Pressing Concerns: Lync, Awakebutstillinbed, Medejin, Screensaver

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Another busy week on Rosy Overdrive ends with thoughts on three new albums that come out tomorrow (from Awakebutstillinbed, Medejin, and Screensaver), plus some writing about the Lync reissue that is also out tomorrow. If you missed Monday’s post (featuring new music from Onyon, Al Murb, Combat Naps, and Zero Bars) or Tuesday’s post (the beginning of my deep dive into new-to-me music from 1993), check both of 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.

Lync – These Are Not Fall Colors (Reissue)

Release date: October 20th
Record label: Suicide Squeeze
Genre: Post-hardcore, 90s indie rock, noise rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Perfect Shot

I’m not exactly breaking any new ground by declaring the Pacific Northwest in the 1990s a fertile ground for indie rock. There are plenty that remain in the public consciousness of the music world today, either due to exploding onto the mainstream (Modest Mouse, Death Cab for Cutie), steadily building and maintaining their cult hero status (Sleater-Kinney, Built to Spill), or being yanked from the past via caring, painstakingly-assembled reissues (Unwound and, most recently, Heatmiser). These barely scratch the surface of a wide-ranging and fertile scene, however–an environment perfect for creating one-album wonders like Lync, who released These Are Not Fall Colors and a handful of singles in their two years of activity in the early 90s. The trio of vocalist/guitarist Sam Jayne (who would later go on to front Love As Laughter), bassist James Bertram (who also played in 764-HERO and co-founded Red Stars Theory), and drummer Dave Schneider briefly aligned to make a sharp record that stands as a testament to the raw power of independent rock music.

These Are Not Fall Colors has been given an overdue vinyl reissue by Suicide Squeeze after being out of print for over a decade, and it sounds about as fresh as you could imagine something like this could. It exists in the middle of an underground music crossroads–if you liked Dischord Records’ agitated post-punk, the punky-post-hardcore of Drive Like Jehu, and the still-congealing sound of “emo”, you can find something to enjoy on this one. Although its original home of K Records feels a little off, there’s even a little bit of an early Built to Spill lo-fi pop in “Perfect Shot” and “Cue Cards” (and even the louder, noisier songs have a dogged catchiness to them). Highlights like opening track “B” and side two’s “Turtle” both kick off as loose basement rock that feels like it could’ve come from anywhere at any time, and they both eventually roar into noise rock songs that create a sound that’s only ever been achieved by the combination of the three of them playing. “Can’t Tie Yet” is the one bonus track included on this reissue, and its chaotic energy makes me wonder just what a follow-up album to this would’ve sounded like.

Casting a shadow over this reissue is the fact that Jayne isn’t alive to witness it–he passed away in late 2020 due to “undiagnosed health conditions” in the midst of financial hardship–and my uncomfortable belief that it took his death to get These Are Not Fall Colors a proper reissue. I remember it languishing on Lync’s Bandcamp page in years past for anyone to listen to, but there appeared to be no one with the will to give it a proper push back to streaming services and/or a physical re-release. Although These Are Not Fall Colors is a unique record in its structure and energy, to me, it also represents the fact that there are a sea of records as good as this one, in their own distinct ways, out there, for those of us who dig deep enough to reach them. This will certainly not be the last time I write about a reissued 1990s indie rock record, and my message to those who have any kind of control over the overseeing of such projects is this: next time, I’d love to be doing it about an album whose principal architects are still very much alive. (Bandcamp link)

Awakebutstillinbed – Chaos Takes the Wheel and I Am a Passenger

Release date: October 20th
Record label: Tiny Engines
Genre: Emo, emo-punk, screamo
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Road

Tiny Engines returned to the realm of active labels with a solid but low-key reintroduction earlier this month in Bewilder’s From the Eyrie, a new (to most of us) band that didn’t have any prior history with the imprint. Two weeks later, the soft launch is over–they’re releasing the long-awaited follow-up to one of the most beloved Tiny Engines albums of all-time. San Jose’s Awakebutstillinbed quietly self-released What People Call Low Self​-Esteem Is Really Just Seeing Yourself The Way That Other People See You at the beginning of 2018; as it slowly but surely grew through word of mouth, Tiny Engines gave it a proper release a couple of months later. This is where I get a bit less objective and admit that, while several Tiny Engines records were and are very important to me, the debut Awakebutstillinbed album was never one of them. I can certainly see why its ragged, screamo-shot-through sound resonated in the realms that it did, but I viewed it solidly in the “not for me” camp. Thus, I wasn’t sure what to expect when putting on Chaos Takes the Wheel and I Am a Passenger, the five-years-in-the-making sophomore Awakebutstillinbed album, but suffice it to say that this thing won me over.

