Heathen Disco Music Reviews #0001

[TL;DR: Sign up for the new music-centric newsletter on deck from the creator of Still Single, filled with valuable takes on new releases and then some] 

Many of you who were paying attention to music reviews around 2004-onward may remember me from writing a column called Still Single, where I attempted to put some shape around my previous efforts in music criticism, and write something down about every new vinyl release that came my way. I was able to maintain this pace for a number of years, eventually bringing on accomplices. When the volume of submissions grew to a certain point, I moved things off of the original site where they were published and onto a Tumblr to keep up. Eventually that publication died off as well, and now lives its afterlife on that same platform.

Some years into this effort, life intervened; I became a father, and moved my family from Brooklyn to Chicago. The need to re-focus slowed the pace of my output, as I took on more paid gigs for outlets like NPR Music to help keep the lights on. Ultimately the bleakness of 2016 through to where we are now more or less stopped it. Detractors told me I was aging out, and wasn’t aware of how much space I took up in the conversation, and for some reason I believed them; to see how little any of them have done with the space I opened up spoke volumes to me about what that was really about.

From the looks of things, this era stopped most avenues for the medium of writing about music as well. Publications consolidated and folded; editorial arms were chewed off in attempts to stifle fair practices over the bottom line. Others achieved growth through what appears to be sheer annoyance, while ever still a few stalwarts continue on like diseased maniacs with walls of text and a pronounced lack of editorial style.

I turned my attention to a different medium – radio – and announced my return to the airwaves in an effort to stay current and use the hoard of records I’d amassed over the years. I came up with the name Heathen Disco to describe what I was doing, a hairy, primal force to describe the music as how I heard it in my head, designed to move and act, determined to smash and rebuild. During this time, my writing about music was largely audience-limited to the other volunteers at the radio station, along with the thousands of releases I added to the library over my nine years on air. Eventually this hit the point where the sad people running the place got to be less than worth my time, and I walked, taking my audience with me and building a home studio and recording rig to continue this show on my own terms.

Bottom line, no one is doing the kind of work I want to see in the world. So it’s time to return.

Heathen Disco is a newsletter aiming for bi-weekly output, featuring my writing about music, with additional fronds reaching out to film, media, culture and aesthetics. I’m not beholden to a format anymore, but will focus on the independent and DIY side of music, be it vinyl, digital, CDs or cassettes. On Tuesdays, I’ll feature somewhere around five to eight new or newish releases that I feel you should be listening to, tell you what I think and how to bring it into your life. Fridays will feature a variety of other thoughts and content – music new and old, films, TV/streaming, books, cultural goings-on, and other thoughts I may want to share with you, both Chicago-centric and beyond. Heathen Disco will continue as my DJ outlet, which currently publishes via Mixcloud, featuring music I write about, and I also plan to record exclusive mixes to share with my readership.

What I guarantee you is the following:

· I will be publishing direct to your inbox. Previous efforts to restart my work haven’t been disciplined enough due to there being no set schedule for publishing, and the relative fluctuation in users and interest of the platforms I used to promote them made efforts seem futile. Once the regimen breaks down it can be difficult to regain that audience. But I am fit for this task, as are you to consume it.

· I am, someday, going to charge a fee for you to receive this newsletter in full. Since I have never charged anyone to read my work before, you’re getting off easy. Unpaid subscribers will still receive a selected portion of the content but the rest will require some skin from your game. My time isn’t free!

· This will be worth it to those interested, because I know your time also isn’t free. If you liked what I did before, you’ll like this. I don’t read other music criticism anymore, so what you’re getting is free from any media bias and focused purely on what I want you to know about.

· This isn’t a competition or a press release barfing contest. This also isn’t a race to get the review up first. If you’re OK with that, let’s proceed. New releases worth their salt shouldn’t expire within a week. Find the value in a slightly longer tail.

· No AI technologies are involved in the writing or recommendations I create. If what I put out there eventually ends up informing a large language model, that is out of my control. Ultimately that model is better off for my contributions to it, but what I send to you will be totally free of AI assistance, augmentation or enhancement from a content perspective, even if my platform wants to provide this sort of “aid” to writers. If someone whose words you read can’t come up with their own ideas on what to say about something without a machine prompt, are they really something you need to be listening to?

