(photo courtesy of my back yard)

Busy weekend over here and why not cap it with some off-the-cuff reviews of records I hadn’t heard before today? I didn’t get a chance to say this last week but wanted to recognize the tragic, untimely passing of Sleepy Doug Shaw. Plenty of people who stayed in NYC longer than I did had far more at stake with losing him, but by any yardstick I didn’t know a single person who didn’t love Doug. I met him at Mighty Robot back in the early ‘00s, a younger guy than me who just showed up one day, wound up in Gang Gang Dance and collaborating with AnCo’s Geologist, and in a solo project called Highlife whose songs I sing to myself all the time. You can say “generational talent” a bunch but what it really boils down to is that, no matter where or when, any time I’d see this guy we’d yell “DOUG!!!” at each other and usually extend a hug or handshake or some gesture to indicate the pleasure of finding someone else with this name, knowing how rare even that connection could be and using it as a springboard for spreading a good feeling around. Doug loved people and was loved in return. I kinda gave up the notion that I would see a lot of people I recognized in NYC again when I left for good, but I really thought we’d have more of this guy to go around, and my heart goes out to anyone whose life he touched. Word is he had just finally finished his first solo album and signed a deal to release it, then left us. A circle has closed but a wider one around it is still open and raw, and will remain that way until the music within attempts to heal us all, change our mood and leave us in a better spot than we were found in, just like Doug did to me every time our paths crossed.

My radar didn’t fail on the music below, either; these records are very of a piece and in convo with one another, a salon of dourness and dark humor that quite frankly I need to brace the nonstop stream of tallow cutting across our sociopolitical affairs of the day. I didn’t really have to look too hard to find these, either, but I know where it is. Now you do too, at least of these. Let them welcome the skid of your work week with some friction or pushback.

Heathen Disco mail: PO Box 25717 Chicago IL 60625 USA // [email protected]

GICHARD Chins for Lefty LP (Night School)

Steadily downbeat, lo-res, monochromatic pop from Glasgow that points at the sky to make the rain fall. Tenderness (“Posthumous Hologram”) between the downpour moments (“Asking the Apes”) and emotional flatlines (much the rest, esp. “Break Up With Johnny Dogbirth”) set up all-too-easy comparisons to talkin’ UK art-punk-DIY bands of the moment, but the innate desire for these songs to bring us down, to push our faces into that ever-spreading asphalt puddle, clears up any dispassion that might concern you. Anything that does that to you wants to do it. The world coalesces around this lack of justice, sticking Gichard between the burly slug of Prolapse and the moment-driven peculiar swing of the Pheromoans, a place where most would never look for a G band hiding between two P’s. But that’s what PGP keys were invented for, right? Early and almost total (some say “military grade”) obfuscation, a covenant opened between you the listener and these two souls, looking for a third for which they can attach themselves.

More below, just pay for it — it’s cheap