suzy Mangion are a married couple from Manchester who played together in a band called George in the early 2000s. The Winter Journey began not long after that, with their 2008 debut record This Is the Sound of The Winter Journey As I Remember It featuring the both of them harmonizing to the tune of 60s-inspired folk pop songs penned by Braithwaite. This Is the Sound proved to be the only Winter Journey album for over fifteen years, but a Mangion solo album in 2023 (featuring songs recorded in the interstitial decade and a half) turned out to be a prelude for a Winter Journey revival. Graceful Consolations does remind me a bit of the duo’s era of origin–a precocious and deliberate period of “indie music”, where everyone from Sufjan Stevens to Belle & Sebastian was suggesting that maybe there was something new to be gained from the old guard of 70s folk rock, Brian Wilson, and soft rock after all. This kind of music is a double-edged sword, to be sure, but The Winter Journey wield it like experts–this dozen-track comeback album sounds delightful and captivating all the way through.

“Downhill”, which opens Graceful Consolations, starts with Braithwaite singing a gorgeously wistful melody alongside folk-y guitar playing; halfway through the brief track, Mangion arrives as a second voice, and the piano and bass begin to fill the song out. This is Graceful Consolations in a nutshell–deceptively simple, but complete and containing so much. Whether The Winter Journey commit to exploring breathtaking, pin-drop quiet folk (like in “English Estuaries”) or pursue a more vibrant version of pop music from long ago (like in “The Way That You Are”, which sounds right out of the Nixon era) or even adding in pedal steel like they do in “Late Night Line”, all of it sounds equally natural. Just as fresh-sounding is the duo’s ever-so-slightly more experimental attitude on the second half of Graceful Consolations–not everything is so obvious as “Little Consolation”, a crackling ninety-second piece apparently recorded on an Edison wax cylinder phonograph, but there are a few more surprises before the album’s all said and done. The homes stretch of Graceful Consolations features the most nervous-sounding song on the album (“Family Line”, a song about endings thereof), a percussionless piece of electric folk music in “Bedford Falls”, the one true “rock” song on the album with “The Years”, and a bemusing closing track called “Friday Night for Sure”. “Pop music is never art / Please don’t ever be confused / Just as there’s never been a poem on the news / Dignity is only something that you lose,” imparts Braithwaite at the beginning of the song, leaving us to question whether or not everything about Graceful Consolations proves this point or refutes it. (Bandcamp link)

Jac Aranda – Ultraviolet

Release date: February 7^th
Record label: Anxiety Blanket
Genre: Power pop, 60s pop, indie pop
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Ultraviolet

James “Jac” Aranda is a fairly busy Los Angeles-based musician–most notably, he’s the guitarist in longtime Fire Talk group Media Jeweler, but he’s also played with La Bonte, Megan Siebe, and Anna McClellan, among others. His associates’ music ranges from art rock to alt-country, but on his own, Aranda (not to be confused with Bay Area folk singer and Speakeasy Studios SF signee Jacob Aranda) apparently makes 1960s-influenced guitar pop records. After a prolific period of self-releasing music as Jac Aranda in the back half of the 2010s, the six-song Ultraviolet EP is Aranda’s first proper new music since his Anxiety Blanket Records debut, 2020’s No One. Although Ultraviolet is a fairly humble-sounding record, Aranda got plenty of help realizing it–a bunch of Southern California musicians contributed, including drummer Miles Wintner (Tara Jane O’Neil, GracieHorse), bassist Tara Milch (The Lentils, iji), guitarist Sam Farzin (Media Jeweler), pianist Dylan Marx (Gigi), and violinists Matt Maruskin (Gigi, Windowsill) and Pauline Lay. Aranda rounds up these musicians and creates something streamlined, taking lofty pop influences like Elliott Smith and the more explicitly Brian Wilson-indebted side of Elephant 6 and turning them into brief, digestible power pop/orchestral pop bursts in a way that reminds me of fellow Los Angeles artist Fur Trader.

