Heathen Disco Music Reviews #0014

Please be content with this content. These are all fairly recent releases, but were reviewed on the Still Single Tumblr in the last gasp / zero engagement efforts I put forth over there. People are using Tumblr still and that’s great, and I enjoy reading some of them (Claire Donner’s pages, donnerpartyof1 and anhed-nia, for starters, as a prelude to her brand-new novelization of the mid-’10s bonkers sci-fi movie Splice — what? exactly!), but it’s where my reviews went to die, and that was the sad part of it. With Beehiiv I know that at least half of you are opening these emails. That’s what counts, right?

Didn’t really want to turn this into a diary but I went out this week.

I WENT OUT

Tirzah / Coby Sey @ Metro, Weds 8/7

I had bought tickets to see Tirzah quite a while ago. The original date was canceled, and I thought I was refunded for these but really, who can know about this stuff anymore. Got some emails to the effect that the show was back on and didn’t have to think twice about going. The four Tirzah records on Domino are far and away my favorites on that label for the past however many years, and listening to the development at play being peeled from high point strange haze to this brutally stripped down piano/beats record from last year was the mark of an artist I’ll follow anywhere.

I only know Coby Sey from guest spots on records by Tirzah, Space Afrika and Zuli. His performance was pretty brilliant, darkly backlit and mostly monastic singing with some loops and reverb, which eventually broke into some similarly stuck-together beat/rhythm moments (which also worked) as he had the club shut off all the lights on stage, closing with a cover of “Kiss From a Rose” which was not contrived in the slightest. Within the first four bars someone yelled “oh shit” and it was on.

Tirzah started out in a similarly quiet vein and then moved to the Trip9Love material, and it was pretty much like the record which was fine by me — vibes continued apace in a very darkly lit/backlit smoke machine mise, in this sack grey athleisure bit with super long hair. Whole thing reminded me of when Cat Power toured solo around ‘96/‘97 with her back to the crowd, super isolated and soulful, felt like I was watching a ghost. Maybe 150-200 people there, def not enough to fill the Metro but people were very receptive.

Going out AGAIN tomorrow to see Tyvek @ the Empty Bottle, maybe see you there.

Here’s those old ancient reviews.

JARED LEIBOWICH Secret Spells LP (Bruit Direct)

New work by a guy who always impresses with new works. Constantly surprised and overjoyed by whatever Jared throws down the pike; maaaaaybe there was a Zoltars LP I wasn't 100% about but who knows, he might not've been either! Secret Spells comes in between releases by new band The Infinites and resembles his most realized effort, strings dutifully chugging behind cascading stings of guitar and grace that hasn't always been within his realm, but it's working maybe better than ever. Ten songs that hit the midpoint between Brian Wilson and My Dad Is Dead's Mark Edwards, the stars firmly removed from his eyes and cataracting on yours. It sounds like his confidence has matched his levels of freedom and both are frankly thriving. Whenever I listen to this guy's work I can think of nothing else but that work. I don't drift and the songs stay with me for a good while after, like I've stared at a bright image and it's burned into whatever I see next. There's even a song about a weird grifter we all know and it's so resolute. Man. Jared Leibowich.

LOS DORONCOS Sun and Fireworks LP (An'archives)

Put on this mellow jammer during work today after liberating it from its mailer and it is doin' it. Don't really wanna overplay this hand, as they don't either, but a more potent blooz-psych low-burn-point groover you will not find this February, and with increasingly stilted promises for our future, I'd take the offer they're presenting here. Heavy heads who count LRD, Usurabi, Minimokoto, Maher Shalal Hash Baz and Shizuka hangin' from their collective belt pull 'em up for a increasingly definite eye-stinger of blessedly incensed proportions (and it's to create a vibe, not trying to change it, like that time I was in a certain Evanston record shop and the man-mountain at the counter audibly farted then lit a cone). Lotsa "hey listen to this" that seems to pry apart the rhythm section when the leads start to smoke. Plus "Tin Ear" (which I was once accused of having, LOL) puts me in the mind of Martin Mull's "The Humming Song," and reminds of an era when giants were allowed, maybe even encouraged, to wear corduroy. Doronkey show starting in 5, 4, 3 ...

