Heathen Disco Music Reviews #0068 (February 14, 2025)

Hey friends. I hope you have something fulfilling on the docket for tonight. Do one for you.

I’m doing one here for everyone: every week I pick up new followers, paywall an edition of this and watch those followers drop. I have to assume there are 325 people interested in new music and maybe 80 that are really interested, or just like me. It’s DISCONCERTING.

The carve-outs I make to do this work come at a cost to a very precariously balanced set of other fulfilling things I could be doing. The weekends sitting indoors with a pile of records while everyone I know goes to the beach … I never forgot how that felt (duty-bound, dusty, not great). There is some give and go here that needs to take place, and if you can handle that, three dollars a month will get all of this work into your eyes and ears, and presumably improve your lives all in one place. Discovering new music is fun at its core, but there are but a few correct paths to take, the rest of them being almost entirely wrong.

So I thank you, and ask that you keep joining me in this endeavor. And if I review your record, and you want access, reach out and we’ll make it so.

Here are five new records for a time and place: now. Well, four.

RAPID DYE s/t LP (Cool Death/11 PM)

Furious, environment-leveling raw punx hardcore from Sydney. Feels like I’ve seen this name around for years, only at the demo tape level (pre-pandemic), and that this record’s been years in the making. It’s a splitter for sure, pushing all the levels, vocals an angry scree mixed just a little louder than the band, which spikes it in a filthy, harsh tone. Fast and precise, gnarly as hell, and solidifies hardcore (in my mind, at least) as the ultimate style of “local music” – for a very defined point in time (here, whenever it happens, for precisely 15 minutes), presence (on/off, 11 or zero), and place, (now, be there or don’t, it’ll be over while you’re still considering when you should show up). Bats you around like a cat toy and leaves you wherever you land, chewed on and discarded, stuffing falling out.

HORSEGIRL Phonetics On and On LP (Matador)

Horsegirl had all of high school and some of college to put together their debut Versions of Modern Performance, with a rangy sound that found a home for ideas so sprawling they couldn’t be confined to a single format; true to the title, each format and release by territory had something different or extra added to it. There’s only one version of Phonetics On and On, by a band that’s locked down its footprints. Their sound is pleasingly formalized and thistle-dry across the spectrum: guitar and bass tones focus on the treble and mids while rolling off the low end, percussion crisp and separated, strings crosscutting methodically to where you can hear the rosin on the bow. Working in the studio with Cate Le Bon, they’ve put their approach into clear focus, reaching back to a Marine Girls-esque frame of simplicity, every sound held up to the same standard of presentation regardless of how up-front or subdued it’s been performed. My listening pattern just dead-ended their record into “Qual” by X Mal Deutschland and it kind of sounded like the same band, a recommendation I wouldn’t make lightly. It’s a step in Horsegirl’s evolution to wherever they take things next, to just put everything where it belongs and bask in the total completeness of where they are now, and the system that made it happen has generated an opportunity for really wonderful music. From a culture that made them, they’re now making the culture.

RAVEN Gnosis LP (Incienso)

Vapory debut full-length from a San Francisco-based producer who’s worked out a total atmosphere here between bluest skies Weather Channel “on-the-eights” style upper register drift and beats that settle on hovering just above four-on-the-floor. Sequenced like dance music, these eight tracks get to the zone when it’s appropriate, otherwise content to drift with purpose in the mid-day air, like a billowing escape from the goose down factory, feathers blowing through the breeze like huge snowflakes. It’s all fairly upbeat and ensconsed in a bed of white noise/tape hiss that gives the impression of waking up in a bespoke, homebuilt environment to create this exact style of art, and going for it with gratitude and intent. Put the kettle on!

MIDDING Nowhere Near Today 12” EP (Tough Love)

Pro forma shoegaze offering from a kitchen in Cardiff, Wales, from one-to-three participants adding something old, something borrowed to the mix. New and blue will have to take an L, and possibly donate it to the band’s name, somewhere left of a I and right of a D. The standard pieces of this, in particular this drum machine with a really defined and off-putting 1988-model snare, place the music in a time and place its creators would probably love to have left sometime last year. Their whole mise has them drifting between Loop-style second string psych/reverb and a mopey demeanor, like Galaxie 500 without the songs or sunlight or Macioce. Apparently the addition of a real live drummer has taken place, and I want to re-evaluate when I hear these folks open up outside of this anaerobic environment, but what is the sense of grabbing at artists just to be first when the end result is a snow-shoveler such as this?

ONILU s/t LP (Eremite)

Satisfying all-percussion trio spanning a few generations of jazz and Afrocentric playing: Kevin Diehl of Philly’s Solic Liberation Front, active since the late ‘90s; Chad Taylor from Chicago Underground [configuration] and sessions with all sorts of past and present heroes like Joshua Abrams, (Mind Maintenance), Jeff Parker, and the late Jaimie Branch and Fred Anderson; Joe Chambers, former sideman to Max Roach whose career started with Bobby Hutcherson, volcanic-era Archie Shepp (Fire Music) and New Thing at Newport. The drum – “who told you that?” Onilu’s beats tap out gently and steadily, a slow spill of rhythm growing in depth, engaging with vibraphone and marimba to add melodic theme and keep the touch as light as it is constant. The spectral connective tissue between African folk and Martin Denny, this is the diaspora writ clean and wide in the magic hour, coming to rest in a world more peaceful than any of us know, a world these three had to create so that it could become real. CERN’s large hadron collider started it, it’s up to all of us to restore ourselves however we can, and eight distinct, chiming, organic paths stem forth from this deep well.

Happy Valentines Day — Doug M