La Roux - La Roux (Polydor)
2/5
In the three or so months that have passed from the release of debut single 'Quicksand' and this self-titled first LP, La Roux (actually a duo, not though you'd know it) have won their way into the nation's hearts and feet thanks, for the most part, to Elly Jackson's gob. "The Red Haired One"s temperate foghorn of a voice, coupled with an unashamedness for letting the world know of her low tolerance threshold for just about everything, has set her and her invisible bandmate Ben Langmaid at odds with much of the plasticine-featured camp currently infiltrating the top 10, and places them more in line with the unabashed humanity of Amy Winehouse and Lily "3 Nipples" Allen. And the bandname's in French! And has an "x" in it! Edgy.
And they are genuinely a top 10 duo now - better than top 10, even, with the album released under the shadow cast by 'Bulletproof' at the summit of the singles chart. And the higher the chart placing, the higher the level of scrutiny applied to your work, especially if you're essentially an emerging female solo artist who dresses outlandishly (read: well - did you see the jacket she was wearing at Glastonbury?) and isn't afraid to speak her mind.
La Roux, therefore, is frontloaded with the big-hitting singles and MySpace attention-grabbers so as not to scare off those who have just bought the album to play those particular tracks over and over. We all know 'In For the Kill' and 'Bulletproof' by now, and we all know that the former in particular is a Good Pop Song, quite possibly a Great Pop Song. All those syncopated beats and "oohs" and wooshy synths - enough to drive a soul to legally download music. So yes, the singles are very good indeed ('Quicksand' too, appearing here with slightly beefed up production, has lost none of the icy bite that made it so enthralling first time around), but would there be enough to sustain for a 45-minute album?
Umm, not really, I'm afraid. The trouble with La Roux, you see, is that every track - every single one, without exception - sounds like the last one. You know the synth rhythm from 'In For the Kill'? That crops up on virtually every song. And the drum pattern? That, too, features in abundance. Yes, they work very well in short bursts - if La Roux is re-released in a couple of decades time as a run of limited 7-Inch singles after a similarly moody be-quiffed pop star has lauded it as the defining soundtrack of her childhood, it'll be lauded as a triumph of the musical late-noughties - but after you hear what seems like the millionth thwack of 808 snare, and realise you're only two-thirds of the way through the record, you do start to wonder if you can stick out the whole thing or if it'd be better to just cut your losses and slap on some Springsteen (at least he knows all his songs are the same).
Many of the songs are all structured with startling similarity - verse, chorus, verse, chorus, breakdown, wordless verse (the most irritating part; 30 seconds of meandering "ooh" = very lazy songwriting), chorus, end - and the chord patterns all start to sound like they were nicked from an earlier track well before the time closer 'Growing Pains' lollops into view. Lyrically it's basically just words that rhyme ("Early nineties décor/It was a day for/We wanted to play/But we had nothing left to play for" runs the chorus to the forgettable 'Colourless Colour'), and Jackson's voice hasn't yet the scope for variation to carry the tracks solely on her own merit.
I, and I'm sure many others who will listen to the La Roux, wanted it to be something genuinely fresh and interesting, a quiet and subtle shift starting from the chart heart and then spreading from the inside. As it is, it's a missed opportunity. There's enough here to carry the project through to the next album, and there's definitely potential lurking for a really great record to be made by these two, but too much of what's here already feels dated and heavy handed.
But you're still going to buy it, because their name has an "x" in.
Artists in this article: La Roux
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