Album of the Week: Lala Lala

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Album of the Week: Lala Lala

The Lamb Out Now via Hardly Art

Sep 28, 2018 By Christopher Roberts Lala Lala

Lala Lala is the project of Chicago-based Lillie West. Her new album, The Lamb, came out today via Hardly Art and it’s our Album of the Week. In his review for Under the Radar, our writer Timothy Michalik declared The Lamb “perhaps one of this year’s finest indie rock records to come out of Chicago, if not the country.”

The Lamb is the follow up to Lala Lala’s 2016’s Sleepyhead. “Whereas Sleepyhead was relative to a scrapbook of ideas, loosely connected and quite sporadic, the arrangements that accompany The Lamb are much cleaner, sparser, less predictable,” says Michalik in his review. “West’s drawl sucks the fun out of every playful moment of The Lamb-and it’s meant to do exactly that. Aside from the monstrous hook of their first single, ‘Destroyer,’ The Lamb is more or less a reflection of meditative isolation. Likewise, The Lamb cloaks itself in a sobering, stable minded, eloquently thought out state of realism. West’s lyrics read like observational prose, her melodies hashed out and clearly defined.”

West had this to say about the album in a previous press release: “The Lamb was written during a time of intense paranoia after a home invasion, deaths of loved ones and general violence around me and my friends. I started to frequently and vividly imagine the end of the world, often becoming too frightened to leave my house. This led me to spend a lot of time examining my relationships and the choices I’d made, often wondering if they were correct and/or kind.”

Michalik observes in his review: “What stands out most about The Lamb isn’t necessarily the back-story, though. It’s the humanity, the realism-the inevitable truth that we are more alone than we think we are. West speaks of experiences that we all have felt, or at least will eventually deal with at some point in our life.”

Previously The Lamb‘s “Water Over Sex” was one of our Songs of the Week and we also shared the more low-key and haunting “Dove” (which was an honorable mention in our Songs of the Week list). Today West shared a video for “Scary Movie.” It features footage her parents filmed of each other before she was born.

West had this to say about the video in a press release: “‘Scary Movie’ is primarily about perception and the often blurred line between reality and non reality. For the video I wanted to use this 16mm footage my parents took of each other before I was born because although I didn’t exist yet, their experience is in some way a part of me, so watching it is both familiar and disorienting. This is where I came from, but if I view it as memory, I am technically wrong. It feels real and fake at the same time, which is how every day feels sometimes, and is what the song is about.”

Read our review of Lala Lala’s The Lamb.

Lala Lala Tour Dates:

09/28 - Chicago, IL - Empty Bottle (Album Release Show)
10/02 - New Orleans, LA - Gasa Gasa %
10/03 - Houston, TX - White Oak Music Hall %
10/04 - Austin, TX - Barracuda %
10/05 - Dallas, TX - Curtain Club %
10/06 - San Antonio, TX - Paper Tiger %
10/08 - El Paso, TX - Lowbrow Palace %
10/09 - Tucson, AZ - 191 Toole %
10/10 - San Diego, CA - Soda Bar %
10/11 - Santa Ana, CA - Constellation Room %
10/12 - Los Angeles, CA - Resident %
10/13 - San Francisco, CA - Cafe Du Nord %
11/01 - Indianapolis, IN - The HiFi #
11/02 - Cleveland, OH - Beachland Ballroom #^
11/04 - Minneapolis, MN - Cedar Cultural Center #^
11/05 - Omaha, NE - Waiting Room #
11/06 - Kansas City, MO - Record Bar #
11/08 - Denver, CO - Gothic Theater #
11/09 - Salt Lake City, UT - Urban Lounge #
11/10 - Boise, ID - Visual Arts Collective #
11/12 - Seattle, WA - Neumo’s #
11/13 - Portland, OR - Revolution Hall #
11/14 - Eugene, OR - WOW Hall #
11/21 - St. Louis, MO - Ready Room #
11/23 - Detroit, MI - Loving Touch #^
11/24 - Pittsburgh, PA - Sprit Hall #^
11/25 - Hamden, CT - Space Ballroom #
11/27 - Portsmouth, NH - 3S Artspace #
11/28 - Boston, MA - The Sinclair #
11/29 - Philadelphia, PA - Union Transfer #
11/30 - Brooklyn, NY - Elsewhere #
12/01 - Washington DC - U Street Music Hall #
12/03 - Richmond, VA - The Broadberry #
12/04 - Durham, NC - Motorco Music Hall #
12/05 - Atlanta, GA - Terminal West #
12/06 - Asheville, NC - Grey Eagle #
12/07 - Nashville, TN - Exit / In #
12/08 - Lexington, KY - Cosmic Charlies #

# w/ WHY?
% w/ Mothers
^ w/ The Ophelias