Heathen Disco Music Reviews #0137 (October 21, 2025)

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Not much to report over here: early mornings, furious bursts of activity (how many jobs can someone apply to in a day, then try to beat that record, etc.), and we got rained out of that vintage market on Sunday so no dice there, just piles of stuff to sell. Some really great records came through, though, and I wanted everyone to know about them, so here you are.

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VERITY DEN Wet Glass LP (Amish)

(out Friday Oct 24th)

Not missing a step, North Carolina’s Verity Den floats back into/out of focus following a flawless 2024 debut, doing it the way a second album from a band with an exacting approach should be doing it. The more accessible moments are just that: appropriate expressions of melody that follow known forms and styles (title track, gazey dream “Green Drag,” the Van Pelt/Lapse/Breaks/Diamond style speak-shout of “Spit Red”), played in the group’s pensive style of rhythmic tension that pulls instead of pushes. Likewise, the more adventurous moments simply flow out: “Unresolved Mystery” with its blown-speaker coarseness against a gentle two-note lead, patient drum machine and vocals echoing from down the hall; the bubbles that escape from the loungey segue “All It Was”; the closing tracks that emphasize that this band came to be without the need for the beat.

Verity Den’s debut plays this wonderful trick where the album simply dissolves into periwinkle static by the end, but Wet Glass can make us follow their lead to the front and then to the back with the same sort of effect. They’re pulling us towards them, leading us in the exact position where they want us to hear what and who they are, something a lot of bands don’t even consider, less figure out so completely in the space of a year. And because this is their second self-produced effort, this approach figures as intent.

There’s a lot of lessons learned here from peak shoegaze, dream-pop and ambient/avant-garde music that you’ll recognize, but as before, Verity Den’s music finds a way to pass through its influences, absorbing what its architects need instead of reflecting the obvious. Once more the group exercises a control of textures unlike any other band in their realm, to where when I’m listening to them, there aren’t any others. You’ll sense this at the end of both sides of Wet Glass, this feeling of natural closeness which obscures anything from outside its tender realm. Another incredible piece of music here, with no loss of presence or intent.

JUST MUSTARD We Were Just Here LP (Partisan)

(out Friday, Oct 24th)

At the end of the day, shoegaze isn’t that rich of a text, and a little digging (and the will to do it) is all that’s necessary to uncover and successfully wield its most brutal elements. Irish quintet Just Mustard figured this out on their debut, 2018’s Wednesday, with annihilating feedback likened to choking out a tugboat siren, drums that hit hard and flat like elders Mogwai, and an ethereal, vocal style from Katie Ball that glowed like one of those bioluminescent sea creatures at the very depths of the sea. It had the marks of a young band, which alone was welcome in an era of maximalist tweak, metal/tuff guy adoption, and don’t-yuck-my-yum simps afraid to make a choice to a genre that had been on loving life support for more than two decades.

They vanished for about four years, then returned with 2022’s Heart Under, a much darker affair in the same key, tentative proof that they were gonna be the kind of band that relishes the uneven footing between the thens and nows, like the Cranes thrown into a cement mixer. Opening dates in the US with countrymates Fontaines D.C. were received as muted you’d expect, at least during the one or two songs I caught at the Chicago date, but it’s the correct move to take that sort of experience as a chance to build strength in large rooms. Woodshedding moments played out in public are rare, and here they went beyond that cool-looking guitarist in the Doctor Who duster, a strong sartorial move that shouldn’t be wasted on, like, Fields of the Nephilim. It’s not a shock, then, that they’re picking up Euro slots with The Cure next year.

