Album Review: Lianne La Havas - Self-Titled
Even half a century removed from the heyday of soul music, the number of worthy successors to its legacy continues to astound, a feat doubly impressive considering how easy the style is to screw up. Anyone can slap together a mediocre alt-rock or synthpop record with comparative ease, but to properly tap into the lineage of soul one needs both an undeniable talent and a healthy appreciation for the genre’s established classics, two qualities that rarely appear in confluence. Despite these barriers of entry, however, its popularity has never truly waned (even seeing a fresh renaissance in the subgenre known as neo-soul), and every year the observant music listener can find a few quality soul records being released if they know where to look (the Monophonics album from earlier this year being a perfect example). It must be stressed, then, how significant it is that Lianne La Havas’ self-titled album still manages to exert itself as a cut above the rest in its class, for less than obvious reasons. Sure, it boasts cleaner production than most of its contemporaries, and La Havas is a notably talented singer, yet those facts alone cannot explain how atypically good this record is. This is neo-soul in its most prototypical sense; not a reinvention, but a recapitulation of the same fervent spirit Marvin Gaye tapped into fifty years ago. If Lianne La Havas were any less of a perfect blend between the old and new of its genre, such comparisons might read as sacrilegious; as it stands, the London-born virtuoso proves here that she will not be denied her rightful accolades, blasphemy be damned.
For the many who are no doubt completely unaware of La Havas’ credentials going into this record, the singles preempting its release make as good a case for her individual genius as one could hope for, especially the multifaceted Bittersweet which also starts the album off. Of course her breezy singing perfectly compliments the tuneful production (built off a particularly soulful Isaac Hayes sample), but even the lyrics serve to impress as La Havas croons in mourning of a past relationship, her words deeply personal and also quite poetic at times: “Bittersweet summer rain/I’m born again/All my broken pieces”. As the song progresses her blatant grief continues to build and ferment, until eventually a particularly stirring cry of “Oh, my sun’s going down” erupts with an indescribable power as La Havas’ intensity becomes a sight to behold. The slick guitar that defines Can’t Fight captures the opposite mood, with the singer’s verses here devoted to a wry, self-conscious look at her turbulent emotions (“I raged like a woman scorned”) and inability to distance herself from an imperfect love: “I knew that I should give you up/I tried to run but got my heart stuck/I can’t fight away this love”. Intrinsic to both tracks is La Havas’ remarkable charisma, the ease of her vocal delivery generating an unmatched serenity that persists across the entirety of the record. The aptly-titled Paper Thin is an odd choice for a single given its incredibly sparse instrumental, yet La Havas somehow manages to sell it with her pained, heartbreaking pleas to a lover (“I know your pain is real/But you won’t let it heal”) delivered in barely more than a whisper, a stroke of aural brilliance that only serves to further highlight her emotional frailty.
As uniformly excellent as this record is, the one track here which overshadows all others is, of course, a rendition of Radiohead’s Weird Fishes; not just because of the audacity it takes to put a Radiohead cover on your album, but because La Havas actually pulls it off with flying colours. Her studio band certainly cannot hold a candle to the legends they’re attempting to imitate, and luckily they’re not trying to; the original’s frenetic yet restrained energy is here reformed into a slower groove that gives plenty of room for the ambient keyboard and intricate bass melodies to breathe. Where Thom Yorke’s eerie vocals drift above the interwoven melodies, sounding almost alien in their frightening melancholy, La Havas instead employs the same warbling calm the listener has already gotten used to, her serene crooning a much more apt fit for her take on the song’s instrumental. The real innovations are saved for the track’s latter half, though, beginning with La Havas’ decision to pull the production back and deliver the tremulous bridge a capella: “I get eaten by the worms/And weird fishes/Picked over by the worms/And weird fishes”. When the instrumental reenters, everything has suddenly changed: the once-crisp percussion is now crashing down on one’s ears, the clean, iconic guitar line of the original finally deigns to make a dramatic appearance, and La Havas matches the song’s newfound vigor with a heart-rending passion unlike any she has displayed before. Often times the dramatic breakup that influenced much of her most recent songwriting exists mainly in the abstract, yet ironically it is in the record’s least personal lyrics that it becomes impossible to ignore: “Yeah, I’ll hit the bottom/The bottom and escape, escape”.
In a sense, what is most remarkable about this album is that La Havas is able to recreate the magic of her immaculate singles across the entirety of its tracklist, to the point where it is immensely difficult to identify any weak points. Some may resent the more minimalist cuts like Paper Thin and Courage, and indeed these are the closest La Havas gets to any sort of uncertainty, but despite her occasionally wavering voice the singer never truly falters in any way worth mentioning. Green Papaya dances nearest to the line between tender and tedious, as La Havas sings (in admittedly repetitive terms) of a “real love” that, while soon to come crashing down on top of her, is authentic enough for the moment. Still, her real infatuation here is with Joni Mitchell, whose influence is palpable all over the track’s muted guitar line and warm, expressive lyrics: “This river of doubt, help me to swim my way out/I’m greedy with love, but my hunger to give is strong enough”. On paper, Soul Flower seems the most liable to fall flat, but the record’s lengthy coda provides a gratifying sense of resolution and finality that La Havas has more than proven she deserves. Even if the delicate guitar plucking is far from a novel production choice, the vocals which float effortlessly on top provide more than enough depth to get lost in; the end result is a ballad notably more vibrant than any of the singer’s previous creations, and a compelling summation of everything to come before it.
It would be inaccurate to say that the legacy of soul has disappeared from the realm of pop music; to listen to any contemporary R&B is to listen to an industry of art profoundly shaped by the sounds of Motown and populated by artists who can list the genre’s most prominent legends among their influences. Those that take it a step further, however, rarely show the sheer force of personality that Lianne La Havas provides in spades, and seldom (if ever) can bare their emotions so painfully and yet so beautifully in the way she does on her self-titled album. And yet, for as intimate as the record’s lyrics are, one would be forgiven if by the end they had failed to truly digest her elegies of heartbreak, too caught up in the buoyant calm La Havas and her instrumentals seem to generate without even trying. That may be soul music’s most telling quality: emotive lyricism, certainly, but supported by a refusal to compromise on the music, even if every year that passes leaves the genre with fewer fresh ideas ripe for exploring. With all that in mind, Lianne La Havas might be the first new record in quite a while to adequately recreate the empathy inherent in classic soul while also injecting its own unique charisma and aptitude; treasure it like the atypical triumph it is.
9/10
Favourite Tracks: Bittersweet, Can’t Fight, Weird Fishes, Please Don’t Make Me Cry