· I’ll be doing this as a solo project. Still Single became a massive undertaking and wouldn’t have been possible without help from voices I respect. At this time it doesn’t make sense for me to overextend this effort to the point where I need other voices in the mix. This way I can guarantee what you’re getting from me is what I want you to know about, at a scale I can manage.

· Together we’ll rebuild the community missing from this avenue of our lives. Feel like you’ve fallen off? Here’s how you get back on. Music never stopped, but sometimes it feels like it could. I’m here to document what’s coming and what’s of value behind us, and the points in between, and make it easy for you to figure it out from there. With some 35 years in the game, you get a lot of scope out of my experience. I haven’t given up on any of this work, and throughout the eras, whatever shape it took, I did it anyway regardless of there being an outlet. I think we can all benefit from this.

I’m doing this because it has to happen. I still love this stuff and I know many of you do too. It’s never been easier to listen to music, but finding it is a whole other game. You can rely on algorithms which only take you so far, or exist in a nebulous pay-to-play zone. Or you can read what I have to say and go from there.

I hope you’ll join me in this venture.

Let’s start it here:

Verity Den s/t LP (Amish)

Challengers arising from the Research Triangle to claw shoegaze/dream pop back from the playlist era, and they’ve done a hell of a job with this debut album, seven songs that sublimate as the tracklist lolls along, but never give out on actual songcraft (even in the all-noise closer) nor traffic in mood-booster riff wars. Nope, this thing is just perfect, patient, and pretty revelatory for any band playing in this puddle decades after the fact, and the little-recognized high card they’re playing with is texture. Just like the Catherine Wheel sang, this is the thing you bands need to give me more of — slam chords all you like, but you don’t really get down to the microscopic level of grime that plays off of Verity Den’s cleanest tones, to your detriment. Hooks galore on this thing, and that roughness in tone is what snags it. First side melodies are evocative of simple, open British and American/Appalachian folk forms before giving into more modern desires on the flip, but everything here — even how the record slowburns from chorus/echo material to something noisier, taking into account the extended lengths to make listeners feel like they have passed through a zone or hit cruising altitude — reminds that the best bands don’t fall into a stylistic trap so much they rebuild the trap altogether, and let others do the falling. This is self-produced effort too, from an internal member of the band, and thay understand the sound and the greater causes of this work better than anyone else. Putting them in a more expensive studio or in someone else’s hands would just feel wrong at this point. Not even trying to oversell this; I don’t know how they managed to nail the short game so well, but this is the stuff; other bands, like those that take the names of other bands and get real uptight about it when called out, there’s too many of you — maybe it’s time to do something else. I hear Warhammer figurines can take up a lot of dudes’ time. Go paint those and clear a path for the real thing.

Drop Nineteens – 1991 LP (no label specified)

Chafer of the year. If you didn’t hit the merch booth at one of the few coastal cities where a reunited Drop Nineteens performed in the spring, or had a reliable friend grab one for you like I did, or paid some astronomical sum on the secondary market, you are officially assed out of owning this mystery. It’s the only way you can hear a remixed version of three-quarters of the Drop Nineteens’ storied Mayfield demo tape (all previously unreleased songs, which the Boston undergrad quintet curiously did not revisit for their debut album Delaware), adding to the decades-long tranche of what this band failed to achieve. It’s a shame too, because this is prime and primary-source material, a full album of unreleased music by a first-generation shoegaze band, one which leavens the diagonal violence of stateside peers like Swirlies or Lilys. These songs are what you would hope for, doubly so because only diehards have even heard the tape, let alone heard of it. By this point in 1991 the Drops were certainly ahead of just about most bands in this specific moment save Ride and the MBV EPs that preceded Loveless, leaning on the bongo/baggy/string bend-heavy tones coming out of Manchester. They avoid a lot of obvious traps that would date their music (like the wah-wah pedal on early Chapterhouse releases), presenting a novel and conscientious take at a time when bands on both sides of the sea were still figuring out how to look down. Had these songs come out in any legitimate format prior to the material they did release, the story would have surely changed, possibly for the better. But for real: no activity for decades, the mystery piling up and the rarity to match; they release a (good) new album, then announce a reissue of Delaware only to have Music on Vinyl and their UMe catalog access me-first ‘em (with the original cover art, no less); AND they get hosed on this legitimate artifact seeing a real light-of-day moment? 500 people can hear this without any weird digital slush from the bootlegs available on YouTube or less savory corners of the Internet. For now. Cool. 

