Heathen Disco Music Reviews #0027 (Sept. 24, 2024)

Happy to be back home from a restorative trip … back home, a town I don’t frequently visit. Immediately got in the zone following a long drive, discovering the hard way that podcasts make me drift to the center line. Infinite thanks to Stephanie Tsong of Pittsburgh’s Jellyfish party for looking out for your guy here at a third-floor walkup DJ set, and to my friend Billy for the incentive to roll out, managing the tickets to the game and generally living up to the 15-year gap since our last in-person hang. Shouts to the Eli, Cary and Zach from the Gotobeds, to Cary’s dog Bat and the Government Center, to Spirit for waving me into that Gee Tee/R.F.M.C. gig, to The Attic in Millvale, to longtime Broke Revue/Oakley Hall homie Greg Anderson and his shop Vinyl Remains out in Mt. Lebanon, to Mikey and Ian over at Fungus Books, and especially to Kassab’s for being virtually unchanged in the 27 years or so since I set foot in there (and for existing at all). Thanks to the city for being an excellent place to take a drive, to discovering neighborhoods I’d never been to (Perry Hilltop this time), the Grandview Bakery in Mt. Washington and all those insane hills. Killed spotted lanternflies everywhere I saw them — please get rid of these things, they’re awful, though their numbers are so strong at this point it may be too late, short of some genetick hack miracle. Also saw what might be the saddest name for a bar ever: Yesterday’s.

I appreciate all the encouragement coming in for the newsletter. I was gonna psychoanalyze the whole resistance to new music I see everywhere but the records I wrote up this time kinda did the work (in that each one punched clean through that mindset). It seems like an awful lot of people think that a couple clicks and a listen is too hard, and I get that feeling something terrible in bigger cities. The joy I saw in people interacting with music all weekend was a counterbalance to the insecurities and jabs I feel crackling in city air. This stuff still matters, maybe now more than ever as the aspirations towards fame are essentially neutralized. Your job now is to bring people together and cajole them to a shared understanding. Take it up.

Help me get high on my supply of worthy new music — send it to [email protected] or PO Box 25717, Chicago IL 60625 USA. I am receptive to anything that doesn’t rank as mid.

Somebody give me an Ampwall beta, because it’d be nice to not post these Bandcamp links.

FEELING FIGURES Everything Around You LP (Perennial)

Feeling Figures have a seven-inch single and two full-lengths, and this second one Everything Around You was recorded before the first one Migration Magic but released after it. PEMDAS style, gotta close those parentheses to complete the equation. There’s not one lost moment in any of these records, but Everything Around You displays a sharpened understanding of a lot of the history that many of us still remember: hearing Sonic Youth, Love Child, the Velvets, Dead Moon, Exene & John, The Chills, and Roky-level inspiration from the same band, on a record that retains both an cohesion on the unit level and an artistry that keeps them from sounding dilettantish (because really, in 2024, what would that get you?), feels like more than a minor miracle. If this review sounds vague, it’s because the band seems to be working from a bigger bushel than a more dialed-in unit like Weak Signal, and from experiences that seem relatable in less specific ways, but they’re both on that same path (and maybe closer, as the relatively twee moments from Migration Magic have exited from the frame – they’re better off without those). Zakary Slax and Kay Moon make for a truly compelling duo of songwriters in this era of post-music industry drift, and make yet another case for using the muscle memory that juiced us over the most salient points of the last 50-60 years to create yet again. Same parts but the shape is ours to keep.

Lots to consider here if you are the considerate type: Feeling Figures incorporates ½ of another recent Montreal institution, Th(ee/a/eee/ine) Retail Simps, and a primary member of each unit performs backup duties in each band. I’m using institution in the historical sense. There’s a noted difference between castlery and sandcastlery, but we wouldn’t have thought to build the latter if the former did not exist. History is happening every moment, and it takes a keen sensibility to determine what will move the needle and what won’t. While maybe rock bands aren’t on the same monolithic level as St. Viateur bagels, smoked meat sandwiches, that movie The Pyx (1973) or the cosmopolitan beauty of the city itself and many of the city’s residents, both units and the six people between them are a force and a cause to keep it going in their city and beyond. History happens where you mark it. To find one band that gets it right, let alone two, in the same area, means there’s enough of an understanding to execute, and people who have heard it happen to matter, which for now is enough to plant a flag on our new, charred map.

