Virginia's Hot Lava isn't the kind of band that goes in for deep thought or weighty musical gestures on their debut for Bar/None Lavalogy, a reworked and improved version of their 2007 album Owns You. The group's sound is 100-percent fun indie pop with an extra 10-percent of silliness thrown in for good measure. Songs about mummy-filled beach parties, dragons with spinach stuck in their teeth, JPG's, and New Year's resolutions show that the band has nothing much of import on their minds. No matter, the way they say nothing is perfectly fine. Singer Allison Apperson delivers her lines with deadpan sweetness, the band rocks pleasantly, and bandmember Jared Sosa's production coats the fairly straightforward instrumentation in a fuzzy halo of reverb and fuzz. A couple of the tracks ("Apple+Option+Fire" and "Mummy Beach") are perfect mixtape tracks for when you need to come out of a ballad with something light and fun. The rest of the record (apart from the unfortunate "O Retorno Da Lovefoxxx," which is a semi-obscene ode to CSS's lead singer that is too sexual by half and totally out of place) manages to escape all the pitfalls that bands who try to be cute and silly often fall into, namely, the sins of being too wacky vocally or presenting the music with too much polish or skill. It's not easy to do that and their ability to pull it off makes Hot Lava a band to watch and Lavalogy a near-perfect album to play when you need some extra sugar sprinkled on top of a cloudy, humdrum kind of day.
© Tim Sendra /TiVo