Pressing Concerns: With Patience, Brian Bilston and The Catenary Wires, Unwed Sailor, IE

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Four new albums that are coming out tomorrow (May 9th)? In Pressing Concerns today? It’s more likely than you think! New LPs from With Patience, Unwed Sailor, and IE, plus a collaboration between The Catenary Wires and Brian Bilston, are featured below. Also, check out Monday’s Pressing Concerns (featuring Flower Show, Tiny Vipers, Deep-Fried Butterfly, and GBMystical) and the April 2025 playlist (which went up Tuesday) if you missed either of ’em.

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.

With Patience – Triptych

Release date: May 9th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Noise rock, garage rock, post-hardcore, punk rock
Formats: CD, digital
Pull Track: Disco

Last year, I introduced the blog to With Patience, a Chicago trio made up of three longtime indie rock/punk/underground music veterans, by way of their three-song debut EP Three of Swords. Bassist/vocalist Lance Curran, drummer/vocalist Lee Diamond, and guitarist/vocalist Chris Wade have played in bands like Careful, Douglass Kings, Alkaloid, and hose.got.cable between the three of them, and their first EP displayed their love of noisy indie punk inspired by the likes of Dischord Records, Drive Like Jehu, and plenty of bands in their home city. They’ve now returned with their first full-length album, entitled Triptych (With Patience do love their threes, don’t they?), recorded in Diamond’s basement in Evanston and then handed off to the experts (J. Robbins, who mixed it, Bob Weston, who mastered it, and John Mohr of Deep Tunnel Project and Tar, who stars in a music video for one of the songs). Triptych expands on the brief promise of Three of Swords, staying in the realms of post-hardcore, punk, and noise rock but with some genuine surprises–there’s a sense of humor and funness to some of these songs that the EP didn’t really hint at, while, on the other hand, Diamond’s occasionally metal-influenced drumming takes With Patience to even heavier places.

There aren’t many chances to catch a breath in the opening section of Triptych between the high-flying garage-y punk rock of opening track “Let Bygones Bury the Hatchet”, the prowling hard rock of “Cobra”, and the art punk/post-punk combustion of “Flybuzz”. “Disco” is not a disco song (of course), but it does come out of the gate with a smooth bassline and brisk drumbeat that leads With Patience into previously-unexplored “toe-tapping” territory, and the cleverness of “False Memories” is in how it combines some of the most overt homages to their musical idols (in this case, MacKaye and Picciotto) with lyrics that explicitly reject and mock the allure of nostalgia (the titular “false memories”). Arguably the most catchy song on the album is called “It’s Time”, a bouncy little number whose lyrics are little more than the title line (“It’s time / We’re all / Gonna die”) and “Dip diddip, dip diddip / D-d-dystopia” (that’s actually how the band write that one out). While Diamond’s furious metal drumming punches up “It’s Time”, it really features prominently in “Temple”, a late-record explosion that might be the single heaviest moment on the album. It’s surrounded by a slow-crawling drama called “Heart Is a Pump” and the garage punk dynamite closing track “Exit As Instructed”, which are both “heavy” in their own ways, too. The latter song, the most “post-hardcore” track on Triptych, is about having a panic attack on the CTA and struggling to make it to one’s own stop. It sounds like With Patience just make it at the end of the record. (Bandcamp link)

Brian Bilston and The Catenary Wires – Sounds Made by Humans

Release date: May 9th
Record label: Skep Wax
Genre: Indie pop, spoken word, twee, post-punk, jangle pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Every Song on the Radio Reminds Me of You

The Catenary Wires are, effectively, right at the center of four decades of British indie pop–the album’s co-leading duo of Amelia Fletcher and Rob Pursey famously played together in the legendary band Heavenly in the 1990s (as well as a host of other Heavenly-associated bands from Talulah Gosh to Marine Research to Tender Trap to Swansea Sound) and they also co-run Skep Wax Records, which releases new indie pop records from both veterans and new faces. Despite all of this, it’s been four years since the group (currently a trio rounded out by Swansea Sound and Papernut Cambridge’s Ian Button on drums) has put out an album, and their newest release is a bit of a departure from their first three LPs. Brian Bilston is a pseudonymous poet (and noted Heavenly fan); after reaching out to each other in mutual admiration, a plan was formed for The Catenary Wires to adapt thirteen of Bilston’s poems as “pop songs”.  Although the cores of these songs are Bilston’s poems, frequently read by Bilston himself, the artists sought to make themselves “equal partners” on Sounds Made by Humans, Pursey (the primary musical composer) carefully weaving in his signature indie pop with the help of the rest of the band (as well as occasional Catenary Wires member Fay Hallam on keyboards).

Bilston’s poems are fairly short, witty, and direct–if you’re going to combine a poet with a British twee band, he’s probably one of the best options out there. “Alexa, What Is There to Know About Love?” kicks off Sounds Made by Humans by balancing two artists with distinct, large styles precariously–Bilston is as an effective speaker as he is a writer, and The Catenary Wires meet his nervous energy with a surprisingly deep post-punk/dream pop instrumental and Fletcher’s haunting vocals (a nice counterbalance to the stoic-on-the-surface but somewhat shaken Bilston). “The Interview” shows that The Catenary Wires can make their mark on a song that’s almost entirely full of Bilston’s rambling (the power pop instrumental is just able to keep up with him) and “Every Song on the Radio Reminds Me of You” injects a chorus sung by Fletcher and Pursley effortlessly. Bilston seems to like his lists, as “To Do List” and “31 Rules for Midlife Rebellion” take this format, and “Compilation Cassette”, while not written as such, is about a list of songs (labored over and most likely discarded by its recipient). The majority of Sounds Made by Humans is soundtracked by Pursey and Fletcher’s indie pop bread and butter, but The Catenary Wires are game to match Bilston’s energy in, say, the almost Zeppelin-esque punchy rock of “As I Grow Old I Will March Not Shuffle” (in which Bilston declares his intent to be an “octogenarian obstructionist”). Sounds Made by Humans works because the openness of all parties is palpable, even as they retain their original forms. (Bandcamp link)

