Pressing Concerns: Adam Finchler, Lonnie Walker, Armlock, Fold Paper

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The third and final Pressing Concerns of the week looks at four records coming out tomorrow–specifically, new LPs from Adam Finchler, Lonnie Walker, and Armlock, and a new EP from Fold Paper. It’s a great cap to what’s been a great week on the blog; if you missed Monday’s post (featuring TJ Douglas, The Drin, Percy, and Big Fat Head) or Tuesday’s (featuring Laika Songs, Broken Hearts Are Blue, Pat’s Alternative Bus Tour, and Mantarochen), be sure to check 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.

Adam Finchler – The Room

Release date: July 12th
Record label: Window Sill
Genre: Indie pop, soft rock, anti-anti-folk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: The President’s Colonoscopy

The Room is the debut album from New York singer-songwriter Adam Finchler, but he’s hardly a new face in the world of music in the greater New York area–he’s played in bands like Rubber Molding, AquaCloset, and Sea Urchin, made music videos for Ought and Charlotte Cornfield, and released a solo EP, Hair Gimmicks of Apathy, back in 2012. The bio for The Room includes a warm quote from Don Giovanni Records co-founder Joe Steinhardt, which makes sense to me, as the lo-fi anti-folk of Finchler’s solo EP reminds me of early Don Giovanni. The Room has been a long time in the making, and the LP–recorded in Montreal by Danji Buck-Moore–is a world away from Finchler’s previous music sonically. These ten songs are given polished pop readings, clear but streamlined, placing Finchler’s songwriting front and center. As a writer, Finchler is vaguely in line with what one might expect from an anti-folker–irreverent, wide-ranging, and fairly unpredictable. The short stories, snapshots, and character sketches of The Room can be genuinely funny and just-as-strongly gripping–combined with the serious, straightforward guitar pop dressing that Finchler and Buck-Moore pursue, it ends up being one of the most striking and unique-sounding albums I’ve heard this year.

The frantic “Eye Massage” opens The Room with a demonstration of musical might–as Finchler and guest vocalist Amelia Schonbek repeat the only two lines of the song over and over again, the instrumental rumbles from a wobbly bass-led indie rocker into a chaotic finale marked by electronics provided by Gen Ken Montgomery. If “Eye Message” is a declaration of how open Finchler intends to be musically on The Room, the rest of the first half of the record showcases his strengths as a pop songwriter. “Summer Flower”, “Patrick”, and “Reason to Cry” are all incredibly potent guitar pop songs, delving into lilting pastoral vibes, peppy indie pop, and jangly guitars with a slight undercurrent of tension (respectively). Lyrically, these songs are all cyphers, another key aspect of The Room that might be overshadowed at first by the more literal side of Finchler’s lyricism. 

The more narrative-based storytelling of the title track (a breezy folk instrumental) and “Freedom Tower Window Watchers” (with just a hint of skyscraping indie rock drama) are successes, and while there’s nothing “traditional” about “Try to Love Toronto” (probably the closest thing to Finchler’s previous solo work) and “The President’s Colonoscopy” (which might be the best thing here, god dammit), it’s not exactly hard to figure out what’s going on in either of those songs. At this point, I’ve mentioned every song on The Room that has vocals except for “Melinda Wagner”, so I might as well throw that one a shout-out, too–one of the most fully-developed songs on the record, the combination of the hooky, jangly instrumental, the economical lyrics, and the sense of never-quite-illuminated dread all make it a highlight, too. Finchler sings of “a tiny world of pain,” in “Melinda Wagner”, and in “Patrick”, the titular character creates “a universe” with “every little movement”. Take any song on The Room, and you’ll find something just as large. (Bandcamp link)

Lonnie Walker – Easy Easy Easy Easy

Release date: July 12th
Record label: Sleepy Cat
Genre: Garage rock, country punk
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Busy Bold Sounds

Lonnie Walker isn’t a person–rather, it’s a southern garage rock group led by singer-songwriter Brian Corum. Corum formed Lonnie Walker at East Carolina University in 2006, and the band released These Times Old Times in 2010 and a follow-up, Earth Canals, in 2015. At this point, Lonnie Walker’s lineup had solidified into the quartet of Corum, guitarist Eric Hill, bassist Michael Robinson, and drummer Raymond Finn, but the band and Corum’s life as a whole were both derailed not long after as he developed an opioid addiction that progressed to heroin. Some of the material on Easy Easy Easy Easy was written in a homeless shelter in Raleigh where Corum was “working through” an addiction program, and now, almost a decade after Earth Canals, the band is back together, their lead singer is “clean and stable”, and they’ve put together an album at least partially drawn from what Corum experienced in the time between records. The North Carolinians follow in the the tradition of the more sprawling side of southern garage rock on Easy Easy Easy Easy, taking scenic routes and augmenting their barebones rock and roll setup with extended jams and hot, humid psychedelia to match the frantic energy of Corum’s writing and performance.

