Lav's Music Corner

With a quarter of the year behind us we're all starting to get a little bit of a picture of what music and the music industry is going to look like in 2019. There have been plenty of flawed records but a handful of them have shown off something really special, so on this list I will run through the ten best albums I've heard so far this year and dive into why they shouldn't be missed. 10. FIDLAR - Almost Free Almost Free  isn't a perfect record by any means and it has some experiments that seem a little strange as well as some moments that don't stand out. But at its best the album is one of the most rattling and fun challenges to rock music that's come out all year. Songs like By Myself , Can't You See and Scam Likely  sound so different from each other but find common ground on excellent songwriting, exciting performances and a refreshing energy not found in so much tame and lifeless modern rock music.  Review 9. Foals - Everythin...

American Football is the legendary Illinois based emo band who's 1999 album American Football  became a legendary pillar of midwest emo and math rock and is considered by some to be one of the best albums of the 90s. The band reunited 15 years later and after playing a series of shows, released their 2nd studio album in 2016 to very mixed reviews. Now three years later than band tries to rekindle their magic and recover their reputation with a 3rd album. Review By Lavender: American Football (1999) is by nearly every metric and brilliant and successful album. It was the pioneering moment for midwestern emo and has a legendary reputation among music fans. The project still resonates with me to these days and contains some songs that I believe are absolute masterpieces. While many were hostile towards their second effort in 2016 I tried to look for what the project did well as much as what it did wrong. While their songwriting took a hit there were a lot of moments of pristi...

Flume is the moniker for Harley Streten, the Australian record producer who has been building up his name since 2013, when he dropped his self-titled debut album to universally positive reviews. In between doing remixes and production work for some popular artists like Lorde, Arcade Fire and Vince Staples he released a second studio album, 2017's Skin , which was met with less positive reviews but granted Flume his first big hit with the Kai featuring song Never Be Like You . Since then Flume has released two Skin Companion  EP's full of material he made for the album that contained some well received tunes and he announced the surprise drop of Hi This Is Flume  just two days before its release.  Review By Lavender: Flume's debut album Flume  was one of my favorite records of 2012 and as far as pure dance music goes it's one of the shining examples of the genre in the 2010's. The decent but not amazing follow-up 2016's Skin  slightly dulled my expectati...

Lux Prima is the first collaborative album between Karen O, lead singer of acclaimed indie band Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and super-producer Danger Mouse who has worked with the likes of Cee Lo Green, MF Doom, The Black Keys, Aaron Dessner, and most recently Parquet Courts. The two are coming from very different places in their respective careers and their styles clashing should be of interest to musical fans of all kind given the pedigree of both artists. Review By Lavender: I would say on average I differ from most fans of both of these artists. I think indie fans like Karen O and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs more than I do and I think fans don't like Danger Mouse as much as I do. So maybe given that balance and the fact that the title track to this album was released as an excellent single, we can all meet in the middle and anticipate a record that should have some above average qualities pulled from its two collaborators. The album already had a pretty substantial headstart with its f...

Matmos is the electronic duo of M.C. Schmidt and Drew Daniel who have spent two decades making some of the most creative, genre bending and conceptual electronic music around. From sampling sounds like cutting hair and crayfish neural activity to crafting an entire album around surgical sounds Matmos have always been interesting and conceptual and their most recent effort revolves entirely around samples of plastic.  Review By Lavender: I am a very big fan of Matmos, lets get that out of the way. Albums like Quasi-Objects and The Rose Has Teeth In The Mouth Of The Beast  are excellent efforts that help bookend their true masterpiece. 2001's A Chance To Cut Is A Chance To Cure is a once in a career burst of creativity that results in a truly special album full of experimental electronic music that helped break ground for the genre. Given that the last Matmos project 2016 Ultimate Care II  was both a unique experiment, created entirely from samples pulled from wash...

