Heathen Disco Music Reviews #0039 (November 5, 2024)

This edition of Heathen Disco is free with my compliments. Subscribe to keep reading future editions!

It was around this time eight years ago that I stopped regularly writing about music. It was a slowdown for sure, one that took years following fatherhood, but I remember getting on the train to work the next day, wondering how this whole thing could go on in the face of such utter disappointment, and a possibly preventable global lockdown by the end of the term.

Tomorrow I might be feeling the same way about the world and our nation’s place in it. One thing I’m not going to do is stop caring about this music enough to let you read my thoughts on it. That didn’t help anyone, least of all me, and the effort it’s taken to build back this community and attention from bands and labels has been slower than I’d hoped. But it definitely opened my eyes to why we need to continue the projects we put down, the ones that actually serve a purpose (in this case, connecting people to music they might have missed, or confirming/engaging against their own tastes and suspicions).

Hopefully this gives you a bit of a break from the worry. This music is going to be here tomorrow. So will you, and so will I. One of these you can forget about, one you can remember (provided you were there, or in the vicinity), and three are here for you to evaluate as very solid efforts in their respective corners.

I appreciate all the support this audience has given me, and urge you to spread this news far and wide. It would also be a good time to support Heathen Disco with a subscription — they are cheap, reliable ways to discover a manageable amount of new music from an avenue where it’s impossible (at least by my watch) to steer the wrong way.

Submissions go to PO Box 25717, Chicago IL 60625 USA // [email protected]

The DJ sets/archived radio shows are at https://www.mixcloud.com/mosurock/ — more than you can listen to in a whole year, pick one at random and go.

Off we go.

THE CURE Songs of a Lost World LP (Fiction/Polydor/Capitol)

Most of you have already spilled your words and thoughts. I like to take a little bit of time. These are the takeaways: The Cure returned to ] their best and most-lasting quality – the intangible ability to pull every listener in and down, somehow empowering these feelings without leaving us feel like we’re alone with their difficulties – and are showing us what they can do in that claimed space, without making a formula out of it. It’s modern-sounding (Simon Gallup put his whole pompadour into this one) and in that modernity – sort of an armored Mogwai/Justin Broadrick-esque weight – connects us to the reality that their sound has never gone away. The Cure’s music is in the groundwater at a macro level for several generations of world citizens, and has been for some time; it is both theirs and ours, a generous play that few can claim for the length of time in which they’ve been doing it. Even when they were fucking off, they still had dozens of bangers and an impossibly deep bench from which to pull their whole thing, so to hear them back on top is pretty remarkable – they did not have to do this. They have taken elements (like a harmonium on “Warsong”) that another band would’ve gone to town over as some sort of relic of disparate, historical importance, and then they fuckin’ bury that thing as the skeleton of the track – listen for it, it’s there, integrated in with prominence but not dominance, because this is The Cure, and they are smarter than most bands, the anti-Coldplay, treacle scraped clear off, the unobtanium of rock bands. It is remarkably easy to listen to this entire album in one pull and not skip a moment of it, something even they’ve had problems pulling off throughout their career. I can’t get through Disintegration without passing over “Lullaby,” personally, and they’ve finally found that point where every track, every note, every emotion feels life-or-death essential, in the same way Faith or Pornography were. The institution thrives.

ARTIFICIAL GO Hopscotch Fever LP (Future Shock/Feel It)

I’ve mentioned this in a few other reviews, but the way in which Feel It transplanted to Cincinnati, and turned the spotlight on every band hiding in what from the outside would seem like an unlikely place for interesting music, is a remarkable asset that any halfway decent scene wishes to have. I spent a rather unremarkable night there on the weekend after last Thanksgiving in a weird boutique hotel, didn’t leave with any strong impressions other than a city minding its own business, and a hellish drive home through Indiana the following day. Knowing that there are bands like The Drin and The Serfs and Corker and Louse and Crime of Passing, and now Artificial Go going on there feels like lifting the proverbial rock. Working off a non-flash, generalized template of Rough Trade modest wonder ca. ’78-’80, the Grant Showbiz/Mayo Thompson/Stuart Moxham era of getting the music to the people cuts to the core of the shoebox-as-ant farm work going on here – affected, accented vocals soaring into a cotton-candy commercial register lace around up-close ric-tic rhythms, simple strum-n-bass, and a sense of purpose magnified far beyond these humble starts. Nothing’s sounded quite like this in modern times since that Naked Roommate demo, and then not even that, as this sounds like it’s got somewhere to be, the Marine Girls with trainers on. We’re living in an increasingly anonymous world given to the coasts, and the benefits of looking in between highlight the striking divide between intellectual/emotional curiosity and physical distance; even in Chicago this band feels like it's two planets away. Never has bridging the gap mattered more, because year-end faves like this one are further eluding our collective grasp, and this Artificial Go record could be your whole-ass life if that’s what you needed of them.

