Music in September 2025

• These Are Days has the elegiac quality and warm early-90’s tone that I find so affecting. Hummingbird Highway has a somewhat similar kind of warm sadness.

• Armies of the Lord is yet another addition to the many biblically allusive poems from The Mountain Goats.

• Straight Line Was A Lie from The Beths might very well be the best album of last year.

• Carter Burwell’s score for Raising Arizona is such an exquisite and odd collection of gems, very much like the movie (the best of 1987, if you haven’t seen it).

• Kim Fox’s 2003 album Return to Planet Earth has a really interesting and nostalgic sound; it definitely feels like the turn of the century.

• Dora Jar’s EP Digital Meadow presents as having a subdued energy, but is actually driven.

• We need to bring back public performance of The Battle Cry of Freedom as a political act; I think its time has come again.

• Losing Haringey is less a song than a reflection. In its specificity and universal relatability, it strikes a particular chord in the heart.

• The Scythe is a dramatic, gusty greeting to death from The Last Dinner Party, a band that I am going to be watching for some time.

• Falling is the theme for Twin Peaks, and itself a collaboration between Julee Cruise, Angelo Badalamenti, and David Lynch, and like so much connected to that show it is a deep and murky well; you never shall reach bottom.