Aided by the prolific Joe Reinhart’s production, it becomes apparent from the get-go that Awakebutstillinbed have polished up their sound but without really “toning it down”. The band (guitarist/vocalist/songwriter Shannon Taylor, guitarist/keyboardist Brendan Gibson, bassist Alex Botkin, and drummer Erik Lobo) hone in on a big, wrecking ball of an emo-rock sound throughout Chaos Takes the Wheel…, although the expansive, hourlong double album still leaves plenty of room for the band to wander and kick against the shinier parts of the record. As great as they sound, I’d still have trouble calling an emo album that opens with back-to-back six and eight minute songs “accessible”, for one. Meanwhile, while shorter tracks like “Far” and “Airport” begin as slick emo-punk anthems, they don’t stay there forever, as they both end up featuring some of the most intense vocal performances on the album from Taylor, whose voice maybe sounds cleaner on average but certainly hasn’t abandoned her roots. That being said, I’m still somewhat of an emo outsider, and so I find myself transfixed by the quieter moments on the album’s second half–the acoustic “Savior”, the seven-minute exhale of “Enough”, and closing track “Passenger”. The latter two tracks eventually wind their way to loud emo-rock by their conclusions, with the semi-title track in particular juxtaposing the expansive sound with the resignation described in the record’s name. In that one, Taylor exorcises some particularly rough thoughts and ends with a triumphant-sounding “I want to be alone”; if that’s not the mark of a classic emo album, I’m not sure what is. (Bandcamp link)

Medejin – The Garden

Release date: October 20th
Record label: Den Tapes/Icy Cold
Genre: Dream pop, synthpop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Shell

The term “dream pop” covers a pretty wide range of styles of music these days–I can tell you that Seattle’s Medejin are practitioners of it, sure, but for those wishing to get a more detailed explanation than that, I’d point no further than the sweeping chorus of opening track “Shell”, in which lead singer Jenn Taranto’s vocals are full, right up front, and melodic, and the instrumental feels like it’s serving her singing rather than the other way around. That is to say, The Garden is definitely on the pop side of dream pop. Although this is the quartet’s debut album, it’s hardly the work of fresh faces–Medejin has been releasing singles and EPs since at least 2017, and Taranto has solo material dating all the way back to 2006, before she met up with guitarist Rebecca Gutterman, bassist Ramsey Troxel, and drummer Matthew Cooke. Taranto has been doing this a while; it feels like she’s gotten the art of writing pop songs for her band to expand and explore down pat at this point.

Although I’m impressed with the pop side of The Garden, I don’t want to understate what the band does on its eleven songs, either; they refer to it as both a dream pop and a post-rock album, and the textures that Medejin explore both underneath and in between Taranto’s vocal melodicism bear this out in a pleasing and interesting way. Although the band open the album with the most conventional-sounding song (“Shell” is about one step removed from a Cranberries or Sundays single), the pop on the rest of the record is a bit more layered and offbeat (while still being very much present), from the fuzz rock of “Our Apartment” to the stretched textures of “January” to the stops and starts that piece together “Sea Stacking”, slowly but surely. Taranto’s synth playing is an interesting recurrent feature throughout the album; typically she keeps it lower in the mix, but she earns the chance to let the keyboard run free on the title track. Still, Medejin as just as likely to lean on the rhythm section (“World’s Fair”) or step back to let Taranto deliver a ballad accompanied by little more than her guitar (the majority of “Everything’s Out of Tune”). Creating a pop album in this realm requires more than a bit of cooperation and synchronicity, and that’s exactly where Medejin excel. (Bandcamp link)

Screensaver – Decent Shapes

Release date: October 20th
Record label: Poison City/Upset the Rhythm
Genre: Post-punk, synthpunk, new wave
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Direct Debit

Melbourne’s Screensaver began in the mid-2010s as a collaboration between vocalist/synth player Krystal Manyard and guitarist Christopher Stephenson (who also plays with Spray Paint and EXEK, two underappreciated art punk/post-punk groups). In this decade, they’ve expanded to a five piece (featuring drummer James Beck, bassist Dorian Vary, and second synth player Jonnine Nokes), put out their debut album Expressions of Interest in 2021, and now are back almost exactly two years later with their sophomore record. As one might expect from a band with two synth players, the instrument takes on a prominent role on Decent Shapes, but the guitars and rhythm section certainly do everything in their power to make this a synth-rock record rather than a “synthpop” one. Although there’s no shortage of Australian bands making post-punk music at the moment, Screensaver’s is of a mostly different strain–it’s less of the garage-y Devo-core of groups like Delivery and Vintage Crop and more of a tougher, beefier variety that owes more to Stephenson’s noise rock background and (as emphasized by Manyard’s vocals) even a bit of goth-rock.

Decent Shapes has an inarguable setup–ten songs, none of which pull any punches. The classic post-punk-driven “Red Lines” opens things on a particularly balanced note, where every instrument feels like it contributes about an equal share to the song’s structure. The equilibrium continues throughout the record’s first half, even as the band traverse into busier territory with the rave-up of “The Guilt” and the dark dance-punk of “Party Interest”. The album’s midsection feels like its hardest-hitting part–the soaring synths trumpet the doom felt in the quick-tempoed “Drainer”, “Severance Pay” kicks up a garage-y storm, and “Direct Debit” clangs along into a post-punk anthem. Screensaver don’t let up on the gas; while closing track “Signals” is the only thing that more or less resembles a synthpop song on the record, it gets there by simply pushing the synths a little more forward rather than dialing back on the rest of the record’s energy.  It’s a slightly different way to telegraph darkness, but, like on the rest of Decent Shapes, Screensaver get their point across. (Bandcamp link)

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