Pressing Concerns: Guided by Voices, The Thirsty Giants, Chaepter, Patois Counselors

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It’s a Thursday Pressing Concerns! We have four new albums coming out tomorrow below: new ones from Guided by Voices, The Thirsty Giants, Chaepter, and Patois Counselors. Check them out, and if you missed Tuesday’s blog post (featuring Christina’s Trip / Mox / Natasha Sandworms, Chevreuil, Casual Technicians, and Jack Shields & The Mojave Rush), check that one 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.

Guided by Voices – Crawlspace of the Pantheon

Release date: May 29th
Record label: GBV, Inc.
Genre: 90s indie rock, post-punk, power pop, college rock, Guided by Voices
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Out with a Theory

They sent me the new Guided by Voices album, and I liked it, so here I am writing about it in Pressing Concerns. Considering that there’ve been periods of my life where I’ve listened exclusively to Guided by Voices and Robert Pollard’s assortment of side projects, Rosy Overdrive giving a thumbs up to GBV LP number 44, Crawlspace of the Pantheon, was probably very foreseeable. For whatever reason, though, the last few albums haven’t stuck with me as much–the last one I’ve really appreciated was Welshpool Frillies, three years and four albums ago (though I actually really liked the debut LP from Pollard’s Rip Van Winkle side project from last year). I attribute this less to a decrease in quality than personal interest gravitating toward other things; that being said, the beginning of Crawlspace of the Pantheon is the strongest opening to a Guided by Voices album in…well, more than four albums.

The choppy, descending guitar chords and triumphant Pollard vocals that open “Lost in the Sun” greet us with this iteration of Guided by Voices doing what they do best–warped arena rock anthems with muscular hooks. “Out with a Theory”, track two, is even better–it’s a surprising, bouncy mid-tempo pop rock track in which the drums don’t kick in until halfway through. It reminds me of “Make a Record for Lo-Life” in how Pollard just pulls a song that sounds like it must’ve always existed somewhere out of nowhere, and, like that song, it’s a track about the act of making music itself. It’s semi-autobiographical per Pollard himself, but I want the song’s title and reference to Mitch Easter in the lyrics to be references to Game Theory, a known favorite of GBV guitarist Doug Gillard (at the very least, it fits with the college rock landscape about which Pollard sings here). Lead single “We Outlast Them All” (just a beautiful Guided by Voices-sounding song, no notes), “Advance Without Dropping” (a surging, energetic rocker), and “Arthur Square” (the requisite “I have no idea how Robert Pollard stitched this thing together, but it rules” one) are the other obvious highlights, although there are plenty more successes among these dozen tracks. Maybe this is the new Guided by Voices album you’ll dive right into, maybe it’ll stay on the shelf until the moment is right, but Crawlspace of the Pantheon will be there to appreciate even after the band that created it has moved onto the next one. (Bandcamp link)

The Thirsty Giants – Escape the Junkyard

Release date: May 29th
Record label: Round Bale Recordings
Genre: Punk rock, garage punk, hardcore punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: No Future

It’s always nice to hear that Minnesota punk rock is alive and well. One sterling example of the art form is The Thirsty Giants, a Mankato-originating “inter-generational basement punk” trio initially founded by the younger Holden Perron (guitar/vocals) and elder David Perron (drums) during the pandemic and soon joined by bassist/vocalist Hunter Theisen. Their releases (such as last year’s Thirst A.D. EP and Southern Minnesota Discomfort live album) have largely been put out by Round Bale Recordings, David’s own record label, and that’s who’s responsible for Escape the Junkyard, the first “proper” Thirsty Giants LP. Escape the Junkyard was recorded by Mark Krogmann at Average Grum when the trio (now spread out between Mankato and Duluth) convened for a “long weekend” in October of last year, and it captures a band in the process of evolving from a pandemic-era Black Flag/Stooges/Circle Jerks cover band to something more wide-ranging. 

