Heathen Disco Music Reviews #0073 (March 4, 2025)

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What else can be said in this messed-up timeline other than to enjoy music?

What better way to remember your past than to look forward?

Not gonna get much else outta me tonight; I need to go to bed. Here are some great records to check out. Promise me you’ll listen, and keep your head where it was to pilot where it needs to go.

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THE TUBS Cotton Crown LP (Trouble in Mind)

Second album for these London troubadours arrives with bated breath (though we had that Ex-Vöid album, a pinnacle of same-guy core, to tide us over), and rings out a remarkable throwback to ’92-’96 guitar pop rippers the likes of Sugar or Gin Blossoms (or a concise take on what The Bevis Frond was up to, right down to the vocals), even a little bagginess at the end on “Strange” which sounds like a Wonder Stuff outtake. Comin’ down to Attitudes with their 12-string, a lotta boozy vigor and the indestructibility of youth lightin’ em up (though they should know that by now, these aren’t kids, they were in Joanna Gruesome), regular Tubbin’ hours in effect. Kinda puzzling that they haven’t placed more than eight new songs here (“Just an Illusion Pt. 1” came off an earlier seven-inch, a trick they also pulled on their first one Dead Meat), so maybe the multiple bands is spreadin’ them thinner than some would like, but there’s no argument about what they did provide: a haul-ass approach, vocal harmonies and spiraling melodies pulling back to triumphant finishes, over and over. American dates coming up soon, unless the nation is dissolved by that point – Chicago will get three chances to see ‘em in the space of two weeks in May/June, so it’ll be cool to figure out how this translates to three kinds of audience (nostalgia seekers aiming to see the Wedding Present celebrate 35 years of Bizarro, summer street fest randos, and intentional fans in a club setting). If they gotta see us in Road Warrior mode, I guess that’s how it’ll go, toe-cuttin’ all the way.

AUX MEADOWS Draw Near LP (Eiderdown)

Following a tape and a bit of good will, here’s a fine debut LP from this Bay Area trio, working a methodical seam of slow instrumental twang, like a round of honey slides for the late Michael Nesmith and the First National Band. An adjacency to pedal steel maestro Chuck Johnson (who mixed this album) makes sense, though there’s a touch more ruggedness to these tunes, which at their wiliest – “No Cash on Premises,” “Permanent (For Now)” – detail a outskirts/desert gallop that never quits, while an all-synth outing (“Clear a Path”) dares inject some melodic/pump organ air drone float into an expectation of staid electronics. Lotsa thought put into this, and it shows. Great work which plays right at the limits of expression and chops, never showy but not content to settle, as dust in the outdoors never does.

EDITH FROST In Space LP (Drag City)

The country-folk-psych pastiches and heathered maturity of Edith Frost’s ‘90s and early ‘00s output covered its times well, expanding the Drag City circle of friends with a wisdom and care towards songcraft that’d find extensions and paeans all the way down the road, a Kendra Smith for the home team (notes written on a second Post-It in Albini Condensed). Seeing her name pop up in the credits of Ryan Davis’ Dancing on the Edge was a bit of a jaw dropper, and moreso now, with a new album her first in 20 years. What’s to do between then and now is maybe not as relevant as this journal of the proceedings, which is to pick up where she left off and keep going. It’s yet another reliably moody, aching collection of almost-loves and hypnotic refusals to compromise, all of a piece but suitably different from one another in approach – guitars, piano, fiddles, synths getting tougher and softer in time – but then we hit the one-two of “Back Again” (coulda been a Plush song, it’s so good at capturing the DC AM radio obsession of yore) and the title track, heavying the air with glissandos, breathy vocals recorded up close, and beguiling mandolin and strings. Everything here begs for positioning on a mixtape, handed to you or packaged special in the mail by someone who wants you to feel what they feel. Can’t do better.

PYREX Body LP (Total Punk)

16 minutes and change of tri-boro pressure by these NYC mutants, getting more opaque as the years roll on. Relatively well-rendered in sound by any yardstick of something so filthy, it’s a fuckin’ stomper – D-beat bulldozers and urban fatberg scum spills (“protein is all I eat” … I hope these guys don’t still have roommates), vaguely spidery death rock (“Vertebrae”), and a longer trial of the two in closer “Reflex,” nearly tipping the scales, twice as long as anything that came before. How are they not out of breath? How are YOU not?

HOUSE Of ALL House Of All Souls LP (Tiny Global Productions)

Here’s one of the great things about this second album from the group made up of ex-members of The Fall: it’s not a fluke. They couldn’t shake this music if they tried. It shows how much The Fall was the people behind MES, how that sound is now just there, on, a switch flip. The country sounds, the city beats, the repetition, the backing vocal hollers … it’s not gone just because their leader no longer is. The most powerful militia in rock music self-regulates and is out in the streets, a spear to the guts from Steve Hanley’s headstock, the notion of two or even three drummers, Martin Bramah having the last laugh. It made sense then, it makes more now.

Thanks for reading — Doug M