Pressing Concerns: Dori, SleepMarks, Lammping & Bloodshot Bill, Eaters Digest

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Good morning, readers! Today’s Pressing Concerns is an odds-and-ends edition, collecting an archival live collection from Dori, a collaborative record between Lammping and Bloodshot Bill, a new album from SleepMarks, and a new EP from Eaters Digest. Check these out below!

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Dori – 11/4/2017

Release date: April 18th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Post-punk, 90s indie rock, noise rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Fool’s Errand

Dori were a post-punk trio from Grand Rapids, Michigan. They released one album called Patchwork (recorded by the band’s drummer, Shane Freeman, “in a cabin in central Michigan”) in late 2017, played a few live shows around that time, and that was it. Bassist and vocalist Jacob Simons moved to Kalamazoo, started up a folk rock group called Moon Orchids, and currently lives in Colorado. Guitarist/vocalist Alaric Bloss ended up in Lafayette, Louisiana, where he co-runs a cassette label called Citronel Sounds with his partner Sidney and has pursued a solo career–his most recent solo record is an album from 2023 called Pensive, which was mastered by Freeman. Freeman, who had also moved to Kalamazoo in recent years, passed away suddenly on March 23rd of this year; he was thirty-one. In the wake of this tragedy, Bloss and Simons found themselves revisiting what they’d made with Freeman as Dori; Simons writes that there is “precious little live footage or audio” of the band, but Lex Valentine had recorded most of Dori’s set at Quinn & Tuite’s Irish Pub in Grand Rapids two days after the release of Patchwork. 11/4/2017 features five songs from Patchwork, three unreleased original Dori songs, and a closing cover of “The Killing Moon” by Echo & the Bunnymen (all proceeds from the set’s release will go towards MusiCares, per Simons).

11/4/2017 is appropriately murky–the vocals are buried and drift in and out of focus, but the instruments all sound great. The first half of 11/4/2017 is made up of the five Patchwork songs; perhaps unsurprisingly, this is where Dori sound most intricate and polished. I first knew of Simons as a fellow Silkworm superfan; I don’t know which songs on 11/4/2017 are written and/or sung by him, but I hear the influence both in his bass playing and in the structure of the recording’s more melodic songs (the almost-college rock-y “Fool’s Errand” and the rumbling but still somewhat sweet “Tangible”). The ferocious post-punk of “Mild Scene” captures the sheer strength of the power trio, a strength that’s apparent even in the more subtle moments on 11/4/2017. Songs six through eight are the previously-unreleased ones, and while I don’t know if Dori considered them “works in progress” at the time or not, there’s an openness to them that indicates they might not have reached their final forms yet. For one, “No Indigo” is an instrumental, and “Victorian Playwright” and “Inconclusive” are both on the shorter side, around two minutes long (of course, this isn’t that much shorter than some of the Patchwork selections, and neither track–particularly “Inconclusive”–feels incomplete). Dori’s “The Killing Moon” is a hurricane, a show-stopper in multiple senses, and it alone would justify the dredging up of 11/4/2017. Dori deserve a look beyond that, though, as the rest of the recording makes as clear as day. (Bandcamp link)

SleepMarks – Tension in the Air

Release date: May 23rd
Record label: Self-released
Genre: 90s indie rock, garage rock, post-punk
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Inactive

No-fuss indie rock groups like SleepMarks are what keeps Rosy Overdrive alive. This group is a trio, made up of three Washington, D.C.-era music veterans–James Smith III previously played in Maple, Pierre Davis was in The Chance and We Capillaries, and Fred Burton played with NAYAN’s Nayan Bhula in the band Gist. The now-Arlington, Virginia-based band formed as an attempt to give all three members a chance to do something different than what they typically do–Smith and Davis have historically been guitarists, and Burton a drummer. Tension in the Air is the second SleepMarks record and their first full-length album, following a debut EP in 2020 called Evaporating Haze. The trio’s first LP is eight songs and about forty minutes of what I would call “indie rock and roll”–SleepMarks’ music is a torrent of post-punk, garage rock, punk rock, and 90s indie rock from across their home country. Parts of Tension in the Air remind me of Sonic Youth at their most direct, other times like early-to-mid-period Silkworm–among the bands that SleepMarks list under their “LIYL” section, I like the “Mudhoney” nod the best, as it explains the raw and sloppy garage-y element to their sound.

SleepMarks certainly have “punk” influences, but this doesn’t exactly translate to song lengths, as the majority of Tension in the Air is built up of lengthy garage-y indie rock journeys. “24 Hours a Day” opens up the LP with SleepMarks’ version of “pop music”–there are some surprisingly swelling keyboard parts, the guitars are loose but melodic, and the hooks are muscular and effective. “Walking Timebomb” thrashes and roils around for six minutes of noise-garage-punk assaulting, and even the “streamlined” classic rock throwback of “The Fire Burns” rides out its simple groove for a clean four minutes. Even though they’re D.C.-originating, Dischord Records post-hardcore isn’t the first thing that comes to mind listening to Tension in the Air, although I can hear plenty of 90s/00s Dischord bands in the construction of stuff like the post-punk stop-starting “Inactive” and the bouncy, anchoring bass guitar in closing track “Leave It All Behind”. Still, it’s pretty hard to categorize a band that can pull off both these aforementioned moves and songs like the six-minute Sonic Youth/Crazy Horse/Velvet Underground bastard child “Beet Red”. If the goal of SleepMarks was to provide a way for the three bandmembers to try something new, Tension in the Air is evidence that they’ve succeeded in more ways than one. (Bandcamp link)

