Pressing Concerns: Junebug, Smug Brothers, Captain Howdy & The Sunset Serenaders, Chandelier

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Welcome to the Tuesday Pressing Concerns! In this edition, we’ve got new albums from Captain Howdy & The Sunset Serenaders and Chandelier, a new EP from Smug Brothers, and an archival release from Junebug below. If you missed yesterday’s blog post (featuring BBsitters Club, Flowerbomb, Pretty Bitter, Lindsay Reamer, and Obscuress), check that one out here.

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.

Junebug – With the Distance of Time

Release date: July 21st
Record label: Subjangle
Genre: Indie pop, twee, jangle pop, lo-fi pop
Formats: CD, digital
Pull Track: Town and Country

Indie pop singer-songwriter Teresa Daniele first gained notoriety in the early 2000s as one-half of the duo Sarah, Plain and Tall along with Ian Jackson (Persian Rugs); over the course of that decade and the first half of the next, the Ontario-based artist showed up in groups like The Haircuts, Two If By Sea, Paint Your Wagon Red, and Seashells, all of which were long-distance collaborations between Daniele and another musician. Daniele hasn’t been releasing new music to my knowledge over this past decade, but thanks to a recent retrospective compilation of the work of The Haircuts (Words to Remember Me By on Boring Spaghetti Records), she ended up unearthing a collection of recordings from Junebug, her solo project, from around the same time period. With the Distance of Time: Selected Songs from 2004-2014 is the first time Daniele’s work as Junebug has seen a proper release–a CD via indie pop stalwart Subjangle–and features members of Seashells, The Haircuts, and Two If By Sea aiding the singer-songwriter across its eight tracks. The recordings range from entirely constructed by Daniele to full-blown postal collaborations, the songs are mostly originals with a couple of covers–but all of With the Distance of Time points toward the work of a low-key but undeniable indie pop talent.

The first half of With the Distance of Time is made up of songs recorded by Daniele alone on a four-track in 2004 (mixing from The Haircuts’ Ryan Marquez being the only outside contribution). Lo-fi and twee, these songs have a K Records-esque ramshackle charm to them, and despite (or, realistically, because of) the homespun nature of the tracks, they’re the most immediately welcoming material on With the Distance of Time. The combination of primitive percussion, bright guitar chords, and shy-sounding, somewhat unpredictable vocals makes the first half of the CD oddly memorable (and when Daniele needs to clean up the sound a bit to pull off the runaway train instrumental of “Town and Country”, she proves she can do that, too). The back end of With the Distance of Time features the collection’s two covers–Marine Girls’ “A Place in the Sun” and the Grateful Dead’s “Box of Rain”, with the worried undertones of the former and the dreariness of the latter (which is a duet with guitarist John McLoughlin) being the first major shifts in mood on the record. The final two songs on With the Distance of Time are collaborations between Daniele and her erstwhile Two If By Sea bandmates–Lisle Mitnik contributes all the music on the reverb-y dream-folk of “Tomorrow”, and Kevin Clark helms the lo-fi, 80s-indebted “A Promise”. These are the two most “produced” tracks on the compilation, but they, just like the covers and the solo recordings, are held together by Daniele’s voice. (Bandcamp link)

Smug Brothers – Another Bar Behind the Night

Release date: July 12th
Record label: Just Because/Anyway
Genre: Lo-fi power pop, jangle pop, psych pop
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Javelina Nowhere

When we last checked in on Columbus’ Smug Brothers, it was fall of 2023, and the Kyle Melton-led power pop group was gearing up to release the most recent of their many full-length records, In the Book of Bad Ideas. That LP itself followed late 2022’s Emerald Lemonade EP by less than a year, and the quartet keep their prolific streak alive with Another Bar Behind the Night, their latest record. Despite the constant stream of new music, it’s actually been a time of turnover for Smug Brothers–lead guitarist Scott Tribble left in the middle of recording In the Book of Bad Ideas, and Another Bar Behind the Night is the first record to feature the band’s newest member, Ryan Shaffer (of Stark Folk Band). Other groups might’ve taken some time to retool in the midst of all this, but not Smug Brothers–Kyle Melton’s got hooks to deliver. He finished In the Book of Bad Ideas as a trio along with drummer Don Thrasher and bassist Kyle Sowash, and the newly-minted quartet roll through six songs in ten minutes on their most recent EP like a well-oiled machine. Smug Brothers have always been a “low-fat” kind of band, but the format of Another Bar Behind the Night gives the band no breathing room, with even the relatively small excesses of their last LP shaved off here.

Only two of Another Bar Behind the Night’s six songs go on for longer than two minutes–one of them is opening track “Javelina Nowhere”, which features what’s easily the most indulgent moment on the entire EP (a brief, fifteen-second mellotron-led instrumental intro). Eventually (about at the seventeen-second mark if you’re impatient), “Javelina” blooms into a jangly, Guided by Voices-fluent mid-tempo anthem that’s carried over the top with Melton’s melodies. “Seamus the Younger” is the first side’s “rocker”–it’s also the first of several “blink and you’ll miss them” flyby tracks, but it gets an entire spirited idea across before the curtains close. The midsection of Another Bar Behind the Night is its delicate part, with “Alexander for Two” offering up an off-the-cuff lo-fi power ballad and “The Seven-Year Inch” being the token moment of instrumental minimalism. After the sixty-one second basement twirling pop of “Cricket Blessings” (now there’s a Robert Pollard-influenced title if I’ve ever heard one), “Shedding Polymer” closes the EP with Smug Brothers as smooth classic rock operators. At least, that’s what the song’s main guitar riff gives off, but Melton’s lead vocal is as earnest and Midwestern-garage-pop as it always is. I don’t know if it’s ever “easy” to get up and make art over and over again, but being driven without being overly precious about it probably helps. (Bandcamp link)