Their new one, We Were Just Here, moves them ahead on their alternate timeline, where the mid-late ‘90s trope of adding rhythmic heft through breakbeats and skiffle a la Bowery Electric and the sideways brightness of Pale Saints. It’s a move towards a center (if not the center) that doesn’t sacrifice any of their purity, and which that makes the slow songs stand out amid busy bass/drum/synth interplay. All the things that worked before return as a force multiplier; the riff on leadoff track “Pollyanna” sounds like it was borne from sticking the mic directly into the PA, and some Kevin Shields-inspired guitar processing throughout pushes the instrument’s tones up into the steel drum range, which makes this one of the most unlikely Victor Brady tributes I can think of. The dusk that shadowed their previous works, most importantly, is still here, another piercing claw extended in an exciting body of work, a defining mark of bands that choose shoegaze as violence instead of jangle.

JOHN CALE Paris 1919 2xLP (1973, Warner Bros., r. 2025, Domino)

It seems crazy that John Cale still seems to denigrate Paris 1919 to some degree, and the liner notes on this latest edition don’t seem to counter that. There’s a story around this record about living in a pattern that is also a trap, an oppositive to where your art and practice say you should be, songs that long for a home halfway around the world, songs that all reference death and ghosts, songs of melodrama and pluck, made with musicians from a band and a producer that seem to come from different directions altogether, to where even descriptions about its process of creation are clouded by the path it took to get there, an incomplete tale that generated a finished product. I had a US OG copy of it that had this murkiness about it, not a lot of high end or clarity (subtly rectified here), and I think about that whenever the record is brought up because of these perceived difficulties, almost none of which make anyone who’s fallen under its spell would recognize. Cale’s songs, his voice, and his coordination with Chris Thomas (“a Moody Blues record,” hah) and the sidemen from Little Feat and other projects don’t miss a step. You can’t separate out what this record is, the feeling of otherness couched in the reassurance of others, from the dissatisfactions around it, around California living in the early ‘70s, around the habitrails of routines, immediacy in a real and perceived distance. It is an essential text to bolster the human spirit. In a lot of ways it’s the quintessential studio album, not for its technical achievements but through its interpretive accomplishments. Maybe only its creator can walk away from it, but most of us know better.

SHIZUKA Glass Night at U.F.O. Club CD (UFO CREAtions)

Another live set, formerly a boot, from the unsung rulers of PSF-dominion psych, circa 2005 and laid down after any known studio recordings. Closer to the kind of material on the unearthed Lunatic Pearl EP from a few years back (the title track of which closes this one out), this performance sounds like how Shizuka was described to Western audiences as opposed to their debut: heroic, charged noise pop ballads christened from membership time in the box with Fushitsusha and LRD, choral-meets-chaos guitar from Maki Miura that frames Shizuka’s upper alto range with mid-slow, deliberate force, and a martial rhythm section that hangs off her every word. Room quality sound means that the two modes are loud and louder, but the guitar positively rings off every lacquered surface, and the quartet marches forth the kind of sound you might expect from a more Goth-informed Magic Hour, or an all-“Halloween” Dream Syndicate. Some of you know the essential nature of what’s here and are already looking; new acolytes might want to get used to any of the posthumous releases on An’Archives before getting in here ... or maybe not. Wig-peeling is in style this fall, and there are several depilatory moments from this show that you might wanna keep away from your eyebrows should you wanna keep ‘em; moreover, this is proof that Shizuka kept getting less stilted and more intense as the years went on.

SURFACE OF THE EARTH In Colour CS (Knotwilg)

Preceding a week of upcoming EU/UK tour dates (a first), this New Zealand trio presents its first studio recordings since their storied, inscrutable self-titled debut for World Resources/Corpus Hermeticum from 30 years ago. Maybe a bit more standardized than the legend would dictate, this tape features ten discrete clouds of variably hazy, huzzed guitar drone and feedback, some resembling compositions (the tones of “Shadow Report” and “Ceramic” play as deliberately musical; one could imagine Alastair Galbraith singing “Bravely Bravely” atop), others avoiding the nature of Lovecraftian hull dream drone in favor of battleship gash-welding as the craft takes in water (“Inquest”). It’d be great to get into a room where this is being let loose, and to be in Europe in general, but this will have to do for now.

Click below so I can win — Doug M

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