Pressing Concerns: Josaleigh Pollett, Nocturnal Prose, Picastro, Jake King

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Welcome to a Monday Pressing Concerns! We’ve got a new album from Josaleigh Pollett and new EPs from Nocturnal Prose, Picastro, and Jake King below; check ’em out!

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.

Josaleigh Pollett – If I Let It Quiet

Release date: July 24th
Record label: Audio Antihero/Lavender Vinyl
Genre: Art rock, indie folk, experimental pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Tacit

It’s been a little over three years since I wrote about In the Garden, By the Weeds, the third album from Salt Lake City, Utah singer-songwriter Josaleigh Pollett. In the Garden, By the Weeds was also Pollett’s second collaboration with Jordan Watko (aka Crowd Shy), who at that point had become Pollett’s producer, co-writer, and co-performer; together, Watko and Pollett pushed the latter’s indie folk starting point into more fractured and electronic directions (I compared In the Garden, By the Weeds to later-period Low at the time). Soon after that album’s release, Watko moved to Japan, but If I Let It Quiet nonetheless continues the duo’s collaborations, assembled remotely between Salt Lake City and Osaka over a period of three years. The end result is an album marked more than anything by the emerging “Josaleigh Pollett sound”, one that isn’t “indie folk” nor “experimental pop” but somewhere down a trail marked by those two starting points.

Pollett has been a fan of the “low-key, slowly-revealing” album opening strategy, and If I Let It Quiet is faithful to that via the ambient introduction piece “Shed Piano, Birds” and “Cherry”, the first “proper” song on the album which also features contributions from co-producer Andrew Goldring. “The Witness” and “Like a River” both sound like they were built from acoustic guitar-originating material, although the wall-of-sound orchestral vibe of the former and more languid, almost soft rock sheen of the latter find the material ending up in two wildly divergent directions. There’s not really a “dominant” sound to If I Let It Quiet –the more strongly electronic songs on the album like the minimal “Repeating”, the bubbling “Escape Routes”, and the dynamic single “Radio Player” all work, as do the songs more prone to showing their folk skeletons like “We All Got It Right” and “Tacit”. I would imagine there are challenges keeping a project coherent and in tune with itself when its creators are separated by continents and time zones, but If I Let It Quiet and its architects have a strong enough bond to push forward like they did when they both were in the same city. (Bandcamp link)

Nocturnal Prose – Our Mi$ery Is Their Currency

Release date: May 1st
Record label: Total Agency/Obscura Waves
Genre: Post-punk, goth/deathrock, lo-fi indie rock, garage rock
Formats: Vinyl (with Demo 2022), cassette, digital
Pull Track: Familiar Pain

Nocturnal Prose are a post-punk quartet from San Antonio, Texas–I don’t know their exact lineup, but I do know that they share members with the power pop group Faulty Cognitions. They debuted in 2022 with a three-song demo tape, and quickly recorded three more songs that nonetheless sat in storage for a while as they were unhappy with their production. Our Mi$ery Is Their Currency finds these three songs seeing the light of day having been remixed and remastered by Jason Tucker, and it also adds two new tracks for a five-song EP (and the three-song 2022 demo appears as a B-side on the vinyl edition of the record, too). Our Mi$ery Is Their Currency, remixed or not, is still relatively “lo-fi”, but this works to these songs’ advantage. Most of my favorite modern post-punk sounds like it came out of a dark basement (I’m thinking of what bands like The Drin, Crime of Passing, and Corker have done in Cincinnati in recent years), and Nocturnal Prose’s dour, noisy take on 80s goth and post-punk fits right into that world. The first two songs on Our Mi$ery Is Their Currency are quick-hitting, two-minutes-ish post-punk garage rippers, and then the final three songs are drawn-out, circling-the-drain endurance tests. Both sides of Nocturnal Prose sound great on Our Mi$ery Is Their Currency, and I look forward to hearing more of them. (Bandcamp link)

Picastro – Double on Time

Release date: June 12th
Record label: We Are Busy Bodies
Genre: Experimental, slowcore, folk, post-rock, ambient
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Ring Description

I introduced Toronto’s Picastro to the readers of Rosy Overdrive back in 2022, when the long-running slowcore group had just released a covers EP called I’ve Never Met a Stranger. That record found the band putting their own “sprawling folk-orchestral…sound” on a bunch of relatively obscure songs and The Velvet Underground’s “Pale Blue Eyes”, marked by frontperson and sole consistent member Liz Hysen’s distinct, haunting vocals. Picastro have returned again; they’re now a trio featuring guitarist Tim Condon and bassist Alex Fournier, and their newest release is an EP of original material called Double on Time, apparently inspired by Hysen’s fascination with the somewhat mysterious famous boxer Sonny Liston. For the most part, I’m not sure how Double on Time relates to Liston–well, the title of opening track “Fell the Family Tree” probably refers to a story about how the only record of Liston’s birthdate was written on a tree that was subsequently cut down, but that’s about it. What I do take away from Double on Time is that Hysen was, somehow, inspired to make music in a particularly hazy, uncertain, and half-disintegrating way; it kind of sounds like you stripped all of the “rock” and “pop” out of a PJ Harvey album. As is typical with Picastro, it’s hard to get a handle on, but that’s the point of Double on Time. (Bandcamp link)

Jake King – Rock and Roll

Release date: April 30th
Record label: The New Disposable
Genre: Lo-fi punk, garage punk, fuzz rock, rock and roll
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Feel So Paranoid

Jake King is a musician from Buffalo, New York, where he runs a tape label called The New Disposable to release cassettes of his various projects. In the past, his band T.T.T.T. dealt in lo-fi garage punk while his solo releases “leaned quiet/freak-folk”, but all that seems to have been upended by a new five-song cassette EP called Rock and Roll. Spurred on by a new live Jake King backing band (which recently played a show with fellow upstate New York act Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death), King cut Rock and Roll, an aptly-titled seven-minute EP of incredibly fuzzed-out, lowest-of-fidelity garage rock hits. This is indeed pop music, filtered through the lens of squealing shitgaze distortion, punk fury, and the brief side of Ty Segall-style garage rock. Everything on Rock and Roll is under two minutes long, but that doesn’t prevent King from evoking the Wipers (“2026”) and The Cramps (“Feel So Paranoid”) among other trash-punk heroes in these quick sprints. Considering what Jake King is doing here, Rock and Roll is exactly as long and as polished as it needs to be. (Bandcamp link)

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