Heathen Disco Music Reviews #0089 (April 29, 2025)

I mentioned a few issues back about feeling validated to learn that a recent 33 1/3 author shouted me out in his path to discovering his subject (John Cale’s 1919). I recently found that Other Music has an archive of all their weekly newsletters published, albeit by bare dates with no mention of what could be hiding behind the 400+ links on the page. So I decided to go back and find some of my work from then, and add some thoughts to what I’d written. Some of that content falls below the jump. I have a memory of talking to Dave Martin after a long absence, and he told me how valuable it was that somebody listen to and record some thoughts on, like, Matthew Friedberger solo records, and that it was good that I was doing it. (Do you remember those? I’m kinda curious to revisit. I remember them being a lot to deal with, and time has certainly let them slip).

Anyway, some of those below, along with a review anyone can read.

More music please: [email protected] / PO Box 25717 Chicago IL 60625 USA. Don’t be shy. Too much shyness these days.

More attention please: forward Heathen Disco to anyone you think should be reading it, the artists covered, the people who listen to new stuff (or want to but just don’t know where to start). That’s what this is here for.

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On with it:

BLANK HELLSCAPE Hell 2 2xLP (12XU)

Claustrophobic, relentless, and monochrome, Blank Hellscape fashion a mololith out of doomscrolling past the point of safety, a transgressive reaction to a system that wants you dead. Hell 2 envisions a stay of execution by leaning into the skid, suggesting that the torture one can inveigh upon oneself is far more severe than any punishment an outside body could apply, the metaphysical psych-out of oppression. Airless drum machine, guitar wreckage, tortured deadpan vocals and signal processing suggest an industrial mill of hatred and self-contempt that seems to keep death, conformity and other end-products of oppression at bay. At around 90 minutes, it is a work of specific enormity, the bored mind blossoming like chemical foam rupturing out of a cylinder, showcasing ceaseless inabilities either to stop itself or to remember what it did just moments before. And yet the ambition here is hard to miss; they leech every shade of the grayscale in this approach, placid and activated, dull and staticky. When we eventually start renditioning our oppressors, it’ll come in handy to inoculate yourselves against Hell 2, and better now than later, so you’ll know what to do when the racing blip of a loop in “I’ve Never Felt More Alive” slows to its origins. Nauseousness is back in style!

Old stuff incoming below: