Heathen Disco Music Reviews #0045 (November 26, 2024)

Hey gang. Thanksgiving comes yet again, with the holiday rush and a new uncertainty immediately after. I am thankful this year for my family and a select handful of others in my day-to-day, but also for all of you who’ve decided to follow me on this journey. It’s been on-and-off but going for a long time, consistently since my late teens/early twenties, and that I have anything of value at all to give back to the music that powers me feels like a gift to be shared. Yes it is hard to find something to say about ten records every week, but if you can use this information to fill your being, to top it off with the comfort that people are still trustworthy to be out here, doing it for real, that’s kinda what counts to me.

What I’m getting at is thanks for supporting this endeavor.

It runs on music, which can be sent to PO Box 25717 Chicago IL 60625 USA or to [email protected]. Gonna be digging deeper into that stack as the weeks roll on, until we get to some year-end action, with more DJ sets to follow.

Might as well use https://bsky.app/profile/heathendisco.bsky.social right?

Read a nice little chat with Ryan Davis and the Roadhouse Band over at See-Saw and decided to drag this one out. More recent action re: records afterwards.

STATE CHAMPION Send Flowers LP (r. 2018, Sophomore Lounge/Feeding Tube)

This got the good ol’ Still Single RECOMMENDED back in 2018, when I first encountered it. Seeing as Ryan Davis is on the cusp of the spoils so richly deserved since State Champion rolled to a stop, it’s as good a time as ever to remind folks that he’s been this way for a long time.

It’s been so long since I felt like a band had something to tell me – maybe not something new, but something that lasted beyond the length of a song, or an album, something hopeful, something of theirs – that I sometimes stop waiting for it to happen, and accept whatever’s new in place of being moved. In recent years I hear a lot more approximations and refinements in music, and way more abstract musical selfies (usually involving a synthesizer), all of which have their place, some of which have more than that, great in the moment though the duration remains to be seen.

Between the mailbox and the inbox and the live stage and the recommendations of trusted friends, music is coming at me at a phenomenal rate, more of it worth hearing than maybe ever before in the lifespan of this endeavor, so much so that it sometimes eclipses my ability to say what I want to about it. I don’t want to come off as glib about my work (others cover that beat, and sadly you’re stuck with them), nor am I heartless, despite how these words over the past 14 years and counting might have made you feel. Maybe a touch of remove would make it easier to plow through it, but I’ve plowed already, with herniated disc and nerve pain the badges of pride, not honor, to prove it. I can’t tell you what I’m not believing in, because when it all washes out this is really me sharing the only thing out in the world of art/commerce that’s legitimately kept me feeling vital in spirit. When I hear these things, I need to tell you about them. It means someone has spoken or performed in a way that changed me, even a little bit, that I would be worse off without their works within my reach.

What I’m driving at is that, even in times of distress and dismissal, I’ve been getting music from Ryan Davis and his Sophomore Lounge label, and have taken pride in how it’s grown its personality out of a regional focus on music and friends and the confluence of both. I’m aware of the things the label does; even when they’ve struck me as perplexing or slight, it’s all happened for what I’d perceive to be a strong reason, or feeling, He and his crew open up their municipality of Louisville once a year for the Cropped Out festival, not to showcase themselves but to lay down the welcome for a physical representation of their tastes, good people casting a wide net. I’ve never gone (can’t swing festivals anymore, particularly those hundreds of miles away, sorry) but I hear tell that they have something to show the attendees. For this guy to be at the helm of at least two bands – the concussive noise rockers Tropical Trash, and the mannered truism of State Champion – and cede the spotlight to out-of-towners instead, seems to indicate a generosity of spirit that I don’t see with any regularity in the narrow margins of independent music.

State Champion plays a loose and stately skein of country music, sturdy and weatherbeaten, far enough off the path that listeners have to do the work of discovery all on their own. There are a good number of players in their direction, most or all of which reaching the same thin levels of recognition, enough to make a movement if there were anyone willing to move. Thinking about State Champion puts me in the mindset of folks like Jerry DeCicca, Little Gold’s Christian DeRoeck, and Zachary Cale, three guys who I met through three separate instances of DJing, me trying to tell some stories with other peoples’ art. I want things to change for all of them; I believe they all have tales that should be moving the needle, experiences to keep fueling them, and carry on what’s really the last thing we have left as a society that hasn’t been destroyed.

The stories on State Champion’s Send Flowers, their fourth and finest LP so far, all seem to be centered about loss, seven poems about the only thing that mitigates losing a person or dissolving a relationship: the remembrances of when things simply were. “Death Preferences,” the album’s second song, takes its time detailing a relationship, words and words and words (which Davis had the luxury of ruminating over during an ACRE residency last year) about putting on accents with a departed friend/co-worker, “data-mapping the system” as it were, something about environmental cleanup, trying to fit in, drifting apart and holding it together with the times they shared. Saying that someone sounds assured seems like such a copout, but I don’t know if anyone could have told tales both this abstract and this evocative the way he has, nor there being a band (guitar, violin, rhythm section, occasionally some keys and pedal steel, occasionally the talents of Edith Frost) better suited to thematically underline what he has to say. There’s songs about tradition (“Stonehenge Blues Band Blues”), songs about appreciating that which others let go as a statement of intent (“My Over, My Under”), but these themes of loss keep turning back up. They’d feel weird in any voice other than Davis’s. They don’t have a ton of regret or nostalgia staining them, but they do have a lot of phrase-turning that, when excerpted out of context (“Jeff Foxworthy in a serious role” comes to mind, and lately quite often) might seem referential for the sake of it. Yet, even in songs that hover around the seven-minute mark, nothing is wasted, no editing is required. Their chosen avenue of song is not a place that some feel comfortable to go, and if hearing a violin is going to be your dealbreaker, then I’ve got nothing for you here. But I will say that they have found their zone, and play the hell out of it, midtempo crooners to put these yarns in the loom and spin ‘em out with righteousness.

If nothing else, this record – one of a short list of my favorites this year – should put State Champion within striking distance of the more recognized musical storytellers of the current century. It’s a small, crowded stage. Help them make room.

New music reviewed after the jump. Subscribe to read it all!