Pressing Concerns: Shaki Tavi, Kind Skies, Street Fruit, Joseph Decosimo

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Thursday! Time for a new Pressing Concerns. We’ve got new albums from Shaki Tavi, Kind Skies, Street Fruit, and Joseph Decosimo in this edition, all of which are out tomorrow (August 15th). We only had one other blog post this week: on Monday, the blog looked at new records from The Chop, K9, Knowso, and Clifford, so check that out if you missed it.

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.

Shaki Tavi – Minor Slip

Release date: August 15th
Record label: Felte
Genre: Shoegaze, noise pop, psychedelia
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Lip

The main thing I remember about Shaki Tavi’s self-titled debut album was that it was loud. 2022’s Shaki Tavi was the work of a six-piece band with three guitarists and a keyboardist making as much noise as a half-dozen shoegaze musicians could possibly make together,  although I did note occasional oases from the sonic barrage when I wrote about it. Three years later, Shaki Tavi have signed with Felte (Vulture Feather, Mint Field, Ganser) for their sophomore album, and while the group now seems to be more framed as the solo project of guitarist/vocalist Leon Mosburg, guitarists Nick Logie and Dylan Freeman, bassist Dane Meyer, drummer Marcos Plata, and keyboardist Cara Salimando all help out on Minor Slip. Mosburg describes “burnout and disillusionment” in the gap between albums, and a desire to do something “fun” with his music brought him back from the brink. Minor Slip doesn’t abandon the hard-hitting wall-of-sound of Shaki Tavi, precisely, but the melodic and pop undercurrents of their first LP are closer than ever to the surface now. With dream pop, psychedelia, and electronica all sitting next to the blasts of guitars, Mosburg and company are now ready to explore an exciting style of “pop music”.

Minor Slip starts on a mountain called “Lip”–Mosburg’s vocals glide steadily over a giant monolithic instrumental that pummels without detracting from the blooming melody at its core. It’s one way to make heavy pop music, but it’s hardly the only one, as the quick tempos and more delicate distortion of “Sunscreen” make clear immediately afterwards (now that’s what I call “good shoegaze”). If you’re waiting for the wonky dance beats to kick in, the middle of Minor Slip has plenty of ‘em–songs like “Breaker”, “Foam”, and “Infinity Trim” all have moments (to varying degrees) that put Shaki Tavi more in line with their labelmates Aluminum or fellow Los Angeles associates Dummy. Last but not least, Shaki Tavi also show off a more direct, burnt out, psychedelic haze of a side in songs like “Trees” (the first half of which is more or less just a glacial electric guitar and Mosburg’s voice) and six-minute dream pop floating benediction “Tilted”. Shaki Tavi display a whole lot of trust in themselves and their listeners by taking a break from their normal sound for as long as “Tilted” runs–or maybe they’re just having fun. It sounds like it, at least. (Bandcamp link)

Kind Skies – Echo

Release date: August 15th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: 90s indie rock, lo-fi indie rock, post-punk, garage rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Crooked Teeth

Rewind things back to early 2024, when I introduced the readership of Rosy Overdrive to an indie rock band from Lexington, Kentucky called Kind Skies (who remain, I believe, the only band from Lexington who’ve ever appeared in Pressing Concerns). It was the occasion of the group’s second record, a four-song cassette EP called Tower, and I used names like “Sebadoh”, “Pavement”, and “Electrical Audio” to describe the unvarnished indie rock sound of the band (vocalist/guitarist Chris Boss, bassist Stephen Boss, drummer Austin Adkins, guitarist Mitch Snider). Kind Skies have remained busy since we last checked in on them, releasing an EP of re-recorded older material called Long Distance later last year and readying a full album called Echo for 2025. Echo is only two songs longer than Tower was, but if the band consider the twenty-six minute collection an LP (which, literally speaking, it is–and their debut on vinyl to boot), that works. Kind Skies haven’t reinvented themselves for Echo–it’s not “cleaned up”, “heavier”, or “more accessible”, it’s just a slightly longer collection of the slightly shambling, slightly rambling, amply melodic 90s-style indie rock at which the band clearly excel. 

That being said (RE: accessibility), opening track “Crooked Teeth” is certainly in the running for the best pop song that Kind Skies have put to tape thus far. It takes a lot from the nineties without sounding like rote recreation–Kind Skies just have the right ingredients to pull off something with this specific type of languid, casual, borderline-unprofessional jangly “slacker pop” vibes. The rockers on Echo are slightly unglued and still catchy–“Enough” is the overly earnest lo-fi pop plea, “Prothombin Pleasure Screen” is surprisingly smoking in parts, and the towering closing track “Ollie” is Kind Skies at their most ambitious. The uncertain, cyclic post-punk of “Unrest” is the song that reminds me of the most of Kind Skies’ last EP (maybe there was some evolution between releases after all, if I can still pinpoint the most “Tower-esque” song on here), and the one song that gets closest to the pop success of “Crooked Teeth” is “Charlie Watts”, another effortless-sounding slacker pop melody flying right off of the band’s collective cuffs. It’s somewhat reassuring that there are still bands like Kind Skies making this kind of music work out there in mid-sized American cities–it helps keep Pressing Concerns alive, if nothing else. (Bandcamp link)

