Pressing Concerns: Gauri Paighan, KD Surreal, Lain Fallow, Mob Wife

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In the second Pressing Concerns of the week, EPs reign supreme: we’ve got new ones from Gauri Paighan, KD Surreal, and Mob Wife, as well as a physical re-release of Lain Fallow‘s debut EP from last year. If you’re looking for LPs, try yesterday’s blog post (featuring albums from Hannah Marcus, Abel, Jacob Freddy, and The Pond).

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.

Gauri Paighan – Teen Error

Release date: June 8th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Indie pop, fuzz pop, dream pop
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: November

Gauri “Gory” Paighan doesn’t exactly style herself as mysterious–she seems pretty active on social media–but I’m not sure exactly where she’s based. She appears to have toured southeast Asia a fair amount, so I’d say somewhere in that part of the world, but I suppose it doesn’t matter all that much. Paighan started self-releasing songs around 2022, leading up to what is her first EP (or multi-song release of any kind), Teen Error. Seven songs in around twenty-five minutes, Teen Error is nearly full-length size, giving us a wide and varied picture of a young, developing, but already quite compelling singer-songwriter. Loosely speaking, Paighan is making a familiar style of “indie rock” on Teen Error, one with a bit of fuzzy distortion, strong propulsion, and dreamy indie pop catchiness. Teen Error is nonetheless large enough to encompass quiet, chilly balladry, orchestral-tinged indie pop, and (in one memorable instance), reggae/hip-hop-inspired pop music as well. The different perspectives and roots visible throughout Teen Error make it a bit tricky to get a handle on the single figure responsible for all of these songs, but that’s hardly a problem for a debut release.

The first two songs on Teen Error are “November” and “Adventures of Us” (they’re swapped on Bandcamp vs. other streaming services), and they’re both wide-eyed, sweeping indie pop rock anthems that introduce us to the full extent of Gory’s range. “Adventures of Us”, perhaps appropriately given the title, is the more driving and forward-pushing one, while “November” is more content to revel in its massive fuzz-pop refrain–in both of them, I’m not entirely sure what Paighan’s words mean, but they both evoke an idealistic and excited writer grabbing ahold of the reins available to her. The rest of Teen Error doesn’t attempt to recreate the feelings of these two songs–Gory expands her sound and pursues a more thoughtful, pensive muse in the gentle ballad of “Behalf of Us” and the shaken, mournful “Rather Be a Tree”. The biggest black sheep on Teen Error by far is “Repeat It”, a reggae-infused pop-rock tune in which both Paighan and guest vocalist Alterno show off a completely different vocal style and attitude. It’s not my favorite song on the EP, but it’s a successful experiment, and helps ensure that nothing on Teen Error is forgettable or a throwaway–of the songs I have yet to mention, the orchestral-tinged closing track “Rare Nerine” is certainly a memorable one, and the dreamy indie rocker “Making Love” is the closest thing the second half of Teen Error comes to matching the gas-pedal vibes of the EP’s opening duo. With this first one neatly tied up, I do look forward to the next error of Gory. (Bandcamp link)

KD Surreal – In and Out of Torpor

Release date: July 4th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Lo-fi folk, bedroom folk, singer-songwriter, slowcore
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Me, at Arm’s Length

What would this world be without one-person bedroom folk projects from the Pacific Northwest? I’ve got one of them for you today–a musician who goes by the name KD Surreal and who hails from Abbotsford, British Columbia (it’s about an hour southeast of Vancouver, on the U.S.-Canada border). I don’t know much else about KD Surreal, but I can tell you that they’ve previously put out an album called If I Die Tonight, Bury Me in Song in 2021 and an EP called Footnotes to the Faultline in 2023. Their latest record is a four-song, twenty-minute EP called In and Out of Torpor (good title!) inspired by “the melody-driven fingerpicking styles of Elliott Smith or Nick Drake” and “melodramatic sensibility”, according to the author. While I wouldn’t compare Surreal’s songwriting structure to the tighter intricacies of Smith, I think that this description on the whole is pretty accurate–Surreal’s songs are sprawling, crawling, lengthy acoustic guitar-led folk pieces that I have no problem whatsoever calling “melodramatic”. Just about everything we hear on In and Out of Torpor is Surreal themself–this amounts to the aforementioned acoustic guitar, what sounds like a mandolin, some kind of bass, and some self-harmonies.

And that’s all that KD Surreal needs. The first song on In and Out of Torpor, “Pray Your Shot Stay True”, is the shortest by a fair margin, yet it’s anything but slight. Surreal’s performance is relatively intense, and their lyrics (“Still you wish to scour me from you / Well, take aim now and pray your shot stay true”) introduce the dramatic side of themself right off the bat. The rest of the EP is a little less outwardly confrontational, but the uncomfortable, up-close edge to In and Out of Torpor isn’t lost in these longer recordings. “Me, at Arm’s Length” and “Don’t Let Me Retreat” both approach seven minutes in length–the winding folky slowcore of the former is an immediate highlight, subbing the direct-hit emotion of the record’s first song for a more puzzling, refracted kind of hurt. “You Will Not Know Peace” is a little more musically bright (the album’s one guest musician, Alex Rake, goes to town on the mandolin on this one), but there’s only so much one can do to brighten a song that imparts the unflinching lesson that “Caring is cancer / Caring is sin / Caring’s a fish hook,” as it reaches its climax. “Don’t Let Me Retreat” closes things out by playing the long game again; the electric guitar that appears in the second half of the song might as well be a lightning bolt. Things start to sound different when you’re In and Out of Torpor. (Bandcamp link)

