Heathen Disco Music Reviews #0144 (November 14, 2025)

Hello new folks. Gonna make today a free edition so you can see what you’re getting with a subscription: prescient coverage and recommendations of music that will improve your outcomes for the next hour, day, week, whatever it takes. Here to help you sort it all out.

CHICAGO: I’m selling records at the Aadam Jacobs fest, iO Theater down by the Blackhawk/New City/Whole Foods apparatus. The date is this Sunday, November 16th, free entry, noon-5pm. I have many boxes ready to go from recent weather-thwarted attempts to pare down my collection, and there will be some real treats in store for those willing to buy, along with a small selection of posters, zines, tapes and 7” carrying cases. Get me out of this rut and help me take home less weight than I hauled out.

As always, contact/submissions to PO Box 25717, Chicago, IL 60625 USA // [email protected]. The year is winding down so expect some lists soon.

Oh, and subscribe if you like this to remove all the paywalls and read it all, hear my mixes and more.

UNMARRY ME “Clean Fight” b/w “Spanner in the Hurt” 7” (Happy Soul)

Inverse to the brolic, maximal slam of Chris Rowley’s most recent band Adulkt Life, the former Huggy Bear vocalist is rejoined by former bandmate Jon Slade and vocalist Lise Francis of Help, She Can’t Swim for a sparse, almost acapella affair ... bass guitar, electronics and vocals. Hard not to compare it to the first Huggy Bear EP Rubbing the Impossible to Burst in terms of it being adjacent to a spoken word approach, but refactored to age and experience, and keeping the soul bare so that their bared-soul messages can take the wheel. One might be able to glean a Marine Girls or Imperial-era Unrest sort of approach, vocally and how these tracks have an inherent swing to them, but the space in the arrangements pull the listener right into the song and keep ‘em there, and these songs are a good bit darker than those comparisons. Heard a little of what’s coming next and I feel like this is gonna resonate with a lot of my readers.

HÉLÈNE BARBIER Panorama LP (Celluloid Lunch)

Third album and best to date from Montreal essential Hélène Barbier, gathering a wide pool of accomplices like Meg Duffy from Hand Habits, Olivier 2mo (Cheveu, Heimat) and some of the Retail Simps crew. This one’s a mood, a carefully-plotted step through the back door of ornate wavo guitar spindles (someone said Tom Verlaine and I’d take that down a closer rue to another MTL band, Freelove Fenner), icy bass and cautious rhythms designed to avoid eye contact and sit with its feelings. It never rises above a simmer, but doesn’t really aim to; sometimes you need a record to match your brooding sentiments, and I’m here to tell you, it’s right here. Helium sitting with their back turned to God Bless the Red Krayola and All Who Sail With It, streaked balayage-style with isolated instrument tracks from Cars records. Casually intense and purposeful, much like Barbier’s old band Moss Lime. Put down what you’re doing and head towards this.

HOME FRONT Watch It Die LP (La Vida Es Un Mus)

Imagine the sound of Blitz’s Second Empire Justice approaching mk. 1 Blitz and you get in the ballpark of Canadian duo Home Front, a wildly popular attempt to get drum machines and coldwave synths into street punk, and the tug-of-war that ensues. Both sounds have their chance to win out, but it’s not like when T.S.O.L. fought this battle. No, this approaches the concept of music streamers, where more music than you can listen to in a lifetime is available to stack in a playlist, one on top of the other. Since both sounds are an overlay, the tensions between these genres are erased, feel-good punker anthems with Ian MacKaye-style vocals, the band Embrace could’ve been if nobody ever embraced them.

TONY MOLINA On This Day LP (Slumberland)

You could fit most if not all of Tone’s solo output onto one 90-minute cassette, and knocking at the door of the 23-minute mark, his latest On This Day would be considered a double album by those standards. You’d also have about 80-90 songs, all chopped down to the bare, shiny jewel within each of them, which is his style, refined to a thoughtful degree on this go-round. Recorded with Alicia VH (The Aislers Set), this is a leap forward in the same approach – we’ve got real arrangements here, somewhat baroque instrumentation covering up the triple rectifier fuzz of his earlier works but also stepping out of the sad boi acoustic-only zone and deeper into classic singer-songwriter territory. It’s a mature work and his most accomplished to date, one that plays like all the time it took to get it just right was well-spent.

SUNJAMMER s/t LP (Tall Texan)

Sunjammer kick things off as a foil of sorts to their labelmates Alien Eyelid – coming from the same Texas country and folk roots but looking at the flipside, a dreamy San Antonio afternooner sipper to their Houston acid attack. Supremely laid back lifestyles while away the hours on their fourth full-length, casually elegant folk pop twang with a preternatural knack for melodies. After the raucous opener “Quit” this thing settles down in a patio/outdoor bar zone, creating this stasis of sentiment that never gets to a holler, content to revel in its own beauties. Great playing, great songwriting, settles you down in a real, righteous way.

THANKS — Doug M