Lammping & Bloodshot Bill – Never Never

Release date: June 67th
Record label: We Are Busy Bodies
Genre: Psychedelia, garage rock, hip hop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Never Never

This is an incredibly Canadian collection of musicians that I don’t know too much about yet, but I’m going to do my best to explain the players on Never Never here. In this corner we have Toronto’s Lammping, a psychedelic duo comprised of Mikhail Galkin and Jay Anderson–the former has collaborated with Boldy James and People Under The Stairs as a producer, while the latter has drummed for a ton of Toronto bands, including the very good experimental collective Badge Epoque Ensemble. Lammping showed up at the beginning of this decade, but Bloodshot Bill, their partner on their latest release, has been at it for significantly longer–this one-man rockabilly machine from Montreal has been reliably releasing albums since the late 2000s. Bill (aka Derek Rogers) has hopped around garage rock-associated labels like Goner and Hi-Tide (his most recent solo album, So Fed Up, came out on the former last month) before landing on We Are Busy Bodies (The Bug Club, Affiliate Links, Julie Doiron) with Lammping for Never Never, a bizarre fifteen-minute trip that is supposed to be the first of four Lammping-led records that are to be released over the next year.

Never Never has a really wild sound, but it’s a natural and pretty intuitive one, too–it really does feel like the synthesis of its three creators. It’s very psychedelic and experimental hip-hop-focused, a vibe that is equally due to Galkin’s rock-band-evoking samples and Anderson’s live-wire, shuffling drumbeats. Bloodshot Bill’s outsized personality obviously comes through on this record (pretty much every piece of writing associated with him mentions that John Waters once described him as “like Roy Orbison with a head wound”–which, to be fair, I’d be telling everyone if I’d been called that by John Waters, too), but he lets himself be dissolved and incorporated into Lammping’s soundscapes in a really open way. The freaky, muddy blues-funk of the title track kicks off Never Never with some pretty aggressive mood-setting between the cartoonishly warped instrumental and a Bill performance to match it. A lot of the songs on Never Never feel like brief snippets, but it seems like Lammping and Bloodshot Bill consistently clip the most interesting parts–songs like “Coconut” and “0 and 1” are curious pieces that sound like dispatches from some strange, corrupted radio station. Never Never may just be a quick glimpse into the worlds of Bloodshot Bill and Lammping, but it’s enough for me to want to see where they both go next in the aftermath. (Bandcamp link)

Eaters Digest – Charcuterie

Release date: June 20th
Record label: Pacing Tapes
Genre:  Math rock, post-punk, experimental rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Bubblegum Fluoride

Seattle’s Eaters Digest describe themselves as a “math-rock supergroup” built from parts of two other local bands–guitarist/vocalist Kurt Henry and drummer Matt Anderson made a couple of solid records earlier this decade as part of the New England-originating trio Supernowhere, and bassist/vocalist Miiko Valkonen and guitarist Aaron Kurzius go even further back to the late 2010s with their own group, Don Forgetti. Apparently both bands are (or at some point were) on hiatus, leading to the four of them linking up as Eaters Digest in late 2023, and a year and a half later we’ve gotten Charcuterie, the project’s debut EP. What I remember of Supernowhere placed them on the “languid” and “chill” sides of music that could reasonably be called “math rock”–some of Charcuterie plays in the same realm, while some of it decidedly does not. Recorded by Great Grandpa/Apples with Moya’s Dylan Hanwright, the band describe the EP as built from “a smorgasbord of ideas we had laying about”, and it certainly sounds like it–Charcuterie (oh, now I understand the title) is the sound of a collision, of some new collaborators throwing everything they’ve got against a wall and seeing what sticks and/or catches flame.

Eaters Digest’s first record is made up of four songs, each one of which is a wild self-contained math rock trip. Parts of Charcuterie will appeal to fans of “Devo-core” indie rock, the Exploding in Sound Records roster, and Palm, although (like a good math rock band), Eaters Digest never settle into a single rhythm or “groove”. “Bubblegum Fluoride” opens Charcuterie on the more unhinged side of things, a stop-start instrumental and theatrical vocals setting up an “anything goes” kind of vibe. “Color Trademark Infringement” is more Supernowhere-esque, maybe a little more “loose” but similarly built on subtle vocals and circular guitar riffs. The second half of Charcuterie, on its surface at least, repeats the setup of the first half, with a relatively bonkers track (the Dismemberment Plan-indebted “Sisyphean”) being followed up by a more peaceful and pastoral one (the almost meditative “Workplace Headspace”). The former of those two tracks has plenty of moments of zen, however, and the latter one increasingly gets more agitated and freaked out as it goes on, finally leading towards a (more or less) post-hardcore conclusion. Whether or not Eaters Digest becomes the main focus for all of its members is probably still an open question, but this combination’s early results have proven quite promising. (Bandcamp link)

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