Heathen Disco Music Reviews #0036 (October 25, 2024)

Real quick — very, very happy to be back on this beat, appreciate all of you who’ve been reading and subscribing. Inadequate coverage of important music and the failures of institutional memory have pulled me back into the fold — I’n here to help you make choices about what’s new to listen to. These times we’re in really suck, and the right record can carry you from moment to moment, until we get to where things need ti be. Here’s news of five more records that may help you find that path.

As of the next edition, all future Heathen Disco newsletters are going to be paywalled. Non-paying subscribers will see an intro and some words but most of the content will be locked, apart from one or two reviews per week. Because this work is … work, I ask for a pretty small and reasonable fee to keep supporting this project and the time that goes into it. If you’ve enjoyed what’s been published so far, you’ll appreciate what I have in store.

Records, keep em coming, stay in touch: PO Box 25717 Chicago IL 60625 USA // [email protected]

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See you all on the other side…

NEW DISCOS

MOPE GROOVES Box of Dark Roses 2xLP (12XU / Night School)

A record is a finite thing. There’s only so many of each, especially now, and only so much room on them. A record can only hold one collection of experiences, and if we’re not sharing a world with the artist, we have to wait for the possibility of another record to pull back from that world to see more of it. Mope Grooves was a project helmed by an artist named stevie who made sure we saw as much of that world as she could show us, especially for those who needed this music to prove they were not alone. This path led across four albums that started in more of a traditional rock instrumentation sense before gravitating to a synth/key-centric sound, heavy on repetition and staccato blasts of rhythmic shuffle, household and world audio sprinkling in through layers of complex percussives, like bucket drumming built an unheard planetoid of inner ear psychotropic melody around itself.

All of those ideas come to bear in stevie’s final work, a staggering 27-track double album that builds off of the previous Mope Grooves LP (2019’s Desire), abstracting the already strong Raincoats influence into a sampler-based journal of the last years of her life, intercut with words about the greater angels in her life (queer and trans revolutionaries, Aileen Wuornos, Dora Richter). Recorded with her partner, cap, and a number of collaborators from Portland and elsewhere, it’s somehow bigger than the world a record can usually create. It’s a journey of stevie’s transition (one track samples the reception area count-out of the hard currency she scraped together for surgery), a work that advocates freedom through revolutionary means, underlines the tragedies of confinement, warns of the constant presence of violence towards fragile communities and against power structures, and the tenderness in the middle that must be protected. A booklet that accompanies the record spells out exactly what it is, who it is for, how it came to be and what it is about. Klaxons, patterns, triggers and metronomes frame a singular art pop/folk castoff sense of song, built small and played personally over the course of the plague years that upended fragile lives and sent them on the run. It’s a celebration where it can be, but largely a warning that the struggles people on the margins have faced are about to get worse than ever, and exists to give power to those who can’t find it through traditional means. Read the book and listen to all 90 minutes of what’s here and notice what’s changed about you by the end. There are lessons in here she wanted us to learn, stories important to tell, a sadly final lift-and-shift of the music in her head out in one grand and permanent statement. Doesn’t even fit into a “best of the year” category because it’s too big for one year. What are we that we were able to fit into the same world that gave us this?

NAKED ROOMMATE Pass the Loofah LP (Trouble in Mind)

From the same core of Bay Area/NorCal musicians that comprise Famous Mammals and Non Plus Temps (and previously The World, Andy Human and the Reptoids, RAYS and others), it’s the second Naked Roommate album, and what a joy. Earlier releases found the pulsebeat inside of the shell of Inflatable Boy Clams and in the shadows of Colossal Youth, and while those notions are still very much in the throughline of the band, the new jams are less stiff, still with their barbs and edges but much more fluid in terms of rhythms and arrangements – the beats are bigger, the melodies clearer, the embellishments of electronics, horns and feedback hit harder, and it makes for a far more diverse and successful delivery, like switchboard wires crossing calls from Paisley Park to the Tom Tom Club, introducing some ‘90s Grand Royal white label synth play and pop bops a la Luscious Jackson, and maybe a buttoned-up glance at something more outré like “What Is Love?” by Deee-Lite. Instructive, politicized lyrics take down Bored Ape style NFT lords and what they stand for (“No Kicker”), question survival under annual wildfire conditions (“Sunblot”), deride activists who don’t dedicate to the cause (“Successful Friend”) and illustrate the necessary freedom of escaping a bad situation (“Fight Flight”), but the unnecessary ceiling pressure present on their debut Do the Duvet (and all but absent from their excellent demo from 2018) is once again removed, allowing these tracks to billow up to the ceiling like party balloons. Nowhere does this work more effectively than in album closer “I Can’t Be Found,” with its chord organ vamps, steady sax lines, acoustic rhythm and slack key lead guitar, vocoder and bubbling synths creating a driven yet completely relaxed atmosphere, simply begging for all the best remixes of 2025 to transform this beauty into even more beauty. It’s the best song on their best work to date, and should end up in crates and USB sticks of open-minded DJs all over the world this winter, when dancing may very well prove to be the last effective form of protest.

