Hey gang. Gotta make this brief as I need to return to work, as I am Under It Right Now. We hit 200 Heathen D’s, we hit 600 followers, just as I’m working 55-60 hour weeks with no reprieve. Purple Vu is growing nicely and you can read all about it over there. I’m pushing onwards here and doing what I can.

These three records covered below are not easy or breezy. They are three reflections of modern life that will not go out quietly. They will break your heart and bruise your ego and slice into you. Music isn’t easy. Quite the opposite. Read on and find out. Woulda been five reviews and a paywall, but Simon Joyner broke me.

I’d really appreciate it as always if you share Heathen D with those who would benefit from it, and that you order up a subscription to both so you can read it all.

Thanks again for all this. I see you and your support (and everyone who doesn’t).

PATOIS COUNSELORS Protection Racket LP (Ever/Never)

Album number four for this North Carolina band that hems towards a trend they lead, which is more bands flocking towards the unstable center of mid-late ‘80s SST bands, in particular Slovenly (Chicago youth Uniflora head there too). Bo White’s lyrics and tone now carry this mournful calm about them, a trend that picked up on their last one Limited Sphere with the music following closer in suit; these are times of sorrow but also of connections we’re made to keep one another company, that we’re not experiencing the horrors alone, and that we remember what happened when we were kept apart. If this band is indeed an encapsulation of commonly-held fears set to music, I would not be shocked. Someone had to do it again, and in a way that drifts down upon us, like nuclear fallout, instead of thrusting upwards like a shiv. Which might not seem like a positive message (it isn’t, doesn’t need to be) but the right one for these times. I don’t see this as a huddled mass, but the outcries and ministrations of people who have found freedom in the cracks and flaws in the façade. Great work from a band that continues to run off in their own directives. There is an audience for this. Fear is not to be conflated with sadness (see below); there’s too much adrenaline involved, and it’s all gotta burn off somewhere.

SIMON JOYNER Tough Love 2xLP (Grapefruit / Sophomore Lounge)

Sadness can’t be conflated with much else, and Omaha’s poet laureate Simon Joyner feels this more than others, turning a Lou Reed croon with a countrified warble for lo these many years. Joyner’s suffered, and perhaps you have too, and Tough Love is a long and therapeutic transference of collective grief and untidy resolution. There’s a lot to cover here, emotions no one wants to experience, particularly on the 20-minute sidelong closer title track framed with an elliptical acoustic phrase and hand percussion that sounds like the chains of a ghost, electric notes peeled out in the shadows to take over the whole room. What looks like bravery to some is mere duty to others, and Joyner creates a remove, especially on this track, to a darkness so unrelenting that hopefully none of us need to face it, the horrors of looking back blacking out the windows and the eyelids, pressing down, making each breath harder to draw. I’ve actually put off listening to this one because I sensed what was coming, the notion that maybe you can’t get past it, that the exorcism won’t work. “T.B. Sheets” isn’t this dark, not even that John Lee Hooker version on Never Get Out of This Blues Alive. Even in its more familiar paces, or when Joyner lets up on himself, Tough Love resists any sort of evaluation, because maybe no records of our day have been this personal, this willing to cross-examine the source of pain as it spreads. It’s not light enough for everyday use but there is no world in which anyone who spends the time with this one will ever forget it. You can’t say that about too much music these days, maybe ever.

CALLAHAN & WITSCHER Sorry to Hear That 2xLP (Post Present Medium)

All these years I’ve been listening to Jeff Witscher’s (pretty excellent) noise/ambient recordings under names like Secret Abuse and Marble Sky and Rene Hell, never knowing he had this in him. This second effort in partnership with Jack Callahan (an arm of Sunburned Hand of the Man amongst others) continues on this journey of electronics-laden, brickwalled guitar pop, filled with riffs, autotuned to fuck and back, so crispy and jaded you’ll cut your forearm if you reach into the sleeve. It’s very polished, shiny, kinda mersh pop (think machine songwriters like Ben Folds or certain eras of Beck or the late Adam Schlesinger) but pushed far in the vector of pain, which serves as somewhat of a fork that spears a piece of you, the listener, as these sample-laden, occasionally profane songs threaten to break containment, and they get close. Hard to deny something that catches as completely as “Let’s Keep in Touch” or “Rather Be Alone,” and none of us on this side would dare question the motives per their critical diss track “Settle the Score” (guys, anyone with a 3D printer can make a statue of themselves), but I am not here to pick, just to point, or simply make one: your complaints can become art if you shove them hard enough into the proper form.

Thanks again - Doug M