Heathen Disco Music Reviews #0143 (November 11, 2025)

The glacial expanse of job-seeking in the fourth quarter is no joke. I got close to a gig, then the hiring manager asked me about Heathen Disco, and I realized I wasn’t all that alone out there. I don’t think this person cared, but it was enough to make me wonder if it had influenced the decision, and lo and behold … it did. Not that taking an offer that would’ve set me back pay-wise to pre-pandemic totals was all that appealing, nor would rearranging whatever fossils existed in the old data analytics team at this establishment, but it seemed like a big challenge for not much reward. And I think it was reflected in the last Heathen D installment.

But, as I noted below, ego death is only for the bold among us, and I soldier on, accepting that one of these gigs will be mine. It’s more a matter of when, and timing is really eating a lot of shit right now, as a single dad and all. So I press forward, because there’s nothing else to do. Going to see the Saints ‘73-’78 band and Chimers in a moment, and having thoughts about some records below. Click the links, look at the ad, and subscribe. It’s keeping my spirits up and dropping pennies in my loafers. So are some of you, and you know who you are.

YUASA-EXIDE Go To Hell, Encyclopaedia Britannica CS (Round Bale)

A couple years ago, recently single and in an attempt to cultivate a greenish thumb, I bought a $20 monstera plant from the warehouse floor of an Ikea. Once removed from whatever dirt-foam it was shipped in, and given a larger pot with nutrient-rich topsoil, it began to thrive, so thoroughly that I had to take it outside, break it in half at the roots, and re-pot it into two larger vessels. By the spring, if not sooner, I’m gonna have to do it again for both, and have four of these plants. But there was a point, after my most recent move, that I decided to leave them outside on the front porch, where they’d receive regular doses of direct sunlight and the occasional downpour as sustenance. The plants did not agree with this, their leaves browning with too much of a good thing. Brought back into the house and given indirect sunlight towards the backyard, they have become the unruly beings I witness every day, unfurling new leaves even as stems have broken off and scarred over. This seems a good metaphor for the music of Yuasa-Exide, a Minneapolis-area hometaper project of one Douglas Busson, who in recent years had cut to fit the music that he loved through physical conditions which would make it difficult for someone to carry on creatively. Following the release of a double-cassette compendium on Round Bale, Yuasa-Exide gained a wider audience, words of praise, airplay and recognition enough to flourish in its zone of gotta-lotta-songs noise pop, a bit grottier than Honey Radar, Sharp Pins or some of Dan Melchior’s output but in thrall to the gods of abundance that touch all those artists, and Guided By Voices before them. Go To Hell Encyclopaedia Britannica reflects what happens when conditions are ideal – the hooks get hookier, the strums strummier; the number of collaborators on hand increases and beefs up the sound, the drive of self-realization punches through the walls holding it back in light of recent notice. It’s hard to consider if this would’ve been so “up” had Busson still been creating this music in a small void – certainly we know there are plenty of bands that would invert that exposure, to where they’d be better off put in a dark box of shit with the rest of the mushrooms – but we got something here, a prolific talent zipping into the passing lane with the restless huzz of lo-fi’s greats and the dewy crunch of another what-if, the dorm daze of Mac McCaughan and Laura Cantrell’s forgotten folk project, Bricks.

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