Lav's Music Corner

I couldn't quite finish this on time yesterday. I have a great excuse but I can't tell you about it so you'll have to take my word for it. 5.  Rag  - Porches Consider me surprised. It's been a while since I REALLY enjoyed a Porches single but I found myself hooked on this one pretty quickly. I love the slurring indie rock style and some of the incredibly evocative lyrics. For a song so intense it's also impressively catchy and has been stuck in my head basically all week.  Listen 4.  Differ  - KMRU, Kevin Richard Martin Normally ambient singles don't really have the kind of pull to stand out on their own the way they do when compellingly assembled into a full album, unless you're Tim Hecker. But the most I listened to this song the more I was impressed by its gentle washes of sound and how impactful they were despite the minimalism. After becoming a big fan of KMRU in the past few years, seeing him collaborate with Kevin Richard Martin of The Bug fame is a c...

5.  inferno  - yeule I was surprised by how much I liked the previous yeule single and for that reason I wasn't surprised by how much I liked this one. Both tracks feature MAJOR instrumental improvements from the previous yeule album which creates a drastically more interesting sonic palette for the understated vocals and mysterious songwriting.  Explore 4.  I Got Heaven  - Mannequin Pussy Welcome back, Mannequin Pussy. While this new song lacks the earworm hook they often deliver I find it hard to complain about the dreamy blown-out replacement. Especially when it contrasts with some of the most pointed and explosive verses I've ever heard from the band. It's immediate, vicious, and totally unflinching.  Explore 3.  Demons  - Doja Cat If you had told me that Doja Cat's newest song would see her doing her best Baby Keem impression I wouldn't have necessarily been more excited. But do I like the song? Oh yeah. It sacrifices some of the sheer catchi...

XUL1  EP - Kai Whiston In my opinion, Kai has been improving more and more with every release. That hit a new high-point last year when he dropped the wonderful Quiet As Kept, F.O.G . The album fused together narrative storytelling with an expansive list of electronica microgenres that I really appreciated and led me to call the album one of the most underrated of the decade so far on my YouTube channel. That's why I was excited to see a surprise new EP from Kai dropped onto our collective lap. While these five new songs all up to just 11 minutes and I didn't have any context at all going into them, I was no less excited to see what they had to offer.  Calling the project a "shift" would be tricky because it's hard to even define what Kai is shifting away from, but one immediate observation about the songs is how dancy they are. While the skittering drums of the opening track SPITITOUT  don't really knock my socks off the thumping bass that replaces it on NOT...

Zach Bryan is an Oklahoma-based country singer who had somewhat of a breakthrough 2022. After building up momentum for years he released his first top 10 album American Heartbreak  last year which also contained his first massive hit song Something In The Orange . Now just a year later, he's following that extremely long album up with a more scant collection of songs that see him leaning into his folk influence and raw stylings.  Review by Lav: Ever falling short of being the definitive music influencer, I didn't really hear about Zach Bryan until everybody else did. Late last year I called his breakthrough mainstream hit Something In The Orange  one of my favorite hit songs of the year and it also landed on my singles of the year list. I completely stand by both of those choices. While his album American Heartbreak  was far too long and inconsistent for me, I was really excited to see what Zach had to offer with this shift to more conventional full-length, and he di...