Lav's Music Corner

Amusement Parks On Fire are a British rock band who dabbled in the realms of shoegaze and noise rock during the 2000's. After a long hiatus the band returned in 2018 with a new EP and series of live shows, before leading up to the release of Ad Archaea , their 4th album overall and first in 11 years. Review By Lav: Amusement Parks On Fire are a personal passion of mine. They come from a time in the 2000's where shoegaze and experimental rock bands in general never really got the credit they deserve and they're one of many bands from that era I consider to be extremely underrated. The bands 2004 self-titled album is a huge favorite of mine and I was excited to see what elements of their sound the band would maintain with over a decade having passed since their previous studio album. With no singles I wasn't really sure what to expect but the band is holding tight to their layered rock sound and proves a few times throughout Ad Archaea  that they still do it well.  The re

The Mountain Goats are a long running indie folk project spearheaded by indie folk personified, John Darnielle. The band has a prolific catalog of early lo-fi recordings from the 90's and early 2000's before their sound shifted to a more expensive production sound, relatively speaking. The band spent the first half of the 2010's releasing acclaimed conceptual indie folk projects before shifting to something a little bit easier to digest in recent years, without receiving the same level of critical success.  Review By Lav: Following The Mountain Goats can be an exciting, occasionally exhaustive pursuit. The band is in the midst of a very prolific run over the last 3 years which has the potential to be quite exciting, but unfortunately the records have been tame and occasionally bloated since 2017's fun and conceptual Goths . I was excited for this project because a couple of the singles I heard peaked my interests more than projects in recent years and I think the recor

Tyler, The Creator is a California rapper and multi-medium superstar. After first emerging as the main brain behind the Odd Future hip hop collective Tyler cultivated a brand for himself that included numerous solo albums, TV shows and an imprint into the fashion industry and that's just a start. Since first breaking out Tyler has drastically changed the sound of his music, transitioning from his edgy lo-fi brand of provocative hip hop into the sounds of pop, R&B and soul music starting with 2017's Flower Boy  and expanding even further on 2019's Igor . Review By Lav: Hello! If you're a Tyler, The Creator fan reading this it's probably the first time you've seen one of my reviews since I covered IGOR  in 2019. You most likely bookmarked a tweet about it or followed my account with a burner so that you could periodically send me provocative DMs because I made the unforgivable mistake of calling out the album for the elements of it that failed to translate wit

Backxwash is an experimental rap artist who broke out last year with her God Has Nothing To Do With This Leave Him Out Of It  album which saw her fusing hip hop with industrial and metal music and would eventually go on to win the Polaris Prize. Backxwash is capitalizing quickly on the records success with a sequel that projected a noisier and even more chaotic direction for her music.  Review By Lav: Backxwash was introduced to me last year as a trans artist who had connections to fellow 2020 breakout act Black Dresses, and in my pursuit of consuming all the great trans art I could I engaged with and enjoyed her last project quite a bit. While it would be reductive to try and collectivize the artistic accomplishments of trans creators in recent years, we can highlight the ethos of the work. When we think of trans peoples contributions to music these days we probably go to hyperpop or niche electronica genres, painting futuristic escapism in digital bangers with experimental flare, and

Your Old Droog is a New York rapper who was once suspected of being a pseudonym of Nas, but has since established himself as one of the most acclaimed and prolific rappers in the rap underground. He kicked off 2021 with a pair of collaborative albums with Tha God Fahim and is keeping his pace up with one of his most fleshed out and thematically conceptual projects he's released in years in Time . Review By Lav: Droog is a fun artist to watch and one of my favorite voices in underground hip hop. He released a trio of studio albums in 2019 highlighted by the excellent Transportation  and followed it up with a busy back half of 2020 and early 2021 which resulted in 3 more projects. I was excited to see Droog returning to solo work, especially with what seemed like one of his most fleshed out and thematically connected projects in a few years. Time  totally lived up to my hype and delivers not only on Droog's classic formula of creative beat choices and lowkey delivery, but also se

