Kevin Morby sounds serious. Sometimes the former Woods bassist shades to the sepulchral but, often, he just conveys poetic heft. Morby’s delivery and his warm baritone is sometimes reminiscent of Skip Spence and often of Leonard Cohen. He sounds like a hip oracle. On his latest, Morby stays in a dark mode, but he changes hats a few times, conjuring John Wesley Harding-era Dylan, evoking Lou Reed and the Velvets here, the Ramones there. (He’s at his lightest when signaling his kinship with Joey, Johnny, Dee Dee and Tommy on “1234,” a jittery ripped-jeans rocker, which is still sort of morbid.) City Music, Morby’s fourth album, sounds less fussed over and rawer than Morby’s 2016 release Singing Saw. That record was filled with songs about songwriting. Morby had holed up in the desert playing piano. This one is filled with songs about cities. Upping the gothic vibe, Morby includes a segment read from Flannery O’Connor’s The Violent Bear It Away. A sense of urban dislocation pervades this record, with tunes from the perspective of someone watching and feeling the world, the city and life itself, but not entirely in it. “I live high oh my tin can up in the sky,” Morby sings on “Tin Can.” At the core of this record is Morby, his voice and his guitar—often sounding like he’s singing quietly, with spartan rhythm-section accompaniment, but mostly alone, in a reverb-heavy bunker. “All alone on a crowded street, I never was someone you’d want to meet,” he sings on “Crybaby.” There’s a sense of motion, with travel and the isolation that comes with it, threaded throughout the songs.