Pressing Concerns: Telethon, The Unfit, Quinine, LP Gavin

First Pressing Concerns of the week! New albums from Telethon and LP Gavin, a compilation album of singles and EPs from The Unfit, and a new EP from Quinine.

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.

Telethon – Suburban Electric

Release date: March 6^th
Record label: Halloween
Genre: Power pop, pop punk
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Middleman (Theme to Suburban Electric)

Telethon are from Wisconsin. They describe their music as “powerpoppunkrock for the modern kids”, and their latest album as “11 different character studies delivered via rock & roll”. Their last album was named after an Everclear lyric and was my favorite album of 2021 (and, between you and me, my second favorite of the decade so far). They have a keyboardist who goes by the name “Gene Jacket”. Nobody else is doing it like Telethon. Ever since Swim Out the Breakers, the sixth Telethon LP has been at the top of my “most anticipated albums” lists, and after a few years of being in the works, they just went ahead and surprise-released Suburban Electric earlier this month. It certainly sounds like a Telethon album, even though it also sounds like a conscious attempt not to repeat the sprawling, overstuffed, guest musician-heavy Swim Out Past the Breakers. There are still a few auxiliary performers here (Justin Mullens on trumpet and French horn, Rima Fand on violin and viola, Peter Hess on saxophone and clarinet), but Telethon proper (Jacket, lead vocalist Kevin Tulley, bassist Alex “DeepSoundz” Meylink, drummer Erik “Drum” Atwell, and guitarist Jack “Psycho J” Sibilski) are the unambiguous vocal point of Suburban Electric. If it’s possible for Telethon’s blend of maximalist power pop, Midwestern workhorse pop punk, and dashes of ska and emo to ever be “streamlined”, Suburban Electric is it.

Suburban Electric is still a rich and stuffed-to-the-gills record in its own way, though. As Telethon cut out the brief “snippet”-type tracks of Swim Out Past the Breakers, every song on this album becomes a wild self-contained narrative (the lyrics are presented as paragraphs on the album’s Bandcamp page, which seems right to me). Suburban Electric could be Tulley’s bid for “best lyricist in indie punk rock whatever currently going”, not in a “heartache-inducing one-liners to write on your spiral-ring notebook” way but in a “how the hell does he fully step into the worlds of his characters in an opaque but charismatic way over and over again like that?” way. Telethon surprise musically on Suburban Electric, too–with the “hook-a-second” record set by Swim Out Past the Breakers unlikely to be bested any time soon, Telethon instead set their punk rock theater energy towards building lengthy, almost prog-pop Jenga towers like “I Believe in Slime” and “Lloyd” and genre excursions like the cabaret/ska-pop “The Pen” and the disco-pop-touched “I Think I’ve Seen Enough”. Of course, the power-pop-punk rush of “Tumbleweeding” and the frantic final track “Middleman (Theme to Suburban Electric)” are both as catchy as anything on Swim Out Past the Breakers (putting your catchiest and most crowd-pleasing song dead last on the album? Again, nobody’s doing it like Telethon), and while “Checker Drive Revisited” is necessarily more subdued than the song from the previous LP to which it nods, it lives up to the lofty connection. I suspect I’ll be coming back to Suburban Electric quite a bit this year–Telethon took a different route this time, but no corners were cut here. (Bandcamp link)

The Unfit – Disconnected

Release date: February 28^th
Record label: Share It Music
Genre: Noise rock, post-punk, garage punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Bad Guys

Who doesn’t love a good noise punk band from the Pacific Northwest? Let me introduce you to a Seattle-originating quartet called The Unfit if you’ve yet to make their acquaintance. The band was formed back in 2012 by four Emerald City rock veterans–vocalist/bassist Jake Knuth, guitarists Michael Lee and T.J. Johnson, and drummer Tyler Johnson–and their roots go back even further, as half of them played in the group Subminute: Radio in the late 1990s and three-fourths of them were in Lila in the early 2000s. Apparently spread thin geographically these days, The Unfit has a fairly irregular release schedule–it took until 2020 for a self-titled debut to show up, and their second LP, Disconnected, isn’t even a proper “album”, instead serving as a collection of the two EPs, one single, and one compilation track they’ve released this decade thus far. Disconnected is fiery and alive nonetheless, following in a grand lineage of Seattle punk bands wielding a combination of wild, sardonic vocals and huge guitars to explosive ends. Too limber (and, let’s be real, not nearly self-serious enough) for the blunt-object post-punk/noise rock revival, but too heavy and hardcore-indebted for “egg punk”, Disconnected is ten songs and twenty-five minutes of The Unfit beating their own personal sweet spot to a pulp.

They might sound like it initially, but listening to Disconnected reveals that The Unfit are anything but nihilists. The first song on the compilation, “Bad Guys”, is a dispatch from a dark reality of heartily encouraged violence and warfare (“I smell blood / I kinda want blood / A little bit of blood never hurt anyone”), but the very next song, “Gatekeepers”, is an explicit rejecting of fighting for fighting’s sake when we’ve got bigger fish to fry (“I know you like to fight / I know you think you’re right / But when you point at your neighbor / The gatekeepers are laughing”). The Unfit are more than just hardcore sloganeers, though–the ballistic “Who’s in Charge?” and (especially) the jokingly self-serious “Condemned” (“You may sleep like a baby / You may die like a king / But I’ll know where I stood / And that counts for something, right? / …Right?”) keep their heaviness light. The Unfit may not be Devo-core, but they share a distaste and healthy fear of the technocratic future–the title track to Disconnected is a searing centerpiece, repeating its mantra (“I think there was a time / Before everyone everywhere / Had to know about everything / Everything all the time”) like a prisoner of war trying to remember their past life (in a way, it makes a twisted sense that their most popular song is their Cyberpunk 2077 soundtrack contribution, “To the Fullest”). If “Disconnected” wasn’t enough, “The Big Machine” drives the point home: “It’s broken / So throw that shit out, right?”. (Bandcamp link)

Quinine – World Tattoo

Release date: February 11^th
Record label: Cherub Dream
Genre: Shoegaze, alt-rock, fuzz rock, space rock, grunge
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: He’s Fine

“The world is pretty messed up. These songs are all kind of just about that.” So says the Bandcamp page for World Tattoo, the latest release from a quintet from Sacramento called Quinine. It may be the group’s first EP for Bay Area shoegaze/fuzz pop imprint Cherub Dream Records, but they’ve already strongly entangled themselves with the label–they released a split single with Welcome Strawberry on it last year, and two of the band’s members (guitarist Cole Apperson and bassist Jacob Waite) are in Cherub Dream band Blous3. Aside from a 2023 demo tape and the aforementioned split single, World Tattoo is the first Quinine record, and the band (also made up of guitarist/vocalist Taylor Kohl, guitarist Zack Bissell, and drummer Wyatt Cermak) showcase an aptitude for Hum-like space rock, grungey, shoegaze-informed alt-rock, and even bits of pieces of noise rock and post-hardcore in these four songs. There are some clear hallmarks to Quinine’s sound–Kohl’s monotone, slightly-buried vocals, fuzzed-out guitars, just general greyscale vibes–but these four tracks are all pretty different from one another when you look beyond the band’s stubborn devotion to basement indie rock anonymity.

“He’s Fine”, the opening track, is the rhythm section workout–Waite and Cermak are on fire throughout this one, doing their best to provide a platform for the band’s three guitarists to play around in Sonic Youth land. The title track follows, and it’s the one with “the riffs”; there’s a nice, squealing truckstop guitar part right in the center of it, making it the one song that really does evoke Hum and the heavier side of the alt-rock/grunge/shoegaze revival thing of which Quinine are on the periphery. The biggest “what the?” moment on World Tattoo has to be the eerie synths (I assume?) that open up “Waste of Time”, which Quinine then follow up with pounding drums and hypnotized vocals in a move straight out of the gothic-era Swans playbook. “Waste of Time” gets more recognizably “fuzzed-out basement rock” as it goes on, but it never totally abandons its haunted undercurrent, buzzing right along until Quinine bow out with the shortest song on the album (and, unless they changed any song titles, the one repeat from their demo tape), “Why Even”. Kohl is finally buried under an avalanche of guitars in this one; not all of the song is pure shoegaze, but when the squall kicks in, it’s a category 5. Similarly, not everyone necessarily is looking for another band like Quinine in their lives, but if you’re open to them, they’re doing as much as they can on World Tattoo. (Bandcamp link)

LP Gavin – Trials, Tribulations, Deliberations, Pratfalls, Reprieves, Etc.

Release date: February 28^th
Record label: Safe Suburban Home/Repeating Cloud
Genre: Lo-fi pop, slacker pop, fuzz pop
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: DTMWTD

A month or so ago, Safe Suburban Home Records released Old Master, an album by Publicity Department, a semi-solo slacker rock project from a London lo-fi pop musician named Sean Brook. The similarities between Old Master and the Safe Suburban Home record that immediately followed it–the debut album from a musician known only as LP Gavin–were apparent to me even before I found out that Brook is actually Gavin’s primary (and, I think, sole) collaborator on Trials, Tribulations, Deliberations, Pratfalls, Repreievers, Etc.. Like Publicity Department, LP Gavin is a London-based artist who combines the off-the-cuff pop brilliance of 90s American basement indie rock with classic British guitar pop songwriting, although the differences between Gavin’s music and that of his associate become pretty apparent when we get beyond the surface level. Compared to Brook’s lethargic, almost folk-rock leanings, Gavin is much more electric and wide-ranging (perhaps because, unlike Brook with his group Brunch, Gavin doesn’t have a “band” to explore louder material), actually living up to an album biography that cites both Ovlov and Robert Wyatt as influences. Beyond the moments of actual “fuzz rock”, though, Trials, Tribulations… is marked by a psychedelic, distorted haze that hovers over even the album’s more gentle moments; Gavin’s low-key British vocals mumble and stumble through these bright and inventive instrumentals, only sometimes the main character in his own show.

Opening track “Launderette Euphoria” is a warm addition to a time-worn indie rock tradition–pop music from New Zealand as interpreted by noisy American bands, kind-of-loopy vocals on the soft end of the spectrum and the guitars (both soaring, revved-up melodic leads and steady, chunky, fuzzy power chords) creating a gradient all their own, too. “DTMWTD” (that’s “Don’t Tell Me What to Do”) does the opening track one better with some straight-up, satisfying fuzzy rock and roll, but Trials, Tribulations… only gets weirder and weirder as it goes on. The midsection of the album is very easy to get lost in–between the plodding-along “Yes Yes”, the mid-tempo fuzzed-out “Man with the Keys”, and the late-night folky haze of “Casino”, Trials, Tribulations… becomes an indie rock train derailing. LP Gavin has a couple more strong pop songs up his sleeve towards the end of the album with the bar-piano mutation of “No Inferno” and the fuzz-pop singalong “(Excluded from) The Banquet of Life”, but both tracks maintain Gavin’s buried wooziness nonetheless. When LP Gavin close Trials, Tribulations… with the whisper-quiet acoustic song “Drawing Board”, it feels less like a stylistic choice and more like the necessary exhausted conclusion to an exhaustive debut record. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

• Fust – Big Ugly
• Alpine Subs – Up with the Geese
• Cameronoise – What If We Just Stop Using Their Money?
• Field Hospitals – Ethel Green EP
• Boo/Hiss – Intro + Six Songs EP
• Terraplana – Natural
• 96 Cougars – Forklift Rodeo
• Leita – Alle Porte Del Regno Animale
• Purser – 3x EP
• Mssv – On and On
• Old Pup – Spider Towns
• Jack Riedy – Raw Deal
• Meagre Martin – Up to Snuff EP
• Tristan Armstrong – The Lonely Avenue
• Ghoulies – Shafted by the Algorithm
• Nancy and the Jam Fancys – Swan Songs
• KEG – Fun’s Over
• First Time – Recitals EP
• Greygarden – I Don’t See It Coming
• Water Gun Water Gun Sky Attack – Six Tenants Killing One Homeowner Six Times Over
• Heaven’s Club – Free World EP
• Neal Francis – Return to Zero
• Ideal Living – This Big House EP
• Rotjoch – Bootlek EP
• Uncanny Valet – Almost Island