- Cassius Select morphs into an R&B singer-songwriter to paint a nuanced picture of a breakup.
- On the cover of his new self-titled album, Lavurn Lee is front-and-centre against a warm-hued, hazy room. His face is half-illuminated by a bright white light, like a crescent moon piercing a stormy sky at dusk. Best known for his work as Cassius Select, Lee's tracks can send the dance floor into meltdown: lurching rhythms and punishing low-ends are finished off with wacky distorted vocals, sometimes his own and soetimes sampled from grime, hip-hop and R&B songs. For almost a decade, Lee has hidden behind various aliases and projects—in the now-defunct group BV with DJ Plead and Marcus Whale, as Guerre and, most recently, the experimental project FAKE—all of which borrowed liberally from his favourite music, both directly and indirectly. As LAVURN, Lee steps out from behind the facade to make R&B-inflected pop under his given birth name, and with his own voice. Away from the dance floor, the pop format allows Lee to brush up on his songwriting skills and get personal in his music for the first time. Compared to the catchy but enigmatic thrum of Cassius Select, his world comes into clear focus.
Lee is heartbroken on LAVURN. It's been a while since he wrote lyrics, and it turns out he has some knockout wordplay up his sleeve. On "Combat Language," Lee chases his tail, questioning himself in his break-up. Over sampled guitars he laments, "I'm not that ghost / Swayze for ur life / Baby 4 ur Lyft." The Swayze namedrop is a clever twist, referencing the Patrick Swayze film Ghost but also Lee's decision to give up on his ex. This strength in his position that inevitably crumbles later on in the album's narrative (as in many breakups). But not all of his writing is clever sleight of hand—most of the time he's straight-up with his words. On "Hardcore," Lee sounds strong, antagonistic even, when he rattles through lines like "We gon' fight / Cut the chit-chat / I hear u comin' like the rain / I hit that splish splash." No hiding behind film references here.
LAVURN might be a reboot, but the weird and inventive sound design of Cassius Select lingers throughout this new LP. There are fluttering ravey harps and glitchy FX on "Compact Disc," creating an intoxicating tension early on in the album. The bubbling rhythms that ripple low in the mix on "Steppin (Flipmode)" are engineered to hit at gut level—a classic Cassius Select touch. Later on, in "+Windchill," Lee pushes the bass so it almost swells around his vocals, which are pitched up and down and layered on top of each other to sound like multiple voices talking at once. The result is like being caught in the crossfire of Lee's intrusive and self-deprecating thoughts.
Lee knows how to tell a story. On "Little Mother," he captures that universal heartbreak feeling with melancholy piano chords that hang like thick smoke—like those initial pangs of remembrance and yearning for the lost other half in the initial stages of a breakup. Those emotions flow right through to the song's closing lines—"I just want you back / Tell me, is that so bad?"—which Lee almost whimpers. Lee covers all the bases of the newly single headspace on LAVURN: the sadness, heartache, resentment, denial, inevitable relapse and recovery, before a hint to absolution in the ending. The nuanced depiction avoids typical pop clichés—a credit to Lee's budding journey as an R&B singer-songwriter.
Tracklist01. CCC
02. Compact Disc
03. Hardcore
04. Steppin (Flipmode)
05. Little Mother
06. Mezzanine
07. Combat Language
08. +Windchill
09. Tool (Medley)
10. Rear View Mirror
11. JK
12. Wicked
13. 30 Bounce
14. Still