Heathen Disco Music Reviews #0093 (May 13, 2025)

Some folks have accused this whole enterprise as being a little too “inside baseball.” Losers. Why would you not want to commune on some level of understanding with the culture around you (and not in some stan / army way / plastic bag over your head way)? If you’re taking the time to root around this backalley of our culture, you should have some vested interest in how it goes and how it’s made. Besides, do you forget the material FUN of sawing a baseball in half, and seeing what comes out? Try it sometimes.

Send the music in: [email protected] / PO Box 25717 Chicago IL 60625 USA, and you too can go under the microscope.

Subscriptions are $3/month and $35/year to read everything within.

ELLE BARBARA’S BLACK SPACE Word on the Street LP (House of Barbara/Celluloid Lunch/Perennial/K)

I come to this record somewhat prepared, in that I’ve heard Elle Barbara’s music, from a long time before (a great, low-key disco/fern bar 7” on Fixture, an equally awesome 12” with remixes on Celluloid Lunch) but Word on the Street stands alone. Its clues are within, on the liner notes you’ll read with a physical copy: it’s an eight-year journal of Elle’s voyage as a Black trans femme on the economic fringes of a cold metropolis, a concept around the conspiratorial pamphlets of André Serouille, a Montreal street philosopher whose work falls in line with the Toynbee tiles of NYC and Philadelphia, of fellow Black artists (incl. Markus Floats, my favorite musician I’ve collided with through random mailouts from Constellation) defying the expectations of the music they create in this alignment. If you want to view it as a cabaret work, there’s probably a lot you’re missing (and not just in the sense of pigeonholing) – this one moves from R&B storytelling to orchestral grandeur, getting soft and softer in its texture and presence (but never once in its message or composition) as it goes along. It plays this softness as a dare, to cajole listeners into understanding their own vulnerabilities. “Before and After” in particular is remarkable, the genre-hopping from symphonic blare into cotton candy denouement, sounding like the Simple Pleasure-esque track the Tindersticks couldn’t pull off. Stands alone, a tough place to be, but it’s ready; closest modern release I could place it towards is the Q Lazzarus comp on Sacred Bones, just in finding out the breadth of what that woman had in her and where it could’ve gone, had anyone heard it. The opportunity hoists up again for a true, living legend – do not pass it up.

ARTIFICIAL GO Musical Chairs LP (Feel It)

Shortlisted: there are three bands that effectively occupy the total spirit of their DIY / ‘80s post-punk progenitors in the world of Heathen Disco, Inc. (formerly Still Single, LLC). There were two – Tyvek (all eras), and Naked Roommate (same, but esp. their demo, which I remarked on in an earlier review of this group’s previous EP). Cincinnati’s Artificial Go carves its name into the pole today. Nothing about this band tells me they are from two states over, circa now, nor that they fell seemingly fully formed out of the chili dome, turkey drop style. Driven but mannered, muted but bursting, plain, but with unmistakable natural curls, you couldn’t dream up a more perfect response to the Delta 5, Raincoats, Marine Girls, etc. In “Red Convertible,” they even have a car song response to Tyvek’s “Honda,” removed from the spreading oil stain of the auto industry and closer to the looming husks of assembly plants in nowhere parts of Ohio. Lordstown didn’t see this coming! Musical Chairs very nearly defies a critical assessment; it’s like seeing pics of Chloe Sevigny or Kim Gordon or Sofia Coppola in some magazine back in the ‘90s and recognizing not just that they seemed so effortlessly cool, but that they had built a new berth on the S.S. Cool, steering it out to waters where skater bois and marketing mavens would have a tough time exploiting them without being turned into chum. We also know that it’s never as easy as it seems, but at some point the coolness becomes a perpetual motion machine, deepening its roots, and over just two records in less than a year, that’s what’s happening with Artificial Go. Untouchable styles here, a record of the year for this year and many others, and that dub track at the end just nails it so completely. Maybe one of the best to ever do it on Feel It, in league with the Pleasure Leftists and that second Silicone Prairie LP.

More sick shit after the jump for my subscribers.