Pressing Concerns: Lunchbox, The Convenience, Gentle Leader XIV, Avery Friedman

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Welcome to the Thursday Pressing Concerns, featuring four records that shall be released tomorrow, April 18th. We’ve got a deluxe reissue of Lunchbox‘s “lost” album Evolver as well as brand-new albums from The Convenience, Gentle Leader XIV, and Avery Friedman below. If you missed Monday’s Pressing Concerns (featuring B. Hamilton, Truth or Consequences New Mexico, Rhymies, and Gamma Ray) or Tuesday’s (featuring Léna Bartels & Nico Hedley, Impulsive Hearts, Entres Vouz, and hairpin), 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.

Lunchbox – Evolver (Reissue)

Release date: April 18th
Record label: Slumberland
Genre: Indie pop, psychedelic pop, art rock, power pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Satellite

If your first experience with the band Lunchbox was last year’s bright, fresh-sounding indie pop collection Pop and Circumstance, it’d be understandable if you surmised that the Oakland group was part of the current wave of new Bay Area guitar pop groups. Closer inspection to that LP reveals a time-honed skill, however, and indeed the band’s founding duo of Donna McKean and Tim Brown have been making music together for over three decades. Evolver came near the end of the band’s initial run–after putting out music fairly regularly in the second half of the 1990s, Evolver and the mini-album Summer’s Over (both initially released in 2002) were the group’s last releases before a silence of over a decade. Evolver, inspired by Brown’s time in Berlin a few years earlier, general dissatisfaction with the uniformity of the then-current Bay Area indie pop scene, and the technology found in the basement studio in which they were living, was something of Lunchbox’s swan song, a difficult-to-replicate statement that stood as the band’s final one until they were ready to re-emerge years later. Referred to by the band as a “lost album”, their current label Slumberland has not only made Evolver available again, but they’ve also “raided the band’s vaults” to add three bonus tracks to all editions of the album, as well as a vinyl-only fourth side of “beats, loops, interludes and puzzling aural ephemera” on the double LP version.

There’s a certain reverence for Lunchbox from modern pop bands like Perennial, and listening to Evolver makes it all the more clear that they’ve had an impact in a way that goes beyond surface-level measurements of their popularity. If you’ve only heard Pop and Circumstance, there are moments on Evolver that are genuinely shocking, but not in an unfamiliar way–I can think of plenty of newer bands, from Dummy to Outer World to Tomato Flower, that are tapping into this unique mix of 60s pop music and uninhibited experimental electronic music. Elephant 6 and Stereolab are some contemporaries that come to mind, although they’re so wide-ranging that they’re not particularly useful descriptors of this album on their own–the bright, trumpet-laden opening title track is very Apples in Stereo, the gliding “Letter from Overend” is the sort of bossa nova-flecked indie rock that reminds me of Stereolab or Yo La Tengo, and the hissing lo-fi guitar pop of “Temperature Is a Constant” and “Satellite” capture a Guided by Voices kind of thing. Aside from the fourth side of the physical 2LP, Evolver is still almost entirely a pop album, although it’s not really one for indie pop purists–sticking the six-minute backmasked psychedelic trip of “Particle Wave” second in the running order will see to that, and everything from the electronic touches of “Tone Poem” to the ambient instrumental choices of “.09”, “.12”, and “Sleeping Is Not Dreaming” (a post-new-wave epic in its own right) back this up. The strong pop statements and the subversions are both incredibly inspired, not sounding like polar opposites but as different stops on the Evolver road. (Bandcamp link)

The Convenience – Like Cartoon Vampires

Release date: April 18th
Record label: Winspear
Genre: Post-punk, art rock, art punk, psychedelic pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Dub Vultures

Few people know this, but you can actually make post-punk in the year 2025 without trying to be as anxious as Kele Okereke or as spiteful as Mark E. Smith. You can actually sound cool while doing it! This is the less-traveled path–the Spoon path, more recently the Cola path, and now we can add the New Orleans duo The Convenience to this list, too. Nick Corson and Duncan Troast have been The Convenience for a while now–their first EP came out back in 2018, and they put out their debut album, the 80s-inspired synthpop/art pop collection Accelerator, in 2021. Like Cartoon Vampires, the second Convenience LP, is a pretty big departure–the duo have spent the last few years playing in indie pop group Video Age, and perhaps they no longer need their “main” band to be an outlet for their lighter side, too. Like Cartoon Vampires is a headfirst dive into the world of “art rock”–snappy rhythms, splattered guitars, and strange psychedelic detours characterize the album. Like Cartoon Vampires is grey in comparison to Troast and Corson’s other recent output, but for a post-punk album it’s bright, shiny, and colorful. The Convenience consider Like Cartoon Vampires a “return to their roots”, an album reflecting the music that Corson and Troast initially bonded over, but it sounds to me like they’ve been able to take parts of Accelerator and Video Age (at the very least, a certain attitude) and apply it here, too.

