Pressing Concerns: Ex Pilots, Freddy Trujillo, Hey I’m Outside, Seawind of Battery

Welcome back to Pressing Concerns! This Tuesday, we’re looking at new albums from Ex Pilots, Freddy Trujillo, Hey I’m Outside, and Seawind of Battery. Alt-country! Instrumental cosmic Americana! Shoegaze! GBV-core! And more! And there’s also yesterday’s blog post, featuring Mister Data, Pallas Wept, Big Bend, and The Knickerbocker5, to check out if you missed it.

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.

Ex Pilots – Motel Cable

Release date: August 23^rd
Record label: Smoking Room
Genre: Noise pop, alt-rock, shoegaze, power pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Silver Sword

For those of you who aren’t staying up-to-date on the Pittsburgh shoegaze/noise pop/Guided by Voices-core scene, here’s a rundown: I’ve written a fair amount about Gaadge, which began as the solo project of Mitch Delong but has since evolved to feature songwriting contributions from the rest of the quartet, Nick Boston, Ethan Oliva, and Andy Yadeski. Yadeski and Oliva also play in the power trio Barlow with bassist Jake “JD” Nowoczynski, and all four members of Gaadge play in Ex Pilots alongside Mary Komondy and Ralph Dilullo (the latter of which has also contributed to Barlow), making them a sextet. Ex Pilots more or less seems to be to Oliva what Gaadge is for Delong–he’s the lead vocalist and (at least initially) the main songwriter, but they’ve pretty clearly been a full-on band for a while now. As Pittsburgh’s indie rock scene has gotten more attention thanks to bands like Feeble Little Horse, Bay Area imprint Smoking Room picked up Ex Pilots last year and reissued their 2019 self-titled LP, a strong collection of shoegaze-y noisy guitar pop–in the same world as Gaadge, yes, but Oliva has always been less interested in the experimental “zoomer My Bloody Valentine” layered texture side of Delong’s projects and more inclined to deliver huge Guided by Voices-indebted rock anthems (a band they’ve opened for, by the way) with distortion on tap.

Depending on whether one counts the lengthy 2015 collection Findlay, Motel Cable is either the second or third Ex Pilots full-length, and the first to initially come out on a label (once again, Smoking Room). On what will likely be an introduction to Ex Pilots for a lot of people, the sextet do what they do best–kick out fifteen songs and thirty-seven minutes of hook-laden, shoegaze-informed indie rock shot through with a sense of Robert Pollard-esque propulsive melancholy that’s equally present on the loud, punk-y rave-ups and the record’s more pensive moments. Ex Pilots have a few different modes–there’s the fidgety, punchy version of the band, in which it seems like the group can’t help from throwing moments of noise and aggression in the middle of perfect guitar pop (this version of the band pops up in dynamic opening track “Downdraft” and “Silver Sword”, a song that makes me want to go crazy and hurt myself and others). 

Ex Pilots aren’t quite “mellow” yet, but there’s a surprising amount of acoustic guitar on Motel Cable between “Glory Thread”, “Not Yet”, and “Starry”, among others–while sometimes it’s just an atmospheric springboard to the louder moments on the album, the latter of the three is content to aspire to be nothing more than a contemplative, quietly beautiful early GBV-style ballad. Hello Whirled’s Ben Spizuco pops up on guitar on “Mystery Ship”, a hazy song that falls somewhere in between the group’s two sides–like early highlight “Hannah” and its restrained, mid-tempo steady-hand guitar pop, it helps Motel Cable feel more like a gradient than something oscillating between “all-hands-on deck rock music” and “dreamy basement vibes”. Whether or not Motel Cable is the strongest front-to-back record that its members have put together between their various projects remains to be seen, but it bodes well for both it and the future of all of their bands that it’s a strong contender. (Bandcamp link)

Freddy Trujillo – I Never Threw a Shadow at It

Release date: May 24^th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Alt-country, roots rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Corpus Christi

