Lav's Music Corner

As is so often the case I'm behind on albums I want to review this year and as we've done many times in the past on this blog, Music Festivals are a great way to knock some of those out. This week I will (hopefully) be dropping two review packs of some artists who spent the past two weekends performing at Coachella.  Underdressed at the Symphony  - Faye Webster After not loving Faye Webster during her breakthrough I really clicked with her 2021 album I know i'm funny haha  in a way I wasn't expecting. I always had my suspicions that her gentle demeanor and witty songwriting would translate into yet another album that good and I think my expectations were lowered even more by lukewarm reactions to nearly every single she dropped in advance of the record. I can give credit to the first two singles though. Lead single But Not Kiss  is easily the best song on the record and one of the only that could slot nicely into Faye's previous album. Its successor Lifetime  is...

Snail Mail is the indie rock and singer-songwriter alias of musician Lindsey Jordan. She first turned heads in 2016 with her Habit  EP before signing with Matador records and releasing a fan favorite debut album Lush  in 2018. Now three and a half years later we are finally getting the follow-up, which quickly became one of the most anticipated new albums of the year for many young indie fans. Review by Lav: Every time one of these records comes out I suppose it's a chance to redeem myself from the narrative that I hate them. By "one of these" I mean a young indie singer-songwriter girl that is probably huge on tik tok and with people who have Smiths fan accounts on Instagram. Faye Webster, Clairo, Caroline Polachek to some extent and pretty much the entirety of boygenius. Every once in a while when I toss out a good review for one of these albums like Phoebe Bridgers last year or Faye Webster earlier this year I hope that it can turn the course, but no. I still get plent...

If there is one genre that always had way more releases than I could possibly ever cover, its rap. But a close second is indie/singer-songwriter records which are easy to produce and there are a LOT of them. It is also one of the most homogenized genres out there with so much of it sounding functionally indistinguishable sonically and relying on the personality or story-telling of its artist to bear the entire weight of the project. This means that I typically don't enjoy these style of projects as much as most, but I still think it's appropriate to get my thoughts out there on some of the bigger ones.  Home Video  - Lucy Dacus While I haven't been head over heels for much of Lucy's work so far it's difficult to deny her talent as a vocalist and her infectious personality. When she's at her best as a soloist or member of boygenius she is capable of great things and after hearing a few good singles I was hoping that Home Video  would be her best outing yet. The r...