Rambling Fox

September 2025 Music Round-Up

Art by Sancoon

September's come and gone, the autumn season has truly begun. Time to reflect on what happened during the month musically... a lot of purchases, for one. Not many new releases though, aat least ones I've listened to more than briefly - I have some catching up to do in some regards)

New Music Immediate Impressions

Jeff Tweedy - Twilight Override

It's... three discs of Jeff Tweedy, solo. No wild experiments he could only pull off solo, not three thematic and/or stylistically different chapters - just three discs and nearly two hours of classic Tweedy alt-country and former-alt-rock singer/songwriter musings. Gentle tempos, softly sung dryly witty heart-bearing lyrics, a comradery atmosphere borne through recording these songs with friends and family in the home studio. This is strictly for the Wilcoheads who find Tweedy's voice and the way he writes melodies to be a comfort zone to just dwell in for a little while. That's me included, hi. I don't think anything on Twilight Override comes even close to Jeff at his strongest, but it's a cosily hypnotic bundle of songs with the warmth and intimacy you'd come to expect from his solo albums by this point. This is nothing that's going to the rock the world of any newcomers or casual Wilco appreciators, but I knew what I was entering when I ordered the album and it delivers basically exactly that.

Book Corner

I also bought and finished a couple of great music books during last month, which are worth talking about briefly.

One is Chris Deville's Such Great Heights: The Complete Cultural History of the Indie Rock Explosion, which in summary is a set of interconnected essays on the 2000s indie rock scene (primarily in the US, though touching a bit of the UK scene too): how it came to be, the different ways it grew and how it evolved to the less decipherable form of "indie" that exists in the modern day. It's both a history of the scene/"genre" as well as an examination of its various facets, from the underground origins and the rise of Pitchfork to the Myspace emo scene and how the sound became mainstream through the likes of The OC. It covers a whole lot of ground in a relatively scant amount of time (350 pages or so), but it's a really good cut-through of the period - especially for someone like me who 1) is an indie rock nerd and 2) lived through that era, albeit from a different geographical location. It's a really solid read. Deville used to write the This Week in Pop column in Stereogum which is partly what drew me into this given he's a really good writer, and I appreciate his narrative voice throughout: keeping things mostly observational and objective, but relating with his personal story throughout in a way that adds colour and resonance.

The other book has been Keith Cameron's 168 Songs of Hatred and Failure: A History of Manic Street Preachers which is, well, the history of Manics told through a deep-dive analysis of specifically selected 168 songs across their back catalogue. I would've been a sucker for a song-by-song book about the Manics anyway, but this has turned out even better than I expected: before going into the book I didn't realise just how much it's built on brand new interviews with the band, and that's incredible. There's so much previously unrevealed information here (and a couple of confirmations/debunkings of popular fan rumours), including from the eras that haven't been dug into as deep as some of their classic albums. Unfortunately this does also suffer from the typical biography flaw of those early and classic albums receiving vastly more attention than the later records (the song chapters eventually shrink from 4-6 pages per song to 1-2 per song), but the information is still excellent - to the point that I really wish they had included more of the band's songs!

It also makes my Manics song by song blog shrivel and wither in embarrassment...

Hoard Updates

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CD

So in my defense, half of these were finds on a flea market and were dirt cheap. I'm not made of money nor have I gone mad - but I am running out of space.

Besides all the random grab-baggery that includes some discography completionism (Music, the Depeche Mode albums) and whim purchases of hit albums from turn-of-millennium Finnish artists to explore nostalgically (Don Johnson Big Band, Emmi), there's a couple of "planned" purchases as well. Both Worlds and Boardface have been elusive debuts I've wanted to have hold of physically for a while, and some of the music shops I frequent online were kind to me this month in that regard; same with the SA Remix album, which came up at a good price at Discogs so I can continue to fill the Sonic shelf (it's not a particularly good remix album but that's besides the point). I also randomly got into revisiting Lemon Demon in August, and then on a whim grabbed a few of his albums on CD - these reissues under Needlejuice Records are really lush little packages, filled with extras.

Music reviews

I was hoping to have more updates this month but life somewhat got in the way. But I did make some progress - finished up the National catch-up, and starting a new 'long discography' project going through Chumbawamba's career album by album and review by review.

Most played song of the month according to Last.FM

I randomly got hooked into The Ark's wonderful debut We Are The Ark in September, and found myself repeat-playing it a lot over the course of a week (this also prompted in me trying to seek some of their old CD singles to get the b-sides physically, "Calleth You, Cometh I" happened to be conveniently sold). Many of its tracks are filling up the top scrobble stats this month - the below, "It Takes a Fool to Remain Sane", is one of my favourite songs of all time.

#music