Pressing Concerns: Climax Landers, Lunchbox, Seasonal Falls, Lane

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It’s a Thursday Pressing Concerns! If you’re looking for new music that’s coming out tomorrow (May 10th), you’ll find it here in the form of new albums from Climax Landers, Lunchbox, and Seasonal Falls (as well as a record from Lane that came out earlier this week). If you missed Monday’s post (featuring VACATION, Nihiloceros, Leah Callahan, and Jon McKiel) or Tuesday’s (featuring The Conformists, Quiz Show, Carry Ripple, and Mike Frazier), I’d recommend checking those 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.

Also: I am adding this after the fact, but I wanted to acknowledge the passing of Steve Albini, one of the best to do it, ever. His fingerprints are all over this blog, from the most popular post on the website (about Silkworm, whose discography was almost entirely recorded by him) to literally two days ago, when I wrote about The Conformists’ Midwestless, which he engineered. My thoughts are with everyone who knew the man personally, and, as for myself, I don’t have much else to say at this time except that I dealt with the news by making a 100-song Bandcamp playlist of songs he recorded, and you can check that out if you’d like to be blown away by what he accomplished.

Climax Landers – Zenith No Effects

Release date: May 10th
Record label: Gentle Reminder/Home Late/Intellectual Birds
Genre: Art rock, post-punk, indie pop, college rock, folk rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Play It Cool

Although Brooklyn’s Climax Landers are new to me, the quartet has been around for a bit (they put out two albums in the late 2010s) and are comprised of musicians I’m familiar with in other contexts as well. The group is led by guitarist/vocalist Will Moloney, but it’s his backing band–drummer Ani Ivry-Block of Palberta, guitarist Paco Cathcart (aka The Cradle), and bassist Charlie Dore-Young who I all recognize from their work with various Brooklyn acts (in addition to Palberta and The Cradle, they’ve also contributed to This Is Lorelei, Kolb, My Idea, Thanks for Coming, and Lily Konigsberg’s solo work, among others). Although Moloney, as the lead vocalist/carnival barker and primary songwriter, is clearly at the helm, Zenith No Effects (their third LP and first in over a half-decade) is just as palpably a record made with full collaboration welcomed. As a frontperson, Moloney frequently offers up his lyrics in a conversational talk-singing fashion–he’s got a little bit of the Minutemen-esque “post-punk as folk music” attitude towards things–but he’s hardly a one-note leader. Zenith No Effects is an offbeat but sincere guitar pop record at its core, with classic pop rock and college rock (aided by Cathcart’s violin and Ivry-Block’s accordion) shading the record, and Moloney ups his game to match the rest of the Climax Landers.

Climax Landers bookend Zenith No Effects with “CL: Into the Quantum Static” and “CL: Sacrosanct Dimension”, two fantastical spoken-word post-punk songs (whose events are depicted in the album’s cover art)–even at their strangest and most high-concept, however, there’s still a lot of melody and brightness contained in these tracks. In between these twin pillars, the Climax Landers run through a bunch of pop songs brimming with instrumental ideas and inspired executions of them. It’s hard to think of a more pleasing way to break open your record than with the retro-tinged guitar heroics of “My Loving Sister” and the restrained, violin-featuring indie pop of “Clear/Bright”. One of Zenith No Effects‘ biggest and most immediate moments is “Play It Cool”, a swooning pop song whose looseness and stream-of-consciousness feeling reminds me of the effortless-sounding pop music of Nate Amos’ This Is Lorelei and My Idea. Although Moloney isn’t the most transparent writer, one can pick out where the agitation of early folk music has influenced his lyrics–specifically in the stretch from “Jailbreak” to “The Judge”, where the references to prison, judgment, and a desire to rise above both of these structures are all noticeable.  It all comes to a head in the dismantling found in “CL: Sacrosanct Dimension”, but what really sums up Zenith No Effects is the richness that accompanies it–jangly, melodic guitars, bouncy bass guitar, tasteful accordion. And then–just as the album draws to a close–Moloney steps away from the mic and lets his saxophone do the talking. (Bandcamp link)

Lunchbox – Pop and Circumstance

Release date: May 10th
Record label: Slumberland
Genre: Indie pop, power pop, twee
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Different Tune

It took a couple of decades for the rest of the Bay Area to catch up with Oakland’s Lunchbox–but when their moment came, Donna McKean and Tim Brown were ready. When the duo started making music together in the mid-90s, San Francisco wasn’t exactly the epicenter of retro-flavored indie pop–not that there weren’t other practitioners of it nearby (like Rose Melberg over in Sacramento), and twee was certainly taking hold a couple of states north in Olympia, Washington, but Lunchbox’s 60s-indebted sound feels specifically more in line with what was going on in England around the same time, or in Athens, Georgia. Lunchbox went away for a bit in the 2000s, but resurfaced with an album in 2014, and have since been even more active, with both members playing with other bands (like Artsick) and joining with Slumberland Records (at the center of the Bay Area’s current sprawling indie pop scene) for 2020’s After School Special. McKean and Brown’s latest as Lunchbox is called Pop and Circumstance, and it’s an immediate record of vintage pop rock made by people who live and breathe this kind of music. 