Ultraviolet (which is being released as a cassette with instrumental versions of these six tracks on the B-side) knows how to kick things off with the “hits”; the opening title track is as catchy as can be, imagining a lost Beach Boys track being played through enthusiastically by a lo-fi basement power pop band. The first three songs on Ultraviolet seem to be the “rock” half–we get a real treat in the electric guitar/piano angst of “Nobody Knows”, imagining a world where Heatmiser stayed together and kept evolving alongside its co-frontperson, and the jaunty Beatles-y arm-swinging of “Out for a Stroll in the Rain”, which is a bit sloppy in parts but never goes off the rails. The second half of Ultraviolet is the quieter side, led by two earnest, show-stopping ballads in “J’accuse Moi” and “Just One More”. The former is the chilly, wintry tinker-pop studio creation, and the latter is the one where Aranda gets to wring his heart out in the vocals over little more than sparse acoustic guitars. Even in “Just One More”, though, Aranda has a bit of trickery up his sleeve, as the song takes a hard left turn into swirling noise as his vocals strain, unbothered. The full band is back for closing track “Honeymoon”, but they’re deployed in a slowly ambling folk-country manner that’s actually a bit of a palette-cleanser after the intensity that ends “Just One More”; for a low-key power pop EP, Ultraviolet is quite generous. (Purchase link) (Bandcamp link)

Grant Pavol – College

Release date: January 17^th
Record label: Accidental Popstar
Genre: Folk, singer-songwriter, alt-country
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: College

Singer-songwriter, Shamir collaborator, and professional person who sends me emails (sorry, “publicist”) Grant Pavol was most active as a solo artist around the turn of the last decade, releasing an EP and two albums on Shamir’s Accidental Popstar Records from 2019 to 2021. Pavol’s been a bit quiet since then, but his plan is to return to making music in a big way this year–he intends to release four EPs in 2025, each with “a different production palate”. College, the first of these EPs, is Pavol’s foray into stripped-down, quiet folk, and even country music, with viola from Sloppy Jane’s Isabella Bustanoby being the only non-Pavol accompaniment. Although the traditionalist approach to instrumentation on College recalls classic folk-country artists, Pavol’s primary inspirations for this simple, string-aided sound are “non-traditional” art rock acts like John Cale and Lambchop. Whether he’s singing about getting stoned during a break from his university courses, his aging family dog, or his own eventual death, the plain-spoken clarity of Pavol’s singing and writing is almost confrontational, reflecting a very deliberate decision to place himself front and center that pays off quickly and uniquely.

Maybe it’d be easier to take the four-song, ten-minute College as part of a larger statement along with the other three yet-to-be-released EPs slated for later this year, but Pavol is still able to wrap up this record neatly and satisfyingly despite (or perhaps because of) its streamlined brevity. The opening title track crystallizes Pavol’s approach the best of any song on here, I think–the beauty conjured up by Pavol’s ringing acoustic guitar, self-harmonized vocals, and Bustanoby’s strings contrasts with lyrics like “I stayed in bed and played on my phone” and “I stayed up late so I could get high”. This successful exercise in gravitas blows College right open–when Pavol continues this thread by upping the tenderness and warmth in “Late Night with the Old Girl” (his “beloved dog Ripley” being the old girl) and by shifting ever so slightly into a low-key country shuffle for the bar report of “No One Talks the Way They Should at Night”, things only make more and more sense. Perhaps the most overtly “traditional”-sounding track on College is the closing track, “Twin Sized Bed”, almost hymn-like in its acceptance of the finality of death. Pavol’s vocals almost duet with Bustanoby’s viola (and later on, a bit of slide guitar); after carrying College as far as he can take it with his voice, Pavol’s closing statement lets the instruments do a bit of summing up for him. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

• Ian Huschle – Algae Days
• Isabella Strange – Slick Git EP
• Palo Alto – In Broken Breath EP
• Dött ljus – Bottna
• Lina Tullgren – Decide Which Way the Eyes Are Looking
• Weaklung – All Problems No Solutions
• Bandshee – The Long Road
• New Orthodox – Bull Market on Corn
• Chuck Vibes – GTHM
• Brother of Monday – Beasts in the Haul EP
• Lacing – Never
• Premium Rat – Stranded on Land
• Brody and the Grodies – Mistakes Were Mad EP
• Eliza Water – Monad
• Lark – Be Still
• edgar déception – Ption
• Midding – Nowhere Near Today EP
• Sleeper’s Bell – Clover
• Venice Treacle – Modern Elixir EP
• Saafewaay – Thank U 4 Shopping EP
• Ironic Hill – SUMMER
• C.A.M.O – Combative Anthems Motivate Outcry EP
• Delta IV – Radium Arc
• MindsOne – Stages
• Beetle Kill – S/T