Heathen Disco Music Reviews #0128 (September 19, 2025)

Don’t have much in the tank for a fancy statement — I think my cold is boomeranging on me, and I’m still unemployed. Plus people got tear gassed in my city today for no apparent reason. Keep fighting.

SHUTARO NOGUCHI AND THE ROADHOUSE BAND On the Run LP (Feeding Tube/Sophomore Lounge)

By the time you read this Shutaro Noguchi has exited the USA after something like two decades of Southern/Appalachian-adjacent living, passing on his benevolence to musicians in and around Louisville/the Sophomore Lounge axis as a musician and engineer. I don’t know how you lose a guy like this and still pull it together but I know at least a few people are probably stunned by his repatriation to Japan, most likely his brethren in Equipment Pointed Ankh. It’ll take about two spins tops to click with his domestic exit interview, ostensibly recorded at the same time as New Threats from the Soul, in the same studio with many of the same folks, switching every gear they have to play this blithely bittersweet suite of capstone sentiments about needing to get out, which touch on not only the Eastern avant-pop signifiers you’d expect, but from the east-west accords that brought so many influences to the West – like the High Llamas going in on Joe Jackson’s “Steppin’ Out” as played on one of those huge old Walkmen, or Camofleur-era Gastr finding the synthy soul in any of the more blissful passages from Steve Hillage’s “Palm Trees (Love Guitar).” On the Run’s penultimate epic “River Dagger,” the only track here sung in English, proffers a philosophical plea to “get out on the water and evaporate,” and that is advice to take to heart. Find where it takes you and let go. Good music made by people within your reach is like one of the sole delights in the veil of shit and oppression we’re now facing daily, and the spirit-buoying you’ll receive here is worthy of your daily meditative practice, however you see fit. Not all of us can just get out of here, but we can all check out to our own blissful path.