Heathen Disco Music Reviews #0033 (October 15, 2024)

Mid-October update: thanks so much to those who’ve stepped up with a PAID subscription to Heathen Disco. There are only three more newsletters to go before the paywall goes up, and exclusive access to the entirety of the writing going forward with it.

Heathen Disco Music Reviews is AFFORDABLE at $3 per month or $35 per year. If you’re getting something out of this work, please get ahead of the crowd and sign up now.

Keep sharing these newsletters. I need more eyes on them!

Oh, I have a Bluesky account, as many do. I can’t find a lot of posters worth following, but if you want to add me I’m @heathendisco.bsky.social so go on ahead and do that.

Records are trickling in and I’m getting around to more time spent sitting with these new releases. Keep ‘em coming: PO Box 25717 Chicago IL 60625 USA // [email protected]

Today’s gonna be all archival stuff from the way back when. Hope you can dig it.

VARIOUS ARTISTS The World’s Lousy with Ideas Vol. 7 7” EP (Almost Ready/Aarght!)

VARIOUS ARTISTS The World’s Lousy with Ideas Vol. 8 LP (Almost Ready)

These comps were reviewed on Still Single via Dusted in May 2009, a time since when looking back seems like the crest of the lo-fi style music we were all enamored with again, the initial breakpoint for bands pressing up vinyl/product floods, just before the digital download/Bandcamp era kicked in. Two years or so before we had a nice run-up of releases tearing up the field, until there was some semblance of “establishment” to break down or winnow out. Whether you took some of these bands seriously or not is your discretion, but if you weren’t then, you never were. In 2024 I am looking forward to seeing the OSEES this weekend because the fun part never diminished from this point onward.

Almost Ready and its side labels Mighty Mouth and Last Laugh, all three hyperactive in their heyday, seem to have held back a bit on new releases over the last 10 years. One time I was walking down Harry H.’s block and he somehow saw me and ran out the door to hand me a pile of records to review, something which I’ve never quite gotten over. I’m sure it was coincidence but it didn’t feel like one, and I was stuck carrying like six records around on an errand that required both hands. These three labels ran at such rapid clip after a while that it started to dwarf all the other submissions I was receiving. It was but one brick in the volley of reasons I had to hang up this work for a time, but there are a ton of good releases on these labels, all of which seemed to line up with Harry’s obsessions, and they are a fine way to obtain some harder-to-find music. Label impresario Harry H. now owns two record stores in Brooklyn and Montclair, NJ, which seems to be taking the bulk of his time; I’ve only been to the Red Hook location but it’s a fine place for used vinyl.

I feel like something has to be said about these compilations, which have been going on at a steady clip for the past couple of years (“Since 2007”). Drumroll, please … uh, they’re pretty good? At least the ones I’ve heard have been compiled with a careful ear, and have done a good job of uniting newer artists into the fold alongside the more established. Compilations, traditionally the worst-selling records around, need to be handled more like this kind of modern document, much like those Dope-Guns-N-Fucking in the Streets comps or those Life is ———— So Why Not —————- LPs from the early ‘80s, chronicling every skid row corner of punk and avant-garde cabaret music being made in southern California. Now that records have gone completely boutique (yes, maybe we can admit this now) and are allowed to thrive under standards not necessarily applicable to the style in which we communicated 20-30 years ago, it’s nice to have a trustworthy ear collecting bands old and new, pushing another pin in the map to mark a place we should remember, as it were.

These latest missives are some of the first in the series to follow themes. Vol. 7 features four bands from Australia, all part of that whole AUS scene revival you no doubt picked up on vis a vis Eddy Current Suppression Ring (who offers up a throwaway here). They’re joined by acolytes the UV Race, who are quickly stepping into the role of simple, slightly comical punk rock that ECSR continues to occupy. There’s some energetic, talentless bash from Super Wild Horses, who can’t even be bothered to tune, much less play a chord on the guitar, and there’s the garage-psych haunt of the Straight Arrows. None of these bands make much of a dent but surprisingly this one has a shelf life beyond one listen, though not too many more.

