Heathen Disco Music Reviews #0032 (October 11, 2024)

After a bunch of readers reached out to insist that I take their money, the moment has come.

Heathen Disco Music Reviews subscriptions are now available for the low, low price of $3 USD/month (or $35 USD/year). Click below to do it.

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I wanted to create a place where I can tell you about new music (as bands/labels rely on it to keep it going, and I want to eliminate the avenues for people who say “oh, I don’t know about new bands” – this is an easily digestible account of what’s worth it out there from someone who knows better. A great new band or record or even just a song can improve your life, and I’m pretty sure you’ll find something like that here at least once a month.

And at $3, it’s not gonna break you. The rule of thumb is that as soon as a newsletter goes behind a paywall, you end up with 10% of the readership coughing up and lose the rest. I think at this price I can beat those odds pretty well.

What does that $3 a month get you?

• Unabridged access to all future paywalled newsletters / website posts by me, Doug Mosurock, the one and only. You’ll be able to read the archived posts published up until then.

• Any other posts I decide to make here. Let’s canonize. Let’s vilify.

• Hearing about some things sooner than later. I like to get a little bit ahead of other writers so you have a chance to read about a record here first. That matters to some of you.

• I’m not here to bullshit you. I’m not beholden to anyone or anything with regard to this endeavor. You know I’m not always happy with music. I don’t hide this, and your support underlines this quality as something you want, and that other writing can’t or won’t offer you.

• My sincere gratitude in that you enjoy this work and support it with money.

Could this wind up a tiered subscription? Who knows. We’ll have to see what’s in the works, but right now I have the time to do exactly two posts a week and record a new DJ set twice a month. So yeah, that $3 means you’ll hear about 40 records a month, some old but mostly new; you’ll find me selectively re-evaluating my own body of work; and you’ll be supporting a voice that apparently a quorum of makers and their appreciators are happy to have back in the fold.

Labels, artists, and publicists who submit music that I would review (emphasis on “would”) will receive the reviews relevant to them, to repost wherever they like. We’ll work something out, but if this is you, email me at [email protected] and let me know what’s up and specifically where to send. I can’t do this without exposure to new music, and the more direct (which for now means you emailing or sending me stuff), the better.

Also I am amenable to bartering in the proper circumstance – do you have a good or service of commensurate value? Maybe a zine or newsletter that you do? Are you one of those labels / artists / publicists who I “would” want to hear from (and “do”)? Let’s talk. We need each other.

Paywall officially goes up October 29th, 2024, so you all have a few weeks to figure out if I’m worth $3 a month to you or would otherwise reach out with a reasonable exemption. But if you’re ready now I’ll take it. Don’t miss out:

As usual, send in music or well-wishes to PO Box 25717 Chicago, IL 60625 USA // [email protected] and we’re good.

On with it:

NEW DISCOS

WHITE SUNS Dredging Heaven LP (Decoherence)

In the ‘90s, my biggest free jazz/improv phase dovetailed with my discovery of hardcore and punk from both the straight and alert direction and things elevated/spockmorgued/Clairol blue-black. When that Swing Kids 7” came out I thought I was losing my mind that a band could understand both, and used to dream / hope that some musicians would figure this out. None of them really did, and it’s not hard to gauge why: there’s a certain subtlety even in the loudest, most lung-blasting free jazz that could easily be obliterated by a Marshall amp, and there’s still a certain formality or direction in jazz music that had been relatively flattened/blown out by most attempts at fusion from when that era began onward. Even a Flying Luttenbachers record (and the pink one was a platonic ideal for this) was so rooted in jazz that it didn’t really land in this Goldilocks zone I couldn’t really articulate. Since then a number of artists would figure out how to coexist on these planes with some success (and no, let’s not get into which ones) but for the most part I realized a lot of reasons why Nation Time and Clobberin’ Time had no real business being together. 

I didn’t know White Suns was still kickin’ around and didn’t hear much following their Load records release (though I remember enjoying a more straightforward noise rock/climate doom affiliated project, Conduit), but I gotta say, this new one – their sixth album – is almost exactly the kind of racket I had imagined over half a lifetime ago coming to fruition. Two guitars, various electronics and effects and a drum kit and their operators have figured out both the shapes of this sound and what it’s like smashed into the floor, the thrill of sounding like it’s all gonna fall apart with the confidence of actually being able to, and the subsequent dash to stitch it all back up into something more primal – big thundering drums, every nuance of amp agony, captured at its essence my Martin Bisi at his studio, who’s had plenty of time to think about this approach too. I get needing to scream over this sort of thing (just to be heard, words can hurt, other reasons) and that may tip the hand of the HC/noise side of it (which of course they subverted on “Heirloom”) but this is a pretty rare case of figuring out how to strike a clean balance for these concepts of messy music, even venturing into Wolf Guys creeper zone on 16-minute closer “Forking Paths.” This might’ve been where Dazzlingkillmen would’ve ended up if they kept on after The Face of Collapse, and I hope that my anticipation of such music doesn’t really oversell what it is, though I see audiences coming together for this action.

