Heathen Disco Music Reviews #0009

Hey there and welcome survivors of this year’s Pitchfork Music Festival, maybe (possibly?) their last. A conscious decision was made to fuck with what has been a smooth logistical production by adding a VIP tier to the whole thing, allowing those willing to pay a premium in the four figures access to the vaunted Guest area, and to claim a little slice of their own specialness, with catered sandwich plates, a gratis tarot reading (congrats, you’re fucked), and most egregiously, two giant viewing platforms, one for each of the big stages, plopped down in the center of the field. This made it virtually impossible to see bands unless you were in front of these platforms, mixing it up with the crowd, and really sticking it to those who would prefer to sit on a blanket and enjoy the entire thing from one side or the other. It was like that really tall person who gets up front at a show and completely blocks your line of sight. These structures didn’t even have seating or any sort of riser component inside them, so again, if you weren’t pressed up against the railing, you too were looking at the back of someone’s head. Those who’ve been in the balcony at the Metro know this feeling, but the notion of obstructing view and having your view obstructed speaks all too well to the notion of privileged buttholes welcoming the tail’s inevitable entrance. It also says something that the previous management of Pitchfork, before it got lodged in the bowels of GQ, seemed to resist this treatment. Either way it felt like there were a lot less people there than usual, and that’s telling.

What was equally as painful was that Saturday’s lineup was probably the best single-day schedule the fest has had in longer than I care to remember — so much so that bands were stacked up against one another in a way that defeated having broadly-developed tastes. Sure, I’d like to see what Carly Rae Jepsen is up to, but not against Unwound, which is where she fell; similar conflicts arose between De La Soul (maybe the fest MVP, esp. with Pharoahe Monch coming out to do “Simon Says”) and Sweeping Promises, Jessie Ware vs. Bratmobile, and on different days, Jessica Pratt on top of Hailu Mergia, and ML Buch fighting for attention on a large stage while Rosali and Mowed Sound leveled a smaller one. Are we so certain of our tastes when cash is on the line that we have to choose one facet against the other?

Chicago festival season is sometimes the only way people in this town consume live music, and to keep up such an unsteady balancing act, while introducing a whole new caste system between those who actively contribute to music and those who just want to buy their way in, and pit both against people who just want to show up and have a good time, is an unfortunate narrative of our times, but it doesn’t need to be. Shut all this bullshit down. Find a way to celebrate on a level plane. This city’s bad enough with the lines it draws. Don’t create more.

Unrelatedly, my block party is this Saturday and I’ll be rockin’ a 10-hour DJ set live from my sun room. Shout out to my alderman Andre Vasquez for supplying the permits, and the drop of IG photos from his days in backpack rap alongside Thirstin Howl III. Andre does not still live with his moms.

Also let’s celebrate the constant ability to see unique / ridiculous vintage transportation in Chicago. My top seed (a Nissan Figaro in the wild) was recently knocked off by dual sightings of this insane mint Toyota Hilux extended cab pickup, nearly offsetting all the Lime scooters. Look at this fucking beauty.

Back to music. New Heathen D set coming too soon. Mountain Movers gig next Tuesday at Cafe Mustache. Everything mentioned below. And me, Doug M., grinding these out twice a week. Good selections below.

Send me more, of course: PO Box 25717 Chicago IL 60625 USA // [email protected]

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Here goes:

ONEIDA Expensive Air LP (Joyful Noise)

The O is BACK, and after some time in the wilderness are at full strength, max hearts, ready to deliver knockout specials. This band holds a special place in my timeline and my experience releasing records that will never fade. Is it safe to say Oneida 2024 is different than Oneida 2004 or Oneida 2014? Unquestionably. The time spent living in different places, dealing with life and its setbacks, pursuing other opportunities and the like is something most bands heading into their third decade will ultimately face. This was felt throughout their turn-of-the-‘10s “Thank Your Parents” trilogy, in the era of sets that spanned anywhere from eight to 36 hours, and the pursuing drone/improv/“back to basics” era that followed. Being different can be cool, it opens up the mind, generates new possibilities, and this was readily reflected in the quality and tenor of live performances in this era, and their ability to rope in names like Lee Ranaldo and James McNew to sit in – ostensibly because these guys are fun to play with from standpoints creative, convivial and endurance-testing. But the O that got to that point was built off the band I know from the ’98-’08 era, a period of impossible, Herculean band dynamics, the ability to generate true moments of strobing psychedelic joy with nothing but their unadorned instruments and bodies. Those of us who knew tried to explain it to the squares, the undoctrinated, couples on dates who read in Time Out New York how incredible this band was, and who quickly fled the second after the first song. Those people would never be touched, never came back into the fold, and you know what? Fuck them. Some deserve that blindness. Expensive Air gives a new generation and everyone who’s been behind them all this time another chance to come back and revisit what the mentally/culturally/spiritually weak couldn’t withstand. It’s full-speed, broken-throttle Oneida, closing in and bearing down It’s beyond the transitional era bow-tie closer of double LP Romance and the back-to-basics Come On Everybody Let’s slug of Success, landing right back in the socket. It knows exactly how to deploy mid-period additions Showtime and Barry on guitar and synth. It bristles with the anxiety of the rarefied present day, swinging hard with everything they have. It’s got Thalia Zedek singing on it. It’s their 17^th album and cooks on the same gas that powered their second (and of course, their fifth). It’s like the night Kid Millions cut off his beard. Pow!

