Heathen Disco Music Reviews #0133 (October 7, 2025)

Hey folks, about to go to bed. Go Pens; nice to see that Mike Sullivan can make any team play that way and it wasn’t necessarily my dudes. Lots sucks right now but lots rips as well. I’ll be selling some stuff at the Andersonville Vintage Market on Sun. Oct 19th, Winona and Clark in the parking lot with my favorite adult. If you liked the records i had for sale in front of my old place, there will be more of those, a bunch of board games because winter’s coming, VHS tapes, beer coasters from Germany, blank cassettes, lots of home decor and other fun shit. Buy them because I still don’t have a job!

Also keep sending records and music to me to cover. You should know what works by now. Some of you did this last week and I was really grateful for it.

PO Box 25717 Chicago IL 60625 USA // [email protected]

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You need to subscribe so I can keep doing this. Twice a week I tell you about records and you do what you want with it. All I ask is for $3 a month. Most of you have that!

On we go…

GOLOMB The Beat Goes On LP (No Quarter)

Like their first one, another solid rock trio effort from a Columbus, OH trio that clearly loves what they’re doing, which makes it easier to love them as a listener. Right in the fold, early KV/Violators jam zone, heart big and shaggy enough for Spacemen 3 worship, lotta up/down momentum here with the slower jams having greater character (esp. on side 2, that “Real Power” / “Play Music” run is somethin’ else). In the grand scheme this isn’t all that far off from the Geese record everyone else is foamin’ for, except made by real people, and from a place people used to move to NYC from to make something like this, before it became Wealthy Island. Maybe they won’t be the second coming, the way so many other bands from Ohio that I loved from Fuzzhead to Mount Carmel couldn’t either, but this music originates from a place that is good and true, maybe fortified with 100mg of Delta-8 to the dome, but yeah. Good job, kids; keep going and you will crack the wall of ignorance in its weakest spot and let your hair grow long.

GARDEN OF LOVE Love Is Coming CS (Ever/Never)

Montreal releases a fusillade of falsetto and helium-filled guitars, twangin’ and bouncin’ off the clouds in the direction of anyone who needs it. Garden of Love is the source from which this emanates, wiry and chopped and twisting around a burst of melodic energy, each song better than the one before, and if there’s a little bit of precedent to point at (Chronophage/Donna Allen, Silicone Prairie), they are truly owning this tweaky charm offensive, rough, ready and busting at the heart strings. Goddamn delightful, heavy and light all at once, and adding another log to the bonfire of maybe one of the best scenes anywhere. Anyone up there wanna sponsor three Chicagoans with a lot to offer? Joe? Helene? We’re ready!

ROMÉO POIRIER Off the Record LP (Faitiche)

Great fun’s to be had in this cut-up collage of studio effluvia, control room mic, count-offs, DAT jog, tape starts, mistakes and general backgrounds/outtakes/warmups from decades’ worth of loose ends throughout the history of professional recording. This isn’t Poirier’s first rodeo, but since Plage Arrière the artist has been moving towards a fluid, decadent center of warmth, lounge-like in its ambition and tenor. This one keeps some of that dynamic in the center of the album but surrounds it with spoken snips and open space in a way that makes the musical aspects seem more intentional, and it works all the way through. That, and there’s a warm tribute to the late Steve Albini saying the word “studio” in different contexts for 30 seconds, granting him permanent ownership of the word. I never took Steve for a hair gel guy. Stu-stu-studio. Pretty remarkable stuff, evidence that people are out there thinking and conceptualizing in an era where most folks are walking around shook.

BITCHIN BAJAS Inland See LP (Drag City)

I think it was the last Bitchin Bajas album that had a local tie-in with a dispensary or cannabis label, something along those lines, and it’s good to note that this one doesn’t. Dispensaries are niceties and were kinda novel at first, but I live near one now, and if you spend enough time in the vicinity you’ll notice how fucking uptight the people going into and out of it are. Like some tiny guy in a “Resist” shirt decides to walk in front of a moving car and then flip off the driver because they need gummies; could this meeting have been an email, buddy? Bitchin Bajas’ music has never really been about that life and it especially isn’t now; Inland See is a real apex moment for them, fully embracing the most whimsical machinations of Krautrock as it meets the New Age moment. It’s not so much breezy as it has lift; the rhythms are resolute but clear, like when that marine layer fog we had in early summer, which covered all of Lake Shore Drive, burnt off within inches of crossing Broadway for the sun to start asserting itself. We get alto sax, oscillations that fit neatly into their containers and possess sterling harmonic counterpoints. The Sun Ra tributes of the past don’t really seem to be gone (“Skylarking”) but everything comes out more composed and deliberate, and still is lighter than plexiglas on a stock car. The drone and groove are not enough in 2025 – we need purpose, and it’s being delivered here, not in a stapled brown bag either.

ARCHIVAL PICK OF THIS WEEK

HURRY UP s/t LP (Army Of Bad Luck, r. 2015)

NOTE: Looks like this is still around! They followed it up in 2022, but you’ll do better here.

A problem with a lot of punk or punk-leaning records that surface today is that they are so completely indebted to a particular moment in the past that they feel stiff and dead, even at their most vital (that C.C.T.V. record and most of the NWI bands being the closest culprits currently within arms’ reach, but they’re not completely responsible). I think a lot of bands are kind of afraid to let go, to belong to different eras simultaneously, to mix up metaphors and fuckin’ rip hard when the moment calls. I also think a lot of bands still get by with using punk as a shading of their sound, without doing the work that would otherwise come with fully belonging to the genre; it’s like an old t-shirt that became cool to wear again. Hurry Up, a fairly recent band from Portland, OR, have none of these problems. They rock like they set a bunch of shit on fire, and they have no problem marrying a few sounds that wouldn’t have fit together so well in their original eras (Jehu/Hot Snakes style gear grinds, supercharged garage rock, DC post-hardcore, dingy rehearsal space recording that misses some of the sibilance but captures all of the heat), as well as crosses up the emotional centers of those various styles (fed up anthems like “Kick Em Out,” abstractions on guilt a la “Guillotine,” gross-out love infatuations in the vein of their awesome “Shit Or Fuck,” which contains lyrics as completely brilliant as “when you’re around, I think I’m gonna puke”) in a way that notices all that those concepts have brought to the table without feeling married to any of them. You would expect this from people who’ve been playing long enough to know better, and that’s exactly who’s behind this one: Kathy Foster and Westin Glass from the Thermals, and Maggie Vail (Bangs, Bonnot Gang). Nine songs, gets in and out like a bank heist, demands you play it again once it’s done. White vinyl. One of the best records of the summer, maybe the year (again, 2015).

C I A O — Doug M