Lavurn: Baby it Cold Outside LP

Last spotted on Nick León’s ‘A Tropical Entropy’, Lavurn lands on Motion Ward with an album of classic indie-pop jangle, with occasional diversions into glassy, glitched refractions, somewhere between Naemi or Hysterical Love Project if refracted by classic Nobukazu Takemura, or the kinda thing Ulla did on their classic ‘Foam’’. The indie revival continues with this one, perfectly placed on the Motion Ward label, home of Chicago's Cancer House (their debut 'The Moth' is one of the albums of the year, trust) and the A-grade dream pop-cum-trip-hop duo Hysterical Love Project. Lee's first album under their own name was a word-of-mouth sensation that perfectly took the temperature of Berlin's off-strip post-ambient underground, the same Kwia-coded space that helped breathe fire into records as seemingly disparate as james K's 'Friend' and even Erika de Casier's early gear. It's that fertile ground where trip-hop and dream pop feel like obvious bedfellows and Lee's softly-spoken, impeccably produced songs, that owe as much to D'Angelo and Erika Badu as they do Portishead and Talk Talk, never tip too far in either direction. He's spent years sharpening his engineering skills crafting bass music for labels like Hypercolour and Accidental Jnr, and although 'Baby it Cold Outside' doesn't bare any of his prior aesthetic hallmarks, its intricacy lets us know there's more going on that meets the eye. Just skip straight to 'Playback', when the saboi guitars that created a Hood-like ambience around the first few tracks disappear and get swapped out for harmonic, harp-ish strums that perfectly match Lee's pitched-up, soulful vocal turn. "I'll leave you on your own," he moans, harmonizing with himself over pulverized breaks that sound as if they've been bounced from stream to stream until the bitrate's been damaged irreparably. Or there's the slippery, subtly byzantine 'Handy', a muddle of wheezing synths, vocal calls and microscopically edited beats that plays more like a side-quest than an interlude. Of course, Lee's bigger, brasher anthems like 'Bug' and the cheekily titled 'Song 1' (it's the second track, natch), will be the real draw here, fitting into the moody auteurist jangle-pop landscape remarkably well. But it's the sleazy, almost cyberpunk moments like 'Scared' and the 'Clubbed to Death'-inspired 'CD' that have stuck around with us longest.