Heathen Disco Music Reviews #0132 (October 3, 2025)

As always: PO Box 25717 Chicago IL 60625 USA // [email protected]

No news to report that isn’t sad. Keep fighting, here’s some records that will hopefully help. Well, most of them.

CREATIVE WRITING Baby Made This LP (Meritorio)

TRIMDON GRANGE EXPLOSION Dreams Buried Under the Sea LP (Feral Child)

Two sides of a beautifully weathered coin: New England vs. Olde England, the dispensary and the tobacconist, and the 4-D windowpane paisleys that daisy-chain them together. I doubt these bands know one another but they’ve hit on sounds that complement one another in familiar ways, a transatlantic psych-pop azure algae bloom bursting forth from a carpet bag. It’s cool to hear the youth ragging away at mod-pop stylings but these two bands have some feet to put up once they flip that Byrds record over.

Creative Writing’s pedigree is out of the Mass moats (Sore Eros, that band Huevos II with the record on Sophomore Lounge, most recently a larger format version of their core creatives called Luxor Rentals, with Jed Smith from My Teenage Stride and the Jeanines on drums). The Luxor Rentals tape was a highlight of my 2023, more of a catalogue of woods-jangle ideas, Dino steamroller tube hits and a great Godz cover, but the sharpest song from there, “Hallway,” gets rearranged for Baby Made This’s second track, and sets an enervated storybook pace that slows, melts and fuzzes/frizzes out as to become absolutely gorgeous, gold-leaf dappled balladry by the end of the record, a gradual slide so graceful and deep you won’t even notice until the leaves are all around you, until The Dream Syndicate and The Three O’Clock are the same band.

The Kiwi-esque bend that closer “Rain” takes is a perfect lead-in to the second Trimdon Grange Explosion album, some seven years in the making. These folks are from the remnants of The Eighteenth Day of May, that Fairport/Fotheringay-esque band that resurrected the Hannibal label briefly in the mid-‘00s, and while their debut leaned into the more caterwauling aspects of that sound, they tucked a pop single in the middle called “Christian’s Silver Hell,” which sounded like Teenage Fanclub firing a distress flare off into the night, a lovely swerve back onto the paved roads. A new lineup foregrounds two electric guitars, sublimating most of the woolier elements in favor of gorgeous bee-sting leads, deeper bass tones and keys, and Alison Cotton coloring things in guest mode on viola. By the time they hit “The Reaver,” the range and scorch of the record’s first few cuts has burnt off, melancholy hanging off each note, and you start to sense the depths they’ve led you down, a slow and slower excursion around the last rays of the day as they cut through the branches on the way down. You might need both records to get you through to the end of this year, as the swell of love and passage of time are represented here as classical, formal gems that hold up to that dying light, catching blinding, singular glints in all of its facets.

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