Vol. 8 is like a senior class yearbook, featuring nine songs from bands that span the beginning of this new lo-fi revival (Times New Viking, the Intelligence) to the end of its first phase (Vivian Girls, Mike Sniper & Tubesteak Army; Wavves seems to be the real wall separating grown-ass men from jittery children, and as such are not included here), mixed through with kids and actual, card-carrying ‘90s (and quite possibly late ’80s) participants. It’s interesting to see this United Nations-esque approach played out so successfully, so many once-disparate ideas crashing into one another … even a shout out to eBay in the Guinea Worms’ “Soiled Sender.” Fuck, the entire second side (“side R”) of this thing – Sic Alps, Thee Oh Sees, Tyvek and Pink Reason – just lays it all out there, really great, signature examples of what those bands can do, all breaking rank a bit from previous excursions but not far enough that we’ll all lose the script. I still can’t quite figure out what Thee Oh Sees is all about; Clinic by way of the Stray Cats, maybe? Thing is though that it’s FUN, and that trumps all these days. A good time is had by all here, and everyone sent in a piece of A-game, right down to Pink Reason’s most masculine effort to date, switching the first twenty Twisted Village releases with a strong remnant of S.E. Hinton jean jacket lone wolf boogie. What’s obvious here is that it’s time to start taking two-thirds of these bands very seriously, your choice as to which. Plenty of cover variants, because “why be normaL”?

OVERHANG PARTY Otherside Of 2xCD+7” (Pataphysique)

Originally ran in a Still Single from January 2007. Overhang Party often gets left out of the Japanese psych revival discussion, maybe because they weren’t on PSF or Alchemy. Maybe they’re front of mind for you, but I’m not in that conversation. I find their music to be a bit more deliberate than other rangy/elegiac contemporaries like Ghost or LSD-March, but far less so than heavies like High Rise or White Heaven. They did take on slow and loud in a way that those bands never fully committed to, and giving into their moment means shifting those expectations into a slightly more above-ground mindset, as these tracks align more closely with shoegaze and ‘80s/’90s American/UK psych than most in their class. Overhang Party broke up in 2008 after nearly two-decade run, but there’s a box set of their studio recordings for the stalwarts (released by Important in 2013), and for the curious, this release right here is streaming on most popular services.

Normally wouldn’t touch a CD here, much less one from six years ago, but this one came with a single, and the entire package is new, still in print, and worth mentioning. Overhang Party are Tokyo psych mainstays, having been at it since 1990, across a plangent set of styles that mixed the melodies with the mope to achieve a Paisley Underground sort of effect, albeit with virtuosic guitar freakouts by leader Rinji Fukuoka. They’re still active, with new releases of live albums (Live 2004-2006 being self-explanatory) and performances on DVD, but this effort is a best-of from the mid-to-late ‘90s, prior to the band’s recent personnel shifts. The single contains two songs from the band’s 1999 US tour, one which was cut at such a length it was causing my stylus to drag. “Le Few Follet” is presented here in a beautiful, ballad-like pop-psych layering, Fukuoka’s and then-bandmate Akira Yamanouchi’s dueling lead guitars leavening all that falls beneath with thick, confident strokes. On the flipside, “Cut Up Us” outlines a collage of sounds from the entire tour, rushing forth with Kevin Shields-esque aspirations within symphonic tapeloops and whatnot. The CDs are great; psychedelia in the classic sense, shot through with majestic melodies, challenging and progressive outlines, ripping leads, and proper song structures. All of these tracks, recorded in Japan, rattle the cages of every young, “tribal” drug-pee band out there these days with the skill and professional freakout-making abilities they all lack. Edition of 1000 numbered copies.

KLANGMUTATIONEN Weisse Messe LP (Holy Mountain)

https://www.discogs.com/label/40094-Holy-Mountain 

Reviewed November 2007 for Still Single. More than just resurfacing this one, a case could definitely be made for the entire Holy Mountain catalog, from the Ghost single that marked their debut to the Barry Walker Jr. solo album that may have endcapped it (though I still see represses of an Om record they released coming through as recently as two years ago). Holy Mountain was definitely on one, building the reps for better-known acts like Wooden Shjips while constantly pushing the needle on bands far less known. I still can’t think of any bands like Malaysia’s Klangmutationen, and much of the HM release slate can be had for prices as blown out as the sound on this record. Those who need heavy, weird and wild on a budget would be wise to (re)visit this entire catalogue and make their own assumptions. JW would likely be chuffed to reclaim a few more square inches of his living quarters, too.

