Pressing Concerns: Miscellaneous Owl, Dr. Kevin Holm-Hudson & The Adjuncts, Yuasa-Exide, Shapes Like People

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The first Pressing Concerns of the week is also the last one of the month (that’s just how time works, sometimes). This Monday edition collects a few albums from earlier in March and one from February: we’ve got new LPs from Miscellaneous Owl, Dr. Kevin Holm-Hudson & The Adjuncts, Yuasa-Exide, and Shapes Like People below.

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.

Miscellaneous Owl – The Cloud Chamber

Release date: March 7th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Bedroom pop, synthpop, indie folk, lo-fi pop
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Tender and Laughing

Thank goodness for February. The shortest month of the year doesn’t have a whole lot going for it, but it’s “National Album Writing Month”, an excuse that Madison, Wisconsin singer-songwriter Huan-Hua Chye has used to make a record as Miscellaneous Owl for several years now. Miscellaneous Owl LPs have shown up in early March since 2019, and last year’s edition, You Are the Light That Casts a Shadow, was one of my favorites of 2024–it serves as a perfect introduction for Chye’s mix of jangly/twee indie pop, acoustic folk, and offbeat, wide-ranging lyricism. This year’s Miscellaneous Owlbum is called The Cloud Chamber, and Chye promises something “folkier, quieter, and dreamier” this time around, as well as “1000% more theremin” than on her last record. While the exact specifics of this description are up for debate (aside from the theremin one–that’s pretty cut and dried), I do agree that The Cloud Chamber displays a more thoughtful and subdued side to Chye’s writing. You Are the Light That Casts a Shadow ran out to greet us with early Magnetic Fields-worthy bright synthpop instrumentals, and while this new one has its moments, on the whole it’s more of an album that one is “welcome to join in progress” than one that’s going out of its way to invite us inside.

One of these friendlier moments is the opening one–the first song on The Cloud Chamber is a quiet, beautiful, synth-friendly indie pop song called “Tender and Laughing”, and while it never stops being “tender”, the chorus is a genuinely chaotic sensory overload that’s kind of surprising to hear from Miscellaneous Owl. The other “hit” on The Cloud Chamber is a burbling, bubbling pure synthpop number called “Oh Sister”–if this record had a physical release (which it could–heads up to the small label tycoons who read this blog), this would be the kickoff to Side Two. In between and after these bright mile-markers are the songs that give The Cloud Chamber its overall feel–but, while they do create a unified sound, they don’t suffer from being too similar, as they range from mid-tempo, downcast but electric indie rock (“You & i are Earth (1661)”, “The Invisible City”), straight-up acoustic folk tracks (“The Wounded Moon”, “Mercury”), and “other” (“The Mortifying Ordeal of Being Known”, an odd one that’s almost into prog-psych-folk territory).  These Miscellaneous Owl albums always feel very deliberate on a song-by-song basis; despite the album-centric creation, every song feels meant to stand on its own. It’s true well into the second half of The Cloud Chamber, where “In Clover” is as musically gripping as either of the songs I labeled as hits (but the lyrics, a very blunt, very effective recounting of the life of Etta James, preclude it from this category). A decidedly different beast than her last album, The Cloud Chamber is still a strong example of a talented songwriting picking up her theremin and getting to work. (Bandcamp link)

Dr. Kevin Holm-Hudson & The Adjuncts – Travelers Rest

Release date: February 21st
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Roots rock, folk rock, alt-country, singer-songwriter
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Home

Dr. Kevin Holm-Hudson is a doctor, and he practices his doctorate in music composition by teaching music theory at the University of Kentucky in Lexington and by making Americana/folk rock in his spare time as Dr. Kevin Holm-Hudson & The Adjuncts. Holm-Hudson debuted The Adjuncts with an album in 2021, and since then the group (featuring his son Toby Holm-Hudson on bass, fellow professor Dr. Jim Gleason on guitar, and David “Chappy” Chapman on the drums) have been making music pretty consistently, including a Christmas album called I Need More Sleighbell last year. With the exception of the aforementioned Christmas record, The Adjuncts tend to favor making long-winded LPs, and their latest album, Travelers Rest, is no exception–sprawling across fourteen songs and reaching nearly an hour, Holm-Hudson takes us on an extensive journey across the United States and its forgotten corners. Hotel breakfast bars, boarded-up former family homes, Fourth of July picnics, and cell-service-deprived stretches of highway populate Travelers Rest, an album that samples classic country, roots rock, soft rock, and jangly power pop but always seeks to serve Holm-Hudson’s narratives. PhD aside, Holm-Hudson’s thoughtful, unassuming, conversational style helps Travelers Rest feel like an engrossing yarn rather than an intimidating manifesto.

Travelers Rest kind of reminds me of the more approachable and folky side of classic Shrimper Records acts like Franklin Bruno and Refrigerator, but with a more openly middle American bent. Holm-Hudson starts Travelers Rest with an unsatisfied wanderlust, covering miles of open road on the opening country-western curtain-raiser “What the Heart Wants”, and “Hotel Breakfast Lounge” breaks out the rock-and-roll piano for a Beach Boys-y tribute to the titular “highway hunger games”. Plenty of the rest of Travelers Rest has an attitude (like “Trashville”, as in “I’m getting out of”), but the big wide empty space of the country gives way to a bit of reflection starting with the jangly “Melancholy Man”, and continues into character studies like “Last of the Local Legends” (“Missed his shot at the big time, now he plays in a corner bar”) and “Home”, the album’s gorgeous centerpiece, which spends six minutes sketching the rise and fall of an early twentieth-century family’s residence. The thoughtfulness of Travelers Rest continues through the joyful “Hello Old Friend” (which, as upbeat as it is, recognizes the finite number of opportunities for interpersonal connection as the years fly by) and “Picnic”, which pokes at the edges of one of America’s greatest myths. More or less the entire final four songs on Travelers Rest feel like a goodbye or a conclusion of some kind, with Holm-Hudson & The Adjuncts trying on different parting messages on for size. We all only get one final statement, but that’s all the more reason to turn the possibilities over in one’s head while we’re still on the road. (Bandcamp link)

