Lion Babe - Begin (2016)

You’ve seen plenty of press photos like Lion Babe’s over the last few years: A glamorous singer, eyes locked on the camera as she shares the frame with an unassuming, narrow-shouldered guy who doesn’t look like he talks very much. Even if you’re only fleetingly familiar with acts like AlunaGeorge or Quadron, you probably have a good sense of what to expect from this kind of singer/producer pairing: posh, slightly left-field R&B with one foot in the past and the other in future. And sure enough, that’s more or less what Lion Babe deliver except that compared to their similarly styled peers, their sound isn’t actually all that left-field at all.

On their debut album Begin, singer Jillian Hervey (the daughter of actress Vanessa Williams) and producer Lucas Goodman (who records under the deceptively Def Jux-y sounding nom de plume Astro Raw) shuffle between disco, house, and neo-soul. And while they update these styles with the airy, wide-open production aesthetic of modern alternative R&B, their songs are rooted squarely in pop. There are no experimental digressions that might alienate the dance floor, no nods to the salad days of Brainfeeder or Ice Cream Records simply for the sake of bolstering the duo’s music-nerd cred. Lion Babe aren’t after cred. They’re after hits.

TRACKLIST

01. Whole
02. Jump Hi (feat. Childish Gambino)
03. Wonder Woman
04. Impossible
05. Stressed OUT
06. Satisfy My Love
07. Where Do We Go
08. On The Rocks
09. Hold On
10. Jungle Lady
11. Got Body
12. Everyday Life
13. Treat Me Like Fire
14. Little Dreamer