Lav's Music Corner

Review by Lavender: Japanese Breakfast is the project of singer-songwriter Michelle Zauner, who has spent nearly a decade now writing some of the most interesting, playful, and versatile music in the world of indie pop and rock. Her appeal spanned new peaks in 2021 with her third album Jubilee , where songs like "Be Sweet" and "Paprika" showed off a more vibrant and poppy side to her sound and found critical acclaim doing so. My favorite Japanese Breakfast album remains her 2017 outing Soft Sounds From Another Planet , which used playful atmosphere and entrancing space to highlight her abilities as a writer. After hearing some of that quiet poise in the singles for this record, I was hoping for a triumphant return to that style. But it is not what I got.  Let's talk highlights first, because the album does have some. Lead single "Orlando In Love" is a track I hoped I would like more within the context of the album. It's a gentle track that could se...

Review by Lavender: The Weather Station is the project of singer-songwriter Tamara Lindeman and she's been releasing albums since the late 2000s. She had her breakthrough of sorts in 2021 when she signed to Fat Possum and released Ignorance,  an album that achieved both more popularity and more acclaim than anything she had done before. I thought that record was fine, just okay, and I didn't really understand all the hype. Which is why I was even more surprised to find her quieter and far less acclaimed follow-up a year later completely irresistible. With subtle performances and infectious songwriting her 6th album How Is It That I Should Look At The Stars  was by FAR my favorite so far and in conjunction with a few good singles leading into Humanhood , I was excited to see her build on her sound.  Humanhood led off with the single "Neon Signs" which I absolutely loved at the time and still do. It has the uptempo pep of tracks on Ignorance  but the songwriting and pe...

Ethel Cain is a singer-songwriter who broke through a few years ago on the back of Preacher's Daughter,  her lengthy debut album. The record trafficked in a Southern Gothic style that often reached harrowing climaxes and featured lyrical content darker than many of her contemporaries, yet Cain managed to become a breakout star on the back of the record regardless. Now 3 years later she's back with a sophomore album that seems deliberately designed to leave much of that audience behind. Trading out her more conventional styles of songwriting and production form a grueling droning 90-minute follow-up that will put anyone's commitment to her style to the test.  The first taste of the controversy that would eventually befall this record came on its lead single "Punish." I liked the song, though I wasn't head over heels for its format as a long, plodding durge with dreary vocals singing creaky refrains. It's better within the context of the album where the song...

Review by Lav: Chelsea Wolfe is an artist whose music I've enjoyed for a long time, though I feel like I haven't gotten to review her at her best yet. I thought her 2019 album Birth Of Violence  was just okay and though I enjoyed her Converge collaboration more it featured less of the hallmarks of Chelsea's music than her own material. That's why I was so excited for She Reaches Out  which featured some of my favorite of her singles to date. The album that resulted is cohesive but still impressively distinct and the best thing Chelsea Wolfe has dropped in a long time.  Describing the singles from this record as "good" honestly kind of feels like an understatement, they're fantastic. Lead single Dusk  serves as the closing track and it's still remarkably good. I can't think of many other tracks that manage to be this chilling and occasionally obtuse while also being so irresistible and well-written. The album opens with another single I loved Whispe...

Review by Lav: Torres is the singer-songwriter project of Mackenzie Scott, who I've been listening to for a long time. Across her 5 studio albums so far she managed to make herself distinctive with both a variety of unique sonic eras and an entrancing lyricism. The last time we heard from Torres on Thirstier  in 2021 she delivered her hardest rocking album yet which righteously dove into unflinching love songs one after another. But as the singles projected, What an enormous room  is a transition back to a much colder and more specious sound she played with earlier in her career.  What an enormous room  had three singles and I like all of them, though they each had to grow on me with repeat listens. The best of them is the lead single Collect , a song I've completely fallen in love with that now feels like a thesis for how chilling the album itself would turn out. The methodical repetition on the hook just reinforced how confrontational it is and the way the song dev...

Way back when I first started reviewing albums in full on this blog one of the first records I covered was Ryan Adams' heartland rocking Prisoner . Since then, I've been basically silent on him as an artist in almost any capacity as he's grown to be a pretty controversial figure for reasons I totally agree with but won't dig through here. In his retreat from the indie mainstream he's taken to releasing an absolute shit ton of music, far more than I could keep up with on the blog. But when he dropped four entire new albums on the first day of the year my curiosity just got the best of me and for some reason I chose to review all of them. Heatwave  - Ryan Adams This album is absolutely ALL over the place right out of the gate. It kicks off with a short roaring classic punk rager before shifting into an 80s power ballad type cut and then hitting the title track which feels like a Spoon-inspired piece of indie rock. The only thing that ties all the songs together is the...

The Mountain Goats are a long running indie project based in North Carolina that is focused around singer-songwriter John Darnielle. They have over 25 years of history diving into numerous concepts and transitioning through different sounds and styles. In League With Dragons  features a wide variety of personnel and was labelled by Darnielle as a "rock Opera" with influences from various literary sources.  Review By Lavender: Despite the fact that I believe Darnielle is quite talented and that the band reps my home state of North Carolina I haven't been the biggest Mountain Goats fan. Most of their material in the 2010's struck me as creative, but not essential. There is almost always a baseline element of songwriting and there is almost never a drowning in influences or contemporary sounds and that is as true as ever here, but once again the band fails to make a significant mark on me. The lead single for this album didn't thrill me straight away, ...