Lav's Music Corner

A month into 2022 it's time for the first rapid fire reviews of the year and as we often do we're diving into some trap records that I don't have the time or patience of preservation of mind to break down in their entirety. We have never been short for trap music and I suspect this year won't be any different. So lets cover some of the newer and older stars of the genre who are turning heads in the first month of the year. Brightside  EP - Rich Brian I haven't reviewed Rich Brian specifically in a long time, like 2018 long I think. I wanted to talk about this EP because I saw a surprising amount of people online talking about how much they enjoyed it and saying it was the best thing he'd done in years. The first thing you'll notice about this EP is that every song has at least one pretty significant beat switch-up which goes a long way to keeping up its hype energy but can make it a bit difficult to judge when the different portions of a song are wildly inco...

We're at that time of year where I try to cover as much as I possibly can before 2021 is out and that starts with some of the albums that have spawned quite a bit of discourse. These are rap records that came out over the past month or so and inspired Instagram rap page admin discussion, profuse memeing and second hand listening experiences outside bumping car windows.  Expensive Pain - Meek Mill Is it just me or was there a lot more discussion about Meek like, two years ago. Obviously during the Drake beef and Dreams Worth More Than Money  era he was quite the headline grabber but even in recent years during his very public battle with the legal system I just saw a lot more people talking about him. This record seems like it's gonna chart pretty well and it certainly attracted the attention of a number of high profile mainstream hip hop artists, but I can't shake the feeling that it's his most culturally inessential album to date. As a pop culture observer that's a...

Tyler, The Creator is a California rapper and multi-medium superstar. After first emerging as the main brain behind the Odd Future hip hop collective Tyler cultivated a brand for himself that included numerous solo albums, TV shows and an imprint into the fashion industry and that's just a start. Since first breaking out Tyler has drastically changed the sound of his music, transitioning from his edgy lo-fi brand of provocative hip hop into the sounds of pop, R&B and soul music starting with 2017's Flower Boy  and expanding even further on 2019's Igor . Review By Lav: Hello! If you're a Tyler, The Creator fan reading this it's probably the first time you've seen one of my reviews since I covered IGOR  in 2019. You most likely bookmarked a tweet about it or followed my account with a burner so that you could periodically send me provocative DMs because I made the unforgivable mistake of calling out the album for the elements of it that failed to translate wit...

Migos are an Atlanta rap trio consisting of Quavo, Offset and Takeoff whose sound in the middle of the 2010's was extremely influential to the culture and style of mainstream trap rap that still persists to this day. The duo first broke out with a series of hits from their early mixtapes and cemented their status with their universally acclaimed 2017 album Culture . After the follow-up Culture II  along with each of the rappers solo records were all critiqued for the bands routine and omnipresent sound, they took a few years of studio album silence.  Review By Lav: At this point, the Migos are who they are. I wasn't expecting Culture III  to be any kind of major change of style for the trio and it isn't. If you're familiar with the band you pretty much know what you're getting with this record, which can be a blessing and a curse. There are plenty of tracks here particularly on the first half that see Migos executing their formula very well, but when there's a f...

Future is an Atlanta trap rapper who really needs no introduction at this point. He has been around for almost a decade now and has frequently released commercially successful projects that have heavily influenced the popular psychedelic trap sound. High On Life  is technically Future's 8th album but with a dense catalog of mixtapes and EPs we have had no shortage of music from the man and at 70 minutes long this record is no different.  Review By Lavender: For somebody that has been popular and influential for nearly a decade now it can be kind of difficult to narrow down Future's music to just the good stuff. While there is certainly enough Future tracks for a greatest hits album or two that is just a drop in the ocean of content he has released and with the exception of DS2  those tracks rarely align into a cohesively great record. Just last year Future wowed me with a handful of tracks on his The WZRD  album and even more on his Save Me  EP yet I consider th...