Pressing Concerns: The Laughing Chimes, Rosa Bordallo, New Not Shameful/Trust Blinks, ASkySoBlack

It’s been perhaps the busiest week of the year so far on Rosy Overdrive, and we’re closing it out with a rock-solid Thursday Pressing Concerns: we’ve got new albums from The Laughing Chimes, Rosa Bordallo, and ASkySoBlack that are coming out tomorrow (January 31st), plus a split EP between New Not Shameful and Trust Blinks that came out earlier this week. If you missed Monday’s Pressing Concerns (featuring IMustBe Leonardo, Minor Conflict, Krystian Quint & The Quitters, and Blood Lemon) or Tuesday’s blog post (featuring a deep dive into the year 1994), 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.

The Laughing Chimes – Whispers in the Speech Machine

Release date: January 31^st
Record label: Slumberland
Genre: Jangle pop, post-punk, college rock, dream pop
Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital
Pull Track: A Promise to Keep

I’ve been waiting for a new album from The Laughing Chimes for a while now–specifically since November of 2022, when I heard their six-song Zoo Avenue EP, although this desire was reinforced the following month when I named said record my favorite EP of that year. Whispers in the Speech Machine–their second full-length and their first for their current home of Slumberland Records–has thus been a while in the making, and the Athens, Ohio-based jangle pop group has changed quite a bit in the meantime. For one, they’ve doubled in size: founding brothers Evan (vocals/guitar) and Quinn (drums) Seurkamp have welcomed in a permanent bassist (Avery Bookman, their cousin) and second guitarist (Ella Franks, who also contributes keys to their newest record). Accordingly, Whispers in the Speech Machine reflects a more expansive sound–Zoo Avenue may have couched Appalachian melancholy with a bright, early Guided by Voices-esque melodicism, but between-record singles like “Tomorrow’s 87” hinted at a moodier, more post-punk and even goth-pop-indebted sound, and Whispers in the Speech Machine (while still being very much a jangly indie rock record) makes good on this. Franks’ synth contributions, given a prominent place in these eight songs, are key to elevating The Laughing Chimes to this next chapter of their sound, but the Seurkamps’ performance indicates that they were ready for this moment when it did finally arrive as well.

Even though Whispers in the Speech Machine is a short album (coming in at under thirty minutes) and it does contain one previously-released song (a new take on “Cats Go Car Watching” from Zoo Avenue), it’s an album that radiates ideas and layers as many of them on top of each other as it can. Evan Seurkamp’s vocals have always been a highlight and anchoring force, and now that they’ve added a second potent one in the keyboards, The Laughing Chimes are free to wander from their typical jangle pop sound to New Order-like synth-post-punk-pop and dream pop while still having everything hold together. So many of these songs could be lost college rock anthems, still somewhat fuzzy from laying dormant and undiscovered in a radio station basement all these years–there’s the half-remembered melodies of opening track “Atrophy”, the all-hands-on-deck sweeping romanticism of “High Beams”, the buttoned-up giddiness of “A Promise to Keep”, the epic mopiness of “He Never Finished the Thought”. “Country Eidolism” is a curveball in the record’s first half, a surprisingly intimate piece of swirling, Flying Nun-reminiscent dream folk that works very well–on the other hand, penultimate track “Fluorescent Minds” finds The Laughing Chimes cranking up the amps higher than ever before, even if the resultant rocker stays a bit closer to their jangle pop core. This isn’t exactly the Laughing Chimes album I would’ve expected had it come right after Zoo Avenue, but there’s no question that Whispers in the Speech Machine is the one that they wanted to make, nor is it in any doubt that they were right to pursue these ideas to where it finally led them. (Bandcamp link)

Rosa Bordallo – Isidro

Release date: January 31^st
Record label: Bad Auntie
Genre: Psychedelic pop, jangle pop, indie pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Crasseux