Lain Fallow – The Path Less Chosen // Winning Culture

Release date: April 14th
Record label: Spleencore/Panique! Paniek!/Slow Down
Genre: Emo-punk, punk rock, post-hardcore
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Absence / Presence

Last March, a Belgian emo-punk band called Lain Fallow released their first record, a four-song digital EP called The Path Less Chosen. Drummer Tommaso Capitello sings lead vocals in the Italian post-hardcore group Amalia Bloom, but it was coincidentally in Brussels where Capitello crossed paths with two more Italians (bassist/vocalist Lorenzo Conti, guitarist Lorenzo Leva), and the three of them linked up with French-Canadian guitarist/vocalist Charles Patterson to form Lain Fallow and record The Path Less Chosen, a record which showcases a group of musicians with a strong, firm grasp on dead-serious, heavy, emo-infused punk rock. A few different small labels throughout Europe took notice of Lain Fallow and teamed up to put out The Path Less Chosen on cassette earlier this year (Panique! Paniek! in Belgium, Spleencore in France, and Slow Down in Europe), a release that also includes the single “Winning Culture” the band put out in January. I’m not sure what exactly I’d expect from a bunch of Belgians (and Italians?) who self-describe their music as “emo punk”, but The Path Less Chosen // Winning Culture is a fresh and earnest take on the genre(s). Too polished for emocore but not polished enough for “pop punk”, the songs on this cassette are infectious, emotional rock and roll before anything else.

Maybe I’m putting too much stock into a solid bass part and whoever’s singing lead vocals first’s Peter Garrett-esque timbre, but The Path Less Chosen // Winning Culture’s opening track, “Swerve”, has a post-punk undercurrent to it, although Lain Fallow’s “emo-punk” instinct are readily apparent from this song. This core of the band becomes more obvious in the next song, “Absence / Presence”, which recalls 90s emo-ish indie punk groups like Seaweed and Knapsack. The rest of the original The Path Less Chosen is made up of a pair of dark, lean, punk songs in “Negative Mirror” (probably the closest the EP comes to the current alt-rock/“nu-grunge-gaze” revival) and “Bottleneck” (the closest Lain Fallow get to “melodic punk”). The newer song appended to the cassette, “Winning Culture”, is evidence that Lain Fallow have already evolved beyond their debut EP–it’s the band’s heaviest and most dynamic recording yet, a larger and more ambitious sound slowly starting to replace the scrappy punk energy of the original EP. “Winning Culture” does raise the question of where, exactly, Lain Fallow will end up on their next more-substantial release, but those involved in this cassette were right to put the spotlight on a band that hit the ground running in Lain Fallow. (Bandcamp link)

Mob Wife – ROT

Release date: June 6th
Record label: Bullhead
Genre: Post-punk, post-hardcore, noise rock, garage punk
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Thank God for Car Parks

Mob Wife are a noise-punk trio from Belfast (made up of vocalist/guitarist Chris Leckey, bassist Carl Small, and drummer Wilson Davidson) who’ve been kicking around since the late 2010s. After a steady stream of singles over a few years, 2022 saw the release of their debut album, Eat With Your Eyes; for the group’s next record, they’ve gone the EP route, putting together a five-song, twenty-minute collection simply titled ROT. The trio claim to be inspired by “American underground” rock groups like Metz, Fugazi, and Protomartyr in their music; leaving aside the fact that Metz was Canadian (but I get what they mean), I do think that they fit alongside a slew of British bands mining a similar mix of punk rock, post-hardcore, and noise rock as of late between Hairpin, Percy, and the recently-reunited Mclusky. ROT sounds a bit like a concept record to me–Mob Wife are drawing from the industrial confusion and collision of capital they witness every day in their home city, using ugly, angry, abrasive rock music to sketch visions of greed, growth at the expense of human destruction, and an inevitable march towards a cliff of soullessness. 

The spirit of Hot Snakes is alive in ROT’s opening track “Heard & Resented”, a shit-kicking garage punk song that adds an Irish tint to great noise punk groups like Meat Wave and Big Ups. Leckey’s characters are detestable types, not only delighting in their misdeeds but also going out of their way to pay tribute to the sociopathic universe that allows them to thrive. “Thank God for Car Parks” is probably ROT at its purest–you can hear the creepy, unfeeling grin as Leckey revels in “leveling old folks’ homes” to create the titular eyesore. After a post-punk workout in “Echo Chamber”, ROT closes out with two scorchers in “Burn the Former Things” and “Make You Rich” that bring the EP full-circle. The former song once again brings ROT into the world of real estate, a dark meditation on the pressure cooker that people are put through in order to “own” a place to live, and “Make You Rich” is one last trip down the mind of a champion of capitalism. This is, of course, the exact right kind of music for taking a stroll down these gold-plated roads, and Mob Wife certainly sound like they’re fed up enough with the world around them to pull it off. (Bandcamp link)

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