Captain Howdy & The Sunset Serenaders – Howdy Reigns

Release date: August 2nd
Record label: Sunset Serenade
Genre: Psychedelic rock, garage rock, alt-country
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Shady Grove

Captain Howdy & The Sunset Serenaders are a new psychedelic garage rock trio from Lawrence, Kansas (I’m fairly certain I’ve never written about any bands from there until now) who made their debut last year with the LIVE/HOWDY live album. Their first studio album, Howdy Reigns, follows less than a year later, giving the songs that appeared on the live record a proper reading. Bassist James Barnett, drummer Jon Chappell, and guitarist Keller Welton have clearly worked these songs out while gigging, as they come into Howdy Reigns ready to rip through blistering, unhinged rock and roll that comes off as a more Midwestern take on freewheeling West Coast psych rock from acts like Ty Segall and Thee Oh Sees. Although Captain Howdy & The Sunset Serenaders filter everything through a fuzzed-out lens, their stated Western, country, and folk influences do come through, both in their ability to swerve into psychobilly/cowpunk musical detours and in the writing hidden underneath the music, which seems to key in on the darker horrors of “Americana” and the less valiant reality of western male archetypes like cowboys and frontiersmen.

If we assume “Captain Howdy” is the person singing these songs, he’s certainly not the friendly character one might want to attach to the name. It doesn’t take long for the restless narrator of opening track “Cold Rain” to move from his grousing to staging a murder ballad–no matter that the “ballad” in this instance is a six-minute high-octane psych-trasher that’s almost entirely moved on to “instrumental jam” territory after ninety seconds. “Shady Grove”, smack dab in the middle of Howdy Reigns, marries their most overtly cowpunk instrumental with a particularly unhinged vocal take that assures us that not only is Captain Howdy destructive to his surroundings, but entirely self-destructive as well. The creepy-feeling “You Can’t See Me” is a slower, more deliberate version of fuzz rock, with the ominous chorus (“I can take you, I can take you / Far away from here, far away from here”) sounding anything but comforting and reassuring. There’s a palpable darkness throughout Howdy Reigns to be sure, although Captain Howdy & The Sunset Serenaders are good enough storytellers to ensure the record doesn’t become a slog. Sure, there’s obvious stuff like the goofy “La Llorona”, but I also mean that it’s enjoyable to listen to the band locking together in songs like the blues-garage “All for You” and penultimate slowburn explosion “Pass Me By”, too. Captain Howdy & The Sunset Serenaders certainly have a fair bit of ambition for an unknown psych rock band from Kansas, but so far they’re wearing it well. (Bandcamp link)

Chandelier – Chandelier

Release date: July 12th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Post-punk, art punk
Formats: CD, digital
Pull Track: Enemy

Chandelier are a new post-punk quartet from Atlanta who put out their debut self-titled album last month, and it’s a memorable one. The group (vocalist/lyricist Karl Green, guitarist/drummer Dennis Bowen, guitarist Bryan Scherer, and drummer Thomas Martino) refer to themselves as an “esoteric guitar band”, a description I could imagine grating on me in the wrong context–but here, they’re just being honest. The instrumentals on Chandelier are crystal clear, mid-tempo post-punk/noise rock that tread into Lungfish territory on the slower numbers and evoke other Dischord groups when they pick up the pace a little bit. The guitars and drums feel laser-focused and all business–when they kick up the noise for a couple seconds in an instrumental break, it’s simply because it’s the best thing to do. Green, meanwhile, is an underground punk oddball in the vein of Al Johnson or Daniel Higgs, although not overly similar to the exact style of either of those vocalists. He’s speak-singing, yes, but neither in a yell-y monotone or an ignoring-the-music ramble–he speaks rhythmically, his opaque (and, yes, esoteric) lyrics form-fitting to the rest of Chandelier.

The riff that opens “Straddle the Line” sounds ready to go, even as Green does his best to temper Chandelier’s opening track–and as the rest of the band add to the instrumental, it works, ending up with a final product that sounds kind of like a tranquilized Landowner. Chandelier is a record of subtle shifts–it’s not like “Pleasure Zone” is a huge departure, but the extra low-end in the instrumental and a slight change in Green’s voice (Listen to the way he almost taunts “Echoes from the velvet womb, emerging from the pleasure zone”) give it a completely different feel. Eventually some more of Chandelier begins to seem concrete, aided by moments like the pummeling drums in “Naught”, the eerie spoken word outro of “Palace”, and the stuttered vocals in “Mirror Calling”. In “Disco Columbine”, Green seems positively bored in the verses before becoming the most animated he is on the record in the chorus, which sounds kind of like Wall of Voodoo if Stan Ridgeway had even worse vibes. The most surprising moment on Chandelier is easily “Enemy”, in which Chandelier pull off a legitimate dance-punk song by, again, shifting their sound up just a little bit. In the song’s chorus, Green stutters his way through declaring war on time, an explicit proclamation borne out by the rest of Chandelier, a record that suggests infinite diverging possibilities in its practice of imperfect, slightly-altered repetition. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

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