Heathen Disco Music Reviews #0010

Hey friendos —

Expect a new Heathen Disco set really soon at https://www.mixcloud.com/mosurock. Might be up by the time this publishes, might be over the weekend. Lots happening over here and I’m keeping pace, but right now my thoughts are about getting through one more workday, moving my rig to the sunroom and preparing for an extremely off-the-cuff 10-hour DJ set from my living room to my neighborhood’s block party this Saturday the 27th of July. I’ll likely record parts of that for upcoming mixes and expect it to be extremely loose and intent on fun. At some point I’ll be mixing records and frozen margaritas at the same time. Hit me up if you’re around and want to show up (at my discretion, please).

Can’t believe I’ve turned ten of these out so far. I feeling relieved that I can even consider this outlet again, and there’s no shortage of new music to cover (or old opions to revisit from my backlog), but please keep pushing it on me.

Music and the like can be directed to PO Box 25717 Chicago IL 60625 USA or to [email protected]. Been really nice hearing from a handful of folks. Keep it up so I can keep it up.

Send this to folks who would like to read it, have them subscribe and grow this where I cannot. I have yet to tap all of my social media outlets in the hopes that I can boost this where needed, but it’s not slowing down on my end, and I know it’s gotta maintain on yours if I aim to make this what I want it to be.

New Discos

NIGHTSHIFT Homosapien LP (Trouble in Mind)

It’s interesting to look at this Glasgow band’s binary cassette-then-album release schedule as the first two cogs in a sizable gear scraping past the tooth and then resetting; fitting as the band also went through similar shifts across their career thus far. The jump between their second full-length Homosapien and the previous tape Made of the Earth show an almost seismic shift in their refinements against their self-titled and debut Zöe; a band with a real mastery over this quiet, surreptitious patch of dirt atop a silver mine, and the yield they’re pulling out is not luck nor an accident. Paring down into a quartet has brought them focus without sacrificing reach; as their name implies, this is banner late-night pop, eerie at times and rapturous at others, drunk on truth and emptying out their satchels. Evoking the Kilgours and the Friedbergers without leaning on the reckless spin of the former or the performative aspects of the latter, or maybe a more settled take on another recent Glasgow band, Vital Idles, this set lives with itself in a jaunty, personal, productively small shapes, little victories that simply express desires in novel and quietly exciting ways.

KENJI KARIU Rain/Water LP (Bruit Direct)

Japanese songwriter Kenji Kariu returns from a Bruit Direct debut (Sekai, from 2021) in am even more evocative, subtly shifting form. Kariu-san makes music that would play as pop under any examination, but the very act of scrutiny causes them to slip away. Even as elements of these wonderful songs maintain some sort of consistent angle, be it a simple, repetitive guitar pattern, a lean into vibrant jazzy restraint, or a collapse of tempo and energy altogether, they don’t return to their starting points, adding treatments to his voice and instruments (guitar, percussion, a few very different synths) that break the monotony of expectations. Hard to cover all the bases here but an acknowledgment of Brazilian MPB and bossa sounds, individualism, and the lowest settings of heat would be a good start. Some dipshit will try to call this city pop; please resist the temptation, this is not that, there’s nothing standard or generic in here, only a soft and concentrated treatise on the romantic observations that quietude and isolation afford.

MARCEL WAVE Something Looming LP (Upset the Rhythm/Feel It)

Somewhat of a merger/shakeout between a number of London art + punk bands like Sauna Youth, Cold Pumas and Monotony, Marcel Wave debuts with sine waves, measured/pressured rhythms and a streamlined freedom that sits at odds with some of the nail-digging tension of their previous acts. Vocalist Maike Hale-Jones enunciated clearly and lets voice soar with clarity, and while this does get up to punk aggression and tone clash at points, mostly this stays in the electronic confines and crystalline expression of people who have decided they crave order, almost presented as a fetish, otherwise it wouldn’t work nearly as well as it does. Well worth seeking out.

