Pressing Concerns: David Ivan Neil, Gaytheist, Hooky & Winter, Joshua Wayne Hensley

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We’ll be starting a really great week on Rosy Overdrive with a Pressing Concerns featuring new albums from David Ivan Neil and Gaytheist, a new EP from Joshua Wayne Hensley, and a collaborative EP between Hooky and Winter. Folk rock, noise-punk, jangle-dream pop, lo-fi bedroom rock; we’ve got a bit of everything in this one!

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.

David Ivan Neil – I Hope Yer OK

Release date: February 21st
Record label: Kingfisher Bluez/Perpetual Doom
Genre: Alt-country, folk rock, singer-songwriter
Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Drums

Who doesn’t love a good outsider folk weirdo? Cult alt-country label Perpetual Doom certainly does, and their latest edition to their stable of anti-stars (alongside the likes of Austin Leonard Jones, Lee Baggett, and Bill Baird) certainly fits the bill. David Ivan Neil hails from the far-inland British Columbia town of Enderby (five hours from Vancouver, where Kingfisher Bluez, who’s co-releasing his latest album with Perpetual Doom, is located), and I can’t even begin to imagine how somebody ends up in a place like that. Neil has been putting out music for over a decade now per his Bandcamp, including a pair of albums on Kingfisher Bluez in 2019 and 2020. So, even though Neil has remained pretty active (putting out an EP with Normal Horse in 2023, for instance), I Hope Yer OK is the singer-songwriter’s first “proper” album in a bit. What he and a revolving door of collaborators (deemed the “A OK Players”) have put together is a pretty fascinating portrait of an off-the-dome rambling troubadour, one who sounds like he grabbed a guitar, played the first three chords he could think of, and then just started emptying his thoughts for the majority of the LP.  I Hope Yer OK gets up close and personal with its creator, and sometimes it’s ugly, but Neil shrugs off the dramatic and the sensational and keeps playing.

The first track on I Hope Yer OK, “Drums”, is a wobbly mid-tempo folk-country-rock opening prayer: “I wanna play the drums / I wanna play ‘em loud,” accompanied by some “na na na”s, “ooh”s, and, of course, the instrument in question. In the aftermath of this surprisingly sweeping declaration, Neil remembers a few people who have passed on from this life (in “Song for an Old Friend” and “Little Bird”), gives himself a haircut to avoid doing yardwork, describes a bidet in amusing bumpkin fashion, and covers “K-Hole” by the Silver Jews (turning the chaotic original version into a dark country death march), among other adventures. The A OK Players do an admirable job of cleaning up their eccentric leader–you’ll hear keyboards, woodwinds, accordion, strings, and more across I Hope Yer OK, a level of intricacy that reaches beyond the plodding, simple basslines and cowboy chords that form the foundations of these songs. “Feelin’ a little hungover, but I’m happy to be alive,” Neil somewhat mumbles in “Haircut”, and then gets into the shower feeling “sad” that a friend of his won’t take a phone call but “happy” to have received confirmation he’s alive. And then, in “Learnin’ to Swim”, he observes “A dream with no plan is masturbation at best,” only to follow it with “But making love to your hand [will] help you build the right muscles / The ones that’ll help you draw the map”. It’s impressive just how easily I Hope Yer OK makes it feel like we’re right in the middle of Neil’s mind. I don’t think that the album is entirely pulled from his unfiltered trains of thought; he’s a lot more brilliant than he’s letting on if so. (Bandcamp link)

Gaytheist – The Mustache Stays

Release date: February 21st
Record label: Hex
Genre: Noise rock, noise punk, hardcore punk, metallic hardcore
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Break Me In

If you go all the way back to the very early days of Rosy Overdrive, you’ll find Gaytheist’s How Long Have I Been on Fire? on the blog’s best of 2020 list, where a more annoying version of myself called the Portland, Oregon trio “a glam-hardcore-punk band” and the album itself “really fucking catchy”. A band squarely in the middle of the “noise rock” landscape with punk energy, metal chops, and a sense of humor, Gaytheist were a breath of fresh air at the time, and guitarist/vocalist Jason Rivera, bassist Tim Hoff, and drummer Nikolas Parks have been sorely missed in the five years since How Long Have I Been on Fire?. The wait is over, however–once again via heavy music institution Hex Records, Gaytheist have unveiled The Mustache Stays, which I believe is their fifth proper album and first in a half decade. If it’s not as immediately catchy and, well, funny as How Long Have I Been on Fire?, it makes up for it in terms of pure cannonball-like energy–Gaytheist sequence the album in the most dangerous way possible, throwing a bunch of brief, explosive noise-punk blasts at us in a row before sneaking in a few surprises in the back half of the LP.

“Shelved”, “Break Me In”, and “Omnimpotent” are all sub-two-minute ragers to get The Mustache Stays’ party started–at their most high-flying, like on the former of those three, they sound like goofy heavy metal/hardcore hybrid Mutoid Man, but with a more obvious noise rock background–“Break Me In”, meanwhile, is clearly the work of hardcore punks even if they’re shooting for something beyond the pit in which the track spends a good deal of its time. “Lift with Back” needs only sixty seconds to wreck everything in its path, but when Gaytheist finally relent and make a song that’s longer than three minutes with “Pyrohydra”, they make good use of every moment of that one, too. Oh, and also there’s a surprisingly faithful eight-minute cover of The Smashing Pumpkins’ “Silverfuck” on this album (I mean, faithful aside from making a few of the lyrics more gay, but this is Gaytheist we’re talking about). It really comes out of nowhere, but Gaytheist absorb Billy Corgan’s prog-thrash-grunge-metal-punk anthem with the strength that can only come from rocking out to some of your most formative guitar records with your friends (I assume). Really, it’s an appropriate choice, because The Mustache Stays kind of sounds like Gaytheist tried to make an album entirely out of the climax of “Silverfuck”, where all the guitars and pummeling drums come flooding back in after Corgan’s dreamy aside. Gaytheist are just crazy enough to make it work for them. (Bandcamp link)

