Pressing Concerns: Labrador, Leah Callahan, American Cream Band, Prathloons

Posted byrosyoverdrivePosted inPressing ConcernsTags:, , , , , , , ,

This here Thursday Pressing Concerns features new albums from Labrador, American Cream Band, and Prathloons that are coming out tomorrow (June 5th), plus an LP from Leah Callahan that came out earlier this week. Check them out, and also check out Monday’s blog post (featuring The Greenberry Woods, Fastener, Ben Auld, and Morningstar) if you missed it.

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.

Labrador – The Rosy Red World

Release date: June 5th
Record label: No Way of Knowing
Genre: Alt-country, country rock, country punk, garage rock, Americana
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: We Drew Straws

After moving from New York to Philadelphia, Pat King retooled his solo project Labrador into the polished country rock/folk rock group seen on the 2023 LP Hold the Door for Strangers and its 2025 follow-up, My Version of Desire. These two albums have also seen the group (King, bassist Will Hochgertel, drummer Steve Kurtz, and guitarist Kris Hayes) steadily go from a Neil Young-inspired alt-country act to one that can also find a home for King’s secondary influences of power pop, soul, and 60s pop rock. The third Labrador album in four years, The Rosy Red World, keeps the project moving forward by embracing a more kinetic country-punk (relatively, speaking) sound and delving explicitly into the realm of protest music. Far from being an awkward fit, it would almost be disingenuous for a band to claim folk music, punk rock, Neil Young, and soul as influences without having something to say about the state of things. The Rosy Red World enters the arena white-knuckled and with gritted teeth, but with the purpose and precision of musical craftsmen.

King practically bellows “It’s mine / Mine, all mine,” over top of mid-tempo country rock in The Rosy Red World’s opening title track, and “Slow Down, King” is a groovy folk rocker in which King sings about painting fascist blood on his face before checking himself in the chorus. It’s almost a relief when the music of The Rosy Red World starts to match the urgency of King’s writing–although, really, there’s not much “relief” to be found in the dire, thundering “We Drew Straws”. The Detroit-flavored garage rock of “Metaphor for Love” is a little more “fun” without dialing it back at all, and “Kill Kill Kill” and “Your Home Is an Eyesore” keep the pace at “blistering” in the record’s second half. There’s an unhinged irony to the sneer in “Your Home Is an Eyesore” (as well as the title track, to a lesser degree) that’s unusual for an overly earnest band operating in overly earnest genres, but amping up the absurdity keeps The Rosy Red World barreling down the tracks. Lest you worry about any plot-losing, though, Labrador close out their latest album with a cover of The Van Dykes’ “No Man Is an Island”, a 60s soul song that beseeches the listener to stand together with the rest of humanity. It’s a song Labrador were made to sing, and they found the perfect place for it right at the end of The Rosy Red World. (Bandcamp link)

Leah Callahan – Our Lady of the Sad Adventure

Release date: June 1st
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Art rock, dream pop, psychedelia, 90s indie rock
Formats: CD, digital
Pull Track: Fall in Love with Your Mind

After coming up in various underground Boston bands in the 1990s and 2000s, Leah Callahan returned from a musical hiatus in a big way at the beginning of this decade. Since 2021, Callahan has released five solo albums, frequently collaborating with producer Richard Marr, members of fellow Boston act The Sterns, and other local ringers for arrangements and instrumental backing. Rosy Overdrive joined Callahan in 2024 with the release of Curious Tourist, in which Callahan and Chris Stern created a song-forward tapestry of music inspired by both members’ formative shoegaze, dream pop, and 90s indie rock without fitting neatly into those boxes. The fifth Leah Callahan LP of the decade, Our Lady of the Sad Adventure, is another album co-produced by Marr and Stern and featuring Jeremy Fortier on viola (who appeared on Curious Tourist) and drummer Ben Polito (a Stern collaborator who also makes power pop on his own as Benny P).

