Lav's Music Corner

For this week's rapid-fire reviews, I'm taking a look at 5 records from indie and alternative bands that would have, at one point in their career, been MUST-COVER acts. For one reason or another all of these bands who have material I adore under their belt slipped through the cracks earlier this year, so let's catch up.  Pink Elephant  - Arcade Fire I can be a little bit picky about production, I think everyone knows that at this point. But one thing I normally don't do it let that fact completely dictate my feelings on an album, but I just can't fucking tolerate Pink Elephant . This shift to a more intimate style at the hands of Arcade Fire's dual vocalists had potential, but god, they should have handed the production off to someone who knew what they were doing. Instead of raw in an intimate and vulnerable way, these songs are raw in a grating, outright painful way that clashes with the obvious ambitions of the songwriting.  Take the single "Year Of The ...

Arcade Fire are a Canadian indie rock band, in fact they are likely THE Canadian indie rock band. They've released albums that were both massively acclaimed and massively successful like Funeral  and The Suburbs . Neither of the bands previous two releases reached that level of acclaim, with their last album, 2017's Everything Now , receiving a particular amount of backlash from fans.  Review By Lav: I have no Arcade Fire hot takes. The closest thing would be that I think Neon Bible  is slightly overrated and some of the deep cuts on Reflektor  are kind of underrated. But there's no doubt that Funeral  and The Suburbs  are indie era defining masterpieces and that the band was essential to introducing the sound of indie music into the mainstream. While I will make a concession here about the title track and I ended up putting Creature Comfort  on my year end singles list, there's no denying that Everything Now  was Arcade Fire's worst album by far....

What an interesting week. We had some exciting comebacks, big announcements, lead singles. A pretty great mix of stuff kind of coming out of nowhere but the weekend was all the better for it, enjoy <3 5.  Honeybrains  - Royal Blood If you have a soft spot for really back to basics rock with heavy distortion, formulaic progressions and simplistic instrumentation then this will be the track for you this week. Even acknowledging how much the band borrows I can't help but admit that they manage to do some good stuff with these stop and start riffs and a handful of catchy refrains.  Listen 4.  Gibson Girl  - Ethel Cain While Ethel's music continues to be difficult to define with genre labels it still has an aesthetic vision that is irresistible. The dark and spacious instrumentation and sexually charged instrumentation paints this expressive portrait of her sexuality that is utterly intoxicating. While the song deploys a number of instrumental additions throughout...

Ten years is a long time, you'll realize that as you stumble upon records on this list that you vividly remember when they were released, and suddenly feel very old, I know I did. But ten years adds a lot to a record, we can see how albums become influential, or forgotten in the wake of the trends they either pioneered or rode in on the tail end of. Had I made a list like this in 2010 I'm sure it would have looked very different from top to bottom, and there are almost no records that we all view the same way today that we did in 2010. But for the sake of retrospective I poured through every album in my catalog from 2010 and even many more that I hadn't heard in years and assembled the 50 albums that sound the most fresh, influential and captivating today.  50. Crazy For You  - Best Coast The debut record from Best Coast isn't going to wow you with compositional density or instrumental complexity, but its attitude is impeccable. From the surf rock riffs t...