Pressing Concerns: Labrador, SAVAK, Foxwarren, Lung

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The Thursday Pressing Concerns this week brings us four albums coming out tomorrow (May 30th), specifically new LPs from Labrador, SAVAK, Foxwarren, and Lung. Check them out below, and also catch up on this week’s early blog posts (a brief remembrance of Pere Ubu’s David Thomas on Monday, a Pressing Concerns featuring Friendship, COR1, Credit, and Jonathan Rundman on Tuesday) if you missed them, 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.

Labrador – My Version of Desire

Release date: May 30th
Record label: No Way of Knowing/Safe Suburban Home
Genre: Alt-country, power pop, college rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Dry Out in June

Sometime in the chilly winter of early 2023, I wrote about Hold the Door for Strangers, an album from a Philadelphia alt-country group called Labrador. After years of being a New York-based solo project for singer-songwriter Pat King, the bandleader reinvented his project as a “lumbering, Neil Young-inspired” five-piece country rock group, and King began working on a follow-up album almost immediately afterwards. My Version of Desire, the latest Labrador album, features a retooled lineup–they’re down to a trio, with King joined by newcomers Will Hochgertel on bass and Steve Kurtz on drums (although former full-time member Kris Hayes does play guitar on the majority of these songs). Labrador and Hayes trekked over to So Big Auditory to have Heather Jones of Ther record these nine songs (Jones also plays keyboard on a few songs), and together they all help the Labrador project take a big, satisfying step forward. King has always been a vocal supporter of music far beyond his alt-country pigeonhole, and while I can’t say that, for instance, his love of metal is reflected in My Version of Desire, plenty of other threads are–power pop and college rock, certainly, as well as classic rock and 60s pop and soul and Roy Orbison (and so on).

Hold the Door for Strangers had an all-timer power pop song that stood out among the rest of the record in its opening track, “State Line to Eagleville”; My Version of Desire has one too in “Dry Out in June”, sitting pretty in the number two slot. Apparently this one’s been kicking around for the better part of the decade, but Labrador finally fully realize it here–they turn King’s frantic, fumbling reaches towards sobriety into maximum pop rock and roll gold with everybody on handclaps, Hayes on squealing lead guitar, and Jones delivering a knockout massive keyboard hook (it’s, like, the midpoint between Jason Isbell and Perennial that I probably wouldn’t expect anyone other than Labrador to hit). I don’t want to get hung up on one song, as great as it is–we’ve got a lot of other good moments on My Version of Desire’s lightning-quick thirty minutes to acknowledge. The driving, Westerberigan college rock of “Heavy Hearts” brightens up the record’s B-side in the one moment that rivals “Dry Out in June” in pure power pop excess, but the streamlined pop rock of “People Like You And Me” has its own breezy charms, too. Elsewhere on My Version of Desire, Labrador make turns (of varying subtlety) to laid-back AOR (opening track “Someday I’ll Pay”), the electric country rock of their previous album (“Every Day Is Something Different”), and lilting, soulful guitar pop (the title track). There’s a Labrador song for most moods and occasions here–and listening to the brief, incredibly tight record front beginning to end is both of those things in its own right. (Bandcamp link)

SAVAK – SQUAWK!

Release date: May 30th
Record label: Peculiar Works/Ernest Jenning
Genre: Garage rock, post-punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Casual Cruelty

Brooklyn’s SAVAK have been putting out records at a steady clip since their debut in 2016, and things have been no different as of late–2024’s Flavors of Paradise is barely a year old now, as is the split EP they released with France’s Contractions around the same time. It’s no surprise, then, that the trio (founding co-bandleaders Sohrab Habibion and Michael Jaworski, plus longtime drummer Matt Schulz) are back already with the seventh SAVAK album, SQUAWK!. Seemingly recorded piecemeal (some songs recorded by Habibion and Jaworski themselves, with Guided by Voices’ Travis Harrison, among others, credited on other tracks), SQUAWK! features a bunch of guest musicians–most notably bassist Matt Hunter and drummer Jeff Gensterblum, but also Maria Marzaioli of the much-missed Slum of Legs on violin for “Your Mother Is a Mirror”. I’m pleased to report, however, that SAVAK still sound exactly like themselves here. A tight ten songs and thirty-five minutes (plus the two Contractions split EP songs as digital bonus tracks), the longtime indie rock veterans continue to hammer out their by-now quite recognizable style of college rock, post-punk, and garage rock–tough but polished, familiar but surprising, catchy as ever.

“The Moon Over Marine Park” is a surging opening track that’s just as strong as “Up with the Sun” from last year, turning SAVAK’s garage-post-punk sound into something quite agreeable without losing its agitated center. If SQUAWK! is on the whole a little bit trickier and thornier than their last couple of records, it’s not apparent from the album’s opening stretch–“Child’s Pose” and “Talk to Some People” both bring vintage, somewhat jangly SAVAK-pop to the forefront, and Will Fitzpatrick of Good Grief and Witching Waves (and a former SAVAK bassist) calls “No Man’s Island” “a a Lou Reed/Velvets vibe” in the record’s bio (he’s onto something with that). The second half of SQUAWK! brings a couple of new SAVAK rippers in “Casual Cruelty” (propulsive garage-y power pop that might actually be the biggest “hit” here) and “Tomorrow and the Day After” (more mid-tempo, stuffed with melodic brilliance). First, though, SAVAK bridge the record’s two sides with a nearly ambient, hushed atmospheric piece called “American Vernacular” (it still sounds like a SAVAK song, but kind of inverted), and the group return to the “strange” for the record’s final two tracks. Marzaioli’s violin adds to the lost-in-time dream-like haze of “Your Mother Is a Mirror”, and “Empty Age” is SAVAK’s own entry into the New York electric noise rock collage tradition. If you’re already part of the SAVAK society, I doubt you’ll need more convincing that they’ve done it yet again–but there’s always room for more. (Bandcamp link)

