Consumer Guide: August, 2025

Kentucky road dog goes global/cosmic, no longer pure heroine has erotic adventures, Afro-prop variants are assembled into a congruent groove, and gifted singer-songwriter essays a concept album.

Aesop Rock: Black Hole Superette (Rhymesayers Entertainment) The white Suffolk County rapper with the government name Ian Bavitz is one of a kind—always has been been, collabs included. He shows no sign whatsover of being an active participant in the ever evolving hip-hop aesthetic, ethos, or subculture. With his simple beats and deliberate, articulate rhymes, he's a verbal artist or maybe we should just call him a poet—one who happily partakes of a relatively recent development in strophic verse, all of which is bolstered by the musical rhythms, textures, and backgrounds that serve to bolster and contextualize the verses he voices. Themes, topics, and incidental verbiage that come to the surface include a snail invasion, a walk in the park, 12,000 birds in a chimney, a fake Eames chair, a baby in the candy aisle, and E-I-E-I-O. A MINUS

Rory Block: Heavy on the Blues (M.C.) Born in Princeton in 1949 and raised by the proprietors of a Greenwich Village sandal shop, Block has released some 40 albums of blues covers and originals—albums I'd never noticed, initially on Rounder but also on the likes of Chrysalis and Rykodisc, clearly an oversight though 40 was probably too many. Although the detailed booklet stresses Block's lifelong passion for a panoply of blues titans, these vary from Charley Patton and Memphis Minnie to such newbies as Buddy Guy, Tommy Tucker, even—idiosyncratically post-blues though he was—Jimi Hendrix. There's not as much grit as you'd figure here; occasionally the tone even verges on perky. But for just these reasons this selection has a winning spring and originality to it, and I expect to play it some more and to delve into her catalogue a little. An obsessive she may be; a purist she's not. A MINUS

Brother Ali: Satisfied Soul (Mello Music Group) Albino rapper copes with the same foibles as all too many ordinary humans ("Better but Us," "Head Heart Hands") ***

Tyler Childers: Snipe Hunter (RCA Victor) "For the birds," this young Kentuckian "worked with words," and that was just the beginning, so that circa 2017 he found himself "road-doggin' in a stripped-out van" with a lot more to come—seven albums in, he finds himself getting to the bottom of an "angst hard-fought to learn" in such locales as first Australia and then India as he essays the first country album ever to enlist the words "pheromone" or, uh-oh, "chlamydia." "Keep your nose on the grindstone and out of the pills," he's warned by his coalminer dad, who you get the feeling had more luck with the grindstone than the pills himself. When Childers emerged from nowhere circa 2017 he had the lineaments of a regional phenom—in one of my favorite strokes, he courted a Catholic girl. Wowing the other side of the world as he ponders the Bhagavad Gita, however, he clearly intends to wow you too. A

Clipse: Let God Sort Em Out (Roc Nation Distribution) Technically, by which I actually mean physically insofar as what rappers once proudly called flow retains aesthetic panache, this album flaunts the kind of musicality only achieved by masters of vocal modulation like these guys. Content-wise, meaning emotionally, they've turned to honoring their deceased parents, which can be counted on to add the kind of gravitas due Class A rappers with colorful work experience who don't hesitate to fold Nirvana and the Fugees into their artistic karass without also reminiscing warmly: "Tried to hide the dope in the message/Like we did the coke in the Lexus." In the dope game, progress is never-ending. B PLUS

Ryan Davis & the Roadhouse Band: New Threats From the Soul (Sophomore Lounge) Nice guy finishes up toward the front ("New Threats From the Soul," "Better if You Make Me") ***

