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Best albums of 2014: No 6 – Trouble in Paradise by La Roux

There were enough warning signs to suggest that the follow-up to La Roux’s self-titled debut album would be a disaster. The five-year wait was hardly the greatest omen, of course, but you could also point to the cancelled live shows, the disquieting rumours regarding an acoustic folk direction, and – most worrying of all – the fact that Elly Jackson had split from the other half of La Roux at some point during the writing sessions. Given that Ben Langmaid didn’t tour or even appear in photos, it was fair to assume that his songwriting role in La Roux must have been a fairly prominent one. If not, then he must have made an outrageously decent cup of tea.

And yet it only took one listen to Trouble in Paradise to make a mockery of such misgivings. From the songs Langmaid had a hand in to the ones he didn’t (Cruel Sexuality, Tropical Chancer), this was an album loaded with potential singles. As for the tinny production that marred La Roux’s excellent debut, that had been replaced with a far more organic 80s sound: groove-laden bass, scratchy funk guitars and a real sense of musical joie de vivre throughout. What you could evidently hear, and what explains at least some of the five-year delay, is a sense of perfectionism, of the musicians being given the time and freedom to explore the possibilities around each song. Silent Partner has an extended two-and-a-half minute synth coda that keeps winding down, then restarting. Paradise Is You has a similarly inventive conclusion – repurposing the chorus into a refrain, interwoven with increasingly dreamy backing vocals. None of this feels like indulgent baggage – it’s simply there to make the songs shine brighter.

Earlier in the year, Jackson told me about the musicians she had hoped to emulate with these ideas: Tom Tom Club, Diana Ross, Chic. The last name is especially revealing, as Chic’s Nile Rodgers played a key role on one of 2013’s standout albums, Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories. While bearing scant sonic resemblance to that record, Trouble in Paradise does share a similar mindset: the belief that most chart music has become drearily uniform, and that one way of addressing that is to ditch the laptop in favour of real musicians, more studio time and, one can only assume, a considerable amount more money. 

You could argue that it was a gamble that didn’t pay off. Unlike Random Access Memories, Trouble in Paradise has not been a commercial triumph. Yet of the critics who voted for it on our list, almost all chose it as their favourite or second favourite of the year. Perhaps that’s because, while most pop artists seemed busy cramming everything into as tightly compressed space as possible, as quickly as possible, Trouble in Paradise did the exact opposite: it let the music breathe again.

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