Heathen Disco Music Reviews #0088 (April 25, 2025)

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Sometime last year there was somewhat of a publicized push from former writers and editorial folks for music websites who’d gone off on their own and created new entities to self-publish. In good faith, and before I’d really cemented in the voice of this newsletter I subscribed to some of these, and I guess I still am, because I get emails, and today I decided to read one of them, where the writer starts out with some self-effacing screed about how they still watch late night talk shows.

There’s plenty of things for Americans to be embarrassed about as a nation, in demographic clusters, and on individual levels these days. What would be wacky is if you didn’t consume some mainstream media! Why would you shy away from some semblance of the normalcy you know in your life? Watch what you can stand, while it’s still here. Celebrate its traditions. Use one of those air antennas if you got it for totally free content. If ever there was a time to use the world around you to make connections outside of social media, this’d be it. Make an effort. Thaw the ice of a decade. These things can alleviate the fear which is consuming you.

We’re only gonna get out of this together and that means some re-establishment of a monoculture that requires you to think and feel with something other than that little hot glowing orange wire inside your mind. In an age where everything has some sort of political connotation, the need to be around others and agree on at least some impartial thing should not fall by the wayside. Hell, I’m over here talking to as many people as I can these days. I’m writing to all of you in the hopes that something here hits you to go find the people who like the music you like, and open up a little. You’re all savvy enough to avoid the creeps and timewasters and to know when something feels off, but the amount of quit that’s going on these days in general is too much.

When someone looks back at what you did five to ten years from now, what lie are you gonna tell them? Because there’s a life where you can look ‘em in the eyes and state plainly that you embraced the arts and culture around you, and explain what that did. Go find a pile of $1 or less seven-inch singles and burn through em. Recreate that life you once knew, or live it on all new terms. Sift through the rubble of the past decades. Me, I watched Burt and Liza, James Remar and Richard Masur in Rent-a-Cop. Today. Top that! Any of you can.

I also listened to the records you see below and was able to form a few thoughts about them.

Keep adding to the pile: [email protected] // PO Box 25717 Chicago IL 60625 USA. You believe in it? Get it over here. You believe in me? I appreciate it, and with luck and perseverance will extend that appreciation to these 350-odd readers.

Rest in power David Thomas. Codex.

UNEMPLOYEE “Gonnae No” b/w “Mr. Scissors” 7” (self-released)

Takes me back to like 2010 when the Columbus Discount engine was hummin’. Unemployee is a subset of that whole community, and two of ‘em are hurting right now and could use your help, but listening to their new band is a good start and you can take it from there. Bo Davis, BJ Holesapple and Mat Bisaro used to pound it out in bands like Necropolis, Vile Gash, and Guinea Worms, and they’re back to show us what starting over fresh sounds like, taking all that accrued tension of this decade and shivving it up to stick in the back of the summertime blue. With so many players dropping out of the field or turning away from the whole of their former selves, the sound of three guys hammering away at big baling wire noise rock, sending it flying across a stage at least once or twice, and making some of it available off the blocks where they live in Ohio feels almost defiant, an odds-breaking enterprise. “Gonnae No” is the fast one, a simple but sturdy riff hammered into the wall, while “Mr. Scissors” gets low and menacing, a study of our surveillance society. If this newsletter is going for $3, these tracks are worth at least $2. You already broke a fiver. Let the rest of it go!

CHRIS BROKAW Ghost Ship LP (12XU)

We’ve been fortunate to share an era or three with Chris Brokaw, who’s been greasing the wheels of this rock thing we celebrate since the mid-‘80s, and whose artistry has afforded him the ability to move about a secret world that most of us only get to witness from a stationary position, a world of friends in every port, and a keen ability to create the storms inside of them strictly out of experience and technique. Much of his body of solo and bandleader work can be striated into veins of expression: these have a full band, but these are loud while those are soft; this was made to accompany visuals, that one because he is a fan or acolyte of another artist; some avant-garde, others decidedly for as many as can take it. Ghost Ship is his first in a while, and one which sounds truly isolated in ways that the abstract ones don’t and his more driven song-oriented material can’t. This is a work of sorrow and potential redemption, of going so far out there you might not ever return. It’s his because you can hear his voice, but the lonesome and steadfast approach here feels like it comes from an exposure to time, history and the elements around them. The songs hang and float, bathed in reverb and blessed with an ear and a memory to capture those influences: Roy Montgomery’s comeback deluge, Flying Saucer Attack’s “Beach Red Lullaby” single, the most stalwart post-SY Thurston Moore solo recordings, black metal absorbed in resonators and bounced off concrete walls until its blood is neutralized, a redux of his End of the Night album where the night has no means to complete. I’m still impressed that Brokaw can keep moving the barometer as a solo act to where he gets as much range across releases as he does while still retaining these masterful qualities that pull us in. Every single thing he’s done is worth evaluating on completely separate terms, and I can’t think of too many musicians who can command that time and again, a constant, determined reinvention. If you’re getting bummed about things, take a tip from someone with works that help you reframe it, and find something within you thought you’d never had, a universal power to leaven all he surveys.

