Pressing Concerns: Miserable chillers, Wendy Eisenberg, Robber Robber, Wax Head

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The Thursday Pressing Concerns features three albums coming out tomorrow, April 3rd (LPs from Miserable chillers, Wendy Eisenberg, and Robber Robber), plus one album that came out yesterday, April 1st (from Wax Head). It’s been a busy week on Rosy Overdrive, so if you missed Monday’s (featuring Stuck, Miscellaneous Owl, The Disassociation, and Louisa Bénâtre & Barbara Bessac) or Tuesday’s (featuring The Pretty Flowers, Fake Canadian, Eggs on Mars, and Shop Talk) blog posts, 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.

Miserable chillers  – Innocent Victims

Release date: April 3rd
Record label: Baby Blue
Genre: Soft rock, indie pop, art pop, sophisti-pop, singer-songwriter
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: The Big Guitar

I wrote about Miguel Gallego and his long-running project Miserable chillers back in 2024; he’d just put out Great American Turn Off, an eclectic self-described “mixtape” of art pop with plenty of help from various guest vocalists and musicians. Two years later, Gallego is back with the first proper song-based Miserable chillers album since 2020, Innocent Victims, which offers a very different listening experience than Great American Turn Off. Musically speaking, we’re still in the same ballpark, do not get me wrong–Gallego continues to mine soft rock, art pop, and 60s/70s studio-auteur-type music for inspiration, and his referencing of Paul Simon, Judee Sill, and Burt Bacharach (among others) checks out. It’s a more muted, pensive version of it than Great American Turn Off was though, a feeling inseparable from the tragedy behind its creation–the unexpected death of Gallego’s partner and bandmate Sarah Goldfarb in late 2019. Innocent Victims took shape slowly over the next five years, with help from frequent Gallego collaborators like Kabir Kumar, Dylan Balliett, Megan Braaten, and Kate Ehrenberg, finally presented to us here as a forty-five minute, thirteen-track package that gives an ironic twinge to the term “easy listening”.

“Telling the Bees” and “Song for Ivy” are the contradiction manifest–beautiful, lush, Rundgren/Partridge-y songs with horns (provided by Rick Rein) and vibrant basslines nonetheless frozen in a skipping moment of time. Innocent Victims floats aimlessly along through these gorgeous dioramas, reaching out and grabbing us on a whim with the plainspoken doom of “The Crater” and its tale of a meteor strike (“We rebuilt the house on the lip of the crater / I see it through every window of our home”), the titular Thin Lizzy worship of “The Big Guitar”, the hopping bass of “Dumb Kingdom”, and the truly, truly devastating “Tybee”. Innocent Victims remains a lot to take in, and there are parts of it I’m still wrapping my head around for one reason or another–for an album that is undeniably heavy no matter how much light it’s dressed in, this makes sense to me. For instance, “Last Lights” and “Hoping for Snow” are lovely pop songs on their own whose tenors change when one is able to connect them together via the weather and the deer in both of them. At this point, I can never return to the times where I listened to Innocent Victims and primarily found myself appreciating the fretless bass, but that doesn’t mean that they didn’t happen. Maybe that’s what the album is about. (Bandcamp link)

Wendy Eisenberg – Wendy Eisenberg

Release date: April 3rd
Record label: Joyful Noise
Genre: Folk rock, singer-songwriter, art pop, jazz-pop, alt-country
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Another Lifetime Floats Away

Rosy Overdrive has tons of respect for Wendy Eisenberg, as should anyone who enjoys good rock and/or experimental music. I’ve written about their solo output and their math rock trio Editrix on the blog before, and they’ve also been performing as part of Bill Orcutt’s Guitar Quartet as of late. Needless to say, they’ve been quite busy in recent years (and I haven’t even gotten into Squanderers, Eisenberg’s newest experimental group with Gastr del Sol’s David Grubbs), but it’s still been a minute since we’d gotten a song-based Eisenberg solo album. Enter Wendy Eisenberg, an album of self-proclaimed “folk songs” made by someone whose definition of practitioners of the form includes Michael Hurley, John Prine, and Willie Nelson but also Van Dyke Parks, Richard Dawson, and the Mekons (although the LP’s biggest influence, hinted at by Joyful Noise Recordings’ bio, is the western Massachusetts-originating artist’s relocation to Brooklyn and subsequent desire to hang onto their more pastoral past in some way).

