Pressing Concerns: P.G. Six, Friend’s House / MyVeronica, DÄÄCHT, Awkward Ghosts

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For the first Pressing Concerns of the week, we have a new album from DÄÄCHT, a new EP from Awkward Ghosts, a reissue from P.G. Six, and a split EP between Friend’s House and MyVeronica. I can confirm that there will be a Tuesday blog post, but you should sit with these and enjoy them for now.

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P.G. Six – The Well of Memory (Expanded Edition)

Release date: August 8th
Record label: Amish
Genre: Experimental folk, art folk, traditional folk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Old Man on the Mountain

P.G. Six is Pat Gubler, a New York musician who came up in the 1990s playing in free folk band The Tower Recordings. Since that jumping-off point, Gubler has played with Azalia Snail, Wet Tuna, and Garcia Peoples (among others), and has put out P.G. Six albums intermittently on labels like Drag City, Feeding Tube, and Amish since 2001’s Parlor Tricks and Porch Favorites. The Well of Memory is the second P.G. Six album, originally released by Amish Records in 2004, a particularly fertile period for strange, experimental, and freewheeling folk music in “indie rock”. This was the era of “freak folk”, and Gubler is often mentioned alongside many of those acts, although there’s a more clear traditional side to P.G. Six’s 60s outsider folk-influenced sound on The Well of Memory; it’s still very “out there”, but in a way that draws heavily from all over folk music’s past. The ukelin, a “bowed instrument from the 1940s”, features on the album, as well as folk harp, tenor banjo, tin whistle, harmonica, pianos, organs, and electric guitars. There’s a lot of digging that went into making The Well of Memory, and Amish Records has done some digging of their own for this expanded reissue of it, putting together an entire second album made up of six songs from The Well of Memory’s sessions and four contemporaneous live recordings.

The original The Well of Memory is still a great folk record in 2025, one with enough space for more traditional compositions like “Come in/The Winter It Is Past”, “Old Man on the Mountain”, and “The Weeping Willow” to sit alongside odd snippets like “Considering the Lateness of the Hour” and “Evening Comes”, not to mention “Three Stages of a Band”, which genuinely rocks, wielding big riffs alongside (what I think is the) tin whistle. The bonus studio recordings are interesting in a behind-the-scenes way–they’re much more ambient-sounding and formless than most of the final album; one imagines that Gubler had to work through challenging pieces like “From My Window” and “A Song Is But a Song” (the latter of which is still the most “song”-like of these extra tracks) to get to what made the album proper. The live recordings at the end of the second album are probably my favorite of the previously-unreleased material–they’re from four different shows in 2004 and 2005, and aside from Tim Barnes’ percussion on one of them, they’re entirely made up of Gubler’s voice and electric guitar. These raw, winding live versions of The Well of Memory’s most “folk”-like songs effectively reinvent part of that album into a different kind of “folk music”. It’s a compelling appendix to an album that had already more or less done everything else. (Bandcamp link)

Friend’s House / MyVeronica – Farewell Skylines

Release date: August 8th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Emo, slowcore, 90s indie rock
Formats: CD, digital
Pull Track: College Radio Static

MyVeronica and Friend’s House are a pair of intertwined Los Angeles indie rock bands–they’ve both been putting out material since at least the early 2020s, with a handful of singles and one EP apiece to their names. The former began as the solo project of singer/guitarist Mia Lin but are now a quartet rounded out by guitarist Tristin Souvannarath, bassist Hovhannes Tamrazyan, and Rah Kanan, while the latter is the aforementioned Souvannarath’s solo project (in-studio, at least). Both acts draw influence from 1990s emo, slowcore, and indie rock with traces of emo and/or slowcore–even the format of this four-song split EP is something of an homage to their forbearers, with the musicians mentioning Mineral, Jimmy Eat World, and Christie Front Drive as acts who’d put out similar collections in the past. We get two songs from each band on Farewell Skylines, and while there may be slight discernible differences between the two groups (MyVeronica is a little more “emo-y indie rock”, Friend’s House a little more “slowcore-y indie rock”), the EP hangs together as a coherent release and makes me interested in hearing more from both bands.

Friend’s House may be the slower and less “band”-like of the acts, but they get the biggest chorus on Farewell Skylines, and everyone made the right choice to have “College Radio Static” lead off the EP. For over a minute, “College Radio Static” is a steady, subtly beautiful slowcore tune, but the electric guitars take off like a rocket around the ninety-second mark and Souvannarath delivers a really passionate couple of lines with the platform. MyVeronica are in the second and fourth slots, and both of their contributions are awesome, melodic emo-ish indie rockers–“Sleepless” is equal parts jagged punk guitar chords and chiming, clear indie pop leads, while the shuffling drumbeat of “Sacred Heart” becomes the driver of a thoughtful and downcast closing statement. Sandwiched in between the two MyVeronica songs is Friend’s House’s “Alright”, the longest track on the EP (a little over five minutes) and a patience-inviting journey through lo-fi indie rock, slowcore, and melancholic manipulated vocals a la early Trace Mountains. To sum it up: there are no skips or filler on this EP at all, and it feels wrong that neither of these bands have put out an LP yet. Hopefully we can hear one from at least one of them soon–they’re welcome to make one together if they’d like, too. (Bandcamp link)

