Pressing Concerns: Little Gold, Cel Ray, Dom Sensitive, Mesh

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It’s a Thursday blog post! We’ve got new albums from Little Gold, Cel Ray, Dom Sensitive, and Mesh, all out tomorrow (July 24th). Check them out, and if you missed Monday’s blog post (featuring Fig Dish, Hail Maria, Crash Outfit, and Red Star Sky), catch up on that one, too.

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.

Little Gold – Public Dog

Release date: July 24th
Record label: Tall Texan
Genre: Country rock, alt-country
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: What You Want

A lot has happened since the Athens, Georgia alt-country group Little Gold released their last album, Wake Up & Die Right, in mid-2020. The band’s frontperson, Christian “Smokey” DeRoeck, has put out albums as a member of the bands Deep State and Blunt Bangs (in both cases, with other members of the lineup that recorded Wake Up & Die Right), and as of late he’s found himself playing guitar in Ryan Davis’ Roadhouse Band (Davis’ label, Sophomore Lounge, had co-released Wake Up & Die Right). Nonetheless, DeRoeck has brought Little Gold back for their fifth album, Public Dog, recorded by Jesse Mangum with a new, expanded lineup featuring Brandon Page, Tyler Key, Drew Beskin, Stephen Payne, Michael Friday, Julia Barfield and Elisabeth Fuchsia. The world around Little Gold may have changed, but DeRoeck is still doing with the project what he’s been doing for nearly two decades now: making a very catchy, humble, and “Athens, Georgia” mixture of country rock, power pop, and “college rock”.

We’ve been living through an era of alt-country that’s very “rambly”, one that takes its cues from Jason Molina and Neil Young above all else. To be clear, I asked for this and I enjoy it–but it’s still such a breath of fresh air when Little Gold open up Public Dog with “Cochise”, an unabashed, concise power pop barnburner. The rootsy guitar pop hits keep coming immediately with “What You Want”, the title track, and “Born to Loose”, and the first acoustic song on the album, “The Queen’s Weed”, is technically as catchy as anything else on the LP. Side 1 is all hits, and the B-side is…well, it’s also all hits, but it’s the misfit hits between the nearly six-minute “Early Internet”, the uncharacteristic interlude “Webistics”, an out-of-nowhere Barfield-sung cover of Kathleen Edwards’s “Mercury”, and the quiet, brief send-off “Twerp”. It’s been heartening to see Ryan Davis get his due over the last few years after a long time in the alt-country underground; maybe Public Dog is the ticket for another lifer whose pen is just as sharp and whose hooks are even sharper. (Bandcamp link)

Cel Ray – Cel Rayzer

Release date: July 24th
Record label: Exploding in Sound
Genre: Punk rock, garage punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Snake’s Maw

The Chicago quartet Cel Ray established themselves as major players in the colorful world of “Midwestern egg punk” when they made their on-record debut in 2023 with a pair of fierce garage punk EPs in Cellular Raymond and Piss Park. I (and many others) have been waiting for the debut Cel Ray LP ever since, and it’s none less than the legendary Exploding in Sound Records who’ve brought Cel Rayzer to us. The band (vocalist Maddie Daviss, drummer Alex Watson, bassist Kevin Goggin, and guitarist Josh Rodin) recorded the album with Doug Malone at Jamdek, and it debuts “a more collaborative approach” to Cel Ray’s compositions. Cel Rayzer reveals a band who’ve spent the three years since their first two EPs (ahem) sharpening their sound via regularly touring and playing together–Daviss is still delivering irreverent diatribes via vocal acrobatics, and the power trio of instrumentalists are still ripping through material fastly and furiously, and there’s just a bit more of a Windy City noise rock edge to their hard-hitting post-punk/garage rock this time.

