Pressing Concerns: The Kyle Sowashes, Daddy Fell Through, Tercel, Silk Daisys

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Welcome to a mid-December Monday Pressing Concerns! We’ve got new albums from The Kyle Sowashes and Silk Daisys, plus new EPs from Daddy Fell Through and Tercel. Stay tuned for some more year-end lists from the blog, but, for now, check out these great records that may have slipped by you.

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The Kyle Sowashes – Start Making Sense

Release date: October 3rd
Record label: Anyway
Genre: Punk rock, garage rock, 90s indie rock, pop punk
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Start Making Sense

Kyle Sowash is a Columbus, Ohio indie rock institution in the vein of lifers like Micah Schnabel of Two Cow Garage and Lizard McGee of Earwig–he’s been stubbornly leading his eponymous band in gruff, punk-adjacent underground rock music for coming up on twenty years now. For around a decade, Sowash (who also plays in Smug Brothers) has been steadily backed by Dan Bandman (drums), Justin Hemminger (guitar/keys), and Nick La Russo (bass)–alongside horns provided by Carolyn Dever and Lonn Schubert (trumpet and trombone, respectively), these are the players you’ll hear on Start Making Sense, the Kyle Sowashes’ first LP in six years. It’s thirteen songs of The Kyle Sowashes experience, which can be described in loose genre-based terms (pop punk, “orgcore”, 90s-style indie garage rock) or more basic, kind-of-backhanded-sounding descriptors (“no-frills”, “workmanlike”, “everyman”, “barebones”).

Imagine a guy from the Midwest who writes songs with titles like “I’m Sorry, But We’ve Done Everything We Can Do at This Point”, “It Doesn’t Really Matter What You Think”, and “The Least That You Can Do” (the latter of which’s title line is preceded by “You can’t even do…”). There’s an unflagging, uncomfortably-up-close feature to Sowash’s writing that reminds me more than anything else of the late Karl Hendricks. There’s classic rock in there, too, of course, and “classic indie rock” like blog-favorites Silkworm (for one, the vocal melody of “I Don’t Want to Hear It Anymore” bears enough of a resemblance to “Wild in My Day” to trigger something in me). These kinds of records make their marks in the margins, and Start Making Sense is plenty marginal–that frantic guitar riff that kicks off “The Least That You Can Do”, or a couple good one-liners in the sauntering anti-cop shrug of “Napoleon Complex”, or the beleaguered chorus to the title track, the big cathartic moment towards which it feels like the entire record was building up. The Kyle Sowashes know how to make a rock-solid, approachable, and (yes) sensible album–who’d have thought? (Bandcamp link)

Daddy Fell Through – Daddy Fell Through

Release date: November 14th
Record label: Olly Olly
Genre: Acoustic rock, lo-fi pop, folk rock, singer-songwriter
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Forget the Tradeoffs

A couple of months ago I wrote about Higher Selves Playdate, a Virginia-based duo who’d just put out their debut album, The New Apocalyptic. I called it a “colorful and glitzy pop album”, grasping for ways to convey how Jessica Kallista and Steve Fitzpatrick enthusiastically melted an “Athens, Georgia sound”, new wave, psychedelia, and synthpop together on those songs. Fitzpatrick now has a new project called Daddy Fell Through, and it’s just about as far away from Higher Selves Playdate as he could get, stylistically at least. The self-titled Daddy Fell Through EP is five songs and eight minutes of Fitzpatrick strumming pop songs alone on an acoustic guitar; the title of the project is a nod to Fitzpatrick’s children, who apparently prefer hearing the campfire guitar chords over the “50 track songs” of Higher Selves Playdate. It’s acoustic, yes, but it’s not really “folk”–I can hear Fitzpatrick writing pop music for Higher Selves Playdate here, reaching for ideas that he and Kallista can tinker around with eventually (he even calls the EP a bunch of “half-completed songs”). At the same time, though, I like the simplicity of Daddy Fell Through. It reminds me of early Mountain Goats, Fitzpatrick giving so much to these basic performances that it seems like the three-chord arrangements are all they could possibly need. Maybe these songs will appear on a future Higher Selves Playdate record with forty-something instruments layered over top of them, and I’ll be interested in hearing those, too. But it’ll also be okay if this is it for them. (Bandcamp link)

Tercel – Tercel

Release date: December 5th
Record label: Fort Lowell
Genre: 2000s indie rock, alt-country, indie pop
Formats: CD, digital
Pull Track: Decoder Ring

The self-titled EP from Tercel is the Wilmington, North Carolina band’s first record in which they don’t have to share the main billing (they took the unusual step of releasing a split EP with hip hop duo Fuzz Jaxx & CoolOutSessions last year despite only having a couple of one off-singles to their name at that point). They’re a quartet co-led by Savannah Wood and Robin Wood and rounded out by Chris Vinopal (pedal steel, guitar) and Taylor Salvetti (drums); on our clearest glimpse of Tercel yet, we start to be able to see them as big-picture, earnest, pop-forward indie rockers. The exuberant, in-focus guitar work reflects a band who’ve taken cues from their home state’s indie rock history (maybe more Superchunk than Archers of Loaf, but probably both), but all five songs on Tercel shoot for giant, polished choruses (call them heartland rock, Americana, power pop…) that skip right past the 1990s into the following decade. The more electric songs on Tercel (like “Stuck and “Strange Energy”) work because the band are just scuzzy enough to give the tracks the sharper edges they need, although my favorite song on the EP, “Decoder Ring”, cuts the fuzz and chases after an overwhelming, immaculately-building post-alt-country indie rock ball of emotion and melody. And if you’re looking to understand Tercel, that’s probably it. (Bandcamp link)

Silk Daisys – Silk Daisys

Release date: December 5th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Dream pop, shoegaze, jangle pop, fuzz pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: That Was Yesterday

2025 is almost over, but there’s still time to hear some jangly, shoegaze-y dream pop from Atlanta, Georgia. This take on it comes to us via Silk Daisys, the duo of Karla Jean Davis and James Abercrombie, who’ve made the jump from “occasional Soundcloud project” to “full-fledged rock band” with their self-titled debut album. Pick your favorite dream pop/shoegaze-straddling band to compare them to–Silk Daisys is a nice, even-keeled survey of a wide array of fuzzed-out, poppy indie rock. Opening track “It’s a Laugh” kicks off Silk Daisys with straight-up jangle/power pop, but, before you worry, the duo’s shoegaze bona fides come into focus very quickly between the 80s coldwave-touched “Kiss Me Like You Mean It” and “Honeymilk”, which is full-on reverb-drenched pop music. Silk Daisys have a Cocteau Twins streak in them, and nowhere is this more apparent than “Little Galaxy”, which pares down their sound to a mist of echoing guitars, prominent basslines, and Davis’ voice. We get a few more wall-of-sound shoegaze/fuzz rock (“Haunted House”, “Everybody Wants to Be My Baby”) and jangle pop (“That Was Yesterday”, “Let Me Be Your House”) moments before Silky Daisys is all said and done, which certainly helps this album feel like a generous and passionate tour through its creators’ favored genres. (Bandcamp link)

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