Pressing Concerns: La Bonte, Sad Eyed Beatniks, Friends of the Road, In-Sides

Posted byrosyoverdrivePosted inPressing ConcernsTags:, , , , , , , ,

Hello, hello! The first Pressing Concerns of the week is a good one, with new albums from Sad Eyed Beatniks and Friends of the Road and new EPs from La Bonte and In-Sides appearing below. It feels like Rosy Overdrive has been focused on the West Coast of the United States as of late, and this edition is no exception, with Los Angeles, Seattle, San Francisco, and Oakland being the homes of these bands. Step up your game, Great Lakes/East Coast/Deep South!

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.

La Bonte – Economy Play

Release date: July 19th
Record label: Anxiety Blanket
Genre: Folk rock, alt-rock, post-rock, slowcore
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Singing to Steel

Back in 2022, I wrote about Grist for the Mill, a five-song EP from Los Angeles slowcore group La Bonte. Led by namesake Garrett La Bonte, the band’s folky, quiet take on the genre was deeply felt inits three originals and two covers, helping the EP end up as one of my favorites from that year. La Bonte released a one-off single called “Keepin’ On” at the beginning of this year, but the four-song Economy Play EP is the group’s first proper record since Grist for the Mill, and it’s a bit of a departure from that previous release. Although Grist for the Mill had showcased the more glacial aspects of La Bonte’s writing and playing, previous releases from the band had contained a more electric side, and Economy Play embraces this louder, dramatic end of La Bonte’s sound. Part of this can be explained by the fact that La Bonte has a completely different group of backing musicians this time, namely drummer Matt Sturgis, violinist Natasha Janfaza, and vocalists Brooke Dickson and Bridey Hicks. Hicks and Dickson even have a co-writing credit on one song apiece, furthering their contributions to the record, but the person most responsible for the shift in sound is La Bonte himself (who plays every other instrument on the record and at least co-wrote three of the four tracks).

Of the three original songs on Economy Play, none of them could even remotely be described as “slight”. Two of them are seven- (“How Did These Hearts Get So Blue”) and eight- (“Singing to Steel”) minute behemoths, and the one that’s a “reasonable” four-and-a-half (opening track “Marching in a Field of Wheat”) is a dark, organ-touched, intense electric indie rocker that roars to a cathartic finish. “Singing to Steel” (co-written with Dickson) is a lengthy meditation recalling underground 90s post-rock–it skips right past Songs: Ohia and dives right into Slint territory. The second half of Economy Play returns La Bonte’s folk rock/alt-country influences to the fold to a degree–if there’s a “breather” on the record, it’s their vintage slowcore cover of Arthur Russell’s “I Couldn’t Say It to Your Face” (a song that I’ve enjoyed seeing get some traction in the world of modern indie rock lately; Ex-Vöid also did a great version of it on their last album), while closing track “How Did These Hearts Get So Blue” ends the record with a lengthy, drawn-out piece of acoustic-based folk-country. It’s the song on the EP that most reminds me of Grist for the Mill, but considering how La Bonte and Hicks’ lonesome, intertwined vocals in the song conjure up a lot of the same emotions that the searing alt-rock in “Marching in a Field of Wheat” does, there’s perhaps less distance between the two EPs than it seems on the surface. (Bandcamp link)

Sad Eyed Beatniks – Ten Brocades

Release date: July 12th
Record label: Meritorio
Genre: Psychedelic pop, lo-fi indie rock, folk rock, jangle pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: The Broken Playwright Waits

