La Roux

It has to be said that any indie artist the media builds up always get knocked back down again. Lots of people are already talking about Lady Gaga and Little Boots, so they don’t really need the extra Mookychick loving. (Slightly) fewer people are talking about the spangly eighties electronica of La Roux…

While that nice musician lady Little Boots was being picked up as the artist of the moment and being swanked of to LA to produce albums with star-making producers, Miss Jackson said ‘sod that’ and stuck around in her home in Brixton to work with Ben Langmaid, a studio producer she’d met at a party.

Together, Jackson and Langmaid make up ‘La Roux’, a retro sparkly love affair with electronicy music things that have tinny boppy beats and jangle at you. Songs like Quicksand make it clear that, yes, La Roux have heard ‘When Doves Cry’ by Prince and thought it was a saucy little song indeed.

There’s a really organice feel to the music – you can tell it’s been put together by friends, not a music industry machine – and the high girly vocals love hanging out with glitchy, odd little electropop arrangements. God knows what kind of machines they had to make music in the eighties. Moogs maybe? There’s probably a moog tucked away somewhere in here.

From the opening thumbs of their No. 1 smash hit ‘In for the Kill’ to fuzzy staccato growl of ‘I’m Not Your Toy’, this is upbeat, shiny and nicely grimy…