LUPO CITTÁ s/t LP (12XU)

Here's ten songs from a fairly new, positively charged trio from the Boston metro that got me thinking about the emotional times the directive, the historical times the experiential.

A duo of Jenn Gori and Sarah Black (guitar, bass, drums, vocals) share history performing together in four previous bands in a variety of settings and locales, and met guitar deity Chris Brokaw at a post-lockdown gathering (there's the experiential, and honestly much of what puts such a cracked-mirror disconnect on those years was that not being able to exist in person), starting a tentative collaboration that grew into a whole album. Brokaw has history all his own, bordering on the Biblical in terms of legend and importance; any body of a person's library of recordings that doesn't feature at least some his work extensively in the CO's (Codeine, Come, Consonant), to say nothing of his untouchable solo albums, soundtracks, and perhaps that GG Allin & the AIDS Brigade 7", ain't all that buff at the end of the day. Now the three of them build history out of this experience, linked forever at the psychic fingertips.

So it's hard to figure out where two start and the other stop; best not to think about that at all, because we're watching this history unfold. And one of the things that history/experience is doing best is underlining the needle-to-thread of a song versus the hammer of performing it. The tension within Lupo Città – which is a primary distinctive of what makes this record so memorable – exists in the space between these actions. Every time I jump into this thing and hear the buzzsaw of something like "Shawano Pickup" I'm thinking, here's a band that's jettisoning the moods and going for the shiv. Then I listen to something like the melancholy in "Gallup to El Paso" or "Only in Love" and realize a shiv can be made of many things and can pierce a variety of objects, some better adapted to the materials than others, and that by doing so they have merged the emotional and the directive, via a process of tailoring.

On tailoring: getting something the way you want it because you have the ability to make it so is a feat of human dominion. It's an abstract, but you'll know when it's happening. It's something The Breeders always have been good at, and something Sleater-Kinney used to be good at, and with a debut like this it's one of the primary distinctions between Lupo Città and (generously) 99.7% of the shit you'll encounter passing for rock music lately (not to mention a comparable percentage of people you'll see around said activity, rolling and cuffing their pantlegs instead of permanently editing them to fit). The bespoke approach to genre and artistic control comes off as fresh as it is vital. Everyone needs this; nobody doesn't.

ROY MONTGOMERY & FRIENDS Broken Heart Surgery LP (Discreet Music)

The importance and depth/body of work of Christchurch, NZ's Roy Montgomery is too long for me to get into here, and probably redundant for a lot of you, but the gap between his '90s works and the spate of releases from 2016 on (dutifully documented by Omaha's Grapefruit label) feels nearly closed now, and in 2024 it's all had time for new chasms to open around it. (If you're mistaking him for the character from TV's Castle, put down the remote and go outside). Other works of recent years have been dedicated to Montgomery's longtime partner Kerry McCarthy's passing back in 2021, but Broken Heart Surgery really feels like the effort where the grief has settled in his bones, some of the acoustic crispness of more recent releases like Rhymes of Chance muted down into mournful low clouds of chorus pedal chords and the haunting vocals of longtime compatriots and collaborators like Stephen Cogle (Terminals, Victor Dimisch Band, Vacuum; essentially the other lynchpin of New Zealand's modern music) and Garbage and the Flowers vocalist Emma Johnstone. Barricaded in by gentle vocal reveries, haunted poetry and atmospheric synths, this one feels colder and slower, yet more immediate than some of his other works, looking back to his '90s touchstones Scenes from the South Island and the soon-to-be-reissued Temple IV, as well as the massive RMHQ box set, as milemarkers in his astonishing career. Words like "goth" don't even begin to set the stage for the desolation and ultimate rebirth that takes place across these six tracks, and I find myself at a loss for an audience who needs to discover this and won't feel it within their bones, forever attached. Unlike the Grapefruit titles this one's a Swedish import and will not hang out for long. Absolutely essential, the first true stunner of 2024.

Keep sending it in. I mean it. Don’t want the well running dry.

Music to PO Box 25717 Chicago IL 60625 USA // [email protected]

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Doug Mosurock