Part of retro culture's weird sorcery is that most of it doesn’t even recapture an old moment, but constructs a new one that summarizes how we imagine the old one went. Take La Roux, a Grammy-winning synth-pop project whose music scans as "'80s" despite having no perfect corollary in the 1980s. It is crisp and modern, but cheerful, too, like a Patrick Nagel in Hockney color, or the diminuitive little "i" in Apple products—the machine that wants you to take it home and make it your pal. Someone could use it to sell things, and they have.
Their first album, La Roux, was an instant success, debuting at No. 2 in their native England, inspiring remixes by Skrillex and guest spots by Kanye West, and opening the door for an inevitable marathon of TV and festival appearances. They were a duo then, singer/songwriter Elly Jackson and producer Ben Langmaid; she a walking magazine cover with hair like an ice-cream cone and he an older guy so disinterested in keeping public face that he let Jackson tour alone. After four years of rumors and false starts, Jackson announced that Langmaid had left.
Langmaid or not, La Roux still sound like La Roux: slick, bright, and instantly familiar. The music on Trouble in Paradise breathes more than it did on their debut, with slower tempos and less of an emphasis on the vacuum-sealed sound of electronics—a reminder that funk was made by people before they had the machines to make it for them. Jackson has loosened up a little too. No longer the irritable pixie routine of "Bulletproof", her delivery has become both sultry and anxious, stiffening up in the middle of lines about sexual curiosity before shivering away into vibrato. That modernist tower of hair has turned into a suggestive swoop.
Sex, generally, becomes a stand-in for everything that gives Jackson the willies, whether excitement or insecurity or some intoxicating mix of the two. "Oh you make me happy in my everyday life/ Why must you keep me in your prison at night?" she sings on "Cruel Sexuality", a suggestion of the gap between companionate love and something a little less sanitary. On the other hand, I don't know what to make of "He never answers the phone/ Oh I'll bet money money money/ I'll bet/ He's at the sexotheque," other than to say that "sexotheque" sounds like a word made up by someone who has heard of sex but doesn't yet know how it works.
The familiarity of Jackson's sound is a virtue and a liability. Listening to Paradise for the first time, I kept feeling like I'd already heard it, only to realize I was mistaking each song for the one before it. Other times I stopped halfway through because I wanted something the music couldn't give me: surprise. Then again, the music probably isn't built for surprise. For all Jackson's personal struggle and exploration, Paradise feels like a safe record, calibrated for the comfort of an imagined audience, working at its best when it becomes almost invisible—the accessory to the experience and not the experience itself.