Lonnie Walker begin Easy Easy Easy Easy with a groove, allowing opening track “The Making of the Man” to stroll along leisurely for five peaceful minutes before “Funny Feelin’” blows it all open one song later. Corum rants and raves almost nonstop over a high-speed garage-punk instrumental, throwing out a bunch of images of pain, discomfort, and spiraling that make a lot more sense after one finds out that it’s about opiate withdrawal. The album’s centerpiece is a steady piece of psychedelic rock called “Cool Sparkling Water”–the band’s rumbling desert energy is quite appealing, and it’s not hard to see how Corum’s single-minded lyrics relate to the greater picture of the record as a whole. Like most of the songs on Easy Easy Easy Easy, “Cool Sparkling Water” crosses the five-minute barrier–even some of the album’s obvious “hits”, like the triumphant “Busy Bold Sounds”, ride themselves out for a similar length. Easy Easy Easy Easy is a jam-packed record from the get-go, but it’s impressive just how much Lonnie Walker do with the final two songs with lyrics on the record, the wandering sort-of-ballad “Softly in the Morning” and the rolling finality of “All Form Will Fade”. The images, questions, and pointed observations in those two songs are a lot to take in, but it all makes sense–considering how long it took to put together Easy Easy Easy Easy, why wouldn’t Lonnie Walker lay everything out before it’s all said and done? (Bandcamp link)

Armlock – Seashell Angel Lucky Charm

Release date: July 12th
Record label: Run for Cover
Genre: Lo-fi indie rock, lo-fi folk, bedroom pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Guardian

Vocalist/guitarist Simon Lam and guitarist/keyboardist Hamish Mitchell are a duo from Melbourne who released their first album under the name Armlock, Trust, back in 2021 before linking up with Run for Cover Records for their sophomore LP. A cursory listen to their second album, Seashell Angel Lucky Charm, puts Armlock in the world of lo-fi, downcast bedroom indie rock (I am far from the first person to say it reminds them of Alex G), but Lam and Mitchell have a shared background that I imagine is fairly different than most practitioners of this kind of music. They met studying jazz in school, and they’ve collaborated over the following fourteen years in various electronic and dance-based acts–Armlock is actually the first guitar-based project from the duo. That’s all well and good–there are certainly electronic elements incorporated into Seashell Angel Lucky Charm–but that doesn’t mean their talents will necessarily translate into the world of steady, slowcore-ish guitars and mumbled vocals. Their Run for Cover debut is a seven-song, eighteen-minute success nonetheless, though, primarily because the writing at the core of Seashell Angel Lucky Charm stands against some of the best of modern lo-fi indie pop.

Opening track “Ice Cold” doesn’t beat around the bush (at least, to the degree that this kind of music–which sounds like the aural equivalent of someone allergic to eye contact–can “not beat around the bush”), deploying a simple melodic guitar part and just as simple and melodic vocals from Lam to begin the song. The embellishments mostly come in the form of subtle vocal manipulations and some distortion, production choices that continue into the slightly-more-upbeat “Fear” and mark more or less the rest of Seashell Angel Lucky Charm, too–time and time again, Armlock seem first preoccupied with setting up the sturdy skeleton of the song, and then they add to and warp it a bit. Other than the sub-one minute instrumental title track and closing song “Fair”, Armlock adhere to this formula, but that hardly means that they’re repeating themselves, with the fluttering dream pop of “Guardian” and the relatively hurried “El Oh Vee Ee” both expanding on the duo’s sound. Depending on which strain of lo-fi indie rock one prefers, it’s easy to imagine any of these songs (as well as the low-key sturdiness of “Godsend”) being one’s favorite song on the album, but if one is a sucker for guitar-and-vocals simplicity, closing track “Fair” is the one song that tamps down on the additional instrumentation and lets the backbone stand on its own. Even though it’s the most subdued moment on Seashell Angel Lucky Charm, Armlock have already proved they can carry something this bare anyway. (Bandcamp link)

Fold Paper – 4TO

Release date: July 12th
Record label: Royal Mountain
Genre: Math rock, post-punk, noise rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Idle Idle

Chell Osuntade was born in Nigeria, raised in Michigan, and eventually settled in Winnipeg, where he began showing up in local post-punk and indie rock bands like Julien’s Daughter, JayWood, and Super Duty Tough Work. Osuntade decided he wanted to lead his own group, which led to the formation of Fold Paper with guitarist Brendyn Funk, drummer Rob Gardiner, and bassist Mitchell Trainor–their first release, the non-album single “Medical Jargon”, surfaced last March. Fold Paper began playing shows with like-minded bands such as Pile, Cola, and Stuck before they even had an EP to their name, but the quartet are now ready to take the step forward with the four-song 4TO, released via Royal Mountain (Ducks Ltd., Gulfer, Cuffed Up). Recorded by Electrical Audio’s Greg Norman and mastered by Stuck’s Greg Obis, 4TO finds Fold Paper declaring themselves to be part of the burgeoning scene of noisy North American post-punk and math rock made up of bands like their tourmates and Pardoner. Although 4TO only has four tracks, each of them stretches past four minutes, and they all contain intriguing and kinetic moments of inspired experimental rock music, ensuring that it’s a memorable and substantial first statement from Fold Paper.

Fold Paper take their time in introducing themselves to us all–4TO opens with a song called “End Zone” that spends nearly two minutes as hypnotic instrumental math rock before shifting gears with a slowed-down, swirling guitar riff, and when the vocals kick in, they’re buried but oddly captivating. “Idle Idle” is what passes for a “hit” in Fold Paper’s world–a sneering, prowling piece of noise rock/post-punk marked by Osuntade shouting over workmanlike, forceful rock music for as long as the quartet can keep the steamroller rolling and steaming. “Nothing to Report” introduces a fiery garage rock element to Fold Paper’s sound, even as Funk’s punchy riffs and Trainor’s prominent bass keep it in the world of post-punk as well. “Nothing to Report” also features Osuntade’s most impressive vocal performance yet, wresting control of the track from the instrumental with a prominent-in-the-mix, self-assured take. 4TO is completed by “Come Down Awkward”, one last statement song from the band, a slice of potent underground, blunt-object post-punk that, unlike a lot of the rest of the EP, maintains something of a steady structure and energy level, resisting the urge to spill into noise and chaos. It all amounts to a debut EP that does a lot in its brief runtime, hinting at several exciting directions in which Fold Paper could expand themselves from here. (Bandcamp link)

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