Consumer Guide Album

Robert Forster: Strawberries [Tapete, 2025]
Eight new ones, all of which postdate 2023's The Candle and the Flame with its definitive chemo song "It's Only Poison," not a dirge because the stuff saved his wife's life. Nothing that strong here because damn few songs are, although for all that the first four come close enough, with my favorite not the title number where the former Go-Between eats all of them himself, but the troth-plighting eight-minute "Breakfast on the Train," which ends with him and his wife-to-be making a racket when they finally find a suitable hotel. And somehow then there's the "alone and in need of love" "Foolish I Know," with its "I knew it at the age of 10, it wouldn't be women, it would be men." A−