Isidro may “only” be Rosa Bordallo’s second solo album, but the New York-based musician has taken a winding road to get to this point. The Chamorro singer-songwriter was born on the Pacific island (and U.S. territory) of Guam and moved to New York at nineteen, where she played in the post-punk/art-punk band Cholo in the late 2000s and early 2010s. After that, Bordallo put out a couple of EPs under the name Manett before finally graduating to using her proper name for her full-length debut, 2019’s Reef Walker. Isidro, then, actually represents something of a slowdown for Bordallo–she wrote these songs earlier this decade in New York before traveling down to Atlanta to record them at MAZE Studios with Ben Etter (Deerhunter, Cate Le Bon, Soccer Mommy). Etter’s previous credits are helpful in contextualizing the sound of this album, particularly Deerhunter–it recalls “indie music” of that band’s late 2000s/early 2010s heyday, a mishmash of forward-thinking synths, “art rock”, and bright, vibrant guitar/indie/psychedelic pop music. Isidro sews Bordallo’s different lives and influences together expertly–there’s the stately coastal psych-folk artiste in her presentation, her post-punk past in the record’s more lively moments, her island of origin in her writing, and the sun-baked psychedelia chronicled by Etter in Georgia.

The first non-intro track on Isidro, “Home”, begins with a familiar reverb-y, jangly psychedelic pop sound, but Bordallo’s writing packs a bite and a specificity (“The profit-driven war games / Menacing our land” … “All they’ve ever done for us / Wreak havoc and desecrate our dead”) that bears the mark of a land with a front-row seat to the malignant force of American imperialism. As stark as “Home” is, Bordallo doesn’t let the looming militant spectre overwhelm the whole of her writing. Perhaps tackling it at the onset frees Isidro to weave more complex and vivid storytelling, which Bordallo goes on to offer up in later highlights such as “Crasseux”, “Silk Moth’s Revenge”, and “I Feel Numb”. The sound of Isidro–aided by drummer Sean Zearfoss and multi-instrumentalist Keegan Krogh in addition to Etter–feels key to realizing the full potential of Bordallo’s writing. The record pulls together a lot, musically-speaking, but it’s an unflagging pop album at its core and the instrumentation exists to channel this. Both the offbeat synth-led instrumental track “Cycads of Micronesia” and the fluttering psych pop “Silk Moth’s Revenge” (which feels like a revolution to me, either labor-driven or decolonialist or perhaps both) draw from Bordallo’s home from thousands of miles away, a connecting force made explicit by her translation of the final verse of “I Feel Numb” into French, Russian, and Chamorro. “I Feel Numb” does not end in triumph and final victory, but it’s laying the groundwork for something greater. (Bandcamp link)

New Not Shameful / Trust Blinks – Split

Release date: January 28^st
Record label: Cherub Dream
Genre: Slowcore, lo-fi indie rock, emo, post-hardcore, shoegaze
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Grass Is Green

San Francisco label Cherub Dream Records has been around for a half-decade, but they really only got onto my radar last year, when I found several interesting new Bay Area bands (Sucker, Buddy Junior, Christina’s Trip) through their output. Eschewing the brighter indie pop that the region is currently known for, Cherub Dream highlights a greyer, more downcast side of the area’s indie music scene–one more indebted to slowcore, shoegaze, and lo-fi indie rock of the 1990s. The label’s latest release is a six-song, eighteen-minute split EP that accomplishes everything one could want in a Cherub Dream release and more–it both introduces an intriguing new Bay Area band in San Francisco’s New Not Shameful, and it expands the label’s horizons by bringing us new music from Los Angeles-originating, Asheville-based slowcore band Trust Blinks (who released an album on similarly-minded labels Julia’s War and Candlepin last year). Within this specific niche of indie rock, New Not Shameful and Trust Blinks are actually fairly distinct from one another, but this exchange of ideas only makes the split EP feel like a stronger collection.

I’m not an emo purist, so I have no issue with calling the New Not Shameful side of the split EP the “emo” side. I think that their three songs capture the mix of ugly and beauty that marks the best emo music, anyway–it’s half Cap’n Jazz and other 90s scream-friendly emo, half Modest Mouse/expansive northwestern American indie rock. “Only for a Second”, their first song, is the most substantial thing on the EP by far, with bandleader Finn Palamaro’s screaming vocals colliding with shimmery guitars in the first half and ascending to something unmoored from this beginning in its second half. The Trust Blinks half of the EP is the “slowgaze” side, although it’s not as predictable as most of that kind of music, thankfully. The Trust Blinks side starts with “Spider (Interlude)”, a slow-crawling instrumental that feels right out of the Duster-Helvetia school of wallflower-rock, but the two tracks that follow it, “Grass Is Green” and “Clean Plate Club” are more electric and dynamic. The former track in particular is a nice surprise, with its fuzzed-out guitars and heavy usage of organ forming a bizarre combination that nonetheless works very well (“Clean Plate Club” also has some nice organ; it makes a little more sense in that song’s lo-fi slowcore body, but it’s still not the most intuitive touch). The three songs apiece are more than enough for me to get a sense of where both New Not Shameful and Trust Blinks are coming from, but it’s brief enough to feel like a low-stakes drop-in with a couple new bands I expect to hear more from soon. (Bandcamp link)

