Pressing Concerns: The Veldt, Feeling Figures, The Ground Is Lava, The Anderson Tapes

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Welcome to a Wednesday Pressing Concerns, the rarest of Pressing Concerns! Due to “Thanksgiving”, this post is going up a day early, so (to residents of the United States, at least) enjoy the holiday, and read about new music at the same time below. In this eclectic post, we have a new album from Feeling Figures, a new EP from The Anderson Tapes, a full-length reissue from The Ground Is Lava, and a previously-unreleased thirty-year-old shelved debut album from The Veldt. See you next week!

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.

The Veldt – Illuminated 1989

Release date: November 24th
Record label: Little Cloud/5BC
Genre: Dream pop, shoegaze, post-punk, jangle pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Willow Tree

One of the more intriguing bands from the initial wave of shoegaze was formed by two twin brothers in the mid-80s in Raleigh, North Carolina. Guitarists Daniel and Danny Chavis are lifelong musicians who began making music inspired both by the gospel and Motown of their youth, the burgeoning “alternative rock” and “post-punk” scenes, and the just-as-wild world of Sun Ra. One of their biggest influences was the Cocteau Twins, so it’s not surprising that the Chavises enlisted the band’s Robin Guthrie to produce their debut album in 1989. Their label was apparently unhappy with what they produced together, however–they shelved the recordings, and some of the songs ended up on their debut EP, Marigolds, in 1992. The Veldt went on to release the acclaimed Afrodisiac LP in 1994, and they never really went away–the brothers made music as Apollo Heights for a while, but brought back the Veldt name for last year’s Entropy Is The Mainline To God. Illuminated 1989, however, returns us to that time thirty-four years ago–collecting these initial Guthrie-helmed recordings, this finally-released album is a snapshot of a strong partnership, a confident group effort, and a still-in-development genre that’d be come to known as “shoegaze”.

As much of a curiosity that Illuminated 1989 is, it’s also very strong devoid of all this context, something which becomes apparent almost immediately. “Aurora Borealis” opens the record on a very Cocteau Twins note, with dreamy, reverb-y guitars chiming–but instead of Elizabeth Fraser’s impenetrable vocals, we’re instead greeted by a completely different but equally compelling frontperson in Daniel Chavis. Clear where Fraser is unintelligible and right in front of the music where many of their contemporaries buried their vocals, Chavis brought a clear soul influence to his singing that is perhaps the most immediately striking aspect of the record. Chavis gives it his all in songs like “C.C.C.P.”, an emotional piece of Cure-ish post-punk-pop that might be the missing link between Robert Smith and shoegaze. The floating “Angel Heart” is The Veldt at their most dream pop, but Chavis is no less restrained vocally here, and there’s plenty of other interesting incorporations (like “It’s Over”, which feels like The Veldt’s version of the jangly college rock that was more prevalent in the American South at this time than most of their other influences). Pointing to an exact moment and saying “Aha! There’s the shoegaze!” is a bit reductive, but the pummeling pop of “Shallow by Shallow”, the steady noise of “Willow Tree”, and parts of the experimental rock opus “Heather” all feel like examples of what was about to come down the line. Like I alluded to earlier, though, regardless of historical value, Illuminated 1989 sounds fresh and inspired. (Bandcamp link)

Feeling Figures – Migration Magic

Release date: November 24th
Record label: K/Perennial
Genre: Post-punk, 90s indie rock, lo-fi pop, garage rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Pour Un Instant

Feeling Figures are a quartet from Montreal–those Canadians got their Thanksgiving out of the way last month, and are certainly not going to be deterred from putting out new music on an American holiday weekend. The band was founded by the songwriting duo of guitarist/vocalists Zakary Slax and Kay Moon in Sackville, New Brunswick a decade ago, and picked up bassist Joe Chamandy and drummer Thomas Molander after relocating to Quebec. Migration Magic is Feeling Figures’ first album, following a debut self-titled three-song 7” single back in 2021. They may hail from the wrong coast, but Feeling Figures certainly feel at home on K Records with Migration Magic–it’s the work of a band steeped in several decades’ worth of underground indie rock, and one that doesn’t see why rock and roll, controlled chaos, and pop all can’t go together in one neat package.

