Pressing Concerns: Winston Hightower, Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death, The Clearwater Swimmers, FakeYou

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Welcome to the Monday Pressing Concerns! It’s got new albums from Winston Hightower, Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death, and FakeYou, plus a new EP from The Clearwater Swimmers! Check them out below. The next blog post will be on Thursday.

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.

Winston Hightower – 100 Acre Wood

Release date: April 17th
Record label: K/Perennial
Genre: Lo-fi indie rock, indie pop, post-punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: High School

Winston Hightower spent a decade in the background of the Columbus indie rock scene playing with a bunch of recognizable names in the city and quietly self-recording and self-releasing a bunch of solo records before K and Perennial Records signed him in 2024 and put out Winston Hytwr, a compilation of songs from across his discography. Hightower’s hometown is known for Guided by Voices-influenced guitar pop and 90s indie rock, but the wide-ranging Winston Hytwr was just as likely to pay respect to those influences as wander into minimal art punk, experimental noise, or even psychedelic hip hop. 100 Acre Wood is the first album of new material of Hightower’s K/Perennial era, and while it certainly sounds like the eclectic artist of Winston Hytwr, this album finds the musician honing in on a more cohesive set of post-punk and lo-fi pop-influenced indie rock.

Aside from bass on closing track “Circling the Dream” by Mystic 100’s’ Charles Waring, the fourteen songs of 100 Acre Wood are all Winston Hightower. The Ohioan comes out swinging after the relatively restrained opening track “Moonside”; from “On Our Own Time” to “Virtue Signaling”, Hightower is snapping, garage-rocking, and econo-jamming his way through some strong pop songs. Hightower takes us on a surprising detour into early Modest Mouse-style wonkiness with “Help Is on the Way” (hey, it is a K Records album) and “High School” is just as surprising in its guitar pop sweetness. For the most part, though, 100 Acre Wood really rocks, with electric material like “Me Time (I Need Some)”, “Beyond the Thicket”, and “The Me I Know” all showing up well into the record’s second side. Perhaps the percussionless, hazy psychedelia of “Circling the Dream” is Hightower’s way of reminding us that he’s capable of a lot more than ripping lo-fi rockers as 100 Acre Wood comes to a close; it’s a beautiful finale, but it doesn’t lessen the excitement we get in the thirteen songs before it. (Bandcamp link)

Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death – Earthquake Lights

Release date: March 13th
Record label: Resident Recordings
Genre: Noise rock, post-punk, post-hardcore, 90s indie rock
Formats: CD, digital
Pull Track: Spirit of the Radio

The upstate New York noise rock supergroup Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death was formed in the late 1990s by guitarist/vocalist David Nutt (why+the+wires), bassist Tom Yagielski (The 1,000 Year Plan), guitarist Joe Kepic (Chimes of Bayonets), and drummer Brendan Kuntz (Grass Jaw). The Ithaca-originating quartet’s existence has been characterized by wide gaps in between releases, so it’s a pleasant surprise that, merely two years after a third album called Thirds, Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death have offered up a fourth LP entitled Earthquake Lights. Last year, the four of them returned to Chris Ploss’ Sunwood Recording in Trumansburg, NY (where they’d recorded Thirds) to lay down nine more blunt-force post-punk tracks inspired by noisy 90s indie rock from Washington, D.C. and Chicago.