Dido is the once superstar British pop singer who blew up the charts with huge hit albums in 1999 and 2003. Since then her efforts have been sparse and less appreciated but given her pedigree there is reason to believe Dido can contribute something late in her career.  Review By Lavender: I am very well aware of and appreciate many of Dido's hits from early in her career and I have always been willing to admit she is certainly talented. Unfortunately I haven't heard much in the way of her studio albums that really thrilled me, despite this I believed in her talent to come around on Still On My Mind  and deliver a good record without falling into the pitfalls that most pop artists do when rounding into the later acts of their careers, she successfully accomplishes one of these. Thankfully at no point on the project does Dido ever feel like she is giving up any of her artistic desires in favor of critical success, as time and time again on this album she chooses muc...

Juice WRLD is the stage name for Jarad Higgins the Chicago trap rapper and singer who blew up to stardom last year with his Lucid Dreams  single, debut album and subsequent features including Ski Mask The Slump God's Nuketown , Travis Scott's No Bystanders , and Lil Yachty's Yacht Club . In 2019 he has kept busy dropping two singles in the weeks leading up the the release of his massive 22 track and hour plus length sophomore album Death Race For Love .  Review By Lavender: I'm willing to admit what many more headass critics won't. Juice Wrld's Lucid Dreams  is a fantastic song. It landed near the middle of my top 100 singles of the year last year and for a huge radio hit it is both trendy and fantastically performed. Juice clearly as talent and on his debut album Goodbye & Good Riddance  he desperately needed help channeling his talent into songs that are unique and well formed. In my review for the album, which some personal friends of mine were n...

Many of the best pop records of all time will click instantly. Michael Jackson's Thriller , Madonna's Like A Prayer  and The Beach Boys Pet Sounds  are full of buttery smooth songwriting that is easy to understand and delicious on the ears, and they all deserve the acclaim they collect. These next ten records relish in their difficulty and craft compositions and concepts that push the boundaries for music and as a result, can be tough on their first listens. These albums may be jarring and confusing at first but sticking with them will provide some of the most rewarding musical experiences of all time. 10. Xiu Xiu - Forget (2017) Xiu Xiu have a long history of making music that can turn your average listener away, but  Forget  is not only one of their best records, but one of their hardest to fully engage with. Frontman Jamie Stewart can turn from whispering devilishly into your ear to screaming his brains out from a distant and if his erratic but brilliant p...

Gessaffelstein is a French music producer who blew up after doing production work om Kanye West's Yeezus  in 2013. Since then he has collaborated with the likes of Phoenix, The Weeknd and A$AP Rocky and released two studio album, the 2nd of which Hyperion  was teased with 3 singles of varying quality in late 2018 into 2019. Review By Lavender: Gessaffelstein is talented, nobody is denying that, Black Skinhead  alone is a testament to his talent. But after releasing a debut album that didn't thrill me and doing some very average work in The Weeknd's My Dear, Melancholy  EP last year I was hesitant for this album. It's lead single Reset  at the tail end of last year grabbed me and brought me back into the excitement of a new project and its follow-up Lost In The Fire  with The Weeknd was a better collaboration then their tracks on his EP and really got me ready to hear Hyperion. This hype was dragged just a touch by the release of the very mediocre P...

William Basinski is an experimental, avant-garde music composer who has released a plethora of solo projects and collaborations surrounding ambient and experimental soundscapes. He is most well known for The Disintegration Tapes I-IV, a brilliant series of lopped ambient tracks that are deteriorating as they loop. This creates the brilliant artificial feeling of slowly slipping away and losing control that was otherwise untapped in electronic and ambient music.  Review By Lavender: If you know me there is a good chance you've had to physically stop me from telling you everything I know about The Disintegration Loops . Basinski's masterpiece series are among my favorite experimental music pieces of all time. The physical destruction of the tapes, the album cover and its relationship to 9/11, its brilliant anniversary release, the unknown origin of the original tapes. Everything surrounding the tapes is brilliant and helps make them what they are, but listening t...

Foals is a British indie rock band who blew up upon the release of their critically acclaimed debut album Anecdotes  in 2008 and have since been a consistent force in the indie rock world as they would drop three more popular records throughout the next decade that established them as one of the most popular and successful indie acts of their generation. It's been five years since the release of Foals last album What Went Down  and after dropping three quick and successful singles earlier this year excitement for the bands project is as high as ever. Review By Lavender: Foals has been a very solid and consistent member of the indie rock world for almost the entirety of the over 10 years they've been in existence. Any questions of their quality that a decent but not amazing first album may have brought up we're certainly fixed in 2010 when their second album, Total Life Forever  took the indie world by storm. But a few years later I was scared that the band may en...