Lorde: Virgin (Universal New Zealand/Republic) Well, she did call her debut album Pure Heroine, so why not something equally provocative? After all, Virgin has never been her label and if this New Zealand-spawned ingenue still has her hymen she sure doesn't act like it, impressive though it is that she remains some kind of ingenue at 29 and even more impressive that a fair helping of the erotic adventures and perplexities she references here seem to take place in lower Manhattan. What's love like for a teendream who's pushing 30? Well, "MDMA in the back garden, blow our pupils up/We kissed for hours straight." Or "I'll kick you out and pull you in." Or "Don't know if it's love or it's ovulation/When you're holding a hammer everything looks like a nail." A MINUS

Edna Martinez Presents Picó! : Sound System Culture From The Colombian Caribbean (Strut) Unlike the radio show featuring Congolese soukous guitar maestro Diblo Dibala that Berlin-based Colombian DJ Martinez assembled last year, this one goes straight ahead and showcases pure picó, which is what becomes of African LPs when they're absorbed as anonymously as is practical, like with their labels scraped off, into local Colombian sound systems commandeered by local DJs called picós. Melding Dibala into this concept was a stroke—he's a unique musician whose style fit right in. But Martinez's command of the many variants that result when Afropop tracks like these are blended into hybrids that's she assembled here into an album that retains an articulate, congruent, varied Afro-Caribbean groove—a groove that even if you're not dancing feels like an Afropop subgenre with its own unique and fundamental identity even if it's never inspired its own pet name. A MINUS

James McMurtry: The Black Dog and the Wandering Boy (New West) Extry extry, or do I mean uh-oh: gifted, respected, well-bred never-much-of-a-star singer-songwriter essays a concept album (see uh-oh) on a theme close to both his heart and a world he knows all too well: that of the gifted, well-respected, never-quite-a-star singer-songwriter. Really, there's a built-in market there: the motley and by no means truly impoverished subculture of second-level "creatives," as they're called these days. A talky but engaging singer whose verbal acuity belongs in the same basket long ago filled by his Pulitzer-winning novelist father Larry, the son's themes include the World Trade Center, Bush meets Enron, Pinocchio grows up, meds that don't work, the salt of the earth in search of a savior, the paperwork of a Texas Ranger, and having a blessed day. A MINUS

Polyfillas: Rude Boys of England EP! (Polyfillasband) Betrothed couple bound together by their love for each other—and also, you betcha, punk ("Rude Boys of England," "I'm Bored/I'm a Whore") ***

Jonathan Richman: Only Frozen Sky Anyway (Blue Arrow) Begins "When I make my transition/I want everyone to know I only changed position/'Cause I was only just frozen sky/Anyway." So while admittedly confused by the frozen sky stuff, I don't get why some deny that this is a death or mortality album, or brush by the possibility that at a mere 74 pioneering protopunk novelty artist Richman has been diagnosed with something not just worth keeping an eye on but actively ominous albeit far from impending—vague but all too common distinctions that I've had on my mind as an 83-year-old ever since being fitted for an ablation and a stent over the past six months. My guess is that he's happy to have such themes available, drolly at times, and note that what sounds like "dark star" here is actually "dog star": to be precise, Sirius, the very brightest in the sky. Going somewhere, Jonathan? Not yet. B PLUS

Ross Thorn: Ross Thorn Tries Fitting In (Casa De Copas) Bluegrass-kinda with polka add-ons from the surprisingly lighthearted industrial outpost of Duluth on Lake Superior's vernal shores ("Pick-a-Dee Day," "Baby That's All I Need"); *

Jesika von Rabbit: Bunnywood Babylon (Dionysus) Novelty record declines to split the difference between silly and complex, which can be interesting at the very least ("Pretty Dum," "What Is Your Ism"); ***

Wet Leg: Moisturizer (Domino) "You wanna fuck me, I know, most people do," brags and/or murmurs LBGTQ bandleader/ingenue Rhian Teasdale to a present/prospective inamorata on a love album where affection is unmistakable, passion explicit, and pleasure guaranteed. That's how eros is supposed to work, right? To reduce half-an-hour of it to soft, lyrical pop-rock is an aesthetic triumph all the more impressive because it never sounds like it's trying too hard. A MINUS

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