DEAN SPUNT Basic Editions LP (Drag City)

No Age proved out their second lifetime had legs on a Chicago label, so why not its members? This is Dean Spunt’s second album and a much more realized foray into synthesizer mutations than his highly-conceptual trigger debut EE Head. Iso-tank circuit board/waterboard is here. Perrey & Kingsley and Dick Hyman lineage respect is here. Fun with presets is here; so is boiling them until they stretch and break. Not Not (not Not) Not Fun melted cassette dashboard tape wobble is here. Things some of us have given some collective thought to (“European Cardboard” as a song title and an actual substance we sometimes handle) are here. Regular beats and basslines make themselves present to keep things fairly bounced and limber, and if the proceedings aren’t as psychically cooked as any work by Black Dice compatriot Eric Copeland effort in this domain, there’s a certain formality, even at its weirdest, that makes this stickier and a bit more profound because of itself and reverent towards the New Age pasts that could homebirth such a collection. Actually works on the promise of compelling art, both through the ethnographic/sociocultural structure of these ten pieces, and the ghost bits that hang off of them, where others are often too busy with one to consider the other as fully. Plunk away, Dean.

A PLACE TO BURY STRANGERS Synthesizer LP (Dedstrange)

A Place to Bury Strangers, now at album seven, remembers as they do every now and then what some knew at album zero: that two founding members were in Skywave, and any attempts to return to the sheer bonkers deafness tornado that band generated can only help the brand. They’re doing more of it here than usual, too: that shitty flat drum set that needed to be played extra hard lives on in some sort of spirit here, and even with all the technical advancements they’ve been afforded by time and experience, going back to that core is essential to their history or even their very presence. And from “Bad Idea” onwards they grab that sumbitch idea with all thirty fingers and toes and pull it in so hard you’ll get angry over how they bother to do so many other things that detract from that core idea of shoegaze at gums-bleeding, too-dizzy-to-drive-home galaxy gas levels of brutality. I guess you can play the sleeve of vinyl versions of this record as some sort of printed circuit synth, which may help to keep this one out from the sale bin and percentage-off stickers at your local record shop, but really all anyone wants from this band is the very thing they started with: annihilation shitsound apocalypse, nothing less than a fucking air raid. It really isn’t enough that they’re one of the loudest live bands I’ve ever seen either: there is a lizard brain imperative that they must regress as they get older in order to survive.

ARCHIVAL DISCOS

FIRE ENGINES Chrome Dawns 2xLP / 2xCD (Cherry Red)

https://www.dustygroove.com/item/182672/Fire-Engines:Chrome-Dawns

Kinda wild that this is maybe the third or fourth iteration of this (admittedly awesome) Scottish band’s whole discography coming back around for new generations of youth to get disjointed over, never to be put back in the same place or order again. It’s like that TV show about knives in that otherwise painful movie “Greener Grass” – your kids watch it once and they’re just ruined after that. Fire Engines’ music is a blueprint for how to get spastic enough to become a full-fledged system of stops and breaks, and provides the overlay to figure out how pop music can work its way back into it. This edition sports a second disc of live recordings, many of which previous versions omitted, were comprised of completely, or just took whatever parts of they could, and plenty of those are brand new to Chrome Dawns. Should be in every home in one way or another (I’m living with two 12”s and the “Candyskin” 7” personally), but the real question still begs: why hasn’t Big Flame been given a similar treatment? That Rigour comp on Drag City was really early to the game, and good luck finding one of those now.

FLIN FLON A-OK LP / Swift Current EP / Boo-Boo LP / Chicoutimi CD / Dixie CD / Dixie (Version) LP / Et Cetera CD (Teenbeat)

Not gonna get too deep in the weeds here, as it’s a lot of music and it all does some semblance of the same thing, and on top of that you’ll have to dig deeply to surface all of this stuff now. Just gotta put it out there that I love Unrest and Air Miami with every ounce of my heart but Flin Flon is my favorite, the best Mark Robinson band that ever was or ever will be.

The psychotically tight, gracefully razortape stern rhythm section of Nattles and Matt Datesman is the cleanest and most efficient ever to back Mark on guitar, which seemed to be the reason this project ever existed (apart than for reasons to endlessly tinker with the music they recorded and push every cut worthy of the cut out there.

Graph paper post-punk, understanding of the imperatives for precision delivery as the fulcrum of human motion at mechanical directives. It’s Happy Go Licky at one end and Flin Flon at the other in terms of DC jackin’. I put on the entire discography on my last long drive and let it rip one end to the other through the rustiest belt we know (glad that I can do that, felt resourceful, and also thankful I didn’t have to return to the 12” versions that all end in locked grooves, so you have to get up and move the needle after each and every song finishes) and it kept me more wired than all the black coffee I could process, and even then I nearly veered off the road when I heard that Tube Bar sample pop up in “Kamloops (version).”

I am always going to be sad that I never got to see them do this live. I did see Nattles play bass in Cold Cold Hearts once and it ruled, they opened with “She’s Lost Control” and Allison was out there doing splits moments later, but all I can do is wonder how like maybe my eyesight woulda got knocked 20/10 had I been in the room with Flin Flon at any time. Had a good time in the handful of episodes I spent in the Galaxy Hut, too, so this clip is making me miss it extra hard:

What else can I say? Subscribe to this, enjoy it like I enjoy being able to bring it to you.

Cheers – Doug Mosurock