Heathen Disco Music Reviews #0043 (November 19, 2024)

Welcome back.

Wanted to mention a few things before we roll out this edition’s “content”:

• See Sharp Pins at any chance you get. Couldn’t get over how fully they’ve embraced the power pop mohair 12-string approach but it was the most fun I’ve had seeing a band in a while. Ringleader Kai Slater is a pretty big wheel in young folks having bands in Chicago and is on a trajectory you’ll wanna follow.

• Oh, also The Sewerheads. More on them soon. The record is great, the live show really hot. Close as anyone’s ventured to Come ca. Near Life Experience in a while. Hopper said the Dambuilders.

• There’s a pretty great opportunity going from EU label A Colourful Storm right now, an imprint I’ve been enjoying for several years. They release what they feel, usually coming into contact with experimental music, folk, electronic/techno expressions and indie pop, with reissues supplanting the newer titles. It’s a great niche. Their subscription series comes in at three tiers, and I went for the deluxe package, with most of the back catalog sent via Bandcamp and delivery of all their new releases on vinyl in the coming year. No spon here, just some folks doing something I appreciate and wanted to share: https://acolourfulstorm.bandcamp.com/subscription for the details.

• Requiescat Reese McHenry, who battled illness for what seemed like a lifetime, and managed to make something as powerful and impassioned as this record with Spider Bags. Listen to Bad Girl today.

• Also RIP to J. Saul Kane, mastermind of UK dance music for several decades, keeper of the DC Recordings stable, always onto what was next and pulling back what was behind.

Review material and well wishes to: PO Box 25717 Chicago IL 60625 // [email protected]

New Mixcloud set coming very shortly.

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Here’s a review, the rest are after the jump.

CHILDREN’S CRUSADE A Duty-Dance with Death LP (Splendid Research)

I’ve wanted to hear these songs since 1993, when college radio mentoring steered me in the path of the Children’s Crusade Scorpio Moon 7”. The project was a short-lived duo of Fraser Sims and Doug Gillard, two high school classmates who banded together in ideological refuge against the rusted shell of Elyria, OH by whatever creative means they could muster. Sims was doing double-duty in Cleveland’s Starvation Army, and Gillard’s path eventually led through Death of Samantha, Cobra Verde, Gem and now as a long-standing member of both Guided By Voices and Nada Surf, but the 1984 where this was made couldn’t have anticipated any of that. I can’t guess what these guys were listening to at the time but there’s something about just-post hardcore expression out of punk/goth leaning folks that presages the burst of creativity also sensed around DC’s Rev Summer and bands like Moss Icon and The Hated and Honor Role, at the point where punk had nowhere left to go but add a hyphen to whatever / “punk and,” I suppose. These songs aren’t really as aggressive as a lot of that music but the same sort of chorus pedal/prescient juvenile poet directive is fully understood, people who had a hand in whatever came next who were just as confused as anyone where to go but had to do what was needed. In their case it was a rocket out to a slightly larger world, an antidote brewed out of punk, goth, rock and general teenage frustration to the sort of leaded gasoline exhaust(ed) atmosphere of diminished possibilities, administered and distributed on cassettes before they suffocated. Sims was a damn good lyricist and knew what to do with his voice, and Gillard saw the nihilism left in the wake of hardcore and did something about it, a reflective, cross-genre trudge into a world that ages people all too quickly. It’s kind of a shock that seniors in high school made this, but also not at all – we see it all the time, the starts anew from a previous crop’s hand-me-downs. Still can’t really believe this record exists, and I can’t peel myself away from it.

After this, new stuff from Earthen Sea, Comptoir Des Vanités, a comp by Winston Hightower from earlier this year and the latest Patrick Cowley archival dig.