REVIEW -- LA ROUX

La Roux

La Roux

(Cherrytree)

Overseas, La Roux (real name: Elly Jackson) is hot shit right now. The 21-year-old Londoner’s dance-club electro-bounce sounds like something from 1983, right when U.S. record companies starting scooping up new-wave divas and selling them to famished music fans as the future. But Jackson and Ben Langmaid -- the other half of La Roux’s creative force – sidestep that whole “future” thing by making their debut album a big bear hug of retro love. The beats are rinky-dink and robotic, the vocals are shrill and flat, and that’s just the way they planned it (the U.K. has detached hipsters too, you know). When JacksonLa Roux halfway lives up to its hype. But most of the time the album soaks in its own synth-pop self-awareness. The real keeper is “Bulletproof,” the song that made La Roux such a big deal in the first place. More of these and she could move beyond the’80s. latches onto a hook – like on the opening “In for the Kill” -- --Michael Gallucci