I’ve been wanting to write about the music of San Francisco’s Kevin Linn for a while now, as he’s a key part of the Bay Area indie pop scene that I’ve documented fairly extensively on this blog. Linn is the founder of cassette label Paisley Shirt Records (Galore, Red Pants, Whitney’s Playland) and, as a musician, has led or co-led projects like Sad Eyed Beatniks, Present Electric, and Hospital. The latter of those three bands also features Mike Ramos (of Tony Jay and Flowertown) and Karina Gill (of Cindy, and the other half of Flowertown), two frequent collaborators who also appear on the latest album from Linn’s long-running solo project, Sad Eyed Beatniks. The previous Linn material I’ve heard (from both Sad Eyed Beatniks and Present Electric) falls towards the ramshackle and psychedelic ends of the guitar pop spectrum–there are hooks, but they’re not given the restraint and polish that Gill and Ramos’ main bands typically have. Ten Brocades, the latest Sad Eyed Beatniks record, doesn’t reinvent Linn’s sound, but it does feel just a bit more deliberate in its presentation and execution across its ten tracks. Per Linn, the record draws from childhood memories of hearing the shamisen- & koto-based music his father liked to listen to and reading translated, graphic-novel versions of classic Chinese novels–the foggy recollections evoked by these touchstones seem like a natural fit for Ten Brocades’ hazy, folk-based psychedelic pop sound.

Ten Brocades opens with “Barong Mask”, a steady, straightforward first track whose crystal clarity (aided by Ramos and Gill) only becomes more pronounced after listening to the rest of the album and circling back to it. The next few tracks (the fuzzed-out ominous cloud of “It’s Who Makes the Scene”, the rainy, melodica-haunted “Monumental Ensemble”, the slightly more upbeat but still equally melodica-haunted “Harlequin with Guitar”) are all Linn solo compositions and sound like the “classic” Sad Eyed Beatniks sound, although “Nail in the Coffin” is even more lo-fi despite the return of Ramos and Gill. Linn uses his collaborators well on the second half of Ten Brocades (particularly in the fiery, hypnotic “The Broken Playwright Waits”), but the record’s centerpiece is the seven-minute, Linn-solo title track. As the song slowly sweeps across the record, Linn somehow goes from lumbering to levitating and achieves something quite striking in doing so. Right after “Ten Brocades” finally relents, Sad Eyed Beatniks launch into the two-minute folk pop of “You Belong With Us”–it’s a reminder of the range of feeling this kind of music can evoke, and it’s delivered with the ease of someone who speaks it naturally. (Bandcamp link)

Friends of the Road – Sunseekin’ Blues

Release date: July 19th
Record label: Bud Tapes/Drongo Tapes
Genre: Folk, country, drone, experimental
Formats: CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Peg and Awl

Who doesn’t love a good experimental folk collective? To those open to this kind of music, I’ll have you turn your attention to Friends of the Road, a “drone-tinged Old Time” group from Seattle who reference longrunning experimental folk act Pelt as an inspiration. The group made their debut in 2023 with a record called Now You Know Something Right Here and I’ll Tell You for a Fact, and the Friends are back a year and a half later with Sunseekin’ Blues, six songs in thirty-eight minutes on CD (via Bud Tapes) and cassette (via Drongo Tapes). Everything you hear on Sunseekin’ Blues was delivered by the Friends’ core quartet of multi-instrumentalist Sadie Siskin, fiddle player Julian James, cellist/guitarist Elliott Hansen, and harmonium player Cameron Molyneux, and the collective split the record evenly between original songs and interpretations of traditional/old-time folk numbers. Although there are certainly moments on Sunseekin’ Blues that fully embrace the group’s experimental instincts, more than anything I came away from the record impressed by how deeply traditional folk music runs through Friends of the Road’s veins nonetheless.