DÄÄCHT – Crying Houses

Release date: July 11th
Record label: Beta Cult
Genre: Garage punk, noise rock, punk rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Maybe Later

Oh, sick, new noisy German garage punk. Allow me to introduce DÄÄCHT, a quartet from Regensburg who apparently used to be known as Kolossus Däächt and who put out an album called Lipstick Love back in 2020. We’ve been overdue for a second album from the group (vocalist Clement Hoffer, guitarist Dennis Scheffer, bassist Benedikt Bartl, and drummer Simon Schuster), all of whom are apparently part of a local group called the “VOID Collective” (it seems like the members are perpetually busy with other projects). Crying Houses is a triumphant return for DÄÄCHT, a garage punk album that puts its foot on the gas and balances heaviness with a commitment to fun rock and roll much like the late, great Hot Snakes. It’s psychedelic rock made by a punk rock band, or a punk album with a heavier, metallic shadow cast over it. Post-punk and goth are in Crying Houses’ mix too, but it’s a more subtle, attitudinal addition to the limber, dark, and loud sound the album hones in on for a nice clean ten tracks and twenty-nine minutes.

DÄÄCHT get right to it with “Notopia”, an attack-mode opening track that marries the Sabbath-influenced delirium of Ty Segall with a speedy punk performance. “Maybe Later” is a dance song if you squint, an excellent garage rock hook in the refrain and a galloping drumbeat carrying the entire thing. The dark post-punk guitars splattered all over “Phantom” recall the German underground chronicled by It’s Eleven Records, although this one has a pretty solid hook, too. There’s no respite in Crying Houses, which roars into its second half with more all-in rockers like the power-punk pogo-ing of “Eden”, the big, crunchy riffs of “Ticket”, and “Mirror”, the most openly psychedelic moment on the album. “Mirror” lurches and prowls for an unthinkable four minutes, slicing through the murk it creates and retreating over and over again for a much more surreal experience than the rest of Crying Houses. Closing track “Smile” is also a four-minute tune, but the fuzzed-out garage punk returns on this one–it’s one last, extended bonfire before the LP bows out. Whatever it takes  to make music like this sear itself into one’s brain, DÄÄCHT are wielding it without prejudice. (Bandcamp link)

Awkward Ghosts – Awkward Ghosts

Release date: July 21st
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Post-punk, indie pop
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Sink the Sails

Sometimes we only need to hear a little bit from a band to get the feeling like they’ve hit the ground running. Introducing Awkward Ghosts, a six-piece band from Asheville, North Carolina who’ve just released their first record, a three-song, nine-minute self-titled EP. The sextet is made up of vocalist Nick Hubbard, synth player/vocalist Catherine Anderson, bassist Andrew Clyde, drummer Andy Culbreath, and guitarists Cole Cremen and Dave Harris, and all six of them piled into the place every Asheville or Asheville-adjacent band records at, Drop of Sun Studios (Florry, Colin Miller, Truth Club), to have Seamus Rooney and Lawson Alderson (The Silver Doors, Rain Recordings) put their first songs to tape. It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly what Awkward Ghosts “sounds like”–there’s an offbeat post-punk revival side to them and a maximalist 2000s-style indie rock one too, and it’s all delivered with some excellent guitar pop hooks and just a hint of Carolinian rootsiness baked into the mix, as well.

There are only three songs on here, so let’s look at each of them. The track order is different on Bandcamp than on other streaming services; on the former, the stop-start post-punk anthem “Sink the Sails” is the opening track, while on the latter it closes things out. Its focused, intense plodding and nervous but catchy hook make it a very solid opener, in my opinion, but then “Thoughts Are Blocks” and “Smell the Flowers (Keep Together)” tread in similar terrain and probably could’ve introduced us to Awkward Ghosts just as successfully. “Thoughts Are Blocks” is Awkward Ghosts at their most “yelpy”, with chilly verses swelling to a synth-led new wave-y chorus, while “Smell the Flowers (Keep Together)” (which closes the Bandcamp version of Awkward Ghosts) is perhaps the group at their most relaxed-sounding (as low of a bar as that is). Awkward Ghosts at their “smoothest” and “nervous-est” aren’t all that far from each other, though, to the point where “Sink the Sails” and “Smell the Flowers” feel like equally-apt ornate indie pop bookends to the EP. Like I said, it’s just a small sample of a band, but it’s enough to start to feel good about Awkward Ghosts. (Bandcamp link)

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