Lovers, Lead the Way!

While the Viva Voce collective has been something of a fixture on the independent artist scene for over seven years now, Lovers, Lead the Way! is, surprisingly enough, only the second full-length release from the husband and wife duo of Kevin and Anita Robinson. Perhaps as much as anything else, the band's particular sound remains hard to pin down. "Fashionably Lonely" evokes late-period Beatles with its swirling orchestral treatments and psychedelic underpinning, before taking a sharp left turn into electronic percussion-lead modern pop. "One in Every Crowd," by comparison, is an delectable slab of lo-fi rock and roll, juxtaposing Anita Robinson's wispy, ethereal singing voice with an swaggering, grit-laden instrumental backdrop. And "N Love W/U" sounds like nothing so much as a teenaged garage band rocker secretly saving their favorite power ballad to tape before the other group members arrive. The duo exhibits a tangible and undeniable joy at the sheer art of songwriting that blankets the entire Lovers project with an irresistible infectiousness. In an ideal world, a much larger portion of the music would sound like this.