Slightly Delayed Tuesday continues with some Big Audio Marmite…
[Video][Myspace]
[4.00]
Dave Moore: Goofy synth-bounce backing track puts the singer front and center, where she flails about whacking a solid melody around like a pinata.
[4]
Martin Kavka: There is absolutely no artistry here. These are our ingredients: a voice that sounds like a stuck pig, a rhythm that is only creative if you think that syncopating the beats on the three and the seven is radical, a synthesizer that sounds like it was someone else’s throwaway, and stupid lyrics (“what are feelings without emotions?”).
[1]
Keane Tzong: Your enjoyment of this song will depend entirely on whether or not you can learn to tolerate, or even like, Elly Jackson’s vocals. I would have guessed that most people wouldn’t, but here we are with a chart position of #11. “In for the Kill” is quite uncompromising: a lot of tuneful shrieking paired with a similarly aggressive instrumental. It carries on like that for four minutes, and then for one moment toward the end, everything drops away to let the aforementioned shrieking reach new highs. While in theory that could be disastrous, the harshness of the song adds to its charm: it makes a nice severe counterpoint to light, fuzzed-out electro without ever turning into something resembling blog-house, and for that it should be commended.
[9]
Alex Wisgard: Passable pop, as yapped by Kate Bush with her foot caught in a mousetrap. I don’t get it.
[4]
Edward Okulicz: How often can you say that a song gives you a headache even at minimal volume? I’m not saying the cheap 80s music (Depeche Mode played on a Commodore 64) isn’t amusing (though it is unappealing) and that Elly Jackson’s piercing shriek isn’t impressive, but the fact is that they sound absolutely hideous together. Painful, and not an exaggeration, either.
[1]
Doug Robertson: At school, the excitement in the room was always palpable on the days the keyboards got handed out during music lessons. Anticipation lingered in the air as hands reached out to turn the switch to the ‘on’ position, and there was a short yet significant moment of silent reverence as every child in the room briefly pondered the electro pop classics they were about to tease out of the mass of circuitry which lay in front of them. Of course, the silence was broken pretty much straight away as almost every child in the room promptly started hitting every key randomly as they worked their way through some of the more esoteric voice options, running the gamut of sounds from Flatulent Duck to Iffy Telephone. But for every 29 kids who never moved on from discovering the myriad ways middle C could sound, there’s always a couple who are more interested in discovering the myriad ways all the other notes could sound as well. La Roux were those kids, and they make a Casio sound like a staccato blast of robotic bodily fluids. More fervently alive than anything this electronic should be, you might want to dismiss them due to their regular appearances on the generally disappointing “Sound of 2009” style lists, but they deserve so much more than the brief flurry of hype followed by obscurity that normally follows such a billing. More Pong than Jing Jang Jong, if this truly is the sound of 2009, then it’s going to be one hell of a year.
[9]
Alex Macpherson: La Roux’s bafflingly ungrammatical stage name annoys from the off, and there is little else to suggest that the Romo wannabe is anything other than 2009’s most reprehensible new pop star. She wears a permanently blank, unsmiling facial expression, possibly labouring under the delusion that this is the same thing as possessing artistic mystique. (It merely makes her resemble a sulky teenage girl asked to clean her bedroom.) Her voice, too, is blank and unsmiling: a grating, po-faced shrill utterly bereft of charm. Behind it, cheap and nasty keyboards plinky-plonk away like some grim pub pop tribute to the ’80s (seriously, people, let it go now). The much-hyped Skream remix is an improvement, but given the continued presence of that harpy voice, not a significant one.
[0]
Ian Mathers: Wow, she really does have an annoying voice, huh? I mean, it doesn’t help that the backing sounds like the results of a Build Your Own Depeche Mode Starter Kit, or that the lyrical sentiment is both opaque and trite, but man. She’s got a really annoying voice.
[4]
Hillary Brown: Thin and underdeveloped but undeniably hooky, plus short enough not to get too annoying.
[7]
Martin Skidmore: This sounds hopelessly amateurish. I am led to believe they are set to be big, but I hope that proves incorrect. Horrible.
[1]