The album is at its best when the pace picks up, effectively canceling out the duo’s desire to set a mood.
She even slips into a throaty rap, proving herself more than capable when she deploys her rapping on Cosmic Wind, like on the minimalist “Reminisce,” it’s a counterweight to her singing, which sometimes feels on the verge of drifting into sleepy weightlessness. The album starts off strong with opener “Cosmic Wind.” Hervey sinks into a warm, bass-heavy groove, her Badu-indebted vocals imploring her subject to tell what’s on his or her mind. To their credit, Lion Babe don’t seem to be chasing hits anymore, and there are moments on this album-like the Pet Shop Boys-sampling, Raekwon-featuring summer jam “Western World”-that feel truly freed from the constraints of their past work. The focus is vibe and mood, on allowing yourself to-as Hervey sings on “Never Before”-“Sip slow with my eyes closed/I can feel more when I let it flow.”įree from their major-label deal, Lion Babe returns to the genial blend of R&B, funk, and mellow electronica of their 2016 debut, Begin. Where Badu cultivated a voice that’s distinctly her own, Hervey is content to simply borrow somebody else’s.Cosmic Wind, the sometimes-engaging, often-listless second album from Lion Babe (aka singer Jillian Hervey and producer Lucas Goodman) seems crafted with a fantasy in mind: warm summer night, rooftop overlooking the city, Christmas lights, friends laughing, drinks flowing. It’s a constant reminder of just how safe Lion Babe play it, as well as the shortcuts they take. It’s as if Hervey prepped for each session by listening to " Bag Lady" on loop, and that resemblance can work against her. There’s no mistaking the similarities: the jazzy flutter, the way her voice glides under words then curls around them to pull them closer. Why take R&B to strange new places, Lion Babe seem to be saying, when it’s already in a good place to begin with? That conservatism might be a little easier to appreciate, though, if Hervey’s voice wasn’t a near dead-ringer for one of R&B’s great risk takers, Erykah Badu.
In some ways it’s refreshing to see that, after a half-decade of aggressive experimentation, sometimes seemingly for the sake of experimentation, alternative R&B is returning to the basics. Lion Babe are open to any style that might lend itself to a personable, three-minute song, and that flexibility generally works for them.
#LION BABE BEGIN VINYL UPDATE#
Opener "Whole" doubles down on the funk, with a jabbing groove that feels like a 2016 update of Nikka Costa’s forgotten hit " Like a Feather." There’s no rigid vision tying together this grab bag. "Jump Hi"'s kinetic funk loop makes up for a lazy Childish Gambino guest verse, pasted onto the track like a placeholder for a better substitute the label never delivered.
"Wonder Woman," an anti-cat calling song produced by Pharrell (his atonement, perhaps, for " Blurred Lines"?), doesn’t ping the brain’s pleasure centers like his top-shelf work, but it’s pleasantly slinky, a nice throwback to the snappy R&B tracks the Neptunes used to pump out in the mid-'00s. So far they don’t have those hits, of course, but they’ve come up with enough passable facsimiles to fill a pretty likeable album. 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. 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. 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.
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