ALVILDA C'est Déjà L'heure LP (Static Shock)

Been a while since Alvilda’s excellent debut 7” surfaced, but time has its ways. Whatever the wait, it’s been worth it – pretty close in style, spirit and even sharing a national border with that Cœur L’Index album covered here last month (Alvilda hails from Paris, CL’I from Brussels), but maybe a touch more in line with Bomp!-adjacent power pop or the Incredible Kidda Band. Game of inches, really – more of this music is certainly welcome when it’s this well-done, with its sterling arrangements, brisk pace, sunny demeanor and surplus of hooks. Hard to put this up against the last wave of non-American pop outfits like Melenas, Parsnip or En Attendant Ana as it’s way more firmly welded to an understood genre, nor does it fit neatly with garage-mindedness a la bands on Thee Headcoatees/Courettes/Miss España axis, and it’s not snotty enough to stand near the Muffs or Redd Kross. It’s gonna have to stand on its own as a driving, delightful collection of songs with an electric snap.

KELLY LEE OWENS Dreamstate LP (dh2)

This is killing me – tracks that could’ve been on any of Kelly Lee Owens’ previous, understated, often wonderful trio of albums have been sweetened and detailed to a dull slush of big room techno/trance, infinity-tracked vocal treatments and bland Euro synth melodies. Certainly not all electronic music needs to be relegated to the bedroom to be interesting but Owens is one of the better-known indie artists where doing more with less is concerned, and this has such a facile foregrounding push about it that only serves to anonymize her work– couldn’t pick this out of a lineup, especially with all that cologne and leather store waft around it. Miss me with this crap and let me know when Kelly O finally turns it around to the inevitable back-to-basics album and disowns this time and place.

NERO LP3.14 DL (Temporary Residence)

Career-as-couple-years-spanning retrospective from this Louisville post-hardcore ensemble, who shared the first Temp Res release (a split single with label founder Jeremy Devine’s band The Concord Anthology Process), and which was a launchpad for the eventual avant composition domain of drummer Sarah Hennies, the seeds of which you can discover growing in fits and starts here. These songs sound like ghosts to me, at least the first tracks which reference the Dune universe, in that I know I’d heard them 25 years ago in some context, an errant CD in a distro box full of screenprinted LPs, or something at the bottom of a Bottlenekk order.

Memory is a funny thing because it’s unreliable, but it’s more interesting than the friction of marketing memories as much as they can be verified, which we know as nostalgia. Right now someone is breaking the third “single” from a EP-length album of a long-departed band (a band I love, too!) that’s been available since 1997. Why? Is Nero getting back together? (Not likely, and don’t mix up that drum & bass Nero that’s on tour, which Bandcamp auto-matched to this release). Is that other band (for any length of time)? That’s why the digital domain is a perfect use case for a release like this – definitely enough for a double LP where someone will have to pay to warehouse all the unsold copies, but why go to the trouble? If it’s new music, get the object. If it isn’t 100% new, the need for object permanence is gone; there’s enough originals left to go out there and get, and in the world of busted typewriters, non-conservation grade construction paper, and Angelfire pages long since deleted, between which bands like Nero found themselves, it was barely a consideration anyway.

Nostalgia also requires a reframing of a legend that, as it was lived, wasn’t more than some good stories rising like grey smoke from the day-to-day burning up of one’s youth. Maybe youth isn’t much more than that, the limited freedom to do what one wants until the vessel containing those lives becomes more defined. Since a significant portion of this Nero comp was unheard at time of recording, it is relegated to memory, from those who were there, and the faultiness of memory is what makes it interesting. Sarah said this band saved her life, in so many words, and that’s why it matters. Some real Act One hours, an operetta, no ending needed.

But what a first act. All of the Louisville bonafides are there, kids who grew up on the music and the lore of bands like Slint, Rodan and Crain, and took those parts to make their own sound after those bands were gone. One of forty bands on a fest in some midwestern hall some weekend, even – this mode of rockin’ was understood, categorized, celebrated life or death by the people close to it; extremely complicated, unstable bursts of rhythm designed to trip you up, voices ragged from screaming, only the most broken riffs played high up on the neck at intervals impossible to gather. This was the prog rock of stoner uncles and Vietnam vets pulled out of the ground by the big red tractor that hardcore eventually winnowed into, as it was democratized and claimed by the kids who didn’t feel like they belonged anywhere else, and who were punching back. The roiling instrumental interplay in the rhythm section, the deliberate and coy bursts of static, the confidence in being able to play yourself into knots, part after part rolling off of some bespoke factory line, each different to one another and only able to be assembled by a select few people. You wanna consider the Dune reboots a hook? Go ahead. They were on the David Lynch version when it was barely a thought and we were revving up on Lost Highway.

What else matters is that I loved listening to this. It’s new enough to many of us, and still exciting to internalize how these small groups of localized kids took what was given to them and bent it to their will. The late ‘90s were a great time for those who didn’t know where to go, to take the most roundabout way there, which in a lot of cases made for a thrilling journey up, around, and back down exactly where you stood when it began.

Thanks for stopping by — Doug Mosurock