to listen or purchase
Considering the sheer volume of music that SoulTracks receives throughout the course of a year, it should not be surprising that a few worthy projects escape unexamined. Lianne La Havas’ Is Your Love Big Enough is the one that got away in 2012. La Havas didn’t glide totally under the American radar. The Brit appeared on Carson Daly’s show and she got a mention on NPR.
I actually learned about Is Your Love Big Enough while looking at the best of 2012 list compiled by an on-line magazine that I respect – Pop Matters. I’ve been going there and comparing their list to ours for the last three years, and usually there’s a lot of overlap. That was also the case in 2012.
Considering the sheer volume of music that SoulTracks receives throughout the course of a year, it should not be surprising that a few worthy projects escape unexamined. Lianne La Havas’ Is Your Love Big Enough is the one that got away in 2012. La Havas didn’t glide totally under the American radar. The Brit appeared on Carson Daly’s show and she got a mention on NPR.
I actually learned about Is Your Love Big Enough while looking at the best of 2012 list compiled by an on-line magazine that I respect – Pop Matters. I’ve been going there and comparing their list to ours for the last three years, and usually there’s a lot of overlap. That was also the case in 2012.
Is Your Love Big Enough landed at number two on Pop Matters’ best R&B list. That piqued my curiosity and I was able to land a copy. However, I didn’t listen right away. I finally got around to it about two weeks ago, and I’ve hardly listened to anything else.
In many ways’ LaHavas is a fusion of the many of the female singers from Great Britain who have achieved varying levels of success in America over the last five years. Acoustic tunes such as “Tease Me,” “Age” – a witty tune in which the 23-year old singer/songwriter tells a tale of falling for a much older man – and the duet “No Room For Doubt” place La Havas in that folk and R&B fusion occupied by singer/songwriters such as the tragically overlooked Rachael Bell.
Tracks such as the sparse and melancholy “Gone” allow LaHavas to display vocal range. La Havas sings accompanied by a piano, an arrangement that gives the artist free range to showcase her powerful and soulful vocal instrument, and might remind listeners of power ballads rendered by Adele on her instant classic 21.
La Havas occupies her own space on the percussive “Forget,” a tune the singer wrote after a break-up. The track is a high-energy amalgamation of funk and rock in which La Havas showcases her deft fingering on her constantly present guitar. Her vocals – especially the hook where she yells “fooorgeeet/all the words the let you break my heart” combine the assertiveness of rock with one the one bounce of funk.
La Havas is a powerful and unique voice, and it’s a mystery to me why she hasn’t attained the breakout success in America of Adele, Amy Winehouse, Corinne Bailey Rae or Joss Stone. Is Your Love Big Enough attests to the fact that La Havas’ artistic range and talent is large enough to operate in the territory occupied by all of those performers while also managing to sound distinctive. Highly Recommended.
By Howard Dukes