Opening track “Gotta Get Away” is very nearly new wave in its first thirty seconds, but Cel Ray’s heavier instincts win out and they eventually end up closer to frenetic John Dwyer territory as the song comes to a close. This is a common theme of Cel Rayzer, whether we’re talking about ninety-second hardcore(ish) microbursts like “Price of Gas” or slower, sludgy material like “Snake’s Maw” (now that’s a bassline!). Always one to keep things brief, Cel Ray wrap up their first album in ten songs and twenty-three minutes, which means that the band churn out plenty of their “bread and butter”–writhing, drilling garage-punk tracks like “Trash”, “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang”, and “Teen (Cult) Song”. Cel Ray are barreling down every inch of their new, longer runway–we’d best get out of Cel Rayzer’s way. (Bandcamp link)

Dom Sensitive – Pop Contest

Release date: July 21st
Record label: Chrüsimüsi
Genre: Psychedelic rap, minimalist post-punk, experimental pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Faint Like a Star

One of the more interesting debut albums of 2024 was Leather Trim by Dom Sensitive, a new project started by Adelaide, Australia’s Dom Trimboli. Most well-known for his time in Aussie garage rock and post-punk groups like Wireheads and Dom & The Wizards, Dom Sensitive was Trimboli’s chance to experiment with wonky sampled piano instrumentals, “patchwork hip-hop production”, and rambling sung-spoken verses delivered by an emcee in the vein of Mark E. Smith and Gareth Liddiard. Despite the strangeness of Leather Trim, it still kept one foot in the world of “Australian post-punk”, an obscure but discernible starting point from which Pop Contest, the second Dom Sensitive LP, moves notably further.

Alongside “longtime friend and collaborator” Tom Spall, Trimboli turns the opening salvo of Pop Contest into his most confrontational and least “rock” material yet. The rumbling, low punk rap of opening track “Queen Bess Row” removes almost all of the “old” Trimboli for six minimal minutes, and “Super Mary Image” is only slightly less stark. For fans of “pop music”, “Faint Like a Star” has more than enough of it in its hook, done the “Dom Sensitive” way of course, and the minimal Television Personalities goof “I Know Where Dan Treacy Lives” nonetheless has enough of its subject matter in its DNA. Dom Sensitive is just as likely to veer into even more novel territory as to recall their areas of origin, though–see “Waiting on a Ship to Come In”, the song that comes closest to justifying the album’s “influenced by MF Doom” tag. As unique as Leather Trim felt, Pop Contest is the odder, more mutated horse in practically every fashion–if we weren’t sure that Dom Sensitive was committed to the margins before now, this seals it. (Bandcamp link)

Mesh – No Fun at All

Release date: July 24th
Record label: Feel It
Genre: Garage punk, jangle pop, post-punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Atrophy

The debut album from Philadelphia quartet Mesh has been a long time coming–it was five years ago that the band (vocalist/guitarists Sims Hardin and Allison Durham, bassist Tom Riese, and drummer Steve Darling) put out their self-titled debut EP on the now-defunct Born Yesterday Records. Now with Feel It Records, Mesh have at long last returned with No Fun at All, an LP that elaborates on the “jangle-punk” sound they introduced back in 2021. See, Mesh (not to be confused with the electronic duo of the same name, or with the U.K post-punk revival group Mush) have a style that owes plenty to early post-punk and garage punk, but there’s also a lot of Flying Nun Records and even C86 indie pop in their songs–and their secret weapon is Durham’s twelve-string guitar, played like it’s always belonged in a Philadelphia basement rock group.

This eleven-song, twenty-eight-minute album is right in the center of “rough-edged and rowdy” and straight-up guitar pop–opening track “Hold On To” is messy, jangly, post-punk-y, and quite catchy, setting the stage for the sweet spot in which Mesh thrive. “Violent Peasant” and “Potatohead” are great punk songs that nonetheless fit in with jangle-pop highlights “Atrophy”, “Sign”, and “Weapon of Peace” (it’s not lost on me that Durham sings lead on more of the overt pop songs on No Fun at All, but the push and pull between the two contrasting vocalists is all part of Mesh’s charm). I think “egg punk” is supposed to be dead, but if you want that microgenre’s combination of goofiness, fury, and unflagging energy, No Fun at All nicely subverts its title. (Bandcamp link)

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