Lav's Music Corner

 Review by Lavender: Darkside is the project of prolific singer and producer Nicolas Jaar alongside multi-instrumentalist Dave Harrington. The project's inception actually dates back to the earliest days of Jaar's acclaimed career and the pair's debut album together was released in 2013. Following a long dormant period, the band returned in 2021 with a second album called Spiral , which I thought was every bit as good as their debut if not better. That's why I was excited to see the wait for a third release taking just half the time and went into Nothing  expecting the pair to keep all their momentum up.  Darkside has always been a strange and difficult to define project. They're probably best described as art rock but with a production and sometimes even compositional slant inspired by Jaar's more electronica-oriented projects. But even with that premise, Nothing is by FAR the pair's weirdest and most difficult to define album yet. The project jumps all ov...

Review by Lavender: Anxious are a Connecticut band that broke through a few years ago after generating tons of regional buzz with a strong debut album Little Green House . Thanks to publications like Brooklyn Vegan I was a pretty early adopter of the band and their debut lived up to a lot of my expectations and seamlessly blended together styles of hardcore, emo, punk, and pop punk. It's for that reason that I was both excited by and invested in the bands future and what I hoped would be development. Instead, a rough collection of singles gave way to a second effort that robbed the band of nearly everything I once found so interesting about them.  I hate writing negative reviews so let me at least start by sharing what I liked about the record, primarily that it gets off to a strong start. The opener "Never Said" is by far my favorite of the singles and my favorite song on the entire record. It's a raucous pop-punk breakup song with a catchy hook and snarling lyrics f...