Lil Skies is yet another in the line of emerging trap stars who had moderate success with two big singles in 2017 Red Roses  and Nowadays  and scored his biggest hit to date with i the lead single to his second studio album Shelby . Riding a similar wave of many of his contemporaries Lil Skies needed to find a way to separate himself and give people a reason to listen while the spotlight was still on him.'' Review By Lavender: My expectations for this album were admittedly not very high, Skies first album Life Of A Dark Rose  was decent but very forgettable and despite being a hit the big single for Shelby which came in the form of i  is one of the least essential hip hop songs I've heard all year and unfortunately Lil Skies proves on this album that he is exactly who we all thought he was.  So let me jump into a handful of the problems that plague this album from start to finish. Starting off with the fact that far too many of these songs are obvi...

Sundara Karma are a British indie rock band that had a handful of viral singles throughout 2015 and into 2016, but stuck in label limbo the group wasn't able to release its debut album Youth Is Only Ever Fun In Retrospect  in January of 2017 to moderate critical acclaim and not much commercial success.  Review By Lavender: I was one of the people very excited for Sundara Karma after some of their early singles grabbed my attention, but even on some of their earliest EPs their failure to hit with consistency showed. After taking way too long to release a debut and losing the hype train they had built for themselves it made almost no splash in the music world, but now two years later it seems like the only thing Sundara Karma have learned is how to drown in their contemporaries sounds. Unfortunately this time around whatever sound Sundara Karma were going for have basically devolved into a mixed bag of watered down versions of some more successful indie pop bands. The...

T-Pain is a Florida rapper, singer and producer who was everywhere in popular music throughout the late 2000's as he blew up dropping multiple #1 albums and appearing on numerous bit hit singles as a featured artist. Though he's been around for nearly 15 years T-Pain has only 6 studio albums to his belt and after a hot start, any music at all has been hard to come by in the 2010's and the quality has been noticeably hit or miss.  Review By Lavender: Who doesn't love some good old T-Pain? Songs like I'm Sprung, Buy U A Drank and Can't Believe It  may be dated but for those of us that remember a time when the man was everywhere they are veritable classics. And that isn't even touching on some killer features like Chris Brown's Kiss Kiss, Kanye West's Good Life  and Flo Rida's Low . But even for those of us that loved his tracks back in the day it is hard to say much about his output in this decade, which is why it's so surprising som...

Andrew Hozier-Byrne known professionally as Hozier is an Irish singer-songwriter who rose to fame in late 2013 on the back of his breakthrough hit song Take Me To Church . He channeled elements of blues and folk music into his debut album Hozier all the way back in 2014 and was largely silent for years after. Until late 2018 when he dropped the critically acclaimed and much loved Nina Cried Power  EP and announced a long awaited follow-up sophomore album shortly after.  Review By Lav: Even though its been a while many of us probably still have the first time we heard Take Me To Church stuck in out memory banks somewhere. The song is an excellent and bombastic pop-rock tune with strong roots in blues and folk music and a spectacular performance from Hozier. His debut album lived up moderately to they hype and I remember in what is now a long lost review giving it a 7/10 and being excited for his future as an artist. This only multiplied once I heard the Nina Cried ...

Weezer is the legendary California alternative rock band that rose to fame in the 90s after dropping two universally acclaimed albums. Following into the 2000's commercial success continued to find its way to Weezer becoming an alternative radio staple and culminating in the biggest hit of the band's career the often maligned Beverly Hills. In the 2010's Weezer traded out their commercial success at large for a return to critical form beginning with the well received Everything Will Be Alright In The End  and peaking with the fantastic Weezer (The White Album). But the stylistic approach changed rapidly in the wake of The White Album  and its follow-up became a much hated return to form making Pacific Daydream  largely viewed as a disappointment, with prominent critics calling out its lead single Feels Like Summer  as being a particularly disastrous pursuit. So with the dropping of largely varied and critically confusing singles in the lead up to The Black Album ...