From the big muff-adorned cover to the studious gear-listing on the Bandcamp page’s credits to, well, pretty much everything about the music, Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death fit in pretty well with modern “lifer”-piloted, Electrical Audio-inspired “PRF-core” acts like Stomatopod, Blank Banker, and Constant Greetings, although that doesn’t mean Earthquake Lights has to be completely predictable. The forty-five minute runtime means that several of these songs stretch out extensively, and Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death are able to indulge Sabbath-inspired heaviness and occasional lighter, melodic bouts, too. As Dischord-friendly as opening track “Joe Sabbath” is, “Comet Flasher” and “Spirits of the Radio” delve into less-easy-to-classify corners of 90s indie rock in their not-so-flashy but clearly present pop attributes. The second half of Earthquake Lights is where the “heavy” is concentrated (“Sleeper Holds” hits like a brick wall, and “Into the Totality” and “Untitled” get there eventually, too), although the heaviness of “Pacific Paving” has less to do with the music and more with its overall atmosphere. That’s the kind of twist that you go to the experts in Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death to experience. (Bandcamp link)

The Clearwater Swimmers – Seasons

Release date: March 20th
Record label: New Martian
Genre: Slowcore, 90s indie rock, folk rock
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Engine

The Clearwater Swimmers are a folk- and slowcore-influenced indie rock band split between New York and New England, initially more or less a solo project for frontperson Sumner Bright (vocals/guitar) but now a full-fledged quartet featuring multi-instrumentalist Connor Kennedy, guitarist Sander Casale, and drummer Timothy Graff. After recording a self-titled debut album with Bradford Krieger in 2024, The Clearwater Swimmers’ second record, the Seasons EP, is their first with all four members prominently contributing to songwriting. The band, after writing these four songs (five on the cassette edition) collaboratively, went to Morrill, Maine to record Seasons with Garrett Linck (Boreen, Lily Seabird, Strange Ranger) and came out of the experience with a collection of deliberate, delicate, electric folky indie rock.

Although there’s a clear Songs: Ohia influence on Seasons, these northeasterners haven’t taken that as an excuse to do alt-country drag–it’s not any more close to Molina than it is to a host of other 1990s slowcore bands, or even to meandering, Real Estate-esque pastoral guitar pop. Seasons opens with the starkest song on the EP with its title track, a three-minute crawl to cavernous empty space that ends with a (relatively) upbeat trip into electric folk rock with “Landline”. “Engine” and “Radio” continue The Clearwater Swimmers’ journey into louder climes, the former succeeding as an early Wild Pink-esque glacial heartland rock piece and the latter being the closest the quartet get to truly “rocking out”. Don’t miss out on bonus track “Branches”, either; if you liked the quieter side of The Clearwater Swimmers in “Seasons”, this is the one song that goes down that road yet again (and to an even further degree than the title track). It’s a nice little addition to Seasons, though the four songs on the “proper” EP are enough to make the record stand out in the vast expanse of “folk-y indie rock”. (Bandcamp link)

FakeYou – Promise to Disappear

Release date: April 3rd
Record label: 59 X
Genre: Pop punk, punk rock, orgcore
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Solace

Hailing from Montreal, the punk quartet FakeYou released their debut EP back in 2024, and they’ve linked up with Atlanta pop punk label 59 X Records to put out a debut LP called Promise to Disappear. The band (vocalist/guitarist Guillaume Ménard, drummer Frank ”kickup” Lessard, bassist Phil Archambault, and lead guitarist Ben Pommier) take us back to the world of late-1990s emo-tinged melodic punk rock for an entire LP of the “orgcore” experience: raspy melodies, bursting, anthemic guitars, a palpable earnestness that will be an immediate turnoff to some and the core of FakeYou’s appeal for others. FakeYou recorded Promise to Disappear with fellow Montreal punk revivalist Max Lajoie of Spite House, and while they aren’t quite as heavy as Lajoie’s post-hardcore-ish band, that’s a good starting point for this album (some more clues would be Off With Their Heads, Hot Water Music, Leatherface, and, of course, Jawbreaker). Over the course of ten songs and thirty-five minutes, FakeYou bash out one dire-feeling pop punk song after another; if opening track “Wanderlost” feels oddly subdued, “Tieluck”, “100 Million Sheep”, and “Solace” are evidence enough that they aren’t half-assing this thing. I’m not sure if it is possible to make music like this half-assed; I’m sure FakeYou don’t think so, at least. (Bandcamp link)

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