If you haven't heard of Santogold yet it's about time that you did. She's written with Lily Allen and Mark Ronson, and has been compared to MIA and Karen O. She is a college-educated singer-songwriter and producer, whose singles Creator/LES Artistes and LES artistes are released together.
Her Myspace site describes her as a basement rock and Bananarama-soundclash artist, which is a wild combination but pretty accurate.
She's an American lady doing an almost tribal-dancehall-electro-grime-punk-ragga fling. Creator/LES Artistes uses haunting, shrieking voice and electric whines with wonderful shifts of tone throughout aided by Freq Nasty's sublime rhythm section. Simultaneously she has a slight old school humour to her, it's reminiscent of the routes and roots of the most innovative Missy Elliott material. It's very exciting to be so close to something so rare and so new.
She has this fantastic ability to blend into two tracks which sound so different and yet so the same. Her voice shows off its versatility in tone and delivery. In LES Artistes it is quirky and fine somewhere between Rihanna and Karin Dreijer Andersson of The Knife, while in Creator/LES Artistes she aggresively, rapidly, fluently raps as well as anyone.
LES Artistes addresses the issues of pretentious followers and standing up for what she believes. It's a nice reminder that she had unmitigated creative control over the forthcoming album. Creator/LES Artistes sharply brings out this theme again "Me, I'm a Creator/LES Artistes, thrill is to make it up, the rules I break got me a place, up on the radar". I'm very glad she has.
The suspenseful escalating drama of the single is her lyrical and sonic manifesto, and hopefully the world will listen up.
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