MARIA SOMERVILLE Luster LP (4AD)

“Back-to-basics 4AD” is what I’ve been sold here, and while this isn’t some lost In Camera record, the notion holds. Irish singer-songwriter Somerville offers up her second album in a well-worn path of close, breathy shoegaze/ethereal sounds which louden up Bilinda Butcher whispering in the ear of you and you alone, pulling in and out of focus, turning a hazy pop approach (“Projections,” “Stonefly”) into a cathedral (“Halo”). Nothing made of whole cloth here, but it’s really nice, and leans on a sensibility that all too often fades away before it can support, or is put forth for surface reasons, life and anima inside the hollow body of an electric guitar. Late spring blooms haven’t had it this good in a long while.

SEMI TRUCKS Georgia Overdrive LP (PPM)

Full-band debut of what was once and could still someday be a solo project by a young LA group, anchored by guitarist Brendan Sepe. This is hittin’ like nine times out of ten, and that one out of ten is an honesty that calls B.S. on just a little bit of what’s going on, so that’s pretty complete, right? Burnin’ guitar pop, riffs that sound like they’re about to fall out of the group’s hands, a nearly firm grasp on a whole bunch of styles and levels of expression ’86-’93 style, the kind of thing the British music press would go Onan the Barbarian over, where that little bit of wobble is the thing that keeps it all together. The snarls say Further or Kurt Vile or some Creation-borne amp burners, but I’m getting into the ballads even harder: “Famethrower” isn’t knockin’ on Pavement’s door so much as it is getting comfortable with the idea of eternal life under the Hollywood sign, while “The Mustang” lilts into some nth-degrees removed cocktail nation bell struck in a lounge that reverberates forever. They handle the loud stuff with the best of ‘em, but it’s where things get quiet and close where Sepe and bassist Bronwyn Bradshaw land it, the meltaway moments that find their beat and hover slowly around it, as if the big loud material is the novelty here. Pretty great trick, hoping it gets pulled even harder for the next one.

SILBERBART 4 Times Sound Razing LP (Philips, 1971)

Haven’t listened to this one in a while; never owned a copy (how could I?) but feel this one’s just strange enough to grab a few new converts. Krautrock away from the winners and leaders, German enough for sure, but weird and severe, like a prog band that forgets where it is and falls into these serene improvisational moments that speak to a band that can’t or willfully won’t fall into line. Someone here has heard Robert Plant (how could they not, given the era) and Deep Purple In Rock (again, a given) and has an ear for heavy riffin’ and howlin’ solo rips, but the band has to figure out how to place all their ambitions out in a linear fashion. Fusion as a term would imply that they have put jazz concepts into rock, but it doesn’t quite go that way here, and the proceedings don’t seem careful enough to take stock in any sort of formalism. They can remember about three things at once and hold on long enough to any idea before throwing it aside for the next one. This may frustrate some listeners, because there’s not much music in the harder rock zones like this and their artistry could be mistaken for precociousness. I just don’t see it. They play in a direction until they run off the road then quickly switch to the next one, particularly on the three long tracks out of the four, then wander back to a starting point they’ll only lose once more. This isn’t some Zappa goofball shit – there’s one understanding and then a total misunderstanding. Hajo Teschner has some proto-Halford moments in here that have me flummoxed. “Chub Chub Cherry” is still as perplexing a heater as was ever let out of the cage, and making the chorus such a strange, quiet little notion while the rest of the song is charging in and out of time sigs and hair-in-eyes amp throttle is one of the more inspired moments on a record that’s all inspired moments.

In power — Doug M