Foxwarren – 2

Release date: May 30th
Record label: ANTI-/Arts & Crafts
Genre: Indie pop, psychedelic pop, folk rock, dream pop, soft rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Listen2me

My familiarity with the increasingly-beloved Regina, Saskatchewan-based folk rock musician Andy Shauf is, admittedly, fairly limited. I heard his 2020 album The Skyline and absolutely loved the song “Try Again”, but the album as a whole didn’t stick with me all that much and I’d never dug further. Still, “Try Again” combined with co-signatures from plenty of people whose taste I respect made me willing to listen to an advance of the latest album from a band he’s also in, and I’m glad I did, because I quite enjoyed 2 by Foxwarren. Since I don’t know that much about Shauf, I didn’t realize that Foxwarren actually predate most of Shauf’s solo work–he formed the band with Dallas Bryson, Avery Kissick, and Darryl Kissick in the late 2000s, though they didn’t release a formal debut album until 2018’s self-titled one. Since then, Foxwarren has added Colin Nealis to their lineup, Shauf’s solo work has garnered more acclaim, and the five of them slowly but surely worked on what would become 2. Stepping away from the folk rock of Foxwarren, 2 is a work of “collage art” featuring sampled recordings of the quintet’s instruments, vocals, and outside audio clips shaped delicately but vibrantly into pop music.

Foxwarren make a big deal of the “classic hip-hop techniques and musique concrète” ideas that went into making 2, and they’re certainly there, but I don’t want to overstate the avant-garde-ness of the album–it’s still within the realm of Shauf’s folk-pop sound, with the songs congealing into familiar shapes built in a completely novel (for Foxwarren, at least) way. It’s “indie folk” with plenty of “dream pop” and “psychedelia” mixed in, not far from fellow Canadian folk auteur Jon McKiel, Flotation Toy Warning, or the more rustic sides of the Woodsist and Elephant 6 catalogs. The snippets of what sound like old movie dialogues (or, at least, audio that evokes old movie dialogues) are the most obvious departure from a “rock band” setup, although there are plenty more oddities that stick out like objects ready to be moved in Hanna-Barbera cartoons–pianos and strings are beamed in from another time zone, sampled bass notes shape themselves, against all odds, into the hearts of several tracks, and Shauf is his usual distinct, direct self on top of it all. The most exciting moments on 2–“Listen2me”, “Deadhead”, and “Round&round”–are that way because of the instrumental moments Foxwarren are able to find hidden within these ingredients, but, to Shauf’s credit, his skills as a frontperson aren’t lost in these translations either. In some way or another, all of Foxwarren are speaking the same language on 2. (Bandcamp link)

Lung – The Swankeeper

Release date: May 30th
Record label: Feel It
Genre: Art rock, garage rock, post-punk
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: The Mattress

Cincinnati, Ohio duo Lung have been an “if you know, you know” kind of band for several years now. The band (who call themselves “art rock” and “cello-core”) are led by classically trained opera singer and cellist Kate Wakefield, and the drumming of Daisy Caplan is the only other accompaniment that she apparently needs. They’ve been putting out records since at least 2016–their bio calls The Swankeeper their fourth studio album, but they’ve put out at least five LPs of some sort as well as a few split records. Their distorted, heavy cello-rock sound doesn’t really fit cleanly anywhere, but that hasn’t stopped Lung from touring heavily and associating with punk, noise rock, and garage rock crowds over the past eight years (and contributing a version of “Don’t Let It Bring You Down” to a Neil Young covers compilation that I singled out as a highlight when I wrote about it). Similarly, I wouldn’t have really expected Feel It Records to pick them up (shared hometown aside), but there’s no reason why The Swankeeper can’t sit alongside the prolific label’s typically more, uh, guitar-based garage punk fare. These thirteen songs are as good an introduction to Lung as any, another thirty-seven dramatic minutes of Wakefield and Caplan doing the thing they do so well.

And what do Lung do so well, exactly? Well, it’s a combination of Caplan’s loud, pounding, noise rock drumming, Wakefield’s intense and wide-ranging vocals (comparisons to the likes of PJ Harvey and Kate Bush are not unearned), and, of course, plenty of cello heroics. “Everlasting Nothingness” is an intense opening track that puts Wakefield’s opera skills (in her voice, yes, but also in how the song unfolds itself) in the forefront, while “The Money” and “The Mattress” showcase how Lung can adapt their sound to the worlds of post-punk and grunge, respectively. The Swankeeper has its fair share of heavy hitters–I mean, all of these songs are to some degree, but “Sunshine’s Over” and “Paved With Gold” in particular are “cello as noise rock”. The banging, almost dance-punk “Clown Car” spotlights a different side of Lung’s talents to equally great ends (both Wakefield and Caplan restrain themselves just a little bit compared to how mighty we know they can work themselves up to be), and the prowling “Lucky You” finds some surprising depths in Lung’s writing, too. It doesn’t exactly take the full length of The Swankeeper to grasp what Lung are onto here, but I’m still glad they’re riding out this sound as long as they can. (Bandcamp link)

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