Nothing exemplifies the range of Feeling Figures more than how Migration Magic’s opening track–the fiery, fuzzy garage punk anthem “Dream Death”–gives way to the C86-literate guitar pop of “Across the Line” one song later. Once the initial jarring feeling passes, it starts to make sense–after all, “Dream Death” has one hell of a chorus in the middle of it, and “Across the Line” meanders in its guitarplay in a 90s indie rock kind of way. Although “Across the Line” is relatively polished, the percussion-led, psych pop drone of “Don’t Ever Let Me Know” and the piano-in-a-basement charm of “I Should Tell You” indicate that the band can deliver pop music of various fidelities and states of undress. Feeling Figures bring some muscle to pull off “Pour Un Instant”, a giddy piece of straight-up power pop right in the middle of the record, and “Movement” in Migration Magic’s second half similarly finds the band at full capacity. Their primary mission accomplished, Feeling Figures close up shop by getting weird towards the end with the post-punk blaze of “Sink” and the Ramones-y fast-pop-punk conclusion of “Remains”. Migration Magic is just as entertaining while knocking down what Feeling Figures built up earlier in the record. (Bandcamp link)

The Ground Is Lava – Bottle Rockets (Reissue)

Release date: October 24th
Record label: Really Rad
Genre: Midwest emo, emo-punk, pop punk
Formats: Cassette, CD, digital
Pull Track: Willow Tree

From 2009 to 2015, the Brunswick, Ohio emo trio The Ground Is Lava put out two full-length records and multiple compilations’ worth of loose tracks before calling it a day. The second of those albums, 2013’s Bottle Rockets, appears to have gotten a Japanese CD release through Waterslide but was otherwise just self-released digitally by the band (vocalist/guitarist Jon Rogers, vocalist/bassist Jordan Valentine, drummer Eric Sandt). Punk/emo label Really Rad Records has commemorated the tenth anniversary of Bottle Rockets by putting it out on both CD and cassette, successfully arguing that it deserves to be heard beyond its initially limited reach a decade ago. I’ve heard more than enough emo of both the 2013 and 2023 variety, but listening to Bottle Rockets for the first time, The Ground Is Lava immediately stuck out to me. It has a polished sound (the album was co-recorded and mixed by Joe Reinhart, who also contributes vocals to the record) and a sturdy, song-first writing style that perhaps helps it connect beyond emo diehards, even as it declines to ditch any of the signifiers of the time–math-y midwest emo guitar riffs, emotional, soaring pop punk vocals, and dramatic, crescendoing instrumental flare-ups–to get there.

Opening track “Not Tonight, Jeff” is an ace submission to the “fun-sounding but meaty” emo-rock hall of fame, as the twinkly guitars give way to the sweeping chorus, which begins with “I wanna have the most intimate moments, where we share in laughter”. Some other highlights of the record’s first half use various tools to chisel their way there, from the prominent pop punk bassline that undergirds “Look, Babe, an Island (We Can Live on It)” to the gang-vocal-emo-anthem-overdrive of “Willow Tree”. Over the 32 minutes of Bottle Rockets, The Ground Is Lava work to keep it consistent with the deployment of emo balladry (“The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Being Stupid for Dummies: A Self Help Book”, the one true concession to the emo title gods, and “Driving Through the Mountains at Night (Tight)”) and slick rock (“Smashers”, “Excuse Me, Can You Fill My Void?”).  A decade out from Bottle Rockets, “emo” music looks pretty different at this current moment; to be clear, I’ve covered and enjoyed plenty of new emo groups the past couple of years, but it’s nice and even refreshing to be reminded of this era of the genre, where something like Bottle Rockets could come out, make a small but real impression, and that was enough. (Bandcamp link)

The Anderson Tapes – Broken

Release date: November 9th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Lo-fi indie rock, garage rock, indie pop, 90s indie rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Something You Wanted

The Anderson Tapes are a quartet from London (via Argentina, Poland, and Middlesbrough) who have been stubbornly releasing EPs and singles since 2019. The five-song Broken is, I believe, the fourth EP from the band (comprised of guitarist/vocalists Olga Ambrosiewicz and Delfina Davaro, bassist/vocalist Martin Keane, and drummer Chris Taylor), coming on the heels of 2021’s Everyday Again and last year’s “Fed Up” single. “Fed Up” appears on The Anderson Tapes’ newest record along with four brand-new tracks that show the band’s appreciation of guitar pop music both lazy and loud. Out of the various bands they cite as influences, Throwing Muses and Sonic Youth feel like the most accurate ones, although, really, Broken runs the gamut from fuzz rock to slowcore in twenty minutes.

On the more electric side of things, Broken offers up “Something You Wanted” to begin with–its initial guitar intro gives way to a mid-tempo piece of garage-punk that saunters with a Detroit energy and sounds impressively confident in its assets. The other straight-up rocker on the EP is the other bookend, “Fed Up”–that song similarly comes out fuzzy and blaring and emanating classic rock-and-roll coolness. In between these two tracks are three more probing, less in-your-face songs, although the bass-driven fuzz-pop of “The Great Outdoors” has some louder moments. The heart of Broken is probably the five-minute title track, which slowly moves across the timeless pop song from which it’s built at its core. The icy “The Game” is the one song where The Anderson Tapes let themselves be consumed with downtrodden 90s indie rock sentiment–although they can’t help but shake off the uncertainty and roll out a fantastic, rolling guitar solo to cap it. As much as Broken has a “found, underground” quality to it, it’s hardly blurry or distant-sounding–it’s an EP that’ll grab you by the collar and decline to let go. (Bandcamp link)

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