ASkySoBlack – Touch Heaven

Release date: January 31^st
Record label: New Morality Zine/Pleasure Tapes
Genre: Grunge-gaze, fuzz rock, alt-rock, post-hardcore
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: On for No One

Philadelphia’s ASkySoBlack was part of New Morality Zine’s esteemed class of 2022 alongside bands like Prize Horse and Downward; their four-song Autumn in the Water EP established the band as slick, alt-rock-loving practitioners of “heavy shoegaze” like their labelmates. At the time, I seem to remember them not getting as much attention as Prize Horse or Downward, but perhaps the release of their debut full-length LP, Touch Heaven, will change that. Given a larger canvas, their peers Prize Horse responded by expanding their sound to something subtler and slowed down on their first LP last year; ASkySoBlack have taken a different course on Touch Heaven. The band’s Hum and Smashing Pumpkins-indebted sound is still present throughout the album; if there’s a change, it’s a shift towards the more streamlined, replacing the heavier, almost-alt-metal extremes of Autumn in the Water with a pared-down, almost-punk attitude towards this kind of music. Jordan Shteif’s vocals remain a secret weapon on Touch Heaven–the band might sound hurried and frantic, but Shteif is an anchor, gliding across these electric alt-rock tracks with a calm, patient composure (that’s only broken when the moment really calls for it).

Touch Heaven begins with an explosion–more specifically, opening track “On for No One”, an absolute tour-de-force of heavy rock music that’s one of ASkySoBlack’s most complete moments yet. The song they choose to follow it up with, “I Wish I Was Not”, is the harbinger–the quartet don’t take their foot off the gas, and in fact rip through the track in two white-hot minutes. ASkySoBlack have a pretty solid claim to the title of best hook-makers in their current scene, and that’s true whether they’re speeding through “I Wish I Was Not” or plowing across the post-grunge “Boy Like a Bruise” or the airborne Hum-worship of “You Sit Useless”. The downtuned riffs of “Carousel House” hint that maybe, just maybe, Touch Heaven is going to dive off the low end in its second half, but while this side of ASkySoBlack makes a couple more appearances (in the post-hardcore inferno at the end of “Did It All Wrong” and the more polished but still intense finale of “Hold Me Holy”), the record’s biggest B-side surprise is probably the relative restraint of penultimate track “Every Heart Needs Some Mileage”. Touch Heaven is probably at its best when ASkySoBlack is making a bit more noise, but they find a few different ways to get there–and, like closing track “Sore for You” hints at, they can stretch things out while still letting the guitars run free if they want to. I get the sense that ASkySoBlack isn’t done evolving, but where they’re at on Touch Heaven is a fine place to be for the moment. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

• Ex-Vöid – In Love Again
• T a F F Y – Lull
• Your Pest Band – Blaze by Me
• Freckle – Freckle
• Marathon Runner – I Dream a Highway
• Chris Eckman – The Land We Knew the Best
• Bonnie “Prince” Billy – The Purple Bird
• Robert Ascroft – Echo Still Remains
• Waldo’s Gift – Malcolm’s Law
• Telesatan – Telesatan EP
• ZEPHR – Past Lives
• Crushing – Birdie EP
• Chuck Roth – Watergh0st Songs
• Samba Touré – Baarakelaw
• Day Residue – I Love What You’ve Done with the Place EP
• RISLEY – Umbra Penumbra
• Frànçois & The Atlas Mountains – Âge Fleuve
• Papa Jupe’s T.C. – Jupe in the Flesh EP
• Ale Hop & Titi Bakorta – Mapambazuko
• Lophae – Perfect Strangers
• Drop Rate – Cheap Fantasy EP
• Mary Chapin Carpenter, Julie Fowlis, Karine Polwart – Looking for the Thread
• Various – Desert Balm – A Compilation for MusiCares LA Relief Fund
• Various – Super Bloom: A Benefit for Fire Relief in Los Angeles
• Various – Musical Aid: A Fire Relief Compilation for the POC Community of Altadena