Lav's Music Corner

These categorizations continue to get stupider and stupider. This time around the name of the game is playful. These 5 bands to varying degrees of rock and pop from post-punk to electro-pop all deliver a pretty playful push and pull that, while nebulous, made sense for me to put together.  Strange Burden  - Font Font are a Texas band that first caught my eye last year when I saw indie blogs hyping up their song It , which I really enjoyed. It also inspired me to listen to their debut single Sentence 1 , which I'll forever be wishing I wasn't so late to. That momentum continued to build into this year with more strong singles and a resulting 30-minute debut album. My favorite of those two follow-up singles was Hey Kekule  a groovy Talking Heads-ish combination of dance rhythms and chimes with a neurotic punk intensity.   The first non-single on the album is the opening track The Golden Calf  a messy and noisy piece of frenetic post-punk. It doesn't star...

This week was headlined by a major new release in the electronica world. See where it laded among a series of promising indie singles.  5.  Point Him Out  - That Mexican OT (feat. DaBaby) I was late coming around to That Mexican OT's big hit Johnny Dang  last year but eventually, the song grew on me a lot as I continued to hear it on the charts. So far this year he's shifted away from the faster and more slick flows that made the track so unique into something harder-hitting. I wasn't crazy about it on his first new single but it works better here with an assist from DaBaby who fits right into this style.  Listen 4.  Sideways  - JT On her second solo single JT continues to experiment with a colder and less expressive demeanor than much of her City Girls music. On Sideways  it's even more of an embrace without some of the confident interludes and attention-grabbing jokes involved.  But what results may be an even more focused and impressive di...

Not exactly a world class week of new music, but here are the highlights regardless.  5.  The Mad Stone  - Everything Everything While this still isn't the band at their peak, I do think this is an improvement from the previous single they dropped. It contains some of the always unique vocalizations you expect to hear from them and it does rise dramatically with a creeping piano phrase that I like a lot. My only issue with the song is that the band isn't writing anywhere near their catchiest material here and the song never really worked its way into my head.  Listen 4.  Get Close  - Ari Lennox While this track is definitely getting more from Ari as a performer than the songwriting itself I don't really see that as all too much of a complaint. Ari continues to be a world class vocalist and even when she isn't given the strongest direction it's still entrancing. The song isn't as memorable as some of the best moments on her last album but I still enjoy what ...

At some point in any great indie bands career, for some reason, they turn to a more synthetic and often more dancy sound. This isn't perfectly true for the pipeline of all three of these acts but it comes in varying degrees and covering them all together just made sense.  Life Is Yours  - Foals I didn't review this record right when it came out because I thought I knew what Foals were doing. After Part 2  of their previous studio effort failed to impress despite a great and hard-hitting lead single, they had turned towards making what is ostensibly a synth-pop album. I was wrong. Unlike many bands who enter the fray having abandoned their songwriting principles completely, Foals actually manage to bring out a number of catchy hooks alongside their ever-present satisfying compositions. The first half of this record features one shimmering high point after another as we breeze through a trilogy of singles that I wasn't crazy about at first but make the start of the record S...

Everything Everything is a British experimental pop band who have spent the last decade releasing five critically acclaimed projects blending futuristic pop sounds with the worlds of art rock and electronica. The decade was highlighted by 2015's Get To Heaven  a record whose specific sound the band has quietly transitioned away from in recent years.  Review By Lavender: I quite enjoy the music of Everything Everything, and while Get To Heaven  is clearly the bands best record I enjoy the rest of their material more than most. That includes their last record 2017's A Fever Dream  which wasn't perfect but included some of my favorite tracks from the bands career in Night Of The Long Knives  and Can't Do . The singles didn't blow me away this time around and I wasn't sure what to expect from the record but the resulting songs here aren't terrible or incredible, just alright. Two of the singles that didn't do much for me still didn't win me over on the r...