Nearly half of Sunseekin’ Blues is taken up by the fifteen-minute opening track “Wagner Creek Suite”, and it’s also where Friends of the Road earn their “drone” designation. The Siskin-penned song begins very welcomely, pulling together its friendliest banjo, fiddle, and guitar playing for nearly four minutes…and then the droning starts. Siskin is credited as playing “sruti box” and “cigar box” on the record, and I suspect that the sustained music and occasional sharp twangs that make up the rest of the recording utilize them. The first song with vocals, “Peg and Awl”, follows, and the way the collective let the fiddle threaten to drown out the traditional folk song underneath merges the different sides of Friends of the Road pleasingly and beautifully. None of the other instrumentals on Sunseekin’ Blues are as otherworldly as “Wagner Creek Suite”, but the joyous festival-folk of “Bonnie and the Garden” (credited to the full band), the seven-minute, trudging banjo workout of “Blessed Be the Day I See Him Again” (another Siskin composition), and their closing rendition of Ernie Carpenter’s “Elk River Blues” (a peaceful and serene benediction that sounds like how I wish the Elk River still looked) all find different ways of approaching and thriving in the world of folk music. Friends of the Road are free to ramble and explore on Sunseekin’ Blues, with the full knowledge that the music they’ve tapped into will hold everything together no matter how far they roam. (Bandcamp link)

In-Sides – Salvo

Release date: June 12th
Record label: Acumen Productions
Genre: Lo-fi indie rock, shoegaze, fuzz rock, 90s indie rock, slowcore
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Mud

Yet another indie rock band from the Bay Area, Oakland’s In-Sides are a quartet led by vocalist/guitarist Stephen Fong and rounded out by vocalist/guitarist Krista Kleczewski, bassist Ryan Schaeffer, and drummer Brandon Paluzzi. They debuted with a three-song EP called Echo Chamber in 2016, and a few one-off singles trickled out before last month’s release of Salvo, the band’s biggest release yet at six songs and twenty-six minutes. As I’ve mentioned many times before (even earlier in this blog post), I’ve heard more than my share of new guitar pop bands from this part of the country, but the tuneful wasteland sound that In-Sides sculpt throughout their latest EP caught my attention. It’s difficult to categorize among the vast Bay Area indie pop/rock scene–not bright and jangly like Blues Lawyer or Chime School, somewhat distorted but not as fully devoted to foggy shoegaze as bands like Sucker, and too uneasy to recall the leisurely folk-y rock of groups like Evening Glass. Recorded by Spacemoth’s Maryam Qudus and mastered by Greg Obis of Stuck, Salvo is somewhat standoffish but quite striking when given a real look–there are bits of psychedelia, dream pop, shoegaze, slowcore, and maybe even emo in these half-dozen tracks, but clearly not made with the intention of overtly appealing to any of these subgroups.

In-Sides are at their most accessible at the start of Salvo, with “Mud” and “Step” standing as superb examples of the band’s version of pop music. Both start out with enjoyably simple pop chord progressions and build up from there–“Mud” balances Fong’s low-key vocals with an increasingly confident noise-pop instrumental roaring alongside him, while the bits and pieces of melodic guitars floating around “Step” ensure that it remains quite pleasant to listen to even as it never “takes off” like the song before it. At the delicate end of Salvo’s spectrum, we’ve got mid-EP highlight “Old Soul”, which develops from a minimalist start to an intriguing combination of downcast power chords and slow, deliberate Low-worthy vocal harmonies, and “Taking It In”, a chilly, earnest slowcore ballad. As deft as In-Sides prove to be at subtlety, it’s just as impressive that they pull these moments off in the middle of songs like “TV Brain” (the one song that really embraces pop-shoegaze hookiness) and “Divine” (the eerie closing track, which eventually builds to a wall of oblique sound to close the EP out). It might take a minute to adjust your ears to In-Sides’ vision, but Salvo has plenty of rewards. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

2 thoughts on “Pressing Concerns: La Bonte, Sad Eyed Beatniks, Friends of the Road, In-Sides”

  1. Pingback: Pressing Concerns: Hello Whirled, The Winter Journey, Jac Aranda, Grant Pavol – Rosy Overdrive
  2. Pingback: Pressing Concerns: The Feelies, Whitney’s Playland, Michael Robert Chadwick, Little Mazarn – Rosy Overdrive

Leave a comment