Heathen Disco Music Reviews #0106 (July 4, 2025)

Why? Well. 

Because I’m distraught over the news about Keith McIvor (JD Twitch, one of the Optimo DJs), honestly one of the best to ever do it, because the words “inoperable brain tumor” should not be in his history. Keith was unreasonably good to me at a time where I truly needed to feel good, and in any size room he and Jonnie could transport the entire crowd wherever they needed to go. I’m certain that I have some reviews of their mixes and remixes, and of records they put out on Optimo Music and all of its sublabels. Once I unpack the M’s, Mount Florida is going on the tables.

I cannot stress how highly I think of the work Keith has done, and I am sending all the ease and comfort I can his way.

Also it’s the 4th of July and there’s not much to celebrate. Here’s some old reviews from a while back, and I’ll see you on Tuesday with newer stuff.

Be somebody: send in music for review, as I’ve been pretty good about keeping up with it: [email protected] or PO Box 25717, Chicago, IL 60625 USA

Also shout to the Lavender Flu, who tore my doors off last night. Only band of their kind, walkin’ the earth among the mortals.

POLVO Siberia LP (Merge)

originally reviewed on Dusted, Oct 1st, 2013

Still love this last Polvo record, and if you didn’t give it a shot, pull it out now. I also reviewed In Prism, the reunion record that preceded this, but we’ll stay here.

Some five years into a restarted career, Chapel Hill’s Polvo introduces a much-needed corrective to the weak spot in its catalog, their initial swan song Shapes. The classic-rock muscle proffered on that stalled effort spelled out the message of a band that had gotten tired of eardrum-bending progressive guitar sounds, infatuated with cultural tourism but grounded in a stoner jock mysticism preoccupied with loafing around the spice market. Why, then, when they tried to merge their piercing, elliptical rock with the muscle-car hesher set on Shapes, that it didn’t work, was because it felt like one of many moves done by a band that was giving up, and by all reports, falling apart. Stacking every AOR rock move they knew into a few songs that sounded more like pisstakes on that sort of music than the real thing is never a great strategy. When a band makes a record of jokes after a string of innovative and highly-regarded works, attentions drift elsewhere.

Listeners of Polvo’s comeback album (2009’s In Prism) heard a band that was trying to get back to its roots, and mostly succeeding. Those rockist in-jokes were still there, though better efforts to integrate them into the band’s signature sound were evident. They’re even more so on the eight tracks that make up Siberia, the band’s sixth full-length. They also don’t feel like nodding references anymore, but a full component of Polvo’s latter-day sound. Some might see this as an oversimplification, or a hyper-referential POV for a band that already could be easily distinguished in their weight class. I suppose that is true, but it also makes for a tremendously satisfying and thunderous effort, and their finest work to date.

Guitarist Ash Bowie mentioned that the material on Siberia was thrown together much more quickly than its predecessor, and as a result, has a more adventurous sound. If that means they combed through record collections for inspiration, then it was time well-saved. “Changed” welds blistering Allman Bros.-esque to a coda of AC/DC stadium thud. “Some Songs” gets by on an amalgam of Zeppelin’s “Dancin’ Days,” early ‘80s Blue Oyster Cult style search, and a Steve Miller-style chorus that could have fallen out of “Jet Air Liner.” Synthesizers turn up to thicken and diversify the standard Polvo sound to significant ends, kinda like how Van Halen and ZZ Top made it work in the ‘80s, but more to the benefit of arrangements rather than a crutch to lean sagging material against. Opener “Total Immersion” storms in on a hopped-up version of the riff from Black Sabbath’s “A National Acrobat,” and adds some subsonic synth grunts below the bassline, which start growling about halfway through the six-and-a-half minute runtime, as Bowie and guitarist Dave Brylawski trade off stanzas of magic and metaphysics, soul transference and psychsploitation intrigue that “reconcile the parts / just to break my heart,” before collapsing into the sort of two-man/12-string tangle you’d expect from any great Polvo track. Like many of the albums longer excursions, this one doesn’t properly resolve, the song content to clash into the fadeout, stop abruptly (“The Water Wheel”) or dissolve into dissonant rhythms (“Anchoress”). This approach feels fresh and off-the-cuff, something Polvo hasn’t achieved since 1993’s Today’s Active Lifestyles. Only acoustic interlude “Old Maps” feels fully rehearsed, and its careful plotting and elegiac delivery feels earned after a suite of barnburners.

