About two years ago, Rosy Overdrive premiered “Gretchen Took a Ride”, a one-off single from Jack Habegger’s Celebrity Telethon. “Gretchen Took a Ride” was a warm and promising song, a piece of dreamy folk and indie-country that walked the line between familiar intimacy and West Coast cosmic psychedelia quite nicely. The song was recorded by the Portland, Oregon-based Habegger, multi-instrumentalist Jordan Krimston, and cellist Addison Clark, and came with the tentative promise of more material to come.
It took a couple years for Jack Habegger to follow up “Gretchen Took a Ride”, but he and the Celebrity Telethon were hardly idle in the meantime. The Celebrity Telethon bloomed into a five-piece band (Habegger, Clark, Isaac Beach, Skyler Pia, and Emmet Martin), played some shows backing up the late great Lavender Country, and signed to Portland’s Lung Records. All the while, they were working on a brand-new full-length album–the Celebrity Telethon’s first.
The Knockout Game comes out August 25th, and single and opening track “End Over End” is the first taste of the upcoming record. Whereas “Gretchen Took a Ride” merely flirted with alt-country, “End Over End” finds the Celebrity Telethon diving headfirst into cowpunk and countrified rock and roll. Habegger’s vocals still sound calm and friendly, but here they’re at the center of a western dust storm–the galloping rhythm section and toe-tapping guitar lines help “End Over End” land somewhere between a sped-up traditional country tune and a kinder, gentler version of the Meat Puppets. The song’s video leans into this sound, functioning both as an introduction to The Celebrity Telethon and as a repository for a bunch of images and clips that echo what we hear in “End Over End”.
“End Over End” is available now for pre-ordering as an 8″ (!?) single with “So Easy”, another song from their upcoming album, as the B-side, and with artwork from Mary Fleener and Pat Moriarity. The Celebrity Telethon are playing an album release show for The Knockout Game at Portland’s Clinton Street Theater on Thursday, August 24th, also featuring Laith & The Texas Birds, Nick Normal, and Scorch.
Rosy Overdrive 