For over twenty years, Freddy Trujillo played bass for long-running Portland, Oregon alt-country-rockers Richmond Fontaine, and since they broke up in 2016, he’s played the same role (along with some of his former bandmates) in soul-influenced country group The Delines. Trujillo, originally from Simi Valley, California, has dabbled in a solo career over the years–he put out an album under his own name in 2002, and again in 2014–but he’s really focused on it in recent years, with Sketch of a Man showing up in 2022 and I Never Threw a Shadow at It, his fourth solo album, arriving merely two years later. I Never Threw a Shadow at It pulls from across Trujillo’s music career and life in general–it’s a deft collection of Chicano rock with alt-country, roots rock, and college rock influences recalling greats like Alejandro Escovedo and The Silos. It’s clearly a “solo” album–almost all of Trujillo’s writing is about his own upbringing and experiences as a Chicano in southern California–but one that welcomes collaboration, as all members of The Delines contribute to it, and the band’s Willy Vlautin even penned the opening track, “Corpus Christi” (a Delines outtake that Trujillo didn’t want to see fade into obscurity).

The rootsy country-rock of “Corpus Christi” is a classic of the genre, an odd-seeming choice to open a record as personal as I Never Threw a Shadow at It, but the circumstances behind its creation serve to connect the Trujillo of the past (who appears in almost every song on the record) with the rock music veteran in the present. The western guitar riff that floats through “I Didn’t Cross the Border, the Border Crossed Me” shades a song about Trujillo’s ancestry that is remarkably restrained and patient in its explanation of the titular line, and the mid-tempo ballad “World There Haunting Me” laments possibility hovering just out of reach. As much of Trujillo is contained within all of these songs, the record’s centerpiece is clearly the title track, a nearly-spoken-word song recounting the blatant racial profiling and harassment he experienced at the hands of the LAPD in a single incident ( “April 17th, 1991: that was the night my car was almost stolen,” he situates us at the beginning of the song). Trujillo follows it with the positive, vibrant sketch of “Mexican Hearts”, although I Never Threw a Shadow at It ends somewhere in between the two with the contemplative “Many Years of Minding”. Trujillo closes the album by ruminating on a lifetime of observation (and even further back, as he acknowledges the “generational” scars of institutional racism on his lineage). The core message of the song–things are never as black and white as we’d like to make them out to be–is simple, but living it as Trujillo does on I Never Threw a Shadow at It is another story entirely.

Hey I’m Outside – Hey I’m Outside

Release date: August 23^rd
Record label: Archival Workshop
Genre: Folk rock, alt-country
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Crash

Medford, Massachusetts alt-country duo Hey I’m Outside made their triumphant debut last year with a pair of EPs–the second of them, May’s Smile, caught my attention with its mix of lo-fi bedroom rock and 90s-style rootsy pop rock. 2023 was also when Hey I’m Outside released the first song that would end up on their self-titled debut album (“Racecar”), and at some point the band became a trio with founding members Patrick McPherson (vocals/guitar) and Hannah Fletcher (bass) welcoming drummer Noah Wisch to the fold. The band’s early EPs were solid and flashed potential, but Hey I’m Outside is pretty easily the group’s best work to date–although it’s still home-recorded, the thirty-minute record is the band’s most polished work yet, and the meandering country rock sound hinted at in their earlier releases blossoms and takes full control on the LP. Both McPherson as a vocalist and the band as players sound like relaxed storytellers throughout Hey I’m Outside, an earnest but not overly-sentimental mix of folk, country, and rock in the vein of undersung underground acts like State Champion and Parister (as well as the nowadays-properly-sung MJ Lenderman).

Hey I’m Outside’s opening track “Frontyard” is a strong first statement that also taps the brakes a little bit, taking a moment to celebrate the beautiful things in life that words can’t adequately describe (and so instead the band lean on a more pure form of expression–Crazy Horse-esque guitar knots). The upbeat country-folk of “Crash” may start with a literal accident, but it shrugs off the mess to run away gleefully to the tune of what I believe is guest musician Timothy McPherson’s dobro. The fleshed-out electric country rock of “Racecar”, “Instincts”, and “Lived in Maze” gives Hey I’m Outside a robust midsection–this is all musical comfort food, and while Hey I’m Outside could’ve easily ridden this thread out for the rest of the album, there are some intriguing moments towards the end of the album that push the record over the line. There’s “Insects”, an acoustic-led song about hibernating, hunkering down, and “waiting for something better, I guess”, their ambivalent ode to the band’s homestate, “Massachusetts” (“Now the cool kids moved away / Down to Philadelphia, PA / And some went down to Richmond town / Where does that leave you now?”), and “Goner”, the band’s jangly tribute to Jay Reatard (“Did it hurt? / Sure sounds like it in the verse, in the hook / Of most of your songs / Yeah, damn near ‘em all”). There’s no shortage of this kind of music out there at the moment, but by the end of Hey I’m Outside, its architects have made their case as clear standouts. (Bandcamp link)

