Pressing Concerns: Jacob Perez, Salty Greyhound, Lake Ruth, FOND

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On this Monday morning, we’re looking at four recent records: new albums from Jacob Perez, Salty Greyhound, and Lake Ruth, plus a new EP from FOND. Let’s get into it!

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Jacob Perez – There’s So Many Ways to Live a Life

Release date: August 1st
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Folk rock, singer-songwriter, alt-country
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Young and Dumb

Hailing from Cincinnati, Ohio, Jacob Perez showed up in 2022 with an album called Get Well that was made in collaboration with producer and multi-instrumentalist Jonah Thornton (Kin & Company).  The partnership must’ve been fruitful, as Perez returned just a year later with another album made with Thornton called Signs, and for the third Perez LP in four years–There’s So Many Ways to Live a Life–he enlisted Thornton once again. Perez calls his music “alt-country”, although maybe it’s closer to “roots rock” or “Americana” depending on one’s perspective–it’s a plain and refreshing singer-songwriter album made by an artist who writes with a Midwestern earnestness and (unlike a lot of people working in these genres) doesn’t sound like he’s trying to sound like any one of his idols in particular. Perez also calls his music “bookish”–I think what he means by that is that there aren’t really any “rockers” on There’s So Many Ways to Live a Life. The quieter side of modern, geographically-near troubadours like Micah Schnabel, Tucker Riggleman, and Hello Emerson comes to mind, as well as at least one big alt-country name (Jason Isbell), but it’s the individual voice holding this well-worn sound together that makes this record stand out in a crowded field. 

Jacob Perez is not going to be the next Noah Kahan, and probably not even the next Conor Oberst either. Choosing to start your album with a chilly, somewhat atypical piano ballad like “Betting Man” is the work of somebody who’s focused on something more insular than “wide appeal”. Any momentum the eventual crescendo of “Betting Man” starts rolling is rolled back by the bleak acoustic folk ballad “115”–it’s not until track number three, “Young and Dumb”, that we learn that Perez is perfectly capable of writing a “heartland rock anthem”. The more upbeat side of There’s So Many Ways to Live a Life contains a few songs that could’ve been sharpened into “hits”–the gritted-teeth of “Ditch” (the closest thing to a real rock song on the album), the breezy folk-ish pop rock of “Daily Driver”, the interstate-traveling “U-Haul”–they’re even better as they are, though, delivered by an unassuming Ohioan lifer who, it slowly becomes more and more apparent, has nothing to lose in his writing. I don’t think that the quieter songs on There’s So Many Ways to Live a Life necessarily are a “truer” reflection of their author, but it’s a little easier to hear him in the pin-drop ambience of “Mercy”, “Part-Time Job”, and “Bill Withers”. The latter of those three songs is the finale of There’s So Many Ways to Live a Life, name-checking Vic Chesnutt and Lucinda Williams in addition to the titular singer. Perez sings all three names without sounding much like any of them, and the unresolved cadence with which he sings the final line (“For once I have the feeling that everything will be just fine”) ends with one last conundrum, one more indication that things aren’t quite as simple as they seem on the surface. (Bandcamp link)

Salty Greyhound – Alligators

Release date: June 21st
Record label: Dog’s Mouth
Genre: Folk rock, art rock, fuzz rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Cherry Pit

I don’t know all that much about Salty Greyhound, a band from Allston, Massachusetts. According to this person’s Substack, they used to be called Brazil and the members are Alex Judd (guitar/vocals/banjo), Maria Cuneo (guitar/vocals), Susie Blair (bass), and Joel DeMelo (drums); according to Allston Pudding, Judd and Cuneo are the “co-leaders”; their Linktree page proclaims “We use musical saws and banjos”. They put out an EP called Birds in 2019, but, interestingly, they took a decade to follow up their sophomore album (2014’s Ghost Machine) with a third LP (last year’s self-titled album). Salty Greyhound clearly decided time wasn’t going to get away from them again, because a fourth Salty Greyhound LP, Alligators, has shown up hardly more than a year after their last one. It’s a bit difficult to pinpoint exactly what Salty Greyhound “sound like” here–if I wanted to be not specific at all, I’d call them “folk-influenced New England indie rock”; in relation to their peers, they’re less rootsy than Hey I’m Outside and less medieval than The Croaks. Alligators does sound like an album made by a band with multiple creative heads–Salty Greyhound are just as likely to rip through an electric rocker as twist their way through an oddball folk track, or even occasionally just drop a solid, unfussy pop song.

I’m not sure if Salty Greyhound intended Alligators as a companion to their previous album or something independent of it–it’s noticeably shorter than Salty Greyhound, but there’s plenty here for it to stand on its own nonetheless. The opening track, “Cherry Pit”, is worth the price of admission alone–it’s one of the best indie pop songs I’ve heard this year, nailing a certain subset of twee “disaffecting but bouncy” brilliance. Surprisingly, though, Salty Greyhound veer far away from “Cherry Pit” quickly–we get an acoustic guitar-led instrumental called “In All Seriousness”, the freaky banjo-folk-rock of the title track, and “Eyes in My Eyes in My Eyes in My Eyes”, which is very nearly a math rock song. There’s a creaky, Pacific Northwest indie rock kind of catchiness to plenty of the electric songs, though–“Fascinating” has a great hook to it, and “Your Tree” and “Honeybee” both have strong melodies in their centers (banjo explorations of the former and guitar wanderings of the latter aside). The closing track, “Monsters”, is positively crunchy, but the delicate touch that Salty Greyhound give most of these songs is present in the noise here, too. I still don’t know entirely what to make of Salty Greyhound, but whatever it is that they’re doing here is working pretty well. (Bandcamp link)

Lake Ruth – Hawking Radiation

Release date: June 6th
Record label: Feral Child/Dell’Orso
Genre: Psychedelic pop, jazz-pop, space pop, post-punk
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: An Offering

First of all, I heard of this album due to Tracy Keats Wilson’s Turntable Report newsletter, so I want to acknowledge that right off the bat (it may not be very active any more, but, as you’re going to find out, it’s still worth reading every time an update does show up). Still, I find it fairly surprising that this New York psychedelic pop trio (multi-instrumentalist Hewson Chen of The New Lines, drummer Matt Schulz, and vocalist Allison Brice) hadn’t been on my radar until now–Schulz has played with important (to me) names like Savak and Enon, and the trio put out a 7” on Rosy Overdrive favorite Slumberland Records back in 2019. After releasing two albums in the late 2010s, Lake Ruth had been pretty quiet this decade (partially explaining my unfamiliarity with them), but Hawking Radiation is a great reintroduction (or, for me, introduction) to a high-quality indie rock band. Recorded by the band themselves with help from Savak’s Sohrab Habibion & Michael Jaworski, among others, Hawking Radiation is a sparkling example of “Turntable Report-core” music–adventurous, psychedelic, synth-led “space pop” with debts to Stereolab and many of the 60s pop albums from which Stereolab drew (Wilson’s own band, Outer World, does indeed fit this description, too).

Lake Ruth differentiate themselves from their like-minded peers on Hawking Radiation via a palpably-embraced jazz side. Plenty of bands like this dabble in “jazz-pop”, yes, but rarely is it so thoroughly a part of a record’s makeup as this–everything from Schulz’s tireless drumming to Brice’s striking vocals to, well, everything that Chen is doing is completely in tune with it. Although the big-screen synth-pop adventure of opening track “A Diamond on Its Side” is quite impressive, it’s the stopping and starting of “An Offering”, the second song on Hawking Radiation, that sets the tone for the album and starts the building of something intricate and long-lasting. The task Lake Ruth create for themselves is wrangling an expansive sound that ranges from perky synth farms like “Potalaka Listening Station” and “From Erika” to guitar-led jazz like “The Next Level” and “An Offering” and everything in between. Lake Ruth end up making dizzy jazzy indie pop (“To Erika”), groove-led chamber pop (“Angels of History”), and propulsive synth-rock glitz (the title track) before Hawking Radiation is all said and done, all of which go a long way in turning the album as a whole into a tuneful, confusing, but obviously well-designed maze. (Bandcamp link)

FOND – Complacent

Release date: August 1st
Record label: Slepping In
Genre: Punk rock, fuzz rock, power pop, slacker rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Dig

It seems like the coastal Southeastern United States has a nice little 90s alt-rock revival thing going on at the moment between the fuzzed-out 120 Minutes hooks of Late Bloomer and the Dinosaur Jr.-inspired assault of Gnawing (and, to a lesser degree, the Madchester-influenced power pop punk of Dazy and the ever-snappier emo-alt-rock punch of Downhaul). The newest addition to this scene is a little closer to the nation’s capital, a quartet from Alexandria, Virginia known simply as FOND. FOND are a bunch of D.C.-area musicians (guitarist/vocalists Chris Issa and Steve Grosso, bassist Matt Carrier, and drummer Rob Seaver) who debuted last year with a three-song EP called Black Sand and two-song single called True Blue; Complacent, at six songs and nearly fifteen minutes, is the band’s most substantial release yet. FOND are a little more melodic punk-influenced than their peers, based on this EP–they also reference names like Iron Chic, Tigers Jaw, and Drug Church as points of reference alongside the more traditional (and “respectable”) ones like Teenage Fanclub, Sugar, and Weezer. Too gruff and emotional to satisfy power pop purists (or even “slacker rock” devotees) but too slow and hooky to land in the garage punk camp, FOND are well on their way to locking down a sound that’s entirely their own.

“Dig” kicks off Complacent with a giant alt-rock hook, establishing FOND as kin to Waiting-era Late Bloomer and plenty of other small bands who sought to make post-Paul Westerberg “heartland” power pop (albeit with a sharper edge). After that starting gun, FOND then try on a few different ideas between the “Say It Ain’t So”-esque tense mid-tempo alt-rock of the title track, the brisk-tempoed, pop punk-hinting “Hooking Up”, the drawn-out power pop twinkling of “Rosaline”, and the emo-y alt-rock of “Pulmonary”. “Shackled by Stoke” is a strange closing track, but the combination of audibly shrugging slacker rock vocals and sneakily polished instrumental work is a pretty solid summation of FOND’s whole deal thus far. “Would you check out my brand new song? / It’s not punk but not too long,” sings whichever guitarist is on the mic in the refrain of this one; if FOND themselves can’t pinpoint their sound better than that, then I’m not sure how helpful my meandering is going to be. They’re certainly trying on Complacent, though, so I’m giving it a shot, too. (Bandcamp link)

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