Heathen Disco Music Reviews #0135 (October 14, 2025)

Look — a masthead!

One more resume re-edit, one more click to apply and I’m gonna be out of this mess and ready to handle other messes. Only gotta land one new gig for now. Thanks for bearing with me, be sure to renew your subscription, tip your servers, all that.

Come lighten my load this Sunday here in Chicago as I dab stray raindrops off of vintage goods, books, VHS tapes and six sick boxes of records from my personal clutch at the Andersonville Creepy Vintage Market, Clark & Winona, 10am til 4pm. I need to show up with less than I came with.

And once again, thanks to everyone who’s been supporting as a reader, reposting their reviews, and sending in music. Get social with it.

PO Box 25717 Chicago IL 60625 USA // [email protected] (next person who asks where to send stuff is gonna have to write me an essay)

On with it!

COPIERS “Drama” b/w “Anxiety” 12” (Future Heart Works)

More releases, in particular more conceptual offerings like what we have here, might be the difference for a lot of artists out there in this fractured landscape of distraction and misadventure. Copiers are an excellent instrumental crew out of Louisville (their latest album covered in one of these emails in the past few months) but here they take a page from the longform, repetitive playbook of groups like Oneida and Water Damage, who both use this template to a true level of notoriety (seriously, ask anyone who knows Oneida the first song of theirs they think of, and inevitably it’ll be “Sheets of Easter”). Both tracks here start with the title word, repeated – sounds like it came from audio materials for in-patient group therapy sessions – and use it to set the cadence and mood, minimal rhythmic choppers with a bed of synth drone and guitar skree crashing in, so that the music mimics the drama (the rise and drop in vocal tone of that word, the crash-in of the guitars) and anxiety (the eight-count, snare-heavy rhythm, the whistling feedback and high-register synth, the bass setting a stage for the guitar to go rip) at their respective cores, and builds up to my favorite Copiers release to date. Good for now, good for when we’re remembering now, some might even be able to dance to it. Someone will ask you what this is when you play it; someone may also ask you to play something else, the mark of a great record. Get two.

ERICA DAWN LYLE On Fire LP (Half a Million/Feeding Tube)

Erica Dawn Lyle’s guitar sounds on her fourth solo album scream like the ghosts embedded a melting steel girder, the sounds of the molecules and ectoplasm ripping apart and the glowing orange scars at the points where it’s giving up its shape. It’s a fitting tone, all slate gray midrange and spot-weld feedback, for a record that divines wildfires, self-immolation, and the resolve of free Americans to fight through a tribute to Van Halen. Variations on a theme to VH1 closer and set opener “On Fire,” Lyle pushes DLR through kittenish falsetto and lets the rig do the rest, attacking the source material with reverence and abandon, the only real release in a world that’s slipping away. The groove hit at the end of this is something I’d like to have heard more of but this one’s lava all the way down, molten earth which you’d better prepare for. 

More action below, you know what to do.