The familiar parts of Siberia also allow the listeners to find alternate ways inside this material, and what it means. “Light, Raking” starts off with brisk phrases about wizards and “a white wall of cocoons on display,” and through heavy synth leads, winds up being more about the disillusionment of staying in place (“It’s no joke when you’re chasin’ the bus / Growing older in a college town”). The album’s longest track, “The Water Wheel,” complete with its involved, Kansas-style hook and open passages of e-bowed guitar and fleeting rhythms, shows the band coming to terms with its past and its present, providing a metaphor about addiction that’s hard to miss, flecked with danger, and exciting through its whole eight-minute stretch. Magic only gets one so far before real life steps back in; the amount of time that we spend outside of reality only prolongs our inevitable recoveries to fall back into it without losing who we are.

That makes closer “Anchoress” all the more poignant; its protagonist, who dons the sacrificial mantle of her tribe, tries to come to terms with her task at hand. Set to a thumping, native beat and abetted by drum machines, it’s a tale more morbid than most material Polvo has considered to date, with a finality that burns with each repeat listen. If this indeed spells the end for Polvo, then their tale is one of complete redemption. With almost all of their contemporaries gone, no one’s making this sort of indie rock this good anymore. Should they be the only ones left to keep it up?

ICKY BOYFRIENDS A Love Obscene 2xCD (Menlo Park)

originally reviewed on Dusted, Jul 7, 2005

Found this CD while unpacking and put it in the car, where it belongs. It’ll take the paint off your lungs. Whatever happened to the Menlo Park label?

Icky Boyfriends were a band that existed righteously in the lost years of 1989 to 1995. Stephen Malkmus just said in a recent interview that “if you can remember the ‘90s, you weren’t there.” That statement resonates deeply in the Ickies music, as those who remember know what kind of damage they tried to wreak … and everybody else wasn’t around to see it.

The band released a handful of 7” singles, cassettes, and full-length albums, even a movie; when all is said and done, this collection of nearly every song the group recorded is as much a celebration of their work as it is a headstone to the freedom rock that era spawned. Lots of you folks don’t remember how the world was before the Internet, pre-dot-com, in the waning years of a war too easily won and a wimp Presidency, when punk often meant punk-funk, and guys looked like Dave Navarro, and smack was king, and a nation of twentysomethings were branded slackers, over-self-educated and with nothing to show for it. Truly ugly times of tribal tattoos and stinky fuckin’ Birkenstocks. Before Nirvana broke, MTV would have had you believe that Michelle Shocked and Transition Vamp and the Lightning Seeds were the alternative to Living Colour and Vanilla Ice, when actually they were just different colors and flavors of the same crap. Subversion took form in the militant hip-hop and Bomb Squad beats, “Heathers” and “Vampire’s Kiss,” the tawdry domestic squabbles that precluded some unseen terror in a Stephen King novel. Cintra Wilson documents these loose times to hilarious effect in her novel Colors Insulting to Nature, as her protagonist lives oppressed, outcast, drug-addled days in the Mission, in some sort of community household where everyone’s taken so much acid that they think they’re elves, waging battles in the park with local groups of the undead bent on harshing the mellows that will send them to a land of eternal bliss.

For all these special ed type scenarios that played out in some sort of countercultural long-long-ago, there were realists just self medicating with booze and pills, books and junk food, funded by some anti-pride job transcribing news broadcasts or working a token booth somewhere. Instruments that former generations of roommates had cast off in warehouse spaces were hoisted up and pummeled like cavemen using the primitive tools that would catalyze evolution. And in that, we have the roots of a band like Icky Boyfriends, who seemed to never even consider being in a band as a generational statement, or for that matter that knowing how to play their instruments would be a reason to start a band.

