Heathen Disco Music Reviews #0117 (August 12, 2025)

Sleeping in these past few days (owing to not having to wake up for work, nor having to get someone woken up for school) has turned from a gift to a prison sentence. I was wronged and I’m mad, and I am doing the only thing to be done: resetting, and letting music calm this all down.

Thanks for the attention being paid over here; thanks to all the new followers and subscribers. You really should subscribe so as to read the whole thing, and go back to the archives and unlock those as well. It’ll be good for both of us.

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Here we go.

SECULAR MUSIC GROUP Volume 2 LP (Love All Day)

(out Sept 5th, couldn’t wait)

Love All Day is a good thing to have and to be, and they haven’t flinched in pursuit of a pure vision. Secular Music Group extends that streak to mannered, compositional jazz, in a quartet of woods, brass, keys and guitar, with percussion handled if/when needed. Recorded in a beachside home on vintage gear, the nine tracks here speak to an evocative, moody, cinematic idyll, the denouement of a relationship near exquisite Italian furniture, staring off at a fixed point in the distance. It’d be worth making a movie just to have these guys score it, as they play the lines that words could never say. Even more remarkable is that this is done through the auspices of a replacement group member (journeyman guitarist and MGMT refugee/Gary’s Electric fixture Will Berman), but it’s less about who’s here and more that this core group is able to communicate so well, like they’ve been playing together for decades instead of years or even months. The more downbeat tracks like “Zuyua” and “Mirror Side” create such a gorgeous stillness, like ECM coming for the modern conservatory. Beautiful, warm, rich, lost in thought and painting emotions on most stately canvas, this group is one to behold.

GREYDINI Freakdini LP (Celluloid Flesh)

Electronic Cancon cabaret paranoia for the few. Evil carnival synths, drum machines, churning bass and samples are plated in anaerobic sentiments delivered from one who’s been driven half-mad from what they’ve seen, and burns up the other half trying to warn the populace of what’s coming for them. There’s an episode of Dogpatch where they talk about shrink-wrapping a breaded pork tenderloin in the shape of E.T.’s head and leaving it in the new release browser of a Kansas City record store that won’t escape my memory, and from the sounds of it maybe Greydini heard it too. This is the first of the artist’s full-lengths following a basketful of tapes and lathe cuts going back ten years (and back to the late ‘90s whilst trading under the name Wolfcow) and it’s the kind of ‘80s xpr hometaper sentiments to build a cult around, so completely absorbed into the ground that it’ll never wash out, a Love Canal for the digital age. There was a tear sheet that came along with this that I won’t read for context, and I don’t think you should either, at least until you’ve listened all the way through at least once. It’s heartening to know this is going on in some Toronto shadow, actively fighting against normalcy and capitalism, totally unaware of the psychic damage that is unfolding around the unsuspected horde. Pretty weird and specific, but if that’s what’s needed, why fight it?

GALAXIE 500 CBGB 12.13.1988 LP (Silver Current)

Beginning their quick rise to their abrupt end, here’s this beautiful band working through pretty much all the songs on Today, just in time for finals and the end of fall semester. It’s a clean, albeit bootleg-quality recording that frames all of their charms just so, and you already know if you need it and why – breaking them out of Kramer’s bonds is sometimes required to understand how this band really worked out in the world. Nothing I can say will change your mind about this release, so instead I think about this in collegiate terms, about the cold weather, about coming back to NYC to see your family or getting ready to flee to somewhere else. All those decisions, all the romantic entanglements, brief relationships ready to splinter around the time of this show, acting as the cleaver and the needle/thread to similar spikes in activity. Who wore the best sweater to CBGB and did it get snagged on a nail in the wall? Who had the best long coat? What kind of romantic memories were embedded in the academia amidst the hardscrabble of the Bowery were formed that fall? Did it work out? Did you leave this show and go to the Cedar Tavern afterwards? Did the excitement of seeing this band take off embody your time in this place? Even at this point of ignition, it is so clear to understand how Galaxie 500 could become someone’s everything, how someone could be bringing this music back to share with a certain person somewhere in the world. Greatness can end in any number of ways, but it can only start one way (by being great), and this record plays like a guidebook to that sort of experience.

Older writing below the jump: