"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.
LION BABE BEGIN 600X600 UPDATE
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. 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. 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. 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.
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