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.