STEFAN CHRISTENSEN In Time LP (C/Site)

It’s been interesting following guitarist Stefan Christensen move about the studio from pancaked Dead C. tribute to some truly loner moments on the guitar that blossomed like colored water on a paper towel. I was recently in another town and saw a lot of these records in the bins, which gives me pause; it’s getting less justifiable to be the guy with a huge back catalog generated over a decade or so, just because space and attention spans are what they are. But In Time accomplishes much of what the dozen records before it did, and better – he’s afforded a quality recording, and brings in the Mountain Movers as his backing band (not too much of a shock, as they’ve played on his records before, and he’s also in their side band Headroom, and live in the same town), really turning a corner both from songwriting and overall patience, and handing back the map to the Twisted Village crew to a new trailer full of smoke. Over the course of four tracks we get less the summation of Christensen’s body of work and more the evolution, a folk-tinged meditation that builds and explodes as needed in prime late-era Crystalized Movements fashion – Christensen’s voice is a reedier counterpart to Wayne Rogers’ sonorous singing style, and slow, patient, vaguely mystical acoustic marches and warmups take their time to build into fourth-quarter fires, with Kryssi Battalene systemically frying amps underneath, Dan Greene providing some organ and sax counterparts to provide alternate melodic leads, and the band generally holding down and holding back to make the big finishes, like the late push into demonstrative freakout on the title track, worth the walk. “Foreign Outlaw” is the one outlier and even that doesn’t stray all too far, an itinerant chorus meeting with MacLise/Cale-esque string drones. As much as there is to appreciate on Christensen’s earlier output, this feels like a natural reset on the very edge.

OSTRAALY Misery Guests LP (Siltbreeze)

I’ve had this one floating around since just before the pandemic c/o Matthew Ford, when I wasn’t writing so much for the public but plenty for the private, trying to prop up a few dozen DJs at an indifferent community radio station with music they’d mostly never heard of. Went through there and gone, as not many were considering new music in this new, smaller world, though we still went to air seven days a week and even managed to provide a safe-enough space for us to leave the house, one-in, one-out, to do our shows in person. Tenth Court released it on tape and Ostraaly’s frontwoman Katharine Daly pushed all of the proceeds towards support of the victims and displacement caused by the Australian bush fires of that summer. I’d heard about Siltbreeze working out a vinyl edition, and here we are now, the band no more, Daly having passed away in 2021, and Misery Guests glowing orange like a 10-watt Edison bulb that’ll never burn out. Somewhere in the same country county as The Mekons or The Johnsons or the more plaintive moments of the Cowboy Junkies (or if we really want to cut down from juice to -ade, most of the Bloodshot roster, or straight down to drink with Camper Van/Cracker), Ostraaly had a different gravity about it, hot sundowners swirling guitars, horns, fiddles, synths and rhythm to whatever accordance is in play, slow or fast, one-chord worldbeaters (I wish “That’s Driving” was a half hour long), tonk for the honkeys, and two fully ripping closers that get to where these are going to a hard, rough finale that most bands in this realm wouldn’t consider. Daly’s voice is in another class than all those rusty fence swinger singers, lilting sweetly up and wavering around the general crash of the band. So many different directions this band could’ve gone here are served up effortlessly their own. One to treasure.

SAM DE LA ROSA Another Trap LP (Rompe Hechizo)

Realm tripper here from the always surprising DLR (formerly of Led Er Est and others), cutting through a very au courant baggy ‘90s downtempo title track through a box of Sonic Boom demos, some harmonic lament of U.S. obsessions with guns (“American St-Stutter”), claustrophobic electronic stungun elegy (“The Nothing Star”) to a drone/folk ending. Didn’t really get the harsh, rogue trip that was promised; this is really quite a beautiful and settled work, randomizing in approach but always with a comforting lullaby melody anchoring whatever might be buzzing around it. Not at all at liberty on what is trying to be said here, but the way it’s being said is with an overlay of consolation that to be honest I definitely could’ve used last week. So it’s good to know I got this backpocketed the next time life overwhelms. We’re all gonna need something like that.

VAGUE IMAGINAIRES L'île volante CD (Versatile)

Fourth-world percolations from last year care of Denis Moran’s oft-interesting project. I have a pair of previous release on 13^th Isle and Not Not Fun that doesn’t really hit the mark for me the same way as this one does – like the others, it’s a fairly somber affair, but the touch of subtlety in delivering these living nighttime dioramas of chirping, humid Ashra pulsations, with lead themes and melodies that thwap like rubber Morocco. Sometimes it takes a few tries to get it right, and while the audacity of the younger vintage took me somewhere and then fled while my back was turned, I felt accompanied this time, like there was something Moran needed to show me. If any of this interests you, have at it.

Take it eas’ — Doug Mosurock