Even better, the punk-tinged You’ll Find a Way runs its heavenly chorus with remarkable skill. Not content, she rolls out ska by numbers on Say Aha and infuses it with dub and new wave. Even though the artist she’s mostly associated with is M.I.A, it’s evident that Santi has been crafting her own inimitable style for some time. She isn’t a mere clone of her Sri Lankan contemporary but an equally intriguing enigma. Santogold steps right up to the punk plate Kala hints and hits everything out of the ball-park. And just for bragging rights, she even tags L.E.S Artistes along the pop vibe everyone’s been clogging in Umbrella’s cloudy exhaust.
Whereas Maya’s music is mostly pastiche because of her art background, Santi studied Caribbean and West African drumming at college and thus her production is more natural and coherent. Santi’s emergence therefore is just as important because she too represents a swathe of musicians that a pop-driven market like North America largely overlooks. Not many straddle pop/rock and rhythm and blues anymore; especially as alternative soul has largely been forgotten.
It’s not as radical as Kala but yet it manages to brook another direction and that is what is so progressive about Santi White. She shores up something deeper than arty genre-testing and hearkens back to a past where musical ideas didn’t restrict themselves. These ideas (I’ll single out the divine I’m a Lady for this point) don’t rock the house as much as they jolt it, but the personal motivation is quaint and touching. Sure, she may look passive on the album cover and content to fold her hands while apparently puking glitter.
But is it really so or is it the unleashing of a style that has been neglected for far too long? Either way you spin it — thanks to Santogold outsider chic remains alive no matter how hard pop culture tries to wrestle it’s intensity into a cold, heartless and homogenous thing.
RATING: 8.5/10
Article comments