“I Got Exactly What I Wanted” is a bold opening track–The Convenience decided to go for “chugging” and “moody” in atmosphere, as if the shift to feedback-aided post-punk wasn’t a clear enough indication of where Like Cartoon Vampires is headed. The Convenience deliver it with an ice-cold precision, though, and when they let some more light poke through in the garage rock-indebted “Target Offer” and the clattering, groovy art punk of “Dub Vultures”, it’s a clean a transition as possible (these songs remind me of another great Southern post-punk band, Balkans). There are moments on Like Cartoon Vampires that sound like a soft rock-conscious band wrote them, although The Convenience largely restrict these to the shorter songs and interludes like “Opportunity” and “Rats”. For the most part, though, The Convenience just want to rock–and they give us track after track of it, from the underground speed-racing “That’s Why I Never Became a Dancer” to the rubber-band-jangle-punk of “2022” (fans of NE-HI and Dehd, take note) to the rockabilly rave-up of “Western Pepsi Cola Town” (alright, so there’s one song that sounds like The Fall on here). The Convenience wrap it all up neatly with a ten-minute noise/drone-rock track called “Fake the Feeling”, beginning as a slightly warped post-punk song before letting the feedback overtake everything. What’s more fun than that? (Bandcamp link)

Gentle Leader XIV – Joke in the Shadow

Release date: April 18th
Record label: Feel It
Genre: Post-punk, art rock, industrial, dream pop, synthpunk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Pig Dream

The latest signee to the vaunted garage rock label Feel It Records is a band that’s new to me, but one whose members have been at it for a while now. Maria Jenkins (vocals/synth), Jeffrey Tucholski (guitar), and Matt Hallaran (vocals/bass/synth) split their time between Cincinnati and Cleveland now, but they originated in Chicago in the early 2010s, playing in bands like Hollows, Running, and Glass Traps. Gentle Leader XIV’s first album, Channels (featuring original bass player Lisa McDuffie) came out in 2018 on Windy City imprint Moniker Records (Dan Melchior, ONO, The Hecks), and they hadn’t released anything in the seven years since, so you’d be forgiven if you thought Gentle Leader XIV had petered out at some point, but they’re back in a new state with a new, Ohio-based label to put out a sophomore album entitled Joke in the Shadow. A post-punk record with prominent synthesizer, Joke in the Shadow doesn’t really fall under the purview of garage-y, Feel It-core “synthpunk”, nor is it polished new wave-y synthpop–it’s an interesting, difficult-to-grasp rock record made by a group of musicians who’ve probably heard it all and need to push things a little further to be truly excited about their craft.

The ten songs of Joke in the Shadow stretch past the forty minute mark, and each one takes exactly as much time as it needs to build the world that Gentle Leader XIV want it to house. Opening track “Pig Dream” is a beautiful but slow-moving ballad, a showcase for Jenkins’ vocals even as it feels like an unlikely choice to open an album like this one. Things get a bit busier with “Fawning” and “Serve the End”–still somewhat difficult, these statues are shaped by synthpop, new wave, industrial, and gothic rock music. The six-minute centerpiece “The Door” trudges along across a minimal synth beat and drum machines, a pop song that hardly feels like pop at all, and the second half of Joke in the Shadow features plenty of songs matching this description as well (like the minimal, floating dreamy synthpop of the title track, or the icy electronica of “Reverser”). The two final songs on Joke in the Shadow are both overloaded in their own way–“Bomb Pop” rides a marching drum machine beat and squealing guitars into oblivion, while “Consequences” dribbles its own mechanical percussion into a finale that becomes a wall of distorted noise. Joke in the Shadow isn’t going to be for everyone, sure, but it’s for Gentle Leader XIV and the people who think like them. (Bandcamp link)

Avery Friedman – New Thing

Release date: April 18th
Record label: Audio Antihero
Genre: Singer-songwriter, folk rock, slowcore, emo-y indie rock
Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Photo Booth

We’ve got some more folky indie rock from Brooklyn on our hands! I get records that match this description emailed to me every day, so you can rest assured that I wouldn’t be writing about this one if it wasn’t a clear standout from that pack. New Thing, the debut album from Brooklyn singer-songwriter Avery Friedman, is indeed a strong and promising collection of music that’s a little emo, a little folky, and a little “arty” from someone who’s openly calling acts like Big Thief and Squirrel Flower influences and who’s played shows with the likes of Dead Gowns and h. pruz. I think that New Thing works so well because of how direct and electric it sounds–music like this often falls into the realm of “bedroom folk”, but Friedman and her collaborators give it a strong, confident, full band delivery. These collaborators–James Chrisman of Sister. and Ciao Malz on guitar and engineering, Felix Walworth of the sorely-missed Told Slant on drums, Ryan Cox on bass–deserve credit for how this album ended up, but, importantly, Friedman’s singing and playing at the center of it all are forceful enough not to get buried beneath them.

New Thing isn’t full-on “slowcore” and it’s certainly not “post-rock”, but fans of that kind of music will appreciate Friedman’s patient take on indie rock here. At eight tracks and under a half hour in length, New Thing doesn’t overstay its welcome, but in its brief time with us it stretches itself out and explores the edges a bit. Opening track “Into” is two minutes of slow-moving electric guitar and mumbled vocals, bleeding seamlessly into the deliberate, emo-y rock of the title track. “Flowers Fell” is subdued but highly charged between the lines, a quality shared by much of New Thing, particularly the slow-building “Finger Painting” and the quiet distortion of “Somewhere to Go”. Single “Photo Booth” is a surprise, incorporating synths and coming off a bit more openly “pop” than the rest of the record (although Friedman does quietly seethe and pine in the vocals in a way that connects it to the more…elemental rest of the album). New Thing starts to fade with “Biking Standing” and continues into the acoustic-led closing track “Nervous”–Friedman finally lets some air out after winding through the majority of the album, breathing a little more after turning down the tension from “suffocating” to merely “ambient”. There’s still a lot going on in these final two songs, to be clear–they’ll be there for us once we’ve gotten a handle on what came before them. (Bandcamp link)

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2 thoughts on “Pressing Concerns: Lunchbox, The Convenience, Gentle Leader XIV, Avery Friedman”

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