Consumer Guide: September, 2025

Soul jingles meet ad jingles, "Dumb Luck" rhymes with "IDGAF," three L.A. sisters savor sex and tunes, and the Mahotella Queens shine on their own.

Amaarae: Blackstar (Golden Angel/Interscope) "Ketamine, coke, molly" at their cutest, weirdest, and sexiest, but only if that's actually your idea of a good time, which I hope it isn't ("Stuck Up," "B2B") *

Body Type: Expired Candy (Poison City, '23) The only discernible reason that this sexed-up Australian band—three frontwomen and a female drummer now together for nearly a decade—is often compared to the estimable though somewhat less predictably preoccupied Courtney Barnett is that, well, Barnett is a woman and indeed a lesbian. What she isn't is anywhere near as raucous; the aesthetic on the band's catchiest album reminds me a lot more of Nirvana except that it's (guess what) sexed-up. Which in itself renders it quite the engaging take on pleasure and hooks and rock and roll. A MINUS

Chance the Rapper: Starline (self-released) With five mixtapes and three albums proper including this one behind him, 32-year-old Chancellor Johnathan Bennett is the son of a Chicago pol who's not at all shy about claiming woke. Michelle Obama has signed on among his many advocates, especially after he oversaw a million-dollar donation to the Chicago public school system. Among the lyrical themes here are barbershops, vegetables, Floyd Patterson, Luther Vandross, and fetching females feeling him up. Never stupid and seldom boring, neither of which adds up to irresistibly compelling, he remains a rapper to root for as the fascists threaten to occupy his city's streets. B PLUS

Marshall Crenshaw: From the Hellhole (Yep Roc) Married to one woman for almost 50 years, Crenshaw no longer has such a vivid autobiographical grasp on what me and my own wife once summed up as his "simple because he's simple," but remains convinced that it's too late to stop now ("Walkin' Around," "No Time") **

Charley Crockett: Dollar a Day (Island) A relaxed, deep-voiced, it says here Tennessee-bred Texan blessed with forefathers who include a state senator and a chemical engineer, not to mention a surname that enables him to claim a bigger forefather who'll ease his way onto the folk circuit. There he'll tour like a hero until he can drive his Ford LTD down the avenue of the stars and become a king of the digital frontier, preferably in that order. B PLUS

From the Dirt: Colored Edge of Memory (Partial Lyrics) From not just the dirt but the modest Western Maryland city of Frederick come frontman Daniel Kenny's lissome, sweet-murmured, troubled love and local color songs, which he bestows with such titles as "Train Wreck at the Bluegrass Jam," "Afterwards, on the Greyhound," and "The Edge of the World Is a Rounding Error." Regrettably, that old unreliable love has apparently proven a bigger problem: "And we swerved through the years like a drunken affair/Crumpled up like discarded clothes/And I hated myself and I hated her more/For the wreck that I'd made of us both." Kenny sounds like a sweet guy. But he also sounds like someone who's been a drunk so long that he's taken up abstinence. After all, "moderation leaves a hell of a mark." A MINUS

S.G. Goodman: Planting by the Signs (Slough Gates/Thirty Tigers) On her third album, 37-year-old Kentucky farmgirl Goodman continues to sing so melodically yet so unassumingly she has few if any peers. Although she never misses a note, she doesn't make a thing of it, achieving a calm, fetching beauty that may well be homegrown but verges on the exotic where I come from. Among other things it includes the only song I can recall that's about saving a turtle, and from local ruffians at that. But I'm pleased to report not just that in addition to "small towns where my mind gets stuck," it also reaches Los Angeles, and that there is indeed a love object, only one I think: "I call your name in sweet surrender/Marry me in inclement weather." Give her an imaginary hug. I have, and it felt good. A MINUS

Haim: I Quit (Columbia) On the most songful of an album catalogue that's never lacked melody, the three L.A. sisters savor sex even more than they do tune while wishing that guys—with special emphasis on the sexy ones—were more patient, more reliable, just better. True enough, "I'm getting you hard/In the back of the car/But baby you know that I'll still be leaving tomorrow." But then again, "Something about it made you seem like/You could fill the seat next to me without complications." By a large margin I find them not just catchy but theoretically attractive enough to truly hope so even if it means not taking the album title literally. A

Mahotella Queens: Buya Buya Come Back (Umsakazo) It's been a quarter century since Lion of Soweto cum mbaqanga king Simon Mahlathini Nkabinde roared on this earth, so it would be going too far to claim that the superb live-in-U.K. 1988-89 Music Inferno is nevertheless not nearly as definitive as 1980's incomparable multi-artist Indestructible Beat of Soweto. The genre is just too male. Nonetheless, I have a hunch that at some future moment when I'm in the mood for an Indestructible Beat alternative this ebullient, newly recorded female sampler-cum-best-of will return to my CD player, fully annotated by Hilda Tloubatla, who joined up 60 years ago at 22 and is still at it. A

The Oxys: Casting Pearls Before Swine (Cleopatra) Mixed-gender "punk firebrands," admirers have no doubt—you know, as in "I'm not gonna die this time/Still might get lucky if I keep tryin,'" ("Long Shadows," "Poisoning the Heart") ***

Panic Shack: Panic Shack (Brace Yourself) Finishing your half hour off with one called "Thelma and Louise" doesn't make your "Girl Band Starter Pack" a feminist bastion, a truth to which they say so what ("Tit School," "We Need to Talk About Dennis") **

Peter Stampfel, Friends & Daughters: Song Shards (Jalopy) Comprising 46 often foreshortened "soul jingles, stoic jingles, vintage jingles, prayers, and rounds" that break down into 20 obscure hymns and apothegms and 26 long-lost radio ads in just 43 minutes, and what can I say? At first I thought those 72 . . . ditties (???) seemed pretty thin as pieces of vocal music and 2021's Peter Stampfel's 20th Century in 100 Songs it ain't. But Stampfel is so unpredictable and so generous of spirit that I found myself playing it over again after reading the downloadable 23 pages of notes Stampfel wrote to contextualize these compositions. These include his thoughts on the religious ramifications of the project, which though an atheist I found worthy of reading, rereading, and revisiting musically. How well they and for that matter it will endure there's no knowing at this point. But let me call attention to my favorite tunelet here, which goes: "When the values go up up up/And the prices go down down down/Robert Hall this season/Will show you the reason/Low overhead, low overhead." True, the clothing chain of that name went bankrupt in 1977. But take it from me—the songlets hang in there. Carola likes it too. A

William Elliott Whitmore: Kilonova (Bloodshot '18) Hard-touring Iowa farmboy turned-protest-singing Iowa atheist puts a radical edge on material appropriated from Bill Withers, Captain Beefheart, Ray Charles, and the Magnetic Fields, among others ("Fear of Trains," "Five Feet High and Rising," "Bat Chain Puller") ***

Jubal Lee Young: Squirrels (Reconstruction) "Singer-songwriter whose father wrote the Eagles/Baez warhorse "Seven Bridges Road" ventures into more personal and occasionally wacky territory in which his grandmother fetishizes a Portuguese punchbowl even though it's missing three glasses, "Dumb Luck" rhymes with a one dubbed "IDGAF," and "Lost in Hollywood" presages a closer called "Welcome to Nashville, Asshole." Without having put time into the research, it's my guess that his dad was nowhere near as funny. A MINUS

And It Don't Stop, September 10, 2025

August 13, 2025

October 8, 2025