Santogold - 'Santogold' (Atlantic) Released 12/05/08

Santi White AKA Santogold is all over it. She is in all the right magazines, on all the right websites, on the lips of all the right people, doing tunes with all right cats and getting all the right cats to do over her tunes – she is all over it. If it weren’t for the fact that she’s just dropped one of the most pole-position pop records of the new millennium Gigwise just might have something to say on that, but she has, so we’ll back up.

Ms. White’s much documented history reads like a music A-Z. She came up in Philly before heading off to study Music at college in Connecticut. She then stumbled comfortably into an A & R role at Epic Records, the home of rock behemoth REO Speedwagon (who will have no further relevance to this article).

Bored with that she decided to write and produce, picking up the debut album of little known R&B artist Shareese Renee Ballard AKA Res. Still not content to sit still Santi then turned her tongue to punk-rock, fronting Philly-band Stiffed who released a couple of albums before she was picked up to… ‘go solo’.

A few singles, a typhoon of good press and some tidy timing brings us to now, and to this album: self-titled and all. Santi is keen to shout down anyone looking to drop an R&B tag next to her name, fair enough, this isn’t R&B.

Santogold (the album) is a hell of a lot of different things – from the grimy reggae bounce of Unstoppable to the bouncy reggae grime of Shove It: “We think you’re a joke, shove your hope where it don’t shine” – but they all shine together.  You may know the singles –  Strokes-esque album-opener LES Artistes and the squeal laden mash-up Creator have graced our ears from the small screen on beer and hair adverts for a while now.

Perhaps this is Santi’s commercial knowse coming through, or maybe she just wants to get the tunes out there. Despite getting them out there, and with much more gay abandon than her stablemates, she is still bathed in credibility by the alt news sheets.

This brings us back to those damn fine tunes again. Those pimped out singles make way on the album for a good breadth of coverage. I’m A Lady sounds like The Pixies fronted by a girl, but doesn’t sound like the Breeders – and it lives up to that canon brilliantly. Say A-Ha on the other hand, sounds like it could be Girls Aloud if Nicola had a gruff sister.

There is not a song under four minutes here, and not a filler in sight, just like pop should be. Well done Santi, well done.