Pressing Concerns: The Ladybug Transistor, Tsunami, Chimers, Tófa

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Wrapping up the first full week of November, we’ve got four releases coming out tomorrow, November 8th, for the Thursday Pressing Concerns. It’s a reissue-heavy edition, as we look at an expanded version of The Ladybug Transistor‘s 1999 third album and an entire-discography-spanning box set from Tsunami. We’ve got new-new music covered, too, with new albums from Chimers and Tófa detailed below as well. Earlier this week, we looked at new records from The Triceratops, wilder Thing, EEP, and Tess Parks on Monday, and Tuesday brought the October 2024 playlist/round-up, so check those out too if you haven’t already.

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 Ladybug Transistor – The Albemarle Sound (25th Anniversary Expanded Edition)

Release date: November 8th
Record label: HHBTM/Merge
Genre: Psychedelic pop, chamber pop, orchestral pop, indie pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Meadowport Arch

Trumpet player and singer Gary Olson founded The Ladybug Transistor in Brooklyn in 1995, and by the time their third album, The Albemarle Sound, came around in 1999, the band was made up of six people living together at Olson’s Flatbush home studio (known as “Marlborough Farms”)–The Essex Green’s Jeff Baron and Sasha Bell on guitar and keyboards/flute, respectively, Baron’s sister Jennifer on bass, San Fadyl on drums, and Julia Rydholm on violin. Both The Essex Green and The Ladybug Transistor are perhaps (unfairly) more well-known for their notable associations (Merge Records, who’ve put out the majority of both band’s outputs, and Elephant 6, who put out an Essex Green EP and whose Derek Almstead recently joined The Ladybug Transistor on tour) than their own music, but if there’s a canonical record between the two of them, it’s probably The Albemarle Sound. The heavily 1960s-inspired baroque pop music of The Ladybug Transistor fully blossoms on this LP–it’s easy to see why they got along with the Elephant 6 crew, but the group’s approach is notably different than their peers in Athens upon a closer look at the album. And it’s a good time to take a close look at The Albemarle Sound, as HHBTM Records (who also put out the most recent album by Jennifer Baron’s current band, The Garment District) has reissued it on vinyl and CD with a dozen bonus tracks of demos, B-sides, and rough takes (physically on the latter format, digitally on the former).

Like a bunch of those Elephant 6 albums, The Albemarle Sound bears the mark of an album made in a “live-in studio”, but while, say, The Olivia Tremor Control’s records sounded like the work of mad pop scientists tinkering away in their laboratory, The Ladybug Transistor’s version of layered, psychedelic pop music is much more relaxed and serene-sounding. Who knows whether or not it was actually the case, but The Albemarle Sound makes it feel like Marlborough Farms was some kind of lovingly-tended Eden-esque garden for music that sounds like Brian Wilson at his most stately, occupied by a group of like-minded and cheerful musicians. Most of these songs are built on the foundation of pianos and horns rather than guitar–it’s not precisely a “sleepy” album, but if it’s any kind of “rock” music, then it’s soft rock. The original dozen songs of The Albemarle Sound still stand as a polished and strong door-shutting of 21st century pop music, keenly and carefully excavating the past to make transportive psychedelic pop like “Six Times”. The particularly jaunty “Meadowport Arch” is still my favorite song, but its energy is hardly an outlier, and when the band do let the guitars sit a bit more prominently (like the Byrds-y folk-pop of “Like a Summer Rain”) it’s a welcome addition.

The crown jewel of the bonus material is “Massachusetts”, a cover of a Bee Gees song that was originally the B-side to the 1998 “Today Knows” single. It fits The Ladybug Transistor like a glove, with more straightforward (and more overall) lyrics being the only really noticeable difference between it and their original material. The various instrumentals and rough mixes are interesting additions, although the four 4-track demos tacked on at the end sound the best to me (particular the version of “Today Knows”, which has a molasses-slow indie pop feel to it that almost sounds like modern slow-pop groups like Cindy and April Magazine). Between the original, the “full length” version, and the demo version, there’s three different full takes of “Six Times” on here, but it’s hard to fault that because each version brings out something new in the song. What more could you want from an anniversary reissue of an already-great album? (Bandcamp link)

