Unfortunately we are now out of stock on the deluxe edition, but you can still buy the standard edition of Is Your Love Big Enough? here. |
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Track Listings
| 1. Don't Wake Me Up |
| 2. Is Your Love Big Enough? |
| 3. Lost & Found |
| 4. Au Cinema |
| 5. No Room For Doubt (Feat. Willy Mason) |
| 6. Forget |
| 7. Age |
| 8. Elusive |
| 9. Everything Everything |
| 10. Gone |
| 11. Tease Me |
| 12. They Could Be Wrong |
| 13. Forget (Live) |
| 14. Lost & Found (Live) |
| 15. No Room For Doubt (Live) |
| 16. Don'T Wake Me Up (Live) |
Product Description
Review
Two well-received EPs, a BBC Sound of 2012 nomination and a high-profile support slot on Bon Iver's North American tour, all before her debut album has come out. Now it’s arrived in the shape of Is Your Love Big Enough?, a strong and skilfully delivered set that consolidates the strengths of her spindly guitar and rich vocals, but also exposes weaknesses along the way.
It’s always been clear that La Havas has a special voice, and so it proves here. Her vocals are soulful, edged with lounge-bar smoke, but each note is sung with force and precision. On pensive Willy Mason duet No Room for Doubt, her resigned words barely escape her lips. Elsewhere, her layered vocals on They Could Be Wrong shimmer like Jill Scott’s, or Erykah Badu’s in her softer moments.
It’s a voice that invites you in, and only the hardest heart will resist the offer. La Havas’ guitar work, meanwhile, is often superb. Her fingers pluck clean lines that shift from playfully atonal on the title track, through the très chic Parisian vibes of Au Cinema, to the palm-muted tension of angry break-up anthem Forget.
While the album demonstrates La Havas’ skill in crafting hand-weaved interplay between voice and guitar, it also shows that she’s less of a natural fit for big, emotional ballads. Piano-led confessionals like Lost and Found or Gone aren’t bad songs, but they lead her into the arena of pop titans. They’re not powerful enough to beat someone like Adele at her own game, and it feels like she sacrifices a lot of her distinctive intimacy in reaching for these giant moments.
Despite these weaker moments of Is Your Love Big Enough?, it’s La Havas’ gorgeous voice and gifted string fingers that’ll make the biggest impressions. This might not be a home run straight out of the gate, but it’s an extremely promising first swing of the bat.
--Martin Longley
Find more music at the BBC This link will take you off Amazon in a new window
CD Description
Customer Reviews
track 'Don't Wake Me Up' we immediately find ourselves in the presence
of a very significant new talent. With 'Is Your Love Big Enough?'
Lianne La Havas has delivered an extraordinarily rich debut album.
What a truly beautiful voice she has! Distinctive, confident and full
of subtly articulated emotion. At every turn it is an instrument which
finds new colour and timbre, the better to articulate her finely-wrought
lyrics and melodies. With her performance of a glorious song like 'Lost
and Found' it is hard not to feel that she has the full support of heaven
and all its angels! It is one of the loveliest things I have heard this year.
The quality doesn't dip for a moment. Whether in the jazzy inflections of
'Au Cinema'; the raucous, angular guitar stabbings of 'Forget' or the
sublimely breathy cadences of 'Elusive' (another cracking composition!)
we are treated to the dazzlingly understated evidence of Ms La Havas' craft.
It's almost impossible to pick a winner but if I were forced to choose one
for my desert island it would have to be 'Gone' where head and heart and
voice come together in a deeply moving display of unaffectedly raw soul.
No doubt about it. Ms La Havas is the real deal. Don't let her pass you by.
Essential.
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