Heathen Disco Music Reviews #0019

This last week whooped my ass, and I know it some of you even harder, so let’s keep listening and reminding each other why we’re in this pact with music and modulating our experiences around it.

To follow up on last week’s post, amid a veritable outpouring of commisery and legend, there’s a GoFundMe running for the late Justin Chearno’s surviving family. Right now they could use your help. If you can do it, do it. https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-stacy-and-felix-secure-their-future

Props to Larry “Fuzz-O” Dolman for the mention in this latest edition of the Blastitude Substack, and welcome anyone who found their way over from there. Seems like a lot. Hello, get comfortable with the archives and I’ll keep punching these keys. This’ll be worth it.

Once more: contact / music submissions to PO Box 25717 Chicago IL 60625 or [email protected]. I am relatively findable.

PEEL DREAM MAGAZINE Rose Main Reading Room LP (Topshelf)

Out September 4^th is this new one from insular/insulated outfit Peel Dream Magazine, which is now in its ET Ketchup/Mars Audiac stage of Stereolab worship / (Philip) Glass recycle value 10 cents a bottle era. Following the dismal West Coast spa-day bill of Pad, the project re-focuses on NYC (why not, it can be great) in a very gentle, specific way, blissed out of reality in a town where that’s not always the easiest or most practical – or even possible – way to be. It’s the city without people, almost, narrative lines indirectly pointing at the landmarks discovered in a burgeoning relationship, a wonder that accompanies romance in a very northeastern, scarf-wearing, rub-your-hands-over-the-mug-of-piping-hot-cocoa kinda way. A very expensive way. A song called “Lie in the Gutter,” which is pretty upbeat, refers to at its core something every New Yorker sees – a person, a fast food wrapper, vomit, but pulls back in favor of order, while “Four Leaf Clover” dares cop the chords from “Smells Like Teen Spirit” on an acoustic. Records can be like this, transportive collections that expand your imaginative worldview. The best records that do this don’t constantly reference ideas, music, and culture that does their respective things better, more effectively, be it a collection of classic New Yorker front covers, Grand Central Oyster Bar, The Royal Tenenbaums, a breakfast sandwich from Peter Pan, or Belle & Sebastian. Before this group decided it was a “groop,” it was kind of comforting to hear their budget exotica obsessions as they still had their own voice about them, but the lean into artifice is taking that away, pivoting to more generalized sentiments, careful and clean. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with what’s going on here, but that might be the problem; the music gives off this diffident air of affluence, and the outlay it takes to turn off the city while still inside. You might not be able to afford it.

MEMO PST s/t LP (In the Red)

Early ‘10s garage stalwarts Orville Neeley III (Bad Sports, The OBN III’s, early lineups of A Giant Dog) and Chris Shaw (Ex-Cult, GØGGS with Ty Segall), find each other in Los Angeles, reframe their Richard Rose project with bassist Daniel Clodfelter (Shark Toys) and drummer Jackson Todd, and off they fuckin’ go. Shaw’s never done it for me (most of the other ex Ex-Cult bands are winners though … was just thinking about Hash Redactor in fact) but Neeley’s kind of a lock, and so this is a pretty solid punk slammer. Shaw sounds just detached enough to sell these monochromatic Angry Samoans / Pistols / Chelsea behind-the-beat moves. There’s little to argue with here, and that’s good, because in this corner of music, you’re gonna get punished by somebody, so it best not be the band.

SCYTHE Head X’Change LP (A Colourful Storm)

Somewhere in the dozen different storage options I use for cassettes lies both tapes by Scythe, a presumptive tape-trading duo of NYC’s Bob Jones (P.E., others) and Austrailian David West (must I type out all his bands yet again?) that I recall being pretty good. Here’s a full-length, two guys hashin’ it out on guitars, synths, various rhythm-making accoutrements, and the sequencer glue to hold it together. Mutant warp noise curtains, dub without the drop, cracklin’ electrons, processing on top of processing … it’s here, inert and hermetically sealed until you need this particular, brittle, affected ambiance to wash over you. Too jittery to calm you down, too open to build up steam, but look, the range of human emotion is wide. Wider than you want given the kinds of people you encounter every day. Something’s gonna happen that you can’t explain and you will run yourself down even trying to consider it. In that moment, Scythe is maybe the perfect meditative balm – fits all your mental crags and jagged outliers in clean relief, where you can find some commonality with the least common denominators at stake here.

OMIT inSec LP (Siltbreeze)

With a background of dozens of tapes and CDs, this is somehow New Zealander Clinton Williams’ first album, originally recorded in a spate of activity over a decade ago deemed ripe for release earlier this year. That doesn’t feel like an accident, since the open, steady static pinpoints and electric motor sounds, slapped back, robotic but running at a low-wattage lope, have more of an audience through the proliferation of minimal electronics in the gulf between then and now, particularly as how the atom-splitting starkness of most Vanity Records releases are now in the conversation instead of hidden by scarcity. The short “Sector Fade” feels like a coda to the two main events here, two 20+ minute pacers of systemic clicks and low sine wave menace detailing a cavernous reliability, each new section of static or chordal doom revealing just how large a space these sounds occupy, and how easy it would be to get lost in them and never come back (much like many of you thought I’d done, perhaps to your chagrin). Buying the Omit CDs on Corpus Hermeticum back when was too far out of my realm, and the only thing I’d heard was the 7” on Stomach Ache, hardly the sort of thing a 16-year-old could wrap his thick head around. But that work is much busier and overtly psychedelic than the meticulously dotted grid of microdoses featured in here, and I’ll bet more than a few of you who haven’t already touched this particular screen are prime candidates for conversion.

GALCHER LUSTWERK Lustwerk III DL (Lustwerk Music) 

By the time I had the time and space to figure out Galcher Lustwerk, it was almost too late, with a bunch of mixes and scattered releases in the rearview before the relative refinement of 2019’s Information. Once aboard, all of this made sense immediately and relentlessly, and there wasn’t enough of it, so stopgap comps like Lustwerk III, alternate versions of tracks from the mid-teens, have been keeping it together over here. Contained, low-key house engines purr beneath realized mantras of self-actualization. Who wouldn’t. Even the electronic averse among you still move to hip hop, and here you’re getting some of both, compacted and cool, barely breaking a sweat and still lighting it up. Like the CAPTcha “crook things” words of yore that created the name for this project, it’s data hidden in plain sight. Can’t unsee or unhear it. One in a million.

Have a good one,

Doug Mosurock