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  • Heathen Disco Music Reviews #0134 (October 10, 2025)

Heathen Disco Music Reviews #0134 (October 10, 2025)

Black Eyes, Possible Humans and a show journal for subscribers

Hey folks — little light this week but I have a treat at the end, an old 50 shows chain letter that I wrote to Facebook, chronicling (give or take), from the start, the shows I’d seen and booked through 1995 or so. Basically lost to time, so here it is. I also found some 2019 reviews I wrote on TinyLetter, which is long extinct, and bring one out here in celebration of that band’s new follow-up.

Appreciating the music and attention. Now just need a job to get back to.

Keep sending em in: PO Box 25717 Chicago IL 60625 USA // [email protected]

Back atcha next week. New DJ set is coming.

Also catch me in person on Sunday October 19th at the Andersonville Vintage Market, 10a-4p, at Clark and Winona here in Chicago. Bringing out a lot of stuff to sell — records, books, games, VHS, home decor, vintage this that and the other. It’ll be the vibe of my yard sale from the summer, only with other vendors around to (hopefully) match my freak. It’ll be cool, come give me your money in exchange for durable goods.

Speaking of money, subscribe. Please! Need it more than ever.

BLACK EYES Hostile Design 12” EP (Dischord)

2025 Black Eyes alright. Needed. As in, we need this music, need this voice, need these discussions. It’s great stuff, definitely moved beyond what they did on their swan song, 2004’s Cough (itinerant horn punk, nothing really like it before or since), and sounds most closely like post-Black Eyes trio Mi Ami, who have a handful of great, extremely inexpensive records, like the incomparable Steal Your Face album, to find. The rhythmic imperative and dub overtones from that project are front and center here, moving into the cadence of the vocals throughout, matched to the beat and marching all this forward. As a friend noted, Daniel Martin-McCormick’s voice has aged enough in the intervening decades to where it sounds like the second coming of Adam Horovitz (and runner-up Zach de la Rocha) and right up in the mix, with clarity, his characteristics make his voice essential, the delivery of message to get, the words drilling it in. Horns come back in a big way and match the energy rather than try to raise it, and when the dual drummers and reverb tanks come in they bring it like Fugazi at their most stewed, finishing a thought that’s been hanging for a while. Six songs under 30 minutes is the right length here, beginning with the charge of “Break a Leg,” combining the personal with the political – in this case, deterrent public architecture that denies the unhoused a place to sit or sleep, crippling their bodies over time, and ends with the death disco of “Tom Tom,” a fitting place where young people who probably saw Fugazi and The Ex at the 9:30 that one time in 1999, and listened to The Pop Group on the way over and back home. Our times can be exciting again, and the good vibes I felt about people who didn’t have this music in their purview back in 2002-04 now able to now get on the same level is a good thing. Even if this reunion doesn’t last, it’ll last.

POSSIBLE HUMANS Standing Around Alive LP (Hobbies Galore)

The patchwork community that’s waited some six years for a new Possible Humans album can stand down; it’s here. Their debut Everybody Split dourly jangled rec-room ruminations on the people in one’s life, what they’re like, and what video games reminded one of them, and then put their feet into it with a majestic 12-minute statement called “Born Stoned,” which played like peak Blue Öyster Cult discovering The Church (or the Rain Parade’s “No Easy Way Down”). With three guitars the BÖC comparisons are inevitable, and with three siblings in the group, they laced a dusky fatalism into their charge, completely understood in a way only olders and youngers can. It stood out in a crop of already great Australian bands, but this isn’t really a main band, with very little output since they formed some 14 years ago.

Their sound, their adventure, is largely intact for this second album Standing Around Alive. A few songs get revved up with Spoon-style intros that snap (“Put It There”) but eventually every track gets down to dawn-stinger McGuinn chords wrestling around the dread of needing to get up tomorrow and grow up in some capacity, to where that notion becomes the thing you come to this band for. Honestly if they were around in 1977-78 we’d hold them in the same regard as the Dwight Twilley Band in terms of how utterly steeped they both were in making every note fill with wisdom and need. There is one really out of place song towards the end called “Dumb Cunts Bluff” that sounds like a different band, maybe a Country Teasers gone popsike by the end, and it breaks the flow so completely that you won’t remember the last two songs unless you skip this one. The closest they come to “Born Stoned” here is one called “Dream of Time,” which eventually drops all its verses in the second half for one repeated riff, droning wordless voices up top and below, and you can see a connection with how Hüsker Dü could do a song like “Green Eyes” and cover “Eight Miles High” in the same strokes, and it’s a standout. When you’ve played a perfect game, though, you’d want the whole thing to be there, and you might get a little mad over how close they came.

I used to write a TinyLetter back in 2019 and thought those emails were lost to time, but whew, they’re here, and they contain my review of the first Possible Humans record, which I’m providing because nothing I’ve written or thought about should ever be lost! Enjoy!

POSSIBLE HUMANS Everybody Split LP (2019, Hobbies Galore; r. 2019 Trouble in Mind)

... took a chance on this one, a Melbourne (right?) five-piece featuring three brothers and a Stroppie between them. It's a real actualization moment for this scene, where I'm hearing the whole '80s jangle influence being painted with a larger brush, the way R.E.M. was able to reframe the Byrds, same diff. Wrist-snappin' strum all over this thing, big riffs, bigger moves with youthful reserve, attacking a more saturated guitar tone and rougher fidelity a la the first Dinosaur record. They sound like they're going for it with everything they've got, and you wouldn't be remiss in drawing lines from them to the Clean, or the Church, or the Go-Betweens, but it's on the 12-minute "Born Stoned" that we get a look at it all at once, this patient, repetitive beast letting loose across the night that changed everything. It's like the full court press of the Feelies' two-steps-forward precision of The Good Earth in the Blue Öyster Cult zone, which lately is all I want. I played this on my show just to see how it would land at the end of a bunch of already-howling guitars and it felt like the highlight of the whole thing, a rousing and confident display of active minds hovering over the abyss, taunting it. Best jam I've heard all year (ed.: still rips).

Here’s that journal I warned you about. Subscribe to read where I went.

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