Pressing Concerns: Hell Trash, Other Houses, Alpha Strategy, No Metal in This Battle

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Welcome to Pressing Concerns yet again! If you like EPs, this is the issue for you: new ones from Hell Trash, Other Houses, and Alpha Strategy grace this edition. For long-player fans, we’ve also got a new album from No Metal in This Battle to discuss.

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.

Hell Trash – Live at Home

Release date: June 30th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Lo-fi indie rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Violence

The band called Hell Trash is a Philadelphia-based duo comprised of vocalist, guitarist, and keyboardist Rowan Horton and guitarist/vocalist Noah Roth. Horton and Roth are also half of the excellent new band Mt. Worry, and I’ve written about Roth’s solo albums before too. Hell Trash appears to be primarily Horton’s project, as they wrote four of the five songs on their debut release and handle lead vocals as well. Speaking of said “debut release”, Live at Home wasn’t intended to introduce Hell Trash to the world, but Dan Jordan and Stuart McKean decided to record a set the band played at the Treehouse of Horror on June 8th, 2023, and Horton liked how it came out so much that a mere three weeks later, these five songs inaugurated the band as a standalone EP.

I’d already gathered that Horton was a solid songwriter based on the strength of the Mt. Worry EP, and Live at Home only confirms that their songs stand on their own as well. Horton’s four songs are presented fairly stripped down here, either played with just an acoustic and electric guitar or keyboard and guitar–there’s nothing for them to hide under, and they don’t need to. The various moods and modes of the four originals come through regardless of medium–the slightly dangerous-sounding, 90s alt-rock-indebted opening track “Violence”, the chilly “Gold Little Things”, the overburdened “Chemical Road” all make their marks.

Live at Home‘s songs are interspersed with moments of sincerity caught by the recording–Horton joking about how the final track sounds like a certain Gym Class Heroes song, Roth mentioning that Facebook told them it’s the ten year anniversary of them buying their guitar. Perhaps the greatest example of this is Hell Trash’s cover of “Shrieking Matter”, a song from the recently-released and very good Eternal Bliss Now! by Leor Miller’s Fear of Her Own Desire. Live at Home was recorded right after Mt. Worry and Leor Miller toured together, and as Horton explains, they wanted to play the song because they miss hearing their friend play songs they loved every night. Hell Trash may be a new band led by a principal singer-songwriter, but their cover of “Shrieking Matter” is a strong reminder that this kind of music thrives when the people who make it don’t treat it as a pure exercise in individualism and instead pay attention to what’s happening around them. (Bandcamp link)

Other Houses – Didactic Debt Collectors

Release date: July 7th
Record label: Aagoo
Genre: Power pop, indie pop
Formats: CD, digital
Pull Track: Swine Among the Relics

New Jersey’s Morgan Enos began making music as Other Houses in the mid-2010s, and he managed to put together a fairly robust discography in a short amount of time before his own music got put on the backburner in recent years as he became a full-time music writer. Indeed, I was familiar with Enos’ writing on Guided by Voices (among others) from Grammy.com, and he’s also a prolific jazz writer. The five-song Didactic Debt Collectors EP is Enos’ most substantial release since 2019, and it’s a charming collection of power pop-flavored indie rock that shows that Enos has learned a lot from both Robert Pollard’s bands and from the vintage power pop/pop rock that inspired Pollard himself. Didactic Debt Collectors was recorded by Enos alone in his “tiny home office”, and it strikes a nice balance between studiousness and lo-fi–the arrangements and writing feels deliberately-placed, but the relatively barebones recording style ensures the songs don’t come off as too labored-over.