Tsunami – Loud Is As

Release date: November 8th
Record label: Numero Group
Genre: 90s indie rock, noise pop, fuzz rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Unbridled

The appeal of Tsunami is a bit more difficult to explain than a lot of their more renowned 1990s indie rock peers (unfortunately for me, though, I have an agreement with myself that “it’s too hard” is never a legitimate reason to pass on writing about a band). Jenny Toomey and Kristin Thomson formed the band at the beginning of the 90s, first with drummer John Pamer and bassist Andrew Webster and eventually adding Luther Gray, Amy Domingues, and Bob Massey and putting out three albums (and one compilation) before they ceased being a full-time band in 1998. Like some of their more comparable peers–Scrawl, Barbara Manning, Helium–they were undeniably a key fixture in the underground rock scene of their time without being defined by it sonically. They put out all their music on their own label, Simple Machines, they associated with indie pop from both coasts of the United States, and they made music that doesn’t fit neatly into categories like “punk”, “twee”, “riot grrrl”, “grunge”, et cetera. I first knew of Toomey through her collaborations with Franklin Bruno (who’s playing in the current iteration of Tsunami that reformed last year), who similarly spent the 1990s trying to make timeless pop music out of the “basement indie rock” stone. Tsunami went on their own journey of cleaning and teasing out their own sound, but it’s not super obvious from a glance–like everything about them, you have to actually pay attention.

So, maybe they’re a hard sell, is what I’m saying. They’re indie rock music for adults, is how I would put it personally. Either way, the Numero Group is giving you all the chance to give Tsunami a chance with Loud Is As, a five-LP, sixty-one-song collection of the band’s entire output from the 1991 Cow Arcade demos to their 1997 final record, A Brilliant Mistake. The compilation puts their three studio albums back to back to back, suggesting we chart the evolution of Tsunami through their biggest statements–and it really is a clean and strong story when presented thusly. 1993’s Deep End is the messy, noisy torrent of a rock record made by a band that nonetheless was hardly “punk” in the way people mean the word, 1994’s The Heart’s Tremolo is the transitional second album that really stretches towards something, and A Brilliant Mistake is the patient, labored-over realization of Toomey and Thomson’s furthest ambitions–a success that they took as a cue to close up shop. A Brilliant Mistake particularly sounds even stronger in this context, as we can hear how Tsunami kept their bright-burning core but stripped away just about everything else from their earlier music on those thirteen songs. Loud Is As is necessarily a lot to take in at once, especially given the grab-bag nature of the final two LPs (largely comprised of World Tour & Other Destinations, a B-sides/rarities compilation originally released in 1995)–but Tsunami make it tricky to dismiss the World Tour tracks, given that they’re comparable (if not stronger) than the two proper albums released contemporaneously with them. Start with A Brilliant Mistake and work backward if this is all intimidating to you, but if you’re open to it, you’ll get something more out of letting Loud Is As reveal itself as is. (Bandcamp link)

Chimers – Through Today

Release date: November 8th
Record label: 12XU/Poison City
Genre: Noise rock, post-punk, garage rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Timber

Chimers are the husband-and-wife duo of Padraic Skehan and Binx based out of Wollongong, Australia (although Skehan is originally from Ireland). Between the two of them, they’ve both drummed for a bunch of local garage rock bands (The Pink Fits, The Drop Offs, Evol), but Chimers finds Skehan playing guitar and singing (and joined by Binx in the latter of the two activities). Chimers arose during the pandemic, with the two of them stuck at home together, and they put out a self-titled album in 2021. For their second LP, Through Today, Chimers wanted to capture the “energy and intensity” that they bring live on the album, enlisting Jono Boulet of Party Dozen to record the album and linking up with American underground rock stalwart 12XU (John Sharkey III, Lupo Citta, Mope Grooves) to release it outside of Australia and New Zealand (where Poison City are handling things). I’ve seen Chimers described as “garage rock”, but that doesn’t quite do justice to the pummeling and pounding you’ll hear on Through Today. It’s a record that does indeed sound like it was made by two musicians who are drummers by trade–the unflagging high-wire-act pulled off by the band rhythmically (led by Binx’s drums, of course, but Skehan’s guitar does it too) gives it a post-punk feel, while the duo and Boulet also give it the blunt edge of classic noise rock.

