Though I Hang My Head in Shame, I Actually Quite Like La Roux

Now, regular readers of this blog will know that I, by all accounts, loathe and despise everything. I am the very image of the snide, snarky internet blogger, casting bilious aspersions over everything I see from the cold cathode-ray comfort of my keyboard. I should abhor popularity. I should discard commonality. I should by all rights stay on-message and disown the mainstream simply for being mainstream. That's me, Generic Internet Blogger #4,000,001. I'm called "I Hope You Catch Fire", for heaven's sake. So why is it, then, that I consider La Roux's self-titled debut as easily the best album of 2009?

I've spent the last few days listening to it over and over, trying to find out quite what it is about this quirky, be-quiffed androgynous synthpop act that I like. Or, more honestly, desperately trying to pick holes in something I simply cannot fault.

Singer Elly Jackson makes the band. It's that simple. Producer Ben Langmead has done a fantastic job throughout the album, but it's Jackson's dreamlike falsetto - which I admit is likely something you'll either love or hate - and lyricism make it what it is, filling the album with a kind of joyful melancholy, a sound somewhere between Gary Numan and Lily Allen filtered through a mask of all too average twentysomething insecurity. Relationship songs, sure, but ones with impressive depth and introspection in a pop landscape where Lady Gaga is scoring top ten hits singing about riding my disco stick. It really is something of a triumph of substance over style - not that there's any absence of style on this record; it delivers wonderful touches in spades.

You'll have all heard the number one smash, 'In For The Kill', which at current standing is the fourth-biggest-selling single of the year, and hopefully enjoyed it's simple bitpop synth lines and Jackson's unique voice, but underneath that there was some truly excellent use of reverb and vocal doubling. 'Bulletproof', their first number one hit, proved that the band could do a modern mainstream pop sound better than any truly mainstream pop act today. It's not a favourite of mine, but neither you nor I can deny that it has everything a pop single needs.

Then there are two of my favourites; "I'm Not Your Toy", which barely cracked the top 30 but has a hook that surely should have taken it far higher, opens with a synth line that clearly consciously apes the music of the 16-bit gaming era that it's target audience grew up with. If it was up to me, this would have been the La Roux single to get to number one, but it's still not my favourite song off the album, even if it will leave you, if you're anything like me, humming the hook for days after you first hear it. That honour falls elsewhere with, horror of horrors, an album track.

You see, much as I like "I'm Not Your Toy", and in fact most of the entire album, nothing sums up or takes advantage of the dreamlike qualities of Jackson's voice quite like "Armour Love". A microcosm of the album as a whole, it's slow, gentle melancholy carries you into a world where everything's in slow motion soft focus, the perfect musical accompaniment to a teenager lonely in love. It's wonderful. It's beautiful. I know that in this age of digital downloads you can buy album tracks as easy as headline singles, but buy the album just for this track, because it's worth much more than the 79p iTunes tells me it's worth. It's the best losing-love song in ten years, because all of us have had that first love we thought meant everything, and we all lost it because we were stupid teenagers. We've all felt the exact way the song describes, and the song isn't the least bit either pretentious or ashamed in it's depiction. It's perfect.

Are La Roux going to change the face of music? Probably not. Are they going to sell ten million records and dominate the face of pop for the next ten years? No - Elly Jackson, though she has her own vulnerable charm, isn't marketable to the boys-with-posters demographic the same way Cheryl Cole is, and her musical stylings lack the overtly sexual, girl-power element that makes Lady Gaga such a marketable phenomenon.

What they have done, though, is produce easily the best unashamedly pop album in years.

The Battle of Tesco's Self-Scan Checkouts

Now, I know that as a massive luddite and technological Johnny-come-lately what I have to say is likely akin to many of you to a weighty 24-year-old man wheezing through the story of losing his virginity, but I am here today to tell you that I recently had my very first encounter with the peril of self-scanning checkouts. All previous shopping attempts had been undertaken in the comforting knowledge that there would be a teenager to shout at come the end of the journey, and that by shouting at that teenager all my wishes would come true. Not so with self-scan checkouts, and the awful contraptions know this.

They know that you are trapped at their cold, mechanical mercy. There is no recourse to appeal if it decides your wheel of Brie is actually a new Citroën Berlingo, there is no button to tell it the unrecognized items in it’s bagging area are your legs, and there is no indicated way of summoning help when the infernal machine swallows your credit card, forcing you to stand in the aisle, the broken debris of your shopping existence all around you, attempting cashier semaphore with a pair of frozen pizzas. They are horrible.

It was my fault, really. I accept blame completely. It was my fault for taking it into my head that I should do my weekly shopping bored at 4am on a Saturday morning, whisking myself off to Tesco’s subconsciously expecting some unfortunate wage-slave to still be there to bag my fish and not turning back the moment I found only stern-eyed eastern European security staring back at me like this was Srebrenica’s answer to Poundland.

But, dear readers, there was an upside, and I don’t just mean the chicken salad sandwich and the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups - recommended to me by an American friend, and easily the most deliciously unhealthy things on the planet - which I bought myself as a reward. No, the upside of my late night shopping adventure is that I discovered that, no matter how weird you might be compared to those of us who dwell in the daylight hours, we are all great bastions of sanity up to the sort of people you find in Tesco’s at 4am on a Saturday morning. Yours truly disappointingly not excepted.

It’s hard to pick out a favourite, though. Was it the astonishingly red-faced man who’s shopping seemed to consist only of innumerable pepperoni pizzas? Was it the wild-eyed woman wheeling her bicycle adorned with Meat is Murder stickers through the pork and beef aisle, greedily scooping packs of chops and mince into it’s front basket? Was it the screaming children running up and down the DVD aisle, who I now know to be there on such a round-the-clock basis that it must surely be some sort of paid shift work for the under-10s? I have never felt so gloriously out of place.

