Heathen Disco Music Reviews #0115 (August 5, 2025)

As expected I forgot to celebrate the one-year anniversary of this newsletter. We’ve climbed to over 400 subscribers and I could not be more grateful. So here’s notice. If you like what you’re reading and you have friends who would be down to receive this sort of news, please pass Heathen Disco along.

Picking up new stuff again (and the paywall) for this Friday’s edition; for now, enjoy the waybacks in

OLD SHIT: 2017-18 ERA

I’m still recovering from a long drive, a plunge back into my day job, and emergency home repairs (nothing like coming home to a busted fridge and a leaking bathroom ceiling), not to mention reeling in embarrassment from plugging a secret fash record (Alley Girl, do not buy, fuck anonymous artists who hide their histories of hate and mustache rides with Meltons) so here are some nugs excavated from deep within the Still Single archive (now 100% unsearchable, thanks to Google and Tumblr double-teaming post histories). Six to seven years is enough time in this accelerationist era to all but erase what came before it, but I believe in a long cultural memory and these are some of the artifacts that prove me right.

Might as well subscribe, right? Keep buying my time to do this thing twice a week for only $3 a month. Look for a return to mixes pretty soon too. Been a bit but I’m coming back to the fold!

ORION s/t LP (Cool Death, Australia)

I still listen to this album every other month or so. These eight songs are fused in my brainstem and I look forward to the chances I give myself to feel them connect with their likeness. This review might not do it that kind of justice but I am well-accustomed to the relative flatness of the sounds here, it’s like they walked in from a dust storm. I was lucky enough to see them play in Chicago whenever it was that they came through, and I learned a piece of news about them regarding their visit to the US that seems unfathomably hard, but they all came out the other end OK. Members went onto a bunch of other bands (The Lewers, Th Blisks), if they weren’t there already (Low Life, M.O.B., Oily Boys). I love this one the most.

For a short while every place I looked towards to get the scant amount of news about new Australian bands (in the wake of Easter Bilby closing up shop) was tipping Orion as one of the best bands in Sydney, if not the country. I’d been hearing this for a while, and never managed to hear any demos or anything up until this record, so expectations were tempered a bit, but it’s a champ, and I’m still thinking about these songs weeks after it landed. They’re of the wavo persuasion but unusually hot for that manner of performance, much like the temperature in that town these past few months, good lord – but of the saturated, narco-itchy variety (cf. Ashrae Fax ca. Static Crash). They have a big sound, and a predetermined stance in which to take that sound, so the overall effort is less original than it is fully-charged and ready to roll, be it in a Siouxsie HK Garten-meets-“Cities in Dust” kinda gloomer (“Last,” “Turbulence”), My Dad Is Dead fronted by Morrissey sorta flanged upper-downer motifs (“Church Bells,” “Execution”), and wild art-classroom blurts of The Glove-style freedom (“Sexy Alien,” “After Day”). It’s great bedroom dress up/getting ready sort of music, and ends on a prom-winning note with the New Order-esque “Crash Course.” Within we’re not seeing so much a wish to regress so much as we’re witnessing a group/scene of people deciding to make a world of their own, and allowing the rest of us a glimpse. The recording is not the best, and they would greatly benefit from a real, live powerhouse drummer in place of the machine they’re currently using around gtr/bs/kbd/vox limits – they need the kind of person behind a kit that would be reason enough to see the band, and with those tweaks they would have this desiccated world by its toe-hairs. Right now, though, it’s easy enough to grab a peek at their hyper-romantic, driven appraisals of young angst, steeped in an ugly, druggy hardcore past but now ready for love or death, whichever feels like more.

VICTOR HERRERO Astrolabio LP (Feeding Tube)

There are so many releases on Feeding Tube, and of such limited quantities, that if you’re not laser-focused on a particular release, the entire label can feel like a blind spot. I came across the Paper Bag LP on SST at Harvest Records in Asheville, NC last weekend and was reminded of those feats of a label going supernova and putting out over 100 releases in a year. I wouldn’t mind being caught up with whatever is happening in this realm, and I remember getting this record in a stack of promos from them that used to come through annually, a brief pause around January to catch up discerning writers before the onslaught of new, wild music continued. There isn’t much out there like this particular album of Portuguese guitar improvisation, and it’s worth finding.