Wendy Eisenberg was co-produced by Eisenberg’s partner, Mari Rubio (aka More Eaze), who also provides string arrangements. Eisenberg, Rubio, bassist Trevor Dunn (Mr. Bungle), and drummer Ryan Sawyer (Weak Signal) are the players here, and the four of them create a record that combines the conversational, wandering jazz-ish folk stylings of Eisenberg’s past solo work (and, in a more math rock way, Editrix) with ornate, string-laden country-folk backdrops. Do not worry, Wendy Eisenberg is still pretty weird–for varying reasons, I don’t really see “Old Myth Dying” and “Vanity Paradox” crossing over to the “Rumours on $50 vinyl” crowd, but Rubio and crew are able to guide Eisenberg into some polished, structured territory without sacrificing that side of their leader. Wendy Eisenberg feels like it waits until the right moment to fully take advantage of the tools at its disposal–like when opening track “Take a Number” lets the strings kick in after a friendly acoustic-folk opening, or how they indulge in some “lush jazz” in “The Ultraworld”, or how they wait until the penultimate song, “Will You Dare”, to play their “full-on embrace of classic country” card (the payoff is worth it). It’s impressive how Wendy Eisenberg, despite existing in completely different genres from Editrix and Eisenberg’s more experimental work, bears its namesake’s unmistakable mark just as clearly. They’ve done it yet again! (Bandcamp link)

Robber Robber – Two Wheels Move the Soul

Release date: April 3rd
Record label: Fire Talk
Genre: Post-punk, art rock, no wave, noise rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Talkback

The Burlington, Vermont quartet Robber Robber debuted in 2024 with an album called Wild Guess, although the group’s founding duo of vocalist/guitarist Nina Cates and drummer Zack James have been making music together since 2017. Wild Guess set the band (Cates, James, guitarist Will Krulak, and bassist Carney Hemler) apart in a folk/alt-country-inspired Vermont music scene by instead taking inspiration from more New York-y post-punk and experimental (“arty”) indie rock. They signed to Fire Talk (Wombo, Cola, PACKS) and re-released their debut album the following year, and they’re back with a sophomore album still less than two years removed from Wild Guess. Despite (or perhaps because of) the quick turnaround, Two Wheels Move the Soul was made during a tumultuous time for Robber Robber–Cates and James were evicted from their longtime home and had to rely on that aforementioned Burlington community (like associates Lily Seabird and Greg Freeman) for stability.

Nonetheless, Two Wheels Move the Soul is every bit Wild Guess’ equal, both more ambitious and smoother than its predecessor but still cut from the same cloth. The first half of the album is teetering noise-punk; “The Sound It Made”, “Avalanche Sound Effect”, and “Watch for Infection” are all warped post-punk scorchers (imagine a more garage-y Water from Your Eyes, perhaps). Cates’ vocals work well as a unifying force as things get more or less wonky, which is important because the LP ends on a different note than how it begins. Amusingly, the final four songs on Two Wheels Move the Soul are arguably the most “pop” ones; sticking the motorik charms of “Talkback” on Side Two is a self-sabotaging sequencing decision, but I do see the vision in sticking the (relatively) mellow trio of “Enough”, “Again”, and “Bullseye” at the end of the LP. The “vision” is key to Two Wheels Move the Soul, as controlled chaos is looking more and more like Robber Robber’s specialty. (Bandcamp link)

Wax Head – GNAT

Release date: April 1st
Record label: Sour Grapes
Genre: Garage punk, noise punk, psych-punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Clatter Coats

Wax Head are a punk quartet from Manchester that nonetheless have clearly spent time with American and Australian garage rock. GNAT is their first album following an EP in 2023 and a handful of singles, and with it, the band (drummer/vocalist Lewis Fletcher, guitarist Harry Bunker, keyboardist Archie Jones, and bassist Evan Chase) have given us a nine-track, twenty-seven-minute foot-on-gas debut LP. Wax Head do a great job of evoking the witchy, sometimes psychedelic garage punk of Thee Oh Sees and the faster side of Ty Segall as they plow through a whirlwind of punk music with images of body horror, violence, blood and the like (or so I’ve been told; it’s not like I can make out what Fletcher’s actually saying most of the time). Take a minute to steel yourself before putting on GNAT, because you won’t get a break once it starts–before you know it, Wax Head have raced through the 90-second metallic punk title track, the wild synth-hardcore-punk of “Bug Doctor” and “Clatter Coats”, and the classic punk throwback “Terminal Sinker”. Things might get a little more unpredictable with the Sabbath-like second half of “Takeover”, the Crampsian garage rock of “Rusty Cutter”, and the five-minute synth-punk-prog odyssey of “Resin214”, but it’s not like GNAT settles down at all. You’re going to have to wait until closing track “Clamp” gets its final blows in before you can start to recover. (Bandcamp link)

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