Perhaps I am being too harsh. Sleep deprivation will do strange things to people and perhaps the man with the armfuls of frozen pizza works such unsociable hours that this is his only time to shop and the pizzas are the only food he has time to cook. Perhaps the children in the DVD aisle are just bored out of their minds that their parents have seen fit for some bizarre reason to bring them to Tescos at four in the morning. Perhaps the woman with the meat-filled vegan bicycle just has an under-appreciated sense of irony. I will never know, I was too scared to look them in the eye.

It did remind me, though, of how much we all worry about fitting in. We all consciously or unconsciously worry about how we look, how we come across to others, and how we could improve. Any magazine you care to read tells you that some eighty-something percent of people are unhappy with some part of themselves, and perhaps it’s just human nature to worry about not fitting in with the pack, but honestly, next time this fear takes hold of you, grasps you in your tenderest place, please don’t go out and buy a £500 haircut, just take an early-morning drive to your nearest 24hr Tescos. You’ll have never felt so normal.

The Best and Worst Transfers of 2009

So, that's the Premier League season pretty much over unless you're Newcastle or Hull after Middlesbrough all but relegated themselves yesterday. West Brom could play themselves back into contention for survival today but as they're at Liverpool, you can't really see it happening. So that's that, then, and for the majority of football fans, it's time for the interest on the pitch to fade away and the shouting and recriminations to begin off of it. Who were the best and worst signings of 2008/09? Who fired their team to glory and who should have just been fired?

Time to look at the five best and worst transfers of the 2008/09 Premier League Season:

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BEST:

Marouane Fellaini (Standard Liege > Everton): Goals, work rate, height, strength, speed, and a big bag of that certain X factor that creates cult figures and takes some of the work of geeing up the team off of Cahill. He might have cost £15m, but he's only 21 and settled into the Everton team right away, becoming one of their most important players almost immediately, something a lot of similarly-priced signings singularly failed to do.

Andrei Arshavin (Zenit St. Petersburg > Arsenal): While I don't quite buy into the hype just yet that Arshavin is the new Dennis Bergkamp despite his heroics at Liverpool - Rafa just has a tactical blind spot to Arsenal attacking midfielders after that absolute donkey Julio Baptista scored 4 past them as well a couple of years ago - the little Russian was certainly the kick-start Arsenal's season needed and the experienced creative spark they were lacking. The difference between Arsenal with Arshavin and without was night and day, plainly and painfully obvious in their lackluster Champions League performances.

Jonas Gutierrez (RCD Mallorca > Newcastle): He might have the haircut of a fifteen-year-old tomboy, but for all of Newcastle's problems this season, none of them have been down to this man. A talented winger with graft, it doesn't matter where he gets played across the midfield, because whereever you don't play him, he'll turn up there anyway. Often playing two positions because of the Toon's bizarre wing-back setup, he's been Newcastle's best player for most of the season. Shame he'll probably leave if they go down; they need him.

Wilson Palacios (Wigan > Tottenham): One of the major reasons behind Tottenham's turnaround in the second half of the season, he added presence where Zokora had previously just stood around marvelling at the opposition and Jenas couldn't see a thing out of his tiny face. Hopefully for him he'll come back fine next season after the killing of his brother, which obviously makes football seem incredibly unimportant.

Robbie Keane (Liverpool > Tottenham): Essentially got around £8m for a six month loan swap. You just argue with the good finances of that kind of deal.

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WORST:

David Bentley (Blackburn > Tottenham): Came in as Beckham's natural successor, went out being kept out of the team by Aaron Lennon's Gay Right Hand. The boy with the million dollar haircut, the billion dollar ego and the FarmFoods workrate spent a few games drifting around the pitch doing very little before vanishing back to the bench to be replaced by a player Spurs already had. What a pointless waste of fifteen million pounds.

Dimitar Berbatov (Tottenham > Manchester United): He's been good, but he's not been £30m of good. That alone wouldn't be enough to get him on this list, but the real reason is that the spending of £30m on Berbatov is the sole reason United can't splash the cash to keep Tevez, a younger, superior and hungrier player, creating the one incident in as long as I can remember that has seen the fans turn on The Big Red-Nosed One. They might regret this next year when Berbatov goes absent without leave when they're 1 - 0 down at Anfield.

Xisco (Deportivo La Coruna > Newcastle): Six million pounds of Spanish striking talent was scheduled to arrive at Newcastle in the summer, only for British Airways to accidentally ship it to Bangalore. Turning up at St. James' with high hopes only to find himself seventh-choice striker in a team embroiled in a bitter relegation battle, you have to wonder just how bad Xisco has to have been in training to find himself behind Shola Ameobi and The Man With 1,000 Haircuts, Andy Carroll. Not what you need when you cost six million pounds, your team's first choice strike force is about as robust as runny egg yolk, and your competition as backup is the player Cardiff didn't want out of Shola Ameobi and Michael Chopra.

Jimmy Bullard (Fulham > Hull): Poor Jimmy, this is through absolutely no fault of his own, but Hull really must be kicking themselves that they paid out £5m for Jimmy Bullard's one half of football. A battling midfielder of just the kind they needed, but not when he's sat on the treatment table, if Hull do go down, it might very well be because they spent most of their January cash on Jimmy's dodgy knee.

Robbie Keane (Tottenham > Liverpool): Essentially paid around £8m for a six month loan swap. You just argue with the poor finances of that kind of deal.

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Goodnight