There is a tremendous freedom in such ignorance; if you remove comparisons to other singers, guitarists, and drummers, and just go at it as it comes naturally, relieved of the need to sound like anyone else. When your main goal is to just jackhammer the one riff you can remember for hours on end and as loud as you can, regardless of domestic and public rejection, anything can happen. Why try to be deep or mystical when a story far more interesting about something that happened to you that day achieves the same effect? Why hold yourselves to the standards of good taste and decency? What do those concepts even mean?

They meant everything and nothing to the Icky Boyfriends, who managed to write catchy and meaningful music anyway, with a matter-of-factness and vulnerability missing from most pop music. Even when guitarist Shea Bond and drummer Anthony Bedard weren’t crafting an unexpected pop miracle, the music was just a vehicle for Jonathan Swift’s lyrics anyway. Someone always covered their collective ass for the two minutes or less that a song would roll on for; it’s a righteous dynamic, and it ensured at the very least listenability for all their material, and often a very memorable song fell out of the mash. Afro’d and nasal, Swift screeches loud-n-proud truisms like a bratty young Ron House, occasionally like a true modern lover (“Nervous Guy,” “Love is Real”) and the rest of the time like a braying, leering friend constantly in trouble and on the verge of collapse, just amazed by the world. On “Passion Assassin” he informs us that “nothing kills passion quicker / than a mouthful of spermicidal jelly.” “I wanna take some PCP / and kill some fuckin’ pigs,” Swift yells in the brief and aptly-titled “Pigs.” Don’t we all feel that way sometimes? “Drug War” reminds us that “if you know your friend is gonna get sick / you gotta help him even though he’s a dick.” Common sense, but how often would you let your buddy rot? Your loyalties are being called into question by these guys! Icky Boyfriends, keepin’ you in check after all these years.

And best of all, you get tons of these notions on A Love Obscene; 57 songs’ worth, more than any right-minded person could possibly listen to in one sitting, but in keeping with their infinite wisdom, there’s always some for later. Think garage bands detuned and defrocked of cool posturing, the kind of band that would constantly bum out the hipsters and drive paying customers out of the venues they’d play, to the endless consternation of soundmen and club owners.

We need this now. And in a sense, we still do have it, though to mention a bunch of other bands’ names in here would do a disservice to the Icky Boyfriends, and to those acts as well.

A while back, I reviewed an awful single for Dusted that was a split between two punk bands who could play OK. And now here’s a review of a double CD of a band who has even less talent and skill, which I adore. Why? Probably because the lame punk bands smacked of effort, were playing music of interest to them that they couldn’t translate. They were trying to sound like someone else; they took round pegs of influence and forced them into square holes of reality, when pegs and holes shouldn’t even figure into punk music until after the show ends. Nobody wants to see ugly people fuck, anyway. So the next time you find yourself at wits’ end at a show while some band wears down your will to live, ask yourself why. You might be right, but you also might be in the presence of those who get “it” – that intangible spirit that separates good rock from the waste – in a way that you haven’t considered. The Icky Boyfriends fall into that category. A Love Obscene extends their chances to enlighten and enrage by a good few more years.

JIM FORD Harlan County LP (Sundown/White Whale, 1970, r. Light in the Attic, 2011) / The Unissued Capitol Album LP (Bear Family, 2011) / Big Mouth USA: The Unissued Paramount Album LP (Bear Family, 2011)

originally reviewed on Dusted, Aug 1, 2011

I sold my OG of Harlan County (can always get another, reissue or otherwise) but the spell these Bear Family editions can cast won’t be leaving my grips anytime soon.

Word has it that if Jim Ford had waited a day or two before signing a record deal, he would have been on Atlantic instead of … White Whale, home to The Turtles, a few coveted psych records, and not much else. That wouldn’t have guaranteed his success, but it would have put him somewhere a little more secure, instead of the Viking funeral that awaited his 1969 debut album Harlan County. He’d have other opportunities to be a pop, soul, and country singer, and carved out a career as an oft-recorded songwriter, but no other efforts of his would result in a finished album released to the public.

