Pressing Concerns: Festiva, Andhi & the O’Neills, C’mon Tigre, Monnone Alone

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Come on down to the first Pressing Concerns of the week! We’re practically giving away this blog post (literally, I suppose; it doesn’t cost you anything to read it, but you might want to earmark some money for purchasing these records). We’ve got new albums from Festiva, Andhi & the O’Neills, and Monnone Alone, as well as a reissue from C’mon Tigre, below.

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.

Festiva – Everything in Moderation

Release date: April 25th
Record label: Repeating Cloud
Genre: Garage rock, weird rock, post-punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Rat Man

I’ve written about a bunch of guitar pop albums from Repeating Cloud Records over the years, but the ones that come from the label’s home state of Maine always seem to be a little…ornerier. There’s the garage punk of Snake Lips and the post-punk of FonFon Ru, but their latest signee, Portland’s Festiva, reminds me of the careening, hooky, sloppy indie rock of Repeating Cloud tycoon Galen Richmond’s bands Lemon Pitch and Gum Parker. I figured that it was something peculiar to Richmond and his collaborators’ bands (Midwestern Medicine, Heaven’s Cameras), but as far as I know, there’s no overlap between them and Festiva. They’re led by guitarist/vocalist Carver Arena-Bruce, who’s played in Rory Strong’s band before, and bassist Simi Kunin is another Rory Strong band alum (Noah Grenier-Farwell of Amiright? rounds out the lineup). Festiva released albums in 2019 and 2020 effectively as an Arena-Bruce solo project–Everything in Moderation is their first as a full band, their first for Repeating Cloud, and first new record of any kind in five years. Everything in Moderation actually might be the missing link between the emo-punk-tinged songwriting of Rory Strong and the Repeating Cloud roster–Arena-Bruce is certainly an interesting writer, but the punchy garage rock instrumentals ensure that the vocals and lyrics don’t have to carry the entire record anyway.

Case in point, “Bird” begins Everything in Moderation with a nice hooky guitar riff, and Festiva proceed to build a strange, dramatic indie rock opera of sorts over top of it. “Ghosts and Lichens” finds the band taking a journey into the world of sloppy, gut-spilling punk rock, but the trio clean up their sound just enough on “Rat Man” to pull off something a little more dynamic and post-punk-influenced (there’s, like, fucked up Elvis Costello and surf rock in this one–it’s definitely a highlight). Things really get weird around the midpoint of Everything in Moderation, starting with the bizarre Biblical rant in the groovy garage rock of “The Shortest Gospel” (“St. Mark, he wrote the shortest of the Gospels / I guess his mind was elsewhere on that day”) and continuing into the lumbering heavy fuzz rock of “DMV (Organ Donor Song)” (first lines: “I wanted to be an organ donor / But they would not take my organs from me”). “The Dead of the Night” teeters on the brink, and the somewhat-heavy “In a Dream” falls straight into the gutter (the vocals on that one kind of remind me of Vundabar, so maybe this is a New England thing going on here). It’s a fairly intense final stretch, although Festiva close things out with a piano track called “Grimoire (Closing Credits)”. Even this “simple” finale gets dizzying with a bunch of overlaid vocals and references to previous tracks on the album, making it a fitting cap to Everything in Moderation. (Bandcamp link)

Andhi & the O’Neills – The Surprise Party

Release date: April 11th
Record label: Mint 400
Genre: Folk rock, Americana, soft rock, blues rock, jazz rock
Formats: CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Peg

Andhi O’Neill spent the 2010s fronting the group Origami Sun, and after that band seemingly hung it up (their last album was in 2017), he put out an album and EP recorded entirely by himself earlier this decade. Now apparently ready to make music with others again, the Peekskill, New York-based artist has launched a project called Andhi & the O’Neills, which also features guitarist/keyboardist Austin Kopec, drummer Greg Hanson, and bassist Stefano Luigi Guida. The first record from Andi & the O’Neills is a debut LP called The Surprise Party, produced by Seth Applebaum of Ghost Funk Orchestra, mastered by Heather Jones of Ther, and released by Mint 400 Records. That’s a pretty random assortment of associations, so what does The Surprise Party sound like? Given that most of the songs are built around O’Neill leading the band with his acoustic guitar, it’s tempting to call it “folk rock”, although O’Neill’s songwriting sensibilities incorporate classic country and blues as much as the canonical folk troubadours. Perhaps O’Neill was writing for his band, perhaps the band brought it out of him, but either way The Surprise Party clearly benefits from a group performance, as The O’Neills give these songs enjoyable readings of everything from jazzy soft rock to 60s psychedelic/folk pop. 

The songs on The Surprise Party aren’t jokes, but O’Neill borrows a clear cleverness from the country and folk singer-songwriters who’ve gone before him. The lilting yacht rock of “Blame It on the Weatherman”, the organ-led 60s excursion of “Caffeine” (in which the titular substance is–perhaps correctly–treated like a debilitating vice), and the country phrase-turning ballad “Sublet My Heart” all let O’Neill get a little creative in the lyrics, but they work because of the fun, excited vibes that the rest of the group bring to them–they sound like a bar band who’re still clinging to their love of the game after years on the circuit, and to be clear I mean that as a compliment. The Surprise Party gets a little bolder as it goes on–there’s less in terms of obvious gimmicks in the music and lyrics, but songs like the stuck-in-time “Town” and the breezy folk rock of “Peg” reward us for putting faith in Andhi & the O’Neills’ ability to be just as good without as many bells and whistles. The closing song of The Surprise Party is the title track, and it’s the right note on which to go out–in a way, all of this album is about strength in numbers, but “The Surprise Party” is the one where (using the titular activity as a jumping-off point) O’Neill just comes out and sings “I admit it’s nice to know / I’m not alone”. (Bandcamp link)

