Heathen Disco Music Reviews #0101 (June 13, 2025)

Pretty busy over here, so just enjoy the music. And please go seek out the Cosmic Invention double LP; it’s a keeper, and a great deal for the cheese grating it’ll give your psyche.

Music in: [email protected] / PO Box 25717 Chicago IL 60625 USA. I’ll review it.

One freebo this week, the rest behind the wall. Subscribe to read it!

NEW DISCOS

HECTORINE Arrow of Love LP (Take a Turn)

“This may not be your cup of tea”: alright. It is, though. I read all this classical pretext to listening to this third Hectorine album before hitting play and felt really at arms’ length with the descriptions against this doleful synth-pop opus, the periwinkle soul of singer-songwriter Sarah Gagnon singing pop ballads with a classical alto vibrato to get to the vulnerability under the charred crust of a burnt bridge that smoked everything else around it. Everyone’s got their record about life turning upside down in the past five years, but this is among the first I’ve heard that use that experience as a lever to start over, rather than find a point of continuation, and be open and honest, vulnerable but not defenseless, about it all. These songs are strong enough to endure any honest treatments or arrangements, but the bells rung in this combo of pillowy keyboards, crystalline West Coast folk/pop shadings and mid-tempo resolve are so keyed in to the emotions expressed in the lyrics that I couldn’t really hear these any other way. By the third track I was sunk all the way in. Timeless and true to itself, this one conjures up a far away space to dream in, a stunning effort to catalogue ones emotions amidst psychic tumult. Stunning.

More below…