Street Fruit – Strange Tanks

Release date: August 15th
Record label: Slouch
Genre: Garage rock, psychedelic rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Back of the Line

I heard about the Los Angeles quartet Street Fruit a little while after they put out their debut album, Beneath the Screen, in late 2022. Some of the band (vocalist Hans Dobbratz, guitarist Philipp Minnig, drummer Tiffanie Lanmon, and bassist Cyrus Gengras) have a history of playing together dating back to the 1990s, and their take on West Coast garage rock, punk, and slacker rock was worn but still fresh enough to sound like a “new band”. The sophomore Street Fruit album is called Strange Tanks, and it’s out via a new label called Slouch Records. Strange Tanks feels like a departure from Beneath the Screen, although it’s hard to pinpoint why, exactly–everything I said about their last album applies to this one too, yet there’s also some kind of seediness, some kind of darkness that’s taken a stronger hold on Street Fruit this time around. Bits and pieces of blues, psychedelic rock, and AOR float around in the very southern California concoction that Street Fruit have put together this time around; if anybody else remembers the freakish boogie-rock of the most recent Advertisement album, Strange Tanks is more or less in the same vein.

I don’t want to make it sound like Strange Tanks isn’t fun; Dobbratz is anything but stonefaced as a frontperson, the backing “hey-hey”s and whatnot from the rest of the band are always welcome, and there are some great cartoonish guitar moments throughout the album. It’s a very freewheeling and real trip, starting with the stalwart groove of opening track “Drug Face” (of course), continuing into the speeding rocker “Back of the Line”, and rolling into a strange midsection made-up of the swampy blues rock of “Guts”, the odd jazz chords and atmospheres of “Hey Operator”, and whatever it is that they chose to open “Anthony and Me”. By the time we get to “Specular Moons”, there are moments where Street Fruit kind of sound like they’re doing a Red Hot Chili Peppers ballad but in a not-awful way (which is something I never really expected to write on this blog), and then that strange mix gives way to one last runaway classic rock song in “Hand Work”. Street Fruit are taking us on a ride whether or not we want to go; thankfully, it’s pretty easy to enjoy it. (Bandcamp link)

Joseph Decosimo – Fiery Gizzard

Release date: August 15th
Record label: Dear Life
Genre: Folk, old time
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Ida Red

Joseph Decosimo is a Tennessee-originating, Durham, North Carolina-based fiddler and banjo player who’s lent his talents to plenty of local artists like Gibson & Toutant, Jake Xerxes Fussell, and Hiss Golden Messenger, among others. As a North Carolinian musician with an interest in exploring the lesser-traveled corners of Appalachian folk and old-time music, it’s probably not surprising that Decosimo has struck up a relationship with Dear Life Records–last year, they put out Beehive Cathedral, a full-length collaboration between Decosimo, Luke Richardson, and Cleek Schrey that was comprised of “resonant, thoughtful, and expansive explorations of Appalachian and American music”, and they’re also putting out his latest solo album, Fiery Gizzard. Decosimo’s fiddle and banjo (and occasional vocals)  are the stars of Fiery Gizzard, of course, but here’s far from on his own here–he’s backed up by an impressive collection of “mostly” North Carolina-based musicians, including fiddler Stephanie Coleman, guitarist Jay Hammond, multi-instrumentalist Libby Rodenbough (Fust), and bassist/producer Andy Stack (Wye Oak), among others. I don’t know the history of most of Fiery Gizzard’s tracks–it apparently “reimagin[es] songs both old and new”, although it’s a pretty seamless journey across time if so.

Decosimo’s banjo rings out all alone at the onset of opening track “Ida Red”, but the song slowly fills out with strings, percussion, bass, and, eventually, Decosimo’s laid-back voice. It eases us into Fiery Gizzard, but before we know it, we’re swept along into the swirling fiddle of “Glory in the Meetinghouse”. Decosimo and his chosen collaborators shapeshift subtly but noticeably like this throughout Fiery Gizzard, going from the breezy, percussive march of “Flowery Girls” to the quietly intense drama of “Shady Grove” to minimalist folk pieces like “I Had a Good Father and Mother” and “Pretty Fair Maid”. The latter of those tracks features a languid electric lead guitar that arises into the mix so casually that it doesn’t even register as anything different than the more blatantly traditional moments before its appearance. Regardless of its technological or instrumental makeup, Fiery Gizzard is a “traditional” folk album in that it’s recognizable and enjoyable to adherents of that kind of music, which, really, is just about the only thing that ought to matter in this case. The language that Decosimo and the rest of Fiery Gizzard’s participants are speaking is equally understood among and beyond them. (Bandcamp link)

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