PRIMITIVE ART GROUP 1981-1986 2xLP (Amish)

Reissue of two self-released albums and a live recording by New Zealand’s first contemporary free/improv jazz outfit, painting them as a key, unsung component in that nation’s creative scene, a schism away from pop, rock, punk and folk, a world unexplored. There’s a book coming as well that spells out the band’s history, their footprint, their political stance (against nuclear testing and proliferation in their edge of the world, anti-Apartheid, participation in Rock Against Racism gigs and the like), the label they started, and the presence they made for this kind of music to flourish where it hadn’t before. With a lot of unknown-to-many archival stuff, there is the fascination and sometimes a tendency to embellish, but when the rubber hits the road, the work has gotta be good. I know not from where the influences came that drove this bunch to the realm of Euro free-meets-AACM/NY Art Quartet style expression (other than really far away) but you listen to enough of this stuff over time and you know that they found it, dialed it in, made something real out of it that easily stands aside some ‘70s and a lot of ‘80s improvisation from the American coasts and the continent. Over the course of these two albums you hear the connections forming, the confidence building as their pieces start to take formal shape, ultimately ending up riffs pretty close to the center (ragtime, soundtracks) and on the fringes (some Zappa-esque splat in places, harmolodics, etc.), and they do it all in a voice that doesn’t neatly fit with everything else going on. From one end to another this is a real treat, a concise and complete history of arguably the last frontiers of acoustics-oriented music and mindful artistic expressions of protest, built up from wishes into a shell for the country’s burgeoning independent noise and avant output. This is a strong, engaged, not-blow-your-face-off set of sessions, and it is a treat to see where they made it go. This stuff is important, and far beyond the ancillary goals of what the group was able to do for the cross-points of art, culture, simple commerce and politics in their part of the world.

SiP Leos Ultra LP (Not Not Fun)

Second album from Chicago musician Jimmy Lacy, working from a palette of synths, sequencers, melodica, winds, thumb piano and a generally wider variety of attendant instrumentation than on his debut Leos Naturals. SiP creates these really peaceful, involved instrumentals that play a bit like ragas, with Eastern scale runs and an enriching, harmonious intent, speaking to jazz (trad, Ethio and klezmer), New Age and Americana forms. Moreso than in previous works, he seems to pick a theme on each track and the sounds to match, plugs it all into the formula and piles it on in interesting ways – the country-ish tracks like “Chicago Gold” and “Palomino” evoke Matmos circa The West via the Moog Country-turned-Creel Pone discovery Gil Trythall, with a “yes-and” approach to building these tracks seems to stem from a similar, outside-in style of arrangements and sound-dowsing. Really beautiful, calming works that scale on their own cultural capital, a self-sustaining world of sound.

ARCHIVAL DISCOS

LED ER EST Dust on Common LP (Wierd, 2009; re. Mannequin, 2017)

We’re at the 15-year mark for this unduly forgotten debut from NYC’s Led Er Est. Dust on Common is a tough one to find these days, and evaluations are as minimal as the synth style it takes after. 2024 would welcome this one completely; 2009 was a pretty jammed-up year for a lot of us, and a Q4 filing may have unduly sealed the fate of this one. Appearances were paramount on the short-lived yet essential Wierd label, but theirs looked a bit anonymous against the kind of sleeve that would hold a “very rare” darkwave/postpunk sound commensurate with that label’s offerings. Black and orange are indeed Halloween colors, but this isn’t a record for Halloween people.

If the best you can do in a rigid form of music is reach the horizon, then your goal should be to get to the absolute top of that curve, less than an inch from the ceiling, and Dust on Common pushes it right up there. The trio of electronicists Shawn O’Sullivan and Owen Stokes and guitarist Samuel Kklovenhoof (née Sam De La Rosa) came from elsewhere – Texas, I’m presuming – to NYC so that they could put this project in front of true believers, and if it’s taken a while for that to happen, it’s not for lack of quality. Listening to it now, it’s remarkable how we’re not celebrating this one more often. Every one of these nine tracks fits where and as it should, steady and confident, dropping the pace to create drama and tension exactly where it’s needed and mercilessly slamming it back up when it calls, not a hint of humor or irony in place. It may take several listens for this to become obvious, because (I’ll assume) you’ve heard records that use these parts before, to whatever ends they might have generated. But there isn’t a single misstep here – not in the songwriting (tense and shook), not in the mystique (late, hot nights in a flat landscape), not in the burning cold pressure of dread this thing evokes, not in the distance they generate between influences (Chameleons, early Tuxedomoon, Pornography-era Cure, the Effigies, KaS Product … it’s here, it’s integrated, it’s powerful) into a sound understood as their own. The confidence to know what they wanted, to understand where it came from, and how to optimize it within the firm guidelines of what they should and shouldn’t do, is the unerring path Led Er Est followed to craft this seamless object.

Thanks so much – Doug Mosurock