C’mon Tigre – TEN

Release date: April 11th
Record label: Computer Students
Genre: Experimental rock, jazz-rock, post-punk, post-rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Federation Tunisienne De Football

C’mon Tigre are a somewhat mysterious art rock duo who’ve been around for at least a decade now–they seem to have connections to both Italy and New York, and they’ve released five albums in their time together and collaborated with everyone from Arto Lindsay to Sean Kuti to Xenia Rubinos. C’mon Tigre’s “sound” appears to be fairly wide-ranging, but the essence of it was captured on their 2015 self-titled debut album–fluid, limber rock music that pulls from jazz, Afrobeats, funk, dub, and psychedelia in a natural-feeling manner. C’mon Tigre was initially released through Julien Fernandez’s Italian imprint Africantape (Big’n, The Conformists, Shipping News), and Fernandez’s current label Computer Students has now put together a reissue of the band’s first album called TEN (or “Tenth Edition Newness”). As it stands now, TEN sounds like a compelling and complete midpoint between “indie rock” and the more exploratory genres from which C’mon Tigre have taken inspiration–it’s a sprawling double LP whose thirteen songs add up to nearly an hour, for one, but its largess masks the fact that it’s still largely built from “rock” instruments. Don’t get me wrong, there are still plenty of moments featuring trumpet and saxophone (and, per the credits, stylophone, vibraphone, and “human beatbox”), but a lot of TEN gets by with little more than guitars and dynamic percussion.

C’mon Tigre introduce themselves slowly and beautifully–opening track “Rabat” is a three-minute, wordless jazz-guitar sigh, and while “Federation Tunisienne De Football” brings some noise, it’s a more streamlined post-punk/math rock-indebted clatter. C’mon Tigre’s true intentions are perhaps not entirely clear until we get to the fourth song on TEN, “A World of Wonder”–the duo still sound fairly jumbled and like an “indie rock band”, but the song stretches to eight minutes and the horns begin to wail fairly early on in its length. Where do C’mon Tigre go from there? Well, a bit of everywhere–they slow it down again with the minimal, jazz-flecked “December”, they come out swinging in the horn-led mid-tempo prowler “Commute” (and then collapse), they put together a sweaty funk rock four minutes with “Life As a Preened Tuxedo Jacket”, and they truly deconstruct and reconstruct themselves with the two-part “Building Society – The Great Collapse” and “Building Society – Renovation”. C’mon Tigre exit TEN much like the way they came in–after the floating end of “Building Society”, both “Welcome Back Monkeys” and “Malta (The Bird and the Bear)” emphasize the group’s jazz interests (albeit to differing ends). Unmoored from much (if any) timeframe, TEN is an easy record to return to after a decade–that is, if anything about C’mon Tigre can be described as “easy”. (Cmptr Stdnts link)

Monnone Alone – Here Comes the Afternoon

Release date: May 2nd
Record label: Meritorio/Lost and Lonesome/Repeating Cloud/Safe Suburban Home
Genre: Power pop, jangle pop, psychedelic pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Dry Doubt

A key figure in Australian indie pop, Mark Monnone spent the 1990s and 2000s playing bass in the great Lucksmiths, and since 1997 he’s been running the record label Lost and Lonesome, who’ve put out records from The Small Intestines, Sonny & The Sunsets, and The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, among others. Monnone started the Monnone Alone project in the early 2010s–at first it was more or less a Monnone solo project with various guest contributions, then it congealed into a quartet rounded out by drummer Gus Franklin, bassist Joe Foley, and guitarist/organist Louis Richter, only to revert to solo project again for 2021’s pandemic-era Stay Foggy. The band are back for Here Comes the Afternoon, the fourth Monnone Alone album and first in four years, and they effortlessly rejoin Monnone’s indie pop journey for these eleven tracks. Like typical Monnone Alone records (Stay Foggy excepted), plenty of outside musicians stop in as well–this LP features contributions from Gary Olson of The Ladybug Transistor, Isobel Knowles (who previously played with Franklin in Architecture in Helsinki), and Dick Diver’s Steph Hughes, among other Australian indie veterans. They’ll pop in and lend a voice or a guitar (or, in Olson’s case, “bongos and Tibetan singing bowl”), but Monnone keeps the focus on breezy, charming guitar pop of several stripes.

Monnone cites the Happy Mondays as an inspiration for Here Comes the Afternoon (alongside more obvious names like The Bats and The Apples in Stereo), and the oddly danceable backbeat to opening track “Dry Doubt” does back this up to a degree. The majority of the album adheres more to the classic Australian indie pop mix of jangle pop, power pop, and folk rock, but Monnone Alone’s take on it is a spirited one, familiar-sounding or not. The bright jangle of “Ways to Wear My Hair” and the melancholic “River of Sighs” take similar setups and make them feel wildly different, while “St Mary’s Pass” adds trumpet from Knowles that gives it a soft rock/sophisti-pop/Skep Wax-esque bent. At their perkiest, Monnone Alone offer up hooky indie pop-rock like “Mr Nobody”, the weirdly sleazy “Brain Stone”, and power pop behemoth “Loose Terrain”–but on the other side of things, “Tilted” is dreamy, hazy, and psychedelic in its interpretation of guitar pop, and the generously-applied organ gives the meandering “The Morning Won’t Last” a psychedelic streak of its own, too. Here Comes the Afternoon is a rewarding trip through Australian indie music with a uniquely qualified tour guide. (Bandcamp link)

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