That echo on “made you into a star” straight ✨?? Comment by yoooooo Cruz Where Badu cultivated a voice that’s distinctly her own, Hervey is content to simply borrow somebody else’s.Download the LION BABE debut album Begin Age Aint Nothing But a Number Aaliyah Age Aint Nothing But A Number. 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.
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. The list of collaborators on Lion Babe’s debut album Begin out now is a good indicator of the record’s diverse sound. 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. Their single Treat Me Like Fire received acclaim, giving listeners a taste.
Following their meeting through a mutual friend, the pair released the single 'Treat Me Like Fire' in 2012, which raised their profile and led them to sign a record deal with Interscope Records. Sasha Gabriella Fox, Singer Jillian Hervey, Helen Tinch, and Vanessa Williams attend the Lion Babe 'Begin' Listening Party at The Roxy Hotel on. Lion Babe have managed to carve out a reasonable amount of interest over the last few years without doing too much. Lion Babe is an American R&B duo from New York City, consisting of singer Jillian Hervey and record producer Lucas Goodman.
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. Singer Jillian Hervey and Sasha Gabriella Fox attend the Lion Babe 'Begin' Listening Party at The Roxy Hotel on Februin New York City.
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. The pair released a self-titled EP together in 2014 and released a debut album in 2016 appropriately named Begin. 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.