Heathen Disco Music Reviews #0052 (December 20, 2024)

Sup folks. Holidays are catching up over here, but soon I’ll have a free non-work minute to keep on analyzing the contents of my hard drive from 2024, and covering the stray records coming in at the tail end of this year.

New folks — don’t run away, I’m sending this out twice a week, and you can read it all for a paltry $3 a month.

Submissions straight to [email protected] and PO Box 25717 Chicago IL 60625. Going to do some clerical work next week to line up all the things that’ve snuck in to get coverage sorted.

On with it!

AMERICAN MOTORS Content LP (Expert Work/The Ghost Is Clear)

Rust belt-borne noise rock band that discerns a key difference between “spacious” and “empty,” in that somehow they’ve figured out how to use that negative space to haunt and draw down rather than build up some sort of monument to the past. The monument was there, it’s in disrepair if it’s still standing at all, and their songs speak directly to that, the ghosts roaming the desolation left by the post-capitalist destruction of rural America, the towns you only stop in to gas up and piss, or have to cut through to save on tolls or follow construction detours. There’s no room for nostalgia in their world, and if whoever’s singing (gonna guess that’s Dustin Travis White, two more tries if not) sounds a bit like Kurt Cobain in the lower registers, it carries all of the poverty in Kurt’s voice – not the thing we get nostalgic about but perhaps the most relatable thing Nirvana had going at the start. I’m thinking about a record covered here a few weeks back which also mined a consistent tone from a bygone era, but where that record seemed to celebrate a young and exciting past playing amidst the first waves of gentrification that led to the deskbound professional capacity of a present, and the setbacks and loneliness of a decade-plus of doing that, American Motors are here to tell us that those places that used to produce the bands we championed from rougher circumstances, like Unwound, don’t come from there anymore. Just because some people can work from anywhere doesn’t mean they’re gonna head out to a post-oxy, fracked-out void/climate change floodplain where politicians and megachurches have long since stopped offering people hope. Nothing comes from those areas, and each of these eight songs is an eyewitness account from deep in the zone (if titles like “Former Mall Anchor Store Call Center Blues” or “A Half Finished Wall of Glass Blocks” don’t give it away), the people there with anchors tied to their ankles, and the minute-by-minute desperation of the party truly being over. Like that sort of misery, it is consistent and familiar from a musical standpoint, tying a bedsheet rope to escape out a window down into Mellencamp’s Scarecrow. Maybe not a good time listen, but an important one, a pretty great record, and a strong production captured by J. Robbins – these guys actually have a sound and stick to it, which is rarer than ever in these times.