Seawind of Battery – East Coast Cosmic Dreamscaper

Release date: August 2^nd
Record label: WarHen
Genre: Folk, psychedelia, ambient, post-rock, cosmic country
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: New Moon

New York musician Mike Horn made his debut as Seawind of Battery in 2022 with Clockwatching, an album full of instrumental, guitar-led ambient “cosmic country” soundscapes that got a bit of attention among those who like their lap steel to be on the psychedelic and post-rock side. Horn has kept a steady stream of Seawind of Battery live releases coming on the project’s Bandcamp page, but East Coast Cosmic Dreamscaper is the second formal full-length from the act. Since Clockwatching, Seawind of Battery have joined WarHen Records (Dogwood Tales, Tucker Riggleman & The Cheap Dates, Mike Frazier) and even grown to a duo, with lap steel player Jarrod Annis jumping from live member to full-timer. Those who enjoyed the singular, peaceful journey that Horn (who played everything on the first Seawind of Battery record) took us on with Clockwatching will find plenty of similar terrain covered on the six songs (seven on the CD) of East Coast Cosmic Dreamscaper, but there are also a handful of moments where Horn and Annis push against their languid roots politely but noticeably. East Coast Cosmic Dreamscaper is a more varied-sounding record than Seawind of Battery’s debut, but the LP is clearly stronger for it.

East Coast Cosmic Dreamscaper opens with “Blood Moon”, the only song on the album entirely recorded by Horn, and it enters the cosmos with gentle guitar melodies and lap steel shading in a comforting and familiar manner. The eight-minute “New Moon” which follows it, however, takes a different (and, indeed, new) turn–the guitar part Horn chooses to begin the song with is smooth and quite nearly peppy, and when the percussion kicks in sometime after the two-minute mark, it keeps up the rhythmic hypnosis. By the song’s midpoint, it’s Seawind of Battery’s version of dance pop, Horn shimmering and sketching over top of the steady hand of the drum machine. The duo pull a similar trick in the second half of the record with “Dreamscaper”, a song that balances earthbound, toe-tapping percussion with guitars played with an eye to the cosmos. These moments are perhaps East Coast Cosmic Dreamscaper’s most striking ones, but they’re richer for coming in the midst of songs like “Maze of Roses” (a brief foray into the world of psychedelic dream-folk that’s perhaps Seawind of Battery at their most “traditional”) and “Stay” (in which Horn and Annis unmoor themselves from the world entirely to float in a twinkling, ambient world of polite guitars). Seawind of Battery are growing, guided forward cautiously but openly. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

• Steve Barton – Time Hard Won
• Starflyer 59 – Lust for Gold
• The Peawees – One Ride
• Love Banana – Love Banana EP
• Bent Knee – Twenty Pills Without Water
• Secret Postcards – The Way Back EP
• Scrunchies – Colossal
• Something Sandy – Wouldn’t Mind a Good Adventure
• Salem Wolves – The Psychotron Speaks
• Billiam – Animation Cel
• Royal Headache – Live in America
• SUUNS – The Breaks
• Wings of Desire – Shut Up & Listen EP
• Snowy Band – Age Difference
• Darvid Thor – In the Space You Carry
• Dylan Rockwell – False Dawn EP
• Miles Cooper Seaton – Phases in Exile
• Nicole Marxen – Thorns
• Brian Gibson – Thrasher
• Amelia Courthouse – Broken Things
• Jon Benjamin – Jazz Daredevil – The Original Motion Picture Soundtrack of the (Unproduced) Film…The Jazz Daredevil
• Drew Mulholland & Garden Gate – Night Blooming Flowers
• Burr Oak – Annabelle EP
• PRONOUN – And It’s Been Raining Ever Since EP
• Go Betty Go – Black & Blue