Heathen Disco Music Reviews #0147 (November 25, 2025)

Hey, what review organ isn’t a Reader Mailbag of sorts, anyway?

Music comes to me in the following ways:

• Someone sends music physically to my PO Box, solicited or otherwise

• I read about something that sounds interesting and figure out how to listen to it, either from another writer, radio playlists, email blasts from record stores, etc.

• I read promotional emails from everyone from major labels to individual artists and decide to follow the music from there

• I look at what people are listening to via Bandcamp, message boards and communities, and talking to other people

• I go out in the world, hear things, and give it coverage selectively — these ears don’t lie

• I take chances with blind buys of unknown (to me/to others) releases at record stores (if you’re not looking at every record in the store and taking things over to the listening station, you’re browsing)

This can be a full-time job, albeit not one that pays a full-time salary, so I do what I can. Could I be doing more? This installment of Heathen Disco, and others in the future, will focus on things people passed along to me (usually after I’ve made an attempt to promote the newsletter and expand the readership over here). Is it the worst thing? Hardly. But it adds another layer to addressing the music I want to share with you. A lot of the time it’s not necessarily new music, either, which means that it’s taking time away from me being able to bring you more info on that stuff, while it’s relevant. But we’re hitting the end of the year and the beginning of a new one, so might as well turn on the broiler and brown someone’s top.

Bear in mind that these submissions come from three separate email accounts, Instagram DMs, my Facebook and elsewhere. I really wish people could just send stuff to [email protected] as it becomes very unwieldy to track down who sent what and when.

This was a worthwhile activity, and the records got better as they went along. Check it out, and subscribe.

DIE GEISTER BESCHWÖREN Ghosts, This Is Survival LP (Ramble)

Released: 2020 (digital) / 2024 (vinyl)

Norcal guys who know some other guys and told me about it, laying down structured prog-folk which pomps with the best of them but doesn’t stick. There’s a lot going on in these six tracks, maybe a bit too much – turntables, a bag pipe player who calls themself The Unipiper, synth atmospheres fighting for space with dueling saxes and an already on-the-march rhythm section, heady string quartets crowded out by singing saw ... overstuffed rustica, maybe too much on the jam band side of things to get traction. Means well but overcompensates for songwriting that shortchanges memorable hooks for difficult, seasick waltzing and arrangements that pile on and push away. I’d be more grateful to hear what any one of the principles is doing rather than all of this together.

TBHQ s/t CS (Radical Documents)

Released: 2024 (digital) / 2025 (tape)

Wild pitch solo environments from one Hazel Rigby (child of Amy and Will), a mutant landscape of pronouncements both musical and verbal that plays literal/unsubtle to its detriment. Maybe it’s a concept album about social media and the effect it’s had on our artist/our world; maybe it’s a by-product of early and prolonged exposure to Laurie Anderson. Anyone who’d benefit from these lessons certainly isn’t going to find this, or find it helpful, and it makes me more curious about the artist and the need to express these common tenets in such a stage/performance art milieu than the art itself. Rigby clearly has talent across multiple instruments and gets some curious synth tones out of this, but this is a case where some subtext could clearly help provide some mystery to the text itself. “They never talk about that.”

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