Lav's Music Corner

Was on vacation this week but I'm cooking up plenty of good stuff for the next week, let's do it. 5.  Vanessa  - Midwife If you're familiar with the brooding cloudy slowcore Midwife typically serves up then you basically know what you're getting with Vanessa . Across a full 6-and-a-half minutes Midwife makes use of swaying repetition to slowly weave together an impressively spellbinding cut that will swallow you whole if you give yourself to it.  Listen 4.  Garmonbozia  - Flying Lotus  I think everyone was anticipating a return from Flying Lotus, but I bet most people weren't expecting something like this. He returns by taking over lead vocal duties on a reserved and murky jazz number backed by his usual fluttering electronics. The slow pace and dark demeanor of the song actually plays to his strengths as a vocalist, even if its plodding pace feels a tad dry by FloLo standards.  Listen 3.  Shake It Like A  - Frost Children (feat. Danny Brown)...

Probably my last rapid fire for a while with a lot of great new music coming out, maybe. Love In Exile  - Arooj Aftab, Vijay Iyer, Shahzad Ismaily Even though I was late to formally cover the album, I really enjoyed Arooj Aftab's 2021 breakout Vulture Prince  and I was really looking forward to how she was going to follow it up. What I didn't expect, though I maybe should have, is this trio of veteran musicians linking up for a deeply compelling explorative jazz record. The group take a pretty sparse approach to filling in the cracks with their sound, serving up just vocals, keys, and bass with almost no studio interference to their original live recordings. The record is also thematically sparse with compositions built around short lines of poetry often repeated throughout and expanded upon through the developing instrumentation. Take the opening track To Remain/To Return  whose vocal diatribes often take a backseat to long wanderings on the piano only to return at surpr...

Lockstep Bloodwar  - Sightless Pit Sightless Pit is a musical project I first caught onto a few years ago as a meeting of the minds between frequent collaborators from experimental metal bands The Body and Full Of Hell alongside one of the most interesting artists in all of music in the past 5 years, Lingua Ignota. Now they've released a second album and even though Lingua Ignota is no longer involved, the record isn't lacking in interesting collaborations as a few artists I was already familiar with like Midwife, Gangsta Boo, and claire rousay appear in the tracklist. When this record is living in its comfort zone of crushing distorted textures, harrowing screamed vocals and the genuine sonic intensity of extreme metal things go pretty well. Opening track Resin On A Knife  is an early highlight and the pairing with Midwife makes perfect sense and the title track around the midpoint satisfies my desire for horrifying shrill sounds on any album associated with The Body. The rec...