Consumer Guide: October, 2025
Nearly half an hour of covers that qualify as beautiful, a remarkably warm and rich love album, a perky bad-ass faces down this grim moment, and amorous vulnerability intensified by a croak.
Bright Eyes: Kids Table (Dead Oceans) Omaha-born Conor Oberst has manned over a dozen bands since he released his debut at 13, but I can’t verify how many share the kind of NYC locale that makes me feel at home with this oddly tuneful eight-track EP, which begins “I wish I had a ship that sailed the waters/Wish I had about a hundred dollars” and goes on to name-check Candace Bergen, Salman Rushdie, Guy Fawkes, and others I bet I missed. Also crammed into the track listing is one that cites “union scabs singing songs for pacifists,” another that goes “When the blue of the night meets the bruise around your eye” a “dyslexic palindrome” that may or may not go “A man, a plan, a canal, napalm,” and one called “It Always Feels Good and It Never Hurts,” an instrumental that nevertheless turns up online with a lyric that reads in its entirety “Heroin.” B PLUS
Sabrina Carpenter: Man’s Best Friend (Island) In which the showgirl-glamorous, romantic-erotic blonde tries and apparently fails to forge one or more deep and indeed pleasurable bonds with an evolving collection of male hunks with brains and