Pressing Concerns: TJ Douglas, The Drin, Percy, Big Fat Head

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Hey there! Welcome to the blog! I’m quite excited for what we have coming up in Pressing Concerns this week, as it’s the one where I finally get around to covering a bunch of albums that I’ve been meaning to cover for a while now. With that in mind, the Monday post offers up two albums that came out last month (LPs from TJ Douglas and The Drin) and two albums from May (from Percy and Big Fat Head).

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.

TJ Douglas – Dying

Release date: June 14th
Record label: Team Love
Genre: Indie folk, singer-songwriter
Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital
Pull Track: It Means What It Means

New York folk singer-songwriter TJ Douglas has been steadily making music for nearly a decade now–their debut (Joey) came out in 2015, the album that caught my attention (Our Lady Star of the Sea, Help and Protect Us) arrived a couple years later, they self-released an hourlong digital album during the pandemic (Lo) that got an abbreviated cassette reissue in 2022 (Lo 2.0). There’s a good deal of familiarity to be found on Dying, their latest album–Douglas’ distinct punctual but laid-back vocals are still accompanied by little more than an acoustic guitar, they’re once again working with Team Love Records (which put out Our Lady Star of the Sea…), the album was once again recorded by Douglas and longtime collaborator Kyle Morgan, and, like a lot of Douglas’ writing, Dying deals with theology and spirituality in some roundabout way. Previous Douglas records have approached this topic from different angles in their life–Our Lady Star of the Sea… as a Master’s student pursuing a divinity degree, Lo while attending seminary to become a hospital chaplain–and Dying continues this thread, featuring writing largely drawn from Douglas’ experiences as a palliative care chaplain. 

The title of Dying is as blunt as it is accurate–it’s music from somebody whose job quite literally requires them to navigate death with others every day. The brushes with religion and theology in the record are the necessary result of staring down mortality, much of which is presented in the form of conversations between Douglas and those in their care. “You say if your soul chose this life / Then your soul made a fucking mistake,” they sing in “Life on Earth”, an early, crushing highlight that lays bare just how impossible the task before them (and, eventually, all of us) can be at times. Other songs clearly drawn from these experiences aren’t quite as rough, but the foggy suddenness of “Nothing Like Everything (Bathroom Mat)” and the more ambivalent “The Light on the Sidewalk” are still affecting. There’s a lot of Douglas themself in these songs, as well–the lines get blurred on songs like “It Means What It Means”, where they’re overwhelmed and trying to make sense of it all (“I walk home through the doorway / Saying ‘babe, I had a realization today’ / … / ‘You say that everyday’ you say”), or the determination of “I Can Be Anything”. Dying ends with a short benediction called “Help Me Die”–it’s a simple conclusion, and its relatively few lyrics (“Be with me in all my grief / My aching relief”, “When it comes time, I don’t want to fight / So please don’t even try”) land heavily. Douglas isn’t the first person to express such sentiments, but in their case, it’s a powerful instance of practicing what they preach. (Bandcamp link)

The Drin – Elude the Torch

Release date: June 28th
Record label: Feel It
Genre: Post-punk, garage rock, art punk, psych rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Elude the Torch

In some ways the beating heart of Cincinnati’s impressive, expansive underground garage rock/post-punk scene, The Drin have steadily put out a full-length each year this decade thus far, in the process growing from a Dylan McCartney solo project to a six-piece group and moving from Future Shock to recent Cincinnati transplants Feel It Records. Much of The Drin’s evolution came to a head last year via Today My Friend You Drunk the Venom (their Feel It debut and first clearly full-band effort) and the wild live album “37 Buried at Helltown”. The 2024 offering from The Drin is called Elude the Torch, made once again with what appears to be a stable sextet lineup (McCartney, Eric Dietrich, Ryan Sennett, Luke Cornett, Cole Gilfilen, and Dakota Carlyle, half of which also play in Corker) and once again released via Feel It. To my ears, Elude the Torch is a pretty clear departure from Today My Friend.., which was a charmingly disjointed album that delighted in stacking fiery, out-of-control garage rock right up against experimental, almost post-rock recordings. Elude the Torch is a much more singular experience, a more cautious trek through a world of dark, rhythmic rock music that finds power in steadiness rather than building up and releasing tension.

Opening track “Bascinet” has a bit of that echoing, busy, almost dubbed-over feel of the last Drin album, but these aspects all dance on the periphery of a laser-focused rhythmic garage rock march. Elude the Torch isn’t a one-trick album, as the title track brings live-wire guitar leads into the picture, and “Tomorrow’s Just Laughin’” lets an acoustic guitar evoke folk and blues music right in the middle of it. It all just fits together so naturally, though, that The Drin are able to pull out of the lo-fi basement pop of “Comb the Wreckage” into the noisy post-punk of “Tigers Cage” and then flit from the garage rock confidence of “Lease on Life” into the dub-influenced “Persistence” easily. Perhaps even more so than their previous records, Elude the Torch feels like one entire statement, with the offbeat breathers like “Persistence” and “Canyon” sounding just as necessary to the tapestry as the more outward rockers. Elude the Torch wraps itself up with a ten-minute closing track called “No One Knows for Sure / Prato Della Valle”–the first four minutes are the uplifting rhythms of the first part, before trailing off into its six minute ambient piano finale. It’s the first moment on Elude the Torch where The Drin truly veer away from their center of gravity, having accomplished everything they needed in forty-some minutes already. (Bandcamp link)