Other Houses displays a knack for both a Pollardesque warped but pleasing melody and curiously memorable turns of phrase on Didactic Debt Collectors. Both of these tendencies are perhaps best expressed by closing track and highlight “Swine Among the Relics”, a relatively lo-fi and chilly song featuring chiming melodic guitar playing and a chorus in which Enos triumphantly sings of “Reliquary swine / With articulating spines”. The twisting structure of “Jacket’s Creed” also feels Guided by Voices-indebted, but Didactic Debt Collectors pulls from other kinds of guitar pop as well, from the deliberate acoustic pacing of opening track “Captive Audience” to the Jon Brion-esque straight-ahead power pop of “Drab Vocabulary”. The percussionless “Arc of the Arrow” layers the electric and acoustic guitars, but not distractingly enough to mute Enos’ wistful melody and lyrics. All of Didactic Debt Collectors ends up shining under this kind of presentation. (Bandcamp link)

Alpha Strategy – Staple My Hand to Yours

Release date: July 8th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Noise rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Mr. Wobbles

Alpha Strategy emerged out of Canada in the mid-2010s as practitioners of a specific low-end-heavy brand of Jesus Lizard-esque controlled-chaos noise rock, recording albums like 2016’s Drink the Brine, Get Scarce and 2018’s The Gurgler with Steve Albini at Electrical Audio. In the five years since their last album, Alpha Strategy bandleader Rory Hinchey relocated to Berlin and later to Prague–while Hinchey originally kept the previous lineup of the band together, it eventually ceased being possible and he assembled a new band, featuring guitarist Martin Doležal, drummer Filip Miškařík, and bassist Ondřej Červený. This is the version of the band that made their first record since 2018, the four-song Staple My Hand to Yours EP, also with Albini at Electrical Audio.

As one might expect, Staple My Hand to Yours is ten minutes of vintage, beefy, scuzzy noise rock. The band offer up every necessary tenet of this sound–prominent and aggressive bass playing, frantic-sounding guitar leads, and insistent drumming. Hinchey is a natural noise rock vocalist, hollering, wailing, screaming, and muttering in a way showing he’s been to the school of David Yow (and I hear a bit of David Thomas in there, too). There’s some sharp and surprising structural choices on the EP, as well–the disorienting opening track “Mr. Wobbles” just straight-up stops for a few seconds, showing that Alpha Strategy aren’t just interested in blowing off steam and can pull off subtlety. The twisting blues rock of “Steel Hair” and the minimal post-punk zippiness of “Mosquito Generation Point” feel self-contained as well; Staple My Hand to Yours may be relatively brief, but it makes its mark nevertheless. (Bandcamp link)

No Metal in This Battle – Wie Kraut Und Ruben

Release date: June 16th
Record label: Muaaah!/A tant Rêver Du Roi/Don’t Trust a Bear
Genre: Post-punk, dance punk, krautrock, psychedelic rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Lightrider

When Luxembourg’s No Metal in This Battle formed over a decade ago, the trio (now a quartet) came from various European math rock and emo bands, but their latest album demonstrates a group that has come a long way from their genres of origin. Wie Kraut Und Ruben is a six-song album comprised of two brand-new songs and four songs that had initially been released as singles over the past couple of years. The record’s songs are, by and large, the sound of slickly-played, groove-heavy post-punk and dance punk: No Metal in This Battle’s influences on Wie Kraut Und Ruben sound like krautrock, psychedelic rock, and afrobeat above anything else. 

Wie Kraut Und Ruben comes out blazing with “Lightrider”, one of the two new tracks, which offers up a slick piece of synth-colored, new wave-y funk rock, and the dancing guitar leads of “Shimokita” one song later keep its initial takeoff speed rolling along quite pleasingly. The other new track, “Lord of Fuzz”, is the record’s heaviest song, diving head-first into (as the title implies) fuzzy, smoking psychedelic rock. Two songs on Wie Kraut Und Ruben balloon to krautrock length–the seven-minute “Zeitzonensynchronisationmechanismus” and nine-minute “Fano”. Both of these songs show off No Metal in This Battle’s interest in Fela Kuti and afrobeat more generally, from the former’s swinging rhythm section and ticking-time-bomb structure to the latter’s Farfisa-aided explorations. The band steer through these turns deftly, but just as importantly, it sounds like they’re enjoying themselves as well. (Bandcamp link)

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