Through Today sounds exquisite–Binx’s drums and Skehan’s six-string feel like they’ve lost no potency from Boulet’s home studio to tape, rumbling and slicing merrily (well, stonily) along for virtually the entire album. Skehan’s vocals aren’t an afterthought, exactly, but they’re lower down in the mix, a ghost haunting Chimers’ mechanical, rusted-out rock and roll. Songs like “Timber”, “Everything’s Green”, and “Gossip” are Through Today’s bread and butter–Binx is cold water to the face behind the kit but also provides a firm anchor, giving plenty of cover for Skehan to slice and dice and drone. Still there are a few surprises on the album–guest saxophone player Kirsty Tickle (Party Dozen) shows up in “People Listen (To the Radio)”, the oddest of the record’s first few songs in no small part due to the squall that the brass instrument spearheads. Violinist Jordan Ireland shows up in “An Echo”, Through Today’s penultimate track and the one true black sheep on the LP. Binx quietly sing-speaks on this one, and the duo dial back their instruments to make something more reminiscent of 90s Quarterstick Records-style post-rock (again, the violin helps by swelling and dispersing along with the core duo). For us, it’s a bit of a rest before the band launches into one last rocker in “Common”, but it almost feels like it takes more effort for Chimers to pull back like they do in “An Echo” than to just follow the rhythm downstream. (Bandcamp link)

Tófa – Mauled

Release date: November 8th
Record label: Damnably
Genre: Post-punk, noise rock, punk rock, garage rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Hot Tears

Icelandic noise punk group Tófa dropped a couple of albums and a split EP in the mid-2010s, but the quartet had been quiet as of late up until this year. Now linked up with Damnably Records (Say Sue Me, Hazy Sour Cherry, o’summer vacation), the quartet (vocalist Allie Doersch, bassist Andri Freyr Þorgeirsson, baritone guitarist Árni Þór Árnason, and drummer Jóhannes Ólafsson) have finally returned to release a third album, christened Mauled. Despite hailing from a country most people in the West consider to be idyllic and peaceful, it turns out that Tófa can make angry, pummeling, low-end-heavy rock music as well as the bands from burned-out American cities. Doersch is an intense punk frontperson, dynamically swerving from a yell to a bitter sing-speaking tone (and even a couple of poetry readings), and the down-tuned, rumbling music accompanying her is cold and harsh. Like a lot of great noise rock, Mauled is about helplessness and evil, and feeling the former in the face of the latter (one imagines that in some ways this feeling is amplified, not dampened, by living in a remote country with little global power, even as one gets a front seat to climate catastrophe and Western genocide).

So Tófa have plenty to rage for, against, and about, and Mauled does so. Careening into focus, the album starts off with the noisy, driven post-punk of opening track “Hot Tears”, the sixty-second clamoring garage punk explosion of “Clogging”, and the heavy, chugging noise rock of “Revenge”. The album features two spoken-word passages, memorably titled “Fancy Poetry I” and “Fancy Poetry II”; the only one that I can understand, the former (I think the latter is in Icelandic), has to do with the mundane repetitiveness of world destruction no one can fully opt out of even as disaster hovers over all of our heads. The fire of Mauled only burns brighter as it inches forward–“Power” and “Letter Home” towards the end of the album are two of the angriest tracks on the album, Doersch practically spitting out her lyrics as the band spirals down and out. Tófa bring everything into focus on the album’s closing track, “It Happens Again”–like the “Fancy Poetry” recordings, Doersch is basically just speaking for the majority of the song, but rather than minimal ambient instrumentation, the rest of Tófa take the form of sturdy, tough post-punk. “What’s a black smear to the endless night?” Doersch actually sings in the chorus, painting a picture of endless, repeating insignificance. What did you expect, a fairytale ending? (Bandcamp link)

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