Heathen Disco Music Reviews #0097 (May 27, 2025)

WHAT I WOULD LIKE: more people reading this and telling their people about it (the self-promotional thing feels like such a waste … can’t you do it for me?), more music and longer leadtimes to process it all, not having to ask labels or confirm with them that I want to hear the record (I don’t leak, come on now), and ultimately to incept some music into your consciousness. No one is above admitting that they learned or felt something from a thing they heard or read about. I wanna be that guy for you.

It’s late, I’m whooped, gotta work tomorrow but here comes tonight.

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Thank you to Derek Erdman for the info about ASSHOLE WEEKLY, would love to read some of that.

PINKPANTHERESS Fancy That 12” EP / mixtape (?) (Warner)

You see/here names all over the place, and if you want to you connect the dots. I was driving back a long way south towards the city with my daughter and my girlfriend, having decided that waiting behind 23 chainsmoking dudes to go through three crates of records in the driveway of an estate sale was already a waste of a very early morning, no matter what was in there. After a diner breakfast we put on a podcast where the hosts mentioned PinkPantheress, a British pop singer who they having trouble with, because they couldn’t remember what the Pink Panther movies or cartoon were about in that sort of dismissive, two-second attention span sort of way. Kiddo was like “that record rules, it’s like 20 minutes long and all the songs are good,” and with the whole of licensed music at the helm and nothing to lose, in I went.

Couldn’t believe what I was faced with here: take a Sabrina Carpenter cooing style vocalist, but instead of digital grandma schlager slop, the music and production are all breathlessly late 90s/early 00s UK-informed – house/tech beats with forays into d&b, all with insistent basslines and this racing, active heart rate detachment about it all. Watched some video clips and she looks like a young Shelley Duvall, not an objectification so much as a reminder of markers from my past, discovering deep-cut Altman at Kim’s and on cable and at Film Forum, schlepping records and videos, and trying to have that sort of detachment from my own life as a 23-year-old in NYC, where I could plug in and be part of something bigger rather than feeling I was watching from afar. I’m reminded of Basement Jaxx and Felix Da Housecat and The Streets, Wipeout XL and Rez, the walls at Plant Bar and Luke Jenner making his trademark cocktail (the Janet Reno) and the police light I brought over there that’d get turned on Mondays around 2:30-3am, and being able to stay up that late on a Monday-now-Tuesday anyway. Florent breakfast at 5 after the bars close. Working a full day in these ridiculous baby blue leather shoes after that, and crawling home to reset. Being around people who I now see on TV.

I love my life now, but I loved my life then too, am still impressed with the places and people and the shit I got up to, and hearing Fancy That made that impossible dream of bridging those eras together and repairing all my mistakes with what I’ve learned feel within reach. Barreling through Volo, IL, is not where one expects to have that sort of breakthrough, but when the promise of a golden age looms, you have to act.

Below the jump, Klon Dump, Retirement and the others.