Pressing Concerns: Jeff Tobias, The Dream Syndicate, Good Luck, Citric Dummies

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In this Thursday Pressing Concerns, we are looking at four records that come out tomorrow, October 17th. We’ve got new albums from Jeff Tobias, Good Luck, and Citric Dummies, plus a reissue from The Dream Syndicate. Whoa! And if you missed either of this week’s earlier blog posts (Monday’s featured Charlie Kaplan, Aarktica, Friendship Commanders, and People Mover, and Tuesday’s had The Ekphrastics, Fini Tribe, Marni, and Laveda), check those out, 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.

Jeff Tobias – One Hundredfold Now in This Age

Release date: October 17th
Record label: Repeating Cloud
Genre: Art rock, orchestral pop, experimental pop, jazz-pop, synthpop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Gimme Coherence

I do think that Jeff Tobias’ 2022 album Recurring Dream was the right experimental, political synthpop album for that particular moment–poking at the post-pandemic malaise that was the Biden era, Tobias (who also plays in art rock group Modern Nature and noise-jazz ensemble Sunwatchers) meditated on pinkwashing and lampooned nonprofit-industrial-complex grifters to the tune of offbeat but quite catchy synth-rock. Things are different now, though, and it’s time for something different. It’s time for One Hundredfold Now in This Age, Tobias’ second album of “songs” and first for Repeating Cloud (a partnership for which I can personally claim maybe about 5% of the credit). It’s time for an album whose first lyrics are “Burn the American flag / One hundred times a day,” set to smooth jazz-pop saxophones made by somebody who not only declines to attempt to view everything at a remove, but openly illustrates the futility of trying to do so at the moment.

Musically speaking, One Hundredfold Now in This Age is more orchestral and jazz-indebted than Recurring Dream was, but if you enjoyed that album’s smooth yet dense take on pop music, Tobias does it again here, more or less. With an impressive list of guest musicians in tow (members of Editrix, The Mountain Movers, Office Culture, and American Football, among others), Tobias turns these songs into a single chaotic, vibrant, and seething beast. Taking off from the aforementioned yacht-rock-soundtracked First Amendment exercise endorsed by opening track “END IT”, Tobias then very explicitly tells us “No one gets to go home” in “Gimme Coherence”, the exhilarating, deteriorating “hit” of One Hundredfold Now in This Age (“What’s the paperwork I gotta sign so I don’t die?”– straight and to the point, Mr. Tobias, I like it).

Tobias’ apocalyptic spoken-word narrative in “Arp (Burning Property)” is both absurd and the day-to-day reality of multiple American cities at the time of me writing this. Tobias dips out of a torture-kidnapping session to “deal with email stuff” and later remarks “I can see the place where I live, but it’s also Beirut. It’s also Johannesburg…It’s Greensboro, and it’s Warsaw. It’s home”. If that doesn’t wake you up, Tobias has reserved the most maximalist, noisiest, most insistent moment on the album for a song called “This Is Everybody Not Talking About It” (featuring a kind of dazed, frantic repetition that also really sells late-album highlight “I Feel Hated”). One Hundredfold Now in This Age ends with a long horn-laden, slow-moving pop song called “Don’t Quit the Band” in which Tobias encourages us to “stay alive” for each other and punctuating it with “Don’t quit the band / We need you around”. My irony-poisoned mind did indeed toy with the idea that this was a sardonic closing message, but no–it’s Jeff Tobias once again meeting the moment, in the most difficult and correct way. (Bandcamp link)

The Dream Syndicate – Medicine Show: I Know What You Like (Deluxe Edition)

Release date: October 17th
Record label: Fire
Genre: Paisley Underground, psychedelic rock, alternative rock, college rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: John Coltrane Stereo Blues

All four of The Dream Syndicate’s 1980s albums are behemoths as far as I’m concerned, and all of them were also, as it turns out, merely incomplete reflections of the high-power, constantly morphing rock band behind them at various points throughout the decade. Fire Records’ reissue series of these albums has been a thorough presentation of The Dream Syndicate and everything that they entailed until their 1989 breakup–over the past few years, we’ve gotten deeper looks at their classic 1982 debut album The Days of Wine and Roses and their undersung 1986 third LP, Out of the Grey. The Dream Syndicate have been praised plenty by critics over the past forty years, and while they may not have the cache in 2025 of several bands for which they helped pave the way, this has nothing to do with the music itself. What The Dream Syndicate accomplished over four LPs–injecting psychedelia, hard rock muscle, and electric Dylanesque rock-and-roll Americana into then-nascent “alternative rock”–is quite impressive, but what Medicine Show: I Know What You Like displays more than anything is that they’re a timeless classic rock band.

