It was pretty obvious that Lady Sovereign would sell her soul to the gods of KA$CHING! as soon as she got to the States. With the corruption of the queen of “chav” culture has come a moulding over of her original sound.
Her latest album “Jigsaw” smacks of Britneee and LA pinkDAZZLE more than any of her previous albums, even though she’s releasing it on her own record label — Midget Records. It’s just depressing to see a UK performer (even one as originally annoying as Sovereign) be corrupted by this country.
Sovereign still proves funny in places: “I am a top notch bitch, my banter is the shit,” she affirms on “I Got the Goods.” And there are some tributes to the UK grime scene that spawned Sovereign — “Let’s Be Mates” is a pretty good approximation of electrogrime culture but lacks the fuller bass sound of other tracks in the genre.
The really annoying thing is that Sovereign did have a distinctive sound; now it’s cacked up. Songs like “Student Union” are confused: Sovereign fuses electropunk with grime, which doesn’t really work well; she mixes American lingo — “high school” doesn’t exist in the UK — with UK terms like “Student Union” (a university-sponsored party complex, basically) and “uni.”
But “Student Union” is not the most egregious track on the album. “So Human,” the single, is actually crap, and so are most of the of the other songs.
“I got that bang bang sound / so come on crank it loud”. Well, no, I’d rather not.