Hooky & Winter – Water Season

Release date: February 14th
Record label: Julia’s War
Genre: Dream pop, lo-fi pop, jangle pop, shoegaze, psychedelia
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Horseshoe

Today we have a brief but solid collaborative EP between two notable modern shoegaze/noise pop/dream pop acts that have yet to appear on this blog. Two birds, one stone! One half of the four-song Water Season EP is Winter, the Brazil-originating, New York-based artist Samira Winter who has been making music for over a decade (most recently via indie institution Bar None Records) but I think can safely be grandfathered into the current wave of shoegaze-pop bands presently hitting the States. The other act on the bill for Water Season is Hooky, a newer band, but the Philadelphia duo of Scott Turner and Sam Silbert have been busy–apparently they’ve released four albums since 2021, and the two most recent LPs have come via Julia’s War, the label at the center of the the modern experimental shoegaze movement. The two acts became fans of one another, eventually leading to Winter traveling to Philadelphia to write and record music with Hooky, and Water Season is the result. Out via Julia’s War, the eight-minute cassette tape is barely more than a tease, but there’s more than enough on this EP to suggest that the creative forces behind it do indeed have a sturdy connection.

I won’t pretend to be an expert on what either of these bands’ music pre-Water Season sounds like; my sense is that the more experimental electronic side of this EP comes from Hooky and the more melodic dream pop is from Winter, but also that there’s a fair amount of overlap in these two acts’ styles anyway. I don’t really make a distinction between “single” and “EP” for records with more than two songs these days, but if we’re doing that, Water Season (though billed as the latter) has a strong case for the former, too–there’s one obvious “hit” in the first slot, and three stranger experiments following it. “Horseshoe”, the hypothetical A-side, is worth the price of admission alone–it’s two minutes of jangly dream pop bubblegum, warped guitar lines, and sneakily huge vocals that all make it sound like a mussed-up, more electronic-influenced version of the best Sundays and Cranberries singles. Nothing else on Water Season will grab you immediately like “Horseshoe” does, but “In Your Pocket” and “Lost Tears” are both “pop music” in their own ways; the former is a two-minute tangle of psychedelia, dream pop, and trip-hop, the latter an electroacoustic, AutoTuned experiment that still has melodies buried in it nonetheless. “I Like You” helps the “single” comparison by ending the EP by basically turning bits of “Horseshoe” into a dubby dance track–calling back to the biggest pop moment on Water Season in the weirdest one, Hooky and Winter make the record’s small circle a full one nonetheless. (Bandcamp link)

Joshua Wayne Hensley – I’m Proud of You, Kid

Release date: February 7th
Record label: Patsy Presents
Genre: Lo-fi pop, bedroom folk, post-punk
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: All Get Better

For over twenty years, northern Indiana singer-songwriter Joshua Wayne Hensley has led South Bend PRF-core indie rock group The Rutabega, and he also has an indie folk side project called Forestlike that put out an album a couple of years ago. This decade, Hensley has seemed to treat his solo output as a clearing house for some miscellaneous ideas and concepts, including a seven-song collection called Stationing, a Fountains of Wayne covers EP, and a twelve-minute, one-track tribute to the late Steve Albini called Get the Lights. The latest Hensley solo release is a brief EP called I’m Proud of You, Kid, and it sees the musician slide into the world of low-key, lo-fi pop music. For the most part, these five songs are the result of Hensley tinkering around alone (Matt Sparling contributes “buckets of drums” to the title track, and “Jimmy Nardello Stole My Heart” utilizes one of Spencer Tweedy’s “Drumprints” drum samples), and aside from the final track, these feel like brief, off-the-cuff basement moments. Sometimes goofy, sometimes quite earnest (sometimes both), I’m Proud of You, Kid has a hand-made, patchwork quality to it that holds it together even as Hensley hops from one idea to the next.

The songs with percussion on I’m Proud of You, Kid lean heavily on the rhythm for structure, albeit to different ends–the opening title track is woozy, kitchen-sink marching band pop music that bobs and bounds along with Hensley as he delivers the titular message as many times as he thinks he needs to. “Bouncing Baby Bunnies” is an absurdist minimal post-punk/dance-punk song, Hensley getting to practice his speak-singing skills as he rattles off lines like “Bounce around / have a bite / Bounce around / Don’t forget your dessert”. “Jimmy Nardello Stole My Heart” is the “skronkiest” track here, a few lines about the pepper that gives the track its title interspersed with a clatter of drum samples and synths. These are fun excursions, but it’s the two departures that form the real heart of I’m Proud of You, Kid–the two-minute acoustic lo-fi singalong “All Get Better” reminds me of a more stripped version of turn-of-the-century twee folk, right down to the lazily-paced guitar chords and thematic uncertainty (“Will we all get better? / We’ll all get better or not”), and then there’s the five minute instrumental “Dream Suite” which closes out the EP. It’s more in line with some of Hensley’s non-“pop” material, but by putting it as a cap to I’m Proud of You, Kid, the empty space and deliberate electric guitar hiking start to sound like a conversation with the more chaotic moments of the record. (Bandcamp link)

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