Pressing Concerns: Langkamer, Seafoam Walls, Humdrum, Ironic Hill

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You don’t even know it yet, but this week in late October is going to be a great one for Rosy Overdrive readers. We’re starting with the Monday Pressing Concerns, featuring new albums from Langkamer, Seafoam Walls, Humdrum, and Ironic Hill (three of which came out last week, and one of which is from back in August).

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.

Langkamer – Langzamer

Release date: October 16th
Record label: Breakfast
Genre: Indie pop, folk rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Heart of Tin

I first came across Bristol quartet Langkamer when they released an EP called Red Thread Route in late 2022, and kept up with them as they put out The Noon and Midnight Manual, their sophomore album, the following year.  I enjoyed the sound that the four of them (drummer/vocalist Josh Jarman, guitarists Ed Soles and Dan Anthony, and bassist Tom Kelly) had hit on as a unit, bits of post-90s “slacker rock”, classic British guitar pop, folk rock, and even a bit of alt-country delivered in a breezy package. I’m not all that shocked that their third album, Langzamer, is a great LP–all the ingredients for Langkamer to pull it off were already visible. Langzamer itself, however, is a bit of a surprising turn for the band–it’s a more serious and darker record than the previous ones I’d heard from them, with Jarman’s lyrics dwelling heavily on death and loss and the music dampening down their past brightness a bit to follow suit (it’s worth noting that, rather than just being a nonsense take off of their band name, “langzamer” is actually Dutch for “slower”). The quartet went to Falmouth to record Langzmer with Ben Woods of The Golden Dregs, and while the group’s guitar pop instincts remain intact, the muted presentation clearly best suits these songs.

“Do you want the good news or the bad news first? / They’re both bad news, but the bad is worse,” is how Jarman starts “Heart of Tin”, Langzamer’s opening track and a really key mood-setter. Langkamer unsteadily march into a mid-tempo indie rock song that matches their lead singer’s uneasy and small-sounding vocals, but the guitars find a lot of melodic lines within the song’s nooks and crannies, and Jarman eventually manages a half-rousing refrain. The balance continues to be struck throughout Langzamer, indie pop delivered deliberately and thoughtfully–the sweeping instrumental of “Aberfan” can’t fully escape the melancholy at its core, while the bright folk-country “Movement” and the buzzing pop rock of “Richard E Grant” help the first half of the record give off some semblance of “upbeat”. The blunt, intent chorus of the former (“If you gotta do it / You can’t go through it / Go around / Go around”) is illustrative of how jarring Langzamer can be, something that also shades album centerpiece “Salvation XL” (a hallucinogenic ballad about religion at “a Burger King in Marrakesh” that is funny, but not a joke). The lightness is furthest away in the late-album quiet tracks, though, with “At the Lake” and “Bluff” really leaving nowhere for Jarman’s heavy voice to hide. The latter song in particular is a tough one–it’s the last song on the album, and it’s a real “sit in your car for a minute after it ends” kind of closer. I wasn’t really expecting Langkamer to make something like this, and I’m not sure the band themselves planned on it either. These songs are what they had, though, and Langzamer does exactly what it must. (Bandcamp link)

Seafoam Walls – Standing Too Close to the Elephant in the Room

Release date: October 18th
Record label: Dion Dia
Genre: Art rock, noise pop, electronic rock, shoegaze, dream pop, jazz-pop
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Cabin Fever

Miami quartet Seafoam Walls came together in the late 2010s and got a bit of attention via their debut album, 2021’s XVI, which came out on Thurston Moore’s Daydream Library label. The band (guitarist/vocalist Jayan Bertrand, guitarist Dion Kerr, bassist Joshua Ewers, and electronic drummer/percussionist Josue Vargas) describes their music as “Caribbean jazzgaze”, and that’s admittedly a succinct summation of XVI, which does indeed combine elements from jazz, Caribbean music, indie rock, and electronica in an intriguing way. If you liked XVI (or are even just curious based on that description of it), you’ll be pleased to hear that Seafoam Walls are still building from the same ingredients on their sophomore album, Standing Too Close to the Elephant in the Room. Not that XVI was an extremely difficult listen, but the band’s follow-up seems to emphasize the “pop” side of Seafoam Walls’ experimental pop, retaining the offbeat jazz and electronic elements but, for the majority of Standing Too Close to the Elephant in the Room, introducing them as supporting elements to the record’s more structured, recognizable indie rock core. Though I still wouldn’t call Standing Too Close to the Elephant in the Room a straight-up shoegaze album (if for no other reason than to avoid the wrath of “pure” shoegaze fans), the psychedelic, layered haze over top of Seafoam Walls’ pop music is at the very least a clear link to the genre.

Bands like Seafoam Walls probably can’t ever be “streamlined”, but the eight-song, thirty-five minute structure of Standing Too Close to the Elephant in the Room feels just about as focused as this kind of music can get. The first two tracks on the record, “Humanitarian, Pt. I” and “Humanitarian, Pt. II” are Seafoam Walls as a dynamic, dreamy indie rock band, slowly and methodically building things up in the former and letting loose in the form of breezy indie pop in the latter. Seafoam Walls’ jazz-rock instincts creep in during the outro to the latter song, but this turns out to be a feint, with “Cabin Fever” actually upping both the volume and the experimentation in a way that puts them in line with the current Julia’s War/Candlepin wave of “new” shoegaze/noise pop. Those looking for the jazz attitude to return will be pleased to hear sprawling second half highlights like “Hurricane Humble” and “Sad Bop”–the latter of the two actually embraces the sparser, more thoughtful end of the jazz-pop spectrum, marrying Seafoam Walls’ restlessness with an audible peace. Of course, Standing Too Close to the Elephant in the Room still ends with “Ex Rey”, a dizzying seven-minute Jenga tower of noises and ideas–when every piece of that song is as satisfying and captivating on its own, though, it’s almost just as tranquil to watch the tower wobble. (Bandcamp link)