INDUSTRY A Self Portrait at the Stage of Totalitarian Domination of All Aspects of Human Life LP (Static Age Musik)

A bunch of punx holed up in Berlin whole out whipcracks of anarcho aggression. We’re almost ready to start sanctions on punk or hardcore bands that decide they need a chorus pedal or a synth; it’s just too much right now, and not enough of the sort of throbbing, driven approach that defines this band and their sound, so close you can almost smell their breath (but thankfully can’t, as we’re all pretty far away). Heavy on the toms, big on riffs, anger and distortion and riffs reduced down into a dangerous, thickened ichor, with song titles like “I Hate Fascist Rock and Roll,” “Nothing Sells Better Than Death” and “Extract Wealth and Die” (not to mention the album title itself), these songs depict the burnt, toxic, crumbling remnants of our near future as a warning, and do it in a way so satisfying and complete that it’s a wonder why others bother, other than to impress a group of friends. Like most music that leans hard on genre, many do, most can’t (and shouldn’t), and only a select few can, in the sense that Industry carries the sound from former peaks to the present and can ably lob the torch down the hallway.

Archival Discos

SEBADOH III 2xLP (Homestead, 1991; re: Domino, 2006)

Welp, time to ruffle some feathers again.

I had a complicated relationship with many things in the world as a young person. Sebadoh’s third album was one of those things that got in my path, when I didn’t have enough of a personality to escape being an indie rock punisher at scale, but with enough self-importance to know what I thought I was above. When you’re growing up rapidly and without guardrails under this sort of mindset, when you’re a captive of your own fears and traumas, it’s imperative to find things within your power to destroy. I still maintain that it’s a better practice than destroying yourself; almost a victimless crime. I wasn’t the only person backlashing against Sebadoh, who’d find more online detractors as online communications gathered speed.

This review ran on Dusted in the summer of 2006, on the eve of Domino’s 15^th anniversary reissue, and it’s been even longer between then and now. I’m not sure how I didn’t see, even back then, that my feelings about this record, as even-handed as I could’ve made them, are on their face the same sort of excoriation of the music as Lou Barlow presented on III and the Gimme Indie Rock EP towards his abrupt ejection from Dinosaur Jr (a band he was reinstated into, and has remained a member of, since the year after this ran)

What I did see was that another contributor to that site quit, on the spot, the day after this ran, this review being the impetus for picking up his toys and going home. I’d later quit as well, disgusted by some implications made about the band Major Stars in a review and wondering who gets to edit the editor.

Refreshed thoughts about the record follow this chunk.

The liner notes to Domino’s deluxe, double-disc reissue of Sebadoh III speak of a band that was every bit as confused as they sounded. Guitarist and founder Eric Gaffney says “Sebadoh III rules!” Lou Barlow refers to the band at the time as “a disaster,” while drummer Jason Loewenstein summarily replies: “Who cares?” It’s that sort of honesty that almost carries the 1991 double album, certainly one of the sloppiest, most epic monuments to creative non-control this side of … oh, I dunno, Freddy Got Fingered. But 15 years out, III remains that gross long-time acquaintance you try to avoid. Waxy blackheads stud its clogged forehead. Boogers stain its shirt. A gangrenous stench follows its every move. This is an album that rolls its pimple puss into a sebaceous dough, plays with it a bit, then orally reintroduces it back into its system.

And amazingly, such a lack of audio hygiene has helped to justify the music; III was always a record that didn’t know any better and couldn’t help itself. It’s the steaming and frustrated emotions of dejected rancor that spurned such an animal in the first place; this, one of the perfect soundtracks to the confusion of being a young male, thrust into adulthood, mapless and awkward. It provides no reasonable answers; it cannot. How many other records of its stature can make this claim? Even Jandek has some sort of ethos. Even Ween can pull it together after hours of mushroom-based terror. Even Bobb Trimble worked from a tangible pool of influence. Still, just about all those examples miss out on the thing that Sebadoh really lives and dies with on III: the concentrated angst of the teenage boy. The world collapses every day and is rebuilt anew, each time with more traps to inflict undue pain on unfettered innocence. Nothing is fair, and comfort is far away.

