La Roux, La Roux (original) (raw)

Of the three synth-toting female singer-songwriters who have so far dominated the Big In 2009 lists, 20-year-old Elly Jackson is by far the most complex figure. You can guess as much just by looking at her. In contrast to her glittery blonde counterparts, she looks pale and wan and rather Tilda Swintonish, staring glumly from beneath the kind of haircut that will one day provoke affectionate chortles from comedians and kids' TV presenters on I Love 2009. Comparisons have been drawn between Jackson and Annie Lennox in her carrot-cropped Love Is a Stranger heyday, but there is none of the latter's snarling, forceful androgyny. Jackson just looks a bit fed up - as apparently she was during the making of her debut album, which coincided with the collapse of a relationship, and tells that story; tales abound of the singer in floods of tears after completing vocal takes.

Likewise, Jackson's music seems more recherché than that of her competitors. For all the talk of their 80s obsessions, Lady Gaga essentially offers mainstream noughties pop R&B in a stupid hat, while Little Boots' debut album is audibly the product of a youth partially misspent in the clubs and raves of the north-west: you can hear the shadow of happy hardcore and trance in its fizzy, synthesised euphoria.

However, Jackson and her collaborator Ben Langmaid - fans of Heaven 17, Vince Clarke-era Depeche Mode and Blancmange - go for the full Sealed Knot approach, to the extent that when you hear something that dates La Roux to a point after 1983, it gives you a jolt. That doesn't happen very often: there's a reference to "early 90s decor" on Colourless Colour and some booming drums on Tigerlilly. Elsewhere, La Roux sounds like an album produced by Jet Set Willy and engineered by Juliet Bravo along with the bloke who said "this is the air attack warning" on Two Tribes. The sound is authentically tinny, bass being something that most synthpop pioneers seemed to think the gleaming Music Of The Future could do without. The rhythms tend to a clipped, funkless boom-crash that listeners of a certain vintage may find difficult to hear without picturing a school disco dancefloor packed with fourth-formers trying to "do" robotics. There are the pinging far eastern motifs found everywhere in early-80s pop, from Sylvian and Sakamoto's Forbidden Colours to Aneka's Japanese Boy. There's even a Thriller-style recitation on Tigerlilly, with Jackson's father chewing the scenery in lieu of Vincent Price: "Have you EVER felt you're being FOLLOWED?"

You might suggest that things have come to a pretty pass when a record that sounds like Blancmange constitutes the leftfield option, but what's surprising is how alien it sounds, even if you remember this sort of thing first time around: the sparse dynamics and stabbing synthesisers of Quicksand offer a reminder that not every aspect of the 80s has been mined to exhaustion in recent years. Its oddness is compounded by Jackson's voice. It is slender and papery, but that isn't necessarily a problem. Admittedly, the falsetto swoops that first sounded striking on In for the Kill turn shrill and wearing over time, but there's something rather moving about hearing her brittle vocals pitched against a gospel choir on the album's heartbroken big ballad, Cover My Eyes.

The voice, the image, the influence of Blancmange: none of this, it should be noted, has put the British public off. At the time of writing, In for the Kill is enjoying its 14th week in the charts - it's the third-bestselling single of the year - while its follow-up, Bulletproof, looks set to debut at No 1 on Sunday. You can see why. Jackson and Langmaid are no slouches when it comes to devising a killer chorus, and In for the Kill was further boosted by a startling remix from dubstep producer Skream, although that surely counts as a mixed blessing: his desolate, breakbeat-heavy retooling is so fantastic that the original sounds a bit rinky-dink, a bit Bontempi organ, by comparison.

In fact, sounding a bit rinky-dink and Bontempi organ turns out to be an occupational hazard of La Roux's 80s fetishism. Still, there are plenty of songs here that sound like hits - not least Fascination, on which Jackson's fragile voice floats affectingly over the bleeping electronics before another ridiculously catchy chorus erupts. La Roux's immediate future looks assured: what happens after that remains to be seen. After all, you can't sound like Blancmange forever, as the former members of Blancmange would doubtless tell you.