Victor Herrero hails from Spain, but it was in Portugal where he met vocalist Josephine Foster, and the two formed a working musical relationship. During that time, Herrero came into the possession of a Portuguese guitar, a 12-string instrument shaped more like a large, wide-fretboarded, steel-strung lute than a traditional acoustic, and the last instrument in the modern world to use a Preston tuner, a steampunk-styled, peacock-like array of tuning pegs. Employing his background in improvisation, Herrero plumbs remarkable depths out of the guitar's unique mechanics and tone, all of which are capably on display throughout Astrolabio, Herrero's first album of solo Portuguese guitar instrumentals. Sounding like a guitar, mandolin, and autoharp, often all at once, Herrero strums, plucks, bows, slides, and thumps the guitar in ways you wouldn't expect, and the result (particularly on the longer tracks) reaches across the folk diaspora, bridging multiple forms from the East and West into the same song. Stock moves abound – Herrero has a tendency to lock into a pattern, then speed it up – but in the sense that nothing here invokes the traditional ways in which this instrument has been understood in both technical and folk histories, he gets a pass; if nothing more (and thankfully it is a LOT more than that), putting the guitarra through its paces reveals the brilliant levels of sustain this thing can produce (and I’m still kinda baffled at how he gets the sounds generated on “Fulgor” out of two hands and a slide, particularly those long, sinuous, high-register notes that I’d only associate with electric guitar feedback). There’s definitely a winging-it feel on a track like “Ondulina” but the sense of discovery and wonderment in ripping this variety of sound out of one stringed instrument is patently obvious in both the freedom of the composition and the veritable joy Herrero has found in using it. Great record, and a bar raiser from even the most accomplished and visionary solo acoustic onslaught facing us right now.

VARIOUS ARTISTS Follow the Sun 2xLP (Anthology)

Follow the Sun is out of print and trades for decent money these days, which is almost a travesty for how effortlessly it places dollar-bin nugs in a row. If you went to Australia, I’m guessing you could still find about 3/4ths of these records for next to nothing, but then you’d have a chunk of shelf space gone, where this slimmer volume would do instead. This comp put me onto the Marian Henderson and Doug Ashdown records released on Cameo here in the States (Decca’s very much non-rock, uncool sublabel), and most likely became the spot from where a music supervisor placed Mata Hari’s perfect cut “Easy” into now-forgotten, long cancelled HBO Max/Starz series Minx, as if that song would’ve ever touched American soil in the 1970s West Coast idyll that the show depicted.

Anthology continued a similar streak with the two Sad About the Times collections, which if for no other reason puts you in proximity of Space Opera’s sublime downer-prog stomper “Holy River.” These days are gone, Mikey Young is maybe still the busiest man on the continent, and here’s a snapshot of this time then.

This collection, compiled by Mikey Young (Australia’s busiest man), tells the story of 20 unrelated soft/folky/vaguely psychedelic downers from Down Under, mainly from independent releases of the 1970s, particularly regarding the similar strains of melancholy conjoining these tracks. Young refers to this through-line between the songs as a side effect of regionalism and veritable isolation of a Western land from the rest of the Western world, as these artists put you in a zone of emotional vulnerability, to help forge an identity, and while we’re seeing that sort of thinking as particularly dangerous – as Young mentions in his liner notes when his shoulders aren’t otherwise shrugging – it can make for cohesive music. Follow the Sun holds up on that end, with some remarkable tracks across two hemispheres of music: a slightly more commercial bent on the first album in the set, and a more personal angle on the second. It’ll flow better for some than others; a lot of folks really eat this stuff up, enough to follow in the footsteps of those who made it, down to the fringes on their jackets. Finding a collection of more or less unknown tracks that fit in the canon is cause to celebrate.

My colleague Andrew Earles coined the phrase “afternoon rock” for this sort of thing, and it feels very appropriate for siesta times. But does it work if it’s an afternoon you never experienced? Young even recognizes that these songs aren’t particularly endemic to the country’s place in the world; everyone was essentially making music like this in the era. Was anything on this particular level of unhurried, vaguely romantic sentiment on the continent at the time? Did music beat all the other forms of art in the bookended Australian 1970s in carving this niche? Probably not, but you have to wonder how and where we consume these songs as to where they’ll deposit us at the end.

Side 1 of this thing pushes that notion of music as a primal emotional driver into relief: we have a title track, a bitter dejection (“Riverboat,” by a venomous Andy Armstrong), a breezy swinger by a group called Mata Hari appropriately named “Easy.” We find a woman named Marian Henderson transforming the Incredible String Band’s “First Boy I Ever Loved” into a sultry seven minutes of Dusty Springfield worship, and we find a Christian rock group called Flock making a minor miracle out of a mandolin and a Leslie speaker. Side 2 continues this streak with a bent towards professionalism, even excess (that Autumn song would be so much easier to take without those parping, discordant horns clogging up the intro and outro, as “Kill My World” earns a place near the top of the canon of ‘70s pop weariness/desperation, that “we just can’t make it” sentiment that colors a lot of America’s music, as well as Laurie Styvers’ excellent Spilt Milk) that fits into a culture that’s putting these feeling out on the line, in hotel bars and the like. The shag carpeting crawls up on Australia’s “Knowing That You’re There” and Moonlight’s “Am I Really Here,” like some somnambulant 10cc stuck in “I’m Not in Love” mode for the foreseeable.

If the script is lost a bit on sides 3 and 4 – both of which contain music that’s well worth hearing – it’s to do with the need to fill two whole albums with this stuff. You can’t fault Young, who’s presenting these songs the way some might place certain complementary colors together, but you have to almost be too in the know, buried in records and adjunct information, to make it through the gotchas on sides 3 and 4, including a Judy Collins-esque soprano folk ballad in Cathie O’Sullivan’s “The Orange Tree,” or in the synth leads and minor chords of Steve Warner’s placidly devastating “Cement River.” This is where your own tastes are going to tell you to put it down, but that’s fine. What’s here is still a treat, particularly the jingle-jangle of Billy Green’s electric Mersey bummer “This Must Be the End,” and the acid flash guitar near the finish line of Catmando’s “Today is the First Day of Your Life.” But it’s a long ride from one end to the other, Young is in no hurry, and here the initiate will likely drift off while the aficionado perks up.

Expect unhurried tempos, synthesizers, electric pianos, soaring vocals and outsized romantic sentiments. If you remember that Sky Girl comp from last year, this lays it on as thick, but directionally (as in Young wants to put you in a space, and wants to do it with folksy pop music instead of a run through 12 genres, or on the opposite side, 20 bands that sound like Bread), putting the sort of keyed-in take on that sort of sadness, trading one person’s ideas on this stuff for your own.

SCUPPER Some Gauls LP (Blue Cheese Toothpaste)

Sometimes it sucks being right, but here we are, seven years out (eight or nine if you go back to the first Scupper EP) and we haven’t heard a single note more out of this incredible project. Every word of this review is true and accurate to form. What’s it gonna take?

Two blips landed prior but we’ve got a Scupper full-length from former Lynnfield Pioneers member Mike Janson, and it’s somehow even more essential than the singles, a whole warehouse full of mown-down pop jangle and nail-breaking scuzz-strum energy, the sound of a guy anonymously collecting the loudest and most triumphant batch of song ideas for a couple decades and then thumping us mercilessly with the finished product, with grain silo reverb and just as much explosive potential. He’s got the reach, and the will, and as we’re seeing more and more folks from the past returning to grace the moment with the lessons they’ve learned, it becomes less a matter of teaching these moves to a younger generation and more a masterclass in brinksmanship. If you can bring me a record that works the crease between half-recalled Love Child songs, concentrated melodic beach/summer/sunlight streaks and an Undertones/Ramones jones strong enough to tear a 1983 old NYC phone book in half, made by someone with a smaller amount of life experience, I’ll lay off. The fact that no one’s stepped into this particular space doesn’t mean that Janson’s just been keeping it warm for us all this time as much as it does that the right people didn’t claim dibs yet again. If 2017 taught us anything it’s that these moments of unadulterated joy cannot be taken for granted, and moreover, they should be taken. We do too little for ourselves and it takes too much time to get there, because we’re feeling a collective guilt, a look of sympathetic despair in every non-dogshit human that crosses our path, and an expectation that we are going to pick up shovels and dig until the foundations bust and we get another shot at making a better world, no matter how temporary. Who gives a shit if we’ve got 10 years, 20 years … that’s a long-ass time to get things in gear and prolong the fate that everyone who doesn’t have something this inspiring in a world they would never even consider improving for all. Some Gauls is a dream record that shouldn’t have taken so long to come into being, if for no other reason that I could have used feeling like this at any point between now and Janson’s last band. Decades aren’t things we can waste, even though they pour out slowly. We’re in the beginning of a new year and have another slate, half-wiped but with room to make a mark. Stop ignoring the best things you can get, as they aren’t going to just come back anymore.

TEMPLE s/t LP (Mental Experience/Guerssen)

Here’s another no joke: this reissue was the inspiration for me coming up with the name Heathen Disco. It’s everything. Zeus B. Held in the house, en route to Gina X Performance. Was Poseidon the G.D.M.???

No joke: this was order padding for my International Harvester box set, with an intriguing hype blurb that sold me something very true. Temple was a quasi-band out of Cologne in the mid ‘70s, when a fellow named Toby Robinson was working at Dieter Dierks’ studio and managed to book late night sessions for himself (under a variety of aliases) and likeminded individuals, under the organizational title Pyramid. Alongside Robinson in his nom de guerre, Temple was fronted by a folk-ghost woman named Pauline Held and her dark rock “head to toe leather” compatriot who went by the name Poseidon, whose voice reminds me of a very deadpan, clenched-jaw Peter Murphy. They attempted to balance hard, proggy rock with space echo folk, and somewhere in the path invented a glam-Goth sound that was rarely considered this far back. They also don’t sing together much/at all, making for a dynamic schism in the two hands of the group’s sound. Only a few years early to the trend, Temple’s five tracks (three shorter, two longer) all have a lot going for them, to the extent that all the descriptions sell short the project – opener “Heathen” keeps a menacing half-time beat and discordant, scattered tones that nevertheless leave a mark, the kind of proto-postpunk strutter that would absolutely kill at the right time of night at the necessary volume (and I know just the tracks to play around it), even with the Deep Purple style organ breakdown in the middle. “Leaves Are Falling/Black Light” doesn’t shy away from the two halves philosophy, with a Fields of the Nephilim-without-the-pith-helmet caravan deadstops into this floating guitar/synth/Mellotron haze as the drums fall away and Pauline starts reciting the title over and over. If this is their folky side, they don’t sweeten it any, and this ambient, Hawkwind-esque section holds untapped, draining power. “Ship on Fire” combines a driving beat and Poseidon’s leering presence in a space rocker that gets overtaken by delay and a cavalcade of Zeus B. Held’s synths, which loft this one into a low orbit. 11-minute closer “Crazy Hat/Kingdom of Gabriel” inserts five minutes of megaphone “Roadhouse Blues” amphetamine choogle into the midst of a pastoral folkpsych wander, seemingly just because, and doesn’t miss much of a beat, even on the fadeout. This didn’t see any tangible issue until the mid ‘90s when Robinson released his holdings on CD through the Psy-Fi label, making this likely the first vinyl edition to torch human hands. However you wanna focus on it, these folks had something interesting going on which should be a “drop everything” moment for what remains of the readership over here.

Kill it — Doug M