Lav's Music Corner

Become  EP - Beach House I enjoyed Beach House's new album Once Twice Melody  quite a bit last year so I was excited to get an extra helping of it. Previous times that Beach House has dug into the B-Side well, most notably the wonderful song Chariot , have been exceedingly pleasing. While these tracks are by no means bad, I can kind of see why they were left off of the already dense tracklist of the band's last album. The first two tracks in the project do have all the hallmarks of Beach House but lack some of the heart and feel like they would just blend in really innocuously into any of their best albums. Holiday House  follows and it's much closer to the band's best material. Even then while I think it does an amazing job of building up to the chorus, that chorus doesn't have the punch that I would necessarily hope for. I've also come around to the beautiful textures of Black Magic  whose instrumentation is truly some of the prettiest I've ever heard on a...

Beach House are a Baltimore dream pop duo who have been around for more than 15 years now. In that time they've become one of the most critically acclaimed and respected acts in all of indie music. Once Twice Melody  is their 8th album and comes 4 years after it's predecessor. The project is a four disc album what was released in portions dating back to 2021.  Review By Lav: Is there anybody who hates Beach House? Maybe if you have no patience or eye for nuance their stuff can sound boring but what makes it beautiful and captivating is so obvious that I can't imagine anybody who doesn't see it. While they obviously have good albums and better albums their ability to continue to impress within their sound and genre scope is remarkable. I'm no stranger to dishing out praise for the band though much of it has been retroactively as most of their catalog predates my reviewing. Last year when I took a look back at 2010 I called Zebra  a top 5 song of the year and Teen Dre...

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...