Lav's Music Corner

These categorizations continue to get stupider and stupider. This time around the name of the game is playful. These 5 bands to varying degrees of rock and pop from post-punk to electro-pop all deliver a pretty playful push and pull that, while nebulous, made sense for me to put together.  Strange Burden  - Font Font are a Texas band that first caught my eye last year when I saw indie blogs hyping up their song It , which I really enjoyed. It also inspired me to listen to their debut single Sentence 1 , which I'll forever be wishing I wasn't so late to. That momentum continued to build into this year with more strong singles and a resulting 30-minute debut album. My favorite of those two follow-up singles was Hey Kekule  a groovy Talking Heads-ish combination of dance rhythms and chimes with a neurotic punk intensity.   The first non-single on the album is the opening track The Golden Calf  a messy and noisy piece of frenetic post-punk. It doesn't star...

This was an all-time strange week where some of the big releases left me very underwhelmed. Here's my best attempt to make clarity out of the mess. 5.  Deeper Well  - Kacey Musgraves This was probably the new single I was most excited for this week but I just can't quite say I'm in love with it. I do like the novelty of Kacey essentially offering to pass you the blunt for a few minutes. But the song also doesn't really evolve in any way that's satisfying and. I also think her attempts at vulnerability in the lyrics kind of come up short even if she is being honest in her writing and delivery, it just doesn't feel like it's actually revealing anything.  Listen 4.  Auset  - Jlin Even though this kind of grinding metallic electronica will be familiar to Jlin fans I still like this song. It has a much more direct house and dance influence than much of her EP last year with stuttering hand claps and tight drum looks worked into certain parts of the song. Even if ...

5.  Petroleum  - Yard Act While I came away from the first Yard Act album pretty mixed something tells me I'm going to like the follow-up a lot more. The singles have seen the band leaning into their grooviest eccentricities and the results are post-punk that fringes on danceability in the way very few bands can achieve. This may not be the most bombastic or infectious of the songs but I still like it quite a bit.  Listen 4.  Tunnel Lights  - Chelsea Wolfe While this track may not blow me away in quite the same way Chelsea's past two tracks have it still has everything I would want in one of her songs. From the spacious percussion marked by booming distorted drums to her haunting voice wrapping itself around mystical fairy tale refrains it's all still so compelling.  Listen 3.  The Fight  - Future Islands The most reserved single from Future Islands' new era might be its best moment yet. It has the patience to squeeze every moment of somber drama ...

It's technically not even March yet and I already have like 50 albums from this year that I want to review but haven't had the time for one reason or another. Hopefully I can really dig in on these rapid fire reviews and covering new albums as they come out and we're starting here with a few experimental rock records I've been listening to and hearing people talk about online.  The Overload  - Yard Act Yard Act is a band I first heard about last year when some of the numerous singles they dropped in the lead up to this debut album started spreading in post-punk circles. Because of how much of a renaissance the genre has been going through particularly in Britain right now, I've sort of kept my ear to the ground with the style. What separates Yard Act is apparently pretty quickly with their lead singers distinctive snarl and their off kilter style of songwriting and performing which serves as set-up for those overtly political messages. The most enjoyable part of the...