Consumer Guide: October, 2025

Nearly half an hour of covers that qualify as beautiful, a remarkably warm and rich love album, a perky bad-ass faces down this grim moment, and amorous vulnerability intensified by a croak.

Bright Eyes: Kids Table (Dead Oceans) Omaha-born Conor Oberst has manned over a dozen bands since he released his debut at 13, but I can't verify how many share the kind of NYC locale that makes me feel at home with this oddly tuneful eight-track EP, which begins "I wish I had a ship that sailed the waters/Wish I had about a hundred dollars" and goes on to name-check Candace Bergen, Salman Rushdie, Guy Fawkes, and others I bet I missed—the "Portuguese construction guy" who falls to his death, for instance, goes unnamed. Also crammed into the track listing is one that cites "union scabs singing songs for pacifists," another that goes "When the blue of the night meets the bruise around your eye" a "dyslexic palindrome" that may or may not go "A man, a plan, a canal, napalm," and one called "It Always Feels Good and It Never Hurts," an instrumental that nevertheless turns up online with a lyric that reads in its entirety "Heroin." B PLUS

Sabrina Carpenter: Man's Best Friend (Island) In which the showgirl-glamorous, romantic-erotic blonde tries and apparently fails to forge one or more deep and indeed pleasurable bonds with an evolving collection of male hunks with brains and maybe even heart. She gives head to the kind of guy who touched her aforementioned heart after a few rounds of naked twister and not only that—tears run down her thighs for guys who both do the dishes and know how to assemble an Ikea chair. But as someone all too aware that "thinkin' of" rhymes with "drinkin' enough," it's her artistic and psychological duty to report that a girl who knows her liquor is quite often a girl who's been dumped. A MINUS

CMAT: Euro-Country (AWAL) Her third album phenomenally musical and phenomenally odd, and not for the first time, this very Irish, even more female singer-songwriter once again bounces from man to guy or guy to man as if she can't get enough and enough is too much too soon. Eschewing the usual guitaristics, the arrangements are original enough and the tunes addictive enough to serve such themes as squandered kisses, expensive jeans, dating a guy with kids, dating a guy so you can write a song about him, a boyfriend on the make who messages you as a diversion, waxing your legs when you're only nine, and unreliable boyfriends being more fun than daytime television although admittedly that's a low bar. But as I assume is clear after all that, enduring love is not on the agenda and may never be. A MINUS

Bobby Conn: Bobby's Place (Tapete) Small-scale synth-effect fantasias—very small-scale, though they do hop along ("Jay and Bee," "Juicy Goons") *

Margaret Glaspy: The Golden Heart Protector (AT0) Maybe if I was a singer-songwriter guy—a folkie, to resurrect the somewhat condescending old term—I'd recognize all her collaborators on these seven cover versions, which include Creedence and Jackson Browne: Madison Cunningham, Julian Lage, Andrew Bird, Alam Khan, and James Bay. But as it stands I'm pretty sure that between Berklee-trained Glaspy's crystalline soprano and her deft guitar and piano, these are almost certainly the renditions I'd rather hear. "Beautiful" is seldom a praiseword I'm comfortable resorting to. But for nearly half an hour it applies. A MINUS

Hamell on Trial: Harp (For Harry) (Saustex) Guitar and vocals more thought through than ever as he approaches—can this be?—75 ("Fun We Coulda Done," "Nadya") **

Joseph Kamaru: Heavy Combination 1996-2007 (Disciples) This compilation by a Kenyan musical hero—who died in 2018 pretty much unknown internationally—never evokes, say, the sustained, undeniable, utopian flight best epitomized by the very much multi-artist Guitar Paradise of East Africa. An ambient artist who worked mostly by collaging taped soundscapes together, Kamaru's rhythms tend choppier. But in their own way or ways they're variable as well as catchier while at the same time bearing what soon evolves into a rather distinct individual identity. Assembled by a grandson known professionally as KMR, these tracks have plenty of rhythmic and hence sonic variety that tends to morph into a single musical identity: his own brand or brands of Afropop. When one is done, the next one will be a little different. But pretty much inescapably, it will also be Kamaru's. A MINUS

Jens Lekman: Songs for Other People's Weddings (Secretly Canadian) Inevitably but also poetically (and also regrettably), one-of-a-kind celebrations for hire often morph into free marriage counseling ("Speak to Me in Music," "Wedding in Leipzig") ***

Rhett Miller: A Lifetime of Riding by Night (ATO) The title brushes up against a big problem with love songs, especially the married kind: taking them on the road, a paradox adduced by the Old 97s headman's killer line: "Tonight I will be lonely in the arms of someone else." But this is nonetheless a remarkably warm and rich love album, complex and contradictory yet calm and thoughtful enough to convince the so inclined that however endangered the love match it analyzes and celebrates may be, it will endure. Credo: "Well now what a fool to figure that forever you'd be mine/Well I wrote a little rhyme to make it right." Quite a trick—quite a triumph, in fact. A

Margo Price: Hard Headed Woman (Loma Vista) Not every perky bad-ass would have the brains much less gall to defend Jimmy Kimmel by going after—yes, she used the word—"fascism." So take her seriously at this grim moment even if or because she's also drawn to "I don't give damn who you think you am," "All the cocaine in existence couldn't keep your nose out of my business," and "Take your tongue out of my mouth I'm kissing you goodbye." But I say be glad for her sake that there's also a "Throw me into the back seat and love me like you used to do." A

Bill Scorzari: Sidereal Days (Day 1) (self-released) Love fan that I am—the concept or feeling, I mean, both obviously much bigger deals than the band—I find this attorney-turned-singer-songwriter's latest album no less poignant for his tendency to croak some when he sings. On the contrary, it's a quirk that intensifies the amorous vulnerability he can't stop emoting or writing about. "She borrowed my heart and brought it back broken, and this day's no fair." "And I can see her in his arms and my heart stops, beaten, struck, and crashes to the ground." "Walking hand-in-hand with you my love. Can't seem to grasp what I was thinking of. I said I didn't want to say goodbye. But you were etching it in stone in my mind." "Desire runs in a race with Time, sayin' 'Who's the bigger fool between you and I. Or did we tie?'" A

Water From Your Eyes: It's a Beautiful Place (Matador) Whereas last time out their ramshackle groove was charming, their seventh—that's right, seventh—album comes too close to falling apart altogether ("Playing Classics," "Life Signs") ***

Billy Woods: Golliwog (Backwoodz Studioz) The most literate as well as the most Marxist frontman/mastermind ever to go over the heads of alt-rap cognoscenti types, Woods has never fully mastered the distinction between rhyming and flow. Even when he's linking (and rhyming!) "armed robberies," "carbon copies," and "autopsies" he's kind of prosaic, more a self-made speechifier than a born poet. But he's so well-informed you stick with him—the relative plainness of his delivery makes you want to hear (I said hear) more about "bad hamburger meat," "pre Xmas eviction," "I spent all summer diggin' out a grave/Can't run with the wolves when you're a stray," "if you never came back from the dead you can't tell me shit," "the king's dead and your uncle's not my friend," "staggerin' postcolonial African zombi state," "I rock a clean pair of socks every day just in case," and last but not least "West 86th three beautiful kids and they wake up and make their own beds." A MINUS

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