As riotous free jazz/rock splatter artists from Malaysia, Klangmutationen makes a case for the positive side of globalization. When did you ever expect blowouts this fevered to come out of Kuala Lumpur? Three long, untidy pieces are collected here, recorded live with extra heat; maybe a bit too much heat to place this group in most Euro-free traditions, and instead steer them towards extreme Japanese instrument abusers like Takayanagi Masayuki or Kaoru Abe. Scalding guitar textures mesh with exploratory drumming, bass wander, and the screech of alto and soprano saxes until the outfit boils over in protest, time and again. Crisp, trebly recording makes it sound as if the instrumentalists are right on top of one another. It's a trip man, a really abrasive and vital trip.

DIRTY BEACHES Badlands LP (Zoo Music)

Originally published as a standalone album review on Dusted, March 28^th, 2011. Joe Chamandy from the Simps/Celluloid Lunch reminded me that I wrote this and kicked up a little bit of a dust cloud over Montreal at time of print. This guy received some level of fame over this stuff, so joke’s on me, right? I’m listening to it now and hearing a little more out of it, mostly awareness of other artists before it that also found themselves as enamored with dishwater fidelity and/or certain taboo signposts of ‘50s culture. I’m also hearing something more akin to Japanese group sounds in here, but extrapolated to a sort of middle ground. Every nod towards Suicide gets an Elvis “woo” that erases any progress made in building a noteworthy successor to the sounds therein. If you’re curious, it’s on pretty much every streamer. Raw Blow, on the other hand, didn’t get out of the garage past one great single and an unreleased full-length. Let’s hear from them instead.

So, the ’50s sucked, right? They sucked pretty hard as a decade, and we’re nostalgic about them solely because of the Greatest Generation’s commitment to framing every piece of shit they ever laid as some sort of cherished momento of the way things used to be. The only reason anyone props up the ’50s is that they still have living ancestors, and designs on what can be cannibalized from them once they die. Sure, let’s remember the generation that lived to pollute in giant, wasteful automobiles that cemented our dependence on foreign oil, and those miracle plastics whose by-products poisoned our atmosphere and groundwater. Let’s remember Pork Chop Hill. Let’s remember the U.S. fucking up Iran’s government and paving the way for the rigid, near-dictatorial state it is today. Let’s remember segregation and George Wallace. Let’s remember where we got our unhealthy eating habits and the proliferation of cheap, chemically-laced foodstuffs across our brand new supermarkets. Let’s remember the Berlin Airlift. Let’s remember the Cold War. Let’s remember Joe McCarthy (seems like Gov. Scott Walker and the Fitzgerald brothers are doing just that). Let’s remember Elvis. What a loser.

Or let’s not. And part of that commitment to erasing our unfortunate past is to bury any memories of this goddamn Dirty Beaches record wherever they may surface. Alex Zhang Hungtai straps on a guitar (maybe) and croons like Alan Vega on top of asymmetrical, cloying samples of ’50s and early ’60s greaser pop crap. The songs can’t go anywhere due to the length of the loops and the conceit of assembling them, so he hisses over the "music" in this hiccuping, Fonzi-fied affectation that is one of the most blatant and unoriginal guises to come down yet in our lazy, near-sighted approximation of what we construe as challenging or worthwhile music in 2011.

On top of that, Badlands sounds like it was recorded over the phone to an answering machine. Can’t you all listen to a Suicide record instead? Because at least there you’re getting the thrill of discovery of a new form, the sound of rock and roll turning inwards on itself, not this useless, endless Xerox copy of a copy that stands before you now.

I know of a band in my hometown of Pittsburgh called Raw Blow. They’re taking a similar approach to what’s on Badlands, except that there’s no attempt to obscure the personalities of the musicians that are making the music. That’s because they have personality to spare; they also cover familiar territory (the Rallizes take on "I Will Follow Him" swapped out for the Rascals, or ? and the Mysterians), but there’s also very little attempt to obscure what they’re doing; rather, they expand on those ideas into a timeless conceit, back it up with live instrumentation and concentrate on building a groove off of the sample, in effect enhancing it, shedding light on something that wasn’t there. They don’t take the low road like Dirty Beaches does, washing out all but the most notable elements of the sample with marine layer filth and hoping it’ll be cool. They’re also probably a fraction as ambitious as anyone involved with pushing this clunker along, so you’ll have to do some work to find them. I feel like I just did that work for you, so forget it. And forget Dirty Beaches too; put some Clearasil on it and pray that it goes down before the prom.

