Pressing Concerns: Six Flags Guy, Dave J. Andrae, Nac/Hut Report, Peaceful Faces

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This very hot Monday in June will soon be a little more bearable, thanks to the albums in this week’s first Pressing Concerns. We’ve got new albums from Six Flags Guy, Nac/Hut Report, and Peaceful Faces below, as well as a career-spanning compilation featuring the various bands and projects of one Dave J. Andrae. Read on!

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.

Six Flags Guy – You Look Terrible

Release date: June 6th
Record label: 329
Genre: Post-rock, 90s indie rock, noise rock, post-hardcore, slowcore
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Everything I’ve Ever Found Useful I’ve Stolen

Do you like the band Slint? Six Flags Guy sure do. In fact, they even sound like them sometimes! 2023’s And Nothing Did So What was the sleeper post-rock hit of that particular summer, a trio of indie rockers from central Ohio making “smoky, dingy soundscapes unmoored from recognizable structure”, as I referred to the record’s eight songs at the time. I think Six Flags Guy might’ve changed up their lineup between that album and their follow-up LP (founding members Jonah Krueger and RJ Martin are still here on vocals/guitar and guitar, respectively, but this time there are newcomers in drummer Sean Pierce and bassist Colton Hamilton), but You Look Terrible more or less picks up where the band’s first record left off. Like And Nothing Did So What, You Look Terrible is a difficult, not-so-friendly collection of lengthy songs indebted to 90s indie rock chronicled by Touch & Go & Quarterstick Records (is it more difficult and less friendly than their debut? I don’t know; I think you reach a certain threshold with this music where the squares are sufficiently repelled regardless). Six Flags Guy’s resting state on this album is one of eerie slowcore and guitar-based post-rock; if you’re looking for respectable indie rock and cathartic post-hardcore moments, they’re both here, but you’re going to have to get to them Six Flags Guy’s way.

You Look Terrible begins with its back to us, hunched over equipment and avoiding even a hint of eye contact–at the very least, that’s how I imagine Six Flags Guy putting together “I’m All Out of Sorts Bro (Not a Goodbye)”, the album’s first track and a four-minute piece of sustained, droning organ and whispered vocals. The next few songs on You Look Terrible bring a familiarity of sorts–Krueger’s voice is still at a low mutter for the most part, but the guitars are back, and there are a few moments in the seven-minute “Everything I’ve Ever Found Useful I’ve Stolen” that genuinely smoke (that’s a rock and roll term, I think). With “My Brother My Killer” and “Ikea Way Gemini Place”, Six Flags Guy follow the tried-and-true method of “post-rock-slowcore song that wakes up from its slumber to deliver a crashing crescendo”, but they decide not to get to predictable by zagging towards the steady “The Children Yearn for the Mines” and “Emerald” (which, lol). You may not be surprised to learn that a band that prefers long song lengths made a long album (51 minutes, in the no-man’s land between one and two LPs known as the “CD zone”), and it all comes to a peak with the eleven-minute penultimate track, “Sleepy Hollow Elementary School”. The guitars rumble and the band lies in wait as they incorporate the likes of “Silverfuck” and Crazy Horse into their mad science. For a band that’s pretty obvious about their influences, Six Flags Guy seem to enjoy tweaking them just enough time and time again. (Bandcamp link)

Various – Splendid Hour: Dave J. Andrae and Associates (1997-2023)

Release date: May 1st
Record label: Kaji-Pup
Genre: 90s indie rock, lo-fi indie rock, experimental rock
Formats: CD, digital
Pull Track: Sound of the Rain (Alternate Mix)

We have a career-spanning retrospective compilation from an unknown (to me, at least), underground longtime indie rocker here for you today. How exciting! Dave J. Andrae is many things, including a film writer and director (he has a BFA in film from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, though he calls himself “semiretired” these days from the medium), a novelist (he put out a book called Rem’s Chance last year), and (most relevant to our interests here at Rosy Overdrive) a musician. Like I said, I wasn’t familiar with Andrae before hearing this compilation, but Splendid Hour: Dave J. Andrae and Associates (1997-2023) is enough to catch anyone up. It encompasses more than a quarter-century of various musical endeavors whittled down to twenty-five songs and sixty-six minutes, beginning in Andrae’s hometown of Milwaukee and ending in his current residence of southwest Florida, featuring both long-defunct bands and projects and Andrae’s still-active solo project Tired of Triangles. Andrae is the common link, of course, but these “associates” include other lead vocalists, writers, and all manner of musicians, certainly a key feature in these tracks’ ability to leap from 90s-style indie rock to “oddball novelty music”, “breezy funk”, and “abstract noise” (as Andrae himself puts it).

