Album Review: Santigold - 99 Cents

Santi White's third album under the guise of eccentric pop artist Santigold is a colourful and eclectic ensemble of songs revolving around the increasingly related concepts of identity and commercialisation.

While artists like Andy Warhol may have felt perfectly comfortable drawing attention to the repetitive and manufactured beauty of the industrial world, Santigold is among a growing number of musicians and artists still actively wondering where the digital revolution is leading. Their art is in turn usually weighed down either by a speedily irrelevant mood of consternation or a whole-hearted and perceptive embrace of the phenomenon.

Thankfully, Santigold is of the later persuasion, and the album largely steers away from dystopian visions of paranoid technophobia. Despite her recent denouncement of mobile phones at shows and the pernicious influence of underpaying streaming companies, she wisely chooses to double-down on the communal nature of music instead, as the singer continues to unashamedly market herself as an alternative pop spectacle. Lead single and opening track Can't Get Enough Of Myself works as a manifesto of sorts, as she sings, "All I wanna do is bottle it to sell," over a bright marching beat.

Later meditations on the convergence of personality and brand take a slightly darker approach, including the swinging Chasing Shadows, which finds her singing from the other side with distanced lines like, "I'm living on the shelf," and "I give my heart away so that they remember me." There are a number of fairly straight-up pop moments, as on the gloriously passive-aggressive Who Be Lovin Me and the driving Rendezvous Girl, although even the great production work from artists like Vampire Weekend's Rostam Batmanglij can't quite save the album from its minor and infrequent missteps.