Sleater-Kinney are a female fronted punk rock outfit from Washington with origins in the riot grrrl movement of the 1990's. The bands original run of records leading up to the mid 2000's is a universally acclaimed set of punk and indie rock releases and that acclaim continued when the band reformed in 2015 with their No Cities To Love  comeback album. They're 9th album was released in 2019 to very mixed reviews and is seen by many as one of their worst despite drawing attention for its St. Vincent production, and Path Of Wellness  is the first record to not feature longtime drummer Janet Weiss.  Review By Lav: I love Sleater-Kinney, from widely accepted classics like The Woods  and No Cities To Love  to underrated gems like Dig Me Out  and The Hot Rock  the girl's punk flare has always appealed to me. This is why it was so difficult to hear 2019's The Center Won't Hold  which did feature a few great songs but was largely the bands most muddled and aimless projec

AFI are a California band with a complicated 30 years history of pop punk, hardcore punk and post-hardcore in their back catalog. The group is perhaps most famous for some of their heavy pop punk flavored hits in the 2000's and have maintained a connection to the world of pop punk despite the influences of emo and post-hardcore that still exist in their style to this day. Review By Lav: While the first half of last decade went pretty poorly for AFI, like really poorly. In the what have you done for me recently world of music AFI actually has some clout to work with. Their 2017 record The Blood Album  was one of their best in a long time and I enjoyed their The Missing Man  EP quite a bit too. An astonishing 7 of the records 11 tracks were released as singles in the lead up to the album so I had a pretty good idea of what the record was going to be like going into it. And as it turns out those estimations were accurate as for everything time the record does something right, it does

Migos are an Atlanta rap trio consisting of Quavo, Offset and Takeoff whose sound in the middle of the 2010's was extremely influential to the culture and style of mainstream trap rap that still persists to this day. The duo first broke out with a series of hits from their early mixtapes and cemented their status with their universally acclaimed 2017 album Culture . After the follow-up Culture II  along with each of the rappers solo records were all critiqued for the bands routine and omnipresent sound, they took a few years of studio album silence.  Review By Lav: At this point, the Migos are who they are. I wasn't expecting Culture III  to be any kind of major change of style for the trio and it isn't. If you're familiar with the band you pretty much know what you're getting with this record, which can be a blessing and a curse. There are plenty of tracks here particularly on the first half that see Migos executing their formula very well, but when there's a f

MARINA is the recently adapted moniker of Marina Diamandis who started off her career with three albums under the Marina And The Diamonds name. After a pair of critically acclaimed albums to start off her career as a tumblr-core pop sensation she released her 3rd album to mixed reviews in 2015. After a long break she had a name change and a new record in 2019 with the two part Love + Fear  release which was met with largescale critical pushback and only moderate commercial success. Review By Lav: Marina was one of the first pop starts whose meteoric rise I got to witness first hand as track after track from her debut and sophomore albums became the backing to "just girly things" tumblr posts and early aesthetic twitter accounts, both of which were a part of my media diet. I was less excited to see Marina turn in a much less interesting direction with the colorful but not very flavorful Froot . Though that was nothing compared to the disappointment of her "comeback"

King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard are an extremely prolific Australian psych rock band who have released 18 albums in less than a decade of existence as a band. This is their 2nd album of 2021 and comes off the heels of a two part series of psychedelic desert rock music on last years K.G.  and this years L.W.   Butterfly 3000  is poised to break this sonic trend as the band promised a shift in sound before dropping the album with no singles.  Review By Lav: It wasn't that long ago that you could count on King Gizz for an exciting new concept and consistent output of good tunes at least twice a year. While 2019's Fishing For Fishes  was as big a miss as the band has ever had I was more than thrilled to see them make up for it with the thrash metal Infest The Rats Nest  later that year. Unfortunately the bands last two records have been two of their weakest to date. Sonically they work as follow-ups to another one of my least favorite Gizz albums Flying Microtonal Banana but a

Slayyyter is an LA based pop singer who first blew up on SoundCloud with hard-hitting hyperpop and club fusions. These sounds were the core of her debut mixtape in 2019 but after singing with a major label and releasing a long lime of singles Slayyyter is finally gearing up to drop her first full studio album.  Review By Lav: I've been riding with Slayyyter for a while now, ever since some of her earliest SoundCloud singles excited me as club ready pop bangers. While she has never been completely a hyperpop artist in the purist sense she is sounding less like it than ever before these days. While bangers are still in her catalog she is shooting for something much more "2000's radicalized" than the shape of hyperpop to come. This was a sonic transition that I didn't mind at all as it made her sound diverse, which was a desperate need coming into a studio album. After being shaky on a few of the singles coming into the record I sort of tempered my expectations, but