What snippets of history I’ve read about the man would suggest that there was probably no other option. By all accounts Jim Ford walked it like he talked it, a singer-songwriter who found his inner talents through the hardships of abject poverty and conscripted labor, through the kind of life that quickly wears the afflicted down to the dust. He came out of the coal mining villages in the hills of Harlan County, Kentucky, and that shaped his worldview, insofar as his music could tell us. When you expect that life will hand you nothing, and your favor turns around, you grab at it like it’s never coming back, because it very well might not.

The title track to Ford’s album serves as his epitaph, a boisterous, three-minute blinder that blends country and R&B, occasionally swinging low into the bellows of a gospel choir, and coming out with the lurid taint of rock ‘n’ roll all over it. Ford has a way with this song, able to leave in the bitter truths about his upbringing and eventual escape (“I walked all the way down to Somewhere,” or more accurately, New Orleans, where the singer-songwriter learned his trade) with gusto, with pride in getting out, but not in its actualities. When your home foretells your demise as early as childhood, anything is better than there. Small wonder, then, that the song hits so hard, Ford and his horn section busting their lungs by the end for an undeniably Southern end product, one which raised more hell than nearly anything on the charts that year or in the decade to follow.

Harlan County was recorded at Wally Heider’s studio in Los Angeles, with arrangements by Ford with Gene Page and Redbone’s Lolly Vegas, the full backing of the Wrecking Crew and many of Ford’s fast friends in one of the greasiest bags you could fathom. It’s a brief album, but there is little denying its impact across an impressively wide swath of musical touchpoints. Ford and company hit them all dead on, with respect for the subtleties of the ballads (“Changin’ Colors,” working out of a rural psych backbone, and the tearjerker “To Make My Life Beautiful” being prime examples) and a complete disdain for tact in the harder numbers. The kick drum in “I’m Gonna Make Her Love Me” is so forceful it could crack a rib, and the juicy guitar skank of the central melody stokes a fire beneath this slinky, sweaty groover that is already well past containment, and he and the band double down on those sentiments in the electrified swamp boogie and wired countenance for their version of “Spoonful,” certainly one of the finest versions of that blues chestnut ever made, and one which would foretell Parliament’s nascent fascination with country blues guitar on their soon-to-be-released debut, Osmium. Ford’s voice is the real star here, a rambunctious, tuneful holler that’s the most appealing element of a record that already hits all of its marks. There’s a lot of soulful emotion within him, rising up about two octaves with little strain, and he never sounds maudlin or hokey in the slightest.

The more you dig for info on Ford’s sordid past, the more you learn, and there’s likely a point at which you’ll wish you could forget what the man was said to have done. He battled a lifelong cocaine addiction which stayed with him up until near the end, but at the time of Harlan County, metaphorical romps like the arch “Dr. Handy’s Dandy Candy,” played with the mindless gusto of an Up With People performance, shows a man who may well have liked himself better when he was high, the world around him be damned. From listening to both of the intended follow-ups to his first album, though, you wouldn’t know any better, as both records capitalize on the musical maturity of Harlan County in different but equally satisfying directions.