GORE Mean Man’s Dream LP (1987, Eksakt/Ediesta/Fundamental; reissued by Southern Lord in 2008) 

Review ran on Dusted, 7/29/2008. Gore remains a highlight of my earliest era of musical discoveries, when I was finding out what the bands I liked also liked. If you heard me call this stuff regressive, no you didn’t. I still can’t think of too many bands that sounded like Gore, though maybe that’s cool as I’m not into wading around black metal/sketch scenes looking for answers. Heavy, dumb, missing. Southern Lord probably took a bath on reissuing these, as copies can be had for as much as $10, but you were never gonna pay more than that for Gore records anyway. Drummer Danny Lommen later landed in the Caspar Brötzmann Massaker, the colder end of said bath for Southern Lord. 

Gore’s second album, 1987’s Mean Man’s Dream, can still be found in used bins throughout this great nation, part of a stalled import distribution campaign that came crashing down when Atlanta’s Fundamental Music label went bust. I found a copy in Chicago earlier this year, priced around $2, an after-effect of cultural obsolescence. Yet you can hear more of Gore’s threatening, forceful influence on bands today than you’d suspect. This Dutch outfit was one of the first bands of the '80s to take instrumental music away from jazzy noodlers and pacifists, and thrust it into the greedy, sweaty grasp of metal. They even wrote would-be lyrics for each song; ugly, hate-filled screeds in somewhat broken English with titles like “Out for Sex” and “To the Gallows,” the kind of words that land teens into counseling. 

Moreover, Gore’s single-minded musical direction created a foundation for any number of male-dominated bands of the late '80s and early '90s, bands that grew out of hardcore and punk, sidestepped the Sub Pop grunge machine and AmRep sleaze pits, and leaned into music that was as serious as it was aggressive. Bitch Magnet, Slint, Bastro, Don Caballero, Dazzlingkillmen and about a dozen other outfits of that stripe all owe Gore a large debt of gratitude, for they were all able to add their own touches to Gore’s simple formula and make it their own. Black metal, as a whole, should also be thanking Gore for helping to voice miserable, horrifying thoughts into a cohesive musical whole; scrape away the layers of distortion and screaming, and you will inevitably find the same elements of songcraft standing bolt upright in the damning sun. The “Gore” in the German band Bohren und Der Club of Gore … you guessed it.

It’s also hard to listen and not think about where a younger Steve Albini might have gotten some ideas for how recorded drums should sound. Danny Lommen’s drums, with the help of eventual Rollins Band producer Theo van Eenburgen (nee Theo van Rock), presented a menacing front line that made room for Pieter de Sury’s searing guitar tone, which leveled all that stood in its path. Gore later appeared on one side of a split live album with the Rollins Band, and would work with Albini in some capacity on an overblown double album entitled Wrede, on an extended canvas that included one song per side.

Back to the issue at hand, however – Mean Man’s Dream, now available as digital download from FSS, with a reported physical version on the way from Southern Lord, depicts a long carving knife on a scratched metal surface as its cover art. This is a step down from the cover of their debut, Hart Gore, which shows a more ornamental blade thrust through a cow’s heart, but in essence is even more menacing. Refreshingly direct and needing little explanation, Mean Man’s Dream is a culmination of slasher movie imagery and serial killer worship. Its thick, muscular character plods along mid-tempo runs of stuttering riffs and oompah-band skanking (check the two-beat on “Loaded”), and each of the 10 songs within feels free from the need to explain itself. Here’s instrumental rock that leaves you to fill in the pieces. Their music is not necessarily narrative; more of a study in metal aggression than a contained story. In essence, these songs put the semblance of foreboding character from your nightmares behind shatterproof glass, allowing you to examine for yourself and fill in the blanks. It’s also Gore’s most successful album, and though the group’s finest moment (“Arena,” off the live split) is lost to time, Mean Man’s Dream displays for a new generation the same sketches that launched an original sound for hundreds of bands to follow.

I remain, your friend,

Doug Mosurock