Pressing Concerns: Karl Frog, Fortunato Durutti Marinetti, Williamson Brothers, Perfect 100

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Hello, readers! This Monday brings us a very full Pressing Concerns, one featuring new albums from Karl Frog, Fortunato Durutti Marinetti, and Williamson Brothers, and the debut EP from Perfect 100. Another great 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.

Karl Frog – Yes, Music

Release date: July 11th
Record label: Spoilsport
Genre: Synthpop, indie pop, post-punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Legends of the Niche

Today, we have the latest album from an enigmatic musician named Karl Frog to look at on the blog. Yes, Music follows two previous LPs called I Love Music (2019) and Why Music? (2020), and the third installment of Frog’s apparent “music” series comes to us via Melbourne label Spoilsport Records. Spoilsport calls Frog “Canberrian/Estonian” and the musician’s Bandcamp page lists his current location as Sweden; as for the music itself, the label references Roxy Music and Brian Eno while Frog himself describes his latest album as “ambivalent digital boogie”. I’m new to the world of Karl Frog, but my impressions of Yes, Music are that of a wholly agreeable, odd, but understandable pop album. It’s indie pop music that cheerfully merges the “orchestral” and “digital” sides of it together; it’s “sophisti-pop” with virtually no hint of pretense. It took me a few listens to Yes, Music to fully get on board with it not because the pop songwriting isn’t immediate (it is), but because Frog delivers it in such a low-key manner that the album really benefits from a consciously-trained ear. If anybody remembers Robert Sotelo (the synth-y indie pop solo project of Dancer’s Andrew Doig), Yes, Music reminds me of that, but there’s a clear guitar pop side to Frog’s music here as well.

A bunch of Yes, Music’s core tenets are set up almost instantaneously in opening track “Colonial Hearts”–the triumphant digital strings (and, to a lesser degree, horns), the prominent bass groove, the passionately half-whispered vocals, the synth interjections, and, of course, pop hooks. “Dancing in a Tomb” adds a more subdued version of a Big Audio Dynamite piano riff and a beat that is indeed more or less danceable, “European Synthetic Country” introduces rubbery bass-led post-punk into the mix, and “Legends of the Niche” is the clearest foray into Aussie guitar pop, but all of these find their ways to fit under the Karl Frog umbrella effortlessly. “Groove” aside, Frog doesn’t overstay his welcome on any one of these songs–he wraps the album up at a little over a half-hour, and every track runs for just long enough to get the most of its ingredients. The opening of Yes, Music is strong enough that mid-to-late record highlights might not present themselves immediately, but the folk-y jangle pop of “What I’ve Plagiarised” and the minimal synthpop of “Hemlock or Hardware” are as good as any of the first three songs. Yes, Music is slippery and slick enough to pass anyone by if they aren’t on-guard enough; consider this a heads-up. (Bandcamp link)

Fortunato Durutti Marinetti – Bitter Sweet, Sweet Bitter

Release date: July 25th
Record label: We Are Time/Quindi
Genre: Soft rock, chamber pop, sophisti-pop, jazz-pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: A Perfect Pair

Fortunato Durutti Marinetti should be recognizable to regular readers of the blog–I wrote about the third album from the project of Italy-originating, Toronto-based Daniel Colussi, Eighth Waves in Search of an Ocean, in 2023, and I’ve touched on music from Coloussi’s collaborators like Energy Slime and stef.in in Pressing Concerns as well. Energy Slime’s Jay Arner and stef.in’s Stefan Hegerat are two of the many guest contributors to Bitter Sweet, Sweet Bitter, the fourth Fortunato Durutti Marinetti album, and the first one to be co-released by Canadian label We Are Time (Tough Age, Motorists, Energy Slime). When I wrote about Eighth Waves in Search of an Ocean, I noted the distinct, leisurely sound concocted by Colussi featuring elements of sophisti-pop and soft jazz rock, and I even directly mentioned Destroyer’s Kaputt as an influence of the record. Despite this, listening to Bitter Sweet, Sweet Bitter, I still found myself surprised at the Dan Bejar of it all. It’s actually less Kaputt-evoking–the more prominent synth-rock touches of the last Fortunato Durutti Marinetti album give way to a wider, more orchestral/string-based/jazz-rooted palette–but the infinite open space given to Colussi’s understated talk-singing vocals here allows the writer to fully indulge in refined, Canadian-Italian absurdity through and through.

Colussi apparently, tongue firmly in cheek, refers to his music as “poetic jazz rock”; it’s hard to think of a more effective demonstration of this thing than the beginning of opening track “Full of Fire”: Colussi’s spoken-word delivery of “You were full of fire / And I was in need of some heat”, and then the horns, drums, and guitars kick in. Such begins a uniquely meandering foray into polished, selectively-chosen orchestral/jazz-pop instrumentals and just-as-meandering observations from Colussi. Arner’s clavinet in “Beware” would steal the show on most records, but here it’s just another piece of the warm, close-up chamber pop tapestry. Even though “Do You Ever Think?” is one of the “lesser” songs on Bitter Sweet, Sweet Bitter, it contains perhaps Colussi’s best one-liner (“Can you tell me – is that dog that’s drowning in your new painting / Supposed to look like me?”), and songs like the lighter-than-air orchestral pop of “Call Me the Author” and the synth-touched throwback “A Perfect Pair” keep the LP engaging as it walks leisurely forward. Either you’re capable of meeting Fortunato Durutti Marinetti on their chosen wavelength or you aren’t, but those open to this kind of music will find few that are more committed to thoroughly exploring it. (Bandcamp link)

