Heathen Disco Music Reviews #0103 (June 20, 2025)

Hi, too busy here. I bought the wrong sized boxes for my records to pack and move, a grievous 9th-hour error that only money can fix. Wanted to make sure you get newsletters while I’m pulled under by my vortex of belongings and clutter, but it’s a new start where things really change. Listen to this music, see if it inspires you to do the same.

Send em in: [email protected] / PO Box 25717 Chicago IL 60625 USA

CHROME CHASM The Hermit CS/DL (self-released)

Two sides of the sunrise semester from this ambient/drone trio of heavies: Tom Carter (guitar), Will Davis (pedal steel) and Mlee Marie (winds), right at the Houston nexus, effortlessly blending the sounds of their instruments as if they were a single voice. Peaceful scuzz forming around the strings burning and pealing, with the sax and flute woven within. New comms style, granola spa vibes, like Popol Vuh post-gig at a Whataburger, zoning out into the patterns on the table. If you’ve been up all night, let your daybreak sound this complete. Strong, true, ultimate zoner for the year to date.

BENJAMIN LAMAR GAY Yowzers LP (International Anthem)

The Chicago express, returning to forever, forever and ever, courtesy of horn deity Ben LaMar Gay, whose cumulative experiments into short song form and scattered electronic/jazz seeds has come to a new and beautiful fruition, in a quartet setting with four-person choir and Bitchin Bajas’ Rob Frye side-car’d in for the ride. Tommaso Moretti’s tearin’ holy hell on the drums, Will Faber squeals and floats alongside Gay’s electronics on guitar, Matthew Davis provides leagues of depth on tuba, and everyone involved is coloring the mat with deliberate chaos, like paint-covered marbles dumped onto the canvas. Gay’s works have really pulled me out of the no-vocals sentiment that clouded my free jazz days, but this veers far from that chalky, severe sound; here, freedom is pushed to the jubilant extremes, hyperspeed rhythms knocked back against intoxicating mood pieces, lake/horizon joins for Breezy, those phrases that get in your head that you can’t stop singing become mantras against this scarred world. We have a lot – a lot – to live for, and the sounds here speak to that, to a creative, restless, rainbow-streaked path more of us could stand to visit.

VARIOUS ARTISTS Olive Seeds: An International Benefit for Mutual Aid in Gaza CS (self-released)

Commie Francis has been dutifully compiling these incredible collections of post-punk and hardcore in support of the Gaza Soup Kitchen, fighting to feed and dignify a people steadily being decimated by maniacs, and have raised over $24K in their efforts thus far. The comps have all been great and this new one’s no exception, with contributions from Home Front, the sublime rasp of Gimic, Enzyme’s gabber-speed digital hardcore/thrash meltdowns, Japan’s square-wave punk of M.A.Z.E, Australian rocker delights Delivery (reviewed here a while back), and so many more, from Bad Breeding to Wat Tyler. Keep looking up, keep helping those in need.

WESTERN EXTRA Zig Zags on the Book of Changes CS (Hermit Hut/Comrade Lucy)

California green blaze duo (now quartet) of Donovan Quinn and Chris Rose, chunneling to the strawberry guillotine of mid-late ‘00s room-rental burn the way Sic Alps and co. could do it when they were doin’ it. Street hassle talkin’/singin’, amp choogle, a dirty paisley word on the straße, structures coming loose and everybody’s cool with it. It’s a big deal. It’s ‘60s psych jaunt, elegantly wasted vocals, blasted guitars that cook and bubble (“Binocular Minds” doin’ both), and ultimately a freedom to change directions and the wisdom to know when, like finding a copy of Oar in a Buc-ee’s. Really somethin’ in a year where there’s been a lot of somethin’s. Music – good music, like this, from people who can make it – is the only thing that’s gonna keep you sane. Not IMAX, not streaming, not AI. Quite the opposite of all that; a restatement of monoculture by clotting out the rest of culture and pulling you into the mono world of their art.

CUNEIFORM TABS Age LP (W.25th/Superior Viaduct)

Second records are skrrrrrt/hard-pan territory for Matt Bleyle and Sterling MacKinnon, and much the same way as they dove off a grainy garage pop/Tony Molina zone from the first record by their previous group Violent Change into the soupy morass of its follow-up A Celebration of Taste, sure enough the second Cuneiform Tabs album rearranges the transatlantic kumbayas they began with and throws itself into experimental peril – loops lopped off at the head, dust-caked drones, Barrett-esque slips, guide tracks removed so that only the dripping shades of gray remain. Tough one to love here but lots to like, and as with the first one the jewels will start to shine with repeat listens. I had this one on in rush-hour traffic and it made me feel trapped out of my skin, but here at home the aimless fords of “Crow Speech” are hitting in a new way. A record for later, made in the pressure of the now.

OK man — Doug Mosurock