SHIT AND SHINE Rum and Coke LP (Riot Season)

Those who enjoy Shit and Shine in both its guises – the noise/rock slam and the cut-up electronic music jokester mode – and for all those modes are worth, and can keep up with the relentless release schedule, will be absolutely frothing over Rum and Coke, which finds Craig Clouse teaming up with Callum Howe, vocalist of Leeds-borne Brainbombs worshippers The Shits for a digitally-enhanced sludge gargling fuckfest. There’s a bit more space between the noise on this one, and I don’t want to call it a limiting factor, but this one might be more for the seasoned heads. Like, would you go see 2024 Drunks With Guns? (You should, but do you want to?) If yes, go find this immediately. Heavy as balls, maybe never heavier than the churning nausea loop and air raid siren of “One Drag.” Some of you might be flipping the coin to determine what’s the obvious single here – “Sparkling Water” or “Airplane Toilet” – but I’m going with the not-so-dark horse of “Intruder,” mainly because I laughed hard enough to justify the purchase price over realizing the spine of this track riffs off a super-slowed sample of “We’re an American Band.” Nobody else is out there digging in the muck like this, and if they are, they’re probably slightly better-known than $&$, or they’re The Shits themselves, so there’s little chance to get disoriented on logistics.

C TURTLE Expensive Thrills LP (Blitzcat)

Reader-recommended, super-casual-except-not pigpile of every ragged indie band of note from the late ‘80s / early ‘90s throwing their squealing, greasy all into the ring. Since we’re beyond a revival moment and clear into nostalgia-packing, it’s legitimate to question what a modern audience will feel about a band that is essentially giving some of us the music we grew up with at a resemblance to how fuzzed-out and grotty that music often presented as, particularly when these qualities were based more out of necessity than nuance. However, even if it is wholly possible that this is the product of young people raiding what’s left of their parents’ record collection, it is really hard to deny just how tonally right C Turtle sounds, like a box of the best UK and US indie singles played back-to-back. They have the churning chaos and sweetly melted qualities that drove Th’ Faith Healers AND The Swirlies to do what they did, to where they could merge into the same group, but also with a predilection for folky/stoned 4-track melodies and harmonies that wouldn’t have been out of place on a Bugskull tape, along with about 20-30 other micro-influences I’d be honestly lazy if I listed here. They don’t stay up the whole time, but they do stand out, and I get to think about young people hearing this and freaking out in that mind-rearranging way some of us went through when we first heard Polvo or New Radiant Storm King or any number of bands in that era, and believing – knowing – that we were on the brink of something new. If we don’t have stuff like this (or as an analogue, what we have going in Chicago right now with the youth band movement), we don’t have any meaningful way forward.

SILICONE VALUES How to Survive When People Don’t Like You and You Don’t Like Them LP (SDZ)

I picked this up on a whim a good while back, sound unheard, because I felt seen by that title (LOL), put it on and worked in my office while it played. I didn’t have to flip it over quickly, because its lo-fi nature and maximalist approach to album-packing put eight songs on one side and seven on the other, but none of it sank in all that much, because to be honest it’s a lot of the same. On repeat revisits, I find a good bit more to like; a one-person British project that sits between the first few gasps of Alternative TV and the second Strokes album, when both still had riffs and cared even less about production choices and more about telling people off and talking shit. Those with feet in both zones already know what we’re getting with here; this isn’t a young person at work here (I think), either singing from experience living through the Cold War or making fun of someone who did. But all this tracks; it’s a mood and not a put-on, it’s firmly connecting disparate eras by the anxiety of both, and there’s gonna be something in here that fans of punk feeding off such tensions will relate to.

SHOWBIZ Act One DL (self-released)

How’s about reviewing something that’s less than 24 hours into this world? Big, loud, black metal-derived punk/rock from NYC, Liza-pilled, Gloria Swansonated, running laps around you with the instrument cables until you’re cocooned. Gnarly like street punk but cleaner in approach, letting the riffs bask and the circle pits open up. Getting whiffs of spooky early ‘00s performance bands like Subtonix and Lost Sounds and The Vanishing but with the kind of riffs postpunk bands were running away from, two specific eras smashing into one another. This is the warm up and they will hit us again and we won’t know what happened.

See you Friday, and maybe Saturday,

Doug Mosurock