This reissue of the band’s 1984 sophomore album is–like its predecessors–as exhaustive as anyone could want, with the CD edition spanning four discs of live recordings, rehearsals, and studio outtakes. Those curious about The Dream Syndicate need only to make their way to the first disc (and the entirety of the vinyl edition), containing the original album (remastered) plus a couple of bonus tracks. Not quite as streamlined as Out of the Grey but on its way, Medicine Show hits like a ton of bricks, and the sprawling track lengths don’t slow down the group’s probing, fuzzed-out rock explorations. An expanded version of the 1984 live album This Is Not the New Dream Syndicate Album…Live! is also vital for the history of the band, and the mostly-previously-unreleased rehearsals and live tapes appended onto the third and fourth discs are quality, too. It’s not really meant to be sat down and listened to in one sitting (hearing this many versions of “John Coltrane Stereo Blues” in short order probably isn’t good for you), but they’re all laid out for us to get whatever we can out of them. And that’s still a good deal in 2025. (Bandcamp link)

Good Luck – Big Dreams, Mister

Release date: October 17th
Record label: Lauren/Specialist Subject
Genre: Indie pop, pop punk, power pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: No T-Shirts

The Bloomington, Indiana trio Good Luck (Ginger Alford, Matt Tobey, and Mike Harpring) released two albums–2008’s Into Lake Griffy and 2011’s Without Hesitation–before breaking up the following year, quietly bowing out of the indie rock/punk underground right before the “scene” began to be dotted with bands making some similar combination of earnest Midwestern indie rock, pop punk, and power pop. I’ve only seen the band (and, in particular, Into Lake Griffy) grow in stature in their absence, but the first Good Luck album in fourteen years doesn’t really feel burdened with that (admittedly still relatively niche) weight. For all I know, Good Luck would’ve reformed and made Big Dreams, Mister as soon as their lives aligned to make another record together regardless of whether anyone remembered them. 

But people did remember Good Luck. Hop Along member and producer extraordinaire Joe Reinhart (based in Philadelphia, where Harpring now lives, too) recorded Big Dreams, Mister in several sessions, Jeff Rosenstock wrote the biography accompanying the album, and longtime DIY chroniclers Specialist Subject and Lauren Records stepped up to release it. Opening track “Into the Void” arrives with communal flair, nonstop pop hooks, and sneakily impressive guitars like no time at all has passed, and the rest of Big Dreams, Mister ensures no letdowns follow. The lean power pop of the Alford-sung “No T-Shirts”, the swinging crunch of “Hold on We’re on the Way”, the rock and roll tug-of-war of “What Young Me Wanted”–these are self-evidently great songs, with no barriers or blockades between them and us whatsoever. This still works, and, though it certainly must take work to get these songs as intricate as Good Luck make them, Big Dreams, Mister doesn’t sound like there were any doubts about that among its creators. (Bandcamp link)

Citric Dummies – Split With Turnstile

Release date: October 17th
Record label: Feel It
Genre: Garage punk, punk rock, rock and roll, hardcore punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: I Don’t Like Anything

That’s right, everyone’s favorite garage punk/rock and roll trio from Minneapolis, the Citric Dummies, are back. Bassist/vocalist David Lunch, drummer D.V. Tinner, and guitarist David Cronutburger (replacing Patrick Dillon aka Blob Mould) are, I believe, on their fifth album now with the amusingly misleadingly-titled Split with Turnstile (considering that their previous LP’s name was a take on Hüsker Dü, the Baltimore pop-hardcore sensation alluded to via this album’s title should wear it as a badge of honor). Always goofy but serious about making fast-paced, gas-pedal-to-the-floor punk rock, Split with Turnstile continues the thread of 2023’s Zen and the Arcade of Beating Your Ass and last year’s Trapped in a Parking Garage EP; maybe it’s just recency bias, but it feels like the riffs hit harder and smoke heavier than ever on this one. Songs like “I Don’t Like Anything” and “I Can’t Stand the Weekend” are the ideal Citric Dummies songs, positively melting into an explicable rage for ninety seconds at a time to deliver anti-social, anti-societal garage punk diatribes. Citric Dummies don’t slow down–certainly not on the heavy-ripping lead single “I Am Your Napkin”, not on the high-concept (I mean, for them) “Grant Richardson’s Burning Wreckage Welcome Home”, and not on the final track, which is appropriately titled “Ain’t Got Time (To Live)”. I suppose I should be glad that they found twenty minutes for Split With Turnstile anyway. (Bandcamp link)

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