‘Efficient at birth, but now a disease.  Convenience was a luxury and it’s grown to enslave me.  The thirst, the lust, the need for progress’ (Progress Calling)

Probably best to cut straight to the chase on this one.  Rotary Club sing about telephones and only telephones.  Yep, just telephones.  Now, clearly in the wrong hands, this could be deemed to be somewhat limiting.  But the Reno band use their thematic obsession to weave an almost sociological narrative of the evolution of the phone and our interaction with the technology, even increasingly possession by it.

This is the band’s debut full-length and follow-up to their 2023 7-inch, American Tower.  They continue to fuse a boisterous late 1970s’ punk base with a certain post-punk angularity and a decidedly off-kilter pop sensibility.  And it is all wrapped up and delivered with an irresistibly upbeat energy as arrestingly nasal lead vocals, energetic call-and-response, and melodically layered backing, revel in the ridiculousness of our plight.

Some of the tracks are firmly tongue-in cheek, such as the ode to the tactile pleasures of rotary dial phones on Touch Tone, and the simple pleasures of My Landline.  The majority though, such as Convenience Attractor and Progress Calling, are a jovially thoughtful deconstruction of how a device designed with progress in mind has, in its mobile form, come to dominate our lives.  It is often more a constraint than a freedom, one that frequently serves to isolate rather than connect.  Yet, even though, we are eminently aware of this, we continue to embrace the technology ever more closely.  A self-inflicted death knell delivered with a gleaming smile a mile wide.