Heathen Disco Music Reviews #0083 (April 8, 2025)

Fellas, is it a curse if you see beauty and inspiration wherever you choose to look for it? Part of the reason I hit up so many estate sales and antique malls is for the presentation, intentional or otherwise, the presence of objects that were part of someone’s life in front of you like “now what?” once their primaries have passed or let them go. You don’t often get to go into someone else’s house and see what a world they built for themselves inside. But, in a sense, you get to do that all the time when you discover new music, new approaches. It may be out there for more than one person to enjoy, but these records here provide a sense that the artists want to expand that private notion to a community of listeners. Which is what this whole newsletter is all about, right?

Finally found a new place to live, too. Just had to wait a stretch. Heathen Disco will continue on in these months before and after I’ve landed. Andersonville/Uptown, see you soon. Lincoln Square, it’s been real; you gotta stop closing up shop.

Music is welcome here for evaluation: [email protected] / PO Box 25717 Chicago IL 60625 USA

Paywall’s going up for a lot of this, so it would be a good time to subscribe. An absolute bargain.

Here’s your freebies:

THE EX If Your Mirror Breaks LP (Ex)

Still moving in 2025, an active band for about as long as I've been alive, and yet this is the first time I recall them hitting the Bo Diddley beat but there it is, right at the jump, on their most rockin' and stripped down album in as long as I can remember. The Ex came back for us right before the dome drops, kicking against the shell, reminding us what's possible, sawin' and clickin' and riffin' away. Gets deeper than deep (their Xpressway side shines black on the darkened "The Wheel"), gets a little funkier and groovier than usual too ("The Loss" could be on a heavy psych/blooze hitter from 1971), the product of active minds and bodies putting out the signal for others to get behind the cause of liberation. Records by The Ex don't really need reviews, they just need the shingle that announces them to the world. Always great ("Great!"), always on, always vital, especially now.

DONNA ALLEN Atom-ic Citizen of the Dying Empire LP (Ever/Never)

Subtitled "2nd Song Diary" following Melon Kolly, here is an effort closer to the studio by one of the main minds behind Chronophage, country/Americana pop that has to make a choice between the beauty this land's created and its opposite. Stays confidently free of anti-folk and othering influences of the alphabet streets to express itself, the strength it possesses coming from the heart and soul. I know a small cat that is super skittish around me until it climbs into its cat tree/house thing, where he sits and naps all curled up, safe behind the size of the thing. I'd do the same thing if I were that small, but the sentience of his little cute self is independent of the body. Listening to this makes me think of that little cat soul; it makes me think of the rotten minds steering a nation and making it seem like their false notions represent the will of an abstract that hasn't uniformly decided to represent itself like that. They don't. Pull them out of that chest-thumpin' exoskeleton and they're little dudes, scared and upset, unsure how to be, not certain how to pilot and pivot around in a form, untouched, unloved. Not everyone believes that they have the mandate. Some just have that strength on their own. The radiant heart at the center of this cycle, twangin' Texas and ruminatin' Memphis, is a beautiful and wondrous thing, and has made for an album that stands apart from all Donna Allen's prior works.

The rest falls after the jump.