This thirteen-song, thirty-minute vinyl LP ranges from early hardcore punk rock-and-roll rave-ups to more meditative, less-easily-categorizable rock music. The thrashing, hardcore-informed garage punk of the first three proper songs on the record (“This Thing Called Junk”, “Read the Room”, and “F.R.F.A.”) is entertaining and furious enough on its own to turn one’s attention to The Thirsty Giants, but it’s the mid-tempo punk rock brooding of “No Future” that suggests that the trio is looking beyond their genre of origin on Escape the Junkyard. Tracks like “Disperse” (which sounds like something from a forgotten math-influenced emo album that would’ve been recently unearthed by The Numero Group) continue to surprise, and “Abandon All Hope” (a dread-fueled punk crawl) and “Wake” (which closes the LP on a metallic note) show that The Thirsty Giants can still be “heavy” while pushing their own boundaries. Not much more one could ask for from an upper Midwestern punk debut. (Bandcamp link)

Chaepter – Dragon of Shame

Release date: May 29th
Record label: Candlepin/Flesh & Bone
Genre: Post-punk, noise rock, lo-fi indie rock, art rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Spook the Market

Chicago has a proud history of weird and noisy indie rock, and Chaepter Negro is a proper heir to the throne. Distorted records of post-punk and jagged art rock like 2023’s Naked Era and last year’s Companion Music found the freewheeling musician steadily honing a signature sound, and somewhere along the line “Chaepter” became a three-piece group also featuring drummer John Golden and bassist Ayethaw Tun. When Chaepter put out Companion Music last November, they hinted that they already had another LP ready to go; six months later, we’ve gotten Dragon of Shame, released by the band’s occasional home of Candlepin Records along with new partner Flesh & Bone (Marni, Cashier, Miners). Recorded by the band themselves at Jamdek Studios, Dragon of Shame continues Companion Music’s foray into a tougher, more “rocking” sound, although there’s more polish to these fourteen songs than its immediate predecessor. 

“Swimming” and “Spook the Market” are classic Chaepter rockers, the former smooth and rolling in the vein of their “shoegaze-influenced” peers and the latter in the realm of choppy, frenetic post-punk. Even the more pensive moments on Dragon of Shame, like opening track “Anhedonia, Island in the Clouds” and “Teflon”, have a nice power-trio heft to them, and “TV Town” and “Miracle Worker” ensure that “rippers” continue well into the LP’s second half. Fans of Chaepter’s weirder side don’t have to worry about it being gone, though–the freak folk-y “Icebox” and the (especially) bizarre psychedelic dream pop odyssey “Hydra Economies” see to that, and the band stick a couple of burned-out ballads towards the end of the album with “The Well of St. Anthony” and “Stages”. It might’ve been a relatively quick turnaround from Companion Music, but with Dragon of Shame Chaepter have once again given us a complete-feeling experience. (Bandcamp link)

Patois Counselors – Protection Racket

Release date: May 29th
Record label: Ever/Never
Genre: Art rock, post-punk, avant-garage, psychedelia
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Generational Riffs

The intriguingly-named Charlotte group Patois Counselors have been flying under the radar for over a decade now: their first show was in 2015, and they put out three studio albums and a “live-in-the-studio” LP on Ever/Never from 2018 to 2024. Protection Racket is the fourth album of new material from the quintet (currently comprised of vocalist Bo White, guitarist Lenny Muckle, bassist Robin Doermann, synthesist Krizia Torres, and drummer Taylor Knox), and it finds them knee-deep in their particular strain of hypnotic avant-garde agitprop post-punk. The album’s Bandcamp page names some familiar canonical post-punk acts as influences (Pere Ubu, Devo, Wire, etc.) but the inspiration is primarily attitudinal; Protection Racket hardly sounds like any of those groups, and it hardly even sounds “punk rock” at all in a recognizable way for the most part. 

Protection Racket is defined by White’s conversational, impossible-to-nail down vocals rambling over confusing soundscapes trending towards synth-heavy, prog-informed art rock. That description does make them sound like Pere Ubu or even a less troglodyte Lungfish, but the trick is that White never sounds like he’s trying to be anyone but himself. It’s how Patois Counselors are able to stitch together “Cop City” (a wonky psychedelic take on “Paint It Black” about the titular fascist project), “Generational Riffs” (“power pop” if you squint), and “Flat No” (a wild, disintegrating art-punk/post-punk journey) into one statement. Bands like Patois Counselors don’t come around all that often (and you do often have to look in unexpected places, such as Charlotte, North Carolina, to find them). It’s even rarer for one to make it to a second decade, but the results are invariably some of the most unique rock music one can find. (Bandcamp link)

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