Williamson Brothers – Aquila

Release date: July 25th
Record label: Dial Back Sound
Genre: Southern rock, country rock, fuzz rock, garage rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Forgotten Generation

It’s been a minute since we’ve heard from the Williamson Brothers of Birmingham, Alabama. Adam and Blake Williamson are perhaps most well known thanks to their work as the rhythm section of cult southern punk rock group Lee Bains III + The Glory Fires, positions that certainly keep the both of them busy, but the siblings have their own project too, which they debuted in 2021 with a self-titled album. Released on Dial Back Sound and recorded with help from the Drive-By Truckers’ Matt Patton and Jay Gonzales, among others, Williamson Brothers was a refreshing version of garage rock made by two passionate everyman-style songwriters from Alabama, and I’m pleased that the Williamsons decided to make another album four years later called Aquila. Gonzales and Patton are once again in tow, and the Brothers have now added a full-time drummer in Model Citizen’s Mike Gault, and this group of Alabama “alt-country”/rock-and-roll professionals pick up right where their first LP left off. Bits and pieces of punk rock and power pop/college rock shade these dozen songs, but Aquila is first and foremost a ripping, roaring collection of fuzzed-out southern garage rock.

A pummeling march of a drumbeat and droning, smoking guitars introduce Aquila in “American Original”–the lyrics are, I believe, a fiery rebuke of American conservatism, but the most important thing about the song is that the Williamsons and Gault back up their fury with their playing. The blistering garage punk of “Medicine” rivals “American Original” in speedy energy, but Aquila has more to it than just adrenaline–on the “pop” end of the spectrum, “All These Years” (featuring some great keyboards from Gonzales) and the bottle-rocket “Forgotten Generation” both put everything they’ve got into massive hook-heavy choruses, creating a pair of amped-up southern power pop singalongs. And although the Williamson Brothers have never been an overtly “country” group, “Good Boy” adds some prominent harmonica (courtesy of John Calvin Abney) and casually strummed guitars to make an interesting, unhurried rootsy turn for the typically much more fast-paced group. Most of Aquila finds the Williamson Brothers in a sweet spot where there’s just a bit of pop hooks, garage rock fuzz, and southern atmosphere, turning songs like “Twenty First Century”, the title track, and “All Lit Up” (among others) into something more and more recognizable as their own style. The Williamson Brothers were getting along just fine making fun, classic-style southern rock and roll, but Aquila’s little bit of character development can’t hurt, either. (Bandcamp link)

Perfect 100 – Perfect 100

Release date: July 21st
Record label: Bloody Knuckles
Genre: Fuzz rock, fuzz pop, noise pop, shoegaze
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Missing Out

If you like a very specific subset of the kind of music I write about on Rosy Overdrive regularly, Perfect 100’s self-titled debut EP is a bullseye. The first release from the project of Brooklyn-based musician Andrew Madore is fuzzed-out, loud, and incredibly hooky indie rock made by someone who knows Guided by Voices, Dinosaur Jr., and the canonical shoegaze records like the back of their hand; bands like Ex Pilots, Gnawing, and Gaadge come to mind, and there’s a Dazy-esque 90s alt-dance vibe thrown into a couple of the songs for good measure, too. Madore played, wrote, and recorded most of Perfect 100 himself, so he deserves the bulk of the credit for how this EP sounds, but the contributions of drummer Adam Wanetik and prolific mixing/mastering engineer Justin Pizzoferrato shouldn’t be overlooked, either. Perfect 100 is a pitch-perfect introduction to Madore’s style, which is right in the middle between greyscale, grunge-y, shoegaze-influenced alt-rock and bright, vibrant, almost psychedelic guitar pop, a combination that sounds quite natural under the guidance of Madore’s high-energy but workmanlike approach to the music and his vocals.

Walls of fuzz and riffs greet us to begin the EP in “Sunday”; Madore has a great vocal hook sticking out just prominently enough in the mix, but the torrent of six strings is the real star of this song, and Perfect 100 gets by just fine by letting the distorted guitars rev their engines right up front. Since “Sunday” worked so well, Perfect 100 figure why not just try something like that again–that’s “Missing Out”, which similarly wields J. Mascis guitar solos and gaze-pop hooks in either hand. The clear black sheep on Perfect 100 is “Longway”, the one song that throws in a dance beat and aims for Madchester/alternative dance excellence without abandoning the fuzzed-out, guitar-blast pop music of the rest of the EP (did I mention it sounds like Dazy? It sounds like Dazy). A first statement of a record without any dull moments comes to a close with “New in Town”, reaching the roaring heights of the EP’s first couple of songs while being (maybe, just maybe) a tad more wistful about it. I’m certainly curious as to where Madore will take Perfect 100 in subsequent releases; it seems like there are few different sides of the project’s sound that could end up becoming future focal points. That’s probably an indication of a strong debut record. (Bandcamp link)

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