La Roux: Old Flames review – a breezy, hook-packed twist on a breakup album

(Vertigo) Devastating moments are dressed up with warm production and kinetic 00s R&B in the now quiff-less singer’s grownup fourth album Over the six years that La Roux, AKA Elly Jackson, was making her fourth album, the singer ended a 17-year relationship, confronted her weed dependency, received autism and ADHD diagnoses and lopped off her signature Johnny Bravo-esque quiff.

One might expect the resulting record to be meditative and maudlin; the opening songs Cabin Fever and Lose Myself , focused on poor mental health and addiction respectively, suggest it will be fraught and claustrophobic. The former’s suffocating bass and unsteady synths segue into the latter’s unnerving nursery rhyme-like verses and thrashing chorus, reminiscent of the crunchier elements of HIStory-era Michael Jackson. What follows, though, is an autopsy of a relationship delivered through kinetic turn-of-the-millennium R&B and 90s-indebted pop. Jackson resists melodrama and, even at its…