Press and Words
“Cheap Impressions” is a powerhouse track featuring the band’s signature saxophone riffs, experimental percussion, and hooky bass runs. Vocalists Millie Kaye and Ethan Kimberly alternate on the verses and chorus, keeping the listener on their toes as the song shifts and changes course multiple times. This track will likely appeal to fans of bands like Guerilla Toss, Rx Bandits, and Agabas. - Colleen Nerny, New Noise
“At number nine, this next band hails from Ohio, I believe, and they go by the name Touchdown Jesus. This is their It's All Feast or Famine EP. If you like your art punk and rock super heavy and a little demented with odd vocals and sinister lyrics, and unhinged performances where everyone in the band is letting loose. I promise you, you are going to get a lot out of this project.” - Anthony Fantano
“Cincinnati post-rock quartet Touchdown Jesus’s newly released sophomore EP, It’s All Feast Or Famine, opens like an apocalyptic horror movie with “I Love My Wife”: The first thing you hear is this nails-on-chalkboard glissando that abruptly lurches towards a headbanging thrash of militaristic percussion, screaming saxophone, and sludgy electric guitars. The prelude sounds like the musical precursor to an announcement that the end is nigh—but it isn’t. “When I get home, you’re the first I see! Come around for a kiss on the cheek!” co-lead vocalist Miller Kaye exclaims on the first verse in a manic, Isaac Brock-like sprechgesang. She’s no doomsday prophet—just a girl that’s really, really into her wife. The musical arrangement bears an erratic temper and a cocaine-shot heartbeat, but “I Love My Wife” lives up to its name as a refreshingly straightforward, and surprisingly sweet, love song (among the most romantic lines: “My evening commute ain’t got nothing on a face like yours!” It’s downright poetic, in a distinctly 21st-century sort of way). The ode isn’t exactly tender, but there’s no question of its sincerity: Kaye roars the titular words like they’re her last, pelting them over the stomping, punk-ish rhythm (laid down with her bandmates Ethan Kimberly, Jack DePrato, and Lee Sullivan) like nuclear bombs. You’ll be hard-pressed to come by a wife-guy [or person] anthem more fervent than this—nor one that rocks even half as hard.” —Anna Pichler
“The track itself is a 4-minute psychout, a track that feels intensely anachronistic but oddly relevant - frankly, any track that begins so assuredly with soaring saxophone is guaranteed to catch my ear. What follows feels like a jam band version Between The Buried And Me - somehow never abrasive, it’s a propulsive track that abruptly hits the brakes, slows itself down, then turns up the weird again before it’s all over.” - Jared Bowers on Touchdown Jesus’s single “Four Grand”