I purchased Sebadoh III as a young whelp in high school, on a hissy Homestead cassette. Repeated listens up through graduation powered away any sort of certainties I had built up in my still-searching, endlessly baffled teenage psyche. No wonder I was so fucked up. Eventually I had to put it away, as my jones for the lower fidelity all-stars had found a more reasonable home within GBV, Luxurious Bags, early Fall, and the stark sincerity of New Zealand hometapers. By the time high school ended, the band had signed to Sub Pop and released two albums during a time when I wished them dead, making music that, while more substantial, I was predisposed to ignore based on past experience. When I did choose to look back, III sounded simply wretched. I had moved on; I had buried too many embarrassing early experiences with women and fighting my parents in the album’s hour run-time for me to even make it past the first song, “The Freed Pig.” The guilt rose up my throat like the vomit following my first hangover, and the tape had to go – right under the wheels of a city bus. I directed my anger at the band; discovering their sensitivity to fan bias, I found out just how easily Barlow and Co. could be wound up, and how upset they were that the throngs were decrying their work as “bullshit.” I downed 12 Rolling Rocks before going to see them play the local rock club (with Cub, who I thankfully missed), propped up by a friend and yelling “BORING!” in between each song until band and crowd alike decided to have me ejected from the venue. (Seems as if Jon Spencer had done something similar to the group early on, rallying the battle cry of “Feeble!”)

Now we return to III, and surprisingly, time has been fairly kind to much of Lou’s portion of it all. I look back to when I was 24 years old, and I probably wouldn’t have been able to articulate the making of my own similarly-styled mess, much less the two acoustic albums and deluge of cassettes that preceded it. His songwriting here is at times more comfortable and well-rested than on any of the brokedick Sebadoh recordings made prior, as evidenced on the still-haunting “Spoiled,” within the sick sweetness of “Perverted World,” and all over the restless lop of “Hassle.” That he chose to wind down his formula of clacking, down-strummed acoustic mope following III was a brave step toward normalcy, as his transition to new electric forms still bore his knack for bending pop music into something at once engaging and alternately hiding under a bed. And by all accounts, the guy had been dealt a fairly raw one following his removal from Dinosaur Jr.; the anger would stain his music for years to come. It’s this side that brings Barlow into a very ill-advised four-song stretch of Mascis-spawned vitriol and sand-up-ass, beginning with the whiny “Rockstar” and ending with the horrible hardcore of “God Told Me.” But it’s “The Freed Pig” that really comes off as too much, too soon; a needling scrag of focused annoyance juxtaposed into a melodic pop song, its patently grating single-note leads designed to mimic someone kicking the underside of your chair. Lyrically, it is musical phenol, charring and dissolving all that comes into contact with it. It’s why you should talk things out and think before you speak. It’s every reason why smoking pot as a career is an ill-advised action. It’s the kind of song that breaks bands up, and its sentiments are so hostile and backbiting, Eric Gaffney refused to play the song in the studio.

