Pressing Concerns: Rural France, The Sleeves, Cola, Unwed Sailor

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Welcome to the Thursday Pressing Concerns! We’ve new albums from Rural France, The Sleeves, Cola, and Unwed Sailor in this one. Check them out below, and if you missed Monday’s blog post (featuring Northeast Regional, Comprador, Josephine Network, and Lirra Skirra), check that out 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.

Rural France – SLOTHS

Release date: May 8th
Record label: Meritorio
Genre: Power pop, jangle pop, indie pop, folk pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: High Hopes (Ballad of Rural France)

I’ll try to keep this brief: Tom Brown is a British singer-songwriter who’s released four power pop albums (of varying fidelity) under the name Teenage Tom Petties since 2022, as well as an indie pop album as Lone Striker last year. He’s also one-half of Wiltshire’s Rural France, a duo he started with his ex-roommate Rob Fawkes in the mid-to-late 2010s. Brown writes and sings the songs, Fawkes adds his signature guitar lines (and, occasionally, another instrument of some kind)–it’s a collaboration that’s worked well on records like the 2024 LP Exactamondo!. Brown’s trademark fuzzed-out, 90s lo-fi power pop sound took on a bit of a melancholic streak on that album, and SLOTHS, the latest Rural France LP, seems to lean into that terrain as well. Deciding to make something “a little slower and a little more melancholy”, the duo cleaned up their sound from “early Pavement” to “mid-period Pavement”, invited John Hare to play horns on a couple songs, and even enlisted a full-time drummer (Teenage Tom Petties’ Jeff Hamm, in fact). 

The result is an intriguing entry in the ever-expanding Tom Brown universe. “Thirty Seven Forever” would be given a beer-raising heft to it on his previous albums; here, it’s somewhat jaunty slacker pop. “Lonely Heart Pyramid Scheme” is perhaps the most immediately infectious song on SLOTHS; instead of slowing this one down, Rural France decide to indulge in some “Carrot Rope”-like keyboards as a way of putting a unique stamp on it. The manipulated vocals in the chorus of opening track “Slab” are the closest Brown’s gotten yet to returning to the cut-and-paste pop music of the Lone Striker LP, keys and Malkmus-style guitar noodling mark “Soulseeker”, and “Casio” is underscored by, well, perhaps you can figure that one out. I think my favorite song on SLOTHS is “High Hopes (Ballad of Rural France)”, a slowly-unfurling anthem that embraces a bit of the worldbuilding of the most recent Teenage Tom Petties album as the LP draws to a close. It takes no small amount of patience for Rural France to get to the key-change and energy-releasing final verse; for once, patience is what Fawkes and Brown have in spades. (Bandcamp link)

The Sleeves – The Sleeves

Release date: May 8th
Record label: 12XU
Genre: Post-rock, slowcore, folk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Rip It Up

London musician Jack Cooper has spent the better part of the last decade leading Modern Nature, a group who’ve explored post-rock, psychedelic folk, and chamber music over the course of several LPs. On their most recent album, last year’s The Heat Warps, Modern Nature became a quartet with new member Tara Cunningham joining Cooper on guitar, and the four of them made something warmer and more propulsive than Modern Nature’s previous work. The Heat Warps is only one piece of Cunningham and Cooper’s burgeoning musical partnership, however: they put out an instrumental album as a duo last year called Pond Life, and this year they’re debuting a new project called The Sleeves. The Sleeves’ self-titled debut album is, loosely speaking, a song-based folk album; Cunningham and Cooper both sing and play guitar. 

Although Cunningham’s arrival in Modern Nature resulted in a more vibrant record, The Sleeves is proof that both she and Cooper can thrive in a more glacial, stark, wide-open emptiness, too. Of course, the unique trick that The Sleeves pulls is that it’s all done with just the two members’ guitars and vocals: they’ve got their “minimalism” locked and loaded. Previous Cooper touchpoints like early Low and later Talk Talk are reached with the barest of ingredients, and, just as impressively, he and Cunningham are able to create distinct song units with them, too. Not that it won’t take a few listens to really get a handle on what The Sleeves are doing here, but the duo are able to make themselves sound insistent on tracks like “Rip It Up” and “You, Now, Again”–just because The Sleeves are slow doesn’t mean they’re leisurely. Bits and pieces of its authors’ previous work are certainly present, but The Sleeves serves to show that Cunningham and Cooper’s current hot streak is taking them to novel places, too. (Bandcamp link)

Cola – Cost of Living Adjustment

Release date: May 8th
Record label: Fire Talk
Genre: Post-punk, art rock, 2000s indie rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Hedgesitting

I really enjoyed The Gloss, the sophomore album from Montreal trio Cola, back when it came out in 2024. A couple of former members of the post-punk group Ought (vocalist/guitarist Tim Darcy and bassist Ben Stidworthy) and drummer Evan Cartwright made a compelling indie rock album evoking everything from Flying Nun to Television to 2000s groups like The Strokes and Spoon (I called it “post-post-punk”). Cost of Living Adjustment follows a little under two years later (if you refer to it by its acronym, it’s sort of a self-titled album), finding the band taking an uneasy step ever so slightly out of their comfort zone.

Of course, The Gloss was such a smooth experience than any amount of deviation from it would naturally feel less “comfortable”, so I don’t want to overstate the effect that these wrinkles (more emphasis on vocal melodies, a healthy amount of studio layering and experimentation, just a bit more Feelies nervousness) have on Cola’s overall sound. The warped early highlight “Hedgesitting” and the late-record (sort-of) ballad “Conflagration Mindset” are new terrain for Cola, but “Haveluck Country” and “Much of a Muchness” more dominantly display the band that made The Gloss in their DNA. Time will tell if Cost of Living Adjustment lives up to its predecessor–it can feel like splitting hairs writing about differences in sound when it comes to bands like this, but it’s a credit to Cola that I continue to want to dig into their finely-hammered-out details. (Bandcamp link)

Unwed Sailor – High Remembrance

Release date: May 8th
Record label: Current Taste
Genre: Post-punk, post-rock, dream pop, new wave
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: West Coast Prism

The Tulsa-based bassist Johnathon Ford has led the instrumental project Unwed Sailor since 1998, but the band has hit a career high in productivity in the past few years–High Remembrance, the eleventh Unwed Sailor album, is their fourth LP in as many years. Like last year’s Cruel Entertainment, it features Matt Putman on drums and David Swatzell on guitar (Patrick McGill, also on drums, is credited on this album as well), and it once again finds Unwed Sailor following Ford’s melodic basslines into realms of instrumental new wave, post-punk, and dream pop. Single “West Coast Prism” is Unwed Sailor at their 80s-evoking best with its bass-led, New Order-influenced charm, and penultimate track “Three Jewels” also takes us to that particular decade with a dreamy, synth-y streak. Not everything on High Remembrance is as easily classifiable as those, of course–“Cinnamon” is inspired by country music and the American Southwest and “Punk Broke” nods to the grunge movement that started in Unwed Sailor’s city of origin, Seattle. I wouldn’t call the latter “punk” at all and the former is only “country” in the loosest sense of the word, but the dimensions they add to High Remembrance are welcome nonetheless (not to mention the layers added by opening track “Truest Sentence”, a strange mixture of shimmering indie rock and brisk rhythms). High Remembrance already feels like it’ll sit nicely next to Cruel Entertainment as part of Unwed Sailor’s current renaissance. (Bandcamp link)

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