Pressing Concerns: Lambchop, Foglights, Eliots Graveyard, Commit 2 Try

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Well, look who’s back: Yes, it’s Pressing Concerns! After a couple of weeks off for personal reasons, Rosy Overdrive has returned and is ready to run down some of this week’s notable releases: we’re looking at new albums from Lambchop and Eliots Graveyard and new EPs from Foglights and Commit 2 Try. I can’t promise that the blog will be 100% back to its normal schedule now, but I’m going to do my best to get us back on track soon.

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.

Lambchop – Punching the Clown

Release date: August 21st
Record label: Merge/City Slang
Genre: Folk, gospel
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Weakened

Since their inception forty years ago now, the Nashville group Lambchop have become one of the most fascinating, rewarding, and perplexing acts to skulk around the realm of “indie music”. Frontperson Kurt Wagner’s muse has led him to some particularly strange and amorphous places in recent years, as they’ve made challenging records with which I’ve admittedly struggled like Showtunes and The Bible (even as I respect Lambchop as much as ever). No consternation has faced me at all with Punching the Clown, however. Lambchop’s best album in a decade finds Wagner returning to writing songs with guitar and voice, the results of which he recorded in Eau Claire, Wisconsin at Justin Vernon (Bon Iver)’s studio. 

Punching the Clown is inspired by a type of gospel music called “lined out singing”, a call-and-response technique featuring a choir. Indeed, an Eau Claire-based choir backs Wagner on these dozen songs, as well as co-songwriter Andrew Broder’s guitar and Vernon’s banjo. “Just West of Nicollet” and “Weakened” are as beautiful as anything else in Lambchop’s mountainous discography (and the first one in particular has a nice surprise to remind us all that this is Lambchop we’re dealing with), and they’re hardly alone in Punching the Clown. It may be spurred on by yet another new discovery by Wagner, but only Lambchop could’ve made Punching the Clown. (Bandcamp link)

Foglights – Nous Deux

Release date: August 21st
Record label: Slumberland/Skep Wax
Genre: Indie pop, dream pop, lo-fi pop, slowcore
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: The Day the Light Stayed (Longer Than Us)

If you’ve been following Pressing Concerns at all, you’re probably aware of the dozens of indie pop bands from the San Francisco Bay area who frequently share members and collaborate with one another. Over on the other side of the world, the British have decided not to be left out either, and so now we have a new duo called Foglights made up of Eva Cord (one half of the Scottish indie pop duo The Cords) and Archie Ingram, a Brit who just released the first album from his psychedelic pop solo project Stone Anthem. I also brought up San Francisco because Foglights’ debut cassette EP, Nous Deux, reminds me of foggy guitar pop from Bay Area acts like Tony Jay and Cindy–these four songs similarly trawl through a dreamy haze inspired by The Velvet Underground, Mazzy Star, and countless bedroom folk pop musicians from decades past. The incredibly slow-moving pop music of the first half of the EP gives way to the relatively jaunty chamber pop of “The Day the Light Stayed (Longer Than Us)” and a hall-of-mirrors dream pop closing track called “A Brighter Kind of Almost”, all of which ensures that Foglights’ brief first statement nonetheless has plenty of shades to it. (Bandcamp link)

Eliots Graveyard – In the Long Run; The Time Together

Release date: August 21st
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Bedroom pop, folk rock, indie pop, singer-songwriter
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Picture of You, Hanging

Eliots Graveyard is Eliot Humphreys, a “socialist & queer freak twee pop musician” from Wrexham in Wales; originally titled Cop Graveyard, Humphreys’ project has been making lo-fi indie pop since 2014, releasing a ton of EPs and singles (including a split with Long Neck in 2024) but only one proper album before now. The long-awaited second Eliots Graveyard album is called In the Long Run; The Time Together, and it’s a humble but compelling collection of earnest, catchy bedroom guitar pop. In the Long Run; The Time Together is steeped in the long-standing tradition of strong British indie pop (like that of The Terminal Buildings, another one-person-pop-group who just happen to be led by a former contributor to Eliots Graveyard) but with a noticeable debt to folk-y singer-songwriters, too (Humphreys lists Loudon Wainwright III and Michael Hurley as influences). The writer behind “Picture of You, Hanging”, “Don’t Wanna Run”, and “The Joke’s on Me” is a compelling one, to be sure. Happy to add Eliots Graveyard to the list of what’s good in Wales these days.  (Bandcamp link)

Commit 2 Try – Famous Stages

Release date: August 19th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: 90s indie rock, emo, twee, indie pop
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Postcards

At the beginning of this decade, a couple of Montreal musicians in guitarist/vocalist Daphne Giannias and drummer Antoine Mahé started making music together under the name Dafnez; at some point in the past year they added bassist Maxeen Paré, changed their name to Commit 2 Try, and have just now put out their debut EP, Famous Stages. The self-described “tweemo” trio claim Rainer Maria, Modest Mouse, and Juliana Hatfield as influences, and these four songs are pop music inspired by a few different dusty corners of 1990s indie rock. It’s in line with new bands like fellow Canadians Tin-Ear or (especially) the Pacific Northwest “Numero Group-core” act Wavers. Opening track “Postcards” is slightly wobbly but lands its heartfelt pop blow just as swiftly, and the darker, more emo-dominant “Smoke Shack” and “Bad Dreams” still have ample hooks to them. The delicate sort-of-ballad “Always a Surprise” caps off a promising debut from a band whose love of great indie rock bleeds through the cracks. (Bandcamp link)

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