Pressing Concerns: The Terminal Buildings, Long Hair in Three Stages, Psychic Shakes, Dan Koshute

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We’re kicking off the holiday week with a traditional Monday Pressing Concerns! We have a new compilation from The Terminal Buildings and new albums from Long Hair in Three Stages, Psychic Shakes, and Dan Koshute to look at today. Just a programming note: due to the American Thanksgiving holiday, the normal Thursday Pressing Concerns will be going up on Wednesday instead.

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.

The Terminal Buildings – Coming to Terms with the Terminal Buildings: Best Ones 2021-2023

Release date: November 17th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Lo-fi pop, power pop, bedroom pop
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Forgettable Guy

The Terminal Buildings are a one-person guitar pop project led by a Glasgowian home recording enthusiast named Finlay. If you’ve read Pressing Concerns long enough, you’re familiar with the type–a project with a huge back catalog on Bandcamp recorded entirely by themselves, usually available for a name-your-price download, containing a ton of hidden pop gems in the vein of Robert Pollard, Martin Newell, Mo Troper, et cetera. Taking in a band in this exploratory kind of way is exciting for certain listeners, but the good news for the rest is that The Terminal Buildings have done this for us, in a way. Coming to Terms with the Terminal Buildings: Best Ones 2021-2023 is indeed what it sounds like–fifteen songs from the past two years of The Terminal Buildings, culling tracks from a half-dozen different releases and presenting them in an easily-digestible 28-minute package. The Terminal Buildings of Coming to Terms sound fairly humble, with the songs often containing the bare minimum amount of instrumentation required to qualify as “power pop”–nevertheless, it’s a compilation absolutely stacked with successful pop music.

The compilation hits the ground running with the basement-version-Big-Star track “Cruel World” and “Struck Me Down”, a lazy-sounding piece of C86-ish jangly indie pop with some melancholic undertones. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly where Coming to Terms cements itself as something special, although some point around the handclap-baiting “More Like That” and the undeniable rock and roll (in spite of itself) of “Forgettable Guy” might be where to set the stake. Tony Molina feels like an obvious point of influence for The Terminal Buildings, which the brief brilliance in songs like “Knew It from the Start” (which darts from casual college rock to guitar-hero power pop in about 60 seconds) and “There’s Still Something About You” serves to underline. With less than thirty minutes to spare, there’s no time for filler here–“Mr L.A.” has some odd moments, but the payoff is more than worth the journey to get there, and Coming to Terms certainly ends strongly with the surprisingly fully-realized pop rock of “Your Dance” and acoustic ballad “I Don’t Want to Wrong My Baby” (recorded to cassette and sounding like whichever folk-pop troubadour feels the most “intimate” to you). Regardless of how many people had heard these fifteen songs before now, Coming to Terms has plenty of material worthy of a real-deal “greatest hits” collection. (Bandcamp link)

Long Hair in Three Stages – The Oak Within the Acorn

Release date: November 18th
Record label: NoiseWave
Genre: Noise rock, post-punk
Formats: CD, digital
Pull Track: Dunning-Kruger-Voight-Kampff

A Sicilian noise rock band who’s named themselves after a U.S. Maple song, huh. Don’t mind if I do. The Oak Within the Acorn is the third full-length album from Catania quartet Long Hair in Three Stages (drummer Giovanni Piccinini, bassist Santi Zappalà, vocalist Giuseppe Iacobaci, and guitarist Fabio Corsaro), and the first album from the group in nearly a decade (following 2014’s Burn/Smother and their 2008 debut, Like a Fire in a Cave). Although the band have certainly learned a bit from U.S. Maple’s guitar squall, they’re more comfortably in the realm of post-punk and art-punk than deconstructed post-rock–Iacobaci’s vocals are more Jello Biafra than Beefheart, for instance, and they’ve probably listened a good amount to their fellow Europeans in The Ex as well. Similarly, Iacobaci doesn’t let any language barrier get in the way of his fiery lyrics–largely in English, his topics range from fascism to Alternative Nation to misogyny to extraction capitalism in a way that is refreshingly not self-serious but hardly a “joke” either.

