Pressing Concerns: Colin Miller, The Tisburys, Jerry David DeCicca, Johnny Maraca & The Marockers

Posted byrosyoverdrivePosted inPressing ConcernsTags:, , , , , , , ,

It’s Thursday! We have four exciting albums that are coming out tomorrow, April 25th, in this edition of Pressing Concerns: new LPs from Colin Miller, The Tisburys, Jerry David DeCicca, and Johnny Maraca & The Marockers. If you missed either of this week’s earlier posts (on Monday, we looked at Perennial, Dauber, Why Bother?, and Mythical Motors, and on Tuesday, we were dropping in on My Wife’s an Angel, Fluung, Shuyler Jansen, and Sunflecks), check those out, too.

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.

Colin Miller – Losin’

Release date: April 25th
Record label: Mtn Laurel Recording Co.
Genre: Folk rock, alt-country, singer-songwriter
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Cadillac

There’s a lovely, understated song on Wednesday’s 2021 breakout album Twin Plagues called “Gary’s”–it might be my favorite Wednesday song, if I’m being honest–in which we get a glimpse of the titular character parking a car, “taking out his teeth”, and smoking a cigarette while on an oxygen tank. I never thought too deeply about Gary, but he’s a central figure in Losin’, the latest album from Asheville, North Carolina singer-songwriter Colin Miller. The same year that Twin Plagues came out, Miller quietly released an EP called Hook that was my introduction to him–and a lot has happened since then. Both Wednesday and their now-partial member MJ Lenderman (who also released a couple of records in 2021 to relatively little fanfare) have both grown substantially in stature, with Miller serving as the drummer for Lenderman’s band The Wind. Miller put out a solo album called Haw Creek in 2023. Miller’s hometown and the surrounding region were ravaged by catastrophic flooding last year. And in 2022, Gary King, the former long-haul trucker and “father figure” to Miller (whose property Miller lived on, took care of, and made music on for many years), passed away. With help from Lenderman on guitar and drums as well as Wednesday members Xandy Chelmis (pedal steel) and Ethan Baechtold (bass, keys), Losin’ is Miller’s attempt to write about what was both the loss of an effective family member and a life-upending event.

As one might expect from a record made entirely by Wednesday and/or Lenderman band members (even the record’s co-producer, Alex Farrar of Drop of Sun Studios, has worked with both of them), Losin’ is solidly in the realm of folky country-rock music. Very little of Wednesday’s shoegaze-indebted sound is on this record, and even Lenderman’s solo records aren’t quite analogous–perhaps if Lenderman got even more insular and quieter after Ghost of Your Guitar Solo instead of leaning into the “rock” of country rock music, we’d have something like Losin’, a friendly, polished, but personable-above-all-else folk rock record. Miller gives us a lot of Gary throughout the record, offering up images of Pall Malls, Mustangs and Cadillacs, NASCAR on the TV, and burner phones. Miller is pretty open about himself and what he’s going through throughout Losin’, too: “I lost it at a Wendy’s,” he sings in “Hasbeen”, and “Excuse me for lookin’ like I lost my best friend,” in “Lost Again” (the emphasis on “friend” feels very intentional, as Miller expounds on it throughout “I Need a Friend” and shows us more in closing song “Thunder Road”). Losin’ is a genuinely comforting listen–as personal and direct as it is, Miller has seen fit to memorialize both King and an era of his life by leaning on friends and collaborators to make something built to reverberate well beyond them. (Bandcamp link)

The Tisburys – A Still Life Revisited

Release date: April 25th
Record label: Double Helix/SofaBurn
Genre: Power pop, Americana, heartland rock, college rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Forever

I first heard about The Tisburys via their third album, 2022’s Exile on Main Street; I called it a mix of “power pop, jangle pop, 90s radio-pop-rock, and [Philadelphia] heartland rock”, and while I liked it a fair amount when I wrote about it, it only grew on me throughout the rest of that year. The band are back a little under three years later with a new one called A Still Life Revisited, and the quintet (which basically began as a solo project from singer-songwriter Tyler Asay) consider it their “most collaborative effort to date”. The Tisburys (Asay, guitarist John Domenico, keyboardist Jason McGovern, bassist Ben Cardine, and drummer Dan Nazario) consciously sought to expand their sound beyond the power pop of their last album, name-dropping ambitious indie rock groups like Frightened Rabbit and The Hold Steady as their targets. This is a bold (and, for most bands in the same boat, would be an ill-advised) decision, but there was a Springsteenian largesse to Exile on Main Street, and A Still Life Revisited subsequently comes off as more of a continuous journey down a familiar road for them. It helps that Asay and crew still know their way around a nice, big guitar pop hook too, of course.

As scholars of classic rock and pop music, it’s not exactly surprising to me that The Tisburys identified the two biggest “hits” to release as the album’s first two singles–the lethal power pop direct strike of “Forever” is A Still Life Revisited’s most single effective pop moment, but the more traditionally jangly power pop indulgence of “The Anniversaries” is arguably the most comforting one. The rest of A Still Life Revisited is more than capable of hanging with these early tastes of it, but the album tracks (and later singles, as there were four of ‘em) are where The Tisburys hint at their aims beyond them. “A Still Life Without You” name-drops Spoon, but the twangy country-power-pop tune looks to a figure closer to home (Philadelphia pedal steel wizard Mike “Slo-mo” Brenner) to complete itself, while opening track “By a Landslide” punches up its waterfalling maximalist indie rock with horns (and “Water in the Clouds” subsequently retains a darkness by opting for keys instead). “Wildfire” is perhaps the most interesting addition to The Tisburys’ toolkit–bubbling synths, guitar heroics, and a danceable beat have all shown up in the band’s music before, but this specific combination of them is the band at their most “new wave Tom Petty” yet. The stop-start guitar journey of “Lost in Electricity” and the six-minute synth-rock finale of “Here Comes the Lonesome Dove” ensure that A Still Life Revisited ends on a mountaintop somewhere, but what came before it did indeed prepare us for the climb. (Bandcamp link)

