Lavurn - Baby It Cold Outside - Motion Ward
For over a decade, the Los Angeles-based label Motion Ward label has connected the dots between electronic and organic forms of meditative music—be it ambient, folk, rock, lo-fi, or trip-hop. Their recent release, “Baby It Cold Outside” by Lavurn, perfectly strikes the right balance between these worlds.
Lavurn Lee is multifaceted and undeniably talented. Under several aliases, the Canadian-born, Berlin-based artist has experimented with different sounds: heavy UK-influenced club music as "Cassius Select", lo-fi R&B as "Guerre" and "FAKE", or indie pop & folk as "Raver" or "The Dimensions" during his early years in Sydney.
With his project Lavurn in particular, under which Lee’s latest music was released, he has dedicated himself to his very own approach to avant-garde pop. The 2024 self-titled album on the Australian imprint SUMAC featured fourteen (as Lee calls them) "bedroom songs", which were built on a common thread of melodic bass music and subtle trap aesthetics. Since then, it seems Lee has experimented less in the field of sound design and turned his attention more toward guitars, distortion, organic drums, and various recording techniques.
The title is a nod to Bobby Caldwell’s "Baby It’s Cold Outside"—especially the subtitle "Fireplace Love Songs" might explain his choice. The high and low pitches of his voice were already an essential part of the first album, and they remain so on this new one. Lavurn uses them to create a dialogue between two parties affected by a breakup or, at the very least, lovesickness.
"Motor Dreamz" serves as a gentle introduction to this new piece, featuring a slow buildup and fragmented vocal snippets over lush layers of guitars. "Song 1" reveals the new album’s trip-hop aesthetics: raw, sluggish drums, catchy guitar riffs, and Lavurn’s delicate voice soaring above it all. This common thread branches out in many directions; there are side trips into R&B like "Playback" or "Come Down", well-crafted cuts like "Bug" or "Scared", and ambient-leaning jams like "Handy" or the album outro "Grass". The feature with XMB stands out: guitar meets harp, building the foundation for intimate, raw, bedroom-style vocals. "Foolish", with its disharmonious interplay between guitar and vocals, puts in a nutshell what Lee said about Lavurn’s approach to pop music:
