Album Review: Love Games by Larrenwong
A Bay Area multi-instrumentalist’s second LP charms and seduces with real skill. It rarely risks enough to let anybody see him sweat.
Somewhere between the Bay Area and Los Angeles, there’s a specific kind of R&B singer who can do everything himself and still struggle to get out of his own way. Play all the instruments, write every lyric, cut the beat from scratch, sing it in three different vocal ranges. The talent isn’t the question. The question is whether the material has anywhere dangerous to go. Love Games, the second full-length from Larrenwong, a Filipino and Black singer-producer out of Union City, California, who played D1 football at Northwestern before walking away from the sport to make music, is eleven cuts of a man who sings beautifully, produces with real feel for groove and space, and almost never places himself somewhere he might actually lose. He produced or co-produced six of these tracks. There are no features. Everything on this LP comes from him, and that self-sufficiency is both the record’s strongest quality and the wall it keeps bumping against.
On “Worth Your Time,” he spots a woman in the club, sends over drinks, and wants to know her name before he makes a move. On “580,” he’s doing a hundred and ten on Interstate 580 to get back to a woman and asks her to meet him at the lake. “Kryptonite” rolls through a full Superman metaphor (X-ray vision, spaceships, cleaning up the city together) and tells her she’s hotter than fresh grits off the stove. “Watch My Back” finds him pleading for a woman to come home because nobody else puts him to sleep the way she does. Each of these has a hook that works, a vocal performance that earns its keep, and a version of the same argument. I’m here, I’m ready, I’m not those other guys. His voice sits in a warm middle range that can slide into falsetto without straining, and his ear for melody keeps even the most familiar sentiment from curdling. But four variations on “choose me” across one record start to blur, and the writing would cut deeper if the man making the pitch ever sounded like he feared she might say no.
The album spends a lot of time in bed. “Bonnet Buster” opens with him counting money and wanting to have sex at the same time, and by the second verse she’s pulling him closer and begging. “Break My Promise” starts with her telling him to take it slow and ends with her legs shaking and him easing up. “Back It Up” goes furthest—hours in the shower, “sound like you’re stirring macaroni,” don’t give anybody else a piece. The writing across these three ranges from playful to blunt, and Larrenwong doesn’t flinch from the graphic stuff, which is to his credit. He’s not embarrassed by any of it. The temperature shifts between them keep the bedroom material from going flat. “Break My Promise” has a slower, tenser energy than the grinning bounce of “Bonnet Buster,” and “Back It Up” turns possessive in a way the other two don’t. The sexual cuts share a ceiling with the courtship numbers, though. He’s always in control, always the one setting the pace, and nobody on any of these recordings tells him something he doesn’t want to hear.
Which is why “Don’t Wait” and “Better with You” matter so much. “Don’t Wait” is the only moment on the record where Larrenwong gets beaten. He’s sitting with his current girlfriend when the thought of an ex crosses his mind, so he dials her number. She picks up, keeps it short, and tells him she just got engaged. He says, “That’s beautiful,” and then adds, “You shoulda seen my face.” The second verse fills in what he lost: if he’d known they wouldn’t last, he would have loved her better. It’s the first time on the LP that his confidence gives way to regret, and the whole thing hits harder for it. “Better with You” goes somewhere different again. He’s been through lovers and friends, shaken hands with fathers, come up empty, then admits he’s been faking peace, fighting urges, second-guessing his own purpose. And then Angela Lewis, Halle Berry’s character in Boomerang (1992 closes the track:
“What do you possibly think you know about love? I’m sick and tired of men using love like it’s some kind of disease you just catch. Love should have brought your ass home last night.”
Shoutout Toni Braxton.
The next set sits at opposite ends of the record’s emotional range without quite connecting to each other or to anything else. “Mystery” is a pining number about a woman he keeps almost reaching but can’t hold, a phantom, a mirage, gone in a blink. He isn’t sure if he’s delusional, feels her absence somewhere deep, and the melody is patient enough to let that longing breathe, though the phantom-in-my-dreams conceit wears thin before the fade. “Positive,” the closer, leaves women behind entirely. He wakes up at 6:30, checks his investments, hits the gym, and writes a new melody. His bills keep piling while a friend catches a new case, and the money he’s made hasn’t bought him any peace. When the weight gets too heavy he drops to his knees. These three minutes contain a version of Larrenwong that the rest of the project barely hints at—a man grinding through real life without the comfort of a woman to sing to or about—and the fact that it arrives only at the very end, for one cut, suggests he knows that territory exists but isn’t ready to live there yet.
Love Games is a good-looking record from a talented musician who can write melodies, carry a vocal, and build a track from the ground up with no outside help. That self-reliance is impressive and, after eleven cuts, also limiting. Larrenwong is at his best when something costs him—when the ex is engaged and he’s standing there with his phone, when a woman’s voice at the end of “Better with You” tells him he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, when the bills are stacking and his friend is locked up and the grind hasn’t brought him any closer to feeling whole. Those moments give Love Games its spine. The courtship and bedroom material gives it its body. The spine needed more weight.
Above Average (★★★☆☆)
Favorite Track(s): “580,” “Don’t Wait,” “Better with You”