Heathen Disco Music Reviews #0004

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Salient Points:

• Heathen Disco is also a mix show. Many readers already know this but it can’t hurt to cross the streams. Used to be a radio show but we took care of that. Just recorded a new one out of records I picked up recently, a handful of new releases (some of which are covered below) and stuff from the stacks to fill in the gaps. The 378th installment of said show is linked above.

• Some thoughts on a movie no one is thinking about much anymore. Tangentially, this movie did have a longer blip in the minds of some high schoolers in the early ‘90s than was expected (not me, I was downing other Carolco crap like Jacob’s Ladder for my jollies, to the betterment of no one).
  
  I bring this up because in 1993-94, an underclassman, alone and aware of all the wrong frequencies, learned of my involvement at a college radio station during my senior year of high school, and foisted his demo tape upon me, the first time anyone did this sort of thing. I listened to one song and got the kind of unformed, pretentious melange of rock tropes as befitting someone who saw The Doors movie and then got fed equal handfuls of Perry Farrell and Kurt Cobain, and then decided to do something about it. I was going to be polite and refuse his requesrt, then friends of mine stole it out of my bag and threw it out a car window into a puddle. I was annoyed at the time for having to deal with the heavy emotional fallout over the fact that, unbeknownst to me, this was the only copy of his recorded music — however many days/weeks he spent corralling participants to finish this thing were totally wiped out, just on the long odds that college kids more jaded than me would want to hit it, and maybe even sport it.
  
  In retrospect, many taxed minds wonder about hypotheticals like “what if we went back in time and really took care of some political figure?” which is only as fun to pontificate on in the inverse to the number of active brain cells they’re firin’. But I look back at this incident and think, for good or ill, there is no timeline in which this guy’s creative output doesn’t get destroyed in full, and I’m still laughing about it.

New Discos

RIDER/HORSE Matted LP (Ever/Never)

Third go-round for this upstate New York concern, which expanded from a duo to a trio and now a quartet, like one of those metal-siding rural buildings in an unincorporated area outside of any zoning jurisdiction that keeps getting added onto (or perhaps the Galloping Ghost arcade in Brookfield, the House of Leaves of video game entertainment). Cory Plump and Chris Turco have fashioned a very handsome and powerful follow-up to Spray Paint, the way only a Ku Kim-related project could, perhaps. Zoots Houston on psycho-dosed slide guitar and newcomer Jared Ashdown on bass lunk keep the knife edge honed on these shattering, industrial-aligned jammers. What if Pailhead kept going? What if Pailhead was merely a spiritual possession that could have transferred to other artists? Some answers can be found here. Rider Horse retains the no-informed klang and windshorn quonset hut abandon of Spray Paint and adds a refinement of additional instrumentation and beats that range from spectral to full-on pounding industrial loop-meets-Hawkwind/Teuton endless perspectives. The firming up of a dedicated bassist — something Spray Paint never had — gives every part of this project more of a chance to be its most crushing. Essentially, what you want, when you want it (unless you don’t want this, in which case you go stand outside).

MORDECAI Seeds from the Furthest Vine LP (Petty Bunco)

Another turn from this constantly surprising trio, started in Montana but now spread out around the land. Six albums in and Mordecai continue to resist an easy read — they have leapt into and out of clarity both sonic and material, and always come up themselves, with vision farther than you know and range to all the hard-to-reach places you don’t find in all but the most discerning of pathmakers. Course-correcting just a bit from the splintery Library Music, the new set is a little more … “joined” as it were, sure of direction within the individual and letting the group dynamic play out from wherever that is, a folk-ish drive squealing off of a few wrong notes and sync loss here and there, those elements that build the idiosyncracies to the collective personality here. Never does it fail to make sense, never does it pierce the bluesy ceiling of more blown-out precedents. Like that new Spatulas record, it sounds like the documentation of real lives, in all its views and mess, the words that need to be said in it and the structure on which it can lean. Couple moments on here break the form, like the thick wall of “Never Get Ahead” and the wheezing shanty-esque clatter of closer “Down in an Alley,” but these are all parts of the journey; all alike, all different, all of itself.

CLIMAX LANDERS Zenith No Effects LP (Gentle Reminder et al.)

