Heathen Disco Music Reviews #0086 (April 18, 2025)

And what a good Friday it is, eh?

Getting things out early this week so I can enjoy the full weekend. After almost a year of hunching over writing this thing, it’s time for a massage.

Mixed bag this week so we’re starting with the good stuff. Lots more after the jump. Subscribe to read it all!

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BAG PEOPLE s/t LP (Drag City)

Unearthed recordings from around 40 years ago from a Chicago crew that relocated to NYC and embedded in noise rock, with its local union cards (mems. DA! and Problem Dogs) flappin' in the frigid winds. These folks would mostly later reconvene as Of Cabbages and Kings and dalliance around Swans, Foetus, and Glenn Branca's various ensembles, and squeezed out one single before wrapping up this detail, but what a hell of a sound they made. Someone said early Live Skull, which tracks in the compositions, but there's a different engine pushing this music along, truly dirty and unafraid of a heaviness expressed through the music rather than demeanor. "Lark's Vomit" is like a glimpse into NYC noise rock of a few years beyond it, with that sort of nauseous, top-volume repetition of a unit like Unsane, and the later tracks on this are somehow scuzzier, less refined, and more indicative of hellhole Dinkins NYC than the earlier ones, to where you are experiencing a response, and even a challenge, to the environment they put themselves into. Fuckin' wild times here, a real ashtray licker, and a goddamn high recommendation.

BILL FOX Resonance LP (Eleventh Hour Recording Co.)

I've got more fingers (at time of writing) than I do power pop personnel I celebrate as much as I do Mr. Bill Fox. Honestly one of the best to ever do it, care of The Mice, the mid '80s trio he fronted (records still tragically unavailable to modern buyers), and from his irregular stream of solo efforts over the past 30 odd years. There'd be no GBV that we know without this guy doing it first, and if 2025 finds him without new material, this collection of unreleased '90s and '00s recordings earns its place at the table of true greatness – Resonance holds up really well, daresay better than some of his more intentional LPs, because of the cobbled nature of what's here. Acoustic folk with Dylan harmonica bursts through the expectations because of the exuberant rasp of his voice and the fullness of the strumming. The last track on this, the only one with a full band ("Got Her On My Mind") stands up against anything Fox ever did, and towers over jobbers like The Replacements from here on out. A perfect case of "don't try this at home" music, unless you are Bill Fox and in your own home; the man operates in a space beyond almost any contemporary, and until you've gone through whatever inspired this music, and have the special skills to turn it into pop this wondrous, you're not gonna measure up.