Pressing Concerns: The Ekphrastics, Fini Tribe, Marni, Laveda

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Welcome to Pressing Concerns number two (of the week)! Today’s edition features new albums from The Ekphrastics and Laveda, a compilation from Fini Tribe, and an EP from Marni. If you missed yesterday’s blog post (featuring Charlie Kaplan, Aarktica, Friendship Commanders, and People Mover), check that out here.

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.

The Ekphrastics – All of a Sudden, Pow!

Release date: October 1st
Record label: Harriet
Genre: Indie pop, folk-pop, twee
Formats: CD, digital
Pull Track: Five Things Lynn Knows

Both Frank Boscoe (a Pittsburgh-originating singer-songwriter known for 90s indie rock bands like Wimp Factor 14 and The Vehicle Flips) and Harriet Records (the independent indie pop label who put out music from Boscoe’s bands as well as Tullycraft, Crayon, and Linda Smith) have been in the midst of a revival lately. After seemingly folding at the end of the 1990s, Harriet’s been quite active this decade, and Boscoe’s new band The Ekphrastics (based out of Camden, Maine) have been at the center of it all. All of a Sudden, Pow! is the third Ekphrastics album in as many years, and it contains a batch of songs in the same historical-record-digging vein as last year’s Make Your Own Snowboard. 

Using the same comfortable laid-back, folk-y indie pop in which The Ekphrastics deal, Boscoe leads us through gripping tales like “I Am Going to Read You the Riot Act” (in which we are, in fact, read the 1715 British act that gave the expression its name), “This Month at the Roman Bros. Gallery” (which situates itself in a particularly refined money-laundering operation), and “My Character Was Killed Off in a Fiery Car Wreck” (self-explanatory). The phrase “too esoteric for its own good” was bouncing around my head listening to “The Wind Chill Factor? That Was Me” at first, but I’ve come around to that one, too–the song’s narrator, an anonymous Canadian soldier who will forever be unrecognized for his contributions to meteorology, is as good an avatar for The Ekphrastics as any. That’s Frank Boscoe’s talent–he can be going on and on, delivering a narrative that doesn’t seem remarkable in any way, but then he’ll sneak in a line or two that builds an entire world and character, and all of a sudden… (Bandcamp link)

Fini Tribe – The Sheer Action of the Fini Tribe 1982-1987

Release date: October 10th
Record label: Shipwrecked Industries/Finiflex
Genre: Post-punk, art punk, industrial
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Splash Care

The Edinburgh-originating electronic/trance act Finitribe put out five albums (and considerably more singles and EPs) on labels like Wax Trax!, One Little Indian, and FFRR between 1988 and 1998 before disbanding. Before any of that, however, the sextet (Chris Connelly, Simon McGlynn, Andy McGregor, Davie Miller, Philip Pinsky, and John Vick) called themselves Fini Tribe (two words!) and had a much more post-punk sound. These early years didn’t seem to get the on-record representation that the later eras of Finitribe did, but The Sheer Action of the Fini Tribe 1982-1987 does its best to make up for that. The definitive 3-CD edition of this compilation pulls together the singles Fini Tribe released contemporaneously, Peel and BBC Sessions, rehearsal tapes, and live recordings in a forty-seven song package (the vinyl edition selects nine from across the sprawl).

The Sheer Action of the Fini Tribe is an exciting look into a fertile time and place in rock music history through the lens of a band dabbling in a bit of all of it–given the presence of some more industrial/dance-influenced material, it’s not surprising where this group eventually ended up, but these recordings also capture a muscular six-piece rock band, a bunch of nervous post-punks, and a team of noisy experimenters. It’s hard to say whether, had they consolidated this era into a single LP at the time, Fini Tribe would have taken a place alongside some of their more canonized peers–but for any early post-punk fan, there’s more than enough here to recommend a deep dive. (Bandcamp link)

Marni – fml era

Release date: October 10th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Fuzz rock, shoegaze, alt-rock, slowcore, 90s indie rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Washed Up

When I wrote about the band Marni briefly in 2023, they were the solo project of Palm Springs vocalist/guitarist Nicolas Lara (who was also playing in Garb around that time, I believe). Since their 2022 debut album Whiskey Girl (and the non-album single I highlighted that came out a couple of months later), they’ve developed into a full band also featuring vocalist/guitarist Michaela Gradstein, bassist Kai Zeleznik, guitarist Manny Trujillo, and drummer Joey Anderson. The Los Angeles-based group has settled in nicely with West Coast groups playing some mixture of slowcore, shoegaze, and fuzz-punk (they opened for Idaho last year, if that helps), and that’s what you’ll hear on their latest EP, fml era. It’s the best that Marni has sounded yet, even if (perhaps because) they’re still kind of hard to get a handle on. “Bee Stings” and “99¢” are both awesome heavy alt-rock rippers to open the EP, but fml era’s final three songs use Marni’s electricity for subtler, more slowcore-indebted, and (at least in the case of “Boozer”) alt-country ends. Lara namechecks the late great Ohioan Jason Molina in “Washed Up”, although the wide-open, star-filled indie rock of the track in question betrays Marni’s southwestern desert origins; maybe you’ll find a band seeing how their heroes play in new environments as worthwhile as I do. (Bandcamp link)

Laveda – Love, Darla

Release date: September 12th
Record label: Bar/None
Genre: Fuzz pop, noise rock, 90s indie rock, post-punk
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Cellphone

Just what we all needed: another noisy indie rock band from the borough of Brooklyn, New York City. To be fair, Laveda are originally from Albany, but their third album, Love, Darla, clearly owes a debt to their adopted home city’s underground rock music from the 1980s and 90s. Band co-founders Jacob Brooks (who also makes music as Retail Drugs) and Ali Genevich have picked up a rhythm section (drummer Joe Taurone and bassist Dan Carr) somewhere between their 2020 debut album and Love, Darla, and the four-piece sounds fully ready to carry on the traditions of bands like Sonic Youth, Blonde Redhead, and Poem Rocket on their latest LP. They hew towards the “pop” side of their favorite noisemakers, to be sure–there’s nice melodies and simply effective rhythms clearly marking could-be-hits like “Cellphone” (a toe-tapping petulant post-punk track) and “Heaven” (a gorgeous dream pop song), and it’s baked into the LP’s noisier numbers as well. I don’t mind hearing a band hopping around from playing at distortion-laden punks (most of “Care”) to oh-so-careful avant-garde-rock guitar whisperers (“Dig Me Out”, the rest of “Care”) when they sound like they have an equal appreciation for all of it. That’s because I do too. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

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