What is going on with Stavi??

As of today I have missed 2 weekly album reviews, so I thought I would just post a little update as to what is going on. To make it short, I had some obligations I needed to attend to these past couple weeks. I had little free time to sit and properly listen to these albums like I do when I write these reviews. One of these albums is over an hour long too! I thought about listening to a couple tracks a day to get it done, but that would be a huge change to my workflow for these reviews. When I do them, I listen to the album in one sitting, paying attention to it the whole time. I'll then give another listen, usually a less focused listen because I think knowing if this is an album I can just throw on while doing something is important. After that, I will start writing the review, skipping around through the album as I'm writing. This all typically happens in 1 day, usually the day I post the review on but sometimes earlier. Due to my obligations, much of my daily free time was gone, and I would come home tired which is no state to listen to an album to. I don't want to compromise my reviews, because that defeats much of the purpose of doing this is which is to truly find new music that I enjoy. If I do a review half-heartedly, I'm doing a disservice to that purpose. I'm not sure if I'll do the review tomorrow, my obligations are done but I'm still in that fatigued state after you doing something tiring for a long period of time so it's a 50-50 chance I do it. I do intend to come back and review the 2 albums I missed a later point, as one of them was an album suggested by a friend of mine and the other is one that I've been very interested in listening to since I found out about it. I hope this clears things up.

Weekly Album: Week of 04/02 - 04/08 - It's Hard To Find A Friend

Before I get to the main post I would like to apologize for posting this a day late. I got lost working on some other things last night and doing my album review never even slipped my mind. Hopefully this is one of the only, if not the only time I post one late. Thank you :)

This week I listened to It's Hard To Find A Friend by Pedro The Lion. I first heard about this album through doing research about the record label Jade Tree, who are probably most well known for releasing Cap'n Jazz's compilation album Analphabetapolothology and several other 90s emo/emo-adjacent bands. I read an article about some of the lesser known releases on the label which included this album. I listened to one song and then promptly got distracted with other things. When I got around to making my list of albums for this project, I remembered this album and put it on. This is a very chill album, certainly up there with most chill album I have listened to. It is a very minimalist album, which I think adds to the chill vibe of it. For the most part it is just drums, bass, guitar, and vocals. It is mixed in a way that feels like you are almost in the room listening to it; it sounds very wide and roomy. David Bazan sings in a soft voice, mixed pretty front and center, almost like you are face to face to him and he is telling you all these stories. The guitars and bass are nice and clean, playing some pretty sounding lines and chords throughout the album. Due to the minimal instrumentation, I tried to listen and read more up on the lyrics, and wow he sings about some pretty varied things. There are songs about love (as is somewhat standard for a lot of albums), a couple songs about religion which I found rather unique, and a couple songs are sung from the perspective of a father talking to their child. David Bazan certainly knows how to tell a story in such short form bites, which tracks with what I've read about other albums of his/Pedro The Lion. This was an enjoyable experience, and now I know another album to listen to when I need something chill and relaxing to listen to. 8/10 album

Weekly Album: Week of 03/26 - 04/01 - Everything is a Miracle Nothing is a Miracle Everything Is

This week I listened to Everything is a Miracle Nothing is a Miracle Everything Is by Kickball. The YouTube algorithm works in mysterious ways. Most of the time it just delivers me junk or videos from people I already watch. But every so often, it delivers me a little gem. This is what happened several months ago, before I had even started my weekly albums, where I was recommended a video of this band I had never heard of before named Kickball playing at some French venue called Grrrnd Zero. I am intrigued by this, and as a lover of small, independent music I decide to listen. After about 10 minutes I am engrossed. They just hit a 4th song without stopping which I didn't even realize until I looked at the setlist with timestamps, I was under the impression this was 1, evolving song. Everything I had heard had these beautiful, sparse guitar lines that were juxtaposed with these intense drum beats and punchy baselines. The vocalist sang with such casualness, somehow out of time in a way that was in time. Boy could he scream, but he could also deliver such pretty melodies. I decide I must listen to their studio work before I finish all of this live show, so I promptly start looking into them and find their Bandcamp page which has a link to a now defunct website. Even looking at the website through the Wayback Machine when the band was still active shows a very sparse website. I try to find everything I can about this band, figuring out what all the members are doing now, reading anything I can online about them. Turns out, they were not the hugest of bands. I start to get a little sad and then slowly forget about the band until I start creating my list of albums for the weekly album reviews, as I got into a bit of an Emo/Emo-adjacent stretch in my list. It easily becomes one of my anticipated albums I want to listen to, as I remember how engrossed I was by their live show.

I bring all this up because I want you to feel the way I was when I was first discovering Kickball. I think that is an integral part of my listening experience was that week when all I had on my mind was Kickball. Finally listening to them gave me such a sense of release. This album is... amazing. These beautiful guitar melodies just sing in my ears when I listen to them. They are made even better since they sometimes have multiple guitar tracks so there are these pretty layers of guitars playing these very unique sounding guitar parts. The bass lays such a solid foundation for the drummer to just go wild sometimes, kind of Mike Kinsella in Cap'n Jazz-esque which I cannot complain about for I love drummers that play like that. Such a control over dynamics and having such a great sense of time and ability to throw in these crazy fills in the middle of a beat. As I mentioned earlier, the vocalist does such a fantastic job balancing his fantastic screams with his calm singing voice that is on the edge of talking. There is such a casualness in his delivery. The words that come out of his mouth are fantastic too, very abstract at times where honestly I'm not really sure what a lot of these songs are about. I remember in a comment on the Grrrnd Zero show that someone thought that there was an overarching story to the album. Now, I don't have the time to do a full analysis of the lyrics on this album (if you're interested in that let me know and I might just start working on one), but I think that goes to show how good the lyrics are that somebody could find something like that out of something so abstract. This album certainly makes me want to listen to all of Kickball's small discography. I'm doing my due diligence to spread the word of such a fantastic band, and honestly I would recommend you do the same. At the very least, give this amazing album a listen. 10/10 album

Link to album on Bandcamp

Link to Grrrnd Zero performance