Yuasa-Exide – Hyper at the Gates of Dawn

Release date: March 4th
Record label: Ape Sanctuary/Floating Skull
Genre: Lo-fi indie rock, garage rock, fuzz rock, lo-fi pop
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Computer Strike

I introduced the readers of Rosy Overdrive to Minnesota lo-fi rock project Yuasa-Exide last December by writing about the Information and Culture + Naturally Reoccurring cassette tape, which was also my first brush with the music of Douglas Busson (and the revolving door of musicians who contribute to his records, as well). The tape (which compiled two previously-released full-length digital albums, one on each side) may have new to me, but it was actually just a snapshot of Busson’s output–I believe that Hyper at the Gates of Dawn, the first Yuasa-Exide album of 2025, is the project’s eighteenth since 2022. Somebody with this freakish mid-to-late Robert Pollard-level of productivity would seem to invite the “creating playlists and mixtapes of highlights” approach, but, as I wrote when talking about last year’s tape, there’s also a good deal of value in taking in a Yuasa-Exide album as a whole, and I feel the same way about Hyper at the Gates of Dawn. To continue the Bob Pollard comparison, this one reminds me of those 1990s Guided by Voices EPs–there’s an obvious “hit” or two stitched together by stranger and more abrasive material, but that doesn’t mean that the “album tracks” aren’t fun no-fi garage rock trips, too.

“Computer Strike” is the one on Hyper at the Gates of Dawn–if you’ve only got time for one, that’s the biggest fuzz-pop gold strike. Busson doesn’t start the record with it, but he deigns to put it in the first half, and it’s gripping from the classic pop-song chord progression and classically-submerged-sounding vocals onward. The song that actually opens Hyper at the Gates of Dawn, “Marjorie”, is still pretty catchy in its own right too, a slightly retro-tinged, laid-back garage rock tune that’s charming in the way Yuasa-Exide knows how to be. In the second half of the album, the biggest pop tracks include the slightly-more-polished “Beatles All the Way Down” and “Closed Circuit”, which is a resuscitated track from an “outtakes and demos” collection from last year (it’s really hard to believe that Busson released seventeen “proper” Yuasa-Exide albums before getting around to finalizing this one; it rocks). In between these moments, we’ve got stuff like the fuzzed-out loitering of “Pasted/Save International Ticket”, the druggy acoustic ballad “Love Without Cause”, the instrumental leisurely stroll  of “TV Guided”, and “Spit” (which I can only describe as “loud”). All of these songs have their moments, but none of them are ones you would put on an album if you were trying to emphasize the “pop” side of “bedroom pop”. Needless to say, that’s not what Douglas Busson is attempting; he’s making Yuasa-Exide albums, and we’re lucky to be reliably receiving them. (Bandcamp link)

Shapes Like People – Ticking Haze

Release date: March 7th
Record label: Jangleshop
Genre: Jangle pop, dream pop, indie pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Ambition Is Your Friend

Shapes Like People may be a new band, but the husband-and-wife duo is co-led by a longtime musician in Carl Mann. The biography for Shapes Like People’s debut album Ticking Haze casually mentions that Mann co-wrote a song with Kylie Minogue around the year 2000 (it appears that he co-wrote several, in fact, and also played guitar in her band for a while), although readers of this blog may be more likely to know him for his work leading Maidstone, England-originating indie pop group The Shop Window, who’ve put out three albums this decade. Clearly Mann is on a roll as of late, as The Shop Window has proved to be insufficient for his songwriting on its own–he’s started a new project, Shapes Like People, with his wife Kat (a New Zealand native) on lead vocals. Interestingly enough, Carl began writing the material with pitching to Minogue again in mind, but he liked Kat’s vocals (intended to be guide vocals at first) enough that we instead get Ticking Haze, an album recorded entirely by the two of them (Kat singing, Carl playing the instruments and providing backing vocals). 

The duo approached Ticking Haze with dream pop both classic and modern in mind (they name The Sundays, Mazzy Star, Weyes Blood, and Alvvays as inspirations, among others), but Carl’s jangly indie pop tendencies shine through across these dozen songs. The first song on the record is called “Ambition Is Your Friend”, and while it’s one of the simpler songs on the album (it’s solid jangle pop all the way down), its title does hint at what to expect with Ticking Haze: it’s about as long as you’d want a single LP to be (45 minutes), and at its busiest it melds 60s pop-esque orchestration with 80s-style atmospherics and grandness. Shapes Like People float through the different sides of their music in a way that can let a song like “Weathering” go from a simple acoustic folk beginning to a whirring synthpop track so subtly that you might not even realize it. I’ve found myself gravitating towards the more straightforward guitar pop songs on Ticking Haze, especially at first–like “Don’t Hear Your Footsteps”, in which Kat really gets to take the center stage, or “Head Spun”, which showcases the vocal chemistry between the two of them. Still, there’s something to the odder corners like the Cocteau Twins-like goth-wave of “Fireworks”, even if it’s not fully explored in the same way that the “jangly guitars” side of dream pop is on this record. Seems like there’s enough juice here for more Shapes Like People material–maybe there’ll even be some leftovers for Kylie Minogue, too. (Bandcamp link)

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