Folk-informed rock/lite squonk with a sort of Joni refinement placed against boho/squat/open layout spaces that recasts NYC now as a “then,” a strident but plaintive walk past those big farmhouses in Kensington and Flatbush and Ditmas Park on the way home to your box. Dude tried to sell me on this with one of those “remember when” sorta stances (felt dishonest as I’m pretty sure I don’t know any of these people, and the times we might have occupied in the same spaces certainly weren’t “shared” in any other sense) and it put me off a bit, but with enough distance I am finding some small yet essential truths and cuteness in this jaunty little offering — mainly in the sense that I too understand the need for escape in a megalopolis. If you’re making a home, make that home, y’know? Make that sound inside of you, put your experience to work. Those experiences certainly cost enough in a place like that. Why not use them to foster community and bring people to the worlds within your world? We’re not all Bree Daniels; somebody’s gotta live next door, y’know? Almost completely won me over by the end, and probably not a first-listen but a grower.

SMUG BROTHERS In the Book of Bad Ideas LP (Anyway)

A curious analogue to that Climax Landers record above, as the open space afforded to Kyle Melton’s long-burning project here is of actual “open space” (Ohio); freed from constraints of physical space, he and his band (featuring Kyle Sowash, of the legendary Kyle Sowashes) have a different kind of freedom, one with good strings attached, one with a mission to extend chiming, harmonized power-pop balladry to its sweet end. Lots and lots and lots of songs over the years but start here. You may not need to remember GBV to know how GBV sounds, but what about Tobin Sprout? Smug Brothers rest more weightily on the Toby sound, make with it what they aren’t getting elsewhere. It’s kind of a trip and definitely a treat. Many have come before, many will come after, but it’s what you do with the now that counts. A reader expressed some wonderment that the same kinda things we got excited about in the early ‘90s are still kicking around in much the same form, still for the few. As long as someone is there to listen, it’s going to stay relevant, if merely on a personal level. These songs gotta come out, and in this particular instance this is the right crew to usher them forth. A fine time in the back room of a bar, where a dream forms for about 20-30 minutes above the stage and lasts as long as anyone within earshot cares to extend it.

Archival Discos

THE GREAT UNRAVELING “Space Travel” b/w “Left With Only Out” 7” (Vermiform, 1996)

THE GREAT UNRAVELING “Burden of Proof” b/w “Running on Fumes” 7” (Vermin Scum, 1996)

THE GREAT UNRAVELING s/t LP (Kill Rock Stars, 1997)

Was cool to see the Universal Order of Armageddon reissue on Numero Group but we gotta go a little further, to this cerebral post-HC trio that followed, with core members Tonie Joy (Moss Icon, The Convocation Of) and A. Scott Malat (later of Love Life and Bellmer Dolls) joined by drummer Randy Davis. The singles are great in the form, very singly — definitely more in the UOA mold at first, lots of studda-step percussion and finger-knottin’ chords but the claustrophobia soon dissipates and the staredown to the void begins, most hopefully on “Burden of Proof” but coming down to long, meditative, crushing mechanicals on their Albini-recorded full length (their only one; band would be cooked by late ‘97/early ‘98 or so, when I saw them for the second and last time, different drummer in tow and new songs played that few others likely got to hear). Moss Icon was poetic; UOA urgent and throat-clenching; Convocation Of off in its own sphere of power trio heroics. The Great Unraveling, by comparison, was patient, pensive, angry about how maybe no one else was seeing the void for what it was. There’s a bit of Fugazi groove solution in here at times which feels fine for the breaks where they are occupied, but hearing this whole enterprise slow down and really sit with the fear, like on their sprawling “Alien Landscape,” spells out a future further away from where we are now, looking at a flatness and cruelty that nobody wants to deal with, and can’t, even when there.

Great records, all. Don’t forget ‘em in the midst of all this — ‘97 thru ‘00 are some truly forgotten cycles as we all basked in collective awe and shook in manufactured fear, fears that would soon become true, the blinders of constant change actually suggesting our monoculture would break down. Honestly I think one look at Jar Jar Binks was enough to knock us out of the trance, and maybe that’s where we went wrong. But these records couldn’t have predicted any of it. Rather, these are gasps from the uncollected, when we could see and report on anxiety as it was to them, rather than have to deal with it intrusively, before unwanted/uncalled for group thoughts and dangerous rationales were broadcast the way they are now.

Thanks for reading —

Doug M