Percy – New Phase

Release date: May 15th
Record label: Tenfoot
Genre: Post-punk, noise rock
Formats: CD, digital
Pull Track: Last Train to Selby

York post-punk group Percy have been around since 1996, when guitarist/vocalist/lyricist Colin Howard and bassist Andy Wiles formed the band–and, not long after, their own label (Tenfoot Records) to put out their music. Other members of the band have come and gone, but in 2018 they added keyboardist Paula Duck and drummer Jason Wilson and experienced a “Dr. Who-like regeneration” (according to Wiles)–they’ve put out four full-length albums since that point, including their latest, New Phase. On New Phase, Percy sound like a classic British noisy post-punk group–somewhere between the bombast of Mclusky and the unflappable trudging of The Fall, one gets the impression that Percy were a perfectly nice 90s indie band that have gotten more callous and cantankerous with age. Percy are open about aging being an influence on the content of New Phase, but the group head towards middle age kicking and screaming–from the injection of new blood in the synths and percussion to Howard’s inspired vocal performances, there’s plenty of energy to be found in these ten songs. 

The absolute cacophony of “Sink Estate Satanic Rites” introduces New Phase with an instrumental that matches an unhinged opening statement from Howard–the “images to haunt the rest of my years” he mentions among the clang of the song is a theme that pops up again in the dark corners of the record, from the unsettling train ride described in the barreling post-punk of “Last Train to Selby” to the frantic self-destruction of “I Can Hear Orgies”, the (sorry) climax of the record. Howard explores personality disorders (“Do You Think I’m on the Spectrum?”), avarice (“Greedy People”), and hypochondria (“You Never Know”) with a droll British attitude–singing about these more worldly concerns, it becomes clear that, while the frequently sarcastic and hyperbolic Howard narrations aren’t precisely autobiographical, there’s something clearly close to home about these caricatures. New Phase is a thrilling listen because the rest of Percy match the gripping, rollercoaster-ride journey of its frontperson, with breakneck garage-post-punk like “Do You Think I’m on the Spectrum?” sitting alongside violin-aided Mekons-y/The Ex-y punk (“Thinking of Jacking It in Again”) and the atmospheric, restrained six-minute closing track, “Afterlife”. After a couple of songs that either end in or swim in death before it, “Afterlife” is an appropriate way to send the record off, but Percy hardly sound dead as they flesh out their ode to the next life. Call it a New Phase. (Bandcamp link)

Big Fat Head – Bobo Rising

Release date: May 31st
Record label: Clean Demon
Genre: Post-punk, noise pop, 90s indie rock, experimental rock
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Ricochet

Big Fat Head are a new-ish band that seem to rep Columbus and Ohio in general a good deal, which I appreciate. Started by vocalist/guitarist Nate Wilder in Athens, the project eventually moved to Columbus and became a sturdy five-piece band (featuring vocalist/bassist Olivia Stefanoff, guitarist Jordan “Flat-pack” Latas, synth player Felicity Gunn, and percussionist Stanic Russ). After some Wilder solo releases, 2022’s Villain Pop EP was the first quintet release, and now Big Fat Head have their first full-band album in Bobo Rising. As if the full-band expansion wasn’t enough, the band have also allowed plenty of other Buckeye fingerprints on their most recent record–it was recorded with John Hoffman of Cincinnati’s Vacation, features contribution from members of Columbus bands Tetnis, Confusions, and Golomb, and the title of the album even refers to Columbus’ Cafe Bourbon Street. Bobo Rising is, subsequently, a fairly all-over-the-place rock record–neither the sparkling jangle pop of The Laughing Chimes nor the bedroom folk-indebted sound of Villagerrr, Big Fat Head have a kitchen sink sound featuring bits of fuzzed-out garage rock, post-punk, lo-fi pop, and even a bit of shoegaze on Bobo Rising.

Bobo Rising feels almost deliberately hard to get a handle on as it kicks off with three fairly different-sounding tracks: album opener “Sneak” is a piece of messed-up, fuzzed-out country-tinged garage punk, “Pit-a-pat” veers into suave, smooth, and relatively minimal bass-led post-punk, and “Spiderweb” lets the synths and drum machines sit up front in service of a completely different experience than either of the songs preceding it. If Bobo Rising ever approaches a “rhythm”, it’s probably around the center of the album, where the 90s indie rock buzz of “Ricochet”, the shoegaze/Bailter Space-y noise pop of “Kahiki”, and the slacker mess of “Pendulum” all feel at the very least in the same galaxy. Still, plenty of Big Fat Head is unlocked in this stretch–for instance, when they go full wall-of-sound in “Kahiki”, an impressive mode that Bobo Rising only leans on one other time (towards the end of the hypnotic “Who Shot the Messenger?”). Taking left turns up until its end, Bobo Rising plays us out with the bizarre grooves of “Let It Go” and “Keep It Up”, the latter of which begins as a skeletal Guided by Voices-esque lo-fi pop rocker but closes with surging, distorted rock and roll–how else could a central Ohio indie rock record end? (Bandcamp link)

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