But perhaps Gaffney is the real problem here. Pulling out of frame, it is now more evident than ever to see how his ideas drag III down, and the band with them. He comes off as highly unaware of his lack of balance, unprepared to make the album at hand, and leaning on a psychosis that threatens to unravel the whole thing. His lyrics are complex, packed down with hidden meaning; the ramblings of one stoned man with a dictionary, and his delivery is patently annoying, a hissing, affected Barlow-esque timbre that switches into sub-death metal growl. His bare lightbulb approach wrecks any semblance of subtlety on his behalf, particularly on the decades-long closer “As the World Dies, the Eyes of God Grow Bigger,” two incessant chords and a useless tale of Manson-esque descent hammered into crazytown: population, you. Here is the necessary second half of Sebadoh: the side that sucks, the side that won’t take its antidepressants even though it really, really needs them to function. Plagued by stoner excess covering up childlike melodies, Gaffney’s contributions are simultaneously inept and self-important, turning the album into the queasy mess you likely remember it as, three-chord meanderings that laze and sway unsteadily. In the liners, Gaffney complains of a nearby high school gang throwing rocks at the garage where Sebadoh practiced. I'll bet they were only trying to hit him. He’s far too aware of himself with this material, and there’s not enough experience and too much dope fogging up his field of view. Then again, he’s always been the weak link to this band, granted too much creative control to allow the group to make any sort of a consistent record at any stage in its career, before or since. By comparison, the slightness of Jason Loewenstein’s three songs on the album seems intentional, and their innocence is mostly what saves the simple country-folk of “Black Haired Girl” or the silliness of “Smoke a Bowl.”

All reissues seem to warrant more material; the second disc of III will make you wish they hadn’t. It is a cobbled-together collection of demos, out-takes, the awful Gimme Indie Rock 7” EP – its titular track serving as both a punch to J Mascis’ solar plexus, and a smart-assed “Talkin’ Baseball” for a scene which deserves to be canonized just about any other way but this – and the patience-testing “Showtape ’91,” in which Barlow intones about 12 minutes worth of pretty much every insult you could hurl at the band into a 4-track, which was subsequently blasted at audiences prior to each live performance.

So there you have it; ridiculously self-aware of its shortcomings, anxieties, and peccadilloes, Sebadoh trudged along anyway, dumping a huge paranormal load on the public’s chest in a fearsome display of raw guts and rawer stupidity. III is one of the few landmark releases in independent rock that is celebrated for what it did, rather than what it was. To appreciate it, even to like or love it, you have to hate at least part of it, and perhaps in turn, part of yourself. I’ve turned around on select Sebadoh these days, particularly the Rockin’ the Forest/Sebadoh vs. Helmet material, songs like Bakesale’s throttling “Rebound,” and particular member off-shoots such as the Kids OST and Deluxx. But to appreciate these, you first need the heat rash of unfiltered records like III. That it warrants reissue in the first place, outside of some time-determined need to resurrect something every 15 to 20 years, speaks to its generation’s mershed-out optimism; a social consumer’s awakening as political awareness (and correctness) crested. It would take a little while longer for it to be acceptable for grown men to cry on record – thank screamo for that – but because of Sebadoh III, they could.

A 2024 revisit of this material provides a nostalgic feeling and a kindness towards this music I didn’t really anticipate happening – one that mirrors the kindness I would have directed towards teenage me. The record is still a mess, and I think my thoughts above reflect that accurately, but at the time and 15 years on, I couldn’t believe people would have the audacity to reflect the ugly honesty and unvarnished desires of their lives up to that point within the confines of something I held sacred, with so little artifice. Why did they get to let out their scorn while I was still pent-up and seething and invisible?

Something real happened to me yesterday in that I had a final therapy session with my current practice. I’ve been a patient with various therapists since 2007 or so, coincidentally the same year Dinosaur Jr decided to reunite with Lou. Taking it out on music is no longer something I really feel great about, and we’ll be exploring this idea more as this publication rolls on. I don’t feel like this sort of writing and the ability to be honest are mutually exclusive, and there’s still a lot of things I flat out don’t like. But it’s important to know that there was a long time where I didn’t like myself all that much either, and crossing that line was a long time coming. Being able to come back to this was like being able to return to myself, not with disdain but with the care and sympathy I didn’t know how to afford myself for a great deal of my life. Will this change the Doug Mosurock you knew? Only in the right ways.

Before I built up scar tissue around this release, there was a time that I was really enjoying it for the songs, the noise, the queasy freedom within. I think I’m finally able to connect with those parts of it again.

Thanks for reading – Doug Mosurock.