Heathen Disco Music Reviews #0114 (August 1, 2025)

Greetings from the very bottom tip of North Carolina, where I’m finishing out a wonderful week at the shore before plunging back into the hot uncertainty, madness and fear of Chicago in these heightened hours. I’ll be coming up through Asheville and back through Cincinnati before returning to try and figure out what the world wants from me now.

The ocean gave me a reset that I needed, and also threw me around, carried me along, took things that were once mine and showed me that they maybe never were. I bore witness to some of the craziest storms I’ve seen in a while and felt the earth and all its nearby creations. I also saw a bald eagle on the causeway, which makes me feel connected to a land that would just as soon throw us all out. I also saw horseshoe crabs fuck in the tidal touch pool at a childrens’ museum. Nature has much to show us.

Thoughts from the road down: only in Indiana did a driver courteously wave me on, but enough weird shit happened on the way down that the act of kindness is what’s worth holding on to. Cincinnati is excellent, with incredible vintage markets and record shops, and one of the dankest Italian meals I’ve had in years at Sotto (hoping to get seated again on the way back). Charleston netted me a bunch of records and a lovely visit to Kin Ship Goods, who I had to call back to get the names/elements of the wax burning in the shop, a smell I’m still coasting on. Lewisburg brought me old and new friends, real comfort, and a walk along the river at night that restored me fully. I hit up a mystery spot for records on the way down to the shore and was humbled by Appalachian hairpin roads. And I made it. And I’ll keep on making it, and you’ll keep on receiving this newsletter twice a week.

Since this is the first of the month I’ll make this one a freebo, but please do subscribe, as it keeps things flowing. I appreciate you reading this with all the other choices out there. I’m hoping that these five releases do for you what they did for me.

COMET GAIN Did You See Something Beautiful Today? DL (self-released)

The proliferation of bespoke Comet Gain/D. Christian Bower releases every time Bandcamp withholds artist fees has been a highlight of the platform/promotion. Some of these are collections of demos that sound like they were taped to a movie theater floor, but there’ve also been these intense, closet-clearing comps of all the singles, B-sides and effluvioae any fan with rabies would want to hear (we’re out there). After the veritable book-closing of this summer’s Letters to Ordinary Outsiders, Feck starts a new volume, a collection of all the songs that didn’t make it over the last few efforts, which are ably cleaned up and presented as a mirror world version of where Comet Gain never ends. Don’t let the looseness fool ya – this is 14 all new songs, a full album out of thin air, and quality from the jump. The connective tissue is sparse and this goes from one sound to another with an excitement that doesn’t get lost, doesn’t need the thematic links from song to song, and doesn’t really need ‘em because ... it’s Comet Gain. I’ll tell you how wonderful they are until my fingernails fall off, and some of you are gonna have no choice but to believe me; nearly all of you understand that peak inspiration can strip the paint off of polished antiquities, and these songs all benefit from a few passes of spontaneity to get them to where they are. Instant pix: “All Her Diaries At Once,” figuring out “Road Runner” as they go along (and the other Shakin’ Neu tracks like “Rekkords!” and “Siberian Girls”); “Stumbling into Summer’s Arms,” maybe their best seasonal song since Paperback Ghosts; the melancholy “When Will I See My Friends Again?”; and the full on strum-shred sheds in “Autumn City Blue” and “Teenage Spartacus.” Better than the last one and maybe it’s crashing into their top five.

WILD THYME Demo DL (self-released)

Lit firecracker pop strum-a-thon from a new Chicago band featuring Rebecca Valeriano-Flores from Negative Scanner on vocals, who has a singing voice to match the Poly Styrene scream-shout power from earlier on. Band hits a ton, like Pet UFO covering “Boys Don’t Cry,” and our minds are free and hearts spilling over with love and fight. Three songs to drop on mixes to your crushes and They Will Understand. Best surprise release I’ve found in at least a week! Can’t even pick a fave here.

WALNUT BRAIN Weird Wire CS (Petty Bunco)

Philadelphia duo of guitar and diddley-bow present a jagged point and sweeping counter, primitive pluck and rusty scrape-twang wedded with three card monte guitar/fx that keeps hiding the ace amidst the rest of the cards. Not like too many other gtr/improv cadets out there, as the titled wire does indeed weird, enforcing fringe musicality and a hovering percussive that the guitarist is all but required to line up with. A complete battery of light industrial sounds, tin can gamelan hours burning into sundown, the essence of Davey Williams splashed on the walls of these kitchens, basements and cabins where these were laid down. Along with the King Blood we are looking at 2025 delivering two of the strongest releases in PB’s automatic legacy.

SHIT AND SHINE Please Bring Cool Friends DL (self-released)

Over three hours – thirty-six tracks in all – of Shit and Shine in electronic slam BPM mode. Taking the shine away from this year’s methodical teuton button-down railroad journey Mannheim BHF, this doubles down on the rhythmic strictures of that release and wilds it out with flanged treatments, basement sweatlodge loops and a mutating electronic purr. Incredibly this thing never lets up the jam from one end to the other (though if you had to jump in anywhere, “glungah” would be the one, a cubicle ritual to make black blood seep from the open floor plan of your return-to-office daymare. What did we do to deserve all this? Why are you still wearing a shirt?

SHELLEY BURGON The In Between 2xLP (Thin Wrist)

Remarkably this is the first solo full-length from harpist Burgon (first reviewed in another version of this critical apparatus back in 2013, c/o a gorgeous, twinkling lathe-cut 10” of hers called “LOVEHER,” and hey, seek out the remaining 24 copies sometime), and paints a different picture here: one longform, 56-minute piece cut into movements by side, recorded in an environment that provides acoustic clarity and the presence of nature, from the beginning of sunset on the horizon to a warm dusk. Sides 1 and 4 begin and end the piece with single-note resonances that give into stark two-string chords that hang and fall like the last icicles of winter from a roof that knows no end. Sides 2 and 3 present these cyclical, elastic runs of notes and eternal pockets of reverb, based off of what we heard on the bookends, as birds chirp and frogs sing in the background. Impeccable, Zen-like clarity awaits. Sign up.

See ya soon — Doug M