Ford escaped his contract and moved over to Capitol, where he recorded a second, presumably self-titled effort, for release in 1970. This album is a much darker affair than Harlan County, the melodies still present but tamped down in the blues even further. Here is where the tenderness of Ford’s musical capacities came into being, from a sensitive and stirring read of Sam Cooke’s “Chain Gang,” his voice taking on the raspy, dusty mountain country foil to Van Morrison, to the rumble-seat bump and Beale Street saunter through “Harry Hippy.” The comfort from earlier ballads shines more clearly here, Ford’s hangdog vocals clinging to the full string section of “Go Through Sunday” and “Big Mouth USA” with an atmosphere of loss, as if he sensed that his days were already numbered as a performer. Yet the album’s final two cuts take the subdued feel of the proceedings and drag them straight into the mouth of evil. A six-minute take on “You Just-A (Sweet Baby Mine)” slinks in on nothing but guitar and organ, Ford singing his heart out on top as the song becomes enshrouded in a dark, sinister feel unlike anything else in his discography, and a coda of stinging blues guitar and studio effects underscores a chilling, percussion-free version of “Rising Sign,” reminiscent of then-labelmate Fred Neil at his most barren. Bear Family’s scant liner notes state that Ford’s record was shelved by Capitol “for reasons best not mentioned in polite company,” and while it might be best not to elaborate any further, whatever he had done earned him the enmity of the recording industry.

Ford’s last opportunity for a follow-up to Harlan Country came a few years later, in 1973. Radically different versions of “Big Mouth USA” and “Rising Sign” were issued as a promo single by Paramount Records, the ailing label arm of Gulf + Western’s media empire. Searches through Ford’s possessions yielded the master reels to this session, as well as a 10-song acetate LP that was the only physical remnant of this project ever becoming a reality. The instability at Paramount probably would have sunk Big Mouth USA regardless, but not for the sake of the product itself, which is of remarkably high quality. Ford takes stabs at his trademark countrified rumble, saving the most blatant funk in the session for a track called “If I Go Country,” before doing just that on the purist folksy swing of “Big Bouquet of Roses.” Outside of these moments, this is a strictly funky R&B affair, peppered with surefire hits and AM radio moxie. If the arrangements of these songs sounds more polished, it’s not at the expense of Ford, who comes off as wild as these stunners could warrant. He heads into Dr. John territory for the one-two punch of “Mixed Green” (the sexiest song ever written using salad as a metaphor) and “Rising Sign,” redone as a scalding funk strut, studded with tense wah-wah palm mute guitar, eerie lap steel, discordant melodica, and a rhythm section tough enough to eat bricks and shit concrete. On the flip, he keeps it up, culminating in a plangent Philly-inspired take on “Whicha Way.” Like the two albums before it, there are no weak spots, and while the change in styles on Big Mouth USA is a bit abrupt, it bears little effect on the end result. This, along with Capitol and an OG Harlan County are three of the finest records I own, with enough truthful moments along genre lines to supplant hundreds of other albums in my collection. 

In the most rotten stroke of luck in an already plagued lifetime, Jim Ford passed away in late 2007, mere months after the Bear Family label released The Sounds of Our Time, collecting all of Harlan County and assorted singles and heretofore unreleased tracks. The liner notes to this collection are some of the juiciest you’ll ever read, profiling a life lived out of control, but lived all the same. Much of Harlan County was covered by a British tribute band of the same name, released in the early ‘70s. Lowe courted Ford not long thereafter, with some disastrous results in the studio and an unfinished record as a result; nonetheless, he still admired and respected Ford, covered his songs both as a solo artist and member of Brinsley Schwarz, and even attempted to get Ford back in the spotlight with a tribute performance that never came to pass. Aretha Franklin and Ron Wood also retooled some of Ford’s songs in the paths of their own careers.

Ford had close personal connections with Bobby Womack, authoring “Harry Hippie” for the soul singer amidst a slew of others, and with Sly Stone (who called Ford “the baddest white man on the planet”) during his darkest hours, lodged in his mansion on a massive bender, armed guards stationed outside. He posed in Playgirl pictorials and was the godfather to one of Marlon Brando’s children. Look closely at the back cover of There’s a Riot Goin’ On and you’ll see a picture of Ford in the collage, beaming, beardless in a shirt and tie. This may all start sounding like Bill Brasky-styled tall tales, but there’s no real reason to discount Ford’s legacy. Due in part to his rotten luck, the man really had no equal in his day, and sits on his own cloud in the great beyond, cross-legged, wild-eyed and wiry, a figure too dangerous to approach but too alluring to ignore.

That’s five, right? Have a great weekend — Doug M