Pressing Concerns: Place Position, Jo Passed, T. Gold, Subtle Body

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In this here Thursday Pressing Concerns, we’re featuring four albums coming out tomorrow, January 23rd: new ones from Place Position, Jo Passed, T. Gold, and Subtle Body. Check ’em out, and if you missed Tuesday’s blog post (featuring Top Jimmy and the Rhythm Pigs, Fuzzy Feelings, Storm Boy, and Ace of Spit), load that one up, too.

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.

Place Position – Went Silent

Release date: January 23rd
Record label: Sweet Cheetah/Poptek/Bunker Park/Blind Rage
Genre: Post-punk, post-hardcore, math rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Chaos Herder Pt. 2

Here we are with Place Position, a trio from Dayton, Ohio evidently named after a Fugazi song, and who make music one might expect a trio evidently named after a Fugazi song to make. Bassist Chip Heck, Jesse Mays, and guitarist/vocalist Josh Osinkosky are probably all “lifers”; the first Place Position album came out in 2014, and all three of them have played in other bands in southwestern Ohio (The 1984 Draft, Shadyside, Landfilth…). Aside from a three-song single in 2020, Place Position had been pretty quiet since their first album, but the dozen-year wait for Place Position LP2 has finally ended with Went Silent. Those paying attention are rewarded with ten slow-moving but still frequently fiery post-hardcore/post-punk songs well-versed in the intricacies of the history of Dischord Records and its flagship bands; while it’s not as zen-like as Lungfish (or their best modern analogue, Vulture Feather), it does sound like a record that has benefited from its creators getting long(er) in the tooth.

Those who enjoy the “flag-planting anthem” side of post-hardcore punk rock will be drawn in immediately with “Chaos Herder Pt. 2”, a stalwart, unflappable post-punk opening statement. Like many a great Dischord record, however, Went Silent is also sneakily quite weird and subversive–this is apparent from the tense atmospheres propping up “Camber” in the first half, and it really comes to a head near the center of the album with strange art punk tangents “Buy Here, Pay Here” and “NO401OK”. Most everything on Went Silent is, to some degree, a “rocker”, but it’s to Place Position’s credit that they have a pretty wide-ranging and open attitude as to how (and when and where) to do that. If you want to know how to make music like this for the better part of twenty years, Place Position have put on a pretty good demonstration on keeping it fresh with Went Silent. (Bandcamp link)

Jo Passed – Away

Release date: January 23rd
Record label: Youth Riot
Genre: Art punk, psychedelia, post-punk
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Alright

I remember the first Jo Passed record, which came out on Sub Pop back in 2018. It was a weird, jagged art rock album called Their Prime; I don’t think I was ready for it at the time, but listening back to it now, it sounds pretty good. It took Jo Hirabayashi, the leader of Jo Passed, eight years to follow up Their Prime, and he alludes to mental health problems in the interim–the previous, Vancouver-based version of Jo Passed dissolved, Hirabayashi moved to Toronto, and worked and reworked what eventually became Away. Aided by a new group of backing musicians (vocalist Téa Mei, drummers Mac Lawrie and Justin Devries, Meredith Bates on strings, and saxophonist/woodwind player Andromeda Monk), Hirabayashi sounds more driven and intense than ever on Away, a gorgeous, tangible pop album in the realms of post-punk, psychedelia, and 70s studio-heavy rock.

Everything on Away has its own personality–just running through the first half, there’s the woozy psych-pop opening track “brb”, the propulsive avant-garage art pop rock of “Precious Word”, the dreamy jangle of “Ico” (about Mei’s cat, apparently), the skronky horn-fest of “339”, and the delicate mid-tempo ballad at the core of “Dizzy Izzy”. My favorite song on Away is in the second half, though: “Alright” is a fully-committed, kaleidoscopic power pop curveball like nothing else on the album. Jo Passed really throw everything they can spare into “Alright”, but Away is as strong as it is on the whole because they give just as much to everything else on the album, from the nearly-percussionless minimal trip of “Too Much Thought” to the sprawling, triumphant deconstructed girl-group-pop of “J Walking”.  Jo Passed may not have a clearly “straightforward” album in them because that’s not really what they do, but for a “challenging” band like this, Away is as good as it gets. (Bandcamp link)

T. Gold – Life Is a Wonder and It’s Cruel

Release date: January 23rd
Record label: Sleepy Cat
Genre: Folk rock, alt-country, art rock, synthrock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: New Land

Gabriel Anderson and Saman Khoujinian are a pair of musicians from Miami who are now based in Carrboro, North Carolina, where they co-founded Sleepy Cat Records in 2019 to release their band T. Gold’s self-titled debut album. Seven years later, Sleepy Cat has released a bunch of good records from North Carolina musicians like Lonnie Walker, DUNUMS, and Gibson & Toutant, and the label’s founding duo have finally returned as T. Gold with Life Is a Wonder and It’s Cruel, the project’s second album. A warmly familiar but nonetheless unique lesson, Life Is a Wonder and It’s Cruel is a friendly, accessible folk-pop album made by a duo who are clearly immersed in their state’s alt-country scene but also have a “quadraphonic improvisational synthesizer collective” called Delver. The production (from both members of T. Gold as well as Dylan Turner and Alex Bingham) is immaculate, and Khoujinian’s lead vocals are crystal clear, setting up Life Is a Wonder and It’s Cruel to be a nice, smooth folk-country-rock listen–except for all the electronic tinkering. It’s right up front and center from the synthesizers whirring along with opening track “Getting to Know the End”, and the extra instrumentation (provided by both Anderson and Khoujinian) adds another dimension to both rockers like “Jewel” and “slow ones” like “Speak with Spirits”. T. Gold truly shine at the intersection of the traditional and synthetic, as highlights like the mountain folk-tinged “New Land” and closing ballad “Wagoner’s Lad” make clear. Looking at what they’re able to do here, the Research Triangle’s music world is evidently all the richer for having T. Gold and its twin minds at the center of it. (Bandcamp link)

Subtle Body – Subtle Body

Release date: January 23rd
Record label: Strange Mono
Genre: Post-punk, lo-fi punk, synthpunk, goth, no wave
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Infinite Casualties

A new quintet from Philadelphia made up by a bunch of “punk, hardcore, and grind” veterans, Subtle Body are the latest group to throw their hats in the realms of muddy, spooky, lo-fi post-punk and synthpunk. The group (vocalist Bo, synth player Rachel, drummer Mike, guitarist Chips, and bassist Dave) have linked up with prolific local label Strange Mono (Idiot Mambo, Snow Caps, Webb Chapel) to release their self-titled debut cassette, a twenty-three-minute descent into the gothic side of basement punk. Dave’s bass swims in a murky sea of haunting vocals, freaked-out drums, and plenty of synths in “The Body”, the first non-intro track, and most of Subtle Body’s rockers (“Infinite Casualties”, “Social Dispute”, “Stolen World”) follow in much the same fashion. Nevertheless, Subtle Body still have the capability to swerve into a strange synth ambient piece right in the middle of the album (“Eyes on the Ground”), and are even able to more or less successfully merge their weird and punk sides with “Estrangement”. Subtle Body wrap up their first album about as quickly as possible, but there’s still time for one five-minute epic in “Black Candle”, which is effectively four minutes of pounding garage-post-punk and then a weird electronic outro; altogether, the future is looking nice and bleak for Subtle Body. (Bandcamp link)

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