Lav's Music Corner

We are fully immersed in the end of year blitz where publications rush to not be the very last one to name their best music of the year. Like each of the past few years I will take up that mantle and release my best of lists in the last week of the year which means this week that many are spending dropping final calls, I'm cramming trying to get in as much reviewing work as possible before throwing myself into the year end haze. These are the last 3 EPs I'll be taking a look at before the end of the year! Alternate Lands  EP - William Doyle William surprised and impressed me earlier this year with his Great Spans Of Muddy Time  album, probably my favorite thing he's done since his East India Youth days. So it was easy for me to jump on board with a collection of tracks from the same era, especially after some singles I enjoyed. Everything I liked about Spans  shows up here with William's fragile intimate vocals providing chilling moments of reflection and the bright ins...

Lil Yachty is an Atlanta trap rapper who first emerged in 2016 with his own very unique personality in his breakout Lil Boai The Mixtape . Since blowing up much of Yahcty's unique characteristics have been replaced with more conventional trapisms. Lil Boat 3  follows Yachty's critically panned 3rd studio album Nuthin To Prove  in 2018.  Review By Lavender: I have been pretty vocal in my insistence that Lil Boat The Mixtape  is one of the most unique and charming stylistic interpretations of modern trap music and has continued to be a favorite for me. Since then it has been kind of a mixed bag culminating in his worst release yet the generic and underwritten Nuthin To Prove . Yachty took a long time off in the greater scheme of trap music before returning with this record which I had hoped would be another good one in the line of Lil Boat mixtapes, But while the record has good fundamentals it is way too long and very little of Yachty's charming and unique personality...

Steve Ellison better known as Flying Lotus is a Los Angeles based producer and rapper as well as the founder of Brainfeeder records. He first garnered critical acclaim and praise from indie, electronica and hip hop fans with his wild 2010 album Cosmogramma . Since then he has dropped two more albums including 2014's much loved You're Dead  and the long absence since then has made this new record one of the most anticipated in all of music this year. Review By Lavender: Flying Lotus is one of the best artists of the 2000's. I have been a fan for years and it is because of his sharp and unique take on instrumental hip hop and abstract electronica. He has been an incredibly influential sound that has been attempted but never truly duplicated and even though not all of his albums are a sharp 10/10 he has been a spectacularly consistent artist for years. Unfortunately while he retains a lot of his sharp sound play on Flamagra  a lot of what made previous works so cohesiv...