Splendid Hour is a lot to take in, but to me that’s part of its appeal. Not every song here is a lost underground classic, but there are plenty of moments on here that stand on their own as single triumphs–for example, Tired of Triangles’ unassuming, Yo La Tengo-ified cover of The Dils’ “Sound of the Rain” is a shining example of the blank-canvas brilliance of the indie rock of the 1990s. A lot of the songs on here are instrumental or pretty close to it, and Andrae shines in this context between off-the-cuff guitar brilliance like “Letraset To-Do List” and “Resolving the Calm”. On the other hand, a few selections from a project called “Astronaut Ice Cream Headache” veer into intentionally-obnoxious novelty fuckery, but I’m not kidding when I saw that “Dancing Cosmonauts” and “Let’s Be Carnies” help Splendid Hour feel like the archival deep-dive that it is (if Andrae spent a notable amount of time since the mid-90s making music like this, it should be represented here, after all). And then there’s everything in between–songs like “Matt Simmons” and “Underwater Cave Diving Stress”, both of which could be throwaways but there’s a weird brilliance to them, too. There’s too much on Splendid Hour for me to cover fully here (I haven’t even gotten to the psych-folk-tinged material that Andrae recorded with “Leila M.”, for instance), but that’s okay–much like Splendid Hour itself, this is just a relatively brief attempt to capture something larger and hypnotically inviting. (Bandcamp link)

Nac/Hut Report – Blue Afternoon

Release date: April 24th
Record label: Enjoy Life
Genre: Dream pop, ambient pop, lo-fi pop
Formats: CD, digital
Pull Track: Blinking

Nac/Hut Report are new to me, but the “Polish-Italian duo” (made up of two people known only to me as Jadwiga and Luca) have been around for quite a bit now–they have albums on their Bandcamp page dating all the way back to 2010. They’re currently based in Kraków, and their latest album, Blue Afternoon, appears to be their first for Warsaw’s Enjoy Life Records, who are putting the record out via CD. Nac/Hut Report traffic in the worlds of experimental but delicate pop music, and Blue Afternoon is a particularly delicate listen. According to Jadwiga, Nac/Hut Report wanted to make a “soundtrack to a sad, gloomy afternoon”, as well as something that they somewhat nebulously refer to as “dead music”. These ten songs are marked by crackling reminiscent of a “gramophone stylus eroding”, faded-sounding vocals, and distant orchestration and pianos–it’s all an attempt to evoke a look back into an era of music (both in terms of genre and in how we experience or “consume” it) that Nac/Hut Report view as now “dead”. However, there’s a line where the fuzz and distance stop being past-tense signifiers and start being deliberate choices in how to make music in the present day, and Blue Afternoon doesn’t sound completely dead (maybe undead?).

It’s hard to get a handle on Nac/Hut Report’s songwriting, as real as it is. There are quality dream pop melodies hidden beneath the gramophone sounds and sepia-toned instrumentation, but you need to pay close attention to these disintegrating tracks in order to tell where one ends and the other begins. Some of the songs on Blue Afternoon, like the opening duo of “Blinking” and “Always Watching”, let the pop cores show themselves a little more readily–other tracks, such as “Elements” and most of “Silver”, are basically noise pieces with a little bit of radio interference peeking through. Most of Blue Afternoon is somewhere in between, and it’ll take some time and tuning to see the beauty of “Screen Glow” and “Comet” and “Other Side” through the clouds. Both the difficulty in grabbing onto these moments in Blue Afternoon and the just-barely-enough hints beckoning at the listener to want to do so regardless are very intentional decisions on the parts of Jadwiga and Luca–more important than the music of Blue Afternoon being “dead” is that the experience of listening to it is still an alive and active one, and regardless of the big-picture societal questions about the role of music that led Nac/Hut Report to creating this record, it stands above all else as a roadmap to keeping this way of interacting with art alive. (Bandcamp link)

Peaceful Faces – Without a Single Fight

Release date: June 6th
Record label: Glamour Gowns
Genre: Indie pop, power pop, indie folk, chamber pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Freee

The Boston-originating, New York-based Tree Palmedo is a singer-songwriter, composer, and trumpet player for hire who’s been making music under a couple of different names for the better part of this past decade. Palmedo leads the instrumental ensemble Drinking Bird, but Peaceful Faces appears to be his “pop” project; Without a Single Fight is the third Peaceful Faces LP since Palmedo debuted it on-record with 2020’s Letters from Late Adolescence. I first heard Peaceful Faces via their 2023 sophomore album Sifting Through The Goo, Reaching For the Candlelight; I didn’t get around to writing about it, but I enjoyed its delicate, chamber-ish indie pop sound, and it was more than enough to get me to queue up the third Peaceful Faces album (and first for Glamour Gowns). Sifting Through the Goo… placed itself firmly on the “soft” side of indie pop music, so I was a bit surprised to press play on Without a Single Fight and immediately be greeted by the guitar distortion and bounding power pop tempo of opening track “Freee”. Not everything on Without a Single Fight is as much of a departure as this first statement, no, but there’s a concision to Peaceful Faces’ latest record that seems to be Palmedo’s driving force.

Co-produced by Dylan McKinstry, Nate Mendelsohn (Market), and Palmedo and featuring a bunch of outside instrumental help, Without a Single Fight nonetheless remains focused on fulfilling a singular vision of pop music across its brisk half-hour. The specific instrumentation and dressings of these songs vary quite a bit–they range from Sufjan Stevens/Elliott Smith-inspired folk-pop compositions in “Half a Secret” and “The Danger” to the full-on power pop of “Freee” and “Feel Around in My Heart” to the electric-based but comparably subdued “Doin’ It Wrong” to the romantic piano-accented “Union” and everywhere in between. The melodies delivered by Palmedo in his comforting, relaxed vocal style are as strong a binding force as anything else on Without a Single Fight–somebody has to hold all these rock, pop, and orchestral instrumentals together, and Palmedo seems up to the task. Without a Single Fight signs off with something called “She’s Getting Married”; from its Sgt. Pepper-evoking title to the tasteful piano that leads the majority of the song to a sudden, out-of-nowhere sweeping orchestral climax to a just-as-quickly-back-to-subtlety finish, we get the Without a Single Fight experience in miniature. (Bandcamp link)

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