Honestly, the most “U.S. Maple moment” on The Oak Within the Acorn just might be the clang of feedback that begins the album, before the song launches into an Ex/Kennedys-ish piece of agit-punk. The album is lean but slippery, with Corsaro’s winding guitar coiling and striking over top of Piccinini and Zappalà’s razor-sharp rhythm section. Iacobaci, meanwhile, is all over the map–he’s referencing Karl Popper, Kalergi, and Qanon in “Dunning-Kruger-Voight-Kampff”, then he’s name-dropping Tindersticks and Sonic Youth in “1991” and on “Mysogynocyde” he’s–well, use your imagination on that one. While this is certainly an album with a good deal of appeal to those of us who know what Alternative Tentacles and Amphetamine Reptile are, I do want to emphasize that Long Hair in Three Stages are, more than anything, a fun and driven rock and roll band on The Oak Within the Acorn. The musical and lyrical references swirl about, but one doesn’t need to catch them with any regularity to get something out of this record. (Bandcamp link)

Psychic Shakes – Forever Now

Release date: November 17th
Record label: Good Eye
Genre: Bedroom pop, jangle pop, indie pop, dream pop
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Little One

Psychic Shakes is the project of Plymouth, England’s Max McLellan, who’s been making music under the name since 2016. Despite this, Forever Now appears to be the first Psychic Shakes full-length, as McLellan’s output had been restricted to EPs and singles up until now. On his first album, McLellan embraces a wide-sounding and sincere version of jangly, dreamy guitar pop (putting Psychic Shakes right at home on Good Eye Records, and it also reminds me of the recent Lost Film album). Forever Now is a short album, at nine songs and twenty-five minutes, but feels full and self-contained due to both the expansive sound that McLellan is able to pull off despite the “lo-fi” origins of the record and because of its driven, purposeful writing. Brought on by pandemic-induced instability and the impending birth of his daughter, Forever Now is deliberately constructed as a snapshot of McLellan’s past and present as he looks at the future.

Forever Now begins with a collection of huge, unstoppable pop songs. The first proper song on the record, “Little One”, starts off as a trebly piece of Cleaners from Venus-sounding jangle pop (Martin Newell is assuredly a big influence on Psychic Shakes), although it develops into a confident and modern-sounding piece of bedroom pop from there. “Fifteen Forever” and “Home” chase that song by offering up a similar level of energy and hooks–the former song in particular is a deft piece of wide-eyed new wave pop rock, and what “Home” lacks in a giant chorus it makes up for with a brisk tempo and a great ratio of melodic guitar parts for its relatively short length. Earning its “full length” status, Forever Now steers us into a contemplative midsection (the probing ballad “When We Die” and the spare instrumental “Island”) before rousing itself with the curious distorted folk of “Embrace”, one more dream pop hit single with “Unfold You”, and the acoustic epilogue of “My Baby Girl”. McLellan is skilled at articulating where he’s at in his life, and his use of arresting guitar pop to do so is a big part of why Forever Now works. (Bandcamp link)

Dan Koshute – Intravolve

Release date: July 26th
Record label: Manga Persona
Genre: Power pop, glam rock, garage rock
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Cavalcade of Faces

I first became aware of Pittsburgh musician Dan Koshute via his contributions to Flowers Telegraphed to All Parts of the World, the latest album from The Garment District, a collective led by The Ladybug Transistor’s Jennifer Baron. He contributed guitar and sang lead vocals on two of the tracks (including highlight “The Starfish Song”), his piercing and confident singing providing a nice counterbalance to the swirling psychedelia of the music. As it turns out, 2023 has been a big year for Koshute–it also featured the release of Intravolve, his fourth full-length album and first since 2018. On his own, Koshute is a much more direct singer-songwriter and performer–on this album, he puts his foot on the gas for a breathless collection of power pop/garage rock tunes delivered with an all-in attitude reflecting someone who doesn’t know how many fully “on-his-own” statements he’ll be able to make.

Koshute recorded Intravolve entirely on his own in “a secret recording studio in the back of a Pittsburgh yoga studio”–all things considered, it sounds great. Opening track “Cavalcade of Faces” is a cavalcade of energy, gleefully hanging on one chord before the rest of the band (I mean, Koshute on different instruments) kicks out a garage-pop anthem. “For Reasons”, “The Mysteries”, and “Till Then” rival the runaway-train spirit of the opening track, delivering hooks and speed in equal measure, and the record’s final two songs (“Leonids” and the title track) ensure that Intravolve ends with just as much zeal as it begins. Koshute does find a little bit of time to deliver something that’s slightly less frantic–“Glow Area” and “Coeternal” are still loud and fuzzy enough, but the mid-tempo power pop of the two of them do work as more than just moments of relative levity. Perhaps most importantly, nothing on Intravolve serves to dampen its identity as a record absolutely bursting with hooks deserving to be heard beyond the confines of a yoga studio. (Bandcamp link)

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