Humdrum – Every Heaven

Release date: October 18th
Record label: Slumberland
Genre: Jangle pop, power pop, new wave, post-punk, dream pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Come and Get Me

Humdrum may be a brand-new project, but its leader, Loren Vanderbilt, is a veteran of guitar pop. The Chicago-based Vanderbilt spent most of the 2010s making indie pop as one-third of Windy City group Star Tropics, releasing a LP and a few singles together before breaking up at the end of last decade. Vanderbilt began work on Humdrum not long afterwards, eventually resulting in Every Heaven, the project’s ten-song debut album. Vanderbilt has a keen grasp on a very specific time and place in the history of indie rock as Humdrum, as he carefully and devotedly pulls together jangle pop, new wave, college rock, and dream pop from the 1980s and early 90s to make Every Heaven’s warmly familiar sound. Although it does feature some guitar contributions from Vanderbilt’s former Star Tropics bandmate Scott Hibbitts, Every Heaven is largely the work of a singular pop-minded visionary, with everything from its prominent, pounding mechanical drumbeats to its New Order-y synth washes to sprinkled guitar arpeggios all working in tandem to service the melodies and hooks. Unfailingly upbeat but also unafraid to incorporate the more wistful side of Vanderbilt’s influences, Humdrum is somewhere between a more melancholic version of bands like Chime School and Ducks Ltd. and a more peppy Lost Film or Old Moon.

Perhaps reflecting its nature as a solo project begun during the pandemic, the writing throughout Every Heaven feels very yearning. Salvation and bliss are glimpsable, but out of reach, coming an unspecified time “soon” or “one day”. Whatever was on Vanderbilt’s mind while putting together this record, it led to some powerful pop songs, with even the instrumental opening track giving off so much vibrancy that it’s easy to miss that it’s a wordless song before it ends abruptly before the two-minute mark. From that moment on, the rock-solid, fully-teased-out jangly, dreamy guitar pop anthems become a steady stream, although some moments stand out as being especially immediate and sugary. “Wave Goodbye” and “See Through You” are both modern jangle pop classics, legitimate rushes of melodies and propulsion with hooks in every crevice. Humdrum does this same trick one more time in “Come and Get Me”, the emotional cracks and visible wear and tear only enhancing the great New Romantic performance given by Vanderbilt and guest vocalist Melissa Buckley. Come for these explosive moments, yes, and stay for the rest of the record and the rest of its dimensions, from more labor-intensive pop music like the particularly New Order-esque charms of “Eternal Blue” and the relatively calm waters of “Test of Time” and “Ultraviolet”. Every Heaven is crystalline, both in how it reflects a bygone era of “indie music” and how it freezes its leader in his own moment in time. Oh, and because it’s very sparkly and shiny, too. (Bandcamp link)

Ironic Hill – Alone in a Field

Release date: August 28th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Indie pop, folk rock, lo-fi pop, singer-songwriter
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Partying

Last year I wrote about a self-titled cassette from Ironic Hill, an anonymous United Kingdom-based bedroom pop project that gathered up ten “humble, no-frills, but nevertheless quite compelling” pop songs in one place after steadily releasing them as singles over the course of 2023. There’s also been a steady stream of Ironic Hill music since the release of that cassette, most of it in the realms of field recordings, ambient guitar, and improvisational (in the form of the SAND, BREAK, and PROCESS EPs). Alone in a Field is the first song-based collection from the project since Ironic Hill, primarily recorded “on a solitary five day trip to Norfolk in July 2023”. The eleven-song, twenty-six minute record (once again self-released on cassette) features plenty of the stream-of-consciousness melancholic guitar pop that can be found on Ironic Hill, but also reflects how the project has grown in the months since. Instrumental tracks (both “full band” and solo piano in nature) bridge the “pop” songs, and the tracks with vocals feel more fully-developed, with more instruments and sections applied to the skeletal cores. Part of Ironic Hill’s appeal was its no-frills presentation, but Ironic Hill adds just a bit more oomph to these songs without losing anything in the process.

Alone in a Field begins with an unusual sound for Ironic Hill–the squealing of electric guitar feedback. The track it eventually launches into, “Dusk”, is an odd one for the project too, but its low-key, almost psychedelic instrumental doesn’t really turn out to be out of place on Alone in a Field at all. The electric guitars continue to flash just a bit in proper pop songs like “Partying” and “Funfair”, but the tracks themselves are vintage Ironic Hill–wearily, the project leader declares “When I was young, I had some fun / But now my partying days are fun,” in the former, and in the latter he sings “I wanna sing happy songs / I wanna dance all night long / Like I’ve never done before / I wanna believe in something,” like somebody who could really use a nice day at the fair. Only five songs on Alone in a Field have lyrics, but Ironic Hill make them count–there are plenty of memorable moments to be found in “Indoors” (“I’ve seen a lot of the world / But I don’t wanna see any more / I only want to see the same old things”) and “Dogshow” (containing the title line: “Do horses get depressed / Standing alone in a field?”). When Ironic Hill breaks their piano-led, meandering wordlessness to observe “The world is a dog show / And everything is no-go”, it’s clearly a meaningful feeling to them–enough to have me nodding along knowingly, somehow. (Bandcamp link)

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