Lav's Music Corner

Posting this at the last possible minute. (She did not actually post it in time anyway.) 5.  Auguries of Guilt  - The World Is A Beautiful Place & I'm No Longer Afraid To Die  I was inclined to like this song out of the gate because they shout me out by name in the first verse. I will say this song may not have the explosive conclusions and dramatic tension of The World at their absolute best work but it's openly sentimental in a way that my heart is just barely warm enough to enjoy.  Listen 4.  To every squirrel who has ever been hit by a car, I'm sorry and I love you  - Fire-Toolz The best single from prolific digital screamo outfit Fire-Toolz upcoming new album so far is this hilariously named 6-minute odyssey. She continues to combine distant blood-curdling screams with maddeningly glossy splashes of cloudy synths in a messy but surprisingly grounded haze. This song takes that to a compositionally expansive conclusion and I'm happy to go along for t...

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...

These are a trio of multi-faceted artists I've talked about before and wanted to make sure I reviewed before their records faded too far out of the lens of music fans, if that hasn't already happened. MAHAL  - Toro Y Moi I had high expectations for this record for a couple of reasons. The first is that I thought both of the last two Toro Y Moi records were pretty decent and that he might be building to his most substantial release in years especially given the more perceivable concept that runs through this one. I also liked the singles quite a bit as a general group but specifically the song Postman , one of the most infectious singles I've heard anywhere in 2022. Surprisingly given the personality of the singles this record is actually a lot more innocuous than I was anticipating and while it isn't exactly chill wave levels of cool, there's a sense of hesitation here to anything too sonically unpredictable. While there are certainly lots of good vibes and pleasant...

The Grammys are tonight, ick. While they will never achieve the level of industry admiration that the Oscars have, the great slap may have inspired the show to shoot for some kind of contrived attempt at cultural ubiquity. So assuming something meme worthy happens at the Grammys that then dominates the news cycle let's talk about these songs that came out this week while we still can.  5.  Deja Vu  - Toro Y Moi The upcoming Toro Y Moi album has the potential to be one of his best ever. After knocking my socks off with one of my favorite singles of the year so far Postman, Chaz came back just as strong with this breezy little psychedelic number. It perfectly combines his consistent delivery of chill wave bliss with an ear for instrumental texture that never fails.  Listen 4.  Sirens  - Flume (Feat. Caroline Polachek) After what was a pretty standard pop and EDM fusion for his lead single, Flume is back with something more outside the lines and I really enjoy...

The truly great EP is becoming a lost art form, at least if 2019 is any indicator. Far less notable artists dropped EPs than we were used to over the past few years and many more of them turned out to be disappointments than ever before. With a lower ceiling and a much lower floor than my lists over the past few years I do have to wonder going forward if artists are just moving away from the EP in broad strokes, but these 10 artists either truly wowed me in the short form, or did just enough to get by with their releases in 2019. 10. Kero Kero Bonito - Civilization 1 KKB are no strangers to this list and have nearly topped it before, while Civilization 1  isn't the bands most shining moment it does show off a ton of creativity as they continue to push their sound and increasingly interpolate socially conscious lyrics and more features of contemporary indie music, where so little of the J-Pop the group originally blew up on remains. The short EP is highlighted by its amazing ...

Toro Y Moi is the stage name of Chaz Bundick, one of the pioneering voices in the rise of Chill Wave during the first half of the 2000's. After releasing six records under the name and a collection of side projects Toro y Moi teamed up with some acclaimed indie artists to dip his toes into the world of ambient music on  smartbeats . Review By Lavender: While I haven't always agreed with Chaz on the sounds of Chill Wave he is clearly an incredibly talented musician and has a number of albums in his catalog that I really enjoy. Earlier this year he released a record that I thought was a bit too inconsistent but highlights like Ordinary Pleasure  and Monte Carlo  have been in my rotation all year. On smartbeats Chaz switches up his approach and drops a mostly ambient album that recruits vocals from a number of indie darling vocalists to assemble some longer form tracks with minimal instrumentation and chopped up original vocal samples. The first and third tracks of ...

Blood Orange is the long time project of British R&B singer and songwriter Devonte Hynes. Dev has released four records under the Blood Orange moniker met with varying degrees of critical success and announced the  Angel's Pulse  mixtape just days before its release and dropped it without a single. Review By Lavender: For a long time my opinion caught the ire of many Blood Orange fans when in 2013 his  Cupid Deluxe  record began to turn heads, but I wasn't convinced. Still to this day the record reads to me as an homage to 80s synth pop with a funky/R&B twist, but made by somebody who didn't really understand what made that music so good to begin with. The follow-up  Freetown Sound  was certainly an improvement but I still wasn't head over heels for the sound, especially given how much acclaim the record received upon release. It wasn't until Blood Orange's next release that I finally came around to his sound, as it transitioned into a much s...

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...

Toro Y Moi Chaz Bundick is the songwriter and multi-instrumentalist behind the moniker that has been pumping out chillwave and glo-fi infused projects for the better part of a decade. His breakthrough project 2010's Causers Of This  made him a well known name in the world of beat driven indie music and his numerous projects and collaborations in the time since have helped cement him as a consistent artist but one with a noticeable ceiling. His last album 2017's Boo Boo  was the most critically and commercially successful since that original breakthrough album and after he began exploring some interesting ideas in the vein of his previous work with Outer Peace 's singles he set the stage for a solid effort that dives into some fresh ideas. Review By Lav: Toro Y Moi was a name that I always knew, I didn't hear him in 2010 when he first came to light in the indie scene and I spent the next 7 years knowing him only by name sake. Then by chance a friend reccomended the...