Heathen Disco Music Reviews #0145 (November 18, 2025)

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TEENGENERATE Live at the Empty Bottle LP (Hozac)

Approximately 30 years ago I was an hour away from getting in a car and heading to Cleveland for my one and only chance to see one of the best Japanese punk bands of my lifetime, Teengenerate, when a phone call from college administrators concerning a show I’d booked the weekend before at my school threw me into crisis mode. I didn’t go. I also didn’t go to see them and Firestarter when I had a chance at Maxwell’s in 2004 or so. These are regrets. Everyone has them; in both instances for me, it was a greater responsibility. But the only duty Teengenerate had at this point, other than to finish out on top, was to give us all a kick in the chops before they bounced, and I wish someone woulda delivered one to me so that I’d smarten up and get to where I needed to be. Still though, regrets can fuel behaviors later on, sometimes to right those wrongs, and hearing these guys runnin’ off the rails at the Bottle on this rough and ready audience tape is helping to close the psychic wound that lesser bands bestowed upon me that night. You can be the impulsive animal or you can have an inner life. I had to clean up because some bands left it all on the field, and now I hear this, finally, and understand that Teengenerate were doing both. It’s unconscionable to believe that anyone was left standing by the end of this, and at the right volume this set could knock down some smug prick wearing AirPods on a Lime scooter within ten paces. Next time, walk!

SCRABBLED Plough Through the Rust LP (Wormwood Grasshopper)

Decade-old recordings from a loose confederation of Brisbane musicians who ramble and amble, but with Krazy Glue man-hanging-from-girder-strong covalent bonds between them all that connect on a psychic level. The Velvets are the main mode of operation/tribute here, but as with all bands indebted to that realm it’s how they play that informs what they play. Brings to mind the Rickety bands in turn-of-the-millenium Pittsburgh (Dead at 24, Dirty Faces, The Working Poor, The Johnsons/Johnsons Big Band, etc.) in how a group of people, connected by geography that’s unburdened by popular demand, and the circumstances that creates, can summon an entire universe among them, light of varying intensity shining forth, radio signals intermitting as from a star on its way to collapse. People sit at the center and the periphery, drawn to it, which from what I understand about Scrabbled – anchored by the late Bek Moore of Clag and a handful of others, and sweet , lanky dude Dusty Anastassiou, who I met briefly one day when I took Thigh Master and Mike Beach & band out to lunch here in Chicago because I liked them all so much, and who cannot have possibly flown comfortably to the U.S. and back on any commercial flight, gave me the record he made as Dag called Benefits of Solitude LP  – owes to the magnetism between them, and the spirit that you can create and scrape by and pretty much do anything. Wormwood Grasshopper deserves some praise for always being a great label (please check those Hammering the Cramps and Howling Gruel LPs) but really went all out to bring this record out of 2015 and making a monument of it today. “O.C.D.” is the vortex in all of this, a practical response to a focus running on its own logic, mantra-like and storming the fields in a cloud of eye-stinging dust. For those wondering what it feels like to be at or near the center of a world, here’s a document explaining it all. Mandatory antipodean psych-folk thump.

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