Unwed Sailor – Cruel Entertainment

Release date: May 9th
Record label: Current Taste
Genre: Post-punk, post-rock, noise rock, dream pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Rock Candy

Jonathan Ford got his musical start in Seattle in the 1990s playing in the cult Tooth & Nail math rock band Roadside Monument, and not long after that he joined Pedro the Lion on bass guitar for a few years. Ford has remained quite busy ever since (you can hear him on a few Damien Jurado albums, for instance), but his longest project is Unwed Sailor, the instrumental post-rock group of which he is the only permanent member. Ford has kept Unwed Sailor active through lineup and geographical changes, eventually ending up back in Tulsa, Oklahoma (the state in which Ford was born) with a trio setup including drummer Matthew Putman and guitarist David Swatzell. After stints on Burnt Toast and Spartan Records, Ford debuted his own new label Current Taste with last year’s Unwed Sailor album, Underwater Over There, and Cruel Entertainment (the tenth Unwed Sailor LP) follows it almost exactly one year later. I’m admittedly not the most familiar with Unwed Sailor’s back catalog, but the “post-rock” tag feels strange to put on this one, as it feels like swinging, electric rock music that just happens to not have a vocalist for the most part. There are perhaps some swelling Mogwai-ish moments, but for the most part Cruel Entertainment feels more in the realms of post-punk, noise rock, and even new wave.

Perhaps it’s not so surprising that a bassist bandleader would make music that sounds a little like New Order. Ford certainly offers up plenty of melodic bass-led moments on Cruel Entertainment, but Unwed Sailor are interested in something darker and louder and therefore less prone to get overly wrapped up in excessive Peter Hook worship. “Rock Candy” feels like a mission statement of some sort–it comes bursting out the gate with a huge, noise rock-esque low end, and the three-minute opening song is a prowling ball of post-punk and fuzzed-out indie rock. Unwed Sailor might step back a little bit after “Rock Candy”–“Slab City” veers into dream pop territory, “Monster Collecting” into bright new wave, “Soft Copy” somewhere in between the two–but we haven’t heard the last of noisy Unwed Sailor, as the almost classic rock guitar riffs of “BODYMOD” assure us. Unwed Sailor close out Cruel Entertainment with some songs that try to balance the darkness and light–penultimate track “Sad Help” and its mix of Dischord-y post-punk and swooning 80s rock is quite successful, and the basement 90s indie rock attitude of the closing title track collides entertainingly with the band’s maximalist ambitions. Unwed Sailor have wound through a substantial history to get to Cruel Entertainment, but they’re still weaving as this record draws to a close. (Bandcamp link)

IE – Reverse Earth

Release date: May 9th
Record label: Quindi
Genre: Post-rock, art rock, psychedelia, dream pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Reverse Earth

The latest signee to Italian art rock label Quindi (Dead Bandit, Monde UFO, Fortunato Durutti Marinetti) is a Minneapolis group simply called IE that seems to fit well on their roster. Since their debut in 2016 with AAOA, the band have dabbled in a bunch of different subsets of experimental music, releasing records imbibed with bits of drone, doom, ambient, electronic, and slowcore. It seems like IE was founded by the trio of keyboardist Michael Gallope, drummer Meredith Gill, and guitarist/keyboardist Travis Workman–in the years between AAOA and their latest full-length, Reverse Earth, they’ve added guitarist/bongo player Sam Molstad and bassist/vocalist/flautist Mariel Oliveira to grow to a quintet. Spanning five songs in thirty-five minutes, Reverse Earth is perhaps not what one typically imagines as a “pop album”, but between Oliveira’s vocals, the band’s sturdy and reliable rhythms, and well-behaved synths, it does feel like a turn for the accessible for IE. It’s psychedelic, but in a sprawling, droning way rather than a sensory overload one–it’s some of the best sophisticated post-rock pop music delivered via a refined jam band that you’ll hear this year.

We begin Reverse Earth with the seven-minute title track, a confident and sleek synth-rock journey that displays both the outer vastness that IE can create and the subtly intricate interiors found within their music. The next song, “Divination Bag”, is even longer and weirder–for a lot of the track, Oliveria’s flute shadowboxes with the synths, and you’d best believe that Molstad’s breaking the bongos out for this one. Despite this, it’s a strong showcase for Oliveria as a pop vocalist, and Reverse Earth becomes easier to get a handle on with her voice as a guide. Compared to what came before them, the relatively brief (under six minutes, I mean) dream pop of “Simplify” and “Dark Rome” are child’s play, but IE pull them off too, the cavernous western guitars in the latter and spacey, brassy psychedelic synths of the former ensuring that the band are still going down as many paths (albeit leisurely) as possible. The only other song on the album is “Babel”, the penultimate denouement that sits a little uneasily between the two shorter tracks. Oliveira’s vocals are more spoken-word here than elsewhere on the album, the rhythms are a bit more “jazzy” than the rest of Reverse Earth, and the synths come and go, dropping in and out of view. It’s all very smooth nonetheless, though–it’s nothing that IE haven’t spent the first half of Reverse Earth preparing us for in one way or another. (Bandcamp link)

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