Jerry David DeCicca – Cardiac Country

Release date: April 25th
Record label: Sophomore Lounge
Genre: Country, folk rock, singer-songwriter
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Frozen Hearts

I first heard of Jerry David DeCicca thanks to his 2023 solo album New Shadows, which at the time was the latest record in a long string of them from the Texas-via-Ohio musician. New Shadows was a sneakily uncategorizable album that owed as much to soft rock and sophisti-pop as folk and country music, but it reflected the work of a lifer still exploring new terrain. DeCicca seems like somebody who’ll keep making music until his heart gives out–an outcome that he came frighteningly close to in 2023, when a leaky aortic valve led to DeCicca receiving open heart surgery. Cardiac Country was (mostly) written and recorded before DeCicca’s diagnosis, but DeCicca clearly feels that his burgeoning heart problems influenced his writing, to the point of nodding to them in the album’s title. DeCicca and his players (including legendary pedal steel guitarist BJ Cole, who recorded his parts remotely from England) make a much more streamlined and even traditional-sounding country record compared to his last solo album–DeCicca himself may not have known what was tying these songs together until after the fact, but Cardiac Country sounds like a record that knows something is up, and glances towards some well-worn terrain to try and make sense of it.

DeCicca is on Sophomore Lounge now, and he begins his debut on the imprint with a folk-country song that reminds me of labelmates Styrofoam Winos and their various projects in “Long Distance Runner”. There’s a bit of “easy listening” on Cardiac Country between the gentle “Good Ghosts” and the smartly saccharine “Frozen Hearts”, brushing up against death and the heart by revisiting records from musicians who’ve since departed from this Earth and by trying to recenter the more productive parts of human nature in the former and latter, respectively. These sit alongside darker fare like “Knives”, “My Friend”, and “Dripping Man” (which is literally about crying all the time), and somewhere in between them is the six-minute album centerpiece “Where Does My Empathy Go”. It’s about, of all things, feeling conflicted about eating meat while loving animals, a question without an answer delivered with the plainspoken directness of the rest of Cardiac Country.  And speaking of “directness”, there’s nothing more direct than “Old Hat”, the final song on the album and the only one to be written and recorded after DeCicca found out what was ailing him. It’s a bleak solo recording, one man staring down his own mortality using the same tools he’s been using to do so in a much more abstract manner for decades. Thankfully it was only a brush with the inevitable this time, and DeCicca will get to put on that hat for a while longer. (Bandcamp link)

Johnny Maraca & The Marockers – Little Heart

Release date: April 25th
Record label: K/Perennial
Genre: Garage rock, punk rock, power pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: And These Tears

Who here likes rock and roll music? Well, Johnny Maraca & The Marockers sure do. Johnny Maraca (and the Marockers, seemingly) is Ian McDonnell, an Oakland punk figure who’s been in bands like False Figure and Big Rat over the years. McDonnell wrote, played, and recorded everything himself on the debut Johnny Maraca & The Marackers album, 2022’s Last Call for Lovin’ (according to KALX, at least), but McDonnell decided to get just a little help for the sophomore Marockers LP, Little Heart–Perennial Records labelhead Hayes Waring recorded and produced the album (and co-released it with K Records), and Violeta Terroba of Rata Negra sings some backing vocals. Still, Johnny Maraca & The Marockers remains mostly a one-man-band on Little Heart (there’s a photo of a quartet on K’s website, so maybe there is a real Marocker band these days). Little Heart is nothing less than a dozen pop songs drawn from the early days of rock and roll and interpreted by somebody shaped by first-wave punk and garage rock. It’s “power pop”, to be sure. It’s romantic. It’s music by somebody who maybe put in a lot of effort trying to look, sound, and be “cool”, but the minute that the tape started rolling, he said “fuck it” and laid it all out there with maximum earnestness.

There’s never a dull moment on Little Heart. Johnny Maraca’s tears are like rain upon his face in “And These Tears”; he wants to be a hot boy on the dancefloor with his hot boy friends in “Hot Boy”; he’s hopelessly in love with a Bad Girl in “Bad Girl”. Almost everything on Little Heart is under three minutes long–the longest track on the album, “Nobody Else”, is positively epic at three minutes and thirteen seconds (it’s about masturbation, of course). I briefly entertained not writing about this album because some of the lyrics are kind of dumb, but fuck that–it’s not an issue. In fact, it’s probably an asset–you’re never going to get moments like McDonnell howling “The only thing I’d never steal is your love, sweet baby” (“Never Steal Your Love”) or “I am the love police, girl / You’re above to get served” (“Sunflower Kisses”) over triumphant garage rock power pop unless the artist is completely, utterly uninhibited. “I’m gonna be honest, maybe share too much,” McDonnell admits in the aforementioned “Nobody Else”, right before he makes it clear what he’s actually singing about. Between the surging power chords, Terroba’s perfectly-placed backing vocals, and the swooning keyboard hook, I’m growing to like the sound of Johnny Maraca oversharing. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

3 thoughts on “Pressing Concerns: Colin Miller, The Tisburys, Jerry David DeCicca, Johnny Maraca & The Marockers”

  1. Pingback: New Playlist: April 2025 – Rosy Overdrive
  2. Pingback: Pressing Concerns: Headphones, Florry, Forty Winks, Wipes – Rosy Overdrive
  3. Pingback: New Playlist: May 2025 – Rosy Overdrive

Leave a comment