On Our Lady of the Sad Adventure, Callahan’s distorted, dreamy indie rock once again remains dominant, but Callahan and her team expand the palette to more wholeheartedly embrace lengthy synthpop, post-punk, and even psychedelic pieces. Six-minute opening track “Fall in Love with Your Mind” is worth the price of admission on its own, rumbling and tumbling through a rhythmic but spacey journey, and it spills perfectly into “Driving”, a “rocker” somewhere in between early post-punk and American college rock that really only a Boston-era music veteran could fully pull off. Other highlights include the minimal synthpop groove of the title track and the fuzz-pop “New Punk” in the first half, and Our Lady of the Sad Adventure also ends on a particularly strong note with the dynamic, almost U2-ish “Irish Goodbye”, the punchy but orchestral indie pop “Miss Me”, and a surprisingly power pop-indebted cover of Molly Drake’s “I Remember”. Our Lady of the Sad Adventure continues to surprise and continues a strong streak for Leah Callahan. (Bandcamp link)

American Cream Band – Twin

Release date: June 5th
Record label: Quindi
Genre: Post-punk, dance punk, kraut-pop, psychedelia, synthpop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Ethical Vampire

We checked in on the St. Paul, Minnesota group American Cream Band in 2023, when the Nathan Nelson-led project released an album called Presents. The LP’s experimental rock music pulled together psychedelia, krautrock, and post-punk with Nelson’s “ringleader bark” as the adherent. American Cream Band is back with a new album called Twin, and though strange, rhythmic rock music from decades past remains the largest influence on the band, this record introduces Liz Buhmann as a new primary lead vocalist. Nelson’s voice still pops in here and there, and American Cream Band use their new singer (as well as the interplay between the two) to delve more intently into the realms of dance-punk and art pop. It kind of reminds me of a more krautrock-y B-52’s, and Twin is exactly as fun as one would hope from that kind of description. 

“Fun” is pretty much the only thing that comes to mind listening to something like the exuberant party-pop “Ethical Vampire”, and even “journeys” like opening track “The Hive Is Pissed” and the heavy groove of “Don’t Burn the House Down” are infectious in their own ways. After an all-hits first half, American Cream Band do offer up a couple of slow-burns in the album’s B-side, but it’s not like “No Funeral Necessary” and “Leda and the Swan” grind the festivities to a halt (and, if they did, “Birthday” would be there to pick them right up). As “We’re Not So Sinister” closes Twin on a psychedelic Western note, I spend the last couple of minutes of Buhmann and Nelson communicating to each other over a “noir” groove deciding what I’d call exactly whatever it is American Cream Band are doing on this LP. Is it “high-concept”? “Camp”? “Pastiche?” Twin generously offers something for the music geeks and the rest of us, too. (Bandcamp link)

Prathloons – Lowcountry

Release date: June 5th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Emo-y indie rock, folk rock, chamber pop, slowcore
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Caroline Off Grace

The Minneapolis-originating, Chicago-based indie rock act Prathloons have been around since 2018, and they got on my radar with their 2022 album The Kansas Wind. Soon afterward, bandleader Collin Dall relocated to Illinois and released an LP called Breadbox that emphasized the quieter corners of Prathloons’ sound. Although Prathloons’ influences (Death Cab for Cutie, Low, 90s emo/post-rock) have always been “delicate”, Breadbox was still an adjustment in its full-on embrace of slowcore; it may be useful to think of their latest album, Lowcountry, as a journey to the other side of Prathloons. The quintet have welcomed blog favorite musician Jon Massey (of Silo’s Choice, Upstairs, and Coventry) into the band, and the five of them (Dall, Massey, Audrey Alger-Daniels, Matt Ciani, and Nico Ciani) return enthusiastically to the realms of swooning, orchestral, ornate indie/“art” rock.

The ninety-second “Promises of Solid Gold” eases us into Lowcountry on a typically low-key note for Prathloons, but there’s nothing shy about the gorgeous string-laden folk rock of “Caroline Off Grace”, the single that immediately follows it. Prathloons aren’t always a “pop” band, but “Carolina Off Grace” is up there with The Kansas Wind’s “Chagrin” in terms of the band’s most immediately catchy material. Whether they’re slow-building (“Fed Back”), letting the strings take root from the get-go (“Name the Stars”), or embracing a surprisingly robust rhythm section (“I Can Remember”), Lowcountry is as adventurous and restless as this naturally-“cozy”-sounding kind of music can realistically be. It all leads up to an eight-minute song called “Dimple”, which stretches Prathloons’ polish out without wrecking their foundation; after that, the final two songs neatly wrap up Lowcountry with a familiar, tight bow. Prathloons have gotten very good at this. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Leave a comment