Consumer Guide: November, 2025

Shameless beauty track after track, an inspirational Afropop surprise, mood pieces suitable for the despondent historical moment, and a country album that fights the blues with more blues.

Big Thief: Double Infinity (4AD) I worried at first about the disappearance of their trademark delicacy, but a few listens in I'd not only cheered up but fallen in love—they were going for shameless beauty and getting there track after track, most strikingly on one called "All Night All Day," which begins with a transported Adrianne Lenker stanza I can't resist quoting: "All night, all day/I could go down on you/Hear you sing your pleasure/God is good/Or whatever made the mouth/To drink the treasure." But the hero is drummer James Krivchenia, who I'd given so little thought that I had to keep looking back to make sure I got the spelling right and whose own idea of transport if not pleasure itself is mating clatter with momentum verse after verse. A

Doja Cat: Vie (Kemosabe/RCA) dance-pop at its cutest, and I don't just mean highest-pitched ("Stranger," "AAAHH! MEN") **

Michael Hurley: Broken Homes & Gardens (Bellemeade Phonics) Literally his last musical words, murmured calmly and whimsically in the face of a void you can bet he felt ready for when he contemplated his options ("The Monkey," "Indian Chiefs & Hula Girls") **

JID: God Does Like Ugly (Dreamville) Atlanta rapper who gracefully not to mention gratefully mashed the birthname Destin Choice Route enunciates clearly enough to opine but not therefore prove that Martin was wrong and Malcolm was right ("Gz," "WRK," "K-Word") ***

The Kasambwe Brothers: The Kasambwe Brothers (MASS MoCA Records) Just three siblings from small, landlocked, mostly agricultural Malawi in southeast Africa singing and playing guitar, drums, and a basslike indigenous instrument called the babatone. Recorded by the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams, Massachusetts, there are no translations I can locate for nine tracks mostly in the five-minute range. But the publicist's one-sheet reports that themes are dominated by varying accounts of courtship and that eventually women participate as well as men. All of which sounds perfectly nice, I hope. In fact, however, the overall effect is considerably more ebullient than that—irresistible verging on joyful in what turns out to be the most inspirational Afropop surprise I've heard all year. A

Gurf Morlix: Bristlecone (Rootball) Let's just hope our president was put on earth to inspire good deeds like this: riling up this productive but less than lissome Austin singer-songwriter so thoroughly that he's not only assembled mood pieces suitable to what has proven a despondent historical moment but cut a six-and-a-half minute title song that begins "I'm gnarled and twisted all to hell" and then followed it with the de facto protest song "Beelzebub," who in case you didn't know has also been known as both Baal and the Lord of the Flies. Laying back in his swivel chair "watching cable news on his big screen in his underwear" he keeps busy "sowing fear and confusion all across the land." Hint: favors red ties. Sound familiar? It will. A MINUS

Alick Nkhata: Radio Lusaka (Mississippi) From the land-locked south-central African republic of Zambia, led initially for a quarter century by a freedom-fighting socialist named Kenneth Kaunda with support from Nkhata, Zambia's best-known musician. A guitarist who on this evidence has nothing against keyboards either, Nkhata favors songs every bit as soothing melodically as they're propulsive rhythmically. As assembled here by his son, they add up to not so much a call to action as a promise of peace. A MINUS

Saint Pierre: Luck and Gravity (Mutchcrud Music) Married young in 1990, Danny and Julia St. Pierre launched an entertainment career as twentysomethings heading up a tribute band with the cheeky sobriquet Petty Theft, and guess who got the tribute? Then, sadly, they got divorced, which, happily, didn't stop them from continuing to make music together, which, more happily than that, set them up to write their own songs, which, happiest of all, pretty much explain why and/or how they then remarried. Tom Petty should have been so blessed. A MINUS

Amanda Shires: Nobody's Girl (ATO) It's the rare female country star who's more ingenue than belter—Kacey Musgraves and Megan Moroney come to mind but not many others. And it's the rarer country singer of any gender who can reel off lyrics of this quality. Her tempos moderate, her pitch elevated, her enunciation crystalline, Jason Isbell's ex is an exception so impressive you can only hope they didn't split up because she can write rings around him that don't wind up on his finger. "The streetlights and stars/They bring up old scars/In the backseat of a car/Wondering how you are/Under the streetlights and stars." "Starship hovered and love left my third eye strained." "You can't hold your breath for the rest of your life." "I stopped feeling anything/No guilt, no remorse, no shame/Didn't breathe any easier with the feelings out of the way." "You think it's tough now to swallow/Wait till it scrapes against your throat." "I hope you finally find/Your missing piece of mind." "How'm I doing? I don't know/Just sitting here listening to Billy Joel." Convinced yet? A

Todd Snider: First Agnostic Church of Hope and Wonder (Aimless) Somewhat rickety musically, more knowing than agnostics generally fess up to ("That Great Pacific Garbage Patch," "Agnostic Preacher's Lament") ***

Todd Snider: High, Lonesome and Then Some (Thirty Tigers/Aimless) "Granted is what you've been taking me for," the perpetually unreliable, regularly lovelorn Rahm Emanuel fave and substance connoisseur is on this evidence spiritually undiminished. But that's not to suggest he sounds hale or anything like that, especially since he was recently hospitalized in the wake of an alleged physical attack outside his Salt Lake City hotel at the start of the tour he has now cancelled. For nine tracks that clock in at 42:31 he sings his songs of emotional displacement and comic woe, which here follow one called "The Human Condition" with one called "Unforgivable," which is not actually the "worst story ever told" as its subtitle claims, well before things get to "All she wanted me to be was a halfway decent person/But I had always been afraid of change." "It's Hard to Be Happy" speaks for itself. "Stoner Yodel #2" allows as how jealousy keeps him alive. "Older Women" wishes his girlfriend would do the introductions before the title song comes along to reprise the bleak descriptive "totally estranged." But before you throw up your hands and go thataway, let me note that on this album Snider's unvirtuosic but irrepressible guitar should be enough to keep you listening. A MINUS

Taylor Swift: The Life of a Showgirl (Republic) As a sheerly technical matter this is at the very least and among other things an excellent Max Martin record. Every one of the dozen tracks splits the difference between catchy and melodic and it's to composer-vocalist-co-producer Swift's credit as well as hookmeister Martin's that they're all both. Beyond that, however, what they're "about," if anything, is beyond my ken. As I understand it she's not only got it going on with some football player, but as mere mortals like to say, it's "serious." And since I'm a person who cannot name a single contemporary football player, I'm not capable in any way of gauging their longterm chances as a couple. But as a marriage fan I wish them the best. If a visitor wants to hear this and my daughter isn't around I'll play it with moderate pleasure. B PLUS

Wednesday: Bleeds (Dead Oceans) Karly Hartzman specializes in bleak tales from the scrubby subsistence bohemia of greater Asheville, North Carolina. Stoking bonfires with leaf blowers seems like fun, and why shouldn't your champagne taste like elderberry wine? But weeds ruin the local trampoline, one guy needs a new set of choppers after a local thug mistakes him for the S.O.B. who fucked his wife, and eating grocery-store sushi while you chop up your ketamine with your room key isn't most people's idea of a good time. In the mountains this music may well have its own life. Pastoral as that term is generally understood it isn't. A MINUS

And It Don't Stop, November 12, 2025

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December 10, 2025