Pressing Concerns: Friends of Cesar Romero, Fran Carlyon, The Fruit Trees, The Sylvia Platters

Posted byrosyoverdrivePosted inPressing ConcernsTags:, , , , , , , ,

Welcome to a Monday Pressing Concerns! We have new records from Friends of Cesar Romero, Fran Carlyon, The Fruit Trees, and The Sylvia Platters below (one of them is an EP, one is an LP, and you’ll have to use your best judgement on the others). Check them out!

There will be a blog post tomorrow.

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.

Friends of Cesar Romero – Soul Scouts

Release date: February 6th
Record label: Doomed Babe/Kit Fox
Genre: Garage rock, punk rock, power pop
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Bitter But Better

J. Waylon Porcupine is back, and he sounds pretty fed up. The Rapid City, South Dakota-based musician is a one-man garage rock/power pop machine; one thing we can rely on in this day and age is a new single, EP, or short album from his Friends of Cesar Romero project every couple of months. The first Friends of Cesar Romero offering of 2026 (coming almost exactly two months after the previous one, December’s Cars, Guitars, Girls EP) is a ten-song, eighteen-minute jolt called Soul Scouts, and it’s my favorite release of his in quite a while now. Friends of Cesar Romero records run the gamut from sunny, hook-heavy power pop to ripping basement garage punk; Soul Scouts hews towards the latter, but, as always, there’s a trace of the former in these songs as well. Nonetheless, Soul Scouts begins with Porcupine absolutely tearing into “The Rapid City Is Boring”, a blistering early punk rock throwback that’s fun and bratty; “Trauma Bonding” and “A Sonnet for Lee Lazy Horse” keep the quick tempos, lurking fury, and very pleasing guitar tones up and “Gate Around the Classy Apple” just barely has a breather moment at the beginning.

I could list all of the exciting pop punk moments on Soul Scouts all day; funnily enough, it’s the closing stretch where Friends of Cesar Romero’s power pop streak really starts to dominate again. “Nurse Midwife Crisis” is right in the middle of “blistering tempo” and “golden-melody chorus”, and “Tassels” is the first thing on the record that could reasonably be called “jangly”. “Lost Her to a Lost Boy” makes the bold choice to get a bit mid-tempo with it, and it turns out that Porcupine saved the biggest, most straightforward power pop anthem for last with “Bitter But Better”. If Soul Scouts feels like an album-length (well, an eighteen-minute-length) letting-off-of-steam, “Bitter But Better” is both the light at the end of the tunnel and a summation of the process that led us to this moment. “I don’t miss missing you” is a simple enough line, but Porcupine spends all of Soul Scouts making sure it lands. (Bandcamp link)

Fran Carlyon – Home Truths

Release date: February 6th
Record label: YYZ
Genre: Lo-fi folk, bedroom folk, slowcore
Formats: CD, digital
Pull Track: Tripping Over My Heart

I’ve known about Southend-on-Sea’s Fran Carlyon thanks to his music blog heavymetalkids.uk, which you should probably add to your rotation if you haven’t been checking it out before. Perhaps this makes me predisposed to like Carlyon’s own music, but I’d say it’s less “music blogger solidarity” and more “well, I know that I like his taste in music, which gives him a leg up”. Plus, his debut mini-album Home Truths comes with co-signs from two musicians I’ve written about before in Goodbye Wudaokou’s Matthew Mills and Assistant‘s Jonathan Shipley, who’ve co-released it on the fledgling label they’ve co-founded, YYZ (in fact, it’s the first record not made by themselves they’ve put out).

Home Truths is not precisely the kind of homespun indie pop with which I’ve associated Carlyon and his labelheads before, but it captures the “intimate” and “lo-fi” parts of them at the very least. Carlyon makes very stark, hushed folk music with atmospheric synths floating around the periphery; melodies are still in play, to be sure, but the acoustic fingerpicking and cavernous feeling are the more immediately noticeable traits of Home Truths. It’s a pretty short experience (the streaming version is only six songs and eleven minutes long, with two extra tracks on Bandcamp and CD), but it doesn’t feel slight; once you’re in Home Truth’s chilly, vaguely haunted world, it commands your full attention. Instrumental passage lapse into stunning slowcore-ish folk/pop material like “Running on Emptiness”, “Ten Years”, and “Tripping Over My Heart” in a dream-like state, and I come out of Home Truths with the same waking feeling of trying to piece together what I remember from my previous state of consciousness. (Bandcamp link)

The Fruit Trees – Teeth

Release date: February 2nd
Record label: Flower Sounds
Genre: Folk rock, psychedelic folk, dream folk
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: My Opal

Los Angeles musician Johnny Rafter keeps plenty busy these days with his project The Fruit Trees. There’s been a steady stream of new music over the past few years; sometimes it’s basically Rafter on his own, sometimes he’ll invite other musicians, sometimes the music hews towards “song”-based folk rock, other times it’s more experimental or amorphous. The latest Fruit Trees album, Teeth, is a pop-literate folk record made by Rafter with the cast of Beth Rosenholtz on piano, Hannah Ford-Monroe (Rafter’s main collaborator on last year’s An Opening) on vocals, Pearce Gronek on upright bass, Brooke Tannehill on violin, Adam Weddle on guitar, and Fletcher Barton on trumpet (with some degree of instrumental musical chairs going on). The Fruit Trees’ version of folk music is refreshing in its unvarnished attitude; this isn’t alt-radio-bait “indie folk”, but rather something that sounds pieced together by a group of musicians with the seams showing. The tempos are wobbly, the strings are droning, and the vocals drift in and out of focus. Some songs, like the vibrant opening track “Parallel” and the peaceful late-record ballad “My Opal”, I struggle to imagine anyone not finding beautiful; other tracks, like the vaguely nightmarish title track and the wonky march of “River Gifs”, might take a bit more patience. They’re different sides of The Fruit Trees’ coin, though–taken together, it’s an overview of an act with a bag of instruments, a bag of concepts, and with oftentimes unusual but always intriguing ideas on how to merge the two. (Bandcamp link)

The Sylvia Platters – Will Tomorrow Be Enough

Release date: February 6th
Record label: Dutch Customer
Genre: Power pop, jangle pop, indie pop
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Gwendolyn, Approximately

Every couple of years, the Vancouver quartet The Sylvia Platters sees fit to drop a brief collection of breezy, jangly power pop; we got the Youth Without Virtue EP in 2022 and the LP (of only slightly longer length) Vivian Elixir in 2024. Fast forward another two years, and The Sylvia Platters are back with a new lineup (founding members Nick and Tim Ubels are joined by new faces Kyle Schick and Ian Fildes, although former guitarist Alex Kerc-Murchison still has a co-writing credit on one song) and a new five-song cassette EP called Will Tomorrow Be Enough. The twenty-minute record is further confirmation that the Ubels are honors students of Teenage Fanclub and their jangly indie pop ilk: “False Colours” rushes up to greet us with a brisk tempo, romantic vocals, and guitars that do exactly what you want them to do. “Tactical Lunchbox” throws some new wave-y/Attractions-style keyboards into the mix (oh, and some nice tambourine), and “Alone” is the “requisite pastoral ballad”, but the five-minute “Gwendolyn, Approximately” is Will Tomorrow Be Enough’s crown jewel; this multi-part college rock opera piece has a massive chorus and all sorts of twists and turns in between repetitions of it. As usual, The Sylvia Platters’ latest missive ranges from solid to transcendent, and they remain worthy of a listen for all indie pop devotees. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Leave a comment