Music in October 2025
Father John Misty’s wry apocalyptic ruminations feel a bit too relevant these days.
The Last Dinner Party’s album From the Pyre is wonderful, loud, loose, and varied.
From time to time I like to remind myself that disco was always cool, so I put on something like Emotion.
There Goes A Tenner is great because it includes the lyric “I hope you remember to treat the gelignite tenderly” sung in an affect Cockney accent. You’re just not going to get that anywhere else.
Clocks and Hearts Keep Going is a good addition to my long list of soft, sad indie albums.
Colors and the Kids is a reverie contemplating perhaps finding the motivation to draw the next breath.
The Fall of Charleston is a song I wish the US sang more often at national celebrations. We need to revive the crusading spirit of 1865 and the memory once maintained by the members of the Grand Army of the Republic.
Rachel Bobbitt’s second album, Swimming Towards The Sand, is full of the kind of sustained background droning one usually associates with bagpipes rather than pop. Just to be clear, this is a compliment.
My Big Nurse feels like David Byrne’s very weirdly upbeat version of an apocalypse.
The Whole of the Moon is everything I love about the ‘80s: sincerely convinced in its own grandiosity, altogether contrived yet wholly sincere.
God Only Knows has Bowie crooning low like a downer Sinatra, and I personally find it quite affecting.
The Kiss is so specific and strange, like everything I’ve heard from Judee Sill.
Ribbons is a lovely little pastoral album from Bibio.
Craig Finn writes interesting, depressing, self-condemnatory ballads, like a more ruthlessly confessional Billy Joel.
Don’t Carry It All is an encouraging call to bear each other’s burdens as we can.
Beth’s Farm is an incredibly moving yet very odd piece from Shropshire’s own Jerskin Fendrix – it’s hard to describe beyond that.
