La Roux – La Roux

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Album Reviews • Tuesday August 11th, 2009 • 9:57 am

These days, everyone with a MicroKorg or DX7 is trying to earn a footnote on the Wikipedia page about electropop while the genre is still dominates popular music again, but it’s easy to tell which artists are throwing beats together any which way and which artists are trying to bring something clever to the table. Although they’ve already reached superstardom and hometown hero status in London, La Roux has really only just begun to make waves on the scene. Singer Elly Jackson makes up one half of the UK duo, along with co-writer and co-producer Ben Langmaid. While their sound is largely an homage to the hottest synthesized pop music perpetrators of the ’80s, La Roux also definitely maintain a stamp of their own, aided largely by the wild hair Jackson consistently sports. (In fact, the band name was selected because it means “the red-haired” in French.) Not only do they have catchy songs, but they come complete with an attitude that makes people pay attention in the first place.

Since giving the album its first spin, their single “Bulletproof” has latched on to my senses and refused to let go. It’s no mystery to me why that track and its tripped out, Tetris-inspired music video managed to usher them into U.S. pop consciousness this year: It’s infectious. “In For The Kill,” another track that caught me right away, has also been a single, and both of those tracks are immediately arresting because of the simple, repetitive chorus lines and rhythms that coax at least a steady head bop. Jackson’s extreme falsetto on the latter somehow manages to work perfectly to open the album, setting the pace and then carrying the listener smoothly from one groove to the next.

It holds up throughout the rest of the track list that the more upbeat songs are where La Roux’s strengths lie. The duo seems aware of this for the most part, evident in the way a song like “Tigerlily” mixes in a creepy, spoken breakdown reminiscent of Vincent Price’s famous “Thriller” appearance just to give the song more levels. They lose a lot of momentum and break the trance a little on slower efforts. Tracks that drag more become increasingly likable with repeated listens, but without taking an active interest in them, it’s harder to even notice that a song like “Cover My Eyes” exists with more in-your-face tracks stealing all the spotlight. It’s a shame, too, because La Roux employ full choirs and interesting drum patterns on the ballads, but it’s hard to deny that even with all that being put in, the album really shines when it spends more time being sassy instead of melancholy. While Elly’s light, high vocals give the record’s opening a much-needed punch, all of the vocal meandering begins to reveal the weaknesses in her ability on a song like “Fascination.”

Overall, however, the 12 cuts on La Roux’s self-titled debut prove that “Bulletproof” is part of a cohesive project instead of a fluke. It’s a well-crafted mix of sugar and bite, and they’re getting great reviews in US, putting Jackson and Langmaid of plenty of other synthpop peers and hopefuls. Whether they’ve got what it takes to hold the attention or make it all the way to a sophomore try remains to be seen, but if they stay as savvy as they seem thus far and continue to pick just the right singles, I won’t be surprised if La Roux have become a common name among highly-sought mainstream performers by the time they lock down a full North American tour.