ROCK SOLID AND JUNE GLOOM SHARE SPLIT ALBUM WITH POPMATTERS

Posted on June 8th, 2018

[as seen on PopMatters]

June Gloom is Jesse Paller, drummer for the Philadelphia band Tall Friend, and Rock Solid is Brooklyn-based musician Jaime Knoth. Paller and Knoth were both at one time interns for the Exploding in Sound record label, but it is their musical similarities that make the two EP-sized halves of their new split album, Subletter / Something Solid, work so well together.

June Gloom's four songs here were recorded in Paller's apartment last New Year's Eve while working through a harsh personal time. The Subletter EP flickers with the enduring candlelight of hunched-over-a-Tascam isolation, though it was recorded on the modern version of the home four-track, a phone and a laptop. Still, you could slip "Fresh Air" into the middle of Elliott Smith's Roman Candle on the stereo at a coffee shop and no one would look up from their textbooks and draft screenplays.

The four songs on Rock Solid's half of the record also serves as Knoth's first official release outside of a handful of songs posted on Bandcamp. Captured with the help of a friend in the attic of Knoth's childhood home in New Jersey, the same space in which they were written, Something Solid walks on the unsteady ground between hope and melancholy. Like Subletter, the recordings are up close and personal, which makes the physical release of this split on cassette feel especially appropriate.