Deep Tunnel Project s/t LP (Comedy Minus One) 

Unfinished business triumphs from this legacy Chicago quartet, reuniting frontman John Mohr and drummer Michael Greenlees (Tar, Blatant Dissent) in a project that leans back on those former victories, and reflections on lifetimes lived in and out of punk/rock. With guitarist Jeff Dean (The Bomb), bassist Tim Midyett (Silkworm, Mint Mile) and some iconic instruments (Mohr’s custom aluminum hollow-body guitar, Midyett’s oar-shaped Travis Bean bass) back in the swing, these guys dig out a patient, driven channel of carefully considered noise, and if it’s a half-step removed from the brutalist blare that Tar constructed in the early ‘90s, it’s certainly a thoughtful follow-up, and well in the shadow. Without getting too deep into lyrical analysis, the album favors looks at the fears/acceptance of loss in last-man-standing-itis (“Absolute Zero,” “Dry Spell”), reflections on lives’ work (“When I Hit the Ground,” the magnificent “Chapter Verse Overture”), an ongoing fascination with landmarks civic (“The Grid,” calling out the Second City’s cross-pattern thoroughfares) and economic (“Gold Standard,” balancing Bretton Woods’ economic theories of order with musical touchpoints), and an amalgamation of sweet history and memories (“Elysian Fields”) which crosses up Sugar’s noise-pop hammer blows with the “whoa-ohs” of Naked Raygun and the legacy of Chicago punk. All of it plays as earned; lessons we’re all gonna have to learn if we want to keep playing this game. If any of these are stories you’ve followed, you may already be on board; if not, that gum you or your dad or uncle may have liked is coming back in style. DTP remains an insular project with few shows outside the city, all the more reason to visit – Mohr’s dry wit is right up front once again when you catch them in the live setting. Rounds things off with a wry Breaking Circus cover, tribute paid to where a lot of this all came from.

Laughing – Because It’s True LP (Celluloid Lunch)

Power-pop Can Con of some renown, gathering a bunch of folks from a bunch of bands (Josh Salter from Nap Eyes and Monomyth being the biggest draw) lighting it up on this debut. They do a really darlin’ four-five deep Teenage Fanclub tribute through most of this jammer, chords ringing out, harmonies nailed, really peaking on this track “Garden Path” where they slow down and rock it out a bit more, that has been front of mind for me for a while and doesn’t seem like it’s gonna leave. Being this heart-on-sleeved means there’s potential to fall into the p-pop pits, which they do, but like most practitioners they have the sense to bury that stuff on the B-side. Still, more hits than misses, a nice foil to that Weird Nightmare record outta Toronto from a few years back, and hopefully helps these folks make moves – would be great to see them come through as like Sloan’s handpicked opener one of these days, instead of whoever else does it. Celluloid Lunch finds another winner. 

The Spatulas – Beehive Mind LP (Post Present Medium)

Bicoastal bop shoebox singer-songwriter jams boomeranging from Portland to Mass. that shakes off some of the weirder angles from previous tapes for this towering debut album. Built for nighttimes around the firepit, a rangy strum and a lead guitar flitting all over it, with a simple rhythm and a singalong spirit, somehow getting at what Galaxie 500 and much less polished brethren were doing all along – following the Velvets’ eternal beat. Insights from singer Miranda Soileau-Pratt sink deep, as her plaintive voice delivers each word and twist with the same clear communicative methods, kinda like Jean Smith without a hint of affectation, or Moe Tucker with more powerful lungs. These songs won’t make sense until they’re the only thing that does – electric folk/tambo roll that gets you by the collar, the kind of record people who don’t know better say doesn’t get made anymore; this could’ve come out at any point between Miami-era Gun Club and now, and not lost a single hair. Beautiful and necessary corrective to years of unnecessary artifice and middle management in this whole style.

See you soon, tell your friends, the kid is back.

Doug Mosurock

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PO Box 25717 Chicago IL 60625 USA

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