The dozen pop songs on Pop and Circumstance were clearly authored by people devoted enough to the music of the 1960s and 70s to be able to pull several different stripes of it together (you’ll hear bits of bubblegum pop, mod, psychedelic pop, and soul at different points on the album)–but while their influences might be worn a little more on their sleeves than those of their C86/twee/indie pop peers, Lunchbox certainly don’t come off as stiff genre reenactors. Part of how they avoid this is that McKean and Brown clearly know their way around a pop hook, and they know how to use their knowledge to deliver it smartly–the way the record starts out with two pure-sugar, horn-laden hits in “Dinner for Two” and “I’m Yours, You’re Mine” is quite charming (particularly when they break out the organ and handclaps for the latter). Pop and Circumstance continues to offer up–well, it keeps offering up exactly what its title describes. Pop song after pop song follows–“Summer’s Calling” adds a bit of sunkissed haziness, “Different Tune” a noisiness that’s nevertheless, well, tuneful, “Love for Free” a smooth operator-coolness. McKean and Brown are masters of instrumental catchiness–the horns in “Is This Real?”, the keyboards in “Heaven Only Knows”–these aren’t merely adding character to the vocal melodies, they’re fighting to claim the “central hook” mantle for themselves. It’s the experience and honed knowledge that make Pop and Circumstance sound fresh and free. (Bandcamp link)

Seasonal Falls – Happy Days

Release date: May 10th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Folk rock, chamber pop, indie folk
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Used to Be Fun

A new transcontinental project, Seasonal Falls is a duo made up of Switzerland’s Roman Gabriel (who’s also played in The Kind Hills and The Dentals) and Los Angeles-based Andrew Pelletier (who released a pretty good album earlier this year as Fur Trader). Gabriel writes the songs and Pelletier sings them, a process that resulted in a couple of non-album singles last year and a full-fledged debut album, Happy Days, this month. On the latest Fur Trader album, Pelletier impressed me with how he combined Sufjan Stevens-esque orchestral indie folk with brighter-feeling chamber pop, and as it turns out, his sensibilities are a good fit for Gabriel’s songwriting, too. Happy Days feels a lot more laid-back than Fur Trader–its songs are looser than the other project’s concise pop instincts, embracing folk rock and dreamy alt-country slowly but firmly. Still, Gabriel is drawing from vintage “indie pop” music of the past in his writing just like Pelletier does, and at the very least, they both seem to agree on Sufjan, going as far as to enlist Ben Lester–who played pedal steel on Carrie & Lowell–to color Happy Days with lap steel.

Another key aspect of Gabriel’s songwriting is the darkness lurking under the polished soft-rock surface of his music. It’s a facet of Happy Days that becomes apparent from the opening title track, whose refrain becomes ironic after the verses position it against a backdrop of global climate change and pharmaceutical industry evil (at some point, “blissful guitar pop” starts to feel like “self-medicated to the point of numbness”). Elsewhere, the half-awake folk-country stumble of “Used to Be Fun” reflects on getting older and becoming less good of a hang, while “Girlfriend” slowly but clearly takes the shape of a toxic, controlling relationship (“I am a lucky guy / To have a girl like her / … / That’s what she says to me”). From a certain vantage point, Happy Days starts looking like a pretty bleak album, but it’s not necessary to read the whole record in this context. The clearest way out would be through “You’re Not Alone”, which is the one song that explicitly finds connection through struggle (“…we’re also weird” is the answer to the song’s title). But there’s also “I Wish You All the Rest” (another rough relationship-based song that almost says more by what it doesn’t say) and the fed-up rejection of closing track “Hey Girl” (a cover of a song from Japanese/Australian punk rock group Mach Pelican). Like I said–pretty bleak from a certain angle, but in an album whose narrators frequently feel like they’re passively floating through life, moments of lucidity and clear-eyed assertiveness could also be seen as small victories. (Bandcamp link)

Lane – Receiver

Release date: May 6th
Record label: Illegally Blind
Genre: Math rock, post-punk
Formats: CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Everybody’s Finding Out

Lane is a math rock band from Boston, Massachusetts that showed up around the beginning of the decade, built around frontperson Wes Kaplan (guitar/vocals). The first run of Lane (spanning an album in 2020, as well as a couple of EPs and singles in the following year) featured contributions from Jesse Weiss (Pet Fox, Grass Is Green), Ian Kovac, and Peter Negroponte (both of Guerilla Toss). After that initial flurry of activity, Lane went a bit dormant, but Kaplan is back this year with the group’s sophomore record and a new backing band in Julian Fader (Sweet Dreams Nadine, Ava Luna) and Jolee Gordon (Houndsteeth). Receiver is a brief record–eight songs in seventeen minutes–but if you’re familiar with math rock, you’re aware of just how much of a time warp this kind of music can be. Lane consciously sought to make a streamlined, “interplay-heavy” version of math rock on Receiver, which can be felt in how happy it is to embrace a simple “power-trio” setup and how these songs feel balanced, without one aspect of them (Kaplan’s impressive but not overly so guitarplay, the stealthily catchy vocals, the steady rhythm section) overpowering the other.

Receiver comes out of the gate incredibly strong with the opening duo of the title track (which rides a choppy riff to some art-damaged alt-rock without losing the “prettier” aspects of their music) and “Everybody’s Finding Out” (a laid-back, XTC-evoking math-prog-pop tune that reminds me of an even more streamlined version of this Exploding in Sound-adjacent sound practiced by bands like Pet Fox and Hammer No More the Fingers). Although “Judy and Jackie” and “I Become Your Vision” aren’t quite as chaotic as Kaplan’s stated influence of Palm, they find Lane upping the “thorny, tangled guitars” quotient of their sound, frequently obscuring (but not fully hiding) their melodic side. With relatively little time to spare, Lane aren’t interested in repeating themselves–as the record’s second half begins, they continue forging forward with “Surfer Girl” (a break from the guitar squalls, it’s a strut anchored by a suave drumbeat) and “Genius of Love” (quite possibly the weirdest song on the record, adding robotic handclaps and slightly processed vocals to the equation). Although Kaplan, Fader, and Gordon are decidedly not overly showy about it, after a couple of listens it becomes apparent that there’s no weak link on Receiver–it’s some of the most consistent, enjoyable, and revisitable rock music I’ve heard this year. (Bandcamp link)

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